Headshot of Carol Kuruvilla One Woman's Experience With 'Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome'

• One Woman's Experience With 'Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome' 

  Posted: 08/19/2015 01:37 PM EDT | Edited: 08/19/2015 01:43 PM EDT 

  What do you do when the faith you grew up in just doesn't make sense anymore? 

   

  This is the dilemma Reba Riley, a 33-year-old from Cincinnati, faced in her late 20s. She was brought up in an evangelical Christian household, but soon realized that the questions she had about her faith weren't being answered by the theology preached by her family's church.

   

  The spiritual crisis prompted her to embark on a wild journey through 30 different religious traditions in just one year. Half of these were various strands of Christianity -- from Mormonism to the practices of the Amish -- and the other half included Hinduism, Paganism and others.

   

  The purpose of the quest wasn't necessarily to find a new faith, but to combat the bitterness that had grown in her heart when she thought about God.

Three years after her experiment concluded, Riley told The Huffington Post she now calls herself a Christian, but with many, many qualifiers. Her faith is now about practicing love and finding God in unexpected places.
Riley wrote about her journey in her new book, "Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing." HuffPost Religion talked to Riley about what prompted her to start exploring her faith. Parts of the interview have been edited for length and clarity. An excerpt from the book is also included below.

Credit: Howard Books.

What is Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome?
It's really important that people realize I'm not trying to diagnose anything medical or mental health-related. This is a way to talk about a common set of experiences. Here’s the definition I usually give:

1. It’s a condition of spiritual injury that occurs as a result of religion, faith, and/or the leaving, losing or breaking of those things.
2. The vile, noxious, icky and otherwise foul aftermath of said spiritual injury.
3. A serious term intended to aid serious spiritual healing -- without taking itself too seriously in the process.

The origins and symptoms are really as varied as the people who are experiencing it. For me, my experience of PTCS was a tremendous amount of hurt, bitterness and anger. I realized that if I didn't get rid of those things I'd never be a healthy person. I came to the point where I needed to take responsibility for my spiritual health.
What was your faith like before this season of change?
I grew up in a Pentecostal-leaning evangelical megachurch, before megachurches were a thing. I was very much about Jesus. I didn’t really have an identity outside of that of being a Christian. That was our whole life, my past, present, and future. My religion was very real to me and it fostered a very real connection between me and the ‘Godiverse,’ as I liked to call it. I was actually in ministry training and when I walked away from that it was like my entire life lost its gravity. It wasn’t just a social circle that I lost. All the certainties I had were gone, I didn't have a support system because I didn't know where to look for that. It was really a deconstruction of my whole world view at once.
What frustrated you about the faith of your childhood?
The absolute certainty. You're allowed to question, but only as long as you come back to the right answer. There was also judgment. I've experienced quite a lot of that, and interestingly, I think it was people outside the church who loved me more, especially through the transition, than anyone inside the church.
It’s really death by a thousand cuts. You find cracks in your faith and you express them and you try harder to hide them and reason your way out of them. The process was probably a year and a half long before I recognized that what I grew up with was ‘believe it all or believe it none’ theology. When I realized there were tenets of this faith system I couldn’t believe in, I didn’t have a choice. It was all or nothing. It’s not that I left my faith, it’s that my faith left me.
30 religions in one year? Where did this idea come from?
It was crisis that brought me to it. I was physically very sick and I got sicker until my 29th birthday. I was having a party at my house, and I'd been hiding this illness from my friends. Everyone was waiting to sing "Happy Birthday" to me, and I was on the floor of my closet, not knowing if I could get up and go to this party and pretend that everything was okay. I was realizing I didn't have anything left physically and this tremendous despair hit me while I was down. I recognized that even if I was able to get my body healthy, I had this lasting anger and bitterness inside me. It was the kind of down and out moment when other people usually call on God. I guess God showed up anyway, in the form of an idea to go through 30 religions before I turned 30. I was so sick, it was a terrible time to undertake that kind of spiritual quest. I walked out of the closet thinking I wouldn't do it, but the idea kept coming back to me and I decided to give it a shot.
The project was never really about finding a religion. It was a way for me to wrap my hands around a really difficult, invisible problem. I didn't know where the journey was going to lead, but I had this vague notion that if I did this, it would change me. And it worked.
What did you find?
The number one thing is that God is bigger than any lines we can draw. I think a lot of times religion is how we try to draw those lines, so we can call God our own and say we've figured it out. What I saw as I went to all these different places was that wherever there was truth and light and love, that's where I wanted to be. And I found those things everywhere.