I am a survivor of religious trauma. I am also an adoptee who spent most of my childhood just surviving — moving through life looking for the family I was convinced was out there somewhere. When I finally found a church that felt like it could be that family, I walked through the door carrying every unmet need I had ever had. What I didn’t know then was that the system I was walking into was designed to create exactly that kind of dependency. My desperate need met a system that knew how to use it. The perfect toxic cocktail.

Ever since fleeing high control religion, I’ve been looking for solid ground. For something real to hold onto after everything you believed was the way forward turns out not to be.

What I’ve learned is that you usually don’t need to look in the same places to find it. You learn that not having the answers is sometimes the answer. You look for those things that will keep you going—glimmers that keep you moving forward one step at a time.

I used to think I needed a sermon every Sunday to get through the week. These days I know the universe sends messages loud and clear when we get quiet enough to hear. I’m beginning to realize we are part of something so much bigger than any one religion can hold. We belong in far more ways than most of us realize. The glimmers reveal this to us—but we have to slow down to notice.

Here is one of those glimmers.

Recently, a cousin shared a song with me I had never heard. He said it came to his mind while he was cutting a path through the ice to his car in rural Newfoundland. The song was Human by the group The Killers. I was surprised clicking on the link that I had never heard this song with 166 million views. The reason wasn’t hard to find — when it was popular I had only been listening to Christian music. I had never heard it because I’d been dancing to the beat of someone else’s tune.

I watched the music video right away but it took a few moments for the depth of it to sink in. Something shifted inside me thinking about the words. Fog clearing. Sun appearing. A path I hadn’t been able to see suddenly visible. The question at the center of the song stopped me — are we human or are we dancer? Are we living from something true and rooted in us, or are we moving to someone else’s rhythm without even knowing it?

My cousin is like that. Sometimes he shows up on a frequency that cuts through noise and gets to what matters. Like a piece of sea glass shimmering in the Newfoundland sun, sometimes the things he shares shimmer and get my attention. And what mattered this morning was the message underneath the ice and the song: be yourself. Cut the cord. You belong here.

I’d been sitting with a similar feeling since watching Greenland 2 the night before. The movie was another glimmer. There’s a moment near the end where a father tells his wife that their son has spent most of his life just surviving and he wants better for him. When I heard those words something in my body released. Lighter. A weight lifting. Because I know what it is to survive and call it living. To be oriented toward something better — a crater at the end of all the suffering, vibrant and alive and full of color — and to keep walking toward it even when the path makes no sense. That crater is what I was looking for when I walked through the church door all those years ago.

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It occurs to me as I write this—our needs are not the problem. The way we cope with our needs when they aren’t met is where things go sideways. And religion offered a way to cope that looked like thriving. Climb on the platform. Hold up your arms. Let us tell you how to move. And it felt right. Because I was dancing. I was singing. I just didn’t realize yet that I was dancing for the system, only ever inside the system.

Here is what that cycle actually looked like from the inside. Feel discouraged. Go to church. Hear a message that seemed written just for you. God sees. God cares. God knows. Feel the relief of being held. Then feel the weight of the expectations that came with it. You are broken without this. You are lost without us. Come back next week and we will remind you again. And so you do. Because the alternative — stepping outside the system, trusting yourself, listening to your own interior — had been framed as dangerous. As pride. As the flesh speaking. As sin.

So I traded one maladaptive coping mechanism for another. Doubt and worry for assurance and faith. Fear and guilt for conditional love and forgiveness. Aimlessly wandering for being told exactly who I was and where I belonged. For a while that feels like coming home. You don’t realize yet that the system needs your hunger more than it wants to feed it. That it is less like a home and more like a politician who will promise you the world to get your vote and then govern entirely for themselves.

That is how it keeps you. My lack was because I was bad. What they offered made me good. Everyone outside was lost. I was found. You stay in the cycle not because you are weak or naive but because you are human. And because the system was very good at looking like the crater.

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When the ground started cracking I grabbed for anything I could reach. Another sermon. Another book. They kept offering the same answers. Slip your arms back into the ropes. Tell the truth. Submit to authority. I found another leader who seemed like he might actually care. He told me to be careful. That knowing the right time to make a move was wisdom. But he didn’t understand. I couldn’t live a lie anymore. Not even to survive.

The only shimmer of hope I had left was just to be true to myself.

When the system itself finally betrayed me there was nothing left to hold onto at all. No map. No church family. No crater on the other side of faithfulness. Just a spiraling free fall into the deep dark unknown.

Devastating. Absolutely devastating.

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For a long time I kept going back to systems looking for something real to hold onto. Over and over it disintegrated in my hands and sent me falling again. So I kept life simple. I watched movies. I read books. I got a job at a residential treatment center.

That’s where something shifted.

I started to see in the eyes of those children my own grief. I witnessed parents who spiritualized and deflected and shifted blame — anything except take responsibility and tell the truth — and I saw how impossible it made it for their children to find solid ground.

But I also saw the real helpers. The ones without agendas. The ones who got screamed at and bitten and kept showing up anyway because they wanted those kids to have a chance at something better.

One moment has stayed with me. A therapist was working with an adopted teenager — a girl who had spent her whole life wondering if she mattered to anyone. I watched something happen in that child’s life that I still can’t fully put into words. The therapist simply saw her. Really saw her. And it registered in the girl’s eyes — this shimmer of recognition that she actually mattered. That she was real to someone. That she counted.

I recognized that shimmer. Because I had been that girl. Kneeling next to a pastor’s chair looking for the same thing — someone to finally see me and tell me I was enough. The difference was that this therapist had no agenda. No system to protect. No dependency to create. She just showed up, for this one girl. And it was enough. It was more than enough.

I learned that it’s okay not to have all the answers. That no system gets it all right. That the best we can offer is to show up without a personal agenda and let that be enough. Because it does make a difference.

That’s when the path started to become clearer.

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I see myself standing at the church door. What was I looking for? Someone to tell me the right way to go.

Today I know I don’t need that anymore. I have my own inner compass. And true North is home.

The path there isn’t certain. But it asks that I listen carefully to what I feel so I can know how to move a moment at a time. Sometimes it’s hard to know who to listen to in this loud and distracting world. But if I come back to myself I will always go the right way. It won’t be a bed of roses. Sometimes it might look like trudging through mud. Sometimes it might look like I’m heading nowhere at all.

But if I walk carefully and listen closely I’ll hear the bees buzzing in the new spring flowers. I’ll watch the bird pulling string from the arbor to build its nest. Life goes on. It’s meant to be lived.

It’s never too late to listen. To come back home. Because home is where you are always welcome no matter how far you’ve wandered.

And the crater? It’s still there. The vibrant green grass covers the ground. New wildflowers are blooming again on land that was once ash. In the distance a new community is being built on a foundation of hope. I can see it more clearly now than I ever could before. I’m not there yet. But I’m no longer going in circles.

No shortcuts this time. Just the path forward, one step at a time.

This post was written in collaboration with Claude, an AI writing partner by Anthropic, who helped me shape what I already knew.

If you are navigating religious trauma, spiritual abuse, or the long aftermath of leaving a high-control system and are looking for peer support, I’d love to connect. You can reach me at loriwilliamsliminalspace@gmail.com.