1302: Mormon Faith Crisis Retreat Pt. 5 - The Key to Healthy Relationships: Emotional Intimacy Pt. 1
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2020
⏱️ 148 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Five years years ago, upon completing my Psychology Ph.D., I began holding retreats and workshops to support Mormons in faith crisis, and specifically to help reduce anxiety, depression, suicidality, family strife, and unnecessary divorce for those experiencing a Mormon Faith Crisis. For many of these workshops and retreats, I was fortunate to co-present with Natasha Helfer Parker and Margi Dehlin.
In August of 2019 we decided to hold a weekend retreat and record the entire experience ,including the attendee participation. This is that retreat, which was held from 8/30 to 9/1/2019 in Salt Lake City, Utah. 40 audience members participated. The following topics were addressed:
- Understanding and Navigating a Religious Transition
- Fundamentals of Mental Health in a Religious Transition
- The Key to Healthy Relationships: Emotional Intimacy
- Healthy Sexuality After a Faith Transition
- Conscious Parenting
- Communicating with Believing Family and Friends
We hope you enjoy this content. It is the best insight we can share to help you navigate your religious transition.
Finally, a HUGE thanks goes to Clint and Jeni Martin for underwriting this event.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, well, welcome everybody. |
| 0:09.1 | We're super happy to have you to talk about really one of our favorite topics. |
| 0:13.7 | Yesterday, I think we tried to set up the framework of how to understand just kind of faith transitions |
| 0:20.2 | from a social science perspective so that we can understand that we're not unique. |
| 0:26.1 | In some ways, we are unique in other ways, right, because each tradition is unique in their own way. |
| 0:31.1 | And that's kind of setting you up so that you can kind of like feel the lay of the land |
| 0:37.1 | from a bit of an objective stance. It's a little hard to be objective when you're right in the middle of it. |
| 0:43.1 | And so now we hope that that framework sets you up for us to talk about relationships |
| 0:49.1 | because at some level, what a faith transition is, it's not just a personal belief system. |
| 0:58.1 | It's a community. It's what your marriage, sometimes as many times, based on. |
| 1:03.1 | It's a structure where you've raised maybe your children or are in the process of raising your children. |
| 1:09.1 | And so all of this has to do with relationships. |
| 1:12.1 | So I think a lot of people that come to these things imagine that we're going to talk a lot about the church |
| 1:17.1 | and as you notice, we're talking a lot less about the church as we are talking about human dynamics and relationships. |
| 1:24.1 | So a huge part is of what we really see as a solution to so much of your woes and your sadness and your concerns is this idea about knowing how to foster emotional intimacy. |
| 1:40.1 | And again, this doesn't necessarily seem to be a Mormon problem. |
| 1:44.1 | So we have issues with intimacy really nationwide, culture wide, for a lot of reasons that we'll get into today. |
| 1:54.1 | So that's kind of where we're starting out. You want to head to the next slide? |
| 1:59.1 | Yeah, and the only thing that maybe I would add is that not to, again, this isn't about the church, but it is really profound for me to consider this idea that we have spent as Mormons thousands of hours in instruction from primary to Sunday school, seminary, institute, elders' quorum, |
| 2:27.1 | relief society, priesthood, all that stuff, BYU, religious classes. |
| 2:35.1 | And there's pretty much never been a single lesson on emotional intimacy that we ever received, or at least I didn't. |
| 2:43.1 | I know there's probably like a celestial marriage course at BYU or something. |
... |
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