Hey everybody, this is Tim Chavez with Faith Matters. In this episode, we took one more opportunity to talk about the comments, thoughts, and questions we received on social media about going back to a full church schedule.

So many of the questions seemed to hinge on ideas of belonging and boundaries, and we felt like there couldn't be a better person to have this discussion with than Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Vife.

Jennifer is a licensed clinical professional counselor with a PhD in counseling psychology for Boston College.

She has a private counseling and coaching practice in Chicago, and is a frequent contributor on the subjects of sexuality, relationships, and spirituality to many Latter-day Saint-themed blogs, magazines, and podcasts.

Jennifer's perspectives were so insightful and refreshing. Her emphasis on agency and choice when it comes to how we engage with church and on finding real connection by establishing healthy boundaries felt like just what we needed right now.

So with that, we'll jump right in. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy this episode.

Dr. Finlayson-Vife, we are so excited to get to talk to you finally, so thank you so much for joining us.

I pleasure.

And welcome.

We felt like your perspective was really important in this conversation. We've been thinking about and talking about gathering again.

And a couple of weeks ago, we asked listeners to submit questions and comments about just how they're feeling about going back to church, and most of the comments, especially the ones that seemed full of a little bit of anxiety.

We're about setting boundaries and about relationships, and so we just kept thinking about you and that this is kind of your will house, and we would love to just get to pick your brain and use your expertise to talk about how to sort of reorient with this new schedule.

And it made me think of something that I've heard you say before that that all humans have two desires to belong to ourselves and to belong to others.

I kind of wondered if maybe this is the conflict that we're seeing that maybe for the people who feel especially anxious about going back to church, maybe this year off was sort of it alleviated a lot of that conflict.

And I think that what they were expressing in every in lots of different ways was just this trepidation that maybe re-engaging will mean that they're going to have to sacrifice this belonging to themselves again.

So maybe could you just start right there and talk about that, and are those things necessarily mutually exclusive?

Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive, but when we're younger in our development, they feel mutually exclusive. So that is to say, when we are more driven by the need to have others be happy with us, to be pleased with us, to have others feel okay about us, we can feel a lot more compromised in our ability to belong to ourselves.

And so, you know, this is really the kind of central conflict of intimate relationships, which is, you know, I just got a question on my Instagram yesterday about this, like, but if I know that my spouse wants something from me, doesn't that inherently mean I have less freedom.

Right, because I was talking about how sexual desires connected to a sense of freedom. And so she was saying, yeah, but in marriage, you can't have freedom.

Because, and in, you know, my response to that is the more that we can't handle knowing what someone wants and disappointing them.

Or being able to understand somebody may want something, but still be clear that we have a real choice.

The more we have developed that capacity, the freer we feel, even in the face of other people wanting things from us different from what we want to offer.

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