The Phantom Pew: Why Your Brain Still Feels Like It’s In Church (Part 1)
- Courtney Heard
- 41 minutes ago
- 10 min read
You are a grown adult. You have seen genitals. You have birthed babies. You have barfed all over your cousin’s bachelor party and lived to tell the tale. Yet, somehow, you still can't seem to give yourself permission to sleep in on a Sunday morning without the guilt. You left the pews a decade ago. You burned the prayer journals. You finally evicted Thunder Daddy from his gold-plated penthouse in your mind.
So, why does the shame still hit harder than Joe-Bob's Purple-Durple Churry-Bomb high dose edibles?
There's no easy way to say it: this lingering, hollow ache is Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS).
[SOURCE: Marlene Winell, Leaving the Fold, 2011]
It is not imaginary.
It is not you being dramatic.
It is not “conviction from the Holy Spirit.”
It is conditioning.
It is a structural alteration of your wetwear. Your brain is essentially haunted by the ghosts of sermons past. To put it simply: the lingering spectre of your churchy upbringing are still bouncing off the walls of your skull.
This isn't going to be some fluffy "spiritual journey." This is a gritty autopsy of your own conditioning. Your frontal lobe was hijacked by a high-speed delivery system for pure, unadulterated horseshit.
The cleanup is going to be messy.
The Sacred G-String: Neural Chafing and the Art of Self-Sabotage
Indoctrination is like a spiritual g-string: It's three sizes too small. It's made of coarse burlap. It's currently sawing your sanity in half.
Many of you spent your childhoods being told that your natural parts are a threat to the universe. The church acted like your meat garden was a biological weapon. They swore that if anyone caught a glimpse of your fun bags, the whole world would spontaneously combust.
You know, logically, that your neighbour is not going to drop dead because they peeped your pork sword through the window while you were waiting for the coffee to brew. However, the church convinced you that your very thoughts were a health threat. They treated your natural desires the way you might treat a retired fireman touring Walmart with assless chaps. They repeated it. They repeated it again. They pounded it into your skull until the mere thought of the one-eyed trouser snake sent you into a conniption worthy of the Sunday stage in a Pentecostal church.
At its core, this has always been about control, with “modesty” serving as the marketing department. They want you to think your own brain is a hazardous waste site. They want you to distrust your very senses. They want you to loathe yourself so thoroughly that the only path to happiness is grovelling at the foot of a magic zombie.
It was driven so deeply into you, that even when you finally rip that burlap thong off, you still walk like you’re wearing it. The mental indentations are deep. You still flinch at the thought of pleasure. You still treat your own skin like a crime scene.
This is the phantom itch of Religious Trauma Syndrome.
The stakes are so much higher than chafing undies. When you believed, they were about damnation and the total collapse of your eternal salvation if you dared to be free. That's no small thing.
Fear is a Hell of a Drug
When you were told, repeatedly, that:
You are inherently sinful.
Your thoughts are monitored.
Your desires are dangerous.
Eternal torture is on the table.
One mistake could cost you forever.
The amygdala heard “existential threat” and built circuitry accordingly.
The human fear system (right there in the amygdala) encodes threats rapidly and deeply, especially when paired with authority and repetition, which is entirely unfortunate, because Sunday school specialized in both.[SOURCE: LeDoux, 1996]
Fear-based religious messaging, particularly about hell, activates the same neural pathways involved in survival-based threat responses. Translation? Sermons about hell light up the brain’s threat circuitry the way any survival alarm would. [SOURCE: Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011]
Your brain processed it as a burning building. Not metaphor. Not a cautionary tale or a harmless fable. It's straight up life and death to a kid; it's fight or flight, a threat to their very existence.
The amygdala does not give a shit about theology. It responds to perceived threat. And hell was presented to you as a five-alarm inferno with your fucking name on it.
Of course you still have fear. Who the fuck wouldn't?
That wiring doesn’t disappear just because you read a little Hitchens.
Symptoms of Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS): What It Actually Feels Like
Religious Trauma Syndrome doesn’t announce itself with a trumpet blast. It doesn’t send you a diagnostic pop-up. It shows up when you’re folding laundry, enjoying a BJ, or trying to have a calm Tuesday... and suddenly your nervous system reacts like you’ve just committed a felony against the cosmos.
You know you don’t believe in hell. But your body still sometimes does.
Here’s what that can actually look like:
1. Persistent Hypervigilance Around “Sin”
You no longer accept the doctrine, but your brain still scans your thoughts for violations. A stray sexual idea, a critical thought about religion, even a moment of pride can trigger a flash of anxiety before logic catches up. This is a conditioned threat response. When children are repeatedly told their thoughts are dangerous, can you blame the brain for learning to treat internal experience as risk?
That reaction was drilled in before you even knew what a prefrontal cortex was. Years of adults pairing normal human impulses with eternal consequences turns your nervous system into a smoke detector that goes off when you make toast. The theology may have moved out, but the alarm system is still shrieking at burnt crumbs.
While your former church friends might think you're being melodramatic, you’re really just running an outdated firewall that was installed by people who thought curiosity was a virus.
You just need a little emotional IT and you'll be set.
2. Anxiety Linked to Pleasure or Autonomy
Many people raised in high-control religion were trained to treat joy like contraband. Independence? Suspicious. Sexual expression? Basically a felony with eternal sentencing guidelines. When you grow up hearing that happiness is a gateway drug to damnation, your nervous system doesn’t just forget that memo because you read a few science books and unfollowed your pastor.
So now, when life feels good, when the sex is solid, the career hums, the Sunday morning is deliciously godless, there’s a tiny internal flinch. A reflexive “careful.” You catch yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the lightning bolt. Or the divine audit.
That flinch is conditioning. Years of pairing pleasure with punishment trained your nervous system to brace first and ask questions later.
Your body spent a long time learning that freedom came with consequences. It’s going to need more than a podcast episode to accept that the sky is no longer keeping score.
3. Excessive Moral Scrupulosity
A disturbing number of ex-believers stagger through adulthood like they’re still being graded by an invisible dean with a clipboard and a flamethrower. Every social interaction becomes a damn ethics exam. You say “no” to someone and immediately draft a three-paragraph apology like you’ve just detonated a small village. You over-explain. You over-compensate. You try to glow with moral purity so bright it could guide ships through fog.
Why?
Because you were raised in a psychological casino where the house always wins and the penalty for a bad bet was eternal combustion! Your brain is still trying to force you to see things in black and white, to snap back to the binary thinking that was drilled into you as a child.
This is normal, and it's the self-awareness and how you move forward that matters.
4. Intrusive “What If I’m Wrong?” Thoughts Under Stress
Stress is gasoline.
You get tired, overworked, blindsided by a bill, a breakup, a bad headline. Cortisol spikes and suddenly the ancient horror-movie reel starts flickering in the background. The old hellfire trailer. You know, the one you thought you deleted.
This isn’t mystical backsliding. It’s neurobiology. Trauma research shows that when stress hormones rise, the brain reactivates threat circuits that were carved in deep and reinforced often. Early fear conditioning doesn’t politely wait its turn. It barges in when the system is overloaded. [SOURCE: J Douglas Bremner, Traumatic stress: effects on the brain, 2006]
So you’re already fried, and then *boom* What if you’re wrong?
Not because you secretly believe. Because the wiring was laid down when you were small and impressionable and told that eternal torture was a reasonable consequence for curiosity.
Under stress, the brain defaults to its oldest survival tools. It reaches for whatever once kept you “safe,” even if that safety came wrapped in apocalypse.
Stress strips the guardrails off the highway. And the old script, the one written in capital letters and brimstone, barrels back onto the road like it never left.
5. Emotional Flashbacks Without Clear Triggers
The dread hits like a lead pipe to the back of the skull . You aren't doing anything scandalous. You’re just mindlessly loading the dishwasher. Maybe you're mid-bean-flick in the bathtub. Perhaps you're just staring blankly at a carton of oat milk in the fluorescent hellscape of a grocery store aisle.
Suddenly, the air turns to ether. Your chest tightens into a knot that would baffle a sailor. It’s that familiar, sickening sensation of being caught breaking the rules by a deity you don’t even believe in.
There is no lightning bolt. There is no booming voice from a cloud. No obvious trigger exists, like a Bible-thumping aunt screaming about your lifestyle choices. It is just a massive wave of shame rolling in like a drunk cop at closing time: just straight-up lookin' for a reason to ruin someone’s night.
That, my little unbeliever, is implicit memory.
Why Changing Your Mind Feels Like Treason
The brain is not a peaceful democracy. It’s a coup-prone dictatorship run by outdated software and, when you used to be a member of high-control religion, a screaming youth pastor who refuses to retire.
You can intellectually torch the doctrine. You can uninstall God, unsubscribe from the prayer chain, and build a whole new personality around science podcasts and orgasms. But somewhere deep in the wiring, there’s still a jittery little hall monitor with a whistle who thinks doubt is vandalism. We can just call him, "cognitive dissonance."
You may update the evidence. Your nervous system updates… never.
A scientist changes position when new data rolls in, right? Your trauma-brined brainwill do the same, it changes position, but then immediately writes itself a citation for why it was wrong to do so. It blames you for evolving. It assigns emotional chores. It sends you to your room for intellectual growth.
You leave religion and somehow still feel grounded for insubordination.
This is the "Algorithm" of religious trauma. It doesn't reward accuracy; it rewards consistency. So when you pivot based on evidence, your nervous system panics like you’ve just betrayed the family mob. It would rather you stay wrong forever than risk being “inconsistent.”
The algorithm has one goal: preserve the original fear at all costs. If adult reality conflicts with childhood terror, adult reality must be the liar.
Internalized Policing
The Internalized Cop in your skull is a badge-heavy, twitchy-eyed ding-dong with a flashlight and a permanent grudge. You aren't even on the road; you're sitting in a dark room with a ham sandwich, yet this mental gendarme is already writing you a ticket for "intent to loiter in the vicinity of joy."
From all of the conversations I have had with those of you who left religion, I can tell you this is the savage reality of internalized policing that comes with religious trauma syndrome. It’s a nasty holdover from the days when you were told a Cosmic Yelp Reviewer was monitoring your brainwaves for any unauthorized flicker of pleasure or a stray thought about the absurdity of a virgin birth.
You’ve burned the pews and shredded the prayer books, sure, but the surveillance cameras are still hot-wired into your amygdala. You’ve become your own informant, ratting yourself out to a precinct that’s been boarded up for a decade.
The science of this rot is as brutal as a night in a county lockup: repetition is the mother of all neural burns. If you spend your formative years being warned that your natural impulses are a biohazard, your gray matter develops a hair-trigger reflex for self-sabotage called hyper-vigilance. It is about as fun as a case of the shakes in a room full of glass. Your nervous system is perpetually checking the rearview mirror for a siren that doesn't exist. You’ve traded literal fire for a metaphorical fever, policing your own desires like they’re contraband in a high-security prison. The only way to kill the cop is to realize he’s a hologram. That bastard is just a glitch in the hardware designed by terrified men who couldn't handle the raw, chaotic beauty of a human brain firing on all cylinders.
In Part 2, exclusively for my patrons, we are digging into the actual neurobiology of rewiring this shame response. We are moving past the "why" and into the "how." I am breaking down neuroplasticity. I am giving you the tactical, "fuck you" scripts for setting boundaries. Plus, we will cover the "plug and play" hacks that help you finally unlearn the crap you were force-fed. Stop letting the "Karens" of your past dictate your future. It's time to shed the shame.
Sources:
Resources
Books:
Divorcing Religion - Janice Selbie - Tactical guide to surviving high-control religious exits.
The Ebony Exodus Project - Candace R. M. Gorham - Breaking psychological bondage within the Black church.
Leaving the Fold - Marlene Winell - Clinical roadmap for healing from Religious Trauma Syndrome.
Pure - Linda Kay Klein - Untangling the damaging wreckage of evangelical purity culture.
Wayward - Alice Greczyn - Memoir of escaping spiritual warfare and finding autonomy.
You Are Your Own - Jamie Lee Finch - Reclaiming the body from religious shame and indoctrination.
#ChurchToo - Emily Joy Allison - Exposing abuse and finding healing after purity culture.
Unveiled - Yasmine Mohammed - Escaping fundamentalism and reclaiming secular human rights.
Empty the Pews - Chrissy Stroop - Diverse accounts of deconversion and finding secular life.
Disobedient Women - Sarah Stankorb - Stories of women dismantling patriarchal religious structures.
Other:
Recovering from Religion: A 24/7 hotline for when the "shame rash" flares up.
Do you have religious trauma? Free Quiz
