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Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.
Emotional and mental treatment in authoritarian religious groups also can be damaging because of 1) toxic teachings like eternal damnation or original sin 2) religious practices or mindset, such as punishment, black and white thinking, or sexual guilt, and 3) neglect that prevents a person from having the information or opportunities to develop normally.
Winell: Religion causes trauma when it is highly controlling and prevents people from thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth. With constant judgment of self and others, people become alienated from themselves, each other, and the world. Religion in its worst forms causes separation.
A good website for those leaving faith and religion. All religious faiths in my opinion are toxic to some degree. All are supernatural nonsense to some level also.
This is so sad, I am so sorry you had to endure that, Kat. Religious leaders have a lot to answer for, I'm afraid.
Thanks Mystic. The sad part is that to recover you have to come out of religion altogether to see it. Some go back to it stronger but I abandoned it altogether and haven't been happier.
I was fortunate in that I was never vulnerable to shame / blame / condemnation and even as a small child had a relatively good ability to separate fantasy from reality enough at least not to be terrified. So I never was terrified at tales of the rapture or afraid I was going to hell (given that I was saved, it just wasn't my issue; it was only later that I realized how callous that was toward my fellow humans and what a free pass, morally speaking, I was giving to god).
But I have certainly known plenty of people who have suffered in this fashion, even before leaving the faith. They were never good enough, always doubting their salvation because they couldn't overcome "sin" or, more commonly, because they just didn't get sufficient goose bumps about "the things of god". Some of them would compulsively answer any and all altar calls "just in case", hoping that their feelings would line up with their faith or they would experience the promised "new creation" that they were supposed to become. Or so that they could have the cathartic conversion experience that others sometimes described.
I was also very lucky in that I didn't feel trapped or confined in the faith; it worked fine for me, until it didn't. And when it finally quit working for me, I was into my adult life, and did not culminate in active apostasy if you will, until my parents were dead ... and I lived far from my extended family as well. So the transition was relatively easy. Lastly my wife at the time, a Christian, was one of those rare Christians who was not threatened by my change of heart, and could still respect and love me.
And yet despite that because of all this, all my stars were perfectly aligned, you might say ... deconversion is still a lot of work, soul-searching, adaptation, and careful thought. And there's a another source of guilt I DID have to deal with ... the years I squandered with religious foolishness, the effectiveness I lost, the dumb decisions I made. The best years of my life were, basically, Not My Proudest Moment. There are many "gifts that keep on giving" from that time in my life. For example, my misguided faith caused me to marry my first wife, a "good Christian girl" who was incapable of being a real wife or mother due to eventually diagnosed mental illness. This took its toll on my two children, especially my son, and I deal with those issues all these decades later, and always will have to.
Of course, religion / faith are not the sole source of Stoopid in the world ... and I must cut myself slack, as I am as human as anyone else. It is hard though in the quiet of the night sometimes to wonder what might have been. I have often reflected how untrue the Bible verse "faith maketh not ashamed" is. No wonder so many evangelicals are so deliberately blinkered and deeply invested in their beliefs. It is not easy to admit you're THAT wrong.
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Religious leaders have a lot to answer for, I'm afraid.
