How to stop feeling guilty for leaving your faith

Whether you’ve been a person of faith all your life, or for only a number of years, it’s valuable to reflect on how much faith becomes a part of who you are.

If you’ve reached a point where you are leaving behind your faith; you no longer believe, you’ve left your church, mosque or other religious setting - you’ve made a decision – ‘I can’t go back there’.

Perhaps this journey has been a long one, months or years of doubting, deconstructing your faith, questioning why things are said by the leadership - or whoever might be standing at the front that week.

I’ve been there, showing up to a church where week in week out I listened to things I no longer believed in, but was overthinking – how did it all add up? I’m currently part of a community where questions, doubts and deconstruction are the norm, but I also totally feel you if you’re not even there anymore either.

Whether from birth, or over recent years, the journey to leave faith behind is painful, anxiety inducing, nerve-wracking, confusing; it can lead to burn-out and depression, and at the very heart is a sense of guilt and shame for reaching a conclusion that at one point in time you never thought you would.

But what about this guilt and shame? Where does it come from and what can you do about it?

It’s very sad, but true that religion – of many varieties, and however welcoming and friendly – use fear on a deep level as a way of controlling and persuading people. I grew up in the Christian tradition, for those that did too, the following may resonate…

Since I was a young child ‘being a good boy’ was used at home, at church and at school to reinforce behaviour – all pretty normal… except at church, being good meant not being evil and being good meant I wasn’t just good in my parents or vicars eyes – but in God’s. It meant that I had nothing to fear because there was nothing that could separate me from God now that I was a Christian.

That was the rule – as long as I was a follower of Jesus, I was all good, God saw me like that, my parents saw me as that.

You can imagine then, how I felt whenever I did something I’d been told was wrong or sinful. That guilt and shame surfaced. The guilt I felt was conditioned in me for anything I did that wasn’t deemed good from an early early age. And this is why when we leave our faith – the psychological conditioning that we undergo in our faith communities is activated and our fear response triggered.

Before I was 18, I barely went out with friends… when I was in my twenties I made up for this… and gradually over the years of my late twenties and early thirties the domino effect of questioning, experiencing life and death and deconstructing led to a new way of being.

But today, I write this from a place of ongoing reflection, processing and journalling about where I currently sit in faith.

Shame and guilt are deeply rooted in the foundations of my faith tradition: if you don’t believe you don’t go to heaven, if you sin you are disobeying God and you’re not living a holy and good life. A word that comes to me here is: disappointing. I am disappointing God, and if my parents were to find out – disappointing them too.

Perhaps you feel the same? Maybe there are others too you need to hide this from…

As part of the process of deconstructing and doubting; hiding becomes a big part of the way of life. For many of us, we keep going and going and going… and then depending on our circumstances, we decide ‘I can’t do this anymore’

The hiding has become normal, but the guilt and shame of hiding remain.

Here are three things that can help with the normal feelings of guilt and shame:

1) Finding Community. Hiding the truth – so much of faith and religion is about finding truth. When you’re in a community that has a sense of belonging with an ultimate truth – then leaving the community or the central thinking behind leaves us with an emptiness – a sense of guilt or shame that you don’t really fit.

I suppose an antidote to this is finding a new place to feel that sense of belonging – whether that’s in someone you can confide in, or maybe another group of people going through the same thing – knowing you are not alone, because whether you’ve discovered this for yourself yet or not – you are certainly not alone in this. You could also start with therapeutic help – where being seen and heard for where you’re at will be met with care and kindness.

2) Talking. Ruminating on the sense of guilt and shame will only allow these thought processes to embed themselves and manifest into physiological responses: lack of sleep, nausea, heavy chest, lack of appetite – all the markers of anxiety and depression. Talking to someone about what you’re going through helps externalise and process in a healthier way. If therapy isn’t for you at this point and you don’t have a friend who would understand – why not go for a walk by yourself and record a voice note?

3) Inner-change. In time, as you sit and live and reflect, your inner voice becomes more and more powerful. You’ve lived your life to this point dependent on and in no doubt about other people’s words, thoughts and beliefs impressed upon you. This is why the process of leaving faith can be so painful and lonely. Where once words, promises, forgiveness, “truth” and even eternity filled your mind – now there is a void, a stillness… and a realisation that you got yourself here and only you can navigate what happens next.

I know how scary this can be – what does tomorrow look like now? What does the future look like without that community I was a part of, or without that old faith.

I'm aware this raises more questions than it answers, and that's probably where you are right now: full of questions, not many answers, and not sure who to turn to…

If any of this resonates and you'd like to talk, I'd love to hear from you.

You can get in touch here.

Get in touch