Many survivors of spiritual or religion-related abuse in childhood and adolescence will have symptoms of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for years or decades unless they receive effective treatment from a licensed psychotherapist trained in the rehabilitation of those with Religious Trauma Syndrome (best, IMO), cultic abuse (also good), and/or Complex PTSD (far better than "therapy" in general, but ranked third here for a reason). Many other survivors are able to dig their way out of RTS on their own to a considerable extent by digging into such as what's described in A Collection of Articles on Recovery from Religious Trauma Syndrome and other solidly grounded material online, in books and workbooks.
But there is a lingering symptom of spiritual or religion-related abuse in childhood and adolescence so often seen in online forums -- as well as face-to-face -- that my sense now is that it may be fundamental to RTS and inability to recovery fully from it. And it is dichotomizing almost all potentially conflicting perceptions in terms of "either / or," "all-good-or-all-bad," “all-right-or-all-wrong," "all-righteous-or-all-sinful," "black & white" thinking with no shades of gray between a pair of mutually conflicting polarities. ("All-righteous-or-all-evil" moral absolutism is a good example.)
I'm certainly guilty of doing it myself at times -- and especially when my not-okay inner child IFSM parts over-I-dentify with similar parts in others who have been traumatized by religion as children -- though I now tend to at least recognize and acknowledge that fairly quickly.
Dichotomistic polarization should -- in my view -- be expected in survivors of any form of childhood abuse and/or neglect or abandonment by parents, grandparents, other family members and cultural authorities who either cannot see, hear, feel or sense children, or worse (actually much worse) can see, hear, feel and sense children but Just Don't Care because they Want What They Want from them. Which runs the gamut from being "seen and not heard" to being "shining examples of our righteous family" to keeping their little mouths shut after they have been battered or used as gratifying little sex toys by others in the church.
Rage is a Stage we have to go through in the course of recovery from abuse. And in that second -- as well as the first -- of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief processing, imitation of one's abusers (very much including their dichotomizing) is normal. That said, it is a stage most therapists see as counterproductive to long-term recovery if it is left unrecognized, unexamined, unaccepted, unowned, unappreciated and untreated.
Thus, may I suggest a review of these books and others of the rational emotive, critical thinking and cognitive-behavioral, psychotherapeutic genre? Because continued investment in and practice of dichotomistic / polarized thinking will NOT get patients where they want to go... which is into secure attachments with other people finally worthy of their trust.
Functional trust, after all, is at least a third of the ground floor in psychotherapeutic Re-Development.
