Finding the Missing Piece: Understanding Your Fragmented Sense of Self After Spiritual Abuse
OK, so I never knew what a sense of self was or that it could be fragmented but after telling you what I've been experiencing, you've been telling me I've been experiencing a fragmented sense of self. Since it's all I've ever known and since I experienced spiritual abuse, can you explain to me simply what sense of self is, how it's experienced in the average person, and how it can be impacted, specifically how did it impact me?
ChatGPT: A sense of self is basically your internal feeling of who you are—your identity, your personality, your preferences, your boundaries, your emotions, your thoughts. It’s the thing that makes you feel like you consistently over time.
How the Average Person Experiences a Sense of Self:
Most people develop a stable sense of self in childhood. By adulthood, they can generally:
Feel like the same person from one day to the next.
Trust their own thoughts, feelings, and desires without second-guessing.
Have a natural sense of what they like, dislike, and believe.
Feel internally "whole" rather than like a collection of disconnected thoughts or roles.
That doesn't mean people never question themselves, but at their core, they know who they are.
How a Sense of Self Can Be Fragmented:
Your sense of self can become fragile, unclear, or fragmented when:
You grow up in an environment that discourages personal agency (e.g., fundamentalist religion).
Your emotions, desires, and thoughts are treated as untrustworthy, sinful, or wrong.
You adapt to survive by becoming who others expect you to be instead of developing naturally.
You experience trauma that makes you disconnect from your own experiences (depersonalization).
How This Impacted You:
You never knew you were supposed to have a core self.
Since you’ve always existed in a state of adaptation (fitting into religious, social, and survival-based expectations), you never had the chance to just be and see what you felt like.
Spiritual abuse forced you to disconnect from yourself.
Christianity and purity culture told you your thoughts, feelings, and desires (especially sexual ones) were sinful and dangerous. You weren’t allowed to trust your internal compass.
You learned to suppress your real thoughts and feelings.
Your mind developed a protective system where parts of you (like your Coked Up Manager) stepped in to keep things running and avoid deep emotional pain.
This led to you feeling like your thoughts disappear before you can hold onto them, like your mind pulls things off-stage before you can even process them.
You experience moments of clarity but then panic.
When you do get glimpses of what feels like you (often during cognitive releases), you feel a moment of relief—then your mind freaks out because it’s unfamiliar.
You struggle to know what you actually want or feel.
You experience confusion about emotions, reading, and even sex because you didn’t grow up trusting your own instincts.
You wonder, Do I actually like this? Am I feeling the right thing? because your ability to just be in an experience was hijacked early on.
You feel a constant push and pull between ‘finding yourself’ and feeling like it’s slipping away.
When you slow down (like now, after making your life stable), you feel lost because there’s nothing external telling you who to be.
The silence is loud, but your head isn’t quiet.
What This Means for You:
You’re not broken. You’re not defective. You just didn’t get to develop your sense of self in the typical way. You’re only now getting the chance to ask, Who am I when no one is telling me what to be?
Your mind has been working overtime to keep you functioning instead of feeling like a whole person. And now that you're facing that, it makes total sense that you feel lost, disoriented, or panicked.
Does this description of your experience feel right to you?
