Ladies and gentlemen, so excited today to have Dr Laura Anderson here.

This is me.

From a book, you just wrote a book called When Religion Hurts You.

Yes, I did.

It came out two and a half weeks ago. I like a book that just tells you what it's going to be about.

And you know, probably should start before we trigger anybody. How do you cope with writing a book about the the parts of religion that are bad which is probably yeah man-made manipulations and things like that?

How do you cope with that versus trying not to scare people away that that feel triggered because if you say

anything bad about God or religion that it's a whole like an issue. Yeah well I'm

pretty clear like on any of my platforms social media website company, company, everything. I'm not anti-religious, but I am anti-abuse, I'm anti-harm, I'm anti-oppression, anti-racism, all the things that can make up a lot of the toxicity that we see within religion.

So that usually puts people at ease.

I don't take the approach that in order to heal from religious trauma, have to be an atheist which is you know

10 15 years ago and before that was kind of like the general consensus in order to

heal from religious trauma you just reject it all and become an atheist.

I don't take that approach.

I take the approach of religious trauma as trauma,

and so that tends to soften people a little bit.

They're able to see like, oh, maybe you're not talking about all religion

or you're not talking about, you're not trying to bash it, essentially.

And I think that's what's so important because if the goal in life

is to sort of have common ground and discuss complicated issues,

then you don't want to just push people away because religion, just like things like politics.

There's certain lines where people will choose that over their family. like maybe not being able to hear like you know there's so many people that are

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