When Your Faith Doesn't Fit Anymore: Deconstruction and Mental Health

Long before I ever heard the word deconstruction, I experienced it. I was a university student, exploring philosophy and encountering ideas that challenged some of the assumptions I had inherited about faith. At almost exactly the same time, I was deeply hurt by people I considered part of my spiritual family.

The combination was devastating.

I remember trying to explain the experience to friends using the image of a building. My faith had once felt like a structure I could live inside. Suddenly, it was as though a bulldozer had driven through it. The walls were gone. The floors had been ripped out. Even the foundation—the things I had assumed were simply true—seemed to have disappeared.

I didn't know what I believed anymore.

Eventually, I found a community where it was safe to ask questions without knowing the answers ahead of time. That mattered enormously. Slowly, I began rebuilding—or perhaps reimagining is the better word.

More than twenty years later, I'm not sure that process has ever completely stopped.

At the time, though, I didn't have a name for what was happening. Today, we might describe at least part of that experience as religious deconstruction—the process of questioning, examining, and sometimes reconstructing beliefs we once took for granted.

What Is Religious Deconstruction?

The word deconstruction has a complicated history. It is associated particularly with the twentieth-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, although the way the term is used in contemporary conversations about religion is considerably broader. You certainly don't need a philosophy degree to deconstruct your faith. At its simplest, deconstruction involves becoming curious about things we previously took for granted.

Why do I believe this?

Do I believe it because I've examined it, or because everyone I trusted told me it was true?

Why is this particular interpretation of Scripture considered the obvious one?

Who was given the authority to decide that?

Whose experiences or voices might have been left out?

What happens when my lived experience doesn't fit what I was taught?

Those kinds of questions fit particularly well within our increasingly postmodern culture.

Modern Western thought placed enormous confidence in reason, systems, institutions, and our ability to discover objective answers. Those impulses gave us extraordinary things, including tremendous advances in science, medicine, education, and human rights.

But there can also be a shadow side to certainty.

Institutions—and religious institutions are certainly not exempt—can become remarkably confident that their particular understanding isn't simply an interpretation, but the interpretation.

Postmodern thought asks us to be a little more suspicious of that confidence. It invites us to pay attention to perspective, culture, language, power, context, and the voices that may not have made it into the official version of the story. I think there is something tremendously valuable in that invitation. It doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist or that every idea is equally good. It simply means approaching our certainty with a little more humility.

When Changing Your Beliefs Changes More Than Your Beliefs

One of the reasons religious deconstruction can be so emotionally difficult is that faith is rarely just a collection of ideas. Our religious worldview may help answer some of life's biggest questions:

Who am I?

What makes me a good person?

Where do I belong?

What gives my life meaning?

Who can I trust?

What happens when I die?

What does my family expect of me?

What does God expect of me?

That means changing a belief can affect much more than theology. Sometimes we pull out one theological brick and discover that nothing much happens. Other times we pull one out and think:

Oh. Apparently that one was load-bearing.

Suddenly we're not only reconsidering an interpretation of Scripture. We may be reconsidering relationships, identity, community, morality, sexuality, marriage, parenting, vocation, or our understanding of ourselves. No wonder deconstruction can feel overwhelming.

More Than One Thing Can Be True

In my last article, I wrote about something I find myself saying frequently in therapy: more than one thing can be true. Religious deconstruction is full of those moments.

I can love the community that raised me and recognize ways that it hurt me.

I can be angry with the church and miss it terribly.

I can treasure parts of my religious tradition and reject others.

I can question God and desperately want God to be there.

I can experience tremendous freedom and profound grief.

I can leave my faith and grieve what I've lost.

Sometimes people assume deconstruction should feel liberating. And sometimes it does. But liberation and loss aren't opposites. They can travel together. When a religious worldview changes, we may be grieving far more than beliefs. We may be grieving certainty, community, relationships, identity, rituals, traditions, or even the person we once imagined ourselves becoming. Making room for that complexity can be an important part of caring for our mental health during deconstruction.

When Deconstruction Affects Your Body and Nervous System

There can be another layer to this process. We may intellectually change a belief long before our bodies catch up. Someone might no longer believe that questioning a religious teaching will result in punishment from God, for example, yet still experience intense anxiety when they question it. Someone may no longer believe in the version of hell they were taught as a child and still feel a wave of fear when the subject comes up.

Someone may walk into a church after a painful religious experience and notice their heart racing, their muscles tightening, or an overwhelming desire to leave. Our nervous systems don't necessarily change simply because our theology does.

As I've written elsewhere, sometimes the body responds to danger before the thinking mind has finished deciding whether danger is actually present. For people whose religious experience included manipulation, coercion, abuse, rejection, or chronic fear, this can be especially important to understand.

Religious deconstruction and religious trauma aren't the same thing. A person can rethink their faith without having experienced religious trauma, and someone can experience religious trauma while remaining deeply committed to their faith.

But the two can overlap. When they do, healing may involve more than finding better answers to theological questions. It may also involve helping the body and nervous system discover that it is safe to ask them.

Finding Somewhere Safe to Ask the Questions

Looking back at my own experience, one of the things I'm most grateful for is that I eventually found people who allowed me to ask questions without requiring me to know where those questions would lead. I think that's an important distinction.

A safe person isn't necessarily someone who agrees with every conclusion you reach.

A safe person is someone who doesn't require a predetermined conclusion before you're allowed to ask the question. For some people, that space might be found with a trusted friend, spiritual director, clergy person, or faith community. Or, it may initially need to exist outside a religious institution altogether like at university or college. For others, working with a therapist who is comfortable discussing faith, spirituality and religious deconstruction can provide a place to explore these questions without pressure toward a particular conclusion

What matters is that there is room for honesty. Because deconstruction can become incredibly lonely when every question feels like a threat to someone else.

Therapy and Religious Deconstruction

I think therapy can offer something particularly valuable here, provided the therapist understands the importance of not determining the destination. Therapy shouldn't be trying to get someone back to church. It also shouldn't be trying to lead someone away from faith.

Some people deconstruct and eventually find themselves outside organized religion. Some discover a different expression of spirituality or faith. Others remain within their religious tradition but understand it very differently than they once did.

There isn't one therapeutic destination.

The work is to create enough safety, curiosity, and psychological flexibility that someone can explore what they genuinely believe, what they value, what they have lost, what they want to keep, and what they may finally be ready to release.

Sometimes that means theological questions belong in the therapy room.

Sometimes it means grief does.

Sometimes anger.

Sometimes fear.

Sometimes relief.

Usually, in my experience, it's more than one of those things.

Maybe Faith Isn't a Brick Wall

Years after my own spiritual bulldozer experience, I encountered another image that gave me a different way of thinking about faith. In his book Velvet Elvis, author and former pastor Rob Bell contrasts faith imagined as a brick wall with faith imagined as a trampoline. The brick wall is built from individual beliefs. Each brick matters because it helps support the entire structure. That can create an enormous amount of anxiety around questioning: if I remove this brick, what happens to the wall? What if another comes loose? How many questions can I ask before the whole thing collapses?

A trampoline works differently.

It still has structure. The springs matter.

But the springs are designed to stretch.

There is movement.

There is tension.

There is even room to jump.

I find myself increasingly drawn to that image. Looking back, perhaps part of the terror of my own deconstruction was that I believed the building had been destroyed and therefore my faith had been destroyed with it. I didn't yet know I was allowed to imagine faith differently.

Continue the Conversation

🛠 Try This: Get Curious About One Brick

If you find yourself questioning something you were taught to believe, you don't have to dismantle your entire worldview tonight. Choose one question. Then, rather than immediately trying to decide whether the belief is right or wrong, become curious about it.

Where did I learn this?

Why has this belief mattered to me?

What emotions come up when I question it?

What am I afraid might happen if I change my mind?

Is there anything about this belief that I still want to keep?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do I actually think?

Give yourself permission not to know yet.

In my psychotherapy work with clients in Milton and Burlington, as well as virtually across Ontario, I sometimes meet people who are trying to make sense of changing religious beliefs, painful church experiences, or questions about spirituality and identity.

📚 Curious to Learn More?

Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell was one of the books that helped me imagine a more flexible approach to faith. His brick-wall and trampoline images have stayed with me because they offer a helpful alternative to the idea that asking difficult questions must inevitably destroy everything we value.

There are many other voices worth exploring, and I hope to introduce some of them in future articles. As with therapy itself, I don't think the goal should be finding one author who gives us all the answers. Sometimes we need people who simply help us ask better questions.

A Final Thought

For some people, deconstruction eventually leads away from religious faith altogether. For others, it leads toward a faith that looks very different from the one they inherited. Still others remain somewhere in between, continuing to ask questions without feeling an urgent need to resolve them. Therapy shouldn't determine which of those destinations is correct.

Looking back, I don't think the bulldozer was the end of my spiritual life. It certainly felt that way at the time. What I couldn't see from inside the rubble was that losing certainty wasn't the same thing as losing my capacity for meaning, spirituality, wonder, or faith. My spiritual life today doesn't look exactly like the building I inhabited when I was younger. I'm grateful that it doesn't.

And I'm still asking questions.

Perhaps that's one of the gifts deconstruction can sometimes offer. It doesn't have to take us from one kind of certainty into another. It can teach us to live more honestly with questions, complexity, and mystery.

Wherever you ultimately land, I believe you deserve somewhere you can explore those questions without fear, pressure, or judgment.

Somewhere you don't have to protect the brick wall.

You can examine the bricks.

You can ask who put them there.

You can decide whether they still belong.

And perhaps, eventually, you might discover that you don't need a wall at all.

Looking for support with religious deconstruction?

If you're questioning your faith, processing a painful religious experience, or trying to understand what you believe now, therapy can provide a confidential space to explore those questions without pressure toward a particular conclusion. I offer psychotherapy in Milton and Burlington and virtual sessions across Ontario. Learn more about faith, spirituality and religious deconstruction counselling, or book a free consultation.