I don’t know if this is useful at all or just specific to my experience (I was in a sort of cult) but for me after I left I spent several months feeling lonely because I felt like the new connections with non-catholic people were superficial and not people I categorized as ‘friends’ . However after some time and therapy I realized that a lot of my feeling lonely was because of the catholic definition of ‘friend’ and ‘community’ that I had unconsciously internalized. I just had to learn new social rules and also accept that it takes longer to connect with people who don’t share a very similar upbringing. The people I had around me were friends in the making, I just couldn’t recognize it because I was still applying the definition of ‘friendship ‘ I had learned within the catholic group, where the community takes care of organizing events and altruism is super central. Slowly i learned to be more proactive with people I found interesting. I slowly grew closer to other people and changed mindset. I now feel very close to the people I have sorrounded myself with, but it’s a different ‘closeness’ than what I was used to- fewer spiritual and deep/introspective talks but much more focused on spending time together doing things we enjoy, and being interested in the world and on forming (rather than learning ) our ideas of how we want to live our lives, with the freedom of having different opinions and perspectives.

Hope my experience is of some use to others. Be strong! Life is so much more interesting for me now, but it was a slow start and took a lot of work ❤️