Understanding Religious Trauma

Understanding Religious Trauma is a three-hour, self-paced training for therapists, counsellors, psychologists, social workers and coaches who want to go deeper than the basics. Religious trauma is easy to mistake for something else. It can look like anxiety, depression, OCD, perfectionism or relationship problems, and most trauma training doesn’t explain the difference. This training gives you the frameworks and language to recognise what high-control religion does to people, and to help your clients rebuild their choice, autonomy and self-trust.

Who it’s for
Practitioners who already work with trauma, grief or identity and want to understand religious trauma properly. It’s a good next step after Religious Trauma 101, and it works well on its own if you already have some background.

What’s covered

• Key terms and concepts, so you and your clients are speaking the same language

• How religious trauma differs from other kinds of trauma

• Indoctrination, thought reform and group-based coercive control

• Purity culture, marriage and sexual expectations, shame, diet culture and sexual coercion

• Fear-based theology, including hell, the rapture, Armageddon and spiritual warfare

• Shunning, excommunication and losing your whole community

• Signs and symptoms across emotional, cognitive, behavioural, social and physical areas

• Barriers to therapy, and how to make your sessions feel safe

• The nervous system, and working with lived experience

What you’ll walk away with
You’ll be able to recognise religious trauma across all areas of a client’s life, explain it in plain language, and support clients without pathologising or minimising what happened. You’ll also learn how to bring trauma-informed, body-based approaches into your work while respecting each client’s spiritual position, whatever it is.

What’s included

• Three hours of self-paced training

• A quiz and certificate of completion, which you may be able to use towards your CPD hours (check with your professional body)

• My go-to list of books and podcasts

• The Religious Trauma Cheat Sheet, a 62-page guide to terms and concepts from Christian and Catholic settings

• A Shattered Sanctuary: From Fellowship to Freedom, my ebook about leaving a high-control faith community

Price: $175

Reviews

“Doing this religious trauma training helped gain greater understanding to the nuances with someone experiencing religious trauma. It provided clear cultural language and key processes to consider when working with clients who experience this type of trauma. This self-paced training expanded my awareness beyond my own religious experiences. Understanding this landscape is much trickier than I realised. I look forward to future training programs to continue my development around religious trauma.” - Counsellor

"I’ve worked with trauma for years, but this training really opened my eyes to how religious systems shape fear, identity, and behaviour in ways I hadn’t fully appreciated. The mix of theory, practical examples, and lived experience made it really relatable. I feel so much more confident recognising religious trauma and supporting my clients without unintentionally minimising what they’ve been through." - Psychologist

"I went into this thinking I knew a lot about high-control systems, but this training gave me a whole new lens. The sections on thought reform, purity culture, and coercive group dynamics were gold; it’s the kind of insight you just can’t get from textbooks." - Counsellor/Coach