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.

Following your own instincts is dangerous. Maybe your high control religion blamed original sin or your inherently sinful nature as a human or eve for eating that apple all those years ago. But no matter what the basis, the conclusion was that you were taught not to trust yourself and not to trust your own judgment about whether something felt good or bad, or reasonable or dangerous.

In this episode, we're going to explore why no logically thinking person could actually believe that they could outsource their moral judgment to another person or another group. And if you've tried, I have certainly tried in my past. Then we're gonna start talking about how to trust ourselves again and develop our intuition.

To be the tool that it was always meant to be. For us,

there are so many different theological moral claims that high control religions, high demand religions will use to justify this kind of rule. People will say things like, we are products of a fallen nature, or We have a carnal mind, or This is just your selfish desires.

And in some groups, women specifically are even framed as more susceptible to deception or emotional impulsivity. And so. These groups will say the safest path is obedience to an external authority within the church. And you need to suppress your personal intuition because you instead are gonna follow these divinely appointed leaders who are going to discern the truth on behalf of the community.

And so any personal instincts you have are almost rebranded as temptation or distraction or an opening for evil influence.

Because heaven forbid, if you were to follow your own instincts about what is right and wrong and what's the next best step for your life, then anything might happen and it could be something really bad and these groups presume that it will be something bad because you followed your own instincts.

And to be quite honest, on some level, I do understand our human fear of trusting ourselves as humans. We have done all sorts of crazy things and we do all sorts of crazy things, and we have all kinds of urges, historically, I would say it's accurate that humans have gotten up to some real trouble and times our decisions as humans have caused a ton of harm to ourselves, to other humans, and to the planet overall.

Like we don't have a perfectly amazing track record. I would tend to agree with other people about that. But where this teaching really jumps the rails logically is that it says. Humans make mistakes, okay? Yes, true obviously, but then it jumps to a very illogical conclusion, which is, so don't trust your own instincts at all.

Outsource 100% of your critical thinking and decision making to this religious authority.

Okay, so what you're saying is don't trust my own instincts, but do trust the instincts of this one specific other person who you say is the spiritual authority from our group. But you're also saying don't trust the instincts of any people outside of our group or people inside of our group who are questioning the party line on anything.

That just doesn't make sense. How could we even know who would be the best choice of person or group to follow unless we reasoned through it ourselves first? There is literally no way for us to escape exercising independent moral judgment. It's just impossible.

And of course, high control religions will say, we're not asking you to do what we say. You're not following the instincts of other humans. You are following God himself. But how did they find out what God allegedly said? From books written by humans about what happened or from the reported spiritual revelations that other humans say that they received from God.

That's a lot of secondhand, not straight from the source information about, supposedly what is spiritually true and ironically. Maybe the most direct experience you could have would be some sort of direct personal revelation, right? It's like if God literally told me something, I'd be like, okay, I heard it.

No one interpreted this for me. This is how I came to this conclusion. But if you were to have that kind of experience within a high control group, you would be told you shouldn't follow that unless it already aligns perfectly with what the group's theology is. Otherwise, it would just be considered. A mistake on your part or a trick from the enemy or something like that.

So let's take this logically even one step further because I think it brings more clarity to the issue

so in law when lawyers are making legal arguments, one of the things that they will sometimes do just to get additional clarity on a particular thing, is that they will accept or presume that something is true, just to see what would happen if, if it were true, even something they believe is not true. So in our example, we're gonna presume that it's accurate that your parent or your church leader.

Whoever taught you this really does have a completely unblemished interpretation of moral law. You really should believe them. 100% following their judgment is objectively better than following your own judgment. Because this particular human is so wise and so wholly that they just really are better at moral judgment than you.

Okay, so we're gonna, for sake of analysis, we're gonna presume that's true. Presuming that's your situation, even if that were true, that person is still a human and they're going to die, and they obviously have no way to stay with you and guarantee that they could always be with you to guide you.

They just could not. So they're just not gonna teach you how to develop your own judgment, listen to your own instincts, and learn from your own mistakes. But they are actually choosing to keep you completely dependent on them until they're gone, and then they're just gonna leave you without guidance, leave you completely vulnerable to other people who could have really poor judgment or be outright abusing or taking advantage of you.

That's absolutely what they would be doing if that were the situation. They didn't even teach you how to identify people like that because you couldn't. Learn to trust your own instincts. They trained you to follow them 100%. So if this allegedly wise person did that, how could you think that they would have your true best interests at heart?

I just can't see. That would be really irrational of them if they really, really cared about your wellbeing and spiritual safety. Not to teach you to have these skills yourself because you're the only person that's gonna be with you throughout your entire lifetime, which is why it seems to me that it's way more likely that there are other motives underlying this type of rule.

There's a desire for control. When people, especially women, trust their own perceptions, they can become much harder to manage, obviously, in these systems, right? I mean, heck, look at me. Somebody gave me an education and here I am with a microphone talking to the internet and joining all of the cool women who've escaped so that we can learn from each other, but encouraging suspicion of our own inner compass.

Channels decision making upward and prevents us from having those kinds of thoughts or tries to, but we're always gonna escape eventually. Anyway, case in point. Suppressing our intuition also. Causes a preservation of the traditional gender hierarchies.

You know, our intuition is such a good alert system for showing us when we are being mistreated or something's unfair. So if women trusted those signals, they might challenge more boldly, like, why are we not in leadership roles? Why are you not asking for our consent with this particular thing? Why are you exploiting our labor in this way?

Of course there are a lot of economic incentives for these groups to suppress people's instincts because if you are out of touch with your own instincts, you may be way more readily likely to accept unpaid labor, high volunteer demands on your time, or unquestioningly, making financial contributions to the group continuously. Here's the thing about instincts. What do we actually learn from our instincts when we are listening to them? They tell us who to trust. They tell us when we're being harmed, when we're being taken advantage of, when something is not fair.

When something's inconsistent or hypocritical, when there's danger. So the impact of being cut off from our instincts means we are fracturing our connection to our own inner world. We are losing our judgment, having difficulty trusting our own judgment once we're adults. We're supposed to have figured that out and we've been cut off from that.

It makes it hard to make important decisions. We can feel kind of paralyzed or stuck because we don't have the capacity, the practice, the experience of making those important decisions. We can be more susceptible to being manipulated, or we can have more deep experiences of self-doubt because we don't have the experience of making a decision, seeing how it plays out, and then learning to trust ourselves over time.

It can also really compromise our personal safety. You know, our instincts often tell us when someone is violating a boundary, when someone's coercing us or abusing us, and that instinctive feeling in our body comes before we consciously even register what's happening. So the more we are overriding our internal signals, the more vulnerable we are to unhealthy relationships and exploitation and even spiritual or sexual abuse.

And we're not even aware how to teach our children to protect themselves either, which is really scary.

So let's talk about the specific logical fallacies that are at play here. Over and over again we see a false dichotomy. Such a black and white rule where. The idea put forth is either you're gonna totally suppress your instincts and follow this spiritual leader, or else it will lead to total chaos and ruin and the downfall of society.

But the truth is, human nature is not that binary. We can have instinct, we can still use reason, and there are so many levels in between where you would make some decisions, some would go well, some not. You would refine your approach. It's just not one or the other. There's also something at play here called a special pleading fallacy, which is a very fancy term, but not a difficult concept. When you look at what it says, the person making the rule basically exempts themselves from the rule. So in this case, they're saying, Hey, instinct is dangerous and you should not trust it except for mine.

Of course, mine is excellent and there's really no logical reason why that would be given other than saying that, the religion anointed them special in some way. Like somehow they're immune to the very dangers that they are warning you about. And then of course, circular reasoning because if you doubt the rule, then you know that's proof that your instinct is not trustworthy.

There's really no way out of that type of logical pattern,

like you just can't win with circular reasoning.

So here are some thoughts that I have about instinct.

So lately I've been doing a lot of reading about. The human nervous system and the way human instincts are wired, and it's basically a type of intelligence that we possess. You know, we think of intelligence in terms of cognition and calculating things, and kind of like book level smarts, but we have this whole other system with our brain, our nervous system, and our experiences that have been shaped throughout human evolution, where

we're really good at pattern recognition at a subconscious level. You know, it's not something magical when we're talking about intuition or instincts. It's an animal and well human.

It's a capability that we possess that helps us perceive danger quickly. It helps us catch mismatches in our expectations or hypocrisy or unmet needs in a way that's super efficient. Our intuition is just a data source. It's letting us know some more information. And any wise decision making process would mean you're considering that data source along with your logical reasoning and your body experience.

I think it's super important to keep in mind that we can have all sorts of instincts, and that does not mean that we have to act on them. Yes, maybe somebody makes me so angry that I feel like I wanna hit this person. I'm so angry. I don't, because I don't believe in violence as a solution unless it was an ultimate last resort, like to save my life or something.

But if you've entirely suppressed your instincts to the point that you don't even register your own anger, you don't even notice your own impulse to defend yourself. Then you don't even get the opportunity to ask yourself, wow, why am I so angry at this person? Have they crossed a boundary? Like, what's going on here?

Or to realize, Hey, what they just did is not okay with me. And then to use your reason to figure out how you're gonna defend yourself or make a change to get outta that situation, that data point is totally lost when you suppress it. It makes more sense to control ourselves at the level of action than at the level of data collection or analysis.

So to rebuild trust of our own judgment after it's been so broken. When we're in a group like this, I think we just need to start little by little, and it starts with noticing those little body messages that come through. Those little urges and instincts and not making them wrong, and just noticing them and just really making a choice that you're gonna allow yourself to perceive your own signals and then make a choice about what you're gonna do.

But that's a separate analysis, right? But when we reflect on those urges. Hey, what is the instinct or urge or desire that I feel right now? And what do I instinctively want to do? And then what am I actually gonna choose to do? And then when we do that, we see how it plays out. That's really good feedback.

And then from there, we can adjust and tweak our approach next time. And then over time, we really develop a lot of experience in sensing our own signals, seeing how things played out. That's frankly the normal process we should have been doing all along as we grew up to become mature adults. But you know what?

Our experience was what it was, and it's okay. It is not too late for us to start this process,

and we're in this together learning how to do this so that our lives can be better.

So to reflect on this topic. Was there ever a time in your life when you did ignore an instinct or an impulse because you were taught it wasn't trustworthy? And then what happened when you did that? What instincts or inner signals do you still find difficult to trust?

And how can you begin experimenting with honoring those signals? 

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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.