Podcast Summary: Religion on the Mind

Episode #370: Trusting Yourself After Religious Change (December 29, 2025)
Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Monica DiCristina (Licensed Professional Counselor, Author of You'd Pain Has a Name)

Episode Overview

This episode explores the profound question facing many who shift or leave conservative religious communities: How do I learn to trust myself—my intuition, my emotions, my body—after years of deferring to outside authority? Host Dan Koch and guest Monica DiCristina, both clinicians with complex faith backgrounds, delve into the psychological process of reclaiming self-trust, discerning between pain and authentic self, and finding grounding wisdom amidst uncertainty.

1. Setting the Stage: Trust and Knowing After Religious Change

• The Core Issue (01:05): Dan frames the discussion around two interlinked ideas:

  1. How can I learn to trust myself after religious change?
  2. How can I sort out what is truly me from what is my pain?

  “How do I even know what my sources of information are that I can really lean on? If I can’t find a Bible verse, for instance, for this, is it true?” (Dan, 01:05)

• Monica’s Initial Insight (02:08):

  • “What is your personal history of knowing? How were you taught to know things? ...Were you taught that you had to have an authority figure to prove what you know?” (Monica, 02:08)
  • Trust issues often stem from one’s earliest lessons about knowledge and authority.

2. Personal Histories of Trust & “Knowing”

Dan’s Upbringing:

• Mixed environment of moderate California evangelicalism, emotional intelligence at home, exposure to both secular and “chill Jesus movement” adults:

  “The most mature and wise older people were not set apart primarily by their knowledge … but their years of lived experience. Emotional intelligence would probably be a good term for these individuals.” (Dan, 04:12)

• These “wise” adults offered warmth, acceptance, and did not claim certainty—a contrast to doctrinal gatekeeping.

Monica’s Bicultural Background:

• Raised in Atlanta with a Spanish (culturally Catholic) father and American mother. Dual influences, but did not feel at home in “Christian South” environments.

  “I never had the luxury, I would say, of only believing there was one way to look at things, because it just wasn’t even that way in my home.” (Monica, 09:05)

3. Authority Structures: Catholicism vs. Protestantism

• Contrast of Authority:
  • Catholicism: top-down, hierarchical authority—“someone between you and a conversation with God.” (Monica, 11:01)
  • Low-church Protestantism: radical individual access—“It’s just you and the text. It’s you and God.” (Dan, 10:48)
• Monica resonated more with direct connection (common in evangelicalism), but ultimately highlights that “personal wiring” often shapes how trustworthy certain spiritual environments feel.

4. Adolescence, Anxiety, and the Roots of Distrust

• Teenage Schism and Anxiety:

  • Monica describes herself as a “deep feeler,” but also developed OCD as a teen, creating conflict between intuition and anxiety:

    “What does that tell your knowing? That can be almost an attack on your knowing.” (Monica, 14:27)

  • Dan shares about panic disorder and how he interpreted anxiety as the Holy Spirit’s conviction, especially around purity culture:

    “My first ten years of post-puberty, anything was always anxiety, which I always interpreted as the Holy Spirit.” (Dan, 17:35)

• Key Insight:

  • Both highlight how religious environments can give spiritual language to psychological distress—sometimes reinforcing self-doubt and obscuring authentic self-knowledge.

5. Naming the Pain vs. Knowing the Self

• Monica’s Book—You’d Pain Has a Name (19:27):
  • Central concept: Many people suffer for lack of ‘naming’ their pain, which leads to personal confusion (“what’s wrong with me?”) and spiritual misinterpretation (“God hates me”).
  • Example:

    “There is a name for your pain. I don’t know what it is... but finding that is going to be a really, really important step.” (Monica, 19:38)

  • Naming can include mental health diagnoses, trauma, or neurodiversity (e.g. adult autism diagnosis)—relief comes from understanding rather than just labeling.
  • “Everybody makes sense once we give ourselves enough time to explore that.” (Monica, 26:56)

6. Rebuilding Self-Trust & Discernment

Cognitive Tools & Therapy:

• Dan describes using evidence-based approaches:

  • Evidence Test: “What’s the evidence for or against this claim?” (Dan, 27:10)
  • Source Credibility: “Is it a reliable source of information?” (Dan, 30:24)
  • Example: Challenging self-beliefs inherited from unreliable childhood authorities.

• Rebuilding Self-Trust:

  • Monica: “By starting small… keeping promises to yourself, trusting yourself with your instinct… your boundaries. Trusting your body knows when it says, I can’t do this right now.” (Monica, 32:27)
  • Both caution against “over-trust” (narcissism/TikTok therapy fads) and “under-trust” (self-abandonment).

• CBT Principles:

  • Dan offers the foundational cognitive insight: interpretations are always shaped by experience, trauma, family, culture, and interpretive habits (35:16).

Notable Quote:

“You need actually a pretty high self-trust, just generally speaking… But, there’s also a too-much trusting of oneself, like a kind of ego or even a maybe mild narcissism… It depends.” (Dan, 33:10)

7. Knowing Amidst the Crisis of Authority (National & Cultural Context)

• Monica observes that after leaving high-control, authoritarian religious environments, people often feel “at sea” about who or what to trust next—even healthy new authorities can seem triggering (38:55).

• Dan points out that the current “crisis of knowing” is not just personal but societal:

  “If I have a client who is having a crisis of knowing individually, if they are alive in 2025, then they are also in the middle of a macro-scale crisis of knowing at the national or international level. And it could be helpful to just call that out.” (Dan, 45:24)

• They discuss the impact of media bubbles, rage-bait content, and algorithmic echo chambers (41:33).

• Challenges:

  • Collapse of old authorities (e.g., churches, denominations)
  • Explosion of new, personalized, and sometimes predatory digital ‘guides’

8. Christian Wisdom Traditions Revisited: Resources and Limits

• Resources:

  • Monica suggests Anne Lamott as an author who navigates knowing-without-certainty gracefully:

    “Here is someone who is the opposite of presenting they know it all, but they’re also not denying their own knowing.” (Monica, 46:40)

  • Dan points out that even clients who have deconverted often find meaning in “love your neighbor as yourself” (from Jesus), which supports both self-compassion and self-trust, cutting around doctrinal controversies.

• Limitations:

  • Some scriptures are harmful or “stumbling blocks” to anxious or scrupulous people. The tradition is a mixed bag—discern what heals, discard what harms.

9. The Vantage Point of Wisdom and the “Right Size” of Confidence

• Restated Goal:

  • Monica: “Confidence is a healthier goal than certainty—a black-and-white, all-or-nothing certainty. Confidence that has flexibility… looking back at things in a different way.” (56:18)

• Dan (with reference to his friend Tripp Fuller): Wisdom traditions as “sources of ideas and concepts that have filtered down through the millennia… because it was useful.” (59:57)

• Humility:

  “Humility is being the right size.” (Dan quoting Darrell Van Tongeren, 65:21)

  • Not a doormat, not a narcissist.
  • Confidence should be “roughly equal to the amount of evidence I have for something.” (Dan, 65:36)

• Wisdom traditions and wise individuals tend toward “non-anxious presence”—a deep, expansive calm rather than frantic certitude.

10. Memorable Quotes & Insights

• On Emotional Safety and Wisdom:

  “You remember how people made you feel… what you’re describing is a sense of emotional safety.” (Monica, 05:10)

• On Reclaiming Autonomy:

  “God doesn’t just care about who you’re serving. God cares about you, too.” (Monica, 50:23)

• On the Limits of Universalizing Your Experience:

  “If I try and make that into a rule about when people should go to dinner, it’s just going to start not applying to people. The more different they are from me, the more different their circumstances… it’s just going to lose that universality.” (Dan, 66:28)

• On Finding the Anchor After Faith Shifts:

  “It is so much like you said—it depends and it’s a process. But I think, realistically, confidence is a healthier goal than a certainty.” (Monica, 56:18)

Key Timestamps

• 02:08 – What is your personal history of knowing?
• 14:27 – Anxiety disorders and undermined self-trust in adolescence
• 19:27 – Naming the pain vs. knowing yourself
• 27:10 – Evidence-based questioning in therapy
• 32:27 – Practicing self-trust in small ways
• 38:55 – The challenge of trusting new sources after religious trauma
• 45:24 – Societal and cultural crisis of knowing
• 46:40 – Anne Lamott as a resource for knowing and uncertainty
• 50:23 – Reclaiming self-compassion in Christian context
• 56:18 – Confidence vs. certainty; recovering self-trust
• 65:21 – “Humility is being the right size”—right-sizing confidence

Takeaways

• Learning to trust oneself after religious change is a layered, gradual process of unlearning fixation on outside authority, naming one’s pain, and building self-confidence.
• Both individual histories and the broader societal “crisis of knowing” shape the difficulty of discernment—but old wisdom (from spiritual traditions or lived experience) can offer grounding.
• True wisdom is marked by non-anxious presence, flexibility, and “right-sized” confidence—qualities worth seeking in both others and oneself as one navigates a new relationship to trust.

For Further Exploration:

• You’d Pain Has a Name by Monica DiCristina
• Anne Lamott’s “Help, Thanks, Wow” and “Traveling Mercies”
• CBT concepts around evidence, cognitive distortions, and narrative therapy

Contact:

• Dr. Dan Koch: dan@religiononthemind.com
• Monica DiCristina: Podcast “Still Becoming with Monica DiCristina”

End of Summary.