Unconditioning Love

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In episode 21 of Unconditioning Love, Casey shares his unique story of growing up in a rural area of Atlantic Canada, where his family’s deep roots in the 2x2 church shaped much of his upbringing. As a sixth-generation member on his mother’s side, with his great-great-grandfather being one of the founding workers in the region, the weight of tradition and expectation loomed large. Yet, Casey always felt like an “other” due to the split nature of his home life—his father not being a part of the church created a sense of separation from those within the group.

Join us as Casey recounts his journey of leaving the meetings and navigating the complex feelings that came with stepping away from the beliefs he grew up with. Tune in for this powerful story of breaking free from generational expectations and finding freedom in authenticity.

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In this episode of "Unconditioning Love," Lydia sits down with Robert, who shares his journey of growing up as a third-generation member of the 2x2 high control religion, a highly sheltered upbringing within a strict religious environment. As a young adult, Robert began to question the core fundamental belief that attending this particular church was the only path to heaven. This internal conflict led him to leave the church, even though he did not have all the answers at the time. He felt that staying would be hypocritical.

Robert discusses the challenges and liberation that came with his decision to step away from the church. He explains how it took him six years after leaving to feel comfortable finding another church and how his perspective on religion has evolved. Now, Robert views religion as a form of language, where the essence and expression of belief can vary widely and still hold deep personal meaning.

Join us as Robert shares his experiences of deconstruction and the importance of authenticity in his faith journey.

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In this episode of "Unconditioning Love," we are joined by Tara, who bravely shares her story of growing up in a high control religion. Tara's parents began converting to this faith when she was six, which brought drastic changes to her life.

She went from celebrating holidays and wearing normal clothes to a life of handmade dresses, strict religious practices, and isolation from her extended family.

Tara talks about the bullying she faced at school due to her distinct appearance and the heartbreak of losing close connections with her grandparents. She was taught that anyone outside their church was doomed to hell, a belief that instilled deep fear in her young mind. 

Despite these challenges, Tara's journey is one of resilience and courage. In today’s episode she shares her journey to seeing the light of Grace and stepping out of the fear-based doctrine, embracing a path of healing and unconditional love.

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Welcome to today's episode of "Unconditioning Love," where we dive deep into the transformative power of forgiveness. Today, we’re tackling a topic that’s both personal and profound: how forgiveness has been misused and how we can reclaim it for our own healing.

In my journey through the church, I witnessed forgiveness often being weaponized. It was used as an excuse to provide safe haven for perpetrators, sweeping their atrocities under the rug and silencing the voices of those who were hurt. This distortion of forgiveness perpetuated cycles of harm and left many feeling invalidated and betrayed.

But what if forgiveness could be something different? What if it could be a personal, empowering journey? In this episode, we explore how forgiveness isn't about excusing or forgetting the wrongs done to us. Instead, it's about releasing the other person’s energy from our space, freeing ourselves from the weight of their actions.

Join us as we discuss the healing process, the steps we can take to reclaim forgiveness, and how this shift can transform our lives. It’s time to uncondition love and embrace forgiveness as a path to our own peace and liberation. Tune in and start your journey towards true freedom.

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Kelly calls in from Colorado to share the first part of her story, opening with the moment her parents professed into the high-control religion known as the truth. She was just one year old at the time. Her mother was new to the faith, while her father, who had left it as a teenager, felt compelled to return after his nephew's sudden death at a similar age stirred up a deep fear in him.

Because her two older sisters had a few years of ordinary childhood before the family's conversion, Kelly grew up with no memory of anything else. No Christmas, no television, no haircuts, nothing to compare it to. She describes herself as something of a blank slate for her mother, and she was a deep, sensitive thinker who taught herself to read at four. Books became the one private world the community couldn't reach. She professed at ten, was praised for the insight in her testimonies, and could only picture two futures for herself: marrying a professing man, or becoming a worker.
By her early teens, the logic of it all stopped adding up. If the only choice was to follow this path or go to hell, that wasn't really a choice. At fifteen, she made a defiant declaration to God: if hell truly was the only alternative, she would choose it, because intellectually the framework simply didn't hold. Emotionally, though, she stayed trapped for years in that same black-and-white thinking, carrying shame for not following the program and finding no one around her, not even therapists, who had ever heard of the group she'd left, which left her feeling profoundly alone in what she was working through.
At nineteen, a near-death experience during an anaphylactic reaction gave her a direct encounter with God that looked nothing like what she'd been taught. No conditions, no meetings, nothing to earn. She calls it the thing that saved her life, a seed of unconditional love that carried her until, around thirty, she began actively searching for and building a faith of her own.
Kelly and Lydia close on the idea of free will as a filter for what is and isn't of God, and on learning to respect each person's own timing and autonomy, even when most of their own families remain in the community. This is the first of two conversations with Kelly, who returns to carry her story forward from nineteen to where she is today.

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Andrea returns for a second conversation, this time recorded in person, after Lydia met up with her during a trip back to the US. Sitting together in Andrea's home, the two pick up a thread from their first conversation and turn it into a close look at two words: authenticity and judgment.

Andrea walks through how her own definition of authenticity has shifted. She used to equate it with being honest and vulnerable, and by that measure she thought she already had it figured out. It wasn't until her healing work that she realized she'd only ever been showing the parts of herself she believed would earn her love, while quietly hiding the rest. Real authenticity, she's come to believe, is being willing to be fully seen, whether that costs her people's approval or not.

The conversation turns to judgment, and both women admit how much of their own judgment toward others turned out to be judgment they were still carrying toward themselves. Andrea describes replacing an old habit of measuring a room before deciding who to be with a practice of curiosity instead, asking genuine questions and staying open, since self-compassion, she's found, is what makes compassion for anyone else possible.

They close on something more physical: dancing, dressing the way they actually want to, letting their bodies take up space after years of being taught not to. For both of them, reclaiming those small physical freedoms turned out to be as much a part of coming home to themselves as anything they'd unpacked in words.

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Andrea grew up in what she calls a "broken home," bounced through twelve different schools and five stepfathers, largely raising herself on the streets of her neighborhood while her mother, in survival mode herself, was often absent. Without any consistent guidance, Andrea would wander into whatever church happened to be nearby and sit through the service alone, starting around age nine, no one ever asking where her parents were.

Religion became something more structured every summer, when her aunt and uncle took her and her brother in and enrolled them in church camp. It was there, around campfires and long hikes, that she first felt something like the presence of God, and began building a relationship with what she describes as "this man in the sky." But that relationship never touched the deeper wound underneath it: she felt fundamentally unworthy of love, and praying to an unseen, unresponsive God only layered a second absent father onto the abandonment she already carried.

That belief followed her into marriage and motherhood, where she built her worth around performance: self-sacrifice, cheerfulness, service to everyone but herself, the verse "a cheerful heart is good medicine" pinned to her identity while she came home each night exhausted, lonely, and quietly begging God to rescue her. It wasn't until she sat down to write, about four years ago, that the mask cracked. What started as an innocent attempt to put her childhood on paper pulled her into what she calls "the cave," a dark, disorienting collapse she tried more than once to climb out of before finally surrendering to it.

As she kept writing, Andrea began to see the deeper belief underneath everything: that her whole life had been an act of self-abandonment dressed up as service, and that being loved unconditionally was never supposed to depend on how well she performed. Reparenting that twelve-year-old version of herself, she says, has meant treating her the way she now treats her own children: with presence instead of pressure, and love with no conditions attached.

That reckoning eventually reached her extended family too, and when she tried to voice what she was working through, most of the people she expected to show up for her went quiet instead. What surprised her was who did show up: strangers, support groups, people with no obligation to her at all. She's since turned that healing into a published book, and closes the conversation with her own definition of unconditional love, which for her comes down to one simple, ongoing question to the people she loves: how can I make you feel loved without conditions?

Connect with Andrea's work here: https://cheydrea.com/book

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This week I'm doing something a little different: instead of a conversation, I'm leading you through a short guided meditation for healing your inner child around your voice. It's meant for a quiet, comfortable moment, eyes closed if you can, definitely not while you're driving, because we're going inward together.

I walk you through a few grounding breaths and then invite you to picture a younger version of yourself, whatever age comes up for you, who wasn't able to speak their truth or use their voice. From there we hold that version of you, send them love, and let a soft blue light move into the throat, the place where our voice lives, loosening the old fear around what would happen if you spoke up.

The meditation closes on a phrase I ask you to carry with you afterward: the world is a better place because I choose to take up space. If it resonates, I'd encourage you to write it down somewhere you'll see it this week, because your voice, and what it took from you to find it, is needed exactly as it is.

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Esta semana Lydia conversa en español con Elda, desde Panamá, quien fue invitada a las reuniones de "la verdad" siendo adulta y terminó entregando toda su vida a la iglesia. Elda comparte cómo, desde niña, sintió una necesidad genuina de pertenecer a una comunidad y servir a Dios, un anhelo que la llevó a las reuniones y que, con el tiempo, se convirtió en el centro absoluto de su existencia.

Juntas reflexionan sobre la enseñanza de que quienes no pertenecen a "la verdad" están condenados. Lydia comparte un recuerdo de su niñez: una conversación profundamente espiritual con un hombre católico que los siervos descartaban por no estar en el camino correcto, a pesar de la sabiduría genuina que ella percibía en él.

La conversación se vuelve más difícil cuando abordan las revelaciones de abuso sexual dentro de la iglesia, incluyendo la respuesta de líderes en Centroamérica que minimizaron la magnitud del abuso en lugar de proteger a las víctimas. Elda y Lydia coinciden en que el poder que ejercen los siervos sobre las personas más vulnerables rara vez se usa para educar o proteger, sino para mantener el control.

Ambas hablan también de la "voz pequeña y silenciosa" de Dios, y de cómo aprender a escuchar esa voz interior, en lugar de depender de la voz de los siervos, fue un regalo central en su proceso de sanación después de salir de la religión. La conversación cierra con un mensaje de esperanza para quienes están saliendo de este tipo de ambientes: que no están solos, que el proceso toma tiempo, y que Cristo, como el gran médico, es quien puede sanar las heridas más profundas dejadas por el abuso y el control.

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When the abuse allegations around "Dean" broke last spring, Relyssa did what she always does with a crisis: she researched it obsessively, joining Facebook groups and reading every exit story and old exit letter she could find on sites like x2x2.com. What she found there dismantled something she hadn't realized she still believed, that the workers and overseers held some kind of moral high ground over everyone else.

The breaking point came when she learned the details of a 2009 incident involving a sister worker at Ira Hobbes' house. That story, on top of everything else she'd been reading, ended whatever trust she had left in the overseers, especially once she realized that even the workers she loved and trusted, including two of her own sisters, ultimately answered to leadership she wouldn't trust with anything. She messaged her group that same day: I'm done. Her husband needed several more months to arrive at the same place, which he eventually did.

A worker once held Relyssa's pregnant belly and told her, remember, your baby has a soul, and that soul is never going to die, a comment aimed less at comfort than at warning. She and Lydia talk about how becoming a parent actually made boundaries easier to hold, since protecting a child's safety and their future understanding of God as love rather than fear became the clearest reason to finally step back.

They also dig into the phrase so many people who've left use to describe the moment it clicked: God led me out. Relyssa never saw herself as rebelling, just as finally seeing clearly what she couldn't unsee, and she and Lydia talk about how leaving makes it possible to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once, something the meetings never allowed room for.

The two also talk candidly about the quiet grief of family and friends who never asked a single question after she left, and how a memory of Lydia's own, a message she felt during a convention warning her that continuing down that path would cost her everything, kept surfacing throughout the conversation.

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