She was told anyone who leaves the church becomes an addict and ends up miserable. She did become an addict. She isn’t miserable.
Crystal Hamilton is a counselor, 12 years sober, and the author of Drowning in Doctrine. She grew up the youngest of six in a Mormon home, where she learned early that her job was to stay quiet and not cause problems. This is a conversation about leaving a high-control religion, and why the shame it taught you keeps showing up long after you stop believing.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Shame in High-Control Religion - Why the blame always lands on you and never on the teachings, and why that’s the piece that takes the longest to unlearn.
▪️ Repeating Your Parents’ Patterns - How you can see exactly what your family got wrong and still catch yourself doing it, and why that realization is often where the real work begins.
▪️ Loving Someone in Active Addiction - How to hold firm boundaries with a family member who’s using while still supporting their recovery, and why you can feel hopeful and terrified at the same time.
▪️ When Your Partner Stops Growing - Why it’s so hard to tell whether the distance is your own avoidance or a real gap, and how far “live and let live” can actually go in a marriage.
▪️ Sibling Violence - Why violence between siblings so often gets dismissed as normal fighting, by parents and even by CPS, and what it teaches the kid on the receiving end about keeping the peace.
▪️ Lifespan Integration Therapy - How this offshoot of EMDR uses a timeline of memory cues to bring a younger you into the present, and why you can heal without retelling every detail of what happened.
🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️Ep 103 | Religious Trauma & Abuse w/ Dr. Laura Anderson
▪️Ep 217 | Good Kid, Quiet Wreckage: Relational Shame, the Silent Treatment & The War You Waged on Yourself w/ Maggie Nick
▪️ Ep 213 | The Truth About Estrangement: Boundaries, No Contact & Grief w/ Dr. Sharon Martin
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