Top reviews from the United States

Caroline Oceana Ryan

5.0 out of 5 stars Solace & support for those who have suffered religious abuse of any kind

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2024

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

This sensitive and well-written book is at turns autobiographical, spiritual, and historical in focus, taking on the incongruities and often-hidden shadow aspects of the Church and its many influences.

The author first describes the broken childhood so many have endured at the hands of perfectionist parents and an unforgiving, highly dysfunctional church.

Turmel’s comments early on that “it wasn’t enough that Catholic religious authorities have developed sophisticated psychological methods of diminishing you, they also used those very methods to shame you further, if you did complain about how you were being treated.”

You don’t have to be catholic to relate powerfully to this book. I easily recognized much of my own background in Turmel's narrative. I suffered very similar situations for years as a child abused by her protestant clergy father, while in church programs, at a christian college, and while working at an evangelical nonprofit in my early twenties.

For centuries, the evangelical (and other non-catholic churches) have used much the same system of dogma and punishment, including threats of what will send one to hell. This has formed a whole system of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse experienced by children and young people (particularly women), which the catholic church has long used. The protestants may use different terminology, but the abuse is often the same.

I was not surprised to learn a few years ago that the evangelical movement is actually an arm of the catholic church—the wealthiest corporation in the world, and long a tool of mass social control.

Turmel does an excellent job of delineating the psychological forms of spiritual abuse. He then leads us beyond those dark times, clarifying how the right therapist can assist us in climbing out from under the crushing weight of christendom’s many contradictions.

His background as a therapist offers enlightening views that offer solace and support to those who may not yet have found the therapeutic support needed to heal from spiritual abuse and its related forms. His implicit message: None of us are alone in this, and healing is possible, if we will reach for it.

Brielle Love Eden

5.0 out of 5 stars A Life Saving Message

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2024

Format: Paperback

This book is destined to save the souls of many people who have lost their own due to the anti-self teachings of their religion.

Dr. Turmel convincingly demonstrates how the fear, guilt and shame producing beliefs and practices of many religions (his emphasis in on Catholicism) lock people into the inner misery of endless conflict with themselves.

Rather than freeing them to fully accept, understand and love themselves, which is what people actually need.

Dr. Turmel’s message opens the door to many millions who are the prisoners of childhood fear, guilt and shame, which is then amplified and more deeply entrenched from their religious indoctrination.

In the opinion of this reviewer, finding one’s identity in a religion, while being poisonous to an individual’s well being, is also the single most divisive force in human culture today.

Religion divides the individual against themself, while dividing the world into tribes of people who fight wars for the supremacy of their religious clan and its views about “God”.

So the less investment humanity places in religion, as the centuries go by, the better!

This book can help the suffering individual take their selfhood back from the religions that kidnapped and tortured it.

And by breaking the spell of religion’s phoney holiness and infallibility…

It takes a bold step toward the human race reclaiming it’s collective heart and soul from the darkness organized religions have always contained.