Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

by Linda Kay Klein

In books, movies, and just about everywhere else, girls get the message that the more selflessly and painfully a woman suffers, the more we love her. But nowhere is this message quite so clear as it is in religion.

One of the most common themes that arose in my interviews was the pain that those I spoke with felt at not being allowed to express their true feelings.

So, you have to be struggling and suffering constantly.

There is no happiness. There is no peace. It’s as though I’m only comfortable operating in chaos. When the chaos and pain are gone, I feel off-centered and somewhat guilty. I was taught I should always be in a state of suffering and don’t deserve to be happy. Things have been going really well for both me and my husband lately, which has filled me with a sense of dread.

Equating survivors’ actions, such as drinking in Laura’s case, and perpetrators’ actions, such as assault, is called sin-leveling, and is often categorized as a form of spiritual abuse.

“Counselors say to me, ‘It sounds like you have PTSD but I can’t find the trigger; I can’t find the trauma.’ And I’m like, ‘I can! It’s twenty years long!’ They don’t get it. This is a whole new field!” “Actually, it might really be,” I replied. “Some people are trying to get what they are calling Religious Trauma Syndrome recognized.” “That would be amazing and accurate,” Jo asserted. “Put it in the DSM-5. Get it in there. Because it’s real, and all of us who experienced it need therapists. So get it in there; make it a thing; and then get people trained on it.” Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), defined as “the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,”8 was coined by Dr. Marlene Winell, the human development specialist whose work I mentioned previously. She suggests that RTS mimics other disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, borderline personality disorders, and so on, and describes symptoms ranging from depression to sexual difficulty to negative beliefs about the self.

Now I have the physical and emotional energy to deal with things that used to upset me or stress me out.”