![]() “The topics that come to the surface tend to be gender and sexual identity, raising children differently from how you were raised, fear of telling your family and spouses about your doubts, childhood indoctrination and early trauma,” says D’Souza. Today RfR has 252 members, with those who have been associated with Pentecostalism, the Anglican and Baptist churches and the Jehovah’s Witnesses dominating the group. There are also members with experiences of Catholicism, Mormonism, the Exclusive Brethren, the Mennonites, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and the Falun Gong movement. Today it has 252 members, with those who have been associated with Pentecostalism, the Anglican and Baptist churches and the Jehovah’s Witnesses dominating the group. After hearing about RfR via a US-based friend, she decided to start a Sydney group. The couple were “disfellowshipped” in November 2019 after speaking out against the Jehovah’s Witnesses.Īlthough she sought professional counselling beginning in 2017, D’Souza realised that there needed to be a way for ex-believers to share their stories. “You can’t describe it to those closest to you because they’re still in the religion.” “It was a very destabilising time, you lose your sense of identity,” says D’Souza, who no longer has any contact with her family. ![]() D’Souza quit the meetings but remained a believer until she read a 2016 report by The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which found that the Australian church failed to protect children in its care from sexual predators. By 2015 he had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 2012, her husband began to “wake up” to the religion, as D’Souza puts it, over what he viewed as inconsistencies in its teachings, culture and history. Although they wanted kids, they decided not to pursue IVF in case they had to destroy embryos later and go against the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Australia, the non-profit that governs them. ![]() In 1999 she married Sasha D’Souza, then a full-time volunteer. She left school after year 10, never pursued university – which she says the church discourages – and began carrying out 90 hours a month of voluntary door knocking. ![]() “We can’t say that all religion is making people suffer, but I think there are some teachings and practices in some that are really damaging. “It’s definitely a very real phenomenon,” she said. Some members, like D’Souza, identify as survivors of religious trauma syndrome (RTS), a term coined by US-based psychologist Dr Marlene Winell in 2011, although not featured in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS), considered the bible of psychiatry.Ĭaroline Winzenried, a psychotherapist based in Boronia, Victoria, is one of what’s thought to be a handful of counsellors in Australia treating patients struggling with the effects of indoctrination by high-control religions, whether they’ve quit their faith or still embrace it. With the number of Australians who have no religion increasing to nearly a third in the 2016 census, and recent studies suggesting that the figure could be higher, similar organisations have appeared across the country in the past few years. Caroline Winzenried, a psychotherapist, treats patients struggling with the effects of indoctrination by high-control religions. ![]()
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