I understand your struggle. I grew up in my family's home church group called "the fellowship". It is an extremist fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity whose essential tenant is that you must stop sinning to be saved. They obsessively study the Bible and read it very literally, coming to conclusions like women shouldn't cut their hair and must be house wives, drinking and even the use of mild euphemisms are sins (e.g. Crap, gosh, gee, darn, etc.), premarital sex is a sin, and the blood of the unsaved is on our heads if we do not tell them about Jesus and warn them about hell. Ironically, their leader is a woman whose every new discovery of what the Bible "really says" is law. My dad is a dogmatic, judgmental, condescending, and in some ways bitter man who took these beliefs even farther to treat things he merely disliked or disapproved of as sins. He didn't call them so, but judged them just the same. We couldn't watch certain tv shows, psychology and theology and evolutionism and even openmindedness were nonsense and bad. We did not celebrate Easter, Halloween, or Christmas especially because of their pagan past. They idolized thanksgiving for its Christian past (ironically ignoring its dark past too). Of course growing up in a sheltered, perfectionistic home, I was an avid believer. I studied the Bible intensely, preached to my friends and occasionally street preached, and shunned any other worldview as the devil's temptations. Once I started going to college and attended bible studies there, I began to meet different kinds of christians whose views on the Bible made a scary amount of sense that challenged everything I had ever known. I had based all of my life's meaning around my views, so these new discoveries even made me suicidal for a short time. My views gradually began to change but I was not particularly open about them with my family, of course for fear of judgement. One of the ways my views changed was about language. That it is not a list of specific words that are bad and sinful, but rather the content and meaning behind what you are saying. Thus I opened myself to the use of euphemisms and "curse words". One day I accidentally said "crap" to my brother who told my parents. They chastised me and we're baffled when I tried to explain my beliefs rather than repent of them. Everyone in the entire church group was talking about it behind my back and each planned how they were going to sit me down and rebuke me for it. I think I was rebuked around 20 times and each time that person concluded that they could no longer be in my company, be my friend, or allow me near their children. My parents took this a step further and cut off any financial or material thing they had given or promised me and demanded I pay more on my car when I was moving out on a Starbucks salary. We eventually regained contact, but three years later and the relationship is still strained and awkward. I am a childcare teacher and an abstract artist and married to a psychological research assistant. My dad says women should be stay at home wives and daycare is sad and shows their mothers don't love them. He says abstract art is stupid and looks like a child's work. And he says psychology is psychobabble and makes excuses for people who just need to grow up and take responsibility for their lives. This is difficult for me as I suffer from depression and anxiety and my husband has ADHD. I was still a Christian through all of this, but I began to have anxiety in response to religious things that sounded like the fellowship, even to the point of panic attacked during sermons. It has now grown to anxiety in response to anything even vaguely Christian at all. I was never allowed to have doubts growing up for fear of "drifting from the faith". But I recently began to allow myself to think through these doubts and concluded my beliefs were very shallow and guilt-driven. It has been hard that all of Christianity is tainted and painful for me and that I cannot objectively give it a decent chance. But I am beginning to release myself from feeling the desperate need to return to it someday after I've healed from my anxiety. I am allowing myself to freely explore other worldviews and am currently interested in the peacefulness of Buddhism. I have been going to therapy for around two years and have found different things to challenge the negative thoughts that are a result of my past. I don't know how long it's been for you since this happened, but I've heard it takes at least 10 years for a person to heal from something traumatic like that. I mean that not in a depressing sense of "you're going to feel awful for a long time" but in the hopeful sense both that it won't last forever and that you can free yourself from feeling the need to be over it now. It is ok to feel pain and anxiety. Accept it as something that is a part of you now, but does not define you forever. Try to become aware of the negative thoughts that drive your fears and sadness. Then accept them for what they are and then think of ways you can challenge those thoughts and think something more positive. Like when you try to blame yourself for things and spiral into self hatred. Catch yourself and label what you are thinking. Then try to address those thoughts with logic and find something, anything, more positive to think. This will not fix everything immediately, but it helps to address the pain before it spirals into things more serious. Hope this helps.
