Purity culture isn’t a thing that happens to OTHER people. The tendrils of sexual repression have insinuated themselves into all of our lives. In the second half of our conversation with Jamie Lee Finch, we see how evangelical Christianity’s restrictive approach to sex, sex education and owning your body and desire isn’t that different from what so many of us experienced. It’s a shocking and bracing discovery that has profound implications for our lives. This conversation is funny and weird and dark. We get into why so many pastors can’t stop talking about their “smoking hot wife” and how missionary work might be completely inseparable from sexual sublimation. Jamie Lee Finch is the author of You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity. Make sure you check out the first half of our conversation from last week! Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2LdiPlkf5XqJiNPr8yKqD2?si=a7a9878a8eb845a4 Episode link: Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Jamie Lee Finch on Purity Culture, Sex, & Befriending Your Body (pt.2)
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST plus member. Just head over to our website TMSTpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy this.
[00:00:31] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. Last week we brought you part one of our conversation with Jamie Lee Finch and this week, big surprise. It's part two. If you haven't listened to part one, I suggest you pause and scroll back for that one. It will give you some important context for where you're going to hear. In this episode today, Jamie takes us inside what it was like to grow up inside evangelical Christian purity culture and what it's taken to rest her life in a healthy [00:01:00] body, positive way.
[00:01:01] Coming out of that, most of us didn't grow up in evangelical purity culture, but I got to say there's a lot of similarities in the way. So many of us were told to deny ourselves. Feel shame for our desire or just have no clue about what we want. Jamie also has some deep, hard won wisdom on how sick we make ourselves when we're chasing that outside approval through things like social media.
[00:01:30] And dominant tightly interwoven communities or willingness to be open and direct about making mistakes in the public eye is so refreshing. And it's proof why she's someone you need to know. Ready? Let's go.
[00:01:56] I want to talk about your background. [00:02:00] Yeah, because I have so many people in my life who come from the evangelical background. It's like five of my dearest friends actually are from that background. So I know a good amount, but I want it to ground other people in this. It's impossible. As I understand, to separate your background from evangelical Christianity, I want to get everyone on the same page about purity culture as you experienced it, because that seems like the foundation we can start from.
[00:02:26] Yes. So what is…explain purity culture?
[00:02:31] Jamie Lee Finch: Well, purity culture. It's a, it's a very specific, I'd say. It's its own ideology, but it also kind of exists as like an ideological subset of the larger ideology. Yes, my experience of it was within the larger ideology of evangelical Christianity, but you also see the trappings of purity culture show up [00:03:00] in various other ideologies as well. Jessica Valenti's book, The Purity Myth does a great job at just spelling out like where do we see virginity culture period in culture, kind of across the board. When I first read that book years ago, I was expecting to read a book that was [00:03:15] telling my own individual experience back to me. And it was so much, it was a much larger view than that. And I really appreciated that about it because my direct personal experience was, I do think it's what most people tend to think of when they think of purity culture, this very, the evangelical Christian, like predominantly white evangelical Christian.
[00:03:35] Where expression, where there's this idea of like, don't have don't have sex before marriage don't have any sexual contact with yourself or anybody else, no sexual exploration of your own body or anyone else's body before you are in a implied lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage. And it's, it's that rigid.
[00:03:57] It's that specific. And so [00:04:00] what I believe to be true about that idea is that it's, it's incredibly inhumane because you've got, you know, and this is kind of the thing that purity culture tends to be known for is like the adolescent experience of it. You have these like church youth group of events that are planned exclusively around talking to teenagers about how it's their highest holiest mandate to resist any of their sexual urges.
[00:04:23] You know, the, every, every unspoken prayer request in any purse circle. Whenever someone says I have an unspoken, it's always like masturbation, it's always looking at porn. It's always something about sex. Like it's a very shockingly kind of sex, obsessed culture. And also the fact that, and this is kind of a joke that, you know, a lot of ex angelical people, like when you say it, everyone knows it.
[00:04:45] The whole, my smoking hot wife joke where like every pastor will incessantly talk about how hot is what his wife. It's a whole thing. You got to have a hot wife. If you're going to be like [00:05:00] a famous, you know, relatively famous hip cool evangelical pastor.
[00:05:06] And you know, what's implied there is she's hot. Not just because she's visually hot, she's hot because she is perpetually available into me. And so it's again, very sex obsessed. There's this they're really obsessed with saying if you follow all of these rules, don't worry. There's this finish line of heterosexual, lifelong monogamous marriage.
[00:05:29] And when you cross that finish. It's just green pastures from here on out, which again is a very. I mean, I could go on for days about how that's also a very patriarchal way of looking at it and obviously a very heterosexist way of looking at it clearly, but a very patriarchal way of like, it's, it's smooth sailing.
[00:05:46] It's green pastures. Like everything's great from here on out. And what they're essentially implying is because your penis will have a vagina to be able to go into whenever you want. They're not actually talking about sex. They're talking about a very heteronormative. You know, masculine [00:06:00] projection of what that means, what sex gets to mean, because the amount, the amount of people that I talk to who have had very unfulfilling, very unsatisfying sex throughout the entirety of their maybe former or even still current like marriage.
[00:06:16] Forged in the fires of the evangelical church. And I'm not just talking about women, I'm not just talking about people who have vaginas. I'm also talking about like people who have penises who are like this still, wasn't it like, but the, but the talking point is your life will be fulfilling because your sex life will be fulfilling because there will always be someone to have sex with.
[00:06:36] And that's kind of the end of the conversation. They don't talk about what intimacy really could mean. They don't talk about like what sex really could mean. I just. It's a really absurdly over-simplified way of talking about human sexuality while largely not talking about human sexuality at all, because you're not getting any information about it.
[00:06:56] When you are a teenager, you're just being told one [00:07:00] day when you're in this marriage, you will start being able to have. You will have it. It will be great the end. So all of these people get to that point and they have no information about their own physical bodies. They have no idea what arouses them personally.
[00:07:13] They've never explored anything with themselves or anyone else, or if they have, they have so much shame because of doing so. And so they're in this, they've crossed that finish line. They're at the point where they were told, once you're here, eerything's going to be amazing and it's not, and it's really fucking confusing.
[00:07:30] Laura McKowen: This is such an obvious question, but I just want you to talk about, I mean, obviously this plants, this deep distrust in your own body, let alone other bodies. I can't even imagine how you'd be into explore other bodies. Was that your experience? I know the answer is yes, but maybe say more about that and like, how did that start to wreak havoc inside of you?
[00:07:53] Maybe when and how, like, how did it show up?
[00:07:58] Jamie Lee Finch: Yes, it was definitely my [00:08:00] experience. I was raised in that mentality and inside of all of those talking points, I went to all those church camps and youth group events and things I have started attempting to go through The Artist's Way. Oh, because I've never successfully made it all the way through for probably obvious reasons.
[00:08:22] Laura McKowen: Well, what, no. Why? Do you think it's confronting, the recovery aspect of it?
[00:08:26] Jamie Lee Finch: It is, I mean, it requires, you know, one of the things that it is supposed to do is that it requires you to go really deep into your own sense of self, your own relationship to your own internal world. And, and this is kind of you asking that question kind of spot on, because one of the things I wrote down that I'm trying to find is maybe one of the less obvious ways in which purity culture and the sexual suppression of it all really damaged me as a person, is that it didn't [00:09:00] just shut down my relationship to my body in the sense of sexuality, it shut down my relationship to my body in all sense of desire, any and every desire. So one of the most vivid memories I have that I conjured up when I was reading this, going through the introduction to her book. So she named, when she's talking about the basic principles of this path of the artist's way, if our mom or dad expressed doubt or disapproval from our creative dreams, we may project that same attitude onto a parental God, because you know, this idea of God source the universe is a big thing in her work. And that brought up this memory for me, it's kind of consistent memory of, so what I wrote in the margin said also my young, my young sense of duty versus desire, like my younger self, where I had written there, I wrote
[00:09:49] diary entry after diary entry, where I would tell God, my idea of God at the time, that even though I wanted to be an artist, because I wanted to be a singer, I wanted to be a musician. I [00:10:00] wanted to be an artist. I knew that the he, God, actually wanted self-denial from me more than anything else. So I would consent to being a missionary instead of an artist.
[00:10:15] Laura McKowen: So any desire, any design, any appetite?
[00:10:17] Jamie Lee Finch: Yes. Great word, any appetite, any desire you learn this, and this is why I'm trying to go through this book. This is why I've made a lot of decisions in the last, like couple of months to kind of blow up certain things in my life that were not working, including my, my relationship and, and other friendships and certain aspects about my job is I'm realizing how that [00:10:41] piece. Yes, I've deconstructed my relationship to evangelical Christianity, but there are all these really insidious little elements of the things that I learned about myself that are still embedded in my psyche and they just become beliefs about myself. And this is probably the biggest one that came from evangelicalism, came from [00:11:00] purity culture is any time you sense desire, drive appetite, shut it down, move the other. What I'm realizing now is that that is so deeply embedded, that it has an, I don't even know how long that hasn't been conscious.
[00:11:15] Laura McKowen: How does that not even, how does that not impact every single thing, every preference that you have is questioned?
[00:11:22] Do I even like this person as whether they're a friend or a partner trusting that.
[00:11:28] Jamie Lee Finch: Yes. Like coming to terms, coming to terms with the fact that my relationship just ended just two days ago. It finally ended, but I had been so obviously unhappy to everyone that knows me for probably a year, but the sense of duty and obligation was so much stronger than any sense of wait I'm not happy here because happiness doesn't matter. Like that was a fundamental element of my upbringing.
[00:11:57] Laura McKowen: It’s actually bad. Not only does it not matter, it's like bad. You're doing something.
[00:12:00] Jamie Lee Finch: You're doing something wrong. Yes. And that wasn't a conscious thought, it's not like I would have the conscious thought I'm unhappy in this relationship, but I have to stay anyway.
[00:12:08] It's a rhythm at this point. It's a rhythm, it's a pattern that is kind of a second nature of it's just how I'm oriented. And so now realizing that is how I'm oriented, because that is where my deepest programming came from. And yes, most of that messaging was given to me by way of talks, you know, talks about sex, but it also came to me through that language that I mentioned.
[00:12:32] And what I just read, like the languages of self-denial in general, that it's in order to within evangelicalism, denying yourself is the highest and holiest thing you can possibly do. So it is the way to please God, the most. So therefore it is the way to get the most love from God. So I'm like 8, 9, 10 years old.
[00:12:51] Writing out in my diary, acknowledging what I want and simultaneously acknowledging, but I will get the most love from [00:13:00] God if I don't do that. And I do the thing I actually don't want to do. And I, Laura, I was a missionary for like eight years of my life. Like I did vocational Christian ministry. And some of that did involve musical elements as a worship leader, but that fundamentally that choice, I made those series of choices of that self denial and the identity I adopted through that self denial.
[00:13:23] I mean, not only navigating my adult life when I was an evangelical, making me a missionary but also when I left evangelicalism, what did I do? I became a coach, which means I became someone whose entire job is just helping other people. So I'm in the space literally right now, like, as we're talking about.
[00:13:44] I think I might have to quit my job. Like I don't know that I don't know, or at least do it very differently because I'm seeing how that messaging, that internalized belief has shown up everywhere that it is my duty to take care of other people [00:14:00] more than, and before I pay any amount of attention to what might be happening in my internal world.
[00:14:06] And that is the biggest thing that I would say and yes, sex is included in that the way I have sex, how I have sex with myself, other people. But that core belief I would say is the biggest impact that being raised in purity culture gave to me.
[00:14:23] Laura McKowen: Oh my gosh, I see it and I, I see it. I work with mostly women and mostly women in the recovery community and I would say 98% of women would say the same thing that you're saying and they're not in this is not their background. It's just like multiplied if you are. Because it’s to me, being a woman that grows up in this culture is like a triple bind in a way, because you've got. [00:15:00] the God, the mega God, that you're, that is
[00:15:06] speaking this down and then you've got the parent, the actual parents that you have that are doubling down on this message and thoroughly believe it themselves extensively. And by the way, everyone else here around.
[00:15:21] Jamie Lee Finch: especially if you're raised as female, especially then.
[00:15:26] Laura McKowen: Right. Maybe it was the culture part. The everyone else? Yeah, the, yeah, the God, the parents, everyone else. It's like, you're so insulated from, from that, that how, I mean, I you're like a magical unicorn that you broke out of it at all, so I'm sure you, you probably, maybe, maybe not, but I'm sure you tend to feel hard on yourself.
[00:15:53] Like, oh my God, this is showing up everywhere, but it’s how could it not. [00:16:00] This was happening before you were even born. This, you are, you are absorbing this, these things. So it's pretty extraordinary that you have even crossed the first threshold of leaving and then, and then it continues on and on and on.
[00:16:14] I mean, it's just like more and more liberation. It’s pretty extraordinary.
[00:16:18] Jamie Lee Finch: Thank you. I legitimately really needed that today. That is making me emotional because it has been. Yeah, there have been a lot of feelings I'm in a very raw tender place considering the decision I just made a couple days ago and it does very much feel like I had a friend who mirrored it back to me the other night and saying, she said, it feels like you beat the big, you beat the big boss in the video game.
[00:16:44] And I was like, fuck, I think I did. And not to say that there won't be more of this. This ethic of like, I had already decided the way other ways in which I was drained personally and professionally, but this was the thing that was still here, that I was like, I'm obligated to [00:17:00] this person though, that my happiness doesn't matter.
[00:17:03] And to finally like pull the plug on that one for the first time in my life and be like, I got to go, because of me, I guess. It's like really it's uncomfortable and so yeah, thank you for saying that because it feels really wrong right now and it feels because it feels so new and different. And so I have been really hard on myself and also very scared.
[00:17:26] There is a sense when you, I think, and this is something, maybe it was. Helpful for your listeners to hear someone say too, like when you start identifying and therefore shifting that ethic that you realize you've been living with it naturally creates this sense of spaciousness. I have another friend that I'm very close to, who is also an embodiment coach.
[00:17:50] I was on the phone with her last night, unsurprisingly. She was like, what are you noticing in your body right now as we're talking. And I identified this, this feeling right? Am I the kind of area of my [00:18:00] solar plexu so upper stomach, lower rib cage. And it was like hollow empty spaciousness that feels like grief.
[00:18:12] It feels like loneliness, but also the longer I sit with it there, it kind of feels a little bit like freedom.
[00:18:25] Laura McKowen: That's where your power is, you know that, right?
[00:18:30] Jamie Lee Finch: Yes. That’s why I think no wonder. And so when those things clear out so intensely, when these ways, in which we have been outsourcing our power and kind of giving all of our time and effort and energy away, when we start calling all of that back, like it does create a spaciousness in your life that can feel terrifying, but it's meant to be filled with you is the thing.
[00:18:54] Laura McKowen: You can know that intellectually and, and it's an animal fear [00:19:00] feeling, like like root level fear, survival fear. So that's what I mean by you're extraordinary for being willing to do it. And you like you have with the rest of your work are going to give so many other people permission.
[00:19:19] Jamie Lee Finch: Thank you. That really means a lot. Thank you.
[00:19:22] Laura McKowen: And you're welcome. You're welcome. Not to just jar off of that, but away from that so quickly, but, but it's, it's all related. What is religious trauma, because I don't think people, a lot of people know that it’s a think.
[00:19:36] Jamie Lee Finch: Yes. I don't think a lot of people do.
[00:19:40] I think more people are becoming aware of it, steadily, which is great news, religious trauma to the, honestly, just really simple about the definition of it is it is just like any other. Trauma in how it shows up in the body and in the brain that comes specifically from the ways in which, and this is my definition for it.
[00:19:58] The ways in which you had [00:20:00] to self abandon in order to survive the, um, the ethic and ideology of the religion that you were raised in. And so not all expressions of religion or spirituality are going to create religious trauma and not all people who are raised or brought up inside of a high control fundamentalist authoritarian.
[00:20:19] Space are going to be traumatized by it. Trauma is more, is less about what happened to you and more about how you responded or were not able to respond to what happened to you. So it's all a very individual experience about whether or not you were able to find, or, or successfully receive a sense of safety in the midst of what felt overwhelming, uh, like too much, too fast, too soon in your direction.
[00:20:44] And for many of us who were raised within evangelical Christianity or. Authoritarian religions. There was no ability to seek safety because the messages you were told about yourself, about the world, about God, you were told that that is kind of, like you said before, that's a water you're swimming in.
[00:20:59]This is just what is real. So there's nowhere to go to seek a sense of grounding and safety away from those things that are really overwhelming. Scary, especially when you're young. So yeah, it's, it's as legitimate as any other form of trauma, like, you know, being in a car accident or coming back from war, like, or even just like domestic abuse.
[00:21:22] Like there are a lot of people who are talking about the parallels between familial and domestic abuse and religious abuse. And there's honestly, if that was like a real life relationship, the way in which the Evangelical God, the father interacts with his children like that, that we would put that person probably in a place where they cannot get to their children anymore.
[00:21:46] We would make sure we would intervene because we would see that's not healthy. That's actually very abusive and bad. But when it's inside of your religion, you're just told, this is how God is. His ways are higher than yours. Don't question it. So you just let, I say in [00:22:00] my book, there's a section in my book, where I'm listing off things that I let that God do to me because what other choice did I have.
[00:22:09] And because I was desperately seeking to be loved by and approved by that God. So I let him do in my consciousness, let him do a whole lot of really horrible things to me.
Laura McKowen: What were some of those things?
Jamie Lee Finch: It's funny. I can't remember what I wrote in the book now, but I would say in this moment, kind of what I said before, what I let that God do to me is convinced me of things about myself that were fundamentally untrue.
[00:22:34] Convince me of things about what I deserve in life or what I don't deserve in life that are fundamentally untrue. I let that God also make me vulnerable and open to abuse from other individuals. In ways that if maybe it hadn't happened inside of religiously sanctioned environments, I might have been able to say, you're not allowed to do that to me.
[00:22:58] There are [00:23:00] many things that might, because of the idea of God that I was raised with and the personality that, that God had, that I just kind of said, I'm at your mercy. Do whatever you want. Hurt me if you want, because I guess apparently when you hurt me, it's for my own good, because you know, better than I do. So any version of just letting that God hurt me, I let him do it.
[00:23:23] Laura McKowen: Do you have a relationship with God now?
[00:23:29] Jamie Lee Finch: I have a relationship with my body and I think they might be the same thing. And that's not me saying like my body is God. That is me saying that I think God, the divine, source, wisdom, the universe, whatever that might be, if that being dwells anywhere/everywhere, then that would include our bodies.
[00:23:58] And my body is [00:24:00] the way that I have most frequently and intensely and powerfully encountered the divine or the mystical same. And also looking back on a lot of my experiences within evangelicalism, maybe even some of like the charismatic or mystical type experiences when I felt like I heard the voice of God, I now am really aware that, oh, that was just her.
[00:24:24] That was her talking the whole time. And I was just tapping into something. That is able to be tapped into, regardless of what name you ascribed to it. So I would say that I do, I don't really use the word God, not because I'm uncomfortable with it, just because that word just doesn't hold a whole lot of weight or power to me.
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[00:26:28] Laura McKowen: So let’s end by talking about your struggles that you've been alluding to or saying, you know, talking about specifically, but not, but not specifically enough. Because I want to really understand that about being a public online person. What were you experiencing? How has that gone for you? Where are you now?
[00:26:48] Jamie Lee Finch: It's been a really, it, it feels like, or it has felt for the past few years, like, this [00:27:00] machine, this, this vehicle of some kinds that I am not driving, I am not in charge of. And it's just going in the direction. It's going at the speed it's going. And I don't. And according to this kind of, crowd, it's hard, that's the hard part to put language to you.
[00:27:19] Because I'm like they're individuals, but then there's also this like collective energy of like…
[00:27:22] Laura McKowen: There's a thing about crowds though. It's a real thing. And they have a consciousness of their own.
[00:27:29] Jamie Lee Finch: That is who I think has been behind the wheel of this vehicle. And I am at best in the passenger seat. Mostly. I feel like I've been like stuffed in the trunk. Like I am I'm in the car, but I have no agency or control over what happens and all I've been doing for the past few years. I now realize is just saying yes to everything that has been asked or demanded of me from.
[00:27:54] Self publishing my thesis, which is my book. Like I wrote that for school and people just told me they [00:28:00] wanted to read it. So I was like, okay, I'll give it to you all the way over. Yes. All the way over to like, you know, the work I do is one-on-one facilitation, but I kept hearing from people like you should create a course, like, cause my waitlist got so long, but I was like, okay, I'll create a course.
[00:28:13] And I don't regret publishing the book. I don't regret creating the course. Those things are very special children to me now that I birthed into the world. But the point is that I never, at any point stopped to consider, do I want to do this? Because my agency was just so far outside of myself, a lot of that has to do with that evangelical upbringing of you give to other people what they need.
[00:28:35] You don't ask any questions about whether or not you have capacity or even interest to give those things. So the other thing that I've noticed that has happened as I've done that is that also when I have been in my own personal, but increasingly public, my personal has become increasingly public spaces of, um, discontent or [00:29:00] anger in the direction of people or entities, algorithms really fucking favor anger and I'm good at anger. And I have been unbridled and unchecked and my anger because I have largely been in the space with former and evangelical people who are angry at the same people as me. And so it has, it has driven my engagement, like so intensely in the past few years. So this combination of these two things is that I have felt like I've just been giving.
[00:29:29] Yes, I'll give you whatever you want from me, whatever you ask of me, I will give to you. And then I'm just constantly angry all the time. And when I'm angry at the people that this group of people I get rewarded for it. Yes. So that unsurprisingly probably I told someone recently that this thing that happened recently, this event that occurred on Instagram recently, When I really sit with it, this, I don't know if we're going to call it karma.
[00:29:56] I don't know what we should call it or could call it, but this was [00:30:00] inevitable at some point, because this energy of, yes, I will do whatever. I'll be, whoever you are demanding me to be combined with, let me be angry all the time and put this energy. Okay. You know, cancellation or punishment? Well, I don't like the cancel stuff, but like punishment.
[00:30:16] Let me just work with this energy of punishment all the time. At some point that was going to reach an unsustainable level that like snapped in half and then got me hurt. Like it was, it was going to. And that's why this situation brought about when I did what I was referring to earlier, when I stepped away, because I could, I was activated, so I couldn't learn.
[00:30:37] So that whole first week or first week and some change after the initial thing happened, I was absolutely exclusively in a state of defensiveness and a state of, I have nothing to apologize for. I'm not going to apologize just because I can't learn. So I knew I needed to attend to what was going on in my body, my nervous system.
[00:30:55] So when I did. What slowly emerged was actually, [00:31:00] I have a whole fucking lot of things to apologize for and it's not just this situation. It's the energy I have contributed to what has created the possibility for these situations to occur, which is the thing that has predominantly facilitated my has built the foundation of the platform upon which I stand now.
[00:31:20] So I actually have to apologize for the entire way that I have been towards everybody, like everyone, but myself included. And it did take a situation where I, I got hurt and a number of people that I deeply love got hurt for me to realize how much hurting I had been doing towards other people and in taking responsibility for that and naming the responsibility that I have in that, and also apologizing for the way in which that has just gone.
[00:31:54] Totally unchecked with me because I was receiving the benefits from it in naming and doing that. [00:32:00] I, when I wrote that I had someone, I had a friend tell me, she said, that's the most human I've ever seen you, which was really impactful to me because how it felt to me when I finally sat down and really told myself the truth about that and owned my participation in all of that, I felt like my humanity came back. It was the first time in years that I wrote something that I was like that wasn't professional, that I was like, proud of.
[00:32:34] Laura McKowen: Well, that's true vulnerability. Supposedly when you aren't actually, when you don't have an agenda, you're not trying to save face. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
[00:32:43] Jamie Lee Finch: Right. And I think that to your point of what you were saying, I think it took, and I think this is what it does take and will continue to take is, those of us who are participating in doing this to other people, [00:33:00] finally getting to a point where the weight of it being done to us hits us and impacts us. And that one of the things I said in, in what I wrote was like, you know, acknowledging for those of you that are looking at this and reading this and saying like, oh, well, how convenient now that this comes home to roost for you now you're like in the position of apologizing and disavowing.
[00:33:22] And I was like, yes, that's how pain works. Would you prefer the opposite to be true? Would you prefer for like pain to not be a teacher? And for me to just hold my pain, ignore my pain and continue to double down on the defensiveness and not change because that that's not the, that's not the way forward in being a human.
[00:33:44] So I'm going to eat crow here essentially and say like, yeah, whatever you might say about convenience, how convenient that is for me. I honor that and any of you who are like, this is bullshit. I don't agree. I honor that. I totally honor. I have not earned your trust. I [00:34:00] haven't totally get that. This isn't for you as much as it is for me to just publicly acknowledge and say like, I have missed me too.
[00:34:07] I got to figure out how to get me back because I can't keep doing this to me much less all of you here. So I don't know where that leaves me as far as your kind of final question with that about. Or what you mentioned as far as, what have you decided about staying, going somewhere in between?
[00:34:26] Laura McKowen: Yeah and I didn't know if you had or not. I don't know that there's an advantage to doing that. You know, and until you do, or, or I don't think that it can be kind of a forced thing. I hope you're not carrying yourself over the coals too hard for it, because the way I look at it is we are in a video game.[00:35:00] We're like in a video game where we literally have wires hooked up to our amygdala.
[00:35:10] Jamie Lee Finch: That's right. Oh my God.
[00:35:15] Laura McKowen: That are, that are stronger than us. I'm all about personal responsibility. I really am. And recognizing when there are systems that are stronger than us playing a part. Right? So you can take the personal responsibility thing too far.
[00:35:34] And it's like you can't control this machine. You can't control this, this thing. This wonderful woman came on my show and was talking about how the algorithm is actually an archetype. It's like an Archetype that is intended to pull you in and keep you in a labyrinth as long as possible. And there's a, it's a complex, a collective consciousness [00:36:00] complex that is designed to keep you there.
[00:36:04] Keep you stuck, keep you sick. And so there are forces that are stronger than our, certainly than our individual wills, but even our collective wills, there are many good things that happen on social media, but I think it also takes the worst of humanity and amplifies it. It turns the volume up and, and, and takes the worst of the best.
[00:36:30] Because even positive things are too positive, you know, it's like, there's no, there is no middle way. And what we know about dopamine systems and how we're wired and how we best function and the predictability piece of how our brains work. It is, we are not made for that machine.
[00:36:50] Jamie Lee Finch: Right. I agree with that.
[00:36:52] Like, something is happening to our brains clearly as evidenced by the fact that the shit we're saying to each other online, we would not say to each other in person. So on that [00:37:00] level, what we're doing here is not our fault and taking responsibility for how we have participated in it is the only way in which we can start to do something different in those spaces and change our ethic in those spaces.
[00:37:14] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Agreed. And, and I think, I spin around in circles on this a lot, I think, not expecting the, the portal as it were to be a different kind of place for us. To really have an expectation of what it's capabilities are and what its downfalls are and be hyper aware of those and to not expect it to be something else.
[00:37:41] So, and that's like, look, that's a dance and a process, you know, at the end of all that, I think you're amazing. And I think the work that you're doing is incredible and I'm, I'm just excited to see where you go with this next phase, because it seems like you're at a threshold of perhaps a different cycle of
your [00:38:00] evolution.
[00:37:59] Jamie Lee Finch: That is very much how it feels. I'm also excited to see what happens because I have no clue at this point. I was thinking earlier, when we were getting ready to do your chord, I was like, I'm fascinated to see where I am when this comes up. Like I know where I am right now as we're having this conversation, but I'm really curious to see in so many different ways, like how I feel, what I know, where I am when this comes out later.
[00:38:26] So yeah. Thank you for saying all of that. I am, I'm deeply curious and I'm feeling slowly and steadily less afraid of the things that I don't know yet. So I am getting more excited about it. So thank you
[00:38:50] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to tmstpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations, previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members only events, and access to our members only community where I hang out a lot, especially now that I'm not on social media. We decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads. This means that we can make the show all about you and not what our sponsors or advertisers want, but it also means we're a hundred percent reliant on your support. So my request and my invitation is simple. Support the show by becoming a member, or you can simply make a one-time donation of as little as $5.
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