How I Got My Spirituality Back
Soul Gum
by Victoria Hutchins
4.9 • 560 Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when your faith collapses? In this episode, I share my story of spiritual deconstruction and how I learned to believe again—sort of. This isn’t a “how to get your faith back” story. It’s the story of tearing my faith down to the studs, sifting through the rubble, and deciding what was worth keeping. We’ll talk god shaped holes, Kierkegaard, Camus, Pascal’s wager, and the surprising peace of not needing all the answers. This episode if for anyone who is currently filling their god-shaped hole with TikTok marathons, self-help books and spiral-inducing questions. If you started at church camp and have landed in full-blown nihilism, press play.
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro: the story of how I lost my faith and got it back (sort of)
08:01 1. Why spiritual crises often happen at the worst possible time
10:35 How my own spiritual crisis began
18:07 Kierkegaard on despair and the self
19:47 2. Why spiritual health gets worse before it gets better
26:19 The delight of spiritual curiosity
27:43 3. Choosing how to fill the God shaped hole
29:42 Absurdism and optimistic nihilism (Camus)
30:57 Pascal’s Wager explained and what it gets wrong
32:51 Approaching belief pragmatically (belief as a choice)
33:53 What “god” means to me now
35:33 Can you make yourself believe? Should you?
36:16 On stepping in the same river twice (Heraclitus)
36:49 Five reflection questions (Rainn Wilson)
38:14 Lightning round recap
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Rhett McLaughlin’s Spiritual Deconstruction Story
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)
St. Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 CE)
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
Heraclitus, Fragment 49a (c. 500 BCE)
Rainn Wilson, Soul Boom (2023)
Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (2016)
MY LINKS
• Listen to my episode of Soul Boom with Rainn Wilson on Spotify
• Watch my episode of Soul Boom with Rainn Wilson on Youtube
• MAKE BELIEVE is out everywhere now
• Get a signed copy of MAKE BELIEVE from Blue Willow Bookshop (write “REQUEST FOR SIGNED COPY” in the order notes!)
• Join the waitlist for future retreats!
• Find me @thedailyvictorian on Instagram
• Find me @thedailyvictorian on TikTok
RESOURCES
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Losing your faith is one of the most disorienting things you can experience, and getting it back, |
| 0:07.1 | at least in some form, is even stranger. Spiritual crisis. Let's talk about it. |
| 0:14.8 | Sogum. Welcome back to Soulgum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological, and spiritual flair. |
| 0:23.6 | I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins. My goal is to give your soul something to chew on. And today, |
| 0:31.0 | we are talking about spiritual evolution. What happens when your faith changes shape? Whether you call it spiritual |
| 0:40.7 | deconstruction, reconstruction, spiritual awakening, spiritual crisis, or maybe just a messy season |
| 0:47.9 | of questioning, it's one of the most destabilizing, but ultimately transformative things you can go through. If you're new to |
| 0:55.9 | Soul Gum, hi, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And if you're not new, hi, welcome back. I'm so |
| 1:02.7 | glad you're here to. Duh. If you've listened to Soul Gum before, you might know I typically |
| 1:07.8 | stay very focused on what will be helpful for you. I don't focus much on me |
| 1:14.1 | and my own story. Today's episode is going to be a little different in that way. It's going to be |
| 1:20.3 | less prescriptive and more personal than usual because I think the subject matter calls for it. |
| 1:27.0 | Spirituality is irrevocably personal. |
| 1:30.6 | I don't think there's anyone who can tell you exactly what your spiritual journey will look |
| 1:35.2 | like, least of all me. |
| 1:37.1 | The only person who I think has the answers to your spiritual questions is you. |
| 1:42.4 | So today I'm going to tell you about my spiritual evolution, |
| 1:46.7 | how and why I lost my faith and how in a sense I've gotten it back. And as I do, I'm going to |
| 1:54.1 | share three things you might go through when you experience a spiritual evolution. But I want to be clear, this is heavy on the might. |
| 2:03.6 | If you are looking for a map for your spiritual journey, this is not that. |
| 2:08.6 | I do not believe there is a map. |
| 2:11.6 | If you're looking for a guided walk back to the face background you came from, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from by Victoria Hutchins, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of by Victoria Hutchins and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.