A word to the still suffering
We cannot treat you, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The Metanoia Project has no rite, no protocol and no cure. But you are not making it up, and you are not the only one.
The Metanoia Project has no rite, no protocol and no cure. It is a research project, founded this year, and it is at the beginning. Anyone who tells you they have the answer to this is lying to you, and you have probably met several of them already.
What we can tell you is that you are not making it up, and you are not the only one.
If you are in danger
This is not the place to start. Contact your local emergency services, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com. Please do that first, and come back to this afterwards.
If you have been passed from a doctor to a priest to a retreat and back again, you already know the thing this Project exists to say out loud: nobody is keeping a record. No diocese publishes how many people come asking. No clinic files what you described. Your search for help leaves no trace, which is precisely why nothing has ever been learned from it.
There is one thing you can do that will outlast your own case. Give your account.
It takes as long as you want it to take. You can give it anonymously. It will be read, it will be kept, and it will be counted — and in time it will sit alongside thousands of others in the first body of evidence anyone has assembled on this.
The first case is mine. I am documenting my own, in public, for as long as it takes to resolve. Yours belongs in the record beside it.