Your Story Can Make Room for Healing

Healing from religious trauma and spiritual abuse can be deeply personal. Sometimes, finding the right words, or seeing someone else put words to an experience that feels familiar, can be a powerful reminder that we are not alone.

At Reclamation Collective, we believe that sharing our experiences can help create space for others to begin, continue, or deepen their own reclamation.

If you have participated in a Reclamation Collective support group, consultation space, or other community offering, we invite you to share an experience (written or recorded), reflection, piece of art, poem, or anything else that expresses something about your experience with RC or your healing journey.

There is no right way to tell your story.

You can share as much or as little as feels right for you.

What would you like to share?

Maybe your experience with RC helped you:

  • Feel less alone in your experience

  • Find language for something you had struggled to name

  • Connect with people who understood

  • Explore your relationship with faith, spirituality, identity, or community

  • Feel safe asking questions you couldn't ask elsewhere

  • Begin rebuilding trust in yourself

  • Find support while navigating relationships with family or faith communities

  • Discover new ways of understanding your own story

  • Feel permission to grieve, grow, change, or simply be where you are

Or maybe your experience is difficult to put into words - you might share a poem, drawing, photograph, collage, song, reflection, letter, or another creative expression. You don't have to explain everything behind your work. Share only what you want others to see.

You are in control of your story.

Before you submit anything, please consider what feels safe and comfortable for you to share.

You do not need to share details about your trauma, abuse, faith community, family, relationships, or personal history.

Please don't include anything you would not want shared publicly.

You can remain anonymous. Reclamation Collective will not share your name with your submission.

We may identify the RC offering in which you participated - for example, Queers Reclaiming Together or Reclamation for All - so that others can understand the context of your experience.

Why are we collecting these stories?

Your story may help someone who is wondering, “Am I the only one?”

It may help someone who is searching for a community where they can ask questions without judgment.

And it may help someone who needs support but isn't sure whether they can afford it.

With your permission, these stories and creative expressions may be shared as part of Reclamation Collective's fundraising and outreach efforts. They help us show why this work matters and invite others to invest in making healing spaces available to more people.

Your story can help continue the circle of healing.

Funds raised through this work help support future healing opportunities, including support group scholarships, programming, and Reclamation Collective's general operating fund.

When someone gives because they heard a story that made them feel less alone, your experience may help make room for someone else's.

A note about consent.

Please share only what you genuinely want to share.

Submitting a story, testimony, reflection, or creative work means that you give Reclamation Collective permission to use the information and/or creative work you submit for fundraising, outreach, educational, and promotional purposes, including on our website, social media, email communications, printed materials, and other communications.

You can choose what you share, and you are never required to disclose more than you feel comfortable sharing.

Ready to share?

There is no perfect length, format, or way to tell your story.

You can share a few sentences, several paragraphs, or a recording. You can upload a video, poem or piece of art. You can share something hopeful, complicated, unfinished, joyful, painful, or somewhere in between.

Your experience doesn't have to be a finished story to be worth sharing.

Thank you for trusting Reclamation Collective with a piece of your experience.

Your story may be exactly what someone else needs to hear:
I am not alone.

“The group dynamic was so supportive. I love how many different places the women were in the group. Each story that was shared showed me the resilience of the human spirit even after adverse religious experiences.”

-- Former support group participant