Purity Culture and Religious Patriarchy (November 2026)

Virtual Training Details

Friday, November 13, 2026 at 2-4pm ET | 12-2pm CT | 11am-1pm PT 

Length: 2 hours

Facilitator: Anna Clark Miller, LPC-S, LMHC-S

Intended Audience: Helping professionals including counselors, psychologists, and social workers.

Description

It takes knowledge, empathy, and self-awareness to support clients who are unpacking experiences in purity culture and religious patriarchy. The unique systemic factors of spiritualized sex and gender-based abuse inflict a complex web of trauma that impacts a survivor's identity, sexuality, relationships, and more. This clinical training will address the ways that both women and men are affected by these experiences and offer useful clinical tools for therapists to meet their clients where they are. Facilitator, Anna Clark Miller, takes a religiously neutral approach that offers both clients and clinicians the freedom to seek healing on their own terms. 

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will gain an understanding of the complex layers of control and abuse involved in purity culture and religious patriarchy.

2. Participants will be equipped with assessment tools for evaluating if and how their clients have been impacted by these systems.

3. Participants will learn practical treatment goals and therapeutic interventions for treating survivors of purity culture and religious patriarchy.

Sources 

Research sources for this presentation can be found here: www.empathyparadigm.com/sources. Specific citations will be included in the slides.

Presenter Qualifications

Anna Clark Miller, LPC-S, LMHC-S, NCC, is a licensed counselor and clinical supervisor practicing in Texas, Washington, and Oregon. She has a masters degree in counseling psychology and has worked in the counseling field since 2015. As a counseling graduate student, she learned about religious trauma and its impacts on people from high-control religious communities, igniting her interest in this specialty. Today she specializes in treating survivors of religious and spiritual trauma and training the mental health professionals who work with them. She is the author of For God's Sake: Recovering From Religious Trauma, which offers a path to healing from high-control religious experiences. Through her company, Empathy Paradigm, Anna manages the Religious Trauma Therapist Directory and a library of other practical resources for religious trauma survivors and mental health professionals. Licensing: LPC Texas #75728, LPC Oregon #C8578, LMHC Washington #LH61328702, NCC #718936.

Continuing Education Credits

This program offers 2.0 continuing education hours for attendees who register with CEUs included.

Empathy Paradigm has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7921. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Empathy Paradigm is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

Additional Information

Please send questions or accommodation requests to info@empathyparadigm.com.