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Purity Culture Recovery
167 Plays10 months ago
Just in time for Valentine’s Day! In today’s episode Julie sat down with Dr. Camden Morgante, a leading expert in the field, to discuss her work in helping women recover from the damages of purity culture.
In this episode, we tackle the sensitive yet critical topic of recovering from purity culture and dismantling the toxic messages young women have been taught about their bodies and their sexuality by the evangelical church. We explore the emotional, psychological, and interpersonal aspects of recovery, providing a supportive space for listeners on a journey towards healing and self-discovery. You won’t want to miss this one!
About today's guest:
Dr. Camden Morgante is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 13 years of experience as a therapist, college professor, and supervisor. She owns a private therapy practice focusing on women’s issues, relationships, sexuality, trauma, and spirituality. She is a writer, speaker, and coach on purity culture recovery, egalitarianism, and faith reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on healing from purity culture which will be published in Fall 2024 by Baker Books. Dr. Camden lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband and their daughter and son.
Get in touch with Dr. Camden:
Website: www.drcamden.com
Take my free quiz, “Which Purity Culture Myth Affects You?”: www.drcamden.com/take-the-quiz/
Work with me: www.drcamden.com/coaching
Instagram: www.instagram.com/drcamden
Facebook: www.facebook.com/drcamden
Twitter: www.twitter.com/doctorcamden
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Transcript
Introduction and Season Highlights
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to season two of Outside of Session. I'm your host, licensed clinical social worker, and therapist BFF, Julie Hilton. This season, I'm interviewing some incredible guests who also happen to be experts in their fields. Mental health, motherhood, spirituality, and so much more, I can't wait for their stories to be told. These are all the conversations I'm having outside of session.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of outside of
Focus on Purity Culture with Dr. Camden Morganti
00:00:49
Speaker
session. Today's episode, I am wildly excited for because this is a topic that has become such an interest of mine. Today's episode, we're going to be talking all about purity culture. And if you're not sure what that is, that's okay. We're going to go deep into understanding all of the complexities of it together with Dr. Camden Morganti, who is actually an expert in this area. And I'm so thankful to have her on the show today.
00:01:15
Speaker
Dr. Kamda Morganti is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 13 years of experience as a therapist, college professor, and supervisor. She owns a private practice focusing on women's issues, relationships, sexuality, trauma, and spirituality. She's a writer, speaker, and coach on purity culture recovery, egalitarianism, and faith reconstruction.
00:01:42
Speaker
She is currently writing a book on healing from purity culture, which will be published in fall of 2024 by Baker books, which we're going to hear all about in today's episode. Dr. Camden lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband and their daughter and son.
Dr. Morganti's Background and Purity Culture
00:01:57
Speaker
I can't wait to dive into this episode and I hope you enjoy it. So without further ado, let's talk with Camden about purity culture recovery. Hello, Dr. Morgan T.
00:02:09
Speaker
Hi, Julie. Thank you for having me today. Thank you for being here. I am so excited to have you here. I have been looking forward to this conversation for weeks now since we first talked.
00:02:18
Speaker
Oh, good. Thank you. I've been looking forward to it too. I feel like this is a conversation that I feel like is so important because it's naturally coming up in my practice with my clients a lot. And to be honest, personally, I'm going through a lot of this too. And so I'm doing a lot of reading and I think I found you on Instagram a couple of years ago. And I just love the content that you're putting out and I appreciate it so much. So when we were able to connect, I was just so excited about that.
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, good. Thank you. I'm glad you found me. Yeah. So just to dive into things, I wanted to start with, can you just share a little bit about yourself, about your practice and how you even became an expert in purity culture recovery?
Defining and Personal Impact of Purity Culture
00:03:01
Speaker
Okay, sure. Yeah. So I'm Camden Morganci. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. So I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. So I'm licensed in the state of Tennessee.
00:03:10
Speaker
I have a private practice here that I actually just this summer established my own practice. I was at a group before and was an employee of the group. And then this summer I said, I'm ready to go out on my own. Congratulations. Thank you. I have my own practice now.
00:03:25
Speaker
And that's been going really well. And so I see my clients there. I see women and couples. And then on the days when I'm not at my practice, I have my online work. So that's, I do coaching for purity culture recovery. And so that is open to anyone worldwide versus my therapy just has to be in Tennessee. And then I write and speak on podcasts like this. So that's been the online work that I've done since about 2020. I've been doing that.
00:03:52
Speaker
and really enjoy that, really passionate about it, really passionate about purity culture recovery.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's just start by talking about even what is purity culture. I posted on my Instagram yesterday if anybody had any questions for us and the questions that I got was what in the world is that? So a lot of people have not even heard of this term purity culture or what you're even trying to recover from. Yeah, I know. I feel like it's something that I've heard for so long, but some people are just not even aware of it.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, obviously I've been living and breathing this work and I've been living and breathing in purity culture my whole life. So it feels so second nature to me, but I love the opportunity to get to share with someone who's not familiar with it. But purity culture is the evangelical cultural movement to persuade young people or Christians in general to abstain from sex outside of marriage, particularly premarital sex.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I say in my definition of purity culture, it's not just the belief in like premarital sexual abstinence that I consider purity culture. I consider it the myths, messages, and cultural movement that used fear and shame as a tool of control. So fear and shame were just the tools of control, but also the results of purity culture. When you use like fear tactics and shaming tactics,
00:05:15
Speaker
to try to convince and persuade people and take away their autonomy. So that's my definition of period culture. And you had asked earlier like what led me to becoming an expert in this and I think
00:05:27
Speaker
A lot
Purity Culture's Effects on Marriage and Sexuality
00:05:28
Speaker
of our clinical expertise comes out of our own personal experience, right? Absolutely. And so I grew up in purity culture. It was strongest in the 90s and 2000s, 1990s and 2000s. So for millennials like me, that was when I was in high school and getting my sex education and things like that.
00:05:48
Speaker
And I really bought into purity culture. I had a purity ring and I made a pledge and I was very much a big proponent of it, including judging others, which I now basically have to repent of. But then I ended up being hurt by purity culture because one of the myths of purity culture that I talk about is the fairy tale myth that you'll get a
00:06:15
Speaker
have a blessed fairy tale marriage if you stay pure. And I dated someone in college and thought that that was going to end up in marriage and felt like we followed all the rules and then he broke up with me and I was just devastated and heartbroken. And it caused this crumbling of my faith really and definitely this crumbling of my faith and purity culture.
00:06:39
Speaker
because I no longer saw that the promises came true. So that was a little bit about how it affected me.
Recovery and Mind-Body Connection
00:06:47
Speaker
And then fast forward, you know, maybe 10 years or so, I've got married when I was 30, which is old for evangelical purity culture, old for living in the South.
00:06:57
Speaker
Ditto. I was 30 and it very much felt like I was lagging behind. Yeah. Which is just a crazy thought to me right now. I'm glad to hear that from you too. Yeah. Yeah. I felt very old. I had been a bridesmaid six times. I had been single almost all of my twenties after that college relationship ended. I was single until I met my husband.
00:07:18
Speaker
And, you know, after we got married, suddenly I started reading blogs about purity culture and like just the conversation had just kind of started around then where even Christians were criticizing it. And it gave me just a fresh perspective, like as a psychologist and being married and having some distance from it.
00:07:37
Speaker
I started to realize this is not all good or all bad, really. There were good intentions, I believe, but the unintended consequences are really what's hurting my clients and was what hurt me less.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting. You said that too, because I think as a licensed therapist, I know what shame does, right? Like I know that what that does to people. And I think that for years, I didn't even realize the shame that I was living with. Almost until someone else pointed out to me and I was just like, Oh yeah, like I carried a lot of shame with that. But I didn't carry, like I didn't have the understanding of it was the system that I had been brought up in that had done the damage, not my own actions, if that makes sense.
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah. Shame is really because it's the tool of the movement. It just becomes what we're used to and we don't even recognize it in ourselves or we think we're deserving of it. So it's hard to overcome. So when you are helping people and you're working with them on purity culture recovery, let's talk about what recovery even looks like. What does that mean?
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah, I describe it as getting your head or your mind, heart, body and soul in alignment. Because I think purity culture really severs the mind-body connection. It teaches you that your body is evil and sinful and can cause men to stumble and sin. Really presents like a very shameful view of sexuality before marriage, but then once you get married, you're supposed to flip a switch and be responsible for your husband's sexual needs. That's the message to women.
00:09:18
Speaker
So it damages the relationship with our bodies and then that creates this mind-body disconnect. So in my purity culture recovery work,
00:09:26
Speaker
I'm trying to help my clients get in alignment so that their mind believes the truth, but their body and their heart and their soul feel it too. Because all my clients were saying, like, I know that it's not true that sex is bad now that I'm married, you know, but I still, I can't get, I don't have a sex drive. I can't get my body there. Or women would say,
00:09:50
Speaker
Like, yeah, I know, like, I should enjoy sex. And I know it's for me, too. And my husband wants me to enjoy it. But yeah, like, I can't get over those messages that I heard that sex is just for men. So I was just seeing such a disconnect. And I was trained as a CBT therapist, like, very focused on thoughts and
Subtle Influence of Purity Culture
00:10:09
Speaker
thinking. And that's my personality. And just naturally, I live in the world of my mind, too. And so it really challenged me to get more in tune with the heart and the body and get those
00:10:19
Speaker
those pieces like bring a lot of somatic work, a lot of mindfulness work into my practice and emotion focus and emotion regulation work because it wasn't enough to just change their beliefs. The trauma of purity culture lives in the body.
00:10:34
Speaker
Absolutely. And I'm glad you're using the word trauma because it is. These messages that, and again, like you're getting these messages from a very young age, preteen, especially for girls, right? Like I can remember as early as like what, 10, 11, 12 years old, starting to hear some of the very first messages.
00:10:56
Speaker
And I always remind people that when we're having these experiences, we're also interpreting them through the developmental age that we are at that time. And so you're trying to make sense of it again as a preteen when you're already just starting to understand what your relationship with your body is in the first place and how it's starting to change and you're going through puberty and all of these things. So there's already enough to figure out, but then you're getting these harmful messages at the same time and that becomes internalized.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah. And when you were asking me earlier, like what is purity culture? Because some of your audience didn't know. I think I would say to them, maybe you don't know what purity culture is, but I bet you have experienced coming downstairs dressed for school or dressed for a party and your mom or dad saying, go back upstairs and change. Those shorts are too short. That shirt's too low cut. Like that's going to distract the boys at school. What are people going to think of you? Like those are,
00:11:51
Speaker
offshoots of purity culture that I would call modesty culture and very much entwined with purity culture. And I think that that's universal even outside of evangelicalism. So for listeners and your audience who weren't familiar with that, I think they would resonate with that experience perhaps.
Impacts on Relationships, Sexuality, and Faith
00:12:08
Speaker
What would you say are some of the, you've already hit on a couple of these, but what are some of the biggest themes that you have come to recognize? Kind of like what you were just saying that the way you dress will cause men to stumble. Like what are some of those other themes that you commonly see?
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, I've kind of categorized the main effects of purity culture into three areas. Trauma in your relationships, trauma in your sexuality, and trauma in your face. So those are the three main domains that I look at.
00:12:41
Speaker
and just looking at like how is the mind, heart and body affected in all three of those areas. So common themes in relationships would be like just discord and male-female relationships from a lot of women. I hear like a distrust of men because they've been taught that men lust and look at them sexually. Um, yeah, I think that's so important too because you know,
00:13:05
Speaker
before you're married, you're given the message of men are very lustful and almost dangerous, which is equally unfair to men.
00:13:16
Speaker
It's dehumanizing to men and women. It definitely is. I think about, I don't want people giving my son that message that he is only a bundle of lust and will hurt girls because he won't. He's being raised differently than that. But if that's kind of what you've been given the message that men are dangerous and you need to protect yourself from them,
00:13:36
Speaker
Then you find one and you love one and you get married to him and all of a sudden you're supposed to be completely trusting him with your body and your intimacy. And that's such a vulnerable place. And I think that that's why a lot of marriages have those struggles, right? Is because how do you undo and be completely vulnerable with a man when you've been taught that men are
00:14:00
Speaker
to be, you're supposed to protect yourself from them because they're dangerous. Yeah. And they only look at you for sexual reasons. And so women have a hard time even identifying their own sex drive and embracing their own sexuality in marriage because they've suppressed it for so long because they had to be the gatekeepers, is what I call it. They had to keep the boundaries before marriage. Speak on that a little bit more. That's really interesting to me.
00:14:27
Speaker
Well, we were taught that men can't help themselves. They can't stop themselves if things are going too far or farther than the couple wants it to. The woman has to be the one to put on the break. Then that gets women always having to be in the gatekeeper role. That really takes them outside of their own body so that when they get married, they're still outside of their own bodies.
00:14:47
Speaker
I tell my clients for sexual pleasure and orgasm, if that's a goal of theirs, you really have to be in your body. You have to keep your mind present and inhabit your body and really own your sexuality and own your sexual pleasure. Absolutely. You're not able to do that if you're still the gatekeeper or if you're still there to just serve your husband's needs is another phrase that's used.
00:15:14
Speaker
Yeah, I'm even thinking about how how we internalize those messages. And I'm wondering if you see some things with that of I have to be the responsible one. I have to be the one in control of my emotions at all times because he can't be in control. He can't be
00:15:32
Speaker
he can't control his urges. So I have to be the one to be responsible all the time and how that gets internalized. And then again, like expecting that switch to just flip. And all of a sudden you don't have to be the responsible anyone, but that doesn't just go away.
00:15:48
Speaker
Right. It doesn't. And that's why I said earlier, it's not enough to change your mind because the trauma of purity culture lives in the body. Those messages are still inhabiting your body, even after you've tried to get rid of them in your mind. So the main way I see that showing up is just women not enjoying sex or not being able to really have
00:16:08
Speaker
much sexual interest or much sexual pleasure because of this just this constant belief that sex is for him. So they're always attuned to his pleasure and his experience and not their own. Yeah, that's really interesting. So that's how it shows up in relationships. What were the other two categories?
00:16:25
Speaker
Sexuality, so some of that I talked about like with the lack of sexual pleasure or the lack of sex drive. It can also contribute to sexual pain. So vaginismus, which is a sexual pain disorder that causes involuntary contractions of the vaginal walls that can make sex pain extremely painful or even impossible. That disorder has been shown to show up 2.5 times more in evangelical women than in the general population.
00:16:55
Speaker
So a restrictive religious upbringing is what the DSM calls it, is possibly one of the causes of it or one of the contributors to it because of, again, it's the body's conditioned fear response, like sex is bad, sex is wrong. And so they close off. And it's a physical condition, but it also has psychological and emotional components. So it really has to have treatment on both sides.
00:17:20
Speaker
Absolutely. And that's when you're talking about the mind-body connection because
Virginity, Identity, and Therapy for Recovery
00:17:25
Speaker
our logical self can be in the present saying, this is my husband. I love him. I want to be able to enjoy sex with him. And I've talked in a lot of my other episodes about how there can be a disconnect between the other part of our brain that holds our fight or flight response, right? Like the protective part of us.
00:17:42
Speaker
It could be saying, yeah, but sex is bad. And so it causes, just like the way your shoulders tense up, the muscles in your vagina tense up too. And so it makes intercourse very difficult, but also painful, like you said. And so I think a lot of women, again, carry a lot of shame that they can't enjoy sex, but it is an actual physical response to what they've been conditioned to believe. It can even be a physical response to like,
00:18:10
Speaker
this shame of not being a virgin anymore. Even once they're married, purity culture idolizes virginity. It gives identity, worth, and purpose to women, especially prior to marriage. And so there can be that loss of identity, worth, and purpose. Even though our minds are like, we're married. This is allowed now. This is supposed to be good. Sometimes that loss of identity and feeling like, well,
00:18:38
Speaker
It gets so wrapped up with spirituality that women can have a really hard time disentangling that even in marriage. That has never crossed my mind before. But as you're saying, I can totally see that it's almost like your worth is in your virginity for so long that even if technically it's okay to not be a virgin anymore, that's still a huge part of your identity that's gone now.
00:19:08
Speaker
Right, because they're like, am I no longer pure? And so I think we have to expand like, what is purity? It's not just sexual abstinence. It's not just sexual. That gets into people's religious beliefs and things like that too. But yeah, exploring a broader definition of purity could help with that. So I'm curious, would people reach out to you?
00:19:32
Speaker
What do they typically know at first? What are their typical complaints when they come to you? Because I would imagine a lot of this gets discovered along the way in the journey of working with you. What do people typically know when they first come to you? When people come to me, they've Googled. And they've come to me because of the purity culture recovery work that I do. And so usually by the time they've come to me, they're already aware that purity culture has caused some problems.
00:20:01
Speaker
That might not be your experience, but I think just having that as an overt part of my work, that's the kinds of clients I attract. They're already aware of the problems. They just don't know how to fix it. Maybe they've looked for therapists who can help them, but their therapist doesn't understand purity culture, doesn't understand the religious background, doesn't have the knowledge or the expertise in sex therapy. That's when they might come looking for me in a coaching capacity.
00:20:28
Speaker
Does that answer your question? It doesn't. I'm even thinking for anybody listening who is interested and they wanted to do this kind of work, do you think it's enough to find a Christian counselor to do this type of work? What should people be looking for? I really think for therapists to do this work, you have to have some training and expertise in trauma, religion, and sexuality. I mean, kind of those three areas I just described.
00:20:58
Speaker
If the therapist has no religious background themselves or just doesn't have training in ethical religious integration, I would say they're probably just not going to be able to relate. They can certainly read books and educate themselves and the client can help educate themselves.
00:21:16
Speaker
And then if they don't have sex therapy training, which most therapists don't, that's not a required part of our degree. That was an elective for me, human sexuality.
00:21:28
Speaker
Um, and then trauma. Yeah. So not every therapist is trauma informed and has trauma training too. So I would say looking for a Christian counselor is not enough. I would look for someone with that has expertise in those areas and you could even ask them like, do you know what purity culture is? Like, are you familiar with that? If you treated that before I'm having these sexual problems, like do you
00:21:50
Speaker
provide sex therapy or do you have knowledge of how to treat these? Because it's more than just regular depression and anxiety that pretty much any therapist can treat. It goes a lot deeper. Absolutely. And I guess the reason why I wanted to ask that was because I was thinking there potentially could be Christian counselors that are still entrenched in purity culture themselves. And you wouldn't want to reach out to someone and kind of have some of those same messages reaffirmed for you, if that makes sense.
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's always a risk, especially if you're going to more of like a biblical counselor who's not a licensed mental health professional. I tend to discourage people from that because that I think is where you would maybe find more of the reinforcement of the very like stereotypical gender roles that purity culture taught us and some of the myths. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that
00:22:45
Speaker
When I reflect, I feel like a lot of the messages that now I realize are dangerous, they were really subtle.
00:22:56
Speaker
growing up and they, they actually, they made sense at the time and a lot of ways. So it wasn't like blatantly abusive or anything like that, right? Um, it's like, it's packaged up as care and concern. And like you said before that the fairy tale piece of it, it kind of comes with these unrealistic promises. Um, so I'm wondering how can women
00:23:23
Speaker
even potentially listening today that have never thought that they grew up in any kind of harmful purity culture, how can women recognize within themselves if they're carrying some of these wounds that they may not even be aware of? Because I think even I wasn't for a long time. Yeah. I would say start in the present and work your way back. What problems are you having now in the present? And then kind of tracing those back of where do you think those might have come from?
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, because I can see how some people would say, like, well, purity culture didn't affect me. And sometimes on social media, people will tell me that, like, you know, purity culture was actually good for me. It helped me make wise dating decisions. And I'm glad that I remain absent, they'll say. And I'll say, like, well, good, I'm glad that you had a good experience.
00:24:13
Speaker
Number one, don't invalidate others' experience who did have trauma from this. Don't discount. Be curious and open to hearing and learning from them.
00:24:24
Speaker
And number two, be curious and open to still exploring yourself and seeing if maybe there's some suppressed stuff that you didn't realize you had. Because I wonder sometimes when I get those messages, what is their sex life like? What is their faith life like? I don't know. Maybe there are some effects that they just don't realize because they are so subtle and they are so insidious.
00:24:48
Speaker
Or if someone is still entrenched in those beliefs, they might not recognize the harm that can come from them.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah. I'm especially thinking about, you know, sometimes the fairy
Dr. Morganti's Upcoming Book and Deconstruction
00:24:59
Speaker
tale does seem to happen for some people, right? So I'm wondering if they, if they feel like, well, I quote unquote, did it right. And I got this reward for it. If that was almost just like confirmation for them of, Oh, this formula does work. When really it's like, no, there's so many other factors that went into you getting where you are. And that doesn't, that also doesn't guarantee a lot of things past the honeymoon.
00:25:23
Speaker
It doesn't guarantee a happy marriage. It doesn't guarantee a pleasurable sex life. Yeah. Yeah. I really think, Julie, if I had married my college boyfriend that I thought I was going to marry, I would not be writing this book now. And I just wonder where I would be in my views of purity culture. If I had gotten that reward, would I still be a proponent of purity culture?
00:25:47
Speaker
15 years later. It's been 15 years since I graduated college. I don't know. I might be. So yeah, I was just thinking about that as I'm writing a book called Recovery from Purity Culture. Yes. Please tell us all about this. I have been so excited to hear more about it. Yeah. As I'm writing that book, I've just been thinking like, I don't know that I'd be writing this if I had not gone through that heartbreak.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, so this has been a long process. I've always had a dream to write a book, but it's been many years that I have wanted to write a book on purity culture. And that's kind of what got me started of writing articles online and doing the podcasts and social media and stuff. And then just waiting for the right timing and just when I was ready too. And so I'm writing a book called Recovering from Purity Culture. It'll come out next fall.
00:26:40
Speaker
So I'm actively writing it now before I got on this call with you. I was working on it. Yeah, and it comes out next fall, and I'm really excited about it, and I hope it's going to be really healing for people because there have been several books published on purity culture already. You may be familiar with them or some of the audience might be, but there's really not been anything written by a mental health professional who has both the personal and professional experience with purity culture recovery.
00:27:09
Speaker
because I'm sharing some of my personal experience in the book, but then I'm also sharing a lot of client case studies and a lot of interventions that I use in therapy and in coaching. So that's what I hope to uniquely offer is not just what are the problems with purity culture, but how do we heal? Can we talk about that a little bit about what some of those interventions are?
00:27:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think the interventions are definitely colored by my theoretical orientation. I'm a DBT therapist, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and so a lot of mindfulness, a lot of emotion regulation skills, a lot of dialectical thinking, which is
00:27:46
Speaker
embracing like both and instead of either or black and white thinking. And I think that's so important in purity culture because usually those of us who grew up in purity culture came from a more legalistic faith background that was very black and white right or wrong. So we did not really develop that ability to think dialectically, to think with the both and.
00:28:06
Speaker
So that's the first skill I'm going to share in the book is this is thinking in both ends. Can you give some examples of that for people who aren't familiar with dbt like what that would sound like with with even with purity culture.
00:28:20
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I'm going to pull up my book manuscript here. You're getting all the tea today. Some of these things I said. One of the black and white dichotomies was you're either pure or impure. One dialectical way of viewing that would be an expanded definition of purity. Again, like I said, that's going to be influenced by people's faith and religious background. But for me, that would be
00:28:48
Speaker
only Jesus is what makes me pure, not my behavior, not the choices that I make sexually. Like as Christians were made pure through Jesus, regardless of our choices. Yeah, another one would be like, some people say like deconstruction means you're no longer a Christian, like
00:29:08
Speaker
deconstructing your faith or deconstructing purity culture means like that you've just you've thrown away like your beliefs. And I think my book is unique in that I'm offering you can heal from purity culture and still maintain your faith and even your values of premarital sexual abstinence if that's what feels congruent for you.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah. Um, yeah. So I'm working really hard in the book to like respect people who land in different places, um, and just guide people with the tools for how to reconstruct their faith or how to reconstruct their sexual ethic without prescribing a specific one. I love that. And I think too, that, um, what I've noticed within myself and with my clients that anytime you work through shame,
00:29:56
Speaker
and you go back and heal some of those harmful messages, I feel like you always land in a place of greater authenticity and knowing yourself so much better. And I think coming from a faith perspective, if you feel less shame and more authentic in yourself, I feel like it actually opens doors for having a more authentic relationship with Jesus too.
00:30:23
Speaker
Because you're not operating in somebody else's rules that have been defined for you, you've actually done the work to be able to heal and define some of those things for yourself that I think it actually, I don't know, it just, even that relationship feels more authentic. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really a big proponent of doing the work of faith deconstruction because I think it can, it can lead to a deeper and more nuanced faith. Absolutely.
00:30:48
Speaker
loving and respectful and accepting of others and leads to a more authentic knowing of who you are and what you believe and authentic relationship with others, self and God. And I think that that process is normal and healthy psychologically. In my book, I'm going to describe like Fowler stages of spiritual development, which
00:31:09
Speaker
every psychology class I had covered, and just that it's normal to go through a crisis of faith or to have these doubts and questions. And we can come out on the other side with a more abstract, instead of concrete thinking, the abstract thinking and the critical thought. And it can lead to a deeper faith. For some people, it leads to leaving organized religion and developing
00:31:33
Speaker
like more spirituality or connection in other ways. But for me, it's really led to, I think, a more open hearted faith. Ditto. Yeah, I love that.
Emotional Impact and Trusting Body Wisdom
00:31:49
Speaker
Hey, everyone. I just wanted to pause for a quick moment to say thank you so much for all the love and support that you're showing outside of session.
00:31:58
Speaker
If you haven't already, do me a huge favor and hit the subscribe button. Give me a five star review and share this podcast with all of your friends. Help me take this show to another level. Now back to today's episode. So one of the things that I also think is interesting is that I think when we think about who has been hurt by the church,
00:32:25
Speaker
We think of the people that say they did lose their virginity and they were shamed for that.
00:32:30
Speaker
But I like that you're particularly paying attention to the fact that you can be hurt from it, even if you abide by all of the rules and the standards and the expectations, right? That that's equally painful and hurtful on the back end of it. How do you see that coming out differently in your work with clients, whether they feel like they lived up to the expectations and they're still realizing how it hurt them, or maybe they feel like they failed those expectations
00:32:59
Speaker
And it changed the way they viewed themselves, especially maybe in their teenage or early adolescence.
00:33:07
Speaker
Yeah. Most of my clients were the rule followers. They were the rule followers who, 20 years into marriage, they're still struggling. And they're like, I'm glad I finally found you. Or they're newly into marriage. I see some people that are just a couple of years into marriage, and they're like, it's painful. Or just, I thought it was going to be so much better than this. What's wrong with me? So that is trauma, too.
00:33:37
Speaker
Like we think of trauma normally as like sexual abuse or even like clergy abuse. Like those things are actually very connected with purity culture. I think there's a lot of connections with rape culture and with excusing sexual abuse scandals in the church and hiding them and things like that. And that is absolutely trauma.
00:33:59
Speaker
you know, and absolutely deserves empathy and validation. But I don't want to engage in comparative suffering and say like, you know, they suffered so much that my, you know, my pain doesn't matter. My pain, I can't call that trauma because I haven't been sexually abused. That's a both and for me. Both their pain and their trauma is very valid and they're deserving of, you know, of help and support. And the pain that I've gone through is valid too and can
00:34:29
Speaker
I'm like, it's worth going to therapy or getting help for is I guess how I put it. Yeah, I love that because I think a lot of people have a hard time calling it trauma because we compare. But a lot of these messages may not have even been directed toward like, it may not have been like you were called out particularly.
00:34:55
Speaker
A lot of it was just the normal conversation of this is the rule for everybody. Like I can think about being at summer camp. I can think about being in youth group and things like that. Like it was just a normal standard. And again, like that's what I mean by it was packaged as so innocent of this is just the way we do things. But I didn't realize what I was learning about my body at the time and how I was being told over time. It's like these little paper cuts over time, right? Um, where you're told over and over again, your body is a problem. Your body is a problem.
00:35:22
Speaker
You have the potential to do a lot of evil with your body. You have a potential to cause a lot of sin in other people because of your body. And again, that's what you talk about with that disconnect with our body because then you end up seeing it as a problem that has to be controlled really, really tightly. Otherwise, it will just cause so many people to
00:35:47
Speaker
sin and go to hell and all these other things. Right. Yeah. And I have a chapter on embodiment in the book, um, sexual embodiment because yeah, our bodies were either threats to subdue or they were projects, you know, and, and that's the broader culture too of just like get a beach body, you know, 10 days to flatter abs, you know, like it's project that I always have to be working on.
00:36:08
Speaker
So that's not specific to purity culture, but I think that the threats to subdue of like, I've got to cover my body or I'm going to cause others to sin or I'm feeling these like sexual feelings in my body. Like that's bad. I got to squash that. And that carries over into marriage or into adulthood. And so being able to see our body not as a project, but as like who we are, it's not just
00:36:32
Speaker
something that I have, it's who I am and being able to inhabit that and make peace and live integrated is part of what I want to help people with.
00:36:44
Speaker
Have you heard, I'm curious, have you heard the research that I've seen lately about how purity culture is also linked to eating disorders? Have you read anything about this lately? I think I've seen that people are doing research on it. And yeah, I mean, that's definitely a very interesting avenue to explore. I talk about like body image and body shame a little bit in the book, but didn't talk about the link with eating disorders.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've been reading about that a little bit lately, because again, it's a message that our bodies are supposed to be controlled. And especially for white heterosexual, cisgendered women, there's an expectation of you should be thin. So your body should be thin and it should be controlled. Yeah.
00:37:34
Speaker
And so they're finding that eating disorders run rampant in church communities, because again, women are told to do what their body is, you know, quote unquote, supposed to be done. And there's like, but again, it's a message if you're supposed to look a certain way, but also don't draw any attention to yourself because your body is a problem.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah. We're just taught so much to ignore our bodies. Like don't listen to your body because, or your heart, because the heart is wicked and deceitful. That is the scripture verse that's taken out of context and used to really sever the relationship with our heart and with our emotions. And as, as therapists, like we, we know that feelings are not facts is what we say in DBT and feelings give us important information to attend to. And I feel the same way about,
00:38:26
Speaker
our bodies. Just today, we were having to make decisions about the title of my book with the publishing team. They sent me a proposed title and my head was like, yeah, that's good. Then in my body, I was like, that one word just does not feel right. I'm trying to really work on this myself, this mind-body connection listening to the wisdom of my body.
00:38:51
Speaker
I took a walk, I meditated, I meditated on that title and just like what feelings came up in my body and you know I spoke up and I said you know this that one word just doesn't sit right with me like I feel in my gut that's not the right word and I think that's just one small example of something I did this morning you know that I'm still working on of listening to the wisdom of our bodies and attending to it instead of just discounting it and living in our heads in right thinking and right beliefs.
00:39:18
Speaker
I love that so much. I say all the time that one of the biggest effects of trauma is that we stop trusting ourselves. Yes.
00:39:32
Speaker
in faith communities, we're often taught that our emotions can't be trusted, that they're fickle, that they change like the winds, that you need to ground yourself in other things. And so I think that we're almost taught that emotions are bad and that we shouldn't trust ourself.
00:39:51
Speaker
And I think that what you're talking about is that there is like an intuition that God gives us and there's a wisdom in our bodies that if we learn to listen to it and have discernment for sure, but if we listen to it that we will make more sound decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm still learning it and still practicing it, but, um, but yes, you're absolutely right that like our emotions are bad and fickle and we shouldn't listen to them. We should just stand on truth.
00:40:19
Speaker
Well, our feelings are one way, not the only way, but one way to discern truth. By me listening to my body this morning, it was telling me this word and this phrase and the title just isn't right. Yeah, so that was one way to gain wisdom and truth. Yeah, I love that.
00:40:44
Speaker
So I'm thinking about if anyone is listening and maybe some of this is starting to resonate with them or maybe they've known for a little bit. What would you say to them as far as like the healing process? What are some of those steps to take?
Beyond Sexuality: Broader Impacts of Purity Culture
00:41:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first step is to recognize that there is a problem and to recognize like how purity culture may have affected you. So I have a quiz on my website called which purity culture myth affects you. Ooh. Okay. Are you taking it? I have not. I didn't know it was there, but I'm going to now.
00:41:20
Speaker
Go and take it. I would like to hear what you get, but it just takes you through my five myths of purity culture and you rate some of your agreement with different beliefs and then you get an overall score for each of the five myths and you can see, oh wow, the damaged goods myth is still affecting me. I still have this belief that I'm broken because of what I did sexually.
00:41:42
Speaker
That's just an example. So yeah, so that's one way to start creating awareness is listening to podcasts, reading things about it and seeing like what you resonate with and what you relate to. And then how it's showing up in your life, like thinking about those three areas I mentioned of faith, sexuality, and relationships. Do you see any effects in those areas that might be traced to purity culture?
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm even thinking about, um, for people who maybe the way this is showing up is not necessarily in their sex life. Like say somehow, somehow you ended up still having a really great sex life with your, with your spouse. It doesn't mean that it's not affecting you in other ways. Right. I think it could still be affecting your thinking, your fame. What are some of those ways that you see it show up maybe with some clients, even with their, their faith?
00:42:37
Speaker
Let me think the black and white thinking in their faith, the judgments. There's a lot of pride in judgment that I mentioned that I would judge people because so much of my identity and worth was wrapped up in my virginity. I would judge others who weren't virgins. And so that can continue on even after people get married and outside of their sex lives, as you're saying.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah. And then I think the shame, even if you don't have shame about your sex life, is there body shame or is there shame of like, I'm not a good enough Christian. I'm not performing good enough or I'm God's not pleased with me. Um, or I'm not a good wife because I did X, Y, and Z. Like there's, there's so much shame and, um,
00:43:23
Speaker
in the black and white fundamentalism. Yeah. But you said you don't have clients who come to you overtly wanting purity culture recovery like I do. So tell me about your experience if you don't mind me changing
00:43:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not used to being the one to ask questions on here. What I think I have seen is I work with a lot of women who have complex trauma. And so what they come to work with me on is that because now they're experiencing issues in their relationship, anxiety. I work with a lot of perfectionism.
00:43:54
Speaker
And I think that a lot of times they come in thinking, I grew up in a Christian home, and that's all they'll kind of say in the beginning. We went to church, we were involved in the church, things like that. But for one thing, I think this conversation is happening in a lot of different spaces now. So people are just having some awareness. But honestly, there have been a handful of documentaries that have come out in the past couple of years that have come up in therapy so many times. There's shiny, happy people.
00:44:24
Speaker
There's the Hillsong documentaries. And then there was another one. Keep sweet. Oh, what was it called? Keep sweet and obey something like that. Yeah. And there were so many women that were like, Oh my gosh, I wasn't even a part of that particular
00:44:43
Speaker
church group, but I remember those teachings. The umbrella, do you remember that umbrella where it's just like, God is the umbrella and underneath that is the husband and underneath that is the wife and underneath that is the children, which by the way is not how umbrellas work. That's besides the point. And so I think people all of a sudden are having these realizations of
00:45:03
Speaker
I think, I think that hurt me. And so it's clients that I may have been working with for a while. And we start to have these conversations. And I've even had a couple of clients that struggled in their sex life, yet their entire marriage and we worked through some of the childhood trauma and
00:45:22
Speaker
they realize they want to start having more sex and better sex with their spouse. And then they realize that it's the spiritual blocks that they're now facing. So even if we heal their younger self, we release the sexual abuse from a family member or something like that. But now they are hitting all of these walls with, but I'm still not supposed to enjoy this. And so it's a second layer of trauma that they have to work through before they can own their sexuality, like you're talking about.
00:45:50
Speaker
And for a lot of them as well, we're really working through this shame that they'd experienced from not being a virgin.
00:46:00
Speaker
and what got put on them from that. One client comes to mind even of someone who was actually being abused by a boyfriend and got pregnant and instead of the parents being able to listen that this was abuse, they said, no, you need to marry him.
00:46:21
Speaker
because of purity culture. So she was pressured into marrying an abuser instead of being protected because what was more important was to cover up a scandal, you know, or to cover up a sin. And what I'm noticing is that a lot of women are very angry when they start doing this work. They're very angry that they weren't protected, that they weren't
00:46:45
Speaker
that weren't taught to value themselves just for who they are. I think there's a lot of anger to process through with this work. Would you agree? Yeah, and the anger is justified. Absolutely.
00:46:56
Speaker
I see anger at the lack of sex education. Yeah. And definitely heartbreaking stories, like you just said, of abuse and manipulation. And I interviewed several women for the book who were divorced because I wanted to get a variety of perspectives.
00:47:15
Speaker
And all of them said they blamed purity culture
Complex Healing Process and Personal Growth
00:47:19
Speaker
for their divorce like that that played a huge role because they got married too young and they didn't have any skills like emotional and communication skills and they were just taught to find a guy who loves Jesus and who's a virgin.
00:47:32
Speaker
and that that's enough. And one of the women said, frankly, that's not enough. And I was like, yeah, that's not enough for compatibility. That's not enough to make a marriage on. Just somebody who loves Jesus and is a virgin like you. So yeah, so the anger is justified for sure. And I think that we need to validate that feeling and take time to let ourselves feel that emotion.
00:47:59
Speaker
and also to explore what other emotions are there underneath it. Because, you know, as therapists, we know anger is the cover, like the outside emotion, but the soft emotion underneath it is usually hurt, sadness, guilt, a lot of grief, shame, a lot of grief. Yeah, but there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of grieving of, yeah, grieving what could have been,
00:48:24
Speaker
the messages that you received and how they affected you, grieving that your parents maybe did the best they could, or maybe they thought they were doing a good job.
00:48:35
Speaker
maybe they have the best of intentions and it still hurt you. Yeah, and I think that that's, I'm glad we're landing here because I think doing this work is so incredibly complicated. There are so many complexities. There's so many different layers to peel back. I do think that parents had the best intentions. And so this is not about attacking their parenting at all. I think that they wanted us to be safe and they wanted us to have healthy, happy marriages.
00:49:03
Speaker
and didn't realize how damaging it was going to be in a lot of different ways. But starting this work is going to be complicated. And I think people underestimate that sometimes that they they don't realize how much is shoved down. And so if you do start this journey, know that you're going to purge through a lot of emotions, but also that it that's that's what healing is, right? Yeah, it is complex, complicated.
00:49:29
Speaker
long-term work, but it's also worth doing. I wanted to just give that encouragement because I think sometimes my clients are like, but I'm married now, so what does it really matter what I believe about sex? Or they'll say, well, if this is just about having more orgasms, who cares? It's okay if I don't enjoy sex.
00:49:52
Speaker
clients having more orgasms has never been the reason that I'm doing this work, you know, like, the reason I'm doing it is for holistic healing. And I'll tell them like, your healing matters, because sexuality is part and parcel of who we are as embodied beings made in the image of God, that's my belief. And so you're worth doing this work for, you know, regardless of
00:50:16
Speaker
if you're married not, or how old you are, or how many mistakes you've made, or some of my clients have raised kids, have adult kids, and they're like, I screwed this up with my kids. It's not too late. So the work is hard, but it's also worth doing.
00:50:31
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that so much. Before we wrap up, I want to ask the question that I ask everyone. And that is, whether it's related to purity culture or not, but if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
00:50:48
Speaker
Yeah, I would say don't worry so much. Amen. Yeah, I'm an Enneagram six, which loves to worry and have anxiety. And I just worried so much about like, I'm never going to find anyone, I'm going to be single forever. And like, you know, how's my life going to turn out? And just, am I going to get a job? I like, you know, just all sorts of worries. And each, each time God has proven faithful to me, and
00:51:15
Speaker
Again, I'm not saying that everybody's story is a fairy tale or that everybody's story works out the way mine has. Like I'm married now, I have two kids, I have work that I'm passionate about and enjoy. And it doesn't always look like that. And of course I've still had setbacks along the way. But just to be able to trust and be at peace and not worry or fret or always have to have a plan for everything.
00:51:43
Speaker
I feel like I'm just not done talking about it because even when you're saying that, I think that another damaging message that especially girls get is that marriage is not that it's not a big deal, it is, but that that's one of your biggest goals in life. There is such an importance put on finding a partner.
00:52:06
Speaker
that we're not really encouraged just to live life and that we don't always know what God's path is for us. And it could be something completely like I feel like there's almost too much of an emphasis put on marriage.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah. There's an idolization of marriage too. I call it marriage, toxic marriage culture. There's nothing wrong with marriage by itself, but this toxic marriage culture that idolizes marriage and puts your whole identity and your whole worth in marriage too. Right. If it was in virginity before marriage, now it's in being a wife and mom. Yeah. That's a meaningful part of my life being a wife and mom for sure, but that's not where all of my identity and value comes from and that's not what gives me
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think we have to deconstruct that idol too. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, don't fear not getting married.
00:52:59
Speaker
It's nothing to be afraid of. Yeah. Yeah. That you can still have a meaningful and joyful life. Absolutely. I definitely tried to make the most of my 20s. That's when I got my doctorate, and I'm so glad now when I see peers who are going back to school later on in life or after kids, and I'm just like, oh my gosh, I'm so grateful that I got it all over with and done with.
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah, because I
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:53:25
Speaker
tried to make the most of my singleness and being unencumbered and had great experiences. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here again today. I'm going to post in the show notes a link to your website, a link to your quiz, because I think everybody should go take the quiz, and then any information you want to share about your book. But I also know that you're on social media. Let everybody know where they can find you.
00:53:52
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. My website is drcamden.com and I'm on all the social medias as Dr. Camden. So it's pretty easy to find me. Yeah. And I will post all of that in the show notes so you guys can go find her and connect with her however you want to. That is all we have for today. I hope everyone enjoyed this episode and we will talk to you next week. Bye.
00:54:15
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Outside of Session. Remember, while I am a licensed therapist, this podcast is not a substitute for individual therapy. The contents of this episode are for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you are having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 for immediate assistance or dial 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.