S5:E14 - A Recovering Evangelical Testimony featuring Mattie Jo Cowsert

Mattie Jo Cowsert was a pastor’s kid and proud purity ring wearer before she moved to New York City and experienced an unexpected worldview and identity implosion thanks to Tinder and her Jewish roommate. When marriage equality passed in 2015, Mattie Jo decided to share how the queer community was one of the catalysts for questioning everything she’d been taught about this Jesus guy in her first publicly released blog post entitled: God and the Gays. This was the start of her popular blog, God, Sex, and Rich People. Before terms like “deconstruction”, “purity culture” or “Exvangelical'' became hashtags viewed by billions, God, Sex, and Rich People exposed the sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious realities of a young female Exvangelical navigating the diversity of the Big Apple, working for the 1%, and trying to have good sex without hating herself in the city that never sleeps (and never stops sleeping around).

Her book by the same name releases on September 10th, 2024.   

Looking for a trauma-trained mental health professional to work with? www.traumaresolutionandrecovery.com/meet-our-practitioners

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Transcript is Unedited for Typos and Misspellings

[00:00:00] I'm Katherine Spearing, and this is Uncertain.

Uncertain is the affiliate podcast of Tears of Eden, a community and resource for survivors of spiritual abuse from the evangelical community.

 So I don't think I've had the chance to officially announce, But in April of this year, I partnered with Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery to work as a practitioner for them. Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery is a online agency that works with survivors of spiritual abuse, religious trauma, purity culture, folks who are deconstructing, All of the things, and it's 100 percent online, so you can meet with a practitioner online.

So many folks are addressing the religious trauma that came from evangelicalism, from working in the church, and they're looking for good mental health professionals that understand this. I know that with most of the clients that I work with, they [00:01:00] have already worked with therapists before in the past.

But one of the main things that they struggled with in their therapy relationship was that the therapist didn't understand the nuances and the complexities of the subculture of evangelicalism.

So if you are looking for a mental health practitioner to help you navigate the complex and confusing and very painful journey