The Myth of the Hardened Religious Trauma Survivor

Allowing for the breadth of the human experience is not a fundamentalist thing

There’s a stereotype in religious circles of people who “leave the faith” or “have a victim mentality.” It’s that they’re hard and bitter, barely containing unprocessed anger and grief, resentful and pessimistic. These words are synonyms for sin. The image is melodramatic and a visual thought-stopping cliché. Case in point: when I searched for “bitter women” images, almost all the results were Christian scold pieces thinly disguised as “encouragement.”