Last time, we looked at the idea of breaking points and spiritual deconstruction. These are not bad things — especially if one has been in a spiritually abusive environment — and in fact are often necessary and ultimately positive experiences. But as their names suggest, they leave us feeling broken and torn down. To make matters worse, it’s a kind of feeling that’s hard for others to relate to. If you’ve built your life around the community you’ve left left, at best your friends still there will struggle to understand why you left (and validating your experience could force them to question their own), and at worst blame and shame you for it; but on the other hand, those on the outside will struggle to understand what the big deal is, and assume you should be happy and have nothing to grieve. I mentioned earlier in this series that a key step in my own re-construction journey was accepting my feelings of grief and loss as legitimate grief and loss. So I thought I’d take a few minutes today to reflect on a few different aspects of the grief that accompanies leaving a faith community that is not healthy for you.
Lost Investment
Lost investment refers to the grief at how much you have put into the life you’re leaving. To my mind, this has at least four components:
- Lost time: This was one of the weightiest aspects of my own journey. The idea of “I spent thirteen years of my adult life on this” became an intrusive thought that stayed with me a long time. I carried not only grief for the years that felt lost to me, but also embarrassment and shame at it.
- Lost energy: With time comes energy: all the work one put into the community and on shaping oneself to fit into it.
- Lost money: Let’s be honest, belonging in a community of faith is expensive. Even in a situation like mine that was actually very healthy when it came to its approach to finances, I did give sacrificially to support my church’s work, to say nothing of money I spent on subcultural things like books, clothing, and music.
- Lost opportunity: This is really the consequence of the whole theme of lost investment, the grief what else I could have done with that time, energy, and money. In my situation, I was still young enough to start over, but old enough that having to do so was a source of a lot of grief.
Lost Foundation
In this theme I include the loss of all the ways belonging to a faith community provides the foundation for the life one has built:
- Lost structure: For a ‘true believer,’ belonging to a faith community is not a matter of how one spends an hour a week. It shapes the whole of one’s schedule: the daily routine of prayer and devotion, the weekly pattern of services and community activities, and annual cycle of celebrations, feasts, and fasts.
- Lost worldview: In the literature this is often described as ‘lost certainty’. But while it’s true that intellectual certainty is a common attraction to high control religions, it was not really active for me. But that’s not to say my religious beliefs did not shape and provide a foundation for how I understood the world around me. Deconstructing one’s belief system is just that: it shakes up that foundation, and some things will inevitably fall.
- Lost meaning: Carl Jung famously said that in his psychotherapeutic practise, he’d encountered no one over the age of 35 who wasn’t troubled by religious questions. He didn’t mean that people were always obsessed with questions about God or ethics or the afterlife, but rather with questions of meaning. Whether it is our quest for meaning that expresses itself in religion or religion that gives life meaning (I think it’s a mix of the two), there is no doubt that the two are inextricably linked. Losing religious belief involves a tremendous amount of lost meaning. And that’s scary. And depressing (literally).
Lost Community
When you’re part of a faith community, even in healthy ones, it’s normal for one’s entire social network to be grounded in it. (This is to say nothing of unhealthy, high-control communities, where this is expected and demanded!) When you have to leave the community for whatever reason, you leave your whole social network, and if it’s the community in which you were raised, you could end up leaving your family too depending on the circumstances. I was very lucky in that my real friends from my church wanted to say friends and did not engage in any blaming or shaming that would make an ongoing friendship possible. But even with this incredible privilege, while I had them as individuals, I no longer had them as a community. A community is more than the sum-total of the friendships. It’s a home. It’s a safety net. It’s an organizing principle. Essentially it’s about belonging. And when you no longer belong, you lose all that, even if you keep the individual friendships.
Lost Identity
This is really the totality of everything else discussed here today. When you lose all that you’ve put into your life, your routines and rhythms, your worldview and meaning, and your community, in a big way you’ve lost your self. While this can be very freeing, it’s also devastating and daunting. The whole midlife crisis cliché of ‘finding yourself’ is very true when it comes to the aftermath of a big spiritual deconstruction. In my case, I ended up letting loose in my curiosity to try to figure out who I really was and what I really enjoyed. Beyond starting to date men, within that first year, I got really into jazz music, learned photo editing and digital illustration, read about Buddhism, started to travel, and rediscovered my love of fiction. And, after all the dust settled, I realized how little of myself I had actually lost — which became the catalyst for my spiritual re-construction in the years that followed. But the immensity of the loss of identity cannot be overstated.
I’ve framed this all in terms of loss, but with loss comes grief: our emotional response to loss. Every one of those losses brings grief with it. Grief for the lost opportunities, grief for the lost rhythms of life, grief for lost community, and grief for what I lost of myself. This was particularly intense for me because, while my belonging was ultimately unsustainable, my church was really very good, and I had wonderfully positive memories that were now tainted with unbelievable sadness.
All this is important because it is only when we really engage with our grief that we can work through it and learn to live with it, and move on in a healthy way. And it’s to that important work of reconstruction that we’ll turn next time.
