Religious trauma part 2

I felt compelled to write a follow-up entry to my Dec 27th one on religious trauma, particularly in reference to the Christian Purity Movement.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a few conversations with parents about what to teach children instead of the shame-based curriculum that’s so prevalent in religious settings.

This is interesting to me, as I’ve found it’s much less about what to TEACH them, and much more about showing them how to live by BEing it; but for the purpose of this entry, I’ll try to stick to the question I was asked 🙃

So, in the absence of the Evangelical Christian Purity Program (ECPP), what do we put in its place!?

My answer: our HUMANITY

This is actually what I recommend to replace all programs, but we’ll just focus on this one for today.

If I had a child, I would talk to them about how sacred their body is and how it’s SO important to use discernment in deciding who to share it with.

I would teach them how it works, how to care for it, and what happens when we do certain things with it.

I would make sure they knew the correct names for body parts, how to set boundaries, and how to identify safe and unsafe people.

I would communicate everything from a place of love instead of shame; and above all, keep our parent/child bond healthy and strong and the lines of communication open so they know they can always come to me with ANYTHING.

Education is empowering. Running a robot program of rules is disempowering and reinforces that they are not capable of self ownership.

Not to mention, dogmatic programs are usually thrown out the window the second someone feels a body sensation.

Having a well-tuned connection to our bodies and our internal knowing is the remedy for so much of the pain and trauma that is occurring in the area of sexuality today- especially with young people.

The more experience a child has in trusting their own knowing, the stronger they will stand in situations where something just isn’t right.

So often, in religious settings, children are taught that their body belongs to God. This is not developmentally appropriate and is just a shiny way of teaching them that their body isn’t theirs.

It’s too vague and abstract, at a time when their minds only understand what is concrete. A two your old will fight like hell for a toy truck that they’ve labeled “mine” because they understand what that means.

They need to react with the same sense of territorial-ness to anyone who tries to access their physical body. It needs to register as enough of an offense that they would cause a scene, then tell you about it.

Sidenote: in order to be a safe place for this information, they need to know they’ll be heard and believed- which means we need to take them as seriously as possible when they share concerns on other topics. To gaslight children out of their own knowing is to set the stage for them to be abused well into adulthood.

Teaching children anything other than their body belongs to them leaves them susceptible to authority figures (literally any “grown up”) having access to them, and the child assuming will responsibility for any sexual misconduct that occurs and not speaking up as a result.

I wish I could separate the topics of what to teach children about their bodies, how to prepare them for sexual involvement with others, and preventing sexual abuse, but (for better or worse), it’s all connected.

Leaving children vulnerable and ill equipped in one area will naturally result in a void in all the others; whereas helping them become informed and empowered will go a long way to ensure safety and increase the likelihood of positive and healthy experiences.

That’s all for now.. ..questions welcome in the comments section 🙏