Jan 3, 2023·edited Jan 3, 2023Liked by D.L. Mayfield
Thank you for sharing this. Writing these posts must take a lot of energy and I appreciate you taking the time and energy to articulate what so many of us experienced, too.
For the past few years since leaving my old cult, I have struggled so much with anger and shame at myself for how I fell and fought so hard to be the Good Christian Girl (i.e., zero critical thinking skills) specifically when one of my best friends saw through it and questioned so many things starting when we were teenagers. Sometimes I still feel so dumb, though I understand better how much my brain was focused on survival. I was surrounded by kids my age with wildly abusive fathers and thought my family life was 'normal and safe'. Turns out, my dad just wasn't a narcissist, but is also ND and his loads of unprocessed trauma deeply affected us. I was so disconnected from myself that I couldn't see how traumatized I was. Waking up to it in my late twenties and thirties feels like I've been cheated of so much.
I'm so tired of processing trauma. I grieve the fact that I am just now, in my mid-late thirties, understanding not just that I do have needs but how to advocate for them, while also having to meet the needs of four children. How different would my life have been, if I had understood my own neurodivergence before adulthood? Parenthood? If I had grown up confident that my needs weren't a burden and that I could actually be in touch with what I want/need, before losing myself in parenthood?
It's not that we can't find ourselves now, and we are. But it's so fucking hard.
This is one of the best things I've ever read. Thank you, friend. I'm really truly in awe of how you can write so clearly and beautifully and extensively (I mean that in the absolute best way) about this. IT IS SO FUCKING HELPFUL to see it all laid out. Especially since I'm over here "working in fragments" to quote Willie James Jennings (or is it someone else?). Collecting old James Dobson (and other nasty) books. Looking through old memorabilia. Writing 40-word poems. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you're processing it all and sharing it with us like this. SUCH A GIFT.
I just finished listening to those 2 Behind the Bastards episodes (on your recommendation) and I'm plotting a James Dobson book bonfire. I'm torn between wanting to take him down and preserving my peace.
And I loooooove what you said about your parents. I took out a few poems from my latest book that I knew would reeeeally hurt them (EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE TRUE) but left some in that will also be painful for them probably, but I also want them to know what they did/are doing.
GREAT BIG SIGH.
Love you much. Thank you for this. I'm not a Christian now either. I find the whole thing not only toxic, but also probably not that much true and also really boring. We'll see how I feel in a few months, years, whatever.
Also, today would have been my 25th anniversary if my husband hadn't cheated and left. The silver lining in the silver anniversary is that wading through all this toxic shit is much easier without him here.
Again, THANK YOU for sharing this. I hope you know how much healing you bring. xx
I’m an adult convert to a different denomination, and this really validates how I feel about raising my kids within this faith. There is so much pressure that says being a good parent, a truly loving parent, a faithful parent, means doing everything to ensure your kids stay within the fold. Having made the choice to become Christian as an adult (raised without a faith tradition), it feels viscerally wrong to me to insist upon a belief system for my kids. I try to mentally frame it as an invitation - I will share my faith with them insofar as they are curious and wish to participate, but I really want them to have have the choice to choose it for themselves - or not. When you say that high control religion teaches children that love is conditional, you hit the nail on the head of my deepest fears as a parent. I would hate for them to grow up feeling that I, or God, is disappointed in them for not fitting the mould of my faith tradition.
My story is wildly different to yours but you give me much to reflect on and learn from.
“But one of the most devastating impacts of childhood indoctrination for me has been that I have been trained from a very early age to be ever-critical of myself. and not trust my own thoughts or feelings as good or worthy of listening to. So now it sort of feels like my full time job to learn to accept myself. I still have a longing for all my years of being a Christian to make sense, for all of my hard work to gain love and acceptance by being a hyper-religious person to have meaning. It’s a deep grief to recognize that what I gave my life to for decades did not deliver what it promised.”
Thanks for being so vulnerable. The whole, not trusting yourself, believing your thoughts are valid…I feel that. I also have been diagnosed with OCD in my adulthood, which makes thinking I can obtain certainty feel like an actual possibility. I’m in the process of realizing we can never be certain on the side of things, but also realizing that the thoughts and conclusions I do come to can come from me. It doesn’t always have to be other peoples opinions. Specifically white males opinions. So, of course the question I always come to is Jesus? What do we do with him? I guess when we talk about deconstruction, it feels like we are still keeping Jesus, but not calling ourselves a Christian at all feels like leaving him behind. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just curious how you view that?
I wanted to cheer when I read this. The pandemic allowed me to make a quiet exit from my church and I'm never going back. After a year away I realized I don't want to be Christian anymore. I also don't want to be in the Exvangelical, deconstructing space because they recycle the same old conversations with the same dynamics. I want a clean break. Not from the people, but from the harmful ideas.
Guilt and shame keep reaching out their tendrils trying to entrap me again, trying to convince me that a good life isn't possible if I'm severed from "the truth". But I have to believe that a good life is possible without the cycle of doubt and abuse that I grew up with. When I open up my eyes and actually look around I realize there are other possibilities. There are people who are modeling unconditional love and seeking justice in the world very separate from Christianity. But more than that, I can figure out my own way instead of following someone else.
It's strange because I'm so thankful for my parents' messy divorce a few years back because it was the beginning of unraveling the story I've been telling myself. At the time I felt like unpacking my family story was traumatic. But now I realize the undoing isn't traumatic, it's empowering. It's seeing the childhood trauma in a new light that felt like trauma.
In so many ways choice was taken away from us. It's so empowering to say no to it all.
This year I started asking myself, “what makes me happy? What brings me joy?” because life has been pretty joyless. Isn’t it weird to be 39/40 before even considering asking myself this?! A basic question like, what do I like doing with my time? All my energy and thoughts went to, “what does God want from me? What will help others?” with the promise that being in God’s will would bring me joy. I have also landed in the deconverted camp after about a 5 year journey.
I could have written this. I’m practicing some radical autonomy myself lately. Wouldn’t call myself a Christian anymore and it’s so strange, especially as I have 5 kids, some of whom were raised in the church for the first 5-6 years of their lives. Thanks for sharing!
To me this feels like a long time coming (in the best way). Thank you. Thank you for putting your incredible voice to so many of the things so many of us feel and have been through. So looking forward to hearing more from you on this topic.
And also thank you for leaving it open, letting us in in the middle without a lable or a pretty bow on top. Because you're right, in a lot of deconstruction conversations there is too much emphasis on black and white. I'm here for all the gray area.
Right now I still find Chrisitanity life-giving, and being part of a church life-giving (religious control was NOT part of my abusive childhood, thank goodness), yet I am deconverting hard right now from Christian supremacy--the idea that Christianity is necessarily better than any other belief system. My PCUSA church is not out-and-out evangelical, but it is evangelical-leaning, and on the conservative side of the denomination. On the plus side, I am able to be honest about my liberal theology there (there's an emphasis on freedom of conscience in presbyterianism). But being in leadership the past three years as an elder was hard, mostly because so much of the way we talk about WHY church matters is to say we need to convert everyone. Which...I think is not only unhelpful and a bad reason to be in church, but also, I think it breeds smug self-satisfaction -always- and leads to all kinds of abuse and toxic thinking. It's tough: this particular church is my extended family. My actual extended family was decimated by my toxic childhood--I really don't want to leave these aunties and uncles who I have so much history with especially since I am able to be myself there, even if I'm out of the "normal" theologically. Also, my husband is more conservative than I am and would not be comfortable in a truly universalist church. So! I stay, but feel the weariness of much of the religious language just not really meeting me where I am, but having the community absolutely fill in gaps and connect me. I wish it were easier to find like-minded people and for me to form community, but it's not.
I just feel grateful for the fact that you’ve found some freedom, Danielle. Thank you for offering the same to us.
Also... I can relate to the sentiment that any movement against evangelicalism really feels like the same fundamentalism, just in the opposite direction. I feel weary to the rules altogether and I’m eager for a way to cultivate a broader vision of myself, the world and God. You aren’t alone there.
"My job currently is to refuse to believe or say anything in order to receive love, care, and attention" will probably become a sticky note all over my house.
One of the biggest differences between my childhood trauma and a lot of others is I didn't grow up with evangelical parents. I was taking myself (by walking or getting rides) to my church. They would ground me and regularly withhold church community from me, largely to minimize me coming in contact with adults who might get close enough to notice the abuse I was experiencing at home. I'm unsure how to feel about the fact that my parents attempt to keep me isolated through abusive means also let me have access to things like other denominations and a large bookcase of Jung, Vonnegut, and science. There are parts of the strict evangelical upbringing I saw up-close, but were never in my house - but wanted.
I really struggle to put my thoughts into words... so often when I read your words I feel understood and seen. I just resonate with this all so much. I started this process after my second child was born nearly 5 years ago and it was so lonely then. But feels less lonely now. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this. It resonates so deeply with me. I left Christianity about 15 years ago (with a whisper not a bang) frustrated with my Christian college, no longer believing in a higher power, dealing with my parents' cancers, but I've had to go back the past few years and work through the religious trauma. I grew up like you did and I find myself thinking about something that happened to me as a kid that everyone thought was normal and just shouting "I was a child!" An instagram post a while back that shook me was like "Did your parents pray the devil out of you as a kid?"- the more I thought about this, the more I reckoned with the fact that I was a (autistic) toddler and perhaps invoking demons when I had a tantrum did more harm than good. Part of my personal struggle is that my parents are dead and I can't ever talk about this with them. It's a blessing because they didn't live to be Trumpers and I can hold out the hope that I would have convinced them to not be) but also there's a lot of anger there.
On learning of my son's ASD diagnosis, I started to realize that my parents both were on almost certainly on the spectrum, and my husband's father was too. My mom is still living.
I'm in this weird place of wanting my son to be accommodated and loved JUST AS HE IS and refusing to spend time around my mother who demands that her religious "worldview" infiltrate all the conversations, judges everything in black and white, and might be a Trumper, too. I will not accommodate her neurodiversity because of how hateful the manifestation of it is to me. I respect myself enough not to sit through her lectures (of course, she does not have theory of mind enough to understand that I don't agree with her). I haven't cut her off but I have made myself dramatically less available. Which means her several prayer groups are almost certainly praying for our relationship.
So what do we do with these high control parents if their high control stems from their autism?
I got this point in June of 2020. You describe so well how it feels. I had the full sad shower scene, like in a movie. I remember telling my non Christian coworker that I felt like I'd gotten out of a cult. This journey has been freeing and disorienting. I felt adrift for a long time, and often still do. After a long time, and reading about the things I'd been banned from reading like other religions, sexuality, etc; I eventually began experimenting with a small personal spirituality with my own little rituals that I don't have to tell anyone else about if I don't want to. I've recently found that deep inside my inner child still believes that she's going to heaven if God and Jesus is real. At this point in time, I don't intellectually believe that God is a person or hierarchical being, but she's still in there with deep faith and I really don't know what to do with her at the moment. But we'll see.
All that say, it has been and likely will be a life-long journey, but I don't regret it. With a sad smile, I hold a metaphorical flute of champagne to you with a sad smile as we grieve our past lives, our parents decisions, our decisions and forage ahead into the dark searching for our own lights. Cheers. Welcome to the club.
Thank you for sharing this. Writing these posts must take a lot of energy and I appreciate you taking the time and energy to articulate what so many of us experienced, too.
For the past few years since leaving my old cult, I have struggled so much with anger and shame at myself for how I fell and fought so hard to be the Good Christian Girl (i.e., zero critical thinking skills) specifically when one of my best friends saw through it and questioned so many things starting when we were teenagers. Sometimes I still feel so dumb, though I understand better how much my brain was focused on survival. I was surrounded by kids my age with wildly abusive fathers and thought my family life was 'normal and safe'. Turns out, my dad just wasn't a narcissist, but is also ND and his loads of unprocessed trauma deeply affected us. I was so disconnected from myself that I couldn't see how traumatized I was. Waking up to it in my late twenties and thirties feels like I've been cheated of so much.
I'm so tired of processing trauma. I grieve the fact that I am just now, in my mid-late thirties, understanding not just that I do have needs but how to advocate for them, while also having to meet the needs of four children. How different would my life have been, if I had understood my own neurodivergence before adulthood? Parenthood? If I had grown up confident that my needs weren't a burden and that I could actually be in touch with what I want/need, before losing myself in parenthood?
It's not that we can't find ourselves now, and we are. But it's so fucking hard.
This is one of the best things I've ever read. Thank you, friend. I'm really truly in awe of how you can write so clearly and beautifully and extensively (I mean that in the absolute best way) about this. IT IS SO FUCKING HELPFUL to see it all laid out. Especially since I'm over here "working in fragments" to quote Willie James Jennings (or is it someone else?). Collecting old James Dobson (and other nasty) books. Looking through old memorabilia. Writing 40-word poems. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you're processing it all and sharing it with us like this. SUCH A GIFT.
I just finished listening to those 2 Behind the Bastards episodes (on your recommendation) and I'm plotting a James Dobson book bonfire. I'm torn between wanting to take him down and preserving my peace.
And I loooooove what you said about your parents. I took out a few poems from my latest book that I knew would reeeeally hurt them (EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE TRUE) but left some in that will also be painful for them probably, but I also want them to know what they did/are doing.
GREAT BIG SIGH.
Love you much. Thank you for this. I'm not a Christian now either. I find the whole thing not only toxic, but also probably not that much true and also really boring. We'll see how I feel in a few months, years, whatever.
Also, today would have been my 25th anniversary if my husband hadn't cheated and left. The silver lining in the silver anniversary is that wading through all this toxic shit is much easier without him here.
Again, THANK YOU for sharing this. I hope you know how much healing you bring. xx
I’m an adult convert to a different denomination, and this really validates how I feel about raising my kids within this faith. There is so much pressure that says being a good parent, a truly loving parent, a faithful parent, means doing everything to ensure your kids stay within the fold. Having made the choice to become Christian as an adult (raised without a faith tradition), it feels viscerally wrong to me to insist upon a belief system for my kids. I try to mentally frame it as an invitation - I will share my faith with them insofar as they are curious and wish to participate, but I really want them to have have the choice to choose it for themselves - or not. When you say that high control religion teaches children that love is conditional, you hit the nail on the head of my deepest fears as a parent. I would hate for them to grow up feeling that I, or God, is disappointed in them for not fitting the mould of my faith tradition.
My story is wildly different to yours but you give me much to reflect on and learn from.
“But one of the most devastating impacts of childhood indoctrination for me has been that I have been trained from a very early age to be ever-critical of myself. and not trust my own thoughts or feelings as good or worthy of listening to. So now it sort of feels like my full time job to learn to accept myself. I still have a longing for all my years of being a Christian to make sense, for all of my hard work to gain love and acceptance by being a hyper-religious person to have meaning. It’s a deep grief to recognize that what I gave my life to for decades did not deliver what it promised.”
Every word of this hits home for me.
Thanks for being so vulnerable. The whole, not trusting yourself, believing your thoughts are valid…I feel that. I also have been diagnosed with OCD in my adulthood, which makes thinking I can obtain certainty feel like an actual possibility. I’m in the process of realizing we can never be certain on the side of things, but also realizing that the thoughts and conclusions I do come to can come from me. It doesn’t always have to be other peoples opinions. Specifically white males opinions. So, of course the question I always come to is Jesus? What do we do with him? I guess when we talk about deconstruction, it feels like we are still keeping Jesus, but not calling ourselves a Christian at all feels like leaving him behind. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just curious how you view that?
I wanted to cheer when I read this. The pandemic allowed me to make a quiet exit from my church and I'm never going back. After a year away I realized I don't want to be Christian anymore. I also don't want to be in the Exvangelical, deconstructing space because they recycle the same old conversations with the same dynamics. I want a clean break. Not from the people, but from the harmful ideas.
Guilt and shame keep reaching out their tendrils trying to entrap me again, trying to convince me that a good life isn't possible if I'm severed from "the truth". But I have to believe that a good life is possible without the cycle of doubt and abuse that I grew up with. When I open up my eyes and actually look around I realize there are other possibilities. There are people who are modeling unconditional love and seeking justice in the world very separate from Christianity. But more than that, I can figure out my own way instead of following someone else.
It's strange because I'm so thankful for my parents' messy divorce a few years back because it was the beginning of unraveling the story I've been telling myself. At the time I felt like unpacking my family story was traumatic. But now I realize the undoing isn't traumatic, it's empowering. It's seeing the childhood trauma in a new light that felt like trauma.
In so many ways choice was taken away from us. It's so empowering to say no to it all.
Me too D.L. ❤️
This year I started asking myself, “what makes me happy? What brings me joy?” because life has been pretty joyless. Isn’t it weird to be 39/40 before even considering asking myself this?! A basic question like, what do I like doing with my time? All my energy and thoughts went to, “what does God want from me? What will help others?” with the promise that being in God’s will would bring me joy. I have also landed in the deconverted camp after about a 5 year journey.
I could have written this. I’m practicing some radical autonomy myself lately. Wouldn’t call myself a Christian anymore and it’s so strange, especially as I have 5 kids, some of whom were raised in the church for the first 5-6 years of their lives. Thanks for sharing!
To me this feels like a long time coming (in the best way). Thank you. Thank you for putting your incredible voice to so many of the things so many of us feel and have been through. So looking forward to hearing more from you on this topic.
And also thank you for leaving it open, letting us in in the middle without a lable or a pretty bow on top. Because you're right, in a lot of deconstruction conversations there is too much emphasis on black and white. I'm here for all the gray area.
Right now I still find Chrisitanity life-giving, and being part of a church life-giving (religious control was NOT part of my abusive childhood, thank goodness), yet I am deconverting hard right now from Christian supremacy--the idea that Christianity is necessarily better than any other belief system. My PCUSA church is not out-and-out evangelical, but it is evangelical-leaning, and on the conservative side of the denomination. On the plus side, I am able to be honest about my liberal theology there (there's an emphasis on freedom of conscience in presbyterianism). But being in leadership the past three years as an elder was hard, mostly because so much of the way we talk about WHY church matters is to say we need to convert everyone. Which...I think is not only unhelpful and a bad reason to be in church, but also, I think it breeds smug self-satisfaction -always- and leads to all kinds of abuse and toxic thinking. It's tough: this particular church is my extended family. My actual extended family was decimated by my toxic childhood--I really don't want to leave these aunties and uncles who I have so much history with especially since I am able to be myself there, even if I'm out of the "normal" theologically. Also, my husband is more conservative than I am and would not be comfortable in a truly universalist church. So! I stay, but feel the weariness of much of the religious language just not really meeting me where I am, but having the community absolutely fill in gaps and connect me. I wish it were easier to find like-minded people and for me to form community, but it's not.
I just feel grateful for the fact that you’ve found some freedom, Danielle. Thank you for offering the same to us.
Also... I can relate to the sentiment that any movement against evangelicalism really feels like the same fundamentalism, just in the opposite direction. I feel weary to the rules altogether and I’m eager for a way to cultivate a broader vision of myself, the world and God. You aren’t alone there.
"My job currently is to refuse to believe or say anything in order to receive love, care, and attention" will probably become a sticky note all over my house.
One of the biggest differences between my childhood trauma and a lot of others is I didn't grow up with evangelical parents. I was taking myself (by walking or getting rides) to my church. They would ground me and regularly withhold church community from me, largely to minimize me coming in contact with adults who might get close enough to notice the abuse I was experiencing at home. I'm unsure how to feel about the fact that my parents attempt to keep me isolated through abusive means also let me have access to things like other denominations and a large bookcase of Jung, Vonnegut, and science. There are parts of the strict evangelical upbringing I saw up-close, but were never in my house - but wanted.
I really struggle to put my thoughts into words... so often when I read your words I feel understood and seen. I just resonate with this all so much. I started this process after my second child was born nearly 5 years ago and it was so lonely then. But feels less lonely now. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this. It resonates so deeply with me. I left Christianity about 15 years ago (with a whisper not a bang) frustrated with my Christian college, no longer believing in a higher power, dealing with my parents' cancers, but I've had to go back the past few years and work through the religious trauma. I grew up like you did and I find myself thinking about something that happened to me as a kid that everyone thought was normal and just shouting "I was a child!" An instagram post a while back that shook me was like "Did your parents pray the devil out of you as a kid?"- the more I thought about this, the more I reckoned with the fact that I was a (autistic) toddler and perhaps invoking demons when I had a tantrum did more harm than good. Part of my personal struggle is that my parents are dead and I can't ever talk about this with them. It's a blessing because they didn't live to be Trumpers and I can hold out the hope that I would have convinced them to not be) but also there's a lot of anger there.
On learning of my son's ASD diagnosis, I started to realize that my parents both were on almost certainly on the spectrum, and my husband's father was too. My mom is still living.
I'm in this weird place of wanting my son to be accommodated and loved JUST AS HE IS and refusing to spend time around my mother who demands that her religious "worldview" infiltrate all the conversations, judges everything in black and white, and might be a Trumper, too. I will not accommodate her neurodiversity because of how hateful the manifestation of it is to me. I respect myself enough not to sit through her lectures (of course, she does not have theory of mind enough to understand that I don't agree with her). I haven't cut her off but I have made myself dramatically less available. Which means her several prayer groups are almost certainly praying for our relationship.
So what do we do with these high control parents if their high control stems from their autism?
I got this point in June of 2020. You describe so well how it feels. I had the full sad shower scene, like in a movie. I remember telling my non Christian coworker that I felt like I'd gotten out of a cult. This journey has been freeing and disorienting. I felt adrift for a long time, and often still do. After a long time, and reading about the things I'd been banned from reading like other religions, sexuality, etc; I eventually began experimenting with a small personal spirituality with my own little rituals that I don't have to tell anyone else about if I don't want to. I've recently found that deep inside my inner child still believes that she's going to heaven if God and Jesus is real. At this point in time, I don't intellectually believe that God is a person or hierarchical being, but she's still in there with deep faith and I really don't know what to do with her at the moment. But we'll see.
All that say, it has been and likely will be a life-long journey, but I don't regret it. With a sad smile, I hold a metaphorical flute of champagne to you with a sad smile as we grieve our past lives, our parents decisions, our decisions and forage ahead into the dark searching for our own lights. Cheers. Welcome to the club.