Other Healing Practices
Outside of (or in addition to) therapy, what's been helpful in healing?
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What’s helped you heal from religious authoritarian parenting?
Summer of 2016, I (Krispin) went no-contact with my parents. Over the course of the previous ten years, trying to sort through a variety of issues with them, I slowly learned my parents were not going to make any room for my perspective or experience. They expected me to simply submit to their perspective, as older and wiser. They didn’t seem to have an imagination for a relationship together where they took my perspective into consideration.
It was a really tough summer.1 I was in therapy at the time, getting support through the process. I listened to Taylor Swift’s Red album on repeat, because there aren’t that many break-up-with-your-parents albums.2 But then I wrote my own break-up-with-your-parents albums, over the following two years, writing more than a dozen songs about my relationship with my parents. It was incredibly healing for me. The lyrics served as an archive of my feelings and the things I knew to be true. When I was filled with self-doubt about the decision I made, I could sing to myself little lines like, “I tried my hardest, I tried to mend it all….” And being able to put the anger and sadness into music really helped me process through it.