On the Podcast: Embodiment & Making Choices
In our most recent episode of Out of Session with Kindman & Co., our therapy practice podcast, skilled religious trauma therapist, Caitlin Harrison, spoke with Cait Ference-Saunders of Move with Cait, a trauma sensitive yoga practice. Read on for their conversation discussing embodiment and what is Trauma Centered Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), the importance and power of making choices, and each of their takes on what is religious trauma. You can also listen to this episode, Embodiment & Making Choices with Cait Ference Saunders, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
embodiment & making choices podcast transcript
Caitlin Harrison (00:00):
My name is Caitlin Harrison, and this is out of session with Kindman and Co., A feelings forward podcast where we leave our therapist selves at the door and have messy real conversations about being human. Today's topic is embodiment and making choices. This is going to be a really special conversation interview that I have with Cait Ference Saunders, who is a facilitator of T-C-T-S-Y, which is trauma centered Trauma sensitive yoga. She and I are going to have a conversation around embodiment the importance of making choices when healing trauma as well as some of our own experiences with religious trauma. I'm really excited for this, so please stay tuned. Hey, my name is Caitlin Harrison. I'm one of the clinicians here at Kindman & Co., and I'm so happy to be sitting down with Cait who we're going to dive into a juicy conversation I'm really excited about, and I'm first going to have her introduce herself and share a little bit more about why she's here today.
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:01):
Thanks so much, Caitlin. I'm really glad to be here. My name is Cait Ference Saunders. I'm a registered yoga teacher and also a certified T-C-T-S-Y facilitator that stands for Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga. I'm a practitioner of trauma sensitive yoga, but I want to be clear that I'm not a mental health clinician. I come to trauma recovery spaces as a practitioner, not as a therapist of any kind. T-C-T-S-Y is, I would call it a recovery modality, and it's a modality that's sort of overseen by the Center for Trauma and Embodiment in Massachusetts. That organization is sort of responsible for both research and the certification of facilitators who are all over the world practicing T-C-T-S-Y. I am a facilitator, but I'm also not a representative of that organization, so I really want to be clear that anything I share today really is from my own journey, my own opinions and learning, and don't really reflect official stances from that organization.
I think it's important to locate myself both where I'm coming from and where I am in this conversation. I am a white cis woman and I am a trauma survivor. I grew up in a high control religious community and both because of that and other experiences, I have a high ACE score, but I also grew up in a suburban metropolitan area, which meant I had access to protective factors like education and extracurricular activities that really served and supported me as I navigated both traumatic experiences and sort of my recovery journey out of them. So I just think it's really important to sort of locate the tools and the support that I come with into this work because we all do this work from our own location, and we're all coming to it with different tools and different techniques and different perspectives.
Caitlin Harrison (03:28):
Thank you. I was introduced to Cait, and yes, we have Cait and Caitlin on the pod. I was introduced to Cait through a former professor of mine at Fuller, and we started, we got coffee and it was just one of those things of like, oh my gosh, and this idea and this idea and wow, we're very much in alignment. I myself, Caitlin, I am a white, cisgender straight woman. I grew up middle upper class with some then highs and lows of financial insecurity and family going through bankruptcy process. And so I name that because part of my experience with growing up in a very conservative Christian Church, which I would put in the lens of having some high control religious framework, it is, I do carry that both end experience of my family went through a lot of strife and it was the community, the church community that really stood behind my family and really helped us, and that was helpful for us. And there are a lot of things that I am deconstructing from that space and continue to do so in my personal work, and it's something that I really love making space for. I now have a kind of focus of religious trauma work with clients because of my own personal experiences, and then seeing how impactful it is and also us living in this society in the US how white Christian nationalism has impacted everything that we do. And so part of the deconstruction process, and maybe we'll get into also what does deconstruction even mean?
There's so many ways to begin this, but with that, noticing how this work is very pervasive. It touches a lot of areas, which is why sometimes it's hard to have a through line conversation because there are so many little spokes coming out well,
Cait Ference-Saunders (05:56):
And the sort of multiplicity of ways that I think religion, religious trauma, coercion, all of those things have affected everyone differently. Every single person has their own journey with their faith tradition that they were raised with and how they relate to it. Now, whether that's been a deconstruction journey, whether it's been an ownership journey, whatever it's been, we've all, I think all people, particularly in the United States, have to, yeah, we have to think about the implications of what we're doing in a really specific way, particularly because of what you've named, because there are elements of faith traditions in our country that are incredibly vocal and grounded in my mind, coercive practices. That's my opinion, but I think it's something any person who sort of walks around the space that faith has to engage with in some capacity.
Caitlin Harrison (06:55):
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for introducing and let's get into, I think as we said, there are so many conversations we can have within this, so we're going to do our best listener to focus, and we love being able to flow in this journey. And so yeah, when I first was introduced to you, there was kind of the intro for me to T-C-T-S-Y, and so I would love for you to share a little bit more about what that is and why that's important for you.
what is trauma centered trauma sensitive yoga?
Cait Ference-Saunders (07:34):
So T-C-T-S-Y is this big funky acronym and it, let's see. I want to sort of tell the story of it. I think it's important as it exists now. T-C-T-S-Y is a form of trauma sensitive yoga that's been pretty highly studied. It's a modality of yoga that was first developed and researched by what used to be known as the trauma center in Boston. So in the early two thousands, there's a big movement in the medical community to research sort of what we might call or what they would've called eastern practices, things like meditation or chanting or yoga. And through that work, some of it which is funded by the NIH, the trauma center, started realizing that yoga seemed to have a pretty profound effect on folks' PTSD symptoms. And from that research over the past 20 years, they've really developed a modality that speaks both to PTSD, but especially to folks who are navigating complex trauma and relational trauma. And it's a form of yoga and it's an adjunctive treatment for trauma. It's to be a treatment modality. So there's been studies about the ways it can lessen symptoms of PTSD or C-P-T-S-D. It can be incredibly effective at complimenting therapy or if it's the only thing you have, it can also be something that's really useful.
And so it really became sort of solidified with a big study in 2014, I think was the year. And since then they've been starting to train facilitators all over the world. So I think right now there facilitators practicing in I think over 30 countries. And in its most recent iteration, they've really tried to center the philosophical history of yoga and sort of all the things we know about intersectionality and identity and generational trauma. And I think also communal trauma has really become a big dialogue theme amongst facilitators right now, because we are in the trauma space, we're of course going to be talking about generational trauma and the trauma that comes with land theft and political events. So it's not necessarily an activist organization by any means in my opinion, but it is a community of trauma workers that is deeply, deeply committed to looking at trauma from all lenses.
And I really appreciate that. That was a big thing that drew me to the work, that this wasn't just about individuals, that part of trauma healing is communal healing, and that as we heal ourselves, as we heal with one another, we're not only building our own resilience, we're building the resilience of our community and the communities that will come after us. It feels like a very important trauma work feels really important in that way, that this is a project we do for ourselves, but it's also a project we do because we have hope for other human beings, other sibling species that come after us. And that feels, for me, that's a very hopeful way to operate in the world, in a world that feels honestly really overwhelming, really scary sometimes. Yeah, I think this is a modality. It really emphasizes the agency of both the participant and the facilitator.
So it's very much a co-created co-facilitated experience. And that also makes a lot of sense to me that if trauma is often an experience that takes away our sense of power, it takes away our sense of agency yoga, and specifically trauma sensitive yoga is a space where we all get to try on what agency feels like, as scary as that can be, as deeply triggering as that can be. And it allows us to do it in a way that connects to our bodies, which again is a site of a lot of fragmentation, post-traumatic event or traumatic relationships. So yeah, I really love the modality and in my mind, it's been effective for me. It is something that is good for me to do, and it is supportive and useful for clients. And so it feels like a very integrated way to work with folks
Caitlin Harrison (12:27):
This I hear and feel the hope I am totally connecting with this process and how you're able to approach, and I was really loving the pieces, especially on the framework, allowing for communal and collective healing. And yes, that's what gets me excited about being a relational therapist. Also. It's so interesting to do a work individually, right? But what I always will emphasize is like, okay, we are building a relationship, you therapist and client, so that relationship can be a ripple effect for all your other relationships because we cannot heal in isolation. And a concept or phrase that we think about here at Kindman & Co. is how is therapy political? therapy is a political act. And so in the same way I'm really connecting with, for me, part of that idea is living in the US it's very individualized culture. And so anytime we are able to heal and take that brave stuff and do it with another person and do it with another community, it feels like we are able to make this a political act. So yeah, I think that's part of why I was so jazzed in having this initial conversation with you because it was like, yes, I totally can see. And I love hearing my clients do. Of course you're going to do work outside of our sessions. I hope you are, because it's only 50 minutes a week. And trauma sensitive yoga is such a beautiful, what's the word? Pairing accommodation in addition to, and it gets to do work that may not be accessible in a talk space. Well,
Cait Ference-Saunders (14:38):
And it's on your own terms. I think what I really love about yoga spaces and particularly trauma sensitive ones, is that we're really trying to create a place where you get to decide how you engage with your body. If you don't want to feel anything, you don't have to. If you want to numb out during a session, I'm not going to stop you because I'm going to honor what you want in the moment. I've had had folks, particularly when I facilitate in groups who they might just sit on their mat the whole time and they might do their own thing and I will make invitations to the group, but it's always up to you whether you accept that invitation and you get to decide how you accept it, and you can't do anything wrong in a T-C-T-S-Y session,
Caitlin Harrison (15:35):
That feels like a whole healing right there. You can't do anything wrong.
Cait Ference-Saunders (15:41):
Every choice you make is going to be affirmed. Yeah, barring maybe a safety for both of us, but within the container we create, yeah, we're creating a space in which both I and a participant make authentic choices based on the information we have in the room at the time. And I think that's also an important part that this sort of choice making that yoga allows you to do and a lot of our physical practices allow you to do. It's not that this is unique, I think, to this modality, but it is sort of a foundational component that everything is choice-based. And those might be complex choices. They might be simple choices, but that's also, it reminds me of that there's a really great quote by Judith Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery, and I'm not going to get it exactly quite right, but it's something like nothing that takes power away from a survivor will ever facilitate their healing. And this idea that if I ever try to tell somebody how to do something or I bring in this sort of teaching hierarchical structure into a space, no matter how well-meaning it is in the moment, ultimately it undermines a person's own ability to make choices about their own self and their own body. And so I think it's a really beautiful thing to share with folks because we're all doing that together.
Caitlin Harrison (17:18):
That feels very sparkly. It feels magical. It feels really helpful connecting with choice and agency. And I wonder actually if this would be a good place for you to talk about what brought you personally to this work
Cait Ference-Saunders (17:36):
So, There's a long version. There's a short version and there's a week long version. So I will try to keep it short. So I started my yoga journey before I started my trauma journey. And so I came to yoga when I was maybe 13 or 14. It was a cross-training opportunity for me as a competitive swimmer and ballet dancer. And I loved it because I loved using my body. And so at that time in my life, it was just something that was really joyful. And for me, that was also the season of my life where I started experience. I had my first interactions with things you would call traumatic, and all of a sudden I craved spaces where I didn't have to justify myself. I craved spaces where I didn't have to talk. And so ballet, swimming, both silent activities, so there's still a level of performance and perfection that's a kind of pressure.
And yoga was skill-based as well, but we were a bunch of swimmer kids. We weren't doing it to be great yogis. We were doing it to do something after swim practice. And so it was this beautiful moment where I got to do something, I got to do something. Well, I didn't have to talk about it. I just got to be myself. And that was so necessary for me in that season of my life. And so I always knew that yoga was a really important thing. It was always going to be part of my life. And it was throughout college and a really tumultuous couple of years. In my twenties, yoga was the only place I felt safe. It felt safer than church. It felt safer than family. It felt safer than friends or my room or my apartment. I knew that when I got on my mat, there was a sure way that I could be me even for a few minutes. And I always sort of wondered why that was. Is it that this thing out of all the things is my thing?
And so let's see, I got certified to teach yoga in 2011 right after college. And so I've taught on and off in all sorts of different spaces and studios and gyms and community centers and all sorts of things since then. And really during the pandemic, I started thinking more and more about, okay, I know that this practice and what it's been for me, I see what it's done for a lot of people I've worked with, but there seems to be something more going on here than just like we feel good or we tend to cry when we do pigeon pose or something. And so that led me to start researching trauma, specifically trauma modalities, all in this time. I'm doing my own trauma for my own self. That's a lot of talk therapy. And eventually found T-C-T-S-Y. I was literally Google searching people, and I found somebody who was doing a foundational training, which is a training they offered to people who are already practitioners of cell kind.
So it's like a month long training. And I did that and it blew open my own work that I did with my therapist, and it felt like sort of the missing piece of my own yoga practice and my own facilitating practice. Like, oh, I've spent so much time thinking about how to keep bodies safe and how to create experiences where people feel held, but here's a modality that actually UNC me and centers the experience of everyone in the room together. And so at that point, I applied for their, it's like a nine month program, and it's pretty intensive. It's more intensive than any other training I've done that is in graduate school. So there's a research paper involved and there's supervised..
Caitlin Harrison (21:53):
There's a research paper in the, oh my goodness. Amazing.
Cait Ference-Saunders (21:57):
So my research was on embodiment and religious drama,
Caitlin Harrison (22:02):
A ding, ding, dinging. Yeah, that's where we all connect.
Cait Ference-Saunders (22:04):
So yeah, it was a long circuitous route, but it was deeply tied to my own story. It was deeply tied to the work I was doing and the people I was meeting and working with. And it sort of felt like the missing piece of how does what we do by accident in a lot of yoga classes become intentional in a facilitation space? And then exactly what you were talking about earlier, I love the image of this ripples out, what we do and the intentions we bring to this work change who we are in the rest of our lives in the world. And I think that's really powerful.
Caitlin Harrison (22:43):
Yeah, yeah. Ooh, I love talking about mean. There were so many things that I could glom onto. And that doesn't mean that doesn't mean you would talk too much. Not at all. I am saying this, I was worried about that. No, I'm saying this because Cait had a little moment of chagrin on her face. But no, no, there are truly so many things that I'm resonating with and connecting with and this piece around yoga being a practice and a space that when you're practicing initially at 13, 14, I'm sure didn't have language for all of the impact, the positive impact, what you were connecting to, what you were building for yourself and thinking about the healing journey. I love when folks that I'm working with, we get to explore something where, oh, this used to make me feel good as a kid, and I didn't know why, but that was kind of the beauty of it, that I didn't have to know the why.
So how do exactly, so how do we approach play? How do we approach childlike joy? How do we approach pleasure in adult bodies where we have been impacted by a lot, where we have learned a lot, where we've been through a lot of trauma, but how do we do it now through what you're saying with agency choice, being able to make choices where we can be in a safer environment now where this can be containing now where maybe I set up, I think about for myself, I am a recovering perfectionist and I very much need some structure of, okay, this is my playtime. So that's the containing part for me of I'm going to put in my schedule, I'm going to WHO or classes can be very helpful for me in that way of like, okay, it's hard for me to get going on my own, but if I pay someone 20 bucks to take an embroidery class, I'm actually going to try. I'm actually going to do it. So I think about what you are bringing into this work and how others get to join you in that, right of like, okay, here I am, Cait, you Cait, not me. Cait. Cait, yeah, Cait, big Cait Energy.
So with that, this has been your journey, and it feels like even for folks who may not have grown up practicing yoga, and this is a newer experience for them, I think there's something really intrinsic, very intuitive once you get to that space of permission and containment of, okay, yes, I'm going to model for you, maybe oppose, but exactly what you're saying of you have implicit agency here. You get to practice, you get to move your arm. And also I think talking about modifications is helpful too, right?
Cait Ference-Saunders (26:00):
Yeah. Well, and this is the thing I think in in T-C-T-S-Y, I can say the acronym of the thing I'm trained in, I promise we don't actually use the language of pose or asana, so we don't use Sanskrit names. One because we're not Sanskrit scholars particularly. I am a white American woman and we also don't, I mean, yeah, we don't, don't say assana pose. I will often say things like, you could try making a shape like this, or maybe together we could explore what making a triangle shape with our legs feels like. So we use shape or form particularly because is that perfectionism thing is so big for so many folks, and really we're trying with this invitational and intentional language to create a structure, but also allow for people to come to their bodies in their own ways that I am never going to tell somebody be like, okay, we're going to do down dog. Now you might like to place your hands on the mat and maybe straighten your legs or bend them and straighten them back and forth. Maybe you'll notice some sensation, maybe you won't. Maybe today you don't notice sensation. That's okay too.
And I like that component of the practice as well because sometimes folks might say, well, is that really yoga then if you're not using all of the words? But there's so many kinds of yoga. This is one very small specific way of using elements of a much larger, much richer tradition that is, is just huge and doesn't originate in this part of the world and has a long and complicated history of why it exists in our corner of the world.
Caitlin Harrison (28:06):
Yeah, I love learning that. I love knowing that that's part of this approach. And it makes sense to me too of, I know we've had some conversations outside of this, but what does practicing something that has been gentrified, watered down for lack of better terms, right? And what does it mean? Also, I think about my own privilege as a white, straight, cis able-bodied person. There's a lot of things that helped me get to a place where I got to go do my master's where I was able to receive the kind of education. And then also I think I hear you bringing in this language of ownership acknowledgement, and that has to be foundational in terms of practicing in a trauma sensitive way. Because if we aren't naming it, if we aren't making it explicit, then it feels so much like the other person has to hold that,
Cait Ference-Saunders (29:20):
Right? Yeah, exactly. And it's not their responsibility.
Caitlin Harrison (29:22):
Exactly. Exactly. So I try in the spaces that I'm creating of, Hey, what is it like for you to pay a white woman? This is something for us to name and acknowledge in this space. And I am grateful since I feel like my own journey with, sometimes I want a different term for this, but wokeness, right? Becoming awoken to awoken. That's not awaken, awaken awakened to
Cait Ference-Saunders (29:55):
Awaken,
Caitlin Harrison (29:56):
Right? But in my own journey, which really when I look at my life has not been for that long, this is a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of ideas, a lot of concepts, a lot of history is very new to me, which is sad. And because of that, I have to recognize I'm at the beginning place here and I have to take on that work and that responsibility as much as I can so that the other person that I'm working with, that I'm talking with, whether that be professionally or personally, doesn't feel that way, doesn't feel that responsibility, which I hear is so much of what you are doing in this approach as well. And also seems like the framework of how you've been taught as well, that feels really important.
Cait Ference-Saunders (30:53):
Well, and I think if you're going to talk about trauma, we got to talk about all the trauma. We can't just ignore and cherry pick which traumas we want to talk about. Great point. That maybe makes the conversation way harder, way more complex, but it also simplifies the conversation in some ways. I find acknowledging the presence of trauma in a room frees us in a lot of ways because it helps us. It starts as help naming, it helps us name all the things that might happen or might not happen in any particular room. I mean, I think about that when I sent emails to people or when people send emails to me, I'm like, okay, so there's layers here. There's layers here. I might never know what those layers are, and I don't actually need to remember that they exist. And that's another thing when I work with folks, they don't owe me their trauma story.
They get to share how much they want or they get to share nothing if they want as well. This is not a process where I'm checking in with your therapist unless you and your therapist really want that. And then maybe we can talk about what that looks like, but it's not the goal. You don't owe me your story for us to share some space together. Part of my training, part of the way I show up in a room is doing the work for myself consciously acknowledging that there is a much bigger story behind whoever walks in the room. And that's part of my responsibility as a facilitator. That's not necessarily your responsibility as a participant. You get to come in with your stuff and you get to expect that the space is a container that we build together. You don't have to be responsible for my stuff.
creating spaces for healing trauma
Caitlin Harrison (32:43):
I love that. Well, I think this goes perfectly into, I'm curious how you create spaces for folks who are seeking healing from trauma. I think you've definitely already touched on so many pieces in terms of the work that you're doing, the spaces that you're creating and everything being choice based. But yeah, I wondered, tell me a little bit maybe about your onboarding process.
Cait Ference-Saunders (33:14):
Yeah, so very practically, I offer sessions in a bunch of different ways because I like people being able to make choices. This is going to be a theme. I have a physical space, a little office space that I can meet folks in one-on-one if that's what they want. I meet folks virtually over Zoom. And actually recently I have been exploring meeting folks in their home in certain circumstances. And part of that is that I trust that you know what you need for your own healing, even if that feels like a scary thing for you to own. I trust in the fact that people are going to make choices, and they might not be perfect choices. They might not be choices that they feel a hundred percent about at all times, but I'm going to honor the choice that you're making now, and you might make a different choice later. Some people start online and they end up in person. Some people start in person and they go back online because it feels safer or it feels better or more challenging to do this work in your actual space. What does it look like to claim relationship with your body in a space where it doesn't normally feel like that? So I think all ways of coming to this work are valid and welcome.
You mentioned my onboarding process. It is a little, I think it's akin to how you would work with a therapist or some sort of clinical practitioner that you'll submit for me. I have folks submit an interest form that just gives me some background on sort of why you're here, how you're here. It gives me a sense of some questions I may want to ask. I usually invite folks to do a short phone call if they would like, and so they can hear my voice. We can start to build a connection. And then if that feels good, we'll do sort of a one-off session, sort of like an intake. It'll be more dialogue based. We'll move a little, but we'll talk a little more than usual too. And then you kind of get to make a choice, okay, I want to keep doing this, but I want to do it only once a month, or I want to keep doing this.
So we sort of set up an idea of how we want to work together, and I try to ask folks to commit to a amount of time just because, and that's not hard and fast if you can change your mind on that, but I asked folks to give it a couple of sessions just because you might experience a bunch of different things when you're figuring out how you want to connect to your body. You might be really bored one session, you might be really overwhelmed. Another, you might be on cloud nine the third time. So it depends on who you are in the room that day. And so I really try to honor that and being really intentional in how I welcome clients into the process. And of course, you get to ghost me if you want.
Caitlin Harrison (36:25):
Ooh, scary.
Cait Ference-Saunders (36:26):
Yeah, you can ghost me. I don't mind. That might be the choice you're able to make, and that is also good.
Caitlin Harrison (36:34):
Yeah. Yeah. That says a lot. I love that. I love hearing about, again, I was thinking, I was like, man, maybe the title of this episode is making choices.
Cait Ference-Saunders (36:47):
Maybe that is one of the things I most resonate with in this practice.
Caitlin Harrison (36:54):
And I love that you named virtual being an option as well, because I know in other conversations talking about, again, the ability to access healing in a way that feels comfortable and where it feels good for you
Cait Ference-Saunders (37:11):
And allowing that to change. It does.
why agency is important—emphasizing having choice
Caitlin Harrison (37:15):
Yeah. Yeah.
So I love hearing about how you approach the work and how you make it for clients, how the emphasis on choice, emphasis on agency is so important when you're using those words, especially around choice and agency. Yes, of course. It's relating to trauma in all forms. Because of the way that I am and how my work is focused, I immediately go to religious trauma thinking about what that means, what that looks like, how that is such an important part of work for myself in my own journey. And then also with folks that I'm meeting with. And so I would love for us to talk about how embodiment and religious trauma intersect, and it feels important, and I appreciate that you brought this up to define these terms when we're having this conversation. Yeah, I think these words get thrown around a lot. And it reminds me too of fact-checking myself. What do I mean when I say this thing?
Cait Ference-Saunders (38:32):
Yeah, when is this, how I use this and when is this? How the literature uses this word and other practitioners and spiritual trauma or religious trauma or religious abuse or spiritual abuse or coercive theology. The list of
Caitlin Harrison (38:49):
Words
Cait Ference-Saunders (38:50):
Is so big and everybody means something slightly different by
Caitlin Harrison (38:56):
Totally, totally.
Cait Ference-Saunders (38:57):
Yes. So I don't want to throw it back at you too much, but I would love to hear when you work with clients, what is the key word you use and what does that mean for you and your clients?
what is the definition of religious trauma?
Caitlin Harrison (39:11):
Yeah, that's a good question because I think folks find me through that religious trauma kind of, it's a bit more of, I don't want to say a buzzword, but it is more in pop psychology now. It's more pervasive in social media. And I do want to recognize too, it feels very privileged to be able to identify with religious trauma and be on a deconstruction journey, which when I use the word deconstruction, I want to know that is a word that is very much familiar with theology. And in conversations I've had with family members, when they get a little fearful, when I use the word deconstruction for myself, I go back to, okay, let's look at what Martin Luther did with the nailing the 95 theses. That was hundreds of thousands. How long ago was that? 500,
Cait Ference-Saunders (40:11):
600 years.
Caitlin Harrison (40:12):
Thank you. I'm looking at the theology student in front of me, Cait. So with that, our approach to religion to spirituality has consistently been deconstructed in that we are approaching it in a way through our own lens, trying to break down thoughts, systems that don't necessarily in alignment with how we believe God to be, how we believe religion to be. And I think an important part of the deconstruction process there typically is a reconstruction. And that is also in the conversations I've had with family members of like, I'm not, deconstruction doesn't mean burning it all down. It means finding something and building something back up as well. There is a word that is escaping me. Actually. I took a training with Reclamation Collective, and yeah, I really like them. And they use this word that if you are looking to leave religion, leave religious thought and go more towards agnostic or atheism, there is a word, and it's similar deconstruction, but it's not, but it is more so there is a specific word that I will Google later.
But coming back to defining religious trauma, I really like this definition from Beam, which is BEAM stands for Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective. And they in this article are talking about religious trauma syndrome, RTS, which is starting to get more known in the psychological spaces. It's not a DSM diagnosis, by the way, but maybe it will be. But religious trauma syndrome occurs when an individual struggles with leaving a religion or set of beliefs. It often involves the trauma of breaking away from a controlling environment, lifestyle or religious figure. In some settings, the symptoms of religious trauma can be similar to that of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which feels very true for me. And what I'm seeing, the complexity, the complex PTSD part feels so real of what is it? These settings are not all good and not all bad. They are very human. There's so many power dynamics. There are a lot of boundaries and limitations. And I'm thinking about when I was just talking about the privilege that I'm seeing, and I'm seeing a lot of mostly white, formerly evangelical Christians being able to leave and that it isn't as much of, it's certainly an upset within familial and cultural spaces. And yet there is the privilege of being able to leave. And I know for a lot of folks who come from stricter religions, I am thinking of Jehovah's Witness, when you leave that space, you are gone. You lose everything. You lose everything.
Cait Ference-Saunders (43:43):
You lose material resource, emotional resource. I think particularly in what we would call high control religious settings, they're high control because they literally have presence in all facets of somebody's life. And so if you try to step away, you are disrupting not just something you do on Sundays, not just your family relationships. You might just be disrupting where you live, your job, your social world, and connections. And I think too, a lot of these communities, because of the amount of control they have often feel like they have a lot of protective capacities too. We have identity. We have a concrete way to make meaning with people that matter to us. Those are so often protective factors when we talk about abuse and trauma. And in a community where even those elements are coercive, the journey out, no matter how, no matter how intentional is going to be painful and it's come in, it comes at a cost.
Caitlin Harrison (44:52):
Yes, yes. High risk without knowing will there be reward, which man, so many conversations on what we were taught around afterlife. So that's a huge part of like, wow, I'm leaving this thing that gave me a lot of hope, not just for now, but for my afterlife, my future. And so when I leave that, I'm also having to redefine for myself what that looks like, what that means for
Cait Ference-Saunders (45:21):
Me. Well, and how I think of myself as a human. Yes. And I think that mean, this is a question I think that anyone leaving any high control religious, particularly religious environment can identify with. I mean, I think it's important to note, you and I are both talking from our experience of primarily white evangelical American expressions of Christianity. Yes, I have experience with Catholicism, but it's not how I was raised. A lot of my education was Catholic, but my experience is growing up in sort of an independent Baptist community. So when I come to this, I get the joke about Martin Luther because yeah, he was a big deal in my childhood and in my college life. But I think there's a lot of work right now, particularly in the US being done, because we are seeing some really overt expressions of a kind of evangelicalism that I think I would be willing to say is harmful in my opinion. And so we are navigating that within the particular context of speaking to that expression of a faith tradition. I think there's a lot of overlap with folks in other traditions as well. But I think it's important to note that anything I'm going to say today is coming in from a place of being in dialogue with primarily white evangelical spaces. And that's an important modifier.
Caitlin Harrison (47:01):
Exactly. Yes. Very important. And I think one more definition that we'll add in, I really appreciate what you were naming of high control environments and spiritual abuse I think is a term that also comes up sometimes it's called religious abuse or spiritual violence. I'm pulling from a definition that's on choosingtherapy.com, but talking about how people who may have been spiritually abused for years without recognizing the abuse or they're simply not sure where the line between abuse and not abuse is particularly when it hasn't been physical. So one of on the most basic level of spiritual abuse uses faith, religion, or to exert control. Another example of religious abuse is with purity culture where modesty and abstinence are revered as the gold standard for spiritual sexuality. And so there are so many parts of spiritual abuse. And also, could you remind me what you were discussing earlier about also certain texts or
Cait Ference-Saunders (48:12):
Yeah, so I think an important, so for me, I mean as we've said, everybody sort of has different definitions they work from, and I really love the two you've read today. I tend to think about trauma that exists in a church. So a traumatic event that exists within a church community, whether or not it has religious, overt religious language, it's still within the construct of the community. And so that's present. But I also think, and this is where is where the fact that I have a theology degree comes out that I think there are expressions of theology or religious thinking that are inherently coercive. I mean the punitive element of evangelical theology as it developed in the 20th century, that's really coercive. I mean, that sets up that if you don't do X, Y, Z, you don't get into heaven or God doesn't love you, God always loves us, but that God will judge us.
I mean, the idea of God as judge is a really complicated idea. It's actually a pretty contemporary idea in a lot of ways, like Carceral theology and the idea that there's sort of like this cosmic prison system is an idea that has some grounding in biblical in the texts that Christians consider sacred. And at the same time, we read all of those texts through our history as a western society that developed a prison system, and we read our ideas about judgment, fairness, and any legal language in these texts through our understanding of what a legal system even is. And so I think back to how children are raised in these communities and how children are taught to be afraid of what God could do to them. And whether that's intentional or not, I don't think parents are out there going, I want my kid to be really scared of God. But the unintended consequence of your child, a punitive theological framework, I mean, it's really logical for then a child to say, well, what does that mean for me? Are the powers of the universe focused on my five-year-old self because I lied about something? What does that do to this child? Little
Caitlin Harrison (50:46):
Baby? Yes,
Cait Ference-Saunders (50:49):
A little kid learning to lie, which is a super developmentally appropriate skill and differentiation for them to then interpret themselves as the bearer of cosmic judgment. It really breaks my heart.
Caitlin Harrison (51:05):
Yes.
attachment theory & god as a developmental attachment figure
Cait Ference-Saunders (51:06):
Well, and I think, well, we can get off into attachment theory, but there's some really cool research coming out about that a child's understanding of God can function as a developmental attachment figure. And so if I relate to my idea of God as one that is fear-based or scary, what does that do to my sense of, is the world safe for me as a human being?
Caitlin Harrison (51:36):
Exactly.
Cait Ference-Saunders (51:37):
And that part of religious trauma is something that we're just starting to unpack, and you can have a perfectly lovely experience on the surface of your church tradition, but this stuff is all at least there in the water. Totally. And it may affect you, it may not. I'm not saying that everyone who's gone to church has a disordered attachment to God. I don't think that's true. But I think for a lot of kids, there is an element of that. There is this sort of profound fear about themselves and the effect of their actions in sort of the cosmic realm. And it's just a lot to put on, a
Caitlin Harrison (52:20):
Lot to put on a 5-year-old. It's a
Cait Ference-Saunders (52:22):
Lot to put
Caitlin Harrison (52:23):
On a 50-year-old. Yes, exactly. Yes. Oh, absolutely. I am really loving, if you could see Cait and how she's talking using so much hands and the bear, she's touching her chest, she's close to like, wow, what is it? It makes me think of the concepts of shame, which comes up a lot with this work and what we're naming with theology, with ideas being fear-based, and that concept of, okay, I did something bad, but something's happening where it means I am bad.
Cait Ference-Saunders (53:01):
And that,
Caitlin Harrison (53:02):
Yes,
Cait Ference-Saunders (53:03):
The sort of transitiveness of taking on that responsibility. Again, there's that word that taking on that responsibility for something that is not yours to take on.
Caitlin Harrison (53:13):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it feels really, I also appreciate what you were naming with attachment theory and recognizing where God plays into that, if that's a system, if that's a belief system that you were born into. And I think that gives language to a lot of different folks who I'll name for myself. I have two very loving parents. I come from a secure home. There are so many things. And yet this part of myself, which I could also hold of parts of my parents, of, okay, so something is happening for me. Something happened for me as a child where their interpretations of God, their beliefs around what God is, who God is in relationship to me, it allowed for some sort of fracture. And I have the protective factors of I do have two parents that really love me. And in using this definition of religious trauma, of what does me leaving this specific faith practice mean for me in relationship with my family, me in relationship with myself. And I think it's important too for us to name, if you feel okay naming how I still consider myself and identify as a Christian. I'm working on not giving the caveat of I'm a Christian, but
Because there is a wide idea of what that means. But it's been so healing for me to reclaim that identity for myself and have a different relationship with God and have a different relationship with the church I now go to. And that feels really helpful for me.
Cait Ference-Saunders (55:11):
Yeah, I think that's really important and really beautiful to also reflect on where you are at in your own. I often your own journey of what I would call reconstitution.
I know that there's another technical term out there for me, I think I was doing deconstruction without realizing it in college. I took a very sort of public, I'm taking a year off of church this year stance. I was like, I think that I relate to God in a way that sounds a lot like this sort of abusive dynamic that I'm reading about in a textbook. So I'm going to see what it feels like not to go to church for as long as I can stand it. And it was really hard and really uncomfortable. And I tried to blog about it. It was a really bad, really blog. I'm so glad it doesn't exist anymore. But in a Christian college that felt profound, that felt so big and so rebellious. And I think we had it in our statement of faith or all the agreements you agree to when you sign on to go to a Christian, there was a clause in there about having to go to church every Sunday. So again, an institution making pretty intense demands over an adult human being that maybe they don't have the right to make a demand over.
But that was really important for me that season, and it gave me a lot of information and material. And what I didn't realize in that moment is that I wanted to be able to choose the spiritual tradition I practiced rather than it being the one I was sort of forced to accept. So again, even then, I guess apparently choice making has been a huge theme in my
Caitlin Harrison (57:05):
Life. Huge theme, huge thing.
Cait Ference-Saunders (57:07):
But yeah, it was really important to me to do that. And at that point there was not the cultural discussion of deconstruction, but to me it felt like I was piece by piece, picking out the things that didn't, honestly, for me, in the language of my tradition, did not feel of God.
Caitlin Harrison (57:27):
Sure
Cait Ference-Saunders (57:27):
These felt like structures that were being placed on me. They didn't feel like what I felt when I contemplated who I was as a spiritual being. And that, yeah, I had that gift. I had the gift of being in a four year college away from my family that allowed me to make these decisions for myself. But I think of myself as sort of a reconstituted person of faith at this point. I am a practicing Christian. I have a degree in theology. I participate in organized leadership in my denomination, but it's very different if it's a very different Christian practice than the one I was raised in,
Caitlin Harrison (58:16):
Which is a helpful distinction and thinking about choice and our word of the day, our word of our lives. And in this discussion of so much identity gets brought up and I think of, okay, let's look at these layers. Let's zoom out. It's like, okay, so how we were raised and our families, and then also the religious constructs or the systems and practices, and let's zoom out to more larger social systems. And there's so much throughout all of that that gets in the way of us being able to be embodied humans. So in that, I would love to hear more of how this intersection, how T-S-T-S-Y has allowed healing specifically around your own understandings of religious trauma and how you've found embodiment.
Cait Ference-Saunders (59:24):
Yeah, I mean, I think another piece of my journey has been that because I trained in ballet and then trained in, I was a theater, I trained in theater in college, and I trained in physical theater. And so my body has always been a really profound avenue for truth telling and truth experiencing. For me, there are so many things in my life that I learned from my body rather than from my mind. And in theater, there is this bifurcation of there are ways of doing theater where you do the internal work first and then you go on stage and do the thing, and there are ways of making shapes and investigating things with your body, and then that leads you later on to whatever the internal landscape is. And I was always more of the latter. And so I think for me, one of the things I've experienced in my specific path through evangelical Christianity was a deep denial that we can trust our bodies.
There's all this language about mistrusting the flesh and the sins of the flesh. And I don't actually think that's what those writers were talking about, but that is how they've been interpreted. Our idea of what flesh means is a culturally constructed idea. And we have it 2000 years later that we're now reading onto this ancient text when we bring all of our assumptions and all of our theological history to bear. My experience, and I think the experience of many folks I've worked with is that there's a profound denial of the goodness of the body in religious spaces and not even the goodness of the body, but the ability for the body to speak truthfully. Yes. The way I think about anxiety a lot, and the way churches often I think a lot of churches don't do this, but some churches I've experienced sort of wave away anxiety as a personal failing.
And what would it be like if we turned to our anxiety and said, what are you saying to me? I'm not saying that will solve everything, but I am saying, what would it look like to interact with our bodies in a neutral way? Not an overly optimistic way, not in assuming our body is always going to tell us exactly what we need to know in the right way, but what would it look like for us all to become people who can use our bodies as another avenue for learning, for listening? And I think we have a relationship to our bodies. This is one of the gifts and curses of consciousness that we can think about ourselves as separate from our interceptive, our sensory experiences. And so if you come out of a tradition that tells you these sensory experiences, these interceptive awarenesses are both separate from you and can't be trusted, might come from a bad place, might come from another power outside of you.
That amount of fragmentation I just think is so painful. And I don't think it does us any good. It doesn't help us live the lives we want to live. And so I think my goal when I work with folks is not, it's not for your body to become your best friend that you love and you do everything with, and it never leads you astray and yay all the time. I'm not a bodied positivity person if we're going to look at it from an external perspective, but I do think there is a possibility for all people to be able to relate to their bodies, how they choose and how they want, and in a neutral way. I think that's possible for everyone. And I think T-C-T-S-Y is one way of doing that. There are a lot of other modalities. I don't think this is the one way that everybody needs, but I think it's one option that if there's resonance for you, I would encourage you to explore it just as if you find another somatic experiencing or any of these other, acupuncture is a great one. There are other body-based practices that might work for you, and you might need different pieces of it at different points in your journey. But I really do think all of us have the capacity to choose things that work for us. And that's not going to look exactly the same for anyone.
But I like the idea of helping folks come to their body on their own terms because you have a body you can't get rid of that it's there. So maybe we can take some of the hostility out of that relationship.
Caitlin Harrison (01:04:38):
Oh man, I love that. I do too. I love it so much. And yeah, that word embodiment, and to me because of how I grew up, how I practice it is so to not acknowledge my body's innateness, my body's truth, that's how I'm able to access my own spirituality, my own faith. And I love the telling message and a way that I describe embodiment on consult calls when folks are wanting to maybe start therapy. I'm like, embodiment is recognizing that emotions do not only happen in our heads, they happen in our bodies
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:05:33):
First.
Caitlin Harrison (01:05:34):
And that truth, and I'm thinking through a trauma lens and how initially in your healing journey, the truth is going to be about the trauma. The truth is, I'm not safe. The truth is I need to protect myself, which is why anxiety presents, which is why hypervigilance is something that you need to be accessing to try to get yourself to feel safer,
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:06:02):
And also how amazing that your body is trying to do that for you.
Caitlin Harrison (01:06:05):
Yes, thank you, body.
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:06:07):
Thank you. I mean, maybe not needed in this moment.
Caitlin Harrison (01:06:09):
Sure. But
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:06:11):
Yeah, this idea, the body holds so much for us. And I think I often talk about the body, and that's very common, and I think yoga space is to talk about the ankle or the thing I am working on myself personally talking about my body or your body and rehumanizing bodies because they're not objects. They are separate, but they are also a part. And I don't know that our language, our English language at least has all the words I want for those ideas.
Caitlin Harrison (01:06:51):
I agree. I agree. And I have found so much goodness in allowing imagination, allowing images and creativity to be the language of, it's okay if you can't use these English words because it feels also with embodiment. I love talking about ancestral healing and connecting with people in our lineage and our ancestors who have paved the way, who sometimes don't talk to us in English where they're showing up in our
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:07:27):
Faces.
Caitlin Harrison (01:07:28):
Exactly. I see. I get to connect with my great grandma when I look in the mirror, right? So yes, I am just really, really enjoying this and because we're enjoying it so much, we're going to say, we're going to put this out there that there is going to be a workshop. Yes, there is with Cait and I on some one or two of these topics that we discussed. But it has been such a pleasure talking with you, learning from you, learning alongside you. Thank you so much for coming to Kindman and and sharing more about your work. And there's going to be, Cait is very knowledgeable and there's going to be show notes after this with more pieces of what we discussed and what links to different articles and whatnot. And then also please be sure to check out Cait's Instagram as well as her website. Her website is move with Cait.com, that's movewithCAIT.com. And then her Instagram is at move_withCait spelled the same. She also has a newsletter that we'll be linking and then we'll be linking also the T-C-T-S-Y website, which is traumasensitiveyoga.com. But thank you so, so much, Cait.
Cait Ference-Saunders (01:09:07):
The gratitude is so mutual. This was such a lovely gift to spend a morning with you learning and thinking and sort of imagining together what healing feels like both for us and for the folks we work with. So yeah, thank you for this. Very
Caitlin Harrison (01:09:22):
Cool. Alright, talk to you soon. Okay.
Kindman & Co. is bringing you to…
Caitlin Harrison (01:09:30):
Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. Before I go back into session, I'm bringing you to Save Poppy Peak, which is an organization that exists to ensure the character and quality of life and historic North Highland Park by protecting the area's last hillside open space from residential development. You can learn more about safepoppypeak.com and where they'll give you options to donate, to write letters and take action to surrounding congressmen and assembly members. But this is a really important action organization that is happening in our neighborhood so that we can keep help against the gentrification of Highland Park. I also want to bring you to an account that I want to recommend to help you decolonize your social media feed. And this account was actually told to me, I learned about this account from Cait Ferance Saunders, who just heard from, and she recommended Michelle C. Johnson's Instagram account, which is at Skill in Action. And Cait mentioned that she just started reading Michelle's book and it's really good. Michelle's a former social worker and yoga practitioner doing social justice work grounded Inic texts, so that is a really amazing account. So please check out at Skill in Action to help decolonize your feed. Well, that's it from me. See you next time when we're out of session.
If you found this conversation supportive and/or enlightening and are interested in learning more about embodiment and religious trauma focused offerings at Kindman & Co., sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about new groups and workshops! If you’re interested in learning more about Religious Trauma, check out Caitlin’s blog about defining religious trauma and tips for how to start to heal.
Caitlin Harrison is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, social justice advocate, and a feminist. She works with individuals, intimate relationships, and families. Caitlin is a sex positive therapist with a special interest in the integration of sexuality and spirituality, women’s empowerment, and eradicating narratives of guilt and shame. She is passionate about working with couples because every partnership can be deepened, stretched, and more pleasure-forward. Caitlin feels at home with a cup of coffee in her hand, a bouquet of flowers nearby, and music at the ready to dance to.
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