After an incident of harassment, Carla began to question being in a church that wouldn't protect her. But the hardest part of walking away was talking to her Honduran parents about it. And Doralis Coriano Ortiz, a psychotherapist who helps BIPOC clients navigate adverse religious experiences shares strategies for speaking with loved ones about a crisis of faith.
Featured Expert:
Doralis Coriano Ortiz is a Chicago-based bilingual psychotherapist in private practice at Live Oaks and serves on the board of the Reclamation Collective, an organization that holds space for folks navigating religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and adverse religious experiences. Her passion for religious trauma support work comes from her own experience of being born into and raised in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church in Puerto Rico. Her goal is to make religious trauma information, resources, and support accessible to anyone who may need it, and especially to BIPOC and to other Latinx/Spanish speakers who may still not have access to this work.
Doralis recommends the Reclamation Collective and the Religious Trauma Institute for anyone looking for support, resources and information about adverse religioys experiences, religious trauma, and spiritual abuse.
If you loved this episode, be sure to listen to When You Don't Believe in God, And They Really Want You To and Abuela is Against Trick-or-Treating.
We’d love to hear your stories of triumph and frustration so send us a detailed voice memo to virginia@lwcstudios.com. You might be on a future episode! Let’s connect on Twitter and Instagram at @TalkToMamiPapi and email us at hello@talktomamipapi.com. And follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody, today I'm speaking with Carla. Carla grew up Mormon and very certain of her faith. However, when she was graduating college, she began questioning it. And when she decided to leave The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explaining her reasons to her Honduran parents was really difficult. Let's get into it.
Carla: My name is Carla. I am from Honduras. I was raised in Miami and growing up, I called my parents mamá y papá. Growing up Mormon was sort of just part of my everyday life. It wasn't until I got to high school that I started realizing that I wasn't going to parties where my friends were drinking. I wasn't dating when my friends started getting boyfriends in middle school and early high school. And a lot of my daily life revolved around church. It wasn't until I was almost graduating from college that questioning my religious upbringing started. There was a lot of things going on at the same time that led me to begin questioning the faith of my youth, the faith to which I had been so devoted to. Part of it was Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for presidency and then all of a sudden, the people that I've looked up to for years are all of a sudden putting their support on someone who I found despicable and not Christlike at all.
That was one of many things that happened at the same time. And then I just started looking around and this image that I had of going to the temple and doing what every good Mormon girl was supposed to do being so disillusioning, being such a place of oppression towards women. Eventually, something else that happened around, and this is all maybe about a two year period, there was a person in the congregation who began to stalk me, to follow me around, to wait outside of these rooms. The person who was stalking me had a developmental disability. I'm not an expert, but I am an educator. And I have worked with a lot of students and a lot of young adult with all sorts of learning disabilities and developmental disabilities. Like I had had enough training to be able to draw a boundary and that boundary was not respected.
Carla: And because this person had a developmental disability, everybody thought that I was just being an awful person who was not accommodating to him. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't know what he's doing. That's how my church community chose, especially the men. The men in charge all chose to protect him. And when I suggested, hey, we should have a talk with some of the women, draw some boundaries, I remember somebody said, "Well, we don't want to turn people against him." And so all of these things began to cause conflict. Eventually I just couldn't do it anymore. I remember standing outside my front door and I remember thinking this isn't for me. If the God that I was raised to believe in really knows my heart and my soul, then he knows why I have to leave Mormonism. And this was after years of internal turmoil that that moment finally gave me peace.
After I shared my experience with being stalked, my parents obviously they had my back. They never pressured me to go. They also didn't tell me to call the police, which it didn't occur to me either. I don't think it occurred to any of us. It was only in hindsight that I realized how bad things was and I definitely should have involved the police. Over this two year period of questioning and doubts, I actually did not communicate any of these doubts to anybody because Mormonism teaches you to doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith. But also on another level, I remember praying and feeling this moment of like, I need to believe in this. I need this to be true, because if this is not true, my entire life is a lie.
After I was stalked and harassed, I stepped away from Mormonism for about six months. I had tried to go to church with my mom in a different congregation, but again, all the doubts that I had been having for years were just proven to me to be true and proven to me that it was a misogynistic place. Church was no longer a safe place, a physically safe place. My family knew that. That was easy. I was able to communicate it. No problem. What was hard was for me to be able to communicate the realization that I was never going to go back because I no longer believed in the doctrine.
And that's when I started living my life the way that I wanted to live it instead of living my life the way that Mormonism told me to live it. Even something as simple as wearing a tank top. That's how my mom knew that I left Mormonism because she saw me wearing a sleeveless dress. She thought that my dress was scandalous. And she said, "Are you not going to church anymore?" And I said, "No, I'm not." And she said, "Is it because of that guy?" And I was like, "It's not just because of that guy." And she teared up.
Carla: So after realizing that the belief system of my youth and of my upbringing was not something that I believed in anymore, it was very hard for me to believe in anything. I do believe in something bigger in the nose. I don't know what it's called. I don't know what it is. I don't know the intricacies of how the universe works, but I know that there is something bigger than us.
Lantigua:
Carla's vulnerability and openness in sharing her story really, really moved me. Doubting your religious or spiritual beliefs can be so painful. Add to that facing harassment from within your community and it can become really traumatic and isolating. How can we as first gens navigate these situations, sometimes dangerous situations and discuss them with our parents in loving and helpful ways? How can we do it when religion plays such a huge role in so many of our families and our cultures? To help us figure it out, I called in an expert. Our expert, by the way, spoke to us from her home in Chicago, not from a studio. So you'll probably hear some noise in the background.
Doralis Coriano Ortiz:
My name is Doralis Coriano Ortiz. I'm from Puerto Rico and I came to Chicago to pursue my masters in counseling psychology and I've been practicing here since then. I practice at a group private practice called Live Oak and I'm also co-chair at the board at the Reclamation Collective. And at the Reclamation Collective, we basically offer support groups on a pay as you can basis for people that are navigating adverse religious experiences or religious trauma and just want a space to be able to process that with other people that have been through similar experiences.
Lantigua: So you heard Carla's story. What did you hear as you listened?
Coriano Ortiz: Wow, I was taken aback because it sounds very similar to some of the processes I've gone through and some of the processes of other people that I've worked with. I was raised in Puerto Rico in an evangelical/Pentecostal church. And I also didn't start questioning till I was graduating college and it was around the time that Trump was running for president and it was shocking for me to see how many people were supporting white supremacy, misogyny, sexual abuse, just because this candidate aligned with some of the values that the church wants to promote. As I was also going through a process of trying to decolonize in my mind, going through that process of why would I follow a religion that was basically brought to my island by colonizers? Right? So I just want to say, Carla, if you're listening to this, you're not alone. You're not alone in this experience.
Lantigua: Walk me through from your clinical experience and your own experience what the process of beginning to question might look like for someone like Carla.
Coriano Ortiz: So for someone like Carla, it sounds like she already had a set of values that impacted her questioning. So seeing the community that you grew up in, seeing the people that have told you we hold the truth or if you follow this religion, you're a good person, right? Seeing them align with values that go against things that you may consider to be good, which is to not be misogynist, to not be racist, can lead someone to doubt is this the community that I want to be in?
After that initial moment of doubt, some people may try to hold on even stronger to their belief system, to their faith. Other people might go down that rabbit hole online and looking for more information about the history of their specific religious community and they may start asking questions. And that can be a really scary process, especially if in that community they have told you to doubt your doubts, right? And so having doubts already can feel unsafe, especially if the theology says that that's a sin or that you could go to hell or any other scary thing that could be associated with failing, failing as a believer, failing in your faith.
Lantigua: I want to ask you about the impact on someone's sense of familial belonging when religion plays such a central role in the family. What happens as someone begins to question that to their sense of who they are within their family?
Coriano Ortiz: When that happens, it can be something that can even break apart families, right? Not the act itself of someone saying I'm not going to follow this religion anymore, but more so the fact that the family might feel disconnected from that person, the family might feel scared, or even may feel that they might be threatened in their eternal life or their salvation. That might be really scary for the family and heartbreaking for them if they don't understand why this person is suddenly to them thinking differently.
Lantigua: So in your work and with your clients, what are some of the strategies that you help them to utilize to start to deal with the repercussions that might come for them as they begin to make these decisions?
Coriano Ortiz: First of all, when someone tells me that they're thinking about telling their family, we first talk about having a safety plan. Having an exit plan that feels as safe as possible for them because unfortunately, we don't always know how the family's going to react. So we make sure that they have a support system outside of the religious community. We make sure that if possible they have some sort of financial independence. And then after that, we make a plan regarding how they're going to communicate that to the family. So in-person is typically ideal, but that's not safe for everyone to do depending on their family history. So if they do want to communicate that in-person, we talk about how that could go, we prepare for that, we discuss if having someone from their support system present would feel safe. And if that does not feel safe, even a phone call, writing a letter, email, text, whatever helps that individual feel in control as much as possible during that process and most importantly, safe.
Coriano Ortiz: And then internally as well, working towards acceptance. Accepting yourself, accepting that this journey that you're going on isn't necessarily bad or evil or sinful, right? Like deconstructing the fear around navigating new experiences and also working towards acceptance. That just because you left doesn't mean your family's necessarily going to leave or doesn't mean your family's going to start viewing religion or spirituality in the same way that you view it now. For a lot of folks, part of the process is trying to convince their family, look, look what I read. Look what I found. Of course, that is part of that fear of losing that familial connection.
Lantigua: I'm wondering if you can help us understand the spectrum of responses and reactions that a person might have to a crisis of faith, right? I imagine some people want a complete break, maybe some other people want to modify the experience. Like what have you seen in terms of the possibility of outcomes for people who like Carla deeply question their religious upbringing?
Coriano Ortiz: That can go so many different ways. One example that I've seen is when people go from potentially being clergy, pastors, leaders in their community, very well-respected to completely criticizing the religion, maybe identifying as atheist. Another way that people can go on this journey is saying I still believe in God or I still consider myself part of this community. I just have a different view of the theology. I practice in my own way or I disagree with certain things, but this is still part of my life, part of my culture and I'm allowed to practice it in a way that makes me feel safe.
Coriano Ortiz: And other people, I see this a lot, especially for black and brown folks, BIPOC, Latina folks, which is reclaiming our ancestral practices and trying to adopt an anticolonial view of spirituality and religion. The spectrum of how people go on this process can be so different. And that can also be part of that grieving process too, that anger towards the community for feeling like you've been harmed, like your life was a lie, the sadness of losing that framework of life, of losing that community. This can go so many ways. And sometimes as people grieve and heal, they might even develop different understandings of how they want to practice faith or spirituality or if they don't. And that's okay.
Lantigua: So I actually want to dig into a point that you just made, which is about physical safety. For someone who might be in a situation where they might be in physical danger or in proximity to physical danger, what are some of the ways that they can get help, that they can mitigate that situation?
Coriano Ortiz: This is a very difficult question because one of the issues precisely of why a lot of folks have found themselves leaving their religious communities is because there's a lot of systemic issues in the church and there aren't always systems of support for when things like this happen. So in a situation like this, someone might be encouraged to report it to the elders or report it to the pastor, but nothing is done. That happens a lot, unfortunately, because in some religious communities, the reputation of the church is more important. That's something really, really difficult to navigate. However, if reporting it to the police feels like something that would offer safety to the person, I would encourage them to do that. If they want to have a paper trail of what's going on, I would encourage them to report it to the police. I would also encourage them to seek support from organizations in their state, in their city, that deal with the specific issues that they may be facing if that feels like a safer option.
Lantigua: Doralis, you're a gem. I'm so happy you came on the show. Thank you so much.
Coriano Ortiz: Thank you so much Juleyka. I'm happy to be here.
Lantigua: All right, here's what we learned from Doralis today.
Prioritize your safety. Whether you decide to communicate with your family in-person, via email, or by text, choose the method that lets you feel most comfortable, in control, and safe.
Create a new community. Seek out support groups, local organizations, and friends from outside your religious community who can offer emotional support, assist with your physical wellbeing, and provide you with a sense of belonging.
And remember, accept without judgment. Questioning your faith or choosing to separate from your religion can be really hard. But it doesn't mean this path you've chosen is bad, wrong, or evil.
In the episode notes, we've shared some of the resources Doralis recommended. Thank you for listening and sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our social media editor. I'm the creator, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @talktomamipapi. Please follow us and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, and everywhere you listen to your favorite podcast. Bye everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Raised Mormon, She Left the Church Fearing for Her Safety'”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., January 10, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.