What the Church Told a 12-Year-Old Gay Kid (My Story: Part 3)

My family moved to southern Alabama when I was in middle school. I was in sixth grade, got to enjoy the freedoms of middle school in Florida. When we moved to Alabama sixth grade was elementary school. And that sucked too. I was already carrying the unprocessed weight of childhood sexual abuse. I was already different…bright, sensitive, intuitive, visibly not fitting the mold that military culture and southern culture had built for boys. And I was starting to understand that the word for the kind of different I was, was gay.

Then the church got involved.

Southern Baptist. Fire and brimstone. A community that wrapped itself in warmth and potluck dinners and "bless your heart"… until they decided you were the wrong kind of person. Then that warmth evaporated and what was left was something closer to organized cruelty.

I was twelve years old when adults in that church told me I was going to hell.

Twelve. That's sixth grade. That's a kid who still needs to be told he matters, who still looks to adults for confirmation that he's okay, who is still forming his understanding of God and the universe and his place in all of it. And the adults who were supposed to guide that formation looked at that kid and said: What you are is an abomination. You are destined for eternal punishment.

Not because I did anything. Because I existed.

What Religious Trauma Actually Does

Here's what people who haven't experienced it don't understand: religious trauma isn't just someone hurting your feelings about God. It's a systematic dismantling of your relationship with the sacred.

I was an inherently spiritual kid. I could see auras. I could feel energy. I had experiences that were, by any definition, mystical. My connection to something bigger than myself wasn't theoretical… it was the most real thing about me. It was the thing my grandmother recognized and the thing my teachers saw when they called me "a healer."

And the church took that connection… the most precious, genuine, God-given (if you want to use that word) thing I had…and they weaponized it against me. I remember when the pastor used to call out asking if anyone felt called to serve to take up that responsibility. I always felt called to serve in spirit. But, they took a child whose entire being was oriented toward the divine and told him that the divine hated him.

Do you understand what that does to a developing nervous system? To a child who is already carrying sexual trauma with no support? You take a kid who naturally reaches toward the light, and you tell him the light rejects him. Where does he go? What does he reach for now?

I'll tell you where I went. I went into hiding. I went into depression. I went into a version of myself that was smaller and quieter and more afraid. The confidence, the vibrancy, the brightness that every teacher had commented on…I started dimming it. Because the message was clear: Being fully yourself is dangerous. The people who are supposed to love you will use the most important thing in your life to destroy you.

That lesson would take me decades to unlearn.

The Slow Poison of Spiritual Abuse

Religious trauma doesn't explode. It seeps.

It shows up as a flinch whenever someone mentions God. It shows up as distrust of any spiritual space…even ones that claim to be safe. It shows up as shame that has no visible source, just a low constant hum of wrongness that follows you everywhere. It shows up as a deep, aching loneliness because the community that was supposed to hold you cast you out, and now you don't trust any community to hold you.

For LGBTQ+ people specifically, religious trauma is compounded by identity. You're not just healing from a bad experience at church. You're healing from being told that the core of who you are …who you love, how you express yourself, the body you live in…is the problem. That's not a theological disagreement. That's an assault on your fundamental right to exist.

I carried that assault in my body for years. It contributed directly to my substance abuse, my self-destructive relationships, my suicide attempts. Not as the only cause …my story has many chapters, and each one added weight. But the religious trauma was the chapter that severed my connection to meaning. And without meaning, surviving didn't make sense. Which is a dangerous place for any human being, let alone a teenager.

How I Reclaimed My Spirituality

This part of the story isn't linear. It didn't happen in a single moment or even in a single year. It happened gradually, painfully, and imperfectly… the way all real healing happens.

I started by rejecting everything. God, church, spirituality, all of it. If the church said it, I wanted no part of it. That was a necessary phase. You can't reclaim something until you've fully separated from the version of it that hurt you.

Then, slowly, I started finding my way back… but on my terms this time. Tarot. Energy work. Psychic development. Practices that honored the gifts I'd been born with instead of condemning them. Practices that didn't require me to shrink or apologize or pretend to be someone I wasn't.

And then I found Reiki. And Reiki didn't just welcome me… it gave me a framework for everything I'd been experiencing since childhood. The energy I could feel. The auras I could see. The intuitive knowing that had always been there. Reiki said: That's not a defect. That's not a sin. That's a skill. Let me show you how to use it.

My mentor Karen was the first spiritual teacher who didn't need me to be anything other than exactly what I was. She didn't try to convert me. She didn't judge me. She just saw me… the way my grandmother had seen me all those years ago… and she taught me how to work with what I was born with.

That was the beginning of everything that Rainbow Reiki Center is now.

Why I Built an LGBTQ+ Affirming Healing Space

This isn't a marketing angle. This is personal. Deeply personal.

I named my practice Rainbow Reiki Center because I wanted the name itself to be a signal. I wanted every queer person, every trans person, every nonbinary person who has ever been hurt by a spiritual community to see the name and know… before they even walk through the door… that this space was built with them in mind.

Not as an afterthought. Not as a diversity checkbox. As the foundation.

Because I know what it costs to walk into a healing space when the last "healing space" you entered told you that you were broken. The courage that takes is immense. And the last thing that person needs is to arrive and encounter another space where they have to monitor themselves, edit themselves, wonder if they're really welcome.

At Rainbow Reiki Center, you are really welcome. In your fullness. In your queerness. In your complexity. In whatever stage of healing or unhealing you're in. You don't perform here. You just exist. And I hold the space for whatever comes up.

I hold it well because I know what it feels like when nobody holds it at all.

To the Person Who Was Hurt by the Church

Your spirituality is still yours. They didn't take it. They buried it under shame and fear, but it's still there… the same way it was always there in me, underneath everything.

You don't need to go back to the church that hurt you. You don't need to go to any church. You don't need to call it God or the universe or source energy or anything at all. You just need to find a space where your spirit is safe enough to come back online.

That's what I offer. Not religion. Not dogma. Not a new belief system to replace the old one. Just a space where your energy can move freely. Where your body can release what the church put into it. Where someone who has walked your exact path holds the container.

If that sounds like what you need, the door is open.

Rainbow Reiki Center offers Reiki sessions, therapeutic yoga, and energy healing that is explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming and informed by lived experience with religious trauma. If spiritual spaces have hurt you in the past, this is a different kind of space.