Sheila: Well, I’m so thrilled to have on the podcast today, Dr. Christy Bauman, and she is a licensed therapist.  She’s a Ph.D., and she’s written an awesome book that I’m so excited to talk about, Christy, called Her Rites.  You tell us the subtitle because I always forget.

Christy: You know what?  I’m going to turn around and read the subtitle because even though I just told you I knew it—a sacred journey for the mind, body, and soul.  You can tell when our editors have helped us do things that we’re like oh yeah, that does convey it, doesn’t it?

Sheila: Yeah, yeah.  I never remember my own subtitles so that’s all cool.  And Christy, you are married to someone who has also been on this podcast before, your husband, Andrew.

Christy: Yeah, he is—we’re both writers.  I mean we’re both therapists by trade, but we both love to write, and that’s actually saved our marriage and it’s also been great for our career.  But yes, I think it’s been so good to be married to a man who has like interests and at times it’s been absolutely infuriating, but we do a lot of work together.  And that’s been so great actually.  It’s been so good.

Sheila: Absolutely.  Okay, well, I got to read an early copy of this book.  Now Her Rites is already out.  It published in May, and I couldn’t get my act together to interview you before this so I’m glad that you are here.

Christy: Thank you.

Sheila: And I read an early copy of this I think, and I was just really blown away by how practical it is, how beautiful it is, how it encourages you to think about your own story.  And honestly, I had never thought about half the stuff you talk about so I’m like oh wow.  I need to go on a journey so let’s dive in and explain to me why rituals are important.

Christy: Yeah, yeah, I think that the old church I think historically—I think even if we go back to Greek and Roman time there’s a sense of we do a ritual or a rite of passage.  If we look at Jewish, Hebrew studies, rites of passage are things that are happening all the time, and I do think in a melting pot culture in the Western world, we have kind of removed ourselves from more of those traditional or cultural rites of passage—quinceaneras, bar mitzvahs, like even birthday parties, anniversaries, things that we might get flowers for or go on a date, and we remember the date, and we know we need to, but we haven’t become creative about how to actually embody them.  And so that’s kind of the premise of rites of passage is have you embodied your own story and these rites of passage that you probably have lived through and not really thought about, not really thought about it’s important to ritualize?  But just as I would say celebrating a birthday or honoring a loss there is something very powerful about the body being intentional, of marking these moments, these rites of passage.

Sheila: You know, we had a twenty-fifth anniversary party a number of years ago now, and I knew it was important to celebrate, and I enjoyed the party.  I did, but the whole time I also felt kind of embarrassed like I’m making a big deal about myself.  I think we kind of get that way.

Christy: Yeah, or like we don’t know—and yet I feel so grateful for people who invite into celebration or into grief.  I feel invited.  I feel like I’m in the inner circle so it’s interesting why we feel embarrassed about inviting someone when I would imagine you love attending other people’s parties or you love attending intentional moments that mark an event, right?  It’s like we actually love celebrating, and if we look at the life cycle as we age our losses are going to increase and so celebrations become more important.  Even if we talk about a funeral being a celebration of life, celebrations actually hold a lot, and they make meaning for life.  They’re meaning makers so I love that you guys had a twenty-five year party, and I’m wondering if—yeah, there needs to be some reorientation of what does it mean to intentionally invite other people to bear witness to twenty-five years of being married and of celebrating that journey.

Sheila: Yeah, I love that.  I think you open the book by saying that the whole point of this is to realize that we belong to ourselves and that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter.

Christy: Yes.

Sheila: Now and you open it and then you say I know that’s going to rub some people the wrong way, the idea that you belong to yourself because in the church we say we belong to Christ which is obviously true.

Christy: It’s true.

Sheila: We do belong to Christ, but why is it important for us to realize that we belong to ourselves as well?

Christy: Right, and we’re now in the realm of the imago Dei, right, understanding that a lot of us have been conditioned in the psychological world to belong to something other than ourselves and that loses our own identity.  So knowing our identity, yes, our identity is in Christ, and I would say because that is actually a correct filter, but when we look to the image of God, the imago Dei, that we are created in, we’re looking at a part of God, a part of God that is displayed in us that’s not displayed in any other human next to us.  And so to me, it’s actually amplifying God’s goodness.  It’s amplifying Christ’s identity.  It’s amplifying what our Creator was doing whenever he created every leaf to look different, every snowflake to be different, every human—human story and every human body is a different representation of God.  And so I love the invitation of getting to know a story.  I mean I sit across a person week after week, and I listen to story, and I’m thinking how can I be curious?  I am looking for the parts of God that I don’t see displayed anywhere else in that exact likeness, and then that’s what I’m going to invite and tease out of them is the imago Dei that they bear.

Sheila: Oh, that’s lovely.  I love that.  Okay, so let’s get—you talk in this book about there’s different times that we need to process, celebrate, mark, etc.  You call these rites—rites of passage.  And the first one is birth.

Christy: Yeah, birth rite which people don’t remember their birth for the most part, and also what I would say is very new to the church probably, not new as much to psychology, but in utero work which means that whenever your heart started beating do we actually know when the soul is brought into the body?  But you were a being.  You were knit.  Scripture says we are knit in God’s womb, and so what is God doing when he’s knitting you?  What was actually happening in your story?  And if I’m an investigator of people’s stories I am going to be curious about even conception, in utero, and then how they were brought into the world because I think that story begins to tell us a theme of our life’s story.  So when we’re growing in our identity, we’re going to look at how we came into the world.  Were we celebrated or were we not?  Did we come in out of what someone named an accident?  Did we come in out of intentionality?  Where do we engage our parents’ story with our birth?  How is that brought in?  What’s our story with our mother?  What’s our story with our father?  And what’s our birthright?  Biblically if you’re female and or if you’re male and you’re not firstborn male, we see with Esau, we see there is a fight over birthright.  Birthright is something that the Bible talks about for the firstborn male, but we don’t understand what birthright means then for everyone else.  So it’s a journey to learn what each of our birthrights are.

Sheila: Yeah, and what does that mean?  Tell me what that means practically.

Christy: Right, so if you look in the Webster dictionary, a birthright is to any human who lives and breathes and moves.  It’s basically what we might hear politically.  There’s a fight about is life the heartbeat?  Is it at the birth?  But what we’re talking about either way is whenever you decide that you believe life is happening you get a birthright which is you have a right to live, and to move, and be in this Earth.  Now then as you grow up, the government or the systems would decide do you have the right to be educated?  Do you have the right to have a meal?  Things like that are more societal and citizenship ideas, but birthright in itself is you get to be alive, and you get to live in this world.  And again it’s a concept that we don’t really ritualize, and so therefore if we’re looking at generations of people who don’t have an identity, I’m going to start there with well tell me when you knew you had a right to be on this Earth?  And what was God telling you in that moment by how you were brought into this world?  So it’s very narrative story, but there’s a spiritual foundation to all of this.  And the psychology is we’re looking at identity.  The spirituality is we’re looking at our identity in Christ, and we’re looking at where was I adopted.  Scripture tells us you were adopted into this faith.  Okay, what does that mean?  Well, when someone goes to their adoption ceremony, it’s the moment that they legally belong to someone, belong to these parents so when did you in a sense legally start to belong to God and did your life belong to God?  And here we’re in the realm of birthright.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s really cool.  I really liked in the section of your book you talked about—I think her name was Angie—who was trying to figure out what her birth story was because you have this exercise that you take people through where what was going on in your parents’ lives when your mom was pregnant, what was going on when they chose to conceive you, or when you were conceived even if it wasn’t by choice.  What was going on when you were born?  And you had her walk through all of that, and she actually understood a lot more about herself after that because her birth story was not that great.

Christy: Right, right.  Sometimes particularly in the work of marriage, our marriages when we are trying to cocreate and when we’re trying to conceive, usually there is some sense of either fear or tension or just the everyday dynamic of a couple learning how to cocreate together.  Birth order, fertility, all of these things are playing in.  Sexual health in the marriage.  All these dynamics are part of the pot that you were cooked in, and so part of that is being an investigator of your own story and understanding how you got here and what was happening in the ethos around you.  Like I had a client tell me just the other day, I know where I conceived all of my kids because I know what country we were in because we were missionaries in that place.  Well, geography matters.  Geography is actually impacting part of that so is the geography of our family of origin.  So is the geography of our parents’ marriage during that season, and is it directly correlated in a way that it’s going to impact detrimentally?  I don’t think so, but it’s very helpful for us to start to understand our identity by how we were conceived.

Sheila: You know, one of the issues we had in our family—no, let me back up a minute.  Let me just say this about Angie is that one of the things that she realized as you walked her through her own birth story was that she was kind of created to be like her mother’s surrogate because there was such tension in the marriage, and the mom actually named her in such a way that it kind of sounded like you’re the one who is going to fulfill me.  And so she felt that from the very beginning that she was really enmeshed with her mom and so realizing that happened way back then opened up a huge—

Christy: Door for her.

Sheila: Door for her.

Christy: Right

Sheila: To reclaim, no I was created to live my own life, not my mom’s life.

Christy: Yes, and now we’re in the realm of attachment styles.  Our attachment styles with our parents, our caregivers, are indicators of our attachment styles or propensity with God.  Whether it’s a pushback from it or it’s an overcompensation for it.  We attach to God based on how we engaged with our earthly attachments so to speak.

Sheila: Yeah, I know I think the person in our family who has—and I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this—but I’ve talked about it before on the podcast, but has the—weirdest may not be the right word, but the most intertwined birth story would be my youngest daughter, Katie, because she was conceived right after our son died.  And so she’s always had to—and we’ve always talked about how like if Christopher had lived, Katie wouldn’t be here.  And then when I was pregnant, I was so hoping for a boy because Christopher had died, but then when she was born, like I said, it was like oh my gosh, this is who I needed.  And it was like she was a gift because she was so cuddly, and she and Rebecca grew up so close, and it was a lovely, lovely family.  But I think one of the things that we did—and I hope we did this right—is that I always talked about this out loud because I knew that she was going to pick up on this anyway, right?

Christy: Yeah.

Sheila: So it was like let’s make it out loud so that she doesn’t have to discover it in some therapy session when she’s 30, and she knows—she sort of sees her life—it’s just parallel universes like in this universe that we are, Katie is here and it’s perfect.  And in another parallel universe, maybe Christopher would have been there, but Katie is supposed to be here.  That’s really the way I see it too.  I can’t picture my life without her, and it was like that from the moment that I was pregnant really and especially from the moment she was born.  But it is strange when you’re born in weird circumstances.

Christy: It’s true, and I love what you did because you brought it to light.  You said you’re going to pick up on this in some way.  This is the story.  I’m going to tell you the story so you don’t have to wonder, and parents are our story keepers until we’re old enough to remember our own stories.  And so that is the greatest gift you can give her is the story.  You’re not God.  You don’t know why those circumstances happened the way they did, but you get to show her that when we serve a God who is everbearing and always creating and continues to create even after there’s loss and even after there’s death and there’s something about the invitation into that mystery that is such beautiful parenting rather than trying to make the story sound a certain way and maybe withholding things in hopes that she’ll believe something instead of just working it out.  This is the God and the world that we live in.  This is our story.  This is our family story.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah.  So we understand—we go through our birth story.  We understand no I have the birthright to live my own life and to have my own identity that is special.  At the end of your book, so you take us through what each of these rites are and then at the end of the book, you have really practical exercises to help people work through these rites and mark them.  I love that so you can write your own birth story, but let’s talk about the next one.  The rite of initiation.

Christy: Yeah, the rite of initiation is the first time so it’s that understanding of naivete like what I did not know before, what my body had not felt before, and then the moment that it feels it for the first time or experiences it for the first time.  And there’s a couple things about rite of initiation.  One a lot of trauma and a lot of harm usually happens in this rite of passage because it’s the first time and because we are naïve so I’m mindful to bring that out, but also the rite of initiation invites us into how we want to initiate ourselves as we age.  I think that I’m going through rites of initiation even at 44.  Like there are moments where this 44-year-old body having lived through what it’s been through will walk up to a situation that maybe it’s done 20 times before or five times before, but I do it differently because I’m coming differently.  And how I was initiated into rites and how I went to first times is going to impact how I do first times now.  And what I would say is my motto in those moments is I want to live brave now so what does it mean in that moment for me at 44 to go through a rite of initiation and initiate myself into knowing something anew.  Well, I’m going to try to be brave right now is what my motto has been.

Sheila: I love that, and there’s all kinds of different things like that women just go through for the first time.  Like women especially—our periods—and I wonder if the reason that boys get marked so much when they’re 13 is because they don’t have a period whereas a girl well it’s obvious.  Like now you’re a woman, and all the stupid things they say to you when you’re 11 and bleeding for the first time but anyway.  But so we have our first period.  The first time you have sex whether it’s consensual or not, these are—yeah, these are big firsts.

Christy: The rite of initiation.  Right, and so your body is experiencing something, and there either can be curiosity and wonder and excitement or there’s fear and closing off and protecting of ourselves depending on if the situation is safe and consensual.  I think even in the book I wrote Theology of the Womb, I go through this understanding that when we bleed, it is important to know how our mothers or our sisters or who is around us to help us understand that we’re bleeding.  Biblically or historically, the idea of gathering together, of a red tent was we had people around us during the rite of initiation.  They were able to bear witness, and there was something kind about that, and now there’s a more alienation in the rite of initiation.  We—mostly young girls—do not have people bearing witness to them.  And so that’s also something where culturally, we don’t have (inaudible) us, and there’s an impact on that.  And so for me I think it’s even as I’m going in, and I’m in perimenopause, what does it mean for me to invite women to be alongside me in that journey?  Because maybe I didn’t have it or it wasn’t there for me—the infrastructure wasn’t there, but I know that I want community in these stages of life as I change.  So initiation for me might be inviting people into that rite starting a monthly Zoom call.  I have friends I know who are in that same place and talking about how our hormones are different now and our weight loss is different now or gain or body image.  What’s impacting our sexuality?  That’s all part of it is I think initiation though it’s happening in our bodies only to us, community and bearing witness to is so important.

Sheila: Okay, two free menopause pieces of advice are if you wake up in the middle of the night and you wonder if you might have to pee, just go.  Just go without even thinking about it.  Just go because you’ll be able to get back to sleep so much faster.

Christy: Don’t just wonder and then start waking up longer.

Sheila: Yes.

Christy: Okay, yeah.

Sheila: Yeah, just go as soon as the thought crosses your mind.  Don’t talk yourself out of it, and the second thing is this was the symptom that no one had ever told me about.  My eyes are so dry because at menopause everything kind of dries up, and I’ve talked a lot on the blog about what to do with vaginal dryness and there’s different suppositories you can get, estrogen therapy, etc., but black cohosh.  It’s a supplement really helps.  I don’t know if it will help anyone else, but it helps me.  But I didn’t know.  I didn’t know my eyes would get dry.  They started to hurt.  I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Christy: Yes, yes.  I mean I love that.  I’m like I have black cohosh so I’m like okay great.  I’m still going to write it down for myself.  But this is it.  These are the moments where we realize—I was actually just listening to an interview with Tara Westover.  She wrote the book Educated, and she says you know I don’t think a person can stay resilient all the time, but I do believe a community can.  And it’s interesting to think that as I am writing a book on the rites of passage that women need to know themselves and to belong to themselves that part of belonging to yourself is being individuated but then asking to be bore witness to, asking people to come alongside you, asking the village to all be their own people but to be together in these rites of passage.  And so as much as it feels individual, it’s just as equally communal, and I needed you to give me those two secrets.  We need each other in a sense to be resilient.

Sheila: Yeah, in this section, you talk about how it is really our mothers who teach us how to be content in the world as a female.  And sometimes that teaching isn’t the best.  We don’t all have really good models about what it means to be a woman.

Christy: Yeah, so I work with a lot of adult women and the opposite gender wound in any therapy room is always what not what I would call low-hanging fruit but what I would call low-hanging fruit.  It’s always there meaning we can always talk about the opposite gender parent and their impact in our dynamic, but the mother and the daughter, it’s so beautiful and it’s so intimate, and it can also be so wicked and so subtle.  And that is a hard reality to bear.  And I also think to the level that we suffer is the level we feel entitled so there are many mothers who are like I did the best I could, and that makes so much sense, but it’s also a bind for the daughter to not push back and say, “And I wanted more.”  So you know, it’s not for everyone, but it’s common that our mothers tell what we can be.  We can watch the Olympics this summer, and we can see women on there—40-year-old women running and think to ourselves, “Wow, that is not my mother.  She did not teach me I could be an Olympian,” and some of those women are saying, “My mother was a Olympian, and I am.”  I’m not an Olympian.  My daughter is not going to look and say, “Oh, I thought about being an Olympian because my mother was.”  She’s not.  Is that good or bad?  It’s what it is, but for her to have the freedom to say, “Mom, I kind of wish you had pushed yourself in these ways so that I had something to look up to,” is that my growth edge.  That’s for me to build and say, “That makes sense to me.”  This is why I didn’t pursue it.  This is what was happening for me in my story.  What in your story?  What are you feeling invited to?  Do you want to live a larger story?  Because we pace our daughters and then at some point, we let them surpass us.  That’s what every—that movement from girlhood to womanhood, that’s the moment where she gets to surpass and run a little bit ahead, and we say, “Go for it, girl.  I taught you how to do this.  You know this.”  But that’s not always the story.

Sheila: Yeah, and so that’s important to process, right?  Was your story of what it meant to be a woman?  What was your story?  You say an initiation—it’s that moving from unknowing to knowing in whatever element of your life we’re talking about whether it’s sexually or with your body or with your purpose as a woman.  Yeah, that moving from naivete to experience, right?

Christy: Yeah.

Sheila: And those things can be really, yeah, hard to process, but if we don’t mark them, and then I think they can still have an impact on us without us realizing it, and that’s really the problem.

Christy: Right, right, because experience helps us feel like we know what we’re capable of.  Once we’ve experienced it, we know what our bodies can handle, what they can’t handle.  We have a sense of our identity, and if we’re not even allowed to say, “Hey, Mom, you didn’t actually risk in those places so then I didn’t risk in those places, or I didn’t know how to, or I didn’t feel invited,” that can be remedied very quickly.  That’s the beautiful part of this.  There’s a difference between a mother who is afraid or limited in what she had, but she can say in that moment, “You’re right.  I didn’t invite you.  What does this look like?  Let’s do this now.”  Or there can be an insecure mother who says, “I did the best I can so why would you—” And then all of a sudden, it’s about the daughter feeling shame that she wanted more or that she felt like she didn’t get that invitation.  Yeah.

Sheila: And so not all of us have mothers that are going to handle this well, and so it’s like learning how to look back on these moments where you did feel shame or you didn’t feel supported, and give yourself grace to rewrite them.  Like what would it look like if you were to do it again.

Christy: Oh my goodness, yes.  And the truth of it is we have a God who gives us second and third and fourth chances, and so can we live in that (inaudible) ourselves in that moment where we think oh I failed and I’m going to give myself grace?  And that is also what I’m going to implement to my children is that they’re going to make mistakes, and they’re going to give themselves grace, and we’re going to keep growing.  We have many chances.  It’s actually always right in front of us which is incredible.  That’s the part of the resurrection story.  There’s always an opportunity for something to happen which leads us if we jumped to the next rite of passage is exile, and exile informs the next rite of passage which is creation.  So I’m zooming through those, but what I would say is I love that each grow on each other, and that it’s a never-ending story so yes, there’s always grace to step into doing it differently, doing it better, doing it again, whatever that is.

Sheila: Yeah, and I—one of the ones that I talk about a lot here on Bare Marriage is you know what to do if your initiation into sex was bad.  Like let’s say you had one of the most terrible honeymoons which we talk about all the time, which is ever so common, and we have so many stats on that coming up in our new book The Marriage You Want which is coming out in March.  Like our honeymoon stats are atrocious and amazing at the same time, like what people have gone through.  So I’m excited to share that with all of you in—starting probably in January and February—but what about these people who had horrible honeymoons or horrible initiations in other ways?  And the dynamics in your marriage just got started really badly and sex was for him, and it was obligation, and her libido crashed because of that, and it didn’t feel pleasurable, and now you want to rewrite it, and you want to start again, but it’s hard because you have all this baggage.

Christy: It’s hard, and I love that is going to be brand new for you meaning like that moment is you coming with a body that’s maybe jaded, that’s maybe discouraged, and so the opportunity to be wowed, to the growth potential I guess is what I’m saying.  It’s risky.  It’s risky to come and say I’m actually going to offer myself to you again, and what can we know here and what can we experience here?  So I do.  I hear it, and I’m like there are so many terrible stories, so many terrible stories, and I also feel the part of me that’s maybe solution focused or just has seen it is there’s potential for so much growth, and that can be a really kind and mind-blowing invitation.

Sheila: But sometimes it does start by acknowledging the initiation story even with your spouse and saying yeah this was bad.  And how can we mark that?  How can we put it behind us?  How can we launch forward?  And so I love that.  I want to get through two of them quickly so we can spend some more time on one of them.  But yes, the next one is the rite of exile.

Christy: Yes.

Sheila: Where you need to leave others to find yourself.  It’s often seasons of grief.

Christy: It’s a desert place.  It’s where you hear all your own inner thoughts, and you hear other people’s critiques and other people’s thoughts, and I say that the gift of exile when you know you’re done with exile is when you hear your truest voice, and you realize that you had to get in a quiet enough place to wrestle down all those other voices and hear your own self.  And you know you’re done with exile when you know what you know.

Sheila: Yeah, you told a story in there about when you moved from Seattle to North Carolina and how hard that was for you.

Christy: Oh, that was a dark place for me, and I go into it in detail, but basically there was just a moment—you almost don’t say this out loud when you’re a mental health therapist, but there’s moments where you think I’m just going to be done.  Like maybe I’ll just be done, and I was leaving everything I had created as a wife, and as a mother, and as my career, as a woman, and I felt like I was literally driving into exile of I would have nothing again.  It felt like a wasteland, and yet, my husband was so excited to be moving.  My kids were just needy in every sense so it didn’t matter, and I felt so alone.  And there was that moment, I tell the story that we’re in our camper van, and we’re driving across country.  Everything is packed up.  We’ve just said goodbye to the place where I buried my child, my first home that I created everything in, where I’d gotten my degrees, where I had a job as a professor, where I had published just everything that I had created that felt like was mine, and I am leaving it all.  And it was the walk from my yelling kids in the back of the van back to the passenger seat and into my seatbelt that I passed the side door, and I thought, “I could just jump out.  I could just jump out, and I wouldn’t have to feel this amount of heartache and fear.”  And instead because I saw that the door was unlocked, and instead I just pushed that lock down and I got into my passenger seat, and Andrew, my husband, was listening to a podcast on financial freedom or something, and just was in a very different place than I was.  And I had to take that moment to say, hey, I need you to know how bad it is, and he couldn’t save me.  And I had to contend with in that moment no one could save me.  I just had to be with myself, and I had to build the resilience that I would be okay if I stayed, but I had to keep bringing my voice in that moment where I felt like darkness was saying just end it.  Just don’t speak.  Don’t even engage it anymore, just be done.  And I was like, “No, I’m going to choose life, and I’m going to choose my words, and I’m going to choose to stay.  I’m going to choose to tell you.”

Sheila: Yeah, and I think we all have those moments.  We all have those moments that we do have to mark, that we do have to acknowledge the losses because I think we don’t do that.  Like we’re so afraid to name what we’ve lost because it will put us in the depth of despair or we’re being selfish or we’re holding it up as an idol before God or whatever we may say.

Christy: Yeah, it’s all the things.  Again and not to just like look at the bright side.  That was a dark moment, and it took me a long time to get out of that space, but exile informs the actual soil that we plant in for creation, and what we can create from those dark places can be really beautiful.  That felt hopeful to me.  Again I wouldn’t say it’s easy.  I don’t even know—I mean I’ve been here two, two-and-a-half years now, I can’t tell you that I love it.  I can’t tell you this is where I want to spend the rest of my life, but I do know that I’m here and that I’m showing up and that I’m putting my big girl pants on, and I’m doing some adulting, and I’m speaking to places that I feel discouraged or I feel held back from.  You know, but also I’m naming my loss, and I’m also not staying in my loss.  I’m not burying myself in my loss.  I’m watering the little like seedling that’s coming out of it, and I’m tending to that part.  And I’m growing deeper roots, and that’s the part that I think comes from exile is we get deeper roots in who we are.  I know who I am more now from surviving that moment, and I’m rooting myself in a deeper identity.

Sheila: Right, and then we have the rite of creation, rite of creating, which I actually did like this part of your book best.  I loved everything you wrote about cooking, about just the legacy of especially of coming out of the slave population and the recipes that got passed on, and the importance of that since that’s the only way we have to memorialize and to hear these women speak through their cooking.  For me, I just love it because I’m such a knitter.  I love knitting.  My daughter, Katie, designs the most incredible dresses.  She doesn’t even use patterns.  Like we’re really big on creating.  My grandmother used to—I have stuff my great-grandmother knit.  And then obviously I’m a writer too and everything like that.  But yeah.

Christy: It sounds like you have story cloths, like you guys have passed down part of the legacy in your family is these cloths that hold generationally and—that’s incredible.  That is incredible.  I have inherited a lot of crocheted blankets and things like that, but I myself don’t do that and haven’t done that with my daughters.  So I love that you guys do that and you create those things.  That’s incredible.  The story is in the stitching.  It’s really—

Sheila: I have these one pair of socks.  My mother was going to frame them.  I knit them in 2019, and I was—or 2020.  They’re baby socks that I knit for my grandson, Alex, who was a year old at the time.  And I was going to give them to him at Christmas.  I knit one, and then I put it away, and then I knit the second.  And when you pull them out, they’re totally different sizes even though I used the same stitches because I was so stressed when I was knitting one that they were a lot tighter, and my mom thought this was hilarious so was going—I think she said she was going to frame them one day.

Christy: Well, even to hear the amount of bonding and of connection that you guys all share through this—and clothing, clothing babies, clothing people, it’s actually a really under talked about, like we don’t really talk about the beauty and the power of clothing, like I think even Scripturally, a mother clothing her family was such a big deal or adorning a bride with certain patterns and materials.  I think we don’t talk about that.  We talk about fashion these days but we do not actually talk about the protection and the power and the intimacy of someone sewing something for you, knitting something for you, and what’s actually happening when you wear that.  I love that.  I love that (inaudible) that.

Sheila: So that’s us, and then you have the rite of intuition which I want to spend a little bit of time here because this is so interesting for what we do here at Bare Marriage.  It’s understand that the body knows what’s happening and learning to validate and listen to what your body is telling you.

Christy: Yes, and so the—my friend, Heather Stringer, on a podcast had said this and it caught me.  She said the most common thing I hear women say is I don’t know—those three words.  She said get them out of your vocabulary if those words are there, but as I’ve listened to that what I realize is that I don’t know is where you separated yourself from listening to your intuition.  So your intuition is the things you do know, the things that come up in your mind, and you’re either in a situation where it’s not a good idea to say it, it won’t like more a conversation along, but you have a sense.  You know something, but you just swallow it, and you hold it.  We as women often do it.  Men do it also, but when we stop and we swallow what we do know, our bodies stop informing us because it knows it won’t advocate for us.  It knows it won’t say that so then we start to second guess ourselves, and then we have filler lines like I don’t know, but this is an option or I think this.  What the rite of intuition is coming back to she knows or he knows, we know what we know.  And we actually have to be curious why we aren’t saying it or why we’ve stopped saying it.  We’ve built that separation in our own body away from our gut, and we know even physiologically our gut is informing the neurotransmitters in the brain, and so we know that our gut knows.  When we’re stopping ourselves from saying that, when we’re saying I don’t know, then we’re actually keeping ourselves further from the rite of intuition.

Sheila: You know, someone told me yesterday, and I haven’t fact checked this, so I need to fact check this, but someone said that in Hebrew a lot of emotions are actually described as sensations.  So like anger is like a burning in the nose or some of the initial words for a lot of these emotions are actually body sensations which I found fascinating.  But isn’t it interesting how so often in the church women are told that emotions are sinful—certain emotions are sinful—and we talked about this earlier this year in some of our deep dives in the book The Lies Women Believe or the book The Excellent Wife where over and over again we’re told that if you have this emotion, it is a sin.  You can’t trust your emotions.  You have to trust faith, and that shuts down women’s intuition.  And then we wonder why women marry abusers because you’ve been told not to pay attention to red flags.

Christy: Right, right.  It is so true.  And that goes back to I mean even that earlier stage of what did we see in our own home, what did we grow up in, what kind of church did we grow up in, were we under leadership that was telling us not to trust our gut, and why?  Why were we so—why did we teach people that?  It doesn’t make sense.  Actually women are embodied.  Men are disembodied even by their sexual reproductive organs.  Our organs are inside of our bodies, and men’s penis—they’re outside of their body, and so their work is to be embodied.  Ours is actually to get out of our bodies.  We’re so in our bodies that we have to understand how to regulate through that, but for men, I don’t think it’s that way.  And so when we listen to a teaching that doesn’t align, to me I would say like oh that makes sense of the masculine to teach it that way.  And that doesn’t actually align physiologically with the female’s body.  It doesn’t actually align with how her body was created, and so there’s a disalignment there, and that makes her crazy and her question herself and not understand instead of going with her intuition and saying what was your intuition saying?  How does that align with truth or not align with truth?

Sheila: Well, I think too when we grow up in a culture which devalues women’s voices, we’re told not to listen, that we probably don’t know.  You’re supposed to listen to an authority.  You have all these people over you.

Christy: And so you’re conditioned in a sense to be this way, and if I haven’t sat across a number, countless marriages where someone will say, I did that because that’s what I was told.  I continued to have sex with him because that’s what I was told.  I continued to not listen to my body because that’s what I was told, right?  How many people—wives—are trying to figure out was I maritally raped?  Was I not?  I didn’t say no, but I was saying no in my mind.  Or I did say no by using these excuses, but I didn’t.  So was that his fault?  Was that my fault?  Was that my pastor’s fault?  Was that my culture’s fault?  It gets really confusing, and all of that is from breaking and having that separation of what did you know?  What was your gut telling you from the very beginning?

Sheila: You know, we’re recording this a little bit before it’s going to go live, and so at the point we’re recording this, I just finished recording a bunch of our podcasts on the book The Excellent Wife, and there’s this one anecdote which is like blaring siren at me right now where she talks about a woman—about how important it is to have sex with your husband and how you really shouldn’t say no and she talks about a woman who feels nauseated by her husband but you have to push through that anyway.  It’s like if you’re feeling nauseated there is a reason.

Christy: There is a reason.

Sheila: Your body is trying to tell you something, and pushing through is not going to help.  It’s only going to make things worse.

Christy: Right, and it’s only going to enable your partner to be more sexually unhealthy.  Like then we’re actually in a place where we’re not even inviting the other into sexual health, into what it means to know the other, or be known by the other.  So you’re right.  If your body is telling you that strongly, it’s telling you for a reason.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, before we hit the record button, you were talking about how this rite in particular, this rite of initiation, you saw this so much in our book She Deserves Better that kind of complement because we’re coming with all the data.  Hey, here’s what you’ve been told.  Here’s why you second guess yourself.  Here’s what happens when you believe this stuff.  Here’s how you get disembodied, and then your book which it really is beautiful.  It’s all narratives of how you can better embody that and get over all the problems we talked about in She Deserves Better.

Christy: Right, and what we are so grateful for, Sheila, is again we’re working with women and men and marriages who we’re unraveling a culture that has set them up for failure and so trauma and abuse are invisible in the church a lot of times, and so we have the visible ones.  Those are a lot easier to navigate because there is physical abuse or there’s domestic violence in a visible way.  Spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, these invisible abuses are much more tricky and they get inside of our bodies and so they highjack and then when I’m always talking when I see someone who is in a traumatic state or a triggered response, I’m like okay you need to read Sheila’s books because all their research is going to be something you can hold onto.  It’s going to be grounded in something, and you will feel so soothed.  It’s going to be your first step to regulate yourself.  Then what I realized is I can get clients to settle their mind to regulate that, and they could get into their heart and the hurt and the grief and the longing but then they couldn’t translate it into the bedroom, into their home, into their actual marriage.  And that is the embodiment piece, and that’s where I bring more of the story and the memoir and the bodywork in the book.  I would not start there if you feel like wow I—mine is more like a buoy where you can hold onto, catch your breath, and then you dive back deep into it.  But man, I have been grateful for your statistics and your research because they are so nice to just stand on solid ground when you’ve been in a culture of invisible harm.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, and it’s validating to say yeah, no, I wasn’t crazy.  This was wrong.  This did hurt me.  I didn’t like this.  I wasn’t sinning by saying I don’t want that.  Yeah, so good.  Okay, last one, the rite of legacy.  And I’ve been thinking about this a lot more.  I’ve said many times on this podcast I really want to be able to retire in 10 years and have nobody notice because I have raised so many people up in this space that—yeah, that there’s so many people saying these messages.

Christy: Well, it’s interesting to think the rite of legacy—the easiest way I say it is Confucious says there are three times we die: when we take our last breath, when we’re laid into the ground, and when our name is last spoken on the earth.  And what I hear you saying is in some ways, I want to focus on the first two—how I’m going to prepare for that or how I’m going to live into my story until that last moment because actually my name and my work and my research is—it will continue.  I feel grateful, and I’ve put into people enough that it will continue.  So you’re looking at that trajectory of like my legacy feels full as far as that last death.  Like my name will continue.  I’ve done the research.  I’ve been faithful to that, and then what I would say in exploring the rite of legacy or what I want women to explore is the actual time that you’ll say goodbye to your body.  This vessel that has carried you, this skin, these fingers that were with you since that first breath, since your birth and will be with you in your last breath, and the song that I actually ended up cowriting for these rites of passage—so I did an album with the book because my hope was if I can’t get therapy to every person—very similar to you—here’s my legacy.  I’ve done my job.  I’ve given you as much as I can.  My idea was how do we make it accessible, and so put it in a book, put it in an album of music where you can just listen to it and walk through the rites of passage, and have therapy through music and just journal, light a candle, have some tea, listen to the album, or artwork where you can look at an image and it can evoke something out of you.  So my thought was how do I make it accessible for people?  What I hear you saying is in the last song we write—it’s called Home—and it is this idea of a woman telling her body thank you and goodbye.  And so a lot of us as women are so busy raising our kids, running our professions, being in our marriage, we are doing so many much that our bodies—we don’t take the time to actually be with this body we were entrusted with.  And so I think that’s part of the work of the rite of legacy is if we have three deaths, how are we being faithful to preparing for those?  That’s the one that I hear.  The next one is when I’m laid into the ground, and that would be what my reverend has asked us to do which is to write our funeral plan.  I take you through that in the book is how to actually write that last day.  I was 42 when I did that, and I thought why am I doing this at 42.  What is this worthwhile?  But when I tell you, I engage my body differently in the way I take a bath or a shower because of how I want to be with my body now because I’ve thought about the time I will have to say goodbye to it, and it’s a discipline we aren’t taught.  We aren’t taught to make time and space for.  And it comes out psychologically in the idea of self-care, right?  But I’m asking women to take a deeper look of being intentional with the—and faithful with this body you were given—and that’s not a priority that our society or culture has really put forth for us to take on.

Sheila: That’s really powerful.  That’s really powerful.  Okay, so in your book, you talk about all these different times where there are rites of passages when we can memorialize, where we can think about things, process our stories, it’s a lot of narrative.  It’s really quite beautiful, and then at the end of the book, you have quite a long section where you take people through each rite and show here’s some really practical things that you can do to work through this rite of passage and to memorialize it.  So I want you to help me for two things, okay?  One’s happy and one’s sad.  So we’ll do happy first.  So Joanna, who is our coauthor and our statistician on Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, she lives out in Edmonton, and we live in Belleville which is quite near Toronto so two different—those who know Canada, that’s like a four hour plane ride.  And so she’s visiting for a couple of days, and she’s staying at Rebecca’s right around the corner, and we just got some really good news about two weeks ago.  I think by the time this airs we will have shared this on the podcast already, but we got accepted into the Journal of Sociology of Religion so we will officially be peer reviewed with our dataset for Great Sex Rescue and that was such a huge thing.  In a way, I feel like that was more momentous than the book being published because our whole thing is we’re trying to raise the bar on what counts as research in the Christian church because it’s been done so badly.  And we wanted to do this well, and so we held ourselves to academic standards, and we actually got in a peer reviewed journal.  And it took a lot of work, but we did it, and it was mostly Joanna.  And so all three of us are together.  I don’t know what to do.  I feel like we should do something, but I don’t know what to do.

Christy: I know what you should do.

Sheila: Okay, tell me.

Christy: I was like, “Lord, I’m going to need some time to think about this.  She just put me on the spot,” but—okay so I mean peer reviewed is a huge thing.  Part of academia and even get my dissertation and doing my doctorate so I think that you guys should do a hooding for each other.  Do you know what I’m saying?  Your doctoral—and so Andrew actually just got his doctorate last year, but we were going to go to his graduation and ended up not going to Seattle.  He was like I’d rather just be with my family so we threw our own party.  We probably only had 10—we only had like 10 people there to bear witness, but we all took turns giving a little speech.  And then I was able to hood him so I had my doctoral hooding on and everything.  But getting some kind of scarf or sash or something that all three of you have that matches or—this is what I would do.  You can take it—or you don’t have to use any of it.  But in my creative mind, I’m thinking you’re in some way you’re having a graduation party with books that are coming into this peer reviewed academic.  I mean that’s what is happening.  They are looked at as a scholarly—in academia, that’s the highest accreditation they have for it.  So I would have you guys each hood.  I mean I would always add a little spiritual like you should get some rose water or rose oil or some kind of oil and do an anointing when you hood and put that oil on the actual material.

Sheila: Oh, that’s sweet.

Christy: And then you could give the oil and the scarf or the hood, and then when you all three are separate and in moments where you need to maybe put that on or feel that again or anoint yourself into workspace or creative space, you know that you come with like the credentials.  You all are legit and doctorates in this, right?  It’s 10,000 hours.  It’s the type of research that makes it credible, and you guys have that.  You’ve proven that, and that’s really beautiful.  So that’s how I would honor it.

Sheila: I like that.  I like that.  Okay, okay, I will talk to them about that because they’re here and we’re so busy with trying to figure out what to do with the four kids and one of them has a broken leg.  You’re taking it with all the practical stuff before children.

Christy: I would try to either find a babysitter or something to all go out and y’all look for some article—clothing.  I mean I don’t know if you want—we don’t have time to sew these things.  Maybe you do.  I don’t know what your capabilities are, but you could all go out and look for the scent and the cloth that you want and you’re altogether and then you actually just have a little ceremony after kids are asleep or at 10:00 pm light some candles and we just—

Sheila: Yeah, okay.  I will talk to them about that.  Okay, here’s a sad one.  So today is August 22 that we’re recording this, and on September 4 which is just a couple of weeks, I will have the twenty-eighth anniversary of my son’s death.  And I never know what to do on that day, and I don’t usually end up doing much of anything.  You just kind of try to get through it.  Sometimes we’ll go to the graveyard.  We don’t always.  But like, and I feel like when I talk to other people who have lost whether it’s a child or a spouse or just someone important, your mom, what do you do on those anniversaries to remember them?

Christy: I mean we have a story of loss, and so we light lanterns.  That’s what we’ve done every year on—when we memorialize Brave’s death.  We fell into that tradition.  Some years it hasn’t happened depending on where we are.  Some years we’ve gotten a balloon and let it go as a family.  I think in those moments for me it is that I want to be—I want to at least some intentional time.  So even if it’s five minutes, thirty minutes, I want something intentionally done, I don’t know that it actually has to be a physical—like I was thinking it would be interesting if you had some kind of mark or image and then everybody just added to it every year.  But I don’t know.  In my own heart what I long for is that we’re altogether for just a space of time even if my kids don’t live at home, like on Zoom, something, a text chain where there is something said.  There’s just something about that intentional moment like if he were here we would be doing something to remember or because he’s not here we don’t remember every day or we do remember but we don’t know how to memorialize it so we’re going to do it on this day.  So I think even asking your family this year like how can we do that?  We have two children that we lost that we still haven’t named, and my kids feel differently about it.  We still talk about it.  We’re trying to find the names, but in our family chaos, we just haven’t had enough time to like sit down and actually name these two children and all agree on it.  Everybody thought different things.  But with Brave’s day, we know we’re going to go out at night.  We’re going to light a lantern.  We’re going to let something go.  We’re going to let something float.  We have that in our bodies, but we’re still working on the other ones so I guess what I want to say is your body is still asking you to mark it somehow, and you can just listen to that and say hey I’m still wondering.  I’m still looking for a rhythm this many years later.  Will you guys help me?  Can we be creative as a family of what could be good?  And you throw out options, and you might not even figure it out this year, but you are at least listening to your body because your body is saying it wants something tactile, and that feels like an easy kindness to give it.

Sheila: Yeah, you know I used to feel—I don’t know—maybe 10 years ago if I would get upset, I would feel like I was the one causing myself to get upset by thinking about it.  I don’t know if this makes any sense, but that the tears were deliberate in some way and I would feel badly about that.  And then I’ve started to realize oh wait these are coming from deep inside, and it’s not a deliberate thing at all.  

Christy: It’s just—yeah, even as your tear just fell I though I have a lot of little—I have jars that I buy from the Dollar Store.  This is embarrassing, but I love jars because sometimes if there’s ash from a fire that was really special or there’s ash that we burned things that we wanted to bury so to speak, I will have people gather it.  And just seeing your tear fall, what if you just had a little bottle somewhere that you gathered your tears in that bottle as God says he does for us?  I wonder if even that in your office that little bottle or in your bedroom could collect it and of course it doesn’t have all the tears that you’ve shed over Christopher, but it will just be a something—a holder of like Mama sees you, likes you, she knows, her body knows, and I love you.  And in that moment, you just collect it and capture it and over the years you capture it and put it in there.  Again they’re all ideas.

Sheila: Yeah, but the point is to just think about it, right?  Think about it and don’t let these moments go because they matter.

Christy: Yeah, the point is that your body is actually trying to bond with you right now.  It’s trying to have you hear her say I need you to do this for me, and that then takes away all the holding in of how do I figure out how to let this out but she begins to trust you when you say okay I’ll be curious.  What would you like?  Just listen to her.  Like she’s still talking to you, and so she’s worth listening to.  She wants to mother him somehow and that’s okay.  That’s beautiful.  It says something really beautiful about you.

Sheila: Yeah, thank you.  Okay, well, I will send you pictures or something, whatever we do for the celebration with Joanna and Becca or for the memorial.

Christy: I might just again I think the answer is what’s really sweet for listeners to even hear now is when your body tells you something, be curious.  Don’t just shut it down or don’t even try to analyze it.  Maybe just be curious first, and she’s telling you something.  We’ve been trained to think that it needs to be taken and scrutinized or taken captive of.  I think sure of bad thoughts, of anxiety, or things leading toward death or evil.  But those thoughts sure can be taken captive but not the ones that are teaching us how to live out of our fullness and how to be fully in who God created us to be.  Those are to be heard and to be held well.  Be curious.

Sheila: Thank you, Christy.

Christy: Thank you.  Thank you for having me.

Sheila: So tell me what are you hoping—what are you hoping your legacy will be with this book?

Christy: Oh, my goodness, I know what it is.  God told me—I was going to teach a women’s conference, and I felt like God was so clear.  “Christy, do not—do not let them fall in love with you.  Let them fall in love with themselves.”  Because we as women keep walking away from different things to idolize or to try to be like and really, really I hope my legacy is that every woman who engages me would engage herself more honestly, more clearly, that she would pick up a mirror and just look at herself long enough until she lives truly into herself.  That’s all I’m hoping.  That’s really what I want is for women to be free, to be free in who God created them to be, and not to be afraid and not to compare and just to be fully in that because I think that’s all what we need from each other to make it in this world.

Sheila: You know, I am so glad for voices like yours and your husband’s and for this book in particular.  Like I said, I learned things I hadn’t thought of, and I’ve been thinking about how to implement it as you can tell.  But I’m just so thankful that there are voices in the church telling women, “Hey, you’re allowed to know yourself.  You’re allowed to celebrate who God made you to be.  You’re allowed to be curious,” because up until now so many voices have been whatever you want, you need to switch that off because of duty.  Switch off who you are because of duty and obligation and shame.

Christy: And that has set us up for failure.  It really has, and I actually think it set our marriages up, and that breaks my heart.  That is what really breaks my heart is when a 20- or 30-year marriage comes into my office, and they say, “I did what I was told, and we’re in ruins.”  I think, “Oh my gosh, we have to do something different.  We cannot set God’s children up for this.”  I’m not going to set my own children up for this.  I will not teach them to do what I was taught.  I believe that’s the heart of God saying no this isn’t what I created.  Trust your heart.  Trust the heart I put inside of you.  I knit you in your mother’s womb.  Your body is good.  Your heart is good like I will guide you, and I think we invite our husbands, we invite our marriages into that same thing.  I want men living into their hearts, into their bodies.  I want their bodies to be satiated as much as I want women’s bodies to be satiated, and I think God knew what he was doing.  I’m not afraid of that and so I’m like let’s explore that because God was not wrong.  The church may have taught you wrong, but God was not wrong.

Sheila: No, exactly, and when we can see how—you know, so much of Jesus is just intimacy.  It’s just knowing people, noticing these key moments in people’s lives, entering into them, and I think he just invites us to do the same because when we do that he is there too.  He was already there.  So it’s like how can we learn to see Jesus in these moments when—that were difficult for us or maybe were great but we just never acknowledged them?

Christy: Right, it’s so true because I think it’s story body leads to creating, and so whether that’s your own story, what is the story God and you are writing and what body did God give you and what’s the story of your body and then what are you and God creating?  And you take that same philosophy for your marriage.  What’s the story on your marriage?  What’s the body of your marriage?  How has it been treated, and what is your marriage creating?

Sheila: Yeah, I love it.  Okay, Christy, where can people find your books?

Christy: Oh, Amazon or your local—I’m not supposed to say that.  Your local bookstore.  That’s probably the best that we can ask for, and I think reviews.  I think you know this too.  Oh, that’s what I wanted to say, I think the audiobook is where people need to go.  I was able to record it myself, and I really appreciated that experience.  It felt very holy, and I say that to say a lot of us don’t have time to read.  I mean I’m saying that as particularly like semi self-help therapeutic books.  They’re just harder to read.  Audiobooks I can get in a good drive or while I’m going to pick up kids and while I’m running around between practices.  My book is not great for kids in the car but like on the car on the way to get children.  It’s great in bite size, and so I would say the audiobook is what I would recommend first.  But the book can be found wherever you—

Sheila: Yeah, and we will put a link in the podcast notes to all of that.  And are you on social media?  I don’t even know.  I follow your husband everywhere.

Christy: I’m on Instagram mostly but I’m on Facebook also.  Yeah, social media is great.  You know what’s funny is when you’re like it’s okay if you find me or not.  It doesn’t—but I really just want people to—yes, I want them to be able to find me, but I want them to find their own care whatever that looks like.  So yes, Instagram at Christy Bauman.  I think my Facebook is the same.  Womaneering is the work I do with women around their bodies and around seasons and the liturgical calendar and how the church invites us into that so I do a lot of that work where I do weekend retreats with women, and I take women into the ocean.  I do a trip into Belize where I can help you harvest—hunt and harvest your own conk and lobster and then we make ceviche on an island, and I teach you to be in the ocean and how to be in your body.  I love that trip.  That’s my favorite.  A lot of those intensive works with women around their body and their sexual and spiritual health, but yeah, you can find me on social media.  I had another thought.  Oh yeah, that the album is free so if you look up Her Rites—Sarah Siskin is the actual performer, but if you look on any place you stream your music, I have cowritten a song for each rite of passage.  And so you can listen to that even if you don’t know if you want to get the book or you don’t have time for the book, you can download that.  Have a quiet time.  Light a candle.  Get your journal out and just listen to the songs in order and it would take you through a therapeutic experience of her rites which I try to offer people because time is limited but I want to make care abundant.

Sheila: That’s lovely, and thank you.  Again, we will link all those in the podcast notes.  Thank you, Christy.  Really appreciate this conversation.

Christy: Thank you, Sheila.  I’ll talk to you soon.