Pushed over the edge...

Deconstruction seems kinda squishy.

To someone who hasn’t gone into or through deconstruction, someone reacting so strongly to a change can seem unusual or even suspicious.  Like it’s an excuse to be rebellious or to complain.  

There are probably situations where that is the case.  

Lots of times, it’s both - where the person is experiencing massive internal change AND their response to it is to lash out or respond strongly in ways or at targets that may or may not be predictable.

Learning something different CAN change how you see the world, people, and yourself. It is the main thing that causes deconstruction in general, and specifically the religious kind.  

The things you learn can be both knowledge AND experiences, positive or negative. 

That’s probably a little redundant to say since experiences that change how you see are simply knowledge that comes through the delivery system of something that happens to you or near you in some way and not just from reading or hearing or learning about it.

As mentioned before, not everyone experiencing change will respond by going into deconstruction. 

Some will see the change in their reality, experience some short term cognitive dissonance - that feeling that things that might be opposite or contradictory from what you’ve always felt to be true - and then “calm down” and work to go back to the way things were and re-integrate all that stuff that was “bothering them”.

The push “over the edge” to where a person doesn’t just “calm down” and go back usually has to be something so compelling, positively or negatively, that there is no going back. It’s personal.  

It’s too big to step back and pretend everything could be fine if you just forget about what you’ve seen. As the world changes around you through what you’ve seen, you change too, in ways that are not yet describable.

It could be a positive thing, like learning that God’s grace is SO much bigger than you’d heard before and that the tribe you came from had severely limited it so that *only that tribe* could be perceived as having access to it. 

In a situation like that, a person might find it laughable or offensive to “go on” pretending with people from their former tribe that everything is “all good”.  They’ve seen a picture too big to ignore.  

They might not have adequate words, time, or relationship quality with members of their former group to be able to dialogue about it just yet and have to just go away.

Or it could be a negative thing, where the nature of relationships with the previous group deteriorated and trust has been lost.  It wouldn’t have to mean that no one in the previous group is a good person or that you don’t still have good feelings toward them.  

It could be that a critical mass of certain individuals - leaders or key people that were depended on to be or behave in a predictable way - became or suddenly appeared to be unpredictable. 

The way a person expected the group would “be” was no longer possible.

That kind of negative experience could be a stand alone thing and cause a person to move on and into deconstruction.  

It could also overlap other experiences - where they’ve been learning different things about God, faith, and such the like AND, maybe because of what they’ve learned, it precipitates a change in their relationship dynamic with their tribe or group.

Probably a good thing to remember is that "the push over the edge" usually isn't intentional. In fact, it's probably done with good intentions. The person who does the pushing is usually assuming the one they push "knows better" and that they share similar values, norms, etc and are just being rebellious and need to be "brought back into line".

So a group or a tribe might have someone exit them and wonder "What in the world happened? How did they get to that point? What's wrong with them?" or things like that.

In some cases, it CAN be intentional and a religious group can come out and say, "We are who we are. This is who we're going to be. If you don't like it, you should find another place." And while it can be painful to say or hear, it's probably better in the long run.

Usually groups try to play both ends against the middle and gaslight the person who has questions or doubts so they feel shame and all the negative weight of what's going on and the group is protected from looking bad by projecting the problems on to a "black sheep".

Regardless of whether it's a mixture of positive or negative things, the change is big enough to cause a person to do the math - socially, philosophically, theologically, and more - and they realize things don't add up anymore. The math doesn't work.

So yes, interacting with someone in deconstruction does feel squishy. There can be a sensation of "being punked" where you feel like someone is messing with you because they aren't using language or morals or interactions the same way you used to use them all together.

It can be a Tower of Babel moment when the things a group was doing together before are halted because the language you used to share no longer works and you must go do different things.

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Okay, that's a little more.

Peace and goodwill.

Blog version in link in comments.