I was in three toxic marriages before I found New Age teachings — and that context matters. Each of those marriages was, in no small part, a consequence of religious trauma. I had grown up in organized religion, and the shame it embedded in me ran deep. Intimacy outside of marriage was a mortal sin. So when I became intimate with someone, I felt compelled to marry them, because that was the only framework I had for making it right.
Even when I knew — somewhere beneath the conditioning — that these men weren’t right for me, I stayed. And when I finally left, I carried a new layer of shame: Christianity had taught me that any marriage after my first would never be fully blessed by God. So I reasoned that at least being married, even unhappily, was better than “living in sin.” That was the logic religious trauma produced in me. That was the cage I was living in.
So when I stumbled onto New Age teachings, it felt like the door swinging open.
When “No Shame” Feels Like Salvation
The first time I encountered The Secret, I was still raw from everything — the failed marriages, the religious trauma, the exhaustion of trying to be good enough for a God who always seemed to be watching for a misstep. New Age offered something I had never experienced before: unconditional welcome. No sin. No judgment. No impossible standard to meet. Just people trying to find their way, using tools like crystals, tarot cards, manifestation, and the law of attraction to build something better.
From there, I branched out quickly — Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, the broader Hay House and Sounds True catalogs, Oprah. I had the vision board, my copy of The Magic, and every tool the teachings offered. I used all of them.
My closest friends were immersed in the same world, many of them people I had met through my online business — and I saw firsthand what these teachings could do to relationships. I can only speculate, but I believe a colleague who had become a close friend eventually turned her back on me based on the delusional readings she was receiving from one of her so-called intuitive readers.
That’s the thing about the New Age world: it doesn’t just shape how you see yourself. It shapes how you see everyone around you.
What I want to be clear about is this: I never stopped believing in God, and I never prayed to deities, goddesses, or spirit guides. Throughout those 11 years, I prayed to God alone. But New Age gave me a version of God that wasn’t waiting to punish me — and after a lifetime of fear-based faith, that felt like an awakening.
After leaving my last toxic marriage and finally striking out on my own, I felt, for the first time, like I was on top of the world.
Eleven Years Inside the Architecture
I followed New Age teachings for 11 years. During that time, I worked with people who called themselves healers, intuitives, witches, and shamans. I had an altar in my home where I drew oracle cards, practiced different forms of divination, and tried — with enormous effort and sincerity — to control my life down to the smallest details.
I say all of this not with embarrassment, but with clarity. I was a serious, committed practitioner. I wasn’t dabbling. And that’s precisely why I can tell you what happens when you go all the way in.
One of the core beliefs I absorbed was that I had chosen everything that had ever happened to me. Not just that painful events had some divine purpose — but that before I was born, my soul had selected my life, my parents, and every person who had ever hurt me. The people who caused me the most harm, I was taught, were “cosmic assistants” who had agreed to wound me so that my soul could evolve.
I believed this. Fully. And looking back, I can see exactly what it was doing to me: it was teaching me to dissociate from my own pain. To intellectualize abuse. To reframe suffering as curriculum rather than something that deserved acknowledgment, grief, and real healing.
The Moment the Architecture Became Visible
The unraveling happened gradually, then all at once.
I had been noticing for a while that within my circle, there was always a next level to reach — another course, another attunement, another modality that would finally unlock the breakthrough that kept being just out of reach. The language of New Age is fluent in almost-but-not-quite. You’re close. You just need to clear this block. Your vibration isn’t aligned yet. It keeps you returning, spending, and — crucially — dependent.
In New Age speak, this is called being a “Seeker”. But in reality, it’s just finding shiny new teachings and tools to take you away from the very thing that needs to be addressed…your trauma.
The final crack came after an appointment with a “spiritual mentor” who shared feedback from her “guides” about my relationship struggles. According to her reading, my recurring pattern with romantic partners was the result of a past life in which my partner had made a mistake that led to my downfall or death. It was presented with complete confidence, as though it were fact.
I sat with that for a while. And then I started asking questions I had never let myself ask before. Why did my partners always appear as my partners in past life regressions? Why did none of the regressions I had done — with different practitioners, using different methods — ever share a single consistent detail? If these were real past-life details, why were they so conveniently tailored to whatever emotional narrative I was carrying at the time?
The answer, when I finally allowed it, was uncomfortable: much of it had been fabricated — and not always by me. The intuitive who described my spirit guides in vivid detail. The shaman who told me a lost piece of my soul needed to be retrieved. The past life regression therapist who walked me through deaths and lifetimes that explained, with suspicious convenience, every wound I was carrying in this one. The spiritual mentor who’d had a Near Death Experience (NDE) and had come back with insights and vision that no one else seemed to have.
These were not insights I arrived at on my own — they were narratives handed to me by people I trusted, people I was paying, people who presented themselves as having access to something I couldn’t see myself. And because I was already primed by years of immersion in these frameworks, I received every one of those narratives as truth. That is exactly how it works. You don’t just believe it because you want to. You believe it because the system is designed to make it believable — and because when you are a trauma survivor searching for answers, someone speaking with that kind of certainty feels, at last, like solid ground.
Not because I was broken or gullible, but because the human brain is extraordinarily good at receiving and constructing the stories it needs — especially when it has been primed to do so. Sometimes the narratives were handed to me directly by practitioners speaking with complete authority. Other times, I was guided through meditations or prompts designed to help me “access” my own past lives, which meant that whatever my mind produced in that vulnerable, suggestible state was then treated as memory.
Either way, the result was the same: a story that felt sacred, personal, and true. Those feelings of awakening and revelation were real. But they weren’t downloads from a higher dimension. They were my own neurology, shaped by years of immersion in these frameworks, generating exactly the experience I had been taught to expect — and in the case of the guided sessions, exactly the experience I had been prompted to find.
I wrote more about this in my article, Was That a Past Life Regression — or Your Brilliant Mind Telling You Exactly the Story You Needed?
What New Age and Organized Religion Have in Common
Here is the irony I eventually had to face: New Age teachings, for all their talk of freedom and self-empowerment, replicated the same structure that had damaged me in organized religion. Both systems told me I was the problem. Religion said I was a sinner. New Age said my vibration was off, my thoughts were creating my suffering, or I had karmic debt to clear. The vocabulary was different. The shame landed in the same place.
Both systems also kept me dependent — on doctrine, on leaders, on the idea that I needed external guidance to access something within myself. The guru replaced the pastor. The oracle deck replaced the scripture. The ascension journey replaced the path to salvation. And in both cases, you could never quite arrive.
Real healing — the kind I have been working toward since leaving New Age behind — looks nothing like either of those systems. It is slower. It is less dramatic. There are no awakenings, no attunements, no past life explanations for why the present hurts. There is only the slow, unglamorous work of learning to be honest about what happened to you, feeling it rather than reframing it, and building a life that doesn’t require a guru’s approval, crystal’s alignment, or a pastor’s toxic teachings.
If you are a trauma survivor who found New Age teachings the way I did — through an open wound — I am not here to shame you. I am here because I was you. And I want you to know that the hunger you felt when you found it was real and legitimate. You deserved somewhere to belong. You deserved healing.
You still do. Just not that kind.
