Why Do I Feel Disconnected from the Version of Me Who Believed?
The Pattern
There was a version of you who knelt without irony. Who lit the candle and meant the candle. Who believed in the story without flinching. You can remember her. You can describe the room where she lived. And you cannot reach her from the inside of who you are now. You grieve her without quite knowing how to name the loss.
Origins & Context
The psychologist James Fowler, whose stages of faith development drew on Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget, described what he called the stage of conjunctive faith, the period in which the certainties of early belief give way to a more complex, more honest, and often more lonely relationship with the sacred. The grief for the earlier self is structural. You cannot return to the room because you are no longer the person who could fit inside it.
The trauma researcher Marlene Winell, who coined the term religious trauma syndrome, documented that the deconstruction of an early religious self is often a grieving process indistinguishable from bereavement. The believer was a real self. Her loss requires the same care as any other death.
The reverence she carried is yours. The form she carried it in is allowed to change.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it when you walk past a place of worship and feel a small, sharp ache you cannot place. You notice it in the way you can no longer say the prayers without hearing the seams. You notice the strange split in which the intellectual self has moved on and the embodied self is still mourning.
You notice it in the way you envy the people who never stopped. You notice it in the way you sometimes go through the motions anyway, hoping she will return. You notice the moments when grief and reverence become indistinguishable.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Loss of First Naivete (Paul Ricoeur), the necessary and grievable end of the unreflective belief of childhood. It is also named as Religious Trauma Syndrome (Marlene Winell), the psychological aftermath of leaving a high-demand religious framework that doubled as identity. The developmental version is named as Conjunctive Faith (James Fowler), the more honest and lonelier stage that comes after the first certainties dissolve.
Related entries in this library: Inner Child, Complex Grief, Reparenting.
Nikita's Note
The believer is not dead. She is in a room you are not currently allowed to enter. The deconstruction was real and necessary. The grief is also real and necessary, and it is allowed to be both.
You do not have to return to the original framework to honor her. You can build her a new shelf inside the more honest life. You can light a candle without believing what the candle used to mean. The reverence she carried is yours. The form she carried it in is allowed to change.
From the work
The reverence she carried is yours. The form she carried it in is allowed to change.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.