Why Did I Want to Pray Again?
Hospital Bed
Recently, I got very sick.
Not the kind of sick where you stay home from work and want your mom to bring you chicken soup. I mean really sick. The kind of sick where your body stops negotiating and simply announces, “We are shutting this operation down temporarily.”
For days, I could barely function. I needed a wheelchair to get to and from urgent care, where I received IV saline infusions every day because my body was struggling to stay hydrated. It was the sickest I had been since 1984, when I was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia.
At one point, languishing in urgent care feeling weak, shaky, and miserable, something surprising happened:
I wanted to pray.
Not just once; many times.
The urge arrived suddenly and repeatedly, almost like a reflex. A compulsion. My brain kept tossing prayer into the conversation as though it were an old emergency protocol buried deep in the basement archives of my nervous system.
That startled me.
I have spent years outside religion. I speak publicly about religious trauma. I write books about indoctrination and recovery. I help others disentangle from fear-based belief systems for a living.
Yet there I was, wrapped in a blanket like a defeated burrito, thinking, Maybe I should pray.
Now let me be clear: I did not suddenly regain belief in divine intervention because I was attached to an IV pole.
What I experienced was conditioning.
And I want to normalize that for people recovering from religious indoctrination.
The Brain Loves Familiar Survival Strategies
When human beings are frightened, overwhelmed, or physically vulnerable, the brain often reaches for what once felt associated with safety, comfort, or control.
That does not mean those things were objectively true. It means they were repeatedly reinforced.
If you spent years praying during moments of fear, grief, illness, uncertainty, or desperation, your nervous system learned something important:When danger appears, prayer becomes the response.
That pairing can become deeply wired.
This is not weakness, spiritual failure, or “God calling you back.”
It is associative learning.
The human nervous system is constantly building associations, where pain becomes linked to response, fear becomes linked to ritual, and uncertainty becomes linked to reassurance-seeking.
Religious systems often strengthen these pathways through repetition, emotion, community reinforcement, and threat. You were told to:
Pray when you are scared.
Pray when you are sick.
Pray when someone is dying.
Pray when you feel helpless.
Pray harder if the first prayer does not work.
After enough repetition, prayer can become almost procedural. Like muscle memory with theology attached.
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About the Author
Janice Selbie, MPCC, is a Clinical Counsellor, Author, Speaker, and Educator who specializes in supporting people navigating religious trauma and life after high-control groups. Raised in a high-control religious environment herself, Janice combines lived experience with over a decade of professional practice to help clients rebuild their identity, agency, and self-trust.
You're allowed to outgrow your beliefs. If you're ready to explore what comes next, Janice would love to help.