Why Deconstruction is an Essential Part of Complex Trauma Recovery

EP 146 | Why Deconstruction is an Essential Part of Complex Trauma Recovery

[00:00:00] Introduction

Hello everyone. Today, I want to talk about something that many of us who are healing from complex trauma as people of faith experience and find really, really difficult to wrap our minds around. Very difficult to accept. And that is deconstruction. Okay, so I know this term deconstruction is... it's kind of like a hot potato.

It's a word that probably would evoke immediate emotional responses in people. For some of us, you know, it's like a red flag, it's dangerous, it's not something that we should encourage. Perhaps some of us feel like we should do anything possible to stop people, to stop people from deconstructing. Because You know, deconstruction would lead to loss of faith in God, maybe loss of any kind of moral compass, loss of having an anchor or groundedness. Now that's one possible take on deconstruction or say the kind of emotional, immediate emotional response, reaction that it may evoke. 

And I want to just acknowledge that when I was younger in my journey. And younger in age as well, that would be the camp that I would have belonged to. All right, but having made my own interior integration journey, particularly in the healing of complex trauma, I have had to admit that deconstruction is part and parcel of this journey. 

[00:01:44] Defining Deconstruction

Now, caveat: first, I think before we get too worried about what deconstruction is, I'm going to define it in a little bit. Okay. How, uh, what I mean by deconstruction, and I'm also going to be talking about three different zones or areas that I have had to experience deconstructing and faith is only one of those zones.

Okay. So when I talk about deconstruction in this episode, I'm talking about in a more general sense. And I hope that by talking about what I've come to understand about deconstruction and why it's a necessary part of the healing journey. I can maybe, uh, give those of you who are experiencing these things and not having anyone to kind of, um, give you assurance, right, that that this is a normal part of the journey. I hope that this episode will give you something to hold on to like not cling on to but you know, give you a sense that perhaps what you're experiencing is normal. And, to also let you know that it is very, very hard to come by people and resources who will assure us in this way, because I think a big part of the reason is unless you have really experienced it yourself, you just can't believe the deconstruction could be a good thing.

Okay. So like practically I'll say all the people like authors or podcasters or resources that I have come across that have helped me, like given me a steadying, a steadying hand as I was going through this part of the interior journey, when I was asking questions I never asked before, doubting, like in a sense, really like deconstructing, um, all of these resources, these people who have become guiding lights, they have gone through that experience themselves.

So I'm someone who I'm going through the experience I've gone through. I think, um, well, I, I hope probably the most intense part of that deconstruction process, I can never be sure. All I can say is it feels like I have come out of the most intense part of that experience, which was, you know, um, two years ago.

And, I think I'm ready now to talk a bit more about why this experience of deconstruction is actually a beautiful thing, at least even if you cannot see it as a beautiful thing, that's fine. Why it makes sense that deconstruction has to be a part of our healing from complex trauma. Okay, so I would like to begin by giving you a definition, okay, of what I mean by deconstruction. 

So, very simply, when I say deconstruction in this episode, I mean questioning basic assumptions that we had never questioned before. Okay? So, that's really scary because we don't often think about the foundations, for example, of the building that we are in, right, or the house that we live in. We take it for granted. 

Deconstruction is when we start finding the need to ask questions about the foundations that our house is built on. Okay, so we start questioning very basic assumptions that we never questioned before. And at the same time, deconstruction is also when we open up to new possibilities that we were never open to before.

Okay, like we are open to considering that, for example, that there could be something wrong in our foundations that maybe there needs to be a rebuilding or maybe that a different kind of foundation is actually better for us to, you know, to build our house on the maybe the realization that the house we're in is actually not on steady soil or not on like not built on rock, for example, right? 

[00:06:02] Three Zones of Deconstruction

So, there are three zones of deconstruction that I have experienced in the process of healing from complex trauma all right. And, this is actually also I'm sharing it in the order that I experienced them all right. 

So the first zone is the zone of self-identity Like who I am, who I experience myself to be, who I believe myself to be.

The second zone is that of familial and cultural values. Okay, so we're talking about, like my understanding of family, of what it means to be family. The values that I learned and imbibed from being part of my family, part of my culture. Right. The values that were handed down as part of the culture that my family belongs to. So that's the second zone. 

And the third zone that I have experienced deconstruction is, is in the area of faith. Okay. And faith here, I would include both who God is, my relationship with God, and also the religion that I belong to or the church. Okay. So I'm, I'm Catholic. I'm Roman Catholic. So what does it mean to be Catholic?

So all of those dimensions would be part of the zone of faith. So again, the zones of deconstruction that I've experienced in complex trauma healing, uh, self-identity, family, and cultural values and faith. So let me just. through each of these in turn and share a little bit on why that is that, uh, you know, that I believe we, we need to experience deconstruction or exactly maybe not why that is, but what, what actually happens, right?

So I'm going to be giving you kind of like a description, an observation of what happens. 

[00:07:57] 1. Self-Identity Deconstruction

So in the first zone and that's self -identity, which is the whole question of who am I. Right, many complex trauma survivors will know this experience of I don't really know who I am or maybe, , I thought I know who I was and then some crisis hits, usually the crisis that brings us into the healing journey of complex, you know, of complex trauma healing integration. And then we realize we never really knew who we are. Right? 

And then we go through this process of differentiating between our Role Self, okay? R-O-L-E, Role Self, and our Core Self, okay? So, when I use the terms Role Self and Core Self, I'm also borrowing terminology from IFS, Internal Family Systems, and also the general literature on healing in trauma. 

Role Self is that self that I need to be in order to survive. Okay, so Role Self is the identity that we have cultivated since childhood or adolescence, young adulthood, that identity that has worked the best for us in order to survive the circumstances that we were in. So, for example, my Role Self includes being like the super responsible, reliable, capable person, you know, that I'm the eldest child, I was the head prefect in school, I'm a leader. I have this Role Self, this identity that this is who I need to be in order to get affirmation. To be worthy of love so that other people will love me and, you know, notice me maybe and trust me with, with responsibilities. I also, my Role Self also includes being the person that can help others who are in trouble, care for those in need, right?

So this Role Self is the self that I have so identified myself with growing up that I didn't really have any sense of who I was outside of that, okay? My Role Self also included being a really good Catholic. And a lot of these definitions in there about what it means to be responsible, to be a good Catholic, to be a good leader, all that, they are not very nuanced.

They come as part of like a package, a script. And we all experience our Role Self in a rather compulsive way, right? There is a compulsion that drives us to perform according to certain scripts that we don't question. We never question the scripts that our Role Self acts out of. Um, because to question those scripts would be to question what we need to do in order to survive. Before our awakening, so to speak, before we really enter into the journey of healing and integration, our Role Self is pretty much all we know about who we are. 

Our Core Self, on the other hand, is like the deeper self, the real self. The Self that God created us with, right? Um, as in, it's that person that over the years have become lost that we have lost touch with because aspects of this core self that weren't received were not affirmed, have been buried, and maybe suppressed or repressed and hidden. 

Now when we begin to make progress in the healing integration journey we begin to differentiate between our Role Self and our Core Self. We begin to reconnect with who we actually are: our Core Self right? 

And more than that, as people of faith, as a person of faith, I began to realize that apart from this distinction between the self that I've always felt I needed to be, and that's not who I really am, it's not the fullness of who I am, that there's this other core self, this deeper self that has been hidden and I want to rediscover, right?

I also began to have this realization that God is still continually calling me to become, right. So my, my true self in that sense is not just limited to the real self that I am now, you know, I am still becoming and that this true self that is still becoming is actually open ended. Now why is this significant? All scripts are closed. Okay, uh, in the sense of the survival scripts are closed. Role selves, the identity that we have to, to survive, they are closed. Meaning they are very tightly locked because it's coming from a place of survival within us. We don't dare to keep it open ended. All right, because to be open ended means to risk what we do not know. And the scripts have come about because we have learned that this helps us to survive. When we are acting from a place of survival, there is no capacity to be open to the unknown and to new possibilities. That's just too risky.

So in order for us continually respond to God's work in our lives, the transformative work in our lives, to continually become who God is calling us to be, we need to get out of our Role Self, right? We need to get out of the survival scripts that we have. So this process means a dying to who we've always known ourselves to be.

That deconstruction that we experience in our identity, it really feels like a death. Okay, everyone who has gone through this process or who are going through this process knows just how difficult it is to die to our role selves or to die to the scripts that have ruled our lives for so long in order to keep us safe, right?

So that's the first layer of deconstruction that I experienced in my interior journey of integration and healing. And I'll say this is the, this was the most fundamental one that I think is the basis of further deconstruction in the other zones. 

[00:14:32] 2. Familial and Cultural Values Deconstruction

So the second zone of deconstruction that I experienced in the zone of family and cultural values. Now this is linked very much to the role self that I have because think about it, where do our survival scripts of who I need to be come from?

Well, we take the cues from our families of origin, right? From the culture that we live in, from the culture of our extended family, the society that we live in. We develop our role self kind of like as a, as a mishmash between the traits that we have, that we're able to do perform versus what is accepted.

So that's why each of our role selves are so different because we're so different, right? We have different strengths, gifts, we have, um, you know, different, different temperaments. Right. And often our survival scripts consist of our gifts, our temperament, you know, like what, what has been given to us now used to help us survive.

So they no longer really lead to flourishing, right? These gifts of temperament or talents that we have may not lead to flourishing, but they become part of what allows us to cultivate a Role Self that can be relatively received or seen by others. So a big part of that would be what was valued in our families of origin, what our parents valued, what our extended family, you know, and um, cultural tradition valued.

So when we begin to question our Role Self, and we recognize that that's not who we are and we realize that there were aspects of us, which are really good, which somehow was not welcome, which in these parts were not welcome or not affirmed by our family, we connected now to what does it mean to be a member in my family, right?

We begin to recognize the role that we play in our family or how our Role Self serve our family systems, and we now begin to notice how those family systems have really harmed us. So when we begin to realize how tradition and cultural values as embodied and handed down through our family has harmed us or caused us trauma, that leads us to start asking questions, right?

Like we never, you know, when you're a little kid, you don't question whether these values or these traditions that your family tell you is very important because it's part of your heritage. You never questioned whether they're good. They just are. And you often experience it as, uh, you know, if I can align myself with these values or I perform, in ways that are aligned to how my tradition or cultural values expect me to act.

So, for example, for me, let's say as a girl, right, as opposed to if I were a boy. I'm female, so, you know, there are certain roles, certain traits, certain behaviors that are expected of a female in my family, in my culture. When I act according to those values, I maybe experience more acceptance. But as I awaken to the complex trauma in my life, I also recognize how some of these things have really harmed me, right? 

So those things that I never questioned before about what was valued in my family, about how one should act in the family, for example, I begin to question them. And at some point, I even begin to reject some of these things, um, very vehemently, because I realized how harmful they have been to me and eventually even to the other people, the other members of my family.

I begin to notice how these things have harmed others, right? So when we begin to notice how tradition and cultural values have caused us harm, caused trauma, or how these traditions have been used to justify and hide abuse in the family such that we don't even recognize abuse as abuse because that's just the way our family is. That's just what our culture is. You know, you don't question what has been handed down through our ancestors. If anything, maybe there have been some improvement, like maybe there has been some progressive healing, let's say in some, you know, in later generations, it's not as extreme, the expression of certain cultural values, but still there's an underlying collective belief that these values are good and you don't question them. 

Now, when you begin to awaken to how those values have facilitated abuse or hidden abuse, or been used to keep us silent and compliant and loyal to the family system in the face of injustice, we start asking questions, right, that we never asked before. 

So this is also one zone in which we can experience deconstruction when we heal from complex trauma, right, in the area of family and cultural values.

[00:19:53] 3. Faith and Religious Deconstruction

The third zone of deconstruction. And this was, um, I wanted to say initially that this is probably the last or the third zone that I experienced deconstruction is. But even as I was gonna say that I realized it's more nuanced than that, it's more nuanced than that because there is, I think my relationship with God and how I saw him has been all along, all along evolving and changing as I went through my journey of healing and, um, you know, healing and integration, right? 

But I think I didn't feel that, I didn't feel the intensity of, um, this deconstruction, the area of faith for me until it reached the point of my religious identity. Okay, so which is distinct from just my relationship with God. But I just want to say that in some ways, this is similar for a lot of us to our experience of family and cultural values. Okay, because this is not just our self identity, but how it connects to something larger than us. 

For many of us, when we begin to realize how religious traditions and values as embodied and handed down through our faith family has harmed us and caused trauma, or has been used to justify and hide abuse. Or, has been used to keep us silent, compliant, and loyal to the religious system in the face of injustice. This is when we really start asking questions that we never asked before. And this area, this zone, is very closely intertwined, for me at least, with the second zone, because religion and my family, uh, you know, they're intertwined, right?

So the experience that I have of my family of origin was a combination or a mix of the cultural values and traditions that come from my ancestry as Chinese. And, uh, you know, and it's more, more complex than that as well, because let's say one half of my family Indonesian Chinese, and I'm Singaporean Chinese, that's in the other half.

So there are all these complexities of culture. And then you add on or you layer on the dimension of how the Catholic faith is embodied, modeled, practiced, experienced within this family system, within this family system, right? There are ways in which the cultural dimensions impact how faith is expressed, how faith is understood, how the religious practices of Catholicism, for example, has been interpreted, understood, and embodied, which may or may not actually have very much to do with relationship with God or who God is. 

So that's part of the whole complexity that there can be a lot about our religious experience that can be quite separate from an actual relationship with God because there are rules and there are rituals and there are traditions and there are there are cultural dimensions to the religion that for many of us I think we experience as part of our family of origin.

And they were never questioned until we begin to really develop a personal relationship with God. And then we begin to notice that there can be a lot of difference between who God actually is, as He reveals himself to us in relationship to us, and, um, just the cultural, um, religious, doctrinal, you know, liturgical expressions of our faith. 

So when we begin to experience, well, whatever, whatever it is that we experience in our complex trauma recovery journey , we begin to question what kind of God we believe in. Because when we realize that the God of the faith that we grew up in is part of a system that has caused real harm to us and to others. And, you know, it has masked or continues to hide injustice, we have to ask, right? I mean, what do we believe in this kind of God? Because in the past, maybe we didn't realize how much harm was being done, how much injustice was actually happening, how much abuse was actually being facilitated and hidden, let's say, under the cloak of even a very religious cultural system, family, or church. Now we see this. 

Okay, we, we cannot deny this because we're on this very real gritty journey about the real. We're seeking the truth. So when we are healing from complex trauma, we are really seeking the truth, not just the ideal. We cannot heal from complex trauma. There's no recovery if we cannot just look reality in the eye more and more and accept and stop denying, stop rationalizing, stop making excuses, for our family, for, the systems that we were part of, for the church that let's say, you know, religion, organized religion, whatever systems it is that we have been part of.

So when you stop rationalizing and denying and making excuses for them, and then we have to face these really, really difficult questions, right? That we can't run away from anymore. Do I really believe that or do I even really want to believe that there's a God who would condone these things? For example, you know, um, do I still believe in this God that I have been catechized about that I used to never question but maybe I just had like a religious assent and cognitive kind of assent to and now now this is really real there is there's an existential weight to this question, whether I believe or not believe in Him, what does it mean to say, I believe in God? Do I believe that God is love? Do I believe that God loves, right? 

So that's one way in which we really start tearing apart the structures of our old belief and a lot of times in process of tearing down, we don't know what it is we believe. So a lot of us will have seasons where we feel like I can't say I believe anymore, right that that's part of the process. And this process can also lead to a growing gap. Okay, this growing chasm between our lived experience of God, because for me, okay, so speaking for myself because I know the process and experience is different for everyone but for me, um that wrestling with God has been, it's been very challenging, but it continues to lead me into deeper and deeper trust in Him.

God was breaking me open. He, I felt like, He was really asking me, do you really trust me? Can you trust me? And He kept showing me that I could trust him. Now, the problem, "the problem". Okay. So I say, I put it in air quotes. The problem was the more this amazing God revealed Himself to me as someone I could trust, as someone who really loved me unconditionally, whose mercy was boundless, as someone who, as someone who was truly attuned to me and wanted me to attune to myself, it's like the more God became embodied in me, the more different, He became, or this, this, this experience of God became from my religious upbringing or my religious experience of being a Catholic. 

Okay. So there's this growing chasm between our lived experience of God who journeys with us and the religious system that we have trusted all along in the past as gatekeepers to our relationship with God. Okay. So this also, this is also connected with family because my family was the first place that I got to know God.

It was within my family that faith was modeled to me, right? And that's something really objectively good about that. I will always be grateful that I was baptized, that I, you know, I was, that I had the upbringing that I had in the aspect of, this is how I got to know God. But along with introducing me to God and initiating me into a relationship with God, that process came with a lot of baggage, a lot of distortions about who God is, a lot of distortions about what love was, right. 

So that meant that although I had a relationship with God, it was very insecure. It was not securely attached. There was so many things about God that was not true about Him that was believed by my elders in my family. And I would say my elders, my spiritual elders in the religious system that I belong to, right. 

So, and, and as a child, and even as a young adult in the past, I never questioned. Their image of God, or the image of God that they passed down to me. They were the gatekeepers to my relationship with God. I looked to them to make sure that I was kind of like on the right path, that I was not believing wrongly, right, that I was doing what I needed to do in order to be a good Catholic, for example.

And all that also played into was part of my role self, because remember I said part of my role self was that I needed to be a good Catholic. So it was a closed loop there. I needed to be a good Catholic. How do I know what it means to be a good Catholic? I look at what the gatekeepers tell me, right, when I was younger.

My parents, the elders in my family, how they practiced their faith, what they said was true, what I needed to do to win God's favor or to be on God's good side. Uh, so I hope you can tell as I say this. It's part of a script already, right? That there is a conditional aspect to what it means to be Catholic because we need to be a certain way or behave a certain way to, in order to go to heaven and not go to hell. And this is also connected with my religious experience of catechism. You know, the whole Catholic experience from the retreats that I go to, the preaching that I've always, all the preaching I've heard, um, the faith formation classes I've gone to, mixed into all of that, there are, there true things and good things, and now I realize there are a lot of things that are distorted. 

So there are a lot of things that are also not good and even toxic and spiritually abusive built into that, that fullness of experience of growing up in a family and in a faith system. Right? And when we begin to make our interior integration journey in earnest, when we start healing from complex trauma, we start going really deep and looking into, like I said, the foundations, which we had never done so before.

Because now we realize something's wrong, right? And when we can no longer deny that something's wrong, we naturally ask questions. So this is also why people often start deconstructing in their faith, right? And, and feel like, I cannot believe the way that I believed before. I don't, I don't think I'm able to believe the way I believed before because if I did, or if I tried to, there would not be any integrity to the existential truth that I am experiencing now in my body.

And when I experienced that God is with me as well, uh, in my embodied experience, and that is very different from the God of my upbringing, I start questioning, right? What is it that I believe in? So that happens in different ways for different people. Okay. I'm not going to go into that because it's just, that's totally different other topic and too complicated and complex to go into.

But in whatever way or form, there is this deconstructing or undoing, okay, the great undoing of our self-identity, of what we even understand or believe it means to, let's say, be a good child, a good daughter. Let's say for me, what does it mean to honor parents? What does it mean to be faithful, whether it is, to a family, or whether, how does it mean to be faithful to God, what does it mean to be a faithful Catholic?

All these things you start asking or I started asking very fundamental questions that I didn't use to before. What does it mean to be faithful? When you see all of this, that is toxic, that is bad mixed in with the good. And when you see how God, the name of God and religion and faith has been used to abuse and harm people. Can I still believe? If I still believe, what does it mean that I believe? How do I believe? 

So deconstruction in all of these zones is scary, like really, really scary. Um, because when you're going through it, it really feels like you know, the ground is like, disintegrating beneath your feet, right? Like, the only ground that you've known is disintegrating. You can only trust that there is something else beneath that ground that you've been standing on, right? 

So deconstruction is so scary, but it's necessary. Because healing from complex trauma continually brings us towards the core of ourselves in pursuit of existential truth, okay?

I'll repeat that. Healing from complex trauma continually brings us towards the core of ourselves in pursuit of existential truth. Not just notional truth, not conceptual truth, okay? But truth that is existential. Like a whole being is staked on this search for truth, okay? There's nothing that's more engaging, nothing that is, that is more and it feels like a life or death thing, okay?

It's not arm's length, it's everything about who we are, who I am and who God is, okay? It doesn't get more existential than that. 

[00:34:44] Existential Faith vs Religious or Doctrinal Assent

And very paradoxically, when it comes to the healing journey, deconstruction actually requires faith. You think oh, but you're deconstructing from faith so wouldn't you be losing faith?

I'll say like, well, it depends on what you mean by faith, right? Deconstruction requires a kind of faith that is not a notional kind of religious assent. Like, oh, I believe in, you know, um, I believe conceptually in God. You know, it's possible to, let's say, recite the creed at Mass every Sunday, I believe in God, you can say I believe in the church, all that, and it can just be a religious kind of assent, like I, I believe in the idea of it, I'm not opposed to the idea of it, so I guess I can say I believe in the idea of it, right?

When I talk about faith in, in the healing journey, it's also more than a doctrinal belief that, oh, I believe in, you know, that the Catholic Church has, , been given the authority to, to teach authoritatively, for example, upon faith and morals, uh, you know, and as a good Catholic, I will listen to what the Church teaches.

That's a doctrinal kind of belief, right? But that's not the kind of faith, that healing requires, okay? The kind of faith that healing requires is a deep existential trust that we are held in a love greater than ourselves and all that we have known. Because when we go through this process of healing, we bump up against the very real limits of what we have known before.

You will reach, and I say this very definitively because I see this happening over and over again. We reach a point where that religious assent we used to have, or that doctrinal belief that we used to have, which was sufficient to us in the past just cannot cut it anymore, right? Like it's just not enough to bring us through this incredibly grueling journey of integration, of healing, of seeking truth, of staring reality in the face.

A religious assent or doctrinal belief does not have enough power to help us. To look our suffering in the eye. It's just, no, nothing short of an existential kind of faith. Even if in the meantime, we are not able to put a name to it. Okay, especially if we're deconstructing our old notions of faith.

There is this deep existential trust that we are held by something greater than us, that there is a love that holds us and somehow encompasses even our pain and our suffering, that does not explain away the pain and the suffering, does not try to get us to rationalize or spiritualize the pain that we have to experience.

And all complex trauma survivors who know that we are complex trauma survivors, know how raw and real that pain is, and you know that anything short of this kind of existential trust is not going to be enough to bring us through. Right? So deconstruction in healing of our self-identity, our role, of the old notions, things that we have just imbibed and accepted from our family and culture, and even in our faith, requires a deeper kind of existential faith. 

Coming to the end of this sharing, but I'm just feeling just the, you know, the weight in a good sense, like just of how weighty this, this conversation, this, this, this sharing has been about deconstruction, , because I, I know I know for a fact, , in my own journey how unsafe it feels like to admit that we are doubting these things.

Uh, you know, because it's just, it's, it's taking apart everything that we knew in this, in the past that kept us safe. And from experience, many of us would know that if you share about this experience with the wrong person, and the wrong person may not be somebody who is mean or hateful or malicious, it just could be somebody who is not trauma informed, who has not experienced what you're experiencing, and their lack of ability to hold this reality, this messy reality that's just, you know, of deconstruction, can really set us back.

Uh, can really make us doubt ourselves even more, and set the healing journey back and that is why so many of us instinctively, right. And I want to say, this is also part of the wisdom of the nervous system and intuition and the body that God has given us, we instinctively will withdraw from the old environments that we used to be part of because we know that these people do not have the ability to understand or hold the journey that we are in, right? 

That is also part of the process of experience of deconstruction. Now, my prayer really, really is that, someday hopefully, there is going to be, like, more space and room, even within, like, the more common religious experience or church experience, for this kind of process, that this process of deconstruction is not demonized or, or it's not so, seen as so scary and threatening.

I want to say that the risk is real. Deconstruction of anything, the risk is real because, or at least experience of risk is real, because you can't deconstruct while trying to hold on to an outcome that you want to have guaranteed. Any journey that requires deep existential trust cannot give you that guarantee. So the risk is real, which is why the trust and that faith is required, right? But where there is a robust faith and trust in God, in this existential, um, trust in God, we will realize that there is less fear of, of the deconstruction process because you know that God still holds everything. 

And like I mentioned, like my prayer is that someday this process of deconstruction can be more normalized and not protected or defended against. Not, you know, not seen as a bad thing. But even as I say it, I have to admit that, I think such a time is going to be very far away just because of where most people are at in our, in our interior journeys. And that's not a judgment. It's just an observation. So. In the meantime, those resources that are out there for those on the margins are all the more precious and valuable, right? I mean, I found them to be so precious and valuable. 

[00:42:17] Questions for Pondering and Conclusion

So I wish to close today's sharing with these questions for you to ponder and reflect on. As someone who is going through maybe healing and recovery and complex trauma as a person of faith: 

• One, I'd like to invite you to consider which zones, , have you maybe begun to experience deconstruction in, in your self-identity, in your family or cultural identity, perhaps, or perhaps in your faith, you know? So which zones have you begun to experience deconstruction in? 
• And what are the fundamental questions you're asking right now, which you had never asked before? I would like to invite you to, you know, you can make this like a journaling question, right? What are the questions? Name the questions that you're starting to ask now. Whether it's about who you are, , or what you believe about family values, what you believe about what it means to, let's say, be a good daughter, a good son, good husband, good wife, all that kind of stuff, right? Whatever to do with family or cultural values, what questions are you starting to ask, or what questions have you started to ask about your faith, about God, um, about your religion, all that, that you are asking. 

And you don't need find the answer. It's such a big deal to just be able to acknowledge the questions, okay, to dignify the questions. There's great power in that in our healing journey and I just want to say that, I really hope that you will find along the way resources, people, unexpected situations or, you know, anything that will affirm you to not be afraid. Because there is something deeper and greater than that which we are deconstructing. 

I've come to see deconstruction as like that furnace. Okay, it's like throwing things into that furnace, you know, throwing gold into the furnace to be purified. So whether it is your identity, your own self, or what it means, what you're not, whatever it is with your family and culture, or your faith, That's, there's gold, it's gold. There's something there, but there are also a lot of impurities. Deconstruction is like putting it all in the furnace and trusting that whatever is pure gold will remain and that what will fall apart or what will disintegrate, what is actually being deconstructed was not really the true gold in the first place. 

With that, I leave you to your own pondering, your continued pondering and prayer and I wish you continued safe journeying in this interior integration journey. Till the next time, happy becoming!