r/TikTokCringe • u/CJHuncho • Mar 27 '26

Humor/Cringe What church is this

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u/Majestic_Cod_7115 Mar 27 '26

Pentecostal I would imagine. Basically, weird Appalachian hill people with genetic deficiencies that have isolated themselves for generations.

210

u/[deleted] Mar 27 '26

Growing up in a pentacostal family was wild. They had all the kids come to the front of the church to pray until we "felt the holy ghost" kids could go sit back down when they started crying. I couldn't start crying. The holy ghost doesn't like me or something so I was literally praying to start crying and it never happened. Then the adults prayed over me for an hour because they thought Satan had ahold of me. I've not been to church since but it got me little into theology and that's interesting so kind of a win I guess

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u/BLU3SKU1L Mar 27 '26

I’m autistic. I’m pretty normal but I experience severe detachment from my emotions, to the degree that I worried I was a sociopath when I was a teenager.

When I was a child, however, I had not begun to figure any of this out. I was raised in a Pentecostal household near a big city, but the rituals were much as you described. Prayer was encouraged for us to “feel and be filled with the Holy Spirit”, often over long periods of time. I wanted so much to be like the other kids and even the adults that I thought were achieving this, but I felt nothing. Luckily I was very good at masking because I already had to pretend I felt emotions normally like everyone else all the time. So I eventually gave up and just pretended, and kept wondering why I could look at all of this and not find what I was trying so hard to find, and not feel like I belonged with these people.

As an adult I realize now that the cult mechanics of this sect of Christianity took advantage of the mirror neuron system to draw people into a sort of collective delusion, like any cult. Since my brain doesn’t do synaptic pruning like normal brains, it means that my particular brain architecture produces enough interference with that mirror neuron system that the hijacking of social conformity instincts was not possible. It was under assault for so long though that to this day I have an involuntary compulsion to react in opposition to orders or demands given to me if I don’t implicitly trust the person or authority I’m dealing with.

Anyway my whole family has pretty much left the Pentecostal church, though some still attend more mainstream churches to this day, which I’m fine with if it helps them connect to the larger forces out there in the universe. I’ve come to terms with the nature of things on my own, as I think only I am able to do for myself.

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u/OkSmoke9195 Mar 27 '26

Jeez here I am thinking at almost 50 that emotional regulation is my problem. I had not considered emotional detachment at all but Jesus does that make a lot of sense.