Instagram linkage seems to be broken right now so posts I make there aren't showing up here! But episodes are still dropping - this one's available now!
@oliviagrigg.rsw shares her experience of Christianity and the spiritual trauma that it caused her, and gives her take on religious trauma as a whole from her perspective as a social worker and counsellor focused on helping people navigate changing beliefs, deconstruction, and that religious trauma. She discusses how many church environments force us to betray ourselves in many ways, from an early age, and normalize the lack of boundaries, portraying that lack of boundaries and submission to church authority as a necessary prerequisite to community. Additionally, she dives into the normalization of physical abuse of children in the form of spanking, how that abuse is advocated by Christian groups like Focus on the Family, and how that can have long-lasting effects even into adulthood.
Content warnings: traumatic religious experiences, physical abuse of children
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3SleykrSnuZiUc7DHDrOjx?si=ByTbMTYERxGPe6dR7jm6Ew
Audio Transcript: The root cause [of religious trauma] that I see in a lot of my clients, a lot of my friends, a lot of my family, is being forced to betray ourselves. Doing things that you don't feel comfortable with, not being allowed to feel the full extent of your emotions - you can feel sadness, you can feel joy, but do not feel anger or resentment, because that is bad. Being punished for feeling feelings. Not being able to be authentic to who you are, and when I say that I'm thinking specifically of the queer community... you were never allowed to fully express who you are. And the fear of eternal torment being behind that lack of authenticity. How deeply painful and sad that is. So that is a common, common theme that I see: I have to hide, I can't be fully who I am - and the result of that being shame.
We're back starting next week for a final* run of episodes!
I had an amazing conversation with @oliviagrigg.rsw about her religious deconstruction, her practice focusing on religious trauma, being forced to betray ourselves as a practice in Christian environments, healing from trauma, and much more. Tune in next Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts to hear Olivia's story!
*Watch this space for more info on what the future holds as we approach the finale!
Laurel nails my own experience in this clip - certainty was a room I was trapped in, and was told made me safe. The more certain I was of what I believed, the less likely I would be surprised with eternal torment when I died. Christianity, for me, was an endless exercise in constructing the walls of that room, to keep uncertainty and doubt out (after all, it's Satan who asked the question "Did God really say?", right?). Over time I'd built so many walls I could barely move, and yet I was taught I was "free".
That's not freedom. Freedom is found in the exploration of all the gray - in all the ambiguity and unknowns you discover when you decide to walk out of the room.
Audio Transcript: "None of us know if God is real. None of us know... We don't know what happens to us after we die. Richard Rohr talks about certainty as being something that is such a danger in the church, having to be certain about everything. He talks about how we've got to let go of that. We've got to let go of the need for certainty and start to understand we don't have that. Really, at the end of the day, we're learning to be content to live in the gray."
Laurel talks about how abusive and manipulative pastors take a parental role in congregations, using similar techniques to control, punish, and rule by fear, in a way that results in traumatized congregants that are conditioned to feel like they need the certainty and tiny boxes the church offers just to keep themselves safe.
Audio Transcript: The childhood tools that are used to keep people in line - choices, consequences, fear, guilt, shame, all that kind of thing - in many of those [fundamentalist] churches, the pastors are really seen as parents. And so those pastors-slash-parents use childhood tactics of fear, and guilt, and control, and shame, to gain loyalty and to gain obedience - which has a huge potential for abuse of power and the creation of a fear-based structure, and that leaves behind hurt and broken-hearted people hiding behind masks of perfection, and terrified that somebody will find out how broken they are and how unworthy of love they are, and searching for some kind of certainty or structure or something that they can follow to be okay.
In today's podcast episode, Laurel talks about the link between dysfunctional families and dysfunctional fundamentalist churches, and how people in abusive situations who are desperate for love are reeled in by the promise of love from leaders who manipulate that desire for the purposes of control.
She also shares her own story of growing up in an abusive environment and how she has since found freedom from environments that use fear as a method of control.
Laurel has incredible insights into people and churches and the manipulation that happens in those spaces - check it out wherever you get your podcasts!
Content warnings: physical and spiritual abuse of children, mental illness, depression
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/19OgiR5Wqc8yJDa6ptVK0x?si=GmMr7rjsRvSdoWj01xt8XQ
Audio Transcript: I believe that there's a correlation - I think that dysfunctional families are particularly drawn to fundamentalist religion, because the church promises them unconditional love. I mean, heck, any love at all would be terrific. It promises them love, and they're desperate for love in whatever form they can get, whether they're willing to admit it or not. My father was desperate for love. So was my mother. So were all of us kids. We were all desperate for love. I'm not saying - and I want to be really clear about this - I'm not saying that anybody that is in a fundamentalist church is in a dysfunctional family, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying though is that I believe there is often a correlation between dysfunctional families being really attracted to dysfunctional churches, to fundamentalist churches.
In two days, Laurel talks about her experience in abusive family and church environments and how they seem to correlate. Fear is leveraged as a mechanism to control and obtain compliance, dangling love and acceptance as a carrot; and when you're conditioned to accept that as normal as a child, it seems so normal when you experience it from church leadership, or even in your conception of God.
Audio Transcript: For a minister, the sign of a really good sermon is when everybody comes forward for the altar call... everybody rushing to the front for repentance or prayer, or whatever. But on this occasion, nobody came forward. This is what the minister said, and I am quoting this, I've never forgotten it. He said, "Each and every one you have hidden sin in your life, and if you don't get up here and repent, then one of these days, God is going to say to you, 'that's it, I've had enough with you.'" And everybody rushed to the front but me.
Next Wednesday, Laurel talks an experience she had that I think many of us can relate to - being part of a church where you don't exactly conform to the mold of who they want you to be, and when you call out problems, suddenly, you're cast as the source of division in the church and the one responsible for everything going wrong. It's an incredibly painful place to be, and so harmful for your mental health, and Laurel speaks about it so eloquently. Check out the podcast next week to hear the whole story.
Audio Transcript: "I know that it was more than five years but I couldn't tell you how many years this went on, but - struggle. Trying to fit in. Not understanding how they could be so cruel. Being in conflict with the leadership. And it didn't go well. I became the black sheep in that place who's responsible for everything that went wrong. Here's the thing - I couldn't understand why I was the only person seeing it. It didn't make sense to me - why isn't anybody else seeing this? So I'm feeling like there's something seriously, deeply wrong with me that I'm seeing things this way, when everybody around me is seeing this as being normal behaviour."
Next week, Laurel shares about growing up in a dysfunctional and abusive home, and how she sees a natural attraction of dysfunctional families to dysfunctional fundamentalist churches. She also shares her experience with mental health in the church, and her journey of healing from abusive churches and an abusive childhood.
Audio Transcript: "Everything went to hell when the leadership [of our church] changed. You gotta remember, [at this point] I'm still very dysfunctional, I'm struggling with depression, and for this leadership, depression meant that you had sin in your life, and that you weren't praying enough, or repenting enough, or you had committed the unpardonable sin, whatever that is. I still don't know what that is. They believed that taking antidepressant medication or seeing a therapist was sinful beyond words. I managed to keep up appearances and hold it together, but things were changing."
In this week's episode, Kevin and I spoke about how to have authentic relationships with people "across the aisle". One aspect is this is understanding that nobody is "owed" a relationship, and there is no "obligation" to have one. A relationship with someone is a gift, not a transaction. When wanting to love someone, you don't get to tell someone how they "should" be loved and love them the way you want to and expect them to appreciate it - you need to understand what makes them feel loved, and lean into that.
Audio Transcript: Feeling that sense of obligation, that you must repair these relationships, that you're somehow a bad person for not re-engaging in those relationships - I want to reject that. What was used against me, was the concept of forgiveness - weaponized forgiveness, I'll call it - where if I've been wronged by the church, or somebody in the church, it was my duty to forgive them and absolve them of this, so they can continue on their merry way. But maybe I'm not ready to do that, maybe I'm not in a place to forgive. Maybe I never will be. I don't see forgiveness as an imperative, and it's very very dependent on the individual. And oftentimes what happens to people who are being pressured to do that, is that when you then withhold forgiveness, then victim and offender get flipped. Now, poor person that wronged you, you're not forgiving them, they just want to make it better, and you're not helping - which is a whole another level of harm... you are not obligated to re-engage in relationships, you are not obligated to forgive, you're not obligated to "reconstruct", whatever that means for you - you're on your own path, you're on your own journey, and only you can say what's best for you. People who are wanting to engage in relationship with you, if it's going to be an authentic relationship, they need to recognize that you are the authority on what's helpful for you.
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1qGT0NHM6rM3CQcG1kWjU1?si=Xjz2RXr5Rtq-dJ4Wm1pvFg
This week I'm joined by Kevin Wilcox (see his previous appearance on the podcast in Episode 6) to talk about how you might be able to maintain or forge relationships "across the aisle" - is it possible for an evangelical and an exvangelical to be friends, and if so, how? What needs to be considered when entering into a relationship like that? What boundaries need to be established, what considerations need to be taken into account, and most importantly, how can we best love and care for ourselves and other people in the process?
We chat about these questions and more in this episode!
Content warnings: evangelical perspectives, Bible verses, a discussion about abortion debates
Audio Transcript: The Carl Jung quote that I have in mind... is a quote at the end of his book "Psychology and Religion". At the end of the book, he says one of the most profound things I may have ever heard. He says "No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them, and if such experience can help to make your life more useful, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to those you love, then you may safely say this was the grace of God." That's really powerful and profound for me personally, and this question of the ultimate things being kind of inaccessible but you know them in their effects, and you can have certainty insofar as they cause your life to improve and be good - I feel like love is kind of in that category for me. So when I say that I think [reaching across the aisle] needs to be permeated by love, I don't think merely standing on the truth, quote-unquote trademark, is sufficiently loving, for example - and so when you get people... that seem to make a living from shouting really insensitive things from the highest platforms they can achieve so as to make bold stances and then pretend to be loving in the process, I think
Tomorrow! Kevin and I discuss what it might look like to "reach across the aisle" and maintain relationships between evangelicals and exvangelicals. In this clip we're discussing some of the difficulties with doing that - one being that familiar concept of "relationship evangelism". Why pursue a relationship if you're just a target for reconversion? If you don't feel valued as you are, and that the other person isn't in the relationship for you as a person regardless of where you land on the God stuff, then perhaps there's other agendas involved beyond simply a friendship.
Audio Transcript:
Josiah: [When looking at a relationship between an evangelical person and someone who has left the church], if you can't handle [the evangelical] being a Christian, or you can't handle [the person deconstructing] saying no to your invitation [to become a Christian], then don't. You're not in a place to get into that.
Kevin: I would agree with that entirely, and I would say that you need to be really honest with yourself about that, because if the answer is no, I can't handle that, but you still feel a compulsion to the relationship, then you might need to be asking yourself whether you're approaching this with an agenda in the first place... you need to be careful with yourself because that can do a lot of damage. You don't want to perpetuate those sort of same wounds.
Josiah: Yeah. You have to really ask yourself, am I in it for the person? Whatever this person ends up being, does it matter for my relationship with them? Or am I here for them, because they are valuable, they are worth loving on their own as they are?
Next week, Kevin and I discuss how to maintain relationships with those in our lives who may disagree with the choices we've made and beliefs we now hold, or vice versa. Note that we aren't advocating in any way for a "both sides have good points" "enlightened centrism" compromise - what we're talking about is thinking the other person is wrong, but not letting that define the relationship; seeing the individual underneath the ideology, and not basing the relationship on whether one person can get the other to change.
Note that there's tons of nuance to this, and we do talk about cases where a belief or behaviour may be so counter to what your values are that a relationship becomes impossible - this isn't always going to work. But for some people, it might!
Tune in next Wednesday to hear more.
Audio Transcript:
Kevin: There's a real profundity, I think, in being able to concretely understand where you are and have a good sense of how the person you're trying to engage in relationship with is different from you, and maintain those distinctions, but still extend the hand across the aisle, and to treat the other person with respect and dignity and humility and grace in the midst of that conversation, without ultimately expecting yourself or the other person to change anything meaningful about themselves.
Josiah: And I think what is very different about what we're talking about now than perhaps, what folks deconstructing have experienced in the past engaging with evangelicals is, perhaps in the past, when you were in evangelical community, you felt require to wear a mask on your personality, a mask on what your thoughts are, what was really going on inside you... that wears on you over time. We as humans, I think, want to be seen and loved and valued for who we are as a whole person, not as the person the community expects you to be. So what you're talking about there, Kevin, is being able to do that with somebody who disagrees with you, but still accept the whol
