00:00:00 Jeromy Johnson: Jeremy here. As I was writing this episode, I was struck at how deep it hit me. This one was pretty personal. I was going to publish it just a standalone, without any reflection or reaction afterwards. But because of how deeply this impacted me, I wanted to bring someone on. So I asked Christy Williams, who is a religious traumatic coach, to share her reactions and thoughts about this episode. So listen to the monologue first, but stick around for the second half, where Christy and I dive into her reaction and thoughts about this episode. All right, let's get started. 

There are things we were told as kids that seemed harmless at the time. Little warnings, little superstitions, the kind of things that we would laugh at later. Sometimes parents tell us untruths to get us to do certain things, and we fully believe them because that's what kids do. We trust the voices that shape us. But there were other things I believed, things that didn't make me laugh when I grew up, things that went deeper, things about God, about me, and about whether love is something I could ever really expect. This episode, titled You Don't Deserve Love, is about one of those beliefs the quiet, devastating idea that shaped my faith, my identity, and the way I learned to see myself in the mirror. It's about a lie that worked its way into my bones. So take a breath. Let's talk about the story many of us inherited, and the love that's been trying to undo it ever since. I'm your host, Jeremy Johnson, and you're listening to Slutty Grace. 

Growing up, my dad used to tell me this. If I wore socks to bed. My feet would fall off. And I believed him. So much so that when I told my brother this truth, he laughed so hard at me, saying, you're dumb. That's not true. Dad just didn't want you to wear socks to bed. But for the longest time, I believed this lie that if I wore socks to bed, my feet would literally fall off. Because kids believe the voices they trust. And kids assume that grown ups know what they're talking about. So this was a belief that I carried with me for a number of years. Thankfully, I still have my feet, but weirdly, I don't wear socks to bed. Now, as an adult, I can look back and laugh. I can see the absurdity. There's no medical warnings about sock related amputations. Here's the thing. 

That wasn't the only strange belief that I inherited. It wasn't the only thing I was told that seeped deep into my bones and shaped how I view myself the way that I saw God. Maybe others. And the way that I thought love worked. and the next belief that one wasn't funny. It wasn't cute. It wasn't harmless. Okay. Seatbelts on. 

I grew up hearing these definitions of mercy and grace in church. Mercy? Is God not giving you what you deserve, not giving you hell, not giving you damnation. That's mercy. And grace. Is God giving you what you don't deserve love, forgiveness. God's giving you that even though you don't deserve it. And it sounded so reasonable, if I'm honest. So spiritual. People said it with conviction, with that tone that tells you this is the gospel. And I remember nodding in agreement at its wisdom. I even regurgitated it in my teachings to youth. But now, now it sounds crazy. Deeply untrue. And honestly, a little traumatic. Okay, maybe a lot traumatic. Here's what that teaching really formed in my heart. Jeremy, you don't deserve love. Not from your heavenly father. Not from your earthly one. Not from anyone. You're depraved. You're a sinner by nature. You're born broken. You're destined for hell. And I was only rescued because I believed something. And God took pity on me. Imagine being a kid walking around your own house, holding this belief like a cracked mirror. My parents love me, but they shouldn't. I'm unworthy of it. Imagine believing your very existence is an offense that Grace has to sweep under the rug. And you know what happens next. You internalize it not as theology, but as identity. You become the person apologizing for taking up space. Maybe not outwardly, but inwardly. The teenager who's terrified of messing up, the adult who assumes the people who love you will eventually discover the truth about you, that you're undeserving and they'll leave. This is what shame based religion does. At least it did for me. It baptizes self-hatred. It calls woundedness humility. It calls fear reverence, and it calls unworthiness good doctrine. And so we grow up believing that love, real love, is something we must never expect, something we must always be grateful for, but fully never trust because we're so undeserving of it. I mean, if we're not deserving of God's love, whose love should we be deserving of? Because grace, I was told, is God giving me what I don't deserve? But let's pause. Let's be adults now. Let's examine this the way that we examine the SoC story, shall we? So imagine a parent telling a child, you don't deserve love for me. You are inherently unworthy of my affection. You are so bad, so depraved, that the only reason I love you is because I decided to, despite you being so undeserving. If a parent actually lived and spoke that way, we'd call it verbal abuse. A therapist might call it trauma. Society would call it neglect. But some religions call it orthodoxy. And I swallowed it. Perhaps you did too. Here's the truth. I've come to see grace. Isn't God giving us what we don't deserve? Grace is God reminding us of what we were always worthy of. Let me say that again. Grace isn't God giving us what we don't deserve. That's that's the lie. Grace is God reminding us of what we were always worthy of love, forgiveness, and grace. We weren't born to prayed. We weren't born stained. We weren't born into a courtroom waiting for the verdict. We were born into love. You were born from love. You were born of love. And nothing about your existence made God flinch or reconsider. And if love is who God is, then love is what you are. And you can't be undeserving of what you are. And if we want to see the heart of God on full display, let's look at the people that Jesus chose to love. The people everyone else decided were undeserving. There's Zacchaeus, the crooked one percent guy hiding up in a tree to hear Jesus. The crowd saw a thief. Jesus saw a dinner guest. I'm coming to your house today, Zacchaeus. Grace didn't wait for worthiness. Grace created it. And then there's the woman caught in adultery. She's dragged out of the heat of passion and into the street, surrounded by men with stones and scripture to justify throwing them. And Jesus kneels down in the dust and dismantles the entire execution. He then tells her, I do not condemn you. Not after repentance, not after behavior change, just unconditional dignity. And then there's the Roman centurion, the ice agent, as you were an enemy of Israel, a collaborator with oppression. But when he asks for help, Jesus says, I'll come. There is no moral exam or doctrinal test, just compassion. And then there's the leper. Untouchable. Unclean. The kind of man people cross the road to avoid. And Jesus crosses the road towards him and touches him before the healing, because belonging comes first. Story after story after story, Jesus gives grace to those the religious world have written off. Does this sound like someone who gave them love, dignity, and healing despite them being undeserving or because they simply were deserving of love, dignity and healing. Period. No asterisk. But maybe the deeper damage is this when you believe that you don't deserve love, you will always doubt it. You'll wait for the fine print. You'll wait for the moment God gets tired of forgiving you. I mean, how many times did I rededicate myself to Jesus growing up? You'll wait for the moment others see the real you and choose to walk away, and religion will say, that's humility. Good job. But it's not. It's self-rejection dressed in Bible verses. Here's the freedom I found. You don't have to deserve love to receive it. But you also were never undeserving of love. I was never undeserving of love. Love isn't earned. It's not a merit badge. Love simply is. And God doesn't love you despite who you are. God loves you because of who God is and because of who you are. A child embraced, loved. For us to say I don't deserve love is to misunderstand both. When you were born, the first thing God said about you was, this is good. Not depraved. Not a problem I'll have to fix. Good. You and I were good. You and I are good. We're never perfect, but always good. Always loved. So if you, like me, have carried around that old teaching that fear soaked, traumatic definition of mercy and grace. Please hear me. You are not a worm. You are not depraved. You are not undeserving, and you are not fundamentally flawed. You are a child of God. You are loved because love wanted you here. You matter because love has never once let you go. And you don't have to earn this. You don't have to prove this. You don't have to apologize for existing. Because love isn't something God forces himself to give you. Love is something God delights in giving you because you are worth loving. Let's stop resisting the truth of our own belovedness. Let's stop believing the lie that you don't deserve love. All right, Christy, what do you think?

00:11:18 Kristi Williams: Yeah. So I grew up seventh day Adventist, and, um, it's the same book, different chapter. We we had slightly different rules and theology growing up Adventist. And so in some ways, that teaching affected me less. in other ways. It kind of came out, affected me more. But it's very similar. So in a nutshell, we believe that we were we were made in the image of God. And we weren't born fallen. We fell when we committed our first sin, like essentially by taking on Adam's sin nature. But then it's like, well, where is that line? Is it this age of accountability?

00:11:54 Jeromy Johnson: So it just delayed it a little bit, but it.

00:11:56 Kristi Williams: Still delayed it. Yes. Yeah. But that embedded sense of like I am, you know, I am a sinner or that sin identity wasn't quite as deep like I, I certainly and maybe it was just my own experience. I think other Adventists would say that they felt that really deeply. But I remember a song at VBS that's like, if I Were a Butterfly and it was like about being fearfully and wonderfully made. And I felt that like I felt love from God. But then it did get really complicated because it's like, all right, I knew at some point I had sinned. I don't know when that magic moment was that, you know, I took on Adam's fallen nature, and then it was told to me that Jesus came to give me a second chance, which always felt like foolhardy, because I was like, well, if the first two humans fell and everyone has since then, I don't think a second chance is gonna cut it. And then at that point, you talk about this concept of like being given grace for something we don't deserve, like God's love that we don't deserve. And as a conservative Adventist, like I was in deep and Grace was kind of a dirty word. It was kind of a taboo word because it really wasn't about grace.

00:13:03 Jeromy Johnson: Kind of slutty.

00:13:04 Kristi Williams: It. Yes, Grace was a slutty word. Completely. Because we were taught that grace. And I think this is how I was taught it. It's how I understood it. Grace was God giving me power to overcome sin because I had to develop a sinless character. And this is what the judgment was about, was really about assessing my character based on my record. Because sin won't be present in heaven, it won't rise up a second time. And the only thing we can take to heaven is as our character. And therefore, if you have a character hell bent on sinning, you can't go to heaven because you would defile heaven. And so it wasn't like, I don't think any of us were taught that, like, God sends you to hell per se, but it's like, that's kind of the default position, and he's trying to save you from that. But for me, that played out. Um, some of you have heard of this and some of you haven't, but, um, attachment theory is how we attach to our primary care givers. Yeah. And I've come to realize that whatever we were taught about religion, our theology tended to amplify the effects that our primary care givers had on us.

00:14:11 Jeromy Johnson: Really?

00:14:11 Kristi Williams: So I by by default, I had a fearful avoidant attachment style, or it was essentially a, a chaotic attachment where sometimes you as a child are better off to like, hyper connect anxiously with your parent to really draw in close and you'll be rewarded for that. But other times you need to minimize your needs. You need to pull back. Take care of yourself. Regulate yourself. Whatever. Hide. Minimize your real feelings. And that's how I related to God. It was like he was this figure I could go to and pray to and be comforted by. But at the same time, ultimately, he had the angel who was writing down everything I ever did. He was the guy in charge of judgment. Like it wasn't Satan running the ultimate test. It was God. You know that I had to pass this test with God, essentially, so it amplified that fearful avoidant attachment with God.

00:15:05 Jeromy Johnson: Wow. So it's almost like how we're connecting with God is like our parent, right?

00:15:08 Kristi Williams: Right.

00:15:09 Jeromy Johnson: And we were taught like that. God loves us too. Right. Like God loves you. He died for you on the cross. Like this is how much he loves you. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you. And then you have the separation theology that says because you sinned in your case or because of your sin nature, in our case, you're separated from God. Therefore you don't deserve God's love and grace until you get it fixed. And so God's going to give you grace to give you that which you don't deserve.

00:15:36 Kristi Williams: And it creates a cognitive dissonance. Two things that really don't make sense together. Yes. And every time we have a cognitive dissonance, it creates like a fracture in our psyche and it opens us up. It's this trauma.

00:15:49 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm. Tell me more about that.

00:15:50 Kristi Williams: As a religious trauma coach coming from a background of spirituality. There's this huge discussion around our demons real. Well what does real mean. Are they embodied. But we can look at objectively and say there is an energy, there is a kingdom of darkness. And to me, so many of these things are our beliefs. They're the emotions we associate with beliefs that we hold. And so in this kind of shattering of our psyche, and in this way of growing up, we take on beliefs that we create an identity around, and those beliefs carry a dark energy. Yeah. And that energy can keep us safe when we're in a traumatic situation. But later on, they essentially, like, knock us off kilter of living like a healthy whole life. So some of those beliefs could be like, I'll never be loved. I'm never worthy of really being loved. I need to stay silent, to be safe, or I'm too much or I'm not enough. And those beliefs orient us a certain way in our childhood. They're adaptive. They help us adapt to our environment. But it is immediately obvious how those beliefs stunt us and keep us stuck and cut us off from really experiencing love in our adult years.

00:17:04 Jeromy Johnson: I think I knew inherently, but I didn't realize just how deeply traumatic this kind of thinking is to a kid and to an adult. Like to think that your entire life you deserve hell. And how backwards is that? You deserve hell. You don't deserve love. So if you want to talk about Satan and lies and if there's anything that created on lies, it's this like, this is so reversed. Yes, you deserve love. You don't deserve hell. That's the truth. But they go. No, you don't deserve love. You deserve hell because of your your sinful nature. Whether you sinned after birth or you just were born into it. Right?

00:17:40 Kristi Williams: Yeah.

00:17:41 Jeromy Johnson: That's so sick. That's gross.

00:17:43 Speaker 4: It was a fascinating.

00:17:44 Kristi Williams: Thing to me. I left the Adventist church just two years ago, actually, at the end of twenty twenty three, and I experienced religious psychosis in twenty twenty one. And that was my real wake up call. My background is in nursing. I never dreamed I'd be in the psych ward. That was terrifying for me.

00:17:59 Jeromy Johnson: Um, wow.

00:18:00 Kristi Williams: And it was a beautiful breaking. But coming out of that, I knew that I had to take a really honest look about how religion impacted my mind. And so I was comparing the Adventist church versus the Bible, and it didn't stack up. But then, like, jumped into the evangelical swimming pool. And the first thing that everyone was talking about was this sin nature. Original sin. Yeah. And I thought about it from a psychological perspective. And I said, that's going to cause problems.

00:18:32 Jeromy Johnson: Interesting. So this was all new to you, right?

00:18:34 Kristi Williams: That was new.

00:18:35 Jeromy Johnson: That's crazy.

00:18:35 Kristi Williams: And I knew I knew like the evangelical church taught that. And for a minute there I thought, oh, well, the evangelical church must be biblical. I think I was I grew up in a cult. Like, that's probably wrong. You did? Evangelical church must be where it's at. Well, what does cult even mean? It means like it's less popular than the most popular.

00:18:53 Jeromy Johnson: No. You know, what cult means is the group you're not in.

00:18:55 Kristi Williams: That's what it means, exactly. But I could not get behind Original Sin. I was studying my Bible really deeply at that point, and especially Romans. Romans really showed me the problems with the Adventist church. But I learned that original sin is based on just a little chunk of three verses. I believe it's in Romans six. And I started learning more about like how that came into the church, like it wasn't taught for the first several hundred years of Christianity. I was just very suspect of it. But more than anything, I saw the psychological ramifications of believing that. As luck would have it, we visited a few different Christian churches, and I just felt such a deep sense that they all operated on power and control, and that they did not have the best interest of people in them. And I felt a voice in me telling me to look for a church where they treated gay people truly as equals. That a gay person could be just as comfortable in the pew as I was.

00:19:55 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:19:56 Kristi Williams: And that they they cared more about people's stories than about policies. I visited a little church right up the road from me, and the first thing I said to the pastor, this guy doesn't know me from Adam. And I'm like, hey, what's your policy about gay people? Let's put you on the spot or anything. He doesn't know what the right answer is.

00:20:12 Jeromy Johnson: That is the pastor's favorite question. Right out of the gate. Yeah.

00:20:16 Kristi Williams: Yes. Oh, yeah. And he, like, takes a deep breath, composes himself, and he's like, I think it's more important to listen to people's stories. We're all equal at the foot of the cross. And I was like, wow, there's that word wow. So we started going there and after a few weeks I was like, there's a lot this guy isn't saying. So we got to talking about Original Sin. I was like, I don't think this is a good theology, much less psychology. And he's like, yeah, it's made up. Like, it's not it's not even biblical.

00:20:46 Jeromy Johnson: That is awesome.

00:20:48 Kristi Williams: I had also seen this verse, John seventeen twenty one, where Jesus is praying his famous prayer, and he says, I would that they would be in me as I am in the father, and you are in us, that we would all be one. And I was like, why?

00:21:01 Jeromy Johnson: Beautiful.

00:21:02 Kristi Williams: It's so beautiful. And it resonates as so true. And it's like, why? If Jesus said it was better for him to go, that the Holy Spirit would be in us, and then we have Pentecost. Why do we keep saying, oh Lord, please come and worship with us today. Please come and fill me like and we're always praying out. And it hit me. I was like, what would it be like to pray in?

00:21:23 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:21:24 Kristi Williams: Because as long as I'm praying out, I'm denying the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

00:21:29 Jeromy Johnson: That's awesome.

00:21:30 Kristi Williams: What really blew my mind was understanding the neurobiology of theology.

00:21:36 Jeromy Johnson: Okay. Okay.

00:21:36 Kristi Williams: So my background's in nursing, and I worked in like three different areas of neurology. So this was always something I understood from the medical perspective. But then going through my own mental illness and seeing the impact that theology has on our lives, it has it's it's opened my eyes. So I'll teach you a few things.

00:21:55 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Please.

00:21:56 Kristi Williams: Right in the middle of your brain, you have a little organ that is shaped like an almond, and it's called the amygdala. And it lives right in the middle of your brain. And it is the the seat, the director of our brainstem. So our brainstem is how we operate. If we're in threat, it's like our fight or flight center. So when the amygdala detects a threat it becomes inflamed and it activates our brainstem. It's our survival mode. Okay, well, when you live in a state of, like, shame or fear or guilt, that is a negative hormonal response coursing through your body that is stored as a threat in the amygdala, a hyper activates the amygdala. And so our amygdala becomes enlarged and activates our survival brain.

00:22:44 Jeromy Johnson: And kids have this right. So as they're growing up they have amygdalas too. And when they're showed and taught this a little six year old Tommy, you're going to hell unless you say this prayer. Well, hell's pretty damn scary when it comes to kids and their minds. So imagine that amygdala probably got triggered, huh?

00:23:01 Kristi Williams: Yes, absolutely. Kids are born just with their brainstem. That's why babies cry when they're hungry. Like, that's the only option they have. And in order to correctly develop our neurobiology, we have something called mirror neurons.

00:23:15 Jeromy Johnson: Okay.

00:23:15 Kristi Williams: That must be mirrored by an attachment figure, ideally our primary caregiver, where we feel attunement, which is our parent coming into attunement to our internal state. We feel containment, we feel seen, held and known by them. And now we're going in another tangent. But this is a whole other part of religious trauma is that we were given behaviorism or a performative role that we needed to be a certain way, and our parent needed us to act that way. And so they used discipline, usually like heavy discipline, to move us into that role. And yet they miss our actual state. And so most of us did not receive mirroring that would develop mirror neurons properly. So all of that high control religion impacts our neural development. But the amazing thing is, is that the brain is plastic. And through healthy adult relationships and a and a healthy understanding of a God who loves us, it heals the trauma that our brain has embedded.

00:24:17 Jeromy Johnson: That can be a healthy part of deconstruction, right? Of rethinking things can actually start to reheal when you start thinking, rethinking God, love and grace and everything else.

00:24:26 Kristi Williams: Which is the Greek word metanoia, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's the word metanoia. This is the birthing into the new mind. Let this mind be in you which was in Christ. The mind of love. Like this is the whole new covenant encounter. It is the healing of the trauma.

00:24:45 Jeromy Johnson: That's awesome.

00:24:46 Kristi Williams: So okay, so you have your amygdala. It activates your brain stem. So you're living out of your brain stem in high control religion. The next part that happens more in the in the middle section of your brain, um, there's a region called the anterior insula. So this is kind of like the receiver of your body signal. So and it's fascinating. We don't often think about this, but emotions are a felt experience in your body, just like hunger or tiredness. If you feel guilt you feel fear. You can feel like that knot in the pit of your stomach. Yeah. What? You know, maybe your hands get clammy. It's a felt sense. So when high control religion puts us in a felt sense of guilt, or I am a sinner and it becomes identity, it's essentially flooding the anterior insula with negative sensations to where the anterior insula loses that sensitivity to pick up small shifts in your body. Like for one, one thing it loses is that intuitively, our body senses our yes's and no's. If we want to do something or we don't, if we have a boundary, if something's violating that boundary, there's senses in our body telling us if we want to do something or we don't. But all of those things get drowned out by this constant guilt being sent to the anterior insula. So then our body does something to adapt to that. Because why would we want to be flooded with negative sensations all the time? Yeah. And so in order to deal with that flood of negativity, we dissociate and we stop picking up on sensations from our body altogether because it is. It is too painful to be in relationship with the sensations that are coming from our body. And this impacts our relationships and our own mental health at a profound level, because we are in a functional free state where dissociated from our own human experience.

00:26:39 Jeromy Johnson: And this can start young, just as a result of a highly religious environment. Again, like I don't think they're like out there, like just trying to hurt people, but no, just the theology or the beliefs in and of themselves like this one. It's just a great phrase. And yet here it is. It really builds on guilt and shame and fear and starting out like you're just a worm. You're just like, you just don't deserve this.

00:27:06 Kristi Williams: Yeah. You know, neurobiology is a new field. Like this information just wasn't available a generation or two ago. They're just starting actually, to run functional MRI imaging on trauma patients. Even like cognitive trauma. And they're picking this up on imaging. And I'm waiting for the day. If you were raised in high control religion, it's going to show up on imaging.

00:27:30 Jeromy Johnson: That would be yeah.

00:27:31 Kristi Williams: You know, and that just wasn't available.

00:27:32 Jeromy Johnson: That's crazy.

00:27:33 Kristi Williams: I wouldn't that be a thing. And so it's like when you can objectively look at this and say these teachings are harmful. Well, where do you go from there? Do you say religion is bad? Do you say we have, you know, dictator running the universe? Or do you say maybe we missed something? Yeah, maybe we misunderstood something. And that's been my journey. Is that the more and more you peel away the layers?

00:27:57 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. There's so many layers. Yeah, but I think the biggest layer is just giving ourselves permission to ask questions and to rethink things and to reshape your mind, because you're not going to reshape your mind if you're not yet allowed to ask questions. And everyone is allowed to ask questions, everyone out there, you're allowed to ask questions. Don't let anyone tell you you're not. Yeah you are. So go.

00:28:18 Kristi Williams: one hundred percent. We actually we just had a sermon at church that was called your doubt is more holy than your certainty.

00:28:26 Jeromy Johnson: That's beautiful.

00:28:27 Kristi Williams: I love that. And I think, you know, if we truly believe in a God who doesn't change, our questions aren't going to change him. It's okay to ask the questions.

00:28:37 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, and if it's truth, questions are going to hold up to it, right?

00:28:41 Kristi Williams: Exactly, exactly. Questions can only bring us closer to truth. They're going to expose what isn't and bring us closer to something that is. I will say, man, I, I was a very Christian Christian. And what what I did was I looked up Greek and Hebrew words and it it just changed everything. I thought about Scripture because a whole different narrative emerged. I got a Strong's Concordance when I was thirteen years old and I started using it. It's worth the journey. There's something beautiful in there. And as I love to say, Jesus is good psychology.

00:29:12 Jeromy Johnson: That's awesome. That should be like a t shirt or a podcast. You should set your podcast. And Jesus, it's good psychology. There you go.

00:29:20 Kristi Williams: Yes. The the other thing that is so fascinating to me, I was just talking with another, uh, former pastor yesterday who's now more agnostic, and he said to me, he's like, I wish I could go back in time and hang out with with the real deal. Jesus. Not the guy that religion made him out to be. And he's like, I think I really like that guy. We would get along, and that's what I consistently hear.

00:29:42 Jeromy Johnson: That's cool.

00:29:42 Kristi Williams: And and, you know, I've made out to be like, well, atheists, they don't believe in Jesus. And I'm like, go talk to them. Every one of them likes that guy. They don't like what you did with him.

00:29:52 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. Atheism is more a rejection of the church and theology than I think it is. Yes, of God it is.

00:29:58 Kristi Williams: Yeah. And and I said to him, I think atheists make better Christians. And if you think about the parable that Jesus told of the master who had two servants, one said he would do the master's work and he didn't do it, and the other said he wouldn't do the master's work, but then he went and did it. If Jesus whole point, because he said that the commandments are summed up in love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And then the whole judgment was based off of what you did for the least of these. I'm like, what if atheists make better Christians? The last part of how sin based theology impacts your neurobiology is your prefrontal cortex. So this is your your highest functioning centers, your critical thinking. It's the place where you access compassion and curiosity and connection with other people. That goes offline because it is not online. When your amygdala is hyper activated and you're living out of your brain stem, so you actually lose access to critical thinking. And from a neurobiological level, that's why it feels really difficult to start questioning your faith, because questioning is accessing your frontal lobe.

00:31:04 Jeromy Johnson: Interesting. So even biologically, that experience is reshaping our brain to almost reject biologically asking questions.

00:31:13 Kristi Williams: Yep. And that's why when you start questioning, it can feel really traumatic. Because essentially it's a whole framework or like a scaffolding, a whole paradigm shatters. And it's it's cataclysmic. Also, everything you've repressed from your life, it's swept under the rug, put it in the closet. It's like a dam breaks and all of that can come rushing back on into the surface. And so I say, healing hurts like hell. Yeah. But if you start going into your own journey, doing your own inner work and it feels really dark, it might feel like you're very much going in the wrong direction. You're not keep going. That's what healing feels like at first, and it's worth it. It is the renewing of your mind.

00:31:54 Jeromy Johnson: But it's scary because everything you've believed and thought starts to crack open and. And that's okay. Yeah. What you're seeing is that the foundation that you thought was, I don't know, God really wasn't. It was something else. And that thing is crumbling, and you're gonna find something so much bigger underneath that.

00:32:13 Kristi Williams: And, you know, and the amazing thing, too, is it's easy to think, oh, how could I have been a fundamentalist Christian? I was very wrong. That was a very bad way to be. It's actually a beautiful part of a developmental journey. It's a stage. All we are on in life is a journey. Every piece of who we've ever been is a journey. That was part of the journey, and it brought us to where we are today.

00:32:33 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, we are who we are because of that. And here we are talking right, because of that. And people are listening because of those experiences that they've had. Christy, this was fun. Thank you so much for hopping on. And, uh, I know we're going to be scheduling a time for you and me to sit down to really dive deeper into your own story. But this is just a little tease, and I thank you for coming on, sharing your thoughts about this. I know I called you kind of like last minute. I said, hey, you want to do this? And you're like, okay, sure, I'll go for it. I said, do you want to hear it in advance? You're like, no, I want to just go for it and talk off the off the cuff. So thank you so much, Christy, I appreciate that.

00:33:06 Kristi Williams: Absolutely. Thank you for the fun opportunity.