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Here because some of these subjects reach further than a written exercise should.
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Tool 24 · Develop yourself
What has changed in what I believe? What follows from that?
A guided 20 to 25 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise will not try to restore your faith and will not encourage you to leave it. Doubt is allowed to stay open here.
Is it the belief that has moved, or the people who taught it to you?
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 look at
- 01What changed, and when you first noticed
- 02What has not changed
- 03What you still do out of habit
- 04Who knows
A note from Mark
I have no interest in telling anybody what to believe. I am suspicious of anyone who does.
More than once, I have watched somebody describe losing their faith. Over an hour, they work out that what they actually lost was confidence in a handful of people who claimed to represent it. Those are very different losses. From the inside, they are almost impossible to tell apart.
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 left a question open for a decade and got on with the rest of their lives.
Read my full view ↓
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
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
What is actually in doubt
02
What has not moved
03
What kind of doubt this is
04
What it is costing you
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What is actually in doubt
- 03What is not in doubt
- 04When it started
- 05What kind of doubt this is
- 06The rival reading
- 07What it is costing you
- 08Who knows
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What, if anything, should change
- 12What remains unresolved
- 13Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
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. Read it back. Precision does more here than resolution.
See more ↓
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
- 01
Separate the belief from the building, the leadership and the community. They are four different things and they fail independently.
- 02
Write down what has not moved before you look at what has. The proportions matter and they are rarely what you assume.
- 03
Notice what the doubt followed. It does not make the doubt less real, but it changes what you are dealing with.
- 04
Do not force a conclusion because uncertainty is uncomfortable. Held open is a legitimate position and it can be held for years.
- 05
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
- 01
Ask what would have to be true for the doubt to settle. If nothing would, the question may not be about evidence.
- 02
Separate what you would still defend from what you would no longer argue for. The gap is the actual territory.
- 03
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
- What changed, and roughly when you first noticed it.
- What has not changed at all.
- Whether the doubt is about the belief itself, the institution, the practice or the people.
- What you still do out of habit, and how that feels.
- Who knows, and what saying it out loud would risk.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
READ · BOOK
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Read it if the exercise found a principle you have never allowed to bend. It is the strongest available argument against the tidy version of consistency.
Read more ↗
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READ · RESEARCH
Deconversion: qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research
Heinz Streib and colleagues
Best for seeing that losing a belief follows recognisable paths.
Read more ↗
Was this useful?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What do I believe?
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
See the thinking ↓
Article
Deconversion: qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research
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
The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale
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
The Happiness Trap
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.