Part of what makes an experience traumatizing is one’s difficulty or inability to make sense of what happened. The memories of an experience can feel fuzzy and incomplete, and articulating the narrative to ourselves—let alone to someone else—is daunting. Often, this leaves survivors in a place of isolation without safe spaces in which to name and process their pain. This is doubly true when the very place in which one typically seeks community (e.g. a church) is the site of one’s deepest wounding. We hold space for people to identify, name, and grieve the harms they’ve endured so they can tell the truth of their experiences.

Too many religious communities reflect toxic cultures that harm human beings and perpetuate unjust systems like patriarchy, homophobia, and systemic racism. Since the best critique of the bad is the embodiment of the better, we model a culture that is safe and healthy wherein human dignity is upheld and human agency is affirmed—honoring all of the many ways our humanity is expressed. We embody the kind of community that resists harmful systems and lives into rhythms and practices that nurture healthy spirituality for all people.

Spiritual practices are too often weaponized in ways that engender shame and exert control. While many people in religious communities have been conditioned to practice particular disciplines as a means of appeasing God and denying self, we believe that spiritual practices are an invitation into fuller knowing of God and Self, an ever-deepening experience of Unconditional Love. We facilitate ancient and modern practices, encouraging people to participate in whatever ways and to whatever extent feels safe and healthy to them.

Most church leaders remain unaware of the nature of trauma and the way it shows up in the lives of people in their care. Knowingly and unknowingly, they create and perpetuate systems that retraumatize. We disrupt those cycles by equipping leaders to be trauma-informed, enabling them to companion others well and thoughtfully discern their decisions, words, and actions.

Many survivors of religious trauma long to retain a connection to faith even as they shed particular iterations of it. This can be a disorienting, lonely process. We companion survivors as they explore their sense of faith and spirituality, providing a listening ear and offering space for reflection. We welcome doubt, dissent, and grief, prioritizing curiosity and rejecting judgment so that people can fully and freely journey into new, life-giving expressions of faith.

Toxic religious systems depend on skewed understandings of who God is and what God is like. Since what we believe to be true about God necessarily informs what we believe to be true about everything and everyone else—ourselves included—we seek to expand our collective theological imagination, sensing and engaging new understandings of God and Self that lead to flourishing. We invite people to see the ways they reflect the Divine image and to open themselves to the Divine image reflected through others.

We are rooted in the Christian tradition, which claims that God is at work to heal and restore all things. Our individual healing as human beings is part and parcel to the healing of the world. Human beings are both beneficiaries and agents of God’s restoring work. Our internal experience of deepening wholeness and integration opens our eyes to the external places needing the very same. By supporting people as they find healing, we participate in the healing of all things—looking towards and living into the future and present reality of God’s intention for the cosmos.