For those of us recovering from fundamentalism, introspection can be the devil. It’s counterintuitive that introspection would exacerbate depression; talking therapy is supposed to help, especially with the addition of some pharmaceuticals.

And to a point, it can. But for those of us recovering from fundamentalism, introspection has become the prime contributor to a self-reinforcing cycle of depression…

Whatever else fundamentalism is, in its Christian flavors it’s an off-shoot of pietism. Pietism in all its glory started in Northern Europe somewhere around the 17th or 18th centuries. It believes in the call for individual and social purity, and it has well laid-out programs to help get you there. It’s highly emotional, yes, but those emotions are carefully scripted within a rational, goal-directed program.

Above all else, pietists search their souls. They teach each other to measure each thought, each action, each intention against a role call of catalogued impurities. When you uncover any impurity—and the catalog is so comprehensive that you will always find an impurity—you must immediately begin to search for its “why” and its “how,” which inevitably leads to a wider network of impurities, each deserving its own attention. Pietism provides rituals and rhythms to help ingraft soul searching practices into your daily life. All community ritual is likewise devoted to the search for impurities. And if by some chance you don’t find any impurity, the community will hold that up as a sign of more hidden, more insidious impurities that deserve extra attention.

Pietists also search for social impurities and try to fix them. Many, many liberal arts college, orphanages, shelters, food banks, and social service agencies were started by pietists. (The Salvation Army is a model pietist community.) But when pietism starts to feel attacked by society at large—now perceived as hostile and all-encompassing—pietism morphs into fundamentalism, building walls around itself and lobbing attacks over those walls. Helping the larger universe becomes just too risky.

The fundamentalist, unlike the pietist, is cut off from other cultures, and thus their resources and critiques. Empathy for the non-fundamentalist other is cut off. The fundamentalist—out of concern for the preservation of fragile purity in a hostile world—can trust no one but himself and his comrades. The military metaphors of pietism are radicalized (and sometimes literalized). “Onward Christian Soldiers” changes from a victory march to a suicide mission.

But through it all the incessant soul searching remains. Now devoid of practices of empathy and belief in social progress, the fundamentalist is a desperate creature, stuck in a life-or-death version of a “no girls allowed” tree house. Cultural cooties, it turns out, can be fatal, and the inoculations don’t always work. Instead of seeking out social impurities in order to help, the fundamentalist seeks them out for fear of a future attack.

Whatever tendencies to affective disorders you might have can only be exacerbated under fundamentalism. Although I haven’t seen any studies, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that it encourages development of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But who knows? For more serious disorders, the heavy contraints of fundamentalism might actually be helpful. It would help explain their prevalence.

But for those of us in recovery from fundamentalism, the old, comfortable practices of soul searching are constant temptations for relapse. The term “recovery” is overused, to be sure. But the former fundamentalist is in constant search of a new fundamentalism; activist politics or another strict religion are more likely candidates than substance abuse because they provide a large social network with large community rituals.

Even absent a relapse into a specific fundamentalism, the person in recovery is regularly haunted by old habits of thought and emotion. The recovering fundamentalist longs for the security of the closed fundamentalist world and psyche. And for the recovering fundamentalist, soul-searching introspection is the alcoholic’s drink. It is always present, always calling, always offering solace, always offering the thrill of the forbidden. Like the alcoholic, the recovering fundamentalist must decide every morning—perhaps every moment—to not take that drink of introspection. One sip can send you over the edge.