Why leaving feels like death
There came a point in my late twenties when I knew I had to step outside the system I was active with in order to hear my own thoughts. I had been attending church regularly for years at that point, and I could no longer tell the difference between what I actually believed and what I had been trained to say. The two had been fused for so long that I could not tell where one ended and the other began. I needed to walk away long enough to find out whether my desire to be there was a childlike obedience to what had always been expected of me, or whether I genuinely believed what was being taught.
I didn’t announce my departure, I just stopped going. The decision didn’t feel brave at the time. It felt like the only honest thing I knew how to do, even though the honesty came with a kind of disorientation I had no language for. I would wake up on Sunday mornings with my body reaching for the routine that had structured my weeks for years, and there would be nothing to reach toward. I would feel a small wave of dread on Saturday nights and not understand where it was coming from. I would catch myself wondering, in the middle of perfectly ordinary moments, whether I was making the worst mistake of my life. The disorientation came from the absence of the scaffolding that had been holding me upright since I was a young man, not from any crisis of faith.
The first time I ran into church members in public a while after I had stopped attending, I was at a Best Buy with my kids. We were paying for some video game they had wanted, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a couple I had spent years sitting next to in services. They had spotted me too. They were standing a respectful distance away, waiting for me to finish my transaction, watching me with the careful interest that people watch other people they used to know well. I felt my body tense before my mind had registered what was happening. By the time I had paid and turned around to face them, I had already been calculating what to say, how to smile, what version of myself I needed to present in order to make the encounter survivable.
The conversation that followed was friendly enough on the surface. We talked about kids, about work, about nothing important really. Underneath the surface, two completely different conversations were happening. They were wondering how far into hell I had slid since the last time they had seen me. I was wondering what was still keeping them in the church I left. I think both wonderings were sincere. Both were attempting to fit my absence from church into a framework that would make sense for all of us. Neither of us could say any of this out loud, so we talked about the kids and our jobs and parted with the kind of awkward handshake.
I drove home from Best Buy that day and tried to understand why an encounter that should have been ordinary had felt so loaded. The conversation wasn’t hostile, nobody said anything hurtful. They were people I had genuinely cared about and who had genuinely cared about me. And yet my body had treated the encounter like a near-miss with something dangerous, and I could tell that their bodies had registered something similar. We had been part of the same group, and now I was not, and that not-ness had made us strangers in a way that polite conversation could not undo.
The psychiatrist John Bowlby spent his career studying what happens when human beings are separated from the groups they are attached to, and his work on what he called the attachment system is some of the most important psychological research of the twentieth century. His main observation was that human beings come equipped with a biological system whose job is to maintain proximity to caregivers and group members. The system is wired into the deepest levels of the nervous system because for almost all of human evolution, being separated from your group meant dying. The infant who lost its mother died. The adult who got cast out of the tribe died. The body still remembers what was at stake even when the modern world has changed the literal consequences.
When the attachment system perceives that we are losing our connection to a group, it does not consult our rational mind about whether the loss is actually dangerous. It activates the same emergency response that would fire if a predator were stalking us. The body floods with stress hormones, the breath shortens, the mind races. The threat is somatic (in the body and outside of our awareness), not intellectual. And the threat does not stop firing just because we have intellectually decided that leaving the group is the right choice. The attachment system was built to keep us alive in a world where leaving the group meant dying within days, and it is doing exactly what it was built to do.
This is why leaving a group you have belonged to for years feels like dying. Your rational mind knows you will not literally die. Your attachment system disagrees, however. That disagreement creates the specific kind of suffering that everyone who has ever left a tight-knit community knows intimately. The sleepless nights. The chest tightness. The sense that something irrevocable has happened to your life. The conviction, despite all evidence, that you have made a terrible mistake. All of these are signs that your body is grieving the loss of an attachment it was wired to maintain at all costs.
Mary Ainsworth, who collaborated with Bowlby and extended his work, showed that the patterns of attachment we develop as children shape the patterns of attachment we form as adults. The child who learned to maintain proximity to a caregiver by being good, quiet, and helpful becomes an adult who maintains proximity to groups by being good, quiet, and helpful. The child who learned that love depended on obedience becomes an adult that feels their belonging is conditional on continuing to obey. The obedience and the belonging fuse together in childhood, and they stay fused in adulthood unless something very deliberate intervenes to separate them.
This is the part the title of this piece is pointing at. For many of us, obedience is the price of admission. The mechanism by which we stay attached. The thing we do without realizing we are doing it, because we learned to do it before we had words. We confuse our obedience with our beliefs because the obedience came first and the beliefs were built on top of it. We confuse our belonging with our agreement because the belonging required the agreement and we have never been part of the group without it.
When a person starts to question, even privately, the deal underneath all of this gets exposed. The attachment system fires up because the system can sense, somehow, that the questioning threatens the obedience, and the threatened obedience threatens the belonging, and the threatened belonging threatens the survival of the self. The body throws everything it has at keeping the person obedient. Anxiety. Doubt. Self-criticism. A wave of grief for relationships that have not yet ended. A flood of memories of all the good times you had inside the group. The attachment system is fighting for its life, and the life it is fighting for is the only kind of life it knows how to recognize.
Leaving the group, when it actually happens, often feels like dying rather than like the bold decision the leaver thought it would feel like. The Best Buy encounter I described earlier was one of dozens of small deaths I experienced in the months and years after I stopped attending church. Each chance encounter with a former member confirmed that I was no longer part of something I had been part of for years. Each polite conversation was a tiny reenactment of the original loss. I would drive home from these encounters and feel a grief I could not justify, because nothing I could name had actually been lost. The people had not died, the community still existed, and I was the one who had walked away. And still my body grieved as if something irreplaceable was gone, because something irreplaceable was gone, and the something was the attachment itself.
What I came to understand, eventually, is that the work of leaving was something other than finding a new group to replace the one I had lost. Replacement work is what attachment-driven leavers do when they have not actually made it out yet. They leave one church and join another. They leave one political tribe and join its opposite. They leave one identity and pick up a different one that performs the same function. The attachment system stays calm because it has found a new object to attach to. The leaver tells themselves they have grown, when what actually happened is that they have moved sideways.
The real challenge is learning to belong to yourself before you belong to any group. That work is slow and unglamorous and almost nobody around you will understand what you are doing while you are doing it. You will spend years in a kind of in-between state, no longer part of the group you left, and not yet part of any group that could hold the person you are becoming. The loneliness in that in-between is real, and the temptation to fill it with the next available group is constant. The work is to resist that temptation long enough for an actual self to develop underneath the loneliness, so that when you do eventually belong somewhere new, you are belonging from the inside rather than dissolving into something else from the outside.
I did not understand any of this on the day I stood in that Best Buy. I just knew that something hard was happening, and that going back to the way things had been would be easier than continuing forward. Now I can say with full transparency that I am glad I did not go back. The years since have given me a kind of belonging I did not know was possible, the kind that comes from finally being able to tell the difference between what I believe and what I was forced to believe. I still see former church members in public sometimes. The encounters are easier now, partly because more time has passed and partly because I am no longer pretending to be someone I am not. The thickness that used to be in the air between us has thinned. We have all moved on, in our different directions, to whatever forms of belonging we have been able to build.
If part of you has been wondering whether your belonging in some group has been built on obedience you never consciously agreed to, you are not alone in that wondering. The work begins by asking the same question I had to ask myself in my late twenties. Is your desire to be there your own, or is it the obedience you learned before you had any way to consent to it? The question does not require an immediate answer, it only requires that you let yourself ask it.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: The Exhaustion of Living Someone Else’s Life
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
