Why Hitler would be proud of my religious upbringing
I lived in Germany the year the Berlin Wall came down.
My dad flew menacing looking F-4Gs with the 52nd Tactical Fighter Wing stationed at Spangdahlem Air Force Base precisely because one charismatic man in the 1930s had so effectively mesmerized, controlled, and galvanized his country that they were willing to invade the rest of Europe and commit genocide on millions of innocent Jews and political enemies.
My upbringing was nothing like that.
I was taught kindness, love, and sacrifice.
I was taught to live in faith and pray in fervor.
I was taught to trust the word of God, that murder was a sin, and so was lying, cheating, lusting, even hatred — especially hatred toward my sisters, even when they (in my childish opinion) deserved it.
And that, right there, is ironically where the trouble began.
See, Hitler used an ‘us vs. them’ mentality to focus the Germans’ hatred on a common enemy.
But what happens when the “them” is yourself?
I was so well trained to believe that I was born a sinner and an “enemy to God” who would send me to hell if I didn’t shape up, that without realizing it (and certainly without my parents intending anything of the sort), I began an internal genocide campaign against my own identity.
I put myself in concentration camps of every kind of devastating self-talk, berating myself for every tiny mistake.
“I’m such an idiot.”
“Why is everything is always my fault?”
“It doesn’t matter how hard I try, I’ll never get anything right.”
“Why don’t people like me?”
“There’s no point in trying... nothing ever works out for me.”
I honestly felt like I deserved every bad thing that ever happened to me, and it SUCKED!
Like God in heaven had somehow tossed one of his factory defects down to planet Earth in the shape of Bob Gardner.
You wouldn’t have seen that on the outside, of course. I hid it well.
(or so I thought, anyway... you can’t REALLY hide these things for long from anyone with eyeballs)
I also hid and/or justified everything I did to cope with the way I spiritually bullied myself.
I even spiritually bullied others at times to try and ease my pain by using the word of God to prove how superior I was.
And then I turned around and bullied myself some more for my bullying of others.
Make no mistake, this is a vicious cycle —
Believing you are bad for who you are and what you’ve done is EXACTLY what makes you into the kind of person that keeps doing the very things you hate.
Believing you need to “improve” who you are is really no different, either.
Whether it’s drinking, yelling, and slamming doors...
Watching porn, not saying no soon enough, or not wanting your parents around...
Or simply not being attracted to your wife, snapping at your kids, and wishing for a different life...
If you’ve learned to hate yourself and berate yourself for any of that, you will never truly be free of the things you do to cope.
See, I managed to “control” my behaviors and tick off the checklist of “righteousness”.
I was kind to my neighbors.
Volunteered my help at church.
Studied my scriptures relentlessly.
Fasted and prayed until my knees were sore.
But it didn’t matter how many fake smiles I plastered on or little old ladies I helped across the street because I still felt that sour ball of failure in my chest whenever I did anything that could remotely be seen as a mistake.
Every failure felt like proof that I was simply not good enough and never would be.
And when it got to be too much to handle?
I went right back to the porn, the drugs, the sugar, and the doom-scrolling I hated myself for in the first place.
All while wishing I were dead.
You know what turned things around?
Discovering that I didn’t have to waste my time trying to “fix” any of that.
Didn’t have to troll my past looking for traumas or waste my future in meetings declaring myself an addict.
Didn’t have to “diagnose” my spiritual flaws (as if any of us are qualified to be our own judge) or ruminate on past sins.
Nope.
Because that feeling in my chest about who I was and what I deserved turned out to be nothing more than a muscle memory.
A sneaky neurological habit I had picked up to navigate life.
One that, so far, had given me a 100% success rate at surviving every curve ball I’d been thrown.
It wasn’t “the truth” about me, just a habit.
So I retrained it.
You can, too.
I go into this in far more detail in my recent book Built For Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body's Innate Ability To Leave Them All Behind.
When you sign up for my daily emails, you can get the first chapter (including audio) for free.
Or you can simply purchase a digital version of the book (plus the companion courses that come with it if you want) here:
Bob Gardner
