Ashley Reclaims Her Life After Religious Trauma & Purity Culture

<cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>0:05</time> <p>Welcome to 90834. It&#39;s the weekly podcast where guests share the biggest lessons they&#39;ve learned in therapy. In each episode, i&#39;ll pose two questions What were you looking to resolve by going to therapy, and what did you really end up getting out of therapy? I&#39;m Shannon Miller, a licensed clinical social worker and private practice who has the privilege of spending every day watching the therapeutic process lead to unexpected and beautiful places. Today I&#39;m speaking with Ashley. She&#39;s a 39 year old woman who has spent several years living in Africa, but since COVID lives in the Midwest of the US, she&#39;s been in therapy for four years. Ashley began therapy because she was stressed, burnt out and needed a change. With her therapist&#39;s help, the cause of her persistent anxiety became apparent Fundamental Christian teachings. What was the reason that you started therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>1:01</time> <p>I was living overseas and I was really burnt out from work. I was sort of living from work crisis to work crisis and giving more than 100% to something that I kind of didn&#39;t even find that satisfying anymore. Or perhaps I just needed some work-life balance, not sure, but something, you know, dinged within me And I just had this feeling of like I know, if I keep doing what I&#39;m doing, i may end up where I don&#39;t want to end up, just with the idea of sort of keep doing what I&#39;m doing, let inertia push me forward without any reflection, and kind of within that, i also recognized that all I knew how to do was what I was doing and it had kind of gotten me to where I was. So I thought, you know, if I want to change anything, i probably need some new tools, an outside perspective, some guidance I don&#39;t know just generally some assistance, because I don&#39;t know if I had anything very, very specific in mind. Except, like man, i feel like I am just kind of burned out and tired And I don&#39;t know if this is like really good for me, but this is what I know how to do. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>2:13</time> <p>So when you said that it was taking you to a place that you didn&#39;t want to go. Where was the place you didn&#39;t want to go? Where was life taking you? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>2:21</time> <p>Yeah, i feel like, because I was having professionals, what I considered to be professional success, i was in you know a position that were, you know, aligned with my education and kind of my career aspirations And so like that was good. But of course, any time you kind of peek behind the curtain and go, oh yeah, it&#39;s still a job and it still can be stressful on all these things. But so there was the dynamic of being, you know, stressed out and burnt out from work. But then also, i think maybe, just maybe a bit of a feeling of I actually have achieved a lot of the things that I&#39;ve wanted to do up to this point in my life. I said, you know, i want to get a graduate degree, i want to speak a foreign language, i want to live overseas, and like I had the opportunity and it worked really hard to do those things And so then I did them and it was almost like phase one goals achieved, what do I do now? And like if I just kind of kept doing those things, it&#39;s like that could be good Or it could just leave me burnt out and unsatisfied, kind of the way I&#39;m feeling. You know at that time the way I was feeling. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>3:24</time> <p>So feeling burnt out and unsatisfied. So you decide maybe I should start therapy. and you do Yeah. What were some of the early lessons or connections or things that stick, stick out to you from early on in your therapy process? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>3:39</time> <p>It was interesting. So I kept kind of telling you about different things that were going on in my life or like, oh, i&#39;m thinking this or I&#39;m experiencing this. And the questions you asked, i think we&#39;re sort of not what I was expecting. I don&#39;t know what I was necessarily expecting, but I feel like they would often catch me off guard And in the sense of like you know a why or like how do you feel about that? Or why do you think you do that Or whatever, it kind of made me kind of stop and be like well, that&#39;s a good question, why do I do that or think that, or why does that just seem so self evident to me, when there could be lots of different ways to think about it? So I feel like, pretty quickly, the questions and kind of the just kind of the way you were framing discussions it sort of seemed like it was a kept revealing my religiously programmed responses of like here&#39;s the response And it&#39;s like, oh dude, where did almost like, where did that come from? Or like talking through you know my thought processes or my emotional responses to things, it kind of made clear that I was so over identified or fully identified within a certain set of spiritual teachings and practices and that it went so deep And I had thoroughly internalized it. And not that I was necessarily at that time looking to question my, you know, religious foundation or whatever. I was sort of not engaging with the church anymore. But I wasn&#39;t looking to like deconstruct anything necessarily. But I didn&#39;t realize how fully overtaken, i guess you would say, my brain was by certain teachings that I maybe even didn&#39;t fully identify with anymore or I wasn&#39;t living that fully Christian church life anymore. So I thought I had some distance from some of those things. But I clearly did not. I had been out of the church for probably eight years at that time And then I realized, wow, there&#39;s still, there&#39;s no daylight between, like my thoughts, what I perceive as my thoughts, and kind of the things I was taught by the church. And is that what I wanted? or did I no longer want that to be the case? It was just something I did not realize was a dynamic present in my life. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>6:09</time> <p>So then, what was that like for you to make that realization? It was very bizarre. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>6:16</time> <p>It felt like tugging on a couple of different threads that all seemed to connect into each other and were rambled together. That didn&#39;t, and that I guess maybe some of the, some of these ideas were kind of core to how I kind of thought and acted and felt, experienced you know, my emotions in the world And that had these tentacles that spread out all over into different areas of my life And I think what I was experiencing when I kind of started therapy was like some of these different tentacles giving me trouble here and there and in these different areas. But I completely didn&#39;t recognize that they were connected in some ways and were kind of all fruit of a, of a poisonous tree in a way. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>7:06</time> <p>So what were some of the particularly poisonous tentacles? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>7:09</time> <p>Yeah, i think, like the way, pretty early on because this would probably be maybe a parallel track that I maybe I wasn&#39;t even consciously aware of it of this feeling of like I can&#39;t survive in my brain anymore, like my brain hurts, i&#39;m tired, i can&#39;t do this anymore. But I wouldn&#39;t have said that when I started therapy. I don&#39;t think it was that conscious, but pretty soon into therapy I that stop thought started to surface more explicitly. It was this feeling of within. You know the Christian tradition I was a part of. You had to judge every thought, every emotion, every action. You had to be constantly aware of, like everything that was going on inside of you, outside of you, in your relationships, just everything, and needed to be constantly examining that thought, that emotion, the behavior that you were about to do, to examine and see if it was sinful or if it was holy, and if it was sinful you had to confess and repent. There was this whole thing, and if it, you know past muster, then you could proceed. So it just made this constant mental were. I think we call that anxiety. I mean, yeah, it felt. It felt very anxious for sure. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>8:24</time> <p>You start to realize that you&#39;re perpetually in a state of anxiety, policing yourself, yeah, and always coming up short, yes. So what does that look like to the outside world If we were to be seeing you out and about? what does that look like when you&#39;re in that state? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>8:41</time> <p>Well, i think to most external actors it looked like me being an excellent student, an excellent employee, a model citizen and kind of doing all the right things. I guess the cost of that, you know, was my mental health. Was me, you know, collapsing on the couch as soon as I got home and just having to numb out everything, usually through like eating, binge TV watching or whatever, like anything to just make it stop, to do something that made it feel like I could just do something else, get my mind on something else, rather than that constant mental anxious hamster wheel, you know. But I think to everybody else I looked like I was, you know, doing all the things and doing really well, and everybody was getting what they wanted out of me. So I kind of feel like I was the only one who was able to make it. I was the only one kind of suffering from it. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>9:37</time> <p>Looking back on it now, were there any other particularly poisonous tentacles that that have come to light for you, that were really driving behaviors that that you might not have wanted to be doing? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>9:49</time> <p>Like about like specific teachings or kind of like. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>9:53</time> <p>Yeah, like you said, the need to constantly be judging basically drove this anxiety inside of you an external perfectionism, internal anxiety, and it was all rooted in the need to judge. So was there other things like the need to judge? Was there other core teachings that were driving a different behavior? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>10:12</time> <p>Ooh, that&#39;s the one that sticks out. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>10:16</time> <p>I mean it covers a lot of things, So I mean there wasn&#39;t an area of your life that it didn&#39;t touch, Right? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>10:24</time> <p>Yeah, I mean I have two visual metaphors that sometimes I guess I think in visual metaphors that are related to me, to this hypervigilance and this perfectionism, which I&#39;d be happy to go into now, but no other practices or teachings jump out to me. I&#39;m sure there were, but they are coming to mind at the moment. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>10:49</time> <p>Okay, so what are the visual metaphors? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>10:52</time> <p>Yeah. So with this perfectionism because personality-wise I am a perfectionist, and so it would destroy me that I could never live the Christian life perfectly Like I was just describing in retrospect, I was an excellent Christian. I did everything I was taught to do, and I wasn&#39;t running around doing simple things. I was more like not reading my Bible enough, and there&#39;s a verse in the New Testament that talks about disciplining yourself for the purpose of godliness, and so if you view your life through that lens, everything in your life can be cast as sanctification making yourself holy, disciplining yourself for godliness. And so then you&#39;re always losing and beating yourself up for your lack of self-discipline or your inability to do the proactive things that the Christian life would demand of you. So there was the certain failings I would experience in my Christian life, and then certain life decisions that I might have made that I regretted, or things that I just felt bad about, and so the visual metaphor would be like all of these different things were like these iron rods and they were in this bag. Periodically I would just go out and pick one of these rods out and just beat myself bloody with it, and the rods were different weights and thicknesses and, like some of them I could just wail until I was a bloody mess And some of them I would just leave a light bruise, you know, but it&#39;s almost like there was. I don&#39;t know if there was some sort of relief in this self-flagellation. I don&#39;t know if I can fully explain it, but I know that I did feel like I deserved to be a broken and bloody mess because I&#39;m such a failure and I have done so many things wrong and I just deserve to be punished and be as broken as possible. That&#39;s sort of the visual metaphor, because I was doing this to myself and it kind of came to be like I kind of feel like this is what I&#39;m doing And I think I did. I did that to myself for years. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>13:02</time> <p>What do you think about that behavior now, looking back on it, reflecting back on it, what do you think? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>13:06</time> <p>about it now. It&#39;s just so unnecessary and so like it just expresses such an unhealthy view of you know yourself, your humanity, the way you move through the world, that, like, you&#39;re so bad in such a failure A and then B, that due to that you need to be punished, which I mean. Those, have you know, echoes of very basic Christian theology which make a lot of people uncomfortable because I mean, it&#39;s there, you know, you don&#39;t have to go looking for it very hard, it&#39;s right there on the surface. And if you really really internalize that, i think you can get to that place to where you&#39;re just destroying yourself very easily, even though you&#39;re the teachings. You would not supposed to be doing that, because you need to be, like, relying on the grace of Christ, like when you fall short. There&#39;s this thought of like well, you&#39;re doing it wrong, you&#39;re doing the Christian life wrong if you&#39;re in this self-flagellation mode, like that&#39;s not what you should be doing, but it is so I think that&#39;s where it does drive you. If you like, take it at its like plain meaning. I do think you can end up there very quickly. And it&#39;s just, it is unnecessary and it&#39;s so harmful and it just creates this dynamic in this cycle where you&#39;re just exhausted and defeated and you&#39;re just trying to crawl through life, you know, while you&#39;re bleeding out and you really can&#39;t live a very good life in that state. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>14:43</time> <p>Sometimes there&#39;s a lag between the realization and making any changes. So talk to me about the process of okay, now I get it, but what do I do with it? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>14:52</time> <p>So I think some of these things kind of started to dawn on me in the last year that I was living overseas and then I moved back to the States and it happened to be like right at the start of the pandemic, and I think the isolation of the pandemic and just how drastically the world changed, like it gave me a new set of things to like, deal with, because we were all dealing with unprecedented things, but it also pushed a lot of things off my schedule, such that, like this constantly stuffing my schedule to be really busy and distract myself from these like unhealthy patterns and things that I would do, and it just stopped a lot of things. So I had to sit with myself And I think during that time that, like early 2020 to early 2021 period just marinated a lot of things in my brain And I would hope that they would have percolated in a similar way if life had been going at full speed, but I don&#39;t know, maybe they wouldn&#39;t have. So I feel like I was kind of able to take some of those lessons, take some of those things I was recognizing and kind of just move very slowly with letting my mind set, evolve And then maybe thinking about acting or reacting in a different way, just like in baby steps. I would say that it took a long, long time of just kind of recognizing some of these things and sitting with them before going. I&#39;m going to put some of this into action. And sometimes it wasn&#39;t even I&#39;m going to put it into action, it was just like, oh, that kind of happened, that kind of came out of me organically because my mind shift had changed so significantly during that time. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>16:44</time> <p>So there is a lag time in there, but it was really sort of pushed forward by the pandemic and kind of forcing you to confront yourself because there wasn&#39;t anything else going on. So now you start putting it into practice. What does that look like? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>17:01</time> <p>Yeah, I think, starting to let go of certain things, that it was like well, i can&#39;t do this, or I can&#39;t do that, or I have to do this or that. And just once you kind of do this or that, like you dip your foot in, you go oh, the world didn&#39;t end Like it&#39;s okay, i can do this. I have this freedom, i have this agency to make these choices for myself. Because it&#39;s like that mental prison that you&#39;re in. You know, if I cannot do these things, because it&#39;s not just the teaching says that I can&#39;t, it&#39;s I have convinced myself and locked myself in a cage to say that I can&#39;t do these things. Okay, this is sort of a silly example And it was before I left living overseas of just like going with some friends to a party which I know that sounds really like high school or whatever, like a house party where there was going to be alcohol, like people just be cut loose and being a little wild, and I was like I like I was like, okay, like let&#39;s go, and I didn&#39;t necessarily have this, like I&#39;m going into a din of an equity, was more like this is going to be a fun time, like people just kind of want to get together and blow off some steam. We all have stressful lives. Let&#39;s just go like cut loose And that that&#39;s that&#39;s fine. Like that&#39;s demonized in so many ways, all these sins of the flesh, that you&#39;re like you&#39;re drinking and you&#39;re partying and whatever. Really it&#39;s fine, like it&#39;s fine. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>18:34</time> <p>Was there a part of you that was always waiting, though, for the other shoe to fall? Like, how long did it take you to trust that it&#39;s fine? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>18:41</time> <p>Oh, um, that&#39;s a good question. I think it depends on what it is. I guess there&#39;s like layers of an onion right And the closer you get to the center, the more like core and central it is to your identity. So I think the more central the thing was to my identity, the more or the more difficult it was And the more I felt like something is going to go terribly wrong if I transgress this. This isn&#39;t a very specific example, but in general, like the the people pleasing thing and like having a boundary and saying you may want something for me that I&#39;m not willing to give you, like I would say that took a really long time for me to go. It&#39;s okay, like it&#39;s okay to disappoint someone, it&#39;s okay to make someone upset with you because you&#39;re not just going to do or say or be whatever that person wants you to be. So I would say that was a really big one And that really gave me a lot of anxiety and fear about like, if I do this, all these terrible things are going to happen, like I won&#39;t be able to be successful in my career, my relationships will be negatively impacted, you know, because, like, this is the way I&#39;ve set everything up to be in my life And this is what people expect of me. Yeah, the world hasn&#39;t ended and it&#39;s been fine. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:03</time> <p>Because I know your age, I know that purity culture played a role in this. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>20:09</time> <p>Definitely. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:11</time> <p>Talk to me about purity, culture and healing from it. The role it played just speak to the whole concept and the role it played in your life. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>20:19</time> <p>That was another one of those ideas that it felt like there was no daylight between the things purity culture said and what I perceived myself as thinking and feeling. I was like, well, this is what I think and this is what is right. And it was foreign to me to kind of question that The ideas of you will be worthless if you have any sort of sexual experience outside of marriage. Or the idea that not only like the sexual intimacy part of it, but the emotional intimacy part of it, because I really was had internalized and was terrified about this idea of if you get too emotionally close to someone that you&#39;re dating, then that is going to negatively impact your future marriage because you have yeah, basically you&#39;ve given an emotional intimacy to someone who wasn&#39;t your husband. And so there was a way in which I feared relationships because when I was like this, it&#39;s a minefield, you can make so many mistakes and I am a perfectionist and I fear making mistakes, failing at anything. So for me, a significant chunk of my life, most of my young adult life, i really didn&#39;t date much And I think a lot of that was tied up in the fear and the minefield I perceived dating and relationships to be. And then I would also say that as much as I bought in to these purity culture ideas, there was part of me that was not fully bought in and that did question and that did not like some of these dynamics, especially about, you know, life submitting to their husbands and having that hierarchical and authority type relationship within marriage. I think subconsciously me looking at that and going I don&#39;t really like the relationship structure that&#39;s on offer. So I think I&#39;ll also opt out of this full dating relationship thing because this is where it has to lead to a marriage with these kinds of gender roles and this type of dynamic. So it really kind of stifled my normal development, as you know, a woman as like just that maturity factor of being in relationships and gaining different types of experience. And so I feel like I ended up in sort of a more I don&#39;t know if you&#39;d say emotionally immature place but just having this very big gap of experience gap and just not knowing how to navigate relationships outside of this purity culture paradigm. But then when I kind of started to that was like layers of an onion too. You know it took time to kind of go. Oh well, if I did something in this way, as opposed to the way I was taught in purity culture. You know it&#39;s gonna have all these negative consequences, not only in this relationship but in the relationship of you know. If and when I eventually get married, all these bad negative consequences will come out. So, shaking loose that fear and real and recognizing that so many of those claims in purity culture are just completely unfounded And you don&#39;t need to follow them. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>23:30</time> <p>They&#39;re tools of control and power. So when you recognize that it was a tool of power and control, I&#39;m assuming there was some anger. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>23:40</time> <p>There was. There was some anger, i think. At first it was kind of like I don&#39;t know if it was euphoria, just like this oh my gosh, like I feel free and I don&#39;t have to be bound to these paradigms anymore, but then kind of starting to, you know, date and experience different things and be like wait a second. I was robbed as a young person. I was absolutely robbed of just normal experiences that a lot of people were able to have. And, yeah, i was frustrated and I was angry at the people who, you know, told me to do it this way. This was the only way, this is the best way. And in particularly, like I&#39;m not married still now and I feel good about that I was never one of the girls in the youth group that just couldn&#39;t conceive of life without marriage. I was like I&#39;ve got things to do, i&#39;ve got things I&#39;m interested in and I&#39;m gonna be out there living my life. But I think that there&#39;s a lot of people, especially in my generation, where purity culture didn&#39;t work out for them. They followed all the rules and they didn&#39;t get the carrot at the end of the stick, and I think a lot of people had a lot of frustration. I feel like my frustration and rage was slightly different because I was like, okay with not getting the carrot, which was like a marriage, a godly marriage at the end. But yeah, i absolutely was frustrated And like I just had to mourn a little bit, have a period of grief for my younger self and all the things that she missed out on. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>25:14</time> <p>So what&#39;s life like now? You&#39;re four years into the therapeutic process. Talk a little bit about what it looks like, as your deconstruction process has kind of waned Like the bulk of the work has been done. What does life look like now? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>25:29</time> <p>Life is awesome. I am so thankful kind of to have reflected on my life and my thoughts and my behaviors and to have evolved in the way. One thing we&#39;ve talked about at various times is this idea of the locus of control, kind of being brought back, being brought into myself for the first time perhaps, and not having everybody else outside of me, particularly religious leaders, define myself to me and tell me what my life should look like, particularly when the things they were describing didn&#39;t feel like they fit me. So now being able to look forward in my life, to look at my current life and my circumstances and looking forward into the future and go, i don&#39;t ever have to have that feeling of oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, like I have to do a thing that I don&#39;t want to do or do something that doesn&#39;t feel authentic or right or good to me. I get to make the call of what I do, what I don&#39;t do, how I organize my life, how what my relationships look like. I get to decide those things for myself and I don&#39;t have to feel like my life is out of my control and I don&#39;t have to have that fear that someone is going to ask or require something of me that I don&#39;t want to participate in. I get to set a boundary, or as many boundaries as I would like. So I feel like there&#39;s just so much more joy in my life, there&#39;s so much less fear, there&#39;s so much less anxiety. I don&#39;t wander around feeling like I&#39;m not doing enough or like I&#39;m not good enough or that there is a standard which by which I&#39;m being judged and that I&#39;m not living up to it. That might be the biggest difference, and I think it does go back to that feeling of like I don&#39;t want to have to judge every thought and feeling and action. I want to be able to just live and if sometimes I get angry, like it&#39;s okay and if I outburst at someone, like I&#39;ll try not to do that, but if I do, I can go back and to apologize to them and work through that and the stakes are not nearly so high, kind of in that Christian mentality like just your thought of something that might be sinful is world-ending, because it is enough to send you to hell, it&#39;s enough and it&#39;s enough to make God displeased with you. And the idea of displeasing God always really, really got to me, the feeling that I don&#39;t have to conform to this ideal, idealized, you know, christian person, that I can just be. I can just be. I can just be me. I don&#39;t have to constantly try to mold and shape and change myself into this other thing. I can just allow my humanity to exist. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>28:31</time> <p>How comfortable are you with that? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>28:32</time> <p>I&#39;m surprisingly comfortable. It&#39;s happened. I mean, it&#39;s taken a while, obviously, but it&#39;s also kind of not taken that long, considering how deeply rooted these things were in my psyche, you know, because I feel like I can do what I want and it makes me very happy, it makes me feel very free and it makes me look to the future with optimism, not this persistent sense of failure and that I&#39;m playing a losing game and I will never win. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>29:08</time> <p>So now you stand a chance of winning. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>29:10</time> <p>Yeah, If it&#39;s a game that I&#39;m supposed to win, I get to make the rules, you know, and I get to decide if winning is important to me or not. you know I get to strip everything down to the studs and build it. I built it back the way that I want it. I get to decide. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>29:26</time> <p>Sounds pretty awesome. I like the saying bringing the locus of control inside, right, So you&#39;re not looking for any external thing to validate you. Previously it was the church, it was the people in authority, it was the systems that had told you you were accountable to them, and it&#39;s slowly realizing. Wait, am I really? Do I want to be? Why would I be? Who does it benefit for me to be accountable to them? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>29:54</time> <p>Absolutely. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>29:55</time> <p>It&#39;s a pretty amazing story. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>29:58</time> <p>I mean it&#39;s felt pretty amazing to experience it and especially when I look back, kind of like where we started this conversation, it wasn&#39;t what I went into therapy looking for. I mean, i looked to kind of change something so I wouldn&#39;t be burnt out and stressed out all the time, but I didn&#39;t expect a complete overhaul of everything in my life because that, particularly because that religious, you know root spreads out into so many different areas, that kind of recognizing that all these tentacles kind of trace back to one place and you start working on that and then all of these different areas kind of fall into a better, fall into line and fall into a better configuration. and I just I had no idea. I had no idea That&#39;s where this road was going to lead for me. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>30:49</time> <p>This seems like the opportune moment for us to wrap up our conversation for today. I want to express my sincere appreciation for generously sharing glimpses of your deconstruction process with us. It takes tremendous strength to open up about these experiences to the world, and we&#39;re deeply grateful for your courage and your willingness to do so. If you have a religious deconstruction process that you would like to share on the podcast, please email me at Shannon at 90834podcastcom. If you are looking to rediscover and redefine your relationship with spirituality, the therapists at Epricity X-PAT therapy can help. We use various therapeutic techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, trauma focused approaches, mindfulness and inner child work to help you strive to heal and reclaim your personal power. We can help you develop healthy coping strategies, challenge negative beliefs and rebuild or build for the first time, your sense of self-esteem and autonomy. If you are ready to begin this process, please schedule an initial consultation at wwwepricityxpattherapycom. </p>