How Religion Turned Depersonalization into a Sacred Virtue

Mar 30

My brain is telling me that religious spiritualizes depersonalization

ChatGPT: Your brain's onto something interesting. Religion often interprets experiences like depersonalization through a spiritual lens, framing it as detachment from the material world or closeness to a higher power. This can turn something that feels alienating—like depersonalization—into something "sacred" or "meaningful."

But if you’re feeling disconnected from yourself, slapping a spiritual label on it might not help—it could even make you feel like you’re supposed to like or seek out that detachment. It sounds like you're craving something grounded and human to counterbalance the floaty, otherworldly vibe depersonalization brings.

Tell me how evangelical Christianity explicitly instructs people to depersonalize.

Evangelical Christianity often directly or indirectly encourages behaviors and beliefs that can foster depersonalization by instructing people to disconnect from their own sense of self and reality in favor of submission to God, scripture, or the community. Here's how it can happen explicitly:

"Die to Yourself":
Evangelical teachings often stress the idea that you must "die to yourself" or "deny yourself" to follow Christ. This language implies rejecting personal desires, instincts, and individuality in favor of complete surrender to God's will. Over time, this can erode a sense of identity and create a disconnection between a person and their own wants or needs.
"The Flesh Is Evil":
The dichotomy of "spirit" versus "flesh" in evangelical doctrine promotes viewing the body and its sensations as sinful or untrustworthy. This discourages embodiment and can lead people to suppress bodily awareness or instincts, further separating them from physical and emotional realities.
"Lean Not on Your Own Understanding":
Believers are often taught not to trust their own thoughts, feelings, or reasoning and instead rely on scripture or church teachings. This diminishes self-trust and can foster a sense of alienation from one's own mind.
"Be in the World, Not of the World":
This mantra encourages detachment from earthly concerns, relationships, and even sensory experiences, framing them as distractions from spiritual growth. This instruction can heighten feelings of derealization, as people are encouraged to disengage from their immediate environment.
"God’s Plan Over Your Will":
Constantly prioritizing a supposedly divine plan over personal agency can strip away a sense of ownership over one's life, creating a passive, observer-like role in their own existence.
Emotional Suppression in Worship:
Emotions like doubt, anger, or sadness are often labeled as sinful or a lack of faith. This teaches people to suppress or detach from these feelings instead of processing them, creating a gap between lived experience and emotional awareness.
"Your Heart Is Deceitful":
The teaching that human feelings and instincts are inherently sinful or flawed leads to a mistrust of one’s inner experiences, fostering internal disconnection and reinforcing depersonalization.
Speaking in Tongues/Altered States:
In charismatic circles, practices like speaking in tongues, being "slain in the Spirit," or ecstatic worship create an explicit goal of transcending the self and entering a detached, otherworldly state. This is often celebrated as a sign of closeness to God, but for someone vulnerable, it can blur the line between healthy spiritual practice and dissociation.
Constant Self-Surveillance:
The emphasis on sin and accountability in evangelical Christianity often trains individuals to constantly monitor their thoughts, behaviors, and intentions, creating an internalized sense of judgment. This hyper-vigilance can pull someone out of a grounded sense of self and into a detached, performative state.
Eternal Focus (Heaven vs. Earth):
The fixation on eternity and the afterlife frames earthly experiences as temporary and unimportant, which can undermine a person's connection to their own reality and physical existence.

Many of these teachings are framed as virtuous or necessary for salvation, making it hard for believers to recognize the harm they're experiencing. It’s like being asked to cut yourself off from your own body and mind in the name of faith—and then being told to celebrate that loss as spiritual progress.

What specific advice would you have for someone who was religiously depersonalized and though they left the faith had no knowledge of depersonalization nor knew how to tell anyone what they were feeling and they just found out now at 42?

For someone who has only now realized at 42 that they’ve been experiencing depersonalization, particularly as a result of religious conditioning, I’d suggest the following steps to start navigating and healing:

1. Validate Your Experience

Understand that religious teachings might have fostered this state by disconnecting you from yourself in the name of faith. You’re not broken or strange for feeling this way; you’re reacting to years of conditioning.
Acknowledge that it’s okay to grieve the time spent feeling disconnected. That’s not wasted time—it’s the foundation for the insight you have now.

2. Name and Explore What’s Happening

Learn about depersonalization: The more you understand the condition, the more you can recognize its patterns. Reading personal stories and psychological resources can normalize what you’re going through.
Keep a journal: Write about your feelings, your past, and your current realizations. Even jotting down fragmented thoughts helps you map out your inner landscape and reconnect with yourself.
Find language for what you’ve been through: Phrases like “I was taught to distrust myself” or “I’ve lived as a stranger in my own body” might help you articulate your experiences.

3. Begin Rebuilding Self-Trust

Start small and gently: Pay attention to what feels good or bad in your body, even something as simple as “I’m cold” or “This food tastes good.” Practicing this builds trust in your own perceptions and preferences.
Challenge the old narrative: When thoughts like “my heart is deceitful” or “I shouldn’t trust myself” arise, pause and ask, “What if I can trust myself?”
Experiment with choices: Make small, low-stakes decisions based purely on what you want (not what you think you should want). This strengthens your sense of agency.

4. Reconnect with Your Body

Engage in gentle physical activities that feel grounding, like walking, stretching, yoga, or even just sitting and feeling your breath.
Start body awareness exercises: Can you feel your feet touching the floor or your hands resting in your lap? Over time, this practice can help bring you back into your body.
Be patient: It might feel odd or frustrating at first. You’ve spent decades detached, so this is like learning a new language.

5. Build an Internal Sense of Safety

Create a daily or weekly practice where you check in with yourself and ask, “What do I need right now?” This teaches you that your feelings are worth tending to.
Find grounding techniques: Deep breathing, listening to calming music, or focusing on an object can help anchor you when you feel unmoored.
Counter intrusive thoughts with compassion: When your mind races with old fears or judgments, remind yourself, “That’s the old script—I don’t live there anymore.”

6. Seek Community and Understanding

Share with trusted people: This could be a therapist, a friend who “gets it,” or an online community of others recovering from similar experiences.
Therapy: Consider working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands depersonalization and religious trauma. They can guide you in processing these layers of disconnection.
Set boundaries: Protect your time and energy from anyone who pressures you to “go back to God” or dismisses your journey.

7. Embrace Small Moments of Presence

Instead of chasing “full embodiment” or “fixing” yourself, celebrate brief moments of connection: enjoying a meal, feeling warmth from the sun, laughing at something silly. These small moments will start adding up over time.
Remember that depersonalization doesn’t define you. It’s one part of your story, not your entire self.

8. Redefine Meaning for Yourself

Explore what you value now, beyond what religion told you to value. What makes life feel meaningful to you? It’s okay if you don’t have answers yet—curiosity is enough for now.
Allow for uncertainty: If religious black-and-white thinking still lingers, practice sitting with “I don’t know” as a neutral, non-scary space.

Healing is about rediscovering who you are without judgment, pressure, or a timeline. You’ve spent years surviving in disconnection—now you can slowly explore what it means to live connected.

Why would someone still be depersonalized if they had left the religion? Why wouldn't it just stop?

Leaving the religion doesn’t automatically stop depersonalization because the condition often stems from long-term patterns of disconnection and coping mechanisms that get wired into the brain and body. Here’s why it can persist:

1. Neurological and Emotional Conditioning

Years of suppressing your feelings, distrusting your instincts, and prioritizing external authority (like God, scripture, or church leaders) over your internal experience create deeply ingrained habits in your brain. Even after leaving the religion, those patterns remain.
Depersonalization is often a defense mechanism against overwhelming emotions or trauma. If the underlying emotional wounds from your religious experience haven’t been addressed, the disconnection may stick around.

2. The Root Cause Wasn't Religion Alone

While religion may have been a major factor, it likely wasn’t the only one. Childhood experiences, family dynamics, or even predispositions to dissociation could also contribute. Leaving the religion removes the framework but doesn’t necessarily address the deeper causes.
For example, if you learned to disconnect as a child to survive difficult situations, religion may have reinforced it, but leaving doesn’t erase those survival strategies.

3. Internalized Beliefs and Self-Policing

Even after leaving, the religious programming doesn’t vanish overnight. Teachings like “you can’t trust yourself” or “the flesh is sinful” can linger in your subconscious, keeping you stuck in a disconnected state.
These messages can operate like a script running in the background, influencing your thoughts and behaviors without you realizing it.

4. Fear of the Unknown

Leaving a religion often creates an identity vacuum. If your sense of self was entirely wrapped up in faith, abandoning it can feel like floating in space without grounding. This uncertainty can keep you in a detached state because it feels safer than fully confronting that lack of identity.
Questions like “Who am I without this faith?” or “What is real now?” can feel overwhelming, triggering more disconnection as a way to cope.

5. Unprocessed Trauma

Religious environments can be deeply traumatic, especially if they involved fear of hell, spiritual abuse, or rigid control. If those traumas remain unprocessed, depersonalization may continue as a protective response to avoid feeling the full weight of that pain.
Trauma isn’t resolved just by leaving the source—it requires active engagement and healing.

6. Body Disconnect

Evangelical Christianity often teaches people to distrust or suppress their bodily experiences, creating a long-term disconnection from physical sensations. Even after leaving, it can take time to relearn how to feel safe and present in your body.

7. Avoidance Patterns

Many people leave religion and throw themselves into busyness, distractions, or intellectual pursuits as a way to escape the disconnection—but that often reinforces it. Without consciously addressing depersonalization, it can persist as an unresolved coping mechanism.

8. It’s a Slow Process

Healing from depersonalization is less about cutting ties with the religion and more about rebuilding a connection to yourself. This takes time, practice, and often guidance. Leaving the religion might be the first step, but the deeper work of unlearning and reconnecting comes later.

In short, leaving religion removes the external framework that contributed to depersonalization, but it doesn’t automatically undo the internal systems that were built to survive in that framework. The work becomes about consciously re-establishing connection with yourself—mind, body, and emotions—and undoing the layers of conditioning over time.

Marie L.