The Models We Live By: Recent Episodes
Miche van Essen
The podcast that explores how overcoming the mental models we all hold on to can help us grow to become better people and leaders.
I’m pretty excited about this episode. My friend Kori, and former kickball team mate, also happens to have a PhD in Educational Psychology and every time I talk to her I am amazed by her wisdom.
In this episode, we delve into research on belonging in STEM through a critical lens. The discussion reveals that the view of STEM as inherently objective, rational, and logical is a cultural assumption rooted in whiteness, which can exclude people of color and other ways of knowing, such as indigenous perspectives. By examining how systems of power impact context and belonging, particularly for Black and Latina students, we aim to challenge and deconstruct these prevailing perceptions in STEM.
Find out more about Dr. Kori: https://education.indiana.edu/about/directory/profiles/nicolai-korinthia.html
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Wow, we're back, everyone! I may have convinced my wife, Kim, to join me as a permanent co-host! For those who don't know her, Kim is a brilliant scholar and human being. She's got a background as a creative director for our UX design studio back in the day and in non-profit management. She received an MA in Education from VCU in Culturally Responsive Leadership.
Today, we're surveying the upcoming season and briefly touching on the concept of the perception gap. First, from a theological perspective, and later we apply it to a modern concept.
I'm so happy to be back with y'all!
Follow Kim on IG @kim_van_essen
Get full access to Like Quiche at www.likequiche.com/subscribe
In this episode, Tamice and Miche discuss their weekends spent with family, games, and kickball, reflecting on the importance of restful family time. They also dive deep into the complexities of physical fitness and overcoming personal health challenges with the help of personal trainers and inspirational fitness figures.
The conversation shifts to more profound discussions about technocratic nihilism, technologic advancement, and black transhuman liberation theology. They explore how technology and spirituality can intersect to create liberation, and ponder on the nature of sin and oppression. Towards the end, they highlight practical steps individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint and reconcile with the earth, emphasizing the importance of small actions for large-scale environmental change.
Deep Resonance Season 6 Kickoff: Embracing Truth, Growth, and Cultural Conversations
In the first episode of Season 6 of the Deep Resonance podcast, Tamice and Miche reflect on their personal and professional journeys, including leadership retreats, spiritual growth, and the importance of authenticity. They discuss significant milestones, such as a successful leadership retreat in Serenbe, upcoming speaking engagements, and personal gender transition anniversaries. The conversation delves into the impact of music genres on spirituality, the evolving dynamics of hip-hop culture, and the importance of truth-telling in personal and spiritual development. The episode highlights themes of abundance, self-awareness, and taking up space unapologetically.
In this episode of the Deep Resonance podcast, hosts Miche and Tamice start an impromptu recording to discuss a variety of topics including the multifaceted meanings of grace, the importance of overcoming mental models, and the heavy weight of words and their multiple interpretations.
They explore how conservative and progressive viewpoints on social justice can differ yet both desire the same end goals of love and justice. Miche also shares personal experiences with trauma and dissociation, and the two delve into how personal and societal trauma shape our approaches to activism.
They critically analyze the current state of progressivism and its colonial undertones, emphasizing how true social justice should resonate with deeper human values rather than simply opposing the 'other side.' The episode stresses the importance of resonance, empathy, and curiosity in driving meaningful change, while also touching on the need for new economic and social justice models beyond traditional binaries.
The discussion concludes with reflections on personal growth, the power of love, and future plans for upcoming podcast episodes.
Hey ya'll
Soooooo, last week we forgot to upload our episode haha. So this week it's a double episode and we hope you enjoy both.
The first one is from this week where we talk about the state of our mind and conservative hermeneutics applied in progressive spaces.
The second one talks about homonyms and the effects in the church.
In this episode of Deep Resonance, we (Mish and Tamice) dive into a candid conversation about our experiences as people from marginalized backgrounds navigating the complexities of social justice, allyship, and personal transformation.
We discuss the importance of centering voices from the margins and share some of the cringeworthy ways well-meaning folks sometimes miss the mark - from comparing transgender identities to drag performances to equating Asian representation with buying from a Chinese restaurant.
We also wrestle with the tensions that arise when privileged people speak out about oppression in ways that feel performative or self-serving, and explore how we can move towards true solidarity and collective liberation.
A major theme of our conversation is the need to go beyond pursuing "justice" within oppressive systems, and instead work towards deep, holistic transformation on both an individual and societal level. We reflect on how our own journeys have led us to embrace non-alienation, recognizing our shared humanity even as we challenge dehumanizing beliefs and actions.
We also talk about the importance of grounding our activism in lived experience and relationships of accountability, rather than settling for shallow "wokeness." And we share some exciting news about an upcoming course we're offering for those who want to dive deeper into these topics in community!
Hey ya'll, we're back again with a new episode.
We're trying out some new gear so forgive the sound quality difference.
We've been out for a while so this was a well needed catch up of us not being able to see each other for a while. Can you believe that some hotels still greet us with racism in 2024? And can you believe that there are people deciding for you what your ethnicity is?
This, and much more on today's episode!
Hey ya'll
Today Tamice and Miche are recapping their weeks as they both went on the road to present some of the things they are most passionate about.
Hey ya'll, we're back and there are quite some changes to our podcasts.
First of all, the name has changed to Deep Resonance and we have a new permanent host: Tamice Spencer Helms
The podcast will remain the same but the style will be a little different. Every week Tamice and I will bring in a topic and just run our thoughts over it live. Which means that whatever we say today, may change in the future because some of you dear listeners educate us, but it also means a more dynamic podcast coming to your inbox every week.
Today's episode is about the exhausted majority, Christian Nationalism, and white male progressives.
Hidden Tribes report: https://hiddentribes.us/media/qfpekz4g/hidden_tribes_report.pdf
Pew Research: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/03/15/8-in-10-americans-say-religion-is-losing-influence-in-public-life/
On today's episode we have SHOC's pastor Donna Burkland on! We get to talk about how Intersectionality adds complexity to one's life and can result in additional expenses, how disability justice should be covered by insurance, and also attending conferences and making plans can be exciting and require careful consideration.
Check out her church: https://www.safeharboroc.com/
Or follow her on IG: https://www.instagram.com/donnaaburkland/
In this conversation, Emily Paulson discusses her journey as a recovery advocate and her experience with multi-level marketing (MLM). She shares her involvement with the Sober Mom Squad, an online community for moms struggling with alcohol use. She explains what MLMs are and why they can be harmful and reflects on her own participation in an MLM and the realization of her complicity in upholding harmful systems. Emily emphasizes the importance of sitting with discomfort and recognizing the nuances in complex issues. She encourages individuals to challenge assumptions and strive for a deeper understanding of the systems they are a part of.
Takeaways
- Recognize the harm that MLMs can cause and be cautious of their predatory nature.
- Engage in open and honest conversations about complicity and the systems we participate in.
- Sit with discomfort and embrace ambiguity to foster personal growth and understanding.
- Challenge assumptions and strive for a deeper understanding of complex issues.
Links and Socials:
- Buy "Hey, Hun"
- Sober Mom Squad
- Ted Talk (no biggie)
In this episode we are joined by my friends Billie Hoard and Eden and we have a frank conversation about our trans journey, how we struggle, and ultimately how we embrace growth.
Follow Billie:
Threads
Substack
Follow Eden and his podcast
Podcast
I'm so happy to be back again! Sorry for a pause in publishing - a lot has been going on but I'm excited to share all the stories from guests that I have interviewed.
On today's show we are joined by Zach Lambert and we get to talk about how to create safe spaces, how pastors have a leading role in creating movements for queer people and other marginalized folks, and the understand that that no one is free, until everyone is free.
Follow Zach on socials (but you probably already do!)
Threads
Bluesky
Hello all! We're back with Season 4!
As has become tradition, we start the season with my wife Kim and hear her insights on this season's topics.
This Season is all about intersectionality; we explore and dive deeper into what that means. If you have the chance, do watch the Ted Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw about the The urgency of intersectionality: https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality
follow on IG: @michevanessen
follow on TT: @michevanessen
Email us: miche@jointheresonance.com
subscribe to the Like Quiche Substack: https://likequiche.substack.com/
and learn more about how we can help your faith organization thrive in a healthy way: www.jointheresaoncne.com
On today's show, we are joined by Micah Melody Taberner. Micah Melody is the Community Care Coordinator for Transmission Ministry Collective—an online community dedicated to the spiritual care, faith formation, and leadership potential of transgender and gender-expansive Christians. The TMC community is created by and for trans people, building a space where trans Christians can be connected to others, grounded in their identity and faith, and empowered to lead. Their programs include an array of support groups, a 24-7 moderated chat server, a leadership development initiative, and educational and faith formation events for both trans folks and those wishing to practice allyship. You can learn more about TMC at https://transmissionministry.com.
Just a heads up, there are some siren sounds in the background.
Today's guest is Liz Edamn.
Liz Edman (she/her) is an Episcopal priest and political strategist, a published author of "Queer Virtue" who has been igniting people's understanding of Christianity and queer life for more than 25 years. She has lived and worked on the front lines of some of the most salient contemporary issues where religion meets sexuality, serving as an inner city hospital chaplain to people with HIV/AIDS from 1989 to 1995, helping craft political and communications strategies for marriage equality efforts, and persevering for almost two decades to become an openly queer priest in the Episcopal Church.
On today's episode, we are joined by Pastor Anthony from the Table Church. Anthony Parrott hails from Goshen, Indiana. Before moving to Washington, DC in 2020, he and his family pastored in northwest Iowa for 10 years. He received a Bachelors in Philosophy and Bible from Bethel University, Indiana, and a Masters of Divinity with an emphasis in Theology from Asbury Theological Seminary. He has the joy of being a husband to Emily and father to Audrey and Wesley. He’s a devoted fan of Star Wars and a connoisseur of fine sodas.
Some editorial notes:
Sabrina made a comment about the bible being interpreted individually but she texted me and said that of course certain letters and books were written to an individual.
Another note is that Sabrina had to leave a little bit earlier as David and I finished the conversation, so she's not in the last 10 minutes of the podcast.
On today's show, we welcome half of the team of authors of the book "Learning Our Names: Asian American Christians on Identity, Relationships, and Vocation." and this episode is dear to my heart as I also live on the intersection of my Asian identity. Both Sabrina and David are genius in their field and I'm excited to share this episode with ya'll.
CW - mentions of transphobia
Today we are joined by Tim Whitaker from the New Evangelicals talking about how white people can navigate space and why he is considering himself an evangelical while at the same time being progressive in his faith expressions.
On today's episode, we are graced by my dear friend Bridget Black, a Theologian and Spiritual Director based in CA. I hope you enjoy how we get deep into the weeds immediately as we discuss proverbs, disembodiment, and holding space for our experience as cocreators with God.
CW - Brief mention of abuse.
Tamice is the author of the transformative book "Faith Unleavened", an exploration of faith in a society that is dominated by whiteness. She's also the host of the popular podcast "Life After Leaven". In today's episode, she shares her own experiences and insights on navigating faith coming out of a white evangelical church as a black non-binary person.
CW Has themes of sexual abuse.
We're back with Season 3 and as our new tradition dictates, we have to kick the season off with my wife Kim!
Today we're introducing the theme of this season and it's all about how theology has shaped our culture and our pet peeves around that.
Thank you so much for listening and it would be great if you could follow me @michevanessen on all socials.
Next week's episode is with Tamice Spencer Helms and will be out right here on Tuesday, June 6th.
CW - Mentions Sexual Abuse
Welcome to the Season Finale!! Woohoo!
In this episode, we talk with Tommy about how experiences like joys and trauma get to live inside our bodies. But we also talk about how bodies have been historically exploited and controlled.
CW - Medical, anatomical descriptions.
Hey all - I'm taking off in the month of April and in this episode Kim and I explain why.
Looking forward to having many more conversations with ya'll in May!
In today's episode we are joined by Angie Hong, co-founder of Kinship Commons, who is sharing about her upbringing within a Korean-American context, how being othered has hurt her but eventually inspired her to do the work of connection, and how liturgy could fit in the bedroom.
Today we are joined by Mathias Roberts, author of Overcoming Shame and Holy Runaways, the latter of which is up for pre-order right now!
On this episode we talk about our experiences with shame, how we connect with God, and how to try to connect with ourselves again.
CW - brief mention of rape
Today Brandi Miller from Reclaiming my Theology will be joining us to talk about sex, belonging, and the way we white supremacy has affected the way we interact across genders.
CW mentions abuse - in today’s episode we’ll be joined by the folks from refuge radio to talk about their experiences navigating the faith spaces as queer people.
CW - This episode talks about themes of abuse and sexual assault.
Today Maddie is joining us again to talk about her experience learning about sex while growing up and her research and opinions on how we can remedy the discomfort when we talk about it.
Double CW - this episode talks about abuse, violence, a rape.
In this Episode, The Models We Live By veterans Wendy Olson & Jen Pool join the show to talk about how we talk about sex affects survivors of sexual abuse.
In today's episode, Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers joins us for a frank and open conversation about how we have gotten to a place where we are unable to talk about sex.
Dr. Tina is the author of Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy and Shameless Parenting: Everything You Need to Raise Shame-Free, Confident Kids and Heal Your Shame Too!
Kim and I are kicking off the season, and we're excited! Although this episode doesn't contain much explicit content nor content and trigger warnings, the entire season is marked as explicit because the topic is "how we talk about sex, or how we don't, in faith spaces." Be kind to yourself. I will feel no offense at all if you want to sit out this season; your health is more important to me.
CW - this episode talks about abuse and mentions suicide
Jen Pool talks about her experiences with the purity culture, how it perhaps has traumatized an entire generation, and if church leaders are doing enough.
Content Warning - The episode talks about abuse, suicide, and trafficking.
Do you go by Ray or Rayanne?
Rayanne
The more people get to know me, they'll, they'll be like, Hey, Ray, and, and I respond to it, you know?
my dad used to call me , number one with a bullet or number one, so I, that's really the only nickname I've ever like, really had. So, and other than, you know, like the street nicknames that your friends gave you and stuff, I had a sister that called me Re Ray,
Yeah. My wife calls me wifey. She actually tries to come up with new names because it used to be Haba, which is a derivative from husbands, which I obviously am not Elmore, but yeah, So it's been actually quite interesting for her to find a new nickname for me, but she never calls me, by my name.
nor do I, I call her Hamaha. Um, it's a long story
well, hey, Rayanne, welcome to the show,
Hey Mish, thank you for having me.
last episode of this season. I feel like to the people who are listening right now, they need a little explanation. I was not intending on having seasons at all. I was just like, I'm just gonna release an episode a week and see what happens. And then I kind of saw that people listen, I just noticed that I really enjoy making podcasts like much, much more than I thought. So that's when I realized, okay, I think I wanna do seasons of eight episodes and really dig deep into a topic and the last. Seven episodes have all been about like mental models and how to overcome them specifically.
And they've been really interesting. I have really interesting guests so I want to, I want to to up the quality a little bit on the back end, but I also want to really think about which guests I'm inviting and make it a theme. So I think I'm gonna release four seasons a year so that I can have some breaks and therefore I can make better podcasts.
So you are the last guests
the last guess of the first season. I like that you actually, I like, not that you actually, but I like that you have a model for it. I mean, I didn't, I just like, I just was like I was gonna wing it and then all of a sudden one day I was just, I'm too busy to keep making episodes and just, they're just gone.
I was like, Oh, interesting. So like, you have time and you have structure for it, and you have dedication and you know what you wanna share, you know, and you know that, you know, that the stories that we share are important, you know? And so I, I think that that's, that's really needed, especially in the podcasting world.
Cause there's just a lot of chatter out there. People just wanting to be heard or sharing. No, I don't wanna say false information, but definitely, bias, you know, without as much structure, without as much integrity and without, enough research, I think, uh, that goes into a conversation, you know?
So, so I appreciate, I appreciate, you know, the dedication that you've obviously demonstrated. So it's, Thank you for having me on. I think it's gonna be a really
Thanks. Thanks for being on here. So for those who don't know you, which includes me because.
I'm meeting you face to face for the first time today. we had a good chat before we started recording. can you tell, uh, me and the listeners a little bit more about yourself?
Who is Rayanne?
let's start with the most, superficial part of the thing. What is your occupation? What do you do for a living? Where do you live?
So I actually have multiple occupations right now. currently I am, an occupational first aid attendant. It's called an of A three. And what that means is that, I can be first on the scene for when someone gets hurt, to ready to assess, to assist in reducing someone's pain and to assist the paramedics in getting him to the hospital.
And I have my of a three, because I'm actually going for my EMR and my pcp. So your EMR is your emergency medical responder, and there's, you know, a level up from an of a three, and then of course your PCP is your primary care paramedic. So I'm
going to, I'm working towards primary care, paramedic. And it was completely unexpected.
I did not, this was not in the grand plan that I had for myself. I guess, but that's just how spirit works sometimes. And it seems to be. Channel that was most available to me and, and most supported energetically. all these doors just opened up in that direction.
Uh, and it wasn't a struggle. it was a challenge in the sense of having to organize my life in such a way that I was able to support you know, and have enough resources to make this happen and at the same time, all the, all the right doors and channels opened, I just had to be willing to do the work, you know, to get here.
but I'm also a property manager, and, and a herd manager on a ranch, on a farm and we, which is called Camino Ranch. And we also work with at risk youth and. And that's been so rewarding. obviously c kind of put a hitch on our giddy up and then we moved properties. So at the new property that we're at, we're literally just in the process of building it up to be able to accommodate children again.
so our next, our next, round of, of guests, of youth is gonna be in 2023. we just moved here this year and we've just been changing the property around to, like I said, to, to make it, to be able to accommodate. So we have about seven horses here and, out of the seven horses, four or five of them are able to work with kids and so the children are able to come here and interact and that's what my personal horse is. I've retired, my personal show horses have been retired to brood MAs and they are now part of the program that teach children. So that's, that's really neat for me. I'm also a content writer. So I edit, I do content editing on manuscripts as well as articles and, uh, and educational pieces.
just because I love it and I'm a big reader. So those are, that's kind of like my main three things that I'm doing occupationally wise right now.
Also I'm working with Jen Poole, our beloved friend, and we're working to create leadership courses, within the anti-trafficking movement that help people to do better and to be better advocates
so you didn't wake up one day and were like, I wanna become a medic.
all I wanted to do was I wanted to hide and I wanted, To prove my worth subconsciously, I wanted to become a champion horse trainer cowgirl to prove my value and my worth to my parents and the world around me. And also, I wanted to, I didn't wanna be a stereotype. I didn't wanna become, I didn't wanna be stigmatized, and I wanted to overcome what everyone told me I was, and prove to the world that I was so much more than that.
So yeah, it's, it's been a, it's been a really interesting journey.
And I also do specialized kinesiology, uh, brain integration. Uh, so with energy acupressure, mudras, applied physiology we help to, to remove the, the energy blockages. That can hold us back from becoming all that which we are. , it it's a proven modality on a lot of levels, through testing, like, through like standard psychological and physiological testing.
They've proven that brain integration specialized kinesiology as a modality is so beautiful and so helpful and, I feel like everything that I'm doing is supporting every other thing that I'm doing at the moment,
yeah, absolutely. I also hear that everything you do is in service of other people. Like all your occupations so far are
After my childhood, um, I, I ha I would definitely say that I, I call it trauma induced narcissism, but really I was just on point for my survival systems. And so, everything that I'm doing of, of being in service now.
The catalyst for that was rage and pain and the death of the, the person that I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life with, you know, and up until that person died by suicide. I had always been not, I don't wanna say self-serving cause that's not the right, that's not the right thing.
I wasn't self-serving, but I was definitely in survival mode, like as a triage patient, and then their
death, was the catalyst for, for everything to change in my world and to move into a, a life of service instead.
that's pretty intense. Wow. first things first. . I'm so sorry that you had to go through that. I can imagine, but let me, let me not interpret your story for you. Let me hear it from you. How did that exactly turn you from a self-centered person into a service, a person of service?
Like I just talked with you for an hour before the podcast, my first impression, and I have a pretty high BS meter. the first impression that I have from you is that you, a very serving person, a very helpful person. you wanna give people the tools so that they can move on with their lives.
What, what exactly happened in your brain or as I would ask all my guests what mental model did you had to overcome? to move away from being self-centered to a serving person?
Oh, this is, this is an exciting topic for me. I love discussing this. So I was 100% lived my life in survival mode and didn't know that. I didn't understand that. And so when my person passed away, it turned where I had been hiding in the world, in which had been my safe place. I exited. I exited the streets and being trafficked for sex at 16, and I entered into a world, into horsemanship, into performance, horsemanship.
And then I hid within that world. And the only thing anybody knew about me was what I told them. Right? And I never discussed my past. And so, because I didn't talk about my past, I didn't have the vocabulary, I didn't have the tools. All I knew how to do was continually move forward
I could become what you needed
me to be because that's how I had been trained as a child. And then as a teenager it was the model that was set out for me. And I had, I had like most people in the world, I had very traumatized parents, I come from, on my father's side, an indigenous background, which, so there was a lot of racism.
There was a lot of, there was incest, there was alcoholism, drug dependency. There was so much. Separation and disassociation of self. And there was so much self-medicating and, so that was passed along to me. And, on my mother's side of the family, there was even more so, which I, you know, I don't wanna tell their story because they're still living.
And so with my father, it's easier cause he is passed away. It's easier to talk about that side of the family. So the models that were demonstrated for me were so conflicting. My parents were just, they were complete opposites in a lot of ways. You know, my mom was, was defensively aggressive and her anger stemmed from a place of pain, she became the provider. She had to take care of herself.
And, , my father was, was totally different. And he was soft and gentle and eloquent and also so destructive because of the drug addiction and the hiding of the abuse, and the disconnect from his own family. So when I exited from the streets, I was fostered out. To other family members.
and then I hit the streets at 15, 16 years old. I hit the streets, I was taken in by a gang, you know, And then I adapted. And I think that everyone says, Well, children are so resilient. And I disagree with that. I don't believe that children are resilient. I believe that children are malleable and their malleable that allows them to become adaptive to their environments.
And the adaptiveness. Eventually as they learn to move through the struggles and the challenges that the world presents them, then they become resilient. I adapt to my . Surroundings very easily and it, cuz it's part of my survival toolkit. When I exited from the streets, I hid and I, I adapted to the environment that I put myself into and I couldn't think farther than wanting to prove myself and wanting.
To have this one thing inside of me that nobody could take away, nobody could touch. And so when I was on the back of a horse, horsemanship taught me, it showed me, and it gave me, it created space within me that nobody could steal because on the back of a horse, my body was my own and my actions were my own.
and at the same time, you know, I was able to hide a lot of my trauma behind workaholic is, I don't know if that's a word. you know, I, I was able to just 100% lean into and drive myself to the point of exhaustion every night. And so when my partner died, I was consumed, I was hiding from my own trauma by, by working myself into exhaustion every day.
And I had blinders on and I was unable to see. The grief in them because I was unable to see the grief and the pain within myself. And, and looking back now, I recognize that was our attraction to one another. Our attraction to one another was the depth of our pain. and I couldn't see it in him because I couldn't see it in me.
The way that I came about, my change felt catastrophic. And at the same time, I don't believe that there's any other way.
My entire identity had to be shaken up, and I had to unload all of the armor that I had in order to rebuild and to, and to discover. I didn't even have a foundation, not a proper one. I had a bunch of maladaptive behaviors. Right. All I knew was I just need to make it through one more day. So when, when they died, I reverted back to a lot of behaviors that had served me in the past. And so when my partner died, all of a sudden all these men were coming out of the woodwork wanting to quote, take care of me. And I was in such a space that because of my early formative years where I had had pimps and I had had boyfriends, that had behaved in specific ways in exchange for my time and my energy, that to me was actually normal, right?
I didn't, I was like, Oh, hmm, okay, let's engage in this behavior. And, and it was also armor for me because it made me feel better at the moment because it was familiar. Not because I actually felt better, but because it was familiar to me. I knew how to navigate somebody else's desire, and I knew how to navigate what it was that they wanted so that I could feel safe.
What I didn't know how to do was process the grief that I was feeling over the loss of my person. And so I just didn't cope with it. I just didn't deal with it. And, and it came a point, there was, it was about a year and a half after his death when I would try to verbalize his name. And the grief was so strong that I would choke.
I actually physically couldn't say his name anymore. The grief was, so, there was, there's no word to describe what it did to me. It, everything just locked up in my body. And so, I needed to find a safe place. And so the first thing I did, Was is I actually started a martial art. And the martial art gave me a safe place to be in my body that was outside of horses.
And it gave me a place to be where I didn't have memories of him. It was mine and mine alone, the same way that horses had been mine and mine alone after sex trafficking. And then I got really frustrated and one of my go-to coping mechanisms was always to leave town.
It was escape. It was, that was, you know, like, Oh, this place is uncomfortable. Let's run I left the city, I left the country, you know, like repetitively. This was, this was an action I took. And so I actually went to Thailand, about two years after, about after my partner's death and, began training.
And I just threw myself into training in a way that was. Honestly unhealthy, but also the only thing I could have done at that time because I was trying to find safety within my body and I was trying to find independence once again and I trained until, you know, maybe you call it God, I call it spirit universe, until they were like, Okay, it's time. It's time, you know, And, and they were, and I was like, Mm, I don't think it's time. I'm not ready to go back yet. And, uh, and they were like, Oh, okay. Boom, sepsis, Go home, . Like, I usually got a leg infection that I went set my whole body on septic and I came home and almost died.
And that might, that might have been the turnaround for me. Really, realistically, when you think about it, the universe was like, they're like, you are not allowed to physically run from your problems anymore. And that was my coping technique, was using my body to run. And they were like, Okay, we're literally gonna chop you off at the knee you now have a leg infection.
You cannot run, boom, bedridden. what I didn't understand at the time is that antibiotics wipe out our microbiome. I knew nothing about biology. I knew nothing about neuroscience. I knew I knew nothing about, behavior, nothing. Right? Like I just knew. I knew what. What I had experienced, that that was all, you know, and I knew how to be a horse trainer and I knew how to survive, but I didn't know anything outside of my own experience.
And so what I didn't understand is that when I came back with sepsis, they put me on intravenous IV fluids. Antibiotics for twice a day, for two weeks, which wiped everything out my system. And it threw me into a depression and a tailspin cuz I didn't understand that I would have to repopulate my microbiome because it, it is our gut health that drives a good majority of all of our hormones.
and I didn't know that. And so I went into this tailspin of PTSD and I, cuz at the same time as I'm going through going through this physical change, I can't outrun any of my thoughts or my fears. I also cannot control my hormones and my drives, my entire ecosystem and my body's upside down. And so I can't.
I, I can't regulate my emotions all of a sudden. And right when I cannot regulate my emotions, I decide I'm gonna write a book about my experience because this big, new flashy word had come out in my life called sex trafficking. And I was like, Wait a minute. You mean I wasn't a child prostitute?
I was like, Oh, you mean I was trafficked? Wait, I was a victim. And that, that really messed with my head walking into this movement called anti-trafficking. And at a time when I was truly vulnerable in the sense of my equilibrium, my identity, everything that I knew about myself is now turned upside down, that I'm being told I'm a victim.
there's something that's called learned helplessness. And I was very much, dragged down that, that lane for, for a little bit. and so then I came into contact. with This course called Barry's Body Management and in order to take this course . , which was an applied physiology course, I was gonna need to take a course called Touch for Health. And so I signed up to take the Touch for health course. I walk in and they ask you, Why do you wanna take this course?
And I start to feed them a lie, The lie that I'm telling myself, which is like, Oh, well, you know, I work with horses and, um, I want to, I, I know that I wanna work with the people because it's actually the people that are creating problems with the horses and da, da, da, da, da. When really what I wanted to do was escape dodge and go live in another country and hide out for the rest of my life, which was my plan.
But as I'm telling about to tell this lie, , tears, start to stream down my face, and then I can't talk. And then I'm just sitting there basically choking on my own lies, literally like gasping for air and rocking back and forth. And my teacher, Christine, she says, Do I have your permission to help you?
Can I, may I touch you? And so she comes over and she places her hand on my forehead and, and then her other hand on the back of my head, and she holds it with this, with this firm, but gentle pressure. And within a matter, I wanna say 60 to 90 seconds, my brain started to operate.
I was able to reengage my jaw, unlocked my throat, the restriction of my throat lessened, and I was able to breathe and to speak again. And that was that moment, that was that life changing moment for me where I'm going. How'd you do that? and since she spoke about brain integration and how Touch for Health was a prerequisite course for something called specialized kinesiology, so I took the courses, the one through four, and then there came up the brain integration course.
And so I went and took my first brain integration course where I was taught about the function and the role of the amygdala and the amygdala and how it self protects and affects our ability to respond versus react in, in a scenario and.
When, when we enter into a space that we feel threatened, our amygdala kicks in and our amygdala sends out suppressing hormones and it sends out a suppressant that prevents us from thinking our way through an event to the locus sores.
And then it sends out another suppressant that disallows for us to pull from memory whether or not we've ever experienced this prior. And then it offshoots hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and all other kind of fun things. And it, and it dictates whether or not we're gonna run, whether or not we're gonna fight.
Whether or not we're gonna fawn. Or whether or not we're gonna freeze on the spot. and that was one of the first brain, that was the first brain integration. I, of course, I took, was how to remove the blockages and come out of what we called deep survival.
So deep survival switching is actually when an extreme traumatic event breaks the neuro synaptic flow within our brain. So when you have a synaptic flow that is broken in the middle, instead of being able to work your way through and problem solve and change your behaviors and change in order to change the outcome of your reality, it's like just continuously hitting a wall and, and this energy work essentially.
To the body, to self correct. And it allows the GLI cells to engage and to wash through, and so that we can form, new, new ways of being. And that neuroplasticity helps neuroplasticity to kick into effect is it's this, this is my internalization of the information that's been given to me. And so I might be uncorrect if you were speaking to a psychologist or to a doctor, but this, this is how I understand that it works.
This, this is how I've made sense of it in my brain. And so I began down this path of brain integration and it was like, it wasn't like, it was the, the more sessions that I engaged in as far as receiving balances, the better I got, the more healed I was, the less I was reacting in a way that was actually self-sabotaging.
And I was, I wasn't as susceptible to other people. and their influence over me, And I was able to make different decisions, I was able to engage with people in a way where I didn't feel I need to, needed to hide who I was because I felt stronger.
And so then of course I began to read books cuz I wanted to understand myself more. And that was something that was really encouraged by my father. My father's side of the family was so academic. that was something that was highly priced with within that family system.
And so I was able to do that because I had that background, but I was able to access the background because I, I was so much calmer, So I was able to receive the information that was coming my way versus not having the time to deal with it and pushing it off and just, Continually acting, out.
And, and it's a continual process. I mean, you know, even just this week I was very challenged on, I was very challenged by multiple parties about speaking out when I felt harm was being done to me and understanding that in the past, my behavior to internalize and to keep quiet was a survival strategy.
And that is a survival strategy that is no longer serving me, and in fact is causing me harm. And so
changing that pattern in my brain, it was challenging. I was very uncomfortable this week. I was so uncomfortable. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt gross. I constantly was questioning if I was making the right choices, even though logically I understood.
I was physiologically, I was very challenged and, and I was very, I was under a lot of distress, you know, even though I knew I was making the right calls and the right decisions. And so I, I feel that, you know, when you've endured and experienced intergenerational trauma, which, you know, as an I come from a, I'm mat, I come from an indigenous background, and there's so much intergenerational trauma because there, there is an ongoing genocide within the missing and murdered indigenous women in our communities.
you know, so it's going back generations to correct survival behaviors and to expand and to open and to allow ourselves to receive new information. And so, you know, we say like, how did you move into self-serving? That was it right there. It was making decisions that were.
He, I don't wanna say healing, but that is what I wanna say. At the same time, I'm just not saying it as eloquently as what I would like. It was, it was showing up essentially is I had to, I had to learn how to show up for myself and so to me, what I knew as safety was just managed chaos. It wasn't truly safety. And so the first couple times I felt safety logically, I was like, Well, you're safe here. But physiologically, viscerally, I felt so alien and it felt so dangerous. And I just wanted, I wanted validation that I was doing the right thing, but I had to learn to give myself validation. I had to learn, to not just listen to myself, but to tell myself, You're doing the right thing to advocate for myself. And yes, it does not feel safe, but when you enact in that, or engage in that behavior enough times, that becomes, your new normal, And then you, you, you level up, you align with that feeling, and then when you align with that feeling, you, you attract more people who are like-minded. And so, upgrading to becoming, serving. I find that every time I show up for myself and I take action that feels uncomfortable, but that I understand is good.
All of a sudden I find myself surrounded by even more like-minded people, So now I'm in a community of people who serve,
and that's helped me to accept and, and find comfort to, to continue moving forward,
, I'm hearing parts of, of your upbringing and how you've gotten into thinking in a certain way how your mental models were created and then how by chance of almost losing your leg, you had a wake up call and like, Okay, I need to change.
And then you met special people. You met people that were meaningful and helpful and got you to a place that perhaps you wanna do that for other people as well. Right?
That's an amazing experience.
Yeah. It genuinely shocked me to say that I love people. Like genuinely like the day that I realized like, Oh, I love people.
I mean like, I need space from people I enjoy. I have a 400 foot cabin with like, you know, no TV that I need in order to rejuvenate so that I can be my best self for other people. But yeah, like I was genuinely shocked to find out that I liked humans . I was like, like, No, I love people. I love people. Sometimes I need space from people. But yeah, it's when you peel back those layers of protection and grief and trauma and you get to the core root, I really do believe that this human soul is love in a constant state of expansion. And that expansion doesn't happen without pain. It doesn't happen without chance. And I truly think like if you, if you lack empathy for yourself and you lack compassion for yourself, and you lack gentleness or love for yourself, it's very hard to be able to give that to the people around you.
The Outcome of seeing you and me sitting here, like having a life talking with each other, is that there's still that glimpse of hope You should be salty. I should be salty. But, and, and believe me, I am salty every now and then.
However, that's not my states, and I'm feeling the same vibe coming from you. That's not your states. You are somebody that has experienced deep, deep hurt and trauma. You're not running away from it a anymore. You don't want another rotten leg. Um, you, you're not running away from it anymore. And you want to demonstrate that, the next generation and the people that you are helping with, that.
That they can take, not shortcuts, but maybe come to that realization in a, in a meaningful way because they have the tools and the language, to talk about that, right?
I can allow things to remain the same and stay uncomfortable and stay bitching and stay negative, or stay feeling sorry for myself or stay within this mindset of, I don't deserve better, I'm worthless, or I can make a change and have a fallout and lose everything.
Or I could make a change and have everything turn in the direction that I needed to be. yeah, that's, that's how I approach the world right now is like, you know, I'm like, I'm uncomfortable, but I'm not quite uncomfortable enough to change. Or I'm just like, Oh, am I okay with, am I okay with if this falls apart,
period?
Like if I make a change, am I gonna be, can I accept that everything could fall out from underneath of me and change the world? And if I'm okay with that, that usually gives me the courage to be like, Okay, I can do this thing, but there's that point of acceptance and or can I walk into this with faith and hope that everything's gonna change for the better?
You know, which also requires a level of courage,
absolutely. No, that resonates a lot with me. It feels there is a safety and there is a comfort in not changing. There's a safety and a comfort because when I had my deepest phases of depression, I would tell Kim, my wife, that it's familiar.
It's kind of comforting and because it's familiar, like fighting is not familiar. Fighting is new territory, and the discomfort is almost bigger than depression. And the reason why I resonate with this is this is my trans journey. Ultimately, when I decided, Actually move forward with transitioning and saying, Okay, this is gonna be rough.
This is gonna be unknown. But looking back one and a half year into a transition, it's exactly how you express it wow, that was a fight worth fighting because I'm in such a calmer place right now.
I'm so full of zeal to work on this now, and there's like this, this second thing that I've been working on right now is really embracing my Asian identity, because people have always told me that I was two lights to be Asian, even though I'm a Pacific Island.
So what do people know? , right? They've, they've no clue how Indonesians look. They mean East Asians, but sure that that's a complete different. So, so now I have this, biracial story that I'm trying to uncover, which is now a fight that I'm ready. To fight
it sounds like you're embracing your heritage and your culture
Yes,
same With my indigenous background, which was I was raised around racism where it was shameful to be native. It was shameful to be an Indian. And when I was growing up, there was so much shame and assumptions and we were called drug addicts and drunks and lazy and undeserving in animals.
So I rejected that side of myself out of fear cuz I didn't wanna be associated with my indigenous heritage. And then as I became older, especially now that I've reached 40, there's so much history like rich history and culture that I never knew about because of the whitewash, because of the, the colonization, because of the genocide that took place and the way that colonization suppresses those that don't conform in order to extract control over them.
And the way that they demonized
Yeah.
my, my grandparents' way of life. And now I look at the richness of that culture. I look at the connection to the world that I have that is so different and I didn't, I didn't have the language. And yet I would tell people, I'd be like, Well, I just listened to my blood song cuz I didn't know how else to vocalize it.
And it turns out that is actually a thing within my culture. That is, that is something that the elders talk about all the time. The blood song, our ancestors speak to us through that and to know that I know things without having necessarily been taught them because of the richness of, our people.
And so I resonate when you say that it's, it's embracing the side of ourselves that we were taught was bad, That we were taught to fear that was so misunderstood. that's been life changing, which has allowed me to find this level of acceptance and understanding for other people around, and, and so that I'm able to love people more because I'm, I'm able to understand and love myself more,
You have lived and are living on the margins. You can understand people who are living on the margins better because of that. It's not, it's not a blessing that you're living on the It sure is handy to understand other people. It just means a lot to me to hear it from somebody else who also has this multicultural background., my grandfather comes from an island called Amun, which is part of the Malaco Islands in Indonesia.
but before Indonesia became Indonesia, It was thousands of independent in independently operated islands. There, there were no country borders, right? There were just islands with different heritages and different colors.
So when the Dutch came, the, the country that I was born in, when the Dutch came, they colonized them and they used the people from the Mala Islands in their army to subject the rest of the Indonesian archipelago to them. So I have residual anger towards the Dutch who used my ancestors to fight against my people.
The Indonesian people had, of course, residual anger towards people from the Malaco Islands. Malaco people have residual anger towards the Dutch people and Indonesian people, like my grandmother lived in a white neighborhood, and I never understood why until now I'm grown up.
That's why you decided to live in a white neighborhood. And that's why my mother did not raise me with that culture. Yes, we ate Indonesian food. Yes, we heard some Indonesian songs, but no language, , no culture, no explanation, just zero, connection.
Understanding that my, that my ancestors have been colonized and then used to colonize others, uh, against their will, you know, gives me an understanding, gives me an insight into understanding.
The continual colonization in, in this world that is still happening right now. So definitely not a blessing what happened to my people, but it sure is handy to give some sort of insight, some sort of understanding of like, Okay, your story is safe with me. You can share this story with me. So thanks for sharing.
And, And icu,
Right. Same. It,
yeah.
I think it's really interesting. I think we, we were discussing this earlier, before we got going with this meeting about looking in the mirror and not seeing who we truly are, and being hard on ourselves and, and I feel like that colonization obviously is a part of it. it is so interesting. I, I really believe that when we look in the mirror I've experienced, when I look in the mirror that I see the baggage around me. I, I will see, parts of my father that I rejected and parts of my mother that I rejected. , and therefore I don't know how to love those things about myself. And so I reject who I see in the mirror as a result of that, And, and so some of that, like with my grandfather, my grandfather told my parents, or my, my father and his brothers and sisters, Mary White, Trying to whiten our skin and to get rid of the, you know, the markers, of our faces and our bodies that, allowed people to see that we were in fact indigenous and I think that that's so interesting, you know, because like when, what we see, when we look in the mirror versus what other people see,
so, yeah, so I, I think that that's just a think that's something that everyone has to work on continuously, you know?
Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much For
For having me.
the show,
Yes. Yes.
Also, did I. Behind you on the shelf Prairie of the Orange Tree, because that was the read of the year.
Was it good? I haven't read it yet.
Oh, no spoilers. Oh, are you afraid to read it because it is 7,000 pages?
that's my favorite part about it. I, I have not, My problem is, is that when I sit down to read, I, I fix it on things and I tend not to get back up. I will not get off this couch and I will not put it down and then it'll trigger, I'll have to, I'll have to compensate the book hunting over that's coming with this, with a whole other series, and then it's just gonna
yeah, yeah. That, this one gave me a hangover, but I, I do the, I go the other way around. After I finished this, I could not read
anymore. I'm like, it was so good.
Okay.
This is the book that you read before, like when you're 98, like a couple of days before you die, You know? Does, like,
why
why did I read this so early?
. Cool. Well, thanks again for being on the show.
Um,
I, I look forward to have you on it again in the future.
Yay. I look forward to our collaborations as well, so it's gonna be
That's right, that's right. For those who are curious, we are collaborating on some coursework, uh, and I'm excited.
Below is an auto-generated transcript:
Hey, Kim.
Hello.
The funny thing is that I actually never call you Kim.
That's true. You've made up a long list of names for me besides my actual name.
Um, Yeah. That's funny because I call you Hamaha. when would I ever call you, Kim?
I know, I sort of feel that way too. I mean, you decided to change your name and I was like, Yeah, I mean, I rarely say your actual name anyway, so it works out.
Yeah. But when I changed my name, you started calling me Mish more because It's kind of cute.
Not that I'm saying that my name is cute. I'm saying that it
no,
to be my
no. Own it. Yep. You're cute. . You're so cute. Mish is perfect
Anyway, how are you doing today?
I'm a little sick, a little tired, but excited to talk to you again.
I'm excited that you're on the show again. Why are you, why are you sick? What happened?
What day is it today?
Today is Halloween, so we've done a lot of building up to and having a long weekend for our kids to have Halloween.
Yes, which is fun. We went to the street in our city, which was absolutely packed. And when I used to live in the Netherlands and I saw movies about, Halloween, I always saw these streets filled and packed with kids.
But I never actually saw that in real life in 10 years. And this was the first time that I actually saw the streets fully packed.
Fall leaves children laughing.
Yes, it was good. It was overwhelming for three minutes. But then I kind of felt okay and it
every parent slightly wonders if they're gonna lose a child, but we made it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scary. Um, but also awesome. And you have a throat ache and you're still here on the show. What's with that?
I must love you.
You must love me. So last week we were gonna go live, however, I had e coli. Darn hipster. Buck Choy
Those veggies will get you every time.
Yeah. What's with that?
Yeah. You were pretty sad and miserable, and I think we're all happy that you didn't try to record anything while you were feeling that way.
Well, I don't remember a lot from that day, but you told me funny stories afterwards.
Yes. I think we should have Wendy back on for some trauma responses to things, but I think you were definitely checked out for most of that. But we were out of state. You made it on a plane, you made it awful blame and you're, you live to tell the tale.
Well, all I can say Indianapolis Airport and Dallas Airports great job because I heard that I was pushed in a wheelchair, because I could not walk because I felt that bad. And they just took care of me.
They took care of me through security. They took care of me to get out of the plane. It was pretty amazing.
Yeah. I mean, this episode's all about circling back on some things that you've already had going on in the podcast and on your Instagram and things, and I think.
Talking about you're real about making churches safe. Some people did a great job of making you feel safe in the airport For sure. And they didn't have to emphasize certain things that they chose to, um, just to make you feel comfortable. So yeah, they did a great job.
I just remember feeling. Terrible physically, but feeling pretty safe all along. Uh, Soto was nice, although you at some point were afraid that people were gonna think that you were kidnapping me.
Yeah. I mean, I guess nobody can assume anything, right? So they probably thought, Well, this is just how she is in life.
I mean, we're strangers, but knowing that you would never be silent and you would never be nodding off in the middle of a event like getting to the airport. It just felt to me like you. Weekend at Bernie's, I'm pushing a body around and someone's gonna start questioning me, but for, for better or for worse, nobody did.
So it worked out
great. Let's go . Anyway, today's episode, Kim and I, wanted to respond to some reels that I have posted over the last couple of months. So a short little background. I was talking with my advising professor for my doctorate, And he said, You're doing something to be like publicly known, right? Because if you're gonna publish anything that you write, you wanna make sure that people already follow you. And I'm like, I am 40. I don't have a popular Instagram or whatever. So we talked about trying to get myself out there.
My ideas a little bit out there. So I think in June or so, I started an Instagram account and started posting reels. And the whole idea was to just share a little bit what goes on in my brain, whether it has to do with trans issues or inclusive leadership or mental models. I'm still trying to figure it out.
But Instagram specifically has been interesting because of the comments that we've gotten. So Kim and I decided that it would be great if we could do a little response to some comments that we got on my videos. And I say Instagram specifically because I never get weird stuff on TikTok. It is only on Instagram, right? So I post a video, I pour out my heart and I get the most vile comments. Sometimes I have to even remove them, or sometimes they just get filtered by Instagram because they're so hateful. But on TikTok, I only get love.
So I dunno what's with that, but that's pretty awesome. Kim wanted to start us off with this video that I just posted a week ago, right?
Yeah. So talking about, how to make safe spaces in the church and that kind of thing, move beyond Welcome.
And it was, I think we all were a little taken aback that the first comment that was posted on a video like that for a little background,
the goal of the Real was to talk about how church building specifically could be more safe for people who are walking in with trauma or who have walked in, and don't traditionally feel comfortable in churches. and within it, you tell a little story.
Let's listen to it together. Some tangible I think it's really because felt very By the way, all when I was still on Reddit, medicine continues
So you describe that story in the grocery store and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
women
have experienced that in some form or another, immediately after you got home and told me that, I thought, Well, yeah, I think when I was 14 or 15 that happened to me.
I know a lot of women who have had somebody walking behind them or, keeping an eye on them in a store and it's uncomfortable. And then the comment that took a SOA back was, it's not my responsibility to keep you safe. If you're walking around in short shorts and heels, you are trying to call attention to yourself and you never know what kind of attention you'll receive.
So maybe you shouldn't be calling attention to yourself, there's a lot to unpack in that one. It's a woman posting, which is a little bit of a, woman on woman crime to be pointing fingers in that way. for this purpose, I think I, we will assume that she's not saying you as a trans individual shouldn't call attention to yourself, but rather it seems like a broader, no one should wear short shorts or heels or else they are going to get this attention and should just be okay with it, which I just find interesting.
I think women especially have this responsibility for each other. We have all experienced this in some way or another. with a hundred percent confidence believe that this person who posted has experienced something uncomfortable, in that regard. So it's very,
interesting. We
just have a responsibility really to come up for each other.
to say it how it is that that kind of behavior is not okay. no matter what, shock and awe and somebody does a double take is an entirely a different thing than somebody saying, I I now have the right to follow somebody around. it's a different level for sure. So for me, in a lot of the things that you have posted or have done podcasts on, it's been really interesting to think about the role that fellow women kind of play in these different situations. you know, Matt, are you talking about women having need of these shelters and these spaces?
it's kind of often overlooked that they, they come with children often, so it's this support needed, for women to understand how women are experiencing those situations. and two, I just find it especially striking, Jen talked about experiences in purity culture, and we talk a lot about different situations within the Christian Church and it's interesting that these things that repressed and these things that do a significant amount of damage in those spaces, women are, are complicit with it.
Women participate in perpetuating these situations and these things that are not okay. So it's been good to reflect and dive into those kinds of things and to think about, as a woman, what systems or, ways have that things have always been, do I continue to allow to happen around me because that's just always how it's been.
Thanks for sharing that. I also wanted to point out, we talked about this the other day, what a random opportunity is for me to have this experience. Like let's put this out there right away. It was a horrible experience.
I hated feeling chased by somebody, disclosed by, but also understanding that so many women go through debts on a regular basis and men will never know that feeling. Period.
Yeah, for sure.
it was such a rare view behind the curtain of understanding how much this world was created for men, because Most men don't have to deal with these situation, like somebody chasing them around in a, in a grocery store. . This world is built for men. The, the narrative is surrounded around what men think. And whenever these issues are being brought to lights, men will less likely to take this serious because they cannot actually feel the empathy of Oh yeah, I totally see how terrible that is, because they have no idea how this feels.
Yeah, definitely. I think the struggle is whenever anyone's in the majority is that, you know, I watched a great TED Talk, I taken a lot of resources for my job. So, you know, I'm a little bit of a cliche walking cliche. I have all the podcasts on my mind, but, um, podcasts and. So there was a TED Talk and it was great because the gentleman who did it was a middle aged white man who was speaking to those like him, middle aged white men.
And I think his takeaway is good for all situations with all of these different identities that people carry, which is acknowledge that what you are is one of many, not the standard by which we compare other people to.
Meaning I'll use myself as an example. You know, I am a white 30 something woman. I need to be careful not to judge everybody's experience, achievement, understanding lens. Through my experience, I am one of many. The right answer is not. How would Kim have taken that? How, how would Kim have appreciated being treated that way?
because we're just not all the same in a very beautiful way. We're not all the same, and so we're gonna experience things differently. Even the same situation differently. I've referenced being followed. It was obviously not nice. but at the same time, I have an innate sense that I'm still safe in most places.
I remember not thinking that it was gonna escalate to anything. I had the privilege of being in a target in the middle of the day, and my mom's across the store and there are other people here, and nothing in my mind suggested that that could go anywhere dangerous. And I think it's important to acknowledge that for other people, if they were in the same situation coming from different backgrounds, holding those intersectional identities within themselves, it could have been experienced in a much different way.
Still so scary. Why? Why do people have to be like that?
Because when they think they are the standard, then they can set the behavior that's acceptable.
I think, what's that saying?
It's okay if you think or fantasize about people, but make sure that it stays in your head. I, I disagree. Because if you have fantasies about women, say you're a man and you have fantasies about women, and it just stays in your head, it's, it will stay isolated. The moment that you say things out loud, that's when it starts sinking in.
How ridiculous those things sound. And also, even if you only think or look at women in a certain way and you're thinking, Yeah, but I'm not doing anything. I'm just looking. vibe is tangible. At least to me. I can see it when guys do it to other people, and now I can tangibly feel it done to me.
Yeah. Yeah.
And we've known people in varying degrees of closest to us that have acted on things. And there was a bit of a shock in awe of, oh my goodness, I can't believe they did that. But that's not, that moment that they decided to act in that way was not the first time that they wanted to act that way, if that makes sense.
Mm-hmm. . So as much as we, as witnesses can say, Oh my goodness, that's not how they are. They're not like that. Their thought life has been like that for a while, I would say. Yeah.
Yeah. And then your old church had this conference. where they invited a men who detransition. So he was born male, then he transitioned to female and he detransition to male. And this happens and I have zero, objections for people who do that.
And they have their own reasons, right?
Everyone is allowed to live their life.
Everyone is allowed to live their life. But then, I created a real, and this is the real, happened last
Yeah. So we sort of heard that that had happened
And,
and we've gone through that church for like a year when I just moved to America, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And, and before that I went there for, you know, 20 odd years. So
whew.
I had been there a long time, but hadn't recently. And we heard that this sort of weekend workshop leading into sermon had happened, all around, quote unquote real identity.
And then, we had, we had been somewhat warned that maybe some people we knew had been there and there was sort of some follow up activities, if you will, for those who had attended. and so we were wondering if we would be subject to some of those follow up activities. And lo and behold, maybe a week later, um, we received a package on our porch.
It was addressed from a PO box in North Carolina, I believe, and opened it, and it was this gentleman's book, concerning, being saved from being trans, for lack of a better phrase. And so many thoughts happened when I opened it. full disclosure, I, I didn't not tell meh, but I sort of . It was a very hard week for a lot of reasons.
She was finishing her master's, finals, all of that. So I said, You know what? This is a later conversation. but I had a lot of thought thoughts when I opened it. And, one of them chiefly speaking on the topic of helping people feel safe was safety. now, Some group that we don't know, certainly don't feel safe around to have our personal home address.
We're on a list somewhere, and honestly, I wanna say in these times, but probably in all times, that's not a safe position to be in.
So it felt very vulnerable. and then added to the layers that it of course must have been somebody who we know, that did it. So they, they willingly kind of gave up our personal information, to this organization.
And it speaks to the ignorance that people have. Talking again about intersectionality, you can say, Well, you know, I've been vulnerable in situations or,
Whatever. But then I'm sure the senders would say, Well, I don't care who has our address.
I'm safe, uh, no matter who may have my address. but they don't have to think about things that we as a family think about.
So it was a really prime example of
Somebody
who I'm sure had the best intentions, but were just ignorant in many things when it came to us and how to approach us,
I am afraid in my home, and you guys hear me speak through a microphone right now with my podcast voice, and I feel generally great. I feel euphoric. I'm so happy with my transition, but I am afraid every day so that somebody has my address.
It doesn't just make it, it, it better, It's, it's terrifying. And let's look at those stats again. Right? Like 50% of trans women report that they have been a victim of trans hate. 10% of trans women have reported that they've been beaten up.
if I interpret those statistics, that means that 10%, one in 10 trans people will be beaten up because they're trans. I don't feel safe. This is an active conversation that I'm in therapy for. we are talking about getting a dog for that reason so that I could go outside and feel safe.
Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's not a little bit ironic that the group of people as a whole that we're talking about that just don't understand, that will take measures themselves to feel safe preemptively try to stop policy from happening, et cetera, et cetera. Because under the banner of I want to feel safe, but then really have no understanding of what other people holding other identities, oftentimes multiple identities have to deal with on a regular basis.
regular Right. Yeah.
Even thinking about those policies, I didn't even think about that because it's those same people that would be very anti-immigration because that makes them feel unsafe.
I, you, you know, I'm wondering how many cases of illegal immigrants violence these people have suffered. I'm not saying that I'm not empathetic to people's fears. That's not at all what I'm saying.
There's always a, a example or an outlier of why you should probably be
Right? Right.
But I don't feel safe every day, and I'm pretty certain that most trans people that I know don't feel safe every single day. So let's say I am a lost soul. Let's say I need to be saved by Jesus. This is not a strategy that is working.
Yes. Sort of a forced exposure therapy will just make you as vulnerable and uncomfortable as possible until you, like most of the 2% that do detransition as youth at least do not out of wanting to do that, but external pressure.
So there's no wonder if you feel unsafe if you start hearing those statistics. And if you think, Well, if that's gonna be my life, I'm, I'm not going to deal with this.
This also leads into the last two reels that I made about the legislation against trans youth. that is going on right now. And this does not affect me directly because I'm a trans adult, I guess. But the legislation that over 30
lawmakers
tried to push a law that was essentially a nationwide, don't say gay bill.
it will never pass. But the fact that there are 30 lawmakers, over 30 lawmakers that are willing to go this far, those are elected officials that want to have something like that nationwide. And then my last real, where I talked about. That Florida went ahead, gave the Florida Medical Board an okay to ban transgender care period for minors.
So if you are on puberty blockers, you, you are 16 years old and you've been on puberty blockers for two years, you have to stop that. That's such a horrible feeling. So we are already feeling unsafe. The trans community feels unsafe. We already feel alone. Now we feel attacked. How is this helping us?
Yeah, it's that whole idea of, you know, we talk about a lot in our family, the importance of love your neighbor and that being sort of, The greatest, commandment that we've been given, second only to loving God, right? So how is that showing love? And I think the argument would probably be, well, we're, we're doing what's best for them.
but you either believe in the authority and the responsibility of parents guardians, or you don't. You either believe that people have been given their children and have a right and responsibility to know them and care for them, or you don't. And so the argumentation that, well, that parent just doesn't know what's the best option.
right?
Falls apart rather quickly. the same people who, you know, those 30 lawmakers would never in their life want somebody else to tell them how to raise their children. I, I assume they have children and they would not stand for anyone saying, Well, see you just in this instance, don't understand what's best for your
Yeah. And this is the frustrating part, right? Because there's a whole attack on this is not what we went in public schools and we don't want to expose our kids to, trans identities and homosexualities because it's so inappropriate.
but this comes from a group that's overwhelmingly Bible literate, right? They go to churches, to bible churches, evangelical churches, and they learn things at Sunday School. But the stories in the Bible are terrible. Again, I, I feel like I always have to clarify. I, I love the Bible. I love the stories in the Bible.
I love to learn from it. I feel that the Bible is authoritative over my life, but the stories in the Bible are terrible. I mean, we're talking about content warning guys. We're talking about lots daughters sleeping with their father because there wouldn't be an heir.
We're talking about Gideon sacrificing his daughter because he made a bet with God. We're talking about babies being smashed against rocks. We're talking about biblical porn in the Song of Solomon. That's all okay to expose our kids to, but it's not okay to expose our kids to your kindergarten teacher is gay, and you talked with them about, Hey, are you married?
Well, I'm married to my husband, or I'm married to my wife. We cannot talk about that.
Well, it's not a big leap, right? We talk about how the culture around raising your kids is from a very young age is talking about purity, and that demands talking about things that are very sexual. There's a sexualization piece to those who are very young in the church that kind of sets that tone.
So it's not surprising that they sexualize other teens, those in the LGBTQ community because it's, it's not a very big leap.
That is so frustrating.
Exactly. Like you say it. As if the LGBTQ community are only having sex every single day, and we need to make sure that we don't talk about
There's no suburban families taking kids to soccer practice. It's only, you know, high media's take on the community.
I think there's a safety in believing that you've got certain things figured out. And I can, again, only speak for myself, but what I have noticed growing up in a, you know, Evangelical Bible church is I think largely with very good intentions. They wanted to prepare people, so there are. Lines that you're given.
And there are arguments that you're given as sort of these are, they're kind of given to you in a plug and play way. Well, if anyone brings up this point, then you just say this. Or well, you know, they'll say that, but just give them this Bible verse and then they'll get it. You know, they'll be persuaded. And that's the methodology. And you know, from personal experience, it leads to a lot of embarrassing moments.
I've had those moments in life where. It sounded so reasonable in my youth group, in my church, whatever it was, and then to step out into the real world and school and other situations and, and say that out loud and see people's faces just looking like you're not making any sort of point right now, that's, that's not reasonable or that's not relevant to what we're talking about.
It really was eye opening to realize like, maybe there's a time and place for me to listen. so I think there's just an element of, Oh, oh, I solved that one. My, my particular flavor of faith solves that one. So I can just give that to you right here. Here. Look, here's the answer to that question. I think that's one. I think the other thing in all of that is not simply that it's hard to break something down, but that it's threatening to break something down.
I think when it comes to something as close to us and as valuable to us as faith, there's a level of feeling threatened
Yeah.
that if one thing is wrong, then all might be wrong. And what does that mean? Will my world come crumbling down if that one thing I thought was one way is a different. Like, Oh my goodness, God actually loves people who are like that
And I have not been living my life in that way. can be a very hard moment for a lot of people and it causes a lot of defensiveness.
I'd say. I also have to understand that, you know, as a background to, to those who listen to this episode, I don't believe in an erry,
Tell the people what's in errancy in a nutshell.
okay.
So in ancy, is the belief that the Bible is without error in its original autographs and I just don't believe it.
However, whenever I engage in these discussions, I put myself on that plane. Because I know a lot of people do believe in an ancy. So in order to have a, a meaningful conversation about it, I cannot just tell somebody who has a conversation with me, Hey meh. The bible says that homosexuality's a sin.
And I will say, Well, I don't believe in an ancy, so I just don't care that you say that. That's not a way to have a discussion. So I put myself on the plane so we can have meaningful conversation. But even if I would adopt, like consider an errancy, a robe or, or glasses, even if I put on those glasses and I talk as if I believe in an erry, I still don't get to these conclusions.
and I've done a lot of studies and I provide a lot of background of why I think a certain way. So I gotta understand that that's what I do and I have those expectations from other people. So, What I'm trying to say here is this kind of is my personality and, and you know it, you're my wife
when
love a good back and forth.
I love a good back and forth, but I also have high expectations of people. So if I put in say, Oh, I studied this for a decade. these are my findings, and somebody just says, Well, the Bible still says homosexuality is a sin. I just get disappointed in humanity. It kind of hurts my hearts that there are people that don't want to think this through.
So yes, I hear you about that fear part. And I also understand that there's strolls people that just enjoy.
they'll always be those,
right? Yes, there will always be those, but there's still a group of people. that is not willing to engage in that level. And that's when I'm looking at pastors.
Because if you've gone through your Sunday school and afterwards you're in the service and you hear your pastor and your youth pastor and your peers constantly bashing homosexuals as if they're sinful, why would you not believe that? How is that even a conservative Christian if you Will's fault?
So something super interesting that I think would be right in line with talking about this idea of, the threatening nature of what if something, one thing in my faith is wrong.
I think really comes down to like what is it that makes Christianity what it is? and to put it a different way, what things about your faith are to be very Christian
salvation issues. I think conservative Christians as a whole have really pinned salvation life and death going to heaven when we die on things that God never asked us to make that foundational, you know, His existence and his desire to be loved by us.
And there's the existence of the Messiah and who I believe was, you know Jesus Christ at that time. But we want to pin so much more on so many other parts of the faith, and I think it would be very interesting to examine some of the models that we have, our understandings of what the Christian faith really
understanding. Mm. get a theologian on the show and talk about this
stuff.
I think maybe you know, a few
Yeah. I would love to talk about that because we already talked a little bit about how would you know something is true like epistemology and there's rules for that. Th there's, this is a well thought out subject, and then we have what's necessary for salvation because let's turn this all upside down.
Let's say I'm completely. Let's say I'm trans and because I'm trans, I go to hell.
does that mean that people should treat me this way? Or does that mean that people should invite me to their homes even more?
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole rippling effect when you start to consider what actually is important that touches on all of the things we just talked
we just mm-hmm
It talks about how we view people like women. How do we treat people like women? How do we treat members of the LGBTQ community? All of those things.
In faith spaces really are predicated on what we believe our faith is and what we think our faith is dictating us to do.
All right, if you know me and you're a theologian, you may get a phone call from me because I think we need to unpack this, I look forward to it. Thank you so much for being on the show again, Kim,
any time, all you have to do is turn around in our house and ask me.
That's right. for those who are wondering, I'm still wearing my princess outfit because we just came back from trick or treating. You actually took off your Dragon costume.
Talk about mental models. If you say someone in our household is a princess for Halloween, it is not maybe what some of you would think the member was, but when the two year old says, You will beat this for Halloween, all you can do is comply.
That's right. Her face is way too cutes.
HUGE CW - contains topics of abuse and violence!
Below is an automatically generated script!
Hey Wendy. How are you doing,
Hey there. I'm great. How are you?
I am doing interesting. I've had lots of conferences that I need to process.
They're both church conferences for how can we make church spaces more inclusive?
Your post the other day about that. I was like, as someone walking around with complex trauma and ptsd, I never actually thought about that, but yes, if I wanted to run, I gotta deal with Susan here, being like, Wendy, where are you going? You know? And that doesn't make me feel safe. Susan's great, but, uh, yeah.
Yeah. That's that whole thing of I already feel like that, but I cannot imagine people that need that safety because of other issues than, than being a trans woman. like, can we think about space design, physical space design? Instead of, let's start a church. Let's go theater style. Can we hire a consultant that can think about the, the makeup of our space?
More importantly, can you pay said consultant for their knowledge and their
expertise?
Cuz the church loves to just like, you know, pimp you out for like, , lack of better word.
. Say more. What do I hear? Some saltiness for churches not willing to pay consultants.
Um, do I feel like they, perpetuate free labor at the cost of emotional health and wellbeing? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Like, I'm definitely very salty about that.
Yeah. There, there you said it. And I think that needs to be said more. You are valuable. I know you do consulting, you're valuable. and not just monetarily. People need to see that. You need to be acknowledged. So let's start this off by, I acknowledge you, you are special. Not in a, like you're special, but you are special.
You are worth it. And I acknowledge you from one consultant to another. Thank you for the work that you're doing.
Same to you as well. You are valuable. Yes.
Thanks. So we just started off about saltiness and consultants and churches, but for the people who are listening to this, they have no idea who you are. Can you give a small introduction?
Sure. So when I meet most people and they hear about what I do for a living, they're very quick to either tell me one of two things, they wanna tell me their life story or convince me that they've never experienced trauma. And pretty quickly when the latter of the two I, I'm ready to dispel any notion that you have never gone through trauma
and just let you know that no one gets out. Life unsaid. So I'm a healing coach and I'm the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called Grip Plus Gumption Farmstead. Um, we serve women survivors of sexual exploitation and domestic violence. We provide free therapeutic services. We build community with them.
We host quarterly healing retreats, all with the sole purpose of empowering women to continually pursue holistic healing. within a safe community. So, I've been working in anti-trafficking for nearly eight years. We worked in Houston before and now I'm in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I've also served as a trainer for trafficking awareness in several capacities.
ran a ministry in Brenham, Texas, which is a little town that's halfway in between Houston and Austin. during a time when the oil field was collapsing in Houston and many people were flocking to Austin, so we're right along that main drag and we saw a lot of trafficking happen. in that time I'm still of course, so I'm not new to the road of healing.
I personally live with PTSD and complex trauma. I'm a survivor of both, domestic violence and sexual exploitation. So we are a survivor led organization. I'm very open about the intimate partner violence and domestic violence experiences that I've had, but I'm still kind of healing and recovering for sure from the sexual exploitation, because that was actually a new memory that came to me just last year.
So, I mean, you can already see like between everything that I do that like obviously healing is not linear. We don't start an end, right? We just never fully arrive at this destination. We just keep like crawl, clawing our way, you know, forward. So, besides that, I'm also a mom and a wife. My family and I live on two acres just south of Fort Worth.
And you know, I have to say, because I live in Texas, I was not born here. I was born and raised on Long Island, New York, and then when I was like nine or 10, we moved to Houston and I grew up there. So we've lived all over, but we've been here for over five years.
. I, I hear a little bit of personal passion for why you started Grid Plus Gum, but can you tell me a little bit more about why you were interested in becoming a healing coach?
About four years ago, I wanted to get back into anti-trafficking work after taking a hiatus. And so I went and saw my friend Emily. She runs Jesus said Love down in Waco. She's an amazing human being. And I was like, you know, how do I. Get back into this, What do you think I should do? Who do you think I should talk to?
And she paused and she looked at me and she said, You know, Wendy, the people that have longevity in this type of the work are the people that know their stories really well. And I was like, I know my story really well. Like, there's just a lot of stuff going on there. Like, it's a long story, you know?
And she was like, I want you to read this book. So I devoured this book called To Be Told by Dan Allander within 24 hours of getting home. And, I just fell in love with it. The idea of story work to do as a modality for healing completely changed my life. I started working for free at the church and leading women's groups through story work.
I don't recommend that. but I did. And then shortly after that, I felt. I was actually at a conference in Austin and I felt the, the words keep coming to me. Healing coach. Healing coach. And I was like, I don't even know what that is. And so if you're gonna ask something weird of someone in Texas, they gotta be in Austin.
Like Austin people are just down. Okay. And I was like, Do you even think that's a thing? And they were all very, That's totally a thing. Like they knew a healing coach or something. So I was like, Okay, well I'll just dive right in. So of course, continuing to do my own personal story work and just seeing the benefits of it, just how it had completely changed everything for me.
And I just saw things in a new perspective. I was like, More people need to know about this. So that's eventually just how I became a healing.
That is awesome. I love that you say that you are attracted by this story based model. You cannot detract from stories. You can be academic and say, when we talk about science, people can't see me now. I'm pulling up my glasses that I don't have on, Like be sophisticated, but a story you cannot detract from that.
This is my story.
It's your, your lived experience.
Like no one can argue with that at all. It's the, you're an expert on your lived experience. No one else is.
Right.
power.
We do things without knowing it, like we behave on autopilot 90% of the time.
So What is trauma contributing to that 90% of autopilot?
when you experience trauma, your lens completely changes. So think of, You . As I've gotten older, I've need more glasses and stronger glasses, right? So like each year I go in and get a different prescription. So think of trauma as just that different prescription that you see the world through instead of, you know, in some ways I would say you see it more clearly, unfortunately, and otherwise you see it more, blurry. For example, in my lived experience, I was, raised by a narcissistic parent, and, I immediately jumped into many other abusive relationships because abuse is my norm, right? So that doesn't seem out of the norm at all. as well as experiencing neglect and. Later in life, sexual assault and, and all these things change and shape the way that we see and experience the world and the way that we see and experience each other, you know, there's always those videos on the internet of like some woman completely freaking out, you know, in the middle of Starbucks.
and like people just wanna be like, Oh, she's crazy, you know, whatever. Um, she's probably having a nervous breakdown and she's probably dealing with unde trauma, or in fact not dealing with her unde trauma. So it completely changes the way that we interact with one another. The way that we trust or don't trust one another, it completely changes our lens and until we start dealing with that trauma, we're not seeing clearly,
if that makes sense.
absolutely. Last week I had Maddie Samson on a podcast and she does research on, childhood trauma, or specifically she focuses on poverty in the district in dc and how talking about trauma using play therapy can help kids reframe their realities to help them cope with it. if you're listening to this, Maddie, and I just messed up your dissertation, I'm so, so sorry, um, but I told her I think it made it in the podcast as well, that I thought that the golf war was normal when I was in Israel.
When I lived in Israel and played around with gas masks until it was not, until I said it out loud. And people were like, That is ridiculous. Me. That is terrifying.
There's nothing so sobering as when you talk about your internal family, like your family of Origins, experience, to someone else and they look at you or they don't say anything and you're like, Oh, that, that was crazy. That's, that's cra Okay, cool. Like, it just, it really will throw you off and be like, make you question everything about your life.
It's, it's very sobering for sure.
And sobering in a way of this should be a fundamental skill that we learn, right? I have conversations with people that think that they have not lived through a traumatic experience, and then I changed the character from them to somebody else. A very vulnerable person we both know, and they're like, Stop saying that's, that's terrible, but that's what you just went through.
yes, Because why? Because we're arm, we're so armored up, right? If it happens to me, it's fine. If it happens to someone else, it's a tragedy.
And we learn that as children, like in our family of origins, we're just taught and groomed in a way to, to live that way. and just accept this is, this is what this is. And it's, I mean, it's a total internal in your, in your brain. I don't know the actual word for it or whatever, but your brain is protecting you.
It's a like a survival mechanism to be able to keep moving forward. Otherwise, we'd be crushed. Under the weight of these sort of literal tragedies happening to us.
It must be related to heuristics. It's something that I study where your brain is preventing proteins and energies from being usurped. So it's just saying, Well, we're not gonna focus on this because this costs a lot of energy.
Yes.
So hypothetically, because I'm not a psych psychology psychologist,
Psych, Oh my gosh. Please put that on your business card. That is a new word. If not, I, you know, I just ordered new business cards, otherwise I would totally psycholog
It's an unprotected title. I can do this. So if you're, I'm not a psychologist, I reckon hypothetically that heuristics can be affected by those traumas and then happen what you say now, from now on, my body responds in a certain way that does not, make me freak out because I'm trying to protect myself or preserve energy.
And, and your body, like at the point of trauma, you separate from your body, right? So you're walking around this dismembered person, this un whole person because you're not integrated with your body. So like the whole work of healing is getting you back into your body and picking up all those pieces that you've like dismantled all throughout your entire life.
So you're not trusting your body either, but your body is still sending you signals this entire time. So if you come into a situation where, you, there's a creepy guy, here we go. That's like a, everybody knows, like if I say, if I say creepy guy, everybody, Oh, I've got, I've got an instance I can think of.
Your body is going to react in a way before you even can think this guy is creepy. Like, your body shows up first,
So it's, it's kind, it's working against you. Your survival, your protection, all, all those things really are working against you and being able to function a hundred percent. In the world.
why do we do that?
I mean, you know, I am person of faith, so I believe God like created the body like perfectly knowing all the things that were gonna be thrown at us. it's a safe way to keep moving forward. So, for example, let's say a child is being abused by a parent. That child loves that parent, even if they drastically violently abuse them every day.
because a child will always protect, their own family. As a way to survive. The child does not want to break up the family or, because that's their safety net. That's all they know. Children are very aware of their vulnerability in this world. They know I am a tiny person and these are bigger people than me, and I can't live on my own.
So I need this other person as awful as they are, to still be with me to, in a way protect me, even though in actuality they're not. it's so, it's a, it's all about survival in a way.
Yeah,
I mean, you think of like things in our bodies, like, we have our wisdom teeth removed, you know, when we get older. but like those were there to help.
Eat certain foods, you know, caveman days or whatever. there's, the appendix and like other body parts that we have that we needed, but we no longer need as we've evolved and the world has changed, so will these things change? I'm not sure. You know, I think the more that we, teach and learn and are willing to learn and, and choose healing over every, I think there'll be a progression towards wholeness.
but I don't think, I don't think everyone's gonna get it. I don't think we're ever gonna live in a perfect world this is not gonna happen. But can we be equipped to move forward in a better, healthy way? Absolutely.
How do we discern from understanding this is a good feeling, this creep alert. We need to listen to this creep alert and when should we say calm down? It's time to take a step back.
I have two kids. One has known me, his most of his life as someone's still living out of their trauma. The other one, has known me more as a healing version. Right? I am very quick to teach my daughter to always trust her gut a hundred percent. and we've been doing that for years, as soon as I learned, because she was not a, she's not a , she was not a friendly child.
she's great, but like she, you know how kids you go up to them in the store and like, typically, you know, their parents will be like, Oh, say hi and whatever. And I'd be like, say hi. And she'd just like, give him a look and look at me and go, No And I had to learn to respect that. Like she knew.
she didn't wanna talk to that person and I can't make her, or, well, I mean, I shouldn't make her right, I shouldn't make her give people hugs. I mean, that was only like a few years ago. She's only 10 now. So like most of her life I've lived under this, listen to your kids.
They, they have this discernment. and just, and fostering that and like watering it, I remember when my, my daughter was really young. Me and my husband had gone back to church and he told me something that I thought was wildly crazy and partially, what's the word they like a here. Or whatever , like you're going to hell no.
Um, he said, I believe that babies are born with the Holy Spirit. And I was like, You're crazy. because, you know, I'd been taught my whole, you know, Southern Baptist and Catholic life that like, you don't get the Holy Spirit until, you know, whatever. And then I watched my daughter discern these things about really adult situations that I was like, Oh, maybe she already has that.
Like, that's already in her. I just need to water it. Like I don't need to put it in there. Like, it's already there. So we're already born with that internal system. You know, some people call it their gut, some people call it the Holy Spirit. Literally had this conversation again with my son last night, but like, whatever you wanna call it, like it's inside of you already and if you water it, it'll grow.
Now my son on the other. born with it. He also says autism. So, like just a straight shooter.
Right.
world has, because of his trauma, because of his trauma responses, the world has already started washing that out of him, and he questions it. I'm like, No, you, you know what is, what is right? What is good and what is true.
Like you already know that. Go back to that. When you lose your way, when you're lost and when you're confused and when you're feeling torn, go back to like the internal, like what is in there, What is that telling you? Not up in your head, like you're huddled drive you crazy all night long till 3:00 AM in your gut, go lower, Get outta your head. What does your body say about this? and I, I use this on everything. Me and my husband went to go buy a couch a few weeks ago. And he wanted this other couch. And I was like, I don't know, you know? And I was like, I'm gonna take a big deep breath and I'm gonna, I'm like, It's not this couch.
It's the other couch. And I feel completely at peace about the couch we bought.
Let's go
So it's, it's with everything you can feel good and at peace when you're trusting that, that internal gut feeling, whatever you call that, your internal guide, for lack of a better word.
Huh? I never heard of that before I'm gonna like process this. Of course, I'm excited to process this. my, my first response right away is that, that is so helpful because If you put it like this, your gut will rarely tell you, Oh, oh, sl that person's throat,
Yes, I, Well, I don't wanna say, you know, I mean like, I think there's an exception for like psychopaths and things like, I'm not sure how their guts is.
Maybe,
have no clue.
But for ex not, they're not, they're not psych agents. Okay. No, but they,
Yeah.
they may be wired differently, but I would say for the mass majority of the world, 98% your gut is just not gonna lead you wrong.
Your gut doesn't tell you go use drugs. Your gut doesn't tell you go drink yourself under the table. Your gut doesn't tell you I should cheat on my partner. No, it.
Your gut response. If we, if we just make a value statement of. It is probably not wrong to listen to your gut. And if you need a little bit more time, it is okay to tell anybody I need 24 hours to process this. I don't have to decide now. What is it with this culture and minimizing gut? Why do we put rationality so high on the scale of skills that we need?
I don't even think it's rationality. I think it's the BS politeness thing we have going on. The only people that do it better than Americans are probably the Brits where it's like the, the, the mask of the politeness, and, and that gets us in trouble. I mean, there's a person that, talks about, being nice will get you killed, in almost every situation where a woman was, assaulted, mugged.
You name it. Niceness played a part, I mean, Jeffrey Daher, you know, his victims that were women that, you know, and he was a good looking man. So like, obviously he's not a creep, you know, and I'm just gonna be nice. And then, we all know how that story ends. So it's the politeness, I think that washes away the inherent need to trust our gut.
we put that over everything. I'm being honest, but I'm not being polite. Well, it's actually better to be honest, in kindness. Kindness is, you know, love, honesty and truth, you know, but being nice and being polite, Dan Aller always says, niceness avoids kindness, pushes in
Yes. Whew. A whole different episodes only on this topic would be great. But we asserted that trauma affects our mental models big time. And we have asserted that guts and mental models are, are connected with each other, and that sometimes we need to listen to our gut a little bit more. and we also need to discern when our gut is messed up because of our trauma. That is very tangible for me and for you and for everybody. And, and it frustrates me that I still enter faith spaces, churches. That's, this is my field, right? I want to talk with churches about how they can be a leadership organization. That's what a church essentially is. Let me give a background there an explanation of why I. Believe that because if you strip away the congregants, there's only leaders left. There's a volunteer leader, there's a children's leader, there's a pastor, they're all leaders. They need leadership development. But for some reason, their main focus is Jesus, and Jesus is essential. Let , I don't wanna downplay it, but lately I've been saying, why do pastors know Calvin Luther or maybe even Bill Hybels, but they have no clue who, Daniel Goldman is or Peter Caza who are seminal leaders when it comes to emotional intelligence in leadership.
because you are a leadership organization, but you focus on things that are, in my opinion, not necessarily irrelevant, but. I would rate them as lower priority. So this is another thing. Yeah. Surface, right? Or some, some are even very important, like Jesus, very important, but it's, It's, it's not Jesus's function. I've been saying this for weeks. It's not Jesus's function to, to heal somebody from trauma. Jesus can certainly help, but that's not the reason why Jesus came on earth. that's my personal faith statement right there. recognizing these traumas and these effects, how can we teach leaders?
I guess there's two parts to this question. How can we raise awareness for leaders that the way our body stores trauma is absolutely massively important and. How can faith leaders be more inclusive words? People with trauma, like how can we make them not just aware of their own trauma and their own gut, but also have a better radar for people with trauma in their congregation so they can serve them better?
So I think a pivotal book, that's come out in the last decade. Probably is the Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Vander Col. talks about trauma in the body, the effects of trauma in the body, how that leads to health issues, blah, blah, blah. Okay. all the things, the, like psychology, Bible on trauma,
Mm-hmm. ?
if you will. if a faith leader has not done their own work of healing from their trauma, there's no way they're gonna recognize trauma in someone else. In fact, they're probably gonna be triggered by other people more than they're going to be, able to recognize trauma in someone else. So a trauma informed leadership, just trauma inform people in general would be great, I think of how, police officers are not that trauma informed and that's disturbing, because they have to make quick assessments and judgements on, on situations and sometimes, They need to already have that in their toolbox.
So same with, when I get my yearly mammogram, I would love for her to be trauma informed, you know, so that she would know I'm freaking out in here, I'm in a closed room and you're molesting my boob right now, and luckily the place I go to, they're very good and I would consider them trauma informed.
And is there a class? Is there a book? There's everything, like trauma informed is not something that, like you can just log on and take this class and are, are there programs that do that? Sure. But it's just knowing your own trauma, processing that trauma, and then you'll be able to see it better in others, but also to just learn more.
Be trauma informed. Learn more about your own trauma, will help you recognize other people's trauma. And then just continue to be a learner and, more curious about other people and about trauma. Read a book every once in a while, you know, when you guys get together to do your leadership, whatever getaways, like have someone come and teach you something about trauma.
it's healthy for you and it's healthy for your, I was gonna say constituents, that's not the right word, Congregation.
Yes,
Um, and the other thing that like bothered the heck outta me is that, will use the verse in the Bible that says, I'm a new creation in Christ. Cool. Yeah, you are. and also do the work.
You are not, healed from your trauma because you decide to follow Jesus. So many times they use the Jesus bandaid as like, Well, I follow Jesus now so my life is better. And I'm like, Who are you selling this garbage too? Because I can tell you, as soon as I started following Jesus, my life got worse.
Yeah.
People are looking for a shortcut. there is no shortcut to healing. It is a lifelong road that you will walk and continue to walk and you'll take a break and sit on the side for a little bit. But it's a lifelong walk and there's no shortcut to it. Is Jesus helpful in your healing?
Uh, yeah. Obviously. Okay, But it's not Jesus, period. The end. Now, the rest of my life will be great and. I cannot be the only person that loves Jesus that thinks this as well and thinks or knows that the church is selling some kind of garbage pop psychology about this Jesus bandaid that's just gonna fix everything.
It's like using Jesus as a crutch. But again, that's not the function of Jesus. how can we change the narrative around that in, in churches, what needs to happen?
I love a vulnerable leader, one that, doesn't try to BS their way through You know, pride is a very toxic, drug. A lot of faith leaders are high on. there's something about that position too, and it's been studied and people, I mean, I think we see it, We have been seeing it.
for the last, at least 10 years of like, this role is very taxing. And something happens, when certain people lead large groups of people and become idolized and they start to hide behind that guarded wall of I'm a perfect individual, be like me. But if you read the Bible, like everything Paul wrote is like, I'm a horrible human being.
Like, where's the humility? that I personally struggle with as well, because as a leader, like you think you need to have all your stuff together. Otherwise, are you really a leader? But that's only because it's been modeled for us for so long that like leaders don't fall and then, We see leaders fall.
So really, where's, where, where's the lie? Do leaders fall? Are they infallible? when are we gonna get away from that? When are we gonna start to see that? Like, we're all human beings. This is our very first go around the sun here. we're all new here.
something that we tell our son all the time is, we've never raised a, right now, 17 year old before. And he looks at us baffled. Like suddenly he thinks we went to college to raise a 17 year old, You're our first kid. Okay? You're our first pancake.
We're gonna burn you. on accident. Of course the first pancake doesn't turn out as great. Because this is our first time doing this. We're going to fail. We're not gonna do it perfectly. We're all still learning. So can we just get to a place of humility and admit that we are all very messed up individuals?
I just had a conversation with Aaron Bailey from Launchpad Partners. If you're listening to this high about something similar, that that data shows us that we need to take care of our bodies. We need to take breaks. 38 hour weeks or more productive than 80 hour weeks.
As a matter of fact, 80 hour weeks study over study shows has adverse effects. On productivity and again, the marketplace is slowly adjusting, but face bases, Oh no, you should work for $25,000 a year, no insurance, and you need to work 52 Sundays and the rest of the days
no sabbaticals. No vacations, terrible. I'm not surprised that the leaders that we are all listening to don't have bandwidth to learn anything. Trauma informed.
Where do, where's the space? Yeah. There's no space for them. And I mean, we see that the same in nonprofit world too, where people are underpaid, overworked, undervalued. it, you're right, like in the marketplace. Absolutely. Like things are starting to shift even though they're very slowly shifting. And I think the other part of that is like in our world in general, like you talked about, teaching inclusive leadership is not also not linear.
It's not like, do this, do this, do this check done. Here you go. Here's your, here's your trophy. you're now an inclusive leader. Um, because things are changing. we have learned more about ourselves and the brain in the last 20 years than we have in the last what, hundred. and so because ironically just like technology is moving a lot faster than it has in even our lifetime, the thirst for knowledge, the curiosity has blown up so much so that we are learning things, we're learning more things, we're learning them at a rapid speed. and we're gonna continue that. I think, I don't think this train is slowing down. I don't think it's stopping at the station or going back to the 1950s.
Like some people would, have it happen. There's opportunity here. at this point, ignorance is a choice. So if you choose to be ignorant about something, that's on you, that's something you're gonna have to deal with.
what is your message to the faith leaders across the nation?
listen to people that are not like you. there has been more times than not where I have sat across. From a pastor or two or three, who have talked to me like I'm new here, who have decided that because I'm a woman, my opinion is not valuable and I'm, you know, a cisgender woman, white woman.
so if they don't value my opinion, I can't think of, or I can imagine how little they put value towards the bipo community, the LGBTQ plus community. so that's a problem. Listen to people that are different from you, have different experiences than you and value what they share. Even if you don't like it, you don't have to like what everyone says, but a broken clock is right.
Twice a day, you're gonna glean some sort of wisdom from listening to somebody that is not like,
That's good advice. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for being on this podcast thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. I feel like we could do this. Absolutely. I think we could do this for a couple of hours and change the world together.
Exactly. Just give us like two more hours. We'll have it all
Yes, that's it. Yes. Uh, I think I have auto transcription on this software so we can even publish it and send it to the White House.
there we
right?
Yeah,
But thanks for sharing wisdom. Thanks for being on the podcast. And please, I, I think, uh, I shared this with Jen that I wanna do a special addition of a podcast where we talk about trauma and sex.
Me and Jen will
love
that
Yes. Maybe you guys together and I'll just sit down and let you talk
and there will be a lot of FBOs dropped between
me and
okay. okay.
uncle. It's fine. It's good.
Below is an automatically generated transcript.
Well, hey Maddie, how are you doing?
I'm doing well. I'm so excited to be here. How are you?
I'm doing great. I just had surgery as you know.
Yes,
so um, I feel euphoric
Ooh, I love that. That's a powerful way to describe how you're feeling.
I just remember that you pastor to and some other directors and myself were on a conversation and you saw me at a very, very bad day. I just got denied for the third time from insurance that my surgery's not gonna happen. And I just remember your response. It just touched me so deeply. You literally hugged your entire laptop. in order to give me a digital hug, and I cried the entire evening. Thank you so much for that. I felt so
course. Of course. It's. Wow. It's making me feel emotional thinking about it. And you know, when I was reflecting on mental models before we logged on today, you know, I think it kind of goes just in line with how I was created. Like, it's so important to me that I see people affirmed for who they are.
And so I think just the spirit was tugging on me and I, I want you to feel seen. You deserve that. Everyone deserves that. So
Thank you so much. And it's interesting thinking about feeling seen, like I'm not a Gary Chapman, five love languages kind of person necessarily, but when it comes to what makes me feel loved, It's that if people follow up, if people make me feel seen,
but when I think about a deeper, isn't this like a deeper rooted thing that everybody just wants to feel seen and belong?
I think, yeah, when we strip everything down, a lot of what's at the core of our longings is needing that acknowledgement and confirmation from the world that we exist. So, yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, if we got really philosophical about it and stripped down those five love languages, they are about, you know, this is a pathway to making me feel the most seen. .
So can you tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Sure. That's such a big question. Um,
but yes, I think the first title that's coming to mind, and I think it's just Run of mind lately for me is I'm a sister, and I'm a daughter. I lost my dad earlier this year. Um, so just still grieving through that. And I'm a wife and I'm also still a PhD student and a full-time DC government employee. .
What makes you view yourself as a, as a family member first?
I think because those are the titles that've I've held the longest. And they're the most consistent. And, I think being a sister and a daughter led to who I am today. But my work and school titles, those are more outward reflections of where my journey has taken me and less so who I am
Do you see your work titles at all intertwined with your vocation and your calling?
So when I was younger, I was the person who liked to take a lot of personality tests, . So this could all be a, you know, a self-fulfilling prophecy, . But, um, I think because I'm like the middle child, I feel like I'm very much a helper. And you know, like the person in the middle that's trying to help keep the calm and tries to see both sides of stories and conflict.
and so I think that that, led to me becoming a teacher and why I enjoy being in community with people and hearing people's stories and trying to figure out how I can best partner with them. and then along that journey of being very pro personality tests, when I, learned about, you know, in the church there are a lot of tests that you can take to learn about your spiritual gifts, and I have seen a lot of overlap.
but then again, like I said, I don't know if like my, disposition or like joy of personality tests kind of maybe informed my results, but it all kind of, centers around like mercy and hospitality. So I see some parallels there, but I think I would have to think more about how independent those manifestations are.
So you were saying that you're doing a PhD. That's pretty impressive. What, what are you doing? And why are you doing a PhD?
It's like all great questions. I feel like the long I'm in the program, the, more cynical of an answer that I tend to have, but because it's you and I adore you, I'll be clear , the PhD I'm pursuing is in public policy and public administration. and I also have a master's degree in public affairs, which is the same thing, public policy and public admin kind of mixed together.
but my initial inspiration for pursuing my PhD was, I've always worked for nonprofits and I love this like, mission driven approach to, waking up every day, going to work with other folks who are passionate about an issue. but then I started to get kind of frustrated on two fronts, operationally, Folks who tend to go into nonprofits don't always have like the business acumen side of how to keep an organization going or like meeting goals and things like that. So that's just been a challenge that we've had in the nonprofit space. And so, on one hand I was very interested in sharpening my skills so that I could bring that back to the nonprofit world.
As you know, a really good evaluator, a really good strategic planner, a really good manager, a team builder. And then the other side of it was the theoretical nature of the nonprofits that I've worked for have all been anti-poverty, nonprofits and focusing a lot on children and families. And then not only doing service in the community, but thinking about how we can advocate for legislative changes at the state, local, and federal level.
And I, I found myself getting really frustrated with that work because it seemed like we were unable to relate to the communities that we were serving. And also advocating for what I consider bandaid solutions instead of uprooting what the real issues were and thinking about how we could really promote, a revolution or a shift in the way that, anti-poverty measures are approached.
So with all that being said, I thought, this is why I'm getting my master's to get the, you know, the, the hard skills of like, you know, that I mentioned as far as the operational piece, but then this PhD, I really wanted to think more about this, uh, systemic and structural issues that we're really keeping folks impoverished in the United States.
What makes you so passionate about. Anti poverty or ending poverty? Exactly.
well, I've always been really passionate about anti-poverty because of my upbringing. So like, I was actually born in Philly, that's where my parents and my siblings and I lived till I was about five years old. And then we moved to Charlotte. So my parents are both originally from North Carolina, um, but they relocated to Charlotte.
And then from literally like kindergarten up till my sophomore year of college as an undergrad, we experienced homelessness in housing and stability. So like even my transcript from like kindergarten through 12th grade, I'm enrolled in a new school every single year.
that's because like we are moving in, you know, living in homeless shelter one year or half a year, and then hotels, living with friends, things like that.
So, you know, the more I articulated through school and the more that folks started to learn about like my background, they would always say, Wow, like, you made it out, Or like, Wow, like, how did you do this or do that? And I don't know, I, I feel like I started to take on the barriers that people gave me because of their assumptions and not really knowing that, oh, because you know, my family is poor and homeless, that
getting a master's degree or PhD were unattainable. So, um, yeah, I think that knowing how I felt living in those spaces and being sensitive to. You know, what my family was experiencing and internalizing the trauma of homelessness and housing instability. I just feel really called to change things for the families that are really vulnerable right now. And if it's ending homelessness, then that's what I want to pursue.
Or if it's just, ending child poverty, which, you know, millions of children are across America, experienced poverty every day, then that's what I really wanna be committed to as far as my life's
Wow. First of all, I'm so sorry
that you had to go through. That , going through homelessness. That just sounds like a lot.
Yeah.
You have all the reason to be salty about that, but you're such a, a kind person. Why, why did you not become salty?
I think, I think it's a number of reasons. despite what our living situation was, I think on one end, my dad, you know, anytime he was in the picture, because there were times because of our living situation, he was in and out of our life on a consistent basis. But anytime he was around, he was always showing us, Alternate paths.
He always had us going hiking and going to events all around the city or you know, anytime he ran into money, he would say, Okay, like, we're gonna drive to Louisiana and like, see what life is like down there. Or We're gonna go to the beach this weekend. Even though that may have been all the money he needed for us to probably, you know, get a little bit more stability that week.
He really wanted to expose us to, other walks of life, other types of people. And I think that that helped probably combat this fixed mindset that, especially as a child when you're developing your worldview thinking, Oh well this is it and I have to accept that I'll always live in this broken down apartment or this shelter, this old hotel room.
Um, because we were seeing always that there were. Other opportunities.
Right.
you know, I think there's a, there's a downside to that. There's a sense of me always longing for adventure that can be to a fault, right? Like never being satisfied or feeling like undeserving of stability sometimes, you know, because of this transient nature of, my upbringing.
But I think another reason is really finding Christ and at a young age, having exposure to, you know, there's always this friend who was so consistent and always sees you and always loves you. And I'm like, who is that? Who is this friend? You know? And, I remember there were times where I'd be so upset or so frustrated and then I would just like open the Bible and just read, um, as, uh, very specifically Psalms 27 about being confident and like, you know, always having God there despite, your parents.
Even if they're not there, he will be there. And I'm confident of that. I think creating this routine where I was just constantly trying to fall into his arms when again, going back to this middle Childness being a sibling, I always frame it like my brother and my mom were very close and my sister and my dad were very close.
So it just kind of left me feeling like I had to perform for attention. and so I would just randomly open a Bible even if I didn't know what I was reading because I so believed in, there's this friend who really sees me. and going back to the sense of wanting people to feel seen, I think it's very rooted in that stage of my development.
And yeah, I think that those are reasons why my brain kind of combated any fixed mindset around, you didn't choose this and now, but it's your fault. And like, you're stuck here and this is all, all you'll ever have. I think that those were just two influences that come to mind when I think about why my mindset shifted, or how I got to where I am.
And that also makes me angry, you know, like there's a lot of, like, I have anger toward myself about that too, because even though my siblings and I grew up the. we lead very different lives today. We have different opportunities. We internalized our upbringing very differently. And then even, you know, I've worked in shelters here in the district and when I see the children, I very much want to, for them to know that like, this doesn't have to be it, but there are some, like I've worked with elementary age, middle school age, high school age, all living in shelters here in DC and it hurts to see the fixed mindset setting in already for them. And I'm like, well, why me? Like why couldn't all of the children that I lived within the shelter all have the same opportunity? Why couldn't we all kind of have a little less bitterness toward our past? And how can we help the children that are experiencing it now. Like that's that double edged sword I think of.
Now having more stability in my life and having this amazing opportunity to pursue a PhD where I'm like, I'm so thankful and grateful, but like, why God? Like, why not all of the children? Why not all of us? Kind of thing that I still grapple with.
Seeing , that young teenagers go through that fixed mindset already.
They have to overcome a mental model that may, correct me if I'm wrong, it, it's not going to, lift them from poverty. It's literally a mental model shift that may make your quality of life better. But it's not a promise of like, well, if you shift your mental model, you're gonna get a PhD.
Like Maddy, how do you think or how do you approach kids that age with those fixed mindsets what mental models do you see in those kids and how do you help them overcome that?
so I think research would tell us that opportunities like play therapy, allowing children the, space and giving them the tools to see that what they're experiencing is not normal. Because I think a lot of trauma becomes normalized. I mean, in media, in politics, like in in politics, we see it all the time, right?
If you just pull yourself up from your bootstraps, you'll be fine. But we know that that's just not the case. And to your point, like shifting your mindset isn't going to equal freedom. It doesn't equal a drastic change in your outcomes, especially if once you bring in intersectionality, right?
When you think about, okay, not only are you now combating poverty, but you could also be combating a lot of things based on how you look and how the world receives you. So depending on the age, it really varies on how we can really make an impact on how youth are combating the mindset that they're kind of absorbing, right?
And it's about giving them an opportunity to articulate what they are feeling about their situation. And what they think about it. Otherwise, they're simply, from my experience, going to mirror the energy of the adults around them. So for example, my mom is very, expressive in her negative emotions.
So like, I saw her cry a lot when we were little. and so that meant to me when I would look around, Oh, I should be very sad about the, the way that we are living. Whereas there is a child that I worked with, a couple years ago here in DC at a shelter who. Whose mom was just, she expressed really different energy and emotions and she's like, you know, yeah, we live here now, but we won't live here forever.
And her children had that very resilient type of spirit too. and never felt sad or embarrassed or ashamed about living in the shelter. whereas I remember trembling at the school bus stop anytime the bus was pulling up because we were the shelter kids getting picked up. And I feel like I was mirroring the shame and negative feeling that, the adults around me were exhibiting because, children, as they're developing, they're learning from us how to conceptualize and make sense of the world around them.
And so I think, like for me, and what we were trying to do with an organization that I worked with, while we were bringing in the play therapy, is empowering the youth to articulate how they're feeling and what they're thinking about their experience. So that's allowing them to act out, scenes from, what's happening in, in their family unit.
that's presenting them with arts and crafts opportunity that allow them to occupy their hands while you have a conversation with them. giving them different words to describe sadness. Is it overwhelmed? Is it that you're feeling anxious? Are you feeling embarrassed? expanding their, their toolkit on words.
it can be really powerful. and a lot of that can be done through, literature, like reading, all that type of exposure. And again, like when I think about my own experience, like my dad was always like reading the newspaper with me, or like reading, blogs and posts, things that were going on in the world, Always expanding my toolkit on.
What life is like and how I could, communicate what I was thinking and feeling.
I feel like I keep on saying I'm so sorry. I, I'm just seeing a young Mattie shivering. When you get picked up, I'm like,
Terrible.
Yeah, But it is, you know, and comparing it a little bit to experiences that I have had myself, like in, early nineties, The golf war broke out and we lived in Israel at that time. So my brothers and I, we went to school one day and we all had to pick up gas masks because, maybe a rocket would land.
Wow.
so we, got the gas mask. I remember that. I felt super claustrophobic in those gas masks. And then when you go outside to play as a kid, you know, you play with marbles.
So I'm seven or eight years old. You play with marbles. You have, your gas mask with you, and then the air raid alarms go off because, A bomb is being launched at, at Israel at that moment. And we all run to our homes and sit in a room that is completely gas sealed, looking at the news with our gas masks up.
so when I say this out loud, that sounds terrible, but I grew up thinking that was normal.. It was just like one day I explained this to a person and they're like, Wait, you were in Israel during the Gulf War wasn't Saddam Hu saying throwing rockets at Israel at that time?
There must have been terribles. Like, Well, no, no. I mean, we, we all went through it and then I explained what happened, and it just all of a sudden hits me. I'm
Mm.
that is terrifying. That is trauma worthy stuff. And just because an entire nation had to deal with that doesn't mean it's less trauma worthy or so.
So, connecting that to your field. In my field, thinking about how to find words for it in, in my field is like overcoming these mental models means that we give language to those mental models. That is so important that kids know at a younger age that was not okay, I need to talk with somebody.
And that will just in my opinion, that that would just mean that we can find healing at a younger age. And then we don't normalize trauma, but we normalize talking about trauma.
Exactly.
Are you researching how to do that specifically or so and are you, what can you share?
So a part of my dissertation is thinking about trauma informed policy making. So once again, going back to the space that I work in is typically. We have this outcome, right? We have poverty. okay, now how can we like fix it and make the poverty hurt a little less? but my dissertation is more so thinking about families within the shelter, right?
So if we know that the outcome of the trauma and compounding the trauma itself is experiencing homelessness, and now I'm living in a shelter, How can we ensure that that trauma is not further compounded by the environment of the shelter, but then also that the child talks about it. So one goal of my dissertation research is to, have therapy mandated in family shelter so that children, get the therapy and the counseling that they deserve.
at that really critical age, a lot of public health services related to behavioral health focus on the adults, especially within a shelter setting, right? We wanna make sure mom is okay. We wanna make sure mom has the tools to get rehoused, but the child, once again, is observing and absorbing the trauma right along with mom.
and there's also research that talks about how. Just witnessing mothers going through trauma can traumatize their children. Right? And we know that adults can share trauma, right? Vicarious trauma. Then why aren't we thinking about that? Developing brain, making sense of the world through a mother experiencing trauma is something that I'm advocating for.
because yes, we can even talk about it at the intersection of race and, mental health and seeking out therapy, being very stigmatized in the black community. But we also know, like our, even thinking about DC in particular, that the fastest growing in largest population of folks experiencing homelessness are black families with a single mother head of household.
So if we know that they're black, they're young, they're, resource, impoverished. and also probably carrying these heavy stigmas around mental health and making sense of trauma, then why aren't we combating that right? In the institutions that they are, being housed in. So once again, uh, I just think that children experiencing homelessness should be guaranteed.
There should be an entitlement package to fund mental health services for them. the mothers still deserve it. They need it. They're, you know, social workers and shelters, case workers and shelter, but not all shelters have opportunities like that for children. So I most recently conducted interviews with shelter administrators and counties that touched the District of Columbia.
And out of the seven that I spoke with, only one had opportunities in house, in Shelter for children. So that right there, we just, we don't think about children being homeless in the United States. When we think about homelessness, if our mind doesn't go to another country, it's gonna go to probably white male vets that we see on the streets.
But we don't think about the black children, the brown children who are, numbering thousands in our district who aren't getting the services they need to combat the, the real trauma that they're experiencing. So, early intervention I think, is so important, and that's really what we should be focusing on in homelessness or poverty, anti-poverty work, because the trauma's either gonna be repressed.
Or it's gonna manifest into, what we call the, cradle to prison pipeline. You know, there are these things that are constantly pulling people closer to imprisonment or death, and often there are black folks who have experienced a lot of trauma but haven't acknowledged or just don't have the resources or tools to work through that trauma.
, we talked a little bit about the mental models that kids have to overcome and the mental models that shelter workers have to overcome and, and like shift, but, Right.
Yeah. Oh, there's lots of bias cuz we're all human. One, we're all human, right? So I'm coming in as a staff member with all of my bias toward this undeserving population. the mother should have worked harder. How could you let your child be in this situation? And now I have to help you and then once again, bringing in those intersections like, wow, what if there's a same sex couple?
What biases am I bringing in and how is that impacting how I serve this family? What if there's someone who, has a different experience than me because of their race or their gender, Anything, their, their religion? how do we feel about folks accessing homeless services if they aren't American citizen? So many, so many problematic models that we can bring in,
, there's this metaphor that I, I really love about like, planting seeds, so like planting seeds for the future. The work that I'm doing now is planting seeds for future.
I will never see, well, who's going to be harvesting? It's gonna be the folks who are children today.
it's a very humble standpoint that you're forced to take because there's no way that you're gonna see results this year. especially not in policy.
Yeah.
So how do you, how do you deal with that? How are you okay with being part of a chain versus the short term fix that this generation seems to want?
I think that's most recently what I've had to come to terms with. And it was hard. It makes me angry and upset, sometimes, But then I look at my niece and she's eight, and I would be devastated if any of the negative things that have happened in my life happened to her. So if it means that by her 10th birthday, she will have, The same address and that sense of stability, for the rest of her childhood.
Like then those are wins to me. Martin Luther King and a lot of civil rights icons from the sixties and seventies talk about this long arc to freedom. And I get impatient with not being at the end of the arc. You know, I want, I want everything that they dreamed of to be realized today, and it just isn't. And if those big thinkers and big dreamers and big doers were okay being just, one little, they were one period at the end of a sentence along this arc to freedom, then I, I have to be okay with it too. They made huge impacts. But the world and the visions that they have, we don't see fully today. and so I'm okay at just being a few steps along, the road just putting more seeds in the ground because they're next to their seeds and yeah, it hurts and it's frustrating. another part of my research is thinking about how the, the manifestation of homelessness that we're seeing today is still really rooted in the practice of slavery that our nation had.
And I think once we have the courage to really face the deep racial in class tension that we have in America,
then we are going to be stuck putting bandaids on issues that just need to be uprooted. okay with that. Every election when I see more young people running, I get more okay with it, when I see churches like the table where people have experience hurt and doubt in the church, but have the courage to come back together and, you know, given another try, then I feel more okay with it, but it's hard. It's hard.
So making people feel seen. I love that. That's the root of your work. And that's, it's beautiful work.
I appreciate that. You're so kind to me. Always
It's easy to be kind to you because you invite kindness. you have all the right to be. I get so emotional now. You get, you have all the right to be salty. You have all the right to be angry at white people . You have all the right to be angry at America, at dc, but you invite kindness because of the way you convey yourself and you conduct yourself.
And it's not your responsibility yet. You do it
I try, I try,
. What do you have to say to all the Mads that are listening to this episode right now?
Uh, all the Mads that are out there, I would just say, Keep your eyes on the sky, like just keep looking for the light. it's always gonna be there, you know, any pockets of joy that you can get to fuel you clean to them. And the world doesn't get to decide what your outcomes are just because of where you started.
It's all up to you. It's all up to.
Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
Of course. Thank you for having me again, so honored. This was such a joy. Definitely the highlight of my week, so thank you.
yeah. I'm excited because I was just going through, I have this simple note of like, Oh, who am I gonna ask on a podcast? I'm like, Maddie, she's gonna say No. We talked like once. And then he's like, Yes, let's go
Yes, yes, I, I would never say.
Take care of yourself though. You have to say no. Every now and then.
that's true. I've been working on my helium hand, but, this was a good choice. This is a good Yes, because sharing space with you is, it's replenishing. So thank you. I don't feel tired at all.
I'm happy to hear that. When we're 80, And we're looking back at, at our lives and when we're able to see where on the arc of social justice we, we were, I hope we can rest a little bit,
Absolutely. Oh, very good. I, I do too. And I will make sure we have matching rocking chairs by then.
Yes, please.
Pink and black rocking chairs.
Pink and black and listening to Black Pink if they're still around.
well, we will have the Greatest Hits album on repeat.
That's right, That's right.
Oh, I just adore you. Thank you so much.
Below is a computer-generated transcript:
How are you doing?
Doing well.
Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself, who you are?
My name is Leah Anne Galliar Ouimet. We may I also just go by Leah.
It's uh, impressive.
Last
name
last name.
It is. So I am 28 years old. grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. small conservative town. And I recently moved back to Richmond, was living on the West coast for a while. . Never thought I'd come back, but me and my wife found our way back here and I am working a tech job. . So my way with vocation and what I wanna do long term with that, but for now, committing myself to it and, working from home, which is a good way of
life.
That's me in short.
Welcome
to the show.
Thank you.
How about you? Who are you?
Uh,
I'm the wife of Leah. That's how I like to introduce
Yeah.
Uh, I'm Megan I am from San Diego, born and raised, and so I am new to the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia, but enjoying it so far. was my first fall and I'm excited to see the leaves drop.
I too work in tech and from home with our Husky Rogue who's just full of antics and adventure. I am an Engram three definitely use the language of the engram to articulate my experience quite often. So, uh, may make references during the podcast. I'm also working to be any Graham certified, uh, in, in teaching.
And so I really, uh, enjoy that through, uh, the narrative tradition. So, yeah, it's a little bit about me.
You are an agram three.
I heard you talk about this a lot. Yes. Can you explain a little bit what it is?
Yeah. Um, if anyone's familiar with the Myers Briggs, I like to think of that one as. Descriptive of how we function in the world. So it's a lot more about, the types of things that we do in our behaviors.
And so in comparison to that, the engram, instead of answering the question of how is more of the question of why and kind of where our motives come from and kind of asking that deeper question of what's behind our behaviors. and I find that really helpful for some of the things that we do because so often we can behave in very similar ways, but have very different motivations for doing that.
And I think it's important to get to the root of it.
So in Agram three, what does that entail?
Yeah. Well, uh, the end angiogram three, the, the kind of why behind what we do is we wanna be okay through our achievements and how we are seen by other people. And our image is very important. And so, um, we try to bring attention to our good qualities and our successes and really avoid our failures.
And so navigating through life, really trying to, appear in the best light and, often very concerned with vanity, wanting to, Come across in a way that will be received well. and often in that pursuit, can really rob themselves of being genuine and being true and often putting on a lot of false mass.
That's pretty big, but it's also cool that you can say it about yourself.
you know, it's all part of the work.
How about you? what an agram Are you, Leah?
I am an Engram one.
What, what does that mean?
I used to actually identify with an Engram four, and so the four is very dear and close to my heart, but now definitely feel more so agram one-ish, but it really just depends on my season of life, the stressors, things like that.
I would say Agram one is, you know, referred to as a perfectionist or the reformer. I definitely associate more with that word perfectionist, just because that's, Kind of the atmosphere I grew up in. Everything had to be done the right way. There was always a right and a wrong, very black and white thinking.
Yeah.
And so that's how I oriented my life really. And viewed situations, people, circumstances, you name it all through a filter of how can this be done the right way? And if someone wasn't doing it the right way, I almost viewed it as inferior. And so there's just this constant judgment of not only others, but yourself too.
Because you're always just judging yourself based on what could I have done better? How could I have been better and so forth. And then, you know, Enio Grand four. I still very much relate to that in the sense of like, no one understands me. No one understands how I'm feeling or what I'm going through. You almost feel kind of like a lone island sometimes.
And I do feel that way just mentally, a lot of times, less so in my life, I guess. Like I don't feel alone necessarily, but I do feel alone in kind of my mental processes of things or kind of what I spend my time thinking about.
I'm, I'm an eight, as you guys know, by now. Which I think just means that I'm rude, but I'm direct. But I have a lot of those things too. Like what you said of the number one, I am very intolerant of lazy thinking. If people cannot figure things out, I just get frustrated.
But I also hear to Agram four that I feel misunderstood.
I think, the feelings that we have like are often felt by each other, right? Like, I think that isolating feelings to a type, I think is dangerous because we, we share so many feelings, right? And so I think it's really paying attention to the dominant style that kind of motivates your life.
I think we all share to some degree that feeling of being misunderstood and feeling alone.
I remember that. I did one of those divergent tests, like from the book. Yeah.
And
guess what came out? Candor came out
for me Yeah.
Like the most boring
it not boring,
I was like, yes. I'm perhaps also divergent. No candor. You love justice and you mostly speak truth. You know when a police officer pulls me over and they say, Do you know why I pulled you over? I'm like, Yeah, because I ignored a stop
sign.
And then it's awkward because I, I cannot lie. Why would I lie there?
There's no benefit to me lying at that point.
Yeah. See my three is all about deception,
Oh, oh, I
Yeah You that appearing in the best light. It's not gonna happen if we admit our mistakes.
So that's the battle and that's the work you know, leaning into the discomfort of being seen in
those
moments of, you know, being caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
So I invited you guys over because I think you have a pretty interesting story. Like I recognize a lot being queer and coming out later in life and thinking, how does this work? Can you tell me a little bit how it was growing up and how it is that you now know, Oh no. I definitely am queer. But that you could also say with certainty four years ago, Oh no, I totally wasn't queer. How did that work?
Yeah, that's a great question. I grew up in a pastor's home. My dad was a pastor, and it was a very just evangelical conservative atmosphere. So the discussion around anything queer, the possibility of any of my parents', kids, my siblings being queer or myself, was just outta the question.
it was just never something that was freely talked about, but I would say around the age of 14. , I just sensed that there was something different about the connection that I had with women and just that energy that I would feel around them, not even turning it sexual or anything, just, just a different energy, a different feel, good vibe.
Right. And I was curious about it, and I didn't act upon that curiosity until 16. And so it was just kind of like a, huh, I wonder But that was never a wondering with anybody or in discussion with a community of people. I kept it to myself because again, that was considered basically like the worst sin next to getting pregnant out of wedlock.
And so either one was, was terrible. and then, yeah, around 16. I just, that, that curiosity kept growing. I would say from the age of 14 and I struggled a lot with just everything from self-harm to eating disorders to, you name it, just over drinking and things like that. Um, and it was, I don't know if I would say I did all those things out of this, like hidden queerness, but I do think there was just so much tension that I was holding inside that I couldn't release or talk about that I just used those, you know, methods as a way to get out that, that tension that I was feeling inside and the things that I couldn't talk about.
So at 16 I was just kind of like, you know, screw this, I'm gonna pretty much live a double life. Like do the whole church thing, good kid
thing Mm-hmm.
don't tell anybody about it, but.
Start dating women. and so I did, yeah, I, I went on the online dating sites cuz there's obviously no one that was eligible in my spaces that I was in.
And, you know, I entered college at a young age, 16, so I was exposed to a lot of things before that. I was homeschooled all my life. So there was just this like bubble that I was living in for most of my life. And then, you know, 16 boom, I'm around a lot of people exposed to a lot of things and I just went for it, you know, I was just kind of like, All right, let's do this.
I, I can't,
I
can't keep all of this inside anymore. I have to find a release for it. And I have to discover this part of myself that has been left dormant for a long time. But I never told anybody. I, you know, I had, gosh, four or five best friends that are still my closest dearest friends to this day who saw me, literally had known me ever since I was in diapers.
And it took me four or five years to tell them to. And so you can just imagine like the deep, deep shame that was associated with just me identifying as someone that may be queer.
and so it was just a very long journey of discovering myself and coming to terms with it, but also never feeling like this was something that I could live into.
And so there was this, going back to this whole mental models thing, is I just judged everyone that kind of gave in to this. Fleshly passion or this fleshly desire because even though I was technically giving into it myself, I would always repent and go back to Jesus and ask for his forgiveness, right?
And just have this whole cycle repeat itself over and over again. But I was always better than those that were out in queer because I was not out yet. And I was constantly asking for forgiveness.
Hmm.
And it, it honestly made me feel closer to God because it felt like we're in this together. And so there's been this, I think, breaking of false intimacy, I guess you could say, from my relationship with God Now, it's, it's a hard thing to navigate post me coming out because so much of my, relationship was around my struggle and my lack of, uh, embracing it.
And so me and God were in it together, fighting it together.
it together Yeah
So,
First of all, I'm so sorry that you had to go through that. That sounds, super hard. you said something about the shame that you felt. Where do you think that shame came from?
Oh, it came from religion. It came from the construct of God that I was taught to believe. Um, came from my parents, my community.
I mean, everyone in my life I don't think knew that they were contributing to that shame, Right? They wouldn't put those words around it. But the entire atmosphere was built for this almost shame mindset and model because I can never live up right, let alone I come out as queer. Like now, you could never, you could never measure up.
So
your up that's
pretty intense. Was your story similar or was it completely different?
Megan?
I think dissimilar to Leah, I don't think I've ever felt like I had a secret, that I was hiding in the way that Leah was. And, You know, I, I too was raised in a, you know, evangelical Christian conservative space, but, the way that I think that I coped with developing and, you know, the time that most people are starting to notice crushes, I didn't feel anything at all.
I think it was just completely repressed. because it wasn't an option. It wasn't something I could explore. And so while I had really close friendships, that's all they were for me. And I, uh, valued them to, a really great degree to the point where now I'm like, Hmm, maybe I could have clued in a bit earlier.
But, yeah, I do think that there was such a part of me that I, you know, as a three, right, as an any gram three, I was so invested in being. Good being seen by everyone as this like good Christian girl. And I was, I was a worship leader. I went to Christian college and was doing all these things and, and volunteering and, did missions and all of these things that, was getting me everywhere I wanted to be that, like to, even explore or.
Kind of asked those questions wrist shattering, everything that I had built for myself. so I think there was a big part of me like in kind of repressing my sexuality that felt like, kind of holy in a way that I didn't, you know, I wasn't boy crazy like the other girls at Youth group. And I know there was a period where I wondered if I might be asexual because, you know, I, I just didn't feel that way that they all described and, there wasn't any room to imagine experiencing that way for the same gender.
so that's like a big part of how that kind of showed up in my growing up. And so, I had came.
quite a bit later, you know, maybe five years ago. And at that time I immediately found a really unique community that was all kind of coming out together in conservative church. And so we were all very passionately side B.
And so, kind of for any of your listeners, you might like not understand that term. side B is like, a Christian perspective of, I'm acknowledging my orientation, rather than like saying, Oh, I, you can't be gay cuz God wouldn't make someone gay. and you need to just accept yourself as a straight person, but rather acknowledge that, you know, I, my experience is queer and a lesbian.
but in that I'm gonna hold myself to the behavior, of maybe traditional sexual ethics. Huh. And so, We were all together in that in a way where it was like, We identify as queer Christians, and we're all gonna just be celibate and, Refrain from, any of our sexual urges cuz that's not what God wants for us.
And so it was a lot of very, sad listening to Julian Baker on repeat, together, And, it was in that, that we all started asking this question of like, okay, if this is what we're gonna do, this is hard. Yeah, this is really hard. What's being asked of us? And also noticing ways that the church really fails, folks who do identify as side B and hold to that belief system because, you know, there's all of these, programs for.
Marriage retreats and the singles group is really to like get people together. And so people who, you know, if they feel called the celibacy or, hold to a side B perspective, there isn't a lot of space to feel supported. What are you gonna do for holidays? What are you, who's gonna pick you up from the airport if like, this is your lifestyle?
And so starting to notice some of those things and, kind of asking this question of, okay, if we're gonna live our lives like this to this code, we need to really understand the book that's telling us to do this. And so collectively, as, as a group, we all started kind of asking a lot of questions of the text and looking at scripture and the way that, we interpret the Bible.
And at that time I also returned, to Biola where I went for graduate school, for seminary. Cuz I was like, I'm, I'm gonna learn how to understand
this
book . it was in that where I started realizing like, I thought I was gonna get surety going back to school of like, I thought I was gonna go back and I was be like, Okay, I know how to understand this now.
but what I found was that it was way more complicated than I would've thought possible. And there's so many different interpretations to understand just one verse, let alone all of scripture. it was kind of that real realization that made me start to deconstruct and, uh, think about my sexuality in a new way.
She,
that's
two completely different stories.
Yeah
But
similar in a way that there's some sort of like, I'm not gonna acknowledge who I am sexually attracted to, or who I am as a person.
Right. Leah, did you also feel shame in there, or was it strictly. You had a certain belief that you cannot be queer and therefore I will acknowledge that I'm queer, but I'm gonna be, celibate.
Yeah. I think there's a degree of shame. I like, I remember even just overhearing my parents casually referencing the gays and even just using phrasing like that made me digest that group of people in a certain light, right? And you know, so I think there were a lot of little things like that where it really formed that kind of off limitness of being able to even explore and wonder.
And I think to this day I kind of feel really curious about if I. could go back and feel a lot more permission to have explored. Yeah. How much of like becoming myself could I have done a long time
ago? Yeah
Um, and so I think like there's a part of me that grieves for that still.
Wow. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry also for you that you had to go through that.
So now you're married?
To a woman?
What happened in your brain?
Yeah, it's a great question and I've, I've been asked this a question like this, you know, a version of this several times, and there's this kind of a story that comes to mind, which is, I think there, I reached a point when in kind of grappling with scriptures, grappling with many different voices telling me what not to listen to, what to listen to, and calling me to repentance.
And even just in my searching, even when I hadn't done anything, that I reached a point where I was just so anxious. So anxious, just crippling anxiety, like feeling just at this brink of like, I'm not sure what I think about all of these things. And in that point, like starting to click, like I just don't know if.
If I actually believe or hold to these things, I would've held my whole life. And what does that mean? It was more the follow up, more than anything that just felt, um, that kept me paralyzed at this place of indecision, even though I could feel in myself like this un unraveling of, you know, I'm just not sure that these things sit with me in the same way
that
they did before.
And so in that place of anxiety, I kind of really just was calling out to God and got this picture of, you know, Jesus as my good shepherd. And if I'm this wandering sheep and I have my eyes fixed on Jesus, I have to trust that. He's gonna use his winnowing fork and, and guide me home. And so it was almost this like leap of faith with that picture of just like, All right, I'm gonna take this step and I'm just gonna have to trust in that step that like these things that feel unraveling will either come together in the way that they were meant to be or continue unraveling.
And this is my news path. This is my new journey of an unraveling faith. And really just trusting that Jesus would make it clear to me one way or the other, whether by just like the continued, Yep, this still doesn't make sense, , and I'm just gonna lean into this, this step in this direction of ultimately Leah and, and marrying her.
or I would, you know, it would make sense to me. and I would come back to my old belief system.
I think there was like a point too where I was feeling like very frustrated because at. Point I really wanted to be the next Beth Moore and I wanted to write Christian books on prayer and all of these different topics. And I remember someone telling me, you know, very earnestly and you know, with love for me that like no one's going to buy those books if I'm openly queer, even if I'm side B and not acting in my, you know, uh, attraction that like the books that they would wanna buy from me would be about how I'm celibate. that was like such a blow to me of like, my value to the Evangelical Christian community as an openly queer and celibate person at the time was only be in my celibacy.
How is that for you, Leah?
Yeah. It felt like a very, very, very long journey. and I never in a million years would've thought that I'd get to the place of peace where I could marry a woman. And so it's still a little bit surreal, to be honest. And I would say it took many, many, many dark nights of the soul and many hitting rock bottoms in order to get here.
It was a culmination of a lot of things, but I do think that those really dark nights, maybe for lack of a better word, like helped me get here, um, because I was just desperate for an answer. I was desperate for something better. And so I knew that it wasn't working. You know, you can only do that for so long and you either end up dead or
you find a new way.
And so, It's kind of how it was gonna be for me. And so I was like, I gotta find a new way. And I just was like, You know what, this, this girl Megan, she's pretty incredible. Mm-hmm. .
And I had always told myself that if I ever did come to that place of acceptance, she would be that person who I would wanna give it a shot with.
And so it came after, you know, again, one of those, really surfacey relationships. And I was like, I want something deeper, you know? But I was just giving myself scraps.
and I just finally was like, Okay, I'm gonna come out. I'd already been out at that point, to be honest, but it was again, like the wording of, Oh, I'm struggling with my sexuality.
All the christianes type of words that you use. And so there was a definite shift when I started dating Megan. You know, I came out to my family in more of an accepting way of just saying, Hey, this is my girlfriend. I had never openly said, that I was dating anybody. being very public about it was crazy for me.
Hmm.
it was really just like, Okay, I'm gonna give this a shot. I have no idea if I'm gonna feel peace. I have no idea. But up until this point, what I've been doing isn't working. Yeah. And so it, it took a lot of that just like trying it out. and feeling it in my own body, in my own mind. But from the point of us starting dating to becoming like at peace in myself was probably two, three years.
and so it's a very, it's a very recent thing, even though I've been out, I guess to myself for quite a while, actually feeling peace within myself is only really in the past year or so. And I would say the thing that kind of tipped it over the edge was probably in 2020 when I feel like for the first time I just kind of woke up to world and how, terrible Christians were, and not all of them, obviously, I don't wanna, you know, Put everyone in that same bucket.
But there was just something with, you know, um, just all the shootings and, just, just all that was happening in our world, especially with politically wise. And I just saw like these people around me whom I listened to all my life just start behaving in a way that felt very not like Jesus. And I was like, I don't wanna identify myself with this way of Christianity.
You know? And they weren't necessarily, acting in a way related to, you know, queer issues or anything like that. But it was so much more than that. It was so much bigger. Right. And I just started seeing cracks in the way that I was taught. And just got to a place where I feel at peace now that even if I'm wrong, that like there's enough love to go around and that makes me so happy. Like it, it brings me so much peace. And just knowing that. I'm good, I'm covered. God's gonna love me at the end of the day, even if we're getting all of this wrong.
That's
Like that's the best. That's, that's who I wanna serve, and that's who I wanna dedicate my life to.
do. That's such a huge mental model shift for, for the entire world to hear if you ask me, because this is not a salvation issue, right
yeah. To your point real quick, I, I do feel like people react in such a, almost a violent way because there is such fear that it is a salvation issue and I think coming to the point where I don't believe that anymore takes such a load off and leads to a much happier life.
Does being an affirming church help find that happiness?
I think so because, there's so much of being a person of faith where. there's common language just in, in the things that we value and, and being able to kind of speak about things, in that sense, but then also to have queerness together.
I think sometimes I've felt too Christian for the queer community and queer for the Christian community. So sometimes trying to find a community that shares both, is rare but precious. And so having an affirming church that kind of gathers that niche is refreshing.
What would you say to. The millions of young Leah out there,
I would say try to be a little bit easier on yourself.
I would say almost a sense of like, life is too short and I truly believe that. I know it's such a cliche, kind of life is so short, blah, blah, blah. But.
it's so short that it's like not worth it to like beat yourself up so
much Especially around things that I now believe are uncontrollable and just beautiful parts of your personality that need to be expressed.
And there's no one right way to be. I'm still learning that myself, but just this take a load off like life is already hard enough, Don't add unnecessary burdens to yourself. And that is so much easier said than done. And I think a major thing that has helped me be able to like say that and try to live into it is surrounding myself with amazing people like my wife, my friends, who just affirm who you are, community makes the absolute difference.
I think one thing that Leah said that I think is really important to flag too is like the piece of the beating yourself up. it takes up so much mental, emotional
space and I think even just, you know, being someone who loved Leah during a time where she was.
beating
herself up and, and, and really just, it took up all this space just to try to, you know, deny her sexuality right. And,
and to try to you know, be in the fight, right. To, to use that terminology and to struggle and wrestle with her sexuality. That there wasn't anything left to kind of give to the world or to offer like, everything, every ounce of her was going into, the, the fight.
And so I think like that was something that really stood out to me as I was navigating my own sexuality too, is just that we weren't meant to not have anything
left over. if this is a fight that like God wants me to fight, then I should have strengthened then some to be able to give good things to the, this planet and, and other people.
And I have nothing left if all of my energy is going into repressing my identity.
Is that what you would say to the millions of Megans out there?
Millions of Megans. You heard it here first.
That's right As you know, I have millions of listeners that after my thousands of guests,
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
I feel like.
Can fill another podcast up with all the questions that I have. Like, . I can talk with you guys forever and that's why I love you guys so much. Thanks for making me
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for making me feel this way. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate
You're
welcome. Thanks for having us. Happy to
be here. We love you.
is a computer generated transcript
CW - this episode talks about abuse and mentions suicide Below is a transcript of the show - this is auto-generated so there will be spelling errors in it.
Intro
When I was 14 for my 14th birthday, my mother took me out to outback, which is super fancy, and I thought it was for my birthday. It was not for my birthday. We sat down, had our meal, and then she pulls out a piece of paper. And she goes, I have a contract that I want you to sign. And I'm like, what? She's like, I have a ring for you. And it's a purity ring. And the contract you're going to sign is to say that you won't have sex until you get buried. So mind you, I am 14. I haven't kissed anyone. I am not even still interested in dating at this time. I just mostly want to be left alone in my room. Being who I am, I was like, I am absolutely not signing a document and promising you anything that I don't know that I'm going to keep in five years more than whatever. I don't know. So I'm not going to sign anything. And instead of being reasonable, like, you know what, I get it. You're basically a child and you don't know anything about this, so I'm not going to force you to do anything. And I respect the fact that you're being honest. We left Outback with my mother in tears and completely destroyed that I have ruined my life. Welcome to the models. We live by podcast. The podcast that explores how overcoming the mental models we all hold on to can help us grow to become better people.
Part 1
Hey, Jan. Hey how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Thanks for being on the podcast and for everybody's listening right now. This is Jenn. Jen is one of my partners at Equinox consulting and I'm so excited to have you here. Would you mind telling a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do, what your vocation is? Well, you didn't warn me about this part. Like I would have had something prepared. The worst thing to tell people about yourself. So, like you said, I'm a partner at Lux. I have been working with you and Kim on and off for like 10 years doing various things. So from anti-human trafficking work to non-profit work all over the place and Enneagram eight, right? Your stereotypical kind of I'm going to get loud and get up in people's faces. And I can be feisty. Probably other words, but I'm trying not to curse on this podcast. So I thought you labeled it as clean. And I was like, oh, no. Oh, really? Did I know she's having me on this podcast? OK, watch my mouth. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I am a mother of two and I don't know what else to say. So last week we listened to Kim and she said that she worked for a company called vine and fig tree. You worked out as well, right? Yes what do you do there? I am the director of equitable opportunities, so that doesn't mean anything to anyone else listening to this. But I do a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion work, but I also work within the community. We do a lot of work with the Loudoun County foster youth and different populations to help them out. Super cool. And we are also colleagues in another organization called Black out trafficking. Can you expand a little bit more about that? Yes so for anyone who doesn't know me, she's the chair of the board and I am the current executive director of the board. And we kind of exist to help raise up average advocates for human trafficking and to lift up smaller organizations that are kind of doing the boots on the ground work that don't get all the large funding and attention that the bigger organizations do. So are you saying that we see each other too often? I'm not saying that. I mean, you invited me to be part of equality even after all of this. So I imagine you're not sick of me yet. No, no. And I think other people don't know. But I also used to work for vine and fig tree. So yeah, there was that time where we were at blackout trafficking together and Vine and fig tree and all our side gigs. We we keep ourselves busy. Yes, we do. That is more about you personally and a little bit about your job. But what is your background in a sense of what mental models did you grow up with in your life? Oh, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s and the kid of a pastor's kid. So my dad grew up in a very strict Lutheran Church and my mom was kind of a born again believer. And I grew up in this. Beautiful crap storm of like the satanic panic, true low weight purity culture. Like, if you're gay, you're going to hell. Oh or of evangelical Christianity. Fun Yes. So much fun. So much fun. So I recognize a lot of that because my parents were on and off charismatic Christians and Jews sometimes together. But whenever we went to church, we went to this charismatic commune. That sounds very negative. I guess it is negative because my experience was negative, but I'd be in for a commune, so I kind of recognized that as well because I may have not grown up in churches a lot, but the times that we did go to church as a family, it was similar. Every member. Things being said to me that dinosaurs were made up and Satan put the bones on Earth because yes, there's no way that dinosaurs could be real. And I think that had to do with a sense of the Earth cannot be millions of years old. So is that kind of like the same picture? We have the picture book of that like that author came to our church and like signed the children's books that he made talking about how dinosaurs didn't exist and how it was just a lie of Satan and, you know, super special. Yeah Wow. Where does that come from? This is super aside and may not even end up in this part, but what do you think? What do you think is behind the whole number dinosaurs cannot exist? I don't know. It's funny because you're the only second person who's ever mentioned that someone else mentioned it. I think it was on Instagram. They were like, Oh yeah, are you from the dinosaurs don't exist generation? And I think I just want to say fear because if you have to question one thing in the bible, then you have to question all of the things. And if it's not that exact, oh, this is the timeline, this is what we're basing our entire reality on. And you have to start questioning things and questioning things, at least when I was growing up was just like a Mark of doubt. And that means you're letting sin creep in. And that's just scary, right? Oh, my. You know, it's also interesting because when I see the bible, I see a collection of books. There was not one guy named Jonathan who wrote the Bible from cover to cover. Right? so it's a collection of books. I think even the most dinosaur hating Christians believe that. So it is really hard for me to comprehend what the problem is with seeing a problem in one book. You know, there could be a problem in one book. Like, for example, what a Genesis is not true or what? What if Genesis is allegorical? Or maybe it's just an analogy. You know, the notion that Genesis has to correspond with the book of x. I remember a pastor that I work for in DC. Hello, pastor Anthony, if you're listening to this, he made a video on TikTok saying if you have a bookshelf. And on one shelf you have Harry Potter and on another shelf you have thermodynamics, and you find out that Harry Potter is not true. You're not going to then say thermodynamics is not true. There's a thing, though, like just like how you said, I can see people that I have gone to church with saying, OK, Harry Potter. Well, Harry Potter is witchcraft. So that's clearly from the devil. And thermodynamics is science. So it's flawed because it's made by humans. But the Bible is the living Word of God. So it is unquestionable. Like, you can't you know, you cannot question it. You cannot doubt it. And I think that's where the fear comes in, because if there's one thing that you can be proven wrong in it, then what's to say that everything that you've learned and based your personality on, and maybe not just based your perspective, but I think a lot of people put a lot of weight into their Christian personality. Yeah, exactly. Then, then who are you as a person?
Part 2
Ooph and that's not even the topic of our episode today. Right but it kind of like fits together. Because you said something about purity culture anyway. Can you explain a little bit about what purity culture exactly is? So purity culture still exists and it existed multiple different cultures and religions. So it's not just evangelical christianity, but when I'm talking about purity culture, it's specifically like that evangelical christianity, purity culture that reached its height in the 90s. So it was basically girls pledged their virginity to their fathers or their parents and they were going to wait for marriage. And it was very one man, one woman. That was it. That that was at the height of the I kissed dating goodbye book came out. Yeah I mean, we spent a whole episode on that, but you're supposed to repress your sexual desires until you were married. It was very gender based. Like you fit into this box and you don't go out of it. So is it like mostly focused towards girls and maintaining their virginity or. So it was targeted towards everyone. Right but the girls were constantly told and sort of reinforce it. You're the gatekeepers, right? You're the ones that are in charge of not just your body and covering up, but you can't. Oh, my god, I can't hate this thing. But like, don't be a stumbling block for your brothers and Christ, you know, God forbid your body makes them stumble or the way you look or wearing makeup or whatever it is. So that message is that you're responsible for yourself but are also responsible for men and how they look at you. There's this one quote from this book called pure by Linda Klein that I thought was really good. It says, evangelical Christianity sexual purity movement is traumatizing. Many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender based anxiety, fear and physical experiences that sometimes mimic the symptoms of PTSD based on our nightmares, panic attacks and paranoia. One might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war, and in fact, we went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church. Wow Yeah. And I think that sums it up really well. In your introduction, you did not mention that you're also ACS certified and do trauma informed work. Knowing that about you and you probably have a personal story here if you're willing to share it. How did this affect you as an adult looking back that this traumatized you as well? And on the other hand, what are we doing well. And what are we doing? Not well in faith organizations of recognizing that the entirety of the 90s grew up under that model. When I was 14 for my 14th birthday, my mother took me out to outback, which was super fancy, and I thought it was for my birthday. It was not for my birthday. We sat down, had our meal, and then she pulls out a piece of paper. And she goes, I have a contract that I want you to sign. And I'm like, what? She's like, I have a ring for you. And it's a purity ring. And the contract you're going to sign is to say that you won't have sex until you get buried. So, mind you, I am 14. I've been kissed anyone. I am not even still interested in dating at this time. I just mostly want to be left alone in my room. Being who I am. I was like, I am absolutely not signing a document and promise you anything that I don't know that I'm going to keep in five years more than whenever, I don't know. So I'm not going to sign anything. And instead of being reasonable, like, you know what, I get it. You're basically a child and you don't know anything about this, so I'm not going to force you to do anything. And I respect the fact that you're being honest. We left Outback with my mother in tears and completely destroyed that I have ruined my life. And so then I on a monthly basis would get books on my bed about not having sex before marriage and basically how sinful women's bodies were. And I had to read them and then report back about what I learned. So in the midst of all of this, my mother was and is a narcissist and was also really physically abusive to me. So I would take the brunt of things and my dad would do nothing. So she didn't care about my body autonomy until I started fighting back, which that's a whole other thing. But the message that I got reinforced over and over until I left was that my body doesn't belong to me and that it's not to be it's not respected, which then led itself to, you know, you don't have the best self esteem at that point and you're just sort of in for me, I was in fight mode constantly, like super hypervigilant, but also didn't know how to set boundaries because I didn't know what they were. So that led to being sexually assaulted when I was in the military from there, because I felt even worse about myself, led to getting into a really abusive relationship. And it wasn't until I left that. And I don't even know what triggered me into leaving, but I had finally had enough because I knew I wasn't going to either. I was going to jail because he was dead or I was going to be. It was one of those things and I realized I was not the person I wanted to be. So I got out. But, you know, it took a lot of realizing that I didn't have any control over my body. And I didn't have any control or I felt like I didn't have any control. I felt like I didn't have a voice and going to therapy and then talking to people, you kind of strip all these layers back and you're like, you know what started because of the messages in the church, because you're taught you're responsible for how people treat you. They're not responsible. And it's reinforced over and over and over again. So I think that answered your first question. Yeah oh, my. Everything I'm so sorry that you had to go through that. Before you answer the second part, like, is church doing enough? It is an interesting phenomena. Do you have a talk with your child at an age that my kids are not 14. My son is almost 7. I don't want to have a conversations that have anything to do with sex with him. I cannot imagine that changes when I'm 14. Your daughter is 13? Yeah do you even want to know what she thinks about? You know, I'm big on talking about body autonomy with your kids. And that's how I started, right? So I just started off with conversations about I will ask my kids permission to hug them. I'm not like, hey, come here. I'm hugging you. You know, we started with that. And then as they get older and more mature, I'll have more conversations with them. And I think when my oldest was ten, because of some situations that happened at school and some conversations that she had overheard, we had more of like a sex talk where I more in depth explained what it was. It wasn't until this past winter that she and I really talked more about sex, and it was because the conversation at church had happened. It triggered my anger about the purity culture that I was like, we're going to talk about this right now, but it's my underlying thing with her. I was like, listen, if you have sex before you get married, it doesn't diminish your worth or your value. It's like, I will support you, whatever you need. I just don't want you to feel pressured into anything, and I don't want you to do it just to get it over with, you know? Right which is a lot of my friends experiences. They were like, I just wanted to get it over with because there was so much pressure and I had so much anxiety over it that just wanted to see it as a big deal. So yeah, I think it's either way, it's hard, it's awkward, but if the more conversations you have. So your kids can talk to you about it, where they're not squirming in their seat or an Outback because your parents just sprung a purity contract on you and then the better. I'm inspired by that. Then that probably influenced me to do the same with my kids. Like, I don't. I mean, of course I have my sexual trauma growing up. Yeah, but yet the only conversations that I have with my son about sex has to do with people. Don't get to touch you without consent. He knows what the word consent is, and I find it comforting in one hand that he knows it and we can talk about it. But on the other hand, like, why do I even have to? That's
Part 3
So yeah, that second half of the question was, what do you think churches or faith leaders in general? Because everybody that's from the 90s and 80s and 70s is grown up now. Yeah so have you seen examples where churches are doing enough and our church is doing enough? I have not seen good examples where church is doing enough or even anything at all. I think it's interesting that more and more churches are coming out and there is these sexual abuse allegations against their leaders for people like, Oh my gosh, I forgot his name just because I don't want to remember it. The guy who wrote I kissed dating goodbye has renounced his faith completely and walked away from the church. And he's apologized for you in writing the book to begin with. And it's just sort of it's just been decades upon decades of covering up. And I don't think church leaders understand what to do. I don't think they're trauma informed at all. I think telling someone to pray away their trauma or that seeing a therapist means you don't believe in Jesus is still so prevalent that it does nothing but traumatize a whole new generation of people into staying silent. Maybe not in the same way that people growing up in the height of the purity culture felt. But it's a whole different way. It's, you know, trauma shaming, almost like, oh, if you believed in Jesus harder, you'd be good to go. And that's kind of the danger of it, too, right? Because the message that the girls got was one thing. The message that the guys got was that almost like it's offensive to me. Like, you have no accountability, you can't help it. You're some dumb animal that is lusting after this girl because you can't help it. That's your nature. It's her fault. And then you create an entire generation of incels, you know, to blame women for everything, right? Men are incapable of making rational decisions when it comes to sexuality. They need to be directed by women. And like, is that your idea of giving women rights? Are you saying, you know, no, no, no. Some things men can't do, they can't regain control after being tempted by lustful women. So that that's where a woman excels and is better than a man. That's that's not saying that women have rights or different roles. That's just a recipe for sexual abuse. I mean, let's be real. So what is the most challenging mental model concerning growing up in a purity, culture, tradition and now being an adults? I think that you have an entire generation of women who not only can't trust their bodies, but they almost divorce themselves from it. So they have their mind and their thoughts and then they have their bodies and they're totally separate things. They're not integrated. If you read any trauma stuff or anything from deformity, like they talk about the mind body connection super strong, and then you start having medical problems and the medical community, by and large, dismisses and gaslit women. You have reproductive system issues, and then because of that, you learn that getting help like you get shamed for it. So then it reinforces your silence and this war. Look at that quote at the very beginning. This war that you're at with your body. And you look around and you see, I love that this body positivity movement is kind of going on, but there's so much more under the surface and there are so many women who have endometriosis, PCOS and all the stuff that's still tied to your mind and your body. And no one seems to know anything about it, how to fix it, how to treat it. And it's just like all these women are in war with themselves. And how do you get out of that? Yeah, you kind of touched on it already with your personal story that your self worth and the way you viewed yourself was so influenced by what you were taught to a point that your mind and your body were on autopilot to think bad about yourself. And it's easy for an outsider to say you're awesome. Why do you have low self-worth? Well, that's the problem, right? It is ingrained because it's been Fed and allowed to grow a stronghold in your life. Yeah and you know, if you're a good Christian girl, right? You learn how to smile through your suffering like there is. You learn how. There's another really good quote in the pure book, and it's about how you learn to put less energy into getting better and more energy into suffering better. And I have never met people who are able to suffer with a smile on their face and kind of steamroll over themselves and a bunch of Christian women who have been through all these kind of same experiences, because you just stop trusting yourself and you're just like, no, I'm just going to keep going. I'm that smile on my face because nobody cares about anything else. I don't want to make the men uncomfortable. So I think it's a terrible mental model to have.
Part 4
To round everything up a little bit. Churches can focus on the health and well-being of their congregants instead of hiring another communications director. Hear me as I am the Communications Director of a church in DC. But, you know, there there's this focus of we want more reach. Versus a focus on more well being in our church. So what do you think are a couple of concrete steps that faith leaders and churches and faith organizations can take to battle this? I think trauma informed training and learning what that actually is super important because telling someone they need to pray harder or telling someone that the Bible tells them to obey their husband and to go back to an abusive relationship or whatever or to listen to their parents when someone comes to you for help, because that's what the Bible says is not working. In addition to a myriad of other examples, all you're doing is silencing those people, but trauma informed training and learning how to actually address someone and sit someone with someone in their trauma. And then also, I think unconscious bias training would go really far, not just for race relations, not just for the queer community, but just in general for treating people who are not your typical white men as actual people. I think it's very easy to overlook things that are harmful when they're so common in your culture. Like an example, I couldn't even when this happened, but like if another man goes up to my husband and says, OK, can I give your wife a hug? My husband thinks, Oh yeah, he respects me enough to ask if he can touch. Whereas I'm like, I'm going to burn this place down because you just treated me as like my husband's property and not a person who has my own body autonomy. You know, this it's like little, tiny, insidious things that are crawling around the walls of the church that do so much harm that people don't even realize are making a difference, especially to New people who are trying to dip their toe back into giving church a chance after being gone so long. But the last one is transparency. If there's any accusations against anyone in your church for something that went wrong, do something about it. Don't hide it away, or transfer the person to working with just boys or whatever it is by not doing anything or hoping it will go away. You're telling every woman watching you or anyone who's ever been hurt by abuse that's watching that you don't care. Wow I knew you were going to say trauma informed training and awareness because, you know, that's what you do. But I like what you say about the whole unconscious bias and implicit bias training because it's kind of a pet peeve of mine that's that it's just being viewed as a checkbox training right now or it's just the woke thing to do. So I understand where the agitation comes from, more conservative people that say really unconscious bias training. And on the other hand, I understand why there is a need. We need it more, but what we need more is the right one, the right version of unconscious bias training. It's not just like, oh, don't misgender me. It is. Do you have certain bias? Do you think that men should be able to dominate a woman? Is that's an implicit feeling and an implicit fundamental belief that you have. What do you do if you find out that it is because the answer if the answer is like yes, oh, if you really ask me, I would just love to walk up to any woman and say whatever I want. It is wrong that you didn't do anything about it because you will act on it even if you say, but I'm not acting on it. It's just. It's just my fantasy. No, listen, it's your belief. And because it's your belief, you give over an air of vileness. I noticed it when I was walking the Earth as a man. And now I notice that even more as I'm walking the Earth as a woman. Thank you very much for being here on the podcast. Thank you for being always encouraging to pursue these very lofty ideas that I think I have. And then I'm like, oh, you know, I'm not going to start a podcast. Who's going to listen to it or I'm not going to minister to faith leaders. Why would they listen to me? But I think an episode like this makes it even more clear to me that's we need to keep on talking about these things. And besides talking, we need to keep on bringing up the conversation to faith leaders. Don't just take a person away and give them a cubicle job. After you heard that they sexually assaulted someone like take this stuff serious, we got to do something about it. And just to be clear, like you don't even have to sexually assault someone. You could just be sexually inappropriate with them and you shouldn't have that job anymore. I've left two churches because of that. And I'm glad you're I'm so glad you're doing this. I am a cheerleader of yours, obviously. I keep hanging around for like 10 years now, but yeah, no, I love what you're doing. You're awesome. So yeah, Thanks. So yeah, I'm seriously going to think about a spinoff on like we should talk more about sex and I'll invite you for that if you're up for it. Yeah, let's see. I will talk about any sort of female reproductive system or sex or anything like that. All day, all day, for hours. And I may even request if you help me with a TikTok This week, because I'm going to talk about the medical system and how I'm being treated, and I feel puny because of it. But you have a much rougher story than I have, so. Yeah, maybe I'm going to. Yes, Yes. If you're listening, if you made it this far in a podcast and you're listening to this real time, then you have seen this TikTok last week. So please help me there. Just let me know what you need. Awesome awesome. This has been the models we live by podcasts. Thank you for listening. And if you enjoy this content it would mean a lot to me. If you look me up on Instagram or TikTok as Mitch Benson, the music is by a guest and the song is called floor. Looking forward to sharing with you again next time.
Below is an automatically generated transcript
Intro
You sort of rummaged in. All of my stacks were going everywhere in my little trinkets that I had in the drawer. And I said something to the effect of, you are such a guy. And I distinctly remember the violent reaction you had to that. Just rarely, if ever, have spoken to me like that before or since. But your response was, you don't talk to me like that. With the follow-up of I'm very uncomfortable being grouped in with men in that phrasing or in that way.
Welcome
Welcome to the models. We live by podcast. The podcast that explores how overcoming the mental models we all hold on to can help us grow to become better people
Chapter 1 - Who is Kim
Today on my podcasts, Kim Van Essen and Kim van Essen is very dear to me, mostly because she's my wife. She's extremely intelligent. She always encourages me to be the best version of myself. She's a great mother to my two children, and perhaps the biggest deal currently in my life is that she's still with me, even though I transitioned into a woman. So, Kim, can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm so excited to be the first guest on the models we live by podcast. You and I have a lot of really great conversations at home around all of these different topics, so I'm excited to get to it, and hopefully, other people will enjoy listening in. So who is Kim exactly? What is it that you do? Or perhaps, more importantly, you do vocational work. You help people explore what they are in real life. So what are you really in life? Yeah, I feel like we do many roles all the time, right? So I like leading with wife and mother. That's a big vocation that I live in. I also work for a non-profit and I consult and Coach on the side as well. So but mostly all of my work encompasses this idea of understanding your identity. What does it mean to achieve your own well-being? And how can we all work together to achieve those for each other? So those are some big things that you stated right there. Would you be able to distill that down to a couple of words? Yes, so there's this idea of vocation, which just means calling, what's your purpose? Why are you walking this earth? And for some, that's exactly also what you call work during the day. But for others, work is something practical that needs to be done and your calling is what you do outside of that space. So I would say I'm pretty happy to embrace wife and mother. Those are some callings that I have. I'm also very fortunate that the work and the school that I do also very much feels like callings that I have in my life. So all that to say that those are pretty big hefty things and sometimes oftentimes people need help figuring those out for themselves. That's pretty great. I also want to note that she's the main breadwinner in our family. She allows me to be a doctoral student and work on what I'm doing right now. Meanwhile, she works full time and is doing a master's in culturally responsive leadership at VCU here in Richmond. And on top of that, she's one of the three partners of Equinox consulting, where she's also a management consultant.
Chapter 2 - how is Kim doing with all of this?
So the reason why Kim is the first guest is that the first episode was about how I invited all you guys in. And a question that I often gets is how I'm doing with all of this. And sometimes it's a very genuine question, like people are concerned about, hey, you guys, are you guys still good? And sometimes people just want to be in the know. They just want to know, is Kim still married to you? Is Kim now lesbian? Did she notice all the time, etc., et cetera. So Kim, can you explain how my transition specifically the last year has been for you? Yeah, I always like to give a lot of people credit. It was a bit unfortunate timing that as me and I were working out what all of this meant for us at home, I took a break from social media. So in a lot of ways people thought that I disappeared, but I didn't. I was there. I was just taking a much needed mental health break from looking at other people's lives and focusing on our lives. So I understand where some curiosity and concern came from. So the last year of working through meshes, discoveries and decisions around transitioning, really I have the advantage now. So we're a year in and I think I have the advantage of seeing that it went as probably about as smoothly and healthily as something so dramatic could go in a lot of ways. So from my perspective, it did feel, you know, initially a bit of a surprise as you shared in the last episode. Thankfully, we can joke about it now, but as the podcast goes on, you might become aware that Miesha is a very all in person, really all in person. So as she was having these revelations and understanding. Exactly what she had been doing to herself over the last decade. It was very much a well, now I want it all. I want to be who I am. I know who that is and I'm going to go for it. And that was a definite moment where I felt taken aback. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more a little bit later about this. But a big part of my reflection on this last year is also that Mitch had an awareness that that's not the healthiest way to go about bringing somebody along to say, you know, we're doing it all and we're doing it now. So, um, I think a big part of my reflection of this last year is also to see that Mitch acknowledged, hey, this is a big thing and it's not something that you expected and let's walk through it together. I like how you shared. I kind of dropped it on you. We talked about it after I recorded the podcast and I let you listen to it and like, wow, I kind of set you up. Like it's like, oh, by the way, we're going to have date nights. I want to talk about my transition. And then we had date nights and then I just brought it up. Looking back at, it's a year later, I'm like, wow, I kind of surprise you with all of this. Can you share what your biggest struggle was? I think if you really want to bring it to a measure of the hardest thing I think really happens at the very beginning. So it was wrestling with this sort of tension of I both knew and accepted that you had hid things from yourself. So it was not a matter of thinking or wanting this every day for hour at that time, nine years of marriage and deciding to keep it from me, but rather you realized what had been happening. And then let me into that knowing. But a very human part of me thought. You've had nine years, and why has this not been a real conversation in those nine years? So that really dominated a lot of our early conversations. Was the head knowledge that you were doing the best you could with the information you let yourself think about, but the heart knowledge that we very humbly, I think we have a very transparent relationship and a very close relationship. So dealing with the heart idea that there was something going on in you that I didn't know about, I'm feeling what you're saying. I closeted myself more and more. Remember when I had that moment, like two or three years ago where I said, you know what? I'm done with all this gender ambiguity. And I just want to be a man. I'm really happy to be a man. If you compare that period of time and the feelings that you had then with like last year when I said the exact opposites, how does that make you feel? I remember something along the lines of, you make me feel comfortable living as a man. And I don't I honestly don't remember how I took it back then, but I can look back now and think that was very much a joy and peace with us as whoever we are. I think that you just find a comfort in where with the people that we were meant to be with, you found a peace in that. So it did feel a little bit like where did this come from? Because, you know, this is a very small area of our lives that we didn't regularly reflect on. So what I had to go on was what was verbalized a lot of times. So if I think about thinking through what has me said about that in the last nine years, oh, well, the majority is certain behaviors or interactions make me uncomfortable. And then a lot of, yeah, I'm finding myself in this role that I have to take on. So it was very different when the message flipped about a year ago when it was, no, I really can't do this anymore. I like how you phrase that. Because that's true. I really feel like your person I feel like your spouse today. I would say I really feel like your wife. I think we were in such a place in our life that I just was reflecting on life in general and thinking, wow, I'm just so happy in the place that I'm at right now. And you make me feel a certain way. You make me feel like I want to pursue romantically as a woman. I don't think I quite understood what that meant. Gender wise, I feel the same today. I want to pursue as a person, as my wife, as the person that I love and the person that I'm romantically interested in. And I think it's important to keep touching on the things that you shared previously, which was there are a lot of other things that go on within you besides struggling with the big issue at hand. Right so your to transition or not what is my identity question was mixed up with a lot of other things with depression and immigrating and just a lot, a lot for one person to hold within themselves. So I hadn't ever quite thought about it this way, but I think it is very much like let's look back and be grateful and find joy that parts of your life found that joy in peace. So your identity question and your transition desires, all of those we know now, we're kind of suppressed, but that your depression, really, you put a lot of work into that and we were able to find another side to reach the other side in a lot of really hard things. While it's sad to think that some things weren't getting attention that needed to, it is good to look back and realize that other hard things were. We're getting a lot of really healthy attention and changing for you. So I don't want to linger too long on this topic, but I still want to bring up my gender non-conforming stage. But then again, I also want to note that we never really called it gender non-conforming. There's just words that we have in 2022 that may have existed in 2011 and 2012, but were not a word for me. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think that. Because we didn't have those words. And because there's really two issues at hand, when we have these conversations, right? So there's gender identity. And there is sexuality. And when the sexuality piece was settled for us because we found our people, the identity was what was left. And because we didn't have the words for a range or spectrum or options in our vocabulary, it caused us to be more ambiguous than we would have been probably today. So for instance, I distinctly remember, and I think I retold the story to you somewhat recently, that when we were dating, I'm weirdly OCD about very specific things. So I'm dating and she comes and I say, yes, I have that thing in the drawer in my room and you open the drawer and there's no dividers. But I have stacked everything neatly within this big drawer space instead of what I pictured gently sifting through each meticulous pile in this large drawer, which is an insane thing to ask of another person. I acknowledge you sort of rummaged in all of my stacks were going everywhere and my little trinkets that I had in the drawer and I said something to the effect of, you are such a guy. And I distinctly remember the violent reaction you had to that. Just rarely, if ever have spoken to me like that before or since. But your response was, you don't talk to me like that. With a follow up of I'm very uncomfortable being grouped in with men in that phrasing or in that way. So it only had to happen once. And I kind of knew och. That's fine. I think it says something about our compatibility that I only needed to know that I had no problem after that with it. You know, I never felt like, oh, but I need to acknowledge you as a man often or any of those very hyper masculine things that I think our culture, specifically our conservative Christian culture, had sort of encouraged. I managed to escape a lot of those assumptions, I guess. I managed to escape a lot of those standards that were being asked of gender roles. But that is an example of just how our interactions were, that you wanted your tastes to be acknowledged, that you liked to shop and liked to watch romantic movies. And I can't remember a time when that really bothered me, actually. So we didn't have the words for it, but we had enough communication to let each other know what was OK and what was not OK for us. That's so cringe y I don't like being reminded about. How I handled anger in the past. But it's good to be reminded. I think I've come a long way, but I want to point out that Kim is so patient and I was a very angry person when she just met me. But the moments that you had to deal with those reactions, I can't remember this specific incident. It does make me cringe a little bit that I didn't just say, hey, would you mind not saying that instead of having a violent reaction? Sorry I forgive you.
Chapter 3 - Nuance
I want to shift gears a little bit, although I typically say change gears. And then Kim has to correct me because after 10 years, I still don't know this language. But we were talking about how you were raised and you already said that certain things just didn't bother you. And I see a lot of that in your parents. Like your parents are just very kind and they're very accepting and generous and like inviting to start with. But when I think about a family that typically goes to a Bible church, that's not the mental model that I have of christians, if that makes sense. So can you tell a little bit about what mental models you had to challenge from that background without going too deep into the purity culture? Because next week our guest is Jen and she will talk about the purity culture. But what mental models did you have to overcome and what mental models do you think I had to overcome? Because a lot of things that I thought about conservative Christians are just not true in your case because your personality, because the way your parents have treated you or like your sister is by nature super accepting. Yeah, that's a lot. So I'll, I'll try to break down a bit. There were definitely standards set out in the way I was raised, particularly in the church. And the church setting I was raised in. However, I had a distinct advantage that I had parents who were very loving and wanted those things for us, but also very much didn't force anything. Now I will acknowledge that maybe my sister has another story to tell. I can't speak for everyone's perspective, but for me, I didn't have a problem with the sort of baseline things. Not drinking, not partying. I both didn't feel that I needed to be a good girl, but also didn't feel like breaking those rules. So for me it was just a pleasant upbringing. I have no bad feelings around those. So for me, if you're asking what mental models I had to break out of. It wasn't so much faith based models. I had reached a point in my own faith journey where I had realized over the last 12 years that Christian looks different for everyone believing looks different for everyone, that theology can look different for everyone, and that's OK. And it became a lot less scary than I had thought growing up. So for me, the mental models around your then husband of nine years sharing this information that they want to transition, that they are a woman, that those things are going to happen in a very kind and let's think this through together way. I will say there are two models that I can think of that, really, I had to examine and reflect and decide whether I was going to reframe. The first one is related to that hardest thing that I shared earlier, right? So the first model I had was I have a partner for life that looks a certain way, that behaves a certain way, that has this role in our family. That mental model of I will say, because it was at the time the Michelle Wright, the Michelle model was a hard one to break out of. I think especially anybody who knows that they're with the person they're going to spend their life with doesn't expect dramatic change. I think you expect evolution and hopefully healthy growth, but generally you don't expect the broad changes that happen in a gender transition that. Yes so I think for me that was the first big mental model, the first big hurdle, if you will. I had to for both our sakes, really face it head on and decide how I felt about it. Was I going to be OK if the personhood was the same? You know that underlying person who I love and enjoy spending time with, but who will look and act and behave differently? Or is the idea of that too much so an answer to that mental model? I do, at the risk of sounding redundant, need to say that Mitch was incredibly careful with me around those things. So to have a mental model in front of me hearing that it will change, but also hearing that it will change at the pace and amount that I'm comfortable with was a game changer for me in reframing that idea. It's not. The right thing for everyone in these positions. But for us, we constantly reiterated our marriage comes first. I will be honest that it hurts me to think of not transitioning, but I do not hold that over you if you decide any or all of these steps is too much for you. So there was still struggles around that mental model because we didn't have the crystal ball to know what the future held. Everything still kind of stayed ambiguous, but the reframing process ended up being a good one because we had that communication. And because we started on a foundation of we're in this together and we're going to figure it out together. The second mental model that I had a hard time with was around myself. The obvious first part of the conversation was how it affected me. She's the one going through the pain and the struggle. She's the one who has this desire to transition to who she is, all of those things. But my mental model for myself was, what does this mean about my identity? So as I shared, what I do in a lot of facets of my life is concerning identity for people. It can be disconcerting when you think maybe I am not the person I thought I was. I am a cisgender heterosexual person who knows who they are and who they like and all of those things. And then thinking, well, my partner for life is not going to fit that identity anymore. My answer for that mental model is a non-answer, and I will tell you why I decided that it didn't matter to me what label any of those things had. I in generalities who and what I like and how I feel. However, I do know that I love and I am attracted to this woman named maisch. Sometimes reframing a mental model looks like I'm OK with this breaking down and not necessarily building back up again. So that's a harder one when you come to the details and practicalities that we won't get into about a relationship. But I will say I have a true piece that we may not look like what I thought my marriage at 2550 years will look like, but I'm OK with that. It sounds like you're suggesting some sort of sexual preference binary that is limiting to you and you refuse to adhere to it. I think accounting for emotional, physical, mental well-being and health of everybody involved, it's only to people's detriment if you don't go by what you feel, but rather what people want to call you.
Chapter 4 - False Dichotomies
This kind of fits in excellently with another topic that you wanted to discuss false dichotomies or thinking that things have to be Black and white. Can you share a little bit about that? Yes in one of my capacities in life, I am a life design coach. One of the things I've embraced in communicating with others is this idea of what kind of problems do you have? And by that I mean, is it a problem truly with no solution, or are you presenting it as a problem with no solution? You have a quote-unquote man and a woman, and the man says, I'm truly a woman. I'm going to transition. It's assumed that then the relationship must be over, but that truly is presenting a problem before you've had a chance to explore solutions. This dichotomy is only a need of exploration. So for us we had a lot of different topics that we had to dive into together and it's not comfortable for sure. Often in these situations, it's not nice to think that you have to linger for any length of time on these uncomfortable things. But we had to talk about intimacy and communication and what our life will look like, what our friends and family will think. There were a lot of layers to go through, and for us, the resulting conclusion that we came to was that this is an over-comfortable situation. Well thank you so much for your time. And your willingness to be on this show. Thank you for having me. It's been so good to have you here. You are the one that encouraged me to actually pursue this and the fact that you came on here on episode two to be there with me and share your story. Just means a lot to me. Yeah, likewise. The English to Dutch translation is not great, but I do always insist on saying that I'm proud of you and good job speaking of mental models, good job. Sounds a little bit condescending to Europeans. I don't know if all Europeans are the same, but Americans have these colloquialisms like, there you go. I don't know. I never use that in context of anything else than a puppy. Here we are, just breaking down mental models and language barriers left and right. Absolutely well, next year, if we have aired the 52nd episode of the podcast, would you want to come again and reflect on another year of living with a trans woman? I'm looking forward to it. This has been the models we live by podcasts.
Outro
Thank you for listening. And if you enjoy this content it would mean a lot to me if you look me up on Instagram or TikTok as Mitch Benson. The music is by yeast and the song is called floor. Looking forward to sharing with you again next time.
Below is the transcript, please note that this is a computer-generated transcript.
Intro
So this is the first ever episode, and I've been talking about this for so long. But you know what? The more I try to figure out how to start a podcast and what the best gear was for podcasts, the more I procrastinated. But this is what this podcast is all about, right? What are my mental models that are holding me back from recording this first episode? And if I dig deep enough, I can find that I'm holding on to this deep-rooted belief that my thoughts and ideas will not be welcomed by the world. And this is many reasons, like I don't always feel worthy enough. Or I get reminded by the adults in my life growing up that my theories were cute but not proper in the real world. And of course, not a fear that I have is that my voice sounds very male, which causes some dysphoria as a trans woman. So I wanted to start exploring that with all of you by sharing my story of how I came out, or, as I like to call it, how I invited you in. Welcome to the models. We live by podcast. The podcast that explores how overcoming the mental models we all hold on to can help us grow to become better people.
Ambiguity
If I would have one word to describe my youth, it would be ambiguity. Pentecostal commune moving to Israel. Mother becoming Jewish but claiming that she was already Jewish. Brothers getting a bar mitzvah. But when it was my turn, we were all of a sudden Christians again. Oh, and there was the sexual abuse and the first Gulf War. But those deserved their own episodes.
Gender Ambiguity
Growing up with this ambiguity has prevented me from understanding that my gender ambiguity was not part of that. In other words, if I had a healthy household, I would not have put my gender identity under the ambiguous category, if that makes sense. My story is the same as many trans women story. I liked wearing girls clothes. I liked wearing my mother's clothes and her necklaces and her earrings. I also hung out mostly with my girlfriends. One of my report cards in primary school even mentions that as a concern. But you know, it's the eighties, right? So of course it's a concern. I think the first time I linked it to my actual gender was when I was in a group home and I was about 16. Some of the girls in our group home put makeup on me and a group leaders wrote a report saying that I have an identity crisis. I did, but my parents were also incredibly homophobic and transphobic, so I got angry and acted out and yelled at the staff and their audacity. Sure me, they were not speaking the truth.
Context 1
When I was young in the nineties, my classmates used to love to sing this song. It goes like this. Hi, it's Anton. Well, I worked in an bordello for smokers. 9 to 5 is high. An all about wife. Of course, most of you don't speak Dutch, but if you do, you may remember this song from the 90s. It loosely translates into he's a transsexual. He works in a brothel from 9 to 5. He is a converted woman.
Coming Out Four Times
I tried coming out four times in my life. I remember I was involved with some Christians and it kind of felt like a warm blanket because I went through a lot of rejection in my life. And these Christians were so nice to me, and they always gave me attention. So I went to church with them and sang their songs, but it never really stuck. One day I wanted to talk about my feelings and I asked for some help if there was somebody that could point me in the right direction. Little did I know. They were pointing me to a conversion therapy center in Amsterdam. I wanted to talk about my gender identity, but they asked me right away if I liked boys. I messed around with a couple of boys when I was young, and I knew that I was mostly attracted to women, but I would not rule out being attracted to men. I didn't really have a word for it then, but I guess you could call it bisexual. I remember this guy sitting in front of me with ginormous hands and I felt so unsafe. So without asking, he put his hand on my head and started praying for me. It took all my courage to actually go somewhere and seek help. So when my first experience turned out like this, I closeted myself again. The second time I tried to come out was by sharing it with one of my queer friends. I thought surely she would understand. Surely she will give me encouragement. So I was at this Center for specialist psychotherapy and it was inpatient and it just felt like a safe space to do. Well, I'm sure she had no clue why I was actually asking it, but the opposite happened of what I was hoping for, and she told me about her sailor friend that went through a transition and he looked super masculine and she would never advise to do this. And that is probably a bad idea. This is not a comment on my friend, by the way. This is the early 2000 and there were a lot of misconceptions about the trans community. Around that same time I talked with some doctors, but late nineties, early 2000, and the focus was on medically transitioning as fast as possible, which I was not ready for.
Meeting Jesus
So after I was in patient for about 18 months, I started college. And I met my wife. Wife, unfortunately, we split up after four years and I would say that we were not in the best place to have a relationship with each other. From what I know, she is pretty happy right now, and so am I. With my current wife, we've been married for almost 10 years this November right now. Anyway, when my ex-wife and I split up, I felt very bold and actually started transitioning together with my primary care physician and my psychologists. This was also a time where I really took a lot of my trauma seriously from when I was younger. Remember that I mentioned the war and some sexual abuse. After being in the process of transitioning for a couple of months, I realized that I wasn't in a healthy place, not physically and not mentally. I decided to take an indefinite break from transitioning and finding a way to be happy first, which I did. I did not want to use my transition as a crutch. I know for some people that can be very helpful, but in my case, it was not. During this time I also met my wife Kim and girl was I in love and I still am. I also met Jesus in a pretty hefty way. This kind of deserves an episode of its own. But let me try to break this down very briefly. One day I was having coffee with a girl and I was kind of into her, but she was Christian and I'm just Jewish, you know? And she wouldn't date me because multiple reasons, but also because I wasn't Christian. So I just said if you were just not Christian, it would have been so much easier. And she said, well, if you would be Christian, not only would it be easier in this situation, but you would also find a life that's more fulfilling. So I just laughed and told her, that's never going to happen. I mean, I was known to be the person that used pretty aggressive tactics to discredit Christianity. She just said, promise me one thing. When you go home tonight, pray that Jesus will show up in your life. So I told her I can do that, but I'm literally going to look at the ceiling because I don't believe a word of what I'm going to say. And she said, that's fine. So that evening, I went home and I got reminded that I promised her that I would pray. So I looked at my ceiling and said to Jesus, show yourself if you're real. And I went to bed and didn't think of it anymore. So this was on a Sunday. And that Thursday I would give my life to Jesus. So on Monday, a colleague comes to me and says, hey, mish, why do Jews not believe in Jesus, not smoke cigarettes with this girl for a couple of years? Every break and ever did she talk about Jesus with me? So I told her what I thought. And she shared a little bit about her life, which was pretty cool. And on Tuesday, another colleague came and he was all giddy and happy. And I ask, hey, what's up? What's going on? And he's like, Ah, you wouldn't be interested. This is a long story. So I said, go try me. So he said, well, we just found a new church and we've been out of church for a while and this is so good. I'm really happy. I like the people. I like the community. I really feel seen. Like I had no clue that this guy was Christian. As the matter of fact, he's another colleague that I smoked cigarettes with during break time for a couple of years. Never did he talk about Jesus. And on Wednesday morning, I went to my landlord because he had a guitar and he asked me to fix it. So I knocked on the door. But my landlord was not home. His wife was home. You got to understand, this family is from the American painter. I know that. Sounds like I just coughed up some phlegm, but it is a denomination in the Netherlands that is extremely, extremely conservative when it comes to female roles. So it is very inappropriate in that culture to invite me in when a woman is alone by herself. But she did. And embarrassingly enough, I thought that had a meaning that she may be into me. Anyway, she showed me what a guitar was. I fixed the guitar and then it was a little bit awkward because she was obviously not into me. She was just very nice. And then I saw some books by John Calvin on the bookshelf. I'm like, so you guys like Calvin a lot? And then she looked me in the eyes and says, do you want to have a tea? I'm like, OK, I'll have a tea. She took me to her living room, maybe some tea, shared the gospel with me and gave me a Bible and I could not believe what just happened. I really started to think maybe my prayer that I prayed that Sunday was coming to fruition. So that evening, I went to bed at practice. I was in a post-hardcore metalcore band and we were recording that evening, not like professionally recording. We were just recording on a Zoom audio interface. No, not the Zoom video conferencing. It's a brand. It's a brand. It's geeky. You, you don't care. So I really wanted to get the lyrics right of this cover that we did by a band called under oath, and the song is called I don't feel very receptive today. I think this song is about drugs and the singer struggling with drugs. But I really identified with the song at that moment because at that moment underoath was a Christian band. Even though Jesus's name is not mentioned in this song, they're talking about so many spiritual concepts. Like part of the song says, this door has been shut for days. And it's all too familiar, which really sounds like my depression. And then the singer continues and I just crack a window. Can't I just shake it off? And it's this liberation, this window that I see cracked open that shows me that there's freedom right there to grasp. He ends the song with saying, it's time to open up the door. I realized that I was talking about myself. It's time for me to open up the door to Jesus. But I wasn't quite there yet because next day I was called in for a meeting with my boss. I was a teacher at that time, but this year was a very rough year for me. And because of that I was a very, very bad teacher. Like I was salty in front of the class. I was depressed every single day. I didn't take care of myself. It was a bad look for the school. It was a bad look for me. It was bad for the students. It was just good for me to not be among the students and they gave me some administrative work to do in the background. Anyway, I came to the meeting hoping that they would give me some hours to teach again because I was coming out of my all time low. However, it was a mess of a meeting. There was a school inspector at the meeting and I drank the previous night, so I quickly took some aspirin in the morning on an empty stomach and mid meeting. I had to run out to throw up. It was terrible. My boss, my team leader and the school inspector all say, well, we don't think it's good for you to go back to work in front of a class anymore. As a matter of fact, we think you should quit, and that was not quite what I was expecting. So I went home Super depressed and I just took a nap because I didn't know what to do anymore. And as I drifted to sleep, I had a dream. I had a dream of that girl that I had coffee with at the beginning of the week. We went into this building and she right away ran into a room and everybody was happy in his room. Everybody had, like good conversations and they were all laughing. I'm like, wow, that sounds amazing. Let me go in as well. But something was stopping me from going in there. So disappointed. I turn away from that room. And I hear footsteps behind me and I turn around and I see my sister-in-law running past me and she's in tears. And I'm asking her, hey, what's going on? Are you all right? And as we're talking and I give her a hug to comfort her, her boob grazes my arm and she looks at me and tries to make an advance at me. And I'm enjoying it at that moment until I snap out of it. I'm like, what? This is my sister-in-law. What am I doing? So I just run away out of that building, hop in my car, and I am in full tears right now. And I keep on yelling over and over and over again. I'm not worth it. I'm not worth it. I'm not worth it. So in real life, my phone starts ringing and I see that it's my team leader. And she says to me, hey, Mitch, do you have a second? I'm like, sure, what's going on? I just had a terrible nightmare, so I'm a little bit out of it. So she tells me, OK, I'll keep this short. I just want you to know. That you're worth it. So I hopped out of the bed. I felt disgusting. I was in my underpants and I'm like, OK, Jesus is real because what just happened this week is just too bizarre for words. So I sat on my couch and I thought to myself, how, how do you do this? How do you give your life to jesus? But I figured, you know, since I just prayed to the ceiling, I can pray to Jesus and tell Jesus, hey, can we be buddies? But I felt disgusting, as I said before. So I went to go get a shower because I felt like, before I go to Jesus, I need to make sure that I'm clean. You know, it's like this silly thought if I think back of this. Anyway, I was holding the doorknob to my shower and an audible voice in my head just says, come as you are. So I went back to my couch and I rolled the cigarettes and lit its and gave my life to Jesus right there, sweaty and disgusting in my underpants, smoking a cigarette.
Context 2
So I often hear, the question or the assumption that because I met Jesus, that was the reason why I stopped my transition. I met Jesus because I was healthy and not the other way around. I didn't get healthy because I found Jesus. I found Jesus because I was healthy. And to me, this is very important. I don't want to use Jesus or my faith as a crutch to mental health. And I'm not saying that this is good for everyone, but I think for me it's very important that I found Jesus when I was in a happy and healthy place.
Napa Valley Experience
A couple of months later, I found myself in America. I visited some people in Simi valley, California. How random is that? My first visit to America and I go to Simi Valley. Sorry, Simi valley, folks. I had a lot of fun there, but it's definitely not an impressive town just because I gave my life to Jesus. Nothing really changed. So I still had my same lifestyle as I had before. And I had this big epiphany moment. I think I was in Napa Valley for a trip and I sat in this big lake just staring ahead of me, and I was just thinking about what the meaning of life was. So I know Jesus now writes, Jesus is pretty important to me. My Judaism is still important to me. And I'm pursuing relationships because I didn't want to feel alone. And just like I took a decision to take a break from my transition because I wanted to be healthy first and just like I wanted to start my relationship with Jesus off on the right foot, I wanted to start a relationship healthy first. So I decided I was going to give relationships a break and stop dating altogether. And about six weeks later, I flew from California to Virginia to meet with Kim. She was a friend that I met in Amsterdam around the same time that I became a believer. And we had some drinks together, but there was never a spark or so. So when I met her in Virginia, within a couple of days, we started sharing how much we hated relationships and how it's just nasty. And before I knew it, I was sharing all the bad things that I've done, not just years and years before, but literally what I've done weeks before. So that was July 15. We started dating July 21st, and Kim knew about my transition attempts, but it was kind of like put on a background because as I said, I was putting my mental health first, but I kind of started to closet myself again, not because of Kim, but because I really quickly started to work in ministry. After we dated for a while, I asked her to marry me in January, and then a year later I finally flew to America and we got married in November 2012. And as I said, I kind of closeted myself again because I started work in ministry and I knew there were a lot of anti trans and anti-gay sentiments in the church. And the church in America is definitely more anti queer than it is in the Netherlands. But I somehow thought it was a good idea to try to fight it from the inside. I don't to keep on repeating myself, but that's also an episode in the making, which is going to cover the topic. Why fighting something from the inside is a fallacy anyway. Any time when I was more convinced that I should transition, things would come up that would give me excuses to not transition like my kids were born. Oh my precious children. My children are one of the things that prevent me from beating myself up from that transitioning earlier. I love them so, so much and I'm so thankful that they have been born.
Pacific North West
So in August 2020, I started working at a pretty large church in the Pacific Northwest, and I was a worship pastor. One of the things that I wanted to do there was fight for women who were not treated equally. I remember in my interview process for that position, I had to fill out some forms. I mean, I already visited them. I already had three interviews. I kind of knew that I was the candidate that they were thinking about hiring. But one of the questions was about women, and another question was about homosexuality. What I thought about it and they emailed me actually and said, Mitch, we need to talk about your ideas about women in church and homosexuality. So I was kind of nervous because in my paperwork I said, I am married to a woman, but I don't think there's anything wrong with homosexuality. And the question about female leadership, I said, well, while I have the leading role in our marriage, I don't believe that is a template for everybody to use. It's different than everybody's families. So the lead pastor calls me, asks a little bit about homosexuality, and it moves on to the female leadership question and said that he's very excited about my ideas. And the reason why he was excited was because he was hoping to work on moving the church to a church that would allow women to lead. So I got excited and moved my family over in August 2020, but eight months later I stepped down, disillusioned and kind of like done with Ministry forever. I mean, a lot of things that happened there and I've made a lot of mistakes as well. The short of it is that I stepped down as a pastor and felt hurt. Oh my. Everything it hurts so, so much. And I feel it because it was just a little over a year ago, in March 2021, after I stepped down, my wife kind of stepped into a protective role and she essentially allowed me to become a hermit for a while. We also decided to move to Richmond, Virginia, to be closer to family and enrichment. The magic happened.
Context 3
Richmond is in the South and you may think of statues of Southern generals and angry people showing up with guns. But the real story here is that Richmond is extremely, extremely progressive. Yes, Richmond was the capital of the Confederate states. And yes, whenever gun legislation is on the agenda in Virginia, everybody shows up with machine guns and Ar 15, which is pretty scary. But besides those political things, this city is so extremely progressive. I can walk around here and older gentlemen open the door for me and say, ladies first. People make comments on the street about my heels and I just feel so, so safe here. It's a great city, so I don't know what Richmond's marketing problem is, but Richmond is a super cool city. It's got old buildings. It predates America since it was founded in 1720. It's got older people, younger people. It's got hipsters families. We have it all. Yes, Richmond still has some problems. It's still a historically segregated city. And that's something that they will have to grapple with for a while. But I do like the energy that is here.
Inviting My Wife
I don't know who was watching my kids, probably. Caroline Caroline, if you're listening to this, Thanks for watching our kids. But Kim and I were at the secret sandwich society in Richmond. We were waiting for our sandwiches. I think Kim at a salad. And I'll look him in the eyes. And I said, Kim, would you still stay married to me if I would have gender affirming surgery? And she just stares at me like, what is going on right now? I have no clue where this is coming from. But the reality is that being in such an affirming environment and really getting more and more in touch with my femininity has given me the opportunity to find my gender expression better. I was healthy. I felt in a safe place, and I don't know why. But even though I ask this big question to Kim there on the spot without Warning, I knew that she would love me forever. So from that conversation, we started to explore my gender a little bit. At that point, I thought I might be non-binary and I started having conversations with my counselor, but it became pretty clear that I wanted to be on feminizing hormones really quick while I was mentally pretty healthy. There was a lot of dysphoria going on. And I started longing for being on feminizing hormone therapy. Fortunately, Virginia is a informed consent state, and some of you may hate planned parenthood, but it was Planned Parenthood who hooked me up. And in August 2021, I had a conversation with their caseworker and she approved my case. And in September 2021, I started feminizing hormone therapy. And I'm recording this part of this podcast right now on August 23rd, 2022. So that's almost a year ago. I remember about one month in of my feminizing hormone therapy. I was sitting on a balcony on our apartment in Richmond and I was staring at a tree and I saw the three leaves move and it looked like a wave that was going over the trees. And I just sat there for it must have been 5 to 10 minutes. And I was just quiet. And that's when I started realizing it. My brain was completely quiet. My brain has never been quiet. It is always stuffed with ideas and business plans and frustrations, everything at the same time. But here I was sitting there on a balcony thinking nothing at all. Looking at the Leafs and just enjoying the beauty and I felt like I could see the colors in 3. D it's very hard to describe this experience, but it became an everyday occurrence from that moment on. That was the moment that I realized that my road to femininity was the right journey for me. Fast forward a couple of months later, I realized that I was not actually non-binary. For months, I've already introduced myself as a trans person, but then it just came out. I'm a trans woman. And then I started dropping the trans and I started saying, I'm a woman. Most of my friends just adjusted really quickly. They started switching from de them to sheer without even questioning it. Thanks, Caroline, again for being a superhero there. And it just felt really affirming. I really felt and I feel at home in my body. I recognize my legs, I recognize my arms. I really enjoy the feeling that I have in my body right now. I feel calm. I don't feel depressed. I feel happy. I am a woman.
Inviting My Family
One final thing had to happen, and that was kind of like coming out to the entire world, which was horrifying. Just saying first things first, we had to tell Kim's parents and I was super nervous. Not because Kim's parents are not nice. They are so, so nice. They're so loving, they're so friendly, they're so invested in our family. But, you know, they went to a conservative church. They historically voted conservative, and I just didn't see it go well. So my son was going on a week-long grandma camp and he has been correcting everybody in the world. That's my mother. It's she her name is me. She's, you know, super cute. But I was, like, worried that he was going to say that to his grandparents and that they would be offended that we never told them. But I was super afraid to do it. And fortunately, Kim gathered all her courage and FaceTime with her mother and had a super long walk and started telling the story to her. Meanwhile, at home. I was in a bathroom about to throw up because I was so nervous. I was so afraid of rejection. So I texted my friend Jen, you are definitely going to hear her on this podcast and she kind of like calm me down and walk me through it. And then my wife came home. She said that her mom said this. I obviously need a little bit time to think about this all. But we are the only parents that Mitch has and that's never going to change. We love Mitch, whether she is a man or a woman because Misha is our family.
Recognizing My Mental Models
And here we are today. Now, everybody knows that I'm a woman. I mean, I get hateful text messages every now and then to remind myself that I am a trans woman, of course. And I'm not going to say that transitioning has been easy. Going through life as a woman comes with a whole set of skills that I have to learn. Navigating the health care system that seems to be affirming but in reality is a little bit cringeworthy and a little bit painful. Finishing up my theology at a University that is not affirming. Yes, all those things have been hard, but it's been also so, so beautiful. And I had more beautiful conversations with people than bad conversations with people, people that I was prejudiced against, thinking that they were super conservative. So they are probably going to hate me. Ended up saying nothing is going to change. We love you as a woman. And people that I thought were progressive kind of like were weirded out by my decision. So you never know what to expect with people. But one thing I do know is that a lot of this comes down to mental models that we have. So mental models are this efficiency system that our brain has. Your brain tries to preserve energy by jumping to conclusions. For example, when you walk a street and you hear screeching tires, you do not want to think, oh, what do screeching tires mean again? And then look over and then see a car speeding at you and think, what should I do when a car is speeding towards me? Now you want your brain to be efficient and you want to jump out of the way right away because you want to preserve your life. The same system happens with a lot of smaller things in our lives and these efficiencies, we call them mental models and these mental models help you to make sense of the world. There's one problem, though, with mental models. If you don't challenge your mental models, if you never ask yourself, hey, are my mental models actually rights? Like kind of do a spring cleaning on your mental models. You never know if you're going to grow or if you're stuck in your old ways. And in the last couple of years of having conversations with people and in my research on inclusive leadership, I found out that mental models affect what we see, which in turn affects what we do. So there's this big guru in my field called Peter Sanjay. He wrote a book called The Fifth Discipline. And the third discipline in this book is about mental models. It's a whole section about mental models and I love it. But he said we can only change or improve what we are aware of. And as I said earlier, mental models affect what? We see and what we see affects what we do. So if we have certain ideas about a people group, that's because we have mental models about them. So if we view an entire subset of population in a certain way, that's our mental models affecting how we see those people. So let's keep it to myself and the example that I just use. I thought that most of my conservative acquaintances and friends were going to reject me because they were conservative. I had a mental model that affected how I saw the entire conservative group, which affected what I did. I avoided telling them. I avoided telling my parents for almost half a year, and then I still avoided telling some other conservative friends for a. Three more months. So if you can only change or improve what you're aware of, how can you become aware of your mental models? That's what this podcast is about.