This is Ashley Stone and you're it to me in an email and so powerful and I've been so excited to hear you know your story on the the live version so yeah I'd love to just you know start by hearing a little bit about you and then we can just kind of jump into it.

Sure yeah absolutely so I have been a licensed psychotherapist for 16 years and I brought my business online and I married my husband and I have my son and we have a dog and yeah that's me. How old is your son? He's three. Oh awesome. I have a two-year-old. So, oh fun. Yes, it's such a fun stage. It's a hard stage, but it's really fun. Yeah, for sure. Well, awesome. Okay, so let's jump into it. We can just start at the beginning or wherever you want to start.

Cool. Okay, well, so I grew up in the church. My family was really active, happy family, really involved in the church and yeah, and I think it's important to my story that I got sexually abused as a child.

And I really struggled after that with guilt and shame.

Like, in my elementary school years, I was really distracted and felt really stressed in school. I just kind of sat there and sweat and it was just kind of stressful. But when I was eight years old, my parents became more aware of how I was handling that and that it was causing me a lot of stress. I wanted to be home. I was calling into, I was calling homesick like almost every day. And so my dad gave me a

father's blessing at that point.

And really it helped me so much, it helped me,

it helped me,

and I didn't really stress about it

as much after that point. So it was a really good thing.

But still, I felt like it kind of still influenced the way that I thought about myself, in church and and I always part of kind of one of the big themes of my story is when it came to the church even though I grew up and I didn't do very well introducing myself but I grew up in in Cottonwood Heights Utah and that's where I that's where I live now.

I were in Cottonwood Heights. And the ward that I grew up in my family, everybody was great, but I just kind of felt dirty and like I had to hide and I remember as like a teenager kind of thinking of myself as a

this is bizarre language but kind of thinking of myself as like a slutty child. That word, that language actually crossed my mind and how bizarre is that to say of an innocent child.

So I just felt stressed and uncomfortable in some church lessons. I kind of felt like I was a square pig trying to fit into the round hole. That's kind of a big theme of the story. And stress and uncomfortable in some lessons as a teenager, especially just trying to feel like I was I was a good kid. I was great. I didn't really rebel against the church. I did exactly I followed my parents rules. I followed church standards, but I just had this kind of this past that I always felt like I needed to hide.

And so one lesson that specifically stands out when I was a teenager because this does not make sense on like a cognitive level why this affected me. But we were learning about the

adultress, the adultress that was thrust before Christ, and then of course what does

Christ say? Like, he that he without sin can cast the first stone and so the story is so beautiful and so merciful and so accepting.

But I felt really stressed during that story. I felt like she was vulnerable in being she was in a vulnerable situation and she was being exposed to everybody including Christ and how how awful that would be for her.

And yeah, it was also felt unjust because where was the man?

Like the man is not in this story, it's the adultress, you know?

So, so yeah, so that's kind of a background there.

Really happy childhood overall, great family.

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