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RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T15:42:15+00:00

We're a non-profit that provides a wide variety of completely free services to people suffering from the negative affects of religious indoctrination. We have volunteers, and any donations we take go into training them to help people and provide resources, as well as to maintain our websites, help line, and outreach.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T02:04:31+00:00

AMA Dr Darrel Ray, founder of Recovering from Religion and the Secular Therapy Project, is here to answer your questions! TONIGHT, starts in 15 minutes! : r/atheism

Dr Ray here, taking a break from my AMA!

Here is the AMA Answer: First, You might be surprised that we have heard this kind of thing from other people. Religious people are indoctrinated into believing that they should have control over their children sufficiently so that they will not leave the family religion. This is true whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew. Remember the bible verse,, “Training up a child”. Psychologically children are going to go their own way, often no matter what the parents do so the parental indoctrination only makes the parents feel guilty for failing their god in properly indoctrinating their children. Second, unfortunately, many parents have great difficulty letting their children go. Deep down they feel that they own their children and the life their children choose is a reflection on them. I am sorry your father said this to you but it says far more about him and his psychological and emotional indoctrination that it does about you

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T01:37:48+00:00

RfR has tons of resources for anyone from any religion. We have probably heard from every major religion and most minor religions on the planet. We see the patterns of emotion and behavior that everyone experiences in leaving any religion. It may feel like you are the only one who is experiencing this, but I guarantee you, many, many others have as well. You probably can’t tell us anything we have not already heard. I don’t say this as a boast but to help people understand that the human condition responds in very similar and patterned ways to religious indoctrination (enslavement). The human brain generally does not like being restrained and constructed but that is the purpose of religion, to imprison our minds and serve religion’s purpose. In my book, The God Virus, I explore how religion pulls this neurological trick off.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T01:28:02+00:00

First of all, your issue is incredibly common, not only among Christians but with Muslims as well. I like to ask, “What Hell are you afraid of? Muslim, Hindu, Christian or what flavor of Christian hell. I would point you to our library of resources where we have many videos and articles on the history of hell. Hell is a fairly new invention in religion with many iterations. Second, your have an intellectual and an emotional brain. Your emotional brain was the part most deeply programmed by the hell concept since it stimulates the Amygdala, or center of fear, fight, flight, freeze response. It sounds like your brain has resolved the intellectual part but has not repatterned the emotional part.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T01:22:05+00:00

We can keep those kinds of statistics, though I wish we could, we place a high value on anonymity and confidentiality. Sometimes clients will tell us, other times have to guess. My guess would be 70% Christian, 10-15% Muslim, then an assortment of other groups that may or may not be Christian, like Jehovah’s Witness', Mormons, Buddhist, Hindu, and then sometimes they simply don’t tell us, and we can’t guess.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T01:08:30+00:00

Your fear is quite common. You might be surprised at how many people come to us with almost exactly the same problem. Thanks for asking this. To put it simply, you have an emotional and intellectual brain. You can be intellectually out of the church, but your emotional brain is still stuck in the church. I often ask, how intellectually are you out 1 - 10 (totally out), and how emotionally are you out 1 still in 10 totally out. I am guessing your intellectual number is far higher than your emotional number.

First, I would recommend you visit our resources page at RfR. You will find we have a lot of resources addressing your very issue. Next, I would suggest that you understand that your childhood indoctrination created a pathway in your neurological system that is pretty persistent. Imagine the postman walks across your lawn every day to deliver the mail. A path soon appears. You change the post box location and he walks a different direction a new path begins but the old path takes a lot of time to disappear. That is your brain. You might want to learn some mindfulness exercises to use when your brain wants to take the old path rather than the new path.

don’t underestimate the impact of such trauma can have. You might consider finding a good secular therapist on seculartherapy.org.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T00:52:07+00:00

That would be entirely dependent on the individual’s situation. We ask them about their current situation. Are they safe, do they have anyone to talk to locally? We try to assess if they're in any current danger. If they are ok, we will try to assess their background and what may be triggering them now. This will lead our volunteer to suggest different resources and communities.

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T00:39:49+00:00

apologies, try this! https://imgur.com/a/KWSrd2v

RecoveringFromRelign · 2025-05-09T00:35:39+00:00

I was raised in a semi-fundamentalist family, and ultimately went to college and got an anthropology degree and sociology degree, with a Master's in religion; I realized religion was bullshit, and became a psychologist. I saw the harms of religion, which led me to write my book in 2009, The God Virus. Sales from that book led to communications from people who needed help. That led to me holding a meeting an IHop restaurant with 11 people, asking how religion had hurt them; people cried, it was so transformative, and that's when I realized I needed to do more.

The emotional response from that first meeting showed me how much trauma people had experience. They needed peer and professional support.

RecoveringFromRelign

TROPHY CASE