I was raised in the Mormon church, and while my immediate family has never been regular church goers, my mother and older sister have always been very faithful Mormons, and my extended family members are all very devout and have always been regular church goers (or at least they’ve always claimed to be).
From the time I was around 5 years old, when I was actually getting old enough to understand God and how he’s supposed to work, I thought that He hated me and though I didn’t know what I did, somehow I had done so much wrong that he refused to forgive me for my mistakes any longer and punished my family for every bad thing I did.
My family growing up was really dysfunctional, we lived in run down apartment buildings, and my mother was on welfare for having a lot of health problems, physically and mentally, while (and I don’t mean this to sound like self pity) my cousins all had healthy and happy married parents, houses in the suburbs, and pretty much everything else a little kid idealizes having, and their parents always looked down on my mother for being divorced and treated me and my older siblings like we were lesser children for having divorced parents/absent fathers, and I took that as proof of what I believed. Now you would think this would be a very painful belief for a kid to have, but it actually didn’t bother me that much, it was just something I accepted as a part of my life. That belief lasted until I was around 9 or 10 years old.
So… would you consider that a childhood delusion? Or just my younger self making up explanations for why I was different from my cousins?