We're Still Talking About Sex, But With Guests

Joined by the hosts of Sexvangelicals podcast, Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson who are both sex and couples therapists. They both grew up in religious communities with strictly controlled sexual beliefs. Our conversation covers topics like, sexual health and relational health and how much they affect each other, forced vulnerability,  perceived injury, helpful books and so much more.  

Transcript

  📍  Welcome to Butterflies and Bravery. I'm your host, Maima, and I'm here with my best friend, Whisper, and we have some guests today. Some fun and different guests. Yeah, we're super excited about this.  We're here today with Jeremiah Gibson and Julia Pastema, who are from the podcast, Sex Evangelicals, and which already sounds fun and interesting.

I love your guys name. , why don't you guys go ahead and tell us about the podcast and a little bit yourselves and what you do, sure. Jeremiah and I are both licensed psychotherapists and we're certified sex therapists. Our podcasts tagline is the sex education the church didn't want you to have.

So it is a spin off on exvangelicals, which was coined by Blake Chastain, ? And sex because we're sex therapists. And we're passionate about supporting folks in relational health and sexual health, especially for those who grew up in fundamentalist or high control groups, especially evangelical Mormon and Pentecostal groups, which we use the acronym EMPISH, E M P.

EMPISH, that's an interesting word. Jeremiah discovered that for us. We realized that we weren't exclusively talking about Christianity. We weren't exclusively talking about evangelicalism. But we were talking about the types of religious structures. That have high control and tend to limit any sexual health education.

And those tend, at least in the U S to fit within the evangelical Mormon and Pentecostal spheres. Yeah, no, I like it. It's just funny. Cause impish. It's is it empathetic or is it like, yeah impish I M P I S I S H is also I'm trying to think what the definition is of impish I M P I S H less educated kind of whimsical kind of thing.

Yeah. Does that as well? Yeah. Okay. That's wonderful. It's really interesting that , we're having this interview today on, in this timeframe, because our last two episodes of butterflies and bravery, we have both centered around issues with sexuality. And I think our last podcast, we talked a lot about.

Sort of what it was growing up for us and  the control that they had around sexuality expression. And then the podcast before that, we were talking about, the struggling and dealing with severe sexual abuse, especially as a child and how that sort of plays into your role as an adult and in dating and everything.

So it's like this is a perfect time to  get to talk to you guys, get to talk to the professionals about this.  We're just talking about personal experience, but you guys are the professionals. Did  you both grow up in high control religion?

So we're the professionals who also have personal experience too. Perfect. That's awesome. Not awesome if that happened. Sure. Of course. I knew what you meant. . , it is interesting because especially like in the case of the children of God, they're often known as the sex cult because promiscuity and obviously pedophilia and incest and all that was encouraged and gotten away with.

But at the end of the day.  It was still controlling your sexuality because  we had to do it the way they wanted it done. , and even though behavioral wise, I guess you could say, two thought patterns , would seem on the different side of the spectrums, whether it's  this uber purity culture or it's this uber  promiscuous sexuality.

If you're in a place where someone else is telling you how to do it and how to have sex it's the same thing where it's just all under control, right? . That's a great point.



It's really interesting coming out of something like that and trying to find out who you are. And I think like we were talking about,  in our last podcast, too, that kind of falls a bit later on the list of things. It's not like your first priority as soon as you leave to start thinking about, okay, I'm going to have sex.

A lot of times you do for example, when I left, I was very promiscuous. Even after I got married and stuff, we went to swingers clubs and had threesomes  all the time, because that's how I grew up. And I was just regular life for me. It wasn't anything really different than it was pretty much just carrying on how I grew up without having been thinking about is this actually what I want?

Sure. And that's the really hard thing, Jemimah, is that. When we work with people professionally, yes, we're talking about sex, but ultimately we're talking about relationships. We're talking about choice. We're talking about given a whole variety of options that you have for how you can do a relationship.

Which of those are you interested in? Which of those fits your preference? Which of those kind of align with your personality traits? And which of those fit the best interest ultimately of the relationship? So that the people in the relationship are the ones that are making the choice as opposed to people in positions of power who know nothing about your relationship and claim authority on some sort of random  religious or spiritual lines.

 In our background and a lot of the people that we talked to on the podcast coming out of high control groups there's. This huge portion of the healing that is really deconstruction, right? , you're breaking the cycles of whatever it was that you were raised in.

You're trying to find out your own thinking. And it's really challenging for those of us who were raised in A way that we never knew there was a different way to think, so that it's not like we're trying to go,  back to lives that we had before, which is what people who join these groups or religions.

They have a life to go back. We don't have one. There's sure. Yeah, exactly. So what happens is when you come out into the real world and, or the regular world, and there's so much that you're trying to catch up on and so much that you're trying to work on that a lot of times the relationships and the sexuality of where you need to deconstruct with your religion ends up being put on the back burner, like Jemima was saying. , because you're , in crisis mode about all this other stuff that you're trying to figure out.

And , that seems like something that you would just not think about or not try to deal with or not try to heal with right away. But I'm just curious on your thoughts on that because I, like, how much does that actually play? How much do you think that the relationships and the sexual health and the relationship health, how much does that play into a reconstruction journey?

We live in relationships. None of us live on islands. We all have relationships that are important to us. Sometimes those relationships are sexual, intimate, long term partnerships, marriages. Sometimes those relationships are physical. Friends their neighbors those types of things.

The healing that happens for most folks happens in some sort of a relational interaction. Sometimes that relational interaction can be this kind of set apart things such as therapy or those of you that do like  yoga, sometimes it can happen in these kind of set apart more artificial spaces, but.

What's really hard about coming out of religious spaces and especially toxic religious spaces is that you don't have the opportunity to take like a six week break from all of humanity and go I don't know if it was me, it would be like hide myself somewhere in the woods and some sort of a cabin and bring 25 books like I don't have the opportunity to do that and most people don't.

One of the important things Julia, about the work that you and I do is recognizing the role that relationships play. And sometimes the challenges that can bring to the healing process, but also how relationships can be our best allies and how we can create new relationship dynamics and make the most out of the relationships that we have to figure out ways.

To do the deconstruction work, to see the world in a new way with a new pair of lenses. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And this is not shocking to any of the four of us, but we also lose relationships when we leave high control religious groups. That's right. So the challenge for so many folks is that you.

You may not have any access or limited access to the people who you were closest to, you can't confide in them, whether because you've been excommunicated or because the worldview difference is too massive, so you're also starting over. In some ways whether that's completely or in some smaller ways, and you're trying to trust new relationships for the first time.

And for folks like me who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist community, and this is true for all kinds of communities you might have experienced like a forced vulnerability that you owe everything to the people around you. And that is through prayer requests. or accountability partners or other types of formal and informal practices.

So some people don't even know how to negotiate boundaries at a socially appropriate pacing. So you're learning everything new while you're also deconstructing and you're navigating perhaps sexual relationships or romantic relationships if you're choosing, but you're also navigating new friendships.

You might be navigating a new work environment if, like Jeremiah, I hope it's okay to say, you were fired from a church position. We are rebuilding almost everything, and for some people, everything, right from the ground floor with pretty limited skills, tools, and resources, and part of the work that Jeremiah and I want to do is helping folks to have good skills, tools, and resources Because many folks don't have them.

Oh, cute cat. Our fur babies make regular appearances on our podcast. I love that.  I actually was writing down when you said forced vulnerabilities. Force vulnerability, because that's a really powerful way to describe what a lot of us went through  in our religions.

And I do agree with you, even though it's so easy  when you were raised in an environment where sex was so controlled and so tied up in whether you were good or bad, so tied up in whether you were, You yourself as a human are right or wrong. , or there was a lot of abuse involved, like in our cases, and so  it's very easy to.

Spend a lot of time in sexual relationships, romantic relationships very, disassociated, so that's why I think it can seem like that's not always the first thing you're focusing on. You're focusing on like trying to find a job for the first time you're trying to get, are you doing education?

 How do you like all those things? So , your sex, sexuality and relationships in that, goes into almost like automatic mode. , it just goes into default mode, almost of , I'll just keep moving forward because I've got all this other stuff going on.

But the problem with that, although not never, ever want to tell anyone   how their healing journey should work. But the problem with being in default mode with some of those things is, it's like what you said, if you come from a place of forced vulnerability, you don't know how to be vulnerable.

Then you never learned it. And what that even means for you. And so there's trust issues. There's fear. There's all that kind of stuff that you're still suffering from. And if you're not being aware of what are your boundaries, , what are your needs or even who you want to be with, you're putting yourself into a space of.

Very like you're not being authentic to who you are at all and  that does actually start affecting the other Places in your life because you're like, why do I feel so misaligned? Why do I feel like i'm not connecting? And it's because you're not looking at well there's some stuff I need to heal with my sexuality  with sex and relationships and Getting with the wrong people Can also like really sideline your life in a massively terrible way.

 We're working right now on a presentation for a big conference and we were doing a survey just among the Kids who grew up in cults and most of them from the children of God. And the percentages of those of us who experienced abuse and bad sexual experiences, the percentage of those people that ended up in afterwards and domestic violence or violent relationships or toxic relationships is really astronomical.

And so when you talk about the healing journey, I think it's  fair to say that our sexuality and relationships should, our sex and sexuality should be higher on the priority list because of what it does affect, right? Absolutely. And we did a series on How relational health is sexual health and sexual health is relational health.

So too often we think about sexual health as this bifurcated category when actually the skills that we need in a healthy sexual relationship are also the skills that we use. In all kinds of relationships. So sadly, it makes a lot of sense that folks who grow up in cults or high control groups who didn't learn good relational skills then don't know how to either choose good partners, good friendships good.

Folks to date and might be in an abusive situation because of that lack of skill, knowledge, resources, which is why sexual health is a great window into broader patterns of good relational health. Yeah.  I think about this concept of intimacy as well. And when I use intimacy, I don't mean intimacy as a euphemism for sex.

Sometimes it gets used as that. I'm talking about intimacy as the disclosure of important, meaningful information about myself to another person. Again, it could be experiential, could be something sexual, could be verbal, could be dialogical. And I'm thinking again about Julia, about what you said about the forced vulnerability, what Whisper, your comments on that.

I think one of the things for folks coming out of religious spaces where vulnerability is expected is also making choices and giving oneself the permission to say,  I can have a successful relationship and not put the pressure on myself to be the one that discloses everything. The onus of responsibility of sharing, of Information sharing of story sharing of emotional checking in like that doesn't have to rely on me.

That's something that can be shared in the relationship a two way street. Absolutely.  The two of you are familiar with Brene Brown because she's so well known. So she talks about obviously see researches vulnerability and yeah, Something that she often says in interviews is that you're not just vulnerable.

You are vulnerable with the people who have earned the right to hold your vulnerability. And folks in high control groups who experience forced vulnerability, they don't know how to assess for that. And that's not a criticism of them. That's not a fault in them. That's something that we all have to learn.

And hopefully we learn as children and adolescents at developmentally appropriate ages, but I certainly did. And So then, as an adult, I needed to go back and do that developmental work that I missed, that the adults in my life didn't show me, they didn't teach me, here's how you know that it is safe to share something, whether that's a conversation, or a vulnerable experience, or something sexual, or maybe Something financial, anything.

We have to be in relationships with folks who've earned that right.

Such good points. . I agree with you a hundred percent. One of the challenges. I think sometimes for us is when we grew up in a way that our decisions and our choices and our behaviors were all told to us how, , there was no self autonomy whatsoever.

There was no way to develop into A, an understanding of who you were or find a self identity. So a lot of the work that we do once we're  coming out of high control groups or cults, a lot of the work that we find ourselves having to do is just to find that self identity and what  I've found interesting is that.

Human nature is we like to label everything, right? We're not comfortable with not being able to understand things. We're not comfortable with holding those spaces of I don't know what's going on here, but I'm okay with it, so we try to label everything, we try and put everything in these little piles and nothing.

I think is more attempted to label than sex and sexuality. That's one of the things that's like society is trying to put on. This is right. And this is wrong. Like immediately who do you like to date? And what group does that fall into? What do you have? And who does, and where does that fall into?

And what's the name of your group of who you date, like that kind of stuff. And it can be. It can be really confusing to be trying to figure that sort of stuff out and being pressured into finding a label for yourself when you're still trying to even figure out your own self identity.

Oh, yeah. I think that's actually, One of the biggest paradigm shifts for folks moving out of cults, moving out of high control religion is thinking of oneself as individual. Because when you're in the cult, like you think of yourself as a collective. Correct., any sort of decision that you make for yourself  comes in response to or , in demand to the needs of the larger system.

 If it's cult that we're talking about, if it's someone moving out of a totalitarian regime, this idea of individuality and this idea of choice can be really paralyzing for folks. And I think that's important to, to normalize  as part of the healing process.

Have y'all read Dr. Laura Anderson's When Religion Hurts You? I have not read that book yet. It's very new, but it's great. Yeah, I would highly encourage folks to, who are in this this process of figuring out who you are, moving out of these early stages of cult work, to read that book because she talks a lot about important steps to do with one's body, like getting in touch with one's own nervous system in a more intentional way, in a more present centered way.

She talks about developing new relationships with one's body, one's relationships with one's voice. She has some really practical advice and feedback  about how to navigate that that I think is really helpful. We actually had Lara on our podcast   late February, early March to talk about her book.

So there's a lot of really helpful information in that for folks who are in the early stages, first six months, year, two years of moving out of high control space and when I have clients come in for sex therapy, whether that's in a couple or an individual, understandably, they want to talk about sex and they want to have good sex and they want to heal.

I was a client in sex therapy before I became a sex therapist, so I can relate to that. And that's a understandable impulse, but what we often have to do before we can think about what we want in our sexual lives is we have to. be in touch with a more general sense of desire. So many folks, particularly women will say, I don't even know what I want to eat for dinner because everything was so regimented.

And so I will say, Hey, I get it. I'm going to support you in healing your sex life. Part of that is figuring out what you want sexually, but maybe let's start. Let's start a few steps back. Let's think about what you want to do with these two hours of free time that you have. Let's think about what you want to buy at the grocery store.

Let's think about what TV show you want to watch. What you want to wear, which is a big one too. And, The residue from some of these high control groups last a long time. So I even find myself to this day, if I have a pocket of time in which I'm not super obligated to do something, I will think I could go on a run or I could read this book, or I could get a headstart on this project.

And I feel this crushing pressure. And I see it as her partner. And then I have to remember, wait a second, this is not a heaven and hell decision. I can do whatever I want for this hour, right? And so a big part of the work in sexual health healing is thinking about desire outside of sexuality and being more attuned to what we want.

And even Laura Anderson, the author of the book, Jeremiah described, she goes back even a step further and she does an exercise with her clients in which they Go to the bathroom when they need to go to the bathroom, which might sound a little bit silly, but folks from high control religious groups are so disconnected from their bodies that they don't even necessarily recognize.

Oh I need to go to the bathroom. I want to go to the bathroom. I want to drink a cup of water. Or, actually, I don't want water. I want juice. The work starts out really basic. Again, not because the folks are are basic people. They're not. I don't think I was. I don't think I am. But because the restrictive messages and the control run so deep that even just the basic bodily functions become complicated.

Yeah. I love what you said where you're like, that's not a heaven and hell decision. I think I'm going to pick that up with Because  we grew up in a way where it was right, like totally what you decided to do with your one hour or what you decided to eat in that time could be considered a heaven or hell decision as in, in the way of now you broke some unforeseen unknown rule or law that means, There's something wrong with you and you get punished.

Yeah.  I get that so much. That whole, let's just walk through trying to go to the bathroom. . Let's go to the bathroom. Let's eat the foods that we want. Let's wear what we want. I'm thinking about I've got spaghetti straps and I've got a sports bra because I was like moving a lot today and I wanted to be comfortable, but spaghetti straps were.

a sin growing up and showing your bra would be horrendous. And so there would have been a time in my life where I would have agonized around this. Today, that wasn't it. I just knew that I needed and wanted to be comfortable. So it was a sports bra that you can see and a spaghetti strap, but the high control groups can be so controlling that even that could be something that has eternal consequences.

, it's so true and so important and what's interesting too is navigating through These types of muddy waters, I guess even of coming out Of a high control group is that whole question nature versus nurture, right? because it was you know, the nurture that you were grew up in was not And not even remotely close to be nurturing.

, a question that I have for you guys is how do you see that playing into people's healing journey when they're coming from a place where they did not have their own choices about

sex, sexuality, and. Now  they do now it's up to them to decide or to figure it out.

How can you help yourself or like, how would I help myself to understand what's my conditioning and what's coming from within , this is actually what I really like as opposed to,  my conditioning that's something that I know that I get very scared of all the time of do I feel this way because of the way that I was raised?

Or do I feel this way? Because that's what whisper feels, and that. That's something I think that we run into maybe even more so being raised in a high control group than, your average  person So yeah, I'd be curious of  what you think about that and how we can help ourselves to safely find  what belongs to us and what belongs to our conditioning totally I had A conversation with a client last week and whisper.

She used almost the exact same language that you did. She was talking about a sexual experience and she said at the end of the sexual experience with a trusted loving partner. She said I felt a little bit weird. It was in no way coercive and abusive and she was saying to me I want to unpack this because i'm not sure if the weird feelings were because This just actually is a new sexual thing that I don't particularly like, which is fine.

Or, if my weird feelings are because I learned some specific things about this or about my body, and the weird feelings are due to that conditioning. It is totally a really common question, a common concern. , I can definitely think of examples from my own life. I don't think that there are any easy answers to that dilemma, but I would say the first step would be just literally slowing down.

Yeah, this is it. And being able to be present to the dilemma without an urgency to solve it and to figure it out. That's what I would say is the first step. Okay, let's literally take a deep breath and sit with this experience and maybe even name the feelings more specifically. What does weird mean?

What would you add to that? And not just name the feelings, like verbally speaking, but also figure out. Where in our bodies we are experiencing those feelings, right? Because that can also be, that can also be informative. , for instance,  we are experiencing  tightness in our chest, for instance, or , a pit in our stomach.

That's something that commonly gets used  Paying attention to that as a process of discomfort and not placing a label good or bad on the discomfort but just acknowledging that, , this is a potentially new thing that I'm experiencing and really being able  to pay attention to like over longer terms, where you experience these different types of.

 Feelings, do they show up in the same place in your body over time? Do they show up in different places throughout your body? And yeah, I think that can give you a lot of information about, is this something that is coming from  my own need, my own desire and 

that's the thing that's creating anxiety for me. Is this something that's connected with other  trauma responses and it feels like a threat to me. If it feels like a threat, then how do I engage? And working that way. And feeling like a threat might be because it is a threat. Sure.

Or it might not be. That's right. A threat., that is a big dilemma. Yeah. Also, for many, I think, Jeremiah you're right. Making a great point when you're asking, where do you feel it in your body? And that's also a hard question for people from religious groups to answer. The first time someone asked me that question, I was like, what the fuck?

I don't feel it in my body. It is a feeling and it's in my head, the thought, and I still struggle  with that.  I'm a therapist who believes in going to therapy and occasionally my therapist will slow me down and ask me something similar to Jeremiah. And sometimes I still, I just don't know.

I'm aware of the feeling, but it's residing either in a cerebral space or in a disembodied space. Yeah. , and I guess in , in these cases  when you are working through this type of stuff, whether it's trauma responses or reconstructing , your identity around sex and sexuality, having that right partner who can work with you through that is probably such a key thing because , one of our recent guests , shared with us, like her partner was just incredible  in helping her heal and being okay with that.

Wait a second, I got to stop. Whereas 90 percent of the regular world, people perceive that immediately as rejection of themselves. And then all of a sudden you, then you get into this loop of Oh, I don't want to make the person feel rejected. So I'm going to stay in this place where I don't feel safe and I don't like this and I don't know what's going on.

But the most important thing is to make sure that the other person does not feel rejected. So having the right partner with you and that being able to,  just a super small example. It was like, I remember some early experiences that I had when I was myself and my own choice being with people.

And , I have a lot of joy when I'm doing things  I like, and I would laugh a lot of times,  throughout the experience. And  a couple of times, I'd have people that are what's wrong with you. Why are you laughing? Are you laughing at me?

And I was like, this is joy. This is, I'm having so much fun. And that's what I realized. And I was like, okay, I cannot be with someone who does not know how to laugh during sex. If that, if and I figured that out,  But , if you haven't got a lot of other things figured out, which I don't, if you don't have the partner, who's okay with saying, if you say, Hey, time out, I don't know if I like this and I don't know if I feel okay.

And they being like, no problem. And still. This is still sexy. This is still awesome. This is, we can still have fun regardless of what we stopped or started.  And being able to feel safe with a partner that you can do that and not hurt them. , I think it's difficult, but it's so important.

It's super important. And it's difficult. The other piece that I would say is that this is long work. This is long term interactions that we're talking about here. This is going back to the dynamic   in your life  on a weekly basis, on a daily basis, on a monthly basis.

 You know how they say  it takes four or five times to do something before it becomes a habit when you grow up in a high control space in a cult, like multiply that by 10, right? It takes 30 times, 35 times, 40 times of going back to this dynamic and developing the bravery, the courage to keep coming back to that.

 I think that's a unique part of the difficulty of the work. Sure. And I remember, actually I'll say this first part of the work in sex therapy is reframing our definitions of sex and recognizing that sex is more than vaginally penetrative intercourse.

Not only that, sex is something that starts and stops and continues. I grew up reading a Christian magazine from Focus on the Family and Something that I learned from the magazine and something that I learned from my youth group leaders was that any type of sexual or physical contact, not just sexual, but physical contact, even holding hands with a boy, because of course we were all heterosexual, even holding hands was dangerous because once you started Any physical contact was going to lead to intercourse snowball effect.

And that first of all, leads to a culture of all kinds of sexual abuse and harassment and socializes men to be abusive. So that is really super,  dangerous. And What can be really important and what I've learned is actually something I really like is to have a very playful drawn out experience that might be one or two or three days and kissing and then taking a break and coming back an hour later or two days later.

That's really important. So another piece of the reframing was like no holding hands. Doesn't lead to penetrative sex. Holding hands can literally just be holding hands. But there was so much fear. And I remember reading a book called And The Bride Wore White by Dana Gresh. And there was inside, like an insert in the book that was essentially this pathway to intercourse and it started with holding hands and maybe like rubbing shoulders, which first of all, rubbing back massage and holding hands is not inherently sexual but.

Even everyday, non sexual interactions were dangerous to me and to the people that I grew up with. And dangerous even from a pre pubescent kind of age, which is really icky and gross if you think about that too much. Or at all.

Yeah, that's fantastic Yeah,  just being able to step back and say let's let's slow it down. I think is a key I guess tool I would say, to start working through whatever , you might be wondering about. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And not only is it okay, that can actually be part of the fun of the sexual experience.

Yeah. Starting and stopping. And maybe just stopping. That's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting though  We're talking about that concept of holding hands, eventually it's the pathway to the penetrative sex. What's fascinating about that is that in a healthy relationship and in a healthy world, so far from the truth, there's such a huge portion of.

Especially in America and, like the purity culture that believes that it becomes the steps to grooming also, isn't that right? Yeah. Yeah. That's a better way to describe what I was trying to say that , it does set up some really troubling troubling dynamics. Yeah. Cause like when you said like a back rub is not inherently sexual and it shouldn't be.

It really shouldn't be, but so much of society sees it that way. , because of these sort of backwards ideas of what's healthy and what are, our. bodily autonomy is and what our bodily, boundaries are. And also when a back rub becomes sexual, sometimes that's because it was given or taken without consent, right?

So people, particularly women, will talk about, oh, and he rubbed my back and I actually didn't want that and I didn't ask for that and he didn't ask me. Consent is also not something that is talked about in high control groups because the marriage indicates consent, at least in, the high control evangelical fundamentalist communities.

For me, consent wasn't necessary because prior to marriage, the answer was just no, and I as a woman was responsible for that, and then after I got married, the answer was always yes. So Consent isn't necessary in those contexts, unfortunately. And that's such a big piece of it. I would say that In our group growing up having a vagina meant consent, right?

, right?  Because it was set up so much, the woman was made for the man and everything that he wants, he can get regardless of how or when, because, we didn't have that structure around monogamy essentially and marriage. So yeah, that's why anything. anything gets really confusing when you come from a, a space like that.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So speaking of monogamy, what are your guys views on that in the context of coming out of a religious space where that was, held as the most important or the least important, like in our case. That's so interesting that we can share so many parallels, even though monogamy and non monogamy being central themes in both of our religious groups, we're on the opposite end of the spectrum.

What Jeremiah and I often discuss with clients is to move from a behavior focused mentality to a value focused mentality. So I'll ask clients what are your values around sexuality? So they might say, pleasure. or fun, or a whole host of other things, and then we talk about what that means for them.

In religious groups, so often the behavior is labeled as good or bad, evil, sinful, holy, and I would answer that question that sexuality Including monogamy or non monogamy or the whole spectrum in between is something that can be negotiated between couples or groups as long as it aligns with their values.

What I'll often say is that, let's say someone has the value that sexuality is holy. Okay, what does holy mean? That person can tell me what that means for them. And maybe holy sexuality is in a monogamous married context or maybe that person could have holy sexuality going to an orgy or a swingers club and being able to choose that autonomously for themselves, not because it was enforced on them, and still live according to those values.

So I pay less attention to the behaviors and more attention to the values of the individual couple or group. And to build on that, Julia, I'm also thinking with folks about what is the function of this relationship? Something that I found is really helpful for me is this concept of relationship anarchy.

The name of it is a little bit weird Google relationship anarchy. And if you can smell smorgasbord, because. That's the title of it. Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord. All the better. But the Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord is a list of, I think it's 30 potential functions of what the relationship could be.

A partnership, right? Say again. Meaning a partnership. Yes, that's right. Meaning a partnership, right? It can serve a parental function. It can serve a financial function. It can serve an emotionally connective function. It can serve a it can serve a sexual intimacy function. It can serve a kinky function.

Or multiple functions. That's right. And many of the relationships that we have do serve multiple functions. But I think that it's really important regardless of whether someone kind of moves into a monogamous setting or a non monogamous setting, it's important for folks to know, okay, the person that I'm with right now what's the function of that relationship?

What are,  that person and I working towards together? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So this is, yeah, this is I feel like my mind expanded because the idea of what you said, moving from a behavior focused to a value focused and then, tying that in  With what you were saying about what's the function of this relationship?

There's such a fear wrapped around labeling a relationship these days. Do we want to have that talk like, or this big, huge thing? I don't know if you see  some of the popular love island, I don't know if you've seen any of those shows, but they make this huge ordeal of asking someone to be their boyfriend or girlfriend as if it's almost a proposal, and that's not, and that's like. Come a lot into society as such a big thing. And the reason why, like when you said about what's the function of this relationship, my first thought was, would that question scare someone away thinking that I'm trying to label a relationship  but labeling a relationship is so tied in with behavior, right?

Because as soon as you say, Oh we are doing this automatically that ties in with all these expected behaviors. So that's why I think people . Get so scared of trying to label. Is that making sense? What I'm saying? Totally, Antonis. So scared  of trying to label something because of the inherent beliefs of what behavior that brings.

Whereas if you're moving into a values focused relationship, then it doesn't matter what you call it. If you're both going towards the same direction, or both seen as something that's meeting both of your needs. It doesn't matter what you call it, yeah, and I would, I try to demystify monogamy and non monogamy by saying no partnership is really fully monogamous.

Every relationship is an open relationship to some extent. Unless you live on an island together. Without any other resources, because even if a relationship is sexually monogamous probably you have other friends, probably you have hobbies, probably you have things or people outside of the relationship.

So I think it's helpful to think about monogamy and non monogamy in a spectrum and to even think about it without. sexual connotations. Now, that being said, most people, when they're talking about monogamous or non monogamous relationships, are talking about sexual or romantic relationships. And if I have a client or a friend talk about it I'll say, okay, so you've got an open relationship.

What does that mean for you? Because it could mean a million different things. And I make sure that I don't have preconceived notions about what that means, and a monogamous relationship, or a non monogamous relationship, however that's created, doesn't mean healthy or unhealthy. Like you were saying, Whisper the label of a relationship doesn't indicate health.

The health of the relationship is the process of kindness and humanity between two people, or four people, or three people, or whatever else it is. Yeah, this is really great. And it's so interesting that you talked about, in your cult growing up, there was like a forced non monogamy and forced multiple partners.

And for me and for Jeremiah, it was this forced monogamy. And so part of the work of healing is figuring out what do I want for my relationships and how can I make consensual partnered decisions without forcing it into a monogamous or non monogamous label?

Yeah, that's really good. 

, that's so helpful. Like thinking about shifting  your thought patterns and that one of the things that Jemima and I, a while back we started, we created this little program for survivors just about to help them with coping strategies and it was very, like a layman's type of thing.

And one of the worksheets that we created was based on Brené Brown's work and it was, identifying your values. So many people came back with feedback from that of, that was the most helpful thing I've had done in so long because we don't even realize that we haven't stopped to understand what our values are or look at them.

And when you are living a values focused life, it really changes almost everything about your perspective when you think about it. Yeah. , that's such a key, I think for, whatever you do, but such a key for people who are working to deconstruct, a life of control. Yeah, I think I know the worksheet that you're referring to.

Brené Brown has some great research on value identification, and it's super, super helpful. And in a high control religious group, you Don't learn the skills of critical thinking so you don't learn how to assess what your values are and hold space that other people might have different values and the relationship can still be sustainable and good and beautiful, even if our values are not.

a thousand percent aligned. Part of the work in healing from purity culture or healing from the types of groups that Jeremiah and I grew up in is being able to negotiate differences and knowing that you have to have enough aligned values for the partnership to be sustainable and holding space that not all the values will be the same is really important.

Because in my group, there was also enforced enmeshment that being in a marriage, because I got married very young, was meant that my husband and I needed to agree on everything and needed to take care of each other in these very overcompensating enmeshed kind of ways. Yeah. And probably very strictly aligned with gender roles too, right?

Yeah. Yeah, there's like I've been saying that. My pre marital counseling class at the church that I went to was called, The Two Shall Become One. And so the marriage also represented you lose yourself, and you become another entity, rather than, you What I would say is that a good partnership are two autonomous individual beings who create something that they can share together  without losing themselves in it.

Yeah.  It's such a huge piece of religion though,  this is where I'm like circling back to what we were talking about earlier about how much influence does your relationships and sexual relationships have with your day to day life.

And you really see that in, in those really intensely gender conforming, purity religions is that whole, the concept of. You're the bride of Christ too, because that automatically puts you into the space of this is how you're supposed to be, women behave in such and such a way.

And therefore, when you are married to Christ, you behave in such and such a way, like forced enmeshment. It's like to the gills, right? All the way out to where that's it. Like you're fully enmeshed. You have no will of your own. And all those fun things that we're familiar with.

I'm sure. And then for men,  the way that the gender role gets played out Is overseeing and trying to control that, trying to contain the behavior of women trying to contain the behavior of children into very specific types of behaviors. And the man loses themselves in that process too.

I think that's something that doesn't get named a lot  in the deconstruction world. Very good point. Yeah. . That's a really good point . , I'm loving this conversation. .  And I think sometimes what you're saying about,  the man's journey in deconstructing some of these things it tends to be not quite as obvious. That's right. Because , you didn't lose your autonomy necessarily, or , you didn't perceive that, , like you said, , there's not a perceived injury, I would say,  with women who are like, you're supposed to be subservient,  you're supposed to submit. You're supposed to have no will of your own. You're supposed to obey. There's a more obviously perceived injury to that. Yes. Totally. Men there's not, but yet the damage of Being put in that place of like I have to control you and I'm like what you're saying Jeremiah like this is what I'm responsible for the injury that comes from that isn't as obvious But it's just as much of an injury that needs to be deconstructed.

Sure. Yeah power can be a great masquerade of some of these wounds that in order to do that deconstruction work, the person who has that power. So for the case of our conversation the man in a opposite sex partnership has to both move into some of these vulnerable spaces and also give up the privilege that comes with the power that has been bestowed upon him by the powers that be in the religious system.

. There's a lot of challenges that men have both in terms of doing that work and also like giving up , that sense of power, that sense of control, either through like overt control , over bodies or things that are more subtle, like hyper intellectualizing. That's actually a thing that I've had to give up quite a bit is not intellectualizing everything and delving into more of the emotional experiences of things.

Yeah it's really complex work for a lot of folks. Our friends Nikki and Stephen Pappas wrote a book, Becoming Egalitarian, which is a phenomenal resource for folks who like to read. And they left an evangelical community and their personalities were quote unquote opposite of what they should have, should, quote unquote, have been.

Nikki is a woman who is really vivacious. She's a strong leader. She's got a lot of opinions. She's a speaker, an educator, an actor. And so many of those qualities fall within what the church would say are man qualities. And her husband, Steven, he is quiet, he is thoughtful, he is observant, he is really engaged, but in a different less vocal, less obvious or theatrical kind of way.

And those are the qualities that the church would deem more female oriented. And so there was so much shame on both ends that Nikki was labeled as aggressive and dominant, which are, Bad words for women. And to go to your point, Jeremiah, Stephen was labeled as passive and in evangelical communities, passive is a huge insult to men.

That means you're not a real man if you're passive. So Stephen talks about what it was like to be labeled in that way. And again, in religious settings, that's a super loaded word, but because men are supposed to be leaders. We assume that Those qualities and that mandate always comes with privilege, but it might not be a privilege that somebody wants.

And then when they don't step into it the way that they're told to, they get labeled in these really awful, demeaning, emasculating kinds of ways. Yeah. I, and this is completely, this is just my opinion. But I find it very interesting in talking about this, that what I see also in that sort of the new age and spiritual communities.

That where they Yep. Stick onto that feminine and masculine energy. Like I'm like, this is just relabel. Yes. We talk about that

like you. You're so free, but you are not right. And it's so insidious because it has a more quote unquote liberal or progressive lens, but it is so damaging and it has all kinds of sexual implications. And for all of us who grew up in different versions of a high control group, , we see those red flags right away.

When I first started seeing that . I had  this like stomach churning reaction because I was like no. That's everything I learned in the religious community that I left. And now it's on the wall of a yoga studio. Yep. Yeah, . That's so funny. Yeah. Enforced gender roles happen outside of church and our friend Tia Levings, who also wrote a new book recently called the well trained wife.

She talks about how fundamentalism exists outside of religious spaces too. She would describe fundamentalism as anything that doctrine or dogma comes before a human relationship. And if you are in a new age or a wellness type of community, and you're still either giving or receiving forced gender mandates, that's just a different version of fundamentalism.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that whisper. It is something that really grinds my gears these days. I never want to hear divine masculine or feminine again. 

So fantastic. . It's like a whole reframing of the way that, that, I don't know, that I personally have looked at things. And I think the most interesting thing for me was like that all your, even your sexual relationships are not just sexual relationships generally, right?

Generally all intertwined with a lot of other things. As well.  And it's important to talk about those other things as well. I'm teaching a class at the place that I teach on Tuesday about essentially talking about what is a sex therapist?

And there is an idea in the broader public that our work is sex therapists as well. We teach people how to have better sex. No, like you can buy Cosmo. Although the advice is not always, don't actually do that. You can't, you wouldn't suggest that. But Jemima, like our work as sex therapists is very much connected with what you're saying.

It's. It's understanding and exploring the how. How do two people work together to create these experiences? In the case of sexuality, these experiences of pleasure, these experiences of deep connection. But the ways that we connect and develop a sense of pleasure in sexuality can also be used to To figure out how we want to work together to have fun and do parenting.

How we want to do money. How we want to just resolve conflict in general.  And developing the, how we want to do this together, that's much more indicative of the work that, that you and I do than it is about You know, finding the best sex positions or whatever.

Sex therapy is not as sexy as people think. Not at all. It is a really not sexy career. Yeah. They're all like, Oh, you must be well versed in the comma Sutra, like how many positions do you know? We actually have a copy of Cosmo's Kama Sutra, and from time to time we'll read it and just like laugh at it.

Just at how unnamely over the top some of the descriptions are. I know. That's so funny. Yeah. So funny. No there's too much pressure, I think, to quote unquote spice it up, keep it spicy, try something new. And if, let's say, adventure or novelty is one of your sexual values, then maybe that's something you want to pursue, which is great.

Sure. But knowing X number of sexual positions doesn't translate necessarily to a great sexual life or a great sexual partnership. Also, some of those positions are hard. We're not all,  I have a background in athletics, but I will sometimes flip through this just for fun, and I'm like, Okay.

Who are the Olympic athletes doing these sexual positions? Certainly not me. And I just don't even think it would be, some of them I'm like, how is this even pleasurable? I know. I have a similar reaction when people like talk about oh I'll teach you how to, find your sex magic or how to practice sex magic.

And I'm like can we just calm down? Red flag. So much pressure, like whatcha talking about? I have to be a magician now. Yeah. Yeah, I, I really appreciate that , that view on that. So I just, I wanted to, I think I missed a couple notes. Some of the books that you mentioned that were really good.

You said one was when religion hurts you, when religion hurts you by Dr. Laura Anderson and the other book that we mentioned is becoming egalitarian by Nikki and Steven Pappas.

I'll have to tell them that I mentioned it because , I think hearing positive feedback is always so lovely, and I will recommend these books, or I'll recommend your podcast or other podcasts to people and I'll think I need to tell someone that I like remember them and reference them. I'm gonna write myself a note to do that later tonight.

Yeah. Like I recommend a book on a podcast. Yeah, that's great. And then the other, you also said The Trained Wife, right? Oh, yeah. The Trained Wife. Yeah, by Tia Levings. That comes out in October. But you can pre order it. Pre order it, though.

Yeah, I feel like I've seen some type of conversations happening around that. I don't know if it was a Yeah, probably. Tia Levings is pretty well known in the, anti fundamentalist community. So this is her first book, but she's pretty prolific. So you probably have heard about it through the work that you do.



Thank you so much. All of these things are just so important to talk about and so fantastic. And one of my favorite things in, Life is to have conversations with people where you look at things from a different angle and you come up with new perspectives. It's just it's like, if there's anything that I could say that like just makes me so happy, , when I do my character strengths, like curiosity is always like on my oh, it's always up there. And it's because I do feel like that. , I spent all my life. In a closet of information. So  now   I'm always happy to be wrong too. That's a big thing to me.

Always happy to be wrong because I'm like, okay, then I learned something right. So these kinds of conversations are just, are super great. I really like that idea of being happy to be wrong because I grew up learning apologetics, which is basically how you always defend your faith in these dogmatic.

kinds of ways. So being wrong and learning to do that with humility and even joy is a life skill I didn't learn. But like you I enjoy when I get a new perspective and can shift my thoughts. . Language is such a powerful thing too

you can say the same principle or the same concept in a couple of different ways. It depends on how you hear it, that it will suddenly a light bulb will go on and you're like, Oh my God, that's right. That's so important, yeah, that's why we've got to keep having these conversations with people.

It's so great. Super great. What about like you guys personally? Like I'm curious I'm curious as like  How you came into doing the work that you did and your podcast and everything like that . Yeah. I'll start. Yeah. So I joke with people that I did my first couples therapy session when I was 12.

I was my parents couples therapist. So couples therapy and relationship work has always been something that's really important to me. And ended up studying to be a family therapist in graduate school. They went to a Christian university. And in, in doing that and learning more about  not just how people work, but how relationships work and how systems work, that really began to chip away at some of the messaging that I had learned  in my own kind Weird, fringy, fundamentalist community that's technically evangelical, although they would fight me if I put them in the evangelical category.

It's really weird going back to the idea of labels, but anywho. So I stumbled, I actually literally stumbled into sex therapy. This wasn't necessarily something that I was interested in pursuing. It fell in my lap. I worked at a spot in Boston. My boss said, Hey, I'm starting a sex therapy training program.

Do you want to be a part of it? I said, sure. I, he said, I'll subsidize. I'm like, great, excellent. And it was after I started to be part of that program, that things really began that the deconstruction process really began to escalate for me. I was in a marriage for. Six years, but also had been dating that person for five years before.

So I met this person in in undergraduate. We began dating in sophomores and had a whole series of sexual challenges throughout the marriage. And after the first class that we had in the sex therapy program was about ethics and talking about consent. And here I am, I'm 33, nobody has ever talked to me about consent before in these ways.

And leaving the class, I came back and I'm like, Oh. We have been having these types of interact, these sexual interactions for years in our relationship without any sort of dialogue, without any sort of conversation, relying just on like nonverbal interactions, looks like all of that. And this immense.

Fear this this immense amount of guilt and shame and fear really came over me. I became pretty motivated to say, not going to have that happen again. Delved into more and more sexual literature research about sexuality studies. And in the process worked my way out of my marriage.

Because while I was gathering all of this information my, my partner was not and in the times that I did begin to talk with my ex about it  the embodiments of anxiety that kind of followed our initial sexual experiences, the panic attacks, those things they started to reemerge and it became a a breaking point at the relationship that And she did some really shitty things.

I did some really shitty things to expedite the the end of that relationship. But yeah, that was around that time, Julia, I met you  I guess we can talk about our origin story in a minute and about how we develop  sex evangelicals. But Yeah, it was my, my upbringing very cerebral very focused on the things that you do, the behaviors that you do to  please God.

Not necessarily in the way that worked for you. I didn't have to do the catech What is it? The Winchester? Westchester catechism? Westminster catechism? Is that right? Did I just offend a whole bunch of people? No, keep going. Like I, I was maybe four years ago when I learned what that was. So we missed that.

We missed a lot of the spiritual warfare left behind type of stuff. But one of the things that I'm like consistently having to do is, how and Julia, I think something you've done really well at teaching me about is , how can I think more relationally and getting out of idea that the family operates on  my energy my know how my drive Those types of things that I have an amazingly  brilliant Talented gifted partner who does some of the things that I do just as well and does a lot of things that I don't do Way better than I could ever imagine.

How can I trust that? And how can we move? That's right. That's right. Feeling great now. And then also how can I lean into more of the emotional the the physical check in,  checking in with my body  those types of things those two things have been a huge part of my  deconstruction and reconstruction journeys , over the last five to seven years.

Yeah. I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist community, I was full in it. When I went to Christian college, I was invested in some sort of ministry work and I was entrenched in it. However, actually going to Christian college, as is the case with many people going to Christian college is actually what started the journey of losing my faith because I was exposed to a broader range of Christianity, what some people would call more, more liberal.

So I learned, Oh, Not everybody in the Christian sphere votes Republican. Not everybody in the Christian sphere believes that the marriage rights of gay people should be restricted. So that was really my first step out. But when I got married very young, after college, but still very young, I still held on to the beliefs that I had around gender and around sexuality.

I thought I was more deconstructed than I was because I went to progressive churches that talked about anti racism and I supported the civil rights of queer people. And being in that Christian, more progressive Christian realm was a bit of a misnomer because there is still some pretty insidious, baked in components around gender, around sexuality.

And so when I got married and I didn't have the blissful honeymoon sex that everyone promised me, my world really crumbled because I learned that my worth was in being a sexually desirable woman who would become a wife and just be the sexual goddess and I hated sex. I didn't feel desired by my partner and that really fucked with our whole marriage.

So to go back to Jemima, what you were saying earlier having challenges in a sexual relationship with a partner that doesn't just impact the sex that impacts all other parts of the relationship. So that wreaked havoc on my marriage and we. were clients in sex therapy. We had one sex therapist who was not a good fit.

We did eventually find a phenomenal sex therapist. She helped me a huge amount individually. She helped our relationship, but ultimately my ex husband and I didn't recover. And when I , completed good relationship sexual health therapy  with my former therapist, Nancy. I decided that I wanted to support other people in having flourishing sexual lives, especially folks who, like me, had little to no information about sexual health.

And I would say most of the information that I had was inaccurate and actually very detrimental to all parts of my life. And the one part that's similar to Jeremiah's story was that if we were to think about deconstruction, like a Jenga tower, those pieces started getting dislodged in college when I took sociology or social work classes.

But it was ultimately finishing sex therapy, training to become a sex therapist, that whole tower just crumbled. Yeah. . And so to answer your question then about Sex Evangelicals, so you and I met Julie at 2018. One of the early things that we connected around was that we are both psychotherapists and we connected around a mutual therapy connection.

We're both psychotherapists  not just with an interest in sex therapy and figuring out how to work with religious folks and folks moving out of religious spaces but also that we had grown up in those spaces. And we did a little trauma bonding as, as often happens in the new relationships.

But over time, we also discovered that, Hey this is something that we're both really passionate about. Let's start a podcast. And so Sex Evangelicals started as a hobby podcast in 2020, end of 2021. But over, especially over the last year, as we've started to do this work more, we've started to realize how important it is for folks not just to learn about the sex education that the church didn't want them to have, but also To recognize that as folks are moving out of cultish spaces out of religious spaces, that they're often doing so with relationships that they have marriages, partnerships that they developed while they were in those religious spaces.

And figuring out then how do we navigate the relational tension that can happen during the deconstruction process? That's become a really important sub goal of ours in doing the podcast, especially in the last six months or so. Oh, wow. Sorry. The cat keeps jumping up on things.

You've got some great fur babies. I always prefer to see people in person, but I would say something fun about virtual work is you get to see cute animals and cute babies. That's true. That is absolutely true. Yeah. Super fantastic stuff. Thank you. Yeah. It's funny what you're saying about, like, when you start healing, I was just talking to somebody about this last night that it's a really forgotten piece of what you go through when you start deconstructing and healing spaces in your heart is you're going to lose relationships, you just are. And you have to be prepared to greet that. That's right. You have to be prepared to, to greet that and let go of that. So thank you so much for sharing your story. It's so wonderful to see how this work came together and came to be. And it's super, obviously like we were saying before, like just from our last two podcasts, we can tell you, it's definitely something that we all think about a lot and try and figure out and navigate through.

Great. Thanks. It's been wonderful to be on the podcast. Yeah. Thank you.  So nice to meet you guys. It's awesome. You too. 

Stay brave. Yes. Stay brave. Stay brave. I like that. And remember that every butterfly was once a caterpillar. Love it. Thank you so much, you guys.