Releasing Religious Trauma – Fuck It!

“Sometimes you just have to say ‘fuck it.’” I love Grace and Frankie, and that’s one of my favorite quotes from the show. Seeing women in their 70s and 80s live their lives with each other, free from the shackles of men or societal expectations literally gives me life. During my tenth rewatch, I realized that I love the show because Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as the titular characters give me hope for life after trauma, and the comfort that it’s okay to still hurt from trauma decades later.

“Fuck you god! Fuck you holy spirit! Fuck you jesus! Fuck you christianity! Fuck you christians! Fuck you church!” I screamed in my kitchen as I stirred my Korean honey citron tea into a mug of hot water. I’m battling an upper respiratory infection at the moment. It seems like I often deal with some kind of ailment, or at the very least a sense of sickness hanging around me. I’m tired, worn out, and my mood is generally a little low these days.

Looking around me at the world and in my own Atlantan backyard, there is good enough reason for this. The world is burning. christian me would have seen this as a sign that jesus was coming back soon, and I would have been thrilled! I know there are many christians out there who look up to the heavens and anticipate the retun of their savior who apparently was just waiting for tens of thousands of Palestinians to be murdered for him to return.

Although I left christianity three years ago, I still bleed from the wounds it inflicted upon me. Every day I realize a bit more that my personal development was stunted by this religion, and that I was hurt in every single way. It would take years to list out the damage that christianity and its followers did to me, and perhaps I’ll write about it in my memoir, but here are the major points of pain.

1. christianity told me to divorce my brain from my body, and my spirit from all of me. If something feels good, that doesn’t mean it’s good for me. Even if something feels uncomfortable, it’s god’s way of refining me. The only thing that matters is my spirit; one day my body will return to dust. My color and gender are only relevant in that I can use them to help bring people to jesus. I can relate to women and brown people, and that’s why god made me this way. When you feel disconnected from yourself, and believe that who you are doesn’t matter, you make the perfect victim of abuse and assault.
2. christianity told me that I am dirty, disgusting, and that my natural inclination is toward evil. It pointed out scripture to show me that the heart is wicked above all things, and that only deceit can flow from it. My first thoughts, feelings, and impulses are all wrong. Beyond that, they’re evil! I must need someone older, wiser, male, and white to show me the true path and to teach me how to be holy. And any holiness I accrue is a result of the holy spirit (fuck it!) and not actually myself. So no matter how I think or behave, my roots are still rotten. That also primes me as the perfect victim of abuse.
3. christianity told me that since all my natural thoughts are evil, I must take every thought captive. What does that mean? It means being constantly aware of every thought that runs across your mind, and those that don’t align with scripture should be “given to god” aka repented of. We are guilty of bad and sinful behavior even in our minds, so we must always be checking our minds for dirty little thoughts. This is the worst thing to tell someone with OCD, like me. My intrusive thoughts already play on a loop and I already think they mean I’m the worst person in the world. christianity just proved to me that OCD is right! This sets me up to stay a prisoner to OCD and to distrust my brain even more. And if I can’t trust my brain, whose can I trust? My pastor’s! Again, perfect victim of abuse.
4. christianity told me that experiencing pleasure is wrong. Enjoying good food can lead to gluttony which is as evil as murder. Some schools of thought believe in a hierarchy of sin, whereas others believe all sins are equal. My little group promoted the latter way of thinking. So my being overweight was a sin, and it was a sin that was as bad as taking someone’s life. Secular music is bad because it teaches and trains your mind to think of dirty aka SEXUAL things. It will lead you down a path to partaking in SEXUAL behaviors. Movies with SEX are another gateway drug to SEX, and movies about demons or ghosts? Oh my! Portals to hell! Really, they open up space for a demon to weasel its way into your life, because you gave it permission to by watching that movie! Yes, demons and the devil operate via a strict legal system and they only enter if you give them permission. Isn’t Satan so considerate?? So if I feel tortured and haunted by my thoughts (my OCD flaring up) and I can remember that I saw Paranormal Activity last weekend, well it must be because my action of watching a scary movie opened a door for a demon to mess with me and now it is! Shit! I brought all of this on myself.
5. Oh, another portal for demons and the devil is SEXUAL activity, like masturbation or sex outside of marriage. Let’s not even go into homosexual behavior because that’s a whole other story and I know we said that all sins are the same but you know what? That sin in particular is gross and so it’s worse and we’re going to stigmatize all those who “struggle with same-sex attraction.” We’ll just hope that jesus turns them around and makes them straight! But ladies, don’t diddle yourselves because you will invite the devil into your life and he will fuck it up even more. Masturbation is a sin because SEX is about two people in marriage sharing their bodies for the glory of god. Ew. Why does god get off on watching us fuck? Don’t get me started on the group of christians who believe that god as our husband means he wants to be ahem intimate with us. Don’t!

I really could keep going, but I won’t. I’m so happy to be free from this religion; to be thirty and still young enough where I don’t feel like I wasted my whole life. But I did lose my twenties to this religion, and my teenage years. I never took risks, did things because they felt good, or trusted myself. I’m SLOWLY learning how to now. But I’m angry. I’m angry with this “god” and his followers for abusing me for so long, and for training me to do it to others. Sometimes I just want to scream because I was lied to. I was duped. The transaction of “believe in jesus, pray this prayer, and you will go to heaven and have a great life!” is actually bullshit. All we have is ourselves. But that’s all we need.

Ok deep breath, my dear reader.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Shake out your arms and shoulders.

Inhale.

Exhale.

And fuck it!

Gabrielle

*By the way, allowing myself to say “fuck you holy spirit” was a big deal! Because of OCD and christianity, I believed that I had probably “blasphemed the holy spirit” and was going to hell. The holy spirit is still one of the things I don’t really talk about, because that fear’s roots are still in there, inside me. But I’m practicing and using those FUCK IT muscles, so once again FUCK YOU HOLY SPIRIT! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE HOLY SPIRIT, OR BLASPHEMING IT, OR HELL SO FUCK IT!

OK, bye!