You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

by Jamie Lee Finch

Survivors must have the permission to know and be in touch with the full scope of what has happened to them if they are going to heal. They have to be willing, able, and brave enough to become curious about what happened in their minds during their developmental years and what stories their bodies are telling now.

obsession with obtaining and securing a position of dominant political power.

By the 1950s, Evangelical belief had become arguably less rooted in the teachings of the Rabbi Jesus and more concentrated in maintaining a morality measured by upholding societal decorum and traditional gender roles.

The Christian life that leaders like Graham described was largely concerned with domestic life and the proper execution of the roles of men and women as husbands and wives within the nuclear family

This reactionary, fear-based language saturated the Evangelical spaces in which I and millions of other Evangelical children developed. Our commission was to separate ourselves from culture in order to remain unaffected, so that we could in turn influence culture and bring it under submission to Christ.

entrenched in the language of the binary—everything is either right or wrong, black or white, and there is little tolerance for nuance or the recognition of personal preference and agency.

Central to this belief is the assumption that we as humankind are born with a built-in urge to rebel against goodness and morality, and that our depraved state leaves us in desperate need of rescuing from divine wrath. Everything that makes us human—our bodies, our flesh—is instinctively bent towards disobedience and evil. We cannot save ourselves, we cannot trust ourselves, and whatever is in us that is of the flesh and not of the spirit is corrupted by sin. Believing that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god” often makes it difficult to develop positive feelings towards those who do not share this belief—because their failure to believe makes them unworthy of compassion or empathy. The best that may be offered those perceived as “other” is an imperious, infantilizing sympathy; similarly, believers do not often feel permission to extend compassion and empathy towards themselves.

We were told that only “god esteem” was allowed because our “self”—our true self, our flesh—was so corrupt that it could not be believed nor supported on its own.

I needed god to stay on my team because my felt reality was that no one else was; and the best way to keep god on my team was to remain a pure woman in every way that I could. I had learned for many years that the best way to be a pure woman was to deny yourself the ability to love, take joy, or take pride in your own body because loving that body would only lead to sin.

My natural empathy was paralyzed in the Evangelical paradigm. I thought there must be some deep rooted sin within me causing me to be so resistant to spreading the gospel, and that I needed to repent and be obedient so that I could be used to fulfill god’s purpose and mission. As a child and as a teenager, I had an ever-present feeling of shame that followed me for the fact that I hadn’t yet converted anyone that I knew. In fact, my biggest regret when my parents removed me from my public school when I was ten years old was that I had wasted my time there by being too ashamed of Jesus to share him with my friends so that they could go to heaven. This debilitating guilt, shame, and fear over the consequences of salvation—or the lack thereof—is where Evangelical belief had always broken down for me, even before I began to break down inside it.

The problem is that I am not sure which pair of socks it is God’s will for me to put on. Perhaps if I put on the right pair of socks, it will somehow lead to a conversation in which I can help someone get saved. And what if I fail to listen to the Holy Spirit instead? Will I be punished? Will I be able to live with myself?

But the way this supposed good news felt within my body was as if Jesus needed to convince this god that I was lovable in the first place. And even then, I was only lovable because of the fact that Jesus did something on my behalf and his blood now “covered” me. Why did someone else’s blood have to be spilled to make me lovable, and what did that mean for the ones who either didn’t recognize or didn’t know to recognize that blood as the only thing that cleaned up their appearance to make them lovable too? Did that make them unlovable? Did that mean we were on opposing teams, and did it make them wrong where I was right? Did that mean that they were wrong and unacceptable in the sight of god in the same way that I was now right and pleasing to him in all things?

I eventually learned that this lesson was the one god most often taught, and that pain and suffering was something god used to discipline the children that He loved. This glorification of suffering would later become what I would use within myself to justify my own self-harm.

quite literally thought and felt that I would never be good, correct, moral, or holy simply because of the existence of my sexuality. Purity culture had long convinced me that there was no greater measure of my character or worth than if I remained utterly unsexual and virginal until my wedding day. I felt like I would lose everything my life was supposed to be about unless I somehow managed to separate myself completely from my sexual identity and impulses and the stress of this inner battle consumed me. It affected the way I interacted with and treated my body at every turn, and I became captive to disordered eating patterns and habitual self-harm because I was terrified of having a body that I took pleasure in, enjoyed, and was proud of—because if I did, I was to bound use that body for sin.

Being afraid of god was one thing; imagining that the god who was so frightening was on my team instead of against me was another—I made that god my only team member, and I dedicated myself to pleasing him so I wouldn’t lose him too.

I let god be the reason why I said no to things that brought me pleasure, because if I were to love any part of my life or even my own body more than I loved that god, that god would punish me or worse—leave me. Because whoever loves their own life loses it, and self-esteem is evil; you must have god-esteem. I let that god be the promised reward for my hatred of my own physical body. After all, the less I clung to myself and my own needs, the more he would be glorified. He must increase, I must decrease; and decrease I did.

“when you sweep an emotion under the rug, you sweep it into the nervous system”. Bottled emotions are not neutral—they go somewhere. There are consequences to believing that this is the way it will always be and this is the way it is supposed to be when this way is rooted in chronic shame and a constant lack of safety.

These girls and women hold a very specific fear in their bodies, the same way I did. We hold it, internalize it, and then eventually even make that felt sense of shame a goal to aspire to—using it as a true north for the cycle of sin and repentance that is held up as so vital to purity and holiness.

Over time, I developed a strange and unhealthy comfort with feelings of shame in my physical body. It didn’t take long for this to deepen into a comfort with feelings of actual disgust and hatred for my physical body. The more I hated my body and all of Her sensations and emotions, and the more uncomfortable or even disgusted my own body made me feel, the closer I was to ridding myself of my curse of sin; and the closer I was to the safety of being chosen by a man looking for a godly and pure wife. Hating myself was the ticket in; punishing my own body for what She wanted was the only way to make Her stop wanting.

The authoritarian aspect of Evangelicalism is what is especially problematic, as it communicates that all that is good, sacred, or correct is external to you and everything internal is considered bad. This position fosters deep codependence and mistrust of self and offers no permission or access to inner resources (Winell 5).

By focusing completely on the virtues of god, of another world, and of the future, fundamentalism and other similar systems create separation and distance from what we need to know and experience as humans

When someone is experiencing PTSD, their ability to orient towards safety and away from danger—even in attempting to differentiate between internal cues—decreases (Rothschild 14). Many people, objects, feelings, and sensations are perceived as dangerous, and sometimes possibly even the entire environment itself. I have seen this reality play out with clients who had lost the ability to tell the difference between the negative feeling of anxiety and the positive feeling of excitement as either occurs within their bodies. When daily, sensational reminders of potential threat become prolonged or extreme, the dissociation can become so debilitating that those with PTSD can become severely socially restricted, afraid to leave their own homes, or distrusting of their own physical bodies (Rothschild 14). Transversely for many, however, PTSD can manifest as a feeling of numbness within their bodies, inability to access their emotions, and an emptiness or deadness in their lives (Rothschild 15). Because of the vast differences in the potential manifestations of PTSD, it can be difficult to recognize and can be misdiagnosed as a personality disorder or mental health issue unrelated to trauma. Arguably a good reason for how often this occurs is related to the innate subjective nature of trauma—many people who have experienced things that their brains and bodies processed as traumatic don’t actually know that they’re allowed to qualify what happened to them as “trauma.”

a reclamation of an individual’s connection to their own body, as well as their intuition, is crucial to healing trauma,

at the root of the development of PTSD is unresolved trauma in the mind and body that was initiated by the freeze response in the face of perceived threat.

Often times, the marker of a traumatized person is that when asked how they feel or how an emotion feels within their body, they tell you what they think or what they cognitively know about that emotion instead.

People with PTSD live in a chronic state of hyperarousal, or ANS activation, not just in their brains, but in their bodies as well. This state of hyperarousal leads to symptoms such as anxiety, panic, weakness, exhaustion, muscle stiffness, concentration problems, and sleep disturbances (Rothschild 47). Adaptive techniques that were first developed for survival can over time become the root of impairment. This is because, in cases of PTSD, neutral stimulus becomes dissociated from the present and attached to the incomplete, traumatic memory of the past, resulting in that chronic state of hyperarousal. People with PTSD live with a strange, simultaneous awareness and confusion when it comes to the state of their bodies—aware that their bodies are acting in certain extreme ways, but completely unaware as to the reason why. Practically, the symptoms of PTSD that can be developed and expressed in the body include both mental and behavioral disturbances, as well as a vast range of physical imbalances. Many people experience insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, depression, memory issues, and an overall feeling of numbness that negatively affect their daily functioning. In addition, they can begin to notice an increase in irritability, poor communication skills, a desire for social isolation, hypervigilance, and various compulsive tendencies to serve as coping mechanisms. Physical manifestations of trauma include extreme weight fluctuation, migraines, difficulty breathing, chronic muscl...

The trauma I developed because of the abuse I received from my mother made me unable to neurologically develop a healthy attachment style. Because of this, throughout the majority of my adult life, I experienced every argument, every break-up, every relocation of a friend, every time someone didn’t call when they said they would as life-altering abandonment, rejection, and loss. I was being re-traumatized in every one of those moments and relationships because of the way my early experiences with my mother had imprinted upon me and—unbeknownst to me—predetermined the way that I would be able to establish relationship and connection with others.

So often, for those raised within Evangelical environments, any single moment of perceived failure, any mistake, any step outside the previously established lines can paralyze with life-altering fear, anxiety, shame, and dread because the trauma of early teaching is essentially playing on a loop within us. Our brains developed in a state of restriction, hesitation, and lack rather than a state of permission, wholeness, and freedom. This is why any misstep threatens identity, threatens worthiness, and threatens belonging—because of being raised on such thin ice in relation to our human nature and the whims of an abusive deity that Jesus had to come and pacify to prevent from harming, torturing, and abusing us forever. When raised to believe that, left to our own devices, we deserve to be punished and tortured forever, worthiness, belonging, and safety are entirely conditional; our comfort with our own identity is conditional. Pleasure becomes dangerous, pain becomes discipline, and discipline masquerades as love.

“My friend said that when she first left, all she knew was that her favorite color was pink and what her name was. She is fine now, and I will be too”

That was how separated and disconnected from myself I had become over all of those years surviving in that belief system. It wasn’t until I had spent a few years outside that I was able to make that simple decision for myself and connect with the inner permission to make such a seemingly innocuous choice.

The only thing the woman in Winell’s work knew was her favorite color. I didn’t even know that much because I never felt permitted to experiment with what brought me pleasure enough to decide on what a favorite color could even be.

I remember an exercise that was conducted in my charismatic Evangelical ministry school years ago where my small group leader encouraged us to sit and write out a list of all of the things that brought us joy. The implication was that the things and places and experiences we had decided we loved were the gifts that god had given to us out of his kindness for us to enjoy unto his glory. I sat and stared at a blank page for almost an entire hour—unable to think of a single thing to write down that brought me pleasure and joy. I couldn’t think of one thing that I truly loved because I didn’t have any external influence, in that exact moment, telling me whether or not each thing I could write down was something I actually had the permission to love. Because of all of the years I had been required to disconnect from any and all internal influence or my own inner voice, I found myself in a place in my mid-twenties where I didn’t have even one answer for what I uniquely loved, what I wanted, or what brought me joy. I had no connection to or relationship with my own inner compass for simple desire, or for uninfluenced, embodied pleasure.

When I was on my way out of my own experience with Evangelicalism, I audited a course online with UC Berkeley called the Science of Happiness because I had no idea how to find joy, satisfaction, or happiness within myself on my own—that is how carved out and empty of valid, real, human emotional experience I was. I was in my mid-twenties and I truly did not know how to feel my own feelings—I was numb every moment of every day—and I honestly felt that I needed some tangible and scientific proof that I would be able to be happy on my own at some point. What is ironic to me now is how that behavior speaks to my former fundamentalist scrupulosity—I went straight to data for assistance. When I look back on my notes from that course and my journals from that time, I must sadly acknowledge what was happening in the inner world of that woman: I couldn’t feel anything, and I needed empirical evidence to tell me how I might be able to find a way to do so.

trauma therapy is all about “unlearning”—it isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. If something took you years to learn, it may take years to unlearn it—but

Once the body feels and knows it is being heard, understood, and related to kindly, the body can begin to feel safe to heal.

The narrative approach to healing states that in order to heal, an individual has to figure out where their imbalance or condition came from, what message it is trying to send them, and what it is trying to communicate to them about what they have too much of, or what they’re lacking. Until the pain or condition within a person’s body no longer conveys an unresolved issue, it will continue to be recycled into their being to protect the traumatized individual in situations of potential threat and arousal (Scaer 104).

Noticing is the first step out of the cycle of dissociation. The development of dual consciousness, or noticing what is happening within and experiencing what is happening without, is crucial for healing and re-association to the body.