Emancipate Your Mind

My kids all started school this week and I received the paperwork with the demands for scheduling and parent volunteer hours this semester in order for them to participate. It’s much more hectic than I anticipated and the craziness already began this week. As they are entering a busier and more demanding phase in their lives, I’m realizing I must enter a new phase in mine to be the sup...

The primary developmental task your teen will go through, whether they grew up in high demand religion or not, is differentiation. Differentiation is a process all humans go through to establish an individual identity separate from their parents and authority figures. It is a process whereby we discover our values, our beliefs, our desires, and our boundaries. The process our teens are going throu...

Creating a sense of emotional safety in your home after high demand religion with teens is a little different than starting with young children. You’ve likely already established relationship patterns. And if it feels like your teen is closed off or won’t share their feelings and thoughts freely with you, there’s likely some work needed to heal those old patterns. In this episode...

Parenting after deconstructing high demand religion can feel daunting. Going from a system where you’re given a road map for how to raise your children to having to rely on both your inner guidance and the guidance your kids share with you can feel scary and confusing. Creating a parenting environment where you’re able to work alongside your kids to make sure their unique needs are met...

When we left Mormonism, we were terrified of what that would mean for our kids. It’s been 6 years of trusting ourselves as parents, trusting our kids input about what they want for their lives, and creating a dynamic parenting strategy together. While it has been far from perfect, we’re pleased with how things are going. This podcast is a conversation about what we’ve learned alo...

How do you even begin to create community for yourself after leaving high demand religion? In this episode, Communication Coach, Chris Peck and I explore how we can be intentional with the process, take cues from our relationship with ourselves, and lean into the sometimes awkward rehearsal process of practicing new ways of relating in community. ___________________________________________________...

I’m so excited to have Chris Peck from Speak Into Action Communications back on the podcast to talk about the subconscious scripts we intentionally or reactively use in our relationships with others. In Part 1 of this episode we explore the difference between showing up intentionally versus showing up in a reactionary way. We also explore how the scripts we used in high demand religion may b...

I know you’ve heard it before and you’re going to hear it again at least one more time today. You’re not meant to be everyone’s cup of tea. Today we discuss the reality that you may fully accept who someone is and STILL not be compatible with their reality. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with them. It just means t...

We all crave acceptance, but what does it really mean to accept someone? In this episode we discuss the pieces of acceptance everyone seems to agree on…and some of the problematic ideas around acceptance that lead to us feeling used, confused, and sometimes abused. We’ll then talk about how you can walk the line between accepting others and maintaining a sense of personal health and we...

Sharing our stories in a safe environment is an important step in healing from trauma. Often we engage in this important step with others who have experienced similar things in their past. When we tell our story and someone else says, “Me too! I get it. I’ve been through something similar” we feel seen, heard, and validated. This feeling can be both empowering and intoxicating. I...

As we’ve talked about healthy attachments, two words kept cropping up in conversations: Trauma Bonding. Many people used these words to describe the almost instant friendship between two people who have experienced the same trauma and can validate one another’s experience. However, this is known as “bonding over trauma”. (We’ll talk more about this next week). However...

Developing healthy interdependence with our partners, family, and friends is healthy and normal. Relationships where we feel free to both give and receive support and love can help us feel more emotionally stable and studies are showing that it can even help us live longer. But in our Western culture where independence is prized almost above all, the word “dependency” can leave us worr...

Developing a safe, intimate connection with others can feel scary for those who are trying to reclaim a sense of personal identity after religious trauma or interpersonal codependency. In this episode, we discuss what healthy emotional co-regulation looks like and how we can set the stage for this powerful experience in our most important relationships. ____________________________________________...

If you’ve been in a relationship with insecure attachment patterns, how do you begin practicing secure attachment? Licensed Professional Counselor and my husband, Kevin Hales, discusses the first three steps he shares with couples in his therapy room as well as practical examples of conflict resolution from our own marriage. ________________________________________________________ RESOURCES:...

In today’s episode, we explore the last of the 4 attachment styles and how high demand religion may have influenced our primary caregivers or us as children and how we relate with others. Disorganized Attachment Style, otherwise known as Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style, is a unique combination of both Anxious and Avoidant behaviors. Today we talk about some of the common traits those with...

If you have an avoidant attachment style, you may feel highly uncomfortable getting emotionally vulnerable with other people, which makes it difficult to create the deep connections you both crave and fear. On the one hand, you would love to feel the joy of connection with another special human but on the other hand, because you were taught that emotional vulnerability led to disappointment and so...

If you have an anxious attachment style, you likely spend your time trying to people please, take care of the people around you, and in general try to win the love and connection you so desperately crave. But, you may worry that those you love don’t care about you as much as you care about them. You worry that eventually, they may reject you or even abandon you and this leaves you feeling an...

Do you crave close relationships with others but find it hard to connect on a deep level? Do you often feel lonely or misunderstood? Do you worry deeply that those you love will abandon you? You are likely struggling with an insecure attachment style. For the next few episodes, we’re going to talk about what we can learn about how we relate to others through the lens of attachment theory. Un...

Have you ever thought about how high demand religion taught you to relate to and attach with God? Have you considered how your learned attachment style with the God you were taught to worship might have informed your childhood relationships and may still inform your relationships today? In this episode, Self-Trust Coach and Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Catherine Quiring, shares the insight sh...

Often, some of the most difficult conflicts of values we’ll face is with the people we love the most. Many of us were taught through codependent patterns and practices that love means always agreeing with one another on the things that matter most. This kind of thinking is reinforced through scripture that tells us that husband and wife should be “one flesh”- which was often inte...

Have you ever experienced that feeling of being pulled between two competing values? It can feel like you’re in the middle of a huge game of tug of war as you wrestle between two values that mean so much to you. No matter what you choose, it feels like you lose something important. Sometimes the fight is so fierce that we feel stuck or paralyzed between the choices- choosing in essence not t...

Everyday, you’re making choices about what to do with your limited time, money, attention, and energy. Every time you say “yes” to one thing, you’re effectively saying “no” to several other things you could be doing with those resources. If you’re spending your limited resources on things that don’t matter much to you, you’ll feel stuck, unfulf...

Every day you are creating a life based on your set of personal values. Do you know which values are running the show? If I asked you today what top 5-7 principles are informing most of your priorities and decisions, would you be able to answer confidently? If your answer is no, you aren’t alone. Many of us haven’t taken the time to really understand the value system we’re operat...

The authenticity movement has brought us a lot of great opportunity to learn more about ourselves and free ourselves from situations that don’t feel healthy for us. On the flip side, with the authenticity movement has grown a binary way of thinking that is reminiscent of the high demand cultures we’ve worked so hard to deconstruct. In this episode, Communications Coach, Chris Peck and...

Authenticity has become a huge topic of conversation in the past couple of decades. While there is great freedom and personal guidance in getting curious about what does and does not feel good to us as individuals, there can also be a lot of confusion about what “being authentic’ means and even shame and fear about not showing up “authentically enough”. This is especially t...