In this final episode of Beyond the Surface, Sam brings the podcast to a close with honesty about why - including her own experience of chronic illness and what it has meant for her capacity to keep showing up in this way. She reflects on the conversations that have shaped the series, the guests who trusted her with their stories, and what it has meant to hold space for the experiences of people recovering from high-control religious environments. It's a warm, candid sign-off that sits with the weight of ending something that has mattered, while leaving listeners with a clear message: the podcast may be finished, but the work of recovery continues, and every story shared here has been part of something bigger than a single show.

Connect

• You can find out more about Sam on her website - www.anchoredcounsellingservices.com.au
• To connect with Sam on Instagram - @anchoredcounsellingservices
• Want to contact with Sam about the podcast or therapy? Use this contact form.
• Also check out Religious Trauma & Cults

I would like to begin by acknowledging.

The traditional custodians of the land on.

Which I live and work, the Gundagara land and people. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I also want to acknowledge the traditional.

Custodians of the lands on which you, our listeners, are joining us from today.

I recognize the deep connection that first nations people have to this land, their enduring culture and their commitment to the preservation and care for their country. This land was never ceded and it always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Welcome to beyond the Surface.

This is a space for conversations that sit at the edges of faith, identity, power and recovery, especially for those of us who have been shaped, stretched or harmed by fundamental religion or high control systems. Some episodes are personal, some are reflective, some are educational or curious or quietly disruptive.

All of them are grounded in lived experience and a deep respect for the complexity of leaving, questioning and rebuilding meaning.

We will be talking about religious trauma, various forms of abuse, cult dynamics, queerness and recovery, not in neat answers, but in honest conversations. In listening to these conversations, some parts.

Might be heavy or activating for you.

Please take care of yourself while listening and feel free to pause or step away if you need to. I'm Sam and I'm really glad that you're here with us.

Okay, here we are. Welcome to the final episode of beyond the Surface. I've been sitting with how to start this episode for a while because there is no clean way in.

There's no obvious hook, no provocative opening question, no story I can use to ease us into this topic today. The topic is the ending of something, and I think the only honest way to begin is to say that directly.

So this will be the final episode of beyond the Surface. And before I say anything else, I want to say this thank you.

Not at the end, not as just the sign off line, but here at the very beginning where I think it belongs. Because the thank you is the thing that I most want you to carry from this episode.

Everything else, the reflections, the memories, the honest stuff about why I'm finishing, all of that comes after. But the thank you comes first. So thank you. Now, let's talk about what this has been.

I started beyond the Surface thinking that maybe, maybe a small number of people would listen. And I mean small. I had no expectations of scale, no vision board with download numbers on it, no plan for what it would become.

I resisted doing it for so long, but I just knew that these conversations needed to happen.

That There were people out there carrying things that didn't have enough language around them and that if I created a space for those conversations, then someone somewhere might find it useful.

What I didn't fully anticipate was how much it would do for me, how much every single episode would give back, how much the act of showing up week after week of listening, of being curious, of sitting with people in the middle of their hardest stories, not as a therapist, but just as someone who is in it with them, would shape me as a person and also as a practitioner. I came into this thinking I was creating something for an audience. I ended it knowing that it was creating something in me too.

I also want to name something practical before I go anywhere else, because it doesn't get said enough and it needs to be said in the final episode. If nowhere else, this show would not have happened without Chrissy. She's edited every single episode. Some of them she's edited twice.

Because I decided to randomly branch out to YouTube. So every recording that went out into the world went out because Chrissie sat with it too, worked on it, made it listenable.

That is an enormous amount of labour and it was given with so much generosity. I know how to talk. I've grown up with people telling me I could talk with marbles in my mouth.

What I do not know is how to edit audio and video, nor do I have a single ounce of fucking patience to do so. Even if I wanted to learn. My ADHD is good as a host, it is not good as an editor.

And so Chrissie is the reason that those things were never a problem. Okay, moving into some reflections.

I want to talk about why I started with the person that I did, which is Joy Vetteline, because that wasn't an accident. And I think it says something about what I wanted this show to be. From the very beginning, Joy was pivotal for me in my own deconstruction.

Before we ever recorded together, before beyond the Surface even existed as a thought, Joy had already been part of how I had started to understand and name my own experience of high control religion. And so when it came to launching the show and when she said yes, there was genuinely nobody else that I wanted to start with. It had to be her.

Not because it was a strategic choice or because she had the biggest platform, but just because she was the right person for me. Because the show was always going to be personal, it was always going to be rooted in real relationship and real experience.

And starting with Joy was a way of saying that from episode one, what I didn't know was that she would give me and so many people a phrase that I still use today and that I still talk about with people today two and a half years later. If you've listened to Joy's episode, you'll probably know what I'm talking about.

She described what it feels like to be inside high control religion as frantic thinking, the way even simple decisions become loaded. Which grocery store do I go to? Because what if I run into someone that I could tell about Jesus?

That image has stuck with me because it captures so many things really precisely, but none more than the way that ordinary becomes saturated with spiritual consequence, the exhausting surveillance of just everyday life. I still use it. I probably always will.

And the fact that a phrase from episode one is still living in my head rent free and in my practice and in the lives of so many says something about the quality of what was shared from the very beginning. A matter of weeks later, I had a conversation with David Haywood, known as the Naked Pastor.

He gave me something that landed very differently and something that I have brought up in many other podcast conversations and in many conversations in my practice with people. He said that deconstruction is a way of life and that he will be deconstructing until he dies.

Now, on the surface, that might feel very confronting or very morbid, but I remember the room feeling like it shifted a little when he said that.

Because I think a lot of us come into deconstruction with the sacred hope that there is an end point to that, that there is a place where you will arrive at where the questions stop and the dust settles and you finally know what you think and believe now. Because that's what happened the first time, right? And yet David just didn't offer that.

He offered something more honest and in some ways, like I said, more confronting, that the questioning itself is the practice that it doesn't end. And I've watched that land on people as uncomfortable at first and then if they sit with it.

Actually, one of the most validating things someone has said to them, because it means that you are not broken for still having questions. You're just awake. I love that it was confronting. The best things usually are. The early episodes set a tone, and I am very, very glad that they did.

They said, this show is going to be honest, it's going to be personal, it's going to go to places that are uncomfortable, and it's going to do all of that without losing the warmth and knowing me as a host, without losing the humor that was the intention from day one. And I think we've held that.

And looking back, I think we held it because of the guests who understood instinctively what the show was trying to be and met it there. I was lucky in that from the start, it wasn't all me, it was the people who I asked to be a part of it also.

One of the things I want to say about the guests on this show is that I never approached an episode as an interview. I approached it as a conversation.

And I think that distinction matters because it shaped everything about how the show felt to me, in particular, hopefully to the guests, and I think to all of you who listened. Conversations are unpredictable in the best possible way. You don't know where they're going, you have no idea where they're going to go.

Sometimes you can't script the moment when someone says the thing that you didn't know needed to be said. And that unpredictability is exactly what produced some of the most significant moments across the life of this show.

Jess Manusama's episode is the most downloaded episode in the show's history, and I think that reflects something real about what Jess brought.

The specific nature of her story, the way she told it, the places it went, it wasn't perfectly curated, it wasn't perfectly polished, but it was real. And that episode clearly reached people. And I'm so glad that we made it.

There's something about a conversation that goes exactly where it needs to go, whether either of you are planning it that way. That's what that episode was. And the response it got confirmed that when a story is told with that level of honesty, it finds the people who need it.

The second highest downloaded episode is surprising for me because it was the second time I shared parts of my own story, and that was one of probably the most chaotic episodes in the best way that I recorded. Matt Glover interviewed me, which meant swapping roles, which, as you might all know, it, is not my favourite thing to do.

But there is something deeply uncomfortable about being on the receiving end of a microphone when you're usually the one holding it. And Matt had insider knowledge here.

He knew where to push, he knew the pointed questions, and he wasn't going to let me get away with the polished version, which is exactly why I hoped that it would go well, even while every part of me that likes to be in control of a conversation with mildly uncomfortable. The result was one of hopefully the most honest things that I've put out under this podcast, and the fact that it landed the way that it did.

That people found something in my story that resonated with their own is something I still feel the weight of, but in a really beautiful, generous and hopeful way.

I want to talk about Colby Martin for a moment and this might be a random episode for me to pull out in amongst all of the episodes to reflect on, but I want to be honest about something.

Every single time I sat in front of a man and I interviewed them, I had female conditioning from being a part of a high control, complementarian gender roles church.

I had to give myself permission every time I interviewed or had a conversation with a male because I had to remind myself that I was allowed to do this. And I don't talk about that a lot.

I don't know that I've ever really talked about that publicly, but it is part of the reality of coming from a space that told you that because you're a woman that you didn't get to have a voice here. Colby's episode was something else entirely because my nervous system was not entirely on board before that recording.

Colby is a straight white pasta. My body knows what it has learned to expect in that combination of words and it was doing its thing in the lead up.

I'm glad I did it anyway because I knew that Colby was affirming. I'd read Unclobber and I knew that people needed to hear what he had to say.

I knew that there were queer people out there, queer people of faith in particular, that needed to hear that those things are not in contradiction from one another.

And I think the second reason why I'm glad I did that episode is because the conversation with Colby reminded me that people are specific and surprising and that my nervous system's pattern recognition, however well earned it is, doesn't always need the final say. That episode was good and sitting with the discomfort of doing it was worth it to flip the reflection for a moment.

Sarah Madison was and still is my favorite person to have been on the podcast.

I remember the moment that I read the email, it was late at night saying that she would love to be on the podcast and I fangirled the fuck out of that episode. I know that people know that who have listened to it. I fan gold, then end in the episode and I still fangirl a little bit now.

I'm not even going to pretend that I didn't or that I don't. I love Sarah's books.

I love the way that she wrote about the impact of purity culture in the spiciest way and I love how much that is impacting so many people who get to read it. And what's made it even better is that we've been able to stay in touch since. And I've been able to play a very small role in one of her books.

And so I love that that is something that's come out of show. It is something that I don't take for granted. The way that some of these conversations have opened into actual, ongoing connection. Sarah is fabulous.

And that is the most accurate thing that I can say.

I'm flipping around in tone quite a bit because I want to name Cheryl Bortenheimer's episode specifically because it was one of the only times, I think, across the entire run of this show that I found myself getting emotional.

Mid recording, Cheryl talks about her experience of child sexual abuse within a religious context with the most amount of rawness and bravery that I genuinely was not prepared for even having prepared.

There are guests who tell their story, and then there are guests who give you their story, who hand you something that costs them something real to share. Cheryl is the latter of that. That episode is still one I think about. If you haven't listened to it, please do so, but please do that with care.

I know that Grace's episode where she talked about asexuality and demisexuality is one I come back to because of what I know it did for people listening.

The messages that I got after that episode from people who said they finally had language for something that they had been describing, trying to describe for years without knowing knowing the words exactly, or knowing that the words existed. This is why the show existed, to give people language, to say, this thing that you are experiencing has a name and you are not alone in it.

Here it is.

And as an extension of that, I want to say something about the LGBTQIA representation across the life of this show, because as a queer person, fuck, I am so genuinely proud of it, because so many of the voices that came onto this podcast were queer voices. Bisexual, gay, lesbians, trans, non, binary, asexual. The full spectrum. And here is something that I want to say that might surprise no one.

Those were almost always some of the most joyful episodes that I got to record.

Because there is something about queer people who have come through religious trauma together, people who were told in the most fundamental way that who they are is wrong, who find each other and can laugh about the pain, yes. But also about the absolute absurdity of some of it. The things that we believed, the things we were told, the lengths that we went to.

There is a particular kind of dark humour that exists in this community and broadly. And it is one of the most alive things that I've been able to be a part of and to witness.

I have had in jokes with guests I've only ever spoken to once, across different continents, different backgrounds, different specific versions of the thing we both survived. That shared recognition of, oh my God, us too. Like, it's one of the things that I will carry the longest from this show.

The intersection of queerness and religious trauma is a particular kind of wounded, but the community that grows in that intersection is also a particular kind of extraordinary. And I got a front row seat to it over and over again across the life of this podcast.

And that was a privilege and I knew it at the time and I still know it now. I'm obviously not going to do this episode without talking about Elise Hurd. She holds the record for the most episodes on the show.

She's pretty much part of the furniture, including episodes where we talk about the Religious Trauma Collective, now known as Religious Trauma and Cults, which we co founded and now co direct together. But what I want to say about Elise is that her support for this podcast predates everything else.

Long before we were in a relationship, long before RTC had fully taken shape, Elise was someone who showed up for this work and for me in it.

Having someone in your corner who genuinely understands this space, who, not as an outsider watching, but as someone who is in it alongside of you, who gets the stakes, who knows what these conversations cost and what they give that is invaluable in a way that's hard to fully articulate. It made me braver, it made the show better. A podcast is spoken as though it's supposed to be a one directional thing. Someone talks, people listen.

And there's nothing wrong with that model. But that is not quite what I wanted beyond the surface to be. The conversations were real. The guests weren't performing for a microphone.

They were talking to me and through me, to the people listening in a way that was genuinely mutual. And some of those conversations apparently didn't want to end when the recording did. They just kept going. And I love that.

Aaron Kelly, Kit Morgan, Christy Hyde, Ben Nicholson, Claire McIver, Liz Cameron, Ash Buckner. These are people that I recorded with and I didn't know them at the time, and then I didn't stop talking.

Real friendships, the kind that you don't manufacture and you can't always plan for. The kind that just happen when two people sit down and tell each other the truth about their world. And their story.

I want to say something about what it means to make a podcast in this specific space about this specific topic. The conversations are not casual. You are not discussing celebrity gossip or debating the best travel destinations.

You are sitting with people in the places their lives were most profoundly shaped and sometimes most profoundly harmed, and doing that repeatedly, week after week, with different people. It connects you to the human beings on the other side of that in a way that is hard to describe.

You see something in people when they tell their hard stories, and sometimes they see something in you when you receive it. And that mutual seeing is where friendships are born. I didn't expect that. I expected to make good episodes. I hoped to make good episodes.

I didn't expect the episodes to give me some of the best people that I now know. That has been one of the greatest surprises and the greatest joys of this whole endeavour.

And I want to say something about what it means specifically to make friends in this space and to make friends as an adult, because they're not casual friendships built on shared hobbies or proximity. They're friendships built on having sat in something hard together, on having been honest in a recording and had that honesty and reciprocated.

There is a particular quality of a friendship that starts that way. It's already passed a certain test, so to speak, before it's even a friendship.

Yet the conversations that happened in these recordings were already the kinds of conversations most friendships might never reach. I am beyond grateful for that.

When I started beyond the Surface, the core of it was stories, lived experience, the specific, irreplaceable thing that happens when a real person sits down and tells you what they actually went through. Not a summary, not a framework, but the texture of it. And that never changed. That was always the foundation of this show.

But one of the things that I'm really proud of is that the show grew beyond that in some ways, but without losing it. We went into territory that was more educational, without it ever becoming a lecture or losing the human centre.

We talked about cognitive dissonance, purity, culture, cult dynamics, deconstructing monogamy and dissociative identities. These are just some of the topics that required care and a real understanding of the landscape. I loved getting to go there.

I loved being able to say, here is something that might give you a framework for understanding your own experience. Here is some language. Here is the mechanism underneath the thing that you felt but couldn't explain.

The Wicked episode is a good example of this, and it's one I'll always be really proud of because of what it did for people. A deep dive into a piece of pop culture through the lens of religious trauma and high control dynamics.

The messages I got after that episode, including from people who listened having never seen the film, saying that the episode made them go and watch it immediately.

Honestly, that is some of the highest praise I've had for this show, because it meant the episode worked on its own terms, not just as a commentary for people who already knew the movie and the subtext, but also because everyone knows how much I love Wicked. I don't think that's a secret now. And so for people to love the episode as well, that feels like icing on the cake for me.

I'm also really glad that I was able to explore a range of traditions and systems represented across the show. Religious trauma is not one thing. It's not one denomination, one country, one presentation.

We had Jehovah's Witness and Mormons, Catholics, the Exclusive Brethren, Charismatic Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, and cultic communities that supposedly have no name, like the Two by Twos. We had those from spiritual cults and some from the little church down the road.

We had Brandy Hadfield from an mlm and we had Sammy as an ex Muslim just last week. We had people who were born into these systems and people who were recruited.

We had people whose harm was primarily theological and people whose harm was also physical, financial, relational. We had people who still hold some form of faith and people who have left entirely and people who are somewhere in the middle and don't know yet.

I really wanted, beyond the surface to hold as much of that range as possible, to not collapse it into one story. And I really hope that we did that.

I want to talk about why I'm finishing and I want to do it honestly because I think you deserve that and because anything less would feel a little inconsistent with what this show has always tried to be.

I live with a lot of chronic pain and chronic fatigue and it has made continuing this show just unsustainable in a way that doesn't really feel like my choice, honestly, which is the hardest thing about it. The stopping doesn't feel like something I decided.

It feels like something my body decided for me, and there is a grief in that, which I'm still sitting with. I want to say something about that though, because I think this is relevant to a lot of people in this community specifically.

There is a well documented connection between a history of trauma, including religious trauma, and chronic illness and chronic pain. Body keeps the score, as the saying goes.

And for survivors of High control religion, who spent years in survival mode, who ran on adrenaline and hypervigilance, and that particular driven energy that comes from having to justify your experience within a system. That toll shows up often later and more often in the body.

And there is something specific about the religious trauma survivors drive that I think needs to be noticed.

The way we keep going, the way the compulsion to help, to create, to be useful, to make meaning out of what happened, can sometimes override the signals that the body is sending, the way that rest can feel like failure.

When you were raised in a system that equated your worth with your productivity and your compliance and your contribution, that is not a personal failing. That's installed programming running in a body that needs something different. I know that pattern in myself. I've known it for a while.

And the body finally made it undeniable. The reason the stopping doesn't feel like mine is that I had more to give.

I had episodes that I wanted to make, conversations that I wanted to have topics that I wasn't done with. And I'm choosing not to make a long list of what I didn't get to because I don't think that serves anybody.

What I will say is that the show is ending while there was still more in it. And that is genuinely hard to sit with. What I've had to come back to over and over is this. The show existed. It is not diminished by its ending.

The episodes are still here. The conversations are still alive. The language and the permission and the hope that people find in them.

I hope that doesn't go away because we're not making new ones. This isn't unfinished. It's complete. Even if it's complete earlier than maybe I would have chosen. And I want to be clear about something.

I'm also not going anywhere. The podcast is ending, but I'm still doing this work. I'm still doing the client work. I'm still building trainings and resources.

And RTC is not only continuing, but growing. Elise and I are still at it every day together. We're developing resources for practitioners who work with cultic trauma survivors.

We're building out support structures for the community.

We're focused on making sure that the gap that existed when I first started this work, the gap that made me want to start a podcast in the first place, continues to get smaller and smaller and smaller. I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I learned throughout beyond the Surface. I learned that people are braver than they know.

Every single guest who sat down with Me and told their story, knowing it would be heard by strangers, knowing the people they were talking about might hear it, knowing their voice would be out there in the world, attached to the most vulnerable and difficult parts of their experience was doing something brave. The courage of coming on this podcast and being honest about your experience in a public way is not a small thing. It is a generous thing.

And every person who did it gave something real to people they will never meet. I hope they know that. I learned that language matters more than almost anything else in recovery.

The messages that I got most often from listeners were some version of I finally have words for this. I didn't know how to explain it before, and now I do.

That tells me something about what the deepest need is for people coming out of these environments. It's not always a roadmap. It's not always a list of steps.

It's often just the right words in the right order that suddenly make something you've been carrying feel nameable. Nameable things are workable things. That's why this show mattered.

Not because it had all the answers, because it didn't, but because it kept handing people language. I learned that permission is a gift.

So many people told me that listening gave them permission to be angry, to grieve, to question, to leave, to stay, to feel whatever they felt without pathologizing it. I didn't fully understand when I started how many people were waiting for someone to just say, you know what? That's allowed.

You're allowed to feel that your experience is real. You don't have to resolve it on anyone else's timeline. But I get to know it now, and I'll carry it into every other thing that I do.

And I want to say to you one more time, just in case nobody else has lately, whatever you are feeling about all of it, the system, the leaving, the grief, the anger, the relief, the complicated love for things that also hurt you. All of it is allowed. All of it counts. None of it needs to be tidied up before it is valid.

I learned that connection that forms around honest conversation is unlike anything else. What grew around this podcast, the messages, rtc, the people who found each other through shared episodes. That was never something that I planned.

It grew because the conversations were real. And real conversations draw real people toward each other.

I'm so proud of, yes, the community that exists in this space, not because I built it, but because I got to watch it happen and be a part of what sparked some of that. I learned that laughter is part of the healing now. I knew this already, but I'm so glad that it reinforced it.

I said earlier when I talked about the queer guests that I've had, but I want to say it more broadly because it's true across the whole show.

The capacity of people to laugh at what they've been through, not to minimise it, not to bypass the grief, but alongside the grief in the middle of the hardest conversation is one of the most alive things I get to witness. Religious and cultic trauma is serious. It causes real harm with real consequences.

And also some of what we believed was objectively hilarious in retrospect. And being able to hold both of those things at the same time.

To be in a recording with someone and find ourselves properly laughing at the absolute absurdity of something and then go right back into the hard stuff, that isn't a contradiction. It's resilience. That is humans doing what humans do. And I loved every time it happened.

I want to talk about a mode that many of you will recognize and just to lean into that humor a little bit. I don't know how else to describe it.

A whole register of language and response, an internal posture that got installed so early and so thoroughly that it still loads. Sometimes, before I can stop it, someone says something completely ordinary, not religious at all. And church mode is there, activated.

Finishing the sentence with a verse or a phrase I haven't said out loud in years, but apparently I have still fully memorised it. Someone says, can you do it? Simple question, right? And before I have consciously processed the question, Philippians 4:13 is already loading.

I can do all things through Christ, who gives me strength. I don't go looking for it. I'm sure you don't either. I wasn't thinking about scripture. My brain just went there automatically, like a reflex.

Which is exactly what it is. The verse isn't a thought I'm having, it's a response that fires before thought gets a look in. How about be still?

Which is a lot to have arrived when someone's just asking you to relax for a minute or to just take a breath or take a moment.

What I love about this, and I do mean love genuinely in a this is the funniest part of recovery kind of way, is that across more than 100 episodes of this podcast, 133 to be exact, I have watched this land in real time with guests over and over again. We would be in the middle of a conversation about something completely different.

And one of us would say a phrase and you can see it, that little flicker of recognition, the involuntary completion, because the language was the same across denominations, across countries, across completely different specific versions of the thing. We all survived. So much of that vocabulary was shared.

And there is something both darkly funny and genuinely moving about sitting with someone from a completely different background, maybe on a completely different continent, and realizing you both have the same sentences living rent free in your heads. Now, unsurprisingly, I'm going to talk about the worship version of this, because worship songs are entirely something else.

Because at least a Bible verse is just words. A worship song has a melody. I think everybody has that part of us that like when we get a song stuck in our head.

And my brain, it turns out, like many of you, I'm sure, has retained a full catalog of songs. I will wake up one morning randomly with Shine Jesus Shine in my head. Not because I was thinking about it, not because I heard it.

Just is there 6:30 in the morning and I'm already in the building singing it. Shout to the Lord will arrive unannounced on any, any given day.

And then there are days, genuinely fucking cursed days where I will walk around and Ocean's is just playing in my head and I just have to accept it because Ocean's is seven minute song and your brain does not do the short version.

Instead, my head got the full Hillsong experience, including the bridge that has a key change and the bit where everyone in the room is crying and you can go back in time and you would definitely also crying, even if you might not want to admit it out loud right now. I don't choose any of this and I know that you don't either.

It's what happens when your most impacting musical education for formative years of your life was exclusively songs about Jesus. The retention rate is genuinely impressive. I wish my brain applied this capacity to things that I might actually need to remember.

However, it doesn't always you can take the girl out of the church. The church, it turns out, doesn't always have the intention of leaving the girl easily or quickly.

I learned that you don't have to have it all figured out to be useful to people. I started this show mid process. I feel like I'm still mid process.

I haven't arrived at some completed version of Healed and sorted and done with deconstruction. And somewhere along the way I realised that the honesty of being mid process was not a liability for this show.

It was part of what made it trustworthy. People could tell I wasn't performing. I hope particularly that I wasn't performing. Certainty that I didn't have.

And I think that mattered far more than any polish or professionalism I could have offered. Instead of I learned that this work changes the person doing it. I am not the same person who launched episode one. Not dramatically different.

I'm still me. Still the same human with the same core things. But the accumulation of these conversations has shaped me.

The way I think about trauma, the way I think about community, the way I think about what people need when they're in the middle of something hard. The way I think about my own history. All of it has been quietly worked on by this show across the time we made it.

That's not something I anticipated, but it is one of the things that I feel most grateful for. I learned that grief and gratitude can coexist in a way that I didn't know before.

You can be genuinely glad something existed and genuinely sad it's ending at the same time that those two things don't cancel each other out, they just both get to be true. This show is ending and I'm grateful that it existed and I am sad it's over and I am proud of what it was. All of that at once.

Which ironically, I suppose is very on brand for a religious trauma podcast to end on. I want to end by talking to you. Not the general you, the specific you. The one who found this show and kept coming back.

The one who waited for the next episode.

The one who sent a message that said this gave me language or this made me feel less alone, or I listened to this in my car and I had to sit in the driveway for 10 minutes after because I needed a minute. The one who shared an episode with someone they love because they didn't have the words themselves and hoped the episode might do it for them.

The one who is still in the middle of it, still working things out, still somewhere in the long and non linear process of figuring out who you are outside the system that told you who to be. I started this show thinking no one would listen, or at least a very small number of people would.

And the size of this audience, which was never huge and never the point, still surprises me every time, because every single person who listened was a choice. You could have been doing something else. You chose to spend time in this space. Week after week, episode after episode, you showed up.

And I am so grateful for that in a way that I don't quite have words for you were the reason I created this. Not in the abstract, but in the specific sense that every episode was made thinking about you.

The person who needed the language, the person who needed the permission. The person who needed to hear someone say their experience out loud without flinching. I hope we gave you that.

I hope somewhere in the 133 episodes of this show, there was at least one moment where you felt. Felt genuinely seen.

The thing I heard most from people across the life of this show was some version of I finally have the words for this, or I didn't know I was allowed to feel that, or I thought I was the only one. And I want to say something about those messages, because they're the whole point.

Not the downloads, not the guest list, not any of the external markers of what a successful podcast is supposed to look like.

The person who wrote to tell me that Grace's episode gave them language for their own experience of asexuality that they'd been searching for for years. The person who said the wicked episode made them go and watch the film and then listen again. The person who said mine and Elisa's shit.

Talking about Easter allowed them to laugh for the first time in years. The person who told me Linda Pesavento's episode helped them explore their own experience of parenting a trans kid.

Those messages are what this was for.

There is something I want to say specifically to those of you who are still early in your deconstruction or recovery, who maybe found this show because you were looking for something and you weren't quite sure what. Who are in the part where everything feels loose and nothing feels solid and you're not sure who you are outside the framework you were given.

I know that place. I've been in it. And I want to know. I want you to know that the looseness doesn't last forever.

Not because you'll go back to certainty, because you probably won't. And honestly, good certainty was part of the problem, but because over time, you find solid ground again. Different ground.

Ground that's actually yours. And it holds better than the old card did because you chose it rather than it being chosen for you. Keep going. Be patient with yourself.

Find your people. Get the right support, and trust that the discomfort of the in between is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

It is a sign that something is changing. And that is allowed. Remember? I want to say what I always say at the end, because I mean it now as much as I ever have and probably more.

Your story matters. It always has. Whatever you went through however long ago, however complicated, however unresolved, it matters. You matter.

The fact that you found your way to a podcast about religious trauma and high control groups and you kept listening, that tells me something about who you are.

You're someone who is trying to understand, someone who is doing the work of reckoning honestly with what happened to you or with what happened to someone you love. That is not nothing. That is hard and it is brave, and I am honoured to have been any small part of it.

And if you are someone who has never told your story, who has been carrying it alone, who hasn't found the words yet, who isn't sure it counts, or if it's bad enough or is the right kind of experience to deserve the name, I want to say it counts. It counts if it happened in a church or a cult or a community or a family, it counts.

If it was loud and big or quiet and slow, it counts if the people who caused the harm would be horrified to know that you're calling it harm. It counts if you still love some of the people involved. It counts if you're not sure what you believe anymore.

Whatever version of this you're carrying, it counts. And there are people here for you. You don't have to figure it out alone.

Now, if you're new here, if somehow this final episode is the first one that you found, please go back to the beginning. There is so much there. There are episodes that will give you language. Guests who will make you feel less alone, those who will make you laugh.

Solo episodes that go into the territory that doesn't get named enough. Start anywhere. It'll find you wherever you need it to. Please know that RTC is not going anywhere.

The community, the resources, the connection, all of it is still there and still growing. This is the end of the podcast, not the end of the work. You can still find me and you can still find us there. I will still be there.

To every guest who trusted me with their story, thank you genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, you gave something to the people listening that I could not have given them myself. What you shared mattered. It still matters. It will keep mattering.

To the people who find these episodes long after today, your willingness to be honest in public about the hardest things is not something I will ever stop being grateful for. To Elise, who was here for so much of this, who built something alongside me and then somehow became more than that.

Thank you for being the kind of person who shows up fully in work and in everything else. And finally to Chrissie, for editing every single episode for all the hours behind the scenes that nobody sees. Every time.

I asked you to change the reels six times for being the reason this show actually made it out into the world in a form that people could listen to. This was always yours, too. This has been beyond the surface. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to make it.

Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and remember, your story matters always.