Jenny and Danielle: The Arise Podcast Speaker 1 (00:00): Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender in the church, and how does that intersect with reality? Today, Jenny and I talk about the intersectionality of faith or spirituality and therapy and dominion and what does that look like. So go ahead and listen in. I think you'll find it interesting.
Danielle (00:02):
Hey, Jenny, you and I usually hop on here and you're like, what's happening today? Is there a guest today? Isn't that what you told me at the beginning?
And then I sent you this Instagram reel that was talking about, I feel like I've had this, my own therapeutic journey of landing with someone that was very unhelpful, going to someone that I thought was more helpful. And then coming out of that and doing some somatic work and different kind of therapeutic tools, but all in the effort for me at least, it's been like, I want to feel better. I want my body to have less pain. I want to have less PTSD. I want to have a richer life, stay present with my kids and my family. So those are the places pursuit of healing came from for me. What about you? Why did you enter therapy?
Jenny (00:53):
I entered therapy because of chronic state of dissociation and not feeling real, coupled with pretty incessant intrusive thoughts, kind of OCD tendencies and just fixating and paranoid about so many things that I knew even before I did therapy. I needed therapy. And I came from a world where therapy wasn't really considered very Christian. It was like, you should just pray and if you pray, God will take it away. So I actually remember I went to the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, partly because I knew it was a requirement to get therapy. And so for the first three years I was like, yeah, yeah, my school requires me to go to therapy. And then even after I graduated, I was like, well, I'm just staying in therapy to talk about what's coming up for my clients. And then it was probably five years, six years into therapy when I was finally like, no, I've gone through some really tough things and I just actually need a space to talk about it and process it. And so trying to develop a healthier relationship with my own body and figuring out how I wanted to move with integrity through the world is a big part of my healing journey.
Danielle (02:23):
I remember when I went to therapy as a kid and well, it was a psychologist and him just kind of asking really direct questions and because they were so direct and pointed, just me just saying like, nah, never happened, never did that, never felt that way, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like as I've progressed through life, I've had even a better understanding of what's healing for me, what is love life like my imagination for what things could be. But also I think I was very trusting and taught to trust authority figures, even though at the same time my own trauma kept me very distrusting, if that makes sense. So my first recommendations when I went, I was skeptical, but I was also very hopeful. This is going to help.
Jenny (03:13):
Yeah, totally. Yep. Yeah. And sometimes it's hard for me to know what is my homeschool brain and what is just my brain, because I always think everyone else knows more than me about pretty much everything. And so then I will do crazy amount of research about something and then Sean will be like, yeah, most people don't even know that much about that subject. And I'm like, dang it, I wasted so much effort again. But I think especially in the therapy world, when I first started therapy, and I've seen different therapists over the years, some better experiences than others, and I think I often had that same dissonance where I was like, I think more than me, but I don't want you to know more than me. And so I would feel like this wrestling of you don't know me actually. And so it created a lot of tension in my earlier days of therapy, I think.
Danielle (04:16):
Yeah, I didn't know too with my faith background how therapy and my faith or theological beliefs might impact therapy. So along the lines of stereotypes for race or stereotypes for gender or what do you do? I am a spiritual person, so what do I do with the thought of I do believe in angels and spiritual beings and evil and good in the world, and what do I do? How does that mix into therapy? And I grew up evangelical. And so there was always this story, I don't know if you watched Heaven's Gates, Hells Flames at your church Ever? No. But it was this play that they came and they did, and you were supposed to invite your friends. And the story was some people came and at the end of their life, they had this choice to choose Jesus or not. And the story of some people choosing Jesus and making it into heaven and some people not choosing Jesus and being sent to hell, and then there was these pictures of these demons and the devil and stuff. So I had a lot of fear around how evil spirits were even just interacting with us on a daily basis.
Jenny (05:35):
Yeah, I grew up evangelical, but not in a Pentecostal charismatic world at all. And so in my family, things like spiritual warfare or things like that were not often talked about in my faith tradition in my family. But I grew up in Colorado Springs, and so by the time I was in sixth, seventh grade, maybe seventh or eighth grade, I was spending a lot of time at Ted Haggard's New Life Church, which was this huge mega, very charismatic church. And every year they would do this play called The Thorn, and it would have these terrifying hell scenes. It was very common for people to throw up in the audience. They were so freaked out and they'd have demons repelling down from the ceiling. And so I had a lot of fear earlier than that. I always had a fear of hell. I remember on my probably 10th or 11th birthday, I was at Chuck E Cheese and my birthday Wish was that I could live to be a thousand because I thought then I would be good enough to not go to hell.
(06:52):
I was always so afraid that I would just make the simplest mistake and then I would end up in hell. And even when I went to bed at night, I would tell my parents goodnight and they'd say, see you tomorrow. And I wouldn't say it because I thought as a 9-year-old, what if I die and I don't see them tomorrow? Then the last thing I said was a lie, and then I'm going to go to hell. And so it was always policing everything I did or said to try to avoid this scary, like a fire that I thought awaited me.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am currently in New York right now, and I remember seeing nine 11 happen on the news, and it was the same year I had watched Left Behind on that same TV with my family. So as I was watching it, my very first thought was, well, these planes ran into these buildings because the pilots were raptured and I was left behind.
Danielle (08:09):
And so I know we were like, we get to grad school, you're studying therapy. It's mixed with psychology. I remember some people saying to me, Hey, you're going to lose your faith. And I was like, what does that mean? I'm like 40, do you assume because I learned something about my brain that's going to alter my faith. So even then I felt the flavor of that, but at the time I was with seeing a Christian therapist, a therapist that was a Christian and engaging in therapy through that lens. And I think I was grateful for that at the time, but also there were things that just didn't feel right to me or fell off or racially motivated, and I didn't know what to say because when I brought them into the session, that became part of the work as my resistance or my UNC cooperation in therapy. So that was hard for me. I don't know if you noticed similar things in your own therapy journey.
Jenny (09:06):
I feel sick as you say, that I can feel my stomach clenching and yeah, I think for there to be a sense of this is how I think, and therefore if you as the client don't agree, that's your resistance
(09:27):
Is itself whiteness being enacted because it's this, I think about Tema, Koon's, white supremacy, cultural norms, and one of them is objectivity and the belief that there is this one capital T objective truth, and it just so happens that white bodies have it apparently. And so then if you differ with that than there is something you aren't seeing, rather than how do I stay in relation to you knowing that we might see this in a very different way and how do we practice being together or not being together because of how our experiences in our worldviews differ? But I can honor that and honor you as a sovereign being to choose your own journey and your self-actualization on that journey.
Danielle(10:22):
So what are you saying is that a lot of our therapeutic lens, even though maybe it's not Christian, has been developed in this, I think you used the word before we got on here like dominion or capital T. I do believe there is truth, but almost a truth that overrides any experience you might have. How would you describe that? Yeah. Well,
Jenny (10:49):
When I think about a specific type of saying that things are demonic or they're spiritual, a lot of that language comes from the very charismatic movement of dominion and it uses a lot of spiritual warfare language to justify dominion. And it's saying there's a stronghold of Buddhism in Thailand and that's why we have to go and bring Jesus. And what that means is bring white capitalistic Jesus. And so I think that that plays out on mass scales. And a big part of dominion is that the idea that there's seven spheres of society, it's like family culture, I don't remember all of them education, and the idea is that Christians should be leaders in each those seven spheres of society. And so a lot of the language in that is that there are demons or demonic strongholds. And a lot of that language I think is also racialized because a lot of it is colorism. We are going into this very dark place and the association with darkness always seems to coincide with melanin,
You don't often hear that language as much when you're talking about white communities.
Danielle (12:29):
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting when you talk about nuts and bolts and you're in therapy, then it becomes almost to me, if a trauma happens to you and let's say then the theory is that alongside of that trauma and evil entity or a spirit comes in and places itself in that weak spot, then it feels like we're placing the victim as sharing the blame for what happened to them or how they're impacted by that trauma. I'm not sure if I'm saying it right, but I dunno, maybe you can say it better.
(13:25):
Well, I think that it's a way of making even the case of sexual assault, for instance, I've been in scenarios where or heard stories where someone shared a story of sexual assault or sexual violence and then their life has been impacted by that trauma in certain patterned ways and in the patterns of how that's been impacted. The lens that's additionally added to that is saying an evil entity or an evil spirit has taken a stronghold or a footing in their life, or it's related to a generational curse. This happened to your mother or your grandma too. And so therefore to even get free of the trauma that happened to you, you also have to take responsibility for your mom or your grandma or for exiting an evil entity out of your life then to get better. Does that make sense or what are you hearing me say?
Jenny (14:27):
Well, I think I am hearing it on a few different levels. One, there's not really any justification for that. Even if we were to talk about biblical counseling, there's not a sense of in the Bible, a demon came into you because this thing happened or darkness came into you or whatever problematic language you want to use. Those are actually pretty relatively new constructs and ideas. And it makes me think about how it also feels like whiteness because I think about whiteness as a system that disables agency. And so of course there may be symptoms of trauma that will always be with us. And I really like the framework of thinking of trauma more like diabetes where it's something you learn to moderate, it's something you learn to take care of, but it's probably never going to totally leave you. And I think, sorry, there's loud music playing, but even in that, it's like if I know I have diabetes, I know what I can do. If there's some other entity somewhere in me, whatever that means, that is so disempowering to my own agency and my own choice to be able to say, how do I make meaning out of these symptoms and how do I continue living a meaningful life even if I might have difficulties? It's a very victimizing and victim blaming language is what I'm hearing in that.
Danielle (16:15):
And it also is this idea that somehow, for instance, I hate the word Christian, but people that have faith in Jesus that somewhere wrapped up in his world and his work and his walk on earth, there's some implication that if you do the right things, your life will be pain-free or you can get to a place where you love your life and the life that you're loving no longer has that same struggle. I find that exactly opposite of what Jesus actually said, but in the moment, of course, when you're engaged in that kind of work, whether it's with a spiritual counselor or another kind of counselor, the idea that you could be pain-free is, I mean, who doesn't want to be? Not a lot of people I know that were just consciously bring it on. I love waking up every day and feeling slightly ungrounded, doesn't everyone, or I like having friends and feeling alone who wakes up and consciously says that, but somehow this idea has gotten mixed in that if we live or make enough money, whether it's inside of therapy or outside of healing, looks like the idea of absence of whether I'm not trying to glorify suffering, but I am saying that to have an ongoing struggle feels very normal and very in step with Jesus rather than out of step.
Jenny (17:53):
It makes me think of this term I love, and I can't remember who coined it at the moment, but it's the word, and it's the idea that your health and that could kind of be encompassing a lot of different things, relational health, spiritual health, physical health is co-opted by this neoliberal capitalistic idea that you are just this lone island responsible for your health and that your health isn't impacted by colonialism and white supremacy and capitalism and all of these things that are going to be detrimental to the wellness and health of all the different parts of you. And so I think that that's it or hyper spiritualizing it. Not to say there's not a spiritual component, but to say, yes, I've reduced this down to know that this is a stronghold or a demon. I think it abdicates responsibility for the shared relational field and how am I currently contributing and benefiting from those systems that may be harming you or someone else that I'm in relationship with. And so I think about spiritual warfare. Language often is an abdication for holding the tension of that relational field.
Danielle (19:18):
Yeah, that's really powerful. It reminds me of, I often think of this because I grew up in these wild, charismatic religion spaces, but people getting prayed for and then them miraculously being healed. I remember one person being healed from healed from marijuana and alcohol, and as a kid I was like, wow. So they just left the church and this person had gotten up in front of the entire church and confessed their struggle or their addiction that they said it was and confessed it out loud with their family standing by them and then left a stage. And sometime later I ran into one of their kids and they're like, yeah, dad didn't drink any alcohol again, but he still hit my mom. He still yelled at us, but at church it was this huge success. It was like you didn't have any other alcohol, but was such a narrow view of what healing actually is or capacity they missed. The bigger what I feel like is the important stuff, whatever that
But that's how I think about it. I think I felt in that type of therapy as I've reflected that it was a problem to be fixed. Whatever I had going on was a problem to be fixed, and my lack of progress or maybe persistent pain sometimes became this symbol that I somehow wasn't engaging in the therapeutic process of showing up, or I somehow have bought in and wanted that pain longterm. And so I think as I've reflected on that viewpoint from therapy, I've had to back out even from my own way of working with clients, I think there are times when we do engage in things and we're choosing, but I do think there's a lot of times when we're not, it's just happening.
Jenny (21:29):
Yeah, I feel like for me, I was trained in a model that was very aggressive therapy. It was like, you got to go after the hardest part in the story. You have to go dig out the trauma. And it was like this very intense way of being with people. And unfortunately, I caused a lot of harm in that world and have had to do repair with folks will probably have to do more repair with folks in the future. And through somatic experiencing training and learning different nervous system modalities, I've come to believe that it's actually about being receptive and really believing that my client's body is the widest person in the room. And so how do I create a container to just be with and listen and observe and trust that whatever shifts need to happen will come from that and not from whatever I'm trying to project or put into the space.
Danielle (22:45):
I mean, it's such a wild area of work that it feels now in my job, it feels so profoundly dangerous to bring in spirituality in any sense that says there's an unseen stronghold on you that it takes secret knowledge to get rid of a secret prayer or a specific prayer written down in a certain order or a specific group of people to pray for you, or you have to know, I mean, a part of this frame, I heard there's contracts in heaven that have agreed with whatever spirit might be in you, and you have to break those contracts in order for your therapy to keep moving forward. Now, I think that's so wild. How could I ever bring that to a client in a vulnerable?
And so it's just like, where are these ideas coming from? I'm going to take a wild hair of a guest to say some white guy, maybe a white lady. It's probably going to be one or the other. And how has their own psychology and theology formed how they think about that? And if they want to make meaning out of that and that is their thing, great. But I think the problem is whenever we create a dogma around something and then go, and then this is a universal truth that is going to apply to my clients, and if it doesn't apply to my clients, then my clients are doing it wrong. I think that's incredibly harmful.
Yeah, I know. I think the audacity and the level of privilege it would be to even bring that up with a client and make that assumption that that could be it. I think it'd be another thing if a client comes and says, Hey, I think this is it, then that's something you can talk about. But to bring it up as a possible reason someone is stuck, that there's demonic in their life, I think, well, I have, I've read recently some studies that actually increases suicidality. It increases self-harming behaviors because it's not the evil spirit, but it's that feeling of I'm powerless. Yeah,
Jenny (25:30):
Yeah. And I ascribed to that in my early years of therapy and in my own experience I had, I had these very intensive prayer sessions when therapy wasn't cutting it, so I needed to somehow have something even more vigorously digging out whatever it was. And it's kind of this weird both, and some of those experiences were actually very healing for me. But I actually think what was more healing was having attuned kind faces and maybe even hands on me sometimes and these very visceral experiences that my body needed, but then it was ascribed to something ethereal rather than how much power is in ritual and coming together and doing something that we can still acknowledge we are creating this,
That we get to put on the meaning that we're making. We don't have to. Yeah, I don't know. I think we can do that. And I think there are gentler ways to do that that still center a sense of agency and less of this kind of paternalistic thinking too, which I think is historical through the field of psychology from Freud onwards, it was this idea that I'm the professional and I know what's best for you. And I think that there's been much work and still as much work to do around decolonizing what healing professions look like. And I find myself honestly more and more skeptical of individual work is this not only, and again, it's of this both, and I think it can be very helpful. And if individual work is all that we're ever doing, how are we then disabling ourselves from stepping into more of those places of our own agency and ability?
Danielle (27:48):
Man, I feel so many conflicts as you talk. I feel that so much of what we need in therapy is what we don't get from community and friendships, and that if we had people, when we have people and if we have people that can just hold our story for bits at a time, I think often that can really be healing or just as healing is meaning with the therapist. I also feel like getting to talk one-on-one with someone is such a relief at times to just be able to spill everything. And as you know, Jenny, we both have partners that can talk a lot, so having someone else that we can just go to also feels good. And then I think the group setting, I love it when I'm in a trusted place like that, however it looks, and because of so many ethics violations like the ones we're talking about, especially in the spiritual realm, that's one reason I've hung onto my license. But at the same time, I also feel like the license is a hindrance at sometimes that it doesn't allow us to do everything that we could do just as how do you frame groups within that? It just gets more complicated. I'm not saying that's wrong, it's just thoughts I have.
Jenny (29:12):
Totally. Yeah, and I think it's intentionally complicated. I think that's part of the problem I'm thinking about. I just spent a week with a very, very dear 4-year-old in my life, and Amari, my dog was whining, and the 4-year-old asked Is Amari and Amari just wanted to eat whatever we were eating, and she was tied to the couch so she wouldn't eat a cat. And Sean goes, Amari doesn't think she's okay. And the four-year-old goes, well, if Amari doesn't think she's okay, she's not okay. And it was just like this most precious, empathetic response that was so simple. I was like, yeah, if you don't think you're okay, you're not okay. And just her concern was just being with Amari because she didn't feel okay. And I really think that that's what we need, and yet we live in a world that is so disconnected because we're all grinding just to try to get food and healthcare and water and all of the things that have been commodified. It's really hard to take that time to be in those hospitable environments where those more vulnerable parts of us get to show up
Danielle (30:34):
And it can't be rushed. Even with good friends sometimes you just can't sit down and just talk about the inner things. Sometimes you need all that warmup time of just having fun, remembering what it's like to be in a space with someone. So I think we underestimate how much contact we actually need with people.
Yeah. What are your recommendations then for folks? Say someone's coming out of that therapeutic space or they're wondering about it. What do you tell people?
Jenny (31:06):
Go to dance class.
I do. And I went to a dance class last night, last I cried multiple times. And one of the times the teacher was like, this is $25. This is the cheapest therapy you're ever going to have. And it's very true. And I think it is so therapeutic to be in a space where you can move your body in a way that feels safe and good. And I recognize that shared movement spaces may not feel safe for all bodies. And so that's what I would say from my embodied experience, but I also want to hold that dance spaces are not void of whiteness and all of these other things that we're talking about too. And so I would say find what can feel like a safe enough community for you, because I don't think any community is 100% safe,
I think we can hopefully find places of shared interest where we get to bring the parts of us that are alive and passionate. And the more we get to share those, then I think like you're saying, we might have enough space that maybe one day in between classes we start talking about something meaningful or things like that. And so I'm a big fan of people trying to figure out what makes them excited to do what activity makes them excited to do, and is there a way you can invite, maybe it's one, maybe it's two, three people into that. It doesn't have to be this giant group, but how can we practice sharing space and moving through the world in a way that we would want to?
Danielle (32:55):
Yeah, that's good. I like that. I think for me, while I'm not living in a warm place, I mean, it's not as cold as New York probably, but it's not a warm place Washington state. But when I am in a warm place, I like to float in saltwater. I don't like to do cold plunges to cold for me, but I enjoy that when I feel like in warm salt water, I feel suddenly released and so happy. That's one thing for me, but it's not accessible here. So cooking with my kids, and honestly my regular contact with the same core people at my gym at a class most days of the week, I will go and I arrive 20 minutes early and I'll sit there and people are like, what are you doing? If they don't know me, I'm like, I'm warming up. And they're like, yeah.
(33:48):
And so now there's a couple other people that are arrive early and they just hang and sit there, and we're all just, I just need to warm up my energy to even be social in a different spot. But once I am, it's not deep convo. Sometimes it is. I showed up, I don't know, last week and cried at class or two weeks ago. So there's the possibility for that. No one judges you in the space that I'm in. So that, for me, that feels good. A little bit of movement and also just being able to sit or be somewhere where I'm with people, but I'm maybe not demanded to say anything. So yeah,
Jenny (34:28):
It makes me think about, and this may be offensive for some people, so I will give a caveat that this resonates with me. It's not dogma, but I love this podcast called Search for the Slavic Soul, and it is this Polish woman who talks about pre-Christian Slavic religion and tradition. And one of the things that she talks about is that there wasn't a lot of praying, and she's like, in Slavic tradition, you didn't want to bother the gods. The Gods would just tell you, get off your knees and go do something useful. And I'm not against prayer, but I do think in some ways it seems related to what we're talking about, about these hyper spiritualizing things, where it's like, at what point do we actually just get up and go live the life that we want? And it's not going to be void of these symptoms and the difficult things that we have with us, but what if we actually let our emphasis be more on joy and life and pleasure and fulfillment and trust that we will continue metabolizing these things as we do so rather than I have to always focus on the most negative, the most painful, the most traumatic thing ever.
(35:47):
I think that that's only going to put us more and more in that vortex to use somatic experiencing language rather than how do I grow my counter vortex of pleasure and joy and X, y, Z?
Danielle (35:59):
Oh yeah, you got all those awards and I know what they are now. Yeah. Yeah. We're wrapping up, but I just wanted to say, if you're listening in, we're not prescribing anything or saying that you can't have a spiritual experience, but we are describing and we are describing instances where it can be harmful or ways that it could be problematic for many, many people. So yeah. Any final thoughts, Jenny? I
Jenny (36:32):
Embrace the mess. Life is messy and it's alright. Buckle up.
If you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.
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Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.