Using Spirituality As Way To Heal Religious Trauma
I grew up in a small christian family that lived in a different random city in Georgia every couple of years. Every child who grows up in an christian religion has a different experience. We were given a different image of what Jesus looks like or how he would want us to live our lives. The bible could be interpreted in so many different ways and most of the time we hear the interpretations more than we hear the actual words. Two people raised in the same religion and the same household could get out of it without totally different feelings when they look back on their childhoods. This story only reflects how I was raised and what it made me feel.
Most Sundays growing up, I spent it going to church in the afternoon. My mom believed that a good church community would help us fix a lot of our problems. She believed that the perfect church home would feel like a second family. The perfect church would come with all of the friends she wanted. However she loved going to church even if we had no friends there. That is because my mom truly loved God. She loved to spend time with him and learn about him. She loved to volunteer in the church which often meant I would spend multiple days out of the week at church.
You may have heard the saying that “all sins are equal”. That isn’t how it was told to me. I was raised to believe that these were the most important rules to help you enter the precious gates of heaven. Some people in my extended family were raised to view these sins as more suggestions for how God wants you to be rather than requirements. However most christians believe in the power of prayer.
Praying was a very big theme in my life when I was christian. Praying was supposed to be the thing that could fix all of my problems. When I was scared that my mom wouldn’t be able to get a job, she told me to pray about it. When I was anxious, she told me to pray. When I told her reasons I wanted to kill myself, she told me to pray. When I told her about any negative feelings, she asked if I prayed about it. As I got older, I learned that prayer was the cure to all things, especially mental illness. My anxiety disorder wasn’t simply that I could just pray away no matter how much I tried.
I was raised to value who God wanted me to be more than valuing who I wanted to be.
God wants his followers to save their virginity for their future spouse. God wants them to view same-sex attraction as something unnatural and weird. God doesn’t want his followers to masturbate and if they do, he wants them to feel like a sex-crazed monster. I was raised to believe in a God that wanted me to value his wants over my needs. I was always told that I didn’t get to define myself but let God define me. I couldn’t listen to the voices in my head telling me how I wasn’t happy because they were just the devil trying to tempt me. I was told I was selfish for thinking that what I needed was more important than what God wants from me.
Sometimes I look back on my relationship with God and it looks like a lifetime movie about a toxic relationship. He wasn’t allowing me to grow into the person I wanted to become. He wasn’t even allowing me to figure out what type of person I wanted to become. I would go to church camps and watch the sunrise on the last day. Over and over again, I would pray for a message from him. I look around seeing everyone bonding with this God. A God I stopped loving a long time ago. A god I only have fear for. Towards the end the only reason I stayed was because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. Believing in God gave me a community of people that supported me towards the end. I looked at my church friends and they looked so happy with their relationship with God. They loved and believed in the power of prayer. While I was starting to stop believing in the power of God. However it was the only thing I had that seemed like it gave me control of the world I lived in. So just like so many people in toxic relationships, I stayed because I didn’t know who I was without him or what else was out there for me.
During quarantine, I stayed with my family in Georgia. Believing in God in the south is like drinking water. Everyone does it even if they don’t want to. Especially in my family. They loved going to a virtual church which started to feel like a chore for me. They loved praying and listening to gospel music. The sound of the gospel music just reminded me of the creepy pastors and how much of myself I have lost to this faith. I watched them dance in joy and worship God. I just wanted to run away. I started to accept that I was tired of God. He didn’t give me any joy or I had no urge to worship him. I realized that I was done trying to fit myself into the idea that pleases someone I don't even know exists. My aunt was trying to show me that God isn’t tied to the rules I was raised to believe in. She couldn’t understand how much pain it had cost me and just wanted me to start over with him.
However the rules were more of a God to me rather than the kind and loving God she believed in. Letting go of the rules meant letting him go. I felt so free after leaving him. When I’m sad these days, I remember how I don't have these rules holding me down. I know now that masturbating doesn’t make me a sex-crazed monster. I don’t have to wait until my marriage because my virginity says nothing about my character.
Realizing all of this was the highest of highs. I get to know who I am and what I want out of life.The world felt bigger and like it had so many more stories to tell me. I didn’t have to limit myself to the rules in an ancient book that’s been charged to fit someone's agenda throughout time. The guilt I once had about existing started to feel like hope. A part of me did miss having a guide and rules that could help me figure out what I should do. I missed the sense of the community I felt I had towards the end. I miss having something to believe in.
That’s when I learned about tarot cards. I watched videos of people doing tarot readings by letting the viewers pick the deck they feel connected to. This led to me buying my own tarot cards. The night it arrived I ran up to my room at my aunt’s house and hid the cards. Once I knew everyone was asleep, I tiptoed to my room and placed a table in front of my bed. I lit up a candle and played some music as I opened the deck for the first time. I start switching the cards around like you would a deck of uno. I closed my eyes as I focused on giving it all of my energy. Then I asked my first question. I don’t remember what my first question was. However I remember how amazing it was to get such a clear answer from the cards. They gave me some advice on what I should do. They also helped me deep inside of myself and gave me some ideas of what I actually wanted. The tarot cards weren’t trying to shape me into the person they wanted me to. Instead they were trying to help me discover who I was.
That was my first taste of spirituality and I loved it immediately. My favorite part of spirituality is how much control I have and how different it could look for every single person. I have friends who have jars of moon water for them to heal their crystals in. I’m lucky if I remember where I put my crystals and tarot cards. I don’t have to compare myself to my friends and their relationship with spirituality doesn’t have to be the goal for my own relationship. I get to choose how spiritual I am. It felt so good to be able to have a belief in something that felt like it truly supported me. Something that still has so much history and culture in it. Something that connected with a community. I have learned to have so much more faith in who I am as a person.
I want to learn even more about how to bring spirituality closer to my life and about the history and the stories of people who practiced before me. Since I started practicing, I have started to become my own person. I stop doing things and holding beliefs just because it makes the people around me comfortable. My new beliefs cause some people in my life not to understand me. Some people may not understand how the Christian God could have caused me so much pain. Some people may say that I’m just rebelling like a stubborn child. It doesn’t really matter what they say (family or friends or stranger), what matters is that I feel closer to who I am more than I have my whole life.