Trusting Yourself After Religious Change (#370)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode, I’m joined by licensed professional counselor Monica DiCristina to explore the question that haunts so many people leaving conservative religious environments: What can I trust about myself? Monica shares her thoughts on navigating the messy reality of learning to trust your own intuition, emotions, and body when you've been taught that authority figures and scripture are the only reliable sources of “knowing.” We swap stories about our own religious upbringings—hers navigating both Spanish Catholicism and 90s evangelicalism—and how anxiety disorders complicated our ability to discern what was "the Holy Spirit" versus our own mental health struggles. We explore how naming your pain is different from naming yourself, why wisdom feels expansive rather than anxious, and how Jesus's command to "love your neighbor as yourself" actually validates self-trust rather than self-abandonment. If you've ever wondered whether you can trust a gut feeling or found yourself paralyzed by the epistemological crisis of our current moment, this conversation offers a refreshingly non-anxious path forward. Monica's Website | Monicadicristina.com ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back everybody to religion on the mind, the show that focuses on the overlap of psychology and religion and spirituality.
0:17.7	I am your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and psychology of religion
0:22.1	researcher. And I'm joined by another clinician, licensed professional counselor in Georgia.
0:27.7	That is Monica D. Christina. Thank you for being here, Monica.
0:31.3	Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to hang out and to chat.
0:35.2	Yeah. So you put a book out back in May.
0:38.6	We're going to sort of work our way back to the book.
0:41.8	I do want to just name it at the top here so that people who don't hear.
0:45.5	Our whole conversation can hear.
0:47.2	It's called Your Pain Has a Name, a Therapist's Invitation to Understanding Your Story
0:52.4	and sorting out who you are from what hurts.
0:55.9	I really like that idea, sorting out who you are from what hurts, like yourself versus your
1:03.0	pain or something like that.
1:05.1	Exactly.
1:05.6	But the thing that I had reached out to you to talk about is a concept that I think is like
1:10.3	kind of logically prior. And it comes up, I know I've seen you to talk about is a concept that I think is like kind of logically prior.
1:12.2	And it comes up, I know I've seen you post about it. It's come up with my clients,
1:17.3	especially people coming out of more conservative religious environments and trying to make sense of their life as an adult.
1:23.8	This question of how do I know what I can trust and not trust, specifically myself,
1:31.9	various versions of myself, my intuition, my body, my emotions.
1:36.7	That seems to me to be a prior question before I can do the difficult,
1:41.4	untangling discernment work of what's just pain and what's really me.
	...

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