Spiritual Healing After Trauma Without Spiritual Bypassing: A Therapist’s Guide for Driven Women

SPIRITUAL HEALING • June 11, 2026

Priya is sitting cross-legged on a gray wool cushion in a meditation hall that smells faintly of cedar, incense, and rain-soaked wool coats. It’s the fourth morning of a silent retreat. The bell has rung. Everyone around her looks serene in the blue half-light before breakfast.

Priya is a 45-year-old partner at a litigation firm. In court, she can hold a hostile room with a single sentence. Her calendar is a machine. Her face rarely gives anything away. But on this cushion, something strange is happening. The retreat teacher has called it spaciousness. Priya has been calling it bliss. Her body, though, is telling a different story. Her hands have gone cold. Her legs feel far away. Her breath is barely there. When she opens her eyes, the room looks flat, as if someone has placed glass between her and the world.

A thought arrives with the force of a gavel: This isn’t peace. This is leaving.

That’s the difficult, necessary edge of spiritual healing after trauma. Spiritual practice can become a place where the soul finally has room to breathe. It can also become a beautifully furnished exit door from the body, grief, rage, memory, and relational truth. In my work with clients, I see this most often in driven and driven women who have spent decades being praised for their capacity to transcend ordinary needs. They can override hunger, heartbreak, exhaustion, fear, and loneliness. So when a spiritual tradition rewards detachment, equanimity, surrender, or non-reactivity, it can feel like home before it’s actually safe.

This guide is about how to tell the difference. It’s not an argument against meditation, prayer, ritual, devotion, plant medicine, contemplative study, or mystical experience. It’s an argument for discernment. Trauma healing asks us to become honest about what’s happening in the nervous system, not dazzled by what sounds enlightened. Spiritual maturity doesn’t require you to abandon the body. It asks you to come home to it with enough compassion that the body no longer has to hide.

In short: Spiritual healing after trauma integrates contemplative practice with somatic and emotional processing rather than using spirituality to bypass the grief, anger, and nervous-system work that trauma recovery requires.

What Is Spiritual Healing After Trauma?

Trauma does not only affect symptoms. It affects worldviews. It can change what your body expects from other people, what your mind believes about the future, what your conscience does with guilt, and what your heart can tolerate receiving. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes trauma as an event that overwhelms ordinary systems of care, connection, and meaning.[^1] Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has similarly emphasized that traumatic stress lives not only in explicit memory but in the body’s implicit patterns of alarm, collapse, and avoidance.[^2]

Spiritual healing enters here because trauma often breaks something larger than a mood state. A woman may still believe intellectually that life is meaningful while her body is living in exile from that meaning. She may still attend services, sit on a meditation cushion, repeat affirmations, chant, pray, hike at sunrise, or read mystical poetry, while some younger part of her remains convinced that love is dangerous and safety is temporary.

That’s why spiritual healing after trauma needs a clinical frame. Without one, spiritual language can be used to rush past pain. With one, spiritual practice can become a container for slowly digesting what the psyche and body could not digest at the time.

The related clinical term to know is spiritual bypassing. John Welwood, PhD, a psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher who introduced the term in the 1980s, used it to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid unresolved emotional wounds, developmental needs, and psychological work.[^3] Mariana Caplan, PhD, psychotherapist and author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, later developed a practical language for discernment in spiritual life: the capacity to respect spiritual openings while remaining honest about projection, dependency, denial, and power.[^4]

The distinction matters because spiritual bypassing often looks polished from the outside. It doesn’t always look like denial. In driven and driven women, it can look like calmness, insight, non-attachment, forgiveness, “expanded consciousness,” or the ability to speak beautifully about compassion while having no access to anger.

| Spiritual integration | Spiritual bypassing | |, |, | | Helps you feel more present in the body | Helps you leave the body more elegantly | | Makes room for grief, anger, fear, longing, and relief | Labels difficult emotion as low vibration, ego, attachment, or resistance | | Supports boundaries and honest repair | Pressures premature forgiveness or reconciliation | | Deepens relational responsibility | Hides behind abstraction, universality, or cosmic explanations | | Increases choice and flexibility | Narrows your options while calling it surrender | | Makes you kinder without making you smaller | Makes you compliant and calls it peace |

Spiritual healing is not the opposite of therapy. For many clients, the two become most powerful when they’re allowed to inform each other. Therapy can help a client notice when a “spiritual” state is actually dissociation. Spiritual practice can help a client remember that she is more than a diagnostic label, more than a survival pattern, more than what happened to her. The art is learning when a practice is helping the nervous system metabolize pain and when it’s helping the survival system disappear.

The Neurobiology: Why the Body Decides Whether a Practice Is Healing

Trauma-sensitive spiritual work begins with one clinical humility: the body gets a vote.

Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and originator of Polyvagal Theory, has shown that the autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger beneath conscious awareness.[^5] Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, calls this work “the science of safety,” explaining that trauma can replace patterns of connection with patterns of protection.[^6] In plain language, your body may decide that a quiet room, closed eyes, a teacher’s authority, a group ritual, a devotional song, or a guided visualization is unsafe long before your adult mind can explain why.

This is one reason spiritual practices can produce such different outcomes in different people. A loving-kindness meditation may soften one person and flood another with shame. A body scan may help one client reclaim sensation and send another into a freeze response. A silent retreat may nourish a person with sufficient internal stability and overwhelm a person whose nervous system has learned that silence means danger.

Allan Schore, PhD, UCLA-affiliated developmental neuropsychologist and author of The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, emphasizes the role of right-brain, body-based, relational affect regulation in early trauma.[^7] Louis Cozolino, PhD, Pepperdine University professor and author of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, likewise links healing with the social brain, neural integration, and the capacity to internalize regulating relationships.[^8] These frames matter because many spiritual settings unintentionally assume that the individual nervous system can regulate itself through technique. Trauma treatment tells a more relational story: regulation is learned in bodies, between bodies, across time.

That doesn’t mean a spiritual practice must be clinical to be safe. It means spiritual practice becomes safer when it respects arousal, pacing, consent, relational context, and the survivor’s actual window of tolerance. David Treleaven, PhD, trauma professional and author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, argues that mindfulness is safer and more effective when paired with an understanding of trauma.[^9] Willoughby Britton, PhD, Brown University clinical neuroscientist and founder of Cheetah House, has documented meditation-related challenges, including trauma-linked flashbacks and dissociation, through the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research program.[^10]

This research does not cancel the value of meditation. It matures the conversation. If a client becomes flooded, numb, unreal, panicked, grandiose, or ashamed during practice, the problem is not that she failed spiritually. The problem may be that the practice exceeded her nervous system’s current capacity.

The same principle applies beyond meditation. Prayer, chant, breathwork, fasting, psychedelics, ecstatic dance, confession, worship, yoga, ritual, and teacher-student intimacy all affect arousal. Some practices upregulate. Some downregulate. Some invite surrender. Some intensify suggestibility. Some open implicit memory. None of this is inherently wrong. But for a trauma survivor, a powerful state is not the same thing as a healing state.

The nervous system tends to ask four questions:

| Nervous-system question | What this means clinically | What this means spiritually | |, |, |, | | Am I safe enough to stay present? | The practice remains inside the window of tolerance. | Presence feels grounded, not forced. | | Do I have choice? | The client can stop, modify, open her eyes, move, speak, or leave. | Consent is treated as sacred. | | Is there relational repair if something goes wrong? | The teacher, therapist, or group can respond without shaming. | Community becomes trustworthy through responsiveness. | | Does this practice increase integration over time? | The client gains access to emotion, sensation, boundaries, and agency. | Spiritual life becomes more embodied and honest. |

The body decides whether a practice is integrating or fragmenting. This is not an insult to the soul. It’s respect for the organism through which the soul has to live.

How Spiritual Bypassing Shows Up in Driven and driven women

Sarah is a 39-year-old founder in Palo Alto, and it’s 6:12 a.m. when she unrolls her yoga mat beside the glass doors overlooking her backyard. Her company is preparing for a Series B raise. Her mother has left three voicemails. Her marriage has been polite and airless for months. Sarah lights a candle, opens her meditation app, and chooses the track on surrender. Twenty minutes later, she feels smooth and distant, like a lake with no wind. By 8:00, she’s in a pitch meeting, smiling with precision. No one knows that she hasn’t cried in two years. She tells herself she’s evolved past anger. Her body tells the truth by clenching her jaw until it aches.

What I see consistently in my consulting room is that spiritual bypassing rarely begins as manipulation. It often begins as relief. A driven woman discovers a practice that gives her access to calm after years of internal noise. She learns language for compassion, spaciousness, non-attachment, forgiveness, and purpose. She may finally find a community that values depth instead of productivity. Those are not small gifts.

But the same practice can become part of the old survival architecture if it rewards the same adaptations trauma already required. If a woman survived by staying quiet, spiritual teachings about silence may deepen her disappearance. If she survived by reading authority figures perfectly, devotion to a teacher may become repetition rather than liberation. If she survived by suppressing rage, teachings about compassion may become a velvet-lined prison.

Common signs of spiritual bypassing in driven and driven women include the following:

| Pattern | How it sounds | What may be underneath | |, |, |, | | Premature forgiveness | “I don’t want to stay in resentment.” | Fear of anger, conflict, or relational loss | | Dissociation labeled as peace | “I feel above it all now.” | Freeze, collapse, derealization, or depersonalization | | Intellectualized non-attachment | “I know everyone is doing their best.” | Avoidance of grief, betrayal, and accountability | | Devotional over-functioning | “My teacher knows what I need.” | Transferential longing for a safe parent | | Somatic override | “My body is dense; my consciousness is clear.” | Shame about needs, hunger, sexuality, fatigue, or pain | | Spiritualized productivity | “My morning practice keeps me optimized.” | The nervous system has made spirituality another performance metric |

Tara Brach, PhD, psychologist, meditation teacher, and author of Radical Acceptance, names the “trance of unworthiness” as a deep form of suffering in which a person experiences life through the lens of personal insufficiency.[^11] For many clients, spiritual practice initially helps soften that trance. But when spiritual practice becomes another way to become the perfected self, calmer, thinner, cleaner, more forgiving, less needy, less angry, it can reinforce the very shame it meant to heal.

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, therapist, somatic abolitionist, and author of My Grandmother’s Hands, insists that trauma and repair live in bodies and in collective systems, not only in ideas.[^12] This is crucial for driven women whose social location rewards disembodiment. Tech culture, medicine, law, finance, academia, and entrepreneurship all teach certain women to treat the body as an accessory to output. Wellness culture can intensify this by presenting the regulated body as a personal brand.

In practice, the question is not “Is this spiritual?” The better question is: Does this practice help you become more truthful, more embodied, more relationally accountable, and more free to choose?

If the answer is yes, it may be part of healing. If the answer is no, the practice may still be beautiful, but it is not yet integrated.

When Transcendence Is Real, and When It’s Dissociation

A client once asked me, “How do I know whether I touched something sacred or checked out?” It’s one of the most important questions in this whole terrain.

Transcendence and dissociation can both involve spaciousness, distance from ordinary identity, altered time, reduced pain, and a sense that the everyday self has loosened. But clinically, they move in different directions over time. Transcendence tends to return you to life with more tenderness, ethical clarity, and presence. Dissociation tends to return you with more fog, fragmentation, shame, or avoidance.

Kathy Steele, MN, CS, Suzette Boon, PhD, and Onno van der Hart, PhD, authors of Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation, emphasize that dissociation treatment requires cognitive, emotional, somatic, and relational work; words alone are often insufficient for highly traumatized clients.[^13] That frame helps us understand why a purely spiritual explanation can be inadequate. If a practice repeatedly makes a client feel unreal, disembodied, or unable to function, it needs clinical attention, not spiritual flattery.

| After a practice, you notice… | More likely integration | More likely dissociation | |, |, |, | | Body sensation | More contact with breath, feet, warmth, tears, appetite, fatigue | Numbness, floating, coldness, losing time, muted senses | | Emotion | Wider range with more tolerance | Emotional absence followed by sudden flooding | | Relationships | More capacity for honest contact and boundaries | More withdrawal, compliance, or idealization | | Memory | More coherent narrative over time | More gaps, confusion, or intrusive fragments | | Agency | More choice about pace, contact, and action | Feeling compelled, spellbound, or unable to stop | | Ethics | More humility and repair | Grandiosity, specialness, or exemption from accountability |

Camille is a 42-year-old product executive in Seattle, and the retreat center hallway is dark except for a thin yellow line under the teacher’s door. She has been told that the terror rising in her chest is “ego death.” She wants to believe that. Camille has built an entire career on being the woman who can endure pressure without flinching. But tonight, she’s sitting on the carpet outside the bathroom with her sweater pulled over her knees, trying to remember the name of her dog. The fear doesn’t feel expansive. It feels young. It has the metallic taste of the closet where she hid when her father drank. In the morning, everyone calls her experience a breakthrough. Her body calls it too much.

A trauma-informed spiritual path does not mock transcendence. It protects it from misuse. There are moments when a person genuinely experiences spacious awareness, divine love, ancestral presence, nondual insight, grace, awe, forgiveness, or communion with something larger than the self. The clinical task is not to reduce every sacred experience to a symptom. The clinical task is to ask whether the experience helps the person become more whole.

A spiritual experience can be profound and still need integration. It can be meaningful and still dysregulating. It can be real and still not safe to repeat at the same intensity. Trauma healing does not require cynicism toward mystery. It requires enough groundedness that mystery doesn’t become another place to abandon yourself.

Both/And: There Is Something Beyond Your Trauma AND Spiritual Practice Cannot Skip the Body

There is something beyond your trauma. Your history is not the whole of you. Your symptoms are not your soul. Your nervous-system adaptations are not your identity. There may be moments, in prayer, therapy, nature, music, community, ritual, silence, art, or grief, when you feel the unmistakable truth that life is wider than what happened to you.

And spiritual practice cannot skip the body.

Both are true.

If you only hold the first truth, you risk bypassing. You may speak beautifully about consciousness while your body is still braced for impact. You may forgive people who have not repented. You may submit to teachers who confuse your vulnerability with consent. You may call your shutdown “peace” because the alternative would require feeling rage, terror, or grief.

If you only hold the second truth, you risk reducing the human person to physiology. You may become so careful about triggers that you lose contact with longing, awe, devotion, and meaning. You may treat every spiritual impulse as avoidance. You may forget that trauma recovery is not merely symptom reduction; it is also the restoration of a life worth inhabiting.

In my work with clients, healing tends to become more durable when these truths begin to cooperate. The spiritual frame says, “You are more than your wound.” The somatic frame says, “Yes, and the wound lives somewhere. Let’s not abandon that place.”

This is where practices such as trauma-sensitive mindfulness, somatic psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems-informed reflection, contemplative prayer, gentle yoga, nature-based ritual, and carefully chosen community can work together. Richard Schwartz, PhD, founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy and author of No Bad Parts, offers a language of parts that can help clients relate to protectors, exiles, and managers without shaming them.[^14] Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, and Janina Fisher, PhD, trauma specialist and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, similarly emphasize body-based and parts-aware approaches to traumatic stress.[^15]

The point is not to assemble a perfect healing menu. The point is to stop forcing the spiritual and clinical worlds to compete. A client may need EMDR, somatic therapy, medication, and a grief ritual. She may need a boundary conversation and a prayer practice. She may need to stop attending a community for a while and spend Sunday mornings by the ocean learning that God, meaning, or goodness did not live only in the room where she was harmed.

The Systemic Lens: Why Wellness Culture Has Made Spiritual Bypassing the New Premium Form of Avoidance

Spiritual bypassing does not happen only because individuals are afraid of feeling. It is also incentivized by culture.

For driven and driven women, wellness culture often packages transcendence as an elite productivity tool. Meditation becomes a way to handle more stress, not a way to question why the stress is inhuman. Breathwork becomes a way to tolerate workplaces that punish softness. Gratitude becomes a way to suppress anger about inequity. Forgiveness becomes a way to preserve family systems that never learned repair. Nervous-system regulation becomes a private responsibility rather than a shared ethical obligation.

That is not healing. It is adaptation to harm with better lighting.

Sandra Bloom, MD, psychiatrist and author of Creating Sanctuary, frames trauma as something that can shape entire systems, not only individual psyches.[^16] Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, child psychiatrist and coauthor of Born for Love and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, likewise emphasizes that human stress systems are built in relational and social environments.[^17] If trauma is relational and systemic, then healing cannot be reduced to individual self-management.

This matters in Silicon Valley boardrooms, hospital corridors, law firms, venture-backed startups, academic departments, and families organized around performance. A woman may be told to meditate so she can keep functioning inside a system that needs moral examination. She may be praised for being calm because her anger would threaten the arrangement. She may be encouraged to “raise her vibration” when what she needs is a lawyer, a medical leave, a boundary, a different supervisor, a trauma-trained therapist, or collective action.

Wellness culture can make bypassing look aspirational. The aesthetic is clean. The language is elevated. The body is controlled. The grief is hidden. The rage is alchemized before it ever has a witness. The woman remains productive.

A trauma-informed systemic lens asks different questions:

| Wellness-bypassing question | Trauma-informed systemic question | |, |, | | How can I regulate enough to keep going? | What am I regulating in order to tolerate, and should I be tolerating it? | | How can I forgive faster? | Has there been accountability, repair, and safety? | | How can I detach from the outcome? | Do I have needs, limits, and legitimate stakes here? | | How can I stop being triggered? | What does this trigger reveal about past harm and present conditions? | | How can I become more peaceful? | What truth would my anger tell if I let it speak responsibly? |

Spiritual practice becomes more honest when it refuses to collude with systems that benefit from women’s self-abandonment. The goal is not to become endlessly serene. The goal is to become more capable of love, truth, boundary, grief, pleasure, repair, and participation in the world.

How to Heal: A Trauma-Informed Path for Spiritual Integration

A path forward begins with one shift: stop asking whether a practice is spiritual enough and begin asking whether it is integrating.

1. Learn your bypassing profile

Most people have a favorite exit. Some leave through thought. Some through service. Some through achievement. Some through caretaking. Some through mystical language. Some through erotic intensity. Some through certainty. Some through collapse.

The goal is not to shame the exit. The goal is to recognize it with enough tenderness that you can choose differently.

Ask yourself:

| Question | What to listen for | |, |, | | What emotion do I spiritualize most often? | Anger, envy, grief, fear, desire, disappointment, disgust | | Which teachings make me smaller? | Teachings that discourage boundaries, questions, embodiment, or dissent | | When do I feel “peaceful” but less alive? | Numbness can masquerade as equanimity | | Who benefits from my forgiveness? | True forgiveness does not erase accountability | | What does my body do around this teacher or group? | Tight throat, collapsed chest, fawning, dread, blankness, or compulsive approval matter |

If this inquiry brings up shame, move more slowly. Shame is often the guard at the door of the wound. Beverly Engel, LMFT, author of It Wasn’t Your Fault, and Janina Fisher, PhD, both write about the importance of addressing shame as a trauma legacy rather than a character flaw.[^18]

2. Choose practices that widen the window, not practices that force intensity

For trauma survivors, more intensity is not automatically more healing. This is especially important for women who are used to overperforming. If a teacher praises endurance, ego death, catharsis, fasting, heroic silence, or pushing past resistance, consider that a clinical yellow light.

Trauma-sensitive spiritual practice often includes options: eyes open or closed, movement or stillness, silence or speaking, group or individual practice, internal attention or external orientation. Treleaven’s five principles include staying within the window of tolerance, shifting attention to support stability, keeping the body in mind, practicing in relationship, and understanding social context.[^9]

A safer practice may look less dramatic. It may be five minutes of prayer with eyes open. It may be walking meditation while feeling your feet. It may be chanting with a trusted community and leaving before you’re overwhelmed. It may be lighting a candle and naming one honest feeling. It may be noticing a tree through the window when internal awareness becomes too much.

3. Work with the body as sacred, not inferior

Many trauma survivors learned to treat the body as dangerous, inconvenient, shameful, or contaminated. Some religious systems intensify this. Some wellness systems disguise the same contempt in cleaner language.

Somatic-spiritual integration begins when the body is no longer treated as the obstacle to awakening. The body is where consent happens. The body is where grief moves. The body is where pleasure returns. The body is where the nervous system learns that the present is different from the past.

Peter Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, describes trauma as thwarted defensive energy that needs renegotiation through the body.[^19] Babette Rothschild, MSW, author of The Body Remembers, similarly emphasizes that trauma treatment must respect bodily arousal and stabilization.[^20] These frameworks help spiritual practice become more embodied and less dissociative.

4. Bring relational discernment to teachers, communities, and retreats

A trauma-informed spiritual teacher does not need to be a therapist. But they do need humility, boundaries, referral awareness, and respect for consent. They should be able to say, “This may be too much,” “You can stop,” “Please consult a trauma-trained clinician,” and “Your body’s no matters.”

Be cautious with any teacher or community that treats doubt as ego, questions as resistance, boundaries as fear, trauma symptoms as spiritual failure, or devotion as entitlement to your time, money, body, secrecy, or obedience. Robert Jay Lifton, MD, psychiatrist and author of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, identified patterns of ideological control that remain relevant when considering high-control groups.[^21]

Healthy communities can tolerate your humanity. They do not require you to perform healing.

5. Integrate spiritual practice with competent trauma treatment

For many clients, spiritual practice becomes safest when there is a trauma-informed clinician helping track symptoms, parts, relational patterns, dissociation, grief, and embodied change. This might include somatic therapy, EMDR, Internal Family Systems-informed therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, relational psychotherapy, trauma-focused CBT, DBT skills, or carefully coordinated psychiatric care.

Marsha Linehan, PhD, ABPP, developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy and author of Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, built DBT around the dialectic of acceptance and change.[^22] That dialectic is useful here. Spiritual healing often asks for acceptance: this happened, this is here, this is what the body knows right now. Trauma healing also asks for change: new boundaries, new patterns, new relationships, new repair.

6. Let meaning emerge after truth, not before it

One of the most painful forms of bypassing is meaning-making that arrives too early. “Everything happens for a reason” can feel violent to a nervous system still trying to survive what happened. Meaning that is imposed from outside often silences grief. Meaning that emerges from inside, over time, can become a form of dignity.

Andrew Solomon, PhD, writer and author of The Noonday Demon, has written movingly about suffering, depression, and the part of the self that survives when simplistic explanations fail.[^23] Mary Oliver’s poetry, David Whyte’s writing, and Krista Tippett’s conversations on wisdom all point toward a spacious truth: meaning is not always an answer. Sometimes it is a relationship with life that becomes possible again.

Your job is not to explain your trauma beautifully. Your job is to heal enough that beauty can find you without requiring you to lie.

FAQ

If you have used spirituality to survive, that deserves respect. Survival adaptations often begin as mercy. But you do not have to spend the rest of your life confusing disappearance with peace. The sacred, if it is worthy of the name, does not require you to abandon your body at the door. You’re allowed to heal in a way that includes your breath, your anger, your grief, your questions, your boundaries, your longing, and the ordinary animal truth of being here.

Suggested Internal Links

| Anchor text | Placeholder | |, |, | | somatic healing after trauma | https://anniewright.com/body-after-build-somatic-healing/ | | the polyvagal theory and trauma recovery | https://anniewright.com/polyvagal-theory-narcissistic-abuse/ | | betrayal trauma | https://anniewright.com/betrayal-trauma-complete-guide/ | | nervous-system regulation | https://anniewright.com/nervous-system-regulation/ | | fixing the foundations | https://anniewright.com/fixing-the-foundations/ | | emotional flashbacks | https://anniewright.com/emotional-flashbacks/ | | attachment wound | https://anniewright.com/attachment-trauma/ | | Internal Family Systems and parts work | https://anniewright.com/parts-work-without-therapist/ | | EMDR therapy | https://anniewright.com/emdr-narcissistic-abuse/ | | religious trauma | https://anniewright.com/religious-trauma-cult-pop-culture-guide/ |

References

[^1]: Judith Herman, MD, Trauma and Recovery. Project source library: “Trauma and Recovery , Judith Herman.pdf.” [^2]: Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score. Project source library: “The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk.pdf.” [^3]: John Welwood, PhD, introduced the term “spiritual bypassing”; see discussion in transpersonal psychology literature and John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening. [^4]: Mariana Caplan, PhD, Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path. [^5]: Stephen W. Porges, PhD, The Polyvagal Theory and The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory. Project source library: “04 , The Polyvagal Theory , Stephen W. Porges.pdf” and “The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe , Stephen W. Porges.pdf.” [^6]: Deb Dana, LCSW, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Project source library: “The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Deb Dana.pdf.” [^7]: Allan Schore, PhD, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. Project source library: “01 , The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy , Allan Schore.pdf.” [^8]: Louis Cozolino, PhD, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy. Project source library: “15 , The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy (3rd ed.) , Louis Cozolino.pdf.” [^9]: David A. Treleaven, PhD, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. Project source library: “Trauma‑Sensitive Mindfulness , David Treleaven.pdf.” [^10]: Jared R. Lindahl, Nathan E. Fisher, David J. Cooper, Rochelle K. Rosen, and Willoughby B. Britton, PhD, “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists,” PLOS ONE 12(5), 2017, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5443484/; Cheetah House Varieties of Contemplative Experience Study, https://www.cheetahhouse.org/vce. [^11]: Tara Brach, PhD, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, https://www.tarabrach.com/books/radical-acceptance/. [^12]: Resmaa Menakem, MSW, My Grandmother’s Hands. Project source library: “My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem.pdf.” [^13]: Kathy Steele, MN, CS; Suzette Boon, PhD; and Onno van der Hart, PhD, Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach. Project source library: “20 , Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation A Practical, Integrative Approach.pdf.” [^14]: Richard Schwartz, PhD, Internal Family Systems Therapy and No Bad Parts. Project source library: “Internal Family Systems Therapy, Richard Schwartz.pdf” and “No Bad Parts, Richard Schwartz.pdf.” [^15]: Pat Ogden, PhD, and Janina Fisher, PhD, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and Attachment; Janina Fisher, PhD, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Project source library files of same titles. [^16]: Sandra Bloom, MD, Creating Sanctuary. Project source library: “10 , Creating Sanctuary Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies , Sandra Bloom.pdf.” [^17]: Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz, Born for Love and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. Project source library files of same titles. [^18]: Beverly Engel, LMFT, It Wasn’t Your Fault; Janina Fisher, PhD, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Project source library files of same titles. [^19]: Peter Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice. Project source library files of same titles. [^20]: Babette Rothschild, MSW, The Body Remembers Volume 2. Project source library: “Body Remembers Volume 2_ Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment, The , Babette Rothschild.pdf.” [^21]: Robert Jay Lifton, MD, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Project source library: “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism A Study of Brainwashing in China , Robert Jay Lifton.pdf.” [^22]: Marsha M. Linehan, PhD, ABPP, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Project source library file of same title. [^23]: Andrew Solomon, PhD, The Noonday Demon. Project source library: “02 , The Noonday Demon An Atlas of Depression , Andrew Solomon.pdf.”

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