Episode 7: How fear based religions keep you disconnected from yourself

Have you ever felt like your own intuition was a "danger" to your faith? If you grew up in a environment where doubt was a sin and fear was a motivator, you might find yourself fundamentally disconnected from your own voice. 

In this episode, we explore the psychological and spiritual impact of fear-based religious conditioning. We dive into why these systems often require you to abandon your own judgment in favor of external authority and how that "disconnect" manifests as anxiety, people-pleasing, and self-doubt in adulthood. 

If you want to connect with me, email at:

vevian@vozmediano.com

or find me on Instagram and Facebook @vevianvoz

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back. Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, the podcast about unpacking your roots and rewriting your story. I'm Vivian, your host, and I'm so glad you're here. Before we begin, I want to say something clearly. This episode is not an attack on religion. It is not an invitation to abandon your faith or dismiss your spiritual life. If your relationship with God or a spiritual tradition has been a genuine source of comfort, community, and meaning, that is real and it is yours. What we are talking about today is something different. We are talking about what happens when religion is transmitted primarily through fear, when the God you were given was not a source of love and safety, when faith becomes less about connection and more about compliance. And when that conditioning got so deep inside you that you stopped being able to trust your own mind, your own feelings, your own judgment, because you were taught from the very beginning that those things could not be trusted. This is not spirituality. This is conditioning. And like all conditioning we have been unpacking in this podcast, it leaves a mark. Most of us did not choose our religion. Like everything else we talked about in this podcast, our family patterns, our emotional inheritance, and our earliest beliefs about who we are, religion was handed to us. Before we had the capacity to evaluate it, before we had the framework for asking, is this actually true? Is this actually love? We were born into it, baptized into it, brought into services before we could speak, taught to pray before we could read. The image of God that was placed in front of us, the rules, the expectations, the consequences went straight into the nervous system the way all early conditioning does. Not as ideas to be examined, as reality itself. And for many people, the God they were given was not a warm one. Keeping score of every thought, every impulse, every moment of doubt or desire or human imperfection. He was easily disappointed, difficult to please. And consequences of getting it wrong, hell, punishment, rejection, shunning, getting cut off from love and salvation were not abstract theological concepts. They were felt, they were real, they were terrifying to a child who had no other framework for understanding the world. That terror is not faith. That terror is trauma. And it shapes you in ways that follow you long after you have left the church, the mosque, the temple, long after you have stopped practicing, stopped believing, stopped identifying with all the traditions. Because it is not your theology anymore. It is in your nervous system. Now I want to offer you a framework here that I think is going to land in a way you might not expect it to. Fear-based religious conditioning can function almost exactly like addiction. I know this sounds like a strong statement, but stay with me because neuroscience actually supports this. When you grow up in a religious environment where fear is the primary motivator, where the driving force behind your behavior is not genuine love or genuine faith, but the avoidance of punishment, the management of shame, the desperate need to be accepted in the eyes of God and the community, your brain gets wired into a very specific loop. The fear activates. You feel the anxiety of not being good enough, and then you do the thing that brings relief. You pray, you confess, you comply, you perform in the right behavior, you say the right words, present the right version of yourself. And for a moment, just a moment, that fear quiet and you feel safe, you feel acceptable, you feel okay, and then it comes back because it always comes back. And so you need another hit, another prayer, another confession, another performance of the goodness. But because the nervous system has learned that this is the only way to manage the unbearable activation of the fear. This is the same loop as addiction, the same neurological cycle of craving, relief, and craving again, the same loss of genuine agency, the same inability to trust your own inner experience. Because the only thing that matters is managing the fear. And just like any addiction, it keeps you from yourself, it keeps you from your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own instincts, and your own desires and judgments. Because all of that internal life has been labeled as corrupt, as something that needs to be overridden by an external authority rather than listened to and trusted. This is the piece I really want you to sit with, because I think it is one of the most profound and least examined cost of fear-based religious teachings. When you are taught from childhood, consistently through every channel available, that your own mind cannot be trusted, that your heart is treacherous, that your desires are suspect, that your instincts are corrupted by sin, and that the only safe thing to do is to surrender your thinking to God, to the pastor, to the scriptures, to the community, you lose something essential. You lose access to your own inner authority. And your inner authority is not a luxury. It is not arrogance. It is the capacity to know what you actually think, feel, and believe. To trust your own perception of reality, to make decisions from a place of genuine discernment rather than fear of getting it wrong, to know from the inside what is right for you, rather than constantly looking outside yourself for permission, validation, or direction. When that capacity is systemically undermined from childhood, when you are taught that trusting yourself is the same as trusting something corrupt, the result is a person who is profoundly disconnected from their own inner life, who cannot make a decision without anxiety, who second-guesses themselves constantly, who looks to others, partners, authority figures, institutions to tell them what to think, what to feel, and what to do. Not because they are weak, because they were taught very thoroughly that their own inner knowing was not to be trusted. And here's a connection that I think is so important, especially coming off of our last episode. For survivors of sexual abuse who also grew up in a fear-based religious environment, these two wounds compound each other in devastating ways. The abuse said, your body is not safe, your boundaries do not matter. What happens to you is not yours. What happens to you is not in your control. The religion says your body is sinful, your desires are dangerous, your worth depends on your purity. And if something happened to you, if your body was violated, there may be a part of you that absorbed that message that is somehow connected to your own corruption, your own sinfulness, your own failure to be good enough. This is one of the most cruelest intersections of trauma and religious conditioning. And it deserves to be named directly. Here is something I want to name that almost nobody in this conversation is willing to say out loud. For many people, religion acts as a blanket and becomes a way of not looking at themselves, not consciously, not maliciously, but quietly, persistently, religion can become the thing you reach for instead of doing the actual inner work. Instead of sitting with what is painful, instead of feeling what is unresolved, instead of asking the hard questions about who you are, what happened to you, and what you are still carrying. Because it is so much easier to say God will take care of it than to turn toward the wound and do the work of healing it. When you have been given a framework that says surrender everything to God, trust the plan, and have faith and let go, that framework can feel like relief. It can feel like the answer to a pain you don't know how to hold. But there's a difference between genuine spiritual surrender and using God as a reason to avoid yourself entirely. To put a blanket over the anxiety, the grief, the unresolved trauma, the patterns that keep repeating and call it faith. I have seen this in my own life. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness. And one of the things that tradition offered, and that many fear-based religious traditions offer, was a very specific kind of escape from the present. The idea that this world, this life, this pain is temporary, that the new earth is coming, that everything will be made right in paradise. And I want to ask you: how many people do you know who have spent their entire lives waiting, waiting for the new earth, waiting for God to fix everything, waiting for Armageddon, but in the meantime, not fully living, not fully feeling, not fully in the life they actually have, dealing with the wounds they are actually carrying in this life. That waiting is not faith. That waiting is avoidance dressed in spiritual language. And the cost of it is your actual life in the present moment, the one that is happening right now, the one that needs your presence, your healing, your honest engagement, not a promise of something better when you're gone. The God you are given may not have been a loving one. The faith you were handed may have been more about fear than freedom. The beliefs you inherited may have never been examined, just abandoned, passed down, and mistaken for truth. And the dreams that you were taught to shrink, the desires you were taught to be ashamed of, the ambition you were taught was selfish. None of that was ever the truth about you. That conditioning, and like all conditioning, it can be seen, examined, and slowly with compassion and courage be released. Before I let you go, I want to leave you with one question to sit with this week. What have I been taught to want less of that I am finally ready to allow myself to have? If this episode resonated with you, please share it, leave a review, and if you're ready to do the work with my support, I'd be honored to walk by your side. My email will always be in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you in the next episode.