Radical Autonomy: The Original Sin Was Self-Trust
For the ones taught to call their intuition sinful: this is your reclamation.
I was in my early 30’s when the therapist I’d hired to help me manage stress from grad school and a floundering marriage asked me, “Tamara, when did you give up your right to choose?”
*crickets*
The funny thing was, I didn’t even know I had.
… But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized, I never even knew I really could.
Let me explain. As a child who grew up evangelical and military, the idea of free will was fraught with conflicting messages and subsequent feelings.
On one hand, I was taught that God had predestined every moment of my existence before the foundation of the world. Every triumph, every tragedy, every Tuesday afternoon grocery run—ALL orchestrated by divine sovereignty. My choices were simultaneously crucial (eternal consequences hanging in the balance) and illusory (God's will would prevail regardless).
On the other hand, I was a military brat whose every move reflected not just on me, but on my father's rank, his unit's reputation, and America's standing in whatever corner of the world we happened to be stationed. My behavior could impact his security clearance, his promotion potential, his entire career trajectory (… sorry again about those prank phone calls on base Dad!). The weight of representation was enormous, but so was the strange comfort of always knowing exactly what was expected.
Both systems offered the same seductive trade: surrender your individual will and we'll give you belonging, purpose, and the relief of never having to wonder if you're doing life right. The church promised eternal security in exchange for spiritual submission. The military offered honor and protection in exchange for absolute obedience.
What I didn't realize until that therapist's question landed like a grenade in my perfectly ordered worldview was how thoroughly these systems had colonized my capacity for autonomous thought. I hadn't just learned to follow rules; I'd learned to forget I was capable of making any that weren't already written for me… that is, IF I wanted to be a good person and not be kicked out of the herd.
The Manufacturing of Spiritual Amnesia
What both systems understood intuitively was something behavioral psychologists spent decades trying to prove: you don't need external force when you can install internal monitors. The most effective control is getting someone to internalize your voice as their own. The prisoner becomes their own warden.
Think about the psychological genius of it. Take a child's natural curiosity and redirect it toward external authority. Teach them that their feelings are "deceitful above all things." That their questions are evidence of weak faith. That their body's signals—hunger, exhaustion, sexual desire, intuition—are manifestations of a sinful nature requiring constant surveillance.
By adolescence, you've created someone who experiences their own psychology as a foreign occupying force.
I've had clients describe their thought lives like war zones. Every authentic impulse becomes a battlefield where flesh fights spirit, where human desires war against divine will. The irony being that this internal civil war creates exactly the kind of psychological fragmentation that makes people vulnerable to external control.
You can't manipulate someone who trusts themselves. But someone who's been trained to doubt their own experience? They'll hand you the keys to their psyche and thank you for the privilege.
The Community Paradox
One of the cruelest aspects of fundamentalist psychology is how it weaponizes human need for belonging. The message is clear: conform or be cast out. Submit or be shunned. Believe “correctly” or lose everyone you love.
I've worked with women who stayed in soul-crushing marriages because leaving would mean losing their entire social network. Who kept their mouths shut about abuse because speaking truth would get them labeled "divisive." Who swallowed their authentic selves whole because the alternative was exile from the only community they'd ever known.
The psychological term is "trauma bonding"—when shared suffering creates artificial intimacy. Fundamentalist communities excel at this. They create the conditions for suffering (shame, fear, intellectual suffocation) then offer themselves as the only antidote. You stay traumatized and grateful, confusing psychological dependence with spiritual devotion.
This shows up in the most mundane moments. The woman who can't buy herself a coffee without justifying it as a “treat for working so hard” because spending money on personal pleasure feels inherently selfish and not what a “good steward” would do. The wife who apologizes for having opinions that differ from her husband's because disagreement feels like rebellion against God's order. The college student who changes her major from psychology to elementary education because 'helping children' sounds more selfless, even though she finds child development mind-numbing.
The Return to Eden
And I’m not going to lie to you… just because you may know this already doesn’t make it any easier to live out… at least not at first. It can even be fucking terrifying and take years of practice before the automatic negative thoughts quit seeming so unbeatable, but I can also assure you there’s no other way out but through, and remaining in old patterns that don’t serve? Actually more painful.
So yes, I did spend the first year or so of my deconstruction oscillating between anxiety attacks and rage spirals, convinced that every choice I made that was “for me” was proof of my inherent “selfishness.” Every time I said no to something that drained me, every time I admitted I disagreed with the party line, every time I chose what felt true over what looked good—my nervous system screamed that I was destroying everything.
Because in a way, I was. I was systematically dismantling the performance that had kept me safe, loved, and approved of my entire life. And while there wasn't a roadmap for this particular journey, I was slowly discovering that radical autonomy follows certain predictable patterns once you know what to look for.
The first truth I had to learn: autonomy isn't automatic isolation or rejecting of those you love. It's the capacity to stay connected to yourself while remaining genuinely available for connection with others if it makes sense to do so.
The second: your body knows things your mind hasn't caught up to yet and vice versa. And that needs to be ok! After decades of override, learning to trust those signals can feel like learning a foreign language where the stakes are your entire sense of self.
The third: real autonomy requires structure, not rebellion, even if that’s what others accuse you of. Let them. You don't need to necessarily tear down EVERYTHING (… although the more extreme the self erasing abuse, the more far reaching the do over), you need to build systems that honor your truth first.
And the hardest one: autonomy doesn't wait for consensus. While others debate your choices, you start choosing anyway. Quietly, consistently, from within. For me it was going back to school on student loans and food stamps and then into private practice without taking insurance and experimenting with reconnecting to my spiritual side in ways that didn’t include organized religion and even non-monogamy for a decade. Yours may just be secular music or not tithing, but whatever it is, I am cheering you on in figuring it out!
Maybe the real sin in the garden wasn't disobedience. Maybe it was the moment humans started believing they needed external authority to know good from evil.
Maybe the forbidden fruit was never about moral knowledge. Maybe it was about trusting your own experience over someone else's interpretation of divine will.
Maybe the exile from paradise wasn't punishment. Maybe it was the first step in the long journey back to ourselves.
Those walking away from authoritarian religions, political systems, or families aren’t doing so because they hate the core values of love or community service, they’re simply running toward a version of the sacred large enough to contain their full humanity. Complex enough to hold paradox. Secure enough to survive their questions.
And in doing so, they're modeling something radical: what it looks like to trust that consciousness itself might be the divine gift, not the divine problem.
In love & liberation,
Tams
If you're ready to explore what spiritual autonomy looks like without losing your connection to the sacred, I'm here. Because the most profound transformations happen when we stop treating our humanity as something to overcome and start experiencing it as something to celebrate.
The way my nervous switched on while reading this! I suppose this means there is work to do here. This is such an incredible read! Thank you!
So so good!!!