A love letter for those deconstructing beliefs and healing religious trauma

With some thoughts on why it's so hard and why it feels like abandonment

I’ve been thinking a lot about some people I met recently who are deconstructing their beliefs and healing religious trauma and I wanted to write them a love letter. But first, a few updates:

1. I’ve decided to delay the start date for Time to do the Brave Thing (I was overly ambitious about my capacity while wrapping up other programs and doing book events). It will now start July 31st. A couple of spots have just opened up, so if you want to be part of a supportive circle doing brave things, join us!

2. We’ve just finished this year’s How to Hold Space Foundation Program and Certification Program and we’ve heard a lot of beautiful things from participants about how meaningful the programs have been for them. One said “It's amazing how many deeper layers there are in this concept. Fascinating. Highly recommended if you need more depth in your coaching practice or for yourself.” Sign up now for the fall program.

3. My Book, Where Tenderness Lives, was mentioned in Forbes magazine as one of 5 Books To Help Entrepreneurs Prioritize Their Mental Wellness. “Unlike many books for entrepreneurs and business leaders, Where Tenderness Lives is remarkably intimate, even raw.”

4. Speaking of my book, I have a few more book events coming up, including a two-day writing workshop.

And now, a love letter for those deconstructing beliefs and healing religious trauma…

At all my book events for Where Tenderness Lives, I read the same passages at the beginning and end, but the middle always changes. Will it be a portion from the chapter about being a mom? Or one about leaving a marriage? Or deconstructing my faith? Maybe healing from the trauma of rape? Or learning to love my fat body? I pick according to who’s in the room and what I think might resonate.

At a recent event, I chose a portion about deconstructing from my evangelical Christian upbringing, including these paragraphs...

Ask anyone raised to believe in hell and they will tell you stories of their fear of being “left behind” (even those of us raised before the popular book and film series of that name existed). I remember numerous occasions when I’d come home from visiting a friend or I’d come in from the barn after doing my chores to find nobody in the house, and the panic would rise as I considered that the rapture might have happened, and I was not among the righteous. That kind of fear, established in childhood before the brain and body are fully developed, takes a long time to leave a person, even years after you stop believing in hell.

After I left the church, I still heard voices from the shore, voices that told me I was sinful and being left behind. While outwardly I was putting my life back together after getting divorced and leaving the church, and my business was beginning to flourish, inwardly, I still struggled with shame, self-doubt, fear, and an ongoing anxiety that I would be rejected by my family and community if I admitted that I no longer saw the church as necessary for me. I avoided conversations about faith and was easily triggered if I sensed a family member judging me for not going to church or for getting divorced.

After reading it, I closed my book and looked around. I didn’t see a lot of resonance on people’s faces, but invited conversation nonetheless. The first person who spoke defended her faith as the most important thing in her life and said that, having grown up in a Southern Baptist home, she couldn’t relate to my experiences and only knew the church to be loving and accepting of her. I assured her that what I’d read was not an indictment of her faith and carried on, reading other pieces, wondering whether I’d misjudged the audience.

As I always do, I ended with a piece on tenderness and then closed my book. It wasn’t a bad event, but it left me feeling slightly deflated.

The event was in a small café attached to a bookstore, and throughout my presentation, a young woman sat at the edge of the room working on a puzzle, not at all engaged in our conversation. While I packed up and participants began to shuffle out of the room, she looked up from her puzzle and caught my eye. “I wanted to thank you,” she said quietly when everyone else had gone. “I was raised in a religious home too and my family has rejected me for choosing to live and believe differently than them. I moved here, from across the country, so that I could figure out who I really am. I’m queer and my family won’t accept that.”

I walked over to her and told her I was glad she was finding a way to be true to herself, and I wished her well. In that moment, I knew my reading of that passage was not for the woman who spoke up in response, or even the other participants who said nothing, but for the young woman at the fringes.

A few days later, I was in the basement of another bookstore and only three people, all of them in their twenties or thirties, showed up for the event. As I read the opening passage, I scrolled through a mental checklist, trying to decide which portions might speak to a younger audience. I didn’t have to think about it for long, though. Quickly it became clear that all three had stories like the young woman with the puzzle. All were deconstructing from evangelical Christianity. At least two (and possibly all three) were queer. One had grown up in a cult and no longer had contact with family. Another, whose body visibly shuddered a few times while I read, had tears in her eyes when she spoke of her father’s rejection of her.

At the end of my book tour, when I boarded the ferry to return to my island home, it was those four people I couldn’t get out of my mind. People who, like me, had been taught their queer bodies were too shameful to be the places in which God could reside. All of them grappling with the trauma that a fear of hell can leave in a body long after a belief in hell is gone. All of them trying to find peace with themselves outside of the safety and belonging of family acceptance.

My mama heart wanted to gather those four people up and shower them with love. I wanted to tell them how beautiful they are, just as they are. I longed to save them from the years of struggle I’d faced and wished that somehow I could replace the harmful messages in their heads with tender ones.

For each of those four people, and anyone else with similar stories, I offer this love letter...

Dear one,

First, let me start with this... your body is a wonder. Your body is just exactly how it’s meant to be. You have nothing to prove, change, or hide.

You’ve been hurt, dear one, by people whose belief systems didn’t allow them to see you fully. You’ve been rejected by people who chose that belief system and their own fear over your tender heart. I am so very sorry that happened to you. You deserved better. You deserved to be celebrated. You deserved to be unconditionally loved. You should have been able to grow up trusting that there was nothing that could sever you from your parents’ love.

It’s okay to feel hurt by that. Please, dear one, don’t gaslight your own feelings. Be honest about how that caused you pain. Be honest about the disappointment, betrayal, and anger. You owe it to yourself to at least admit that it wasn’t fair – that you were short-changed. Let go of the fear that it’s a betrayal of your parents to admit they didn’t know how to love you the way you deserved to be loved.

It’s also okay to admit how much you still long for their love and acceptance (if that still feels true for you). There are few things that matter more to us than the love and acceptance of our families, especially before we’re old enough to make our own ways in the world. I don’t think that longing ever fully leaves us, even though we can learn to thrive without the thing we most crave.

Your religious trauma taught you not to trust yourself and to outsource your authority. It taught you that your life was in the hands of an unseeable force, and that you were only safe if you obeyed the rules that someone told you had come from that unseeable force. It taught you to doubt your own instincts, to distrust your own body, and to deny yourself pleasure.

As Alexandra Stein wrote, religious trauma comes, at least in part, because your source of security and your source of fear were one and the same. Your family of origin and religion of origin taught you about a loving God, but it was a God who also threatened to condemn you to hell. That kind of belief can put a person’s nervous system into a state of constant hyper-alertness. It’s the same as someone who’s grown up with a parent who cuddles them one moment and harms them the next and they have to stay vigilant because they don’t know when things will switch. With an unpredictable authority figure, the nervous system can never fully settle or learn to trust.

When love and fear live in the same place, it’s hard to know a true and embodied feeling of home. There’s a good chance, in fact, that you struggle more than most people do to feel truly embodied, because you never learned to experience your body as beautiful, trustworthy, and a source of wisdom. And there’s a good chance you don’t entirely know what “home” means, because you didn’t grow up with one that gave you the unconditional safety and belonging you needed. I’m so sorry that’s true for you.

If you’ll stay with me for a moment, I want to offer you something that might help you better understand what you’re struggling with, and – if you’re open to expanding that understanding – it might also help you see the people who raised and helped shape you a little differently. What I’m about to share is true for you, and it’s true for them too.

It begins with your primary needs. At the core of all your needs – what you were born with – are three things:

• safety (both physical and psychological),

• belonging (within family, community, nature, and, in your case, with God), and

• identity (a sense of purpose, a source of dignity, and a unique expression of yourself).

When those three needs are met (and the circles of the Venn diagram overlap), you feel grounded and accepted, have higher cognitive functioning, make wiser decisions, and are better able to meet other people’s needs and make meaningful contributions to your community. Unfortunately, though, many of us (especially those in high-control religions) grew up in homes where one or more of those needs were almost constantly under threat. Safety was under threat whenever you feared the punishment of a wrathful God (and/or parent), belonging was under threat whenever you deviated from the acceptable belief system, and identity was under threat whenever who you were or what gave you purpose didn’t line up with what was defined as “godly”.

You prioritize whichever need is the most under threat and deprioritize the others. When all three are under threat simultaneously, though, you’re left with a dilemma because you can’t prioritize them all at once, especially when one might jeopardize another. That’s when safety and belonging demand a higher priority and identity is shuffled to the back of the line. Especially when identity might jeopardize safety and belonging (i.e. if you’re queer or have a different belief system), you learn to hide it. Often you become severed from your own identity in order to adopt a false identity that helps ensure you have access to safety and belonging. For some of us, that false identity becomes such a well-practiced thing that we don’t really know who we are until something wakes us up far into adulthood. (I, for example, only came out as queer after a 22-year heteronormative marriage.)

If access to safety and belonging requires a severing from identity, though, that safety and belonging are not genuine. A false identity can only ever ensure false, fickle, and temporary safety and belonging. True safety and belonging wouldn’t vanish like a mirage the moment true identity showed up.

You know how sometimes, when you’re driving, it looks like there’s a shimmering lake ahead of you on the road, but you can never get to it because it’s just a mirage? That’s how a lot of us spent our young lives – always in search of the safety and belonging that we could never quite reach.

When you were a child, you didn’t know it was a mirage, and you had no other place to turn than your family of origin and community of origin, so you did whatever you could to survive. Those survival skills became the patterns that shaped the rest of your life. They’re hard to unlearn when you become an adult, because there’s still a scared little child in you insisting everything must be done to get to that mirage. Whenever you’re triggered, you revert back to that scared little child and behave as that child would to try to get back to safety and belonging.

Here's the thing... each of the people who raised and shaped you also has a scared little child in them and they’re each on a quest for their own mirage. When you become a parent (and/or spiritual leader), it doesn’t mean that scared little child in you grows up. Unless you work to heal the old trauma, in fact, the scared little child can become even more activated because now they’re responsible for the life of another little child and they’re afraid if they screw up that responsibility, EVERYONE will lose their safety and belonging. If hell is part of their belief system, they’re going to do everything they can to keep you (and themselves) from going there.

Another concept that might be helpful in understanding this is cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we feel when we try to hold two seemingly opposing thoughts or beliefs at the same time. If you’ve done something harmful to another person, for example, it’s hard to hold “I am a good person” with “I hurt someone” simultaneously. The cognitive dissonance gets so uncomfortable that you want to banish the thought that threatens your safety and belonging the most (i.e. “I hurt someone”) and justify and bolster the one that ensures your safety and belonging (i.e. “I am a good person”). You employ your confirmation bias to look for all the evidence that you are a good person and look for excuses why you needed to do the hurtful thing (i.e. I was just looking out for their best interests, they deserved it, etc.). You can also shut down and dissociate from any guilt over the harm caused.

In your case, a religious parent or leader who rejected you for being queer was probably trying to hold “queer people are condemned to hell” alongside “my child is queer” and that caused cognitive dissonance and threatened the sense of safety and belonging they thought was available to them from God. It’s especially challenging when one of those opposing things is a belief that’s been held for a very long time and a disruption of it can cause a person’s identity to feel threatened (i.e. “I am a good Christian who will end up in heaven”). Because they weren’t aware that the scared little child in them was running the show, and they hadn’t done enough trauma healing work to sit with the discomfort of those two opposing thoughts, they reacted from their fear and had to justify and bolster the belief that they thought would give them the most safety and belonging (i.e. queer people are condemned to hell) and make excuses for and/or dissociate from the harm they caused you as a result.

As Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explain in Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), when two people, who might have similar beliefs at the beginning, each seek to lessen the discomfort of cognitive dissonance by justifying and bolstering the belief they think will offer them the most safety and belonging, they can find themselves sliding down opposite sides of the justification triangle, ending up farther and farther away from each other with less and less ability to see the other’s perspective.

Dear one, I give you this information not because it’s your job to help your parent or spiritual leader work through their stuff, but because I want to lighten the load of shame and abandonment you feel over having been rejected by people who should have loved you unconditionally. If they haven’t done any work on themselves and aren’t willing to do so, there’s a good chance there’s little you can say that will change them and turn them into the source of safety and belonging you need.

Your job, now, is not to change them or even to fix the disconnection in the relationship. Your job is to chip away at the shame, heal the trauma, and learn to love yourself in the way you deserve to be loved. As you heal, I encourage you to learn what it means to re-parent yourself, to give yourself whatever you wish you’d received. (Bethany Webster’s book Discovering the Inner Mother might be a place to start. My book, Where Tenderness Lives, might also help.) As you do so, you will learn that there is a source of safety and belonging deep inside you – a safety and belonging that holds your true identity as sacred – and it can never be taken from you. (If you feel okay about stripping away the trappings of religion and getting down to its essence, you might even say it is “god in you”.) Trust me when I say that you can learn to experience your own body as the safe and loving home you’ve always longed for.

As you do this work to honour and heal that scared little child in you, you will find the kind of people who can be trusted not to threaten your safety and belonging when the real you is fully present. If it matters to you, you can find a version of God that’s about love rather than shame or fear. It starts by daring to show up in bookstore basements where you can be anonymous at first and then begin to find the people with whom you can reveal your beautiful realness.

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Note: I am working on a series of posts and videos in which I’ll go into more depth about the Core Needs Triad (safety, belonging, identity) and will make those available to paid subscribers on Substack. Subscribe (or upgrade) if you don’t want to miss them.

If you know anyone else who’s deconstructing beliefs and healing from religious trauma, please share this post with them.