This week’s guest is Anne. Anne grew up in an English family whose Christian history goes back generations. As a young child, Anne and her twin took their beliefs seriously, even the damaging ones.

Her parents’ divorce shook her up. Her family had been “that Christian family,” and it felt like her parents had become strangers. Still, she clung to her faith throughout her teens and twenties.

Anne married young, meeting an American missionary while in Scotland, but it seemed her partner wasn’t as devout as she’d hoped. His was on his own journey through deconstruction but she didn’t want to see it.

In her thirties, Anne began to acknowledge the questions and psychological distress she’d had for years. “It’s almost like this pressure had been building and building and building and finally it broke through, and I just thought, What if it’s not real? I had not allowed myself to ask that question.”

It took a little googling, excellent therapy and other people’s deconstruction stories for Anne to see that she no longer believed. It’s been freeing for her to see the world as it really is. No more “magical thinking.”

She and her partner are asking whole new questions, and it’s growing them and changing them in ways they never could have imagined.

Interact

For quotes, recommendations and more see the full episode show notes
https://gracefulatheist.com/2023/02/19/anne-so-i-persisted/

You are not broken, you are human
https://gracefulatheist.com/2016/12/06/you-are-not-broken-you-are-human/

Join the Deconversion Anonymous Facebook group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/deconversion

Support the podcast on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/gracefulatheist

Secular Grace
https://gracefulatheist.com/2016/10/21/secular-grace/

Deconversion
https://gracefulatheist.com/2017/12/03/deconversion-how-to/

Deconstruction
https://gracefulatheist.com/2017/12/03/deconversion-how-to/#deconstruction/

Attribution

"Waves" track written and produced by Makaih Beats
https://makaihbeats.net/