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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Hello?
Speaker 3:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 2:I know. Hi. Good to see you. Okay.
Speaker 3:So I am so excited to, like, talk to you about all of this. So for context, I have on the podcast for the last year or two been working through religious trauma in therapy, talking about it on the podcast. The shiny happy people documentary came out on Amazon. I was in that church in Arkansas growing up and, related activities to that all the way through college, and I had already talked on the podcast several years ago about my college experience and what happened there. And really struggling with not just those experiences from childhood, but the vulnerability being appropriated by a high demand religion as an adult.
Speaker 3:And then in that context, going through the experience of an arranged marriage where I really had only spent six days in the same time zone even as who was becoming my husband, who thankfully was very good and kind, but also I was still gay, and I was introduced to this whole plan as part of my like, an act of faith. Right? Like, if I would be good enough, if I would be righteous enough, I it would take away my gayness. And that's obviously all kinds of problems with that. And so going through the trauma of conversion therapy or reparative therapy mixed with religious trauma, all of this, and then deconstructing that the last two years to not just reclaim myself and who I am, but also my queerness and what that means pragmatically for my family and untangling there.
Speaker 3:It has been a lot. And so when I heard you have a new book coming out this October, I was super excited to talk to you about it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the opportunity, and thank you for being very candid about this part of your story and sharing this untangling journey of faith and religion because especially when we grow up queer or questioning, oh, that that was very much a part of my story and feeling like if I only I was holy enough or righteous enough as the way the churches I grew up and wanted me to be, then I wouldn't be gay anymore. And, yeah, lot we can talk about, but I'll let you, formally ask the questions, Emma.
Speaker 3:It's so much, I feel like not only are there, like, the conditioning, the cognitive pieces to deconstruct, but also there's this grief I have been through, like, finding out there's no Santa Claus, except then also redefining what holidays mean. Like, all of the things, it is so intense, the whole process, and it is a place of healing that I have found it be harder to find people who understand because it sounds crazy. When you try to tell any kind of story about religious trauma, it sounds crazy. And I'm like, that's not even a word I want to use. Why is it a word I am feeling in this context?
Speaker 3:But you literally can't tell what is real, what is not real, what is true or not. Everything is so binary in the context of religious trauma. How how did like, where do you even wanna start with what all of that has meant to you?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I remember and just for a little bit of my context. I mean, a lot of people who are listening to this interview and your podcast know me as, oh, doctor Jamie Marich, dissociative specialist. I'm out about my dissociative identities. I've written extensively on the topic.
Speaker 2:But up until now, I've not really told a lot of my backstory as to what made my brain this way, which I'm proud of now and can celebrate now as as a dissociative person. But my trauma was largely spiritual in nature. I mean, I encountered some other types of trauma as well that I think created my system, yet I grew up with two different flavors, if you will, of Christianity, conservative Christianity. My parents were married Roman Catholic. And then when I was about four or five, my father converted to a, evangelical group called the Assemblies of God.
Speaker 2:And I've met in other Assemblies of God folks over the years and have definitely learned that the way my dad interpreted a lot of those teachings was certainly more extreme. But he was converted in the eighties, the Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker televangelist era. A lot of James Dobson influence in our church. And I was about four or five years old when I witnessed this conversion. And as the oldest child in the family and seeing how the extremism he took on really affected my mother, and I got the brunt of a lot of that, it it was just yeah.
Speaker 2:It was a lot. And I I go into the detail in the book about what that experience was like being a young, sensitive kid already attuned to so much of how my father's character issues and abuses just were amplified by this very high demand religion. So over the years, he and my mother stayed together, and my mom was very rooted in her Catholic faith. But another big part of the spiritual trauma for me, which I know is not a lot of people's experience because a lot of folks who grew up in high demand religion, both parents are committed, both parents are all in. And for for in our experience, my mom was still very firm in her Catholic faith.
Speaker 2:And the particular brand of evangelical Christianity my dad subscribed to, they believed Catholics are going to hell. They believed anybody who wasn't a certain narrow kind of evangelical was literally going to hell, Catholics, Mormons, etcetera, etcetera. You know, I would ask questions like, what about Presbyterians? And that would give me his big explanation of why why they were going to hell. And what about Jews?
Speaker 2:What about Muslims? So it was it was just a very hate filled place to grow up. And I was often pitted as the referee in their fights about religion. You know, this was after I was forced to convert, at least in my dad's eyes, but my mom's like, you're still a Catholic. And, I tell a story in the book about how when I was eight years old, they were arguing over this one doctrine in the in Catholic teaching about the immaculate conception, which is the teaching that Mary was born without sin.
Speaker 2:Right? And they were getting so vicious in their argument, and then they asked me what I thought. And so in addition to feeling a lot of the shame of high demand religion, knowing that I was growing up to to be queer and where where my likes were. A lot of my trauma also involved my parents asking me to to decide, and I would hear things like, we're gonna lose you yet. We're gonna lose you yet.
Speaker 2:So I very much felt like they were at war for my soul, so to speak. So I remember when I was about 16, after one of these fights and this was, you know, a good twelve years, because I remember I was four when my dad came into my room and basically well, did not basically, he did, like, force me to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and it was really creepy. But all these years later, I was about 16, and I plopped out on the bed. And I just said to myself, spiritual abuse has to be a real thing. That has to be what this is that I'm feeling right now.
Speaker 2:Because I it was on my radar enough about what abuse meant of various kinds, but I just said that to myself and I cried, and I didn't think much of it until many years later. So I went through moving to Europe, getting sober from my chemical addiction, starting to have my trauma validated. 02/2004 is when I formally sought out trauma therapy and had my DDNOS diagnosed. And it was also in that same year. It was probably before just before I was formally diagnosed.
Speaker 2:I was in a graduate class. This I was in my master's program, and I was given the opportunity to do a research paper on really anything I wanted within the scope of human development. And this was at a very conservative Catholic institution because to to fast track it, I left my mixed Catholic evangelical background. And then at a certain point when I was a teenager, my mom just said, I don't care. Just go to church with him.
Speaker 2:So I just did, like, the full scale evangelical thing for about two years. And then I left that in a wreck after something very traumatic happened to me at 19. And then when I was still seeking, I'm like, oh, let me try the Catholic side again because it'd be a softer, gentler way. So after working for the Catholic church in Europe, I ended up at at a Catholic graduate school. So I know I'm talking in a couple directions.
Speaker 2:I will get to my point. When I had the chance to do this paper on human development from any kind of lens, I asked the professor, could I look up this thing that I think exists called spiritual abuse and how it affects development. He's like, oh, absolutely. Sure. So I remember going to the library on campus and doing my EBSCO search, and it it turned out yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The term had been created, that spiritual abuse. And even just seeing it there in literature was very validating that, okay. I wasn't crazy what you were saying. I wasn't making this up.
Speaker 2:And at the time, most of the literature about it was related to cults, or there had been some Christian pastors who had started writing about it. But it it was still fledgling at that point. I'm not even sure. I think leaving the fold, Marlene Whannell's book, which really kind of formally, defined, religious trauma syndrome was only a few years old at that point. But for me, I would say the term spiritual abuse has always fit better than religious trauma.
Speaker 2:Because even though religious trauma was definitely part of my story, I think anything that is spiritual has the potential to be turned into a weapon. And when I'm asked for my working definition professionally of spiritual abuse, it is whenever God or any spiritual construct, it could be enlightenment. It could be the state of, divine union with self that often gets talked about in yoga circles. When that is weaponized by somebody who is in power, it can potentially be abusive. So organically, it always felt best to me to name it a spiritual abuse because that's what happened that day in my bedroom at 16.
Speaker 2:And that was the first time I ever professionally explored it was in graduate school. And as I've navigated through these years doing a lot of teaching on trauma, I've always named it as as such. And sometimes people are real eager to have the discussion. Sometimes people are like, I don't wanna talk about that either because there's still this societal tendency to hold religion on such a high platform, or sometimes people don't wanna look at their own spiritual abuse. So I've been progressively speaking more about this part of my story.
Speaker 2:And so being able to share on it through memoir form just really feels like the next step for me.
Speaker 3:That's really interesting. I'm going to have to think about it some more. I think I see religious trauma partly because it's in those books like Leaving the Fold or things like that, and for me was so in the context of church settings. And, also, when I broaden that, like you're seeing spiritual abuse, it encompasses more things, like even the sexuality piece or purity culture or things like that in a way that I had not thought of including. Like, I knew those pieces were also traumatic, but I had not thought of including them in the language of spiritual abuse.
Speaker 3:I think for me, the reason I have said thus far that I've said religious trauma instead of spiritual abuse was because I feel like my spirit was the only part they couldn't get to. Does that
Speaker 2:make sense? It does make sense. It makes a lot of sense. And one time, I had a conversation with another colleague who said, I don't like spiritual abuse because if it's truly spiritual, it can't be abused. Because I think we have this association is that religion is what's potentially the stuff of evil, but something that is spiritual.
Speaker 2:But I've seen so much toxicity. I also spent some time off and on at a yoga ashram over the years, which I talk about later in my adulthood. That comes into the memoir as well. And guess what? A lot of the same patterns.
Speaker 2:So I think that's beautiful. And I also believe my spirit never got broken. And I also believe they tried to break my spirit so so that I would just comply. And so, you know, Emma, that I feel very much about pick pick words, pick terms that work for you. Like, do you wanna call your system a system or a collective?
Speaker 2:A part or an alter? I'm very much about you pick the language that works for you, and I feel the same way on this issue too. If spiritual abuse fits, if religious trauma fits, if religious abuse fits, pick what works for you. I just still have such that visceral memory of being that teenager and naming it for myself without even knowing if it was a real thing. So I think that's a big part of why I feel the connection to that phrase.
Speaker 3:Right. Right. I think that what you're saying makes sense. I think it just makes me feel nauseated that it's one more layer of, the implications of everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. You know, for me, though, now that I I I mean, I like how you phrase that because I think our immediate visceral reaction to that is yet for us, it was like the layer that because for a lot of years, if you looked at the details of specific abuses I endured, it's for a lot of reasons, I didn't think I had it bad because I was never trafficked or I was never physically abused in certain ways. Right? And I remember it was actually a mentor that I met through the Catholic church who ended up being my first recovery sponsor.
Speaker 2:And when she started naming a lot of my experiences trauma, I said to her, you know, I I never trauma no. I never went to war. I never had to survive anything that bad. And she kinda raised her eyebrow at me, and she said, would you consider that the war zone was your house? And, yeah, she was right on.
Speaker 2:And at that point, I was very much willing to have the open discussion about this expanded definition of trauma. And even in writing this memoir, it was very striking for me to see right there on the page. Yeah. You went through a lot of shit, and what made it horrible was how much of it was done in God's name or in the church's name. And, I mean, I was able to own spiritual abuse before any other kind of trauma I endured.
Speaker 2:So I think and and I don't know if we were talking about this during one of our prechats or if I'm revisiting a point of the interview, but I think what makes spiritual abuse, spiritual trauma so, biting for someone like like me and possibly like you and others listening to this is everything in me, everything in us wants spiritual connection. Like, we never stop believing in God. And I don't judge anybody listening to this if you your journey has taken you to not believing. That that's, again, your journey, your choice. But for us, we never doubted God's existence.
Speaker 2:And even looking at it now, we're pretty cool with Jesus too. It's what people did in their name that really ended up causing the damage. So, yeah, I I I think I was naturally going to be so wounded in this area because everything in me wants spiritual connection, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:It does make sense. And I think that's one of the challenges of deconstruction is holding on to what you want to keep from your faith as you're sorting through everything that never really was a part of it to begin with.
Speaker 2:Correct. Very well put. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the reasons I went with the title for the memoir, You Lied to Me About God, because this this memoir has has been stirring within me for years, and the time never felt right to fully put it on paper until some of the political events that have transpired in the last several years.
Speaker 2:And as I was doing some prewriting for it, it just came blazing out of me. I kind of wrote this poem towards my dad. You lied. Like, you lied because the God I have met in my ongoing journey, in my recovery, through my connections with other people is is such a different god than the god you told me about. And then I looked at how the various institutional churches have lied to me and how society in many ways has lied to me about things.
Speaker 2:And one of my favorite quotes that I use a lot in my writing is Anais Nin's shame is the lie that someone told you about yourself. It's been a foundational quote for us for many, many years, and then it's like, fuck. Or you can edit that if you need. Damn. Shame is the lie that others told us about god as well.
Speaker 2:And how dare they? Because god loves me, and I love divine presence. So it felt very good to say. Thank you for giving me the space.
Speaker 3:It's such a big deal. I think I don't know. Maybe I'm just still coming out of it enough that it's so raw or because I have the outside kids and trying to navigate them of, like, think about what you're saying. Think about what you're doing. Are you choosing this as you like, all the questions.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, we went through the questionnaires from leaving the fold with the kids even on the podcast and just discussions of what what does this mean and all of these questions. So it's very much still even though I feel like I've deconstructed so much of my faith and then reconstructed what I want my faith to be to me Uh-huh. There is so many just pragmatic layers that I'm untangling. Like, for example, with my husband and I both being gay and doing this deconstruction work of not just okay.
Speaker 3:It's actually time for us to get divorced, not because I hate you, but because we're gay and we need to marry other people. And Yep. As part of that, I actually filed enrollment first so that it could be on record that I was frauded by the church. Spiral. I needed that on record.
Speaker 3:I needed that reclaiming of my voice. Even though I knew it would be denied, I needed it on like, to the core of my soul needed that.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that. And there are pragmatic issues. I it comes with any form of abuse that I think you've made a decision to get away from or untangle from. I know something I reflected in the memoir is how my own mother had a hesitancy to leave my dad because she had so many ideas in her brain about you have to keep the family together, you have to keep the family together. And, I mean, another pragmatic issue I've had to deal with with even coming out with this story is I have a brother who's a Catholic priest.
Speaker 2:I love him dearly. I really do. And if he's listening, I really do. Because when I look at my journey, he was the one who was so there for me in the house growing up. He was six years younger than me, but got it.
Speaker 2:As we've talked about our spiritual pathways, he's expressed to me a lot of sympathy for the fact that I lived through this conversion, whereas he was already converted by the time my brother was born. And so my brother just kinda knew my dad as one way, and he never really bought it. So yeah. I mean, I'm I'm basically outing a lot of the family laundry in this book, and I've alerted people to it. And I know there's not a lot of happiness with some of my decisions about certain things, yet I I can't stay quiet anymore when I see devout religious toxicity doing so much harm.
Speaker 2:And since we've talked about queerness, quite frankly, taking the lives of a lot of our siblings in this in this world. I mean, it could be, like you said, maybe taking the life you were meant to have. I think the church did that, and I'm still unpacking a lot of the damage from that around my own sexuality and how even a lot of my marriage choices I made early on. Even though I was totally okay with being bisexual, I've had a look at did I choose men because I know that's the way I would keep my family. And, I tell the story in the book pretty extensively of one of my best friends, Jason, who died by suicide in 2019.
Speaker 2:Also a gay man who grew up in conservative religion and continued to work for the church, and it tortured him. And he was is, because I believe he's still with me, just such a beautiful light. And I saw how much toxic faith snuffed that out of him. So I have to speak up. I I I have to speak up because I think the kind of trauma we're talking about and like, it I'm just sidestepping a bit here.
Speaker 2:I think we can look at a cult, like, the kind of cults that get documentaries, like Wild Wild Country and and and Osho's cult and Jim Jones and David Koresh. And and we could look at those kind of cults and be like, yeah. That's a cult. But I'm glad there's been more attention now paid to, like, the IVLP and and other systems of religion. But I'm even saying, look at the places that you're likely to see on Main Street, like your Catholic churches, your evangelical churches, your synagogues, places in any faith tradition.
Speaker 2:They can be held up in such respect that we often don't see the cultic dynamics that are happening underneath. And part of my work has has been, let's have these conversations of making it okay to say, hey. This was not okay, what I experienced in god's name or in the church.
Speaker 3:I I had this conversation with my girlfriend, Jules, who has been very kind. Nathan and I separated in 02/2019, and we've not lived together since then. And as I have met her and gotten to know her, she has been very patient while I was doing deconstruction work and sorting through things. And I got to this point after I mean, it's been the whole five years since we've separated, really, since sometime during the pandemic that I was like, I think this is connected to my past in ways I didn't realize it was connected to my past, the the church things. And, so it's been a long, slow process of deconstruction, but I got to the point where I have this letter that I had to do with an attorney to get notarized and send with my attorney, like, certified with my attorney to the church to be like, not only am I not a member of your church, but you have to stop stalking me, basically.
Speaker 3:Right? And my girlfriend said, I've never actually been in a group where I had to send a notarized letter to leave them. And that for me was one of those moments of that profound pragmatic impact of, oh, that's a time for a conversation of this is not what I thought it was. When it's this hard to leave, that's a problem.
Speaker 2:Yep. That is a problem. Yeah. And I'm glad you're seeing it and naming that.
Speaker 3:It's, so painful and and the I appreciate what you said about, like, taking our life away. I think of coming out to my family as lesbian when I was, like, 19 or so, and the reaction and response I got to that more double binds, like, you were talking about earlier with is that really a choice when your parents make you choose between them? And, I remember my mother screaming at me, tell me the truth. Tell me you're not gay. Tell me the truth.
Speaker 3:Tell me you're not gay. I'm like, what what which do you want? I can't do both.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:Yes. And then thinking, like, the fallout. Like, I ended up losing my job and losing my housing and losing my community, losing my church, losing my friends, all because I got outed. And so, basically, then a series of domestic violence kind of experiences and then just being like, okay. This is probably because I'm gay, and so God is punishing me.
Speaker 3:So I'm just not going to date anyone
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Until I landed in this situation where the church was like, we'll give you housing and a job, but you need to my supervisor is like, you need to marry my cousin. And and that will, like, save you from your gayness and trying to do that for a decade. So, ultimately, literally, two decades of my life that are just gone of me trying to not be myself. And even I was talking to Katie Quito last week and talking about, right, that being like, even the masking involved with that that I literally didn't know until that conversation counted as masking for church and for queerness to cover up. I am never going to be that kind of woman as you define womanhood.
Speaker 3:Even though I, for myself, am very happy to be a woman, I cannot be that kind of female that the church is saying I need to be, and I cannot un gay myself. Like, there's nothing I can do to un gay myself.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm so delighted hearing you say that. Because, yeah, it's just I yeah. Yes. Yes. We can't.
Speaker 2:And I I go into a section writing about as well everything I was taught about what a woman should be. And this is where there was a lot of overlap between between the Catholic messaging on that and the evangelical messaging on that. Because after I chose the Catholic church for a while, I did get involved with a pretty because because Catholicism is more likely to run the range. You have people like president Biden, who is a Catholic yet also has very progressive political values. And then you have people like, there there's just people who are completely, you know, anti choice, anti LGBT rights, very conservative in their beliefs so much so that they think that the current pope is actually too liberal.
Speaker 2:So Catholicism is more likely to run the range, but especially when I worked for kind of a more conservative wing of the Catholic church and then went to one of the most conservative Catholic graduate schools in the country, I was definitely shown an ideal of what a woman should be. And conservative Catholics have a very rigid teaching around not using contraception. So I was connected to a lot of that teaching for many years, and I thought I was supposed to get married and punch out all of these babies. And I wanna be clear, I don't judge a person who chooses that path authentically. I look back at that now and know that that likely would have killed me physically, if not mentally.
Speaker 3:I I feel the same way even as someone who adopted children because we were both gay. Right? So, like, we fostered and adopted, but I feel like I love my outside kids. I love them. And Yep.
Speaker 3:I will continue to do my best by them even though that sometimes varies because I'm human. Okay. I feel like that was absolutely pressured on us. We fostered 87 kids in five years because my salvation depended on being a mother. And because I could not be a mother, I had to, like, somehow make up for it.
Speaker 3:And I think it was cruel what they did to me in that process and what these kids have gone through. Not because we haven't done our best as a family and I will continue trying to do my best, but because I think the kids deserved even more than what they got. And I know, oh, it could have been worse or at least they were a doctor. This like, all of that, Adoption is always a story of grief. There's never an adoption story that is not grief.
Speaker 3:And Yes. For them to go through I don't know. I just think different boundaries. Like, I think a few of them would have been better just being on their own. And we have ultimately, the last five years while we are living apart, the children have on their own sort of filtered themselves out into different groups, alternating where they're living and going back and forth a little bit because they do need more time on their own or more time of this.
Speaker 3:And so I'm glad we have been flexible with that, but I absolutely consider that a trauma that I endured and a trauma that children endured and definitely that Nathan was overwhelmed by, that there was so much pressure to be a parent.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. I I just think there's so many of these ideals put on us of how things should be. We get that in the clinical professions as well.
Speaker 2:This is what a therapist should look like. This is what a PhD in academic should look like. And I I've just I'm I'm sick of it at this point. Yeah. And one of the reasons I also feel this is an important story to tell is here are two Christian denominations I grew up in that were very suspicious of each other.
Speaker 2:You know, Catholics think they're the one through church, and my father's church thought they were the one through church and downright condemned Catholics to hell, whereas at least Catholics have more of a open and embracing arms theology of other other peoples, which I respect. Yet there was a lot of emphasis on the same things. And one of them was it was not okay to be gay. It was not okay to be queer. And I discovered at the Catholic school that I went to for nine years that I I liked girls just as much as boys.
Speaker 2:I shared the tell in the book about, my first any kind of intimate experience I had was with two female friends. And I remember feeling on cloud nine about the whole thing and then very quickly being kind of thudded back down to Earth. Yeah. You can't do anything with it. You're not allowed.
Speaker 2:And I really dissociated that part of myself for a lot of years just to be able to survive it. And it wasn't until I went to the dorms in college that I even let myself come out to myself. I share that tale in the book too about how the most important coming out I had to do was to myself because it was just not okay in church, and I couldn't come out publicly at that point either because I knew I would lose my family.
Speaker 3:Right. Right. That ultimately became my conversation with Nathan, honestly. We've done great living apart for five years. I appreciate that you've always been kind to me.
Speaker 3:I'll continue to support you in these ways. We'll keep being co parents. But, ultimately, I got to a point in my healing and in therapy where I cannot continue healing and also be a member of this church and also be married to a man.
Speaker 2:Beautifully honest.
Speaker 3:I just Yeah. I couldn't anymore. I could not go further. If because I had learned enough and healed enough that to continue doing so would have been now me doing to myself what they had done to me.
Speaker 2:Amen. I'll give that an amen. That's awesome. Yeah. Because I think healing is ultimately about and this goes for systems who are listening to this that may not necessarily relate with religious trauma or spiritual abuse, although I think a lot of us do on some level or another.
Speaker 2:But I think healing really is getting honest about all the parts and aspects of yourself and learning to embrace them and love them. I remember my my big kind of moment of conviction about my sexuality. This was in 2015. I had a huge year in 2015 for a lot of reasons, and I was sitting and listening to doc doctor Robert ack doctor Robert Ackerman lecture. He's a big leader in the addictions field, and we were both keynoting the same conference.
Speaker 2:But I came a day early to hear him because his work had influenced me a lot. And he had just written his memoir, because his father had passed, and he was sharing that his opinion that I don't believe you can ever be a whole healthy or I'm paraphrasing here. The healthiest person you can be if you're still being dishonest about parts of yourself. And in that moment is when I really knew that I had to come out more publicly because at that about my sexuality. Because at that point, I was out to my inner circle of friends and close folks and, obviously, people I had dated or done stuff with and my husbands because I'd had my I was on my second husband by then, and they knew.
Speaker 2:But I knew I was getting to a place where I had to be more out publicly in my professional life, which meant then with my family if I was gonna be out at the level of social media. So 2015 was my big coming out year. I tell more of that story in the book. But what Ackerman said really, really has stuck with me over the years. And I think coming out about my sexuality publicly and professionally as well, so convinced me and and encouraged me that I really had to come out about being plural too, Both know how difficult that could be in our field.
Speaker 2:But it's just this idea of I gotta be honest about who I am because if I'm hiding and and it doesn't mean you can't have privacy. Like, I'm still private and and and guarded about a lot of things that I don't want out there because they're my private things to work through. But anything I do share publicly is stuff that I feel I've worked through enough to feel comfortable sharing. And, but, yeah, lying to myself is not gonna help my healing going forward, and I'm grateful we've learned that.
Speaker 3:It applies both ways. Like, inside and outside, I told Katie when I was talking to her. It's part of why I was refrained with the refractory. She was talking about the refractory on the podcast, and I was like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was literally in a place where I could not join a new church even though it was just the refractory. Like so I was like Oh, quit it. I will be here. I will be supportive. I will.
Speaker 3:You can anyone who wants can come and share their voice here, and I will support that. But I just needed I needed a year to catch up to myself because everything last year, everything with deconstruction, everything with reorganizing my family, it was all such crisis in a healthy way, like breakthrough healing kind of way, not crisis, like, terrible. It was all hard and awful and brutal and raw, but good like birthing myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. Relate. On many many many many many levels.
Speaker 3:Right? Oh my goodness. So what do you think clinicians or people with lived experience can learn from your memoir, not just about faith, but about the context of sort of really becoming themselves. Like, when we talk about even a broader version of relational trauma, even if someone doesn't know or aware or think that they have spiritual abuse, those of us with any kind of relational trauma kind of go through those same dynamics even if it's our parents who are God. Right?
Speaker 3:Like
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:You still lied to me about God. You know, it wasn't about God. What is
Speaker 2:hit on a very important point. You hit on a such an important point there that for the small child, their parent or their parent figure is the god presence in their life. And when we discuss the types and forms of spiritual abuse, yes, it happens in churches and cults and institutions. It can happen at the level of the state when governments that are religiously inclined can impose laws that affect everyone. But I think the most pervasive spiritual abuse that happens is in the home.
Speaker 2:And, yes, if religion or spirituality is involved, of course, this parent figure that is your god, if they're telling you certain things about god, that's that's gonna mess up the head. But I'm glad we're talking about this because even if religion or spirituality isn't directly involved, a parent is the person who provides the needs ideally for the small child who gives them their worldview. And I'm thinking of doctor Rachel Weaver, one of my good friends and colleagues and also a spiritual abuse survivor. And she goes, even just being a child makes you vulnerable to spiritual abuse, that that's one of the greatest risk factors. And that could be spiritual abuse of the religious variety we're talking about or spiritual abuse of the I'm trying to break your spirit.
Speaker 3:That one really hurts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That one really hurts. I think that's where I am talking about things in therapy right now in different forms. And so every time you say that, it's just like a sucker punch in the gut even though I know it's coming. Yeah. It's so hard.
Speaker 3:What
Speaker 2:do
Speaker 3:you have for people who are like me in that place of the sucker punch of the reality of this? Right? What do you have to offer people for hope as part of their healing after this or through this?
Speaker 2:I'm just I'm still sitting with the memory of a lot of these sucker punches because as you reported yours, I'm like, oh. I mean, I think my hope is lean into the people you know you can have these conversations with as you because I think for so many types of recovery, support is essential. This is, I think, critically so. Like, my friend, doctor Rachel, I talked about and talked about. Shoot.
Speaker 2:She and I have such a shared vocabulary around a lot of this. And we also have the ability to, like, break into hymns, like, the hymns that we learned in the churches. And, personally, I still like to sing. Even a lot of the songs I learned in the churches, they don't trigger me. They actually remind me of how singing and dancing kept me sane in a lot of the evangelical spaces.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, having I think having friends you have shared vocabulary with can help you when you go through these moments of, like, oh my gosh. You know? Am I crazy? Am I making a big deal about this? Am I, you know, whatever whatever.
Speaker 2:I think, you know, another bit of the hope I could offer is keep reading. Like, when I get those sucker punch moments, sometimes still, it's like holding my breath does not make me easier. It does not make it easier. And sometimes and I think, Emma, this is one of the reasons. Admittedly, I love all the documentaries, The cult documentary is Shining Happy People, anything about toxic faith or cults.
Speaker 2:And I think a reason I watch them I'm I'm gonna admit this publicly. I do have a sense of the religious way to say it is there, but for the grace of God, go I. Yes. Or that could have been me in that situation. And I know I had I have the dissociative skills to have pushed through and and done it and sucked it up and been the good Catholic wife or the good evangelical wife.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think my other parts will bust it out of me eventually.
Speaker 3:Religion makes you really good at fawning. Oh,
Speaker 2:shoot. How a lot of the prayers are written and how some of the hymns are written. And I don't know. In my recovery, I have just found such a different god, a god who embraces us, embraces me as I am, who empowers my voice, and who loves me, who absolutely loves me. And I see God today in other people.
Speaker 2:I see and feel the presence of God so strongly in this conversation because the reason we still keep a foot in Christianity is and this is due respect to everyone else's belief systems or non belief systems, but we think it's cool, this idea that God wanted to become human, that the word was made flesh. And that inspires us to know that I am part of that same incarnation, that human beings have God within them and share share God in their lives. And I I just I love people so much. Some days, I feel like people frustrate me. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna come across as, like, oh, I know you know, I I'm very human. Oh, I am very human. Very human. But I I've I've learned to see God in the kindnesses and the actions of people, and that is something for which I'm eternally grateful because so many people have helped me to get here.
Speaker 3:Maybe that is our hope as humans is that very incarnation of love and how we care for ourselves with love and compassion, how we interact with others with love and compassion. That I mean, that's what in in that Western Christianized language, that's where it comes from. Right? Love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, self control. Maybe that is our hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Those are a lot of words to reclaim really fast. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Alright. It's alright. This, this was good. I'm really, really glad we're at this point in both of our journeys where we can have this conversation today.
Speaker 3:I am so glad to hear from you. Was there anything else you wanted to share?
Speaker 2:We we, meaning my my system, are just feeling very full right now, very full in a good way. Very grateful that we were given the platform to share a lot of this, especially with plural folks and plural or professionals who work with plurals, people who listen to your podcast from a lot of different areas, and we're just very grateful to connect with you in this way.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much. Say again one last time for people to hear the name of your book and where they can get it when it comes out in October, and we'll try to air this episode in October.
Speaker 2:Great. So it's called you lied to me about God. It's, just You Lied to Me About God, a memoir, and it's coming out with North Atlantic Books, who is my longtime publisher. And, yeah, it'll be available anywhere books are sold. So as people are listening to this, whenever they're listening to this, please give it a listen, and please consider passing along this episode because I think a lot of people, even if they can't afford the book, may benefit from hearing this conversation where we touched on a lot of the highlights.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Emmis.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeakcommunity.com. We'll see you there.