Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Kellen Swift-Godzisz, 35, said he doesn’t go on dates, struggles with erectile dysfunction and is hesitant to trust people. For more than 20 years, he’s experienced intense bouts of anxiety and depression that have had a “major hold on his life.”
“Imagine being told by everyone you trusted that you’re going to hell because you like men,” Swift-Godzisz, a marketing project manager living in Chicago, told NBC News.
At just 11 years old, Swift-Godzisz recalled, he would sit in his bedroom every night praying or writing letters that said, “Please God, remove my affliction of same-sex attraction,” and would then store each letter in an overflowing shoebox in his closet.
No fucking shit. Maybe it’s just the queerness talking but I assumed this was common knowledge. And it’s clearly intentional. Religious folks don’t protest pride to present an informed alternative, they do it because some of us will have trauma responses when hearing what they say and trauma responses make for vulnerable people, and Christianity preys on vulnerable people.
It’s the same as how Christians give us the trauma that drives us to alcohol abuse then use treatment for that as a recruitment ground. Whether it’s actually intentional or not they drive us to the exact positions that they recruit from.