The Natural Man Response When Your Child Leaves The Church

If this episode resonates with your heart and you are carrying pain, fear, or distance in your relationship with your child, I would love to invite you to a free Connection & Peace Call with me. You do not have to walk this alone.

Schedule your free call here: https://calendly.com/sherylee-kartchner/25min

Episode 20: The Natural Man Response When Your Child Leaves The Church

What happens in the brain when your child tells you they no longer believe in the Church?

Why do loving, faithful LDS moms sometimes react from fear, urgency, panic, control, or heartbreak during hard conversations with their adult children?

And how do we stay connected without letting fear lead the relationship?

In this powerful episode, we dive into the motivational triad, the primitive brain, the higher brain, emotional regulation, and what the scriptures call the “natural man.” You’ll learn why your nervous system reacts so strongly when your child’s choices no longer align with the values you raised them with, and how to move from survival mode into peace, connection, and intentional motherhood.

This episode will help you:
• Understand why fear and emotional reactivity happen
• Learn the difference between the lower brain and higher brain
• Stop responding from panic, urgency, or control
• Feel your feelings without becoming consumed by them
• Rewrite fear-based stories and thoughts
• Stay connected to your child while honoring agency
• Strengthen relationships instead of creating distance
• Find peace even when motherhood feels heartbreaking

If you are an LDS mom struggling with an adult child leaving the Church, faith transitions, family tension, fear about eternal families, or emotional overwhelm, this episode will help you better understand your brain, your emotions, and how to respond with more love, regulation, peace, and connection.

Your story is not over.
And God is still aware of both you and your child.

If this episode touched your heart, please share it with another mom who may need it too. And if you would like personal support as you walk through these hard conversations and emotions, I would love to meet with you.

Schedule your free Connection & Peace Call here: https://calendly.com/sherylee-kartchner/25min

Transcript

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When your child tells you they no longer believe, your brain immediately goes into survival mode. Today, we're going to talk about why that happens, why good, faithful moms react the way they do, and the two things you can do that will protect your relationship instead of creating more distance and heartbreak. Welcome to the Sometimes Listening isn't for LDS. Sometimes you're ready for listening. I am so glad we get to have these conversations together. God is still working in ways you fear gets loudy really fast in moments like these. But fear does not have to be the loudest voice in the room. I'll share the two things you need to do so you do not damage the relationship with the ones you love. We all have what many like to call a lower brain and a higher brain. Your lower brain is your primitive survival brain. It's fast, reactive, emotional, and protective. This is where the amygdala lives, the part of your brain responsible for fear responses, survival instincts, and emotional alarm systems. Its job is to keep you safe. It is constantly scanning for danger, threats, pain, rejection, loss, fear, or anything emotionally overwhelming. Your higher brain, or your prefrontal cortex, is the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, discernment, compassion, emotional regulation, problem solving, and intentional decision making. It's that part of the brain that can pause, process, pray, think clearly, and choose how you want to respond instead of simply reacting. I believe this is the place where the spirit speaks most clearly. Just to recap, the lower brain says, danger, fix this, control this, make this stop. The higher brain says, pause, listen, seek understanding, respond with love, trust God. The reason this matters so much is because when your child tells you something heartbreaking, your brain immediately drops into survival mode. Not because you're weak or you lack faith, but because you are human. Your brain interprets emotional pain as danger, and your amygdala immediately sounds the alarm. Your lower brain cannot distinguish between physical danger and emotional danger. To your nervous system, being chased by a bear and hearing heartbreaking news from your child can both trigger the same survival response. That is why your heart races. That is why your thoughts spiral. And that is why you feel panic, urgency, fear, or even desperation to fix things. Understanding this helps us realize something really important. Just because our lower brain reacts does not mean we have to let it drive the conversation. I want to teach you about the motivational triad and how it relates to your primitive brain that lives down here in the back of your skull. Your primitive brain job is to keep you safe. It does this in one of three ways. Seeks pleasure, avoids pain, and conserves energy. That part of the brain is not evil. It is designed for survival, which can be very useful. Thousands of years ago, it helped humans survive danger, starvation, harsh environments, and threats. The problem is your primitive brain cannot tell the difference between physical danger, like I said earlier, and emotional danger. It protects us so we don't touch a hot stove or we know when to run from danger. But it does not care about your long-term peace, your relationship with your child, or the kind of mother you want to be. It only cares about getting out of pain as quickly as possible. Spiritually speaking, our primitive brain often mirrors what the scriptures call the natural man. Mosiah 319. If you hear natural man, you might be thinking it means being selfish or indulgent or sinful. But I also believe the natural man is the part of us that reacts from fear, self-protection, pride, panic, and survival. That part of us that wants immediate relief instead of long-term connection. Listen carefully to this because I really want you to hear it. That does not make you a bad mom. It makes you human. A loving mother with a human heart and a human nervous system. Let's take a couple of minutes and dive into the motivational triad and how it affects us. Then I'll show you how that relates to the two things I'm going to teach you that you need to do to respond to those tough conversations in a way that you want to. The first thing in the motivational triad is avoiding pain. One of the biggest things your primitive brain wants to do is avoid pain. And when your child shares something heartbreaking, your brain immediately starts searching for relief, certainty, control, or a solution because helplessness feels incredibly unsafe to that nervous system. This is why the thoughts start firing so quickly. I failed. What happened to my eternal family? What did I do wrong? How did this happen? What will people think? I have to fix this. Or I need to say the perfect thing right now. Those thoughts are painful, but your brain is trying to solve the pain as quickly as possible. It believes if it can figure it out, control it, fix it, reverse it, then maybe the fear and heartbreak will calm down. That is why the lower brain often pushes us towards things like correcting, preaching, defending, questioning, blaming, bearing testimony from fear, trying to force a spiritual outcome. Not because you're bad or manipulative, but because your brain is desperately trying to regain safety and relief from the emotional pain. The primitive brain believes if I can fix this fast, maybe I will not have to feel this hurt. But here is the problem. Fear-driven reactions rarely create connection. Trying to escape pain too quickly often keeps us from responding with love, curiosity, calmness, and presence. And survival mode often creates the exact thing we're terrified of in the first place. The higher brain understands something different, that love and connection are usually built not with urgency and control, but with safety, listening, and trust. The second part of the motivational triad is to seek pleasure. Now, pleasure in this situation, when your child tells you something you don't want to hear, does not mean fun, indulgence, or happiness. Sometimes pleasure simply means relief. Your brain desperately wants relief from uncertainty, fear, heartbreak, and helplessness. It wants the relief of believing I can say the right thing, I can fix this, they'll come back if I just explain it better. The brain even looks for relief through blame. Blaming a spouse, friends, college professors, social media, culture. Because blame gives the brain somewhere to place the pain. It creates the temporary feeling that there is a reason, a cause, or someone responsible. And for a moment, that can feel emotionally relieving because uncertainty is incredibly uncomfortable for the human brain. But blame does not create peace and it definitely does not create connection. Your lower brain wants immediate emotional relief. Sometimes seeking pleasure looks obvious, like pornography, gambling, emotional eating, overshopping, doom scrolling, because we do not want to sit with the discomfort or painful emotion. But sometimes it shows up in much more subtle ways, especially for moms carrying heartbreak and fear. It can look like overthinking, obsessively researching church questions, replaying conversations in your head, trying to say the perfect spiritual thing, overfunctioning, panic texting, venting repeatedly, or trying to control the outcome because control feels safer than helplessness. The lower brain does not really care how it gets relief. It just wants relief from the discomfort as quickly as possible. The problem is that temporary emotional relief is not the same thing as lasting peace. What feels relieving in the moment can sometimes create more distance, fear, and disconnection long term. That is why learning to pause, regulate, and move into the higher brain matters so much. We'll get into that in just a minute, so stick with me. The third part of the motivational triad is conserve energy. The three parts of the motivational triad: avoid pain, seek pleasure, and conserve energy. This one is a little more subtle, but still important. Your primitive brain loves familiar patterns because familiar patterns require less energy and less effort. If your pattern is to panic, your brain panics. If your pattern is to overthink, your brain wants to overthink. If your pattern is to lecture, your brain wants to lecture. Not because those reactions are true, but because they are familiar, conserving energy. The brain would rather repeat an old pattern than build a new one. Every single one of us will react from fear, pain, hurt, or survival. That is part of being human. The problem is not that the lower brain shows up. The problem is when we let it stay in charge. Awareness is what changes everything. Because when we notice what is happening inside of us, we can pause and invite the higher brain and the spirit back into the conversation. So how do we move from the primitive lower brain, that natural man, to our higher, holier connection? Once we notice what the lower brain is doing, we can invite the higher brain and the spirit back. The beautiful thing is that God did not leave us trapped in survival mode. We have the ability to pause, think, discern, regulate, choose intentionally, respond instead of react. The primitive brain says control, correct, convince, defend. The higher brain says listen, stay connected, seek understanding, allow agency, trust God, respond with love. Fear is loud. The spirit is calm. So what do we do when the lower brain takes over? I want to give you those two things that can completely change the trajectory of hard conversations. Like when your child tells you they no longer believe what you taught them about the church, they want nothing to do with it, they don't want you talking about anything church with them. Your brain will immediately go into survival mode. So step one is to feel your feelings. The most loving thing you can do in that situation is pause. You may need to say, I love you so much, I need a little time to process this because I don't want to respond from fear or hurt. Because emotionally your nervous system is flooded. You're dealing with a chemical response inside your body. And when emotions are high, we end up saying things we wouldn't normally say. Blaming, reacting in fear, all the natural man responses. So pause and be truthful. Let them know this wasn't what I was expecting or this was hard to hear. So I need some time. Because you love them and you do not want to say something out of fear or surprise or hurt. So breathe, pray, regulate, recognize those feelings, and then allow yourself to actually feel what you are feeling. Is it sadness, grief, confusion, fear, heartbreak, disappointment? You're allowed to feel all of that. Feeling emotions is not weakness, it's part of being human. You might think that feeling those feelings is not the thing you need to do. But unfelt feelings do not disappear. They stew and they fester. It's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for some time, but then something happens and it comes flying out in all kinds of ways in all kinds of directions, probably in ways you don't want it to. Feeling those feelings, recognizing them, acknowledging them might take a day or two. I wouldn't worry about how long it takes. Take as long as you need to calm yourself, to calm that nervous system so that you can move into your higher brain and think clearly. The second step is looking at the story that your thoughts and feelings are creating. Because your emotions are not only coming from the circumstance, they're coming from what your brain is making that circumstance mean. What story am I creating with my thoughts and feelings? Maybe the story sounds like I failed. My eternal family is ruined. God abandoned my child. I knew she shouldn't have married him. This is my fault. I have to fix this. Why is this happening? I bet it was his wife. Let me give you some new thoughts that will help you move from that natural man, primitive brain thinking to your higher, holier brain? It might look something like this. Is that actually true? Have I failed? Is my eternal family broken? Does my child need to make the same choices I would make in order for me to feel okay? Is fear helping me become the kind of mom I want to be? What if this story isn't over? Can I trust God is still working? Agency was always part of the plan. I know love matters more than panic right now. Slowly we begin creating a different story. Not a fake story, not denial, a more intentional story, a more truthful story, a story that sounds like this is my child and I love them. I can disagree and still feel connection. I do not want to react from fear to prove my faith. God loves and knows my child. I want my child to feel my love. I want connection more than I want to be right. When that story changes, the emotions begin to change too. If you don't take the time to do those two things, your conversation might sound like, how could you do this? What happened? Who influenced you? You're making a mistake. But if you take the time to feel and to look at your story, the conversation starts to sound like Tell me what's been going on. Help me understand. What has this been like for you? And here's the beautiful part. You do not have to surrender your faith in order to love them well. In order to love them whole. You're still allowed to believe deeply. You can have your convictions, but know the relationship is no longer being driven by fear. It's being led by love. And perhaps that is the part of what we are learning to do, why we came here. How to love without controlling, how to stay connected without fear taking over, how to trust God while still holding grief and hope in the same heart. Because connection and heartbreak can exist in the same room. One of the greatest doctrines we believe in is agency. God Himself allows agency while remaining perfectly loving. And perhaps that is part of what we are learning too. How to love without controlling, how to stay connected without reacting, how to trust God while holding grief and hope in the same heart. Connection and heartbreak can exist at the same time in the same room with those you love. If you've had a child come to you and say something that was really hard to hear and you didn't react as well as you'd hoped, no problem. When we know better, we do better. And knowing better doesn't mean we never screw things up. But being truthful and open, letting them know of our heartache and letting them know they are still loved goes a long way in connecting with our child. So if you have a child come to you and say they no longer believe what you taught them, I want you to remember that natural man brain wants immediate relief. Your higher brain wants lasting connection. And the beautiful thing is, you can learn this. You can pause, you can regulate, you can feel your feelings without being consumed by them. You can rewrite the story fear is trying to tell you. You can respond intentionally. You can become the kind of mom who creates safety, love, and connection even in really hard conversations. The coaching that I do is not about helping moms stop caring or feeling whole when everything is fixed the way they think it should be. It's about helping them stop suffering unnecessarily. It's helping them move from fear into peace, from panic into presence, from control into connection, from that survival mode into intentional motherhood. And honestly, I think that is some of the holiest work we can do. If this episode spoke to you and you know a mom who needs to hear it, please share it with her. Your story is not over. God is still very aware of you, and He is still aware of your child. This is why coaching tools matter so much. We're not trying to shame the lower brain. We're learning how to notice it. And then we invite the higher brain and the spirit back into the conversations. Sometimes listening is enough, and sometimes you're ready for more support. I want to invite you to a free connection and peace call with me. In our 25 minutes together, we'll talk about where you are, what feels hard right now. You will leave with more hope, connection, and peace. You can find the link to schedule your free call below. And if these conversations matter to you, following, subscribing, and sharing the podcast helps more LDS moms find support, feel seen, and know that they are not alone. Your story is not over. God is still working in ways you may not be able to see.