Religious Trauma Trigger....Prayer

The Goddess Diaries - March 19, 2026

Today I was prayed for and it unexpectedly weirded me out. I had to use my “Phone a Friend” card and talk about it with someone who would understand.

A little background….

I grew up in a very religious environment and when I reached the age of 18 or so and went to college and had to take a Religion class my first semester. Coming from a strong church background, I thought it would be like a Bible study or something but on the first day the professor blew my mind when he blatantly suggested that the Bible was not, in fact, the “word of God” through the authors such as the apostles. He encouraged us to contemplate other concepts I couldn’t even fathom and I was so disturbed by it I came home and told my dad I wanted to drop the class and why. He understood and was equally as disturbed and I dropped the class.

As the semester went on and I made friends from all walks of life and from around the world. My friends were Catholics, Muslim, Hindu and seemed pretty “normal” to me. We talked about their culture and traditions and beliefs and I found it all very interesting. I began to think for my Self and there were some things about the church that I didn’t feel aligned with. When I went away to finish my Equine Management degree in Kentucky (yes, I’ve been a horse crazy girl my entire life!), I once again had to fulfill my Religion class requirement, but by this time….I was hungry! I loved reading about Greek myths and the Roman gods and the ancient rituals for dreaming and healing and offerings. I still had one or two toes in the church, but that soon changed.

I got married, had to change churches and didn’t like it. I didn’t like the teachings or the guilt trips, and I didn’t want to go to church anymore which was very hard for my very religious husband to understand. Eventually we divorced and I was spiritually “lost”.

After my daughter reached kindergarten, I met a mother of one of her friends who taught meditation classes and did readings. I had also started watching John Edward on TV who gave messages from deceased loved ones. I had never explored this before and was excited to visit the New Age store and attend some classes. Things really changed for me, some of it good and some of it wasn’t but I couldn’t NOT be a spiritual person. It fed something I was missing inside.

The Crash….

Years ago, when the crash in the economy happened, I had to get a “real job” to make ends meet as our family company went down. I remember distinctly deciding to shut off my intuition and be a “normal” human since I was going to be in this “real world”. I felt something physically inside of me crack and I became severely depressed and stopped eating. I think it was my soul. There were other factors happening, too, which I don’t want to discount their part in it all but ultimately inside I was in a very deep, dark place. It was a very tough time for me and all my family as I was so empty inside. Their love for me was the medicine I needed and I fed on that while I slowly started to eat more. The mind is a curious thing and it took me a few years to finally overcome my eating disorder.

The Prayer that shook me….

Over the years, my extended religious family has continued to pray for me and it was disturbing to me that they thought I was possessed rather than depressed with a serious eating disorder. Little did they understand that I was UN-possessed and empty of my spirituality and disconnected from my soul and my self love. They prayed for the demon to come out of me. After I had healed and was better, whenever I would visit my grandma she would always want to pray with me before I left to have a safe trip home. It used to really bother me but then I realized that this was her way of showing love because it was literally all she knew and I listened to the words of her prayer, her voice, and felt her love. It became a sweet hug to be prayed for by my grandma.

One of my jobs that is super sporadic, is substitute teaching at the local high school. One day, I gave the kids about 10 minutes of free time and they wanted to do a “spell” in which they chanted and lifted someone up with their fingers. I wasn’t too sure what to do with that exactly, but felt that they were going to experiment with this sort of thing anyway and it was probably better to do it when there was an adult around. So as they giggled nonstop and got in place, I simply asked them to ask for protection before doing something like this to keep negative spirits and energy away. My own daughter when she was around 8 years old played a similar game with her friends, and they stated if they wanted “bullet holes” or “scratches”….and she ended up with physical scratches all over her back so I wanted these older kids to keep that sort of thing in mind. I really wasn’t sure if anything would actually happen as they were laughing so much, but you never know.

Nothing happened of course, but then they started to ask me some questions about some of my “weird” experiences so I decided to answer them. One girl asked if I believed in God and what I thought happened when we died. I had a tinge of hesitation but again decided to be open and share my thoughts. The area here is pretty church-heavy but more than half the students were asking about spells and ghosts so I kept the conversation. A big part of why I like substitute teaching is that I have the opportunity to be with kids to make them feel like they are seen and heard and I especially enjoy the high school kids.

Once class was over, the girl who asked if I believed in God came to me and started to get very emotional when she shared that she thought I was a very nice and kind person but that she was worried about me and wanted me to know that Jesus died for my sins and that he loved me very much. I totally knew exactly where she was coming from, as I was her at that age and so when she asked if it would be all right if she prayed with me I said yes. I made sure to tell her that I appreciated her, understood that she was a very compassionate young lady, and acknowledged the courage it took to stay back to talk with me and ask pray with me.

Like the times my grandma prayed for me, I listened to her voice and her words and felt her care and concern that were genuine for my soul’s safety and to have many blessings in my life. I thanked her for her prayer and encouraged her to always follow her heart and do what she felt was right. She seemed relieved that I didn’t scold her and wished me a wonderful weekend.

Phone-a-friend….

When I left the classroom and got to my car, suddenly I was very shook up. I was questioning whether I should have shared my thoughts with the class and if allowing them to try to levitate their friend was such a good idea. My heart was pounding, my brain felt like it was going to explode, and her prayer kept ringing in my ears. I was sweating and having such anxiety over the experience, which really surprised me because I was very calm through the whole thing! I realized it was a trauma response to my religious upbringing that I was “sin” and that I wasn’t “worthy” without Jesus. I phoned a friend who grew up in a similar environment to talk about it. That was so helpful and slowly I began to feel calmer and okay with my Self. We talked about how weird that feeling is and how it can sometimes come out of nowhere but how very real it is….and how many spiritual people suffer from it with no verbiage for it.

We talked about prayer in general and how we pray to our goddesses for our friends and family who are sick or traveling but also how the words may be the same, that it comes across differently through the lens of Christianity. Even now, writing this out is causing me to feel uneasy inside!

Final thoughts….

It’s my hope that by sharing this experience that if you’ve come from a religious background and are spiritually recovering, that you know you’re not alone, that you know you’re on the right path for you, that those in your life who pray for you are showing you love in the only way they know how, to try to hear their love and feel their love, and appreciate them for following THEIR path, just as you’re following yours.

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve experienced religious trauma in the comments below.