Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion

by Marlene Winell

Roughly speaking, the child represents feeling and the adult represents thinking. Without the adult, the child is unprotected. Without the child, the adult can get out of touch with true needs and feelings.

Unfortunately, the cost of using your idea monster for protection is high. You ultimately live permanently in a state of fear and self-condemnation. Your motivation becomes negative. Instead of doing something because you want to, you do it because you think you should or because you fear the consequences.

As you become more in touch with yourself, you will feel more, but what is wrong with that? Pain and frustration are bearable and they don’t last forever. Your adult needs to learn this and reassure the child — and not let the idea monster say that it’s too much, it’s intolerable, and it will never end.

In short, your religious training has probably damaged your ability to feel free, open, and joyous; to express yourself, to identify and process feelings like anger, sadness, and fear is probably limited. But these are skills essential for human mental and emotional health. Healing in these areas will produce a remarkable change.

Rather than trying to get rid of all fear, as many people think they must do to be healthy, it is much more effective to learn good judgment in assessing perceived threat.

The person who is angry about everything and the person who is never angry are both confused.

A key to accepting and feeling joy in your life is to have faith that you can handle other more difficult feelings.

You can repeatedly give yourself the gifts of awareness, acceptance, affirmation, and action.

Your indoctrination was deep and primitive and unjust, whether you were a small child or not. An attack of “you’re bad and will be punished” on your inner child is an undeserved distortion of reality.

In general, the more you feel capable, the more comfortable you will be with the changes that go on in life.

You don’t just walk away from a philosophy, you leave a person — one who sacrificed and died for you.

No wonder I feel guilty about setting down any kind of boundaries with people I need to limit contact with. If they’ve done one kind thing for me, i feel like I owe them my eternal allegiance.

Underlying all of these areas is a deeper assumption that you are real. You do exist. While that may sound strange to say, it is not at all obvious after you were taught to diminish yourself.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The message here is to feel guilty for being inadequate. When sin is defined this way, nothing you do is ever enough.

Nowhere in the Bible is the body discussed with respect.

Remember that your body is you. It’s not your car or your house or somebody else’s temple.

In contrast, the fundamentalist Christian is expected to remain a child emotionally. You are “born again” but may not get very far past infancy in your sense of self. Therefore, many people who break away feel small and helpless. It can be frightening to realize you have to grow up.

It’s not as though you were once a channel for God and now you are becoming your own person. You have been a capable human being all along. You have always had immense capabilities. You were simply taught to attribute your strengths to God.

You can discount your own value and your own power. If you fail to return a defective item to a store, you are discounting if you decide they won’t listen to your complaint. Discounting is prevalent in dysfunctional families, where children are not taught to value themselves and respect their own power.

The world was coming to an end. Why bother?

Funny that this worldview is actually extremely nihilistic

Your life does not need to feel like a high-wire act.

Preach. Don’t listen. Assume that if people don’t readily accept, it is because they are proud and resisting the word of God. Don’t cast pearls before swine. What a convenient explanation for any lack of immediate receptivity.

This is a subtle but very important point, because if you have been convinced that these ideals are necessary, you feel much more anxiety if they are not present. When you feel disappointed, you are more likely to panic about having a bad life instead of a bad day!

There is an important distinction between perfectionism and healthy idealism. An ideal can be a useful image; it can provide direction for organizing one’s effort.

In contrast, perfectionism focuses on arriving, instead of appreciating the process. Thus small achievements can be lost in the emphasis on reaching perfection.

People are imperfect; they always have been and always will be. The relationships we have are necessarily imperfect as well. This can be very hard for the inner child to accept. Your adult needs to appreciate these facts and help your child. Otherwise, nothing may ever truly satisfy.

In general, the main benefit of learning to accept is liberation. You feel liberated when you accept a situation and “go with the flow.” You enjoy people when you accept who they are and stop trying to provoke change. Life can be sweet when you embrace it for what it is.

When I’m not extremely busy and productive, I feel worthless. I have to earn my right to be on this earth.

This is an extremely capitalist mindset too. Which modern Christianity and capitalism are bedfellows so it makes sense.

It is important to realize that fun is an important matter. Children who do not have any fun are not happy and are eventually not healthy. The same is true for adults, since your inner child is your core.

This issue of responsibility is central. If you believe that someone or something outside yourself is responsible for your happiness, you can never be satisfied.

There is no wrong decision if it does not violate your sense of morals or ethics.

However, you may still be sad that you cannot do everything you might like to do. It is an essential truth about life that every time you make a decision, you also experience a loss of some alternative. I will probably not be able to be an astronaut in this life, and with my interest in space, that’s a little sad. But it does not mean I should have chosen it as a career. When you buy a chocolate ice cream cone, it means you are not eating strawberry. But you accept the loss in order to enjoy the chocolate. You owe it to yourself to focus on the ice cream you have chosen.