What are you exploring?

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk surveys how overwhelming experience can alter memory, attention, bodily sensation, relationships, and the nervous system. Drawing on clinical cases, neuroscience, developmental research, and decades of trauma treatment, he explains why people may continue reacting to danger after an event has ended and discusses approaches ranging from relational therapy and EMDR to yoga, neurofeedback, theater, and body-based work.

Broken Trust

F. Remy Diederich

Diederich offers a pastoral account of spiritual abuse and recovery, with attention to distorted authority, boundaries, and rebuilding trust.

The Deepest Well

Nadine Burke Harris

A pediatrician explains adverse childhood experiences, stress physiology, and the case for trauma-informed public health.

Healing Spiritual Wounds

Carol Howard Merritt

Minister Carol Howard Merritt writes for people whose relationship to Christianity has been damaged by authoritarian teaching, shame, exclusion, or betrayal. Through pastoral reflection, memoir, spiritual practices, and engagement with psychology, she names wounds involving harmful images of God, the body, gender, sexuality, family, and religious authority, then explores forms of repair that do not require denying what happened.

Leaving the Fold

Marlene Winell

Psychologist Marlene Winell offers a self-help framework for people separating from authoritarian or fundamentalist religion. She describes indoctrination, fear, guilt, family and community pressures, stages of leaving, and the practical work of rebuilding identity, relationships, meaning, and everyday life. Exercises and recovery language turn the book toward personal use rather than detached religious criticism.

My Grandmother's Hands

Resmaa Menakem

A body-centered account of racialized trauma and practices for working with inherited patterns in Black, white, and police bodies.

The Myth of Normal

Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté

A broad synthesis connecting trauma, chronic stress, culture, and illness, written for a general audience.

Peer Support Group meeting list

Recovering from Religion

A meeting directory from Recovering from Religion for free peer-support groups, many online and some in person.

Religious trauma support groups

Reclamation Collective

Something's Not Right

Wade Mullen

Researcher Wade Mullen examines the language and performance organizations use to hide abuse and preserve a positive identity. He identifies tactics such as impression management, strategic apologies, blame-shifting, flattering supporters, attacking critics, reframing victims as threats, and using carefully staged compassion to redirect attention away from conduct and accountability.

The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse

David Johnson; Jeff VanVonderen

David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen describe spiritually abusive systems in which religious authority, performance, shame, secrecy, and distorted images of God are used to control people. They identify patterns that keep members compliant and leaders protected, then address the confusion, exhaustion, mistrust, and difficulty receiving grace that can remain after someone recognizes or leaves the system.

This Here Flesh

Cole Arthur Riley

Short theological meditations weave Black family memory, embodiment, dignity, lament, and liberation.

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Lewis Herman

Herman connects private trauma with social and political violence and organizes recovery around safety, remembrance, mourning, and reconnection.

Trauma in the Pews

Janyne McConnaughey

Educator and trauma survivor Janyne McConnaughey translates trauma research into guidance for congregations, classrooms, and ministries. Combining personal narrative with accessible accounts of adverse childhood experiences, attachment, dissociation, triggers, and nervous-system responses, she shows how ordinary church practices can unintentionally reproduce danger—and how consistent, informed relationships can make religious spaces less isolating for survivors.

What My Bones Know

Stephanie Foo

Journalist Stephanie Foo investigates complex PTSD through memoir, reporting, family history, and her own search for treatment. She traces childhood abuse and intergenerational trauma, the ways achievement can coexist with profound dysregulation, the difficulty of finding appropriate care, and the uneven process of building relationships and a life that are not organized entirely around survival.

When Religion Hurts You

Laura E. Anderson

Therapist Laura E. Anderson offers psychoeducation for people affected by high-control religion and adverse religious experiences. Using trauma-informed language, she connects religious messages and environments with nervous-system responses, identity, grief, sexuality, relationships, and difficulty making choices, then proposes practices of pacing, embodiment, self-trust, and integration rather than prescribing a new belief system.

You Are Your Own

Jamie Lee Finch

Jamie Lee Finch describes how evangelical formation can estrange people from bodily signals, consent, pleasure, anger, boundaries, and self-trust. Blending memoir, somatic attention, and practical invitation, she frames the body not as an obstacle to spiritual authority but as a living source of information after systems that taught suspicion of the self.