Member-only story
When Religion Leads To Trauma
In August 2020, I made the decision to leave my church. I realised that it was becoming quite a damaging place for me, and was somewhere that I didn’t feel safe, or happy.
“ISN’T EVERYTHING WONDERFUL?”
After months of being in lockdown, with the online services all beginning with how wonderful everything is, I became disillusioned.
Life is not wonderful, for a large number of people, and I was beginning to feel like the Jesus that I came to believe in- the Jesus who cried with the hurting and who healed the sick, was not actually in the church that I had been attending.
TWELVE YEARS
I’ve attended the same church for twelve years, and I’d never pictured the day when I would decide to leave. If you’d told me, even six months earlier that I would be standing on this decision only a little over half a year later, I would have laughed at you.
BUT HERE I AM
This isn’t a spur of the moment decision, though. There have been things that I wasn’t happy about, probably since 2017, if I’m honest… things that I have overlooked… things I thought I’d forgotten about, but in the isolation of lockdown, and with the space to think, I’ve had some much needed distance, which has given me the…
