The Beliefs You Left Behind Can Still Affect Your Life
You may have stopped believing a long time ago.
Maybe you no longer believe that God is watching for every mistake, that questioning authority is dangerous, or that being a good person means sacrificing yourself for everyone around you. Maybe you've examined the beliefs you grew up with carefully and consciously decided which ones you no longer accept.
And yet, every once in a while, you may catch yourself doing something that makes you wonder where that reaction came from.
You say no to someone and immediately feel selfish. You get angry and start explaining to yourself why you shouldn't be. You make a perfectly reasonable decision and then spend twenty minutes constructing a defense of it for someone who hasn't even questioned you. You find yourself searching for the right answer to a decision that is entirely yours to make.
Or you make a mistake - and it feels much bigger than simply being wrong.
Sometimes the beliefs we leave behind don't continue to show up as beliefs. They show up in the ways we've learned to move through the world.
You may no longer consciously believe the original teaching at all, but the rule you learned from it can remain surprisingly persistent.
Here are five places you might notice one hiding.
1. You Say, “I’m Being Selfish”
There is nothing inherently wrong with asking ourselves how our choices affect other people. Caring about others is a wonderful quality, and sometimes we really do behave selfishly.
But there's a difference between considering other people's needs and automatically treating your own needs as morally suspicious.
Maybe someone asks you for help and you genuinely don't have the energy. Maybe you'd rather spend your Saturday doing something you enjoy instead of doing what someone else wants. Maybe you have money available and decide to spend some of it on yourself. Maybe somebody needs something from you, but this time you're simply not willing to provide it.
What happens next?
If your immediate reaction is, I'm being selfish, it may be worth getting curious about what you actually mean.
Many religious environments place enormous value on service, sacrifice, humility, generosity, and putting others before yourself. Those can all be meaningful values when they're freely chosen. The problem comes when caring for yourself begins to feel like evidence that you're failing to be a good person.
There is a substantial difference between “I value generosity” and “I am selfish when I have needs.”
You may have consciously rejected the second idea years ago while still feeling guilty every time you behave as though your needs matter.
The old belief underneath might sound something like:
A good person puts other people first.
If you recognize that belief, you don't have to immediately replace it with the opposite extreme. You don't have to stop caring about anyone but yourself. You can simply begin asking whether generosity still counts as generosity when you aren't actually allowed to choose it.
2. You Say, “I Shouldn’t Be Angry”
Anger is particularly interesting because many of us don't simply dislike feeling angry. We judge ourselves for having the emotion in the first place.
Someone hurts you, crosses a boundary, treats you unfairly, or does something that genuinely pisses you off, and before you've even had time to understand what you're feeling, another voice appears:
I shouldn't be angry.
Maybe you should forgive. Maybe you should be more understanding. Maybe they didn't mean it that way. Maybe you're overreacting. Maybe you need to calm down.
Those things may eventually be worth considering, but notice how quickly the focus moved away from what happened and onto whether you are allowed to feel the way you feel about it.
In some religious environments, certain emotions are given moral significance. Anger, jealousy, resentment, pride, and even doubt can become more than uncomfortable human experiences; they can become evidence that something is wrong with your heart, your character, or your relationship with God.
That can make it difficult to treat emotions as information.
Anger doesn't automatically mean you're right. It doesn't give you permission to mistreat someone, and it doesn't necessarily tell you what you should do next. But it may tell you that something deserves your attention.
The old belief underneath might be:
Certain feelings make me a bad person.
Instead of immediately asking, How do I stop feeling this?, you might try asking, What is this feeling trying to tell me?
You can decide what to do with the answer afterward.
3. You Automatically Explain and Defend Your Choices
Have you ever noticed yourself giving someone a lengthy explanation for a decision they didn't actually ask you to justify?
You aren't available that day, but instead of simply saying so, you explain everything already on your schedule. You decide not to attend something and prepare a detailed case for why staying home is reasonable. You buy something you wanted and immediately explain that it was on sale, you've needed one forever, and you haven't bought yourself anything lately anyway.
Sometimes explanations are useful, considerate, and appropriate.
Sometimes we're presenting Exhibit A through Exhibit G to a jury that does not exist.
If you're accustomed to having your choices evaluated according to an external standard, making a decision simply because this is what I have decided can feel strangely uncomfortable. You may find yourself searching for enough evidence to prove that your choice is reasonable, responsible, considerate, or morally acceptable.
The old belief underneath might be:
My choices require approval.
One small way to notice this pattern is to pay attention to what happens after you've already answered a question.
You say, “No, I can't do that.”
Then comes the urge to add another sentence.
And another.
And perhaps a supporting PowerPoint presentation with citations. 🤣
Before you continue, you might ask yourself whether the other person actually needs more information, or whether you're trying to earn permission for a decision you've already made.
4. You Keep Looking for the “Right” Answer to Your Own Life
Some decisions have right and wrong answers. If you're trying to calculate your taxes, wire an electrical outlet, or determine whether two medications can safely be taken together, please do not gaze meaningfully into your soul and decide that all answers are equally valid.
But an astonishing number of life decisions don't work that way.
Should I take this opportunity? Should I stay home this weekend? Do I want to continue this friendship? Which spiritual practice interests me? What do I want my life to look like? Is this important to me?
There may be consequences to those choices, and some options may ultimately work better than others, but there often isn't a single correct answer waiting somewhere outside you to be discovered.
If you grew up in an environment where there was supposed to be a correct answer to virtually everything, that can be surprisingly difficult to adjust to.
- What does God want me to do?
- What does scripture say?
- What would a good Christian/Muslim/Hindu do?
- What is the right choice?
Even after the religious framework changes, the structure of the question can remain. You may simply replace the old authority with another one.
What does this expert say I should do? What does this book say? What would my therapist say? What does everyone else think? What does the internet say?
Advice can be incredibly useful. Other people can see things we can't see ourselves. The problem isn't asking for perspective; it's forgetting that perspective is not the same thing as permission.
The old belief underneath might be:
There is a correct way to live, and my job is to find it and follow it.
One of the strangest parts of moving away from that belief is realizing that sometimes nobody is going to tell you the right answer because there isn't one.
Sometimes you have to choose.
And then you get to find out what happens.
5. You’re Afraid to Get Things Wrong
This one is closely related to looking for the right answer, but I think there's an important difference.
Sometimes the problem isn't that you need somebody else to tell you what to do. You may be perfectly willing to make your own decisions.
You just need to make the correct one.
You research long after you have enough information. You double-check things you already know. You feel disproportionately embarrassed when someone corrects you. You hesitate to try something new because you don't know how to do it yet. You think you need to learn more before you're qualified to begin.
You may call it perfectionism.
And sometimes, underneath perfectionism, there is fear.
If you came from a religious environment in which being wrong carried enormous consequences, that makes sense. There wasn't simply a difference of opinion about theology. There was Truth and error. Right belief and false belief. The correct interpretation and the dangerous interpretation.
Depending on what you were taught, getting the most important answers wrong could have consequences extending all the way into eternity.
You can stop believing those teachings without immediately becoming comfortable with being wrong.
The old belief underneath might be:
There is a correct answer, and getting it wrong is dangerous.
This can show up in all kinds of places, but I see it particularly often when people begin exploring Tarot after leaving a religious environment.
At first, the obstacle may be the old teaching that Tarot itself is wrong, sinful, dangerous, or even demonic. Once you've examined that belief and decided you don't accept it anymore, it can feel as though you've cleared the hurdle.
Then you pick up a Tarot deck.
And discover another one.
Now you're looking at the cards thinking, What does this card actually mean? Am I interpreting it correctly? What if I don't remember the official meaning? What if I see something completely different from what the book says?
You got past “Tarot is bad.”
Now you're dealing with “I have to get Tarot right.”
That can make learning Tarot much harder than it needs to be, because Tarot asks you to become comfortable with interpretation. The question matters. The surrounding cards matter. The artwork matters. What catches your attention matters. Two people can look at the same card and notice completely different things, and those observations can lead to two useful readings.
Learning the accepted meanings and symbolism can certainly deepen your understanding of Tarot, but you don't have to memorize every meaning before you're allowed to read a card.
Sometimes learning requires being willing to look at something you don't completely understand yet and say:
Here's what I see.
Then you go from there.
You May Not Know What You Believe Until You Notice What You Do
None of these behaviors automatically means you have religious trauma, and religion isn't the only place we learn these patterns. Families, schools, relationships, workplaces, communities, and culture can teach many of the same lessons.
The point isn't to trace every uncomfortable feeling back to religion or decide who is responsible for it.
It's to notice.
Because sometimes asking “Do I still believe this?” isn't enough. Your conscious answer may genuinely be no.
A more revealing question can be:
Do I still live as though this is true?
The next time you catch yourself feeling selfish because you have a need, apologizing for an emotion, defending a decision nobody challenged, searching for the correct answer to a personal choice, or becoming afraid that you're going to get something wrong, get curious about the rule underneath the reaction.
Where did I learn this?
Do I actually agree with it?
Is this one of my values, or is it something I learned I was supposed to value?
What am I afraid would happen if I stopped following this rule?
You don't have to throw away everything you learned from religion simply because some of it hurt you. You also don't have to continue carrying a belief simply because you've been carrying it for a long time.
Sometimes you don't discover the beliefs you've left behind by looking at what you say you believe.
You discover them when you catch yourself still obeying them.
If Tarot Is One of the Places You Get Stuck
If you've moved past the belief that Tarot is something you're not allowed to explore but find yourself frozen by the idea that you don't know enough or that you'll interpret the cards “wrong,” that's exactly the problem I designed the Amethyst Tarot Method to address.
Instead of requiring you to memorize 78 cards before you can begin reading, the method gives you a five-step process for looking at the card in front of you, noticing what's actually there, and building an interpretation from what you see.
Because reading isn't the reward for finishing your studies.
Reading is how you learn Tarot.
