Reddit mentions of Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis

Catholic until college. Atheist for about 10 years. Now I'm a non-churchgoing Jesus-loving theist. Some days I even call myself a Christian.

In my case it took a lot of things to get me back to God, which I will divide into emotional and intellectual factors:

Emotional:

• Complete failure of my life and complete failure of my high-horse sense of myself as somebody who does not harm others. Nearly killed myself from punitive cutting and other self-injury.
  
• The use of marijuana to connect me to my emotional life, providing the initial steps in overcoming my autistic tendencies.
  
• During one psychedelic-fueled meditation, I was really disturbed by stuff like the fact that, as a US taxpayer, I am responsible for the suffering and death around the world caused by my insane government. I saw my integral connection to everybody, saw the fact that I cannot, by hook or by crook, escape my responsibility as long as I live. I broke down in tears screaming "I repent!" wondering if there is a way out.
  
• A saving experience in a dream which, in one fell swoop, caused me to turn around a death-spiral of nightly cocktail of binge drinking, chain smoking, and drug use, quitting everything cold turkey.
  
• Fear of God stimulating me to take actions which directly improved my life and my relationship to those around me.
  
  Intellectual:
  
  
• Rejection of physicalism/materialism on the grounds of a categorical difference between an experience and a physical object, coupled with the fact that discussing experience via a physical medium implies that experience affects the physical world. But I now prefer the shorter, "I find materialism to be self-evidently false." Satisfactory tentative solution to the mind-body problem in the idea that willful actions direct the construction of new neural machinery (compare the first time you learned to drive a car with what it's like now). To save space and time I don't want to explain this in much detail except to say that as a programmer who has built artificial neural networks, I found something which satisfied me enough intellectually to allow me to move on. See my post history for extensive discussion of this topic.
  
• Related to the previous point on the categorical difference between experiences and physical objects, and also related to speculative discussions on things like teleportation and reincarnation, an increasing conviction that the "experiencer" must be eternal (or in any case cannot be destroyed by any mere physical destruction).
  
• Psychological self-awareness. Realization of how much I cling to ideas merely to avoid having an honest wrestle with other ideas. Realization that, in spite of all this, an honest search for truth is possible, but it requires constant effort and ceases the moment effort ceases. (Self-awareness assisted by the work of Karen Horney (also this) and other writers.)
  
• Once a person becomes aware of his own mortality, he cannot escape nihilistic misery unless either 1.) He exercises some form of escapism and cognitive dissonance, or 2.) Death is not actually the end. The positive effect which "trying out" a belief in immortality has had on my health, motivation, relationships to other human beings, and mundane achievements, all contributing to a growing conviction that man is meant to believe in his own immortality.
  
• The difference between healthy and unhealthy religion. Unhealthy religion is narrower than the universe (thereby forcing its adherents to close their minds). Healthy religion accounts for everything observable (thereby allowing full expression of all curiosity and intellectual faculties).
  
• The apologetics of G. K. Chesterton, especially his book Heretics which, while it didn't make me a Catholic again, is the most brilliant lay-targeted apologetic work I have ever read.
  
• Having been on and now several years off psychiatric meds, a better idea of what mental illness is all about. It really was about the deep inner conflicts that wreaked havoc on me. The medications saved me from destroying myself and I am thankful for them. They put my conflicts out of operation and allowed me to develop some strength, but they did not ultimately resolve what was bothering me in my depths, in fact they prevented its ultimate resolution and therefore I needed to outgrow them. So I would never define my troubles as a chemical imbalance. My troubles are defined as the suffering and agony I experienced due to inner conflicts, which manifested physically as abnormal brain chemistry. The brain reflects the state of the soul. And the fact that I finally resolved my conflicts to such an extent that I no longer need medication implies that I was able to "fix the chemical imbalance" via entirely mental processes. Therefore, while you can look at what's going on either from the perspective of the brain or from the perspective of the soul, it is obvious to me that the soul is what really matters, and if we can fix things with the soul, the brain will right itself as it must. In less "spiritual" terms (since as an ex-atheist I know you cringe every time you see the word "soul") this simply means that I believe psychotherapy has more potential for a permanent improvement in mental health than psychopharmacology.
  
• Discovered completely new meaning in a lot of the Gospel verses compared to what I grew up with. Especially the stuff Jesus said about children, the parable of the sower, his talk of wineskins, the Beatitudes as psychological laws I discovered within myself, etc. Understanding sin as error (it is literally an archery term that means "to miss") instead of as breaking arbitrary rules. Certain Hindu scriptures clarifying my understanding of sin. The sayings of Jesus became the most profound and yet concise (seriously, the guy's meaning-to-word ratio shot up out of this world) words I have ever read, putting all historical questions to rest with a simple "Well somebody wrote that shit".
  
  Those are just the few I could come up with in one sitting. My path toward religion has been a long one and I am still walking it. It may very well end in Christianity. I do not have contempt for my atheist phase the way I had contempt for Catholicism as an atheist, as I now realize my atheist phase was necessary to overcome a very narrow-minded family upbringing and start to realize some of my potential as a human being, which had hitherto been wasted due to my neurotic issues stemming from my upbringing.