Spiritual Aloneness

In a follow-on to my previous post (Women's March 2018 Reflections)...

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Particularly I listen to them while I'm working in the kitchen. They help to reduce the level of emotional distress that cooking has caused me since the end of the relationship. 

This evening I made a super cheesy Mac & Cheese while listening to (the one and only episode of) "Hard Feelings." Three Seattleite hosts introduce themselves and talk about who they are and how they met.

I ended up in tears several times as I listened, as I often seem to do when listening to podcasts. It wasn't that this episode was particularly moving or insightful (frankly it was a little rambling and unfocused, perhaps why they never produced any followup episodes).

Rather, my tears were about the extreme loneliness, fear, and difficulty of my own "deconstruction" process as I slowly moved away from faith and from Evangelical Christianity, a process that occurred from my early 20s up until six years ago when the last of my faith evaporated.

What struck me was that the hosts talked about their church history going back to 1998. I relocated to Washington State from Florida in 1997, and really floundered. I very hesitantly tried to visit a few churches to find somewhere to attend, but my experiences all made my hair stand on end and drove me further from church and faith.

I reflected as I listened tonight that if things had gone differently, I could have met these other questioners and gone through my deconstruction together with them instead of all alone (save for eventual but only occasional furtive fearful conversations over dinner with my friend Mick).

I also reflected and wept when one of the hosts mentioned entering deconstruction of faith at a time when their partner was still a believer, and how the partner was fully supportive.

My experience was that my journey was both unsupported as well as made additionally painful by the person who claimed to love me. I attempted very actively to share my process with him, but he never engaged with me in any real way. That was "at best." At worst was his ongoing pressure for me to reengage in church and Evangelical Christian circles.

I didn't understand it fully then, but I was trying desperately to break free from indoctrination and the spiritual abuse and related trauma from growing up in a fundamentalist religion that bordered on "cult." Rather than offering me support or love or a safe space in which to be in my own process around all of that, he consistently added to my stress and trauma. It was one more aspect of the psychological warfare that was our relationship. It was one more element of the abandonment and withholding he perpetuated, and one more piece of my ongoing aloneness in life.

So tonight I wept as I reflected back on the pain of how difficult things were and on grief over how things could have been instead.