The title of this book caught my eye: "For God's Sake: Recovering from Religious Trauma" because I can relate to it. Its author, Anna Clark Miller, is a therapist and grew up the child of missionaries. Miller talks about how her parent's involvement in the ministry was more important to them than their actual children. She was very transparent with her feelings, sharing as follows: " That meant the needs of my siblings and I were an obvious second priority to the gospel. I spent much of my childhood feeling ignored, abandoned, and uncared for as I watched my parents give their time and energy to people who needed it more. I felt profound shame about my discontent as a missionary kid, fearing that it indicated that I was spiritually flawed an inadequate." She talks about emerging from fundamentalism and finding restoration, which was a surprise to her since she had always been told that only darkness was "on the other side of the door." She goes on to refer to all the characteristics of trauma and the one that caught my attention most was scrupulosity, which is a type of religious OCD.

Each of Miller's chapters end with reflection questions and actions to take. I related to a lot of what I read in the book and think it will be very helpful to others coming out of fundamentalism. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Former missionary kid, now therapist Anna Clark Miller, writes an evidence-based, trauma-informed, gentle and informative book for people healing from religious trauma.
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I'm glad this book exists. I think it will truly help people. I found it well-researched and well-written. I thought it covered a lot of important topics with a feeling of gentleness and safety throughout.

The main change that I would make to this book is to put the final chapter regarding therapy and what to look for or look out for, closer to the beginning. It is incredibly good and important information, and I think it would be better to introduce up front. My reasoning is that a lot of people facing religious trauma likely need that external professional support to even properly delve into the topics that this book covers. The author is correct that doing this healing work requires both a real and a felt sense of safety, and I think that reading and working on this book's topics completely independently could likely be highly triggering and feel intensely unsafe. I would recommend the therapy angle sooner.

The first half of the book covered a lot of important information, and I viewed it as a sort of centralized primer for those emerging from abusive and/or high control religion. A lot of the material had to do with examining various facets of what those groups tend to teach and inflict and utilize as tactics.
This part wasn't quite as striking for me, personally, given that I'm years out from my initial deconstruction journey and have already gone through a lot of this information during that time. I personally sought out online resources that were less about solely sharing information, and more about survivors finding community. I discovered various podcasts and their accompanying Facebook groups, as well as various Instagram accounts, which both delved into a lot of these topics with a critical thinking lens, and encouraged all types of different people to chime in and share their experiences and perspectives. That common humanity was crucial for me in that time.

Part 2 is absolutely invaluable trauma work, and it is really tough. Despite my deconstruction occurring years before, I'm only now healing from my trauma. I've both seen and personally experienced the techniques in this book really work for treatment. That said, it is really tough, and is why I think the therapy chapter needs to be earlier. With that support though, this material is so relevant and helpful.

Some more general notes - I think this book likely works better as a physical copy than as an ebook. The checklists and diagrams don't really come across digitally.
While the reflection prompts are good, and I think it's important for this type of book to encourage physical journaling, they're very dense with so many questions each. I didn't work on these prompts because I was already currently working through Marlene Winell's book on the same topic; however, even just reading through the prompts felt really overwhelming to me. I wonder if it may help to break up some of the prompt questions and scatter them to the applicable portions, asking the reader to jot down a few bullet points for those, and then doing a slightly deeper reflection prompt alongside the checklist at the end.

This is a tough read, and also an important read. I'm really glad this author did the tough work herself, is helping people in her job now, and is extending that help even further with this book.