October 28, 2021
Faith deconstruction and deconversion from religion brings with it a lot of emotion—usually negative emotions. It’s not hard to see why. Leaving religion is far more than simply ceasing to believe in dogma or a supernatural entity who lives in the sky. Leaving religion also damages your entire life in many ways. There’s a lot of loss and change and it’s a huge adjustment for anyone who goes through it.
One of the most predominant emotions in someone who is deconstructing their faith is anger.
- They’re angry for having been lied to about the entire nature of reality.
- They’re angry for being indoctrinated at a young age and feel like they never had the chance to choose for themselves what to believe.
- They’re angry because they feel like they’ve missed out on a huge chunk of their lives.
- They’re angry because they’ve been hurt, abused, or traumatized by the very people who claim to exhibit the love of Jesus.
Those are only a few reasons off the top of my head. There are perhaps an infinite amount of other reasons.
And that’s okay. That’s normal. Feeling and experiencing anger when you start to realize the Church and the Christian god aren’t what you’ve always been told is a very appropriate way to respond.
Since anger is not a pleasant emotion, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s “bad” or that it “shouldn’t be there” or that it “needs to be pushed away as fast as possible.” I definitely fell into that trap for a long time.
Emotions are energy in motion (e-motion). Like all energy, emotions need to flow. When they get blocked and can’t flow, then bad things happen. Bad things happen because energy (and emotions) will find a way to flow, even if they have to be diverted around a blockage. Those diversions usually come about as less-than-ideal ways to express. I discussed this in regards to sex energy in this article.
Everyone knows someone (maybe it was even you) where some minor inconvenience happened and that person absolutely lost his shit. To your outside perspective, it looked like he lost his mind over something simple. But that’s not the case. That person has actually been enduring numerous inconveniences for a while and bottling it all up. The current situation you happened to witness was the one that pushed him over the limit. It was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” so to speak.
Anger, along with other emotions, needs to flow. In my experience, anger is very easy to bottle up and put away because it makes other people uncomfortable—it ruins social situations, it starts fights, and it gets you in trouble at work, as just a few of many examples.
It often seems like the best thing to do is to put your anger away and deal with it later. More often than not, later never comes. Anger just keeps building and building until something bursts and you have a freak out. As I said, emotions will flow out one way or another, even if you’re trying to suppress or block them.
Although it may be unpleasant, you should let your anger flow in healthy ways. Don’t take it out on other people, of course. Don’t hurt yourself or others. But do look for ways to express your anger in a safe environment.
Usually this means when you’re alone. When you’re alone you can scream, cry, and punch pillows (not walls please). You can also journal and write out exactly why you’re so angry. It can be cathartic letting all of this flow.
It can also be helpful to further describe what you’re feeling more specifically than just “anger.” Anger can be a very broad term for a wide-ranging spectrum of emotions. If you’re angry at having spent so much time in religion, it could be that what you’re actually feeling is righteous indignation. Righteous indignation means that you were wronged and it wasn’t necessarily your fault and that the entire situation was unfair. It’s totally normal to have emotions from those circumstances. So if “anger” seems like such a dirty word to you (because maybe you were taught it was “wrong” by people in the Church or because society in general is uncomfortable around anger) then perhaps try honing in on righteous indignation or something else equally as specific.
It’s honestly quite cathartic for me to write this article in the first place. As a former “Thinking Christian” as opposed to a “Feeling Christian,” an INTJ, an Enneagram 5, and a traditionally masculine male, feelings weren’t something that ever made much sense to me. I often considered them worthless and intelligence, logic, and reason were what should be prioritized in every situation.
That’s all wrong. Intelligence, logic, and reason are valuable, but there needs to be balance (because energy seeks balance). Throughout my time in the Church I never really learned how to identify, articulate, and handle what I was feeling. Most things would get bottled up and then I’d have an outburst. After, I’d never really analyze why this was happening, make no changes, and then things would just repeat.
One of my biggest projects post-deconversion was learning how to identify and work with what I was feeling. Because it’s valuable. It’s meaningful. It’s part of who I am.
So yeah, anger’s there and that’s okay. Listen to it, lean into it, and channel it appropriately. It might not feel good, but trust me when I say bottling it up is only a very temporary band-aid. You’re going to feel even worse when it finally bubbles over and explodes.
Strong emotions such as anger are communicating to you what you need in that moment. They’re clues regarding things you need to contemplate or reckon with and sort out.
And of course, if you need help with your anger, consider working with a licensed mental health professional—particularly one that has experience with religious trauma.