Life After Religious Deconversion
When I went through my deconversion from Christianity, I didn’t know what to expect on the other side. I wasn’t sure if life after religious deconversion was going to be better or worse, but all I knew was that I wanted my life to be based on truth from that moment onward. In the eleven years since my deconversion, I’ve found that life has been so much better for me ever since and I suspect it will be for you too if you’re going through a deconversion as well.
While some things that were once precious will be lost to you, I would argue that those things were never good for you anyway. Furthermore, what you gain is far superior to the experience you could ever have while being repressed under religious thought and control. Therefore, today I’m going to present to you five things a person loses and five things a person gains in their life after religious deconversion.
The Things You Lose After Religious Deconversion
#1 You Lose the Obligation to Attend Church and Other Religious Activities
The most immediate and noticeable change when you deconvert is that you no longer feel obligated to attend religious services or activities. While some of these activities were enjoyable, there was always a pressure to be there, wasn’t there? If you had a tough week and needed more rest on the weekend, that was too bad because you were judged by others and by yourself for your church attendance. God forbid (literally) that you take some time for yourself on the weekends to recover and spend time with your family. And let’s be real, did any of us really need to hear those sermons every week when we actually needed rest and connection with the people we loved far more? Once you no longer feel guilted into the obligation of consistent church attendance, it’s amazing how much more enjoyable and relaxing your weekends (and maybe even weeknights) become. We as humans already have enough to do with our work, school, and daily lives. The last thing we need is another obligation to consume the last bits of energy we possess, especially when we wake up and realize that our religious obligation was actually a waste of time and based not on truth, but instead on assumptions and fear.
#2 You Lose the Obsession with Moral Perfectionism and Repentance
You know, it really sucked being obsessed with my behavior all the time as a Christian. I felt like I could never do anything right. It was like I was being monitored by God continuously as he nitpicked my behavior. After all, just ONE minor, insignificant mistake or moral fault could send me to a LIFETIME in hell. Yeah, like that ever made any sense. This caused me to constantly obsess over obtaining and maintaining moral perfection, as is the case for most of the Christians I’ve ever known. Instead of focusing on living a moral life and accepting my mistakes when they happened, I instead was encouraged by my religion to obsess over these mistakes, feel excessive shame and remorse for them, and repent for these “sins” afterward. However, when I left religion and became an atheist, I finally developed a proper understanding of moral reasoning and moved on with my life. I no longer obsess over my imperfections. I no longer need to repent to a god that might not even exist. And finally, I’m focused on being good instead of beating myself up for all the times when I’m bad. Honestly, being religious created an unhealthy psychological state for me, one which finally healed once I deconverted.
#3 You Lose the Fear of Judgment in the Afterlife
While going through a deconversion, one of the hardest things for some people to shake is their belief in hell or some type of judgement in the afterlife. It’s honestly sad how religious people are motivated by fear of judgment to stay in line. Instead of being motivated only by love and moral reasoning to be good, so many religions and their holy books have preferred fear and cruelty to keep people in their control. So basically, instead of tapping into people’s best instincts for social harmony, someone thought it necessary to scare the shit out of people to keep them in line. During my deconversion, I like many others, initially had some fear of hell. I occasionally thought, “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m going to go to hell or be judged harshly by a god when I die for becoming an atheist?” However, as time passed, I realized that most religions had their own unique afterlife fabrications and that because they were all different, they couldn’t all be true at the same time. I also strongly suspected that all of them were false. As a result, my feelings eventually shifted and I realized that for hell to be an actual threat, it had to actually exist. And for me to believe that it existed, there needed to be evidence of the afterlife. Because I soon realized in my research that there was absolutely ZERO credible evidence for the afterlife, my belief in hell faded and I realized that there was nothing to fear. It was all just superstition and deserved no further serious consideration. If you still have a fear of hell, just realize that it’s not based in reality or reliable evidence, but instead in indoctrination. It’s just a feeling, a feeling that will go away with time as your belief in hell goes away.
#4 You Lose the Shame for Prioritizing Yourself
While I can’t speak for all religions, the version of Christianity I grew up with turned me into a self-depriving people pleaser. I was expected to serve others and always put their needs above my own. Sacrifice as a concept was adored within my religious community, treated like an ideal to be sought. As Christians, we based our worth as individuals on how much value we provided to other people, instead of basing our worth on who we were. There was no emphasis on self-worth, self-love, or self-care; it was all about what you could do for others. I often heard the phrase “God first, others second, you last” from the people around me. What an awful piece of advice and a terrible way to live! This concept is completely contrary to everything we know from modern psychology about achieving the wellbeing of both the individual and society as a whole. Instead of prioritizing the wellness of the individual, religion actually prioritizes the wellness of itself! It was never about helping people achieve wellness; it was always about profiting and upscaling the religion. In the same way that greedy companies mistreat their employees to maximize their financial gains, religion also encourages self-deprivation, self-neglect, and self-sacrifice to maximize its reach. However, once you leave religion behind, you can finally drop that insufferable shame for honoring your needs and start prioritizing yourself the way you’ve always deserved. You start to realize that YOU come first and that you’re no good to anyone if you aren’t taking proper care of yourself.
#5 You Lose the Company of Close-Minded People
And finally, the last thing you lose when you deconvert from religion is the company of close-minded people. At this intersection between your past religious life and your new secular life, you discover very quickly who truly loves and respects you. In my experience, some of your religious friends, the open-minded ones, will continue being friends with you and agree to disagree with you when necessary. Some of them may also choose to disrespect you by refusing to even acknowledge your shift, continuing to treat you like you’re still religious. And lastly, some of them will show you just how close-minded, prejudiced, and insecure they really are, leaving your friendship or criticizing you for your new position. The reality is that while you will lose people, either completely or partially, the ones that you lose were probably never that good for you anyway. However, the people that stay in your life and treat you and your new position with respect–you don’t lose these people. You only lose the ones that are worth losing.
The Things You Gain After Religious Deconversion
#1 You Gain the Company of Open-Minded People
In your life after deconversion, you not only gain new people who respect you and your new position, but as alluded to earlier, you also gain appreciation for the open-minded people who still remain in your life after your deconversion. Because religion thrives on being close-minded to the world of possibilities, when you leave religion, you finally gain access to people who are much more open-minded. These people will not only be much more likely to be interested in discovering and valuing you for who you really are, but they will also be much less prone to being condescending toward the way you think and feel. I would argue that open-minded people are healthier to associate with and will bring much more love and acceptance into your life than any close-minded people ever could. While I do value challenging my beliefs occasionally because I value truth, the last thing anyone needs is a close-minded person who doesn’t care to understand or respect another human being for who they are or how they think.
#2 You Gain the Ability to Ground Your Beliefs in Evidence
This one is a big one. Instead of constantly trying to convince yourself that something is true on the basis of faith or religious dogma, you can begin rebuilding your beliefs on the basis of evidence. You won’t realize how insecure you felt about your previous beliefs until you develop new ones based on evidence, observation, science, moral reasoning, and psychology. The confidence you gain in what you know to be true is vastly superior to the feeble confidence you understandably had in faith, religious authoritarianism, or superstitious texts. No longer are you trying to force confidence and conviction because they come naturally since you actually have evidence this time! Also, the days of having to have an answer for everything are over. I remember when I was a Christian that I was expected to be ready to “defend the faith” at all times. I often felt like if I didn’t have an answer for something, I had to pretend like I knew the answer or defer to the “God knows the answer” excuse. Now, as an atheist, I admit what I don’t know when the evidence is insufficient, but boy oh boy, when I do know something, I KNOW it and can prove it. Being able to be honest with myself about what I do and don’t know is such a relief. Being grounded in evidence instead of trying to determine what is true based upon shifting feelings (i.e. faith) has resulted in clarity instead of the frustration I previously lived with in my religious past. Now I know what I know and have the honesty and humility with myself and others to admit what I don’t know. It’s so freeing!
#3 You Gain the Motivation to Live YOUR Best Life
Once you leave religion and realize that the concept of an afterlife is probably just another man-made pipedream, you gain an urgency to start taking your life more seriously. Instead of deferring your hope and happiness to an afterlife that may never happen, you understand that this life is probably the only one you’ll ever get and that you need to live it YOUR way. Gone are the days of living your life in subjugation to an authority that might not even exist and sacrificing yourself for the benefit of your “non-profit” religions and churches. Instead, you begin to question what really matters to YOU and who you really are, beginning the process of self-discovery and aligning with your true self. Doing what matters to you becomes of primary importance because you realize how much time you’ve wasted serving goals and values that were never really yours. The truth is that you actually begin living YOUR life for the first time. No longer are you living by someone else's arbitrary rules or values, but instead by those of your own. You begin to realize that what you need, want, think, and feel actually matters and that religious servitude has only been stealing those things from you your entire life. Because of your deconversion, you now OWN your life and can begin to live your best life as a result.
#4 You Gain the Freedom to Think for Yourself
In addition to the open-minded people you will attract, the confidence in your convictions, and the motivation to live a life in alignment with your values, you also gain the freedom to think for yourself. Instead of doubting your inner wisdom and deferring your mind to the religious authorities or holy books held over you, you begin to trust yourself and realize that you’re capable of thinking for yourself! Because thinking skeptically and freely is no longer the “sin of doubt” or some other type of sacrilegious grievance, you gain the ability to discern what is right, what is wrong, what is true, and what is false. Trading blind trust in authority for trust in yourself, you gain self-respect and finally honor your ability to think. You begin to realize that it is your responsibility to develop the critical thinking skills religion never taught you and that you are ultimately responsible for what you think and do. You also look back into your religious past and realize that you’ve always had this responsibility, but failed to acknowledge it because you gave away your ability to think to appease a religion that doesn’t want you to think. Now though, there is no institution trying to shut down your logical faculties, but instead only yourself, seeking truth and understanding in a world that far too often fears and avoids it.
#5 You Gain the Freedom to Be Yourself
Most importantly, in your life after religion, you leave behind all of the acting, pretending, and hiding you did to alter and stuff yourself into the tiny hole religion created for you. You gain the ability to expand into your true self and be who you’ve always been on the inside. Because you think for yourself and are no longer diminishing yourself under the authority of religion, you finally gain the freedom to be yourself. So many religious people spend their whole lives never living in alignment with their true values or expressing their authentic selves. But you, because you’ve left all of this self-repressing dogma behind, are about to bloom into something beautiful. Some people might tell you that you have “changed”; however, you and I both know this isn’t the case. You’re just being the person you’ve always been, free of the false self religion continually expected of you. And what the world needs is more people like you, not the mindless drones that religion keeps trying to manufacture, but instead REAL, authentic, independent-thinking individuals. The world never grows or changes in a healthy way when people are forced into self-abandonment and compliance through propaganda, indoctrination, or brainwashing. Instead, the world becomes a better place when every individual owns their own mind and contributes their unique perspective into the world’s consensus. Therefore, the freedom that you gain to be yourself when you leave religion is not only a gift to yourself, but also to the world. Individuation and collaboration make the world a better place, not compliance and dissolution of the self.
Final Thoughts
If you’re currently going through a deconversion, just know that after a while, all of the stress and uncertainty you’re experiencing will eventually get replaced with confidence and a much better life. While you may lose some people, you'll also lose the shame, guilt, fear, obligation, and self-depreciation that religion has been giving you too. And what’s left after that? The opportunity to gain healthier friends, ground your life in evidence instead of faith, live YOUR life for the first time, think for yourself, and most importantly, be yourself. All of these things are priceless! If only more people could go through this process to experience a better and healthier life, the world would become a better place.
You’re not crazy, you’re not weird, you’re not weak in faith–you’re just awakening to the reality that has always been in front of you and inside of you that others deny. Most people don’t get this far, either because they’ve never had something happen in their life to stir their awakening OR because they’ve lacked the courage to discover the truth when they do. But YOU…you’re not them, and you’re going to get through this.
While it may be difficult right now, you’ll eventually come out the other side and you’ll be FREE!
An Atheist’s Journey Through Psychosis
After a lifetime of struggling with depression and anxiety, I had tried many different things in an effort to find healing, including intense exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, self-help books, and experimenting with different coping strategies. After a while, I realized that despite these efforts, I had unhealthy core beliefs about myself that were at least partially responsible for my symptoms. Therefore, I began searching for therapeutic techniques that would allow me to change these core beliefs, because no matter how hard I tried to change them consciously, I never could.
The Beginning of My First Psychotic Break
I found a coaching program that used a special technique that could supposedly change a person’s core beliefs and transform their life. It involved a combination of imagination, visualization, and intentionally trying to feel both old, detrimental beliefs and newer, beneficial beliefs. Because its claims seemed too good to be true, I contacted the coach and negotiated a pay-as-you-go arrangement instead of buying the package deal. I wanted to be able to cancel at any time if I wasn’t convinced of its effectiveness.
As usual for me, I dove head-first into the program and gave it the best effort I could. The combination of my obsessive-compulsive disorder and my determination to heal caused me to put over an hour a day into this therapy when most people usually did only fifteen minutes a day. As I continued to desperately follow the program, something did indeed start to shift within me, but it wasn’t anything good. Instead of my beliefs shifting and my life improving, I started to confuse my imagination with reality.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I was losing touch with reality. I thought that these shifts in my perception were a natural progression of the program. That’s what made this program so dangerous! It blurred the distinction between imagination and my true feelings and core beliefs. Because I thought that my increasingly delusional state was just my imagination, I had no idea that I was actually becoming psychotically delusional.
In the summer of 2020, I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that a robot in my mind was trying to take control over my body, threatening to set my spine on fire and kill me. I got out of bed and ran into the garage to get my infrared laser thermometer to check the temperature of my lower back. Even though the temperature read normal for human body temperature, it made no difference to me. I continued to believe that a robot was hijacking my mind and body because I was delusional and in full-fledged psychosis.
My fear escalated as I tried to convince my wife that there was a dangerous robot in my head in the process of hijacking my mind. While I could tell that she was very concerned for me, I knew that she didn’t believe me. If you’ve never had this happen before, it's actually quite painful to have someone very close to you not believe you when you’re so convinced that you’re telling them the truth. She compassionately and anxiously told me that she thought that something was wrong with me and called 911. I’m glad she did.
When the police arrived, I opened the door to greet them and told them what was happening to me. You know, that a robot was taking control over my mind and that I needed to fight him off in my imagination or I would forever be erased and he would have permanent control over my body. Interestingly, as a side note, I believe that this robot was a metaphor by which my mind was processing the fact that I was going psychotic. I was losing myself, just not to a robot, but to psychosis!
Despite my best attempts to explain the subtle nuances of mental reprogramming to the medics, firefighters, and police–I only succeeded in convincing them that I was crazy. At this point, I was surrounded by three police officers in my front yard in the middle of the night. They assumed defensive postures, slightly bending their knees with one foot forward and their rearward hands resting on their holstered pistols. They gently, but firmly asked me to come over to the ambulance so that they could take me to the hospital. Despite their kind offers, I was frozen in indecision. Due to my delusional state, I believed that they were actually going to take me to jail. However, I didn’t want to go with them because I believed that to prevent this robot from taking over my mind that I would need to stay home, sit on the couch, and conduct strategic battles in my imagination to defeat him. For a moment, I actually considered running away from the police or even physically fighting them if necessary so that I could escape. I honestly thought that my life was on the line. However, I believe it was my wife encouraging me to go with them to the hospital that eventually caused me to comply. There was still some sensibility left within me, but it was rapidly fading. I hopped up on the stretcher, and they strapped me down, very thoroughly. This was the beginning of my first psychotic break….
The Beginning of My Second Psychotic Break
After being stabilized on anti-psychotic medications in the hospital for two weeks, I was sent home with several prescriptions, a disheveled beard, and appointments with a terrible psychiatrist. When my wife arrived at the hospital to pick me up, she was surprised and saddened to see the state I was in. Because of Covid, she wasn’t allowed to visit me in person at the hospital, so she had no idea what I looked like until then.
At the time, I still didn’t fully understand what had happened to me. Because I was in denial of my new psychotic disorder, I was able to talk my psychiatrist into taking me off my anti-psychotic medications after only a week out of the hospital! This was an incredibly foolish thing for him to allow me to do because it caused me to have a second psychotic break in just a few weeks. People recovering from psychosis should never wean off their meds that quickly. At least six months on anti-psychotic medications would be far more appropriate in my opinion.
Not surprisingly, only four weeks after getting out of the hospital from my first psychotic break, I started to feel those familiar shifts in my perception happening again. I knew I had another one coming. I told my wife about it and we cried on our couch because I didn’t want to spend another two weeks in the hospital like that again. For me, the psych ward is like being in prison. There’s very little to do and the highlights of the day are meal times. I even had a fellow patient tell me that he had been to prison before and that there really was no difference.
After lamenting what had to be done, my wife and I decided to get a head start and try to get me to the hospital before I totally lost it again. Keep in mind that I had already been an atheist for five years before having these psychotic breaks. As we parked our car and started to walk a couple city blocks toward the emergency room, I could feel my belief in God coming back. However, I knew that this wasn’t a real conversion to Christianity, but instead my psychosis coming back.
Because of Covid, my wife wasn’t even allowed to sit with me in the waiting room. I cannot convey to you how awful it is to go through such a scary and destabilizing experience without anyone around to support you. I didn’t even have any hospital staff assigned to be with me. There I sat in a makeshift waiting room full of chairs, all by myself, going psychotic. As I waited there for about an hour, I began to have a unique hallucination. My heart stopped beating. I could feel the heart beating in my chest slowly fading out and then…..there was nothing. However, because I was still conscious, I decided to check the carotid pulse in my neck with my fingers, and yes, it was still there. Therefore, while I could still feel a pulse with my fingers, I could no longer feel my heart beating in my chest. I then thought, “Oh shit, here we go again.” I was entering psychosis, fast.
Soon after this hallucination, a couple hospital workers put me in a wheel chair to take me to a quarantine floor while they tested me for Covid. They wheeled me into an elevator and the door slowly shut. At this point, I was still sane. However, by the time we exited that elevator, I was INsane. I was completely delusional, hearing voices talk to me, and I firmly believed in God again.
I was psychotic….AGAIN. I was put back on the medications that my foolish psychiatrist had allowed me to discontinue only three weeks earlier. Within two days, these medications brought me back to sanity and being an atheist again. Between my two psychotic breaks, in the period of eight weeks, I went from atheist to Christian to atheist to Christian and finally back to atheist again. When I was psychotic, I was a Christian and when I was sane, I was an atheist.
My father, a close-minded evangelical Christian, always held contempt for my agnostic atheism. He perceived the intellectual objectivity and humility of my agnosticism–acknowledging what I did and didn’t know on the basis of sufficient evidence–as a form of cowardice, weakness, and indecision. However, this experience of rapidly changing beliefs must have been my mind’s joke on him because I was converting and deconverting from Christianity faster than a Catholic during spring break!
After spending two weeks stabilizing in the hospital, just like the first time, I was released to go home and begin my long, difficult recovery to wellness.
The Delusions I Experienced During Psychosis
During my two psychotic breaks, I experienced many different delusional states and beliefs. On the ambulance ride to the hospital in my first episode, I believed that God was threatening to kill my wife unless I killed myself in her place. I spent the entire ride to the hospital banging my head on the stretcher as hard as I could trying to kill myself with a head injury to save my wife. I also pressed my abdomen into the restraints around my body as hard as I could, hoping to rupture my abdominal aorta. At the time, I thought these things were possible, despite my experience to the contrary as a previously trained paramedic.
At one point during the ride to the hospital, I believed that God was going to strike the ambulance with lightning to kill me. For a moment, I looked up at the ceiling of the ambulance and honestly believed that I was about to die. A certain peace and stillness came over me as I knew that all of my pain, suffering, and striving was about to be over. My impending death wasn’t scary for me; it just felt like my journey was over and that it was time for me to rest. I actually experienced a sense of relief. However, I lamented the fact that I was about to go to hell in my wife’s place, which was an awful realization, but I was okay with my decision. Better me than her. I had just reached the end of my life. However, for some reason, the lightning strike never came. It was all just a delusion.
I also had many other delusions during my two hospital stays. At one point, I believed that I was a serial killer, news of which spread quickly throughout the psych ward. Afterall, there wasn’t much to do there, so for a short while, I was the talk of hospital staff and patients alike. I also believed for a while that I was Satan himself and that I was prowling about like a dangerous lion. I actually pleaded with hospital staff to watch me closely because I believed that I was a danger to everyone around me. Eventually, even though I wasn’t a threat to anyone because I cared so much about everyone’s safety, they listened to me and upgraded me to a more secure psych floor, assigning me my very own personal security guard. He was very kind and talked with me while we walked the hallways for several days until my doctor decided I no longer needed his supervision. I will never forget his kindness and support.
Once, when my wife was talking to me on the hospital phone–the only way I could communicate with her because of Covid–I believed that she was actually Jesus talking to me on the phone! It’s amazing how despite hearing my wife’s voice, my delusional mind was able to believe that Jesus was talking to me instead. While this delusion was short-lived, it was definitely an interesting experience for me for sure.
The last significant delusion I experienced was the belief that my wife was having an affair. Apparently, this is a really common delusion for those going through psychotic breaks. I experienced the whole she-bang (see what I did there? ;). Anyways, I truly believed that she was cheating on me and nothing she could say could convince me otherwise. Interestingly, this delusion, like some of the others, persisted in me emotionally for about six months after my psychotic breaks. It was like the beliefs that took root during my psychosis persisted with me for as long as any other belief would, taking time and processing to go away. Even though I knew on a conscious level within a couple days of being on anti-psychotic medications that she didn’t have an affair, I still felt like she did. It was a very unique experience during my long-term recovery because I occasionally felt anger toward her and felt like she had cheated on me even though I knew it wasn’t actually true. This was a very valuable lesson for me about truth, showing me that no matter how strongly you feel or have faith that something is true, that doesn’t mean that it is actually true.
The Hallucinations I Experienced While Psychotic
In my hospital stay, I experienced several different forms of hallucinations. The first was closed-eye hallucinations. Whenever I was sleeping or resting, when I woke up and opened my eyes, everything looked normal. However, when I closed my eyes again, despite being awake, I often saw vivid, colorful, cartoonish movies. I even battled with the robot trying to take over me for hours in this virtual reality world one night. It was like I was playing a video game, but fighting for my life! Sometimes what the human brain does during psychosis is far more interesting and fascinating than what it does when working well.
I also experienced an olfactory hallucination once when I smelled human excrement for over an hour but there was no physical source of it. I looked all around the psych ward and couldn’t find where it was coming from and eventually realized that it was just a hallucination. I even tasted poop when I was eating my lunch. That was probably the worst meal I ever ate–it tasted like shit!
However, prepare yourselves for the most interesting hallucination of my entire experience. I had a delusion that there was a snake living inside me that was trying to take over and control my body, similar to my robot delusion. I could feel this snake slithering all over my organs! At one point, I felt him wrap around my lumbar spine, slither up through my intestines, slide past my kidneys, and travel under my stomach and up my thoracic and cervical spine into my head. His head then split into two heads once he entered my skull and each traveled separately, one up each side of my head. Each snake then came to rest on the temporal lobes of my head (about where the arms of sunglasses are). I remember standing in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, looking at my head for the two snake heads that I could feel. Because I happened to have a couple veins protruding where I felt the snake heads, in my delusional state, I thought that those were the snakes hiding under the surface of my skin.
But here’s the crazy part: those snakes talked to me and acted like they were trying to take over my body. My brain had combined the tactile snake hallucinations in my body with the schizophrenic voices I was hearing to create a full delusional reality! I could even feel the texture of the snake’s scales scraping past my organs as it slithered through my body!
My Experience with Cognitive Dissociation
In addition to having delusions and hallucinations, I also experienced elements of dissociative-identity disorder, which is the modern term for what used to be called “multiple personality disorder”. Yeah, you probably thought it couldn’t get any more interesting than what I’ve already told you, but it does. At the time, I believed that I had multiple personalities, called subpersonalities, that were fighting for control over my mind. The truth is that subpersonalities are actually a real thing in psychology and everyone does have them. However, they are called subpersonalities–not personalities–because they are a collection of different behavioral patterns that combine to make a person’s whole identity. Most people don’t perceive their subpersonalities as separate identities within themselves like I did at that time; instead, they just see their subpersonalities as different moods or behaviors they express over time, which is accurate. However, because I was delusional and dissociated at the time, I misperceived my subpersonalities as primary personalities. I thought that I was like the people in movies with multiple personalities that could take turns ruling a person’s body, like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
There is a reason that psychologists no longer use the term “multiple personality disorder” and instead use “dissociative identity disorder” in its place. It’s because there is no such thing as having multiple personalities within one person’s body. However, someone in a state of dissociation like I was can FEEL and ACT like they have multiple personalities even though they only have one primary personality.
So what is dissociation? Dissociation is an altered state of mind where some of your thoughts and feelings no longer feel like your own. Instead, they feel like they are coming from someone else inside your head instead of you. Therefore, a person can easily misperceive the thoughts and feelings they don’t emotionally identify with as coming from another identity in their head. However, instead of having multiple personalities, it’s really just a person misunderstanding their dissociated state. THAT is why it’s no longer called “multiple personality disorder” and is instead now called dissociative identity disorder. You are one person who becomes fragmented in your perception of yourself to the point where it feels like you have more than one identity within your body. Also, because you have this misperception, you can mistakenly assume that your different moods are different personalities taking turns controlling your body when it’s nothing more than normal mood changes. Dissociation is really just a disorder of emotional perception.
During my first psychotic break, because I was in severe dissociation, I abruptly swapped back and forth between different aspects of my psyche. As you would suspect, it was very alarming to my wife because it looked like some type of demonic possession. However, let me make something clear: this is just another example of how ignorance about psychology has caused people past and present to believe in unfounded superstitions like demonic possessions. We now know that these behaviors are most likely nothing more than undiagnosed cases of schizophrenia or dissociation, all of which are treatable by modern medication and therapy.
As a side note, for thousands of years religious people have been fabricating superstitious ideas like demonic possession in an effort to repress their uncertainty of what they don’t understand. Instead of admitting to themselves what they don’t know and accepting their fear and uncertainty, they choose to make stuff up to delude themselves and pacify their discomfort. However, with what we know from modern psychology and science, these anxious supernatural imaginations have no place in the thinking person’s reality. Do demons exist? Maybe, but just like any other unfalsifiable supernatural concept, why fret about something supernatural that is unproven when natural explanations make far more sense and are actually grounded in credible evidence? There’s just no justification to believe in things like demons when they are likely to be nothing more than just another fearful creation of mankind.
My Experience with Depersonalization
Besides my experience with dissociation, I also experienced several brief periods of physical depersonalization. Depersonalization is a form of dissociation where you experience a sense of detachment from your physical body, external reality, thoughts, and self as if you are a third-party observer of your life. It’s like a more physical version of the cognitive dissociation we just discussed. When depersonalization happens, your experience of reality no longer feels like yours and sometimes you even feel like you’re not fully in your body or that your body is no longer in your control. It’s a weird feeling, similar to the temporary disconnection from reality that happens when you lose or gain consciousness while fainting.
Once, while in the hospital, I walked toward a window and suddenly, something took control over my body and continued walking toward the window. I panicked because I felt like I had lost control over my body. Was it demonic possession, some evil entity taking control of my body, or a Jekyll and Hyde scenario? Nope. It was just a depersonalization episode, where I felt like someone else was controlling my body when it was actually just me walking toward that window the whole time. See the pattern here? It feels like there is someone else in your head or someone possessing your body, but there isn’t….. It’s just a misperception of the mind, one which makes the perfect breeding ground for superstition when combined with ignorance and assumption.
My Experience with Age Regression
Besides periods of dissociation and depersonalization, I also experienced a period of age regression as well during my first hospitalization.
After attempting to escape the hospital by throwing a fake punch at a security guard to get him to duck out of the way so that I could run past him, he tackled me and I was pinned to the ground by about eight people and tranquilized with Haldol. The guard that I punched toward slammed me to the ground so hard that my glasses flew off my face and went skidding down the hall fifteen feet from where I landed. I later woke up in a room surrounded by hospital staff, laying face up and stretched uncomfortably over a firm restraining table with my wrists and ankles secured tightly in restraints. At the time, I was enraged to be hog-tied to a table like that even though I later understood why they did it. I felt like a wild, caged animal. However, I chose not to show them my anger; instead, I hid it and began formulating a plan for my escape.
Because I knew that the hospital staff would respond well to an act of harmless innocence, I acted pitiful and gently complained about how the restraints were uncomfortable and hurting me–which they actually were because they were so tight and wrenching my shoulders firmly behind my head. I then targeted one of the more compassionate care techs and successfully got her to loosen the restraints around my wrists and ankles so that I could move more freely. Then, I waited for the perfect moment to escape.
About 20 minutes later, when everyone thought that the excitement was over, most of the hospital staff left the room, leaving behind a small 130 pound woman to guard me (facepalm). I started by quietly working my hands out of the restraints, being careful to not break my hands. At one point, I pulled so hard that I could feel the metacarpal bones in my hand flexing on the verge of fracturing, so I decided to back off on my intensity and slowly, but methodically work my hands out of the restraints. By working the restraints around my hand in a circular process, I was finally able to break loose. The restraints on my ankles were far too loose to be effective and came off easily as well.
Once I was free, I quietly hopped off the table, landing silently on my ugly yellow hospital socks like a ninja. I felt like an assassin sneaking up on the woman guarding the door. However, I didn’t want to hurt her or anyone else; I just wanted to get close enough to her that I could blast by her without having to fight my way through her. And blast by her I did!
I sprinted by her so fast that she didn’t even move. She knew she didn’t have a chance of stopping a guy my size who was sprinting with life-or-death level focus. As I cleared her and the door, I made it into the main hallway. Then something interesting happened: for a moment, I felt like a child running for his life. I had no plan at this point; all I had was pure fear. In that moment, I experienced what I now believe was a temporary age regression where I embodied a younger version of myself, or at least I felt like it. As hospital employees yelled for help and chased after me, I had about a 15 yard head start on them. I sprinted in fear and desperation to the end of the hallway and slammed into the door of the stairwell, but it was locked! I then turned to the right and ran through another doorway just to see another patient, wide-eyed at my abrupt entrance into his room. I then ran back out of his room and looked around and saw two double doors leading into another hallway that I had missed earlier in my fury to escape. The guards were closing in, so I made a run for it and slammed into those doors, but they were locked too!
Knowing that my escape attempt was over and that I was about to be captured, I impulsively decided to try to end my life. I didn’t even think about it or hesitate at all; I just ran up to the wall closest to me and slammed my head into it so hard that I knocked myself out. The second my head smashed into that wall, my vision went black and I saw a bright yellow spark in the middle of my field of view. That spark was the last thing I remembered before waking up the next day in my hospital room on my bed.
My Unawareness of Suicidal and Self-Harming Behavior
During my psychotic breaks, I never consciously wanted to kill myself, however, my actions told a different story. If there had been an open window, I probably would have jumped out of it to fall multiple stories to my death. What was weird though is that my delusional state caused me to believe that I was doing these things for other reasons than self-harm. I never thought that I was trying to hurt or kill myself, but instead that I was trying to escape or keep my wife from going to hell. My mind was playing tricks on me. I felt like I wanted to live, but another part of me obviously wanted to die. Therefore, I was fractured within my mind between the desire to live and the desire to die, which honestly was probably just the psychotic version of what I had been living with for years. I’m just glad that I didn’t succeed.
Medication Side Effects – The Surprising Source of Suffering
It might surprise you that being psychotic wasn’t actually that painful or scary for me most of the time. However, the medications I had to take were HELL. I discovered very quickly that I was very sensitive and reactive to psych meds. I was initially put on Loxapine, an old-school antipsychotic that made me drool at the lunch table because it was so sedating. Paradoxically, despite it being such a strong sedative, it also caused me to live in a constant state of anxiety. In fact, its effects were so severe that I felt like I was constantly on the verge of a panic attack. Once, a patient care tech accidentally dropped her clipboard on the hospital floor right behind me and I felt a shockwave of fear and panic whip through my body like nothing I’ve ever felt before or since. Loxapine sensitized my nervous system and put me on edge. After realizing that the medication was the cause of my anxiety, I desperately brought my suffering to the attention of a nurse at the nursing station, and he didn’t care or do anything to help me. It took my wife calling the hospital and complaining to get my medications changed. It’s such a shame that anyone would ever be ignored and neglected like that during such a vulnerable and painful time of their life, especially in a hospital of all places.
In my second psychotic break, I was put on Risperdal, a very common anti-psychotic medication. While it knocked me out of psychosis within three days, it too caused intense anxiety and constant muscle tension throughout my body, just like Loxapine. The anxiety it produced was so severe and painful that all I could do was constantly pace the hallways to slightly mitigate it. However, if I stood still, it was unbearable. I couldn’t even participate in any of the planned activities with other patients, like coloring, because when I tried to sit still and color, I started to panic. I had to keep moving. This is a common side-effect of anti-psychotic medications known as akathisia, and I had it BAD.
In fact, my anxious suffering from Risperdal was so severe that despite wanting to live, I contemplated the reality that I might have to kill myself to end the pain. I felt like I could tolerate maybe one or two more weeks of this extreme anxiety, but if it went beyond that, I was going to have to get creative and find a way to commit suicide in that hospital. That is how bad my reaction to that medication was. I lamented internally that after surviving so much in my life already, I might have to kill myself even though I didn’t even want to die this time. My experience was similar to being slowly burned alive and wanting someone to shoot you to put you out of your misery even though you’d rather just get out of the fire and live instead.
Fortunately, because the nurses at the second hospital were far more compassionate and professional, I was immediately put on Valium to ease my anxious suffering. Little did I know that while Valium helped me tremendously in that moment, it would later result in a six…month…long…withdrawal that would be the most agonizing period of my life.
My Recovery–The Long Difficult Road to Serenity
After getting home from my second psychotic break, little did I know what was ahead of me: something far worse than the actual psychotic episodes and hospitalizations I had already experienced.
For three years, my antipsychotic medications caused me to have no energy, sleep 16-20 hours a day, be unable to feel any positive emotions, and instead live with a persistent feeling of complete emptiness. I was so fatigued that I couldn’t even sit upright on the couch. Instead, I spent most of my time reclining even when I was awake. I also gained fifty pounds in three months and never wanted to do anything. Looking up at the beautiful sky felt like looking at a grainy low-resolution black and white image. Watching tv was also boring to me, felt pointless, and actually became a negative experience because all it did was drain what little energy I had trying to concentrate on it. Things that used to be enjoyable did nothing for me anymore because I was experiencing a condition known as anhedonia, where you don’t feel joy or happiness in activities you previously did. You don’t realize how important the good times are in your life until all you have is complete emptiness and exhaustion. For three years, I felt like my heart had died, unable to feel anything other than numbness and doom. And the worst part of it? I had no idea if I would ever feel good again. While I knew that the medications were causing this experience, I also knew that I might not ever be able to discontinue them because of my condition.
At this point in my life, I was constantly in a state of survival. There was no joy, happiness, meaning, or purpose in my life other than to survive. I had no idea whether I would ever get better or how I would ever be able to improve in the pitiful condition in which I found myself. The only thing I knew was that as long as I stayed alive, there was hope for me in the future. So stay alive I did.
After several years of trialing different antipsychotic medications, I did find some improvement, but nothing significant enough to regain my quality of life. However, after three years, I finally found Caplyta, a next generation antipsychotic drug that changed my life. Caplyta wasn’t even on the market when I had my psychotic breaks, but it was everything I had ever hoped for while surviving those three awful years. I’m so grateful that a group of people made it their life's work to create a medication like this that could finally pull me out of the hell that all of the other anti-psychotic medications put me in. I could finally feel again! I went from needing 16-20 hours of sleep a day to only needing 10-12, a vast improvement. Over time, I began to have more energy again and even started providing strength training sessions for a few of my family members in my home gym. While I still didn’t feel as good as I did previously before my psychotic breaks, it was night and day compared to the past three years!
From the time of my psychotic breaks to finding Caplyta was a period of three years and from Caplyta to the day I’m writing this was another three years. Now I am off all my medications other than Caplyta and am healing significantly, not just from the after-effects of my psychotic breaks, but also from a lifetime of mental illness, complex ptsd, and emotional abuse. I have finally found the healing I’ve always sought. I have traveled the long, difficult road to serenity and have finally made it home. And now I hope that I can share my insights and experiences with you so that you might find healing and growth for yourself as well.
My Message to Those Going Through Difficult Times
If you’re going through hard times, just know that you have what it takes to survive. You may feel like there isn’t any hope, but objectively, there is as long as you stay alive and take good care of yourself. You might feel like you’ve endured all that you can take, but your mind and body can handle so much more. If you choose to accept your pain, stay alive, and do the best you can with what you have, you will have the best possible chance of making it through. I think that most people can and will make it to the other side if they choose to objectively focus on the hope and possibilities in their future instead of trusting their present feelings of doom and despair. You are already surviving right now; you just have to keep doing it! It’s never easy, but if you just take one day at a time, one moment at a time, you WILL make it through. Honestly, you have no other choice, because if you could have avoided it, you would have; therefore, the best thing you can do is accept this challenge in your life and do what you have to do to survive so that you can get through it and come out the other side.
Let this time show you who you are: not someone who is fearless, but someone who chooses to continue moving forward despite their fear. This is called courage. Also, you don’t have to feel strong, because every step you choose to take makes you strong. Therefore, courage and strength are choices that you make in every moment of every day, not character traits only held by a few. If you understand this, you will realize that survival is a continual choice and that you can do it too.
I encourage you to choose strength and courage for yourself in these difficult days and for the rest of your life. You get to choose who you are, and from today onward, you’re going to kick this thing in the ass!
Will you do that for me?! But most importantly, will you do that for yourself?
If You’re Suicidal, Just STAY ALIVE
I sat on my bed in a dimly lit room with a loaded pistol resting beside me.
“Is today the day that my suffering is going to end? Is today the day that I’ve finally had enough?”, I thought.
I felt intense emotional pain surge throughout my body, contracting my muscles wherever it went. Depression inundated my demeanor and sadness made my posture sag. I then felt intense anger flood through me with a desire to grab the gun and punish myself for my inability to escape this misery. Just one moment of self-hatred, just one moment of raging impulse and it could all be over! I nearly grabbed the gun right there and sent a 124 grain 9mm Speer Gold Dot hollowpoint at 1250 feet per second into the temporal lobe of my head. It was that close. My anger toward myself for being unable to thrive and my distorted sense of self-mercy almost ended my life that day. I wasn’t afraid to do it either; in fact, I was never afraid to kill myself, yet, something always stopped me.
What was it? Hope. I knew that if I could survive just one more day, there was a chance that I might find healing in the future. While I knew that I might not ever thrive again, as long as I stayed alive, I knew that there was hope. I also realized that what I really wanted was to live without so much pain and suffering and that I couldn’t do that if I was DEAD. At the time, suicide felt like bestowing a form of mercy (and punishment) upon myself, but it would have actually ended the opportunity for me to find healing from my afflictions. I didn’t crave non-existence, which would have been the end result of pulling that trigger, but instead a peaceful existence. And now, twelve years later, I have finally found that peaceful existence, the healing that I had always hoped for all of those painful years.
If you are on the verge right now, realize that what you want isn’t oblivion and annihilation. What you actually want is peace and joy, and you can only obtain that if you stay alive long enough to find it. I know that you’re suffering and feeling immense pain right now, but death isn’t the answer; compassion upon yourself in the form of choosing to live and take better care of yourself IS.
You don’t need to end the pain right now. You probably couldn’t even if you tried. What you can do is end your suffering by no longer resisting your pain. Let yourself feel the pain. Observe where it is present in your body and notice what it feels like. Once you’ve located the pain, choose to accept it and allow it to be. It won’t be there forever, but as long as it is with you, you must only feel the pain instead of adding additional suffering to it.
Suffering is an unwillingness to feel pain and is actually far more painful than the pain itself. While humans have incredible pain tolerances, they also have poor suffering tolerances in my observation. Pain isn’t a choice; it’s an unavoidable aspect of life. However, suffering IS a choice and therefore it is within your power to end your suffering now, not by killing yourself, but by choosing to accept your pain and allow it to be.
Choose to be okay with how you feel right now. Choose to embrace your life as it is without the need to change anything immediately. I know this is hard to do initially, but trust me, after my lifetime of suffering, I’m telling you that it is so much harder and infinitely more painful to resist your pain than it is to accept it. Acceptance is where you will find peace and healing for yourself. I’m not promising fast results. I’m not promising the end of your pain. But you can end your suffering today by continually choosing acceptance in every moment and allowing your pain to exist as it is.
Just remember,you will never find the peace and healing you crave if you end your life today. Now is not the time to worry about thriving and being pain-free. Those things can come later. Right now, just focus on accepting your pain and staying alive. I made it through to the other side and YOU CAN TOO. It won’t always be easy, but trust me, it will be worth it. Progress might feel impossible right now, but if you keep moving forward, there is always hope that things can eventually change and gradually get better. At this point in your life, just staying alive is a form of progress. Just know that you won’t always feel and be this way. You might not be able to handle much right now, but with time you will have the opportunity for healing, and with healing you have the opportunity to thrive once again. But for now,
Just stay alive…
Why It Is Okay to Be a Lone Wolf
I’ve spent most of my life feeling different from other people. While most people value companionship highly, I’ve always found myself enjoying solitude over socialization instead. While I still have social needs, I rarely feel like being around anybody and even when I do, I usually find those interactions unsatisfying and exhausting. As I’ve grown in self-acceptance, I’ve also noticed that the desperate need I previously possessed for others to validate me has been replaced with increasing indifference and acceptance of the fact that I like being alone. Therefore, my preference for solitude as a lone wolf as well as my diminishing need for social acceptance has made me question if high levels of socialization are really as beneficial for all of us as many would claim. In my own experience and observations, I have found that less socialization is actually better for me as a lone wolf.
The Consequences of Too Much Socialization for the Lone Wolf
While this obviously doesn’t apply to everyone, those of us who are closer on the spectrum to introversion would do well to disregard the traditional extroversion bias we often encounter and instead discover what works best for us. I have grown up in a country (USA) where lone wolves are shamed for being who they are and are pressured into being more social. However, in my experience, this makes me miserable. Too much socialization exhausts my energy, stifles my creativity, and overstimulates my highly sensitive nervous system. Lone wolves like myself don’t need other people surrounding us to feel good; instead, we actually need significant amounts of time alone to feel good! It’s sad that so many people in my life have seen this attribute as some type of mental illness or social defect when it isn’t. Therefore, if you know someone who prefers lots of time alone, don’t criticize them for it; instead, understand that for them, time alone makes them feel the same way as being around people makes you feel.
Socialization Isn’t as Important for Lone Wolves
I know it might be hard to believe, but lone wolves find joy, fulfillment, and happiness in solitude that many people only find in the company of others. While I sometimes enjoy the company of others if I’m willing to drag myself into it, I rarely experience the satisfaction I observe others feeling in similar situations. When I was younger, I did enjoy receiving validation from others because I wasn’t able to validate myself at the time; however, I still didn’t really enjoy socialization that much for its own sake either. As I’ve gotten older, healed my childhood wounds, and increased my self-esteem, I’ve found myself no longer needing as much from my social interactions with other people anymore. When I do connect with others, I’m not looking for validation, but instead sharing interesting conversations or life experiences. These connections now fall into the category of life enrichment for me instead of desperate need.
Optimal Social Interaction Is Better Than More Social Interaction
In my observations, I’ve noticed that every person has their own optimal level of social interaction. The more social a person is, the more important higher levels of socialization are to their wellbeing; however, the less social a person is, the more important solitude is to their wellbeing. Therefore, wherever you are on the social spectrum determines what’s best for you.
The Pressure to Socialize More Only Hurts Lone Wolves
I’m often frustrated by how so many people, including psychologists, pressure solitude-preferring people like me to socialize more and treat everyone as if we’re all the same. It’s like they think that more socialization is always better. However, they could not be further from the truth! My fellow lone wolves, you and I both know we’ve all tried this. We get goaded into attending social functions and being around people more and do we feel better? No! We get exhausted, feel disconnected from our joy and creativity, and take days to recover! Yet somehow this excessive socialization is supposed to be good for us?! I don’t think so. Instead, when we minimize social engagements and engage with ourselves–thinking, creating, and reflecting alone–we bloom into people full of energy, enthusiasm, creative ambition, and fullness of life! Therefore, a person’s wellbeing should be judged not by some arbitrary psycho-social average, but instead by what makes a person thrive.
It is Okay to Be a Lone Wolf!
If you are a lone wolf and prefer solitude over socialization, don’t let others tell you that something is wrong with you and that you need to be more like them. That is just their ignorance of psychology and insecurity about their emotional dependence on people being challenged by your alternative lifestyle and emotional independence.
Lone Wolves Have Different Needs
If you are a very social person, try to understand that everyone’s needs and preferences are different. Just like it would be unhealthy for you to be socially isolated, it would also be very unhealthy for a lone wolf to be oversocialized. Therefore, no one needs to change anyone. Let’s just accept our differences and appreciate the value that comes from each of us.
Take the Alone Time You Need
For my lone wolves and introverts out there, give yourself permission to disappoint people and take more time to enjoy the solitude you need. You deserve to live a life that is healthy for you just like highly social people do. Why is it okay for them to get what they need and be around people all the time, but for you, it’s unacceptable to get what you need and spend more time alone?
Conclusion
It’s time that we live in alignment with who we are and set boundaries with others to ensure that we get the time alone we need to thrive. After all, isn’t that what makes us lone wolves? We thrive alone.
The Root Cause of People Pleasing
The root cause of people pleasing behavior is an emotionally unsafe childhood. Maybe self-expression wasn’t allowed. Maybe you were blamed for things that weren’t your fault. Maybe your parents or caregivers made you feel like you weren’t good enough, providing only conditional love in an effort to control you instead of accepting you the way you were. Whatever it was, all of these injuries damaged your self-image and filled you with toxic shame–the belief that your authentic self isn’t good, lovable, acceptable, worthy, or respectable as it is. And tragically, your natural response to this belief was to alter yourself in an attempt to gain safety, love, and approval instead of realizing that your caregivers failed to love you for who you are. Today, if you’re willing, you’re going to drop this shame and choose to love yourself as you are.
The Misery of Being a People Pleaser
People pleasers, also known as “nice guys or girls”, spend their whole lives wearing a mask to cover their true self. They constantly assess how to please everyone else except for themselves. Having spent the majority of my life as a people pleaser due to the toxic shame instilled in me by my narcissistic parents and Christianity, I can tell you that it ruins the quality of your life. Instead of living authentically, being who you are, doing what makes you happy, and taking good care of yourself, you do the exact opposite. The nice guy gives everyone else what they want in a desperate need to gain validation from those around him because he’s convinced that he’s unlovable and is unable to validate and love himself.
The Psychology Behind The People Pleaser
Because the people pleaser’s childhood caregivers convinced him that he wasn’t good enough, he has already rejected himself. He had no chance to avoid this internal shame because it happened so early in his development before he could think for himself. Because he isn’t able to validate himself, he desperately seeks to counteract his own self-rejection with validation from others. He subconsciously feels, “If I can get other people to love and accept me, then maybe I’m worthy of my own love and acceptance.” However, in this process, because he’s rejected his true self, he erects a false self to show others because he’s terrified that others might see his “awful” true self. So, he’s driven to create an idealized personality that no one could reject that pleases everybody. He becomes a chameleon and alters himself to match whoever he’s with at the moment. As a result, his mind becomes exhausted in social situations due to the unrelenting effort to optimize his act to receive the acceptance he craves from those around him.
The Confusion and Social Anxiety of the People Pleaser
After a while, reading people and presenting the ideal false self to please them starts to confuse the people pleaser. He begins to realize that he’s not really sure who he is anymore. Afterall, when you spend your whole life as a professional actor, acting starts to feel safer than authentic self-expression. Because you have no idea how the people in your life will react to your true self, the fear of being yourself increases over time. Eventually this fear develops into severe social anxiety. Furthermore, this fear from your social anxiety isn’t that people might reject you; it is the belief that people will reject you because you have already rejected yourself.
My Years of Failed Attempts at Healing From People Pleasing
So now that we understand what causes people pleasing, how do we heal this unfortunate condition? For years, I tried to be more authentic, to force the mask off and show my true self to everyone, and I could never sustain it. Before my recovery from people pleasing, I was a perpetual smiler, smiling at everyone even when it wasn’t necessary. For a while, I tried to force myself to not smile excessively and I just ended up feeling like an asshole whenever I withheld my smiles because I couldn’t tell the difference between an authentic smile and my mask. Because I couldn’t even tell which ones were real and which ones were false, I often mistakenly suppressed the real ones in an effort to get rid of the false ones! It was so aggravating and confusing for me. In my effort to express my true self more, I couldn’t even figure out which behaviors were genuine for me.
What Finally Began My Recovery From People Pleasing
So what eventually worked for me? Determining the origin of my toxic beliefs about myself. I had to examine the damaging beliefs I had about myself and realize that I didn’t choose them for myself. Instead, I had to become aware that these unhealthy core beliefs came from my narcissistic parents and their toxic Christian religion. I was told from an early age that I was an evil sinner–despicable from the day I was born–and that I needed someone to save me from a hell that I apparently deserved just because I dared to live. Also, I was constantly criticized for not being good enough because my parents were perfectionists. Furthermore, I was always wrong because my parents idolized themselves and blamed me for their mistakes because they were covert narcissists. My parents systematically rejected my true self because they wanted to manipulate me into a more pacified, controllable version of myself that they could use to feed their narcissistic egos. As a result, self-discovery and self-expression didn’t happen in my childhood like it should have; instead, I repressed my true self to survive and took on characteristics that weren’t my own to give my parents and their religion what they wanted from me. I also later realized that just like my parents, the god of Christianity himself was a narcissist too, blaming and punishing humanity for his faulty creation and convincing us that we’re the evil ones when it’s actually his intolerant, wrathful, blood-loving, and hell-creating self that is evil.
Rejecting the Brainwashing of My Childhood
Once I understood that I was brainwashed to believe that I was an unworthy, unlovable, terrible person, I rejected those beliefs. It made me angry to see how an innocent child like me was conditioned by my parents and their religion to despise myself. I started to think independently and reconsider all of the beliefs that had been forced into me during my vulnerable childhood. I asked myself, “Who am I? What matters to me? What do I want? Do my actions indicate that I am a good person or a bad person? Am I a lovable person? Am I worthy of anyone loving me? Is my judgement always wrong or have I just been the victim of narcissistic abuse?”
The Beginning of Self-Differentiation from My Parents
As I asked myself these questions, I noticed that my answers differed tremendously from the poisonous presumptions pressured into me as a child. I realized that I was a unique person, with values and beliefs very different from my parent’s. Truth and authenticity actually mattered to me instead of wishful thinking and hidden motives. I also wanted real connection, not the conditional love from my parents that required self-abandonment. Furthermore, my actions indicated that while I was a very hurt person, I was also a good person who valued moral reasoning over the mandates of a morally-devoid god. I also realized that I was a lovable person and that like everyone, some people would like my personality and some wouldn’t. I decided that I was worthy of love and that even if no one else would choose to love me, I would choose to love me. And lastly, I realized that my judgement was actually quite good, considering all of the years of hyper-awareness that I developed as a people pleaser in emotionally unsafe environments.
The Rise of My Anger and Self-Worth
My answers to these questions began a shift within me from insecurity to righteous anger. I began to realize that instead of being a bad emotion that should be suppressed, my anger was actually a self-protective instinct meant to shield me from those who would harm me or diminish my value. It was this very anger that began to rebuild my self-worth. Whenever anyone mistreated me, instead of justifying and minimizing their actions like I usually did, my anger would rise and motivate me to communicate with them to achieve resolution. My anger was advocating for me, revealing mistreatment from those around me so that I could hold them accountable. I started to understand that many of the aspects of myself that I had repressed due to the unhealthy emotional environment of my childhood, like my anger, were actually parts of me trying to help me.
Rebuilding Myself One Day at a Time
Over time, I slowly began to integrate all of myself into my life, including the parts of me that didn’t always please those around me. I began to be myself a little bit more every day, exposing myself to my fear of rejection while also reminding myself of the truth of who I am and my worthiness as a person. As I overcame these fears one by one, I began to realize that these fears were nothing but illusions coming from the awful core beliefs about myself from my unfortunate childhood. My confidence started to build, not the type one gets externally from others, but instead the type that comes internally from oneself known as self-confidence.I also began to view myself in a much better light, raising my self-esteem. And, most importantly, I chose to love myself in a way that no one ever had, developing self-love.
Overcoming My Fear of Rejection
While many of these realizations have been immediate on the conscious level of my mind, it has taken time for these beliefs to shift on a deeper subconscious and emotional level for me. As I’ve recovered from my previously poor self-image, I’ve grown in empowerment and self-respect over time. I used to be afraid of significant shifts in my behavior being seen by people who’ve known me for a long time, feeling like if I ever revealed my true self, I would have to do it around new people. I began to realize that I had been rejecting myself every time I thought like this, diminishing and hiding myself from the people in my life just to make them comfortable and avoid triggering my own shame. I began to think, “What about me? What about my self-expression? What about my comfort? What about what I want?!” As a result of questions like these, I started to gradually reveal my true self to the people around me and as expected, some people liked me and some people didn’t, but that was okay with me because I liked me.
The Results of My Healing and Transformation
As I write this, I have transformed significantly from being mostly an externally-validated people pleaser to mostly being an internally-validated authentic man. I’ve let people go who weren’t good for me instead of trying to keep pleasing them. I’ve held people accountable who love me, but have been neglecting or disrespecting me. I’ve also held myself accountable for not being the man I want to be. The end result is that I’ve chosen to leave almost all of the relationships in my life because most of them were dependent upon my deprivation, tolerance, inauthenticity, and self-sacrifice. I’ve realized that it’s better to be alone in authenticity and love yourself than to surround yourself with people who don’t love or respect you the way you deserve. It’s this shift toward providing love for myself that has enabled me to leave these unhealthy relationships behind and begin a new relationship with myself, one with self-love, self-respect, and self-esteem. Relationships with others are less essential for me now because I provide for myself what I previously sought in the validation of others. Now I no longer try to make incompatible relationships work by altering or diminishing myself. I no longer try to see the best in people out of hopes that they will do the same for me. Instead, I try to see people for who they actually are based upon their actions and if they’re not good for me, they’re out of my life. The people who give me the respect I deserve and who celebrate me for who I am–those are the people who remain in my life. However, I am done with diminishing myself to make those who reject my true self accept a false version of me.
I’ve finally found the contentment with myself I’ve always wanted. I’ve finally found the love and acceptance I’ve desperately sought my whole life. I’m no longer a people pleaser because I’ve found love and acceptance where I least expected it–from myself.
Looking for Love in the Right Place
If you’re a people pleaser and you’re looking for love and acceptance, stop looking for it in the wrong places like others and religion. Instead, start looking for love in the one place that it really matters–from yourself. You don’t need to feel love for yourself to give it to yourself. You just need to choose to love yourself, for it is this choice that will begin your healing journey. Love yourself the way you’ve always wanted to be loved! It’s time for you to switch from being a people pleaser to a self pleaser. The world will benefit far more from your authenticity and self-expression than it ever did from your false self and fearful mask. It’s time for you to give yourself and the world the real version of yourself!
Final Thoughts
Will you choose to love yourself? Will you choose to become the validation for yourself that you’ve always painfully sought in others? Will you choose to stop avoiding rejection so that you can gain something far greater for yourself–your own joy, authentic expression, and happiness? Will…you…choose…YOU?
“It’s better to be who you are and be loved by some and rejected by others than it is to be someone who you are not and never be loved for who you actually are.”