When I first saw this story a few
days ago, I felt an immediate connection.
Whether one loses their faith community because they were asked to
leave, as in this story, or struggle to find the courage to walk out on their
own, as in mine, there is still a void left.
It took a couple of years after separating from my former church before
someone finally suggested that I might have unresolved feelings of grief from
the loss of that community. Even though
my experiences there were harmful to me in some ways, encouraging me to
suppress my sexuality and asking God to heal a part of who I am that I realize,
in retrospect, didn’t need healing, that church was my community for thirteen
years. That is not insignificant. If anyone reading this has suffered a loss of
community such as this, I would encourage you not to ignore it. Give yourself permission to grieve and work
through your own process to acknowledge the loss of relationships and
community. Hopefully, like me, your life
will be filled with amazing new relationships, community, and sense of
purpose. Still, those new presences in
your life do not erase the feelings of loss that some from being suddenly cut
off from a community of faith that has been your home and place of connection
for years prior.
For me, the need to address this
unresolved grief surfaced after a break up.
After spending all those years living as an ex-gay, this was my first
real relationship. So, when it came to
an end, I was devastated. I tried
everything I could to keep the relationship from ending. We went to meet with my pastor for
counseling, but it was over. Still, I
couldn’t accept it. My pastor referred
me to see a psychologist that she knew to help me work through the loss of the
relationship. The psychologist, after getting
to know a bit more about me, was able to see the connection between the extreme
grief that I was feeling over the end of the relationship and my unresolved
feelings of loss from my former faith community. Having her help me make that connection was
an important revelation for me. Up until
then, my focus had been on moving forward and surviving. This was my first moment to consciously pause
and look back to recognize what I had lost. I continued to work through my
grieving process with the psychologist, and I also, at her suggestion, ordered
a copy of the Grief Recovery Handbook. I
asked a friend who had suffered the loss of a close loved one to go through it
with me. I found the experience of being
able to talk about it and to have my loss acknowledged to be very
affirming. Too often, we push people to dismiss
losses like this. We shouldn’t. While I am better off today and I wouldn’t go
back, I still needed to have my loss acknowledged and validated. Giving myself permission to acknowledge that,
while no one had died and I had left of my own free will, I had still been left
with a sense of tremendous loss was very healing for me.
~ Culbs
No comments:
Post a Comment