In When Religion Hurts You, Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at a side of religion that few like to talk about. Drawing from her own life and therapy practice, she helps readers understand what religious trauma is and isn't, and how high-control churches can be harmful and abusive, often resulting in trauma. She shows how elements of fundamentalist church life--such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders--can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today by a returned guest, somebody who's been on this show many times and is not sick of us yet, is a friend and a colleague, and that is Dr. Laura Anderson.
So, Dr. Laura, thanks for being here.
Yes, thank you for having me.
Definitely not sick of you.
This is one of my favorite podcasts to be on.
Good.
I'm glad we practiced that and you read the script as exactly as you were supposed to.
Thank you.
I will now Venmo you the $18.
So, Dr. Laura Anderson is a trauma-informed psychotherapist, founder of the Center for Trauma Resolution, and co-founder of the Religious Trauma Institute.
Her dissertation focused on healing after sexualized violence and trauma in connection with purity culture, and we're going to talk about the book that came out of that dissertation.
Dr. Laura Anderson has spoken on Christian and post-Christian podcasts and online platforms and written for Religious News Service and The New Republic.
The book that we're here to talk about is fantastic, and I'm going to hold it up.
It's called When Religion Hurts You, Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion.
I'm so excited for this book to be in the world.
I know that there are many people listening who are going to be helped by it.
And I'm just so excited because you're really one of the leading voices when it comes to religious trauma, a kind of new word that's entered the lexicon over the last couple of years.
And so I'll just start here.
This book, as you write in the very first pages, is coming from a personal context.
And I think we're going to get into healing, trauma, religious abuse, high control, high demand religion.
But what are the personal elements that spurred you to write this text?
Yeah, so much of my professional work really is inspired by personal, which I think you can probably relate with as well.
And the really, I mean, the bottom line is this is one of the first resources out here like this.
This is the book that I wish I would have had 15 years ago.
And so I come from a different perspective.
I believe religious trauma is trauma, and I don't believe the cure for religious trauma is atheism.
Which is a different take than what people have taken before.
And so that's where this book came from, is my own trauma resolution process, the recovery process that I and others are still in.
And then of course, the amazing clients that I have been able to work with over the last decade or so, whose stories have contributed not only to this book, but my own learning, continued education.
And actually it's what inspired me to go back for my PhD and, you know, do all that fun stuff that only really weird people think is a good idea.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so you said something there that I think is worth returning to.
You said, I don't think the cure for religious trauma is atheism.
And I think one of the things that I love about your approach is this is an approach focused on the body.
It's focused on the nervous system.
It's focused on an actual clinical approach to trauma, not just using that word in its kind of colloquial sense.
And so what I hear, and I want you to correct me.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
Tell me what hits you when I say this.
When you say the answer to religious trauma is not atheism, what's your What you're not saying is, hey, atheism is wrong.
You're saying atheism may be a worldview people adopt.
It may be an approach to how they understand themselves and their place in the world and a kind of scientific, rational understanding of things.
That's great, but recovering from religious trauma is not about belief.
It's about a relationship with your body, it's about an understanding of healing, and it's about so many other components that go beyond just, hey, now I believe this and I used to believe that.
Is that fair?
How does that hit you?
Very much.
Yeah, what you said, I would agree with 100%.
And, you know, where our work intersects so much is really in the year of like 2015, 2016, when we started to see a mass exodus from a lot of different churches as the result of the election in the United States.
And what people were realizing On a cognitive level is, hey, what's being taught is not, you know, and promoted is not necessarily what I was taught growing up.
They became disillusioned.
They started leaving churches.
They started leaving spaces of religion.
And that's not just within Christianity or Evangelical Christianity, that's a lot of different high control religions.
Where my work goes that's, you know, kind of different is I focus on the people are going, okay, so I've left this, I've kind of cognitively deconstructed.
I no longer believe some of these things, yet my body is having physiological responses to a variety of different things.
And that's where my work came in.
That's what I was able to start to see in myself, in my clients, in the people that I was observing online.
There was a lot of activation that we were seeing around a lot of different issues and And, you know, the idea of somebody becoming an atheist or adopting atheism, that is, I think, a great option if that is what you choose.
But that's a cognitive piece.
I always say like deconstruction and where you land atheism, that's a philosophical concept that we're talking about.
Trauma is a physiological process that we are navigating.
I think that's an important definition because they can go together, but they are also very separate.
And that's, I think, the piece that was missing was the physiological component, the recognition of how do these beliefs and practices live in my body in such a way that even if I cognitively reject them, my body is still believing them and therefore having adverse responses, even potentially trauma, as a result of what I was brought up in believing and practicing.
I love this as a religious studies professor because one of the things that religious studies professors do like day one of intro to religion class is try to get their students to see that religion is about belief and about like the sixth or seventh priority.
It's usually about so many things, tradition, ritual.
Garb, the clothes you wear, the foods you eat, the smells.
And then once we start talking about garb and ritual, we start talking about bodies.
And that really leads us right to an overlap with your trauma-informed approach to understanding all of these issues.
I have to say that this hit me as somebody who left evangelicalism.
Like, like three months after leaving evangelicalism, I knew I don't believe that anymore.
Like you just said, hey, up here in my brain and my in my head, I'm done.
But I had someone who I'd started dating and they said they were still a churchgoer, but they kind of knew I was skeptical.
And they're like, what if we go to this church?
Will that work for you?
And I should have said no, but I didn't.
And so we go and we sit down and right when we do, the song starts and the message has come.
Cognitively, I'm like, I don't believe any of this anymore, but you know what my body did?
My body got up and walked out of the church before my brain even knew what had happened.
Before I knew it, I was outside fuming mad, and my brain had no chance to even catch up with my body.
I always come back to that when I think about your approach.
All right, you're not my therapist.
I don't get to use this as a chance to just talk to you about things, so let's do this.
Before we talk about healing and so on, would you give us a really succinct definition of religious trauma and or religious abuse, if that's possible?
I will try.
Okay.
So what the unfortunate thing is that we're working up against, so I do believe religious trauma is trauma.
There is not clinically a succinct definition yet of trauma, because if you look over the last 30 to 40 years, how we understand trauma has shifted drastically.
So I think, you know, in 20 or 30 years, we'll get a succinct definition.
Um, but, you know, kind of what I tend to say is trauma is anything that is too much, too fast, too soon, that overwhelms your ability to cope and come back to a place of safety.
So what that means is trauma is not the thing that happens to you, but it's the way your body or your nervous system responds to the thing that happens to you.
Which means that trauma is subjective.
So what is traumatic for you may or may not be for me and vice versa.
Trauma is perceptive.
That means it does not have to be an actual real threat in front of you.
It could be a perceived threat or a remembered threat.
And trauma is embodied.
It doesn't live in your head.
We can't think it away.
And so when we look at that, we go, okay, so religious trauma, well then religion or religious is an adjective that helps us better understand the context where the trauma originated, which also gives us some clues into the recovery process.
So that's religious trauma.
Religious abuse and religious trauma are not interchangeable, though some people do like to say they are.
But if we go with that definition of trauma is not the thing that happened to you, but the way your body responds, abuse or religious abuse would be the thing.
That could be the thing that happens to you that may overwhelm you to such an extent that you're unable to come back to a place of safety.
It doesn't mean that that absolutely will happen.
There's a lot of different responses that our body can have as a result of religious abuse, and trauma is one of them.
There's a myriad of other relational, physical, psychological things.
I, you know, kind of when I talk about what is religious abuse, I really boil it down to the improper use of religious beliefs, practices, systems, relationships, really that are fragmenting an individual, taking away voice, choice, and autonomy in order to have more power and control.
And that's very loose and vague, but it's almost meant that way because I'm less inclined to say, here's these specific practices or teachings that are abusive.
These ones aren't.
That's getting some sticky territory that I don't know that I want to necessarily go into.
Yeah.
So if we take these ideas of religious abuse as the thing that happens and then religious trauma as the way your body responds to the thing that happens, we can then ask, well, what does it mean to heal from those?
If I'm somebody who has experienced And I want to be careful here not to couple these in ways that are improper, but if I'm somebody who believes that they are experiencing religious trauma, what does it mean to heal from that?
And I think one of the great merits of your book is that you really share with us some of the discoveries you made about healing from religious trauma and the ways that you needed to think about it for it to be helpful for you and for the people you work with.
Would you mind sharing with us a little bit about that?
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, so the process of healing really is kind of the core of my doctoral work.
I knew that I wanted to involve, when I was doing my research, I knew I wanted to somehow involve my own story.
And I had this idea in my head that by the time I was writing my dissertation, I would be healed from my trauma.
So that meant I would look a certain way, feel a certain way, act a certain way, be in these relationships, be not in these.
I had this very specific picture of what it would mean to be healed.
And then I was going to tell everybody else how to do it, which I'm just laughing now because I'm like, oh, that sounds like me and like purity culture when I wanted to write a book on purity culture and how to have a peer relationship.
Okay, so old habits die hard.
Anyways, we get into the process and of course this picture that I have seems to be getting further and further away.
No matter what I do, what therapeutic modalities I do, how much I'm working and efforting, this picture is not happening and I instead of being hopeful and becoming incredibly discouraged and the amount of shame That I'm feeling is just exacerbated all of the time.
And I remember going to my dissertation chair and I said, I don't get it.
I'm supposed to be using my story.
I'm supposed to be talking about this process of healing and I'm not going to be the right person for this project because this picture is not happening.
And she was so wonderful and so kind.
And she said, you know, maybe it's possible that you're looking at healing in too limited of a In too limited of a way.
And this idea that, you know, to be healed means you get to this finish line, a period at the end of the sentence there.
I'm done.
Now I'm done.
I'm healed.
I can move on with the rest of my life.
And what I really came to find was, well, begrudgingly, she was right.
I did not want to because I thought, oh, that means I'm going to have to give up this picture of what it is.
But I realized that if I Hold on to that really tightly.
I was missing a lot of things that were happening that actually were evidence of me healing, that I wasn't counting, right?
And so, by opening up this idea that healing is not this end point that we get to, but it's this ongoing process that often happens in very small, very nuanced, even very mundane moments, it means that everything counts.
And it allows us to really kind of lean into the living piece of our life.
Like, you know, life is about actually living rather than saying, I have to get to this end goal and then I can live.
And so what it turned out as is that when I took that definition off and I opened it up, All of a sudden, for myself personally, I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, I have actually come so far in all of these different ways.
I'm watching myself make different choices.
I'm watching myself handle triggers differently.
I'm watching myself choose different relationships.
And though it may not be that picture I had, like, it has to count for something, right?
And so that was really, really important.
And then kind of the basis for the research, I went back and I started looking at data of like, what are the themes that we start to see in people that are living in healing bodies?
What do we notice?
And that's really where the themes of both my research as well as the chapters in the book came out of that data.
So this is all just so helpful because I think there's so many of us who have experienced a variety of things that are really driven to say, hey, I want to heal.
I want to live a life that's different than the one that I inherited from these experiences.
And I can't wait till I get to the day when I can have that party, invite my friends over and say, it's all over.
I'm healed and it's all done.
But as you say, when we think about it that way, we often miss what's happening, you know?
And I think for me, there's always been a constant theme in my life where I've thought, you know, if you wait for the good old days, you'll miss the good days that you have and you won't realize all of the wonderful and marvelous and often enjoyable relationships, experiences, accomplishments that happen.
And you'll look back someday and go, wow, that was actually really good.
That was actually really positive.
But I was so mired in trying to reach this one salvific moment that I didn't ever notice that.
So I just appreciate your approach so much here.
You go through just a number of different kind of attributes of healing and characteristics of people who are healing in the book, and you focus on these in various chapters.
We don't have time to highlight all of them.
But I do want to highlight a bunch.
One of them is something that you and I have talked about in the past and that is engaging in a relationship with your body.
This is a lot of material from people who have experienced purity culture.
But it seems like people who come out of high-control religions, high-demand religions, often are taught to somehow disengage from their body.
And part of the healing process is finding a way to actually live in your body.
And people who haven't experienced this will be like, how can you not live in your body?
That doesn't make any sense.
But would you mind sharing with us what it would mean to heal in a way that you actually engage your body, perhaps in ways you have not before?
Yeah, I think one of the tenets or the playbook rules of many high control religions is what I might call a divorce from your body.
So it's this idea that your body is bad, evil, sinful, of course makes other people sin, especially if you are female or assigned female at birth, right?
And so the solution to that, of course, is cut it off, you know, suppress, oppress, enslave all these things that we are supposed to do to this body and then essentially live in our head.
But the more I lean not only into this theme, but this, this, the research around this and just in it, and I should say an anecdotal research as well,
The more I realize that when we control people's bodies or perceptions of their bodies, which also I'm going to include sexuality in there, not as whose genitals are smashing up against whose, but like the essence of who we are, the more we can kind of vilify and cut off from that, the more we can control people.
Our body is a meaning maker.
We make meaning through our senses, through our emotions, through our visual imagination.
All of these ways.
Um, and so if we are cut off from that, not only do we not have access, but we actually vilify large parts of who we are, large parts of how we navigate through the world.
So I really view the idea of embodiment or the concept or really the lifestyle of embodiment as a very rebellious act of, you know, towards high control religion of getting back into our bodies.
And I mean that in a very literal way, like starting to pay attention to actual cues that are coming up in our body to use the restroom, to eat, to stop eating, to go to sleep, to take a break.
That's something that is often very foreign in high control religions where we do not like to even lean into natural cues.
We vilify those.
But then even on a greater level of like understanding what it's like to navigate the world as a body.
And how that shapes our experience and perception of ourselves and other people and systems and environments.
That's maybe a bigger conversation for a bigger day.
But when we do that, when we can become embodied, it also shifts the way that we see other people.
I think I ended the chapter with something like saying, you know, when I love myself, I cannot not love you.
When I respect myself, when I honor myself, when I see myself as a valid human body, I cannot not do that for the next person.
And that's what changes the world.
And I know that sounds like, you know, what, Michael Jackson, heal the world or whatever.
But there is truth to that, right?
When we become embodied, it extends to our fellow neighbors and friends and those we come in contact with near and far.
It really is.
I mean, there's so much discussion of this among certain folks who've left high-control religions, and it really seems to be an experience that really traverses so many people's contexts, whether you're assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth, whether you grew up in the South, or whether you grew up in New York City, whether you're, you know, coming out of Latter-day Saints, or Catholicism, or Evangelicalism.
There's just this characteristic of My body was seen as the enemy.
And I know for myself, you know, when I left evangelicalism, I really entered the academy.
And I didn't realize until many years later that I had taken the training of hating my body from evangelicalism and placed it in the academy because it was like, hey, you know, you need to work 12 hours a day to get to, like, be a professor someday.
You better, like, discipline your body.
No, you're not tired.
No, quit being, you know, such a blank, blank, blank.
You need to, like, blah, blah, blah.
Only years later did I realize that some of those, like, mechanisms were still at play in my body, and it took a long time to, like, identify, you know?
Yeah.
Religion does not have the corner market on fundamentalism, and so it's so easy to get out of these systems and then replicate them with wellness culture, academic culture, all these other things, because it just all goes really well together, and that's very familiar to us.
And I also think that you mentioned wellness culture.
There's a temptation to think, well, that thing didn't solve me.
What's the thing that will?
So like, you know, Christianity didn't solve me.
Maybe wellness will solve me.
Maybe yoga will solve me.
And I think your approach is like healing is not about resolution or solving the condition of being human.
It's about living with it in a way that allows you to flourish.
And I think that's really wonderful.
This brings me to another chapter that I think is really tricky and something I get asked about a lot, and that is grieving your former life.
For so many of us, the days of being young and free and in college, in high school, a teenager, a young person in the world drinking martinis and hanging out with the gals from Sex and the City.
I don't know what it is we were supposed to do.
But none of us did that.
And when we look back on it, we're like, I'm so sad.
Or all those friends are gone and they weren't my friends anyway.
And how do I remember anything about those times without pain?
How do I inherit my past without feeling like it was all a waste?
Can you help us sort of think about that in terms of your approach to healing?
Yeah, I often say to like my clients and my colleagues that I have discussions where we talk about like trauma work in so many ways is grief work.
It's this constant examination, not constant, but it's this examination of the things that we've lost and how do we integrate that into our current lives.
And I think it might sound so cliche, but I think it's important is to be accurate and honest.
We don't, we aren't able to heal things if we're denying it.
We don't grieve things if we're denying it.
And so there is room to hold in one hand that, yeah, it really sucked.
We really did miss out.
There was some really harmful things that happened that had a lifelong impact that even if we go back and do inner child work and we let ourselves pole dance and be in an open relationship or try all the martinis and watch Sex and the City on repeat, We're still not going to get it back, you know, and so there is, there's, it's, it's okay to be angry about that.
It's okay to feel things about that.
And it's about this balancing of saying that is true and accurate.
And also I'm here in this present moment, what.
Do I need?
Maybe I can let myself be sad without getting swallowed by it.
I'm going to skip ahead just for a second to the last chapter of the book.
I talk about integration and I use the work of Janina Fisher, whose most recent book is called The Living Legacy of Trauma.
And I think this goes hand in hand with Greece because she talks about a legacy is usually something that gets passed down to us from somebody.
But a living legacy is something that we are living, this thing that happened to us that has shifted and maybe contorted our lives.
And we now live differently as a result of it.
And it doesn't mean it's without pain, but it also doesn't mean it's defined by pain or defined by the past.
And we learn how to integrate these experiences in our life.
And with grief, sometimes it does mean we go back and we try new things.
We give ourselves permission to Dress however we want or go on, you know, a four month backpacking trip across Europe because that's what we should have done when we were 19, not get married.
You know, like we do give ourselves permission to recreate some of those moments.
And then other times we go, yeah, like if I were to leave for four months, that would do a lot of damage to my family.
And the repercussions of that would be far greater than the potential adventure I could go on.
And I have to grieve the fact that I may never have that experience.
And that's all part of it.
That's part of that living legacy of saying, this is, this is what has happened.
It is not who I am, but it has happened.
So to deny it, like, also cuts me back off from a large part of who, how I've gotten here.
So we learn then to balance it.
Acceptance does, and this is part of the grief process.
I mean, I don't abide by the five stages of grief, but they are helpful language, you know, to have.
But when Elizabeth Kudler-Ross came up with the five stages of grief that we now use all the time, she came up with them for people that were experiencing chronic long-term illnesses that were inevitably going to result in death.
And the reason she had these five steps to this grieving process was so that they could learn to live even though they knew they were dying.
And there's something about that that feels really similar to what it is that we're going through.
To say, this thing happened to us and I am going to learn to live as my legacy in this present life.
And there's something beautiful and poetic, and maybe that's because I'm an Enneagram four and I like dark stuff, but it works, right?
And so, yeah, there's the grease.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, well, I appreciate your perspective there about, you know, denying it isn't going to help.
And getting to a place of acceptance and integration is really an ongoing, it's an ongoing process.
It's an everyday, because there are going to be days when you wake up and you're like, you know, no, I am.
I am mad.
I am angry.
I spent all those good years doing this.
And and I think that makes sense.
I want to say that I don't know how you did this, but I did get married at age 20.
And when I was in grad school years later, after being divorced, I did go on several backpacking trips.
I lived in Europe, but I did, you know, there are many memories of being in random Czech cities or Slovakian cities or Croatian cities in August, because that's where I was trying to like live my life and figure some stuff out.
Can I ask you a question?
One of the things that I've encountered with people, and I often say was part of my own journey with this whole notion of grief, was I had to give myself permission to do cringy things.
Here's what I mean by that.
Yeah, we didn't do those things when we were young, and sometimes that means you're going to do them a little later, and you don't know what you're doing.
Like, you don't know how to do stuff other people did, or you're going to, like, try to go to a salsa dancing class, or maybe Pilates, or ride a motorcycle.
I don't know what it's going to be, and you might feel really embarrassed and uncomfortable, but you know what?
That's what life is and that's okay.
There's a permission there to kind of test out who it is you want to be.
I don't know.
Does that strike you?
I mean, yeah.
It does.
I think it's really great to have those redemptive experiences, whatever that looks like for you.
I'm not necessarily one to put a silver lining on things, but one thing I often tell my clients and friends is, you know, I did a lot of things at 30 that I quote unquote should have done at 20, right?
So I did the cringy things.
The one thing I had going for me is that my brain was fully formed when I was doing them.
And there is something really nice about that.
Because at 20, I would have had to repeat that mistake at least seven times in order to get it.
At 30, I did it once and I was like, yeah, I'm good.
I'm really Really, really good.
So there's your silver lining for you.
However, I think it's good to give yourself those experiences, even if they're cringy.
Full disclosure, the first time, you know, I did some online programs for school and stuff because, you know, I had to stay, you know, close to my church.
When I was getting my PhD, I had an experience where I got really high one night with some of my classmates.
And it was not good the next day.
I was in hypnosis class all the next day.
Not a good comedy, right?
But I remember going, I have the experience now.
I can say, hey, remember that one time when I got high back in grad school or whatever?
And I was like, yeah, here's my cringy silver lining moment.
Right?
Yes.
And we may or may not have all of those moments.
But I do agree with you that, you know, if you want to go do the things, Let's do them.
I mean, I think that's incredibly important.
I have a friend right now who is just getting out of 25, 27 years of marriage, and so there's a lot that they're experiencing now as a 40-something-year-old that most of the time we do at 20, 22, 24.
And I constantly tell them, like, this is okay.
Like, be kind and compassionate to yourself.
You need to have these experiences.
It helps you create an identity that is yours, that is fully yours, and it's not created by anybody else.
And I love when people go do stuff like that.
I love to do it myself.
So there we are.
Well, just as you really provide us this framework in the book, the healing is not a, I'm leading up to this apotheosis moment where it's all done.
And it seems to follow from that, that life is not linear.
Life is a life we live with texture, with layers, with dimensions, with chapters, with various iterations of ourselves.
And that means we do things, we accomplish things, we test out things at various times in life, and as long as we're safe and healthy and respectable to other people, then that's good.
That's not bad.
I have tattooed on my arm a quote from Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning, Death is the Mother of Beauty Mystical, and it follows along with your… Your trope about death and dying and our mortality give us a chance to live lives that are full of texture and intention.
And we can see that as people healing from trauma, I think, very acutely.
One more thing before we go, and that is a chapter that follows right along this, and that is developing healthy connections and relationships.
And this is sort of all tied into everything we just mentioned.
Why is that such an important part of this process for those who are experiencing religious trauma and trying to heal?
Yeah, a couple reasons.
I really believe as humans we are relational beings and I think I could cite off a lot of research that also backs that up.
And so relationships are important and what we know about healing from trauma is that relationships are also essential there.
But what we also know is that when we are harmed in the context of relationships, then healing in the context of them feels incredibly scary.
And so the reason that that chapter is placed where it is, is because oftentimes when we experience, when there's trauma, when there's all these overwhelming experiences, when there's abuse, We want to isolate ourselves because we don't have boundaries or we're not able to regulate our nervous systems or we don't trust ourselves.
We don't have a sense of our own body and how to navigate through the world.
We're constantly deconstructing.
And sometimes isolating a bit or stepping back can feel like the safest thing to do.
And yet, there comes a point where that isolation is actually what impedes us from moving forward and where we should invite people into that process.
And what I can say personally is that There was a point, and I don't have words to describe exactly what this was, but my body just knew it was safe enough to lean back into relationships.
And I fully credit my dog for making that happen.
She's my little wing woman.
And, um...
Where my body was going, okay, this feels scary, but we're going to try this.
Because if you can lean in, you might get a gift that's bigger than the fear that you have.
And that has been true.
There is a bow to wrap that up.
You know, there's a pretty bow to wrap that up.
But I think then in relationships is where we see the, kind of the quote unquote, or religious word, shrewd.
Of our work that we've done, it's where we come to learn even more about each other.
And it is what I think kind of the goal and the purpose of this life that we live is to be in connection with other people in a variety of different ways.
But relationships on a myriad of different levels and depths of intimacy, I think, is something that heals and changes us in the most beautiful ways.
And And it gives us something to, I don't know, in religion they're pretty messed up.
Relationships can often be pretty messed up.
And to have access to a new kind of relationship where you can show up authentically and be loved and accepted for exactly who you are is such a wonderful gift that we can give to ourselves and other people.
It is amazing how healing that is to find healthy community, to find people who see us in our full selves, and just what that means for human beings.
I love that part of your book, and I love that part of just thinking about what it means to come out of what feels like a traumatic situation, toxic communities, and build something that really feels Healthy and life-giving is the way I always like to think about it.
It gives me life rather than takes it from me.
It is the, it's the chapter in my book that I get emotional every time I talk about or read because there is a visceral knowing in my body or a visceral remembering of the isolation and then coming into relationship.
Yeah, yeah.
And I feel it so much that I go, oh, that's like the living experience of healing right there.
Yeah.
I have it in my body and it's, it's pretty, it's like overwhelming in a good way.
Well, and I won't spoil the story, but one of the stories you share is really about kind of taking a small risk, showing up at a get-together on a Saturday, kind of telling yourself, like, yeah, this is going to be terrible.
I'll get some chips.
Then we'll, hey, I'm going to tell everyone I'm going to the bathroom, and then I'm going to leave.
And I've been there.
And it ends up being something that is truly, like, meaningful and lasting and develops into friendships and the whole thing.
Those parts of being human are so great.
Anyway, we're out of time.
I know you are very busy and are going all over the place to talk about this wonderful book.
The book is When Religion Hurts You, Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High Control Religion.
I'll just ask you as we go, where are places people can link up with you and your work and everything you're doing with the book?
Yeah, thank you.
Well, my book is available wherever you purchase books.
Of course, I always encourage you to go to your local bookstore and or library to request it.
My website is DrLauraAAnderson.com, and that's where you can find everything that I do and the things I'm a part of, my podcast, Substack, links to different projects that I'm working on and how you can participate.
All of my social media platforms are DrLauraAAnderson, and of course, I'm the director of the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
We are an online coaching company that specializes in working with religious trauma, folks coming out of high-control religion, cults, purity culture, all the, you know, really fun stuff.
And so you can find us at TraumaResolutionAndRecovery.com or on Instagram at TraumaResolutionAndRecovery.
That's fantastic, and I have been part of the Center in the past.
Dan is someone who continues to be a coach and practitioner, and so we are big fans of your work and of the Center, and really appreciate all that it does for people.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find all we're doing with Axis Mundi at AxisMundi.us.
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We'll be back next week with the weekly roundup, with it's in the code, but for now we'll say, thanks for being here.
