Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, Allabest. On today's episode, we're going to be discussing loss, loss of family, loss of loved ones, loss of faith, and specifically we'll be discussing loss in the context of excommunication.

For listeners who may not be familiar, excommunication from a religion is the single most

severe form of discipline which church leaders can enact.

It's a severance, total, and often sudden from a person's community and from their faith

tradition, and its fallout can be devastating.

Humans are social creatures, so to be ostracized and exiled from

their group is traumatizing. And often, high-demand religions that practice excommunication also

teach that their rituals are salvific, which means that you need them to get to heaven. So it's not

just banishment from a person's group, but banishment

from heaven. To be fair, excommunication is also used to remove criminal or dangerous individuals

from a community. And there's an argument to be made that some behaviors do indeed harm and do

warrant separation from the group. But while this form of punishment may have its

proper uses, it's clear that sometimes it's instead wielded as a form of censorship against

proponents of progress and accountability. It's used to silence dissenters and to maintain

a patriarchal status quo. So on today's episode, we're going to be digging in deeper

to understand excommunication and its impact, as well as other relevant forms of loss. I'm joined

for this conversation by Natasha Helfer, a therapist, writer, and podcaster, who sat down with me

for a deeply honest interview about death, divorce,

and her own experience of being removed from her faith community.

It's going to be both a heartening and harrowing conversation, but first I'd like to introduce

our guest.

Natasha Halfer is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a certified sex therapist,

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