"When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the impact of High-Control Religion," by Laura E. Anderson, [View all]

When Religion Hurts You, by Laura E. Anderson, , Brazos Press, 2023.

For those hurt by their exposure to a religion, and for those who want to understand the thinking of people who want turn the United States into a Christian theocracy.

“(RNS) — Raised in an evangelical church she now describes as a “dumpster fire” of fundamentalist beliefs, Laura Anderson’s terror of hell kept her up at night as a 4-year-old. Her insomnia was less about hell itself and more about the fear of being separated from her family if Jesus came back. So she’d lie awake, picturing an image of Jesus dying on the cross, hoping it would guarantee salvation.
Decades later, long after her sleeping patterns had regulated, she suddenly suffered from severe insomnia again — this time after she’d come to reject the idea of hell.

“Because of the way I had embodied those messages about the consequences of going to hell, my body started to panic again, because I didn’t have this assurance of salvation,” Anderson explained to Religion News Service…
Anderson gives language for and insights about this under-researched form of trauma and invites readers to take part in the ongoing process of healing.” (from Religion News Service