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?
Surviving Mental Illness as an Atheist
As someone who has lived with mental illness most of my life, I have experienced anxiety, depression, irritability, and more as both a Christian previously and now as an agnostic atheist. While the struggle has always been there regardless of my perspective at the time, there have been several key differences between surviving mental illness as an atheist versus as a theist. Both can survive, and proponents of each will likely continue to argue that their position is better for surviving hardship. However, having experienced both sides, I am in a unique position to be able to share how the atheist position offers several key advantages while navigating the difficulties of the mind.
1—Atheists Pursue Healing Instead of Fighting Demons That Aren’t There
When I was a Christian, I honestly thought that my struggle to get out of bed in the morning and overcome my anxiety and depression was caused by demonic attack, spiritual oppression, or a lack of faith in God. Instead of figuring out what I needed to heal my mind or my body, I wasted valuable time praying for help and assuming that I had a spiritual problem instead of a psychological or medical problem. Once I willingly discarded my faith in Christianity, I began to look for actual solutions instead of continually seeking the failing intervention of the divine.
2—Atheists Listen to Their Intuition Instead of Unanswered Prayers
As mentioned above, because I thought I was under spiritual attack by demons and other “dark entities”, I wasted years praying to God for help. Because I never received any help or relief, I thought that God either wanted me to suffer for some inexplicable reason “for his will” or that I was somehow at fault–gaslighting myself as religion often does. I could never understand why being crushed by depression to the point of complete social isolation would do anything for advancing God’s kingdom. It just seemed like a needless waste of my life, and it was. When I became an atheist, however, rather than seeking God’s help through prayer, I began asking myself what I needed to heal and I actually started getting real answers! As a result of this, I can confidently conclude that my deconversion from Christianity was the beginning of my healing process from mental illness. Because I started trusting my intuition and allowing it to guide me toward doing what I needed to do to heal–instead of waiting for unanswered prayers–I started getting the help I actually needed, both from myself and others. This transition from prayer to self-trust marked the beginning of tremendous healing in my life.
3—Atheists Trust Themselves Instead of Feeling Abandoned by Gods
In the process of desperately praying for God’s help for years, I began to feel abandoned by him. I could no longer ignore the fact that I had never heard his voice or witnessed any notable answers from him to my prayers. Instead, I was actually getting worse. Why? Because I was trusting God instead of taking responsibility for healing myself. However, when I became an atheist, instead of feeling like God didn’t give a shit about me, I started giving a shit about me. I became what God could never be for me: someone real who I could trust. Someone who had my back. Someone who was present to love me. As an atheist, I began to trust myself and find my own inner advocacy and support so that I could begin the journey of healing my mental and emotional health.
4—Atheists Take Responsibility Instead of Waiting on God’s Intervention
Once I became an atheist and began to trust myself instead of waiting on God's help, I began to take personal responsibility for the challenges in my life. While I know that many of us have heard the whole Christian speech on “Trust God, but do your part” thing, you and I both know that is just an excuse for the fact that prayers go unanswered (or unheard) and that gods don’t intervene (or don’t exist at all).It was this realization–that God didn’t exist or was unwilling to help–that ignited personal responsibility in my life for my mental health problems. I started to understand that regardless of whether the supernatural existed or not, I was on my own and if I didn’t do anything, nothing was going to change. I realized that my healing journey was up to ME, not a god who didn’t exist or who didn’t care to help. I was never going to get better unless I took responsibility for my struggles and helped myself.
The Lies Theists Tell You About Surviving Mental Illness
If you’re an atheist in the middle of a crisis, whether that be mental illnesses or something else, don’t believe all the lies that theists will tell you about suffering, such as:
“Only through the power of God could I survive ______.”
“Without God and the support of my local church, I wouldn’t have made it.”
“It’s faith that got me through.”
And the list continues…
The problem with all of these self-depreciating assumptions that theists make is that the vast majority of them have never experienced hardship as an atheist. Even if they had gone through hardships previously as atheists before becoming theists, the fact that they negotiated those hardships and survived as atheists proves my point! The reality is that most theists underestimate their survival capacity because they believe that strength (or anything good really) can only come from their gods. They assume that they are feeble, frail, and foolish people who couldn't handle anything on their own without the support of their faith and their gods. See what I mean? How would any theist know if they could survive hardship as an atheist without actually being an atheist while going through their fires? By their same logic, atheists could easily claim that they wouldn’t have survived what they’ve been through if they had been religious.
Conclusion
The reality is that both atheists and theists can survive immense suffering. They can both claim that it was their life philosophy that got them through it, but the reality is that surviving mental illness has nothing to do with the religious or philosophical label by which one defines themselves. Sure, different perspectives have their own advantages and disadvantages in the realm of coping with hardship, but in my experience, having been on both sides, it doesn’t really matter. What actually matters is committing to living another day and accepting your pain. Acknowledging your struggle and asking for help. Realizing that it’s okay to feel bad and that you don’t need to force these uncomfortable feelings to go away immediately. Learning that emotional pain is both a sensation and a message from your subconscious, but that suffering is a choice. Taking better care of yourself instead of beating yourself up. Giving yourself permission to not be as happy or as successful as your peers right now. And, choosing to love and care for yourself in a way that your family probably never has.
Don’t let theists tell you that you're screwed without their gods if you’re navigating mental or emotional challenges in your life. The reality is that you’re probably better off. At least you can count on yourself instead of gods that never show up. At least you’re fighting to heal an actual condition instead of battling against evil superstitions. And most importantly, because you’re unencumbered by waiting for supernatural disappointment, you can start taking responsibility for your healing right now by trusting your intuition and getting the help you need.
You’ve got this. Afterall, isn’t that what theists and atheists share in common–our humanity? And given the fact that we are both able to survive hardships, maybe it’s never been gods getting us through it afterall? Instead,maybe it’s just been our humanity this whole time.Afterall, survival is what we do, because if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be 8 billion of us on this planet.
You are a survival machine that doesn't need an illusion to get you through this. You just need to show up for yourself. You need YOU.