In this solo episode, Sam turns her attention to something that might be uncomfortable to sit with and that's the way progressive, supposedly safe communities can replicate the very dynamics of control and harm that so many of us fled organised religion to escape. Drawing on her own experiences, Sam examines how the instincts shaped by high-control environments don't just disappear when we land somewhere that looks different on the surface, and how even well-meaning communities can prioritise group harmony and reputation over genuine accountability to the people they've hurt. It's a sharp, honest look at the ways dissent gets managed rather than engaged, and an invitation to listeners to get curious about their own reflexes because the work of not repeating harmful patterns isn't a destination, it's a practice, and it starts with being willing to look at ourselves honestly.

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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, 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. Hey friends, welcome to another episode of beyond the Surface.

It's just me today, but we are going to have a chat about something very, very important and I want to start with a moment, not a specific one. Or maybe it's all of them all at once, honestly. But you're in a space that's supposed to be different. Maybe it's a progressive community group.

Maybe it's a queer social club. Maybe it's an online recovery space or a workplace that talks openly about well being and psychological safety.

Maybe it's run by people who have done the work, so to speak, people who know the language, who have read the books, who have been through their own version of leaving. And something happens. Someone raises a concern, someone names a harm, someone says quietly or loudly, I don't think I feel safe here.

And you watch, or you feel the room shift not towards the person, not toward curiosity, but toward management. And so the concern gets reframed, the tone gets questioned. Someone says, I hear you, but the way that you said that, or something like that.

Someone else talks about how hard the leadership is working, how much they've done, how much they've given, how much damage. This kind of thing can do to this group.

The original harm, the thing that was actually named starts to blur at the edges or disappear completely by the end of that conversation. The person who spoke up is somehow now the problem.

If you've been in a high control religious system, or any high control system, religious or otherwise, I'm pretty certain that you know this feeling. You felt it in your body. The slow closing in of a room, the subtle repositioning of who is the threat here.

And the thing is, in the new space, nobody thinks that they're doing that right? That this is what makes it so tricky. Nobody thinks that they're the church. Nobody thinks that they're rep like replicating harm.

They think they're protecting community. They think they're being careful. They think that they're the good ones. I've been in those rooms.

As a queer person who left a high control religious environment, I spent years walking towards spaces that promised me that they would be different. Spaces that were built specifically for people like me, by people like me, with language and values that I recognized.

And more than once I have felt that same low level hum, that same quiet alarm in my nervous system going, wait, this feels so familiar. I've been here before. Not the same structure, but the same culture. That's what this episode is about.

We can leave the system, but the system doesn't leave us immediately or sometimes ever. Not unless we actively do something about that. And I'm going to say up front in this episode, this one might sit uncomfortably for you.

I'm not going to wrap it up neatly at the end. There is no here are five things to do moment waiting for you.

If you are looking for an episode that affirms that you've done the work and you're one of the good ones, this is not it. This is an episode for people who have already considered themselves. Wait, let me start that again.

This episode is for people who already consider themselves self aware, who have already done real recovery work, and who are willing to ask whether any of that work has created a blind spot. Because I think it does. I think it did for me. And I think that, well, that is worth talking about. So that's what I want to get into.

When most people think about high control groups, cults, fundamentalist churches, high demand religious environments, they think about the obvious stuff. Rigid doctrine, authoritarian leadership, in and out. You either comply or you're out. Rules about dress, behavior, relationships and thought.

All of the control aspects. And yes, all of that is very, very real and it is also very harmful.

But underneath Those structures underneath the specific theology or ideology, there is a culture. And the culture is far harder to see than the rules, especially from the outside. The culture is the water.

It's the assumptions so embedded that nobody has to state them because everybody already knows them. High control culture has a particular flavor. Let me describe it if you don't know it already, and I want you to listen for how familiar this sounds.

Not in the churches that you've left, but maybe in the spaces that you've moved to into since. High control culture centers the group over the individual, always.

The health of the community, the reputation of the community, the unity of the community, these things take precedence over the named experience of any single person within it. And this doesn't always look brutal. Sometimes it looks like, well, hey now, let's not create division.

Sometimes it looks like we need to approach this really carefully. So sometimes it sounds like I just think there's a better way to raise this. High control culture manages dissent rather than hearing it.

There is a huge difference between community that sits with discomfort and a community that contains it.

Containing it looks like pulling the person aside rather than addressing the issue publicly, asking them to reconsider their framing, giving them a process to follow that places so many conditions on their complaint that. That most people just give up before they finish or.

And this one is a little bit more subtle because being so warm and concerned and saying, I hear you, that the person ends up consoling you for how much their honesty cost you. High control culture defers to leadership by default, not because leadership is always right.

Nobody would say that out loud because that sounds far too much like the old place. You know, the pastor who doesn't take accountability and who gets all of the warm concern.

And the survivor is in the room just watching that play out and unfold. And there is that baseline assumption that leadership is trying, is trustworthy, and deserves the benefit of the doubt.

And that assumption is not evenly distributed, though, because it doesn't apply to the person raising the concern. It applies to the person with the power. High control culture has a loyalty structure.

And again, we know this belonging is conditional even when no one would use that word. You belong as long as you're not the one making things difficult.

You belong as long as your honesty is the kind of honesty that doesn't inconvenience anyone with real power. You belong as long as you perform the values rather than actually holding the community to them. Now, none of that requires a doctrinal statement.

None of that requires a charismatic pastor or a specific theology it just requires people who were shaped by these dynamics and who haven't examined the shape they're still in. Because that's the thing about culture, which is that it travels. It travels in us.

It lives in our instincts, our defaults, our reflexes, the way we instinctively side with authority when there is conflict, the way we feel vaguely threatened when someone is openly angry, the way we reach for, hold on, let's keep this respectful. When we actually mean, let's keep this comfortable. For me, we left the system, but we do not automatically leave the culture.

And the spaces we build reflect that because we built them with the tools that we have, with the instincts we inherited, with the patterns that feel like common sense because they're in the water that we were raised in. That doesn't make us bad people, but it does make us responsible people.

Okay, this is the part I think is going to sting a little bit, myself included, by the way, because I'm not standing outside of this conversation looking in. I'm in it also. One of the most seductive things about doing recovery work is that it can give you the feeling of being exempt.

You've read the books, you've been in therapy. You know what Davo is. You can spot a coercive control dynamic at fear 50 miles away.

You use words like somatic and nervous system correctly in a sentence. You've done the work and that work is real. I am not dismissing it. Recovery is hard and it is important.

And the self awareness that comes from genuinely examining your past is not nothing. It matters greatly. I am a therapist. I am not discounting recovery. Recovery matters. But here's the but. Awareness is not immunity.

And I think we need to say that more often in recovery spaces, because there is a version of self awareness that quietly becomes its own kind of certainty. And certainty as we know it intimately from the systems we left is where accountability goes to die. And this is what I mean.

When you've done trauma work and you've developed a story about yourself, a recovery narrative, and that narrative has shape. I was in a harmful system. I recognized the harm. I left. I did the work. I am now someone who knows better.

That is a healthy and necessary story to build. It gives you a foundation. But that story can also function as an armor.

Because if you are someone who knows better, then when someone suggests you're replicating harm, your brain goes, that does not compute. It's like that meme that says, computer says, no, I know what harm looks like. I wouldn't do that. I've been through this I'm not like them.

Sound familiar? Because then this is the part that's particularly painfully familiar if you know that pattern.

The focus shifts not to the concern itself, not to the person who raised it, but to the narrative, to defending the story, to reasserting the identity. Again, sound familiar? Because it should. Because this is what high control systems do when confronted with accountability.

They don't reckon with the concern. They defend the institution. They protect the narrative.

They make the conversation about their intentions, their history, their good work, rather than the actual experience of the person in front of them. And people who have done recovery work are not magically exempt from this.

If anything, the recovery language can make it more sophisticated, because instead of you're being divisive, it becomes, I'm noticing some reactivity here. Instead of you're attacking the church, it becomes, I wonder if this is touching on some unprocessed trauma for you. The message is the same.

Your experience is the problem, not the harm. You're naming. This is what I mean when I say awareness can make you more dangerous, not less.

Because at least when someone is obviously operating from an unreconstructed high control playbook, people can see that when it's wrapped in therapeutic language and progressive values and genuine good intentions, that's much, much harder to name. And the person trying to name it gets accused of being unfair, of not recognizing how much growth has happened, of not being charitable enough.

There's also something worth saying about the particular way that recovery communities can develop their own orthodoxy. And I say this with love because I am a person who works in this space. Recovery and deconstruction spaces can.

Can become their own kind of high control environment. There are right ways to talk about your experience and wrong ways. There are acceptable levels of anger and unacceptable ones.

There are people whose frameworks are centered and people's whole, people whose are not. There are leaders, formal or informal, who are. Whose interpretations of trauma and recovery carry more weight than others.

And if you question the framing, or if you experience.

If your experience doesn't fit the dominant narrative, or if you're asking something inconvenient of someone with standing in the community, well, I'm sure you already know what happens there because you've been there just in different clothes. And if you're in a religious system, likely far more modest clothes. The antidote to this, if there is one, is not more awareness.

It's a specific kind of humility that is genuinely hard to maintain. It is the willingness to hold your recovery narrative loosely enough that it doesn't become a defense against accountability.

It's the ability to be confronted with a concern and stay curious instead of immediately scanning for reasons why it can't be right. It's being more committed to what's true than what makes you a good person in the story you've built. And don't get me wrong, this is fcking hard.

It's hard for me, it's hard for everyone. It's particularly hard for people whose sense of self is deeply tied to having survived harm and become someone who doesn't perpetuate it.

But it's the work and it matters.

And I want to add one more thing here in this bit because I think it explains a lot about why these patterns persist even in communities built around recovery and deconstruction. There's a concept I keep coming back to, and it's the way that certainty functions as a substitute for safety.

In high control systems, certainty was safety.

If you were certain of the doctrine, certain of the leadership, certain of the framework, well, then you were in, you were protected, your place was secure there. And then we leave and we rebuild.

And somewhere in that rebuilding we find new certainties, A new framework for understanding harm, a new language for our experience, a new community that makes sense. And that certainty feels good. It should. It's evidence of recovery.

But it can start doing the same work the old certainty did can become the thing that tells us we're safe, we're on the right side and we figured it out.

And then when that certainty gets challenged, when someone says, actually this community isn't safe as you think it is, the response can look a lot like the one we received when we challenged the certainty of the system we came from defensiveness, dismissal. You must be misreading it. That's not what's happening here. You don't understand the full picture. Again, sound familiar?

Because it certainly does for my experience. I'm not saying certainty is inherently bad. I'm saying it needs to be held loosely, especially when it comes.

Especially when it concerns your own community, your own leadership, your own good intentions.

The moment your certainty about your goodness is doing more work than your curiosity about your impact, you are in familiar territory and it is not the territory you think you left. Okay, I want to talk about who pays the price here, because we can't have that conversation without it.

Because when these patterns play out, it is not evenly distributed. It's not even close. In high control religious systems, the people most harmed are usually the ones with the least institutional protection.

First nations people, people of colour, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, women, children, the ones whose bodies, identities and experiences the system is most invested in controlling, they bear the weight of the harm. And when they name it, they bear the weight of naming it too.

This does not change just because you've left the institution, because the same pattern plays out in progressive spaces. Progressive spaces, in recovery spaces, in friendship groups, in professional environments that use trauma informed language.

The most marginalized person in the room is still the one most likely to name harm, and they are still the one most likely to be managed for doing so.

Also, let's talk about tone policing specifically, because I think it's one of the most insidious patterns that travels from high control culture and into the spaces we've built after. And it travels so cleanly because it's wrapped in the language of care.

And I've talked previously about how spiritual coercion is often wrapped in the language of care. Tone policing is very similar. So tone policing is when the response to a named harm is a critique of how the harm was named.

So the anger was too much, the directness is too much, it's too confrontational, the language is too strong, the timing is off, the person is making others feel attacked, and the result, intended or not, because we'll talk about that later, is the conversation pivots from the actual harm to the presentation of the person describing it. Then the original harm gets buried. And this is not new.

This has been the mechanism for particularly dismissing black women, indigenous women, queer and trans people, disabled people in progressive spaces for as long as progressive spaces have existed. And I'd even argue they're not that progressive. But that's a side note.

I agree with what you're saying, but not how you're saying it, is often code for, I would hear this if it cost me nothing. I would hear this if it didn't inconvenience me or challenge my authority or require me to actually sit with my complicity.

And I want to be clear that I am not being exhaustive here.

There are layers to this conversation that are beyond the scope of one podcast episode, and people far, far more qualified than me to speak specifically to some of these experiences.

But I'm naming it because it's real and because it happens in spaces that consider themselves safe, because a safe space has become one of the most misused phrases in progressive community life and in therapy spaces. Calling something a safe space doesn't make it one. Describing your practice as trauma informed doesn't make it so.

Having good intentions doesn't create safety.

What Creates safety is who gets believed, who gets protected, whose discomfort gets centered when there is conflict and whose expression gets regulated so that other people don't have to feel uncomfortable. In high control religion, I was regularly asked to manage my expression so the system could stay comfortable. Don't ask too many questions.

Don't be too loud about your doubts. Don't let your grief be inconvenient. Don't let your queerness be. Be visible. Make yourself smaller so the group can stay intact.

And then I was forced to leave and I found myself in spaces where the same request was being made of me, just in different language. Can you bring this more gently? This feels just like a difference of beliefs, though this isn't the right forum for that.

I think people are feeling quite triggered by this conversation. We need to think about the impact on the community. The specific request is the same. Make yourself smaller so the group can stay comfortable.

And here is the thing that I want to sit with for a moment because I think it's really important, which is the people most likely to be asked to regulate their expression are not randomly distributed across the community. It's the queer person who's angry about something homophobic being said. It's the first nations person naming a colonial dynamic.

It's the person of color pointing out racialized harm or microaggression. It's the survivor whose anger at being gaslit is being described as escalating.

And the people most likely to do the asking, to invoke the tone, to call for calm, to worry about the community, are usually the people whose own comfort is being disrupted. The people who have enough institutional protection that they've never had to be allowed to be heard. This is not about assuming bad intent.

Most of the people doing this genuinely believe they're protecting this space. They genuinely believe they're de escalating. They genuinely believe that managing the expression of the harm is the same as addressing it.

But it isn't. Managing harm is not the same as addressing harm. Managing someone's expression of their experience is not the same as believing them.

And a community that is more interested in its own comfort than the safety of its most marginalized members is not a safe space. It's a comfortable one for some people. And those are not the same thing. And I want to talk about.

I said I would go back to the intent piece because I want to talk about intent and impact, because I think this is where a lot of people get stuck and genuinely stuck, not in a defensive way, but in a real sort of like, I don't understand why this is still a problem if I didn't mean harm kind of way. And I think that confusion is honest. So in fairness, let me try to be honest back. Intent matters. Of course it does.

There's a meaningful difference between someone who sets out to harm and someone who causes harm without meaning to intent speaks to character, to pattern, to whether someone is safe to continue a relationship with. So it's not irrelevant. But intent does not change impact.

And in high control systems, we were specifically trained to center our intent over impact because it kept us from naming harm. They meant well, they love you, they're doing their best. They didn't realize how that would land for you. They're just doing it for the Lord.

Whatever the language was used, these aren't lies necessarily, but they are. They do function as reasons not to address what actually happened to you. So when someone comes to you and says that thing you did caused harm and.

And your first move is to explain your intent, you are doing a version of the same thing. You might not be doing it maliciously, but you are doing it functionally.

Because what you are saying underneath the explanation is my understanding of what happened is more accurate than your experience of what happened. And that is the core dynamic of every gaslighting conversation you've ever been in. I didn't mean it that way.

Is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. What comes after it matters enormously. And what comes after it.

In high control culture, in any culture that centers the comfort of the person with more power is usually a return to the intent, an expectation that the other person will now accept the intent and drop the impact, and a quiet repositioning of the conversation back to solid ground for the person who caused the harm.

So I'm sure you're sitting there or walking, listening, wherever you are, listening to this, going, well, what would it look like to do it differently? Well, not perfectly. I'm not interested in perfect, and a lot of people aren't interested in perfect. Perfect is a performance.

But what would it look like to be genuinely different?

Well, I imagine it looking something like sitting with a discomfort of having caused harm you didn't intend long enough to actually hear what the harm was. It might look like asking, can you tell me more about what that was like for you?

Instead of immediately constructing a defense, it might look like not making the other person responsible for managing your feelings about having caused them, about having caused harm. Because that's the thing we do, consciously or not, we reveal our distress about being called in.

So clearly that the person who raised the concern ends up reassuring us, and then nobody talks about the actual harm ever again. Sometimes. And there's also something to name here about the difference between being called out and being called in.

And not because I think the distinction always works the way people intend to, but because I think it reveals something anyway.

The preference for calling in, which is framed as a more respectful, more relational, more trauma informed, can become another way of saying, tell me about my harm privately, where I can manage my response, where it won't affect my reputation, where the community won't see it, essentially. And sometimes that is appropriate. Private, relational accountability is real and important.

But when it's the always, when it's always the expectation, when, when people consistently require harm to be named on their terms, in their preferred format, at a volume they're comfortable with, that is not relational accountability, that's control.

With better branding, I think about what it would feel like to genuinely receive a concern, to be on the receiving end of someone telling me I've caused harm and to actually stay there. Not to immediately justify, contextualize, explain, or reassure or reframe it, but to actually sit in it and say, okay, tell me, I'm listening.

Will my heart race? Will I internally go, oh fuck, what have I done? Will there be an internal panic and a desire to defend?

Yes, probably, because I'm human and you're human. And to choose not to defend and to choose to listen instead takes a kind of ego security that is genuinely hard to develop.

And none of us are going to be good at that all of the time.

Especially this is especially the case, if your sense of being a good person, like we said, a safe person, a healed person, whatever that is, is doing a lot of load bearing in your identity. Because if you're a good person and you caused harm, that creates a problem.

And the human brain is very, very good at resolving that problem by questioning the harm rather than questioning the identity. It's not a character flaw, it's not a conversation of good or bad people. It's psychology.

But it's also something that we have to actively work against. Because in high control systems we were trained to trust authority and manage challenge.

If we've become the person with authority, formal or informal, we've inherited that same dynamic. And so, okay, let me say something about repair too, because I think we skip over that a lot.

Repair is not an apology, and I think it gets collapsed into one. Repair is not an apology. An apology is a statement.

Repair is a sustained change in behavior that demonstrates that you actually heard what you were told. And in high control environments we saw a lot of what I would call performance repair. The public acknowledgment. I'm sorry if you felt hurt.

The visible moment of accountability that functions primarily to kind of close the conversation or, or end or restore the person's reputation rather than to actually address the harm itself. But real repair is quiet. Real repair is boring. Like real repair is the changed behavior 612 months later in a moment where no one is watching.

Likely it's the thing that you do differently the next time the same situation arises. It's the thing you do to prevent the same situation arising next time. It's not a grand gesture, it's evidence.

And the hard part is that not everyone is going to give you the chance to demonstrate repentance. Some people have been harmed enough times in enough spaces that looked like this one. They don't. That they don't have the capacity to stay and watch.

That is not them failing accountability culture, that's them surviving it. And their exit is not a verdict on whether repair is possible. It's just information about what this particular person needs to be safe.

Needing someone to stay so that you can prove you've changed is in its own way another form of centering yourself. Repair that genuinely doesn't require an audience. Repair that you do because it's right, not because it will be witnessed.

That's the version worth reaching for. I told you at the start of this episode that I wasn't going to wrap this up neatly. And I genuinely meant that I'm not.

I'm not going to give you a list of things that to implement that will make you exempt from these patterns, because that list simply doesn't exist. But I do want to name some things, not as instructions, but as just honest markers of what doing better actually looks like in practice.

And this is what I've seen from my own experience as a queer person. Experience in like existing in spaces, in the mess of these spaces.

And not the theory of them doing better looks like developing a genuine tolerance for being wrong. Not as a performance of humility, not as like a self flagellation exercise, but as a real internal shift toward I can cause harm I didn't intend.

And that doesn't make me a bad person, but it does require my attention. Both of those things are true at once. That's not a contradiction. That is accountability.

Doing better looks like noticing your first instinct when someone raises a concern, especially if they're more marginalized than you, and asking yourself what that instinct is protecting, is it protecting them? Or is it protecting the narrative, the community, the reputation of someone with more power? Or maybe your own comfort?

Because we all have a default, and our default was shaped by the systems we came from, Noticing it is not the same as being controlled by it. But you can't interrupt a reflex you can't see. Doing better looks like separating this space is healthy for me from this space is safe for everyone.

They are not the same thing.

A space can be deeply nourishing and affirming for you personally, while simultaneously being a space where the most marginalized people are doing constant invisible labor to keep it comfortable for everyone else. If you're not the one doing that labor, you might not see it, and not seeing it is not the same as it not existing.

Doing better looks like being willing to ask of yourself and of your communities, whose voices are centered when things are going well and whose are only heard when they're in crisis. Who gets to speak freely? Who has to calibrate? Who gets the benefit of the doubt as a default? Who has to earn that?

Doing better looks like actively seeking out the work of first nations people, people of color, queer people, and disabled people.

Not wanting, not waiting for someone in your community to hand it to you, and definitely not waiting for the most marginalized person in the room to explain it to you while also managing your feelings about it.

There is so much writing, research, and lived experience that exists specifically on these dynamics, and the bar for accessing it has never been lower.

Read it, listen to it, sit with the discomfort it produces, and understand that the people whose voices and frameworks you're learning from have already done the labor of articulating it.

Your job is to do the work of receiving it, not to outsource that to the person standing in front of you, who is tired, who has already explained it a hundred times, and who should not have to earn your curiosity by performing their pain for you again and doing better honestly fundamentally looks like choosing people over groups to circle back to that first thing not perfectly, but as a genuine default rather than a stated value. Choosing to believe the person in front of you over the story that makes the institution look okay.

Choosing to stay in curiosity when your first instinct is to manage, and choosing to ask what do you need? Rather than how do we contain this? None of this is comfortable, and none of this is a final destination.

It is ongoing work, and it's ongoing specifically because the culture we absorbed was so thorough, so pervasive, and so good at disguising itself as common sense. You didn't just absorb belief when you were in the high control system, you absorbed instincts. And instincts don't get rewritten by leaving.

They get rewritten by practice, by repeated, intentional, uncomfortable choice to do the opposite of what comes easily. That's what the work is. Not the reading, not the vocabulary, not the having done therapy. Though, again, all of those things matter.

The work is the choice you make in the room, in the moment when everything in you wants to default to the old pattern because it's faster and easier and doesn't cost you anything. Choosing to stay, choosing to listen, to believe, to not manage. That's it. That's the work.

So I want to leave you with something which is, again, not a resolution. I told you one of them wasn't coming. If you're still waiting, you're going to be waiting a while.

But I want to leave you with a question for reflection.

Where in your life, your relationships, your communities, your professional spaces, where are you more invested in protecting the group than believing the person? And I'm asking that not as an accusation. I'm asking it because I've had to ask it of myself more than once.

In spaces I loved, in spaces I helped build, in spaces where I thought I was safe and generous and good, and had to reckon with the fact that I had defaulted to the group quietly, without even deciding to. That reckoning is uncomfortable. It should be. It is supposed to be uncomfortable. But uncomfortable is not unsafe. And that is important to remember.

It's also not a verdict, it's an invitation. Because leaving high control culture isn't a single event. It is a practice. It's something we do or don't do.

Every time we're in a room where someone with less power than us is trying to tell the truth, what do we do in that moment? What we do in that moment is who we are.

Not the frameworks we know, not the history we've survived, not the therapy we've done or the books that we have read or the values we post about online or that are on our website. What we do when it's inconvenient, that's who we are. Okay, I think that's it. That's me. That was heavy.

It might have been heavy for some of you, and I honestly, I make no apologies for that. If this landed somewhere uncomfortable for you, that's okay. Sit in it a little bit. Don't reach for the resolution too fast. Sitting in it is okay.

As always, thanks for being here. Thanks for being the kind of person who listens to things that ask something of you rather than just affirm what you already think.

So until then, I'll see you next time. 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.