S7E05: Summer Series: Taking a Break From...Setting Goals

It's the first week of school for many students and families. The excitement of a new school year comes with new relationships, new beginnings, and setting goals. For many folks, especially those who grew up in conservative religious environments, setting goals can carry an enormous amount of anxiety with it. 

This week, Julia and Jeremiah explore what it might look like to engage with the back-to-school season without the pressure of setting goals. We discuss:

• Goals (2:00): Jeremiah kicks us off, “The pressure to constantly be achieving goals is not unique to Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal communities, or those coming out of highly controlled communities. However, if you are in the exvangelical or deconstructing types of communities, you may struggle with concepts of productivity or purposes for some pretty unique reasons.”

• Pressure to Be Excited (5:00): Julia notes, “Those back to school ads seem to suggest that we should all be getting back to something, even if it's not school. There's a pressure to be excited about it.”

• Heaven: The Ultimate Goal (10:00): Jeremiah highlights, “The biggest goal in these communities is getting to heaven, which you can do through a variety of methods. There was much more dialogue around the behaviors that would get you rejected from heaven than the behaviors that would allow you into heaven.”

• Double Binds & Goals (12:00): Julia discusses, “I learned that the most important thing I could do was help the non Christians get to heaven through the process of evangelism. However, here was the double bind. I also learned that these secular folks were dangerous. So I had very little contact with anyone who was not in my fundamentalist community. The double bind was to save as many souls as possible and don't spend too much time with the people that need saving because they're dangerous.”

• The Goal of Play (13:00): Jeremiah points out that in EMPish circles, “Play can't be play. Play has to have a goal. It has to have a function to it.”

• EMPish Communities & Developmental Loss (18:00): Julia notes, “Folks who survive high control religious groups experience what a previous therapist of mine would call a developmental loss. In the context of today's episode, this might mean that the anxiety of witnessing to your friends, the hypervigilance about modesty, and the learned denial of needs for the sake of the kingdom that impeded your ability to play, use your imagination, and so forth.”

• The Concept of “I’m Third” (20:00): Julia shares, “The concept was I'm third, which means that the goals of the kingdom of God and the needs of others always supersede your own. For me, this meant that even basic human needs like sleeping, eating, and engaging in leisure activities were either discouraged or came with a deep sense of guilt denying myself was something honorable.”

• Athletics & the EMPish (23:00): Jeremiah draws the parallel, “I actually think that there are a lot of similarities between folks who grew up in evangelical communities and folks who do either professional or collegiate athletics. The requirements are often the same. The outcome of that is people who have this sense that I am only successful when I'm able to achieve high quantities of things.” 

• The Weight of Heaven or Hell (26:00): Julia says, “Small decisions can still provoke anxiety for me. I often have to remind myself that what I eat for dinner or how I spend an hour of leisure time are decisions that don't hold the weight of heaven or hell. They can actually just be neutral choices. I also don't think it's a coincidence that for many folks, these small decisions that hold so much anxiety are often around basic needs. Sleep, food, exercise.”

• Westminster Shorter Catechism (29:00): Julia shares, “So let's say my friend is quizzing me on a question. If I use the article “A” rather than the article “The”, that would be a point off. And we would dock each other to the most extreme degree. The absolute vicious rigid perfectionism that the adults enforced on me and my peers created a culture of anxiety, perfectionism, and competition.”

• Rubrics for Educational Success (31:00): Jeremiah discusses, “I'm also thinking about education and what the purpose of education is. And do we know that we have successful students by their ability, ability to think critically, to be creative or their ability to fall into line and repeat back and regurgitate back what adults are giving them? And in your system that you grew up in, it's very much the goal is getting it right, getting it perfect, rather than stretching yourself, or imagining something new, or being curious, or any other rubrics for potential success in education.”

• Guilt (34:00): Jeremiah says, “The fourth consequence to the Christian obsession with evangelism directly ties to the theme of this episode, which is that taking breaks from goals can come with massive amounts of guilt and shame. When a person's soul is in a balance between heaven and hell, how can you even consider taking a break? Even after a person leaves a high control religious group, the guilt and shame that can follow them makes it extremely difficult to take a break without spiraling.”

• On-Ramp/Off-Ramp & Taking a Break (38:00): Julia says, “Something that Jeremiah and I talk about with our clients, and something that we talk about on the podcast, is the on ramp and the off ramp towards a sexual experience. Thinking about sexuality as more than what happens with foreplay and genitals is highly essential. The on and the off ramp may be longer, or a person might need to make more modifications. You are not obligated to power through your exhaustion to have a sexual experience. In fact, it might be better not to”

• Making Decisions (42:00): Julia offers, “Ask yourself, are you the kind of person when you are feeling anxious about a present moment decision? Ask yourself, are you more prone to make a reactive knee jerk decision? And then the best step is going to be slowing that down. Grab a drink of water, go to the bathroom, move your body for 30 seconds, really gently challenge yourself to slow that decision making down. If you are like me and you are more prone to getting stuck in paralysis, actually the best thing to do is to speed that up a little bit.”

• Pressure & Sexuality (47:00): Jeremiah gives a piece of advice, “Let's reframe the performative, goal oriented approach to sexuality.  Orgasm and penetration is not the pinnacle. It's not indicative of a positive, successful sexual experience. It could be, but it doesn't have to be.  Ask yourself what the relationship might need. If that's laughter or play, consider a touch experience, a physical experience, a sexual experience that allows you to access that without putting too much pressure on it.”

• Urgency Trap (50:00): Jeremiah discusses the last bit of Relationship 101, “Be aware and avoid to the best of your ability, the urgency trap and the urgency trap is this anything that tells you, Hey, the best time to do this is now.”

• Rushing Desire (54:00): Julia notes, “Rushing into sexual scenarios is not typically a great recipe. Now, if you've got the capacity and you want to have an orgy every weekend, awesome, by all means, have so much fun with it. But what I have noticed within myself and now after many years of practicing within this community is that often the desire for those more diverse experiences comes from urgency rather than a personal internal desire. Two different types of desire. An urgency desire versus a personal internal desire.”