Some forms of healing begin with staying.
Staying long enough to understand what hurts. Staying long enough to recognise a pattern. Staying long enough to know whether something can change.
But sometimes healing begins differently.
Sometimes it begins when we finally give ourselves permission to leave.
One of the most difficult chapters of my own healing involved leaving a religious community that had been part of my life, identity and sense of belonging.
This isn’t a story about what anyone else should believe. It isn’t an argument against religion, faith or belonging to a church.
It is simply my experience of what happened when something I once trusted no longer aligned with what I was observing, what I valued, and what I understood within myself.
Leaving eventually gave me freedom. But first, it brought loss.
When Something No Longer Feels Aligned
I was raised in a devoted Christian family.
Faith was part of our lives, but so were family, forgiveness, understanding and freedom to express ourselves respectfully.
As I grew older, my spirituality became increasingly personal.
At the same time, I became more curious about people and the world around me.
I observed. I questioned. I noticed contradictions.
This wasn’t unusual for me. Even as a child, I watched people carefully. I noticed words, expressions, body language and tone of voice. Sometimes I senses that something wasn’t right long before I could explain what had caught my attention.
Over time, I began doing the same thing with the religious environment around me.
I wasn’t only listening to what was being taught.
I was watching what was being lived.
Gradually, I began encountering things that didn’t seem consistent with the God I understood and experienced.
For a long time, however, recognising that contradiction wasn’t enough to make me leave.
Something deeper was keeping me there…Fear.
The Fear Beneath Staying
I didn’t consciously tell myself every day: If I leave this church, I will lose God. It was subtler than that.
I already believed I had my own relationship with God. I prayed, reflected and had spiritual experiences that felt deeply personal.
Yet somewhere within me, the institution and my relationship with God had become connected.
The church was where I worshipped. It was where community existed. It was part of the structure surrounding my faith. So leaving didn’t feel like simply leaving an organisation. It felt as though I might lose something sacred.
Looking back, this became one of the most important discoveries in my healing:
Sometimes we remain somewhere not because it is still right for us, but because we are afraid of what leaving seems to represent.
I didn’t yet know how important that distinction would become.
The Poem I Found Years Later
There is another part of this story that I have only recently been able to revisit with greater clarity.
For years, I remembered writing something before the crisis that eventually changed our lives. Recently, I found it.
It was a poem called Be Our God.
And attached to it was something memory could not give me: a date.
I originally posted the poem on 23 November 2014.
Reading it again more than a decade later was confronting.
The poem was written as a prayer, but its imagery reflected fear, danger, deception and protection. I drew upon biblical images that were familiar to me — David facing overwhelming opponent, Daniel surrounded by danger, faith being tested, and people asking God for protection and deliverance.
I can read it differently now. But I also try to remember the person who originally wrote it.
Something was troubling me.
I was trying to understand something I couldn’t yet name. And I expressed it through the spiritual language available to me at the time.
Then I Returned to It
Approximately eight months later, I returned to the poem.
On 23 July 2015, I shared it again.
Alongside it, I wrote: “I stay with Him as He stays with me.”
Soon afterwards, during the period surrounding the church’s 101st anniversary, a crisis erupted within the community.
What followed was fear, uncertainty and confusion.
Finding those old posts years later brought back a question I have carried for a long time:
Why did I return to that particular poem at that particular time?
I don’t know.
There was once a time when I might have felt that I needed to find a definite explanation.
Healing has made me more comfortable with something else: not knowing.
I Can Honour an Experience Without Having to Explain It
There are different ways I can understand what happened.
Perhaps I had been noticing contradictions, tensions or subtle patterns long before my conscious mind could organise them into an explanation.
Perhaps previous experiences influenced what I was feeling.
Perhaps my sensitivity to people and environments played a role.
My spirituality also gives the experience personal meaning.
I don’t feel that I have to force those possibilities into competition. Nor do I need to turn what happened into proof that I knew what was going to happen.
What I can establish is much simpler. I wrote the poem.
I returned to it. Then the crisis unfolded.
The record preserves the sequence. It does not prove the explanation.
Learning to make that distinction has become part of my healing too.
I can take my experiences seriously without assuming that every interpretation I make must be correct.
I can remain curious about intuition without surrendering critical thinking.
I can allow spirituality to hold meaning without needing that meaning to become evidence for somebody else.
And I can say I don’t know without dismissing what I experienced.
When The Conflict Reached My Family
Eventually, the situation became more than something I was observing.
It crossed one of my deepest values.
I experienced pressure around loyalty to the church that conflicted with my responsibility to my family, relatives and relationships inside the institution.
That changed something.
My family mattered.
My conscience mattered.
My values mattered.
And my understanding of God mattered.
I could no longer reconcile what I was experiencing with those things.
Inside me was a persistent message: Protect my family. Leave.
Eventually, I listened.
Clarity Didn’t Feel Like Relief
We often imagine clarity as a peaceful moment.
Everything suddenly makes sense. The confusion disappears. We know exactly what to do.
My experience was different.
I became clearer about what I needed to do, but that didn’t make doing it easier.
In some ways, clarity made the situations more painful. Because once I acknowledged what I was seeing and feeling, I could no longer comfortable pretend that I didn’t know.
People were surprised when I left the church. I had been seen as spiritual and devoted. But from inside my experience, leaving wasn’t an abandonment of my faith.
I was trying to remain aligned with my conscience, my family and the God I understood.
That decision mattered deeply to me.
Leaving Wasn’t the End of the Story
I wish I could say that leaving immediately brought peace…It didn’t.
We lost community.
People who had once surrounded us were suddenly no longer there. We experienced rejection and abandonment. We had to begin again.
And as a parent, I carried another layer of uncertainty. I worried about our children.
What would losing this community mean for them?
Had protecting my family created another kind of loss?
What would our lives look like now?
There were moments when it felt as though we were completely alone. It became one of the darkest periods of our lives.
And this is something I now understand about healing:
Making the decision that protects you doesn’t necessarily protect you from grief.
Sometimes healing hurts.
Sometimes a boundary creates loneliness before it creates peace.
Sometimes leaving removes what was hurting us while simultaneously removing familiarity, relationships, identity and belonging.
We know something needs to end and still mourn its ending.
Healing Meant Grieving What I Lost
For a while, I had to live inside that contradiction.
I could believe leaving was necessary and still miss what had been there.
I could recognise what had hurt me and still grieve people I had cared about.
I could protect my family and still question whether I had done the right thing.
Healing wasn’t about convincing myself that everything before leaving had been bad. Life is rarely that simple.
There had been relationships. Memories. Belongings. Faith. Familiarity.
Parts of my identity had developed inside that world. So I wasn’t only healing from what happened. I was also learning who I was without the structure that had surrounded me for so long.
I Left the Church. I Didn’t Lose God.
Eventually, I noticed something. The thing I had feared most hasn’t happened.
I had left the church. But God had not disappeared from my experience.
My faith remained.
My spirituality remained.
My sense of being loved and cared remained.
Only then did I begin recognising the misconception I had carried. I had connected belonging to an institution with belonging to God.
Leaving them separated them. The church was an institution. My relationship with God was personal.
Whatever else I had lost, I had not experienced myself as losing God.
That realisation became part of my healing.
The Words Mean Something Different Now
Finding my old post recently brought me back to the sentence I had written on 23 July 2015:
“I stay with Him as He stays with me”
At the time, I was still inside the church.
Today, I read those words differently.
There was a time when staying with God and staying within a particular religious structure were intertwined in my mind.
Eventually, life separated them for me.
I stay with Him as He stays with me.
Those words no longer mean staying somewhere because I am afraid.
They don’t mean surrendering my conscience. They don’t mean remaining silent about what I observe. And they don’t mean that another person or institution owns my relationship with what I consider sacred.
“God is my conscience and my heart.”
The words became more personal. And strangely, leaving helped me understand them.
Sometimes We Confuse the Container With What It Represents
This is where my experience stopped being only about church.
I began recognising the same pattern elsewhere in life.
We confuse a relationship with love.
A career with purpose.
A title with identity.
A community with belonging.
A role with worth.
A place with safety.
And, in my experience, a church with God.
When the two become fused together, leaving the container can feel like losing what it represents.
So sometimes we stay. Not necessarily because we’re happy. Not necessarily because something still aligns with us.
Sometimes we stay because we’re afraid of the emptiness we imagine on the other side. That leads to a different question.
Instead of only asking: Why am I finding it so difficult to leave?
I can also ask: What am I afraid I will lose if I do?
That question reaches somewhere deeper.
Understanding Doesn’t Require Staying
My upbringing taught me to understand and forgive.
I haven’t abandoned those values. But healing changed my understanding of them.
I learned that compassion doesn’t require unlimited access to me.
I can understand someone’s behaviour without accepting repeated harm.
I can forgive without reconnecting.
I can care about someone from a distance.
And I can leave without needing to hate the person, community or place I am leaving.
That was an important change.
For a long time, perhaps part of me believed that understanding meant tolerating. Now I understand that boundaries can coexist with compassion.
I can understand you and still choose myself.
Healing Changed the Way I Understand Discernment
Perhaps one of the biggest changes was learning that trusting myself doesn’t mean believing every thought or feeling automatically.
For me, discernment became more nuanced.
When something inside me responds strongly, I can ask:
What actually happened?
What did I observe?
What am I interpreting?
What meaning am I giving the experience?
Finding Be Our God years later gave me an unexpected opportunity to apply those questions to my own history.
There is evidence.
There is interpretation.
And there is meaning.
They can influence one another without becoming the same thing.
That distinction allows me to remain open to my sensitivity and spirituality while also remaining curious, reflective and grounded.
I don’t have to reject mystery. But I don’t have to turn mystery into certainty either.
What Remained When Everything Else Fell Away
Looking back, leaving didn’t heal everything. Healing came gradually.
It came through grief.
Through questioning.
Through rebuilding.
Through learning boundaries.
Through understanding my sensitivity.
Through examining beliefs I had carried without realising I was carrying them.
And through discovering what remained when something that had once seemed inseparable from my identity was gone.
I lost belonging.
I lost relationships.
For a time, I lost a sense of security.
But I also discovered that some of what I feared losing had never belonged exclusively to the place I left.
My spirituality remained.
My values became clearer.
My relationship with myself changed.
And eventually, I felt more free, loved and cared for.
That is why I no longer think healing always look like fixing what has been broken.
Sometimes healing means recognising what have been holding onto because we’re afraid.
Sometimes it means grieving what we cannot carry forward.
Sometimes it means learning to trust ourselves again.
And sometimes it means discovering that what we were most afraid of losing was never contained by the thing we had become afraid to leave.
Clarity does not always make a decision easier. Sometimes it simply makes it harder to keep pretending we don’t know what we need to do.
For me, leaving wasn’t the healing itself.
It created the space in which healing could begin.
Mirror Guide
Think about something in your life that has become difficult to release — a relationship, role, career, community, identity or place.
Rather than asking only whether you should stay or leave, gently ask:
What am I afraid I will lose if I let this go?
Have I connected this person, place or role with something deeper — love, belonging, security, purpose, identity or worth?
What am I actually observing, and what am I interpreting?
What part of this experience needs grieving rather than fixing?
What might remain even if the container changes?
You don’t have to force yourself toward an answer.
Sometimes healing begins before the decision.
It begins when we finally allow ourselves to see clearly what we have been afraid to look at.