Identity-based harm

Being harmed or targeted because of your religion or lack of religion

Being targeted because of your faith, your religious community, or your rejection of religion. Hate crimes, discrimination, family rejection for leaving a faith, or being harmed by a community that used religion to justify it.

Being harmed for your faith, or for leaving one, cuts into questions of meaning and belonging at the same time. Losing family or community over belief, or surviving harm justified by it, leaves complicated wreckage. Whatever your relationship with the sacred is now, it is yours, and nobody here will try to correct it.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

Trust issues Trust that was broken, repeatedly, by people who were supposed to be safe. Loss of meaning The questions that will not resolve. Spiritual injury Something happened and the belief system that held your world together stopped holding. Loneliness This is different from pulling away. Hypervigilance The nervous system that learned to scan for danger all the time. C-PTSD When trauma happened repeatedly, over a long time, or at the hands of people who were supposed to care for you, the effects go deeper than a single event. Depression Not just sadness. Shame Not guilt about something you did.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

Find a meeting Join the fellowship

Need support right now?

Related experiences we cover

See everything we cover