Introduction and Guest Welcome

John Dehlin [00:00:47] What happens when a convert to the Mormon Church becomes a therapist? Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is May 28, 2026, and today we have in studio Brad Reedy. Hey, Brad.

Brad Reedy [00:01:03] Hey, nice to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] Brad's known all over the world as somebody who helps parents and regular people with their mental health. He's the author of several books. One book's called the Audacity to Be youe Learning to Love youe Horrible Rotten Self. He has another book for parents called the Journey of the Heroic Parent, which is giving in its title, Joseph Campbell Vibes. The subtitle is yous Child's Struggle and the Road Home. And then finally he's the author of a new book called Stay in the room with Michael McClain, Mormon songwriter Michael McClain and his son Jeff. The reason why I'm interested in Brad's story is because, you know, we don't always have converts on Mormon Stories podcast. But Brad's story of addiction as a teen converting to the church, serving a mission, and then going to BYU and eventually getting a PhD in marriage and family therapy. Becoming a therapist and then how gaining that expertise and wisdom affects his faith and his Mormonism is super interesting to me. Plus from reading his outline and application, he's into so many thinkers and influencers, authors, philosophers that I love. Joseph Campbell, Thich Nhat Hanh, Carl Jung, Rumi, the poet philosopher. So like his come from in terms of philosophy and mental health and just worldviews, very much resonates with me. And it also resonates with my co host for today, a face familiar to many of you, zelfontheshelf's own Samantha Shelley. Hey, Samantha.

Samantha Shelley [00:02:43] Hello.

John Dehlin [00:02:44] Thanks for joining.

Samantha Shelley [00:02:45] Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] You made me aware of Brad, and I think you're excited about this story as well.

Samantha Shelley [00:02:51] Yes, I am.

John Dehlin [00:02:52] Tell us really quickly who you are and what you do and how people can find you.

Samantha Shelley [00:02:55] Yes. I'm half of Zelph on the Shelf on YouTube and other platforms, and I'm also a faith and relationship transitions coach@samanthshellecoaching.com

John Dehlin [00:03:04] all right, well, cool. Well, Brad Reedy, welcome to Mormon Stories podcast.

Brad Reedy [00:03:10] I'm really honored to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:03:12] Or should I say Dr. Reedy?

Brad Reedy [00:03:13] You can call me Brad.

John Dehlin [00:03:15] Okay. And Brad, is there anything you want to correct or add to the intro or any sort of disclaimer or context you want to provide before we jump into your Mormon story?

Brad Reedy [00:03:30] No, I don't think so. I think the connection I've felt with you, as I've had so many clients work with you, is that similar kind of philosophy background. So I've always felt kind of a kindred spirit with you. So it really is an honor to be sitting across from you right now. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:03:45] Our pleasure. And Samantha, please jump in at any time, as always.

Samantha Shelley [00:03:49] Yeah.

Brad's Non-Mormon Upbringing and Family Background

John Dehlin [00:03:50] So, Brad, normally we always start by saying, where does your Mormon story begin? And we usually start with multi generational pioneer Mormon parents that meet at BYU and get married to the temple and then they have a baby and that's our guest. But that's not your Mormon story. So where does your non Mormon story begin? And then we'll go to your Mormon story.

Brad Reedy [00:04:13] You know, there's a part of what you just said that is my Mormon story, which is I had two grandparents that grew. Grew up in northern Utah and Idaho.

John Dehlin [00:04:21] Really?

Brad Reedy [00:04:21] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:04:22] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:04:22] Who were brought up Mormon, but both were the black sheep of their family. So long before I came along, they had left the church. They did baptize their children, including my mother. So that's that history. I did not even know growing up because it was so distant from us. In fact, the. The gentleman who ended up excommunicating, pushing to excommunicate my mother later on, I found out many years later, was the one who volunteered to pay for my mission. So I wasn't aware of these connections, but I had distant relatives that were of the LDS face that had long died before I came along.

John Dehlin [00:04:55] Okay, so I've re encoded this idea of black sheeps because as a Mormon growing up, someone who leaves the church is just a bad human. And they probably wanted to drink or do drugs or smoke or have sex out of marriage or something. Now, if I hear about somebody who left the church 10 or 20 or 50 years ago, I think maybe they just figured some stuff out before other people did or just objected to maybe some harmful things. So do you know why your grandparents left the church or stopped believing? You know, because it could have been for really cool reasons.

Brad Reedy [00:05:31] Yeah. Gosh, I wish I had asked that question. I wish I knew to ask that question because I would be very curious. My best guess, from what I hear, the stories that I hear, is it just didn't fit for them. It wasn't a good fit. And so even as you talk about people leaving for various reasons, as a psychotherapist, what I realize is that sometimes those reasons are in play because the person can't leave through the front door like you're describing. So I think for them, it just wasn't a cultural and spiritual fit for them. But they had those roots, and so they just kind of followed the basic ordinances until it didn't work for them. But I don't know the answer to that.

John Dehlin [00:06:08] I guarantee there's a cool story.

Brad Reedy [00:06:09] Yeah, I bet there is. I want to look it up after this, actually.

John Dehlin [00:06:12] Well, just because it's such a high demand religion to leave, nobody just casually leaves. Am I wrong, Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [00:06:19] It's always smoking.

Brad Reedy [00:06:21] There is one claim to FEMA that I have that I was told after I joined the church that my grandmother went on one date with Ezra Taft

John Dehlin [00:06:28] Benson, who is my cousin.

Brad Reedy [00:06:29] Is that right?

John Dehlin [00:06:30] Yeah. Yeah. So my mom's from the Franklin Preston, Idaho area. Oh, wow.

Guest [00:06:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:36] So that's where.

Brad Reedy [00:06:37] Yeah, that's where they grew up. That's where they were, right? Yeah. Crazy.

John Dehlin [00:06:41] Well, he must have been a fun date. I'm sure he was.

Brad Reedy [00:06:46] It was just the one date.

John Dehlin [00:06:47] Barrel of glass.

Brad Reedy [00:06:48] Somebody didn't decide to do it again.

John Dehlin [00:06:52] That's quite a distinction. Okay, so your grandparents, you said they baptized their kids but then left the church. So your mom was a member of record but wasn't raised Mormon, Is that right?

Brad Reedy [00:07:04] She tells me she'd maybe been there a couple of times as a youth. And one of the associations she had was she tells us that the gentleman sitting next to her in church on one of her visits smelled like alcohol. So she had really negative experiences with it. And like I said, she left long before I came along. So that wasn't that solid connection to it, that. To my history in that way.

John Dehlin [00:07:29] So where and how did your parents meet?

Brad Reedy [00:07:31] My parents met in San Diego. My dad was in the Navy.

John Dehlin [00:07:34] Oh, so he's never Mormon.

Brad Reedy [00:07:35] No, my dad was never Mormon. My dad would say, when I would ask him about his faith, he would say, I don't believe in God. I consider myself an atheist. But if I was on my deathbed or drowning, I would probably call out for him. That's what my dad would tell me about his religion.

John Dehlin [00:07:48] And that's also kind of wild because in the 70s and 80s, I don't think there were a lot of atheists around, you know, so. Yeah, that's a story. Has your dad ever told you how he became an atheist in his twenties?

Brad Reedy [00:08:01] No, I. I think. No. The story that I understand is that he grew up with an alcoholic father and a very liberal, secular family. So I think it was just encouraged, that kind of mindset, that kind of way of being. So he was a very intellectual, philosophical man. Growing up, the little contact that I had with him. But I always admired him and loved him as a human being. As a father, he was kind of so. So. But as a human being, he was a really great guy. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:28] So did your parents split early or.

Brad Reedy [00:08:31] When I was eight, they divorced.

John Dehlin [00:08:32] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:08:33] We moved from Torrance, California, to Irvine, California. Later on, I learned that Donny Osmond was in that location, in that area. I met him later on.

John Dehlin [00:08:43] What was he doing in Irvine?

Brad Reedy [00:08:44] He was living. That's where he lived. What, in the late 1980s? Yeah. He was in the Irvine. I think we switched wars. But he was in the Irvine Third Ward when I joined. He was sitting literally a couple of seats away from me in the back row with his purple socks. And I did not. Didn't even know that that was going to be a thing. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:02] Is that so? In the 80s, Donny Osmond was living in. Is that Orange County?

Brad Reedy [00:09:07] Orange county, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:08] Why was Donny Osmond in Orange county in the 80s? Tell us, Samantha.

Samantha Shelley [00:09:13] It seems like a reasonable place for a singer to live.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] Yeah. But I mean, his career had kind of like. His career wasn't doing great in the 80s.

Brad Reedy [00:09:23] No, no. It had peaked earlier, that's for sure. And he was kind of in a lull.

John Dehlin [00:09:26] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:09:27] I think. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:28] Yeah. That's a story. Why did Donny Osmond go to Orange County? But we won't know. Okay, so you're growing up in Orange county, not as a Mormon.

Brad Reedy [00:09:38] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:09:39] Did your mom remarry? Did you just.

Brad Reedy [00:09:41] She remarried during middle school at one point, for a few years. But most of my life, I would describe as three boys. I was the middle of three boys, and my mom was a single mother for most of that time and she was working minimum wage to try to support us. So it was a. And this, this will lead into what the church was for me. I didn't have a family. I didn't have a sense of belonging. I was pretty much autonomous in grade school, really, because my mother was just overwhelming, overwhelmed with trying to gather resources to support us. So I didn't have anything to tether myself to. I was, I was a free range latchkey child of the 1980s, believe it or not.

John Dehlin [00:10:20] I was too. And I was raised Mormon, but that's another story. My parents did divorce as well, so. Okay, so was it lower middle class?

Brad Reedy [00:10:28] Lower middle class, for sure. My grandparents, those two that I mentioned earlier, they bought us a house. So they made sure I had a house in a nice neighborhood.

John Dehlin [00:10:36] They saved your mom?

Brad Reedy [00:10:37] They saved my life. Yeah, they saved our lives.

John Dehlin [00:10:40] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:10:41] But they didn't do too much. Right. She still had to support us in the, in the daily life. But, but eventually, if there was ever something that was a crisis or we weren't safe, my parents would, would, would jump in. But we were a relatively poor family in a really relatively affluent neighborhood. So that brought its own challenges growing up also. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:11:03] In an affluent area.

Samantha Shelley [00:11:04] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:11:04] Irvine was, Irvine was a nice area and we had a nice, A decent house in a nice area. So everybody around me, you know, they, they bought their house. They had two parents, most of them. So I felt from the beginning like an outsider.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] But you were in decent schools then?

Brad Reedy [00:11:19] I was in. Okay, schools, yeah. Yeah, I had good schools.

Teen Years, Substance Use, and Spiritual Searching

John Dehlin [00:11:22] Okay, so tell us about, I guess, your teen years. No religious upbringing at all?

Brad Reedy [00:11:27] No religious upbringing whatsoever.

John Dehlin [00:11:28] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:11:29] No. There was a stint where my mom joined a born again church. I was saved then. I had, I think. John, what was that like? What was that like?

John Dehlin [00:11:38] I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Brad Reedy [00:11:40] It was wonderful. For a little while. It was wonderful. But I always, I think I had this yearning for the divine experience. I wanted. I wanted to know what life was. Even as I started to progress through my drug years and through my teen years, which could also be called drug years, I think that that was in part a search for this transcendent experience that I was searching for. LSD was my drug of ch. Marijuana, of course. So I think I was searching for something to be connected to, something greater than myself to be connected to for sure.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] How does a kid in the 80s get into LSD? Like, I understand weed, but LSD?

Brad Reedy [00:12:16] I was resourceful. I was good at problem solving. I actually started using marijuana in the third Grade What? It sounds crazy.

John Dehlin [00:12:25] How do you light a bowl as a third grader?

Brad Reedy [00:12:28] Usually with a toilet paper. An empty toilet paper roll is how we did it. Cutting it up and put a little foil in it. But my friend, she had a parent who had marijuana, and we would just go over to her house because we were free range, like I said, and we would go into her mother's marijuana drawer and we would smoke.

Guest [00:12:49] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [00:12:50] What is that?

Brad Reedy [00:12:50] Very young. It's insane when I think about how young I was now.

Samantha Shelley [00:12:54] What would you feel as a third grader who was high?

Brad Reedy [00:12:57] I don't know that I remember the experience of being high. I really don't. What I remember was just feeling that edge of rebellion that I doing something that I wasn't supposed to do. And for me, again, I think that was a search for myself in a way, because I had an instinct to resist authority. I had an instinct to resist what I was told to do. So I think it was, for me, more about the ritual of doing what I wasn't told, doing something that adults were doing. In a lot of ways, I was trying to escape the pain of my childhood, I think. So I was searching for. I don't. I didn't know what I was searching for. Now I have some sense of it. But back then I was just searching. And when you search without knowing, you look in a lot of the wrong places.

John Dehlin [00:13:40] Wow. Powerful. Okay, so that's definitely crazy. I'm thinking what I was doing in third grade, right? I was like, playing soccer and skateboarding and going to church.

Brad Reedy [00:13:53] Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [00:13:55] Okay. So, yeah. How does your childhood progress into your adolescence?

Brad Reedy [00:13:59] So obviously it was pretty liberal in terms of what I had access to, so that would wax and wane. I. I ended up getting kicked out of my fifth grade class because I called the teacher some names in anger and frustration. So they put me in a. In an all 6th grade class with Mr. Dan McKechney, who eventually won the teacher of the year in California, I believe, or an educator of the year, won some awards, and he brought me into his sixth grade class and fifth grade class. And he became this father figure that I didn't have. And for several years, he was like my surrogate father. I would spend time with his family. He would take me on trips. So there was this. This period of time where everything was different. I was getting great grades. I was doing very well. I wasn't using drugs during sixth grade, which I think typical for most sixth graders after some years of use and experimentation. So I. So there was that middle period with Mr. McKechnie. But then as I went to.

John Dehlin [00:14:58] Can I just say, teachers are so instrumental for me, too. There were key teachers in my life that helped turn my life around. So I. I really relate to that. Right, you too. Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:15:08] I first wanted to be a teacher because of him. That was my first dream as a child of imagining myself as an adult for sure. And I'm still in contact with him.

John Dehlin [00:15:16] Oh, wow.

Brad Reedy [00:15:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:18] Just shout out to Mr. McKechnie. McKechnie. Yeah, yeah. Send him this interview. Yeah, I will.

Guest [00:15:23] I will.

Brad Reedy [00:15:25] So, okay, then. Middle school happens and I'm untethered again. I've left Mr. McKechnie in my elementary school. And so then is when the experimentation began to be more serious. You know, alcohol, marijuana was more regular then. I do remember what it was like to be high during middle school and got kicked out of school for things. Was. Was having a lot of trouble during middle school.

Guest [00:15:47] Were you.

John Dehlin [00:15:48] Did you kind of present as a stoner by that point? Because that was a thing back then.

Brad Reedy [00:15:52] Yeah, not quite yet. I was more like surfer and surfer. Stoner in Southern California.

John Dehlin [00:15:58] No, I get it.

Brad Reedy [00:15:59] You know, the Jeff Spicoli kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:16:00] Oh, yeah. Fast Times. Original.

Brad Reedy [00:16:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:16:03] So that's an 80s reference.

Samantha Shelley [00:16:04] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:16:05] So early Sean Penn. But.

Brad Reedy [00:16:08] But I think what you're alluding to is I'm looking for group membership. Right. So to be a stoner or a surfer.

John Dehlin [00:16:14] Yeah, yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:16:15] Those were my people then. I knew when I walked into school who my people were without that sense of overwhelming anxiety of uncertainty about where do I belong? So you're right. It was an identity also that I was looking for at that time.

Guest [00:16:31] I didn't like what you said.

Brad Reedy [00:16:33] Odin pauses about the future.

John Dehlin [00:17:19] Wow. Okay. So, yeah. How does it progress?

Brad Reedy [00:17:23] So high school comes along. I'm going to give it a good try at this Point I'm going to recommit to my high school years.

John Dehlin [00:17:29] Did you surf?

Brad Reedy [00:17:30] I did surf, yeah. Learned how to surf as a kid.

John Dehlin [00:17:33] Did you wear ops?

Brad Reedy [00:17:34] Oh, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:35] I wore advance.

Brad Reedy [00:17:36] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:17:37] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:17:37] Flip flops. Usually it was flip flops and a board short. And a surf T shirt is what I wore most every day.

John Dehlin [00:17:44] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:17:44] I didn't own a winter jacket until we would go on a winter trip somewhere and I would buy it. And by the time I needed it again, it didn't fit. So it was Southern California.

John Dehlin [00:17:54] You Californians in the 80s were influencing what we Texans in the 80s were wearing.

Brad Reedy [00:17:59] Is that right?

John Dehlin [00:18:00] We started wearing, you know, vans and parachute pants and op, you know, shorts.

Brad Reedy [00:18:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:07] Because of you guys.

Brad Reedy [00:18:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] You were setting the trends for the rest of us.

Brad Reedy [00:18:12] We didn't know it, but we're happy to. We were happy to, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:15] Okay, so high school, you're giving it a go?

Brad Reedy [00:18:18] I'm giving it a go. I'm trying. I had the capacity to do really well in high school, but, you know, I learned through my therapy that I participated in as a client that I was overwhelmed with the pressure of being smart and being successful. So early on I started to feel that pressure that if I didn't get straight A's, I was nothing. So I made it through 9th grade year. It was okay. 10th grade gear comes along and I decide that school's not for me. And I spend a lot of time skipping school, smoking pot every day, surfing, using more and more lsd, more and more psychedelics. So by the middle of my 10th grade year, I dropped out of high school.

John Dehlin [00:19:03] Wow.

Brad Reedy [00:19:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:04] Okay. And that's pretty, that's pretty significant to just drop out.

Brad Reedy [00:19:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:10] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:19:10] Things were not going well at that time. I had been sent to treatment early on in that ninth grade or in that 10th grade year, and against my will for drug treatment. But I was a hassle there too. I ended up getting kicked out of that after I organized all of the other clients to do a sit in against the staff. So I was really disruptive. Eventually they kicked me out of that. But like I said, by the middle of sixth grade year, the drug use had progressed to a point where it just didn't fit with my high school career at that point.

John Dehlin [00:19:46] I'm always mindful of all these people leaving Mormonism and organized religion, and sometimes they don't necessarily feel like they need a structure to replace it with. And then they have kids or they're raising kids and there's no structure and it doesn't always repeat this pattern that your mom experienced. But it can. And it leaves kids. It can leave children or teens without a structure that then can make them maybe a little more vulnerable.

Brad Reedy [00:20:22] Right.

John Dehlin [00:20:23] Which ironically then makes them a little bit more interested in religion.

Brad Reedy [00:20:27] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:20:29] Tell us if that's.

Brad Reedy [00:20:30] That was the draw really, I mean, after an overdose.

John Dehlin [00:20:34] Oh, wait. Okay. So, yeah. Tell us about hitting rock bottom.

Brad Reedy [00:20:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:38] How you got there.

Brad Reedy [00:20:40] Late November 1987. 1986. Excuse me, late December, I overdosed on amphetamines and LSD and went to my mother, told her I was frightened, went to the hospital. They gave me Thorazine. I slept it off. This is how old I was. 16. At this point. 17. At this point. 17.

John Dehlin [00:20:59] Oh, man. Were you working or.

Brad Reedy [00:21:02] I was working, actually, I was. I was working at Wiener Sitzel, assistant manager. And I was actually making pretty good money. So I had the capacity to function at a. At a professional level and I was doing well.

John Dehlin [00:21:12] You're making chili cheese dogs.

Brad Reedy [00:21:14] I was making chili cheese dogs, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:16] But you were using.

Brad Reedy [00:21:17] I was using.

John Dehlin [00:21:18] And you overdosed it. 16, 17.

Brad Reedy [00:21:21] So I. I used one more time after the overdose just to make sure. Just to see if it was. If it was as bad as I thought. And that day, December 17th, I just came to the realization that I wasn't going to live long. This was on LSD during the day, mid morning. I wasn't going to live long at this pace. And I also had the experience that the more you learned about life, the more you learned, period, kind of the more power you had, I think. I think it's maybe freedom that I felt empowerment that I felt. So I figured that I wanted to live as long as I could, to learn as much as I could. And that's all I knew on that day, December 17th. And so that day, in the middle of an LSD trip, I decided that I was not going to use hard drugs anymore. That was it. And that then led to a series of choices around where alcohol and marijuana, cigarettes, caffeine, even meat. At the time, I kind of took this journey where I just wanted to be healthy. I just wanted to live as long as I could.

John Dehlin [00:22:23] Okay, I want to just pause here because I think this is significant. I think Samantha will agree. But so growing up it's like, okay, cigarettes are bad and alcohol is kind of bad, but what's really bad is like lsd, you know what I mean? Or acid or mushrooms. Like, well, mushrooms and LSD are super bad. But now in 2026, we know that like every ex Mormon in their pet is using psilocybin or oil, SD or ayahuasca or whatever? Because many people are finding that psychedelics are helping them achie achieve more insight or some sort of mental health transformation.

Brad Reedy [00:23:04] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] So are you using LSD at the time in the 80s, as a teenager, desiring psychedelic or psychological introspection, or is it just to get high? Because isn't it like, I remember hearing about Steve Jobs, like, he ends up by the end of his life saying, if there's one thing I wish on anybody, and here's one of the most successful people in the history of modern America saying if he had one wish for anyone, including his own child, it would be that they try LSD at least once in their life.

Brad Reedy [00:23:35] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [00:23:36] Were you using LSD thinking you were looking for psychological enlightenment, or was it just to get high, but you were just lucky that it also helped you achieve insight at a time where you were bordering on dying because of addiction?

Brad Reedy [00:23:51] Yeah, I was pretty consciously looking for the psychedelic experience, in fact.

John Dehlin [00:23:57] You were?

Brad Reedy [00:23:57] Yes. In fact, one day I had been kicked out of my house at this point, and I was living with my father. This was one of the few contacts I had with my father growing up that was significant. So I was working for him, and one day his truck broke down in Palos Verdes, California, and he bribed me to wait for the tow truck by giving me a half of a joint. He said, I'll let you stay. If you stay here, I'll give you this. So I smoke this joint. I'm in Palos Verdes, California, parked on a really nice road. I finished smoking it, and a cop pulls up and he knows immediately from the smell what I've been doing. After he can't find the marijuana because I was a good user of weed and I smoked it all. I began to have a discussion with him about the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of lsd. So I was trying to recruit this police officer. I was talking about Jim Morrison. I was talking about various poets that I'd been introduced to. And the thing that was interesting, John, is I was seeking the psychedelic experience. My friends weren't. They wanted to party. So I was kind of a downer to them because I wanted to talk about life and the purpose of life and what I was seeing and experiencing. So I think it was kind of a transition for me because, like I said, it was on LSD that I decided that drugs were not right for me. So it did. Bill W. I don't know if you know, but after he started aa, he Used lsd.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] I heard that. I've heard that.

Brad Reedy [00:25:22] Because he thought it was the cure.

John Dehlin [00:25:23] He's one of the founders of aa, right?

Brad Reedy [00:25:25] He is one of the co founders, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:26] Yeah. So, yeah, it's like drugs helped get me off drugs.

Samantha Shelley [00:25:30] Right.

Brad Reedy [00:25:30] People still do that today. People still do that today.

John Dehlin [00:25:32] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:25:33] Yeah. It gives you this expansive reframe of life where you see things differently. And for a lot of people and for myself, that can shift everything. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:43] And that happened at 17.

Brad Reedy [00:25:45] 17, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:46] Wow. Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:25:48] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:25:48] So drugs got you off drugs?

Brad Reedy [00:25:51] Drugs. I then became curious about religion. Of course, I. My psychedelic experiences had a religious content to them. The overdose that I'm talking about, I had several images. I saw and spoke to demons. It was terrifying. I was overwhelmed. I almost died that night. And I remember asking somebody when I was in the emergency room later that evening, I said, I keep seeing the devil. Why can't I see God? I mean, that's where my head was at. And somebody said to me, maybe you're not living a life worthy to see God. That was what somebody said to me in the hospital that night. So that started to leave an impact on me. Maybe I'm not living. Maybe if I become worthy, God will make himself known to me. So that was. I was really in the psychedelic experience, even at my lowest point, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:26:37] So you get put on the worthiness train.

Brad Reedy [00:26:39] Yeah, I did. I did. Right. I wanted to be beyond reproach.

John Dehlin [00:26:43] I'm not sure that's the path I want you to. Your. Your past self to go on. I mean, that was your journey.

Brad Reedy [00:26:51] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:51] This is the hero's journey.

Brad Reedy [00:26:52] That's right. That's right.

John Dehlin [00:26:54] Campbell's already in play here.

Brad Reedy [00:26:56] That. We go looking in places for something, and what we find is ourself in the long run. But sometimes that art takes a long time. Yeah.

Conversion to the Mormon Church

John Dehlin [00:27:04] Okay. So you start seeking the spiritual. So.

Brad Reedy [00:27:08] And I got that confused with the religious early on. I didn't know. So I was looking for religions. I talked to an extended family member who was lds, and I said, what about your faith? And they didn't want to talk to me about it because they'd seen my. My path and they thought I wasn't serious. So one day I'm working in Westminster, California, at Wienerschnitzel. Two missionaries come up, and they're trying to order a two chili dog, small fry, medium soda special for a buck 99. And they start looking for a substitute because we only have drinks that have caffeine in them, soda that have caffeine in Them. And I said, I don't drink caffeine either. And their eyes got big. And then I said, as a matter of fact, who could I talk to? I did not even know what their job was. I said, who could I talk to that could teach me about your church? Then they really got wild. So I started with them. I started learning. I didn't want to go to my house, first of all, I was working outside of my city, you know, in another store. So I. You know, we weren't close to my house, so I went to where they live, which was the basement of a member's house. And because my mother's experience, because I didn't want to draw that, because she would have seen my joining the Mormon Church as, I think, a very frightening and uncomfortable thing for her. So there was that barrier there where, again, as I began my transition into the church, I had this experience where I had to leave behind what pieces of my people existed in my world, including my mother had to be willing, as Robert Bly says, I had to be willing to steal the key from under her pillow to let myself free. So I had to leave. I had to go find it myself. Eventually, I told her, of course, and joined. I ended up baptizing her.

John Dehlin [00:28:49] Okay, wait, so you had the missionary traditions and you got baptized at age 17?

Brad Reedy [00:28:56] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:28:56] And did you read the Book of Mormon? Did you pray about Joseph Smith? Like, was it a theological, emotional, social

Brad Reedy [00:29:03] conversion, the similarity of the modern church to the ancient church? I loved the idea of 12 apostles and a prophet. That really just made logical sense to me. And then I remember the day, you know, I read the portions of the Book of Mormon, and I remember they invited me to pray about it. And I remember the day. And this is. This is significant to me. I kneeled to my bed. You know, I put my. I kneeled on the ground and leaned against my bed. My bedroom was messy. And at this point, I was three or four lessons in, and I was. I wanted to know the truth, but I didn't have a lot of confidence because I had sought God in my experiences. I'd never had any direct experience that I could identify. So I said to myself, the answer to this prayer will be this. When I get up from my knees, whatever I want to do will be your answer. God is what I said, Whatever I want to do will be the answer to if this is true or not. So I got up and thought, do I want to join the church? And I thought, of course I do. I want to join the church. I want that cleansing goodness all over me.

John Dehlin [00:30:11] I've heard that before. Yeah, it's. Is it self programming? Like, what is that? Like, the answer to your prayer is whatever I want to do is what God wants. Is that what I. Is that what you heard?

Brad Reedy [00:30:24] I think it was just a version of thy will is my will is what it was. I just believed that he would change my heart because I couldn't hear a voice. I'd already had those experiences on LSD and those weren't that helpful all the time. And so to me, I found a way to find a faith in my body that I could trust. And since I didn't expect to hear, to see a vision or to hear a voice, I knew I wanted an answer and I needed an answer one way or the other. So I think it was a version of thy will is my will. But as I look at it now, it was the divine in all of us. Rumi says. Rumi says that I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.

John Dehlin [00:31:11] What does that mean?

Brad Reedy [00:31:12] That means that the divine is in all of us. That means it's similar to the Egyptian book of the Dead, which says the kingdom of heaven is within you, and whosoever shall know himself shall find it. I think it was actually what Christ was trying to teach. That's my best guess. My interpretation is he was asking us to find the divine in all of us. So, you know, to become whole. Not perfect, but to become whole. So for me, I found a way for that to make sense. And then I wanted to join the church after that moment. And that was my answer from God that the church was true.

John Dehlin [00:31:46] It's a cousin of a testimony is gained by bearing it. In other words, you kind of condition yourself into it because you want it to be true. Right?

Brad Reedy [00:31:57] I wanted something to be true that I could hold on to. That's the answer, John. I wanted something that I could feel connected to, something larger than myself. That gave my life a broader meaning for sure.

John Dehlin [00:32:09] And it's so wild that 30, 40 years later, humanity is still not totally able to figure out what it can provide to somebody like you in their teens who's trying to find something to

Brad Reedy [00:32:21] hold onto that is true.

John Dehlin [00:32:23] And that's why there's a resurgence of religion in 2026, is because humanity is still often seeking religion as the answer to the problems you were having 40 years ago.

Brad Reedy [00:32:36] Absolutely.

Guest [00:32:39] I didn't like what you said.

Brad Reedy [00:32:41] Odin pauses about the future.

John Dehlin [00:33:27] So you joined? You felt called to?

Brad Reedy [00:33:30] Yeah, I was popular. I was this 17, I think by. By the time that I joined, I may have been 18. It was right around that time. And so I was popular. I was a convert without a family who had a history of serious drug use and addiction and danger, which everybody, of course, as parents, was worried about. I mentioned to you that Donny Osmond happened to be in my ward at the time. I think we were the Irvine Third Ward at the time, but later we became the Irvine fifth Ward. So I saw him sitting in the back area because I was sitting alone. I didn't have a family and noticed him right away and knew him from his TV show that we used to watch. And shortly after that, among other things, I was a speaker. I got invited to speak a lot and Donnie and I went and spoke at multi stake conferences. He would tell he was the headliner. He was why they came. But then I would tell my story of addiction, overdose and conversion.

John Dehlin [00:34:22] So you went on tour with Donny Osmond? Not a large tour, but fireside tours. So were y' all friends, you and Donny Osmond?

Guest [00:34:30] Not really.

Brad Reedy [00:34:30] I was nervous to talk to him. He was in the young Men's presidency or young Men's program.

John Dehlin [00:34:34] But for the ward?

Brad Reedy [00:34:35] Yeah, for the ward. But I just. I was just happy to be around him and happy to be able to tell my story.

Samantha Shelley [00:34:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:43] Wow. Okay. Yeah. They say the most celebrated are the rehabilitated. That's from the Wicked or the musical Wicked. And it's so validating to people when somebody's lost and they join the church. So. But also you were rejoining your ancestral heritage.

Brad Reedy [00:35:00] It was something like that.

John Dehlin [00:35:01] Did you recognize at the time you were rejoining the faith of your ancestral heritage?

Brad Reedy [00:35:07] That was part of the belonging connection that I felt as I felt I was connecting to generations that had been before. So that felt really good to me. It felt my daughter, who is also who is a psychologist, has said that the church at that point became my transitional object. Right. It became the thing that I anchored myself to, that represented home for me.

John Dehlin [00:35:30] And it's hard sometimes people call others who lead the church anti Mormon, but, you know, this podcast I don't believe is anti Mormon because, like, I don't care what gets you healthy and happy, on a healthy path, and if it's the church, more power to you. That's how I feel. So I'm glad you found Mormonism.

Brad Reedy [00:35:52] I'm glad that it saved my life for a time. It also. I, of course, for me, joining the church meant going on a mission. I wanted to catch up to the other young people, wanted to know and understand. So I went on a mission. A year later, almost to the month, I think it was 13 months after I joined, I went on a mission, went to Illinois, Peoria under Hal Weisik,

John Dehlin [00:36:16] and remind us who that is.

Brad Reedy [00:36:17] Hal Weissik, at the time, was the general counsel for byu. So he was a wonderful. Another father figure. I was looking for these father figures, and he and I became very close.

John Dehlin [00:36:29] So did he become kind of a father figure as well?

Brad Reedy [00:36:32] He absolutely did. I served under him as the assistant for around a year.

John Dehlin [00:36:36] So you made assistant. You went from. I mean, you basically went from convert to assistant in a matter of a year or two.

Brad Reedy [00:36:44] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:36:45] And I mean, there's a bunch of multi generational Mormons that never make quote assistants.

Brad Reedy [00:36:49] So I loved teaching.

John Dehlin [00:36:51] That's fast. That's fast acceleration.

Brad Reedy [00:36:53] Yeah, I do everything fast and early. That's my thing. I just. I loved public speaking. I love teaching, I love studying. I broke all. I shattered all the records for memorizing scripture at one point, because I had accomplished all the things that our mission had for memorizing. I decided I would just memorize the entire Book of Mormon from the beginning. After about 10 chapters, it became too consuming and monotonous and crazy for me. So I stopped. But I just wanted to study. I just wanted to learn. And I figured that that was my best ticket to a bigger and better life, was to study and learn. And now I was in the church where I was doing that. And I loved my mission. I loved all of it.

John Dehlin [00:37:34] You're in Illinois, right? Yeah, Peoria, Illinois.

Brad Reedy [00:37:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:37] So that's. Nauvoo was part of that.

Brad Reedy [00:37:39] Nauvoo was part of that mission. Back then, it was. Peoria was the mission headquarters, but Nauvoo and Carthage were a part of our mission. That was wonderful for me to visit.

John Dehlin [00:37:47] You got to Visit Nauvoo and Karthi.

Brad Reedy [00:37:50] I got to slept, actually. We broke the rules, but we slept in the jail one night where Joseph was martyred. Whoa. My missionary companion. And I did. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] How?

Brad Reedy [00:37:59] I was the assistant to the present. We just had ways of getting around things.

John Dehlin [00:38:02] So was the Nauvoo Temple rebuilt by then?

Brad Reedy [00:38:05] No, no, no.

John Dehlin [00:38:06] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:38:06] I think I. No, it was not rebuilt a few years later. Two years later. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:09] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:38:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:11] Okay. And so did you, like, have a lot of success on your mission? Did you, you know, enjoy. Enjoy the proselyting? I mean, as a recent convert, you could probably bear a pretty powerful test.

Mission Experience and the Worthiness Cycle

Brad Reedy [00:38:23] Yeah, yeah. And I was looking for somebody like me, and I didn't find anybody like me that would come up to me and ask me about the church and join and go on a year later. But. But I did have success. I loved the families that I worked with. I love what it seemed to do for them. And I just. But mostly what it was. And see, I think this goes back to my story is I was afraid that I was not good. And so the Mormon Church, especially a mission, they told you what to do and if you did it, and I could do it, I could do the schedule, I could wake up when they told me and study what they told me and proselyte the number of hours that they told me to proselyte and get home on time. And so for me, it was this defense against the uncertainty and ambiguity of life that I was struggling with as a person, coming from where I came from. So the goodness and the rules of it for me were a structure that at that time in my life, I think, much like primary children experience, it offered me a sense of safety and a sense of understanding in a context that made sense to me that I could do. I could be good during those two years if I followed the rules.

John Dehlin [00:39:29] And I'm gonna ask a question about that. And, Samantha, I want you to push back if you don't agree. But when people leave the church, often it's this worthiness hamster wheel that they cite as a reason for leaving and as something that was toxic and unhealthy for them. Always chasing after worthiness. And then the aha moment after leaving Mormonism is I was always worthy. You know what I mean? Isn't it possible to also say that there's a positive aspect to this kind of unworthiness cycle because it puts you on a path of self improvement and of meaning and of connection and of structure? So while my current self wants to be upset, that you were put on the unworthiness hamster wheel. I mean, look at the results. Like, can't we also say that there's a, a light and a dark side to that quote, unworthiness hamster wheel.

Samantha Shelley [00:40:28] Yeah, well, I was going to say I really relate. I also joined the church at 17 and most of how you're describing your conversion feels very similar to mine. But John, to your point, I would say, yeah, the church can give you a sense of self worth and sort of momentum in your life to in some ways make healthier choices. But it's also like you're allowing a high control group to co opt your psyche. It's like the artificial version of the real thing, which is like, you know, authentic self worth and self connection. So it's like you're outsourcing something that needs to come from within to this group that wants to, you know, control your psyche.

John Dehlin [00:41:11] So I love this conversation and I love that pushback. Samantha. If you look at Father Richard Rohr and what he writes in Falling, he talks about first half of life and second half of life and his basic premise, premise is that you, no kid develops spontaneously their sense of self. What happens is they're put in a structure inevitably. Because when you're 8 or 10 or 12, you just need structure. You're gonna like, you end up smoking weed as a third grader. So you're given a structure to help you get to at least 26 where your brain is fully formed. And it's then after your brain is fully formed and you've achieved maybe your potential with the structure and the framework you inherited or were given, that gives you the luxury and the ability to then become born again and figure out who you really are. But if you don't have that initial structure, you may not even make it to 26 or 30 or 35 to be able to experience the board again. So that's, I'm not arguing with you, Samantha. But also, I think it's ironic, Samantha, that you had almost an identical experience. And I think you're pretty awesome. And it's Mormonism that helped you get from whatever you were struggling with as a teen to the awesome person that you are now.

Samantha Shelley [00:42:41] Yeah, like the psyche's gonna find what it needs at whatever stage of development it's at.

John Dehlin [00:42:45] But I still just think, but that can be Mormonism.

Samantha Shelley [00:42:49] Yeah. And it, you know, it, I guess, worked out well for us. But you know, just thinking about how most kids who are raised in Mormonism, the amount of unpacking they will have to do if they are able to go beyond it at 26 or whenever. Like, it can leave lifelong damage. So doesn't. Isn't necessarily conducive to that goal of. Of having, like, a whole sense of self and self worth. And, like, we know people that have been out for decades that still really struggle with the shame instilled in them.

John Dehlin [00:43:21] And I want to jump back to your story, but just my playful response to that is there's plenty of kids raised atheist or agnostic that have a lifelong of unpacking, or Catholic or evangelical or Muslim or with hippie parents that have a lifelong of unpacking. So there is a part of me that wants to say, life, you're going to have a history of unpacking with whatever framework you were raised in. Not to trivialize the difficulties of healing from an unhealthy Mormon upbringing.

Samantha Shelley [00:43:50] Sure, yeah. Not that it can't be the case with other groups. But I also think one of the risks with Mormonism is because it encourages people to take on really, like, lifelong commitments very young. There also is a much bigger risk than if you're raised here for your atheist, that by the time you sort of wake up, you're, you know, you have kids or you're in a marriage that you, you know, your life is already so locked in, it's stickier. Yeah, it is. And that can cause a lot more trauma to just everyone involved.

John Dehlin [00:44:20] Well, back to your story, but thank you for letting us philosophize with your story as the vehicle.

Brad Reedy [00:44:27] I really relate to that. The way that I think about it now. Developmentally, it was perfect for me. It was structure, it was rules, it was thou shalt and thou shalt not, and that helped me stabilize myself. So in a way, I was recreating a childhood that I didn't have. I was recreating an experience that I didn't have where there was a belonging, there was a structure, there was a hierarchy, there was rules and roles that I knew how to play. And so, especially on my mission, that was incredibly. That incredible. It created a lot of peace for me because I felt safe at that time.

John Dehlin [00:45:03] Yeah. So that's why I'm not anti Mormon, because it helps create you. And it helped create Samantha.

Brad Reedy [00:45:09] Me too.

John Dehlin [00:45:09] And it helped create me, you know, so. Okay. So anything else about your mission?

BYU, Marriage, and Riding the Mormon Train

Brad Reedy [00:45:15] No, not. You know, the only thing I can say is I did not deserve to go to byu. I had dropped out of high school, like I mentioned, and. But my mission president and I were close, and he knew of my capacity. He Knew it wasn't based on my inability to do hard work and to do well. So he made sure that I got into BYU basically without even applying. So they accepted me and on probation. And I had no idea. I was 21. I hadn't been in school since I was 17.

John Dehlin [00:45:44] That's wild, because BYU was competitive. I was there at that point.

Brad Reedy [00:45:48] It was.

John Dehlin [00:45:48] So it would have been hard to drop out of high school, Never really have a lot of those core study skills or even knowledge framework, and then to try and compete in the late 80s at BYU.

Brad Reedy [00:46:01] Yeah. How was that in math? It didn't go well. And the other subjects, I could kind of make up with some natural abilities that I had. I was frightened. My first semester, I thought I might not be capable. And I ended up finding out that I got straight A's in the top of my. Most of my classes. So.

John Dehlin [00:46:21] Whoa, what major?

Brad Reedy [00:46:22] It was really relieving.

John Dehlin [00:46:23] What major did you pick?

Brad Reedy [00:46:24] What's that?

John Dehlin [00:46:24] What major did you end up.

Brad Reedy [00:46:26] I started to be. I wanted to teach English. I was an English teaching major, which was a specific major. But after one semester of taking a child psychology child development course with Dr. Price, I realized that that's what I was meant to do for my entire life. So after my first semester, I switched majors. Knew I would become a therapist, and I knew I wanted to be a therapist for young people and families that were struggling, like the way that I had. And we had.

John Dehlin [00:46:53] Okay, so you. What major did that end up being?

Brad Reedy [00:46:58] Family Science was the name of it.

John Dehlin [00:46:59] Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:47:00] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:01] That's marriage and family therapy. Family studies, What?

Brad Reedy [00:47:05] Yeah, Family science had a few. I was in the family science kind of general, but it was the lead into marriage and family therapy as a graduate degree. And I knew that, and I knew, coming from Southern California, that the psychological issues of the children are mirror images of what's missing in the family. So I knew I wanted to work with systems and families from a young age because I knew for me, that was critical.

John Dehlin [00:47:32] How was dating at byu with your background?

Brad Reedy [00:47:34] Well, I didn't date at byu, not really. I was doing everything fast and early, so I got engaged within 30 days because that was the right thing to do.

John Dehlin [00:47:42] 30 days?

Brad Reedy [00:47:43] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:44] Whoa.

Brad Reedy [00:47:44] Yeah. Okay, so no dating. I got engaged right away because I thought the right thing to do is to get married. Then the next thing to do is have children. I didn't have any financial support from my family, so it was all loans, eventually scholarships, academic scholarships. But I just was just checking off the boxes and doing all the right things. So got engaged to my wife and got married within six months after getting home from my mission. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:12] Wow. So you were married that first year off your mission?

Brad Reedy [00:48:15] Yes. Yep. Six months later.

John Dehlin [00:48:17] Dang. Okay.

Brad Reedy [00:48:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:19] I mean, oh, my gosh. So I'm going to segue just a tiny bit, but recently there's a family from Southern California that reached out to me, and they have a child who they have two children. The oldest child is, you know, married and an adult. Then the second child just finished a university, but none of them are LDs. Raised secular, and the second of two children in high school fell in love with the Mormon boy. And long story short, she has graduated from university and wants to get baptized and join the church. Super secular, intelligent, thoughtful family, and the child wants to get baptized into the church. And, you know, obviously it's the falling in love with the Mormon boy as part of it, but also being embraced by the Mormon social group. And the parents and the older sibling honestly just called me, just hysterical. And their basic concern is that they're worried that the church has brainwashed their child and sort of, like, taken over their child as a robot.

Brad Reedy [00:49:40] Right.

John Dehlin [00:49:40] That the child has lost their autonomy, lost their personality, and is forsaking all the values that the child was raised with. Now, the child doesn't see it that way. The child is smart and educated and moral, but in their mind, they just have found this group that they love. So I want to introduce this idea. I mean, I don't want to be insulting, but Stephen Hassan calls it the cult personality, where the religion of the organization hands you the structure, but they also hand you a personality of how they want you to be. And it's not you, it's you conforming to the structure and the personality that they have decided is best for you, which I believe in reality is best for them. In other words, the person you were becoming was the best person to meet the needs of the church ultimately. But also it gave you a structure that was maybe for you, preferable to what your life was before.

Brad Reedy [00:50:46] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:50:46] So talk about how you're experiencing just jumping on the Mormon train and riding it when you're in there somewhere. But you're not really cultivating the you. You're trying to be the best Mormon you can be.

Brad Reedy [00:51:01] Yeah, Yeah. I didn't know that yet.

John Dehlin [00:51:05] Did I describe what was going on there?

Brad Reedy [00:51:06] Yeah, yeah. Very, very well. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:08] Because you're getting married in 30, you're getting engaged in 30 days.

Brad Reedy [00:51:11] I mean, it was wonderful. Looking back, I was happy as could be. And Felt content and peaceful. And I was passionate about the church. I loved studying, I loved reading about it. I had an incredibly strong testimony. So for me, it was all those positive things that you were describing. And I didn't experience a chasm between my authentic self and this personality that you were describing. Although I started to notice, you know, after my mission getting married, I started to notice in Sunday school and in elders quorum. I started to notice that the explanations that they were giving for life's behaviors for what people were doing didn't line up with my own experience, especially as I was beginning to study psychology. So. So things like guilt and shame, those for me started to mean something very different as I was studying psychology and studying therapy than the answers I was getting from the pulpit or in Sunday school in elders quorum. So there started to be a rift after my mission, and as I progressed through undergraduate and into graduate school, I started to feel that chasm began and started to widen at that point, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:52:21] So any other big moments of your faith development at BYU before you go to Loma Linda?

Brad Reedy [00:52:31] No. It was a fantastic four years. We had a child right at the end of. We'd had a couple of miscarriages, and then we had a child just before I graduated. I actually went to Southern Connecticut for graduate school to begin.

John Dehlin [00:52:46] Did your mom come to your temple wedding? Was she?

Brad Reedy [00:52:50] No, no, no.

John Dehlin [00:52:51] Did she come at all? Like.

Brad Reedy [00:52:53] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:52:53] You just got married without your mom?

Brad Reedy [00:52:55] She was there at the luncheon afterwards, but none of my family were there.

John Dehlin [00:52:59] Isn't that wild?

Brad Reedy [00:53:00] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:02] I mean, she helped raise you.

Brad Reedy [00:53:04] I know.

John Dehlin [00:53:04] And you just get married.

Brad Reedy [00:53:06] It was a strange experience.

John Dehlin [00:53:08] Mom, you come to luncheon.

Brad Reedy [00:53:09] Right, right, right, right. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:13] See, I knew really that Samantha.

Samantha Shelley [00:53:15] Yeah. I'm like fly across, across the world, come to this luncheon.

Brad Reedy [00:53:19] You know, there's this idea that I have that I identify with that there's an old Irish proverb that says, a long and happy life has many deaths. And so for me, the death of my pre Mormon life. I was used to being an outsider. I was used to being by myself. I was used to going it alone during undergraduate. I had no financial support because we just didn't have it. I ended up loaning my mother money during my undergraduate school. So already the parent child relationship was not what most people would identify.

John Dehlin [00:53:54] You're trying to, in a young marriage, just trying to make it through school and you're loaning your mom money.

Brad Reedy [00:54:01] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:02] That's wild.

Brad Reedy [00:54:02] It was, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:04] So like, she's almost. You've almost become a parent in a sense. If you're loaning your parent money and you're like getting a college education and starting to thrive, it's almost like the roles have reversed a little bit.

Brad Reedy [00:54:16] I think they had been reversed from the beginning. I think I was her pseudo husband and her parentified child from a very early age. She was my. I say this in this context, it makes sense, but I say she was my first therapy client. I listened to her as she talked about the way that her parents would treat her, which I got to see the way that they treated her when we'd visit. And she would talk to me on the way home and cry and express her pain and anger toward her parents. And so I learned, I must have been 10, 12 years old. I started to learn just to listen, just to understand and to offer small ideas that gave her comfort and that gave me a sense of belonging, like I mattered, like my mother loved me. And so I started to develop the identity of the counselor right the from the very beginning. And so like many people, it was my wounds that predisposed me to this profession. Right. I was searching for a healing and an integration and some kind of transcendence from that experience, which I did not know at the time. I thought I was going to be a therapist just to be a good guy and help people, but it was really searching for my own healing to my own wounds.

John Dehlin [00:55:24] Yeah. Because me too, 12 years old, I'm seeing my parents lives destroyed and then I'm counseling my parents and listening to them. On the one hand, that's not the job of a 12 year old to listen to and counsel their parent.

Brad Reedy [00:55:37] Right.

John Dehlin [00:55:38] On the other hand, it does, it can augment a sense of maturity because you're put in an adult role as a kid, you know, so it's complex.

Brad Reedy [00:55:49] One of my favorite little ideas is that all hero heroes and villains have the same backstory. You know, Batman, heroes and villains. Heroes and villains have the same backstory story. Batman was Batman because of a tragic event in his story. No death of his parents, no Batman. So now I understand that the wound and the gift impact in my philosophy as I study mythology. What I understand from the myths is that the wound and the gift are almost always right next to each other. So the thing that made you feel different, alienated, isolated as a child is often the thing that you bring back to the community later in your life as a gift to the community. Like in Frozen, right, Elsa gets kicked out because she has this magical power, this gift to freeze people and she gets in trouble because she's a child and has an underdeveloped ego and almost kills her sister. So they get mad at her, and she eventually isolates and goes to an ice castle and lives far away. But when they need someone to save the kingdom, she's brought back. And the very wound or issue or problem that she had as a child is now the gift in her mature self that she has developed where she saves the kingdom. And so for me, my wound, your wound. It makes sense, if I can make this comparison, that our wound and our gift are side by side, and there's a dark and a light to it, and we both know how it can go in both directions.

John Dehlin [00:57:16] And seeing Joseph Campbell very clearly in what you're talking about right now, I'm also thinking of Luke Skywalker and his parents are killed at a young age, but that also becomes part of what fuels him as a Jedi. Right?

Brad Reedy [00:57:28] Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. That's a fascinating story, too. One of my favorite myths that is based, as you know, on Joseph Campbell's teaching explicitly, because Lucas read Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces and wrote finished Star wars based on that philosophy. So that's a great hero's journey. What I love about that story, John, what I always like to ask is, at the very end, what we realize is that as Luke and Darth are coming together in the Return of the Jedi, both trying to convert each other, Darth has decided to turn to the dark side, which is the control based out of fear. And Luke is talking about love, and they have this confrontation. And when Darth Vader sees the Emperor hurting his son, in other words, when he sees the philosophy that he has subscribed to to prevent his pain, that's what the Emperor represents, because he didn't want to have another loss. When he sees the impact on his son, that is what saves him. So often I have found in Parenting, which is my first book, that when we realize that the child is here to save us and to teach us, everything changes. But most parents, especially in patriarchal, strict father families, orthodox families, most people think it's their job to shape the child. But in my experience, the child is the one who transforms us and saves us in the long run, that's the problem.

John Dehlin [00:58:49] That's deep. That's super deep. Hopefully. I mean, ideally, that can happen. Hopefully, yeah. Parenting is. Parenting thinks it's about fixing the child. You learn when you're in psychology that child psychologists train the parents, not the children.

Brad Reedy [00:59:09] No kidding. I learned that as a therapist that for Every one hour I spent with a parent, it would have the same impact as 10 hours I would have with the child.

John Dehlin [00:59:17] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [00:59:17] In terms of the overall mental health of the family and the child.

John Dehlin [00:59:20] Yeah. So I'm sure your book talks about that.

Brad Reedy [00:59:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:22] Yeah. Okay. So to bring it all back now, you. You go to. You leave BYU married, you have a kid by the time you leave. And you said you didn't go to Loma Linda.

Graduate School and Marriage and Family Therapy

Brad Reedy [00:59:38] First I went to Southern Connecticut State University, which I really liked. Their program in marriage and family therapy. Marriage and family therapy. Master's in marriage and family therapy. But again, we were so alone. We were so isolated, my wife and I with this new baby, and it was. It was overwhelming for us. So I decided after one semester, I came out to California for Christmas to my family, and I looked at the schools that I had rejected and one of them was in Southern California, Loma Linda University. So I asked if I could transfer all of my credits because I didn't have a lot of money, so I needed those credits. I didn't want to have to pay for them again. And they accepted all my credits. I transferred to Loma Linda and ended up getting my master's degree at that organization, that church based.

John Dehlin [01:00:19] Yeah. And we just interviewed an ex Seventh Day Adventist. So that's the only reason why I'm knowing what Loma Linda University is at all.

Brad Reedy [01:00:27] It felt like a good cultural fit, a really easy thing to slip into.

John Dehlin [01:00:30] You said there was a high percentage of Mormons in at Loma Linda?

Brad Reedy [01:00:37] Yeah, we had several in our class of 23 or four, maybe five in our class of 20.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] So were there also Seventh Day Adventists in your cohort?

Brad Reedy [01:00:45] Most of them were Seventh Day Adventists and then a few of them were non denominational or secular.

John Dehlin [01:00:50] How compatible did you find Seventh Day Adventists with. With Mormons now that we know that they have very parallel origins, Basically it

Brad Reedy [01:00:59] was a really easy fit. For me. It felt really similar, even though I knew I had the right church and theirs was kind of a second best option. It felt culturally like a really easy fit with the laws that they had around food and drink. So for me, that really set the foundation because one thing I knew when I met the missionaries is that drugs and alcohol were not my path. And the Word of Wisdom was actually probably the thing that attracted me to the church and probably helped me with the Seventh Day Adventist a lot also.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:31] Same.

John Dehlin [01:01:32] Samantha, do you know that Sunday Adventists are, you know, very healthy, you know.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:38] Yeah. Vegetarians.

John Dehlin [01:01:39] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:40] Yeah. But the Word of Wisdom is also what got me into Mormonism.

Brad Reedy [01:01:43] Oh, is that right?

Samantha Shelley [01:01:43] Yeah. Wow.

John Dehlin [01:01:44] Samantha's vibing with your story.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:46] I really am. It's actually shocking.

John Dehlin [01:01:49] Yeah. Cause she converted, you know, as a teen as well.

Brad Reedy [01:01:52] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:02:44] Okay, so you're. You transfer to Loma Linda. Is that a two year program?

Brad Reedy [01:02:48] Two year program. Finished up apply again to PhD programs, hoping to get into BYU and was eventually accepted into the BYU doctoral program in marriage and family therapy.

John Dehlin [01:03:00] Okay, so back to byu.

Brad Reedy [01:03:03] Different experience.

John Dehlin [01:03:04] Okay. Okay. Do you have any major cracks developing in your Mormon faith through graduating with your master's at Loma Linda, or are you fully on the train?

Brad Reedy [01:03:17] Fully on the train. Little fissures began to appear.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] What were those?

Brad Reedy [01:03:22] Guilt was the first thing I learned in psychology. That guilt is at least what I interpreted from psychology, is that guilt was not necessarily a fantastic motive for morality. So I started to realize that as I was doing student counseling that many people would say to me, I knew the right thing to do and I couldn't do it. And I would say why? And they would say, because I felt guilty. So I started to learn that in order to do the right thing, you had to walk through guilt and feel guilt. I teach today that the one commonality that I see in people that are on the therapeutic journey that are becoming more healthy is they will feel guilt because they are betraying old ideas, old constructs, old context. So that guilt thing began to be. I remember teaching in elders quorum about the dangers of guilt and shame. And one of the men in my group said he told a story about being a lawyer and going and having the experience of interviewing somebody who had killed somebody for not a lot of money. And he asked the inmate, he said, what did you do after you killed this gentleman? And he said, I just went home and went to bed. So he said to me, so if not for guilt, Brad, why would we do anything? And I just thought about Jesus, and I said, love. You do it out of love. That's the whole message. That's the whole idea of the gospel, is you don't have to do it out of guilt and fear. And I would teach him, I would say, know the one commandment that he has. I still use this today, where he says, love thy neighbor as thyself. I said, I don't think it was a commandment. I think it was just an observation about the way things are, that the relationship we have with ourselves forms the relationship about the way we feel about virtually everybody. So. Because it wouldn't make sense to me to command somebody to love somebody, because then you would be doing it to be good to check off that box.

John Dehlin [01:05:12] Well, that's when Mormons make friends with their neighbors to convert them. That's not.

Brad Reedy [01:05:16] Not.

John Dehlin [01:05:17] You know, it's not authentic.

Brad Reedy [01:05:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:19] It's not love. It's assignment.

Brad Reedy [01:05:20] It's something else. Assignment is a great word. Yes. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:05:23] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [01:05:24] So I started to see the fissures, John, at that point, but I thought I could stage this revolution from the inside. I talked to friends who had similar kinds of questions and doubts. Former mission companion that I respected, and. And that was his ideas. Let's change this from the inside out, and let's bring the wisdom from what we're learning in school and our careers, and let's bring that back to the church. So I was a great teacher. I could still walk into an LDS Church today and give a talk or teach an elders quorum lesson with perfect integrity, using all the principles and scriptures.

Encountering LGBTQ Issues and Church Teachings

John Dehlin [01:06:01] I'm guessing that you would have bumped into the miracle of forgiveness by this point and saw that that was what bishops gave any member that was, quote, sinning. And you probably. I'm wondering if you develop strong feelings about your emerging sense of mental health and love versus shame and guilt, as contrasted with the most ubiquitous, most often gifted or required book for, quote, Mormon repentance, which was Spencer V. Kimmel's Miracle of Forgiveness.

Brad Reedy [01:06:33] Yeah. And like a lot of people, I would just compartmentalize things. Right. I would just put that in a box, and that would come under the umbrella that many people in many faiths use, which is God works in mysterious ways, and we don't understand everything that he's doing right now and that we'll understand. And that, for me, at the time, seemed like an act of faith. It Felt like an act. I was told that it was an act of faith, so I took things like that and the LGBTQ stance that the church had, and I just said, well, doesn't resonate with this inner kind of compass that I have. But. But the authority figures, right? The appeal to authority, somebody telling me the right thing, they're saying it, so it must just be beyond my understanding. And eventually it will all make sense to me, but not now. And I can live with this way of kind of just compartmentalizing things.

John Dehlin [01:07:22] Okay, wait, so developing LGBT empathy as a Mormon in the early 90s would have been kind of early. Are you saying you were having LGBT empathies in the early to mid-90s?

Brad Reedy [01:07:34] Yes, but it wasn't. Wasn't strong. I wasn't vociferous about it. I was just having conflict about it at that point.

John Dehlin [01:07:41] How did you have clients, colleagues? How did you.

Brad Reedy [01:07:44] What, friends in the past?

John Dehlin [01:07:47] Mormon or just not Mormon?

Brad Reedy [01:07:49] No. And so I just. It just didn't make sense. It was like a lot of things, I just assumed that what they said was true. See, that's the. I just did my own podcast the other night on Logical fallacies in the defense. And one of the things that I explained that I think make people prone to high demand religions is that when you are taught to trust an authority for your morality. Right. That's the thing that predisposes you to religions like this, because that's the way that you've been raised, that somebody else knows your truth and can tell it to you, and that's how you are guided as a human being. So I just found a way, like a lot of people, to take complex, seemingly contradictory ideas and try to fit it into this one idea. That we don't know the mind of God, we don't know the mysteries of God, and all will be made known to us sometime in the future.

John Dehlin [01:08:40] Yeah. So you're compartmentalizing a lot, and cracks and fissures are starting to develop. And you're going to byu. Back to byu.

Brad Reedy [01:08:49] Back to byu. And now shaving, cutting my hair, not wearing shorts started to not make sense to me. I was not a child anymore. I was becoming an adult in my mid to late 20s. And so just my re entry into BYU started to not make sense to me. And now, because during the doctoral program, it's more philosophical, right? It's a doctor of philosophy, I started to really understand it from a broader context. What life meant, what it was, what feelings were, why people, the explanations about why people do what they do in church compared to my understanding and now psychology as I was learning it, why people do what they do. The answers from psychology were richer, more complex, more nuanced. They also offered. This was the most important part at this point. They also offered, in my estimation, more compassion, more non judgment, more love, because it was just description of people and what happens to us. Whereas in the church there was all these shoulds and shouldn'ts and moralities which didn't make sense. Being a convert, I remember I was on my mission and one time talking with my companion about pornography during my mission. And he grew up in the church and he said, you must have known in your heart that it was wrong as a teenager. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, you knew? And I said, my parents watched, was around. There were Playboy magazines when I visited my father in the bathroom, a stack of them next to the toilet. So what are you talking about? I knew the soup that I was cooked in, the air that I breathed didn't have that idea at all. So no, I did not know. It was a transition for me. So I began to just have a different way of thinking about people. And that's when it started to widen my first year back at byu. Right away it started to widen between what my inner compass was telling me and what I was being told from the pulpit.

John Dehlin [01:10:53] But also another book that we need to mention is Mormon Doctrine because Bruce Omer Conkie overtly sort of denounced the mental health sort of disciplines. And I think at some point he says psychiatrists or psychologists are of the devil, like that sort of thing. Were you aware that the church, Mormon church, had this long standing, almost discomfort and or antipathy towards the mental health profession?

Brad Reedy [01:11:22] Yeah, and I have a really, I think a really fascinating story about that in my story. So I'm back at byu. My marriage is starting to become rocky because we're drifting away and just the way that we think and the way that we do life. Because she's more faithful, she's more orthodox. Oh, she's more conservative.

John Dehlin [01:11:41] You're getting liberal on her.

Brad Reedy [01:11:42] Yeah, yeah, I'm get.

John Dehlin [01:11:43] You're changing the contract.

Brad Reedy [01:11:44] That's right, I am. I was changing. She was not.

John Dehlin [01:11:46] Yeah.

Brad Reedy [01:11:48] So I went to my bishop to get counseling. We went to our bishop to get counseling at one point in my mission. Lawrence C. Dunn. I don't know if you remember Lawrence C. Dunn.

John Dehlin [01:11:58] Tell us about him.

Brad Reedy [01:11:59] Who was he? He was a very strict, very tall, very matter of fact man. He was the area president over our mission. He was one of the 70.

John Dehlin [01:12:06] So I remember Paul done.

Brad Reedy [01:12:07] Do you know, I don't think he was. I don't think he was. In fact, he made a joke about Paul Dunn one time to me because I think he. Because Lauren was very strict and orthodox. I remember one time I was wearing a paisley tie at his own conference. He was there, and he made a comment about my tie. And I said, ella Maxwell wore a paisley tie. And he said, I bet you thought that meant it was okay for you, too. And that's the personality, right?

John Dehlin [01:12:32] Wow, that's intense.

Brad Reedy [01:12:34] So during this crisis of my life, marriage, faith, I call the church office building and I ask to talk to Lauren C. Dunn. And he picks up the phone. They say, okay, we'll pat you through. And 10 seconds later, hi, this is Elder Dunn.

John Dehlin [01:12:50] Good old days. Yeah.

Brad Reedy [01:12:52] So I said, I'm Brad Reedy. I was Elder Reedy. We met a few times and reminded him of a couple of encounters we had. So I started telling him the story that I was having about my marriage and about my life. And he said a couple of things to me. He said, read the Book of Mormon. I said, I've read it about 30 times already, but I'll read it again. He said, said, just circle hope and faith every time you come across it. So I started doing that, and he said, you might also want to go to therapy. And I said, funny you should mention that. I'm studying to become a therapist. And then he said, well, you know, therapy also is one of the tools of Satan.

John Dehlin [01:13:26] Which is it? Go to a therapist, you are Satan. Which one?

Brad Reedy [01:13:30] Exactly. So then I think he just realized that this, probably this phone call was not the right phone format for him and for me. So he said, do whatever your bishop says to do, even if it's wrong, and you'll be blessed. And that what the. Was the moment.

John Dehlin [01:13:48] How so?

Brad Reedy [01:13:51] It wasn't. That didn't fit for me.

John Dehlin [01:13:54] Why not?

Brad Reedy [01:13:54] I just realized. I don't know. I began to ask myself, I don't know if I want to live in that for the rest of my life. Do whatever the bishop said I wanted to ask.

John Dehlin [01:14:03] Even if it's wrong.

Brad Reedy [01:14:04] Even if it's wrong, you'll be blessed.

John Dehlin [01:14:07] The obedience to authority, kind of Milgram, the Milgram stuff, where you just obey your authority and that leads to, literally, the Holocaust. Right?

Brad Reedy [01:14:17] Right.

John Dehlin [01:14:18] Stanley Milgram would have taught you that. That is no bueno.

Brad Reedy [01:14:21] The best way to get a good person to do bad things is give them religion, as you say, as one says. So that began. That was when it broke wide open, that's when I became completely untethered by it and started asking questions at BYU or I was at during my PhD program. So at that point, I started to question my membership, question my belonging. I will tell you that going forward, obviously, where this story is heading. This led to me leaving the church. And I remember one day, this is in 2016, many years later, I was looking at one of those signs that they had during the 2016 election that said, we believe, you know, all people are created equal. Nobody's illegal. You know, water is life. You know, those signs that people had on their lawns. And I remember one day I was looking at that sign. I was on a phone call, I was looking at the sign, and I thought, I'm so grateful now that I get to believe whatever's true for me that I don't have to check it with somebody and make sure that it's okay and it fits. And so that moment with Elder Dunn was the moment when I decided that I was going to choose the spiritual life over the religious life. I was going to, as they say. They say sometimes religion is doing whatever you're told, no matter what is right. The spirituality is doing whatever's right no matter what you're told. So I started to go in that direction, in earnest toward what was right instead of what I was told. I was growing up out of my early childhood spirituality at that point.

John Dehlin [01:15:53] So you're being born again, basically.

Brad Reedy [01:15:55] Yes. For the third time.

John Dehlin [01:15:58] Yeah. But that's interesting.

Gradual Doubts and the Beginning of Faith Transition

Brad Reedy [01:16:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:03] Yeah. They're saying that now in 2026, so many people, especially younger adults, are leaving religion but still claiming or seeking spirituality.

Brad Reedy [01:16:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:17] And so what's the. Will you help us understand the difference from your perspective of religion and spirituality? You just gave us a good quote. Doing what's right regardless of what you're told, versus just obeying authority. Right.

Brad Reedy [01:16:32] Yes. I'll bring in Joseph Campbell. For those who don't know Joseph Campbell, he studied the world's religions from history and culture, and he discovered, or decided, observed, that there was one story, and he called that the hero's journey. So Joseph Campbell said, mythology, in other words, religion. Mythology is psychology misinterpreted as biography, history, and cosmology. It's psychology. We think back to Greek culture, and we think about the gods and the goddesses that they had. And we imagined that they were so stupid that they believed in that literally, and were so smart and enlightened that we realized that it was just. Just figurative. When in reality, many people back Then knew it was metaphorical and used it metaphorically to describe the psychological experience. Right. If you had an Eros energy, it meant you had a creative energy inside of you that you were embodying the spirit of Eros. Right. If you had a Zeus kind of energy. Right, right. You were having a discerning kind of energy in your body. So they were describing the human experience through this mythology. And Joseph Campbell also said, all religions are true if taken metaphorically, but none of them are true if taken literally.

John Dehlin [01:18:00] So, wow, that's good.

Brad Reedy [01:18:01] My experience started. We talked about this prior to me coming on. I think you used a phrase in one of your questions about losing my faith. And in a way, it was a loss of a certain faith. It was the death of a certain version of me. Right.

John Dehlin [01:18:13] It was the death of literality and orthodoxy.

Brad Reedy [01:18:16] Right, right, right. And today I would say that my spirituality is. I believe in all religions also.

John Dehlin [01:18:25] I think none and all.

Brad Reedy [01:18:27] None and all that. If you understand it metaphorically, they all have a really important story to tell about the human experience. So I started to gravitate toward Joseph Campbell even before I knew a lot about him. And that idea that there was a way of understanding and using religion in a way, you know, one of the thoughts that also happened because guilt was kind of the. The crux or the impetus of the beginning of my faith transition. I thought when I left the LDS church, which I eventually left, I thought that I would leave guilt and shame behind. I thought I had gotten rid of that because I left the church. I faced this dragon, as Campbell says. What I realized was that they followed me. Guilt and shame. They just changed costumes. Now they weren't wearing the outfit of the bishop or the prophet or the apostles. Now they were wearing the outfit of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Now I thought I could be good in a psychological sense. See, I was still. I hadn't really transformed my consciousness at that point. I was still just taking the ideas that I had to be good. And I just changed the way that it looked initially. That was my transition and my faith. Campbell says that the cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. That what we think we are going after on our journey. King Arthur's knights went for the Grail. That's what they were set out to do. And they went into the forest where it was darkest because they thought that most noble, because if there's a clear path, it's not yours. None of them ever got the Grail, but they came back with tales of adventure about how they had been changed. Right? And that's what the stories show us. That's what movies show us. The protagonist starts off with a goal, but by the end of it, they usually don't accomplish the goal. Rocky did not win the first fight. He did not win the fight. But what happened for him is his life changed. Henry Miller said that the destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. So I started to feel this transforming kind of power in my life at this point, when I was starting to use these ideas in a more spiritual sense, I would say, and my faith became larger when I left. Eventually the church and people would ask me about losing my faith. I would say, my faith is larger than it used to be. It encompasses more now, and I'm walking by it. Whereas before, I don't think I was really walking by faith. I think I was. I think I was outsourcing my sense of self to somebody else. And that felt really safe to me as a small, immature child that I was. But for me, this is about faith expansion.

John Dehlin [01:20:59] So as you're losing your orthodox, literalistic Mormon faith, you're actually growing your broader. I don't want to say secular faith. How would you describe it? Universalistic faith.

Brad Reedy [01:21:13] I know it sounds silly and it's not a cop, but I would just say my faith.

John Dehlin [01:21:17] Right, and faith in what? Like, we think of faith as. Like believing. As a Mormon, I'm trained to think of faith as believing in something you can't see. And so you want to say, that's God, or that's the true church or whatever. What are you having faith in?

Brad Reedy [01:21:32] The same God that led me into the church, the one that's in here. Joseph Campbell says, all the gods, all the devils are in here. So what I will tell you now is I left because God told me to. The same God that told me to join. You remember that story? The same God that told me to join was now the God telling me to leave. I didn't know what that meant. I really did not know what that meant at all. I just know that I couldn't stay anymore, that it didn't feel good to me. And by the way, I wasn't angry or judgmental about the people that were staying. I had family members at the time that said they wanted to stay. Because the transcendence that started to occur was, I don't know anybody else's truth. And I look back on my early Mormon years, which were absolutely wonderful and joyful and gave me my wife, my education, my children, and I Don't want to throw that away. Right. It just was a time in my life where that was right for me. And later on, something else became right for me. So I didn't leave because I decided that the doctrine and the dogma was wrong. That's not where I left. I left because the way of being that I knew to be, to be joyful and more transcendent and more free, I couldn't find it there. I couldn't experience it there. So I left. Left not for dogma, not for doctrine, not for church history, facts that were found. I left because I couldn't be my highest self within that organization effectively. And I think other people maybe can, I don't know. But for me, I could not.

John Dehlin [01:23:03] So on the one hand, this feels very Christian if you take that in a very literal, direct sense. Jesus literally taught the kingdom of God is within. What did he mean? He said, you need to be born again. Again, Mormons interpret that as like getting baptized with water. But if you really, really study what Jesus the mystic was trying to say, he's saying you need an inner transformation. So on the one hand, and that if you're looking for God, look inside. That all makes sense to me. But my Mormon brain is saying, now wait a minute, that sounds secular. Seek for what's inside. Be internally driven, self driven. That's secularism. That's selfishness, self centeredness. And also, Joseph Smith in Mormonism wanted to make God literally a corporeal being with 10 fingers and 10 toes and a beard, and he's up in the sky. He sits on a throne, literally, in a planet called Kolob. So, like, what is God in your emerging spiritual worldview at this point in your life? If God's within, how do you even tease out? You just doing what you want versus there being an external source of wisdom and direction that is the higher part, versus just you becoming hedonistic and driven by your own passions. I'm trying to make sure I did that too.

Brad Reedy [01:24:38] Just to be clear. I did that too. I tried all that too.

John Dehlin [01:24:40] Wait, in high school or after?

Brad Reedy [01:24:42] After my lds.

John Dehlin [01:24:44] See? So you just became hedonistic?

Brad Reedy [01:24:46] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:24:48] You left your marriage and you became hedonistic. I'm joking. I'm. I don't mean.

Brad Reedy [01:24:53] No, no, no.

John Dehlin [01:24:54] I'm trying.

Brad Reedy [01:24:54] My Mormon brain laugh at this, then I shouldn't be here.

John Dehlin [01:24:58] So help make sense of this.

Brad Reedy [01:24:59] That's the thing, is that you have to try. You know, Jeff, in the new book that I wrote with Jeff and Michael McLean, you find God in the Places you were told not to look. So I left and I was untethered again. It's not like I moved from that to what I'm describing right now. That's taken another 25 years, 30 years to develop what I'm talking about, the way I'm talking now. But I trusted this, see, I trusted God, the divine, the sense inside of me. So I started looking into Buddhism. I heard about Alan Watts, and I started to listen to an app that somebody gave me where he had like 40 hours of lectures on it.

John Dehlin [01:25:39] Okay, wait, apps come much later, so. Right.

Brad Reedy [01:25:43] Well, yeah, yeah, I've skipped some time. So you're right. You're right.

John Dehlin [01:25:46] So your first marriage ends around what year?

Brad Reedy [01:25:49] 2000 or 1996. Okay, I get married in 1999. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:25:55] Again, a second marriage.

Brad Reedy [01:25:56] Second marriage, Right, but also to a Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:25:58] Hey, did you let the church by your second marriage?

Brad Reedy [01:26:01] No, I was on the fringes. But part of the condition of my new wife was that we stay in the church.

John Dehlin [01:26:05] When did you graduate from BYU with your PhD?

Brad Reedy [01:26:08] I finished my coursework in 97. Took me six years to do my dissertation.

John Dehlin [01:26:14] Okay, really?

Brad Reedy [01:26:14] 40 hours. But I struck. I spread that 40 hours over six years.

John Dehlin [01:26:18] But you were able to get your therapy license?

Brad Reedy [01:26:20] I already had a master's degree with a license.

John Dehlin [01:26:22] So you had that.

Brad Reedy [01:26:22] So I was a licensed therapist already.

John Dehlin [01:26:24] Okay, so you were ABD for six years.

Brad Reedy [01:26:26] ABD for a long time.

John Dehlin [01:26:27] But you were practicing as a therapist?

Brad Reedy [01:26:30] I was practicing as a therapist. I got married to my second wife in the temple. I got myself worthy to get married in the temple with my wife after being divorced. We were married in the temple.

John Dehlin [01:26:41] Did your second wife have a more liberal, non literal sense of Mormonism?

Brad Reedy [01:26:48] She complained about the crap of it. So I thought we were on the same page. But once we got together, she wanted us and me to stay in it because that made her feel safe. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:00] And you had kids with your first wife?

Brad Reedy [01:27:02] First wife, two kids.

John Dehlin [01:27:04] So that's a blended family at that point.

Brad Reedy [01:27:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:07] Okay, but would you say by your second marriage you don't believe anymore or you still believe?

Brad Reedy [01:27:12] No, I was just having problems. We were complaining about. We'd sit in the back row. We were the back row Mormons and complaining about it and talking about how everybody else was stupid in not getting it and how it was wrong. But I used to say during my temple interviews in those days, I would say it's the metaphor with which I choose to identify. That's what I would say.

John Dehlin [01:27:31] So you were basically. You went from Fowler Stage three to Fowler, stage four. But staying in the church.

Brad Reedy [01:27:38] Yes, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:27:39] So the church isn't literally true of the capital T, or it's corrupt or it's problematic. So you're kind of going through your dark night of the soul on a slow burn, but not leaving the church, getting temple married the second time, but staying in it, but just complaining on the back bench.

Brad Reedy [01:27:56] And that decade, that decade, what I will say about that decade or so, I don't have a lot of regrets in my life because I've made a lot of mistakes, but I've learned from them. And so to regret my mistakes is to somehow also dismiss the lessons, the value and the gold that came from them. But the one regret I say that I have today is the years I spent living somebody else's life. I was doing what I was told.

John Dehlin [01:28:24] Wasn't that 17 until your mid-30s?

Brad Reedy [01:28:27] Well, I wanted it for the first few years, and it really worked for me. But as I started to feel the pull of something larger, something greater, something with more love in it, that's when I didn't have the courage to leave. Because I had been taught. I mean, I taught at the MTC for three years after my mission. I was going to become a seminary teacher. I studied Hebrew for three years. I was all in. I loved it. But what happened for me was this, the spiritual self that was beginning to emerge. I didn't have the courage to leave because I had all the same doctrine and teachings about people that had been led away by the devil. Right. All the things I was thinking were the things I was told to be afraid to think. So for more than a decade, I stayed where I didn't belong. And that began to eat away at me in a pretty significant way. I allowed myself to be mistreated not because of what they were doing. They're just doing what they're doing to people. But I couldn't leave because I was scared. So it took a long time for me to leave.

John Dehlin [01:29:23] Well, yeah, and I'm thinking of my brother at this point because I lost my faith around 2001. We're both at Microsoft, and I go to my brother, who had a very different Mormon upbringing than me. I was the Nephi. I would have thought of him as the lament, lady layman in the sense that he was wayward. But then his mission in the church brought him back from his waywardness. And so when I told him, joel, I think the church might not be what it claims, he literally looked at me. 2001 at Microsoft ish And he said, john, the church pulled me out of the gutter. I'm not leaving it, so I don't want to know. And he literally said, I'm sure there's stuff there. It'll wreck my marriage. And I don't want to know, because it had transformed his life. And so I'm just saying, don't beat yourself up. I can see why you wouldn't want to leave the church. It literally saved you. Right.

Brad Reedy [01:30:15] And what happens?

John Dehlin [01:30:16] Am I wrong? Did it save you?

Brad Reedy [01:30:17] Oh, yeah. Saved my life.

John Dehlin [01:30:18] So why would you want to leave it?

Brad Reedy [01:30:19] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:30:20] Even if you didn't leave it anymore

Brad Reedy [01:30:21] on some level, One of the first things I learned about adult children of alcoholics was that they have a pathological loyalty. And I think I had that where I was grateful for this life boat that saved me from the flood of my life. And so I held on to that for a long time. But what I found is. And today, and I think this is really relevant to what you do, if you're not willing to leave, if you're not willing to walk out the front door, then you'll develop symptoms. And so what the church calls unworthiness stuff, in my estimation, is the real self searching for something, trying to get your attention. And this happens in every context that I'm in, if you can't speak the truth to your partner. And at that point, I couldn't not tell my wife the truth about what I was feeling because it was too scary. It threatened our marriage, so I had to hide it. When you start to hide it, you start to act out. So I acted out for a while.

Secrets, Honesty, and the Cost of Inauthenticity

John Dehlin [01:31:21] You have a quote in your outline that I just heard on a totally different podcast about you being sick with your secrets kind of thing. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Brad Reedy [01:31:31] Right? Yeah. Yep.

John Dehlin [01:31:32] What's the quote?

Brad Reedy [01:31:32] The quote is from 12 Steps. You're only as sick as your secrets. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:37] But also something about bringing things to light versus not. I do have to. I'll pull out your outline.

Brad Reedy [01:31:43] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:45] Samantha, you nodded when he talked about getting sick by holding things in. What were you resonating with? I'm curious, you know.

Samantha Shelley [01:31:52] Oh. I mean, I just think it's a true sentiment.

John Dehlin [01:31:56] Yeah. Yeah. So it's not healthy. I got to find the quote. It's about bringing things forth.

Brad Reedy [01:32:09] Oh, it's from the Gospel of St. Thomas. The Gnostic Gospel.

John Dehlin [01:32:12] Tell us that quote.

Guest [01:32:13] Yes.

Brad Reedy [01:32:13] So for those who don't know what the Gnostic, what the Gospel of St. Thomas is, it was found in The Dead Sea Scrolls. Part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So it's not been interpreted. Excuse me, it's not been translated by anybody. It's ancient. And in verse 70, he says, if you bring forth what is within you. Yeah, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

John Dehlin [01:32:36] And I see that with like, autoimmune diseases and stuff, it is deadly for people to just keep things inside.

Brad Reedy [01:32:44] Right. I have one of those autoimmune diseases that will probably shorten my life. I have multiple sclerosis.

John Dehlin [01:32:51] And do you? I mean, I guess you wouldn't know, but do you. So. So you said the one regret you have is that you lived someone else's life. Are you saying sort of that those 10 years you stayed in the church after you probably somehow in some part of you knew it wasn't true, was very toxic or damaging for you? Is that what you're saying?

Brad Reedy [01:33:13] Yeah. I wouldn't confine it to that because it's been my whole life. I've learned through my own therapy that I'm a liar. I will tell you what you want to hear and I don't even know it. I'm a people pleaser. I want to. Right. Like I have a hard time being myself. And the cost that you're required to pay for that. Speaking of Wicked, you quoted Wicked earlier in my book the Journey of the Rogue Parent. I quote Elphaba when she says, if this is love, it comes at much too high a cost. And for me, I don't confine that to my religious experience, although it fits perfectly within that. I can find that to any time I'm in a situation, a circumstance where it's not lining up with my true self and where I can't speak my true self at the fear of being cast out and I repress it and I will end up. It could be a passive aggressive comment, it could be something more significant, but the real self will find a way to get your attention. If you're not listening close enough. If you're listening, it's a whisper. If you're not listening, it's a car crash.

John Dehlin [01:34:16] It's a car crash. If you're ignoring what your inner self is trying to tell you, it ends in something, potentially something.

Brad Reedy [01:34:30] Richard Rohr says in one of his books that he prays for one small humiliation per day. Because if you don't learn to overcome humiliation is your ego. Right? It's your ego. It's who you thought you were. You're not who you thought you were. It's that you become who you really are. Which I think was Christ's message was about wholeness and integration, but it's been misinterpreted for other reasons. So if you're not paying attention to the small humiliations, if you're not seeking yourself, you'll end up in a marriage, in a life, in a job, in a house that's not yours. And you'll end up in a situation where the price that you pay, the bill that comes due, is much, much larger than if you had listened to it along the way.

John Dehlin [01:35:19] I've totally seen that over and over again with the people that I've worked with, I bet. And in my own life. Yeah, you have to confront that stuff.

Suppressing the Self Inside Mormon Culture

John Dehlin [01:36:18] What's hard is that for me, what's definitionally being Mormon? It's assuming the Mormon personality and suppressing and pushing down and hiding and never talking about anything that's either authentic and. Or problematic because the church functions. If it's a great plan of happiness, then it's making us all happy. And if it's making us all happy, then we've got nothing to complain about, nothing to be vulnerable about, because the church is making us all happy. So sometimes people just say, well, I was just vulnerable at church. Why did the. Why did somebody jump down my throat? And I'm like, vulnerability is one of the most dangerous things to Mormonism because if everybody started being truly authentic and talking about what was going wrong or what was hard, bad marriage, I didn't get my witness. My faith is struggling. It all unravels.

Brad Reedy [01:37:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:37:17] So it's like Mormonism, orthodox Mormonism is constructed to beat down vulnerability and authenticity and authentic internal disclosure. Is that unfair?

Brad Reedy [01:37:30] No. You know, I think the way That I would talk about it from a Jungian perspective is that Mormons have very little experience with the shadow. That's why Mormons aren't typically known worldwide. Is there are some. There are some, but they're not known for their art. And art requires some grappling with the shadow of the dark side. In Eastern religions it's all the same, right? You look at their gods and their goddesses in Eastern religions and their gods are kind of crazy sometimes. They're jealous. They do things out of petty spite for each other, right? Those gods tell us about the human condition. The Western God is perfect.

John Dehlin [01:38:05] See, that's interesting because the Jewish God is a bipolar sort of genocidal maniac who also loves you. But Jesus tried to just basically say there is none of that evil stuff in divinity. It's all love and rainbows and jelly beans and lollipops. At least the way some people have interpreted Christianity.

Brad Reedy [01:38:26] Yeah, I don't think he did say that. That's my guess. I have no proof. I don't. But I can piece together what he said, you know, when he says, be there, be perfect, even as your Father in heaven isn't perfect. The word that was used, as you well know, was hole complete. He was talking about integration, but they can't hear it. Even my own, when I work as a therapist, I cannot tell you how often somebody takes an idea that I share, a concept that we're grappling with and they walk away with. Brad says, you should do this or I should do this, which I don't use that word. I don't use that word at all. So I think the translation into commandments comes from our fear based psyche. I think Jesus was enlightened. I think he was rebelling against the system. I think he was rebelling against orthodoxy. I think he was. You know, the early followers were called the Way. They weren't called Christians, of course, they were called the Way. And that's a way of being that he was trying to teach them. But it's so hard to understand this transformation. In fact, it's so profoundly a transformation that the best analogy to use for how different it is is death and rebirth, baptism, right? It's so different, right? The consciousness is such a transformation. Campbell says that the purpose of myth is for a transformation of consciousness. In Star wars, when Luke puts on the mask fighting that little droid the first time he gets on the Millennium Falcon and Obi Wan puts the mask on his head, right? And Luke says, I can't see. How am I Supposed to do anything if I can't see. But Obi Wan is saying it's so fundamentally different. You're gonna have to find a new way to look at the world, a new way to understand the world. And he has some success with it at first, and he begins to learn about this. So for me, the transformation is so fundamentally profound. And I think what Christ was trying to teach it, but it got misunderstood, misinterpreted, and then used to control people. Societies serve the politics of the time. That's where it's been perverted, I think in the original, I assume he was very enlightened person.

John Dehlin [01:40:27] And here's what I'm getting at. You started with the premise that we need to do better, talking about the dark side and the light side. And then you talked about Greek and Roman mythology and even Hinduism that has evil gods and dark gods and jealous gods and good gods and happy gods and strong gods and positive gods. And what I was basically saying is even the God of the Old Testament is bipolar. He's got evil and good within him because he's about love, but he's also genocidal. I think it's a modern Mormon interpretation of Jesus as the new God, as the God of love. There's no dark side. There is a Satan in Mormon theology, but he's not really a God. He's just like a super demon. So it's back to this point of. It's this toxic niceness and positivity that's In Mormonism, contention is of the devil. Dark, bad feelings are of the devil. So you need to always be swimming in toxic positivity, even if it's killing you, because God is love and contention is of the devil. I'm just saying that it feels like an orthodox Mormon theology of a Jesus positive teddy bear. Jesus is what keeps us oftentimes from being willing to explore our dark sides. That's all I'm saying. I think I'm agreeing.

Brad Reedy [01:41:52] Let me ask you this challeng a little bit. What you say about the Jewish God. I work with a lot of Jewish people, a lot of orthodox people, actually. I have orthodox clients, several of them. They don't think that God is bad. They think everything he did was good.

John Dehlin [01:42:08] Sure, but he was also genocidal.

Brad Reedy [01:42:09] Yeah, but they think jealous. They think that that was good. Right?

John Dehlin [01:42:13] Exactly, Exactly.

Brad Reedy [01:42:14] Just like in Mormonism, it's not. Well, the lgbtq. See, Kant, Immanuel Kant says, said he had this idea of the categorical imperative, which says that you treat yourself and humanity in such A way as an end and not a means to an end. He said by thou, he said, if a being had come to him, like Abraham and said, kill your son, he said, I would have known that was not God because his reference point for truth is in his body, is in himself, and that the God has to measure up to it. But the God of the Old Testament, the Mormon God, like you're saying, the kind of orthodoxy, more fundamentalist God, it's. Anything he does is right. Right. The way that you define something as right is it's God will. So God's will, so he can do something that on the surface looks like genocide is genocide, actually. But since he's God, it's right. So it must have been the right thing to do. They don't say it was bad, they say it was right. They just fit it into that category. That's my kind of pushback. But I'm happy to hear your counter.

John Dehlin [01:43:17] Well, I mean, I think we're kind of just swimming around trying to make sense of everything. I don't have a position other than that. I believe modern orthodox Mormons are just really bad at vulnerability, pain, anger, negative emotions that we all know now in the mental health profession are actually very healthy and adaptive. But Mormons want to push all that aside as Satan and evil and bad, and try and swim in this toxic positivity which then leads to decades of toxic living where your insides are developing really bad diseases. But on the outside you're smiling and you're on plan and you're doing everything you're told and you're temple worthy.

Brad Reedy [01:44:00] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:44:01] So that's all I'm saying.

Brad Reedy [01:44:03] Yeah, that's absolutely consistent.

John Dehlin [01:44:05] So you're saying we need to. That there's a health and a positivity to being able to embrace and make meaning of your negative emotions.

Brad Reedy [01:44:16] Charles Bukowski said. Said.

John Dehlin [01:44:18] What do you mean by shadow? Like, what is that? Shadow work?

Brad Reedy [01:44:21] Charles Bukowski says, don't fight your demons. Some of them are very interesting. Ask them questions, learn about the scratches on their hands. And so what we have been told are the devils and the demons are the parts of ourselves that we have discarded. That's the shadow. The shadow is there's parts of us that are unacceptable to our context, our parents, our religion. And we take those parts of us and we shove them into the unconscious. I'm not going to be. It could be as simple in a family as you're not allowed to be angry, not allowed to be sad. Right. Talk about toxic positivity. So you take the anger and the sadness which you have been told is wrong and bad, and you repress it, and it comes out in aggressive, unconscious ways. That's the shadow experience. So therapy, in my estimation, as I see it, and religion ideally, is an attempt to reintegrate all of that stuff. It wasn't bad. The subtitle of my second book, Learning to Love youe Horrible Rotten Self. It's not really a horrible, rotten self, right? So when somebody comes to me with a symptom, I tell this story in the. I will edit it for pg. But when I was in therapy, at one point talking to my therapist about something I had done, and I was ashamed of it. So I was stuttering and stopping, and she said very gently, this is after working with her for 12 years. She said, brad, you don't understand what we're doing here. If you came in here telling me you were having sex with a chicken, I would assume you had a good reason, and I would want to understand why. And all of a sudden, a whole world opened up to me and I realized my symptoms, my mistakes. My sins aren't sins against. Well, they are sins against God in the way that I'm. They're sins against consciousness. I was unconscious. I was acting out of unconsciousness because there's some need in me that hasn't been met and I don't know how to do it. And the way that I've been told to meet it is wrong and bad. So I've repress it. That's the shadow. So when I work in psychotherapy and somebody comes to me with any vice, any sin, any problem, my response is not to recoil and to tell them to get rid of it, is to say, let's listen to that. What's it trying to tell you? How can we get the goal that it has to offer? Because if we can listen to that, you will be free of it.

John Dehlin [01:46:34] I was gonna joke and say it was a sin against the chicken. It was a sin.

Brad Reedy [01:46:37] I say that too. That's a good one. I love that.

Sexuality, Shame, and Jungian Shadow Work

John Dehlin [01:46:40] No, but I was gonna say let's talk about sex. Because, like, isn't that the preeminent Mormon? Dark side is the fact that we're all feeling shame and oppression around our sexuality.

Brad Reedy [01:46:52] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:46:53] And why do we have such high rates of child abuse, such high rates of pornography use, even high rates of infidelity, apparently by report. Let's talk about sexuality and the suppression of sexuality as a dark side. Do you feel like. Do you see that that has unhealthy fruit in Mormonism.

Brad Reedy [01:47:16] I do. I think, again, it's another part of taking the human experience and drawing a line about what's good and what's bad. So then what's bad has to be gotten rid of to fit in, to belong, to be safe. Safe. And when you take a part of yourself and you shove it into the closet, to the unconscious, to the shadow side, it will come out in uglier ways. Freud said that unexpressed emotions don't die, they come out later in unhealthy ways, in dangerous ways. So the experience in psychotherapy is. See, that's where I found God again, is the spirit of God again. It was in therapy. I'm sitting to listening to alcoholics talk about all kinds of sins and mistakes that they made. And I'm listening to clients talk about horrible things that they've done. And when I meet that with compassion and understanding, they're changed. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, if we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in every man's story suffering sufficient to disarm all hostility. In other words, if you understood somebody's backstory, everything they're doing would make sense. It doesn't make it okay. It doesn't make it right. It just is something you can have compassion for. And compassion and love, that's the healing balm, right? You come back and you offer that to somebody like in Les Mis, you know, he gets caught for, for, for. For stealing the bishop's silver.

John Dehlin [01:48:38] Jean Valjean.

Brad Reedy [01:48:39] Yeah, Jean Valjean. And the bishop, you know, lets him off and says, take the, Take the candlesticks. The most expensive part. And that story, it's not a. It's not a historical story, right? It's a myth. It's. It's a story that, that Victor Hugo wrote.

Samantha Shelley [01:48:52] Wrote.

Brad Reedy [01:48:53] But the story shows us that what changes us is compassion and non. Judgment is somebody who can meet you with curiosity and understanding instead of judgment. And the judgment is what keeps scared people safe. It's what keeps people safe who are overwhelmed with the ambiguity and uncertainty of life. That's. The judgment, is the defense against God. It's the defense against the divine experience of connection and love. And in therapy, I find God every day in that way.

John Dehlin [01:49:24] And you're saying the antidote to shame and unhealthy behavior is curiosity, curiosity, love and compassion.

Brad Reedy [01:49:33] I want to understand why. I don't care that what you did was bad and wrong. And I know it hurt people, and I know you have grief for that, but let's Understand it first, because if we listen to it, it will tell us something that was lost. Lost that is so important to who you are. And when you integrate that the. The. The. The defense, the symptom will disappear. We don't have to worry about the symptom because the symptom is just a messenger. And if we can listen to it, we can really. We can really do some healing.

John Dehlin [01:50:01] Do you have something you want to say?

Samantha Shelley [01:50:02] Well, I'm just so grateful for the way you're articulating all this stuff because how many times have we gone back and forth on podcasts together where you'll be like, what about hedonism? Isn't it good to get people to rein in these? You know, and you know, I do

John Dehlin [01:50:14] that as a devil's advocate.

Samantha Shelley [01:50:15] No, I know you do. That's your thing. But how many times have I said the exact sentence on this podcast? Wherever we repressed comes out in a more dysfunctional way.

John Dehlin [01:50:22] Are you feeling validated? Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [01:50:24] You have never had a guest that has more perfectly spoke to my soul. Like, every quote that you bring up, I'm like beaming inside because I'm like, that's a quote that has meant so much to me and been so important to me on my journey. It's almost spooky how much everything you're saying is just like a better articulated version of what I would say.

John Dehlin [01:50:42] Is it a coincidence that you brought this guest to me?

Samantha Shelley [01:50:45] Yeah, but it's like, I had heard from Jeff that you're amazing and I do trust Jeff's opinion. But yeah, I had a sense reading your new book Stay in the Room, that you weren't just a regular therapist. Not even though I love and respect all therapists. But yeah, this is kind of blowing my mind how similar our thinking is.

John Dehlin [01:51:04] And part of what I'm loving too. Thank you for that, Samantha. And there's so many things to explore. But part of what I'm loving about this is, you know, I was trained, you know, as a psychologist from 2009 to 2015. And you know, by 2015, CBT and even kind of third or fourth generation CBT that's informed by kind of Buddhism is kind of all in vogue like acceptance, commitment, therapy and Freudian, Jungian kind of psychoanalytic therapy is viewed as the non empirical, non evidence based, first generational therapy that's kind of like no longer credible. But we respect it because it got us to where we are. So you're all infused with Jung and even psychoanalytical stuff, but Jung and Joseph Campbell are intertwined. And if anybody's gonna say that story and myth and the hero's journey aren't relevant to the human and, you know, mental health and awakening, they're crazy. So I love it that you're bringing that back and saying, let's not discard. You know what brought us to the dance too quickly. Right?

Brad Reedy [01:52:13] Yeah. Most people that criticize Jung and Freud. Most people, not you. But most people can't name a thing about them that they taught. But you're right, it's not.

John Dehlin [01:52:23] Well, they'll say he was too sexual. They'll say Freud was obsessed with sex with his mom or with childhood masturbation. Right. Which, again, is sex shaming.

Brad Reedy [01:52:30] Right, right, right, right, right, right. Absolutely. Yeah. Those things, those. Those methods, those ideas. And that's what I've been trained in subsequent to my PhD, was Jungian and Freudian psychology analysis. Those don't look at pathology the same way. The American way is to fix it. The American way is you have a symptom, get rid of the symptom. And Freud and Jung were like, don't. The symptom is not the thing. In fact, the symptom is a gift. So let's understand it. And by understanding transforms, it alchemizes into something different. Right. What Elsa came back with in Frozen was the exact same behavior, but with maturity and time and a shift in consciousness in the community, her dangerous behavior as a child became the thing that saved it. So that's what we learn from the stories that we read from others.

John Dehlin [01:53:23] So let's. And, Samantha, I really love that you're loving this, and it's validating. And I know, Samantha, you work with a lot of clients that are dealing with a lot of dark stuff. Do you do shadow work, Samantha? I mean, kind of. Do you try to even target shadow stuff? Is that part of your approach?

Samantha Shelley [01:53:39] I think it's so woven into my approach. Yeah. I don't know if you can say, like, I'm not qualified to do any specific Jungian work, but it definitely informs my shadow work. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:50] Okay. So let's take maybe one of the most, if it's all right. This is fun. This is interesting for me, and it's probably relevant to me personally on some level. Let's take a typical Mormon journey, which is, you know, either grow up. You know, you grow up with a big heap of sexual shame from, you know, law of chastity stuff that you're raised with, miracle, forgiveness stuff, whatever, and. But you get married and you do your best to Be monogamous and to be faithful. But you're always haunted by the demons of sexual thoughts or masturbation or pornography or whatever. And then let's say you have a faith crisis, but you're in all of that soup, you're feeling terrible that you masturbated. You may feel shame from your spouse that you were unfaithful in some flavor, way, shape or form. And now let's just say you lost your faith. Faith. And you're thinking about all the ways you didn't maybe get to explore sexuality in a healthy normative way as a teen or as a college student or young adult. And so you're. And so you have to kind of grip with, do I stay in my marriage, Do I leave my marriage? Do I explore sexually, do I consider non monogamy or some other type of thing? What do I do with this dark side of unexplored or suppressed or shamed sexuality that's going to be coming out in some unhealthy way that's often stereotyped to ex Mormons as, as your life coming unglued or hedonism because you have just been suppressing this sexuality for so long.

Brad Reedy [01:55:38] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [01:55:39] Do you, do you work with clients who have got dark sides or scars around suppressed or demonized sexuality?

Brad Reedy [01:55:46] Yeah. A good portion of my work, just because of where I'm positioned, transitioned, is working with faith transitions. A lot of people and people with trauma history that is tied to and connected to their faith and the religion of their family of origin. So that happens a lot. So it's not a quick little transit. Right. It's a process. But the first thing that I do is I meet those people with non judgment.

John Dehlin [01:56:14] So let's say they're either masturbating or looking at porn, or they're cheating or they are giving lots of ways you can act out. Right. Okay. So they come to you and they

Brad Reedy [01:56:25] feel what shame they want to get rid of. Most people come to therapy because they don't want to get rid of the thing they have a symptom. So my response is gently, let's not worry about the symptom, let's talk about what it means. What do you think you're getting out of the masturbation or the sex? And this takes time. It's not an easy, quick answer. But eventually they realize that the sex was this ritual where they were looking for connection and nurturing, for example, or they were looking to be loved and to be seen and to be desired. So then we start to Understand, and this is a complex process. We understand that in their childhood, those things were missing those parts. They didn't feel seen, they didn't feel celebrated. The child is supposed to be the biggest deal and seen and loved as they are. But most children are taught to be good. Good. Even outside of this church, most people are taught to be good. And that's the one way to destroy a human being, is to teach them to be good. Because then they have to get rid of half or more of their personality.

John Dehlin [01:57:26] What's wrong with being good?

Brad Reedy [01:57:28] What's wrong with being good is it's not a real thing. I suppose Jung said, I would rather be whole than good. If you don't acknowledge the parts of yourself that you have been told are bad, you will hurt people. People, and you will hurt yourself. So the problem with being good is that the whole premise is flawed. We don't think in Jungian therapy that the goal of parenting is to raise a good child. In fact, the epigraph of one of my books says, why were each of us taught the notion of being correct? And the very notion ensured our failure in the world.

John Dehlin [01:58:00] So being taught to be good ensures failure.

Brad Reedy [01:58:03] It'll ruin your life. It ruins your life.

John Dehlin [01:58:07] See, like, you know, let's just say Mormon apologist or orthodox Mormon critic or a cultural warrior. Again, we'll say ex Mormons. They're hedonistic. They're, you know, they're experimenting with drugs and sex and alcohol. And it's selfishness, it's passion, it's desire. And that's the problem. It's the church with controls and guardrails and morality. It's the only reason to be good. It's the only reason to be moral. Moral. Otherwise. It's, again, as Samantha and I have talked about, it's hedonism. It has no guardrails, and it just leads to an unraveling, unhealthy life. And you're saying the opposite.

Brad Reedy [01:58:47] I'm saying it does unravel a certain life. But I'm also saying, so what you're saying to me, if I were talking to someone like this, I'm saying, so you're saying that somebody who comes down in experiments should try to figure out.

John Dehlin [01:58:58] Out.

Brad Reedy [01:58:59] I'm using the words right and wrong, metaphorically, right from wrong. What brings one a sense of heaven and transcendence. Right? In this way of thinking, heaven is not a place with an address. It's a metaphor for a way of being. The prophets weren't, in this estimation, weren't saying, do this so you will be good and therefore be happy and rewarded. They're saying, I think this is the way wife life works. I think this is how it goes if you do this thing. People that do this tend to feel. Feel a sense of peace in their bodies, right? So people come to earth to experiment, as everybody does, to figure out who they are, what's right from wrong, and somebody who. The privilege I have of growing up in a life where I didn't have a lot of supervision is I got to find out for myself things. I got to discover it for myself, right? And so I would say to that person, that is the. As I understand the plan of salvation, you have just, in your criticism, criticism of this approach, you have just criticized the very plan of salvation, which is come to earth, experiment with choices, make lots of mistakes, but I have a plan that will save you. And in the end, when you stand before judgment, you will know. You will know because you will have experienced it versus somebody else told you, and you trust them. You will have an inner knowing that transcends anything that anybody can tell you. And from my experience, that only comes. Comes through experience. And sometimes the experience is very, very messy. We call that a midlife crisis, right? People break free of their traditions outside of the church and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Buy a convertible, start wearing gold chains, right? They become this other thing. But eventually that is the beginning of the hero's journey of finding yourself. And you will look in places where the piece is not found, but you will find it out for yourself and figure it out.

Samantha Shelley [02:00:47] Out.

John Dehlin [02:00:48] So this is. There's a paradox here that I'm. I'm hitting. So Samantha and Brad, both of you are basically saying that your life was going in a bad, unhealthy direction, right? And that Mormonism helped put you on a structured path that in some ways led to healing and growth and development and very positive things. And it just so happens that Mormons theology and morals are based on extrinsic authority and this notion of sin and evil and good and bad and faithfulness and obedience. And you're both telling me that was positive for you, and you're also telling me that that's the problem, that that is unhealthy and it leads to bad. So either it's one or the other or it's both. Which is it?

Brad Reedy [02:01:43] I think it's both for me.

John Dehlin [02:01:45] I want to hear both of you.

Brad Reedy [02:01:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:01:47] Samantha, let's start with you.

Samantha Shelley [02:01:48] Well, it's just stages of development, you know, and what is like, useful at one Stage is then limiting later down the road.

John Dehlin [02:01:57] So how, Samantha, how do you explain to our audience that Mormonism's shame based, rules based, extrinsic, authority based culture was good for you for a while?

Samantha Shelley [02:02:09] Well, because it provided structure and belonging and a temporary, artificial sense of self worth that was still better than what I had before. It's still somewhat empowering to be like, okay, these are the ways that you become good. And like Brad said, I could do them, I could hit those targets. And that can be empowering if you're coming from a place where you'd never really even have had any real sense of morality of any kind outside of sort of the basic societal things.

John Dehlin [02:02:44] It's kind of like high school and college. Right. You graduate, you need it. It's helpful. High school, K through 12, whatever. And this is a condescending metaphor to faithful people that stay in the church. But you're basically arguing kind of like a graduation metaphor. You need K12 until it's time to graduate to something bigger. And Mormonism is. That can be that K through 12 that then graduates you to something higher.

Samantha Shelley [02:03:10] Yeah. I think kind of a good analogy is like if you have, you know, never looked at your relationship with food and you've overeaten your whole life and you've never really like been cognizant of what, how much you're eating, what the macros of that thing are, whatever. Some people find it useful to track that for a while to sort of get a better sense of what would be good for their bodies. But then ultimately that can ruin your relationship with food and your body because it's like disconnecting you from your own hunger and fullness cues. And so you kind of need to go beyond that eventually.

John Dehlin [02:03:50] Yeah.

Mormonism's Light and Dark Sides in Balance

John Dehlin [02:04:41] So Mormonism isn't bad. And Mormonism isn't good.

Brad Reedy [02:04:45] Correct.

John Dehlin [02:04:46] It can be good until it's bad.

Brad Reedy [02:04:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:04:48] And it can be bad until it's good.

Brad Reedy [02:04:51] You know, I think that religion is only as good as your mental health.

John Dehlin [02:04:56] What do you mean by that?

Brad Reedy [02:04:57] I mean that if you adopt a philosophy, a dogma, a spiritual practice, but you haven't really transcended the developmental stages that Samantha's talking about, that you'll use those new things in the service of the old consciousness. Einstein famously said you can't solve a problem at the current level of consciousness in which it was created. And so it's how you use your religion. If your religion doesn't lead to love, then I would say that there's a gap in your religion. And I don't care if you're Mormon, non Mormon, orthodox Jew, Muslim, it doesn't matter to me. I don't start there with. I don't start with the idea of the dogma because the shame based, controlling, autocratic, patriarchal system is not exclusive to Mormonism. It just happens to be housed very well within the Mormon structure. It's a very good example of it. But at the same time, it's bigger than that, it's wider than that. And there are people that have religion that have a relationship with Mormonism that from where I sit, looks really healthy and spiritual.

John Dehlin [02:05:55] What does that look like? What does a healthy, graduated, enlightened Mormon look like in 2026, in your opinion?

Brad Reedy [02:06:02] My business partner's lesbian, lived in the Harvard Yale area in Salt Lake City. And Elder Hinckley's son moved across the street. He was the stake president, I believe that's his first name. He was our stake president at the time, but he moved across the street from my business partner and her wife. And at one point, the story is told, as they got to be friends, is that the wife said, what do I do? She says to her husband, Clark, what do I do to this couple across the street? How do I serve them? And Clark apparently said, you just love them. So in that moment, Clark's religion, in my perspective, was based on really good psychology. You just love them.

John Dehlin [02:06:46] So if, if a Mormon is love based, that's a good sign. They're a healthy, enlightened, mature Mormon.

Brad Reedy [02:06:54] It's one sign. Yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [02:06:56] I mean, you're basically just saying that love is the most important thing.

Brad Reedy [02:06:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big deal.

John Dehlin [02:07:01] On the one that's. On the one hand, that's so glib. That's so like John Lennon, Beatles, all Right. But I guess that was Jesus's core message.

Brad Reedy [02:07:09] He didn't. He wasn't.

Samantha Shelley [02:07:10] It's a glib.

Brad Reedy [02:07:11] He did not follow convention. He did not follow the traditions of his parents. He broke free of the system. And he was saying, there's something missing in your practice. He was saying to them that's missing the spirit of it. You're missing. The point of it all was his message. So it's that I don't try to lead people in or out of any philosophical context or construct. I try them to find themselves in the process, and they'll figure out where they need to go and what fits for them.

John Dehlin [02:07:40] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [02:07:41] I would say, though, thinking about this is just my opinion, but thinking about the James Fowler stages of faith and how the stage six is the sort of universalist love everyone point of view. I do think of different religious organizations make it harder or easier for that to be possible for someone. And I would say Mormonism is one of the harder ones because, I mean, do you remember when we did that episode with Stephanie Brinkoff where she, as a faithful Mormon, took mushrooms for the first time and she kind of instantly deconstructed the church because she just realized, like, this isn't loving. And I do think there's a lot of things about, you know, Mormon authority complex and the arbitrary morality and all that that is, like, pretty antithetical to love. So even though it's like, I can. I know there are Mormons that, you know, can be that way, can be very universalist. I do feel like it's one of the harder religions to do it in.

John Dehlin [02:08:37] They might do it in spite of Mormon orthodoxy. Father Richard Rohr says that Mormons do first half of life better than anyone, and they do second half of life worse than anyone. Right? Yeah.

Brad Reedy [02:08:48] That's a really good.

John Dehlin [02:08:50] Have you heard that?

Brad Reedy [02:08:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's talking about the shadow, Right. The first half of life is, as Jung says, and he's a Jungian, essentially. The first half is to build up the ego, and the second half is to let it go. The ego is the energy that I have to be good. Alan Watts said, once you realize there's nothing on the dark side to be afraid of, nothing is left but love at some point. John, in 2011, I accepted that I was the devil.

John Dehlin [02:09:16] What do you mean by that?

Brad Reedy [02:09:17] I mean all Mormon mind.

John Dehlin [02:09:18] That's terrifying.

Brad Reedy [02:09:19] I surrendered to all the judgments that everybody in my context, my church, my community, gave me to me. I was a bad guy. I accepted that I was not Going to spend my life trying to prove that I was good anymore, which I had spent up to that point, 40 some years trying to prove to the world that I was good. And in that I abused many people, I mistreated many people. Friends, right? Because I had to be good. So if you're mad at me, you're the problem. And since I have a skill set and I'm pretty capable orally, I'm going to win a lot of those. So I made the people around me feel small and less than because I had to be good. Good. But once I surrendered, you know what? Nothing was left but love. All I wanted to do was give people the love that I was now feeling for myself. And so when I was freed up, when I said this, when I stopped using my energy and resources to try to be good, I could take all of that energy that was occupied in this other project that now I was realizing was worthless. And I could use that same energy now to spread love into the world and to understand there really are two fundamental energies that this is my perspective. There's fear and there's love. No rules, just those two things. And if you're living as Rumi says, if you move through the world the way that fear moves versus if you move through the way that love moves, it makes all the difference in the world. So for me, the acceptance or maybe the surrender that I was bad according to this context finally freed me up to a greater and more expansive, more comprehensive love.

John Dehlin [02:10:51] So I'm getting caught on one thing.

Brad Reedy [02:10:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:10:55] How can you love yourself if you conclude that you're evil or bad?

Brad Reedy [02:11:00] That's a good question.

John Dehlin [02:11:01] What do you. Because I think you mean something more, more complex than that, that you're bad, I'm bad, therefore I love myself and everyone more. That doesn't totally make sense. So talk more about what you mean by that.

Brad Reedy [02:11:13] It's more like what Jung said when he said, I would rather be whole than good. Right? It's that I am. Ram Dass said. Ram Dass said it this way. He said most people, when they have a self esteem issue, they try to counter it with, I'm not bad, I'm good. But then he goes on to say, but that still keeps the world at the level of polarities and of judgments. And the fact of the matter is, he says, I am bad and I am good and I'm everything in between. I am, is how he ends it. And so once you realize that you are selfish and generous, caring and cold, loving and hateful, once you realize and accept those parts of yourself. See, at one point, and Richard Rohr talks about this at one point during this journey, I thought about suicide in 2010 because I couldn't be happy where I had been and I didn't feel like I was finding happiness where I was, was. And again, traditional Mormons and others might assume that that suicidality was a sign of the sin kind of rearing its head in my life. But I had children at the time, four children, the four children I have now. And I wasn't going to kill myself for them. I went to my therapist and I said, I'm not going to kill myself, but I think about a gun in my mouth every day. And she said the instinct to kill yourself is a good instinct. But the mistake that most people make is they think they need to kill the whole self and you just need to kill part of yourself and then you'll be free.

John Dehlin [02:12:45] What part's that?

Brad Reedy [02:12:46] What other people think. That's what it was for me. So I'm still working on that today. What other people think. I'm still trying to kill that idea. Which for some people keeps them safe. Right. Especially if you have a religious leader that you can look to to tell you what to do.

John Dehlin [02:13:03] Or a parent.

Brad Reedy [02:13:03] Or a parent.

Samantha Shelley [02:13:04] Parent.

Brad Reedy [02:13:05] Right, right, absolutely. It's the same microcosm.

John Dehlin [02:13:08] Don't kids need to kill as adults? Dependency on their parents, adoration or affection or approval?

Brad Reedy [02:13:17] Yeah. There's a Buddhist saying that says to grow up you have to kill your parents. And in the 12 step program, the way that that same sentiment is expressed is what other people think about me is none of my business. Most importantly, importantly, I add the parent. Once you realize that what the parents think about you has nothing to do with you and it's not your job to make them proud, not your job to make them happy, not your job to serve them and their serenity. That's their job. Once you let go and kill them, metaphorically speaking, you're free to love, you're free to be who you are.

John Dehlin [02:13:50] So parents keep their kids sick by nurturing the idea that. That they approve or don't approve of their kids behavior.

Brad Reedy [02:14:02] Yeah, that's what I thought parenting was. I thought I was going to tell my son, I thought I was going to do it in a really rational way and tell him, my first child, that when he was doing something that scared me, I would tell him I was scared or when I was frustrated or angry or sad or disappointed. And I was going to tell him when I was proud of him. Or happy or excited about what he was doing. I thought that would become his moral compass. That's what I thought my job was. I didn't know my job was to help him find himself, to help him be who he was and to support him on that journey. I thought my job was to shape up in my own image. And now I realize today that it was a mistake and that really he's changed me and saved me much more than I've saved and changed him. And the same is true of my other three children. So I had the whole thing upside down, down, the whole thing backwards.

Therapeutic Approaches for Parents and Families

John Dehlin [02:14:55] So let's say there's a parent that's struggling with a kid who's addicted to video games or addicted to weed or cannabis or vaping or struggling with school. What advice, as a starting point, I know you wrote a whole book on it. What advice do you give to a parent who sees an adult kid who seems to be by their definition, and really struggling?

Brad Reedy [02:15:19] Yeah, great question, because I don't give a lot of advice, but I do give a couple of.

John Dehlin [02:15:26] What approach? How about approach?

Brad Reedy [02:15:28] I just say do your work. We know two things about children and attachment. We know that the number one prophylactic, the number one protection against distress and pain in life is a secure attachment to the parent. Secure attachment builds resiliency. It helps the child feel safe, they feel okay about themselves, and they can go forth in the world. But this is what's fascinating. The number one predictor of whether a parent can do that is how well they know themselves. Going back to the St. Thomas, right, if you know yourself, which is layers and layers and layers upon layers, you can provide a secure attachment. So what I encourage parents to do is stop trying to fix the child. That was never the task. Fix yourself. Look at your history. Alice Miller said in what I think is the most important childhood book ever written, the Drama of the Gifted Child, she says, experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our fight against mental illness. That's the discovery of the unique emotional history of our childhood. So my work is go back to your childhood. Sort it out. When that gets sorted out, you know exactly what to do with your child and with your spouse and with your friends. Friends. Work on yourself. That's my advice. Look at yourself. Keep going. And find a therapist that wants to find you and not fix you. And find a therapist who doesn't know what you should do because you already had that growing up. And look at the damage that it did. Find somebody who's more interested in you finding your truth than them imparting their truth onto you and what your journey should look like.

John Dehlin [02:17:01] I love all that. Can you be a parent who unconditionally loves their kid, let's say an adult kid, but they also see that in their mind, by even objective standards, the kid might not be thriving or might really be struggling. And so it's not like they're withholding love or even judging their kid. They just want to see their kid be able to get off drugs or alcohol or get a career or a healthy job, be able to provide for themselves. Where's this line between unconditional love and, like, just having genuine concern about a kid that may not be thriving?

Brad Reedy [02:17:41] That could be part two.

John Dehlin [02:17:43] You're saying that's its own episode?

Brad Reedy [02:17:45] Well, because.

John Dehlin [02:17:47] Give us a teaser.

Brad Reedy [02:17:49] What happens is you realize that the mistake sometimes is the most important thing that they could do and that the struggle is important. So I have an autistic. Autistic child. The child that's on the spectrum happens to be also transgender. And the life that he lives. I'm not talking about his LGBTQ status. I'm talking about the way that he lives his life is 1000% different from the way that I would live my life. I have a son that lives in Provo, the only one remaining in the church, and he's living a life that I would never live because he's faithful in the church. Because he's a weird artist and he's faithful in the church. Lots of things, but it has nothing to do with me. And so my job is to be present with them. And that takes a lot of capacity. And I first had to be present with myself, which was really hard. So when I started to be present with my own horrible, rotten self, I can sit with your horrible, rotten self with incredible patience because I've learned at first about myself. So when you tell me you're using drugs, my answer isn't get off of them or let's work on that. My answer is, what's that doing? I want to understand. What's that doing for you? Tell me about it. Does it make you not feel afraid? I wonder where you felt afraid before, and then all of a sudden, we're not treating a symptom, we're treating the root cause of it. So you develop a kind of capacity and complexity as you embrace all these paradoxes, that the transformation occurs in ways that you can't even describe and predict at times.

John Dehlin [02:19:12] So, again, it's Samantha got a big smile. It's curiosity. It's just as apparent parent to adult kids or whatever, or younger kids. You're just curious and you're. And I think when you say do your own work, I think what you mean is number one, non judgment, non judgment towards yourself and others. And then distress tolerance, learning to sit with uncomfortable emotions, starting with yourself, so that then if you're feeling protective or concerned about your kids, did you can let that pass through you?

Brad Reedy [02:19:48] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:19:49] So that it doesn't affect how you engage them, which is to just be curious and allow them to have their experience not only even if that involves suffering, but like especially if they're suffering.

Brad Reedy [02:20:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:20:03] That's what you're saying. That's what they need to go through.

Brad Reedy [02:20:06] Is that right? Yeah. And my children have struggled in various ways in their life with drugs, alcohol, self harm, depression, various things. Things. But what I'm grateful for is that the relationship that I have with all four of them is solid. And so I get to be their first call in a crisis. I get to be their first call when they're hurting because they know if they show up to me that my answer is going to be non judgment. I'm not going to have an I told you so. I'm not going to have advice from them. I'm going to be with them to understand them. And so the attachment trumps all of it. It, the healthy attachment trumps all of it. We want to go back to control and engineering our children to be healthy and right and good. Those aren't even bad things to be healthy. But this idea says everybody's on their own hero's journey. And all you can do is have the privilege of sitting close by a loved one while they're on it and, and being curious and compassionate and loving, asking questions and sharing. Sharing it with them.

John Dehlin [02:21:09] Beautiful. I'm loving it. I'm excited to, to learn some of this for my own life.

Brad Reedy [02:21:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:15] And parenting too.

Brad Reedy [02:21:16] Me too.

John Dehlin [02:21:17] Okay. So you, you lose your faith, you accept that you're bad and that leads to self healing and it allows you to be a better human to other people.

Brad Reedy [02:21:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:27] That's such a paradox that like embracing your evil allows you to be Christ like.

Brad Reedy [02:21:32] Yeah,

John Dehlin [02:21:35] that's so in a sense that's anti Mormon.

Brad Reedy [02:21:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:38] You know what I mean?

Samantha Shelley [02:21:40] Yeah. I feel like a lot of the best truths in life are paradoxes.

John Dehlin [02:21:43] Right.

Samantha Shelley [02:21:44] But systems like Mormonism don't are the opposite of that.

John Dehlin [02:21:48] Yeah. I mean, obviously. I'm sure you've heard of the quote from east of Eden, Jonathan Steinbeck. Now that I don't have to be perfect. I can be good.

Brad Reedy [02:21:58] Yeah, right, right, right.

John Dehlin [02:22:00] Is that kind of the sentiment of what you're.

Samantha Shelley [02:22:02] Yeah, yeah.

Brad Reedy [02:22:03] His words are a little bit different than mine, but he's saying, you know, once you can realize that you don't have to be something, you can just be love is what I think he means by that. And so.

John Dehlin [02:22:12] And you can't love others till you love yourself.

Brad Reedy [02:22:14] You can't.

John Dehlin [02:22:15] Is that right?

Brad Reedy [02:22:17] Sometimes serving others can awaken you to a love of self. But deeply, how you feel about others is a reflection of how you feel about yourself. And so when I sit with somebody with. With a difficulty that had been struggling for decades, I look back on how long it took me to finally have the courage to walk through that door that I needed to walk through in my life. So I can sit with you for a decade while you complain about the same symptom. And I can sit there with you patiently because somebody sat with me. So I can sit with myself. So now I can sit with you and listen and wait and love. That's all I can do. Like Ram Dass said, we're all just walking each other home. So I get the wonderful sacred honor of bearing witness to people's stories as they figure themselves out on their own hero's journey. And I don't have an opinion because as Campbell and David White and Jung all said, how do you know what's your path when it disappears? Because if the path before you is clear, it's somebody else's path. And that's a universal idea in this spiritual journey that I call life.

John Dehlin [02:23:33] What do you do if you're afraid somebody's gonna hurt themselves or even die because you see them on a journey that in your mind could be fatal? How do you sit with that and watch them and witness them and accompany them on a journey when, and sometimes people do die by suicide or they do die by addiction?

Brad Reedy [02:23:55] Right.

John Dehlin [02:23:56] What do you do in those moments when somebody isn't having that self correction and those transformations, but they just. They follow their. Their own path into self extinction?

Brad Reedy [02:24:11] Well, there are duties and responsibilities as a therapist and as a parent that you can hang your hat on for sure. And legal ones. But I suppose you're describing what God must go through every day. So my answer would be, it's the right question and that's yours to figure out how to do that. And in simple terms, if you're able to do what you just described, you have now incorporated an attribute of what most people would realize. That's what God must be going through every single day watching people that he loves, his own children hurt themselves, do horrible things to each other. And he still, according to most people's faith, has unconditional love or great love for everybody. So you learn what it means to be more like the gods, the Jesus, the people that you worship. Because that's what's required, what you're talking about. But yeah, I have to report people that are suicidal or involved in child abuse. That's my job. I'm not going to let my 3 year old play with a knife just because, because she wants to. You have to make decisions along the way. But what I like about the journey of the heroic parent is parenting is impossible. Freud said that if you want somebody to grow, set them up in a situation where they will surely fail. And the one thing that prevents people from looking at their own narcissistic wounding, which is I have to be good to be loved. I have to be productive or pretty or smart or rich to be loved. The only thing, thing that causes people to look at that wounding and really start to heal it is failure. So I can't think of anything more that you will care about that you will fail at more than being a parent. You will fail at that more than anything ever, that's for sure. And thus it becomes something that transforms you perhaps more than anything other. The relationship with somebody you love will teach you more about God's love than you'll find in any book. And it's impossible, John. It's impossible. So all you, you earn from me about that, if you're working with me, is you just earn my love and compassion and understanding that I know what it feels like to not be able to get it right all the time. I screw up every day of my life and I try to practice, as Richard Rohr suggests, small humiliations because I don't want the big bill to come due anymore. I know that some of the things I'm saying here today might cause me humiliation this afternoon or next year here. But that's okay. I want it now because I want to find this sublime sense of the connection to the divine that is in all of us. Myself, you, it's all God to me, all of it.

Samantha Shelley [02:26:47] I also feel like the beauty of that mindset and approach is that it creates space inside us for an emerging in the moment wisdom. When situations happen where maybe, maybe the way you've been taught to respond to a certain situation isn't the right move in that moment. And when you're not like when you have that spaciousness inside that can come through. Because there's so many situations where I feel like humans will have a stroke of brilliance of what to do in a really impossible situation. But when we're too beholden to a certain way of doing things, then that's kind of blocked.

Brad Reedy [02:27:25] Beautiful.

John Dehlin [02:27:27] Samantha. I was going to tease you and say you're limiting your growth by not having kids. Because all those failures either in marriage or in having children are opportunities for growth. I was going to say you and Oprah are limiting your self development.

Samantha Shelley [02:27:41] I'm failing more than enough without them. It would just become unmanageable at that point. And then I would need some kind of thing to clean to, to survive.

Brad Reedy [02:27:51] My daughter asked me a question. She said to be a really good therapist. Do you think I can be a great therapist dad if I don't have children? Because she knows how I teach, she works with me, she's fantastic. And I thought about, and I said it's possible. But it's hard to find something that you'll love that much that you'll fail at more. And she's found some things to fail at that she's learning about herself. But you have to fail. You have to come to the. The edge of the futility of the way that you've been living your life before you're ready to let go of it, cross the next threshold and embrace the new, larger, more spacious version of yourself. And I hope for me that that keeps continuing. I hope that I keep growing. If I'm the same person today that I am 20 years from now, I will argue that I've wasted 20 years. So it's about transformation, it's about change. It's about death and rebirth over and over and over again. That's what the hero's journey about about is about. And my own belief system. I think that's what Christ was trying to teach people. It's just hard for people to hear anything and not translate it into a should, into a rule and into a guarantee, into a non paradox.

John Dehlin [02:29:02] And I was thinking about sometimes as parents we justify. Maybe our over involvement and or even unhealthy codependent relationships with our children again out of fear sure that they'll die or harm themselves. I totally agree that it's through harm and failure that often they achieve most growth. But also unhealthy codependent relationships can actually make harm or severe harm more likely, not less. Sure, right, right.

Brad Reedy [02:29:46] Codependency is not the euphemistic too much love codependency is not enough self, that's the switch. And in codependency, when you don't have a sense of self and your sense of self is outsourced and your peace and serenity are dependent. When parents come to me for example, and say, say you know, I'm not sleeping, they tell the child how upset they are, they're using heroin, whatever it is, horrible things I say, you have to go and take care of yourself.

John Dehlin [02:30:12] To the parent or the kid.

Brad Reedy [02:30:14] To the parent.

John Dehlin [02:30:15] Meaning what?

Brad Reedy [02:30:16] Meaning you have to go to a group and talk to other parents of heroin addicts, or you have to go to therapy, or you have to go somewhere. Because if you don't go somewhere and take care of you and your serenity, which is your job, and you outsource that to the child, it will crush the child, them.

John Dehlin [02:30:30] How so?

Brad Reedy [02:30:31] Because then they know that they're responsible for taking care of the parents peace and serenity and life. And a child is ill equipped to take that responsibility on and they will sacrifice large, enormous parts of themselves to take care of the parent. The old adage, you're only as happy as your least happy child is not just an adage, like a way of. It's something we aspire to and it's insane. It means that children are raising parents. If my responsibility, if my serenity is my child's responsibility, who's raising who? I have to go somewhere and get my cup filled. So when I come to the child, I could be in service of love, of what they need, not what I need. Because if I don't take care of my serenity, my peace, my sleep, my health over there, when I show up to the child and their crisis, my actions will unconsciously serve my needs and not theirs. So go get full somewhere else. Go to an al anon, a coda meeting, a therapy session, a yoga, whatever it is, go get full. So when you come back to the people that you love that you're struggling, you're not gonna be asking them to continue to take care of them. Cause I'm thinking, I'm guessing that part of what they're self medicating is the guilt and the shame of what they're causing you, the person who loves them the most.

John Dehlin [02:31:42] Mmm. Cause I was gonna say, how can a parent be at peace and healthy and happy if their kid is severely suffering. Suffering?

Brad Reedy [02:31:50] Impossible, isn't it?

John Dehlin [02:31:51] Is it so hard or you're saying it's not impossible. You're saying if you do enough work, you can be a happy, healthy parent with a kid that's in danger of self harming or dying. And as a parent, you're like, hey, I'm good. How can I show up for you? That's hard.

Brad Reedy [02:32:09] It's not that tried or glib, but yes, because go to an Al Anon meeting here in Salt Lake. They're free. Anybody can go. And you'll meet a handful of parents who have lost their children and ask them, and they'll tell you, it's a wound from which I'll never fully recover, but I have peace. You know, in Buddhism, the Buddhist philosophy isn't a defense against feeling unhappy. You will feel sadness and grief and hurt. It's a practice that prevents suffering. You know, in Star Wars, I often say when Darth Vader was confronted with the idea that his wife was going to die because he had lost his parents, like you mentioned, he'd had enough. So he was seduced by the dark side, that he can control life. The emperor promised him that he had power over life or death if he joined his church, his philosophy. That's what Darth Vader was going. He thought that the dark side was the answer. I used to have a bishop. My bishop would say to me, my first year of being a member, he'd say, in our family, we have Satan's plan until the children turn 18, is what he would say. We control until they go on a mission. He would say, the truth is, the

John Dehlin [02:33:17] church never relinquishes Satan's plan. It's operating on it, full fumes.

Brad Reedy [02:33:22] Everybody is everywhere all the time.

John Dehlin [02:33:24] Oh, right, I am too. Right?

Brad Reedy [02:33:26] So we either learn to relate to our fear in a healthy, courageous, painstaking way, or we become its slave.

John Dehlin [02:33:37] We can't control death is what you're saying.

Brad Reedy [02:33:39] You can't control anything. In Star wars, when Yoda found out all the children were murdered, all the Jedi children were murdered. Same episode, episode three, where Anakin became Darth. It showed how Yoda dealt with that. And it's a subtle scene. And all he does is he kind of moans and groans, this sigh, and he starts to cry. You either feel your pain or you try to avoid it. Like codependency is in my definition, it is trying to control outside things, to manage an inside feeling. It's not love. My job is my responsibility, my serenity. And if I'm attending to that, then I can be there for you. But if I'm not taking care of this, I will unconsciously act in a way for you to serve my needs.

John Dehlin [02:34:26] Okay, so this has been so powerful for me Personally, so I'm so grateful that you're here, and I'm loving. And, Samantha, thanks for bringing Brad Tuas as well. So you leave the church at what age? What year?

Formally Leaving the Church and Life Since

Brad Reedy [02:34:46] Finally, I went to my bishop in 2012 and asked my name to be taken off the records of the church.

John Dehlin [02:34:52] What happened? Did something happen in 2012?

Brad Reedy [02:34:53] Specifically, my son was now identifying as transgender non binary at the time.

John Dehlin [02:34:58] This is before the November 2015 policy, but this is after Prop 8.

Brad Reedy [02:35:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:35:04] Was Prop 8 hard for you and that sort of thing?

Brad Reedy [02:35:07] Yeah. Yeah. I did not. And when I had LDS family members that would come over in support of it at our house, I would tell them, we don't talk that way in our house. So it was a problem. So I was working with young men who were suffering under the guilt and shame of the LDS Church and other organized religions. So I went to my bishop, and I was ambivalent about my name being on the church. Spiritually, it didn't matter to me. But I said to my bishop, I said, if a Mormon boy asks me, because I work with boys, if I'm a member of the church, I don't want to qualify anything. I want to be able to say no. So I did it. I sent the letter in. And when I got the letter back, I sent it to my very close good friend who was gay, who's passed away since then of natural causes. I told my son it was my gift to them to say, I'm doing this in honor. The actual act of removing my record because I had spiritually left prior, was in honor of LGBTQ youth, for sure.

John Dehlin [02:36:10] So I just want to rewind for just a tiny second. So, like, one path that a lot of liberal, progressive, faith matters restore type Mormons these days is to reach Fowler stage five or even stage six. But to stay in and to do so, thinking it's my community, it's my tribe, or I'm going to stay and help others as a part of the tribe. Tribe. What made it so you didn't want to do that? Was it just the LGBT stuff? Were there other things that kept you from just being your best enlightened self? But, you know, going to church for an hour every, you know, once a month or whatever, just to keep your card and to be a positive influence from within?

Brad Reedy [02:36:49] I suppose I had had experience with leaving my tribe once when I joined the church, and so I was willing to leave it again in a formal way. I. I couldn't sit in church.

John Dehlin [02:36:58] Why?

Brad Reedy [02:36:58] Because what were the biggest things it was everything. Honestly, it was everything. It was just the way they thought about good and evil and right and wrong, the way they thought about shame and guilt, the way they thought about everything we've been talking about today. And so for me, I have no opinions about people that stay in the way you're describing. But for me, it was intolerable. It was soul crushing for me to be there for me. And at the same time, when I left, because part of the transition includes fundamentally that each person's path is their own. So I didn't leave thinking anything about anybody else. I just left. I remember when my good friend, who was the bishop at the time, came by and said, when are you coming back? I said, I'm not, and I'm happy to talk to you about. About what I believe, if you'd like to talk. And of course, he just kind of walked away and wasn't interested in that. I think of it as I have no opinion about what you should do, no opinion about what you should do or anybody else. And as a therapist, what I believe fundamentally is that we are not experts on anybody's life. We are an expert on creating a container or an experience where somebody can find their own truth. And I'm tired of telling people how to live their lives because it's come back to bite me many times. So. So I just want to honor someone else's individual journey and whatever they discover, I'm there for.

John Dehlin [02:38:27] And subjecting yourself to Mormon doctrine, theology teachings, became toxic and harmful to you personally.

Brad Reedy [02:38:37] I couldn't participate, I couldn't share, I couldn't talk about my own experience. I couldn't say what I was learning

John Dehlin [02:38:44] or what would happen. Did you try?

Brad Reedy [02:38:47] I tried. Took a lot of energy to kind of couch things in ways that I found would be palatable, but it just didn't work. And because I had accepted this, I'm good and bad and everything in between, it didn't have its grip on me anymore. So I wasn't interested in being good anymore. And so I didn't want to disrupt their experience because I knew I was on a different path than the folks that were going every week. And I just thought it would be the kindest thing for me, to me and to you, if I didn't attend on Sunday because. And if I didn't belong, because for me, if I show up to places and situations and conversations because I should and not because I can, I'll abuse one of us for sure. So I left as an act of grace for all of us.

John Dehlin [02:39:33] You'll abuse yourself or someone else. And just so that someone operating not in good faith doesn't take your comment out of context. When you say you weren't interested in being good anymore, that doesn't mean you were okay with being unfaithful or lying or stealing or harming others or yourself. Right?

Brad Reedy [02:39:55] It's not that I'm okay with it. Those things cause distress. I'm a tremendously empathic person, and those kinds of acts hurt me and others. So it's not necessarily. It's that there was a different way to think about all of those things,

John Dehlin [02:40:10] not in terms of good and bad. And even Jesus said, don't call anything good, which is right. So instead of saying you're not interested in being good, you would say, what?

Brad Reedy [02:40:22] I would rather be whole. The Mormon missionaries knocked on my therapist's door years ago ago. She lives here in Salt Lake. And their pitch said, do you want to learn how to be happy? And she said, I want to learn to feel all of my feelings.

John Dehlin [02:40:39] Who said that?

Brad Reedy [02:40:39] My therapist.

John Dehlin [02:40:40] Oh, okay.

Brad Reedy [02:40:41] To the Mormon ministry. So for me, Winnicott said, the great paradox is it's only when I accept myself that I can change. And so for me, loving my horrible, rotten self is realized. I'm hard to live with. John, you had a little bit of an experience with me last. Like, I'm tough. I can be difficult and intense and perfectionistic and want to be right. All the things my daughter was asked one time when she was standing next to me and somebody asked about the journey of the heroic parent. She said, is your dad a heroic parent? Not knowing what I mean by that. And my daughter paused and she said, well, he's an idiot, but he knows it, and that makes him tolerable. That's what I mean by accepting that I'm bad is once you accept that, you're an idiot. When Ghani answered the question at the end of his life about the battles that he had faced, the last thing that he said was, and this is depicted in the movie with Candice Bergen,

John Dehlin [02:41:32] he says, ben Kingsley.

Brad Reedy [02:41:33] Yeah. She said, how well did you fare in the battle against yourself, the third kind of enemy? He said, he said, not very well, I'm afraid to report. That's why I have so much patience for all the other scoundrels in the world, the enlightened people that I respect fact. They talk about what an idiot they are. I heard the Dalai Lama talk here a few years ago at the University of Utah. Half of the speech was about him laughing at what an idiot he was.

John Dehlin [02:41:58] You don't think that's just like false self modesty?

Brad Reedy [02:42:03] No. Knowing what I know now or performance. Knowing what I know now, imagining what he knows now. He's come to terms with his own darkness. And he's sincere because he has belly laughs when he talks about it. When I first confronted my therapist with something that she heard, hurt me with, I was shaking when I said it. She said, thank you for telling me. You must have been really, it must have been really risky for you to tell me. I'm glad you would tell me. And I started to realize, so that's what an adult sounds like when they show up. My daughter explains that in the Mormon Church there's not a great example of a divine apology. And our leadership, she says, doesn't make apologies on a regular basis.

John Dehlin [02:42:42] The policy is that we don't apologize in the Mormon.

Brad Reedy [02:42:45] Just think about that. Perhaps the most important trait for connection and human experience in the world is learning to be wrong and say, I'm sorry. That's what I mean by loving your horrible, rotten self, accepting that I dented you. We don't have divine examples or leadership examples. And so what I would say is a core part of the spiritual journey is out of the Mormon doctrine in many churches that run that kind of high cost, top down philosophy.

John Dehlin [02:43:17] So you left the church in 2012 and how's it been since? Did you lose clients?

Brad Reedy [02:43:23] No, no, because at that point I realized my job wasn't to bring anybody in or out of any. I realized at that point my job wasn't to fix people, but to find them. So what's happened since then is I've had a life of joy and pain and sorrow, but a life of joy that I could never have imagined before. I am so fulfilled with my life. My wife has left the faith, most of my family has left the faith. And not because I wanted them to or needed them to. They just have come to their own conclusion. So I get to believe. I get to believe. What resonates with that, what Emerson says is that kind of inner iron, that inner self, I get to, that's my measure. I get to figure out for myself what's true. I don't have to wait for somebody to tell me what's true. And to me, that kind of freedom, I get to love so much more. I get to embrace and expand my circle so so much wider than I used to, so I could not be more grateful and joyful for where I am. And I honor everybody on whatever path they're on, on whatever they are doing and just hope that they can find the same kind of joy and sense of transcendence that I have experienced for myself.

John Dehlin [02:44:43] And when somebody says, why don't you, you know, why don't you harm others or yourself? Your answer is, what? Well, when you don't, right? When your best self isn't harming others or yourself, why? What's your intrinsic basic motivation or reasoning?

Brad Reedy [02:45:00] Ricky Gervais, I don't know if you saw Afterlife, he's famously an atheist and somebody in this episode asked him, why don't you go around murdering and raping people if you don't believe in God? And he said, I murder and rape all the people that I want to right now. So I would say I harm all the people that I want to right now. I don't do it because meaning none,

John Dehlin [02:45:22] by the way, meaning none doesn't mean

Brad Reedy [02:45:23] as Ricky Geras's murdering and raping none

John Dehlin [02:45:25] also that we know of.

Brad Reedy [02:45:28] I don't do it because it resonates with my soul. What I would say to a religious person is God tells me not to, but that doesn't make sense, right? But it's really an inner knowing that once you. Once you know yourself, which can only be based on how much you love and accept yourself, because your self awareness will only be as good as your lack of shame and guilt. Otherwise you won't see parts of yourself that cause too much distress. Once you realize and come to love the horrible, rotten parts of yourself that you've been told to hate, you love everybody else. So it's not an act that I consciously don't do. I just know what it feels like to hurt. And I don't want to do that to you because I'm connected to you. When a great philosopher, modern philosopher, said, when we see the coral reefs dying off, why does it hurt us as if it's happening to us? And he says it's because it is happening to us, to our extended self. So I feel connected to all the people. Really doesn't matter where they are and what they're doing. I feel connected to all of them because I'm them and they're me. We're the same. So for me, the reason I don't do things is back to what I said earlier is love.

John Dehlin [02:46:41] It's kind of this. There is no other kind of idea. We're all one kind of thing. What do you say? And this is going to approach my last question like I can. Again, I have apologists in my mind all the time. Time. And they criticize secularism. And if someone were to say, you've just made God in your own image, you've made yourself God, basically. So instead of obeying God externally, you're just like being self driven, which is basically just being narcissistic or selfish or idolatrous. But from a standpoint of individuation and narcissism. Right?

Brad Reedy [02:47:20] Yeah, it's a great question. I really can't. First of all, I would listen to that person. I wouldn't try to convince them of anything of my way of seeing it. I understand where they're coming from. I have been there, so I understand what that's like. And so for them, I would just meet them where they're at and connect to them where we share. I wouldn't try to get them. I guess what I would say is I had rehearsed, as many people do, all of those debates in my head, to try to be right and good, good to leave and justify my leaving. And see, I'm not interested in justifying my leaving anymore. So your accusation. I mean what you think, and I don't mean this in an unkind way, in this kind of role play that you're playing. It doesn't matter to me because I live my whole life trying to live up to other people's standard. And it practically killed me.

John Dehlin [02:48:08] I mean, you wanted to die.

Brad Reedy [02:48:10] Yeah, it practically killed me. So I'm not interested in being right anymore in anybody's mind about how I look at God, God, religion, the church or anything. It's not of interest to me anymore. It makes no difference to me.

John Dehlin [02:48:23] But what is God?

Brad Reedy [02:48:25] My definition? Yeah, all of it. Everything. Alan Watts said that if Jesus had lived in India and said, I'm the son of God, they would have said, congratulations, you finally figured it out.

Samantha Shelley [02:48:39] I've been wanting to quote that for ages.

Guest [02:48:41] And since.

John Dehlin [02:48:41] What's the quote? Samantha? Have you internalized the quote?

Samantha Shelley [02:48:44] Like, if a Western person wakes up and is like, I've just realized I'm God, then we want to put them in a mental hospital.

John Dehlin [02:48:52] But if it's blasphemy, right?

Samantha Shelley [02:48:54] But if someone in the east said that, we'd be like, oh, thank God,

Brad Reedy [02:48:57] you realized at last, everything is sacred. Everybody is sacred. Joseph Campbell, in his book Thou Art that pointed out everybody is part of this massive creation. And the idea, I always wanted to say, say this. The argument that you have to believe in God because this couldn't come from nothing. But then where did God come from? It doesn't even. It's just a philosophical error begging the question, if God created all of this, which I understand the reasoning, well, then who created God? Because he's even bigger and better than all this. So we want to answer questions. I was in Santa Barbara last year, and I saw this Christian Scientist slogan that said, are you overwhelmed by the uncertainty of life? Mental health is largely your ability to sit with uncertainty and sit with ambiguity. But the defense of religion sometimes becomes the defense against God, against the experience of the divine that you're describing by that east, west comparison. So, for me, the answer of God is everything.

Spirituality, Uncertainty, and Current Beliefs

John Dehlin [02:49:55] It's so interesting because Mormonism has, in its theology, this idea of the divine within, that we're all children of our Heavenly Father and that we can all become God someday.

Brad Reedy [02:50:06] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:50:07] So on the one hand, it's not blasphemy for Mormon to say, I can become a God, but it is blasphemy for a Mormon to say, I am God.

Brad Reedy [02:50:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:50:15] Isn't that interesting?

Brad Reedy [02:50:16] It is.

Samantha Shelley [02:50:17] I also think that Mormons are still creating God in their own image, too. You know, it's all the same. Everybody's just like our different.

John Dehlin [02:50:25] How so?

Samantha Shelley [02:50:27] Well, people, even within Mormonism, people have completely different ideas about God depending on their. Their personal level of empathy or values or whatever.

Brad Reedy [02:50:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:50:35] Like, the things they choose to emphasize is just a reflection of what they care about, but they're projecting that onto God and then projecting it back on everybody else.

Samantha Shelley [02:50:43] Yeah. It's like, what's the highest thing we can imagine?

John Dehlin [02:50:46] Or what are the rules that we think God cares about most? And then we tell everybody they're falling short. So we're all divine is your. Is. Is a message and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brad Reedy [02:50:58] And then just think about what the implications are. How do you treat an other. As you quoted, there is no other. So all of a sudden, your relationship, the way going back to Christ's early followers, the way is different. It's a different way of seeing the world. It's a different way of relating. And so it's a different consciousness. It's a rebirth.

John Dehlin [02:51:21] Wow. All right, all right. Well, I did not know. I mean, I knew I was going to love today's interview or I wouldn't have done it. And I did not know I was going to love it this much. So, Brad Reedy, Dr. Brad Reedy, thank you for being willing to come on, especially since it was a little bit bumpy getting you here. There's backstory there, but we're not going to share it today.

Brad Reedy [02:51:47] Thanks for having me, John. It's A real honor to be here and to sit with you. And I love the work that you're doing. Many of my clients talk about your voice being life saving, being water in the desert for them, and life saving. So thank you for what you're doing for people.

John Dehlin [02:52:00] Well, we're trying, but I want more of your Z in what I do. Samantha, how are you feeling? What do you want to say to close and make sure and give yourself a shout out so people can also. And I want you to do this too, Brad. But, Samantha, go ahead and do whatever feels you're comfortable and any closing thoughts or feelings.

Samantha Shelley [02:52:22] I don't really have a spiel. It's samanthshellecoaching.com I just.

Brad's Work, Books, and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin [02:52:27] Who do you work with? What types of people do you work with?

Samantha Shelley [02:52:31] I mean, in theory, anyone, but it's a lot of people navigating faith and relationship transitions and sort of. I mean, learning to trust themselves. I would say. Everything we've talked about today has meant so much to me. There's not a single thing you said that isn't so deeply important to me. It's feeling a little bit overwhelming to have just had that conversation because I think it's pretty rare that you get to listen to someone for several hours who perfectly articulates all the things you care about and have spent a decade learning and caring about. And I'm inspired by your ability to voice them so well. And I'm also thrilled that it's now part of the Mormon stories universe, because I. Yeah, I'm so many of these ideas are things I'm always wanting to, like, be able to articulate, but, you know, still on the journey of figuring out how sometimes.

John Dehlin [02:53:40] So beautiful.

Samantha Shelley [02:53:42] I just feel really touched and grateful for these few hours.

John Dehlin [02:53:45] Well, thanks for helping make it happen, Samantha.

Samantha Shelley [02:53:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:53:48] It's always great to have you around.

Samantha Shelley [02:53:50] Yeah. I think I'm gonna have a little cry after this driving home.

John Dehlin [02:53:53] Okay. I love it. And Brad. Okay, so I'll just plug your books one more time. So the book that you start recommending is the Audacity to Be you, which is about basically finding the divinity within, I would say, in the context of what we just talked about. Learning to love your horrible, rotten self. That's book number one. Book number two in parenting, the journey of the heroic parent, your child's struggle, and the road home. We'll let Brooklyn and Julia make sure to include links to these books in the show notes. And then a most recent book. And I. I should thank Jeff because we wouldn't be Here without Jeff. You wouldn't be here without Jeff. So shout out to you, Jeff McClain and your dad, Michael McLean, in this book. Jeff, you were right. It is shameful that I didn't know who Brad Reedy was. And you had every right to be offended that I didn't know who Brad Reedy was. So kudos to you, Jeff McLean, for making this happen. And the book that Jeff and Michael McClain wrote together that you helped with is called Stay in the Room Room How a Gay Son and a Mormon Father Found themselves and each Other. And you helped with this book.

Brad Reedy [02:55:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:55:05] So aside from buying these books, what else do you do? And if people want to support you and or work with you, what types of things do you do? And yeah.

Brad Reedy [02:55:15] Findingyouprograms.com is our website.

John Dehlin [02:55:17] Finding new finding you. Finding you programs. Programs.com. okay.

Brad Reedy [02:55:23] Okay. The finding you podcast, I like to say it's just visiting a certain consciousness that I talk about and teach. I've done, done, done quite a few episodes.

John Dehlin [02:55:32] So is this audio only or video and audio?

Samantha Shelley [02:55:35] Both.

Brad Reedy [02:55:35] Some video, but it's audio primarily.

John Dehlin [02:55:37] Spotify. Where, where can you find it?

Brad Reedy [02:55:38] Spotify, itunes, anywhere.

Guest [02:55:41] Where?

Brad Reedy [02:55:41] Podcast. I've been doing it for 18 and a half years.

John Dehlin [02:55:43] YouTube.

Brad Reedy [02:55:45] Some YouTube. Probably about 500 are on YouTube. I don't have all of them on.

John Dehlin [02:55:48] Oh, wow. You've been doing this how, how long?

Brad Reedy [02:55:51] 18 and a half years. On the birth of my last child, on her birthday.

John Dehlin [02:55:55] You started a podcast that's almost as long as me.

Brad Reedy [02:55:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:55:58] I don't meet many people that have podcasts.

Brad Reedy [02:56:00] We were connected. I really did.

John Dehlin [02:56:03] Yeah. I've been in 21 years. You've been doing it 18.

Brad Reedy [02:56:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:56:06] That's amazing. Okay. Finding you podcast.

Brad Reedy [02:56:08] Yeah. Yeah. So. And then you can just Google. I speak, I teach. We run therapeutic retreats in Midway, Utah. People come for five days, seven at a time. Time.

John Dehlin [02:56:18] What's the profile?

Brad Reedy [02:56:20] The non acute individual. So as long as you're not dealing with something dangerous. Codependency is very common. Having a struggling loved one. A lot of people come with faith crisis also. So we're helping them navigate their family of origin issues which are of course very connected to their. Their larger context. So we do a five day experiential psychodrama. But based on Jung, based on what we've been talking about today, we help people find themselves a little bit more and get them set to know that the project is to find you seven

John Dehlin [02:56:54] people at a time.

Brad Reedy [02:56:55] Seven people at a time for five days.

John Dehlin [02:56:57] Do you mind sharing the price point, just for those who need to know

Brad Reedy [02:57:00] it is, yeah, $5,000 for five days.

John Dehlin [02:57:05] Okay. Yeah, but I mean, people come.

Brad Reedy [02:57:08] So it's all in value. Yeah, yeah. They come from all over the world. We get. Probably about 10% come from Utah. Utah. But they come from all over the world for it.

John Dehlin [02:57:15] How many of those a year do you do?

Brad Reedy [02:57:18] We do 12 of our flagship finding use and then we do tons of custom. I did one, I've done two others this. This month where I do like a couple or a family that wants a little bit more private attention. So we, we run several a month, and we run that flagship program once or twice a month, depending upon the month.

John Dehlin [02:57:36] So do you have a company like

Brad Reedy [02:57:38] employees finding your programs? Yeah, yeah. Finding new programs. I ran a wilderness therapy program for almost 30 years, and so I did that and we closed in 2024.

John Dehlin [02:57:49] Those don't have a great reputation these days.

Brad Reedy [02:57:51] They are largely misunderstood, for sure.

John Dehlin [02:57:53] Okay.

Brad Reedy [02:57:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:55] So we shouldn't throw them all out wholesale.

Brad Reedy [02:57:57] No, Wilderness therapy was the original therapy in the beginning anyway.

John Dehlin [02:58:01] It was all going, jesus went to the wilderness.

Brad Reedy [02:58:03] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:58:03] Okay.

Brad Reedy [02:58:04] So did Moses.

John Dehlin [02:58:05] Okay, okay, okay. How many employees?

Brad Reedy [02:58:10] Oh, our program just has a handful of employees. At Evoke Therapy, where I used to work, we had at the height, 700 employees.

John Dehlin [02:58:18] My goodness.

Brad Reedy [02:58:19] Yeah. Four locations nationally. But I transitioned to finding you where I just work with the non identified patient, typically the one who thinks that it's their child or their spouse or their loved one that is causing their suffering. And we help them to find their own source of the suffering that's inside of them.

John Dehlin [02:58:35] I love that approach. Very cool. Finding you program.

Brad Reedy [02:58:42] Finding you therapy programs.

John Dehlin [02:58:44] Okay, okay.

Brad Reedy [02:58:45] Findingyourprograms.com is the website and what if

John Dehlin [02:58:48] somebody says five grand, that's too much, I can't afford that. What do you say?

Brad Reedy [02:58:51] We have some scholarships. We've actually had some wonderful LDS active folks who have contributed to our scholarship funds. So we have some scholarship available so you can reach out to us and see what's available. I'm also running a workshop at the Omega Institute in New York this, this summer with my daughter, and then at the Art of Living Retreat center in Boone, North Carolina, later. So I also travel all over the world and speak and teach and run workshops, and those are anywhere between free and like. The workshop in New York and North Carolina are $500 for a full week, for example.

John Dehlin [02:59:21] That's cheaper.

Brad Reedy [02:59:22] That's a lot cheaper.

Samantha Shelley [02:59:23] And 20 years of podcasts.

John Dehlin [02:59:24] What's that?

Samantha Shelley [02:59:25] 20 years of podcasts for free.

John Dehlin [02:59:27] Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. And on the one hand, 5,000 bucks is a lot of money. Have you seen someone's life transformed in a week? I know you're going to say yes or you wouldn't do it, but yeah,

Brad Reedy [02:59:40] it's the most powerful intervention I've been associated with. And my wife accurately accuses me of overselling everything that I love, whether it's a movie or a toothbrush.

John Dehlin [02:59:51] I do that.

Brad Reedy [02:59:52] And so I oversell finding you, of course. And people tell me invariably that no matter how much I oversold it, that it exceeded their expectations. It is a transformative process that I have been through 13 times myself somewhere else. So I am also a customer. My family, all of my adults in my family, my older two children, my wife, have also been through one somewhere else. So we believe that the answers to the most important questions are found when we look inside. And that's what finding you is. Looking inside, looking at your history, are

John Dehlin [03:00:21] you saying this is a model that you've adopted that other people have been doing?

Brad Reedy [03:00:25] We have taken other people's ideas and we have expanded upon. Ours is a much more attachment based, Jungian kind of approach than others. But the idea of looking at family, of origin, of using psychodrama role plays. You get to have a conversation with your father, somebody playing the role of your father. But what's cool is we get to hear what you think he would say back to you. And now we start to feel what your childhood feels like. So you go back and you say, dad, dad, it wasn't okay that you did this to me or said this. And then we role play that. And then we get to hear you get in the role of your father and say, what would he have said back to you? And now we can feel your childhood. Now we understand why you're struggling today because we understand the soup that you were cooked in.

John Dehlin [03:01:07] Sounds like a little bit of parts work.

Brad Reedy [03:01:09] Parts work for sure, is a great example. Object relations parts work. Inner child work based on the work of Jung. And we love Alice Miller and her book the drama the Gifted Child. Also an understanding that it is our histories that are haunting us today. Like in Al Anon, if you're overreacting, like happened this week, if you're overreacting to something they say in Al Anon, if it's hysterical, it's historical. So we think that the roots of what we're struggling with today are facts down in our histories. So we go back.

John Dehlin [03:01:44] Love it. All right, Brad Reedy. Dr. Brad Reedy. Thank you for coming on Mormon Stories. What a gift. What a blessing.

Brad Reedy [03:01:52] Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [03:01:53] Keep up the good work. Thank you, Samantha. Thanks for making this happen.

Samantha Shelley [03:01:56] Thank you, Dr. John De Lynn.

John Dehlin [03:01:59] All right, and thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Thanks to Brooklyn and Julia for all they do behind the scenes to make this possible and and Margi. And thanks to our donors that make this podcast possible. We couldn't do without you. If you value this type of content and you want to see, continue MormonStories.org donate. You can also subscribe and like and share and comment. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com we are being sued by the Mormon Church. We believe to be silenced and shut down and defamed. That's just my opinion. If you want to support our legal fund mormonstories.org legal and most importantly, we just hope all we do is helpful to you and your healing and growth. So enjoy today. Apply if you want to be on the podcast mormonstories.org apply we love great new interesting stories. So that's how you do it. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Find your inner divinity, which is discover your best self. The journey of the heroic person, the audacity to be you. Learn to love your horrible, rotten self so that instead of trying to be good. Sorry, instead of trying to be perfect or even good, you can be you. In the name of Brad Reedy, amen. And in the name of Jesus and Gandhi and all the great philosophers. Take care everybody. Be well. See you soon. Bye.

Brad Reedy [03:03:29] I want to date with Rawls Carty says. Rawls Rocca asks.

Samantha Shelley [03:03:34] This is the love story of real

Brad Reedy [03:03:36] hinge couple Carty and Rocca written and read by me, Nicola Dinan. Listen to the free audiobook now.

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