Adverse Religious Experiences
Not every harmful religious experience needs to be labeled trauma in order to matter. Adverse Religious Experiences (AREs) offers a broader framework for experiences connected with religion or spirituality that negatively affect psychological health, identity, relationships, sexuality, bodily autonomy, or well-being.
This language is useful because people often get stuck on the question, Was it bad enough to count as trauma? That question can become another form of self-invalidation. A person can examine harm without first proving that it meets a diagnostic or popular definition of trauma.
On this page
- Religious harm exists on more than one level
- The same event can affect people differently
- Harm can come from doctrine without malicious intent
- What the research field currently looks like
- When spiritual practices destabilize rather than heal
- AREs, spiritual abuse, and religious trauma
- Why specificity matters
- Recovery
- When religion caused harm but "trauma" feels too strong
- From category to formulation
- Why a broader category improves clinical precision
- From event to mechanism to consequence
Religious harm exists on more than one level
Some adverse experiences are obvious: sexual abuse by clergy, coercive control, forced marriage, conversion practices, shunning, discrimination, or threats. Others are cumulative. Years of fear about hell, repeated sexual shame, being taught to distrust one's thoughts, chronic suppression of anger, or pressure to obey a leader may not produce one dramatic event but can still shape development.
Harm can also be relational or institutional. A community may ostracize a doubter. A family may make love conditional on belief. An institution may protect its reputation after abuse. A spiritual teacher may use metaphysical claims to override boundaries.
AREs and religious trauma overlap, but they are not identical categories. Religious trauma describes enduring injury in which religious meanings, practices, relationships, or institutions become part of a traumatic process; AREs deliberately include a wider range of harmful experiences that may or may not be experienced as trauma. In either case, effects can persist when fear, shame, authority, belonging, identity, sexuality, or moral judgment have been deeply conditioned. Recovery begins with identifying the actual mechanism and consequence rather than forcing every experience into one label, then rebuilding the specific capacities that were compromised—such as safety, agency, self-trust, relationships, bodily autonomy, or freedom of belief.
The same event can affect people differently
Two people can hear the same hell sermon. One shrugs it off. Another has nightmares for years. A third develops obsessive checking about salvation.
A fourth does not feel fear until decades later when their child begins asking about death.
This variation does not mean the harmed person is weak.
Psychological impact depends on age, temperament, prior experiences, family environment, repetition, intensity, social support, and the meaning attached to the event.
Harm can come from doctrine without malicious intent
One of the most difficult questions in religious-trauma work is whether anyone intended to hurt the person.
Sometimes the answer is clearly yes. Often it is no.
A parent may sincerely believe that terrifying a child about hell is an act of love.
A pastor may sincerely believe that homosexuality is sinful. A meditation teacher may sincerely interpret destabilization as spiritual progress. A community may sincerely believe shunning protects spiritual purity. Intent matters morally. It does not determine psychological impact.
A person can be profoundly harmed by someone who believed they were helping.
What the research field currently looks like
The evidence base is developing and uneven. A 2024 scoping review screened 8,048 records and included 44 sources that offered psychotherapy implications for harm from adverse religious or spiritual experiences. The literature was frequently qualitative or grey literature and disproportionately focused on White, Christian, U.S.-based populations.
That limitation is important. Religious harm occurs across traditions, but researchers cannot responsibly assume that findings from American Christianity automatically describe Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, or other contexts.
New measurement work also reflects the field's maturation. The Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale was developed in a large sample, and a 2026 Spiritual Safety Scale was validated in North American Christian samples. These tools help operationalize constructs such as coercion, harmful leadership, system maintenance, and psychological safety, while their population limits should remain visible.
When spiritual practices destabilize rather than heal
Religious harm is not limited to conservative or authoritarian doctrine.
Meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, fasting, intense retreats, energy practices, prolonged prayer, or altered-state practices can sometimes produce distressing experiences.
Research on contemplative practice has documented adverse and challenging effects that can affect emotion, perception, sleep, cognition, sense of self, and functioning.
A spiritual practice should not be assumed beneficial merely because it is spiritual.
AREs, spiritual abuse, and religious trauma
These concepts overlap but are not identical. Spiritual abuse generally emphasizes misuse of spiritual authority, beliefs, or practices to manipulate or control. Religious trauma emphasizes lasting traumatic or trauma-like effects. Adverse religious experiences is intentionally broader: it can include harmful experiences whether or not there was a clear abuser and whether or not the person identifies the result as trauma.
The broader category also helps avoid forcing a survivor to adopt a clinical identity they do not want.
Why specificity matters
A generic checklist of anxiety, shame, and boundaries is not enough. The mechanism matters. Fear of hell is different from caste-based exclusion. Shunning is different from guru exploitation. Purity culture is different from adverse meditation effects. A useful framework asks what beliefs, relationships, authority systems, family structures, or practices produced the harm.
Recovery
Recovery from an adverse religious experience may involve trauma treatment, grief, identity work, sexuality, family boundaries, psychoeducation, rebuilding self-trust, or simply having language for something that never previously made sense.
The person does not have to decide in advance whether religion itself is good or bad. The first task is more concrete: identifying what happened, how it affected psychological and relational functioning, and what now needs to change.
When religion caused harm but "trauma" feels too strong
A person does not have to prove that an experience meets a particular definition of trauma before seeking help. Persistent fear, shame, disconnection from the self, sexual confusion, loss of confidence in judgment, or painful family and community dynamics are legitimate subjects for therapy when they arise from religious experience. The language can remain provisional while the work becomes concrete.
From category to formulation
A broad category becomes clinically useful only when it leads to a more specific question. Rather than stopping at "religion harmed this person," formulation asks what changed: fear, attachment, sexuality, self-trust, identity, moral reasoning, community, grief, bodily safety, or the ability to tolerate uncertainty. Those differences matter because the appropriate work may look like trauma treatment, OCD treatment, grief work, sexual therapy, relational repair, identity reconstruction, or a combination.
This is also why adverse religious experiences should not become a catch-all explanation for every problem that follows religion. The category identifies a domain of experience; it does not establish causation by itself. Good formulation connects particular experiences with particular consequences and remains open to other contributors in the person's life.
Why a broader category improves clinical precision
The value of adverse religious experiences is partly methodological. The emerging research on religious and spiritual harm remains heterogeneous: studies use different definitions, samples, traditions, and outcome measures, and much of the literature has focused on North American Christian populations. A broad descriptive category makes it possible to study and discuss harmful experiences without assuming in advance that they constitute PTSD, a single syndrome, or one universal form of "religious trauma."
That precision is clinically useful. A person might report humiliation by clergy, fear-based teaching, exclusion after coming out, coercive confession, meditation-related destabilization, shunning, or the collapse of a religious community. Those experiences do not have to be identical to deserve attention. The formulation should identify what happened, what meaning the religious system gave it, what consequences followed, and what remains active now.
From event to mechanism to consequence
A useful assessment separates three levels that are often collapsed. The first is the event or environment: what was taught, done, required, forbidden, or lost. The second is the mechanism: fear conditioning, coercive control, shame, attachment rupture, social exclusion, obsessive doubt, betrayal, or identity foreclosure. The third is the consequence: panic, grief, sexual difficulty, mistrust, intrusive memories, relationship conflict, or no diagnosable disorder at all.
This structure prevents the label from doing more work than the evidence. It also points toward treatment. Two people can report the same religious event and need different forms of help because the mechanism and consequence differ. Conversely, people from very different religions may share a mechanism such as shunning or sacred-authority abuse while needing culturally distinct ways of understanding it.
About Andrew Jasko
Andrew Jasko, MDiv, MPhil, MA
Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT 146397)
Q Psychology Group · Supervised by a licensed psychologist
Andrew is a former minister and missionary who left Evangelical Christianity after his own crisis of faith. He holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Seminary, an MPhil from Oxford in Indian contemplative studies, and an MA in Counseling Psychology.
He works with people recovering from religious trauma, spiritual abuse, high-control groups, and faith deconstruction – as a therapist for clients in California, and as a coach internationally.
Selected Research
Zaeske, L. M., et al. (2024). Addressing harm from adverse religious/spiritual experiences in psychotherapy: A scoping review. Practice Innovations, 9(1), 1-18. DOI: 10.1037/pri0000237. 8,048 records screened; 44 sources included.
Koch, D., & Edstrom, L. (2022). "Development of the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 61(2), 476–506. N=3,222. DOI: 10.1111/jssr.12792.
Chong, L. H., & Tortez, L. M. (2026). "Development and Psychometric Validation of the Spiritual Safety Scale (S-SAFE)." Journal of Religion and Health, 65(4), 3634–3665. North American Christian samples: Study 1 n=331; Study 2 n=491. DOI: 10.1007/s10943-026-02734-y.