Religion and spirituality can be healthy and positive aspects to people's lives. For some, religion and spirituality can provide hope, meaning, comfort, community, and a sense of connection with self, others, and a Higher Power. For others, religion and spirituality may have been sources of great pain, shame, fear, and even a sense of disconnection from self, others, and a Higher Power.
Some people find fulfillment being engaged in a religion and spiritual practice throughout their lifetime. For others, it may be fulfilling for them to participate in a religion or spiritual practice for seasons in their life. Some may find their religious or spiritual ideas, beliefs, and practices change and unfold in new, unexpected ways throughout their lifetime. And some may find they are most at home within themselves when they walk away from religion or spirituality completely. Each person has their own life experiences. It's a personal thing for someone to discern how and if religion or spirituality plays a valuable role in their life.
For those who have been involved in high control religion and left or who have stayed but started to re-evaluate your beliefs, you may have started a process some refer to as deconstructing your faith. When you deconstruct your faith, you mindfully explore the ideas, beliefs, and systems that structure the high control religion you've been a a part of. As part of this process you consider other ways of thinking, believing, and moving through the world outside of your religious group's accepted ways of thinking, believing, and living.
This can be an extensive and at times emotionally and even relationally painful process. While there are often challenging aspects to deconstructing your faith, many also experience increased feelings of freedom, authenticity, and self-acceptance. When you deconstruct your faith you will likely examine areas of your life that have been directed through messages received through individual guidance from religious leaders and other religious group participants as well as in broader settings like your religious group's weekly meetings, classes, or membership process.
It can be a scary thing to deconstruct your faith and look at your religious background from a different perspective. There can be a great deal of nuance to your experience. While your experiences in your religious background may share many similarities with others' experiences from a shared or adjacent religious background, your personal experiences are still uniquely your own. There may be aspects to deconstructing your faith that look different from someone else's faith deconstruction.
There is no one way to deconstruct your faith. The idea that there isn't a standard process to deconstruct your faith may feel unsettling for you after spending time in a high control religious system that has many rules and group expectations for how you think, believe, and act. Part of this process can include learning to build trust with yourself as you practice critical thinking skills and build a stronger sense of self-awareness. As you further develop your self-awareness you may benefit from taking time to do the work of discovering your personal values separate from your learned beliefs formed during your time in a high control religion. When you build the awareness needed to identify your personal values, you can use your values to help guide you through building the life that best aligns with your authentic and embodied self.
It's natural and common to feel fear, anxiety, and depressed mood while deconstructing your faith. It can feel disorienting to consider the ideas, beliefs, and systems you've been taught may have been unhelpful at best. At worst, personal experiences in these environments can create varying degrees of harm to self and others.
High control religions often teach that your emotions, mind, and heart can be dangerous to you and others. You may have been taught to become detached from your body, feelings, and intuition. It is common for high control religions to teach participants that people are deeply flawed and in desperate need of being saved from themselves. When moving through life with this mindset, not only can people experience lower self-esteem, they can also be deeply effected by the debilitating belief that they cannot trust their judgment.
When stepping outside of a high control religion, it can take time to build a healthier relationship with your self. It can be a challenging process to unlearn beliefs that favor dismissing your inner voice, gut instincts, and your emotional and physical responses to experiences in your life. When you feel like you cannot trust your judgment, you may feel like you cannot trust your thinking. When you feel like you cannot trust your thinking, it's normal to look to someone else's thinking to trust. This is where indoctrination in high control religions can flourish. When you feel like you can't depend on your own mind, it's easy to accept everything you're taught by others in positions of authority - regardless of how damaging those messages may have been.
As you move through your process of deconstructing your faith, it is common to experience feelings of loneliness, isolation, and loss. You may feel like you don't have someone to talk to who has the capacity to listen to what you're saying and hold space for you to sit in all of the discomfort that can come with deconstructing your faith. It can be helpful for you to find a counselor who can create this kind of space for you to process through your experiences in high control religion. A counselor who has experience helping clients to recover from religious trauma can help you navigate the challenging yet empowering process of deconstructing your faith.
Deconstructing your faith doesn’t mean you have to leave religion or spiritual practices altogether. Though, it can mean that for you, and that’s okay. It can also mean you have an opportunity to cultivate a deeper sense of spiritual and bodily autonomy while also nurturing you own self- growth and integration of self. This doesn’t have to simply mark the end of how you’ve been doing things in the context of the high control religious system you’re re-evaluating. It can be the fertile ground for growing new ways of living your life in better alignment with ideas, beliefs, and systems that are guided by your personal values.
Whatever deconstructing your faith looks like for you, you don't have to do this alone. If you're curious to learn more about what it looks like to work with me to help you recover from religious trauma and receive support while deconstructing your faith, take a look on my Religious Trauma Counseling Information Page to get an idea of some of the work we can do together.
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