Finding Safety Again: How Havening Supports Religious Trauma Recovery
When you’re healing from the impact of harm experienced in faith spaces, if you’ve been taught you can’t trust your emotions, and your body and desires are unsafe, Havening can support you as you reconnect to yourself.
Havening is a beautiful way home. It’s nurturing and restorative. It’s also been shown to increase emotional resilience and support sleep.
If you’re looking for someone to support you as you make sense of your experience, our Practitioner Registry includes professionals who are experienced in religious trauma recovery and list the therapeutic approaches they use, including Havening. You deserve to feel safe, seen, and supported.
Reclaiming (or Not) Easter: Resurrection, But Make It About You
Easter used to feel like a time to shrink myself—sacrifice, surrender, and somehow be grateful for it. These days, I’m choosing a different kind of resurrection. One that’s about coming back to myself. In this blog, I reflect on the complexities of Easter after leaving faith, and how we might reframe resurrection as a deeply personal act of reclaiming our voice, our joy, and the parts of us that were once lost or left behind. No pressure. Just permission.
When Easter Hurts
Easter can stir deep pain for survivors of religious trauma, often resurfacing old spiritual wounds. This reflection explores how fear-based theology, coercive messages, and self-abandonment shaped the Easter narrative for many, and invites survivors to reclaim the season with gentleness, autonomy, and authenticity.
Deconstructing Purity Culture in Your Relationship
Relationships may change, evolve, or even end during this process, and that's okay. Embrace the freedom to redefine your beliefs about love, sex, and emotional intimacy in a way that feels authentic to you. You may both change throughout this process and that’s ok.
Purity Culture 101: Unpacking the Beliefs, Harm, and Healing
Purity culture, a movement deeply embedded in conservative evangelical Christianity, has caused immense harm by tying self-worth to sexual purity and imposing rigid, fear-based teachings on sexuality. Its impacts are far-reaching, affecting women, men, queer, and trans folks alike. This blog explores the core tenets of purity culture, how it controls bodies and emotions, and the lasting shame it leaves in its wake. It also offers guidance on how to heal from these wounds by reclaiming autonomy, challenging harmful beliefs, and embracing a new, self-defined relationship with sex and intimacy.
Relationships and Religious Trauma
In high-control religious groups, love often comes with fine print. Relationships are deep, intense, and all-encompassing - until you start questioning. Boundaries are discouraged, and belonging is conditional. Leaving means facing isolation and loss, but it also opens the door to rebuilding authentic, unconditional connections. True love doesn’t require surrendering yourself.
Summer Lovin’
February brings a flood of roses and romance, but for those who grew up in purity culture, love and sexuality can feel far more complicated. In this blog, I reflect on my own experience—how a teenage kiss was framed as spiritually dangerous—and the long road to reclaiming my sense of self. If you’ve ever second-guessed your sexuality, struggled with shame, or felt frozen in your own experiences, know you’re not alone. Healing is possible, and there are practitioners, books, and resources that can help.
Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month: Shedding Light on a Silent Struggle
It’s Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month. Spiritual abuse hides in subtle behaviours, using religious authority to control, shame, or manipulate. Its impacts—shame, fear, and identity loss—are deeply tied to religious trauma. This blog explores the harm, the healing, and the hope that survivors can reclaim their voice and story. You are not alone.
What do you need?
It can be mortifying to ask for what you need. Especially if you’ve spent any time in high-control / high-demand faith settings. You learn quickly that the needs of others come before your own and it becomes clear that it’s easier to just not have any.
Finding Freedom in Feeling
Religious trauma often teaches us to fear our emotions, labeling them as too messy, too wrong, or too dangerous to trust. In this blog, I share my journey of reclaiming emotional safety and learning to embrace my feelings as vital signals guiding me toward healing and wholeness.