What if you are carrying grief, shame, or rage from a religious experience, and nobody in your life has a name for what happened to you?
This is therapy for people who were told their identity was a sin, or their questions were dangerous, or their body was a problem to be managed. For people who left a faith and discovered the leaving was only the beginning. For LGBTQIA+ people who loved a tradition that could not love them back in full. For anyone who experienced a community that used the language of love to cause harm.
At Embodied Therapy, we understand religious trauma as both a personal wound and a political reality. The harm is real. The grief is real. And you do not have to minimize either to begin healing.
Religious harm does not always look like a single dramatic event. For many people, it was slow and pervasive. It was a framework that shaped how they understood themselves before they had the language to question it. It was a community that felt like home until the day it did not.
Leaving a faith, or living inside one while secretly questioning everything, is one of the more complicated grief processes there is. The thing you are grieving was never just a belief system. It was community. Identity. Family relationship. Daily ritual. A way of understanding meaning in the world. A version of yourself that no longer exists.
Most people are doing this grief without anyone acknowledging that what they are carrying is grief. They are told to move on, to be glad they are free, to focus on what they gained rather than what they lost. That response, however well-intentioned, leaves people alone with something enormous.
Therapy here makes room for all of it. The grief and the rage. The love and the harm. The parts that you miss and the parts you are relieved to be free of. Nothing has to be resolved before you start.
Religious trauma is psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical harm that results from religious belief systems, religious communities, or religious authority figures. It is not about whether religion itself is good or bad. It is about the specific impact of specific teachings and experiences on a specific person’s nervous system and sense of self.
Religious trauma can develop in many forms. High-control religious groups where questioning was forbidden or punished. Families where faith was used to justify abuse. Purity culture that attached a person’s worth, belonging, and lovability to behavioral compliance. Conversion practices that told LGBTQIA+ people their identity needed to be eliminated. Any religious context where fear, shame, surveillance, or punishment were used to manage belief or belonging.
It does not have to be the most extreme version of any of these things to have caused real harm.
Purity culture refers to religious teaching that ties a person's worth, dignity, and lovability to their sexual purity, most often directed at girls and women, though its harm extends across genders and sexual orientations. It teaches that desire is dangerous, that the body is a threat, and that worth is conditional on compliance.
The psychological consequences of purity culture are significant and lasting. They include chronic shame around the body and sexuality, difficulty experiencing intimacy without guilt, disordered eating and body image concerns, and a distorted understanding of consent. For LGBTQIA+ people, purity culture often operates alongside messages that their very existence is impure, compounding the harm considerably.
Conversion practices, sometimes called conversion therapy or ex-gay programming, attempt to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. They take many forms, from formal programs and residential facilities to informal interventions by religious leaders, parents, or communities. They are harmful in every form.
Research is unambiguous: conversion practices do not change sexual orientation or gender identity. They do cause significant psychological harm, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and elevated risk of suicidality. Many people who experienced conversion practices in adolescence are still navigating the effects years later.
If this is part of your history, therapy here holds that clearly. What happened to you was not therapy. It was harm.
For many LGBTQIA+ people, religious trauma is inseparable from their experience of coming out or coming to terms with their identity. Being told by a faith community that your identity is sinful, disordered, or a choice to be overcome is a particular kind of harm. It often happens during the developmental period when identity formation is most fragile, and it comes from the people and institutions that were supposed to be sources of safety and unconditional love.
The loss of a religious community at the moment of coming out is often the loss of an entire social world. Extended family, community belonging, ritual and practice, a sense of being held by something larger. That loss is real and it deserves to be grieved, not skipped over in the relief of being free.
We cannot talk about religious trauma for LGBTQIA+ people without naming the current political moment. Religious beliefs are being used to justify legislation that actively harms LGBTQIA+ people: restrictions on gender-affirming care, attacks on legal protections, policies that allow discrimination under the banner of religious freedom. For many LGBTQIA+ people, the harm of religious trauma is not historical. It is ongoing. It is showing up in legislation, in the news, in the bodies of people who are watching their rights be debated by people who have never met them.
The chronic stress of existing in a political climate that treats your identity as controversial is a real psychological stressor. It is part of the clinical picture, not a distraction from it.
At Embodied Therapy, we do not ask clients to set aside the political reality of their lives to do healing work. Those are not separate things.
Religious trauma is not limited to one type of faith community. It happens across Christian traditions, including evangelical, Catholic, and fundamentalist communities. It occurs in other religious contexts as well. The mechanisms are similar: authority that cannot be questioned, belonging that is conditional on compliance, and the use of shame and fear to manage belief and behavior.
Within these contexts, some people carry disproportionate harm.
LGBTQIA+ individuals are harmed by religious environments in ways that are specific to the intersection of identity and faith. Many carry the particular wound of having been told, by people who claimed to love them, that who they are is fundamentally wrong.
People raised in high-control religious groups often navigate significant difficulty understanding their own autonomy, making decisions without external religious validation, and trusting their own instincts after years of being taught that their instincts were corrupted.
BIPOC individuals experience religious trauma in complex ways shaped by the history of Christianity and colonialism, the role of faith communities in both sustaining and harming communities of color, and the particular grief of navigating harm within communities where church has also been a site of survival and belonging.
People who were raised in purity culture often carry a complicated relationship with their body and sexuality that does not resolve simply because they left the religious context.
Religious trauma therapy here starts with your experience. Not a framework we are trying to fit you into. Not a predetermined outcome about what your relationship with faith should look like by the end.
We take time to understand what you were taught, how those teachings shaped your understanding of yourself, and what is still running in your nervous system even when you no longer consciously hold the beliefs. Shame is not only a cognitive experience. It lives in the body. Approaches that only work with beliefs often do not reach the places where religious harm has actually settled.
Our approach is also explicitly anti-oppression. We are not neutral on conversion practices. We are not neutral on the use of religious arguments to deny LGBTQIA+ people their rights and dignity. We hold those realities as part of the clinical work, not as political opinions to be bracketed.
For clients who still hold faith, or who are somewhere in the middle of deconstruction, there is no agenda here about where you should land. The goal is not to help you leave religion or to help you stay. It is to help you understand what happened to you, separate what belongs to you from what was imposed on you, and find a relationship with meaning and identity that you actually chose.
People navigating religious trauma who do this work often find they are able to:
Approaches are chosen together based on what actually fits each person’s brain, nervous system, and life. There is no single method that works for everyone.
Shame from religious trauma lives in the body, not only in beliefs. Somatic approaches work directly with that embodied experience in ways that talking alone does not always reach. Especially useful for purity culture harm and the physical manifestations of chronic shame.
Explores the different parts that developed inside a religious system. The part that still believes. The part that is furious. The part that misses the community. The part that is relieved. All of them have something important to say, and all of them are welcome.
For experiences that function like traumatic memories, including conversion practices, religious abuse, or specific events within a religious context. EMDR can help process those memories without requiring detailed retelling.
Helps clients clarify their own values, separate from the ones they were handed, and build a life oriented around what actually matters to them now. Particularly useful during and after deconstruction.
Addresses the thought patterns that religious teachings can install: shame, self-punishment, black-and-white thinking, and the belief that worth is conditional on compliance.
The foundation of everything here. Religious harm of LGBTQIA+ people is not treated as a theological question. It is treated as harm. The political context is part of the clinical work.
This may be a good fit if you:
This is also for parents and caregivers who are watching their teenager navigate something that feels bigger than what they know how to hold. You do not have to have the right words to reach out. If you want to learn more about parent support, read more here.
We see clients virtually. Our therapist is licensed in New Mexico, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
Our founder, Allison VanGordon (they/she), is a queer, gender non-conforming therapist who understands the intersection of religious harm and LGBTQIA+ identity from both clinical training and personal frame. Their work is grounded in anti-oppression principles and in an understanding that religious systems have been used historically and continue to be used to cause harm to LGBTQIA+ people, neurodivergent people, and other marginalized communities.
Their PhD research focuses on marginalized communities and the ways mental health systems have historically failed the people they were built to serve. That research includes an examination of how spiritual bypass operates in therapy settings, where therapists treat religious belief as inherently benign and miss the harm it has caused.
Therapy here is not neutral. It is grounded in the belief that LGBTQIA+ identity is not a problem, conversion practices are harmful, and the people who were told otherwise deserve care that is clear about that.
Read more about Embodied Therapy here and read more about Allison here.
No. Some people are still inside a faith community and quietly navigating harm that has never been named. Others are in the middle of deconstruction. Others have been out for years and are still carrying what they left with. You do not need a resolved relationship with religion to start therapy.
Therapy here holds no agenda about what you believe. The work is about what you experienced and what you want your relationship with faith, meaning, and identity to look like going forward. You are not required to land anywhere specific by the end.
Yes. The psychological harm caused by conversion practices is well-documented in clinical literature. Multiple major mental health organizations, including the American Psychological Association, have stated that conversion practices are harmful and ineffective. The harm is real regardless of what any individual provider or religious community claims.
The relational cost of leaving or questioning a faith is part of what therapy holds. We can work through the grief, the fear, and the complicated loyalty without requiring you to make any particular choice about your relationships.
Yes. While much of the public conversation about religious trauma centers Christian fundamentalism, religious harm occurs across many faith traditions. If your experience involves harm from any religious context, that is within the scope of what we work with.
Therapy here is politically clear about certain things: LGBTQIA+ people deserve dignity, conversion practices are harmful, and the use of religious arguments to legislate against queer and trans people causes real psychological harm. These are not political opinions in the sense of partisan debate. They are clinical realities. If the chronic stress of the current political climate is affecting you, that is part of the work.
The intake session is $250.
Ongoing individual therapy sessions range from $85 to $155, depending on need and availability.
Family and parent support sessions range from $105 to $175.
Sliding scale options are available. You can check your eligibility instantly below — no phone calls, no hassle.
You do not have to have it figured out. You do not need the right words for what happened to you. You just have to reach out.
A free consultation is just a conversation. You ask questions. We ask questions. Together we figure out whether this feels like the right fit.
