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Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Kellen Swift-Godzisz, 35, said he doesn’t go on dates, struggles with erectile dysfunction and is hesitant to trust people. For more than 20 years, he’s experienced intense bouts of anxiety and depression that have had a “major hold on his life.”
“Imagine being told by everyone you trusted that you’re going to hell because you like men,” Swift-Godzisz, a marketing project manager living in Chicago, told NBC News.
At just 11 years old, Swift-Godzisz recalled, he would sit in his bedroom every night praying or writing letters that said, “Please God, remove my affliction of same-sex attraction,” and would then store each letter in an overflowing shoebox in his closet.
Bish, please. Religious trauma haunts everyone.
“Everyone” doesn’t have to worry about being subject to a cottage industry of legal child abuse/indoctrination camps meant to change their sexuality or gender identity and are rife with sexual abuse.
Yeah, the rest of the kids have to be taken to church regularly in order to be sexually abused. How privileged of them.
Then there are those extra lucky ones who get home visits instead!
Are you actually comparing being taken to church with “conversion therapy?”
Are you unable to take into consideration the idea that the religious staff didn’t need special camps in order to assault children? That they could and did do it on church grounds or even in the victims own homes?
Do you really not understand the difference between taking a child to a church where they may possibly be assaulted and forcing a child to be sexually tortured? Really?
Dear cephalopod, you’re too focused on comparing who gets harmed the most. It’s not a contest. None should be harmed at all.
The division is unhealthy.
You cannot make it any more illegal to sexually abuse children in church than it already is. Conversion therapy is legal in a majority of U.S. states. It is legal sexual abuse. That’s a huge difference.
Converting “deviant behaviours” was a mainstay of psychological practices up until recently. It wasn’t limited to sexual identity. Anyone who didn’t conform to social norms of so-called ‘morals’ and religious background was subjected to this kind of torture, one of its more famous victims being a daughter of the Kennedy family.
There is no legal sexual abuse. There is lack of information, lack of evidence or complicit corruption. Any judge that respects the spirit of law will treat abuse as such when presented to them.
Yet if by chance, any abuse is legal then you are also allowed to perform it on those who practice it on others. I recommend you do so if there is such a situation.
The irony of the person who came into a post specifically about the trauma that religion causes LGBTQ people and tried to make it about other people saying this is too unreal.
Pot, have you met kettle?
I didn’t try to make it about other people. Being a victim of religion is not an exclusive membership. Or are you proud of being an abuser’s favoured one and I’m threatening that position?
If so, then I apologize. Please, segregate yourself. Stand out. Be different from any other victim.
My bad.
No. They were talking about organized sexual abuse.
Conversion therapy is organized sexual abuse. In fact, it’s sexual violence.
Did it make sense to you when you wrote this comment to suggest that kids subjected to conversion therapy camps are somehow less exposed to abusive religious practices?
TY. Came here to say the same.
Doesn’t matter your orientation, guilt and shame are the tools of control and clergy wield them to great effect.
That’s absolutely true, but there’s an added dimension for queer people because it serves as an additional original sin.
That seems very dismissive of the actual trauma many people experience. Lots of people grew up without abusive religious authority figures, or without any religious authority figures at all. I’m one of those people and I don’t want to downplay other people’s suffering by acting as if I experienced it too.
It sounds like you probably experienced religious trauma yourself, and part of how you cope with it is telling yourself it’s just normal. It’s not.
The lgbt person’s story is just an example. The article goes on state religious trauma may affect as many as a third of US adults. It’s not saying this hypothetical new dsm diagnosis would be specific to only lgbt related religious trauma.