Learning to Trust Yourself

Week 6 of What Do We Do After Deconstructing Fundamentalism

This is week 5 of a new series on what do we do after deconstruction. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what to do. This is based on my own life and observations of others I’ve walked with. I hope you find this helpful.

One of the deepest wounds I keep running into has very little to do with theology. It shows up long after people have sorted through their beliefs about the Bible, heaven and hell, sexuality, politics, or church. I recognize it immediately almost every time. I’ve heard some version of it from more people than I can count.

And it’s because I’ve heard it in my own head too.

People often assume the hardest part of deconstruction is deciding what you believe once the old framework falls apart. That wasn’t the hardest part for me. The harder work was rebuilding a relationship with myself after decades of being taught that my mind, my heart and my discernment were fundamentally flawed.

I can remember sitting in church on a typical Sunday morning. We had just come upstairs from Sunday School and I sat down next to my parents. We sang the usual hymnals (1st, 2nd and 4th verses, standing on the 4th… IYKYK) and after passing the offering plate our pastor got up to deliver the sermon. I don’t know about your pastor but mine was in love with Jonathan Edwards. I won’t bore you with the details but Edwards was a slave owner who believed that God was ready to fastball sinners into hell at any given moment. He is the author of the infamous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

Oh how my pastor loved to go on and on about how depraved we puny humans were/are. He would tell us on a weekly basis that humanity was lower than worms. He did that so much that I started referring to his belief system as worm theology. He painted the picture of a God that despised our sinful ways and it was only because of the sacrifice of Jesus that God could even look upon us. In my child mind, I pictured God looking at me through Jesus glasses.

It was weird really. On one hand, I loved being me. I had an amazing childhood. I had amazing parents and great friends. I really liked being me. On the other hand, I also knew that I was totally depraved, that I deserved an eternity in hell and that accepting Jesus into my heart was the only way to escape my punishment.

Which meant that nothing that ran through my mind was of any value. Not my thoughts. Not my opinions. And least of all, not my decisions. Good lord, NO! How could I trust anything that my lower than worms, deserving of hell brain came up with?

That kind of self-doubt doesn’t just disappear. It was rooted deep down into my being. It was learned over years of teachings, and reinforced on a weekly basis until it started feeling like common sense instead of indoctrination.

When Distrust Sounds Spiritual

Most of us weren’t told outright that we were incapable of thinking. The message was much more subtle than that. “Trust in the lord with all your heart…don’t lean on your own understanding. The heart is deceitful above all things… who can trust it?” We were given stories of people who followed their own feelings and ended up far from God.

That was the lens handed to me as a child.

Whenever our instincts conflicted with what we’d been taught, we already knew which one was supposed to lose. Whenever something inside us felt unsettled by a sermon, a leader, or a church culture, the first question wasn't whether the concern was legitimate… it was whether we were being prideful, rebellious, or spiritually immature. We learned to question ourselves long before we ever considered questioning the system around us.

TRIGGER WARNING. The following story mentions a youth leader assaulting a student. Please skip this section if you need to.

When I was in high school, we had a youth leader named Shawn. Shawn was a nice enough guy and he seemed to be a perfect fit for our youth group. But there was just one weird thing about Shawn… he was super intense about getting to know a handful of us.

I remember one evening he hollered and asked if he could take me to McDonalds and just hang out. He picked me up from my house and we grabbed some burgers and then just talked. At one point, he slipped me a handful of money. When I asked him why he was giving me cash he said… “Just because.” We then left to go to his house. And on the way, he asked me some odd questions. I don’t remember what the questions were specifically but I do remember how I was feeling. I told myself that I was being ridiculous.

Thankfully, nothing happened to me that night. I was (and still am) a very self assured person. I think that confidence scared him off. But it didn’t stop him. He eventually found someone that wasn’t so self assured and assaulted him.

I don’t blame myself for not saying anything to anyone about my experience with Shawn. I was just doing what my system told me to do. He was a trusted spiritual leader. Who was I to not trust what he’s saying or doing? I was just being dumb.

Listen, I still believe that humility is essential to faith and life. Humility reminds us that none of us sees everything clearly. But humility does not require chronic self-distrust. Humility never tells us to hand over our discernment to someone else and call it obedience.

Loving God With Your Mind

One question kept surfacing during my own deconstruction, and I never found a satisfying answer for it: if Jesus tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind then why in the world did I spend so much of my life being taught not to trust mine?

I was expected to believe my own thinking was dangerously unreliable while the pastor I sat under for over a decade was trustworthy enough to shape my life. He was every bit as human as I was. He brought assumptions to the text just like I did. He had blind spots, preferences, fears, his own internal baggage… all of it!

So why was I taught to doubt my own discernment before I ever questioned his?

That arrangement benefited authority in ways I couldn’t possibly understand at the time. It trained us to look away from our own observations and toward whoever stood behind the pulpit or sat at the head of the conference table. Even leaders with good intentions inherited a system built to treat institutional authority as more trustworthy than individual judgment. The result was a church full of people who knew how to obey but had forgotten how to listen to themselves.

When Your Body Knows Before You Do

I’m no expert nor am I a professional therapist. But I have noticed that people healing from high control religion often get signals from their bodies way before their brains give language to it.

Recently, I was standing in the back of our auditorium during the song portion of the service. The worship leader had been talking about reclaiming things from our past and was going to do so that morning with an older song. It was a good intro and was totally appropriate for where our church community is. But the moment he struck that first chord… my body just revolted.

I was instantly thrown back into the space where we sang that song. I could feel my heart rate speed up, my blood pressure started rising and my chest got tight. Tears welled up in my eyes and soon started spilling over. I couldn’t stop any of it. It was like a flood gate had been opened and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Thankfully, I was standing next to someone who comes from the same kind of places I did and they just stood with me, offering a calming presence. Eventually, I was able to slow by breathing and regain some composure. But it was just another reminder of how deep spiritual trauma lives in my body.

In my past, I would have thought those things meant that I needed to pray harder or trust God more. I would have seen it as a spiritual attack. Now I wonder how often those things were invitations to pay attention instead.

That doesn’t mean I believe every emotion tells the truth. Feelings need wisdom, reflection and sometimes correction. But the answer isn’t to silence them before we even listen. Our minds and bodies carry information. They deserve curiosity, not suspicion.

Trauma disconnects people from themselves, and high-control religion reinforces that disconnection. It teaches people to override what they’re seeing or feeling or experiencing whenever it conflicts with authority. Eventually we get so practiced at dismissing our own inner voice that we stop hearing it at all.

Why This Is So Dangerous

We don't talk nearly enough about what it costs to teach people not to trust themselves.

When someone believes questioning authority is spiritually dangerous, it gets much harder for them to recognize spiritual abuse when it’s happening to them. When they’ve learned their discomfort probably means their faith is weak or they’re going through some sort of “testing”, they stop asking why a leader’s behavior feels manipulative. Which causes people to start overriding the very instincts designed to protect them.

I have friends that were on staff at Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill church. They experienced this first hand. For them, it wasn’t only that Mark was the lead pastor and the one ordained to lead, it was also the fact that so many people were coming to Mars Hill. They kept saying things like, “But look at what God is doing!”

They told me that they said that to themselves for several years. Despite all the abuse they endured, all the anger and accusations and bullying… they still kept telling themselves, “But God…” It wasn’t until the last year before the church imploded due to Mark’s wildly abusive behavior, that their eyes were finally opened and they were able to leave the church.

These are highly educated people. They are smart and driven and kind. From the outside you would find yourself asking, “Why in the world would you put up with that?” But when you’ve grown up being taught all the things we’ve talked about, when you attend a conservative, fundamentalism Bible college (and we did), then it makes perfect sense.

I’ve endured enough unhealthy, abusive church staff environments that when they told me about this, I was like… “Yeah. That tracks.”

I don’t believe that every church teaches or practices this on purpose. Most leaders genuinely think they’re helping people become more faithful. But intentions don’t erase outcomes, and the outcome is a generation of people trained to ignore their internal alarm that says something about this isn’t right.

That’s part of why abuse survives for so long inside high-control systems. The people most capable of noticing something is wrong have already been discipled not to believe themselves.

Coming Home

The longer I do this work, the more reconstruction has looked less like changing beliefs and more like recovering parts of myself I never should have had to give up. My conscience is not my enemy. My questions do not make me less faithful. Paying attention to my own experience was never the opposite of trusting God.

I no longer need you or anyone to agree with anything I teach, think or believe. And I mean that in the best possible sense. I love to nerd out with others about theology and life but at the end of the day, I just don’t need what I once did.

I still change my mind. I still find places I’m wrong. I still need people who challenge me and help me see what I can’t on my own. None of that threatens me the way it used to, because I no longer start from the assumption that being human disqualifies me from the search for truth.

Maybe that’s what healing looks like for me now… not arriving at certainty, but learning that my own voice was worth listening to all along.

A Few Questions to Sit With

I don’t normally end things this way, but this topic felt different to me. Some of what we’re talking about here isn’t meant to be sorted out in your head. It needs space, and maybe a notebook, or a conversation with someone you trust. So, if it’s helpful, take a few minutes with or two of these before you move on with your day.

• When did you first notice that you weren’t trusting your own intuition or inner voice? What made you notice it?

• Whose judgment were you taught to trust over your own? What made their discernment seem more credible than yours, and does that reasoning still hold up now?

• Is there a physical reaction you’re still dismissing in some part of your life right now? If so, what is it and what might it be trying to tell you?

• What would it look like to treat your own conscience as a source of information rather than a problem to manage?

  ---