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Recognizing Religious Trauma · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation. It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling.
• 0:41
  It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship. Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to.
• 1:06
  We're all different, and all of our stories matter. As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Because I don't have to take the children to church until afternoons this year. I have Sunday mornings off. I lay out their breakfast so they can eat when they're awake and hungry. But then I go back to my room. The door is open if they need me, but I go back into my bed and curl up with my books.
• 1:57
  It's been really lovely, especially in this particularly chaotic season, to have those quiet mornings on Sundays. But always the first book I read is the one I'm reading about religious trauma. I try to read through it before they're awake, just a chapter a week, pacing myself carefully, slowly, intentionally, and reading it while the children are still sleeping, not because it's a secret. I have showed it to them and talked about pieces of it with them, But so that I have privacy and space, which is hard for any parent, no matter how many children you have. I need to be able to think, and some chapters are painful.
• 3:07
  But I thought I would give you an update. I know that this is triggering for some people, so that is a trigger warning for sure. But mostly, I'm not talking about church. Mostly, I'm talking about abuse dynamics and thinking patterns and how I can't consent or have agency if I can't think clearly and know what I'm choosing, what is being done to me, and the impact because of it. So whether that's child abuse or church abuse or any kind of abuse, the relational trauma in that, the self trauma in that is heavy and painful.
• 4:09
  The book I'm referencing today is again that leaving the fold book. In the second chapter, she shares her story, some of which parallels some of mine. She was a missionary kid in another country. I was the child of the music minister, a music minister who couldn't hold his spot and so led music in different places at different times and my early childhood. Years I remember on my own When my sibling was sick at home or not with us at church, usually it was just him, my father, and me.
• 5:09
  We were Southern Baptist growing up. That was my church growing up until high school when what was available and where I lived and where I went to college was a kind of nondenominational evangelical. I know when the English teacher came on and spoke and talked to me and shared with me, she mentioned it being a cult, the churches in that area being so heavily influenced by a particular philosophy, an actual school in the area. And part of that came from what is called IBLF. Most people, unless they have looked at the materials or seen the umbrella picture or remember something specific, don't even realize it's connected because they think about churches by denomination.
• 6:22
  But this is the same group miles from literally only a few miles from where the Duggar family is. I am not part of the Duggar family nor am I speaking about the Duggar family, and I have not yet seen the show that is coming out on Amazon. So I don't at all mean to be speaking about them or regarding them. That's just what made IBLF famous because of their TV show. IBLF stands for Institute in Basic Life Principles.
• 7:08
  It was established by Bill Gothard and has been officially called out as a cult. It's heavy in the Midwest all the way from Texas to Illinois and impacts other, especially rural churches because it's a thing culturally. It started in the sixties, and every year makes over $63,000,000. That's on Wikipedia. It influences local politics, schools, and other cultural interactions that I can't even get into all the details of.
• 8:15
  After the leader had to step down because of alleged sexual misconduct, they moved their headquarters from Chicago to Texas. They are influencing politics like book banning, taking over school boards, and the movements against the trans community and other GLBT issues. Females are expected to obey males. Daughters do what their fathers say. Wives do what their husbands say.
• 9:21
  Women are only for birthing. Husbands are usually chosen by the father. There's an emphasis on modesty, and women aren't supposed to get educated because they're supposed to already be married. Most children deep in the culture are homeschooled. Parents are taught physical discipline.
• 10:39
  There are classes my parents took for how to beat their children. That's what my mother said, told the husband that once over dinner, just in passing. The rest of that information, I'm not trying to disparage anyone. That's all just what I'm reading on Wikipedia. It's public there, whether and so I'm not responsible for the content.
• 11:15
  I'm just sharing what has already been made public. We are not allowed to divorce. The kids who are homeschooled are not taught sexual education, leading to confusion during sexual development in ways that are common with different purity cultures. And any sexual acting out, they say, is the responsibility of the victim, that she was asking for it, that she was immodest, those kinds of things that are not true. But that is the culture.
• 12:28
  There are public scoldings, demotions personally or professionally, intense counseling, like the dean of women telling us we could not stay in college if we did not get therapy, and that to be considered compliant with therapy, we had to go to that particular therapist. Or when we saw her, that we had to journal certain things, and then she showed those things to our parents. Women cannot have financial independence. Women cannot say no to sex. Women cannot seek counsel apart from her husband or outside the church.
• 13:34
  I know I'm generalizing and stereotyping and consolidating what it says on Wikipedia, what I remember growing up with the umbrella of the children under the mother, who's under the husband, who's under God. I know that there are good and kind and safe people who mean well or who don't know or are not involved in any kind of harm or abuse. So I don't mean to say that. I am speaking of a culture that many have experienced as abusive. Life principles gone astray.
• 14:37
  Aside from Wikipedia, these examples have been documented in court cases and other news media. Most recently, a behind the scenes kind of Duggar story on Amazon, I think, that I have not yet been able to watch, but it's coming. I don't really want to talk about that anymore, and it makes me uncomfortable. And I know it's triggering for a lot of people, but I wanna be clear about what I'm talking about, what my experience was growing up, the environment that I was in, the environment in which everything else happened all the way through college. Because it is a lot, and it is hard.
• 15:56
  It means as this book says in chapter two, that the kids growing up in that environment know little about what to do beyond punishment and prayer. There is not emotional expression. There is not conflict resolution. There is not interpersonal skills. That's what makes me weird.
• 16:26
  Still weird today and always a step behind the social cues. One of many reasons I can't quite keep up because the only relationship that matters is the relationship with God. And the only way to know your relationship with God is through your relationship with your father. And that's messed up. It's a common thing I read actually in a different book that those of us who have childhood trauma also struggle with a concept of God, what he is or is not, what she is or is not, what it means to us or not, what it means for us or not.
• 17:31
  I also wanna be clear that I have done a lot of work of my own faith. I talked about some of this on podcast as a guest there. Which is linked to in the Lev episode. So I think I do have a strong faith that I have fought hard to untangle from all of this. And that is very real to me and very private for me and very sacred to me and not something anyone else is defining.
• 18:22
  And, also, what it does to me about what I think what I think about myself and how I think for myself still needs some therapy. This author says, I continue to have emotional needs that were unfulfilled. My faith taught me to glorify the idea of being different, which psychologically fostered a feeling of alienation. My faith taught me to fend off sexual interest. And to settle with those whom I was safe as if safe and sexual were opposites.
• 19:24
  How can you learn about safe sex? Healthy sexual relationships. Healthy any kind of relationship at any level if you're not taught about conflict resolution or how to embrace what is natural that is good. The author talks about because of the urgency in that culture, both the timeline spiritually and the urgency to be good and the urgency to help others be good. That it causes a seriousness in communication, she says.
• 20:16
  A heaviness that others don't always have because we never got to be free. We never got to be children. She says, aside from how zealous I was, I shared in my contribution to the pain and conflict in my family. I felt guilty for my part, and I blamed the others for theirs. How nice it would have been to have learned something about communication or how to express feelings.
• 20:59
  But nowhere in our belief system was there any help for working on these things. Only hope that God would do miracles. Troubled relationships only meant lack of faith or submission to God. She talks about growing beyond that as she entered college in a secular school and learned about other religions and other philosophies, she said, it was revolutionary for me to think that personal problems or bad habits could be the result of environmental conditioning rather than sin. I noticed a growing softness in my judgment of human beings.
• 21:45
  We were all in the same boat, struggling to meet our needs. When you grow up with any kind of trauma, but especially developmental trauma, and absolutely with religious trauma, you aren't even allowed to have needs. Needs are not a thing. So how can you learn how to meet your needs when you don't even have any? How do we ever learn what they are?
• 22:24
  She talked about her early years becoming a teacher, and she says, in my preschool placements, the children were wonderful, natural, curious, creative, affectionate, and alive, which led me to question some of the precepts I had accepted before, all based on original sin. Learning child development was quite the eye opener. A child's behavior that appears selfish is often simply a part of learning identity and self worth. I couldn't help but develop a respect for natural intuitive growth processes. People are for the most part well intentioned.
• 23:14
  As I learned to relate more openly to a variety of people, I became more accepting and appreciative of human diversity. Gradually, I stopped filtering and twisting information to make it fit the framework I grew up in. I gradually realized I no longer felt emotionally needy all the time. Being loved and held daily was wonderful. The closeness with a real life person had a profound effect.
• 23:48
  It broke my addiction to God. I had to reconstruct reality. Before this, good things were always due to God, and all the failures were mine. It took deconstructing my faith, my understanding of the world around me to even allow myself to be in the world. In the next chapter, she talks about how we know the things that we know and about how we are free to make our own choices and yet also must be responsible for our own lives and that sometimes some religions, in taking away our choices, takes away our capacity to ever even learn how to do that.
• 24:45
  She says individuals who do not trust their own judgment can use religion for self control and conclude that without it, there would be disaster. This avoids ethical maturity. Religion can also be used to control the behavior of others. Having strict rules for the entire group gives an added degree of security. And yet, what is neglected in these teachings is that people have intuitive knowledge of ethics.
• 25:19
  They develop codes of behavior and create healthy social contracts. Although this takes courage and hard work, there are many examples of communities that have forged a variety of methods that succeed. I don't know how to go into all the details of what I learned from this chapter, but after much crying and wrestling with the difficult concepts it talks about, one of the things that I learned was that my degree of devotion was not about how much God loved me, but about how much love I was lacking, how desperate I was to be loved. And in my search for the right religion, as I talk about in the Lev podcast, I don't think I was searching for religion. I don't think I was even searching for God.
• 26:21
  I think I was looking for my father. The author says, having a heavenly father can give a sense of safety and ultimate belonging. Children need nurturing for physical and emotional survival. My mother was always very distant, often her own world someplace, never touched us much or seemed to care about our feelings or thoughts. My religion became my whole life.
• 26:51
  It filled an emotional vacuum. And then she talks about self acceptance. You are taught that salvation means you are forgiven, clean, and acceptable to God. This external stamp of approval enables you to approve of yourself, especially when no one else is. All of us want to be valued for simply being instead of doing.
• 27:21
  We want unconditional love. It is unfortunately interpreted by the fundamentalists as external approval only. Since it depends on God and does not translate to true self worth based on inherent goodness, if you leave the belief system or if you leave your family, you lose acceptance. You are only acceptable as you are and as you have always been, which is as they said to be. That's why it was so hard to leave.
• 27:59
  That's why it is so hard to leave. That's why it feels like being so alone in the world once you have. It's not about my parents being deceased. It's about I was alone the moment that I left. It's about that I was alone when I could not live up to what they wanted.
• 28:30
  When I was a failure, wrong, crazy, whatever they called me on any particular day, when who I was as myself was not enough and nothing good. I was alone. Hell was not something that would come later in my future as a punishment. Hell was already here. How do you rescue someone from that?
• 29:13
  How do I rescue myself from that?
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and healing brings hope.