If you don’t feel shame, they think there’s something wrong with you.

They expect to feel shame from their God, shame from their family and friends, shame from the community leaders, and most importantly, internalized shame. In the religious communities that I was raised in, shame is an expected part of life. This led me to grow up extremely anxious, hyper-vigilant and perfectionist, to avoid making the mistake of being perceived as oppositional in any way. Some of those “mistakes” were asking for help at the wrong time, being afraid at night, acting like a child, and other normal childhood behaviors that were labelled as defiance. During my developing years, I learned that if I made a mistake, even a little one, I could be punished in this way. The use of so-called “corporal punishment” (physical abuse) as way to correct children’s behavior was excused and sometimes encouraged using the religious texts. More often, though, the effects of shaming and ostracizing caused people to leave on their own, as I eventually did. It was a common practice to shame or exclude people to convince them to comply, and, occasionally, a repeat offender might be asked to leave. Religious and household authorities were expected to ensure the rest of the community adhered to these standards, reprimanding or punishing as necessary. I grew up under the kind of fundamentalist religious ideology which rejected all scientific understandings of the world and prescribed pure or correct ways of being and living. The use of religion to exercise control and perpetrate abuse. I identified three major ways that I have experienced religious trauma and how that has impacted me.ġ. When I finally learned about religious trauma, the rest of the pieces fell together, and the puzzle that was my past started to come into view. But for all that these labels could help explain how I had been impacted by my past, there were still pieces that the mainstream medical model couldn’t identify or place. When I learned about C-PTSD, even more of the pieces fell into place. It argues that impairment of conversion survivors' relationships with religious communities, and religious self-concepts, point to the need for additional improvements in pastoral practice.When I learned about borderline personality disorder, a lot of pieces of my life fell into place in my head. The paper examines the survivors' support needs around the nature and extent of religious trauma and moral injury, to inform services working towards supporting their recovery from such experiences and their resolution of conflicts deeply bound in their sense of self and belonging. This paper explores their contribution to the particular harms of moral injury and religious trauma, drawing firstly on the foundational moral injury literature to offer a unique conceptual framework of spiritual harm and moral injury, and secondly on a rare qualitative 2016–2021 study of the spiritual harms reported in semi-structured interviews of 42 survivors of LGBTQA + change and suppression practices in Australia.

However, research shows conversion practices are harmful, and particularly associated with increased experiences of abuse, mental health diagnoses, and suicidality.

Deviation from this heterosexual cisgender social identity model is cast as curable ‘sexual brokenness’. Religion-based LGBTQA + conversion practices frame all people as potential heterosexuals whose gender aligns with their birth sex (in a cisgender binary model of male and female sexes).

Religious trauma