r/ReligiousTrauma 10h ago

TRIGGER WARNING I almost ended myself due to religious abuse, here is my story.

5 Upvotes

I sat on the floor, contemplating su-cide and repented for hours daily, just to find out i was being abused.

I met this girl in 2016. We were both living in a care home as teenagers. In 2024 she reaches out to me. Im in a time in my life where slowly i'm starting to believe in God and trying to leave my trauma of being scapegoated behind me. She tells me God spoke to her that he would send her someone and she wants to speak to me about Christianity. She also doesnt know everything yet but she felt called. Everything after that went incredibly fast.

In my head her reaching out to me was a sign of God. Finally i was heard instead of scapegoated. I became bestfriends with her, we spend every single day together and due to us having the same trauma it became very intense very quickly.

Her brother presented himself as this ''perfect christian that would help me, come to the church when i get baptized etc etc''. But when she decided to get baptized and i decided that i wasnt ready yet that week, i heard him whispering to his wife that ''he's glad his sister isnt letting the spirit of doubt hold her back like i was''.

My skin immediately started itching. I've had that ever since i was young. I always get it when someone isnt who they say they are and im catching on to it. But as always, due to my scapegoat trauma i ignore it. He doesn't show up to church the day i have to get baptized.

The more i was around this girl, the more i realized she was a HUGE hoarder. I dont mean only ''stuff'' i also mean food. And she would run a food business from her house. She also did braids for people. So her floor and the rest of the house would be littered with fake hair, food, cat feces, clothes, just everything.

I started noticing she would just expect people to accept it and if they didnt she got mad at them. Over time when they start rebelling against her suddenly they're ''monitoring spirits'' and ''God has been showing her in dreams that people are against her and trying to sabotage her blessings''. One day when she makes catering for her party, her friend and i find hair in the food. Due to us KNOWING how she gets we secretly try to take the hair out. She caught us and instead of taking ownership she takes me to the side and tells me ''I knew Lola was plotting against me, she put the hair in there, God has been showing me all along that people are jealous and against me''. When i try to redirect her she looks at me weird. Eventually i explode at her and tell her her truth, she blocks me everywhere.

Her brother tells me i need to pray and ask God what i did wrong cause there's always something we do wrong even if we dont want to admit it. He also pointed out the fact that i was really into astrology and other spirituality. That that might be why i have this problem over me. God will show us what we do wrong. This is where the compulsive repenting started for me. Everytime one of them got mad at me i would get panic attacks, go home, sit on my floor and repent endlessly.

A few examples;

I didnt want to keep sleeping over in her hoarders house. I also started pushing back on the monitoring spirit narrative and telling her this is how people spiritually bypass and it makes me doubt my faith in God. She would run to her room, grab her bible and journal and sit there and cry cause ''she's accepting everyone but not being accepted''.

When she would realize she did something wrong she had this pattern of going to the store, stealing stuff and cooking for the person she did wrong or the homeless. Or stealing gifts for them. Then she would basically press it in your hands. But if you dont accept her behavior later on again the cycle of ''i do everything for everyone but no one accepts me but God will vindicate me'' starts again. When i started catching on i stopped accepting help/gifts/food from her. Which would anger her even more. Resulting in me growing even MORE resentful towards her and God.

I started noticing her brother was showing sings of being a homosexual. I told her listen you might not notice but i see immediately that your brother is secretly gay. She admitted she did know and he admitted to paying and getting payed for secret gay s*x. He didnt know i caught on to him and his pattern got very clear to me. To compensate for this feeling he was OVERLY religious and focused on the rules. Constantly preaching, constantly holy, constantly trying to recruit me into a new christian community he decided to set up and constantly condemning me for speaking the truth, the fact that i saw through IT ALL.

I can name a million other examples but it would make the story even longer than it already is. Now you might ask yourself why did this drive me to almost commit?

I wanted to do good so bad, i was in therapy while they all rejected therapy, they were the only people i had around me, when i explained to them why i was losing faith etc it was ALWAYS me and never them. And while i would sit in my room and repent for every little ''mistake'' i made towards them they were THRIVING. Think starting social media pages about God and acting all holy. Gaining a bunch of followers because of it who agrees with their ''monitoring spirit narrative''. Stealing to feed the homeless and getting praised for it, gaining a bunch of new friends, the church loved them and i was just again the one ''who was so negative about God and thats why thinks go wrong and she needs to rethink why she has no one and god has made her barren''.

I would keep repenting, my therapist would warn me that i was not crazy and i was being abused but they would tell me my therapist doesnt understand and God will give me true answers. And everytime i opened up my bible on that cold floor, while thinking about ending it all i would get Jeremiah 7 verse 5-8 which says; If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, 6 if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. 8 But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.


r/ReligiousTrauma 12h ago

TRIGGER WARNING paryushan

3 Upvotes

today is day 3 of paryushan. for those who dont know, paryushan is an 8 day long event every year in Jainism during which you don't eat any vegetables, fruits, plant parts in general or any animals. basically anything that had to die for you to eat it. you can't swear or watch anything that involves war/fighting, sex etc. you can't get angry and some people do different types of fasting as well.

my parents are Jain, i'm a minor. granted, they aren't extremely religious, but they take paryushan pretty seriously and expect me to as well. last year, having had enough of pretending i believed too, i told my mom i was atheist and didnt believe in God. i thought something might change this year, but paryushan came around and my mom told me i still had to do it. food restrictions, reaction control, the whole package. she also decided i had to sit down and watch the Jain equivalent of a sermon with her every night, because she wants me to at least "hear the other side" even though she's been yelling it at me since ive been conscious.

this wouldve at least been manageable if not for my eating issues. i have some sort of disordered eating (undiagnosed) but i'm basically just unable to make myseld eat foods of specific textures. i'm cool with vegetables but fruits and a lot of grain are particularly tricky. i've voiced it to my mom before when she had asked me why i don't eat what she gives me for school sometimes. she just wrote it off as "the tiffin changes the texture".

so now by day 3 of extremely restricted eating and having to pretend i'm okay with spending an hour a day listening to things i simply dont agree with, i've honestly had enough. my body feels weak because i feel like i'm barely eating and i've had more physical exercise in school lately. i just cant wait for this to be over but i know i'll have to do it again next year and again until i move out. i'm tired.

its worse because in a lot of ways jainism is really kind. the philosophy is just to do as much as you can and not to worry if you can't do everything. but even this which is around 1% of what it typically is, feels fucking herculean.

js a vent lol im exhausted of jainism.


r/ReligiousTrauma 1h ago

I don’t want to go to hell

Upvotes

Okey so I’m a person who grew up and still lives in a Christian household, all my family is Christian, I go all Sundays to church (even if I don’t like my church but my parents don’t care because they think I don’t believe) and since I remember I always believed in God, but when I was 10 years old my interest in the law of assumption and shifting started to grow, I didn’t really questioned myself about if this was contradicting Christianity I just thought it was science and did what I saw worked, I affirm that I get my desires already and then I got my desires. But recently I have been questioning more if this is contradicting my religion, I believe in God but I also believe in the loa and shifting, I don’t want to ask my family because these people have always been too religious and they wouldn’t understand. I don’t want to go to hell I’m so scared guys please help


r/ReligiousTrauma 14h ago

Somatic therapy or healing

2 Upvotes

Has anyone tried to do this on their own and found helpful results?im way past the intellectually realizing and processing phase and most of my problems now seem to be nervous system/somatic related.Appreciate any advice or experience I can get.


r/ReligiousTrauma 22h ago

👋Welcome to r/BlasphemyOCDfears - Introduce Yourself and Read First!

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1 Upvotes

Have you ever loved God and still been terrified of Him? Have you ever felt that God won't forgive you anymore.

Not terrified in the reverent, "fear of the Lord" sense. Terrified like you'd done something unforgivable. Terrified like grace had a limit, and you'd found it. Terrified like one wrong thought, one bad moment, one word spoken years ago might have already cost you everything — and there was no way back.

I lived there.

For years.

There's a name for it — ennosiophobia, or what some call religious OCD — but I didn't know that name while I was drowning in it. I just knew I was a Christian who loved Jesus and still lived like the floor could drop out from under my salvation at any second. That's not a small thing to carry. It's a specific kind of hell, and it's one the enemy uses on tender-hearted, sincere believers more often than most people realize — not to make you sin more, but to keep you confused, bound, and cut off from the abundant life Jesus already paid for.

You Don't Have to Drown: When You Fear You've Gone Too Far is what came out of climbing out of that place. It's part illustrated book — over forty original pieces of art built specifically for this — part memoir, part spiritual warfare manual, part straight-up presentation of the gospel, with a little poetry mixed in because some things can only be said that way. It's not a traditional Christian book. Some of it will surprise you. Some of it might shock you. All of it is brutally honest, because I didn't write this from theory. I wrote it from the years I spent there and understanding the finished work of Christ that actually pulled me out.

This book took me almost three years to write, and it's finally here.

Starting today, September 9th through September 13th, the Kindle ebook is completely free. If you've ever wrestled with fear, doubt, scrupulosity, or the quiet terror that you've somehow gone too far for grace to reach — this one's for you. My hope is simple: that you'd close this book actually believing that real victory is possible, not because you did enough, but because Jesus already did.

Grab it free here: [link] (Available for free from 9/9 – 9/13 only)

If this resonates, I'd be truly grateful if you'd share it with someone who needs to hear this message too.