🌿 4: Why Nela’s Nest Exists — The Layered Trauma: Childhood Wounds, Female Socialization, and Doctrines That Silenced Me

An introductory reflection on how being born female, childhood trauma, and religious texts shaped my voice—and my silence.

When I began healing, I realized something I had never been able to name before:

**My pain did not start with religion—

but certain doctrines interacted with my childhood wounds in ways that kept me silent, afraid, and compliant.**

And I want to say this clearly, academically, and without hostility:

There is a collective trauma carried by many women—not because of isolated experiences, but because of being born female within systems shaped by certain religious doctrines.

This isn’t about attacking a religion.
This is about acknowledging the psychological environment created for women by specific teachings many of us were raised on.

🌱 The Collective Trauma of Being Born Female (Within Islamic Doctrine)

Across the Qur’an, Hadith, and classical commentary, there are recurring themes regarding women that form an emotional landscape many females must navigate. Academically, these include:

the expectation of female obedience
the normalization of polygamy
the silence surrounding child marriage
the prioritization of male authority (spiritually, socially, and legally)
the association of female value with purity, modesty, and virginity
the concept of divine punishment for women who assert boundaries or express anger

These teachings collectively form a psychological environment—an environment where many women learn to silence themselves, excuse harmful behavior, internalize fear, and accept emotional neglect as “faith.”

This is not about blaming individuals.
It is about acknowledging the effects of a doctrine when combined with real human vulnerability.

🌑 How Childhood Trauma Intersected With These Teachings

Because of my unresolved childhood trauma, I was already conditioned to:

avoid conflict
people-please
stay quiet
fear abandonment
accept mistreatment
distrust my own instincts

So when I entered a religious system where:

obedience was spiritualized
silence was idealized
male authority was normalized
polygamy was always a possibility
women were inherently secondary in the moral hierarchy

…it all felt familiar.

It felt like home—not because it was healthy, but because trauma recognizes trauma.

📚 The Doctrines That Kept Me Silent

There were specific teachings that shaped my voice—and my inability to use it.

For example:

“The righteous women are devoutly obedient…”

(Qur’an 4:34)

I taught this verse.
I instructed women to be patient, submissive, compliant.
I told them to endure emotional hardship “for the sake of God.”

And here is the truth:

I helped normalize emotional and spiritual abuse—because I believed God required it.

That is something I had to grieve deeply.
And something only Jesus has been able to free me from in forgiveness.

⚠️ The Things No One Talks About

There are topics Muslim women whisper about privately but rarely acknowledge publicly, including:

• Child marriage

Aisha’s young age is well-documented in major Hadith collections.
Women avoid this topic because it is painful, confusing, and uncomfortable.
Silence becomes the only safe response.

• The Prophet’s 11 wives

Even though the Qur’an limits men to four wives, classical biography records the Prophet exceeded this limit.
Women are forbidden from questioning this discrepancy.
Again—silence becomes survival.

These issues do not just exist in books.
They shape how women feel about themselves, their bodies, their worth, their roles, and their right to question harm.

🧩 The Layering of Pain

By the time my faith crisis arrived in 2019, I could finally articulate something I had felt for years:

**My childhood trauma made me vulnerable.

These doctrines deepened the wound.
Together, they created a layered trauma I did not have words for.**

This blog is not an attack on Islam.
It is a place where many women will finally see their own pain reflected—and understood.

🌸 And Now… Healing

Healing for me meant asking questions I had been too afraid to ask.
It meant recognizing that spiritual truth cannot grow where fear is the foundation.
It meant understanding that God is not the author of my trauma.
And it meant forgiving myself for the years I taught women to carry burdens they were never meant to bear.

December 4, 2025 0

🌿3: Why Nela’s Nest Exists — Deconstructing Islam: Permission to Question

The Three-Year Journey That Broke Me, Freed Me, and Rebuilt Me

When my emotional and spiritual worlds collapsed, I found myself staring at a terrifying truth:
I had lived 25 years inside a belief system I had never truly questioned.

I had been taught that doubt was dangerous, that curiosity was rebellion, and that silence was obedience. For decades, I accepted doctrines that shaped every part of my life—how I prayed, how I dressed, how I thought, how I understood God, and even how I viewed myself.

But when the crisis finally stripped away the layers, there was only one thing left:

❗ A question I had never allowed myself to ask:

“What if everything I believe… needs to be examined?”

That question changed everything.

🌫️ The Forbidden Curiosity

For most of my life, curiosity was discouraged.
Questions were labeled as weakness.
Doubt was framed as betrayal.
Critical thinking was considered a spiritual threat.

So when I finally gave myself permission to question, it felt like stepping into forbidden territory.

I was terrified.

Terrified of being wrong.
Terrified of divine punishment.
Terrified of losing the identity I had poured my whole life into.
Terrified of the truth — whatever it might be.

But I was also exhausted from pretending.

And so, slowly, painfully, courageously… I started asking.

I asked the questions I had swallowed for years.
I examined doctrines I had accepted without understanding.
I challenged teachings that had shaped my fear, shame, and sense of unworthiness.

🌱 Curiosity became my first act of self-love.

🕊️ The Painful Discoveries

As I questioned, layers began to peel away.

Some answers devastated me.
Others liberated me.
Some broke my heart.
Some healed parts of me I didn’t even know were hurting.

I realized that many of the beliefs that controlled me were rooted not in spiritual truth, but in cultural pressure, patriarchal structures, fear-based theology, and unexamined tradition.

And with every truth uncovered, I felt myself both breaking and becoming whole.

🌑 The Three-Year Descent

This deconstruction wasn’t quick.
It wasn’t clean.
It wasn’t gentle.

It took three years of wrestling with grief, confusion, betrayal, and disorientation.
Three years of crying over lost certainty.
Three years of mourning the identity I once wore proudly.
Three years of rebuilding trust in God—not the God I had been taught to fear, but the God I was slowly learning to love.

The process was satisfying yet excruciating.
Liberating yet disorienting.
Empowering yet deeply lonely.

And the grief?
The grief was unlike anything I’d ever felt.
I grieved the faith I loved.
I grieved the version of myself who once believed wholeheartedly.
I grieved the dreams I had built around that belief system.
I grieved the sense of belonging I once had.

It was a grief I would not wish on my worst enemy.

🌿 The Turning Point

But somewhere in the middle of all that pain, something beautiful began to happen.

I started finding my voice.
I started hearing my intuition.
I started seeing myself outside of religious identity.
I started meeting God in ways I never had before—
not through fear, but through presence.
Not through ritual, but through honesty.
Not through submission, but through relationship.

And this is why Deconstructing Islam became the first category on my blog:

🌱 Because this was the first step in my healing.

🌱 Because this was where I learned to think, feel, and trust again.

🌱 Because this is the doorway many others will walk through, too.

⭐ Next in the Series:

Post #4 — “The Hidden Root: How Childhood Trauma Shaped My Spiritual Life”

This next post will uncover the unexpected truth you discovered—that your spiritual trauma did not begin with Islam. It began in childhood.

December 1, 2025 0

🌿 2: Why Nela’s Nest Exists — My Breaking Point: The Collapse That Changed Everything

In 2018, my world fell apart.

What looked like an “emotional breakdown” from the outside was, on the inside, a complete unraveling of my identity, beliefs, and sense of stability. For years, I had pushed myself to survive, to perform, to remain the devoted believer I thought I was supposed to be. I wore strength like a mask. I held my pain like a secret. And I lived my life according to beliefs that looked holy on the surface but were suffocating me underneath.

But in 2018, my mind and body could no longer hold the weight.

🌑 The Breaking Point

It wasn’t a single moment — it was a slow crumble.
My emotions became unrecognizable.
My thoughts became loud and chaotic.
My sense of self seemed to disappear.

I couldn’t explain it at the time.
I just felt like I was dying inside.

For 25 years, I had lived as a devoted “slave of Allah,” clinging to rituals, rules, and doctrines that structured every moment of my life. I believed that obedience would bring me peace. But in the silence of my breakdown, I heard a truth that terrified me:

I knew religion, but I did not know God.

It was a realization that cut straight through everything.
It was the beginning of the end — and the beginning of something new.

🌫️ 2019: The Faith Crisis

The next year, the emotional collapse became a spiritual one.

Everything I had built my identity upon suddenly felt fragile. I began to see inconsistencies, manipulations, fears, and contradictions I had ignored for decades. The beliefs I once clung to no longer comforted me — they suffocated me. The certainty I once wore with pride dissolved into confusion and pain.

And perhaps most painful of all:
I realized that the God I loved had been buried under layers of fear-based religion.

This wasn’t rebellion.
This wasn’t ego.
This wasn’t anger.

It was heartbreak.

The faith crisis wasn’t about wanting to leave God —
it was about finally acknowledging that the version of faith I had inherited was hurting me.

🌿 The Start of the Healing Journey

My collapse wasn’t a failure.
It was an invitation.

It was the moment that forced me to examine everything I had avoided:
my childhood wounds, my fear of abandonment, my need for approval, my longing to feel safe, and the religious beliefs that had taken root in the cracks of those wounds.

My breakdown wasn’t the end of me —
it was the beginning of my reconstruction.

It was the painful, sacred point where I learned the truth:

🌱 Sometimes your life has to fall apart before you can finally begin to heal.

This moment — the collapse — is what pushed me toward the deep healing work that would eventually lead to Nela’s Nest.

Because I know this:
There are others out there right now who are standing in the same darkness, questioning everything, feeling like their world is cracking open. And if that’s you, I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me:

You are not falling apart. You are breaking open.

November 29, 2025 0

🌿Introduction: Why Nela’s Nest Exists

A Sanctuary for Trauma Healing, Not a Spotlight on Me

What brought me here is not why I am here.

Yes, it was trauma—religious trauma, emotional trauma, and the collapse of everything I thought was true—that pushed me into the healing process. My story includes an emotional breakdown in 2018, a faith crisis the following year, and the slow, agonizing unraveling of a belief system I had committed to for more than 25 years. Those experiences shook me awake. They forced me to confront the gap between what I believed and what I truly knew in my soul.

But make no mistake: that is not why Nela’s Nest exists.

My personal story is simply the doorway. It is not the destination.

I share pieces of my journey—my years in the Middle East, my deconstruction process, the grief I carried, and the truths I uncovered—not to center myself, but to create connection. I offer my experience as a bridge so others don’t feel alone as they walk their own difficult path toward healing.

Because the real mission of Nela’s Nest is this:

🌿 To support the healing and recovery of those who carry childhood trauma, spiritual trauma, or both.

What I learned on my own journey is something I never expected:
The religious and spiritual wounds I suffered did not begin with religion.
They were rooted in my childhood.

Unmet needs.
Silent pain.
Confusion that had no language.
A longing to belong.
Fear of disappointing people who held power over me.

These early wounds laid the foundation for later spiritual trauma. They created vulnerabilities—openings—through which harmful teachings, rigid systems, and fear-based doctrines took hold.

When I finally began untangling my religious trauma, I found the deeper root beneath it. And that changed everything.

🌱 Healing, I discovered, is an inside-out process.

You cannot heal religious trauma without addressing the childhood patterns that allowed it to shape you.
You cannot reclaim your spiritual life without understanding the emotional life that lived beneath it.
You cannot build a new identity without honoring the parts of you that were silenced, ignored, or conditioned to accept harm.

Nela’s Nest was created to support you through this entire journey.

This is a space for:

asking questions without fear
understanding the connection between childhood wounds and spiritual patterns
learning how trauma shapes the way we believe, trust, love, and relate
rebuilding a sense of self rooted in truth, not fear
finding compassion for the parts of you that had to survive

I am here not as a guru, not as a religious authority, and not as the center of the story—
but as a fellow traveler who learned how to climb out of a deep, dark place and now extends a hand to help others find their way too.

Welcome to the Nest.
This is your sanctuary.
This is your soft place to land.
This is where healing begins.

November 27, 2025 0