While I, personally, feel like religion being interjected into these processes likely dilutes their efficacy, if you feel like it may help you to work through them, then by all means do it. If you don’t feel that way, then, again, it’s your well-being and you need to put that first. Things may be rocky, but the people who love you will adapt.
My mother has never been one for adapting very well, religion for her is simply too powerful a component in her life. When she insisted that I see a Catholic therapist, and I told her that I wanted someone more impartial, she became extremely angry, thinking that I was asking for an atheist (which I never said) so that they could push their views onto me, as if I needed to be pushed back towards her views.
If you’re a dependent, however, and you live with them, it’s best to keep things smooth and diplomatic. Maybe strike some deal where you see a secular psychologist but also assuage her fears by agreeing to some form of religious something or other? I honestly don’t know what the best option would be, and I can’t really tell you what to say. Just be insistent but understanding and open.
I’m almost 29 and still live at home. I’m so stunted. My brother definitely went his own way in life, and my mother perceives the fact that he and I don’t share her level of religious faith as a personal failure after all of her years of instilling it in us. It genuinely upsets her and makes her feel like a personal failure. I crushes me to hurt her. I love mother more than anything in the entire world. She’s literally given her whole life to me, every day after long work shifts she would sit down and help me with my homework, she feeds me, clothes me, shelters me, paid for 16 years of private school education for me. I hate hurting her. Maybe it’s at the root of the problem: by even watching some of these anti-religious videos, maybe it unconsciously felt like a betrayal of her. I simply felt like I couldn’t stop, some sort of obsessive compulsive manifestation.
I wouldn’t say you’ve made things worse, these things just need to be massaged and dealt with in a diplomatic fashion. As your mother, the hope is that she will eventually realize that your well-being is more important than her desires for your religious beliefs.
I hope so. She’s had the entire lives of my brother and I to accept that we don’t have her religious fervor, and it seems to crush her all the same. She perceives the situation as an immediate desire for atheism on my part, as if I want to become Richard Dawkins. I don’t perceive the situation this way, I certainly don’t want to “battle against religion” or denigrate her beliefs, but I simply don’t hold them as strongly and I’m a different place spiritually. I wish I could figure out the root of this whole problem, since I already knew all about these anti-religious polemical sand simply was able to ignore them previously. It’s not something which effects my life personally, why can I not simply put it on a shelf intellectually like I used to?!
All parents eventually go through this sort of “disappointment” at some point in their parenting careers: whether their child is gay, religious, not religious, not a fan of their favourite sports team, didn’t get into their university, a Liberal Arts Major rather than a doctor, doesn’t want children, moves out of state/country, or a million other things, something you do will disappoint them and they will cope with it, come to terms with it, and hopefully move on. You must do what is best for your mental heath, whatever it may be.
I don’t know, she’s literally had my whole life to cope with it. I simply think her faith is too strong for her to see around it. I don’t, as I have repeatedly Said, mean this to ride her about it or criticize her for it, simply that I’m in a different place than her. I want to curl up in a ball and cry. I don’t know what to do anymore. I thought talking to her about it would make things better, not worse. I have people where I work making comments about how I don’t look well. It’s like my mind is being destroyed. It’s horrible.
I feel like my head is going to explode.