2026 WAMFT October Webinar

Religious Trauma in Couples: Clinical Considerations for Systemic Practice

Religious trauma, often overlooked, shapes couple dynamics through conflict, disconnection, and value incongruence. This session offers a systemic framework for assessing how internalized beliefs influence intimacy, power, and roles. Emphasis is placed on belief divergence, pursue-withdraw patterns, and emotional regulation, while distinguishing trauma from normative spiritual struggle and maintaining cultural humility in clinical practice. This 90-minute session begins with a 10-minute introduction using brief slides to establish religious trauma as an often-overlooked influence on couple dynamics and to orient participants to a systemic lens. The next 20 minutes present a structured framework, supported by a handout to guide assessment and case conceptualization. A 25-minute case example follows, integrating brief reflective prompts to support application. The next 20 minutes focus on practical interventions, with a second handout offering clinical prompts and language. The final 15 minutes are reserved for participant questions, discussion, and integration across clinical contexts..

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to use a systemic assessment framework to identify at least three ways religious trauma is influencing couple dynamics, including intimacy, power, and role organization.
2. Participants will be able to use clinical differentiation strategies to distinguish between individual religious trauma symptoms and relational patterns (e.g., pursue–withdraw cycles, belief divergence) in couple presentations.
3. Participants will be able to use at least two targeted systemic interventions to address value incongruence and restore emotional safety in couples impacted by religious trauma, while adapting interventions to align with clients’ spiritual identities, belief systems, and deconstruction processes.

Continuing Education Units

You can receive up to 1.5 CEs for this webinar series. Click Here for information on CEs. Approved for LMFTs, LPCs, and LCSWs in Wisconsin.

Non-Members

Non-members wishing to register for events will need to create a prospective member account. This will provide you with an AAMFT account but you will not have to pay dues. This way you can register for any event with us in the future!

Kimberely Welk, LMFT

Kimberley M. Welk, MSMFT, LMFT, AAMFT Approved Supervisor, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with nearly two decades of experience working with individuals, couples, and families, particularly in high-conflict and transitional periods. She maintains a telehealth-based practice and is licensed in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Idaho, and Hawaii. Her clinical work is grounded in systemic, trauma-informed, and parts-informed approaches, with attention to how relational systems reorganize under stress. She focuses on emotional regulation, relational accountability, and the ways belief systems, identity roles, and internalized authority structures shape patterns of intimacy, power, and conflict within couple dynamics. Her work includes a particular focus on religious trauma and belief-system disruption in couples, an area that is often overlooked in clinical practice and directly informs interventions applicable in everyday clinical practice. She integrates culturally responsive perspectives by attending to the influence of religious, familial, and sociocultural contexts on meaning-making, identity formation, and relational expectations within couple systems.

Kimberley is an AAMFT Approved Supervisor and has held multiple leadership roles within the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), including positions within the School-Based Family Counseling Topical Interest Network and the Wisconsin Division. She previously founded and operated a multidisciplinary outpatient mental health clinic and developed Wisconsin’s first school-based telehealth mental health program. She has presented internationally at the Oxford University Symposium for School-Based Family Counseling.