Both harm and healing can happen in spiritual communities, though there is rarely space to acknowledge or process stories of harm. Carrying stories of harm connected to religious community or spiritual practice can be lonely and confusing. For many people, it is helpful to process with others who are also on the healing journey. Opportunities for connection and introductions to various resources can pave the way for ongoing healing. 

Reclaiming Our Spirituality is an interactive Zoom workshop that offers space for connection, and tools you can adapt to your particular needs. It is a space where we build our capacity to reflect on our own stories and to bear witness to the stories of others in compassionate ways. It is a space where we can practice respecting each other’s agency and boundaries, and where we affirm both the uniqueness of everyone’s experience and the ways our stories connect us. 

Join us to participate in this collaborative healing space: 

Schedule Overview: 

Session 1—Getting Started (September 28, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

This first session introduces the compassionate witnessing framework that will be used throughout the series, and offers working definitions of spiritual harm and religious trauma. This session also includes a review of what can and cannot be offered in this workshop and explains how participants can connect with other resources. 

Session 2—Cultivating Safety (October 7, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Because all trauma wounding ties in some way to breaches in safety or breaks in our access to support, connecting to a safe haven is a skill we will practice in one way or another during every group meeting. During this session participants will have an opportunity to reflect on what tools are helpful to them and to experience what it is like to connect to a sense of safety by attuning to physical sensations in the moment or by imagining yourself in a safe place.

Session 3—Celebrating Agency (October 14, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Humans all have a built-in need for connection and belonging and also for autonomy and individuation. Ideally, we have the opportunity to become our own person without our important relationships suffering. However, both in childhood wounding (attachment or developmental trauma) and in wounding connected to religious community, many people receive the message that they must choose either belonging or autonomy. This session explores reclaiming a sense of boundaries and agency while remaining in relationship.

Session 4—Embracing the Intelligence of Trauma Responses (October 21, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

There are a number of automatic reactions we usually draw from (usually without conscious awareness) when we feel threatened. These include fighting or lashing out, freezing or shutting down, fleeing or getting away from the situation as quickly as possible, and fawning or being pleasant and deferential and pretending nothing is wrong while you wait for the moment to pass. This session examines how these responses make sense, and how even if they currently don’t serve us well, they helped keep us safe at times when our basic needs were not being met. 

Session 5—Noticing Triggers (October 28, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

One of the ways trauma wounding impacts us is by making us feel stuck or like we do not have options. Continuing the discussion of basic needs and how we react when our needs are not met, this session explores how expanding awareness of our triggers and our most common reactions can equip us to be aware of what is happening when we are triggered to more and more quickly return to a sense of options and agency rather than stuckness and tunnel vision.

Session 6—Getting Grounded (November 4, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Many people who are healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma have internalized a message that if they set boundaries, name their needs, and experience the full range of human emotions, they are being selfish. This session explores the concept of humility as groundedness in reality. As we become more honest about and more aware of our assets and liabilities, our strengths and our limitations, we can operate from a deepening sense of rootedness and grow in our ability to discern what is appropriate in a variety of situations.  

Session 7—Interrogating Silence (November 11, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Silence can harm and silence can heal. Silence is connection and intimacy; silence is misunderstanding and severed relationship. Silence can feel spacious, and it can also feel like a closing in. This session explores what connotations you associate with silence (your own, that of others, perceived silence of God, silence out in nature, etc.), and invites participants to name losses that are connected to experiences of silence, and to consider how they want silence to fit in their life.

Session 8—Holding Space for Grief (November 18, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

All change, even desired change, involves loss. When we name harms and invest in healing, there are losses that come into our awareness at various points along the way. Grief can be an honoring and also a letting go. And when we build our capacity to sit with the grief, however it is showing up for us at the moment, we expand our ability to be fully present with ourselves, with others, and with the divine. This session invites curiosity about the fears, longings, aching wounds, and suppressed gifts that we and those around us may carry, and invites the grief process.

Session 9—Naming Betrayal Trauma (November 25, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Sometimes the harm we experience comes at the hand of the very people and communities who are supposed to have our best interest in mind and upon whom we rely for good care. Recognizing and naming these aspects of our experience can feel like betrayal in more than one way. We may feel like we are betraying people and communities we care deeply about by being honest about harm. And we may also carry tremendous pain from being betrayed by those we trusted more. This session creates a holding space for bearing witness to betrayal wounds.

Session 10—Distinguishing Care from Control (December 2, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

One of the challenges of embarking on a healing path in the aftermath of spiritual harm or abuse is developing tools for discerning between care and control. Many perpetrators of harm, including both individuals and systems, have disguised control as love. And when anyone names this, it is scary and can bring backlash. This session explores what good care looks like and feels like.

Session 11—Exploring the Complexities of Hope (December 9, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

As trauma wounds heal and open wounds become scars, one of the patterns noticed by therapists is that people’s capacity to accept and embrace the multiplicity of human experience expands. Humans can experience multiple things simultaneously. This session explores human psychological multiplicity using hope as a case study. Embracing and being honest about hopelessness can create space for hope. 

Session 12—Connecting to Core Values (December 16, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time)

Throughout this series, we have invested time and energy in expanding our awareness—of wounding and triggers, needs and feelings, the many facets of our human experience. One of the main reasons for sharpening our awareness is that the more aware we are the more choice we have. As we become more and more able to respond rather than react, we become more and more free. In this final session, we will explore what values matter most to us right now and how we actualize those values in our lives.