The Girl Who Was Never Enough
One woman’s path from religious trauma and childhood abuse to secular recovery
By Emma S., Guest Author
Religious trauma, childhood abuse, and shame can feel like a life sentence—especially when the people who were supposed to protect you were the ones causing the harm. For many people healing from childhood trauma, the path to recovery isn’t straightforward. It’s tangled up in belief systems, family loyalty, and years of learning to silence your own voice.
Emma’s story is one of religious trauma recovery, CPTSD, and the courage it takes to find a secular recovery path when traditional approaches don’t fit. It’s raw, it’s real, and if you’ve ever felt like you were the only one carrying this kind of weight—you’re not.
I grew up in a house where love came with conditions and God came with a LOT of rules.
My mother married my stepfather when I was four. By the time my youngest half-sibling arrived, there were five kids in our house—but I was the only one who looked different. The one who stuck out like a sore thumb in family photos. The only one who carried a different last name. The only one who reminded my mother of the man who left.
She made sure I knew it. “You look just like him,” she’d say, and it was never a compliment. My face was evidence of something she wanted to forget. My stepfather wasn’t subtle at all—spankings and slaps were common punishment for disobedience. Being too loud. Staying up late reading fiction instead of scriptures. Asking too many questions at church. I watched him play gently with my siblings and learned early that I was tolerated, not chosen.
When a child learns she isn’t safe in her own family, she will find something—anything—to numb the pain.
Our church reinforced everything happening at home. Obedience was godliness. Questioning was defiance. Children—especially girls—existed to be quiet, modest, sweet, and grateful. By fifteen, I’d found alcohol. It was the first thing that made the noise inside me stop. I didn’t feel anything at all, and although I grew up praying, alcohol was the closest thing to peace I’d ever known.
I managed to get into college, still living at home, still trying to be good enough. I got an office job through a church connection. My boss was in his forties, married, a man who held a leadership position within the church. When he assaulted me in his office on a Tuesday afternoon, I went completely numb. I didn’t fight. I just left my body the way I’d been doing my whole life.
When I told my family, they asked what I’d done to invite it. My mother blamed my low-cut shirt and tight pants. My stepfather said I should have known better. The church said nothing. No one believed me. No one protected me. Again.
I never reported it. I dropped out of school. And I spent the next several years cycling between rigid religiosity and reckless self-destruction. I’d white-knuckle through weeks of “good behavior,” then crash, drink until I couldn’t feel my face, and wake up drowning in shame.
I kept wondering why I couldn’t just get it together like everyone else. I didn’t realize yet that I wasn’t broken—I was surviving.
At twenty-five, I moved out of my family home and something shifted. For the first time in my life, I found a therapist on my own—not someone recommended by the church, not someone who’d filter everything through a gospel lens. She didn’t flinch when I told her the truth. She didn’t tell me to pray harder. She listened. And she reflected back that what I’d experienced wasn’t discipline—it was abuse. The assault wasn’t my fault. It was never my fault.
I started trying to stop drinking, but the shame fueled the drinking, and the drinking fed the shame. I tried traditional 12-step recovery meetings, but the higher power language felt too much like the belief system I felt had made me feel so much shame. My therapist pointed me toward a secular, evidence-based recovery program focused on self-empowerment rather than submission. It changed everything.
But I still couldn’t fully break the cycle on my own. A friend from my secular program told me that in-patient treatment was the best choice she’d ever made. I was terrified. People depended on me. I didn’t know who I was without substances. But I went.
Those thirty days were the first time I felt genuinely safe. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD—and suddenly, my behavior made sense. The hypervigilance. The people-pleasing. The way I’d learned to abandon myself before anyone else could. It wasn’t a character flaw. It was a wound.
Getting a diagnosis didn’t fix everything. But it gave me a framework for understanding why I’d been in so much pain—and it gave me permission to stop blaming myself.
When I got out, I had a couple of slips. The old shame spiral tried to pull me under. But the difference was, my program didn’t treat those moments as failures. They encouraged me to have compassion for myself, to examine what triggered the urge, and to keep going. So I did.
I’m twenty-nine now. Three years sober. I’m married to someone who sees all of me—the scars, the messy parts, the work-in-progress—and chooses me anyway. We have a two-year-old daughter, and every single day I make a conscious choice: she will grow up knowing she is enough, exactly as she is.
I still go to therapy. I attend meetings when I need them. I’ve set boundaries with my family that would have been unthinkable five years ago. I have real friendships—people who know my story and love me alongside it.
My life isn’t perfect. But it’s mine. And it’s beautiful.
If you’re reading this and you see yourself in any part of my story—the shame, the silence, the feeling that you’re fundamentally broken—I want you to know something: You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become. And you don’t have to do it alone.
Emma’s story illustrates what so many people healing from religious trauma and childhood abuse know firsthand: the shame doesn’t end when you leave the environment that created it. It follows you into your relationships, your coping mechanisms, and your sense of self. Recovery from CPTSD and the shame-addiction cycle often requires more than willpower—it requires a framework that meets you where you are, without recreating the power dynamics that caused the harm in the first place.
Secular recovery gave Emma the space to heal on her own terms. Not everyone’s path looks the same—but everyone deserves one that doesn’t ask them to shrink.
This story has been shared anonymously and with permission. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. If you or someone you know is struggling, you are not alone.
If you’d like to tell your story, we’d love to give you a space to heal by sharing. Email Us.
