Fundamentalist Religious Childhoods and Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing

This book seeks to educate trainee and qualified counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and professionals in connected occupations on the benefits and challenges of a fundamentalist religious upbringing and the impact on wellbeing in adulthood. It seeks to start to fill the gap on this topic in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally as the literature on this topic is sparse. The aim of this publication is to increase the awareness of caring professionals so that they can recognise the potential impact of such an upbringing on the adult client, including how they might present in therapeutic and other caring settings.It also seeks to tackle a potential elephant in the room in that in recent times there has been a huge upsurge of interest in religious trauma generally and especially in the United States of America (USA). In the last two decades, there has been some research and writing on spiritual abuse within UK churches and organisations mainly through the seminal work of Professor Lisa Oakley and Dr Kathy Kinmond (Oakley & Kinmond, 2013), but there is a complete lack of research-based literature that focuses on both the benefits and challenges of growing up within a strict religious environment. This a subject that many caring professionals seem unaware of, so it can go unnoticed and unrecognised in client presentations.