Broken at Two Levels

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: This post is part of our Guest Writers series. At Deconstruction Doulas, we seek to present many survivor voices with many perspectives on the issues that we confront: spiritual abuse, patriarchy, high-control religion, deconstruction, deconversion, and everything that lives 'downstream' from these things.

The content found in posts made by guest writers are not the opinions of the Deconstruction Doulas. You may find some survivors’ opinions and perspectives triggering for various reasons. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Please read carefully, respecting your own nervous system, needs, and direction, and don't be afraid to discard what is unhelpful. Not everything is for everyone, nor should it be.]]

Written by Weylin Unruh (written for Deconstruction Doulas, originally published June 8, 2026)

The place our hearts live when we have to be ready to throw away our best friends — and when we know, always, that they may have to throw us away at a moment’s notice — cannot be overstated. It is so harmful. And I don’t think we talk about it enough.

I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I believe it creates people who carry two simultaneous and opposite trust wounds.

On one side, we desperately want friends. We want to belong, to be known, to be loved. That hunger is so real that we ignore red flags. We let people in long before they’ve earned it. We hand over our secrets and our vulnerability to people who haven’t proven they can hold them — because we need connection so badly that we skip the part where trust is actually built.

On the other side, we can’t fully connect with someone who could — at the command of another person — walk away from us permanently. When a pastor can declare you guilty of sin and an entire congregation or even a religion disappears from your life, real trust becomes impossible. Not because you’re broken, but because the threat is real. The danger is real. How do you give someone your whole heart when you know that under the right conditions they’ll hand it back — or smash it?

So you end up broken in two directions at once. Overextended with people who haven’t earned it. Withholding from people who possibly could have.

This plays out in marriages too. I’ve had several people describe to me the feeling of the church sitting between them and their spouse — a third presence in the most intimate relationship they have. When an institution defines what a good husband is, what a good wife is, what a godly marriage looks like, you’re never actually finding each other. You’re both performing for that third audience that isn’t even in the room. And after years of that, deconstruction can leave you looking across the table at someone you’ve lived with for decades and realizing you may be strangers.

The cruelest part is that you didn’t know there was a ceiling. It didn’t feel shallow because you had no reference point for what depth was supposed to feel like. The shallow was all there was — dressed up in the language of covenant and sacred community.

Which brings me to the questions I sat with for a long time:

Who can teach you what trust looks like when everyone in your world is capable of complete betrayal? How do you calibrate your instinctual radar when ignoring red flags was rewarded and listening to them was called faithlessness? How do you even know what real safety feels like when you’ve never been allowed to find out?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the actual wreckage.

And the wreckage doesn’t stay neatly inside the community walls. It travels with you.

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The vulnerability didn’t appear at the exit door. It was built inside, long before you left.

In a high control religious community, the broken radar isn’t just a personal problem. It’s a feature of the system. A community that needs people to override their instincts, bond around shared belief rather than actually knowing each other, and hand their doubts to authority — that community is extraordinarily easy to manage. And extraordinarily easy to exploit.

The people most at risk aren’t the ones who are obviously struggling. They’re the ones who want connection so badly that they’ve learned to perform it. They bond fast. They share too much too soon. They extend trust before it’s been earned because the hunger for belonging is louder than the quiet voice saying something is off here. And they’ve been trained — theologically, systematically — to distrust that voice when it comes.

That’s the environment predatory people look for. Not necessarily the ones who arrived as predators. Some of them were shaped by the same system and figured out that certain things were available to them that wouldn’t be elsewhere. When people have been taught that connection is transactional — follow the steps, fill the role, perform the right things — they can be leveraged. Secrets shared too soon become tools. Vulnerability extended before trust was earned becomes a handle.

Here’s what makes it worse. The community doesn’t just allow exploitation — it covers for it. When someone’s instincts start working again and they begin to name what they’re experiencing, the institution has a ready response. Proud spirit. Independent spirit. Dark spirit. The person whose radar is finally functioning gets labeled as the problem. The person exploiting them gets the protection of a structure that needs everything to stay undisturbed.

I watched this happen. I’ve talked to people who lived it. The speed with which a community closes ranks around the wrong person — and turns on the one raising concerns — is breathtaking when you see it up close. It isn’t always cruelty. The true believers are doing what they genuinely think is right. But the effect is identical to cruelty. The person who was already vulnerable gets left more exposed. The person who needed the community’s protection gets cut off at exactly the moment they needed it most.

This is also why certain marketing strategies find such fertile ground in these communities. The structure is identical. A few at the top absorbing the gains from the trust and labor of many at the bottom who believe they’re part of something meaningful. The product changes. The mechanism doesn’t. When you’ve been trained your whole life to trust the structure and push down the signal that says something is wrong here — you’re not just vulnerable in your personal relationships. You’re vulnerable to any system that knows how to speak the language of belonging.

That signal doesn’t have to stay broken. But first you have to know it is.

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And then you leave. And you think the danger is behind you.

What you don’t realize yet is that you’re carrying the same wiring into the new world. You left the church but you didn’t leave behind what it built in you. The habits of trust — bond fast, ignore the signal, perform connection, submit to whoever speaks the language of belonging — those don’t disappear because the building does.

It doesn’t announce itself. It just runs quietly while you make the same kinds of mistakes with new people in new places. The names change. The context changes. The spiritual language disappears. The pattern doesn’t.

And here is the part that is hardest to accept in yourself.

The season right after deconstruction is one of the most vulnerable times in a person’s life. Not just emotionally — relationally. You’ve just lost community, possibly family, possibly your whole framework for understanding who you are. You’re grieving and raw and hungry for connection in a way that’s almost unbearable. That hunger is real and it is legitimate. And it is exactly what certain kinds of people look for.

I’m not talking about obvious monsters. I’m talking about the ordinary charming ones who are very good at recognizing need. They don’t have to work hard with someone coming out of deconstruction because the system already did the work for them. It trained you to bond quickly around shared experience. It trained you to trust people who speak your language and seem to understand your pain. It trained you to override your instincts when they conflict with your need for belonging. It taught you your gut feelings weren’t reliable.

You walk out carrying all of that. And the world has no shortage of people who know exactly what to do with it.

This isn’t your fault. I want you to understand that. The vulnerability is not a character flaw. It’s a predictable outcome of what was done to you. But knowing it’s there is the beginning of being able to protect yourself from it.

The radar can be recalibrated. You can get back to the point where you feel the difference between someone who is actually safe and someone who has just learned to look that way. That ability isn’t gone. It was suppressed. And it can come back.

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So what do we do with this?

First, we grieve. We have to let ourselves feel the weight of what was lost — not just the friendships and the community, but the version of ourselves who knew how to trust. The person we might have become if we’d been allowed to develop real intimacy. That grief is real and it deserves to be honored before we try to fix anything.

Then comes something harder: we have to learn to trust ourselves again.

And here’s where I want you to look at for a moment, because this part is importnant. The fact that you are here — reading this, naming this, starting to understand what happened to you — that is already an act of self-trust. You caught it. You diagnosed something that was invisible to you while you were inside it. That took something. That took you starting to listen to yourself again.

That’s where rebuilding begins.

From there, slowly, we get to decide for ourselves what trust is going to look like. Not what we were handed. Not the version that served someone else’s agenda. Ours. Built on our own terms, at our own pace, with people who earn it over time.

And if you are in a friendship with someone navigating this — it is hard to be that person, I won’t pretend otherwise. But if you can show up for them through it, stay when it’s uncomfortable, let trust be built slowly and honestly — what comes out the other side is one of the deepest friendships possible. Because it was built on something real.

I know this because I’m living it.

The deepest and honestly almost only relationships I have are ones I built after my deconstruction. People who had to earn their way through my hurt and my cynicism. People who showed up anyway, who stayed patient, who didn’t need me to perform wellness or gratitude or certainty. Those relationships are the realest things in my life.

But I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty more than you deserve a tidy ending.

I still trust very few people. Not all of that is from what happened inside the church. Some of it came after — people I believed in during deconstruction who, once I stopped being useful to them, revealed that the care had been performance all along. Years of it. And then they were gone. Family has been the hardest part of that. Family, it turns out, is not exempt.

So I’m not going to tell you that healing means trusting freely again. It doesn’t. What it means, I think, is that you get your instincts back. Slowly. Imperfectly. With some painful lessons still ahead. But the radar can be recalibrated. You can learn the difference between the feeling of real safety and the counterfeit version you were handed for so long.

That’s what we were never allowed to have. And it’s still available to us.

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About the author: Weylin Unruh spent the first 34 years of his life inside the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite — a closed fundamentalist community that considered itself the only true expression of Christianity on earth. He left with almost nothing intact: community gone, family relationships fractured, a marriage ended, and nine months of self-imposed isolation while the system he'd left continued running in him. What came out the other side was six years of intensive study and a book — The Godly Face of Narcissism: When Faith Becomes a Mask — that maps how narcissistic patterns hide inside religious language (not narcissism in general) and what it looks like when it learns to wear the face of God. He writes at wunruh.substack.com and believes that naming is how you find the door.