This is an aspect in which I have changed as well. During adolescence, I was deeply influenced by religious ideals. I felt tremendous external pressure especially when I was at a Christian boarding school at ages 16-18. I felt intense pressure to "be a good example". I was taught alot about the end of the world and how if we didn't have a perfect character by the time Jesus returned, then we wouldn't be able to go and some other things like that which exacerbated some of the emotional imbalances I had anyway. My world view had been constructed and imposed on me and it caused some cognitive dissonance on a variety of levels.
Yes, we both had a similar upbringing.
Although it's a weird dichotomy for me... Externally I guess I was complying to avoid getting criticism or disrupting my life, internally on some levels I did accept the worldview as "mine." I do believe in health and growth and perfecting oneself (I have always driven myself
hard), and I guess the religious environment only exacerbated that. Where I am now is far different, now that I've learned to accept my humanness and not see it as an "evil" thing. Maybe my sense of higher morality changed more into how I interrelate with people in the positive sense, rather than how few sins people can visibly credit to my account.
There was a core aspect of myself that I discovered independently of the external pressures. This I found when I would go alone in nature and let go. I had a little walk I would take from the school so that I was hidden behind a group of trees and could see nothing except for some fields of corn, soybeans, and the clear blue sky. Every perception would take in a richly aesthetic experience. The boundary between myself an this tremendous beauty would disappear. It healed me every time.
I think nature is one thing that saved me.
Art was the other -- music, writing, drawing, whatever.
In my most miserable times I would just disappear into the woods and fields when I could, all by myself, and all the pressure would vanish. I could just be me.
And shutting myself in a black room and playing the piano in the dark, or listening to evocative music... again, I no longer had to "be" anything except me, and I could just feel and live.
All the pressure was gone.
My soul could sing.
Of course, those things haven't changed. It's just that I feel more "me" without having to specifically do them. But I still love to do them.