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Poll For Childhood Trauma Sufferers: Did Religion Play A Role In Your Trauma?

For childhood trauma sufferers: Did religion play a role in your trauma?


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Yes, mother was very much of the catholic, you're an evil, sinful person who will burn in hell and I need to punish you kind of thing.

Struggled with the whole concept of religion ever since.
 
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Religion was on the periphery of my trauma. I was left outside of a church when I was 5 years old, the church my kindergarten class was in, the church I went into looking for help and safety. All I found was more angry people, no one that would listen and almost immediately was being sent back out onto the street I had just ran in from.

I have never felt safe in the church and although I know there are good people that belong to churches I also feel there are a lot of hypocrites that hide behind religion to make themselves look good in the eyes of people that don't really know them. Although religion didn't play a direct role in the trauma, to a 5 year old looking for help it just felt like betrayal.
 
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I was in a session last week and I remembered a most horrifying thing. I got baptized under my own power. I was trying so hard to regain the support and approval my parents had withheld from me after becoming super religious that I willfully ignored what I remember my feelings were before and after the fact and jumped through the heavenly hoop as it were. Kind of shocking to realize that although I hold the religious people in my family in total contempt and gladly accept the shunning and ex communication, in fact I enforce it, I may have foolishly caused myself more grief in the long run by showing them that it was possible to break my spirit, it had to have given them the hope that kept them trying at it for another 38 GD years!
 
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My experience matches more what Lizio, reallydown, Zef, justmehere, ice_fire have related. My folks were along the lines of Protestant fundamentalism, especially during my preschool and elementary school years. The whole spare the rod, spoil the child routine. Their protestantism (their brand of it at least) was also racist. Growing up in Texas as Anglo Americans, my family merged their racism against Mexican-Americans (most of my friends that I had the previledge (sp?) of being friends with) with a Protestant disgust of Catholicism. Luckily my interaction with the Latinos and African-Americans at my school (through desegregation and bussing) gave me the opportunity at an early age to see the hippocracy (sp?) in my family -- which of course made me an heretic and disobedient soul against their god. It was very confusing and heartbreaking for me as a kid and younger adult.

I'm a very spiritual person but in ways that -- under no circumstances -- do NOT conform to any dogmatic or institutionalized religion.

Thanks to you, Zef, for creating this thread. And, Emma, your book recommendation is officially on my book-list.

It gets so lonely sometimes in this RIGID world -- another reason why I am thankful for this forum.
 
welcome, we are thinking about printing t-shirts.........

I survived a religious zealot posing as my parent
Thank you god for delivering me from your followers
Always remember and never forget, Hitler issued bibles to his troops
If there is a hell it waits for them, not us (Frank Zappa)
They tried to get me into heaven but all I got was this anti-religious t-shirt
Anyone else?
 
Non of the poll options really work for my response. In my case, my father withheld religion. My mother wasn't allowed to have me baptized as a baby, and we weren't allowed to go to church. When they split and he was allowed to take my sister and I for the day two weekends a month, he picked Sundays so it conflicted with attending church.
 
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Just me here,
I'll see if I can come up with any clever ones.

If you protect a molester, you are a molester. (Maybe with a half-tone picture of Paterno or the Pope behind it)
God offered me eternal life as long as I behaved. . .I am Spartacus.
I prayed to be shown the way, I left religion the next day.
I play with Sparlock. (Maybe only ex-Jehovah Witnesses will get this one.)
Moses gave me a staph infection.
 
Okay, heres one I have actually seen:

would a god that gave us sex and told us multiply really want us to be afraid of him too?
 
Nadia,
I think you hit the nail on the head. This summer, the Jehovah Witnesses released a short series of videos on how to be a 'proper' Christian parent. When I watched one, a lot of childhood stuff came back to me.

In the videos, every time the child misbehaved, the parents were shown telling the child that he is making God sad or angry or that he won't have an afterlife. The basic message is, "Do what we say or God will kill you."

At least, that is the message that came through to me when I was a kid.
 
Yeah, so the trauma got really complex. So people who are spiritual and do energy work have also triggered me. But using the concept of God in this way is inhuman and has nothing to do with religion.
 
Only passively, if at all. My dad lost all faith in God when his own father died, which was an element of his own PTSD (that and living with his psychologically unstable and emotionally abusive mother). He was a believer whose life experiences had cast doubt on that belief forever. He never emotionally healed from his father's death, not while I was a kid anyway, and maybe not even now. So he was always kind of on the fence - never really tehnically an atheist, never really seriously Christian. But he had all the hangups leftover from the religious upbringing - all the patriarchal entitlement, all of the guilt and shame about sexuality, all of the blind obedience to the standard code of conduct for intolerant white US Christians (which includes at least passive racism, xenophobia, etc.) as well as for whatever temporal laws (he'd swear up and down how he'd never done any illegal drugs, "never touched the stuff," he'd say proudly, even as he was drinking himself into a stupor night after night, convinced that it was OK, because alcohol was, y'know, legal.) He always wanted to be convinced he was checking off all the boxes of what he 'should' do according to some law or laundry list, never once taking the time to really assess where all these choices were taking him and what it was doing to everyone around him.

So: I think religion played a role in my dad's trauma, and that filtered down to me. But directly? my trauma had nothing to do with God or the Church. I answered No.
 
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