Coping With Belief Change

November 7, 2008 12:56 PM

Have you experienced sudden, traumatic changes to a deeply-held belief? How did you deal with it?

We typically adjust our belief systems as we grow older. That's a given for most people. But what about those times when a belief is completely exploded?

I'm working on a story in which several people hold a strong belief in common about a subject only to discover that they are completely wrong. As a story device this is not new ground, I admit, but I think the effects of the destruction of a deeply held belief are too often minimized or turned to melodrama.

I'd like to hear first or second-hand experiences in this regard, and especially how the trauma was handled.

Not so much interested in who broke the news to you about Santa Claus. This is about serious, deep beliefs.

As I understand it some people refuse to cope and turn to suicide but most do not, although the extent of that could be a cultural thing.

posted by trinity8-director to society & culture (31 comments total)

Can you give an example? (Especially, of suicide.) My impressions is Believers cling to their faith even when confronted with insurmountable evidence to the contrary, because it's part of their identity.
posted by Rash at 1:13 PM on November 7, 2008

I don't know if this is of the way-too-obvious-to-be-considered variety, but ask any gay person who grew up in a conservative household.
posted by kittyprecious at 1:16 PM on November 7, 2008

IIRC, when apocalyptic cults predict the end times and they don't come, they will usually find a reason for it consistent with their beliefs and and postpone their predicted end time date.
posted by phoenixy at 1:20 PM on November 7, 2008

My mother was taught an Us/Them dynamic by my grandmother, that essentially ran that my grandmother had the right to act as she did, and that 'normal' was oppressive, scary and dangerous. It took a long time for my mother and her sisters to start to discover otherwise, and it seems recovering from that sort of fundamental belief is a multi-decade process involving a heck of a lot of denial, false starts and wandering around being boggled that what went on went as long as it did.

So let us say your group of people had been raised to believe that they lived on the inside of a sphere ruled over by a god-king, or that most other humans were alien robots, even when shown otherwise there would be a lot of arguing with reality as the people each tried to make the new world fit their old way of thinking. For example in the god-king context, signs that the god-king was a mere mortal would be retranslated to "we're being tested, we have to still believe/our badness changed the god-king", clinging to the cultural behaviours the belief caused "we still greet the inner sphere in morning prayer, it's a metaphor/tradition" and so on. A sociological study on cultural integration should give you a more scientific explanation on how humans behave when their norms are challenged.
posted by Phalene at 1:20 PM on November 7, 2008

'Believers' aren't other people, btw. We are all believers and we build our lives around those thing that we believe strongly. But the point about identity is well taken.

Let's use for example the USSR. Many believed strongly (inside and outside) in the USSR and may have been traumatized by the fall and break-up of the empire. Some of those people kept their belief, as Rash says, but some accepted the change after going through....something.
posted by trinity8-director at 1:21 PM on November 7, 2008

Another example might be that a particular king/emperor is a deity. That has been common enough in history and yet those guys died just the same. This was true as recently as Japan in WWII.
posted by trinity8-director at 1:24 PM on November 7, 2008

Maybe the tale of Captain James Cook being killed after he was observed pooping, and no longer believed to be a god, as told from the point of view of an Hawaiian native.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:43 PM on November 7, 2008

Most of the immediate examples that leap to mind are religious conversions, either to or from. Even if you are not religious, you may find the kind of emotion you seek in these sort of accounts. (Could someone fill in some of the best examples? It's been a loooong time since religious studies classes for me.)

The second category of earth-shattering revelations that come to mind tend to revolve around questions of identity, especially parentage. Finding out that you're adopted. Finding out that you have previously-unknown siblings. Finding out that you have a child. And more positive "everything I thought I knew was wrong" experiences include finding out that you're pregnant and having children.
posted by desuetude at 2:04 PM on November 7, 2008

A classic example of this is Augustine's conversion to Christianity; you can read his account of it here.
posted by languagehat at 2:22 PM on November 7, 2008

We are about to see this on a national scale in North Korea, so just pull up a chair and keep your eyes open. (Or is this why you're asking the question?)

I'm glad they don't have (very many/very big) nuclear weapons.
posted by jamjam at 2:51 PM on November 7, 2008

I was raised in a deeply apocalyptical fundamentalist religion which included a teacher telling me (and me believing until COLLEGE) that dinosaur bones were placed in the earth by Satan to lead us away from the truth. It's taken me years to come to grips with it, and I'm still trying to understand how some very nice people, including my family who I love very much, can believe some truly wacky things. In fact, I have an askMefi post about half-written about it, looking for stories of people who've successfully left such a cultlike environment.

To your specific question, "what's it like?":

It's horrible. It's like not knowing inside from outside or up from down. It's creepy. It's unfair. It's devastating.

I refused to cope for years and kept faking a belief that I didn't share, panicked that I was losing my sanity. I kept "walking the walk" and "talking the talk" figuring that true belief and peace would come when I was "pure enough". For about two years I was really tortured with the minutiae of belief, the doctrinal differences between the religion I was raised in and the religions of the world. And then I was severely depressed to realize that ultimately, I don't believe in anything. Or more accurately, I find everything to be equally likely, which makes it all equally improbable. Giving up an identifying belief meant I could no longer keep my job (I worked for the church), have lost many friends and networks (I went to church-affiliated high school and college) and will have to have some bitter battles with my family (for now, it's easier to live across the country and let them believe what they want about me). It's lonely. And it's still worth it, for me.

An interesting story, I think, is Stolen Innocence about one of the underage brides who helped put Warren Jeffs behind bars, and also the upcoming I'm Perfect, You're Doomed (March 09) about a woman who leaves the Jehovah's Witnesses. Not sure if all this religious stuff is quite what you were looking for, but you hit a nerve for me.
posted by purplecurlygirl at 3:06 PM on November 7, 2008 [5 favorites]

purplecurlygirl, thanks for reminding me that I actually know a woman who got caught up in a polygamist cult. I will definitely touch bases with her and rewatch her documentary. It was a brutal and damaging experience.

I understand that we reach for religious examples easily. They really do stand out in our minds and are often what we think of first when we hear the word 'belief'.

I don't want to focus on religion exclusively but I'll take any examples.
posted by trinity8-director at 3:20 PM on November 7, 2008

Rash, I can't put my finger on why I think that people might commit suicide over the failure to cope with broken beliefs. Perhaps I imagine a downward spiral of despair and hopelessness?
posted by trinity8-director at 3:24 PM on November 7, 2008

I haven't experienced it, but I have known people who were in cultlike groups that simply dominated their lives, and, when it ended disasterously, they were quite traumetized by it. One of them wrote extensively about her experiences a few years ago.
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:46 PM on November 7, 2008 [3 favorites]

Without getting bogged down in details (it was not a cult/religion issue though), for me, when something I desperately needed to be true turned out to be demonstrably false, I had something akin to a full mental collapse.

The initial shock lasted 6 weeks, during which time I was barely functional as a human. After that, I fell hard into nihilism in the sense that I was unable to find any objective ground of truth. 17 years later, it's still an issue for me. I used to say that if someone bet me $5 that the sun wouldn't come up tomorrow, I wouldn't take the bet. Slowly I moved away from that brink and took baby steps toward belief again, but it was a looong road.
posted by Failure31 at 3:51 PM on November 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

One of the canonical examples would be the Millerites. When preacher William Miller predicted the end of the world, his followers -- at the time surpassing one million -- gathered to expect it. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't come. The ensuing reaction was known as the Great Disappointment.

that a particular king/emperor is a deity... and yet those guys died just the same

The Japanese Emperor was considered arahitogami, essentially divinity in human form. I don't think it precluded human mortality.

As for non-religious examples, I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned 9/11. And the election of Barack Obama seems to have had a dramatic effect on some Americans.

On a perfectly ordinary level, my father's Alzheimer's shatters my worldview daily.
posted by dhartung at 4:15 PM on November 7, 2008

It is strange and fascinating that you posted this question right now. I just finished writing a not-at-all-positive review of the Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions, ed. by James R. Lewis. It's a terrible reference book, but it includes an article by Diana Tumminia titled “How Prophecy Never Fails: Interpretive Reason in a Flying Saucer Group” about how a group of Unarians (UFO-believers) dealt with the failure of the great flying saucer to land when and where their chief prophet told them it would and the general psychological state surrounding that. It's really a serious presentation of the topic, despite how woo-woo-X-Files UFO religions sound.

One of Tumminia's other books might also be of interest: WHEN PROPHECY NEVER FAILS: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group, although I haven't actually read or looked at it and can't be sure.

If you think this might be useful and you can't dig up a copy of the article, MeMail me.
posted by fuzzbean at 4:34 PM on November 7, 2008

I am currently writing a book with Warren Jeffs' nephew which deals with how he dealt with this. He and his brothers became "lost boys"-- the boys who were thrown out so there'd be enough girls for the men to have many, young wives. Virtually all of the lost boys go through a period of heavy drinking and drug use.

It's odd, but cults are often a way out of addiction-- and addictions are often a way out of cults. it's because the two things both provide an identity, a group to belong to, a source of meaning and purpose and way to spend all your time.
posted by Maias at 4:40 PM on November 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but here's my story:

While I was in college I decided that I wanted to go into international adoption. Just coming to that decision was huge for me, because I was never someone who knew exactly what they wanted to do. I zeroed in on my goal and gave it my full attention. I asked questions of everyone I knew who had adopted internationally, read about agencies online, etc. I wrote my thesis on adoption from China to the United States and I was sure that I wanted to work at an adoption agency and possibly even adopt myself when I was older and married.

During that time I started listening to a lot of NPR, and after writing my thesis I heard a report about an American woman who was trying to adopt kids from a country in Africa (don't remember which) and that particular country had really strict international adoption regulations because of the importance of keeping children in their homeland. These and other ethical issues of adoption never occurred to me. I was really torn because all of a sudden adopting a child, which I had thought to be a purely good, generous and loving act, became something highly unethical and wrong in many ways.

After much contemplation I decided that I couldn't rightly pursue adoption as part of my career. This was a huge disappointment because I had finally made an important life decision, invested a lot of energy and hope into that decision, and now I had to let it go.

Today when I see parents with children of a different race (who I assume are adopted from another country), I tear up. I am so overwhelmed by the love there, in that family. But part of me is sad because I know now that I can't be a part of the adoption process because I now believe it to be wrong, and that pains me.

This experience was not by any stretch as extreme as losing religious faith, but it was a loss and I have had to cope with that loss.
posted by easy_being_green at 5:05 PM on November 7, 2008 [4 favorites]

this is not on the same level as religious cults, but as a longtime reader/frequenter of the political blogosphere, sometimes you can watch in real time as groups of people on blogs coalesce and gradually form a set of specific and fairly rigid beliefs, it can be a bit cult-like - not everybody gets that way, but some do, and tend to take over. Back when Dean was running for POTUS and a whole lot of netroots people were on the Blog for America - there were practically no political blogs then - people got.. more and more intense. Kerry was wrong about everything and ran a dirty campaign, the media were out to destroy their candidate, and there was no possible way he could lose Iowa, the polls were wrong, it could never happen. So in that case a deeply-held belief about what would happen was forcibly wrecked by the actual turn of events. And what you saw after that was a lot of despair.. and then some people deciding to keep fighting for a candidate they believed in, some deciding to throw their hands up and quit, deciding to switch to another candidate, and some.. obsessed with every possible way to explain away what they'd thought was impossible, something corrupt must have happened.

So check Daily Kos in November 2004 as Bush was reelected, or Democratic Underground those same days, see how people react.

Or, in 2006 or in this year, you could take a tour of liveblogs and comment threads on a lot of conservative blogs from the past couple days, the ones who'd convinced themselves and their readers that the polls were all wrong, the media was all wrong, the American people would never vote for Barack Obama, there was just no possible way that Barack Obama would win this election. See how they react as the returns come in. Look at what they're talking about afterward - some pragmatically looking at the next election (Chambliss runoff in Georgia), some insisting that ACORN stole the election, some looking for a scapegoat (McCain's people) - try RedState, Little Green Footballs, FreeRepublic.
posted by citron at 5:09 PM on November 7, 2008

Apologies if this is too trite, but have you seen, "The Celebration"/"Festen?"
posted by rhizome at 5:13 PM on November 7, 2008

Lots of people embrace an opposing belief/belief-system/viewpoint with evangelical zeal. People that are born-again set out to become the best street-preacher-ever. Those who lose their faith join atheist groups. Ex-smokers become annoying anti-smokers. People in AA want to talk about it all the time. Lots of lefty peaceniks became dogmatic neocons after 9-11. People that never thought about having children bother their friends being the most doting parents possible. People think their rebound-relationship is "the One." Teenagers who leave or are cast out of one clique take up another clique or subculture like their clothes & music are without question the coolest thing ever invented.

When a person loses something (or when keeping it becomes impossible) that was a big part of their life and identity, they often feel a big void and try to fill it with something similar. And rush into it, quickly develop an encyclopaedic grasp of it, and heap scorn upon people who don't follow them into their new belief-system. Or at least tut-tut them, or sigh condescendingly at their lack of enlightenment.
posted by K.P. at 5:28 PM on November 7, 2008 [3 favorites]

I really like K.P.'s answer. It puts it in a context that most can relate to, though I understood all the others.

Very good question, trinity8-director.
posted by captainsohler at 6:14 PM on November 7, 2008

Here's a recent, well-known, non-religious example.
posted by robhuddles at 6:29 PM on November 7, 2008

Sharing someone else's story:
Guy was super religious, and was in love with this one girl who he respected a lot, thought she was super religious, waiting for marriage, a good person, etc. One day he finds out he's not so innocent, and not such a good person, and just because someone claims to be religious doesn't make them flawless. Religion pretty much went out the window for him then. Also, soon after, he met me, the most UN-religious person ever and realized that just like religious people can be not-so-good people, non-religious people can be really good people.
posted by KateHasQuestions at 6:43 PM on November 7, 2008

This is on a more personal level, but I would imagine things like being married for, say, 20 years, only to find out that your partner had been cheating on you might bring up the same feelings of destruction. On a smaller level, but looking at this might help with the insights on a smaller and more intimate scale.
posted by Vaike at 10:11 PM on November 7, 2008

Just to provide an example from a different point of view: some really worldview-shattering experiences can be immensely positive and exhilarating beyond belief. I'm thinking specifically of psychotherapy and other paths to self-understanding that can turn a situation that once was desperate, shitty and grey into something full of life and goodness.

When I was suffering from depression and bad anxiety, I had some breakthrough therapy sessions that really turned night into dawn for me. It felt a little like running for hours and hours and hours and finally stopping -- I was exhausted, I hurt a lot, but I knew something huge had just been accomplished. There was a sense of calm and inner peace, and a rather goofy feeling that by realizing my weaknesses, I had become stronger.
posted by DLWM at 8:11 AM on November 8, 2008

There are a number of people who have left Scientology who have described experiences like this. You might find some insights in the My Story thread at the Ex-Scientologist Forum.

My impression is that it's often a long process of integrating new information (information that was previously forbidden) into your world view, bits at a time, while dealing with intense anger and grief, and often shame over having believed in the old belief.

And just to be clear, not every ex-Scientologist has a huge, world-shattering change of belief. Just as with other belief systems, people's level of involvement varies.

One specific account I'm familiar with was posted by "Cerridwen", who found gardening helpful in coping with her unindoctrination (her word). (Note: self-link, sort of; not hosted on my site, but includes a lengthy reply from me.)


On another note, robhuddles' description made me think of when the mayor of San Diego abruptly changed his stance on same-sex marriage.
posted by kristi at 12:24 PM on November 8, 2008

I believed my dad was deep down a good guy. When my parents divorced, I got to see how ugly he was since my mother wasn't shielding me from it any longer. Rocked my world. I think I'm still grieving, 4 years later. To cope with it I've thrown myself into a ministry at my church called Theophostic Prayer Ministry. It has been hugely helpful to me to learn what God thinks about particular situations, especially those situations that were really hurtful. I've learned a lot about my dad that way, and it has been healing. Still rocks my world, particularly at the holidays when all the happy memories come around.
posted by orangemiles at 2:13 PM on November 8, 2008

Seconding Failure31, except that it's only been 1,5 years. Mental collapse and isolation. I spent 3 entire days and nights in a restless quest for more testimonies of people who had gone through the same experience, informations and articles that would confirm what i feared the most. In my case it was a deconversion from a fundamentalistic lifestyle. During the weeks that followed, i thought of nothing but what this change of values would involve, and between the mourning of the idea of what my god was, and the euphoria of seing all kinds of open doors open to me, with new ways of thinking, new lifestyles, a new definition of right and wrong, things were very, very hectic. Do I need say that the process involved entire days of crying (i mean terrible days, losing weight, etc..) and having to drop a year of gradschool ? It was devastating at all levels...especially since my family had a hard time understanding it..But so worth it =)

Several times, every single days, new ideas and links between past thoughts would appear, and my mind has never raced this much ever since. I would frantically write them on little pieces of papers, wherever i would be at, and pinned them on a big board once i would be back home, then every once in a while place them differently in order to have a visual picture of what all this was built on, a little bit like a mathematician in fron tof his board, erasing and correcting bits and pieces. The point, i think, was to be able to hold a realistic new view of the strange world that surrounded me, as quickly as possible.. because it looked scary.

It worked very well, along with more endless discussions with close friends who were still holding the beliefs. Indeed suicidal thoughts were part of the process, after i had taken the step. Eventually, cutting a few ties has been another necessary step, and working towards a single view of existencial matters/questions (usually a deep skepticism.. instead of 2 views that cohabited, that excluded one another).

You may want to check websites such as exchristian.net , etc etc..
posted by Jireel at 2:33 AM on November 11, 2008

The initial shock lasted 6 weeks, during which time I was barely functional as a human. After that, I fell hard into nihilism in the sense that I was unable to find any objective ground of truth.

Something similar happened to me. By luck, accident, blessing, somehow I kind of realized that there doesn't need to be an objective ground of truth. There might not be one. The trick is that I can interact with it exactly as if there is one!

That really eased the tire back onto the wheel for me.
posted by krilli at 2:53 PM on September 16