Thursday Discussion post: How did you leave a totalitarian environment?

Be it evangelical Christianity, patriarchal gender norms, or an abusive home, let's learn from those of us who have resisted!

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersction of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. If you are new here, welcome! I often post personal essays and discussion posts for the paid-community only (partly as a means of privacy and keeping the community safe). If you are a member of the queer community and are unable to afford a subscription, please email me at strongwilledproject at gmail . com and I will get you sorted. For everyone else, thank you so much for your support!

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Hello everyone.

I’ve been struggling with super bad tension headaches over the past few days (possibly because I have been wanting to have some epic meltdowns but have been shoving them down, or maybe because I published a really honest podcast episode about becoming estranged from my parents). So I haven’t been able to write very much this week at all. I am checking in on the news a few times a day and it is . . . terrible. I am working really hard to not lose too much time to rumination, but sometimes it happens.

In the STRONGWILLED discord community¹ somebody asked a question that sparked some really great discussions and gave me a lot of hope. It was about what caused people to leave Christianity — what where the questions that couldn’t be answered, the realizations (fast or slow) that maybe there was more to the world than we had been taught? I greedily read all the answers, and so many of them resonated with me, while others were completely new and different.

With a totalizing worldview like white evangelicalism or Christian white supremacist patriarchy, it can sometimes feel like there is no escape from its claws. It sinks its way deep inside of you, telling you there is no other way to be — and you should obey it in order to be safe. This is why I think sharing our stories of how we got out — and found safety in other ways — is so important right now. So this is the question I am going to ask today: