22 West Magazine - 2022 Community Issue

CULTURE BY ANONYMOUS

I Think That's How I feel, but I Am Not Sure

HOW THE SOCIAL PRESSURE IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES WARPED MY PERCEPTIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word: community? There are probably positive connotations, a sense of belonging, a secure space to share your experiences, and a safety net for emotional support, but that is not always the case. Sometimes, instead of a community carving out a spot for people to be their authentic selves, it pressures people to mold themselves to narrow expectations of what is acceptable in that community. Instead of bringing people together while respecting their unique differences of taste, opinion, and background, it enforces a code of conformity and removes the chance for true connection.

When growing up in a tight-knit religious community, you quickly learn that there are acceptable ways to act, speak, dress and look at the world around you. While certain ways of thinking may not be explicitly criticized, those who don’t behave or think as expected are often ostracized. As I look back at the structure that I grew up in, I find that many of the religious communities I was in, from schools to churches to families, coerced me to accept behaviors and relationships that are not beneficial to myself in my formative years, only because there weren’t any other options. For years and even to this day, it has led to me to question and dislike myself, making me out of touch with who I was.

Only now, as I begin to rediscover what I like, how I think, and what I want for myself am I able to put into context how the community I grew up in molded me in ways that were against my nature. As I was growing up, I had a persistent sense of wanting to connect with others around me but found that being stuck in a social bubble where everyone has similar beliefs made it difficult to find an actual support system. Since everyone is brought up being taught the same ideas, it created a surface-level sense of uniformity in personality.

Everyone’s edges are smoothed over with an industrial wood buffer until everything becomes smooth and slick. Slippery. Interactions between people were like a vertical countertop and water. Just slipping, connectionless. It felt like trying to climb the wall of your shower. I could not get a fucking grip. But as I consider it more honestly, more fairly, with a healthy amount of self-criticism, I realize I often did the same thing. I nodded and smiled and gave a quick remark of agreement with dozens of statements when I was internally screaming. Just maybe… no, most likely, I wasn’t the only one who thought, “you know what? Fuck it. It’s not worth it anymore. I’m just going to shut up.”

Here it is: another pleasant side effect, the all too familiar guilt. Why wasn’t I better? Why didn’t I say what I thought? I never could answer that question. I thought it was because I was afraid. But it wasn’t. It was because there wasn’t any point in yelling into the void, when not even an echo would come back. I knew the stove was hot and banging my head against a wall was going to hurt.

There was a constant expectation of vulnerability. Being honest about your struggles, your “sins,” was a sign that you were engaged in your faith. Quite frankly, it felt uncomfortable to be thrown into a random youth group and have people bare their fucking souls. I mean, people you just met. The only thing more uncomfortable than that was the mounting pressure to share your personal life with these people who you just met and didn’t know if you could trust.

Wait, no I take it back, the only thing more uncomfortable was when you shared something vulnerable and personal only to be met with an empty rehearsed answer. Uncomfortable isn’t the precise word for that though. Insulting, maybe. It felt like a slap in the face: to share vulnerable parts of yourself and receive an impersonal answer that could have been given to anyone. It was almost as if they didn’t even listen to what you said.

I can remember being told by my youth group leader, a young woman, who was supposed to support the high school and middle school students in their faith that I had no reason to be sad about my grandparent’s death when Jesus had gone through much worse. And that he understood everything I was going through. It’s one thing to tell someone their opinion is wrong, but it’s another thing to tell someone they don’t have the right to feel the way they do. The idea that being upset, anxious, sad, or angry is wrong encourages a very emotionally unhealthy set of coping mechanisms. But of course, feelings are natural, and often impossible to prevent. They are signs that tell you something about yourself. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then. Since I couldn’t get rid of how I felt, I figured I would just hide it.

But I didn’t find the community to be invalidating just emotionally and socially, but also intellectually. If you had a problem, I could guarantee you the first dozen people you asked would all give you the same solution. Getting a second opinion? Yeah… that was nonexistent for the most part. There was one opinion. The opinion. In fact, most people wouldn’t even consider it an opinion, they would consider it a fact.

If you happened to have a different opinion, expect everybody to look at you like you have four heads or as if you just told them you torture small woodland creatures for fun. I distinctly remember a bible teacher asking me for my opinion on abortion because he thought I seemed “very smart,” so he was just curious about what I thought. Of course, I really appreciated that he thought I was smart enough to make my opinion valid, really, I didn’t consider my opinion to matter before he said it did. Anyways, the condescension continued when I got cut off halfway through my explanation that personhood is different from life with a quip that a fetus was a human obviously, not an elephant. I mean, case closed. It didn’t bother me as much as his opinion being wrong or different from mine, just the fact that there was zero intellectual honesty.

At least three-quarters of the time, an opinion that was rare in the context of our religious community was met with a straw man argument, shock, disbelief, or some sort of ridicule. Yet, I had all these adults telling me I was “bright” or “intellectual” yet completely ridiculing my opinions, even if they were the ones asking me to share. You get to a point where you start to think you’re crazy or stupid. The gaslighting was off the charts. Now, these behaviors wouldn’t phase me, but when you are young, you assume everyone around you is smarter, wiser, and better than you. So, I never considered that my opinion and thoughts were valid or maybe even, right. Even now, the nagging feeling that I can’t trust my own judgment persists.

Another intellectually dishonest behavior that never ceased to annoy me: everything the pastor said was right. Even when it was directly contradictory. Even when there were genuinely other ways to interpret the text. Other interpretations were branded as only being brought up because of ulterior motives to twist the text to match their own beliefs, rather than mold their beliefs to what God was really saying. If I have to hear someone say to just “trust in his authority,” one more time I will have a brain aneurysm.

It seemed that all these adults I grew up with seemed so assured of themselves, so confident they were right. At first, I felt that way too. That what I thought and said was important, but then I wasn’t so sure. Then I wasn’t even so sure of what I thought at all.

Although I started by describing how my experiences, my self-awareness developed the other way around. Beginning to understand how these experiences affected me was a bit of working backwards. I started with a nagging sense of discomfort, a feeling of suffocation that was persistent and painful. I had a continual, inaccurate fear that I couldn’t trust myself: not my opinions, my choices, my perceptions of the world, my judgments on whether others were healthy to include in my life or not.

Honestly, that fear has not gone away completely, but it has been lessened little by little as I follow my own instincts and the world doesn’t implode. In fact, sometimes my choices leave me with good results. Maybe, one day, it won’t be a leap of faith every time I make a decision to trust myself.

Disclaimer: This is my personal experience; it is not meant to be taken as a widespread indictment of an entire religion or religious/spiritual practices in general. There were some lovely people I grew up with, I’m just describing the general atmosphere of the religious communities in my church and school.

ILLUSTRATION BY CAROLINE BAE