This week’s guest is Tracey. Tracey spent her childhood in a white American Christian home where Focus on the Family reigned and “Obey right away” was the expectation. 

She was a believer as an adolescent but began asking hard questions in high school. As a young adult, she saw how prideful the leaders were and how easily Christians were pulled in. 

“That’s a theme through my whole experience of Christianity…Christians are actually attracted to narcissists…People are drawn to or encouraged to seek answers from narcissists.”

As an adult, Tracey became Catholic, only to see the same threads running through—narcissism, misogyny, racism, abuse and more. 

In the past few years, Tracey’s found solace in yoga, meditation and nature. She’s grown and been changed, not through the religious beliefs she’d had as a child or as an adult, but through experiencing the real and tangible world. 

“The mountain of evidence, learned throughout my training and experiences as a physician and a mental health professional, that church teachings do not lead to emotional well being and human flourishing, my coping with the cognitive dissonance and eventually being unable to live a double life as an evidence based professional on the weekdays and devout follower of church teachings at home and on the weekend.”

Recommendations

Why Stay Christian by Brian McLaren

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes du Mez

Raising Children Unfundamentalist Facebook Group

Catholic Sabbatical Facebook Group

Quotes

“As someone who’s come out of this now, I see how performative Christian parenting is…There’s a lot of pressure in Christianity to make sure everything looks good.” 

“…a lot of interviewees have Hell Anxiety. I had the opposite. I had like, Hell Skepticism.” 

“That’s a theme through my whole experience of Christianity…Christians are actually attracted to narcissists…People are drawn to or encouraged to seek answers from narcissists.”

“I saw how my psychological agency was taken away by this idea that women are supposed to be the ‘followers,’ and not initiate things [romantically].” 

“I was still going to an evangelical church…I started to see that their prayer life is just magical thinking.”

“I look back at…confession. It’s very problematic. There’s secrecy involved; whatever happens in the confessional stays secret…There’s a power dynamic there, as well.” 

“They really promoted these ideas, like ‘wanting to have other things in your life besides having kids is selfish.’ Even things like, ‘wanting time to rest or wanting your own hobbies’; that’s selfish. All you were supposed to be doing was having children.”

“I think the church encourages men to have narcissistic traits.”

“I was now trying to be a progressive Christian but I still saw so many things…I just couldn’t get over.” 

“The Catholic Church was really making women reproductive objects.” 

“…trying to discover these answers to my questions? It all just started to fall apart.” 

“I had done all this work on myself, for my own personal spiritual wellness—my yoga, meditation, just being silent, being out in nature. Christians will say, ‘When hard times come, you have to lean on your faith,’ and a hard time had come, and I really saw that faith was superfluous. It wasn’t doing anything for me. I didn’t need it.” 

“The mountain of evidence, learned throughout my training and experiences as a physician and a mental health professional, that church teachings do not lead to emotional well being and human flourishing, my coping with the cognitive dissonance and eventually being unable to live a double life as an evidence based professional on the weekdays and devout follower of church teachings at home and on the weekend.”

Interact

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Deconversion
https://gracefulatheist.com/2017/12/03/deconversion-how-to/

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https://gracefulatheist.com/2016/10/21/secular-grace/

Attribution

“Waves” track written and produced by Makaih Beats

David Ames  0:11  
This is the graceful atheist podcast United studios Podcast Network. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the graceful atheist podcast. My name is David and I are trying to be the graceful atheist. Please consider rating and reviewing the podcasts on the Apple podcast store, rate the podcast on Spotify, and subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening. If you're in the middle of doubt, deconstruction and the dark night of the soul, you do not have to do it alone. Join our private Facebook group deconversion anonymous and become a part of the community. You can find us at facebook.com/groups/deconversion Remember, we have a merchandise shop on T public where you can get your graceful atheist podcast and secular Grace themed items. You'll find the link in the show notes. Special thanks to Mike T for editing today's show. On today's show, my guest today is Tracy Tracy grew up in a Focus on the Family obey at all costs, family environment. She started off in a Presbyterian Church, she experienced evangelical churches, she eventually got married to a Catholic man and became Catholic. During medical school, she began to deconstruct and ultimately her being a psychiatrist and relying on science began to conflict with her faith. She now calls herself a nun and o n e. Here is Tracy, to tell her story. Tracy, welcome to the grateful atheist podcast.

Tracey  1:52  
Oh, thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I've been listening for really only a couple of months. But it's been a joy to listen to the podcast. And I'm really excited to get to tell my story.

David Ames  2:04  
Yeah, and I'm excited to have you it sounds like you've got some unique perspective as well as some unique expertise that you bring to the table. So I'm really glad to get into it. But we'll begin with where we always do, what was the faith tradition that you grew up with?

Tracey  2:19  
Sure. Um, so I guess my story of how I relate to religion starts maybe a couple years before I was born, that my parents both had grown up in a Presbyterian Church that became part of the Evangelical revival that was going on in the 1970s. And so they met after college and got married. In the mid 1970s, when all of this Evangelical revival was going on, they had this charismatic pastor at their church. So, so this church I grew up in was was like a mainstream, or like mainline Protestant Presbyterian Church. But I would say it tended more like towards the evangelical the, or the conservative side of things. So you know, I look at I look back at my life as a young child, and I see, you know, my parents were, they had good intentions, they, they meant, well, they were loving people. But they were probably also, you know, people were very young, starting their family, not really having a lot of confidence, or a lot of, you know, like that, like they really needed some sort of outside source to tell them what to do. And so that became evangelical Christianity and for, for you for their parenting and their family decisions, they really relied on an organization called Focus on the Family, which I think a lot of listeners, if they've had a background in Christianity, they know what that organization is. For any listeners who don't know, what Focus on the Family is, or what I've come to understand it to be is Austin, it's ostensibly are like superficially, just an organization that helps with like Christian parenting, Christian marriage, just giving advice, the person who runs it is named James Dobson. He's been around since like, the mid 70s. And he is a psychologist. Um, but if you really dig into what this organization is about, there's a lot of political ties to white Christian nationalism to the religious right. There's really a lot more to it than what it looks like on the surface. So my parents follow this parenting philosophy and it's, you know, based on this Christian idea that we're all sinners and so that means that children are sinful to children who kind of have to have their will broken or be trained through discipline, how to be obedient, and so that training included some spanking and corporal punishment. It also includes the idea which I think is a little bit more insidious but also important that children need to be instantly compliant or that obedience means obeying right away like the child is not supposed to have time. Um, to process their emotions, to be able to shift from what they're doing, they just need to comply right away. And, you know, it really the model is emphasizing obedience compliance, not emphasizing emotional well being regulation and understanding of emotions, mental health, those things were not emphasized. So, you know, I have one memory of being spanked as a child. And I could tell you know, that we talked so much about cognitive dissonance, and I could tell my parents had that cognitive dissonance too, you know, they would say things like, I don't really want to do this, but I have to do it out of love. This isn't pleasant, but I'm doing it because I love you. And you can see, like, we all know as human beings, that hitting someone as the opposite of love, but but we're all in this. We're all in this distorted world, right. And so So, you know, I, my parents were kind people, they weren't doing this in a cruel or repetitive way. But, but and I look at myself and I would not that I look back labeled myself as a highly sensitive person, or maybe an empath is like a label that some people use. And so it didn't, it didn't take very much for me to get in line. And, you know, I really learned very quickly to be sensitive to my parents moves or to what they wanted. And as I, as I look back on that, that kind of discipline, it really robbed me of my own agency of my own sense of personal autonomy, and instead was replaced with like an outward compliance, a fear based compliance. And so I look at my family life as a lot of good things happening. My parents were kind people, they wanted me to get a good education, we had nice times walking to the park, having a pet dogs going on vacation. But I always see like, there was this overlaying sense of fear, or like, I wasn't totally safe to be myself, you know, I think my parents probably didn't have some of their own emotional issues dealt with. And so it was hard for them to like validate or empathize with my emotions, it was really more an outward focus on behaving yourself, keeping yourself under control. And you know, when unfortunately, the result of that is that outward outwardly other people would see my family and say, oh, what good children you have, and your children are so obedient. And so then my parents are getting this positive feedback, like overdoing it a really good job. And I see, as someone who's come out of this now, how performative Christian parenting is, I saw my parents judge what was going on in other people's families, what was going on in other people's lives and how they were raising their children. It's there's a lot of pressure in Christianity, I think, to make everything look good look like it's working, living up to expectations. So I'll come back to that. Because that, that comes back in my life as an adult in my parenting.

David Ames  8:07  
When you were young, was this something that you personally took on? Or were you just following along with your parents? In

Tracey  8:13  
terms of my, my faith or my Christian belief?

David Ames  8:17  
Correct? Yes.

Tracey  8:18  
Yeah, I was so good. So getting into some of that, you know, so we went to this Presbyterian Church. And I do remember, like, when I was seven years old, and there was like, a really nice Sunday school teacher. And there was a little boy in the class who had said, he asked Jesus into his heart to be his savior. We're all about seven at this age. And, and the teacher was the Sunday School teacher was so happy and all this is so wonderful. So I'm like, oh, I should ask Jesus into my heart, too. And so I did, whatever that involves saying a prayer or something. And I remember telling my parents, and they're like, Well, you already did that when you were four. And they told me, they explained the whole story to me, and, and I'm like, I don't even remember that. So So I look at that now, like, you know, we were just these really tiny children, whether I was four or whether I was seven. Like we didn't really understand we were just doing what the adults told us to do. But, um, you know, like that, that Presbyterian Church, I really don't see anything there being like, like traumatic or abusive, it was a pretty nice place. I had some good memories. But I never, you know, for my parents, that was like their community, that's where they belonged. And I never really felt that either. I was just kind of there. Because that's what we did every week as a family. And I didn't really ask a lot of questions as a child, really not until high school. Did I, you know, look at things on a deeper level. Did that answer your question?

David Ames  9:42  
Yes, it does. And then going into like, The Age of Reason, and maybe into high school, where you're part of youth groups and things like that. Were there things for you to participate in, in that church?

Tracey  9:53  
I did. I did like a youth choir in high school, but I even know part of my experience. Who was that? I didn't always feel like I fit in socially at the church. I didn't really have any close friends there. My close friends were at school and I went to public school, or other kids in the neighborhood, but it just I never really like clicked with that whole church community. Okay. There is another brief period of time, and I don't really know why. But it was around middle school age, like maybe 1011 12 years old that my parents left that Presbyterian Church and instead, we went to a fundamentalist Bible Church for a couple years, I think maybe there was a pastor they didn't like at the Presbyterian Church. And so that was a different experience. And we're like, the women would wear these little like lace doilies on their head, and I'm like, What's that all about? And they sit, oh, that's how they showed their submission to their husband, because there's a Bible verse about women covering their heads or something, and my mom, to her credit, would not wear it, which, you know, I appreciate that now, um, but you know, it, this was a lot more, you know, like sitting and listening to an hour long sermon, and, you know, just a lot more hardcore teachings. And I just remember, like, Oh, I just hated going to that church. Yeah, and this is where, you know, like, there was nothing very traumatic at the Presbyterian Church, but at this at this church, I remember in Sunday school, they taught us about hell, and so we're, like, 1011 12 years old. And I really think it's interesting looking back, that you have a lot of interviewees who have held anxiety. And so I had the opposite. I had like, held skepticism or how,

David Ames  11:30  
okay, yeah. What's the

Tracey  11:34  
word I'm looking for? Nevermind, I can't think of it. So I remember, like we had to, we had to look at these Bible verses that are about like, people burning in the lakes of fire and all that. And I'm just sitting there, like, 11 years old. Like, they want me to be scared by all of this, but it just, This just can't be true. Like this is this. And I don't know what it was. But it just, it just never sank in with me or I just never

David Ames  11:56  
good for you, Tracy. Yeah, I think skepticism is the right word for that. Good for you. Yeah,

Tracey  12:01  
yeah. Yeah. So then, you know, by high school, we were back at the Presbyterian Church. And another interesting thing I saw is that when my parents chose to leave that fundamentalist Bible Church, there was a family that we'd been, we'd been really close with there, like, we have dinner at their house all the time, we would spend time with their family, their kids were the same age as my brother and I, we it seemed like we were very close. And when we went back to the other church, this family just stopped speaking to us completely. Okay. And that, you know, that was really eye opening for me too. And I asked my parents, like, why don't they invite us over anymore? Or why don't they speak with us? And my parents said, Oh, well, they're angry that we stopped going to their church. And it was just interesting to see that it looked like this was a close and trusting friendship. And then it was really contingent on us believing what they believed going to their church, and it wasn't really a mutual friendship.

Yeah, so moving into high school. So going back to this Focus on the Family organization, so they really emphasize adolescence is like it's a really dangerous time. People, there's sexual temptation, people stray from the faith, they ask too many questions, sex, drugs, rock and roll all that and so, so I could, you know, again, as a highly sensitive person could feel my parents anxiety about this period of time, even though I was a good kid, they really didn't have anything to worry about. But they were, they had that anxiety, there was a lot more control. You know, the other thing that happens in adolescence, I think, is there's a lot of, you know, pigeonholing people into gender roles. And so there was a lot more control about what I was wearing, you know, who I was spending time with, my parents had the idea No, none of my friends at this public school, we're like, good enough people for me to spend time with. And, you know, that was difficult for me that there were times that I, I wanted to date somebody. And I just didn't really pursue that because of the negative attention and the the control and anxiety that would have been happening at home. And that's something I had to grieve later on that I didn't really get an opportunity to, to have some relationships that would have been nice relationships to have, right? Yeah. And so like to my parents, I was appearing very compliant, very well behaved. But, you know, like going to public high school was really an exposure to a lot of other things. And I really loved public high school, you know, that I had this whole variety of friends who were Catholic, Jewish, atheist, agnostic. And there's were some more cognitive dissonance came in like, especially my Jewish friends who were very devout, a lot of them in their own faith and very lovely people and doing a lot of good through their synagogue or through their own community. And saying, Well, you know, why would my church say these people go to hell or the you know, Like, like they don't believe in Jesus yet they have this really good life. It just it just didn't fit. And then just learning from my public school teachers, just all these views of all these intellectual pursuits, science literature, I was interested in like, like theater, and I'm a musician. So I did a lot of like with the orchestra, the musicals, I really loved psychology. That had always been fascinating to me. And so, so, you know, I really saw from my parents more, trying to control that intellectual control at home, like when our biology class did the unit on evolution, my dad wanted me to read some other stuff about like, creationism and like, Oh, this is a other point of view, you should believe. And I had an American history teacher who was like, very, very avant garde, in terms of like, not teaching us the sanitized version of American history. And I could see how uncomfortable that made my parents that I was learning some of this information in psychology was something that was fascinating to me. And then my, you know, my parents want mostly my dad was like, Well, you know, that's like those social sciences aren't really like serious sciences. And you see now like, like, Christians have a hard time with psychology, because it doesn't lead to the same conclusions about what makes us happy. And what's healthy for us.

David Ames  16:23  
Well, neither neither do the harder sciences. But yes.

Tracey  16:29  
Yes, yes, that is true. So then it was time to go to college. So it's so you know, another thing that had happened to me through adolescence is I hadn't because of that intellectual control, I haven't really had the opportunity to figure out what I wanted, or how to make my own independent decisions. And so, you know, it's time to go to college. And I'm like, I don't know how to choose something. So my parents, so you know, they, they picked a couple of different conservative Christian colleges for me to look at. And, you know, I picked the one where I felt the most comfortable and I got a scholarship there. And so, so that's where I see like, the religious trauma became more where religious trauma came into play, or where things became really intense. So theory, the culture was not I just got like purity cultural light in high school, nothing that was really that traumatic. But in college, there was really a heavy emphasis here that you were supposed to marry young, you had to marry somebody from the college, you had to be engaged. By the time you were graduating at age 22 A lot of stuff on gender roles, modesty, that really came some of that coming from the college, some of it coming from the students who brought their own baggage with them. So I saw my peers, you know, like, like, either dating or the more conservative ones having a courtship being engaged by age 1920 21. Yeah, a lot of other a lot of other sort of, you know, heavy religious concepts of like sacrificing your own happiness for God's will. A lot of pressure to go into the ministry and missions and everything was very performative. You know, a lot of like, these student led worship services, where everybody, you know, all these, like, very heartfelt, dramatic stories. And, you know, I just kind of felt inadequate, because I wasn't a very dramatic or attention seeking person, and I didn't have anything real profound going on in my life. So and then the same, the same issue came up here that I still never really dated. Because I think deep down, I knew, you know, I'm 20 years old, I'm not ready to get married. And if you start dating somebody here, you're going to be pressured to marry them. There was one guy who was really interested in me, and he pursued me and it just scared me to death. And I just kind of like, you know, held him at arm's length. And, you know, I still kind of he was a good person, I just wasn't,

David Ames  18:49  
I think this is really important. What you're describing. Yeah, part of part of adolescence and dating, is finding what you like and what you don't like. And if the, if they're the heavy expectations that this is courtship, leading to potential marriage, it just completely removes your ability to learn what it is that you like, and a potential partner.

Tracey  19:12  
Right. Right. And that will that will come in later for me but yes, I had I had a close friend who she started dating somebody and like, you know, like the night they decided they were going to start dating. They said it was a courtship and it was like, they were on the path towards marriage from like, like the day they decided they wanted a relationship together. And that, you know, that was really, that's really a lot you know, we'd our brains aren't even fully formed at age 19 or 28 to make those decisions

and I was a really good student I majored in microbiology and knew I wanted to go into health professions and you know, as college is progressing, I'm still single I have my whole life ahead. To me, so I decided to apply to medical school and I got accepted. And so I look at that now like how warps was that, that I thought going to Meadows medical school is like, that's my plan B, or that's my backup plan if I don't get to be a Christian wife and mother. No, I think like, like, like, you know, you're you're 22 years old, you've been accepted to professional school, you have your whole life ahead of you. Like, that's, that's a wonderful thing. That's like, that's great. It's not a problem. But but you know, this environment I was in was warped, where it was hard to even see that. And you know, and then the other really significant aspect of this Christian college experience was there was a professor there and I don't know if you'd call this exactly sexual harassment. Was it spiritual abuse? Was it on a narcissist. So there was this professor who he had this like reputation around campus as having this spiritually powerful aura, he is very charismatic. He, but he was a biology professor. But he was always really weaving all this religious stuff into the classes. And he told these stories about himself. Like he's got some special spiritual, spiritual abilities, or like, he could like Intuit things about people. And, you know, and so it didn't take long to see what was really happening was his, his special interest was only in the young single women.

David Ames  21:21  
The shocking,

Tracey  21:22  
I am shocked, attractive young woman. Yeah, so he would, so he would encourage some of these students and sometimes it was me, oh, you're not understanding that come to my come to my office hours, and we'll go over this one on one. And so so like, there was nothing that was overtly sexual, or that was, you know, like assault or anything like that. But he would just, you know, get very intrusive, very personal about, like, tell me about your spiritual life? Are you dating anyone? You know, lots of way would you like me to pray for you, let's, uh, you need a hug. And so, um, you know, eventually I mentioned some of these things to my parents. And so my mother, despite her evangelical Christian part of her, she's still a human woman, who has been through some of these things themselves as herself and was like, you know, this is not okay. And that was just devastating for me, you know, like to, to, you know, to be in this, like, these rose colored glasses about religion, and then in this huge loss of innocence to see like, this person is using religion, and using God for their own narcissistic supply. And then a couple years later, it came to light that there were a couple other students who had reported this kind of thing. It was ongoing, and the school didn't really do anything about it. So look at the irony here that my parents sent me to this Christian College to keep me safe. From the problems of the world that then this is, this is what you get at a Christian institution.

David Ames  22:47  
Yeah, I mean, clearly ironic. The thing I wanted to mention is, you know, if you felt like, you know, there was some grooming activity happening with you that maybe wasn't, you know, aggressive. You can imagine that somebody with maybe a less strong personality than yourself, or born who would be pushed around by that. Yes, sort of. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So clearly, that person was preying on people on

Tracey  23:09  
Yeah, yeah. And so I mean, I think that's really a theme that I see through my whole experience with Christianity, too, is that there's this Christians are actually attracted to narcissists. And, you know, they don't get that information about personality disorders, about coercive control, psychological manipulation, people are actually like, encouraged to be like, drawn to or trust or seeking answers from narcissists. And, you know, with, we see plenty of that going on. So So then my next step was medical school. And so that I my deconstruction from evangelical Christianity happened fairly quickly in medical school. So I'm finally exposed to all these things that I'd been protected, protected in quotes from, you know, may like meeting a lot, lots of people from all different religions, atheists, secular humanists, queer people, just like everybody who I was told to kind of keep it arm's length. You know, now I'm interacting with all these people in medical school and they're all lovely people, none of the things I had been taught about them were true. But you know, I did still kind of at first stick to my Christian roots. And Elena like, went to the the other evangelical or Christian students as my friend so I started dating a man in that social group. And we, you know, this relationship was like, it was just fraught with poor communication. Like I'd say, we probably dated for five months, but I can't even tell you exactly how many months it was because the communication was so poor about like, are we friends who are interested in each other? Are we actually dating Are we in a relationship? And so this is where I see like, where purity culture hit hard for me that you know, for me that like the physical, the stuff about my body, like I was kind of spared that part, but I saw my psychologic To go agency was really taken away by this idea that women are supposed to be like the followers and not initiate things. And I realized, like, I didn't even feel like I get asked this man like, like, What are your intentions? are? Are you attracted to me? Or are we dating or not? You know, unfortunately, fortunately, he was a nice person, he just didn't have good communication skills. And so I was, it wasn't like a severe harm when we broke up, but I thought like, how vulnerable that could leave me to not be able to speak up for myself to not be able to plan my life, get my needs met, speak up for what I needed in a relationship. You know, when I saw to how like that, like that whole dynamic that puts an unfair burden on the male to if he's supposed to, like, take all these risks and make all these decisions. without really any input from the person that he's dating. You know, that's, that's really, that's really a lot to put on anyone. So you can see all the reasons this relationship failed. I also saw like purity culture, had taught me to look for external qualities, performative qualities, you know, treating a person, like a commodity, like this person is my means to the end of a Christian marriage. Instead of, you know, I didn't ask the questions like, Is this person kind does this person communicate? Well, does this person honest, is this person authentic? You know, I didn't. I didn't learn until I gone through that experience, that that's really what I needed to be looking for.

Yeah, so So then, you know, as medical school progresses, I started spending time working with patients. And you know, not just the classroom learning. And so I saw like, all these politically conservative theories about social problems about poverty, about single mothers, all these things, it was all wrong, like, all these conservative theories are totally off base. And I seeing I'm seeing all these things, like how hard the working poor have to work, and they can never get ahead. This is in the early 2000s, before Obamacare. So some people like they just can't get health insurance, and they can never get ahead because of that, you know, I met the obstetricians who were actually the ones going to Planned Parenthood and doing work there. And I'm like, you know, these people aren't greedy, these people aren't getting any money for doing this. They're just, you know, trying to help these underserved people. You know, seeing how what we call poor life choices are what Christians would call sin, I'm like, these people are just having like mental health problems, and they're dealing with trauma. And this is about psychological distress, or they're just doing these things because they have to, to survive. And so but also, like, learning all the science of, of medicine, and so I was still going to an evangelical church at the time. And I'm just realizing, like, you know, they would have all these prayer requests for all these people who are sick. And I started to see like, like this, their prayer life is like magical thinking, like, they don't even understand the science of this, or they're praying for things that are like, wow, that, you know, that wouldn't really be a safe outcome. If that happened. It just, and then I saw how they, you know, they didn't credit the work of the health care providers, when something went well, they would just say, Oh, God works in miracle. And I also saw how selective they were with like, if someone had cancer, or someone had heart problems, they would get surrounded with love and attention, and they'd come to the front of the church, so everyone could pray for them. But then there's people with mental health struggles, people whose children were having behavior problems, like those people were hidden. We don't we don't talk about those people. And I even like, like, David, just like, a couple years ago, found out that a couple of those my peers, like young women in that church had had a teenage pregnancy and it was so well hidden, I didn't even know for like 20 years. And then I saw, you know, I saw two there they had while I was there a whole political dispute over half the people loved the head pastor, and half of the people didn't like him. And there was all kinds of bad behavior about that, where I was just kind of like, you know, I can't I can't do this anymore. And so I was kind of out of the evangelical church after that, but wasn't ready to leave my whole religion. So at the same time, you know, I'm in medical school and I decided to specialize in psychiatry. So I still always been fascinated by Psychology found out as I'm going through medical school I'm much more interested in this person's story than I am in like, what is their lab work look like? Or you know, what are their what is their heart sounds like and so that's kind of going against that Christian culture where people saw Christian saw me know mental health and psychiatry is kind of like like scary are those people are all atheists are they're gonna like, like, convince you that your faith is wrong and so so I really he kind of had to go against the grain with that too. And I remember my mother saying, Oh, I'm kind of disappointed, I thought you'd be a real doctor with a white coat and a stethoscope. Fortunately, by that time, I had enough confidence in myself that I'm just like, Well, no, this is what I'm gonna do. You know, another sidebar that was interesting, as I well, you know, when I worked on the inpatient psychiatric units a couple of times, people who had attended my childhood church showed up having a psychiatric admission, and I'm like, wow, you know, like these, you know, these problems are there that people never really talked about. And so like, while all this is going on, you know, I've gotten over a purity culture, I've started taking a different approach to dating and yeah, just in found that went so much better to just appreciate the person for who they are. Just take it one day at a time, don't plan your whole future out, I, you know, I was starting to speak up for what I needed in the relationships, set boundaries, you know, and finding out like, those relationships ended, and then I would just feel sad and move on, I didn't feel like I was ruined, or anything was ruined, or God was disappointed, just like, well, you know, that wasn't the right person, or the chemistry was off, or, you know, this, he didn't respect me about this issue, so and so so and eventually, I met the man who ended up becoming my husband. So he was a medical school classmate. And he was Catholic. Not like a super serious Catholic, but attended a Catholic church. And so by this point, I was open minded enough, I thought, well, you know, like any Christian is a real Christian and a good person. So. So sometimes I would go to his Catholic Church. And this was not a typical Catholic Church. So this was the church that was like, like the student, parish, on the campus of where we were going to medical school. So it was run by this hippie Franciscan priest who what didn't have to answer to the whole church, government structure, and he just kind of did his own thing. So it was a very progressive search. And so that was that was really appealing to me, but the progressive part, but also like, the things that didn't exist in Protestantism with like, you know, there's a whole you have a whole season, a liturgical season where the calendar moves around like Christmas, and lent and Easter, and there's all these different feast days to celebrate, and all the feed all the physical aspect that wasn't there. Or like the sensory aspects, that's a better way to say it, right? There's not there in Protestantism with the candles and the, you know, the way the music was just kind of more like more rich, or the bells and the incense and all those things. And so I was kind of intrigued by Catholicism, but I didn't want to convert yet. And so we ended up going to an Episcopal church that had some of that, you know, formal and liturgical aspect, but there wasn't this pressure to conform. And that was a really good time in my life, you know, like, like, I was falling in love with the person I wanted to marry, I wasn't taking religion so seriously. I would, you know, I was enjoying what I was studying, like, by that time, we graduated from medical school, and we were doing our training. And so I so I went into a psychiatry residency and loved learning all the psychology about that. You know, my husband and I did not wait until we were married to have sex. And so that was another thing where purity culture was disproven. You know, like, I remember, I remember waking up and going into work the morning after I lost my virginity and just being like, I don't feel any different. I'm still he told me that I was going to be a completely different person. And I'm not and

David Ames  33:37  
the only difference between you your husband and Christian couples who say they didn't is that you're telling the truth?

Tracey  33:45  
Yeah. Oh, man. Yes. So and then, but one interesting thing I found out is that, you know, when my husband decided to propose, he took my parents out to lunch to ask them for their blessing. And he told he didn't tell me right away. But he told me later on that my parents were really pretty hard on him. And, you know, they really interrogated him about his theology, and like, kind of questioning if he was really a Christian. And then it had a lot of questions for him about is he going to be complementarian enough for them? Like, was he going to be the spiritual leader of the family? And how was he going to do this? And would he and how, and if we didn't agree, was he going to be the one to make these difficult decisions was I going to submit to Him and you know, he said, that really weighed heavy on him for many years and you know, he felt a lot of pressure then to like prove, hey, I can do this I can be a good Christian husband and father and so he started to get more religious especially after our first child was born.

And so then my after my oldest child was born, we finished our training program. So now we have to find a place to work with long term and so and we and our baby was one so and we decided to move back to my husband's hometown. And so he came from a small town like in a rural farming community in the Midwest. So, so it was at that point, you know, we had our child baptized, and then I'm like, this is kind of weird that we're all you know, kind of, like from different church traditions. And I decided then to join the Catholic Church, sort of based on what I knew from the Catholic church in the city. Okay, but then the Catholic Church and my husband, small rural town was quite different. So and then at first, you know, I probably, I've probably maintained a healthy skepticism about some things like, you know, the, this was, you know, like, maybe five years after the, the pre sexual abuse scandal had really hit the mainstream media. One thing we decided to do then, too, is, you know, the Catholic Church has this issue about contraception, and you're not supposed to use contraception. They have an alternative thing called natural family planning. And so what that that really is, is like, and if the if the background on this is like, when contraception became mainstream in the 1960s, the Catholic Church had to make a decision about are we going to say, this is okay or not, and it's a very controversial decision that they decided no, but they said, people can use fertility awareness methods, to they said, postpone, like not to prevent, but to postpone to space, your births. And so, so we decided to go that route after our first child was born. And you think like, Okay, you're 30, you're healthy, you know, your life is kind of together, you know, you want to have more kids, like, that's not that terrible of a decision at that point in your life. But it could, it could be later on, but we went with that. And so now we're in this more conservative community. You know, but I was kind of focused on, we had two more children getting my career established. And it was really, by the time my third and my youngest child was born, things started to get more difficult. So my husband, you know, and he has this pressure on him to be a good provider, and to be this Christian husband and all these things. And he was getting very focused on his job. He was having a hard time saying no to work demands. He put a lot of identity into his career. And so then I'm trying to maintain my career too. And I'm raising three young kids. And I really found that a lot of those in almost unconscious Christian beliefs came back to really haunt me a lot of stuff about like, good mothers don't send their children to daycare, or you know, like, when I was growing up in the 80s, and there's like, the Satanic Panic of like, like, you know, the people who work at daycares are all child abusers, and Satanists, and you know, you, good mothers stay at home with their kids. And so I was really having a hard time with anxiety about my children's health and safety, I was having a hard time trusting other people to take care of my kids. And I really see, like we were getting drawn into those traditional Christian family stereotypes, you know, my husband has to be the provider. And you know, and then I'm, I'm feeling like, I have to be this perfect mother. And so it gets back to, you know, what I was talking about before with his performance, and my Christian family is his performance. And we have to live up to these role expectations. And we were really getting drawn into that. And that was having an impact on our marriage, where my husband and I were kind of getting emotionally detached from one another, and not really being our real selves anymore. And unfortunately, everybody in our church would reinforce that and praise that, Oh, you're such a good family, your children are so well behaved. And, you know, you said the sexism in the church, too, that my husband and I had gone to the same medical school, we have the exact same knowledge of that same training, exact same degree. But they said he's such a wonderful doctor, and they told me she's such a wonderful mother.

David Ames  38:59  
Wow. Yeah.

Tracey  39:02  
And what I was really finding was, I liked my career, in a lot of ways better than I liked being a parent, at least have young children. You know, I'm going to work and I either like, like, using my intellect, working with other adults being professional, it's very rewarding. And so so that was, that was not what the expectation was supposed to be that I like my job more than I think, you know, I think a lot of women feel guilty to admit something like that, like I don't I always enjoy being a mother. I like being at work more. Yeah, but I also started to see in this small town, this small town, there was just so much misogyny, so much sexism built into this rural culture. And so some of it was at the hospital like in my mental health practice, I felt very comfortable but the larger medical staff had a lot of older male doctors and you know, they'd go to meetings and just like speak over people and act intimidating and hijack the meeting with their Gender, they made a lot of sexist comments. So it was that was sort of a hostile environment. But then in my work, I worked with a lot of women patients who had been then they've grown up in that community and been survivors of childhood sexual abuse or other sexual violence, there's a lot of domestic violence. And I just saw like misogyny and abuse of women and children, it was just epidemic in this community. And it's so ironic that you, when you drive into the town, on a certain highway, there's a road sign, and it says, Welcome to, in the name of the town, see you in church. And then it's got a list of all the churches. And so it's supposed to be like this model, religious farming community. But then I saw the underground of that of like, like these women and children who had just been abused, and like all of this underbelly of this community. And that was really hard for me. The I Am a sensitive person. But I see too, that in my Christian upbringing, I wasn't really taught how to set boundaries, and to keep myself separate. And and you think about what, what happens in Christianity is you're supposed to spend all your time helping other people worrying about other people, you're supposed to go up to total strangers and ask them about their beliefs, and you're supposed to insert yourself in other people's personal decisions. And so I had never learned boundaries, and I was really overwhelmed. And unfortunately, I kind of looked to religion, to the Catholic religion to help me with that anxiety. So something else is unique to Catholicism is confession. And the idea that, you know, you don't just confess your sins to God, that you go to the priests, and you have this little private meeting with the priest, and then the priest tells you that God forgives your sins. And, you know, I think I've just really needed someone to talk to, and I was going to confess things that weren't really sins, you know, just like, I felt irritated with somebody or, you know, I noticed somebody who's not my husband, who I think is attractive, you know, like, those aren't really sins, that's just part of being human. But by this time, we had a new priest, and when he heard these confessions, he kind of encouraged me to think about myself that way, and to be hard on myself that way, and to come back and kind of, and, you know, I look back at that the whole process of confession is very problematic. There's a there's secrecy involved, that whatever happens in the confessional state secret, and we see and you know, that's there's a public discussion about that in terms of if somebody confesses something like abuse of a child, and then the priest doesn't report that because it's part of it's part of this secrecy, but there's a power dynamic there that sets up a lot of unhealthy situations. And what I also saw is how it created this cycle of shame, you know, like, the Church teaches you that you these things you do are sinful, so then you feel shame. And then you need some relief from your shame. So you go to confession, and then you feel this wonderful relief that you've been forgiven. And then your life goes on, and you make mistakes, because you're human. And then the cycle repeats. And I started to see, you know, looking at my professional life, you see that like their cycles of domestic violence, their cycles of addiction, and I'm like, oh, you know, this, this cycle of shame and going to confession, it doesn't really look that different from these other cycles of pathological behavior.

But then, so this priest, it got to know my husband and I, he encouraged us to get much more involved with natural family planning, not just to practice it in our private lives, but to be involved in the community and to become teachers. And he thought it would be a great look for his church, if he had two physicians who could also teach this natural family planning method. Yeah. So. So we joined an organization and got their literature, we started taking some classes. So like, this developed a new anxiety for me, because my youngest child was about one. And I knew I never wanted more than three kids. Like if you would ask me at age 1415, I would say, Oh, I probably want three kids. Like I always knew I wanted three kids. But But this but this organization, was really promoting the idea that like you're not supposed to put a limit on it or you're not supposed to have that much control over your life. God's supposed to decide how many kids you're gonna have.

David Ames  44:31  
Can we just say three is a lot? A lot.

Tracey  44:35  
Yeah, to to the world, but like in this in this organization, they would say that's a small family and a lot of these people have 6789 kids and, and, you know, they really promoted these ideas, like wanting other things in your life, besides having kids was selfish. Or just things like wanting time to rest wanting time for your own hobbies, like that selfish, like all you were supposed to be doing was having children. And so I started to feel this guilt about like I knew knew I didn't want a fourth child. And like, is that wrong. And it's just like really getting caught up and anxiety about that. And so this preset also befriended my husband. So my husband had finally gotten to a healthier place with his work where he had cut back on his work as a doctor. But now this priest was encouraging him to like, like, join the school board for the Catholic school and start a Men's Ministry at the church. And I was really jealous about that, because I wanted to do a lot of things for the church. But nobody ever asked me because I'm a woman. But all these people look up, they looked up to my husband, they admired him. And so they you know, that's where the narcissism comes back in that I think the church encourages men to have narcissistic traits. And I saw, like my husband, he was not like that at all, when I met him and fell in love with him, but you know, this whole system and what this priests was encouraging him to do, got him like, very caught up in his image and feeling like he was a community influencer. And again, just like really getting drawn into the church and to being this model family. And not really being happy on the inside. But every blood looking good to everybody else.

David Ames  46:13  
The fact that you both went to the same medical school at the exact same training is just such a painful example. Yes, of that different standards.

Tracey  46:22  
It's right. And we and we get mail all the time that's addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Yeah, and I think in our entire 20 years of marriage, we've had one piece of mail that's addressed to Dr. And Mr. Right, right. And that's just not religion, that's all of society.

Yeah, so 2015 was the year everything fell apart. So I had to, you know, I've been getting more and more strict with myself. And so lent came around. And then that's, that's also a unique sort of Catholic thing, maybe not just for Catholics, but like giving something up. And that can become very performative, or they're like suffering is encouraged or being hard on yourself. And so I decided to not eat any snacks. And you know, I started losing weight, and I was hungry all the time. Interestingly, in the middle of all this, I got called into jury duty. And this was like a really serious case, where there was a serious crime that had been committed, and the defendant was facing a life sentence. And I remember, like, I wanted to go to church and talk to this priest, I needed advice, I was overwhelmed. And he just wasn't there. Thank God, he wasn't there. So I went in. So this whole week, I was on jury duty, I was just left alone with my own thoughts. And I had to make this momentous decision. And I came away with that with like, I am perfectly capable of discerning the facts, I'm perfectly capable of making my own informed decision, I can be at peace with the decision I made, I didn't need any help from anybody. And that was really like this little, you know, this, this event that just kind of like broke up, this thinking pattern had been stuck in with the person, we decided the person was guilty, and he went to prison for life. And I was just like, really at peace with that, like, I know, that was the right decision. The other thing that was going on then as my hospital was, had been bought out by a bigger healthcare company, and I would have had to renegotiate my contract. And I was very stressed about that. So you know, like, I'm not eating properly. I'm all stressed about all these things. And so I started having chronic digestive problems. My My body was saying, you have to stop this, you have to stop all the stress, you have to stop putting yourself through all this guilt, stop beating yourself up. I was talking with my lawyer about these contract negotiations. And he said, you know, Tracy, you're a really talented psychiatrist, your work is valuable to the community, you can do everything you want. You don't have to sign this contract. You don't have to work for this company. And I think that was the first time somebody in the community said, like, you have value, you have power, you can do what you want to do. And I also saw at the same time, like, like, I'd like to working at this hospital for quite some time, but I thought people were taking advantage of my empathy. They were taking advantage of my leadership, my responsibility, they were piling too much work on me. So I started seeing a therapist, a secular psychotherapist, and I decided to quit that job. And so my therapist really introduced me to this concept of scrupulosity. You know, like call it like, like you're a normal human being. And you're, you know, there's all these things that you're saying are sinful, and they're not sinful, and you need to stop beating yourself up. She encouraged me to use yoga and meditation to calm my body down. I finally had a moment of clarity where I was like, why would God want me to have all these children? And like, why am I feeling guilty about not wanting to have more kids? And I realized, like, that idea wasn't even coming from my concept of God. All it was was worrying about what religious authorities and church people would think of me was like, oh, you know, like, that's not even, like, why do I care that much with those people? will think of me. So I was starting to find my voice. And so this priests that was at our church, I started to push back and ask him some really hard questions about like, Why can't women be priests, and the financial scandals in the church, and then most importantly, the sex abuse scandal. And he got very upset and very defensive. When I was asking those questions, especially about child sex abuse scandals, and, and he actually started yelling at me after church, and I surprised myself that I just stood my ground, I didn't fall apart, I didn't burst into tears. But I just walked out and I was I left. But then I emailed him and said, I want another meeting with you about this. And you know, that was a very strange meeting, like where he said he was more concerned about the reputation of the good priests. He didn't say a word about the effects on the victims or like children being harmed, right. And so I, you know, I disagreed with him, like, I'm a medical professional, I think we should be subject to higher scrutiny. If we if we do something that breaches trust, that should be public knowledge. And I can't remember what he said, but he got so upset that he likes got out of his chair and stood over me. So that was just like a very strange reaction. I got there. And I had also said, like, Why does my husband get to lead a men's group and the women don't have anything, and I want to lead a women's group? And, and he said, Well, you can only do that if I oversee everything, and I approve all your material. And I'm like, oh, forget that. So this really like this whole, you know, this whole situation, I just really, that relationship with that priest was kind of broken after that. So then I kind of started over, I found a different job. I've joined it. There's like a liberal Catholic justice can't sorry, Catholic Social Justice group, and I joined the town's NAACP chapter. And I decided, since I couldn't do my women's group, we just met privately and did a book group that we just met in people's homes. And so I kind of found like, this small town had this liberal underground. And so you know, I found some different people, I started doing yoga regularly, all my digestive symptoms, and my health issues went away, you know, I gain back the weight, I lost from the anxiety, so I was doing better. But I, you know, I'm still trying to be a now a progressive Christian. And I just saw so many things with the cognitive dissonance, they just couldn't get over with, you know, and one was the church teaching on LGBT people. And I saw, you know, of all my patients, my LGBT patients were the ones that I loved the most. And were just like, they were just like good people who were stressed out by the discrimination around them. None of the people at church were really like, close friends to us. They were friendly, but they weren't close friends. And our closest friends were our next door neighbors who were a married gay couple, and they were just, like, kinder and better to us than any of the church people. Yeah. So you know, like, the Church says these things like, oh, LGBT people have disordered lives. And I'm, like, you know, how can this be possible? You know, when I saw that, I was still seeing the same patient population of these women who had been abused, and they're like downtrodden, by family life, and, and I saw in my own life, like, you're gonna feel better, if you stand up for yourself, you're gonna feel better if you find your voice. And none of these women really wanted that. And they wanted me to just just prescribe me some medication. So I can live this submissive Christian life and not feel any anxiety about it. Just seeing all these other ways, people were downtrodden in this small town, like with, you know, like factory work, and just not really being happy with themselves not accepting their emotions, they just kind of wanted to erase their real selves, and just live the way the society here wanted them to be. And I just saw, like, you know, this just isn't, this just isn't right. And you know, the church has encouraged these dysfunctional beliefs that are making people miserable. And nobody here really wants to change. You know, I thought yoga and meditation had saved my health, and had reduced my anxiety, but most of my patients would reject that, because it's not, is not a Christian belief. So it was it was just hard to continue practicing in that situation. And at the same time, I'm doing a lot of reading on my own. And so now I'm reading like very liberal Catholic theologians. So reading a lot of feminist theologians. So John Chen Duster is one who is really interesting to me, as he was talking about how like feminist theology or like a, like a feminist society is one that's shaped like a circle, you know, everybody's equal, everybody has a seat around the table. And a patriarchal society is shaped like a pyramid with the most important person at the top and then, you know, like, the structure trickling down to the people at the bottom and I'm like, Oh, shit, you know, that's exactly what the Catholic church looks like. The Pope is vicious. And I'm like, Oh, how can I? How could I be a Catholic and a feminist? I don't Um, if this is gonna work

you know, I really wanted to dig into why does the church say that women can't be priests? And when you really dig into that theology, what it says, is that because women don't have a body like Jesus, women are less like Jesus than men, and only males could be priests, because Jesus is male. And it's in really, when you get into it, it's like they're saying that men are more like God than women.

David Ames  55:42  
What I'm seeing heavily implying that yes,

Tracey  55:44  
yes, yeah. And so you see the flaw in the theology there that there's there's saying God is about power and authority. So the people with power and authority must be more like God. And the people who are more like God are the ones who should be given power and authority, and it's like a circle. But what I'm seeing at work is 90% of the people who inflict abuse and trauma are men. Like, how can you say that those people are more like God. And so it's so there's like that complete disconnect to there. You know, my husband and I gave up on the whole natural family planning thing. In I really saw, I really saw as a result of that, that. Like, the Catholic Church was really making women reproductive objects, like everything was about like, Oh, you don't need to be a priest, because you could be a mother. And then your job is to like, like, pass on the faith to your children. And, you know, all this theology kind of ties into like, like gender roles, and that the church is supposed to be like a woman and that Jesus was like the leader of the church. And so I really started to ask like, well, how is a reproductive object different from a sex object? Like they say it's wrong to sexually objectify women? But if I'm a reproductive object, how is that any different? Right. So and then another really interesting thing, and this was like the huge chunk This is, like the, or the huge link in the chain, there really unraveled my Christian faith was reading Walter wink. And his book is called The powers that be so he was like a non violence theologian. And he said, we can't believe the atonement theory. Because that's been complicit invite in violence, like why would we worship a God who demands a violent human sacrifice to appease his own wrath for creating us being able to send but now he's so angry that we're just doing what he we, He created us to do, that he has to violently kill his own son. So God like that would be aligned with all the dictators, all the conquerors, all the abusers of history? Like, why would and I'm like, oh, no, you know, like, the whole, the whole faith is built on this. And he's right. I can't believe this. So So reading all those theologians try, you know, just like trying to discover all these answers to my questions, it all just started to fall apart. You know, the other thing was that Catholicism Catholics will say, like, Catholicism has the fullness of truth like these other religions have some truth, but the fullness of truth is only found in Catholicism. But what I saw is like when I started doing yoga, that gave me something that Christianity never gave me that it reconnected me with the goodness of my own body. And I learned to find like self esteem, and peace in myself. And I had never found that Christianity elite alienates you from your body, and I had to find that in another religion. So I'm like, Well, how can Catholicism have the fullness of truth? If this other religion gave me something that Christianity overlooks?

David Ames  58:53  
I think you've just put your finger on the most dangerous thing about traditional religion in general, is that they each claim exclusive access to the fullness of truth, right, like each each church will say to themselves, that they're the one true church and then out is whether that's formally doctrinal lay or just implicit. That's the danger that can be so devastating. Yeah.

Tracey  59:19  
Yeah. And so, so at the same time, you know, my, so things were starting to unravel for me. My husband was really still a believer at the time. But he started to see like all the stuff he was doing for the church unraveling. So he had been president of this Catholic school board for a couple of years, and they were really taking advantage of him. Like this was like a second job that he wasn't getting paid for. And like he was taking care of his patients at work and the school principal would call him and he'd get like, pulled out of the healthcare he was doing, to try to solve some kind of crisis for the school and he was like constantly responding to complaint letters, resolving conflicts, spending our own money on like, material rules for board meetings. This man's group that he was in, he found out like nobody there really wanted to work on themselves, they just kind of wanted to complain about all the young people and complain about politics. And so he dropped out of a lot of a lot of stuff that he was doing. And so this is by like, 2016. And so the, like, Donald Trump is running for president at this point. And I saw the impact on that small community, where I was never, I was never shocked. The way people in the mainstream media were because I had seen that how Christians embrace this, you know, like these narcissistic leaders and Christians are really like, the theology is more about power than it is about love. But it was still, you know, like, like, it's some of these things that happened during this campaign were just really atrocious. And I saw like, the signs still went up, all over the community bumper stickers on cars in the church parking lot. And I was just kind of like, we've had enough like, we can't live in this situation anymore. So we moved back to the larger metropolitan area where I grew up and where we'd met in medical school.

So we weren't ready to completely leave Catholicism. And in a large city, you can find more like a wide variety. That's an interesting thing about the Catholic churches that there's kind of more room for different, you know, different cultures and different politics. And so we found a more progressive Catholic Church. And so we had about like a year and a half to get settled in. And then the pandemic happened. And so the pandemic for me was, like, really, it all unraveled for me with the pandemic. And so another thing with Catholicism is that the belief is more more involved with the sacraments and the idea that receiving these different sacraments like baptism, and confession and all these things that you're getting grace from those sacraments, and the most important one

David Ames  1:01:59  
is in physically physically being there to receive sacraments, right.

Tracey  1:02:03  
And so the so the, so the Eucharist being the most important one was so communion, and the Catholic Church does communion every single week. And the idea is you need to go and they believe that that's like, Jesus was fully present. And it's not just bread and wine. And then you get grace from receiving that, like you're receiving Jesus every week, and that makes you a better person. Okay, but then the pandemic happens, and it's like, like six months that we can't go to church. And this all happens in the springtime during Lent and Easter and these, like, most sacred times of year. And, you know, I really saw absolutely no difference in my life from not doing that

David Ames  1:02:43  
practice, right.

Tracey  1:02:47  
And in you know, what I, what I saw too, was that I really, I really did okay with the lockdown the big the beginning part from March 2020. And that, you know, like six to eight weeks after that, and like every human being on the planet, I had anxiety about like, am I going to get sick or what's going to happen in the future. But I had done all this work on myself with you know, like, with from my own personal spiritual wellness, my yoga meditation, just like being silent, being out in nature. In You know, I think like, like Christians will say, when hard times come, you have to lean on your faith. And a hard time had come. And I really saw that faith was superfluous. It wasn't doing anything for me, I didn't need it. And I was doing fine. Like, I had learned how to manage my worries and and so when I, when I saw other people, like, they didn't know how to do that, and they're like, oh, everything's gonna fall apart if we don't go to church, or I don't know what to do with myself when I don't go to church and like, I just wasn't having any trouble with that. So and, you know, and then and then I was really disappointed with how a lot of Christians responded to the pandemic, like I think it was the Archdiocese of Brooklyn, sued and went all the way to the Supreme Court saying that it was a violation of religious freedom to have to follow the state's social distancing laws, and they won that case. But to say like, we need to be in charge more than we need to protect vulnerable people from getting was just really just it was just really strange to me, or like the the debates about the masks and so so people would say, like, oh, the mask doesn't work. It doesn't protect me. But the idea of the point isn't to protect yourself. It's like if you wear the mask, that's going to protect somebody else. And so then if everybody wears the mask, we all protect ourselves, we all protect everybody and we're all in this together. And it was like that frame of reference didn't even make sense. Christians in it, the religion is supposed to be founded on love of neighbor on Do unto others as you would do unto yourself. And it's like this when the rubber hits the road, people don't even care about that.

David Ames  1:05:11  
I was profoundly surprised by that. I really I really was like, you know, I even having lived through the, the Trump era, I thought that Christians would want to care for people's health. And I was truly surprised yet again. Yeah, the reaction that came out of that.

Tracey  1:05:30  
Yeah. And then seeing, you know, like, as the vaccines are developed, or people, Christian saying faith over fear, and they meant like, oh, I don't need the vaccine, or I don't need to wear a mask, or I don't like like God is going to magically protect me. And I kind of took me back to my medical school days and seeing this, like, relying on magical thinking instead of and like rejecting the science. So then, in August of 2020, the news broke that this priest who had been having such a heavy influence over my husband and I, during those years on the small town, he was arrested on Federal sex trafficking charges. And so you open up this whole story and it like it was it was this very disturbing story, like there was no doubt that he was guilty. Like there were tapes, confessions, he made videos of some of his crimes. Yeah, I mean, it was it was disgusting. So it and as we absorbed the shock of all that, we realized, like everything we'd experienced in the relationship with this person who we kind of thought was our friend or somebody who cared about us, it was all spiritual abuse. And my two, and so he was attracted to teenage boys. And my two younger children are boys, who were very young at the time. But I saw like, he could have had a long term goal of like grooming our family to get access to our two young sons as they were growing older. And seeing how like, he had encouraged that script velocity in me because it kind of kept me preoccupied with myself. And he kept my husband busy being like, dependent on by all these committees, so that my husband was too busy to notice. And, but then I also saw that when I woke up, and I started challenging this priest, he just like, he dropped me, like a hot potato, and I and like, at the time, it was really hurtful. But then I think, you know, standing up for myself, thinking for myself thinking critically, that probably saved my two sons from becoming abuse victims, it probably saved my kids lives. Yeah. And so since then, he's been found guilty. So he's gone to prison for the rest of his life. But what we're still kind of working through that how that is affected our ability to trust people.

David Ames  1:07:35  
Sure, yeah. That would be devastating, even if there were no direct physical abuse or sexual abuse. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Tracey  1:07:53  
But, uh, you know, just just reflecting a little bit more on the other things that happened during the pandemic, with the election of 2020, and then the January 6, insurrection, and just seeing that same that same shallowness and in Christians of not being interested in what was really true or not being interested in the long term good of democracy and public order. And, you know, like, I had a devout Catholic friend who gotten a huge Facebook argument with me, basically, just all I said was that January 6, was a bad thing. And just seeing like this, you know, and I didn't realize it until later. But growing up in the 1980s, you know, there was this marriage that developed between Ronald Reagan and American Christianity. And how has that developed over my whole lifetime, most like American Christians were really their religion had really become the Republican Party. So the book Jesus and John Wayne, which is written by Christian Kobus, copes dma's I don't know if I'm saying her name. Right. Like, that's, that's a really good book in terms of like, the overview of that whole process.

David Ames  1:08:54  
Yeah, yes.

Tracey  1:08:58  
Yeah, so and I got a new job, I started working at the VA Medical Center. And so that was a that was a much better experience for my career. So I have continued to enjoy being a psychiatrist. I'm still there. You know, the I think the pandemic was really a time to pause and reflect about a lot of things. And it really gave my husband and I a chance to reflect on how all those years of our marriage and our family life being a performance how we'd really lost our emotional connection. You know, my husband was starting to question starting to deconstruct, but, but he was like, a couple years behind me in the process, but with the pandemic, he had some time to really think about that more question a lot more. And then between 2019 and 2022, he lost his mother and his three remaining grandparents. And so he and he started to come to grips with the idea that his Catholic faith was really more about pleasing His mother and pleasing His grandparents. And, and pressure from a lot of other people. So things started to unravel for him too. And I, you know, I think we all deal with that, to some extent the idea that, especially when we were kids, these were our attachment figures that people were dependent on for food and for shelter. Like we needed to believe this or we needed to be involved in this church community. So that these people that we depended on for survival could stay connected with us. And you know, there's, there's really so much I'm not sure I'm saying this very well, right now. There's, there's, you know, there's so much pressure that comes from your relationships, being with people who are really invested in their faith and feeling that motivation to also have that faith or appear to have that faith to please those people around you.

David Ames  1:10:52  
And parents just have a tremendous impact on your belief systems, your likely belief systems, and it sounds like even for your, for your husband, even as an adult. And yeah, yeah, you have to consciously recognize that you are independent from your parents, and that you have your own beliefs.

Tracey  1:11:10  
Yeah, yeah. And then from my husband to the when this priest got arrested, that was just really a bombshell for his faith. And it just really made him question and unravel everything. And so and so during this time, my husband and I also decided, you know, we weren't making enough progress, with our relationship getting better. So my husband got into psychotherapy in against, like secular psychotherapy, if you you're, excuse me, a few years later, I got into individual therapy myself, we did couples counseling, too. And it was really important for me to find couples counseling that was based on like secular or science based evidence, I think there's so much marriage counseling that's based around Christian ideas or religious ideas, and I really didn't want that. So we did find a marriage counselor who's the Gottman method. And so John and Julie Gottman, their researchers, their relationship research researchers, they're in they're out in Seattle. And so they've developed a lot of like behavioral and communication methods that are based on their research, behavioral research on what makes relationships work. So what we so and that was really wonderful for us to, to do that psychotherapy. And it really was, we were able to get back to who we were, before we had kids before we got so entrenched in this church life, and we're just two human beings who loved each other, we didn't have to have all these roles and all these expectations. And just enjoy being with each other. Again, we had to learn a lot of communication skills, we had to work on like emotional regulation, we had to make our relationship feel safe and welcoming again. And, you know, I and I look back on that, like why the church should want people to know those kinds of skills, because the church is so into marriage, but but they don't teach that kind of stuff. It comes from secular research. Yeah. And another thing that had happened during the pandemic is that my oldest child came out to us as bisexual when she was 14. And so So and she's given me permission to talk about this in this interview. And so she had been doing confirmation classes in the church before the pandemic hit, and I could tell something was kind of off. But she didn't want to talk about it then. And then when she came out, I'm like, Oh, okay. Yeah. So then I asked her about that. And she said, she just couldn't feel accepted in a church that didn't affirm her or allow her to be herself. And she said, and so I asked, like, what do you want to do? And she said, she did not want to go through with the confirmation, which I think is interesting, because you look at confirmation as being sort of like a rite of passage of you're becoming an adult in the church. But her rite of passage, and her understanding of her adult phase was I can't be part of the church.

David Ames  1:13:59  
Interesting. Just, just side note, by the time people are hearing this Christian loves Dalton, who is the president of the Norwegian Humanist Association, they have humanist coming of age ceremonies, and most most of Norway does either a religious coming of age or a humanist one. And it really, it's very interesting like that. Those are valuable, it is valuable. But it's, I take your point, that her actual becoming an adult was the rejection of of ritual.

Tracey  1:14:30  
And so my husband and I really had to question that too. Why would we want to be a part of this church that excludes someone we love dearly?

A different experience with my youngest child who was only about 10 at the time, and when we had gone back to in person services at church. I remember looking over at him and he looked like he was going to have a panic attack. And so I took him outside and said what's going on? He's like, I just don't like being at church. I don't feel like my real self when I'm here. And I felt like he was articulating to me something that I'd felt all those years ago was just like, I don't belong here. I'm only here because my family is making me come, this isn't me. So after that, we decided, you know, we would give our children the choice if they wanted to go to church or not. And interestingly, so the oldest and the youngest don't want to the middle child likes being an altar server, and he still goes, and so we want to respect that too. So you know, as as my faith is kind of unraveling during the pandemic, another book that I read that was really helpful was Brian McLaren's book, Why stay Christian. And so he has a the beginning section of all the reasons not to be Christian. And then the middle section of why to stay Christian. And then the last section is, whatever you choose, this is how to take care of yourself. And I you know, and I recall, like, like, none of the reasons to say Christian resonated with me at all. A year ago, I guess, reading this, yeah, and all of the reasons not to be Christian, but the one that was most compelling to me, there was a chapter titled, because Christianity is a failed religion. And what he meant, and what he meant by that was, Christianity does not change people's lives. It doesn't have any real. It doesn't do what it advertises that it does. And, you know, that just nailed it. For me. Like I said, I've been trying to do this for 40 years. And it just hasn't transformed my life. It did not help my marriage. It did not help my parenting and actually made those things worse. I didn't see it in transforming individual churches, I certainly I you know, I really saw Christianity making the country worse, making the community that I lived in worse. And then all these things outside of Christianity, like like yoga, like meditation, being in nature, studying all these other disciplines. Psychotherapy had had made me better. And so I just saw, I just started to see like, like, you could be a progressive Christian. And you could try to argue some of these things from Oh, like the Bible says, welcome immigrants and all these things that I'm like, I don't need that. I don't need a Bible verse to tell me that, like, I just know that it's the right thing to do. So why do I need to hold on to all this? So this really, that's where I am now.

David Ames  1:17:24  
I think that's a really profound insight. And actually, I was, I read reread your email before we chatted today. And I want to just quote you, because I think you really capture what you just said, in a sentence here. The mountain of evidence learned throughout my training and experience as a physician and mental health professional, that the church teachings do not lead to emotional well being and human flourishing. My coping with the cognitive dissonance and eventually being unable to live the double life as an evidence based professional on the weekend and a devout follower of the church teachings at home and on the weekend. And it reminds me of the quote from Christopher Hitchens, and which I'm going to just paraphrase, in fact, that Christianity can't even satisfy the faithful that it's even the people who are the most dedicated, who are the most committed, find it unsatisfying. So I think you're expressing that. And that's, that's a really interesting thing.

Tracey  1:18:16  
And I Yes, I tried so hard for so many years, and it just didn't, it just didn't make me happy. It just didn't give me the life I wanted to have.

David Ames  1:18:25  
Right. I want to close with you've given several recommendations that we've gone along, but I understand that you have a Facebook group that's dedicated to recovery, but specifically about Catholicism. Yeah, if you want to talk about that,

Tracey  1:18:36  
yeah. So this all started, I was a part of another Facebook group that I would recommend called Raising children on fundamentalist. And that that group was really geared around parenting for people who had left the faith or who want to who wanted to avoid the religious pitfalls of raising children. And so and that is mostly people who have left like your podcast, mostly people who have left evangelicalism, but there were a few Catholics in the group, and I had to kind of, you know, like, made Facebook friends or had private message some of those people and one of them said, why don't we start our own Catholic group? And so we did. And so there are about four of us who, who left and started this new group. And so the name of that Facebook group is Catholic sabbatical. And so that is a group for anybody who is interested in like they've been a part of the Catholic Church and are questioning deconstructing are in the process of leaving or who have already left and and just just need a safe place to process that. Fantastic. Yeah. So and that's something that I you know, anybody who's listening to the podcast, who has been in Catholicism would, we would welcome more members, but I would advertise that. It is for people who have had actual experience in Catholicism. We don't welcome members who are just curious about what Catholicism is or or I just want to see what's going on because we want that to be a safe place for people to process without having to spend a lot of time and energy educating people.

David Ames  1:20:09  
That makes total sense. Tracy, thank you so much for being on the podcast and telling your story. Oh, you're welcome.

Final thoughts on the episode. Tracy story covers so many things. It's hard to summarize. I love that she was a precocious child. I love how she said she was hell skeptical. She was recognizing the generals that she was being put into, she experienced the sexual harassment in in Bible college. Down to She says that her medical degree was plan B. It's astonishing to me. I'm very grateful that she went on with her medical education and became a psychiatrist and that science played a role in her deconstruction process. Tracy has a lot of insight for us. From that psychiatric point of view. She talked so much about the magical thinking of prayer, the Christian tendency towards narcissists and cognitive dissonance. I think those are valuable insights that she brings to the table for experiences a psychiatrist also informed her that the conservative political view of poverty was incorrect. Another great insight heartbreaks that the experience with the priests who went on to be discovered to have been abusive to young boys is just tragic and heartbreaking. also appreciate that we get to hear Tracy's experience of autonomy of growing to trust herself, during the jury duty and contract negotiations, recognizing that the support of the church wasn't adding anything to it. Ultimately, she says that faith was superfluous. And I want to end with the quote one more time that Tracy says the mountain of evidence learned throughout my training and experiences as a physician and mental health professional, that church teachings do not lead to emotional well being and human flourishing by coping with the cognitive dissonance and eventually being unable to live a double life as an evidence based professional on the weekdays. And a devout follower of church teachings at home on the weekend. I think that captures everything about Tracy story. I want to thank Tracy for being on the podcast for sharing her story with us. This is It's been amazing. Thank you so much Tracy for being on the podcast. The secular Grace Thought of the Week is you can be good without God. Tracy says this while she's wrapping up she's saying that although there are good things within the Bible, she doesn't need the Bible to tell her how to be a good person. She already knows that she should welcome immigrants. And this is so force fed to us from within the bubble that not only is the only goodness that we might have from God, but that we are ultimately not good at all. None of that is true. You can be good without God, you can be good without the Bible. You do not need a religious tradition to tell you how to be a good person. You can choose to do good for other people to show kindness to give love and show secular grace. Next week Arline interviews Nora Tomlin you're not going to want to miss that one. Until then, my name is David, and I am trying to be the graceful atheist. Join me and be graceful. The beat is called waves by MCI beads. If you want to get in touch with me to be a guest on the show. Email me at graceful atheist@gmail.com for blog posts, quotes, recommendations and full episode transcripts head over to graceful atheists.com This restful atheist podcast part of the atheists United studios Podcast Network

Transcribed by https://otter.ai