Religious trauma and executive dysfunction go hand in hand more often than you might think. Executive dysfunction is commonly associated with ADHD and autism, but it shows up in all kinds of other places too. It plays a role in nearly every mental illness.* There are also certain situations where nearly everyone will struggle with executive dysfunction, even if they’re totally neurotypical and totally psychologically healthy. Examples include isolation, ambiguous loss, moral injury, indirect aggression (aggression where the aggressor retains plausible deniability), apparently overwhelming odds, or a lack of clarity about possible goals and rewards. Since most of these situations commonly accompany religious trauma, it’s extremely likely that if you’ve experienced religious trauma, at some point you’ve experienced some executive dysfunction too.
What is Executive Function?
Executive function is our ability to set goals–large or small–and then complete them. There are a number of skills and abilities that contribute to executive function, and there’s no consensus among professionals about exactly how many of these “executive skills” there are. However, most people who struggle to set and complete goals find it helpful the first time they see a breakdown of what executive skills are and how to build them up(I like the one in Smart but Scattered). Or, a list of tools or strategies for supporting yourself around executive skills you struggle with.
But if executive dysfunction could be solved by handing out a list of strategies, it wouldn’t be the stubborn and often overwhelming challenge it is for so many people. One problem is that it takes some executive function to build some executive function. But there’s another problem too–one so significant I’m always surprised at how little it’s addressed in discussions on the topic.
The link that’s usually missed: executive function (like religious trauma) is a social phenomena.
When they stop to think about it, most people have a strong intuitive understanding of the social nature of executive function. We know that it’s much easier to do what the people around us are doing, and we know that it’s much easier to complete tasks for other people than to complete them for ourselves. But very rarely do executive function specialists take a clear look at the mechanisms through which our connections to one another mediate our executive function: meaning, a sense of being witnessed, and a sense of autonomy. Each of these mechanisms is frequently touched on by religious trauma.
Purpose and meaning:
When Angela Duckworth completed her MacArthur-award winning research on grit, 100% of the highest achievers she studied referred to a service-oriented purpose that motivated them to continue their work. They were able to overcome setback after setback because they believed that the work they were doing would make a positive difference in the lives of other people. Most of us have, at some point, experienced the energy and satisfaction that service to others can give us. Religious trauma can disrupt this by creating disorientation around purpose and meaning. Some survivors who previously poured their efforts into causes that they now see as harmful experience moral injury; as a facet of moral injury, they may distrust their own ability to accurately judge what might contribute positively to the lives of others. Other survivors feel alienated from their own moral instincts more generally; they may associate ideas like generosity, service, or accountability so strongly with the religious environments that harmed them that they find themselves avoiding the concepts entirely, even when those concepts are deeply important to them. In turn, this creates ambivalence about activities that might otherwise be deeply meaningful, motivating, and generative.
Emotional regulation through witness and support:
One of the core mechanisms for healthy relating is called “attunement.” When attunement is successfully carried out early in life, a caregiver attends to a child’s subtle behavioral cues about what they need and what they are experiencing. This process lays the foundation for self-awareness and self-regulation later in life–and we never stop needing, to some degree, a similar process of witness.
From infancy through old age, if some important part of us is never reflected and cared for by the people around us, we will feel isolated and possibly ashamed. That is–we will come to feel that the part of us that never receives connection is not worthy of connection, or that this part of us drives the possibility of connection away.
The distress that typically comes with isolation** and shame then shows up as procrastination, numbing behaviors, or moments of intense emotional dysregulation. For example: I might learn that the parts of me that have “sin thoughts” about drinking alcohol or having sex should be cast out and abandoned. But I might have more and more of these thoughts when I’m attempting to learn a new skill or start work each day on a difficult project–because those are inherently emotionally challenging endeavors, and a lot of people find sex and drinking to be soothing. If I had loved ones who I could talk to authentically about what I was experiencing, who could normalize and relate to the parts of me that were having all these thoughts about sex and alcohol–or even who could normalize and relate to how hard it is to learn new things and start work on a daunting project every day–I might be able to feel witnessed and supported and able to go about pursuing my goals freely. However, many people in high demand religious environments do not receive that kind of support, and their un-witnessed parts can become a huge burden of distress and distraction.
Exercising autonomy at a comfortable level:
The last important mechanism through which connection moderates executive function is our sense of autonomy. An activity that feels fun and worthwhile can instantly become unappetizing when we feel we are being ordered to do it–it feels like we are not being allowed to act autonomously.
Depending on our feelings about fitting in, the same activity may become unappealing the minute we are told that it’s weird for a person of our demographic to do that thing–it may suddenly feel like that activity demands too much autonomy of us, pulling us too far away from our social norms. Our relationship to autonomy is mediated by a lot of things, including neurotype–and there’s a lot of variation in how people experience these autonomy-related cues.
Religious trauma can sometimes injure a person’s relationship to their autonomy, or change the level of autonomy that must be associated with an activity for it to be comfortable for them to participate. For instance, recovering from a high demand religious environment can create heightened sensitivity to demands–amplifying that sensation of discomfort, when something seems to be a demand. In extreme cases, this could manifest as trouble in any relationship with authority across all domains of life–trouble holding down a job, calmly paying a parking fine, or collaborating with a partner who seems to be requiring similar things to what authority figures in the past required.
Alternately, religious trauma can leave us adrift, without any sense who “people like us” are and what they might be likely to do–and therefore, without the boost that people with a greater sense of belonging (especially those with a sense that they belong to groups with high levels of executive function) receive from this knowledge. The social aspects of executive function are far from the only ways it can be impacted by religious trauma.
Religious trauma is often a trauma that encompasses not just your relationship to theology, but also to community, meaning, heritage, service, and the broader culture in which you live. Religion can impact every area of life, and a harmful experience with religion can distort our relationship to any aspect of human behavior. What I’ve listed here can hardly scratch the surface. However, I hope the examples I’ve given here have started to elucidate how strongly religious trauma can impact a person’s ability to pursue and achieve their goals.
If all this is resonating for you a little too hard, know that there is help out there. Religious trauma often leaves people in a kind of frozen grief–and simply having a skilled and knowledgeable person to talk to about what you are experiencing (like the practitioners at Divergent Path Wellness!) can start to cut through the ice and help you begin to move towards healing.
Author's notes:
*I definitely experience my own mental illness as an illness, and lean towards the framing that the ableist thing is other people's discomfort with my chronic illness (physical and otherwise). That said, I know that people who are more rooted in western/colonial medical perspectives of illness than I am often experience that framing as suggesting that the "illness" is something wrong with an individual, rather than being an expression of a larger system that is out of balance. And that's not what I intend to imply at all.
**Isolation is not the same thing as alone time. Alone time is something you move towards to restore yourself because it feels good; isolation is something you can either a) self-impose when you aren’t able to connect with others in a way that feels authentic and good to you, or b) be subjected to involuntarily.
Thomas Harper LMSW
Supervisee in social work
Providing individual therapy in Virginia
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