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Goodbye Jesus

Has religion caused you any trauma? If so what is it


YouDontNeedToKnow17

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I'll go first 😂

This isn't really trauma but I'm scared to have fun lol... 

Anyone else? 

Just thought this would be cool to do, I'm interested to find out all the kinds of negative affects it has on people 

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It'd be difficult to differentiate between trauma caused by childhood indoctrination, trauma caused by an abusive mother, and trauma that was the result of a combination of the two.  

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24 minutes ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

It'd be difficult to differentiate between trauma caused by childhood indoctrination, trauma caused by an abusive mother, and trauma that was the result of a combination of the two.  

True, I'm sorry 😕 I should have used a different word

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Yes, the main problem for me was thinking I was going to Hell because I assumed from church teaching that my attraction to girls (and masturbation) was the sin of "lust".  This was traumatic because I couldn't make the attraction go away, and I attribute it to the beginning of years of depression.  When all  along it was a normal sexual drive and healthy way of temporarily "relieving" the tension without the chance of pregnancy or STDs. 

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1 hour ago, YouDontNeedToKnow17 said:

True, I'm sorry 😕 I should have used a different word

I don't think any harm was done.  You ask a very good question.  One I wish I had been able to ask when I was young.  

 

Sex was the big one for me, but also thinking that you could go to Hell for any little "mistake" is not a fair burden to put on anyone.  We all make mistakes and have "bad" thoughts and feelings at times.  

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6 hours ago, Weezer said:

Yes, the main problem for me was thinking I was going to Hell because I assumed from church teaching that my attraction to girls (and masturbation) was the sin of "lust". 

I follow a few ex-Christian accounts on instagram and I saw somewhere that the Church uses that to bring shame on people. Which makes sense. Unfortunately I don't think they realize how badly they can damage someone with "hell" 

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10 hours ago, YouDontNeedToKnow17 said:

True, I'm sorry 😕 I should have used a different word

No need to be sorry.  Trauma is the right word.  My point was simply that I really don't know the exact source of some of my quirks and foibles.  It would be dishonest to blame religion for all of them while ignoring the emotional and psychological abuse of having a narcissistic parent.

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8 hours ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

hem while ignoring the emotional and psychological abuse of having a narcissistic parent.

That makes sense. I'm sorry for what you went through though 😕

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47 minutes ago, YouDontNeedToKnow17 said:

That makes sense. I'm sorry for what you went through though 😕

There's plenty who had it much worse.

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Christianity with its demons, spirits, angels, voice of God etc. Provided me with a whole world of crazyness to lose my mind in.  With severe bipolar disorder I had psychoses in the theme of Christianity.  

Now that I see things clearly it is easy not to lose myself in psychosis.  Christianity helped further my insanity.

I guess I don't have so much trauma anymore without Christianity.  What a relief.  Phew....

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The doctrine of christianity was one of the reasons I left my teenage sweetheart who I was married to for 17 years..... because he was so angry with me getting involved with this church and they convinced me though the sermons that I could possibly be 'unequally yoked' with the wrong person. Absolutely the worst mistake I ever made in my life and right to this day, almost 35 years later, I am still paying for this horrible decision. I've already been to hell in this life. Besides being indoctrinated that I could go to hell (and there's STILL a bit of fear in me) There ya go hon, that was just the start of some of the trauma I would go through over the next 35 years.

 

Glad you're here with us. (hug)

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Trauma is a tricky word, because there is not real agreement in psychology about a normal state is, or could be, and what an abnormal state is. So I prefer more clear, descriptive terms - a lot of anxiety, or isolation, or lack or education, or enduring physical, emotional pain, etc. But, if we just mean by this something like an intense discomfort, then I could say yes, for me, the biggest problem was confusing and contradictory claims about reality that I could not and I do not know any way someone could reconcile. The next, Hell anxiety, altough Hell terror is considered in a lot of Orthodox acestical practice as a virtue or even gift from God that helps you on the path to virtue and become bad only when it eliminates all hope for salvation. Of course this can lead to lots and lots of  nervous tension.

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Attempted indoctrination when I was a teenager led me to develop OCD so bad, I had to be hospitalised.

 

That Bible basher has gone merrily on her way without knowing the immense damage she caused me.

 

Her and Christianity....SUCK! 

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That’s a good question.  My first panic attack happened when I thought I had blasphemed the Holy Spirit and thus have committed an unpardonable sin.  However, thinking back on it, I’m convinced that my predisposition to panic likely a attached itself to what was very scary to me.  Perhaps if I was an atheist, I would have experienced existential crisis and that would have caused a panic.

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I wouldn't say trauma, but anger definitely. The church I'd been going to in another state was great, very chill. The one I went to in Florida was very haute couture and looked like a rock concert, and the talent all had designer labels and a small local following, etc.

 

season 16 episode 21 GIF

 

The thing that made me angry was when they would talk down to my wife for me and her living together (even though we had both families' approvals, and even her grandparents' approvals {and he's a fundamentalist pentecostal!}), and disregarding the fact that we'd only agreed to live together because it made financial sense, and because the end goal of doing so was to get married anyways (we'd already agreed we wanted to marry each other before moving in together - we just wanted to get all the quirks out of the way first).

 

dos equis facepalm GIF by Dos Equis Gifs to the World

 

The other thing that made me angry was how leadership would hear a rumor, and immediately jump to the talents' benefit in making a decision, and well scr** the volunteers, or the member. The other other thing that made me angry was how many perverts and creeps were in the church (as in people that would get arrested for abuse/horrible crimes). Don't get me wrong, it wasn't everyone, but when I go from 1/100 people being genuinely evil or cruel people to 1/10, it's quite a shock.

 

Forest Gump GIF by memecandy

 

Finally, the most religious people I've met beyond my wife's grandparents have always had a very rough edge, and made a lot of bad life choices that made them disliked. It seems like the really religious folks I knew who I've been great friends with or have good connections too are emotionally very religious and base their morality on their faith and take it seriously.

 

Happy Big Lebowski GIF

 

The ones who are intellectually fundamentalist always seem to give me the most issue. The church has also purposefully screwed up my sister-in-law's future by penalizing her for dating a non-Pentecostal, and that bothered me, since my wife was myself, an ELCA Lutheran at the time! Especially since she was giving thousands to the church to do what she was doing - and volunteering. 

 

post see GIF

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Edit: *wife was with myself

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