For the past 20 years I have been providing support, counseling, and therapy for Mormons navigating a faith crisis/transition, and for the past 10 years I have been partnering with Natasha Helfer Parker and Margi Dehlin in this work.
This presentation focuses on improving your relationships during and after a Mormon faith crisis/transition. It can apply to virtually all types of relationships, including:
- Spouse/partner
- Parent/child relationships
- Extended family
- Friends
- Community/ward members.
This presentation was delivered in August, 2019, in Salt Lake City, Utah – as part of a Mormon Faith Crisis retreat. 40 audience members participated. The full retreat can be found here.
Emotional Intimacy Pt. 1
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Co-host: Margi Dehlin · Guest: Holly
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Welcome and Framing the Conversation
Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1302
Margi Dehlin [00:00:07] All right, well, welcome, everybody. We're super happy to have you to talk about, really one of our favorite topics yesterday, I think we tried to set up the framework of how to understand just kind of faith transitions from a social science perspective so that we can understand that we're not unique in some ways, we are unique in other ways. Right. Because each tradition is unique in their own way. And that's kind of setting you up so that you can kind of like, feel the lay of the land from a bit of an objective stance. It's a little hard to be objective when you're right in the middle of it. And so now we hope that that framework sets you up for us to talk about relationships. Because at some level, what a faith transition is, it's not just a personal belief system, it's a community. It's what your marriage sometimes is many times based on. It's a structure where you've raised maybe your children or are in the process of raising your children. And so all of this has to do with relationships. So I think a lot of people that come to these things imagine that we're going to talk a lot about the church. And as you notice, we're talking a lot less about the church as we are talking about kind of human dynamics and relationships. So a huge part is of what we really see as a solution to so much of your woes and your sadnesses and your concerns is this idea about knowing how to foster emotional intimacy. And again, this doesn't necessarily seem to be a Mormon problem. Right. So we have issues with intimacy, really, nationwide, culture wide, for a lot of reasons that we'll get into today. So that's kind of where we're starting out. You want to head to the next slide?
John Dehlin [00:01:58] Yeah. And the only thing that maybe I would add is that not to. Again, this isn't about the church, but it is really profound for me to consider this idea that we have spent as Mormons thousands of hours in instruction, from primary to Sunday school, Seminary institute, Elders Quorum, Relief Society, priesthood, all that stuff. Byu, you know, religious classes. And there's pretty much never been a single lesson on emotional intimacy that we ever received, or at least I didn't. I know there's a. There's probably like a celestial marriage course at BYU or something, which I've taken.
Margi Dehlin [00:02:49] And I've also taught the ld, the marriage class, you know, in my wards before. And I would say they do not focus necessarily on what we're going to be focusing on today.
John Dehlin [00:02:58] And what's bizarre about that is, I think this is probably the single most important topic we could ever talk about because it permeates, as Natasha just said, it's not. It, it starts with your own self awareness and health, which is kind of what we tried to talk about yesterday. But it, it's your partner, it's your kids, it's your parents, it's your siblings and it's your community, it's your best friends, it's everything. And we've never talked about it. And it's not, again, it's not just a Mormon problem, but it's, it's, it's a global problem. And I just don't understand why the most important things are completely ignored. I don't understand that. So that's why we, that's why we did this and that's why we're, that's why we believe so much in this. This is the single most top important topic I feel like I talk about.
Margi Dehlin [00:03:46] I would agree with that because it sets up the foundation for everything else we'll talk about like parenting and sexuality and identity concerns and all of those things. You can't really do any of those things well without a good foundation of understanding what intimacy is about.
John Dehlin [00:04:01] And it's also essential for the communicating with believing family and friends conversation that we're going to have later too. Because if you don't understand healthy relationships, then you don't know how to navigate these extended relationships.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:14] Really. In the church, we've been taught, mostly through a missionary kind of lens, how to teach people and how to talk to people and how to try to convince people that we have the right way. And that's actually probably the most antithetic thing you can do for intimacy as far as trying to connect with people is trying to change people. Most of us don't want to be changed. Most of us. I mean, if you have a two year old or if you've raised, you know, at any point in your life a two year old, you start understanding pretty quickly that people are fairly independent.
Guest [00:04:46] That's.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:47] What's the first word that a kid learns that they're really excited about?
Guest 2 [00:04:51] No.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:53] So they want their own way. Right. They want their own kind of independence. And again, what's so fascinating to me and the irony of it all is that Mormon doctrine has a lot of ideas around personal agency and the importance of honoring that. And yet as a culture, we do a poor job of that.
John Dehlin [00:05:11] The whole war in heaven was about no compulsion, right? Not being forced, about free agency, free will.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:19] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:05:20] And we struggle with that as A culture.
Research on Intimacy and Connection
Margi Dehlin [00:05:22] The other thing I'll just mention from a research perspective. So there's been a lot of interesting research recently coming out, I would say in the last five years in regards to substance dependence. Addiction is what most of us call that. And so they do a lot of this research with nice little rats. And so what they have found out, which is really interesting, is that if you have a rat in a maze with the cocaine drip or the meth drip or whatever, they find that pretty fast and they figure out ways to get to that pretty fast and they become dependent on those substances to feel good. What's been really super fascinating is that they have made a rat community with lots of fun things for the rats to do and lots of relational aspects for the rats to be a part of with a cocaine drip. And they don't become addicted. They actually choose not to go towards the cocaine when they have lots of other aspects to bring pleasure in their lives. So I think that really fits into this category of rat intimacy. They're having a lot of intimacy with themselves and other rats. They are able to avoid some of the self medicating things that we talked about yesterday that can be so harmful. So it's really kind of changing some of the ideas about. A lot of times we think, oh, substance dependence is all about the biology and getting addicted to something. We're realizing it's much more relational. It's much more relational. People choose medication and drugs because they are completely alone and isolated and unresilant and have been through many difficult things. So anyway, that's just an interesting little tidbit.
John Dehlin [00:07:09] Yeah. And I think if you look at what I, what I perceive to be the statistics of Utah in terms of pornography use, pornography addiction, prescription drug abuse and those sorts of things, somehow Utah
Margi Dehlin [00:07:24] is really high and even opiate addiction is high in Utah.
Guest 3 [00:07:29] So.
John Dehlin [00:07:30] Yep. And I, I just have to think that if we as a culture could get better at emotional intimacy and not just in the marital level, but in the community level, understanding how to, how to get our needs met through healthy relationships, we wouldn't have such epidemics in, in these areas. Yeah. Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:07:58] So what do we mean by emotional intimacy? Right. I mean, these are kind of these, these catch words. They sound really nice. But how do you start defining it? How do you start breaking it down so that we can actually attain it? Why is it so hard to obtain if it's something that we can all benefit from and that we can actually probably want? Why do so many of us resist it or act in ways that don't allow us to have it. So that's a lot of what our presentation is going to be on today to help you understand. Again, it's not because we're stupid or self harming or any of that. There's real reasons why these things come hard to attain and most of that has to do with self protection. So again, most of the things that I find really interesting about humans is that there's always a tension between two kind of either values, needs, desires. And so the need for self protection kind of goes against the things that are required for intimacy, like vulnerability, for example. So if I have to be vulnerable, I have to take a risk. Right. And so I don't know if I want to do that because I want to self protect. So those tensions are constantly at work. And that's what a lot of this presentation will be about, is helping you understand what's getting in the way.
How Mormon Culture Distorts the Meaning of Intimacy
John Dehlin [00:09:15] So what do we think of, we talked about this yesterday. How has our collective Mormon experience kind of corrupted the use of the term intimacy? What? Sex. Right. And why don't we just say sex in a Mormon context? Because it's a taboo, it's a dirty word. So we've co opted actually the less dirty thing. That's actually the most essential thing. And we've now, you know, made it synonymous with sexual such that we forget the importance of the core thing, which is the emotional intimacy. And now we've associated it with something that we perceive to be dirty. It's messed up on a lot of levels. Right, but, but it is true that because we're afraid to say the word sex in a church context, instead we say the word intimacy. But it's important to understand that when we talk about emotional intimacy, we're not talking about sex, although it's a prerequisite for a lot of the healthy type of sex that you probably are interested in. There, there is sex with that intimacy, of course.
Margi Dehlin [00:10:24] And I'm like, I'm like about to jump in.
John Dehlin [00:10:28] Yeah, go ahead.
Margi Dehlin [00:10:29] So, yeah, I think that these are things that again, from a values perspective, you may value intimacy as part of a sex life, but there are actually many ways to have healthy sex without intimacy. That is something that we do not necessarily make room for in our culture at all. And so it is really important to separate those two things out because you want to know what type of sex you're interested in and whether or not you want intimacy to be part of that. So yes, I would just say we need to be careful to not just assume that sex and intimacy have to go together in order for it to be healthy. And you can actually have a lot of intimacy in a relationship and still have not so great sex or no sex.
John Dehlin [00:11:13] Yeah. So intimacy is not sex. It's not the same thing as a committed relationship. And you know that because how many of you know about committed relationships that really aren't having a lot of sex? Right. And it's not romance. You can have sex without romance. You can have romance without sex. So these are all separate things that we tend to get confused about. The best definition that, that I've come across that's kind of most memorable that really is effective for intimacy is sort of this play on words into me seeing. It's having your partner see the full and the real you inside. So that's kind of simple. And I think, you know, I only discovered this just a few years ago. I'm like, wow, that's really good. It's being seen fully or as fully as possible by your partner.
Guest [00:12:07] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:12:07] And I don't know, I mean, maybe I'll just get into this now, I can revisit it later. But especially, you know, in, in Mormon culture, we really do not necessarily propel or role model true intimacy. What we are much more, which, what we're much better at projecting is what I call protective intimacy, which is fake intimacy. And what I mean by that is that we are set up especially in like Mormon men typically have messages about don't hurt your wife. Right. She's fragile, she's beautiful, she's special, she's sacred. So don't bring your whatever into a space where that may harm her. In the sexual sphere, this is a huge problem. Right. Because if you have fantasies or libidos or tastes or differences that you want to explore with your wife, well, now that's set up in a way where you may hurt her. And so what happens oftentimes is that goes underground and secret. So Mormon men in my practice typically show up in ways that they have very little skills in knowing how to advocate for, for their own kind of desires and needs and wants, especially in the sexual field. Women also are given a lot of messages about protection and being caregivers and being people who are going to really help the community and help their families. And many of you spoke about these themes in the last few days where again, your needs are not necessarily primary. The needs of the system and of your children and of your husband are primary. So how are you supposed to even show up to be seen when you can't even Express who you are to begin with. Many of you already said, I don't even know who I am, so how can I see you if you don't even know who you are? So you can see how the messages that we've had that I think are well intentioned about protecting each other are actually not at all about intimacy. So we conflate kindness with intimacy. And actually intimacy is not so much about being kind, but it's about being real. And I don't know that we know how to be real.
John Dehlin [00:14:20] Yeah, and if I think about, you know, men are supposed to be these righteous, strong priesthood holders and providers. They're supposed to serve in their callings and be really busy at church if they're not at work. Women are nurtured from, from adolescence or even childhood to be the gatekeepers of purity or of chastity. So they're almost in this motherly role of the relationship before the relationship gets going. So the woman's making sure the husband's not, you know, looking at porn. The woman's making sure that everything stays righteous and pure and, and it's so easy to drop into the role of parenting and just worrying about life that a couple really never ends up forming an emotional bond in a marriage. And that's, that's kind of what this slide is about. This is kind of my best attempt at characterizing an average of kind of how many of our lives unfold. And you guys just, if you'll do like a little checkbox, how many of these bullets kind of apply to you? I know it's hard to read, but I'll read them out. So the first bullet is that you, you probably didn't have good intimacy role models in your parents.
Margi Dehlin [00:15:35] Yeah, our parents weren't taught any of this stuff either.
John Dehlin [00:15:38] Our parents grew up, a lot of our parents grew up post World War II baby boomer kind of thing. You know, their ideas about patriarchy and what meant the role of men and role of women and trying to prosper. And so. And then you add on that the church layer. A lot of us didn't have the best role models as parents for intimacy. And how many of you would endorse that? Okay. The second is that we learned that love was conditional. And I don't think that's like, intentional. In fact, I don't think. Well, there are a few prominent church leaders who would say that love is conditional. But on overall, I think if you asked most church leaders, they would say love is unconditional. But the way that we talk about the Atonement and repentance and obedience. The way that oftentimes relationships get lived out in. In a Mormon context is you do good, you get the little reward. You know, you get the little badges for your, you know, your Articles of Faith banner, or you get your medallion or you get your eagle. You do, you know, you go to church, you do what's right, you get the pats on the back and the public acknowledgments, and you bear your testimony, and your parents are super proud of you. And it's this sort of like, do the right thing, get the reward. And even if it's unintentional or subconscious, we learn that love is conditional.
Margi Dehlin [00:16:58] It's earned.
John Dehlin [00:16:59] It's earned.
Margi Dehlin [00:17:00] It's something that you have to, again, be worthy for. And we have a lot of language around worthiness in the Mormon culture that is quite problematic when it comes to how we understand ourselves and what we think we deserve and how we then negotiate our relationships.
John Dehlin [00:17:16] So we're always hustling for love, and we're hustling for worthiness and is not conducive to good emotional intimacy. It undermines intimacy, and we'll get to that. You oftentimes learn to do the right thing out of fear and control. And healthy emotional intimacy is anathema to fear and control. You don't. And we'll talk about why. You need safety. But if you are always fearing and being controlled, you don't feel safe.
Fear, Control, and Conditional Love in the Church
Margi Dehlin [00:17:45] When you think about the classic fear response, what do you think of? You think of closing up, right? You think of your shoulders tensing. Well, that's happening to your vagina and your penis, and that's happening to your brain. So try to have intimacy.
John Dehlin [00:17:57] And even more important, it's happening to your. It's not. And this isn't about sex necessarily like it's happening to your emotional safety. So we throw up walls to protect ourselves from being hurt emotionally. And so that closing up, most importantly, happens around our vulnerability and our identity and our feeling of a desire or not desire to be fully honest and open. And that's. That. That's the real killer that then leads.
Margi Dehlin [00:18:27] Everything that's physical is a symbol of what's happening emotionally. Right. So I bring up that. That imagery to help you understand what he's just saying.
John Dehlin [00:18:37] Yes, totally. So because we're always worried that we're not worthy. And by the way, we learned this in adolescence if we accidentally masturbate or if we accidentally stumble on porn and the hammer comes down. There was a beautiful story told to me yesterday, and I won't. I won't say who because I don't have permission, but about a mother who found out that their child was looking at porn and she literally picked up the monitor from the computer and threw it in the trash, right? And. And, you know, just imagine and not to, you know, and. And we all, you know, we all believe in the Maya Angelou thing about when you know better, you do better. But think about what that's like to a kid that. That sees that type of reaction. It's just like, oh, my gosh, I need to be. I can't upset my mom or my dad anymore. I can't do what, do anything that's wrong and that carries into adulthood. Where in the marriage, sometimes you can just always be on alert to not do what's wrong, but also you don't want to violate the Lord's commandments in addition to hurt your partner. And so it's just a lot of tensing up in all the physical and emotional ways.
Margi Dehlin [00:19:43] Well, in the research on fear driven kind of outcomes is that they only last short term. So I don't know how many of you remember the drunk driving campaign where they would bring in the cars to the high schools, right. And show us the horrible car. And that would work for about. That works for about two weeks, and then it doesn't work anymore. So people are not motivated by fear long term. And actually a lot of the parenting research that's coming out, you've probably seen some of the parenting research on punishment and especially spanking and things like that, that those are actually not helping the child curtail behavior, or if they do curtail behavior, it's from this kind of secondary fear response. And so then you're causing trauma and you're causing not really that kind of safety that people need to be more value driven instead of fear driven, which is a lot of what we talked about yesterday was value driven.
John Dehlin [00:20:35] So how many of you feel like you had a conditional love model growing up? Okay. How many of you feel like you had a lot of fear and control growing up? Okay. We're getting. For the viewing audience, we're getting lots of hands going up. How many of you were in a home where you kind of didn't talk about the hard stuff? In fact, you might talk about everything but the hard stuff, right? Elephants in all the rooms. You just don't talk about them. And then, yeah, so. And then we get married super fast, right. Without actually really getting to know our partner. It's like the guy gets off the mission. Is she cute? Does she have a heartbeat? Is she temple worthy? Am I feeling excited about the prospects of our courtship? Let's get married.
Guest 4 [00:21:26] Right.
John Dehlin [00:21:27] And it's within four months, you know, or six months. Right. Lots of. Lots of heads nodding. We get married super young and super fast. And tell me if I'm wrong, that Margi tells me there are good data that show that people who wait to get married oftentimes have more satisfying marriages.
Margi Dehlin [00:21:46] Yes. The data really is super bad for us. So the data shows that you do much better in marriage if you wait until your late 20s. It shows that you do much better if you have an education, both of you. And it shows that you do a lot better if you don't have kids.
John Dehlin [00:22:09] Jessica's like, I'm screwed. I'm so screwed. She's going home. Jessica's going home.
Margi Dehlin [00:22:20] So although we love our children and most of us want to have children, this whole idea that children make us happy is the biggest lie we've ever been fed. Right.
John Dehlin [00:22:30] During the marriage. Isn't it true that after the kids move out, happiness can go quite high?
Margi Dehlin [00:22:36] It can.
Guest 5 [00:22:37] It can.
Margi Dehlin [00:22:37] It's also a time when that's true,
John Dehlin [00:22:41] says the old couple.
Margi Dehlin [00:22:42] Yes. It's also a time when many couples, you know, kind of realize that they've allowed their marriage to not be a primary force. And so then when the children leave, that's oftentimes another. We see another up in divorce at that point.
John Dehlin [00:22:58] Yeah, that's true. So we get married super young, super fast. How many of you got married super young, super fast? Okay. And then. And then this is where it gets even more problematic, because it's almost like it's not a. In some ways, it's not a twosome, it's a threesome. In other words, the church is the third partner in the marriage. You're not just married to each other, but it's almost like the church is between you.
Margi Dehlin [00:23:20] Well, there's simple. I mean, yeah, you're saying the triangle. We were. I remember the triangle being taught.
Guest 6 [00:23:25] Right.
Margi Dehlin [00:23:25] So it's the husband, the wife, and God. And as long as you're both focused on God, then you're going to be fine.
John Dehlin [00:23:31] And what's hard is in Mormonism, God means the priesthood leaders, because the priesthood leaders speak for God. So it means the church and the priesthood leaders, even if they say God. And so all of a sudden, there's this third party in the marriage that can impact connection, that can impact closeness. That's like always monitoring, giving feedback, even if it's unconscious or, you know, indirect. Are we doing this right? Are we doing that right? Are we doing all that we should be doing? You shouldn't be doing that. Why are you doing that? You're not living up to my standards. You're not reading the scriptures like you should. You're not praying like you should. Oh, you're looking at porn. I caught you masturbating. Like, whatever it is, like, it's, it's just more that can kind of tense us up and, and set us, set us up a little bit. So, and then immediately we're taught to have kids, so the kids start coming. And once you kind of get on that train, kind of that Mormon train, it's like, okay, I've got a man's got to have this successful career, got to have lots of kids, got to serve in our callings. 20 years can go by just boom. 20 years go by and again, never once did we ever have a lesson to kind of become literate about emotional intimacy. We're just on that train. And as long as you're so busy in parenting or in your job or serving in the church, you don't have time for anything else. And you almost don't even need emotional intimacy because as long as you're so busy doing everything the church needs you to do, like, you know, you're full. At least you're full in terms of your time commitment. Where are you? Where are you not full necessarily?
Margi Dehlin [00:25:08] It takes 18 months to get past the original limerence phase. That many, if you've experienced that, it's the falling in love phase where you're kind of like goo goo gaga, you can't see anything wrong with your partner, you can't think about anything else. You're super, you know, in love. And not everybody experiences that prior to marriage, but many of us do in this kind of romantic culture that we're in. And so it takes 18 months to just kind of have that weighing down so that then you can become a little bit more rational about your decisions. And so if you think about a typical scenario that comes through my office a lot, if you're married within four months of knowing each other and pregnant within two months of your marriage, I can guarantee you as a husband that you never understood or knew your wife to begin with, because pregnancy changes us in ways that are non reversible. Excuse me. And it takes two and a half years to hormonally and physically recover from a pregnancy, and that's after the baby's born. And so if you have A child every two years, which is what a lot of you have done for, you know, the next 15 years. I can guarantee you that you don't know who your wife is. Your wife may not know who she is either, but you don't know who your wife is. So your entire marriage is based on a reality that just. That then implodes in my office with women at age 40 to 50 in what I call feminist rage and like identity rage and all of these things that they are understanding that something happened to them physiologically and biologically and maritally that completely rob them of their own self identity. So try to have intimacy in that perspective.
Participant Sharing: Personal Experiences with Intimacy
John Dehlin [00:26:57] So just to kind of switch to some processing now, who would be willing to be vulnerable and kind of say in their experience which parts of this they relate to or their feeling particularly. And let's get the mics going, let's get the mics turned on.
Margi Dehlin [00:27:17] And before we even do that, I just want to say that looking at all of you right now, like my anxiety is rising because I can see your facial expressions about like, oh my gosh. So I'm very glad that we're processing.
John Dehlin [00:27:33] Yeah. So let's just swim in this for a little bit, get some, get some catharsis going.
Guest 7 [00:27:39] So I grew up in a very large Mormon family. I have 10 siblings. As much sex as. Well, I can tell you that my parents didn't have a lot of sex in their marriage because my mom, well, they had it 10 times and probably about 10 times, you know, in talking to my dad later on because my parents ended up divorcing after all of our kids, all the kids got out of the house. There wasn't a lot of emotional intimacy that went on because my mom kind of was a very strong and in many ways domineering parent and spouse. So there wasn't a lot of that emotional intimacy. Us children didn't get taught about sex or if they or my parents way of talking about sex was kind of church related and kind of, I guess they taught my oldest brother who kind of passed things down as we kind of got a little bit older. But that was never something that was discussed or talked about. You know, we.
John Dehlin [00:28:57] What about emotional intimacy?
Guest 7 [00:29:00] Did that even come up between my parents or anytime. Anytime ever in any way? I mean we were. My mom would say that she loved us, but things were very fear driven. We were spanked as children and
Guest 5 [00:29:24] you
Guest 7 [00:29:24] know, there was a lot of, a lot of conditional things or terminology that was used. We didn't talk about the hard stuff. I grew up in a house where my mother never admitted if she was wrong. And in fact, even now, like, sometimes my brothers and I will try to have little competitions and see if I can get my mom to say that she's wrong or admit that she's wrong about something. So, like, that's the type of house that I grew up in. Fortunately for my wife and I, we did have before we ended up getting married, we did have a period of time where we had a relationship with each other. We knew each other in high school and didn't get married until after we'd both served missions. And we had actually, before we served missions, we had actually done a few years of college. But in our early part of our relationship, we didn't have true emotional intimacy. And I think a lot of that was because the church, again, that was something that was never taught to us both in our own homes, but also not at church. And I think there's a lot that. Getting back to the fear, you know, if we had some sort of desire or sexual fantasy or anything, that it falls outside of what the church prescribes as normal, you know, there's a lot of fear of what's my spouse going to think of me? You know, even if it's something that's really simple, you know, there's always that fear of, is she going to think that I'm looking at pornography? And we had many discussions later on when we started becoming more emotional, intimate of her, admitting that she would often worry about me looking at porn if I were to bring up something like if I expressed a desire for sex a little too often. Whatever interval that she determined was
Guest 8 [00:32:01] what
Guest 7 [00:32:01] it was supposed to be, she had that fear that I was looking at pornography or doing something that I wasn't supposed to be doing. And so that fear of really letting her see me for who I am or who I was was dangerous because of the fear of judgment. And, you know, so that's definitely things that we. We've had to work through.
John Dehlin [00:32:34] Can I. Can I just share one quick reaction? Jacob? Right. I. I've. I've been, in my mind, I've been thinking, okay, we're. This is about emotional intimacy. Intimacy. This is not a presentation about sex. We're trying to actually make it clear that there's a difference between emotional intimacy and sex. Yet we keep coming back to talking about sex. And I. I mentioned that to Natasha, and then I just realized that the level of obsession and shame and fear we have around sex is one of the primary culprits for Killing our emotional intimacy because, and I kind of alluded to this earlier, but because if you step out of line sexually, you're beaten down in such a significant way, you're ashamed, you feel so awful that it makes you so scared and protective that you don't want to show who you really are. You learn to lie or cover up or hide because of that. And so they, it's really hard. I don't think we can really separate it out. So thank you for, for helping us see that better.
Margi Dehlin [00:33:35] They're intricated in the sense of it affects emotional intimacy. Whatever, whatever it is that you are feeling, there's potential judgment. I'm not going to be accepted. If I really show my cards, will somebody reject me? Will somebody not want me anymore? Am I going to be undesirable? And so it can be a myriad of topics that lead you to feel that way. And yet our current obsession around the narrative of sexuality in our culture, it just kind of sets it up that no matter who you are, you're going to fail. You're going to fail at the ideal of the sexual narrative in our church. And so I don't know how any of us, men, women, straight, gay, transgender, are going to escape the reality that emotional intimacy will be affected by our sexual scripts and narratives. And why, you know, in my profession, when people say, well, what do you, what do you focus on? And they want me to choose either faith or sex. And I'm like, nope, it's both. I have to do both.
Guest 9 [00:34:39] Who else?
John Dehlin [00:34:40] Camille.
Guest 9 [00:34:45] Second time on camera with bike clothes on.
John Dehlin [00:34:49] Isn't Camille a great singer by the way?
Guest 9 [00:34:54] Not quite. Idina Menzel. But so I, I was going through all the bullet points. I can check every single one. And it's easy to, you know, direct the lens on my parents and you know, everything that's wrong with me is always your parents fault. But I actually have had enough training now to know to turn that it's a lot more powerful to turn the lens on me. And you know what of this am I, I am not modeling healthy intimacy to my children at all.
Guest 2 [00:35:24] You're not?
Guest 9 [00:35:25] I am not, No.
Guest [00:35:26] I
Guest 9 [00:35:29] one example, intimacy with my 19 year old daughter who is very strong young woman.
John Dehlin [00:35:39] This is the stem innist, right?
Guest 9 [00:35:40] This is the staminist who is leaving on a mission to Tahiti in six weeks and just, you know, knocked it out of the park in engineering her first year dean's list, like smart, deeply thinking young woman. And we went on a bike ride last Thursday on her 19th birthday and she she admitted, because we started to feel a little bit more safe as we're riding in the canyon, and it got a little bit more intimate. And she broke down into tears and admitted that my certainty about my. What did you call it? Hysterical feminism?
Margi Dehlin [00:36:18] Feminist rage.
Guest 9 [00:36:19] My feminist rage within the context of the church that I come across was so much certainty, you know, that I'm never wrong. She just says, you're you. You can't be wrong. You don't apologize. And it really gets in the way, Mom. And she's choked up with our intimacy. So there's a lesson for me.
John Dehlin [00:36:48] Thanks, Camille. Others who's connecting to something on the
Guest 2 [00:36:53] slide so I can check all the boxes for myself pretty much. Except I have a different story in that my husband was a convert and he was drawn to the church because he had kind of a tumultuous, you know, raised by a single mom and. But his mother was very open to seeing to sex. In fact, he. He's from England and there their bodies, they don't shame them whatever size or shape. Like she would. His mother would walk around the house naked and he would like it was just a normal thing. It wasn't a shaming experience for him. And so he recognized the repressiveness almost immediately when we were married. But he, his mother was open to having sleepovers with women in his bedroom. And yeah, just very different upbringing. And of course he was. He was experienced and he was immediately when, when we met, he saw me and was attracted to who I was. And I, through my upbringing brought in all of these these issues that really affected.
Guest 5 [00:38:17] But he.
Guest 2 [00:38:19] But now I'm just seeing today it's just been really an epiphany. Like he wouldn't let me be arms length. He would kind of chase after me and say, hey, we're not going to be buried underneath children and church. Our relationship is the most important thing. And. But as a Mormon woman, I felt responsible to keep him in line. I felt like it was my duty to make sure that he wasn't watching porn, that he wouldn't cheat, that he like it. Like that was my duty to give him what he needed so that, you know, he, he wouldn't look elsewhere. And I, I was the lower desire partner, but actually I don't think I was the lower desire partner. I think the, the most damaging message I received growing up was there are things that you can't. You shouldn't do after you're married that are against the laws of God. But we're not going to tell you what Those things are. And so do you take your clothes
Margi Dehlin [00:39:42] off all the way?
Guest 2 [00:39:42] I don't know. You know, do you. Do. I mean, all of these things where you second guess because you're. You're given these messages that, like, having sex before you're married is next to murder. And you bring that with you in your marriage. And as a woman now, it's your responsibility. And these are the messages we see with. With a modesty, like, it's your responsibility to keep your husband in line. And I never knew if we were crossing the line, and as we got more and more married and intimate and everything, I'd always be like, wow, did what we do last night was that even, you know, do I need to repent of that? And I'm a married woman, you know. Yeah. And he. And he made sure. I mean, for the first time, I actually was. I did have sex before I was married. And so the going to the bishop repeatedly to confess my sins, I had nightmares about it years and years later. The shame around sex was suffocating. And so anyway, that has been my experience. Gratefully today, I am so thankful that my husband had a different experience than I did growing up. And at the time, we were shamed for him being not a returned missionary and being a convert and, you know, having that experience like that, that part of him was kind of hidden from the world, the world of Mormonism, because it wasn't the narrative that we should have. But now I'm just so grateful.
The Missing Dialogue: Growing Up Without Emotional Language
Guest 3 [00:41:56] So I just wanted to talk a little bit about kind of dialogue that didn't exist growing up. So, like, as a kid, your parents are sitting there, you shut up and you listen to me, and they tell you all these things and you don't have the chance to kind of have a voice and speak. And so there's no. The parent isn't listening to the child and the child isn't listening to the parent. It's the parent telling the child this, this and this. And so for me, when I think of my parents, and I was just making this connection is my whole life, I've never had the chance to have a voice and just sit there and tell them my kind of story and have them hear me. It was them telling me their story. And then. And so my whole life, I never had a voice. And so with my kids, the intimacy part is what I'm trying to do is shutting up and just listening to them and their story and acknowledging and repeating what they're telling me and listening to them and, oh, that's Difficult. And that must be hard for you, and how can I help you with that? And. And so I think what was lacking for me and the intimacy and this ties into my relationship with my wife as well, is having the dialogue and listening and shutting up for a minute and not talking and hearing that other person and then acknowledging what they're saying and validating those things. Like, when you say, acknowledge some person that's in the audience that's hurting, and you validate that, like, that's what creates, I think, the intimacy, maybe, and it creates that connection and that emotional intelligence, maybe.
Guest 10 [00:43:30] So.
Guest 11 [00:43:30] Thank you.
Guest [00:43:37] So I'll check all those.
Guest 12 [00:43:38] For me, I. Basically, my house was an elephant to, like, walk into and live in.
John Dehlin [00:43:44] An elephant.
Guest 12 [00:43:45] Right. I lived in an elephant. But I've been sitting here, and I relate to. Relate to so many different things, but just the one short story I wanted to share that I think kind of started off our intimacy. That's. I don't want to say that it didn't start. It's just one thing that. Just how the church kind of influenced our intimacy. So when we were first married young, we'd probably been married two months maybe, and he would. I was in this little apartment, and I. He would come visit the first month. He would come home from work, and I'd be, like, naked, right? And like, oh, this is gonna be so fun. I can do this now. It's not wrong. It's not bad. And after, like, a couple days, he sat me down and was like, well, we're kind of supposed to wear our garments, like, day and night. And so it's not really, like, good that you're doing this. And it just, like, it closed me so tight because I was so ready to be open. And it was just like this. This part of the triangle just, like, slammed down on me. And now I know he feels bad. I know that. That it wasn't his intention to do that, but that's how we were told to be, right? And so I. That's. And it wasn't even about the sex. It had nothing to do with sex. It just had to be. It was about me being free and open with who I am. I would go to a notice calling, like, I'm okay with bodies, but in that moment, I was told that who I am and what I'm okay with is not okay.
John Dehlin [00:45:24] Just one second. And, Jeremy, I just want to just say for you, that's. That's. Can't be fun to hear in a public, you know, arena. And I had a client last Week with the. Almost an identical story. And it's actually an identical story. And, you know, we talk about patriarchy and how it hurts women and children. Patriarchy hurts men. And you were simply trying to be a righteous priesthood holder, as you were taught. That's it.
Guest 13 [00:45:55] It's.
John Dehlin [00:45:55] It's that simple. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. But I'm just saying, like, we're all. And I. I also just want to say we're going to keep referring to the church because that's our frame of reference. I don't know. An institution that's good at nurturing healthy emotional intimacy. So I think this is just like new territory. I mean, Brene Brown is kind of like groundbreaking because before her, who was talking about this stuff in any really globally visible way. Mister Rogers. Yeah, mister Rogers is great. Yeah, mister Rogers is great, for sure. But he got associated with children. Yeah. And that's for children, but not for adults. And so we're kind of breaking new ground really, with this. And so let's just keep repeating to ourselves the Maya Angelou quote. When you know better, you do better. And that's it. You did the best you could when you were there, and now you're gonna do better because you know better.
How the Church Harms Both Men and Women Equally
Guest 5 [00:46:51] So this is a really good topic to show how both men and women are equally hard harmed in the church. And, you know, on the one hand, you mentioned yesterday some of the good things that the church provides. And I think a lot of people might look at it and say, hey, one of the good things is it overall. Members are encouraged to be very industrious and very hard workers and sort of, you know, as units, as family units. Everybody's sort of working towards all these different goals. And so it can appear like everybody's being very successful. But the downside to that is there isn't time for intimacy. First of all, even if it was known how to do it, and it's unimportant to the goals, and so that's why it's not taught. You know, I mean, I think of statements kind of like, if you have the church in common, you could marry anybody and it would work. You know, just as an extreme of this is unnecessary to even heaven. This is absolutely unnecessary.
Guest 12 [00:48:14] And,
Guest 5 [00:48:17] you know, for me, words have always been extremely important. I have always felt my world in words and understood people with words. And so even as a child, I would assume that everybody was ready to use their words and explain themselves. And I learned that adults were extremely guarded, that people were scared to share and what have you. And I Was constantly told, you don't ask this, you don't ask this, and stuff like that. And that didn't necessarily stop me.
Guest 12 [00:49:00] But
Guest 5 [00:49:03] one of the things that I try to teach my children, and I actually tell people that I see it as the most important thing I can do for them is I teach them how to talk because they learn it too. How to talk English or whatever language is in the house. But that doesn't mean they know how to communicate. And so I. I really push them to have to access everything going on inside and turn that into the words that work for them, even if it's hard and whatever. And it comes easier for some of my kids than others. But I'm like, what do I have to give you? But knowing how to access yourself, and in human world, we do that with words. And so, you know. Anyway, thank you.
Guest 14 [00:50:05] So I wasn't raised in the church active anyway, so I can't blame a lot of it. Of our. My husband and our emotional. Not emo.
Guest [00:50:16] Yeah.
Guest 14 [00:50:16] Emotional intimacy on the church. I did witness a lot of emotional. Like, my dad was very shaming to my mother, and so I witnessed a lot of that. They. They weren't. There wasn't a lot of communication going on or healthy communication, so it wasn't modeled for me. And so most of. I don't know. I think my husband and I had very different expectations about what marriage was going to be. And I've never felt like I've lived up to his expectations. He. He's a little bit older than me and a little bit, you know, into the typical roles that, you know, husband and wife should have. And realizing now, as I'm kind of going through this faith transition, one of the things that I wrote down that I'm avoiding is talking to him. He doesn't. He doesn't know. He knows that I don't go to church. I haven't been to the temple in four years. But it wasn't until I stopped wearing my garments that he was like, oh, this is serious. I hadn't. I hadn't told him anything. I mean, I couldn't. I didn't feel like I could. I don't know what he believes. I'm learning that he believes, you know, that he believes that everything that the prophet said is doctrine and from God. And so, you know, for me to try to open up to him is terrifying. I don't know what his. Well, I just learned what his political beliefs are. I don't think he's. Would love it knowing that I'm you know, more active in feminism type things. I feel like I have to hide that I'm going to support the LGBT community, which is because our children are. Are both lgbt. So, yeah, we need to. There's zero emotional intimacy in our 26 years, and it's done a lot of damage. And thankfully, we're, I feel like, both committed to trying to. To work it out. We love each other, and we want to work it out, so pray for us.
Margi Dehlin [00:53:12] So I'm so glad that you said the word love. You know, we love each other, but we don't have emotional intimacy, because that's another thing. Intimacy is not. Is love. You can love the heck out of people. I mean, I think that we're a fairly loving community as Mormons. Right. We really love each other, and yet we're not doing this intimacy thing well as a community.
Guest [00:53:34] Right?
John Dehlin [00:53:34] That's a great point. Yeah, that's a great point. Thank you.
Holly [00:53:38] Is there.
Margi Dehlin [00:53:38] Do we have time for one more?
John Dehlin [00:53:39] We do. We're not just going to pray for you. We're going to put this presentation on the Internet. And as long as your husband won't be too hurt that you were so vulnerable, hopefully this will be a tool you guys can watch together to help kickstart an improvement in your relationship.
Guest 8 [00:54:03] So my wife and I met 29 days later. We were married, had our first kid at, like, what, 19 months? And we had kids every two years for 10 years. So we have six children. I think that emotional intimacy wasn't ever really there. Matter of fact, we had some major hardships, and I don't know how we made it through, but we have. And the last little while, things have really improved. But as we have chosen another path, leaving the constructs of what we both grew up knowing in the church, real intimacy is taking place between her and I, but more pronounced now is with our children. Like, there's no conditional love. It's. I don't know, it's just taken down a tremendous amount of barriers to be able to talk to our children and figure them out and help them shape their life in a healthy manner. I think I can safely say that both my wife and I growing up, although our parents did the best that they knew how, did not do a very good job teaching us any amount of emotional intimacy. So this is one of the main reasons that we've come here. So I really appreciate the insights that each one of you are providing into a healthier life. Thank you.
Margi Dehlin [00:55:38] Okay, one more comment.
Guest 5 [00:55:41] Okay.
Guest [00:55:41] I know we have to move on, but I just Wanted to maybe share the perspective of someone who can't check all those boxes. I mean, I had a dysfunctional home in many ways, but my mom was very unconditional in her love. And so when I see something like this, I feel like I'm approaching this from a place of privilege and luck. And I just sit here and stew in the shame that I can't provide better parenting for my children. I mean, I do apologize, I say I'm wrong, but I do quite a bit of fear based parenting and I'm extremely controlling. And so I sit here and I, I just feel so bad about myself and wish I were a more evolved human being because I had more privilege and I should know better. And when it comes to emotional intimacy in my marriage, again, I feel very lucky and privileged because when my, I mean, I did get married older and when my husband was in college, he went to an Ivy League school and had a mental breakdown and had to go to years and years of counseling and therapy and did cognitive behavioral therapy and ACT and journaled. So by the time we got married, he came with so many skills. And so when, you know, when I have issues or whatever, he can, he can actually, I mean, he's not a psychologist, but he can say like, do you want to mindfully watch your float thoughts float by or do you want to like beat the crap out of them by like writing them down? You know, I mean, he, he has skills so that we can have emotional intimacy. And so I feel very privileged in that way. But also want to say that I think therapy works and there is hope that with treatment things do get better. One more comment with regard to the sexual intimacy piece. I think honestly, and I don't know what my husband would say about this, but I think one of the greatest gifts that I brought to the marriage was that I had premarital sex with, not with my husband, with someone before my husband. And so I have a reference point to know that I prefer him. Not that I had sex with him before we were married, because, yeah, anyways, but I have a reference point and I think that has really helped our marriage. I mean, it's helped my perception of things. Not that it's perfect, but having a reference point I think for me is healthy and it's something that I want to teach my children that is an option for them if they want, not to shame them into thinking they have to.
Current Narratives and Scripts Around Intimacy
Margi Dehlin [00:58:13] I would just say one last thing before we move on is back on the other slide is, you know, the, the current narratives and scripts we're hearing about how to deal with doubts, because there are so many people dealing with doubts. And since this is a faith transition, retreat from the pulpit is antithetical to intimacy. Right. So pretend they're not there. So even with yourself, intimacy with yourself.
Guest 6 [00:58:37] Right.
Margi Dehlin [00:58:37] Just pretend they're not there. Don't pay attention to that.
John Dehlin [00:58:40] The shelf. The shelf is a barrier to intimacy because it's basically saying any authentic concern, any way that your soul is crying out, noticing something that doesn't feel right, put up a wall. A shelf is a wall to yourself.
Margi Dehlin [00:58:57] And again, given our history and Joseph Smith's family, I think that's actually one thing that they did fairly well. They had a lot of family conversations about all kinds of religious ideas and thoughts. And I don't know if there was
John Dehlin [00:59:12] tension, necessarily, a lot of tension, but
Margi Dehlin [00:59:15] at least they were talking about it. Right. And at least they were being, you know, open and honest about those things.
John Dehlin [00:59:22] Absolutely.
Margi Dehlin [00:59:23] Yeah. Okay.
John Dehlin [00:59:23] And that was kind of what I wanted to say is that again, I don't. I have no data to say that Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Hindus or do do emotional intimacy better than Mormons. So we're not picking on Mormonism. But when you think about kind of an orthodox religion and when you think about the, you know, the type of structure that would allow for that first half of life, build up the vessel kind of thing, it really is about a path. And so the focus isn't on what as. As Heather was saying, the focus isn't like, hey, five year old, what feels good to you? Hey, 12 year old, what feels moral? What are your ethics? Right. It kind of doesn't matter. It's like, get on the. Get on the train. This is where we're going. And so just, just that orthodox religion just generally is not going to be concerned about the individual morals and preferences and needs and desires of the individual. And that's not, you know, there's good that comes from that and there's harm. And emotional intimacy is the casualty of kind of an orthodox structure, but it's also the opportunity of the second half of life. It's the opportunity of the faith crisis where now we get to have this awakening. And instead of life being boring at 30 or 40 or 50, we've got a whole new domain that we need to learn how to conquer, which keeps it interesting. Right. Trying to put a positive spin on things.
Margi Dehlin [01:00:49] Good framing, John.
John Dehlin [01:00:50] Good framing. Natasha already alluded to this. I was trying to find the best slide that I could. You know, as I was thinking about, well, why isn't this just natural? Like if we all need it, if it's our core need, like this is our core need, right? There's nothing more important than this. Even if you want to say sex is the most important thing, you really, you know, in a most healthy marriage, you're not going to have great sex if there isn't good emotional intimacy because your partner won't feel safe on average. And so emotional intimacy really is. I oftentimes put up the tree, Lehigh's tree and the glowing tree and Lehigh's dream. Like for me, the plain and precious fruit. The thing that's desirable above all things is emotional intimacy. And so why isn't it just natural? Because it's the thing we want most, right? If it's the thing we want and need most, why aren't we experts at it? Like we figured sex out, why didn't we figure out emotional intimacy? Please stand up.
Guest 9 [01:01:56] And
John Dehlin [01:01:59] I was just as I was
Guest 15 [01:02:01] listening to you and a few other people that have all these children at such a quick age and they're right on top of each other, it's really difficult to stop what you're doing and say, how are you doing? When you're just trying to keep them all in line so you can get from point A to point B. Yeah, that's good. And the other thing is too is I teach school and I really. A new focus that we were trained on this year is on emotional intelligence and social intelligence.
John Dehlin [01:02:25] Big push.
Guest 15 [01:02:26] We now have a counselor in our school that is there for the children. It's really, really exciting and I'm all behind it. But coming from a realistic point of view, trying to teach 28, 10 year olds all day long, it's really difficult to stop and really care about what they think sometimes. And I think that's honestly where we're at in our lives with our family, with our neighbors and everything. When we've got to get from point A to point B. I really don't care what you're thinking right now. I need to get this done. I need you to sit down and be quiet so we can get this and this and this done.
John Dehlin [01:03:06] Bottle up what you're feeling and then
Guest 15 [01:03:09] we'll talk about that some other day. And then some other day never comes up. So that's kind of where I'm at. You know, I've always been like that. Well, it's not important right now. We have to do this and this and this. So I think that it's really never been a high priority Priority.
John Dehlin [01:03:27] Yeah. That's definitely one. Yeah. Yeah. Isaac, quick theory.
Guest 8 [01:03:34] I think it's because we're not authentic, we can't be trusted. We have a construct of we always have to be happy all the time. It's like we're fake people. It's hard to trust fake people. So if you're not your true authentic self.
Guest 14 [01:03:49] Yeah.
Guest 8 [01:03:50] There is going to be. No, there's going to be barriers everywhere that are gonna be hard to break down. That's. I don't know if I'm off on my thing.
John Dehlin [01:03:57] That's all true. That's all true. Yeah. Yeah. And back. And then
Guest 16 [01:04:07] I think it is just so dang painful to be rejected.
John Dehlin [01:04:11] There you go.
Guest 16 [01:04:11] And to have people think your ideas are stupid or what you're feeling is dumb. So, so it's that pain. Trying to avoid that pain. Pain is easier or better. Pays off more than not in the long run. But at that moment, just to keep your ideas or your feelings to yourself than to be. And especially as little kids, we're told, you know, like you said, there's. And kids are falling apart all the time. They're always having tantrums. And you're like, I just gotta get to the doctor. Put your dang shoes on. I don't care if you want red or blue. So it's, you know, it. We're taught as little kids just suck it up, you know, and if you. And a lot of our parents weren't really raised with it either, and it was a very, you know, tumultuous time. So they, especially males, you know, you're taught to just put on a stiff face and don't have feelings about that.
Guest 2 [01:05:04] So.
John Dehlin [01:05:04] Yeah, that's all true. Yeah. Thank you. And, and just to piggyback off of that, I, I, this is going to betray how old I am. But the slide that I chose to represent the biggest obstacle to emotional intimacy is that one somebody's old like me. Yeah. I will submit that all that is true. That everybody said. But the most, the, the most important reason why emotional intimacy is, is something that we avoid in fear instead of are naturally attracted to is because it kind of works like this. If you are to be emotionally intimate, it's basically to take your heart. You know, it's, you know, the, the heart is the defining organ that sort of like ends up determining whether you die. Because of course, when you're brain dead, you're dead. But why does your brain die? Because it stops getting the blood that it needs to survive. And so it's basically Metaphorically taking this most precious organ, the most precious thing you. Who you are, at your very center, taking it out of its protective shell, presenting it to the person who you care for most, in theory, and who you're also literally naked with, both physically and emotionally, which means you're the most vulnerable to them. Right. And the prospect of doing that is that when you do present them with the most vulnerable thing you have, they might smash it and step on it. And I think that's. We. We can. What's that? Yeah. Which is smashing it, right? Not being interested. You mean just not being interested?
Guest 11 [01:06:54] Is that what you mean?
Margi Dehlin [01:06:55] Just the busyness of life.
John Dehlin [01:06:56] Yeah, but that's. How awful is that? That's almost worse. Like, you saw that quote from Robin Williams where it's like, the worst thing in the world isn't being alone. It's being with somebody and feeling alone. Right? Like, it. Like, them being too busy to really care about that heart that you present to them. That's almost more damaging. Ignoring is almost more damaging than actual criticism or rejection. Sometimes. Sometimes ignoring or isolation is actually the worst form of torture, you know? Holly, did you want to. Are you raising your hand?
Recognizing the Absence of Emotional Self-Intimacy
Holly [01:07:39] I don't. I feel like I'm gonna, like, hyperventilate because this is really, like, hitting me right now. A lot of levels, because I. For the first time, I'm, like, figuring out what this whole concept of intimacy really is. And. Sorry. I mean, I think if the reason we're all here is because we. We're lacking that. I'm thinking about, like, the reason I removed myself from the church is because I. There was this disconnect, this, like, lack of connection, being around all these wonderful people who are worshiping together and singing together and serving together. But there's, like, this disconnect, and I felt it, and I felt it in my marriage. And there's, like, one benefit to being apart from my husband and to being separated is that I have to, like, figure out who I am and sort of, like, date myself. So I'm here by myself this weekend, and I'm doing a lot of things by myself and just realizing, like, who I am underneath all the stuff I've built myself up to be, and. Sorry. I'm, like, shaking. I think for me, the gift of all of this is the gift of the crisis. The gift of all of this is gaining this. So.
John Dehlin [01:09:36] Thank you, Holly.
Guest 11 [01:09:38] Thank you.
John Dehlin [01:09:39] Please.
Guest 17 [01:09:41] Just a quick comment to Holly. I'm a military wife, and he's gone on a lot of deployments, and I think that Was one of the things. We both come from really broken families and have, you know, fulfilled all those quick marriage, lots of kids in a short amount of time and had a really difficult marriage. But the thing that think has saved us is that time apart or one of the things that saved us is that time apart when he goes on deployments and when he would leave, I. We didn't. We didn't really connect very well over the phone. I never. I don't like those conversations. But he. So he's gone. Gone, like emotionally and physically when he's on these deployments for nine months to a year at a time. But during those times, I have healed and figured out, like Holly said, dated myself, and I figured out who I am. And I found that during those times that I was strong and I found out my own strengths and
Guest 14 [01:10:49] it made
Guest 17 [01:10:49] me a better person and it made me strong enough to. When he came home to don't cry
Holly [01:10:56] at me,
Guest 17 [01:10:59] I just knew who I was when he came home and I figured out who I was because our marriage wasn't good. It was. It was awful.
Guest 14 [01:11:08] It was almost.
Guest 17 [01:11:09] I would have left had I had a place to go and. But I think that you're gonna find that you are strong and you're gonna
Guest 14 [01:11:18] figure out who you are.
Guest 17 [01:11:19] You. And you're going to be a better person for this experience eventually.
Guest 10 [01:11:31] You asked the question, why, if it's so important, is it not natural or seemingly not natural? And from my experience, it is absolutely natural. We're taught at a very young age that acceptance comes with conformity, and that is the death of intimacy. So, you know, even the scriptures say, look at the little children learn from them because they haven't. They still have the intimacy. And it's bred out of us by institutions. It's spread out of us by, you know, wanting to be accepted as part of something. And when you have something as strong as the church, as far as acceptance goes, it's bred out of you really fast.
John Dehlin [01:12:28] Thank you. The wisdom of our group, huh? Margi's like, do you have any favorite, like, group members when they comment? And I'm like, no. What I love is the wisdom of our group and the diversity of our group and the many wise voices. It's like a freaking orchestra choir. Yeah.
Guest 12 [01:12:51] One thing, like, listening is one thing that I realized, too, is like, emotional intimacy with myself is severely lacking as well, because I don't know how to hold myself in safety.
John Dehlin [01:13:05] Yeah.
Guest 12 [01:13:05] And so I hurt myself. And so I think, you know, you talked earlier before about, unless you're you're okay. It's hard to be okay with everybody else. And so I think learning how to hold myself safely is like, super. Is like, that's the one thing that's, like, standing out to me that I need to work on first before I can hold my husband or my children or my community. Intimacy.
John Dehlin [01:13:28] That's brilliant.
Margi Dehlin [01:13:34] There's only one caveat I want to say to that, because I think that's a beautiful idea. And, and I think it's. It's very much in the pop culture, you know, work on yourself. Love yourself. You can't be. Can't expect people to love you if you don't love yourself. And. And I think there's great truth in that.
Guest 9 [01:13:50] And
Margi Dehlin [01:13:52] I don't know what island we all get to go to when we get to do that. I don't know what job is going to give me a sabbatical for my responsibilities or my children are like, oh, yeah, mom, just go work on yourself. We'll take care of everything at home. And so I just want to remind us that we do this work in our community, in our systems, in our marriages, in our parenting styles. And the fact that you. I don't want it to feel. Feel like you're less than. Because you cannot offer everything to yourself. We are not wired that way. We are pack animals, and we have to have relationship. Back to the rats, right in the maze with the cocaine versus the cocaine and the community. So it really is a yes. And like, work on yourselves and understand that you need people who are going to be ballet date you. And that doesn't mean that you're weak. That means you're a pack animal. Does that make sense? Okay.
Guest [01:14:57] Yeah.
Guest 12 [01:15:00] To Holly and also to Heidi and to you, Natasha. I. I agree with everything you're saying.
Margi Dehlin [01:15:06] And yeah, I do feel like there
Guest 12 [01:15:10] are times when it is necessary for
Margi Dehlin [01:15:14] your fortune, for me, for my safety
Guest 12 [01:15:17] and well being, to make that separation so that I can find out who
Margi Dehlin [01:15:24] I am and what I need and then be able to come back to that relationship hopefully stronger.
Guest 12 [01:15:30] Like Heidi was saying, a little bit of separation, hopefully to create a space where I can feel like I'm safe again.
Guest 14 [01:15:40] Because.
Margi Dehlin [01:15:41] Because this is where I'm at right now. My heart is broken. I shared my heart and it was reject. And I'm not safe.
Guest 12 [01:16:09] It's not safe. So I've had to create space.
Margi Dehlin [01:16:16] Thank you. I'm in a very similar spot. So I understand what you're saying, and I hope what I said wasn't interpreted as space. Space not being okay, because. I totally agree. I totally agree. I think where, I mean, in pack form is whether that's with a therapist or a best friend or a sibling or a retreat group. Or a retreat group. Right. That's what I mean. Like, it's. We do our. Our solo work also usually best in conjunction with somebody, something, some entity that will not reject us. And in some ways, that's what therapy is supposed to be. I know that people haven't always had great relationships or great experiences in therapy, but it is supposed to be that blank slate where you can show up without the consequence of rejection. Right. And so, yes, yes. And not everybody deserves or has earned our heart or our intimacy attempts.
Guest [01:17:26] Right.
John Dehlin [01:17:28] Margi and I have had a few super hard things in our marriage, and there were a time or two where I would have been. Deserved to be kicked out or for her to have left for sure, and vice versa. But just, you know, just. Just a year and a half ago, like, if. If you would have asked me, like, In December of 2017, I would have said, our marriage is better than it's ever been. It's phenomenal. I couldn't ask for a better marriage. And that was on the heels of, you know, us getting excommunicated. Excommunicated, which really excommunicated my whole family. We had a daughter who was sexually assaulted as a senior in high school. We had some kids doing some identity work that was very significant emotional, you know, element to our family dynamic. And then Margi's dad died, and then my sister died, and we moved. And there was this point where over Christmas break, we kind of had a family argument over Christmas break. And the culmination of it was. Was to my just shock and horror, Markie kicked me out of the house. And here I am like a coach and, you know, like a public figure. And I, you know, for whatever in the past I, you know, did or didn't do, I didn't deserve that. In this case, I didn't deserve it. And I think Margi would agree with that now. But Margi was having her own emotional break because of all she had been through and was dealing with. And in her feminist rage or whatever we want to call it, in her midlife crisis, she was feeling too suffocated in our merged identities, especially with me as a public figure. And so I found myself looking for a home, you know, in late December, like between Christmas and New Year's of 2017. I'm like, where do I go? All my stuff is in my van. You know, I ended up calling Tom Christofferson because I, you know, he had, I just interviewed him and he just seemed like a dear man. And I didn't know who else to call. Who am I going to go live with as a grown ass man? You know, like, can I keep, can I come live with you? You know, because I, you know, like, apartments are expensive and like. So Tom Kristofferson took me in to his home without any questions, and I lived with Tom Kristofferson for a month or two while Margi and I got our lives back on track. But the point was Margi needed that separation and it was the healthiest thing that she's probably ever done. And she, it was like cocoon into butterfly for her to have that separation. And, and what did she do? She ended up like, I'm going to become a life coach. And then she got her life coach certification. And then all of a sudden, once we worked out her stuff, she's like, I want to partner with you on podcasts and doing workshops and retreats. And I'm like, who's this woman? This woman wouldn't even go to a, you know, like a mixer with other people for years and years. She didn't want anything to do with any of the thing I did or any of the people. And that was just something she arrived at. And that's not the right conclusion. That was just what she found. But I just want to validate. Sometimes a, a structured separation can be transformative to a relationship and sometimes you need to get divorced. Like there's not one way. And so I just wanted to be a little vulnerable and share that as well, because that was.
Guest 11 [01:21:35] So some of these things are pretty deep as to, for instance, with my wife as an individual, you're going through these things, your own thoughts and your own feelings and then you're processing them and then I don't know what her situation is. But if once you decide you're going to present it to your husband, you know, it's a, you're very vulnerable in doing that. But you need to also allow them plenty of time to process. I mean, they can't immediately, you know, agree with you or tell you you're right. It's going to take them, you know, days and weeks to process this, especially with the transition. So anyway, thank you.
Navigating Mixed-Faith Marriages and Breathing Exercise
John Dehlin [01:22:28] I like to tell the, the non believing spouse in a mixed faith marriage, how long did it take you to arrive at the. From start to finish, to arrive at the place you arrived at? Can you allow your partner at Least that much time for them to have their process. It's hard, but it's hard. It's devastating.
Margi Dehlin [01:22:45] And it's that cyclical safety thing we talked about yesterday, right. That sometimes. Sometimes this is hard because you want to present your heart and just somebody say, I've got you. Right. I've got you. But then maybe what you're presenting also hurts or helps them feel rejected. Right. And so then now you're dealing with these kind of complex dynamics of the cyclical safety that is. Is not feeling very safe for either one of you, probably.
Guest 12 [01:23:12] Right.
John Dehlin [01:23:13] We should do a mixed faith marriage retreat and record it like this, because that. That could be really powerful.
Guest 4 [01:23:19] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:23:21] Well, this is beautiful. So that's the other picture that I found. You know, once your heart's been ripped out of your chest, that's kind of how you feel. And who wants to let's. You know, Donna, that's what you're feeling, and who wants to feel that way. Right, Holly, that may be what you're feeling. And many of others, you felt this place. So this is the. My best way of describing why this isn't natural for us at the most core psychological level, transcending Mormonism.
Margi Dehlin [01:23:47] So I think it's. Well, let's put it on a nicer slide. Do we have a nice. Let's put it on that one.
Guest 13 [01:23:56] What?
Margi Dehlin [01:23:57] I think it's time for a breathing exercise.
Guest 11 [01:23:59] Okay.
Guest 8 [01:24:00] Okay.
Margi Dehlin [01:24:06] I'm feeling it, and I can see lots of you are feeling it. So let's just put on this slide for. So if you don't mind. I hope this isn't too cluttered, corny, but I think it's just really good to just sit with ourselves for a minute and give ourselves grace. So if you just don't mind following my voice, and I'll close my eyes so you don't think I'm weird and staring at you. But if you want to close your eyes as well, that would be. That would be good. So just take a deep breath. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Settle into this chair that's offering you support. Be grateful for the support that your body feels through the structure of that chair. Continue to breathe. Your main job, as you listen to me, is really just to relax into your breath and allow anything that comes up in your brain to just float around and be there. And at this point, I just want to honor that. We've been talking about things that are. Are in many ways painful. We've looked at our own backgrounds, our own stories, our own current relationships. The roles other people have played and at times contributing to feelings of rejection and sadness and worry for us. We've also maybe considered ways that we have also doled out rejection to those that we love and want intimacy with. That's a heavy space. And if you can, somewhere in your processing and assessment of your body, where would you say that space resides? Do you hold that space in your head, kind of like heat? Or in your throat that feels closed up? Or in your chest like a heavy weight is upon it? Or maybe in your stomach where you feel maybe slightly nauseous? Or even your pelvic floor that feels tense? Or your shoulders, where does that reside for you? Give yourself grace for the fact that that is there. It is there for a reason. If you can try to give it a color or even turn it into an object, what would it look like? And once you have the object in your mind and wherever it is in your body, can you reach in with your fingers and pluck it out
Guest 16 [01:27:01] so
Margi Dehlin [01:27:02] that you can look at it and hold it and recognize it and validate it and also understand that it does not have to be all powerful? Thank the object for giving you information that you desperately need to move forward. And now turn that object into something light. So if it was a rock, maybe now it can turn into a feather. If it was rigid, maybe now it can turn clay, like. And in some way or another, I want you to imagine that object either floating or flying or ebbing away from your presence. And you can notice it and you can understand that it does not have to be something that you carry with you at all times. Thank yourself for doing this exercise with me. Continue to give yourself thanks. Three or four more breaths. Allow for a light or something that feels maybe like it can soak you with something positive in the sense of hope for intimacy, moving forward, and the many different relationships you have. So if that's imagining yourself in the sprinkle of a light rain, or in the sunshine of a bright day, or in the snowflakes of a mountaintop, imagine that energy being hope that permeates every aspect of your body, from your head to your cheeks, to your throat, to your chest to your back, to your pelvic floor, all the way down into your toes. Take two more deep breaths,
Guest 9 [01:29:11] and when
Margi Dehlin [01:29:11] you're ready, you can open up your eyes again. Some of you may really like that. Some of you may think that was a waste of five minutes. It's okay. Either way, it's okay.
John Dehlin [01:29:31] Natasha plays a role of emotional circuit breaker. It's like Overload. Emotional overload. It's great. Thank you. Thanks, Natasha.
Margi Dehlin [01:29:43] Anybody want to share if anything came up significant for you during that exercise? I would say maybe if someone needs
John Dehlin [01:29:48] a bathroom break, two or three of you take a quick bathroom break.
Guest 2 [01:29:53] Yes.
Margi Dehlin [01:29:55] Right behind you.
Guest 4 [01:30:00] One thing you said, Natasha, that really resonated with me. Well, I also just want to make an observation that when Holly sort of broke, I feel like she punctured an emotional balloon. And that was an observation, which was a great thing because I saw that it sort of opened other people up, and I just made that observation in my own mind. That emotional intimacy and being able to put your heart out there and take that risk kind of opens up other people to want to do the same thing. And so. But one thing that Natasha said that really resonated with me is I've tried to. This emotional intimacy idea has been a big theme in my life the last couple of months as I listened to some podcasts and things like that. And I've kind of introduced that idea with my mixed faith marriage. And she's coming at it from a different perspective. And so emotionally intimacy for her, for me, it's talking about the way what I'm going through makes me feel. And it's almost like she views that as a little bit of an attack on what she holds dear, because the result of that is that, you know, breaking covenants and that kind of fear, you know, that it brings up. And then her emotional intimacy, to me is opening up to how it makes her feel. The fact that, you know, she's posited. I mean, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but the message I'm receiving is that she is disappointed in me, that I'm being selfish in this endeavor that. That's really heartbreaking for her. And that's her. That's her kind of across the bear right now. And so I don't know how to make that connection because it's almost like we're talking past each other. I'm trying to be. Emotional intimacy is hurting her. She's trying to be emotionally intimate. It's hurting me. I don't know how to deal with that.
John Dehlin [01:32:03] I'm hopeful we'll be able to give some tips that are helpful. But we also have a full presentation on mixed faith marriages that we'll get to, too. So we'll start by addressing it with today. And either later today or in another retreat, we're gonna really tackle that directly. But, yeah, yeah, there is this idea of toxic intimacy where each of you are offering intimacy and it's damaging the other, but you're both offering the best you can. And it's just. It becomes a mutual harm. And that's a great. It's a great topic that we could talk about. So thank you for bringing it up.
Margi Dehlin [01:32:42] Anybody have a reaction to the mindfulness exercise we did?
Guest 12 [01:32:51] Just one thing I noticed is I was holding Jeremy's hand, and as we were breathing, our breathing became synchronized. And that just was like, gave me a lot of hope that we can be synchronized again.
Guest 13 [01:33:12] I've never done anything like that before, but certainly meditation is something that I think is. I'm interested in, that would help me kind of find that in yourself. And as we were sitting there like that, we were holding hands and I noticed that also. I also noticed for some reason I started to feel emotional and I didn't know why. And trying to picture things and visualize things and part of the question, am I doing it right? And then, you know, but I'm. But I'm getting emotional. And as I did, I felt that wall come up of, oh, no, I can't break down right now. She'll know. People will know. And I kind of, again, it just taught me that I've. I've got to be able to let go a little bit more. And that is something I need to work on. But it was a very, very cool thing to do.
Guest 6 [01:33:57] Thank you.
Guest [01:33:57] Very good. Thank you.
John Dehlin [01:34:02] All right, thank you, Natasha. So because of that, one of the ironies, one of the ironies of this emotional intimacy dilemma is that we actually spend a lot of our lives actively and maybe subconsciously avoiding or undermining the intimacy that we desperately need out of fear of rejection. So we are. When it comes to emotional intimacy, we're usually our own worst enemies out of fear and out of a desire to self protect. And you'll see this dynamic at play when, like one spouse bids, the other spouse kind of withdraws. And then there's like this detent or like, cool down. And then the other spouse will bid. And then what does their original spouse do? They withdraw. And it's almost this cat and mouse game. I'm seeing a lot of heads nod. And that's because we both want it needed, but we're both terrified of it. And so we do this cat and mouse of pursue, withdraw, pursue, withdraw, because we're just terrified. We're terrified. So we don't need to go into the self medication. But when you go too long without the thing you need most, it really starts to wear you down, you start to get depressed, you start to feel awful all the time. Lonely, sad, longing. And it's just not good to feel those feelings all the time. And so we, we do turn to Netflix or to podcasts or to drugs or alcohol or, you know, pick your avoidance. Sometimes infidelities, just when, when we're trying to medicate away the loneliness and the sadness and the pain. And we won't go in today to the ways that we self medicate, but again, even serving others, being a workaholic, having some cause, being a social activist, other friends, girls nights out, guys nights out, affairs, control, anger, parenting. Parenting is like a supreme form of avoidance. It's like, well, I got to worry about the kids. The kids have needs, the kids are in trouble. And it can be just a wonderful excuse for never risking opening up your heart to somebody.
Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms and Avoidance
Margi Dehlin [01:36:29] It's really important to know that unhealthy coping mechanisms doesn't mean the thing is unhealthy. Right. So scrapbooking pornography, I kind of put them at the same category. They can both be used.
John Dehlin [01:36:47] Mommy, mommy porn and daddy porn.
Margi Dehlin [01:36:50] Well, it depends. There's mommies and daddies that like both of those things. But we often like to blame a thing. And in our culture, certain things have been taboo. Right. And so I just say both of those things can be used in really wonderful ways and they can both be used in really very harmful ways. Right. So that's. Let's not get caught up on the thing.
John Dehlin [01:37:13] No. And yesterday we had, I think Mehdi talked about hyper exercising as a way to avoid.
Guest 12 [01:37:19] Right.
Margi Dehlin [01:37:20] You know, whereas we would say exercise is a really good thing usually.
John Dehlin [01:37:23] And viewing audience listen to our presentation from yesterday to learn about just this idea of coping mechanisms are actually healthy. They can be. They can save our lives. So we're not shaming any of these coping mechanisms per se, but what's important is to understand what's the function of the behavior. If the function of the exercise is to be fit, that's different than if the function of the exercise is to keep from having to go home to face your partner or children. Right. So the function is important. And who doesn't love Netflix? Right? So, you know, again, we live our lives running around frantically trying to avoid the thing that we desperately want and need most. And that's a picture of Javert from Les Miserables. And we'll talk. We can talk about him another time. But we bring these intimacy models into our marriages and our kids learn them. And so I'm just going to skip that slide so here we are. We are now finally at the point where we're going to lay out, and the processing is brilliant. I mean, Clint was really wanting us to focus on processing. And I just love the wisdom that's. That's coming out and the diversity of thought. So I love that we're doing this, but this is a little bit unique. We usually would be done with this presentation by now, but now we're just starting the core of the presentation. Eight essential ingredients for healthy relationships or for real emotional intimacy. So here we go. You guys ready? All right, number one, we talked about this yesterday, and we did an entire session on mental health, right? So we're probably not going to spend a ton of time on this other than to say, if you're not physically and emotionally healthy, it's going to be really hard for you to be in a. In a. To engage in emotional intimacy with others and vice versa. If the person that you're trying to be emotionally intimate with is not. Well, it's going to be. It's probably not safe to even try this. You know, it's like, don't try this at home, right? You know, if you have a partner who's a diagnosed narcissist, if you have a partner who's clinically depressed and they're not treated, if you have a partner who's doing. Experiencing chemotherapy right now, like, just imagine all the different ways someone can be either physically or mentally unwell. You know, you want. We talk about. And we'll talk about this. You want to gauge the. The. The level of intimacy that you seek to engage with based on your partner's health and safety and capacity for engaging. So let's just say it's zero to five. Zero means they're abusive and completely unsafe. You want to match that, right? But if there are two or three, you match at that level and you save the fours and the fives for the people who really have earned your trust and deserve your trust. Because again, you don't want to trust. Try that. You don't want to just throw your pearls before swine. You don't want to open up your heart to someone who, you know, has a proclivity. Proclivity to stomp on it. Right? So I don't need to say much more about that, but we certainly. I would love to hear if you have additions and if there's any processing we want to do. That's step one is don't try this with an unsafe person or when you're not well, get well before you try this would you add, what would you say?
Margi Dehlin [01:40:55] Well, I know that like from a therapy perspective, I hear a lot of people again, you know, and even colleagues will try to compartmentalize some of this. Like, well, I won't see you as a couple until you go and get some individual therapy. That has not been my approach. Just because again, I don't know that our, our lives stay on hold. Right. It's not like I can very neatly, oh, I'll deal with this little problem and then I'll come back and deal with this little problem. Things are so intertwined, but I was trained in systems theory and so I'm more comfortable dealing with multiple kind of issues at the same time. So depending on the therapist, you might get different approaches. I do think it can be. Some people said it's contraindicated to do marital counseling while doing individual counseling on certain topics. And I guess I would just challenge that most of the time. Most of the time. I think there's issues with domestic violence where that needs, where safety does need to be prioritized first. And this whole idea of measuring, I don't know, do we have a, we have another slide that really goes into that more. Isn't it the whole measuring safety or not, or is this the time to do it? Okay, well I do think that after learning about intimacy, most of us are like, woohoo, we want it, let's go get it. You're probably crying because you're thinking of all the people in your life you want it with, right? And realize it's not there. And, and I just really need to just kind of make sure you have realistic expectations about it because like John was saying, not everybody can offer what is being offered. And so safety is a really big issue. And I, and I think against trying to get away from black and white thinking that we're all so well acquainted with, we really want to spectrum the idea of intimacy so that you'll have some relationships where you do have the 10, you know, the really intimate relationship where you can pretty much say anything you want and you feel safe and it's reciprocal and, and then you'll have people that you have a zero with which you don't want to necessarily maybe have any relationship with. And many of your relationships will actually, the majority of them will be somewhere in the middle. And that's because intimacy requires a two way street. You can only have as much intimacy as two people are willing to engage in. And so even if you may be at an 8 with your mom and she's at a 4. Then there's going to be some grief work you're going to have to do there. Because even though you may desperately want a more intimate relationship with certain people in your life, they may not be equipped or have the skills or they may have their own physical and psychological issues and, or, or their interests or values. But even, even more than that, coming from an orthodox religion, I think a lot of people have the intent, intention or value or desire. I think if you ask most Mormons if they want intimate relationships with their children, they would say yes. But again, they are coming at it from a very ill equipped space. They're not going to a lesson on intimacy. Right. And so they have been taught to really, it's been conflated with getting you to the celestial kingdom, especially your, your parents. Right. So, so their way of protecting and loving you is to reject your faith transition. Oftentimes that's their way of loving you and it's very sincere and it comes from a place of deep concern and love. That's why several of you mentioned you can't handle the thought of disappointing your parents or telling your parents. And I think it was, I forget her name now. And she's gone right now. But her brother went through it. She saw her brother go through it, saw how much pain that caused her parents and she doesn't want to now open up to them about something that's going on very personally. So that's interfering with intimacy and that's why it's again important to not conflate intimacy with love. I'm sure many, many people within our community love us desperately and yet are acting in very rejecting ways. Right. And that interferes with intimacy and we also can do the same in return because we're feeling rejected.
Guest 7 [01:45:14] Right.
Margi Dehlin [01:45:14] So we get defensive and all of those things. So I do think it's really important to have realistic expectations to kind of go through an assessment in your mind, who are the people that I really want to develop intimacy with? What is my, what is my prognosis for that really being able to happen given what I know about this person, personality wise, circumstance wise, orthodoxy wise, etc and how do I meet, match my expectations to that? With hope, with hope that it can improve, but not devastation if it doesn't. Does that make sense?
Holly [01:45:52] Okay.
John Dehlin [01:45:54] Yeah. And I definitely believe that sometimes individual therapy and simultaneous couples therapy is, is very valuable. So I'm certainly not one of those that thinks it needs to be serial. But this is particularly difficult because there are spouses or parents who aren't interested in this model or literally aren't capable of it. And. And that those are some of the most difficult situations. And so it's good that we focus on that. So that's. That's point one. I think we've covered it. Is there anybody who just feels like they have something to share about that? I mean, this would obviously ask you to call out somebody potentially in your life, and we don't. You know.
Margi Dehlin [01:46:39] Yeah, I don't know if this is
Guest 17 [01:46:41] related to what you're saying, but this is what keeps coming to my head. Different levels of intimacy with different people. Like, even in my marriage, I don't. I'm not 100% intimate with Isaac, and a lot of times I'm more emotionally intimate with my girlfriends than I am with Isaac. Is that what you're talking about?
Margi Dehlin [01:47:05] Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, how are we going to define intimacy? So you may, you know, have a certain style of sharing that's maybe more fun or open with your girlfriends than me coming home and how you talk to your husband. But I think ultimately we're just thinking about intimacy from the perspective of, am I seen? Do I feel safe? Can I come to this person with my concerns? Can I feel accepted and loved? Regardless, there might be different styles of that. There may be times where you might enjoy hanging out with your girlfriends more than your. Well, just like. But you also have a different relate. You don't go home with your girlfriends. You don't pay bills with your girlfriends, you don't raise kids with your girlfriend. So in some ways, certain friendships will be lighter. A lighter intimacy.
Guest 17 [01:47:56] Well, it's even more like spiritually. Isaac's always struggled with having the relationship with God thing has been really important during this conference for me, and he's always struggled with that. And so I go to my girlfriends that also feel the same way, and so I'll be spiritually intimate with them where I can't do that with Isaac at all.
John Dehlin [01:48:16] And I really love the work of Esther Perel as one really good role model and reference point for healthy relationships. I want to. She has a podcast. She has a couple books, and she makes the point that the way marriage has evolved, it has evolved in a very unrealistic way, which. Where we expect our partners to be our lovers, our best friends, the best parents, the provider, the therapist, the parents, the teacher, you go on and on and on about. And not just for 20 years or 30 years, but for 70 years. And she makes the point that our expectations in these monogamous relationships sometimes have Spun out of control. And she makes the point that it's impossible for any partner to meet all of those needs at all times for 70 years. And so instead she says it's very. If you can find a partner that meets 75 or 80% of your needs, you're actually doing fantastic. So it is absolutely okay for you to have girlfriends that meet some fun needs or some joy needs or some spiritual needs if. If you know your partner right now isn't always able to meet all those needs.
Guest 18 [01:49:35] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [01:49:36] And another theme that I heard you say there, that maybe we should also put on the slide of what intimacy is not is sameness.
John Dehlin [01:49:43] We got. Well, that's pointing.
Margi Dehlin [01:49:44] Okay, all right, so we'll get to that. But so you can connect with people that have similar things that your partner may not have similar either interests or beliefs on, but that doesn't mean that you're having less or more intimacy.
John Dehlin [01:49:57] So that's. Step one is, is do your best to. To be as well as you can and to assess the wellness of your partner. What's hard is you can't make your partner, either one, want emotional intimacy and they may not value it, or you can't make them go to therapy and you can't make them get well. You can't force them to want to open up. And so that's. That's a lot of you might get stuck just in the point that you don't have a partner or a parent or child or friend who's actually interested in this. And that's an unfortunate. It has to be reciprocal. So that's a tough reality. Alex,
Guest 18 [01:50:42] So you talked about mentioning this.
John Dehlin [01:50:44] You might have to call out some people.
Guest 18 [01:50:47] The person to call out is myself. Looking at some of these slides and what everyone said. I think my marriage is at kind of a point where my wife has wanted this emotional intimacy for four years. And my whole life growing up, I've put up walls and I've gotten really good at distancing everyone for myself. And so when I see becoming psychologically healthy, it's taken years to get to that point and a lot of therapy. And now I feel like I'm
John Dehlin [01:51:28] all of this.
Guest 18 [01:51:29] It feels like I'm sitting in my therapist office the last couple weeks because this is what we've been working on of how can I get to the point where I can open up, put my heart out there? Because my greatest fear is that it's going to get stomped on. And the easiest natural thing for me to do is to just reject that, reject my wife and not open up, and she's craving that. And so I'm on the end where I'm the one that needs to make that effort. But I've come to realization that I couldn't over the last few years because I wasn't ready. And now I think I'm a lot more ready to open up and do that.
Guest 14 [01:52:14] Thank you.
John Dehlin [01:52:19] Thank you for your vulnerability and doing that introspection. A second point that we're offering today is common value. The next slide is providing unconditional love. But the truth is, I don't think any of us really believe in total unconditional love. In other words, if you have a partner that punches you in the face or, you know, sleeps around serially without telling you and without an agreement or an understanding, or if they're in any way other verbally or emotionally abusive or abused the children or neglect their core responsibilities, you know, if you have a. If you don't share enough common values and enough commitment to the same common values, unconditional love just becomes this glib buzzword that actually is meaningless. So this is why we spent so much time yesterday on that values exercise and the mental health presentation. This is why I've urged all of you to do your own values assessment. And the next step is if you're going to try and have emotional intimacy with a partner, parent, or kid, to do a mutual values assessment to make sure you're building on a similar platform that you have enough of a contract to say, these are the bounds of our relationship that neither of us are going to violate, because again, that's a prerequisite for engaging in deeper levels of emotional intimacy. If. If I'm okay with punching and you're not okay with punching, then maybe, maybe it's an irreconcilable difference, right? And again, if I'm interested in emotional intimacy and you, that's the last thing in the world you want. You have a values discrepancy that at least right now, may not be. May maybe a non starter. So, so do the values assessment individually and collectively when you can. It's maybe hard to sit mom down and say, mom or dad, what are your values? These are mine. But I actually think there could be a lot of power in that if you're willing to kind of break out of that mold and just say, let's put religious words aside for a second. I'm not talking about. You value church attendance or reading the scriptures. Go underneath that a little bit. I value love and honesty and kindness and compassion and unconditional love and service. What do you value? Can we have that be the foundation of our relationship? Now that the church is no longer able to be the foundation of our relationship? I think we still share 98% of the values mom or dad or partner. Can we have that be the explicit named foundation of our relationship so the church doesn't get in the way with the more important connections? Do you want to add anything to that?
Unconditional Love, Boundaries, and the Me Versus We Tension
Margi Dehlin [01:55:18] Yeah, I think that a lot of people do get unconditional love mixed up with limits or boundaries. Right. And so even going back to the comment from the teacher in the back row, you know, there's first of all different styles and roles that you play. You're going to have a different type of intimacy with a 5 year old than you are with your spouse. Right. And there are certain roles like a teacher or a parent or a police officer that are necessary at times and that are going to limit or at least look different in intimacy, style and texture than maybe with a best friend or a partner. And I think a lot of people think of unconditional love from this perspective of, well, then anything goes. Anything goes. And it's through the work of, well, a lot of people before Brene Brown, but Brene Brown brought it to the kind of like the awareness of a lot of people is this idea that unconditional love does best with good boundaries. And that's something that we haven't really necessarily been taught how to do. And sometimes boundaries can feel harsh or difficult or unkind or unloving. And so then how can that be unconditional love? But you can unconditionally love somebody that you have decided to divorce from, or you can unconditionally love a child who you've set some parameters about whether or not they can continue to live in your home when they're 28. Right. Or use your monies in certain ways. So by sure, we can offer unconditional love, which is much more about respecting the person and their weaknesses and their strengths and where they come from, as well as respecting your own. And then hopefully, depending on the type of relationship, you can either in an egalitarian way, contract what your boundaries are going to be like in a marriage, or maybe not so egalitarian as a small child or other things, but it's still from a space of respect and love. So I know those can be kind of confusing concepts, but they're good things to be thinking about, interweave.
John Dehlin [01:57:25] And so point two is common values. Point three is the unconditional love that we've already talked about. And point 8 includes boundaries and differentiation. So let's pause for a second and as you're here thinking about the partner you want to have a relationship with or, or a parent or a child or whoever, how do you bring in. I'm just interested in the processing part. How do you bring in values, unconditional love to kind of that equation with whoever you're thinking about right now? Do the issues of common values and, or unconditional love factor into the relationships that are top of mind for you right now?
Guest 4 [01:58:19] Well, going back to my broken wheel issue that I always bring up, my mixed faith marriage, what I think I'm grappling with and coming to realization of is I need to love my wife exactly how she is and how she wants to be. And if that includes that she wants to be in Mormonism the rest of her life and doesn't want to listen to a thing about truth claims and all this stuff, I got to get over that. That's the thing I'm grappling with. And that's hard. But yeah, you know, the unconditional love. I'm a hypocrite if I can't love her and let her be in that space that she loves.
John Dehlin [01:59:09] Bingo. Profound bingo. And what, where that gets, where that's where that's actually complicated. But where the growth opportunity is, is it's not, it's, it's a little bit more sophisticated than that because how you, your new worldview is important to you, even if it's secular or alternatively religious. And the, one of the difficult, most difficult parts of a mixed faith marriage is you are desperately wanting to be able to talk to the person who's most important to you in your life, to have them see you now. Right. So it's not just a matter of now I'm going to just let her be religious and never talk to her about any of the things that come through my mind in my new worldview, because that's, that's running counter to this idea of into me seeing. You want to be seen by her, you still need to be seen by her or you will grow apart. And then when you grow apart, you can grow apart too far and that bridge becomes, that distance becomes too far and irreconcilable. And so the trick is not how do I just let her be religious and I'll go be secular and we'll just go live our different lives in the same household. It's how do you learn to communicate in a way where you can, you can help her feel safe enough to start seeing you for who you are now in a way where she doesn't feel attacked or threatened about who she is because it's still very important for you to be seen. And the truth is believers are not simplistic and monolithic. Believers have nuanced and complexity too. Like, is it Abe, like Abe, right. Or Robert? Yeah. And so, and so can you not put the TBM label on your partner as if you get everything about them because you perceive them as a tbm? And can we as non believers, let that down and allow them to say, actually you're, you're stereotyping me. You've got me wrong. You're applying your perception of the brethren's construct of what it means to be a believer on me when really I'm a complex. Even as a believer, I'm a complex nuanced person too. I don't agree with everything that I'm told. And I, I have a different type of Mormonism. And why are you making it that I have to be a certain type of Mormonism? Because that's what you perceive Mormonism should be or that's the way you perceived a good Mormon needed to be. Can you allow me, can you see me for, for who I am in my belief? Right. And so that's the trick. How do you kind of put religion to the same side and just focus on seeing each other really without a way that makes either of you defensive? That's the trick. So yes, you hit the nail on the head. And I want to say you, we, you know, you have to still go for the seeing part. Right.
Margi Dehlin [02:02:19] And that's the complexity where you really got it right. Is that the strategies that we're going to teach you, whether today or in mixed faith marriage retreats, have very little to do do with doctrinal truth, has to do with relational skills, curiosity, respect, so that even if doctrinal issues come up here, that's not your main focus. And I think we've been taught through that missionary lens to focus primarily on the doctrinal or historical aspects. And that's. So you're absolutely right in that sense that it will require something different than that here.
John Dehlin [02:02:54] Yeah, go ahead. We have three people, so
Guest 14 [02:02:59] I don't know if anybody else here feels this way, but I know probably until fairly recently I equated everything with him, not my husband, not loving me. So rather than he can be angry and love me, I just always felt very unloved because he always was disappointed or silent. And so I would make up a lot of things about what he was thinking because he didn't share it with me. So learning that he does love me and he can be disappointed just the same, you know, I can. I still love him and I'm angry with him, you know, but. So I don't know if anybody's had to learn that too.
Guest 10 [02:03:55] In my experience, for me, what it usually boils down to is how important is the issue? Is it a deal breaker? Is it a situation where I want to sever a relationship or not sever it? And usually, and I think this applies to you, and how much of myself do I have to lose in order to accommodate the other person? And am I willing to do that? And if I can find that I can, I can live within that dynamic, and it's not going to make me lose too much of myself, then I'm saying, okay, this is not a deal breaker. But if it gets to the point where, and I think this happens a lot, and it's mainly why we're here, I think, is the idea that we lose too much of ourself at that point, it becomes too dramatic to continue in that situation. So as hard as it is, and it's a dance of intimacy, okay? You got to decide whether you can actually get to the core issue and how important it is to you. And if it's that important, whether you're on one side or the other, you have to find a middle ground or just, you know, decide that it's a deal breaker.
Margi Dehlin [02:05:25] There was two more.
Guest [02:05:26] I think
Margi Dehlin [02:05:29] I just want to ask the question of self sabotage, because I did a lot of that because I wasn't worthy of love. So even with my children, you know, I could love them, but I couldn't accept their love because I wasn't worthy of it. So there was a lot of self sabotaging going on. And, you know, how do you address that?
John Dehlin [02:05:51] I think that's what you were saying, Jessica, is like, this starts with yourself, right?
Guest [02:05:56] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:06:00] How do you. How do you unconditionally love yourself? How do you get clear on your values? You know, and, and, and really, we have eight points for intimacy. You could literally go through it and, and say, how do I practice doing this with myself? Right. How do I practice unconditional love? How do I practice being vulnerable with myself? How do I get still and get to know who I am to develop a deeper personal understanding of myself? Because that'll help you be in a better relationship. Relationship. How do I spend quality time with myself instead of my partner? You know, like, and that was the whole point of dating yourself. Which, which Heidi. Heidi, Right. Heidi made the point. What? Yeah, and, and a commitment to your own well being.
Guest 16 [02:06:42] Right.
John Dehlin [02:06:43] This is going to be point six. But how do you develop a fierce commitment to your own well being where you're more important? And I'm kind of going jumping ahead here. But the point is, yeah, we sabotage ourselves. And so I'll just turn it around and say instead of focusing on these eight points for your relationships with others, see how much of these eight points are individual work that you need to do with yourself first. Does that make sense? And that's part of the getting healthy part of the first point. Does that make sense?
Margi Dehlin [02:07:15] Some thoughts that are coming up for me from both of your comments are we are constantly in tension with me versus we, right? The me versus we is a constant tension, whether it's our partners, our children, our extended families. And I do agree that there are deal breakers. That's kind of where the boundaries are and the contracting and the idea. And hopefully, you know, the research on cutoffs are not, is not very good. So the idea that, well, I'll just cut this person completely off from my life, especially if it's a family relationship, doesn't show that it does that well for your mental health. Oftentimes it's kind of like a backfire effect. They become more important in their absence in your life. So again, using that measurement scale of maybe I need to go from like my expectation of an 8 to a 2. A 2 is better than like a cutoff usually. So if you have toxic people in your life, maybe figuring out a way that you can do a yearly letter or something that helps you feel that me versus we versus a complete cutoff. I'm not saying that's a sweeping statement, but in general, the other thing that I think is very important to consider so that we don't get into this win lose mentality is I really like to talk about systemic authenticity. This is more in my marriage class, but I'll just share this here. A very popular, popular word for us, as you know, nuance or post Mormons is authenticity. Right? And authenticity is so important because I think we have felt so driven by other people's expectations of us, other people's, you know, the institution or our families or God per se idea of what we should be or how we should be. So now we're in this kind of like we do the pendulum shift, we where I will do nothing, nothing that I don't want to do and that I Don't you know that I'm not 100% okay with. Right. And yet that is contraindicated to any relationship. Any relationship. So we've gone from here over to here. And I'm just saying maybe we want to land somewhere in the middle. And this idea of systemic authenticity is I can do things that maybe if I was in this relationship, I would rather not do. And the typical example I give is changing poopy diapers. Nothing authentic for me about changing poopy diapers. Right. So why have I, like, changed thousands of them? Right. And not just for my own children, but for my, like, nephews and nieces and kids I babysat for, and even my friend's kids.
Guest 17 [02:09:49] Right.
Margi Dehlin [02:09:50] Why would I do that? Well, because there is something authentic in me being a caretaker in certain positions of me being a mom, of me being a friend, of me being, you know, concerned about a child's well being. Right. So when you think about the me versus we, it can be. It's not that it's just me. And I'm being inauthentic if I go to church with my believing spouse, or I'm being inauthentic if I keep my garments on for another six months while my spouse, you know, transitions with me and. And, you know, maybe. Or I'm being inauthentic if I go to the blessing of my brother's baby because I no longer want to be part of this quote unquote cult. You can do those kinds of things in a very authentic way from other values. Again, this is why it's so important to go back to your values. Because I can go to the blessing because my value is my relationship, relationship with my brother and what he really holds dear in his life. Even though, you know, I don't like going into this building anymore, or I can wear the garments because even though they don't have meaning to me anymore, I understand that my spouse still feels like that has to do with our vows and our commitment to one another. And I care and love for that person. So I will do something uncomfortable for a season or a time or every now and then until things shift or change or have a transition. And I can do that from a very authentic place. Does that make sense?
John Dehlin [02:11:19] According to. You can't do it any longer. Right, Right. And I think. Lily, did you raise your hand or did someone back there. Okay, okay, okay.
Guest 6 [02:11:34] Respond right here. Just real quick.
Guest [02:11:36] It.
Guest 6 [02:11:37] So, what's your name? I just don't want to. What's your name?
Guest 15 [02:11:40] Kim.
Guest 6 [02:11:40] Kim. Okay, so I related Very much to your comments around self sabotage. And something that comes up for me around that in particular is, you know, the difference between cognitively processing something and knowing what you should do and like that connection emotionally. Right. And that's something I feel very, very much for. And with regard to self sabotage, when it comes to intimacy in particular, one thing that I have found helpful and sometimes with my clients being helpful, is to actually process emotionally. So that would look like something like going back to the girl you were. Where did you start having these messages that people leave you that you're not good enough, that people will reject you if they see who you really are. And to really start looking at where that started. And then if you come upon pivotal moments, sometimes for people, there are memories in particular that you can feel kind of it shifted who you were.
Guest 15 [02:12:43] Right.
Guest 6 [02:12:44] Is to go meet yourself there like as an adult woman, to go back to the child you were, to go back to the teen you were and show up for yourself in an emotional way to see that person trying to cope the best they were and to rewrite as best you can. Sometimes that emotional work can be a key component to sort of the integration of what we know, but what we can't bring forth for whatever reason.
Guest [02:13:20] Well, I'm kind of processing my answers to myself. Part of me wonders if I should even be asking this question. But the thing that comes to my mind when I see this slide. Unconditional love and authenticity. I think of the relationship I have with my mom and how difficult that is to navigate because I so deeply appreciate the unconditional love she has offered to me my whole life and continues to do so. But I. I don't know how to be authentic with her without wounding her because her perception of, I mean, we have a values based relationship, but her primary value is the church. And so her self identity is the church. And, and at the same time, she wants emotional intimacy with me, I want emotional intimacy with her. That's something that we've always had. And so when I am authentic with her, because right now, the most important thing on my mind right now is this transition of belief and the shift in identity. So when I try to share that with her, I can perceive that that's wounding her. But she wants to know because she wants that relationship. And so this, we're in this kind of catch 22 of continually wounding.
Holly [02:14:36] I'm.
Guest [02:14:37] I feel like I am this person who is continually offering my mom pain and she's only ever given me love. And it feels like such a deep betrayal. And it also feeds into my self narrative of I'm such a bad person. I'm surrounded by these wonderful people. I'm so privileged, I've been given everything. And here I am betraying all this love, all this kindness, all this understanding that they offer me. And I don't know quite how to navigate that.
Margi Dehlin [02:15:11] So there's so much beauty in what I just heard you say. That actually for me does fit the definition of intimacy. Right? So what I'm hearing is that both you and your mother value knowledge about each other more than you. You value comfort. So intimacy isn't always comfortable. And if you could frame it that way, right? Like mom, you know, I, I talk about the sandwich approach, right? So, mom, I, you know, I've always felt so loved by you. The fact that you are willing to be uncomfortable with. With the things that make you sad about my life is incredible for me. The fact that you're open to me sharing some of my new ideas and some of my new feelings, even though I know it's so painful for you, mom, I can't tell you how much that means to me. And then, you know. So, yeah, I have been thinking this, right? This is where the meat is, right? That was the bread, now the meat. So, yes, I have been thinking this differently. Or. And then when maybe she tears up or whatever, you can go back to the bread. It hurts me to hurt you. And yet I know that we are closer because you let me talk to you like this, mom, and I love you so much. Thank you so much for offering me this. That is intimacy and pain. And it's okay to have intimacy and pain.
John Dehlin [02:16:44] And just because I, I want to be able to make sure we address. If I don't need to add anything more because this was such a beautiful exchange, but I do want to add a tiny bit. And that's just that sometimes we confuse pain with harm. The truth is there's no growth without pain. But we think, I don't want to cause my mom pain or I don't want to cause my children pain. But the truth is that if B equals C, then what you're saying is I don't want my mom to grow and I don't want my kids to grow. Protecting your kids or your parents from pain could be protecting them from growth. And there are parents who are not growth oriented, who don't have a growth mindset. And so that's where the dial of 0 to 5 or 0 to 10, you know, in those types of relationships where, you know, like with My dad, there are limits to his ability to grow at 85. And I've tried to talk to him about progressive politics or to help him see why liberals may not be evil or dumb, you know, or why he might not say certain things to my daughters. You know, whatever it is, there, there are caps to his ability to change at this point. And so in those instances, and my dad's lovely, he's amazing, but in those instances, you do have to kind of dial it down and just say, this is going to be a seven or this is going to be a five. And they have to mourn and grieve that. But having said that, you know, it's not. Ideally, it's not a child's job to. Job to protect their parents. I think I. I hear this from Natasha, you know, so. So who knows, One of the beautiful discoveries may be that. That this pain actually helps your mom grow in new ways at whatever age she's in. And that's the. The opportunity.
Margi Dehlin [02:18:46] You can't get more Mormon than that. Well, like, our trials are meant for our clothes growth. Right. And so, and, and it goes back to that original point I made about protective intimacy that we've been taught that it is loving and intimate to protect people from our truth and our pain. And in fact, intimacy is all about pain. It really is all about pain in many ways.
John Dehlin [02:19:13] And for. For many of you just know whether it's having an LGBTQ child or a. A sibling or a child that loses their faith, time can really heal wounds. And so if you can just sort of like, grit and bear that initial pain and discomfort, have a lot of authentic discussions, 1, 2, 3, 5 years down the road, you will be surprised with the right person, how much growth they're capable of. Right? Yeah. So it sounds. It sounds like you have a beautiful opportunity. Okay, let's have Heather and then Mehdi.
Values as the Foundation of Our Humanity
Guest 5 [02:19:51] So I just wanted to say one thing that really hit me with this. What you're presenting the concept of values, it made me realize this is where our humanity lies. Like, if we're actually going to see each other as fully human and not just how we. How we do right now, we're very polarizing. We're very reactionary. We're very. If you voted for who I'm unfriending you, if you stand, don't stand with me or stand against me, I'm throwing you out. And very much a what kind of person could agree with or support or what have you, and it makes it so that we're willing to harm one Another, whether that be a full on war, whether that be genocides, whatever that acts like, you know, it could just be a local decision to defund something that really helps me, people that we no longer see as human. And I, I was thinking of my dad and how I always thought he and I were very similar. And then recently he became. He politically helped run some campaigns in his state for he who shall not be named. And
John Dehlin [02:21:33] you just did it.
Guest 5 [02:21:36] And then, you know, and I would talk to him about that and try to understand and. And then when, you know, I was, when I was in law school, that's when the Kavanaugh confirmation was going on with Dr. Ford. And, and I remember asking him, well, dad, would you have believed me, me if I had ever been abused and come to you? And he said no. And I appreciated his honesty, but I remember feeling so hurt because he told me he believes that women lie. And so he, he's always been very honest. And so there's a lot of things that have kind of caused a wedge. And as I sit here, I think, oh, well, if I think of my dad's values, what's underneath all of that, if I can just not let that be what gets in the way of me seeing him, then I realize he and I have a lot of the same values. You know, like he is very concerned about the state of affairs of our country and he very much values freedom and sort of a libertarian model. And, you know, he values honesty, you know, even if it hurts and all of these things. And I'm like, oh, you know,
Holly [02:23:09] people
Guest 5 [02:23:09] can share values and go different ways with their behaviors of how they implement. And so when you mentioned that your mom, you said your mom values church. And I would say, well, that's a behavior based off what she actually values, right? She probably values community. And maybe she found a community that accepted her for who she was and she was able to share that with you. And so you were able to accept yourself the way you were, which is an amazing gift. And so, you know, it's. It will feel threatening to her that the things she gave you that you value, you know, you're saying is harmful. And, you know, so just. It really hit me that this is what has to happen for us to stop killing one another.
Guest 19 [02:24:15] So I have five children and four of them are out of the house and are adults now. So I'm thinking about this from the mom's perspective. And one of my kids went off to college and the next day she ended up checking herself into a psychiatric unit. College was Just overwhelming for her. And I spent the next, I don't know, six months of my life realizing how. How difficult, how many toxic things were running in her head. And some of them were from Mormonism, but a lot of them were from me. And I would never have intended to hurt her. But the last few years have been a lot of me unpacking things that I said that unintentionally hurt her. And another one of the things that I realized is that one of the most deeply spiritual times in my life now, like, this is my new temple, is sitting with her and hearing her cry and not needing to fix her. Because if I, as a parent now with an adult child, give her this feeling that I need to fix her, what I'm telling her also is, you are wrong, and you need to be fixed. And I have felt more and more like that is the thing that I must never at least do my best. I'm gonna mess up, but that is the thing I want to do my best with her. And so when I was on vacation, she had this massive panic attack in the middle of San Francisco. And for an hour, she was sobbing again. Something that I did that triggered her, and I sat with her for an hour and said to her over and over and over again, there is no place I would rather be than right here with you. Please let go of this idea that you have messed up our vacation or that there was something else I wanted to do. This is the connection that is motherhood. This is the best part of my life. I can't imagine anything better than a child share like an adult child that I raised and did my best with coming to me and saying, like, you harmed me. And so we have been working on this process of. This is part of my journey about giving up exercise, because that's one of the things that damaged her, is that I gave her this idea that. That it was her fault, that her body is this way, that she doesn't have a perfect body. And I have lived my whole life with this compulsion to perfect my body, and I didn't realize I was doing that. So that's another thing where I've just been, oh, I have to change. But I just to want. Wanted to say, like, from the mom's perspective, I can't imagine anything more beautiful, more spiritual than, like, that is the temple of my life is sitting with my kids in their pain, reminding them again and again, this is the best part of my life. I love you just the way that you are. You don't need to change a thing about you. This just sit with you know. This is who you are. Sharing that with me. That is the best.
Margi Dehlin [02:27:42] One of the deaconesses.
John Dehlin [02:27:45] Thank you, Mary. That was beautiful. Beautiful. Okay, well, this is beautiful. Thank you. Lots of tears.
Eight Steps to Emotional Intimacy Introduced
Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1303
John Dehlin [00:00:08] So far, you know, today we've been talking about emotional intimacy. We've had an amazing conversation. We've shared with you, you know, three pillars or components of emotional intimacy that we, that we've already covered. One is getting physically and psychologically healthy yourself. The second is, is building upon common values. And the third is offering unconditional love conditioned upon the mutual sharing of those values. There's five more quickly that we want to share. The fourth one is something that is. It's a concept that has been popularized recently by the amazing work of Dr. Brene Brown, a researcher and a professor out of Houston, Texas. And she has probably two of the top ten TED talks ever given. And the very simple but yet profound and often very difficult concept that she has helped us come to understand better is this idea of vulnerability as strength, vulnerability as the key to individual health and healing and relational health. And it's very different from maybe how we were all raised, because many of us, as we've talked even today, it was about how we appear. It was about appearing happy, it was about appearing successful. It was about not sharing, not talking about the tough stuff, not sharing our weaknesses, but instead hiding what's scary or hiding the things that we view as problematic, putting our best forward, compartmentalizing our lives. And then, of course, in a social structure, only talking about the things that we all agree upon, especially in a religious context. And that may be great for public relations, that may be great for organizational health of some types of organizations. But, you know, an avoidance of vulnerability and an avoidance of emotional vulnerability is actually toxic or damaging to anyone who wants to develop true emotional intimacy, either with a loved one or in a community. And so the opposite of what we've all been doing is actually the way to emotional intimacy, which is to talk about the difficult things, let people see inside of us, talk about the things that we've been hiding and showing that true vulnerability. And what we've been conditioned to think is that people won't love us unless we are obeying and performing and are doing what they expect us to do. And what turns out that when everybody's trying to appear perfect and everybody's trying to appear like they fit a role, we're not getting closer to each other. Instead, we're just all almost robotically acting when we're not really getting any closer to each other. And the opposite dynamic is actually what. What brings people closer together. And we've seen it here this weekend. The, the minute that people start tearing up, the minute that they start sharing their weaknesses, start Sharing their problems start sharing where they're broken. We. We feel emotionally connected to those people. We develop love for them, we develop affection for them, and we draw closer to them than maybe we have many people that we've been in the same ward with for five or 10 or 20 years. What's always astounding at these retreats is because of the vulnerability, sometimes people forge closer relationships in two and a half days than they do with people that they've known for years, if not an entire lifetime. And that's the power of vulnerability. And this is true in our deepest relationships. Instead of only putting our best self forward, instead of only. Instead of hiding our problems and our weaknesses, once we have a person who shares our values and is committed to unconditional love, and we're both in a relatively healthy place, that sort of lays the soil for planting the seeds of vulnerability. And I call vulnerability the gasoline and the engine of emotional intimacy, or the seeds. And if we feel safe enough to plant those seeds of vulnerability, what we'll see is the emotional intimacy sprout. So this is probably the most important of all the eight steps in terms of what actually fuels the emotional intimacy. Natasha, how would you add. What would you.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:57] Something just happened with my computer.
Guest [00:04:59] Okay.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:01] So I think that one of the really important ways of how to do this is to learn the difference between vulnerability, language, and information. So I think a lot of times you might walk away from something like this and say, okay, I'm headed to vulnerability. And you go home and you sit down your mom, and you're like, I've decided to leave the church and disaster ensues, but I was being vulnerable. So that's information that it would be helpful in the vulnerability equation to clue your mother in to the idea that you are entering vulnerable space. And you do that not through information, but through sharing feelings. So, Mom, I'm really feeling very nervous about sitting down with you right now. I am a little scared. I want to talk about something that's important to me, but I'm not sure how it's going to go. Do you see the difference between kind of, you know, lubricating your information?
Guest 2 [00:06:11] I know
Margi Dehlin [00:06:15] when you're a sex therapist, like, everything has an innuendo. Yes. Lubricating your information with vulnerability, language. Right. So that. Because then the person isn't going to. The person is going to have a certain reaction to the information. But what we're really wanting vulnerability to be about is to be a reaction to you. And if you're scared or if you're nervous or if you're sad or if you're angry and you're letting me know about that, then my empathy, like John just said, said we empathize with each other. We connect with one another because of our feelings, not because of really the information that we're sharing. Does that make sense? So that's a huge part of doing this successfully.
Holly [00:07:01] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:07:02] So if you're dealing with a healthy person, you have something difficult to share. If you start out by saying, I have something to share with you, I'm just. I want you to know I'm really scared that. That you might. I worry that you might not like me, you might not respect me, that this thing I share with you is going to come between us psychologically. And I don't ever want anyone to ever intentionally be manipulative, but you just have to understand the psychological reaction to that is for them to go, oh, no, there's no way I'll ever reject you. There's no way that I'm ever. This is ever going to come between us. I value our relationship too much. And so starting from that vulnerable place, before you share the actual vulnerable information, can. Can with a healthy person really lay a groundwork for a healthy reception of whatever it is you have to share? I'm just gonna. I'm gonna be vulnerable and talk about the powerful combination of unconditional combination of unconditional love with vulnerability. And it has to do with my relationship with Margi, and she just left. So that sucks. Or it's good. But, you know, this is an example that some of you will relate to and some of you won't. But. And I'm going to talk about masturbation for just a second. So I'm a bit of a weird Mormon in the sense that I actually never masturbated before marriage. I was able. Like, I took. I just took the church that seriously. And my parents actually never. It was never a topic in my home. I was never told not to. It wasn't really emphasized in my ward growing up, but I'm sure other kids did it, but I just never did. So I got married, having never done that, and Margi and I, you know, got married. Then we had our first kid. And then there was that time after a childbirth where you're just not being intimate, you know, because your wife is healing. And it was during that time where I found myself having sex. What did I say? Did I say being intimate? I come by it honestly. Thank you. We weren't having sex.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:21] Vaginal intercourse. You were not having Penis, vagina, intercourse.
John Dehlin [00:09:27] Piv. Wow. The joys of co presenting with the sex therapist.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:38] Because sex is a lot more than
John Dehlin [00:09:39] penis and vagina too.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:41] So there you go.
John Dehlin [00:09:42] So we were so we. It was a period where we weren't having sex and, and I just found myself in the shower one day and I, you know, and I masturbated and from, I didn't, like, I didn't, I felt awful like I felt. And Margi, I'm telling our story now, so just so you know, I'm being vulnerable. Margi just walked in. So you just had a baby and I just masturbated, basically. Are we in sync? Are we good? Are we good? So, so I of course was mortified because I'm like, wait a minute, how did I go all the way to marriage? And now I'm doing this in a marriage context. So I felt super guilty and shameful about it. And so of course I didn't tell her. I'm certainly not going to run down and tell my wife who just had a baby, like, look what I just did, you know, So I just, you know, I did what I did. I, I hit it. I, I compartmentalized it away and I'm like, well, I won't do that again. And okay, you know, I, that was just a one time thing. And then, you know, and then just whenever, if we would be in a fight or if I would be on a business trip or if we, you know, for some reason, if I was feeling like I needed that, I would, I would start turning to that occasionally. Right. And, and then over time when YouTube came out, you know, somehow I stumbled on to, you know, not naked pictures of women, but just like women kind of walking sexy or dressing sexy or kind of like being suggestive and, and, and that would, that would help me obtain a release. And so I started looking at images and you know, long story short, 5, 10, 15 years into it, I would occasionally look at images and masturbate. You know, once couple weeks, once every three weeks, once a month, whatever it was. But the more important point is I just carried this incredible shame about it every year and we never talked about it. And the weird thing is, the more shameful I felt about it, and I was going to church during this whole time, the more shameful I felt about it, the more I would try and not do it. But then the more I tried not to do it, the more I would do it. So I was caught in the shame spiral of. The worse I felt about it, the more I try not to do it. And the more I do it. And then it got to the point where it was. Where, weirdly, it was like I was almost doing it more than I really wanted to. And I was just caught in this awful spiral, you know, of my own kind of like, of my own doing to myself or in the context of the church. So anyway, we get to this kind of midlife point where we're doing Mormon stories and we're living in Logan, and, you know, Margi had been begging me for emotional intimacy for many, many years, and I didn't even understand what she was asking for. I'm like, what? We watch Felicity together. Like, what else? Like, what else do you need from me? Like, we exercise together, we talk about the kids, we watch TV shows. What do you need? What are you. What are you asking for? You know, I. I just didn't even speak the language of emotional intimacy. I didn't even, like. Like we've talked about. I was illiterate. So. So once. Once our marriage really started to fray, and I was starting to ask myself, after I had lost my faith and after I was starting to question morality and. And I reached that phase where I was really angry about all, you know, a lot of my friends had left their spouses or were divorced, and they would share with me kind of their sexual exploits and their, you know, their sexual adventures as single men. And I was like, oh, that's when I, you know, like, I joked about this the other day. It's like, what? All the sex I could have had and all the things that ways I could have experimented. And I started feeling angry at the church and resentful for what I might have missed out on, all the fun that I could have had. And our. You know, our marriage was struggling in some ways because we had not learned any of these principles. And I got to the point where not only was I questioning, you know, I didn't. I didn't believe in the church anymore. And then I was questioning the existence of God, which meant I was wondering what my morality really was. I was getting to the point where I was questioning whether I wanted to stay married to Margi. And I was leaning against it. I was just like, I think, well, I'll be happier. Like, we're fighting a lot. Our kids are struggling. Midlife. This is awful. Maybe the answer is for us not to be married anymore, you know, and so. But you can't just say that. You can't just say, I don't want to be married to you anymore, because that's awful, right? You don't just say to somebody, I don't want to be with you anymore. So we do some catastrophic thing to blow it up instead of actually confronting it directly. So, so I started to go down that road of, of, of starting to act in a self destructive way and in a marriage destructing way. But oddly enough, what I decided to do, my little genius plan was here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell Margi that I sometimes masturbate and look at porn. And I know she's going to be devastated and I know that it's going to make her angry at me and furious. And if she's angry and furious at me, then I'm not going to stand for that and that will be the way that we can part, you know, so it was like I'll sabotage by being, you know, my, my strategy was I'm going to be candid and honest as a way to sabotage this relationship that I, maybe I want out of. You know what I'm saying? And I don't know that it was that calculated, but as I look back, that's kind of how I think about what I was doing. So I, I did that, I did that. I, I sat her down one day and I just, this is how I remember it. Margi may remember it differently. You can, you can respond to this dialogue if you want this monologue. But I sat her down and I told her, I said, margie, sometimes I, I masturbate and I look at porn and just like, you know, the way I remembered is immediately the tears just start streaming down her cheeks and I see the devastation, or at least I perceive devastation in her face and I'm thinking, yes, you know, I mean, I'm not really thinking that way because I'm breaking her heart. But at the same time I'm like, this marriage isn't going great and I'm looking for a way out and this is all kind of going like I thought I would, you know what I mean? And, and you know, and that's kind of what we think is that if, if we don't do what's right, if we don't follow the rules, you know, the love is conditional. But what I, what I experienced was not that. Of course Margi was hurt about that. To hear that and to hear that I'd been doing that for so many years and that we hadn't talked about it. And of course she had been conditioned to think about that as meaning maybe that I didn't find her attractive or Maybe I wasn't. Maybe I was being unfaithful because some people associate pornography and masturbation with faithfulness or, you know, insecurities that she may have had or, you know, whatever was going through her mind that made her cry. There were good reasons for that. But after she kind of gained her composure and this may have not been the exact same day, the way she responded was. Really took me by surprise because she was like, it wasn't a shameful response. She didn't shame me. I didn't feel like she thought I was a bad person.
Guest 3 [00:17:54] She.
John Dehlin [00:17:54] She kind of got curious about it, and she was like, well, you know, you know, I love you. And the only thing I just want to say is, you know, is there anything we can do in our, you know, sexual intimacy? Emotional. Is there anything I can do so that I can meet your needs in. In any other way that we can, you know, whether it's frequency or different ways, we can try different things. Like, I just want you to know I'm always. I'm. I always want you to feel like I'm interested in. In sex when you're feeling like you want that. So it wasn't like, don't do that anymore and you're awful. It was just, hey, what can we do to enhance our relationship so that you just know that I'm. I'm. I always want to be there for you. And again, I'm not saying that a woman should feel like it's her job to service her husband. I'm not saying that. I'm. But I am telling you what her reaction was to me. And sounds. There's two things that. That are profound about it, at least to me. One was how for the first time, I started feeling this unconditional love. I was just like, whoa, she didn't want. She didn't want to kick me out. She didn't shame me. She still loves me. And that was just like. I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have guessed this kind of would have been Armageddon to our marriage, but it wasn't. But this, the second crazy mind bending thing, guess what it did to my desire to masturbate and look at porn? It decreased significantly where I was caught in that trap of trying to stop, but then doing it more just to be told, hey, I love you. And, hey, it's. It's no big deal. And, you know, if there's anything we can do to enhance our intimacy, I'm here. That transformed that, took it from something that was like, freaking me out. It was a problem and was always on my mind to, like, I kind of lost interest. And I'm not gonna say I never did it again, or I've never done it, or, you know, I'm. But my point is it fundamentally changed that whole trap that I was caught in. The combination of vulnerability, you know, unconditional love and vulnerability. And it led to, oddly, some of the first cracking opens in our relationship where we were able to be vulnerable, other. Vulnerable about other things, where we felt safe about other things. And it became one of the important inflection points for us, healing a lot of problems in our marriage and climbing in terms of our marital satisfaction and connection. And so that's just. I just want to share that in a sense of vulnerability to help illustrate the concepts of unconditional love and vulnerability. Now, Margi, do you want to add anything to that? Did I get anything wrong, or do you want to give your perspective?
Vulnerability in Marriage: A Couple Shares Their Story
Guest 4 [00:21:09] One thing that I would say is that conversation, I think happened at a time in our marriage that you mentioned where there was a deep tumult going on. And I think the way I remember in memory is very faulty, as we know. But the way I remember it is I. I sensed something going on in our relationship but couldn't. I didn't know what it was. And when we sat down that day, John provided a list. It was like, not just porn and masturbation. It was like, this isn't working for me. I hate it when you do this. This isn't. And it was like a list of like seven to 10 things. And what I realized was. And the. The crying was just this sense of like, oh, my reality actually is not my reality.
Guest [00:21:58] Right.
Guest 4 [00:21:59] I've been living. And I think it's important to know our marriage wasn't bad. Like, if I looked around, we spent more time together than other marriages. But that's the way this stuff works is, I think, you know, you can oftentimes be blindsided yourself by things that you feel. But I had this sense of, like, this rush of sharing a lot.
Guest [00:22:19] Right.
Guest 4 [00:22:20] And then I remember my response from there being, well, what is it that you need? And then from there, we revisited a lot of the things that he talked about. And that was a shift in our marriage where I decided for, you know, and what do you need to heal and what do you need? And kind of negotiating that in a way where we could really heal and rebirth the relationship. And part of that was porn and masturbation. And I actually remember at one point I said, you know, if I Just want you to know that if there's a shame component where you feel like you have to do it alone, that I'm willing to do it with you. Like I can be intimate with you while you do those things. If so if there's this shame thing about you going off and feeling like.
Guest [00:23:07] Or.
Guest 4 [00:23:07] And so I just think, I don't know, there are those moments and vulnerability sometimes doesn't feel soft, you know, it can feel lousy. It can feel actually in the moment like one of the worst things ever. But there was a rebirth and a new start, I think, to our relationship in that moment.
John Dehlin [00:23:31] Thank you. And of course, there were all sorts of ways that I was not meeting Margi's needs and that that obviously is something that we arrived at as well, that it wasn't just about my needs, it was about her needs and our needs. And so thank you for indulging me as I share that. I hope that is helpful in some way to illustrate some of these points.
Margi Dehlin [00:23:57] I don't know that I would add more to this other than, you know, I think this is one of those classic principles where the golden rule really does apply. You know, it's really easy to want this and it's really hard to offer it. And so I think, you know, that's the thing I try to constantly be thinking about with my own kids or my spouse or my friends is am I a safe enough, you know, vehicle to be approached with vulnerability? It's not just about, oh, I've got to take the risk and be vulnerable with people and see if they're going to be safe. It's like, am I also safe, safe for that in return? And that's a really hard thing to look in the mirror at sometimes, right? Because of my own reactions, my own triggers, my own things that I get angry about or I'm disappointed in or really frustrated with. So it's a two way street all the time. It's hard.
John Dehlin [00:25:03] Emily wants to clap. Emily wants to clap. Anyone else want to clap? Emily's clapping.
Margi Dehlin [00:25:15] Thank you. Yeah, go.
John Dehlin [00:25:17] Yeah.
Guest 4 [00:25:18] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:25:19] So my sup.
Guest 5 [00:25:20] I know being vulnerable is important and everything, but coming from a place, like trying to just get my thoughts in order, like being vulnerable in my family growing up, like, a lot of people would have thought we had this great family and we do it in a lot of aspects for my parents, but it definitely was not a safe place to be vulnerable. Like, I feel like a lot of manipulation type of thing happens. And I know, like, just inherently, like, as I've gotten older I've started recognizing, especially just recently as I've been exploring the thought and idea of vulnerability as a good thing. I just don't know. How do you even take steps because. To be vulnerable? Like, because, you know, for 40 years, I've. I think that I've lived my entire life being very not vulnerable. And like, the Mormon fake is very strong within me. But I don't know what I'm saying exactly. But it's just neither my mom nor my dad were very safe to be vulnerable with. And we were. It was okay some, even though it was not spoken, I knew how I was supposed to react and act to things. And I've always kind of pushed against, like, hated that. But in a sense, I know that I have brought that into my own marriage. And so it's just one of those things. I'm like, I totally agree with you and I love it, but I don't even know. How do you even do that? I don't know.
Guest 3 [00:26:43] That's all.
Margi Dehlin [00:26:44] Oh, that's a really good.
Guest [00:26:45] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:26:49] A few thoughts as you were talking. I mean, I think that back to the spectrum thing, finding who are the safest people in your life, you know, to start practicing that with so that you can build upon positives. Another thing that's really something that comes up in therapy a lot with a lot of people, especially going back and trying to do repair attempts with parents or abusers or, you know, people that you feel like, really harmed you. And some people really want that chance to go back and be able to confront something. A big part of the work that we do in individual therapy and those kinds of cases is to make sure that that process, that risk that you're taking is much more centered on your ability to do that and not focused on. On the result you're going to get because you can't guarantee the result. Some of these efforts go really well, like, surprisingly well. You know, some people have been dealing with 10 years of secrecy. Kind of like this, right? Where he thought, oh, my gosh, the minute I say that our marriage is over, and yet he sits down with his wife and has a very different experience than he expected. And other times, you know, you're thinking, oh, my goodness, I'm going to take a risk. I think it'll probably go okay. And then you're devastated. You know, like my father said, he wouldn't even believe me if I was sexually assaulted. Right. So you really. One of the tricks maybe is to visualize yourself offering vulnerability and have that be the space where it's successful and not allow the response. Response to necessarily be such a measurement stick because you don't have any control over the response. And then you can also visualize yourself with a positive response or a negative or neutral response. How would I then it's kind of like playing chess, right? You think ahead a few steps, right? And so it's kind of like, well, if this were to happen, what could I then say? Or if this was to happen, how can I kind of shut down the conversation and go self soothe in some way? Or is there a support person I could go then talk to? Or you know, so have, have kind of some strategies in place to help you not be so dependent on the response.
John Dehlin [00:29:18] Marty wanted to say one thing.
Guest 4 [00:29:24] Did you go over levels of relationship already? Okay, so one thing, maybe you mentioned this. Did you talk about it with regard to vulnerability? What I'll say is this. In a recent interview I was listening to with Brene Brown, she was talking about, wow, like I brought up this concept of vulnerability and now everyone is just being vulnerable all over the place, right? And this is just not what I intended. So what I meant was basically, definitely go for vulnerability. But the people we're vulnerable with should, should be worthy of it. And that's a really important piece because I find particularly with coaching, you'll have people, particularly family, right? Family's a really tricky area with regard to this where we're talking about a mother or a sister. So we have this idea it's a close relationship. But if you apply the level of relationship, let's do the one five, one being more surface, five being deep, it's really a level two. But we're going in at a five. And it's really important, I think, just to kind of check that if it really is a level two, let's try. It's healthy to go in at a level two.
Guest [00:30:35] Right.
Guest 4 [00:30:35] So we're keeping the level five. And that kind of goes back to your question in my mind is it's easier to be vulnerable with the people who have already done right by our vulnerability. That gives us this sense of success.
Guest 6 [00:30:48] Right.
Guest 4 [00:30:49] And being cared for and having it really received in the way that we so deserve. So level of relationship is a great thing to consider when it comes to sharing vulnerability and who we share it with.
Guest 7 [00:31:05] Jacob, thanks. So I think that, Margi, you actually addressed the. What I was going to ask about and that is that I wonder if we could speak to the level of healing that comes from just the act of trying to be vulnerable. Even though the response could be really negative, maybe in some ways, because I know that Emily and I, if we've worked to be vulnerable in our relationships and with family members as well, have had that discussion about, you know, what kind of an outcome do you. Do we expect to get from this sort of thing? So I guess if I try and dial that more in, how do you make the differentiation between it's better that I just not even make this attempt if it's going to be negative, or I'm going to make the attempt, it's probably going to be negative. And I hope that it helps me or maybe it helps me more to not do it. I don't know if that's clear or not so.
Practicing Vulnerability and Navigating Difficult Relationships
Margi Dehlin [00:32:05] Well, there's no right or wrong necessarily in this process. And some of it we find out through practice. Right. So if I do something once or twice and it really doesn't give me the results I'd hoped for, that's information I can now do different things with. And some people may decide not to take the risk at all. And then that, you know, if you can again of frame that from the perspective of where's that decision coming from? As far as my risk cost benefit analysis per se, I guess what I would say is that this is the power of framing it. So much of the work that we do is cognitive behavioral work, and that's really choosing a different story or a different way to think about it. So if you're going into vulnerability, risk or exercise with the idea of I'm going to feel proud about myself that I even took this risk and I'm kind of working against my own proclivities that I'm trying to better myself. And then the success isn't even related to what happens right Then the success is like, wow, I stepped out of my comfort zone, I did something different, I tried something new. The results of that really doesn't have anything to do with your primary success then at that point. So I think framings are really an important way to think about this.
John Dehlin [00:33:30] Would you be comfortable telling us a little bit more about the relationship you have in mind when you ask that question? That will help us answer your question a little more. Is there a person? And you don't have to give names, you don't have to necessarily identify the person in a way that you think would not be safe. Well, whatever you can tell us about the issue and, or the person that still is safe helps us with formulate a response.
Guest 7 [00:33:58] Okay, so, and you know, push me over, reach up, push the turn the mic off or something. Emily and I have spent a lot of time in our marriage talking about her relationship with her mom and you. Yeah. And I know that there's a lot of pain there and we're not really sure the best way to address that. And my fear comes from I don't want it to get worse for Emily. So that's. I think we know that there needs to be some sort of communication there or some sort of just acceptance of how it actually is, but how to get to that point in a way where it's a healthy and a good thing. We don't really know how to make that journey. And so my question really was designed. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about, is it, is this something that we need to just divorce ourselves from and just accept it or is there a way through this? Because I'm very uncomfortable with how the outcome could affect us.
John Dehlin [00:35:10] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:35:11] Beautiful.
John Dehlin [00:35:12] And this is really. We have a couple people wanting to respond. Let me give my quick response. And then Becca and then Fred. So there are a couple values that are, I'm hearing coming into play. One is the value of authenticity with Emily's mom. Potentially. Right. There's another value of safety. How safe is it to be authentic? And in this case there's your safety, but then there's also her mom's safety. Because sometimes it can be devastating to a parent to hear that their kid no longer believes or is struggling with something. And another value that I often like to introduce here is the value of compassion. And the extreme example I Give is a 90, 90 year old grandma who's on her deathbed. Do you go and tell her that you hate the church and you've left it and when she's not asking it and her days are numbered and it's just going to sort of like sour the final moments of her life? Right. That's an extreme example. But there is an element of compassion you can overlay here to say, you know what? I do value authenticity, but I value compassion too. And the compassion in this case overrides any need I have to be authentic. Because why spoil this person's final days on the earth, you know what I mean? So those are all things that like Mintatasha said, there's no right answer. How much do you focus on authenticity versus your own safety versus her? Safety versus compassion. But it's important to keep those dynamics in mind. And you brought in the final value of acceptance, which is a really important psychological move because it would be totally reasonable just to say, I think that our Relationship. I value this relationship, even if it's superficial on some level. But it would probably be catastrophic to our relationship for me to be vulnerable or catastrophic to them or catastrophic to us. And so I will intentionally make the choice to never go there, to never talk about Mormonism with these people, because like Natasha said, the. The math doesn't add up to it being worth it. And then there's another. There's another component to that, which is the level of disclosure. It's one thing to say the church is a total fraud and I hate it, and I'm never going back. It's another thing just to say, hey, our relationship. And we talk about this in the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. We'll talk about this in our presentation about communicating with believing family and friends. But there is a move that just says, hey, love sandwich. Love you. You've been a great parent. I'm so grateful for our upbringing. I love the church in so many ways. Our relationship with the church has kind of changed a little bit. And I just. I won't go. I won't go into any more detail than that, but I love you. And then the other part of the sandwich, I love you. We're the same people. We're committed to parenting and our marriage, and we love you and all the good things about the church, you know, but our relationship with the church has changed and then never going beyond that because you really do communicate all that needs to be communicated, which is things have changed, but then you don't go into the detail that could be more devastating. So those are all. We're not going to be able to give you the formula or the answer, but. But balancing some of those values can be important factors for whatever you end up deciding.
Margi Dehlin [00:38:48] Did your relationship with your mom change significantly with the faith transition or was it always a difficulty, or does she know?
Guest 5 [00:38:56] They know
Guest [00:38:59] it.
Guest 5 [00:38:59] Honestly, it didn't. I feel bad because I was rather. I mean, this is so central to just one person. It's a weird relationship.
Guest 8 [00:39:07] It.
Guest 5 [00:39:07] It didn't change much.
John Dehlin [00:39:08] I'm just here to think about their relationship with their parents. Okay, so is this.
Margi Dehlin [00:39:12] Is this helpful to everybody?
Guest [00:39:15] Okay.
Guest 9 [00:39:16] Okay.
Guest [00:39:17] Well, I'm. No.
Guest 5 [00:39:18] My main thing is just. No. My relationships with my mom and my parents has been strained for years and years. My whole life, they probably. I used to be kind. It's like the opposite. I was super close to her throughout my teen years, super open and. But it was because I was always doing exactly what she wanted, pleasing her. I was a pleaser. And once I became an adult. I decided that's when things started changing is. You know, I went on my mission and she loved that. And it all kind of started when I got married, but anyways. So the last few years have been really bad. But it's more just. It's when I started not conforming to what was expected of me. Even though from the outside I look like I've done everything right anyways. I don't know. So we actually have told her that we've left, but it's just been 100 radio silence. Like, I talked to my sister and who. And she guilted my mom into talking me. Anyways, it's fine. But it's more just. My whole thing about vulnerability is I've kind of come to the point of. That's okay. That relationship with my mom is just, you know, she's in her mid-70s. It's not. I don't know. I've just kind of. It is what it is, but it's more that I feel like to be vulnerable with my husband, which I've always felt like there's. I wanted to be more open, more intimate on an intimate level with my. And I kind of feel like maybe that's. It's because I've kind of shut all intimacy off with. My dad's been shut off for my entire life. And I feel like once I became an adult, it kind of got shut off with my mom too. And so I just kind of feel like it's transferred. But anyways, this is probably not something for a huge group discussion. I don't know. I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, that. That's all I was saying. That's why I was asking about, like, well, how do you take those steps to.
Guest 4 [00:41:09] To be vulnerable?
Guest 5 [00:41:10] Because I haven't. I don't feel like I've been vulnerable in my entire life. I've always been very sheltered. Always put on a pretty hardcore front with everybody in my life, no matter who they are.
John Dehlin [00:41:22] Right.
Guest 5 [00:41:23] So.
John Dehlin [00:41:24] So we have Becca, Fred and Karen. I want to recommend a book called Getting the Love youe Want by Harvl Hendricks. These are three really powerful books that help Margi and I through a lot. And Harville Hendricks. His kind of shtick is we all come to our relationships with brokenness, with dysfunctional relationship patterns or trauma. Right? And sometimes we even pick our partners either as a way to sort of help save us from past trauma or as sort of a way to, in some dysfunctional way, repeat the trauma until we kind of learn whatever lesson we need to learn. But there's something powerful about whatever trauma we bring to the marriage, why we choose our partner as it relates to our past traumas. But then also the, you know, the opportunity of all of that is, oh, and then, and then when we get angry and triggered and lose our minds in our marriage, it's usually because our partner has stepped on that triggered traumatic. So sort of place that's deeply rooted in our childhood and usually in our relationships with our parents. Right. And so what this book does is it. It's a systematic approach. And if you can believe this, Margi and I were still attending the church, you know, in 2012, 2013, when we. When we decided we really needed to fix our marriage.
Guest 7 [00:42:53] So.
John Dehlin [00:42:54] But we hated Sunday school, so. But we want our kids to go to church. So we would go to soccer meeting, then drop our kids off at Sunday school, and then we go walk home and we would do the exercises out of this book as our Sunday school. Right. And then we'd go back to, you know, if we felt like it, we'd go back to priesthood and relief society. This is back when church was still three hours, when the real Mormons were doing the Mormon thing. But what this book does is it's got like a week by week approach where you identify your triggers and traumas and vulnerabilities, you be thoughtful about why you chose the partner you did as relations as related to these traumas. You then practice talking about these sacred places, talking about why we get triggered, talking about why we're triggering the other, and then practice the vulnerability that leads to the healing. And so I just want to recommend that book as a really great resource for you and your husband to be able to practice identifying and healing from the types of things that you're responding. I don't mean to just push it off on a book, Margi. Would you agree that that could be useful? Okay.
Guest [00:44:10] About 15 years ago, my. Anyway, my siblings and I found out about our dad having this, like, double life. The whole time he was in high council, council and bishopric and expecting a lot from us of, you know, expectations of, you know, you're gonna get married in the temple, you're doing this, you're gonna go on missions. We were like the perfect family at church. And so if anybody's watching this today, they'll be like, what?
Guest 4 [00:44:38] And so I'm a little freaked out
Guest [00:44:40] because my parents are both very much alive, but so I hope they never find it. But if they do, it's okay. I'll still live or I'll move away. But anyway. So my. So anyway, my siblings and I, we kind of dealt with our own ways. Some of us went really off the deep end and I kind of pulled more to the church because that was all I knew and that's what I held onto. And the rest of them kind of. We all kind of just waffled in space for a while trying to figure things out. And now we're all. That's one thing that really brought us close together. We realized we had our parents mess in common. That impacted our lives considerably. And so about two years ago in therapy, the therapist I was with said, I don't know, there's this drug called ketamine and they give you a shot and they put you under. And he wanted to do a group ketamine session with my siblings. He thought that would be really impactful because I don't. You. You kind of go into this anyway hypnotic state and, and in that space it was, it was actually really healing because we realized how much we were. What we were doing for each other in this because you feel like you're in a different existence there, but in this existence, how much our roles in the family we were playing was looking out for other. Each each other and really being concerned for each other. And they. The therapist told us that 24 hours after that ketamine would be really effective, that our minds would be clear and crisp. And we felt it. It was, it was actually really crazy. But we felt. I felt I'm always like wishy washy. I don't know, I don't know should I do that? And I was like, I need to do this, this, this. So in that moment, we decided randomly just to drive to my parents house and go sit down with them and have a discussion because my mom had played us all against each other. She would say one thing to another and one thing to another. And we, as we, as we talked, we all realized we are being pawns in their little scheme of. And it was just. It was so unfair to us. And so we decided if we were all there, we would be a strength to each other. So we sat down in the room and we didn't do it as beautifully as Natasha just did.
Guest 4 [00:46:56] We kind of.
Guest [00:46:57] But it was, we were very direct, which I have always struggled with. I'm a little passive and I just said, I will no longer be the peace. The. Not the peacemaker, but the pleaser. I said, I have always worked so hard to please both of you and I'm done with it. I'm not doing it anymore. And we said, mom, you are doing this, this, and this. Dad, we have found out terrible things about you, and we love you no matter what. All we're asking for is that you love us as we are, just like we're trying to love you for who you are. And, mom, if you want to have a relationship with us, this has to stop, and you can no longer do this. Like, we kind of just set up boundaries, and we walked out of that together feeling like it was the most amazing. Like, we go back to that all the time now, and we're like, that ketamine was the bomb. That was the moment we, like, took back our lives for each other. But, you know, our marriages are struggling, every single one of us. We were vulnerable in that moment with our parents, but we don't know how to do it in our relationships, so. And now that therapist no longer practices, because I don't know what happened. Maybe we set him over the edge, but I hope not. But anyway, my whole point was, what I found interesting with that whole experience is that my mom and dad could have turned to each other and turned to us, and you would think. I thought it was the most loving approach. Like, we were very loving. I mean, the things he has done are pretty. I think, pretty disgusting. But we love him because he's our dad, and we wanted him to. To know that. And so what I found interesting was that in that moment where they could have just loved us, we realized they're not capable of that. And so even here it's been a year later, and I finally called my dad, like, it was about a year, a full year before, they wouldn't even talk to us. And I was in a conversation with them, and he just said that was. It was our fault. It was. Look, how dare us talk to the them that way? How dare we do this to them? And I realized, you know what? I can still love my parents. And I'm so proud of myself and my siblings that we were vulnerable in that moment. But I don't need them. I don't need them to tell me anything. I know that. I know I'm lovable. I know what I did was brave. And going forward, I have to keep them at a distance in my life because I realize they're not capable of giving me what I had hoped for. And that doesn't make them bad people, but that makes them incapable of being the people I need in my life right now that I need, because they're very toxic, and I can't have that. But I will always respect and love them for what they've done for me and for the life they've given me.
Guest 8 [00:49:59] And.
Guest [00:50:00] And I will be their daughter who still goes up and helps them move furniture or help them with whatever they may need in their life. But it's not the loving, caring relationship I had hoped. It's not the mom I wanted, it's not the dad I need, but it's mourning the loss of that. But it's okay. So.
Guest 7 [00:50:28] The things I wanted to share have
Guest 5 [00:50:30] been covered 10 times over. Just nothing right now but gratitude for everything that's been shared.
John Dehlin [00:50:34] Did you still?
Holly [00:50:42] So I was just thinking, first of all, this group of people is so amazing. Your comment was so beautiful. But so my little brother, when he came out of the closet, my parents handled it so badly that when he came out, when he came out of the closet, just to them and to me, we were the only three that knew. And his mission president, my parents handled it so badly that when he came out to the rest of the world, nobody knew. My parents refused to even admit that he had told them that they had known all those years ago. And they were really horrible to him.
Margi Dehlin [00:51:20] They did a really poor job.
Holly [00:51:23] But in like a moment of vulnerability, when my child many years later told me that she was my daughter instead of my son, I kind of went to my parents knowing my child is going to be coming out to the world, and they have to know before the rest of the world knows. And I cried and I said, I'm about to tell you the hardest thing, and maybe it will kill you. Because my dad was 90. He's almost 91 now. My mom was 86 and now she's almost 87. And they shocked and amazed me by being nothing but loving and supporting of my child. And I look back at that and I know that my little brother paid the price for my daughter. Now, because my parents couldn't accept something all those years ago that now because my brother paid the price for it, my parents now could be loving to my child. So this really horrible thing that you're going through with your mom, other people in your family are going to follow after you, and other people are going to come. And maybe your parents will grow up and will accept, expand, and your mom will become a different person through your love and through just you being you. So maybe she can show up maybe sometime in the future for someone else in a way that she couldn't. For you and this other thing, you can be everything to yourself that your mom wasn't to you. And you can be everything to your own children that she wasn't capable of being because you now know exactly what you need to do differently. And you are so warm and beautiful. And you totally have this,
Guest 4 [00:53:14] I think, for me, really stands out. I love the idea of providing really intentional opportunities for people in our lives to have the information to. To have the vulnerability attempt. I do always like to say, if you have a highly, like a history of highly problematic behavior, though there is such a thing as letting it go and providing yourself, you know, that warmth and that healing. Because you can see it so often the children of parents really taking on the healing. They want all the healing. And the parents are not growth mindset either at that moment or for decades or for. And it can be tremendously traumatizing to keep at this thing that you can't fix. You can't own both sides. You can only own your side. And so I just want to be really direct about that, that there are times, times when you've got to drop that rope too, and you've got to release it. And the best you can do is really, like I was saying before, kind of go back to yourself and say, can I mother myself? How can I be that mother I so am worthy of? And sometimes, you know, friends can be that. I have amazing friends as well that give me such nurturing love. We get to be that for each other. And then it is that we just like you were saying with our own children, sometimes that's the healing we get, is that you get to really step into empowerment and say, it stops here, it stops here. I'm doing something different. And so that wound I have, I can't go to my. I can't heal that through this relationship, but I will, will heal it through my daughter. And I will definitely offer the love that I so was just deserving of to my son. You know,
Intergenerational Patterns and Repairing Parent Relationships
Margi Dehlin [00:55:21] There's two thoughts I'm having right now. One that Margi just brought up, which is so important in intergenerational work, and we do this in genograms. Genograms is how we kind of assess a family system. We look for pattern breakers. Pattern breakers. And to be a pattern breaker in your family system is a tremendous thing. And in many ways, you're all doing that just by being here today. Right. So there is something very beautiful about being able to understand the limits of your system and offer something new to the generations in front. Right. We have language for that in Mormonism, but it's very incorrectly placed. Right that, oh, you're going to ruin generations to come if you leave the church. But emotional intimacy is a space where you can have a lot of power in generations to come. The second thought I had as we're doing all this is how many times did the CES letter come up or church at all? Right. Like, these are all issues that are affected by church membership and church ideas. And we could have made. I could have said something like, ever since I sent you that letter, mom, about our church stuff, I've even noticed it get worse. You know, I could have said something like that in our little dialogue. But very little about this is about church doctrine, really. When you really get down to sharing. I miss you, I love you. I want more closeness with you. Maybe we do put something. Some topics on the shelf that are hard for us to know how to navigate. So how do we focus on all these other things that we have in common? Right. And so very little of this has to do about learning how to talk to your family and friends about doctrine. Okay.
John Dehlin [00:57:11] All right. So vulnerability, It's a good thing. Go get it. Go do it. Go for it. It's good. We need it. All right. There's only seven, not eight. I've been saying eight all along, but there's only seven today. I don't know how one got lost, but five. Component five that we're offering today as a tool for emotional intimacy is develop a meaningful friendship by spending quality time together regularly. This is something John Gottman really emphasizes in his book. Again, I'll reference that book. It's called the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Natasha has an entire amazing presentation on marriage that's built at least in part, on the work of John Gottman. There's a really great. If you guys watch or listen to the Dax Shepard podcast called Armchair Expert, Margi lovingly asked me to listen to this episode with Dax Shepard and John Gottman. So to and from this retreat, I've been listening to John Gottman and it's really good stuff. But he emphasizes that couples who do really well together spend quality time together as friends.
Margi Dehlin [00:58:34] I would recommend that book just flat out, relationship wise. I don't think it's just. I think the principles relate to parenting. And even if you're single, you're gonna have relationships. I would get honed in on those.
John Dehlin [00:58:46] Oh, not just for marriage, just for.
Guest [00:58:48] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:58:48] Even though it says seven principles for making marriage Work, I think it's a great book for just relationships.
John Dehlin [00:58:55] And it talks about contempt and it talks about stonewalling and it talks about criticism and what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse of relationships. And. But. But, you know, we don't have to dwell a lot of time here other than to say, you know, you know, it's really hard to develop emotional intimacy with somebody unless you're. You're also just spending meaningful time together. I remember when Margi and I were even, when during our separation, I told him about our separation. During our separation, we sought a coach, Liz Dalton. We love her. And she gave us this rule, which was, okay, while you're courting again, trying to decide if you want to stay married, you're to go on a date once a week with each other. And I forbid you to talk about anything that would ever cause you to have conflict during that date. Your date is purely for fun and enjoyment and no talking about anything serious. You are forbidden from having any conflict during that date. And all you're allowed to do is, like, go to a movie or go on a walk or have fun or go out to eat, whatever it is, you know, but you're forbidden from any conflict, and you're only allowed to have fun. And it was weird. It's like, whoa, we have to be told, don't have conflict. And we have to be, like, shamed into just enjoying ourselves. But, you know, that. That's kind of stuck with me. And so I was working with a client just the other day, and his wife, a couple, and they were really struggling over mixed faith marriage stuff. And they realized that before he had had his faith crisis, they had had a weekly date together, a date night. And it didn't even occur to them nine months later, after the faith crisis and all the trauma that ensued, that they had stopped having those date nights and those sorts of things where you just find a way to get away, take a little weekend, take a night away. Margi and I, we thought we had to go to Mexico to have a great getaway. We just drive 10 minutes to the Grand America and just spend a night at a local hotel where we're away from the home, away from the context of work and kids. And we'll sit in the Jacuzzi, we'll sit it by the pool, we'll go to a local restaurant. But just getting away, even if it's a staycation, we do that a few times a year. And it's a really lovely memory that we share. And so if you want to develop a good emotional intimacy with somebody, have fun with them, have joy with them, develop regular, meaningful investments of time, because it's More than just serious relationships and vulnerability and all the heavy and sadness that comes with being vulnerable and receiving that, it's just also learning how to enjoy each other.
Margi Dehlin [01:01:47] And time is a limited commodity. So please don't. You don't feel like you're supposed to be at a five with everybody. You know, you can't really do that. Choose wisely who your fives and fours are going to be. And then that way your twos and threes and ones feel less painful too. It's like, okay, so, yeah, I have the weather type of relationship with this particular family member. You know, how's the weather? And we're polite and we see each other once a year at the family reunion.
Guest 4 [01:02:16] Right.
Margi Dehlin [01:02:17] And even though there's maybe sadness in that and you wish it was different, it's okay. Not every relationship has to be at a 5.
Applying Intimacy Principles to Parenting and Believers
John Dehlin [01:02:24] Turning this to the conversation about children, because I know many of you are thoughtful, mindful about your relationships as parents with your children. I've tried to do this with my own children. And so, you know, I have a child that likes to play video games, and I play video games growing up, but I felt like, well, you're. Your video game playing is excessive and it's not good for you, even though mine was heavy at the time. But the point is that we got into this adversarial relationship where I was just always getting angry at the video game playing, and he was just getting more and more annoyed with me at how controlling and judgmental I was, and it was just wrecking our relationship. So I just did a couple things differently. I. I realized that he really was interested in snowboarding. I had not learned. So we started snowboarding together. And. And it was completely ineffective to try and, like, ask him at breakfast how he's feeling in the morning because he didn't want. You know, sometimes kids don't want to talk or. Or after school. Like, tell me about your school day. Like, sometimes the last thing a kid ever wants to do after they've come home from school is talk about their day. And so even those attempts at connecting when explicit were backfiring and making things worse. But when we found ways to either snowboard together or I actually started playing video games again, and I'm like, what video game do you play? I'll learn it and we'll play together. Those provided moments for us to then have a little more fun, a little more casual conversations, and it's helped in our emotional intimacy as a parent child. So whether it's date nights with your kids, Hobbies that you pursue with your kids or loved ones. This applies to kids, parent child relationships as well.
Guest 2 [01:04:17] So it's funny because at the beginning
John Dehlin [01:04:19] of this slide I was like, okay,
Guest 2 [01:04:21] but quality time needs to be underlined because, you know, we go on dates and, and we just go to dinner and a movie and it's not like quality. We don't have deep conversations. And then as you move on, I'm like, wait, the word quality to me has a different meaning for me. It's like, oh, we have to be having deep conversations. We have to be vulnerable. We have to do like that. Quality time has to be quantified by how deep and how emotional we get. But now I'm like, oh, crap, we're supposed to be having good times. And the quality of the time is how much joy it brings us, not how much sadness and drama has dealt with. Right. So my comment went. Changed quite quickly. But that was just something that I noticed that I think sometimes, like our definition of things need to change in order for growth and things to change happen.
Margi Dehlin [01:05:18] Yes, yes.
John Dehlin [01:05:24] Other comments about this point.
Guest 10 [01:05:28] I just want to quickly say that when after I left the church and Jacob was still in that we decided to have dates where we did not talk about anything church related because it was so painful. And even though I so wanted to talk about it, I mean, I wanted his thoughts, I wanted his feelings. And we weren't really talking about it any other time. And so it seemed like a great avenue. And so we just sort of made a rule like we hardly see each other when we go on dates. We are laughing and we are having fun. Because that is, that was at that time, the only time I think we remembered each other. And so I think that's not just a thing you can do with your spouse when you're going through a difficult time with, in any relationship that you need to, you know, have a time where there's still that person you loved.
John Dehlin [01:06:50] All right, number six. Evolve into a fierce commitment to the other's well being. And this is, this is something as I watched couples go from orthodox couples to mixed faith couples to, you know, high conflict couples to eventually really, really healthy couples, there's this point in the marriage, for whatever, whatever reason, where each person is defending their own side, their own turf. It's like, well, you work too much and you don't spend time with me. And then it's like, well, I, I'm earning a living and I need to work because you spend all my money. And, and so there's this like, there's turf, right? And you're defending it. You're defending your turf. Well, I believe, and you broke the contract. And it's like, well, I'm just seeking truth and you're blind and you have your head in the sand and just this idea of each of you defending yourself and kind of attacking the other. And what I've seen as transformational that many couples don't see as a possibility, but it's some of the most inspiring work I've ever done, especially with mixed faith couples, is when the couple is able to work through everything we've talked about to get to the point where instead of the believer defending the believing turf and the non believer defending the non believing turf, each one is defending the turf of the other. In other words, let's say there's a mixed faith couple and one of the kids starts trashing on people who aren't faithful in the church. It's an extraordinary order of power. If it's the believing partner that says to that child, hey, there are people who don't believe for really good reasons. There are people who stop believing because of abuse they've experienced or because of integrity or because that's what their soul tells them to do. And it's the believing parent that reprimands or instructs the child about showing more love and tolerance about non belief. And imagine the flip side where a kid becomes secular and a kid starts mocking believers. And it's the non believing partner that says, hey, child, that's your believing mom you're talking about. Don't make fun of belief. People who believe it's important to them and those beliefs are sacred to them. And again, it's the non believer who's making that argument. And so if you can keep in mind the goal of working towards the point where you shift from defending turf to defending the other person's position, you'll know that you've really not only understood where they are, but shown to them that you will fight for their position and the right for them and the validity of them to hold the place that they hold. And so we just offer that up as a goal so that any relationship you have that really achieves kind of a level 5 or 10 depending on your scale of intimacy, this is a characteristic to kind of strive for.
Margi Dehlin [01:10:04] I just briefly, I'll just share a little bit of what you would probably talk in the communicating with believer people, but this is a very important principle when talking to your believing family and friends. So starting off again with the sandwich approach of I Don't want to do anything that would put your testimony or your beliefs or your ideas feeling threatened or feeling like that's not my intent, that that's not my agenda. Sometimes we've got to watch that because it is our agenda. So we have to be really mindful about our own agendas. And again, do we want the believer to send us the Ensign articles and to send over the missionaries and to send over, you know, we don't want that. We don't want to be convinced away from our positions that we feel like we've come to honestly. So can we offer the same in return? Right. Like my only intent in sharing anything is only for understanding communication vulnerability. It is not because I'm trying to attack where you're coming from. So this is a really important aspect. It can also be a really important aspect in divorce. And this is really hard because there's nothing that brings up turf wars more than divorce or the idea of separation. So can I still be committed to your well being outside of our marriage, especially if we have children? And can we really give that type of role modeling to kiddos? And there are a lot of separations and divorce around faith transitions just because it's one piece. Oftentimes you're having to relook at your entire relationship at that point. So it's really a very high level concept that I think really teaches us what maybe I would call true religion to really be able to do this.
John Dehlin [01:12:11] Why don't you take this one?
Margi Dehlin [01:12:14] Yeah, so I mean, we've been kind of talking about these things all the time, but the concept of differentiation is just something I want to really quickly explain. We hear a lot about individuation and that's a value that again, Americans have greatly is how to become an individual, stand on your own two feet, strap your boots up kind of ideas. And so differentiation is really a bit different. Different than that in that it's actually not about the individual at all. It's about a relationship being able to tolerate its differences. Okay, so it's not, well, I don't need to agree with you, so I'm going to go be by myself and stand on my own. That's individuation. Differentiation is, I'm going to stay connected. There's still going to be a tension of commitment and love and loyalty between us in spite of the natural anxieties that come with difference. So this is a highly differentiated, you know, parent, for example, can tolerate the very anxious feelings that come when our kids are quite different than how we'd want them to be or think differently than we want them to be, or taking risks that we don't agree with. Right. Things of that nature. I'm sure you can all, at some level, resonate with that. And it's interesting, again, in a different presentation, I go into this more in depth as far as how systems and individuals are different in their differentiation abilities. Right. And so you have, like, the church as an entity, as an organization, has a certain differentiation level of how much difference it will tolerate. Certain wards will have different abilities to tolerate different levels of difference. I know my Ann Arbor, Michigan ward, which was very much, you know, in a liberal city and liberal college, was a very different feel than my Wichita, Kansas ward. Right. So the levels of differentiation were very different as a system. So that's something that, you know, I think we can think about. How do we tolerate our own anxiety when our loved ones don't respond the way we want them to, when they believe differently than what we want, when we see them thinking differently? And then, of course, the boundaries are, how do we create these spaces where we know what we can offer, what we're not willing to put up with, per se, and how do we do that in a respectful way? So I think we've touched on a lot of these principles. But if anybody has any further questions, be happy to.
John Dehlin [01:14:57] I'll just. I'll just say my little piece about these two things in. In Mormonism and in many orthodox religions, sameness equals good. If we're the same, if we dress white shirts and ties, skirts, shoulder, you know, all the different look, haircut. Right. Behavior that's good. Oh, somebody's got hair that's different, or too many earrings or drinks the wrong beverage.
Margi Dehlin [01:15:23] The bad.
John Dehlin [01:15:24] Right. That's fine. Military is an example of maybe an institution where there are reasons for sameness being good. And again, corporations or churches or whatever, I can understand from an institutional perspective why the need for identity or for conformity for an obedience culture. I'm not really condemning that per se, but what is required in terms of a mentality shift for emotional intimacy is this idea of not just tolerating differences, but celebrating differences as actually really useful and valuable. And it's a total mind shift because as Mormons, I think we're conditioned for our instinctive reaction to be concerned if there's difference. Right. You know, I'm always like, it's been really perplexing to me whenever I go to a party with post Mormons and there's alcohol, how really uncomfortable many post Mormons are That I don't drink. And it's funny, but it's also, it's. And you know, I'm not talking about anything specifically that happened last night, say, but there have been people that I've known in post Mormonism that like every time we're together it's like, well, do you drink yet? Why don't you drink yet? You know, and outside of Mormonism, you would never, you know, if I'm at Microsoft in Seattle, no one would ever ask once, but if they asked once, they would never ask again. It certainly wouldn't be something that someone would ask over and over and over and over again. And there's a sense that there's this. I think as post Mormons, we still carry with us a lot of our Mormon ness.
Margi Dehlin [01:17:14] We take our Mormonism with us.
John Dehlin [01:17:16] Yeah. And part of it's this binary worldview and part of it is just this intolerance of difference. Why is my not drinking making you so uncomfortable? I don't judge you. It's not a moral position. It shouldn't matter. It shouldn't even be something that's brought up necessarily. I mean, it's okay if there's curiosity. I realize I'm a public figure, but, you know, it's kind of, I'm just struck by how uncomfortable sometimes people are at that differentiation. And all I'm saying is differences can not only be, you know, we not only need to tolerate differences, we need to celebrate differences. Think about the varieties of food that we have. Think about the way different cultures, different genders, not only just allow us to be more broad minded, but inform and provide creativity or thought or expertise or insight that we would never get. You know, a salad with lots of ingredients is better than a salad with just one or two. At least that's how I feel. Differences are great. So that is one important capstone principle for emotional intimacy where you're not threatened by the differences. You embrace them and celebrate them. So if you're more analytical and your partner is more emotional, you celebrate that. If you're more introverted and they're more extroverted, you celebrate that and you value the differences that you bring and how each of those differences actually enriches the relationship and helps teach the other different ways of being. Margi tends to be more introverted. Sometimes I tend to be more extroverted. She's helped ground me so that I'm not like all over the world and neglecting what's most important. And maybe I've helped her get out of her comfort zone. Sometimes and meet new people or have new experiences that she otherwise might not have had. And so it's just an important principle. The second is boundaries. And I'll just say that in Mormonism and in life, sometimes we equate a boundary as meaning I don't love you. In other words, if I say I don't want to talk about that right now, now, or I need you to not do this that you've been doing, I think as Mormons we have this reaction of like, well, you must not care about me or you must not love me anymore, you must not trust me and you're not being kind or
Margi Dehlin [01:19:37] you're not being, or you're rude or
John Dehlin [01:19:38] you're mean or I feel a bad thing. And that's the spirit of contention. So you're introducing contention into our, you know, there's all different ways. And by the way, I, I think Mormons are famously awful at boundaries and we get it from a very young age where a 45 year old man can ask a 12 year old girl alone in a room where she might touch herself or not like, and that's an extreme example, but there are all sorts of ways. Okay, it's not, it's not. Or like how many of you women have like noticed when someone's trying to see if you're wearing what undergarments you're wearing or not, right? They might, they touch you or how they touch your back or they're looking at your, you know, like we, we, we feel comfortable asking people what underwear they're wearing.
Margi Dehlin [01:20:22] We ask about family planning inappropriately.
John Dehlin [01:20:26] Why aren't you, why aren't you working? Why do you have so many, you know, why don't you have so many kids? Why have you tried to have kids? Like what's going on? Why do you work outside the home? You know, just all sorts of things that impolite educated company would be completely outrageous. It's like, it's like, it's like including
Margi Dehlin [01:20:44] like father in laws asking new suspect or prospects, suspects prospects about pornography use. I mean adult men, right, Being asked by their adult father in laws, all kinds of things. So yeah, it's, we stink up boundaries.
John Dehlin [01:21:01] Yeah, we're really, really awful. Tithing settlement is, I mean, how much do you give? Let's, let's review how much you've given our non profit, voluntary, you know, contribution organization, charitable organization. Have you given enough this year? Have you, have you met your quota? Like that's just all other churches don't do that, believe it or not. Right. So anyway, I made the point. But the point is we have to have a shift for emotional intimacy. A boundary can mean, and I get this from Brene Brown. Margi. Through Margi. You know, Brene Brown says a boundary can actually mean I love you. It means I care about our relationship so much. And you can say this to your mom or your dad or your in laws or whoever, your spouse. You say this to your spouse, I love you so much. I value our relationship so much. There's this thing you're doing that is causing me a lot of sadness and distress and it's, and it's pulling me away from you. And I don't want to be distant from you. And so I am putting up a boundary. But it's not a boundary that says, get away from me, I don't love you, I don't like you. It's a boundary that says, I value our relationship so much. I'm going to put up this boundary so that we enjoy being around each other and we want to spend time together. And if you can respect this boundary, then we can go on having as good as, or even a better relationship. If you can't respect this boundary, it might mean that I have to reduce the amount of time or the ways that we spend time together because otherwise it's hurting me and it's hurting our relationship. And I know you don't want me to be hurt. And I'm hoping that you value our relationship. And so I'm going to ask you to respond, respect this boundary. And you know, it goes back to that saying of good fences make good neighbors, right? That's, that's the new way to look at boundaries. They actually mean, I love you, I want to keep you in my life and for us to, and I'll respect your boundaries, but I need you to respect mine. Does that make sense? And those are just some capstone components to the structure of what emotional intimacy can look like. Does that make sense?
Boundaries, Differentiation, and Leaving the Church
Margi Dehlin [01:23:17] And go back to vulnerability, the vulnerability discussion. Some boundaries will look like white picket fences that are nice and polite, have a lot of room to get over. And some boundaries will look like the, you know, the prison, you know, like barbed wire stuff up, you know, up top. Because again, you're dealing with, you know, anytime you put forward a boundary, you're also really inviting another person to, to also put forward a boundary, right? Because in a sense, their yes or no to your boundary is a boundary of their own. Right? And so if they're not going to respect your boundary, that's them basically saying, hey, that's not an okay negotiation between you and I. So just because you put forth a boundary doesn't mean you're going to get it. It's just the beginning negotiation piece. And so then you have to decide what the consequence is going to be in regards to a certain boundary being breached or not. So hopefully we can have a lot more white picket fences than barbed wire,
John Dehlin [01:24:14] but yeah, or brick walls. Will you share that with Margi, please, and whoever else is raising their hand?
Guest 4 [01:24:22] Just a real quick thing with boundaries, I think we oftentimes think about them with regard to other people. We, we boundary, which it completely works. One thing that we found to be really helpful is sometimes we're the ones that need to be boundaried. So there's this idea of boundaring ourselves for the sake of the relationship. And an example of that would be when you're in a heated argument with your spouse or someone you love and you can recognize you're triggered, you have actually crossed over and you're going to hurt the person you love. And you can actually boundary yourself and do that in a way where you say, you know what, and you always speak your point of view about yourself. So it's not like you're all, you know, hot over there and you need to calm down. So we're gonna have a boundary so you can chill. It's yourself. So it's like I'm noticing for me right now, I'm feeling overwhelmed and I really love you and I care about this conversation too much to kind of go right now because I'm afraid, you know, I'm going to say things that will hurt you. So what I'm going to ask is just let's take a break and I'll come back to you, let's say by the end of day. And we can talk about this in a way where I feel like I can, you know, speak from a place that will help our relationship. So boundarying ourselves too, that's a great.
Margi Dehlin [01:25:44] Yeah, that's, that's a great example. Margi just gave of what's considered, considered a timeout. What you have to be very careful which she role modeled. The person who takes the timeout is responsible for coming back to the table. Because typically, especially in a marriage, there's a classic pursuer and a classic withdrawer. So it's very easy for the withdrawer to say timeout and for the pursuer to honor that is very difficult. And if the withdrawer doesn't build trust that they come back to the, the table, then the withdraw. Then the pursuer's like, well, why am I even going to honor that? You never come back to the table. So, you know, held to the. No. So if you're the one that's calling the timeout, make sure that you're the one that comes back to the drawing board.
Guest 3 [01:26:35] I wanted to. Batteries are incredibly important, and I love. Thank you, Margi, for what you said. I wanted to go back just real quick to differentiation as well, because that hit me when we were talking about it. I think one thing about my faith crisis and being able to kind of look outside and around is how much I appreciate diversity now. I think as members of the church, I mean, the whole idea of missionary work is go out and find people that aren't enough like you and make them more like you. Right. I mean, that's the whole idea is. And it's so we can have things in common. I get that. Oh, you believe in Joseph Smith. Me too. All right. You know, and. But it's also subconsciously almost like we want them to suffer as much as we do, you know? Oh, you pay tithing, too? Yeah, me too.
Guest 10 [01:27:14] Oh, good.
Guest 3 [01:27:14] Oh, you go to extra meetings?
Guest 7 [01:27:15] Oh, yeah.
Guest 3 [01:27:16] You know, and when you kind of take. You step outside of that and you look around, it's like, now, people that are of different faiths, different cultures, races, you name it, it's beautiful. It used to be like, oh, that neighbor is gay, that neighbor smokes, that neighbor has tattoos, so don't try missionary work on them. But it's beautiful. People think this. I've heard people talk about it, but it really. It's just beautiful to see differentiation, different people and have friends that are different than you that can enrich your life and, you know, live by their experiences, learn and communicate. It's just a great thing that I think is very helpful for all of us.
Guest 2 [01:28:03] Okay.
Guest 9 [01:28:04] I also want to talk about differentiation.
Margi Dehlin [01:28:09] I can't say that word
Guest 9 [01:28:13] when it
Guest 4 [01:28:14] comes to faith transitions.
Guest 9 [01:28:16] My little sister, I really appreciated how she reacted to when I told her that I was leaving the church. She's very, very Mormon. And she responded. Or when I was talking to her last. And she wanted to know how my spirituality has changed, and she was open to that. Like, she. She said, I really am interested in how. How things have changed for you. And that really meant a lot to me that she wanted to hear, and she was open to hearing a different point of view and. And that I didn't put up any boundaries for her, but it was unspoken and she knew that, you know, not to proselytize me, and I don't proselytize her. And so she was able to have that healthy boundary between us and also to appreciate that we have differences now and she wants to know about them. And that meant a lot to me.
Margi Dehlin [01:29:13] I would say curiosity is a huge ingredient to differentiation. And that's, that's a great example of that.
Guest 2 [01:29:20] Now.
Guest 8 [01:29:25] That would be awesome if I had someone ever ask me.
Guest [01:29:31] I mean, I'm serious.
Guest 8 [01:29:33] Do you have any insight to that? Because it's really wonderful that no one waves at me in my neighborhood anymore. They obviously see that I'm not wearing my garments and I put in my second earring. And so they. But no one asks. No one asks unless they want me to go to some sort of church thing. And I have asked to please don't come to me with church stuff. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to get to know you. But they don't want to. Obviously. They don't want to know why they don't ask me. They don't.
Holly [01:30:11] What, what, what?
Guest 8 [01:30:14] Does anybody have any insight? I mean, I just, I feel so alone. I mean, searching guns, like, so excited. I have a friend, you know, because I seriously have lost all of my friends.
Guest 7 [01:30:25] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:30:26] First of all, you need to, you need to look into waka. Have you heard of waka? Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. And that's. And that is what Mormon spectrum is about. And that's what these thrive communities are trying to be about. We need more local communities, more face to face communities. What you just described is what I call the cricket effect. You know, we write as, as, as transitioning or post Mormons. We write these exit letters. Sometimes there's longer than the CES letter where we're gonna, where we're basically, here's the 500 reasons I'm leaving Mormonism and why the church is a cult and Fanny Alger and peep stones and LGBT people and feminism and blah, blah, blah, you know, ad nauseam. And we put all this effort into it. We think they really care and they really love us and they really want to know, should I email my ward? Should I email my leadership? Should I email my siblings? You know, and for all the effort that goes into these huge exit letters, overwhelmingly the most common response is no response. And in my experience, the overwhelming experience with these exit letters is that they're not read. And the reason why they're not read, there's a simple reason and then a more complex reason. The simple reason is, well, they get A bad feeling as soon as they start reading it. And they're taught that, you know, if you get a bad feeling, well, that's the Holly Ghost telling you. It's not that that bad feeling is like, oh, my gosh, this is terrible and hard and uncomfortable, and there are problems here. And so I feel unsettled. Instead, we're conditioned to say, oh, I feel uncomfortable. That's Satan. So I have to stop. And they stop. Right? But there's a deeper reason. There's a reason I pulled up this slide. It's, as we know what religion emerges out of an attempt to answer these fundamental questions. And it wasn't an accident that I picked someone balled up in a fetal position in a corner representing what it feels like to not have answers to all these questions. And the reason why the cricket effect is so strong, in my opinion, is because people understand somewhere, subconsciously, that they're relying on the church to fill all these holes. And it's not simply just a matter of, like, I really want to understand you better and I want to know you. Right? It's if I talk to them. And this may be a subconscious process, but I think what's going on is they're basically saying if I talk to them, the virus might spread to me, and then I am going to end up with my entire worldview unraveling. It could threaten my marriage.
Guest 5 [01:33:17] It could.
John Dehlin [01:33:17] It could cause me to get fired, it could make my kids not want to be around me anymore. I could lose my community, and I could lose my comfort in an afterlife and everything that my entire life is based upon. And guess what? They're right. They could lose all that, as you all know. And so it's not. It's kind of understandable why the walls go up really fast, right? Plus the fact that we've all been conditioned to ignore information, to control our thoughts in only ways that are acceptable, to avoid any person that ever could be a threat to that, etc. Etc. So it's a. You probably knew all this already. But that's why the cricket's response is so pervasive within Mormonism. Wouldn't it be amazing if all of our friends and family responded like, whoa, really? You're so smart and wise that if you're having questions, I want to know all about it, because at a minimum, I love you and you're important to me, and so I want to know everything about what you're experiencing because I care about you. But if you're smart enough and strong enough and honest enough, in the rest of your life. And you're having questions here that I want to know what you've discovered because maybe I'll learn something too. You know what I mean? Wouldn't that be amazing? And then rainbows would come down and butterflies. Unicorns with jelly beans would fly from the sky and. Right. I mean, but that's just not the reality that we live in. Okay, a few comments.
Guest 6 [01:35:01] I just want to also say when. So my experience, when my brother left the church, he was the first one out of my family. And then my other brother a week later. And it was during the 2015 policy, he sent a detailed letter email to the family stating all the reasons why the church. Just what you said, like huge letter to me and my several of my sisters. Sisters. We took that literally as a personal rejection of us, of our identity, of who we were. Like, we are not good enough for you. Like we're stupid for believing this. And the crazy thing is, is I was even a doubter at that time. I had a lot of doubts in my mind and I. There were a lot of things I didn't believe in. But for some reason I still was enough in that I. To have him in my life was painful to me because I felt like he was rejecting me as a human, as a person, as. Because it was so wrapped up in my identity. And so that's what I try to remember when people act like that. And I try, you know, to help them understand that that's not what I'm doing. And you know, because if you can feel like what it would. What you feel like to feel rejected, I don't know, that's kind of what we felt.
Holly [01:36:32] So.
Guest 6 [01:36:32] And it wasn't him personally, now that I, you know, I'm aware. I am now I understand it wasn't a personal rejection. And I feel sad for the way that I did. I was crickets. I was like, I'm. I just can't talk to him right now and I can't talk to my other brother right now. And little did I know how much pain they were in. And so that's sad to me. But anyway, I just want to suggest that also is. Is a piece to it.
Margi Dehlin [01:37:03] And think about anything that you feel really passionate about and think about a person that you really care about. Sending you a list of 50 things why you shouldn't be passionate about that thing that you really hold dear right now.
John Dehlin [01:37:18] Gun control, the environment, abortion, politics, how
Margi Dehlin [01:37:22] well that would be over for you.
Guest 10 [01:37:25] Right?
Margi Dehlin [01:37:25] I mean, it is. I mean, a lot of this is just human nature. It just really is. Yeah.
Summary and Closing Reflections
John Dehlin [01:37:32] So we are so thrilled at what we've been able to do together for this session and and you know I'll just conclude by kind of summarizing these points. This is kind of it all in one slide. If you want to take a picture of this or we'll send we'll share these slides afterwards. But just to summarize for us what we're offering to you as kind of a formula for emotional intimacy is to get healthy yourself to make sure you select healthy people that you're going to try and engage with to become clear on your values to build on common values in these relationships to offer and expect unconditional love to be vulnerable and to nurture to make it safe for the other person to want to be vulnerable with you. Listen, understand and empathize. Spend quality time together. Fight for the other perspective not for your own. Differentiate and enforce lovingly healthy boundaries. And that is our presentation so thank you.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
Emotional Intimacy Pt. 2
Emotional Intimacy Pt. 1
Emotional Intimacy Pt. 2
One Response
These are fantastic – Biggest problem I am having with them…. I’m listening via podcast whiling doing projects or work – I want to shift and re-listen with a pad of paper and pencil.
#1303 – at about one hour eight minutes John talks about how we tend to defend our position. Imagine the change and growth we could reach if we could defend the right for the other’s, spouse or person, to have that different perspective and belief. Imagine the lesson that would be to a child as you step in to teach understanding and empathy of respect for other people and their beliefs. Natasha builds on that with the idea that this is the healthy out look to have in a situation of divorce. The parents are still the parents of the child and the children don’t need or deserve having parents bash or bad talk the other in front of or to the kids. Perhaps you still believe deeply in religion [mormonism] but your spouse / relative / friend no longer does – can you support and defend their faith adjustment to someone that might be attacking it.
thank you John and Natasha