Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

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At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia.  When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behavior—my Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister.  “If you ask anything in faith, believing,” they said.  “It will be done.” I knew they were quoting the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers.  But my horrible compulsions didn’t go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasn’t just the bulimia.  I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldn’t fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.  

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.   

Two years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a “relatively niche topic.” One commenter said, “A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.” 

Is toxic religion simply misinterpretation? What is religious trauma? Why does Winell believe religious trauma merits its own diagnostic label?

Let’s start this interview with the basics. What exactly is religious trauma syndrome?

Winell: Religious trauma syndrome (RTS) is a set of symptoms and characteristics that tend to go together and which are related to harmful experiences with religion. They are the result of two things: immersion in a controlling religion and the secondary impact of leaving a religious group. The RTS label provides a name and description that affected people often recognize immediately. Many other people are surprised by the idea of RTS, because in our culture it is generally assumed that religion is benign or good for you. Just like telling kids about Santa Claus and letting them work out their beliefs later, people see no harm in teaching religion to children.

But in reality, religious teachings and practices sometimes cause serious mental health damage. The public is somewhat familiar with sexual and physical abuse in a religious context. As Journalist Janet Heimlich has documented in, Breaking Their Will, Bible-based religious groups that emphasize patriarchal authority in family structure and use harsh parenting methods can be destructive.

But the problem isn’t just physical and sexual abuse. Emotional and mental treatment in authoritarian religious groups also can be damaging because of 1) toxic teachings like eternal damnation or original sin 2) religious practices or mindset, such as punishment, black and white thinking, or sexual guilt, and 3) neglect that prevents a person from having the information or opportunities to develop normally.

Can you give me an example of RTS from your consulting practice?

Winell: I can give you many. One of the symptom clusters is around fear and anxiety. People indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity as small children sometimes have memories of being terrified by images of hell and apocalypse before their brains could begin to make sense of such ideas. Some survivors, who I prefer to call “reclaimers,” have flashbacks, panic attacks, or nightmares in adulthood even when they intellectually no longer believe the theology. One client of mine, who during the day functioned well as a professional, struggled with intense fear many nights. She said,

I was afraid I was going to hell. I was afraid I was doing something really wrong. I was completely out of control. I sometimes would wake up in the night and start screaming, thrashing my arms, trying to rid myself of what I was feeling. I"d walk around the house trying to think and calm myself down, in the middle of the night, trying to do some self-talk, but I felt like it was just something that – the fear and anxiety was taking over my life.

 

Or consider this comment, which refers to a film used by evangelicals to warn about the horrors of the “end times” for nonbelievers.

 

I was taken to see the film “A Thief In The Night”. WOW.  I am in shock to learn that many other people suffered the same traumas I lived with because of this film. A few days or weeks after the film viewing, I came into the house and mom wasn"t there. I stood there screaming in terror. When I stopped screaming, I began making my plan: Who my Christian neighbors were, who"s house to break into to get money and food. I was 12 yrs old and was preparing for Armageddon alone.

In addition to anxiety, RTS can include depression, cognitive difficulties, and problems with social functioning. In fundamentalist Christianity, the individual is considered depraved and in need of salvation. A core message is “You are bad and wrong and deserve to die.” (The wages of sin is death.) This gets taught to millions of children through organizations like Child Evangelism Fellowship and there is a group organized  to oppose their incursion into public schools.  I’ve had clients who remember being distraught when given a vivid bloody image of Jesus paying the ultimate price for their sins. Decades later they sit telling me that they can’t manage to find any self-worth.

After twenty-seven years of trying to live a perfect life, I failed. . . I was ashamed of myself all day long. My mind battling with itself with no relief. . . I always believed everything that I was taught but I thought that I was not approved by God. I thought that basically I, too, would die at Armageddon.

 

I"ve spent literally years injuring myself, cutting and burning my arms, taking overdoses and starving myself, to punish myself so that God doesn"t have to punish me. It"s taken me years to feel deserving of anything good.

Born-again Christianity and devout Catholicism tell people they are weak and dependent, calling on phrases like “lean not unto your own understanding” or “trust and obey.” People who internalize these messages can suffer from learned helplessness. I’ll give you an example from a client who had little decision-making ability after living his entire life devoted to following the “will of God.” The words here don’t convey the depth of his despair.

I have an awful time making decisions in general. Like I can"t, you know, wake up in the morning, “What am I going to do today?” Like I don"t even know where to start. You know all the things I thought I might be doing are gone and I"m not sure I should even try to have a career; essentially I babysit my four-year-old all day.

Authoritarian religious groups are subcultures where conformity is required in order to belong. Thus if you dare to leave the religion, you risk losing your entire support system as well.

I lost all my friends. I lost my close ties to family. Now I’m losing my country. I’ve lost so much because of this malignant religion and I am angry and sad to my very core. . . I have tried hard to make new friends, but I have failed miserably. . . I am very lonely.

Leaving a religion, after total immersion, can cause a complete upheaval of a person’s construction of reality, including the self, other people, life, and the future. People unfamiliar with this situation, including therapists, have trouble appreciating the sheer terror it can create. 

My form of religion was very strongly entrenched and anchored deeply in my heart. It is hard to describe how fully my religion informed, infused, and influenced my entire worldview. My first steps out of fundamentalism were profoundly frightening and I had frequent thoughts of suicide. Now I’m way past that but I still haven"t quite found “my place in the universe.

Even for a person who was not so entrenched, leaving one’s religion can be a stressful and significant transition.

Many people seem to walk away from their religion easily, without really looking back. What is different about the clientele you work with?

Winell: Religious groups that are highly controlling, teach fear about the world, and keep members sheltered and ill-equipped to function in society are harder to leave easily. The difficulty seems to be greater if the person was born and raised in the religion rather than joining as an adult convert. This is because they have no frame of reference – no other “self” or way of “being in the world.” A common personality type is a person who is deeply emotional and thoughtful and who tends to throw themselves wholeheartedly into their endeavors. “True believers” who then lose their faith feel more anger and depression and grief than those who simply went to church on Sunday.

Aren’t these just people who would be depressed, anxious, or obsessive anyways?

Winell: Not at all. If my observation is correct, these are people who are intense and involved and caring. They hang on to the religion longer than those who simply “walk away” because they try to make it work even when they have doubts. Sometime this is out of fear, but often it is out of devotion. These are people for whom ethics, integrity and compassion matter a great deal. I find that when they get better and rebuild their lives, they are wonderfully creative and energetic about new things.

In your mind, how is RTS different from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Winell: RTS is a specific set of symptoms and characteristics that are connected with harmful religious experience, not just any trauma. This is crucial to understanding the condition and any kind of self-help or treatment. (More details about this can be found on my Journey Free website and discussed in mytalk at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Another difference is the social context, which is extremely different from other traumas or forms of abuse. When someone is recovering from domestic abuse, for example, other people understand and support the need to leave and recover. They don’t question it as a matter of interpretation, and they don’t send the person back for more. But this is exactly what happens to many former believers who seek counseling. If a provider doesn’t understand the source of the symptoms, he or she may send a client for pastoral counseling, or to AA, or even to another church. One reclaimer expressed her frustration this way:

 

Include physically-abusive parents who quote “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as literally as you can imagine and you have one fucked-up soul: an unloved, rejected, traumatized toddler in the body of an adult. I"m simply a broken spirit in an empty shell. But wait…That"s not enough!? There"s also the expectation by everyone in society that we victims should celebrate this with our perpetrators every Christmas and Easter!!

Just like disorders such as autism or bulimia, giving RTS a real name has important advantages. People who are suffering find that having a label for their experience helps them feel less alone and guilty. Some have written to me to express their relief:

There"s actually a name for it! I was brainwashed from birth and wasted 25 years of my life serving Him! I"ve since been out of my religion for several years now, but i cannot shake the haunting fear of hell and feel absolutely doomed. I"m now socially inept, unemployable, and the only way i can have sex is to pay for it.

Labeling RTS encourages professionals to study it more carefully, develop treatments, and offer training. Hopefully, we can even work on prevention.

What do you see as the difference between religion that causes trauma and religion that doesn’t?

Winell: Religion causes trauma when it is highly controlling and prevents people from thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth. With constant judgment of self and others, people become alienated from themselves, each other, and the world. Religion in its worst forms causes separation.

Conversely, groups that connect people and promote self-knowledge and personal growth can be said to be healthy. The book, Healthy Religion, describes these traits. Such groups put high value on respecting differences, and members feel empowered as individuals.  They provide social support, a place for events and rites of passage, exchange of ideas, inspiration, opportunities for service, and connection to social causes. They encourage spiritual practices that promote health like meditation or principles for living like the golden rule. More and more, nontheists are asking how they can create similar spiritual communities without the supernaturalism. An atheist congregation in London launched this year and has received over 200 inquiries from people wanting to replicate their model.

Some people say that terms like “recovery from religion” and “religious trauma syndrome” are just atheist attempts to pathologize religious belief.

Winell: Mental health professionals have enough to do without going out looking for new pathology. I never set out looking for a “niche topic,” and certainly not religious trauma syndrome. I originally wrote a paper for a conference of the American Psychological Association and thought that would be the end of it. Since then, I have tried to move on to other things several times, but this work has simply grown.

In my opinion, we are simply, as a culture, becoming aware of religious trauma.  More and more people are leaving religion, as seen by polls showing that the “religiously unaffiliated” have increased in the last five years from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. It’s no wonder the internet is exploding with websites for former believers from all religions, providing forums for people to support each other. The huge population of people “leaving the fold” includes a subset at risk for RTS, and more people are talking about it and seeking help.  For example, there are thousands of former Mormons, and I was asked to speak about RTS at an Exmormon Foundation conference.  I facilitate an international support group online called Release and Reclaim  which has monthly conference calls. An organization called Recovery from Religion, helps people start self-help meet-up groups

Saying that someone is trying to pathologize authoritarian religion is like saying someone pathologized eating disorders by naming them. Before that, they were healthy? No, before that we weren’t noticing. People were suffering, thought they were alone, and blamed themselves.  Professionals had no awareness or training. This is the situation of RTS today. Authoritarian religion is already pathological, and leaving a high-control group can be traumatic. People are already suffering. They need to be recognized and helped.

Mon, 03/25/2013 – 05:53

 
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Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

Are Some Men Born Pedophiles? New Science Says Yes, But Sexologists Say Not So Fast

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Pope Benedict’s legacy will be forever tied to it. Penn State’s lawyers are offering legal settlements over it. Adults who knew perpetrators for years still struggle with it. And now new research suggests that some people are born with brains ‘wired’ for sexual attraction to children—or pedophilia—a propensity that’s further shaped by life experiences and often cannot be controlled.

“Whatever the chain of events is, the chain begins before birth,” said James M. Cantor, a University of Toronto professor of psychiatry whose research team has made a series of startling correlations finding that pedophiles are likely to share physical attributes, such as slightly lower IQs, shorter body height, left-handedness and less brain tissue.

“There is no way to explain the findings that we get for pedophelia without mentioning or without including biology,” he recently told Canada’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “It is inescapable at this point. We cannot rule out psycho-social influences, but we cannot have a complete theory that cannot explain these non-obvious but but exquisitely important biological findings.”

Cantor’s findings have become big news not just because pedophilia is seen as one of the worst crimes—and its scandals and cover-ups don’t seem to end, whether in the Roman Catholic church or football-protecting universities. The idea that moral—and immoral—behavior has a basis in biology is the latest twist in the age-old debate of whether nature or nurture drives human action. For much of the 20^th century, psychologists looked more to the nurture side of the equation. But 21^st century science, with brain-scan imaging and computing power to analyze big data, are suggesting that both factors—one’s genes and one’s upbringing—shape human sexuality.

“It’s another ride on the nurture-nature merry-go-round,” Cantor told AlterNet, when asked what his findings portend. “It comes to the same point. We can’t take them apart. For scientists, the question of what portion is nature and what portion is nurture is incredibly interesting… Ninety-five percent of men are attracted to adult women. But looking at the exception, we can better understand the dynamics of sexual attraction for all.”

Like all science, research like Cantor’s can be cited to bouy one’s political beliefs—that people are born with bad genes must be treated harshly, as those on right say; or if people cannot help their genes they must be helped to manage, as liberals say. But in the 21^st century, a new intellectual paradigm—or fad—is emerging implying that once scientists find a problem has genetic roots, then it will eventually be traced and fixed.

The New York Times magazine has this recent report on how teenage abilities to cope with stress may have a “genetic component” that turns on one gene that’s been identifid. This Canadian television show discusses how feelings of romantic love originate in specific brain regions, reducing that life mystery to mechanics. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, has this TED Talk video—seen by 1.1 million people—describing how human illnesses will be cured in coming years by reprogramming one’s genes; essentially by treating cell-mutating diseases as a “software” issue.

Cantor’s talk to Canadian therapists who treat sex addicts and abusers held out a similar promise—that research was approaching a day where pedophiles could be identified early and prevented from acting out. He was mindful that such an ability was filled with political and legal implications, but he was bullish nonetheless.

“There is nothing in anything that we are learning that changes anybody’s right to treatment or right to refuse treatment,” he told colleagues. “Now it is my hope that as we go on, that we will pinpoint very precisely the exact place where things start to go off. And then we might have the greatest opportunity to change it… If the brain research is successful, then instead of preventing the second offense, we can prevent the first offense, which would be extremely, extremely exciting.”

Cantor said that he led one of three research teams worldwide—the others are German—doing new analyses of large data sets that looked at pedophile’s neurological and physical attributes. Some of these data sets are based on brain scans using MRIs, which is far more detailed than CT scans. Others are based on medical records of sex offenders, including so-called phallometric monitors, where the blood flow in a penis is measured as a man is shown different graphic images. Asking individuals about their sexual preferences will not always reveal true answers; hence the blood flow metering.   

The MRI brain-scan surveys found that pedophiles often have IQs in the low 90s, which is slightly below average, Cantor said. Pedophiles also have lower visual memory scores, he said, adding that many were put in special education classes as they were growing up. Cantor also said that many were an inch shorter than the average height of men, and also are more prone to being left-handed than the general population. The physical traits were “present before they conducted their offenses,” he said. “It doesn’t rule out that there are social or more psychological contributors… but there is no psycho-social way to explain height or handedness.”

The MRI data led to another striking finding, Cantor said—one that comes from his team as opposed to reanalyzing others’ data sets—that pedophiles have less of the connective tissue that sends electrical signals between areas of the brain. Several regions of the brain become activated when a person is sexually stimulated, he said, but in pedophiles that “wiring” between these regions is skewed or operates differently.

“No area of the brain is the sexual center,” Cantor explained. “In theory, what it looks like is the thing that goes wrong is there is a problem, not in the sex centers, but in the network that is responsible for identifying what in the environment is a potentially sexual object.” He said, “This is a metaphor. It is as if there is a literal cross-wiring and when a person perceives a child in the brain, instead of triggering the nurturing instinct, it is triggering the sexual instinct… That is a very helpful way, so far, that explains the data.”     

“How we react in particular situations is likely, at least to some extent, hard-wired,” said Russell Swerdlow, a neurologist who was cited in a recent Los Angeles Timesreport that discussed Cantor’s findings and how scientists were increasingly seeing pedophilia as a physical condition. A decade ago, Swerdlow had a famous patient in science circles: an ex-teacher convicted of molesting children who a day before his sentencing was found with a tumor growing in a brain lobe tied to sexual desire. After it was removed, his sex drive receded. And as the tumor grew back, so too did his unmanagable sex drive.

“We"re dealing with the neurology of morality here,” Swerdlow told NewScientist.com in 2002. “He wasn’t faking,” his co-researcher, Jeffrey Burns, said. “The difference in this case was that the patient had a normal history before he acquired the problem.”

The ‘Nurture’ Explanation

A decade after that case made international news, reporting that pedophilia is being seen in mainstream science circles as a consequence of natural causes and not entirely as the result of one’s upbringing and life experiences, as believed by psychologists and many in the indisciplinary sexology field in the 20^th century is, to say the least, controversial.

“That’s totally absurd. It’s again somebody trying to say, ‘Hey, I’ve found the golden thread and I can manage sexuality,” said Rev. Ted McIlvenna, founder of San Francisco’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a graduate school, who entered the sexology field in 1962 after the Methodist Church asked him to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. “I haven’t found the grail.”

McIlvenna, an octogenarian who has spent five decades studying sexuality through the nurture lens—or how life experience molds behavior—says the scholarship that links pedophilia with one’s genes barely explains anything. Instead, he explains pedophilia by drawing on insights gained from years of taking personal sexual histories. McIlvenna says human sexual behavior has several basic but key bottom-lines: people are sexual, have desires, express them differently, and those desires evolve over a lifetime—as relationships to one’s body and as the stories they tell themselves about sex change.

“One of the problems we’ve had in sexology is that you have to look at what people do sexually and how they feel about it, and not what they should or shouldn’t do—but what they really do,” McIlvenna said. “You need to do profiles of people. You need to know everything about them. We need to know the provenance of people and their sexual behavior. Everybody is so different. So what you have to do is find a way to look at it.”

McIlvenna believes taking thousands of personal sex histories has revealed surprising psychological traits about pedophiles. They generally do not seek out images of adults having sex with children, he said, but are likely to seek images of children in “poignant poses.” That is because their sexuality has not evolved past key stages in otherwise healthier childhoods, he said.

“One of the problems is we didn’t research people as they were growing up,” he said. “We don’t look at children and do sex histories and profiles on them. We don’t do it with teenagers. We think that suddenly you’re an adult and that’s the thing we look at. We can tell very early where a person is, the stories they tell themselves, how they feel about their bodies and other people’s bodies, because it really depends on how they feel.” 

Humans are “pleasure-seeking creatures,” McIlvenna said, saying that sexuality evolves first in relation to one’s own body—as a child and adolescent—and then as an experience with other people. Pedophiles, like all people, have irrepressible desires, he said, but they have not been able to evolve past a child’s early phases of experiencing sexual feelings. “My experience of watching what happens with people who talk about pedophilia is that they’re people that really focus much more on their own bodies—and finding something that’s like their bodies—and they stop there.”

McIlvenna said he has no patience for “preachers who say ‘the devil made me do it’” or “doctors who say, ‘Well, something happened…’” He said, “Is the question sexual health or is the question to find somebody or something to blame or justify because somebody likes little kids? It hasn’t changed behaviorly at all in 3,000 years. Statistically, it has not—I don’t care what that guy in Toronto says.”

However, that guy in Toronto—James Cantor—who also is the editor-in-chief of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, told AlterNet that the most recent data and analyses “doesn’t necessarily rule out nurture hypotheses.” If anything, Cantor said both factors are at play, and the sexology field seems to be recognizing that.

“The basic idea that pedophilia is in the biology in the brain is more than 100 years old,” he said, saying that perspective took a back seat to the development of psychology led by Sigmund Freud. “But now we have new data sets that we can look at.” 

Swerdlow, the neurologist who had that famous patient with a brain tumor a decade ago that increased his sexual desires for children, said that there was no single factor that accounted for behavior—such as genes condemning men to become pedophiles. “Many things undoubtedly affect the wiring—genes, experience, aging, disease,” he said.

But, as Cantor told Canada’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, brains of pedophiles are physically different from most other men.

“Pedophilic brain structure does indeed appear to be different from the non-pedophilic brain structure,” he said. “We are not exactly sure where yet. And we are not exactly sure how yet. And the differences are slight. We can pick them up when we have large groups to sample. But we can’t see it on an individual brain scan.”

 

Thu, 02/21/2013 – 11:29

 
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Are Some Men Born Pedophiles? New Science Says Yes, But Sexologists Say Not So Fast