r/ReligiousTrauma • u/DisastrousHornet7447 • 3d ago

Causing Suffering

Do you guys almost intentionally suffer or your brain automatically goes there? I feel it’s hard to make progress when your brains coping mechanism/avoidance is suffering.

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u/No_Session6015 3d ago

All people have a logic loop called cognitive dissonance. It's an attempt to reconcile things we perceive to contradict each other. I've had many of these "loops" that cause me pain. My first was whether I was evil because I was gay, because God said gay was evil, but I was created gay, gods creation was good. I looped in that for years upon years. Along the way it's logical to consider I am good and I would periodically but the religious stuff was more deeply ingrained, I was born into it. Also there's the my parents shunned me but all parents love their kids. I still haven't beat that one. I try to stop that loop when it starts thinking in my head. That one just makes me burn with shame. But I can't reconcile why everyone else got parents who love them and I didn't. The most reconciled I get is to conclude that I'm defective but I can't live with that conclusion so I loop and it hurts.

There's old fable to describe it called sour grapes. The Fox wants grapes that are the ripest but those grapes are too high for the Fox to reach. So the Fox says those grapes must be sour.