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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about the gratitude they’ve found for their religious upbringing.
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13 comments
Haven’t finished listening yet- but I’m so grateful for this! I left the same religion approximately 5 years ago and had the same experience. Everyone else I found who left was all vim and vitriol and I was just a dying star blackhole of sadness collapsing in on itself. I could never bring myself to feel anger towards the religion, because it changed my parents lives so radically when I was a toddler (they were heavy drug users, mom was suicidal), and therefore the entire trajectory of my childhood. The contrast between the lives of my cousins and my own makes it obvious that the religion gave me an extreme advantage. I ended up being very privileged by comparison, even if you factor in what I ultimately lost and the grief I experienced from losing my entire social support structure at age 25.
C.G. Jung summed it up best “All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.” My parents needed that therapy, potentially still do, and I cannot bring myself to begrudge them that. My boyfriend also said it nicely once, “They did exactly what they were supposed to do as parents- they got to a better place so you could have a better life.”
How could I harbor ill-will towards them for that? If anything I feel guilt that I stood on their shoulders, was able to climb higher, and consequently left them behind in what sometimes feels like a lower ring of hell.
My comfort is that I know if I had children that’s exactly what I would want them to do. Even if they never consciously allow themselves to have that thought and only fret for my soul forever, it’s still true that they gave me a profound gift. I think ultimately the greatest gift a parent can give a child.
I also am grateful that I was forced to work through that dark sadness and those emotions on my own. The religion is so good at feeding you mental stories that I really didn’t have any idea of how to author my own. And if my growth path has taught me anything it’s that learning how to tell your own narrative with purpose and intention is the #1 way to get to a place of health and wellbeing.
I don’t know if it was more of coincidence, but it was amazing to find this episode back to back with Why the World Needs Introverted Intuition, as I thought this episode was a very good representation of YOUR Ni!
The idea of being immune to being triggered sounds amazing. Though I’m not sure if it’s possible to fully achieve. I’ve found that I’m naturally harder to trigger than most people (largely because I’m fairly easy-going personality wise), and I’ve worked towards becoming less easily triggered. But there are a very select list of things that of someone does or says to me or someone else, I will instinctively have a more volatile reaction.
I’m still loosely in the religion I spent most of my youth in, but decided a few years ago that I wanted it to be a solely personal experience. So, I distanced myself from public spaces of religious expression for the most part. I found a lot of the ways I saw the religion used and the religion expressed were wholly inauthentic to what I saw as the true core and meaning and, at worst, very toxic. So, I can understand feeling gratitude for the paradigm of childhood because what I essentially did was take the things that resonated with me and kept them for myself.
I can more relate to the experience of having transcended the political ideology that was dominant in my upbringing. I wasn’t too engrossed in it since the process of me leaving coincided with my coming of age. That’s coincidentally just when external factors drove me to abandon significantly large chunks of it. Had those outside events not happened, I think I would’ve stayed more in line with the party and adopted my parents’ stance of “We disagree with you on some things, but you’re better than the other guys.”
In the end of the day, it was actually another paradigm that was instilled in me that caused me to turn away from that political ideology. And that was respect. My parents raised me to be open and accepting towards people of all backgrounds, even if that doesn’t always translate into being the nicest (they usually line up well). I felt that the ideology had turned into a force that was actively being used as a tool of disrespect. This was abhorrent to my introverted feeling since I’ve integrated my concept of respect as my guiding principle. When I’ve evaluated my actions and responses, the concept of respect has consistently popped up as something I subconsciously consider pretty much constantly.
The feeling I felt when realizing these things was mostly frustration, which is very closely connected to anger. I also feel that the things I took from both my religious and political backgrounds are often connected in my mind because the two factors were so very much conflated together in a lot of circles. Though since I only consider myself to have left the political ideology, I’ll just comment on that. I get a lot of my strong work ethic from that particular paradigm and my persistence and perseverance to improve my own standing. It also instilled ideas of self-reliance in me as well. Then there are principles embedded in the ideology that are more society wide and are espoused by people regardless of major paradigms. I still consider these to be things I received from the paradigm. I get my sense of the rule of law, justice, and rights from that environment.
I think there’s also an inherent advantage in just understanding and comprehending the paradigm you came from because it allows you to develop more empathy and understanding with others. I’ve encountered a lot of people from different backgrounds who seem to have trouble comprehending the thought processes behind the religious and political groups of my youth. And I find that, even if it’s an aspect I rejected, I can utilize my own experience to try to bridge some understanding.
I especially try to do this politically. In a heavily polarized society with two major parties, there seems to be a concerningly sizable portion of people who are willing to disregard everything about people on the other side. It’s a gross overgeneralization. And people can make their own choices of who to associate with and who to take seriously. But, to this day, some of the most important people in my life, past and present, subscribe to this ideology. Several of these people have supported me and saw my talents and value when not many people seemed to. I can disavow some of the things they are complacent with, but I know that they and most others do not represent the worst impulses of the party. And I try to argue this whenever the need arises. I want to foster an understanding for others about why genuinely good people might think a certain way or hold certain beliefs and prioritize certain issues. And I see this as a strength I have as someone who left one political paradigm and, while not truly on board with, have found myself closer to another.