CORT: Conference on Religious Trauma
If you are interested in speaking at our next conference, or have topics you would like us to cover, please reach out.
CORT will be resuming in 2027
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The Conference on Religious Trauma (CORT) brings together mental health professionals, researchers, advocates, educators, and people with lived experience to explore the complex and often lasting effects of religious trauma, spiritual abuse, coercive control, and high-control religious environments.
Through expert presentations, research, clinical perspectives, and personal stories, the conference examines how religious experiences can shape identity, relationships, sexuality, mental health, and the process of rebuilding a life after leaving or changing one’s relationship with religion. CORT creates a collaborative space for education, professional development, dialogue, and greater understanding of religious trauma and recovery.
Recordings of previous conferences are available for free on Youtube
Previous Speakers
Our speakers at CORT represent a variety of fundamentalist religious and cult backgrounds including Amish, Evangelical, Muslim, Hasidic Orthodox Judaism, and Children of God. They will be covering a vast array of topics related to religious trauma including:
· Child marriage
· Recovery from patriarchal mindset
· Recovering from the Jehovah's Witnesses
· Reclaiming 2SLGBTQ+ sexuality post Purity Culture
· How beliefs are formed
· Purity Culture recovery
… and more.
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Gillie Jenkinson, PhD, is an accredited psychotherapist, international speaker and Director of Hope Valley Counselling.
For over 25 years she has specialized, as a therapist and researcher, in the challenges faced by those who have experienced coercive, cultic, and spiritual abuse. She created ‘Post-Cult Counselling’ for those who experience religious trauma in a cultic religion and trains therapists in its use.
She is a former member of a Bible-based cultic group. Gillie’s book ‘Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse: A Workbook for Recovery and Growth’ will be published by Routledge in May 2023.
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Dr. Ray is the founder and President of the Board of Directors of Recovering from Religion.
He has been a psychologist for over thirty years and is the author of four books: two on organizational teamwork as well as "The God Virus-How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture" and "Sex and God-How Religion Distorts Sexuality".
Dr. Ray has been a student of religion most of his life and holds a Masters Degree in religion as well as a Bachelor's Degree in Sociology/Anthropology with a Doctorate in Psychology.
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Dr. Danielle Kramer (she/they) is a certified sex therapist and board-certified clinical sexologist who splits their time between clinical practice, research, consulting. In clinical practice Dr. Kramer specializes in the care of LGBTQ+ folks and women’s/AFAB (assigned female at birth) folks.
Dr. Kramer was raised in purity culture and devotes a significant amount of their practice to working with religious and sexual trauma, as well as being the only certified sex therapist in the Florida Panhandle providing gender affirming care. In research Dr. Kramer focuses on misogyny in the US, abortion care and access, and AFAB sexual health. Dr. Kramer also consults on the local, state, and federal level on the politics and policy of abortion care and access.
Dr. Kramer is a member of American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (ASSECT); The American Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance (TASHRA); and the Sexual Health Alliance.
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Dr Josie McSkimming is a clinical social worker with over 35 years experience. She is currently in private practice in Sydney, providing counselling to couples and individuals, and also clinical supervision.
She is an adjunct lecturer at the University of New South Wales, teaching Narrative Therapy. Her book ‘Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity’ describes how power spreads like a chain throughout church communities, shaping and re-shaping identity. Individuals are understood as not only subject to a form of judgment, but also exercise it, with everyone seemingly complicit in maintaining the stability of the church organisation.
Reconstruction is explored through the life-changing journeys of 20 people, who refuse & resist, engaging in various forms of anti-pastoral revolt.
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Ling Lam, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in the Counseling Psychology Department where he teaches courses on Complex Trauma, Crisis Intervention, LGBT Counseling, Family Therapy, Couple Therapy and Multicultural Psychotherapy.
Ling is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a part-time practice in Palo Alto and San Francisco. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, a M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Santa Clara University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. (with distinction) in Electrical Engineering, both from Stanford University.
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Willie Cartwright is a speaker, entrepreneur, author, and advocate who holds a B.S Degree in Finance and an Executive MBA.Though he and his wife now own several successful businesses, Willie and his sister were raised by a single mother in the public housing neighbourhoods of Birmingham, Alabama.
As a child, he was relentlessly bullied due to his thick glasses and stutter. His stepfather was so verbally abusive that Willie threatened to kill him. Raised in a strict Christian household deep in the Bible belt, Willie walked away from organized religion and Christianity in 2015.
After doing exhaustive research on the topic, he wrote his most recent book: From Saved to Sane: My journey away from Christianity and how it has adversely affected the African American Community.
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Mahrs Schoppman is a queer & trans somatic psychotherapist with a private practice based out of his home office in the redwood trees of Occidental, California, the traditional territory of the Graton Rancheria and Coastal Mi-wok people.
Mahrs specializes in working with the queer community and with those who live with the embodied traumatic impacts of growing up in an oppressive religious environment. He is passionate about walking with people on their journeys of reclaiming embodied knowing, sensation, emotional range, and vitality as a means of recovering from the learned dissociation that comes with restrictive religion.
Mahrs facilitates therapy groups for queer survivors of religious trauma and is in the midst of writing a book about his experiences and ideas around religious trauma.
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Christy is a Texas based Licensed Professional Counselor and gender and sexuality therapist who uses mindful self-compassion to engineer emotional chemistry, relational bonds and sexual alchemy through kink, poly and queer affirming therapies for religious shame and trauma.
He hosts and produces the Atheist Experience Network's Secular Sexuality and is a former member of the Atheist Community of Austin's Board of Directors, he practices under the name Valence Counseling in Austin, TX.
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Carol Merchasin is an international lawyer representing victims of sexual violence, slavery, and human trafficking in spiritual communities and cult organizations.
In addition to heading up a practice covering sexual misconduct in religious, faith-based, and spiritual communities at the McAllister Olivarius law firm, Carol is also involved in developing new legal techniques to hold cults and spiritual communities to account.
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Claire Alison Hams is based in the UK. She is a psychodynamic and relational counsellor with a first degree in Counselling with the University of Greenwich and an advanced diploma in psychodynamic counselling. She is currently doing doctoral research with the University of Chester exploring second and multi-generation ex-Jehovah's Witness recovery.
Claire has lived experience of being born in and growing up as a Jehovah's Witness. She left as an adult and recognises the unique form of grief that comes with the process of leaving and restarting a life outside religion. She now works with former members and survivors of cultic groups and relationships including spiritual abuse, religious trauma, various types of undue influence, coercive control and partner abuse.
The Bigger Picture: Our CORT Vision Statement
By Dr. Marlene Winell
There are widespread assumptions that religion in general is good or at least harmless. Yet people are seriously hurt by religious doctrines and practices every day. This has to end.
There is such a thing as religious trauma. Certain aspects of authoritarian religion cause harm that is physical, sexual, mental, and emotional. We are dedicated to making this clear. No longer is it a taboo subject. We intend to make evident the adverse ways in which religion can affect individuals both immediately and long-term. We seek to clarify the way that personal psychology interacts with religion to create suffering that is properly called trauma. We are committed to developing ways to relieve that suffering and treat religious trauma. We want to disseminate this information to our culture – in fields of mental health, education, the justice system, and other areas of society. No longer will the damaging effects of religion be a widely held secret among survivors and no longer will they be treated as invisible.
Separation of church and state is crucial. Respect for science is mandatory. This includes the social sciences and child development in particular. We must support human rights and oppose government policies that violate human needs. We reject superstitions that hold back the advancement of environmental health, global peace, and human well-being. We reject dangerous apocalyptic views of the future. We assert trust in human goodness and natural emotional intelligence.
In a world filled with conflict, alienation, and questionable leadership, basic human values at times need to be clarified and amplified. We seek to support the health and development of strong, compassionate individuals who can think for themselves. We embrace preventative educational methods that mitigate the impact of religious indoctrination. Children need to learn how to think, not what to think. They need to be supported in respecting their own feelings and intuitions, not denigrated as sinners. Humans need to take their rightful place in the natural world, being fully in their bodies, and not just “flesh.” People need to be empowered through human connection, not separated by categories of “us” and “them.”
Civil society depends on making these changes. The world cannot bear more fracturing. Democracy depends on independent thought and autonomous individuals. Freedom of religion must include freedom from religion. We must eradicate the idea that people of integrity must have a supernatural framework. We must celebrate naturalism and humanism as valid paths to ethical and fulfilling lives of joy, wisdom, and satisfaction.
While sounding the alarm about damaging religious teachings and practices, we also acknowledge healthy religion that supports positive human development. There are communities that avoid the worst of mythology, promote intrinsic human dignity, and take collective social action. We embrace spirituality as separate from religiosity. For example, we want to nourish our capacity for awe and wonder, as well as honoring human creativity in the arts and humanities.
To these ends we plan to share knowledge, dialogue about our viewpoints, and develop together approaches to healing our world of religious trauma. We realize that this is a new and growing area of study, so we advance with both confidence and humility, trusting that we are professionals about learning.
By working together, we reclaim the word “faith” by believing we will make progress toward these ends. Please join us.