Tool 24 · Develop yourself
This exercise will not try to restore your faith and will not encourage you to leave it. Doubt is allowed to stay open here.
A guided 20 to 25 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Those two are almost indistinguishable from the inside, and they lead somewhere completely different.
Nothing needs resolving. Held open is a legitimate position.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have no interest in telling anybody what to believe, and I am suspicious of anyone who does.
What I have watched, more than once, is somebody describe losing their faith and then, over an hour, work out that what they had actually lost was confidence in a handful of people who claimed to represent it. Those are very different losses and they are almost impossible to tell apart from the inside.
The other thing I would say is that doubt does not have to go anywhere. There is a strong cultural pressure to resolve, to announce, to become either a believer again or something else entirely. Some of the steadiest people I know have simply left a question open for a decade and got on with the rest of their lives.
So this exercise does not push. It describes. If you leave with a sentence that says exactly what has changed, that is the whole result and it is worth having.
What you'll get
01
What is actually in doubt
02
What has not moved
03
What kind of doubt this is
04
What it is costing you
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
A precise description of what is in doubt, separated from what is not.
02 · Test it
Write the sentence that describes exactly what you doubt, and read it back. Precision does more here than resolution.
If this is heavier than an exercise
Losing a framework that held a life together is a real loss and it is often accompanied by grief. If that is where you are, this page is not the right instrument, and speaking to somebody who knows you, or to your GP, will do more.
If you are inside a community where doubt carries a cost, be careful with the first conversation. Choosing who hears it first is not cowardice.
What I would do
Separate the belief from the building, the leadership and the community. They are four different things and they fail independently.
Write down what has not moved before you look at what has. The proportions matter and they are rarely what you assume.
Notice what the doubt followed. It does not make the doubt less real, but it changes what you are dealing with.
Do not force a conclusion because uncertainty is uncomfortable. Held open is a legitimate position and it can be held for years.
Be careful who you test this with. The wrong first conversation can make you defend a position you have not decided to hold.
Test it
Ask what would have to be true for the doubt to settle. If nothing would, the question may not be about evidence.
Separate what you would still defend from what you would no longer argue for. The gap is the actual territory.
Notice whether the doubt is louder near particular people. That tells you where it is located.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are losing something and must decide whether to keep it. Often that is not what is happening. Sometimes what has gone is trust in the people who taught it to you, and the belief itself has not moved at all. Sometimes the belief is intact and the practice has become impossible for reasons of time, health or distance. Sometimes this is grief, arriving in the only vocabulary available. And sometimes the belief has simply stopped fitting a life that changed around it, which is neither a betrayal nor a discovery.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If you want the description of what remains
Further thinking
Deconversion: qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research
Heinz Streib and colleagues
The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale
Julie Exline and colleagues
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Article
Heinz Streib and colleagues
A careful study of people who left a faith, which resists both the triumphal and the tragic version of the story. What stands out is how long the process takes and how rarely it turns on an argument. If you are in the middle of doubting something, it is steadying to see that the experience has a shape and that the shape is not decline.
Article
Julie Exline and colleagues
Exline's work treats religious and spiritual struggle as a describable experience with several distinct forms, including doubt, moral struggle and conflict with other people. Naming which kind you are in is more useful than deciding whether you still believe, and it removes the pressure to resolve anything this year.
Book
Russ Harris
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.