I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the problem wasn’t much religion telling you these things as the fact that your parents were also clearly broken and/or incompetent, yet continued to persist in pretending that they could somehow fix you.
You definitely go through some stages of brokenness as a child growing up because everything doesn’t necessarily grow at the same rate or the same time, so I don’t think it’s necessarily abusive to be upfront about that. What IS abusive is letting you continue to labor in that state without providing any sort of hope for relief — which the Bible clearly does, but your parents and priests may not have.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the problem wasn’t much religion telling you these things as the fact that your parents were also clearly broken and/or incompetent, yet continued to persist in pretending that they could somehow fix you.
You definitely go through some stages of brokenness as a child growing up because everything doesn’t necessarily grow at the same rate or the same time, so I don’t think it’s necessarily abusive to be upfront about that. What IS abusive is letting you continue to labor in that state without providing any sort of hope for relief — which the Bible clearly does, but your parents and priests may not have.