Specialized, affirming therapy for Religious Trauma Syndrome — for LGBTQ+, Asian American, BIPOC, and Indigenous individuals carrying the lasting harm of authoritarian religion. Online across California, Washington, Oregon, and New York.
Religious Trauma Syndrome doesn't just leave you with bad memories. For LGBTQ+ people raised inside faith traditions that named their sexuality as sinful, RTS shapes the relationship you have with your body, your desire, your worth, and your right to be loved fully. Those messages arrived before you had any defenses against them — and they were delivered by people you trusted.
For Asian American and BIPOC communities, religious trauma intersects with cultural identity, family loyalty, and immigration history in ways that make it harder to name and harder to treat without cultural context. For Indigenous communities, religious harm is inseparable from the history of colonization — a systematic campaign to suppress spiritual practices and replace them with European Christian doctrine.
At Rainbow Connection Counseling Collective, we understand the full complexity of this wound. Our approach honors your autonomy in defining your own beliefs and values while reducing the suffering caused by harmful religious conditioning — wherever that conditioning came from.
"Religious trauma is the effect of the burden of stress on your body and nervous system when in religious systems and relationships that steal your safety and call it spiritual."K.J. Ramsey
RTS looks different depending on who you are, where you come from, and what was done to you. Select your experience below.
Understanding the specific mechanisms of harm in your community isn't about relitigating faith — it's the context that makes real healing possible.
Religious Trauma Syndrome produces a wide and often surprising range of effects. The areas below reflect the most common threads in this work — though every client's path is shaped by what they specifically bring.
One of the hallmark features of RTS is how thoroughly it lives in the body. For LGBTQ+ people raised in faith traditions that named their sexuality as sinful, the result is often a deeply somatic shame — a physical contraction that shows up in the bedroom, in the mirror, in quiet moments after intimacy when the old programming reasserts itself. Using sex-positive, trauma-informed approaches, this work helps you build a relationship with your body and your desire that is genuinely yours — not inherited from a tradition that required your self-erasure to grant belonging.
Internalized homophobia doesn't require you to consciously believe you're inferior. It lives in the gap between what you know intellectually and what you feel viscerally — a gap that RTS creates and widens. The work is not about re-litigating your faith or demanding you arrive at any particular conclusion. It's about becoming conscious of what you absorbed and deciding, as an adult, what you actually believe about yourself.
Grief is a central feature of RTS that is frequently underestimated. You can grieve a community that hurt you. You can miss a sense of spiritual belonging and also recognize it came at an unbearable cost. You can mourn the relationship with a parent who loves you and cannot fully accept you. For Indigenous clients, grief around lost spiritual traditions, languages, and sacred practices is layered with the weight of deliberate cultural erasure. These are not contradictions — they are the actual texture of this particular wound.
For LGBTQ+ people, anxiety and guilt cycles around sex tend to be especially acute because sexual shame was often the mechanism through which religious harm was delivered most directly. The result is a relationship to sexuality that ping-pongs between extremes: profound avoidance because sex activates too much shame to approach without dread, or compulsive use of sex as a temporary escape from that shame, followed by the guilt crash that re-triggers the whole loop. As an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, this work addresses these patterns from a sex-positive, non-pathologizing framework — with clinical expertise that most therapists don't bring to this area.
Religious Trauma Syndrome doesn't only wound your relationship to sex or spirit — it wounds your relationship to other people. When you grow up in an environment that demanded conformity as the price of belonging, you develop highly refined habits of self-concealment. RTS creates a social architecture of guardedness that can persist for decades, producing relationships where you are present but not quite known — connected but still fundamentally alone inside it.
LGBTQ+ individuals who are also members of Asian American, Black, Latino, Indigenous, or other racial and ethnic communities navigate religious trauma while simultaneously processing racial identity, cultural belonging, and potential rejection from multiple communities. Loss of religion in these contexts can also result in an identity crisis — because spirituality was deeply entangled with cultural identity, not just personal belief. For Indigenous clients especially, healing includes reclaiming and reconnecting with spiritual practices and wisdom that colonialism tried to erase — a profound act of resistance and healing.
Four principles that set this practice apart from generalist trauma therapy — and from most other affirming practices.
Our lead clinician grew up in evangelical Christianity and attended a K–12 religious school. This practice was built by someone who survived religious trauma personally — not just clinically. That changes what's possible in the room.
Our clinician is an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist. Sexual shame is a specific clinical focus — addressed directly and without circumvention — because it is often the center of religious harm for LGBTQ+ clients.
This work is not anti-religion. We have no agenda about where you land. The goal is healing from harm and building a life — including a spiritual life, if you choose — that genuinely belongs to you.
We hold LGBTQ+ identity, racial identity, cultural heritage, and the specific legacy of religious colonialism together — as interwoven parts of a single wound — never treating them as separate issues.
Care from someone who has lived it, not just studied it.
Ready to start? Schedule a free 15-minute consultation.
If you don't see your question here, reach out — a free 15-minute consultation is the best place to explore whether this is the right fit.
Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) is a term coined by psychologist Dr. Marlene Winell to describe the condition that results from prolonged exposure to authoritarian, high-control religious environments. It produces a recognizable cluster of symptoms — including anxiety, depression, black-and-white thinking, difficulty trusting your own judgment, sexual shame, grief, social isolation, and existential disorientation — that can persist long after someone has left the religious environment that caused them. For LGBTQ+ people, RTS is frequently compounded by the specific harm of having one's identity named as sinful, which adds a layer of sexual and identity-based shame that requires specialist attention.
RTS exists on a spectrum. You don't need to have experienced overt abuse, dramatic rejection, or a formal exit from a religious community. The quieter, more ambient messages — delivered through sermons, school curriculum, family silence, or community assumption — can produce the full range of RTS symptoms just as reliably as more overt harm. If you grew up being told that your queerness, your identity, or your cultural heritage was sinful, shameful, or something to be overcome — that counts. A free consultation is a good place to explore whether this framing fits your experience.
Not at all. Many clients have fully left their faith tradition, while others are still navigating a complex relationship with belief. Religious Trauma Syndrome doesn't require active religious participation to persist — the symptoms it produces can outlast the environment by decades. What matters is whether religious messages have shaped how you see yourself, your body, your identity, or your worth. That's the work, regardless of where you stand today.
No. This work is not about indicting faith or religious communities broadly. It's about helping you process the specific harm you experienced and building a life — including, if you choose, a spiritual life — that belongs to you. Many clients actually build a healthier and more authentic relationship with spirituality through this process. Some rebuild a faith practice on their own terms. Some find new forms of belonging and meaning. Some learn to live comfortably with open questions. All of it is valid.
Yes. Religious shame and its effects on intimacy, communication, and sexuality can be powerful forces inside a partnership — even when only one partner was raised religious. Couples work is available for partners both located in a state we're licensed in at the time of sessions.
Our sessions are private pay. HSA and FSA cards are accepted, and we provide detailed superbills you can submit for out-of-network reimbursement — it is worth checking your out-of-network benefits, since many plans cover a meaningful portion of out-of-network costs. Harry Dixon is our only clinician in-network with Cigna. Our fees are listed on our FAQ page.
All sessions via telehealth — wherever you feel safest.
The suffering that religious trauma produces is real, documented — and treatable. Schedule a free consultation and experience the difference of working with a therapist who understands this wound from the inside out.
Questions? Contact us directly · 619.363.4674