I thought I would make a page for my purpose since it comes up so often in comments. This is a modified response to a comment I just wrote:

I write what I write for two reasons:
1) When I first left the faith, I thought I was the only one. I could not have been more wrong. When I discovered a multitude of people like me, I found other blogs, books, and resources. What I didn’t find was very many women, even fewer discussions about how painful it is to leave the faith, and absolutely no ministers’ wives. Most reading material centers around news articles and reasons why people leave. Instead of becoming another one of many, I focus on the process (though lately I’ve struggled and have posted more news and comics than usual). Because that is something else I was taught that was very wrong: that people who leave the faith do so willingly, because they would rather lead a sinful life or go their own way instead of believing in God. This is also untrue.

2) The second reason is the church has many problems. I don’t know anyone in ministry who does not acknowledge this. But if nobody points them out to the congregations, how can they fix them? I know why you wrote to me what you did [claiming that I was never a real Christian, that other people weren't real Christians, that I never experienced God's real love, etc]. You have to believe that it’s not religion that’s the problem, but the people or myself because anything else threatens your own security in your faith. But if you close your eyes to the dysfunction in the church and blame the victims for their own pain, nothing gets accomplished. The church will lose more and more members. Which is fine with me; I am much stronger and healthier without it, and I know many others would be as well, but they’re scared. So if you want to say I left because I was bitter and experienced only counterfeit Christianity, that’s perfectly fine. You can ignore the real issues all you want. No skin off of my nose. I really only care because I don’t want anyone else to go through the absolute hell I went through. And really, I understand because 5 years ago, I would have said the exact same thing to someone in my position. I did.

And yes, I do get angry and frustrated over things that happened in my past and that is reflected in my writing at times. But I didn’t leave the church because of them. Rather, I blamed myself for them, not God. Pain of the magnitude I had takes awhile to work through. The last month or so is the first time I’ve really felt *better*. And really, it’s a pretty good timeline. What you construct as bitterness, I think is just the pain of the moment. Not bitterness anymore than you would accuse someone who experienced a trauma of bitterness soon after. I had to build my entire life from scratch. It hasn’t even been two years. I think I’m making pretty good progress on forgiveness.