Fundamentalist Religious Childhoods and Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing

What happens when the beliefs and rules we grow up with become closely tied to safety, belonging and acceptance?

This webinar explores fundamentalist religious childhoods and their potential impact on adult mental health and wellbeing, including experiences that may be understood as religious trauma or spiritual harm.

Through an attachment-informed lens, we consider what it can mean to grow up within a religious environment where belonging may feel connected to behaving, believing or being in particular ways. We explore how early experiences around faith, family and community can shape a person’s developing sense of self, relationships and expectations of others.

The session considers themes including attachment, shame, fear, identity, belonging and exclusion, and how these experiences may continue to show themselves in adulthood and within the therapeutic relationship.

For counsellors and psychotherapists, religious experiences can sometimes be difficult territory to navigate. How do we remain curious about a client’s faith or religious history without making assumptions? How might we recognise the impact of harmful experiences while also respecting the importance that faith may continue to hold for the client?

This webinar offers an opportunity to think more deeply about religious trauma in therapy and the complexity of working with clients whose experiences of religion, attachment and mental health are intertwined.

Suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals interested in religious trauma, attachment and the psychological impact of fundamentalist religious experiences.