This is part of a series of guest posts on the topic of mixed faith marriages (MFM) from a variety of mental health professionals, coaches, podcasters, counselors and regular readers offering advice from their own experiences. Keep your eyes on the blog over the next few weeks for more great content, and feel free to submit your own essay to this series by emailing [email protected]. (Thanks! -Abby Maxwell Hansen)
Guest Post: Megan Story Chavez is a licensed marriage and family therapist at https://progressivepathstherapy.com/ and a professor of Marriage and Family therapy at Utah Valley University https://www.uvu.edu/mft/. She enjoys working as a therapist with couples who have a significant difference in their relationships such as mixed-faith, interracial, or mixed-orientation partnerships, and emerging adult individuals. Megan’s research focuses on the biopsychosocial-spiritual framework, currently, the studies she is working on center on the interconnection between spiritual transitions and mental health. She loves teaching graduate students, especially supervising student therapists. Megan enjoys attending concerts with her partner and playing with her two kids.
My Experiences
As someone who group up in Utah Valley, I became very used to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints being mainstream. Most of the friends I had growing up attended church with their families each week. We would often talk about achievement days, young women, and family home evening without considering that there may be members of our friend group that did not have context for what we were discussing. Many of my friends were also LDS. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I began to interact with others who were not actively LDS, however even then being LDS was the majority. This sameness in religion was my normal. With that sameness, the challenge of navigating relationships, especially close relationships with people who believed differently religiously was not something I knew how to do.
As I stepped away and retired from the church, my parents, ½ of my siblings, most of my best friends, many of my students, and a good portion of my clients were still actively members of a church that I no longer believed in. A church I felt had harmed me and others; the same church that offered them peace and happiness. How do we develop and have strong relationships when we believe so differently? When they mentioned something about the peace they felt in the temple, I wasn’t sure what to do with the gut punch I felt. They also experienced a gut punch when I talk about feeling grief over my temple marriage. None of us have a map for how to do this, especially when we have been so used to the sameness in religious practice. None of us knew how to manage our feelings, conversations, and changes around this.
While I was personally trying to figure out how to manage this, I also saw this in my clinical practice. My clients shared that they also struggled to relate to people that they love who had fundamentally differing beliefs. Beliefs that were deeply integrated into the identities of people on both sides of the experience. Clients described conversations where neither party wanted to be unkind or disrespectful, but both were unsure about how to do that when their own feelings about the topics were so strong and intense. As a researcher I tried to go to both social media and the research literature for support. I found many therapists talking about it, many of whom had great tools, but not many who had research literature to support their approaches. During my clinical training at BYU in 2014 faith transitions and mixed-faith marriages were not topics discussed regarding couple and family therapy. When I moved back to Utah in 2019, my case load was full of people in these experiences. So, without research to rely on, I did the best I could and when I got an academic position in 2020 at UVU, I knew that I would focus on how to support people in these experiences, and I have done just that.
Findings
In the research I have been doing in this area a clear concept has emerged that supports individuals and couples navigating mixed-faith relationships. That is the concept of differentiation. This is the therapy language for the concept of being able to recognize that we need others and connection is critically important while also knowing we can do that without losing ourselves for the relationships in our lives. We can have different beliefs from one another while still being connected. Meaning someone that is highly differentiated can know their relationship with people who believe differently can be critically important while also staying calm and clearheaded enough face the conflict that comes with this. Mixed-faith couples who described feeling resilient in their relationships with one another also described a process of being able to practice and increase their levels of differentiation.
This may look like being able to sit and listen to your partner describe the beautiful experience they had at church and validate the experience while also holding the discomfort that brings to you. It may look like your parent or partner recognizing that your desire to drink alcohol or coffee is related to your values and doesn’t speak to you being a bad person or unworthy person. They may show this by being able to support you in this by making you a morning coffee or even having coffee in the home when you come to visit, even though they don’t drink it. It is about finding a way to be an individual who knows how to connect with people who are different while still owning who they are and their identity outside of the relationship. One of my favorite therapist theorists, David Schnarch stated, “Giving up your individuality to be together is as defeating in the long run as giving up your relationship to maintain your individuality. Either way, you end up being less of a person with less of a relationship,” (2009, p. 55). People in relationships that are able to be differentiated do not give up individuality or the relationship but find a way to hold both.
Practicing Findings
The question I often get is how do we become differentiated? There are a few things that I believe help. One strategy that is increasing our own emotional regulation strategies. That way when our partner/s, family members, or friends bring up topics or ideas that are challenging for us, we have the tools to process and soothe ourselves. Four elements of emotional regulation according to Chen and Giblin (2018) are:
- Emotional Acceptance – Accepting our emotions and the emotions of others without judgment.
- Mindfulness – Building awareness of experiences, thoughts, and emotions.
- Flexible Reactions – Practicing flexibility in our reactions and responding to our own emotions in accordance with our own values.
- Interpersonal Skills – Recognizing and expressing emotions, thoughts, and ideas and asking for support when needed.
Learning how to increase emotional acceptance, mindfulness, have flexible reactions, and increasing interpersonal skills are each process that take time. One way of engaging these tools in conversations within mixed faith relationships is to recognize our feelings when they arise and let ourselves sit with the sensations that come with those feelings and checking in with what information those emotions are offering to us about our values. We can then process that through conversation, movement, art, etc. When we can personally do that, it gives us more space to hold both our own feelings and give space to others. As both people practice emotional regulation tools, the conversations can become responsive and engaging rather than reactive and activating.
Another strategy that supports differentiation is recognition of our personal values. Values are different than goals but rather are directions that we move towards without an endpoint. Common values are kindness, integrity, honesty, authenticity, etc. Values support us in finding ways of living and doing things in life as well as support us in living our lives with meaning and purpose. I’ve found that as people when we know what our values are, it better helps us accept differing values in other. When we are confident in ways of living that give us meaning, discussion of values for others are less challenging or confronting to our own identities. Then within our conversations we can become curious about other people’s values and recognize the differences without a threat to ourselves. This supports the idea that love doesn’t mean sameness but that differences can provide us opportunities to be curious, connect, and get to know each other better.
References
Chen, M. & Giblin, N.J. (2018). Individual Counseling and Therapy
Schnarch, D. (2009). Passionate marriage: Keeping love and intimacy alive in committed relationships. W.W. Norton & Company.
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This post is part of a series about navigating Mixed Faith Marriages. Find more from this series here.
One Response
Another thing to keep in mind is that in our culture, there is still remnants of the idea that the wife becomes a subset of the husband with no identity legally or socially except as his wife. This is a huge lack of differentiation. And in the LDS church, women are still socialized as auxiliaries to their husbands. So, when a husband leaves the church, the wife loses a huge chunk of her identity because her identity is so tangled up in his as priesthood holder. So, she loses the priesthood in her home as well as a chunk of her identity as “good Mormon wife.” And let’s face it, the church still treats women who lack priesthood in the home as lacking. Her testimony doesn’t matter because without a priesthood holder in her home she is no longer “good enough” for the church.
I guess I had an advantage growing up in Utah in a poor neighborhood where the Mexican migrant workers would move in to the cheaper housing, so I had more Catholic friends than Mormon until junior high. Then, I no longer depended on neighborhood friends, but found school friends that lived across town. Even with the same Mormon best friends, all through junior and high school I had more friends who were not Mormon than were. I just seemed to attract them, maybe because I didn’t treat them as needing to fix their lives by converting. I look back now and wonder how I even found all those nonmembers in Provo, Utah in the 1960s.
But as I got older and we moved back to Utah after 20 years military service, I began to realize that it is me. I don’t think I like Mormons. At least not Utah Mormons. So, maybe blame all my Catholic friends from grade school. But I have always felt more myself around nonmembers.
In fact, I was to lunch with some ladies friends recently, and two of them had recently visited the new temple open house in Washington Utah. So, the other four ladies were all talking about Mormons and the temple and what went on in the temple, and never seemed to even register that my husband is an active Mormon and so I might know something about what goes on inside a Mormon temple. I was too busy laughing inside that they all seem to think of me as not Mormon to add to the conversation by disabusing them of the idea that I know nothing about Mormons.