You Might Not Be Bad at Making Decisions. You Might Just Be Out of Practice.

One of the things that can be surprisingly difficult during religious deconstruction is making decisions.

Not necessarily the enormous, life-changing ones. Sometimes it's deciding what you want to do on a Sunday morning. Who you want to follow on social media. What you want to wear. What you want to do with your free time. Which relationships you want to invest in. What you actually enjoy.

For someone who has spent years in a religious environment with strong expectations about how life should be lived, these questions can be much more complicated than they appear.

There may have been a lot of shoulds: what you should believe, how you should spend your time, what relationships should look like, what you should prioritize, what a good Christian should want, and what kind of life you should build.

When you begin recognizing those expectations and putting some of them down, there can initially be a sense of freedom.

And then there's a void.

If I don't have to do what I was told I should do, how do I decide what I actually want?

When Making the Wrong Decision Used to Have Enormous Consequences

For many people coming from high-control religious environments, decision-making wasn't simply about weighing options and choosing what seemed best.

There may have been a right choice and a wrong choice—and the consequences of getting it wrong could feel enormous.

At the most significant level, beliefs and choices could be connected to salvation and eternity. But this way of thinking could also show up in everyday life.

Consider teachings around sex before marriage, for example. In some religious environments, the message isn't simply that abstinence is considered the better choice. Sexual decisions may be presented as having permanent consequences for your worth, your future marriage, or something about yourself that you can never get back.

When decisions are consistently presented this way, making the "wrong" choice can feel catastrophic.

So when someone leaves that framework and suddenly has much more freedom to make their own decisions, the difficulty may not be that they are incapable of deciding.

They may have learned that decisions aren't safe unless they're certain they're making the right one.

What If There Isn't a Perfect Decision?

I am a big believer in making the best choice we can with the information we have.

That sounds simple, but it represents a very different way of approaching life when you're accustomed to believing there is a correct path you are responsible for identifying.

Sometimes we make a decision and discover information we couldn't have known beforehand. Sometimes an experience turns out differently than we expected. Sometimes we gain a new perspective several years later and realize we would make a different choice now.

That doesn't necessarily mean our previous self failed.

Our previous self made a decision with the information, resources, perspective, and capacity they had at the time. Now we know something different, so we get to make the best decision we can with what we know now.

And there will probably be things we understand differently in another five or ten years.

We are constantly growing humans. There isn't a point at which we finally arrive, know all the right things, make all the right choices, and protect ourselves from ever experiencing the natural consequences of being alive.

Part of developing self-trust is accepting that.

Your Therapist Shouldn't Become Your New Guru

Sometimes clients will ask me directly, "What do you think I should do?"

When that happens, I usually want to slow things down.

There can be a temptation during deconstruction to replace one source of authority with another. Perhaps a church, pastor, religious community, or belief system previously provided direction. Once that authority is gone, a therapist can very easily begin to occupy a similar role.

Tell me what you think. Tell me which option is healthier. Tell me what I should do.

But if someone's long-term hope is greater autonomy, simply giving them another person to provide the answers doesn't actually serve that goal.

My job isn't to become the next guru.

Instead, we can become curious about what is happening underneath the request. Why does this decision feel so urgent? What would it mean to make the "wrong" choice? What is their nervous system responding to? What are they hoping I can give them by making the decision for them?

Sometimes even recognizing that pattern can be powerful. If you've spent much of your life looking outside yourself for direction, it makes sense that you might continue doing that even after your beliefs have changed.

The goal isn't to shame that impulse. It's to notice it and begin practising something different.

You Can Make a Decision Without Knowing Everything

When I'm helping someone work through a decision, we can still do very practical things.

We can look at the pros and cons. We can imagine making one choice and consider what might follow, and then imagine making the other. We can identify what is within their control and what isn't. We can gather the information that is actually available.

And then we can identify the information they simply cannot have yet.

This part matters.

There are things you cannot know from this side of a decision.

You can't know exactly how another person will respond. You can't know precisely how you'll feel six months from now. You can't foresee every consequence. You can't gather enough information to remove all uncertainty from being human.

Sometimes simply naming those unknowns helps.

I don't know this. I can't know this yet. This part isn't within my control.

And eventually:

I can make a decision anyway.

Self-trust doesn't mean trusting yourself to always make the right decision. It means increasingly trusting yourself to respond to whatever happens after you make one.

You have done difficult things before. You are developing skills. You can learn. You can adapt. You can change direction when new information becomes available.

That matters much more than becoming perfect at predicting the future.

You May Have to Discover What You Want

There is another challenge that often appears once the shoulds begin falling away.

You may genuinely not know what you want.

If you've spent years asking what God wants, what your family expects, what your church approves of, or what a good Christian should do, you may not have had many opportunities to ask yourself what you actually prefer.

Discovering that isn't necessarily going to happen through introspection alone.

There will probably be some trial and error.

You might try something you've always been curious about and discover that you love it. You might finally give yourself permission to do something you assumed would fit you and realize that it doesn't.

You might also discover that something you previously valued wasn't entirely an act. There may be pieces of your former life that genuinely matter to you, even when the religious expectations surrounding them no longer do.

All of this requires honesty and self-compassion.

You may have presented yourself as a particular kind of person in the past because that was genuinely who you understood yourself to be then. Learning something new about yourself now doesn't mean you were being dishonest before.

It means you're learning.

Practise With the Small Decisions

You don't have to begin this process with the biggest decision of your life.

Autonomy can be practised.

Sunday morning is coming. What do you want to do with it?

Maybe you sleep in. Maybe you make a big breakfast. Maybe you go hiking. Maybe you still attend church. Maybe you try something completely new.

Then notice what the experience was like.

You can experiment with following different people online or unfollowing accounts that no longer provide the kind of content you want to consume. You can join a club, take a class, return to an old hobby, or explore something your previous religious community wouldn't necessarily have encouraged.

Some of these choices may feel strangely uncomfortable even when you cognitively believe there is nothing wrong with them.

That's important information too.

Sometimes our beliefs change before our bodies catch up. You can know intellectually that you're allowed to spend Sunday morning however you choose and still experience an old feeling of I shouldn't be doing this.

That feeling doesn't necessarily mean you're making the wrong decision.

It may simply mean you're doing something new.

These low-stakes decisions give you opportunities to experience choosing for yourself, noticing what happens, and discovering that you are okay afterward.

Over time, those experiences add up.

Regret Doesn't Mean You Can't Trust Yourself

And eventually, you will probably make a decision you regret.

That's not evidence that this process failed.

Regret is part of the human experience.

It can also give us information. Regret can tell us something about what we value, how we want to spend our time, what matters to us, or what we would like to do differently in the future.

You can look back and think, Knowing what I know now, I would choose differently.

And you can have compassion for the person who didn't know that yet.

The goal of learning to make your own decisions isn't to construct a life in which you never choose poorly, never change your mind, and never wish you'd done something differently. That's another version of trying to achieve certainty.

Instead, you can begin seeing yourself as a human being in process.

You gather the information you can. You notice what is within your control. You acknowledge what isn't. You consider your values and what you know about yourself right now.

And when you have new information, you're allowed to choose again.

Maybe you aren't bad at making decisions.

Maybe you're learning how to make them without someone else telling you what the right answer is.

And like most things we haven't had much opportunity to practise, that can take some time.

If religious deconstruction has left you questioning your decisions, struggling to identify what you want, or feeling like you can't trust yourself, you don't have to sort through it alone. At Find Your Way Counselling, we work with people navigating religious deconstruction, religious trauma, and experiences in high-control environments. Book a free 20-minute consultation to see whether working together might be a good fit.