Liberate Your Story Podcast

Who are you?

What was the first thing that came to your mind when I asked that? Did it surprise you? Or did it make you feel a bit dizzy?
It’s my new favorite question just for this reason…it shakes up what we think others want to know about us. It also makes the conversation suddenly very interesting. We have these pre-programmed ways of interacting socially, like an introduction, that when we change that system or cultural expectation, it rattles us.

I want to read you a set of phrases from my cultural context to help you understand what I mean.

God won't give you anything more than what you can handle.
God is allowing this in your life to grow you and teach you.
Love the sinner but not the sin.
If God wants this for me, then He will make it happen.
God answers prayers.
God will protect you.
God wants an intimate relationship with you.

Language is very powerful. It has been used to communicate, instruct, teach, tell stories, and connect with each other. It can also be used to control.

After spending 40+ years in the Christian Evangelical faith system, I learned a language. It's insider language. You learn it, you use it and you live by it. It wasn't always from the book we believed in, but culture too. This language formed me. It taught me who I should be and how I should exist in my world. Now that I stand outside of the belief system and its culture, I hear its language very clearly. It's so loaded.

Now..don’t worry…this won’t be all about my Christian experience but it is the language that formed MY world view so I will be using it as an example from time to time. You will likely find yourself relating even if it comes from a different context, religion, or culture.

So…the phrases I listed just a moment ago are typical Christianize. I heard them day in and day out. They were used to comfort, disciple (inside language here) or guide, and equip us. But really they just aren't helpful. In fact, I would go as far as saying they damaged us. These aren't even things that are true or can be held to a standard of truth. They also compel us to believe things about other humans that move us further from love.

After years of healing from narcissistic abuse and gaslighting, I came to see these types of phrases as ways we gaslight ourselves to hold up a set of beliefs that couldn't hold themselves up. Let me show you what I mean by engaging just one of these statements. I could probably do a podcast episode on each one of these.

God won't give you anything more than what you can handle. This was a mantra I heard over and over again. I think it was used for two reasons. First, it allowed us to acknowledge someone's hardship without having to actually help them. And if we questioned it, we were offered a follow-up "pray for faith" or "have more faith". We were still left without our hardship addressed. The second reason is that it protected God from not being god. If we believed God loved us, then he wouldn't hurt us or pile mounds of despair on us. So in order to save God's reputation of being a good god, then the underlying tone of this statement is that we actually can handle this very hard thing....so go handle it.

So why would I consider this gaslighting? Consider that a gaslighter's whole purpose is to reorient your reality so that you will operate in their reality rather than the actual truth. This ultimately gives the gaslighter the ability to create the reality they want. If we have a belief that is so important that we orient our entire life around it, then questioning that belief becomes difficult. It's even more difficult if questioning that belief makes the whole system fall apart. Who are we, then, without this "thing" we have built our entire identity, lifestyle, morality, culture, and worldview around? So might it be easier to gaslight ourselves (create the reality we want) than to disrupt the entirety of our existence?

I've gone through many of these phrases over the last 5 years as I unravel myself from a complex system of beliefs. I've learned that I have a physical reaction in my body now when I hear these phrases. I think I can feel and hear the threads of my previous theology unraveling at that moment. This culture, this language, ran so deep in my existence that my body feels it. Why? I think it's because language guides us to our view of ourselves and the world. We see it in advertising, marketing, politics...everywhere. We figure out who we are based on the language we and others use with us. We form our innermost being around language. And then we live accordingly. We cope, we celebrate, we play, we connect, we have sex, and we do all the things in our bodies that we have decided in our minds. If I believe that God will not give me something that I can't handle, then I lead my body into a level of survival and coping that is required to endure the hardship. And if I believe that God thinks I can handle this, then I have to handle it at any cost to myself. It's in my body. The language begins in my mind but it is lived in my body.

We are in a political war right now around language. Everything from the pronouns we use to what "life" means. It's so powerful. My goal now isn't to trade my language out for another that suits me better. My goal is, instead, to know who I am without the language so that when I reenter the conversation, I am using language that is true. I am committed to no longer gaslighting myself. If my beliefs can't hold themselves up without me altering reality, then I stop taking on the responsibility of making sure they stay held up. Do you get that? Do you understand that I am saying that truth will hold itself up? I do not need to defend it. It just is.

This frees me to be able to ask any question I need to. It offers me curiosity without the risk of losing my identity in the process. You see, my identity is not my belief system. My beliefs come as a result of who I am, a result of what I value. This allows me to change and grow and evolve as much as I need to while still being me.

You see...after 40+years of “being” my belief system, I actually did find the truth. But the truth was me. I was the central point from which I viewed the world now. And that was liberation!

So if language is so powerful that it can form me, then how do I re-form? Each of us will have different journeys, no doubt, but I encourage my clients to do two things when they are ready to shift how they view themselves.

One…we dive into what they value. Consider your values like the rudder on a boat. They steer you towards what you believe. This is one BIG reason why some cultures just don’t understand America’s drive towards identifying with their religious affiliation. Yes, we are a land of freedoms. And yes we have the freedom to choose what religion we practice. BUT we also have cultural expectations that we WILL participate in a religion.

Consider this. When we meet new people we ask questions about who they are. It’s part of us figuring out what they value. For example, we might ask “what do you do for a living?” What career path we have chosen says a lot to others about what we value. If you chose to be a doctor, you might value helping other people. You might also value science or research or even problem-solving. So when we ask someone what they do for a living, we are essentially asking who they are. I know what you’re thinking. “But I just work this job. it's NOT a reflection of who I am”. This is the main reason I don’t enter new relationships with people asking this question. I now ask “who are you?” I want to offer you the opportunity to separate who you are from what you do to make money. In this case, if I work a job that doesn’t reflect who I am, I would have a disconnect of what I value from what I do. Over time, this creates inner conflict. We feel a need to make a change, find a new job, go back to school, etc. We find it harder and harder to live at odds with ourselves.

In America, there is another question we eventually ask each other in the search of learning who someone is. “So, where do you go to church?” or “Do you go to church?”. If you aren’t asking others this question, you’ve been asked it at some point in your life. This little question, in America, tells us what someone believes about life and death, politics, family structures, money, immigration, drinking, and even how we spend our free time. It’s a truly loaded question. You see, in America, we have a foundation, a hidden cultural expectation, that what you believe about religion or God, reflects on what you believe about ALL of the things. For a country so set on “freedom of religion,” we aren’t actually free from the “expectation” of religion. We almost don’t know how to navigate our social structures without it.

Up until a few years ago, I hadn’t recognized how powerful this cultural experience was. But my world opened up to more relationships with people from other countries. My Australian friends don’t really get our recent shift in American religions. They don’t understand why we are so polarized by our religious affiliation or why deconstructing or leaving our faith systems creates so much relational stress. I’m not saying they are faithless, by any means. But they don’t really connect with the need to create support systems around those who have left a faith system. It’s just not how they culturally understand each other. But for us Americans…leaving a faith system can mean leaving your entire tribe. It can mean that we are understood socially as wayward, heretical, rebellious, that we don’t value our tribe, and that we are immoral. It’s so loaded, friends.

The reason that we may have left a faith system, political party, family structure, or career is likely because our values no longer connect with it. We can no longer live in conflict with ourselves. This is where I take my clients through deep values work. We hone in on what they value most. And what we value, creates what we believe.

The second thing we do is to define the language, the words, we are using to describe themselves and their relationships. Often we will see that how we live out these words is quite different from their actual meanings. We attach ourselves to the language our culture uses and we build ourselves around this. And if our culture has loaded meanings for words, then we can get very lost from our truth, our identity.

Consider recent events in our society that have re-formed the meaning of a word. Let’s just use a simple word like “choice”. Are you saying “oh that’s not such a simple word!”? My Point Exactly. We raise our kids to make choices in life. We want them to choose good things. So in that context, it has one meaning. But when we use choice in relation to women’s health, well…we’ve socially opened up a can of worms, right? And to take it further, if you reveal what your relationship to the word choice is, you’ve now been placed in a particular tribe. So choosing our language becomes tricky.

Here’s another example at my own expense. I am 5 foot 1 and ¾ inches tall. I know this in a detailed way because my height is such that it's noticed by others. The language produced by my culture about this measurement are words like “short”, “cute”, “swee ant”, “adorable”, “small” and “athletic”. And you’re thinking, well that’s not mean or bad. What those words aren’t saying, though, are “sexy”, “strong” “mysterious, attractive” “alluring” or “big”. Our culture has decided what a “short stature” is and then when we don’t hear words used for a tall, long-legged woman we struggle to claim the same equal identity. Now, I love being short. But I did miss out on the “sexy” identity. I was always just cute. So presenting myself to the world wasn’t about being a sexy woman. It was about being cute and sweet….childlike. This embeds deeply in our identities. It actually works towards my lived relationship with sexuality. And this example is just about height!

Consider other words we use within our communities that can create further, more oppressive experiences. I mentioned a few of these in my podcast trailer. Purity or Pure. Holy. Rebellious. Desire. Feminine. Masculine. Moral. The list is long.

So where are you going with this, Jess?? Where I’m going is right here in this space. I want us to find freedom from these cultural experiences so that we aren’t living in roles that keep us small. You see, what I understand about who I was as a short woman in an evangelical Christian community, was that the space I took up NEEDED to remain small. My role was intended to be small. It was intended to allow someone else to take up more space than me.

Acknowledging that our language, our community and our social contexts form who we are IS our starting point. This acknowledgment is that place where we give ourselves permission and freedom to explore, to discover! I’d love for you to begin paying attention to the language you use and the language used around you. Take two extra minutes to contemplate the meanings and how they affect you. May you find a new awareness of how your world and self-view are affected by the language around you, even the language you use ABOUT yourself.

In the next episode, we will start diving into specific words and unravel our identities and values from their loaded meanings. We will find the filters we use and scramble them up.

The newfound ability to live in freedom and truth is going to rock your world! It will change everything.

When you liberate your language, you liberate your story.