PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
Ten years ago, this June, Jim Obergefell stood outside the Supreme Court marking a historic win the court case in his name that legalized same sex marriage.
Jim Obergefell Archival Tape
Today's ruling from the Supreme Court affirms what millions across this country already know to be true in our hearts, our love is equal music.
Anita Rao
Pride parades filled the streets an outpouring of celebration captured on national television. But on the other side of one of those TV screens in a living room in South Texas was a 17 year old who was hearing a very different message from her faith and her parents that her queer identity was an illness that needed to be cured.
Celeste Gracia
At that time, I was going through conversion therapy because my parents had found out about my sexuality. I was isolated and alone, and I remember saying this on the TV and then going into the bathroom, and I turned on the bathroom fan so that way my family wouldn't hear me crying on the floor.
Anita Rao
For Celeste, this moment is a core memory, something she's thought about a lot in the 10 years since she was that scared teenager on the bathroom floor. All the threads that were tangled up in that moment, faith, family, sexuality and politics are ones she's still unraveling today. The religious trauma that she experienced then is something she's only recently begun to work through, and in the recent weeks and months, she's found herself returning to a familiar question, when we've experienced wrongs and trauma at the hands of people and institutions that once supported us. How do we forgive and heal? This is embodied our show about sex, relationships and health. I'm Anita Rao Celeste. Gracia is a name that may be familiar to some of our listeners. Celeste is an environment reporter in our newsroom, but her journey to this moment starts 1500 miles away from Durham, North Carolina, in Edinburg, Texas, a town on the border between US and Mexico.
Celeste Gracia
For about 100 years now, my mom's side of the family has been in that area of South Texas, on my dad's side of the family. I've asked him before, and he told me that my family didn't cross the border. The border crossed them. Okay? My family has been in this area for generations, and it is, to me, one of the most beautiful places ever, because it's the only place where you can go to your Walmart, and I'm a little tall, and there's an Abuelita, a grandmother, next to me, and she'll tell me in Spanish, oh, yeah, Mija buena este, which is like, can you she's asking me to get the thing on the top shelf and
Anita Rao
Calling you mija, like, my daughter.
Celeste Gracia
Yes, my daughter. Everyone there is. It's like, 98% Hispanic, 98% Catholic. One of the few drawbacks of this area is it's a monolith, because there's such little diversity. I grew up believing and grew up thinking that I have to be a certain way, and that message was definitely reinforced with how my parents disciplined me. So growing up, I just grew up very strict and very like, I have to go to school every day, I have to get all A's. I have to be perfect, and anything less than perfect is completely unacceptable, and I will be grounded for the rest of my life.
Anita Rao
What kind of relationship did you have with your faith, like, how did God and a vision of religion play into this kind of self narrative that you developed.
Celeste Gracia
Well, we definitely went to church and the same church almost every Sunday, if not every Sunday. I think going to church and having faith is part of this. I have to be perfect. So I think growing up, it was instilled in me. You're just expected to love God and love church, etc.
Anita Rao
Let's, let's go specifically to talking about your early relationship with your sexuality and how that played out with your parents. What is like your earliest memory of being told that what you were feeling was wrong.
Celeste Gracia
I think my earliest memory about feeling some kind of way toward a girl was the summer after fifth grade. Before sixth grade, I was cuddling in bed with my best friend at the time, and we were in my parents room, on my parents bed, and I think we were watching something on my iPad, on YouTube, and I remember feeling some kind of feeling like butterflies in my tummy. And I remember thinking like, wow, I just love her so much. She's my best friend. I realize now I had a crush on her. Yeah, in sixth grade, I met someone, a girl who was in my grade, and we. It essentially, we started sexting. At the time, I did not realize that it was sexting, but we were talking a lot about touching each other's no no squares.
Anita Rao
Oh, okay.
Celeste Gracia
And my parents found these messages and were freaking out, I think, around the same time, and this is so embarrassing, but around the same time, I was also caught on my iPad on YouTube watching girls kissing like the YouTube search was girls.
Anita Rao
As one does when they're 12 years old.
Celeste Gracia
Of course, of course. But like both of these incidents of me sexting this other little girl in middle school, and then my parents catching me watching this on YouTube. There was a sit down conversation with both my parents where, and this was sixth or seventh grade, where my parents told me, like, you know, I understand that you're having feelings. I understand that you're curious, and it's totally okay if you want to learn more, but in so many words, they told me that you can't like girls. Girls like boys and boys like girls, and that's it. I think they were trying to walk a fine line now that I look at it. They were just trying to balance like, okay, you can be curious, but just don't be gay. I also have to have another caveat here, that my mom had me. She got pregnant when she was 16, and I was born when she was 17, when my parents got together. My dad is different than my biological dad, but he's my dad, and they got together when I was three, four years old. So they were like 2021 so my parents were kids, and they never got the chance to grow up themselves. And I say that with love, and they have told me this themselves, like they didn't get a chance to think about their own childhood trauma. They didn't have the opportunity to think about their own generational trauma because they were so busy just trying to put food on the table and trying to take care of me. I want to emphasize that I don't think my parents are bad people. I think they were just unfortunately continuing the pattern of abuse, because they didn't know any better.
Anita Rao
So you you went to middle school, your sexuality continued to develop. You started identifying as pansexual, not with your family, but with your friends, and then you began to develop your first more serious relationship. Can you take us into how that evolution of your sexuality and faith was happening at that time.
Celeste Gracia
So now I was a junior in high school. I'll call her rose, that's not her real name. It started escalating where we were texting non stop, and all day at school, we were always together and holding hands, and in the mornings, I would get to school and give her a kiss on the cheek. This went on for about two, three months before I realized, oh no, I like her, and so I confessed my feelings to her, and she felt the same way. And so it was honestly only a few weeks that we were together before it all fell apart. What happened is, this was toward the end of junior year of high school, so April, May 2015, and I was extremely depressed. I didn't know how to describe what I was feeling. I didn't know how to ask for help. My little baby brother had just been born, and I remember I was holding him and feeding him his bottle, and I was sitting in the living room, and I was thinking of taking my own life. My thought process was okay, I can either take my own life or I can go to the prom after party and get super drunk, which, looking back on it now maybe doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense, but that's just where I was in that moment. And because I was holding my little brother, and I thought to myself, I want to see him grow up. I want to be part of his life, I decided to go to the prom after party and get really drunk, which is what happened?
Anita Rao
Whoa, that's intense, that that was like those were the options that you felt like you had in that moment. How did you get to that place where you felt like it's either this or that?
Celeste Gracia
I think I felt so trapped and I felt so suffocated. And it wasn't even just about my relationship with Rose. It was also about this narrative that I have to be perfect. When Rose and I were together for those just that little brief time, I remember thinking to myself that I can't tell anyone the internalized homophobia was very strong. It had already been instilled in me that I cannot tell my parents about this relationship. I have to keep it a secret. I either wanted a way out, or I wanted to do something that was so out of the norm, something that was not perfect. I wanted to rebel in my own way. I.
Anita Rao
So you went to prom, you went to the after party, and then what happened?
Celeste Gracia
Well, I got I blacked out. Okay, because I had never had alcohol in my life before. I think I had like 10 shots within 45 minutes,
Anita Rao
Whoa, yeah, and that's the first time alcohol had ever hit your system?
Celeste Gracia
Yeah.
Anita Rao
Okay.
Celeste Gracia
I was caught red handed by my parents because it was already past midnight and I had not told them that I was at my friend's house, and so they called me because they were worried. I answered the phone, and in my own head, I thought I sounded fine. I sounded totally normal. Obviously, my parents clocked it immediately, and so they went to go pick me up, and when they realized I was drunk, they took me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. And so when my mom and I got home from the hospital, there was a whole conversation with my parents about, why did you do this that's so irresponsible, and saying you're grounded for the rest of your life. And then I go to my room, and I'm lying on my bed, I'm cuddling with one of my stuffed animals, crying, and then my mom comes in, and she had just read my messages with Rose, and she yells at me in a very ugly way. She says, Celeste, are you an effing lesbian? So now, not only was I in trouble for lying and getting drunk in the after party, the more severe situation was now I had a girlfriend, and they found out about that.
Anita Rao
Coming up after the break, how this prom night discovery eventually led Celeste parents to center to conversion therapy. Celeste Gracia is an environment reporter at W UNC, and you're listening to embodied from North Carolina public radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear embodied as a podcast, follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao, today, we're talking with one of our W UNC colleagues, Celeste Gracia, about her 10 year journey of healing from religious trauma. We left off with Celeste on prom night when her parents discovered that she had a girlfriend which went against everything they tried to instill in her about her obligation to be a good Christian daughter, looking back, she can see that her parents reactions stemmed from firmly held beliefs about the afterlife, like the idea that her queerness would have eternal consequences.
Celeste Gracia
The whole idea is that, as Christians, our life here on earth is temporary, but once we die, our spirits will go to heaven and live eternal glory. And so their fear is that if I'm gay, I will not go to heaven. And from their perspective, they just want us to be together in heaven forever.
Anita Rao
As Celeste contended with her parents anger and fear, she focused all her energy on finishing her junior year of high school, but at first, her parents tried to prevent her from going back to take her final exams, because returning to school meant she'd have a chance to see her girlfriend.
Celeste Gracia
They didn't want me to see rose, but I fought with them tooth and nail, because if I don't take these exams, I'm gonna fail 11th grade. I have to go and so the compromise, the quote, unquote compromise, was that my mom came with me. Your mom came with you to school every day, yes, for that week, and sat in the back of the class while I took my tests.
Anita Rao
So did rose and your friends know what was going on, yes, okay, yeah, they had figured it out, but you had no way to contact them because you were cut off from all communication. Right? I was completely isolated. So you go into the summer, you finish 11th grade, you're cut off from pretty much everyone. But then one day, your dad's sister, your aunt, comes to your parents house and tells you to get in the car. Did you know about what was going on? Like? Why was she showing up?
Celeste Gracia
I was very scared at this time. I remember it was around that time when my parents were still so angry with me that my little brother, he was only two months old at the time, and I he needed a diaper change, so I went to change his diaper, and my parents told me, No, don't touch him like you're not allowed to touch him because you're dirty. My little sister's birthday. She had a birthday party. It was a sleepover with some friends and some of our cousins. And my parents told me, Don't talk to your cousins. You know, we don't want you to influence them in any kind of way.
Anita Rao
Wow. So you what you have in their view is, is like a disease that should not be spread,
Celeste Gracia
Right. So with that in mind, when my Tia came, when my aunt came, I didn't know where she was in this, I didn't know where she stood. Again, this doesn't really make any logical sense now, but. At that time, in that moment, I remember truly believing that she was going to take me out into a field in some rural area, and I thought she was gonna kill me. She did not do that. She did the exact opposite. We got in her car, and I was sitting there in the passenger seat, probably shaking with fear, and I was just completely still and silent and just like staring at the glove compartment. And she said, Celeste, to come here. And she gave me the biggest hug and the biggest squeeze. She gave me a kiss. We went to IHOP, and she just listened to me, I mean, she might have saved my life, and she told me, then something that has stuck with me all these years. She said, Celeste, I love you and your parents love you, but you will never be enough for your parents, and your parents will never accept you. And that was brutal to hear, but I'm so thankful that she told me that now as an adult, now that I've done four years of therapy and all of this emotional intelligence work, I think my parents do love me, but they don't love me the way I need to be loved. That's why I have my chosen family now, and I think hearing that from my Thea so many years ago has stuck with me, and when I have heard similar sentiments from my friends or from my therapist, I know that there's an ounce of truth to it, because my Thea told me that too.
Anita Rao
So she has this conversation with you. You're kind of living in this limbo space where you still have a year left of high school, a year left of living in a house with your parents, where they're seems like kind of afraid of you and afraid of what might happen, and that motivates them to send you to conversion therapy. Can you tell us about what those sessions were like.
Celeste Gracia
I remember it was a church off of a busy street, and I don't remember what the lady's name was, but I do remember that she wore a necklace with her initial. I want to say it was the letter K or the letter C. That's the only thing I remember, I believe it was like, once a week, it was talk therapy. Sometimes the sessions were just me and her. Sometimes it was my parents. And the phrase that was repeated over and over and over again is, homosexuality is a deviant behavior of Christianity, and homosexuality is a sin. And yes, God loves you, and God and Jesus forgive you of your sins. But why would you want to commit a sin anyway? If you know that this is a sin, then why are you choosing to hurt God and Jesus in that way deliberately? I fought this for a while, and I was trying to make my therapist and trying to make my parents understand that this is not a choice. You know, I didn't choose to have hazel eyes, I didn't choose the color of my skin, I didn't choose to be pansexual. And at some point I broke down, and I realized that I was not gonna win, and I realized it was not about winning, it was about surviving, and so I faked a coming to Jesus moment. My thought process was, I have to play the role. I know what they want me to do. I know what they want to hear, so let me just do that. Let me put on this performance so that way I can just stop going to these things like that. Way I can just live a tiny, tiny bit more.
Anita Rao
So what exactly did you say in this faking of coming to Jesus? So
Celeste Gracia
So it was a therapy session with the therapist and my two parents, and I said it was something to the effect of, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think you're right. I think that this is bad behavior, and I don't want to do this anymore, and I'm so grateful for everything that that you guys have done for me. I didn't believe any of it. I was going to ask if you believed any I don't know. I believed it enough to make it believable.
Anita Rao
So what was your internal narrative about your sexuality after sitting there for weeks having this woman say this to you with your parents there, telling you that what you were doing and how you felt was a sin, like what was happening internally for you,
Celeste Gracia
I don't know if I can answer that, because I think the conversation that I needed to have with myself about what is my sexuality, I I had to put that in a box, yeah, and put that box, like, in a shelf, in a closet, and just save it for later, yeah, and I got to that in college, but in that moment, I just needed to focus on selling the lie and finishing high school. I didn't have the capacity to think about that. So. Did they believe you? They did. They did believe me. And I stopped going to that therapy. And after this coming to Jesus moment, my parents actually took me out to eat for lunch, to celebrate. And I remember my dad went in to get us a table, and so it was me and my mom in the car, and I told her again, like to really sell it. I told her again, like, Mommy, I just want to say thank you again. Like, I know you did this because you love me and I love you too. And she said, Yes, baby, of course. Like, we just want you to be in heaven with us. That's all. We just want all of us to be together.
Anita Rao
So what was your relationship like with your faith and religion at that point?
Celeste Gracia
At that point, it was all performative. I did not get a chance to really explore my faith and my sexuality until college and even into my adulthood. What I can say now is I definitely have had a lot of hard conversations with myself specific to faith, and I have come to realize that there are so many different kinds of faiths, and now that I am no longer living in South Texas, and I went to college and I met new people and saw new things, I feel like who's to say Which religion is actually true or not true. And I think that having faith is a very deliberate choice, and so I do consider myself a Christian today and forever, because I would rather live my life believing in God and Jesus only to die and find out that he's not real, than to live my life not believing in Him, only to die and find out he is real. However, how I choose to show my faith is through love. It is my belief that God and Jesus and Christianity is nothing but love. I'm not the type of Christian that I'm going to bug you to come to church with me every Sunday. I actually don't have a church that I go to every Sunday, because I really reject the idea of organized religion. I have a personal relationship with God and Jesus, and that's all I need.
Anita Rao
You were in survival mode, and you'd put everything into a box, because there was no way to look at your relationship with your sexuality when you were in survival mode, right? You finish high school, you go to college, when did you kind of begin to, like, take the box out of the closet and begin to kind of name and unpack some of the things that you'd been experiencing as religious trauma?
Celeste Gracia
Not until after college. I graduated college in december 2018 and I started working here at W UNC in September 2019 so it really wasn't until the end of 2019 the beginning of 2020 that I was finally able to unpack all of that. Because throughout college, I did have more freedom. I wasn't necessarily in survival mode, but I did know that I needed to become independent from my parents. I knew that I could use my education and my career as a way out, and so during college, I worked so hard to get in internships and to do as many extracurriculars as I could. I mean, one semester, I was taking five classes, working a part time job, also working a part time internship for free, plus, like, two or three extracurricular activities. But it paid off, because I graduated early, and as soon as I graduated, I had the biggest blessing to go intern at NPR in Washington, DC, and then I ended up here. So it wasn't until after all that that I was finally able to digest this. So this is within the past five years,
Anita Rao
So it's a new kind of phase of your life, unpacking and naming this in terms of your sexuality in college. Were you exploring that more freely on your own terms, or was that also kind of still put to the side to be in survival mode?
Celeste Gracia
Well, Rose and I actually continued our relationship despite everything that happened. We reconnected toward the end of senior year of high school. We were together for about another year and a half, and I ended things with her at the beginning of our second year of college. And I did that because my parents had once again found out about us. So I was with rose for the first part of my college career, and then after that, I mostly just stuck to dating boys. Like, in the back of my mind, I knew that dating men was just going to be easier, yeah, than dating a woman.
Anita Rao
While you've shared all these stories from your past, you've also shared a lot of like, moments of reflection and insight that you kind of attribute. To some of the work that you've been doing in the past four or five years, but I guess I'm curious about what led you to decide to go to therapy after having had such a traumatic experience with someone who claimed to be giving you therapy, like how did you decide to go back and seek out a therapist.
Celeste Gracia
I wasn't scared, I think because I was in a brand new state, in an area that's more progressive, I felt confident that I was going to get the help that I needed. I think also enough years had passed from the actual situation that I was ready to talk about it. So I started therapy in january 2021 and again, I'm so blessed to say that I've had the same therapist the entire time, and I love her so much, and she is bisexual, and I think I've just obviously our trust has built over time, but I knew that she would help me.
Anita Rao
There's a lot of internalization that you've kind of mentioned that happened in moments of your life, of like voices or critiques or narratives, that you have to do this to be enough. You have to succeed in this way to be enough. Are there moments in your life now where you feel like those voices come back?
Celeste Gracia
Yes, every day I have a negative core belief that I'm not enough, that no matter what I do, no matter how many journalism awards I win, no matter how often I go home to visit my family, I am not a good enough daughter, I'm not a good enough Sister, I'm not a good enough journalist, I'm not a good enough friend. Those voices are definitely a part of my everyday narrative, but I think those voices have gone from a volume of 100 to a volume of two.
Anita Rao
That's pretty stark.
Celeste Gracia
Yeah, I recognize that it's there, but it's very minute. I mentioned earlier having my chosen family, my chosen family has also come together over the past five years. Whenever these voices start to act up a little bit, I just think, what would my friends tell me? And then the beliefs immediately go away. Also, for the past year, I've been single, and I have spent a lot of time with myself, where I've just come to know myself really well, and I am starting to love myself a lot. And so having that self confidence also helps with all of the core negative beliefs I have.
Anita Rao
Your parents did at one point apologize for sending you to conversion therapy. When did that apology happen, and what did it look like? How specific was it to the things that you experienced?
Celeste Gracia
I think the apology happened around 2020, I can't exactly remember how it came up. I do remember the conversation happening with my dad. There was a recent family incident that's separate from this. And my dad was apologizing and saying, I'm sorry if this is traumatizing you. And I said, No, this is not what has traumatized me. And he said, Well, what has and I said, Well, everything you did to me, this, this and this. And he said, You're right, and I apologize for that, that and that, and I'm sorry what we did was so extreme, it was cruel, and I'm so sorry. I know that we can't take it back, but please know that we are never going to do anything like that again. And it's true, my parents have learned their lesson, and they have been better toward my younger siblings and my mom and I actually now can have open conversations about generational trauma, and my mom acknowledges that she passed down her generational trauma to me, and that's huge. Now all this to say, my parents do still hold the same belief that being gay is a sin. The last time we had this conversation was in October, November of 2023 and they were just saying, like, Well, I understand that that's how you feel. You know I love you, but I don't love the sin. However, that's between you and God, you're still my daughter, but maybe we just shouldn't really talk about it.
Anita Rao
So are there big parts of your life that you just don't share with them. Now,
Celeste Gracia
Yes, my parents probably have never heard of Chapel Roan, and yet she was my number one most listened to artist last year. Currently, right now, I am talking to someone who is amazing and wonderful, and I'm really excited, and we're just in the talking stage, but it's the stage where I get butterflies and like, I'm screaming and kicking my feet, and I want to be able to share that with my parents. I wish I could tell them, like, Hey, I'm talking to this wonderful girl. You guys would love her, but I can't, and that's sad, and that sucks. I'll put it this way, if I were to ever marry a woman, I would. Still want my dad to walk me down the aisle, but if my dad decides that he cannot walk me down the aisle because it's going to conflict with his moral and spiritual beliefs, I understand that is heartbreaking, but that's okay, because I have people who will walk me down the aisle.
Anita Rao
What were the things that you were told that you couldn't have because of your sexuality that you have in your life now,
Celeste Gracia
Community is the first thing that comes to mind, and having people who love me and accept me unconditionally, a relationship with God. Actually, this was in March 2023 and I was just thinking about my faith and my sexuality, and I thought, You know what? I did not choose to be pansexual. God made me like this, and God is perfect, and I was made in God's perfect image, and God literally knows how many hairs I have on my head. So no, I don't believe homosexuality is a sin, because it's not like I'm choosing this, and I've stuck with that, and I believe that firmly, but I didn't believe this until two years ago. Unrelated specifically to my sexuality, I do feel a lot more free than I did 10 years ago, and part of it is because I moved across the country that I truly feel like I can be completely myself. Right now today, I am surrounded by enough community and by enough chosen family that I can be me.
Anita Rao
Celeste Gracia is an environment reporter here at W UNC after the break, Celeste and I will be joined by a social worker to discuss why religious trauma can be so hard to heal from, and what he does to help folks through that recovery journey. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. We've been talking today to our W UNC colleague, Celeste Gracia, about her 10 year journey of healing from religious trauma. Celeste grew up in a religiously conservative family in South Texas. She went through conversion therapy and is still processing her beliefs about sexuality, faith and family. It's this profound ripple effect of religious trauma that often makes it so challenging to heal from an idea that's central to the work of therapists like Jonathan Bell.
Jonathan Bell
Religious trauma is something that is not just necessarily experienced within a very clearly church system, right? It is something that also occurs within a family system. A lot of my work as a therapist is helping clients see how they relate to the different systems in their life, whether that's church, faith, family school,
Anita Rao
Jonathan is a licensed clinical social worker based in North Carolina. He specializes in helping queer clients with religious trauma, some of whom are hesitant at first to seek therapy, because of its similarities to context where they were told their sexuality was a sin.
Jonathan Bell
With something like family, that is something that is so tough for people who are experiencing religious trauma, to come to a place of healing around because not only are you yourself trying to heal and grow from these negative messages you've received, you're also doing it while the people in your life, ie family, are learning alongside of you, if they're willing to learn and if they're willing to understand how what they've done has been so harmful. And I think it is relationship, and the wounds that come from pain that's done in relationship that can make healing from religious trauma just so difficult. And that really stuck out to me from your story, Celeste.
Anita Rao
I love the way that you talk about that intersection of those three things shaping the experience of religious trauma. And I'm curious if that comes up for you in how people find you, or the initial interactions people have with you when they think about okay, one of the parts of these core wounds was being in relationship with someone who breached my trust, maybe a therapist who was doing conversion therapy, for example.
Jonathan Bell
Yeah, yeah. I think part of what I try to make very clear in my work with clients is that I am a person who is going to let you be in the driver's seat, right? Like I am a person that recognizes that harm can come from so many different relationships in our life, and part of my role as a therapist is to create a corrective emotional experience for the client. So it's basically like if you have had a therapist that has. Been more of an adversary, someone that has told you, like, this is what you need to do in order to live a healthy life. I'm trying to create a more helpful emotional experience for you, where you get to determine what is healthy for you, right? So it's basically like, wow, I've had this experience where I've had a therapist, and it was really, really negative, and it was felt like the therapist was almost against me. Well, I get to perhaps do something with a client, where they get to see, oh, this type of relationship doesn't have to look this way. Maybe I have a therapist that actually is going to be an advocate and an ally for me, rather than someone who's a challenger in a negative way. And so I think my role as a therapist, I try to make it very clear that I am trying to be a representation of what a healthy relationship can look
Anita Rao
Celeste what comes up for you when you hear him say that in terms of any questions you have for Jonathan about like working with folks with religious trauma.
Celeste Gracia
Well, I will say everything that you've described, I think that my therapist has made that space for me, which I'm just so thankful for. One question that I did have for you, I have found myself, still to this day, with a lot of internalized homophobia toward myself, never toward anyone else, yet I do hold a small amount of animosity toward myself, if I may give you an example. My girlfriend from high school rose. We first had sex when we were in college. It was in 2017 I did not have sex with a woman again until this past December, in the sense that I, I mean, I kissed women at the club when I was drunk, or I got to, like second or third base, but until this past December, I had never had full on sex. And this just happened a couple months ago, and I was telling my friends, oh, I'm gay. Like, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that way more than I've ever enjoyed being with a man. I think I'm I think I'm gay. And my friends were like, really, I didn't know. But it was not, it wasn't a shock to me, but I was acting that way because I was still holding on to a sliver of hope that maybe I would not like it, and if I didn't like having sex with a woman, then maybe I still could be with a man. Yeah, and I'm just curious, how do you approach this?
Jonathan Bell
Oh my gosh. I think that is such a such a really, really interesting point that you bring up. I think what is really sticking with me is also a part of what makes religious trauma so precarious is that a lot of what I walk with my clients around is how oftentimes there's something called, like a misalignment that happens, right? We have sort of an external behavior, or we are doing something that perhaps doesn't align with how we view ourselves or exactly what we believe, right? And so me as a therapist, if you were my client and you were telling me that story, I would perhaps sit with you and say, huh. So, you know, help me understand? It sort of sounds like that. It perhaps has taken you some time to be able to get to a place where you feel comfortable, maybe using the word gay for yourself, or perhaps having an experience where you are engaging physically with another partner. Can we maybe, like, sit together and understand, like, what have been some of the internal things that are there to protect you, right, like all of these internal messages or sort of defense mechanisms are there to protect you and keep you safe. And let's just take some time to sort of unpack what those have looked like for you and how maybe there's something that isn't quite lining up with what you're doing externally and what how you see yourself internally, and how can we maybe slowly start to bring those two things into alignment with one another, and me, as a therapist, I get to sort of sit with you while you're unpacking a norm or a belief that you haven't quite looked at for some time. Does that make sense?
Celeste Gracia
That makes perfect sense, and I can tell you that the internalized norm is the phrase that the therapist repeated to me over and over, homosexuality is the deviant behavior of Christianity and so again, referring back to my experience a couple months ago when I had sex with a woman, I do think like there was that very tiny voice that has been so deeply embedded in me saying homosexuality is a sin.
Jonathan Bell
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Anita Rao
So Jonathan, I mean that core belief I know is something that you have worked through in your own personal life, in addition to therapy, like, where are you in your relationship with unpacking what? That?
Jonathan Bell
Okay? Let me see if I can still working on it. I'll say I grew up in evangelicalism here in North Carolina, it was very difficult for me to come out and to hold these two truths of gosh, am I allowed to be a person that is a Christian or someone who has a faith and also sees himself as gay? And it was through therapy that I started to, you know, unpack those parts of myself, right? And I definitely came across very similar core beliefs that said I'm bad, I'm dirty, I am not good enough, and so I think that it's still an ongoing process for me, it's been really powerful to recognize where I'm at now in looking at my chosen family, my community, my life with my partner, and seeing that, wow, I didn't realize that this type of a life was possible when I first came out and was processing through some of this.
Anita Rao
Yeah, I'm curious to talk to both of you about this kind of conversation around boundaries with family, and I feel like in the past year, there has been, I don't know, like, a bit of an interesting resurgence in how people are talking about, like, boundaries and estrangement, and this kind of very black and white, either your family accepts you for who you are and you stay in relationship with them, or like you don't know them anything and like you can disconnect. That's a boundary that you can set. And now there's like a whole pushback of people saying, well, family systems are really important. You're not really healing that core wound if you're just cutting people out of your life. So how do you help people figure that out? And what a healthy version of that looks like.
Jonathan Bell
I have so many thoughts about this. Really. What stuck out to me about Celeste story was the grace and compassion that I think, that you show your family, and the reality that, from your parents point of view, they were doing the best they could, they were working off of their best intentions, based off of their belief system. And I think that is so important, and helps, perhaps, find another way that isn't the black and white right, because I think you're exactly right. Anita, I think that there is a very common pattern of, well, I either have to stay completely connected to my family, as if nothing ever happened, or it's like I'm never speaking to my family again. And it makes sense how we have gotten there. And I just really try to help clients think about is that actually what's right for you, an ethic that is core to what it means to be a social worker is to honor a client's right to self determination, and that's something that I hold in high regard when I'm working with clients, particularly my queer clients who are living with religious trauma because I never want to prescribe a certain path through them that does not feel true to who they are or where they're at in their story, right? And so my role as a therapist is to help reflect back what I'm hearing about their relationship with their family. So if Celeste with my client, I might say, Gosh, it sounds like family is a really important core value of yours, and yet, I've also heard you come into my office and talk about the pain that they have caused you. Help me understand what you want for your relationship with your family. And a client may say, like, oh, you know, I want to be in a place where I'm able to bring my partner home to see my family over the holidays, or I want to be able to talk openly about my sexuality, and I say, okay, that's it's good to know of like, what sort of the dream ideal is here. And if they do try it with with a family, and they realize, Wow, this did not work out. Well, I really hoped that it did. Then I helped them process, okay, you tried, and we sadly didn't get the result we were hoping for. Now, what do you want, right? How do you get to stay in the driver's seat? And you know, if this is something that's a value to you, I want to be your cheerleader and help you try this in a way where you feel like you're always going to have someone to come back to and process this with, and to talk about safety with, and to talk about pain with. And also, I might be the person that says, you know, based off of what I'm hearing, you know, we may need to start having conversations about what we do next holiday season.
Anita Rao
I feel like one of the things we've been talking about and threading throughout this conversation is relationship with forgiveness, forgiveness of family, forgiveness of self, for past beliefs. How do you help clients with these questions about how and when to forgive? Especially. Moments like this, where it feels like the lines are so drawn between who's on what side and how people believe things.
Jonathan Bell
Yeah, I tell my clients that sometimes forgiveness is for yourself, right? Forgiveness is not to maybe it's not even something that you communicate to the person that's harmed you, right? Maybe it's something that you just give to yourself to say, I forgive my loved one that caused me pain. I forgive my loved one who is actively voting against my self interest. And the purpose, I think, of forgiveness is to get to a place of acceptance and to perhaps let go of resentment that is not helping the current situation. Perhaps for some folks, if they aren't able to get to a place of forgiveness, what can sometimes show up for people, maybe not all the time, they'll continue to be sort of stuck in a spiral of bitterness and resentment, and I think that prevents people from actually being able to grieve and to accept the fact that this is actually happening, right? And if we continue to stay in a place of bitterness and resentment, and we continue to sort of spin our wheels and, you know, shake our fists being like, why on earth did this person hurt me? I think we continue to actually give more power to that person who oppressed us, and so of course, I'm never going to tell a client you need to forgive, but I might say like, Gosh, I wonder what life would look like for you if you were able to forgive your loved one, right? Maybe you forgive the person in your life and you still never have a relationship with them. That's okay, but as your therapist, I'd love to see you get to a place where you are healthy and thriving, and it seems like that bitterness and resentment might be getting in the way of that. Maybe it actually looks like trying to recognize that our loved ones are doing something out of their best intentions that doesn't, of course, absolve them of what they've done. But perhaps again, the forgiveness is not about absolving and saying, Oh, it was totally fine. You did this. Forgiveness is more saying, I'm making the choice to try to move forward and heal from my pain.
Anita Rao
Yeah, I want to end with your your thoughts, so go for it.
Celeste Gracia
I have a note that I've written to myself, and I have it folded up and it says to Celeste. From Celeste, please read when you need to break the spell of unconditional love, and I have it on my nightstand so that way I can remind myself the phrase is forgive and forget. I disagree. I do forgive my parents, but I do not forget. I forgive my parents for all the harm that they have caused, because I do know that while their actions were abusive, their intention was from love. So I can forgive because, as Jonathan is saying, it does help me move forward. And I don't hold any bitterness. I don't harbor any resentment, but I do have to remember what happened, so that way my expectations are adjusted accordingly, so that way I don't continue to get hurt.
Anita Rao
Celeste Gracia is an environment reporter here at North Carolina public radio W UNC. Jonathan Bell is a therapist and licensed clinical social worker based in North Carolina. Celeste, Jonathan, thank you so much for the conversation.
Celeste Gracia
Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Jonathan Bell
Thank you so much. Anita, it was a pleasure to be here.
Celeste Gracia
Can I the last thing I want to say,
Anita Rao
Go for it.
Celeste Gracia
My goal in sharing this story is that one, just one person, will hear this and that it's all going to be okay in the end. And if it's not okay yet, then it's not the end yet.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about everyone featured on today's show at our website, embodied w u n c.org, you can also stay up to date by following us on Instagram. Our handle is at embodied W U N C, make sure you're also subscribed to our weekly podcast. Today's episode was produced by Audrey Smith and edited by Kaia Finlay. Nina Scott is our intern and Jenni Lawson our technical director. Special thanks also to Sean Roux and Wilson Sayre. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District North Carolina. Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.