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There are girls who never really get to be girls. They smile in Sunday school. They memorize verses. They learn to pray early and to sit quietly in the pew. But beneath their well-behaved exterior is a tightly wound inner life. A life shaped not by innocence, but by vigilance. These girls are not parented, guided, supported or encouraged to trust themselves. Rather, their experience is one of being raised to obey. Raised to obey, and with a particular focus relative to obeying male authority (and men in general).
Such is the legacy of the purist and fundamentalist Christian culture, where obedience is moralized, where spiritual performance is mistaken, and advertised as spiritual depth, and where girls, especially girls, are taught that their primary purpose is to be good, pure, and pleasing.
I’ve worked with many women raised in such environments and in this way. Often they come to therapy years later, unsure why they can’t make simple decisions, or why they feel shame, have little or no idea of who they are, for having a body, and why they consistently or constantly fear they are one wrong thought away from spiritual ruin.
The answer lies in the formation, (slow, persistent, and often invisible, sometimes subtle), of a religious culture that elevates purity above presence, perfection above authenticity, and submission above truth, authenticity and honesty. They are taught to live the lie and shortly, you’ll believe it. This lie becomes their personal truth.
From the start, many girls in purist Christian households are taught that they cannot trust themselves. These young women hear statements that are enforced over time – your heart is deceitful and contains evil. Your feelings are suspect.Your bodies are dangerous, to yourself and to others.Your thoughts must be monitored,and Your desires suppressed.Your role is to please and obey because safety lies in submission.Parents, pastors, and church authorities may speak in loving tones. But the underlying structure is often clear:
“If you follow God’s design, all will be well. If you stray, even in thought, you risk not only your soul, but the well-being of those around you.”
This belief, slowly shaped and absorbed over years, leads many girls to internalize a fragile, fearful, and conditional relationship with their own inner life. It becomes unsafe to want, to question, to explore and ask for discussion and understanding. Even their own conscience is placed beneath an external hierarchy: male authority, church doctrine, and the ever-watchful eye of a God portrayed as conditionally loving and wrathful if performance is less than expected.
Purity culture teaches that a woman’s worth is tied directly to her sexual behavior, or even her sexual potential. Young girls are taught that modesty is protection while male lust is their responsibility. They are taught that virginity is their greatest spiritual offering and no one will want you if you are a “stained” woman, and that saying “no” is their sacred duty, yet saying it too strongly may be considered lacking in submissiveness, being oppositional, and generally too much, (“no man will want to live with that”).
The body, in this culture, is not a home to find comfort in. It is a threat to be managed, contained and if necessary neutralized. What this creates is not holiness, but dissociation. Girls grow up feeling disconnected from their physicality, unsure of how to say yes, and terrified of saying no. Often this becomes a kind of frozen withdrawal born of the fear to express anything at all and certain that chances are it will bring disapproval and/or criticism that will be followed by an increasingly a familiar, deepening sense of shame. Even in adulthood, many women shaped by purity culture describe sex as something to endure, not enjoy. Desire feels wrong. Pleasure feels suspicious, mysterious and suspect. And boundaries, limits and clarity, of a physical, emotional, or spiritual nature feel like selfishness, or worse. What begins as “protection” through splitting off and disconnecting, becomes a lifelong exile from the self.
Because obedience is praised and dissent is punished, often spiritually, many girls learn early how to perform righteousness. They smile. They serve. They become the “good Christian girl” admired by parents and youth leaders alike. They are held as examples of what it is to be a successful Christian woman. But beneath that surface are often anxiety, self-loathing, suppressed anger, unnamed and free floating grief and deep confusion. This leaves her with an inability to know who she is apart from the roles she has played
In therapy, I’ve sat with women who say:
“I don’t know what I want. I only know what I’m supposed to want.”
“I’m exhausted by always needing to be good.”
“They think they know me and understand me, but who they know and understand isn’t real”
“I feel like I’ve lived my whole life for other people, and for a God I was taught to fear.”
The pain is not only psychological. It’s spiritual. These women were not only told what to do, they were taught that God Himself was watching to see if they did it “joyfully.” Even the experience of struggle was considered a lack of faith.
When women begin to question the teachings, they were raised with, especially those rooted in strict purity and fundamentalism, they rarely feel free. Rather, they feel afraid.
Afraid that they’ve wandered from God.
Afraid that their doubt or questioning is pride, arrogance, a character flaw.
Afraid that if they stop being “good,” something terrible will happen.
But beneath the fear is another, deeper current: grief.
Grief for a lost childhood lived in fear of damnation, a body never experienced without shame, and a voice that was trained to ask for permission before it could speak, relationships that were conditional, always depending upon compliance. And finally, the self they were never allowed to become. Such grief doesn’t always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it comes quietly, a sadness that lingers in the background, a longing for something unnamed. It is the sorrow of a soul that was never allowed to take root fully in this world.
And it must be mourned.
Many women raised in purist and fundamentalist Christian households find themselves in adulthood without the ability to make even the simplest decisions. The cause is not cognitive. It is spiritualized psychological paralysis, a result of being told for years, explicitly or implicitly, that they are not to trust their own judgment and they must submit choices to male authority figures (fathers, husbands, pastors). And further, a wrong decision might lead to sin, suffering, or divine disapproval.
Behind this is a deeply embedded belief that women are morally fragile. That they simply are too emotional to lead, too easily deceived (Eve being the prototype), prone to selfishness or seduction, and inherently inclined toward disobedience unless kept “in order”.
This messaging creates perpetual spiritual childhood. Women are praised for being quiet, agreeable, and dependent, and often punished, shamed, or labeled rebellious for demonstrating agency or spiritual autonomy. The result? Grown women afraid to choose a career, make a choice of who to date and eventually marry or choose not to marry. They are unable to define boundaries and limits. Such women cannot express desire, voice preferences or wishes, or say “I want” without guilt let alone challenge what they feel is a harmful teaching, belief or practice.
Instead, they ask, endlessly, for permission, a permission that is sadly more about seeking relief and safety than consent. Even from voices they no longer believe in.
At the heart of purity culture is one of its most damaging and enduring lies:
If a man is attracted to you, it’s your fault.
If he stumbles, it is your fault, you were a temptation.
If he sins, your body was the cause.
You should cover yourself. Lower your eyes. Know your place.
This is not spiritual guidance. It is the moral outsourcing of responsibility, and it fosters, strengthens and fortifies deep shame in women and a spiritual immaturity in men. Rather than teaching boys and men how to recognize and respect their impulses, develop self-regulation and impulse control, and recognize women as equals with interior lives of their own, purity culture teaches that female beauty is dangerous and male attraction is inevitable and barely controllable. It also teaches that responsibility lies with the woman to prevent male sin.
The consequences for women are devastating:
This belief does not protect. It imprisons. It tells women to hide, men to indulge their fragility, and both to confuse repression with spiritual righteousness.
Leaving purity culture, or the fundamentalist system that enforces it, is often a disorienting experience. Women may find themselves caught between two lives, the outer freedom of adulthood and the inner structure of fear still running strongly beneath it. They no longer believe the teachings that shaped them, but they still feel the emotional consequences of breaking them such as guilt when speaking assertively, fear when they set a boundary, shame after intimacy, even in loving relationships and doubt that they are any “good” without rules to follow. This is not failure. It is residue. It is normal. Healing begins when they stop trying to re-perform goodness and instead begin to reclaim selfhood, slowly, quietly, in their own time.
In therapy, I often begin with permission.
From there, a kind of rebuilding begins. Not a rejection of God, necessarily, though for some, that is a stage of healing, but a rebuilding of the inner voice, long exiled under the weight of doctrine.
As the healing process emerges, these women begin to:
Some return to faith. Others walk a different path. But all, in their way, begin to return to themselves.
If you are reading this and feel the ache of recognition, the exhaustion, the sadness, the longing to know who you are beneath the layers of spiritual performance, I offer this:
May you stop apologizing for your truth.
May you remember the girl who once wanted to run, to laugh, to question, to rest.
May you know that goodness should never have cost you your voice.
May you begin, in this moment, in this breath, to come home to yourself.
You are not bad.
You were shaped to believe that obedience was holiness.
But what’s holy now is your honesty. Your courage. Your becoming.
Here, you don’t have to be good, just real.
Greg Corbin, LMFT
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