Purity Culture & Sex Shame: Healing with the Sexvangelicals

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[00:02:06] Hello, everybody, and welcome back to this week's episode of A Little Bit Culty. Jeremiah Gibson and Julia Postima are psychotherapists and certified sex therapists. Their specialty? Helping couples with negative religious backgrounds discover sexuality that works for their partnership. They also co-host a podcast called Sex Evangelicals, the sex education the church didn't want you to have. On today's show, they're going to help us understand the negative impact religion can have on relationships, especially when it comes to sex.

[00:02:34] This episode isn't an official therapy session, but Julia and Jeremiah will discuss tools for overcoming shame and fear around sex. We'll also get into purity culture, fundamentalist gender dynamics, and strategies for healthy communication within relationships. It's fascinating and maybe even a little bit spicy. Let's welcome our guests.

[00:02:53] I think that this podcast should not be about sex or politics. It should be about sports. I think we should have a sports podcast. I have most of my sex there.

[00:03:22] That's where you learned about sex. For sure. That's what I practiced. Yeah. That's what you practiced the most. Oh, dear. For better, for worse. For worse. Largely for worse. I actually would prefer to have a counseling session from the two of you. And when I listened back to our episode on your podcast, which I loved, I felt like it was therapeutic. I do. I think it was good for us. I really appreciate it. But I kind of, you know, how ironic that we're talking today and this podcast could be

[00:03:52] how to not be a jackass post-election also. For you. We have so many directions we could go. Right. Should we stick with sports? I know. I know. I know. That would be so much easier. It could be a podcast where all of you teach me the rules of football and it probably would take at least an hour. I could get into the fandom. Well, anyway, keep going. Yeah. What is football and how do you play?

[00:04:19] I mean, there certainly is a culty aspect to it in terms of the fandom. Oh, there's so totally this. In the South in a way that I've never experienced before. But anyway, back to you guys, to you all, to you all. I'm still getting into that. It's y'all. Yeah. Back to y'all. Tell us about your backgrounds. I mean, I think we spoke about when we first connected, we normally follow the same format with ex-members of like, how did you get in and what were the red flags and how'd you get out? And one of the interesting things, Julia, is that for both me and you, we were both born

[00:04:49] into evangelical spaces. I didn't choose it. You didn't choose it either. So my family is and continues to be practicing members of a denomination called the Church of Christ. It's a denomination that's a part of evangelicalism, even though they will say that they are not LOL. About two, two and a half million people, mostly based in the South.

[00:05:14] And a lot of my upbringing was rooted in religious spaces, being involved in youth groups. I've told this story in our podcast before that when I was seven, my family and I went to these midweek Bible studies because it's not just good enough to go to church once a week. You got to figure out a way to go twice a week in order to really get on God's good graces. At least twice a week. At least twice a week. That's right. We actually went three times a week, but that's a whole other story.

[00:05:42] I showed up to the small group experience, the small group meetings on Wednesday nights. And it was my family and like five other families. And a lot of times the moms would show up. The dads would not be present. All the other children were girls. And the women adults turned to me and said, okay, Jeremiah, you're the boy, you're the man.

[00:06:11] And so you lead things. So you have to lead the songs. You have to read the scripture. You have to lead the prayer. And being the compliant oldest child that I was, I'm like, okay. And so I learned really early on that I get positive attention by stepping into leadership roles, by running shit, for lack of a better term. And that was the expectation from other people. Other people look to me to move into that. And not just other men.

[00:06:41] My experience is that other women looked to me to play those roles. And so a lot of my engagement with Christianity has been less about like, what do I individually believe? And more about how do I like uphold this identity that I've developed as leader that gets me positive attention, that gets people to trust me, those types of things. So to be clear, you look to uphold it?

[00:07:11] Or do you feel like it's something that's in you and you seek to fulfill? I think it's a little bit of both. I think that, I mean, there's definitely some good things that are developed over that. Like the leadership skills that I have developed as a result of being in these roles. Like I'm thankful for those.

[00:07:30] I think that a part of my engagement in religious spaces is also recognizing that I can be seen as a trustworthy person by being in these religious spaces, even if I don't believe what the religious communities are talking about. And I started questioning some of those religious spaces in high school when my church began to,

[00:07:57] not began to split, when my church split and eventually closed its doors over the question of what role do women play in the church, in the church assembly? About half the people in the church said women have no place of leadership, no place of voice, and chose to raise a stinkin' leaf as a result of that. And so my family actually chose to stay.

[00:08:23] My family thought that it was ridiculous, but they rebelled by stop attending church like altogether for about four or five years. And it was really, really heartbreaking to see the way that division within the religious space caused so much unnecessary harm, unnecessary conflict. And so I began to kind of carry then this tension between I get positive reinforcement

[00:08:52] by presenting as a leader in the church. And also like I have seen and witnessed and experienced just the harm that can happen from the splitting of hairs within religious institutions. So. And when did you leave? So I worked in churches in my early 20s. I was actually a worship minister at a pretty sizable church in West Texas. We had about 2,000 people at our church. Moved to Boston when I was 25.

[00:09:20] Ended up working at another church for about six or seven years doing a kind of worship ministry organization. Became a sex therapist along the way and ended up getting fired. So I didn't actually leave. I got kicked out and chose not to return, which is a little bit of a different experience from you. Why did you get kicked out? The reason that I was told from other people within the church was that enough people in

[00:09:50] the church who had positions of power were unwilling to hear my positions on sexuality. And my positions on sexuality meaning, one, we should talk about it. We should talk about sexual health and not pretend that it doesn't exist. Two, we should be aware of the oppression that happens, especially towards queer folks and towards people who get divorces.

[00:10:16] And three, that sexuality and the way that a couple does sexuality is also a window into their relationships. So when we're talking about sexual health, we're also talking about relational health and talking about how folks can experience relationships in a diversity of ways and solve problems in a diversity of ways. That was too much for the wrong people.

[00:10:42] And I ended up getting fired as a result of all of that. So for standing for something. Sure. Yes. Just before we get into that, Julia, tell us your story in a nutshell. What group were you in and how'd you get out? I grew up in a very small fundamentalist Baptist church community, and my growing up experience was highly insular.

[00:11:07] My world revolved around three structures, my fundamentalist Baptist church, my tiny Christian school, and my Christian camp. I met my first Christian Democrat in college, which was actually mind-blowing to me. That is how tiny my world was.

[00:11:29] No space for a Christian, a woman, a person to be anything outside of very rigid scripts, particularly rigid scripts around gender, around sexuality. My education, both my background in sociology and social work, and then ultimately studying sexual health was a huge part of my escape from a high-control religion.

[00:11:56] That, in combination with my own sexual story, was ultimately what moved me out of religious spaces over time. And I will say that I probably left before I was kicked out, or sometimes I wonder how much choice did I really have in leaving a religious community when my religious communities made it very clear that no space existed for a woman like me.

[00:12:24] I became the person in my late 20s and then into my 30s who my 16-year-old self would have prayed for. I would have prayed for the person that I became. How would you describe that person? Well, I am a sex therapist who works with a very diverse group of people. I have strong political beliefs that inform what I do.

[00:12:48] And while I believe that I have a rich, thriving life, what I stand for, the relationships that I have, and the way that I pay my bills all have roots in what I told was off-limits, what is evil, and what would send me and anyone like me to hell. Because you're now a Jezebel. Yes. Is that the word? Yes. That would be a great way to describe it. So tell me some of the sexual mindsets and messages that are most harmful in high-control religions.

[00:13:17] Let's just talk a little bit about that. Yeah. The two that we can dissect to whatever extent you want would be, one, gender essentialist language or rigid gender scripts. And then two, focus on behaviors, especially behaviors around don't rather than what sexual health actually is. What is it around religion and particularly having stringent structures around sex in particular?

[00:13:46] Like, why do you think that's targeted in the way that it is? That's a good question. That's a really good question. I think Christianity specifically has a several millennia-long history around being a heady religion, a cognitive religion, you think your way through things. Right, right, right. And second of all, through repression, which I actually don't think is much about the religion itself as much as it is about the intersection of religion and politics and what happens when

[00:14:16] a religious system becomes kind of the dominant political force. When something becomes the dominant political force, one of the ways that something stays in power is through repressing other people and through trying to keep other people in particular the boxes and in restrictive kinds of ways of operating. So I think that it's a really good question. I think that part of it is the uniqueness about the religion of Christianity and part of it

[00:14:43] is around like its role in the history of especially of Western civilization. But one of the things, Julia, to kind of build on that, we talk in our podcast, our opening series is called The Seven Deadly Sexual Sins According to the Church. And those seven deadly sexual sins are don't have sex before you get married, don't be gay, don't have wants, don't have desires. That's especially true for women. Don't watch porn. Don't pursue those desires.

[00:15:12] Or if you do, make sure that you do it in these like super secretive kind of icky types of ways. That's more for men. Don't get divorced slash don't have an affair. I'm trying to remember. And don't ask questions. That's what it was. Yeah. Which ultimately gets back to these rigid gender norms that dictate so much of a person's life. As early as pre-puberty for me, modesty was something that I learned about women.

[00:15:41] And so when I was nine years old, I would have a conversation with a friend about, well, are spaghetti straps sinful? And this was me as a nine-year-old. I hadn't started puberty. And I knew as early as that age and younger that I, as a woman, needed to protect myself from the lust. That was the language in my church and in many churches of men, particularly older men. Women are asexual. Women are modest.

[00:16:08] Women protect themselves against what I now know to be assault. And men are these sexually aggressive kinds of creatures. And we can talk about the double bind that exists for men. All of these structures hurt men and women. So from waking up in the morning to who you date, to how you date, to initiating sex or not initiating sex, the gender scripts really are pervasive to potentially every single part

[00:16:37] of a person's existence in and outside of a marriage. And so one of the damaging things then is that, Julia, you and I learned, and a lot of folks who grew up in evangelical spaces learned, that a successful relationship is based on how well you perform the gender norms. As opposed to having a successful relationship based on how well two people work together to solve problems. How well two people are able to utilize their own personality strengths, their own traits,

[00:17:07] their own preferences, and to be able to find similarities with another person and also kind of navigate differences in ways that are humanizing, that are healing in order to make decisions. Is it safe to assume that you learn early on that sex is, I don't want to say bad, but like bad? Yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And you're saying it started at nine. Earlier than that.

[00:17:34] That's when I remember having conversations about the inherent sinfulness of spaghetti straps. I can't remember when I learned that sex was bad because I always knew it was bad. Now, some adults, many adults would tell me, oh, no, of course sex isn't bad. Sex is really beautiful when you're married to a man, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, young children can't differentiate that.

[00:18:01] And ultimately, that's also a very rigid view and a rigid boundary and container for sexuality. So I'm not exaggerating when I say my childhood was really defined by the dichotomy of heaven and hell and purity, purity or not purity. Right. Sex. So it's like a binary thing from the get. And then it seems like you're going from sex is bad and then all of a sudden you're told to go, now it's good under these parameters. Right. Yes.

[00:18:30] When you have an indoctrination of it being bad up until a certain point. And the metaphor that we use, and even seeing like what your hands are doing, the metaphor that we use is the light switch metaphor. That suddenly that when you get married, when God allegedly is sanctioning your sexual experiences, that suddenly your bodies are going to know what to do. That you're going to be able to have like these really positive, awesome experiences. How confusing for people. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:01] You're like, no shit. That's why we're therapists for the next evangelical. I mean, it must be so interesting talking to people. I was just so not raised that way. Like my parents showed me like, what's happening to my body? And like, here's a pictures of people having sex. So you would like, like not, I mean, not too young, but obviously. Wait, what? No, like my parents were like hippies and counselors. And there's like a lot of open communication and about all this stuff. So we're asking questions from the place of like, wait, it's bad. So it's, I mean, you'd be like, duh.

[00:19:31] I mean, that's how you were raised. And my dad was just like, use condoms. Good to know. Hey, Kalti listeners. As you probably know, Nippy and I are working on a manuscript for our first book together. And as you probably also know, maintaining control is important to us. That's why we've decided to produce our book with the Self-Publishing Agency or TSPA. Unlike traditional publishing, where you're often left waiting for months or even years

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[00:20:59] We're at patreon.com slash a little bit culty. Go there for bonus episodes, exclusive content, and the occasional Zoom with our fan favorites from our past episodes. Subscribe now and join us. That's patreon.com slash a little bit culty. And now a brief message from our Little Bit Culty sponsors. Remember, when you support our sponsors, you support our podcast. Spring is here. Not a lot of time to make all the meals with baseball practices, school, etc.

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[00:23:20] This summer, get outside with Wayfair. Head to wayfair.com right now. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. You've heard from our sponsors. Now let's get back to a little bit culty, shall we? So are most of your clients that you work with now ex-evangelical, like survivors? A big majority of them are, yeah.

[00:23:47] And what I didn't know was common when I got married and was moving through my own pain, disillusionment, and ultimately departure from a religious faith is actually this national phenomena. And Linda K. Klein, I believe, was one of the first authors to produce some research in her book Pure.

[00:24:13] And so what to me was so shameful and scary and what the hell is happening, although I wouldn't have sworn at that time. Like, I had no idea why I hated sex. I had no idea why I was massively depressed. I was going through this awful thing. And I had no language to know that, oh, sadly, what I was experiencing is something that I hear

[00:24:38] every single day from my clients and what other therapists might hear every single day from their clients. And so this was a systemic oppressive structure that harmed the sexuality and relationships for Gen X folks, millennial folks, and even now the purity culture 2.0 with Gen Zers. Tell us about that. Is it the same thing? Different? What's 2.0 version of it all?

[00:25:04] I would describe purity culture 2.0 as a softer and yet more insidious messaging or a softer yet more insidious framing of the same language. So I grew up learning that if you had sex before you got married, you were like a crumpled up rose or a chewed up piece of gum or like some sort of garbage kind of metaphor.

[00:25:31] And these were the metaphors that my friends and I like were inundated with. The purity culture 2.0 people might say, well, you're not like a chewed up piece of bubble gum, but still sex can only happen in these specific kinds of ways. So they are attempting to be gentler. They are attempting to be softer, but ultimately they're coming back to the same conclusions. Can we talk about purity culture 1.0? Yes.

[00:25:59] Because I think that what you're talking about is absolutely right. That technology, that forms of communication have shifted the way that information gets communicated. From my perspective, and this is new, we've really only begun to study the impact of Christian nationalism probably in the last 10 years. And so there's not really a common language. Some folks, Christian nationalism is something that's kind of brought to the forefront. Purity culture is kind of insider language speak.

[00:26:28] But what we're talking about is a movement that started in the early 70s on the heels of the Civil Rights Act. In the 60s, on the heels of movements towards more sexual expressiveness, sexual freedom. What happened in the 70s, we see this around the election of Nixon actually, is that you have groups of people largely in evangelical churches getting together and organizing

[00:26:56] around, quote, traditional family values. Traditional family values meaning women being less involved in the workplace, pushing back against messages of sexuality. This is where the specific abstinence only type of movement begins to develop. And in the 70s and 80s, you have folks, you have like Phyllis Schlafly is a big name. One of the biggest organizers in this. Jerry Falwell is another big name.

[00:27:23] Like these are really important figures in terms of organizing people around a moralistic... Cult leaders. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. And to build on that then, purity culture is this multi-billion dollar business that uses the publishing houses. Christian Publishing House is an enormously prosperous business. That uses the onset of radio and television.

[00:27:51] James Dobson and focus on the family. One of the reasons that they were so successful is they were also some of the early innovators of using kind of widespread television programming in the 70s and the 80s to communicate their messages of fear-based parenting, of corporal punishment, including that and endorsing that in parenting, gender messages, things like that.

[00:28:16] And this culminates then in the mid-90s with the Abstinence Only Until Marriage Title V Act, which actually the Clinton administration signs in response to... I forget how many pledges that there were. I think it's 60,000, 70,000 purity pledges that were planted onto Capitol Hill.

[00:28:37] And Title V Abstinence Only gave government funding to local school districts to promote these types of values. These values of sex is only to be done in a monogamous opposite sex relationship. That sex is inherently going to lead to bad outcomes when done by 15, 16, 17-year-olds. There's an assumption that pregnancy is going to be an outcome. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

[00:29:07] And so, Julia, what you were talking about earlier, one of the parts of purity culture is, we say in our podcast, you don't have to have grown up in the church to have been fucked over by the church. Purity culture is the federally endorsed... The culmination of purity culture, I should say, is policies like Title V Abstinence Only Until Marriage. And we see other versions of that too. Dobbs v. Jackson is a really good example.

[00:29:34] Other types of policies that endorse on a federal level these very rigid ways of operating as family, as operating as relationships. And I think that we're only going to see more of them with the second Trump presidency. You were saying we've not really studied that, like the effects of purity culture. Has there been any studies done on it? Or like, what's the upshot of that now? We're just now studying it. Because it's a newly emerging area of research. Yeah. So from my perspective, you mentioned Linda Kay Kline. Pure came out.

[00:30:04] Pure was one of the first memoirs written about the interpersonal dangers of evangelical Christianity. Pure was 2016, 2017? Is that right? I think so, but I don't remember. One of the biggest researchers on the sociology of Christian nationalism is a guy named Sam Perry. He's a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. He began publishing about 2016, 2017. So a lot of the data that's out there, a lot of the conversations that's out there is pretty anecdotal.

[00:30:33] But yeah, Julia, I'm really, I guess one of the good sides of the ways that purity culture is enacting itself into the public spectrum is that you and I can also be some of the early researchers. And we actually have an interest in doing this and researching the impact of religion on long-term relationships, especially for folks who choose to leave those religious movements. So where do you even start with people who've left these movements and clearly have a lot of trauma, specifically around sex? Yeah.

[00:31:03] As therapists. Yeah, it's a great question. We also have a slightly different take because we often work with the couple. And so if I work with an individual, probably I will approach it a little bit different than when I work with a couple because deconstructing from a harmful religious group is hard enough to do individually. It was a groundbreaking, disorienting part of my life. And my relationship with my ex-husband did not survive that.

[00:31:31] So when Jeremiah and I met and started our relationship, we had a new foundation because both of us had already left the religious groups in which our marriages had formed. So to answer your question, I promise I didn't forget about it. Part of the work in addressing these issues with couples is reevaluating the foundation of the relationship.

[00:31:51] For so many people within high-control religious groups, when they've had a negative impact, particularly around the sexual relationship or the health of the relationship in general, they only have that religious foundation to hold them together. And if one or both of them, I don't think it matters, is questioning that, then you've got the rug pulled out from underneath you and you've got to evaluate what is the new purpose? What is the foundation of the relationship?

[00:32:22] In any sort of system, in any sort of relationship, in any sort of family, a family is trying to navigate between two truths, often which can conflict with each other. One, which is this idea of homeostasis, which is the idea of, okay, how do we create enough commonalities, enough consistencies between the two of us that we can continue to identify as a couple, a marriage, a family, like whatever it is.

[00:32:51] And the second thing is this idea in therapy speak that we call morphogenesis. The idea that we are constantly changing. We're constantly receiving new input.

[00:33:04] I am not the same person that I was at 1034 yesterday, not just because of the result of the outcome and all the terrifying implications of that, but also because, like Julia, you and I have had some conversations between now and then that have given me some new input. The four of us are having a conversation that's giving me some new input. Like, I'm constantly changing. I'm shifting. I'm morphing. I'm thinking about things in new ways. You're thinking about things in new ways, Julia.

[00:33:32] And so one of the challenges, and we actually read this in Project 2025. One of the fantasies that is throughout that document, particularly in the introduction, is that, well, people aren't going to change. We're going to do whatever we can to make sure that everyone kind of has this consistent thing.

[00:33:51] Maybe that sounds good, but that's also unrealistic because with the new information that I get, with the new input that I get and my sense of openness to that, like, I'm going to be thinking about the world differently. I'm going to be engaging with the world differently. And so to implement that then, Julia, into the work that you and I do, when we're talking about folks who are choosing to leave religious spaces, they're doing it likely for really good reasons. Yeah, of course.

[00:34:21] They're doing it because they realize that, oh, this thing that I signed up for, that I'm a part of, that I was born into, like, that something about this no longer works for me. It could be the consistency. I don't want to get up on Sunday mornings at nine. That could be part of it.

[00:34:38] But it could also be I'm recognizing, oh, the ways that religious leaders are communicating with other people, with people within the church, with politicians, like, that doesn't align with the messages that they're speaking, the messages of hope, the messages of good news. The moral inconsistency is too big. I got to get the hell out of here. Mm-hmm.

[00:35:01] And if you have two people kind of doing that at the same time, in a best-case scenario, two people can figure out a way, and Julia and I have had success in helping people kind of frame this, to identify some shared experiences. How are you seeing this? How are you seeing this?

[00:35:18] Nippy, Sarah, y'all actually talked about this on our podcast, too, in kind of y'all's kind of similar movement out of NXIVM, that in a best-case scenario, two people can realize, oh, like, we're seeing this through the same lens. We may have kind of different prescriptions. My vision may be 2025. Yours may be 2020. But we're still, by and large, kind of seeing the same thing. The really, really hard things for us are the other scenarios, Sarah, that you talked about, where one person wants out.

[00:35:47] When one person is in the process of deconstructing, I'm putting that in quotes, and the other person is still committed to the religious institution. There can be a lot of conflict, a lot of strife that could come as a result of that. And so part of our work is being able to simultaneously hold each person's position and to create some more understanding as to, you know, what are you gaining by moving out of this religion?

[00:36:16] What are you gaining by staying in and figuring out, okay, like, how do you want to move forward? What are the commonalities? What might the function of the relationship be if religion is no longer the centralizing force to it? Julia, you mentioned that your first marriage didn't survive. Mine didn't either. Religion was very much an organizing principle for our relationship. And as I began to ask more questions, and essentially as I got kicked out, I got fired in October.

[00:36:47] We were separated by February. And so, like, that happened really, really quick. So it's really tough work. The distinctions is like, you know, when we blew up, I was 43. Sure. And I had also had my morality and my framework for the world implemented by my parents, my surroundings, my schooling, and other things, not by a religion.

[00:37:13] So I would imagine it was an easier pivot, I would say. Yeah, yeah. And someone coming out of, say, a religion where, like, the religion was your morality. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And not just your morality, but also your community. That's right. Yeah, your community, everything. It's like, I can't relate to that. So I never will be able to. The closest thing I can do is basically at a young age, probably telling my mom and dad to peace out. And that would be devastating to me. Yeah, yeah.

[00:37:41] You know, I mean, it was devastating as it was for us. To leave the community. To leave the community. But I can't imagine, like, what it would take to turn your back on the thing that formed who you are and maybe in your own mind is who you are. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's just, you know. You know where I also do see a parallel? And I agree with you, Nippy. That takes so much. Imagine trying to tell your mom, I'm never going to see you again. No, I'm afraid. Yeah. Yeah. That's not.

[00:38:11] The answer to that is no, right? No. That's a strong hold. Yeah. But we weren't born into NXIVM. We chose it. It was easier, I think, easier in that way to leave. But where I do see a parallel is in the, we call it the ranking system, right? Like the sashes. And I don't know enough about your particular denominations of evangelicalism, but from learning from like Tia Levings in regards to like the umbrella and God and then the man and then the woman. That must be a hierarchical ranking system within your own framework.

[00:38:41] Like how do you step away from that and how do you help people not do that anymore? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. That's such a hard, that's a hard question. And even within the ranking systems, you've got these sub-ranking systems. So I remember I had a friend several years older than me. She was my youth group leader. And she committed that she was not going to kiss until she got married.

[00:39:05] And so then six years younger, okay, in order to be the best of the best, then I need to not just follow purity culture in general. I have to be more legalistic, more rigid. And then when you leave a religious space, the dilemma that you're describing, Sarah, can show up in all kinds of places. I'm sure Jeremiah could probably give his experience of watching me.

[00:39:32] For me, that means that I struggle to make sometimes very simple decisions. If you have a hierarchy and the hierarchy has rules that you follow in order to maintain or keep achieving, well, what do you want for dinner? That can be a really hard question for some people, especially for women, when you are trying to untangle yourself from all of those hierarchies.

[00:40:01] And often our clients come to us wanting to talk about sexuality because that's their most pressing concern. We're sex therapists. And sometimes we have to go 12 steps back rather than talking about what do you want sexually. We might have to say, well, what do you want to wear? What do you want to eat for dinner? You have this hour where you aren't obligated. Do you have to go on a run or could you take a nap? Could you read a book? Or does it actually not matter?

[00:40:30] When you have those hierarchies, every single thing matters and has these eternal consequences. And so just like the gender scripts pervade everything from getting dressed to initiating sex, then when you leave those systems, you are learning sometimes very basic skills all over. Yeah, it's not the content. It's the process. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Sex is one content point.

[00:40:58] Going from what would Jesus do to what would I do? Yeah. What would I do? W-W-I-D. I like that. It doesn't have the same ring to it. What would? For more context on what brought us here, check out my memoir. It's called Scarred, The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, The Cult That Bound My Life.

[00:41:25] I narrate the audio version and it's also available on Amazon, Audible, and at most bookstores. And now, a brief message from our Little Bit Culty sponsors. And remember, when you support our sponsors, you're supporting this podcast. With warmer days finally here, I'm itching to spruce up our outdoor space. Wayfair's massive selection of outdoor essentials has me covered.

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[00:43:42] about pacing, is that folks who are leaving these spaces are often pulled in these two different directions in another way. One, there is a part of them that really wants to kind of break the shackles and try a whole bunch of new things, a whole bunch of new items. But if you've never been given permission to do that before, that freedom to figure out

[00:44:11] what you want your own relationship can be, can be really, really paralyzing. And so it's really, really important. So if you work with us, you'll find Julia and I doing a lot of, okay, can we slow this down? Can we simplify this? And really kind of resisting the urge to kind of do, I think what a physiologically natural thing would be to do, which would be like, jerk yourself out of the shackles and

[00:44:39] sprint as far away as you can. That's a really hard tension that we find. So if you work with us, I think you'll see us encouraging you and your relationship. Let's go as slow as we can here. I know that this feels urgent to make some decisions, but the best decisions are going to be made, or most of the most thoughtful, comprehensive decisions are going to be made with a slower pace.

[00:45:05] And given that tendency to be urgent and to get out and to make those decisions, well, at least for us in NXIVM, I personally, after 12 years of being, you know, I don't need drugs and alcohol to have fun. My pendulum swung a little far when I first got out and I, you know, partied a little bit. And now I feel like I've stabilized into a healthy relationship with those things. But do you find that people, when they get out, just go extreme and try to break all the rules that they were given in some cases? Yeah.

[00:45:35] I think that's a common version. And what's interesting is that what you're describing can be a different version of what that person might have learned in church, which was a focus on the behaviors. So if I learned don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Okay, I'm gone. I'm going to do, do, do, do, do. I'm going to go to all the sex clubs, all the orgies, all the experiences that I didn't have sexual or otherwise. And if a person can make a values-based choice and pursue all of that, then that's amazing.

[00:46:05] But what happens is folks bypass the thoughtful reflection around their values and then jump from one set of behaviors to the other. And what Jeremiah and I will encourage folks to do is say, let's take this sexual thing off the table for a second. And let's just talk about what's the value that you want to have? How do you want to engage your sexuality or your relationships rather than one set of behaviors to another set of behaviors?

[00:46:31] And also values are informed by experience and they've been cheated by a lot of experience. So they have to have the experience to see if they like something. Right. It's even more tricky, you know, especially late night. Yeah, absolutely. And there are some values, and Julia, you and I will also bring our own values into the conversation as well. So there is a sex therapist named Doug Braun Harvey. He and Michael Vigarito developed the six sexual health principles or values.

[00:47:01] And these are things that we hold to as well. The values of consent, that sexuality is a conversation, is an ongoing dialogue that requires both people to say yes. Non-exploitation. We're not going to hurt each other during this. We're going to protect ourselves from unwanted pregnancy. We're going to do the best we can to be honest about like what it is that we want. So making decisions because it's something that I want.

[00:47:27] We're going to make decisions and look for shared values for common understanding. And we're also going to encourage pleasure. We're going to encourage play. We're going to encourage things that feel good for the individual, but ultimately things that feel good for the couple. And so there's this ongoing conversation then between our values, the values you and I bring, the values that a couple that works with us brings.

[00:47:52] And yeah, working together to see how the four of us, you and I, Julia, and then the couple that we work with can work together to create a new way of doing a relationship. And I would hope that there are probably a lot of people listening and hearing Jeremiah list off those values. And they might be saying, well, of course you are going to practice consent. Of course you are going to be honest. And as Jeremiah, as you're talking, I'm thinking about my friends, my clients, my own experience,

[00:48:20] and what might be so, I hope, basic to many other people are not things that people learn in a high-control religious group. That's right. All they learn are the don'ts. So focusing on pleasure, consent, being honest, that can actually be like a mind-blowing experience for an individual or a couple, which is a really tragic, heartbreaking thing when you think about it to have someone in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s having their first conversation about consent

[00:48:50] or honesty or pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. So Nippy and I are writing our second book, which is more prescriptive and a summary of everything that we've learned since doing the podcast. And we're actually on a section right now about what do you do when the shelf breaks? You've been holding all these things. The shelf is broken. It's time to get out. Logistically, what are some of the things in regards to healing, choosing a therapist, finding somebody who's right to help you deconstruct and deprogram?

[00:49:17] Therapy was massively helpful in my movement out of harmful religious spaces. Here's what I tell new clients when they're considering a new therapist. You've got three pillars here. You've got clinical scope. You've got a therapeutic relationship. And then you've got the logistics. Logistics are easy. Payment, scheduling, all that jazz. The two that are harder to assess are who's a therapist who has clinical competency.

[00:49:45] And when a person is navigating a relationship and sexuality following a harmful religious space, you actually need someone with a very specific set of skills that probably a generalist therapist won't have. In terms of sexual health, I encourage folks to go to the ASECT website. And it's aasect.org. And on the homepage, you can click the button that says Find a Provider,

[00:50:15] and you will find certified sex therapists in your state. Now, that doesn't guarantee that that person will have the clinical scope for you, but it does narrow it down very significantly, since sadly most therapists across multiple licensees don't have good sexual health training. So that is one first step. And most therapists will do an initial consultation, typically for free, over video, over phone.

[00:50:41] And if you are in a relationship, ask them if they have experience working with relationships and couples. And if religion is a big part of the work that you are trying to address, ask them what has your experience been like in working with folks who have been in harmful religious spaces, and hopefully that person can meet your skill set. And then make sure you trust that therapist, because they can be the most clinically competent person in the world.

[00:51:10] If you don't like them, if you don't trust them, then it probably isn't going to be helpful. If you've got the resources, sexual health therapy with a relationship therapist is an amazing step to take. Yeah. And we'll talk more about our options for that in a minute. To the couple themselves, who's like holding up the bookshelf, one of the big things, the first thing that I would tell them is to take a deep breath.

[00:51:37] That there is going to be a lot of grief, a lot of rage, a lot of anger, a lot of fears that come up kind of in those initial months. And it's important to figure out ways to talk about that and know that that's going to take time. I encourage folks who are in these types of situations to not make any rash decisions,

[00:52:03] to not make any rash decisions moving towards divorce, moving towards pursuing other relationships or relationship structures or anything like that. Too often, folks move too quickly into those types of solutions. And that may be the ultimate outcome. But being able to make those decisions in a healthy and rational way involves slowing down

[00:52:28] enough, slowing down the pace enough so that we can unpack the pain, the unmet expectations, the grief, and that we can hear each person, that I can hear my partner, that my partner can hear me, and that we can understand, oh, this is what it is that we survived. And that we can come to some sort of an understanding of, oh, right, like we've been through some shit. Great advice.

[00:52:55] After being on your podcast, Nippy and I realized just how lucky we were that we were on the same page about what we were going through together at the same time and not deconstructing at different times and that we got stronger in that process, I think. Yeah. Sounds like it. It could have not gone that way. Yeah. One of the biggest challenges is that folks tend to be isolated. And the higher the control, the more community a person leaves.

[00:53:25] I was also a little bit lucky because when I formally left religious spaces and when I got divorced, I did have friends outside of those religious spaces. So I had some support networks. Many individuals and many couples don't have those support networks. So this is a really lonely process. If there is anyone that you can trust, I highly encourage people to find trusted folks who can walk with them so that they're not alone.

[00:53:52] Outside of the clinical expertise, what can be helpful about therapy is you are not holding it all by yourself. And as your conversation with Tia showed, she lost everything. She didn't necessarily have people on the outside waiting for her. If you do hold on to those people and if you don't, see what little handholds you can create for yourself because you're also losing the structure of a community.

[00:54:21] You're losing the friendship, but you're also losing, well, my life revolved around my small group and my church and these friendships. And I read my Bible and I prayed and I practiced all my Bible memory verses. Really, you're building a whole new life. And so whatever structure you can give yourself is helpful. That's great advice. We'll make a note of that in our chapter about leaving. We're literally on it right now. Last few chapters of our book. We're so excited just to have it all in one place.

[00:54:51] We could just give to people. It's a pamphlet. It's a manifesto. It's a bit thicker than a pamphlet. Please call it a manifesto publicly. That'd be great. The cultist manifesto. Yeah. There's also a chapter about like if your group was mission oriented, not being mission oriented on the other side of it all. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, that's so important. Totally guilty of that. Any other particular books or resources for listeners that might be dealing with these issues that you'd like to throw out there? Yeah. Do we talk about Laura's book? Yeah.

[00:55:19] I would recommend Dr. Laura Anderson's book, When Religion Hurts You. And she has a podcast, Sunday School Dropouts. And Laura's book is particularly good for like, I just left. Like her book is like a wonderful landing pad because I think there are like stages of the healing, just like the example Jeremiah often uses is if a person is becoming sober, that first year they're just trying to survive.

[00:55:46] It isn't until 12, 18 months later that you can start really repairing relationships in a healing, in a meaningful kind of way. And so if you were the person listening to this and you're like, I am lost as fuck. I stopped going to church last Sunday and nothing makes sense anymore. Laura's book and her podcast is like a great landing spot. And I think it could be a great landing point for someone beyond that, but it is particularly helpful if this is a new journey for someone.

[00:56:14] The other book that I would mention is Sex, God and the Conservative Church by Tina Sellers. This was written a bit ago, 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. A lot of the literature and podcasts around leaving religious spaces deals with how does an individual take care of themselves? To our knowledge, Tina's book, Sex, God and the Conservative Church is the only book that talks about the relational and the relationship impact of this.

[00:56:42] Julia, you and I are actually in the early stages of writing a more, a book that talks about how a couple relationship can navigate the deconstruction, the leaving of religious space, cultic space together. We're in the process of that as well. But yeah, that would be another good resource to have. Yeah. The final one would be Dr. Emily Nagoski, and she has two books. Listeners could be very familiar with her.

[00:57:06] Her first book is Come As You Are and is a sexual health education book specifically geared towards women about how to engage in thriving sexuality. However, I encourage partners of women or literally anyone to read Come As You Are. I think it is a helpful sex education book for anyone of any gender. And then her second book, Come Together, takes a really partnered approach about, okay, with

[00:57:34] all this great sexual health education that you have, how do you integrate it into a relationship, especially a long-term partnership? And folks leaving high-control religious groups haven't had any sex education or they've received very poor sex education. So it's hard to know, okay, like I'm not reading church books anymore. So who are some good sources? And Dr. Emily Nagoski is probably the best sex education research source available. Amazing. I hope that this was helpful.

[00:58:02] I know it's such a big topic. It's a huge topic. Interesting people, interesting conversations, I think are what podcasts are for. So regardless of how it goes, I think we achieved that here. Okay, I hope it met the standard of interesting. We covered a lot of ground. We appreciate the time that we got to have with you, Jeremiah, and on your pod, which we think is wonderful, and we'll include all of that. And let's end on one final positive note. Well, first of all, where can people find you? Lots of places.

[00:58:33] So our podcast... For now, anyway. Our podcast is Sex Evangelicals, the sex education the church didn't want you to have. You can find us online at Instagram. Jesus, I do that every single time. We can find us online on Instagram at Sex Evangelicals. We also have a sub stack called Relationship 101. Do we want to announce our coaching business? Oh, sure. Great. We are in January launching officially a relationship coaching business.

[00:59:01] We're going to say nationwide, although it's actually worldwide. We have some initial clients who are living in Europe called Let's Heal Together. You can find out more at lhtconsulting.org, and we'll do relationship coaching specifically for folks where one or both people are in the process of leaving a high-control religious organization. Amazing. And if you're on that ASECT website, and depending on what state you live, you'll find our names

[00:59:28] on some state certification boards for sex therapy. That's cool. Perfect. Until next time, you guys. Take care. Yeah. Thank you. You too. Thank you, guys. If you like the show, please consider supporting us by giving us a rating, a review, and subscribe on iTunes. Cults are commonplace now, and we're looking at them all, and every little bit helps. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. That was a great conversation.

[00:59:57] Julia, Jeremiah, thank you so much for being here. We always recommend therapy to listeners who've experienced religious trauma in any form. So if you want to learn more about how religion impacts relationships in particular, check out the Sex Evangelicals podcast. You can also find Julia and Jeremiah's Relationship 101 blog on Substack. And if you need a therapist in the Boston area, hit them up. Thanks, as always, everyone. See you next time. We're sinking down to the depths of the ocean.

[01:00:39] A Little Bit Culty is a Trace 120 production. Executive produced by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Nippy Ames, in collaboration with Amphibian Media. Our co-creator is Jess Temple-Tardy. Audio engineering by Red Cayman Studios. And our writing and research is done by Emma Diehl and Kristen Reeder. Our theme song, Cultivated, is by the artists John Bryant and Nigel Aslan.