Brainwash Be Gone is a podcast for women who have left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms.

Today we will be talking about the belief that kids raised without church will be rebellious.

As a parent leaving a high demand religion, many of us worry about what will happen to our kids. We have heard lots of terrible stories about how our children will be lost if we do not raise them in the faith. Stay with this episode if you want to see why that is not true at all, and also to hear what you can do to be the best parent possible without religion.

It is hard enough to leave a high demand or high control religion. Many of us, once we get to the point of actually leaving, realize that we can handle the moral nuance of leaving this group and making our own moral, ethical, and spiritual decisions outside of that framework.

But then we wonder what will happen to our kids. Are we letting them down. Are they without guidance. Can we even imagine a universe in which a child grows up outside of the system that we ourselves were raised in.

I often hear people who were raised in religious groups or authoritarian settings say things like, I cannot believe my child said this, I would never have said that to my parents, or I would never have done this thing that my child did. I can definitely relate to that. It is shocking when you grew up never talking back to your parents and then your child calmly tells you what they think, or even gives you some feedback about your parenting, or just says things that feel totally out of pocket about the world in general.

It is shocking because many of us had a childhood in which we never talked back. I know for me personally, I have talked directly and frankly with each of my parents exactly one time in my entire life. That was after I was an adult, and it was very hard.

As a teenager, I never did any of the things you were not supposed to do. I completely suppressed myself and never rebelled. I have spent the last couple of decades trying to recover from that level of identity suppression. I know many of you did something similar. Or maybe you coped in the opposite way and did all the things you were told not to do. Maybe you are now afraid that your children will do those things and put themselves in danger in various ways.

Here is the thing. The reason that we did not say those things to our parents or try different things as kids and as teens is that the consequences were so dire. You might be beaten. You could be ostracized. All love would be cut off from the family if you said or did any of those things.

It makes sense that many children in that situation would not push any boundaries. It is not a success story if you manage to have children who never tell you what they think, who never express an emotion, who learn to completely suppress sadness and anger and personal needs, and who constantly criticize themselves. That is a terrible tragedy, as we know from having lived through it.

Now that we are at the point where we have left these groups, we have seen the harm for ourselves. We are doing something different for our own lives. It is time to take a totally new look at parenting and at how we raise our kids.

The structure and certainty of a high demand religion used to make us feel good about parenting. It provided a very clear structure. Everything was black and white. There were clear rules for what every person in the community could do and not do, and what their role was.

All you had to do as a parent was strongly enforce that framework, strongly punish anything outside of it, and focus on getting the result you wanted. You were the enforcer. You believed you knew the one truth.

The truth is that this kind of clarity is an illusion. Parenting is difficult, no matter what. Yes, you can try to abuse your children into being robots so that they do exactly what you want, but that is not successful parenting.

You should not be proud when you have a church pew with twelve kids in it and even the small children sit perfectly still. They are not doing that because they love God. They are doing it because they know they will be beaten if they do not.

Let us just call that what it is.

Parenting is difficult, and it certainly appears to be easier when there is that black and white worldview that offers an answer for every detail of how we live. But the cost of parenting within an authoritarian religious structure is extremely high. We know personally that it causes lifelong limitations in your personal expression, your ability to relate in a healthy way, your communication patterns, your self care, and your mental health. It can lead to depression, anxiety, and many other problems.

There is so much complexity and uncertainty when you approach parenting without the false clarity of a high control religion. That can make us as parents very uncomfortable. But I think we owe it to our kids to be uncomfortable and to do everything we can to learn to parent them in a healthier way.

We do not have to pass all of this on to the next generation. We can leave some of this junk behind.

I definitely do not know all the answers, but I have been at this for a few years. One of my children is an adult and the other is still a child, a work in progress. I have some ideas I have developed over time and learned from people who I think are doing a great job. These are ways that we can approach parenting after leaving a high demand religion.

The first thing we want to look at is the goal for our parenting. How do you define success as a parent. What is the ideal outcome that you imagine. Just like in so many other areas, if you do not know what you are working toward, the decisions you make along the way are not likely to take you there.

Our old goal, while we were in the religion, was to raise kids who were perfect members of that group. We wanted children who did not ask questions, who did not think critically, and who followed all the rules exactly. Once we leave, we realize that is not healthy and we do not want that anymore. So what is the goal now.

For me, my goal was and is to raise my kids to be functional, healthy adults. I want to raise them with as little trauma as possible. It is not possible to have a life without trauma, but I want to minimize it as much as I can.

I want to teach my kids to follow their own inner guidance. I want them to live their adulthood making their own decisions about what is best for their lives. I want them to feel loved. I want them to know that I love them simply for who they are, not because they achieved a certain thing or because they did what I wanted. I do not want any kind of transactional arrangement. I just want them to feel loved and safe and able to work out the challenges of life in the context of our family and their relationship with me.

Your idea of what you want for your children’s lives and how you want your parenting to impact them might be different. For many of us it will be something similar to what I just described.

Once you have that idea of what the ideal end result is, you can work backward. You can realize that if you want them to know it is okay to make mistakes and to love themselves, then you will have to allow them to make mistakes while they are growing up. You will have to give them opportunities to test out their own decision making in a safer arena, where the stakes are lower and not life and death. They need practice making decisions, making mistakes, and then repairing and recovering from those mistakes.

You will also need to allow them to see you making your own mistakes and then fixing them, while still loving yourself and moving forward. You can show that you are allowed to change your mind.

If you want your kids to be able to feel their feelings and communicate effectively once they are adults, then home must become a laboratory where they learn to do that. As a parent, you will have the discomfort of hearing how your child feels about things and helping them navigate those feelings. You will have to help them learn how to feel feelings without suppressing them, while still respecting other people. You will practice how to productively negotiate and communicate with the people you live with in order to find solutions that work for everyone.

You will need to be sure that your child has tools for making decisions, changing their mind, and repairing relationships when they go too far in one direction.

I am not going to lie. Almost everything about this is more work, because there is much more nuance than there was in the conservative religious parenting most of us experienced.

Let me give a more specific example. I was raised with the idea that there should be absolutely no sex until marriage. Maybe a chaste kiss, maybe not, depending on your particular group. If you had sex before marriage, you were told you would go to hell, your life would be ruined, and your marriage would be terrible. All of those threats.

I was raised with a very hard line rule. As parents, all they did was track our whereabouts constantly, make sure we were never alone with someone of the opposite sex, and fill us with guilt and shame. Those guilt and shame systems became embedded in our minds so that any exploration in that area felt terrifying.

When I was raising my kids, I thought about what it would mean to let go of that hard line rule. I wanted my children to have a healthy view of their own bodies and of pleasure. I wanted them to have healthy relationships. I wanted them to have age appropriate experiences that grow over time, so that by the time they are ready for a partner, they have some knowledge and confidence.

For that kind of nuanced approach, kids would have to understand the wide range of physical activities that can happen between two people, instead of just the very simplistic one or two sentence definition of sex that many of us were given. Kids need to understand what is possible. They need to learn how to decide what feels good and right for them when they are relating to someone else.

They need to know how to express those boundaries and desires to a potential partner. They need to learn how to maintain physical safety if they choose activities that carry certain risks. They need to learn how to maintain emotional safety as much as possible. They need to learn how to respect other people’s decisions, check in about consent, and make sure their partner also wants what they want.

They also need to learn how to handle disappointment in relationships, heartbreak, and all the other challenges that come with being human. Life is hard. It is a very complex area if you want to grow and learn and become a functioning adult.

This is a big project. Parenting is no joke. It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and I feel like I have done some hard things.

I think one reason it can be harder to leave religion after having kids, or to do any kind of personal development work, is the guilt many of us feel about what we already passed on to the next generation before we knew better. But until you know something, you do not know it. We cannot blame ourselves for that. We can only have the courage to make changes now and to pass on as little of the harmful patterns as possible.

Every piece of the old craziness that we do not pass on to our children is a victory worth celebrating. It does not have to be perfect. This may be a multi generational project to escape the mind control and psychological impacts that come from living in such a restrictive environment that is designed to keep you trapped.

It is wonderful that we are all here doing this work. We are helping the future of humanity. It is an exciting time to be alive, that we can support each other, hear each other’s stories, encourage each other, and share what is working. Together we can help move humans out of these inhibiting and damaging structures.

This is a huge topic, but here are a few questions to reflect on as we wrap up.

How comfortable do you feel with allowing your children to make mistakes or to chart their own path. What do you think would be the best outcome of your parenting efforts. What do you wish for your children’s future. What is one thing you can do or learn to help this become a reality.

Do you believe in our mission here at Brainwash Be Gone. Please leave us a review on your podcast app. It helps other women find us so we can keep helping more sisters break free.

Tags: Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, deconstruction, exmormon, exvangelical, cult recovery, parenting after religion, authoritarian religion, exjw, church trauma, mind control, breaking free, high control religion, healing from religion, brainwashed, high demand religion, spiritual trauma, church abuse.  

Writer and Host: Clare Corado  

Voiceover Talent: Jason Kirkover