Hi friend,
I want to tell you about a moment from this week’s episode that I have not stopped thinking about.
My guest, Audra Phelps, had been out of the Mormon church for eight years. Eight years. She was making Thanksgiving dinner from scratch, the way a good Mormon wife does it, and she noticed she felt resentful in her own kitchen. So she did what I would want any of us to do. She got curious about the feeling instead of pushing it down.
Why am I resentful?
Because I don’t like making apple pie.
Okay, so why am I making apple pie?
Because it’s my husband’s favorite. Except he had never once asked her to make it.
So she decided right there she would make her own favorite instead. And she stood in that kitchen, a woman in her forties who had been baking pies her entire adult life, and realized she had no idea what kind of pie she liked.
That is what identity loss actually looks like. Not a breakdown. Not a dramatic scene. A blank where an answer should be.
Here is what stayed with me
Your nervous system keeps the rules long after you stop believing them.
Audra had already said out loud that she was not Mormon. She had already told her husband, her kids, her parents. The belief was gone. The programming was not. Eight years later it was still running the pie.
This is the part people miss when they talk about leaving anything, whether it’s a church, a marriage, a family role, a job that shaped who you thought you were. Deciding is the fast part. Your body takes longer, because your body learned those rules as a survival strategy, and survival strategies do not release just because you changed your mind.
She was taught to distrust herself before she could speak in full sentences.
When Audra questioned something as a child, she was told those feelings came from Satan and that it meant her faith was weak. Pray more. Read more. Obey more.
Sit with that. A curious child asks a question, and the answer she gets is that her own inner signal is dangerous.
I told her while we were recording that my nervous system was activating just hearing it, and I meant that literally. Because I know what happens to a person who is trained to treat her own knowing as a threat. She stops asking. Then she stops noticing. Then one day she cannot answer a question about pie.
The pattern is not about religion.
Audra works with women leaving the Mormon church. I work with women leaving narcissistic relationships. We got about twenty minutes in and realized we were describing the same thing with different vocabulary.
Conditional love. Isolation from anyone outside the system. A smear campaign when you leave. Family recruited against you. And on the other side, a woman who says the same sentence I hear in my practice constantly: I know what I’m not, but I don’t know what I am.
The container changes. The wound does not.
The part I want you to take with you
If you are somewhere in the middle of this right now, questioning something big, not ready to name it out loud, please hear what Audra said. It took her ten years. Ten. She did not wake up one day and walk out. She moved through it letter by letter, and the last letter came when she read something and finally had a visceral reaction she could not talk herself out of.
You are not behind. You are not weak for taking a long time. Slow is how people leave things that were built to keep them.
And when you get to the other side and someone asks you what you want, and you have no answer, that is not failure. That is the starting line.
Start with the pie.
Connect with Audra Phelps Website: https://mamaaudra.com Free masterclass: Five Shifts Every Former Mormon Mom Needs to Make Program: Reclaimed, her 8 week identity rebuild for women leaving the church
P.S. Audra ordered a different pie every week until she found her answer. It was blackberry. If you cannot answer a question that small about yourself right now, the HURRT Survey is a good place to start looking at why. It maps how what happened to you before 18 may still be running the show today. Take it free here: https://www.flipyourmindset.com/hurrt
P.P.S. If anxiety has been driving the bus for too long, The Calm Code is my 8 week small group program where you learn to heal it from the inside out instead of managing it forever. Details here: https://www.flipyourmindset.com/thecalmcode
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