My Story

This is my story of religious trauma - there are many like it, but maybe reading this can help you feel a little less alone.

Up until about 2nd grade I my family was a member of a Branhamite cult. Pretty run of the mill Evangelical cult, everything they believed was "normal" except for...the addition of one weird prophet, Joseph Branham. I remember almost none of this period because I was in church from infancy.

I started to rebel at about 9 years old, 4th grade. During church I was always defensive daydreaming and dissociation, literally ANYTHING to do to protect my brain from all the fire and brimstone and altar calls. I didn't understand what I was doing at the time - I just knew I did NOT like Church, but it was all I knew, so I thought maybe I just hated everything. I dreaded it every single Sunday and Wednesday, and fought my parents over it constantly. No Saturday or Tuesday could be fully enjoyed without the specter of church dread hanging over my head. They had so much disappointment to express over this, they loved me, but only "in spite of this". Ultimately they believed I was going to be tortured for eternity because I was bad. In hindsight it's because every week was another screaming dude telling me I was gonna go to hell if I didn't submit to his will. I hid in the bathroom a lot, sometimes for the entire service, because my parents were too embarrassed to come find me. This was pre-smartphone, so it was just me in the quiet, smelling urinal cakes. It was a southern baptist megachurch, so I could orbit the bathrooms for the entire service and not get caught. I was sent to the church psychologist, diagnosed with childhood depression, and threatened with conversion therapy because I did not actively oppose("renounce", in the parlance) homosexuality. Youth pastors quickly realized I was a lost cause, a disrupter of their brainwashing, and two kicked me out and my family switched churches over it.

Leaving that environment when I moved out got me effectively shunned - I no longer had friends because "they couldn't hang out with somebody who didn't go to church", I cut off all contact with my family for about 5-10 years because they couldn't stop ambushing me with a church trip around Christmas or having aunts and uncles come over and "lay hands" on me to heal me of the demon they believed was possessing me. TWO of those aunts would go on to die long slow death of complications from illnesses they treated with faith instead of medicine. Their funerals had altar calls and an offering plate. But I was the bad one, the wild one.

Today I am successful in my field, as an Engineering Manager. I'm happily married and in the best mental health of my life.

So what helped me survive this and live to be a normal(ish) adult?

1. Going no contact and taking control of my life made me feel better. With zero support network, it was HARD to make it through college, but that success was mine. My family was allowed back into my life when they could respect me. If they couldn't, I was not going to visit them. I moved 800 miles away.
2. Getting treatment for depression. I am not joking when I say that starting an SSRI completely changed me for the better in the course of about a month. Suddenly I was able to see these experiences objectively and evaluate their impact on me, without immediately going "red zone" and being blinded by emotion. Therapy was useless, but after having been abused by a psychologist, I guess that shouldn't be surprising.
3. Reading lots of books, watching lots of talks, on Religious Trauma Syndrome. It resonated with me immediately.
4. Reading tons of philosophy and constructing my own values system. Philosophy and ethics can help you replace your unconscious conditioning with ideas that you
5. Doing a supervised heroic dose of LSD was transformative.(sorry if this is controversial). During my trip I replayed my entire life, I witnessed my birth, I erased the lies about myself that I was holding on to, or that I had told other people, I met my VERY sad 13 year old self and gave him a hug, and I experienced what I would describe as a death and rebirth. I felt that old well-worn patterns in my brain were erased, and that my brain had been rinsed. I would describe this experience as the polar opposite of trauma - still somewhat terrifying and sudden, exhausting, not "fun", but healing. I journaled the entire experience and continued to write about it for the next few days in an effort to integrate it. After this experience I firmly believe that hallucinogens have a role to play in healing from trauma if used thoughtfully.