They Don’t Get to Keep the Sacred

Religious Trauma, Psychedelics, and Healing

For much of my adult life, I would not have described myself as particularly religious. Spiritual, yes. Curious about mystery, ritual, consciousness, and the ways human beings have tried to make meaning of suffering, absolutely. But my relationship with organized religion became complicated fairly early, and one experience in particular created a rupture between me and the Jewish tradition in which I had grown up.

I was raised Jewish, in a family where Judaism was part of our identity even though my upbringing was relatively secular. When I was a young adult and decided to marry someone who was not Jewish, I went to speak with the conservative rabbi I had known through my family and synagogue. His response has stayed with me for decades. He told me that by marrying a non-Jew, I was “killing my parents.” He went on to tell me that any children I might have would be welcome in his synagogue, but I would not.

I remember the impact of those words clearly. This was a person who represented my religious tradition, speaking with the authority that came with that role, telling me that a deeply personal choice about whom I loved amounted to an act of violence against my own parents. Even more confusingly, the hypothetical children produced by this unacceptable marriage could someday belong, while I could not. I walked away feeling rejected not simply by one rabbi, but by something much larger that he seemed to represent.

For many years afterward, I wanted little to do with Judaism. In some ways I wanted little to do with spirituality at all.

I share this story carefully because my experience pales in comparison with what many people have endured in the name of religion. I was not subjected to years of physical punishment, sexual abuse, conversion practices, threats of eternal damnation, forced isolation, or the severe control of my body, sexuality, relationships, finances, education, or access to the outside world. Many survivors of religious trauma have experienced those things. Some have been taught from childhood that questioning authority could endanger their souls. Others have been rejected by families and entire communities because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, choice of partner, divorce, reproductive decisions, doubts about doctrine, or decision to leave a faith. Some have lived with terrifying images of hell, sin, impurity, demonic influence, or divine punishment that remain embedded in the nervous system long after their intellectual beliefs have changed.

Religious trauma exists on a spectrum, and not every painful religious experience constitutes trauma. At the same time, we can underestimate the effect of spiritual shame because there may be no visible injury. When the message comes from someone understood to represent God, sacred teaching, moral truth, or the community upon which a person depends for belonging, it can reach very deeply. The wound may involve much more than disagreement with a doctrine. It can disrupt identity, attachment, family relationships, trust, sexuality, and a person's fundamental sense of goodness.

When Belonging Becomes Conditional

One of the most painful aspects of religious trauma is that it often occurs within communities that also provide love, culture, family, ritual, and belonging. People rarely leave behind something that was entirely terrible. They may miss holiday traditions, music, food, prayer, grandparents, community gatherings, sacred stories, or the feeling of being connected to generations who came before them. A person can feel harmed by a religious community and still love parts of the tradition. They can reject certain teachings while grieving the loss of the world surrounding them.

That grief is sometimes overlooked.

Leaving or questioning a religious tradition may mean losing more than belief. It can mean losing a social network, a language for understanding life and death, familiar rituals for marking important transitions, and sometimes relationships with parents, siblings, friends, or extended family. For people raised in highly insular religious communities, leaving may require constructing an identity almost from scratch. Even ordinary decisions—what to wear, whom to date, what to eat, how to spend a Sunday or Sabbath, what happens after death—may suddenly have to be reconsidered.

The nervous system may also continue following religious rules long after the conscious mind has rejected them. Someone may intellectually believe that sex is not sinful and still experience intense shame after sexual intimacy. A person may no longer believe in hell but become terrified when they question God. Someone may have left their religious community twenty years ago and still feel a surge of fear when disappointing a parent or religious authority. The theology has changed; the body has not necessarily caught up.

This is one reason religious trauma can be difficult to recognize. A person may say, “I don't even believe that anymore. Why does it still affect me?” But deeply learned fear does not disappear simply because we have developed a different intellectual understanding of the world.

God, Authority, and Attachment

There is also an attachment dimension to religious trauma. For many children, God is introduced alongside the earliest lessons about safety, goodness, obedience, and love. Depending on the tradition, God may be described as loving and protective, but also as constantly watching, judging, testing, rewarding, or punishing. Religious authorities may be given enormous power to interpret what God expects.

When those messages become frightening or coercive, spirituality itself can begin to feel unsafe.

For some people, the image of God becomes remarkably similar to an unpredictable or punitive parent: behave correctly and you are loved; break the rules and love, belonging, or protection may disappear. In other families, religious teaching reinforces dynamics that are already present at home. A controlling parent gains divine backing for control. A child's natural anger becomes sinful. Questions become disrespectful. Sexual development becomes shameful. Individuality becomes rebellion. Forgiveness may be demanded before someone has had an opportunity to acknowledge their anger or even name what happened to them.

Sometimes spiritual teachings that are beautiful in another context—surrender, forgiveness, humility, service, obedience—are used in ways that encourage people to remain in abusive or deeply unhealthy situations. A person may be told to pray harder rather than seek help, to forgive an abuser without accountability, or to interpret suffering as God's plan. In these situations religion can become a form of spiritual bypassing, placing a sacred explanation over a wound that needs protection, anger, grieving, boundaries, or action.

The Shame That Follows Us Out the Door

Shame is often at the center of religious trauma. There is an important difference between being taught, “This behavior is inconsistent with our values,” and absorbing the message, “There is something fundamentally wrong with you.”

Religious shame can attach itself to the body, desire, sexuality, gender, anger, pleasure, ambition, doubt, and even curiosity. Some people learn very young to monitor their thoughts for evidence that they are sinful or impure. Others become exquisitely sensitive to whether they are disappointing God or the people who claim to speak for God. For people already prone to anxiety or obsessive thinking, religious environments centered around purity, confession, moral certainty, or punishment can become particularly difficult.

And leaving does not automatically resolve this. Sometimes leaving creates another layer of shame: I betrayed my family. I abandoned my community. What if they were right? What if something terrible happens because I left?

This can be especially painful when religion is inseparable from culture or ancestry. That was part of my own experience with Judaism. Walking away from the synagogue did not mean that I stopped being Jewish. It meant that I had lost access, for a time, to a part of myself because the doorway through which I had known that tradition no longer felt welcoming.

Finding Spirituality Again

My eventual return to spirituality did not happen through returning to exactly what I had left. It came through exploration. Buddhism became important to me. Later, I found myself drawn again toward Jewish spirituality, including Kabbalah, ritual, and aspects of Jewish thought that felt very different from the experience that had pushed me away. Over time I became increasingly interested in the places where psychology and spirituality meet: meditation, altered states of consciousness, ritual, nature, grief, ancestral connection, and the ways we create meaning from experiences that cannot always be reduced to ordinary language.

Interestingly, finding my way back did not require pretending the original hurt had not happened. Nor did it require deciding that Judaism was either “good” or “bad.” I could recognize that one rabbi's words profoundly affected me without making him the sole representative of an ancient and extraordinarily diverse tradition. I could also understand more about the historical and cultural fears surrounding Jewish continuity and intermarriage without deciding that those fears justified the way they were placed upon me. Understanding where something comes from is not the same as excusing the harm it caused.

I have also become interested in the role psychedelics can sometimes play in this process. Many people are turning to these medicines not only for psychological healing, but also in search of meaning, connection, and experiences of the sacred. For someone whose earliest experience of spirituality was bound up with judgment, fear, shame, or exclusion, a psychedelic experience may offer a very different encounter: a felt sense of belonging, compassion, interconnectedness, awe, or love that is not dependent upon following a particular doctrine. Others may find themselves grieving what religion took from them, feeling anger they were never permitted to express, reconnecting with an ancestral tradition on their own terms, or discovering that spirituality is still available to them even if organized religion is not.

Of course, psychedelics are not a cure for religious trauma, nor are they appropriate for everyone. They can bring difficult material to the surface and need to be approached with appropriate attention to safety, preparation, and integration. I also believe there is an important caution here. Someone who has been wounded by religious authority does not need a psychedelic facilitator becoming a new spiritual authority. A therapist or facilitator can help create a safe container for exploration without telling someone what their experience means, what they should believe, or how they should understand the sacred. In some ways, that freedom is part of the healing.

For someone healing from religious trauma, returning to spirituality is not necessarily the goal. Some people find tremendous peace in becoming secular, atheist, or agnostic. Healing does not require finding another religion, forgiving a religious institution, believing in God again, or reclaiming practices that no longer fit. The goal, if there is one, may be much simpler: having the freedom to decide for yourself.

For others, however, there is a desire to reclaim something. They may discover contemplative Christianity after growing up with fundamentalism, find progressive or queer-affirming religious communities, reconnect with ancestral traditions, explore Buddhism or earth-based spirituality, work with psychedelics, or develop a spiritual life that does not belong to any formal religion.

Some return to the tradition they left, but on very different terms.

There can be something powerful about realizing that the people who wounded us do not necessarily get to keep the sacred.

Reclaiming Choice

Healing religious trauma often involves separating what was given to us from what we actually believe. That sounds straightforward, but it can be surprisingly difficult. Religious beliefs are rarely handed down as a neat list of propositions. They arrive through family stories, rituals, fear, holidays, food, music, expectations, relationships, and experiences of belonging. Some deserve to be discarded. Others may still feel precious. Many require examination.

Therapy can provide a place to do that without requiring a particular spiritual outcome. Trauma work may help when religious memories continue to carry intense fear, shame, or bodily activation. Parts work can be useful for exploring the internal conflict between the part that wants freedom and the part that remains frightened of what freedom might mean. Somatic approaches can help people notice where old religious rules still live in the body. For some people, carefully chosen ritual can also become part of healing—not as another set of rules, but as a way of marking transition, grief, reclamation, or return.

I sometimes think about the younger version of myself leaving that rabbi's office. I did not have language such as religious trauma or spiritual injury. I simply knew that something I had understood as part of my heritage suddenly seemed to be telling me that there was no place for me.

Years later, my relationship with the sacred looks very different. It includes Judaism, but it is not confined to Judaism. It includes Buddhist practice, meditation, ritual, nature, psychology, and an ongoing curiosity about consciousness and what it means to be human. Perhaps most importantly, it belongs to me.

For people who have experienced religious trauma, that may be one of the deepest pieces of healing: discovering that spirituality, meaning, morality, and connection to something larger do not have to remain under the ownership of the people or institutions that once defined them for us.

A Reflection: What Is Mine to Keep?

If you have experienced religious or spiritual hurt, take a piece of paper and divide it into three sections. You might approach this slowly rather than trying to complete it all at once.

In the first section, write What I Was Given. Include the teachings, rules, images of God, expectations about your body or relationships, ideas about goodness and sin, family traditions, and messages about who you were supposed to become. Include the beautiful things as well as the painful ones.

In the second section, write What I No Longer Want to Carry. Notice what belongs here without forcing yourself to justify it. Perhaps it is fear of punishment, shame about your body, the belief that questioning is dangerous, responsibility for preserving someone else's faith, or the idea that belonging must be earned through obedience.

In the final section, write What I Choose to Keep—or Discover for Myself. This may include compassion, ritual, prayer, music, community, connection with ancestors, meditation, nature, justice, awe, mystery, God, no God at all, or simply the freedom to remain uncertain.

When you finish, spend a few moments with the final section. Notice what happens in your body as you read what you have chosen. You might ask yourself: If no one else had authority over my spiritual life, what would I want my relationship with the sacred—or with meaning itself—to look like now?

There is no correct answer. There may not even be an answer yet. Sometimes reclaiming spiritual autonomy begins simply with recognizing that the question is finally yours to answer.

About Dr. Heidi Dalzell

Heidi J. Dalzell, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, EMDR Consultant, author, and psychotherapist with more than 30 years of clinical experience. Her work focuses on trauma and PTSD, eating disorders and body image, complex grief, LGBTQ+ concerns, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy from a harm-reduction perspective. She integrates evidence-based trauma treatment with mindfulness, somatic approaches, EMDR, and psychospiritual practices when these are meaningful to the individual.

Dr. Dalzell is the author of Midlife Eating Disorders: Body Image, Trauma, and Recovery and practices through Sedona Integrative Therapy in Arizona and Lambertville New Hope Integrative Therapy via telehealth in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her approach to spirituality has been shaped by her own journey from a secular Jewish upbringing through Buddhist practice and, later, a renewed exploration of Jewish spirituality and Kabbalah. She is particularly interested in helping people develop ways of approaching healing, meaning, and the sacred that honor both psychological safety and individual choice.

I think the psychedelic addition now sits in the right proportion: significant enough to be meaningful, but it doesn't turn the piece into a psychedelic-focused essay. It remains fundamentally about religious trauma, spiritual autonomy, and reclamation.