Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 6 of 6
The most intimate moment of my post-divorce life wasn't a vacation. It wasn't a candlelit dinner or a grand gesture or any of the things we're trained to think of when we think of romance.
It was a weekday morning.
My girlfriend had gotten up before me and was in the bathroom, the ordinary choreography of a regular day. At some point I got up and walked in myself. She stood there, wrapped in two towels, toothbrush in hand, mouth full of white foam, completely unselfconscious, not performing anything, not braced for anything. Just herself. And she caught my eye and smiled. The kind of smile that said: I'm glad you're here. I'm not surprised you're here. You belong here.
I felt something I hadn't felt in twenty years of marriage.
Safe.
Not safe like nothing bad will happen. Safe like: I don't have to be anything other than what I am in this moment. I don't have to perform. I don't have to manage her comfort with my presence. I can just be here, bedhead and bad breath and all, and that is enough. That is, actually, exactly right.
My ex-wife — for reasons I don't fully understand and don't need to anymore — was never comfortable with me seeing her naked. And over time, without either of us naming it, that discomfort became a presence in our marriage. A reminder, always quietly there, that some part of her was not available to me. That there were conditions on closeness I didn't know how to meet. I absorbed that, the way you absorb things in a long marriage, and eventually I stopped noticing I was absorbing it.
What that regular morning showed me — what it showed me in my body before my mind had language for it — was the difference between being tolerated and being welcomed. Between fitting into someone's life and belonging in it.
That's what I'm looking for. That's what this whole series has been circling.
The Permission Question
Five articles into this series, I've talked about grief and performance and emotional illiteracy and the tyranny of choice and all the ways this culture — in its genuine attempt to prepare people for love — left so many of us without the actual tools to find it.
But there's something underneath all of that, something more fundamental, and it's the thing I want to end on.
Permission to be authentic.
Not permission to sin. Not permission to abandon everything you were taught or burn down the frameworks that gave your life shape. Just permission to be honest — with yourself, with the people you're trying to love, with God if that relationship still means something to you — about who you actually are and what you actually need.
That sounds simple. For most of us from this background, it is the hardest thing in the world.
Because we were taught, very early and very thoroughly, that authenticity was conditional. That you brought your real self to worthiness interviews and confession and covenant renewal only after you had cleaned it up enough to present. That the parts of you that didn't fit — the natural man who was an enemy to God with the doubt, the desire, the anger, the grief, the ways you had failed to be who you were supposed to be — were things to be managed and minimized and repented of, not things to be known and accepted and loved anyway.
And so we learned to perform. All of us. The faithful ones and the questioning ones and the ones who left and the ones who stayed. We learned to present the version of ourselves that the situation demanded. We got very good at it. And then we tried to build intimate relationships using that skill set — and wondered why we kept ending up alone in a room full of people who thought they knew us.
Authentic connection requires two authentic people. You cannot get there by performing. You cannot get there by waiting until you're fixed enough or healed enough or certain enough to finally show up as yourself. You have to show up as yourself first. That's the only way in.
This is what Unchaperoned Life is actually about. Not freedom from faith. Not permission to abandon your values. The unchaperoned part is this: you get to be in the room as yourself. No chaperone standing between you and your own experience. No intermediary telling you what you're allowed to want or feel or believe. Just you, honest, present, accountable to your own conscience — and open to the same honesty from someone else.
That's the relationship worth having. And it starts with deciding you're allowed to have it.
What Repentance Actually Is
I want to say something about a principle the church taught me that I believe is genuinely, universally true — not because the church taught it, but because the evidence for it shows up in every healing tradition I've encountered, with different names and different language and the exact same mechanism.
The church calls it repentance. Tony Robbins calls it radical responsibility. Joe Dispenza calls it becoming a new self through elevated emotion and intentional rehearsal. Brené Brown calls it accountability without self-punishment. The therapists call it integration.
They're all describing the same thing.
The principle is this: acknowledging where you've fallen short — honestly, without performance, without minimizing or catastrophizing — is what makes change possible. Not because confession earns forgiveness from an external authority. But because the act of honest acknowledgment breaks the pattern of hiding. And hiding is what keeps us stuck.
What the church got right about repentance is the direction of it: you look at what happened clearly, you take responsibility for your part in it, you decide to do differently, and then you actually do differently. That process works. It works whether you call it repentance or therapy or a Robbins intervention or a Dispenza meditation. The mechanism is real.
What sometimes got distorted was the climate around it — the shame, the worthiness interviews, the sense that falling short made you fundamentally less lovable, less worthy of belonging, less seen by God. That climate turned a healthy process into a reason to hide. And people who are hiding cannot connect. They can perform connection. They cannot have it.
The saddest irony of purity culture is that the very tool designed to help people grow by honest acknowledgment of where they fell short has became something so loaded with shame and consequence that most people learned to use it as little as possible. To hide the parts of themselves that needed it most. To perform sufficiency rather than risk the vulnerability of saying I fell short and I need help. They lost the ability to have positive self-regard. To acknowledge they did the best they could with the knowledge they had.
You don't have to hide anymore. Not from yourself. Not from the people you're trying to love. And not, if this resonates with you, from God.
What I Do Every Morning
I want to tell you something personal, because this series has asked for your honesty and it should offer mine in return.
I pray twice a day. Out loud.
Not the rote prayers of my childhood — recited with the form and cadence of something performed for an audience. These are conversations. Sometimes halting, sometimes embarrassingly simple. I talk about what I'm grateful for, what I'm hoping for, and what I want to be ready to recognize when it shows up. I do them out loud because saying things out loud makes them real in a way that thinking them doesn't.
I believe in this practice not because a church told me to, but because every framework I've found that produces genuine growth in human beings includes some version of it. The names change. The mechanism doesn't. Expressing gratitude rewires how your brain scans the world. Naming what you're looking for — what neuroscientists call activating the reticular activating system — means your brain starts noticing opportunities it was passing over before. Rehearsing elevated emotional states, as Dispenza describes it, primes your nervous system for experiences it hasn't had yet. And acting before the evidence arrives? The church calls that faith. Robbins calls it a committed decision. Dispenza calls it becoming the person your future requires.
Same thing. Different words.
I am looking for a woman I can pray with in the morning. Not because she has to share my exact theology or use my language or believe everything I believe. But because I want a partner who understands that there is something worth showing up to — some practice of honesty and gratitude and intentionality that we bring to our life together — and who wants that too.
I want to wake up on a weekday and see her smile because I'm there. I want to go to bed knowing she knows me — not the performance of me, not the version I assembled for presentation, but the actual person. Uncertain about some things. Clear about others. Still growing. And worth loving anyway.
That's not a fantasy. I know it's not, because I've felt pieces of it. And once you've felt it, you know what you're building toward.
What I Want You to Walk Away With
Here's what I hope this series did — not the articles individually but the whole arc of them together.
I hope it gave language to things you've been carrying without names. The grief that doesn't look like grief. The performance that doesn't feel like a choice anymore because you've been doing it so long. The loneliness that persists even inside a marriage or a ward or a community because none of those structures got close enough to the real you.
I hope it told you, in a way that landed, that the things you want are not too much. That intimacy without transaction is real. That being known without performing is possible. That love does not have to cost you yourself.
I hope it introduced the men in your life — or the man reading this — to an honest accounting of what this culture produced in him, without condemning him for it. He is not the enemy. He is someone who was handed the wrong tools and told they were enough. The invitation for him is the same as for her: put the tools down. Learn new ones. Be willing to not know, and say so.
And I hope — this is the thing I most want to leave you with — I hope it gave you permission to be authentic. In your relationships, in your spiritual life, in your understanding of yourself. To stop hiding the parts of you that don't fit the script. To bring those parts into the room. To find out, maybe for the first time, what it feels like to be accepted as you actually are.
That is what healing looks like. Not the absence of wounds — the willingness to stop hiding them.
The Conversations That Give Me Hope
I want to end here, because it's where I actually live right now.
The conversations I've had with women since I started building this community have changed me. Not because they confirmed what I already believed, but because they showed me something I needed to see: that women from this background are not broken. They are not bitter. They are not closed. They are people who have been carrying enormous weight with very little acknowledgment, who are still — despite all of it — looking for connection with a kind of hope and openness that frankly humbles me.
And the men, when they finally get into a space where honesty is safe — when the performance isn't required and the shame isn't waiting — are the same. Uncertain. A little lost. Still looking.
That's not a tragic picture. That's a hopeful one.
If we can get the men and women from this background into honest conversations with each other — not debates, not defensiveness, not the old scripts running on both sides — something real can happen. We can obtain the healing that therapy offers but can only take so far. We can have the growth that feels impossible in isolation but becomes available in community. We can feel the love that we have been looking for our whole lives but kept from finding – and just out of reach –because we have all still been performing.
We are getting there.
I walk around with gratitude for that. Genuinely. Not performed gratitude — the kind you announce to seem spiritual — but the real thing, which is quieter and more durable and shows up most clearly on an ordinary weekday morning when someone smiles because you're there.
That's what I'm building toward.
I hope you are too.
Unchaperoned Life exists for people who are done performing worthiness — and ready to find out what love actually looks like when it's built on something real.
Thank you for reading this series. If it said something you needed to hear, share it with someone who needs to hear it too.