Easter Monday has a particular kind of quiet to it. The services are over, the family lunch has wound down, and the world is slowly easing back into ordinary time. But if you’ve experienced religious harm and if church was once the centre of your world and now it isn’t, or can’t be; that quiet can be deceptive. It can sit on top of something much louder.
I’ve noticed this in my own body before I’ve even named it. A low-level hum that started building on Good Friday. A kind of bracing. Not grief exactly, not anxiety exactly but something older than both. The kind of feeling that lives in the chest and doesn’t need a reason, because the reason is already woven into the calendar.
Easter is not a neutral event. For many people who’ve left high-control religious environments, it carries the weight of everything that was once meaningful and is now complicated. It arrives every year whether you’re ready for it or not.
The Problem With Resurrection Language
There is something particular about the Easter narrative that makes it especially difficult for survivors of religious harm, and I think it should be named directly.
The resurrection story is the cornerstone of Christian tradition and it is inherently a story about rising. About death that leads somewhere. About the promise that suffering is not the end of the story, that it transforms into something glorious. In many traditions, that narrative doesn’t just stay in the gospel readings. It applies to people – to you.
You can rise above this. God can resurrect your pain. Let this be your resurrection.
This is the language of forced hope. It moves fast, before grief has had time to breathe, before loss has been witnessed, before anything has been named as wrong. It is not comfort but a redirection. You’ve spent years inside a system that used spiritual language to manage your emotions, to silence your doubt, to reframe your pain as something to be overcome rather than held; resurrection language doesn’t feel like good news. It feels like a door closing.
There is also something quietly violent about the suggestion that you should be rising. That you should be further along. That your continued grief or anger or ambivalence is somehow a failure of faith or now, of recovery. The Easter story, in this context, becomes another performance standard. Another measure you may not be meeting.
If that language has been activating for you this weekend, that makes sense.
The Weight of Other People’s Easter
Families are complicated. Family during a religious holiday, when you’ve left the faith that organised much of your shared life; that’s something else entirely.
There’s the table you used to sit at, where the day had a particular shape: church in the morning, a shared meal, maybe a liturgy of small rituals that made you feel held. And then there’s the table you’re sitting at now, where you might be doing an impression of someone who’s fine. Or where your absence from the morning service is noted. Or where someone has said something, gently or not so gently, that lands like an expectation.
Come to the service, just this once. For the family. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
The pressure doesn’t always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who genuinely don’t understand what it costs you to walk back into that building, to sing those songs, to participate in a ritual that once held your whole identity and now feels like wearing clothes that don’t fit your body anymore. They see the external act. They don’t see what it does to your nervous system.
And even when no one says anything, the silence can carry its own weight. The day is organised around church and there is an assumption that you’ll participate. The slight recalibration in the room when you don’t. The invisible but legible sense that you are, somehow, the one who has disrupted something.
Belonging has always been conditional in high-control religious systems. Easter can make that very visible.
Grief for What It Used to Be
This part is quieter and, I think, often the hardest to admit.
Before the harm, or before you understood it as harm, Easter might have been something you loved. Genuinely loved. The specific light in a church building on a Sunday morning, the feeling of being part of something ancient and larger than yourself. The community gathered together. The sense of meaning that made ordinary life feel held by something.
You can grieve that.
You don’t have to frame that grief as naivety, or collapse it into the harm that came later. Both things can be true: the community could have been real and warm, and it could have also been a system that caused you damage. The faith could have held genuine comfort, and it could have also been used as a mechanism of control. Easter could have been something beautiful, and it can now be something that activates your nervous system and makes you want to stay in bed.
Grief doesn’t need to be cleaned up. It doesn’t need to arrive at an insight. Sometimes grief is just grief; the loss of a world you lived inside, even if that world was never entirely safe.
We underestimate how religious survivors are expected to be relieved. To be glad they got out, to focus on what they’ve gained. And yes, there can be relief and gladness that is real, legitimate relief. But relief and grief are not opposites. They sit alongside each other, sometimes in the same breath. The relief that you’re out does not require you to stop mourning what was there.
On Opting Out, or Making Something Different
You don’t have to do anything with Easter.
That feels worth saying plainly, because so much of what high-control religion instilled was the sense that participation was not optional. Rituals were required, and opting out was a form of failure, or faithlessness, or something to be explained and justified.
You can let this weekend be unremarkable. To treat it like any other long weekend. To sleep in, watch something ordinary, not assign it meaning.
If opting out feels like grief in itself; like you’re losing even the secular version of the day – that’s real too. You can hold that without it meaning you need to go back, or that something is wrong with where you are.
Some people find it helpful to build something small and entirely their own. Not to replace what was lost, but to mark the day on their own terms.
- A walk somewhere quiet.
- A meal with people who don’t require a particular version of you.
- A playlist that has nothing to do with church but feels like something.
- A deliberate act of rest, framed not as laziness.
These aren’t rituals in the grand sense. They’re just small choices that belong to you. That no one handed down and don’t require your body to perform a meaning it doesn’t feel.
And if none of that sounds right; if what you actually need is to sit with the discomfort and not make it into anything – that’s also enough. You don’t need to arrive at peace by Monday evening.
Whatever this weekend has held for you, I hope there’s been at least one moment that felt like yours. And if there hasn’t and if it’s just been heavy, or strange, or quietly exhausting – that’s honest.
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