Review of For God’s Sake: Recovering From Religious Trauma
For God’s Sake by Anna Clark Miller is an extremely useful and easily digestible nonfiction, educational book that honors the complexity and heft of religious trauma. It is a very welcome addition to my bookshelf, and I started recommending it to my clients before I was even done reading it.
Miller provides an excellent explanation of religious trauma (RT) and its various facets that is authoritative and nuanced, yet easy to read. It’s suitable for both the average layperson and for mental health clinicians who are looking to deepen their knowledge on the subject.
The greater part of the book is devoted to education about what RT looks and feels like, with a second smaller portion devoted to tools and approaches to recovery. She identifies five main areas of concern in religious trauma – fear and anxiety, shame, rigid thinking, self-suppression, and social dysfunction – and devotes a chapter to each. She also explores topics such as spiritual bypassing, high-control groups, the special impact of RT in childhood, and deconstruction.
There is a lot packed into a relatively short book – it is just a little over 200 pages. Because it’s easy to read and not terribly long, it is tempting to rush right through it. However, I strongly encourage the reader to take their time with For God’s Sake, both to absorb the information and to reflect deeply on how they’ve been personally impacted by RT. Most chapters end with a small “Reflect” section that poses several questions for introspection. One could very easily take a 10-15 page chapter and turn it into an hour-long journaling time or an entire book club discussion meeting.
Miller includes many “inventory” questionnaires to help the religious trauma survivor assess their own circumstances, behaviors, and emotions. Examples include a general Religious Trauma inventory, a Learned Helplessness inventory, and a Codependency inventory. These lists serve to educate the reader and help draw attention to specific circumstances that one might overlook. They’re helpful for identifying RT-related patterns that can be difficult to see in oneself, since blindness to the impact of one’s own religious trauma is often baked into religious trauma. These lists of specifics help shift the reader out of the pervasive RT survivor’s shame (a view that says “I am inherently bad, that’s why I’m like this”) to a more nuanced and self-compassionate view (“maybe this thing I don’t like about myself was shaped by experiences”).
In the chapter on marginalized groups, Miller devotes a few pages to LGBTQ+ folks and discusses how they are uniquely affected by religious trauma, and the negative impact of conformity demands. Since queer religious trauma is my area of clinical focus, I would have enjoyed more extensive exploration around this topic. But for a comprehensive RT book, it addresses queer religious trauma more than adequately. I deeply appreciated the acknowledgement of the following point:
Those who learn to survive in nonaffirming church communities often become so good at avoiding and denying their identity, they don’t even realize they’re doing it. For this reason, there’s a very high number of “late in life” coming-out stories among religious trauma survivors.
She does talk about identity development (and lack thereof) in the chapter on childhood RT. Miller discusses the insidious effect of a childhood infused with shame, rigid expectations, corporal punishment, and strict gender roles. She explores the stunting of curiosity and the effects of being sheltered from mainstream culture and ideas, both of which are common in high-control groups.
I especially appreciated her noting that religiosity in childhood sometimes involves fear-inducing beliefs being deeply installed well before a child’s brain can think abstractly. That is, if a 25-year-old has never heard of “hell” before, they’re a lot less likely to buy into the concept of literal burning-in-agony eternal damnation. But if you’ve been hearing about this horrific thing since you were 2, you believe it (until you deconstruct it later). Your brain and nervous system may have wired around the idea that if you do something wrong, the worst, scariest existence imaginable will be in store for you. How terrifying! Even if you no longer intellectually believe in hell, you sincerely did until your own deconstruction, and the experiences you had can result in long-term anxiety, perfectionism, and more.
Another of my favorite parts was the chapter on “Recovering From Shame.” She accurately observes that, “In many ways, the opposite of shame is self-compassion…self-compassion tells us we’re worthy of love and care even if we’re not perfect.” Earlier in the book, in the chapter on shame she notes that “frequently, people with religious trauma have shame-based core beliefs that they are bad, broken, inadequate, or disgusting” due to the unrealistic expectations thrust upon us by fundamentalist or high-control religion. For these reasons, I find self-compassion work to be essential to most of my clients’ recovery from RT.
I expect I’ll make good use of the Shame Vs. Self-Compassion table in my work (p. 174-175). It lists examples of simple sentences that articulate how someone steeped in shame might see themselves, and pairs each one with a self-compassionate alternative. For example, “I’m lazy” is paired with “Everyone needs rest and relaxation, including me.” “I’m not lovable” pairs with “I’m worthy of love even though I’m imperfect.” She acknowledges that a true shift out of shame is not as simple or quick as saying some nice things to oneself, and gives an example of a client who started with one affirmation she could buy into, “I’m human, just like everyone else.”
And really, the quest to recover from RT is summed up by that quote. Recovery from religious trauma is about finding your way into your full humanity and embracing it positively. This book is going to be a practical tool for so many survivors and for those walking beside them on their journey.
Are you looking for a therapist who understands the nuances of religious trauma, or to help you figure out if that label even applies? You can schedule a free consult call with Tara today!