Religious Trauma
Religious Trauma and the Mind God Gave Me
There are many wrong ways in religions. The cult world is real.
I know because I’ve lived with visions since I was a child, and I’ve watched religion try to name them, shame them, or silence them.
I remember one time being at Sunvalley Mall in Concord, CA and seeing my classmate. We were in Macy’s and I told my mom I did not feel well and she left. We were in the exact place that a few hours later a plane crashed in Sunvalley Mall and my classmate was badly burned and it took her months to recover. After leaving the mall I felt better.
That was not mental illness. That was knowing. But religion would have called it demons. Religion would have told me to pray it away. Religion would have made me afraid of my own mind.
My mother always made sure I had the best therapy as a child. I went to RAFA counseling and worked with Dr. Stambaugh who studied the way the brain worked. I loved going to his office and rearranging his office and then telling him. It was awesome having a positive male figure like him and he had a PhD. He was well educated.
Dr. Stambaugh studied my brain and I loved sitting in his office. It was peace from living in Pittsburg, CA. He didn’t tell me I was cursed. He didn’t pour oil on my head and call it deliverance. He asked questions. He listened. He taught me that my brain was not broken — it was different.
That’s the impact religion has on mental health when it’s wrong: it pathologizes the Spirit. It turns intuition into rebellion. It turns visions into schizophrenia. It tells a little girl that God speaks, but not to her.
Religion also taught me fear. Fear of the Antichrist in a Nazarene church in Concord. Fear of a pastor’s wife screaming at me. Fear that if I left, God would leave me. Fear that if I went to my father again, it would kill my mother — she always said that. So after my stepbrother’s death, I chose to never see my father again. Religion uses love as leverage. Spirit never does.
But therapy gave me something religion didn’t: tools. It also got me closer to my mom. She would pick me up from school in her 74-year-old yellow Volkswagen and we would head over the hill toward the direction of Pleasant Hill, often stopping at Goodwill and ending the visit by going to Taco Bell. I had more time with my l mother than my other siblings who left home. I had one-on-one interaction.
In that car, between Goodwill and Taco Bell, I was safe. No pews. No pulpits. No one telling me I was going to hell for how my brain worked.
Religious trauma is real. It’s being told your gifts are sickness. It’s being baptized 10 times trying to wash off something God never said was dirty. It’s watching pastors divorce while they preach on marriage. It’s being told to vote against hope because a man might be the Antichrist.
The cult world is real. And sometimes it meets on Sundays with a choir.
But the Spirit is real too. And the Spirit never told me I was crazy. The Spirit told Dr. Stambaugh to study. The Spirit told my mom to drive the yellow Volkswagen. The Spirit told me to leave Macy’s.
Religion tried to break my mind. Therapy helped me understand it. Spirit taught me to trust it.
And today, at 51, in Salem, with a PhD in progress and a non-profit in my future, I know the difference.
God is not in the trauma. God is in the healing from it.
Cathryn M. Murray
From Ashes | Diagnosed, Not Defined | Still Seeing
Salem, Oregon | August 4, 2026
