Module 9: High Control Religion and Relationships

This module focuses on how high-control religious systems use relational dynamics as tools of coercion and compliance, contributing to long-term relational trauma. Clinicians will examine at least five common strategies used in these environments: conditional love and acceptance, surveillance culture, public confession and shaming, isolation from non-members, and shunning or excommunication. These tactics are deliberately structured to suppress autonomy, enforce group loyalty, and externalize moral regulation. Over time, they produce attachment wounds, emotional dysregulation, and maladaptive relational patterns such as fawning, people-pleasing, or relational avoidance. By highlighting the relational mechanisms of control, the module equips clinicians to recognize how spiritual trauma is often encoded not just in beliefs but in a survivor’s entire relational blueprint.