The holidays come with an expectation of joy. For many people, that expectation can feel impossible.

In this quiet, honest conversation, Amanda shares a truth she’s been sitting with for a long time: healing doesn’t automatically make you receptive to happiness or joy. When your nervous system formed in trauma, joy doesn’t arrive on command, and it often can’t depend on other people or outcomes you can’t control.

Together, Amanda and Kyle talk about trauma and the weight of holding other people’s stories, as well as what it looks like to create moments of joy that aren't forced or performative. Amanda shares how she has reframed joy to focus on small, sensory, unexpected moments that arrive when we make room for them.

If the holidays feel heavy this year, this episode is an invitation to let joy look different — and to know you’re not broken if it does.

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In this episode, Amanda and Kyle dive into moral scrupulosity OCD and how it has shaped Amanda’s life. She shares openly about the intense anxiety and compulsive behaviors she developed growing up in a high-control religious environment under Bill Gothard’s IBLP cult. These patterns looked like “perfectionism” on the surface but were actually rooted in fear, uncertainty, and shame.

Amanda discusses the research connecting high-control religion to obsessive-compulsive symptoms and explains how scrupulosity didn’t disappear when she left the belief system, it just changed form. Today, it shows up in relationships, conflict, and her own internal self-perception. She talks through the coping strategies she uses now, the progress she’s making in therapy, and what healing looks like in real time.

This episode is an honest, thoughtful conversation about anxiety, identity, and the leftover rules your brain keeps long after you’ve left a cult or high control religion behind.

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We’ll see you next week, when we’re feeling better, for an episode Amanda is so excited to share with you all! We’re grateful for you and we love you guys!

Send us text! Please note this platform only supports one-way communication.

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