Episode 49: Hillary McBride & Preston McDaniel Hill – Mental Health in a Faith Transition

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Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

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Jared: Well, hey, everybody. Today on Faith for Normal People, it’s just me, and we’re talking about mental health in a faith transition, and we’re talking with Hilary McBride and Preston Hill. Hilary McBride is a registered psychologist, counselor, speaker, and writer. She’s the author of several acclaimed books, including Practices for Embodied Living: Experience the Wisdom of Your Body, and The Wisdom of Your Body, Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living.

And Preston Hill is a theologian and psychological scientist whose explores the intersection of faith, trauma, and mental flourishing. He aims to use his academic research and experiences to ask big questions about God, suffering, and healing. But together, Preston and Hillary have a project that they are leading called the Spiritual First Responders Project, which is a new resource for navigating faith change through evidence-based processing groups led by mental health professionals, licensed mental health professionals. And you can find more information about it at sfrproject.org. So if you listen to this episode and you really resonate with what they’re talking about, and it connects with you at a deeper level, I’d encourage you to check out the spiritual first responders project. SFRProject.org. 

Don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for quiet time where Pete and I are going to reflect on this conversation. All right, let’s dive in.

Hillary: “These moments of crisis where something starts to fall apart do not have to become the moments where we fall apart. We can be broken open into a more expansive, more whole, more organized, more congruent version of ourselves. Most of the time we don’t have the relational container to allow that to happen, but that is what is meant to happen. Like, we take off this old skin and we’re like, Whoa, what’s under here? Like an even more expansive version of myself.”

Jared: Alright. Well, Hillary and Preston, welcome to the pie house. You’re of a rare number where we’ve had multiple guests on at one time. So welcome. 

Hillary: Thank you!

Preston: Thank you for having us. 

Hillary: It feels so good to share this space with both of you. I feel very honored to be amongst the groups who’ve shared space together. 

Jared: Okay, well, we want to talk about spiritual transitions and mental health, and it’s a really, really, I think, important and timely topic. But before we do that, let’s get to know you a little bit. How did you get into this line of work of helping people navigate faith transitions? Are there some personal stories that maybe could elucidate sort of how you got here? 

Hillary: I think a couple of things that come to mind when you ask that question, the first is that I grew up in a home with two therapist parents where the, like, probably in a rare way, the dinner table conversation included this key phrase, I will quote my father verbatim when I say this, “Human growth and development,” it was like, pass the peas. “Let’s talk about human growth and development. What happened at school today? That makes sense based on human growth and development.” Like I wish I could give you a number for how many times that was like something that we just talked about conversationally.

And the thing that I learned from my parents who are again, therapists, my dad specialized in some developmental stuff. And people of faith is that they’re like, it makes sense that your faith would change over the course of your life. Of course, that’s part of how we grow and develop. And I was kind of handed this narrative personally, that the things that work for us when we’re a kid don’t work for us when we’re a teenager and don’t work for us when we have kids or when we face suffering or when we age, that there’s an assumption that as we grow, we have more experiences, we change, our worldview changes, and our faith and our experience of God, our spiritual practices should change too. 

So I think I was kind of offered this very normalizing story about the way that as people we are constantly evolving in a way that I think really contradicted some of the experiences that I had in my clinical practice when I was meeting people who were experiencing faith transition and changes in their way of organizing what they understand is happening here in the world as being really like distressing and isolating and creating a conflict inside of them which seemed to position in opposition their adherence to their community belief structure and their belonging in that community. As if like, you know, “I have to believe all the same things that I’ve always believed in order to be a part of these people who I think are my family.” 

And so there’s this tension inside of me as I was listening to people, thinking, this is like, kind of strange in a way that people are feeling a lot of distress about it. And yet, as I’m listening to people talk about their mental health and how their mental health is shaped by their faith experiences, it became impossible to ignore that for some people that the box that they were handed around what to believe and how to believe and how to practice belief—the box was too small at some point and that to step outside of that box or to enrich it or stretch it in some way came with a lot of distress, social distress, psychological distress and spiritual distress.

Jared: Yeah. I was furiously writing here. I have some questions, but Preston, I want to hear from you first. What about you in terms of your upbringing and how that is intersecting with this work. 

Preston: Yeah, I love hearing—we’ve had a lot of dialogue about this, obviously working together, but I love hearing you put language to that, Hillary, because for me, in a contrast to what you said, I was raised in a very religious home. I was raised very, like born and raised in North Carolina, Bible belt of the U. S. Like it was a part of my upbringing was just very conservative religious values. I never really got burned by that. I think my whole story has been one of deconstructing without knowing it. And that really happened for me through theology.

So I went and studied theology. I remember I was raised in this Baptist church that was very fundamentalist, I realize now. And at the time I told my pastor, I think I want to go study theology. And he said, where do you want to go? And I said, I want to go to Moody Bible Institute. And he said, you should watch out. You should be careful. And he thought that, like, Moody, which is a very conservative, like, fundamentalist sort of school, was too liberal. So I came out of that, and I went to Moody, my world expanded, Chicago was amazing. Then I went to St. Andrews in Scotland to study theology, and that was like, blew my world wide open, because, you know, just the different contexts, they don’t have the same, like, culture wars for Christianity that we’ve, some of us have experienced here.

So I sort of got to escape my American Christianity, go to Scotland, break everything down and figure it back. And then I came back and started teaching basically younger versions of me. Therapists, that’s primarily what I do is teach religion, spirituality, theology, competencies for therapists, people training to be licensed mental health practitioners.

And there’s one story that comes to mind, which is, I remember I was teaching a class on the Trinity and I was teaching Richard of Saint Victor’s argument for the Trinity from love. And it was just like basic ecumenical introduction to why Christians believe the Trinity. It’s all about love being at the heart of God.

This one student raised her hand and said, “Dr. Hill, what you’re saying makes me so happy and makes me so mad because I was raised Christian and I was never taught any of this.” And I remember going home that night and processing with my wife Chesney. I was like, the more I teach Americans basic Christianity, the more I feel like I’m teaching a foreign religion, like to a new people group.

And so I’ve just been in this process of like, it’s very painful for people who don’t know the options that are out there. And they don’t know how much exploration is even possible within a religious tradition, not to mention, like Hilary was saying, the normal developmental stuff of going outside and exploring and how that’s, that’s part of healthy psychology. So it should be part of healthy spirituality too. 

Jared: Yeah. Hearing both of those stories, I kind of think of an X and Y axis in terms of breadth and depth and kind of Hilary, your story talked a little bit about this depth of expecting change as we develop and we grow. And then for you Preston, it was sort of this breadth of the arms of Christian faith, not to mention other faiths, are way broader than people are ever given access to, and a lot of what we do at Bible for Normal People and Faith for Normal People is to help people understand that whatever their view is, we can probably point to some theological tradition that can contain that, that can hold that, because it’s like, well, that’s not new, but like you’re saying, you know, I grew up with a very narrow view of the Christian faith.

And if that, if you weren’t there, not only were you not a Christian, but you were going to go to hell for eternity, which is a very thin line to skate. So going back to what you said, Hillary, this idea I think could be new for people. Of course, your faith will change. And I think something you said that I think is important, maybe you can expound on, and that’s the community that you’re a part of. So if your community doesn’t expect change because truth is static and so why when you have it, why would you change? Because then you’re just going to be wrong because to change the truth is to be wrong. 

So if you’re part of a community that doesn’t allow for change or doesn’t expect change within your faith tradition, that can be very alienating and stressful. Can you talk about this community impact and the impact that that has on how their experience goes? 

Hillary: I think that in a lot of these communities, there is a very strong link. Like if we were looking at a Venn diagram, the circles would be almost completely overlapping where we look at the beliefs around like theological beliefs, practices, and then community belonging.

That those are so overlapping that people find it hard to distinguish them from each other. And so what that ends up meaning and feeling like is “I have to be exactly like you and these people in order to not just belong, but maybe have my relational needs met, to feel safe, not just here, but feel safe in a kind of an eternal sense.”

And so the stakes for behaving like other people and agreeing to what people want of you, including if there’s some rising cognitive dissonance inside this. I mean, the stakes are really high. People can feel like not only am I going to lose these people who I believe come to believe are my family, but if I think differently, I will suffer for eternity. And so will everybody else in my family and so on and so on. And so it creates this really interesting dynamic for people. Where because belonging is so essential to our survival and so essential for our development, like we actually need connection and community to not just thrive, but basically to, to develop.

Right? For our psychology, for anything, even like neuroanatomically for our brains to develop. We need belonging. We need connection. It’s part of how our nervous systems regulate, that people will do all sorts of things to try to dismiss or repress any instinctual inkling that they have that says, I don’t think this is right for me. I don’t know if this is what I believe and it can leave people feeling very, very fragmented between either staying connected to what they know to be true, kind of basic things that they know about how the world works, including like, I should feel my feelings or like, it’s okay for me to say no and have a boundary.

Those things can be repressed at the cost of integration and at the cost of having a whole healthy self. But they’re doing it because we need closeness, right? We need community. And the other side of it is people feel like if they stay connected to those knowings that they have, that it costs them, again, their family. I think of so many people who’ve grown up in religious or faith contexts where the word family has been used to imply, right, these bonds are, permanent and they’re enduring and maybe they might even supersede anything that you think or feel or want that these are your people and that if you disagree with them, if you think different than that, you are breaking up the family, you are creating a kind of division that has profound and long lasting repercussions.

So people feel, people get put into this place where there is a conflict between what they know to be true and this fundamental human need to belong. And I think that makes it very, very hard for people to feel like they can have an integrated healthy spirituality that grows as they grow and have people come along with them and witness and affirm and support and help them with the complexity and nuance of a, like an unfolding emergent experience of God.

Jared: I want to go fast forward from there, and I think a lot of our audience will resonate with this, and let’s say they’ve gone through a faith transition, but a lot of times people experience a bit of a wilderness after that. There’s a bit of a bell curve, or maybe an inverted bell curve, right, where the exhilaration or the excitement of following their heart, following what their intuition has been telling them, following these things into a new way of being spiritual or having a new faith. But then they don’t necessarily have their footing right away with that new tradition or whatever that is going to be. Maybe they don’t even know what it is. They just know what they’re leaving. They don’t really know what they’re leaving to or leaving toward so within that, what are some signs that people—because I think sometimes there can be a shame or an embarrassment to acknowledge that this faith transition has had an impact on you, right? because if you’re trying to like You’re leaving a faith tradition, and like you said, all your community and friends and family are kind of looking at you like, did they make the right decision, and you don’t even know if you’ve made the right decision.

You may be ignoring or trying to downplay some of the negative impacts of these faith transitions. So what are some signs that people might have been impacted by tradition in negative ways, like, how does that show up after you kind of, you’ve kind of left it, you’ve acknowledged that this is not the healthiest place for you, what are some things that would be signs that maybe that faith tradition hasn’t had a, a positive impact on you in some ways?

Preston: Well, just the first thing comes to my mind is some of the research that we’ve drawn from, from Daryl Van Tongren on people who do leave religion or people who, you know, take that step and feel like I can’t keep repressing these intuitions anymore. I can’t keep this, this dissonance is too much. I need to get something else. I need, it’s that—as Hillary was talking, I was thinking about attachment and, you know, when people are forced to choose between authenticity and connection. They will a lot of times choose connection because that bonding is so necessary for survival. But at some point, many people come to this place where they’re like, I can’t, this is not authentic. This can’t be true. Right? When you take that step, I think about the work of Dara van Tongeren on people who leave religion. 

If you had a lifetime of development and growing up in this family or this world, that religion, those systems, those cognitive frameworks, those emotional systems, they have a way of sticking with you even after you’ve left religion. So researchers call this religious residue. That there’s something that even after you leave religion, something about religion still stays with you. You can take the kid out of the youth group, but you can’t take all the youth group out of the kid. There’s some stuff that stays. And so when people leave, a lot of times they feel this dissonance of like, I know what I don’t want. I don’t know what I do want, but I still feel these impulses and there’s some things I still miss. And that ambivalence can be so disorienting. It can feel like your own intuitions are betraying you. It adds to the confusion and it certainly doesn’t help this fundamental problem of learning to trust yourself, learning to know that I can be safe to explore.

So I keep coming back to an attachment framework of you know, when you have a secure base, you feel free to go and explore. But if you’ve never had that, if you’ve never had a sense that, I mean, if all you’ve been taught is I’m fundamentally bad, God doesn’t like me, I’m destined for hell unless I get a little bit of mercy, and then you’re thrown into the wild of having to figure out your own spirituality, you don’t have a lot of good internal resources to move forward. So I think a lot of people just feel stuck and disoriented and groping in the dark. 

Hillary: It seems like, you know, one of the hallmarks of people who come out of religious and faith contexts where they’re realizing there’s like a, there’s been some damage done. I think to emphasize what Preston is saying, there’s often this fundamental mistrust of self, and that includes not knowing what to do with the information that we have in our body, that people have learned to silence and disavow.

We can think about our body as the place where knowing emerges. The compass, right? There is some data inside of us that tells us, “This is important to me, or this is what I want, where I can, I can trust my decisions.” And even that sense of I can trust myself comes back to a phenomenological experience that’s felt in the lived reality of the body.

But when people have been disconnected from their body and still believe that their body is bad, then it’s really hard to know how to make decisions. It’s really hard to tolerate the affect, uh, the emotion of feeling scared of the not knowing, and of being able to be okay with the not knowing and the figuring it out and the picking oneself up again.

But there’s like these little things that I hear from people clinically all the time that sound like, you know, “I’m bad.” And they might have left religion, or they might have like really changed their theological ideas. And yet still, this is the religious residue that Preston’s talking about. There is this deeply embedded belief that at my core, “I am bad.”

And they might be looking for other spiritual practices or going somewhere else, but that thing still lives inside of them. And I would say that, “my body is bad” and “I am bad” are two of the things that I see the most from people who have left religious context, where, you know, yes, there were some beautiful things to it. And yes, there was probably some connection and meaning and a sense of belonging in some way. But to me, those feel like really important diagnostic tools for being able to say to somebody that, that was not good. That hurt you in some way. It left you with an imprint that is persisting, even though you’ve left that context.

Jared: Yeah, I’m, I’m thinking of, I’ve known several people who years after they’ve left a faith tradition of like an eternal damnation would say, “I’m still terrified of going to hell. I haven’t even believed in hell in a decade.” And it’s still that, that religious residue. It’s a really good phrase for I think what a lot of people experience.

Jared: What are some key concepts that help people in those early stages, when they, it feels like a free fall, they are starting to realize what they left was sort of holding them up in such a way. And now they want to stand on their own two feet, but they have no tools for that. What are some concepts that you guys use in the mental health profession that can start giving people a new way to look at things, or a new, a new frame, a new practice or whatever that is, you know, what are some things that people can understand from a, from a conceptual level that may be helpful for them? 

Hillary: Yeah, what comes to mind for me is something from Dr. Carol Gilligan’s work. She wrote a really influential book in the eighties. She’s a Jewish psychologist and her work was called “In a different voice.” And it was really looking at the way that we have multiplicity of voice inside of us. For people who’ve become more familiar with internal family systems or ego state work or parts work, you might be familiar with that idea. 

But Carol Gilligan, I mean, her work was the first to introduce me to the way that we carry different voices inside of us. And the voices represent neural networks that help us engage with the world around us. And why that’s so important to talk about not just from like a day to day consciousness perspective, but from a feminist perspective, is that that actually helps us navigate the world and the way that we interact with different forms of power.

And so it becomes very useful for us to learn to speak the language of the people who have the most power, the people who we’ve come to fear, the people who have the most control. And so Carol Gilligan’s work highlights that we, particularly growing up, learned to speak in different voices as a way of staying connected to people who could keep us safe.

And as we leave religious context, I think it’s really important to help people start to begin to name and identify what those voices are inside. There is a voice that sounds a lot like that preacher who told you, you are going to burn in hell forever. And do you notice how you keep playing, like, that voice keeps speaking up, even though that preacher isn’t there?

Let’s like, let’s start to identify that voice and the role that it served. And let’s also notice this voice inside that tells you, “you’re horrible and terrible” and has a lot of shame. Okay. There’s a shame voice. But as we start to identify the different voices inside, we can start to also notice the whispers of other voices that have been there all along. Like there’s a voice that might say, “I don’t like this. This doesn’t feel good.” 

And as soon as like, you can imagine a choir director, this is often the analogy that I use in my thinking about multiplicity of self, like Hillary’s voice, what you’re hearing is like a choir of voices. And in one moment, like a good choir director, you might hear the, you know, the Alto in the back and be like, “Hey, I need to hear a little bit more from you. I need to, I mean, you know, I want to pull your voice forward” and say, “Hey, that we actually need that to round out the sound here.” And so I think a really good clinician is not just listening for the places of injury, but just also listening for the voice of the person, like the kind of healthy ego structure. And is like, “Hey, I saw that moment where you said no to me, you actually spoke up to someone who had authority and said, no, that doesn’t work. And wow, I want to hear more from that voice.” That was the voice that had to go away a long time ago. 

So looking at internal family systems, parts work, ego states, kind of the feminist rendition of this, or even political theory, standpoint theory is really interested at looking at this, like how we, depending on how much power we have learned to speak the voice, like have a voice that sounds like the person in the room who has the most power, like just starting to do some analysis around that and then pulls [to] the forefront, um, the voices that were there all along that had to go away and making room for them.

I think that’s probably one of the most fundamental skills that we can give people to honor the residue, right? To honor, there is going to be this voice in you that says, you’re a bad kid and you’re going to go to hell. Like that will still be there for a long time. And actually that doesn’t need to go away for you to be able to work on developing these other parts of you and create an ego structure that allows you to face the world and maybe even love that younger part of you who had to develop that voice just to stay safe.

Jared: So good. And Preston, I want to ask if you have anything to add into that, but I think that is a really, it’s a powerful image. Because I think of a lot of people, and myself included, that when you look back, there were these moments that you can, a lot of people can point to where they read a story from the Bible and thought, well, that doesn’t seem quite right, uh, in terms of some violence or there’s something else that they can remember a time when they were curious about it and it didn’t seem quite right.

But then it’s sort of like you look around and no one’s asking that question, or you may be explicitly told not to ask that question. And so to be able to recapture that childhood voice or that other small voice and to say, that’s needed. Let’s bring that to the front. I think it’s just a really powerful image, but Preston, do you have any other concepts or thoughts that might be helpful?

Preston: I just think it’s so good. What we, this whole thing, the choir, the multiplicity, the internal family, the internal world that’s going on inside. I would just add that, you know, that internal world, that multiplicity emerges out of contexts of our own, to quote Hillary’s father, “human growth and development,” and how different demands from different voices require this emergent internal choir to happen. So I just think of how all of this happens in the context of attachment. 

I’ve found attachment to be such a helpful framework to help people understand, okay, not just where you’re at, but what happened, like go back through your life and understand. Oh, that was anxious attachment. That wasn’t actually my spiritual fervor. It was my need for security that drove that religious commitment. To actually go back through and see how are these attachments developed? How did that develop a relationship with myself and my own self efficacy? 

And I think the biggest insight that I found liberating for a lot of people is to just invite them to understand that, you know, attachment theory is all based on this process, this dynamic process between two, where I feel secure with you and therefore I am free to go out and explore my world. And when I go and explore my world and I have secure attachment, the caregiver is not anxious or possessive. The caregiver actually is like, yes, go explore, go explore. And I’ll be here if you need me, I’m your secure base and I’ll be your safe haven.

And just reframing, okay, if that’s what healthy psychology looks like, how can you do a 180 with theology and say that it now becomes a protective, constricted game? I mean, if it’s healthy in psychology, it can’t be the opposite of that health in theology. So just inviting people to think, what if you had an attachment-fueled view of your spirituality where exploration was actually not a threat, but was part of your health?

Jared: You talk about meaning-making as a part of this process, and I, I want to, I want to dive into that because I do think that’s an important part of it—is there’s a worldview or a way to make sense of my place in the world and what my purpose is and, and how I go about my day to day life that fits into a framework and gives me meaning.

So, when people don’t have a religious framework for that anymore, or it’s not the one they grew up with, and they’re searching for it, how does this fit in? How do you help people? And why would they need help with that? Like what purpose did certain religious traditions play in meaning making? And then how do you go about doing that without kind of this absolutist framework?

Preston: Well, it’s really hard, right? Because if you were raised in a high-control religious context, in some sense, your life is easy because you already know what’s meaningful and what isn’t. And so the value structures are already assigned, you don’t have to go discover them, you don’t have to cut your teeth on them, it’s a purely passive process.

And in some sense, I think there’s a, I want to acknowledge there’s a real comfort in that for a lot of people. It serves as a powerful terror management tool to know, “Okay, these are the boundary lines. This is what’s good. This is what’s bad, but I didn’t have to determine any of that.” But the problem is we can stay underdeveloped spiritually. But psychologically, if we’re going to survive, we have to develop. So there’s this growing split where I actually learned part of mature life and relationships is creating meaning with people in the world. But then if that never translates upward or vertically to your spirituality, you never learned that actually spiritual meaning can be created and discovered, not just received. Then you’re left in between a rock and a hard place. 

So I think a lot of the work is inviting people to recognize, again, that idea of exploration and efficacy. Is that spiritual meaning doesn’t have to be any less real just because it is discovered or, you know, co-created or you are active in the process of bringing forth that meaning that doesn’t make it less real just because it was not passively received as an inert objective absolute object.

So I think that’s the challenge for people is developing. But that feels hard because it’s like asking me to bench press 180 when I’ve never stepped foot in a gym. I’ve just never done that before. So what are you even talking about? 

Jared: Yeah, how do you even get people to get their arms around what that means? Because I do think people experience what I often jokingly, you know, refer to, um, Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the terrible freedom.

“Uh, I feel like I’m just free falling here.” And yeah, to exercise the will in meaning making is so abstract for people who’ve never really done it or needed to do it or had a concept for it. So how do you help people even start to get on that track? 

Preston: Well, I want to hear what Hillary thinks, but I would just say that something I’ve seen really powerful is inviting people to go back through their lives and see how they’ve actually already been doing this in small ways. So maybe it’s a big step to exit your church or to go to a new tradition or whatever. But I think most people can identify those moments, like in that youth group, or in that small group or Bible study, or whatever it was. Like there, we do have these micro traces of evidence of co-creating and discovering.

I think that’s, it sort of is hidden in the shadows underneath this assumption that it’s all, I don’t think it’s all actually passively received. I think actually people are co-creating it. They just don’t realize their active role in it. So you can sort of invite people to go on a treasure hunt in your past and try to find where there have been those moments where you felt the not just the terror, right? But the exhilaration of that co-creating process and how satisfying and how it felt in your body. 

And a lot of times you just have to start bottom up. Like, when did you feel the most safe and the most seen in a spiritual context? And if people start talking about that memory, you can often start to find some traces of, wow, it sounds like you were actually a pretty active agent in that process. Have you ever noticed that or thought about that? What’s it, what comes to your mind, Hillary? 

Hillary: The first thought that I had while listening to your question, Jared, is that meaning making is a human process and is not owned by religion. And that is something that is organic to our existential development. In fact, it’s actually really important even when we’re within religion, that we take some ownership of the meaning that we’re trying to make as, as something that is actually part of what we’re doing here. Like there’s a task, an existential task there that is asked of us in terms of supporting us towards our development and our flourishing.

And so it brings to mind Yelum’s four fundamental concerns, death, meaning, freedom and belonging. And how this is so, these things need to be wrestled with in order for us to really be here to really, really be alive. So a couple things that come to mind for me in terms of supporting people with this are, are practicing in really small ways, the ability to decide meaning to not just receive meaning, but to co-create it. And I think that can be as simple as like, well, what did that mean to you? Right. Someone like there’s an interaction. Oh, you had this beautiful friend, you know, this friend and this birthday and this interaction and this gift and it touched you like, tell me, what did that mean to you? 

What does it mean? Right? About what lights you up? Like, I think that we can start with these really small experiences that don’t leave us feeling like we have to make incredibly large claims about the universe to be like, “Oh, this feels like personally meaningful because it tells me something about myself.” And I think that there’s, you know, these other pieces, it comes back to attachment.

Like I’m loving to riff off this idea that Preston, you’ve been bringing up so much around attachment, which is: it’s a really hard thing to tolerate the distress of the not knowing. And when we, when we can feel ourselves as held and seen and known and accompanied in the places of not knowing—quite literally what the empirical literature says about that, is that we move from the terror that immobilizes us into the ability to be curious and explore.

And so when we have someone saying, whether it’s a partner or a friend or a parent or a therapist or spiritual director, whoever it might be. Someone saying, “I’ll be with you while you don’t know.” It breaks apart this assumption that most people had in religion, which is that you have to know, and it has to be the same as what I know in order for me to be connected to you. And for people to be able to feel connection and belonging without the knowing, I think it, it begins to dissolve the terror, and it allows us to become curious, to begin to explore and experiment with what meaning is, could be.

Jared: And maybe even this is a quick sidebar, but I think a lot of parents. You know parents have asked me like how do you raise your kids in a faith tradition that they’re not going to have to undo later because kids don’t do well with ambiguity and I don’t want them to have anxiousness and what I share without such eloquent language Is what you just gave me is none of that really matters if you’re attached to them if you’re in this trusting relationship, whether or not, you know, what happens if you die is like really clear to them or not actually doesn’t, at least in my experience with my kids, it didn’t matter that much.

It was sort of like, well, what my relational needs are being met. And so it feels a little bit less important to get all these things right when you have that connection. And so that attachment piece, I think is, yeah, and then to take it and bring it into for people who are going through that faith transition and maybe I’ll kind of tie back into that community piece. If you’re going through these faith transitions to have someone who isn’t there contingent upon you believing the same thing and say I’m just walking along with you and we can explore it together, can be a really powerful part of the healing process.

I mean, I’ll ask that as a question. Do you guys agree with that in terms of a way for people to do this? You, faith transition stuff better or well is to find those people and sometimes that means truly leaving that faith community who says they’re gonna accept you but then feels like it’s still conditional and then maybe finding some people who truly will walk alongside you no matter the conclusions you’re coming to, no matter the observations you’re making.

Hillary: It feels like such a fundamental human need that I would say that goes beyond meaning making or religious identity or religious deidentification into like, what’s my vocation? What do I want to, like, what, what do I love about life? What makes me feel alive? What’s happening in this other developmental transition for me?

What about parenthood? Like, to have people who can witness us and hold space for us as we are in places of not knowing and change, I think is the thing that allows it to become an invitation into healing and flourishing instead of moments of crisis where we have to fragment off from ourselves in order to stay safe.

Like these moments are, they’re difficult and they’re painful and we see that in the research, we see that in clinical context, we’re seeing that in the, in the nature of this study that we’re a part of. But I think I have this deep belief inside of myself, and this is, I would say, evidence based, that these moments of crisis where something, something starts to fall apart, do not have to become the moments where we fall apart.

It’s like we can be broken open into a more expansive, more whole, more organized, more congruent version of ourselves. I think that the problem is that most of the time we don’t have the relational container to allow that to happen. But that is actually what is meant to happen. Like we, we take off this old skin and we’re like, Oh, that’s too small. Whoa. What’s under here? Like, Whoa. An even more expansive version of myself. 

Like the analogy that we often used in my family growing up or that my dad and I bat around all the time is like, you’re not supposed to wear the same shoes at five that you do at 15. Like quite literally your foot size grows. Like you’re supposed to bust out of those shoes and be able to find some container that holds the version that you are now. And then again, and again, and again. And that, that transition I think is so scary because we’re not supported well, but it doesn’t have to be scary and it’s not bad. 

Preston: Yeah, Donald Winnicott once said early, he’s an early psychoanalyst, early attachment theorist said, “there’s no such thing as a baby,” by which he meant we’re all just highly developed babies and you’re right, kids don’t tolerate ambiguity well. But our goal is not to take away the ambiguity. Our goal is to teach them the gift that it can be and how to tolerate distress. 

And the thing that popped in my head as you were talking, Hillary, is one of my favorite passages is Augustine’s Confessions Book 10. And in there, he just repeats this question over and over again. He says, “what do I love when I love my God?” Over and over and keeps answering it and and reworking it and deconstructing it trying to figure it out. And I was just thinking if God can do it with Augustine, then we should be able to do it with each other, to try to discover what do I love when I love this thing I’m trying to call God. So I would just say yes, like at all levels, psychologically, theologically, it’s a pretty normal, good thing to do. 

Hillary: Can I add in one piece, which I think just like further emphasizes your point, I think what Winnicott says after that, or like the other iteration of the quote that I heard is there’s no such thing as an infant, only a nursing couple.

And that I’ve heard it interpreted as when a caught saying, there’s actually no such thing as an individual. That’s not how we start. Like, there’s no being that exists entirely on its own. That there’s actually just a relational dance that’s happening. And to assume that an individual phenomena, like the person exists outside of influence from other relationships, is like to fundamentally misunderstand how we think and grow and be.

And so if, if relational context is going to be that important for shaping our destructive views about ourself, then relational context is still going to be important when we come out of those even more so for creating opportunities for us to feel like we can envision new versions of ourselves. 

Jared: Well, I don’t want this conversation to end, but at some point we have to. If I can, I want to, I want to end the conversation by talking a little bit about flourishing. So can you just talk about what you mean by flourishing whenever you talk about it? Because again, I think the language for a lot of people has been shaped by their religious tradition and they don’t have another vision for what flourishing is outside of that context. So can you talk a little bit about flourishing and if it helps, maybe contrast that with how some religious traditions would talk about flourishing. 

Hillary: I am thinking about—the mental health continuum is coming to mind, which is a theory we use in sanctuary mental health. That’s an organization that I do some work with where we’re trying to promote mental health resources and conversations in faith communities.

And the conversation implies that there’s kind of two accesses to understanding how we are as people and that you can have mental health concerns and still be flourishing, or you could have the no presence of like a diagnosable mental health condition and be languishing in what’s happening for you.

So I want to position flourishing as not from an ableist perspective, which I think is really easy for us to do where we say flourishing exists if no distress, like no mental health acuity, no suffering, no diagnostic criteria are met. Like that’s actually not what flourishing is. It’s our ability to experience and accept ourselves as we are, have the tools and the resources to meet our needs, to face the world around us and to be able to see and experience joy and aliveness, including perhaps the things that feel most painful about life and know how to be with those. 

And I would go on to say again, because of the nature of attachment and how it’s featuring in this conversation, that it’s really hard to flourish individually. It’s really hard to flourish in a silo when we have, when we are isolated, that there is something about belonging and experiencing the richness of connection which supports our flourishing and being able to, to do some meaning making. I think it’s really important. It can be really hard to flourish when everything feels chaotic and distressing, but I don’t think that meaning making has to have this, like, really rigid structure around it that feels enclosing and restrictive in some way.

But I definitely know that the ability to be present in life, to accept ourselves, to be connected to other people and to have at least the tolerance to ask the meaning questions are a really big part of our ability to feel like we are well. 

Jared: Preston?

Preston: it’s so hard. Flourishing is, there’s just so much literature, there’s so much like as a topic, it’s one of these things. I mean, I literally was thinking what is flourishing is like asking what does it mean for something to be delicious. It’s like, well, it’s hot and spicy. No, it’s cold and sweet. Well, yes, yes. It’s like, what is it? Well, I think it’s properly basic. That’s a philosophical thing that means it is what it is. And what I’m drawn to is like, we know it when it’s there. And we know when it’s not there. We can’t always say why, but it’s just very self-evident. And I was drawn to, as you’re asking that question about flourishing, there’s an awesome book I’ve been liking recently by Jonathan Pennington on “The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing” is what it’s called.

The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. And how the word blessed there, like blessed are the peacekeepers, blessed are so and so, is actually a great word for it is flourishing. Like this is what it means to have a good life. Like what is a good life? What is a well off human being? Is a big question we all have.

What’s a, what’s a flourishing human look like? And something I love about, you know, Jesus’s answer is he says, “You earthly parents, if your child asked for bread, would you give them a stone? If your child asked for fish, would you give them a snake?” And the crowd rhetorically in the background is saying, No, Jesus, of course not.

And Jesus says to them, “If you know what goodness is like, God is like that, but even more.” And he’s doing this argument from the lesser to the greater. What I love about it is he’s basically inviting people—I never knew this until I really broke it apart, and it’s just been really transformative for a lot of my deconstructing students, is to realize that Jesus is inviting the crowd in that passage to reason from their own experiences of flourishing toward divine realities.

In other words, you know what it’s like to flourish, you’re a human. You’ve had experiences, you’ve had touches of being seen, of feeling felt, of feeling like you impact your world. Take those things and use them as a compass for what you know ultimate reality must be like, if it’s worth chasing after at all.

So I think of flourishing as one of these self-evident things and can take, also I think it’s important to have humility. Because what’s flourishing for one person may not be for another. And so if it is properly basic, I need to be really curious and humble and open. Maybe what’s flourishing for me isn’t flourishing for someone else.

Jared: Well, thank you, Preston. Thank you, Hilary, for coming on. And for those of you who resonate with this and are really tracking, I would encourage you to check out the Spiritual First Responders Project, this new resource for navigating these transitions backed by the Folks like Hillary and Preston. So thanks so much for joining us and having this conversation. It was wonderful. 

Hillary: Thank you!

Preston: Thank you. 

Hillary: What a treat to be with you. 

Jared: And now for quiet time…

Pete: …with Pete and Jared .

Jared: Well, I think this episode with Hillary and Preston is going to be really helpful for a lot of our our listeners. But for you and me Pete, it’s relatable. This transition, leaving one sort of religious expression, whether or not people end up with another one or not, that, that phase of, of leaving a religious tradition or a faith expression can have, it’s, it’s similar for a lot of people. But for you, Pete, like, what were some of the psychological effects of leaving that faith tradition or that community or that expression at the time for you? 

Pete: Well, I mean, it’s, it, it wasn’t one thing. It actually, there was a little path, and at first, it was just an incredible sense of relief, you know? I mean, I was in a different situation, it was employment, but still, I felt like, goodness gracious, I’m out from under this oppressive way of thinking.

But then I think the real stuff hit me months later when I realized there was nobody watching me anymore. There was no guardrails. I felt really alone and it was a very disorienting experience. And that’s when things for me got very just silent. I mean, there was sadness. I remember lying on my sofa in what was my study at the time and just thinking to myself, I’ll never sing another Christmas carol again.

I won’t have those familiar holiday rhythms because nothing made sense to me. So I think, I think sadness, a little bit of fear about not having a narrative, a totalizing narrative, right? That makes sense of everything. And really just, I like Richard Rohr’s language of orientation, disorientation, reorientation.

It was a disorienting period for me. And, um, that’s why people who say, you know, you’re deconstructing because you’re sexy or something. You’re just trying to be cool. Nah, nobody, nobody does that for that reason. It’s something that just hits you and you go through it. How about you? 

Jared: Yeah, I appreciated you know, on the episode, we talked about the terrible freedom. Where it’s that sense of freedom, but then there’s also a terror attached to it. And that’s what I picked up a little bit when you said feeling really alone. It’s sort of like, yeah, there’s this liberation. But sometimes liberation comes with loneliness or feeling isolated or alone.

So I definitely relate to that. I think the only other word I would add to what you said was an emptiness, it just felt like a lot of things were stripped away from me. And so I did have like a sense of emptiness of, it was both relational, like a loss of community, but it was also structural, if that makes sense.

Like a loss of a structure of like, okay, I’ve been wanting this thing. And now that I have it, it’s like, hmm. Uh, yeah, I didn’t, I don’t think I anticipated the impact or the effects of what it looks like to kind of let go of a certain structure. 

Pete: Yeah, I mean, that’s, that exactly describes, uh, you know, um, my own process of just the, I remember the, the, where I was when it dawned on me that it was so much easier before, because you have people telling you what you had to believe.

And now nobody’s telling me and the inner voice said, “Well, Pete, you got what you wanted. Now, what are you going to do?” Right? And to me, that was again, it’s an overused metaphor, but that’s when that path started for me. I had—Do I have, frankly, the courage to see this through? And I had no plan, I just kept reading stuff and talking with people. And without a plan of like, I need to get back to where I was, because I knew that—that I don’t want that. I’d left that on purpose. But where do I go now? And I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage.

This is a courageous thing. It’s not a flippant thing. And that doesn’t make anybody heroes, but it’s, it’s difficult. And it’s, it’s hard to, you know, if we can use the metaphor, it’s, it’s hard to leave the fortress, even though the fortress has crumbled, the temptation is to want to build it back up again.

But then to say, I’m leaving this behind, I’m not looking back, I’m going forward. And that path is, is nice for a couple of turns. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it, there’s fog and you don’t know where your next step is going to take you. And yeah, that, that terrible freedom. It is exactly that. 

Jared: Yeah. And maybe not to mix metaphors. I mean, I will mix metaphors. I hope it’s not a confusing metaphor. But what you said earlier reminds me too of, yeah, something I experienced where it’s almost like, it’s almost like going to the gym, but your back spot has been like holding most of the weight. So you think you’re like, pushing all of this weight up. You know, you’re sitting there bench pressing, but it turns out that like the authority in your life was the one really doing all the heavy lifting. And then all of a sudden it’s like the weight comes crushing down on you and you realize like, “Oh I haven’t been working out at all.” And then there’s this like embarrassment and like, I have to go back to the drawing board. I have to lift almost no weight and then I’m sore and it’s like, then I have to build that up on my own. 

Pete: Yeah. I love that. So you had a spotter who just walked away. 

Jared: Yeah, exactly. 

Pete: Or you told them to go away or whatever. 

Jared: Told them to go away and didn’t realize the impact.

Pete: I got this. Yeah. 

Jared: Good. Well, maybe to turn the corner a little bit on, on, you mentioned orientation, uh, disorientation and reorientation.

What were some things that, that helped you, you know, we talked about quite a few with, uh, Hillary and Preston, but just for you personally, what were a couple of things that helped? And even as I say it out loud, I do feel like time is a big part of that. 

Pete: Oh yeah, absolutely. 

Jared: I think time in itself can help a lot, but what are some other things that helped you with that reorientation piece?

Pete: Well, I mean, just, just being left to feel. Right? That’s not just the passage of time. I think that’s implied in what you said, but it’s just, you can’t escape this. You can’t manufacture some quick thing. So just having, when I first came, I didn’t remember, like, I was probably reading something monastic or something. I don’t know what it was, but, and I was just seeing, like, “Oh, this is normal, this is what happens to people, this is not like I’m weird, I’m actually late to the game.”

And I think knowing that was a tremendous help, and, and the community that expressed that to me was a, you know, a book community, or an online article community. And, and to this day, Jared, I don’t remember, like, did I intentionally seek stuff out? Did I, like, search for things on the internet? I don’t, I don’t remember doing any of that stuff. I was just too tired. 

But people came to me, and things came to me, and book recommendations, and I, I happen to have had a couple of friends who had had a very difficult, uh, a tragic event in their lives, and, uh, they made some turns as well, and I sort of followed their lead every now and then. So I think it’s people. It’s people who understand, who don’t judge you. And for me also, one thing I’ll add is making the decision to do church—when I eventually went back to church—to do church very differently. And that for me meant a move to churches that model stuff that I was reading. So something that’s more liturgically oriented and not you know, a 45-minute bad sermon, that’s really a much worse lecture, you know, and then not really connecting with this, this journey that you have to be on.

Jared: Well, I just want to tie what you said, if you remember from the episode, Hillary and Preston talking about attachment theory. And so, you know, you saying it’s people that you don’t feel judged around. And so I thought it was really impactful and maybe this is a good place to end, to talk about that, that safe place to explore. Where if you can find a place where you’re not going to be judged for your questions and you’re going to be able to explore, but that requires that initial safe place, that attachment. That connection so that there isn’t a fear. 

And that can be theological where you feel maybe attached to a god who’s not going to send you to hell for your questions, but it can also just be very practical a group of people a new community a new group of friends who are like you said it could even be a metaphorical community in a book it could be finding like “Oh, there’s a whole group of people like me, you know, I’m not going to be judged for now the questions, and I’m not going to judge myself knowing there’s a great cloud of witnesses, so to speak, that I can draw from to normalize my experience,” and I think that’s a really critical thing. 

Because when you come out of a community thinking you’re the only one, it is pretty easy to have this narrative or this tape running in your head that you’re the apostate, you’re the heretic, you maybe, maybe you have, maybe you’re kind of gaslighting yourself, like maybe I did have some secret sin in my life that I’m trying to, but then to have that normalized by these communities or these books and resources and new church communities.

Pete: I would, I would add, uh, to, to normalize, you know, the related concept of validate. Because people want to feel validated on, uh, there’s nothing wrong with me other than a normal process in the life of faith, and, and, and you have those, those difficult times when transitioning, transitioning is hard. I mean, I don’t like to buy new clothes. [Jared laughs] You know, I don’t want to go car shopping, I don’t want to find a house or an apartment, I don’t like, I hate that stuff, right? But this is like the transition of all transitions. This, you know, your connection with ultimate reality. It’s like—

Jared: Right, right, exactly. All right. Well, thanks everybody. And we hope that you keep thinking about these things and processing on your own. And, uh, hopefully you found some tools that have been helpful for you on the journey as well.

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.