In this solo episode, Sam sits with something that doesn't get talked about enough during Pride Month - grief. For queer people who've come out of religious environments, the celebrations of June can sit alongside a very specific kind of loss, and Sam reflects honestly on that tension: the way communal joy can sometimes make private sorrow louder, and why those two things don't cancel each other out. It's a gentle but unflinching episode that makes space for the complexity of being somewhere in between; mourning what was taken from you while also finding your way toward who you actually are.

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Foreign. 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 so 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 neatness 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. Hey everyone. Just me today and it is June and I want to talk about grief.

Now I know how that sounds because many of you will know it's Pride Month and the rainbow flags are out and here I am wanting to sit down and talk to you about loss. But stay with me for a minute because I think that tension is kind of the point that I want to make in this episode.

I think if you found this podcast and if you are queer or you have queer friends, family members or anything like that, then you know what it is like to have your queerness and your faith in in the same body at the same time. And you probably already understand why those two things aren't actually a contradiction. Pride Month is complicated.

For a lot of us, that's just the truth. The visibility, the celebration, the collective joy. That stuff is real and it is hard won and it is beautiful.

There are people who died for for the right to exist the way that we can exist today. And the celebration of that is not nothing. And I am not here to rain on that parade.

But for queer people who have come through religious trauma, Pride Month is also one of those times that the grief surfaces the hardest because joy that's everywhere can make your own absence of that joy louder. The collective celebration can illuminate exactly what you didn't get, what was taken from you, what can't be recovered.

Watching people be celebrated by families who are proud of them. Watching people carry who they are without a wound underneath that can ache in a very specific way.

Not because their joy is wrong, but because yours maybe was delayed or, or diminished or had conditions attached to it that theirs just didn't. And I think we need to make room for both things at the same time. The celebration and the grief.

Not as opposites, not as contradictions, but as a honest texture of what this particular life for a lot of us is. So that's what this episode is. It is a conversation about queer grief.

We it actually is what makes it distinct, why it's so bloody hard to carry and so hard to resolve. And maybe why resolution isn't the goal, and why religious trauma makes it more complex.

I want to say, before we get into it, that this isn't just clinical territory for me. And I know that many of you know that I am a therapist who works with this stuff. Yes, but this is also my life.

I have my own grief in this space, my own losses, my own experience of betrayal and abandonment that I will weave throughout this. I'm not talking about this from the outside. I am in it with you. And that matters to me. And I want you to know that from the get go. So get comfy.

This one is again, not a quick, quick ep, but I don't think it should be. I think it deserves the space to breathe.

So let me start with what I think is the core problem, which is that queer grief from religious backgrounds doesn't really have a container. And containers matter. They're how we know what something is, how we locate it, how we begin to move through it.

We have a reasonable cultural infrastructure around grief.

Now, we might do it pretty poorly, but people broadly understand that grief is messy, it is non linear, that it doesn't move in stages, that it doesn't have a timeline that's better than it was. But even with that understanding, the grief that tends to get held, witnessed and ritualized is still largely the grief that comes with clear losses.

Someone died, a relationship ended, a job was lost. There are losses that get acknowledged. There are rituals.

People bring food, they bring flowers, they sit with you, they say I'm so sorry, and they mean it. Queer grief from religious backgrounds doesn't have any of that. Most of the time, it doesn't even get to exist as grief in any acknowledged way.

It gets called a transition, a chapter, a necessary growing pain.

And the people who would normally hold someone's grief, family, faith, community, the people you grew up with, are frequently the source of it, which means you're grieving alone, often without even being sure you're even allowed to call it grief. So I want to name what gets lost, not as a list, just as an honest accounting. Here you lose community.

That was, more often than not, your entire world.

And I want you to sit with that one for a little bit, because I don't think people outside of this experience really fully understand what that means.

For a lot of people who grew up in high control religious environments, the church or community wasn't just where you went on a Sunday or a Wednesday or Tuesday or every fucking day. It was your social infrastructure, your school, sometimes your friendship network entirely.

The place you marked every milestone, birthdays, graduations, marriages, births, deaths. It was the container for your whole life.

And when you leave, or when your queerness means you're pushed out, you don't just lose a place to worship, you lose the entire fabric of your social world. You lose relationships that couldn't survive your queerness.

Some of those relationships end with drama, with confrontation, with things said that can't be unsaid. But a lot of them just quietly dissolve.

People who don't return texts, who start being unavailable, who are technically in your life, maybe, but have moved to a distance that makes the closeness you had feel like it might have been all in your head or complete fiction, that slow version of its own particular kind of loss, because there's no moment to point to, no conversation to process, just a gradual withdrawal. You lose the family, sometimes that is still physically present, maybe, but changed in a way that can't be undone.

This one is one of the hardest to grieve, because the person is still there. Your mum is still there. She's still your mum. Your dad still comes to some things. Your siblings are still in your life in some form.

But there is a version of those relationships that no longer exists. And you can see its absence every time you walk in the room. The ease that used to be there, the way you used to be fully known, that's often gone.

And then maybe you're sitting at Christmas dinner with the person who used to hold that and trying not to name the loss out loud, because that's just going to make everyone uncomfortable. You might lose the faith that gave your life shape and meaning, even while it was also causing harm.

This one is complicated because people sometimes expect it to be simple. You left the thing that hurt you. So surely the leaving is straightforwardly good. But faith isn't just doctrine.

It is a framework for understanding reality. It's what made things make sense. It's what gave you a place in the universe.

Losing it, even when losing it was necessary and maybe even right, it is still a genuine loss. The grief of it is real.

And it doesn't mean that you made the wrong choice and you lose the version of your future that you had to grieve before you could even build a different one. The wedding that looked a certain way, the family that had a particular shape.

The life that had been half imagined from childhood in a specific image.

Even if the life you build is more beautiful and more true, and it often is, there's still a loss in the relinquishing of the one that was laid out for you. You had to let it go before you could build something real. That letting go is grief, even if the other side of it is better.

I want to give a name to the quality that a lot of these losses share, because I think it helps. It's called ambiguous loss. The kind of loss that doesn't resolve cleanly because the thing lost is still partially present.

The family that's still there but isn't fully there. The community you can see from the outside but can't re enter. The faith that you don't believe in anymore but still feel in your body sometimes.

The God that you might reach for in a quiet moment without even meaning to. Ambiguous loss is particularly hard to carry because grief usually moves, it shifts, it softens, it integrates.

But ambiguous loss keeps snagging because you can't mark it complete. The thing is still there, the people are still there. It is just not available to you in the way that it was. I have my own version of this.

The community I existed in from 12 years old, the one that was my entire world for a long time. I can still see it. I drive past it every time I drive in and out of my hometown. It still exists. People I loved are still inside that building.

And there are moments when the grief of that isn't about what was wrong with it. It's about the particular warmth of belonging that I haven't been able to fully replicate elsewhere. That is not a simple thing to hold.

It would be easier if it was just all bad. But it wasn't just bad. It was also home. And that's what ambiguous loss is missing. Something that also hurt you.

Grieving a Place that wasn't safe for all of you. I also want to name something about the grief of God separately from the grief of faith, community and the theology.

Because I often think that they're collapsed together, when actually I think they're quite different experiences. The community can be grieved with some clarity eventually, even if it's still ambiguous, even if it is still complicated.

There is something that you can point to. The people, the place, the rituals. You can name what's missing. But the grief of God is different.

Because for a lot of people who grew up in high control religion, the relationship with God wasn't just theological, it was intimate. It was the place where you went when you were afraid or lonely or trying to make sense of something.

It was what you reached for at 2am it was in some ways the most constant relationship in your life.

And when that relationship fractures, when the God that you believed in turns out to be too small to hold all of you, or when the theology becomes impossible to hold and everything it supported comes down with it, what do you do with that grief? There is no funeral for a God. There are no rituals for losing a faith.

There are no people who acknowledge that loss the way they'd acknowledge a human death. Most of the people in your life will either tell you that you're better off, or that you should go back, or that it was never real to begin with.

None of those responses hold the actual grief. And then there are the unexpected moments when you reach for something that isn't there anymore. The habit of prayer that doesn't have anywhere to go.

The reflex towards gratitude that doesn't know its object. The 2:00am moment when you want something that used to be available and you reach and there's just silence.

That silence can be peace eventually, but first it's often lost and it deserves to be grieved as one. That's the first thing I want you to hear from this episode. What you're carrying is real grief. It has a name.

You're not dramatic or unable to move on. You're grieving losses that are genuine and complex and that most of the world around you has never had to think about.

Queer people from religious backgrounds didn't just lose community and faith though. They lost time. Developmental time specifically. And I think this is one of the most under named griefs in this whole landscape.

So let me try to say what I mean by that. There are experiences that typically happen in adolescence.

Figuring out attraction, navigating desire, learning how to be in a body that wants things. The fumbling early intimacy of working out who you are in relation to other people, romantically and physically.

For straight young people in relatively healthy environments, this stuff happens. It just happens. It might happen imperfectly and awkwardly, but it happens. It's part of the developmental furniture.

By the time you're an adult, you've had some version of that foundation underneath you.

For queer young people who have come from high control religious environments, none of it happened, or it happened in fragments, in secret, in shame, or in ways that you couldn't be integrated or built upon.

The desire was there, the feelings were there, but the entire environment was structured to ensure that none of it could be acknowledged, explored, or held with any tenderness. You might have spent those years suppressing the thing, praying against it, trying to become someone who didn't feel what you felt.

And the developmental work that should have happened during that time, the practice, the learning, the gradual building of a self that knows how to be in relationship didn't. And then you come out maybe in your mid-20s or maybe much, much later.

Maybe it happens all at once, or maybe it is a long, gradual process and you find yourself navigating what feels like adolescent emotional experiences.

The intensity of early attraction, the not knowing how to be, the complete overwhelm of a new relationship while being in a fully formed adult body in every other dimension of your life.

Also, you might have a career and a mortgage and a decade of adult competence behind you, and yet still be completely disoriented by intimacy in ways you can't always explain. I want to be really careful about how I say this because I don't want it to land as pathologizing in any way.

This disorientation that you might have felt or feel is not a flaw. It is completely logical consequences of what happened. If the foundation wasn't built, the building doesn't stand on it.

And no amount of wanting to be okay, no amount of self awareness or automatically installs what should have been there and wasn't. It affects relationships in specific ways.

There can be a rawness, an intensity, a kind of emotional escalation that arrives early and can be confusing for everyone involved, including you. Partners who didn't have this history sometimes don't understand where this intensity comes from. And I'm not saying intensity is bad either.

We just need to be aware as to where it's coming from and be curious about what it's telling us. It's hard to explain without telling a story that feels too big, too heavy, or too much for an early relationship to hold.

It can make queer Spaces feel unexpectedly alienating, which is its own painful irony. You finally get to these spaces and you find that there is a shared cultural history you weren't a part of.

The references, the milestones, the coming of age experiences that form the connective tissue of community.

You missed those everyone else seems to have a before, a teenage love story, a first drag show, a queer coming of age that happened when it was supposed to. And you have a gap where that should be. And walking into a room full of people who had the thing you didn't can feel lonelier than staying home.

The grief here is particular because there's nothing to point back to with most losses. There's a before something existed and then it didn't. But this is an absence where something should have been.

You can't grieve a specific thing because there's no specific thing to name. It's more like the shape of a space that was never filled.

And that's harder in some ways because there's nothing concrete to mourn, just the knowledge that something was supposed to happen and it didn't. For me, this showed up in ways I didn't have language for, for a really long time.

Coming to things late, not just firsts, but the whole emotional grammar of certain experiences and not understanding why they felt so disproportionately large. Realising that the size of a feeling wasn't because something was wrong with me.

It was because I was doing at 30 what other people did at 16, with none of the scaffolding that comes from having practiced it during your younger years. And all of the self consciousness of an adult, who knows, they should already know how this works.

And so if any of this is landing for you, I want to say very, very clearly, you didn't miss anything because you weren't paying attention. You didn't miss it because you were weak or broken or too deep in something that should have been obvious.

You missed it because you were in an environment specifically designed to ensure that you would. That is not a character failing, that's a theft, and it deserves to be named as one.

The grief of lost developmental time is real and it doesn't have an easy resolution. You can go back and have the experiences you didn't have. You can have new ones, and those new ones matter enormously.

But they don't replace the ones that were prevented.

They exist alongside the absence, not instead of it holding both the genuine joy of what you do get to have now and the genuine grief of what was taken. That is part of this work. I want to say something about identity here too.

One of the things that gets lost in this developmental window isn't just relationship experience. It is the slow, very ordinary process of building a queer identity in in community with other queer people.

The cultural inheritance, knowing your history, the films, the music, the particular language and reference points, and in jokes that form that same connective tissue of queer community life. If you grew up with that, even imperfectly, even in a limited way, you have something to stand on.

When you enter queer spaces as an adult, there is a foundation, there is a sense of, I've been a part of this. This is mine too.

If you grew up in a system that actively kept you from it, that framed queer culture as dangerous, worldly, corrupting, or evil, you enter those spaces without that foundation. And then you have to build it as an adult, which is a different kind of work. You're not just discovering things you hadn't come across.

You're building something that should have been installed in you earlier, that is tiring in a very specific way. And it can make you feel like an outsider in spaces designed to be your home, which is a painful irony that not enough people talk about honestly.

Queer community, for all its beauty, can also have its own unspoken assumptions, especially about shared experience.

And if your experience was radically different, if your path to yourself was longer, more costly even, you can find yourself nodding along to things you don't quite relate to, or feeling like your story doesn't fit the shape of stories that get told. That is not a reflection of your worth in those spaces, but it can feel like one.

And naming it as a form of developmental grief rather than as a personal failing can make a real difference. There is a concept in trauma work called betrayal trauma, and the short version is this.

When the source of your harm is also the source of your safety, the wound operates differently than harm from a stranger or a distant institution, because it doesn't just hurt you, it ruptures the attachment.

And the nervous system, which is designed to orient towards safety and away from threat, becomes profoundly confused by a situation in which the thing that's hurting you is also the thing it learned to feel safe with. This is why the church's rejection of queer people is so devastating in a way that goes beyond theology, beyond even community loss.

Because for a lot of us, the church wasn't just an institution we belonged to. It was the primary attachment system. It might have been your family.

It was the context in which love and safety and belonging were first understood and experienced. It was where we were held when we were small and where we learned what it meant to be held.

And when a system like that rejects you, not incidentally, not as a byproduct of something else, but centrally, theology, theologically, and as a matter of doctrine, it doesn't land like being let down by an organization. It lands in the attachment system. It hits the same places that early relational wounds hit, because that's what it is.

I want to talk about my own experience here for a moment, because I think it's relevant and because I don't want to make this abstract when it isn't.

I grew up without a father for the first nine years of my life, the formative years, and when he did end up in my world, quickly and abruptly, it was anything but good. It was full of emotional and verbal abuse and a very clear message that I was not enough and that I would never measure up to his other children.

By the time I reached what became my home church at age 12, the church understood that absence that I felt all too well.

There were people in leadership who knew how to speak to it, who knew how to make the church feel like my family in a way that filled something in me that was genuinely empty. Father God was not a metaphor I held loosely. He was the closest thing I had to the thing that I didn't have.

And the community, the sense of being known, being claimed, being loved by something larger than myself, that was real. Whatever ended up being harmful about it, that part was real.

What I understand now, and what took me a very long time to see clearly, is that the absence was also used, not maliciously, by every person involved, but structurally, as a mechanism of attachment. The gap was the entry point. And the more tightly I attached to the community, to the theology, to the God who framed.

Who was framed as my real father, the more I had to lose when the conditions became clear, because the conditions became clear. They always do.

When your queerness surfaces, when the part of you that the theology has no room for starts to become undeniable, the thing that gets activated isn't just fear or shame, though those are there too. It's the specific terror of losing the attachment.

Not losing a belief system, like losing what felt like home, losing the closest thing you had to a father, losing belonging in the primary place you'd ever felt it. That is not just a theological crisis, it's an attachment crisis, and the body responds accordingly.

And I want to name the specific forms that betrayal takes in this context, because I think it matters to name them separately rather than collapsing them into one big thing. There is the betrayal of leadership.

The pastor, the elder, the mentor, the one who may be like me, positioned themselves not just as a spiritual leader, but a familial one who knew something was happening in you and responded with prayer for change rather than presence with you.

As you were the person in a position of spiritual authority who had the opportunity to say, I see you and you are not broken and you belong here, and instead reached for the theology that is a specific betrayal. It has a specific texture, and it lives in you in a specific place. There is the betrayal of parents who choose the theology over the relationship.

Now, I want to make it clear that this is not my experience, and I am beyond privileged and grateful for that. And I, because of that, I want to be really gentle, because I know that for many of you this is the rawest one.

I want to be honest, because when a parent cannot fully receive their queer child, when there is a condition on the love, even a soft one, even one that the parent doesn't experience as a condition, that is a rupture in the primary attachment bond, it doesn't matter that they love you. It doesn't matter that they're doing their best within the only framework they have. The impact is the impact. The wound is the wound.

And the specific grief of a conditional parent is one of the loneliest things I know. There's the betrayal of friends who disappeared. Now, this is still the heaviest and the most painful thing for me.

So if you feel that, know that I see you in that they maybe didn't disappear with cruelty, or maybe they did, but often just with distance.

The ones who stopped having time, whose messages got shorter or colder, who are still technically in your life maybe, but have moved to a place where the closeness you had is no longer available. That particular loss is slow and quiet and has no clean ending.

And then there is the betrayal of the institution itself, the community that told you it loved you unconditionally and then demonstrated the conditions very clearly. The theology that said God is love and then drew a sharp line around what God's love required you to be.

The promise of unconditional belonging that turned out to be conditional in the most fundamental way possible, conditional on you being a version of yourself that you are not. That gap between. Between what was promised and what was delivered is its own kind of wound, because the promise was real to you.

You didn't imagine it. You weren't naive for believing it. You were told something repeatedly and with great warmth, and then you found out that it had an asterisk.

There's something else that I want to name here, which is the specific complexity of the abandonment from people who don't experience themselves as having abandoned you. These are the parents who would say, we haven't abandoned you. We love you. We just disagree with your choices.

They're the friends who would say, I haven't gone anywhere. I'm just not sure what to do. The leaders who would say, you know, we are still praying for you. We haven't given up on you. They're not lying exactly.

They might love you in whatever way they're capable of. They don't experience themselves as having caused a rupture. But you feel the rupture and the loneliness of that.

Of knowing that someone who says they love you is simultaneously causing you harm and cannot see it, and of being unable to make them see it because their framework prevents it. That is a very particular kind of aloneness. You're not just grieving the loss of the relationship.

You're grieving the loss of being understood by the person causing the wound, which is a grief that has nowhere to go because the person it belongs to can't receive it. That's betrayal, trauma. That's what it does. And it deserves to be named properly and not softened into its complicated. Or they meant well.

Both things can be true. They can have meant well and they caused harm. The harm is still harm.

There is a specific grief, of course, for the God figure in relation to betrayal. Because for a lot of us, the wound isn't just about the people. It's about the God who the people were supposedly representing.

When you were told from childhood that God loves you unconditionally, that you are known and held, and that nothing can separate you from that love. And then the condition emerges. Something happens to the God figure in your internal landscape.

Because the people who delivered the message of conditional love weren't speaking for themselves, they were speaking for God. That was their claim.

And if the love they delivered was conditional, if the belonging they offered came with terms, then either they were wrong about God, which requires you to reconstruct your entire theological framework, or they were right. And God is a conditional being who requires you to be someone you cannot be. Neither of those is a small reckoning.

And the grief of the God, the God who is supposed to be unconditional and turned out to be more complicated than that, or who turned out to not be there at all, or who maybe you're still unsure about. That's one of the loneliest griefs of all, because it's not something most People around you can witness.

They're either inside the faith and want you to come back, or outside it and can't understand why losing it would hurt. The middle space where you're not sure where you're grieving, something you can't even name clearly or cleanly is a very unsupported place to stand.

I want to talk for a moment about the chronic dimension of this, because for a lot of people this isn't just a historical grief. It's ongoing, it keeps getting reopened.

There are people listening to this who are out, who have built a life, who have community and maybe a partner and maybe years of therapy and genuine joy in who they are and who still, in certain moments, feel the grief as fresh as if no time had passed. I am one of those people.

And there will be people who go to a family dinner where you bring your partner and you watch your mum be warm but careful in a way that tells you she's still working on it. The holiday where your dad is kind but never once looks at the person you love the way he'd look at a spouse if that spouse were the opposite sex.

The sibling who is great with you privately but doesn't quite back you up when your aunt says something randomly. These are small moments and each one individually manageable, but they accumulate.

They tell you a story, and that story is you are loved and you are not quite fully seen. And those two things are happening simultaneously and nobody is naming it.

There are people whose parents still pray for their restoration, who send gentle articles, who talk about it with their pastor, who genuinely believe they are loving you faithfully while also believing you are living in error.

And every time that surfaces, every time you see the prayer request, every time a well meaning aunt brings it up, every time Christmas takes on that particular quality of everyone managing something that nobody will say out loud, the wound reopens, not dramatically, just quietly, in the similar way that a bruise aches when you touch it or press on it. The milestones are their own particular grief. The wedding.

I want to talk about the wedding for a moment because I think it carries so much for those who choose to have one. For a lot of queer people from religious backgrounds, the wedding, if it happens, is a site of such complicated feeling.

I think of my own wedding and whilst I view it with so much joy, I also have an ever present ache attached to it. There are people who should have been there who weren't, and not because they couldn't, but because they wouldn't.

And that pain doesn't just magically go away just because you get to look at beautiful images and videos and you get to marry the person you love. Weddings are supposed to be the place where your family of origin and your chosen life come together and celebrate.

And for so many of us, that convergence is partial at best. Family who came but had to be carefully managed.

Family who didn't come, family who came and whose presence was edged with something that you could feel even while they were smiling. The day you wanted to be purely joyful instead has a layer of navigating other people's discomfort with your joy. That's a grief.

Even if the day was beautiful, even if the marriage is the best thing in your life, the grief is still there, sitting underneath the beauty. And it deserves to be acknowledged rather than asked to be quiet because the rest of the day was good.

I think about this in terms of my life with Chrissie. The life we've built together is genuinely one of those things that I'm most grateful for. And.

And yet there are still moments when I feel the absence of the version of this life that I was supposed to get. The version where being fully celebrated by everyone that I wanted in my world isn't a complicated thing.

There's no undercurrent to navigate where I don't ever have to calculate who in the room is managing feelings about my relationship and who is just happy for me. Those moments don't diminish what I have, they exist alongside it. And I think for a long time I felt like I should have to be over them by now.

Like being genuinely happy should mean the grief has resolved somehow. It doesn't work like that.

And I want to say that clearly, because I think a lot of us carry this quiet shame about grieving something still when we also have a lot to be grateful for. As if gratitude should somehow cancel out the grief, because it doesn't. They can live in different rooms.

You can be genuinely, deeply grateful for your life and still feel the loss of the version of it that was supposed to be easier. Both things are true at the same time and neither one undermines the other.

I also want to name the exhaustion of carrying that and carrying chronic grief while also trying to be present in your own life.

Because it genuinely is exhausting and tiring and not in a way that's always visible from the outside, not always in a way that you can even articulate when someone asks you how you're going, but just the management of it.

The constant low level work of navigating spaces where you are partially seen of Showing up to family events, knowing what the temperature will be of watching pride content and feeling joy and grief simultaneously, and not always having somewhere to put that either. That in itself takes energy.

The expectation from people outside this experience that you should be over it by now, or that you have enough good things in your life that the grief should have faded is its own exhausting thing to carry. There is something that I want to say about Chosen Family here, because I think it gets held up as the resolution.

You lost your family of origin or your church family, but you found your people. And that is real. Chosen Family is real. And it is one of the most genuinely beautiful things about queer spaces and queer community.

The people who see you without the conditions, the relationships where you get to be completely yourself without managing anyone's discomfort. But Chosen Family is built on the foundation of a loss.

You needed to find your people because your people were not the ones you were given or that you had originally chosen. And that original loss doesn't disappear because you found something better. The love of Chosen Family and the grief of the family you lost coexist.

And sometimes at the moments that matter most, a birthday, a health scare, a celebration, you feel both at the same time, the fullness of who is there and the absence of who isn't. And that's allowed. That's not ingratitude. That's just the honest texture of this life.

And about Pride Month specifically, because in the context of this chronic grief, I think there is a particular timing of this that matters. There is something about June that concentrates it.

The social media posts from people whose parents come to the march with them, the photos of families holding flags together, the stories of people being celebrated by the people who made them. Those images are genuinely beautiful and I am genuinely glad that they exist.

But for a lot of us, they also hold up a mirror to what we didn't get and what we don't have.

And the volume of them concentrated into a single month can make the grief louder in a way that feels inconvenient, like you're supposed to be celebrating and instead you're sitting with a feeling that you can't quite put down. That is not bitterness, that is not you being anti celebratory. That's just what happens when visibility makes absence visible too.

The brightness of the thing you didn't get is easier to see when someone else is holding it up in the light. And the expectation to celebrate, to show up joyfully, to perform Pride in the conventional sense, can sit really uncomfortably on top of that grief.

Not because joy isn't real, or that it's not available, but because joy and grief together don't. But because joy and grief together require more of you than joy alone.

And a month where the cultural expectations is uncomplicated celebration, the complexity of what a lot of us actually feel can become its own kind of lonely. Now, you didn't think I was going to talk about grief and not talk about anger, did you? Because there is a lot of anger inside this grief.

And I mean that specifically and honestly without apology. I am angry about some of this. And if you're carrying this, I'd be surprised if you weren't. Also, there's the anger at the years.

The years spent suppressing something that was true and good and yours. The years of prayer against your own desire.

The years of trying to be someone the community could hold while the actual you waited in a room that no one else was allowed to enter. Those years cannot be returned. They happened. And being angry about them is not bitterness, it's accuracy. Something was taken from you.

You're allowed to be angry that it was taken. There's the anger at the deliberate suppression. Because in most high control religious environments it wasn't passive.

It wasn't that the queerness was simply not affirmed. It was actively named a sin as disorder, as something requiring correction.

The environment was designed theologically and practically to ensure that you could not be who you were without consequence. That design was not accidental. People made decisions, books were written, sermons were preached.

And the cumulative weight of all of it landed on you and on millions of other people and told that and told you that you were fundamentally wrong in the most intimate possible way that deserves anger. There is anger at the specific people who knew and said nothing useful.

The leader who saw what was happening and reached for theology instead of presence. The parent who sensed it and looked away, the friend who suspected and never created space for it to be said.

I'm not interested in ranking these or deciding who deserves the most anger, I but I am interested in naming that each of them is a specific experience and each of them carries its own weight. And then there is the anger at yourself.

And I want to be careful with this one because I think it can turn into self punishment if you are not paying attention. The anger at yourself for believing it for as long as you did, for the compliance for the systems that you enforced on yourself or even on others.

I think that one needs to be named rather than skipped over. Not because you were wrong to be inside the system or because you could have left sooner than you did, because you almost certainly couldn't have.

And the reasons for that are structural and worth examining. But because the anger is there, and pretending it isn't tends to mean it goes underground and comes out sideways.

And I want to say one thing here really clearly. Religious frameworks have a specific move they make on this anger. They reframe it as bitterness.

They invoke the theology of forgiveness as a reason to put the anger down before you've actually had room to feel it.

They suggest that being angry still is evidence that you haven't truly healed, that you're holding on to something you should have released by now, that your unresolved anger is the thing standing between you and wholeness. That move is one of the most harmful things religious frameworks do to people recovering from religious harm.

And I want to say clearly that it is a continuation of the original harm, because it's doing the same thing the original system did. It's still telling you that your response to what was done to you is the problem rather than the thing that was done to you.

It's asking you to manage your own experience in a way that keeps everyone else comfortable. It's putting the responsibility for the wound on you rather than on the people who actually did the wounding. Anger is not the opposite of grief.

It's part of it. It's one of the most important parts of it, actually.

It's the part that says what happened was wrong, not sad, not unfortunate, not a misunderstanding wrong. And your nervous system, which has been storing the knowledge of that wrongness for however many years it has been, is not broken for feeling it.

That's it's functioning, it's telling you the truth. Anger is also not the same as unforgiveness, which is another conflation the theology makes.

Forgiveness, to whatever extent that's a concept that you want to work with and. And you don't have to, is something that happens in you over time, in whatever way your process takes you.

It is not a prerequisite for being allowed to feel what you feel. You can be in the middle of genuine anger and still be on the path towards that. Some kind of peace. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

The insistence that they are is a control mechanism dressed in the language of healing. I'm still angry about some of this, not all of it, not equally, not in the same way I was years ago. But the anger is still there in places.

And I've stopped treating that as evidence that I haven't done enough work. I've started treating it as accurate information about what was done.

And there is a kind of clarity in that that I didn't have when I was trying to manage my way out of it. You don't have to perform your way into being over it. You don't have to arrive at a place of peace on anyone else's timeline.

And you absolutely do not owe equanimity to people who cause the harm.

When you have spent years suppressing something, not just intellectually, but physically in the body, the anger doesn't just live in your thoughts, it gets stored. It is in the tension that shows up in certain spaces. The way your nervous system still does a threat assessment when you walk past a church.

The way certain songs, certain phrases, certain tones of a voice can activate something in you, in your conscious mind that has already processed, but your body hasn't. The way intimacy can sometimes brush up against something that has nothing to do with the person in front of you.

And everything to do with what you were told your desire meant that somatic anger is real. It's not irrational. It's not.

It's the body doing its job, holding a record of what happened in a way that keeps you alert to environments that resembled the harmful one. And part of the work is not getting rid of it.

You can't just decide to not have a nervous system response, but it's learning to be with it, to recognize it for what it is, to give it some room without letting it run everything. The anger in all its forms is part of your story. It's not a detour from recovery for a lot of people, it's the way into it.

The anger is often what finally gives you permission to say what happened was wrong. And that's not a small thing. For a lot of us, for a very long time, we couldn't say that. We had frameworks that prevented us from saying it.

And the anger, even the messy, inconvenient, doesn't come out clean. Anger is what breaks through those frameworks. It's the part of you that refused to accept the story the system told you about what you deserved.

So let it be there. You don't have to act on it in ways that cause harm, but you don't have to tidy it up before it's ready. It gets to be a part of this, too.

I told you I wasn't going to wrap this episode up neatly, and I meant it. So let me try to say something honest about where grief actually goes when you let it be what it is. This is not closure.

I think closure is Largely a myth for this kind of loss. There's no moment where you finish grieving the community, check the box and move on.

There's no arrival point where the developmental losses stop mattering. There's no conversation that resolves the betrayal into something clean and complete.

The losses are too complex, too ongoing, too woven into who you are for there to be a tidy ending. What there is, I think, is integration, which is different and in some ways more interesting.

Integration is when the losses become part of the fabric of who you are, rather than a wound you are constantly managing. When you can hold what happened with some steadiness, not without feeling and not without pain, but without being destabilised by it every time.

When the anger is still there, but it's yours, rather than it's running you. When the grief is still there, but it has a place in you rather than everything else having to work around it.

That doesn't happen through thinking your way out of it.

And I want to say something about that because I think a lot of people who are smart and self aware and have done so much of the real intellectual work on their deconstruction can hit a wall here.

You can understand everything about the system, name every mechanism, have a comprehensive analysis of what was done and why it was done, and still carry it in your body in a way that the understanding doesn't touch. Because your body is where grief lives, not in the head, and it needs to be met where it lives.

What actually helps, and I'm not going to make this a list, just some honest observations is being witnessed, having language for what happened, which is part of what I hope this episode does for some people.

Community that doesn't rush you towards resolution, that can sit with you in the messy middle of it without needing you to be further along than you are. The somatic work that meets the body, where the grief actually is, that works with the nervous system rather than just the narrative.

Time, but not time alone time with the right conditions, with the right support, moving in the right direction. And for what it's worth, the therapeutic relationship itself can be a part of this.

Not because a therapist has the answers that you don't, but because being genuinely seen by someone who has the capacity to hold what you're carrying without flinching, without rushing you, without needing you to arrive anywhere particular, that is healing in itself. It is a corrective experience for an attachment system that learned it was only safe to be partially known.

I want to come back to Pride month specifically because I started there and I think it's where it needs to land. I think real pride for people from this background isn't just celebration. I think it is the insistence on existing fully.

Grief and joy and anger and tenderness and everything else. All of it, all at the same time, without asking any part of it to be quiet so the rest can perform better. That's not a diminishment of celebration.

It's a more complete version of it. Because the pride that costs nothing isn't the same as the pride that came through all of this.

You are allowed to celebrate who you are and grieve what it cost, at the same time, in the same body, on the same day. Even that's not a contradiction. That's the full truth of this particular life. I'm not at the end of it. I don't even think there is an end of it.

Not in the way that that phrase means. But something has shifted over the last few years in how I carry it. The losses are still real, the anger is still there.

In places, the ambiguous ones are still ambiguous, but there is a quality to it now that's more like this is a part of me rather than this is happening to me. And that difference between being inside the grief and being someone who has grief, I think that's what integration actually feels like.

Not the absence of pain, but the pain having a home. And there is genuine joy in this life. And I don't want to end without saying that.

Not in a way that cancels the rest of the episode or cancels the grief, but in a way that holds both of those things honestly.

There is joy in finally knowing yourself, in the particular relief of stopping the fight against something true, in the relationships that are chosen freely, without obligation, without a theological framework deciding who you are allowed to love.

In the queer community, flawed and complicated and sometimes alienating as it can be, with all its warmth and humour and the specific way queer people look after each other when the wider world doesn't. In Pride Month itself, when it's at its best messy and loud and unapologetically alive, there is joy in having come through something now.

Not in the toxic positivity sense or in the everything happens for a reason, nothing needed to happen the way that it did, but the real, grounded recognition that you are here, you are yourself, and that took something real. The self you've built out of and through and despite all of this, is genuinely yours in a way that the self handed to you would have never been.

I want to finish with something simple.

If you are carrying this grief, the queer grief, the religious trauma, grief, the developmental grief, the betrayal, the chronic reopening of things that should have closed by now, and you've never quite had language for it or permission to take it seriously, or a space where it was treated as the real and specific and significant thing that it is. I hope this episode gives you some of that. You are not behind. You are not stuck. You're not failing to recover because this still fucking hurts.

You're carrying something genuinely complex in a world that doesn't have any good infrastructure for it, and doing that while also trying to build a life is no small thing.

I want to speak directly to whoever is listening, who is right in the middle of this, who maybe came to this episode because the pride content was making them feel something that they couldn't name. Who is trying to celebrate and grieving at the same time and wondering if something is wrong with them for not being able to just be happy about it?

Nothing is wrong with you. The grief and the joy. Being in the room at the same time is not a malfunction. It's what happens when you've paid a real cost to be who you are.

It's what happens when the celebration is hard won and the fact that it's complicated doesn't make the joy any less real or the grief any less valid. Both are true. Both are yours. You are allowed to hold both without having to resolve the tension between them.

If any of that landed somewhere tender for you, I want to say one more time, you do not have to sit with this alone. That's what I keep coming back to. Being witnessed matters. The right support matters.

And there are people in spaces that exist specifically for this kind of grief that understand the intersection of queerness and religious trauma and the specific complicated loss that live at this intersection. Things can be better and the losses can still be real. Both are true. Both deserve space. Thanks for listening to beyond the Surface.

If this episode resonated, challenged you, or named something you've struggled to put words to, I'm really glad you found your way here. You'll find ways to connect, learn more, and explore further in the show. Notes as always, you are good.

You have always been good and your story matters always.