June 17, 2021
Addressing your mental health, especially if you are just now working through your belief system for the very first time, is key to landing on your feet after your deconstruction.
Not too long ago, I wrote an article about how focusing on my physical health during my own faith deconstruction was immensely valuable in helping me get through it. As important as that is, it’s only one half of the equation.
Your mental health is just as important. The mind and body are inextricably linked. Damage to one causes damage to the other. Likewise, improving one improves the other. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can only focus on one and neglect the other. Balance is important, so it’s important to have balance between both a healthy mind and a healthy body.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to understand why people who leave an abusive, fundamentalist environment struggle with their mental health. For years—perhaps their entire lives—they were told:
- you aren’t good enough on your own.
- you are inherently an evil sinner.
- your questioning and confusion could land you in hell.
- your good deeds are like filthy rags.
- your plans for your own life don’t matter; only God’s plan matters.
- your natural inclinations and sexual desires are wrong, dirty, and sinful.
Frankly, breaking out of a fundamentalist religion without any lasting damage to the psyche would be a Jesus miracle.
There are some churches out there—certainly not all—who don’t take the mental health of people in their congregations seriously at all. To them, any and all mental health problems can be attributed to sin, or to not “having enough faith in God,” or “not being in touch with God’s plan.” All of these perspectives are as harmful or more than the list above.
Some churches, in an effort to address it, still drop the ball when they appoint a “wise” person in the Church as a “Christian counselor” to help people through mental health challenges. This person is usually not a licensed therapist. They rationalize it with the sickening line we’ve all heard before: “God equips the called.” Essentially, that means anyone who decides they “have a heart” for people who are struggling with their mental health can just start offering counseling one day because God will magically fill their mind with all the perfect advice that everyone needs.
“Mental health” is a huge topic that goes both wide and deep and I couldn’t hope to cover everything there is to it in a single article here, or even an entire book. It would also be ridiculous for me to presume that I even know enough about mental health to write that much about it. But I do know this:
Your mental health deserves your time and attention.
That might be easy to say and you may be nodding along, but taking steps toward working on your mental health can be a difficult challenge.
As you probably already know, perhaps the best and quickest way to make improvements to your mental health is to work with a therapist. A therapist relationship could quite possibly be one of the most beneficial mentorship relationships you ever have.
A good therapist can help you do the following, all of which are immensely valuable while deconstructing your faith:
- They can reveal to you patterns of behavior and thinking that you may not have noticed before.
- They can help you understand that some of the detrimental and harmful stories that you’re telling yourself aren’t, in fact, true at all.
- They can help keep you accountable to the positive changes you decide to make in your life.
- They can help give you a broader perspective on what really happens within fundamentalist belief systems—things that are much harder to see when you’re caught up in it.
- They can recommend additional valuable resources that you may have never heard of before.
If even just one of these things sounds like something that you could benefit from, I suggest you make it your top priority for the next couple days to track down a therapist and book an initial appointment.
My experience with therapy:
I’m relatively new to the therapy game. In fact, it was probably one of the last things I tackled in my deconversion.
For the longest time I told myself I didn’t need it. Instead, I got to work taking practical and actionable steps to improve my life after my deconversion. I didn’t see therapy as either practical nor actionable because I figured that it was just a bunch of sitting around and talking while I wanted to get up and do.
Well, my strategy worked. I describe what I did step-by-step in my book, but looking back I realize I would’ve put the pieces of my life back together much faster had I also given adequate attention to my mental health along the way. The act of accomplishing tasks and goals is so much easier when you have a healthy mind supporting the actions taken by your body. While a therapy session does usually consist of sitting and talking, each session should ideally consist of some practical items to enact in your daily life going forward.
My own therapist is a good third party and outside observer. What I appreciate most about him is that he doesn’t tell me what to do. With my stubborn and skeptical personality, I would probably refuse to listen (after all, I spent far too long unquestioningly obeying authority while in the Church). Instead of telling me what to do, he asks thought-provoking questions to allow me to consider some angles that I haven’t spotted yet. He also helps me to get out of my own way by helping me recognize where I might be hindering my own progress through some sort of fear or imposter syndrome. He also knows that I’m especially prone to analysis paralysis and can point out when I need to stop thinking so much and just take action. He also tells me not to come back until I’ve taken those actions. I appreciate the tough love.
What about you? Did therapy help you during your own faith deconstruction? Do you still talk regularly about your time in the Church during your sessions? Let me know in the comments!