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

by Linda Kay Klein

“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.