I Didn't Leave My Faith. I Left My Abuser.

I did not have a life changing "burn my records" conversion moment. I was not introduced to God as an adult with baggage from a life lived sinfully. He was just always there, the way the furniture and pictures on the hallway walls were always there, the way my father was always there. Faith was not a thing I chose. It was the water I was born swimming into, and I did not know you could drown in faith until much later. Religious trauma does not always begin with a dramatic break. Sometimes it begins before you are old enough to know what faith even is.

I was raised not to believe in Santa Claus. My parents thought it was important that I not believe a lie at their hands. So I grew up knowing the truth about Santa while other children didn't, and I remember first feeling a need to reveal the truth to them, and then something like pity for them. They needed a father figure who was benevolent, and they had invented one. I had God. I did not need a fiction.

I was irresistibly friendly (even though I was also really weird). I ran the neighborhood until the streetlights came on, watching the warm glow of dining room windows from the street and feeling something I couldn't name then, a longing for whatever was happening inside those houses, the shadows of families eating dinner together. I knocked on doors to find out if anyone had a kid close to my age. I made friends that way, a girl from the neighborhood, one from church, an older woman across the street I visited because she was there and I needed somewhere to be. I lost one friend at twelve when her mother found out what my father had done and that he had moved back home. I was homeschooled in the 80s and 90s, cut off from the peer world where children figure out who they are without a theological framework supplying the answers in advance. That did not change until I was fourteen, when I met Gabrielle through church. She helped me grow up socially and showed me a more normal world. She is still my closest friend today. My church community had given me the framework for everything before I was old enough to question it: what love meant, what fathers did, what God required, what I owed the people around me. I pitied children who believed in Santa from inside a world so total I had no idea it was a world at all, and then I went and knocked on their doors anyway. Partly because I thought I had something they needed and mostly because they had everything I wanted.

I was eight years old when I gave my heart to God, and it was not just a reach for comfort. I believed. I read a newsletter that had been sent to the house for me, one of those children's devotional mailings, and something in it resonated in a way that felt true and necessary, and I made a decision that felt like the most real thing I had ever done. I wanted God to be my savior and my friend. I believed he could protect me in ways nothing else had. That faith was not performance. It was not grasping. It was genuine, and I held it genuinely for a very long time. Buried in pillows on my couch, with my head pressed deep into the cushion so no one around could hear, I prayed that sinners prayer written in the newsletter and felt enveloped in safety and security.

What I did not understand at eight, what I could not have understood, was the significance around my father being exposed for sexually molesting me for years. What I understood then was partial and confused. I knew something had happened that was bad enough to bring strangers into our lives. I knew it involved me and I knew it was wrong. But my father was still there. Nothing had changed except that now there were adults asking questions. He had always framed what he did the way someone frames an affair, as a secret between two people, as something shameful but mutual. I was a child. I worked with what I was given. And what I was given was his version.

The adults around me were processing a catastrophe. I was eight, reaching for a father who would not hurt me, at the exact moment the one I had been given had just been revealed as a predator. The abuse had not stopped. Being exposed did not stop him. But I had God now, and I believed that meant something was going to change.

Certain expressions of Christianity function as a grooming process that produces religious trauma, and for a child who has already been groomed by a parent or an adult they trusted, the pattern feels like home. Not because it is safe. Because it is familiar. The faith I held genuinely was used against me by a structure that had its own interests in keeping me compliant.

How Religious Grooming Begins Before You Can Name It

Grooming does not begin with harm. It begins with belonging.

For children born into faith, the belonging is total. God knows your name before you are born. He counts the hairs on your head. He loves you specifically, not generally, not abstractly, but you, your name, your face. For some children in frightening home environments, faith functions as survival. Something to hold onto when nothing else holds. But that was not all it was for me. I did not believe because I needed to. I believed because it felt true. The belonging was real. The conviction was real. That matters, because what was done to me was not an exploitation of my desperation. It was an exploitation of my genuine faith.

The love bombing in high-control Christian faith is the grooming that is built into the doctrine itself. You are chosen. You are precious. You are a child of the King. The emotional intensity of hours long worship services, of community, of belonging to something with cosmic significance, produces a real psychological and physiological experience. The warmth is not fake. The bond it creates is not fake. That is precisely what makes it effective. You are attached before you understand the cost of the attachment.

Then the isolation begins. It is rarely physical, though sometimes that too. More often it is theological and structural. The world outside the faith is fallen. Your secular friends are a spiritual risk. Doubt is reframed as sin, and questions are reframed as faithlessness. The wall between the community and the outside world is presented as protection. For some children that wall is also a homeschool curriculum, a ban on secular music, movies, or TV shows, a church calendar that fills every weekend. You are taught to be grateful for it. You do not notice that it also keeps you in. You do not notice because you have never seen the outside clearly enough to know what you are missing.

When Religious Systems Use Coercion to Keep You Compliant

The coercion comes after the bond is established. Stay in God's will. Submit. Obey. Trust the leadership. Do not question what you cannot understand with your limited human mind.

The promises from the love bombing phase do not disappear. They are placed just out of reach, made contingent on compliance. Answered prayers, protection, a life of purpose: these are available to the faithful. Suffering is not evidence that something is wrong. It is evidence that you are being refined. Bear your cross. Be a good soldier for Christ. Trust that God is working all things together for good, even the things that are destroying you.

I knew that framework. I had lived inside it and the faith at the same time so long that I could not have told you where one ended and the other began. An abusive parent operates on the same architecture as authoritarian religion: love that is real enough to bond you, conditions you cannot fully meet, punishment reframed as love, loyalty demanded in the face of harm. My nervous system did not have to transfer what it learned at home to a new environment. It was always the same environment. The same rules. The same god.

That familiarity is not a personal failing. It is how trauma works. The nervous system learns the rules of the earliest environments it has to survive, and it applies them to everything that comes after. If you want to understand what years of navigating that kind of chronic threat does to the body, this breakdown of how the nervous system adapts to chronic stress is worth reading.

"You Didn't Know the Real God": How Religious Grooming Gets Defended

There is a response I have heard more times than I can count, and you may have heard it too. It goes like this: what you experienced was not true Christianity. The church you were in got it wrong. If you had known the real God, the real Jesus, you would not have been hurt the way you were.

I understand why people say this. It protects something they need to protect. But it also does something else: it locates the problem entirely in your experience and leaves the structure that produced it completely unexamined.

The church I was part of in my formative years was not a fringe group. It drew from theological frameworks that were widely distributed across mainstream evangelical spaces: Bill Hybels and the umbrella of authority model, Focus on the Family, and the Growing Kids God's Way curriculum, which was used in homes and churches across the country to teach parents how to train children into obedience. The church itself had roots in the Latter Rain movement, a mid-twentieth century charismatic tradition that placed heavy emphasis on spiritual authority, submission to leadership, and a hierarchical chain of command that ran from God through male leadership down to women and children. The movement was controversial enough that the Assemblies of God formally condemned it in 1949, citing its authoritarian leadership structures and claims to restored apostolic authority. These were not obscure influences. They were the theological water of an entire subculture.

The umbrella of authority model teaches that God's authority flows downward through a hierarchy: God to husband, husband to wife, wife to children. Women and children are spiritually protected when they remain under male covering. Step outside that structure and you lose that protection. It is not presented as control. It is presented as care.

That framework does not produce abuse in every home that holds it. But it produces the conditions in which abuse is nearly impossible to name, because the authority of the person causing harm has been granted theological legitimacy. When male authority is framed as God's order, when submission is your spiritual responsibility, when the person above you in the hierarchy has divine sanction for that position, you do not have a framework for saying that what they are doing is wrong. It does not require a father in the home. The pastor fills that role. The elder board, the one women cannot join, fills that role. The theology itself fills that role, because it has already told you that questioning authority is the same as questioning God. The system that was supposed to protect you is the same system that made you available to whoever was standing above you in it.

My mother was operating inside the same theology. Every decision she made about who to protect and who to believe was shaped by a framework that told her the family unit was sacred and male authority was divine. She was not an exception to the system. She was its product.

She allowed other children to sleep in our home without telling their parents what my father had done.

This version of Christianity did not need a political label to do what it did. I know this because I lived the proof of it. When my father's abuse was exposed, my mother fought to keep the family together. And I, a child who was still being abused, was told that I needed to fight against Satan. Satan, in this framing, was Child Protective Services. Satan was anyone who said my father should leave. God hates divorce, and so the spiritually correct position, the faithful position, was to keep the family intact. I believed it completely.

My pastor sat down with me when I was eight years old and opened a Bible to the verse that says if you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you. He told me I needed to forgive my father and tell him that I had. So I went home and wrote it on a Post-it note and put it in my father's lunchbox so he would have it when he went to work. I did not know what forgiveness was. I just knew how to comply. I smiled brightly when my mother told my father to check his lunchbox for a note from me, they were proud of me.

My father never asked for forgiveness. Around the time I was ten, after the courts had become involved for a second time, he wrote in a letter that the abuse was my fault. Because I could have said no and didn't. My mother read that letter. She knew he had said it. The church knew what kind of man it was protecting. He was not an anomaly. Systems that shield abusers do not produce just one. They produce conditions, and conditions are not accidents.

What my father did was abuse. What the church did in response was also abuse.

Still, I remember sitting by my closet door, I was ten, maybe eleven, asking God to show me something. I opened my Bible and found Isaiah 8:10. I took it as a war cry, certain I was doing God's work, certain that anyone who said my family should not be together was speaking for Satan. I held onto that verse for years.

My father had also used scripture to establish his authority over me long before any of this came to light. The theological language the church used to protect him after the exposure was the same language he had used to groom me in the first place. The institution and the abuser were working from the same text. That is not a coincidence. That is a system with consistent internal logic, and the logic protected him at every stage. When my father died in 2021, the church honored him at his funeral as a man of God. The system that protected him in life eulogized him in death.

So when someone tells me I did not know the real God, what I hear is this: the real God would not have looked like what you described. And my answer is that I did not invent the God I was given. I was handed him before I could read. He was built from specific texts, interpreted by specific people, inside a specific structure that granted specific men authority over my body and my soul. That is not a misunderstanding. That is a system. And it functioned exactly as designed. And it still does, in more churches than anyone wants to count.

What Deconstructing a Faith You Were Born Into Actually Feels Like

It was not the abuse that ended my faith. Plenty of people survive terrible things inside a religious community and come out the other side still believing. I endured church hurt and abuses inside the capital C "Church" long after my childhood, across different churches, different cities, different versions of the same structure. That did not end my faith either.

What ended it was something more deliberate. My faith in the God I was given ended when I started examining the actual theology, the structure, the hierarchy, the doctrine of male authority, the way the system was designed and who it was designed to serve. I found that I disagreed with it. Not because of what had been done to me inside it. Because of what it actually said and what it actually did, independent of my story. The abuse was the context. The theology was the problem.

I had believed genuinely. That is the part that takes the longest to hold. The faith was real. The conviction that I was on God's side, fighting the right battle, doing what he required of me — that was not manufactured. It was as sincere as anything I have ever felt. Which means that what was done to me was not just an exploitation of my weakness. It was an exploitation of my faith. Of my genuine desire to be good and loved and aligned with something true.

Even as a kid, there were things I always knew felt wrong, a quiet friction I could not name for years. It grew louder as I got older. By my early twenties I was skeptical in ways I could not yet fully articulate. Real deconstruction did not come until my thirties, but the thread had been pulling loose for a long time before I was willing to look at where it led.

For most of my life God felt like the safest relationship I had. My savior. My friend. The one constant that held when everything else was unstable. I did not experience him as withholding or conditional. I experienced him as present in a way no one around me was. It was not until I began deconstructing in my mid-thirties that I started to see what had been true the whole time without my knowing it: that the God I had been given was built in the image of the first unsafe attachment I ever had. Conditional. Responsive to performance. Absent in the specific ways my father had been absent. I had not found a better father. I had found the same father wearing robes. And I had loved him completely, which is the part that took the longest to grieve.

I know what people will say. That the heavenly father is not like my earthly father. That the real God is loving and protective and kind and I can trust him even when people could not be trusted. I held that distinction for a long time. What I could not see while holding it was that the God I had been given was not an abstraction. He was built by specific people, inside a specific theology, using a specific framework. You cannot fully separate the God from the system that handed him to you. And any system that reserves spiritual authority for men and withholds it from women, even in its mildest form, is operating on the same foundational logic. The dial can be turned down. The dial is still the same dial.

What I believe now is harder to name and does not fit inside the tradition I was raised in. That is not a loss I am grieving anymore. It is just where I landed after a long time of looking honestly at what I actually thought was true.

What I found on the other side is something larger and less punishing than anything I was handed as a child.

Deconstruction does not arrive cleanly. It arrives in pieces, and each piece costs something. First you see the pattern. Then you see how long you were in it. Then you see how much of yourself you bent and flattened and silenced to stay inside something that was never going to give you what it promised.

And then, if you are lucky, the anger comes.

It needs to come. It needs to be felt and expressed and not spiritualized away or reframed as bitterness or unforgiveness. For a long time anger was the most honest thing I had. It told the truth about what had been done when everything around me was still insisting nothing had happened or that it had been God's will or that I needed to let it go for my own sake.

But anger is not the end of it. I moved through it, and what is on the other side is something closer to indifference, and something closer to recognition. For people who are exhausted and don't know why. Who pray harder when things fall apart because that is what they were taught to do. Who feel the gap between what they were promised and what their life actually looks like and conclude the problem must be them. I was that person.

If you are somewhere in that process and you have questions about whether therapy could help, you are welcome to reach out through the contact form. You do not have to have it figured out before you make contact.

Religious Trauma Is the Wound Underneath the Theology

Religious trauma is not about losing your beliefs. It is about losing the entire structure that organized your sense of self, your relationships, your understanding of what you deserve and what love is allowed to look like.

For people who were already carrying abuse before the faith took hold, religious trauma sits on top of something older. The theology did not create the wound. It colonized one that was already there. It gave the wound a framework that made it feel sacred, which made it nearly impossible to examine. You cannot easily question something you have been told is holy. You cannot easily name as abuse something that has been reframed as God's will.

What I can tell you is that naming it does not make the loss smaller. It makes it larger, at first. You are grieving the belief system and the lie of it at the same time. The community. The certainty. The version of yourself that believed. The relationships that depended on you staying. Whatever you built your sense of safety around inside that structure. That is a specific kind of grief that most people around you will not understand, and that is exactly why it belongs in a room with someone who does.

Religious Trauma Therapy in Las Vegas, Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, and Utah

If something in this post named an experience you have been carrying without language for it, therapy can be a place to bring that. If you are someone who wants to hold onto your faith and heal from what was done inside it, that path is just as real as mine. Deconstruction is not a requirement for therapy. Healing is.

I work with adults who are untangling religious trauma from early childhood abuse, who are trying to understand why their faith or their departure from it felt like losing themselves, and who are done being told their anger is a spiritual problem. Religious trauma therapy is one of the primary areas I specialize in, using EMDR and somatic approaches that address the body-level patterning that talk alone cannot always reach.

Sessions are available in person in Las Vegas and via telehealth throughout Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, and Utah.

You can reach out through the contact form if you have questions and are not quite ready to book. If you are ready, you can schedule a free 20-minute consultation here.

You named it. That took longer than it should have, and it still counts.

Rachel Hansen, LCSW, is a licensed trauma therapist in Las Vegas specializing in EMDR, somatic approaches, and psychedelic integration for adults healing from complex trauma, religious trauma, and high-control environments. She offers in-person therapy in Las Vegas and online therapy in Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, and Utah.