Sexvangelicals Newsletter 5/21/24: Discussing Sexuality with Your Kids When You Grew Up in an Evangelical Community
Part 2 of our Interview with Lindsay, Meg, and Sarai, co-hosts of the Holy Ghosting Podcast
Like all of our weekly newsletters, this article is free for everyone! Please subscribe and donate to Relationship 101 so Julia and I can continue to write about sex and relationship education that the church, and so many other systems, didn’t want you to have.
Happy Tuesday! I mentioned this last Tuesday, but wanted to put a quick plug for a conference that I’m co-hosting on Friday June 7 from 8:30-4:30 ET called Combating Anti-Trans Systems. Lucie Fielding, author of the 2021 masterpiece Trans Sex, is the keynote speaker, and there will be various breakout sessions throughout the day on working with trans and gender diverse folks in relationship therapy.
It’s $150 to attend, and all proceeds go to Trans Emergency Fund in Boston. Sign up on the NEAFAST (the non-profit I co-founded) website.
Podcast Episode
One of the key principles of family systems theory is the multigenerational transmission process, which suggests that the subjects and experiences that families get anxious about transfer down from generation to generation through a variety of unhelpful communication processes, from secrecy to silence to criticism.
One of the most common topics that folks get anxious around is sexuality, fueled by moral institutions that put a variety of limitations and existential consequences around non-marital sexual relationships and a culture that favors and fetishizes certain types of bodies.
Multigenerational transmission process would suggest that if a family communicates a sense of anxiety, restriction, and punishment around sexuality, that, without deeper relational and intrapsychic work, children who received those messages (hello to the Gen-Xers and millennials who read this) are likely to communicate this anxiety to their children.
It takes a huge amount of courage and bravery to break patterns of silence, avoidance, and ultimately shame regarding sexuality. This week, we talk Lindsay, Meg, and Sarai, co-hosts of the podcast Holy Ghosting, about how they are navigating this undoing so that their children have more healthy relationships with their own bodies, as well as the bodies of others.
Sarai discusses her relationship with her parent, and how she wants to engage with her sons’ relationships with their bodies differently.
It was also like a huge shame because once my mom found me [masturbating] when I was like eight or nine. She saw it, literally screamed.
I was so scared. I was like, what is happening? And she's like, “That's something your body's meant for when it's older.”
And I was like, “Oh, this must have to do with sex. Oh, okay.” And then I just kind of went back to it. But also worried Jesus would come back in the middle of it every time I did it, which was a lot.
I never wanted to make sex a big, shameful, weird thing because it's a normal thing that everyone generally at some point in their life participates in. It's just how humans work.
And so for me, it has really been about helping [my boys] experience their normal sexual development without it being encumbered with a bunch of weird judgment or shame. So it started really early for me as little boys, like figuring out like, “Oh. It gets hard when I touch it.” It's sort of a normal thing. Kids explore their bodies.
And so I was always like, “Yeah, that's cool. You could do that in a private place, but you don't do it around other people.”
And so just like helping them navigate those things without feeling freaked out about them as they come up. The reason why people shame other people is because their shame is triggered when that's happened. It's not like my mom; in fact, I'm sure it didn't just like out of nowhere. It was just a part of all of the things that we were taught and what she was taught and the way that she wanted to live.
Folks who engage with discussions around sexuality in different, more affirming ways with their children than they had with their parents might experience their own grief along the way. Check out Episode 71: How to Talk About Sexuality With Your Kids When You Grew Up in an Evangelical Community to learn more about how Lindsay, Meg, and Sarai are navigating this process.
Relationship 101 Articles This Week
Rather than talking about sexuality from a behavioral perspective, Julia and I often talk with folks about sexual values. This week, our articles will explore how parents can explore two different values that might inform conversations about sexuality with children and teens
On Thursday, we’ll talk about the values of honesty and transparency, and explore how couples navigate the tension between giving children “enough information” and “too much information”.
On Friday, we’ll discuss how parents can develop structures for healthy sexual dialogue around the values of agency and choice.
Picture of the Week
Yesterday (Monday 5/20), Julia and I went to quite possibly the coolest art exhibition that I’ve ever seen.
The STRAAT museum in Amsterdam Noord is an art collection dedicated to street art and graffiti. Housed in a five-story warehouse, each of the designs are massive, innovative, and thought provoking. You’ll see a lot more of these in future Substack articles; I try to use my own photos whenever I can. Here’s one of my faves.
Books That We’re Reading
Jeremiah’s Recommendations:
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. This is a really hard book to review. On the one hand, it's a brilliant window into the mind of a woman who simultaneously captures a superfluous amount of detail in the present moment, and can connect what's happening in the present with things that happened to her at other points in her life, which she describes with superfluous amount of detail. On the other hand, it's a showcase of passivity, partially rooted in gender descriptions, as a woman who was socialized to serve others, and partially out of the experience of being a foreigner. However, there are few depictions of actual interactions with other people, and the ones that do happen seldom involve dialogue and depth, contrary to the vivid depictions and assessment of her internal world. Most of the dialogue happens in her head, leaving the reader questioning the reality of her surroundings. Is she actually navigating xenophobia, as other reviewers have suggested? Or is she extremely lonely and, in trying to survive a new situation, reverts to engaging with the world as she was taught--serving others? Incredibly thought provoking though. 3.5 stars.
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. This is part two of a trilogy series centered around Ray Carney. As a stand-alone book, this is…a weird one. Three seemingly disconnected stories, especially the second one, that discuss way more about the development and history of Harlem, especially in the 1970s, that it does about any sort of plot points. It needs to be read in the context of Harlem Shuffle, which describes a little more about the backstory of Ray and what it’s like to simultaneously class jump in the context of a discriminated community and also stay engaged with family and legacy, especially when that family and legacy is connected to organized (or, in some cases, disorganized) crime. It’s hard to rate this book without knowing how book three is going to turn out. For now, I’ll give it a placeholder of 3.5 stars.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia