005: Finding Liberation and Reclaiming Agency through a New Story with Cait West

Episode 5: Finding Liberation and Reclaiming Agency Through a New Story with Cait West

"By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power." — Barbie

What does it take to break free from a life controlled by religious patriarchy? Cait shares her journey of awakening to the abuse and control she experienced growing up, and the long and courageous process of reclaiming her agency and voice.

Throughout the conversation, Cait discusses the challenges of writing about trauma, the importance of therapy in her healing journey, and her approach to portraying complex family dynamics with grace. She also reflects on the nature of liberation, both personal and collective, and how she maintains boundaries to avoid falling back into harmful patterns. If you’re looking for insights into the power of storytelling, the ongoing work of healing, and the pursuit of freedom from oppressive systems, this one’s for you.

🔗 link to full Show Notes and transcript
—————
Guest Spotlight

Cait  is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse, and co-hosts the Survivors Discuss podcast.

Website | Substack | Instagram | TikTok

Get RIFT: Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy at Bookshop.org | on Amazon
—————
Don’t Miss the Next Episode!

Subscribe for free and never miss out on these conversations with old and new friends like Tim Whitaker, Laura Barringer, Scot McKnight, Chuck DeGroat and many others.

—————

We need your help. Your gift of just $25 will make a big difference and help us continue this work. Donate today.

—————

Sign up to receive our weekly Podcast Newsletter with new episodes, updates, exclusive discounts, and more!

Subscribe using your favorite podcast app:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Leave us a rating and review on Apple or on Spotify. This all helps us to grow and continue providing quality content for you and our community of listeners.

—————
As an Amazon and Bookshop.org affiliate, I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Cait West: 0:00

I've always been really confident that the number one audience I wanted to reach is people who might relate in some way, whether that's growing up in this movement or being in an abusive relationship or having to leave family or break off relationships, whatever it is, religious trauma, purity culture, I hope that they feel seen and heard and reminded that their story matters, and so I really do hope that it helps people not feel alone in whatever they've experienced, and that it does matter and that they're not insignificant.

Brian Lee: 0:32

Welcome to episode number five of the Broken to Beloved Podcast. I hope to provide practical resources through compassionate conversations to grow in trauma awareness, set up safeguarding practices to prevent or avoid future trauma and move toward healing and wholeness. I'm your host, Brian Lee, and I'm so glad you're here today. We're talking with Cait West about her book"Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy." It's her story of resisting and escaping the life her ultra conservative Christian parents plan for her. Our conversation goes deep, and you'll even hear me take a pause three questions in to recognize it. Kate is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in the revealer Religion Dispatches, fourth genre and Hawaii Pacific review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement. She serves on the editorial board for tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse, and CO hosts the "Survivors Discuss" podcast. And now here's my conversation with our new friend, Cait West. Cait, welcome to the Broken to Beloved Podcast.

Cait West: 1:38

Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian Lee: 1:40

Yeah. I'm really excited to have this conversation. I love your book,"Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy", which I've got here in my hands. I love just the format and the setup of it, the short chapters, their snippets, their glimpses into different layers of your life and story. And they kind of bounce back and forth between the narrative of your life, and then just things like the little chapter Colorado is like an early standout for me. So it narrates the birth of the Rocky Mountains and how they create this great and continental divide. It's just five paragraphs, but it's told over millions of years, right? So as you look back on your own story, now that you've written it, you've been talking about it, I imagine you've identified kind of these landmark moments that created your own great divide. Do you have a sense for before and after now, or does it still seem very current and in process for you?

Cait West: 2:32

Yeah. So the the ideas of the Great Divide, and you know, the title of the book is rift. It's a very binary concept of a before and after. And I think I was grappling with that the whole time I was writing the book of what was my life like before I left the Christian patriarchy movement, and what is my life like now? And I think it's it's a false binary, because I can never separate who I was before from who I am now. And I try to do that when I leave, I try to pretend like nothing bad had ever happened to me. But it wasn't until I learned to integrate the past and understand who I am and how it's affected me that I was able to heal. So in a sense, there is no clear cut break, right? Because I'm through the healing process. You go back and you return and you reprocess and build for yourself a future, but it's tied into the past, and so I think I was playing with those binary concepts a little bit.

Brian Lee: 3:43

Yeah, I love it. And I think you call back to them throughout the book, just talking about these different layers, right? Solid faith, solidified like layers of rock, or kind of having these significant moments throughout your life that just show you, like when this thing finally breaks or erupts, it's just you're gonna see all the parts that make this up, and I really appreciate that. And I think that's something that we talk a lot about here, too, is a sense of non binary thinking or non dualistic thinking, that things don't have to be either or, that we can hold the tension of both, and Right exactly. So thank you for sharing that. You share quite a few excerpts and synopses, or I don't know how you want to what you want to call them from all these different like beautiful girlhood books, from what I assume is kind of like a Christian mail order catalog, right? And you write about reading them, I think, at the age of 11 and up, how they shaped your idea of self, and then about sneaking books like Pride and Prejudice because you didn't know how to talk about or ask about love, attraction, desire, or, as you say, real romance, right? And the beginning of recognizing what did or didn't feel safe, or about emotional purity, and then you just have this sentence at the end that just kind of killed me, "I was good at hiding things like thoughts, like menstrual pads, like diaries, like anxiety like crushes depression like songs like rage like pain." And there's just so much wrapped up there. Would you walk us through kind of that waking up moment for yourself?

Cait West: 5:09

Yeah, I think it's hard for me to remember a time before I was so impacted by these beliefs around what it was to be a girl and gender, and what I was being taught was girls are supposed to be quiet. They're supposed to be submissive. Their whole purpose in life is to be a wife and a mother and not have their own individual dreams. And so it's hard for me to remember a time when I wasn't repressing myself. And so emotions, I was taught emotions were mostly bad because they were from your heart rather than your mind, and so they could be deceitful and lead you astray from God's will. And I also repressed my emotions and anything that felt good, I assumed was bad. And so that included when I started having crushes on boys at church, I believed that that was sinful. And so I would try to repress those desires, and I would write about it in my diary and try to explain what I was feeling, and then I would go back later and white out everything I had written that felt wrong or that felt emotional because I wanted to erase it and hide it in case anyone read it. So I was always going back and forth between I feel these things. I have to hide my feelings. I have to suppress myself. I didn't have language for that, so I didn't understand that was happening, yeah, but it was a coping mechanism to survive in this world where emotions made you a bad person, and so I was, I became very skilled in dissociating and hiding who I was and hiding what I really felt and and just to survive and conform to the world I was raised in.

Brian Lee: 7:11

Yeah, I'm sorry, and thank you for sharing that. It also occurs to me that for me, you can tell me how you feel. It feels like I'm just jumping in and grilling you with all these crazy questions, and I really just kind of want to ask, having read the book, and there's, I mean, it's this incredible lifelong journey that you share with us of the whole thing. How are you today?

Cait West: 7:39

I'm doing good. I, you know, I'm in such a more, a much more stable place than I was when I left 11 years ago, when I started writing the book, like seven, eight years ago. I have a lot more roots down in my support system. You know? I i have therapy, I have friends, I have colleagues, I have ways to cope that are healthier than dissociation, and so I'm in a much better place. It's also been overwhelming to have the book come out and all of this be public. And I know I chose it and I thought about it for a very long time about what I wanted to do, but it is overwhelming to hear how many people have lived like this or have experienced these things, and to know that it's ongoing, and so that that does weigh heavy on me, and in That way, I feel still tied to that world, because not everybody has been freed from it.

Brian Lee: 8:46

Yeah, it's true, and it helped. It helps to hear how much time and distance you have from your experience. Because my I recognize that for people who are listening, there are some who've been out for years and years and years. I left my last place in July of 2021, so it's been about three years now, and then I know that there are people listening who are still right in the middle of it. And so I try to be aware of or conscious of where people are in the present, and that some of these conversations may or may not be activating or triggering for them based on what we're talking about, based on their own personal experiences. We all come with our own stories, and even recently, I posted something about how alone suffering makes us feel sometimes, and how there is a healing in connection. And this is based on Chuck DeGroat's upcoming book, and someone responded and just said, "I'm frustrated by the answer, that connection heals our trauma, but that in many ways, it's out of our control." How do you find connection to heal from a trauma that has brought the loss of it, and just hearing about the way that you're putting roots down in a new support system after having experienced a. What you did growing up for so long and just kind of having to to re-examine and deconstruct all these things that you thought were right and good and holy and all these things. How did you start putting those roots down? What is that like for you?

Cait West: 10:13

I can really relate to that struggle, because the way I grew up, I didn't have many friends, and the only friends that I really had were at church that I went to once a week, and so I didn't learn how to build relationships with peers, with people my own age. I never really had a true adolescence, and so in some ways, I feel socially developmentally stunted. And so I've had to learn all of that in my 20s and 30s, and so I can really relate to that struggle. It, it really can be very lonely, isolating experience to leave a community where that was your only support system. And so for me, the church I grew up in was the only support system, and so that's why I use the metaphor of roots, because instead of just one hold onto a support, I have many holds onto many different kinds of support and and that's because you can't rely on one thing to help you heal or to help you through. And so there are so many ways to enjoy life and to heal and and so for me, that's that includes therapy, includes friendships, it includes building these connections. And that takes practice, you know. And so for me, the church isn't a place that I feel safe in anymore, so I've had to learn how to build relationships outside of that. And what I found helpful is to follow your curiosity and what you're interested in. And so for me, that's writing and reading and so book clubs and writing groups are exactly what I love to do, to be social. And that helps, I think, to make it feel less scary is when you find people who are interested in the same things, and they might be from different backgrounds and and you don't have a religion that makes you all conform to look the same way. And so I would, I would just encourage people to follow their interests and creativity and see where it leads you, because you can open up a lot of doors for those connections.

Brian Lee: 12:37

Yeah, I love that. Thank you. We just recently spoke with Lore Wilbert, who wrote The Understory, and it's all about putting down those roots and the life that we find in death and decay of things. And I think we often hear that this adage of when life gets hard, you know, you look up, you know, and Shannan Martin looks, writes about looking at the sky or the clouds, and she responds like, I hear that and I get it, but when I'm having a hard time, I look down and where are my feet planted right now? And where am I rooted? And what are the things that are that are holding me in place? So I again, without the dualistic thinking or the binary kind of thinking, I really appreciate that. Thank you. In addition to the themes of being rooted, you also. I love the theme of kind of open water that you have throughout the book, whether it's the Pacific Ocean or specific beaches in Hawaii or Lake Superior. What does that hold for you?

Cait West: 13:31

It's something I think about a lot, because when I was a kid, we would go to the beach at my uncle's house in North Carolina, and I've always struggled with a sense of feeling at home in my body and just in a specific place, and the ocean always felt like what I wanted a home to be like. And that sounds very abstract, but it just felt so wild and free and like it could hold all of the different emotions that I wasn't allowed to express. And so I always felt connected to water in that way. And you know, all the places I've lived, maybe except for Colorado, which is very dry, and I didn't feel very at home at there at all. But water has really defined the places I've loved the most. And now when I live I live in West Michigan, and so when it's warm out, I like to go to the lake as much as I can, because I feel a sense of calm and peace, and me feeling small next to a large body of water just is very comforting in a weird, ironic way, to feel small makes me feel safe.

Brian Lee: 14:53

Thank you for sharing that. I think, for people who haven't read the book yet are unfamiliar with it, you're. Writing about Christian patriarchy and the breaking away from it, and just the absolute chokehold it had, not just on you, but on probably literal millions of people, at least in America, if not the world. And I think that there's just, I don't remember exactly where it is in the book, but the waking up moment that you have as you begin breaking away from it, right, and beginning to gain language around it, or to have this sense of agency of making the choices, to make your own choices, is an incredibly courageous step, and I imagine is an incredibly validating maybe is the right word affirming? Might be the right word for you. What do you feel like are the right words for that kind of shift that you experienced as you begin to wake up to what was going on, gaining language for what was happening to you and making those choices for yourself?

Cait West: 16:00

Yeah, and you know, the term waking up is a really good one, because in cult survivor community, we talk a lot about waking up and how when you're in a high control group, you feel like you're sedated or you're living a kind of a dream life that isn't quite real, and when You wake up, you can't unsee what's happening around you, and so that language helps. For me, it was a slow process of slowly waking up and getting in touch with my intuition again, which I had repressed for for decades, and one of the first moments where I felt that fire inside of me come alive was when I was around 21 and I had just gone through a courtship process, which in Christian patriarchy is is how you find a marriage. It's not like dating at all. It's very father, controlled and chaperoned, and I was in this relationship for a long time, and my father ended it, which I talk about in the book. It's really kind of arbitrary reasons, I think. And I was so heartbroken because I had imagined that I would get married to this person, that I would get to start my life, because I was told, you won't be an adult until you get married. And it felt like my dreams were shattered because my father said, No, you can't get married. And I realized in that moment I had no choices. I was helpless, and I was I was probably angry and just didn't know how to use the words for anger. But I remember my father sitting me down and telling me to repent for feeling sad and for feeling love for this person that I wasn't allowed to marry, and in his eyes, that was sinful, because we really believed in emotional purity, where you don't have any affection or emotional attachment to someone unless you were committed to marrying them. And so in a courtship, you're not committed yet, so you're not allowed to feel anything that I couldn't help my emotions, and he told me I needed to repent for that. And I just felt this fire inside of me and this this intuition saying that is a complete lie, that how would God want to send me to hell for love, for loving somebody, and I just knew it was wrong. And that was maybe the first time I felt like I was hearing my own voice in a long time, because I had tried so hard to obey, and because I was told, if you obey Dad, you're being God, yeah. And I was just like, well, maybe dad's wrong, and maybe that's not what God wants, and maybe that's not what I want. And that was the first big moment for me, when I started to contemplate leaving or what that would even look like. And I was 21. I didn't leave till I was 25 so it wasn't an easy process, but I needed to go through that mental barrier of of believing that I could make a different choice.

Brian Lee: 19:28

Thank you. I recognize that some people may be listening to you and having a sudden realization that this is part of their experience, or maybe they're having their own wake up moment. If you could go back to your 21 year old self who is sitting there wrestling with those feelings or realizations or with those really big questions that took you four years to process and act on. What would you tell 21 year old Cait?

Cait West: 19:55

I would explain to her what abuse really is. I didn't have the language for. That yet, and I would tell her that abuse isn't love, and even when someone says they're loving you, but they're hurting you at the same time, that's not real love, and that she deserves to be happy and to not be depressed and miserable her whole life because she's been suppressing her true self.

Brian Lee: 20:22

Yeah, yeah, thank you. You also write, "God was the author of my story. He had a plan for my life, and my father had control over the details. I always knew the story had power, but the power was never mine." And so many people in our community have felt their agency stripped from them, because that's what abuse does. So what has this process been like of reclaiming your agency and the power of not just owning your narrative but being able to tell it and share it with other people? What has that been like for you?

Cait West: 20:56

It's been such a beautiful process. I mean, they're definitely being really dark days. Writing about trauma isn't really fun. There have been really difficult days when I had to revisit things I didn't want to revisit, but I know I needed to for myself, and I knew I needed to do all of this, because writing for me is a way of asserting myself and using my voice in a way that I don't always feel comfortable with speaking, and I could try to make something beautiful out of something that was a terrible experience. You know, hopefully the book isn't a drag, hopefully it's not completely depressing, but that, you know, writing it for me was trying to find the beauty where I could, and I think I would have been, I think just writing it would have been enough. And so I don't, I don't see me putting it into the world as part of that healing. Because I think I needed to do that for myself. Putting it onto the world is like a whole different process, because once you publish a book, it doesn't really belong to you anymore, and so now the readers are going to have their own experience of it. It's going to make them remember their own things and have their own reflections and interpretations. And I want that to happen. I want people to make it their own whatever, whatever that is. And so it is empowering to be able to create something that can connect with other people. And I think the biggest part is meeting so many people who've experienced similar things. And I often people often say things like, Oh, it wasn't as bad as you, but I've experienced such and such, and I always say, Please don't compare. Because, yeah, I have done that myself, and it's not really helpful, because you can't really put these kinds of experiences on a scale of how much harm it causes you, yeah, and so I would just say, if it resonates with you, it resonates with you, and I'm really sorry that we're part of the same club, but also we can connect through it and through the stories that we tell. Maybe we can prevent this from happening in the future or enable more people to feel like they can leave bad situations.

Brian Lee: 23:27

Yeah, thank you. I will confirm that, from my point of view, the book was definitely not a drag. There was so much beauty and hope in it, even in the middle of you telling really hard stories, it was, it was just for me, filled with a sense of hope, if for nothing else, for other people, being able to wake up to their own story and recognize, not necessarily that their entire life has been a lie, but just being able to own like I don't want people to devalue all the things that have already happened to them, but just to be able to own it and make it their story, instead of something that someone else is writing for them. So having told the story and released it to kind of give it to everyone else, what are you hoping people will take away from your book?

Cait West: 24:12

I've always been really confident that the number one audience I wanted to reach is people who might relate in some way, whether that's growing up in this movement, or being in an abusive relationship, or having to leave family or break off relationships, whatever it is, religious trauma, purity culture, I hope that they feel seen and heard and reminded that Their story matters, because books, for me have been a way to both see other ways of existence and also feel validated that I'm not alone. And so I really do hope that it helps people not feel alone in whatever they've experienced, and that it does matter and that they're not insignificant. Yeah. Then the secondary audience has always been people who may not be able to relate, but they probably have people in their lives who can, and so I hope it helps them foster that empathy for people's experiences that might be difficult to understand, and especially with abuse. You know, I talk a little bit in the book about wanting to be physically harmed so that I would have evidence, but that's just because so many people don't believe you when you talk about spiritual abuse. Yeah, and so I really want to show how harmful it is, and even if you don't have that physical evidence, it's it's devastating to people, and I hope it telling the story will encourage people to not take it lightly.

Brian Lee: 25:54

Yeah, thank you. I just came across a quote again from JS Park's book, As Long As You Need, he writes, "The grief of every victim is that they are mired in a perpetual current that protects abusers but drowns the victims. And psychiatrist and professor Dr Judith Lewis Herman gives us a reason why this happened. It's very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator, because all the perpetrator asks is that the big bystander do nothing." And I think it's just that that so often when there aren't physical marks of abuse, when they are emotional or spiritual or something else, it's it's so easy for people to not want to believe it, even though they know you and love you, because it would be too much cognitive dissonance on their part to believe that about someone else, or they can't handle the amount of pain that you've experienced, and they don't know what to do with it, and it's their own discomfort. Man, I've been there and I'm both so sorry for your experience and so glad that you've taken these steps to share with the rest of us for our benefit, too.

Cait West: 27:01

Thank you.

Brian Lee: 27:02

Something that I really, really, really appreciate and value in the way that you tell your story. Because I I imagine it could have been told a million different ways, and you write it with so much grace. There's a line that you have in there. It says, I wondered if a heart could be overprotected, if, instead of breaking it could dry up from the lack of love. And there's such a delicate balance in the way that you tell your story that doesn't demonize your parents, especially your father. It doesn't demonize all the pastors and leaders you were under or the elders that you had met with. It's made pretty clear in the ways that he was controlling, dismissive, even abusive, and yet you managed to write it in a way that seems to offer explanations without excuses, that somehow you've managed to see it from. This is what he needed. These are the decisions he believed were the right choices for our family, for others in our community who may relate with your experience of a lack of love, of drying up for it, who could very easily go down a different path of how they tell the story of people who have abused them. Was that a really conscious choice on your part to write it that way, is it? Is it the product of a lot of work that I imagine you've done in narrating the story?

Cait West: 28:29

Yeah, and I think everyone has the right to tell their own story the way they want to. For me, I have this belief that people are more complex than than we want them to be, especially when we tell stories we really want to have a clear cut villain and a clear cut hero. Yeah, and that's, that's not my experience of humanity. I think that people have potential for all sorts of behaviors, and I wanted to show my father as a person, not as a monster or the villain of the story. And that's not to excuse the abuse, and I definitely call out the abuse and the harm he's caused, but I think it's, it's helpful to see people as complex, because we're not born. Okay, one this might be controversial, but I don't think we're born. I don't think anyone's born a monster, you know, and lots of things can lead people into harming others, and they have choices. I'm not saying they don't have choices, but there's a lot of factors that go into a person's life, and I think it's helpful to examine those for many reasons, to understand the people around us, to help ourselves grow to be better people. Um. It was very intentional for me to not diagnose my father. Um, publicly, I'm not a I'm not a licensed therapist. I can't provide a diagnosis or a a solution for who he is or why he does the way things he does, because there's some things I just don't understand. But I will be honest, I have my own personal thoughts about that. I get angry sometimes, and there's lots of names that come to mind that I'm not going to put into a book sure that I'm going to publish, right? So I think there's just different ways of expressing this and communicating this. And I wanted my book to be a place for people to come and not feel overly triggered or unsafe, and some of those feelings I have for myself and the people closest to me, and I don't have to yell in the book, I guess about all my angry feelings, and I've also processed A lot of that in therapy. I guess, what ALMS is trying to say is I find that some people wish I had been harsher to my father, which is an interesting it's an interesting thought to me that people want me to be harsher to somebody. And I think we do have that sense of justice. You know, we want to, we want the bad people to to receive their due consequences. I've made peace with the fact that my dad's never going to be sorry, and he's never going to have, I'm never going to have that sense of justice about that. Um, on the other hand, he doesn't exactly make himself a happy person. I don't know if you've known people like him, but when you live like that, and the way you treat people like that, you you aren't surrounded by good friends. And so I think he's created his own punishment, in that sense, by cutting off people. And I and I just want to see people as human beings who deserve compassion, even if they don't deserve it, if that makes sense, yeah, sure. And that's just, I don't want to live in hate and resentment, and that's just my own choice. And forgiveness is for me, it's not for him. That's how I feel about it.

Brian Lee: 32:24

Yeah, thank you. And I think it says a lot about who you are in the choices that you've made, even as you hear feedback about how other people wish you would have written about him or told, I don't know, told more on him or about him. And I think it speaks to who you are, and to the way that you've chosen to portray him in your story, that you own right, that you released there. And I think you do make it really clear throughout the writing. You even write about you include a letter that you wrote to him right about forgiveness and a move towards reconciliation. And I really loved the way that you wrote it, because I think so many people have forgiveness weaponized against them. People have reconciliation weaponized against them. It's like, oh, well, you did wrong, but you believe in Jesus, so you have to reconcile. You have to forgive and all these things. And you make it really clear in that letter, it's like that you would love to move toward reconciliation, which would include, we can't do that unless we're both willing to listen, acknowledge the wrong and to change, and you set up these really strong and really clear boundaries. And I think it's just beautiful. I think it's like you're saying that this ability to offer that compassion and that grace to someone who, for your entire life, was just entirely controlling of basically every aspect of your life, to have come out of it on the other end and to still be full of grace is nothing short of a miracle. And I just there's so much beauty in that, and there's so much hope in that, Kate, I hope you see, because there are so many people out there who go in a different direction because they don't know what else to do. And I think they often ask that question. It's like, is there any hope for me? And I would love to point them to your book and just say yes, yes, there is.

Cait West: 34:11

Yeah. And I think all your emotions are valid. And I think if you've been harmed this way, anger is absolutely a valid feeling, and you need to go through it. You can't repress it. And I think that's my point. Is I didn't want I did that before I wrote the book. You know, like I my book isn't my therapy. All of that's off the page. And so I think, I hope that people do feel like they can go through all of those emotions, because you need to process it and feel it in your body, and that's the only way you move through it, I think, instead of holding it inside. But there is hope. You know, once you get in touch with your body and your emotions and your intuition, you can live a fuller life. Because. Because you're in tune with yourself and not listening to abusive voices telling you what to do.

Brian Lee: 35:07

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So for you, I love that you said that your book isn't your therapy, because I think that's so important. And I think for everyone who is benefiting from your book there, I imagine there must have been a lot of therapy behind that. You know, being told your entire life, even like you said, what you're allowed to feel or not allowed to feel. How did you learn to get in touch with to name, to experience your own feelings?

Cait West: 35:37

That's such a good question, because in the first place, I was taught that psychologists were evil, and so I had to go over that barrier first of like, Oh, my mind needs help, and psychologists are helpful, and deconstructing all of that. And, you know, I've been in therapy for years, and the beginning days, it was a lot of trauma therapy, which is a specific kind that focuses on reprocessing memories. I did EMDR therapy, and it's really helpful to do that in order to move through all of these traumatic memories that you hold in your body. And so for me, it's very much an embodiment thing. I was so dissociated and disembodied before that I couldn't feel pain. I couldn't feel what I think is a normal thing to feel. And so it wasn't until I did all of the therapy that I realized things like I had a chronic illness and I needed help from doctors, and I needed to stop living in my head all of the time, and so I feel like I'm I don't know it's a continuation for me. It's, it's an ongoing process of returning to the past and then coming back to the present, but not dwelling in the past anymore. Um, and I think I've done a lot of that work, and so I don't return to the past very much, um, on my own. This, this book, has been hard in that way of of I need to do that to put the book out in the world, but it doesn't haunt me, I guess, as it used to, does that answer your question?

Brian Lee: 37:28

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Thank you. You close the book by writing some more about your present day relationship to faith, to the church. And I don't want to spoil it for people who should go get the book and read it for themselves, but I do want to highlight a section and a passage where you just kind of write, "if better means..." where you kind of address making progress, finding purpose, healing, breaking or breathing through pain, acknowledging trauma, receiving and showing compassion, and then you write, "I'm a person who breaks the stories told to bind me. I must tell new stories to keep the ropes from nodding over again, having been through this whole thing and having shared your version of that story." And for me, learning the power of learning to identify and write and tell and share our own stories and the process of what that does to heal us. How are you identifying what those ropes are, where the knots come up? How you avoid them from nodding over again as now that this story's been told, you've got a whole bunch more in front of you, right? What does that look like for you?

Cait West: 38:36

I mean, it's a tricky it's a tricky thing in our current political landscape with feeling like Christian patriarchy is spreading more in politics, especially so it is difficult in that sense that I'm always reminded that liberation isn't a static thing, and I'm trying to think of the best way to answer this, because I also believe that personal liberation needs to be tied to collective liberation, and so I don't want to completely forget what's happened to me until everyone is out of these situations. And I know that's an idealistic goal, but it's hard for me to let go completely of the past when I know there are still stay at home daughters and kids who are trapped. But I think I pay attention more to red flags, and I trust my gut a lot more, and I don't put myself in situations where I feel unsafe. And so for me, that's not having it's having a no contact with my dad. Yeah. And that relationship became unreconcilable, in my opinion, and the letter you mentioned, he never responded to that, and has never directly talked to me since. And so that has been liberating for me to not have that impact in my life anymore, and so I avoid those kinds of relationships that aren't going to be healthy or accept me for who I am as a person. And part of that is creating safe a safe space, so like my home. You know, I can be here and my dad's not allowed here, for instance, this is where I feel safe. And then I can go out in the world and do the work I need to do, and sometimes that's virtually, you know, with social media and interviews. But then I can return to my safe place and remember where I am and how far I've come and I'm not alone anymore, and just reminding myself that I don't live tied down in that way like I used to. And so I just that that line you're talking about in the book is just like part of my reminding myself to remember this like you've been through a lot and you can still keep going and you're not you're not ever going to go back there.

Brian Lee: 41:30

Yeah, thank you. As I hear you talk about liberation, I recognize that that might look different for different people coming out of different situations. How do you define it?

Cait West: 41:43

Oh, that's, that's maybe the hardest question I've been asked. I mean, I see it like I talked about. I see it per like a personal liberation, which is for me, not submitting to the Christian patriarchy or any patriarchy, which is complicated in the world we live in. It's resisting It's resisting oppression. And then there's the collective part of that is fighting for liberation of all people. And that's that can be, that can show up in many different ways. You can't really speak to just your own issue and ignore all the other ways people are being oppressed. And I think that's why we have experts in intersectional racism, for instance, who can speak to all these different aspects of liberation and injustice. I guess, idealistically, it's a freedom from oppression. It's a freedom from colonization, it's a freedom from patriarchy. And I don't know if anyone really knows what that's completely like, sure, because our world is so, so flooded with all of that. Yeah, so in a way, that's a it's an idealized version of the world, but I don't know if we can make any change without imagining something different. And so it's a process. Yeah, I don't know if there's ever a static state of liberation.

Brian Lee: 43:15

No, I don't either, because it I feel like liberation is such a an active thing, that it doesn't come with a state of rest, like I don't know that we ever get to rest in liberation. Because I don't know that we'll ever live in a world without some kind of oppression in one sense or another. And I appreciate that you're someone who really lives out and acts out what she's saying. I mean, at the back of the book, you offer a land acknowledgement, as we talk about liberation, or just acknowledgement of the things that have happened, and as we look at like you're saying the political environment, or this weird kind of what feels like for a lot of people, is step backwards in patriarchy, or in terms of whatever terms we want to use. And I recognize how much abuse comes out of a need to hold on to power and control. And I think for me, part of that liberation has been removing myself from those systems of power and control, not necessarily to hold it for myself, but to have a sense of agency and to have a sense of autonomy that that I won't be dictated to. I have a million other questions that I haven't asked, but where can people find you or connect with you?

Cait West: 44:35

Sure, and I don't mind the hard questions. I like being surprised. So my you can find me on my website, caitwest.com, and all the info about the book is there, as well as events that I'm doing, so readings or traveling to different towns. Um, I'd love to see you. And I'm also on social media @caitwestwrites, and I spell my first name c-a-i-t, so in case you need to make sure you spell it correctly to find me. But yeah, I'm a very online person most of the time, so you can find me there.

Brian Lee: 45:12

Awesome. Everyone. Go get a copy of "RIFT: A Memoir of Breaking Away From Christian Patriarchy." Wherever books are sold, we'll provide the links for everyone in the show notes, Kate, thanks again, so much for being with us today.

Cait West: 45:24

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.

Brian Lee: 45:26

Man, wasn't that a great conversation? If you enjoyed it as much as I did, be sure to follow Kate and say thanks for being on the show. If you're looking for links, resources and more, you can find the show notes on our website at brokentobeloved.org. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review or share on your socials and tag us. I'd love to see who's listening and to see your takeaways as a 501c3 nonprofit, our work is made possible by our generous donors. If this has been helpful to you, would you consider joining us? You can give a one time gift or choose to support us monthly. Just $5 or $10 a month goes a long way in helping us to create these resources. You can support us today at brokentobeloved.org/support. Coming up on the show, we have Laura Barringer, Scot McKnight and many more. Next time, we'll be talking with Tim Whitaker about his work with the new evangelicals, how it got started, and what they're hoping to accomplish. There's so much that we cover, and I can't wait for you to hear it. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. And here's to moving toward healing and wholeness together. I'll see you next time.