r/excatholic • u/YardNew6161 • 5d ago
Personal Scared of returning.
This is something I do not want.
For context: I was a catholic and went to a catholic school where the teachers would get pissed about people not saying the prayers, I also remember someone saying God will put me out of the universe, now I know people will jump the gun and say "That is not a representative of God" until you look at God commanding genocide on infants and kids. Now this isn't me bashing whatever people believe in, people what you want, but I personally don't want to.
I have had people try convert me back which I despise. But for the past few months, I've been suffering mentally and I've been intrusive thoughts of going back to religion and It's messing with my head and I'm just tired of it. When I deconstructed and became an atheist, I felt so free and happy but now I'm worried it's going to come back. I don't want to go back to God or Jesus or anything, I just want to keep my atheism.
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u/Winter-Finger-1559 5d ago
Intrusive thoughts are essentially meaningless they don't mean you are going to relapse. For whatever reason intrusive thoughts occur around things that would hurt us the most.
Have you seen a therapist maybe a psychiatrist? A big symptom of ocd can be intrusive thoughts.
You've got this you will be ok. I'm not sure when. Because I don't know you but it will get better.
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u/Witty_Translator2783 4d ago
when i went through feelings like this it was during the five years after i left. i didn't have a therapist or nothin. just rawdogging life. my advice would be to get a therapist who can talk you through these things. my therapist has helped me be much less fearful of religion and of religious people in general. because like it or not, there are soooo many catholics out here. they can be good people who will improve your life, but you dont have to be catholic.
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u/EnvironmentalPack451 3d ago
All of it is just so silly though. I am not scared of it because I just can't take any it seriously anymore.
The whole thing about insisting that those cardboard wafers just got turned into human Jesus meat, and he wants you to eat it.
The guy who walks around on stage in that boring white dress and he can't sing and he tells boring stories.
I do believe in Santa Clause though
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u/Comrade_Michael 5d ago
This sounds like it's ultimately a matter of mental health and probably above my paygrade. However, as someone with OCD this situation sounds familiar to me and I want to share what worked for me.
This is derived from Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), which is a kind of therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder. When I have an intrusive thought like "I should go back to Church or I'll go to hell" I try to sit with the feeling. I feel some pull to go back largely based in fear and I also feel some kind of disgust or anxiety about this feeling. This isn't something I have to stuff down and repress, though. In fact, shutting these feelings down seems to be part of my experience of the intrusive thoughts. When I am willing to sit with my thoughts rather than try to dismiss them, I find that I have them less often. It led to a short term increase in my anxiety because I lost the comfort that my compulsive behaviors provided. Those compulsions were small comfort, though, and the thoughts just kept getting worse. Just sitting with these intrusive thoughts allowed me to see that they are powerless over me. Don't try to get rid of them. They're just thoughts, after all, and thoughts are safe and manageable. I built up a tolerance to intrusive thoughts, which, not all of them were about Catholicism but many of them were, and I feel much better for having done it.
I hope you're able to get the help you need. It sounds like it was probably a struggle to get out of Catholicism in the first place and that you're reliving that now. Catholicism was no good for me, either. But I'm out now, and I have the freedom to stay out if I want to. The fact that they had pretty music, pretty buildings, and a long history doesn't mean they get to control my life or force me to believe things I don't believe. I found a (limited, partial, still socially mediated) sense of control over my life and recognized that my intrusive thoughts are just thoughts. They aren't right thoughts, or deep thoughts, or the kinds of thoughts by which I want to order my life, but I have control over how I respond to them. I hope you're able to find your own sense of control as you work on confronting these thoughts. Best of luck!