Part 2: The Healing That Cost Me Belonging

The Church became my community, my identity, my social network, my purpose, my friendships, and my support system.

When religious abuse happened, not just in one church but in every church, I experienced, I began to ask myself hard questions. I wanted to understand what real healing looked like. I began to study about trauma, the body, the nervous system, and eventually how to process and regulate my nervous system. This was the moment everything began to change.

As I learned to regulate my nervous system, I met parts of myself I had never truly known. I began to understand love without earning it, safety without control, and peace without perfection.

Once I experienced true safety within my own body, the conditional love with religion no longer felt like love. Once I began to love myself, I could no longer settle for relationships that required me to shrink, perform, or pretend. The very healing that brought me home to myself also opened my eyes to what was never real. When I stopped performing, most of my relationships began to fade.

What I thought were genuine friendships started to shift. I didn't leave them, they left me. The grief of losing that community was very difficult.

It was disorienting to realize I didn't know what authentic community looked like. But through the loss came truth. I was never meant to find belonging in spaces that required me to lose myself.

I didn't abandon my faith; I began reclaiming it. I never walked away from God. I walked toward what was real.

In part 3, I will share what rebuilding connection looks like on the other side of destruction, and how love becomes sacred again when it's rooted in freedom and authenticity.

By Carrie Payne