As both a therapist and a mother, I now spend much of my life thinking about development. It is impossible to work with children, adults, trauma, attachment, and families without becoming deeply aware that development has its own pace. Children are not miniature adults. They are not simply adults with less experience. Their brains are literally unfinished. Their capacity for emotional regulation, perspective taking, frustration tolerance, planning, impulse control, and self-reflection develops over years of relationship with regulated adults. None of this is controversial in developmental psychology. It is simply how human beings grow. Which has left me wondering why so much of my own childhood felt organized around the expectation that I should already know things I was not developmentally capable of knowing.

That question has become surprisingly personal as I watch my son grow. He is four years old, and every single day he reminds me what four actually looks like. He is impulsive, wonderfully imaginative, deeply sensitive, and absolutely convinced that every thought in his head deserves to be heard. He argues because he is trying to make sense of the world. He melts down because his body becomes overwhelmed faster than his language can organize what is happening inside him. He forgets rules he knew yesterday because memory, impulse control, and executive functioning are still developing. Sometimes he hits when his nervous system has become flooded. Sometimes he cries over something that seems incredibly small to me, only to recover ten minutes later and invite me to build a fort as though nothing happened.

I find myself watching him with two different sets of eyes. One set belongs to his mother. The other belongs to the little girl I used to be. I often wonder who I might have been if my own childhood had been interpreted through a developmental lens instead of primarily a moral one. I don’t know the answer to that question, and I never will. By the time I was my son’s age, I already had three younger siblings. My childhood unfolded within a family system that required maturity very early, and within a religious culture that emphasized obedience, self-control, and discipline as essential virtues. I don’t know what parts of me were simply my temperament, what parts were shaped by birth order, and what parts were adaptations to the environment around me. Human development is rarely that simple. But I do know that somewhere along the way I stopped experiencing myself as a child who was learning and began experiencing myself as a child who was failing.

Looking back, I don’t remember believing that I was a bad child. It was actually more confusing than that, more fundamental than that. I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me because I kept struggling with things I thought I shouldn’t struggle with anymore… the sin nature with which I was programmed to believe was instilled to me at birth. I was too emotional. Too sensitive. Too overwhelmed. Too reactive. Too much. I don’t think anyone intentionally sat me down and taught me those exact conclusions. Children don’t usually learn through explicit statements. They learn through thousands of interactions that gradually teach them who they are. My nervous system slowly organized itself around the belief that I should somehow have been able to regulate emotions I had never been taught to regulate, understand perspectives my brain had not yet developed the capacity to understand, and respond with maturity that only years of healthy development could have produced.

That has become one of the hardest parts of parenting for me. My son does not simply invite me to teach him. He continually exposes the places where my own development was interrupted by expectations that now seem impossible. There are moments when he is completely dysregulated, and before my clinical knowledge has time to respond, I can feel my own nervous system react with urgency. A part of me wants the situation to end immediately. I want him to calm down. I want him to stop arguing. I want him to understand. Then almost immediately another part of me recognizes what is happening. He is not asking me to expect less of him. He is asking me to remember how old he is.

I have come to realize that many of my deepest parenting struggles have very little to do with my children. They have to do with the fact that my children’s developmental needs continually collide with the expectations I once held for myself. My son is asking for patience in exactly the places where I never learned patience. He is asking me to stay emotionally present in moments that taught me to withdraw from myself. He is asking me to believe that learning requires repetition instead of assuming that repeated mistakes reflect a failure of character. Every difficult parenting moment asks me whether I truly believe what I have spent years teaching other people—that children develop in relationship, that regulation precedes reasoning, and that behavior almost always makes more sense when we understand the nervous system underneath it.

I also find myself struggling in ways I did not anticipate with religious parenting advice. That has been difficult to admit because my faith still matters deeply to me. But my experience has made me profoundly cautious of any theology of childhood that cannot adequately account for development. I have become skeptical of any framework that too quickly interprets developmental immaturity as moral failure or assumes that obedience can be separated from the neurological capacities required to exercise it. Those questions are no longer theoretical for me. They are deeply personal because they shaped the way I came to understand myself. For many years I believed that ordinary childhood limitations reflected spiritual deficiencies. I believed I should have been less emotional, less needy, less questioning, less dependent. I spent years trying to become smaller because I mistook self-erasure for holiness.

The greatest surprise of motherhood has been discovering that healing has looked much less like becoming a perfectly patient parent than learning to recognize when my own childhood has entered the room. My children are not simply asking me to raise them well. They are asking me, over and over again, whether I believe that children deserve the grace I am still learning to extend to myself. Some days I answer that question beautifully. Other days I become overwhelmed, shut down, or lose patience far sooner than I want to. But even those moments have become opportunities for something I never experienced enough as a child: repair. I apologize. We reconnect. We begin again. I no longer believe that good parenting means never rupturing the relationship. I believe it means showing children that relationships can survive rupture without anyone having to disappear.

Perhaps that is the profound undoing of the under-parented parent. It is not simply choosing different parenting techniques or rejecting certain ideas we inherited. It is allowing our own understanding of what it means to be human to change. It is recognizing that children are not problems to solve before adulthood begins, but human beings whose dependence, emotions, and immaturity are exactly what development is supposed to look like. My greatest hope is not that my children will remember me as endlessly patient…. because I’m not. It is that they will never grow into adults who believe there was something fundamentally wrong with them simply because they spent their childhood being children. My children are children, free and feral. And sometimes I am triggered by the childhood I am trying to give them.

Instead, it lives in the mental, emotional and spiritual scar tissue. The habits of being, belief and behavior that developed and changed from “healthy” or “typical” development. 

It lives in the places where repeated experiences shaped me so gradually that I stopped noticing their influence. Like scar tissue in the body, it becomes part of the landscape. It tightens around certain movements, limiting flexibility. It pulls on places far away from the original wound. Over time, it begins to feel less like an injury and more like part of I am. I have been reshaped by my religious trauma. 

For years, I thought healing would require examining what I had been taught. Undoing belief structures cognitive and examining the behaviors I took on due to belief. Now I spend just as much time examining what was nurtured into me… which is not always the same thing.

I was taught that God loved me. I was nurtured to fear disappointing Him.

I was taught that I had value. I was nurtured to believe my value came from obedience and subservience. My usefulness.

I was taught that women were cherished. I was nurtured to make myself smaller.

I was taught that my body was created by God. I was nurtured to distrust it and believe it to be dirty, shameful. 

I was taught about grace. I was nurtured by shame.

The religious teachings were often beautiful on paper, the their conditioning through religious trauma was something else entirely.That conditioning took root in places deeper than belief: Beliefs live in the mind. Conditioning settles into the nervous system. 

It becomes the apology before the offense. The guilt before the decision. The shrinking before the rejection. The fear before the desire. Long after I stopped believing many of the messages I was given, my body continued responding as if they were still true.

These days, I notice the ache most when something good enters my life. That still surprises me. I expect trauma to show up around pain. I don’t expect it to show up around joy. Religious trauma, for me, can meaning an orientation to dark over light- and confusion about why. 

So often trauma is reinforced by the good things in my life:A healthy relationship. A meaningful opportunity. A moment of being seen. A moment of wanting something deeply. These are often the moments when the scar tissue tightens. Some old part of me still believes that desire is dangerous. That visibility is risky. That wanting too much will cost me love. That taking up space will eventually lead to punishment.

What has been hardest to admit is how familiar suffering feels. Not because I enjoy pain. Not because I want to suffer. Sometimes suffering and pain end up being sought because they’re so familiar. It’s hard to enjoy the good because suffering was one of the first emotional languages I learned.

Longing feels familiar. Yearning feels familiar. Self-denial feels familiar. The ache of almost having something feels familiar. Sometimes I think I spent so many years learning how to survive darkness that I accidentally began mistaking it for home. At least now I am able to draw comparisons with comfort versus health, not an easy place to differentiate.

There were periods of my life when the darkness even felt energizing. Living from a place of seeking— that edgy energy of the impossible relationship, the longing that could never quite be fulfilled, the constant pursuit of becoming worthy enough, holy enough, lovable enough. Those experiences hurt, but they also made me feel intensely alive. It’s hard to admit that it’s taken 20 years for me to begin to understand that intensity and aliveness are not the same thing.

A nervous system raised on fear often mistakes activation for meaning. For me, the adrenaline felt like purpose. The longing felt like love. The suffering felt like depth. The ache itself begins to feel sacred because it is so familiar. Only now I can start to identify trauma wounds gaping under the surface, the ache of an unmet need.

But for so many years, pain became substance. It gave shape to empty places inside me. It gave me something to chase, something to fix, something to explain. In ways I could not see at the time, I used longing and struggle to soothe myself… even in ways I thought were holy, until I burned out for a while. The darkness hurt, but it was known… it had texture. It felt more substantial than peace.

Finally I am learning what I see talked about in different communities of recovery… that healthy things can feel strangely quiet.

Healthy love is quieter. Healthy spirituality is quieter. Healthy relationships are quieter. Even happiness is quieter… and maybe quiet isn’t the right word, but regulated and still doesn’t seem to catch it either.

For someone whose nervous system learned to equate intensity with aliveness, peace can initially (and even in an ongoing way) feel like emptiness. Safety can feel like boredom. Being loved without earning it can feel suspicious. I am still learning all of this, and to soothe myself seeking of disquiet. 

As messed up as it is, I am just beginning to truly absorb that peace is not emptiness. I am still learning that safety is not boredom.I am still learning that love does not have to hurt to be real.

Most days, I am still deeply in the middle of this work. At times I still feel the pull toward intensity. I still find myself reaching for old stories where suffering is the price of belonging and longing is mistaken for love. I still discover places where fear disguised itself as faith, where shame disguised itself as humility, where self-erasure disguised itself as virtue.

I write this not as someone who has healed from religious trauma, but as someone who is still uncovering it. Someone who is learning to notice the scar tissue, the ache for more conditioning me to yearn beyond healthy limits. Someone who is beginning to understand that what was nurtured into me is not the same thing as who I am.

The scar tissue is real. The ache is real…and it might always be there.They have shaped me in ways I am still discovering. But they are not the whole story.

Beneath them, there is still something living. Something that existed before fear took root. Something that remains untouched by shame. I am tangled up in the acceptance of what is there, without wishing it away go become someone new… though the fantasy of erasure isn’t entirely a ghost yet. And, I can’t entirely return to the person before the scars. So this is me, scars and all.

May this clumsy reckoning with the darker side of self in trauma recovery shine a light for others, somewhere in a same or darker place. I welcome your words too as you learn. 

Not dissociated in the dramatic sense. Not obviously falling apart. Quite the opposite, actually.

Highly competent women. Warm women. Thoughtful women. Women who remember birthdays and anticipate needs and know how to make everyone around them feel emotionally held. Women who apologize quickly. Women who can adapt to almost any environment. Women who seem “easygoing.” I know this woman well because I have been her for most of my life. Still am, if I admit to a slow recovery from being so “polite.”

For a long time, I thought this was simply kindness. Emotional intelligence. Maturity. But I understand it differently now. I think many trauma survivors—particularly women raised in emotionally restrictive or highly religious environments—learn very early that maintaining connection is safer than remaining connected to themselves.

And the body adapts accordingly… quietly and gradually: You learn to override hunger because your needs are less important than the atmosphere in the room. You learn to override exhaustion because being “good” means being available. You learn to override anger because anger threatens attachment. You learn to override discomfort because politeness has become fused with morality. After enough repetition, the interruption becomes automatic.

Someone asks something of you and the answer leaves your mouth before your body has fully had time to respond.

“Yes, that’s fine.”

“No worries.”

“I can do that.”

And then sometimes later—hours later, occasionally years later—the brain, heart and body catch up to one another. I experience the tightness in my chest. The heaviness in my stomach. The exhaustion. The strange grief that comes from realizing you crossed yourself again in some small but familiar way. I don’t think I realized for a long time how physical this pattern was for me.

I held my stomach in constantly. Not consciously, exactly. It just felt normal. I breathed shallowly from my chest. My jaw was always tight. Even now, after years of work, I notice how quickly my body moves toward tension and containment when I feel emotionally unsafe. And sometimes still it takes realizing that tension hours later to become aware of it.

The pelvic floor work after childbirth opened something for me psychologically that I was not fully expecting. There was something deeply confronting about realizing how much tension I carried in parts of my body associated with vulnerability, sexuality, softness, instinct.

Holding had become my baseline:

Holding emotion.
Holding posture.
Holding breath.
Holding discomfort.

Even hunger became something negotiable. I used to think hunger cues were just inconsistent in me. Now I think I was simply practiced at ignoring them. And not only physical hunger. Desire in general. Preference. Wanting. Needing.

I became very skilled at not noticing myself. That skill was rewarded almost everywhere. Especially religiously.

I grew up in an environment where self-sacrifice was deeply moralized, especially for women. Humility, modesty, submission, gentleness—these qualities were treated not merely as values but as evidence of spiritual maturity. There was a quiet suspicion of too much selfhood. Too much desire. Too much presence.

The body, particularly the female body, often felt like something to manage carefully. Not necessarily through overt shame all the time, though there was some of that too. More often through subtle conditioning. A constant shaping toward smallness. Toward pleasantness. Toward self-containment. And eventually that shaping moved inward.

I am struck by how many women no longer know what they feel in real time because they have spent years interrupting their own internal signals before conscious awareness fully forms around them.

People think trauma always looks explosive. Sometimes it looks incredibly polite. Sometimes it looks like a woman who cannot identify that she is overwhelmed until her body forces the issue. Sometimes it looks like chronic tension, shallow breathing, pelvic pain, autoimmune flares, insomnia, numbness during intimacy, relentless overfunctioning. Sometimes it looks like a woman who says yes while her body is quietly saying no.

And the hardest part is that many of us learned to interpret this disconnection as goodness. As maturity. As being low maintenance.

Healing, I think, has involved learning to tolerate my own internal experience without immediately reorganizing myself around everyone else’s comfort. It sounds so simple when written out like this. It has not felt simple in practice.

There are still moments where noticing my own anger feels vaguely dangerous. Moments where having needs feels embarrassing. Moments where resting feels morally loaded. Moments where inhabiting my own body fully still feels unfamiliar.

But there are also new moments now. Moments where I pause before answering. Moments where I notice hunger before dismissing it. Moments where I allow discomfort to exist long enough to understand what it is trying to tell me. Moments where I stay connected to myself even if someone else is disappointed.

That, more than anything, feels new. And maybe that is what recovery actually is.

Not becoming fearless.
Not perfectly healed.
Not endlessly self-actualized.

Just slowly learning that your body was never the enemy. Reducing the abdominal guarding and letting your pelvic floor relax and contract with each breath.

And that disappearing from yourself was never the same thing as being good.

I write about high-control religious trauma and how it shapes the female body, identity, and psychological development—often long before we have language for it. Much of my work focuses on the embodied aftermath: how we learn to live in (or disconnect from) our bodies, and what it takes to rebuild that relationship over time.

Lately, my writing has turned more directly toward the lived, physical experience of that impact, as I move through my own process of recovery. This is work about integration—about coming back into the body, and making sense of what was formed there.

—————————

 High-control religious systems do not only shape belief: They organize human experience. They structure how a nervous system learns to interpret the body—what feels safe, what must be contained, and what is quietly coded as dangerous. Within these systems, the female body (unlike the male body)is not introduced as neutral, but rather inherently morally consequential.

From a clinical perspective, a girl does have the opportunity to first experience her body and then interpret it—she is given an interpretive framework in advance by the religious system. Albeit a confusing sense of meaning, in which her body is described as sacred, powerful, and something to protect… but also inherently tempting and dangerous. Embedded within this description, often unspoken but deeply internalized, is the idea that a girl’s body must be protected because it can provoke, mislead, and carry responsibility for the response of others.

This is the central dynamic of sexual purity systems: the externalization of male desire and the internalization of female responsibility. The result for those victimized in this system is not simply behavioral restraint, but also somatic vigilance. One’s own body becomes something to monitor before it is ever something to inhabit. In other words, one’s lived experience competes with and often loses to the framework high-control taught one about their body before the individual ever had a chance to conceptualize themselves.

Layered into the high-control framework of feminist handed to young women and girls raised in such religious environments is also the idea that femininity is implicitly contaminated. Not always explicitly named, but consistently reinforced through tone, expectation, and practice (this rel Menstruation is concealed. Discharge is managed. The cyclical, permeable nature of the female body is treated as something that must be regulated to remain acceptable. The body is not only sexualized—it is rendered potentially problematic.

Puberty, then, does not arrive into neutral ground. It arrives into a system already bracing for corruption—and for many girls, it becomes the first rupture.

There is a moment—often quiet—when the shift becomes visceral. You look down and realize your body is changing without your consent. Your thighs are fuller. Your hips are widening. Clothes that fit one way no longer fit the same. It is the same body, but not the same experience. And almost immediately, the meaning changes around you. The same clothing is now interpreted differently. The same presence is now more visible. The same body is now something to be managed in new ways. Cover more. Be careful. Be aware. Not because you chose this shift, but because your body has become meaningful to others.

In my experience, and what I have heard from some other young women— puberty was dreaded and mourned. Mourned and dreaded because we had seen so many young women before us be “ruined” through puberty. But really, because we lost our sense of selfhood and became those dual objects of desire and dread.

This is where self-objectification becomes embodied. Not just cognitively, but somatically. A young woman is still inside her body, but also outside it—observing, adjusting, anticipating how it is being received. Part of her feels. Part of her monitors— not due to vanity, but rather a  regulatory adaptation in response to increased visibility without corresponding safety.

Then there is the blood. High-control evangelical purity culture has such mixed feelings on menstrual blood with the literalist readings of some Hebrew Scriptures.

Thus, the onset menstrual cycle is a very mixed experience the first time it comes. Cramping. Disruption. A clear signal that something fundamental has changed. And yet the expectation is continuity. Go to school. Sit still. Function. Or, in some contexts, to celebrate it—without acknowledging the complexity of the experience itself. Without naming that it can feel intrusive, demanding, or inconvenient. A lifelong physiological process introduced without adequate integration. And in many cases within the high-control evangelical purity culture, so many young women are not prepared for the onset of menses.

Within a high-control religious context, these experiences are not interpreted neutrally. They are absorbed into a broader moral framework. The developing female body becomes associated with risk—not because of its inherent nature, but because of how it is positioned. Visibility becomes linked with responsibility on the part of the girl. Thus, embodiment becomes something that must be carefully managed and sensation something to be approached with caution. Over time, this can filtered experience is often consolidate into a deeper internal belief that the body must be contained in order to remain acceptable.

From a developmental standpoint, this type of religious interpretation of normal bodily experience interrupts integration at a critical stage. Puberty is biologically designed as a period of somatic and psychological alignment. But within a high-control framework, that process becomes one of fragmentation. Sensation is interpreted before it is experienced. Desire is moralized before it is understood. The body is managed before it is inhabited.

Sexual development within this structure tends to follow (at least from my experience, exposure and observation) two primary adaptive pathways. The first is the spiritualization of desire. Desire is displaced into longing for the unattainable—the divine. Connection is elevated beyond the physical to a form of spiritual ecstasy in which the body is bypassed. This creates a form of disembodied sexuality—one that allows emotional intensity without requiring somatic presence. My choice of escape for the purpose of continued development.

The second pathway often emerges later, when embodiment begins to occur outside the original constraints. This is intensity-based activation. Desire appears quickly, often without regulation. It can feel consuming, overwhelming, difficult to track. In some cases, this includes diminished internal boundary awareness—not necessarily overt harm, but a reduced capacity to remain anchored in one’s own experience while desire is present. Desire is experienced as something that happens to the individual rather than something that is co-created and internally regulated. Poor attachment to the self in this state of deregulation can lead to sexual reactivity that in some communities would be labeled promiscuity.

Many women carry both templates simultaneously: a spiritualized, disembodied sexuality and an intensity-driven, dysregulated embodiment. Between these poles, there is often an absence of integrated erotic development—sexuality that is both embodied and regulated, both desired and chosen. While the absence of secure connection to one’s self and Ones sxuorl absence is frequently misinterpreted as dysfunction. It is more accurately understood as developmental disruption within a high-control moral system.

Body image disturbance emerges naturally within this structure—not as a superficial concern, but as an organizing framework for self-experience. If you were not raised in this, imagine growing up with a disordered perspective to your own body. Never good enough. Never chaste enough. But the question is not simply whether one looks acceptable, but whether one can live in the body at all. For some young women, this develops into chronic monitoring. For others, avoidance of pubescent symptoms. For many, something consistent with body dysmorphia—not simply distortion, but a persistent lack of familiarity or ownership. The body is visible. The body is evaluated. But the body is not inhabited.

These patterns do not resolve with time. They are reactivated during subsequent biological transitions—pregnancy, birth, postpartum, hormonal shifts. Each phase reintroduces the same developmental task: can the individual remain in relationship with a body that is changing, visible, and meaningful?

I am in the later postpartum years now. My children are four and five and a half. And my body is still healing—both structurally and emotionally. There is a recognition that what presents now as discomfort, hyper-awareness, or disconnection is not new, but is the continuation of a developmental trajectory that was never fully integrated.

Motherhood intensifies this awareness… at least for me. Because parenting within an intentional framework requires the very capacities that may not have been modeled—emotional attunement, co-regulation, embodied presence. One finds oneself offering to a child that their body is theirs, that their feelings are safe, that they do not need to earn connection—while simultaneously developing the internal capacity to believe and receive those statements.

I notice that this is where generational and religious trauma converge. My continued work is not behavioral correction at its root, but integration of the physical, emotional and maybe even spiritual selves from an ingrained state of dissociation. A gradual shift from observation to inhabitation, from management to relationship, from moralization to experience. This process is slow, non-linear, and often isolating. But it is also the mechanism through which patterns are altered across generations— into the process of being, and being present to the self and one’s own children.

The first rupture may occur in adolescence. But integration remains possible in adulthood—not by returning to a prior state, but by developing, often for the first time, a relationship to the body that is internally anchored, emotionally attuned, and inhabitable. My body is no longer something to monitor from a distance, but rather my physical home in which to live.

And then there are forms of theology that are absorbed. Not through formal instruction, but through repeated relational experience. Through tone, correction, approval, and withdrawal— essentially through behavioral conditioning in what is met with softness and what is met with tension.

Through these interactions, something more foundational begins to organize—a patterned way of interpreting internal experience, of locating the self in relation to authority, and of moving through the world. Over time, what develops in that space is not simply belief, but rather an orientation.

Not consciously constructed, but formed through repetition. Not easily revised, even when belief shifts.

This piece proposes a working concept I am calling the theology of suppression—a relationally transmitted framework in which ordinary human development is moralized, and the body’s natural processes are consistently reinterpreted as requiring containment.

Within this framework, the child does not simply learn what is right or wrong.

They learn, through repeated correction and reinforcement, how to relate to their own internal starts— or in other words how to police their own internal world based on the will of that external authority. 

In the case of those who grew up in high control religious environments, as I did in fundamentalist American evangelicalism, another organizing principle emerges: The weaponization of certainty—the systematic prioritization of definitive answers over experiential understanding, resulting in an intolerance for ambiguity that extends beyond theology into development itself.

Certainty, in these systems, functions as more than doctrine. It becomes a regulatory structure for the community as well as for the individual nervous system: Ambiguity is resolved quickly. Internal experience is interpreted rapidly.Language is used to stabilize what would otherwise remain open. The questions of life are answered, before they can even really be asked. 

From a developmental standpoint, this introduces a critical shift. We all know that human development unfolds through ambiguity—through gradual differentiation, incomplete understanding, and iterative meaning-making. When certainty is imposed prematurely, the child does not learn to explore internal experience, but rather to resolve the ambiguity— the religious system becomes the solution.

This is where premature moral attribution becomes clinically relevant. Across developmental stages, behaviors that are normative, necessary, and biologically driven are recoded as indicators of moral failure:

The hungry infant is interpreted as excessive.
The dysregulated toddler is interpreted as defiant.
The relationally adaptive child is interpreted as deceptive.

These interpretations represent a consistent pattern in which developmental processes are moralized before they are understood. From a clinical perspective, this disrupts accurate mirroring which is truly essential to early development of the self.

In attuned development, a caregiver reflects internal states back to the child in a way that organizes meaning: you’re hungry, that was overwhelming, you’re trying to stay safe. Through this, the child develops interoceptive awareness—the capacity to recognize and understand their internal experience.

When moral language is introduced prematurely, this process shifts, for both child and caregiver. The caregiver doesn’t translate the child’s internal state in support of the child’s healthy development, but evaluates the child as already independently requiring judgement. Too much. Not okay. Wrong.And because the child depends on the caregiver for meaning-making, this evaluation becomes internalized for the child.

Over time, the locus of understanding reorganizes for the child. The child no longer learns to ask, What am I feeling?They learn to ask, Is this acceptable? The child turn away from internal awareness, towards external evaluation of the self. The body’s signals lose their function as information and become problems to manage. This is both a cognitive and somatic shift.

A truly traumatic shift in which attention moves outward, expression is modified preemptively or others’ response and acceptance, and the nervous system learns to prioritize relational safety over internal coherence. The developmental result is not self-trust, but attunement directed away from the self—a learned orientation toward monitoring, adjusting, and getting it right.

I believe this theory has implications for persons in multiple high-control environments, where caregiver attunement in particular as necessary for healthy development of the self is disrupted. But as I am writing in particular at the intersection of religious and family trauma, I invite others to observe and theorize with me.

I did not have access to these distinction while I was inside high-control fundamentalist American Evangelicalism. In fact, much of this contrast only became visible nearly twenty years after leaving—through relational comparison.

I am very fortunate to have, as a help to my psycho-social-theological noticing, a partner whose upbringing was religious, but not organized around the same density of subculture. Not structured by the same degree of internalized moral surveillance. Not mediated by the same urgency toward certainty. This contrast in dialog has helped something become comprehensible to my deeply programmed mind.

This process of realization occurred through a series of small discrepancies: the absence of urgency around sharing a system of belief, but rather resolved acceptance; The absence of pressure to resolve ambiguity brought on by typical life circumstances; The absence of moral weight assigned to ordinary internal experience.

At first encounter with each discrepancy from my own experience, the difference was glaring. Over time, I noticed the absence of healthy parental support systems to my developing nervous system, the unhealthy reliance on external meaning… truly a realization of the emptiness and absence of resolution in the system through which I found so much meaning. Not absence of values or care—but absence of a particular internalized structure.Through that absence, what had been present in me became more visible.

This becomes most clinically relevant in the context of parenting. As the parent of a neurologically dysregulated toddler, I find myself in direct contact with development in its unfiltered form. My experience parenting a dysregulated child though dysregulation cut through any illusion that dysregulation was evolutional or moral. My child and I are struggling neurologically. And in retrospect of the most dysregulated moments between me and my child,  I can observe—somatically—the reactivation of the original framework with which I was raised.

The child’s dysregulation does not register solely as need.Through the conditioning I received, it begins to take on evaluative weight—something that must be handled correctly, something that reflects on my capacity as a parent. And when I cannot meet it with perfect regulation, the internal response is not proportionate to the moment. My system organizes the disproportional response as parental failure— and I admit that because I know I am not alone in this. This is not a cognitive convolution It is a conditioned response—an internalized extension of the original theological structure applied to a new developmental context.

This is where the somatic encoding of suppression becomes most evident—Because what I learned was not limited to belief, but became encoded in my physiology. in my next piece, I’m going to write about the ways in which physiological response becomes default response, even though the body no longer needs to remain hypervigilance protect the psyche.

The doctrine cracks. The certainty dissolves. The internal arguments have already been happening for months, years even. By the time someone leaves a high-control religious system, they have often already rejected much of it internally. The theology no longer makes sense. The authority no longer feels legitimate. The language begins to sound hollow.

And so leaving can feel like clarity. Like freedom. Like finally telling the truth, a truth without speaking that has been burning inside since the first glimmer of a crack. 

But what becomes clear, slowly and often disorientingly, is that belief is only one layer of conditioning.You can leave the belief system long before the belief system leaves you. This is my unfolding perspective as a Clinician, trained theologian and admirer of sociology of religion, and religious trauma survivor.

The Body Keeps the Structure

High-control religious systems do not just shape what we think. They shape how we become.

They function as developmental environments, not just belief systems—organizing how we learn to feel, attach, decide, and regulate. Before we had language for ourselves, many of us had language for God. Before we understood our bodies, we understood them as moral. Before we knew desire, we knew whether it was permitted.

In that way, our human development itself becomes imbued with religious meaning before it is ever developmentally understood.

Psychologically, this is not just belief formation—it is conditioning at the level of cognition, behavior, and the nervous system. A young nervous system developed under the stress of high control religion is a deeply dysregulated nervous system. Repeated exposure to external authority—what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable, what is dangerous—creates not only thought patterns, but behavioral reflexes and physiological responses.

The body learns:

• when to tense

• when to go quiet

• when to override instinct

• when to perform safety

Over time, this becomes a form of behavioral-cognitive conditioning embedded in the body, down to the level of nervous system programming. 

When the Body Recognizes Before the Mind Does

I was reminded of this viscerally watching “Trust Me: The False Prophet.” My nervous system reacted before my mind could organize it.

A low hum of unease. A tightening. A kind of internal shaking I couldn’t immediately place.Because what I was watching was extreme—and yet overly familiar to my own upbringing amongst the women of this FLDS sect.

The hair.

The clothes.

The vocal softening.

The quiet, deferential tone.

The deeply practiced fawning.

There is a particular kind of relational posture that emerges in high-control religious environments—especially for women. A way of making oneself smaller, softer, more agreeable. A way of orienting constantly toward approval. It is subtle enough to be praised. Deep enough to be ingrained.

And sitting there, watching, I felt the uncanny edge of recognition: Not this. But close enough. Different form. Same nervous system training.

A kind of “there but for the grace of God” realization—not in the theological sense, but in the developmental one. How small shifts in environment, leadership, or extremity could have led to something far more overt. My body knew that before I could articulate it.

The Recovery Cycle

What I see over and over—clinically and personally—is not a linear recovery, but a cycle. As I continue to write, observe, iteratively articulate, I map this cycle and invite the reaction of others: 

Cognitive Departure: The beliefs fall away. There is clarity, sometimes relief, sometimes anger.

Initial Expansion: There is space—new ideas, new language, new permission.

Somatic Return: Without warning, the body reintroduces the old system: shame, fear, hypervigilance, self-doubt. Not as belief—but as conditioned activation.

Disorientation: Did I make a mistake? Is this conviction? Am I wrong? what truly is right? How do I formulate choice and morality without the programmed principles?

Recognition: This is not truth. This is conditioning.

Choice: The pull is still there—but not absolute. I can differentiate from the programming and choose to keep searching for truth apart from that familiar pull of familiarity. 

Integration: The system reorganizes apart from programming. And then the cycle repeats.

We talk in the clinical world about different types of recovery: from substance use, from violent relationships as victims, from trauma and unhealthy attachment cycles… religious trauma too is something I firmly believe we can learn to recover from due to neuroplasticity and the stories of others. Stories alongside science keep our hopes alive.

Why It Still Lives in the Body

The systems that programmed us, our neurons, our way of being in this world do not just teach belief. They shape identity. These high control religious systems collapse principles of morality, belonging, safety and selfhood—even community— into one structure. 

From an attachment perspective, when God is introduced before the self is formed—and mediated through authority—the relationship becomes organizational. It shapes how we experience approval, fear, and connection.

So when the body reacts later, it doesn’t feel like memory. It feels like truth. 

There is so much more to unpack here, and I have spent some time on it in other writings.

Grief, Memory, and the Body

And then there is grief. Silent grief. A self organized into composure before it was allowed to feel. A self that cared for others at the expense of knowing itself. A self that had to forge its own path for truth, had to differentiate from and potentially lose those dear to us to find ourselves. That false dichotomy of self or others is often the fatal flaw that gives away high control, toxic religion. And stirs so much grief. 

Grief that lives in the body. That becomes tension, vigilance, endurance. In adulthood, grief reemerges—but what it touches is older. The uncontained places. The moments where there was no room to fall apart.

When stress builds, the body remembers:

• how to freeze

• how to overfunction

• how to appease

• how to disappear

These are not failures, even though the stressful patterns can feel disheartening and like a lack of progress. They’re part of the process—the learned survival patterns.

And sometimes—like watching something that hits too close—the body activates before the mind can contextualize.

The shaking comes first. Understanding comes later. Uncovering more layers to undo in our healing.

Healing Is Not Avoidance

Healing is not about avoiding the situations that reopen old wounds— unless they truly cannot be contained. Avoidance can feel like safety, but it narrows a life.

Healing is about recognizing that the pain can rise and fall. That activation does not equal danger. That the body can feel without collapsing. This is where choice begins to return. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But enough to move forward.

And over time, something shifts. The reactions still come—but they soften. The patterns still activate—but they loosen. The body still remembers—but it does not stay stuck in the old nervous system. 

And slowly, something else emerges:Trust. Trust in the process of the body and mind’s ability to move through and come back. Leaving a high-control religious system is not a single act. It is a process of unwinding. Not just from belief—but from the ways belief shaped cognition, behavior, and the nervous system itself. Because what we are leaving is not just doctrine, it is the architecture of how we learned to be.

Women who are functioning at a high level professionally while also absorbing the invisible, constant demands of caregiving.

There is a particular tension that comes with this kind of life. You are expected to be competent, steady, relational, and emotionally attuned—without becoming overwhelming, sharp-edged, or “too much.” Power is permitted, but only in moderated forms. It must remain accessible. Contained. Non-threatening. 

I only recognize all these tensions in retrospect from having been in this life for over five years now as my youngest child just turned four and my oldest is approaching 5 1/2. There is a challenge and a stress level associated with edges on all of the perimeter being so demanding.

And yet, anyone living inside that reality knows there is far more capacity underneath the surface than we are allowed to acknowledge openly. 

In my personal and professional life, I think about powerful women occasionally, not very regularly. I reflect on the power we women have in furthering one another both personally and professionally. And that brings me to the figure of Galadriel  from JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

I approach Galadriel, not as fantasy, but as a useful psychological and relational metaphor. Follow me down the road, especially if you know the figure of Galadriel from the Lord of the Ring or some other Tolkien work. In the moment where Galadriel is offered the Ring, she does not deny what it would awaken in her. She does what no other character does when faced with the opportunity to take up the ring. She names; clearly, what the One Ring would awaken in her: “I would not be evil… but beautiful and terrible as the dawn. Treacherous as the sea.”

What stands out to me is not just her refusal, but her willingness to recognize her own magnitude without immediately softening it. We women apologize too easily, and glad real does not back down from her own power. This recognition feels particularly relevant for women operating in high-responsibility roles, especially mothers. There is often an unspoken requirement to remain approachable, stabilizing, and emotionally contained—even when carrying significant authority and influence. The expectation is not simply to lead, but to lead in a way that does not disrupt the relational field.

Over time, this can create a subtle disconnection from one’s own vastly capable self. Not because the capacity isn’t there—but because there are few places where it can be named directly. Often times we women cannot even create space to see ourselves. This is why being seen by another woman in that context matters so much.

Recently, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary professional moment, another woman—one who has already navigated leadership and motherhood at a high level—looked at me and named something I hadn’t fully articulated to myself. She called me Galadriel.

For me this landed more is recognition than flattery. 

There was no elaboration, no over-explanation—just a clear acknowledgment of presence, capacity, and reach. And in that moment, something shifted internally. Not because it introduced something new, but because it reflected something back that is rarely named in women, especially in environments where relational stability is prioritized.

There is a particular power in women recognizing this in one another. Not in a performative or inflated way, but in a grounded acknowledgment of what is actually being held—complexity, influence, endurance, and the ability to impact systems, relationships, and outcomes in meaningful ways.

We often support each other through encouragement, validation, and empathy. Those are essential. But there is another layer that is less commonly expressed: the ability to say, in effect, I see the scale of you. I see what you are capable of. And I trust you with it.

That kind of recognition does something different.

It doesn’t ask a woman to become smaller in order to remain connected. It allows her to stay in relationship without relinquishing awareness of her own power. This is where the Galadriel metaphor continues to move me. 

She does not take the Ring—not because she lacks the capacity, but because she understands it. She is able to hold awareness of her potential without needing to enact it fully or prove it externally.

For high-performing women, particularly those also navigating motherhood, this balance is ongoing. How to remain connected without collapsing into over-accommodation. How to lead without becoming isolated. How to acknowledge capacity without being consumed by it. There is no clean resolution to this tension.

I don’t think this kind of tension requires resolution for women who are navigating motherhood and high-performance work environments. We end up thriving in the tension against all of our true desires to screw off to the woods and homestead a bit. But having that tension named and recognized in ourselves and having a scene in a world that makes us invisible as women… There is something deeply stabilizing in that.

And perhaps part of the work—especially in female leadership spaces—is not only supporting one another in the demands we carry, but also recognizing the magnitude of who is carrying them. Simply seeing this, not softening or minimizing it.

Recognizing the inner power that can sometimes be terrible, for me, reminds me of all that I hold within myself when I can lose side of it day-to-day. And that, in an of itself is grounding.

What I’m realizing more and more is that this kind of recognition doesn’t just belong in friendships or leadership spaces. It belongs in the therapy room.

Because I sit across from women every day who are carrying enormous weight—professionally, relationally, emotionally—often without language for the scale of what they are holding. Women who have been taught to see themselves through deficit, through failure, through what they are not doing well enough.

Women who are exhausted.

Women who are performing.

Women who are disappearing in plain sight.

And part of the work—quietly, steadily—is to see them. Not just their pain. Not just their symptoms. But their capacity.

To reflect back—not in a way that inflates or distorts—but in a way that names what is already there:

I see what you’re carrying.

I see the reach you have.

I see the parts of you that have had to stay contained to survive. Because so many women have only ever had their power named as a problem.

Too much.

Too emotional.

Too intense.

Too demanding.

And when power is only ever mirrored back as something to regulate or reduce, it becomes something we disconnect from.

But when it is seen—clearly, without fear, without judgment—it becomes something we can hold. Something we can choose how to use… something we don’t have to give away. And maybe that’s the quiet extension of this Galadriel moment.

Not just recognizing the power within ourselves—but learning how to see it in other women, and trust them with it.

Yesterday a colleague I deeply respect reminded me- in a professional context where she knows me as a professional- that my fist job is as a mom. I have a wonderful and deeply challenging relationship with my almost four year old that has made me reconsider so much in the past school year. Between this moment of arrest and the combination of life til now… I have realized how much I have only begun to unpack the stress that units me differently since the beginning of my parenting journey all of just over six years ago. 

There are moments when I am still moving through an ordinary part of the day—packing a bag, answering a question, wiping a counter—and somewhere beneath the surface my nervous system has already shifted. My breath has shortened. My shoulders have lifted. My jaw has tightened slightly, almost imperceptibly. I have become alert in a way that feels subtle but unmistakable. The awareness comes later, mostly in the impact of my body holding too tightly- a headache, a tight pelvic floor, hunger I pushed away.

Sometimes this awareness comes minutes later. Sometimes only when I feel the sharp edge of overwhelm beginning to rise. By the time I can name the stress—I am overloaded, I need space, this is too much sensory input—my physiology has already been carrying it for some time.

As a clinician, I know my autonomic nervous system is designed to detect shifts in safety before they reach conscious processing. Sensory input, relational cues, unpredictability, the sheer constancy of caregiving—these are registered below the level of narrative. The body prepares for demand before the mind organizes it into explanation. Understanding this has changed how I interpret my own reactions as a mother.

There are days when I find myself wondering why something small feels suddenly heavy—a child leaning into me, a voice repeating my name, the sound of toys clattering across the floor. The instinct is to assume impatience, or inadequacy, or some failure of emotional capacity. But when I look more closely, I can see that the moment I noticed was not the beginning of the experience. It was the point at which my awareness finally caught up with what my nervous system had already been managing.

In that sense, motherhood has forced me to become more attentive to my body than I ever was before. The signals are often quiet at first. A tightening across my chest. A feeling of pressure in my diaphragm that makes full breaths harder to take. A subtle urge to move faster, to finish things quickly, to create order before something spills into chaos. None of this begins as language. It begins as tone, tension, sensation. And failure to attune to my body and manage the needs it signals in the moment leads to loss of emotional bandwidth and relational impacts.  

BecauseI spent so many years learning to override my own signals (as the oldest daughter in a big family, as a devout young person in high control religion, as a female taught self erasure in purity culture)—to be attentive to others before attending to myself—it can take time for me to notice what is happening.

This is where my  clinical insight meets lived experience. When a person has spent much of her early development in a caregiving posture—monitoring emotional environments, anticipating needs, maintaining stability—her nervous system becomes exceptionally skilled at scanning outward. It becomes less practiced at scanning inward. The body continues working, but the signals are not always consciously received.

Motherhood exposes that pattern quickly.

Children live close to the body. Their needs are physical, rhythmic, constant. They lean, climb, cry, laugh, reach. They ask for attention not only emotionally but sensorially. And when a nervous system that has long been oriented toward vigilance meets the steady proximity of small children, it can feel as though the internal volume has been turned up.This does not mean something is wrong with the love between mother and child, myself and my babies… it simply means my body is working hard to almost traumatically relearn close proximity regulation.

So I am learning, slowly, that part of the work of motherhood for me is learning to notice earlier. To recognize the tightening before it becomes overwhelm. To pause before the sensation becomes urgency. To treat my own physiology with the same attentiveness I instinctively offer others. This is not always easy. Some days the signals still arrive late. Some days I realize I have been bracing for hours without knowing it.

But this very awareness itself is a beginning. Recognizing when chronic stress is becoming illness and the routines of health concerns occurring after periods of intense stress has been another data source for this internal process reliant on external data. And recognition cannot live in my cognitions alone but must become compassion and listening and hold for my body before the automatic thoughts of judgement from past programming take over.

I can say with confidence that this compassion will not come flawlessly—I must practice the act of deeply breathing and offering my body the space to regulate. I am learning to accept practice and slow habit building over perfection. And a few years in to my own parenting journey, I feel the post of the quiet practice of noticing—breath by breath, moment by moment—that my nervous system is still learning how to live inside this life I have chosen.

I grew up inside evangelicalism, but even now that sentence feels imprecise. I didn’t just grow up in it. I grew up organized by it.

It taught me what certainty felt like somatically. Not conceptually—physically. The exhale of knowing the right answer. The relief of alignment. The quiet reward of belonging when my thoughts matched the room. It also taught me how quickly safety could evaporate when they didn’t. Doubt wasn’t framed as curiosity. It registered as danger.

So when people ask whether I still believe what I was taught, I find myself pausing. Belief is the wrong diagnostic category. Belief lives in cognition. Formation lives in the nervous system. You can revise belief in a moment. Nervous systems take longer…which is why I keep returning to the sweater thread.

What I am trying to understand is not simply what happened, but where it lives now. My family was my first interpreter of reality. Before doctrine, there was tone. Before theology, there was atmosphere. Before morality, there was the subtle calibration of when I felt safe and when I didn’t.

Then religion arrived and gave those sensations language. It named them, moralized them, organized them. Feelings that were adaptive responses became spiritual conditions according to my familial programming. Hypervigilance became conviction. Compliance became virtue. Fear became reverence.

And underneath all of it, if I am honest, there has always existed in my experience this almost primordial uncertainty. Not the ordinary uncertainty of childhood, but a deeper hum I could never quite locate. Was it temperament? Was it wiring? Was I a child with a nervous system already tuned toward vigilance? Was I neurodivergent? Was I responding to an inconsistent caregiver? Was I absorbing a theology that taught salvation was conditional rather than secure? Are these distinct origins—or do they all shape the same internal climate when they occur together? I don’t know if their impacts are identical, but I do know this: in my life, they compounded.

That translation is where the strands knot. Because religious trauma, family trauma, and developmental nervous system patterning are theoretically distinct constructs. Clinically, they can be separated. But developmentally, they often co-encode. They are learned in the same rooms, from the same voices, during the same formative years when the brain is not analyzing reality—it is absorbing it. In other words: the sweater was knit all at once.

I don’t think religious trauma is always loud. Mine wasn’t.

It was songs I loved.

It was sincerity.

It was devotion.

It was adults who believed they were protecting me. Nothing in that list looks traumatic from the outside. And that is precisely why the categorization is so difficult. We tend to reserve the word trauma for rupture, violence, or visible harm. But some systems do not shatter you. They shape you. Quietly. Consistently. Devoutly.

They shape:

• how quickly guilt appears

• how dangerous questions feel

• whether desire registers as threat

• how authority sounds inside your own thoughts

• what it means, in your body, to be wrong

You can leave the environment and still carry the patterning. That patterning is what I mean when I say religious nervous system. The longer I sit with that phrase, the more accurate it feels to my upbringing.

Because a religious nervous system is not just belief. It is a conditioning environment. It is a network of associations learned early enough that they bypass analysis. It is what happens when theology is not merely taught but paired, repeatedly, with belonging, approval, fear, and relief. The religious nervous system is not identical to: family trauma, developmental dysregulation, or even doctrine. But it can braid with all three so tightly that disentangling them becomes less like sorting threads and more like studying textile.

In my case, the fibers fused.

I approach the fused fibers with a desire to understand rather than accuse my system of developing wrongly. There are songs I still can’t listen to casually. Not because I agree with them. Because my body recognizes them. Music travels faster than cognition. It goes straight to imprint. Certain chords still release the old chemical reassurance: you are safe, you belong, you are right. The sensation arrives before my mind can cognitively evaluate.

That’s when I understand something I wasn’t taught growing up: the body is conditioned to respond to familiarity before it responds to accuracy. This means that healing is not just about changing what you believe. It is about teaching your nervous system that unfamiliar does not automatically mean unsafe.

I used to think distance meant I was healed.

Twenty years is a convincing amount of distance. Enough time to build a different life, a different language, a different interior world. But distance, I am learning, is not the same as differentiation. You can be geographically far from something and still physiologically organized by it.

The thread keeps appearing- not because I am failing to move on, but because formation runs deep. I am still differentiating from my upbringing because it made all my first points of reference. 

And maybe the work is not to cut the thread, but to study it: To understand its fibers, learning which strands are theology, which are attachment, which are survival, which are temperament, which are memory. Not so I can assign blame, but so I can assign meaning.

I don’t live inside that world anymore. But it still lives, in certain ways, inside me. This world has left its imprint as a fossil deep beneath the layers of my evolution- rather than as present authority or ongoing allegiance. 

The thread still pulls. Not backward, but inward. Sometimes I wonder if I keep pulling, will I come undone? If I keep pulling while I get to the knot at the root of my experience and be able to take perspective on everything? Will that perspective be my answer?

So I pull on the thread- towards the place where my history, my body, my faith, my fear, and my longing were first woven together before I knew they were separate strands. 

And maybe integration of all this experience is simply this: not finally unraveling the sweater, but learning how it was knit. Recognizing how much of the sweater I am still wearing, and why it is still challenging to take it all the way off. My journey now is to notice where the religious conditioning of my childhood is still programmed into my nervous system, what my body holds onto and braces for, where I hesitate from unconscious belief. And as I notice, I need to reprogram. This is part of the ongoing journey of deconstruction.

There is a form of religion that functions less like a belief system and more like a regulatory system. In high-control religion like the form of evangelical Christianity in which I was raised, from birth we were taught to internalize the religious sy…

Read more

Because for many of us who were raised in high-control evangelical environments, Jesus was not simply a figure of doctrine. He was an intimate presence. A beloved. A witness. A constant companion. We were taught to speak to him, confide in him, surrender to him, belong to him. We sang love songs to him before we ever kissed anyone. We pledged devotion before we understood desire. We learned intimacy as a vertical experience long before we ever attempted it horizontally.

In other words, we were formed inside a romance.

Jesus was the safest beloved imaginable: attentive, perfect, endlessly forgiving, never physically demanding. He could hold longing without friction. He could inspire surrender without risk. He could be adored without requiring negotiation. And because he was disembodied, he never complicated that devotion with touch, hunger, or reciprocity.

At the time, it felt like holiness. Later, I realized it was also a template.

The First Loneliness

Differentiation always costs something.

For me, it began in adolescence—the first moment I realized that my thoughts were not identical to the world I had been given. That realization did not feel liberating. It felt isolating.

Because when you grow up inside a high-control religious environment, belonging is often contingent on sameness. To think differently is not just to disagree. It is to risk disconnection. And when you are young and still dependent on the very environment you are beginning to outgrow, differentiation can feel like exile without exit.

I could see differently. But I could not leave.

So I learned a particular kind of aloneness: the kind that exists when your inner world has already stepped outside a system your outer life still inhabits. The kind where you carry two realities at once—the one everyone else believes, and the one you’re starting to see.

That split is its own form of trauma.

Because the nervous system does not experience that as intellectual tension. It experiences it as threat:

If I am fully myself, I may lose belonging.

So you learn to remain, even while part of you has already gone.

The Third Presence

When you’re raised inside a system like that, you don’t enter relationships alone. You enter them accompanied.

There is always a third presence in the room.

Not metaphorically, but psychologically.

You feel watched. Evaluated. Measured. Not necessarily by a judging God—but by an internalized witness whose presence was installed early and reinforced often. Desire doesn’t just register as sensation; it registers as something observed. Attraction isn’t just attraction; it’s something interpreted. Intimacy doesn’t unfold privately; it unfolds under supervision.

And trauma makes that witness louder.

Because trauma trains the nervous system to scan for danger, for judgment, for consequence. When you’ve been formed in environments where love and evaluation were intertwined, where belonging could be withdrawn, where spiritual language carried emotional stakes, your body learns that being seen is not always safe. It learns that closeness can mean exposure.

For a long time, Jesus himself was inseparable from that system in my mind. He wasn’t just a figure of comfort; he was entangled with the entire emotional architecture that had shaped me. And I could not separate him from it without risking exile—either placing myself outside of him, or placing him outside of my life. One of us had to live in diaspora.

So when I dated boys who shared my religious background—evangelical boys, conservative Catholic boys, any boys whose frameworks carried the same moral architecture—it felt less like dating and more like reenacting a script.

Not because they were unkind.

Not because they were oppressive.

But because the system we both carried into the room had already decided what love meant, what bodies meant, what desire meant, and who was responsible for containing it.

My nervous system didn’t register them as individuals.

It registered the system.

The relationship was never just two people.

It was always:

me

him

and the echo of God

The Hidden Triangle

That triangle changes everything.

It means:

• your body is never only yours

• desire is never neutral

• longing has consequences

• intimacy is spiritually charged

It means you are never just discovering another person. You are negotiating a cosmology.

And when two people share that cosmology, it can feel seamless—but not necessarily free. Because both of you are responding to an authority that isn’t either of you. Even tenderness can carry the weight of expectation. Even attraction can feel like something that needs permission.

I didn’t have language for this at first. I only knew something in me tightened instead of opened. Something in me watched myself instead of inhabiting myself.

Trauma often feels like that: not fear exactly, but constriction. Not panic, but surveillance. A subtle bracing in the body when something should feel easy. I didn’t want a chaperone in my own nervous system.

Why I Dated Atheists

For a long time, I thought it was rebellion.

It wasn’t.

It was regulation. The pendulum swung in the opposite direction of fundamentalist, high control religion, and that was non-Jesus date.

Dating atheists wasn’t about ideology. It was about silence—the absence of that third voice. With someone who did not share my religious conditioning, the invisible witness disappeared. The air changed. The room got bigger. Desire stopped feeling like a performance review and started feeling like sensation.

My body could finally exhale.

For the first time, intimacy wasn’t triangulated. It was just… human.

No metaphysical stakes.

No moral surveillance.

No spiritual evaluation layered over chemistry.

Just two people discovering each other without heaven leaning over their shoulders.

I didn’t realize how much tension I had been carrying until it was gone.

That relief told me something important:

It wasn’t men I was avoiding.

It was activation.

Separation Before Desire

What I eventually understood was this:

I couldn’t actually date freely until I emotionally and spiritually separated from Jesus.

Not rejected him.

Not hated him.

Not erased him.

Separated. Because you cannot build mutual intimacy with a human partner if your deepest template for love is still organized around surrender to a perfect, invisible beloved. As long as that internal bond remains primary, every human relationship is measured against it—usually unfairly, often unconsciously.

Separation, in this sense, didn’t mean abandoning meaning or spirituality. It meant releasing exclusivity. It meant allowing that internal figure to step out of the role of ultimate partner so that real partners could finally be encountered as themselves.

Not symbols.

Not tests.

Not substitutes.

People. Embodied connection 

The Realization

Here is the quiet truth I wish someone had told me when I was younger:

The intensity you felt in your relationship with Jesus was never proof that he was uniquely capable of intimacy. I had an easiest partner, say something to me about the way I described intimacy with Jesus being in the isolating phenomenon, and that really struck a cord that is stuck with me for the past 20 years.

It was proof that you were.

That capacity—the depth, the longing, the devotion, the ability to feel connection as something vivid and consuming—did not originate outside you. It originated in your own nervous system. It was always yours.

Religion didn’t create it.

It organized it.

It named it.

It claimed it.

But it was yours long before anyone told you where to direct it.

What Remains

Separating from Jesus didn’t make me empty. It made me available.

Available to experience love without surveillance. Desire without moral panic. Intimacy without an audience. Presence without comparison.

It didn’t erase the past. It clarified it.

I can still recognize the beauty in what I once believed. I can still understand why that early romance felt real. But now I know something I didn’t know then:

I was never actually being loved by an invisible beloved. At least that’s how it felt.

I was practicing loving.

And once I realized that, I didn’t need a divine partner to complete the experience.

I could finally meet another human being without a third presence in the room. I didn’t leave God to find love. I left surveillance to find myself.

Not metaphorically.

Not poetically.

Relationally.

We were taught to cultivate a personal relationship with him—intimate, exclusive, emotionally vivid. He knew our thoughts. He saw our hearts. He walked beside us. He loved us more than anyone ever could. We sang love songs to him before we ever held someone’s hand. We pledged devotion before we knew what desire felt like. We learned the grammar of intimacy long before we encountered its embodiment.

Jesus was romantic. The epitome of all high notions of courtly and romantic love.

But he was never sexual.

And for many of us, that distinction quietly destabilized everything. We unintentionally bifurcated sex and love, two things that cannot truly be separated.

The Romance Template We Were Given

In purity culture, intimacy was introduced as devotion before it was introduced as experience. Longing was spiritualized. Attachment was sanctified. Desire was redirected upward. We were taught to give our hearts away before we understood what a heart was capable of wanting.

This formation wasn’t framed as deprivation. It was framed as holiness. With holiness as the ideal, a girl can sublimate the sensations of her body- the feelings of the flesh can be sacrificed for the eternal.

Jesus was the safest object of longing because he could not cross a boundary. He could not misread a signal. He could not take too much. He could not want anything from us that we did not offer. He was perfect love precisely because he was disembodied.

For young girls especially, this became a template:

• be chosen

• be seen

• be known

• be devoted

• belong completely

All without physical risk. It was intimacy without friction. Love without mutuality. Passion without consequence. At the time, it felt transcendent.

What we did not yet know was that it was also incomplete.

We did not know that this paradigm would set us up for failure in our human relationships.

The Developmental Function of Jesus

Psychologically, a personal relationship with Jesus often functions as what attachment theory calls an idealized attachment figure—a presence that is always attuned, always responsive, always available, and never overwhelmed. For a developing child, this can actually serve a real regulatory function. The image of Jesus can provide comfort, structure, and a sense of being held in mind. In environments where emotional attunement is inconsistent or conditional, that internalized figure can help stabilize the self.

In that sense, Jesus is not inherently harmful. For many children, he becomes a scaffold for identity—someone through whom they learn what it means to be known, loved, and seen. He can serve as a mirror in which a young self begins to form. Developmentally, that kind of internal figure can be protective.

But here is the quiet pivot that often goes unnoticed: That process is meant to be transitional.

In healthy development, early attachment figures—real or symbolic—help the self form, and then the self gradually differentiates. The goal is not permanent fusion with the figure. The goal is maturation into one’s own center of gravity.

When a system teaches that the relationship must remain primary, exclusive, and unquestioned, differentiation is interrupted. The mirror is never meant to be set down.

And that is where formation becomes fixation.

The World Outside the Sanctuary

Many of us who grew up this way eventually stepped into the wider world—sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, but always with a sense of crossing a threshold we had been warned about.

I was homeschooled. Sheltered. Formed almost entirely inside a theological ecosystem that defined reality for me before I ever tested it.

And then I encountered something no devotional language had prepared me for:

Reciprocal desire.

Not symbolic longing.

Not spiritual intimacy.

Not metaphor.

Embodied wanting.

And it was disorienting—not because it was wrong, but because it was real. Because it had weight. Because it had temperature. Because it responded back.

The Jesus romance had taught me how to adore. It had not taught me how to be desired. How to share adoration with a real life person.

The Fracture Point

Here is the quiet psychological rupture many survivors of purity culture eventually discover: When your earliest template for intimacy is intensely romantic but entirely nonsexual, your nervous system learns to separate longing from embodiment.

Love lives in one category.

The body lives in another.

So when sexuality finally appears—not as doctrine, but as sensation—it can feel overwhelming, destabilizing, even holy in its intensity. Not because it is sinful. Because it is integrated. Because it reunites two systems that were trained to stay apart.

That reunion can feel electric. It can also feel confusing.

Because part of you recognizes: This is what longing was always pointing toward.

And another part whispers:This is what I was warned about.

That tension is not moral failure. It is developmental whiplash.

When Symbol Meets Flesh

Jesus, as we were taught to know him, occupied the emotional territory of a beloved but never the physical territory of a partner. He held devotion, surrender, awe, and intimacy—but never hunger, friction, or touch.

So when someone in real life evokes intensity and embodiment, they can feel disproportionately powerful. Not because they are uniquely extraordinary, but because they complete a pattern your psyche began forming years earlier.

The mind recognizes the shape.

The body recognizes the charge.

And suddenly something clicks that had previously only existed as abstraction.

This is why first awakenings can feel seismic for those raised in restrictive systems. It isn’t just attraction. It’s integration.

The Misinterpretation of Intensity

Many of us were taught that strong feeling meant divine significance. Intensity was framed as confirmation. The deeper the pull, the truer the call.

So when we later experience intense desire, our nervous systems may interpret it through the same lens:

This must mean something.

This must be important.

This must be real.

But intensity is not always revelation. Sometimes it is recognition. Sometimes it is the nervous system encountering, for the first time, something it was wired for but never allowed to experience.

That does not make it destiny.

It makes it new.

What Actually Breaks the Spell

The spell of the Jesus romance doesn’t break when someone stops believing in God. It breaks when someone realizes they are allowed to inhabit their own body.

When longing no longer has to be redirected.

When desire is no longer treated as betrayal.

When intimacy is no longer confined to imagination.

It breaks when love is allowed to be mutual rather than devotional. When connection includes response. When presence replaces projection.

It breaks when a person understands:

The capacity for depth they once attributed to the divine was never proof of God’s uniqueness. It was evidence of their own.

What Remains

Leaving a system like this does not erase the imprint it left. Many of us still feel echoes—moments when intensity feels sacred, when longing feels cosmic, when desire feels fated rather than embodied.

Those echoes are not failures. They are remnants of a language we learned before we knew other dialects existed.

Recovery is not about silencing them. It is about translating them.

Learning that awe can exist without surrender.

That desire can exist without danger.

That intimacy can exist without losing yourself.

The Truth We Were Never Told

Jesus was romantic because romance was the safest form longing could take in a world that feared bodies.

But we are not disembodied beings.

We are incarnate.

And once you discover that your capacity for intensity lives inside your own nervous system—not in a doctrine, not in a savior, not in another person—you cannot unknow it.

The spell does not shatter violently.

It dissolves quietly.

Not because love disappears.

Because it finally has somewhere real to live— it is deeply destabilizing, but when the myth finally fades away or at least show signs of weakness, true love actually has a chance.

Trauma does not end when the danger ends. It relocates. It lives in muscle memory, in startle responses, in the subtle tightening of the chest when an email subject line reads “urgent.” Recovery from C-PTSD is not a clean break with the past; it is a slow re-education of the body. The mind may know the war is over. The body waits for sirens.

Even as a person long in the journey of recovering from complex trauma, certain triggers can bring back less healed wounds. High stress environments long-term can make it easier for me to engage in pre-healing behaviors. And my leadership role in an organization for the past 1.5 years is such an environment.. Leadership, when layered on top of this, becomes both calling and crucible.

This is because leadership requires exposure. It requires standing where decisions are visible, where criticism lands, where responsibility accumulates. And trauma survivors know what exposure costs. We learned early that being seen could mean being hurt. So we lead with one hand extended toward others and the other braced quietly against the inner wall, steadying ourselves so the shaking does not show.

This is the paradox of post-traumatic leadership: you are strong because you had to be, not because strength was ever optional. And in some ways, needing to be strong becomes its own type of stress.

The Myth of the Self-Assured Leader

We like to tell stories about strong leaders as if confidence were their native language. But confidence, for many trauma survivors, is not an inheritance. It is a reconstruction project.

And for those who carry religious trauma, there is often an additional wound—quieter, more insidious, and harder to name. It is the wound of not trusting yourself.

High-control religious environments frequently teach that your instincts are unreliable, your desires are dangerous, your questions are suspect, and your inner voice must be filtered through external authority. Over time, this training does not just shape belief; it shapes identity. You learn to outsource your knowing. You learn that certainty belongs elsewhere. You learn that safety lies in obedience, not discernment.

So even long after leaving those systems, something lingers:

a reflexive hesitation before trusting your own judgment

a subtle suspicion toward your own intuition

a background question whispering, what if I’m wrong?

This is not indecisiveness. It is conditioning.

Leadership, however, is built on the opposite premise. To lead is to decide. To discern. To trust that your perception of reality is accurate enough to act on. Self-trust is not a luxury in leadership; it is structural. Without it, every decision feels like stepping onto thin ice.

So trauma survivors in leadership often carry a hidden tension:

externally decisive, internally verifying

externally steady, internally checking

externally confident, internally negotiating

Not because they are fraudulent—but because they were trained, at formative ages, not to trust the very instrument leadership requires: their own mind.

Survival Intelligence Disguised as Instability

Many leaders who carry trauma histories are exceptional precisely because their nervous systems learned early how to read subtle signals—tone shifts, micro-expressions, silence patterns. What is labeled “intuition” is often finely tuned survival intelligence.

But religious trauma complicates this gift. When your early environment framed your perceptions as sinful, prideful, or unreliable, you may grow up with a strange contradiction:

You are extraordinarily perceptive.

And you do not trust what you perceive.

So leadership becomes not only the work of guiding others—it becomes the work of slowly rebuilding epistemic trust within yourself. You must relearn that your thoughts are not betrayals, your instincts are not threats, your discernment is not rebellion.

That is sacred work, whether or not you use sacred language for it.

The Erosion No One Talks About

There is a quiet erosion that can happen in leadership, especially in systems that are chronically strained: healthcare, education, social services, ministry, public work. Not the dramatic burnout collapse people recognize, but the subtler erosion of interior life.

It happens gradually:

• one crisis absorbed

• one boundary flexed

• one night of vigilance

• one compromise made for the sake of stability

Until you realize the role is asking for more of you than the job description ever named.

Trauma survivors are particularly vulnerable here because we are practiced at endurance. We know how to override signals of depletion. We know how to keep going while tired, afraid, or alone. We learned it as children. Leadership simply gives that skill a socially sanctioned stage.

But endurance is not the same as wholeness. And if you were taught not to trust yourself, the erosion can happen faster—because the voice that would normally say this is too much was once the voice you were trained to silence.

Shielding What Still Needs Protection

For those of us healing from trauma while leading, there is an additional task most leadership literature never acknowledges: we must actively shield our own humanity from the erosion of leadership.

Not just our time.

Not just our energy.

Our self.

And often, our families as well.

Because leadership can be porous. The needs of organizations do not stop at office doors. The problems of systems do not clock out. They follow you home in the form of unfinished thoughts, ethical dilemmas, names you can’t forget, decisions that keep replaying in your mind long after the meeting has ended.

If you have known trauma, your system is already wired to stay alert for unresolved threat. Leadership gives that wiring endless material.

So you learn to build interior boundaries:

rituals of return

moments of grounding

small acts of reclamation

You learn that protecting your family from the emotional residue of leadership is not secrecy. It is stewardship. They did not choose your role. They chose you.

And you must remain someone they can recognize.

A still Healing Incarnational Wound

What I have come to call the incarnational wound is this: the experience of having learned early that being fully embodied—fully present, fully expressive, fully alive—was not safe. Trauma teaches you to leave parts of yourself behind. To freeze feelings and moments. To fragment. To float above sensation. To shrink.

Religious trauma often deepens this wound by spiritualizing disembodiment. The body becomes suspect. Desire becomes dangerous. Certainty becomes pride. The self becomes something to monitor rather than inhabit.

Recovery, then, is not merely psychological. It is incarnational. It is the slow, trembling return to occupying your own life.

Leadership complicates this return because leadership often rewards disembodiment. It rewards productivity over presence, composure over authenticity, performance over integration. It asks for steadiness even when your interior world is still learning how to stand.

So the work becomes twofold:

to lead

and to come home to yourself while doing it.

This is slow work. It cannot be rushed. It is not dramatic. It looks, from the outside, like ordinary functioning. But internally it is tectonic.

It is the daily practice of choosing not to abandon yourself, even when responsibility would make it easier to.

What Healing Leadership Actually Looks Like

Healing leadership is not loud. It is not theatrical. It is not charismatic in the way we are taught to admire.

It looks like:

• pausing before reacting

• trusting your perception without over-interrogating it

• noticing your breath in conflict

• telling the truth when it would be easier to posture

• leaving work at work when your body says it has carried enough

It looks like staying human inside systems that reward machinery.

Trauma survivors who lead do not need to become harder. We need to become more integrated. The goal is not invulnerability. The goal is permeability with discernment—soft where it is safe, firm where it is necessary, rooted enough to remain present without dissolving.

And for those healing religious trauma, perhaps the most radical leadership act is this:

to trust your own voice

before you trust any external authority.

The Quiet Triumph

There is no ceremony for this kind of leadership. No award for the leader who breaks generational patterns while meeting quarterly goals. No applause for the woman who runs an organization while teaching her nervous system that she is no longer in danger. No public recognition for the person who chooses not to replicate the harm that once shaped them.

But this is real leadership.

Not domination.

Not perfection.

Not tireless strength.

Transformation.

The slow burn of becoming someone who can hold responsibility without being consumed by it. Someone who can stand in authority without abandoning tenderness. Someone who can remain present to others without disappearing from themselves.

Healing, for trauma survivors in leadership, is not separate from leadership. It is the most ethical form of it.

And perhaps the truest measure of success is this:

Not how much you carried.

But how much of yourself you were able to keep while you inevitably carried so much.

This is a heavy time for me- and writing allows me to keep this self connection. 

All the erotic gravity of myth is there.

And it draws the reader—or the viewer—in.

That is what’s unsettling.

With distance—and with clinical training—it becomes difficult to read Wuthering Heights as a romance at all. What it offers instead is a portrait of enmeshment so complete that there is scarcely a self left to observe it. Cathy and Heathcliff do not merely love one another; they derive their very existence through the bond. Meaning, identity, vitality—all of it flows through the Other. When the bond fractures, there is nothing sturdy underneath to hold what remains. The self dissolves with the relationship because its very existence required that relationship to continue.

A self cannot survive—much less thrive—inside a system where meaning is outsourced.

Where identity is borrowed.

Where the Other remembers you into being.

Enmeshment feels powerful precisely because it relieves the burden of selfhood. It answers the existential question Who am I? with You are mine.

That answer can feel intoxicating.

It can also be annihilating.

For those raised in high-control evangelical environments, this structure is not unfamiliar. Intimacy is introduced early, framed as salvation, and organized around exclusivity. God is not primarily communal, symbolic, or transcendent, but personal in the most psychologically charged sense: a divine beloved who sees all, claims all, and gives life meaning through relationship itself.

This God is intimate and omnipresent.

A watcher. A lover. A rescuer.

Often jealous. Often demanding. Always total.

Desire, in this system, is not eliminated—it is concentrated. Puberty does not arrive with room for experimentation or uncertainty, but with direction. Longing is encouraged, even intensified, as long as it is directed upward. Worship language borrows freely from romantic grammar: pursuit, surrender, devotion, union. The emotional experience is deep. The bodies inhabiting it are young.

From a clinical and philosophical perspective, this matters profoundly.

Selves are not formed through intensity alone. They are formed through differentiation—through the gradual experience of being distinct, limited, separate, and still connected. When intensity replaces differentiation, the self may feel alive, even exalted, but it remains structurally underdeveloped.

This becomes most visible after the rupture.

Breaking up with God—especially a God framed as a personal, all-powerful beloved—is not simply a shift in belief. It is the collapse of a meaning-making structure. The aftermath is rarely linear. There is relief and grief, liberation and panic. There is often a period of oscillation: a reaching for autonomy followed by a longing for fusion; an insistence on self-sufficiency followed by a pull toward something—someone—who promises totality again.

Clinically, this is not pathology.

It is reactivity.

A nervous system trained to locate meaning outside the self will continue to search for an anchor. Sometimes that anchor becomes a romantic relationship that feels outsized and consuming. Sometimes it becomes work, motherhood, ideology, or a cause. The form shifts, but the pattern remains: the self organizes around the Other in order to feel real.

For those who have lived through religious trauma—and often other forms of trauma alongside it—this progression makes a painful kind of sense. When you have been taught that the very thing that makes you good, holy, or lovable is emptiness, filling the void of loneliness with another person can feel not only natural but necessary. When we have been taught that being ourselves is suspect, that disappearing is virtue, intimacy becomes deeply confusing.

The tragedy of enmeshment is not that it lacks feeling.

It is that it leaves no room for growth.

When the Other holds meaning, the self cannot experiment, fail, expand, or revise. Desire becomes directive rather than informative. Separation feels like death because, in a way, it is—the death of a borrowed identity.

This is why Wuthering Heights remains so unsettling. Cathy’s famous declaration—I am Heathcliff—is often quoted as romantic truth. But psychologically, it signals collapse. There is no self left to return to when the bond ruptures. Love becomes indistinguishable from annihilation.

Theological systems that mirror this structure—where salvation is personal possession, where God belongs to the individual, where meaning flows through exclusive intimacy—can inadvertently train the same fragility. When God is the sole source of coherence, the self never practices standing on its own ground. And when that God is lost, questioned, or redistributed into community, the ground feels unbearably thin.

What emerges slowly, often painfully, is the realization that neither God nor love was ever meant to function as a substitute for selfhood. And yet, how understandable it is—especially for those who have lived through so much trauma, religiously and otherwise—that relationship becomes the place where the void is filled again. When we have been taught that being empty is what makes us worthy, learning how to exist as a self in relationship is deeply disorienting.

This is where differentiation enters—not as a rejection of intimacy, but as its necessary condition. To be intimate and truly share ourselves, there must be a self to share to begin with.

Differentiation allows meaning to be held rather than received. It permits connection without collapse. It makes room for longing without obedience, closeness without erasure. It is the capacity to remain oneself in the presence of what matters.

Cathy and Heathcliff never learn this. Their world allows only fusion or exile. And so the self never survives long enough to mature. Their unmet need for a sense of self continues to draw them together again and again—despite loss, despite consequence, despite better judgment.

For those raised to love like salvation—first into God, later into others—the work is quieter, less dramatic, and far more demanding than the moors suggest. It is not about abandoning faith or scorning intensity. It is about cultivating a self that can survive meaning without surrendering to it.

Learning how to stand—

limited,

separate,

and still alive.

The self that grew up in a high-control evangelical purity culture often must first break up with that version of God—the God of fusion and erasure—before it can ever become whole enough to live, and eventually to find peace with divinity again, perhaps in another religious form: one rooted in community rather than exclusivity, in shared meaning rather than private possession.

Only then can intimacy—human or divine—be something other than salvation.

Read more

I am no longer evangelical. I don’t even inhabit those categories anymore. What interests me now is not belief versus unbelief, but the structure of the relationship that evangelical Christianity teaches—particularly the idea of a “personal relationship with Jesus.” Increasingly, I see this language not as spiritually liberating, but as psychologically isolating, deeply individualistic, and uniquely capable of co-opting human intimacy, desire, and development—especially for children and adolescents.

The Myth of Timeless Personal Faith

The “personal relationship with Jesus” is often presented as the essence of Christianity itself. Historically, it is nothing of the sort.

For the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history, faith was primarily communal, sacramental, and embodied. To be Christian meant to belong to a people, a rhythm of worship, a moral and social world. Salvation was not understood primarily as an interior emotional bond, but as participation in a collective life oriented toward God.

The sharp turn toward individualized salvation emerges during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and John Calvin re-centered faith on the individual conscience standing alone before God. Grace was no longer mediated chiefly through church, sacrament, or community, but through an interior, psychological encounter between the soul and the divine.

This individualism was not incidental. It was the theological solution to a particular problem: if humanity was fundamentally depraved and condemned, then God’s mercy could only be preserved by singling out individuals to save. Salvation became personal because condemnation was universal.

The cost of this move was profound. Faith was relocated from the shared world into the private psyche.

Universal Mercy vs. Interior Surveillance

By contrast, Catholic theology—despite its own institutional failures—maintains a different metaphysical logic. Because God was understood as fundamentally universal and merciful, salvation did not depend on explicit verbal assent or emotional intimacy with Jesus as a discrete object of attachment. One could be oriented toward God through conscience, goodness, truth, and love.

Contemporary Catholic thinkers such as Robert Barron articulate this clearly: a person need not “say the right words” to be saved. The divine spark—the conscience, the capacity for love and moral striving—was sufficient. Salvation remained tethered to participation in the good, not to the quality of one’s interior emotional performance. This distinction matters deeply when viewed through the lens of trauma.

When salvation is individualized, failure is individualized as well. Doubt becomes betrayal. Desire becomes disobedience. Confusion becomes a flaw of character rather than a signal of unmet need. God ceases to be a shared mystery and becomes an internal supervisor—watching, judging, evaluating the private self.

When Religion Becomes a Relationship

In evangelical culture, the language of personal relationship is not neutral. It is relationally specific. Jesus is described as intimate, attentive, ever-present, emotionally available. He “knows your heart.” He “walks with you.” He must come before all others.

For girls in particular, this relationship is often subtly romanticized. Jesus is framed as the perfect man, the faithful partner, the one who will never leave or betray. Girls are implicitly positioned as the feminine beloved of a divine male figure.

This does not remain symbolic.

During puberty—when desire, curiosity, and bodily awareness naturally awaken—these energies are not allowed full human expression. Instead, they are spiritualized. Longing is redirected upward. Attachment is sacralized. Sexual development is postponed or moralized into silence.

Many women, looking back now, are realizing something unsettling: they did not experience adolescence as a bodily process. They experienced it as a religious ordeal. Puberty did not unfold as growth; it was framed as temptation. Desire did not integrate; it went underground.

And what goes underground does not disappear. It waits.

Isolation as a Feature, Not a Flaw

The personal relationship model in religion is isolating by design. If salvation is individual, then suffering is a private test. Doubt is a personal weakness. Struggle is something to take to God alone. The collective—where experiences might be mirrored, named, or challenged—is bypassed.

This structure is particularly dangerous in contexts of abuse. When harm occurs, individuals are encouraged to search their hearts, forgive quickly, endure silently, and spiritualize pain. Forgiveness is demanded before safety. Endurance is reframed as holiness. Silence becomes virtue.

In this way, individualized salvation does not merely allow abuse. It actively protects it. There is no shared accountability when everything is happening between God and the individual soul.

What People Are Actually Grieving

When people leave evangelical Christianity, they are often accused of abandoning faith, morality, or God. But what many are actually grieving is the collapse of a falsely intimate attachment—one that organized their inner life while quietly distorting their development.

They are grieving:

• a relationship that demanded loyalty without reciprocity

• a spirituality that replaced human connection rather than supporting it

• a God who required the postponement of embodiment to remain “pure”

This is why Taylor Tomlinson’s joke resonates. Because what lingers is not God as an abstract idea. It is the relationship. And like many first relationships formed under conditions of control, idealization, and asymmetry, it takes years to untangle what was love, what was fear, and what was survival.

Toward a Less Coercive Sacred

If there is something worth recovering, it is not a privatized romance with the divine. It is a spirituality that can hold the collective, the embodied, and the unfinished.

A faith where conscience matters more than compliance.

Where desire is not treated as betrayal.

Where adolescence is not sacrificed to purity.

Where God does not need to replace human intimacy to justify divine presence.

This is a different take than many I’ve heard from those who’ve left evangelicalism. I cannot blame the person who’s abandoned the sense of spirituality or religion due to the trauma experience within a religious system. I’ve been through some pretty dark nights of this all myself, but at the end of the day, I don’t think I’m fully abandoning Abrahamic Christian spirituality.

Leaving evangelicalism, for many, is not rebellion. It is differentiation. It is the slow reclaiming of a self that was asked to belong too early, too completely, and too quietly.

It is not returning to the ex.

It is finally walking away—and learning how to live in one’s own body afterward. I am eager to continue conversations with those who are reconstructing a faith outside of the system in which they were raised, and even those who stayed in their system or who have left the religious belief structures altogether. We are still healing together.

My child undoes me.

Even writing that feels dangerous, like a confession I’m not supposed to make out loud.

His very presence—his weight, his need, the way he takes up space—challenges something in me that I was not ready for. Carrying him in my body did it first. Pregnancy stripped away the illusion that my body belonged solely to me, but I told myself that was temporary. A phase. Something I would move through.

But his arrival didn’t give my body back.

It changed the terms entirely.

Now, as he struggles—right on schedule—through the long, grinding work of differentiation, he needs me more, not less. He pushes away and pulls closer in the same breath. He wants independence and collapse. Autonomy and fusion. He wants to be himself and still be held like he is not separate.

And that is where I unravel.

There is something about being needed this much, this physically, this insistently, that lights up old wiring in me. Not memory exactly—something deeper. Sensation. Alarm. A tightening that arrives before thought.

I am triggered.

Not because I don’t love him.

Not because I don’t understand development.

But because my body learned, long ago, that closeness could cost too much.

What he asks of me is simple and relentless:

to show up and hold until the wave passes.

He does not want solutions.

He does not want distraction.

He wants me to stay—steady, present—while the surge moves through him.

He needs me to be the barrier reef.

To take the full force of his feeling and break it into something survivable. To stand between his raw emotion and the open sea, softening the impact so it does not drown him. To be the bulwark—absorbing, diffusing, holding—until the water calms.

And this is where it hurts.

Because being the reef means feeling the wave hit first. It means letting his distress crash into my body and trusting that I will not be destroyed by it. It means holding without hardening, absorbing without disappearing.

My nervous system does not trust this.

His cries land in my chest like a demand I cannot satisfy without erasing myself. His need feels endless, bottomless, and my body interprets that as danger. I tell myself this is toddlerhood. I tell myself this is normal. I tell myself he is learning that he is separate.

But my body hears something else.

There is no edge.

There is no relief.

This is forever, you will suffer forever.

You will be consumed.

So I brace. I flinch. I go rigid inside myself while trying to look calm on the outside. I feel myself split—one part holding him, the other watching closely to make sure I don’t lose myself in the process.

This is the part that shames me.

I believe, deeply, that parenting should not require self-harm. That I should be able to soothe an anxious child without inflicting pain on myself. That presence should not feel like erasure.

And yet—here we are.

My child wants a kind of closeness that hurts me. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Just honestly. He wants my body, my arms, my full availability. He wants contact that is total.

And I am not good at total.

I was trained to survive closeness by staying alert. By monitoring tone. By preparing for the moment it would turn. I learned to walk on eggshells not because I was fragile, but because the ground was unpredictable.

So when my child clings, when he collapses into me, when he refuses separation, something ancient tightens. I am no longer just a mother in the present moment. I am a body remembering what it took to stay intact.

This is unfinished learning.

He is not asking me to be perfect.

He is asking me to stay.

To stay without explaining.

To stay without escaping into competence.

To stay without abandoning myself or him.

That is brutal.

Some moments I can do it. I breathe. I ground. I remind myself that I am an adult now. That I can step away if I need to. That staying is a choice, not a trap.

Other moments, I cannot. I pull back. I feel resentment rise. I feel the urge to make his need smaller so I can survive it.

None of this feels noble.

But it is real.

My child is teaching me—slowly, painfully—that presence does not have to mean disappearance. That I can hold and still have edges. That differentiation is not just his work. It is mine.

I am not finished learning how to be the reef, how to hold.

But I am learning, in fits and starts, that being triggered does not mean being dangerous. That struggling does not mean failing. That love can coexist with limits, even when my body is still catching up to that truth.

This is the story of being unwound—and staying anyway. Of trusting in the safety of the unknown, because I am the safety for my little one. No one can be safety for him like I can.

I have a complicated relationship with longing.

I suspect many people do, but for those of us shaped by childhood disruption, family trauma, or high-control religious environments, longing is rarely a simple ache. It is braided tightly with survival. With belonging. With shame. With the sense that to want too much—or to want in the wrong way—might cost us connection altogether.

For children growing up in unstable or unsafe families, longing is not abstract. It is visceral. The longing to belong, to be seen as oneself, to be safe without apologizing for existing becomes inseparable from attachment itself. Belonging is not a luxury; it is the condition for survival. And so children adapt. They become who they need to be in order to stay close to the person or system that provides care—even when that care is inconsistent, harmful, or emotionally unavailable.

This is how longing becomes conditional early on.
I can belong if I am less.
I can be loved if I manage myself well enough.

This is why containment matters so profoundly in parenting—and why it is so often misunderstood. Recently, a client spoke about her anxiety that she was neglecting her child by not “appropriately managing” his expectations. What she described, though she didn’t name it this way, was a child who felt safe enough to be volatile, unpredictable, ungrateful, and emotionally messy in her presence. Together, we reflected on what that actually signifies: not neglect, but safety. A stable relational container where a child does not have to regulate himself in order to be loved. A space where feelings can move through rather than be managed away.

Many of us did not have that.

Alongside this trauma-shaped longing, there is also the more universal, human kind. The longing to matter. To be known. To have one’s inner life mirrored and received. This is the longing that animates art, music, romance, friendship. It is not pathological. It is the ache of being finite, embodied, relational creatures. When environments are safe enough, this longing can move toward expression, connection, satisfaction, and rest.

But when trauma is present, longing rarely completes that arc. It gets stuck in striving, fantasy, intensity, or self-abandonment. The longing itself is not different—its conditions are.

And then there is religious longing.

In many Christian frameworks, particularly those shaped by high control or purity culture, longing is not only acknowledged but actively cultivated—while simultaneously being deferred. One is encouraged to long for God, for wholeness, for union, for redemption—but closeness is positioned as fundamentally absent. Fulfillment is always later. The divine is near yet unreachable. The body is suspect. Desire is dangerous. Satisfaction belongs to another realm.

For someone already trained by family systems to wait, to hope, to adapt, to subordinate their own needs for belonging, this theology lands with particular force. Longing becomes holy only insofar as it is unfulfilled. The ache itself is sanctified. Resolution is postponed indefinitely.

Purity culture adds another layer of distortion. It does not erase longing—it interrupts the ability to recognize, trust, and process it. In a healthy developmental arc, longing moves toward expression and contact. In purity culture, longing is met with silence, shame, or moral panic. The body becomes an unreliable narrator. Desire is severed from wisdom. Awareness itself is suspect.

What results is not the absence of longing, but its fragmentation. Longing becomes disembodied, intensified, abstracted, or displaced. It circulates without a place to land.

This is where so many of us find ourselves: taught to long, commanded to wait, forbidden to reach.

It occurred to me recently—on a run, in that clear-headed liminal space—that American culture offers a workaround for this unbearable tension. When you are taught to be less, capitalism whispers that you can have more. More productivity. More achievement. More consumption. More meaning. Longing is redirected, not resolved.

Not because we are shallow or ungrateful—but because longing must move somewhere.

I think what I am circling now is not the elimination of longing, but a different relationship to it. One that asks which longings belong to unmet developmental needs, which are simply human, which were amplified or distorted by religious systems, and which are now allowed—finally—to be answered without guilt or transcendence.

Perhaps the work is not to spiritualize longing or rush to resolve it, but to let it be seen clearly. To allow some longings to be fulfilled in embodied, relational ways. To trust that satisfaction is not betrayal. That rest is not failure. That belonging does not require erasure.

Longing, when held—when contained—does not have to consume us.

Sometimes it simply wants to come home.

Aimless Wandering was written during the early stages of my separation from evangelical purity culture—before clarity, before language, before I understood what I was untangling. It came after A Fatal Attraction, not as a correction, but as a continuation of the same internal conversation.

At that point, I had perhaps overly rejected the system that formed me, yet was still inside its gravitational pull. I had leapt far beyond the teaching of my youth, but immaturely. Desire still felt dangerous, cognition felt safe, and seriousness passed for maturity. I cut off the system of control and threw the baby out with the bath waters, but I was beginning to sense that something had gone wrong… and did not yet know how to name it. The conflict was not theoretical. It lived in my body, my journals, my metaphors.

This piece carries the weight of that moment. It is more punishing than I would write now, more fatalistic, more willing to confuse intensity with depth. But it is honest. It reflects a mind trying to reason its way out of a formation that had taught it to distrust feeling and to equate restraint with goodness.

What I see now—and what I could not fully see then—is that even inside that seriousness, something else was present. Imagination. Longing. A quiet refusal to disappear entirely. The counter-voice you’ll hear in this piece was already there, even if I didn’t yet know how to listen to it.

I offer Aimless Wandering not as a finished reflection, but as a record of differentiation in motion, an early attempt to tell the truth from inside the struggle, before resolution was possible. Yet little did I know the work itself was not to arrive, but to step into the space I already inhabited. 

Aimless Wandering

I became serious too early.

Not because I lacked imagination, but because seriousness felt safer than joy. When I was young enough to believe in dreams and fairy tales, I learned—quietly—that dreaming was fragile. Thinking was durable. Thought could endure where feeling felt exposed.

I look now to academics the way I once looked to holiness, searching for a language that might redeem a life I had not yet learned how to inhabit. It’s strange what God—or the idea of God—can use to reach beneath armor-plated skin. Not doctrine, but ordinary things: a children’s song about grace, a sentence sharp enough to expose places frostbitten long before I knew they were numb. Things gentle enough to slip past vigilance.

I set out early, self-knighted, on a quest I did not fully choose.

I traveled roads of fortune and mystery, convinced that gravity itself was proof of depth. Melancholic, I learned seriousness beyond my years. I mistook weight for wisdom. I mistook restraint for maturity. Joy felt indulgent. Ease felt suspect.

The sun baked my skin into something tougher than armor as I trudged forward on what I believed was the only likeness of meaning. I was too young to take this road with so much life still ahead, but intensity felt inevitable. A fatalism settled early—no diversion seemed possible, no alternate path permitted.

And yet—

Even then, something resisted.

I wandered not only out of despair, but instinct. Wandering was the only freedom that did not require permission. I escaped into thought not only to survive, but to travel. Cognition became my sanctioned refuge. If the body was suspect, the mind could roam. If desire was dangerous, imagination could disguise it.

I called this discipline.

I called this devotion.

I did not yet know I was splitting in two.

Then there was fire.

It appeared as recognition, not danger.

A brightness that entranced my thoughts and intentions. I welcomed it hungrily, too quickly, fanning a flame with haste. I did not yet know that the most precious things are delicate, that they must be permitted to grow rather than pried open or sealed tight.

The fire burned uncontrolled.

What I thought was treasure revealed itself as something fragile. I panicked. Afraid I had destroyed it, I sealed it away, keeping watch with diligence that resembled care but was closer to fear. I guarded what little life remained with such intensity that it had no room to breathe.

Was it already too late?

Could the flower be uncovered and restored?

Or had I saved it from one death only to sentence it to another?

So I continued the wandering.

I chose motion over trust. Distance over repair. Control over uncertainty. I told myself the fire had consumed the forest—that extinguishing it was wisdom. That obsession was the danger, not the longing beneath it.

And still—

The counter-voice did not disappear.

It waited.

It watched me avert my gaze from every blossom passed for fear of renewing hope. It watched melancholy thicken into something self-sustaining, watched joy become an empty endeavor. Without warmth, frost settled. I learned how to petrify—on the surface.

Mystery became shroud rather than invitation.

Unknowing lingered like mourners beside me.

Life narrowed into motion: one step, then another, then another.

The aim was lost, but the journey continued, carrying the faint evidence that hope might someday resurrect itself.

Aimless wandering permits return.

Paths repeat.

And one day—without intention—I found myself back in the glade where something had once bloomed. The rose, frozen into ice, retained sap from a source beyond itself. Preserved more fragile than before, but not gone. Trodden underfoot, hidden from the sun, still alive in a way I could not explain.

The dream broke.

Wakefulness arrived.

I do not know yet if the fire will rise again to melt what I preserved through fear. I do not know what tending that fire looks like now. I only know that seriousness was never the absence of longing—it was its containment. That wandering was not aimless—it was the perseverance something in me that refused to disappear entirely.

I am no longer willing to seal desire away in the name of safety.

I am learning—slowly—to let gravity and longing speak to each other without demanding an ending. Learning to journey into my own skin and withhold punishment from the pressing voices.

But this journey, too, is unfinished.

“I can’t access my emotions.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

I hear this from people who are 19, 32, 65. Different histories. Different languages. The same ache underneath.

In sessions, over and over again, clients frame this as a personal deficit—as avoidance, resistance, fear of vulnerability. As if feeling were a muscle people…

Read more