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What happens when religious trauma collides with mental health crisis—and your old faith doesn’t survive the fall?
In this raw and deeply honest conversation, Kristi Williams shares her journey from high-control Christianity to psych ward hospitalization—and into real mental health recovery.
Together, they unpack religious trauma, psych ward hospitalization, nervous system dysregulation, and the long road of mental health recovery after high-control Christianity.
Raised inside Seventh-day Adventism, Kristi shares how years of fear-based theology, end-times anxiety, perfectionism, and spiritual pressure shaped her nervous system long before she realized it. After postpartum stress, insomnia, pandemic fear, and accumulated trauma pushed her into psychiatric crisis, she found herself in a psych ward—terrified, unraveling, and unexpectedly encountering radical, judgment-free love.
What followed wasn’t a tidy testimony. Her faith collapsed. Theology stopped making sense. Attempts to “CPR” her old belief system failed. But something deeper began to emerge.
We explore:
- Religious trauma and its impact on the nervous system
- Why changing theology alone doesn’t heal trauma
- Body-based trauma healing and daily regulation practices
- Cognitive belief shifts vs. subconscious integration
- Insomnia, fight-or-flight, and nervous system burnout
- Deconstruction after mental health crisis
- Rebuilding faith after psychiatric hospitalization
Kristi explains why trauma isn’t just a belief problem—it’s stored in the body. And why real recovery requires working with the subconscious, grief, and nervous system patterns shaped by high-control religion.
If you’ve experienced church hurt, deconstruction, spiritual abuse, anxiety around hell or the end times, or mental health struggles connected to faith, this conversation offers language, tools, and hope.
This is not theology from a distance.
This is trauma work in the aftermath.
This is grace that meets you at rock bottom.
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Grace doesn’t hold back. She breaks the rules, softens hearts, and loves without apology. The open, universal, unapologetic love of God. Together we’re building a braver, more honest space. Thanks for your support and for listening.
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Episode written, hosted, edited and produced by Jeromy Johnson.
