S5:E15 - What if I Get Sued? Protecting Yourself When Telling Your Story Featuring Jenai Auman Katherine Spearing

New book on Spiritual Abuse available from the founder of Tears of Eden: A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: The Subtle, Insidious Nature of Spiritual Abuse and Life on the Other Side

This is one of the most important and practical episodes you will likely ever listen to! As more people speak out publicly, sharing their stories of abuse in the church, more and more churches, denominations, and pastors are growing litigious, further abusing victims in civil court. If you're thinking of going public with your story, LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE!

Featuring Jenai Auman, author of the recently released book Othered.

We'll Cover:

Question to ask yourself before going public with your story
Things to consider before going public
Tips to mitigate your risk
HOW to prepare IF you get sued
What to expect from lawyers
And More

* Disclaimer: This is NOT legal Advice! *

Read this article, written by Jenai, that inspired Katherine to ask her to talk about this on the podcast. This is seriously one episode Katherine has REALLY wanted to do.

Jenai wrote a companion article with examples of corroboration here.

Jenai Auman is a Filipina American writer, artist, and author of Othered. She draws from her experience and education to write on healing, hope, and holistic spiritual formation practices.

Looking for a trauma-trained mental health professional to work with? www.traumaresolutionandrecovery.com/meet-our-practitioners

Sign up for Tears of Eden’s newsletter to receive updates on the release of Katherine Spearing’s upcoming book: www.tearsofeden.org/about

Uncertain is a podcast of Tears of Eden, a community and resource for those in the aftermath of Spiritual Abuse. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to like, subscribe, or leave a review on your favorite podcasting listening apparatus.

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Transcript is Unedited for Typos and Misspellings

[00:00:00] I'm Katherine Spearing and this is Uncertain.

Starting in April of this year, I began partnering with Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, working as a practitioner for this organization. This organization's CEO is Dr. Laura Anderson. You may be familiar with her. She's been on the pod a couple of different times. She's also the author of the book, When Religion Hurts You.

She's awesome. She's the boss. I work with her and a bunch of other really great practitioners over there. If you are looking for mental health professional, a trained, highly qualified, highly experienced mental health professional that can help you navigate religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and all of the sub categories that fall beneath that.

I encourage you to check out Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery. I am currently accepting a few new clients, and there are several other practitioners that are also accepting clients. I know that's a big thing that comes up a lot in the religious trauma spiritual abuse [00:01:00] world is folks just really struggling to find a mental health professional that understands religious trauma and spiritual abuse and the nuances and complexities of the subculture of evangelicalism and church culture.

So if that is something that you are looking for, I encourage you to check them out. The link will be in the show notes. Also in April of this year, I signed a book deal with Lake Dry Books. My book, Surprise Surprise is about spiritual abuse. It will be coming out in sometime in 2025.

Date is yet to be determined, so I encourage you to sign up for Tears of Eden's mailing list for updates on the release of that book. The need that this book is going to fill in the world of religious trauma and spiritual abuse recovery, that is something that I see lacking in the

It's the need of making the connection between the theology of evangelicalism that actually leads [00:02:00] to the abuse happening. I'm not seeing that a lot in the literature today. Our guest a couple of weeks ago, Krista Brown, she made that connection in her memoir, Baptist Land. But outside of that, it's not really a common thing that folks are addressing.

So I felt like it was a pretty important subject to navigate in my book. It's going to be mostly. Following my journey of recovery, but it's not a memoir and it is also going to be pulling some stuff from the work with Tears of Eden. There are direct quotes from podcasts that you may have listened to

So sign up for the mailing list so that you can get updates about that. Today's guest is my friend and colleague Janai Allman, and I am so excited about this episode. This is an episode that I have been wanting to do for a couple years. And a few weeks before Janai had, and I had this episode scheduled to record, she sent out a Substacks article about the very subject [00:03:00] that we're going to be talking about today.

We are going to talk about her book that just came out, Othered, and we are going to talk about the book a little bit as well, But Janai graciously agreed to have this conversation with me because we both learned a lot of things about telling our stories publicly and how to stay safe and also make sure we get to say our side of the story and those two things are super important on the other side of abuse.

So very excited about this episode. I hope this is one that people will re listen to over and over and over again, and I am so excited to be able to include this as a resource for Tears of Eden and for folks who encounter Tears of Eden. Janai Almon is a Filipina American writer and artist who draws from her years in church leadership as well as her trauma informed training to write on healing, hope, and the way forward.

She is passionate about providing language to readers so they can find a faith inspiring that freeze. She received her bachelor's degree in behavioral health science, and is currently pursuing a [00:04:00] master's in spiritual formation at Northeastern Seminary. Janiyah lives in Houston, Texas with her husband, Tyler, and their sons, Quinn and Graham.

Here is my interview with Janiyah Allman

Katherine: Hello, Janai.

Jenai: Hi. How are you? I'm really good. I'm so glad we're doing this.

Katherine: Yes, me too. I'm very excited about this episode and the subject that we are going to talk about today because it is one, as you and I have, talked about prior to the episode is something that is a big discussion within the survivor community for folks who are wanting to go public with their stories and discussing how to protect ourselves from the potential for a civil lawsuit.

It is not an uncommon thing and it's becoming more common like I'm, I'm seeing it happen a lot. You just went through experience of writing a book before we [00:05:00] jumped on, you talked about going through a legal review when you were writing your book. So everything that we're sharing today is going to just be to help people have some awareness about this experience of going public with your story and protecting yourself because you want to, you want to protect yourself.

As we jump in, I definitely want to highlight your book . So give folks a just rundown of what your book is and why you wanted to write this book.

Jenai: Yeah, I, so my book is a faith oriented book, so I know that some people who might listen to Uncertain, they might be in varying degrees of faith, or totally deconvert...