This talk is an opening, a crack to let light into considerations of racialized survivor experience with hopes to expand this conversation, and invitations to research the lives, challenges, healing journeys, and to visibilize the living bodies of cult survivors of color.
Clinical psychology and professional counseling can serve as a profound aid in cult recovery, training in the counseling professions often leaves new clinicians unequipped to handle lasting questions of faith and self-trust in the aftermath of spiritual abuse.
Most trauma – especially complex trauma – disconnects an individual from their self, their true essence. For those who have come out of a high demand group or relationship, it is imperative to rediscover, or in the instance of an SGA, discover for the first time, this sense of authentic self.
This paper will showcase interventions and resources created within the SGA community and offer a framework for how these initiatives could be applied to rehabilitation and reintegration efforts with repatriates from IS-controlled territories.
Tommy’s story line and the processes of traumatic dissociation, reenactment, and misguided healing, that culminated in Tommy becoming (and failing as) a cult leader.