Editing Religious trauma syndrome (section)

=== Leaving ===
Leaving a controlling religious community, while often experienced as liberating and exciting, can be experienced as a major traumatic event. Religious communities often serve as the foundation for individuals' lives, providing social support, a coherent worldview, a sense of meaning and purpose, and social and emotional satisfaction. Leaving behind all those resources goes beyond a significant loss; it calls on the individual to completely reconstruct their reality, often while newly isolated from the help and support of family and friends who stay in the religion.<ref name="Winell BABCP 1" /><ref name="Moyers">{{Cite web
|title=Psychological Issues of Former Fundamentalists
|last=Moyers
|first=Jim
|url=https://www.jimmoyers.com/spirituality/issuesexfund.html
|access-date=2020-10-26
|website=www.jimmoyers.com
|archive-date=2021-11-30
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211130182602/https://www.jimmoyers.com/spirituality/issuesexfund.html
|url-status=dead
}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book
|last=Newberg, Andrew.
|title=Neurotheology: how science can enlighten us about spirituality.
|date=2020
|publisher=Columbia University Press
|isbn=978-0-231-17905-8
|location=New York
|oclc=1145902629}}</ref>

In addition, when violent or threatening theology, such as a belief in hell, [[divine punishment]], demons, and an [[Us vs. them|evil "outside world"]], have been incorporated into the basic structure of an individual's [[worldview]], the threats of engaging the outside world instead of remaining in the safe bubble of the controlling religious community can induce further anxiety.<ref name="Stone" /><ref name=":3" /><ref name="Moyers" />

As individuals identify the harm they are experiencing in authoritarian religious settings, their concerns may be minimized by the religious group itself, but they can also be compounded by society's investment in positive views of religion.<ref name="Winell BABCP 1" /> Institutional betrayal, first at the hands of beloved religious communities, second at the hands of a world that upholds the utility of religion rather than the experiences of religious abuse survivors, can make symptoms of RTS worse.<ref name="Winell BABCP 1" /> People leaving religion can experience extreme hostility from their former co-religionists.<ref>{{Cite news|title=The Health Effects of Leaving Religion: How a loss of faith can manifest itself in the mind and body|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-health-effects-of-leaving-religion/379651/|last=Fortenbury|first=Jon|date=2014-09-28|access-date=2022-01-08|work=[[The Atlantic]]}}</ref>