blog
When a community ties belonging and spiritual safety to sexual compliance, and enforces it through recurring interviews and confession norms, it reliably creates fear-based self-policing. That's not just 'values.' That's behavioral control.
Podcast
Have you ever sat in a chapel pew, supposed to feel peace, while a silent fire alarm of perfectionism blares in your head? You are not alone, and it is not unworthiness.
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Repentance itself doesn't break people. But when the prescribed process, the one meant to restore someone, instead convinces them more deeply than before that they are fundamentally unfit for the grace of God and the fellowship of those who follow him, that process is the problem.
Podcast
A reflective conversation about how cultures of worthiness can become private perfectionism — and how to reclaim belonging without performing for approval.
advice-column
Ever met a great guy and realized you don't want a date, you just want a nap? You aren't broken. If romance feels like adding one more chore to your endless to-do list, pay attention: exhaustion is information. Here is why you are allowed to go slower than the chemistry.
Religious Trauma
What if the pressure to remarry quickly after divorce is the same operating system that produced the wrong marriage in the first place?
Religious Trauma
A worthiness interview doesn't ask 'what did you do?' It asks 'are you the kind of person who belongs here?' In this high-stakes system, shame, not guilt, is created, which frequently leads to concealment, not repentance. Performance over authenticity becomes the only rational response.
blog
There is a version of this story that plays out quietly, without drama, in thousands of LDS homes. No affairs. No cruelty. No villain. Just two young people who got married because everyone around them made it feel like the only reasonable next step, and who then spent the next
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Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 1 of 6 I was five years old when I learned I was trash. Not metaphorically. Not as a passing frustration someone immediately walked back. I was told I deserved to be thrown away — and to make the lesson stick, I
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Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 2 of 6 She was everything the church ever told me to look for. Faithful. Devoted. A mother who clearly adored her kids. A woman whose social media feed — over six years of staying loosely in touch — told a consistent story
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Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 3 of 6 She stopped letting him hug her. Not because she didn't want to be held. She was desperate to be held. But every hug had become a down payment on something she hadn't agreed to
Faith & Dating
Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 4 of 6 I want to say something that men in this situation almost never say. I wasn't ready. Not for what she needed. Not for what she was asking. Not for the thing she had every right to