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when you process religious issues, you end up processing all of your issues.
A critical area of recovery will be to discover and learn to use the inner resources you do have.
Leaving the faith can also mean alienation from your own family. Until you replace or amend key relationships in your life, you might feel abandoned and very lonely.
Guilt is often a continuing issue, because it is one of the only feelings indulged by religion. You are probably used to feeling bad for many things, and now you no longer have the old means of forgiveness.
After leading a religious life, it can be quite an adjustment to live an ordinary human life in the here and now.
Former fundamentalists often need to heal from the habit of denigrating the world and other people.
This dependence is why children will sustain their loyalty to parents despite abuse.
The fundamentalist Christian family is usually part of a distinct and powerful subculture as well. Like belonging to a family, cultural identification also has a potent survival function.
Strength lies in the group
there are strong reasons for choosing the approval of family and community.
we all have essential needs that the fundamentalist system can appear to satisfy.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with meeting human needs. However, in practice these needs are exaggerated and used to frighten potential converts into joining and to preserve existing membership.
deny mortal existence
saved from everyday life.
Fundamentalism preys on the normal concerns people have by painting the world as completely out of control and humans as essentially helpless.
In the fundamentalist framework, decision-making is a matter of discerning God’s will, to the point of looking for God’s blueprint for your life.
Fundamentalist Christianity relieves the burden of responsibility very thoroughly. When one is “born again” and finds a place in the “family of God,” one’s freedom and responsibility are traded for the comfort of following the plan.
Having strict rules for the entire group gives an added degree of security.
people have intuitive knowledge of ethics.
Emotionally, many Christians describe their salvation as a kind of homecoming, much like the prodigal son of Jesus’ parable. Having a “heavenly father” can give a sense of safety and ultimate belonging. Yet, because everything is spiritualized in this system, very human emotional needs can be masked or obscured.
The divine parent also seems to offer guarantees that mortal parents cannot provide, in the present and the future.
You can refuse to grow up and feel justified about it.
Church groups provide both rituals and support for life transitions like baptism, marriage, and death.
It is always easier to be sure of something. A religion that neatly provides all the answers saves you the frustration and anxiety that inevitably accompany a struggle with difficult questions.
the religious addict uses heavy church attendance and religious behavior as an avoidance of life. The payoffs are real and addicting.
Accepting Christ as personal savior can actually be a way of finding self-acceptance. You are taught that salvation means that you are forgiven, clean, and acceptable to God. This external stamp of approval enables you to approve of yourself. Clearly this has an enormous payoff. The effect can be life changing. From a psychological point of view, the impact is due to self-acceptance, which is often hard to achieve in life. For the born again Christian, the change is attributed to the conversion experience.
if you leave the belief system, you lose your acceptance.
more people have died in holy wars throughout history than in any other kind of war.
potent and vicious fantasy
Power is a primary theme in the worship rituals of many churches. I once made a content analysis of hymns sung in fundamentalist churches, expecting a majority of songs to be about love and praise. It turned out that power was by far the dominant subject, exemplified by such hymns as “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” (Interestingly the second most frequent theme was safety.)
