144 Embodied Sexuality and Religious/Sexual Trauma with Jenny McGrath

The Place We Find Ourselves

Adam Young

Hope, Christian, Christianity, Healing, Story, Trauma, Psychotherapy, Mental Health, Restoration, Heart, Sexualabuse, Health & Fitness, Adamyoung, Therapy, Attachment, Interpersonalneurobiology, Religion & Spirituality, Limbicsystem, Neuroscience

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I am joined today by therapist Jenny McGrath who is passionate about helping people heal from the damage of purity culture. One byproduct of purity culture is a disconnection from your body and a distrust of your body. If you feel shame about your body, or especially shame about your sexuality, this episode will hopefully help you. For those who want to dive deeper into these things, please consider signing up for Jenny’s Embodied Sexuality course. You can use coupon code “PLACEWEFIND” to save $60 off the cost of the course.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and I am joined today by Jenny McGrath in Seattle.
0:07.4	Jenny, it's good to see you.
0:08.8	You too, thanks for having me. You're not a stranger to the podcast. You've been on it before, but today we're going to talk about something a little bit different. We're going to talk about sexuality and purity culture. Let's just start with this. Will you explain what is
0:26.8	purity culture and then how is purity culture likely affecting listeners more than they might realize?
0:36.2	So I guess I would preface by saying I think there's a million different types of purity
0:40.5	culture.
0:41.5	So when I'm talking about it, I'm specifically talking about a movement
0:46.3	that happened primarily among white evangelicals in the 1980s and then really took off in the 1990s and it was this movement that had this
0:58.0	hyper emphasis on abstinence or purity.
1:03.0	It was sort of like nothing we'd seen before
1:05.8	where there was these giant movements
1:07.7	of hundreds of thousands of adolescents
1:10.4	pledging their abstinence publicly and doing these big displays. and only stay in evangelical white Christianity but it really impacted our education
1:26.3	system beginning with Reagan and then further with Bush there was a really big push for abstinence-only education in schools.
1:36.5	A lot of youth who grew up in that time experienced very little or no sex education about their bodies, their anatomy,
1:48.0	about understanding about sex at best. And at worst there was a lot of messages about shame and about the dangers of sexuality and what this produced for pretty much an entire generation and maybe some of your listeners,
2:06.1	I would venture to guess many of your listeners, is a disconnection or a severing or a distrust of the body.
2:14.8	Because when we don't have anywhere safe to go,
2:18.2	the safest place to go is away from ourselves.
2:20.8	And so when we have these messages that our body is bad it's dangerous it's out of
2:27.0	control it's actually kind of the wisest thing our body can do is to dissociate and to disconnect from itself.
2:35.7	And so I think it's so so common for folks who grew up in purity culture to experience a level
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