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.

Your body is a temple.

I have to say this is an unusual episode because normally I fundamentally disagree completely with the rule that I'm presenting. But this one, my body's a temple. I feel like, heck yeah, my body's a temple. But as you might imagine, I just interpret it completely differently from how it was taught to me as a child.

This episode is about releasing that body shame, sexual repression, fear of feeling good and loving yourself. That came from church teachings about our bodies. So listen on if you're committed to living in a way that's a lot more, Ooh, yeah. My body is a temple.

And a lot less… Your body is a temple [in “bad pastor” voice].

So if someone who didn't grow up in a high demand or high control religion or cult heard the saying. Your body is a temple. They honestly might think it sounds pretty great. I'm picturing a a majestic hall with colorful curtains, velvet cushioned furniture, a table piled high with a feast and some beautiful golden accents and candles and incense and tropical gardens, and the surroundings of the building.

That sounds amazing, but no. Somehow, somewhere someone heard that metaphor and decided to basically make it mean the exact opposite. That's right. This is a temple. You can't adorn it with anything fun or sparkly. Or beautiful. You can't show the temple to anyone. You can't invite some guests into your temple and have a lovely evening.

You own the temple, but you don't get to make any decisions about it. Someone else does, and you feel ashamed and embarrassed about your temple and you hide it away

high demand religions will often present this teaching under a category like stewardship, and they'll say, your body belongs to God. So you have to keep it pure according to our definition of what purity means. And that might be things like dietary restrictions or. Certain ways you can act and not act what you can do sexually.

Maybe you can't have tattoos or piercings or your hairstyles restricted. Whether you can wear makeup or choose not to wear makeup might be dictated by the standard, and certainly clothing is often highly regulated as part of the “your body is a temple” standard.

It might be held up as a moral signal to the world too. If you're acting in this certain discernible way out in the world, then publicly you're marked as faithful or set apart from other people. There could be claims that if you follow strict modesty, it might actually protect women from male attention from assault or violence.

And sometimes it's even presented as health and sanitation codes. How you prepare your food, how you wash your personal hygiene might be dictated as part of this. But the truth is it seems I don't know. There are a lot of other possible motives that could be behind them teaching this type of rule

Because the truth is that anytime you have something that's super highly regulated in a complicated way, no matter what the version of regulation that your group used. It really keeps a lot of control over members. It keeps them busy just trying to comply with all of this specification about exactly what you can do and what you can't do.

And when people are busy, they don't have time to ask questions. They don't have time to think, wait a second, why would we be doing any of this? And the fact that it's so difficult to comply perfectly with complex codes also means that the religion's authority figures. Can then take a power position over you and basically say, Hey, you need to repent.

Hey, you need to change your ways. 'cause this is imperfect. And so it keeps you in a one down position where you have to keep trying to do better.

Sometimes it's also used for reputation management of the group. It's like they wanna look like a good public brand of everyone's falling in line. Everyone's being modest according to the group's standard. And sometimes it's just tradition. Hey, we've been wearing the same bonnets for 400 years.

Why change it now? Even though we live in a different climate and the style is totally different than when this started, when that was the cool thing to do, right? Sometimes things just don't change, even though they probably should change or there's no reason they shouldn't change.

So the impact of these rules about your body allegedly being a temple, can be quite negative. A lot of people who live under these codes find that they feel a lot of shame and anxiety about their body. Maybe the chronic monitoring of  their clothing, they had people always pointing out when they were falling out of line or if something was supposedly too sexually suggestive, but really it was just their body or they were going through puberty.

Not being able to make your own choices about your hair and makeup and personal style also takes away your individual identity, your ability to express yourself in the world. And maybe that's part of the point too, but it can cause increased risk of disordered eating. You can feel compulsive about having to be modest.

There's actually a diagnosable mental illness called religious scrupulosity, and it's a type of obsessive compulsive disorder where the way you play it out is you have intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors that have to do with religious beliefs and practices. So ironically. Here's this thing that's considered literally a mental illness that needs treatment, but many high demand religions.

Consider that obedience or good behavior like that would make you a good example for other people to be behaving in such a compulsive manner. It can cause sexual dysfunction where people have these ideas about purity and that can cause a lot of fear or even physical pain. When people are having sex, even once they're married, it can cause medical harm if you are under pressure to refuse certain types of medical treatment or mental health care or contraception.

And there can be a lot of victim blaming when if you are harassed or assaulted or there are other crimes of sexual violence against women or other people who. Are then blamed for it being a failure of their modesty. So that can also cause underreporting of abusive situations. So the way that high control, high demand religions interpret your body is a temple, has a lot of logical gaps.

Your body as a temple is not a literal statement. Your body's not a building. It's obviously supposed to be a metaphor or poetry. Something beautiful about loving yourself, respecting yourself, respecting your own body, and so it is quite strange to take a snippet of poetry, and then try to construct an entire detailed and rigid legalistic code of behavior on top of that. Like what people, it's just supposed to be a nice idea. If it's supposed to be anything at all, it just doesn't make sense that it turned into that. It's also just another great example of an appeal to authority where because our leader says so, or because the Bible says this and we interpret it to mean it this way.

There's not really any reasoning or logic behind that. It's just because we said so, because we interpreted it this way.

There's also a lot of false causation at play, which is when two things are connected that really aren't the cause one of the other. So in this case, it would be things like. If you dress this way, then you will be safe, or then you will have good relationships or then people will respect you. And in reality, that is not the way to cause safety or to be treated well by how you dress.

It's just that's a false causation. There's quite a bit of hypocrisy there too, where frequently. Women are just blamed for male behavior and men are not held to account at the same, level like you. You cause someone else to sin by what you do, and that just is such a circular and ridiculous premise.

A lot of these practices are also supposed to be for your health. But at the same time, those groups are not looking at modern scientific health knowledge. So if this is supposed to be a health code at its core, then why are we not caring about studies and scientific evidence and seeing what works for people scientifically?

It makes no sense.

So what are some alternate ways that we can look at this whole concept? What beliefs might you choose to replace whatever legalistic clothing, dietary behavior code. You were taught under the umbrella of your body as a temple, and here are some ideas that I have. I think that autonomy is non-negotiable.

A body's first and final authority is the person who lives in that body, and they have to consent to whatever's happening. They have to be the one to choose. I would no longer ever accept anyone having power over my body in any way. Like I just won't, I'm gonna choose how I wanna decorate it.

I'm gonna say what feels good, what doesn't feel good, what I'm in the mood for. I give permission to interact physically with someone or not. And I assume that every other person has the same authority over their own body. So that means things like I don't just hug people 'cause I feel like it. I ask them, would you like to share a hug?

Because they get to choose whether they wanna hug me or not. If we're both like, yeah, let's hug, then we'll do it. But if they're not, I don't wanna put them through that. I also don't do things like tickle little kids against their will, and I raise my kids to make their own bodily choices about how they'll dress themselves, what they like and don't like.

I know they need to practice as kids to get comfortable with their own self-expression and boundaries. It's super important. I wouldn't let them do something like super wildly dangerous , like try to climb Mount Everest in a bathing suit. But the truth is, there are actually very few scenarios where their safety is actually at risk and they can definitely make some questionable and interesting and self-expressive choices and not be harmed and get some feedback about how they feel about it.

And it teaches them so much.

I also think that context matters. It is totally weird to have universal dress or health codes that ignore culture, climate, people's level of ability, their personal preferences, their sexuality, everything about everything. There's a reason there's so much diversity in this world because there are so many different circumstances and each person is different.

We don't have to be identical, uniformed automatons.

So to reflect on this topic, how do you feel about this? Do you like the metaphor of comparing your body to a temple or do you not like that? Some people find that very triggering. I think I went through a phase like that and then I came back around to reclaiming it a different way. But where are you with that?

And what are some ways that you can show your body love? How can you learn to trust your body? And it signals that it gives you about what you want and what you don't want. And are there things that you can do that help make your body feel good? What can you do this week to really respect your body in the way that you choose?

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.

Topics: 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