Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about motherhood is your highest purpose in life.

So whether you already have 12 kids or you don't ever wanna have any kids, or you'd like to have kids, but aren't sure if that's gonna be a possibility for you, or you haven't decided yet, this episode is gonna help you explore and embrace your opportunity to choose how you wanna live your life, and not just any life, but a rich, multifaceted, exciting, and fulfilling life.

So if you're still feeling pressure to conform to the supposed ideal role for women in life, this episode will set you free. So often in high demand, high control religions, motherhood is presented as divine design. God created women to be able to bear children and created them to be naturally nurturing.

So motherhood is their God-given role, and as a girl you're often taught that having babies, being a mother, being a wife, will bring you. Deeper joy than anything else you could possibly want. So if you feel any desires come up for other things like education or a career or a hobby, you can just kind of set those aside because your real deep and only joy will come from motherhood.

A lot of times churches will also talk about your spiritual calling. How one of the holiest contributions you can make to the community is raising children in the faith. Some groups even have a system of spiritual gold stars or brownie points that you get in the afterlife for having focused on motherhood in the present life.

Which is hilarious. I always think the best, the best scams are definitely things where you, you get the thing from the person now and then you promise them something later, and then there's no way for them to come back and complain if you don't follow through. Right. Just saying, and some religions will even teach that.

Focusing on motherhood can even protect women from worldly corruption because you know, women are kept in the home. They're away from distracting secular pursuits or influences. You know, avoiding education and careers and activism information in general, but how is motherhood as a purpose presented in your experience?

Were there particular justifications that your church used to promote motherhood? Did you feel the pressure to become a mother? Did you feel the pressure to not pursue other things other than motherhood? Or if you're a mother, did you feel, do you feel the pressure to have the act of motherhood, the tasks related to motherhood be your entire focus?

You know, without having a more well-rounded life experience, or is our highest purpose, but just like all of the rules that we cover, there are definitely. Some other possible unstated motives. I think the most obvious and biggest one in this context is growing church membership by having more children.

It seems easier. I should put easier. Easier in quotes, right? It's easier for the church leadership to grow the number of church members by other people having children that they take care of and that they raise and that they pay for and everything like that. It's certainly not easier for. The mothers who are involved in this whole situation.

But for a church community, the push to celebrate and insist on motherhood can really be related to the fact that they wanna keep their membership growing. They wanna make sure that more new members are coming up each time. It's easier for their members, their current members, to just keep having children and then training their.

Children from infancy in this religious system, so they don't have the opportunity to see anything else. It's a lot easier than, for example, going out to recruit adult members who had, you know, who were raised in a different situation and have critical thought. Certainly keeping women in the demands of motherhood, especially when you start having a lot of kids, it can.

Easily keep women away from accessing more information, from having power in their community, from being able to obtain finances in their own name. Basically making it so that they're unequipped to be able to escape the situation. Not that it's impossible, it just certainly is a lot of logistical hurdles when you have children.

So there are so many different impacts that can come from. Groups having a rule or a value system that focuses on motherhood as the sole purpose for women. Women's identities overall get suppressed when it's all in service of motherhood. So any talents or ambitions or desires that women have beyond the motherhood are squelched, and they also might feel guilt and shame or like a failure for even wanting these other things.

Why am I not entirely fulfilled by being a mother? This was supposed to be the, my entire joy in life, and yet here I still wanna write a book here. I still wanna go to school and become a therapist, or I wanna create my art, or I want to do scientific research to further the medical field. I just can't shake this feeling, and it's crazy that that would be an impact that we would, we would allow to have in our system.

Right. It also causes loss of autonomy for a lot of women. There can be quite a bit of mental health strain, social stigma, isolation when women either realize that they don't wanna have children. Or maybe biologically they cannot have biological children, or maybe they wanted to have children, but at the time when they biologically could, they just didn't have the right partner.

The situation wasn't right. They weren't able. And being in a situation like that in a community where motherhood is the highest purpose and not participating in that can be a really painful thing for a lot of women. Another thing that. Really can be affected is actually the relationship between the mothers and the children.

You know, ideally children, they grow up. You want to equip them to live independently without their mother. That's the goal of raising children, at least in my opinion, right? That they become their own person, they develop their own judgment. They step by step, take steps towards independence, and they become their own purpose.

But think how mothers feel when their whole purpose is being a mother. They feel devastated when kids leave home. If that was their whole purpose. It's like their purpose just walked out the door. And if at that point in life the mother has lost her identity, lost connection to all the other parts of herself.

She would feel quite rudderless, you know, and it doesn't even make sense. Why would someone's purpose in life end in the middle of her life when statistically she's likely to live for decades more? So subconsciously those mothers might actually have an unhealthy urge to keep their children needing them, you know, to kind of.

Keep their children somewhat helpless so they keep coming back so they can keep mothering because that's their only purpose. Or maybe they just push their children to have kids before they're ready because, you know, since they aren't a mother anymore, they don't have kids at home anymore. They think, well, I have to jump straight into Grandmotherhood because that's, that's the next step of this purpose.

Or maybe the mothers start to have an urge to have a toxic level of involvement in their adult kids' lives and relationships. None of those things are are good. The subconscious urge to sabotage your child's maturity and independence that can come from your own need to have a purpose in life, which is understandable, but just not when it's played out like that, obviously.

And there's a huge impact and loss on society. When a huge portion of the population simply does not contribute to the workforce, to politics, to culture, to art, to science, all of those high IQ women who could have been solving the world's problems, all of those big hearted women that could have been mediating disputes around the world, all, all of the pe, all of the art that hasn't been made, all of the books that haven't been written, all of the things that are lost when women are told that their only purpose is motherhood.

So let's look at the logical fallacies, hypocrisy, inconsistencies that we can see in this rule just on its surface. You know, one of the main arguments here is that it's women's nature. It's women's nature to have babies. That's what they do naturally. And so that must be their purpose in life. But logically, just because having a baby is one thing that we can often do that logically does not mean it's a thing that we should do.

Or that we have to do, or that it's the only thing we should do. Right. Somehow fatherhood in these religious groups, it's never presented as an exclusive activity. You can be a father and do anything and everything else, in addition to being a father. It's just part of your, you know, you have kids and that's part of your life, but then you're still contributing to society, learning things, growing as a person.

You, you're still allowed to be a person, plus be a father, and let's be honest. Have you noticed. Because I certainly have that the only time that most high demand religions go on and on and on about the importance of a father and the child's life is either once a year on Father's Day or when they're criticizing single mothers or gay couples.

It's like they only use the concept of fatherhood as a weapon, but not as a true honoring of part of some men's experience. It's just really telling where the, where the motivations are. Another logical fallacy we see here is a false dichotomy, meaning it's all one thing or all the other thing.

Suggesting that a woman either is a mother, that's her entire purpose in life. That's all she's dedicated to do. That's the only thing she could do, and that's what every woman must do or else. You have a totally meaningless life that serves the enemy. You know, it's like, obviously there are billions of people in this world and there are so many ways to live a life.

That obviously women can choose. Right, and the overgeneralization just kills me. Assuming that women have certain personality traits, that we are identical in our desires and our aptitudes. A lot of these people do believe in things like IQ or different personality test results or different skill sets, or even the churches themselves will talk about spiritual gifts that you might have.

Different people have different spiritual gifts. Why would those variations exist in a population? And then every single woman. Would be literally in the same role without any variation in what she was going to do. Like that makes no sense at all. The reasoning is also quite circular. I think that's true for like every single one of these rules, but we are just gonna talk about that every time, because if every single rule that we are taught is circular reasoning, we do need to think about that every single time as we're undoing all this damage and brainwashing that we have in our minds.

The logic here is well. Motherhood is your highest purpose because God says so. How do we know God said so well, because our interpretation of our own religious texts say so, and those texts are the word of God. So God says so, and it's kind of like you could never insert any critical thinking into a system like that.

There's also quite a bit of hypocrisy when we look at many religious groups benefit significantly from women's work in other contexts like they are running educational systems or even homeschools. They are doing all kinds of volunteer efforts. In some religions, the women might even have professional expertise that they're providing to this religious group, but at the same time, they're discouraging any of that or they're saying.

Well, it's fine for women to do this volunteer work. It is still within the realm of motherhood slash stay at home mom, but somehow the minute you make some money, that's where we draw the line. Then you're outside of your purpose. It's kind of like, okay, that certainly tells us that it's more about limiting the women and their.

Independence and possibilities than it is about the actual activity being wrong because women are doing a, a big diversity of activities within the realm of volunteer work. So you all know that after what I have lived through, I am basically allergic to telling people what to do with their lives. I hate that.

I'm not here to do that. This podcast is about you making decisions for yourself, considering potentially some new viewpoints on some of these things you've been taught and deciding. What makes sense for you, but here's some alternative potential views you could have about this topic if you so choose. I believe that human dignity is very multidimensional.

I think a woman's worth or any person's worth could never be reduced to their reproductive capacity or any individual choice or part of their life. I think life is really beautiful when we can explore and grow and develop all these different facets of ourself without limiting to any one thing, and that changes over life and we discover new things and how beautiful and exciting and wonderful it is to be able to do that, that makes us whole.

It makes us better. It makes us better people, it makes us have greater enjoyment of, of this life. And why wouldn't we do that no matter what your religious beliefs? I think that. Parenthood when chosen should be a partnership between the people who decided to have or adopt the child, not just a unilateral burden on the mother.

And I think that a meaningful life comes from autonomy, authenticity, and not imposed standard rules that put everyone in the same situation. And I think society thrives when all members of all genders, all identities, when they're free to contribute in diverse ways. However, they. Feel is most appropriate.

Like how awesome is that for society? It's wonderful. So to wrap up here, let's do a little bit of reflection. How has your life been impacted by the conditioning you received around motherhood? What are your current top priorities for your time and energy? And that can be in several different things, not just one area.

That has to be your only purpose in life. If you're currently a mother or if you plan to be a mother someday, how can you express your own individual personhood? How can you honor who you are outside of your role as a mother? 

Who do you know who would appreciate having this podcast as part of her life? Send her a link to the show page at www.brainwashbegone.com.

Tags: Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, deconstruction, exmormon, exmo, exvangelical, recovering catholic, excatholic, former jehovah's witness, women's empowerment, feminism, leaving religion, self-worth, high demand religions, high control groups, high control religion, cult, cult recovery, brainwashed, high demand religion, spiritual trauma, church abuse