Episode 182 (Transcript): The Harder the Better | A Conversation with Valerie Hamaker

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Zinah Burke, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

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SH: Hi, I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW:  And I am 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: The Harder the Better. It's a special episode today, Cynthia. 

CW: It is, but that title makes me not think it's so special, I don't know. 

SH: Okay, but the special part is that we've got Valerie Hamaker with us! Hi, Valerie. 

VH: Hello, how are you both doing today? 

CW: Wonderful. 

SH: We're excited to be recording with you. We've been talking about this pretty much like since the beginning of podcast history. So we're excited that it's finally happening. 

VH: It's a good topic. I have a lot of thoughts on this because we're so, we're so good at making things hard as women of the LDS church.

SH: I'm afraid we are. 

CW: We are, we are. And also Susan and I have been kicking around the idea of having an episode called The Harder, the Better, but we were like we need a therapist to come on because I feel like we kind of would get to the threshold of an idea of like, what's the solution? And we're like, we need someone really smart who's trained in this. And so we might be deferring to you quite a bit, Valerie. So thank you for being our expert today. 

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VH: Well, I am really grateful to be here. And when we started talking about this topic, it was one of those funny moments where I thought to myself,  what do I have to say about that? And then, next thing I knew I had like 500 things to say about it. Right? Because I feel like it's, it's like so much a part of the narrative or the unspoken narrative of our faith tradition that we are, you know, we're persecuted and we're pioneer stock and we do hard things. So, there's just a lot here to unpack. And so I'm really excited to be a part of this conversation with both of you today. 

CW: Well, we're excited too, cause oh my goodness, Susan and I, we are a little unhinged. I think as we, I feel like, I don't know when, Susan - six months ago I think you and I said to each other “That would be a great episode talking about how so often as Latter day Saints we think if something is harder than it's surely better.” 

SH: Well, it's kind of been one of my lifelong pet peeves, actually. So I'm going to try not to rant at any time during this conversation, but the whole thing feels like a rant to me because I just, I have a lot of feelings about this.

CW:  I think we all do, which is going to become very evident to our listeners in a hot minute that we have a lot to say about this. So, well, before we jump into our, we're going to tackle three very meaty questions today, Valerie, since you're our guest today, can you kind of introduce yourself and where you podcast and a little bit about your background as a therapist and an LDS woman?

VH: Yeah, thank you. I am actually, weirdly enough, a little bit, I think it's still fair to say I'm fairly new to the podcasting world. I've just been doing, well, I've just been doing this in the Latter day Saints space for about two years now. I am the host of the Latter day Struggles podcast, and I jumped into this space mostly because I am a therapist. I do relationship work and marriage counseling and family work. And a lot of my clientele is LDS. I'm from the Midwest. I'm from the Kansas City area. I worked with a lot of LDS people here in the Kansas City area, and I just started noticing things that concerned me about mental health, the intersection between mental health and spiritual health.

VH: And when I began working as a therapist, I was actually very traditionally believing. I was quite orthodox, but also having a master's degree in counseling started me thinking about more critical -  I started to become a more critical thinker, I guess you should say. And, and so I just noticed things that worried me or that concerned me. And I started asking hard questions and I started seeking authenticity and honesty rather than just loyalty to the tradition. And I started just having a lot of thoughts and feelings about how I noticed the people that I saw having the same problems that were hurting their souls that was connected to their faith.

VH: And it hurt my soul, hurt my heart too, because I was, you know, an active LDS woman, but at some point in time, it actually felt like a higher call from God to speak to these problems rather than to protect the institution at the risk of these people that were in pain. And so that's why I started the podcast and it's been going for just a couple of years.

VH: And so as you both know, because you're in the same space, the need is huge and we just need to start having or continue to be having tough conversations about the intersection of spirituality and mental health and relationships because our Latter day Saint and surrounding people are deep thinkers and feelers, and I think we have a huge hunger for growth. And I think that's why our spaces are being received well in the podcasting world. We are offering something that people aren't finding elsewhere, and they're hungry for it, and they want to grow. And so, yeah, that's, that's me. 

CW: That was wonderful. I feel like I have many, many questions. One, and if there isn't time, I'll cut this out, but I have a question, Valerie, as you talk with your other therapists, co-workers, colleagues, is your story unique? Meaning like you came in maybe as a more orthodox or orthoprax member, and once you started doing therapy with LDS folks, it kind of changed who you were. Like, is that common? 

VH: Yes, I think that's very, very common actually because I think stages of faith and stages of human development actually align quite well with one another. So early stage faith and early psychological development kind of go hand in hand. And so as we evolve and grow as human beings, by default, we become more complex thinkers. We become more capable and able to ask hard questions. We become more differentiated to the extent that we start being willing to look at things at face value, even if it means that we might not be validated by people around us who aren't comfortable at our conclusions. And so I think at least for me, that skill set kind of came, it didn't come immediately, but it kind of eventually came as a part of sort of my spiritual journey. Becoming a therapist was my spiritual journey becoming a different kind of woman and a different kind of Latter day Saint, I guess you could say. So yeah, I think it's probably pretty common. 

SH: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing with us, Valerie. I'm sure that our listeners are as excited that you're here today as we are. And so Cynthia is going to take us through the questions that are going to lead this discussion today. I think I'm just going to turn it over to Cynthia. 

CW: OK. Our first question that we wanted to discuss among the three of us is, why is it that the harder something is in our church we seem to see it as more righteous? And when we first started chewing on this question, I kind of immediately thought of that talk by Elder Holland, where he says “the cost and blessings of discipleship,” or that's the title of it. And this famous line that I feel like I've heard echoed over and over for years he says, “It is a characteristic of our age that if people want any gods at all, they want them to be gods who do not demand much. Comfortable gods, smooth gods, who not only don't rock the boat, but don't even row it. Gods who pat us on the head, make us giggle, then tell us to run along and pick marigolds.”

CW: So I mean, never mind the fact that there's a very wide spectrum between like, a god who demands too much, someone who's like, punishing, vengeful, and wrathful, and then like, a god who's just like, go pick marigolds, like, I think, there's a whole lot in between there, but I think the point he's trying to get across is: God actually is demanding and hard and maybe punishing. I mean, I don't want to put words in Elder Holland's mouth, and when we try to dumb it down and make God as someone who, as he says, just makes us giggle I think it's safe to say Elder Holland's not a fan of that So, that was the first thought I had when we were thinking about this question: Why Is it that something harder seems to be better, more righteous? What about you two? 

SH: Well, first of all, I want to say that that is one of my least favorite general conference quotes of all time. That landed for me at a time where it was exactly the wrong thing for me personally. And so I'm going to call that one of the foundational quotes of my “faith journey.” That really did set me off in a direction that I hadn't really clearly identified before. So I have a relationship with that quote and it's not a good one. But right at the beginning of this conversation, I really want to say, as I've thought about it, our preoccupation with hard equaling righteous is so deeply ironic to me. I don't even really know where to start with it. I mean, of course, the first thing that came to my mind was Matthew 11, where you have “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden,” right? We all know that scripture. “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” And it's so funny to me that for a church that connects itself so dot to dot with Jesus Christ, that we want to make things harder than Jesus makes them. All the time. All the time, it seems to me like we refuse to take him at his word that this is supposed to be an easy and light burden that this gospel is supposed to lift things off our shoulders, right? Not pile bricks on top. And so I feel like we just weigh ourselves and the gospel down with all kinds of things that Jesus never asked of us. And then we make martyrs of ourselves over it, right? Over all the stuff that we've piled on. So I feel like our tendency to do that is part of what has been so hard for me in my life as a Latter day Saint woman to ever find the good news. The good news has been obscured under all the other stuff that we have piled on.

SH: And I feel like what Jesus was asking us was hard enough, right? We didn't really need to add a lot of extra weight to it. But obviously there are a lot of members, and members in very high places - looking at you, Elder Holland - that don't see the irony of this or maybe they feel that the cost of discipleship, which I think was right in the title of that talk, right? Is seated in things like sacrifice and suffering and hardship and all of those things that I feel like Jesus was trying to help us give away. 

VH: I'm loving what both of you are saying and agree with it. And I feel like we come by these struggles very honestly because they're very Christian in nature. They're not just Latter-day Saint. As I was listening to you, Susan, it kind of occurred to me that like, you know what this really kind of goes back to is, actually it goes back clear to John Calvin, the idea that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God and that we are bad, and that only just a few of us are going to return back to God's presence, and therefore, to earn our way back as one of the few, it's gonna be tough.It's gonna be painful. We're going to have to do all of the things that it takes to overcome our sinful natures, and so just get ready for it. Like, this is not going to be pleasant. Like, Earth life is going to be challenging. And to me also kind of very linked to this is I feel like no matter what I am thinking about or pondering in my own personal spiritual work or what I'm doing on my platform, it almost always goes back to a really, really unfortunate and unhealthy understanding of God. And I mean, that's what you are both really riffing off of here with what Elder Holland is saying is that not only God the parents, right? Really in this, in the way we're talking, it's God the Father, right? We aren't talking about the mother here but God the Father and Jesus. And I wanted to address each of them slightly separately because God the Father is of course the white, bearded, angry, punitive, one that needs - like, he's mean, and he's scary, and we need Jesus in front of him.