So I think I'll start here with a personal story. I've mentioned another video that my father was a devout Catholic, but for him, religion was more for his image rather than being a devout follower of Jesus. And think about that in terms of a psychological issue. How things look versus an authentic connection with something like a higher power.
And it fell right in line with this narcissism. It was kind of like a game that he played. And sadly, you know, going to church was a way for him to feel superior to others. He kept score about it with us. And he, even privately, he would kind of do that with strangers. And I believe this came from his own trauma, his own upbringing, where somewhere early for him, he went into competition with everybody.
And as young children, we were taken to church and looking back, both of my parents were sort of checking off boxes by being there, rather than cultivating a sense of community and spiritual growth. There was really attending, but there was really no teaching for my mother. Catholicism was a shame-based thing that you could use to kind of get outta trouble and go right back into the fold when you left.
And maybe the same was true for my father, and I believe church for them was. Was based upon kind of covering up their addictive behaviors and gradually as a family, one our once a week church life died off as we got older, and as my family got more chaotic with the parental alcoholism. So however, like my father's behavior.
Around religion wrecked curiosity about it since he kind of made it slimy. And I think some kids could see the hypocrisy in the game that adults will play around religion. And I would later, you know, uh, find my own alternative spiritual path in my late teens and my early twenties, but also gave me this aversion to organize religion.
And that might be the whole point to this video. How the human experience around a religious or spiritual path gets wrecked by what systems and individuals model about spirituality in their example. So religious abuse, as I'm outlining in this video, isn't really a big part of my story. It wasn't the main theme.
It was more about poor religious modeling from my own parents. And the clients that I've had recovering from religious abuse or cult-like experiences came from families who were totally immersed in a fundamental system. They experienced abuse from both their nuclear family and from the fundamental system that the family put them in.
Think of that double impact on abuse on a child's development. And we can look at religious abuse kind of on a spectrum. Like most things in my video spectrum of like severity, how I grew up was more nuclear family system trauma. There was still aspects of religious abuse given how my father treated us and modeled spirituality for us.
But this video is gonna be geared for those who had nuclear families and who, who spent significant time in the daily immersement. In the fundamentalist system, but you can still have significant spiritual abuse without that secondary system just in the nuclear family, if the religion was weaponized or even a cult-like experience was weaponized by the parent.
We're even seeing that today in the political climate in the US with political cults. So I'm not comparing severities of trauma here. I think that that's kind of goofy as survivors. We all have our own wounding, and what I'm saying is that for religious trauma, there are two systems going on of abuse, usually the nuclear and the fundamentalist.
So let's talk about a little bit about systems of religious abuse. So I'm not gonna be able to cover all the dynamics of this kind of abuse, and I'm kind of combining a brief overview of both cults and religious organizations, uh, discussing more on their similarities rather than their differences. And I'm not an expert in theology, religious fundamentalism, or cults.
My expertise is in childhood trauma, and this video focuses on that in context of growing up in fundamentalism. And I'm not saying in any way, shape, or form that every single spiritual group or religious organization is abusive or toxic. That'd be silly. So keep paying attention to when I use the word fundamental and like a rigid adherence.
To the doctrine. So why I mentioned my father earlier is that I, again, I didn't have that experience of being like a hostage in a secondary toxic system. We had plenty of what we had going on at home. That was enough. So I had my own abuse at home. And I did my best to hide it from the community by trying to seem as normal as I could.
But I didn't go from an abuse at home into like an off and isolated organization, like a fundamentalist youth group or something like that. So here I'd like to somewhat define what I mean by fundamentalist religious experience or a cult-like experience or a cult-like community. Uh, what makes it religious abuse or a cult?
Like experience if it looks like that when children are forced to any of the following. One is living 24 7 in a lifestyle experience in the fundamentalist system where every day is focused on it. Another is forced to live in a black and white, rigid, fundamental adherence to scripture. Theology or dogma like.
Good people and bad people. The churches or the cult is right, and everyone else is lost and either dangerous and though they need to now buy into that. So another is being forced to promote the said cult or religion with the peers or your people in your community. Like had a client who had to make cold calls to strangers about being saved because they were taught that those people needed to be saved.
Or things like handing out materials in public or showing up to people's houses or. Preaching as a child. This is different if adults were doing that, but when children are forced to do it, that's what I mean. Being convinced that one must give themselves entirely up to the organization with giving up things, everything from some of your income, your time, your way of parenting, your own children, even your monogamy with your own spouse.
In some extreme cases, as we saw with the Branch Davidians and David Koresh in the nineties. Another is being forced to be social with people you wouldn't otherwise be. And the pointed internal versus external shame for not liking someone or not liking the group, like it's very gaslighting like this one is about not having choice.
You are bad for not being a hundred percent on board with the organization, and we'll come back to this when we talk about damage to intuition. In other words, when you're forced to have religious ideas being weaponized to you and also encouraged to use. Religious ideas weaponized against others. Like, um, churches might humiliate members for their humanity as a way to set an example for others, or you'll end up in hell if you don't subscribe to this one way of living or even questioning the system or the rules, makes you to be a lost member who needs to be, you know, straightened out.
Another example is when children are forced to believe harmless things are. Extremely taboo and dangerous, like certain types of popular music or media or television, like watching Star Wars or watching the Golden Girls as sinful and sexuality or sexual expression as sinful. So those are some of the things that are forced onto children in religious abuse or caught like experiences.
Now I'd like to give some definitions of the. Terms I'm using around religious abuse. One is fundamentalism. This is the strict adherence to religious scripture or dogma. We can see that in extremist western monotheistic religions, but we can also see that fundamentalism in adherence in say, Eastern or holistic cults or spiritual organizations, whether the rules.
Are literal, like you are going to hell for eating meat on a certain day, or not wearing a full length skirt, or you're not using the right flour essence before the Equinox. Things get very rigid and dogmatic, and these can be weaponized and become abusive. Rigid rules are the parameters that members are controlled within.
So that's fundamentalism. So for cults is a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange and sinister. Um, a misplaced and excessive admiration for a particular person or thing in a, like a cult of personality surrounding the leaders.
We can see this in the. Fascist political movements. You'll see this kind of stuck take place in a cult like that. And it's hard to separate fundamentalist religious systems from a cult experience because there is often a figurehead or a leader contributing to that cult of personality, phenomenon of cult behaviors.
So here I'd like to define religious abuse can often be defined as. Using scripture or dogma to control another's life or choices, whether to have kids whom to marry, whom to interact with. Controlling some financial contributions to the church, controlling how one should feel and act, and how you should dress and where to work.
Another is, like I mentioned, humiliating members who ask questions, uh, or potentially stray in their questioning. If you don't take the vague answers to heart and stop asking questions, you're the problem and you need to be punished. Cultivating a toxic culture that is not unlike makes me think of like the paranoia and betrayal system of extreme communist Russia, where where family members might have even snitched each other out to the leaders from just hearsay.
Another piece of religious abuse is being separated from your outside group to just the membership. I've had many clients who wanted to see a therapist while growing up, um, in the religious abuse, but they were just given church counselors for the distrust of the outside world, or no counselors. Um, there's a hard one.
The sexual abuse and grooming that happens in some religious abuse situations. There is often a lack of protection from the nuclear family. Um, here if the parents are usually. The loyal disciples of the organization or fundamentalist system. Um, another is sharing private in info or coercion or manipulation, making an example out of you during gatherings.
Like I mentioned, you're singled out because someone saw you in the mall. Doing mall things. Um, there is usually a theme also in, in religious abuse about male dominated hierarchy in a sexual preoccupation with purity culture where females are conditioned to be pure and submissive, overly compliant. This is not unlike the setup of domestic violence dynamics where females are scrutinized, um, because it's believed that they're untrustworthy by nature.
And lastly, a, a big part of religious abuse is emotional abuse and gaslighting. Um, things like using scripture to spin evidence that you're not all in it enough, or you've been taken over by evil forces to the extent that even you are confused if you actually did have the flu, um, and didn't attend a gathering because of that.
Or were you taken over by an evil spirit because you didn't pray enough or give enough or whatever. A little bit on fundamentalism and cults. You could see how they're hard to actually suss out. Here are some examples of fundamentalist systems. Again, these would be religious cults or cults groups of people or churches who have an unwavering devotion and attachment to a set of principles, scriptures, dogma, deities, or personalities.
And this is often paired with a group. Think around who was in and who was out of that system. Some examples of fundamentalist organizations, and I'm giving a US-centric, an extremely brief list here. The topic is very vast. There are organizations in the US such as Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses, evangelical Extremism, which is actually on the rise.
Cults like the Branch Davidians, the KKK, the Westboro Baptist Church. Past and present. There was the People's Temple, which is the Jim Jones, uh, massacre of the late seventies. There's also Mormonism. Which can be seen as a cult or seen as religiously abusive. So that's some of the examples. Cults in extremely religious groups can offshoot.
They usually do offshoot from a major religious idea like Judaism. Then there's Zionism, the same with Islam or Bud or Buddhism, cults, um. You can name the general umbrella of the religious idea and there will be sex that pop up underneath that, that take religion to an isolating and extreme place. And again, I wanna make it clear in this video, I'm not saying all these religions are abusive or toxic.
What makes these religions abusive is the fundamentalist quality in the daily immersement and control that happens in some of them. There's also a theme in human history of religion splitting into new groups due to disagreements or lineage, disagreements or political reasons, um, about devotion or assimilating more into the society that the religion is rooted in.
This makes me think of the Sunni and Shia split in Islam or King Henry vii, how he broke with Rome over the issue around divorce or supremacy. That's what I mean about offshoots. There seems to be a part of human nature to create a new group out of something that's not either hardcore enough or works for them enough where they need to get people to really buy in and leave.
So the examples I gave are splits. Those have to do more with people rather than the religious message itself, I think. And in religious abuse, there's often a psychological pathology in the leadership that makes kind of members. Be vulnerable to that kind of control and manipulation due to their own childhood trauma or their own narcissistic abuse.
And I also need to mention the communal cults that sprang up in the 1950s and sixties through today that tend to involve apocalyptical prophecies, sexual abuse, forced polygamy, drug use. The Manson family comes to mind where the cult leader convinced followers that he was the incarnation of Jesus.
There tends to be a theme there that was true with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and these leaderships, they leadership tends to involve like a charismatic, pathological leader, um, that need, they need lost folks for kind of capital in the organization. Like they're nothing without people who are malleable, which is scary.
Um, with all of these, I find that the cult's use of conspiracy theories or twisting reality can encourage horrific cross boundaries between adults and children. And growing up in the nineties, we saw a televised cult compound raid in Texas of the Branch Davidians at Waco. And that was the first time I really heard of such things, another leader selling to followers, that they were the new Messiah and it was God's will to take the wives of men and groom children into sexual abuse.
Manson and Koresh were similar in the way that they believed that they were the son of God in a very grandiose way and were sexual predators who condoned and encouraged violence on the vulnerable. And then parents are wrapped up in that. So these are not the only examples of cult leaders. By the way, these are very extreme examples that I'm giving.
There's plenty of small evangelical extremists in this country. Pastors doing somewhat similar things. In their organizations, and you don't have to be raised by a Branch Davidian to experience religious abuse. It comes in all shapes and sizes. So what does the day to day look like? If you're growing up in this, coming back to the idea of a double system of the nuclear family and the fundamentalist structure.
If you grew up in religious abuse, fundamentalism, or a cult, um, you were experiencing, again, two toxic systems in context of those systems. Here are issues clients have. Brought up from their childhood, from living in both of those systems. One is extreme anxiety around rule following and making any missteps.
Mistakes have huge consequences, and the bar is impossibly high. The standards are, are really a setup to fail of, of being godlike or something like that. There's also, this is a really hard one, abandonment and rejection of parents. If bringing up the abuse that happens in a church and the parents respond with like, well, what did you do?
It's your fault. The pastor singled you out. I don't believe you, and you're making that up. I don't believe that they touched you. Really betraying. From the loyalty piece, I've had clients refuse medical care because their parents took the advice of leaders who said that God would heal the child once the child accepted God more.
Um, just horrific stuff. Parents defaulting to the fundamentalist perpetrators, giving up their autonomy as parents, kind of selling their children out in that way to be parented or disciplined by others. Um. Another is having to really buy into the culture like toxic, toxic positivity. Like this is so great that I'm part of this li really limiting experience.
Um, they may have been compelled to tell on their friends about things that they were doing against the church or outside of the church. Buying into that culture stuff. Another is the terror of being told that outside friends are going to hell if they weren't saved, and it's up to you to save them. And I've had clients that had nightmares as children about what was gonna happen to their good friend in the first grade if they weren't saved.
Um, another is loss of the outside world, not getting the cartoons that kids might talk about in school. If you're, if you're still allowed to go to a pelvis school or something like that, or pop culture references and feeling left out of those things because they were deemed as evil, you'd be surprised actually at how many religious abuse survivors don't understand most of our memes because they've never had the, the original context to, to find the meme funny.
It's a very isolating experience. Um, that, and you might have to kind of pretend to get it. It's like the, the world of almost like the, if the religious abuse is almost like living in the 1890s America and, and then the, everyone's sort of where we're at now. It's like you have this. Overwhelming thing of catch up.
Another piece to this is seeing siblings being abused by the system and having no resources or power to get help from the parents. Parents choosing the organization over the children not being believed. So as a childhood trauma therapist, I think. The, the, really, the heart bridge, there's so much, but the, the heartbreaking thing here is how the nuclear family parent betrays the child by engaging and defaulting towards the abusive system.
To get a visual on the two systems that I keep talking about here is a very basic family tree. Let's first think about the family system, the nuclear family system on its own outside of the fundamentalist system. Here is the aggressor, codependent family system. This is a type of family from my seven types of toxic family systems.
It's a video I did, I'll put the link in the description of this video. We have an aggressive abusive parent and a codependent unprotective parent or what is also maybe known as the safer parent at times. Um, this is a very common presentation in toxic family systems or dynamics. In this case, a mother is the aggressor.
Who is emotionally and physically abusive to three children. There are two girls and a boy. Squares are male, circles are female, and the father in this system is shut down and does not challenge the mother. They're just kind of along for the ride, and they may even sign off on the abuse by taking no action.
The codependent parent can even be like a fourth child in a system like this, or the soldier for the aggressor. Families like this revolve around the aggressor. They can have secrets. They can even feel that the shutdown parent is a saint for putting up with everything, when in reality they are a major contributor to the abuse.
Since they actually have the power to change the abuse, the children will often struggle with things like perfectionism, extreme anxiety. Parentification triangulation. Deep shame that they are a burden to the aggressor and will start to find ways to cope, like overly achieving or substance abuse or caretaking or bullying or rebelling or being little soldiers for the parent.
The coping strategies to deal with the pain can really be unique from child to child. We all have our own strategies for survival growing up. There's often a narrative around the codependent pairing being the only victim of the aggressor, and the children take care and idolize that parent. So there is that system that the children are being raised and at home.
And now let's superimpose the fundamentalist organization, the cult, or the Religious abuse organization. On top of that, genogram. The three children are exposed to a perpetrating leader who might be emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive or all of the above. They are forced to engage and attend in the organization, which wrecks a sense of preference or choice or autonomy to the point that the children don't even know what they would prefer if given the options, if they didn't have to be part of the cult or religion 24 7.
Peers are complicated in that they. Could be close, but they could also really be morally policed by each other as the organization teaches to root out the devil or demons in their friends. And it can be horrifically re-traumatizing to be kind of sold out by peers to the leadership to be made An example of there is also control over the outside world, deeming it.
And dangerous where natural kind of likes or preferences like movies or music or basic fun is seen as the devil luring you in. And as a side note, the outside world can often be used as a scapegoat to further strengthen the organization. An example currently is the scapegoating of the trans community with the rhetoric that the trans community are coming for your kids.
When actuality statistics tell us that kids are less safe in rigid religious or fundamentalist systems. And the main theme here is the manipulation and betrayal. Imagine losing your parents to the addictive dogma or the cult of personality. Some of you can already get this or that you were being groomed emotionally or sexually or physically, and the parents ignored that or even condoned the connection you had with leadership.
The one nuclear system is enough to make children dissociate and show signs of C-P-T-S-D, but then imagine adding that second system to it. It creates a new layer of complexity and difficulty when it comes to recovering, and I think that people kind of recover from this because they just kind of wake up from a dream, like a horrific foggy dream, and it all kind of comes crashing down.
So that's a bit on the systems of religious and cult abuse. Let's now talk about what it looks like post leaving or recovering from these systems. I'd like to get into what recovery looks like for, for survivors who are now deconstructing their conditioning and. Deconstructing their faith or trying to rebuild that.
Deconstructing after religious abuse or cult abuse is a process of redefining, reevaluating, unpacking, separating the religious abuse beliefs from what you actually believe, such as those who aren't in the system are not actually doomed to go to hell. Um. Is that damnation kind of true, that people are kind of exploring or re questioning?
Are you really an empty vessel for God or needing to pass on God's lineage? Or are you just really like a complex human individual just living their life? So the deconstruction process is a lot of reflection in awakening to how abusive the system was. A lot of memories might come back as you try to make sense of it all, and just like standard kind of childhood trauma recovery, it's.
Painful until it's not. You know, the good part about it is finding yourself. In, in your own belief system, in your, you know, grounded in, in your own reality. But there's a lot of it, you know, it's, it's hitting you what it was like at that summer camp when you were like 14 and you were told it was about devotion, when in actuality it was really abusive, bullying and hazing.
So I'm gonna be giving these recovery ideas through the lens of childhood trauma. And a common thread I find for both is really. Redefining ourselves after leaving a system. If we, in some capacity, low contact, no contact or whatever, but those who are thinking of leaving or have left, or you're in the process of deconstruction, you might have experienced any of the following, any of these appropriate issues that come with deconstructing.
One is isolating from the prior built-in community and network. For a long time it was your only network or your only family, and now that you're leaving that. Or you left another is having difficulty navigating a new network. How friendships work. How do they go now while battling the old conditioning of not yet knowing how to be in that dangerous outside world fully.
Another common piece is extreme guilt and shame. The inner child is usually running on the old abuse belief system, like you're bad while the inner adult is trying to wrestle its way out of that. It's not really on that different than C-P-T-S-D, from child to trauma recovery. Say you gave 10% of your income to the religion or the cult, and there may be a period of guilt and shame and anxiety about no longer doing that.
Having. Extra income now might make you your inner child, feel like they're getting away with something or you're, you're doing something bad or you're gonna get into trouble. It's that unconscious feelings about this stuff. Another issue is separation from family and leaving others behind in the abusive system.
Another is wrestling with sex. Sex is a huge part of this dating sexual expression, trying to find one's footing in a new reality. Um, there's depression and anxiety from the adjustment and realizing just how insane the whole thing was. The prior system that you were in, anger and rage about the manipulation and not for being handed over to emotionally and physically and sexually abusive.
Kind of predators and not protected if that was part of your story. Another issue is grief about not having a standard kind of glue that one could relate to or a family like, or from the old system that you had. It's odd to say, but one can actually feel safe. In the container of fundamentalism, but the self dies in that same system.
So the grief is also in context of N now, like being disowned or demonized by family who are still in the system. So that's a bit about deconstructing. So now let's get into some of these deconstruction points. I'd like to define some of the recovery issues and also give some possible ideas of the recovery goals.
Or healthier ideas to substitute from the fundamentalist ones. Um, your prior, your prior fundamentalist church will probably dismiss these as being brainwashed now by psychology, just FYI. Um, so I'd like to take into consideration. Of the inner adult and the inner child re-parenting process in these, if you resonate with that, just like having an abusive, toxic family system, the survivor again will be wrestling with the trauma, conditioning and beliefs juxtaposed against the new, healthier system.
The thing that you're going for cultivated by your inner adult. And if you don't like the inner adult and inner child language, just flip it to for the adult, you can call it the prefrontal cortex. Or, and for the inner child, you can call it your limbic system or amygdala, whatever you like. Um, so the first piece from the deconstruction thing is assimilation into a different society For a survivor, having been immersed in a cult or fundamentalist religion or religious abuse at home.
Leaving involves as simulating into the non-religious general population part of the community, or a lesser extreme system or something like that. You may have been taught that the outside community is lost and dangerous or will corrupt you. So the inner child might struggle with knowing how to be in that community that was once so unsafe and dangerous.
Yeah, there is probably gonna be great anxiety about fitting in for not knowing how the outside community really works. So here are some issues that come with assimilating into a new community. One is socializing. Socializing without the church and its norms, or abnormal norms or whatever. Socializing now doesn't really have an agenda.
Um, and you're gonna probably feel like you're not knowing gonna, how, how to be in that. How do you show up to a work party or a date or be intimate, say without the goal. Of saving somebody or being of service to them in some way. I know that this stuff sounds pedantic, but for those leaving these systems, it can be overwhelming.
One issue is reclaiming autonomy and privacy. Like no one is watching you in your life. Now you're living more anonymously and just like everyone else, like the only, you gotta just watch out for Facebook watching you. That's about it. Like cults and religious leaders like to. Make you think that they know what they're thinking as a way to kind of control.
And within that, there's new boundaries. There's, you know, seeing others as, you know, respecting their choices, respecting their preferences instead of living in a system that gives you the power to save them or, or deem them to be in on the wrong. Um, and allowing for people to be way more complex than that, allowing, you know, it's like reclaiming kind of some faith and autonomy in others as well as yourself.
Um, the recovery issue in assimilating is allowing for a long process of getting used to and embracing life outside of the church or the system. That can be scary, but it's also pretty exciting. A trick is to try to celebrate the new freedoms while working with your inner child that it's okay now to break some rules, and it's also good to journal about what you really value about the new system that you're in or the new society or community.
Um. You're in that you didn't have in the old system, like the freedom to choose or not living in guilt and shame so much, or not feeling like your group was the superior group or something. And the second issue in deconstructing religious abuse is working with self-doubt and your intuition. This is really about working through shame to find out what's good enough.
Being in a system that requires one to not use critical thinking, usually does damage to one's own compass and intuition, which we'll come back to later, such as the leader who is being sexually off or sexually exploitive and you feel that it's off, but you're gaslit into it being normal or maybe what God wants.
And like with the toxic family system or fundamentalist system, it takes away one's natural compass and it prefers you to second guess yourself. Second guess your feelings. Second guess your behaviors so they can tell you what's actually going on with you. Is it really about you being faulty in the present?
After church life? The inner child might believe that your difficult boss is right about you or is showing you something, and churches can conflate abuse as teachings. Um, so you can now see your boss as just kind of crappy and there being no bigger meaning in it being human versus being God-like, you know, having lived in such a less of me system and more of a God system, survivors can get caught up in having debilitating games of looking for opportunities to do good and.
Perfect. And you don't have to doubt your goodness 24 7. You know, you can step outside of that game. And with working with intuition, when it comes to say, dating or, and struggling with people pleasing or sexual circumstances for women, fundamentalists can often demand support and deference to males no matter what.
Um, so saying no. To a second date or disappointing a male may feel scary or really off to you. You don't have to doubt your goodness when it comes to just having your own standards or wants and needs. So there's also the transfer of the locust of control from the outside system to your insides like you can think and feel for yourself.
Now, the control and fundamentalism can make survivors feel like. They need to be told how to think and how to feel. You now have that power, which is actually amazing. Um, very reclaiming, very healing. Another part of our intuition is working with our intuition To combat self-doubt is often helped after religious abuse to have healthy sounding boards, it's okay to be a beginner in rebuilding reliance on your own compass.
I got a lot of help from a therapist, a really good therapist, after being gaslit and manipulated in my family about reality, bouncing things off with healthy friends or people who are in a similar recovery path. Was I wrong or bad for not wanting to take on that project or saying no to the person? This feels unbearable.
Um, you'll need that kind of validation to get that compass up and running. The third recovery issue in deconstructing is allowing yourself to be in a free fall. This is no person's land. Um, this is a process oriented issue. I think survivors of religious abuse or survivors of leaving even the toxic family system, have to accept that it's normal to feel like you're free floating in somewhat rudderless.
I was. So you've been in a system for an extremely long time. And now you're trying to find your place. This is, there is often toxic reactions from the old system and from potential family if they were involved, except that you will be most likely dehumanized and demonized by the system. And it won't matter how good you were in it or how much time you spent in it, or what kind of member you were.
And this is a sign to the system's, black and white nature of that group Think. You are either in or you're out. And part of this is embracing the greatest freedom, which is to know that you were right for yourself in leaving that's brand new, totally unfamiliar territory to make a big decision for yourself that is healthy for you.
So, uh, part of this is also feeling like betrayal of how quickly you are demonized for leaving, and it's a deeper sense of not being seen. In the re realization that no one was really seen outside of the dogma or the manipulation. This can feel existentially kind of in grounding in this, this kind of part of the process.
Another piece to this is that the old system, the individuals, they do think about you, a friend who is deconstructing and left the system, stated that they were taught to think that way about people who left to or who wanted to leave. This is really a deeply lonely. Thing. It can feel very betraying and ungrounding, just like the toxic family system erases you after you're gone.
Not all systems, but you'll most likely feel in this process that you're in trouble when you're actually not, which is a normal part of the recovery. From this, you might hear from the system people or individuals, we knew you would do this. It's just like how the toxic family system behaves. So the recovery piece here is to embrace the process of adjustment, which might really take a long time.
Um, it might take several years initially to just feel comfortable in the new norms. As an orphan or kind of an outcast by choice, if that makes sense. Um, it's not forever, but of course you would feel like kind of a fish outta water because that's really kind of what's going on. The fourth issue in deconstructing is leaving others behind.
Grief and abandonment's probably the hardest one for some who left fundamentalism and left the toxic family system. We can leave behind siblings and parents that we care for deeply. Um, this may be perhaps the hardest aspect of religious or cult abuse with the breaking up of family connections due to the loyalty to the abusive system, not the person leaving.
I really want you to kind of take that in. We can think, or there can be, they can spin the narrative that you left and you broke up the family, but it's actually the abuse is what got everyone there in the first place. So some issues around this one, again, you are more demonized and dehumanized for leaving and those you care about are actually told this like you're now contagious.
Or you have corrupted ideas or both. You may have to wait for siblings to come to more of an adult age or young adult age to maybe contact you or reach out to you if they need help. If they do, try to remember that you are actually modeling healthy, leaving of an abusive system for some who may later contemplate leaving as well.
There's no guarantees, but I can't tell you how many clients I've had would later hear that. Their siblings were kind of watching and kind of going, wow, you can really do all that. But they're so caught up in it, they're so trapped in it. The recovery piece with this one here is about patience and feeling your feelings.
The patience is about accepting that those who are left behind have, they're gonna have to have their own process. And I mean that for more for the adults and the young adults for small children, if. They are in danger, such as in the case of grooming, I think of course you would try to do everything in your power for the safety, such as connecting with child and protective services.
Um, if you, if you have that in your country like we do in the US and even that's kind of a mess. The feelings are around grief of not just losing your family system or your connection to the greater system, but also the mind f of being listed as the perpetrator for leaving while seeing the. Family enmeshed with the real perpetrators.
I think that that's the issue there with that one. The fifth idea around deconstruction of reclaiming who you are, being good enough versus being selfish or selfless. So recovery from fundamentalism, religious abuse, or cult abuse will experience a process of reclaiming and finding out who you are. Toxic families.
Are not really different than these systems because it's not possible to develop a healthy sense of self in the middle of abuse. So of course we can feel that you're without an identity after leaving. Re-parenting our inner child after this kind of abuse will involve helping them know that they are lovable, unique, and it's our likes, preferences, your spark and your interest that makes you who you are.
Religious abuse usually involves having to give up who we are to be more useful, to be more malleable. So some issues and ideas around reclaiming. Remember toxic people don't tell us who we are anymore. You decide who you are. Now, you may feel lost without the identity of that system starting new, starting fresh.
And I think this will involve working with shame, really. Like if you want to be creative or doing something for yourself, you may feel like you're bad. Or you're engaging in the dangerous world out there. And that world totally needs to be reframed as well. One of my favorite ones here is you don't need anyone to sign off on what you want to do anymore.
You are no longer controlled. 'cause you don't, you're not in that system anymore. You get to decide what you do with your time, with whom you spend it with, and what makes you happy, which is beautiful when you really think about it. Um. Another issue is losing interest in the narrative that is toxic. Like the old tapes of ingroup and outgroups or damnation start to really become lame and annoying, which is a sign of of healthy progress.
The recovery issues here are like, you've been kind of emptied out in this system and selfless, so it's time to. Go to the concert, buy a t-shirt, go on a date, read some of those shunned books and find out what those scary sinners are really like. Um, moving on to probably the most powerful, but also the most complex issue in, in deconstructing is sex and sexuality.
This is a big one here. It's gonna be ranging from. Being in a repressed fundamentalist system where you're supposed to serve a purpose to the shame of being subject to grooming or off behaviors by members or leaders, some issues or ideas. Fawning, which you've heard about. Fawning is usually prevalent because being in the fundamentalist system in general results in giving up and shutting down and defaulting towards somebody else.
Um, another issue in the sex and sexuality piece is pleasure reclaiming the system, usually wrecks a sense of self pleasure or pleasure in general, being something. Naturally that's been taken away from you. So this will be a process to reclaim bodily autonomy and choice, um, reexamining what you really value.
Are we just for procreation? Do we serve just a purpose in that way? Is that even human? Does that even work? Another issue is your sexuality wasn't yours. It was interpreted as being of God. And this needs to be broken down and kind of deconstructed. It's actually, it's your body, it's your sexual preferences, it's your sexual identity.
Um, so there's that. Another is a really hard one here, is being treated like a vessel. Or being treated as just kind of a soldier for God and maybe in the mail realm or something like you are empty. That was really a lie and very dehumanizing related to that. A friend of mine who was deconstructing their faith would told me about that in their church.
They would often reference this psalm from the Old Testament Testament, Psalm 1 27, which is to have a quiver full of children, which is an analogy like bow and arrow quiver. To have like a so many children to honor God and to have kind of soldiers for God and protect yourself from your enemies. And a woman's job is to provide.
And keep, keep stalking that quiver. I mean, that's left up to interpretation, but like that's an example of how scripture can really become kind of sliming our sexuality or just say that this is our only purpose, um, or that women are treated to carry on that scripture. So the recovery piece here is about becoming more and more.
Affirmed in your sexuality. It involves reclaiming what you actually prefer or identify as, or becoming more comfortable with self-pleasure, if that's a struggle. Um, the sex barrier here is really hard because these systems were so off sexually. Um, these systems are very shaming in general, so just allowing oneself to embrace.
Being a healthy sexual individual is what the work is gonna be about with that one. And these systems are very shaming in general. So just allowing yourself to embrace being a healthy sexual individual is what the work is about with this one. Moving on to number seven and deconstructing is, um, and again, these are just my thoughts on deconstructing when I, when I was thinking about religious recovery.
Um, number seven is reclaiming, what do you think? Um, it's the opposite of gaslighting ourselves or second guessing, like I mentioned earlier. Reclaiming what you think is actually something that my mentor, mentor Curin taught me in inner child re-parenting. Self-doubt is often protection from fear or reality.
An example is we'll simply ask clients who are in self-doubt say if they don't know if they can judge their abusive partner as abusive, will help them with giving them the rights that they can actually judge and. Thing for themselves and they, they actually do, but they don't allow themselves to or tune into that due to shame.
So we'll simply ask, what do you think? A lot of this is about reclaiming rights. You have the right to your own thoughts where it makes me think of Catholicism saying that there's an omnipotent God who knows your thoughts, which is kind of terrifying when you think about it. Another right is the right to judge others.
Around safety, around morals, where, you know, where we have this internal voice in our head that like, who am I to judge? Which is can be seen? That's dangerous to not judge. Coming back to that intuition piece where fundamentalists benefit. And they even survive on taking away your right to judge. What do you think is actually inhumane?
You can judge that. Do you think scaring children into shame just for being born is humane? You can judge that. What do you value? Do you value, say, original sin or, or being a complex human being who is on a path? Do other people really need to be saved? Or do they need their own autonomy, just like you did?
Did you need to be saved? You know, fundamentalism needs people to believe that humans are inherently bad, which isn't true. You don't need scripture to be a good person. Another piece to this is what is right in general. Versus what is right for you. The work with this piece around reclaiming is like say, think about your boss or your family or anything, and try to catch the old dogma as it pops up.
Here's what I mean. The old dogma might say that your husband's mother just needs to be understood more. And then maybe if she feels more loved, she'll stop being abusive, like throwing things in from an enraged, you know, out of control place during your visits. So that's the old dogma. A new way is to untangle all that and really get real about who your mother-in-law is about not being a safe individual.
Um, to be around or to even that it is okay to not judge yourself for being frustrated that the family is so stuck in enabling and refusing to acknowledge that the mother is not stable or safe. So getting outside of that old dogma and dealing with the world in a new way means to reclaim both what you think and to reclaim your inner compass.
You, it's actually there. You just, you just need some help connecting to it. Um, as a side note, you can totally disagree with me in the example that I just gave. You can choose what best works for you about that hypothetical mother-in-law situation. I would be fundamental if I told you that that was the only way to deal with the mother-in-law when it's not.
It's just, just my ideas. So lastly, number eight is in deconstructing is. Take the meaningful with you. Um, this won't resonate with you or apply with you if you're a survivor who wants nothing to do with spirituality or spiritual concepts or connections. I totally hear you. This is not about me suggesting that a religious experience is necessary in life.
I. I don't believe that it is. This will apply if you're still seeking to rebuild your connection with a higher power or spirituality, or your belief system, or you're trying to suss those things out. For those enmeshed in religious abuse or cult experiences. Connection with others and with spirituality often gets wrecked, and it's important to reclaim and piece out what was meaningful to you about the spirituality and have some ownership over it, meaning you now own it.
These systems play power games that they have the red telephone to God, and people need their help to experience God and teachings only from them. That's bs. You can be your own spiritual individual. No one owns that or can keep it from you. It's between you and what you believe. Only some issues and ideas.
With this one, there can be dissonance in how the system interpreted the ideas from the actual. Ideas, meaning like, uh, what do you think? You get to decide what the system manipulated from the, from the original ideas or the original text, um, you can reclaim what resonated from you in taking that away from how the system interpreted it.
Interpretation is, is subjective, just like that quiver thing. That was my interpretation of it. I was a little bit creeped out by it, but that's. Where I went with it. So your ideas on faith belong to you. It's between you and your concept of a higher power. The church isn't the gatekeeper to your connection and spirituality.
The recovery piece on this one is really separating out from how the system manipulated and weaponized the ideas to serve them all while telling you what was best for you. That's different from say what you loved or took from the text or the ideas. It's like taking the power of interpretation away from the abuse of leadership and members, and you get to decide what it means for you.
So some final thoughts. You know, my main focus here is for those who grew up in the two systems. Um, but you can also qualify for religious abuse. If there wasn't that secondary system, you know, you can just experience it at home with a fundamentalist parent. So I barely covered the extensive types of, of extreme religions or cults.
There's just too many examples, too much info. And again, my intent here is to not state that all religions are abusive. Of course not. Perhaps the saddest part of religious abuse and cult experiences is the damage done to one's sense of faith and community. What part of the recovery ideas resonated with you?
I would love to know that. Was there something important to you that got left out? I would love to hear about that too. If you're seeking to explore childhood trauma work more so, and or wanna have a sense of how others are recovering, you can consider joining my monthly healing community. The link is in the description to this video.
The community involves. Bimonthly live q and as with me going over your questions. It also involves weekly journal prompts on inner child work and it also, you get all access to all my coursework on childhood trauma. There is currently a 15% off discount code for the membership, and I'll also put that in the video description.
