At this point in my life I have spent more time out of organized religion than in it and I can definitively say that I feel a difference in myself and my quality of life.
I have way less guilt and anxiety and self-doubt and self-loathing.
I’m part of a group chat with a few folks I went to bible college with and we all have the same kind of survivor’s guilt feeling about the whole experience. My experience church youth groups and bible college destroyed my self-confidence and self-esteem and filled me with anxiety, self-loathing, and guilt because I never felt like I fully fit in those places.
As the parent now myself I have been processing through a lot of memories and emotions and realize and can see more clearly how absolutely fucked up some parts of my childhood were thanks in some part, but not entirely, to organized religion and how it was practiced around me.
My former default was to just go along with whatever made the other person happy and would avoid conflict. That is what was modeled for me and it was and is not a healthy way to go through life and has not served me well in my life. It has been and remains a conscious effort to recognize and correct the just go along with it mentality and behavior.
It’s a conscious effort to recognize and correct my behavior when I find myself in a situation where I don’t necessarily agree but also don’t want to risk any kind of conflict. Not going along with something I don’t agree with doesn’t mean the only response option is the nuclear option of blowing up and causing harm to the relationship (something else I saw modeled growing up). It has taken a significant amount of conscious effort to unlearn so much of what I learned and saw modeled growing up and I’m still working on it.
When I was a sophomore in high school and had given up and didn’t care about school anymore my mother started going to a new church which meant I had no choice but to go. I was compelled to get involved with the youth group. I soon discovered that the typical “don’t ever leave the house” rule did not apply if it was something church related. Doing church stuff was the ONLY acceptable reason to not be home so I used this new loophole to my advantage to be gone as much as possible.
If there was something going on at the church, I was there. Not out of devotion to the cause but the desire to not be at home.
When the time to go to college was approaching I got it in my head that I had to go to bible college. Again, because that was the only way I saw to get out of the house and completely away from the dysfunction I did it. Once there, I never felt like I truly fit in or even belonged there.
Years later I was finally able to put my finger on why I felt this way: I never actually believed or bought into the religion stuff. Going along with it was necessary for survival in my home situation so it was not really an option to not go along with it.
I knew what to say and how to act but deep down I never fully believed it. It was the only way to not be at home.
Growing up all the adults around me used yelling and shame (in the name of god) to control my behavior and eventually it broke my will to do anything and I gave up.
Looking back I see that I was “tended to” rather than “raised”. I was never taught about how to handle money. I was never allowed to have an after school job. Any mention of possible career paths was met with “you’re called to be a pastor” and never discussed further. Another example of how my future was stolen.
It probably wasn’t the strongest sign that vocational religion wasn’t the thing for me when I had to be reminded that that’s what I was “called” to do with my life. My heart and mind were never really in it.
This post was originally longer but I decided to end it here and save the rest of the original post for a part 2.