Affective Religious Reenactment: A Psychodynamic Model of Compulsive Religious Ritual as Traumatic Reenactment and Dissociative Avoidance

Something is happening at religious altars that existing frameworks have not identified or named. A person arrives at church with weeks of accumulated feelings, often turbulent affects, and without understanding what they feel. They engage with a religious ritual that allows the strong emotions to erupt, often including: weeping, screaming, strong bodily movements, speaking in tongues (glossolalia), the felt presence of the divine. The ritual transforms them and their mood changes, experiencing what they often describe as having had their “mourning turned into dancing.” However, within days, the distress returns. The uncomfortable feelings are back and the family absorbs costs that go unacknowledged. The religious community celebrates what it reads as spiritual depth, and the wound that generated the flooding in the first place is never touched. This dissertation proposes Affective Religious Reenactment (ARR) as the theoretical construct that names this pattern. ARR describes compulsive religious ritual behavior that unconsciously reenacts unresolved early trauma, functioning as a somatic pressure release valve that discharges affective energy while dissociating the individual from the wound that produces it. The mechanism is unconscious, not avoidance of a known wound, but instead a reenactment of one the person does not know exists. This is ARR's sharpest distinction from spiritual bypassing and the feature that explains its profound treatment resistance. Drawing on somatic trauma theory (Janet, 1889; van der Kolk, 1994, 2014), object relations and god representation (Klein, 1946; Fairbairn, 1952; Winnicott, 1958; Rizzuto, 1979; Kirkpatrick, 1992, 2005), and behavioral addiction frameworks (Shaffer, 2004; Khantzian, 1985), ARR is defined by five converging features: compulsive engagement driven by affective flooding; somatic discharge without psychological integration; unconscious reenactment of the traumatic object relationship; the theological frame functioning as a dissociative mechanism; and measurable maladaptivity in relational and self-care functioning. The surrounding religious community is analyzed as a co-dependent system with its own structural investment in the cycle's continuation. Operational criteria for distinguishing ARR from healthy devout practice are proposed, along with a clinician-administered assessment strategy, a longitudinal outcome framework, and a primary empirical research agenda. ARR makes no claim about the theological reality of the experiences it describes. It claims only that a specific pattern, when present, produces measurable harm, and that naming it makes that harm possible to address. Keywords: affective religious reenactment, trauma reenactment, compulsive religious behavior, object relations, god representation, spiritual bypassing, dissociation, affect dysregulation, behavioral addiction, religious addiction, religious trauma, psychology of religion