Episode 014 — Bec Sonkkila Pt.2

00:41 Welcome back to Unspun. This is part two of our conversation with Bec’s. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, we’d really recommend starting there. Bec’s shares her story of becoming involved in MISA, what life was like inside the cult, and what eventually led her to leave. It gives important context for the conversations we’re about to have.

01:04 They were exploring some of the deeper issues that came out of Bec’s story. We’re talking about connection, desire, sexuality, consent, and what it looks like to reclaim your relationship with yourself after living in a high-control environment. While these topics have been shaped by Bec’s experiences, they’re relevant to many people, and we hope you find something meaningful in the conversation wherever you are in the journey.

01:32 Welcome back, Bec. Awesome to have you here.

01:35 Thanks.

01:37 I’m really excited to continue the conversation because this is talking about my work.

01:41 Yeah, absolutely. Last episode we heard your story. Today I’d love to explore some of the ideas that your experience has made you think deeply about. And I know you think deeply, so I’m excited about that. One thing we’ve spoken about is the idea that control doesn’t just happen in your mind. It happens in the body. What does that mean to you?

02:04 Well, it depends what we mean when we talk about mind and body, that these aspects. There’s a lot going on inside a physical system that isn’t just these two categories. Mostly when people think about their mind, they’re talking about the thoughts that they can see. And we only really see a fraction of our own thoughts. There’s a lot of things that are thoughts we have that we could tune into, but they’re just the water we’re in. You don’t even notice them because you’re thinking those things all the time. And then there’s the thoughts that we think on the surface: do this, do that, do this, and they’re what we think about the mind.

02:40 Beyond that, behind that, beneath that, there’s a whole system taking in a lot of data and reaching a conclusion and a decision about behavior that will never be represented in the front mind, all of the decision trees that come to that.

02:56 And so control happens in the way it subverts our signalling system between the data that we take in and our decision making on the outward side.

03:08 Mm.

03:09 So in a system that’s aligned with its authentic self, if we can use Jillie Jenkinson’s term, there’s a sense that your body and mind are mostly aligned, like, I felt to do it, I did this, I made this decision.

03:24 Tuned. Yeah.

03:27 However, there’s the experience with people inside cultic organizations that take an action without having a built process of decision making behind that. So there’s an inner sense of dissonance or confusion and then confabulation, where there’s a reason created by the story mind, the front mind, the narrator, about why that behavior was taken without an inner decision tree. And yet there’s no decision tree. It doesn’t match value systems, it doesn’t match physical experience, it doesn’t match the decision made in the body. And there’s kind of a disconnect there between the signalling process and the…

04:02 Yeah.

04:02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. How do controlling systems disconnect people from their bodies? Do you think? What’s the main kind of activator for that?

04:18 Well, we’re all really aware of how this happens when we tell each other, don’t worry, or don’t be scared, or don’t this, or don’t that. We’re controlling our natural inner responses to a situation, which might be concern about something. And there’s a number of those that are just normal socialized things where if you feel icky about something, you know, someone’s smelly because they smoke and you’re a kid and you’re told, go give them a hug, or some such thing. So you’re overriding that.

04:49 There’s an amazing book, The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, which—it’s a fantastic book.

04:57 And he talks about how we have all of these data points. His whole argument is that people can save themselves from violence by listening to the inner part of them that knows before it can come out with a cohesive narrative. And overriding that what might seem to be a bizarre intuition or a weird or a surprising new direction of behavior—well, why wouldn’t I trust them? Why wouldn’t I let them in? Like, overriding that gets people into trouble, and saving yourself from violence is listening to yourself.

05:30 Really answering your question. You asked how. And so first, I wanted to shape what that connection looks like in action. But then the how is our culture of the organization reframes, reshapes, and swaps out our inner value systems for its own value system.

05:50 So our coercive organizations, they teach you that your signal is the enemy, that your doubt is getting in the way of some higher thing. It teaches you that doubt is sin or questioning the leader is absurd because they’re so advanced. And so you learn to ignore your inner signalling and look externally for what to do.

06:07 And even though the inner signals can be very, very loud with panic attacks, depression, tears, nightmares, all kinds of many kinds of symptoms can come up. You just—you’re taught so powerfully to look outside that that’s what you start doing. And that’s that process of inserting introjects, a whole cultic framework into you that subdues and replaces your own value system, your own identity.

06:42 I think part of the process too is when they either restrict your food or tell you how to eat, but then also keep you so busy you’re exhausted and tired, so you’re way more vulnerable to letting that stuff come in. You’re not so resilient to it as well.

07:01 Yeah, there’s a lot of systems used and each individual will respond to one thing or another. So many, many different tactics of reconditioning someone’s thoughts and behavior are used at the same time. They’re taken from their home environment and their family and their friends. You know, we’re put in unusual situations, like a house in the middle of France or in the countryside somewhere. You’re given different tasks, things that you’re used to, so you’re in a completely unknown environment doing something completely new. Therefore, you’re already conditioned to look for support in a new environment, in a new situation, with a new task, so you’re already going to be taking in data and putting someone above you because you don’t know where you are and what you’re doing and how to behave. And then that’s a pathway to take in a whole culture inside.

08:07 You know, someone is taking care of that. Don’t worry, take care of your own business. Just practice and that will resolve in yourself. So it’s just work harder. Just be focused on what we’re trying to insert and the solution will come for whatever problem you have. Whether it’s relationship or situational or physiological, there’s only one answer: just do us.

08:30 Destabilized that you’re much easier to insert all of that stuff.

08:40 People just don’t realise. I didn’t realise how vulnerable I really am to socialization. I’m a really independent person who’s quite intellectual about things and quite organized and particular. I wouldn’t have thought that I could be heavily influenced, but this is just how any normally socialized person who has a number of friends who gets along in a culture does so because we take in a culture, because we can. If you can be socially integrated, then you can be manipulated because that’s what social integration is. It’s just using the things we normally use in society to get along with people, have friends, blend in, you know, and it’s just—we treat this cultic mind control as some kind of extraordinary power or something unusual. But it isn’t. In the same way as intuition isn’t something mystical or far-reaching that we can’t understand. It’s the body’s wisdom and it’s right there available to us all the time. That’s why everyone’s rabbiting on about being present, being here, listening to yourself.

09:54 Having said that though, people can come out of cults—many people come out of cults unable to know what they feel. At that point of coming out, there’s a whole period where you come out of the cults, this kind of in-between land where you’ve rejected the cultic dogma or socialized structure, but you don’t have your own yet. And then in that period you don’t know what you feel or what you want. You don’t have points for that. It hasn’t gone. It isn’t disappeared. It’s in there. It just takes time to notice the signals again and value them. I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m tired. Even on that basic level, those things become very quiet. The very primary needs that you wouldn’t think someone could ignore.

10:49 I love your point before too about how, I mean, we’re humans and we’re social beings. So we’re designed to kind of assimilate and connect. And I guess in a cultic environment, we just start naturally doing that because of the way we are, I guess.

11:08 It’s not unique to certain people. It’s unique to our species, I guess. Why is reconnecting to our bodies such an important part of recovery, do you think?

11:21 I think all my experiences in MISA and from what I’ve read about other coercive organizations is you work past exhaustion, past sleep deprivation, past impossible standards with no positive feedback, and quite extreme isolation and attacks and accusations everywhere. And you create gratitude for this void of positive experience and it becomes a falsified—there’s a lot of falsified world.

11:53 And yet, so there’s this huge loss and in order to feel genuinely good about anything—yourself, another, the moment that you’re in, what you’re doing in life—it has to come from within. It has to be something that’s arising naturally inside. So apart from making good choices for yourself, your partner, your children, your community environment, your finances, your retirement—apart from being able to make good choices for yourself and needing to evaluate situations for how they will impact you and those that you love, that’s important for reconnecting to yourself.

12:33 And if you continue to keep the values of an organization that considers you worth less than they are, then you will spend a lifetime considering yourself expendable and other things of worth. And so reconnecting with yourself to value your own existence and just for its own sake—I exist and therefore I am of value—that’s important. But also to feel good, to feel happy, to feel not just to feel that I exist and therefore I have a right to exist, but to feel genuinely pleased with something you have done, to receive praise for who you are and what comes from you naturally rather than some overlaid, falsified, forced production of behaviours and actions through exhaustion and sleep deprivation and fear. That would be a good life, like a life that’s worth having.

13:38 Definitely. It’s like you really want to be able to feel that sense of contentment and part of that is kind of being in your body or connected with your interior world.

13:52 Connected, yeah, with your interior world, the moment. Then there’s just—and then words get really tricky here because every word I use has been co-opted by every spiritual tradition and then it becomes a trigger fest for somebody. And yet…

14:10 And yet, if all the people I heard only asked me to do things for them and the praise was thin on the ground, then I never really hear, well done. I never really hear, you achieved something right now, unless I can slow down enough to see what’s actually difficult for me and what I have overcome. And then through seeing what is hard for me specifically and what I have overcome through reintegrating with the world after a cultic experience, then through that I can say, through knowing myself, I can say, yeah, that was hard, well done.

14:53 Yeah, and that’s the—to give myself that, then I can receive that from somebody else. Otherwise, it’s a lot of years. It’s a lot of—it’s a lot of years till the end, always believing the worthlessness is the true.

15:13 Well, it’s not a life. It’s just not a life because the premise is that my life is worthless. That’s not a life. A life is believing this has value somehow.

15:29 I’d love to kind of move on to the subject of desire because I just think it’s so topical for people coming out of cultic environments in terms of their ability to absolutely squash it, and it’s often considered evil and wrong. And so, yeah, I’d love to hear your perspective around that. Why do you think so many controlling systems are concerned with people desire?

15:54 I love this topic because desire is right in the center of trauma therapy. It’s like somehow there’s nothing new in the world and yet the cutting edge of trauma therapy is right here in these questions around desire: what makes us want something, how we respond to it, what we’re doing there.

16:16 And in that is why cults want desire. It’s how you control people. It’s the engine for an entire life: I want, I need, and then I bring all my focus, energy, intelligence, my kids, my family, my community, everyone on board to that track.

16:36 I think it’s worthwhile to sail around the world. I desire to be biking or hiking or growing flowers or knowing herbs or painting pictures, beautiful paintings. And that’s what we bring our energy to. So all cultic organizations are fascinated with desire because as soon as they know what you want and need, then it’s a power play. It’s like, yes, I will give you that, whatever it is, it’s promised. And then in the act of offering it is the swap for their own needs. You become the producer of their porn or their engine for building things like in MISA. My experience is that it doesn’t matter what is wanted; it’s swapped out for the organization’s structural requirements, and the person and their individual wants and desires are made invisible and not just swapped out or usurped, but actually completely devalued systematically and entirely because that engine is the thing that will break down a cultic organization. You can’t have people wanting something other than what they have. They have to want the pittance that they have.

17:57 Yeah, I think that’s such a ploy in some ways. It’s like, I mean, often in my experience, or what I missed when I left was this kind of direction in life: this is how to live. If you follow this, then this and this will happen. And for me it was like, well, I don’t really need to think about it that much. I just do what I’m supposed to do for God’s will, whatever that was. And the swap is that you squash everything that you want.

18:32 There’s a perfection to being in a cult where you’re offered a very clean, complete packet that says you will cleanly and completely get exactly what you want if you just simply sacrifice all the other things because they’re in fact everything. Sacrifice everything because it’s all getting in the way. I’ll give you what you want, just trust me, and then do all these things that are actually taking you in some entirely different direction. But the certainty is nice.

19:02 What I found fascinating in this model I’m studying is that all the cults have similar—it’s a similar swap and value system that they’re doing. So the organization is controlling what you wear, whether you’re monogamous or polyamorous, how you educate your children, how many children or if you even have children. In MISA it was no children; other organizations it’s many children. Where your money goes, usually to the organization.

19:37 Yeah, what kind of conditions you live in and are acceptable. They’re controlling exactly the same things, and all of these things are keeping people busy, controlling their desires. So, you want, I want to eat only eggs, or I want to have many lovers because it brings me closer to God. And this is the point about desire that I found really interesting here. Is that there’s desire as the cult educates you to have—the coercive mesh of I want to be polyamorous, I want to eat only this food, I want to wear clothes that go from my neck to the ground or I want to wear like itty-bitty micro minis—that looks like a desire but actually there’s a deeper desire, something under that, and that’s what drove people to the organization in the first place.

20:31 And it’s something more profound: to be closer to God, to be filled with divinity, grace, peace, to bring peace to the world, to bring love to the community. It’s beautiful value systems. And that thing, it doesn’t go away. It’s just been redirected. Like the light of that want and that desire has shone the engine or pointed like an arrow, the individual’s engine into producing for the coercive group. And yet you can remove that wire between those things and then find what lies underneath in yourself: actually, my desire is to connect to people. I do love people and I do want to share, feel fully loving and loved in my life.

21:21 And that’s always underneath, and that thing, that innocence, that innocence of just the longing to connect and to love and be loved and make things better, that’s still in there.

21:34 How does shame and desire become connected? I’m interested in this question.

21:42 Yeah, I think I’m just gonna go back a bit into desire and then go into shame. So, it’s because desire—so you’ve got your inner desire, you want to maybe be loved or share love, and it’s the same needle but it’s a different map. They put you on this different map of the ways that you should behave. And so disentangling yourself from their map and taking from that your inner desires is part of the process of recovery.

22:18 And part of that is facing the things that you did for the organization. That’s an uncomfortable process. You may have given a lot of money away. You may have done sexual things that are hard to remember. You may have lost…

22:35 Or treated your children poorly. Yeah, it’s awful.

22:38 You may have lost family members. Yeah. And so understanding that, but facing this and what was consented and what was coerced, is essential. Otherwise the rest of your life you’re defending the value system of people that believed that your life is worth less than theirs.

23:01 So how is shame and desire connected? So here we have in these coercive situations, you’re pushed, forced, coerced, controlled, manipulated into behaving in such a way that you hold such a huge burden of disentanglement of shame.

23:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that was really hard for me. You know, I never consented to those things. I was coerced into them, and yet it’s still a burden of shame that I carry. And yet facing that and recognizing making mistakes is human, that being confused and going one way and then another is part of a normal human life. That’s really digestible and it’s a huge important step to believe that I’m worth something.

24:27 And this organization, that hierarchy sustaining their belief system, is not worth the rest of my life protecting that sense of shame.

24:38 So your question was about how is shame and desire linked, and so the organizations, they notice your desire and offer it back: we give you this love, connection to God, grace, pleasure, all of it, it’s yours. And then they say this part of your life you should be ashamed of, and it’s all of those things that actually bring you your desires to yourself. You should be ashamed of wanting anything outside this organization. You should be ashamed of a normal desire to have a partnership we don’t approve of. You should be ashamed of wanting or not wanting children. And so there’s a huge burden of shame around anything you really want. So it becomes very scary to reconnect with your own desires because they’re shaped as the demons or they’re shaped as the devils or they’re shaped there for so long as what is totally against what’s your inner truth and what’s your direction of purity or to get the thing that you wanted. So it’s really confusing and scary to say, hang on a minute, that’s actually the thing that gets me the thing that I want in the first place. Like just, you know, resting when I need rest, for example.

26:02 Yeah, especially for me, the whole purity culture thing. I was a really curious teenager and I wanted to explore stuff and I did, but the shame that came with that was huge. And I thought, you know, I’ve ruined my life now. That’s it. I’m done.

26:20 So shame isn’t there to kill the desires, it just steers them. So it just steers your desire for human connection away from a human connection that feels natural in a way that feels good and into something that serves the greater group. And each organization has its own particular way of doing that, yet the kind of map is the same. And the work is separating that and working out which shames are yours and which are theirs.

27:06 And a large part of that is because I wasn’t encouraged to by this organization. I was encouraged to spend my time working for this organization and supporting them instead of going to see my mother. And it was directly said that you will do more good, you will bring more God to her than if you went to see her. And I thought, yeah, you’re probably right. And I have a profound guilt…

27:31 Because she is no longer alive, and maybe I had a profound guilt. I don’t now, but I had a profound guilt for a long time that I could never—there were conversations that I have not had that I don’t have the opportunity to have. And yeah, and just facing that, there’s no getting that time back.

27:51 Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to move on to compliance versus consent. I have a wee discussion about that. What do you believe the differences between compliance and consent?

28:06 Is a yes without feeling it through your whole being, like through a bodily decision process that came there. Consent is that same yes, might be the same action, might be the same answer, but it’s just that you have it clearly inside you, came to it of your own volition. And for that you need to be inside your window of tolerance. You need to be relaxed enough. Lifton called confession an act of symbolic self-surrender.

28:41 And so that’s surrendering to another so that you simply give everything up to somebody else. But consent or disclosure, consenting information or disclosure, is a different thing. You’re yourself choosing to tell that other person with the understood risks involved in that conversation.

29:02 And in that way you consent to disclose. And so compliance versus consent, it’s actually quite difficult to word it, but somewhere in there there’s something you know in your body and there isn’t—there could be confusion. You can still be confused and not be absolutely sure. Sureness, absoluteness, it only comes with that dogmatic cultic framework. You can be sure of doing something, but that’s a different kind of sureness to the sureness of a cult, which is like absolute, world-shattering sureness, where sureness in yourself is, I’m sure I’m choosing this.

29:43 Yeah, and I think to your point, it’s kind of like consent feels like it comes from an authentic place that’s you, your voice, your agency. Compliance is kind of like, it’s not your voice, it’s the voice that is being fed to you.

30:02 But how does an ex-member know that? And in the case of when you’re inside an organization like that, there’s so much of the organization’s words inside you that your experience is—it’s the same sound. It’s their voice speaking through you. I’m devoted. Devoted to the cause. Again, back to desire. So it is tricky for the person to know the difference at various points, but the body—it knows. And there is that flinch in the body that you can find that says, I’m not aligned.

30:42 I don’t believe myself right now. I don’t even believe them right now. I’m just doing it because…

30:47 It would be a hassle not to. And we’ve all done that in many areas of life. Just this kind of an organization or this kind of a relational setup, it’s the normal to always be doing that. It’s not just one Tuesday afternoon.

31:01 I think that’s like, it ties into decision making a lot. Like that was one of my biggest challenges and it’s still really difficult for me today to make decisions. But it ties into the whole, how do I know the decision I’m making is right for me? Because I’ve been taught that making a wrong decision is sinful and bad and mistakes you get punished for in this kind of karmic sense. So…

31:34 Yeah, so how do you do that? And when I first came out of my cult, I couldn’t make my own decisions. I’d still ring my family three times a day and talk to all my friends and do this and do that. And then I’d make this tentative decision being terrified that I’ve done the wrong one. I certainly don’t do that today, but I still find it tricky.

31:58 Yeah, and here we’re talking about a few different things. Under enough threat the frontal lobes shut down and coherent speech becomes impossible and decision making becomes impossible. So there’s this kind of hypoarousal and interiorization and decisions are impossible.

32:18 So even though you may look entirely the same on the outside, the data is scrambled, the communication is scrambled, and then from that point making a decision becomes impossible. So if anything looks like a cultic situation, this can trigger this kind of numbness, compliance, like the mouth is paralyzed or just saying words that aren’t making sense, not—or not choosing but submitting. And also if a situation is a reminder of a cultic experience, there’s or any kind of power interaction, for example, there’s this knowing that so many experiences you just had to submit, so you might as well just submit now. So it feels right to just say yes instead of…

33:06 It feels right to have any kind of friction or tension or do anything different. It feels right to do what somebody else said. And so there’s a difference between feeling right, feeling familiar, and feeling into what you want, need and what nourishes you. And as I mentioned before, it can be a long time before one learns what it is that is missing in terms of supporting your own system as an ecology.

33:34 How do we help people reconnect with their authentic choice, do you think? That’s a whole podcast in itself, but…

33:43 Yeah. It’s been a big journey for me to learn to label my feelings, express my feelings, speak when I feel I need to, not be in a forceful way or raise my voice, but it felt a lot of the time like I was dragging it up out of myself, getting it out of my mouth. It’s difficult, it was hard. There’s a lot of techniques in the world. I’m training in a method which is psychoeducational therapy because I’m a therapist, so I am adding models that are supportive for people.

34:20 Works as long as it works for you. You know, there’s dancing, there’s ecstatic dance, there’s somatic experiencing, there’s TRE. There’s a lot of therapies out there where trauma and finding your voice and finding what you’re feeling and expressing what you’re feeling are at the center of that. I think it’s necessary and really important to realize that cult recovery—and I would rather say coercive relationship recovery—is a very specific kind of recovery.

34:57 A very specific kind of recovery because it breaks the bonds…

35:02 What is really a natural thing to know what you want and who you like and what you like. It’s a natural thing that we’ve been growing since we were born. That’s completely sub—the energy is completely redirected.

35:20 And so rebuilding that inner direction, finding your own sensations and labeling them, responding to them, expressing them. That’s a very specific thing to do.

35:38 Relationships break trust in the very people that we need to trust, those closest to us, because in those coercive relationship experiences, it’s the closest people that are telling us that we are worthless.

35:55 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I like the point you used on the last episode, was that it’s kind of like developing your own compass. And I guess people respond to things differently and different therapies, and it’s kind of an exploration into how to kind of put that compass together, back together again, or build your own entire new compass. But yeah, I think you’re right. There’s a lot of different ways and we’re all unique, so we have unique kind of paths in many ways.

36:31 Yeah, it’s gotta stay interesting. You know, what’s the point of saying, yeah…

36:38 What’s the point of saying go to talk therapy or work it through? But I will say my experience of people—the people my own experience and the people that I’ve known recovering from cults—you can go to therapy for a lot of years and never touch the cult thing itself. It takes a really specific focus.

37:00 To acknowledge that coercive relational manipulation and the breaks in the relationships to yourself, your own body, your own truth, your own trust, networking trust, to pull that coercive identity out and find your own. It is quite specific.

37:22 And finding the inner voice is not something you do on paper. It’s not—you can go ahead and learn it in a book, but it’s through action. You have to go, I feel like this is right, and then do it. And it’s scary. Even tiny little decisions like you said can be really scary. Make the choice, take the step, and then do it and then repeat.

37:48 And in this way you build a language for understanding your own body sensations, what you want, what you need, where you are.

37:56 Yeah, in life, and you learn how to give yourself the space to decide.

38:01 It’s really important in terms of consent to give yourself the right to fully consent to what’s happening around you. Now I am a huge believer in consent. My own experience is that I have not come across a situation that can’t wait. In my own experiences, every situation that I’ve experienced can wait long enough for me to check: are you comfortable with this? Do you need time to think about this? Are you aware of the outcome of this situation? Are you fully…

38:39 Here right now? Do you understand what’s happening right now?

38:44 Those things just to check: are you engaged in this? Are you here? Like, it’s really important. And there isn’t even a really hot, passionate, erotic situation happening too quickly to truly check my consent and anybody else’s. And that’s the inner voice as well, to give it a chance to be heard, to not rush forward, rush ahead, bully yourself into interactions that feel that they have a power imbalance, to take the time it takes to listen and to respond.

39:20 And to try new things. How about I wait half an hour? How about I walk outside and see what I feel then? How about I bounce up and down a bit and tap my body maybe and see if…

39:31 It—see if I become more engaged. So, and through giving myself the right to consent, I found nuances in my own body, mostly through slowing down and just asking questions.

39:45 And then allowing myself to choose to do something different. What about I just do something different? And different is enough. It doesn’t have to be the right choice. There’s no perfect answers, perfect clarity, encapsulated perfect outcomes only come in fairy tales. The reality of life is much more a kaleidoscope of infinite unimaginable potential, something like that. And some of that is uncomfortable.

40:12 Very uncomfortable. I know that fairly well. Yeah, really beautiful words. I like the way you put that together. And the waiting, yeah, is really important. Because the urgency, whenever I feel urgency, I know I need to slow down because that was the tool that was used to push me into doing things. It has to be done now because this, this, this, this, and if it’s not done then the world’s going to fall apart. But yeah, like you said, taking space and time to really check and explore is such an important facet of learning to get consent.

40:59 Yeah, and the…

41:01 All our topics. Well, we haven’t raced through. We’ve gone slowly through and we’re kind of getting to the end of our time. Can I just do some rapid fire questions for you? Would that be okay?

41:14 You can, but I just wanted to make a point about relationships because you brought it up by saying about consent.

41:20 I did. Right, okay. We don’t have to do rapid fire.

41:26 Well either way, I just wanted to say that through consent you build a relationship to yourself. And then that’s a relationship of trust. Always knowing that a safe relationship is a relationship you can pause. You can pause just because you want to.

41:41 You don’t need a good reason. And that’s safety without punishment, without retribution, without attack, without anything. Just like, let’s just pause for yourself, for myself, just to take a moment. And that’s what builds a safe relationship with another, that you can share wants and needs.

42:01 Yeah, yeah, beautiful words. What gives you hope when working with survivors?

42:07 These are the rapid final questions.

42:09 I think when someone takes an action they’re terrified of and it doesn’t have the outcome that they expected, and the sense of relief and delight that fills a person when they see an array of new possibilities because of one relatively small action.

42:34 If listeners remember one thing about today’s conversation, what would you hope that it would be?

42:40 The compass is inside. Resilience isn’t like strength, you’re not tearing something down, ripping it out, ripping it apart, raging against. It’s simply that you are here, you have a right to exist. The static and the noise pass, and your instrument is humming as it always did and always will. And you can learn to read yourself again and sing your own song.

43:12 I love it, love it, love it. I guess, yeah, we’re coming to a close right now. I’d love to have you back to discuss some other interesting topics because I really enjoy your perspective on these things. But yeah, on behalf of Unspun I would like to say huge thank you to you Bec’s for giving up your time and sharing so deeply and warmly.

43:36 I’ve really loved this conversation.

43:39 Thanks, Allie. Thanks for having me here. I hope that this perspective of mine, as well as I could put it in this short time, touches people and they find themselves, find their way to me if they feel drawn, or find the way to the connections needed.

43:58 On behalf of Unspun, I’d like to say thank you for joining us today for part two of our conversation. We hope today’s discussion has reminded you that reconnecting with your body, your desires, boundaries and your sense of self is not just about becoming someone new, it’s about rediscovering who you’ve always been beneath the layers of conditioning and control. These conversations aren’t always easy, but they’re important. By talking openly about topics like desire, consent, shame and healing, we create space for understanding, compassion and recovery.

44:37 If episodes have resonated with you, we’d love your support. Please follow us on Unspun, leave us a review and share these conversations with others who may find hope in hearing them. Also, please check the show notes if you would like to see Bec’s socials or connect with her. If you’d like to learn more about our work, connect with us. Until next time.

45:01 Take care of yourselves, be kind to one another. And remember, recovery isn’t about returning to who you were before. It’s about discovering who you are free to… Thanks for listening to Unspun. Bye for now.