Welcome to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast.

I'm your host, certified religious transition and trauma recovery coach, Terry Hales.

I help people step out of the shadows of religious fear and shame and embrace their

authentic selves with love and empathy.

If you're ready to throw off the shackles of learned binary thinking and explore

a more nuanced approach to life, this is your playground.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast. Today, we're talking about something I think there is a lot of confusion about. In my conversations with people, even over this past week, there have been a lot of questions about what does it mean to co-regulate? Is it okay to ever depend on someone?

I've even talked with some of you who've said that dependence is really scary, that relying on

someone to meet some of your needs feels very outside of your comfort zone and feels unsafe to

you. And I even had one comment that said,

you know, I think that what you're talking about is codependency. And so I'm glad that we

were already planning on having this episode about codependency versus co-regulation.

There are several other episodes out there and articles out there talking about codependency and

interdependency and co-regulation is a part of being interdependent.

And this is a big issue, I think, for those of us that are recovering from religious trauma,

for those of us that are finding resilience, that are creating a life that

feels more healthy and connected because we have experienced over dependence on others.

We've experienced a melding of our personal identity, perhaps with a romantic partner, perhaps with our family unit,

perhaps with a religious community, depending on, you know, how high demand our religious

community was, we may have lost all sense of self in service of the community or in service

of God dictated to us by the religious community.

And so this idea of depending on others can feel really, really scary. And it can feel like

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