Threatening Children With Divine Separation

Humans are intensely social animals. Our dependence on one another is part of our biology, and separation from someone we are attached to can produce agonizing distress. In affective science, WE call the neural emotional system involved PANIC/GRIEF: the system associated with the pain of separation and loss, and with the urgent protest that motivates us to seek contact again. It helps keep young mammals close to their caregivers and adult mammals cooperating. Crying and desperately trying to reconnect are expressions of a need on which our survival depended in the evolutionary past (Panksepp & Watt, 2011).

Children face that distress with far fewer resources than adults. They cannot arrange their own care, have little experience recovering from overwhelming feelings, and depend on caregivers to help them regulate those feelings while the relevant brain systems are still developing. Research with children shows that a mother’s presence and cues associated with her can reduce emotional reactivity and support regulation (Gee et al., 2014). The person a frightened child needs is also the person whose disappearance they may be terrified of. That dependence makes threatened separation an especially severe experience.

Now teach that child that a divine event could suddenly separate them from the people they love and depend on. They may be taken away, or someone they depend on may be taken from them. The threat concerns losing both the relationship and the person who helps them cope when they are frightened. From this developmental perspective, terrifying a child with sudden separation exploits an existing biological vulnerability. The event doesn’t have to happen for the distress to be real. An adult’s account of what could happen can be enough to make the child afraid.

This is the concern with fear-based teaching about sudden extraction, gathering, or separation: the Rapture or Catching Away; the Translation of the Saints; the Gentle Wind or Breath of the Believers; Raigō or the Welcoming Descent; and the Harvest or Evacuation. The question here is how these beliefs are used with children. When a caregiver or religious authority uses them to frighten, threaten, isolate, or control a child in developmentally harmful ways, that is child abuse. The theological vocabulary doesn’t make the child’s dependence any less exploitable.

When separation becomes a means of control

Emotional abuse is defined as frightening, threatening, belittling, or otherwise hostile treatment by a trusted adult that causes actual or potential harm to a child’s development or dignity (Norman et al., 2012; Fortier et al., 2019; Matsumoto et al., 2021). Fear-based teaching about rapture or separation fits that definition when a caregiver repeatedly uses it to threaten or frighten a child, especially alongside humiliation, isolation, or coercion. Rigid threats about what will happen if the child fails to comply make the controlling function particularly explicit (Norman et al., 2012; Xiao et al., 2021; Fortier et al., 2019).

Some theological ideas are inherently abusive because they create fear, worthlessness, and alienation in children. Parents can use religious ideas to intimidate and control, while the content of the teaching itself can leave a child frightened, lonely, and convinced they are worth less than others (Capps, 1996; Simonič et al., 2013). If you were taught that separation from the people you needed depended on your obedience, the adults had made a basic need for connection conditional on doing as you were told. That’s a brutal way to obtain cooperation.

A single age-appropriate discussion of a religious belief is not necessarily abuse. The threshold at issue here is repeated frightening that harms development, within a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power. The child cannot realistically consent to the treatment, leave the relationship, or independently evaluate the claim (Fortier et al., 2019; Norman et al., 2012; Saide & Richert, 2020). The adult can insist the danger is real, impose the conditions for avoiding it, and control where the child can turn for another explanation. The child has very little power to contest any of it.

The fear does not require the event

Research on parental verbal threats identifies a direct route by which adults can teach children to fear. Threatening information from parents produces large effects on children’s fear, and fear learning has been observed across ages ranging from 30 months to 18 years (Nimphy et al., 2024). Children can acquire strong fears from words alone. When adults repeatedly use those messages to cause substantial distress, impairment, or coercive control, the practice fits established definitions of emotional abuse (Nimphy et al., 2024; Xiao et al., 2021). Nobody has to disappear for a child to become terrified of being separated from them.

The consequences can extend well beyond the occasion on which the warning was given. Maltreatment heightens vigilance for danger and sensitivity to stress, leaving the child more alert to possible threats (Jaffee, 2017; Scott et al., 2023). Psychological maltreatment also predicts broad cognitive and social harm (Strathearn et al., 2020; Dube et al., 2023). The developmental burden includes what happens as a child grows up trying to manage the fear, alongside everything else they are supposed to be learning. Repeatedly frightening them has consequences for far more than their opinion of a religious story.

Emotional abuse is serious abuse

Emotional maltreatment is a recognized category of abuse with lasting mental health consequences (Norman et al., 2012; Bottoms et al., 1995, 2015). Emotional abuse shows particularly strong associations with depression and anxiety (Humphreys et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2019; Xiao et al., 2021). Emotional abuse and neglect are also associated with PTSD-related symptoms and suicidality, poorer self-esteem, difficulties regulating emotion, and social difficulties. These associations are often as strong as, or stronger than, those found for some more readily recognized forms of abuse (Humphreys et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2022; Gruhn & Compas, 2020). There is nothing minor about that list.

Research also supports a causal contribution of maltreatment to later mental health problems (Baldwin et al., 2023). That strengthens the case that these experiences contribute to the harm, rather than merely occurring in families where other problems happen to exist. Threatening and frightening treatment is well defined as emotional abuse, and its links with depression, anxiety, suicidality, and impaired self-esteem and emotion regulation are consistently documented (Norman et al., 2012; Gardner et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2022; Gruhn & Compas, 2020). Describing the treatment as religious instruction doesn’t change what the adult is doing to the child.

Religious authority and the betrayal of trust

Documented cases show religion being used to justify abuse, including attempts to rid children of supposed evil and intimidation by people in positions of authority. Religious and spiritual abuse can produce shame and anxiety, grief, emotional and spiritual harm, and a rupture of trust (Bottoms et al., 2015; Perry, 2024). Accounts of clergy abuse and religion-related family violence likewise identify fear, coercion, betrayal of trust, and distortion of the child’s relationship with a god as central mechanisms (Sutton-Adams, 2023; Durkin et al., 2025; Hollier et al., 2022). The trusted adult’s religious authority becomes part of how the harm is inflicted.

The risk is greater when the practice involves terrorizing, chronic threat, or coercive control than when a belief is taught without demonstrated harm (Perry, 2024; Dhirachaikulpanich et al., 2025; Elzamzamy et al., 2024). The decisive issue is whether adults induce fear in developmentally vulnerable children in ways that predict harm or function as intimidation (Nimphy et al., 2024; Simonič et al., 2013). An adult who uses the prospect of sudden separation to secure obedience is using the child’s need for other people against them. The child has to live with the consequences of that fear long after the adult has finished talking.

Working with the fear in psychoanalysis

In psychoanalysis, we work with what you were taught to expect and how that expectation still affects you. We talk about what the separation was supposed to involve, who you feared losing, and what you believed you had to do to prevent it. As you describe those experiences and the feelings attached to them, we can begin to understand how the fear shaped your responses. We also look at what happens in your relationships now: whether distance feels dangerous, for example, or whether disagreeing with someone brings an expectation that they will leave.

We work on these fears together. We examine how you learned to manage the fear, what those responses once achieved, and why they may persist after the religious belief has gone. Feelings that were difficult or forbidden to express are spoken about and understood, including anger toward the people who frightened you. Through that sustained work, the expectation of sudden loss becomes less automatic and has less influence over how you relate to others. The point is to help you form and maintain close relationships without having to keep earning reassurance that you won’t be abandoned.

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