This weekend, I have been sitting in on parts of the Religious Trauma Collective’s online conference. The lineup covered familiar territory: apocalyptic terror, sexual abuse, indoctrination, shunning, estrangement, evangelical patriarchy, cults, and leadership. Good speakers and important stories.
While the event rightly centres on experiences familiar to its speakers—mainly Christian ones—I want to pick up a related thread. What happens when someone leaves a high-control religion and finds their way to Paganism?
This isn’t just a convert’s story, though. Even for those raised Pagan or never Christian, we live in a culture deeply influenced by Christian ideas—sin, judgment, and an ever-watchful authority—which subtly shape everyone, not just those exiting high-control churches.
Religious trauma and spiritual harm
There is no single, widely agreed-upon definition of spirituality and religion, but I propose the following for the purposes of this essay.
Spirituality concerns experiences, relationships, values, and orientations that connect a being to what it perceives as significant, sacred, transcendent, or larger than itself. Religion is a particular expression of spirituality through shared beliefs, practices, rituals, and community traditions.
Just as spirituality and religion overlap, so do religious trauma and spiritual harm, but they are not identical.
Religious trauma refers to psychological, emotional, social, or sometimes physical harm resulting from religious beliefs, teachings, practices, institutions, leaders, or communities. It often involves experiences such as fear, shame, coercion, abuse, exclusion, spiritual manipulation, loss of identity, or threats related to salvation, damnation, purity, or divine punishment. Religious trauma may occur within a religious setting, but its effects can persist long after a person leaves that tradition.
Spiritual harm is broader. It refers to injury to a person’s sense of meaning, purpose, connection, identity, dignity, hope, or relationship with what they hold sacred. Spiritual harm can arise from religious experiences, but it can also result from illness, grief, trauma, discrimination, institutional practices, moral injury, cultural dislocation, or existential distress.
A person raised to believe they are inherently sinful and worthy of eternal punishment may experience religious trauma. A patient whose cultural or religious practices are ignored at the end of life may experience spiritual harm. A survivor of clergy abuse may experience both religious trauma and spiritual harm.
The psychological and emotional effects of religious trauma and spiritual harm are familiar: PTSD, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, sleep disturbances, deep anger, toxic guilt, avoidance, dissociation, and more. While distrust in religion and religious communities is common, there are other spiritual effects that are less discussed. These include feeling abandoned, betrayed, or violated by God, moral confusion, and deep isolation from the loss of a central tool for making sense of the world.
Often, deconstruction—the gradual dismantling of an inherited belief system—is described as the endpoint. After all, if you get through deconstruction, you’re supposed to be free. But that’s an incomplete picture. While deconstruction breaks down beliefs, the nervous system still requires focused care, and that’s where Paganism as a landing place introduces new complexity.
What’s specific to Paganism
For many newcomers to Paganism, the fear of the old god doesn’t disappear. There is a quiet, creeping terror that God hasn’t stopped watching and that Hell is waiting. This dread interrupts a confident and excited decision to practise Paganism. It appears at three in the morning, even when the daylight self is sure of the choice. It isn’t a sign that the choice was wrong. It’s a sign of how well that fear was built and how strongly it survives.
It would be easy to see this as merely transferring an old Christian fear onto a new god—feeling the same dread over forgetting an offering to Apollo as one did for missing a prayer. While this does occur, it simplifies the complex challenges facing Pagan practitioners. Paganism introduces its own difficulties, such as learning to reinterpret or unlearn deeply rooted fear, and managing the uncertainty that comes with navigating multiple deities and practices, which is more nuanced than merely shifting fear from one faith to another.
A person raised to fear one god’s judgment has spent years organised around a single relationship and a single set of consequences. Move into a polytheistic framework, and the structure changes completely. There’s no single authority demanding total compliance, no one figure whose anger determines everything. For some people, that’s liberating or, at least, loosening. For others, it does the opposite: more gods means more ways to get it wrong, more relationships to manage, more chances to offend someone you didn’t even know you owed anything to. The fear doesn’t always shrink when the pantheon grows. Sometimes it just finds more targets.
There is also a real divide in how Pagans relate to correctness. This is less about seriousness and more about where certainty comes from. Reconstructionist practice draws on historical precedent and scholarship, doing things in ways that are attested to or well-evidenced. This can offer a clear answer to ‘was that done correctly.’ It’s serious work, not a safety net, but it does mean a frightened practitioner has somewhere concrete to look. Eclectic practice does not have that inherited record. Correctness must be built, not found. This can be freeing for those shaping their own relationships with the gods. But for those still carrying old fears, the lack of external answers can leave the fear circling with nowhere to go.
My traditions don’t let me dodge this. Lukumi carries serious expectations around correct ritual performance, lineage, and consequence. Hellenic polytheism has its own long memory of hubris and the gods who punished it. I don’t think historical Paganism supports the increasingly popular idea that the gods never get angry and never withhold favour. But there’s a difference in scale worth holding onto.
Pagan consequence, even at its sternest, isn’t built around eternal damnation. Hubris brings punishment that is specific and often brutal, but limited. A breach in Lukumi ritual has real consequences in one’s life and community, not an eternal loss of the self. Christianity’s unique contribution to religious fear was making the stakes infinite and the verdict final. When that fear migrates into Pagan practice, it tends to keep that infinite and catastrophic shape. Yet the tradition it is now attached to was never built to carry it.
So the task isn’t only telling devotion apart from fear. It’s important to check if the scale of fear matches what the tradition claims. If the dread feels total, eternal, or identity-annihilating over a missed offering, that intensity is almost always old wiring. It persists, no matter what tradition it now points to. If you can’t tell, it’s not a failure of insight. It’s worth bringing to a teacher, elder, or therapist, rather than struggling alone at two in the morning.
I have to acknowledge here that Paganism has a structural problem. Most Christians, whatever else is true of their tradition, have access to clergy, a congregation, and some form of pastoral care, even within traditions that themselves are the source of harm. Most Pagans don’t have an equivalent. Many practise as solitaries, with no elder down the road and no one to call. The advice to bring this fear to a teacher, an elder, or a therapist assumes those people exist, are findable, and are affordable. For a lot of solitary practitioners, none of that holds. Therapists with genuine religious trauma experience are scarce and rarely cheap, and ones who also understand Pagan practice are scarcer again. None of this means the fear has to be carried alone forever. It does mean the path back from it is often harder and slower for exactly the people most likely to be facing it without support.
Care versus fear
A tradition’s genuine expectation of you and a trauma response can both produce the same outward behaviour: careful ritual, attention to correctness, hesitation before acting. But devotion can carry someone for decades without wearing them down. Fear, held at that pitch, eventually exhausts the person carrying it.
That distinction shows up most clearly in what happens when something goes wrong. A practitioner working from devotion and care notices an error, adjusts, and moves on, with maybe a flicker of embarrassment. A practitioner working from old fear spirals into dread, scans for omens of punishment, and loses sleep over a missed step.
In practice, these two states often blur together rather than sit neatly apart. Someone can be genuinely devoted to a serious tradition and still have an old trauma response firing alongside that devotion, get triggered by the same missed step that a less wounded practitioner would shrug off. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and noticing that they can coexist is more useful than trying to sort every reaction into one category or the other.
Indoctrination isn’t a failure of intelligence
It would be easy to read all of this as faintly mocking, as though people caught in these fears simply weren’t clever enough to see what was happening to them. That’s not fair, and it’s not accurate. Indoctrination doesn’t target people for being credulous. It targets them because they are loved and want to belong.
Indoctrination doesn’t work by tricking unintelligent people. It works by attaching belief to family, to community, to safety, often from early childhood, often through people who genuinely loved the person being indoctrinated. The fear takes hold long before critical thinking enters the picture, and it gets reinforced by everything that made a person feel they belonged. Reasoning someone out of it with better arguments rarely works on its own. This is trauma work, and trauma work takes the time it takes.
What healing involves
A full account of healing from religious trauma is well beyond the scope of a single blog, but a few things are worth noting and remembering. I’m writing this as a spiritual carer and practitioner, not a clinician, and what follows comes from pastoral and devotional experience rather than clinical training.
It helps to notice the fear without obeying it. When dread shows up over a missed offering or an imperfect ritual, the goal isn’t to argue yourself out of the feeling on the spot. It’s to recognise it as a familiar visitor with an old name, separate from whatever god you’re currently relating to, and let it pass through without acting on its instructions.
It helps to test what remains once punishment is off the table. If you knew with total certainty that nothing bad would happen, no matter how a ritual went, would you still want to do it? A yes points to devotion. A relieved “no” suggests the practice was carrying a weight that was never really about the deity at all.
It helps to build language for reverence that isn’t fear, learning to feel the difference between awe and dread in the body rather than just in theory. And it helps to find people who tolerate your mistakes, since isolation was part of what made the original fear so total, and a community that responds to a missed step with patience does more to retrain a nervous system than reading about deconstruction ever will.
None of this replaces trauma-informed therapy when the fear is severe, persistent, or tied to specific abusive experiences. Deconstruction and devotional practice can do a great deal, but they aren’t a substitute for it. I know I’ve already said this kind of support isn’t always reachable. Where it isn’t, the other practices here aren’t a replacement, but they’re not nothing either. A peer support group, an online community, or simply one other person who takes your fear seriously without feeding it can help in the meantime.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, in the late-night doubt about whether you did the ritual correctly, in the flinch at certain words, in the fear that something will be angry with you for getting it wrong, that fear has a history, and the history isn’t yours alone. Some of what you’re carrying may even be a genuine, appropriate relationship to a tradition that asks something real of you. Some of it is older than any god you currently serve. Learning to tell those apart is slower work than finding the right new theology, and it’s allowed to be.
Hi Cosette – thanks for your extraordinary (in the best sense of the word) blogs. You write so beautifully, bringing together your exacting intelligence and fierce compassion. I hope people realise what an asset you are to the spiritual care scene here in Naarm, with your broad, broad experience across multiple spiritual and religious traditions. Thanks for both educating me, providing a framework for my own reflection around religious trauma and for encouraging me in my unfurling SC practice. Every blessing on this winter solstice. Anne
Anne, thank you so much for reading and your kinds words. Happy solstice!