Did your former religion ever make you feel broken?

[Foxaèr]

---

Did your former religion ever make you feel broken?  I mean truly broken.  Like there was something wrong with you, when now you know there wasn't?   I know that Christianity is predicated on the idea that we're all broken, but did anyone else actually feel broken? 

I know that I did.  In my early teens when I first started touching myself sexually... my earliest sexual fantasies were about other girls.  I already felt wrong for masturbating, but doubly so because I was attracted to girls.  I was attracted to boys too, but other girls turned me on more than boys did.  So I was convinced that there was something wrong with me.  That I wasn't born right or something.   I had the feeling again later when I started taking birth control pills.  I didn't feel any guilt about it, but I knew it was against the teachings of the church.  Which made me feel like there was something wrong with me because I didn't feel guilty about it.   Sometimes I would skip the pill, telling myself that I should quit because the church says so (this is how I ended up pregnant the first time).   Religion just made me so confused about who I was and what I was doing.  

It's not even just about 'sin'.  It can be about all the terrible things that happen to you, and you wonder why god wouldn't help you.  A good friend of mine was molested by her father when she was a child, and she confided in me that she felt so broken because god wouldn't help her.  Like he had turned away from her because there was something wrong with her so she 'deserved' it.  She's now open about what happened to her, and speaks with people who've been abused.

Religion makes you feel broken so it can fix you.  It creates the problem, then sells you the solution.  Atheists tend to see it for the snake oil salesman that it is.  Which is why I'm wondering if anyone else ever felt broken because of their religion?  I know now that I wasn't broken.  There was nothing wrong with me.  I was normal.  Were you able to avoid the feeling of being broken, or did you have to break free of that feeling?  I know I was able to break free after reading the bible, and realizing that so much of it is a bunch of nonsense.  It's like looking in the closet for the monster, and finding that it's just a couple of clothes piled in a funny shape.  You realize that you aren't broken, and that you never were.  You realize the monster wasn't there, and it was a ridiculous idea from the start.

---

I think it is especially harder for us gay people, but it is becoming easier for younger generations now to no longer suffer unnecessarily.