Therapy for Religious Trauma
in person in Center City, Pennsylvania and online across PA & NJ
Healing from faith-based harm, purity culture, and spiritual abuse
Outwardly…
For some people, religion was a source of comfort, meaning, and belonging.
For others, it was also a place where fear, shame, control, or silence took root.
Sometimes both are true at the same time.
Religious trauma therapy is for people who were harmed in the name of faith. This harm is often invisible, dismissed, or minimized, especially if others insist that “it wasn’t that bad,” or that you should “just focus on the good parts.”
You adapted to belong.
Your nervous system remembers.
If your body learned to stay small, quiet, obedient, hyper-vigilant, or ashamed in order to belong or be loved, that matters. If your worth felt conditional. If your body or sexuality felt policed. If doubt felt dangerous. If leaving, questioning, or staying all came with grief, you are not broken. You adapted.
At All of You Therapy, we offer trauma-informed therapy for religious trauma that honors both the pain and the complexity of these experiences. We do not tell you what to believe. We help you make sense of what happened and how it shaped you, so you can choose what comes next with more agency and less fear.
What religious trauma can look like.
Religious trauma does not always come from extreme or overt abuse. Often, it develops slowly through repeated messages about who you are allowed to be, what is acceptable to feel, and what parts of yourself must be controlled or denied in order to be “good.”
You might recognize yourself in some of these experiences:
Chronic shame or self-doubt that feels baked into your identity
Fear of doing something wrong, even when no one is watching
Difficulty trusting your own intuition or internal signals
Anxiety around authority, rules, or disappointing others
A complicated relationship with your body, pleasure, or sexuality
Feeling frozen, numb, or disconnected when talking about faith or spirituality
Grief, anger, or confusion about what you lost when you questioned or left
A sense that love, safety, or belonging must be earned
Purity culture and the body.
Purity culture deserves specific attention.
Many clients we work with grew up in environments where bodies, especially female or queer bodies, were treated as dangerous, tempting, or morally suspect.
Sexuality was framed as something to control, suppress, or fear. Desire was equated with sin. Boundaries were taught in ways that prioritized obedience over consent.
Even years later, this can show up as:
Discomfort being present in your body
Difficulty experiencing pleasure without guilt or shutdown
Confusion about consent, desire, or boundaries
Feeling responsible for other people’s thoughts, feelings, or actions
A split between who you are internally and who you were allowed to be
Purity culture does not just affect sexual functioning. It shapes how people relate to themselves, to power, and to intimacy. Therapy creates space to gently reconnect with your body, reclaim agency, and untangle shame from identity.
This work is slow, relational, and deeply respectful. We do not rush it.
You get to decide what stays.
Many people worry that seeking therapy for religious trauma means rejecting spirituality altogether. That is not the goal here.
Some clients want to deconstruct their faith completely. Others want to reconstruct it in ways that feel safer, more embodied, and more compassionate. Some are unsure. All of those paths are welcome.
Our work is not about telling you what to believe. It is about helping you notice where fear replaced choice, where shame replaced curiosity, and where your nervous system learned to survive rather than feel alive.
You get to decide what stays, what changes, and what you leave behind.
How therapy helps:
Religious trauma often lives as much in the body as it does in beliefs. This is why insight alone is rarely enough.
Our therapists work from attachment-focused, experiential, and nervous-system-informed approaches. We pay attention to what happens in real time between us, not just the story you tell but how your body responds as you tell it.
In therapy, we may work on:
Making sense of early faith experiences through a trauma lens
Identifying how religious messages shaped your attachment patterns
Rebuilding trust in your internal signals and emotional responses
Working with shame, fear, or inner critics that formed in religious contexts
Supporting embodiment and reconnection with the body at a tolerable pace
Grieving what was lost while honoring what helped you survive
This is not about “fixing” you. It is about creating enough safety for the parts of you that learned to hide, comply, or perform to finally rest.
Who This Work is For
Religious trauma therapy may be a good fit if you:
Grew up in a rigid, controlling, or fear-based religious environment
Were taught that questioning, doubt, or curiosity were dangerous
Experienced spiritual abuse, coercion, or misuse of authority
Are struggling with shame rooted in religious or moral messaging
Feel disconnected from your body or sense of self
Want to explore faith, spirituality, or meaning without pressure
You do not need to have all the words for what happened. You do not need to be sure it “counts” as trauma. If something in your body tightens when you think about religion, that is enough to start.
Therapy for religious trauma in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania
All of You Therapy is a trauma- and attachment-focused group practice based in Center City, Philadelphia. We offer in-person therapy in Philadelphia and telehealth across Pennsylvania and select states.
Our clinicians are deeply trained in working with complex trauma, developmental trauma, and the long-term impact of early relational experiences. We understand that religious trauma often intersects with family dynamics, gender roles, sexuality, and identity, and we hold that complexity with care.
You deserve therapy that takes your experience seriously.
Life can feel larger than the harm you were shaped by.
Choice, safety, and self-trust are possible for you.
We can help you more deeply understand and heal from the impacts of religious trauma, so you can move through life, with all it’s beauty and complexity, on your own terms.