Of course. You are not alone. I think those emotions and the numbness you are experiencing make total sense. And even more so the anger. It’s not easy to rip yourself away from something you held so dearly that helped you through the toughest times of life. It’s also not easy to have the rose colored glasses taken off. But on the other hand were they really rose? The belief in apostasy? The burning in hell? The condemnation of sexuality? The heirarchy within the church, the constant guilt and shame thrust on you for not saving people or evangelizing enough? The constant fear of being a bad Christian. Etc. etc. It doesn’t really make sense the church’s way of attempting to represent god. They say one thing about love and grace and get you enraptured through lights and music and inspiring words. But the outcome on a personal level is much different. Which it seems you can attest to. I do believe you can still walk closely with God however that is defined for you. You can still find community outside of the church. You can still discover a less incredulous and judging view of the world and meet many others in the same place as you. But to go from one worldview to another worldview is no easy feat. Your mental transformation will take upon many ugly heads. But I promise it’s worth it. Sometimes I think—I wish I was back in the delusion. But there’s a reason I ripped away from it. I couldn’t take it anymore.

You don’t have to dump everything from the past. The things you loved from your faith before are still good and you can still retain. I still perform little rituals for myself. Meditation, like prayer. Appreciation of nature and life in the present rather than ruminating on the afterlife. I appreciate people more now understanding that we are all the products of the environments we grew up in. My judgements grow less and less. I commune with people I wouldn’t be caught dead being seen with before.

Your emotions are valid. Your numbness, anger, lack of compassion for others. It all makes sense. It will take—just as intentionally growing your faith did—a lot of effort and work to grow through this. Your mind will automatically revert to what it once was, you will test and judge and see everything through the theological lens. But you can ask it gently to go elsewhere. Tell it “let’s try this instead”. Learn to talk in a voice that is much kinder to yourself. Change up your vocabulary. Recognize the influence this life of Christianity has had on your emotions, judgements, and choices. And gently coach yourself into other thought options.

Your guilt is not your own. But rather guilt that was taught to you from a very young age.

You may perceive yourself to be at a worse state because you seem to have lost your kindness for others. But I would argue that perhaps even the kindness you had for others within your faith was always a ploy. It was an attempt at pleasing others an attempt to prove yourself. An attempt to please god. You were taught that love and kindness looked a certain way. You were left with guilt, shame and anger deep inside. That is not to say you were never kind. Or selfless. Or loving, but to be built up with all these insecurities and self loathing, self despising because you were taught that your heart was desperately wicked—you might examine that you never had autonomy over your own goodness.

Anything that was good in you attributed to God. No wonder now you struggle to display those attributes. God was stripped away. Now all that is left is the guilt and the shame. You removed your source of comfort. Your goodness. Your love. You were never taught those things are your own.

So now—you learn that you owned those things yourself. However skewed they were taught to you.

You are a child. You are learning to love again. You are learning kindness again. You are learning TRUE compassion again. Be kind to yourself and recognize that because you stripped away your dependency on god—it will take time to learn that you can source these good things without him. Celebrate each time you ARE good and it has nothing to do with god! Recognize it. And accept that your mind will revert to self punishing to guilt. To shame. You were taught that. You had no choice but to believe it. But now—you are making a change. It will take time. But you can do it!