Is It Me, or Is It Toxic Religion?
I was nineteen years old when I started attending church on a regular basis. One Sunday, the pastor preached on the story of the writing on the wall — the hand that appeared out of nowhere and wrote “You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27). I still remember the knot in my throat — God as a terrifying hand, writing my failures on a wall where everyone could see. It felt like something out of the horror movies I grew up watching. But he wasn’t a monster. He was my Creator, and that made it so much scarier. He knew everything.
I thought about the toxic relationship I’d just left. The drinking. My best friend, who’d ended up with my rebound boyfriend on a night none of us should have been out that late, drinking that much. God knew all of it. And somewhere out there was a judgment day, and I wanted to be on the right side of it.
So I did what I already knew how to do. I got down on my knees — the same way I had as a preteen, watching a TV preacher describe the fires of hell and the gates of heaven, confessing sins I barely understood yet. I started listening to the pastor in front of me the way I’d learned to listen my whole life: carefully, completely, ready to become whatever was required of me.
What I didn’t understand yet was that I hadn’t walked into that church empty. I’d walked in already carrying a shadow. And the church didn’t create it. It just told me the shadow was God, and that I’d been right to be afraid of it all along.
Where the Shadow Started
Long before that pew, there was a little girl sitting alone in a fancy living room, reading a book about her own adoption as an infant. The story it told her was simple: she was lucky. Two mothers had loved her — one who couldn’t keep her, and one who’d given her the home she needed.
I was supposed to feel grateful. And some part of me did. But underneath the gratitude, my body was telling me something the book never mentioned — I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Just a quiet, constant sense of not-quite-fitting, with no acceptable place to put it, because feeling it at all seemed like proof I was ungrateful for a gift I was supposed to be thankful for.
That was the house I grew up in — one where my father’s instability meant I learned to watch him, to read the room before he entered it, to adjust myself before he even had the chance to be upset. When things fell apart — when he was writing bad checks, when the ground under our family felt unstable — some part of me decided that had to be about me too. Like my own badness was somehow leaking out into the world and causing the damage.
I didn’t have language for any of this at the time. I just knew how to do one thing very well: mold myself into whoever the people around me needed me to be. I’d been doing it since before I could remember doing it at all.
Why a Child’s Mind Does This
This isn’t unusual, and it isn’t a flaw. It’s one of the most well-documented patterns in childhood development.
Young children are naturally egocentric — not selfish, but wired to understand the world through themselves. When something goes wrong at home, a small child’s mind doesn’t reach for “my parent is under stress.” It reaches for this is about me.⁴ That belief is protective: if a child can believe I caused this, they also get to believe I can fix this — which feels far less terrifying than the truth that the people they depend on are unpredictable, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Over time, that self-blame calcifies into a habit that follows a person long after childhood ends: a readiness to mold and shrink themselves around whoever holds power in the room. Not because they’re weak. Because it once kept them safe.
The Shadow Dr. K Describes
I heard a psychiatrist, Dr. K, describe something once that finally gave language to all of this. He said trauma like this isn’t damage done to an otherwise whole person — it’s more like the shape a person forms into while they’re still being made. And he compared it to walking into a room with a light behind you, looking for something up ahead. Every time you move toward it, you cast your own shadow onto the very thing you’re trying to see.
That’s what happened at nineteen. I walked into that church looking for stability, for relief from shame, for a version of love that didn’t come with betrayal attached. That desire was good. It was wisdom, not weakness — the healthy part of me reaching for what every person needs.
But I brought my shadow with me. And the doctrine I found there didn’t dispel it. It matched it. A God who watches everything, weighs everything, and finds people wanting — that wasn’t a new idea to me. It was the exact belief I’d already built as a child trying to explain an unstable home. The church didn’t introduce that fear. It confirmed it, gave it scripture, and told me exactly what to do about it: keep molding myself, only now it was called devotion instead of survival.
I’m not the only one who has named this. Janyne McConnaughey, author of An Exhausted Faith, What if the Struggle Isn’t Spiritual , describes the same distortion from her own life: her body stayed hypervigilant in church settings, and for years she mistook her own dysregulated nervous system for spiritual conviction.¹ Not weakness. Not sin. A nervous system on high alert, reading danger into a room and calling it God.
Whose Shadow Was This?
“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” (often attributed to Anaïs Nin)
If that’s true, then the God I was handed wasn’t the only version out there — it was one man’s shadow, cast onto scripture and handed down as truth. Here’s what confuses me most: I know people who grew up in church too, and their God was never someone to be afraid of. They were taught a God who was gentle, who delighted in them, who felt more like an anchor than a verdict — not someone you lived in constant fear of. Same religion, same scripture in many cases — a completely different God.
I used to think that meant they just hadn’t looked closely enough, or that I was the one who finally saw the truth underneath the nice version. Now I think it’s simpler than that: we were all handed an interpretation, shaped by whoever taught it to us, and most of us were never told it was an interpretation. We were told it was just what God was like.
So I still wonder: whose version was I handed, and why did it look so different from the one my friends carry?
These days, before I ever listen to a sermon, I read the church’s “About Us” page first. In hindsight, doctrine mattered a lot more than I understood at the time. It was the doctrine, taken seriously, that taught me who God was supposed to be and how he supposedly saw me. I take it seriously now too — just earlier, and on purpose.
Where the Real Danger Lives
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: doctrine matters. It’s not just words on a page. It’s what shaped how I understood God, how I understood myself, how I understood whether I was safe or in danger every single day.
And most of the doctrine I was handed wasn’t taught to me as one way of seeing things. It was taught as certain. This is who God is. To question it was to question God. I didn’t realize until much later that certainty wasn’t just something that happened to come along with the doctrine — it was the doctrine, doing exactly what it was written to do. Settle the question. Close the door on not-knowing. Make sure I never had to sit in the discomfort of not being sure.
This isn’t only about one specific doctrine, or one denomination. Some of my own ancestors were Puritans — part of colonies that blamed witches and demons when crops failed or people fell ill or a family fell apart — anything rather than look honestly at the greed, envy, and ordinary human conflict sitting right there in the community. It was easier to name a witch than to name each other or their leaders.
I’ve seen the same pattern in the churches I’ve belonged to since. Systems that hand out endless grace for certain sins, but only for the people in charge — while everyone else gets judged for simply trying to survive inside environments those same systems helped create.
Here’s where it gets confusing, and where it took me a long time to untangle: the doctrine itself teaches grace and forgiveness. But the systems built on it don’t apply that grace evenly. Forgiveness gets handed to whoever the system decides deserves it, while everyone else gets judgment. And underneath the doctrine’s language of grace is still the same foundation — fear, judgment, consequences, the belief that we’re born already guilty. They just get to pick and choose who that applies to and when.
For a long time I thought the confusion was the point — that not being able to make sense of it was where faith came in. I don’t believe that anymore. It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t built to make sense. It succeeds by being complicated enough that you stop trying to follow it and just trust the people explaining it to you. That was never faith. That was control.
I still have more questions than answers. I think that’s the actual point.
The Doctrine Itself
Here’s the part I need to say plainly: this isn’t only damaging for people who already carry a wound. McConnaughey names this directly from her own life — her belief that her struggles were spiritual hinged entirely on the understanding of herself as sinful since birth, original sin, so that even a simple lack of discipline got filed away as disobedience, which got filed away as sin.² When you’re taught that nothing in you can be trusted, your own sense that something feels wrong stops counting as information. It gets filed under the very corruption the doctrine warned you about. That’s not a side effect. That’s the doctrine working exactly as built — a closed loop, unfalsifiable from the inside, regardless of who’s holding it.
For most people, a doctrine like this runs quietly in the background — a belief filed away, rarely load-bearing, rarely tested. But trauma changes how often a person hits overwhelm. If your nervous system was built by instability, overwhelm isn’t rare. It’s frequent, sometimes constant. And in overwhelm, people don’t reach for their most examined beliefs. They reach for whatever’s closest, whatever promises solid ground fastest.
That’s when the doctrine stops running quietly in the background and becomes the thing you grab. And here’s the cruelty of it: it’s offered as an anchor, something meant to hold you steady in the storm. But an anchor has weight. If what you’re holding onto teaches you that you are the problem, that you can’t trust yourself — then the very thing you reached for to keep from drowning is what pulls you under instead. McConnaughey describes something close to this from the inside: trying to control a dysregulated nervous system, she writes, feels like holding a beach ball under the water — it only leads to more exhaustion.³ You don’t just fail to find solid ground. You sink faster, holding on tighter, believing the sinking is proof you were right to distrust yourself in the first place.
This is why the potential harm goes unnoticed by so many people who hold the same belief. If you rarely reach for the anchor, you never find out it doesn’t float. It’s only the people who need it most — the ones already closest to the water — who find out what it’s actually made of.
What I Actually Wanted
It took me a long time — years past that pew, past that church, past several churches — to get underneath all of it and ask what I was actually looking for. If someone gets condemned for being different, the real question underneath is never about them. It’s what happens to me if I’m ever different too. I know something about that cost firsthand — years spent moving through different communities, hearing plenty of compelling sermons, and finding only a handful of people actually willing to sit with me while I questioned everything, without needing me to arrive at their answer first.
What I’ve come to understand, after years of therapy and learning about the nervous system, is simpler than any doctrine I was ever taught: I wanted to thrive. I wanted to know that was possible, and I wanted support along the way. That’s it. That’s what was underneath all of it the whole time.
A system built on fear can’t give you that. Neither can six weeks of a program, or one prayer prayed correctly. Real change is slower than that — staying honest, asking real questions about what I was taught, paying attention to whether harm is happening in the places I belong to.
Here’s the simplest test I know: when there’s pain, pay attention. A baby cries, and it moves us to go pick them up. Most of the time what they need is small, and it costs us very little to give it. But a baby who learns no one is coming also learns something else — that pain is something to survive alone, not something that gets met.
It matters what we believe. Not because belief is a test to pass, but because what we believe about ourselves, and about whether we’re safe to be met in our pain, shapes every path we walk after.
I don’t think naming any of this means the wanting was wrong. What I found instead was a room with its own light source pointed in the same direction as the one already behind me. Two shadows, overlapping, until I couldn’t tell anymore which darkness belonged to me and which belonged to the doctrine.
Both are true at once: I was vulnerable because of what I carried, and the environment I walked into did real harm on its own terms. One doesn’t cancel out the other. Naming my trauma was never meant to be the whole explanation — and it was never meant to let toxic theology off the hook, either.
The Rest of the Field
Not long ago, I was out walking with the late afternoon sun behind me, and I noticed my shadow stretched out on the ground in front of me. If I had kept my eyes down, that’s all I would have seen — a long dark shape swallowing the path ahead.
But a shadow only exists because something solid is standing in the light. You don’t get a shadow from darkness. You get it from a body blocking part of something bright. That’s all it’s ever been — not proof of what’s wrong with me, but proof that light was already there, and I was standing in it.
I was taught to keep my eyes on the shadow. To study it, confess it, manage it, be afraid of it. No one told me to look up and ask where the light was coming from.
When I lifted my eyes, there was so much more than the shadow. Birds moving through the trees. Cows and goats in the field. Hills rolling out toward the horizon. Grass so green it looked lit from somewhere else entirely.
The shadow was real. It was mine, and it still moves with me, long or short, depending on where I’m standing. But it was never the whole landscape. It never was.
I’m learning to ask a different question now — not how bad is my shadow, but where is the light, and what happens if I turn toward it. Healing from this hasn’t been a straight line — some days the shadow is easier to see than others.
A note on process: I used AI to help me organize my thoughts into this post — not to write my story for me, but to help bring clarity to myself and to you, the reader. Trauma often feels like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces jumbled — the memories, the beliefs, the connections are all there, but not yet in an order that makes sense. Part of integration is putting those pieces in a shape that can finally be seen. That’s what AI has been for me in this process — a tool for organizing what was already mine, the way a calculator helps do complicated math. It doesn’t replace the thinking. It just helps carry the load of it.
¹ ² ³ Janyne McConnaughey, PhD, An Exhausted Faith, What if the Struggle Isn’t Spiritual
⁴ Piaget’s theory of childhood egocentrism (1952/1964); Grych & Fincham (1990) on children’s self-blame in response to conflict in the home