Trusting Yourself After Religious Change (#370)

Summary

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)

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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’

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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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.

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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: [e-mail]
• Monica DiCristina: Podcast “Still Becoming with Monica DiCristina”

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End of Summary.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind, the show that focuses on the overlap of psychology and religion and spirituality. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and psychology of religion researcher. And I'm joined by another clinician, licensed professional counselor in Georgia, that is Monica Di Christina. Thank you for being here, Monica.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to hang out and to chat.

[A]

Yeah. So you put a book out back in May. We're going to sort of work our way back to the book. I do want to just name it at the top here so that people who don't hear our whole conversation can hear. It's called you Pain has a. A therapist's invitation to understanding your story and sorting out who you are from what hurts. I really like that idea. Sorting out who you are from what hurts. Like yourself versus your pain or something like that.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

But the thing that I had reached out to you to talk about is a concept that I think is like kind of logically prior. And it comes up. I know. I've seen you post about it. It's come up with my clients, especially people coming out of more conservative religious environments and trying to make sense of their life as an adult. This question of how do I know what I can trust and not trust specifically myself, various versions of myself, my intuition, my body, my emotions. That seems to me to be a prior question before I can do the difficult untangling discernment work of what's just pain and what's really me? Well, 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? You know, you might start there and then you get to this place, hopefully of greater trust. So those are the two kind of ideas I want to talk about today. Starting with this trusting and then we end with the naming stuff. So does that bring up anything for you kind of off the bat?

[B]

Oh, gosh, so many things. It's such a great and important question. I mean, I think. I think the first thing it brings up for me is, is what is your personal history of knowing? And that's not a technical term. Right. I'm just making that up. But what is your history of knowing? How were you taught to know things? How were you taught to understand things? Were you taught that you had to have an authority figure to prove what you know? Were you taught that it had to be, say in the Bible as you referenced, Were you taught that your opinions weren't as important as somebody else's. So I think the first thing to be to do would be to unpack what's my history of how I know things and what that brings up for people.

[A]

That's really great that that's the thing it brought up for you because I wanted to start in a place that I thought might be a little bit of a non sequitur. But now it feels very organic, like I planned it all along. So I'll take those points. I was thinking about it this morning, just kind of sitting with it with my coffee and I was like, okay, so listeners know. I'll give you the very short version, Monica. I was raised what I call California moderate evangelical or just California evangelical. So definitely nom to nom. Christian schools got all the left behind shit. But my dad was a therapist. My mom liked swear words and had non Christian friends. I had a buffer. I had a buffer from the kind of fundamentalist, like Southern, you know, you know, that kind of stuff that a lot of listeners kind of grew up with. So I had a mixture of people in my life. And I was thinking this morning, who were the people growing up that I now think of as being like, wise? So like, let's say I had to answer your question with, like, who would I ask? So what's my history, my personal history of knowing, you know, subcategory? Who knows? Like, who are the people that knew?

[B]

Great question.

[A]

So I'm mixing that a little now and then, but. But I also had a sense of trusting these people then. So it's not only from sort of hindsight.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I was thinking about it. So in my church and Christian culture growing up, the most mature and wise older people were not set apart primarily by like their knowledge, like their scripture knowledge or their theological chops, but it's more like I would say now their years of lived experience. Emotional intelligence would probably be a good term for these individuals. Many of them had some serious pain or suffering in their background that they had gotten through. So it sort of like hard won kind of wisdom. And overall this just like warm, accepting, loving orientation towards me and my friends, you know, me and my brother, my family, whatever. And just thinking like, huh, that's interesting because that wouldn't be how anybody would have probably said it on paper of what to trust. So I just thought we'd kind of start there and see what that brought up for you.

[B]

Yes, I love that. And it makes me think of, I think it's a Maya Angelou quote, but that you remember how people made you feel Right. And I think that what you're describing is a sense of emotional safety. And I would say that that would be who I would trust, too, without ever having those words as a kid. I think what I would add to that, too, is I find myself. I found myself then, and I find myself now gravitating more towards trusting people that don't say they know it all, that there's something grounding and almost more Makes what they say more realistic and more believable because they're not coming with this energy of. I know every single thing that. That, to me, signals a little bit of emotional danger, you know? Well, if you know everything, well, gosh, how did you get there and what's gonna happen next? So, yeah, that's what comes up for me when you describe that. But I think it's a fascinating list of descriptions that you're saying about who you would trust. You know, it's not necessarily the letters behind the name or in a church sense, the. The scripture knowledge or even the title. Right.

[A]

Where did you grow up, briefly? Did you grow up kind of in the Southeast and you're still there. Is that basically your geographical history?

[B]

It's my geographical history, but it's not my cultural history. So I grew up in Atlanta, but my dad is Spanish, like Spain Spanish. And my mom is American, and they met in Spain and came here because my dad got a scholarship, and so. And then they stayed here, but they're actually in Spain right now, so they go back. We have a lot of family there. So I grew up in the Southeast, but I didn't grow up in oftentimes the way people think of the Southeast. Right.

[A]

That makes sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So the reason I ask is it does seem like there's kind of a California angle here, like, just broadly speaking, growing up half hour from Santa Cruz, you know, in the Bay Area, surf and skate culture, hippie culture, but also Jesus movement culture. Like, I knew 90s evangelicals who. Who were culturally still really connected to the seventies Jesus movement of Southern California. They were more chill. They still wore sandals and Hawaiian shirts, and they didn't have what I associate with, like a Midwest or Southern certainty about God and Scripture. You know, I could think of, like, a reformed thing in Michigan, Minnesota, whatever. Or I could think about, like, a Southern Baptist thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it's this kind of like, we know God, we know the truth.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[A]

I just. I'm thinking, oh, maybe there was, like, that being in the water culturally was helpful. Now, this brings up a very interesting question, sort of Bicultural upbringing is what I'm hearing from you. So you get some Southeast, you also get some Spain, some Spanish, European vibes. I don't know. How would you contrast that with your experience?

[B]

Like sort of the California versus my Southeast in Spanish?

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I mean, well, with the Spanish, you got a lot of Catholicism.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I don't know how it is for all families, but I'll say for my family, cultural Catholicism is a big part of it. So I had to do all the Catholic classes and go to all those things. But we didn't go to church, you know. Cause that was just. My parents got married by a Jesuit priest. And when you get married Catholic, you have to promise to raise your kids Catholic. And they are people of their word, so they definitely did that. But I grew up in the 90s and around 90s evangelical Christians, and that is where my faith was really sparked. And that was very much, to put it mildly, awkward fit for my family of origin. This is not a good fit. This was a concern, I would say from my parents that I was sort of involved in this more evangelical world and it had its time and served its purpose. And I think I really feel very settled in where my faith is, even though it may not align with those 90s years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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. And I think that that has served me well.

[A]

Yeah. So when you said earlier that a feature of trustworthy adults that you came to recognize, or maybe you're speaking more from now. Now's perspective.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Of this. Like. Yeah, like, don't claim to have it all figured out. Like you lived that from the beginning by having a sort of bicultural. Would you call it sort of bi religious or would you say it was just. I don't like. Would that. Does that word too strong?

[B]

That's a great question. You know, I would love to hear what my parents would chime in and say. I know they'd have really big opinions about it. I wouldn't say bi religious. I would say probably bicultural. And just, you know, it was not a natural fit to be in Christian South. And in my liberal bicultural, bi national household, that just wasn't a fit.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, so.

[A]

Well, Catholicism is also an interesting contrast here to kind of bring it back explicitly to this question of what we can trust, you know, or the way that you said it, like your personal history of knowing. How were you taught to know things you know, Catholicism has a hierarchical authority structure, Pope down to archbishops and bishops and your local priest. And, you know, it's. We're doing. Depending on your parish. Maybe the catechism holds a certain place or whatever. But. Yeah, whatever. The thing is, it's like, you've got official stuff.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And Protestantism, especially low church, Southern Protestantism, sort of the opposite of that continuum of, like, it's not just capital P priesthood of all believers. It's like all caps.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's an unhinged Facebook post that has priesthood of all believers in all caps. And it's like, no, no, it's just you and the text. It's you and God.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that's already an interesting contrast. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit.

[B]

Mm, sure. Absolutely. You know, again, I was just raised culturally Catholic, so I don't have a deep. And I have respect for, you know, friends that have a deep, you know, relationship with Catholicism. But I will say, having gone through all the things, having my first confession with a priest, you know, and then later finding myself in more of an evangelical, like, hey, it's just me and Jesus vibe, I found it much. Gosh, it's so complex when you think about how you know things. But I found it much more approachable to not have someone between me and a conversation with God for the way that I'm wired. And that may be different for all kinds of people, of course, but for the way I'm wired, I found that as a teenager so much more compelling that I could be in my room with my worries and my fears and my hopes, and Jesus could be there too. You know, I found that idea so much more comforting. I'm not saying that that. That doesn't exist in Catholicism. Of course it does. But just that there was that sort of experience that I had of that high church experience wasn't the best fit for me personally.

[A]

Yeah, it's funny. Listeners know I have a lot of love for Catholicism, and I almost became Catholic through hanging out with a Jesuit who I just heard passed. He was very, very old. He was in his 90s. He lived a very full life.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[A]

But, like, that part also is true for me. Like, I have this natural rebellious streak that I think I get from both my parents, actually, as well as I was kind of raised on punk rock. And the only way I was gonna become Catholic was directly through this Jesuit priest where I wouldn't have to do the RCIA classes and all that stuff. Cause I don't think I could Submit to it, frankly, even if I tried. So that's just kind of interesting. But in terms of what to trust, though, right? So we are already getting to that a little bit. When you say, I'm a teenager, I'm alone in my room. I filled in. In my mind with all my feelings and my headphones and all my.

[B]

Posters and all. Thing. Yes. Yeah.

[A]

My case Logic disc case. Yeah, My posters. Right. All the band posters and stuff. Like, there is something there where you are, like, whether or not you know it, Teenage years spent sort of navigating the space between your family and your sort of received tradition, and then your new friends and your emerging identity. There is a kind of trust of self that begins to be navigated there in a way that I think is recognizable as adults. Right. In those adolescent years. So maybe that's a place to start talking about trust for oneself.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a great thing. And I do. I want to clarify that like this. What I said about Catholicism was just my experience. I have so much respect for every expression of faith. But that disclaimer aside, I would say that, you know, what I started to develop in my teenage years was a little bit of a schism. Is that the right word?

[A]

Sure, yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So I am a deep feeler, naturally. I'm artistic, intuitive person. That is how I often feel a knowing. I feel it almost like in my stomach. I feel it in my gut. I feel a sense of grounding and peace. However, in my adolescence, I also developed a pretty acute onset of an anxiety disorder. And so what does that tell your knowing? Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That can be almost an attack on your knowing. So I would say early on, and I think probably a lot of listeners can resonate with this. There's a sense of knowing. But you also may struggle with anxiety or something in that neighborhood where you doubt your own knowing. And I get the question a lot. What's the difference between anxiety and intuition? How do you know what you know? Right. So I, you know, long story short, that's. That's what started to develop in me at that time.

[A]

I think that's wonderful. I also had an anxiety disorder as a teenager. Mine was panic disorder. I don't know what yours was, but.

[B]

Ocd. Yeah, ocd.

[A]

Okay. Well. And, well, so can I ask you, did it for you, become religious scrupulosity or. Not specifically that.

[B]

Fascinatingly enough, looking back, it did not. It probably started to creep in that direction a couple times, but, no, it did not. Which is interesting.

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, I Find it interesting, the more that I work with OCD and learn about it, there's just. Specialists have identified something like 20 plus sort of distinct themes. People know contamination, listeners know about scrupulosity or sort of more moral perfectionism.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But then there's, you know, there's disgust stuff, there's violent images, there's totally all the checking behaviors. It was like, yeah, 20 of these categories. It's, it's so interesting the ways in which it can manifest. For me though, just to, to pick up on the anxiety teenage thing. So I had panic disorder. And the way that, that showed up for this question of knowing was it's easiest for me to talk about it around romance and purity culture because that was just the sort of cleanest example. So anytime, like if I started dating, quote, unquote in eighth grade. Yeah, talking a friend and we kiss or something, or maybe we say, let's go on a date this weekend or something. Then the next morning I would wake up with bodily just like shot through with anxiety, gastrointestinal symptoms. And then of course, to follow, to catch up. Racing thoughts, racing, anxious thoughts, eventually sometimes becoming panic attacks, sometimes not. But I interpreted that data as, oh, this is the Holy Spirit convicting me that I am stepping outside of sexual and emotional purity at 13, 14, or whatever. And it really was stunting all the way up until my early mid-20s when I met my wife at 23. And by then some stuff kind of started to change for me a little bit in that area. And within a couple years I had named my panic disorder and started working on it. But my first 10 plus years of post puberty, anything was always anxiety, which I always interpreted as the Holy Spirit.

[B]

Wow. Yes. I think that I'm sure there are people listening where there's light bulbs going off, because I think that that is the really dangerous part of big sweeping teaching like purity culture or even sweeping teaching about the Holy Spirit that doesn't contextualize or take into account how young minds, especially anxious young minds might be interpreting that, you know, because how would you know the difference between a panic attack and the Holy Spirit saying, oh, don't do that? You know, you didn't know the difference. How could you have?

[A]

No, and really the answer to that from my perspective today is, well, it depends. Yeah, like there's no simple answer to that question. You need discernment. You have to look for, you know, clues and stuff. Okay. So that's one way that a young person could sort of have their trust of themselves be undermined.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Like we're talking about through mental health issues.

[B]

Yes, absolutely.

[A]

And the way I say it is I would have had panic disorder, I think, whether or not I was raised evangelical. But because I was raised evangelical, my panic attacks were about sexual, romantic purity and the end times. That's what they were about. Because that's the shit that I was given for them to be about.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

But I would have had it either way.

[B]

Yeah, makes sense.

[A]

And now we are kind of talking about your book, I guess. So maybe we could bring that in. Because that, that's one way of saying, is this me or is it my pain, my suffering? So is that one of the ways that you talk about how people can figure this out is like, how do you come to the real. I know now as a 42 year old doctor of psychology that I would have had panic disorder either way. I know that. But it took me a lot of time and education to know that. So how do you say that for just someone who picks up your book who's not in grad school?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say that like the heart behind the book is exactly what you finally figured out, but hopefully being one link on the chain for all of us to maybe figure it out sooner.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know that I encounter people all the time who walk into my office. I was one of these people who, you know, has no idea what's going on. I feel so bad. And in the absence of not having a name for your pain, that's when things get really messy. So it's not just an innocuous, benign absence of knowledge. We fill that in. Right when you're having anxiety, panic, shame, you name it, you've gone through trauma, you fill in the lack of a name with what's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me. God hates me. This is like your story. This is the Holy Spirit telling me to stop this. Or my story was, I'm bad. If anybody knew how bad I am, they would never love me. And it turns out, well, my brain was firing off and I had an actual anxiety disorder, but I didn't know that. And so we're both giving versions that are anxiety disorders. But you can fill that in with so many other things. And really my heart behind the book is to say, listen, I don't promise anything. I don't really believe in that, especially mental health and self help, because it's dangerous. But one thing I firmly believe is that there is a name for your pain. I don't know what it is, and I can't Name it all in one book, of course. But finding that is going to be a really, really important step and hopefully a step towards relief.

[A]

Hey, I'm accepting clients for my coaching and consultation practice right now from anywhere in the world. Of course I do therapy, but that is only for clients in Washington State. And coaching and consultation differs from therapy in that there's no direct treatment of mental health symptoms. But that still leaves a lot of stuff that can be done that is still influenced by and informed by my psychological education and my therapeutic work. Most coaching clients meet with me every other week and I generally assign homework in between sessions to keep progress going. And most of the coaching work ties in some way to religious issues. For instance, navigating personal faith change or faith change in a loved one can have impacts on things as wide ranging as self understanding, values, clarification, career consequences, marriage and family relationships, boundary setting, personal agency and self esteem, determining whether or where to pursue spiritual community again. And you know, a lot of big questions that humans ask have kind of whole cloth answers in our religious systems. This is something Darrell Van Tongren talks about a lot. And when change happens in our faith, some of those questions go from settled to all of a sudden being live like meaning and purpose, like sex, friendship and community, parenting. That's something that comes up with a lot of my clients. Other work that I do is less specifically tied to religion, like discernment around big life decisions or even what type of therapist to look for in your area. Sometimes that's just a single session where we're kind of clarifying what's at stake and what you're trying to do. If you're interested in potentially working together as a coaching and consultation client, there is a coaching [e-mail] that link is always in the show notes. You can also email me directly dancochclients gmail.com Coke is spelled K O C.

[B]

H.

[A]

Give me an example of some names that you or clients or you know, feel free to.

[B]

Sure, yes.

[A]

Massage that for confidentiality reasons, however you like to do it. But give me some examples of names.

[B]

Yeah, oh sure. Great. You know, I mean and I share some stories in the book but it's all as I'll do today. It's all a conglomeration. It's not a literal person. Cause you know, we see themes but.

[A]

You know, that's how I do it too. I never talk about individual clients, only themes across multiple clients.

[B]

Exactly. And so you know, one theme is thinking one thing is one thing and then it's another. So, you know, a really beautiful thing that I've gotten to be a part of is adult diagnosis of autism. And I don't diagnose that because I don't have the credentials to do that. But I've worked with amazing people who came in for one reason. And then the clients and I just stayed curious together and I didn't assume, I knew, I didn't jump to anything. And then we listened to their self knowledge and they said, hey, I'm kind of thinking this. And then we think, well, hey, why don't you go get tested and really figure this out. And then there's this huge alignment and sense of relief and increased self love and understanding. So, like naming our pain isn't always naming like, oh, it's trauma. A lot of times it's that. But sometimes it's, hey, this is who I actually am. You know, it has been presenting in my life in this way because I didn't understand it. But gosh, the relief and exhale of understanding is just one of my favorite parts of this work.

[A]

I agree. So in that case, then the naming of the pain versus the what is myself, that person would be able to say something like, oh, the name of the pain is all the shit I went through when I didn't know that I was autistic.

[B]

Totally. Yeah.

[A]

And then who I am is, oh, I'm autistic. That's a part of who I am.

[B]

And it's awesome. You know, I love myself knowing this.

[A]

Yeah, right. And I can, you know, and then people. Well, people have their own journeys with acceptance or of course, embracing or you know, having a hard time with that or whatever. Although. So I have done a fair bit of that. I've been directly involved in six or seven adult autism assessments and a couple for adhd. So I totally agree that that kind of the light being shown on a client's life is really the. That's the coolest. That's the coolest part of it. And I've also had many experiences where, you know, the client doesn't come in to talk about that, but then it comes up. Same with adhd. That happens a lot.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely.

[A]

All kinds of other issues, like, you know, sex related issues. Some people don't realize that, that they're having panic attacks or that they have been in a mild depression for years. I mean, there's a lot of things that can kind of 100% come up as you stay curious. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

You know, a simple thing I see often is people come in with Boundary issues, not knowing why they can't say no and, you know, beating up on themselves or their life feels chaotic. It feels like a mess. And the way that we name that is we go to the why. You know, why is it hard for you to set boundaries? What's going on underneath that? That's a simple way too, that I think a lot of people listening could maybe relate to. Is instead of beating yourself up for the hard thing you're going through becoming more curious and what. Why are you making these choices that you're making? Because there's. Everybody makes sense. That's what I have found I don't know about you in this field is it doesn't mean that some things may not need to change. Doesn't seem like you said some things may not be really hard to accept, but everybody makes sense once we give ourselves enough time to explore that.

[A]

So I agree. But it also points me back to this first question or a set of questions that I wanted to talk about, which is, but how do you know that you can trust the new sense that it makes? And I love.

[B]

Great question.

[A]

Getting to luxuriate a little bit with clients in their history of knowing in their kind of where this is now rubbing up against whatever is going on for them today. One way in is to do a real basic CBT question, which is, what is the evidence for or against this claim? So that's a. A very straightforward move we do.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And I always have to explain first time what counts as evidence. Feelings are not themselves necessarily evidence, but they can be, especially when they coincide with other forms of external evidence. And this really. This is already getting to. What's difficult about this is we neither want to not trust our feelings at all, which is sometimes what we are given in conservative religious environments, nor do we want to exclusively trust our feelings in every moment to be sort of like telling us the overall truth of the situation. We have to find that middle ground of listening to them, but then recognizing when they are kind of running the show in a way that we would call emotional reasoning, which is a cognitive distortion and can lead us astray.

[B]

So.

[A]

How do you help your clients? How do you think of like, that middle ground? Do you have language for that? Do you have terms that you like to use or metaphors or. Or anything like that, of kind of finding that appropriate level of trust?

[B]

It's such a good and layered question. I think what honestly comes up for me is, is how I kind of go in through the back door, you know, not to like, keep talking about Naming your pain. But when you name what you've believed about yourself for many, many years, and oftentimes our beliefs about ourselves are unfair, unkind, unloving. When you name those things you've believed about yourself, you're starting to identify an interpretation that you're walking around with at all times, right?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yes. And so that's kind of the back door I go in with clients. Is that. So when we're evaluating a decision, an experience, how do I know what I know? When you are very or becoming in therapy and you have become very familiar with your own narratives and interpretations, you're able to spot more quickly, oh, I'm projecting onto myself this story that I'm shameful, I'm bad, or I can't trust myself in this situation. And when I'm able to identify that interpretation, I can now separate myself from that interpretation and hopefully return back to a less biased form of knowing that's less shame based, that's less interpretation based. Does that make sense?

[A]

Yeah, it does. I mean, in one sense, though, it still kind of kicks the can down the road. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, it does. Yeah, sure.

[A]

How do you know?

[B]

How do you know what you know?

[A]

How do you know that one's not as biased?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and so maybe I'll just connect it to what I was saying. I like the what's the evidence for it? Question, because it can help to clarify that. So, like, for instance, someone might say, well, the evidence is that. My mom always told me that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And let's say it's about. Well, my mom always told me, like, you're inherently selfish and lazy.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Okay. Let's just say that's what a client says. Then I go, I love this one. Which actually comes out of the trauma work that I do, which is cognitive processing therapy. Is it a reliable source of information? Is the question in cpts. But I just, I turn around. So I go, okay, would you say your mom is a good judge of character?

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Yes.

[A]

And. And then they go, oh, and. And sometimes they might be like, well, sometimes she is. And, okay, so is there something to look at here? But oftentimes it's no, she's an awful judge of character.

[B]

Yeah. Right.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, tell me more. Well, she thinks my uncle is this way and he's not that way. Or she's always telling my sister that she's like this, and I know my sister is not that way. Okay, so then is that really a piece of evidence that you are lazy or is it not?

[B]

Yes. Yeah, that's so good. I just had a conversation exactly like that with a client this week. You know, about different topics, different people in their lives, but yes, exactly. It's considering the source. And I feel like also what you're asking with how do I know what I know is can I trust myself to know? Can I trust my own knowing? And I think that that is, you know, not trying to kick the can again. But I think that that is often one of the biggest injuries that happens to people in emotional hurts, in relationships, through traumatic experiences across the spectrum, is that we lose our self trust. And so how does, how do people build that back up? Well, I think by starting small, you know, like keeping promises to yourself, trusting yourself with your instinct of, I don't feel safe with this person. And I'm just gonna trust that. Trusting yourself with a boundary, I don't have the energy to deal with this person right now. And I'm gonna just allow that to be okay. I'm gonna trust that my body knows that I can't do that right now. So starting to slowly build that up as a way to kind of help you know, what you know, by practicing trusting your own knowing. That makes sense.

[A]

It does make sense. It's kind of a catch 222 because you really have to have quite a bit of trust in yourself at a basic operational level to sort of do anything to make any choices to move forward in the world. I think of it like you need actually a pretty high self trust, just generally speaking. And maybe it's a little bit influenced by the kind of current moment we're in in terms of social media and the way that therapy talk has become much more mainstreamed. So I can also imagine like a TikTok content creator.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Really trusting his body and himself and his intuition in making videos about how everybody should remove all the toxic people from their life.

[B]

That's a good point.

[A]

You know, or fill it in however you want. Right?

[B]

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

There's also a too much trusting of oneself, like a kind of ego or even a maybe kind of mild narcissism or, or whatever you want to call it.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

It's like unsatisfying to, to say out loud. Yeah, it depends.

[B]

Yeah, it is like, it is, it.

[A]

Depends on a lot of shit. And, and like, if everybody could have unlimited therapy sessions with really great therapists, we could figure all that out maybe. But of course that's not possible.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So it's. You're in this kind of imperfect state.

[B]

And I, and I think it's such A great example you brought up. But I also think. I think understanding, like, I do a lot of couples therapy work, and I think understanding that two people are going to have a different experience of the same moment.

[A]

Yes. And.

[B]

And that. That is. That's a real complexity that we have to live in. You know, that I literally sit with couples and they're describing the same dinner, and it's a completely different account of what was said, how it was said, what happened next. Which shows that not that it's impossible to know things, but that we are all bringing things to our knowing. Right. We're bringing histories, interpretations, biases, hopes, confirmation bias.

[A]

You sound like a cognitive therapist. Monica, are you a cognitive therapist?

[B]

No, I would not identify as a cognitive therapist, but.

[A]

Okay, well, this is cognitive. I mean, this is cognitive theory.

[B]

I wouldn't not identify as one.

[A]

You know, is what you're describing right now.

[B]

No.

[A]

You're not, like, rejecting it outright. You don't have a CBT with a red outline cross, no smoking sign.

[B]

Yeah, no, I love cbt. I love cbt. I just wouldn't count myself as credentialed to identify as that. You know what I mean? Yeah. But, no, I'm very CBT friendly and think it's phenomenal.

[A]

Okay, I see. I see. Well, that you're just teeing me up for, like, principle number one of cognitive theory, which underlies CBT and other cognitive therapies, which is that at all moments, we are bringing in data from our five senses, and we are combining it with everything we have experienced and made sense of before. All the meanings that we've made before our history. Right. Which might include our trauma, it might include unprocessed trauma.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely.

[A]

All the interpretations we've been given through loved ones over time, habituation, also our genetics. And then we are, with all of that big soup, making second by second interpretations in the moment.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

I usually give an example with clients of when I was trying to lose weight for a while using the Noom app. And no free ads, because I gave them, like, $165 of my money. And their internal, like, how much I should eat calculator was wrong.

[B]

Oh, gosh.

[A]

But I didn't know that. So after three weeks of doing it, like, to the letter, I was like, I'm broken. I'm gonna get diabetes. I'm gonna die early. I'm gonna miss my son's adulthood. Okay. Two days later, I just put my same info into two free calculators of, like, how much calories I should eat. And they both gave me like 4 or 500 calories less. I started doing that. I started losing weight. So if I had been. If I had interpreted as.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, maybe Noom is a slightly rapacious tech company that is, like preying on podcast listeners like myself. This is back when they were. Every third ad was a Noom ad.

[B]

Right. I remember those days.

[A]

Yeah. If I had interpreted as, like, big tech sucks, I would not have been feeling so despairing, like, I'm gonna die and lose a limb, which is really where my mind went. So I was interpreting this data in that moment. And what if I had a different interpretation? It would totally change my experience of it. And couples work is a great example of that. Cause you have two people who are there experiencing the same thing, and then they can explain how their interpretations might wildly differ from the exact same data 100%.

[B]

And their different interpretations are often what's hurting each other. Right. And so it's really tricky. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great example.

[A]

So here's a more difficult question that I don't. I've never asked anybody. I don't think I've heard anybody talk about this.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Okay. So let's say you have someone who is recovering some self trust from having grown up. Let's just say in a conservative religious environment where they were really encouraged not to trust themselves. They were encouraged, whether they were boys or girls, to trust these men and their interpretation of the Bible, which, by the way, would never be explained.

[B]

That's true.

[A]

Nobody would ever say, we're Southern Baptists because Jim went to Dallas Theological Seminary instead of Princeton Theological Seminary, and we would be Presbyterians if he had. No one ever says that.

[B]

That's true.

[A]

Okay, so that's just a little caveat.

[B]

But yeah.

[A]

So like someone who's, okay, I'm coming to trust myself and not just authority. What's it like when it's time to trust new sources of authority outside oneself? Like that? That's like a later move. That's. Maybe you're in a better part of your story there. It's encouraging. It's a good place to be. It's a good problem to have, in a sense. But what have you seen with clients navigating? Well, do I just trust Renee Brown now? Or, you know, like, who's the new. What do I do here?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is I think it's gonna be quite triggering, you know, which is, of course an overused word, but it's gonna be at times. And that's what I've seen. Really scary. Because if you've had trust misused over you or authority misused over you in any way, it can be really scary and alarming for your nervous system to see anyone in that position. Right. And so I think that people going forward who have come out of maybe a high control environment are naturally going to trust less. And I think that that can be a good thing, though. I think that their relationships can be more intimate because they're not looking for these sort of hierarchical relationships as much, that they can be more on a level playing field with themselves and with other people. But I think scary. I think it's gonna be scary. I think there's no. I don't have a fancier way to.

[A]

Say that this is less about therapy and more just about culture. But it strikes me that that's also could be a tenuous situation given our modern media landscape.

[B]

Absolutely, yes.

[A]

Where. You know what I mean? Like, so we had sort of an opposite problem growing up evangelical. It was like, well, whichever dude sort of called my Christian school and was like, I'm touring through, can I come give a talk? And they were like, do you believe that Jesus is the son of God? And he would say, yes and go, you're fucking hired. Great, get over here. We don't need to know anything else. So that was like, there's like no gatekeepers. Sure, there were gatekeepers that were gatekeeping the wrong thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So that's what I had, for instance, growing up. And now, okay, oh, I gotta. It's harder to know who to trust. I have some, like, built in distrust maybe at a sort of a trait level now, through time. But now if I just log on to TikTok or Instagram or whatever else, or X or Blue sky, there are companies who are trying to give me voices that I already agree with as quickly as they can so that I will not leave their platform and will continue to give my eyeballs and attention so that they can make advertising money, also sell my information.

[B]

It's really something.

[A]

So, like, that's what their incentive is. And, you know, you could throw in that. We used to have three television networks. Now we have 150, you know, new media content creators that are vying for our attention and all that. So I don't know. I mean, that's. It's not a therapy room question. But it comes up for me as the real world.

[B]

Yeah, it comes up for me as a person and in the therapy room, you know, I mean, I have worked with more than Once several adult children who have lost their parents to Fox News, they really have lost relationship, you know, and I'm not blaming the parents or the Fox News, but the inability for them to cross that bridge, someone's.

[A]

Got to get blamed. It has to be some percentage of Rupert Murdoch and some percentage of the parents themselves.

[B]

Yeah, sure, maybe I'm trying to be too careful here. Yeah, yeah. But it's really real, that sort of echo chamber, whether it's on social media or just watching one channel and the content that's created with the rage bait or that's literally omitting facts or creating things. I would say to your really great question that sort of teed up this whole podcast is I think, creating a bit of a crisis of knowing because it feels, I think many people walk around feeling like, well, I can't trust anybody. Or they walk around thinking, I know who to trust and you're an idiot for trusting those people because that's not real. And sometimes that's accurate. But I think that it's become very, very complex and scary to know anything. And the way our algorithms feed us things is shocking. And for those of us that know that, it's one thing, but I think a lot of young people, you can tell them that, but they don't really believe that. I think it is just feeding and shaping and feeding and shaping the same things over and over again.

[A]

One thing that I really value from the, I would say it's kind of more progressive coded, which I think the current state of therapy training is pretty left leaning in general. I actually think there's, there's some real problems with that because we are, we're losing really a conservative voice in both clinicians research study. But also just being able to meet conservative clients where they're at without judging them, which is our job.

[B]

Sure, absolutely, our job.

[A]

But one of the things that I really value from more of this sort of progressive perspective is the technical term. It's Broffenbrenner's ecological systems model, but it's easier explained by just imagining sort of like a target with a bullseye in the middle, you know, sort of concentric circles coming out. And the idea is that in the middle of that you've got your client, a person. And then as you go further, there are concentric circles that are increasingly less directly related to them, but that nonetheless have an influence on them here and now. So you start with their immediate family.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

And then it's like their neighborhood and other people in their life, maybe their school. Then you get to the national or state level. And you have all the things that are going on. So to use a different example to clarify, like let's say there was an economic problem and the person's dad just got laid off. And they are struggling financially in their own family, but also they live in Michigan in 1998 and factory jobs are moving to Japan. And so not only is this person's dad struggling, but most of the friends are worried about losing their income in the auto industry. So that's an example where both the macro system and the micro are going to be affecting a person. Okay. So to take that to knowing, you know, epistemological crisis. Right. This is a term that people are using. We are in a crisis of knowing. It just struck me for the first time right now talking with you. Helpful. Thank you. That 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.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

And just go, oh, shit. Like we're, we're kind of double challenged here. I'm trying to learn to trust myself from my own particular story. But also all of us are trying to learn what to trust and having a hard time with it.

[B]

So. Good. I think just contextualizing that and normalizing that, you know, makes people feel less like, what's wrong with me? I'm the broken one. Right. I'm the only one who is experiencing that when I think we are all really experiencing that.

[A]

Yeah. Where do you find, do you find, I should say, do you find resources from within the Christian tradition that are helpful? Let's say a client can get beyond any potential triggering where they're sort of by default not going to be helpful because the client just can't. They're not going to be able to sort of approach them at face value. Which is fine. That happens.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But for clients who can, like, do you find resources within Christianity that are helpful to be sort of brought in when the time is right for the right client and can help some of those clients reclaim autonomy or integrate their own trust of themselves with some aspect of their faith, past or current? I'm curious about that.

[B]

Great question. I do not know a lot of resources that I would recommend offhand, but, you know, who comes to mind is Anne Lamott.

[A]

Yeah, I love her.

[B]

And, and you know, and I'm sure she would hate being called a resource because she's a brilliant author.

[A]

If you name a book, help thinks. Wow. And you say in the subtitle, these are the only three prayers there are. You're a resource, Ann. You're a resource.

[B]

That's true. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. And so I would say that that comes to mind because here is someone who is, I think, the opposite of presenting that they know it all, but they're also not denying their own knowing. In her stories, my experience of her is she embodies and gives an example of how to know when she knows and how to. And she says things like, I was just finishing up reading Traveling Mercies, and she said something at one point like, maybe you think it's crazy that God, you know, God did this for me, to have this moment with a friend's dying mother. Maybe that wasn't God, but maybe it was. And I think that there's Sometimes there's a sense of relief in that kind of knowing that I don't have to prove to you with certainty that my experience is real, and yet I'm finding great comfort in it. And so I think she's a great resource of that. Just reading her words, her stories, too, as an example of how does one do that in this world where everyone disagrees about everything and we all hear about it all the time, is perhaps allowing yourself to feel comfort from what you know is a type of knowing in and of itself. You know, not if it's gonna hurt people, other people, not if it's gonna be destructive. But if it's like, I think God just showed me that, and that was right on time for me. And maybe it's okay for me just to accept that comfort without arguing and making it into an intellectual argument.

[A]

Yeah. When I think about this question of, like, resources from within the tradition, I think that the words of Jesus can be a mixed bag. For instance, like, I know for religious scrupulosity, the verse be therefore perfect, like your Father in heaven or whatever is. That can be a real stumbling block to use some Christianese for clients, because, like, of course, nobody can be fucking perfect. And, you know, that might be ripped out of context, or it might. Maybe Jesus never said it. I have no idea. So there are passages that can be tough for people, but then there are passages that I find often can be quite powerful, and I wonder if they solve some of the authority trust issue. So that's kind of a. Put a pin in it. But, like, for instance, I've done this one with a lot of clients. What do you think Jesus meant by Love your neighbor as yourself. What about the as yourself part? And then that will go wherever it needs to go from the client. But like, that seems relevant to like self trust, self compassion. Jesus. Jesus did not say love your neighbor and die to yourself. Not there anyway, not in the Sermon on the Mount, you know, and so that like, as yourself thing is like, you know, for some clients who have never learned to trust or love themselves or prioritize their own needs, that can be very liberating. So first your thoughts on that and then maybe I can draw the line to the authority problem.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I've had that same discussion with clients about that same passage that's loving your neighbor as yourself. And I think that it speaks to the self abandonment that so many people in Christianity are taught as love and as service. But it really is self abandonment or self endangering even. And so it can be, I think, a radical idea and a relief for people to understand that God doesn't just care about who you're serving. God cares about you too. And you protecting yourself and taking care of yourself is also important. Not at the expense of another person, but certainly you are not to, you know, sacrifice your own sense of safety and well being to love other people. But that's what people are often taught in big and small ways.

[A]

You know, that came up in really concrete terms when my friend Sarah and I were discussing the Shiny Happy People Season 2 on Prime Video this past summer, where it's like these stories of these missionary, like teenagers on mission trips being put in, like, frankly, physically and nutritionally and medically dangerous situations. Well, because we're advancing the kingdom, God will take care of us. It's a kind of magical spiritual thinking that like, even fully trained missionaries don't do that shit. Like they, you know, like these major longer term organizations, like have best practices now, they might not always follow them, but like they at least have this accrued wisdom over the years. Yeah, and like in our training to be therapists, we learn about self care, we learn about vicarious trauma and how to avoid it or recognize that it's going on. Like there's like a real world honesty to it that I do think can get papered over when people are calling on the Holy Spirit or God's supernatural work in the world. That's going to sort of obviate all those, you know, pesky little real world problems like God can handle that. Like, do you, do you come upon that sort of tension?

[B]

Mm, I do. I come up upon it more when I'm working With adults who were raised in environments that mirror that.

[A]

Okay. Like missionary kids and stuff like that or.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Even if the parents weren't missionaries, they were emulating that in their lifestyle choices at home. And so working with people who are learning that their safety and their well being was sacrificed by being in churches where there was harm going on and not being called out like all the way to that point from leadership that's really dangerous to just even as simple, but not to a child that's developing that they didn't have any friends and it wasn't important to the parents because they needed to stay at this particular church. Right. So they didn't get a chance to make any friends because they were so sequestered in an environment that didn't fit them, you know. So I think that's really where I see that.

[A]

I had a buddy who was raised by missionary parents and I think part of his life was over in Eastern Europe, but his younger siblings got much more time. I think there was like a big break or something like that. He was significantly older, this was maybe 10 plus years ago. And he was the first person to say to me to sort of name the sacrifices that his parents had made on behalf of him and his siblings without their consent, which of course you couldn't get that consent, but based on assumptions that they made about missionary work and about what was valuable in the world. And you know, my friend had gone through some faith change at that point and he was like, you know, the way he said it to me was like, I'm feeling really angry at my parents for that. They continue to be this Eastern European missionaries and I just see in my younger siblings, like what this is costing them. They go to the international school, they've got a little bit of socialization, but they're really being poorly set up for life. And like, to what end? I don't even agree with my parents missionary goals anymore. And I remember that being a really kind of. Whoa, shit. An interesting new way of thinking about that that I had not heard before.

[B]

That is a very powerful insight about, you know, how I mean. And truthfully, we're probably all on some level, in less extreme ways signing our kids up for things and lifestyles that they did not agree to.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

But hopefully in ways that are not, you know, hopefully in ways that are not harmful, maybe just annoy, you know.

[A]

But yeah, well, yeah, how about, how much therapy will they need later?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, right, right, exactly. But yeah, that's a really powerful insight and I would say that that mirrors What I. What I see more just the clientele I work with are people coming out of that or looking back, like your friend, years later and saying, wait a second, wait a minute. That wasn't. That was. I don't even think that was okay. You know, but it was presented to me as love and good.

[A]

Yeah. Which is ultimately, you know, to tie it all the way back. We could say that what my friend had done was he had established other ways of knowing that he felt confident in and that he was able to sort of critique his previous experience from a confident new vantage point. And that's kind of a good way of saying, I think what I'm hoping for my clients to find a confident new vantage point from which to then discern what was good and what was not good in what I was given. And that's a process.

[B]

It is a process. You're right. And 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. Right. A black and white, all or nothing certainty. A confidence that has flexibility that we know so much of our mental health is based on just being able to be flexible and move with new information and new conclusions and looking back at things in a different way. But I really like that. I like that confidence.

[A]

So to tie it back to the authority question, like Anne Lamott and Jesus.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

One thing, and I don't get very many, to be clear, I don't get very many of these clients who would still need something to be like the words of Jesus or a Philip Yancey book or that's. I'm dating myself. I don't even know who the current. I don't know. Wash girl, wash your face. Who's that? I don't know the current hip authors in the Christian world. But, like, I don't have as many of these clients. My clients tend to be like, they. They have deconverted or they have deconstructed pretty significantly by the time they come to me. I think in part because I'm not safe to people who are earlier on in that process because of my own public views. But the nice thing about the Jesus quote versus Anne Lamott is that now some people don't trust the words of Jesus at all. But even most former Christians that I have met don't, like, hate Jesus. It's not really about whatever Jesus was about. They probably would be really into it if they could know kind of a thing, you know, so there's something that you get to bypass by saying, what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself that you don't have to deal with? Like, well, why do I trust Anne Lamont? Yeah, I've heard that she, you know, I heard someone specifically criticize her or, oh, no, it's Richard Rohr. Oh, I heard someone say that that leads to Universalism and Unitarianism, and that's like losing the gospel. Okay. And then that person has to. Now it might be good for them to go again. Was that person a good source of information? Are they a good judge of books and ideas or not? So maybe there's grist there for the mill. But the nice thing about a quote from Jesus is it's like, well, I don't have to do that. Probably, like, most people, even non Christians, would go, if you say, do you think Jesus was right that we should love our neighbors as ourselves? 90% of people, if you phrase it in their language in a way that they would understand, we'll go, yeah, he's right about that.

[B]

Hard to disagree with.

[A]

Yeah, that's not controversial. But Anne Lamott, coming from evangelicalism would be very controversial.

[B]

Yeah, I think that there is a. Perhaps, you know, and this is perhaps, you know, revealing that I agree with you about that, is that there's a surety there. You know, there can be, you know, whether you believe in Jesus in the way that you used to or not, or in the way other people think you do or think you should or not, that there is a surety there. And I think, what is that surety? Is it that it's long standing? Is it that it's hard to disagree with love? You know, is it. I mean, what is the surety? And I know the evangelical Pat answer, but I'm saying beyond that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

What is the surety?

[A]

Let me try. Let me give you kind of an answer that I might give, and I'll see what you think about it. My friend Tripp Fuller, who hosts the Homebrewed Christianity podcast, he helped me think about things in a new way about five years ago or so when he was like, think of religions as wisdom traditions. You know, that's like one way you can think of it. That's not the whole thing.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But as a source of wisdom, sort of ideas, concepts, ways of doing life that have filtered down through the millennia. And this is true of every major religion. It's thousands of years. And even, like, if you say Mormonism, like, it's still pulling on a lot of Judeo Christianity and stuff in its formation of its own particular doctrines. But like you're sort of like taking it as well. This is the stuff that's stuck, and it's stuck because it was useful. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean all of it is true. There might be things that were useful for a while and are not useful anymore.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But that is a way I like it because I do think it sort of gets at this point problem we're talking about, which is, well, how do you start to build up that trust? And you said in yourself, you can test it. You can build up trust in yourself by sort of seeing how things go. How do we have trust in outside stuff? I like the wisdom tradition angle. What's the wisdom here for me? What might it be for me? If it's worked for 3 or 4 billion people over 2000 years, how might it work for me? And that takes the. That's not like, what's the Holy Spirit saying to you right now? That's a different question.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's giving you agency to determine and discern which is necessary for trusting yourself and figuring out who else to trust. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So what do you think about that answer?

[B]

I love that answer. I think it's, it's a real, it's a very calming answer. It's the way I interact with. It's not frantic, it's not all or nothing. It's not overly certain. And there's a really beautiful combination there of agency for myself getting to choose how I will or will not engage with this wisdom tradition. And there's also an appreciation for the larger wisdom tradition or scripture, whatever it is, and how powerful that can be when it has been applicable to so many different lives and helpful to so many different people. Like, it's a great combination of those two things together, myself and the way I interact with it. And also that, you know, there is great surety outside of me that I don't know about that I would really like to interact with and it'll help me. You know, I think it's a great combination of those two.

[A]

Yeah. Then the non anxious thing is what stuck out to me about your answer there. Yeah, wisdom. And it's funny, that's exactly the same thing I would describe, like when I said here was the non sequitur to start with, the kind of lived wisdom of the people that I both trusted the most then and continue to trust the most now, even from my evangelical upbringing of like, they do have this non anxious presence is another term for them, which is also. We're trained to do that as therapists. Right. It's hard.

[B]

It is sometimes.

[A]

But I do also think it is a natural consequence of wisdom.

[B]

I think so, too. And I think that wisdom is expansive. And I don't mean sort of in like, a pluralistic way or maybe sometimes it is. But I think that wisdom, to me, when I encounter someone I think is wise, they're not really flustered by what I might be flustered by. They're not even flustered by someone who doesn't think they're wise. You know, like, there's a sort of expansive rest.

[A]

They can handle it.

[B]

There's an expansive rest, a deep well sense. And that, I think, that. That, you know, plays into what you were saying. And whereas anxiety, I think, is really fast and frantic and unsure. You know, I think that wisdom and intuition and knowing is deep and anchoring and wide.

[A]

This could be a swing and a mission, but I'm gonna take a chance. Before we wrap up here, I would like you to think, Monica, of the people in your life that you would describe as wise. What percentage of them are confident that if their political party loses the next election, that America will cease to exist as we know?

[B]

It's a great question. Just to make sure I'm getting the question right, the people that I think that are wise, how many of them think that if their party loses, the America's done. Yeah.

[A]

How many of your wise friends go, Monica, you do really need to read this article. This is. How many of them do that?

[B]

None. Zero. You're right. That's a great question. Yep.

[A]

Good. Me, too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now, they might. They have opinions.

[B]

Of course. Of course.

[A]

Some of my wise friends and people I know that have opinions. Some we agree on some of them. We disagree on some of them, but they're less. Yeah, there's something. Yeah, there's something anchoring. Now, just to be clear, what I'm not saying is, oh, so we have to have Christianity or another wisdom tradition. I'm drawing a line between that and the sort of thing that your book is about, which is like finding eventually that seat of rest.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[A]

And, like, appropriate confidence, but not certainty and not overconfidence. So, like, I love my buddy Darren Tongren, the research psychologist says that humility is being the right size.

[B]

Mm. That's so good.

[A]

You know, it's like, you're not. You're not, like, just a doormat, but you're also not a narcissist. And you're so. It's like, confidence, I think, is similar. Like, my confidence should be roughly equal to the amount of evidence I have for something. Something like that.

[B]

I love that. And doesn't that, I think, really apply to your great questions about knowing is that it needs to be right sized. You know, what I know for myself and feel sure about could become dangerous if I inflate it and apply it to every single person I see when it doesn't apply.

[A]

Like the TikTok influencer.

[B]

Exactly. I have one moment of insight and I've decided to fix everyone's life with my moment of insight. Right.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So knowing needs to be right sized, I think, too. I think that's really great.

[A]

Yeah. And if you think about it in terms of confidence, I think it maps pretty well. So, like, I might be like, hey, honey, I cannot go to this dinner tonight because I know myself and I have no battery left. I am going. We will regret that I went to this thing.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

If I try and make that into a rule about when people should go to dinner, it's just gonna start not applying to people. The more different they are from me, the more. More different their circumstances are from me. It's just going to lose that universality. And maybe that maybe just to wrap up, that's kind of. Maybe that's a way of describing what is wise about the Sermon on the Mount or the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or these things. Is like these brilliant people, spiritual leaders, they found a way to sort of distill things in a maximally universalizable formation formulation, which is not easy to do.

[B]

No.

[A]

And you kind of need thousands of years for people to go, yeah, that's the stuff. No, not that. Yes, that. So love your neighbor as yourself is like, oh, actually, that's pretty. Well, there's not a whole lot of instances where that wouldn't be true. That's a good one. That's better than whatever. Or I would have come up with about, you know, wait till your battery's at 30% or some shit, you know? However, I would try and universalize.

[B]

Yeah, right. Yes. That's great. That's great. I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

[A]

Okay. Well, that's a good place to end then.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I like to end in agreement. Well, Monica, thank you so much for joining again. The book is called you'd Pain, has a. A therapist invitation to understanding your story and sorting out who you are from what hurts. Fantastic time chatting with you. We'll put a link to that as well as your Instagram in the show notes. And you're. You're on hiatus, but you do host your own podcast, right? What is it called?

[B]

I do. It's called Still Becoming with Monica D. Christina and I am on a hiatus just with the whole book finishing and launching and everything. But yeah.

[A]

Okay. Well, we'll put a link to there.

[B]

Great.

[A]

To that show as well in the notes for people if they want to go back to older episodes or subscribe for the future. Thanks again for being here.

[B]

Thank you. It was really fun.