This is a quote from Hillary L. McBride who is working on a project about spiritual trauma:

“There are very real psychophysiological consequences of living in systems that use fear to motivate, coerce, and control, but tell the people within those systems that their fear is bad, dangerous, and can’t be trusted.

Most often, the healthy normal fear that is part of being human gets exasperated. Because the fear itself has become threatening, it goes unprocessed or is repressed, turns into anxiety, hyper-vigilance in the mind and body, and strategies to cap it develop. People are then blamed, shamed, or in some cases praised for these strategies, and the cycle continues.”