Why Did I Want to Pray Again?

By Janice Selbie, MPCC

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.

Conditioning Is Not Consent

One of the strangest parts of deconstruction is realizing that old mental habits can survive long after belief itself has faded.

People often assume that once someone leaves religion, the programming disappears like an uninstalled app.

Unfortunately, indoctrination behaves less like deleting software and more like discovering glitter in your house five years after Christmas.

It lingers.

Certain situations can reactivate old pathways:

• illness

• grief

• loneliness

• fear

• parenting stress

• death anxiety

• uncertainty

• major life transitions

This is especially true when the nervous system is exhausted or overwhelmed. Under stress, the brain tends to favor familiar pathways because they require less energy.

In other words, the brain does not always ask:

“Is this true?”

Sometimes it asks:

“What helped me survive before?”

The Important Part: Labeling the Experience Correctly

This is where many people become frightened during deconstruction recovery.

They think:

“Why am I wanting to pray again?”

“Does this mean I still believe?”

“Am I backsliding into religion?”

“What if I was wrong?”

But intrusive urges are not the same as conscious beliefs.

A recovering smoker may suddenly crave cigarettes during stress. That does not mean nicotine is secretly the meaning of life.

Likewise, the urge to pray during vulnerability does not necessarily reflect spiritual truth. It may simply reflect old conditioning resurfacing under pressure.

The key is learning to recognize the urge without catastrophizing it.

You can notice it.

Name it.

Understand it.

And decide consciously what you want to do next.

What I Did Instead

I did not pray. Not because prayer is morally wrong, but because I wanted to remain honest about what was happening inside me.

What I actually needed was:

• medical care

• hydration

• rest

• reassurance

• nervous system regulation

• support from people I trust

I needed science, time, care, and heroic amounts of electrolytes.

With all of those, eventually, my body recovered.

What helped most was not magical thinking. It was understanding that my frightened brain was reaching toward an old survival behavior during a moment of vulnerability.

That realization brought relief rather than shame.

If This Happens to You

Please know: There is nothing wrong with you if old religious impulses resurface during illness, fear, grief, or crisis.

Conditioning can persist long after belief changes.

The goal of religious trauma recovery is not to become a robot who never has old thoughts or reflexes again.

The goal is awareness, where you learn to pause and say:“Ah. There’s that old pathway again.”

And then you decide, consciously and compassionately, what comes next.

About the Author

Janice Selbie, MPCC, is a clinical counsellor speicalizing in Religious Trauma Syndrome and recovery from high-control belief systems. She is the author of Divorcing Religion: A Memoir and Survival Handbook and the host of the Divorcing Religion Podcast and the Sex & Power Podcast. Janice works with individuals navigating identity loss, grief, and meaning-making after belief collapse.