Yesterday a friend said something beautiful. But instead of taking in that beauty, I spent the evening and the morning taking it apart.

I realized that I love my boys unconditionally and if I love my boys that way, my father must have loved me the same way too, even if he couldn’t always full express it.

We had been talking about what changed in his thinking when he was about the same age I am now, as it related to his own hunger for his father’s approval. He was talking about the way he began to quiet that need. The crazy thing is that he still felt a hunger for his father’s approval and affection, and his father was in his life. We have talked about his childhood and his father’s presence before. In the ways that mattered most, his father was the opposite of mine. He was consistently loving, encouraging, and most important of all, physically present.

Hearing him say that about his own boys was beautiful. I love that he can say it that way. I want to be able to take it in the way it was offered.

Who am I to critique a man’s love for his own children? But then I realized, I am not doing that. I am doing something else to protect myself. So what am I protecting?

Hearing him say it activates three things in me. Doubt. Shame. Grief. Doubt is the one that shows up first, and it is loud enough to keep me from the other two.

Doubt comes first because doubt is fast. Within a second of hearing him, my mind already had two objections ready. The first is that the love is already conditional. He loves them that way because they are his kids, and I suspect he doesn’t feel that same love toward his sons’ friends who are the same age. The second takes the form of, “yeah, but what if one of your boys goes wayward and ends up hating you?” I know what he would say to that. He would say it is possible, and that he would love him anyway.

The objections are not stupid. They are also not the point. I have spent enough time with the part of me that produces them to know what it is doing. It has been doing it my whole life. If I can find the flaw in the sentence fast enough, I never have to sit with what it feels like to have never been loved that way.

Because here is what my doubt was covering. My friend can look at the way he loves his boys and reason backward from it. If I love them like this, my father must have loved me like this. He gets an answer he can live with.

I became a father too, and it worked the other direction on me. Loving my daughters that way did not tell me what my father must have felt. It told me what I did not get. And it made the distance between the story I believed and the life I was actually living impossible to keep ignoring. That is a large part of what broke my faith.

For many years, the evangelical churches I attended, and especially their male leaders, filled that gap for me. They stood in as representatives of Jesus. But no person could reasonably bear everything that role carried for me.

They could love me well, but they could never go back and give me what I had needed from my father.

As I go back and read the Bible now, I keep seeing Jesus offer something over and over that I didn’t see when I was a Christian, because I didn’t know how to put words to what I was looking for. I can articulate the hunger more clearly now, and appreciate the beauty of what was being offered in the teachings of Jesus.

The religious story that most powerfully captures this struggle and longing is the story of the prodigal son. The part that still moves me is how the father runs to meet his son while the son is still far off. Before the son has said a word, it says the father ran and embraced him and kissed him.

I read that line this morning and wept over it for the first time in my life.

How deeply I long for my father to have done that with me, and how deeply I still long for him to do it now. To see him run. To have him embrace me. The beauty of those words doesn’t hit as powerfully for people who have never known that kind of pursuit. You only know how good ordinary food tastes after you have fasted for a day.

It’s incredible how deprivation changes your perception of the ordinary.

I love that story. I want to believe that God the Father runs to me and embraces me and kisses me. But God isn’t a physical being on earth who can do that. Jesus is using the beautiful image of an earthly father to show what God the Father is like.

But my body doesn’t get to physically experience that.

Jesus uses a physical story to elicit a response in my body. His parables almost always invoke a felt, embodied presence to drive home the point, and I love that about him. I love that his teachings are embodied, and how could they not be? His presence on earth is theoretically God taking an embodied form.

He is teaching in parables what he represents literally as a walking parable.

But as much as I love this story, and as much as I want it to be true, I don’t get to talk to Jesus, or see him, or experience him as an embodied being. There was one place above all where I needed that story to become physical for me. If my father had been saved out of his addiction and begun to live out the truth of the Christian faith, Jesus would have become tangible to me in the body of my own father. It would not have undone my childhood, but it might have healed something in me that his addiction had taught me about fathers.

So when my father died, the last chance I had of touching an embodied Jesus died with him.

I know there are legitimate rebuttals many evangelicals could raise, about how this isn’t a correct test of whether or not he is real, and why I should still believe. But I can’t help going back to that beautiful image of a father who sees me far off and runs to me and embraces me and kisses me, before I say a word. If I could experience that from God, I would weep in his arms and just allow myself to be held.

I would ask him why he let so many terrible things happen to me. Why couldn’t my father have gotten better? Don’t you know how hard this burden is to carry? Do you know what it is to see the beauty of a story, and to know a whole generation got to touch him, and that I never will?

This leads to shame. Shame because I keep wanting to be seen by the people whose framework I can no longer affirm. And I know my writing reads as a threat to it, even when what I am mostly doing is telling them how beautiful I still find the story.

I tell them the incarnation still moves me more than anything else I have found. That the image of a God who comes after his creation in a body is the most beautiful thing I know.

But I am also telling them that I took the story so literally that I couldn’t stay any longer, because after becoming a father myself, I began to feel the disconnect between the embodied story and the reality of my lived life.

I have sent my writing to a few evangelical leaders. Some of them read it, and I am grateful for that. One pastor never answered the email. Every time I send it I am opening myself up again, and then waiting, not just for a response but for one that feels like being seen. What I am handing them includes some of the darkest, most vulnerable moments in my deconversion process, specifically about not wanting to be alive any longer. It costs me something to write that down. It costs more to send it to someone who does not hold it with the weight it deserves.

As I was finishing the book, I told an elder’s wife what it was about. She reflected that she sees most deconversions as the result of unprocessed trauma. She meant it as an explanation, not an insult, and it still stung.

Then coffee with a pastor. An hour of good conversation, and on the way out a passing comment about my “daddy issues.” I got in my car and sat there while an incredible sadness came over me. I wanted to sob and couldn’t. So I drove home replaying the conversation over and over. I parked in the garage and stayed in the car, because the anger had come up over the top of it, the way it always does. I sat there until it was safe to go inside. I texted him shortly after and told him it hurt. He was kind about it and said he didn’t mean it as an attack, and that he would say the same of himself.

But whatever they intended, both responses located the problem in me. If the wound explains the leaving, then the faith itself never has to answer for anything. The trauma did it. God comes out the innocent party.

Except that is not how Jesus handles anything. He does not explain suffering from a distance. He walks into it and puts his hands on people.

And still I send it out to be read. My own hunger drives it, and so does knowing someone else is sitting where I was. I long for the evangelical church to do what the father does in the prodigal son story. Run, embrace and kiss me and those like me.

What I want is not for them to tell me I am right. I want someone to say, “I see how deeply painful this was and why you walked away. If I had lived your life, I might have done the same. I love you, and I am here. I cannot erase the pain or make God physical for you. But I am physical, and I can sit beside you. Let me be one small representation of him on earth.”

But because I can’t say with certainty that the resurrection was a literal historical event or that the Bible is inerrant, they can’t run and fully embrace and kiss me.

And I understand why. Most of the people I have in mind love me and would tell you so. But understanding doesn’t take away the longing or the hurt. The embrace has a condition attached to it, and the condition is the one thing I cannot produce. So I write, and I hope it reaches them, already knowing where the embrace will stop.

I bear the shame of wanting it anyway.

Underneath all of it is grief. I know I carry the desire for my biological father to do this, and he died in 2018. The yearning is still present. No matter how well my writing lands with readers, they are not my biological father, and they are not the evangelical church representing God the Father to me. I am not sure this is grief I get to set down. What I am learning is how to carry it.

If God the Father is real, he created in me the longing for a father.

He named himself after the thing I tasted but was starved of.

I hungered for that as a young boy when I first heard the story of Christianity, and I still hunger for it now.

I still long for God the Father to run to meet me while I am far off, to embrace me and kiss me. Not a metaphysical knowledge of it. Not a psychological projection of it. The physical thing the story actually describes.

A father who crosses the distance.

One of my first memories of my mother is her celebrating my birthday. I remember her asking me what cake I wanted, and getting me a root beer float to start the day off before the celebration. I would have been younger than five. I remember her surprising me with a Jurassic Park poster after we saw the movie in theaters when it first came out. That poster taught me how to spell Jurassic Park at six, and I would spell it for anyone who would listen. I remember the special valentine presents around that same time. Any child likes a toy. But for me it meant my mom was thinking about what would make us happy.

Soon after Jurassic Park, my mother’s focus shifted. It moved from what would make us happy to us sharing in the emotional struggles of her life.

She has always been present in my life.

But being present in a child’s life is not the same as embodying a good mother.

Shortly after Jurassic Park came out, my family life became chaotic. My father’s outbursts and aggression became a fixed reality. Then one day my mom wasn’t living in our house. I didn’t know why. I’m sure a reason was given to me, but I didn’t understand it. I remember feeling despondent and confused. My dad was deeply depressed about her absence. He would sob in his bed with us three small kids sleeping next to him, there to give him a small amount of comfort while she was gone.

Then one day my mother showed up at the house. I remember how excited I was to see her, how badly I wanted to hug her and talk to her. I was frantic to get to her. My dad told me to stay in my room while he talked with her. This was the first time my father physically abused me. I kept trying to push past him, and in his anger at me for not listening, he grabbed me by my throat and threw me back into my room and shut the door. I don’t have much more from that memory. I don’t know if I got to see my mom that day. I don’t know if my father apologized, or if I just sat in my room and cried. All I can remember is his anger and getting thrown.

My father was the obvious one. His anger was immediate, physical, and impossible to miss. There was never a question about the damage he did, and it was easy to point at him as the villain. That was especially true for me as a child. Things are black and white at that age. My father is physically harming me for the crime of missing my mother. He’s the bad guy. My mother didn’t know what was happening.

The reason my mother was gone was that she and my father had been using meth together. The batch was strong enough to cause a psychiatric break. She was hospitalized, and then admitted in-patient to a mental hospital.

My mother had known my father was a meth addict from the start. Their relationship was unhealthy from the beginning. She told me he asked her to marry him one day on the couch. He did not propose or make anything of it. He asked her the way you ask someone what they want for takeout. But that is the thing. When you grow up with a childhood like my mother’s, you settle for what you should never settle for, because you have been conditioned to believe you are not worth the pursuit.

She stayed because she believed it was the best she could do. She overlooked his drug use because she was doing the same things. By the time I was old enough to know my father was using, my mother had mostly stopped, and she had begun blaming everything wrong in our lives on him.

Because my father was the greatest physical threat in my childhood, I couldn’t see my mother as part of the problem. There were times I was so afraid he would kill her, or the three of us, that his mood decided whether our bodies got to be at peace. I had no idea what parentification meant. I never saw my mother as someone harming me. I saw her as a helpless victim of my father’s wrath, and as someone who needed protection.

My mother’s upbringing was traumatic. Her relationship with her own mother was horrific. Her mother said things to her that no mother should say to a child, and I understand why my mother struggles to be the mother I needed. At every corner there is a good reason for why my mom was the person she was. There is an abusive story to explain her behavior, her lack of hope, and her need for me to comfort her.

But I didn’t understand until I became a parent myself that there are things no parent should ask a child to bear in order to make their own suffering better. I couldn’t hold that weight as a child. I still can’t carry it now.

That was the shape my relationship with my mother took. I became her protector. In my book, the night I write about the birth of my hyper-vigilant protector, he is not only the protector of me. He is the protector of my family, and of my mother in particular. I saw the fear in her eyes and heard it in her voice. I felt her tears and her pleading with my father during those fights. I began to carry my mother’s pain in my own body. When I interjected, it was to protect her.

As I got older I learned more about my father. Things a child that age should never know. I watched my mother get drunk and tell me how she and my father had cheated on each other, more than once. I was eight. I cried and hid in the laundry room, and my brother and the rest of the family laughed at how upset I was. I was ashamed. My idyllic picture of my parents was breaking in real time, and I couldn’t tell my mother how much it hurt, because she was drunk. I couldn’t mourn it.

That little boy learned that his pain and his disappointment were not welcome in the world he lived in.

After their fights, my mother’s account of my father was always the same. He was terrible, he treated her badly, he was dangerous. I remember the night he held her at gunpoint. She described to me, nine years old, how sure she was that he was going to kill her, and how we needed to get away from him. We stayed with a friend of hers for a few days.

Then they made up, and we were back in the house.

As a small child, making sense of that is close to impossible. One moment your father is a monster. The next, your mom is holding his hand and the world is good again. This continued through my childhood and into my college years. They fought, split up, and got back together more times than I can count. I don’t know the number.

As a parent, my job is to stand between my children and the dangers they are too young to carry. My mother’s life was legitimately terrible. It was still her job to protect me, and she failed me. I needed a mother who shielded me from her own pain and gave me a fresh start. It was never my job to right the wrongs she went through. I couldn’t make my father not be abusive. I couldn’t make the world right for my mother.

Here is what most people don’t understand about a terrible childhood. It doesn’t stay a childhood. It follows you.

After Mary and I had our first child, my mother came to visit. She stayed the night and cried about how lonely she was, and about living at her mother’s house. I told Mary I wanted to build onto our house and move my mother in with us. Mary was willing.

Mary’s mother talked me out of it. She said it was a noble thing to want, and that I should help my mother get a place of her own instead. Her own parents had lived with her for the last decade of their lives, and she told me it would change the entire dynamic of our marriage.

So I moved my mother to our town and helped her get an apartment. I furnished it. I gave her my car. I brought her to church and tried to introduce her to people, hoping she would find some community. By then she had been on disability for her back and out of work for over a decade, and ordinary conversation had become difficult for her. The interactions were awkward for her and for nearly everyone I introduced her to. This was 2017.

Mary made her a birthday cake. We brought her over to celebrate. I don’t entirely remember what set my mom off that evening, but she was sullen from the start of it. I remember the shock on Mary’s face, and how she got up and left the table. I raised my voice at my mother about how she was treating Mary, and how hard Mary had worked to make the day special.

Then my mother started crying, and I asked her to leave.

My father died in April of 2018. My mother did not comfort me. The reverse happened. She came to church with us not long after, and during a song she started crying. I assumed it was about him. She grabbed my arm. I have never wanted to shove someone as badly as I did in that moment. This was before I understood what my anger was doing, how it was standing in front of something deeper that wasn’t being attended to.

I didn’t know I needed a mother to comfort me about my father’s death until after he died.

More than that, I didn’t know I had never truly had a mother until after he died.

With him gone, I could finally see the rest of it. How she failed to protect us. How she kept taking us back. How she asked us to hold the pain of her childhood and to give her a sense of purpose.

How my childhood was stolen from me because hers had been stolen from her.

Two weeks ago she texted me at 11:45 at night. She was about to be homeless and she was scared.

I was enraged.

I texted her back the next morning. I told her she had refused my help three months ago, the help that would have kept this from happening, and that I can’t do this any longer.

My rage is guarding a grief I have carried since I was six.

There was no funeral for it. No one brought food. No one offered condolences. Nothing happened that would let a child understand what he had lost. To everyone else, my mother is still alive. To that six year old boy, the mother who once held him and celebrated his life died when the chaos started, when she disappeared from our home and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

A relationship with my mother drains the life out of me. She has not been able to give me hope or encouragement in any meaningful way since that year. I want to sob about the loss of her. I can’t, because she is still alive, still needing me to parent her, and the child in me still feels responsible for her.

I hate that I long for the day she is no longer on this earth, because then what I live with will finally match the death I experienced over thirty years ago.

I still need a mother. Saying that makes me vulnerable. Not because it is bad to want a mother, but because mine will never be able to be one.

Happy birthday, mom. I wish our relationship was different.

This past week has been an incredibly hard one, and my deepest fears have begun to manifest in me. It started last Monday, with a run I went on with my oldest daughter and a conversation we had about my childhood. The fear it stirred up is so powerful it makes me want to scrap this whole Substack project and the book I’m writing.

To give context to this story and to our relationship, last year I told her that I am no longer sure about Jesus and who he is. I knew telling her would be painful, that she would cry and be afraid. I withheld it for over two years. But if I was going to keep being a part of my family and stay married to my Christian wife, I needed to be more honest, because living a double life was destroying me on the inside, to the point of suicidal ideation.

My oldest daughter feels everything deeply. She cries with an ease that I honestly have never seen. She weeps over the ants outside being washed away in a rainstorm. She worries about the snails that come out around our house after it rains, afraid they will be accidentally crushed on the steps, and spends an hour relocating them into the surrounding vegetation. My daughter loves every living thing with a passion that honestly annoys me. Not because it isn’t beautiful, but because I hate to see her in pain, and I can’t shield her from it. I can’t stop the world from being an unsafe place for all the creatures she loves. And if I’m honest, that’s one of the most painful things I still feel about the world we live in, a world that is deeply unsafe, where death is constantly threatening everything we love, at all times.

After I told her I was no longer sure what I believed about Jesus, she began to weep and said she was afraid she wouldn’t be with me in heaven after I died. Mary was there to hold her and comfort her. I was able to sit with it for a few minutes before I had to stand up and leave the room. Offering her comfort on this without challenging her belief, and my wife’s belief, was a fine line. I didn’t want to challenge her faith in that conversation. It would only have made things worse. So I left, because the pain was too great and my protector was beginning to turn it into anger, his oldest method of coping with a pain this powerful.

Ever since that day, my oldest daughter has been afraid of what will happen to me when I die. She has written me cards with Bible verses, hoping to “help me believe in God.”

Here is the irony. I am afraid too. Maybe even more than she is.

This week that fear manifested in a new way I didn’t see coming. On that run, we were able to talk more about the book I’m writing. The book is my life story, told from two angles. One angle is how I grew up without a consistently present father, and what that did to my psyche. The other is how I projected that absent father onto a version of God I came to believe had set me on fire after I denounced his existence, smoking pot for the first time as a twelve-year-old.

I told my daughter a small, age-appropriate version of this story. She has only ever heard snippets of how painful and hard my childhood was. Many of the things that happened would crush her sensitive soul and be too hard for her to make sense of. But I wanted to begin connecting with her about it. In many ways, this book is a manifestation of that same hope, the hope of connecting with people still inside the evangelical church.

After our run, I felt really good about our conversation and about connecting with my daughter around my story. I felt hopeful about the book and what it could do for my relationship with an institution I still feel deeply rejected by.

Then reality hit me.

On Wednesday morning, my wife told me, in the kindest way, what my oldest daughter had said to her. She had told her that dad was “trying to get her to not believe in God.” Mary was not accusing me. She knew that wasn’t what I was doing, and she was telling me gently, hoping to help me go back and clarify things with our daughter. It was a kind and generous prompting.

I was crushed.

How could she have taken that away from the conversation? I was so precise with what I said. I intentionally didn’t say anything about God not being real. In fact, I argued the opposite. I told her about the view of God I had built as a nine-year-old crying out for him to stop my father from being harmful to me, and how I had wrongly internalized his silence as apathy and distance. (Again, I used language simple enough for an eleven-year-old.)

But then my fear came raging back. If my own daughter can’t understand me, maybe this whole project is a waste of time. Maybe the people who read my work will take the wrong message from it too. Maybe this is a lost cause, and none of it is worth doing. Maybe releasing this would just be me putting myself out to be rejected, over and over, by the institution I so deeply want to show up for me.

Instead of receiving Mary’s help, my fear overpowered me and I rejected her sweet prompting. It turned into a fight with my wife that triggered my aggression, a destructive response that created a deep rift in our marriage. I was grumpy and sullen and frustrated, not someone who felt safe to be around. Because the reality is that I didn’t feel safe, and I was manifesting my internal state in my actions. I became what I felt inside. And even when I did manage to calm down, my calm came with a caveat. More than once I told her I would be peaceful and kind, but only while we waited for her to be ready to return to the real fight, whether she would keep believing in a version of hell I could not accept. My peace was a holding pattern, not a gift. Each time, I created a false sense of safety with a string attached to it, the exact opposite of what I am arguing for in my book.

That Thursday morning she told me, plainly, that I become an unsafe person to her when I change like this, and how deeply it triggered her own need to retreat and protect herself. That she has flashes of needing to escape, and that I don’t understand how I come across.

Her message set off the deepest fear I have, the one I have carried my whole life: that I am unloved, and that I will be abandoned by the people I love the most. In that moment it was Mary, the person closest to me, my most secure attachment figure, telling me I had become unsafe, and underneath her words all I could hear was that she might leave.

I did not respond well.

I dismissed her feelings and went harder on the attack. I blamed the whole disconnect, and my internal state, on the one target I felt was safe to attack, the institution of evangelicalism. The institution that created this division between me and my family, with its us-versus-them idea of belief. Accept Jesus and you’re saved, reject him and you’re separated from God, and from them.

But here is the truth. I am deeply afraid that this is actually true, and that I’m wrong.

This is what I believed about God when I was burned at the age of twelve. I was afraid he was an unsafe person who threatened me with hellfire for rejecting him. I felt that fear as true torture in my body, through the debridement procedure to remove the dead flesh from my burn. I know the physical fear of torture, and the threat of God, in my body in a way that almost no evangelical I have ever met does.

I lived on the other side of the evangelical story for the first fifteen years of my life, before I became a Christian. And now, after leaving the faith, I am back on that other side again, standing right where I started. I felt the fear of hell in a way that most evangelicals born into the faith never have and never can. My wife became a Christian at the age of four. She has never known what it means to be on the opposing end of the faith. My daughter is the same. She has believed in God and Jesus since she was old enough to understand it. She has never been afraid of God, or worried about being separated from him. She only knows that fear now, through her fear for me.

This fear of God that I still carry produces a miniature version of hell, not just in me, but on earth. And it is the antithesis of my book’s argument. My book is my life story, and the hope of it is that people can understand that the most loving thing we can do with those we disagree with is to sit with them in their pain and care for them, even if they can’t change what they believe.

I want so badly to be understood by evangelicals, for them to remain present in my life without needing me to accept the metaphysical claims I no longer can. I want them to see the pain I feel, the struggle I carry, and to not leave me. To love me without the expectation that their love will change my thinking.

I want love that doesn’t have a caveat.

Here is the reality, though. This fight, this whole week, was me being unwilling to give the evangelicals in my life the very thing I was asking of them. I was aggressive and demanding toward my wife because I wanted her to change her theology about hell and separation from God. I withdrew my love, my kindness, my closeness, and used my anger to try to change what she believed before I would offer any of it back.

And I owe Mary more honesty than that. Her own understanding of God and of hell has been evolving for a long time. She is not the fixed, certain believer my fear needs her to be. But this week I gave her no time to sit with the wound in me. Instead of asking her to be present with me in my pain, I came at her aggressively and demanded that she change. I wanted her to have already arrived somewhere it has taken me years of my own suffering to reach, and I withdrew from her for not being there yet.

I dreamt all night about hell, not about being in it, but about arguing aggressively about its absurdity with pastors.

After sitting with the dream, I was able to let the true grief surface, and I cried this morning.

I realized that the pain I’m really feeling is still about God and Jesus. It’s the pain of a God I still desperately want to be real and present in my life, the way I wanted my biological father present, rejecting me, and rejecting the love I want, because I cannot assent to a metaphysical reality I cannot verify.

So I wept about this version of God I am still so deeply afraid of, and about how the fear is retriggered by my daughter’s fear that I’m “making her not believe in God.” That same fear of being abandoned is resurrected by my daughter’s childlike fear, which is a mirror of the God I felt at twelve. The God who set me on fire because I told him I didn’t believe in him, the first night I smoked pot.

What I need from Mary, from my daughter, from any evangelical, is for them to stop believing in a God who would punish people for their unbelief, whether by Hellfire or by annihilation. And needing that from them is a deeply wounding thing to carry. At the same time, it’s my own fear about God being manifested in another person.

That is the wound my daughter activates, and that Mary’s inability to abandon her deeply nurturing and sacred beliefs about God activates. It’s the wound that says you will be forever separated from everyone you love, because you refused to believe in this specific version of the hell game. It’s the fear that God really is that vindictive, that he would destroy me, and their subtle acknowledgment of hell feels like they are joining in on making my deepest fear come true.

I still carry that fear with me to this day. A part of me is still afraid that when I die, I will be wrong, and God will send me into eternal punishment, away from the people I love and from my family. That even though I’d be open to accepting him after my death, it will be too late, and everyone who warned me will have been vindicated.

But my realization this morning was that as long as I keep looking for Mary, or my daughter, or any evangelical to reject that interpretation, to reassure me that I’m not the one who will be cast out, I will always be anxious, because my validation is being outsourced to other people. If I can’t feel secure in my own relationship to God and to this fear of hell, people will always trigger me, I will always be reactive, and I will ironically demand that they change their beliefs so that I can sit with them.

So my goal is to genuinely cry, to let that pain surface, and to turn toward that scared twelve-year-old boy, for the adult me to reassure him that he is safe. That if God is real, and if the incarnation is real (something I will never be able to prove), then he is standing on solid ground. He wouldn’t reject that love. He would accept the love of Jesus, and Jesus would accept him. He doesn’t have to be afraid.

The only route that lets me heal is the one where I am simply honest about the pain and the fear, and cry, without trying to change the people around me so that I can feel okay about myself.

The moment it turns to anger, I’ve lost. I’ve lost the people who still hold that belief, because now their nervous system is activated. And I’ve lost to myself, because I’ve started playing a game I can’t win, against them, and against me.

I’ve created my own miniature version of hell by generating my own isolation, cutting myself off from the people I love, refusing to be with them unless they change what they believe.

And ironically, what I actually want is to choose the way of Jesus over my own anger and need for self-preservation. I am not sure Jesus was divine, and I may never be sure. But I am sure of his example. I want to emulate the beauty I see in his story, to sit in the idea of a love that doesn’t reject or refuse even the people who are killing him. He is not a pushover, not someone who submits to abuse for its own sake. He is someone entirely secure in the love of God, and willing to give his life for that belief.

If Jesus had become angry and refused the people killing him, it would have been based on fear, fear of what their judgment meant about God’s approval of him. It would have been his wound externalized, demanding that they confirm from the outside the truth he already felt about God on the inside.

But he refused that path. He chose to operate from a secure, loving place.

That is the path I want to choose, to be secure in my relationship with a God I can’t truly talk to, and that I’m still deeply afraid of. But I know my own heart. I am open to a relationship with that being, and if he is there, he knows that about me.

For now, though, my only hope is to sit with that twelve-year-old boy and hold him. Because he is still so deeply afraid.

She was three days old when we brought her home. Small enough for me to hold in one hand, barely over five pounds when we picked her up from the DHS office. A premature baby, placed with us to be loved and kept safe until her family could become safe enough to take her back.

And she made me angry in a way I could not explain.

Why does this little girl get to be saved? What is different about her that she was able to make it out of her childhood unscathed? Why didn’t God send someone to rescue and love me? Was I not worth being saved?

These questions began to surface once I slowed down and looked at the anger. It was not consistent with the reality of the situation. Bringing a helpless little girl into our home had stirred up a deeply wounded part of my childhood I had long suppressed.

While I was a completely functional adult, mostly in control of myself, I had unresolved complex trauma lying dormant in my body. Something that once ravaged your whole body, now out of sight and out of mind, can come raging back unannounced.

This is one of the hardest chapters in my book, and it sits right before the collapse of my faith. Read straight, you might think that rescuing a little girl from a life that would most likely have looked like mine, maybe worse, should have sealed my love of the faith. It didn’t. That confusion is part of the point, because it did the same thing to me when it happened.

So how does a deeply therapeutic and emotionally beautiful event cause the reaction it did in me?

We intentionally chose to open our home and foster children. We did it with the explicit hope of changing the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in America. So why would bringing this helpless baby into our house to receive love bring up such explosive anger? None of it makes sense, until you understand the reasons under the anger. The louder the anger, the deeper the wound underneath that it is protecting.

By the time she entered our home, I had begun therapy for the first time in my adult life. My father had just died, and our second biological daughter had been born after my wife almost died from an ectopic pregnancy. The year before had been a deeply tumultuous one, and my need to be in therapy was driven by the anger that kept bubbling up in my daily home life.

A couple of months before my father passed, I would feel anger I couldn’t explain, and it would spill out in simple frustrations at my wife and my daughter. Nothing in my day could account for why I felt this way. My wife, being the wise woman she is and a trauma therapist, knew more about the reasons than I did, and she was kind in how she approached me about them.

She insisted I begin therapy, because the anger, while not abusive like my father’s, was still destructive and unhealthy. It had an echo of my childhood I did not want to hear, and it was not something my wife was willing to let our family live inside. So I agreed. I was resistant at first. I thought, what good would talking about my emotions do, and how could that change the past and what happened to me? I also saw emotions as untrustworthy, something to be mastered rather than expressed. Expression was a weakness in my eyes.

What I didn’t expect was how much therapy would open up my body’s ability to feel again. It wasn’t that I felt nothing before. I couldn’t feel the softest ones, the most vulnerable and sensitive ones. How could I, when no one had ever been able to hold those emotions for me safely?

As I began therapy, I became able to access the deep emotions my trauma self had buried. It let me touch something I never could before.

The grief underneath the anger.

I began to see the anger as a protector, shielding me from the more vulnerable emotion beneath it. I saw for the first time how dangerous grief is to a young, vulnerable child, and how the anger had protected me. I also saw how it had become maladaptive. It had never been safe to touch that grief as a child. Now, as an adult, I had the resources and the attachment figures to begin to do it, so the anger was no longer necessary as a guard.

When the anger stood down, the wound could fully surface. The wound of why I wasn’t rescued when I so badly wanted to be. On top of it sat another fear. What if she went back to her mother, and that home wasn’t safe? What does it mean for a little girl to taste safety and have it ripped out of her grasp? What does that say about how the world works, about God’s priorities and human agency? None of it could be resolved cleanly.

There is an irony in the role of a foster parent. You are the one on the front lines, and in many ways the one with the least say in the child’s future. Your role is to house and love a child with the expectation that you will hand her back, in hopes that the home she left has done the work to become safe enough for her to return to.

As a child of a broken home, I understood its mechanics in ways people raised by loving parents don’t. So as we stayed in communication with the biological mother and grandmother, we could see the ways she wasn’t truly safe and was deliberately hiding things from the courts. My old childhood wound, needing to speak up and not being able to be heard, resurfaced. Here I was as an adult, watching this helpless little girl possibly return to the destruction I had lived, and I couldn’t change it.

It wasn’t until my therapist asked me whether I could speak up in any way that might change the outcome for our daughter. Her situation did not look hopeful for reunification. I knew with every fiber of my being that if she went back, she would be back in the system in no time. Had I kept quiet, still believing no one was going to listen to me, she might have been sent back to a mother who clearly wasn’t safe.

So I began to speak up, in court and to the DHS caseworkers, and I changed the trajectory of her story. I had processed the childhood wound that said I can’t speak up because no one is there to listen, and I realized it was a version of myself I was still carrying. It wasn’t that I never spoke up about injustice. I had spent much of my adult life angry about it, and aggressive about it. But that wouldn’t work here. If I lost my temper in court or with the caseworker, I would only hurt her chances. I needed to speak up, but I needed to do it vulnerably.

So I resolved to call DHS and be vulnerable. I wanted to ask them the way that small boy asked the question under the rage, the one who held the deep wound and wanted so badly to say, “Can someone save me?” As I told the caseworker my concerns, I began to cry, and I asked her why we were reunifying our daughter when I had sent documented evidence of the mother lying and hiding it from her. The caseworker listened and told me she would speak with her supervisor.

I hung up, thankful the tears had come during the call, and that I had quieted the rage inside me. A week or so later, she called back. They had reviewed the concerns and decided to change the goal from reunification to adoption. My excitement could barely be contained. Then came the next question. “Would you two be willing to adopt her?” Before she finished the sentence, I let out a soft, audible sob and answered, “Yes, we would.”

How this related to God was more complicated. In my mind, this was God orchestrating the events, allowing me to suffer as a child so that I could become a father who would open his home to a helpless child and love her in a way that was unique because I had known the pain of a broken family.

But that was painful in its own way. It still required God to have allowed me to suffer and be abused in order to become this father to her. If that was his “plan,” I didn’t get a choice in it, and he allowed a small boy to be abused for the future potential of being a good father. As poetic and beautiful as that idea can appear on the surface, it is paid for by the suffering my body had to hold to get there.

For the first time since my childhood, my body experienced what it meant to speak up and be rescued. The rescuing came through my own need to know that speaking up against injustice, vulnerably, could change the world around me. So while it saved my daughter from a life I had once lived, it also showed my body, for the first time, that my vulnerability had a place in this world.

I remember sobbing in the shower about this. Sobbing because, for the first time, that small child felt seen and listened to, and had tasted a small measure of the love he so deeply wanted. It had come through my own actions. I had been the rescuer of my daughter, and at the same time of my childhood self. I was showing that little boy that I would have spoken up for him if I could. I would have brought him into my home and loved him like he was my own son. I would have fought for him in the courts and with a DHS worker. I was answering my own question in real time.

Yes, you were worth saving.

This morning, I sat sobbing in my office.

If you had told me even two months ago that I would be writing over twenty essays and a full-length book, and crying as I did a deep excavation of my life, I would have laughed and thought you were crazy. Not because men shouldn’t be emotional. I think modern American culture has done great damage to the idea of what a real man is, specifically around the idea that a grown man doesn’t need to cry. But I never thought the tears would come through writing out my own story.

The past month has been more emotional than I could have imagined. The book I’m writing slows down and lets the scenes from my essays breathe. Yesterday I wrote about the most pivotal time in my entire life, the year I turned fifteen. So many things happened that year that changed the course of who I was and who I would become. But this morning was the first time I gave myself permission to slow down and fully enter into what that fifteen-year-old boy felt.

The first thing I wrote about was the police raid on my house.

Honestly, most of the emotions of that night are buried deep. My internal protector was in full gear. As I wrote about it, I realized how much of the pain my subconscious had buried. I have very specific memories. The police coming into the house with guns drawn and screaming at us to get on the floor. Being handcuffed with my hands behind my back for over an hour in a police car. The wreckage of my house after they left. But what I can’t access is the grief. What my body did to protect a young child in that situation was suppress the weight of grief that should have accompanied it. To truly sit in that pain at that age, with no adults to hold me, would have been devastating. I didn’t have the luxury of processing it. I had a house to clean up after they left. I had a small town to face. I had a job to go back to and a school that would know all of my family’s chaos. The protector needed to make sure I could survive, and for that, I am thankful for what he did.

Then I wrote about my conversion to Christianity, which followed shortly after.

I wrote about the night I thought I was going to die, when I prayed to God without knowing anything about Jesus. I had only heard about him in passing, that he could “save me.” So I asked him to, over and over. I didn’t know if the laced drug I’d smoked was going to kill me, and I was paralyzed with fear, reaching for anything that could save me.

I woke up the next day and resolved I’d never smoke pot again. I have kept that to this day.

But the following weekend, I decided to get drunk. For some reason my mind thought this was different, that alcohol was milder. I had been getting drunk since I was twelve and always had a good time. This time was different. A deep depression set in that night and would not lift. Even worse, when I tried to think of the things that normally made me happy, like leaving the small town, getting a good job, being away from the chaos, I couldn’t feel the joy I used to feel reaching for them. So I called my mother, who was living with her sister, and asked her to come get me.

A friend found out I had suddenly moved and invited me to summer church camp. I agreed to go.

The reason I was sobbing this morning was the realization of what that fifteen-year-old actually experienced at that camp.

In my first draft of the chapter, I had condensed the whole week into a single sentence. I’d basically written that it was amazing, without going into why, without letting it breathe. I naturally stray away from flowery prose. It isn’t how I talk or who I am. My default register is matter-of-fact and direct. But writing has forced me to slow down and look at what was happening in my body in ways I wouldn’t normally allow.

So this time I wrote about what made that week amazing.

I wrote about the way people talked to one another at camp. There was no attacking language. No threats. No name-calling, no shame. People spoke words of encouragement. I would have made fun of people who were that positive before this week. But that week, I allowed my body, and more specifically my internal protector, to rest. I took in the encouragement. I let myself feel empowered by the words. I tasted what it felt like to live in a completely different way than I had for most of my childhood.

But the thing that truly set the tears off was the realization of how profound a dinner table is to a dysregulated child.

When I was very young, before the chaos began, our family had a dinner table and we ate together. Ironically, that table is also where my first memory of my father losing control of his temper took place. After we moved from that house, we never owned or sat at a dinner table to eat as a family again. I didn’t realize until this morning how completely a table can stand in for a connected family.

At camp, we ate every meal together at a table. We laughed. We were present with each other. There was no television to distract us, just one another. And there were adults I could feel safe around. They were there to support and care for the children at the camp. I didn’t have to absorb the chaos of their lives. I could just be what I was, a kid.

This morning, the profoundness of losing my faith hit me in a way it hasn’t since I left it in October of 2023. I felt the weight of the safety that fifteen-year-old boy had experienced that week, and I felt it as a loss for the first time. And I let myself imagine what it would have meant to him to never have had it at all. And more than that, I began to reflect on what that week actually meant to that scared child.

A cynic would say: See, you just needed a family that was present and didn’t speak harshly, and a dinner table to sit at. You didn’t need Christianity.

But that misses what created the situation in the first place. I am not claiming Christianity is the only thing that could build a place like that for a hurting child. I am saying it is the thing that built the one I walked into. The faith is what moved these particular people to organize a camp, to welcome a child they had no connection to, and to care for him as if he were their own.

I have had to sit with the complexity of acknowledging that the faith wasn’t just a cover for what the experience really was. It is true that my conversion was a bodily experience, biological and psychological. But it is also true that this experience happened because the faith had moved adults to care enough to build a space where a traumatized child could hear a message and feel something that changed the trajectory of his life. The theology was the fuel. The embodied actions, the safety, the table, the encouragement, were the outputs produced by the engine it ran. And that engine allowed a deeply abandoned child to feel safe.

The weight of that complexity is something I am still wrestling with. I can no longer hold the literal truth of that faith the way I once did. But I cannot deny the truth of the embodied experience either.

So I am left with a question I do not know how to answer. If I can no longer hold onto the literal truth of the faith, is the embodied reality that held that fifteen-year-old boy now forever out of my reach? Can a faith that lets go of the literal still build a space where an isolated, frightened boy finds the comfort he found?

And if it cannot, that is the answer I am most afraid of. Because it would mean the literal was never just a belief I could set down. It would mean the literal was the thing holding up the archetypes of the faith that I still champion now. I do not have a resolution on this. Like Jacob, I’m still trying to wrestle God to the ground.

I wrote this piece with the thought of what would I say to myself in October of 2023 when the collapse happened and I was terrified and anxious about what comes next and if things would get better. Some of these points are universal to the experience of leaving a rigid dogmatic interpretation of the faith, but a couple of them are specific to me and my experience.

Identity and Meaning

1. You are not overacting, you are losing a surrogate father.

You need to know that the terror you feel is not about a lack of truth, but a lack of safety. You built a rigid, literalist theological fortress to protect yourself because your actual childhood home was a volatile war zone. Leaving the faith feels like walking into outer space because you are stepping out of the armor that kept you alive. It is okay to be terrified when you take off a survival suit you have worn since you were twelve.

Normal feelings to have:

You will constantly question your choice and be afraid of death and what comes next. After I left the faith, I would have dreams where something was happening that would result in my death and I screamed out for Jesus to save me. You still want that protection and that is okay.

2. The black hole of Nihilism is real, but it doesn’t have to consume you.

You are standing on the edge of what feels like absolute nihilism, terrified that if God and the Bible are not a literal truth you can plant your flag on, then your life has no meaning. You will soon discover that the divine and the transcendent moral order do not vanish just because a rigid dogma did. But it will take time to recalibrate and you will go through withdrawal. You need to be honest with people about it or it can consume you.

Normal feelings to have:

This will hit in waves as you had previously built your meaning and purpose on the certainty of knowing you held the one and only correct way to view the world. You will have to do work to begin letting yourself sit with the pain of the unknown. You will want to rebuild a new certainty but will find that you can’t, not in the way that you did before. But you’ll see that is actually more healthy and humble than what you held before.

3. Your value is not sitting on a scale that needs to be tipped.

Right now, you are panicking about what your life means if you cannot prove your worth by knowing that you possess perfect truth. You will try and make massive career achievements your next priority. You do not need to build an empire to prove yourself to everyone who doubts your decision. And even if you did, it won’t stop that desire to prove them wrong — because it’s more about how you feel about your own decision than what you are projecting they are thinking. You don’t need to be the best at something just to justify the space you take up on this earth. You can slow down and feel the weight of the decision.

Normal feelings to have:

The energy you put into the faith will naturally look for another outlet. You will feel the need to justify your decision by showing Christians that you are just as good as they are morally and you didn’t need prayer and Bible reading to get there. This is not a healthy place to be because the reality is that you are a complicated mix of emotions, trauma, and competing desires that will inevitably lead you to fall short of your own expectations for yourself and others. Don’t give into the need to prove your morality by being perfect. No one can do that — not even Christians.

Relationships

4. You will navigate a new normal with your spouse, but it will take work.

This will be one of the hardest parts of your decision, especially if you both were serious Christians when you got married. They will feel like you have abandoned them and that you are progressing on a different path without them, and to some degree that is true. You will need to hold space for them to grieve it as well. You will most likely need a marriage counselor who can act as a neutral party to help navigate the appropriate compromises.

Normal feelings to have:

You will struggle to feel like you are on the same team. You will be hurt by the statements they make about feeling abandoned and will want to challenge them and stop them from grieving. But the reality is that you left, not them. Even though you didn’t do it to hurt them, you will have to make space for their pain. This will be volatile and that is expected. Give it time.

5. You will feel isolated from your old Christian friends, and talking with them about why you left won’t always feel good.

Many of your friends love you and are deeply concerned about you. However, many of them won’t understand why you left and explaining it to them won’t always ease the pain. I had many conversations with friends at coffee shops and by the end of the conversation it felt like there was no true resolution for them. They want to understand but since they are still in the faith, the decision to leave isn’t something they can truly agree with. By the time you finish the conversation, you’ll feel disappointed because nothing you say can help them feel better besides hearing that you believe again. Some of them will also try to keep you in the faith and argue against you. This is coming from a place of love, but it will feel hurtful.

Normal feelings to have:

You will feel isolated and alone in a significant way. Try and find at least a few friends who can truly hold space and be empathetic towards your decision. You will also need to find a few people who have walked through this as well and are not aggressive toward the faith. When people want to meet to try and talk you out of leaving, you do not have to engage in that. You can if you feel comfortable, but don’t feel forced into the conversation. You don’t owe anyone an explanation, you can decide to give it when and if you feel comfortable.

Beginning to Rewire

6. Your body knows the way before your head does.

Stop trying to think your way out of panic loops and career anxieties. The panic is your internal protector trying to shield you from the raw grief and fear of the unknown, which is an important system. However, you need to cycle through it and begin to speak to yourself kindly, even thanking that protector for the work it did to keep you safe and letting it know it can put down the defense now and sit with the grief. The only way forward is by entering into it.

Normal feelings to have:

You will be afraid and cry more than you are comfortable with. Some days it will feel heavier than you can take but you can get through it. It’s okay to want that comfort from a heavenly father, even if you can’t believe it’s possible. I remember voicing that to my spouse and deeply mourning that.

7. Your brain will automatically try to replace the old rigid system with a new version.

Human programming craves certainty. When you leave a system based on rigid compliance, your subconscious will immediately look for a new set of rules to master so you can feel a sense of safety about the world. I immediately turned to starting a new company to deal with my pain, it worked for a few months, but ultimately the void came back. It’s easy to also turn academic achievement, political ideology, or even the deconstruction process itself into a new form of fundamentalism. Watch out for the urge to turn your new life into a performance test.

Normal feelings to have:

Your desire to create a new system is completely normal and expected. You’ve been in this system for years and it has brought peace and comfort. It’s okay to want that and even to cycle through this. I still crave that but it will get less and less intense as you get further from the initial leaving.

8. You will have to learn how to trust your own intuition from scratch.

Literalist frameworks teach you that your internal compass is inherently broken, deceptive, or sinful, forcing you to rely entirely on external authorities — texts, leaders, rules to live by — for direction. One of the hardest tasks is learning to listen to your own body and mind. This is the first time you are giving yourself permission to feel, adapt, and grieve ideas that you once struggled to make sense of and moral fights you might not have wanted to take up but felt obligated to because of the requirements in the text. Learning to trust yourself will take time but it will become more and more natural as you learn that your sense of morality doesn’t leave you once you decide to leave the faith.

Normal feelings to have:

You will fear your ability to hold things as sacred or morally important because you were conditioned to think that you can’t without the faith. However, you will see you are still able to discern things that you find harmful or good based on the results they produce in your life. Many of the moral imperatives are intuitive and experientially you’ll see that living by them will produce a life you want and going against them will cause more chaos. You’ll start to understand these moral truths not just as divine commandments, but as a reliable trail to guide you through life.

9. The divine and the transcendent do not belong exclusively to the system you left.

Christianity claims a monopoly on meaning, morality, and connection to the sacred through the text and the teachings of the New Testament. Because of this, leaving the institution can feel like diving into a black hole of absolute nihilism and unknowable meaninglessness. However, you will learn that it’s okay to be soft towards the things that were and still are true moral teachings in the faith. You can agree with and champion those things without feeling like you are committed to believing all of it as literally true. You’ll also begin to discover that awe, mystery, a transcendent moral order, and deep human purpose exist entirely outside of dogmatic frameworks and in other traditions as well. The sandbox you were in broke, but the universe did not.

Normal feelings to have:

You will want to reject everything about the faith because you want to fully separate yourself from it. It’s normal to desire to feel truly disconnected from it before you can feel soft towards it again. You might also find that once you are softer towards it, the desire to protect it as something unique resurfaces. That urge is normal and okay.

I sat all day today running an anxious loop. I was trying to solve a problem about what my next career move would be. At the end of April, I left a career at a company I had been at for the past thirteen years. I left not because I was not good at what I did, I left because I knew how unhealthy I had become in that role. I needed to change course if I was going to continue to grow healthier for my family.

I ran various different scenarios about what I could do with my life now at the age of thirty eight. Could I go back to school and get the PhD I originally wanted before I decided not to continue with schooling? How much would that cost, and could that turn into a career that is meaningful and I would be proud of?

But in reality, the question I am really asking is if he would be proud of it.

Most of my life drive has come from one sole aim to prove: am I worth it?

A father has many symbolic meanings: provider, protector, guide, and supporter to name a few. To me, all of that could be summed up in the symbolic meaning that said, “you are valuable to this world and I am glad you are here.” When my father was present, I felt that with every fiber of my being. I felt all of the layers of the symbolic but most of all I felt that his love and affection for me always answered the question of my worth. When he was engaged and interacting with me, I knew the answer was yes.

But my father struggled with that question himself. His own relationship with his father was a strained relationship. I remember asking my father how he got addicted to meth and his answer was pretty simple. His father was absent as well. Not in a drug use and abusive way, but in an emotionally and physically distant kind of way. My father desperately wanted the same question that I desired to be answered by his father, and it was met with a metaphorical no.

What is the most upsetting and damaging part about childhood trauma is that our mind is thirty eight but our emotions are still nine. When we get wounded at a deep subconscious level, our emotional age does not progress and we get trapped in the age of the trauma. My thirty eight year old self knows my father loved me and that he was suffering from his own wounds. But my nine year old emotional subconscious is still screaming, “was I not worth fighting for? Am I not worth it?”

As I lay on the couch with my wife tonight, I was able to get to the core of the anxious searching for the perfect next career move for me. I was able to cry and tell her the desperation I have to be seen and understood at a level that would combat that programming that is trying as hard as it can to answer the question that I know cannot be answered.

My father died a distant alcoholic who only met my oldest daughter twice and died one month before my second daughter was born. In some ways my subconscious is saying, “the question has been answered, you were not worth fighting for.” So my subconscious has fought to drive me to performance to challenge that answer. I am going to be the most successful person I could possibly be to prove that wrong. It has been doing that ever since I left my house at twelve and did not live under his roof any longer.

It was there under the surface driving me as I strived for every new achievement that I thought would prove my worth to him. If I could just be more amazing than everyone else, it would be undeniable and he would be overcome with awe at my achievements, and he would decide that his self destructive tendencies could be stopped and his love and admiration for me would force him to give up his vices. My accolades would overpower his weaknesses and addictions and I would have a father that finally answered that question with a resounding, “YOU MATTER!”

Then one day, he was gone. The ability for him to change the answer to that deep visceral existential question of my value is no longer possible, and I was left with an answer that I am still desperately trying to disprove to this day. When I achieve a milestone in my career or someone notices a painting that I did, or something that I built and says, “wow, that is amazing!” I think subconsciously, “you see that dad, I matter.” Every achievement is me trying to tip the scale back in favor of my value that is being weighed down by the weight of my father’s corpse on the scale.

My cry was therapeutic tonight. Not because it answered the question, but because it allowed me to accept the weight that I still want that answer. It also allowed me to dwell on the fact that my test has some flaws in it. It assumes my father’s abandonment and inability to overcome his own issues from his childhood are predicated on my value. My test at its core is flawed. It puts my father in a position that he could never truly answer.

But here is the rub: he should have been the one to answer that question. For whatever reason biologically, we are predisposed to want our fathers to answer this question. There is a reason the father archetype exists. But my father was a damaged child that was always going to struggle to answer that question the way he should have answered it. It does not excuse my father’s failings outright, but it does allow me to have kindness towards the little boy my father once was that did not get that question answered for him either.

The battle with this question is far from done. I am still wrestling with my value and worth to this world. I am still deeply unsure about if there is a grand meaning for all of my suffering and if me being on this earth means anything more than a random chance. I will need my wife to continue to ask me what is wrong and for me to take the time and ask myself what is driving this anxiety. My body always knows before I do.

I have to slow down, be present for the grief, and let the tears come.

When a person deconverts from a lifelong faith, their entire internal architecture collapses. It is an existential car wreck — inducing a level of grief and dysregulation that mirrors acute trauma. People are messy, and no one in this situation will handle it perfectly. But being prepared to walk alongside someone through it is one of the most loving things you can do for both the person leaving and the family they’re leaving with. A therapist should be involved if at all possible. This list is not exhaustive, but it comes from my own experience and is meant to be a place to start.

Don’t Make it About Theology

1. Don’t try to argue them about facts, and whatever you do, do not hint at where they are going now that they’ve left.

This is almost never the real reason people deconvert. The same is true for why people become Christians. Arguing at this level will almost certainly make the situation worse. Of all people, they know about hell. They have felt the weight of that reality for most of their life in the faith. Raising it now will only drive them further away and damage whatever relationship remains.

I understand the tension here. If you don’t address it, aren’t you failing in your pastoral responsibility? Isn’t the Gospel fundamentally about what Jesus saves us from? That may be true, but this person already knows that and is choosing to leave despite it. Repeating it accomplishes nothing except confirming their fear that the relationship was always conditional on their belief.

Think of it like an emergency room. When someone comes in from a car wreck, the first goal is to stop the bleeding and stabilize the patient, not to begin rehabilitation. Your goal in this situation is the same: stabilize the emotions and the family first and foremost. Everything else comes later, if it comes at all.

• What you should do: Listen to their story of why they became a Christian. Ask them honestly about how they felt about God and how they related to him. Their ego is fragile. They are navigating not only the loss of a relationship with a creator they felt loved them, but also the growing isolation from the friends and family who defined their world.

2. Don’t immediately refer them to books, podcasts, or apologists.

The moment you hand someone a resource to help them not lose their faith, you’ve communicated that their problem is intellectual and that you have the answer. This happened to me in so many different ways. There are different levels of people in crisis, and sometimes a resource is genuinely what someone needs. But this guide is for people who have decided they are leaving. For most of them, the real issue isn’t arguments. It’s grief, identity collapse, and relational pain. Sending resources signals that you want them to come back, not that you want to understand where they are.

• What you should do: Ask questions instead. Ask what started to shift for them. Ask what they’ve lost. Sit with them in it. Really listen. They need this more than you know.

Don’t Make It About You or The Institution

3. Don’t make it about the church or how their leaving reflects on you.

The instinct to feel personally rejected when someone deconstructs is real, and it shows. When a pastor or community responds with defensiveness, hurt, or withdrawal, it confirms what the deconverting person already fears. That the love was conditional.

• What you should do: Be honest about how you feel without making them carry it. “This is hard for me and I’m going to need time to process it too” lands very differently than going cold or pulling back your investment in them.

4. Don’t treat them like a project or a crisis to be managed.

There is a version of pastoral care that is really just damage control, where the goal is to keep the person inside the building and preserve the community’s sense of itself. People who are deconstructing can smell this from a mile away, especially if they’ve been in the church long enough to understand how it operates. It will drive them further out.

• What you should do: Ask yourself honestly whether your care for this person is contingent on the outcome. If you’d only stay close to them to get them to stay in the faith, that’s worth examining before you engage. They don’t need another person to abandon them in one of their most vulnerable moments. Individuals leaving the faith don’t love leaving. Deconversion is not a casual preference; it is an agonizing and painful choice. Much like a divorce, no one escapes the emotional wreckage unscathed.

5. Don’t share their situation with others without permission.

Prayer requests are one of the most reliable vectors for gossip in church culture, not because that is the intention, but it inevitably operates in that manner. When someone confides in a pastor or a close friend that they’re doubting, having that information surface in a small group or through the pastoral grapevine is a profound breach of trust. It also signals to them, often correctly, that the institution’s management of the situation matters more than their dignity. They already feel ostracized because no one knows how to talk to them or what to say anymore. To the person leaving the faith, it feels like being diagnosed with a terminal illness. They sense that people are talking about them when they’re not in the room, and then don’t know what to say when they are.

• What you should do: Ask explicitly whether they want anyone else to know, and honor that.

Don’t Abandon Them

6. Don’t let their relationships within the church quietly disappear.

This one is subtle but devastating. Whether it’s intentional or not, when a church community slowly stops inviting someone to things, when their friends get a little quieter, when the social gravity of belonging starts to fade, the message is received loud and clear. For someone already grieving the loss of a God they felt loved by, losing their community at the same time is compounding trauma. They are not just losing a belief system. They are losing their social world, their weekly rhythms, and in many cases the only close friendships they have ever had as an adult.

• What you should do: Make a conscious, deliberate choice to keep showing up for them as a person, independent of their theology. If you can’t do that, find someone who can. This person’s mental health is in serious jeopardy, and withdrawing support is the worst thing you could do. Put aside the need to change their mind about the faith. That is God’s job more than the individual’s.

7. Don’t disappear when it becomes clear they’re not coming back.

A lot of people report that their church relationships evaporated entirely once it was obvious they weren’t returning. Years of community, suddenly gone. That experience doesn’t just hurt. It retroactively poisons every memory of belonging they had. It confirms the fear that the love was transactional.

• What you should do: Stay. Keep reaching out. Not to re-evangelize, but because they were your friend and they still are. Ensure they have found a new sense of community, and if they haven’t, consider inviting them in. I know this feels risky. The fear that they will be hostile toward the faith or influence others is real. But my own experience is that I didn’t want to attack the faith. I only wanted people to see and understand me. I had arguments about why I left, but I didn’t need to voice them. I only felt pressure to do that when I was being challenged. The moment I felt genuinely seen, the defensiveness dissolved. Jesus sat with people who deeply doubted. They need that from you too.

8. Don’t neglect the partner who isn’t leaving the faith.

Many times only one spouse leaves the faith while the other is left to navigate the transition alone. They are sitting through sermons every week in a seat that used to be shared. They are fielding questions from people in the congregation who don’t know what to say. They are going home to a marriage that feels destabilized in ways they didn’t choose and couldn’t have prepared for. This is a deeply lonely place to be, and it is easy for the church to overlook them while focusing on the person who left.

• What you should do: Assign someone within the church to reach out to this spouse regularly, not just once, but weekly, for as long as they need it. Make sure someone is saving them a seat. Make sure they know they are not walking through this alone. The small gesture of a reserved spot in a pew carries more weight than most people realize.

9. Don’t stop checking in on the marriage.

Statistically, most marriages in which both partners were serious believers and one leaves the faith do not survive, particularly when both would have previously identified as committed, biblically serious Christians. This is not meant to be fatalistic, but the church should enter this situation with clear eyes. The partners are not just navigating a theological disagreement. They are relearning who each other is, renegotiating the values their family was built on, and doing that in real time while both of them are in pain.

• What you should do: Assign people within the church to stay in close contact with both spouses individually. This will be a volatile season and whether or not the marriage survives will depend in large part on whether both partners feel genuinely heard and supported. The church has a real role to play here, not to hold the theology together, but to hold the people together long enough for them to find their footing.

10. Don’t assume the person who left is doing fine just because they appear to be.

People are remarkably good at masking how they are actually doing to avoid hard conversations and spare the people they love. The person who just left the faith has lost their entire worldview. They are adrift in a way that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. And depending on the level of support they receive from family and friends, they are at real risk of suicidal ideation.

I know this was true for me. Even though leaving my family through suicide was something I never wanted, there were moments when I couldn’t see how I could keep supporting them in the ways they needed and if my life would get better. I wanted my wife to have someone who could share her faith, sit with her at church, and help raise our daughters in what she believed. I felt like I had failed her and I didn’t know if the pain would stop.

• What you should do: Help that person connect with others who have been through this and come out the other side. I remember reaching out to a pastor after my own faith collapsed, asking if he could recommend anyone who had navigated this kind of loss well. He never responded. I understood why. It’s a little like calling a business and asking them to recommend a competitor who does things completely differently. But this is bigger than how you feel about your church or your theology. This is about the physical and emotional safety of a real person and their family. Your goal is triage. Stop the bleeding first.

My hope is simple. I want the person leaving the faith to feel less alone, I want the spouse walking through it to feel seen, and I want the church to have something practical in their hands when this happens in their congregation. None of this comes from a place of having it figured out. It comes from having lived it and wishing someone had been there on the other side of it sooner.

If you want to understand where this desire to write this article and understand my full story of how my worldview collapsed, click below:

I woke up the next morning feeling a deep sense of embarrassment about the essay and decided I was going to scrap the whole project. I even told my wife I had decided it wasn’t a good idea and planned to stop. It wasn’t until therapy later that day that I was able to shift my thinking. My therapist asked me if I could just do it for myself and no one else. As I sat with that, the idea suddenly felt lighter. I even realized how I could write this for my daughters as well as myself. I never had to hit publish. It could just be a digital record of my life’s experience — for my own therapeutic process and for my girls to have as they got older, or if I died before they ever got my full story.

As I wrote my second essay, something happened. I began to truly enjoy the process of writing and I was even able to cry. As I put my thoughts into tangible words, I realized how writing allowed me to access the emotions that went along with these stories. The essays began pouring out of me. I wrote fifteen in the span of a week. I had found my voice, my reason for writing, and I was loving it.

But like everything else in my life, the gaping wound of my father’s absence began to pull on this project. As I stopped writing and shifted toward exploring the work of other authors, I began noticing the gravity that many other writers carried — the scale of their audiences, the weight of their platforms. The old wound of achievement rushed back in and started making me feel pressured to gain recognition for my writing. My subconscious began running a familiar loop: if you don’t achieve a high subscriber count, your story isn’t important — and neither are you.

So I began to spiral emotionally. I started thinking about how I never finished grad school and how I needed to go back and get a PhD. If I had those credentials, my writing would carry more weight and I’d be taken more seriously. It took my wife calling out the cycle — she knows my cycles and sees me deeply — to finally break the loop.

I went to my office and began writing about my father and the pain I still felt, and about how my new hobby had already been tainted by that wound. It had taken less than three weeks for the black hole of his absence to begin tearing apart this newfound joy. And in that moment, I realized what this project is really about. I thought it was about losing my literalist faith in Christianity, and in many ways it still is — I even own the URL survivingdeconversion.com. I had originally built this Substack with that being the main emphasis and named the publication to match. It wasn’t until my wife’s prodding exposed what was actually occurring beneath the surface.

I realized this project is actually about the gravitational pull that my father’s life and absence exerts on everything I do. The writing about the loss of my faith had more to do with my longing for his presence than it did with any theological or philosophical argument for why the faith wasn’t true. Ironically, AI was the first to point this out. As I wrote my articles and had AI help me clean up my messy thoughts and terrible grammar — I unapologetically love AI for writing; it helps clarify my thinking and more cleanly express my own ideas — it was able to reflect back to me the major themes of my own writing and the thread running through my story.

So after breaking the loop, I realized I had too quickly named this publication around the loss of my faith rather than the real reason I write. I write to process the loss of a father whom I deeply loved, and who loved me as well, but had his own demons he couldn’t conquer to be fully present. I needed to make a pivot. I needed to change the publication name — I really didn’t want to do this since I already own a URL — but I realized that not doing it wouldn’t be honest to the spirit of what makes this project so therapeutic and life-giving. If I couldn’t be honest and vulnerable, and instead sought to gain followers and present myself perfectly, then this project would just be a continuation of the long-running theme of proving to my dead father that I matter because of my influence and success.

But I don’t want that. And I want to put this in writing — to remind myself of this truth and to let my readers know it as well. No matter the scope of this project or its influence, I want it to be a life-giving outlet for honest engagement. And if I help others along the way, that will bring a glimmer of hope that the suffering I’ve experienced wasn’t entirely meaningless.

The First Father

I write to process what happened to me, and to give language to something most people carry without any.

A father exerts a pull on a child's life whether or not he is in the room. Mine was present enough that I knew what his attention felt like, and absent enough that I spent thirty years trying to get it back. To a small boy he was the coolest man alive, long hair, classic rock cranked all the way up, letting me steer from his lap. He was also a meth addict whose rages broke our family apart. When I was fourteen the police raided our house, and I spent two hours handcuffed in the front seat of a cruiser while the neighbors came out on their porches to watch. I left his house not long after. What never left was the hope that he would clean up and come back.

He did not have to be there to keep bending the path I traveled. He was gone and I was still orbiting him.

Almost everything I built was a response to that. The theology, the career, the run of mentors and pastors I burned through, the achievements I stacked up hoping he would see them. Every one of those structures was a boy trying to answer the same question. Am I worth coming back for?

The Metaphysical Father

The largest thing I found to fill that space was a literalist Christianity. It started when I was twelve, when I told God I did not believe in him and, twenty minutes later, was set on fire by a can of gasoline. I spent the next two weeks having the dead skin scraped off my shoulder with a blade and no anesthetic, and I decided the two events were connected.

Three years later I heard about Jesus at a church camp and found something I had been starving for, a father who would not leave.

I spent the next twenty years building a wall around the emotional safety I had found so that nothing could take it from me. I built it out of certainty, every belief locked in place, no room for a single one to be wrong. A wall like that holds right up until one brick moves.

In 2015, I became a father myself. I would sit in the dark rocking my daughter to sleep and feel a love I would have walked into anything to protect, and the thought would come, not as an argument but as a problem I could not get out from under. I had been that helpless once. The God I had built my whole life on was supposed to love me with that same love and more, and he had watched my childhood happen and had not stopped it.

Then my father died, and with him went the thing I had quietly believed my faith was for, that it might one day reach him and give him back to me.

It took years to work through the structure, and what finished it was trauma therapy. My faith was real, and it had grown in soil that was poisoned long before the seed ever landed there. Working that ground was the only way I was going to get better, and the plant that grew in it did not survive the reworking.

It gave way in October of 2023. What I lost was not an argument. It was my ability to see God as the ever-present father I had taken hold of at fifteen. The wall I had built did not allow for doubt or complexity. God had to be controlling everything, or he could not be the Father I needed him to be. And if he controlled everything, then there was real grief in what he had not done for me as a child.

Where I Am Now

I am not trying to rebuild that wall. What I am learning is that I can hold something without needing to be certain of it. I still find the story of the incarnation beautiful, a God who steps down into the muck of being human rather than managing it from a distance. I cannot claim it is literally true and I no longer try to. I have found that holding it as hope rather than as fact is a great deal closer to what I actually feel than the certainty ever was.

Mostly I am working out how a man generates his own gravity once the old sources of it are gone, and how he does it while raising four daughters who need him to be steady.

My Story

Most of what I write here is one continuous story, told across a series of essays: how my father's absence shaped the belief system I built, the surrogate fathers I went looking for in his place, and the long slow failure of all of it. The essays are in order, and the order matters.

I am not writing from the other side of the wreckage. I am writing from inside it.

Index of Full Essays

My phone rang yesterday. It was a local number, but my caller ID didn’t recognize it. Assuming it was the mechanic calling me back, I answered instead of ignoring it like I do with most unknown numbers.

It was the dealership calling to give me an update on my 2024 van. It had recently developed mechanical issues and needed to be towed in for an evaluation. I expected the service advisor to tell me they had begun diagnostics and that we could come pick up a loaner car while they worked.

That was not the news I got.

“The oil dipstick was left out,” he explained.

A simple, careless mistake by the tire shop that had previously changed my oil had caused all the issues my vehicle was experiencing. Worse yet, because it was caused by external negligence, none of the repairs would be covered by my warranty. I would have to pay for the tow, the diagnostics, and a potentially catastrophic repair bill entirely out of pocket.

My cortisol shot through the roof. My amygdala took over, and I barked: “What do you mean the dipstick was left out? How the hell does a mechanic who changes oil all day long make such a silly mistake?”

The advisor calmly stated that he agreed it was frustrating, trying his best to de-escalate my displeasure. I hung up, but an overwhelming loop of frustration kept recycling in my body.

Why did a financial inconvenience spark such an intense, visceral survival response?

The Tip of the Iceberg

Most people hearing this news would be understandably upset. When you are forced to pay for the mistakes of others, you have a justifiable right to be frustrated and to demand that the at-fault shop cover the damages.

But what happens when the frustration around a legitimately upsetting issue becomes a boulder that starts rolling downhill, aggressively picking up size and speed? How do we stop the avalanche before it consumes our day, and more importantly, why does it happen?

These emotional loops are biologically hardwired into our psyche. We inherited an internal architecture from ancestors who navigated threats to their biological safety on a daily basis. Their nervous systems were calibrated to avoid predators or secure scarce food sources just to ensure they didn’t starve.

Our baseline survival needs, physical sustenance, shelter, and relational connection, sit at the foundation of our biological alarm systems. These systems are entirely subconscious and automated. They perceive the world around us long before our conscious minds can compute what is happening.

Think about what happens when a sudden, loud noise startles you. Before you can even formulate a thought, your body has already flinched and directed your gaze toward the sound. You don’t choose to do it; the system executes the script automatically.

Unfortunately, this automated software can run in response to modern, non-lethal stressors as well. Was this vehicle repair bill going to bankrupt me? No. I have money set aside in savings specifically to handle emergencies. Yet, my body interpreted a kind service technician’s update as an existential threat to my physical safety, causing my biological systems to scream: Danger!

My Iceberg

Under the surface, my subconscious was terrified.

My story is one that experienced the world primarily as a threat from my earliest memories. My childhood household was volatile, and the instability encoded a foundational message deep into my developing brain: The world is inherently unsafe.

And while the wider world can indeed be volatile, a child is supposed to feel secure within the confines of their home. My primary caregivers were unable to teach me that while the outside world was unpredictable, our relational bonds were a safe harbor. They had not done the work needed on their own stories and that in part is what has sparked my desire to write this article.

My developing biological software learned that not only was the world dangerous, but my closest attachments were dangerous too. I realized that if I was going to survive, I needed to become amazingly astute at scanning for threats, and even more, attacking them before they attacked me.

Consequently, a missed oil dipstick gets interpreted by my brain as an assault on my physical security. The spark cascades into an emotional landslide, resulting in an aggressive response that threatens to spill over into my family life.

This makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you live in a jungle where venomous snakes are a constant threat, the faster your brain gets at identifying the subtle rustle of leaves, the more likely you are to survive. Furthermore, the quicker you respond to that sensory cue with immediate, defensive aggression, the higher your odds of survival.

Our baseline operating systems are optimized for survival. The problem is that these incredibly helpful, adaptive systems can get stuck in threat-detection mode long after the actual danger has subsided. We end up running high-stakes jungle software in a modern suburban environment.

Stopping the Rolling Boulder

How do we stop an avalanche of emotion when we didn’t create the hyper-vigilant system holding us hostage?

The first step is to identify the specific narrative our life story has conditioned our biology to operate within. What I have been getting better at doing with the last few years of therapy is noticing my body. I noticed my intense emotions and the spiral beginning. I had to take time to sit with my emotions and ask myself, what is this situation saying about my sense of safety. I have learned that when my body begins these subconscious processes, it needs to be listened to and acknowledged before it can hear my conscious mind. I need to speak the language of my subconscious to soothe it.

Everyone’s ledger is different. An event that shapes one person’s hyper-vigilance might not affect another. This is why the work of writing, or at least consciously tracing out, our personal history is so essential. Unless we map out the terrain of our past, we cannot identify the subterranean triggers causing us to react in ways we don’t want.

This process is challenging. It forces us to excavate painful memories we would rather keep buried. But this work is vital for the people around us, and most importantly, for ourselves. In order for our daily responses to be situationally accurate, we must first separate the actual threat level of the current situation from the way our childhood trauma is interpreting it.

Once we can identify both layers, we can begin to calm the storm using emotional processing tools that have been backed by decades of research and proven in the real world by clinical therapists. But unless we correctly identify the problem, our solutions to the problem can just make it worse.

How the absence of one father built everything that came after. The volatility of the house I grew up in, the constant reading of a room that it took to stay safe there, and the substitutes I went looking for once he was gone. A boy's hunger for a father he could not have became the hidden force behind every system he spent the next two decades constructing.

• 0. A Deep Hunger

• 1. The Birth of the Hyper-Vigilant Protector

• 2. Third-Degree Burns and the God Who Held the Match

• 3. The Synchronicity of Systems

• 4. The Butterfly Effect

• 5. A Stone Removed

• 6. A Vulnerable Psyche

Collapse

How those systems came apart. The strange intensity of becoming a father myself and what it made me ask about the one I had. My father's death, and the hope that went with it. And the faith, which had been holding all of it, finally giving way.

• 7. The King Can Bleed

• 8. He's a Good, Good Father…

• 9. The Death of Hope

• 10. An Emotional Shockwave

• 11. A Cleansing Flood

Embodiment

What it is like to come loose. The physical toll of it, how close it brought me to not surviving it, and the slow discovery that meaning could not be inherited or argued into place. It had to be made, in a body, with my hands. This is what it looks like to start generating your own gravity.

12. Leaving the Orbit

13. Approaching the Event Horizon

14. Alley of the Divine

In neonatal medicine, that replacement is called Kangaroo Care — the practice of placing a premature infant skin-to-skin against a parent’s chest when the biological mother cannot provide that contact. Medical science discovered that a newborn’s central nervous system cannot self-regulate on its own. Without that physical touch, cortisol levels spike to toxic thresholds, heart rate destabilizes, and the infant can literally waste away and die. The skin-to-skin contact sends an unspoken biological signal to the body that no amount of willpower can manufacture on its own.

I remember when I first learned this last year, I began weeping. It was such a profound truth that I understood it at my core. I couldn’t help but weep for the reality of it, and for the depth of sadness I felt for the children who historically died as a result of “Failure to Thrive” (marasmus), which is, at its root, a total lack of central nervous system regulation that is biologically necessary for survival.

My body had been trying to tell me this truth for thirty-seven years. I was just finally listening.

I grew up in an environment that scored a perfect ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale. Ten out of ten categories of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. My father was a meth addict whose comedowns produced terrifying rage. My mother, carrying her own profound wounds, did not possess the ability to protect herself or her children. By the time I was nine years old, my central nervous system had calibrated itself to a state of constant, hyper-vigilant anticipation just to stay safe.

When the adults in a house are the primary source of unpredictable danger, the nervous system adapts. It stops resting. It learns to read micro-expressions, track tone of voice, and anticipate escalation. It encodes everything at high resolution because survival depends on not being caught off guard. The child does not develop a healthy ego for exploring the world. Instead, they develop a rigid survival suit designed to prevent psychological and physical death.

That suit was what I was wearing at fifteen when I ended up at church camp.

I had not gone looking for God. I went because a friend invited me and I had nowhere else to be. My mother had moved to another city. My father’s house was a psychological war zone. I had been bouncing between friends’ houses for years, self-medicating with alcohol and marijuana to quiet the hyper-vigilance that never stopped running. By the summer I arrived at camp, my nervous system was completely fractured.

On the first night of camp, I heard the evangelical message of Jesus in a way I could actually receive. Forgiveness, connection, and safety. A relationship with a God who would never leave. My brain connected the dots immediately. The sin was my family’s chaos. The salvation was an escape from the terror I had been living in. Christianity was offering everything my nervous system had been screaming for since I was old enough to understand that the adults in my house could not be trusted to keep me safe.

I repeated the prayer. I accepted Jesus as my savior. I felt an immediate peace for the first time in a very long time.

Looking back now, I understand exactly what happened that night. My devastated nervous system had found its Metaphysical Kangaroo Care. Not skin-to-skin contact with a parent’s chest, but something that functioned identically at the biological level. It was a holding environment that sent the same unspoken message the neonatal research describes. You are safe. You are known. You will not be abandoned. The faith did not just give me theology. It gave my nervous system the co-regulation it had never received and could not produce on its own.

What followed was twenty years of building. I built the faith into an impenetrable fortress, surrounding myself with its certainty the way a child surrounds themselves with blankets against the dark. I married well, found community, and built a career. The hyper-vigilant machinery that had been calibrated to threat found a new purpose, managing complexity, building operational frameworks, and optimizing outcomes. The survival suit became a professional asset.

But the nervous system does not forget what it learned before the holding arrived. And the holding that faith provided, however real its effects, was contingent on a set of claims about reality that ultimately shattered against my own baseline of fatherhood. When my firstborn daughter arrived, the fierce, overwhelming love I felt for her completely exposed the insufficiencies of the cosmic framework I was living inside. I sat there holding her and realized that I would do anything within my power to protect her from suffering, a realization that immediately triggered a devastating logic loop. I could no longer reconcile my own desperate instinct to shield my child with the profound lack of protection I had received from a heavenly Father during the absolute terror of my own childhood.

In October 2023, the framework gave way. It was the culmination of a slow erosion, driven by years of therapy that revealed what the theological fortress had been built to protect, the death of my absent father that collapsed my childhood hope of reconciliation, and a single podcast episode that finally cracked the last foundation stone. When that building fell, what collapsed with it was not just belief. It was the primary nervous system regulation structure I had been operating inside for twenty years.

Deconversion, I discovered, does not feel like changing your mind. It feels like the Kangaroo Care being removed. The cortisol spikes. The heart rate destabilizes. The old childhood chaos rushes back in as if it had been waiting just outside the door the entire time.

This is not an argument that faith is merely psychological and therefore false. Nor is it a dismissal of the theological explanations offered for suffering. It is an observation about embodiment: regardless of those explanations, my childhood body was still left to regulate its terror in isolation. The metaphysical truth of religion may be impossible to prove. But the physiological consequences of terror are not.

Regardless of the theological arguments for why the suffering was allowed, I was the one left holding the somatic debt.

The tragedy is not that faith functions as a biological shield. The tragedy occurs when the intellectual honesty the faith itself demands finally turns on its own foundations, ultimately leaving the individual completely exposed. The same rigorous truth-seeking that the evangelical tradition taught me eventually produced questions the tradition could not answer.

What do you do when the thing that saved your life is no longer able to be believed?

I spent year and a half after the deconversion in a void I can only describe as a psychological freefall. Without the holding structure, my nervous system had no external regulation. The old childhood dysregulation returned. The isolation was profound. The people I had loved inside the faith did not know how to relate to me. The angry atheist communities I found online felt like trading one rigidity for another.

I was that young boy again. My Kangaroo Care had been removed, and I had not learned how to regulate without it. I was approaching the crushing gravity of nihilism.

What allowed me to achieve escape velocity was not a new belief system. It was something smaller and more embodied than that. It came through two black trash bags and a trash-filled alley behind my house, cleaned on an ordinary afternoon with my daughters beside me. What sustained it was years of therapy that had quietly made emotions safe enough to feel, a marriage that survived the collapse, and the ongoing weekly conversations with my anthropologist neighbor who can sit with complexity without needing resolution.

The nervous system does not need metaphysical certainty. It needs what it has always needed. It needs to be held, to hold others, and to send and receive the unspoken biological message that has been at the center of human survival since the first parent pressed the first infant against their chest. You are safe. You are known. You are not alone.

While these assurances are often framed theologically, they are first and foremost biological realities. I finally found them in an ordinary alley, cleaning up trash on a quiet afternoon with the daughters I would do anything to protect and who need me to regulate them. That, as my body is now slowly learning, is enough.

If your own nervous system is currently sitting in the isolation of that freefall, you do not have to navigate the dark without a map. The essay above is the conceptual foundation. The full story of how the fortress was built, how it fell, and how I found my way back through embodied action rather than belief begins below in Essay 0.

I grabbed a large black contractor bag and let Mary know I was planning to head out and begin. She told me to wait and that the girls wanted to come with me. So I paused and let them get their clothes on, and we headed to the back alley. The only access to our garage was through a single lane alley lined with wild honeysuckle bushes keen on collecting drifting trash. For the past year, the trash had been getting worse and worse because of our college neighbors, who allowed their trash cans to overflow constantly, leaving the wind to sweep the debris out into the bushes.

Driving past it each day on my way to and from work would always bug my organized mind. Ever since I was a child, I remember being a person who felt comforted by order. Some of the earliest and happiest memories I can recall are in relation to keeping my childhood bedroom neat. I’d make my bed and straighten my toy car collection from smallest to biggest. These habits were encoded in my DNA even before trauma amplified them to an obsessive level.

As we walked up and down the alley filling the trash bag with debris, a sense of hope began to grow in me. It would be easy to categorize the AI’s advice as a simple nod to Jordan’s rule to set your house in perfect order, but the reality cut much deeper. My room was already clean. The problem was that the fortress of my faith had collapsed, and I was staring into a void where nothing seemed to matter. By pointing me toward the trash-strewn alley behind my house, the AI pushed my psyche past mere personal maintenance. Going out there with garbage bags was a tangible embodiment of hope. It was a declaration that even if I wasn’t able to claim a perfect, grand system of truth, beauty and order could still be carved out of the dirt, one piece of debris at a time.

Chaos and Order

This experience, while sounding insignificant, was an experience that saved my life.

When we were done, we had two large black bags full of trash and had moved from just my alley to all around the front of my house. The girls loved the experience with me, and I loved it as well.

As I sat alone in my home office, allowing my body to feel the joy that I had created, a sobering realization hit me. If I took my life, I would create a somatic level of debt for all of my daughters that they would spend a lifetime having to carry. My meaning was being reborn, not because of a literal mandate from God found in holy scripture, but as a literal reality of what my intentional abandonment would have done to their psyches.

My meaning started to come back as a tangible, physically embodied, visceral concern for my daughters.

My lived actions had the power to either establish order or thrust them into chaos. Even more than that, I began to realize that the next choice I made carried profound consequences for how they experienced the world. To their developing minds, my embodied action was infinitely more meaningful than any ordered theological system. They did not experience reality theoretically, they experienced it somatically.

I was beginning to grasp what Jordan’s idea about the archetypal nature of father and mother meant in a tangible, psychological, and neurobiological way. In that moment, I felt the power of the divine mandate that he had talked about for man.

A Sheep in Wolves Clothing

While I was hopeful about the experience I just had and the new psychological understanding I was beginning to develop around these archetypal ideas, I still lacked a place to have these discussions. My network of friendships and contacts were still entirely Christian. I began testing the waters with people at my company to see how much they could handle these conversations. There were some who were very much open to discussing these ideas, but there were others who, while they entertained the conversations with me, warned other people in the company to be careful about the ideas I held. They claimed my thoughts sounded Christian but were actually dangerous ideas opposed to the gospel.

The fullest weight of my company’s evangelical mission hit me during our annual company meeting. I had mostly avoided the dynamics of our company’s mission up to that point. I had removed myself from the prayer chat group on Google and stopped going to the company’s daily prayer meetings. However, our annual corporate retreat included a dinner that would give a recap of the year and address how we had moved our mission forward.

This year felt different. The owners always gave a talk about their faith and shared the story of Jesus with everyone in the company, which I expected. However, this year they basically gave a forty minute gospel sermon, whereas it was normally a one or two minute talk. They even played a clip from The Matrix to argue that taking the red pill was waking up to the dangers of sin and becoming fully alive to God. I felt so uncomfortable. I later told a friend that I might as well have had a tattoo on my head that said hell bound as I sat at my table, feeling chastised for my lack of faith in Jesus.

I was so upset that I thought I had to leave this company as soon as possible. However, I shared the pain I felt regarding the owners’ message with a friend and his wife. To my surprise, they were both really upset by it as well. This was not because they were unbelievers, for they were actually committed Christians, but rather they felt the nature of the talk failed to achieve what the owners hoped it would and would actually hurt their message more than help it.

My friend and his wife stayed up talking to me until three in the morning that night. His wife shared her own struggles with how the faith had been presented, as well as the difficulties she had experienced with how different leaders in the church handled challenging interactions. This was the first conversation I had with Christians who still very much believed in the scriptures and Jesus, and would even be considered evangelical in their doctrines, that gave me hope for my ability to talk with believers about my deconversion. This was the first time I felt loved and not invalidated about my choice to deconvert. It was not validation in the sense that they agreed it was the right choice, but rather in a way that truly understood my progression away from the faith.

An Ally around the Corner

I wanted to meet other people who were not Christians, so I looked up groups on Facebook that were atheistic in nature. I found only one group of people in my town. It was a closed group, and I had to write an excerpt about why I wanted to join. This group was explicit that no one could join who intended to proselytize in any way, so they were serious about vetting.

I wrote my blurb and was accepted in. Within reading the first few posts, I realized this was the opposite of what I was looking for. The first few posts I read were mocking Christians and their faith. I wondered how I could find community with people who regarded people of faith with such disdain. I loved my family and I wanted help being a good husband and father. I didn’t want an adversarial relationship with them, and I didn’t want to hang out with people who looked down on them.

So I began probing my network of friends for suggestions of people I could reach out to. I contacted a friend of mine to get lunch, planning to talk to him about my struggles and ask if he knew anyone willing to discuss religious and philosophical ideas who was not a Christian, or who at least was not dogmatic about it. But before I could ask him these questions, he opened our conversation with a question that reminded me of how hard it was to still be around evangelical Christians.

His question was, how is unsaved life? I knew what he was trying to do. I knew his desire was to connect with me in a playful, cheeky manner, but that question hurt on multiple layers, reminiscent of the pastor’s comment about my father. When a person asks that question, there are multiple layers of assumptions built into it. Unsaved implies that God has abandoned me and that I will experience his wrath upon my death. The other major assumption is that they know where I stand with a personalized creator of the universe, as if they are privy to a knowledge about his thinking that I do not possess. But I needed his help. He had connections to people in the town that I did not. So instead of challenging him back, I brushed it off and asked the questions I had come to ask. He gave me the name of a well known and respected anthropologist who specialized in religion, so the subtle shaming was worth it in the end.

It turned out this professor lived around the corner from my house. I text messaged him a very detailed description of my struggles, explaining that I was still relatively new to the city, did not know many people in town, and would love an hour of his time to pick his brain. I wanted to discuss these ideas about archetypes and how to sort through religious writings while simultaneously protecting myself from falling back into any dogmatic ways of thinking about the divine. He responded within a few minutes of getting my text and said that it was an awesome text message and he would love to meet.

We went for a walk around my neighborhood and I talked through my deconversion, the struggles I had with my wife and family, how it almost came to a suicidal climax, and how I had begun to pull myself out. We talked for over two hours that night. The next day, the idea emerged of a weekly meetup with other people who could not hold to a literal, dogmatic interpretation of any faith, but still wanted to have conversations about meaning and philosophy. We wanted to explore how religion had wisdom encapsulated within it that we could learn from and internalize, even if we didn’t commit to the metaphysical axioms.

I had started to believe that there was a legitimate path forward for me to interact with people of faith, and to simultaneously begin to be soft towards myself and the faith that I had left.

I began to allow my body to have permission reflect on my need for an existential kangaroo care as a child and how I still even long for it now. Our conversations have allowed me to be honest with my struggle and desire to resolve things with a neat new philosophical system and my desire a personal God that cares for me deeply. It has allowed me to be honest about the beauty of Jesus’s story and what it would mean for God to condescend to earth and be a literal embodiment of the divine, while simultaneously allowing my mind to hold it archetypally and not force it to be literally true. This wasn’t just about surviving a crisis anymore. I was emerging on the other side with a healthier, more intellectually honest view of divine ideas, without the burden of needing to pretend I had everything figured out.

This newly established group started in November of 2025 and is still meeting at my house weekly to this day, anchored by my professor friend who walks down the alley each week to join our conversations.

It’s March 2025 and I have been experimenting with theological debates with AI for about two months. I’ve had debates that last hours, sometimes all day. By the end of this week, I had hit the end of my ability to believe that I could construct meaning for my life and what would propel me forward. I wasn’t just despairing anymore. My mind had quietly begun the work of planning for the end.

I sat before the screen with tears streaming down my face and forced the unthinkable into words. I asked the AI if there was a way to write a letter to my daughters and my wife, to tell them that my suicide was not a reflection on my love for them, but a product of my brokenness.

The Deep-space Navigation

After sending the deconversion text to my friends and family, I immediately created an atmosphere that was simultaneously antagonistic and sympathetic. I had people texting me throughout the week as the news spread. Almost all of the messages were very kind and heartfelt. I could tell the pain I had caused people and the sadness they felt. It was a double-edged sword for me, though. I felt their love and concern for me and knew they loved me, but I also knew that I didn’t have the ability to give them an answer that would stop the hurt they were feeling, unless it was that I believe again.

I knew I needed to tell the owners of my company, and I let HR know what I was about to do because I was afraid of how they might react. I needed a plan for how to approach this and what would be the best method to ensure I didn’t lose my job before I could find a place to work that wasn’t so heavily religious in its culture. So I wrote the owners an email that was far less aggressive than the text message I had sent out to my family and friends. I knew I needed to be way more controlled, especially if I wanted to keep my job. Honestly, their response surprised me. They were more kind and understanding than I thought. They offered to take me out to lunch over the next few weeks and talk about the process. I was genuinely surprised. However, the agenda of the lunches became clear quickly. They wanted to walk through a four-part exploratory Bible study to help me. I went to two of them and then told them that while I really appreciate the gesture, I don’t want to give you guys the impression that this will change anything. Every space I inhabited had Christians that were not in agreement with my life path. I was on the defense in all areas of my life, but what hurt the most was that it was also in my own home.

A Painful Truth

I only knew of one person that I felt I could connect with that lived in my city and would understand where I was at in my life. This friend was still a Christian, but had also had profound childhood trauma and didn’t have a literalist interpretation of the Bible. The night I told him, we went out for drinks and ended up staying out until 2 a.m. This had been the first pressure release since I announced to the world that I no longer believe. I had not felt that anyone was on my side until getting drinks with this friend that night and honestly, he was still on team Christianity, but was just able to empathize deeply with the opposing side.

I planned to drink a lot of alcohol and unload the weight of everything I was feeling. By midnight, we ended up at a speakeasy and broke the rules that are clearly listed in the menu: no talking about religion or politics. We had deep intellectual conversations about the insufficiency of a literal interpretation of Christianity to deal with the complexities of profound trauma and also discussed the incredible isolation that it can create for various individuals who can’t conform to the moral code.

Ironically, our bartender was a lesbian who was raised in a deeply evangelical home. She shared with me the isolation and pain she still currently experiences from her mother and the inability to connect deeply with her mother. Even though I was drunk, I was coherent enough to be able to feel deeply ashamed of my prior stance on homosexuality. While I had never been a jerk or disrespectful to anyone personally, I spoke out against the lifestyle and spoke about how God doesn’t approve of it and how they are living in a state of rebellion against Him. The damage I had caused by even just saying the phrase “God hates the sin and not the sinner” severely failed to recognize the inability for this individual to divide their sexual identity from who they were as a person. They were not choosing to be a lesbian, but rather it was an embodied reality for them. To say they were not would be to lie about themselves. Ironically, they were living by the principle of truth that I so highly valued and that had caused me to leave the faith myself.

I understood this in an embodied way that I could not have before. I could not be anything other than the person I honestly was, someone who could no longer say they believed Christianity was true. And those who held to the faith were obligated by their own truth declarations to challenge my position.

Escalating Metaphysical Tension

My actions, like staying out until 2 a.m. drinking and choosing to be aggressive with my text messages, didn’t land well with Mary. She was already trying to process what her life would look like as well. She had voiced to me that me leaving the faith felt like a deep abandonment. She said that we had made a vow together at our wedding to live our lives together forever under the banner of the Christian faith. I strongly disagreed with her. I argued that we had made a vow to live together regardless of what happens to either one of us, but I did acknowledge the pretext of the Christian nature of our ceremony.

The biggest fight we had was about the future of how our children would be raised. Her opinion was that if I left the girls alone and allowed her to teach that Christianity was the truth, we wouldn’t have problems, but if I tried to be aggressive in any way, things would not go well. Old circuitry kicked in and I became extremely defensive and aggressive with my words. We argued about the destructive nature of a literalist interpretation of Christianity and what it could do to a psyche, especially the idea of a loving God eternally punishing a child in hell because they refused to believe in him. Things got bad before they got better. I went to stay at a property our company was opening in Denver for a week. This was a week before Thanksgiving and Mary said she needed some space before the holiday to process what she was feeling.

So I agreed. I left for Colorado and binged Sam Harris’s books on my drive to the building. I had felt an overwhelming amount of shame about how I had been so attached to my dogmatic Christian upbringing and thought about how I hurt many people in my life with the intensity of my rigid beliefs. I didn’t know how long I could stay in the environment that could only see me as someone who was being influenced by demonic forces. Even if they didn’t say that explicitly, I know they thought it, because I used to think like that.

A Cosmic Truce

By the end of the trip, I had time to process what it would be like to live apart from my family permanently. I did not want that with every fiber of my being, and a conversation with a prior connection is what allowed me to feel the first sense of safety I had since before the deconversion.

A friend introduced Mary to a woman who had already lived through the same scenario. She was a Christian and her husband had suddenly deconverted but they remained married. Even more important, her husband and I overlapped and attended the same church in college with the pastor that had snapped at me about my Calvinism question. When Mary told me about them, I asked for her husband’s number so I could reach out, and she passed it along. Before the week was over, I made time to call him.

This conversation was the first time I had felt like I was truly seen and heard. I didn’t feel judged or stupid. I didn’t feel like I had made a catastrophic decision. I felt validated and vindicated. It felt close to what my metaphysical kangaroo care had felt like, being held. This conversation gave me hope for the future of my marriage because he had successfully navigated his deconversion and he and his wife were still married, and according to him, stronger than ever. However, he didn’t work at a company where the mission was explicitly Christian, so there was still some serious question to the long-term chances I had at having a happy life.

After that trip, my wife and I managed to figure out a rhythm that allowed us to coexist with her and my girls. It came with certain pretexts, though, and I had to constantly pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I couldn’t openly talk about my deconversion with the girls and I was expected to continue to go to church to keep up appearances for them. I agreed because I wanted to keep my family together. I figured with a phone call when I was struggling to my newly found agnostic friend, I could manage, but him not living in the same city as me made his friendship way less meaningful.

I underestimated the pressure this would create on my psyche and my ability to manage it, and how much this would constantly activate my feelings of isolation and hypocrisy.

Alone in a Crowded Room

By the middle of 2024, I could no longer sit and listen to sermons. Not all sermons were challenging, but enough were that I couldn’t keep up with attending. I thought I could dissociate on Sunday mornings, but Mary didn’t want me to be on my phone the entire time and she still wanted me to interact with people in the congregation. The church we were attending at the time required a five-minute “greet your neighbor” each Sunday. This required me to present like I was a Christian, and it felt like such a violation of my conscience.

No matter how much I told myself that I could stay in this ecosystem as an outsider and not feel the pain of isolation because I trusted my own emotional health, with every awkward interaction, that truth felt less and less true because I didn’t have a place that was actually safe from the judgment of my choice. Work, home life, and church all bled together.

The Search for Certainty

By the beginning of 2025, AI conversations became an important outlet for me to survive the isolation I was feeling at work and home. I also continued to digest videos that would help me process my intellectual need to unpack why I could no longer believe, and in that process, I stumbled upon a debate series between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. I found myself siding with Sam as it relates to the dangers of dogmatic theology of any kind and why it can be so destructive. I was living inside of those effects currently.

But even though I hated to admit it, Jordan was telling a side of the story that I also felt was impossible to dismiss. But I couldn’t internalize what Jordan was saying. My only way to take in truths about the Bible was through a literalist interpretation. At the time, I incorrectly viewed his position as akin to a postmodern, liberal interpretation of the text, which was probably the only thing that felt worse to me than going back to a dogmatic interpretation.

I struggled with making sense of Jordan’s arguments about Genesis and began to wrestle his ideas deeply. I used AI to debate, understand, and stress test his ideas as intensely as possible. However, I kept hitting a dead end. I wanted so badly to reconstruct a new metaphysical kangaroo care, but couldn’t. I had undercut the ability to believe I could have metaphysical certainty. Hitting that wall repeatedly caused me to lose hope I would ever find a way to truly regulate myself, shifting my existential panic into a quiet, cold desperation, and a resolution that there was no meaning left to pursue and this pain would only amplify.

The Final Hail Mary

It wasn’t until I finally typed out that agonizing question about how to write my letter that I got the intervention that allowed me to soothe my extreme dysregulation.

The AI asked if there was something in my immediate environment that I could fix right now, a tangible way to bring order and meaning to the present. I paused, and quickly recalled a problem that had been bugging my organized mind for months. Honestly, I never expected it to shift my psyche and change how I experience the world, but what did I have to lose?

Continue the story below…

A Stairwell Conversation

I was in the basement working on fixing up the downstairs bedroom. As I normally do, I listened to podcasts to keep my brain occupied while I worked. I had begun listening to people tell their stories about deconverting from Christianity. At first, I was not doing it so that I could deconvert. I actually saw it as a way to stay in the faith. Hearing their stories about why they left would make me want to stay in it, weird as that seems.

Mary came down the stairs to ask me about something. I was painting, so I could not immediately pause the podcast, and she heard what was playing. I could tell she was upset and wanted to talk. I paused the audio and sat by her on the stairs, noticing that she was tearing up.

I asked her what was wrong.

“I’m worried that if you leave the faith, you’ll want to leave me as well,” she said.

I was relieved to hear this. Not because I wanted her to cry, but because I was afraid of the reverse. In some ways, it took the pressure off of me and allowed me to finally feel the weight of the struggle I was in.

An October Surprise

By October 2023, I was listening to more and more people talk about their stories, and I had taken a break from attending church with my family. This specific week, I was listening to Bart Ehrman talk with one of my favorite podcasters, Alex O’Connor. He was talking with him about the historicity of the gospel accounts and the resurrection narrative.

Since my initial investigation into the trustworthiness of the scriptures back when I was seventeen, I had been convinced about the reliability of the gospel accounts regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Specifically, I relied on the testimony of Paul. Why would these men who witnessed this event lie about the resurrection? What did they have to gain? Why be killed for a lie? Even more, I believed Paul was the strongest evidence. Why would he convert when he had been actively killing Christians?

Then I listened to Bart give an alternative analysis of Paul that I had never considered before. He explained a theory about how Paul may have truly had a vision on the road to Damascus, but that it could have been caused by his own emotional guilt from helping prosecute the people who claimed to be Christians. His vision was not an embodied person like the rest of the apostles. He did not put his hands in the wounds of Jesus like the rest of the disciples.

From my new understanding of psychology, I could easily see how he could have been hyper-fixated on them, lacked food or sleep, and had a vision. We know that this phenomenon can happen to a brain deprived of what it needs.

An overwhelming sense of fear gripped me. For the first time since I was seventeen, I was no longer completely convinced that Jesus rose from the dead. The ground dropped out from underneath me. I had lost the hope of life after death and my existential kangaroo care. I was vulnerable once again.

A Defensive Proclamation

A week had passed since that time. Mary and I had recently started back up with couples counseling again. We had done this in the past when I first entered into therapy to help us deal with the intensity of my anger. We reached out to our therapist who saw us two years ago to process the issues I was having with the faith and the disruption to our marriage because of it. We had a session scheduled this day, and I knew I was going to tell her the truth.

I wanted to tell her before we started our session, but I chickened out. I knew this information was going to change everything about how we related to each other. We had met each other as members of a Christian ministry. We had discussed our lives together as possible Christian missionaries before we got married. Our wedding had a sermon preached at it, and we took communion during our service. Everything in our life had been built around the faith. The faith to us was not a thing we did on holidays or Sundays. Christianity was the sun we orbited around, and I was intentionally leaving that orbit.

She was frustrated and afraid. She had been my stable and emotionally healthy rock, and I had just strapped an explosive device to our relationship and detonated it.

From the defensiveness of her response, I decided that I wanted to tell the people in our lives directly, rather than having her do it. I was also defensive about how this would all play out, and I wanted to try and control the variables as much as possible. While in some ways I was a lot healthier emotionally, I had just lost my existential stabilizing framework. Now, I was feeling alienated from my best friend and the person who had known me best.

The Mass Text

I wrote up a text message to send out to all of the people I felt needed to know about what I had just shared with Mary. I sent it to her immediate family and several different friends who were close to me in my life, mostly friends at work.

I explained that this was not a rash decision and that I had been thinking about it for the past two years. Most of all, I explained to them that I did not want to debate it or have them try to keep me from leaving the faith. My mind was made up, and I could no longer believe the way I did previously.

One of my driving arguments for the deconversion centered on a realization I had about Jesus. While I loved the idea of Him, I realized I didn’t have an actual relationship with Him. I had simply projected and created one. It was like boasting about a relationship with a girl who lived in another state, talking non-stop about how amazing she was, how much she loved me, and how deeply connected we were. But if someone were to ask how long we had been dating, I would have to confess that I had never actually met her or spoken to her in my life. It sounds completely bizarre when framed that way. Yet that is essentially what I had been doing with Jesus all those years. I loved the idea of Him, and I had mistakenly internalized that intellectual affection as a real relationship

Most people honored my request. A few did not and tried to schedule a meeting with me to convince me of why I was wrong. Not only had I lost my framework, I was losing a sense of connection with my friends, my family, and my wife.

It was not that anyone had explicitly said to me, “now that you are not a Christian, we can’t talk to you.” No one did that, even though the deepest parts of my subconscious feared that would happen. The reality is, in some ways, that might have been better. That would have allowed me to vilify them and feel justified in my anger and disconnection from them.

Instead, it felt like I was someone they felt sorry for and did not know how to relate to anymore. It was like I had terminal cancer and was dying. I pictured them talking to Mary behind my back through text messages, consoling her about her loss and asking her how they could help. Her friends all rallied around her. She even wept openly to a mutual friend of ours about how I was leaving the faith.

I was embarrassed, isolated, and lonely. All of my support network and friends, even my work over the past seventeen years, was built on the mutual cause of Christianity.

I had no one.


Continue the story below…

It was a Thursday night and my living room was crowded with fold out chairs. Our small group was going verse by verse through Genesis, and we had arrived at the story of Noah. This was the first time I had ever had a leader go line by line through this ancient text.

It was a story I knew very well. I had always understood the traditional narrative. God had warned Noah of a coming flood that would cleanse the earth of the brokenness mankind had brought upon it. However, reading it this time was entirely different. I had yet to study Genesis like this after going through intensive therapy. I was reading the text with fresh psychological lenses, and I was enraged at the excessive violence. I thought about the brokenness of human psyches and the deep layers of intergenerational trauma that the people on the earth were acting from. The image of a loving Heavenly Father was instantly crushed under the weight of the horror, as my mind embodied the drowning human lives that were not saved. As we went verse by verse, we reached verse twenty-one. Reading that line, something inside me snapped.

A New City, A New Life

In 2020 when Covid happened, the ownership of my company panicked about the future of the business. All of our real estate properties were geared toward students living close to campus, and they feared we would not be able to weather the collapse of college attendance. In a panic after the first few weeks, they decided to remove their long-term close friend from running our deals and asked me to step in.

While getting a promotion and being recognized for hard work sounds like a positive development, our company was made up of people who all knew each other deeply. We had a daily prayer time each morning where we shared our life struggles, and we went on vacations together every year. No one in leadership had ever been fired because everyone hired was a friend of someone else in the company. This was a deeply personal, disruptive decision, and it was not something I celebrated. The owners had made up their minds. They told me I would be the new leader and asked how quickly I could move to the corporate headquarters.

By this time, I was significantly healthier emotionally and able to process what I was feeling in a way I could not when my father died. I felt the full weight of the decision the owners were making during an extremely chaotic period. It was April of 2020. No one knew what was going to happen with the virus, the economy, or the long-term effects on the world. In the middle of that unknown, I was being asked to uproot my family, move to a new state, and lead a company with properties across nine states.

I remember being able to sob deeply for the first time in a long time. I thought about how much I loved the house we were living in. Three of my four daughters had lived there since they were babies, and it was the first time I had ever felt a stabilizing connection to a physical home. I did not realize until that moment how much frequently moving as a child had impacted me, or how much a stable house actually meant to my sense of safety.

I told the owners I did not want to move and requested to do the job remotely. Furthermore, we had a foster daughter who legally could not leave the state until we officially adopted her. For the time being, they agreed to let the situation play out and allowed me to work remotely.

By the beginning of 2021, we knew we were moving toward finalizing the adoption of our foster daughter. A court date was set for August with an official October adoption date. When I let the owners of the company know, they were happy for my family, but their very next question was immediate. When are you moving?

A Cautious Optimism

After processing the reality for almost a year, my wife and I decided this relocation would be the best thing for our future. The new city would offer more options for friends, houses, and church potentials.

Before the move, I had begun telling Mary about the severe issues I was experiencing with the faith. I shared my new struggles trying to reconcile how the church was ill-suited to deal with my emotional hurt and, furthermore, they lacked an emphasis on emotional health. Even worse, I was realizing how resistant the religious community was to any discussion about emotional growth and how it relates to how we as Christians think about and interact with the world.

Even though we were scared and unsure, we looked at houses and got excited about what our lives could look like with a fresh start. We visited churches after moving to our new town and eventually landed at a smaller, more intimate church that Mary was really excited about. I was not as enthusiastic, but I wanted to help her with the transition as much as possible.

I was already seriously doubting my ability to stay in the faith, and this new church was unfortunately accelerating that doubt. This was not because of the leadership or any negative interactions with the congregation, but rather because of how seriously and literally they took the words of the Bible.

The Last Bible Study

I remember the dizzying feeling that swept over my body. It felt like the blinding sensation that hits right before you are overcome by rage, almost akin to blacking out. Why was God killing all of the animals? I am not someone who is overly concerned about animals, but for some reason, that specific detail hit a raw nerve. God killing all the people who were doing horrible acts was something I was not happy with either, but at least that action possessed an internal logic. Killing the animals felt completely senseless and excessive. It did not look like a father who deeply loved his creation and wanted what was best for it.

Thoughts rushed through my mind to say out loud, I don’t believe this any longer, this is ridiculous, and leave the study. But for the sake of my wife and her new friendships, I kept my composure.

I sat there spiraling emotionally, and the only thought that grounded me was that when I first believed in Jesus as a teenager, I did not know any systematic theology or any of the Bible. Maybe I could just strip the system away and go back to that simple way of believing. I resolved in my mind to leave this church and stop attending Bible studies, promising myself that I would try my absolute best to hold onto the person of Jesus.

But that would prove almost as impossible as surviving a literal global flood.


Continue the story below…

This is one year after the loss of my father, the summer of 2019. We had two biological girls and opened our house up to foster care shortly after our second child was born. We did it thinking it would take at least six months before we got a placement, but within a month, our phone rang while we were at dinner with friends. They had a three-day-old baby girl that needed immediate placement and asked us if we could come and pick her up.

The whole process was surreal. You show up to the DHS office and a baby is there just waiting to go home to a random family after being ripped away from her biological mother. She was premature and barely over five pounds. I could hold her with one hand. We signed the paperwork and took her home with us. Mary had nursed our other two children and we had never used formula, so we had no clue what to do. Even more than that, she was born at thirty-four weeks so we were frantically googling how to care for a premature baby. We had to wake her up throughout the night to make sure she kept eating to take in enough calories to keep growing.

It was an incredibly challenging time in our life. This was our first placement. She was a brand new baby and even though we had already parented two kids, this was different. We were tasked with caring for and loving a child that we didn’t know how long would be with us and what the future of her life would look like. We didn’t know if the impact we would make would matter or last in the course of her life, or if she would ever even know who we were. We poured our hearts out and didn’t know if there would be any return of love.

A Primal Rage

It was early in the morning during this season and I was changing the diaper of my foster daughter. She was crying like babies tend to do when you are changing them. I felt an intense sense of anger come over me. Children crying can drive any normal person crazy, but this rage was deep and primal. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I had no reason to feel this level of rage about a diaper change, and I didn’t feel it with my other two daughters. This was different, and I couldn’t understand why and it scared me. Thankfully, I had been in therapy since the loss of my father and was beginning to have language and an understanding of what was happening to me behind my conscious mind. I started to understand the thinking that was happening subconsciously.

I was angry. Angry at her. Angry at God.

Why does this little girl get to get rescued from her terrible childhood and get to come live with parents that intentionally chose to open up their homes and pursue her? Why didn’t God send someone to rescue me? Was I not worthy of being rescued? Was I not worthy of pursuit?

The Pain of Emotional Revelation

Therapy had been incredibly challenging for me. When I first went in to process the loss of my father, I wasn’t emotional. The therapy model I sought was CBT because it seemed to make the most sense and be the most logical. I would cognitively talk about my life, make sense of it, and get my actions under control by cognitively controlling my emotions. At least that is what I thought. I never lost emotional composure in my CBT sessions, with the exception of one that I remember vividly.

I was processing an event that had happened at my work. A mother was in the office with her son helping him fill out an application for an apartment. I watched their interaction and felt a deep frustration about how he was talking to his mother who was trying to help him, and I couldn’t pinpoint why. As I told my therapist about this interaction and the anger I was feeling and my lack of understanding, he asked a question that broke my defenses. His question was simply, what does that mean about how you feel about your mother? I started sobbing and said, I never got help from her and I hated how disrespectful this kid was to his mother.

Now I don’t want this therapy example to come across like my father was the good guy and my mother was bad. But what I began to realize after that therapy session was that both of my parents had their own flaws. My mother, while she had never really left me, she was never capable of leading and guiding me. She was physically present, but not emotionally mature or capable of truly leading us. This wasn’t due to anything malicious on her part, but rather her own lack of guidance in her own life and the limited amount of resources she had.

Emotions Are Not a Bug

I had unlocked something I didn’t realize up until this point in my life. Under my deep anger and aggression was a deeper emotion that was trying to be expressed, but my protector had always jumped in to suppress it and protect me from feeling the full weight of it. I realized that running a human system on logic only and suppressing all emotions with the tyrant emotion of anger wasn’t actually healthy and couldn’t deal with the complexity of life. Anger was secondary and always signaling a deeper emotion under the surface.

I had been in therapy now for two years, I had actually switched into a few different forms to deal with the complexity of my trauma (EFT, EMDR and DBT), and I was really beginning to understand the need for emotional expression and sitting and tapping into what I was feeling to prevent aggressive outbursts. I was also listening to a therapy podcast that was talking about the research around how our thinking actually changes our brain structures and how our childhood trauma actually rewires our brains as children. More importantly though was the research that showed how trauma victims could do therapy and actually change their brains as adults.

I was shocked. My prior thinking was woefully inadequate. The irony is that I used to think, what would talking help? It wouldn’t change the past. Little did I realize that the past had changed me biologically, and that by processing my emotions, I could actually work to undo the biological damage that happened to my brain structures.

The Insufficiency of a Systematic Theology

I was doing so much better in relation to feeling my emotions and processing my trauma around my childhood for the first time in my life. But as I began to understand what it means to be an emotionally healthy and expressive person who is honest with what they are feeling and speaks about their emotional needs, I realized how lacking this message was in church. I had heard hundreds of sermons, read many Christian books, and been to countless men’s conferences, but I hadn’t heard about any of these things I was learning in my therapy sessions.

The thought crossed my mind and I couldn’t shake it. How could the last two years of therapy have changed how I relate to my wife, my children, and the world around me more than fifteen years in a rigid theology? How do I make sense of this?

The seismic shift had begun. The foundation of my theological wall was no longer stable.

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It was a Saturday, and I was working on replacing all the interior doors in my house. Home projects were something I really looked forward to and found great joy in. Something about making a place better than it was when I moved in just brought peace to my anxious mind.

My phone rang, and I saw it was my brother calling. When a member of my family calls me, my stomach always drops and I prepare subconsciously for bad news. We are not the family that calls each other just to talk. Almost always, there is an agenda or a piece of bad information to deliver.

“Dad had a heart attack, and they are taking him to the hospital,” my brother said.

I knew this was the day my dad was going to die.

I asked my brother if he was conscious or if they had just revived him. He told me they had already been forced to revive him twice. I calmly sat down in a chair in my bedroom and prepared for what was most likely to happen, while my older brother was frantic and rushing to the hospital to see him. I tried to call the hospital to get information on his condition to see if I should also drive forty-five minutes to see him. But from what I knew about multiple heart attacks, the chances of surviving were very unlikely.

So I kept working on my doors, and cried. Not sobbing, not deeply, just a tear or two every so often. In many ways, I had been preparing for this phone call for the past few months since the last visit with my father. This was one of the hardest things about his death. Because I had been somewhat subconsciously preparing for it, I wasn’t able to truly grieve him.

My protector was already operating behind the scenes since that last visit to protect and prepare me. However, protecting me didn’t always mean doing what was best for me. Anger and suppression were some of his best methods at preventing me from feeling the gravity and weight of a situation. The month before my dad died, I was driving home and feeling a deep anger that I couldn’t put my finger on. It had begun to bleed into my relationship with Mary and my daughter. I would snap about the littlest things and struggle to understand why I was so angry. My emotions felt like such a mystery to me. So, almost a month before my dad died, I called to schedule an appointment for therapy for the first time. I was put on a waitlist and would start in a couple of months.

I was actually all alone when I got the call about my father. Mary had gone to the city with our daughter to hang out with her family. I was thankful for that because I got to process his death by myself, and I felt no pressure to look a certain way. I let Mary know, and when she asked me if I wanted her to come home, I told her no and to just have fun with her sister.

Later that night, we did our normal nightly routine. We would make a snack and watch a show after getting our daughter down. This time we were going to watch a movie. We usually took turns picking what type of movie we watched, but Mary didn’t want to watch any of the movies I was picking. I remember being very aggressive with her and reacting very irrationally. I said something to the effect of, “Are you kidding me? Let me pick the movie, my dad just died!”

She apologized and said, “Sorry, you just seemed like it wasn’t affecting you at all. I didn’t know.” In that moment, I realized how good I had become at suppressing deep emotions and pain, and I knew grieving him was going to be complicated.

We were at a different church at this point in time. We ended up being in four different churches over the course of our time in Stillwater. Without asking me, the pastor decided to come to my father’s funeral in my hometown. I didn’t want him to come. I didn’t have a great relationship with the pastor of this church, but it was a smaller church and we had other friends that we really loved who went to this church, so we stuck with it.

My father’s funeral was one of the most awkward things I’ve ever been to. My grandma had it at her church, and the pastor clearly had never met my father. She gave a mini-sermon about God and then asked the crowd if they had anything good that they wanted to say about my father, and no one stood up to say anything. Then there was a slideshow of my father that didn’t include any photos of us, just photos of the last few years. Ultimately, it felt like I was at a funeral of a random person that I didn’t know.

We got home, and my pastor decided to come over to my house to talk. I didn’t invite him. Really, I was quite annoyed he was there, but I knew he was trying to be kind and do the pastorly thing, so I didn’t tell him to not come. He ended up overstaying his welcome, inferring that my father was in hell, and talking way too long about the bad relationship he had with his own father.

I quietly raged inside. How dare he act like he knew where my father was. He didn’t know God’s mind, or the state of my father’s soul, or what my father’s inner spiritual life looked like. My father didn’t hate God, and every time we talked about spiritual things, he was always interested and willing to listen. He didn’t go to church or read the Bible, but he was never opposed to my religiousness or Jesus. In fact, he told me how much he liked Him. I remember thinking that if God is merciful and forgiving, He could forgive my father and choose not to send him to hell. He would know all of my dad’s struggles and failures, and He would know his heart.

The thing I couldn’t shake, though, was the thought of how my dad died. I had talked to my grandma at the funeral and asked her about that day. She told me that he had been staying in the room I had stayed in when I lived with her in high school. He had shouted for help, stumbled into the hallway, and collapsed. My grandma, who had been a paramedic when she was younger, immediately began CPR.

I couldn’t help but replay that event over and over in my mind. I entered my father’s mind and embodied his fear. I imagined what it would be like to be a 57-year-old man living at home with your mother, absent from your family, and then to have your heart stop beating and know something is deeply wrong. To scream out for help and to make it out of the room. To know that you are in serious trouble and to think, This might be where I die. What rushed to his mind? Regret? Anger? Fear? It all felt like too much, and I would have to stop thinking about it or it would consume me.

I remember googling how to grieve a father who was absent, and I couldn’t find any good resources or help on it. There were people who wrote about how they were glad their parent had died because they abused them, and then people who were grieving because they had lost a parent that was great. But how do you grieve a father who you deeply loved and was a good father when present, but was absent because of his own childhood demons? No one had wisdom on this.

So I felt stuck. I was glad that I already had counseling set up, but it was still almost a month away. I didn’t know how or if it would help. I was skeptical about it. I hated the idea of processing “how I felt.” I thought, How could talking about my emotions make any difference? Once again, I realize the irony of the fact that I married a therapist. But subconsciously, I felt above all of that. That is for people who are emotional, not logical. If they were smart, they’d know that emotions lie and you can’t trust them. If they knew the truth about God that I did, that was all they needed. They didn’t need to process their feelings; they needed to pledge allegiance to the truth of the Gospel. That is where real power for change comes from.

But here I was, angry and unable to grieve the loss of my father. I had the truth, but I wasn’t feeling better, and I wasn’t able to control my anger.

And even worse, a realization began to surface. I had lost a deeply held subconscious belief that I had carried since the day I hugged my father at the gas station after church camp all those years ago. Maybe this story and this message of Jesus would be powerful enough to change my father. Maybe if he could understand it, he could change his life, like I did, and be the present and loving father that I knew he could be. Maybe with this message, I would finally have my earthly father.

But what was painfully clear to me, even more than his physical death, was the death of the hope of his reconciliation.

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It is late and I am cradling my firstborn child in my arms. In order to get her to sleep, most nights she would require us to rock her continuously until her eyes finally closed. As she lay there in my arms, the intensity of my love for her was overwhelming. I cared about this little girl with an intensity I had never experienced before. I was deeply invested in the flourishing of her life and the thought of, I would do anything to protect her and ensure she did not get harmed, crossed my mind.

I remember that moment so vividly because even as I type these words, I tear up. That thought still brings me an immense amount of pain today. Because even though my love for her is pure and untainted, it simultaneously highlights the insufficiencies of my own father’s love, and even more than that, God as a father over me.

The thought that crashed into my mind was a logic loop I could not solve, How could I love my little girl and be willing to do anything to protect her, and God love me with that same fatherly love yet allow the terrible things to happen to me that I would never allow to happen to my daughter if I had the power to stop them?

That episode of deep pain began showing up more and more frequently in me. While things kept getting better for me in many ways, a high paying job with a meaningful mission, a new house to be proud of in the country club, and our first daughter, my deep seated trauma began to surface in ways I did not see coming. My daughter’s birth caused me to confront the realities of my lack of fatherly love in a visceral way that I had been able to suppress throughout most of my adult life.

A Lowering of The Wall

By the end of my senior year I had realized that I wanted to pursue a PhD in theology. Nothing mattered as much as knowing the truth of the Gospel and telling others about it, so it made perfect sense that I would pursue a religious career instead of a secular one.

However, my wife needed to finish her master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy, so we decided that we would stay in Stillwater until she finished her schooling before we would move to Louisville, Kentucky for me to complete my master’s degree at Southern Seminary, the flagship Baptist college. In the meantime, I would start my master’s online while she was finishing her degree, so I enrolled in my first class, early church history.

I was excited about starting school, and at the time, I was the store manager at a local mattress store. I loved that job because in between customers, the environment allowed me to do my classwork during work. I was really excited to begin this class because this timeframe from the Apostles to the Reformation was something I knew almost nothing about, which ironically made up the majority of Christian history.

What I began to realize from this class was how much the early church struggled to make sense of Jesus. There was not a fully formed consensus on who he was, how he related to God, and even how the church should be structured.

Logically, you would think that this would have destabilized me based on my need for certainty. But what it did was actually allow me to feel better about uncertainty and the messiness of life. It was still the same basic software, but it was allowing for God to be trusted to straighten out the mess of life and people to get us to the perfect code. The implicit thought I had was if God could work through the mess of these early church fathers, he could handle the messiness of life.

A New Mission

While in the middle of my semester of online seminary, I got an offer to come and work for a Christian Real Estate Company that had built a property in Stillwater. The owner of the company called me on the phone of the mattress store to offer me a job. He started out by pitching the role and asked me if I had any interest. I told him I appreciated the offer but I enjoyed my current job, was in seminary, and planned to move in a couple of years.

He did not take no for an answer and proceeded to tell me about the Christian mission of the company and the pay. He told me that they had the goal of eventually giving away 90% of their profits to spreading the message of Christianity and only keeping 10% of the profits to pay for operations. He also said that he would give a significant amount of money to my home church each year as well. I jokingly told him he should have led with that and I would consider his offer. I joined the company a week later.

By the end of my first and only seminary class, my thoughts on the rigidity of theology had begun to soften. It is not that I did not think a literalist interpretation was necessary any longer, it is just that I had moved the goalposts. In many ways, thanks to my emotionally healthy wife, I started to see the unhealthiness of how an incredibly tall brick theological wall was isolating and too heavy.

I thought I could remove the top few layers of the wall. The bottom layers, the orthodox beliefs of the scripture, still felt essential because they ultimately kept the uncertainty of life and the fear of death at bay. But with this new found revelation and this new job, I thought maybe this career could be how I make an impact in the world for Jesus. So I poured my heart and soul into growing this company.

Little did I realize that while this was definitely an improved, updated software to my previous extremely rigid literalist framework, it still contained the same core root issues that would ultimately lead to a later collapse.

A Last Visit

While I was learning how to be a protective father to my daughter, my own father was still pretty absent in my life. While he had quit doing meth, he had become a full on alcoholic that was drunk most days. He had only visited me one time since I moved to Stillwater, which was for my daughter’s first birthday.

I had heard from my mom that he had an incident of blacking out while driving and had lost his license. From my background in nutrition, I knew about the symptoms of liver failure, and the last time I had seen my father he had been showing most of the signs. Therefore, after I heard about this incident, I decided that I needed to see him again because I did not know how much time he had left.

I called him and asked him if I could come and pick him up so he could stay the night with us. He agreed to it and we set a date.

When I showed up to pick him up, he had clearly been drinking and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. However, he was very pleasant, kind, and playful, the fun cool dad that I always loved. His visit to our house was mostly uneventful. He stayed the night and we went out for lunch the following day before I drove him back home.

Our conversations were mostly shallow and I could tell his mental state was declining rapidly. When I got to his house, I hugged him a powerful long hug. No one hugged me as powerfully as he did and I loved it.

I drove home from dropping him off reflecting on how bad he looked and how sad I felt about his lack of care for himself. When I got home to decompress with Mary, I told her with tears in my eyes, I think that will most likely be the last time I see my father alive.

I hated that I was right.


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