What I Shared with Medium About Why Religion Attracts Narcissists

In January 2026, writer Maria Cassano published a piece in Medium's Bitchy publication exploring a question that sits at the intersection of faith, psychology, and harm: why do religious institutions and communities tend to attract narcissistic personalities? I was one of three therapists interviewed for the article, each of us specializing in religious trauma and narcissistic abuse.

I agreed to be part of this piece because it addresses something I see in my clinical work that rarely gets named clearly enough. Faith communities are meant to be places of safety, belonging, and spiritual grounding. For many people they are. But the same structures that make religious environments powerful, the hierarchy, the deference to authority, the culture of forgiveness and grace, can also make them environments where narcissistic behavior is enabled, protected, and in some cases rewarded.

Why Religious Structures Can Enable Narcissism

Narcissistic personalities are drawn to environments where their need for power, admiration, and control can be met with minimal accountability. Religious settings, where challenging a leader can be framed as faithlessness and where loyalty to the community often supersedes loyalty to one's own perception of harm, can provide exactly that kind of cover.

This is not a critique of faith or religious practice. It is an observation about structure and accountability, or the absence of it. The same dynamics appear in any high-trust institution where authority is granted without sufficient checks and where members are socialized to defer rather than question.

What Religious Trauma Actually Costs

For people who have experienced narcissistic abuse within a faith context, the harm is layered in ways that make it particularly difficult to process. The abuse itself is harmful. The spiritual dimension compounds it: the loss of a faith community, the confusion of having something that was meant to be sacred become a site of harm, the guilt that often comes from leaving or speaking about what happened. Many people spend years wondering whether they are the problem, because the environment told them they were.

In my work with clients navigating this, I pay particular attention to the identity dimension. For people whose sense of self was deeply shaped by their faith community, leaving or being pushed out does not feel like leaving a bad situation. It feels like losing a fundamental piece of who they are. That grief is real and it deserves real attention.

What Healing From Religious Narcissistic Abuse Actually Requires

One of the things I emphasize with clients navigating this is that recovery from religious narcissistic abuse is not the same as recovery from narcissistic abuse in a secular context. The faith dimension changes the work in important ways that generic trauma approaches do not always account for.

In a typical abusive relationship, the survivor eventually recognizes that the environment was harmful and begins to separate themselves from it. In a religious context, the environment was also spiritually formative. The beliefs, the community, the rituals, the sense of meaning and belonging — these were not incidental to the harm. They were part of the same structure. So when a person leaves, or when the harm is finally named, they often lose not just the relationship or the community but their entire framework for understanding who they are and what their life means.

That is a profound loss. And it requires a specific kind of clinical attention that holds both things at once: the harm that was real and the meaning that was also real, even inside a harmful system.

What I have found in this work is that the path forward is rarely about abandoning faith entirely or holding onto it unchanged. It is about something more nuanced — developing the capacity to separate a spiritual identity from the institution or individual that weaponized it. To grieve what was lost without being defined by the harm. To rebuild a sense of self that is not contingent on belonging to a community that required silence in exchange for membership.

This work also requires addressing the particular shame that religious trauma often carries. Many people who have experienced narcissistic abuse within a faith community have been told, implicitly or directly, that their perception of the harm is itself a spiritual failing. That questioning is faithlessness. That speaking is betrayal. Untangling that messaging from a genuine sense of self is slow, careful work. It is also some of the most meaningful work I do.

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Who This Work Is For

I specialize in identity, faith, and the psychological complexity of navigating both. If you are processing harm that happened within a religious context, trying to understand your relationship to faith after a painful experience, or carrying the weight of what it cost you to leave, this is territory I am trained and honored to work in.

Read the full article on Medium →Why Religion Attracts Narcissists — Maria Cassano, Bitchy/Medium

If what I described resonates with what you are navigating, visit my Identity, Faith & Purpose page or schedule a consultation to start a conversation.