Episode 170,171 (Transcript): What About Guilt and Shame? : A Conversation with C.A. Larson, Part 1 & 2
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener, Sarah Thomas, for her work in transcribing both of these episodes!
This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.
SH: Hi, I'm Susan Hinkley.
CH: And I'm Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is, “What About Shame and Guilt?” Today we're having a conversation with C.A. Larson.
CW: Yay, you're back, C.A.
CL.: Yay.
SH: Welcome, C.A. The title was even hard for me to say. I have a feeling I need to just lie down in advance.
CW: I was just going to say, Susan, are you lying down?
SH: If I sound kind of weird, it's because I'm recording lying down.
CL: It's a tough one today.
CW: It is. This is a tough one. It's a good one though.
CL: Yeah. A necessary one.
SH: A necessary one, especially for some of us.
SH: So C.A., we usually have our guests introduce themselves at the beginning of our conversations. And that seems completely ridiculous at this point; you're a regular; you're one of us. But is there anything that you would like to say to listeners to give a little context to this conversation - who you are and why you're here - all those things?
CL: Sure. Well, I felt like I needed to keep in congruence with the things I've shared in the past. So I have a few things to share with you today about myself.
SH: Awesome.
CL: I'm kind of a coward every time I get on an airplane because I'm really claustrophobic, but I am brave because I do it anyway because I want to see as much of this fascinating world as I can.
I love to cook and entertain when I have time and I like to try new recipes because I'm not a creature of habit, as I've shared before. I feel like I'm in a time of spiritual awakening. I just realized this the other day when I was thinking about all the amazing ideas that I want to explore and all the books I still need to read.
I feel like I need another lifetime to satisfy the curiosity I have about life, humans, and how we find meaning. I'm also content in a way that I don't think I've ever been before. Preparing for this podcast on guilt and shame has helped me realize that I can move on from some of the things I was holding that keep the guilt monster showing up in my life.
I think I see him more often in the rearview mirror now, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
SH: You are the queen of the intro. I love the way you do that. So good.
CW: So, so good.
SH: Thank you. Thank you for all of that. Today, we're going to let Cynthia kick off the discussion, and then I have a feeling it's going to be mostly the C.A. show, so let's get to it.
CW: Hopefully. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting, C.A., because I think you were the one that said to myself and Susan, “What about an episode on shame and guilt?” And we were like, wait, haven't we talked about that 82 times already? Cause I feel like we kind of have touched on it here and there. And yet never quite - am I right, Susan? We've never quite had an episode that this was the explicit topic.
SH: No, I don't even want to say the words.
CW: That's true. Susan's already lying down because she can hardly say the words out loud. So we definitely needed a therapist to come on. If Susan's already lying down, we can talk about this.
But, in preparation for this, I went ahead and combed our emails. We've been getting amazing emails from people for the last almost four years where people just spill their heart out. So I pulled in a few emails that we're going to intersperse throughout this conversation from women who wrote us about guilt and shame.
So, that's pretty much my intro for today.
A. I can't believe we haven't had this episode already, and
B. It's very needed because we get lots and lots of correspondence about this. So take it away, C.A.
CL: Great. Thank you. Often, when we're talking about a subject, we look up definitions, and this one is so loaded. If you look up definitions of guilt and shame in various dictionaries, you find all kinds of different stuff. It was just overwhelming to me. I had to stop and say, “I can't keep reading these.” Because there's no way we have [00:05:00] enough time - even if we had a 24-hour podcast - to go into all these things that it brought up.
The one definition of shame that was really correct was “a painful feeling that's a mix of regret, self-hate, and dishonor”. It's really heavy, but I felt like that really gets to the heart of it.
The guilt one's not so good because I think guilt can mean so many things to so many people. When you go back to the old definitions like the old English, it's “crime, sin, fault, or fine”. I'm not sure what fine means. Maybe you get fined for things that are crimes or wrong.
But guilt is so much more nuanced. So, instead, I thought I would move into who many of us think of as the queen of shame and vulnerability - and that's Brené Brown.
I think probably most of the listeners know that name too. In her books, Daring Greatly and Atlas of the Heart, she says, “Shame is a focus on self and guilt is a focus on behavior.”
So I take a test and I get 47 out of 100. Shame would say I am an idiot. Guilt would say I should have studied instead of going out with my friends.
We should recognize this when we're working with children, for sure. Instead of giving them a label - like you're a liar - we can say - you told a lie. We need to focus on behavior, because when someone labels themselves, we can correct that. We can say, “Oh no, you're not an idiot, you just made a bad decision”.
We can really help people who end up using labels associated with shame about who we are versus what we do.
That's what I always think of after reading Brene Brown: Oh yeah - guilt is about what I do; shame is about who I am.
And I think really, in the context of the LDS church, that pretty much holds up - when we feel guilt, it's about what we do or don't do. But shame oftentimes really sinks down deep into our character, who we think we are.
CW: You know what's interesting? A few months ago I did a presentation in person where I wanted to talk for a second about shame and guilt and the difference between them.
And I was like, “Oh, everybody knows Brene Brown's definitions, I don't need to do that. But I thought, well, I'll just put it in the slide anyway.” And her definition - I think in those two books - is, “Shame says I'm bad, whereas guilt says I did a bad thing”.
I had that on a slide and everyone pulled out their phone and took a picture of my slide. So I thought, “Oh, OK, maybe it isn't as obvious as I thought.” So I'm glad that we're going to discuss the difference.
CL: Yeah, that's a very concise way of saying it. So, I think that's good for those who aren't familiar, and I think we should never make those assumptions.
Sometimes you're talking on the podcast and I'm like, “Oh, no, I don't know that book, or I don't know that quote.” I think that's good to be aware of that.
Brene Brown goes on to say that shame is the fear of not being worthy of connection and belonging. It is the fear that you are not enough and will be rejected for your weaknesses.
It overtakes the prefrontal cortex of your brain and initiates your fight or flight response. She also says that if you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.
So I think that's really, really important as we talk about the difference between guilt and shame. Shame makes us feel small, flawed, and never good enough. We desperately don't want to experience shame and we're not willing to talk about it. Yet the only way to resolve shame is to talk about it.
And so that's what we're going to do today.
SH: Man, I just feel like our church culture is a perfect set up for shame.
CW: A perfect petri dish?
SH: Well, yeah. Even when what's actually being talked about is behavior, I feel like a lot of members’ (by which I actually mean me) response to that is, “I'm a bad person.”
And I don't know if that's something that I bring to this culture - like I have some kind of predisposition to go there with it - but I don't think that I'm alone with that. And so as I start to break these apart I think it's really great to make that distinction. But what I'm really interested in understanding about my own experience as a Latter-day Saint woman, is what I brought to that, and what was groomed into me as a result of my life in the church. Because I feel like it's both things.
CL: No, I think you're right. I was just going to say that. I think it's both things. I think we have a certain set point in our [00:10:00] DNA. And I think I'm going to talk a little bit later about inherited guilt and how some things just come down through our genetics.
So some of it is our personality characteristics - what we come with. But again (and I know I've used this phrase before on the podcast) I think it is also taught, and it becomes in every fiber of our being because, from such an early age, all of this messaging is there, over and over and over again.
And so anything that we take in is going to bounce around against that blanket of what we've already instilled in ourselves. Everything has to then be taken in and evaluated according to what we already believe - or we think we believe, or someone's told us to believe.
CW: Kind of a perfect storm, maybe.
CL: It is a perfect storm, but I so agree with you, Susan, that we are a set up for that. And I think even the secrecy, silence, and judgment - those things are very present. At least that's what really resonates with me as being present throughout my life in that setting.
It's interesting also in Brene's research that she found that shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying, but guilt is not.
So I think that's - again - that huge distinction between when we can just say I did something wrong versus I am wrong. Her hopeful message is that empathy and guilt can work together to create a force that's adaptive and powerful. And I think you'll see that thread throughout our discussion today. Because I think that's super important.
There are some other ideas out there about guilt and shame in psychology, which is my field. In reading different authors and different schools of thought around it, a lot of it comes down to healthy guilt and unhealthy guilt, and I agree with that.
I think with healthy guilt, we recognize that we've done something wrong - the obvious thing we need to change. And so having this feeling of, I hurt someone's feelings, or I made a mistake there - that can motivate us to better behavior or to take care of what's wrong.
It also makes us more aware, a trait we call conscientiousness. That's not a word I hear a lot, but it shows up on personality tests because it's a good trait we want to have a good amount of because it is our awareness of how we're impacting others. It helps us to see if our actions misalign with our values so we can make the adjustments we need to.
CW: Well, yeah, that makes total sense. Otherwise, how would we ever be good and healthy humans if we didn't know when we did something wrong and we needed to apologize?
CL: Exactly. And, you know, we talk often about narcissism - it's such a buzzword these days - but that's one of the characteristics when we're looking at personality and personality disorders - it’s that lack of conscientiousness, that lack of ability to look at oneself and have awareness of how we're impacting others, which also leads to a lack of empathy, right? Those are hallmarks of that.
I think the hopeful thing is - I know you both are younger than me - but I at least think in my children's generation, I feel like they're doing a better job of not accepting guilt from others if it doesn't align with their knowing of themselves. Do you think that's true?
SH: I do.
CL: Do you see that? I think it's not about caring what others think, but rather going inside and seeing how that aligns with our personal beliefs. The unhealthy guilt makes us want to give up because we can never be good enough. And the healthy guilt just makes us say, “I can change - I need to do something different.”
Interestingly enough, in the psychological literature, you also can run across people saying that there's healthy shame and unhealthy shame.
CW: Really?
CL: I don't believe it. I don't agree.
SH: Say more about that because I want to know, what would healthy shame be?
CL: Well, what they say is that healthy shame is what keeps us within community standards.
SH: Oh, that makes sense.
CL: But I don't label that as shame. I'm sure it's semantics, but I'm not sure it's shame that keeps me from going out my door and running up and down my street naked. I think it's more like, that's not appropriate. Even if I'm feeling good or whatever, I would never do that.
But, you know, I think that's the idea - that it keeps us conforming to what we agree as a society or certain standards or certain ways [00:15:00] of behaving. I just don't like the idea that it it takes shame in order for us to conform. Because then I think that's negative, right? Instead of saying - we make agreements, we have laws, we have ways of behaving that make us able to get along with each other and work together.
But that is how they define it. But I do agree that there's toxic shame. For me, all shame is toxic, and it makes a person feel like God made a mistake when he made them.
SH: I think there might be a generational thing at play here a little bit, too, because I'm thinking about the adults in my world when I was a child. I think shame was regarded as a useful tool.
And in talking to my parents, who are now around 90 years old, I think they're looking around at the world saying, what happened to people? Don't people feel shame about anything? You know, why are people behaving the way they are? What happened to shame?
I feel like it was more accepted or even, utilized with some intention sometimes to keep kids in line at school. I think of all of the ways that I was molded into a person as a child of a different generation. I feel like it's different now. Those tools are no longer - well, we've recognized that they're not good.
CL: Yeah. That answers part of the question of why you feel the way you do.
SH: Exactly.
CL: And as you're saying that, I'm thinking, do you ever hear the phrase, “Shame on you”? We don't hear that anymore.
SH: Right. We don't use that.
CL: We said that growing up, didn't we?
SH: Absolutely. A ton of it.
CL: So I think you're absolutely right that that is generational, and we didn't necessarily think there was anything wrong with it, but I do think that's what we bring to the table now.
SH: I think so too. So I mean, hooray! When we know better, we can do better. I love this, let's change.
CW: Yes.
CW: Do we all remember - speaking of shame being more acceptable back in the day - when someone was excommunicated, they would announce that from the pulpit.
SH: Of course. Yeah.
CW: Can you even imagine doing that now? That just wouldn't happen now.
SH: No. To what end?
CW: So I'm fully with you, Susan. Society has changed.
CL: Exactly. So one of the questions that always gets asked of me as a therapist is, “What do I need to do to take care of these things that come up for me? If I did something wrong, or if I didn't do something wrong, how do I deal with this guilt that's coming up?” There's a good book - it was one that I only became familiar with getting ready for this podcast. Valorie Burton is the author, and the book (I like the book's name) is Let Go of the Guilt, Stop Beating Yourself Up and Take Back Your Joy.
She has a method of looking at guilt and she calls it the peel method. P E E L, that peel. And she says it's about peeling back the layers to see if it's authentic or false guilt.
The letters stand for P - is pinpoint your guilt trigger. Recognize where this is coming from? Why is it showing up? Why am I feeling this way?
And then examine. E - is examine the thought. Think about what that is and what that means to you. Is it something that you really do believe is in agreement with your values and what you believe is right?
If it's not, then she says the next E - is exchange the lie for the truth. What is a more accurate thought about what I really believe?
And then the L - is list the evidence for that truth. You know, flesh it out and say, I believe this because this is important to me. And so that feeling I was feeling is not necessarily congruent with that.
So these are the things that I want to really believe. And when you go through that process, you're dissecting it and processing it and coming to a place where you're like, “Oh, no, I shouldn't feel guilty about that because that isn't congruent with the things that I really believe for myself.”
And I don't know if anyone ever told me I could do that, I could think about it that way.
CW: I love that. That is an amazing kind of point of introspection to go through and see, is this healthy or unhealthy guilt?
SH: I think so too. And I think it gives you some ownership of the process. Is this guilt a useful tool for me in some way and a way to explore that and move through it and get something out of it? Or just set it aside and see it for what it is.
CL: Yeah, and I think instead of just feeling like we're always falling short and we feel guilty and sometimes it even goes into shame, I think we need to realize that the guilt often stems from falling below the expectations of others.
And I think that's the most liberating process. Part of this process is to realize that no one's expectations for my life matter but my own.
SH: Well, now you're just talking crazy talk.
CW: I was just going to say.
CL: I [00:20:00] know. I know, but take that in. Hold that for a minute.
SH: Yeah, I'm going to have to think about that.
CW: Thank you for saying that, Susan. I was thinking the same thing.
CL: We were thinking the same thing.
CW: I was like, “Now C.A. is just talking crazy.” And yet at the same time, I'm like, “Can you take the pulpit at General Conference and kind of broadcast that?”
SH: Exactly. Could you say that again, please?
CL: Exactly. And there's a great quote by Lori Gottlieb - the one who wrote the book Maybe You Need To Talk To Someone - and she says, “Just because someone sends you guilt, you don't have to accept delivery.” I think that's so good. Because I think we grew up thinking if someone sends us guilt, we have to accept it. It's part of our culture.
SH: Well, especially if it comes over a pulpit or from someone in a position of authority over us.
CL: Exactly. And that's why, because it's so contrary to what we're used to in the church - the expectations are spelled out for us. We're expected to become this certain thing that's defined, and it's usually by the roles that we play and those are defined.
And so then how do we reject that? And I think it goes back to your consent. Did we really consent to all those things? Or were they just handed to us and we took it because that's what we were supposed to do? We would go through this checklist and then when we complete the checklist, we're worthy. Right?
And that's why when I did my Barbie monologue for LDS women, that was what was coming up for me - all these things, all these expectations, all these checklists of things that we are supposed to accomplish. And even though it's a little bit tongue in cheek, there's a whole lot of seriousness in it because it's the thing I hear from LDS women all the time.
So I think you have a quote from one of the listeners about this.
CW: Yeah, we received an email from a woman who said she's really glad now to see our new general Relief Society presidency, who have all been career women. She said, “Other working women love the messages as they have felt guilt or shame from others for feeling like they were ‘breaking’ the church rules, and now they feel validated.”
CL: Yeah. I think that's really good, and I'm glad they feel validated because I think sometimes the response that I hear is they feel a little bit angry.
SH: I think it's both. That's what I was just going to say. There is validation in it, and also a possibility of a little bit of gaslighting that might make you feel pretty angry.
CL: Yeah, because we're taught that this is who we're supposed to be. But then you're putting women now in positions of authority that show something different. And I think in some ways it's wonderful and in some ways it's really confusing.
SH: I guess what would make it better is if we could say out loud, “Hey, we're so happy to see this change. And also, yes, here's what's hard about that…” Because if we've aired that problem, we can move forward together to where it's just a good thing. But you have to get the healing part in there, which comes with acknowledging the problem and being able to say it out loud.
CW: Well, now you're talking crazy, Susan!
SH: This is the thing I yearn for from my church leaders, and also from the members around me in the pews. Just let me say, “Hey, I love that we have these career women in high places now. And also that's really hard for me as a woman who made choices and concessions in my life.”
CL: Absolutely. I’d love to hear that too. We're taught to aim for the highest degree in the highest kingdom, something that all but the most egotistical people fear they can never achieve because of their shortcomings.
Mormon hell is an eternity of guilt and shame. That's how strongly people feel about those two emotions. “If only I had…” and then there's a whole list of things that they should have done that would have then maybe made them feel like they were worthy.
SH: Well, I'm so glad that you brought the F word into this now because fear is really the thing that I if I had to choose one characteristic of my life as a Latter-day Saint, I really think fear might be the thing that's been played on with the most consistency.
I was thinking when we were preparing for this conversation about being a little girl and I'm remembering where we were in our church building, which had an upstairs and a downstairs. And if you were in a classroom downstairs, you were still in Junior Sunday School or Junior Primary. So, I was young, right?
And we were having a conversation. We had a substitute that day - like a young returned missionary had been asked to teach us. And so he was telling us fantastical tales of the [00:25:00] second coming, right? Here are all the horrible things that are going to happen. But one of the things was that all of our sins were going to be shouted from the rooftops.
It's that shouted from the rooftops thing that went somewhere right deep into my imagination as a young kid at church. And I felt fear about that forever after. I've never really been able to quite root that out. But I heard someone allude to it the other day again in church, so I thought - it's not totally gone.
There are still people who believe our sins are going to be shouted from the rooftop. So everyone's going to know what you did.
CW: Is that like from the book of Revelation or something?
SH: It's somewhere, yeah. There is some line in the scripture somewhere where this took hold, but it's such a powerful idea that really goes straight to shame.
CL: It does go straight to shame.
CL: And fear.
SH: And fear. And so, just like that little anecdote from my own childhood tells me so much about my own experience. And how I went on to move through the church. Because for some reason I was really susceptible to that idea and it took hold.
CW: Okay. Well, I just Googled it, Susan. It's Luke 12:3.
SH: Oh, it's not even Revelation, so we can’t even say, “Wow, crazy Revelation!”
CW: Yeah. “What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight. What you have whispered to someone behind closed doors will be shouted from the rooftops.”
SH: Ouch.
CL: Yeah, I'm not a fan of that one. I remember from that kind of same time, getting some kind of image that was taught me - I'm sure in Sunday school or wherever - about the fact that we'll go to the judgment and we have to watch a video or a movie of our life - all the things we've done wrong.
And that felt bad enough, but that maybe was not public. Maybe that was just a few people that are going to judge me and tell me where I get to go.
CW: Different than rooftops.
SH: Yeah, it's still bad enough. I don't know. I don't want to see it committed to film. Please let's not all replay it.
CL: Please let’s not have that be what it is.
So, this goes right into this message of fear and guilting. If we don't do what we should, we will be lost. We'll be in sad heaven. And I think that the church does a really good job of that.
And one of my examples that I just think about over and over again is my mother-in-law. When she was at the end of her life, she was in her late 90’s - so we're talking like 96, 97 - and she told my husband, she didn't want to die.
And he's like, “Well, I get that. You know, I don't think any of us really want to.” We always laugh because she was one that had FOMO - she was always afraid of missing something. So I feel like that's why she hung on as long as she did - she didn't want to miss anything.
But then she went on to say that she was afraid she had done something wrong - and this went back to her early 20’s - and that God would not be able to forgive her. She didn't share what the sin was, but knowing her, it was probably a minor infraction.
Even if it was something of significance, she had served in the church her entire life. She and my father-in-law were pioneers in the church in the South. They had dedicated their whole lives to it.
And yet she was afraid to die because she felt guilty that she wasn't good enough to face God.
SH: And she carried that for all those years.
CL: I know. That's the thing that makes me the most sad that I think about and I just think oh, we’ve got to help. We’ve got to help people get rid of this so that they don't show up in their 90’s still holding something from 70 years before.
There was another one that I read about a man who reported his elderly mother was sobbing after General Conference and saying, I know I'm not good enough. I know I'm not good enough.
And then there was a man who had cancer and he got a blessing and went into remission. He was so happy that the blessing cured him and that he was good enough to have that blessing. And then the cancer reoccurred and he got another blessing; and this time, the cancer got worse and he became terminal. He was so distraught, not just because of the cancer and that he was going to die, but because he felt like he was not worthy enough to have his blessing work. He felt guilt and shame for this.
SH: I'm just trying to think what that says about your whole outlook on the entire world and what the trajectory of people's lives says about their worthiness or not. I mean, I don't know.
CL: If we're only good enough if our prayers are answered or if the blessing works or whatever - we're only good if that happens, then there are a lot of sad people. I'm feeling really guilty that, gosh, what did I do wrong that didn't get answered the way I wanted it to.
SH: That's just tragic to me. It is tragic.
CW: I'm not surprised though.
SH: I'm thinking about like I'm 25 years old [00:30:00] and I can remember it so clearly, I'm sitting on the floor with my friend, she was about 10 years older than I was at this point. We were talking about something that had happened in our ward on Sunday, like a gospel doctrine lesson.
And I said, “I'm just so tired of being made to feel guilty for not reading my scriptures. I'm sick of that.” And she said to me, “I have never felt one second of guilt at church for not reading my scriptures.”
CL: Whoa. What church was she going to?
SH: Right? That was my reaction. But the reason I remember that so clearly is because it was the first time ever that I realized, “Oh! I might be having a different experience than some people in this organization.”
And it made me wonder, “What am I bringing to this that is making it all so hard to me? What is it about me that makes me feel all of this guilt and shame from what she obviously didn't even think was a remarkable Sunday school lesson at all?”
It didn't have the same impact on her at all. I've always thought about that and wanted to somehow leverage it to understand more about myself and see if I can improve my own experience of all of this.
CW: And did it do that, Susan? Because I'm thinking if I heard someone say, I've never had any guilt, and then you're thinking, well, what am I bringing to the table then - wouldn't that in some way be liberating? Because then you could be like, “Oh! I can choose!”
SH: It's not necessarily a choice, though. That's the thing. I mean, can I choose? I struggle with a significant amount of self-loathing in my life, for instance, with guilt and shame things.
Those things are hard for me. So if I could choose my way out of those, believe me, I'd have chosen a long time ago. I'm not gonna care about any of this, right? But I haven't always felt like I had that choice, and I have envied her that somehow she was able to go to church and not feel those things.
CW: Yeah. Well, and that's why I love the acronym that C.A. shared earlier, P E E L. Like I really think that could be a really useful exercise. You just needed that acronym when you were 25 years old, Susan.
SH: Exactly. That P E E L thing that you mentioned feels like a really accessible tool. That's actually something I could pick up and engage in a process that could help me. So where was that when I was 25? That would have been great for me.
CL: Exactly. Amen to that.
I think the other hard thing is that the church really functions when the members do the things that are expected of them. There are many things we do at church that are inherently rewarding, for sure, but there's also a lot of shame, guilt, and fear used to motivate the members to do what needs to be done.
And the reward of rising to the top is the carrot dangled in front of the members. And that [carrot] is where we're going after this life.
SH: Well, I'm pretty sure, like in the story I just told, that the teacher intended the people in the room to feel guilty. I don't think that was totally on me, right?
CL: You were in alignment. I think you were feeling what was intended and how most of the people in the room felt. So I think if you're feeling like she's the norm and you're not, I think that's wrong. I think you were probably with the majority of the people feeling like, “Oh, shoot.”
I had someone come into my office just this week. (I always love it when I hear a lot of guilt and shame coming in because it is like - oh yeah, I'm going to talk about this.) But she was mad. She's semi attending and she'd gotten an email saying that tomorrow you need to show up and clean the church.
She was just fuming about it. She said, “I didn't sign up for it” - again the consent thing - “I didn't say I would participate in this. I think the church has plenty of money to hire janitors and it gives someone a job, and I just think it's ridiculous. Why are they sending these out?”
And they also said, “If you can't make it, you need to find someone to replace you.” She was like, “Oh, I'm not doing that. No, I'm not.” And so I thought, “Oh they're trying to guilt you. They're trying to say, this is your responsibility. We want to have a clean church. We all go there. And so you need to do your part.”
That's just one example, but I think there are a lot of places where that shows up in our church life.
In preparing for this, I read that the church began in Utah as a theocracy. So the government and church were under one rule under Brigham Young. Since the government and kingdom of God were one, they could enforce whatever they wanted; they could not just guilt and shame, but they could take away life, limb, and property.
And so when [00:35:00] Utah became a state, this power went away because it separated church and state. And that's when guilt and shame began to take root because they needed a different kind of power to control.
There's a threat of what will happen if we don't do what we're supposed to do. And it might be a real threat or it might just be implied or it might just be something we're going to miss out on, or be sad about, or whatever, but it's there.
SH: Well, I think it's getting better, but that's been slow to go away - that theocracy idea. I'm thinking about back in the dark ages when I first went through the temple, there were some really harsh things as part of that ceremony.
CW: You're thinking before 1990, right?
SH: Exactly. That was a very real threat, right? And scary. Really traumatizing to a little fearful me. Anyway, it was traumatizing and it's kind of still lodged in my brain. You can tell things take root in me and they just stay. I feel like we're getting better, we're moving away from that, but those are the seeds that we're continuing to grow fruit from.
The temple endowment continues to evolve and get a little better and a little better, but the seeds are the same. And without being able to talk about those kinds of things either - which we don't - can we really make it better for people like me?
CW: I know you say, Susan, it's getting better and it is getting better, but I also think that's why the message of grace that you and I peddle is such a radical message. Just like what C.A. was talking about a second ago about a theocracy - it's like, well, wait a minute - grace? That's so foreign to our Mormon ears.
You're saying I'm already whole? God's okay with me the way I am right now? Well, if I accept grace, then what motivation do I have to be a good person? Life will just descend into chaos if I don't have the guilt propelling me to become that better person.
And it's like, wow! The church really has done a number on us in our quid pro-quo-ness, that we have to earn these things. We have to do all these things to be worthy of being whole and okay with Christ.
So we're getting better, but you and I see it so much - grace sounds good to people's ears, but it's also like, wait a minute - foreign object approaching.
SH: Well, it's pretty hard to insert grace into something that was grown from seeds of something else. Pretty hard to go back later and have grace have a meaningful impact.
CL: You're so right.
CW: Yep. Now, I need the lie down!
CL: It's like the building blocks, right? It's part of the structure and you can't just extract those without totally deconstructing everything.
SH: We've got to raze it to the very foundation in order for that to be changed.
CL: I wasn't going to say that, so thank you for saying it.
SH: Wow. Well, now I’ve got to think more about that. Or try not to think about it. Maybe that'll help.
CL: That's probably a whole episode, right?
CW: We can always have another episode on grace, Susan, because I think we're not finished talking about that.
CL: And I think that leads us into where there are places where we have improved. I would never deny that. But there are still places where we do public shaming. We marginalize those who have made mistakes.
Someone can't go on a mission, someone can't take the sacrament, someone can't hold a calling or pray in church if they've had discipline taken against them. A young man can't bless the sacrament. A young woman can't go to the temple to do baptisms for the dead. These things show up in public.
A lot of what I hear from women is about the judgment of others around the clothes they wear - “Oh, they must not be wearing their garments” - or about the things they do, how they spend their time, how they're not serving enough. There is a lot of criticism that still goes on. I think you had an email about that.
CW: Yeah. We got an email from a woman who has chosen to stop wearing garments. And she said, “I feel just as close to God. And my testimony hasn't changed, but the way people talk about them publicly makes me feel like I should feel guilty for not wearing them. I don't dress differently, but I somehow feel so much better about myself, even though my body definitely doesn't look as good as it once did.”
CL: Yeah. So [00:40:00] again, we still have a ways to go in changing the culture to be one of acceptance. I often hear about the damage it can do to those who don't feel like they fit in. And we'll kind of proceed and talk about different ways people feel that.
Oftentimes people will say things like, “I feel like I'm a square peg in a round hole, I don't fit.” And I know it's not always intentional that people want to make them feel bad about that, sometimes it's unintentional shaming and guilting, but it can be so devastating for those who don't fit the mold.
Even if people are making different choices about how they're going to live the gospel and how they're going to be a church member, it brings up a lot of angst because they're uncomfortable with thinking outside the binary mindset of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.
And so if someone like your friend could say, “No, I don't feel guilty about not reading my scriptures.” It's like, what? You can do that? No, you can't do that, right?
CW: Right. Yeah. We received an email from a woman who wanted to leave the church, but she's a public figure, so she hid it and here's what she said about that.
“I couldn't stay and I couldn't go. So I stayed, but cut myself off - just kind of put my own self in a spiritual prison - so much guilt and fear.”
CL: That makes me so sad - a spiritual prison - that just feels so not okay to have to do that in order to make everything work. I believe it, I believe that it probably happens more than we know.
CW: I recently learned in the last year the acronym PIMO, have you heard of that C.A.? P I M O. Physically in, mentally out. And so plenty of people physically stay in the church for different reasons - for this woman, she's a public figure - but mentally, they are gone.
CL: I do hear that for all kinds of reasons, whether it's my spouse is active and wants me to be there with them, or I have children and they still want to participate so I feel like I need to support them, or my extended family - my family of origin - would disown me so I just kind of show up, but I'm checked out.
SH: Which has got to be some kind of self preservation that removing yourself mentally from it. Which is very opposite of what church should be. So that's gotta be doing a number on you also because it's so opposite of what you should be getting from that experience. By should, I just mean ideally. Ideally, a person goes to church to have their spirit fed, not to shut their spirit down and withdraw.
CL: No. So it is sad and I don't know how sustainable it is. I see that in other areas where someone can just kind of tough it out, for even a number of years they can make it work. Then at some point they just get so worn down, they say, “Whatever the consequences are, I have to be authentic. I have to make another choice around this.”
Everyone's journey is their own journey, but I do find it's hard to see people suffer in this way. I look outside the church at my friends and it's different for them. So I recognize this as being a specific thing to the church because I will ask them -my close friends that are not members - I'll ask them things like, “Don't you feel guilty about that? Don't you feel guilty about not doing this and this for your children or not being this, or what?
And they're, they look at me like I'm a little bit crazy (which I probably am a little bit crazy). But they're just like, “No, I don't feel that. I don't have that degree of guilt and shame.”
I have one close friend - we laugh about it because I've asked her so many times - and she'll even just answer before I ask her, she'll say, “Nope, I don't have guilt about that.” And I'm like, “Okay.”
I do see this in other places. And that is with the people that I see in my practice from other orthodox religions. So my Muslim friends and clients, my Orthodox Jewish clients, my Evangelical Christian clients, they all share a lot of these same feelings. The list is different that they feel like they have to conform to, but the guilt and shame is very familiar and very much the same.
I think it makes it easier for me to work with them because I really understand it coming from my own place with that. And oftentimes it's just the feeling of never being enough. Never doing enough. [00:45:00] And, so that resonates.
SH: So would it be possible to have religion that had power in people's lives without having this component of it?
CL: I think that question from all the reading, and you guys do tons more reading than I do, but don't you find that question being posed?
I know in the book Faith After Doubt by Brian McLaren, the whole last section of the book is about where do we go with this? How do we create community and organizations that don't have the guilt and the shame. And acceptance - acceptance for people finding their own pathway, believing their own things, and having a place where they can still come and have community. I have been thinking about a lot about this.
SH: I'm not sure human beings have shown that we are capable of doing that. I am hopeful for us, but I don't know.
CL: He points out places where it's happening in small ways. And so I think he wants to be hopeful that will grow and grow and be better. And on a good day, I want to be hopeful about that too. And on other days I'm like, I don't know if we can do it.
CW: I don't know. I follow a public figure and she is Episcopalian and she jokes about that. And she says, “Episcopalian is like light religion. They kind of leave a lot of that guilt and shame behind.” Now, I'm sure that's not true for every Episcopal church, but at least the one she goes to, she's like, “Nah, we don't do that kind of stuff here.” And I'm like, “Okay!”
CL: I love that. I love that if someone doesn't do the guilt stuff, that's a good thing. We should look into that.
So a lot of times we're just getting messages and I think they too often come from across the pulpit. There's a recent one I think that's caused a lot of chatter that I've heard in my office, but also on social media about Elder Godoy, his talk from October conference.
SH: Yeah, I read it this morning in preparation for recording. I wish you hadn't said that, so I wouldn't have reread that.
CL: How'd it make you feel?
SH: How'd it make me feel? It made me just growl. Didn't you just hear me? Well, okay, it goes back to something my husband and I joke a lot about. Most people believe that they can be together with their families forever, but what Mormonism brings to the table is the idea that maybe we can't.
CW: But don't worry, we have the solution to that too.
SH: Right. We do, but the solution is for you not to step outside the chain that you're in, right? The solution is you've got to be the link in the chain, which is what that talk is about. Yeah. It's about not breaking the chain so that you can have an eternal family, because any bad decision you make - looking forward with it - you're ruining it for everyone.
That's what that talk is about. “You're ruining it for everyone, would you please reconsider?”
CL: So heavy, the responsibility it puts on individuals. I think mothers feel that more than anything because we're totally the ones that if we're faithful everything will be okay, we'll keep all those links in place, right? It's so heavy.
I had the same feeling when I really sat with it yesterday, reading it again, I could feel a pit in my stomach. I could feel that age-old thing from every fiber of my being rearing up and saying, “Oh, but what if?” and “Oh, I should…”, and I had to kind of do that method that I shared with you of really examining and realizing - no, that's not in alignment with what I believe. I'm not accepting that guilt. But it was a wrestle.
The other talk I wanted to bring up, because it's been talked about a lot lately is the Ezra Taft Benson 1987 talk, To The Mother's in Zion. That one - maybe because it's more removed time wise, and maybe because I feel like it's archaic in so many ways - it was easier for me to just read it and shake my head.
I could even read it and say, “Yeah, moms should talk to their kids, Moms should do this.” But you don't have to be this kind of a mom. You don't have to be a stay-at-home mom, or you don't have to be the perfect little Mormon wife to do those things. So I could read it that way and it [00:50:00] didn't have that negative impact on me. But there are so many talks about the value of women. And you have to realize that men are the ones that have created this image of the perfect woman.
That's how we see if we're valuable or not: against this image and criteria that men have decided for us. It makes me realize why so many women hate Mother's Day: because it's a reminder of all the things we're not.
I gave a talk once called, “I Hate Mother's Day”. I probably gave it three or four times - it’s one of my favorite talks. I would hear so many women say, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to hear one more talk about a perfect mom who does everything right.” It sets us up for failure and makes us realize that men control our value. It's based on the standards they have set and it's built around women serving men and fulfilling their expectations.
CW: I'll never forget that moment when I realized that everything I had been taught in the church about what a woman should be came from men. And I remember - speaking of a lying down moment, Susan - I was like, “Oh my gosh! This is the most brilliant plan that patriarchy could ever come up with - let's define what a woman is and that's how we will control them.”
SH: Well, let's first of all, write the Bible so we can start way, way back and define women there, and then we can build everything else on top of that!
CL: It's true. It starts at the beginning, doesn't it? And I think I said this in my talk at the October conference - why would the men want that to change?
SH: Of course, they wouldn't. There's no incentive for that.
CL: No, no incentive. So we wonder why change is slow and tiny and what I feel sometimes is insignificant. Some of the change is window dressing because it's like, “See how progressive we are, see how we're changing this?” And then you read news articles about the women getting kicked off the stand in the Bay area, and you're like, “Oh, okay, for every little change we're making, we're also backstepping.”
Sometimes it's hard for me when some of the things in the talk by Elder Godoy feel punitive.
And so then I have to go back into my own personal spirituality and say, you know, it's not really Heavenly Father or Jesus. Jesus was only punitive to the hypocrites. He was only punitive to those who deserved to be called out, but otherwise, he was so kind and so accepting and so loving. Sometimes I have to go back to that just to breathe.
CW: You know what I love about what you're saying right now is when you defined PEEL earlier, I wrote it down because I'm like, “This is going on my mirror.” But it sounds like that's what you're saying. When you go back to what Christ modeled for us, that would be maybe the second E, you know, E exchange a lie for a truth, like going back to the truth of what Christ taught us.
This is maybe where we could get our bearings and say, “Well, I know that's not true. That's not what Jesus taught us.”
CL: Yes, that's how we exchange. We exchange the lie for the truth.
SH: Oh, so good. Well, in my life as a Latter-day Saint, I have always felt like somehow the church (I don't wanna blame it on the organization) has always been able to take something that should be good news and make it not good news. And a good example of that is families being together forever. We make it not good news when we say, “Well, maybe yours can't, right?”
That's the kind of shift that I'm talking about. I could never understand when people were talking about the good news because it didn't ever feel like good news to me. But there's been a shift now, you see, I've found the good news.
But that's something that I had to change within me. And now it doesn't matter so much what is coming from the organization or the culture. I don't care if they want to distort the good news, whatever! It doesn't change the way that I understand it now. I found the good news, and I think, Cynthia, there's a Nadia Bowles Weber quote that you used recently.
CW: The one about transformation?
SH: Yes, about how it's never about her working harder, right? Anything that really transforms can't be about working harder. That's the kind of thing that I mean - for something to be good news now, it [00:55:00] doesn't involve something that I'm not good enough - and I'm gonna have to do better - to get there. That's never gonna feel like good news to me.
Once that changed for me, then it shifted the power dynamic in my whole relationship with my church.
CW: Gosh, that is so true.
CL: Yep. From an external one to an internal one.
SH: Yeah, why couldn't someone have given that to me as a kid?
CL: I know. This is where I feel like I need to live my life over again.
SH: I know. Me too. I'd like a do over on a few key things.
CL: Yeah. The things we know now.
CW: Okay, Susan. Well, surprise, surprise. We have a lot more material than we thought. So, how about we end part one this week and come back next week for more talk about guilt and shame.
SH: I think if there was ever anything that deserved two full episodes, it's probably guilt and shame. Unfortunately. So for sure, I'll be back next week. Okay. Thank you.
Voicemail Caller 1:
Hi, Susan and Cynthia. Last night I went to the temple preview for my daughter who's heading into Young Women's. She's the only girl in our ward in this age group, and it was her and several boys.
There were multiple reminders that girls are treated as second-class citizens in our church, starting with the primary president saying, “You boys are moving up to be deacons and all of the responsibilities that come with that.” And then to my daughter, “You'll be moving up to the, what is it called again? Oh, the younger class in Young Women's.”
Then a member of the bishopric spoke directly to all the boys about all the things that they get to do to show the ward that they are stalwart men of God. He barely acknowledged my daughter was in the room.
I wanted to stand up and scream how completely obvious it is that everyone seems to care more about the boys and their growth and potential than the girls that are in the church. They don't even get a name anymore because those designators like Beehive, Miamaid, and Laurel were taken away from them, too.
That is how unimportant and nameless girls are in this church, and it just breaks my heart. And it's getting harder and harder to want to raise my children in this environment. Thank you so much for all that you do. It makes it so much less lonely to know that you're there speaking up for the women.
Voicemail Caller 2:
Hey! I've been waiting forever for an episode on patriarchal blessings. I have so many thoughts and just so little time. As I listened to this episode, I kept thinking back to my own experiences with my blessing and a talk given in October 2014 by Elder Carlos Godoy. He shares how a friend asked him how he was fulfilling his patriarchal blessing.
His talk is about his response to that. More importantly, though, his talk made me analyze my own blessing. If we believe in putting our shoulder to the wheel, being more than just benchwarmers, or that faith without works is dead, why should we assume that our patriarchal blessing is something that just casually happens to us?
I see my patriarchal blessing as an invitation for me to get to work. My blessing specifically talks about how my involvement in my community will bring people to Christ. My blessing has encouraged me to be an activist when I would really love nothing more than to sit at my house and be left alone. I see activism as an extension of being like Jesus.
Because of my patriarchal blessing, I have been involved in social justice groups. I volunteer to work with refugees, I write opinion pieces to the newspaper when I want to see change, I attend school board meetings and volunteer in the PTA. When I am afraid of standing up for the marginalized in church or in conversations with colleagues and friends, I think about my patriarchal blessing.
I understand how patriarchal blessings are sticky and uncomfortable for so many. My blessing talks a lot about future church callings with my husband, who has left the church. It's painful, but thinking about how I can be proactive about my blessing makes me curious about other forms of callings my husband and I can do together that don't include the institution.
Closing Credits:
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Episode 171: Part 2
CW: Hello, I'm Cynthia Winward
SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley.
CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of today's episode is, “What About Shame and Guilt? Part Two.” Thanks for coming back, Susan, because what a fun topic.
SH: It's a great topic! Do you think I can live through another conversation about this, Cynthia?
I'll tell you why I can, because C.A. Larson is here to discuss it with us, so it's all good.
CW: It is all good.
SH: Let's roll it.
CL: The author E. L. Koenigsberg said, “Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.”
I think that's the journey that we're all on - to find ourselves. What really makes a difference in how we deal with guilt and shame is knowing ourselves. We can take those things in and know whether or not they're real and resonate with us versus something that someone else wants us to believe about ourselves or about our world.
A woman commented on Instagram about how guilty she felt about going back to grad school when her kids were young, and the fact that she loved it. I think the guilt came from not just doing it, but that she loved it. And even though her husband was able to stay home with the kids and it all worked out well, she still felt so much guilt.
And I just think, “How is this a good thing that we make women feel guilty about the good things that they're doing with their lives?” And that also led me to think about some comments that I've had from clients. One said, “I thought I was going to be happy as a wife and mother. I'd been taught that my whole life, that was the thing I was supposed to look forward to, but I'm not happy. I married later and I gave up a really promising career and I'm resentful and my husband criticizes me and how I do my job as a mother and a wife. And I'm so unhappy.”
I know sometimes the formula does work for people and they really do find happiness, but I think it's important that we look at the fact that sometimes it doesn't, and this idea of one-size-fits-all that we put out there can be really damaging to people when they think, “I did everything right. This is what I was supposed to do. And now what?”
I think those are hard. Those are hard messages. Those are hard things to hear.
There are two types of guilt we talk about in the church. I remember learning about them from the time I was very small. There are things we do wrong, and we call those sins of commission. And then there are the things that we don't do that we should be doing. And those are the sins of omission.
We can go through and list all the things under the commission, like all the sexual sins - promiscuity, pornography, affairs and there's abortion, alcohol, drugs, coffee, and tea and there's cheating, lying, abuse, murder, and sin against the Holy Ghost.
And then of course, if you're LGBTQ and you're acting on that, that's definitely a sin of commission. And then there are the things - the longer list - of things that we should be doing, but sometimes feel like we're not, or we aren't.
Those are things like doing our callings, ministering, attending church, doing family history, having more kids and staying home to raise the kids, obeying our husbands, getting married and not being too loud or aggressive. Obeying priesthood leaders, praying, scripture reading, service.
It goes on and on. I feel like I'm doing the Barbie monologue again, right? It goes on and on and on. It's interesting because I recognize these lists of things weigh people down.
And sometimes people will come in to talk to me and it's not even one thing or the other. It could be on both lists [00:05:00] and often it involves expectations that they have of themselves, how they think they should be living their lives, and who they think they should be.
There are so many shoulds. And it just gets all so muddied with, “But I shouldn't be doing this… But oh, and I did this and, oh, but I'm not doing this and I should be doing this.” And it just it's overwhelming. It doesn't surprise me that we feel overwhelmed a lot about these things.
SH: Yeah. I was going to say, I'm looking back over my own life as a Latter-day Saint woman, I have experience with things from both of those lists. And I can't even tell you for sure, really, which one I think has burdened me the most. It's both. It's all of it. I feel like we do a really good job of playing up the badness of both of those lists.
CL: Because they both cause guilt and shame.
SH: Yes. Yes. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. And it does really impact the decisions that people make in their lives.
SL: Oh, absolutely.
CW: I think the sins of omission list might be worse because that's an infinite list.
CL: It is.
SH: It is an infinite list. I agree. And I feel like that's the one that gets harped on at church every week the most. As a youth, I felt like I had people lecturing me about not engaging in heavy petting with my boyfriend. But I'm not hearing about that so much now. Now when I go to stake conference, I'm hearing about all the ways that what I'm doing is not enough.
CL: Yeah. I think that's, that sums it up: What I'm doing is not enough.
CW: And that list is infinite.
SH: So it can never be enough.
CL: It can never be enough, but then that's when we have to take that inside myself and think about where that coming from - was that just given to me? Was that handed to me without my consent? Or is it something I developed for myself, which would be my true values?
So, am I accepting guilt from others about things I didn't agree to in the first place?
SH: And what do you think about that? Personally, I would love to know your personal answer to that. Is that how it feels to you?
CL: Yeah. I mean, that's something that I'm working on. It's definitely a work in progress. Because like I said, when I read that article again, some of that showed up and I had to really dissect it to just calm down those feelings of fear and shame and guilt that Oh, maybe I'm not doing what I should be doing to make sure I'm not the weak link in my family - those kinds of things - they come up.
Working on this podcast has made it easier for me to think about where it is coming from. Do I accept that delivery of guilt? Do I accept it? Does it make sense for me? It's a work in progress because it just takes a long time to mull that over and to really be honest with myself - is that something I want to hold on to? Am I really holding on to it because I know someone else wants me to hold on to that?
And how can I say I reject that when the church tells me I can't reject that.
CW: I think when guilt and shame - toxicity of that gets into our soul. I think you have to use the hard words like you just said, C.A. And like Susan said her daughter learned in law school: I reject that! I think we need to use equally harsh language, “Get thee behind me, I reject that!” We just have to root it out.
SH: Once you identify it. But that's not a one-and-done either because like you just said, C.A., it keeps bubbling up. You have to be willing to engage with that every time it bubbles up and say, “Wait where is this coming from? Is it something that is serving me that I want to keep? Is this mine? Does this belong to me or not? Did I get it somewhere else?”
CL: Yes. And I think it's insidious because at least for me, they bubble up all the time and really stupid ones bubble up. I may have even shared this before when we talked about resentments, but I will find myself walking out the door and I’ll say to my husband, “Would you mind picking up the dry cleaning while I'm at work?” And I’ll get in my car and I feel that sensation inside of me saying, “Oh, you shouldn't have asked him to do that. That's not his job to pick up the dry cleaning. Why did you think you could give him that?”
It's like my rational mind and my evolved self just go, “Are you kidding, C.A.? You’re asking him to pick it up for you again?” Like, you can't ask people to do things because you're supposed to do them all yourself.
CW: I recently heard that our first response is our conditioning, but our second response can be the reality of who we've evolved into. So I like that because the dumb things still bubble up for me as well, but [00:10:00] my first reaction might be my conditioning. The second reaction is hopefully the healthier, evolved Cynthia's voice saying, “I reject that!”
CL: Yeah, which is good, but I think that comes from that place when you can check in and say, “Oh no, that, that doesn't make sense. I don't really believe that anymore.”
But to Susan's point, they do keep coming up, right?
SH: Yeah. Unfortunately.
CL: It's always going to be a work in progress. I know that's not the best news, but I do think it's the truth.
CW: Well, I think it is the truth, but I think admitting that out loud is actually really helpful because then I know, Oh, this is just something I'm going to need to keep in my tool belt. This is a tool I will probably just always need throughout my life. And maybe I will need it less at some point. But, it's a good tool to keep.
CL: Yes, it is a good tool. And what I do know is beating ourselves up is not the answer. The answer is that awareness and curiosity and, using that method to go inside and look at what's really going on here and how do I feel about it? Instead of defaulting to, “Oh no, I'm not good enough” And then I'm going to sink into that guilt and shame place.
So I can't talk about this topic and not go at least a little bit to the place where I see people sinking into the depths of shame. It's such a vulnerable place and I see it a lot in a lot of different populations, but the one I think that's close to my heart is that I see it in teens and young adults who identify as LGBTQ.
Such a hard place to be and try to to stay engaged with the church and to be in families that are engaged in the church. They often go into a place of shame and despair. And the result is often self-loathing, scrupulosity, self-harm. I have to say these are the loveliest people - and I know that's a generality and of course, there are all kinds of people - but what I see in them is they are the ones that are trying so hard to do everything right.
Trying so hard. They are the kid you want in your Sunday school class because they're answering every question and they're listening - the ones you want in seminary because they're not falling asleep. They are hopeful that if they do everything right, then God will make them straight, and make them normal.
And oftentimes what they report to me in my office is that they receive blessings that tell them this, that promise them this. I've had a whole slew of people tell me that on their mission, they were given a blessing by their mission president; and he blessed them that if they were faithful on their mission and obeyed all the rules and did all the things they were supposed to as a missionary, that they would become straight. They would go home, they would marry in the temple and they would become a bishop.
For some reason that's always tacked in there somewhere.
SH: Wow!
CW: Okay. I have a question about that. Are these clients in your office - please tell me these are like 50-year-old men!
CL: No, these are clients in my office that I would categorize as young adults. So I'm talking about ones that are not that far off of their mission - some of them just a matter of months, but maybe a year or two.
CW: So in the last five years, though, there are mission presidents saying you will be made straight?
CL: Yes. Or, they may not say straight because I don't know that that's a term they should use. You'll be made whole, or you will have your wish and you will go home and you will marry in the temple. Yep, it's still happening. I know. I'd like to think it wasn't.
And it's so damaging. It's so damaging that oftentimes they don't want to live because it doesn't change them. And then they think it's because they're not faithful enough. Remember, these are the really good kids that are trying so hard. And so then they feel like they're not good enough. And they feel like if they're in the closet still, they're hiding a shameful secret and that secret is going to damn them forever.
It is so painful to watch that and to try to help them untangle that with them, to help them find a place of self-love and acceptance, to know that they aren't being punished, that this isn't what God meant for them, and that they are okay.
CW: We received an email from a [00:15:00] queer woman and she said this, “I am also bisexual. I experienced much guilt and shame surrounding it because of the way I was raised. I'm still active, but the church's stance on homosexuality is such a tender spot for me.”
So even as a grownup, she's still having a hard time sorting that all out.
CL: For sure. I don't think that one goes away.
CL: So the other thing I see a lot in my practice is a lot of guilt around parenting. That could be a whole episode, but I just think we can't talk about guilt without mentioning it. And we all have adult children, but we still feel it, of course.
I really hear a lot about those who are in the trenches of parenting every day. I really like the book Good Insight by Dr. Becky Kennedy, I've given it to all my kids who are parenting actively now, and I've read it myself to be a better grandparent.
She says, “If your parental guilt is running on overdrive - if you're worried you messed up or missed the boat and that your kids have aged out of the most important time, take a breath. Say hello to the guilt, and then remind yourself that you're a good parent working on yourself and your relationships. And this is actually the best any of us can do.”
So I just think that's so refreshing. I love the idea of, “Just say hello to your guilt! Hey, here you are in the pit of my stomach.” Instead of thinking it's never good enough, just to be able to say, “Hey, it's a work in progress. When I know better, I'll do better.” We haven't necessarily ruined our kids.
I do often say to parents, “You should have two funds, an educational fund and a therapy fund” because all of our kids need therapy after growing up; nobody does it perfectly.
SH: Yeah. Growing up is hard. But we have this sort of perfect setup for parental guilt because we're sold this idea where there's a formula and if you do A and B, then your kids are going to C.
And A plus B just does not equal C in parenting. We've talked about that so many times on this podcast. But I feel like Latter-day Saint parents are very much handed that expectation. This is a math formula, and if you do it right, then all your kids are going to be in your forever family.
CL: Yeah, we're still that bill of goods.
CW: Just this week, Susan, we got an email or a direct message - I can't remember which - from someone saying that they were looking at some kind of report or something (I don't know if it was generated by the church or outside) And it was like, “How do you keep your kids within the church?” And it was the formula.
It was, the children most likely to stay in the church had daily scripture study with their families. And then it went through, the list of family prayer and blah, blah, blah. And I'm sitting there going, okay, I did that. I did all those things and two-thirds of my kids are not. So then of course that would be where the guilt monster rears its ugly head.
And so, yeah, we still are presenting it as a formula and I'm just going, “When are we going to stop doing this?”
CL: No, I saw that too. And I think it's so devastating. I had a friend recently say, “All four of my kids are out of the church. What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? I thought I did everything I was supposed to do.”
So, then you read that thing about keeping the kids in the church and you're like, “Oh, I must've missed something.”
CW: Right. Must've been something else.
CL: “I'm going to go through this list because I must have done something wrong that what I was promised is not happening.”
SH: I love in that quote that you just read that she says, “You're a good parent working on yourself and your relationships.”
And I just feel like that is not the emphasis in parenting that we talk about at church. I never felt like I was receiving instruction on how to have good relationships with my children. I felt like I was receiving instruction on how to keep my children in the church.
CW: You said that recently, Susan, I can't remember which episode, I think it was on our episode To the Children of the Mothers in Zion. And we got so much feedback from people about that and I had never thought about it that way.
SH: Well, I never did either. This is why I'm saying it again. It's sort of a recent revelation to me that is still rocking my world because I'm thinking, “Why did it never occur to me that my real responsibility to my children was to have a relationship with them?”
That's something I've had to lean into and try to learn as an adult. And that is tragic to me!
CL: That emotional connection would be the thing that would matter the most.
SH: Right! The only thing that matters! What else matters?
CL: No, it doesn't matter. Love.
SH: Right. If I failed to teach my children love and their bottom line worth and value, [00:20:00] not just to me, but to God because I think that's where they learn to understand that they are valued as a person is in their being loved and accepted in their family relationships. I think there's a direct correlation and what we internalize about our worth. If I failed to pass that along, then it just doesn't matter what else I did.
CL: But that thing that you just read, Cynthia, about the things we're supposed to do, that doesn't include those things, does it? It doesn't say anything about your relationship with them - your emotional connection. This is the one thing I see over and over again, is that adults who felt loved as a child growing up, are the ones who have the healthiest attachment. That matters the most. That is the be-all, end-all.
CW: I don't like that list - the checklist of, those who do family scripture study and prayer were at the top of the list. And I'm just thinking, okay, but what if Susan, what if we could have our wish and relationships was at the top of that list. That would be so life-changing.
SH: Absolutely. If God is love, and we're trying to teach our children about the nature of God and their own place in things - in the eternal order of things - then it has to start with love. But my thing about that list, Cynthia, is statistically, maybe it's true, I don't know where the church is gathering that information. They have whole teams of people they pay to gather information, so maybe statistically that is true. But I mean, I just am not sure I even buy it.
CL: Well, not only is it true, but does it matter? I have to examine that with my kids who aren't involved in the church. What matters most to me is that my children are good human beings
and that they show up in the world and try to make a difference and try to be a good person. That's what matters.
If I use that template, then I recognize the things I need to support what I think matters. Instead, what I see at October Conference when new mission presidents are called - it's all about their accomplishments and past callings - that's how we really identify people, you know?
Is it important to me to show up with my friends at church and say, “Oh, my son was just made bishop, or my daughter is doing this in the church, or my grandkids are all going on missions”? If that's my template, then the things Cynthia was listing about reading scriptures, family prayer, or whatever - maybe those things are accurate in order to lead to that. But I have to ask myself, “Is that what's most important?” Because if it is, it's just another checklist.
SH: Right. Well, I had to come at it backward because my kids left the church. And I was devastated, as anyone who listens to me knows because we talk about it all the time - how hard that was for me and what I had to learn from it. It's the greatest thing that ever happened to me because it turned that list on its head for me. Because at that point, I was able to look at my children and say, “Oh my gosh, they're amazing human beings. I did something right, right? So they're amazing human beings and therefore all that other stuff that was supposed to keep them in the church didn't matter.”
But I had to get to that after. I honestly feel lucky that they're amazing human beings because as their mother, I sort of missed the whole point of what I really wanted to be doing there. I failed at the goal that I thought was the goal that I had set for myself. I actually achieved the much more important, larger goal.
CL: Yeah. I love that. That's a great way to say it.
SH: But I beat myself up a lot before I got to recognize that, “Oh yeah, I did do something right.”
CL: Yeah, a lot.
CW: That's fascinating, Susan. So that guilt and shame was eating you up. And then once again, you had to do the introspection, examining your values, and then exchanging out that life.
SH: It's hard though, because I didn't get validation for that from anyone else. No one else was looking at my kids and saying, “They're amazing people.” Instead, people were putting my kids' names on the temple roll to pray for them because they're struggling in their lives, right? Which is crazy-making when you're going through that.
CL: It's another thing I think we just have so messed up. We are so wrong about what we think matters versus what really matters.
That brings me to another one - the whole idea of inherited guilt - the things that get passed down through generations. I think it's very fascinating, this whole field - which is a fairly new field - of epigenetics.
SH: Yes. [00:25:00] I'm so interested.
CL: So fascinating about how we used to think that the chromosomes and everything got scrubbed. And so when it came into the next generation, the new baby would have characteristics, but not have memory passed.
Now they're finding there are little tags on the chromosomes that don't get scrubbed and can show up - which means that there are emotions and things that we can inherit from our progenitors. I think this is so fascinating.
I had an example show up in my life this last weekend, which was so fascinating to me. I've spoken before on the podcast about my mother and her family, her very successful family. My grandfather had three boys and three girls, and he created these businesses and all the boys worked in the businesses.
I've talked about how my mom didn't get to work in them cause she was a girl, right? But anyway, one of the three sons was what we would call the black sheep in the family. And I didn't really know him well. He lived in a different city than I did. I just knew him at big family gatherings and he probably didn't even know my name cause there were so many cousins, right? But just enough to know who he was to say hello, whatever.
I didn't have a relationship with him, so I didn't really know him, but I knew of him because he was famous. And I would hear my mom talk to her sisters about him. I knew what my grandfather felt about him - that he was lazy and he had to control his money for him because he wasn't good with finances. There was all this messaging that even as a kid - at the time I was a teenager - I absorbed all that about this uncle.
Fast forward years later, and I went to his funeral, and I couldn't believe the things that people said about him. About how kind he was and about what a good person, what a good neighbor, how he would show up for people and how his children and grandchildren loved him. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I missed knowing this person because I took in and just believed all these things that were told or that I was hearing in the background.”
So last weekend, I was in Utah at meetings of these family companies that I'm a part of and I recognize that these traits are showing up in the children and grandchildren of this uncle.
The children make sense because they were raised by him and I think they probably got treated a little bit differently because they were kind of the marginalized family. One of our cousins - now an adult - told my sister, “You know you were always the favored one.”
She definitely recognized that she was the family that was on the outs, that was seen differently. Now seeing it in the next generation, how it shows up and how I feel like they're working so hard to earn their place in the family and be valuable, heard, seen, and be an equal. It's like, oh my gosh, this is it.
SH: Fascinating.
CL: This is how it shows up. I thought it was so fascinating. So it just shows we're up against all these things, even those things that just show up the minute we're born, in our DNA, and that we are going to have those and hold those.
So I think at least we need to say it, so we recognize that when we think about it. And what might be those things that come down? I think people who come from Holocaust survivors or 9/11 survivors or whatever. There are things we notice and recognize, but it's a field that is just in its beginning and we're going know more and more about that in the future.
SH: I've wondered a lot with Latter-day Saints about this because of things like pioneer hardship and polygamy, I wonder how did those imprint on our genetic pool and continue to roll forward and affect the lives of Latter-day Saints.
CL: No. Absolutely. So that's another whole fascinating topic to me. I thought about that because I was with some friends recently and one of them said that she felt like her daughter was born feeling guilt and shame. She said she felt like it came with her from as young as she can remember and that she's never felt like she was good enough.
SH: Well, I feel like that for me. That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say, what did I show up with at church that made it so hard for me? I feel like I was born to that. [00:30:00] And that's why in a way this field of epigenetics feels hopeful to me in understanding myself and being able to compensate for that.
CL: Well, once we have awareness and understanding, then we can do things to change. But that comes first.
CW: Gotta recognize it though.
CL: Yeah. Yep. This was really fascinating. I think this was again in Brene Brown's works, but she says sometimes we choose guilt over happiness. Because happiness is a risk and guilt is safe.
Guilt dampens our happiness, but if I get too happy, it's risky. Guilt can be safe for us because we can't lose it. But I hate to think of the fact that we may have adopted guilt as a security blanket.
SH: Oh my gosh. This might be where I have to lie down. We may have just hit the point of the episode.
CW: Hang in there, Susan. We're still here.
SH: I know, but that, for some reason, is really resonant to me. Ouch.
CL: I know, and I mean it does. I read it about five times because I kept thinking, wait a minute, we choose guilt over happiness? No, we wouldn't do that. And then as I read it, I had that same feeling of it sink in and say, “Oh yeah, it's safe.” It's safer. It's like what we know.
And if I risk, because the happiness thing is vulnerability, right? If I move into a place where I'm letting go of the guilt, I'm putting myself out there and I'm talking about it - that's risky. Vulnerability always has a risk with it.
SH: Well, I'm also not really sure our church wants us to do that.
CW: Well, I was just thinking again, Susan, that this comes back again to grace. What if our default was wholeness and happiness? What if that was step one? Square one - what we started with? So yeah, as soon as you said, “I'm not sure church wants us” I was like, “Oh good. Susan sees the religious component.”
SH: Well, yeah, this is the grace thing because this is why so many members push back on grace or struggle with it when we bring it up. This is why we feel radical for bringing up grace, Cynthia. It's because other members feel like we're not supposed to have that kind of happiness.
CW: Yes. Right. That shouldn't be the default. You need to earn it.
SH: Yes. The guilt is safer. So I'm going to that security blanket. Oh, man.
CW: It's so nutso. That is just nutso.
CL: And it's pervasive. I read this story online and then I did a little bit of research because I wasn’t sure how accurate th person that was recounting it was. So I found another version of it, which I think is probably the more accurate one. Of course, when we're just reporting things that we hear secondhand, I don't know for sure, but I think the point of it is really significant.
It's a story that John Lund tells. The first one says that the visiting authority was Bruce R. McConkie, but in the one I think is accurate, it was A.Theodore Tuttle (that's not so important) He's talking to a group of bishops and stake presidents, and there are about 35 of them, and he asks them to put their heads down and to answer two questions by raising their hands.
The first question is, “Do you think that most of the men here in this room will go to the Celestial Kingdom?” Almost every hand was raised.
Then he says, this is my second question, “Do you think that you will go to the Celestial Kingdom?” Only three hands were raised in that group of 35.
I don't think it's so important that these were people in authority because that doesn't impress me. What's important is the pervasiveness of how we feel about ourselves in the church, even if we are very active, very engaged, holding positions - not that the positions themselves matter.
But those feelings of inadequacy - of guilt and shame and fear - that they themselves are not worthy, but they make the assumption that everyone else in that room is worthy. I think that's really powerful.
My husband told me he was at a high priest meeting and the teacher said to the men (and these are older men, some younger) but said to them, “How many did you love yourself?” My husband said he was the only one in the room that raised his hand.
And he just did it automatically, and then he looked around and was like, oh! And then he lowered it a little because it's like, wait a minute, are we not supposed to love ourselves? Isn't this kind of the whole purpose of why we're here at church and the whole plan, right? So again, those two things I felt were really significant.[00:35:00]
Okay. So I think it's important that we end on a positive note. We've talked about things we can do to understand and recognize and go inside ourselves about the guilt. But I think there's a principle we need to talk about because whenever I bring this up with people I work with, they don't believe me.
They're kind of like, nah. They believe that we change from a place where we don't like ourselves, to where we've hit the bottom. The only place to go is up. And so we think we changed from a place of fear and shame, but the truth is - and the research shows this over and over again - that we change from a place of acceptance and love. First from ourselves, then from others, and also from the institutions that we're a part of.
So that is really significant. In order to really change, we have to be in a place where we say, “Hey, I'm okay. I'm okay where I am and who I am. And there are things I'd like to do differently. And so I'm going to work on those.” And then we actually have results.
Yeah, we have to be more specific about what it is we're going to do, but that's when actual change happens - when we go from a place of acceptance - not from a place of fear and shame.
SH: But doesn't that mean that churches are going about it all wrong?
CL: Yeah.
SH: I mean, that's pretty ironic.
CL: I know. Exactly, because they want us to feel so bad about ourselves. It's that whole needing to take our punishment, needing to really feel bad about what we've done.
And if I think about it, that's not what motivates me. Even if I'm just feeling guilt, like I've hurt someone's feelings or I've done something I'm not proud of, the guilt, the feeling really bad about myself paralyzes me. It doesn't allow me to say, “Oh, I made a mistake.” And let me think about maybe doing something differently in the future. But also maybe I need to make that right. If there's something I can do, maybe I need to talk to that person, or I need to do something to atone or to make up for whatever it is that I've done.
But that comes so much easier from a place where I'm feeling okay about myself and recognize I just made a mistake, I'm not a bad person. That's the difference between the guilt and the shame - if I can just see it as prompting me to do something different - ott's just a guilt feeling - then I can act on it. But if it's sunk into shame, I'm gonna have a hard time, because for one thing, I'm not want gonna want to admit that to anyone
CW: Well, I'm sure some people are hearing this thinking, no, no, it's when I, hit rock bottom or something that I realized I was a piece of garbage and that helped me to change. And it's like, maybe short term, but I don't think that kind of change is ever long term and really lasting.
SH: It’s not transformational change.
CL: Right. It's more just like, “Oh, I'll go through the motions because they're telling me I have to go through the motions - someone's telling me that.”
SH: I'm happy to hear this because on my very short list of goals as a Relief Society teacher - and it was just intuitive to me (I didn't know why this was…well, I did know why. It was because I'd spent so much of my life leaving church feeling about a billion times heavier than I did when I went in, and I didn't feel like I should feel that way when I left. That's not what I wanted from church, to feel worse than when I went through the doors.) - so one of my goals as a teacher was to have the women in that room leave feeling just a tiny bit lighter than they did when they walked in.
So actually this research would back me up on that. That actually does position us to be in a better place to move forward in our life.
CL: And you just think about that when people feel good and they leave a lesson or a talk or whatever, they want to go out there and take it in and do something with that, so you nailed it.
And I think it's interesting, too, but when people go back and do an actual translation - I don't know if it's from the Greek or what - of repent, but the meaning is to change, really the more accurate word would be to change.
And so isn't that just a more positive way to look at it? What we need to do when we make a mistake, we just need to change. We need to make it right. We need to think about how we want to be different. But we also accept ourselves and our humanness, then we can make those changes because we're coming from a place of self-love.
CW: Right. Right. Not from a place of depravity. So often I think repentance is such a heavy word. The other words associated with are sin and darkness, and it's like punishment. What if we could reframe repentance as [00:40:00] just hmm, I need to change.
CL: Yeah, there's a woman whose name is Kristen Neff, and I think she works with Brene Brown. She actually predates Brene, and she does a thing about shame resilience. I wanted to share this as we get to the end of this episode.
She says that first we need to recognize shame and understand its triggers - so very similar to the PEEL method of working with guilt - and then feel our way through it. What messages and expectations triggered it? So again, going in and really feeling our way around and asking where's that coming from? Where's that trigger coming from that tells me I should feel guilty about asking people to do things for me?
And then she says, number two is practice cultural awareness, which I think is very interesting. This is not church, right? This is someone who's just saying that you need to reality-check the message and expectations driving your shame. That's what we've been talking about today, right? We know where a lot of these come from.
They come from the culture, the church culture that we live in. Are they what you want to be, or what others need and want from you? That one I think is really important. Is it what you want or is it what others need and want from you? Because we get that messaging a lot.
And then - I think this is really significant and a really important way to wrap this up - she says number three is reach out and speak shame. Own your story, talk about how you feel. Empathy comes in these spaces, and it is the antidote.
I think that's so difficult and I'd never really thought about it, but it's the whole thing that Brene Brown says - if you have the petri dish of shame and you put in the secrecy and judgment that it thrives, but if you put in the empathy, it can't, it goes away.It can't grow.
I don't know that I have really thought about that idea - that we need to speak our shame and we need to own our story. I think that feels really uncomfortable to me, even now. I think maybe I need to lay down and I'm the one doing the talking, because I think I've hidden from shame.
I always want to go in a little corner, in a little quiet place, and just lick my wounds and feel how I feel about myself and how I've done something wrong. That's something to really think about because it does resonate as true - we can't get empathy (because empathy comes from someone else) about what we're feeling and what we're going through unless we are brave enough to reach out to others and to speak our shame.
So it's something to think about.
CW: I love that you brought up Dr. Kristen Neff. She's someone who's come on my radar recently and her website is actually self-compassion.org - that's the name of her website. We cannot move forward and do these things without self-compassion. That's just the root of it - we have to give ourselves grace. We have to accept our wholeness and then move forward. So I totally believe that. Totally. Totally.
SH: But the urge to self protection is so strong in a culture like ours. But really what you're talking about is what I have come to understand as really the life-changing magic of vulnerability. I really do believe that it changes everything. I say all the time that in our stories are the keys for healing this church, and I really do believe it. That bringing being able to bring that shame into the light and put some sunlight on it and give it some air - share with others - that's where the change can happen individually and collectively.
CL: Yeah, that's perfect. That's so perfect.
So I just have a little ending thing. Are you ready for that? Okay! So I get to decide what works for me, is the theme of this. Last weekend I also went to the new Disney movie Wish with my grandkids. I didn't think the movie was amazing, but I thought there was a really important message and I felt like it was important to what we're talking about today.
In the movie, the king wants to own and control all of the wishes of the people. All the wishes are in these beautiful bubbles and he wants to keep them and control them, not necessarily to grant them, but to be in control of them. And it is the queen that sees the truth and she becomes the guide and the one to lead the people because she knows that the people's wishes are decided by their own self-authority and not dictated by anyone else. And they alone can see them [00:45:00] to their fulfillment.
So I thought a lot about that when I was thinking of the guilt and shame and the control, and how we need to decide what works for us and we need to have our own wishes and see them to their fulfillment. When we have our own autonomy to craft a life that is ours, based on our own personal beliefs and the truth, beauty, and love we have found in the world, then we will be free from so much guilt and shame.
Or at least we'll be able to deal with those very real human emotions in a much healthier way. And that is my wish for all of us.
SH: Beautiful. Thank you, C.A. Thank you is a silly and small word for the gift that you give us when you show up and talk about these things with us. It's incredible.
CL: Thank you for letting me. I really love it, it's painful sometimes. I can't tell you how many times I said, did I really say we should do an episode on guilt and shame? As I was delving into it, I'm like, “What was I thinking? This is a painful topic. This is a hard topic.”
CW: Well, maybe that's why you couldn't tackle it until you came on the podcast six or seven times?
SH: There you go.
CL: Probably. Yeah. I needed a lot and I needed to know that you guys were just going to be right there with me, which is the greatest thing about doing this is just having that.
SH: Yeah. And our listeners are going to be right there with all of us. I just know it. So you've given a great gift today. Thank you so much.
CW: We're all heading towards healing together, so thank you.
Voicemail Caller 1:
Cynthia and Susan, this is Emily. I just had a chance to teach Sunday school this week and we studied from Revelation chapter 12. I love this scripture that talks about this amazing, glorious woman. She is clothed in the glory of the sun. She has a crown. Here's a woman with power and authority and position and the crown of 12 stars that alludes to the priesthood.
She literally wears the priesthood as jewelry. And then the other characters in the story are the serpent or the dragon that we know as Satan and then Michael who's Adam and yet then we are supposed to believe that this woman represents a church organization run by men. I just refuse. I refuse to accept that she is not a real person, that she doesn't represent someone that I can admire and look up to and learn more about and strive to become like.
Voicemail Caller 2:
Hi Susan and Cynthia. This is Jenny. So I was in church last week and during a talk, one of our senior missionaries came on and he's talking about the great commandment - love other people and love God. And as he was talking about a woman that he knew that had tattoos and, had a failed marriage and how, he came to love her and appreciate her and had totally misjudged her and her character. And, she was this great person.
And so I was, listening and thinking, okay, well, he's being open-minded and he's trying at least. And then as he was coming to the end of his talk, he said over the pulpit, “Even Democrats have divine potential.” I just wanted to get up and walk up and say to him, “You know what, even misogynists have divine potential!”
Why do we say these things at church? Why is it okay to say to someone, “Oh, you're a Republican, but you still have divine potential”, or “You're a Democrat, you still have divine potential”? We talk about loving and keeping the great commandment, which is loving God and then, loving other people. And I just don't think that fits in so well.
And so it really just left me wanting to punch him in the face, but I didn't. I deferred to the better angels of my nature and I'm saying it here. Thanks for all you do.
Behind The Scenes:
CW: Hey side note, we're just about at the hour mark, but this is so good. I'm cool with this. I think this is a really important episode.
SH: It'll be a two if we have to make it a two episode.
CW: Oh, you want to? Okay, because I'm cool If it's like an hour and twenty minutes.
SH: Or make it an hour…either way. However we want to do it.
CW: I don't know how far you feel like you are CA in your notes.
CL: I feel like I'm only about halfway.
CW: Okay, then maybe it will be two episodes.
CL: Which is so funny, because last night I was looking through my notes and thinking, “Oh, this is gonna be my shortest episode ever”. Isn't that funny? I felt like I was just glossing over some things because there's so much to go deep into, but you guys have brought so much to the conversation, it's become so much more rich. And I, I feel like, yeah let's keep going. You can either edit it down or you can do it in two.
CW: No, I don't want to edit it down. I think this is really important. So yeah, let's just assume it'll be two, because I don't want to [00:50:00] rush it. So let's keep going.
CL: Okay.
CW: Is that it?
SH: Is that enough?
CW: Is that good? I think so.
SH:Okay
CW: Okay, that's good.
SH: Okay.
Closing Credits:
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