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

by Jamie Lee Finch

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.”