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Hey fellow G&T'ers, those of us like our spirituality with a twist. Today we have the special pleasure of having on a wonderful guest, Dr. Bahara Saeedi. Um and we will be having a deep conversation especially focused on the fascinating and important concept of religious trauma. And uh really something that's I think just such an important subject in the world right now. So thank you so much for joining us, doctor. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Awesome, it's great. Uh based on our pre-podcast conversation, it's going to be really deep and really interesting. Uh okay, first we have to do of course two staples of the podcast world. The first one will be the long introduction where all kinds of deservedly wonderful things are said about the guest.

[laughter]

And they have to sit there and listen to all of this while I do it. So

with adoration. Yeah, that's true.

[gasps]

Dr. Saeedi is a clinical psychologist, licensed marriage and family therapist, educator, and author of integrative systemic therapy in practice, which has been translated into Italian as well and released this month. Her clinical specialty is in couples and family systems and treatment of trauma as well as systemic clinical supervision. Her recent scholarship is focused on collective trauma and how chronic repression, authoritarian political systems, and large-scale geopolitical forces shape psychological life within families and communities. Uh she also has served as assistant program director and clinical assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University and teaching faculty faculty at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She is a recipient of Northwestern University's Teaching Excellence Award Award and continues her teaching now with a focus on building bridges between marginalized communities and the institutions that shape public understanding. Her recent work is featured in Fair Observer, Rest of the World, Independent UK voices, global voices, and family therapy magazine with further work currently in press for an upcoming edition in open global rights. And she has a substack uh which you can find at uh substack.com at Dr. Sahebi. Um so that's all the bio stuff. Thank you so much again for being on. Thank you so

Second thing we got to do is a staple in the podcast world is to ask you to do all the things which will be to like, subscribe and then especially I would say share an episode. Like share this episode with friends. Cuz on the one hand this is a labor of love for Daniel and I, but also it'd be wonderful to share this uh important work from important thinkers like Dr. Sahebi uh and they can find even more viewers and readers. So uh thank you so much. I plan on sharing this episode with my clinical counseling class. Yes, make it required homework. Make it required homework. Good afternoon TCM students. So I guess we'll jump right in cuz we realize we have a lot to talk about. Yeah. Um I'll just like I guess start the conversation going and we'll kind of flow back and forth. The thing that jumped out to me that we kind of exchanged a little bit of email stuff on is this idea of religious trauma which I think is such a deep concept and that you know like I said earlier when we were talking it's one of those things that you know you've been looking for a phrase to capture something that you have a feeling about and then that phrase appears and you're like ah voila, that's what I've been looking for. So I guess the first thing to do would be maybe to have you talk a little bit and like what that phrase means to you and yeah a little definitional part of this. Uh so I'll I'll throw it to you. Absolutely. Thank you so much. It is a really important topic to talk about and like you said generally when we're talking about it we don't really define it in any which way. Luckily the literature has defined it for us and part of that definition and how I see it is from the literatures, I would define it as less of the by the belief system itself and more by the experience of living within it. You can think about it as it's when a person's relationship to themselves becomes organized around fear, around shame, or even punishment in connection to a system that's supposed to provide meeting and guidance, right? Because that's what religion is supposed to do, provide meeting and guidance. So, instead of feeling grounded or supported in the religion, then they feel watched, constrained, and internally conflicted in a way. People often recognize it, I would say not so much by what they believe themselves, but how they felt, whether they could question things, whether they felt safe in their own thoughts, or whether they were constantly monitoring themselves. So, that's what I would say religious trauma is in general. I'm just sort of curious because, you know, I have like my little psych undergrad like floating around in the background and I teach this stuff for TCM students and it's like a kind of a thing that like this is just a curiosity thing, but like could you see something like that eventually coming like a DSM kind of thing cuz that isn't like a diagnosis per se like it's such a complicated question. So, I thought I was just curious to ask what you think about something like that.

this generally would go in the um realm of complex trauma. DSM, no version of DSM has gone past PTSD so far and that's the unfortunate part. PTSD is very specific based on specific criteria and it hasn't even captured complex chronic uh trauma at all. I feel that after COVID and everything that uh transpired came up after COVID in the world, more and more there may be conversations around topics of complex trauma, which this would be a sub sec of, and hopefully it will get more attention. Luckily in the literature, it's a growing area of conversation in the psychological literature right now. So, that's a good start. Yeah, it feels like really important, right? And that Again, like I imagine we'll get on to these different angles on this, but it's such a touchy subject. It's so complicated, right? And you don't know how like the mental health world will ultimately handle that in some way or another, but I think it's really important. It's also important to mention that the DSM is based on the medical model, right? So, it's psychiatrists going by based on symptom symptoms that they're looking at. And what we as psychologists or other mental health professionals do, specifically systems therapists like myself, are um looking at the person within the context of their universe. Uh so, the person in the constellation that they belong to. And part of that constellation are these external factors such as how religion is going to play a factor in their daily lives, even if they don't abide by the same religion. And we'll get into some of that in more detail later. I was really curious cuz you kind of like led into my next big question. I thought was sort of a preamble at least from my side, Daniel, which was like systems theory, right? So, you sort of like informally kind of described it, but what I find really interesting about you know, that whole I'll let you define it.

Yeah, but before we before we do that, Eric, can we I want to just go over for the audience cuz most of the audience is not going to be psychologically informed. So, the couple things that I wanted to highlight. One, you mentioned DSM earlier. Um do we do either one of you want to highlight what the DSM manual is for those who are unaware? I'll hand that one off for sure. Okay.

So, what the DSM is is um a book. It's diagnostic and statistical manual uh for mental um disorders. Uh and we're currently in uh the fifth TR edition. So, every several years they have some updates to it. It The primary authority of these um diagnoses that are used for mental health conditions in the US is used from the DSM. Mhm. In Europe and other places, they have other ways that they do that diagnosis. It belongs to the psychiatric American Psychiatric Association. But it is because um insurance companies and everybody else is very much tied to the medical model, we use it for those purposes. However, um the person themselves is so much broader than just a series of their symptoms. As uh you're aware from your um broad, you know, holistic work that you do. So, we just we we basically look at it to inform us, I have a common language we can speak with other mental health professionals about the symptomology, but by no means do we use it as this is what the person is and what they're carrying. And then the other part um so, talking about religious trauma and then we had mentioned, you know, systems how it it's it's a PTS it's similar to like PTSD. Um I just wanted to highlight some of the symptoms of religious trauma for people to kind of understand. Again, going into what the you know, hearing terms, getting definitions, but then making it sort of That's going to be a big long thing, right?

Yeah, that that's Yeah, because

to be like an hour conversation. The symptoms are

Well, just some you know, some things so people understand, you know, they have a frame of reference. Sure, sure. So, I'll just break it up as into what is, you know, how does it impact the person and then I'll get into details about it later. Because it it's basically something that ruptures the person's experience of the self, their cognitive and affective, so the way that they're feeling internally, their relationship with those emotions, and as well and the how those emotions play out as well as their thought process, the those constraints, as well as behavioral symptoms. So, it's really a triangle of how it impacts all areas of functioning, hence part of what makes it more complex. And I'll go into the details later of all the things that you would look for in terms of which you wouldn't find in the DSM that you would look for to see, "Ooh, there may be something related to religious trauma going on for this person and their reaction to it." Yeah, and I I asked that because in case there are people who are you know, who watch this who are wondering like, "Hey, is this is this for me or is this somebody who I know?" to try and, you know, highlight some symptoms, right? That that may fit under this purview.

It's going to be a huge list of symptoms. It's going to be really long, yeah.

Let let me mention this. This might help just to get us started on this topic. A lot of people may feel like they grew up religious. Mhm. Some people put that in the category of my parents were really strict when I was growing up and they were really religious. So, that's not necessarily religious trauma. What distinguishes it from a strict upbringing is um the key differences is whether there's a psychological flexibility or constraint here. A strict upbringing can still allow room for questioning, your level of individuality can grow in it. Emotional safety is available for the person. Um religious trauma tends to emerge when the system becomes so rigid and punitive and controlling where there's any deviation carries emotional, relational, or even physical consequences many times. And it's not just structure. It's the uh presence of fear and the um um absence of freedom of any sort that makes this uh something that's hypervigilant in your system and develops as a trauma. Perfect. That's good. Kind of like that idea of like the high-control religion idea, right?

[clears throat]

Yes. Yes, exactly. But like um I mean, I guess we'll get to this in the very end of it, but there's this funny line, you know, between what constitutes like conservative upbringing and then, you know, where's that line? It's one of those like funny questions, right?

Right. Exactly. It seems like that like old-school like Supreme Court pornography definition or something, right? Where you're trying to cut like what's the thing where something crosses over a line, right? I know it when I see it, I guess, but it's not like an easy thing to like do, right?

about the person and how were they raised and what are their reactions that are coming up when they want to do something and they're constrained by it. I think you had mentioned before when we had talked last week about um uh conditioning, right? The way that they're conditioned in uh holding on to a belief system, but any any deviation from that conditioning causes um great deal of discomfort in the person. Um I don't know who I am. I don't believe I'm a bad person. It's a lot of turning toward I am as in somebody who's flawed or something is wrong with them. So, I guess like, you know, you kind of talk about this idea of, you know, the distinction would be between the restrict upbringing would be like its impact on the experience of that person and how it impacts them in terms of things like self-concept and and these kinds of ideas. So, um you know, uh then how do like one of the things that you said that was important was, you know, how do systems of belief shift from providing meaning and structure becoming sources of fear, control, or psychological constraint, right? Would be kind of a natural follow-up of that. Yeah. So, um systems um I guess I should say belief systems, let's start from there. Belief systems begin as a frame like frameworks, right? For meaning-making. Uh that's how they're generally done. And please um after I explain this, if I still haven't answered your question fully, please let me know. So, these frameworks for meaning, they can shift into systems of control. When authority, so it could be parents, it could be school system, it could be community system, it could be, you know, government system, right? Societal level, too. It becomes centralized and and there's a unquestionable feel around it that you cannot question a question anything. There this is the central belief system. And when the moral frameworks are enforced through the fear rather than any kind of reflection, which is something we're all used to doing, right? Like what what does that feel like in your body? What what what are you feeling it? What's coming up for for when uh you think about yourself in those um as a whatever whatever that they're bringing up, their perspective. Those reflections don't exist. There's just a centralized way of being and it's unquestioned. So, at that point, the system is not organizing meaning anymore. It's dictating it. It's organizing behavior and identity through the constraints that they're dictating it from, right? So, um over time then, those con- constraints become internalized in the person, like I was mentioning before. So, the person begins to regulate themselves even in the absence of external enforcements. I can tell you some of the ways that they would do it as examples, if you like. Yes. Well, I think like, okay, yeah, yeah, please do. Mhm. Yeah, so um so, for example, um I'm I'm Iranian-American. So, uh I I'm very much tied to everything that's going on in Iran. As uh you and your audience are aware, there have been uh protests for decades in Iran. We have had the latest ones happening in January where over 40,000 people were killed. And um I don't even I mean, uh tens and thousands were detained. Now, every night, there um every night when we go to sleep, we tend to have this trauma in our body that wakes us up around 3:30, 4:00 in the morning. And And you can check with other Iranians in the diaspora that um there is uh there executions taking place. And these are public executions. And these executions of protesters, they're accused of and I'll quote unquote maharebeh in um I I think that's what they call it in Arabic, but it's called raging war against God. That's what it translates to. As enforced religious constitutional law. So, when And what do they do? They play the um azan, which is uh the morning prayers uh in um for Islam. They play that while they hang the person publicly. So, you can imagine the conditioning that And this is every single night we go through this. We wake up in the morning with their faces. We spend the days posting their names with uh hashtagging their names. We've been doing this for years and years. And it's it's still it doesn't get any easier. So, imagine if this is your conditioning of that you're hearing raging war against God because you protested against the government that you don't approve of because they are doing all kinds of things to their own people that you're just trying to stand up for what you're asking for without any kind of guns or anything. Just peaceful protest. And then you find yourself or somebody that you know or somebody in your country being executed in raging war against God. And then you hear the azan in the morning. These things put give hand in hand together. So, imagine how that would feel when if anything related to the Quran or the peaceful religion of Islam or anything related, how it would feel in the body of somebody like me or somebody who's Iranian who's been going through this. That's one of them. And the other one So, public executions of gay men or religious minorities like a Baha'i people who are part of the Baha'i faith. They are extremely marginalized. They have been all along. Stoning of women accused of adultery, public part of that, honor killing being protected by law. So this is what I mean by it's we're not questioning this. This is just the way it is. And now we've written it into law because God said so. Um I'll give you another one that's really hard to hear. So I'm just giving you a heads up for the listeners that raping girls before execution based on the fabrication of religious laws that state virgins cannot be killed. So if a girl is not married, therefore she's a virgin and you can't kill a virgin. So you have to rape her before you hang her. And these are real things, but getting away from my

to that interview with you and that was like one of the more ones that like it's you know quite shocking obviously, you know.

yeah, very. It's the fact that this is a reality of our real life and not a movie is what's disturbing and it's just so difficult to even try to explain it. Sorry, I cut you off. No, I brought my little prop here. It's Reza Aslan, A Martyr in Persia.

I happened to hear him speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival a couple of years ago and he was like really sharing this with the audience, you know, part of the whole women life women life freedom movement that was going on, right? At the time he felt very optimistic that maybe things were going to change and that was one of the main

Yeah, and then obviously didn't come to pass in that way and now things are just obviously messy and messy in ways beyond, but yeah.

We're still hopeful and we'll still continue to fight because um we have to. We don't have any other choice. It's you know attempts to turn get rid of the Islamic Republic which I'll talk about later, but this is this is what you just said is very important. Reza Aslan actually makes a really good point in his books and in his conversations about because he's a religion religion scholar. He's studied he has a PhD in it so he's able to bring in the essence of religion and what how it stands and then how it also impacts different societies in a really good way. Um so I'll give you another example outside of Islam and my culture which is like the Catholic Church, right? Being a Catholic Church rape survivor who has been shunned by the community for reporting abuse or dismissed by law that's a really big one that I think we're continuing to struggle with and then the person may not have the same relationship with their belief of what God was taught to them what God is supposed to be as protector. So these are examples of how this could manifest within the system within several systems how the um the macro systemic level and also within the systemic framework of how the person sees things because we're meaning making creatures, right? So we all of these things that happened to us we form some sort of meaning right or wrong doesn't matter. So it is very easy for somebody people who have gone through some of the examples that I've mentioned or witnessed it or from cultures or religions of to take a step back and make a meaning that religion is bad. We got to get rid of all of it. I'm just against it all. That was like a kind of a big deal cuz we tried to be a little personal on the podcast and I was raised Catholic. And you know, from my own little town and it was one of those things that was kind of like fluttering around like you sort of I'm going to use Father Tony cuz it was Father Tony in our particular parish where you sort of knew like oh Father Tony, you got to be a little careful with Father Tony and it like it does like it kind of like permeates through the community and it's weird to reflect back on it. I guess kind of psycho-spiritually to think okay, yeah, we were sort of a knowledge of that before that really publicly kind of exploded in the way it did. Yeah. And the same is true for the mullahs in Iran. I'm not going to say outside of Iran, I'm not talking about their religion as a whole, I have no idea. But the mullahs in Iran and the things that they do to younger children, younger girls and boys have been documented and there's no way to be able to hold them accountable because the law protects them. The law is written by the religion that protects them. Maybe like doubling back on it. So I think when we get into like a lot of the the religious trauma, we can almost kind of think about it and you kind of done it a little bit. Maybe we can go a little deeper into like the different groups that are affected and I was very struck by the conversations of how often these things are really directed at women in different ways. So you can see that in Iran and you can see that probably, you know, like in other sort of oppressive religious systems that there's this this thing where it like tends to direct its radar onto women. Do you have specific commentary around that, doctor, that you think is important?

actually. Abs- absolutely. You know, um in in my courses, it surprises me uh when I um see that there some students in the newer generation even who do not um want to say that they're feminists. I think we have forgotten what feminism is and how it's defined because they think it's just women owning everything for some reason and I don't know when that definition changed or shifted in the public view, but feminism is as you know is about equal rights for everyone, right? Not being able to say if a woman if a woman is accused of adultery you know, she wouldn't be stoned to death. If she is, then so will a man who's had adultery. Uh but in Iran, they can have up to four wives and many others if that they can do temporary wives, too. That number is limitless. So, they can do whatever they want, but a woman even if she's accused of adultery, not even gone through with it, will actually be stoned. That's a good example of um the imbalance in the system. So, when we're thinking about feminism, we and we see that there are so many discrepancies and we would be fooling ourselves even in the Western world sitting here saying that um no, women here have equal rights. We already know that the pay is not equal. 70 cents per every dollar last time I checked. Um maybe the um audience can, you know, verify that. And if you are

I heard. Yep. Yep. It's 70 cents per for every dollar and uh if you are a black woman, then it's much lower. It's like 64 cents. And it's just there's so many different levels. So, as long as and in this country, what happens to a woman, where are the laws going right now when a woman for abortion, for example, the right to her own body and what happens for a man. So, these things really are emboldened for us to continue to know laws are not written necessarily for equal rights. And equal rights does isn't just for women, it's also for other marginalized communities such as LGBT, such as anybody else who belongs to a minority sector of a society that is persecuted. Even if the the combination of all the minority sectors are greater than the quote-unquote majority, if the majority is or that the you know, the majority of that in this discussion is a religious conservative, then it there's almost like an inherent belief that they are the actual majority, but they're not the majority, you know.

Absolutely right. In particularly in in in this country, we assume that they are, but actually they're not. They're not the majority. And and to your point about feminism, the reaction to feminism and the view that like we we we're I think we're all in agreement that like, oh, women want to run everything or they want to be in charge of everything, that's the response from the power structure that is, you know, has been male-dominated to say instead of acknowledging a discrepancy and saying, oh yeah, it is unbalanced. It says, no, they want everything. Oh, woe is me. I I I had better, you know, fight back tooth and nail in case I have to cede 1 inch of ground on this sort of invisible battlefield. It's It It shows the weakness and the and the actual like the the sensitivity of the people who are fighting so hard over an idea of equality. Like, it's equal, it's not more. Exactly. Equa- Equal is what we're after. And you said it so well, much better than I could. You know, you made me think about also the societal level, not just the level of laws and how those are put into place. At the societal level, even if the laws are there to protect men and women equally, we're we're just going to talk about our own country, right here in America, there is still a I I and I see this in high school age kids that I work with and middle school age kids that I work with that when let's say there is a girl who has a crush on a boy, she tries to dumb down her intelligence so that she can get his attention to for for example, help her with her math homework, but doesn't try to show that she can help him with something as well. Do you know what I'm saying? And it's it's the way like he's not going to feel good if I am if if I can do better than his. This is still true even though we're talking about this generation that, you know, gender is completely a construct and you know, it's fluid and they still have this going on. And then there is the little bit older generation which actually the literature supports this for in our generations and the ones below us which is the higher the education level of the woman goes before she finds somebody, a partner, if she is straight and wants to marry a man, the less likely she will find a partner. That's very sad. My daughter is like

living in New York, Northwestern graduate, you know. Wonderful. And go cats. And you know, it's it's been very interesting watching her trying to figure this out because if there's a reality there, you know, and it's whatever's going to happen in the relationships, you know, these kind of like heterosexual relationships, this hetero cis heterosexual relationships is really complicated going forward. It's not that easy. You can see it playing out in her very

Yes, this is not about men acting a certain way, either. It's also other people, um you know, women also feeding into the same stereotypes. It's this at the societal level where people don't even realize the internalized sexism that they're holding onto, and one of them being women in education. Well, I have to give a plug for the wonderful documentary Idiocracy, which came out in

it. Love it.

2007. Eric, do you ever watch Idiocracy? Oh, yeah, I've seen it. We're living it. I mean, it's so like that if for audience, if you it's a little bit of an older cut now, almost 20 years, which is so crazy to think about. It is it is a it is a I don't know. It's like going to a fortune teller and then being so crazy when they talk to you about it, and then it all coming true, basically.

a fortune teller predicting that you're going to turn into a chicken and fly into the sky, and then holy it happened.

all of a sudden you're a piece of KFC on someone's plate. You're like, "What? How did this happen?" That seems so implausible, and yet The first 10 minutes of that movie is everything. That's literally if anybody watches that first 10 minutes, they'll see that we're living it right now. Yeah.

In many ways. the patriarchal aspect of this is I think there was this notion that if women were given the opportunity to succeed they wouldn't somehow. And like what I see in the statistics, you can correct me if I'm wrong, doctor, but like once women were given the freedom to like actually start to go out and pursue their own paths, well, they're going to excel. Is that shocking? No. But I think people were shocked.

Oh my god, all these women are doing so well, you know, and this whole notion of like male superiority in so many areas, which just got exploded in the way that probably people who held those kinds of like misogynistic or sexist attitudes wouldn't have anticipated. You know, and number of years ago they looked at Iranian universities in Iran and they saw that majority of the graduate graduating people from universities in Iran are women. So then they started saying we have to cap how many women get in despite the fact that they're going to score higher to get in and they work as hard. They're we can't have all women doing it. I don't know how much you're paying attention to what's happening in our country right entrances in the universities now in um balancing capping the number of women. Yeah, yeah, it it it is a very disturbing the direction that we're seeing this play out. And part of that is the use of religion that we're talking about right now. The use of religion in order to control and this is how religious trauma will build up. So in in our country here um Christianity is actually in danger and if I was a Christian, I would be uh very outspoken about this is not my religion. Don't do this in the name of my religion just like people who are Muslim are doing that in Iran. Yeah, I think over the past year and a half we've been having a lot of conversations about this tension within Christianity in the United States. You know, Daniel's right in the sense that it's not the majority of Christians who think this way. It's probably in the stats that I've looked at, maybe it's a third, maybe it's less, you know, where we're really you know, Christian nationalist, these ultra ultra-conservative people and it's a very funny situation then because you have like a debate over like what Christianity really means, which is like obviously like a huge subject matter, but imagine the same is happening with an Islam. There's going to be debate of like what this religion fully means. Then people start tearing at the threads of it each kind of trying to pull the thing in their own direction. It's Yeah, it's obviously it's very toxic on some level, right? But one last one one other piece to this where I don't want to beat a dead horse, but we're talking about like societal controls of education and women in education in particular, this administration has removed a lot of the ability for people to get student loans from the government from very particular fields that generally have a higher incidence of women like nursing, like acupuncture, teaching. You know, you Social work. Social work. Work. Yeah.

All of these professions are generally 60% or more women women driven. And it has been I think a concerted effort to try and reduce the ease to which women can educate themselves. And you know, there is obviously a an epidemic of you know, male confusion or feelings of inadequacy in in the culture overall. And I I'm not the first or last one to make this point, but part of it is that there are a there is a large driving force in today's female youth to educate themselves because they have to. They want they want to, but they also know that they have to because of how many of the men are sort of feeling left out in general. And I don't personally, and I think we're all in agreement here, don't believe that eliminating people's ability to emancipate themselves is harming society, but it is a means cuz we're talking about control. This is a means to which you're going to try and attempt to shape how people are are developing themselves and then how society is developing themselves. And of course, this is all based on false religious doctrine, which brings us back to our point. Yeah, you know, um the points that you're making are making me think about so many different things and that's the point of intersectionality. Intersectionality is such an important uh notion here because we can always fight back and uh protest and uh lobby against any of these um um policies that may be passed, right? Because it's a it's um right in front of us, it's tangible, and we can argue with it. But one of the things that uh controlling societies do, besides using religion to do it, is try to um change the way the society thinks about things. So, as we're talking about women here, it's about at what age is it appropriate for women to get married? Even though now we've gone way past that, we think there's still an overarching Christianity says, you know, you get married, you have children. What if you decide not to have children? I chose not to have children. Chose not to have children, and that was my right. Uh but when you belong within a community or you are part of a um part of a religion, either you haven't really thought about that before or you are not allowed to. So, it increases a lot of anxiety within women, and I see that in my clinical practice. I actually my dissertation I for my dissertation I built a program to uh for couples who wanted to go through and find out about themselves about um what it's like to have a child just so they can decide by the end of the 10 weeks whether they wanted a child-free or parenting parenthood lifestyle. And if they are one of them is not sure or both of them just are thinking about it but aren't sure if it's for them. And by the end of the 10 weeks with all the assessments, all the information, all the exercises they would do, they would have a better understanding if it was right for them now or not. And it sounds very reasonable, right? Giving people rights um to do that. Well, when me and my team would try to find spaces where we could see the couples. This is way before Zoom meetings. Um we we couldn't find a space because the places that would give spaces would be like churches or certain places that were funded by churches, like community agencies that were funded. And they would not allow it. The minute they would see child-free, they would take that they would say, "No, we can't do that." So, therefore, the reason why I'm pointing this out is because the laws are the laws, you know? Policies are policies. Right now, we're struggling with the whole abortion policies and laws that they're changing all around the country. But what if there is no policy and law? At what level are they working to change the public view on what's appropriate and what's not? Woman needs to have a child, but a guy can decide at 60 if he wants to or not. And if he doesn't, cool. No problem. We're still there, unfortunately. I guess like weaving it back to what we were talking about in the beginning, you know, this is part of like a systems theory idea, right? So, if we put like, you know, tantra is to weave. We'll weave it all together. It's kind of like the idea of like, okay, you'll explain it better than I can, doctor, but this idea that we can like think now of like psychological health or for the purpose of our pod, what we might say like psycho-spiritual health, on these multiple different impacts on people now. So, maybe like this is a good time to like flesh out a little bit more of that systems theory kind of thing cuz we really been talking about it, right, without really using that phrase, but it sounds to me that's that's what really what we've been doing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, systems theory as far as I can speak about it from my profession, right? And which it's systems theory started from marriage and family therapy, really. So, but it came before that. In clinical work, it started from there, but before that, it existed. But it's the view that families are as interconnected emotional units where where a change it when one member of the system is going to impact the entire system. Rather than focusing on on the identified patient, like there's something wrong with you, you're the one who has an issue, it's more about the person and the system that they belong to and how these different parts of it. Now, the work that I do and the writing that I do takes it beyond the family because there's so many great scholars that talk about that, but I'm trying to expand that systems framework in MFT to pay more attention, not just use the macro level systems like at the societal level, at the community level, at the political level, and how they impact the individual not just as context, but as a way to be able to work with the person and what they're bringing and how the the system has impacted them, one of them being religious trauma. So, yeah, a this um it it's fascinating to read about uh systems theory and uh how it started, but in in my field we use it within families. I feel like there's the idea that it's starting to include like not just the individual, but the family unit, and then how that fits into the community, and maybe how that fits into the bigger structures, and how those things are like more intertwined, which I think is like a big part of like what we like to talk about on our little podcast, but I also think is like so important, right? Yeah, actually, you know, in the mid you just reminded me of this in mid-20th century the general systems theory that's outside my profession started in the 1940s and 19 50s, where specific attention was starting to by biologist actually it started. You know, looking at how are these living systems how can we understand them in the where they live? And then it was adapted in in other ways. So, they look at feedback loops. We look at feedback loops. How do it's not about what the person's bringing in, but their impact, their dynamic with the other parts of the system. How's the system impacting them? How are they impacting the system? Different parts of the system. So, it's it's really really interesting topic because like we're talking about religion right now. Religion and looking at how it's impacting communities, how it's impacting individuals, and you know, I'm talking about the trauma aspect. So, obviously not the positive portion, but religion is also as we know, it's a source of resilience that helps people build meaning-making process when they have the freedom to be able to question and learn, and you know, it's a place where community can form. So, religion is very, very beneficial. Uh you know, for for many, many reasons. It's just I I want to make sure that the audience is aware that we're talking about the trauma it can cause when it's constrained. And also the idea of um cybernetics that I'm talking about the general systems theory. That's control systems. Cybernetics was part of that. It was developed after World War II in what I just mentioned to you. And that was the first time they started looking at, "Wait a minute, the war impacted the system in many different ways, individuals, people." And so, here we are all these years later. Now even though we've always looked at all parts of the system, but not knowing how to work with it on an individual level. That's the work that I'm trying to bring in. I always feel with this and I don't know what you think about this, Danielle, and you, doctor, as well. But like there's a Buddhist wisdom of like interconnectivity. Yes, yes.

can't isolate things and all of a sudden you realize you start pulling on one thread and it's connected to all the other threads and the whole thing, right? And then you're then you're taking the sweater apart,

which may never have been your intention. I think we not we have to dwell on the recent events, but I feel like that's what's happened in this war that's like going on in the kind of the elephant in the room behind all of this, right? You know, and uh I don't think people thought about how interconnected things were on like even very obvious ways, but it does have that Buddhist wisdom quality to it, doesn't it? This is what I love about our professions and this collaboration because you're absolutely right. Many of the things we're talking about in psychology now, in biology even, these have been wisdoms that have been passed on from ancient years, you know? Eastern medicine, so many different uh things have been passed on. The So, we're not dismissing that, right? I I benefit from the work that you do every week. So, the the thing that I'm trying to uh make a point of is that these what that brilliance and that wisdom has taught us is now we just have a way to be able to test it, to see that it's actually true. So, we've known these things all along, but now because of the scientific approach, we can actually test to see that they're correct. And so much we've learned to be exactly as they had said. Or like the show the ways that things interconnect, right? We can use the scientific method to go into the details of how things interconnect and impact one another. And like the Buddhist world, this would be called conventional truth, right? You explore the way things interconnect. Okay, I got a pet question if you don't mind me asking it, uh Daniel, but okay, so I teach this class for uh TCM students, traditional Chinese medicine students, acupuncture, herbalism, and so on. I got the responsibility for teaching the clinical counseling class, the psychology class. And so, I decided to do it as a survey. I really love it. It's very enjoyable for me and like we get to integrate the ideas together. And one of the things I try to say, and if if you if you disagree with me, Doctor, I'll just tell the students to skip this part of this lecture and they just won't listen to

I got a special version where I just cut But, what I sometimes

that will be the case.

What I sometimes think about is like you know, America's a very individualistic culture in many ways. Daniel I think really cares about this a lot and makes this point a lot, right? The individualistic aspect. And I feel like when people think about psychology, they tend to think about it it's my issue or it's my personal trauma that's the issue. It's very individualized. I think sometimes in the way people think about that. I don't know if you two agree with that's true, but I sometimes that seems so much true to me, right? There's almost this idea of individual trauma and if you can just get over your individual trauma, then that will solve everything somehow. But it's different

trauma just came from within, right? It just developed inside the body. Um um Yeah. A couple of bad things happen when you're young and it's not connected to anything else at all. Don't look at anything else. And I I I've always I'm trying to emphasize to students the idea I think what I see in the whole systems thing you're bringing up. No, that individual functions within a whole you know, panoply of influences, right? That are surrounding them. And you know, the the the the damaging part of that could come from all parts of that different kind of system. So, I don't know if you agree with that or not, but I I wonder about that, you know, even in like the psychological world. Obviously, you're dealing in in areas where people are trying not to be that way, right? But I wonder if that isn't something that you see Americans thinking. It all has to do with me and my individual trauma and my getting over my individual trauma. You see something in that.

I see it every single day. Actually, um let me let me start it from the smallest part of the system, which is couples and families, right? Like that's the smallest version. The literature is very clear on this that when couples go to individual therapy, let's say I'm I'm the one in, you know, who has my traumas, go work on yourself. You're, you know, you have your own stuff to work on. And they don't do couples work together or they don't address the traumas in the couples work together, they actually grow apart and the divorce rate and separation rate is higher in that. Um same thing I I don't see children by themselves. I say, "No, I need I need part of your family system here." Of course, they're going to be just fine if it's just me and them. How are they going to a in the family system? I even go to their homes to see how those interaction, how they function together. So, in-home therapy for kids many times because there is the way that they react in front of their parents or how they respond in front of their parents is very different than how they would respond to me. So, it has to be addressed at that level. So, in the trauma is although trauma we can say is part of if if we were to just, you know, define trauma by itself, we can say that yes, it is something that sits inside the body. It's encoded in the brain which then manifests in in the body and sits in the body. And so, the body remembers things, right? The feeling memory that shows itself. However, however, that's not where it came from. So, if we were to be able to do some of that bottom-up work that you all do and some of the things that I do, for example, EMDR or brain spotting or somatic forms of therapy and all the wonderful things that you do and you teach, if we can do that within a group atmosphere, just like the classes that you have or the gatherings that you have, or um even within, you know, a community of their own, they're so much more impactful than when they're done individually over and over again. Yes, we are living in a very, very individualistic society where I even the couples I work with, they're like, mine, yours. You're responsible for you, I'm responsible for me. And how does this work? Where you're a unit. I cannot work with you until you see yourselves as a unit. You can still honor your individual differences, but you work together as a unit going forward. Uh so, it's almost like in our brains that you should do your own thing, go work on yourself, and I'll do mine. And that's against the science that we have that works. I I want to emphasize that that it the more we can do it within the system, the better off the outcome will be. And this is um there was a we guess we've had on the podcast a couple times teacher of mine, I think teacher of Eric's as well, Mary Kay Ryan, um you know, who I you know, used to be a student of, but she would say regularly that the trauma resides in the individual, but the healing occurs in a community. And so, you know, I like I have been you know, and we talked about it on the previous podcast, like I've been doing these public breath work events. And one of the reasons why

I'm a big fan. I just wanted to point that out. Thanks, yeah. Great.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. And I'll I have a couple coming up, so I'll put some links in the description here for that, but if you're if you're in the Chicago land area, but one of the reasons why I intentionally do not do individual work like this is because of the intentional um pressure I want to put on and I do call it pressure cuz they need to be kind of reined in of people doing it together of maybe you're not like working with somebody, but you're doing you're not working with someone in in pairs, but you're doing your work next to someone doing their work next to someone doing their work next to someone doing their work, and collectively you're having your own experience, but we're having it together. So, whether you know everybody who's there or you don't know anybody who's there, you can hear the sounds of people next to you when they're doing a little chanting or they're doing a little singing, or they're letting themselves go, or they're crying, or whatever the case is, you see uh the emotions of somebody else, and you're reminded that you are a human being just like them, and we're all doing the exact same thing, looking at each other, and it takes down the, you know, potential random barriers that you might have. And especially if somebody reminds you of somebody else, right? And so now you are kind of like associating that with somebody else, and you see them that's not that person, actually. They are their own individual being, they have their own energy, and I can totally be fine with them, which is why I really like inclusive spaces. I am definitely pro uh men's work, which I've I ran a men's group for a couple years. I'm pro women's work, I think that's important to have. I'm you know, minority groups, or whatever, should have their own space to talk about things with each other that they understand well, and can provide some kind of insight for others. But I think ultimately to bring people together of various backgrounds, orientations, uh religious ideology, political ideology, and to put them in a place of like self-nourishment, and of release, and and, you know, and sometimes states of ecstasy, it really transcends the the actual small amounts of differences that we have in a very physical kind of a way, and one that you can feel. That transcends your ability to just rationalize or think your way away from somebody. You're like, no, I felt that person's uh whatever it is that they shared during the the experience, that far supersedes our disagreement on how to spend, you know, ex text out tax dollars on some program. So, um I I like this conversation on community, because I think it really is the only way forward. I mean, we can do our work as you work with couples, um Um, Sahabi, but couples have individual work to do, but they're doing it together. You can't just do one person can't do all the work, and the other one can't do all the work. They have to do it together. And so, as we, you know, try to find some semblance of of reasonableness moving forward with people in community in in life, we're all in community all the time. Even if you hate the people in your community, they're still your community. So, you know, you got to find a way to work together. Even as we move further and further apart on the on the fringes and in our political and sociological discourse. There's like a brilliant kind of like Zen paradoxical thing that we're all individuals, but we're all entwined. That's like a very Zen thing. Yes. Right? And you can kind of make that work, right? And, you know, we did our retreat together, Daniel. We did the breath work thing as part of that. We did all our meditation together. We're all individual going through our experiences, but we're all affecting one another. And it's amazing to realize how much impact you're having on other people, right? Just within those spaces. We tend to forget that what we are is energy, right? So, when we are all together, that frequency, that energy that's exchanged even in the breath work that I attend, that you host, that's so wonderful. In those places, we are not talking to the people around us. But by the end of the 3 hours, you feel so connected and close to the people that are sitting around you without a word being said. I don't want to say this as if individual therapy is not useful. But guess what? The literature shows that yes, a lot of it is the theory, and you know, part of it is the theory and the things that we know. But most of it is within the relationship, the therapeutic relationship. So, that is the part that is the essence of change. We as human beings, there's one thing we all have in common. And I always challenge my students to think about what is the one thing you think we all have in common as human beings? Can you think of it? Air. Well, besides the obvious and water.

Oh, I mean, you know, our we we all want I want people want to avoid suffering. They like to be happy. I think that's a

a Dalai Lama answer. Yeah.

Yeah, that was the Dalai Lama answer. Want to optimize their happiness and minimize their sadness, right? Minimize their sadness. It's like

Those are right, but we all at the end of the day want to belong, right? How would we do what you're saying you know, to to add on to what you said? Yeah, yeah. We need to belong somewhere in order to optimize our happiness and minimize our suffering. If we don't and and some of us may distance ourselves from belonging anywhere, and that's only because we have suffered in the belonging realm and we don't feel like we're belong. So, we go to the other extremity, which is still the same. It's rejecting the the um surveys have shown the place that has the most depressed individuals, the highest level of depression, guess where that is? Places where people feel isolated, I would imagine. New York City, where it's the busiest place, right? Because you're walking around individually and there's no sense of community, no sense of belonging. People aren't coming together. Even when you're walking around among other people, uh you can't reach them really in the same way as if you were from a smaller town, but everybody knew each other and attended the same schools or certain events. So, that's a really important piece to not forget when it comes to any type of healing, any type of trauma work that's done. Imagine if somebody has gone through or is really struggling with religious trauma and they're doing individual work. Imagine how much more productive it is if they are doing it within a community of people who also have had similar experiences. How validating that feels, how how comforting it is to hear the other stories and be able to work through the body like you do in being able to remove some of that. So, I hope that's one thing that everybody's going to walk away with. Well, as we as we come to the last couple minutes here, I think this is why the religious trauma piece is actually such a big piece, and we did a pretty long series last year on cults, cult psychology, cult mentality. We had people from uh Jehovah's Witnesses on and um you know, a couple different people actually. And That was a good podcast. I listened to that.

yeah. Yeah, we had some people who had really beautiful shares. Um one of the one of the reasons why this particular issue is such a poignant one at least and especially for our work here is that people go to community for that sense of belonging like you had mentioned earlier, for that sense of interconnectivity, and for, you know, what we're going to call it, healing or education or wholeness or happiness or reducing suffering, whatever the, you know, you want to use from that uh from those selections there, but then when you go there and they actually remove you from yourself. Yeah. And they institute these very strict organizing rules of personality and who you should be and how you should behave and how you should not question the place that you're going refuge to is actually bringing you harm. And it becomes this very kind of toxic relationship that you don't know where to turn, so you end up turning back to that same thing that is harming you probably because you don't have another choice. You don't have another option. Grew up in that you don't even know any better anyways, right?

Right. And then when you try and leave, you're ashamed, you're made to feel bad, you're abandoned, and therefore, like you said earlier, um Dr. Abi is this like desire to belong is like ripped away from you, and your sense of purpose, your sense of identity is all stripped away. And if you don't have a really strong sense of will or very curious drive to see what's on the other side of the super high brick wall, you're screwed. You're really screwed. And it just it it it rots people to the core. And it's unfortunate because, you know, all of us have different sort of, you know, religious backgrounds and things like this, and we all love various aspects of religion, but this here is isolating the the most toxic parts about religious dogma, structure, and as we like to say all the time, uh conditioning. This is This is the problem right here. I I actually work with people who have left Jehovah's communities. And one of the things that comes up over and over again with people that don't even know each other is why did you stay in a harmful system when you were being harmed? And it really always falls into it didn't just provide rules for them. It provided an identity, belonging, like we said, a sense of moral certainty. Leaving can mean losing family, which they do. The The ones I work with completely lose everything, family, community, even a sense of who you are. So, staying in often not it's not about agreement, it's really about survival at the end of it. And psychologically, it usually um Uh, easier to just, um, just take the harm than to, uh, confront the possibilities that the system itself is unsafe. And this happens in family systems as well. We'll get to more of that those before and I I just want to give a little bit of, um, a teaser for others that may may would want may want to continue learning about this because I'm hoping that in the future we'll talk more about what how does religious trauma shape identity and the self in what ways? How does it shape relationships? How does it even show up in relationships? You may feel like, "No, I'm fine. This is who I am now. I'm fine." But it still shows up in relationships without you even realizing it. Um, it examples of how Islamophobia is playing out in in our society right now, we can talk about that as well as what does it mean for trauma to become internalized? How does it How does what is happening to you become internalized in a way where the work that you do has been so beneficial and helpful and being able to, uh, remove it from the body and the work that I do with trauma. How does ex- exile intersect with this and why do communities fracture under this kind of pressure? These are really important topics that we continue to talk about as well as how are we How does healing happen after this? What does that look like?

Yeah. So, I'm looking forward to continuing some of these conversations about the complexities that all of this brings and how things without collapsing. This is That was like, uh, excellent foreshadowing. Yes, like literal future events. It was like, "Okay, yes."

Yeah. I think the thing that fascinates me and I, you know, imagine we'll get back to it as we go forward and we're ending this up, but I'm like kind of like you have the individual level and then you have other things. And when you start talking about religion, you're talking about something that's sweeping. Yeah. Right? And it's a force that is, you know, going to envelop a lot of people, maybe in ways that are traumatic and maybe in ways that are not, but when you get to that level, that fascinates me. Cuz all of a sudden you have to be diagnosing all three of us being diagnosticians, right? You have to be diagnosing things. Well, this is beyond an individual now. Exactly.

at something that has a sweeping effect. And then what does that totally mean? You know, that's a deep idea to me. I I I don't know how you feel about Daniel and and Dr. But I like I found that fascinating cuz you know, what do you do about that? That's that's striking to me. Yeah, absolutely. Foreshadowing.

Absolutely. I I wanted to ask Do we have one more minute for me to share something to show you or should we save it for the next time that we

Save it for next time. Okay, great. So make sure you tune in because it's the personal story that you want to tune in to and how these shifts can happen. A teaser. It'll be fun. It'll be fun. A teaser. Yeah. Actually, I was thinking cuz we know it's interesting to hear a little bit how you got interested in all of this, Dr. So I'm I'm interested in like Being Iranian does it. Being Iranian definitely does it. Okay. Being in a system of um you know, Islamic Republic, raised in will do that to anybody. Yeah. Well, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. This was really great.

Yeah, fantastic. This was very educational, really, really lively. So thanks for doing this. We're going to do it again, and you know, at least one more time, but the way things are going, it's probably going to be, you know, more than that or continuing or something like this. So we'll figure it out. Yeah, Dr. volunteered to be our ongoing personal friend of the show and resident psychological consultant. So Yes, oh

Little did she know what she was volunteering for, but she did.

That's right. Free labor, we'll take it. We have good energy between us. It'll be fun conversations and hopefully people will enjoy it as well. Thank you.

That's right. Yes, and uh Eric as always, thank you so much Amigo for being on the ship. Audience, thank you so much for tuning in. Uh like, comment, subscribe. You can find our work uh obviously here, wherever you're catching this at, but uh also follow us on Instagram at the Gin and Tonic Podcast. Or if you have any questions uh for Dr. Sahebi, I will leave her Substack uh information below, but if you want to get a hold of her, you can feel free to email us at ginandtonic@gmail.com and then we'll we'll forward it along uh for Eric and Dr. Sahebi. This is Daniel. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Bye-bye.