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. I am so excited for us to start talking about parenting after high demand religion. And as I was sitting here and thinking about like what is the first topic we should cover, should we talk about boundaries? Should we talk about sex? Should we talk about, you know, any of a host of topics that we could talk about, really what

it came down to for me, the very first building block of parenting our children after leaving

high demand religion. And honestly, it should have been the first building block when we were

in high demand religion, but we just didn't know any better, was creating emotional safety

for our kids. So today we're going to be

talking about how we can create an environment of emotional safety for our very young children.

And next week we'll talk about creating emotional safety for our older children and teens and

even young adults. Now, before we get into creating emotional safety,

it helps to kind of understand the different parenting styles. So there's three different

parenting styles. There's authoritarian parenting, which most of us experienced in high-demand

religion. I'm sure there are a few of us that had maybe some permissive parents or even authoritative parents. Those are the three styles. But authoritarian parents,

they emphasize obedience to authority and external control. And there's very little input from us

about how we were experiencing the parenting or what would work better for us.

Many of us, if we were raised in a religion where we viewed God as an authoritarian parent and

we were taught to emulate God in that way, then our parents may have really stressed obedience,

you know, doing what they say just because and like following

...