Painting My Deconstruction: From Evangelical Fear to Witchcraft Healing

When I painted this piece, it felt like something was clawing its way out of me. The sharp white teeth, the screaming void, the violent red strokes, it all poured out of my body before I could even think about what it meant. Only later did I realize I was painting my own religious trauma, the shadows of an evangelical upbringing I’ve been unraveling through my deconstruction story.

Growing Up Evangelical and Terrorized by Fear

I still remember being nine or ten years old, sitting in church with my eyes squeezed shut as the pastor told us to visualize hell. He wanted us to imagine the fire, the endless screaming, the suffering of the damned. I was a child, and yet I was asked to rehearse eternity in torment as if it were a bedtime story. That memory branded itself into me, one of many ways fear was used to shape my faith. For years, I carried that terror like a secret weight. Every mistake, every stray thought, felt like it could tip me over into those flames. My evangelical upbringing trained me to fear the unknown, to believe darkness was punishment, and to silence any part of myself that didn’t fit the mold.

Making Fear Visible Through Art

This painting is what that fear looks like. A mouth wide open, jagged teeth ready to consume. But it’s also something more, it’s my scream. The one I buried to survive. The one I never let out until now. Art has become a form of therapy for me, a way of pulling the shadows out of my body and giving them shape on canvas. What once lived inside me as shame and terror can now live outside me as color and texture. This piece feels raw, chaotic, unsettling… but so is transformation.

From Religious Trauma to Witchcraft Healing

Deconstructing my faith hasn’t been clean or easy. It’s messy. It’s painful. It tears apart what you thought was solid and leaves you standing in the rubble. But in that mess, I’ve found a strange kind of truth: the darkness isn’t always the enemy. Through my witchcraft practice, I’ve begun to reframe what I was taught to fear. The void no longer looks like eternal punishment, it looks like possibility. It’s a space for shadow work, for healing, for hearing my own voice without shame. Witchcraft has given me tools to face the darkness instead of running from it, to honor the parts of me my evangelical past tried to erase.

Closing Reflections

This painting is more than just a piece of art, it’s part of my deconstruction story. It’s a snapshot of religious trauma transformed into expression, of an evangelical upbringing broken open by paint and brush, of witchcraft healing where fear once lived. I talk more about my religious trauma in previous posts as well as this is an ongoing process. Sometimes healing doesn’t look soft or pretty. Sometimes it looks like teeth and screams and chaos on canvas. And sometimes that’s exactly what we need.