Loosing Touch With Reality

[Guest Perus32]

I have been de-converted for several months now, and no longer consider myself a Christian, don't believe in the Bible, or the authority of the church, however I'm having hard times releasing that "relationship" with God that I supposedly had. I have hard times saying F**K It, and simply going by my own business, being whomever I want, doing whatever I want, thinking what ever I want.

 

I still have that guilt and voice in my head, the "conviction", etc. I still pray and feel a need to ask God for protection and forgiveness. I too suffer with OCD and so I have a lot of fears and phobias about my death, which I can't get out of my head unless I pray to God for future protection. If i stop all communication with God those phobias will take the best of me. Plus, i have hard times simply saying that that voice and that 'relationship' are not real, as I feel like I would say NO to a God who is out there, which is a terrible thing to do, and I will be all by myself, and not feeling protected.

 

What is real and what is not???? is praying normal, is God there, does he care? Should i ignore that feeling of a 'relationship' with god? I really want to, but what do i do with fear and guilt of offending an old friend?

 

Crap, so many questions, so little understanding of reality!!!

 

Any suggestions? ANYONE?

[Kathlene]

Perus32,

 

I know exactly how you feel. I have gone through the same struggle you described and the only thing I can tell you is that it gets easier over time. It's been 6months for me now and I still feel the guilt and fear of not being protected. It only shows me how much christianity truly brainwashes you. I have come to a point in dealing with it in just functioning purely in the rational world that I can only see and feel and touch. To me that is real. That has helped a lot in getting over my fears and stress through the deconversion process. I suspect it will take a few years as I have read on this site for your brain to be totallty clear of it all. There are millions of people out there in the world walking around, fully functioning as normal human beings without the pressing need to pray for protection and feeling fear and guilt of walking away from an entity that you cannot even see. It takes time. Hang in there.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

It really does take time to change established patterns of thinking and expectations. It seems like I've been out for a long time now, but in reality it has only been 6 months. So I still have songs pop into my head, occasionally feel the desire to speak in tongues or rebuke the devil, and so on. Losing touch with reality isn't what is happening to you, it is what happened while you were in Christianity. What is happening now is that you are beginning to get your grasp of reality back. But it does take time. In the meantime, cut yourself some slack and realize that it can take years to change, especially since a lot of the behavior patterns were established with the powerful emotion of fear. But you will probably begin to notice that the universe doesn't care at all if you follow your own desires, just other people that are caught up in superstition.

 

Some of us who have come out completely drop all religious thought, others of us now follow different spiritual paths (typically that don't have a domineering deity that likes blood). I'm investigating spiritualism, but I take everything with more than a grain of salt now. Others here have chosen Buddhism or one of the Pagan paths. I think most prefer just to drop it all and set their own course. That is really what all of us are doing, but we just choose differently.

 

But it does take time to change established patterns. Be patient with yourself. Most of us have gone through, and are still going through the emotions you describe.

[Creepy Doll]

As others have said, give it time. Time really does heal things. It will get better and those feelings will wane.

[Guest Perus32]

yeah I think time will hel, but when i want to speed up my process, and i recall the way i was thinking while i wasn't a Christian, i get guilt for trying to push God out of my mind, and i feel like i'm abandoning an old friend and turning my back on him. So i feel guilt, and then fear of God turning his back on me.

[par4dcourse]

Give it time, take it easy, and do something you've not been allowed to do before: think for yourself.

My personal way of dealing with unwanted thoughts is to stop and think "what good would this line of thinking do?" If, as usual, the answer is none, I switch to another>

Give it time.

[Guest Ramos28]

this is the approach I took. I wrote about it in my blog...http://ruinedbyreligion.blogspot.com/

 

So what's been going on in my life is that the Christian mind set kind of came back to me, and I was functioning kind of like a Christian, without being one. What that means is that I would pray for protection all the time, cast out demons from myself as I felt they were trying to enter me because of some 'open doors' to my soul. I also was praying for forgiveness all the time, and trying to figure out what's moral and what's not.

 

The other thing that happened is that there are two ways that my mind can think now...i can make it work as a non-religious mind since I remember what it feels like, but i can also think as a religious man because I also know how it is.

 

So i need to choose one, and obviously I prefer the non-religious mind set, but when I do that I feel like I am turning my back on my old friend, and pushing him away from my life, which is upsetting, and guilt producing.

 

So I figured that all truth is God's truth, and whatever makes my mind think better and my mental state healthier I must do that. So if thinking as a non religious man helps me to be free, mentally stable, and happy then that's exactly what I need to do.

 

Also, I asked God to show me that He is real and I need to continue thinking as a religious man, but to do that without guilt. I kind of said that I choose to believe that guilt is a product of my mind and not reality, and so I no longer listen to guilt and no longer obey its rules. This should make life a lot easier!!!

 

So I'm excited for that, as last night was a torture...Last night i went to a party with a lot of drinking, dirty dancing, sex jokes, etc. going on, and the guilt came back again, and those anxiety thoughts, etc... Then went to a club after and the same thing happened. I was constantly trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong, and what I should be doing. That was so mentally draining and I NEED to put an end to this...I've lived like that for too long and it must stop!!!!

 

So we'll see what happens and how this experiment turns out... I read this quite ones...

"Sometimes in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark." ~ from the movie Minority Report

 

So I'm risking...

[oddbird1963]

I have been de-converted for several months now, and no longer consider myself a Christian, don't believe in the Bible, or the authority of the church, however I'm having hard times releasing that "relationship" with God that I supposedly had. I have hard times saying F**K It, and simply going by my own business, being whomever I want, doing whatever I want, thinking what ever I want.

 

I still have that guilt and voice in my head, the "conviction", etc. I still pray and feel a need to ask God for protection and forgiveness. I too suffer with OCD and so I have a lot of fears and phobias about my death, which I can't get out of my head unless I pray to God for future protection. If i stop all communication with God those phobias will take the best of me. Plus, i have hard times simply saying that that voice and that 'relationship' are not real, as I feel like I would say NO to a God who is out there, which is a terrible thing to do, and I will be all by myself, and not feeling protected.

 

What is real and what is not???? is praying normal, is God there, does he care? Should i ignore that feeling of a 'relationship' with god? I really want to, but what do i do with fear and guilt of offending an old friend?

 

Crap, so many questions, so little understanding of reality!!!

 

Any suggestions? ANYONE?

I think what you are going through is normal. The christian religion is a constant barage of mental messages and habits that we cycle through over and over. It's only natural that we will give up our intellectual acceptance long before those mental habits go away.

 

When I catch myself praying, or doing something out of the christian mental habit, I try to pause, identify what I am doing and think about whether I should correct it.

 

As far at the OCD, that no doubt amplifies the conflict you feel. I'm sure that others on this site who struggle with OCD will have helpful things to say about that.

 

You don't have to feel a certain way or do things a certain way. So try not to be too hard on yourself and give yourself time to change - - and to revert back on occasion. You're the one who's free. That means freedom from self-condemnation as well as freedom to do what you can, in good conscience, do.

[Looking4Answers]

I've only de-converted about 8 months ago or so (back at the end of August/beginning of September). Despite that, every once in a while I find myself accidentally whistling a hymn or, when something good happens, the thought of, "Thank you, Lord," goes through my mind, etc. So what do we do about things like that?

 

First of all, when a thought like this runs through my brain, I instantly and forcefully stop it. It does not matter what I am doing, I stop everything (if possible) and forcefully think about the thought and remind myself about what I know to be true or real. If a hymn starts to go through my mind I may think something like, "Stop that!" and then force myself to think on another song or to start whistling or singing it. By actively grabbing a hold of these thoughts and correcting them, I find that these thinking patterns begin to change over time. Less and less do hymns come into my head. Less and less do I find myself "thanking god" out of habit.

 

Earlier on after my de-conversion, I spent some time going through the Bible. I did this in order to see the passages with new eyes ... eyes that were not dedicated to god or to Jesus. I began to see passages that appalled me ... that made me sick ... especially considering that I used to lovingly read these passages and had devoted myself to the supposed god of these passages. What this did was to helped me to see that the Bible was not a book that can be trusted ... not a book of truth, or morals or of value to a modern society. Whenever my mind started to slip back into an old Christian pattern (I had been a Christian for 17 years and was a pastor and a missionary) I simply (and forcefully) remind myself of some of these passages ... god commanding genocide ... god killing a man for not impregnating his dead brother's wife ... god commanding the stoning of children ... god killing an entire family for the supposed transgression of the father ... god commanding a rape victim to marry her rapist ... and on and on it goes. After a while, I had to do this less and less. Now I rarely have to do this at all.

 

For me, the key was to ground myself in knowledge and to use that forcefully against any thought that would be a temptation to draw me back toward any Christian habit or pattern.

[Deva]

Some of us who have come out completely drop all religious thought, others of us now follow different spiritual paths (typically that don't have a domineering deity that likes blood). I'm investigating spiritualism, but I take everything with more than a grain of salt now. Others here have chosen Buddhism or one of the Pagan paths. I think most prefer just to drop it all and set their own course. That is really what all of us are doing, but we just choose differently.

 

But it does take time to change established patterns. Be patient with yourself. Most of us have gone through, and are still going through the emotions you describe.

 

I would just say that Fuego makes some good points here. We are all different. Dropping Bible God need not mean dropping God or theism. But, it might be necessary for you to - I don't know. Maybe you could re-imagine God, take out the Biblical story about him. I think that it takes time to shift your thinking process when you are indoctrinated with Christianity.

 

i have hard times simply saying that that voice and that 'relationship' are not real, as I feel like I would say NO to a God who is out there, which is a terrible thing to do, and I will be all by myself, and not feeling protected

.

 

I am thinking that something that might be helpful for you to do is to list the qualities and attributes of the God that you still believe in. Would he feel offended if you didn't talk to him? What are the implications of that if its a fact? Make a list and try to reason it out.

[Weetie]

I can remember being at the point you're at right now. Perhaps I can make some suggestions that will help.

 

First, keep in mind that if God really is an old friend of yours, he'll understand what you're going through & not hold it against you that you're confused, frightened, or angry. I don't say this to encourage you to keep believing in God so much as I say it to encourage you to let go of your guilt for feeling the way you do. You are a human being. You have emotions & thoughts. You have a RIGHT to experience them without the stress of thinking that you're rejecting God by doing so.

 

My next suggestion is to BREATHE. Sounds corny, but what I mean is that you're wrestling with some of the most profound and complex questions that any of us deal with during our lives. There is no guidebook, no one way of working through this, and no one-size-fits-all solution. So...take a deep breath, pour yourself some coffee, and relax. The questions before you are best explored with a tranquil mind, feeling your way forward gradually, and taking plenty of mental vacations from it along the way.

 

Finally, I too have gone through some pretty major phobias about death. If you're going through what I went through, you have my heart, because it truly is hell facing the idea of death without God for the first time. Have hope, though, because there IS a way to be at peace with the situation whether or not you believe in God, and you'll be able to find that way in time. I'd be happy to talk in depth with you about that if you'd like, because that was the hardest part for me to cope with & that was when I benefitted the most from talking to others.

[Guest Ramos28]

I can remember being at the point you're at right now. Perhaps I can make some suggestions that will help.

 

First, keep in mind that if God really is an old friend of yours, he'll understand what you're going through & not hold it against you that you're confused, frightened, or angry. I don't say this to encourage you to keep believing in God so much as I say it to encourage you to let go of your guilt for feeling the way you do. You are a human being. You have emotions & thoughts. You have a RIGHT to experience them without the stress of thinking that you're rejecting God by doing so.

 

My next suggestion is to BREATHE. Sounds corny, but what I mean is that you're wrestling with some of the most profound and complex questions that any of us deal with during our lives. There is no guidebook, no one way of working through this, and no one-size-fits-all solution. So...take a deep breath, pour yourself some coffee, and relax. The questions before you are best explored with a tranquil mind, feeling your way forward gradually, and taking plenty of mental vacations from it along the way.

 

Finally, I too have gone through some pretty major phobias about death. If you're going through what I went through, you have my heart, because it truly is hell facing the idea of death without God for the first time. Have hope, though, because there IS a way to be at peace with the situation whether or not you believe in God, and you'll be able to find that way in time. I'd be happy to talk in depth with you about that if you'd like, because that was the hardest part for me to cope with & that was when I benefitted the most from talking to others.

 

 

thanks! These are some great suggestions. Appreciate it!

 

Its funny, i never have the feeling about death without God cause I guess I became "spiritual, not religious" (typical North American saying). So i still pray and believe that it will be okay after death. I am not sure if God is real or not, but at this point in life it helps me to deal with my OCD (even though the Christian version of God really messed up my OCD, the one i created in my head helps). So it might be all in my head and not real, but it is helping me to deal with certain phobias now.