Shoot. I'm 99% sure someone has made this connection already, but I've been thinking about my anxious people pleasing tendencies and how they could stem from teachings of a wrathful God, vis a vis hell of eternal conscious torment.

If you need help making this connection, let me try, because it's very simple:

Q:

How does God respond to sinners, according to some?

A:

With a wrathful vengeance.

Taught this from an early age, and that "you must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect", this increases an already burgeoning people-pleasing perfectionism inherited through nurture, and some nature. And the result is an anxious adult who, unconsciously, believes that any little mistake or shortcoming will be met with an anger not unlike that of God's, except from a human.

I had thought that by moving to a different Christian tradition, this would start to work its way out of my system, but it hasn't. A parasite doesn't just leave one's system, I guess.