When it comes to loss, this universal human experience impacts each person in unique and painful ways. This is especially true when it comes to ambiguous losses where what’s been lost feels intangible. For instance, losing someone to divorce, cognitive decline, or substance abuse are all profound experiences of loss that often go unnoticed by others. While we discuss the topic of ambiguous grief more broadly in this blog post, I now want to focus on a specific facet of it that uniquely impacts the LGBTQIA+ community: religious trauma and losing a faith based community after coming out.
As many in the queer community know, it can be really scary to come out regardless of where you grew up or how accepting those in your life are. Even when you know you’re likely to receive an outpouring of support, it can be terrifying to share this deeply personal aspect of your identity with the world for the first time. Sadly though, many in our community aren’t met with support and acceptance when they come out, and this is especially true for many queer individuals raised in religious families.
While not all faith communities are unaccepting of LGBTQIA+ people, many perpetuate attitudes such as “hate the sin, love the sinner” and the promotion of harmful tactics such as conversion therapy or even disowning loved ones who come out. This is a heartbreaking and damaging experience for many LGBTQIA+ individuals, and it can create a unique ambiguous loss for many who find themselves grappling with a crisis of faith on top of losing the love and support of friends and family.
If you or someone you know have had the experience of feeling unaccepted after coming out, what I just described probably sounds terribly familiar and upsetting. This type of experience is sadly common for many queer folks, and it can create many new questions about who you are and where you belong after coming out. Do faith practices still align with who you are? Is there cognitive dissonance about practicing a religion that says your identity is a sin? How can you deconstruct your faith to divorce it from harmful patriarchal, homophobic and racist ideas and reconstruct it into a practice that aligns with you? Do you even believe in a higher power anymore, or does a faith practice no longer fit with who you are? These are just a few questions that may surface for LGBTQIA+ people after they come out and receive backlash and othering from their faith communities.
The experience is different for everyone, but one thing remains the same: the ambiguous loss of feeling like you don’t fit in a community that has been a huge part of your self concept is isolating, and your painful experience is likely invisible and unrecognized by most which can create more heartbreak on top of the original loss.
Different types of faith-specific ambiguous loss
While this topic is deeply personal to me as a queer person who was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, the language to explain my experience didn’t feel totally accessible to me until I read a journal article about how faith and ambiguous loss impact transgender youth. Although I’m a cisgendered woman, the findings from the study “I feel like God doesn’t like me”: Faith & Ambiguous Loss Among Transgender Youth (Anderson & McGuire, 2021) really hit home for me. In their research, Anderson and McGuire discussed how non-affirming religious affiliation directly contributes to minority stress which was another new-to-me term that helped me better understand my own experiences with marginalization. Their research broke down faith-based ambiguous loss into several important categories:
Physical Absence of Faith Practice with Psychological Presence of God: The authors described this type of ambiguous loss as “leaving without saying goodbye” wherein the person experiences the loss of their physical connection to their faith community (i.e., being pushed out of their church or family) while still maintaining a personal relationship with their higher power.
Physical Access to Faith Practice with Psychological Absence of God: For this ambiguous loss experience, the authors succinctly describe this as “goodbye without leaving,” and in this experience the person may continue engaging in their faith practice while experiencing an undertone that God doesn’t like them because of who they are.
Physical Access to Faith Practice with Psychological Absence of Community: In this type of loss, the person maintains ties to their faith practice while feeling a rupture in their interpersonal relationships, especially with others in their faith community who aren’t accepting of them.
While this research is specific to interviews conducted with transgender youth, the findings feel very generalizable to the broader LGBTQIA+ community. Maybe one or more of these ambiguous losses speak to your own experience.
In my own identity development as a young bisexual woman growing up in Mississippi, I know that I went through each of these types of ambiguous loss as though they were phases in both my becoming and unbecoming. For instance, I wholeheartedly believed in the Christian faith as an adolescent, and when I had my first crush on a girl, I struggled with the dissonance of having feelings that I couldn’t seem to reconcile with the faith I was being raised in. To make matters worse, I was constantly receiving harmful messages from my faith community about purity culture, a woman’s place in the church and in her family, and how gay people were headed straight for hell. For anyone else who grew up Southern Baptist, you know how harmful all those hell fire and brimstone messages can be to the psyche of a child trying to figure out who they are, and it’s even more damaging for anyone the church has deemed sinful and an abomination.
I laughed out loud while typing abomination, but also I want to deeply affirm how damaging and unacceptable these messages are. If you’ve made it this far into my blog and into your own life, I want to take a moment to affirm that you are wonderful just as you are, you belong because you are part of nature and part of this world, and acceptance and freedom to be yourself are your birthright. While you may know this intellectually, let me share some inspiring words to help you feel these truths in your soul:
When we die, all the water in our bodies returns to the water cycle. I grew up thinking I was going to hell. What if someone had told me, ‘Yeah, baby, the church says that, but what’s bigger than the church is nature. And nature says no matter how you love, you will return back to this holy sacred thing. One day, you’ll be rain.' -Britton Smith
For more wisdom from Britton Smith, check out his recent interview with Them in which he describes his own unique experience as someone who is queer and Black that grew up experiencing shame in the church but has now reclaimed his spirituality through his love for music.
Finding community and belonging after religious trauma
In the wake of the ambiguous grief involved in losing a faith community, many queer people find themselves grappling with isolation and loneliness, having lost their circle of connection within the church. While we all need caring people in our lives, this is especially true for anyone who has been ridiculed, marginalized, or otherwise harmed because of their identity, and it’s crucial to find new community and connection following this type of ambiguous loss.
In my personal journey, I felt like I didn’t fit in many spaces because I believed I was either too queer or not queer enough to quite belong anywhere. It wasn’t until I found community with other bisexual people as well as queer-allied folks that I started to believe I belonged and that it was okay for me to show up authentically as myself. Especially since I grew up in a culture that vilified my sexuality, it felt scary to be authentically me, but it also was the beginning of me living truly as myself which has become a lot less scary and much more expansive as time has gone on. The more I showed up as me, the more my people seemed to magically appear in my life.
It’s also important to note that not everyone is privileged with the safety to always show up openly as themselves, and there is grief in that too which needs to be witnessed and honored. I recognize this might not feel accessible to everyone, but I would encourage anyone grappling with religious trauma and related grief and loss to consider what they have to gain by being truly, expansively themselves. There are so many people who want to know the real you, and I strongly believe that they far outnumber the folks who might want to push you into the shadows or make you feel ashamed of who you are and always have been.
Finding community can look different for everyone, but a few ideas for building that loving community include…
Attending LGBTQIA+ events or joining queer organizations
Exploring what your identities mean to you
Identifying affirming religions, an ethical society, or a group in your area or online that is focused on healing from religious trauma
Becoming more involved in advocacy and social justice movements in support of LGBTQIA+ rights and collective liberation
Opening up to those closest to you so they can offer support and compassion
Your community is out there waiting to experience the full spectrum of who you are. And most importantly, your true self is waiting to be witnessed by YOU so that you can see how truly wonderful you are. In the inspiring words showcased in this artwork, it’s never too late to come home to yourself. You belong here just for being you, and cultivating home within yourself is paramount in knowing you belong with others.
I also want to acknowledge for those who lose their faith communities but aren’t part of the LGBTQIA+ community, this loss can feel especially isolating and as though you have nowhere to go. While this blog focuses on the experiences of queer folks, much of it directly applies to all people who’ve experienced religious trauma, and I hope it resonates even if you aren’t part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Reconnecting with spirituality after religious trauma
For those who’ve experienced religious trauma, it may feel impossible to connect with spirituality, but it may also feel empowering to connect with a spiritual practice that wasn’t imposed as a requirement. Regardless of whether your spiritual practice involves attending a church, synagogue or temple, or if you prefer connecting with spirituality through nature, oracle cards, or mindfulness practices such as meditation, spiritual practices may be a part of your wellness journey and an avenue for deeper connection with yourself.
One facet of cultivating that spiritual practice may involve connecting with your queer chosen ancestors, those who’ve come before you that have offered you support and love despite not being your biological ancestors. This might look like exploring queer history in depth and identifying prolific leaders in the early LGBTQIA+ rights movement such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Harvey Milk, and beyond. It might also involve connecting deeply with artists, activists and musicians who inspire you and create more space for you to bravely show up as yourself. In my own life, that’s involved looking up to Janelle Monae, Phoebe Bridgers, adrienne maree brown, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Chappell Roan and more. These activists, writers, and musicians have all shown me unique aspects of the queer experience and how I get to show up uniquely as myself and celebrate my own queerness. Connecting to queer chosen ancestors may feel like a revelatory experience for you if you’re still reeling from the pain of religious trauma but seeking a deeper connection with the truth of who you are. I encourage you to consider who you would choose as your queer chosen ancestors. Make a list, and see who’s been responsible for helping you feel braver and more able to show up authentically as yourself!
Incorporating spirituality into therapy and healing from religious trauma
In the world of therapy specifically, there are some counseling modalities that are inherently spiritual. A few examples that come to mind include dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness based cognitive therapy, contemplative and transpersonal therapy, and internal family systems therapy (often called parts work). Each of these therapeutic modalities incorporates facets of mindfulness, acceptance of the here and now, and seeing each client as uniquely brilliant and whole. A more mind + body + spirit approach to counseling may feel unfamiliar to some people, including those who’ve been in counseling before or experienced religious systems that denigrate the body and elevate the spiritual, but each of these modalities can play an integral role in supporting clients as they work to feel more whole and authentic within themselves following religious trauma and rejection of their LGBTQIA+ identities.
My favorite of these modalities is Internal Family Systems (IFS) or parts work. IFS-informed counseling involves guiding clients back to previous life experiences that were traumatic, harmful and instilled false or limiting beliefs about themselves. Through this excavation of the past, the therapist and client are able to reconnect with younger parts of the psyche and extend compassion, curiosity, and acceptance to those tender, younger parts and invite them into the present moment. For those who are new to IFS, this approach can feel a bit strange at first, but as time goes on, clients report a powerful ability to connect with their younger parts and feel like they’re better able to attend to the present moment from the seat of their highest intuition versus being guided by the instinctual behavior of a 4- or 16-year old part, for example.
This therapeutic approach feels especially spiritual to me because it focuses so heavily on drawing on each client’s own inner wisdom and knowing which has been developed through lived experiences including those that were harmful and traumatizing. For those who’ve experienced religious trauma, it can be hard to trust our intuition since the church instilled into us that our natural instincts were somehow wrong. Maybe these words feel eerily familiar: “The heart is deceitful above all things and not to be trusted.” Fortunately, parts work can aid in the process of coming home to ourselves and trusting that we know who we are in order to not be guided by falsehoods of the past. This type of therapy can be especially impactful for queer clients who are struggling to externalize false beliefs about their worth and goodness, and I know from personal experience how powerful it can be to witness younger parts who experienced harm within faith communities and offer those parts compassion and an invitation to come live with me in the present. For a deeper dive into the IFS model, you can visit the IFS Institute which outlines the parts work process in great detail.
Individual therapy support
If you’re ready to find support on your journey of deconstructing your faith and healing from religious trauma, individual therapy is a great place to start. Counseling services, like those offered at Her Time Therapy, offer the support needed to explore and nurture the deep wounding left by harmful religious beliefs so that you can reclaim your wholeness.
Our therapists can support you as you investigate the far reaching impacts religious trauma has had on your life and your identity development and expression. We’re here to celebrate you, be with you in your grief, and support you as you allow yourself to expand into the full expression of who you truly are. Your wellbeing and resilience are of utmost importance to us, and we would be honored to work with you on your path to recovering from religious trauma.
If you’re ready to get started with therapy, we can match you with a queer-affirming therapist who can provide compassionate care as you process your ambiguous grief and pain as well as your strength and resilience as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. You belong here, and we want to support you!
Call/Text (720) 255-1667 | info@hertimetherapy.com | www.hertimetherapy.com
Lesley Fulton (she/her), is a Clinical Mental Health Graduate Student Intern offering affordable counseling services to Her Time Therapy Clients under the supervision of Julie Noyes, MA LPC NCC and Adams State University professors. Lesley is passionate about helping clients with trauma, LGBTQIA+ identity, attachment issues, codependence, chronic illness, and disordered eating/body image.
*Disclaimer: This blog does not provide medical advice and the information contained herein is for informational purposes only. This blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a licensed health provider before undertaking a new treatment or health care regimen.
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