Eric W. Phillips To keep our episodes focused on our experts and the value that they bring to these conversations, we're supplementing them with some deep-dives. These additional episodes may consist of conversations between Tim and Alyssa that deserve to be heard in full, or may highlight even more insight from our expert guests. Lizzy Bean Raising children within or adjacent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means navigating many layers of influence. Malia Burgess is a mental health professional we’ll hear more from in Episode 6. She gives us an overview of the way Church members, even children and youth, experience and carry the quiet suffering of our pioneer generations, whose obedience and silence was prized over safety. She’ll walk through how to talk to a child in ways that build trust and resilience if they disclose abuse or discomfort, and what actionable options are available for healing and support. Then, she'll look ahead at what it means to raise children who are equipped with the tools, language and agency to protect themselves in systems that still resist change. Malia Burgess My name is Malia Kealana Burgess. I am a licensed clinical social worker (I’m licensed in the state of Utah and in the state of Montana) and I'm currently the director of clinical operations at Encircle. Generational trauma is bred into us as members of the Church. You got to think about it: like, who were the people that were coming across the plains? These are people that are willing to endure risk. These are people that— whatever they were leaving behind was not good enough to make it seem better than this push Westward, right? So I think that, like, we have to admire the chutzpah of our ancestors or pioneer ancestors. And like, I think when you are walking across the plains and your virtue of being long-suffering and suffering in silence is being made into songs, and then basically worshipped by the modern church. I'm thinking of the push— the handcarts, I'm thinking of Trek— like, how you go— when you're, you know, a member of the Church, you go and you do all these things, hard things that your pioneer ancestors did, and you're not allowed to complain, right? Because whatever you're experiencing isn't as hard as what they experienced. So I actually think that sometimes generational trauma goes hand in hand with our veneration of our ancestors. And it's— and guess what our ancestors never did, was talk about sex, or talk about sexual assault, or talk about boundaries or talk about like, “Hey, there's a tricky person in our ward” that wasn't talked about for many reasons, right? It was a get it done, make it to, you know, Salt Lake City and live your life. It wasn't about like, you know, “Hey, are you okay?” I don't think our ancestors— that part was ever addressed. Like, “What is your experience of this world?” What we have done is venerate people who produce. And of course, now we're getting into our— my, Malia’s— capitalist society rant, which we won't go into today, but like, that seems to be more important— the suffering— than the healing. And I think that that is something that continues on with generational trauma today, is that, like, we worship the suffering of our ancestors, the silent suffering of our ancestors. How on earth can we reward people who stand up and say, “No, this is messed up,” when that is not what we have ever been taught to do from for our ancestors? If they had been like, “Hey, this is messed up, Brigham. We should wait to go till next year. It's a terrible time to leave.” We don't— we don't talk about that, right? We don't talk about the squeaky wheels, the whistleblowers. We talk about the long-suffering, the quiet strength of our ancestors, and I really think that some of that has come down into our current generation. Malia Burgess There's this sociological concept about sort of being on a stage, right? Where the stage is created, right? So I'm going to kind of paint a picture— for those of us that were raised in the faith, it'll be very familiar. You're waiting in this sort of almost darkened Church area where you never go at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night, so it's already feeling extremely unfamiliar, and it's almost like you're going to the principal's office. This is an intimidating landscape. This is a landscape that prioritizes, “you're on our time,” basically, and that your own autonomy in that moment— you will go into that room only when you're called, right? So the picture I'm painting to you, obviously is like a bishop's interview. I'm not sure if they call it something different now, but back in my day it was called the bishop's interview, where you would sit outside the bishop's office, and then once the bishop was ready, they would open the door and you would come in. The thing that would happen after that was always: the door will be closed behind you. So painting, again, this picture of you going into this adult man's office with all— and behind him there's a picture of Christ, right? That is the set, right? The set being: not only is this office that you're in a place that is not for you, it is a place that is ratified by God Himself. So the person that you are speaking to in this interview is not just, you know, your friend-down-the-street’s dad, even though that's the reality of who it is— you know, it's the guy whose lawn you walk on every other week or whatever. It makes it feel like you are facing God Himself, right? That this person speaks with the power of a deity. It is an power imbalance of the greatest degree. It could not be more imbalanced. And with all the the props around us being like, the Bishop's Handbook— that prop is not for me. That prop is for the bishop, meaning the bishop has a whole set of rule books (that I'm not privy to) that he will be following during this interview. So again, with the power imbalance, you're going into this whole setting: God is speaking through this picture to the bishop, and He's going to know if you're going to lie, right? That's the idea. Certainly when I was growing up, I'm like, “Well, if the bishop has the power of God, then I can't lie, right? Because the bishop's going to know,” and sort of, like, infusing that mystical experience when you are literally an eight-year-old girl sitting in— alone in a room with your friend-down-the-street’s dad, and he's asking you, “Have you ever masturbated?” Something like that. The imbalance becomes even more pronounced. It can be scary. It can be intimidating. And certainly I don't think that most people are equipped to talk about masturbation with their friend’s dad. It is the most uncomfortable situation that I think— one of the most uncomfortable situations I've been in as a human myself. And it's just being replicated for everyone in the Church. It's pretty interesting if you think about it. The thing that comes up for me most when we're kind of comparing and contrasting, like, a bishop’s interview with a therapy session— number one: me as a therapist, my first thing that's in my mind is rapport, right? I want to build rapport with my client, meaning I want my client to feel like they can talk to me. I want my client to feel like they can open up to me. Primarily, though, and with the groups I'm working with, I want them to feel safe. I really don't think that that— any of those things are prioritized inside of a bishop's interview. The bishop's interview is set up just like the Church, which is hierarchical, right? You are coming in— again, right? You're sitting in— you're sitting out the front waiting to be summoned. It's giving principal. It's giving, “You're naughty, go in the hallway,” right? It's giving all those sorts of, like, power differentials. So for me as a clinician, I'm working really hard to remove some of that space and distance and to be like, “Hey, I'm just a person,” right? In my therapy office, I might have behind me, right, my credentials to show, like, I'm actually trained in this stuff. In a bishop's office, you'll never see that, right? You won't see credentials posted on the wall. You will see a picture of Jesus. That is enough, right? That is— that is all the credential that a bishop might be asked to sort of pull out and show. For therapy, also, I work really hard to make it seem like I'm just a person, too. I might have a picture of my dog, I might have a picture of my family just to show, “Hey, I’m not any better than you. I don't have any more insight than you do into your own problems. You are the expert of your own life. And I might be here to point out some things I see, but I'm certainly never going to determine or judge you.” And I feel like in a lot of these spaces, that is exactly what is happening. And I think that often times when it comes to these situations, the bishops are so far out of their league they don't know what to do. And I'm certainly— I'm speaking to this as someone who— I kind of like, you know— I don't want to speak to recently what the Church has done because I haven't been super involved, but certainly when I was coming up in the Church, there was a lot being placed on bishops, an expectation of— you're not going to know how to handle this. And again, these are just— this is your friend's dad down the street. And I think sometimes that the secrecy is actually concealing or obfuscating “I don't know what to do. I don't know how to make this better. I don't know how to— I don't know how to deal with this sexual assault situation. So I'm going to, you know, tell this person to do that, tell this person to do that, and then we're not going to talk about it anymore.” And I think sometimes— I do feel for the bishops because they are being expected to play the role of a social worker, of a patriarch. They're expected to play— andand do it all unpaid. And a lot of— you know, a lot of the people who become bishops are people that have very high-powered jobs anyway. You know, there's a lot that is expected of them in that role. So I'll give them that much. I'll give them a tiny bit of pity around that. But I think sometimes that the secrecy and the silence is actually because people have no idea what to do when something like this happens at the ward level, and what it should be done is reported, right? But that has not been part of our cultural lexicon. And I don't know, I would hope today it's different, but I guess I don't have a lot of hope that it is, just because these patterns— the layman being able to have this much power for a ward, and all the— I mean, we know rates of sexual assault for women at 16% across a lifetime. Like, this is a high number of women that are experiencing sexual assault at the ward level. And I don't think bishops know how to handle it. I don't think they know what to do, and they don't want to say that, right? Because Jesus is behind them, right? And if they don't know what to do, what does that say about the power that they have? Malia Burgess I'm happy to speak about some of the modalities that I use with trauma. I originally trained working with kids, though— very young to, sort of, up through teenage years, and now I've sort of moved away from that. But I have found that a lot of the principles that we've come up with, working with trauma with young people, actually translate way better to adults than any other, like, modality: play therapy. I do a lot of play therapy with folks. In fact, I was just at this wonderful conference, the Mountain West Transforming Care Conference in Southern Utah— Springdale. What I have found— we were talking a lot about video games and how some of these video games can be used in therapy. And that's actually something I do with some of my clients. We play The Sims, where they are creating their whole family, and there's a bunch of personality traits for each family member. And it's fascinating to watch the process of a creation of a person that represented so much in someone's life, and then to watch their avatars interacting. There's really something magical and healing for a lot of my clients. They can sort of see them— see a version of themselves reflected on the screen that gets to fix the harm that happened. And while we weren't able to, you know, stop something from happening, stop something terrible from happening, there's something about watching— something about play and avatars. And it goes— it's the same for several different types of play therapy, like sand tray. That's— it's the same tenets of that. But watching your avatar experience healing can sometimes be a fantastic way for you, the individual, to start doing it. So anyway, play therapy. I’m also trained in EMDR. Most of the— most trauma therapists are or wish to be. We don't fully know why EMDR works. We have ideas about why it works, with the bilateral stimulation, but it is clinically proven to work. It helps you to sort of change your emotions around really hard times that you might have gone through. It uses sensory stimulation, just like lights and sounds, to help process through some of those deeper, difficult feelings that you might have. I myself have had a lot of EMDR for my own stuff. I found EMDR very helpful for me and as a clinician. There's a lot of other types of therapies that people use. CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) is kind of an old standby. A lot of people aren't super fans of it anymore, but I am a fan. So there are many, many different modalities and no way is wrong. It's really just kind of whatever the practitioner and the clinician— excuse me— and the client feel most comfortable with. Malia Burgess What I'm hearing is it might be helpful to hear kind of a timeline of like, recognition of behaviors, and then what would happen for a parent if they were to engage in the healing process if there was something. So I'm going to kind of work from it in that way. I would say, number one, trust your gut. I hate that answer for y'all. I'm sorry, but number one is trust your gut. If you're a parent and there's just— something doesn't feel right, something feels off, I saw my child engaged in something, and I— it's giving me a little tickle of, “Is that normal?” Right? And I hate that word, too. But I think you need to trust that. And then when it comes to, like, asking your child, like, “Have you been sexually abused?” That's really not what we— how we want to ask it. But there are ways to sort of ask in a way that isn't going to traumatize the child or maybe put some sort of narrative on something that they don't even understand. And maybe you don't have that understanding either of what's going on. So you can say something like, “Are there any tricky people in your life right now?” Right? You're not saying “bad person”— that doesn't connect for very young kids. You're not going to say, “Is there someone that's harming you or hurting you?” I remember asking a kid that once and he told me, “Yeah, the doctor,” because the doctor gave him shots, right? So if you— but if you're kind of sort of saying, “Is there someone in your life that, like, feels tricky to you, that feels a little bit sneaky? Someone that you don't trust, or someone that doesn't listen to you when you say, ‘I don't like that, that's sort of a little–‘?” And the answer might be something like, “Yeah, my uncle, he tickles me too much.” And then you can be curious about that. “Where does he tickle you?” “Oh, on my feet, and I hate it when he tickles me on my feet.” “Oh, anywhere else?” “No.” Right? That way you have sort of put a border around the thing that made you feel like you needed to ask about it, right? But if you— I would say for me, if I truly thought my child might be suffering or I'm feeling nervous, I would probably take them to a therapist or to a doctor or something like that. Doctor gets a little tricky—they may want to perform a physical exam, and that's not always the right— first right move because they're very invasive and can sometimes actually perpetuate harm. So, let's say though— God forbid, let's say that the child does disclose that there has been abuse. Parents have a real hard—obviously it's devastating. Parents have a real hard time with that. They don't want that to be the truth, right? So sometimes, as the therapist, there's some hard conversations that you might have to have with the parent to get them to understand sort of what is going on here. What I would never do is pull the child in and get into an argument with the parent about what happened and what didn't. So in that way, it's very good to have a professional sort of inside that conversation. So let's say, God forbid, some abuse was disclosed and the child begins therapy for me, I would probably go straight into Trauma Focused CBT— TFCBT— and sort of the trajectory of that. (And I'm just like smashing a really big modality into a few words here.) It's sort of preparing the child to tell the story of the abuse that occurred. With my clients, it's usually done through drawings or writings, and it will be maybe a few pages, a few books, a few images to put together the story of what happened to me. And— at which point, we will then bring in the primary caretaker, usually the parent, and be like “So-and-so, this child wants to share this story with you.” And this story took weeks— months— to prepare, right? And then the child will read or explain to the parent the things that happened, right? And at that point, usually I will say to the kid, “What should we do with this book?” Nine times out of ten, we go to burning it, right? And then we take it out behind my office, and burn it in a little metal trash can, and I'm like, “That's over now,” right? (I mean, obviously there's more to it. I'm smashing, right?) But the thing that ends up being most difficult in that is not what the child is doing— it's preparing the parent to hear it. And that is usually where a lot of my work goes into, without the child present, with the parent, preparing them to hear the story. And it's very important that the parent is not falling to pieces when the story is being told. That the parent— that the only feedback the parent is giving is, “Wow, you're very brave for sharing this with me and I am so grateful.” It's not, you know, picking apart the details of what the child remembers. What is important to a parent or— will never be what is important to a child, so of course details are going to differ. It's preparing that parent to not have an emotional response when the child is telling the story. We're modeling for children how to regulate and how to heal, right? And part of that is the adult’s— the adults’ role is to model that for the child while the trauma narrative is being spoken. So there's a lot of work that goes into that process of preparing the parent to hear it. So, and then honestly, at that point, I’m not saying that every kid is like, “Yay, I'm great.” But I have had many children that have just been like, “It's done now.” At that point— like, “I said the thing, we built it up to be— and then you did it, and you told your mom, and we burned it out back, and—amazing! Like, should we play some Uno?” You know, that sort of that's sort of a trajectory of it. Obviously it's not that simple. I don't want to discount any experience. It might take years and healing, and some people never heal, unfortunately. But that is certainly how I've seen it in my practice. Malia Burgess Teaching bodily autonomy goes hand in hand with consent. And consent is an important thing to teach not just to our girls, to our boys especially. I have a young son and it's always amazing to me how much consent is not built into our society. You have to mindfully teach it. It will not get in there just because you're a good person. You must teach people about consent— young people. So I would say— and consent can also extend to pressure. Like, I know, sometimes we think of consent like, “Hey, don't grab me,” but it can also— it's important to teach consent as a— you know, “If you don't want to do that and someone is verbally pressuring you, you don't have to do that,” right? So teaching someone that they have the power to can, to say no and to mean it. It doesn't always have to be waiting for them to grab you, right? It's not all— consent is not always a physical thing. So having— like, respecting verbal consent and having the words to say no. I work with so many young teens that don't know how to say no. They— we don't teach young people to be like, “This is how you say no to someone. This is how you say, ‘No thank you, I don't want to do that right now. No.’” We don't teach teens to be forceful when they say no. We sort of— and, for lack of a better word, we have absolutely prepared our children to not want to disappoint the adults in their life, right? So it's very important to teach children how to say no to an adult, right? And sometimes I don't love that either. My son will say, “No, I'm not going to do that.” And then I'll be like, “Okay, well”— that's a mom ask. Like, “You have to— you're— too many bath towels in your room. You must go collect them,” right? Like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, like, how do you teach your kid, when their aunt comes up and kisses them right here, half on the lip, half on the cheek— how can you tell your kid that they can say no to the aunt kiss, right? And they can do it in a way where you are giving them the words, because they may not have the words to convey their regard to their aunt but also at the same time say, “I don't really want a kiss right now.” We have to allow those two things to exist at the same time, and we don't do a good job of that in the Church— of being like, “No thank you, and that doesn't mean I hate you.” We have become so ingrained that saying no means that you're being mean or rude, and that is just not true. And it's leading a lot of people to not be able to say no in situations where they even— they don't want to do it. I think, I myself have many times heard myself saying, “Okay,” when it's something I don't really want to do, but because I know the other person wants me to do it, I hear myself, like, capitulating and going with it. And the minute the conversation is over, I'm like, “Why did I say yes to that? I don't want to do that.” It's because I was raised to be a people pleaser, because I was raised in the Church that taught me that my highest worth is in my adaptability, right? Is in my— in my ability to do what people need and want me to do. And unpacking that is extremely difficult and it can take a lifetime. So that's kind of why I'm like, let's start off early and like, not pack that suitcase. How about that? Let's not pack that suitcase and take it with us. So, the other thing I would mention is, for adults and especially for parents, if you're not already, you really need to be comfortable with talking about body parts and talking about what is and isn't okay, and using the appropriate words for those body parts, especially for the very young. We have to use words about our body parts that are normal, like words in a dictionary. Infantilizing body parts, calling them by different names, makes it seem weird and secretive and shady and something to be lied about when we know that lying about a body is not necessary or needed. So getting comfortable with talking about body parts with— talking about sex, depending on where your kid is in the stages of development, they may be ready for that, they may not be. You know, use your best judgment, read some books and, you know, get— you don't want your kid to be learning about sex, if you could help it, from anyone but you. You really don't want that. So, being okay with addressing some of those tougher topics with your kids, and then if your child is showing some sort of like, interest in something that is vaguely sexual— I don't know about y'all, but like, when— the first time I saw my kid kind of like, look at a girl in a bikini and be like, “Ooh,” I remember immediately my first reaction was like, “Don't do that,” right? Even though, like, I'm like, that's the most natural thing in the world. Like the kid— he saw a girl in a bikini, she looked pretty, and he went, “Ooh,” you know, that's normal. That's not weird. But my own knee jerk reaction was to go to that shame place for my child displaying any interest in a woman in a bikini. And that's my shit to unpack, which— I'm trying, but it's crazy where it ends up coming up. Lizzy Bean We’ll hear more from Malia in Episode 6, and numbers of our other expert guests, who all weigh in on the fact that the number one thing a survivor of abuse can do is pursue a path to healing.