[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.

Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com\network.

Welcome back to the podcast. This is Dawn Gabriel, your Faith Fringes host. I am so excited today to kind of jump into a harder topic about religious trauma. As I’ve been working on creating this podcast and interviewing people and just talking about it to different people in my life, or even friends of friends and just kind of hearing what people are saying, I think one thing that’s come up more than I realized was a lot of people feel like they have more trauma from a religious part of their life than they realized before. And so that’s what I’m hearing. I didn’t realize that was going to be a major theme, but I wanted to be able to bring someone in to talk more about that and today’s guest is someone who can do that. In fact, we joke about it that she doesn’t really broadcast this, but a lot of her, she is a therapist, and a lot of her clients do come to her to work through religious trauma.
[DAWN]
She actually has an M. Div., which is a Masters in Divinity and also a master’s in counseling. So it’s kind of one of her specialties. She just doesn’t broadcast it. Today’s guest is Jenn Fredette, and she would call herself a psychotherapist and endlessly curious soul and I would agree that. Jenn is a relational and psychodynamic oriented attachment based, loving and existential thinking psychotherapist based in the DC Metro area. In addition to her clinical work, Jenn partners with psychotherapists who want to market their depth, not just to offer quick solutions, to get people in the door. Jenn is passionate about dismantling the obstacles that get in the way of people exploring their own psyches of which a core one is that depth psychotherapist struggle to market themselves in congruent, compelling ways. You can follow her on Instagram at A Thinkers Guide and her podcast, A Thinkers Guide. So I’m so excited to have Jenn come today and talk to us about what religious trauma. Jenn, welcome to the podcast.
[JENN FREDETTE]
Thanks Dawn. I’m so happy to be here.
[DAWN]
Yes, I am so excited to talk to you. I know when we’ve talked before we had such a great time and I just remember we kept going on and on. So I’m excited for my listeners to kind of get to know you and hear some of your thoughts. You’re such a deep thinker and I know you’ve worked a lot with religious trauma and I’d like to kind of jump in there. Tell us, first of all, a little bit about you and how you got into working with religious trauma.
[JENN]
Sure. So I know some of your listeners, not everybody’s a therapist, but here’s a secret about therapists. A lot of times the things that we work on are things that we’ve been through ourselves and doesn’t necessarily mean that we have figured it all out or like completely 100% healed from it, but we often have done a lot of work internally. So part of how I got into religious trauma was trying to heal my own. I grew up in a very, very conservative, very evangelical and very isolated religious Christian community, which my very Jewish therapist says, “That really sounds like a cult child.” And I say, “Yes, sure you’re probably right. I’ve looked it up. It meets all of the criteria, but it’s not like a cool, sexy, cult. There was no Kool-Aid or comets or anything like that. It was sort of a boring, boring run of the mill religious cult.”

So I grew up really isolated, very, very, I don’t even know if I was religious, but that was baseline of that’s who and what you ought to be. And when I left to go to college, which really in retrospect was pretty rare that for me, as a young woman, that I would even be encouraged to go away to school and to go to college at all. When I went, the world started to open up to me and I started to be like, “Oh, hell, like I got to figure out, like, how did I get to be who I am? What was happening? Everybody tells me that that’s really weird and that’s not the way the world normally is.” And so I spent a lot of time in higher education, both in college. I was a religion major, I went on and got my Masters in Divinity, and eventually also got my master’s in counseling, technically in pastoral counseling, just trying to figure out like, what happened to me? Who am I? How did I get to be here? And also, how do I make sense of the divine I carry within me, no matter how much of a religious piece I might leave behind the divine still continues to be inside. So how do I make sense of that? And so, oh yes, I’m sorry.
[DAWN]
Oh, that’s okay. I was just saying, “Wow.” So you kind of dove into it through education and you felt like that was a safe place to kind of pull it apart?
[JENN]
That’s a good question. I am, just considering like, did I think it was a safe place? I think I was at the point that I just needed to figure out what had happened. And my brain, I’ve always been somebody who thinks about things. This is what I did not do so well. Belonging to my religious community, growing up, I would ask questions and try to make sense of what they were saying. One of the big tenets of how I grew up in, I think in a lot of very conservative religious traditions, regardless of the religion, is that literalism, like, let’s take the text quote at its word. But I don’t know if, I’m going to assume you’ve read the Bible. It does not work to read it very literally, like, I don’t know, an Ikea furniture manual.

Like, it doesn’t make sense that way. And so I would have all these questions and it did not go over well. So when I was in college and took a pretty basic religion 101, which I went to a Baptist school, a Christian Baptist school, which pretty moderate, like not super liberal, not super out there, but enough to be like, “Hey, there are other ways to read the Bible. Hey, there’s other things that it’s important to know when you read the Bible,” was mind-blowing for me like, “Oh, I can look at this in different ways.” So I don’t know that I thought it would be a safe container, but it quickly became one because I got to ask the questions I hadn’t been allowed to ask.
[DAWN]
Oh yes. So you were just able to think for yourself and decide things for yourself in that capacity or in that space?
[JENN]
Yes and have that validated. Even when, again, lot of my classmates were, like they would be horrified, like in terms of how progressive, how liberal I’ve become now, but we’re conservative, but not as conservative, not as insular as I had been. So getting it validated, like, “Yes, you can think about that in a different way.”
[DAWN]
So it sounds like you had even more experiences after your education that you said you kind of went more liberal? Was that, would you call that some deconstruction or reconstruction? What would you identify with?
[JENN]
That’s a good question. So I had a really good professor in divinity school who, I just love him. He’s since died. He died a couple of years ago, but one of the things Frank would say, and actually just to give you a picture of Frank, like any sort of eccentric, older, rambling professor type that you can think of, who’s a little disheveled, always sort of like rambling, like not totally present there with you because they’re lost in their thought, but that’s your Frank was. I loved him. I took a ton of classes with him in div school and one of the things that he often would start class with and actually heard him say three or four times, because it was like one of his favorite lines, he’d like to go back to again and again is he would talk about the act of Theology, what it meant to do with Theology is to take your heart out of your chest and examine it and to turn it into, look at it. And that was the beginning of doing Theology. But eventually you have to put your heart back inside and here’s how if you succeeded at doing Theology or you failed. You succeeded if your heart was changed and if your heart hadn’t changed, you didn’t get Theology. He didn’t know what to tell you, like, “Just move on, take more preaching classes.” Like he doesn’t know what to tell you.
[DAWN]
So Theology should be impacting to the point of change, is what you’re saying?
[JENN]
Yes, Theology should change your heart. It should change who you are in terms of how you understand yourself, how you understand others, how you understand divine. And so to come back to like the deconstruction, reconstruction question deconstruction, the way I was trained in sort of the more philosophy classes I’ve taken, it’s not so much about, let’s just demolish this or demo this. It’s about, let’s take this apart and really examine it and then we put it back together. It’s not that you just stay with all the broken pieces. The ideas, you still need to put it back together. You still need to have a container to work in and I think often coming back to the original question like did you work with religious trauma, a lot of what trauma does, religious trauma does is it breaks apart how we see the divine and how we engage with the divine and it doesn’t help us rebuild it in healthy way.

It doesn’t use all of the parts and the components and it doesn’t work to heal the jacket edges. It doesn’t work to make space for not everything to be totally complete. Religious trauma doesn’t always give us the tools to put it back together. And I think that’s part of the healing process. Not that you necessarily stay religious, but that you are able to take the heart of what holds religion together, which is spirituality from my point of view, how we make sense and make meaning of the world that we can still hold that component and connect in the ways that, I’m getting like kind of I’m using my spiritual jargon, but like connect the ways our soul wants to connect. Does that make sense?
[DAWN]
Yes. I like how you kind of differentiated between Theology on a heart level versus religious abuse. And those sounded very different. I think some people, when they’re going through deconstruction, they like walk away and throw everything out and then they forget about the reconstruction, or they’re just not interested because of hurt or pain from the community, the religious community. But I think what you were saying is Theology is more of examining your beliefs and your values and the heart change, and like really pulling pieces out that do make sense to you. I just really liked how you said it and really kind of narrowing down different terms.
[JENN]
Yes. What I’m realizing, when we talked before we talked some about, I think he’s a, I’m not going to say this right radiotitian. He’s like a literary critic out of the deconstructionist schools. So like [inaudible 00:14:25] and Foucault and among others are part of the deconstructionists. Their sort of philosophy, their sort of literary criticism, you’re philosophers and literary critics who are listening will be like, “No, Jenn, they’re actually blah, blah, blah.” But there were a bunch of French dudes running around, like coming up with these ideas. And [inaudible 00:14:45] was out of University of Chicago and he has this metaphor that has been really helpful to me. I think Frank is probably the one who introduced me to it is that the idea is we all start in our first night of a tag, that we’re given ways to think about stories and images and even metaphors and we take it really literally.

When you and I are recording this, it was just Easter a couple of days ago and I was walking down the street and there was, one of our neighbors had children and they were doing an Easter egg hunt and one of the little kids is like. “The Easter bunny didn’t come. I don’t believe that.” And I was remembering like being young and believing in the Easter bunny as like a literal figure, like it was a real, I guess it’s not a person, but like a real giant rabbit living somewhere, maybe Florida. But the Easter bunny was real just like Santa was real. And Jesus got put in that camp, for me that it was this in many ways, mythical figure, but was real, like concrete and could show up at any moment. And that was my first night of tag, like I could only see those figures, those constructs in really literal ways.

And that’s a part of just human development, right? Like we take things really literally. Many people who are just working on their spiritual development, or I think particularly when you have trauma, you’re pushed to develop whether you want to or not. You enter, what record would say is the desert of criticism. You start to doubt things, you start to ask questions, you start to not buy the lines and the stories that have been given to you. And that’s a really important part of faith. And it’s a part in conservative traditions that often gets maligned because it’s easier if people just take things literally. It’s just easier to keep goofing. And a lot of people stay in the desert of criticism because they can’t imagine going back. All they can see is I got to take that stuff literally if I go back to faith. And that’s not really the case. And so record talks about the second night of a tag, where you go back, you return to these images and the things that were symbolic, and you understand the symbolism and you allow yourself to enter it back in. Jesus, I think talks about this when He talks about the faith of a child, to enter back in, but not to lose your adult brain, not to lose your own critical thinking awareness, but can you make new sense of old stories?
[DAWN]
I love that. Yes, I’m just sitting with it. Like so many people think if I am reconstructing, I have to go back to X, Y, Z rather than no, let’s integrate, don’t forget your adult brain, but enter back in and look at the symbolism and look at what does spirituality mean to you now? I mean, I feel like that’s the heart of my podcast. Like what are the fringes? Can you walk into the fringes and do some edge work and really figure out what you want it to be now and work with it and wrestle with it?
[JENN]
Yes. I’m with you. And it’s hard sometimes.
[DAWN]
It’s messy.
[JENN]
Yes. And I don’t, maybe it’s just, I have a biased opinion because of the people I spend time with both. I spent a lot of time with therapists. My husband’s a lawyer, so I spend all that time with lawyers and then I spend time with a lot of people who in some ways didn’t have a choice to be conscious. Like they just have a deeper conscious awareness of the world, and of life and of themselves. Like, it’s not like anybody chose it to be that way, but that’s part of how they’re made up. And so I sit with all of these people and most of us don’t like to be messy because we’re so accustomed to being in the mess. It can be really uncomfortable. And so sometimes it’s just like, it would be nice just to believe Santa really would take care of Christmas and then I wouldn’t have to shop for my in-laws or my family.
[DAWN]
Yes, like sometimes, let’s just embrace that negativity. Well, let’s go back to something you were talking about, because I think this does bring up a lot more when we are talking about religious trauma. Can you go into that more? Because I think it goes right along with what we’re talking about. It does impact how we view the divine, how we view God, how we view religion and eventually our spirituality, because it just gets all messy in there. So tell us more, maybe even define it or what does it look like?
[JENN]
Yes. I am realizing like I should have written Dawn a paper before I came, so I have my thoughts organized.
[DAWN]
That’s okay. We like this conversation.
[JENN]
So I’m just thinking to myself like, “Okay, how would I explain trauma to clients?” And one of the things I’ll often talk about with clients, just about trauma and in general is that they’re often when we think about trauma, we think of like lifetime movity, capital T trauma, like, “Ooh, holy crap. That was really, really bad.” And that’s true. That certainly exist. And in some ways I have capital T religious trauma. I grew up in a really punitive environment, a really isolated environment that had a very rigid in and out. And so that happens, for some people it happens more than I wish it would. And I can talk more about that in a sec, but I think the other thing that’s really important to keep in mind is the idea of microtrauma, which is something that I often talk about with clients is yes, okay. You might not have been an afterschool special in terms of how you grew up, but gosh, when your mom said this or when your parents weren’t able to show up this way or environmental factors of this and that, like, that really impacted you in ways that have never quite healed.

It’s like having a bunch of tiny little cuts that get infected and that we have to clean out those traumas in order for you to be able to heal and not carry the infection of that. And I actually think more religious trauma is micro trauma. I think about it a lot when I talk about sexuality with clients, even clients who grew up in a very, very secular family, a very secular environment. It worked just outside of the DC Metro area, which is, I don’t know if it’s infamous, but like we have a lot of transplants. So a lot of people from a lot of different places come and live here and so I’ll talk to clients, especially who grew up in the south, in the Midwest, I guess actually the Northeast too, Catholicism is more Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and then a lot of much more evangelical, conservative traditions in the south and the Midwest.

They’ll come and some of the messages they’ve just imbibed from culture around Christianity’s real shaming of sex and sexuality of the way Christianity has woven in with patriarchy and white supremacy. Like all of that gets wound in that even if you did not grow up religiously, you might still have some religious trauma, which is always shocking to like my clients who are atheists. They’re like, “That just doesn’t make any sense. I never went to church.” It’s like, “Well, okay, but you have some really unhealthy views and you’ve been negatively impacted by the way these unhealthy religious traditions have played out in your communities that you grew up in,” which is sort of in some ways still evading the question, like what is religious trauma?

Well, it’s what happens when we can’t have a healthy relationship with the divine and not because we don’t long for it, but because we haven’t had either religious leaders, had parents, religious communities attuned to our spirituality, which means that we haven’t had somebody who can meet us to challenge us, to encourage us, to engage with us in ways that will allow us to grow. Not that anybody has to be religious, but we all wrestle with spiritual questions. If you’re more secular, you probably think of them in terms of existential crises, but we’re all trying to make sense of what religion tries to make sense of.
[DAWN]
Yes. And I like what you were talking about when you were saying there’s microtraumas. I think that is so impactful. I remember when I got trained as a trauma therapist, I was trained in EMDR, they actually said one major big T trauma has less impact than multiple little T traumas or microtraumas throughout a lifetime. That microtraumas can be more impactful. And so I remember hearing that and looking back at my life going, “OH, I would’ve never named this and this as a trauma, but it was because of how it impacted me.” And so putting that over, looking at religious trauma, I think even with Jenn, when you and I talked maybe a month ago, when we were brainstorming about this podcast interview, there was one point, I forget if it was you or me who brought it up. But we watched this movie in youth group called Mark of the Beast or The Thief in the Night.

And I think Mark at the Beast, it was a trilogy. And this movie, for those of you who’ve not heard it or didn’t grow up in that era it was these seventies movies that were about the rapture of, what happens is all the believers at the time, the Christians go up to heaven and or they left you back on earth to prove that you were Christian enough and you would have to be, your head would have to be cut off by a guillotine. And it was terrifying, like to the point where I was having nightmares and panic attacks. If my parents weren’t home on time, I thought it was the rapture and I was left on earth. Like I was terrified. I don’t remember if it was you or me who brought it up, but I remember both of us going, “Oh my gosh, we forgot about that.” And that was another form of trauma to us because it impacted, it was fear-based and shaming. I feel like fear-based and shaming are parts of trauma with religious, is somebody in power or somebody in the religious format is using fear and shame to get you to make a decision or to live a certain way. And that just doesn’t feel spiritual to me.
[JENN]
No. And I mean, I think it’s like, those are the classic earmarks. Particularly, I mean, we talk about cults and having narcissistic leaders, but shame and fear are hallmarks of people who have narcissistic tendencies or even full-blown narcissism. To kind of clear on that, like not only was that, I think for both of us, like horrific in the moment when we were watching it. And y’all please do not watch the movie. It’s terrible. But it continues to have the ripple effects. Like after we had that conversation, I told my husband, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so excited I’m going to be on Dawn’s podcast and we talked about this thing and I don’t, I’ve never told you about it.” And my husband grew up very secular. His parents are like Christian Buddhist, who like love Eckerd Tolle and things like that.

So he was just like, “What are you talking about?” And I was like, “It was awful.” He’s like, “Your childhood was so dark.” I was like, “I know.” And then I went on to explain to him, and I can’t remember if I said this to you, but there is still a very irrational fear inside of me of the UN, which makes no rational, logical sense. But the UN is like, I don’t know, like where the antichrist gets this power. I don’t know if he’s like in charge of the UN, I don’t remember exactly in that movie.
[DAWN]
That’s right. I forgot about that.
[JENN]
So I still, like, I have this suspicion that is not based in my logical adult well-regulated brain, but it’s like, “Ooh, the UN is bad. Like I have a bad association to that.” And so that, like, those things continue to live on, even if we don’t always recognize where they come from.
[DAWN]
Yes. And that’s super important to mention for anyone working through trauma is like, it’s not, your adult brain can push it away and say that’s nonsense, but it’s, usually trauma is trapped inside a memory network that you necessarily can’t always have an adult response to. So if something comes up for someone like for example, me, I would be in church before I worked through my own trauma with churches. And I was like, “Why am I having so much anxiety?” I would have panic attacks, I’d be sweating, my heart would be racing and I finally got curious about it. And that’s what I want to encourage listeners to do is get curious, like notice, what are you thinking? What are you feeling when you’re around certain things if they’re talking about church or if you’re in church? Get curious about it .and maybe it is a child response, but it’s still stuck in your adult body. That’s another sign that you might have religious trauma that you need to uncover. I mean, can you think of anything else, Jenn, that would help people understand, like this might be religious trauma if you’re experiencing this?
[JENN]
It’s tricky and part of this, and you know this because you are a trauma therapist, trauma has a tendency to layer over each other. And so sometimes it’s hard because, especially people who have trauma, we want to compartmentalize because that’s part of how we’ve kept ourselves safe. I was just thinking like, “Okay, like what else comes up for me?” And then I’m thinking like, “Oh, but is that family of origin, developmental trauma? Is that religious trauma? Like where does that all fit together?” And so I think often when we’re living lives that feel restricted, even if it doesn’t look restrictive to others, but lives that we can’t tap into certain parts of ourselves that often can be a sign that there has been trauma. And it’s hard because sometimes the mark that trauma leaves is a sense of emptiness. Like there might be like, my fantasy is like, “Oh, I’ll just go inside and I’ll like name all these things of this really horrific thing happened to me and therefore I must have trauma and that’s what happened.”

But often it’s more, at least for me the lack of something. And I think about it sometimes when I think about naivity. But that’s one of those words, like, please don’t ever call me naive because that was a lot of the feedback I got, particularly when I was still like really in my religiosity, like, “Oh, that’s so naive. That’s so naive.” And that like word is such a trigger for me and might be part of why I like record, like, “No, I’m in my second naivity. You just don’t know because you haven’t even gone through your first. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But like one of the stories that I often think about, and that’s when I have these conversations about science and how the world works sort of scientifically. I grew up knowing that science was a very, very dangerous and like, it was a tool of the devil and a lot of ways like secular science, which is just science.

And one of the things that I grew up believing, which is, feels sort of ridiculous in retrospect, was that dinosaurs still exist like on the earth right now because they couldn’t have died out because if they died out, then that’s proof of evolution. If evolution is true, then that’s proof that God didn’t actually create the world in a certain amount of time and that’s proof that the Bible is not literal and if the Bible is not literal, then did you —
[DAWN]
Where are we?
[JENN]
Yes. Yes. Like it’s this whole tangle. And so until I was probably, I don’t even know, like there’s some part of me that’s like, maybe until I wasn’t div school. Like, I don’t think I was consciously thinking about dinosaurs, but I was just like, well, yes, like the Lochness Monster is a dinosaur and the Lochness Monster of course exists and there’s other dinosaurs and we just don’t know about them. When my husband and I watched Cosmos several years ago, I was just in tears at the end of every episode. I was like, “I didn’t know any of this.” He’s like, “How did you not know any of this?” Like, “Well, I was homeschooled and I grew up in a cult. Nobody was telling me this stuff. I didn’t know about these people.” And so it’s this lack of having access to that kind of information. And I think for a lot of people, particularly those who grew up in religious traditions, it’s often a lack of what is happening in the world. So whether it’s pop culture or news or just what happens outside of your really small community, like that gets put off limits. And so that’s sort of a rambling way to answer your question of like, I think sometimes it’s noticing where do you feel the lack of what you wanted or needed, but was really off limits.
[DAWN]
That’s a good way again, getting curious about that lack or what you’re feeling, like you don’t have knowledge. I mean, curiosity is awesome and I feel like that is something, it’s forbidden, not forbidden, but like frowned upon. Like we don’t want to explore like evolution. And I just remember thinking can both exist, like evolution and God? Like, I remember back then thinking that and I’m like, “Why do we have to be so black and white? I don’t understand.” Like, I feel like most of life is lived in the gray and black and white doesn’t really work for me anymore.
[JENN]
Wow.
[DAWN]
Yes. So, and Jenn, you said you work a lot with people who are experiencing or working through their religious trauma. What would you say like you’re seeing as far as how important it is to name it? Because you said sometimes they don’t even realize that’s what it is. It shows up either in lack or it shows up overlaying with other stuff. How, what if, so my question, I guess, is what do you think the importance of naming it is?
[JENN]
I think it’s always about the stories we tell ourselves. I met with somebody earlier today, a client earlier today, and we were talking about their story of depression, which isn’t necessarily about religious trauma. And one of the things I reflected back to them, I was like, “Wait, here’s what I know.” I actually said to him, I was like, “Maybe I’m going a little psychoanalytic, but here’s what I know about your story. So it makes a lot of sense to me that you would feel that way. In fact, I think that if I was in your situation, I would have reacted very similarly.” Like I don’t know that other people would have done that differently, but the story of this client was telling themselves was, well, there was something wrong with them. They hadn’t worked hard enough, they weren’t trying hard enough, they weren’t being honest or authentic enough. Like there were all of these, I’m not enough.

And sometimes with clients that will be like, “Well, but I was too much. I shouldn’t have done that. Or I pushed it too much or it was too this, too that,” which are, I mean, just verbal affirmations of you’re feeling a lot of shame. And so when we can name a thing what it is, gosh, that was religious trauma. Like that’s not a healthy way to develop a spirituality. And gosh, that’s pretty amazing actually that you can still feel that pulse of the divine in you, even having gone through all of that. That you could still want to pursue a life of wholeness and try to make sense and to be curious about this, gosh, that’s extraordinary given what you’ve lived through. And being able to reframe the story and see what it is, is a huge part of being able to heal because sometimes we trauma does is it wants to bend the perpetrator because if you’re the perpetrator, then you can stop it. And if you can stop it, then you don’t have to go through it anymore. And that’s not, at least in my experience, what trauma actually is. You have to own that. Sometimes this world is really screwed up and people who don’t deserve to get hurt, get hurt. And really, I don’t know that anybody deserves to get hurt and that it could happen again and there’s ways to keep yourself safe. There’s ways to take care of yourself, especially as an adult, but bad things happen, and that’s a really hard truth, I think, to sit with for a lot of people.
[DAWN]
Yes. Especially when you’re brought up like to obey your elders and trust the church and trust the religious structure and you have a lot of belief and faith in it. And so to realize that the church is filled with humans and people, and guess what, they make mistakes and they’re, they have their own stories. I remember going through some of my stuff and realizing, I need to allow them to be human and separate that from who God is, versus who they portrayed Him to be through their own painful story. And that, for me, it was powerful to separate those, but to name it as this was not okay. And like you said, I can still have this spark of divine in me and I want to know more about that. I think that’s kind of the heart of my podcast of even though people have been hurt or doubting, like there’s still this longing within us to want to connect to a spiritual level. I just love that. That’s what I want to fan that flame of that fire of spirituality.
[JENN]
Yes. It’s something I say it, so it’s interesting. We talked a little bit before we started recording and I was like, “Oh, Dawn, I don’t tell people specifically that I work with religious trauma, that I’m more of a speakeasy sometimes when it comes to this.” Like if you’re in the know, you know. And I see a lot of people who, this is like me believing nobody has to get attachment. I believe everybody has some measure of a little bit of trauma and probably religious trauma if you’ve grown up in a Western country just because Christianity was so married to political structure for so long. But people who I show up more pastoral with, which is very fun for me, is having grown up as fundamentalist and like all of those Bible verses I’ve memorized are finally coming in handy. They’re great clinical interventions.

But what I’ll say to them is like, look, we really got to talk about this. And I don’t know for certain if God exists, I kind of hope He or She does. I would be cool with that. I like the idea of having like that soothing to me when I have my own death anxiety, but I got to believe whoever God is, if God is, that God is kinder. God is bigger, God can have more capacity than I, as your therapist have. And I am pretty kind, I’m really smart, and I have a lot of capacity to hold your stuff. And if I, as a human can do that, I just don’t buy that God is as punitive as we’ve made him. And so being able to examine what our image of God is and what we have projected onto God is really vital when we’re starting to do this work of healing.

And truthfully, sometimes we need to project onto God that, “You are horrible, awful. I’m pissed at you. I don’t like you. You should have stepped in sooner, or you’re supposed to be all powerful. Like I’m pissed.” And I really believe that God can hold that and not react with a punitive defensive stance, which is how God often is depicted, not just in Christianity, but frankly in all of the world traditions, God gets vengeful or violent. And I think that’s a lot more with humans not being able to see that God is much larger.
[DAWN]
Yes. That He can hold space for all of that. Like again, with the fear, like learning and fear of God. I mean, I think there’s like a healthy respect fear, but like the fear of He’s punitive and we have to watch out. But God can handle any of our questions, any of our doubts, our anger, any feeling. He’s big enough to hold space for that.
[JENN]
Yes. And won’t lash out, which I think is what a lot of people are taught, He will, even if it’s not directly said.
[DAWN]
Yes, and that’s a human emotion or a human thought, I think, the lashing out is a human reaction, I should say. Well, Jenn, thank you so much for all this. I feel like we had a great conversation about religious trauma and some how to deconstruct and reconstruct. I just loved hearing the way you put things, the way you put words, I just love how you talk and examine things and explain things. I just really, it draws me to you. So thank you so much for spending time doing that
[JENN]
Was so much fun. Thanks for having me.
[DAWN]
Yes. And if anybody wants to get ahold of you, do you want to put out an email or a website? What’s the best way to get in touch with you, Jenn?
[JENN]
Sure. So I’m trying to think what is the best way. If people are interested in hearing more about sort of my own journey through making sense of my own religious trauma, they can go to my private practice website Therapy for Thinkers. And that’s where my podcast is housed, The Thinkers Guide. And the first season was The Thinkers Guide to the Apocalypse. So people can go check me out there. They can follow me on socials at A Thinkers Guide on Instagram and Facebook. Those are probably the best places to come and see me. And they can always drop me an email at jenn@therapyforthinkers.com.
[DAWN]
I love that. Okay. So a thinkers guide is your podcast and social media handles and then your Therapy for Thinkers is your professional website? Love that. Well, thank you again, Jenn. It was so nice talking with you.
[JENN]
Same Dawn. Thanks for having me.
[DAWN]
Okay. Take care.
[JENN]
You too
[DAWN]
Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up.

Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com. .

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.