46 min
S5:E11 - Escaping Christian Patriarchy with Cait West Uncertain
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- Society & Culture
Cait West is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse.
In Cait’s memoir Rift, she tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.
Uncertain is a podcast of Tears of Eden, a community and resource for those in the aftermath of Spiritual Abuse. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to like, subscribe, or leave a review on your favorite podcasting listening apparatus.
You can support the podcast by going to TearsofEden.org/support
To get in touch with us please email tearsofeden.org@gmail.com
Follow on Instagram @uncertainpodcast
Transcript is unedited for typos and misspellings:
I am so excited about today's guest. Kate West has a very special place in my heart. We met over the internet in the very early days of Tears of Eden, in the early days of the podcast Uncertain. She was the first person that I encountered outside of my family who'd Similar to the way that I had, who was talking about it openly in public, online, we have been friends and colleagues ever since then.
Her book is about that experience of growing up in the Christian patriarchy movement in the stay at home daughter movement. We'll talk a little bit about the dynamics of that. podcast before. So I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. She's also a member of Tears of Eden's editorial board.
and is responsible for a lot of the content that is on the Tears of [00:01:00] Yin blog, the website. Super grateful for her. Very grateful for her story. And here is my interview with Kate West.
katherine: Well, hello, Kate. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right it is good to see you.
Cait: You too. And I think we both have sunny days. It seems like you have some sunshine in your room.
katherine: Yes. It's going to be, it's going to be a relatively warmer weekend. I think like 60s ish. How's weather where you are?
Cait: Yeah, I think it might get up to 60 today. And I want to, I want to get outside and start. Scraping around in the dirt and get my garden started, but we'll
katherine: see. Speaking of dirt, your book.
Cait: What a segue.
katherine: Your book is called Rift, and you have a metaphor throughout your book about geology. And the earth, you talk a lot about like the earth [00:02:00] and I'm not even going to try to like get into scientific things.
So talk to me about your book, which is the full title is rifts, a memoir of breaking away from Christian patriarchy. You have been on the podcast a couple of times before, so I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. But talk to me about the, the theme of this book and that metaphor, that geological earth metaphor that you use here.
Cait: If you've listened to other interviews, the other interviews, you'll know I grew up similar to you, like, as a stay at home daughter, Christian patriarchy movement, quiverful. And this book is a story of me growing up in that and not understanding the world I was living in until it started going wrong and how I figured out how to leave and my life afterwards.
And the idea of rifting comes from [00:03:00] this idea in, Well, there's this interesting thing that happens in geology where the earth splits apart and something like continents c
Cait West is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse.
In Cait’s memoir Rift, she tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.
Uncertain is a podcast of Tears of Eden, a community and resource for those in the aftermath of Spiritual Abuse. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to like, subscribe, or leave a review on your favorite podcasting listening apparatus.
You can support the podcast by going to TearsofEden.org/support
To get in touch with us please email tearsofeden.org@gmail.com
Follow on Instagram @uncertainpodcast
Transcript is unedited for typos and misspellings:
I am so excited about today's guest. Kate West has a very special place in my heart. We met over the internet in the very early days of Tears of Eden, in the early days of the podcast Uncertain. She was the first person that I encountered outside of my family who'd Similar to the way that I had, who was talking about it openly in public, online, we have been friends and colleagues ever since then.
Her book is about that experience of growing up in the Christian patriarchy movement in the stay at home daughter movement. We'll talk a little bit about the dynamics of that. podcast before. So I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. She's also a member of Tears of Eden's editorial board.
and is responsible for a lot of the content that is on the Tears of [00:01:00] Yin blog, the website. Super grateful for her. Very grateful for her story. And here is my interview with Kate West.
katherine: Well, hello, Kate. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right it is good to see you.
Cait: You too. And I think we both have sunny days. It seems like you have some sunshine in your room.
katherine: Yes. It's going to be, it's going to be a relatively warmer weekend. I think like 60s ish. How's weather where you are?
Cait: Yeah, I think it might get up to 60 today. And I want to, I want to get outside and start. Scraping around in the dirt and get my garden started, but we'll
katherine: see. Speaking of dirt, your book.
Cait: What a segue.
katherine: Your book is called Rift, and you have a metaphor throughout your book about geology. And the earth, you talk a lot about like the earth [00:02:00] and I'm not even going to try to like get into scientific things.
So talk to me about your book, which is the full title is rifts, a memoir of breaking away from Christian patriarchy. You have been on the podcast a couple of times before, so I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. But talk to me about the, the theme of this book and that metaphor, that geological earth metaphor that you use here.
Cait: If you've listened to other interviews, the other interviews, you'll know I grew up similar to you, like, as a stay at home daughter, Christian patriarchy movement, quiverful. And this book is a story of me growing up in that and not understanding the world I was living in until it started going wrong and how I figured out how to leave and my life afterwards.
And the idea of rifting comes from [00:03:00] this idea in, Well, there's this interesting thing that happens in geology where the earth splits apart and something like continents c
46 min