S2E21 Religious Crisis:The Movement from Certainty to Nuance

We talk about what a faith crisis really looks like and why it often shows up as we grow into nuance rather than certainty. We share practical ways to explore belief, handle family pressure, and deconstruct without losing the parts that still give life. 
• defining the presenting issue behind spiritual struggle 
• exploring faith for the first time through trusted friendships 
• visiting a place of worship with curiosity 
• applying the STIR personality model to openness and resistance 
• navigating family-of-origin baggage and hard conversations with parents 
• understanding midlife shifts and taking responsibility for your faith journey 
• deconstruction as redefining rather than discarding 
• rejecting black-and-white categories in faith and culture 
• rebuilding community through nuance

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You can connect with the cohosts through their respective websites:

AFCCounselors.com (Dr. Shalley) / https://www.inyourdreams.coach/contact (Dr. Kelley)

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to Therapy Coaching in Dreams. So glad you are with us. My name is Dee Kelly, and this is Jim Shale. Good morning, Dee. Good morning, Jim. We have been spending some time conversing about so many different things. The last time we talked, we dug a little bit deeper into the STIR personality model and how it applies to specific situations of life. We've looked at dreams. And the topic for today, we're gonna probably need to acknowledge that we've touched on this on a couple of the different occasions, but maybe from a different perspective today. And that is to deal with the faith crisis that we often see in individuals. We've talked about it in terms of sometimes midlife crisis or when young people individuate, or it can be when somebody is hurt or feels harmed in a faith-related situation. We've also talked a little bit about both of our faith backgrounds that have been significantly influenced by or informed by the Christian, Judeo-Christian tradition. But but the issue of faith trauma is not unique to the Christian tradition. So here's where I'd like to start. I'd like to just maybe in a very healthy way talk about over the years, as we have worked with individuals, some of the ways in which people can, through flexible thinking and maybe reflection, avoid some of the big pitfalls that might come, though I don't know that that's always possible, particularly if there's some abusive type of trauma that happens through faith, as sometimes we feel beaten, shamed, and guilt-ridden by things that are said within our faith tradition. But enough of that. Let me just ask, Jim, if you were asked in a situation where you're working with an individual that they're struggling with their faith, so let's just start at that very simple place, struggling with their faith. And I don't know what to do about that. And let's say it's a relatively young person in their 20s, 20s. Sometimes that occurs at college age for some individuals, but others it takes place later. Where do you begin with that?

SPEAKER_02 2:41

Well, uh, it would be what's the what's the presenting issue? Have they been involved in a faith system that has disappointed them? Or are they searching for what faith means in their lives if they've never had any introduction to faith? So it would it would determine on what what their questions are concerning faith. Aaron Ross Powell Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Let me play that role then. I have been raised in a home where there was absolutely zero faith context. I never went to church, to synagogue, to temple, to anything. But I have connected with a group of friends, and all of them seem to have this deep faith tradition. And I'm curious about that. How do I pursue that?

SPEAKER_02 3:29

Yeah. Well, well, first thing I would say, what kind of conversations are you having with these friends and what's their context? And how what would they say as far as introducing you to their faith?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

So the friends in my life, they keep they don't it's not overly pressured, but they keep inviting me to things that I don't go to, but I feel like I'm missing out on something because it feels like it's part of their social life. So why don't you go?

SPEAKER_02 3:56

It feels weird. Okay. So I would certainly ask, are you open to new experiences? Do you try new foods? Do you do those do those kind of things easily?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think I'm open this up, but this feels like it's more like it it'll say something about me.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

So then I would ask, so what's your what comes to mind when you talk when you when someone talks about faith? Or church or synagogue or the you know, whatever. What comes to mind? Nothing because I had no experience.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

I I don't you know I've never turned to one of those stations on TV. I just flip right past that. Well, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Yeah, just keep doing that. No, I would say at that point, go with one of your friends to wherever they had wherever their faith system is attending.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Is it okay to ask questions of your friends?

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Yeah, or will that ruin the friendship. Absolutely. Depending on the the tradition, you might find that a little bit freaky when you the you know, in in the evangelical Christian thing, it would be like the sinner's prayer or something like that. But I would just go, I would encourage you to just go and be a part of and see what you feel. A lot of people are very attracted to just the energy that's there. And then they find they become more increasingly interested and intrigued by it. So that's where I would I would suggest that you just visit, visit go with one of your friends to where they attend. There's a big movement in the Catholic Church right now among young people. That's a really growing segment uh for the same reason. They've disconnected, my opinion is we've just we've disconnected from the divine in the culture at large. And I think younger generation are are striving or are starving for something that's more meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So that's great. Okay, let's uh flip the scenario a little bit. Thank you. That was very helpful.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

So before you we leave, it would be like how do you use the stir when it comes to these things? Well, who's open to new possibilities? The Transformer. Absolutely.

unknown 6:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

The feminine energy is relationally driven, as we've said many times. So that energy is what you would access. Nurture yourself, take care of yourself, be open to new expressions, that that would be what you would access in order to entertain new possibilities.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

So if I'm a stabilizer with very little faith background or none at all, my radar would go up and I'd be resistant and I'd have all of the arguments to try and keep things stable and not make any shift, correct? Yeah. Right. But I would find it mysteriously intriguing and maybe attracted to somebody who has that transformer energy to draw me in. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Absolutely. You'd be kind of skeptical to go to go to a church or a or a place of worship. But you'd be intrigued, especially if there was a good friend of yours that was into it or interested in it. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Somebody who also is in most scenarios, I would think it would be younger, but this also can happen easily middle-aged with parents who are still alive, where you have come to a point where your parents' faith tradition all of a sudden feels incredibly inadequate. Or it has left you with questions that you never even thought to ask at a younger age, because you assumed everybody thought the way your family of origin thought. And it feels like, for some, it feels like all of the sudden there's no solid ground underneath you. And a little bit of panic as to how to have the conversation with parents who always seem to ask questions that you don't want them to ask. Like, are you going to temple? Are you going to church? Where are you going? You move to another city. Have you found a place? So you're working with somebody that is, I mean, it's it's the baggage of family of origin stuff. Help guide us through this. Where do you start?

SPEAKER_02 8:15

The last time I had I did any research in this, it was 60% of people that are raised in a certain religious tradition leave that tradition. Because in midlife, you grow to a place where you are more cognizant of what's working and what isn't working. A lot of times you buy the faith system because you were raised that way. And it seems to work until you're faced with things in your adult life that may not be working as effectively as you thought it was supposed to. So then you go on a search for usually a different, if it's in the Christian realm, a different denomination, some people leave Protestantism and go to Catholicism. Some people leave Catholicism and go to Protestantism. You know, there's all kinds of different, different things that people do to try to adjust to that. For me, it's it's maturing and growing up and taking responsibility for your own faith journey. Like we talked about before, Carl Hughes talks about we live out of our unconscious the first 40 years. It takes 40 years for us to have enough life experience to figure out who we want to be and where we want to go. I associate that same thing with the faith tradition. And you're right, back to your point that I didn't answer directly. Those conversations can be very difficult to have. And I think a lot of family systems, they just avoid them. So somebody just avoids, they feel uncomfortable going home because they know they're going to be asked, you know, are you attending church or or whatever? And they try to avoid it. Or some family systems, they just don't talk about it. You know, family systems they either talk about everything, talk about nothing, talk about a little bit of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

So it would depend on your family system. I think this portion we've talked a little bit before in one of the previous conversations, but uh sometimes we overly expand what we think is going to happen if we're honest in a conversation like this. Like we anticipate that our parents are going to explode or never talk to us again. And truth is, sometimes it happens. Yeah. But we usually overestimate how how it will be as opposed to trying to, in a very calm way, say that, you know, I'm changing and I'm not sure where this is taking me. But right now that doesn't feel right for my journey. I mean, that that's not what everybody should say. I'm not proposing that, but trying to step into those conversations as opposed to shutting down all conversation and never visiting a family member again because you don't want to have the conversation, that's a tough trade-off.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

It is. And usually there's one parent that's more reasonable than the than another parent. It's usually one parent that takes it personally or whatever. And then sometimes kids are so angry about everything that they just kind of in an angry way, yeah, I'm not doing that. I don't believe in God anymore. They make these bold statements because of the disappointments they felt. Or the or I will say that one of the one of the hardest things to navigate is when you have a faith system that says you live a certain way and you ain't living it as the parents. If the parents aren't living how whether they go to church, synagogue, whatever, they aren't really living it day to day, that's where the kids get a little confused. It's like, oh, you're not you're not even being a Christian yourself, or you're whatever. And I think that's that can cause a lot of frustration and anger.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

One of the things that you've said before that I think is worth repeating and maybe even expanding, and I hope you'll be willing to do that, is that often when this faith crisis comes, and it looks different in everybody's life, but often when it comes, a person feels like everything has to be thrown out in order to move forward, as opposed to recognizing that maybe there is a spiritual component of my life, it just doesn't look like this. Or maybe there is maybe there are pieces of my faith tradition that have been meaningful to me, but others uh other portions are not. In other words, to to move into that conversation not with a black and white, but like exploring what this gray area is like.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

Yeah. We talked about, I think, way back in the first season, I think, as far as deconstruction of your faith. And I think that you're right. A lot of people deconstruct it and throw it all away rather than realizing, wait a minute, do I want to have faith in my life? That's important. I can redefine it. I can define it through my own through my own filters, my own lenses now. I don't need to fill define it the way it's always been defined. And I do think that's the mistake. And usually if they do throw it all out, they're angry about something from my perspective that it didn't meet a need or it or it was promised to meet a need and didn't. That's another big thing is how people perceive their faith and what it's supposed to do for them. And when that it doesn't do what you think, it's like the expectations. If my faith isn't doing what I expected it to do, then I become really disillusioned and I'm tempted to deconstruct or or throw it all out.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah. I I wonder if part of deconstruction, and for those who aren't familiar with that term, give us, if you don't mind, just when you say the word deconstruction, what are you referring to?

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Great. Perfect. So if that process of questioning your faith is built around an upbringing where faith components were very black and white. You either do or you don't. Yep. You you believe this or you don't, and you're a sinner, an outsider, or lost, whatever it is. It leaves very little room when you grow up and begin to question that my only choices are your statement or I'm lost and it's not.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Right. And so and so it even question you're going against it in that in those very rigid systems. And I would say the real strong black and white rigid systems are the ones the kids struggle with the most. If they if they embrace it, the next generation can pull it off. But at some point, some generation is going to push back. Because it's too rigid. I mean, that's in my mind, that's always the issue. You gotta build you gotta build in some space and grace to realize that humans are complicated sometimes. And they want to ask lots of questions if they're if they're involved at all in their journey.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

So I saw a I don't know if it was Pew Research or a different research group that recently did a political uh study, pretty large study, and it divided United States voting constituency instead of into three portions, Republican, Democrat, and Independent. It divided it into nine groupings, all different places on the spectrum. And it was actually a great division. They did a wonderful job and looked at the nuances across the country and all of those kinds of things. And it was primarily targeted at voting coming up for midterms, what that might look like. But what I loved was when I looked at the nine categories, which was so much more meaningful and helpful than our tradition liberal or conservative, I still felt like, well, the way you describe this category, I buy into two of those things and I buy into one of these over here and three more here. And I thought that is actually the truth, is that as soon as we create these category boundaries, we have left the majority of people out because they don't neatly fit into each one of those.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Yeah. I mean, look at the culture at large. You have to believe a certain thing, or you're whatever, a Nazi, or you're I don't know, whatever you are. It just we've so become black and white in our politics that it's it's just disturbing. I think day-to-day people get along better than what the what the culture of media would say. So yeah. Yeah. I I think maybe sometimes human beings are so much more nuanced than we're we're acting like these days. That's an opinion, but I think it's pretty accurate.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Well, I Jim, I think actually that to me is a great way to define the faith crisis. The faith crisis is a movement from rigid categories to nuance. Yeah. And when I have been raised in a very rigid, categorized way of faith, when I find myself not neatly fitting into that category and considering the possibility that my life is nuanced, that's kind of a crisis.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way of putting it. It's like it's like any monolithic thinking is just it's just destructive. Yeah. And yet on the on the surface, it seems to bring comfort. Because I'm just hanging out with people that believe like I believe. But you don't even really believe that in your depth anyway, because you're nuanced. I mean, everybody is. We just act like we're not. Yeah. Because we want we want the the support of individuals, and and yet it's like people we carry projections all the time of what people want us to be. And when we break through, it's kind of like people will say at times, just play basketball. I don't want to know what you think. Because it changes how I view you. You know? Or just act. Don't tell me what you think, because it changes and it does. It it does change things. And I that's uh it Yeah, so I'm not sure if I have any thoughts about that, but that's that's why I'm saying when we get into the nuances of conversations, i i I wish it was much more cooperative and compati compatible than the others, but sometimes we can't hold steady while someone's giving an opinion I don't agree with. And so we then we negate the nuances as opposed to embracing them.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

I don't think people realize how radical it is when somebody says, uh, I don't agree with you, but I still want to be with you. In terms of friendships and community, you know, to be able to say, I don't agree with what you just said, but I'm I'm still on your side for who you are and and learning from you and all that goes with that. We just gotten so far away from that, it seems like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think if somebody can respond in the same way and say, yeah, I actually do enjoy being with somebody who has a different color spectrum in their life than I do, all of a sudden community starts to take on a different meaning. And compassion and support and looking out for others has such a great potential to exist in the community when you realize that we're all that nuanced, and that's part of what makes it great.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Yeah, one of the one of the controversial or classic ones right now is like I read a thing a few weeks ago of a lady from what's considered a blue state, whatever that means, moved to a red state, whatever that means, and she's she moved in beside a family that had a uh a sign of the president of Trump in their yard. And immediately they were, oh my word, we can't, we can't we can't leave. We didn't we didn't know this. But then that that family brought, I think, some food or a pie or whatever over to this family just moved in and they got to know each other. And it changed both their whole attitudes because the the uh Trump supporters were as cautious and and and suspicious of they of them. And so, but once you get to know each other, you're right. It's like, oh, we're just people trying to figure out life. Yeah. And because I b believe this this thing doesn't mean I can't talk to you, but yeah.

unknown 20:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

I love that line, it's a great one to end on. Just trying to figure out life. And it to a great extent, that's what this podcast is about, is trying to figure out life.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

We'll need to be honest, we have it figured out. We're trying to share our incredible insights with everybody else.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Ah okay. I need to say that's a joke. Okay. So, Jim, having figured out life, could you could you come back next week and give us the three magic formula that's that's uh what's that called?

SPEAKER_02 21:27

A uh teasing line or something. Um let's just say it now. Go back and listen to all of our podcasts. There you are.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Great to be with you, Dee. As always, Jim, great to be with you too. See you next week. Bye everybody. Bye. That's it for this episode of Therapy, Coaching, and Dreams. If you're enjoying the podcast, we'd love for you to follow, rate, or share it with someone who might appreciate it as well. Thanks for being here, and until next time, keep growing, stay curious, and take good care of yourself. Yeah, now that's good stuff.