The clock on your office wall ticks loudly, a sharp, rhythmic sound that seems to fill up all the empty spaces in the room. I sit back against the cushions of the couch, watching the way the afternoon light cuts across the floor. My hands are tightly wound together in my lap, my knuckles white, before I finally find the breath to start.

I think about it a lot, how easily people talk about losing their faith, like it was a set of keys they just misplaced on a busy afternoon. They talk about it like it slipped out of a coat pocket during a walk. For me, it was never a sudden loss, and it was not just about the boy leaving or my stepmother throwing me out. Those were just the moments the structure finally collapsed. The truth is, my relationship with God was eroding slowly for years, worn down by a thousand different layers of silence, control, and performance until there was simply nothing authentic left to hold onto.

I grew up Apostolic Pentecostal, and back then, that church was the entire world. It dictated how we breathed, how we thought, and how we saw the future. But everything shifted when my dad married his new wife. We packed up our lives and moved into her house, and looking back, that was the exact moment a monster took total control of our universe.

Moving into her space completely flipped the dynamic of our family. We were on her territory now, forced to play entirely by her rules with absolutely no home court advantage. She rarely ever raised a hand to hit us herself. She did not have to. She had a puppet to do the physical damage for her, manipulating my dad into enforcing her cruelty. Her real warfare was deeply verbal and psychological. She forced us to call her mother, demanding a title she never earned, while she actively blackmailed our actual birth mother into completely cutting ties and staying out of our lives. On top of the isolation, she used God as her ultimate weapon of absolute control.

You lean forward slightly, your voice gentle as you interject. “It sounds like she did not just want to rule the house. She wanted to rewrite your past and control your future by cutting off your actual mother.”

“Exactly,” I say, nodding as a bitter laugh escapes me. “She took every single piece of joy she could find. I absolutely loved volleyball, and I was happy playing on the team until the fourth grade. But by the time I hit fifth grade, she decided it was time to strictly enforce the specific rules of her religion on us. Suddenly, girls could not wear pants. We could not wear shorts. I was forced to wear ankle length skirts and heavy dresses. The ideal standard was to have the top half of your body entirely covered by long sleeves, though she tolerated short sleeves as long as they were not tank tops. Just like that, I was pulled off the team and away from my friends.”

I shake my head, the memory of those days causing a familiar tightness to form in my chest. “She barred us from school clubs, threw us out of sex education, and refused to let us take science classes that contradicted her beliefs. She claimed it was all because of her strict religion, but as I grew older, I realized she just absolutely hated that I was smart. She saw that I had potential, and she wanted to keep me down. She kept me entirely cut off from the outside world. I had absolutely no friends because she never allowed me to have them. We were strictly forbidden from ever having company over after school, and we could never go out to just hang out with other kids. Instead, we were trapped in a loop of constant punishment. We were either grounded or forced to clean her house because no matter how hard we worked, it was never clean enough to meet her impossible standards.”

You pause for a moment, absorbing the weight of that environment. “So you were trapped in a constant state of hypervigilance. Home was not a sanctuary, it was a battleground where the rules were designed for you to fail.”

“Yes, it felt impossible,” I continue, looking down at my hands. “And that environment is where the slow leak in my faith started. Through all of those dark years, I prayed. I prayed to God constantly, pouring my heart out in the dark. I begged Him to bring my real mother back to me, or to at least make this woman just a little bit nicer to me and my siblings. But He never answered. He never stepped in. I also prayed desperately that my dad would be able to find some shred of happiness. He looked so utterly miserable all the time. He would literally sit out in his car after a long day of work, playing games on his phone in the driveway, just delaying the exact moment he had to open the front door and face her. He did it so he would not have to walk inside and immediately find out we were naughty again, which meant he would be ordered to hand out whatever punishment she demanded. God never answered those prayers either. He just let the silence stretch on.”

“That is a heavy burden for a child,” you say softly. “To watch your protector be so defeated that he avoids his own home, leaving you to manage her volatility. When prayers go unanswered in an environment like that, the silence feels less like a mystery and more like abandonment.”

“It really did. And because of that abandonment, even the milestones that were supposed to be deeply spiritual just felt completely empty,” I say, the frustration leaking into my voice. “I was baptized in August of 2009. The only part of church I actually looked forward to back then was Sunday school, mostly because my teacher was this incredibly kind, single lady. My siblings and I used to look at her and secretly wish that God had given her to us as a mother instead of the monster we were stuck with. I remember trying so hard to fit into that world, even doing what the religion calls speaking in tongues. But looking back, I do not ever remember actually feeling God. Not once. Maybe I was just faking it because the pressure to conform was so heavy. Honestly, at this point, I do not even remember a lot of the specifics. My childhood memories are very fuzzy like that. I think my brain just tries to protect me from some of the worst stuff that happened.”

“Your mind did exactly what it needed to do,” you validate gently. “Fuzziness and missing pieces are a very natural protective shield when chronic stress becomes too much to process all at once. And performing those rituals, like speaking in tongues without feeling a connection, builds a profound sense of inner disconnection. You were practicing the religion to survive, but the internal spiritual link was already fading.”

“It was completely fading,” I admit. “It was a prison, and the very moment I showed any sign of independence, I was completely discarded. When I was 17, I went to a math club meeting after school. I was dealing with a really severe wave of depression and anxiety that afternoon. I texted my parents to let them know I was going to my stepsister’s house because it was my only true safe space. Nobody replied to my message, so I assumed everything was fine. But later that night, a text from my dad flashed across my screen. It said I had to be home in exactly 30 minutes, or else. My stepsister was at the hospital right then due to a terrible work accident, so she could not drive me, and it was easily a 45 minute walk back to the house. I pleaded with my dad over text. I begged him to change his mind and understand the situation, but he stood his ground. The next morning, I walked up to the front porch only to find all of my belongings packed away in garbage bags. The front door was locked tight. My stepsister came with me and hammered on the door, screaming at them to face us, but they just completely ignored her from inside.”

You lean forward, your expression serious. “They demanded an impossible task, ignored your distress, and then completely locked you out for a situation you could not control. That is an extreme level of emotional abandonment.”

“The cruelty did not stop at the locked door,” I point out, a tightness rising in my throat. “Immediately after throwing me out, my stepmother enforced a strict no talking rule. She decreed that anyone still living under her roof was completely forbidden from speaking to the ‘devil child.’ Suddenly, the absolute weight of how alone I truly was crashed down on me. I was entirely cut off, unable to speak to my dad or my own siblings. So, I moved into my stepsister’s place permanently. I finally got a job to help out with the bills while I finished my senior year of high school, which was something my stepmother had always strictly banned me from doing. She used to claim a job would take away from my home life, but the truth was always much simpler. She just wanted to exert complete dominance over my life.”

“Labeling you the devil child is a highly potent form of spiritual abuse,” you interject quietly. “It uses the highest authority in her world to completely strip away your humanity and justify isolating you from the people you love. It deepens that gradual fracture with faith because the language of God is being used to exile you.”

“And that is exactly why the final fracture cut so deep,” I say, taking a shaky breath. “During that final year of high school, this guy I had a massive crush on, who happened to be my stepbrother’s best friend, finally acknowledged my existence. He was incredibly religious too, which made me feel safe. We went out for a while, hanging out at his parents’ house and talking in the hallways at school. Then one night, my stepsister was out, and he came over to the apartment. We were completely home alone. We were hormonal teenagers, and things got incredibly heated. I hesitated, but he was so convincing. He looked at me and said God would be completely okay with us having sex because he was absolutely going to marry me anyway. I believed him, so I gave in, and we had sex.”

I look up from my lap, meeting your eyes directly. “I went straight into the shower right after to clean up. By the time I stepped out and dried off, he was completely gone. He called me later on the phone to tell me he had changed his mind. He said he realized God actually would not be okay with premarital sex after all, and because of that, we had to part ways forever. But he made sure to tell me he would pray for me.”

I let out a long, exhausted sigh and lean my head back against the wall. “And that was the moment the final string snapped. But looking at the whole picture, the string had been fraying for a decade. It was the years of unanswered prayers while we were being abused. It was the empty rituals and faking it just to stay safe. It was being called a devil child by my own family. God was always the entity used to judge me, to restrict my life, to punish my actions, and to justify abandoning me. And then this boy used God to take exactly what he wanted from my body, only to turn around and use Him as the perfect excuse to leave me in the dirt. So, yeah. That is the long, gradual story of how I actually lost my relationship with Jesus.”

You let the silence settle in the room for a moment before speaking. “He used the exact same weapon your stepmother used. He twisted God to serve his own desires, and then used that same God to absolve himself of blame and discard you. But you are entirely right. This was a long, structural erosion. You did not just lose your relationship with Jesus in a single night; the institution around you spent your entire upbringing weaponizing Him until the relationship became unsustainable.”