If you’re interested in exploring spirituality and religion on your quest for meaning, make sure to also check out happiness, community, utopia.
And if you’re wanting to heal from the trauma of religious or cult abuse, make sure to check out the page on trauma and grief, especially if you can relate to feelings of death, suicide, dystopia.
Nurturing a Spiritual Practice
Spirituality is one of those things that “the Western world,” has made difficult to access. Yet, a great many people consider it to be one of the cornerstones of a meaningful life. Maybe you’re one of them.
When I talk about the spiritual, I’m talking about the metaphysical – that which exists outside of observable scientific processes. These are the stories that organize our understanding of the world.
Spirituality can be connected to an organized religious practice, or it can be just you, or anything in between.
Nurturing a spiritual practice can involve:
- Routine and ritual.
- Storytelling.
- Community building.
- Connection beyond the human.
If you’re interested in nurturing a spiritual practice, I can provide an open and nonjudgemental therapeutic space for you to explore that.
Religious Trauma
Mainstream religious communities can have strict beliefs about what is right and wrong, authoritarian hierarchies, and complicated legacies of intergenerational trauma.
I have experiences working with folks coming from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and smaller religious communities. Through working with people coming from different experiences I’ve noticed some common themes: questions of identity, family, and a whole lot of pressure to be “good.”
If you have experiences of religious trauma, even if you’ve left your religious community, you’re still carrying this stuff deep within you.
In healing from religious trauma, we’ll talk about topics like identity, morality, and community building.
Cult Abuse
Cult abuse is one of the most difficult things to heal from. This is because cult abuse isolates you, it strips you of your individual identity, and your closest people sometimes harm you the most.
If you have experienced cult abuse, expect our therapeutic process to feel excruciatingly slow. You’re going to be suspicious of me as a person in a position of power, that’s a normal part of the process.
We’ll need to work through some things that come up because of that and if we’re successful, we’ll be able to build trust over time.
While we’re building trust, we’re also going to be working on soothing your nervous system. That means the “bread and butter,” of therapeutic work: sleep, exercise, food, distractions, naming feelings.
I know that this stuff can feel boring, and especially once you start to trust me you’ll want to quickly process some of the horrible things you’ve experienced. In order for us to be successful in doing that, we need to make sure we have strong foundations.
In time, we’ll build trust together and you’ll simultaneously be developing a deeper trusting relationship with yourself. You’ll have an opportunity to reformulate your identity and make sense of what happened to you.
It doesn’t have to continue to define you. You can define yourself.