God Didn’t Smite You After All… Now What?
For many folks leaving high-control religious groups, the time leading up to their final exit is full of thoughts like, “What if I’m wrong? What if all of this really is true and God punishes me for leaving? What if I wind up miserable and alone for nothing?”
While not true across the board, it’s not an uncommon experience for people to finally walk away after months or years of agonizing over the decision, only to find themselves wondering, “Well nothing instantly bad happened… now what?”
Suddenly All the Rules Are Gone
One of the reasons it can be so disorienting to walk away from high-control religions and family structures is that suddenly all the rules are gone. You might have disagreed with the rules. You might have even hated the rules because they caused you harm. But the rules provided a clear, absolute structure for determining what was okay and what was not okay.
Many folks step outside those harmful rules only to find themselves immediately looking for another set of instructions to replace them with. It can feel upsetting and scary to not have a map when your route was always carefully planned out for you.
How Do I Know I’m Doing the “Right” Things?
Do you remember a time you walked into a new school, new job, or new social situation and had to watch and learn in order to figure out what the “right” thing to do was? Maybe you spent a lot of time clocking what people around you were doing in order to feel comfortable in new environments.
Or maybe you were someone who always found themselves getting into trouble for not understanding the unspoken rules around you, and learned to rely on the explicit rules and regulations of religion to make sure you were doing “what you needed to do.”
Either way, it’s common to wonder if you’re “doing it right” when you don’t have clear guidelines to follow. Especially for those who grew up learning to suppress their own desires and intuition in order to follow other people’s rules, it can be genuinely confusing to start living a life in which there are very few definitively right and wrong choices.
Freedom Doesn’t Have to Mean Chaos
The good news is, finding your freedom doesn’t have to mean that you live the rest of your life living in chaos, unsure how to make decisions or do the “right” thing. It might just take some time to establish your own personal code of ethics that you can feel good about following.
Religion often tries to make people believe they can only know what’s right and wrong through studying religious texts or asking for direction from God. In fact, many of the guiding principles religion claims to have a monopoly on are actually just… free to use! You can start to build your personal ethics with some of these common-sense principles (no prayers or Bible quoting necessary):
Integrity
Kindness
Community
Mindfulness
Pleasure
Consent
Gratefulness
It’s okay to not be sure what these principles look like in real life when you encounter confusing situations or have to set firm boundaries with others that feel uncomfortable. Religion also likes to make folks believe that there is never any room for mistakes, growth, learning, or reevaluating their choices. In reality, those things are pretty constant experiences. Learning as you go and changing your mind are often signs of growth and personal accountability, not failure.
Intuition is a Valid Decision Maker
Along with establishing a personal code of ethics, you can rebuild a relationship with your intuition and instincts. High-control religion often teaches folks to squash their own desires and to view their instincts (especially any self-preservation instincts) as invalid at best or the literal Devil at worst.
It’s not surprising, then, that folks often walk away from church with a fear of trusting themselves. A question I often ask my clients is, “What do you want?” Not, “What should you want?” or “What do you wish you wanted?”
What do you want? What would make you feel good in this situation? What would make you feel safe, or joyful, or confident? It’s important to ask and answer this question honestly and without judgment of the answer. Even if you don’t always get what you want, you can begin to develop a trusting relationship with your intuition again.
What if I Still Believe in God?
For some people, it’s not an instant shift from following the church’s rules to complete atheism. Many, many folks leave strict religion while still believing in the existence and importance of God in their life. This can be confusing for some and feel liberating for others.
Whatever your current beliefs, it can be helpful to remember that you left strict, harmful religion behind for a reason. If you still believe in a God who’s worth following or getting to know, consider why you’re interested in getting to know them.
Is it because you’re hoping they have a new set of rules to hand down and punish you if you get them wrong? Or is it because you believe in love, unity, and purpose beyond yourself? And if that’s the case, maybe it’s okay to let go of the idea of God as a spiteful parent who’s out to smite you if you step out of line.
Making Friends with the Unknown
So here you are. Fully intact and un-smoten. (Un-smited? Un-smote?) Facing a world that’s offering you a lot of nuance and not a whole lot of firm answers. Or maybe a world that’s offering you a million answers, all contradicting each other. Either way, you’re probably looking at a whole lot of the big, scary, exciting, frustrating unknown.
Deciding to sit with the unknown, to make friends with uncertainty, and to re-engage with intuition is something I’ve watched friends and clients do over and over again. And even though they have made a thousand different choices along the way, it turns out I’ve bever seen a single one be smitten by God.
If you’d like to have a conversation about navigating your own journey of leaving religion, developing your own code of ethics, or making friends with the unknown, I would love to chat with you and see if I would be a good fit to serve you on your way. Contact me here for a consultation.
