Reclaiming Our Power: Healing from Religious Trauma

By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 08/11/2023

We talk often about agency in our house because therapy! If you aren’t familiar with the concept of agency, think of it as the control we have over our own lives, our faith in our ability to make our own decisions, and our ability to handle a wide range of situations. It’s our agency over our own lives that helps keep us psychologically stable as well as flexible with the world around us. It’s like our own superpower. Too often, the church, especially fundamentalist churches and high-control religious communities, squelch our agency. They take away our power, and they hinder our ability to believe that we can, in fact, think for ourselves and have power over our own lives. After all, the crux of “high-control religion” is the control.