But today's episode is going to be quite a bit different than my normal content, because I'm not going to be reading through Bible stories or deconstructing the teachings of Jesus.

Instead, I want to share a very personal story that I think will be very relevant to the content that I make here.

I think it's important that ex-Christians, they share their stories of religious trauma.

The whole purpose of this channel is to encourage critical thinking so that we can reduce harm.

And we can cut down on the amount of harm that is being caused in the name of Jesus, God, Christianity, these ideologies.

And so if I'm going to talk about the harm and talk about the religious trauma, I think it's only fair that I share my story.

And I talk about how it impacted me, because I am just one person in a sea of thousands, millions of other people who have also experienced religious trauma.

I think it's really important that I share this story so that I can provide some background and context to why I'm here.

This is not an attempt to gain your sympathy or to make you feel bad for me.

This is something that happened to me a long time ago.

It has deeply impacted me and my mental health, but I am healing.

And so this is not an attempt to gain sympathy from you.

You do not need to feel bad for me.

I'm okay.

Secondly, this is not a story about why I lost my faith or why I'm no longer a Christian.

A lot of times Christians tend to think that it is our church hurt or our religious trauma that causes us to lose faith.

But they don't realize that there's a lot of steps usually in between.

And that often the church hurt comes after we've already started questioning and losing our faith.

So it's really important that we make that distinction right up front.

I also want to say that even though this was incredibly traumatic for me and that I have experienced symptoms of PTSD since this event,

I consider myself very lucky that this is the most traumatic thing that's happened to me.

Because there's a lot of people out there that have experienced a lot worse.

But one thing that I've learned about trauma is that it does not care who else has experienced what.

You don't get to choose what traumatizes you.

You don't get to choose what impacts you negatively.

That it just does.

And it's just something you have to live with and deal with.

And that's what I'm doing.

So just a quick background.

A lot of you might know this.

Many of you might not.

I was born and raised Southern Baptist.

I said the prayer to be saved at five years old.

I said it again at 14.

And though I was raised in a very strict fundamentalist culture, we were also Baptists.

And if you know anything about Baptists, they can be pretty wishy-washy.

Okay?

Like one foot in the church, one foot in the world.

So that kind of gives you some idea of how I was raised.

It was very much, our religion was very much for show.

But at home, it was a lot more relaxed.

And up until I was about 14, 15, my upbringing was, I think, relatively normal.

Though very steeped in that Southern Christian culture.

I was allowed to listen to secular music.

I was allowed to watch secular TV.

But then when I was about 14, I rededicated my life to Jesus.

And then from there on out, I really got serious about my faith.

And very devoted to Jesus.

And I think this also kind of encouraged my home life and my family.

They, too, got a lot more devout.

And I'd say I was a bit of a golden child in my family.

I had a very large family.

Lots of aunts and uncles and cousins.

And I was the firstborn.

So I had a lot of responsibility to do things the right way and to be an example.

And so I took that role very seriously.

And I devoted myself to the teachings of Jesus and to the church.

And then when I was about 17, I really started questioning what I believed.

Because I was being exposed to new ideologies.

I was digging deeper into the Bible.

And I had a lot of questions.

A lot of questions that people couldn't answer.

So I started really digging into it for myself.

Trying to figure out what I believed.

And when I was around 18, I started going to a different church.

Because I felt like the church that I was raised in wasn't really aligning with what I was finding out about the Bible and about Jesus.

And so I wanted to kind of branch out and try something new.

So my family went to their church.

And I went to my church on Sundays.

And through that process, I only got more confused.

I realized that Christianity was vast.

There were a lot of beliefs within it.

That everyone who claimed to be a Christian had their own idea about who Jesus was and what the Bible said.

And I just, through my searching and my desperation of trying to find God and trying to find the truth, I became more confused.

And very tired.

Very, very tired of trying to figure things out.

So I kind of put my relationship with God on pause.

I didn't give up.

I didn't stop being a Christian.

I still considered myself a Christian.

I still believed in God.

Believed in Jesus.

But I didn't know what to believe about God and Jesus.

I just wanted to live my life.

And I wanted to go out with my friends.

And I wanted to be a normal 18-year-old girl.

And so I stopped going to church.

I stopped reading the Bible.

And I was still living at home.

But I was kind of doing my own thing.

I lived in a college town, so there was always partying going on.

And I was making friends that were going to these parties.

And so I, too, started going to these parties and living a little bit more of that worldly lifestyle that they warn you about in the church.

And this caused a lot of concern in my family.

They were seeing me do these things.

They didn't like it.

I was kind of butt in heads with my parents for a while.

And one day I actually tried to move out.

I moved in with someone that I knew at that time who offered me kind of a temporary place to stay.

I just kind of packed up my stuff and left and decided I was going to go out on my own.

And I had all my stuff, like, packed up in trash bags in the back of my car.

I was at work one day, and I came out to my car, and all of my trash bags were gone.

All of my stuff was not in my car.

And there was a note on my car from my family, my parent, that told me to come home.

They wanted me to come home.

They had keys to my car because my car was financed by my parents.

Though I had a job and I was working, I had been kind of working to move out, and they didn't want me to move out.

It was a whole thing.

But my mom had a key to my car, and she came.

She took all my stuff, left a note, told me to come home.

And I really didn't have a choice.

I had to go home because that's where all my stuff was.

My clothes and everything I had.

I was not raised in a way that prepared me to live out in the real world.

My parents wanted me to stay home to live there until I got married and then move in with my husband.

Or my husband and I could move in there temporarily and then move out.

They very much wanted me under their roof.

So I was just not prepared.

And so I realized that, and I went home.

And I was there for a little while.

And then one day, I was coming home from work.

I saw a vehicle in the drive that belonged to an aunt and uncle of mine that didn't really come around very often.

And I walked in, and my aunt came up to me, and she asked if she could talk to me in private.

So we went to my room.

My mother opened the door to my room and asked me to step out into the living room.

It's funny because I remember I was wearing, I had changed into comfy clothes for the house.

And I was wearing like these, I don't know, just normal shorts and a tank top.

And she said, I need you to change your clothes.

And I thought that was really weird because I was like, why do I need to change my clothes?

My family is here.

It's just my dad out there, you know.

And she's like, just do it.

Your father's out there, so change your clothes.

Which, that's a whole other thing, you know.

If we're telling teenage girls to change their clothes because a grown man has been invited to the house and can't see her in a tank top,

I think that that says a lot more about the grown man than it does the teenage girl.

But regardless, I changed my clothes, and I walked out into the living room.

And when I got out there, the living room had been set up like intervention style, like all the, you know, big circle of chairs.

And there were all these people there.

They had all planned it to arrive when I was being talked to in my room.

They all came into the house.

There were 12 people there, including the pastor at the church, friends of my parents, my grandparents.

There were aunts and uncles there.

And there were my Sunday school teacher and a friend from church who was kind of like a mentor.

They were all there with their Bibles and tissues.

And some of them were crying.

I was asked to sit on the couch in between my grandparent and my parent with everybody circled around me looking at me.

And I'm trying to not be specific with who did what, because this is not about that.

And I'm not trying to put blame on people or to expose people.

So you might hear me just say parent or a person, because I'm trying to tell this story without getting too personal about other people.

But a parent had a stack of papers.

I was like, I don't know, like this.

I don't know.

In my memory, it was like this thick, but it was probably only like this thick.

And it was sitting in their lap.

And it turns out that these papers were printouts of all of my online activity, my emails, messages between friends on Facebook, text messages, Internet activity.

Because my parents had installed a program on my computer, unknown to me when I was gone at some point, to keep track of me and to log everything that I was doing.

It basically tracked everything, made a recording, and then sent that to them so that they could see who I was talking to, what I was doing, where I was going, even though I was an adult.

I was 18 years old.

And that is illegal.

It is illegal to install that on anybody's computer device that doesn't know about it that is over the age of 18.

So they had been tracking all of everything.

They had been watching me, basically, trying to keep tabs on me to make sure that I wasn't doing anything crazy.

And they were holding on to that stack.

I assume they had showed other people there my own private, my private life, my private conversations.

And they went around in a circle talking about how I was making really bad choices, that I was going down a really bad path, and that I needed to turn back to Jesus.

And they took turns.

The pastor said some words.

My parents said some words.

And to be honest, a lot of it is a blur.

I really don't remember much of what was said or really anything that was said because I just remember sitting there in shock.

I was just in shock.

I felt cornered.

I felt attacked.

I felt embarrassed because I'm like, what do these people know about me?

You know, what kind of what bits of my private life have been exposed to all these people that I didn't invite them to know about me?

And I think my head was just like spinning and I was just sitting there frozen and afraid.

I remember at one point I just kind of stopped and I was like, I appreciate all of your concern.

I love you all.

But this is crazy.

This this is a lot.

This is really, really not OK.

And it was actually at that point that my former Sunday school teacher and church mentor, they actually spoke up and they said, hey, can we pull you outside for a minute?

Can we just talk to you, please?

And I agreed.

They actually apologized and they said that.

They did not know what that was going to be.

They didn't realize that they were ambushing me, that the parent that had reached out to them to ask them to show up told them that I was seeking help, that I was wanting to come back to Jesus and that I needed support around me.

I needed my my community to kind of come behind me and support me and help me with that.

And so they were there under a false assumption about what the intentions were for that night.

And they recognized that what was being done was really not appropriate or OK.

And so they offered to just be there and to support me.