June 3, 2025 • 38 mins
One of the most common questions I’ve been asked in the past ten years is if I would talk about my evolving process with the Christian faith of my childhood.
I even recorded an episode called, “Are you still a Christian?” here:
Finally, after years of avoiding and evading the question, after nearly a decade of processing and evolving privately, I’m ready to share parts of my experience.
The concept of deconstruction can be feared and even demonized but the reality is that the deconstruction of a story is a natural and healthy part of the creative process. We are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing the narratives in our lives — and for good reason!
As you listen, consider what you might be deconstructing in your life.
If nothing comes to mind, ask yourself: what story that I’m currently telling might need to be deconstructed and looked at from a new angle?
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about a topic that I actually have been asked to
talk about several times, and I've avoided addressing this topic
in part because it felt like, well, it's kind of
(00:44):
off brand, it's not really what I'm talking about on
this podcast anyway, or on my Instagram or anywhere else.
And in part also I think, if I'm being honest,
I've avoided talking about this topic because it feels a
little bit like it's so personal to me, it's so
so specific to my situation. It's somewhat of a sacred topic,
(01:05):
something that I've been really wrestling with in my personal
life over the course of the last decade, I would
guess since I went through my divorce, and so it
hasn't been something that I've really felt comfortable talking about
more publicly. The topic that I want to talk about
today is deconstruction. And I think one of the reasons
why so many people have asked me to address this
topic is because if you're kind of in my ecosystem,
(01:27):
if you've heard these episodes, if you follow me on Instagram,
you probably have picked up on context clues that although
I was raised in the evangelical Christian Church, that my view,
my worldview, has evolved so significantly over the course of
the last ten years or so that my faith is
really different now than it was back then, and I
(01:49):
don't hold many of the same beliefs or ideologies that
are held by the traditional Christian Church. And so I
think people who are all so in that process of
evaluating and reevaluating, like how do I see the world,
and what do I think about these sort of hot
button topics or issues, and what is my theology? And
(02:10):
what do I really believe about God? And what do
I believe about Heaven and Hell? And where do we
go when we die? And these questions that are very
human to ask ourselves, and that so many people are asking.
I think I believe people who are really healthy and
integrated and you know, are very human are asking these questions,
and so those people out there who are also asking
(02:32):
those questions are looking at me and going it seems
like she must be asking them too, And so they're
wanting me to share more of my story because this
is how we connect us by sharing stories, and so
my story is just my story. It's not anything that's
spectacular or unique. In fact, I think that there are
hundreds of thousands of people who are going through the
same process or experience that I am, as it relates
(02:53):
to the faith of our upbringing, and not only evangelicals,
but like if you grew up Catholic, or you grew
up Hindu or Buddhis or you grew up in a cult,
or you grew up you know, seeing the world one way.
I think it's extremely common to leave your hometown, or
leave your nuclear family, or be launched into the world
and be introduced to different ideas and different ways of
(03:16):
seeing the world in different people who see things different ways,
and go, huh, I wonder if there's something worth paying
attention to here. I wonder if the way that I
was always taught that things went is the only way
that they could go or I wonder if there's more
to this, and so we start to kind of explore
and what I would call deconstruct those original beliefs. And
(03:36):
I'm of the belief and one of the reasons i
want to talk about this today is I'm of the
belief that deconstruction is an extremely healthy thing to do,
and healthy people are deconstructing their worldview over and over
and over again until they die. And one of the
things that I've noticed as I've done my own deconstruction,
and as I've talked about deconstruction not even publicly, but
(03:58):
just in friend groups or in mixed company sort of
thing like mingling at a party, is that when you
bring up the word deconstruction, it brings up a lot
for people. It's an extremely triggering word, especially for those
who grew up in the church, or at least that's
just my experience that for those who haven't necessarily deconstructed
(04:19):
the original faith container of their upbringing, the word deconstruction
is almost like a frightening word. And I think there's
a reason for that. I want to talk about the
reason why this can be so intimidating and so scary,
And so we'll talk about all of this today. We'll
talk about what is deconstruction. We'll talk about why, in
my view, this is an absolutely integral part of being
(04:42):
a healthy human being. Every healthy human, in my opinion,
will deconstruct many times over the course of their lifetime.
And we'll talk about why deconstructing anything, any worldview can
be an extremely unsettling experience. And I want to talk
about all of through the lens of sharing my own
personal story. So I want to start by saying that
(05:04):
I started deconstructing the faith of my upbringing. I mean,
it's hard to put a date on it, actually, because
I look back now and see moments when I was
asking really tricky questions, even as a teenager. But I
really started deconstructing when my first marriage fell apart in
twenty fifteen. So I was married to a pastor. He
and I planted a church together in South Florida, and
(05:27):
we were in ministry together for the entire time that
we were together, which honestly wasn't that long. We were
married almost exactly four years. We were dating and engaged
for less than six months. I think from the day
I met him to the day we got married was
around four months, which is insane, by the way, but
was also a product of my upbringing and the container
that I was handed as a child and as a
(05:49):
teen and as a twenty something. My worldview affected in
a massive way the speed at which I met this
person and married him, the choices that we made for
our wedding and our life together and our wedding night
and all those different things. And so I was married
to this person. We had this one life together. I
(06:13):
uncovered some evidence that was extremely shocking to me because
it basically just confirmed for me something that I had
been thinking for a while, which is that this person
wasn't who I thought he was, and that thread. I
used this analogy a lot, but it was like pulling
on the thread of a sweater that was coming apart,
pulling on the loose thread. The minute I pulled on
(06:35):
that thread, the entire sweater unraveled, and the sweater included
my business because we were in business together. It included
my marriage, it included my worldview, it included my faith.
It was like having the rug completely pulled out from
underneath of me and kind of having to go back
to the drawing board. In terms of what I thought
about life and how I saw the world, and what
(06:57):
I thought about marriage, what I thought about divorce, And
it was a really heavy and horrible and depressing time
on the one hand in my life, and also on
the other hand, I look back now and I can
see that period of time with such gratitude because it
was an inherent deconstruction. In fact, I would say a
divorce in general is an inherent deconstruction because you have to,
(07:19):
in order to get divorced, rethink what you thought when
you first married this person. Nobody gets married and goes
I'm going to get married. I'm just going to see
how it goes, and then after a while we're going
to get divorced. I just don't believe anybody walks into
marriage with that kind of a mindset. I think there
are a lot of different reasons to get divorced. But
no matter your reason for getting divorced, it's not a
(07:42):
reason that you could have foreseen on your wedding day. Otherwise,
probably I'm guessing you probably wouldn't have gotten married. You
would have just lived together or had a partnership or
something like that that you would have expected to sort
of evolve out of. But because of the way our
culture works. And because of how, at least how I
was taught about marriage, marriage was not something that I
(08:03):
walked into lightly. It was not something I walked into
thinking that it would end after a period of time.
And so when my marriage fell apart, I had to
really reconsider, you know, who was I on the day
that I chose to marry this person? How have I
evolved as a person? And I can't even see things
the way that I used to see them. I have
to learn to see them in a whole new way.
And it was extremely unsettling, and yet, as I mentioned before,
(08:27):
it's also a time that I look back on with
a lot of gratitude because it initiated my deconstruction. And
I said this a few times already, and I'll say
it more times before this episode is over. But I
really believe with every fiber of my being that deconstruction
is something that healthy people do. And so deconstruction, as
scary and as unsettling as it can be, is just
(08:47):
something that's part of the human experience. And if you're
doing it, each time that you're doing it, you're becoming
more integrated, you're becoming bigger, you're becoming more evolved, you're becoming.
You have a broader worldview, more or compassion, You have
a deeper understanding of what it means to be here
and to be alive and to be on this planet.
I really believe that that's true. I don't think that
(09:08):
you can access those things without deconstructing and reconstructing your
reality multiple times. And so this is why we have
chapters and seasons of our lives. You know, if you
never deconstructed, you would also never leave high school. You'd
never leave grade school, you never leave college, you'd never
leave home, you'd never move away from your parents, You'd
never you know, evolve out of something that used to
(09:28):
fit you and now doesn't fit you. In order to
evolve out of those things, we have to deconstruct and reconstruct.
So another layer that I'll add to this part of
my personal story is that I have been saying to
my therapist and to my husband and to my close
friends for the last couple of years that I feel
like I'm going through my second deconstruction because I started
my first deconstruction. It's not really true, because just like
(09:51):
I'm saying, I've been through probably ten deconstructions in my life.
It's just not. They weren't something that I would have
called a deconstruction. So now I'm going through or what
I keep calling my second deconstruction, because I had my
first big deconstruction in twenty fifteen when I left my
marriage and filed for divorce. That was my first big deconstruction.
It was like the deconstruction of the faith container of
(10:14):
my childhood, which felt like a really big deconstruction because
the faith container of my childhood. And you'll notice how
different deconstructions feel different depending on how attached you were
to the current scaffolding. But the faith container of my
childhood was such a massive piece of stability and security
(10:36):
for me that to stand back and question those tenants
of my faith was like unthinkable in some ways. And
I mean the marriage ending really kicked this off because
something else that was unthinkable for me in terms of
my past worldview was getting divorced. In fact, my unw
(11:00):
willingness to consider getting divorced is what kept me in
an extremely unhealthy, toxic and abusive marriage for as long
as I was because if I had not had the
worldview that divorce was wrong and I was never going
to get divorced and divorce was for other people, and
it wasn't for me, and it wasn't for my family.
If I hadn't had that worldview, I would have left
that marriage on day one. I mean pretty much twenty
(11:22):
four hours after we got married. I would have left
the marriage. It was that bad. It was just really
that toxic and that uncomfortable. But because I had the
worldview that I did, I stayed in that marriage for
a really long time. So when the marriage crumbled and
fell apart, when I willingly chose to go to the
attorney's office and file for divorce, it was inevitable that
(11:43):
I was also saying, I'm changing my mind about this,
I'm reconsidering my views on divorce, and in order to
move forward with my life and make the decision that
I could feel that I knew was right for me
in that time, I had to completely reconsider that worldview,
the worldview that divorce was wrong, divorce was for other people.
(12:04):
I was never going to get divorced. Nobody in my
family got divorced. I was part of this long lineage
of marriages that you know, chose to stick it out.
I had to willingly decide that I was going to
unwind and untangle that worldview and choose a different worldview.
And that's exactly what a deconstruction is is it's unwinding
the narrative we were telling ourselves and choosing a different narrative.
(12:28):
And so that's what I had to do in order
to get divorced. And because that experience took place, because
I welcomed that experience, it also cascaded into these other
parts of my life, including my faith container and the
divorce narrative. The divorce scaffolding was part of the broader
faith scaffolding. You know, there were so many different things
(12:50):
that I was taught as a young person that I
don't categorize necessarily as good or bad. There are some
of them that you know, are extremely problematic, But I
don't necessarely categorize that initial scaffolding is good or bad necessarily.
But there comes a point where the scaffolding that you're
using no longer works for you, and you have to
be willing to let that scaffolding go and choose a
(13:12):
new scaffolding. So did the scaffolding of let's say heaven
and hell? Did the scaffolding of save yourself until marriage?
Did the scaffolding of don't ever get divorced. Did the
scaffolding of make sure you marry someone who's a Christian.
Did that scaffolding serve me for a period of time?
Obviously it did, or I wouldn't have chosen it. You know,
(13:33):
it provided me with a lot of things, including a
sense of security and safety, and a sense of moral superiority,
because as long as I followed the rules and checked
these boxes, then I could feel good about myself and
feel like a good person. So I had those that
scaffolding for a period of time that served me in
certain ways. And then there came a point where that
scaffolding stopped serving me, and I had to let the
(13:55):
scaffolding go and create something new. And I think this
is where a lot of us get stuck. I don't
want to get too far ahead of myself, but I
do think this is where a lot of us get
stuck because we recognize that the scaffolding that we're holding,
or the scaffolding that's built around us, is no longer
serving us. But because it's so unsettling to let it go,
we choose not to let it go. Sometimes life pushes
(14:18):
us out of the nest and I feel like that
has been my story over and over and over again.
I don't know if I like made some kind of
agreement before I came here, you know, if my soul
knew that this was my purpose or whatever. And so
it's my higher self that's kind of pushing me out
of the nest. But I feel like, over and over
again in my life, I haven't been really even given
an option to stay stagnant. It's just like, Nope, we're
(14:39):
gonna move on to the next thing, and it's going
to be extremely uncomfortable and unsettling, and yet we're going
to do it anyway. And so that's what happened in
twenty fifteen when the rug was pulled out from underneath
of me, and I feel like that's in some ways
what has been happening for me and for Matt since
we got married in twenty nineteen. Late twenty nineteen. COVID
(14:59):
hit in March of two And I'm not going to
repeat the whole story because if you've been here a while,
you've heard it a million times. But essentially the sweater
began to unravel again in March of twenty twenty when
COVID hit and things just didn't go the way that
we expected them to go. I have been in a
second process of totally deconstructing my worldview that has been
(15:20):
extremely uncomfortable and extremely unsettling. And yet I have to
trust that this is leading me to more depth, more compassion,
a more complete understanding of how the world works. Because
you know, when you have one set of scaffolding, you think, oh,
I get it, I know how the world works now.
And I do think that life or God or the
universe or whatever likes to kind of show us like, no, no, no,
(15:41):
you don't have it all figured out. You don't have
it all worked out. You know, it feels nice for
a second to be there where you're like, I have
it figured out. I know the way the world works.
I understand the inner workings of this thing. And then
things begin to unravel and you realize like, oh, there's
actually more to the story. There is actually more to
the story than I ever knew before. And this deconstruction,
(16:04):
any deconstruction, whatever deconstruction you are in, is about you
learning more depths to the story than you were ever
able to see before. So let me try to summarize
this really quickly. So twenty fifteen, my marriage falls apart.
(16:26):
I'm deconstructing mostly the faith of my upbringing, my evangelical
Christian faith, and trying to ask myself the questions about like, okay,
so if that's not how things work, then how does
the world work? Is there a God? Is there? Heaven?
Is there hell? What do I believe about all these things?
Do I need to go to church every Sunday? I've
gone to church every Sunday for my entire life. What
(16:47):
does life even look like if I'm not connected and
involved in a church? You know, what do relationships look
like if they don't have to fit this rigid understanding
of male roles and female roles? What is the meaning
or the sacred dis or the sanctity of marriage if
some marriages do end and some marriages should end like
in my experience, and you know, how do I conduct
(17:10):
myself as a thirty something year old woman who is
divorced and who's dating and trying to connect with people
and really wanting a partnership and really wanting to be
in a partnership slash a marriage hopefully that was my
goal that would last where I could build a family.
How do I move through the world as a divorced
(17:30):
woman in my thirties who's not eighteen anymore. I'm not sixteen.
I'm not saving myself for marriage because I've already been married.
So how do I move through the world under those conditions?
And so these are all questions that I'm asking myself
back in that period of time. Then I meet Matt,
then we get married, then we start our own family.
There's a ton of stability that comes into my life.
(17:52):
He and I are both in the same place as
far as deconstructing the faith of our childhood and sort
of rebuilding a new faith that feels like, Okay, I
do feel connected to God. There is something bigger at
work here. I am understanding how the world works in
a new way. I'm understanding my connected is to all
things in a new way. And Matt and I are
(18:13):
navigating all of that together. So even though there was
always questions, it felt like a lot more stability in
my scaffolding came into my life when Matt and I
got married and when we started our family together, and
then COVID happened, and it felt like it set me
on this whole new trajectory of deconstruction. One thing that
(18:34):
feels important to say about this second deconstruction was that
I found myself deconstructing ideas that were very similar to
ideas I'd had in the first deconstruction, but just with
a little bit of a different face on them. And
I think this is something to think about as it
relates to deconstruction, because human beings really cling to certainty
and to security. We really like to feel like I
(18:56):
know how the world works, I know what this is
all about, I know what I'm supposed to do. I
have my list of expectations. I can just sort of
check the boxes, do the things, follow the rules, and
get the payoff that I'm looking for. And so even
when we deconstruct, even when we're forced, we're pushed into
this season of deconstructing, I think it's extremely easy. And
(19:17):
I've watched this happen for not just myself and for
mat but also many people that I've watched to go
through this experience. It's extremely common to grab on to
a new set of scaffolding that is slightly different, but
at its essence still the same, because if you think
about it, you've got these neural pathways that are carved
in your brain, like the neural pathway of divorce is bad.
(19:38):
Don't ever get divorced. So if that's a neural pathway
that's carved in your brain, then to deconstruct it is
extremely upsetting to the equilibrium of your brain. And also like,
you have this pathway that you've driven one hundred thousand
times in your life telling yourself divorces bad, divorces bad,
divorce is bad. So when you try to veer away
(20:03):
from that path just human have, it is going to
take you back to something that maybe is different, but
that sounds kind of similar, and you might not even
realize that it sounds similar. Sometimes things that sound similar
can actually be quite opposite. Like I don't know if
you've ever seen someone swing in the pendulum from being
like I am never going to touch alcohol to like
I can love Jesus and still drink all the time.
(20:24):
And I actually know people who have the pendulum has
swung quite far and they're drinking becomes even I would
call problematic, even though they're saying like drinking is fine.
You know, Jesus turned water into wine. That sort of thing.
You can see how the scaffolding. It's so comforting to
have that scaffolding that replacing the old scaffolding with the
(20:47):
new scaf scaffolding, Like drinking is fine, Drinking is fine,
Drinking is fine, but there's still that same kind of
attachment to that scaffolding. There's not a real freedom to
make a choice out of nothing, like to make a
choice out of your own intuition or out of your
own the present moment or whatever, because you're still so
(21:08):
attached to this scaffolding. So I found myself in this
second deconstruction realizing that I had adopted beliefs that seemed
different than evangelicalism, but that actually were complimentary or actually
were very similar ideas to evangelicalism, and they were comforting
(21:31):
ideas to me that I could grab onto or hold
on to for the sake of comfort or security. And
it's almost like, in these last five years, life has
been saying to me, are you willing to really let
it go for good? Are you willing to really let
go of the white knuckle grip that you have on
this feeling like you've got it figured out, like you
(21:52):
know how the world works, you know how life works.
And I feel like I'm being sort of edged into
this new season or new phase of life where I'm
being asked or being invited to maybe just not know
for a second. And so I started to become aware
that in my first deconstruction, as I'm calling it, it
(22:15):
was really about stepping back and abandoning some of the
theology that I had been taught for my entire life,
simply because like there was a lot of stuff going
on in that culture, in that environment that was just
extremely hypocritical, and inside of my marriage was just simply
a microcosm of that, but it was actually going on
(22:35):
at a much larger on a much larger scale. So
you know, like these famous Instagram pastors or whatever are
falling from grace, and you're realizing like behind the scenes, okay,
you're preaching on a stage every Sunday, you're saying you
believe these things. You're telling people how to live their life,
and then behind the scenes you're actually hanging with strippers
and hiring sex workers, and so one thing doesn't match
(22:57):
the other. So there's like so much hypocrisy that for
me to sit in a church building and listen to
you tell me how to live my life when you
clearly have your own integration work to do as all
human beings do just feels like a very strange way
to do things. And the other thing that happened in
that first deconstruction was an abandonment of the pieces of
(23:20):
theology from my upbringing that just simply felt inhumane. So,
for example, things like this idea that women are not
supposed to be in a leadership positions, like women aren't
supposed to be pastors, women aren't supposed to be on stage.
Women are supposed to be silent on Sundays at church.
You know, the church that I grew up in, the
women were allowed to teach in the childcare but only
(23:43):
to age only sorry to fifth grade, because based on
the understanding of that church's theology, the sixth grade boys
were too old to be taught by a woman. The
women were allowed to sing background vocals, but they weren't
allowed to sing on the main mic. And I have
a really vivid memory of being like twelve years old
and having on a Sunday, the small group leaders being
(24:07):
introduced to the church and there's maybe like, you know,
twelve to fifteen couples on the stage, and the guy
would get the microphone and he would introduce himself and
introduce his wife, and then he would pass the microphone
past his wife to the next man, who would introduce
himself and introduce his wife and say like, this is
where our small group is happening, et cetera, et cetera.
There were things like that that I just started putting
(24:27):
the pieces together and going like, this isn't how I
want to live, and this isn't fair. And just because
these this one group of people says that this works
this way, how does that make it true? And is
their freedom outside of this scaffolding where maybe I could
be a leader. I could be in a leadership position,
not necessarily in the church, but where like women do
have important things to say and should be given the
(24:49):
microphone and should be given platforms, and do need to
be sharing their perspective and their stories. So things like that,
things like shutting out LGBTQ folks, like things like Christian nationalism,
for example, this idea that just because you're a Christian
that you need to align yourself with a certain political party.
Concepts like even abortion, which is just such a sacred
(25:11):
cow in the church, but is such a more nuanced
conversation than anyone is willing to have in the church,
and so I'm witnessing all this happen, the hypocrisy, the
gender differentials, the bigotry, all of it, like the whole picture.
I was like, this is not working for me anymore.
This scaffolding is not serving me, and I would like
(25:32):
to evolve beyond this scaffolding. And so as I let
go of that scaffolding, I found myself in a place
where there was so much freedom to be who I was,
to move through the world in a way that felt
more comfortable to me, to open my heart to things
and to people that I never felt I was given
(25:54):
permission to open my heart to before books, you know, teachers, ideas, concepts, people,
human beings. Like suddenly, I'm like, wait, I was taught
my whole life to be wary and sort of scared
of people who lived differently than me, or thought differently
than me, or taught these you know, different concepts. It
was a slippery slope. If I read this book or
(26:15):
listen to this podcast or entertained this person's thoughts, and
all of a sudden, it was like the whole world
was open to me, and it was such a freeing feeling,
even though there were times when it was definitely extremely scary,
and yet I found myself at times also latching on
to new ideas or new ways of seeing things. Like
(26:36):
here's just an example. I'll give you a specific example
so you can, you know, sink your teeth into this.
One specific example is astrology. I was taught my entire
life that astrology was evil, and that if I listened
to an astrologer or even entertained the idea of an astrologer,
that it was such a slippery slope that it was
going to, you know, taint my thinking and drag me
(26:58):
down this slippery slope. I was going to go to hell.
And when I stepped away from those ideas of my childhood,
and when I stopped going to church and left that
community and that ideology, I was able to open my
heart and my mind to astrology. And so I started
listening to podcasts and started reading things, and started learning
(27:19):
about my birth chart and learning about my sun moon
and rising sign, and having conversations with people about this,
and it was so exciting at first. It was like,
you know, it's so amazing that there's an opportunity to
get to see the world through a different lens. And
that's just one example of a hundred I could give
you of ways that I was like, I can connect
(27:41):
with God or spirit or universe or whatever you want
to call it. I can connect with this thing that's
bigger than me, that's operating. It's so clear to me
that I'm not alone in the universe, So I can
connect with that without it being this old way of thinking.
And it felt so open and really free. And then
over time, as I dug into this even further, I
(28:02):
realized it's not just astrology. I'm not bagging on astrology
at all, but I did begin to realize that I
had in some ways replaced the old with the new. So,
in other words, like if you have an attachment to
astrology and you always need to know like what's going
on in the stars, or what's going on the planets,
or you know, something weird happens, so mercury must be
(28:23):
in retrograde if you always have to be so attached
to that one way of thinking, it almost is like
this weird replacement for the old scaffolding. So it's like
old scaffolding gone freedom, But now I have this new scaffolding,
and so the freedom doesn't I can't taste the freedom
quite in the same way, I don't have as much
access to it as I used to have, And so
(28:53):
I began to realize a couple of months ago that
this process that I've been going through for the last
couple of years is actually, I'm calling it my second deconstruction.
It's basically an opportunity to let go of the tight,
white knuckled grip that I have on needing to know
how things work, needing to know how the universe works,
(29:14):
needing to know where we go when we die. I
think it's extremely human to have these questions, and I
think it's also human to not totally have the answers.
We can feel into the answers, we can imagine what
the answers might be, we can have long conversations about
what the answers are, we can try on a million
different lenses about the answers. But the fact of the
matter is, you don't know where we go when we die.
(29:35):
And think about this. This might be triggering for you
if you still are very attached to a certain worldview
or a certain scaffolding, and it is triggering for me
on some levels too. But think about how insane it
would sound for you to say you know what happens
when we die. Unless you've had a death experience where
you've died and then come back, you don't know what
(29:56):
happens when we die. You know, it's everything that we
could imagine aspecative. And so for someone to say like, no,
I know it's specifically this, I know it's reincarnation, or
I know we go to heaven, or heaven looks like
this or is like this or whatever, is all just like,
think of the insanity of it for you to act
like you know something that you don't know. And yet
(30:16):
many of us do this, and I still find myself
doing it on many occasions. So this is not like
a you're doing this and I'm not thing. It's like
it's a human tendency to grab on to whatever makes
us feel a sense of stability and security and certainty
when the reality of the matter is that life is
an uncertain thing and there are no guarantees in this life,
(30:37):
and the more that we can relax into that and
surrender into that, the happier I believe that will be.
And yet everyone has their coping mechanisms, and maybe this
is just my coping mechanism is certainty, But I think
certainty is a coping mechanism for so many people who say, like, no,
I know for sure. The Bible says this, you know,
God told me that I'm supposed to X, Y and
(30:59):
Z or whatever. The fact of the matter is, we
don't have certainty about anything. And I'll share this last
story and then i'll wrap up. But one of the
reasons why the fall apart of this business venture that
my husband and I had been working on for the
last couple of years was so devastating for me, and
this is one of the things that initiated my second deconstruction,
(31:19):
as I'm calling it, was that I had these really
spiritual experiences where I here's an example, I had a
dream and in the dream, an angel came to me
and told me, I have a message for your husband.
I've been trying to get the message through he's not
hearing the message. So here's the message. And it was
three things that were very specific that one of which
(31:39):
I completely didn't understand, and only Matt understood when I
told him. And there were so many moments spiritually where
it felt like I had such certainty that this was
the path that we were meant to be on, and
the way that I would have said it back then
was like, this is going to work. This is going
to work. You know, we are way out on a limb,
but this is going to work. And I felt so
(32:01):
sure of that. I felt like God had told me.
I felt really affirmed and confirmed in our position. So
when everything fell apart, it really shook me because I thought,
how can you be so certain that something is going
to happen. How can you feel that you're having this
experience where you're connected to something bigger than you that's
saying like, keep going, You've got this, Yes, this is happening,
(32:24):
this is going to happen, and then still have it
not unfold the way that you expected. It's an earth
shattering experience to someone who thinks they've got it under control.
It's an earth shattering experience to someone who thinks like, Okay,
because I had this dream, that means that you know
(32:44):
that we're safe, that everything's going to be taken care of,
and you know even as I'm hearing myself say this,
and this is part of the deconstruction that I'm in
the reconstruction, is I'm hearing myself say, well, I thought
we were going to be safe. The fact of the
matter is we are safe. You know, here I am,
I'm here, I'm recording this podcast. I'm telling you the story.
I'm safe, my kids are safe, everyone's fine. You know.
(33:05):
It's been devastating. Yes, it has wiped out our entire savings.
It has put us in really tricky financial positions at
times over the course of the last couple of years.
It's been extremely stressful. It's been a stressful time to
have two little kids and to feel responsible for people
and feel like our financial world is crumbling around us. So, yeah,
(33:26):
it's been really stressful. But the fact of the matter
is we are safe. And so maybe even my attachment
to needing the numbers and the bank account to look
a certain way to feel safe is part of what's
deconstructing itself right now. So I tell this whole story
really simply to say that deconstruction is a healthy, natural
part of human development. That if you never deconstructed your
(33:49):
worldview and reconstructed it to something different, you'd still think
the same way that you did it two years old
or three years old or four years old or whatever,
you know, those first couple of years of development. I
watch this happen with my kids two or three and four.
Like there, they change from one season to the next.
Their brain is quite literally changing and developing all these
new neuropathways and dendrites, and you know, like all the
(34:12):
connections that they're making on any given day. They're a
different person from one day to the next, and they
go through different seasons and phases. Like six months ago,
I would have said to you, like, Charlie, my three
year old is the sweetest, most tender, most loving, you know,
snugly buddy and just wants to crawl up in your
lap and has the biggest heart and could burst into
tears when he sees anyone being hurt. And in the
(34:35):
past couple of months, because of his development and because
of a natural, healthy human way of developing, he's become
a little bit more just you know, like stubborn and
resistant and not always wanting to snuggle. And yeah, he
still has like that tender, sensitive heart, but he also
stands up for himself and pushes back. And so you
see your kids go through these different seasons, and you
just think like there's different seasons for different things. There's
(34:58):
different seasons for different ideas, and part of natural human
development is to deconstruct your ideas about something and reconstruct
it into something different, and just know that every time
you reconstruct your ideas into something different, you may not
have it right. And maybe there's no such thing as right.
Maybe that's part of the freedom that I'm talking about,
is a willingness to just be like I don't know,
(35:19):
I don't need to get it right, Like I don't
have to get my theology right in order to feel
okay about myself and the world. I actually can try
on these different lenses, like astrology is such an interesting
lens to try on, to go like, what if I
look at the world through this lens? Then what do
things look like? What if I look at the world
through the lens of oracle cards? What if I look
at the world through the lens of honestly, like, pick
(35:40):
a lens that feels really triggering for you, and try
to see the world through that lens, Like if make
America great again? And the Trump lens feels like a
triggering lens to put on? See about it? Just see
about putting on the lens. What does it look like
to look at the world through the lens of of
those people I'm not saying adopt the lens if it's
(36:03):
not a fit for you. I'm just saying your worldview
will expand when you're willing to see the world through
someone else's lens who maybe someone who you vehemently disagree with.
And maybe for you, the triggering one is astrology, or
maybe the triggering one is something totally different that I
haven't mentioned, but maybe you try it on. Maybe you
are willing to look at the world through a different
(36:24):
lens so that you can expand your understanding of how
the world works. And this is to me, this is
the beauty of personal storytelling, is that the more stories
we listen to, the more we expand our lens of
how we understand the world around us, how we understand
people around us, how we connect to people. You know,
you cannot listen to the story. I just finished listening
(36:44):
to a memoir on Audible that's called The Secret Lives
of Mama Love and it's a few years old or
maybe a year old, and it was an Oprah Book
Club pick. It's so phenomenal, like so phenomenal. I was
riveted at every turn. And it is a story about
a mother who becomes addicted to drugs and ends up
(37:08):
going to prison, and you know, lives this whole experience
that because I'm a mother and I can connect with
that part of her experience. Understanding how she got to
where she got, Like, what was it like to see
the world through her eyes and make the choices that
she made? It honestly just made me a better person.
Listening to the story. I just felt such a deep
well of compassion for her and felt like, gosh, life
(37:31):
is such a fragile thing, you know, and the human
body is such a fragile thing. Any of us, given
the circumstances that she was up against, could have made
those same choices and could have been in that same position.
And it allows me to move through the world with
a more open heart when I understand where other people
might be coming from. So as challenging as that is,
I do challenge you. I challenge you, and I invite
(37:53):
you to try on a lens, a different lens than
the one you normally see through. If you have a
lens that feels really comfortable to you, You've got your
friends who all kind of see the world the same
way that you do. You're surrounded by people who agree
with you. Try to see about trying on a lens
that feels really different from the lens that you're used to.
(38:13):
I hope you find that exercise helpful. I hope you
find it freeing. I hope you find the courage to
share your own story, of your own deconstructions that you've
been through, because we've all been through them, whether we
can acknowledge it or not. And I will see you
back next week on the Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about a topic that I actually have been asked to
talk about several times, and I've avoided addressing this topic
in part because it felt like, well, it's kind of
(00:44):
off brand, it's not really what I'm talking about on
this podcast anyway, or on my Instagram or anywhere else.
And in part also I think, if I'm being honest,
I've avoided talking about this topic because it feels a
little bit like it's so personal to me, it's so
so specific to my situation. It's somewhat of a sacred topic,
(01:05):
something that I've been really wrestling with in my personal
life over the course of the last decade, I would
guess since I went through my divorce, and so it
hasn't been something that I've really felt comfortable talking about
more publicly. The topic that I want to talk about
today is deconstruction. And I think one of the reasons
why so many people have asked me to address this
topic is because if you're kind of in my ecosystem,
(01:27):
if you've heard these episodes, if you follow me on Instagram,
you probably have picked up on context clues that although
I was raised in the evangelical Christian Church, that my view,
my worldview, has evolved so significantly over the course of
the last ten years or so that my faith is
really different now than it was back then, and I
(01:49):
don't hold many of the same beliefs or ideologies that
are held by the traditional Christian Church. And so I
think people who are all so in that process of
evaluating and reevaluating, like how do I see the world,
and what do I think about these sort of hot
button topics or issues, and what is my theology? And
(02:10):
what do I really believe about God? And what do
I believe about Heaven and Hell? And where do we
go when we die? And these questions that are very
human to ask ourselves, and that so many people are asking.
I think I believe people who are really healthy and
integrated and you know, are very human are asking these questions,
and so those people out there who are also asking
(02:32):
those questions are looking at me and going it seems
like she must be asking them too, And so they're
wanting me to share more of my story because this
is how we connect us by sharing stories, and so
my story is just my story. It's not anything that's
spectacular or unique. In fact, I think that there are
hundreds of thousands of people who are going through the
same process or experience that I am, as it relates
(02:53):
to the faith of our upbringing, and not only evangelicals,
but like if you grew up Catholic, or you grew
up Hindu or Buddhis or you grew up in a cult,
or you grew up you know, seeing the world one way.
I think it's extremely common to leave your hometown, or
leave your nuclear family, or be launched into the world
and be introduced to different ideas and different ways of
(03:16):
seeing the world in different people who see things different ways,
and go, huh, I wonder if there's something worth paying
attention to here. I wonder if the way that I
was always taught that things went is the only way
that they could go or I wonder if there's more
to this, and so we start to kind of explore
and what I would call deconstruct those original beliefs. And
(03:36):
I'm of the belief and one of the reasons i
want to talk about this today is I'm of the
belief that deconstruction is an extremely healthy thing to do,
and healthy people are deconstructing their worldview over and over
and over again until they die. And one of the
things that I've noticed as I've done my own deconstruction,
and as I've talked about deconstruction not even publicly, but
(03:58):
just in friend groups or in mixed company sort of
thing like mingling at a party, is that when you
bring up the word deconstruction, it brings up a lot
for people. It's an extremely triggering word, especially for those
who grew up in the church, or at least that's
just my experience that for those who haven't necessarily deconstructed
(04:19):
the original faith container of their upbringing, the word deconstruction
is almost like a frightening word. And I think there's
a reason for that. I want to talk about the
reason why this can be so intimidating and so scary,
And so we'll talk about all of this today. We'll
talk about what is deconstruction. We'll talk about why, in
my view, this is an absolutely integral part of being
(04:42):
a healthy human being. Every healthy human, in my opinion,
will deconstruct many times over the course of their lifetime.
And we'll talk about why deconstructing anything, any worldview can
be an extremely unsettling experience. And I want to talk
about all of through the lens of sharing my own
personal story. So I want to start by saying that
(05:04):
I started deconstructing the faith of my upbringing. I mean,
it's hard to put a date on it, actually, because
I look back now and see moments when I was
asking really tricky questions, even as a teenager. But I
really started deconstructing when my first marriage fell apart in
twenty fifteen. So I was married to a pastor. He
and I planted a church together in South Florida, and
(05:27):
we were in ministry together for the entire time that
we were together, which honestly wasn't that long. We were
married almost exactly four years. We were dating and engaged
for less than six months. I think from the day
I met him to the day we got married was
around four months, which is insane, by the way, but
was also a product of my upbringing and the container
that I was handed as a child and as a
(05:49):
teen and as a twenty something. My worldview affected in
a massive way the speed at which I met this
person and married him, the choices that we made for
our wedding and our life together and our wedding night
and all those different things. And so I was married
to this person. We had this one life together. I
(06:13):
uncovered some evidence that was extremely shocking to me because
it basically just confirmed for me something that I had
been thinking for a while, which is that this person
wasn't who I thought he was, and that thread. I
used this analogy a lot, but it was like pulling
on the thread of a sweater that was coming apart,
pulling on the loose thread. The minute I pulled on
(06:35):
that thread, the entire sweater unraveled, and the sweater included
my business because we were in business together. It included
my marriage, it included my worldview, it included my faith.
It was like having the rug completely pulled out from
underneath of me and kind of having to go back
to the drawing board. In terms of what I thought
about life and how I saw the world, and what
(06:57):
I thought about marriage, what I thought about divorce, And
it was a really heavy and horrible and depressing time
on the one hand in my life, and also on
the other hand, I look back now and I can
see that period of time with such gratitude because it
was an inherent deconstruction. In fact, I would say a
divorce in general is an inherent deconstruction because you have to,
(07:19):
in order to get divorced, rethink what you thought when
you first married this person. Nobody gets married and goes
I'm going to get married. I'm just going to see
how it goes, and then after a while we're going
to get divorced. I just don't believe anybody walks into
marriage with that kind of a mindset. I think there
are a lot of different reasons to get divorced. But
no matter your reason for getting divorced, it's not a
(07:42):
reason that you could have foreseen on your wedding day. Otherwise,
probably I'm guessing you probably wouldn't have gotten married. You
would have just lived together or had a partnership or
something like that that you would have expected to sort
of evolve out of. But because of the way our
culture works. And because of how, at least how I
was taught about marriage, marriage was not something that I
(08:03):
walked into lightly. It was not something I walked into
thinking that it would end after a period of time.
And so when my marriage fell apart, I had to
really reconsider, you know, who was I on the day
that I chose to marry this person? How have I
evolved as a person? And I can't even see things
the way that I used to see them. I have
to learn to see them in a whole new way.
And it was extremely unsettling, and yet, as I mentioned before,
(08:27):
it's also a time that I look back on with
a lot of gratitude because it initiated my deconstruction. And
I said this a few times already, and I'll say
it more times before this episode is over. But I
really believe with every fiber of my being that deconstruction
is something that healthy people do. And so deconstruction, as
scary and as unsettling as it can be, is just
(08:47):
something that's part of the human experience. And if you're
doing it, each time that you're doing it, you're becoming
more integrated, you're becoming bigger, you're becoming more evolved, you're becoming.
You have a broader worldview, more or compassion, You have
a deeper understanding of what it means to be here
and to be alive and to be on this planet.
I really believe that that's true. I don't think that
(09:08):
you can access those things without deconstructing and reconstructing your
reality multiple times. And so this is why we have
chapters and seasons of our lives. You know, if you
never deconstructed, you would also never leave high school. You'd
never leave grade school, you never leave college, you'd never
leave home, you'd never move away from your parents, You'd
never you know, evolve out of something that used to
(09:28):
fit you and now doesn't fit you. In order to
evolve out of those things, we have to deconstruct and reconstruct.
So another layer that I'll add to this part of
my personal story is that I have been saying to
my therapist and to my husband and to my close
friends for the last couple of years that I feel
like I'm going through my second deconstruction because I started
my first deconstruction. It's not really true, because just like
(09:51):
I'm saying, I've been through probably ten deconstructions in my life.
It's just not. They weren't something that I would have
called a deconstruction. So now I'm going through or what
I keep calling my second deconstruction, because I had my
first big deconstruction in twenty fifteen when I left my
marriage and filed for divorce. That was my first big deconstruction.
It was like the deconstruction of the faith container of
(10:14):
my childhood, which felt like a really big deconstruction because
the faith container of my childhood. And you'll notice how
different deconstructions feel different depending on how attached you were
to the current scaffolding. But the faith container of my
childhood was such a massive piece of stability and security
(10:36):
for me that to stand back and question those tenants
of my faith was like unthinkable in some ways. And
I mean the marriage ending really kicked this off because
something else that was unthinkable for me in terms of
my past worldview was getting divorced. In fact, my unw
(11:00):
willingness to consider getting divorced is what kept me in
an extremely unhealthy, toxic and abusive marriage for as long
as I was because if I had not had the
worldview that divorce was wrong and I was never going
to get divorced and divorce was for other people, and
it wasn't for me, and it wasn't for my family.
If I hadn't had that worldview, I would have left
that marriage on day one. I mean pretty much twenty
(11:22):
four hours after we got married. I would have left
the marriage. It was that bad. It was just really
that toxic and that uncomfortable. But because I had the
worldview that I did, I stayed in that marriage for
a really long time. So when the marriage crumbled and
fell apart, when I willingly chose to go to the
attorney's office and file for divorce, it was inevitable that
(11:43):
I was also saying, I'm changing my mind about this,
I'm reconsidering my views on divorce, and in order to
move forward with my life and make the decision that
I could feel that I knew was right for me
in that time, I had to completely reconsider that worldview,
the worldview that divorce was wrong, divorce was for other people.
(12:04):
I was never going to get divorced. Nobody in my
family got divorced. I was part of this long lineage
of marriages that you know, chose to stick it out.
I had to willingly decide that I was going to
unwind and untangle that worldview and choose a different worldview.
And that's exactly what a deconstruction is is it's unwinding
the narrative we were telling ourselves and choosing a different narrative.
(12:28):
And so that's what I had to do in order
to get divorced. And because that experience took place, because
I welcomed that experience, it also cascaded into these other
parts of my life, including my faith container and the
divorce narrative. The divorce scaffolding was part of the broader
faith scaffolding. You know, there were so many different things
(12:50):
that I was taught as a young person that I
don't categorize necessarily as good or bad. There are some
of them that you know, are extremely problematic, But I
don't necessarely categorize that initial scaffolding is good or bad necessarily.
But there comes a point where the scaffolding that you're
using no longer works for you, and you have to
be willing to let that scaffolding go and choose a
(13:12):
new scaffolding. So did the scaffolding of let's say heaven
and hell? Did the scaffolding of save yourself until marriage?
Did the scaffolding of don't ever get divorced. Did the
scaffolding of make sure you marry someone who's a Christian.
Did that scaffolding serve me for a period of time?
Obviously it did, or I wouldn't have chosen it. You know,
(13:33):
it provided me with a lot of things, including a
sense of security and safety, and a sense of moral superiority,
because as long as I followed the rules and checked
these boxes, then I could feel good about myself and
feel like a good person. So I had those that
scaffolding for a period of time that served me in
certain ways. And then there came a point where that
scaffolding stopped serving me, and I had to let the
(13:55):
scaffolding go and create something new. And I think this
is where a lot of us get stuck. I don't
want to get too far ahead of myself, but I
do think this is where a lot of us get
stuck because we recognize that the scaffolding that we're holding,
or the scaffolding that's built around us, is no longer
serving us. But because it's so unsettling to let it go,
we choose not to let it go. Sometimes life pushes
(14:18):
us out of the nest and I feel like that
has been my story over and over and over again.
I don't know if I like made some kind of
agreement before I came here, you know, if my soul
knew that this was my purpose or whatever. And so
it's my higher self that's kind of pushing me out
of the nest. But I feel like, over and over
again in my life, I haven't been really even given
an option to stay stagnant. It's just like, Nope, we're
(14:39):
gonna move on to the next thing, and it's going
to be extremely uncomfortable and unsettling, and yet we're going
to do it anyway. And so that's what happened in
twenty fifteen when the rug was pulled out from underneath
of me, and I feel like that's in some ways
what has been happening for me and for Matt since
we got married in twenty nineteen. Late twenty nineteen. COVID
(14:59):
hit in March of two And I'm not going to
repeat the whole story because if you've been here a while,
you've heard it a million times. But essentially the sweater
began to unravel again in March of twenty twenty when
COVID hit and things just didn't go the way that
we expected them to go. I have been in a
second process of totally deconstructing my worldview that has been
(15:20):
extremely uncomfortable and extremely unsettling. And yet I have to
trust that this is leading me to more depth, more compassion,
a more complete understanding of how the world works. Because
you know, when you have one set of scaffolding, you think, oh,
I get it, I know how the world works now.
And I do think that life or God or the
universe or whatever likes to kind of show us like, no, no, no,
(15:41):
you don't have it all figured out. You don't have
it all worked out. You know, it feels nice for
a second to be there where you're like, I have
it figured out. I know the way the world works.
I understand the inner workings of this thing. And then
things begin to unravel and you realize like, oh, there's
actually more to the story. There is actually more to
the story than I ever knew before. And this deconstruction,
(16:04):
any deconstruction, whatever deconstruction you are in, is about you
learning more depths to the story than you were ever
able to see before. So let me try to summarize
this really quickly. So twenty fifteen, my marriage falls apart.
(16:26):
I'm deconstructing mostly the faith of my upbringing, my evangelical
Christian faith, and trying to ask myself the questions about like, okay,
so if that's not how things work, then how does
the world work? Is there a God? Is there? Heaven?
Is there hell? What do I believe about all these things?
Do I need to go to church every Sunday? I've
gone to church every Sunday for my entire life. What
(16:47):
does life even look like if I'm not connected and
involved in a church? You know, what do relationships look
like if they don't have to fit this rigid understanding
of male roles and female roles? What is the meaning
or the sacred dis or the sanctity of marriage if
some marriages do end and some marriages should end like
in my experience, and you know, how do I conduct
(17:10):
myself as a thirty something year old woman who is
divorced and who's dating and trying to connect with people
and really wanting a partnership and really wanting to be
in a partnership slash a marriage hopefully that was my
goal that would last where I could build a family.
How do I move through the world as a divorced
(17:30):
woman in my thirties who's not eighteen anymore. I'm not sixteen.
I'm not saving myself for marriage because I've already been married.
So how do I move through the world under those conditions?
And so these are all questions that I'm asking myself
back in that period of time. Then I meet Matt,
then we get married, then we start our own family.
There's a ton of stability that comes into my life.
(17:52):
He and I are both in the same place as
far as deconstructing the faith of our childhood and sort
of rebuilding a new faith that feels like, Okay, I
do feel connected to God. There is something bigger at
work here. I am understanding how the world works in
a new way. I'm understanding my connected is to all
things in a new way. And Matt and I are
(18:13):
navigating all of that together. So even though there was
always questions, it felt like a lot more stability in
my scaffolding came into my life when Matt and I
got married and when we started our family together, and
then COVID happened, and it felt like it set me
on this whole new trajectory of deconstruction. One thing that
(18:34):
feels important to say about this second deconstruction was that
I found myself deconstructing ideas that were very similar to
ideas I'd had in the first deconstruction, but just with
a little bit of a different face on them. And
I think this is something to think about as it
relates to deconstruction, because human beings really cling to certainty
and to security. We really like to feel like I
(18:56):
know how the world works, I know what this is
all about, I know what I'm supposed to do. I
have my list of expectations. I can just sort of
check the boxes, do the things, follow the rules, and
get the payoff that I'm looking for. And so even
when we deconstruct, even when we're forced, we're pushed into
this season of deconstructing, I think it's extremely easy. And
(19:17):
I've watched this happen for not just myself and for
mat but also many people that I've watched to go
through this experience. It's extremely common to grab on to
a new set of scaffolding that is slightly different, but
at its essence still the same, because if you think
about it, you've got these neural pathways that are carved
in your brain, like the neural pathway of divorce is bad.
(19:38):
Don't ever get divorced. So if that's a neural pathway
that's carved in your brain, then to deconstruct it is
extremely upsetting to the equilibrium of your brain. And also like,
you have this pathway that you've driven one hundred thousand
times in your life telling yourself divorces bad, divorces bad,
divorce is bad. So when you try to veer away
(20:03):
from that path just human have, it is going to
take you back to something that maybe is different, but
that sounds kind of similar, and you might not even
realize that it sounds similar. Sometimes things that sound similar
can actually be quite opposite. Like I don't know if
you've ever seen someone swing in the pendulum from being
like I am never going to touch alcohol to like
I can love Jesus and still drink all the time.
(20:24):
And I actually know people who have the pendulum has
swung quite far and they're drinking becomes even I would
call problematic, even though they're saying like drinking is fine.
You know, Jesus turned water into wine. That sort of thing.
You can see how the scaffolding. It's so comforting to
have that scaffolding that replacing the old scaffolding with the
(20:47):
new scaf scaffolding, Like drinking is fine, Drinking is fine,
Drinking is fine, but there's still that same kind of
attachment to that scaffolding. There's not a real freedom to
make a choice out of nothing, like to make a
choice out of your own intuition or out of your
own the present moment or whatever, because you're still so
(21:08):
attached to this scaffolding. So I found myself in this
second deconstruction realizing that I had adopted beliefs that seemed
different than evangelicalism, but that actually were complimentary or actually
were very similar ideas to evangelicalism, and they were comforting
(21:31):
ideas to me that I could grab onto or hold
on to for the sake of comfort or security. And
it's almost like, in these last five years, life has
been saying to me, are you willing to really let
it go for good? Are you willing to really let
go of the white knuckle grip that you have on
this feeling like you've got it figured out, like you
(21:52):
know how the world works, you know how life works.
And I feel like I'm being sort of edged into
this new season or new phase of life where I'm
being asked or being invited to maybe just not know
for a second. And so I started to become aware
that in my first deconstruction, as I'm calling it, it
(22:15):
was really about stepping back and abandoning some of the
theology that I had been taught for my entire life,
simply because like there was a lot of stuff going
on in that culture, in that environment that was just
extremely hypocritical, and inside of my marriage was just simply
a microcosm of that, but it was actually going on
(22:35):
at a much larger on a much larger scale. So
you know, like these famous Instagram pastors or whatever are
falling from grace, and you're realizing like behind the scenes, okay,
you're preaching on a stage every Sunday, you're saying you
believe these things. You're telling people how to live their life,
and then behind the scenes you're actually hanging with strippers
and hiring sex workers, and so one thing doesn't match
(22:57):
the other. So there's like so much hypocrisy that for
me to sit in a church building and listen to
you tell me how to live my life when you
clearly have your own integration work to do as all
human beings do just feels like a very strange way
to do things. And the other thing that happened in
that first deconstruction was an abandonment of the pieces of
(23:20):
theology from my upbringing that just simply felt inhumane. So,
for example, things like this idea that women are not
supposed to be in a leadership positions, like women aren't
supposed to be pastors, women aren't supposed to be on stage.
Women are supposed to be silent on Sundays at church.
You know, the church that I grew up in, the
women were allowed to teach in the childcare but only
(23:43):
to age only sorry to fifth grade, because based on
the understanding of that church's theology, the sixth grade boys
were too old to be taught by a woman. The
women were allowed to sing background vocals, but they weren't
allowed to sing on the main mic. And I have
a really vivid memory of being like twelve years old
and having on a Sunday, the small group leaders being
(24:07):
introduced to the church and there's maybe like, you know,
twelve to fifteen couples on the stage, and the guy
would get the microphone and he would introduce himself and
introduce his wife, and then he would pass the microphone
past his wife to the next man, who would introduce
himself and introduce his wife and say like, this is
where our small group is happening, et cetera, et cetera.
There were things like that that I just started putting
(24:27):
the pieces together and going like, this isn't how I
want to live, and this isn't fair. And just because
these this one group of people says that this works
this way, how does that make it true? And is
their freedom outside of this scaffolding where maybe I could
be a leader. I could be in a leadership position,
not necessarily in the church, but where like women do
have important things to say and should be given the
(24:49):
microphone and should be given platforms, and do need to
be sharing their perspective and their stories. So things like that,
things like shutting out LGBTQ folks, like things like Christian nationalism,
for example, this idea that just because you're a Christian
that you need to align yourself with a certain political party.
Concepts like even abortion, which is just such a sacred
(25:11):
cow in the church, but is such a more nuanced
conversation than anyone is willing to have in the church,
and so I'm witnessing all this happen, the hypocrisy, the
gender differentials, the bigotry, all of it, like the whole picture.
I was like, this is not working for me anymore.
This scaffolding is not serving me, and I would like
(25:32):
to evolve beyond this scaffolding. And so as I let
go of that scaffolding, I found myself in a place
where there was so much freedom to be who I was,
to move through the world in a way that felt
more comfortable to me, to open my heart to things
and to people that I never felt I was given
(25:54):
permission to open my heart to before books, you know, teachers, ideas, concepts, people,
human beings. Like suddenly, I'm like, wait, I was taught
my whole life to be wary and sort of scared
of people who lived differently than me, or thought differently
than me, or taught these you know, different concepts. It
was a slippery slope. If I read this book or
(26:15):
listen to this podcast or entertained this person's thoughts, and
all of a sudden, it was like the whole world
was open to me, and it was such a freeing feeling,
even though there were times when it was definitely extremely scary,
and yet I found myself at times also latching on
to new ideas or new ways of seeing things. Like
(26:36):
here's just an example. I'll give you a specific example
so you can, you know, sink your teeth into this.
One specific example is astrology. I was taught my entire
life that astrology was evil, and that if I listened
to an astrologer or even entertained the idea of an astrologer,
that it was such a slippery slope that it was
going to, you know, taint my thinking and drag me
(26:58):
down this slippery slope. I was going to go to hell.
And when I stepped away from those ideas of my childhood,
and when I stopped going to church and left that
community and that ideology, I was able to open my
heart and my mind to astrology. And so I started
listening to podcasts and started reading things, and started learning
(27:19):
about my birth chart and learning about my sun moon
and rising sign, and having conversations with people about this,
and it was so exciting at first. It was like,
you know, it's so amazing that there's an opportunity to
get to see the world through a different lens. And
that's just one example of a hundred I could give
you of ways that I was like, I can connect
(27:41):
with God or spirit or universe or whatever you want
to call it. I can connect with this thing that's
bigger than me, that's operating. It's so clear to me
that I'm not alone in the universe, So I can
connect with that without it being this old way of thinking.
And it felt so open and really free. And then
over time, as I dug into this even further, I
(28:02):
realized it's not just astrology. I'm not bagging on astrology
at all, but I did begin to realize that I
had in some ways replaced the old with the new. So,
in other words, like if you have an attachment to
astrology and you always need to know like what's going
on in the stars, or what's going on the planets,
or you know, something weird happens, so mercury must be
(28:23):
in retrograde if you always have to be so attached
to that one way of thinking, it almost is like
this weird replacement for the old scaffolding. So it's like
old scaffolding gone freedom, But now I have this new scaffolding,
and so the freedom doesn't I can't taste the freedom
quite in the same way, I don't have as much
access to it as I used to have, And so
(28:53):
I began to realize a couple of months ago that
this process that I've been going through for the last
couple of years is actually, I'm calling it my second deconstruction.
It's basically an opportunity to let go of the tight,
white knuckled grip that I have on needing to know
how things work, needing to know how the universe works,
(29:14):
needing to know where we go when we die. I
think it's extremely human to have these questions, and I
think it's also human to not totally have the answers.
We can feel into the answers, we can imagine what
the answers might be, we can have long conversations about
what the answers are, we can try on a million
different lenses about the answers. But the fact of the
matter is, you don't know where we go when we die.
(29:35):
And think about this. This might be triggering for you
if you still are very attached to a certain worldview
or a certain scaffolding, and it is triggering for me
on some levels too. But think about how insane it
would sound for you to say you know what happens
when we die. Unless you've had a death experience where
you've died and then come back, you don't know what
(29:56):
happens when we die. You know, it's everything that we
could imagine aspecative. And so for someone to say like, no,
I know it's specifically this, I know it's reincarnation, or
I know we go to heaven, or heaven looks like
this or is like this or whatever, is all just like,
think of the insanity of it for you to act
like you know something that you don't know. And yet
(30:16):
many of us do this, and I still find myself
doing it on many occasions. So this is not like
a you're doing this and I'm not thing. It's like
it's a human tendency to grab on to whatever makes
us feel a sense of stability and security and certainty
when the reality of the matter is that life is
an uncertain thing and there are no guarantees in this life,
(30:37):
and the more that we can relax into that and
surrender into that, the happier I believe that will be.
And yet everyone has their coping mechanisms, and maybe this
is just my coping mechanism is certainty, But I think
certainty is a coping mechanism for so many people who say, like, no,
I know for sure. The Bible says this, you know,
God told me that I'm supposed to X, Y and
(30:59):
Z or whatever. The fact of the matter is, we
don't have certainty about anything. And I'll share this last
story and then i'll wrap up. But one of the
reasons why the fall apart of this business venture that
my husband and I had been working on for the
last couple of years was so devastating for me, and
this is one of the things that initiated my second deconstruction,
(31:19):
as I'm calling it, was that I had these really
spiritual experiences where I here's an example, I had a
dream and in the dream, an angel came to me
and told me, I have a message for your husband.
I've been trying to get the message through he's not
hearing the message. So here's the message. And it was
three things that were very specific that one of which
(31:39):
I completely didn't understand, and only Matt understood when I
told him. And there were so many moments spiritually where
it felt like I had such certainty that this was
the path that we were meant to be on, and
the way that I would have said it back then
was like, this is going to work. This is going
to work. You know, we are way out on a limb,
but this is going to work. And I felt so
(32:01):
sure of that. I felt like God had told me.
I felt really affirmed and confirmed in our position. So
when everything fell apart, it really shook me because I thought,
how can you be so certain that something is going
to happen. How can you feel that you're having this
experience where you're connected to something bigger than you that's
saying like, keep going, You've got this, Yes, this is happening,
(32:24):
this is going to happen, and then still have it
not unfold the way that you expected. It's an earth
shattering experience to someone who thinks they've got it under control.
It's an earth shattering experience to someone who thinks like, Okay,
because I had this dream, that means that you know
(32:44):
that we're safe, that everything's going to be taken care of,
and you know even as I'm hearing myself say this,
and this is part of the deconstruction that I'm in
the reconstruction, is I'm hearing myself say, well, I thought
we were going to be safe. The fact of the
matter is we are safe. You know, here I am,
I'm here, I'm recording this podcast. I'm telling you the story.
I'm safe, my kids are safe, everyone's fine. You know.
(33:05):
It's been devastating. Yes, it has wiped out our entire savings.
It has put us in really tricky financial positions at
times over the course of the last couple of years.
It's been extremely stressful. It's been a stressful time to
have two little kids and to feel responsible for people
and feel like our financial world is crumbling around us. So, yeah,
(33:26):
it's been really stressful. But the fact of the matter
is we are safe. And so maybe even my attachment
to needing the numbers and the bank account to look
a certain way to feel safe is part of what's
deconstructing itself right now. So I tell this whole story
really simply to say that deconstruction is a healthy, natural
part of human development. That if you never deconstructed your
(33:49):
worldview and reconstructed it to something different, you'd still think
the same way that you did it two years old
or three years old or four years old or whatever,
you know, those first couple of years of development. I
watch this happen with my kids two or three and four.
Like there, they change from one season to the next.
Their brain is quite literally changing and developing all these
new neuropathways and dendrites, and you know, like all the
(34:12):
connections that they're making on any given day. They're a
different person from one day to the next, and they
go through different seasons and phases. Like six months ago,
I would have said to you, like, Charlie, my three
year old is the sweetest, most tender, most loving, you know,
snugly buddy and just wants to crawl up in your
lap and has the biggest heart and could burst into
tears when he sees anyone being hurt. And in the
(34:35):
past couple of months, because of his development and because
of a natural, healthy human way of developing, he's become
a little bit more just you know, like stubborn and
resistant and not always wanting to snuggle. And yeah, he
still has like that tender, sensitive heart, but he also
stands up for himself and pushes back. And so you
see your kids go through these different seasons, and you
just think like there's different seasons for different things. There's
(34:58):
different seasons for different ideas, and part of natural human
development is to deconstruct your ideas about something and reconstruct
it into something different, and just know that every time
you reconstruct your ideas into something different, you may not
have it right. And maybe there's no such thing as right.
Maybe that's part of the freedom that I'm talking about,
is a willingness to just be like I don't know,
(35:19):
I don't need to get it right, Like I don't
have to get my theology right in order to feel
okay about myself and the world. I actually can try
on these different lenses, like astrology is such an interesting
lens to try on, to go like, what if I
look at the world through this lens? Then what do
things look like? What if I look at the world
through the lens of oracle cards? What if I look
at the world through the lens of honestly, like, pick
(35:40):
a lens that feels really triggering for you, and try
to see the world through that lens, Like if make
America great again? And the Trump lens feels like a
triggering lens to put on? See about it? Just see
about putting on the lens. What does it look like
to look at the world through the lens of of
those people I'm not saying adopt the lens if it's
(36:03):
not a fit for you. I'm just saying your worldview
will expand when you're willing to see the world through
someone else's lens who maybe someone who you vehemently disagree with.
And maybe for you, the triggering one is astrology, or
maybe the triggering one is something totally different that I
haven't mentioned, but maybe you try it on. Maybe you
are willing to look at the world through a different
(36:24):
lens so that you can expand your understanding of how
the world works. And this is to me, this is
the beauty of personal storytelling, is that the more stories
we listen to, the more we expand our lens of
how we understand the world around us, how we understand
people around us, how we connect to people. You know,
you cannot listen to the story. I just finished listening
(36:44):
to a memoir on Audible that's called The Secret Lives
of Mama Love and it's a few years old or
maybe a year old, and it was an Oprah Book
Club pick. It's so phenomenal, like so phenomenal. I was
riveted at every turn. And it is a story about
a mother who becomes addicted to drugs and ends up
(37:08):
going to prison, and you know, lives this whole experience
that because I'm a mother and I can connect with
that part of her experience. Understanding how she got to
where she got, Like, what was it like to see
the world through her eyes and make the choices that
she made? It honestly just made me a better person.
Listening to the story. I just felt such a deep
well of compassion for her and felt like, gosh, life
(37:31):
is such a fragile thing, you know, and the human
body is such a fragile thing. Any of us, given
the circumstances that she was up against, could have made
those same choices and could have been in that same position.
And it allows me to move through the world with
a more open heart when I understand where other people
might be coming from. So as challenging as that is,
I do challenge you. I challenge you, and I invite
(37:53):
you to try on a lens, a different lens than
the one you normally see through. If you have a
lens that feels really comfortable to you, You've got your
friends who all kind of see the world the same
way that you do. You're surrounded by people who agree
with you. Try to see about trying on a lens
that feels really different from the lens that you're used to.
(38:13):
I hope you find that exercise helpful. I hope you
find it freeing. I hope you find the courage to
share your own story, of your own deconstructions that you've
been through, because we've all been through them, whether we
can acknowledge it or not. And I will see you
back next week on the Write Your Story podcast
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