Survivors Discuss Podcast

 Hi, welcome to episode one of Survivors, discuss for 2025. Uh, I’m Claire Heath, Mac. I’m here with Cait West. How are you today?

Cait? I’m hanging in there. It’s, uh, 2025, you know.

Is is it, is it just me or has this year been a year long already? Um, I think

10 years. I think it’s been 10 years long. Yeah.

Yeah.

10 years worth of democracy has been well and truly screwed over in the last month. Mm-hmm. So, um, now our guests today are the wonderful DL and Crispin Mayfield. Now DL recorded a kick ass episode with us on Focus on the Family, and I was so excited about putting that up. And then we realized that one of the audio tracks hadn’t worked and there was so much back and forth between DL and the other guest, which was Amber Katonya Wild.

I had to, I had to send the whole long lot to the cutting room floor, and it was just massively disappointing. So it’s a great, it’s a tragedy and hugely grateful to have DL back today. Um, before we jump into this interview, Cait, why don’t you introduce our guest this morning?

Sure. I am so excited to welcome Crispin and DL Mayfield.

Um, I’ve been following their work for years and just love what they’ve been doing. Um, and I can relate a lot to both of their backgrounds. Crispin and d Mayfield are both products of the modern religious authoritarian parenting movement that has shaped millions and millions of evangelical Christians.

Crispin is a therapist who specializes in working in religious trauma recovery. Just so important and hopefully more and more therapists specialize in that, um, and supporting neuro neurodivergent clients. He wrote a book on attachment theory in Christianity in 2022 and has since left the faith. He loves photography, music, and most anything creative.

And I love, uh, Crispin your, uh, photography Instagram. I think that’s really fun and beautiful. Way to, uh, be creative.

Gotta have some way to balance writing about authoritarianism.

Yeah, you gotta balance it out, right? DL is the author of three books and a former freelance writer. DL is an amazing writer.

Uh, they are a late diagnosed autistic who currently has a special interest in exposing Christian authoritarianism and healing from high control religion, which is also something I’m very much interested in. I talk about a lot. Their, uh, Crispin and DLS latest project is called Strong-Willed. It’s a multimedia project that focuses on the personal and political impacts of religious authoritarian parenting, which is why we’re here today.

Um, and it’s such a relevant topic for what’s going on, especially in the US but also globally. Um, you can find the project on Substack and there’s a podcast.

Yes.

Now before we jump

in, Crispin, could you turn up your outputs a bit more? Yes. I’m just not getting the same height of wavelength.

Mm-hmm. How about that?

That is so good. Thank you so much. Okay,

great.

Look guys, what a time in history to be writing about authoritarian anything. How you doing? Are you okay? Let’s start with that question.

Okay. Am I okay? Personally? No. Professionally, does every batt thing just further make my thesis correct? Yes. So it’s like, it’s a mixed bag.

Um, but if. It’s just a really interesting time to be talking about religious authoritarianism, how it impacts you in childhood, but then how it also impacts political frameworks. So I’m like, yeah, I I’m,

we wish our work was not so relevant.

That’s a much

more succinct way of

putting

it.

Right.

Do you, do you know, I, I was writing an article on Christian nationalism in Australia this week, and I mean, the, the, the tricky place that we all sit right now in this evangelical and exau authoritarian high control religion space is we wish our jobs weren’t necessary and we wish that people would listen to us five years ago.

Yes. So that our work wasn’t necessary now, but yeah. Fuck. I think mm-hmm.

Yeah. We, you know, US canaries in the coal mine are tired and now everybody’s experiencing, um, the toxic gas and it’s such an interesting place to be. However, you know, as survivors, we’ve lived through this shit. Um, we’ve developed some incredible methods of connecting to our true selves, being who we really are.

You know, I also think we’re important. Members of the resistance movement that is going on. So I’m like, I wanna keep drawing on like super triggering time to be people like us, but it’s also a weirdly empowering time. We’ve survived this before and fuck it, we’re gonna survive again. You know? Yeah. That’s, that’s where my head has to go.

Yes. That’s where your head has to go. Absolutely. Crispin religious trauma therapy. When religious trauma is being inflicted on the, the world talk, right. How you do, what, what are you seeing in your passion? Oh my gosh.

Yeah. It’s, it’s, I mean, there’s two elements. One is this element of helping people. And myself included, like walk away from these religious authoritarian communities and then write, like stepping outside of them and then realizing like, oh, I thought I escaped.

Mm-hmm. I did not escape. Um, and so that’s really hard to hold. And, and then I’ll just say, it’s just, it’s a lot like in the therapy world, we talk about, uh, as helpers, we support people as they go through things, you know, stuff that comes up in their life. And it’s, it’s an extra level to help people process, give them support during.

They, when they are going through something that you are also going through and also processing at the same time. So yeah, that’s really where I am, I’m at these days, is just like I am trying to do a lot to, uh, care for myself, um, because yeah, we’re like showing up for, you know, this work of strong-willed.

I’m showing up for clients. Um, you know it for so many people that have kids during this time, right? Like, I think whether or not your kids are plugged in the energy right is, is really palpable and our kids are feeling that and so they deserve extra care and yeah. It’s just, it’s so much.

I, I’m curious, you did work on attachment theory.

Am I hearing this right? Mm-hmm. While you were still a Christian? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Attachment theory is very interesting, especially when it comes to authoritarian parenting. Um,

mm-hmm. You two

are of course parents, aren’t you?

Mm-hmm. So

is that where this project sort of came from?

That’s a great question. I know for me, I, one of the, being a parent, and this happens to a lot of folks, right, is when I started to be like, oh, the way I was raised, I don’t actually wanna continue that on with my kids, which was very odd ’cause I was.

Very into Jesus, but I just didn’t feel like forcing my kids to be into Jesus either. Um, yeah. Yeah. And I dunno, it really caused me to be like, oh, maybe I should rethink the way I was raised. But Chris, when I think you even went back further Mm. Right. To these attachment styles. Mm-hmm. And it kind of helped you see some toxicity in, in y Evangelicalism,

right?

Yeah, totally. That’s where I was. Really, I was just doing research to further my professional development as a therapist, reading about these different attachment styles. Um, and then I was like, oh my God, like these different attachment styles and these like parenting methods that create them really sound like the white evangelical god I was taught about.

And especially when we look at kids that have been through severe neglect and trauma, um, the sorts of like feelings that they have internally about themselves, I was like, this is like the, the bread and butter of like what I was fed just growing up. So like, like kids that have gone through neglect will often feel like the core of who I am is broken and bad and ugly.

And I’m like, this is what I was just like told every Sunday. Like, is this, is this like, yeah. So that’s really where I, um, sorry, I was trying to keep going.

Um, so it just really, like, starting with this attachment science, um, it really helped me get clarity on like, yeah, this whole religion that I was brought up in is really emotionally damaging and really helped me understand like, why I felt so bad about myself. And, um, I went forward from there and it, I sorted a lot of things out, but I, uh, wrote a book about like, you know, what’s a better view of God?

What’s a more emotionally healthy view of God? And then like a year later I was like, actually I think I’m out. I don’t, I’m, I’m not, I I feel really proud of my book still. Like, I think that there’s a lot there that, um, that is not just ’cause of the work that I did, but um. A lot of the, the therapists and authors and folks that I had read and like putting that all together.

But I eventually got to this place where I was like, I don’t need to do all of this work to convince myself that God loves me. Mm-hmm. Like, I would rather just be like, Hey, I’m o I’m okay and I can love myself. I have people around me that love me. Like I don’t need to keep on going back to this, like validation to this God.

So that was when I walked away.

That is, can I just, uh, really quickly say, I’ve read your book Crispin? Um, I used to work for the publisher that it came out with. Wow. Little secret. But that was one of the last books I wor, uh, helped work on. And it was one of my favorite books, uh oh.

When I was there,

because I was also on my way out of, you know, religious stuff and I was like, mm-hmm.

Um, I was really happy that we had your book.

Oh, thanks.

That’s really cool.

Yeah, I, I mean, I don’t wanna like go on and on about my book, but I think what it feels so important to me was looking at this attachment science and saying, Hey, if you’re given these messages, like you’re belonging depends on your behavior or like, you don’t deserve love.

You’re loved, but you don’t deserve it. Um, that is going to create a lot of like internal feelings of worthlessness and. I think being able to write about that and say, Hey, if you grew up feeling this way, it makes sense. That fits with what we understand psychologically. Um, my hope was, and I hope it continues to be validating to people to be like, yeah, it’s not, there’s not something wrong with me that I feel so bad about myself after growing up in this religion.

I mean, I’m really happy for you that you wrote a book that you can still be sort of proud of. Before leaving Evangelicalism, I wrote young adult fiction that was inspired by Frank Ferretti. So let’s just, let’s just, um, embrace that cringe for a while.

We’re still waiting for you to re-release that Claire.

I think we all deserve. Oh, it’s not happening. We all deserve. It’s

absolutely not happening. Um, I mean it was, well the thing is that the second one, um, was remnant theology. I mean, nobody gets to own remnant theology like a white evangelical, cisgender straight church, right? I mean, oh my God. Like, let’s inaccurately place ourselves as the victims there.

And I tried to write the sequel and um, it was supposed to be like, the fruits of dominion is like what happens when Dominion is. Makes it to, you know, the proverbial throne of a nation. And all I could spot was exactly what’s happening now. I was, I was gonna say, well, we’re figuring it out, aren’t we? And lemme well, would it be a spoiler for anyone that, that that sequel wasn’t gonna end happily.

And, you know, did, did have a role in my deconstruction, I’d say. Um, so did my husband’s coming out. Uh, and that, you know, gender and sexuality is something that kind of intersects on a lot of, uh, deconstruction journeys. That, that, and actually studying the Bible. Um, I saw a post this week saying that from Trump, saying the Bibles were gonna be, you know.

In every school or something. And I’m like, bless you. There’s nothing that forces deconstruction quite like studying the Bible. So let’s see the fruits of that. But if, if I may, um, strong-willed dl, how much was that impacted by your being raised through focus on the family, um, through that, that high control authoritarian parent and how, and how much was sort of impacted by, if I may, your own neurodiversity?

Yeah, I mean. I figured out I was autistic, you know, a few years ago by seeing a therapist, and it really helped me be able to see myself as someone who gets super fixated on certain, uh, yeah, topics. And each one of my books, I’ve had three books published, like you could just call them a special interest.

My first one was kind of on the Mission Industrial complex. My second one was on Christian nationalism called The Myth of the American Dream. My third one was a biography of this radical anti-fascist Catholic anarchist named Dorothy Day. And, you know, I just would just go all in on these topics and just pour everything into them.

And, and now I am trying to have a bit more balance in my life. But unfortunately, my special interest is Dr. James Dobson, and I want to be his very worst nightmare. And so, as I’ve been sort of fixating on on Christian nationalism for quite some time. His name just kept popping up as this really influential figure and as an ex evangelical who’s been on the, you know, the mean streets of social media for over a decade, right?

Like I’m used to evangelicals and ex evangelicals. Like we make fun of our background, we make fun of the way we were raised. We have the humor. We talk about how weird it was, how quirky it was, and I think I eventually reached a point where I was like, I’m not sure this is quirky. I think maybe, um, this was a whole thing and that there actually is a really big story here about how a child psychologist.

Got millions and millions of people to parent their children in such a way as to make them ripe for authoritarianism and to actually clamor for it. And that man, that child psychologist went on to become the most successful, far ripe political lobbyist that the United States has ever had, you know, and that’s James Dobson.

We probably know him from Focus on the Family from Adventures in Odyssey, but he has his fingers in so many things. I’m actually reading a book right now by these Russian historians, and they were like, we can trace to when Dr. Dobson came to Russia in the nineties and brought the cultural conservative wars and Putin started using the same language, used that to get democratically elected.

And we all know what happened there. So I’m like, damn, I, you know, this man has done so much. And I think taking it back to the beginning by, how did he get his start? By telling parents how. Parent their children, how to break the will of their children. That was the expressed aim of his bestselling books.

His first one was called Dare to Discipline. Mm-hmm. And his second one, uh, was called the Strong-Willed Child. So that’s why we claimed that term for our project because his express aim was to help parents, you know, beat the strong-willed out of their kids. And it’s like, it never fully goes away. We all have a strong-willed child right inside of us.

Yeah. It might take some work to, to learn how to access and get in touch with that strong-willed child, but, but they’re there. They’re in there. And so that’s a lot of what our project is focused on.

I was absolutely shocked, not shocked. Last time when you mentioned that Dr. James Dobson was mentored by a eugenics.

Mm-hmm.

And I was also shocked, not shocked, that one of the first moves that Trump made was to attack diversity and inclusion and. You know, the DEI stuff by executive order or whatnot. Um, just in the last 24 hours I’ve seen that he’s stood down a very competent chairman of the Joint chiefs, who is of course a black man and replaced him with a lesser capable white man.

Um, we’ve, you know, when the helicopter crash happened and when these planes were crashing just after it stood down the air traffic controllers, it was blamed on DEI and not on the fact that it stood down the air traffic controllers. Um, how deep does that sort of seeds of white supremacy sit within, um, this gen, this Dobson thing?

And, um, and, and what is your opinion about how this is impacting the rollout of Christian nationalism in America at the moment? Sorry for sounding very journalistic right now. Um, I’ll. Try to be more of a person for the rest of this interview. Yeah, I love it. I love it. And

yeah, like you said, this is, this is something that Dobson does not want very widely publicized, but when he was starting off as a child psychologist, he worked for a man named Paul Popo, who actually.

I guess you could talk about this part started modern marriage and family counseling in the United States, in southern California as a positive eugenics movement. Now, Paul Popo, we can’t get all into it. The Nazis loved him. He loved them right back, he wrote horrific articles praising their four sterilization laws in Germany.

I was like, California, please, can we do this now? And and he was a wretched, wretched man. He eventually shifted into. Positive eugenics is the way to go. How to convince white women to marry white men, have tons of kids, and then raise them in such a way as to replicate these values. The values were white supremacist patriarchy.

Popo is not a Christian, so dobsons,

which is wild. He wrote the Forward to Dobson’s first book. Okay. You’ve been in Christian publishing. It’s just wild to think that James Dobson’s first book was The Forward was written by an atheist. An atheist, yeah. Who was a, was a positive eugenicist.

And when you sound positive, we don’t mean good.

Yes.

Right.

It sounds very much, it sounds very much like quiver full ideology, which is what I grew up with, of like having more children. Of course. That they, they meant white families. Yeah, they did. They didn’t say that out loud all the time. But Quiver full is very much the same kind of concept of let’s have as many children as possible so that we can take over the culture

and tread life.

Yeah.

And tread life. I think also understanding the political moment when Dobson started to do this work. So this was during the Vietnam protest, this was during the civil rights movement. So he was seeing these young white people protest against the government in, um, to the benefit of marginalized groups.

And he’s saying, if we can spank our kids, if we can indoctrinate them, if we can raise them in a way that they will never push back against the police, they’ll never push back against the government. They will. Right. So like, thinking about that DEI question, that’s what Dobson was trying to do. He’s trying to create a society where people would not push back when, um,

the Godly authority was in charge, which they said over and over, right?

It’s godly. White male authority. So that, I mean, that was his stated aim. All these, all these patriarchal list were freaking out in the sixties. Yeah. And now we have to live with that. I mean, that’s, this has been their aim. They’ve been, you know, I kind of hate talking about Dobson because I do not believe he’s some sort of genius.

You know, if you just read his books, you’re, you’re gonna get the vibe of, um. Bloviating narcissist who just never quits. He never quits. He never stops running. He never stops trying to get in with power. Um, the only reason he’s quiet these days is I believe he’s probably on death door, you know, like, and rest in piss, you know, I, I can’t wait till the day he dies and we can actually start talking some real ass shit about him.

I’m so sorry if you’re gonna have to bleep all of this out. Um, it’s like, it’s like him and it’s like him and Gohar

and I’m like, how are they still here? It’s just

by their evil, their evil nature is keeping them alive. I think they made deals with the devil and so their children

Yeah. Like death becomes her.

But, you know, yeah. I, I also think that there’s no one quite as encourageable as a narcissist because, especially a Christian one, because if something bad happens, they’re like, oh, it’s the devil attacking us. It’s the devil. Absolutely. Take this as a win, and if it’s something good is happening, it’s the favor of God.

So yes, they can kind of manufacture double binds out of. Just about anywhere. But I, I wanna pick up on, um, something you said earlier. It was about conditioning and about breaking the will of children who have now grown up. A lot of them have now grown up, but this stuff continues. By the way, my entire, uh, puberty education came through, uh, Dr.

James Dobsons. Oh, preparing for which I got to read after a significant biological event had taken place and I thought I was gonna die. But anyway, uh, moving right on from that, um, which is to say that it made its way to Australia and, you know, dare to discipline was on bookshelves and stuff like that, but.

Uh, yeah, train of thought. My coffee’s upstairs in the flurry of trying to organize computers. I left it up there. Anyway, hopefully my children, one of whom is Neurodiverse, don’t actually drink a coffee. This, this setting people up. I almost think of it, and maybe this is a question for you, Crispin, as like these little sleeper agents who have been so conditioned, um, and now is the time where it’s all being activated.

Either one way or another. Either. Um. They’re going, oh, this feels comfortable. Maybe ’cause it’s a schema that this way of viewing the world is shortcut to feeling comfortable. That means that there’s traditional values and these, you know, bullshit executive orders, they’re all feeling very comfortable ’cause it’s familiar.

Is that something, am I on the right track with that or am I Yeah,

no, I, I, I totally agree and really a lot of, when I think about this, the message over and over was, um, don’t allow your kids to negotiate with you. Don’t allow them to speak their mind. Don’t allow them to have opinions. They need to learn to just automatically submit.

And so it makes just so much sense that like, when it comes to autonomy, when it comes to, you know, pushing back against authority, it’s like there’s not even a framework for it. Um, and. Because that was coupled with what I would call physical abuse, corporal pun punishment. Right. You, you grow up with this sense of Yeah.

If I express my opinion, if I, um, push back, it will mean pain for me.

And, and can, if we can just really quickly hone in on like the methods of discipline, because if you grew up like this, you’re like, yeah, that’s how it happened. If you don’t grow up like this, I’m here to blow your mind. Let me tell you about the Dr.

Dobson way of, of spanking. Okay. What it is is every time your toddler search their own will. And it’s in direct opposition to what you have ordered. Yeah. You spank them. Now you make sure you tell them you’re doing it because you love them and because you love God. You as a parent are being obedient to God by hurting them in a very sensitive part of their body.

Um, and you make sure that by the end, that child says, I’m sorry. Thank you right for punishing me. I love you, mommy. I love you, daddy. I love God. You can have a prayer time afterwards. Hugs all around. So just think about sort of the sadistic nature of that. Not only are you physically hurting your kid to the point where they’re supposed to cry dobson’s, like, yeah, they should cry for a little bit.

If they cry too long, they’re being manipulative. So hit him again. Mm-hmm. Okay. This is just, and he just thought he was the, he. The way he talked about children, he obviously hated them, like hated them with a passion. Mm-hmm. Called them tyrants, dictators, little tigers. Um, he just delighted in telling parents to hurt their children because the children were being willfully manipulative.

Right. Children are, and he loved the Christian doctrine of original sin So he is like, we all know kids are pieces of shit. That’s why you have to do this. But he really made this big deal. Like, if you don’t do this every single time when they’re toddlers, they’re gonna grow up to be those white kids protesting Vietnam.

Like they’re gonna be on drugs, they’re gonna do all this stuff. Like, so you better do this. And so his books were so popular. Churches all had them. If you were a parent in these communities, you were being watched like a hawk. Absolutely. You know, does your kid. Immediately obey you. If not, you better be reading Dobson like your or your kid is out.

So there was so much pressure, um, within these environments to, to abuse your child in this specific way. And I just find it so deeply upsetting. Mm-hmm. Even though that was my life and I thought, this is the good way, you know, to span my parent doesn’t just hit me out of anger. Right. There’s this whole ritual now I’m like, okay, ritualized is kind of worse.

Right. Yeah. Because it’s like, I, I have like, you know, I, I worked with clients where it’s like I had a, you know, a, an angry stepfather that would like hit me when he got mad. But within that, there’s this ability for a lot of folks to be like, well, he’s an asshole. I’m gonna leave as soon as I can. I don’t deserve this, blah, blah, blah.

But in this way of like taking your kid into your room, sitting down like this is because I love you. This is how God wants it. Right. And then the God part is this whole other part where it’s like, yeah. When you don’t have God. Then there’s this element of like, I can still be angry within myself. I can still have like resistance within myself, ident, like autonomy within myself, like my own experience.

Like say this is wrong, that my parent is hurting me, and calling it love is wrong. You can have that, but once God is added, right, it makes it even more confusing for the child, right? ’cause it’s

like, well, God’s reading my thoughts. God sees my feelings. Like I have to feel grateful because I need to make God happy, right?

I can’t have like this, this mask between like, all right, this is what my parent wants from me, but this is how I really feel inside. It’s like you end up having to really. Be like, all right, well try to make yourself feel that way. Right? Try to feel grateful for being spanked and

internalize. I’m wrong.

Mm-hmm. I’m wrong. I’m bad. I’m bad. And love hurts. Love hurts. I deserve it. Now think about it, what are the long-term impacts of having a whole society of people who, who feel that way deep down inside? Yeah.

Mm-hmm. They’re gonna be ready for

a punishing father who says he’ll make everything right. You know?

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And I

was just sitting here thinking about the research being done by Sheila Gregor and Rebecca Linden bark, um, about, you know, how. Domestic violence, family violence, violence against women and children perpetuates in churches how there’s no difference in the statistics with domestic violence in or outside church, but women stay longer.

Um, I just wanted to pick up on. The Kate’s face right now. Uh, you, you look like you’re not okay.

You look like I was thinking of the same thing. I was like, I, I I don’t know what your face usually, your emotions usually look like. I’m loving it.

That’s the face that this conversation deserves. Right. You look sad and it’s a sad thing.

I

Yeah. Bad with edges of disgust and maybe I wanna vomit. Um,

yeah, no, I just like, uh, I don’t know. A lot of my emotions are like on the surface lately, and I’m just like feeling a lot more things. This is why I dissociated so much when I was a kid, is because mm-hmm. There was violence everywhere, but we were told it wasn’t violence.

Yes, exactly. It was just like this mind fuck, like

mm-hmm.

It was love. It was God’s love. Yeah. My pastor told people in the congregation, I, I listened to this sermon again just to make sure I remembered correctly, but he told everyone it’s okay to bruise children because Bruises heel.

Yeah.

With spanking and as long as you don’t break anything, you know, and it’s just like you’re not a bad

person if you don’t break a bone.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And

it’s just like all of these kids, a generation of kids just being abused and being told this is what God wants for you. Mm-hmm. It’s just, I just can’t get over it. I’m just always angry about it.

Yeah. And, and I think to pick up on what Cait just said there, if you’re listening to this and you’re feeling like your emotions are close to the surface too, what we call that is collective trauma.

Um, and it might be pretty difficult. For us to give that words, um, to, to flick this conversation across to, to you, Chris. But I’m picking up on what Kate’s saying or DLS saying here, when we equate love with abuse and abuse is normalized and abuse is like if you don’t have God then and then you asshole or step up and stepfather are beating you is bad.

But if you parents say, I’m doing this ’cause I love you, and it’s a Christian way of discipline, it’s good. What does that do to attachment and self-worth in a chart?

Right. So there is this term disorganized attachment that people might be familiar with. That is what we generally associate with trauma and abuse, with kids that go through that in childhood.

So it’s not, we see this with kids that, um, that do not get what they, they need during childhood and what is, what happens within the child is there is a drive to connect with a parent. So I need to go to my parent to be safe, to be regulated, to be calm. Right? That, that really is what attachment is all about, is I need to connect with my parent because they are my safe place in the world.

Mm-hmm. Now what happens when your safe place in the world is actually also your biggest threat of danger and pain? Your attachment system doesn’t know what to do, and I feel like I’m tearing up talking about this. You never feel safe. Never. You never get a sense of self, of being loved. Um, and then you’re trying to make sense of it.

Your, your attachment system is trying to make sense of it. What do I do with this? What does this mean? And usually. What that ends up at is, is there’s something wrong with me. Yeah, right. Here’s this person that’s supposed to love me, but they treat me badly. It must be because I’m bad. And as we know, that just falls right in line with evangelical theology.

So, um, there’s really, on a theological level and an experiential level, all the messages are just saying there’s something really rotten about you as a child and you don’t deserve love. You are loved, but you don’t deserve it. And,

and you should be so grateful for the love that you get. Like, I remember as a child, my dad was an evangelical pastor, still is, can’t retire because capitalism, you know, um.

But my mom, and this is a hallmark of evangelicalism. I’m not sure it’s and charismatic ones, but my mom, the first thing I remember is her telling me that God talks to her, right? Yeah. So she’s the voice of God in my life. She also homeschooled us. Didn’t let me have access to any other people or outside resource, you know, she was my whole world.

She was like running a mini cult, basically, right? Um, in our home.

A cult of two. A cult.

Well, I mean, I had two sisters, but I was the only one locked into the cult. You know, the only one giving the, the, the supply there. But, um, think about how confusing that was for me as a kid. Like if I ever even had a thought, mom is actually not making a lot of sense right now and she’s really scaring me and she’s hurting me.

I couldn’t even have that thought because that would make her wrong. That would make her a liar. That would mean God, this loving God, this loving Jesus that I’ve been told to cast all my cares upon. And the only one who ever would love me was not real. So I’m like, I couldn’t even begin to question any of that because I had not a single other resource to fall back onto.

And that kept me in, that kept me in the fold for decades. And I just think, wow, if that happened to me, I, I bet that happened to a, a lot of other people as well.

Well, uh, I was homeschooled. Cait was homeschooled. Yes, for sure. And, uh, I’m also a pastors kid. My dad also still pastor a church, a church that I have publicly called a cult on 60 Minutes.

So you were my hero. Oh my. Yeah. I got cred there. Um, oh yeah. I think I’m permanently written outta the will. Um, anyway. Oh, and my sister’s a Christian, uh, a very far right wing. Um, so that’s a whole, that’s a whole thing anyway. Um, so yeah, look, I hard relate there, but as a parent, I’d, I’d been, um, because my then husband and I left the, well, we were kind of forced out the door at my dad’s church starting the day.

We found out we’re pregnant with my son. I’d been raised in this environment that told me that children were all of these things and you needed to, you know, spank them, um, when and, and original sin. But then when I held my children for the first time, there’s no way you can look at them and think, oh, look at you, you’re sinful creature.

Like

mm-hmm.

It’s not.

That’s not a normal response. A normal, okay. Some people have it, I guess, but, um, I don’t think that’s the majority of people.

Yeah. And then there’s this whole dilemma of would you, like if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? Um, I like, I just don’t think I could I kill Hitler’s dad who abused Hitler?

Yes. Okay. Yes, I do. So, so let’s talk about this then, just as a bit of a thought experiment, I suppose, um, the generation before Nazi Germany, do we know how they were parented? Was this in line with, like, was that a Petri dish that. Are you ready? Are you

ready for me to unleash, unleash some of my special interest?

Go for it. Go for it. We like to use strength-based, know, uh, language here. So channel that autism. We need this.

Well, ever since 2016, I have been highly cautioned against talking about Nazi Germany. I wonder why you could never, if you were in America, you could never say that anything in America even remotely resembled anything fascist because fascism cannot happen in America.

So I have a little chip on my shoulder about that. And you know, here we are, here we are, realizing Fascism’s been here the whole time. Um. So I got really into obviously thinking about how influential parenting experts have been just from like a sociological standpoint. And maybe it’s something that we don’t explore enough because, and Chris we can probably talk to this better.

We all have these really intense mental blocks where we don’t wanna process childhood pain. Um, I know there’s real reasons for that and again, maybe Crispin will chime in on that, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t impact us so, so profoundly. And so I found the works of Alice Miller, who I must say is a really sort of controversial figure.

Her son ended up writing a book about her and was like, she was horribly abusive, but she wrote tons and tons of books on what she calls poisonous pedagogies, so like these poisonous ways of teaching children to obey authority and to break their will and how this was. Going on in Germany in the 17 to 18 hundreds, and she didn’t use the phrase religious authoritarianism.

That’s just something Crispin and I have started using as like a sh a shorthand for what we’re seeing. But all the German parenting experts that she talks about in her book four, your Own Good, um, were all Christians, right? And so they directly equated this idea of original sin. God wants an orderly society where everybody learns to obey, where you break the will of your child.

Um, that’s what God wants for you. And so she kind of made this case that this was the environment that not only led to Hitler, but it led to people loving Hitler and how he was the role of the punishing father. You know, the fear that everybody was clamoring for, was desperate for, and he was going to save them.

It might hurt, right? But that’s what fathers do, um, because they love. And so she was sort of writing in the fifties, sixties, seventies. Outsiders cannot understood, cannot understand why people were so drawn to Hitler ’cause he just seemed like a caricature of a human being. She’s like, if you read these parenting books, if you understood that people had been.

Basically brutalize since toddlerhood right into believing this is how you deserve to be treated and this is what we need. Plus you have the whole psych psychological element of scapegoating, right? Finding, uh, one person or one community to place all of your repressed anger and that repressed energy, right?

That you can’t put, you put that onto the scapegoat. So, Claire, when you were talking about your family, really briefly, I had this thought like, oh, you’re obviously the strong-willed child in your family and Dobson Yes. Put this into all of his parenting advice, right? There’s, there’s kids that are perfectly compliant and are awesome and they’re the good kids.

Then there’s the strong-willed child. That’s why his second parenting book had to be about these kids that no matter how many times he spanked them, they still wouldn’t obey, you know? Yeah. And they wouldn’t do it with a good attitude and you couldn’t break their spirit. And so his advice was basically like double down.

That’s all he had. But he was also creating this path for parents to start to scapegoat their own children for churches, to start to scapegoat people who had some questions about theology and if it was harmful or not. And, and it turned into this thing. Now we’re seeing in the United States, right. Um, immigrants.

Trans folks. Like there’s just these certain groups being singled out as the cultural scapegoat. This is the one group that if we eradicate them, you know, everything will be fine. And you just see people falling for it over and over again. Yeah. Because that’s a part of the psychology that was beaten into them that happened in Germany.

Right. And I think we are seeing those same patterns play out in the United States and people don’t really realize how popular Dr. Dobson was. He himself. So take this with a grain of salt. ’cause he’s probably a narcissist. You know, he himself said that one third of the American population, uh uh, had access to his parenting materials specifically dare to discipline.

And the strong-willed child. So that’s what he’s saying. We know these books have sold millions of copies. We know that it actually is the one thing that unifies all these little evangelical churches in America who don’t agree on things. Right. But they all use the same parenting books.

Yeah. In the mid nineties, like a third of the US population identified as Born Again or Evangelical.

And those were the people that were reading these books. So,

so I think it’s been so much more powerful than we realized. And I know that those parenting methods were outsourced to places like Australia, New Zealand, England. Like I’ve, I’ve heard of this from, from multiple people, so I’m like, wow, it’s, it’s so far reaching.

Andy was all over the radio. You know, like it wasn’t just books, it was like all this different kind of media that was coming out. Mm-hmm. Um, I think that people just could access anytime, anywhere.

And not to be too weird, but Hitler was super into like. His writings weren’t that popular. Um, but his speeches were, and so propaganda wise, radio is much more effective than books.

Mm-hmm. Um, and Dobson did both and so I always focus on the books. Yeah. ’cause I’m a writer, but you’re absolutely right, Cait. Like, he had these weekly radio programs that reached millions and millions of people, and I mean, focus on the family’s still going.

And I mean, if you read, especially his later books, they just read like him just talking aloud, like, you know, it’ll be like, they

probably are right.

Just transcripts. Right.

It’ll just be like, the heading will be like the importance of like father and son relationships, but then he’ll just be like, I got a letter. From a listener the other day, and they told me this story and their, how their son is so grateful to them that they played baseball every night or whatever, you know, and it’s just like, there’s no, there’s not even an argument here.

You’re just like talking aloud. You know?

I thought you were to choose the one where Dr. Dobson said if you don’t want your son to turn out gay, um, you, the father must bring your child with you into the shower. Um, so that child can see what a grown adult male penis looks like, and then your child won’t turn out gay.

This is one of the many things. He was like, I got it, I got it, I got the answer. Um, I’m sorry, but that is

screaming

Exactly. Mm-hmm. That is screaming. Mm-hmm.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, Claire. But we can’t get into it here until she dies. No, we come on. So, um,

come on already. Um, I, sorry. I shouldn’t wish for anyone’s death.

Really? Shouldn’t. Um, it, it’s interesting. Um, yes, of course I was the, the first strong-willed child, but I was outwardly compliant. The actual strong-willed child in my family was my middle sister. Um. And I really like, I’m estranged from all of my siblings. Uh, and I do wonder how she’s going because at least I’ve managed to break free and Yeah.

Um, and I’m quite aware because of the gossips in the hometown that I am likely the scapegoat for all sorts of things that I have nothing to do with, but I can deal with it because I’m so far away from it. But I really, the people who are scapegoated and are still living in the environment that it’s all happening in, that’s a, that’s a hell of a place to be.

And yeah. Now that you pointed out, scapegoating entire communities is just, it’s abhorrent. And I, I don’t know how we sort of process that in real time while it’s happening, and especially trying to find the parts of ourself that were the strong willed child that was broken. That now needs to find those reserves within themself to stand up to or withstand what’s happening in the cultural landscape.

I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. What is this?

I mean, I’m non-binary and living in America right now, it’s just like, oh, I guess I don’t exist. Um, and if I do exist, then I’m like the biggest existential threat to the patriarchy. It must be targeted and, and, and all this stuff. And I’m like, yeah. That’s why in the United States, like the people we most need to be listening to, right, are these marginalized scape, go to communities, and they’ve had to resist this rhetoric and this reality for so, so, so long.

I just kind of feel like a newbie in, in some ways. But that’s been a really important thing for Crispin and I is to kind of. Remind ourselves like resistance to religious authoritarianism has been going for a long time. And it’s the queer communities, it’s the black community, it’s the indigenous community.

It’s the immigrant communities that have really been at the forefront of taking this shit. And they need all of us. They need all of us right now. Um, yeah. Just to lock arms and say, I, I think that is kind of what’s gonna happen in America. It’s like Trump is attacking too many people. Yeah. Honestly, if you just focus on the trans community, it could be a horrifying shit show that is, is a kind of Holocaust, but he’s going after everyone and it is slowly turning into this, like, I might not be into trans people, but okay, I need my Medicaid, so let’s go protest.

So I’m like, I think we’re slowly gonna get there. And Americans, hopefully the ones that haven’t had to, will be able to get in, in touch with this strong willed child. Mm-hmm. That for whatever reason. You, you had to figure out ways to survive as a kid, so maybe you suppressed that. Mm-hmm. But it’s still there.

Yeah.

It’s, it’s a heavy thing to sit with and I’ve, I’ve kind of been just watching it play out. You know, from Australia, we’ve got an election coming up. It’s likely to be called for the 12th of April. Um, the conservative government with a lot of right wing politicians, quite likely to get in. It’ll be hung parliament, but, um, I mean a minority government, so we won’t be able to move as fast as what things have in the, in the us.

But I definitely feel like there’s a bit of apocalyptic anxiety sort of sweeping over our community. And I kind of feel like. You know, people are hurting. And, um, and, and I wanted to sort of touch on a bit of revisionist history that’s been happening. Um, so Stonewall the, the Stonewall Memorial, um, and obviously that was a big moment in LGBT rights, but it was all started by trans woman.

Mm-hmm. And you know, the, and I’m not super great on Stonewall history, but I know it was like important.

Mm-hmm. And I

know that during the, this first weeks of the Trump presidency, they’ve written trans people out of that. So, um, that revisionist history, it doesn’t like, and we need to stand up for our trans siblings.

We need to do that, but we also need to make sure that we’re keeping the institutional memory of what actually happened. And mm-hmm. Nazi Germany was so good at propaganda, like you just said, and

Trump

propaganda has been rolled out. In such, like the magazine cover with King Trump and people going,

oh my God.

Yeah. There’s

so much here. There’s so much here. And, and I wanna get to the neurodiversity aspect soon. I haven’t forgotten about that. Um,

I had a, I had a thought about the scapegoating that is, ’cause we’re seeing that happen on, on a, on a national level. But the, the reason scapegoating happens with this religious authoritarian framework is this idea of God designed this system to work this way.

Mm-hmm. Now inevitably things go wrong. Yeah. Right. Things like conflict happens, especially in a, in a society like what we’re talking about where like there is just inequality baked into it. But Right. We like the message then is. If something’s going wrong, it’s because not everybody is fulfilling their role, right?

Your role is to obey. Your role is to be the submissive wife. Your role is to be the husband who leads, who you know. And so really, like that’s the framework and that is that evangelical framework of like, God created the, you know this, this way. And so if something’s going wrong, it’s not because the system is broken, it’s because somebody is not adhering to the system.

In the way that they should, which just leads to scapegoating. And so that’s where it leads in families. Right. And then on a national level, and I think that’s exactly where this is coming from, is this, you know, people, whether they’re religious or not. ’cause I think that a lot of, uh, conservative folks, you know, they’re not necessarily Christian, but they’re like, yeah, this, this is the way it should be.

Right? And when, if people are not falling into their roles, if they’re not adhering to the system, that’s why things are going wrong.

Yeah. And, and I’m just gonna make my little impassion plea here. If, if you think you could sort of sit out the issue of trans people, um, it’s actually an issue that impacts everyone who’s not a white man and trans people are just.

In the bullseye, right? Yeah. Of being a threat to the patriarchy. So even when we’re just talking about revisionist history, we all were homeschooled. You know, I didn’t learn a thing about obviously queer history. My God, no. Um, but I didn’t learn about any history that contradicted this white Christian nationalist right version of events.

And yet here I am just like bizarrely awkwardly, non-binary. And I, I think like there’s just something. That I’ve really found delightful as a part of healing from this kind of shitty way to grow up, is you get to figure out who you are. It’s never too late. It’s never wasted time to get in touch with who you really are.

And if you grew up under these Dr. Dobson materials, you had incredible amounts of pressure to fulfill a gender-based role, you know, that was due to the sex assigned you at birth. So I, I wonder if either of you have anything to say about that, because we know what it’s like to be told for second class citizens from birth, but in like a really loving way that it maybe takes a lot of us a while to figure that out.

I don’t know if that sparked anything for either of you.

I mean, so many things, but Cait first,

no. Yeah, I mean, uh, being told that my, my job in life was to get married and have as many kids as possible, like I had no identity. And so, yeah, I think. I was used to just feeling like I wasn’t important. My voice didn’t matter.

Mm. And, and just getting out was a way of like finding my voice and discovering who I am, whoever that might be, you know? And I think I’ve learned so much from the queer community about just being, like, being joyful in who you are and not being ashamed of that. Um, my brother’s gay and like, I think he is one of the people who taught me most about love and about how to care for other people.

Um mm-hmm. So, yeah. So, so contrasted to what I was told what was right.

Yeah. Yeah. I. I think, I mean, I was homeschooled using the Ace Pacers. Was anybody home?

No, no. I have those booklets. I’m using them for this like weird religious trauma art thing I’m doing. Can I tell you? I’m so glad I get to talk to somebody about this.

Um, those booklets and the cartoons that are in them are the most atrocious thing I’ve ever read in my life.

I went down a Reddit rabbit hole, um, the other day, like horrendous. Like this stuff in that. Yeah, yeah. Go.

I

mean, that’s

it. I’m like, I, I’m taking pictures of all like the little comics that in there for kids and the comics alone.

I’m just like, put this in a museum of white supremacist propaganda 1 0 1. Like this is just it. I found it. You know, it’s here.

It’s exactly, A friend actually sent it to me and that’s why I went down the rabbit hole. But there was literally in the older paces, like when you’re approaching year 12 and still need cartoons, guys, um, they were talking about targeting your.

You know, your local representative, they’re talking about targeting politicians and systems well and blah, blah blah. But like really early, they’re talking to kids about modest or talking to girls about modesty and then talking to girls about how they should let their husbands decide the budget and stuff like that.

So that, like, that’s also baked in. And I’m raising a daughter now and I’m, I’m raising a, a neuros sparkly daughter. She’s, um, we don’t have a DH ADHD in this house. We have s lady hd.

Oh yeah.

And you know, we’re teaching her that she has a Ferrari brain and it can accelerate really quickly and it’s not about it.

Like a Ferrari is a very cool car. So let’s, we don’t judge the car, we just learn how to drive it. And, um, I wish I had that language growing up of, of how. You know how that all is. I’ve totally lost track of the question, but I’m just gonna ramble. So, you know, whatever. Um,

well, I think just like DL was saying, trans people throw a wrench in this system and so do neurodiverse Yes.

Folks, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Is You have this, especially the wrench of capitalism.

I know, right? I just, that’s such a good way of putting it. I just, I’m starting to rec unclean that too. I’m like, I’m not a high wage earner, and that’s cool, you know?

Mm-hmm. Right. No, I mean, I mean, I am, uh, married to someone who’s neuro divergent, but I’ve worked with a DHD years for like 10 years.

Yeah. And yeah, people that are brilliantly creative.

Yeah. And yes.

Um, and just have so much to offer. And it also doesn’t always work well with James Dobson’s view of what a adult man should be in society, you know? No,

I, I’ve got a friend who, I mean, he’s evangelical, he was diagnosed, or DHD, um, in his forties.

And the way he sees numbers and the way he sees communities is something I wish I could bottle. Like, um, and, and taking the language of shame away from that is, is one thing, um, that I wish I could do in my lifetime. But also what Cait was saying about, you know, your, your gay brother being someone who taught you a lot about unconditional love.

The person who taught me the most about unconditional love was my ex-husband. After we separated, um, of, sorry, just a second. Speaking of neurodiversity,

um, the, yeah, like he was the one who taught me the most about unconditional love after we broke up. And that I think is something, I mean, a lot of mixed orientation marriages and, and people deconstructing out of, you know, evangelicalism, uh, having to learn under difficult circumstances. But this inherent unworthiness is something that is taking a long time for me to unlearn.

Mm.

As is

the feelings I have around being a, like I’m a great partner, but I’m not a good wife. I am inept when it comes to keeping a house under control. Um, like keeping the washing under control. I don’t even do that anymore. When Patrick and I started cohabitating again, um, you know, separate rooms and all of that kind of stuff, but he does the washing ’cause he knows.

You girl ain’t doing it. Like I just wait for the kids to grow out of clothes and before I fold them and put them away, like, you know, this is, yeah, but that’s not a traditional gender role. You know what I mean? Like, there’s, there’s all sorts of stuff going on there, but, you know, it’s learning. It’s,

and it, and it’s wild to me that so many people are, are going around their daily life just having this constant stream of, I’m, I’m not good at this.

I, I’m a terrible housekeeper. I, I don’t, I spend too much money at the grocery store. I, I am not like, pretty enough when, when I go out, I’m not thin enough. I, I, and like all of this is in service to the patriarchy. They, they want. All of this happening. They want miserable, stressed out, overworked people.

They wanna come home to a clean house and a meal cooked on there, and they don’t want people getting access to education. Like it’s so stupid. But that’s really what it is. And capitalism is just like this beautiful vessel for the white supremacist patriarchy. And, and, and here we are. And yeah, a bunch of us are like, you know what, we’re just gonna be weirdos who don’t keep house that well and who love our kids and, and we’re gonna change society.

I truly believe. Right, and this is what Alice Miller said too. If we can have one generation of kids that are not abused, we’ll change the world. We’ll change the world, right? Seems ’cause these men Trump’s dad. Was a horrific person whose middle name was Christ. What the hell? There’s no doubt in my mind that he physically harmed Trump, emotionally harmed Trump.

You know what I mean? Like all of these people, that’s the common denominator. Hitler’s dad, Elon Musk, like Elon Musk dad was the

worst. When I wrote my book, I wrote quite a bit, and I was really influenced by Doug Frank, um, who wrote this wonderful book called Gentler God. I gotta give him props. But just going and looking at these men that created these horrible theologies, these horrible pictures of this punishing God

like Billy Graham.

Mm-hmm. They, you go back and read their biographies and they all have, you know, were mistreated in childhood. And then it, to me, it’s them trying to figure out like, okay, this horrible thing happened to me. I was treated badly by this person that was supposed to love me.

About my dad. Yeah. How,

you know, how can I make this into love?

How can I like, you know, I mean we see this with Dobson. Dobson was hit by his mom and he says, but I know that she loved me. Therefore to hit is to love. Like, that was him trying to figure out like,

can we tell the whole story really quick? Yes. He tells this story at the beginning of Dare to Discipline about how his mom, when he was like 10 or something, maybe eight, took a girdle, like an old fashioned girdle and just like whipped it around and like clocked him with it.

And he was like, and I knew from that was my fault. ’cause I was within hitting distance and I sassed her, you know, and he dedicates all his books to his mom. And he talks about how psychologists have said like, well that’s why I write these books is ’cause my own mom physically abused me and jokes on you.

I’m fine. And like, that’s literally all he says.

He says, he says, you can say that that was psychologically harmful, but I was the only one that lived it. And I get to say whether it was loving or not. And I say it’s loving, which by the way, we have sort of taken up to be like, okay, well if Dobson says you as a child get to determine whether it was loving or not, then all of us who survived this kind of parenting get to decide whether it was loving or not.

And

I I say it wasn’t Chris spin. Right. What do you say? A lot of

us say that it was not

every person who’s told me that, uh, they were spanked and they’re fine, has not been fine.

Right.

I mean, right. I mean, they’re so not fine. Right. Like

Donald Caps is this, um, the, he’s actually was the, uh, like pastoral theology.

Theologian at Princeton for a while, but he was a huge critic of Dobson and he has wr written about Augustine and like looked at like how Augustine was treated in childhood and how then Augustine comes up with this like original sin idea and he’s like, I think it’s because he was abused as a kid and he was trying to make sense of like, why as a kid why was I hurt?

And the, the thing that he came up with was like, well, I guess I must have been bad and therefore everyone else is bad too. It’s

so shocking. How simple it really is that abuse people trying to make sense of their abuse come up with these theologies that then impact Western civilization. And, and I’m like, whoa.

And it’s wild to look at like,

yeah.

Yeah. When we talk about like parenting experts, like, and the theologians, like, it just goes hand in hand because it’s so much in terms of like Dobson, where it’s like the, the theology fits along with the parenting methods.

It’s, it’s, and I think people like wanna give our parents a pass and be like, you know, the 1970s was a different time.

And I like to say Mr. Rogers was around in the 1970s. Okay. Yeah. And that’s why Dobson started writing his stuff is because it was actually, we are on the cusp of what I was talking about, of having a generation of kids who were not abused. Yes. Thanks to the work of not only Fred Rogers, but the people he.

Studied under Eric Erickson, Margaret McFarland, Dr. Spock, they were all advocating for a different way of parenting. Yeah. And dobson’s like, not on my watch bitch, not on my watch. And so that’s why I’m like, it really isn’t a reactionary movement that kind of ramped up the targeting of the wills of children through physical abuse and tying it to religion.

Mm-hmm.

Um, speaking of children, mine are running around in the background because it actually is Sunday over here and I’ve, you know, organization has not been my strong point this morning, but it, it’s, um, it’s interesting that all of this is coming together in the most horrible way now. Um, I’ve, I’ve been thinking a lot about colonization because we’ve been talking about the Christian.

Basis of a nation, the Christian founding fathers, and even in Australia, people are talking about this, even though we don’t actually have any Christian founding fathers. Um, we’ve got, you know, we had this inherently Catholic, um, or inherently Church of England colonial background. But this, the Christian origins of our nation started with a genocide when they landed in Australia.

But, you know, we took the gospel to the, the aboriginal people. Well, no, yeah, you took the gospel to them while you were taking their children out of their homes, trying to force a simulation under the White Australia policy, which by the way, is what South Africa kind of looked to for, um, inspiration when they were setting up a bud guide.

Um, and, you know, we’re looking, this revisionist history again is being applied to colonization. It wasn’t a good thing. It wasn’t like some of the founding fathers of the, the region that I grew up in, um, Gippsland Angus McMillan, you would’ve would’ve attended church on Sunday, but then gone back to his state on a Sunday afternoon and hunted First Nations people.

Aboriginals, oh my God, for sport. This is like saying something is good because you’re using c Christian language to apply to it is the basis of Christian nationalism. Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you. Absolutely. And, and we’re, we’re in an absolute like flurry of Christian nationalist activity at the moment that seems to be built on this scaffolding of everything that you guys are talking about.

How do we in this moment reclaim our strong-willed selves? How do we seek out psychological safety? How do we. Be part of the resistance in a sustainable way when we’ve got a long four years ahead of us. If indeed it is only four years. ’cause I’ve seen the news on that too.

Okay. I’ll give my spiel and then I’m sure Crispin will have a therapeutic, um, approach.

I think for me, going back to what people have said, who have studied, um, you know, what happened in Germany after the third Reich fell, and Alice Miller again, she said. Uh, it wasn’t education level, it wasn’t religion. It wasn’t any of these things that would show what made a person resist the Nazi party.

It was their level of connection to their true self. That’s it. So the deeper your connection to your true self, the more likely you are to resist authoritarianism in whatever form it arrives. So I, I’ve really taken that to heart. I’ve also seen that to be very true in my life. And so if that sounds very vague and ambiguous to you, um, you know, it’s just like, what do you like what?

Like, what foods do you wanna eat and what colors bring you joy? And you know, you could start to maybe explore with your gender and your sexuality. Maybe you can reread comfort books from your childhood and, and try and get in touch with your younger self. Like all of this is not wasted work, and it’s actually really important work to do when we’re in the throes of a crisis.

Like right now, I’m the type of person who’s like. The apocalypse is happening. I must know everything. I must be prepared. That’ll keep me safe. And that’s not true at all. The hallmark of totalitarianism is it seeks to control people by terrorizing them from within. They don’t wanna just terrorize you in your public life.

They want you to be scared 24 7, which will make you, uh, compliant and make you obey. That’s what our parents kind of did to us using this religious Christian language. We were always terrified of being disobedient, mom and dad being mad at us, of God being mad at us, of not being holy enough, of not making it to heaven of the end.

Times coming right? We had so many things to be terrified about, and that kept us in a compliance state. So for me, you know, we have to take breaks from the news. We need to protect our mental health to ensure we’re not being terrorized 24 7. And I’m like, we’re microdosing terror over here, okay? And yes, in the evenings especially, we’re like, oh my God, let’s talk about every terrible thing we heard on the news.

And then this, you know, and then you have to find other. Things to think about. You have to find ways to care for yourself, to care for your physical body here and now. And everybody will have different ways of doing that, but just reminding yourself there’s nothing good that comes from feeling that terror constantly.

Um, nothing good. And that’s actually what they want. So that’s my little

mm-hmm.

Pep talk. What

about you guys? I actually, I mean, rest is resistance in, in one way, and I think there’s, that’s my son. Um, there’s different types of rest. Creative rest is a, you know, rest from the news, my god, doing something creative, all that kind of stuff.

I love that. Rereading your comfort books. But mine was at McCormick. Um, stuff like mysteries that I got from a Christian bookstore, so I’m not reading them. You don’t read those? Don’t read those. No, we don’t, we don’t read tho those. I did read, um, Anne Gr Gables growing up and oh, I just thought Anne was just me, you know?

She was just me. And then I reread them recently and I’m like, oh God, Marilla is me. I just

marillas the goat. Honestly, the goat and Anne is the most Audi, DHD little head in the clouds traumatized child I’ve ever seen in my life.

Right? That was exactly what I felt when I, when I looked back through that, um, Crispin.

The, the question. Yeah. I’ll let you answer that question and then I’ll fire another one at you and I’m writing it in the copy so I don’t forget. How do we replay?

Yeah. Well, I think that, um, gosh, I mean, how do you reclaim? I, I just, DL said a lot of the really good things to say, which is true. Like, I stole ’em.

I stole ’em all. Yeah, you stole ’em all. I think that another piece around the rest part is if you grew up in evangelicalism, you know that feeling of there, there’s never actually like a point where you’re like, I’ve done enough. It’s like, all right, what’s the next thing? You know? What’s the like, I need to be praying more.

I need to be evangelizing more. I need to, you know, et cetera. And it can be really easy to take that approach during a time like this, and especially in a time when a lot of people are rightfully saying, Hey, we need to do more. We need to take action, et cetera. But I think creating some sort of structure for yourself, so you’re like, Hey, here are my values.

Here’s the things that I want to do that I wanna invest in during this time, the ways that I want to, um, take a stand against fascism, but also having a sense of like, something that makes it so you can check it off and say, all right, I did my thing today and I’m gonna do my thing tomorrow. But like, I can rest now.

I can, I can, you know, enjoy watching YouTube with my partner if you’re at our house. Um, but, you know, creating that structure and rhythm so that there is, like, I’m giving out that energy and then I’m resting, and then I’m giving out that energy, and then I’m resting and like moving through that cycle I think is really important.

So, yeah, that’s, that’s me. As, as I mentioned, you know, years working with a ADHD years, sometimes we need a little structure in our lives so that things feel less chaotic and we have a sense of like, all right, I am doing something, even if it’s not all the time,

but can I, can I add on one thing? Mm-hmm.

Because Claire, I just loved it so much when you said that people sort of use Christianity as this blanket of like, well, I’m good, I’m a Christian, so I’m good. And honestly, I’m like, that’s the work I wanna see more people doing is standing up to people and being like, you’re not good. Yeah. You’re not good.

Mm-hmm. Show me how you’re good. Show me what actions you have done. Show me what beliefs you have that show me that you wanna live in a pluralistic, diverse society with equal rights for all and human rights for all. If you can show me anything Yeah. That points to that. Okay. I’ll say you’re good. If you can’t, you are not good.

And just standing up to people with that they do not know what to do. And honestly, they can react pretty violently. Yeah. But if more of us do it, if all of us unionize mm-hmm. And say, you’re not good. You’re not good. Yeah. You’re human who has been lied to by the rich. Yeah. Um, and let’s go eat the rich.

You know, like Yeah. I, I’m, I’m okay with moving on and moving forward. Yeah. But I am not. I’m no longer going to pretend these people are good, and I, I hope more people join me on my little one. Yes, I’m with you. I’m with you.

DL sign me the fuck up. Um, it, I actually listened to a podcast, well, I listened to a podcast the other day, and in it, somebody had sent it to me, what just asked me what I thought of it.

And in it, it was two Christian nationalists basically. I don’t think they’d use that word because they don’t tend to label themselves with the things that might cast them as the villains. But I could tell that the podcaster was trying to draw this pastor out on, you know, gay rights and gay conversion and, and gay marriage, all the gay things.

Um, and I just, anyway, um, I have so many strong feelings about that alone, but, um. They asked, they raised this thing. Or somebody once asked me if I was dominionist and, oh, what does that even mean? And you know, Jesus was a servant leadership, and we talk about servant leadership a lot, but serving people really means getting into positions of authority so that we can serve them by bringing in godly policy.

And I, I was sitting there going, huh, this is the degree of mental gymnastics that you have to do. Mm-hmm. To convince yourself that you are not exactly what people have asked you about, that you are not dominionist and dominionist dominion seems to be a language that we used to use that’s now dovetailing in with Christian nationalism.

Yeah. ’cause we’re starting to see it in its full throated glory. But to kind of segue away from that, I’ve been trying to, I, I guess this question is difficult for me to ask because, you know, how do you spot a red flag when you’re raised in a sea of them? So many of us were raised in a sea of them, and so many of us are trying to, it’s deeply uncomfortable to name it abusive.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You may actually find that people react to you quite strongly when you say, no, that’s abuse. Oh yeah.

Mm-hmm. Denying a child

in education, a robust education is educational. Neglect is abuse. Yes. Mm-hmm. Denying a child health information and telling them to save themselves for marriage and then not, you know, giving them agency over who they choose as a partner is abuse.

Um. Corporal punishment

mm-hmm. Is

abuse. Um, I’ve heard of people using blanket training Oh my God. Where they’ll sit a child on a blanket and a caregiver and enticements will sit outside the blanket. And what they’ll do is every time that child, that infant or that, you know, toddler will reach out for this person they love, they’ll squeeze their hand with a smile on their face, squeeze their hand until the child cries or beat them with a smile on their face.

That’s abuse.

Mm-hmm. Um, and

it’s. Screwing up a child’s attachment and it’s screwing up a child’s sense of safety. But for us, we might find it really hard to name it what it is, and we might minimize it in our memories and then have moments of, oh God, I’m I, oh God, I remembered that. More kindly than what had actually happened, Kristen?

Mm-hmm.

How do we handle these uncomfortable moments? How do we process that?

Oh my gosh. I mean, this is a lot of my work during, uh, a lot of the week, uh, because we are biologically. Like our attachment system wants to protect our parents. Yeah. Wants to believe that they’re good, wants to believe that, um, that what they did was okay.

Um,

and this was exploited by Dr. Dobson. Mm-hmm. Yes. He was a child psychologist and he knew that children and their attachment system is designed to always protect the parent. Mm-hmm. So, I’m sorry.

Yes. No, exactly. And it’s, and so part of it too is that so much according to this model, so much spanking happens actually before you really form many conscious memories.

So this blueprint for what it means to be in a relationship with a parent, um, what it means to be cared for, what it means to be take, like to, to receive affection. Um. Is marred by that corporal punishment. And the research is really clear that it has so many impacts psychologically on development, on even on brain development.

Um, but we don’t, many of us don’t even remember, and a lot of us a lot, you know, there are a lot of folks that are like, yeah, I was spanked until I was 10. I was never behaved. But a lot of us were like, I, I sort of was able to figure it out before I started remembering the spanking. You know? And so that can be hard as well.

Like, so a lot of times there are these feelings. I think one of the biggest things mm-hmm One of the, the biggest things that people talk about experiencing is when I’m around my parents, I feel on edge. I feel like I have to take care of their emotions. I feel like if they are not calm or if they’re not approving of me, I am not safe.

And that comes from being two years old and expressing a different opinion and getting spanked for it. And you might not consciously remember that I’m not, I’m not about like, oh, like maybe this happened, maybe it didn’t. It’s like you will know, like if your parents grew up with like you, you’re not putting together like a false memory.

If your parents used Dobson parenting, even if Spank, you don’t remember the spankings that happened. Yeah. Right. Yeah,

yeah. Oh, absolutely. We had a, I remember my mom coming back from the shopping, doing the grocery shopping, and she had a, a wooden spoon with a little girl on the end.

Oh no.

And we were like, oh, that’s cute.

What’s that for? And she goes, it’s for Wendy Spank Little Girls. Mm-hmm.

I was like,

oh, okay.

Mm-hmm.

And yeah, and I continue to, um, point out that I often laugh. Like af after saying something that’s so dark. It’s inappropriate emotional affect, guys, and it happens to people with cholesterol also. People are having a breakdown and I’m, I’m conscious of it, so I’m not having a breakdown anyway.

Um, yeah. Mm-hmm. I want to keep you forever ’cause there’s so much to talk about. I will say this, I think everyone needs to get DLL’s books. I think everyone needs to subscribe to any, any book that Crispin writes. Even probably the attachment one. You need that too. It’s absolutely vital during this time because we’re not just parenting our own children during this time.

We’re reparenting ourselves. Exactly. And we’re growing through all of this stuff, and we’re watching all of this mind blowing. It’s a mind blowing foster clock, let’s just call it that, of, you know, Christian nationalist sort of end times anxiety proportions. And it’s time when we really have to look after ourselves and have to connect with people that’ll help us be the resistors and do this in intelligent way.

So, please go follow DL and Crispin, subscribe to all of their stuff. Read and listen to all of their stuff. So there’s that. But Cait, um, whose face has been the, like, the disgust, the horror, that this is so normal to me that all of that reflections on this session.

I’m sorry, I’m, I’m not sorry, but, uh, yeah, it’s

just, no, no, don’t be sorry.

This is the ability to react in real time. Is

reclamation. Yeah. It’s like, it’s the kind of thing like, I wish we could stop talking about this, but we have to keep talking about it. I know, know, we have to keep helping each other because otherwise it just ends badly. Um, mm-hmm. I, first off, wanna say I’ve got to, there has to be a connection between how obsessed I was.

You talked about Anne of Green av, green Gables.

Mm-hmm.

And I love that book too, but how obsessed maybe you were too, like of books about orphans. Yes, absolutely. Absolute. There were no parents. Little

princess, the little princess was my

shit, you

know?

Mm-hmm.

Like Harry, Harry Potter. Is that

Harry Potter?

There’s gotta be something about like, obsessed with these kids who didn’t have parents. Um mm-hmm. Anyways, but, uh, I went through episode. Yeah, I, I just wanted to say I went through, um, psych psychological testing for some of like the, the stuff that I struggle with and. One of the most helpful things that the doctor said to me was, I have never experienced a nervous system regulation.

Um, I don’t have like a baseline Oh, because of the way I grew up and the complex PTSD. And like, it’s a scary thing to hear, but it’s, it’s also empowering because like now I can work on creating that baseline. Um, and that’s like what I’m trying to do this year, well, probably the rest of my life. But DL you’ve written a lot about nervous system regulation.

Mm-hmm. That’s really helped me. And I would just say to people listening, um, starting with yourself and starting with figuring out ways that help your body regulate and the mind body connection is so important. Um.

Mm-hmm.

And I think I was, as we were talking, I was thinking about. How come we are here talking about this and other people who grew up with this perpetuate the harm.

Yeah. Um, what’s the difference? And I think we still have so much to learn and to, to grow from, but I think we can start with healing ourselves, um, and trying to break those cycles of abuse, um, for the next generation. And I think otherwise, I, I feel like, you know, one path could lead to more fascism like it has over and over again with authoritarian parenting and continuing that.

And then the other, well, maybe there’s not a binary, but another path could be, um, reaching towards healing and, and that I think that starts with ourselves. Um, but, and also in community with other people, you know? And I think it’s, it’s complex but also really simple in some ways.

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That’s a beautiful summation, I think.

Um. Yeah, I was horrified when I, I went to a psychiatrist for a medication review, and then I obviously had to take the letter to the doctors and all that kind of stuff, and I she’d written developmental trauma and I was like, but I raised myself and I did a damn good job. You know, like, and it, it obviously, like I’ve been kind of grappling with, well, at what point did I really start raising myself?

And for me it was after I was eight. Um, you know, that that’s the moment in time where I began to feel a lot more like Anne Grant Gables, a lot more orphaned, a lot more flooded with people in my house who weren’t from my family and stuff like that. But of course my mother would remember it entirely different because she’s got her own psychological protection mechanisms in there and whatnot.

Ah, there’s so much we could say any final words from our. Wonderful guests who I’m so grateful for.

Well, yeah, I, I, we’ve, you know, talked about a lot of different things here, uh, the history, everything, um, around this like political movement and the impact of parenting. Um, but recently, like this year, um, we have been both on our podcast and the chapters we’re writing, we’re talking a lot about how do you, what do you do with the relationships with these parents that raised you this way, that, um, that voted this way?

And, um, so that’s where we, our heads have been. And it’s been a really great conversation to have, like with, with our community. ’cause I think that’s a big question that a lot of folks are facing right now. Um,

how, how do we move forward? Um, because. Trump’s gonna fall. I mean, he is, but the people who love him and the people who, um, have embraced fascist ideology, they’re still gonna be around.

So, um. That’s our long term kind of plan is helping people develop inner resources, be who they are, be the strong-willed child. So basically what we’re doing now is we wrote a book called Strong-Willed and we are putting it out on Substack so anybody can read it. We’ve done, I don’t know how many chapters we’re at, uh, like

14 I think.

And we might actually pursue the, like publishing it in in a different form. But we just thought, this is a project that centers survivors, so we wanna hear from survivors and they have shown up and they are commenting and they are sharing their life. And we have a podcast that goes along with it. We have an amazing Discord community, and I view this as such important work because we were not allowed to ever tell the truth of our inner world and our inner experience if it did not match up to our parents.

We were punished, we were shamed, we were guilted, and Jesus was supposed to help us align with them. Right. So I just think every time someone comments, every time someone. Reaches out to another person and, and shares what it was like to be them. And also shares the relational fallout, the developmental fallout that we all experience now.

We’re doing this work, we’re archiving Yes. Our histories that have not been archived. I mean, Cait, your book is one of these beautiful artifacts, right, that we can actually hold in our hands. And, and Claire, you said, you know, people don’t really wanna think about this stuff. And I think that’s true. It’s why I, I have an obsession with collecting evangelical artifacts.

So like, first editions of all Dr. Dobson’s stuff, precious moments, figurines, like, uh, the Teen Adventure Bibles, like I am obsessed with collecting them so I can say it happened. It was really this bad shit. Weird, y’all. And so, um, I, that’s another thing we kind of share in, in our communities is we share pictures in like DC talk CDs and, you know, like.

We’re keeping the memories alive ’cause they really happened. Okay. Sneak a museum. A museum. I’m doing an art show actually in a month that I’m gonna use so many of these materials and I’m really excited because the physicality is like so important to me to say it happened. It was real.

Uh, well, I’ve got a Frank Pertti, um, book that I haven’t thrown out yet, and, and I’ll send you a copy of my, my novels.

I already got one, but I’ll take more. I’ll take more. You must not read my novels. Anyway.

Thank you for your time. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for your experience. Um. I don’t know what will title this, this episode, because we’ve covered so much. Um, and I just wanna say that if you are dealing with an adult diagnosis of neurodiversity and you’re dealing with the, the grief and the struggle of all of that, please know that your brain is exactly what it needs to be, and you are exactly who you need to be.

And, you know mm-hmm. Find that, uh, find that community. Yes. Um, I need to end this episode now, so I have pushed my family to the very edge of patients today. Um, here, here’s the title suggestion, James Jobs’s Worst nightmare. Yes. Let’s call it that. Let’s call it that. And, and taking down the Christian Nationalist Patriarchy.

Mm-hmm. Let’s do it. I’m on board. I’m on in for the cause. Sign me up. And by that I mean. You’re disco called server. Here I come and, uh, podcast books, DL and Kristen Mayfield. Thank you so much. Um, and Cait West as usual, Sherry Smith will be back with us next time. She’s exercising her right to arrest and I applaud her wholeheartedly.

This is Survivors discuss. I’m Claire. See you next time.