Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Kellen Swift-Godzisz, 35, said he doesn’t go on dates, struggles with erectile dysfunction and is hesitant to trust people. For more than 20 years, he’s experienced intense bouts of anxiety and depression that have had a “major hold on his life.”
“Imagine being told by everyone you trusted that you’re going to hell because you like men,” Swift-Godzisz, a marketing project manager living in Chicago, told NBC News.
At just 11 years old, Swift-Godzisz recalled, he would sit in his bedroom every night praying or writing letters that said, “Please God, remove my affliction of same-sex attraction,” and would then store each letter in an overflowing shoebox in his closet.
The word “still” makes it seem like the cause of the religious trauma was solved. It wasn’t, so of course people are still traumatized.
For real, I’m pretty sure the city of Philadelphia is still stuck using a Catholic adoption agency that refuses to place with gay couples for it’s foster care because the Supreme Court won’t let the city ditch their bigoted asses
Being traumatized by the amount of power religious conservatives hold over all of our lives is rational
Fuck Religion and if you’re here to defend religion, fuck you too!
I periodically remind my children that if someone approaches them talking about god that they’re lunatics and to find another adult immediately.
religion poisons everything. we must defeat our oppressors
Honestly, the worst part is going to a doctor who you can tell is mildly religious and they start asking questions about why you think you feel anxiety and depression.
The trauma response to lie and hide is so strong, it takes SO MUCH effort to just be honest that it was your religious upbringing… and the second you do, they act like you’re personally attacking them. I’ve had doctors/nurses go from being warm and kind to suddenly going cold because I had the audacity to say that their religion is the cause of my trauma. You just have to keep looking for a new doctor until someone gets it.
It’s 2024…time to start telling these religious fucks to go fuck a boulder when they do shit like that. I’m not saying get violent, but fuck these aging ideologies and the people who keep propping them up. Easy to say, harder to do, but gotta start somewhere.
Bish, please. Religious trauma haunts everyone.
“Everyone” doesn’t have to worry about being subject to a cottage industry of legal child abuse/indoctrination camps meant to change their sexuality or gender identity and are rife with sexual abuse.
Yeah, the rest of the kids have to be taken to church regularly in order to be sexually abused. How privileged of them.
Then there are those extra lucky ones who get home visits instead!Are you actually comparing being taken to church with “conversion therapy?”
Are you unable to take into consideration the idea that the religious staff didn’t need special camps in order to assault children? That they could and did do it on church grounds or even in the victims own homes?
Do you really not understand the difference between taking a child to a church where they may possibly be assaulted and forcing a child to be sexually tortured? Really?
Dear cephalopod, you’re too focused on comparing who gets harmed the most. It’s not a contest. None should be harmed at all.
The division is unhealthy.You cannot make it any more illegal to sexually abuse children in church than it already is. Conversion therapy is legal in a majority of U.S. states. It is legal sexual abuse. That’s a huge difference.
The irony of the person who came into a post specifically about the trauma that religion causes LGBTQ people and tried to make it about other people saying this is too unreal.
Pot, have you met kettle?
No. They were talking about organized sexual abuse.
Conversion therapy is organized sexual abuse. In fact, it’s sexual violence.
Did it make sense to you when you wrote this comment to suggest that kids subjected to conversion therapy camps are somehow less exposed to abusive religious practices?
TY. Came here to say the same.
Doesn’t matter your orientation, guilt and shame are the tools of control and clergy wield them to great effect.
That’s absolutely true, but there’s an added dimension for queer people because it serves as an additional original sin.
That seems very dismissive of the actual trauma many people experience. Lots of people grew up without abusive religious authority figures, or without any religious authority figures at all. I’m one of those people and I don’t want to downplay other people’s suffering by acting as if I experienced it too.
It sounds like you probably experienced religious trauma yourself, and part of how you cope with it is telling yourself it’s just normal. It’s not.
The lgbt person’s story is just an example. The article goes on state religious trauma may affect as many as a third of US adults. It’s not saying this hypothetical new dsm diagnosis would be specific to only lgbt related religious trauma.
No fucking shit. Maybe it’s just the queerness talking but I assumed this was common knowledge. And it’s clearly intentional. Religious folks don’t protest pride to present an informed alternative, they do it because some of us will have trauma responses when hearing what they say and trauma responses make for vulnerable people, and Christianity preys on vulnerable people.
It’s the same as how Christians give us the trauma that drives us to alcohol abuse then use treatment for that as a recruitment ground. Whether it’s actually intentional or not they drive us to the exact positions that they recruit from.
Equal opportunity haunter…
