What does religious trauma have to do with body image? If you’ve been around here a while, you know that these are 2 areas where I focus professional counseling work. I specialize in working with survivors of religious trauma and spiritual abuse. I also focus on working with folks to address their body image concerns and find peace with food and their body. The connection between those topics may not be immediately obvious, so I invite you to read on to learn more.
The Meaning of Words
Let me share about each topic – religous trauma and body image concerns – so that we have an established understanding before we consider the connections between the two.
Religious Trauma
Trauma is when an event or experience is too fast, too soon, or too much for a person’s nervous system. When that event or experience occurs within a religious context, that is referred to as religious trauma.
Each individual’s nervous system is different. So, something that is too much or too soon for one person’s nervous system may not even register as remotely distressing to another person’s nervous system. Understanding this concept helps shed light on why multiple people may experience the same thing, yet some resonate with being traumatized while others do not. One person may be able to move forward without experiencing a disruption in their life and mental health, while another person may experience multiple symptoms of post-traumatic stress. These symptoms may include things like intrusive thoughts, inability to feel safe, hypervigilence, insommnia / troubling dreams, physical pain or digestive issues, or feelings of shame.
Sometimes religious trauma is one specific event. However, survivors of religious trauma have often experienced multiple events over a period of time, which adds to the complexity of their emotional, mental, and physical responses. This is often referred to as complex post-traumatic stress.
Religious trauma frequently goes hand-in-hand with spiritual abuse. What is spiritual abuse? Abuse occurs when a person/group uses their power to control or manipulate another, often influencing their feelings of autonomy and freedom. When this occurs within a spiritual or religious setting, it is known as spiritual abuse. Spiritual abuse may be conscious or unsconscious, and can include aspects of verbal, sexual, and emotional abuse within the spiritual context.
Body Image Concerns
Body image includes a person’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions about their physical appearance. Thoughts might include things like, ‘I look so frumpy in this outfit’ or ‘I’m all arms and legs’ or ‘The wrinkles around my eyes are very obvious today.’ The feelings of sadness, anger, fear, and envy are common when talking about body image. Perceptions are often based on comparisons with what we see in media or the messages we’ve learned about bodies from our environment.
I use the word “concerns” when talking about body image because there are just so many ways that body image can show up for folks. One person might be focused on weight or clothing size, while another person might be concerned with their level of strength or mobility. Often, there is overlap between a variety of different concerns when it comes to our bodies and how we view and experience them.
What’s the Connection
Religious trauma and body image concerns can grow from the same roots and can show up in your life in similar ways.
Disconnection from Body
A feeling of disconnection from your body is common with both religious trauma and body image concerns. I’ve heard this described as “living in my head” or “a head floating around with this body attached, but not connected.”
Years of religious teaching that focuses on connecting with a higher power via education rather than experience can lead to this disconnection from body. Some religious teachings emphasize that your being is spiritual and any sensations experienced by your physical body are not reality. Purity culture, the emphasis on avoiding even the appearance of sexual sin often found within evangelical Christianity, can cause someone to become numb to all desire in an effort to remain pure.
In the same way, years of seeing images of bodies that do not reflect yours can lead to disconnecting from your own body in an effort to protect yourself. Multiple cycles of losing and gaining weight due to yo-yo dieting can lead to lack of awareness of physical cues for hunger and fullness. Hearing comments about bodies, your own body and the appearance of others’ bodies, can lead to coping by numbing out the emotions or sensations that arise when those comments are made.
The outcome of these experiences, whether in the context of religious culture or diet culture, is often a disconnection from your body and bodily experiences.
Emphasis on Moral Purity
The presence of moral purity within religion may seem more obvious than its presence in relation to body image. However, the ideas of moral purity or cleanliness show up in both areas.
Religion often teaches ideas related to staying clean or pure, both in mind and body. This may include things such as not associating with those who believe differently, avoiding sexual activity during menstruation, not consuming certain types of media, refraining from masturbation, or not eating certain foods. All of these things are prescribed in an effort to maintain a sense of purity and are based on the morality of the belief system.
Diet culture, the belief that certain body sizes and ways of eating are superior, is also permeated by ideas of moral purity. One of the most obvious ways this shows up is with discussion of “clean eating.” The concept of “clean eating” suggests a morality of food choices – some are “clean” (i.e. good) and others are not (i.e. bad). A hierarchy of moral purity also exists within this context based on the perception that those who have the ability/desire/access to pursue “clean eating” have attained a higher morality or purity status than those who do not have the ability/desire/access to foods prescribed for “clean eating.”
Lack of Autonomy
Folks who have experienced religious trauma and those who struggle with body image concerns often share the commonality of feeling that they do not have control of their own self. This lack of control can include their body, their interests, their values, and many other areas.
When one is a member of a high-control belief system, often the context in which religious trauma occurs, many areas of life are dictated by the beliefs of the group. A member of the group may not have typical developmental experiences in learning to think critically or make decisions because approved activities are prescribed by the group. This type of system does not allow for the development of autonomy for those who are members from childhood, and can lead to forfeiture of autonomy for those who join in young adulthood or later.
The messages of diet culture also influence the presence and strength of one’s autonomy. Messages that certain body sizes or shapes are inherently better than others seep into our subconscious. The constant talk about calories and new diets contribute to the feeling that it’s normal to constantly be attempting to change your body, often to make your body smaller. When you don’t see people who share your skin color, body size, hair type, or style in media, you can easily forget that you have the right to exist and to embrace yourself just the way you are. You can lose your sense of self and autonomy related to your body.
How It Shows Up
The effects of relgious trauma and/or body image issues can show up similarly in peoples’ lives. You may not resonate with all of the following experiences, but it’s likely that, if you are someone who has experienced religious trauma and/or struggles with body image concerns, at least one of these areas is a concern in your life.
Anxiety
Anxiety is common in both folks who have experienced religious trauma and those who struggle with body image concerns. This goes beyond your everyday worries. Anxiety can show up as continual worries that you feel unable to control or stop. Anxiety can cause you to feel the need to attempt to manage or control things and people around you. Anxiety can include an ongoing fear that something bad will happen. It can disrupt your sleep, your ability to complete tasks, and your relationships.
It’s common for anxiety around food, social interactions, and/or sex to be present in survivors of religious trauma and those struggling with body image. Fear regarding food – that it’s unclean based on prior religious rules or that it will cause weight gain based on the messages of diet culture – can permeate one’s mind. Your thoughts may be focused on food, even when you’re not eating, to the point of intruding on your ability to be fully present for other things.
Social anxiety, the fear of being judged by others, is a common issue for those who have body image concerns and those who have experienced religious trauma. This may take the form of excessive worry about appearance – to the point that you spend hours getting ready to go out or avoid social gatherings altogether. You may be worried that folks will make judgmental comments about your food choices or the way you choose to spend your time. You may have difficulty interacting with other people based on years of being taught that folks outside your belief system were dangerous in some way.
Anxiety around sex and pleasure can also be the result of dealing with body image concerns and/or religious trauma. This can show up as difficulty getting aroused or experiencing sexual pleasure. It can also show up as fear of exploring sexuality and intimacy, with yourself or with a consenting partner. There can even be biological responses that decrease the pleasure of sexual intimacy due to mental wounds of religious trauma or body image concerns.
Difficulty Making Decisions
In high-demand religions, many decisions are made for you. This may include: what you believe, how to behave, how to relate to others, the meaning/purpose of your life, and what clothing is acceptable. You may not have experience with the freedom of making your own decisions, particularly if you grew up in this type of belief system from a young age; therefore, you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or frozen when faced with decisions.
Body image concerns are often the result of diet culture, another high-demand system that makes decisions for you. The decisions made by diet culture include: thin bodies being viewed as more worthy, white bodies being held as the standard, continuous weight loss efforts being the norm, satisfaction with one’s body being impossible. It can feel liberating and terrifying to consider making your own decisions about body, food, and appearance when you have been surrounded by diet culture all your life.
Grief
Grief is a complex emotion that is often misunderstood or avoided because it’s uncomfortable.
Religious contexts frequently have beliefs that provide ‘answers’ to common sources of grief. For example, Christian belief systems include some form of positive afterlife, frequently referred to as heaven, for those who pass away and have professed to hold those beliefs. This can be comforting to family members and friends of the deceased, but it can also be a way to bypass the experience of grief. By shifting the focus immediately to the belief that the deceased person is “in a better place” or “no longer suffering”, we may miss out on the process of ackowleding the loss and truly feeling the associated emotions.
There are also experiences of grief that are not widely acknowledged, sometimes referred to as disenfranchised grief. This can include things such as loss of a relationship that was not widely known or recognized or loss of hope for the life you envisioned. Most religious belief systems don’t have anything in place to help address this grief. When it happens, you don’t know what to do with it.
Those who experience spiritual abuse and/or religious trauma are frequently left with sometimes overwhelming grief. They have lost their community, their sense of safety, and sometimes their entire belief system and worldview. Yet, this grief is often not recognized and these folks generally haven’t been given or seen modeled any ways to healthily deal with grief.
Body image concerns also frequently include grief. You may grieve the body size or mobility you once had. You may grieve the treatment you have received because your body has never fit within the prescribed “norm.” This body-related grief is often disenfranchised grief because most folks don’t recognize it and you likely don’t know what to do with it.
Whether the source is body image, religious trauma, or some overlap of them both, grief shows up and it can be difficult to figure out healthy and helpful ways to experience the grief and honor your experience(s).
Identity Confusion
Identify Confusion, in this context, occurs when a person has uncertainty about who they are and what is important to them. If you’re struggling with identity confusion, you may question your values, be uncertain about your likes/dislikes, and frequently seek input from others to determine the “answers.”
High-demand religions often teach followers the beliefs and values that are to be embraced. There may be little to no room for questioning or differing thoughts. Those who are part of a high-demand belief system from childhood have frequently had most, if not all, life decisions made for them by outside sources, so it makes sense they are confused if they separate from the system. In addition, spiritual abuse generally contains an element of a leader utilizing their power to manipulate or control another’s actions and choices. These types of experiences breed identify confusion.
Being entrenched in diet culture can also breed identity confusion. Many of the folks I have worked with regarding body image concerns have difficulty trusting thier body. We are regularly fed (pun intended) information about about what we “should” eat or how we “should” move our body. After receiving so much external guidance, we lose touch with our own internal awareness. This can show up as difficulty identifying favorite foods or tendency to look to others for guidance about your body’s needs.
So What?
Now that you have seen some of the connections that show up between the areas of religious trauma and body image concerns, I hope you have a greater understanding of how I came to focus on working with these two areas. Not everyone who has experienced religious trauma struggles with body image concerns, and body image concerns exist for folks who have never been part of a religious belief system. However, for many, there is some overlap of experience and how it shows up in their lives.
If this post resonates with you, and you’re located in NC or FL, I would love to chat with you regarding how we might be able to work together. I provide professional counseling via telehealth, and specialize in religious trauma and body image concerns, either independently or as intertwined issues. You can contact me via my website to set up a FREE 15-minute consultation to determine if we might be a good fit for working together.
Michelle F. Moseley is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in NC and a Registered Telehealth Provider in FL. She believes ALL people deserve respect, compassion, and access to mental and physical healthcare. Michelle specializes in working with survivors of religious trauma and with those who have body image concerns, finding there is frequent overlap in these areas. You can learn more about Michelle by visiting her website at MichelleFMoseley.com or following her on Instagram – @therapy_with_michelle