Healing from Religious Trauma: Learning to Center Yourself as the Main Character in Your Story
When you’ve been shaped by high-control religion, one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you belong in the center of your own story.
For many survivors of religious trauma, it feels more natural to focus on everyone else. To put others’ needs first. To make sure you aren’t being “selfish.” But when you’ve spent years—maybe decades—believing that your voice, your feelings, and your needs don’t matter, it can feel almost impossible to pause and ask:
What about me?
This question is not selfish—it’s sacred. And learning to answer it honestly is a huge part of religious trauma recovery and faith deconstruction.
What I Hear So Often in Therapy
In my work as a therapist supporting survivors of religious trauma, I’ve noticed a familiar pattern:
Client: explains a painful experience in detail
Me: “That sounds really difficult. How has that affected you?”
Client: immediately begins explaining how it impacted everyone else
When I gently invite them back to their own perspective—“What about you? What did that feel like?”—there’s often a pause. Sometimes even discomfort. Because focusing on themselves feels unfamiliar, or even wrong.
This isn’t by accident. Many of us were taught in church that our feelings should come last. That it’s sinful, selfish, or prideful to center ourselves.
But here’s the truth: you are the protagonist of your own life.
Your needs and emotions are not just valid—they’re essential for healing.
Why We Learn to Push Ourselves Out of the Story
Religious systems often train people to view themselves as background characters in their own lives. Here are some of the ways this shows up:
Harmful messages about selfishness and selflessness
Maybe you’ve heard these before:
“Die to self.”
“Be full of Christ and empty of yourself.”
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Verses and teachings like these are often used to convince people that their desires, needs, and feelings are inherently bad. Serving others is “good,” while paying attention to yourself is “selfish.”
And while caring for others can be meaningful, it should never mean that your own needs are erased. When you’re always told to put yourself last, you risk losing touch with who you are—and what you need to feel whole.
It also leaves no room for nuance. There’s a difference between being generous and being erased. Between practicing compassion and abandoning yourself. Many religious environments blurred that line, leaving people with no model for what healthy balance actually looks like.
Distrust of personal experience
Many high-control religions encourage you to distrust your inner world.
Maybe you felt exhausted by endless service but were told to push harder:
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
“Do not grow weary in doing good.”
Instead of honoring your limits, you were taught to override them. Over time, you might have learned to silence the very cues your body and emotions were giving you—signals about safety, capacity, and need.
The more you dismiss your own experience, the harder it becomes to trust yourself at all. You might second-guess your instincts, feel disconnected from your body, or wonder if what you feel is even “real.” Re-centering yourself in your story means beginning to believe your inner signals again.
Strict gender roles
In complementarian systems, men are expected to lead, and women to serve. This leaves little room for individuality, freedom, or nuance.
If you’re a woman who wanted to pursue a career, delay marriage, or choose not to have children, your own desires often had to be suppressed to maintain belonging. And for men, strict roles could also be stifling—shutting down emotional expression, vulnerability, or paths outside of authority.
The result is the same: your authentic self is pushed to the background so the system can function.
Homophobia and exclusion of LGBTQ+ identities
For those who are queer, trans, or otherwise outside cisheteronormative expectations, staying true to yourself often meant risking everything: community, family, belonging, even safety.
The choice became devastatingly binary: abandon yourself, or abandon the community. Either way, you were forced out of the center of your own life.
This leaves deep wounds—because belonging should never have required self-betrayal.
Why It’s So Hard to Recenter Yourself
If you’ve been conditioned to believe your needs don’t matter, it can feel deeply uncomfortable to suddenly claim them. You might feel guilt. You might even hear an inner voice telling you that you’re being prideful or selfish.
And yet—ignoring your needs doesn’t make them disappear. It just buries them until they leak out as resentment, exhaustion, depression, or disconnection.
To move forward in your religious trauma recovery, you need to give yourself permission to step back into your own life.
What It Looks Like to Center Yourself in Your Story
Centering yourself doesn’t mean ignoring others or becoming careless about relationships. It means bringing your voice, your perspective, and your needs into the narrative.
Here are some gentle starting points:
Notice your own feelings first. When something painful happens, pause and ask: How did this affect me? What do I feel right now?
Validate your experience. Even if others had it “worse” or “different,” your pain is still real.
Challenge old messages. When you hear the voice that says you’re selfish, remind yourself: My needs matter too.
Practice saying no. Every time you decline something that doesn’t serve you, you strengthen your sense of self.
Revisit your preferences. Ask yourself what foods, music, routines, or hobbies actually light you up—not the ones you were told were “appropriate,” but the ones you truly enjoy.
Invite safe support. Healing doesn’t mean doing it alone. Sometimes centering yourself means letting someone else hold space for you, so you can practice taking up room again.
Think of it this way: centering yourself is not about pushing others out of the story. It’s about finally stepping onto the stage of your own life.
Reclaiming Your Story
If you are in the midst of religious trauma recovery or faith deconstruction, remember this:
You are not a supporting character. You are the main character of your own life.
Your story is yours to tell. Your needs matter. Your voice matters. Your healing matters.
So ask yourself:
How have you been affected by harmful religion?
What emotions surface for you when you look back?
What do you want and need as you rebuild your life?
These questions might feel scary at first. But with practice, they become liberating.
Because when you center yourself, you begin to live as though your life belongs to you again.
If you’re ready to begin—or continue—your journey of healing from religious trauma, I’d love to support you. I offer therapy for survivors of spiritual abuse, high-control religion, and purity culture in California, Florida, and Missouri.
Click the button below to request a free consultation.