Submitted by Andrew Jasko ~ M any religions teach ideologies that psychologically traumatize millions of people. Yet few helping professionals are trained to help people heal from religious trauma. Religious abuse can result in anxiety disorders, PTSD, spiritual suppression, sexual dysfunction, and communal shunning. Indoctrination also results in societal harms such as oppression of women and LGBT communities and climate change denial. When people leave religious total identity systems, they face a major life crisis. The process of transitioning and healing has a general shape and stage-specific challenges. Challenges like grieving the death of god, overcoming fear of hellfire torture, and rebuilding the self-relationship damaged by teachings about sin and surrender of agency are commonplace. How can we help people suffering within oppressive religions? How can we facilitate spiritual and life transition for those questioning their religion? How can we help those in recovery heal fr...

By Andrew Jasko ~ W estern religions have made narcissism a virtue through the worship of God, who bears all the markers of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Narcissism is a painful condition of low self-esteem masked by a shallow presentation of grandiose confidence. Through their imitation of the Divine Narcissist, the religious suffer, alternating between the crushing narcissistic wounds of superiority in salvation and inferiority in sin. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) , “the essential feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy” (DSM-IV-TR, 714). Narcissists form a grandiose self-image as a compensatory defense in order to protect themselves from facing the pain of an actual self-image of inadequacy, which is kept out of awareness in the unconscious mind. There is no one more grandiose or egotistical (or insecure) than the biblical God. In his mind...

By Andrew Jasko ~ H ell exists as a real place of torture in the minds of those who feed its imaginary fires through their fear. It is only religious people who suffer from the real hell, and those escaping religion who are still in recovery from hellfire trauma. Hell really exists for the millions of people who believe in it, in the form of terrifying flash-visualizations, nightmares, and psycho-somatic sensations of burning. They suffer because they believe it exists and because they believe people who don’t believe in it are going there. It is a psychological hell that burns and exists solely in the mind through the faith of fear, inspiring religious devotion through sheer terror. In an effort to save the world from hell, the religious spread hell to the world through evangelism, exposing vulnerable minds to its fearful seduction of eternal safety. Hell is the manipulation that if you live in fear and spread that fear to others, you will escape being consumed by it in the afte...