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- [00:00]
A
I am conducting some more spiritual abuse research with the help of Dr. Lisa Adam quals and Carrie Klatt of Concordia University in Wisconsin. And we are looking at the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and lifetime exposure to spiritual abuse. Our anonymous survey is live and the link is in the show notes. The only requirements are that you are 18 years of older and that you either were raised Christian or have identified as Christian at some point in your life. Again, that link is in the show notes. And please feel free to share with anybody else in your life who you think might appreciate taking part in this research. And we thank you heartily. Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind, the show where whenever, whenever a new listener that you signed up signs up their own new listeners, you get paid too. I'm your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist, and with me today, already enjoying herself, is Valerie Martin. Valerie's a licensed social worker therapist, clinical director of the Gaia center in Nashville, which is what appears to me to be a very cool collaborative group therapy practice. Also co host of the podcast, but for real, great title. We met recently at an existential therapy conference and cooked up this conversation, which is really gonna start with Valerie's story of kind of getting into wellness, multi level marketing world and what she thinks about that as a clinician. And I cannot fucking wait. Thanks for being here, Valerie.
- [01:52]
B
Why, thank you. I'm delighted. And that is the first, but not the last time you will hear me cackle today.
- [01:57]
A
There's a positive, linear relationship between cackles and the quality of the episode for the average listener. More cackles, higher quality. So we're going to be listening for that. Okay, so I have a couple things prepared, but the idea here is that you've got a pretty interesting personal narrative around this stuff, and then we will use that as an architecture to talk about concepts and things like that. So how far back do we need to start for this story?
- [02:29]
B
Well, I guess I'll just give like the context that I was not really raised religious, though sort of in the background. Like my grandfather and aunt were Methodist ministers, and so we went to the Methodist church and then some things went awry there and my mom then left for the Unitarian Universalist Church when I was in high school. So I've been kind of a longtime uu, but the thing about UU is you can be that and whatever. So you can be UU and atheist or pagan or Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or whatever. So my sort of path since then in adulthood has kind of winded around, but I have that little bit of, you know, context from sort of more traditional religion.
- [03:21]
A
Yeah, you get the cues and you understand the sort of context, and you can feel comfortable in a church and things like that. But, yeah, Unitarian Universalism, that's a really interesting way. One thing to highlight there that's probably relevant for this conversation is if we were to graph religious groups on a continuum of. Some people talk about high control. I think that's helpful. But control is sometimes not exactly the thing. Like, totalizing is a word I kind of like. Like, how much of your life is this religious group supposed to inform? And, like, how central is it supposed to be? How totalizing is it? UU is at the very end, you know, so I'm working with, you know, ex Jehovah's Witnesses, ex Mormons, people who've left, you know, cults or something quite like it. That's on the one end of the spectrum. Unitarian Universalism is. Is as if it was designed in a lab to be the least totalizing and, like, require the least of you and give you maximum agency. And there are draws and also there are consequences and sort of negative, you know, drawbacks to all those things.
- [04:35]
B
Yeah, and I love to hear that because I remember, you know, when I was, like, the angsty teenager and my mom was sort of making that transition, and I was like, church is dumb, and, you know, I don't want to be told what to believe. And then when I realized, like, wait, I can go here and they're not going to tell me what I have to believe. I mean, there's sort of the seven principles, which is like, hey, we're all, like, more or less on board with the inherent worth, the dignity of every human being and things like that. But beyond that, believe what you want to believe. And that was sort of revolutionary to me. So I still identify as that, even though I stopped going to actual church
- [05:15]
A
during COVID So I'm trying to remember from, you know, two cocktails in and an evening. Isn't that where it starts? Or does it. Does it kick? Does it really get going during COVID or is that when the story kind of begins?
- [05:30]
B
Oh, yeah. So I would say a little before, like a couple years, maybe 2017, I started, like, dipping my toes in the new age sort of waters and, you know, getting into tarot. And I was already a registered yoga teacher by that point. And I got curious about paganism because I am such a fan of the Earth. Big fan, big fan.
- [05:57]
A
Waterfalls, sunsets, you know, big fan Gaia Center. I mean, you chose that Term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does that term mean? I feel like I'll get it wrong.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, so like Gaia theory, designed or created by James Lovelock was really the first kind of concrete theory noting that the world is a living system. Right. So everything is interdependent and everything is sort of alive. And I like to say the Earth is our larger body. So Gaia is, you know, the Greek earth goddess. And I think it's all like our disconnection from the Earth is at the root of, I think, a lot of our psychological distress. So, yes, very much a fan of Earth centered spirituality. And you know, I think the beauty of that is like, let's say that there's a giant pagan umbrella. There's so many things under that umbrella. Everything from your kind of classic Wicca witchcraft stuff to druidry, which I trained in Druidry for a while with the order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and lots of other things under the umbrella of paganism. And some pagans but believe in sort of supernatural or paranormal phenomena, like, you know, maybe what we traditionally think of as like magic or spell work. And some pagans do not. And so I really fell more into that category of like materialist pagan, where I'm like, the Earth, like it is magical, but there's nothing supernatural about it to me. And so anyway, I started, but it's like, I think one of the things I noticed in that journey is like, I would find someone who's, oh, I like their work around this one thing, like around tarot. Oh, but they're also talking about past lives or they're talking about communicating with your spirit guides. So this is where it started to get a little slippery is especially as an entrepreneur, there's a lot of content that's geared toward you're stepping to your next level, which requires you to get out of your thinking mind and into your spiritual mind. So then where that became a problem for me was instead of trusting my sort of inner discernment of going, okay, I like what this person says about this, but that actually doesn't mean that I have to agree with or dive into this part of their work. If it doesn't align with me is then I would sort of take on the implied message of if I'm struggling to believe or lean into that other thing, it's just because I'm being too cognitive, too intellectual and I'm blocking myself. That's my limiting beliefs. So if I really want to achieve my breakthrough quantum leap, then I have to get out of my head and lean into the spiritual. Right.
- [09:02]
A
You're already kind of highlighting something that I think will probably come up more explicitly, which is that in these areas that have a bit of an esoteric sheen on them, they are in part marketing themselves as alternative. That, that is sort of baked in. It's baked into the graphic design, it's baked into font choices, it's baked into mottos and phrases. There also is very often, especially for the ones who are really trying to swing for the fences, they're going to use just enough regular science, or at least terms that sound like regular science. And there are of course legitimate, interesting empirical questions to ask at the frontier edges of all of those scientific ideas. And some of these sort of taking it off in this direction will end up being true, some of them will end up being false. But there's, there's a freedom, there's a felt freedom, it seems to me to sort of incorporate that like, yeah, you're self limiting beliefs. Well that's Aaron Beck, that's cognitive theory. But it's not the way we use it in cbt. Like it, it's a little, it's like. And there is performance psychology, there's sports psychology that focuses on performance. There's, there are forms of like, you know, yeah, high performing individuals. There are psychologists and other folks who look at that and there is research on it. And there's also always the question, is the person who's sharing this back to me, are they conversant in that? Like, do they actually understand it or have they picked up just enough to sort of. For their purposes.
- [10:45]
B
Right. And a lot of it is very superficial because I agree that, you know, that there's a lot of the sort of, like you said, fringe areas that I'm actually sort of coming back around to the idea that just because something is not necessarily aligned with the current mainstream paradigm of science and psychology, for instance, doesn't mean that it's like total bullshit. But there are a lot of these people who sort of like did some yoga and went on a retreat and decided that they were going to become a master spiritual life coach. And then of course the real money is in the business coaching. So they, you know, coached five clients and then they decided what they really wanted to do was coach other coaches. And that's where like the MLM angle comes in because that's where the real money is. So it's a very slippery slope. And then you really are left having to do a lot of discernment of like, is this person, the real deal. Because there are good coaches out there. Hashtag, not all coaches. There are good coaches out there, but there are. There's a lot of. I don't. Snake oil might be too strong of a term, but just like, you know, if you're not investing in yourself, it's because you don't believe in your value. And that means signing up for this $10,000 mastermind. And in that mastermind, really, you're just gonna show up and be in my energy, which is a privilege.
- [12:17]
A
Yeah, well, okay, well, I'm gonna. I'm going to. I'm not going to touch that one. I'm going to go back to the narrative and ask you, what do you think it was around 2017 that. So you said you were already a yoga teacher and you were already had. Already recognized in yourself something that is still true of you today, that you really do care about the earth. And you. You genuinely believe, like, that sort of modern, industrialized, technologized culture that separates the average person from the physical earth to a much greater degree than, you know, that's sort of a historical experiment that's unprecedented, that, like, there are real consequences to that, and that includes consequences related to standard mental health issues. All of that makes sense to me and totally agree. And also interested in what are the limits of that and how efficacious is that kind of stuff. Great question. Open question to me. But tarot, that's a little different. So you got into tarot. So let's start there. What do you think was like, oh, yeah, maybe this. What do you think it was? Sort of. And I'm curious if you still feel that way today. What was that scratching?
- [13:32]
B
Yeah, Well, I think tarot in particular is really cool because, yes, there are people who approach it from perhaps what we might say a more supernatural place of like, divination. Right. That I am going to imagine that somehow these cards are not just connecting me with my intuition, they're also connecting me with some knowing of, like, what may come to pass. So I've never used tarot for divination, but I use it in more of like sort of a Jungian sense of these are 78 archetypes. And if I, you know, whether it's I pull a card a day or I do some sort of five card spread or something like that, what I see in those particular cards, if I have some level of familiarity with those archetypes, it's sort of like Rorschach. Like, what comes up for me today, seeing these particular cards when I'm bringing this question and that to me is more like tapping into your intuition or maybe some would say the subconscious mind for that sort of self guidance. So I'm really drawn to that. I think the imagery, I don't love the traditional Rider Waite imagery. I think it's kind of a little stark. But I have, I mean, I've got five decks sitting on my shelf next to me because I've been getting back into it recently. And again, I love that you can interpret it in a number of different ways. But then I'll tell you, sort of the next thread that I came into was astrology. And I mean, it's like, I don't know any Tarot person who doesn't also love astrology. So then I thought, oh, okay, you started to get it informed by like, oh, it's not just your sun sign. It's like you gotta know your whole natal birth chart. And then based on that, it's like what's happening in all your houses and where all your planets are. And the way it was sort of sold to me is that once you understand more your full birth chart, your sun, moon and rising sign, then it's much deeper and more useful than like just knowing your sun sign and your horoscope.
- [15:44]
A
Well, that's. And it's not dissimilar at some level from saying, oh, I see that you have been coming to church most Sundays. What you really should do is get into a weekly Bible study. And then what you really should do is have your own daily, you know, devotional practice. And, you know, there's a sense in which. There it is, it is 100% true, I would say, at the phenomenal phenomenological level, that is the experiential level, that when a person dives deeper into an already existing rich ecosystem, like, you know, Tarot and astrology and all that kind of stuff, or Pentecostalism or picket, whatever. As you dig deeper, if this thing has been around long enough and enough people have sort of created stuff in here and there is a whole ecosystem to play in, you will feel a deeper, you know, assuming you like it, right? If you, yeah, if you go deeper and you go, oh, this actually, I really don't. And maybe we're gonna come to where that kind of started to happen and you had to draw some lines, right? But assuming that you don't hit those things, then yeah, you will feel more invested and, you know, we'll talk a little bit about some specific language that researchers have for what's going on there. But in general you're just spending more time, more energy, the more time and energy you spend with it. It's seeping into your vocabulary, but also your schema, your way of understanding the world and yourself within it. And you'll start to pull on that vocabulary to describe yourself. And now you are telling your own narrative to people and you're basically doing narrative therapy or you're doing the sort of just the narrative version of narrative therapy. And now this is a part of you, and now it's becoming your identity. And you fought, you know, you just follow these steps and it's like, yeah, that, that's like, that's just kind of what happens when we get into something. And the sort of more sort of deeper and more pre existing size and scope of the thing means how far you can go. And this stuff, you can go pretty far. I mean, you can get into, you can get into like the modern Satanists reading into like alchemy. I mean you could go really, you could go very far if you want to go there.
- [18:01]
B
Oh yeah, absolutely. And I will say that again, like I'm in this moment of sort of, you know, again questioning my understanding of things. Questioning like why I have pushed back against certain things. I certainly threw the baby out with the bathwater. But I will say, like I want to. I can't sit here and say I know for certain that astrology is total bullshit. However, it's I guess going back to the narrative around the time that Covid hit, when I was already kind of delving into all these things and trying to sort of push myself to become more sort of supernatural or paranormal with my sort of pagan practices. And I was really kind of felt like I was square peg in the round hole. But I was like, you gotta try harder, stop intellectualizing. Then when Covid happened and a lot of those, that was when we first started seeing sort of the snake eating its own tail with conspirituality. And a lot of those same people whose books I had on my shelves, like Christiane Northrup, totally went off the deep end of saying masks are medical tyranny and very much discouraging the vaccine and all of those things. So I sort of had this reckoning with, not just because of the virus, but because it sort of like opened my eyes to like, wow, this is. I don't know that this aligns with me. And like I'm a science minded person and I'm, you know, believe in medicine and all these things. So I kind of, you know, had like, all but a book burning at that point and threw the baby out with the bathwater. And with astrology in particular, became something that, like, honestly, I know this term is really overused, but really triggered me for a long time. Like if I would hear someone say, like, you know, Mercury's in retrograde. So I was running late, I'm like, oh my God. Let me send you this link to this astronomer's post about how Mercury being in retrograde has absolutely no bearing on human behavior. And I started to question, okay, if you don't believe that the moment that you came out of your mother has a bearing on the kind of personality you will develop and the things that will happen in your life, then stop talking about astrology because you don't believe in the fundamental premise. So then the rest of it is irrelevant.
- [20:32]
A
Well, so this is, yeah, this is where I think it gets interesting to me. It's where I think you and I have, where we see things clearly. But I don't always hear this very clearly expressed. So with both tarot and astrology, now I know less about tarot, but you talked about how one way to do it or one sort of theory of the case of what's going on is that it's divination. And for, you know, for the Christians and recovering Christians among us, it's casting lots for Jesus's clothes. I mean, casting lots is divination. Reading tea leaves, you swirl it up, you, you dump it on the plate or in the cup and then the, the universe or God or whoever sort of gives you a message that you can interpret through that. That is the crux of all of this for me. If we're talking tarot without divination, then we're talking Jung and archetypes and. Yeah, and the idea there is you can get, and you could get a little more, you could get more woo woo with it. You know, Jung believed that these archetypes, like, have some sort of a real existence in this collective unconscious. I mean, that is definitely more of a spirituality type of a concept than, you know, your average sort of atheistic psychologist would be comfortable with. In astrology, there's also a non divination version where people say, hey, the different star signs and stuff like that, these represent like sort of different ways that people kind of tend to end up being. And you know, maybe there is something about where in the year you're born, you know, people talk about Malcolm Gladwell outliers and how like if you're older than the rest of people in your Class, you have a better chance of like getting higher in hockey camp, you know, like in Canada and stuff. There may be some little effects around the edges, but the idea that like, yeah, that, like the moment or day or whatever that you were born, that somehow that's written in the stars, that is a, that is a supernatural claim. And that really is not supported by any empirical evidence. And for me too, it poisons the well of all the other stuff. So I need to understand that someone's not making that assumption. And then I can engage on either of these topics because I think there can be things there worth engaging. But once you're doing that, now I'm back to like fundamentalist Christianity or something. I can't go there.
- [23:06]
B
And I think what bothered me about it when I really started to question things was I just wasn't sure if everybody out there who was, you know, talking about their birth chart and their rising sign and all of this actually critically examined for themselves whether or not they did agree with that fundamental premise. And so then I'm just like, well then you're all just walking around doing something just because it's cool. Because that's the other thing is all this stuff became really cool. So when I decided to like throw it out, all of a sudden I felt like I didn't belong in all these spaces where I used to belong. And also as a woman, it's like this is sort of like this type of spiritual expression, you know, the divine feminine and the astrology and the moon cycles and the tarot and all of that is sort of like a reclamation of spirituality in a more feminine way. So it's like, well, shit, I guess if I'm throwing that out, I don't fit anywhere. But yeah, I agree with you that again, I don't want to throw it all out now because there are some interesting questions there around astrology and I'm trying to be more open minded. And I think Jung, I don't know which version of astrology Jung was into, but he was into it. But yeah, it's just having a hard time with the premise and the assumption that many people are not doing their own discernment around that.
- [24:48]
A
So I want to bring in one of these concepts because it just fits so perfectly into this part of the narrative you're sharing. So Robert Cialdini is an American psychologist. He's like end of his career now, he's like a professor emeritus at ASU and kind of like in between psychology and more kind of like marketing world, which is of course Extremely psychology based, but his work has been very influential. I don't sort of know where it stands in today's current consensus, but he put a book out in the 80s called influence that he updated in 2021. And there are three concepts from that work that I think are relevant to what we're talking about today. And this is sort of going out of order, but the third one, they're kind of sequential, they're kind of stage like the third one is unity or identity enmeshment. And so here's a way of saying it in a, in a wellness community, this sort of conspirituality, which by the way, if you haven't heard that term, that's conspiracy and spirituality joined in. And I think that was coined in 2011 by some researchers and has been. Yeah. In the conversation since then. Anyway, if you're in one of these spaces you like when, by the time you get to this stage of identity enmeshment, you're not just a person who meditates or a person who does yoga. You are conscious, you are awake, you are aligned. You actually see things that the unawake world misses. And you know, recently listeners will know Daryl Van Tahren and I talked about this. Both Christianity and existential psychology have a version of this. A lot of worldviews have a, you were asleep and now you're awake. Okay, so that's normal. But like that also carries with it certain sort of power. And when this community that you're a part of becomes identity constituting and not just identity adjacent. So when it's like, oh, this is, this thing here, this tells me who I am, that's why it's so hard to leave. That's why it is rare to leave. Because leaving, much like if you are a Jehovah's Witness or something like that, it's not just, oh, I am a person who meditates less, I'm a person who does less yoga, it's like, oh, maybe I wasn't awake. Like, that's such a bigger thing to say to yourself is I was wrong about being awake. And I'll tell you from working with, you know, ex cult and culty and high control religion clients, that that sort of fundamental question of who am I? How do I know what's true? What are the things I really care about? Like the, that scrambling is a logical necessity when you actually acknowledge I was wrong about that. Because what you were wrong about was like a really big set of claims about the whole world and you in it. And so you've mentioned now a couple times, baby out, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm kind of wondering if this concept sheds a helpful light on that of like, why was it, why did you even have baby in bathwater to begin with? Why couldn't you have just drained a little bit of the bath water? You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying?
- [28:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And I don't know, I guess it felt like I realized I had taken the wrong pill and now I was going to take the correct pill, you know, like now, now I'm really awake now. I see the like, bullshit that I was being sort of like led to, which again, is a harsher way now than I would, than I would look at that community right now. But it really is so identity driven. I mean, I think of all of these, like, again, the online coaching world for women is so spiritually aligned. And you know, when you enter someone's orbit in that world and you join one of their containers and you know, you're like buying into all of that and then if you back away from it, there's this sort of implication that like, or if you have any criticisms of it, there's an implication that it's you and your own limiting beliefs that's wrong and not something that the coach did or didn't, you know, did wrong or didn't deliver on. So yeah, there's cost.
- [29:34]
A
So that makes me think of the, of the first of the three ideas which he calls social proof. And so social proof is the idea that in the absence of some other sort of empirical or, you know, unambiguous form of proof, like if you're basically like, you know what, I don't trust mainstream medicine. If you say that now, what, what does that do? It means mechanistically that there would have been a place that you would have gone before to answer a question about vaccines, let's say. And you would say, oh, I would ask my doctor or I would, I would look at the local medical board's website and trust their information. Once that's gone, you do have to fill that vacuum with something you like. We do have to make decisions and we need to feel like we have thought about them and we have evidence for them. So when there's nothing you don't have like this sort of authority to look to, then it's like, well, I guess it's other people around me. What they do is my evidence. And by the way, this is also true of high Control religious groups. Right. So it's like, well, you shouldn't trust those people. You trust us and this group. And like you got testimonials you hear before and after transformation stories, also known as testimonies. Like that's the sort of conversion story testimonies. Right. You have this visible community enthusiasm. This is like proof by consensus. And because. And a lot of these claims, some of them are sort of like unfalsifiable. Like you. How would you even test them if you wanted to? And also people are not actively testing them. That's not a big part of it. So then you just sort of look, and I'm wondering if that feels relevant there too. And maybe I am square peg round holding it here with you. But like, you know, I sort of heard that in that part of your story of like looking around at what everyone is saying and doing, and that's kind of what brought that out.
- [31:47]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, the piece that I really connect that with is like the literal testimonials because I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I spent on sort of spiritually oriented, like coaching or business coaching programs because there were some like killer testimonials of someone just talking about the transformation that they had or they made, you know, this amount of money working with this coach. And those are so powerful. Right. It's like. And man, I read Cialdini's book back in my undergrad advertising class. So all of these ideas are coming back to me. But yeah, I mean, it's. The marketing is so good. And the other piece of which, tell me if I'm taking us on too much of a tangent here, but I think the fiduciary responsibility that exists in sort of like, let's say mainstream psychotherapy, counseling psychology with licensed professionals, hopefully it usually exists, right. That we're being honest about our financial practices. We're bringing integrity into that part of the relationship. It's the wild west in the coaching world, of course. And so that goes out the window. And all the marketing to the pain points is speaking to this sort of self discrepancy theory of like, tell me the person that I want to become and if you tell me that you can make me that person, then I will pay you whatever amount of money that you want. And then you provide those testimonials and like, take my money. Right?
- [33:22]
A
Yeah. And then, by the way, Once I've spent $5,000, I'm extremely invested in telling myself that it was worth it.
- [33:31]
B
Yes.
- [33:32]
A
Which then just goes to the credit of the person that charged me $5,000. So gives them a more robust testimonial that then they can share and get 5,000 more dollars from somebody else.
- [33:43]
B
Absolutely.
- [33:45]
A
Yeah. Like, this is worth. Just. People don't know this unless you train to become a therapist. There's certainly kind of similar, you know, fee structure ethics in other forms, like possibly medical professionals, but usually they work for hospitals that sort of handle all of that for them. It's very. You have to really learn about it as a therapist, especially if you're going to be in private practice. And the rules are basically like, you cannot give kickbacks. Nobody. You don't get. You cannot get referral fees. If you consult with someone and you provide them something of value with your expertise, you can charge for that. It should be appropriate to what people charge. Your fees for therapy need to be publicly posted so people can see them. If they're on a sliding scale. They know they're on a sliding scale because this is what your full rate is. You don't charge people more than that. You don't sort of hide the ball on where you make your money. You. You're saying, I went to school, I got trained, I learned how to do this job. This is what this job is worth. I will charge you that much and only that much. And there are no games. And the psychological safety that that provides is actually immense. Like you, you just, you. Ideally, the weight when this is working well and you can lose your license for not following these things, which is great. When this is working well, the therapy, the client just shows up to the session. They know what it costs. They're not, they're not getting a sales pitch in the middle of it. Like, it's just straightforward. And, and, and that then creates a safe umbrella for the kind of internal work that is extremely difficult, sensitive. It's. You know, anyone who's done therapy knows what I'm talking about. Like, you need that safety. You need that feeling of safety, including financial safety. And the. So the way that this stuff is more. More slippery, that's like really fucked up in my mind. That's like actually kind of poisons the whole.
- [35:54]
B
Well, yeah, it is. And of course, again, there are ethical coaches out there who are going to handle that all well. Yes, but they don't have to.
- [36:01]
A
They don't have to.
- [36:02]
B
They don't have to. And the other piece of that is because they are not beholden to. I mean, they could choose to join the International Coaching Federation, which I am a member of, but they don't have to join that they don't have to follow that code of ethics. And the other thing that comes up ethically is scope of practice, which, again, I know some fabulous coaches who know exactly when they need to refer or collaborate with a therapist, but many of them don't. And then you have coaches out here who are doing things like hosting rage retreats and, you know, doing, like, deep somatic trauma release with your inner child. And, like, that's what's trendy right now is this sort of psycho spiritual, somatic thing. And that's, you know, these people who are in a deeply vulnerable position are that those are the people who are good at marketing. And the therapists usually kind of suck at marketing. So.
- [36:57]
A
Yeah. Ye. You can listen to the rest of this episode by joining the patreon@patreon.com dancoke.