Most adults understand why you wouldn’t threaten a child with torture. But add ‘after you die’ and, suddenly, we’re discussing religious education. The child, meanwhile, has been given something terrifying to believe by the people they rely on to tell them what’s real. Evoking fear of hell constitutes emotional abuse, even more so when adults terrorize a child or use damnation to enforce obedience. Emotional maltreatment includes treatment that frightens children or undermines their sense of safety; religious threats belong under that scrutiny [1, 2].
In psychoanalysis, we can examine what happens when you grow up believing that ordinary thoughts and wishes could earn you catastrophic punishment. A warning about hell can become a habit of accusing and frightening yourself, even when nobody is there to deliver it anymore. What you were taught matters, along with how you understood it and who made it believable. For a child, ‘Mom says so’ carries considerably more weight than an argument about whether hell exists.
Recognizing psychological maltreatment
Research on emotional abuse identifies terrorizing alongside rejection, isolation, and exploitation as forms of mentally harmful caregiving. These categories concern what adults do to children and how they use their authority. A child doesn’t need a physical injury for us to take the treatment seriously [1, 2].
Repeatedly telling a child that they face eternal torture unless they comply fits the understanding of terrorizing. How often the warning comes, how graphic it gets, and whether the child can question it all matter. So does what happens when the child becomes frightened: do the adults reassure them, or take the fear as evidence that the lesson is working? Personalized predictions of damnation can make the message especially coercive. ‘You could burn forever’ is a fairly aggressive approach to teaching someone right from wrong. It makes no difference if the adults themself believe these warnings protect the child. They may deliver them calmly, with every intention of being loving, while describing suffering that supposedly never ends. The child still has to live with the fear. A gentle delivery does very little to improve the prospect of eternal torture, and an assessment of harm has to consider the child’s age and dependence on the person describing it.
Emotional abuse can also go unrecognized because familiar parental behavior gets accepted as ordinary discipline. Research examining child-welfare records found substantially more emotional abuse than had been identified at referral, while research with child-maltreatment professionals documented difficulties recognizing and reporting it [1, 3]. These studies don’t measure religious abuse specifically, but they give us reason to question the reassurance that, surely, somebody would have intervened if it were that bad.
How adults teach children to fear
Children learn to fear things through what parents tell them. Nimphy and colleagues [4, 5] found a large average increase in fear after parents gave children threatening information; research with infants also shows that observing a parent’s fearful reactions increases fear and avoidance. You don’t have to experience the danger yourself to become frightened of it, the adults you trust can supply the fear quite effectively. That explains the concern about hell: a parent speaks with certainty about a supernatural danger the child cannot independently inspect, and other trusted adults may confirm every word. From the child’s position, who exactly is available to say this might be nonsense?
We also have research on lasting trauma. Longitudinal research separately links emotional abuse and neglect with adverse psychological and developmental outcomes, while research on childhood verbal abuse finds associations with emotional and behavioral difficulties across the lifespan [6, 7]. Taken together, the findings give us good reason to take sustained threats seriously.
Why the content of the threat matters
We can distinguish doctrine from delivery without excusing the doctrine. When hell is described as endless torture for disbelief or ordinary desires, the content is already frightening. There is no reassuring amount of time after which the punishment ends, no point at which you’ve paid enough. That’s what ‘eternal’ means, and a child who takes the adults is being told they could be tortured forever. And the threat extends to things you haven’t done. If an all-knowing authority judges private doubts or unwanted thoughts, merely having a thought can seem dangerous. Being told that god loves you may do little to resolve this: you’re also being told that he might allow you to suffer without end. It’s quite a demand to expect a child to feel safe with both propositions at once.
Clinical accounts describe parents using religious ideas to intimidate children and justify destructive family interactions [8]. Research measuring spiritual harm identifies threatening images of gods and controlling religious leadership among the experiences associated with that harm [9]. We need to examine both the teaching itself and how adults use it. If it harms children, being part of a religious tradition is no excuse.
A psychoanalytic perspective on fear of damnation
In psychoanalytic terms, fear of hell may become bound to a punitive superego: an internal authority that treats wishes and feelings as offenses deserving punishment. You may therefore have stopped believing in hell years ago and still feel frightened by a sexual thought or a moment of anger. Knowing you reject a belief doesn’t tell us how thoroughly the fear associated with it has been learned. We need to examine how that works in your particular experience.
The caregiver who preaches about the danger may also be the child’s main source of comfort and the person who explains how to secure salvation. Questioning the threat can then feel like risking both salvation and the relationship you depend on. Compliance may preserve that relationship while leaving you terrified. Religious explanations of obedience and sin can also make it harder to identify the adult’s behavior as harmful, as philosophical work on the interpretation of religious abuse helps explain [10].
In psychoanalysis, we examine what damnation has come to mean to you and when you still react as though punishment is imminent. That includes separating responsibility for things you actually do from guilt about thoughts and feelings. We learn to doubt, be skeptic, question. For someone taught that doubt could get them tortured forever, being able to disagree without fearing punishment can take some getting used to.
When you’re terrified as a child, you’re dealing with feelings you don’t yet have much experience managing, and you depend on adults to help you recover. If those adults are the ones telling you about eternal torture, that help may be hard to find. Repeated fear can shape how your developing brain learns to recognize danger and respond to it, with consequences for how you handle later experiences. By adulthood, questioning hell may be considerably easier than changing the reactions you’ve developed around it. Working through those early fears and learning to feel safe can take time. Give yourself patience: you were a child trying to make sense of what trusted adults insisted was true, and you don’t deserve another round of criticism for how thoroughly you learned it.
References
[1] Trickett, P. K., Mennen, F. E., Kim, K., & Sang, J. (2009). Emotional abuse in a sample of multiply maltreated, urban young adolescents: Issues of definition and identification. Child Abuse & Neglect, 33(1), 27-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2008.12.003
[2] Brassard, M. R., Hart, S. N., & Glaser, D. (2020). Psychological maltreatment: An international challenge to children’s safety and well being. Child Abuse & Neglect, 110, 104611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104611
[3] Baker, A. J. L., Brassard, M. R., & Rosenzweig, J. (2021). Psychological maltreatment: Definition and reporting barriers among American professionals in the field of child abuse. Child Abuse & Neglect, 114, 104941. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.104941
[4] Nimphy, C. A., Venetikidi, M., Elzinga, B., van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2023). Parent to offspring fear transmission via modeling in early life: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 26, 751-772. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-023-00448-1
[5] Nimphy, C. A., Mitrou, V., Elzinga, B., van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2024). The role of parental verbal threat information in children’s fear acquisition: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 27, 714-731. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-024-00485-4
[6] Strathearn, L., Giannotti, M., Mills, R., Kisely, S., Najman, J., & Abajobir, A. (2020). Long-term cognitive, psychological, and health outcomes associated with child abuse and neglect. Pediatrics, 146(4), e20200438. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0438
[7] Dube, S. R., Li, E., Fiorini, G., Lin, C., Singh, N., Khamisa, K., McGowan, J., & Fonagy, P. (2023). Childhood verbal abuse as a child maltreatment subtype: A systematic review of the current evidence. Child Abuse & Neglect, 144, 106394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106394
[8] Simonič, B., Rahne Mandelj, T., & Novsak, R. (2013). Religious-related abuse in the family. Journal of Family Violence, 28(4), 339-349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-013-9508-y
[9] Koch, D., & Edstrom, L. (2022). Development of the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 61(2), 476-506. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12792
[10] Panchuk, M. (2020). Distorting concepts, obscured experiences: Hermeneutical injustice in religious trauma and spiritual violence. Hypatia, 35(4), 607-625. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.32
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