On conversion, liminality and spiritual abuse
I’m writing this off the back of my research — but not for academia.
I’ve spent years researching liminality, conversion, identity, and the psychological life of becoming. I’ve written the papers, done the PhD, spoken the language. And yet, when it comes to writing now, my body resists academic spaces entirely.
Not because I have nothing to say.
But because I want to say it where it can breathe.
So this is a reflection — not a paper.
A piece written in what I think of as a connective third: social space, relational space, human space.
And maybe also an ADHD space — hurried, urgent, written before the thread is lost.
Liminality is not the problem
Conversion places a person in an in-between state.
You are no longer who you were, but you are not yet who you are becoming. Language doesn’t quite fit. Practice feels uncertain. Belonging is fragile. There is often a quiet panic underneath the surface: Am I doing this right? Am I enough yet?
This is liminality — a necessary threshold in any profound transformation.
Liminality is not pathology.
It is not weakness.
It is not failure.
It is becoming.
But liminality is also a vulnerable state. And vulnerable states invite power.
When certainty rushes in
In many convert spaces, when a person expresses uncertainty, doubt, or inner conflict, something predictable happens.
Someone steps forward with answers.
Rules.
Corrections.
Certainty.
A sheikh.
A teacher.
A “born Muslim” voice that implicitly (or explicitly) says: I know what this means — and you don’t.
This often isn’t malicious. Sometimes it’s well-intentioned. Sometimes it’s anxiety dressed as authority. Sometimes it’s a genuine wish to help.
But psychologically, something important happens at that moment.
Power enters the threshold.
And when that happens, the space needed for becoming collapses.
The loss of the relational space
In psychoanalytic thinking — particularly in the work of Thomas Ogden — there is an idea called the analytic third. It refers to the shared relational space between two people, where meaning is not imposed but emerges through relationship.
You don’t need to know the theory to recognise the experience.
It’s the difference between:
- being with someone in uncertainty
and - being managed through it.
When authority replaces accompaniment, the shared space disappears. Meaning no longer forms between us; it is delivered to one person by another.
Liminality cannot survive that.
Why power feels comforting — at first
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: power often feels like safety.
When you’re unsure, someone else’s certainty can feel like relief.
Someone knows.
Someone can tell you what to do.
Someone can protect you from getting it wrong.
Especially if you already carry shame, trauma, rejection sensitivity, or a deep fear of exclusion — all common in convert stories — authority can feel soothing.
But the cost comes later.
Because instead of developing an inner compass, you are handed an external one.
And over time, that external voice becomes internalised.
When authority becomes conscience
This is where the damage quietly sets in.
Questions start to feel dangerous.
Doubt feels like spiritual failure.
Your own experience becomes unreliable.
Faith becomes organised around:
- fear of being wrong
- fear of disapproval
- fear of exclusion
Practice becomes performative.
Piety becomes visible rather than lived.
Belonging becomes conditional.
Outwardly, you may look settled.
Inwardly, something remains unfinished.
This is what happens when liminality is foreclosed rather than accompanied.
Arrested becoming
Liminality is meant to be transitional. A passage. A crossing.
But when power rushes in too quickly, the process gets stuck.
The convert learns how to appear Muslim long before they feel at home in themselves.
Compliance replaces integration.
Submission replaces transformation.
This isn’t a failure of faith.
It’s a failure of holding.
What accompaniment would look like instead
A different response is possible.
One that doesn’t rush.
One that doesn’t panic in the face of uncertainty.
One that doesn’t need to be the answer.
It sounds like:
- This phase is part of the path.
- Not knowing doesn’t mean you’re failing.
- Your relationship with Allah/God is forming — slowly.
- I don’t need to resolve this for you.
This stance preserves the space where becoming can happen.
It trusts that faith doesn’t need to be forced into shape.
Why I’m writing this here
I’ve realised something uncomfortable: academia often reproduces the very dynamics it claims to critique.
Certainty.
Gatekeeping.
Inaccessible language.
Power disguised as legitimacy.
Right now, I don’t want to submit anything to spaces that feel extractive or performative. I’m not interested in publishing for approval or impact factors. That feels like another version of borrowed authority.
I’m interested in connection.
In writing where uncertainty is allowed.
Where lived experience counts as knowledge.
Where meaning emerges between writer and reader.
This feels closer to a third space than any journal ever has.
There’s also this: if I don’t write when the thought arrives, it disappears.
ADHD doesn’t always allow for slow, polished, perfectly structured output. It brings urgency. Improvisation. A need to speak before the thread is lost.
This post is written in that spirit.
Not finished.
Not perfected.
But alive.
Closing
Liminal spaces are holy precisely because they are undefended. They are where old identities dissolve and new ones take shape.
When power enters too quickly, something sacred is lost.
And when we mistake certainty for guidance, we risk turning faith into performance — and becoming into obedience.
I’m not writing this to offer answers.
I’m writing it to keep the threshold open.
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