Everyday Prophets: You Can't Heal What You Won't Name with Conscious Coore

What does it mean to offer care to people the church has already harmed? Conscious Coore, founder of Flamingo Trauma Recovery and educator in trauma-informed spiritual care, has been answering that question for years.

In this first episode of the Everyday Prophets series, Kristen and Conscious go deep on what trauma-informed faith actually looks like in practice, why the church keeps collapsing reconciliation and reconnection into one thing, and how doctrine gets weaponized when we adopt it uncritically.

Conscious brings a framework that will stay with you: doctrine, choice, and power. She makes a distinction between reconciliation and reconnection that the church desperately needs. And she closes with a call for every listener to see themselves as a person of influence, because this work was never meant to live in the hands of a few.

If you've ever walked out of a church service feeling more alone than when you walked in, this conversation was made for you.

Connect with Conscious
•       Website: Conscious Coore or Flamingo Recovery

•       Instagram: @consciouscoore

•       Threads: @consciouscoore

Resources Mentioned

•       Flamingo Trauma Recovery | trauma-informed spiritual care training and counseling

•       Beyond Faith as Usual Resource List 

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

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Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenannette.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

Justice Coaching options!

"Find your justice mindset" quiz!

Transcript

speaker-0 (00:00.45)
What does it mean to offer care to people the church has already harmed? Conscious Core has been answering that question for years. And if you've ever walked out of a church service feeling more alone than when you walked in, this conversation was made for you. Welcome to Jesus, Justice and Mercy, a podcast for Christians waking up to a deeper, braver faith, one formed by Jesus.

shaped by justice, and committed to healing the world. I'm Kristen Brock, and each week I'm here to wrestle alongside you with what it means to follow Jesus with courage in a world on fire. Together, we engage Scripture, history, and our own stories to ask, What does love require? What does justice demand? And who are we becoming as disciples? If you're tired of shallow answers, silent churches,

or a faith that avoids hard truth, you're in the right place. Because here, we let Scripture confront us. We let Jesus lead us, and we let justice shape us. Welcome to Season 3, Discipleship on Fire. Let's go!

So hey friends, I am super excited today because I have a guest. Her name is Conscious Coore. And I am actually gonna just go ahead and get started and have her introduce herself. So welcome Conscious to Jesus Justice and Mercy.

speaker-1 (01:30.594)
Thank you for having me, Kristen. I'm so excited to be here, part of this conversation. Just to introduce myself, I am a founder and an educator trainer with Flamingo Trauma Recovery. A lot of the work that we do is to provide trauma-informed spiritual care, spiritual counseling, providing education for people who are interested in.

a faith integrated mental health journey and also providing education for faith leaders, therapists, or counselors, coaches, you name it, anyone who is integrating faith in their counseling in any capacity. We train them on the trauma-informed approach to how they weave in doctrines, scriptures, and ideologies.

speaker-0 (02:16.28)
So that is amazing. Anybody who knows me well knows that Trauma Informed is my heart from raising my boys. I just, conscious and I connected randomly on threads. And so I'm so excited to have you here today, because that's such a, that the ability to merge those two things, our faith and trauma is something that is sorely lacking in the church and the work you are doing, man, that is God's work right now, because it is so needed in this world right now. So I appreciate what you're doing.

speaker-1 (02:46.51)
Thank you.

speaker-0 (02:47.296)
So tell me a little bit about your upbringing. What was your upbringing in faith like as a woman of color?

speaker-1 (02:56.108)
Yeah, that's an interesting question for me. I was talking about it with my husband as I compare the work that I do now with how I grew up. I grew up in Louisiana. I was always very active in church. My mother was always very active in church. My father, not so much, but I grew up in a non-denominational context. I didn't have a lot of understanding about the...

vast differences between denominations and how much denominations separated the church. And I also didn't have much of a perception of segregation. Because the church that I grew up in, for the most part, was just very much into teaching the Bible, teaching the gospel, responding to issues that come up with a faith-based view, but not so much. It wasn't apparent to me.

that there were even people who maybe ascribed to an approach to theology that could potentially be polarizing. So now that I'm older, I grew up in Louisiana, went to church in Louisiana, and I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, later moved to New Jersey, and now I live in New York. And I've been able to see a lot more variety in how people worship.

what brings people together, how culture plays a role, and how we understand faith. But as far as my personal spiritual formation, I think a lot of it came from participating in church. But then there is a huge part of my life that involves grappling with what is biblically true versus what is more culturally promoted. And a lot of that

Those questions came from discussions with my dad, who was not a churchgoer, who had a lot of views that might mirror what you call Hebrew Israelite doctrine or doctrines that very much relate to, yeah, relate to, you know, how...

speaker-0 (04:58.817)
interest

speaker-1 (05:06.484)
America is represented in the scripture and America's role in the end times. So I got a lot of that from him at home. And I think it influenced me to think critically. didn't necessarily, I'm sure it influenced how I approach faith, but it most definitely encouraged me to think critically about what I believe.

speaker-0 (05:28.076)
That's fascinating. I've been talking on my podcast a bit about black theology and how it is rooted in Israelite story of exodus and freedom and also how a black theology has been rooted come from a place of suffering versus where white theology has come from. Was there a point in your life you mentioned briefly that talking about social issues was just what you did in church and that is not what we

tend to do in the white church. Was there a point when you kind of thought, my gosh, this is really different than what I grew up with or what I understood the church's role or theology to

speaker-1 (06:09.486)
Well, even when I think about social justice and the way that I heard it, it was very much just, this is a part of life. So we are interpreting issues that are happening in the world and culturally and socially through what the kingdom of God promotes. There was definitely a difference between what I heard taught in churches and what I heard my dad speak about. There was a vast difference.

speaker-0 (06:35.906)
day.

speaker-1 (06:37.334)
So when you mention that black theology often stems from suffering, that I heard more of that from my dad when I'm at home with him. Yeah, but I heard a lot more language around empowerment at church, not because of cultural ties or racial identification, but just because this is a part of citizenship in the kingdom of God.

speaker-0 (07:03.34)
So when you say empowerment, what did that mean for you in the church?

speaker-1 (07:09.73)
Yeah, it interprets as the ability to not just be successful. I want to even be careful about, you know, how we use language to describe success or power. So I would, and now this is also me, I'm older, more mature now. So I would define empowerment the way that it was taught as just having the ability to live in alignment and in accordance with...

the standard of the kingdom of God. So this isn't necessarily wealth, but it could lend itself to wealth. It's definitely not a person's ability to use power comparatively to someone else. It's more about the ability to fulfill God's mandate for each individual's life. so empowerment in that regard, how do we see ourselves in the scripture versus

looking to world systems to be able to be successful and to live abundantly.

speaker-0 (08:13.516)
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious because it sounds like you had a really interesting upbringing with what your dad brought from faith and what your church and your mom brought from faith. How do feel that shaped the way you read scripture or you understand Jesus?

speaker-1 (08:29.752)
That's a great question. So it's so interesting because in church, my teacher, my pastor very much leaned into teaching. He was an intellectual. He understood the power of language and vocabulary and, you know, making meaning. And I would say that my dad also was an intellectual and he loved to make meaning. He loved to teach. So there were some values that came from both sides of the coin.

that I could at least consider. I think that my personality type, I was not taught to be a blind follower. And because I wasn't taught to be a blind follower, I just found myself as more of a critical thinker and it helped to authenticate my faith from a really early age. So the way that I...

saw faith was very practical. It was also through the lens of my personal suffering, but it's a part of how I was able to navigate my questions about who God is and about why suffering happens and what is the point of everything, which by the time I'm age 16, 17, 18, that question, why, was blaring in my head for nearly everything, because everyone had very-

speaker-0 (09:51.474)
Right? Like a lot of us didn't come to that until way later in

speaker-1 (09:55.214)
Life is so interesting you say that because now here I am 33 and I am so familiar with the question why and a lot of my role is encouraging people to lean into that question of why. So in faith and not necessarily the spaces that I grew up in but I know that what's common to those spaces is steering away from questioning. But I found a lot of conviction in a lot of

certainty about who God is because of my journey through the question why. And there is, of course, there was a space where I had to understand what surrender was and understand what trusting God's sovereignty was. But that didn't mean that my curiosity about why things happen and who God is had to be entirely abandoned. So I didn't realize when I was growing up.

that I was maybe in the minority around with the questions of why are things happening? But I can see how it also helps me to serve people who have trouble asking that question for themselves and maybe are afraid of what the answer would be.

speaker-0 (11:07.756)
Yeah, that's such an amazing kind of concept. think we in the church, at least in the way I was formed, we were always taught like, God has a reason for everything. And if you just trust Him enough, and you and I know in the mental health world how unhelpful that is, you know, if you were just read your Bible more, you wouldn't be depressed. you know, this wouldn't have happened if you did this. So I think that question of why

suffering and how does that fit into the kingdom of God on earth right now. And so that's really fascinating to me as you think about the work you're doing right now. I'm curious how you have been able to weave that into the work you're doing with people who either have come from significant trauma or are

I have always said the church, I have my own stories with my kids, but the church had no clue about what trauma-informed youth group looked like, what a trauma-informed church service looked like. It doesn't even cross their mind. And I think that layer that you're talking about, the layer of suffering, what is the, is there purpose to suffering or is it just the result of sin in the world? So I'd love to hear how you've kind of either

process that or how you get beyond, again, I don't know if you grew up with, know, God has a purpose. Which again, if you've just lost a baby, I'm sorry, that's not helpful. We are not good. I will say definitely in the white church, we are not good at lament at all. We just want to move to healing. So I'm just curious how you've processed that or integrated that into the work you're doing right now.

speaker-1 (12:49.802)
Yeah, you know, I have a lot of ways that I interpret that question and a lot of responses popped in my head. But the first thing was definitely just by way of the definition of trauma informed. think that in society, we think that trauma informed care means to be informed by trauma or to be informed about trauma, to have information intellectually. So one of the things that

I really promote and often think about is how trauma-informed care is really more about how we adjust our procedures, how we adjust our care and our language to accommodate those who have been impacted by trauma. When you tell a person who's been impacted by trauma that everything happens for a reason, that might be sufficient for someone who has not experienced trauma, and there are people, in my opinion, who have.

not experienced any, you traumatic event. we can, let's suppose that there is someone on the earth who, when they heard everything happens for a reason and God has a plan and works in mysterious ways, let's say that that did work for them. Trauma-informed care means that my procedure and my approach to offering care cannot be adjusted.

for the experiences of someone who hasn't gone through life the way that I did. The second thing that I think about is this idea around logic. A lot of people think that in order to be a person of faith, you have to abandon logic. I think that for trauma survivors, it's really important for there to be something that makes sense, that's grounded. And maybe this stem from that original.

thing that we just talked about, the question why, but the way that I help people in reconciling is not by, you know, relying on human logic, but helping to decode the logic of the belief system, the individual belief system that is in front of me, and then decoding the logic of the spirit realm, the logic of that's powerful God.

speaker-0 (15:02.774)
It's both and, right? Not either or.

speaker-1 (15:05.408)
And so for people who are looking for safety, it is not sufficient to be in a space where no one has answers and no one feels accountable to offer answers or no one feels accountable to not just stand on truth, but to be very concrete and clear about what truth is, where there's a lack of accountability and a lack of objectivity.

there are more risks and that is for anyone. So for the trauma survivor, they are not just looking for answers and maybe in extreme cases, you may be working with someone who feels like they need to know everything about everything. But at minimum, what we're dealing with is a world where people do need to understand what is happening because in their most

vulnerable state often, someone took advantage of their lack of power or what they didn't know. And I think that it is more than okay for faith spaces to accommodate that need to know what is real, what is true. And that is what Jesus came to do, to reveal what is real, what is true, and hold systems of power accountable to that.

speaker-0 (16:25.996)
I love that when you talk about repair or reconciliation, Jesus came to obviously reconcile us to Him, that vertical, but He also came to reconcile us to one another. And I think sometimes in the church, we really rush to that reconciliation space. And we rush because it makes me feel better if I can say, like, you know, let me hug you and we're all good.

speaker-1 (16:52.341)
love

speaker-0 (16:52.716)
You can talk a little bit about, because I literally have just been talking about this, like rushing through repair or completely skipping repair to get to reconciliation. What that looks like for you or in the trauma-informed space or in a cultural space as a black woman. What does repair look like before we get to reconciliation?

speaker-1 (17:15.2)
Yeah, I love that question so much. And it can be difficult to get people to prioritize the process of repair for different reasons. So when I think about reconciliation, I refer to it as, I call it reconciliation theory because there are so many parts of reconciliation that need to be established conceptually before we can truly reconcile one to another.

And so I think that you mentioned this already that Christ came to reconcile us to himself. But I think that one of the major realities that we have to come to terms with is that people are not securely reconciled to God and they are not securely attached to God. So what we tend to project this theoretical reconciliation that we have to God onto

our connections and attachments to other people. And it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to anyone. It only makes sense to people who are comfortable with living disintegrated realities where things don't have to make sense to them. trying to make it from one day to the next, which is essentially survival. But people who want to thrive, they want to be able to live in coherence with what God said.

and know that they are not abandoning themselves or living in any level of pretension or pretentiousness to appear to be reconciled. So, I mean, I have so many thoughts about that. think that the, well, you know, we have to consider so many things that are essential to the gospel. So if the gospel or if the tenets and the principles of the gospel are not framing how, when, and if we reconcile, then we will attempt to, I'll put it this way.

I saw someone say, someone responded to a post about reconciliation and the response, that's what it was. Forgiveness is free. You don't have to earn it, but reconciliation is earned. And I thought to myself, that's an interesting way of putting it because if you consider the gospel, reconciliation and forgiveness almost go hand in hand. I think that people are confusing reconciliation and reconnection.

speaker-1 (19:42.382)
Reconciliation is more giving an account for all things, putting everything in its place, which is essentially peace. But reconciliation doesn't have to equate to connecting to someone the same way, especially if the basis for the original connection was harmful, was idolatrous, was built on sin. So reconnection is not necessarily what Christ came for. And the scripture says that

He came to bring a certain level of division because people would have to choose him. And that would be the natural reaction, fighting, you know, mother from father, right? So when we think about what Christ came to do, it was primarily to reconcile us back to him, to God, as we are securely attached to him and as we are securely reconciled to him.

we can look at these other relationships and put everything in its place and make peace and be at peace. I think that's different from what people attempt to do when they think about reconciliation.

speaker-0 (20:52.492)
Yeah, and I mean, there's so much I want to respond to, like I think the idea of attachment theory and how can you believe in a good father when you didn't experience a good father on earth. want to talk a little bit about, you talked about forgiveness and I think one of the things we tend to do is say, will you forgive me? whether someone offers forgiveness or not is not up to me, that's up to that person.

But if they do offer me forgiveness, that takes the weight off me. Okay, I feel better, they forgive me, but if I haven't addressed the harm I've done to that person and repair that harm, then that forgiveness is shallow. And I'm curious when we think about or when you think about whether that's faith-based. So even if I, you know, sin and I know God has forgiven me, but there might be repair I need to do on this side of heaven, right? To make that okay.

And I'm curious how you see that in human relationships. And I think particularly when you come from trauma, if you come from childhood trauma, you can forgive a perpetrator. But if there's not repair, it's really hard to kind of move forward without just saying, OK, I'm just going to let that go. At times we have to just let it go, right? Because there is no repair.

But I'm curious how you might see that because your forgiveness lets me off the hook, but it doesn't require anything of me to heal the relationship.

speaker-1 (22:21.198)
Absolutely. You know, I don't often think about forgiveness from the perspective of the person being forgiven. And if I do, I think about, you know, what Jesus says in, I believe it's John chapter 21, something around there where Jesus blows on the disciples and he says, receive the Holy Spirit.

Whoever sins you forgive, their sins are forgiven. Whoever sins you don't forgive, their sins are not forgiven. I always, I think that's so interesting because Jesus already laid the foundation in that if you don't forgive, your sins won't be forgiven. So he's not giving authorization to not forgive. He's instead highlighting how much power we hold if we will forgive. And so I think that what people gain from

being forgiven is there is the power of condemnation and shame that we can remove from someone. I most often think about forgiveness from the perspective of the person who is offering it. for that person, I interpret it as the decision that you will make about a debt. Will you require the debt to be repaid or will you excuse the debt?

I think that is the essence of what forgiveness is. The only follow-up that it implies is that you will not turn around and decide that you now want repayment. I think some people do use distance and disconnection as a form of repayment. But if you choose disconnection and you know that this is not a form of repayment, this just is a decision that needs to be made.

then the conversation about forgiveness and reconnection, one does not imply the other.

speaker-0 (24:22.666)
I was thinking about this too, because I think often we talk about individual forgiveness, you you and I, but I think there's also a conversation the church should be having about systemic harm that the church has done, particularly to marginalized people.

You know, this country was built on the doctrine of discovery and saying, it's our land and God's giving it to us and I don't care who lives here or what you believe. You know, our job's to bring Jesus to you and that means we get this land. But I'm curious how you think about systemic harm and systemic forgiveness and systemic repair and reconciliation, which is just deep and wide. And I think it's particularly problematic for white people.

speaker-1 (25:08.193)
speaker-0 (25:09.026)
to work through that harm we have caused historically. So I'm just curious how you would, what you think about that, what that might look like. Especially coming from a trauma-informed.

speaker-1 (25:21.536)
Yeah, no. So there are some essential areas for consideration when we are talking about trauma-informed care and faith. And those three areas are around doctrine, choice, power, and not just natural systemic power. We're also looking at spiritual power. We're looking at the power of the scriptures, and we're looking at the power of doctrine. We're looking at

these three things critically to see how they got us to now. And I think that so often we take doctrine at face value, but if we really look at what doctrine is made of, it's made of authoritative piece, something was in place that caused people to believe that it's true. We're looking at theory at some point this

appear to be effective in some context. And we're looking at culture. It appeared to be relevant to the people who adopted it as true. And so if we break doctrine down to those parts, we can look at where doctrine came from and we can look at whether or not it is applicable, if it is any good, if it is essentially harmful. But I think most people are not willing to dissect the doctrine that they have adopted.

And if you tie in, you know, even faith, with the work that I do in training, a lot of it has to do with offering language around why these things are harmful and what we can do to correct the harm. I think the first thing that we can do to correct the harm is by giving sufficient language as to why it's harmful. You know, we cannot be satisfied with saying, that's not okay.

We have to be able to explain why it's not okay. We have to be able to look at even the faith that we ascribe to as Christians. Do we understand the tenets of the gospel? Do we understand the principles of the kingdom of God? Do we understand how spiritual laws work and how it impacts the human body and human experience? Most of the time we adopt doctrine and faith.

speaker-1 (27:39.818)
As if we don't investigate it and even if when it was given to us, even if it came from a place of truth, we are gonna internalize it, it adapts to whatever our lived experiences are. And to do that uncritically is essentially a flex of power.

speaker-0 (27:59.386)
looking at the doctrine we grew up with and critically looking at the Bible and saying, did this really mean and where did this? I think you said something about the idea that how that doctrine served you, not those exact words, but it came from a place of power. And so I think that idea, just the language of dissecting doctrine is really important because we don't want to throw away everything we know, but we've got to look at it critically and say,

What did this, how did this serve my people? How did this serve my church? How did this create more power or control or money or whatever those things are? So that idea of dissecting is really good. I love it.

speaker-1 (28:46.106)
Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the work that I do. So in training therapists and clinicians, coaches, ministers, you name it, we really look what makes up doctrine. And what ends up happening is as people are hearing the information, they become more reflective about their own spiritual formation, which is really important. But when working with clients, it is my responsibility to, and this is how I decode the logic of the belief system.

by understanding how doctrine, not externalized doctrine, not the doctrine that was written that was supposed to be, you know, used and applied and acted upon, what we're looking at is the internalized doctrine. So how did the written doctrine or the verbalized doctrine land in your belief system, considering what you were already taught in your formative years and what you came to believe, experience and adopt?

in your adult years, has the formation of your belief system been impacted by the knowledge of God or was it more impacted by what people said about faith and spirituality? Or has the knowledge of God impacted your beliefs or are your beliefs a filter for how you see God? That is all the logic of the belief system. takes a person being willing to

you know, objectively dissect doctrine, but then also think, how does this map for me as an individual? Because the same thing that I can see in someone else, it has happened in me in its own unique way.

speaker-0 (30:28.502)
Yeah, I love that because I think you can even take one piece of doctrine and how it's interpreted by someone who grew up in a safe and secure home versus someone who grew up in a home that was never safe and never secure or a neighborhood that wasn't safe or secure. How do you unpeel or dissect that doctrine when lived experience is on complete opposite ends of the spectrum? I'm assuming that work that you do. just can't say enough how important

important this work is that you're doing because it's not just therapy with a Jesus lens, right? It's really peeling back the depth and the width of how this all shows up and how we move through the world as more healed humans.

speaker-1 (31:04.47)
huh.

speaker-1 (31:14.734)
Yeah, yeah. mean, one thing that I think is so interesting about doctrine is that it is not inherently spiritual. Doctrine is like a, it's not positive or negative. There are so many neutral things that we have given either positive or negative, you know, judgment or connotations. Doctrine is, it can be good, it can be bad, but it's used in different contexts, in warfare, in, you know, policy.

politics, but what grounds us are those principles. So doctrine that worked in one context, if it was good, genuinely good, then it was most likely designed to contextualize principles that are healthy and holy. I think about the origin of different things, and I could be wrong about this, but I saw on social media that St. Patrick's Day is actually a holiday that commemorates someone who literally taught the gospel.

What I'm saying is I'm not entirely immersed in the Irish culture. So I don't all of the doctrine that may have been established to contextualize the gospel for Irish people. But there are things that have been isolated from that context that now, know, St. Patrick's Day represents something entirely different. The principles that of the gospel that may have originally been there have been isolated from

whatever that original doctrine or way to relay the gospel or piece of the gospel, the theory, what makes it effective, why? Why was this ever, did this ever become a thing? But there are ways that people understood God, you know, and when you take the context of one place and what they needed to be formed in the knowledge of God.

and you try to apply it somewhere else. That is the issue with doctrine, but it's the principles of the gospel and it's the tenets of the gospel that ground us. And it's way more easily transferable. It's a lot more healthy. The real issue is that we have a crisis in spiritual formation where people don't know the gospel. So doctrine is more harmful most often than anything.

speaker-0 (33:34.7)
Yeah, and I love what you said about isolating pieces of doctrine that serve your needs, right? So if I can take the gospel and isolate a sliver of that to create something that serves more my people or my church or whatever that looks like. I could talk to you for hours. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. I ask all my guests and then give you your last statement and how people can get a hold of you because the work you're doing is so important.

important. So my first question is, what is bringing you joy right now that has absolutely nothing to do with productivity?

speaker-1 (34:05.742)
That is such a great question. The weather, for sure. And New York is like, it looks like Gotham City for seer. And I'm from Louisiana, so the sun is the warmth. There are things that I love about being in Louisiana, and I always get a little homesick between January or maybe December and March. So when the sun first starts coming out and beaming into my window, I really feel like

Life is very good.

speaker-0 (34:38.112)
I feel that, power of the sunshine, right? The second question is, what are you currently obsessed with in the best way?

speaker-1 (34:41.187)
Yes.

speaker-1 (34:46.826)
Okay, the first thing that popped in mind, I'm wondering if I should say it or if I should think for it. So my current obsession is Criminal Minds, the TV show. I watched it all the time when I was in between freshman and sophomore year of college, I believe. And this was before streaming was a thing. So I'm now watching different seasons of Criminal Minds that I never saw.

Some of the episodes I did see, but then others I've never seen before. And so that's my new obsession.

speaker-0 (35:20.662)
Yeah, our kids who have no idea that we had to watch a TV show at 10 p.m. on Tuesday nights and that's all we got and we missed it. We missed it.

speaker-1 (35:28.226)
I'm literally wondering how I was able to binge Criminal Minds back then because how did I just happen? It was intuitive. You were where you needed to be to watch what you wanted to watch.

speaker-0 (35:42.146)
Yep, we worked our world around it. So for my listeners, I will put all this in the show notes, but how can people get a hold of you? And what's the last word you want to leave my listeners with?

speaker-1 (35:54.242)
Yeah, I'm very active on Instagram and threads, which is where Kristen and I met. ConsciousCore, C-O-N-S-C-I-O-U-S, that is my real name. People always wonder, is it like a brand strategy? No, that's my real name and I married into my last name, Core. I'm all active on those platforms. You can learn more about me at ConsciousCore.com, but I'm also a very social person, so.

feel free to reach out DM and comment. Just like Kristen and I had a conversation in the DMs and now we're here. I love taking connections that I make online, offline, because the impact really is offline. So, yeah, I can be reached there.

speaker-0 (36:39.754)
What's the one thing you would like the listeners to take away from either the work you do or our conversation?

speaker-1 (36:47.414)
I'd love listeners to think about themselves as someone who is able to make ripple effect change. think that people hear the work that I do and they think that it's work that only I can do. But I want the listener to see themselves as a person of influence and imagine themselves as being able to use this language to impact the spaces that they have.

active influence in. I don't believe for one second that this idea of trauma-informed spiritual intervention was ever supposed to be something that one or a few people do. It requires multiple voices from multiple different contexts to be able to make systemic impact. And I think it does start with language. When I was in college, I remember hearing about the Gestalt Theory language thought and

I believed it wholeheartedly then and I still believe it now. So I believe that change is entirely possible with more people having the language that they need to be able to describe where we are and where we are going. So if you heard something that sounded like I'm speaking your language, I want you to consider yourself as someone who can become fluent in this language and ultimately be compelling.

to create change. think that in conversations around trauma, mental health, and faith, what a lot of people lack is confidence, language, and the ability to influence and make compelling arguments. There's just so much that we are sifting through. But I find that with the many different ways that we can see trauma-informed work in faith-integrated care, there are so many doors to be able to access what will be relevant for people.

and to work from there. So those are my thoughts.

speaker-0 (38:43.31)
I cannot thank you enough for your time and your knowledge and for using the gifts that God gave you. How we say, using our gifts for good, not evil. the work you are doing, it truly changes lives and it truly heals people. And so I cannot thank you enough for that, particularly in bringing it to the church and integrating it with our

speaker-1 (39:05.535)
Thank you for having me. It's been a really great conversation.

speaker-0 (39:09.634)
Thanks for joining me today on Jesus, Justice, and Mercy. If this conversation stirred something in you or gave you language you've been searching for, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend, especially someone wrestling with their faith. You can connect with me at KristinAnnette.com. If you want to go deeper into justice-shaped discipleship, coaching or community, you'll find everything you need there. Until next time, keep telling the truth, keep learning.

and keep loving in ways that disrupt what harms and helps heal what's been broken. This is Jesus, Justice and Mercy. I'm Kristen. Thanks for being here.