Kalla Mort 0:00
And this, like creative battle and journey I'm having in, like awakening to my own inner critic and disassociation and all of these things I must remember when I'm simply going through the motion as a careful thing, because I'm not. I'm not okay with it capping there, because I've experienced so much more, and it's important for me to get to have all of my experience. Be welcome at the table.
Josh Lavine 0:36
Welcome to another episode of what it's like to be you. I'm Josh Lavon, your host, and on this show, I interview accurately typed guests about their experience as their Enneagram type Today, my guest is calla Mort who is a social self pres six, wing seven with 639, try fix. And this episode absolutely blew me away in so many ways. Calla is extremely wise, and it's a wisdom that she's earned through a very profound and difficult life story, her transformation from starting in a place of high control religion, and her journey of learning how to see beyond the narrow frameworks of her culture of origin to, for example, embrace herself as queer, among many other things, is absolutely remarkable, and it's a truly sick story in the sense of mental attachment, and being attached to an orientation that was providing me a sense of safety and belonging socially, especially as a social six, and then learning how to anchor to an orientation that was arising from within and trust it and develop courage in that, etc. So in the Enneagram, we talk about the essence and virtues of the types and the essence of six is truth, which is not capital T truth, objective truth, but more an honoring of the Subjective Truth arising from inside me. And also courage, the willingness to take risks based on self belief that I'm not anchoring to external sources of support and guidance, but taking steps into a void without knowing what's going to happen or what will come. Calla is such a incredible, beautiful example of this, and her life story speaks for itself. So I'll leave it at that. Without further ado, I'm very excited for you to learn from my friend Calla. So as I was saying before, I was thinking about giving you a lot of space to tell your story, and you have a really fascinating and illustrative story of being a six, given your background and where you came from and where you're at now, kind of the journey of transformation. So my understanding is you started your life in the midst of a high control religion. That's that's your phrase, and you are no longer there. And so just take us through, maybe from like early childhood. What are your memories there and then? What are the beats of the story?
Kalla Mort 3:01
Yeah, I don't have a lot of memories before the age of 789, around there, okay, um, but starting there, starving strong. I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical religion, Christianity that I would now call a cult. I cult, because of my own deconstruction and understanding of, I don't know, I got very in my very 60s, 60s nature. Got very interested in Cults and Religions. But starting, yeah, I remember going to church all the time. Um, my life was church. We would go to church on Sunday. We would go to a one on Tuesday, we would go to worship practice or youth group or home group or some kind of thing, probably once every night, and on the other nights, I was a part of, like my parents, big thing was discipleship, and so we would have a lot of home groups at Our house and with my whole world, and I was so invested at it, into it, even before I have memories I have. One of my cousins used to babysit for us, and she told me that when I was probably three years old that I would ask her to read the Bible. To us as kids, and the her response to me was always, I don't think that's appropriate for children, and she was not as practiced in this religion, and she's since out of it, and we've been in communication. But it's interesting that that was the reflection at such a young age that I was so invested that not only was I practicing this dogma as a three year old, but I was also invested in these texts as well, because it was it was everything to me. It was my whole world. It was how I navigated and my parents were not very involved in I'm checking myself, my parents were very involved, but they were not not very personally or relationally, there was not a lot of emotional or reflection or structure that was given to me pretty early on due to some Major death in our family. My we lost three people who were very, very close to us, my dad's best friend and my dad's best friend's son passed within a year of one another, and this is following a year prior my grandfather, my dad's dad passed away from cancer, and this is all before I am so all of this happens within the years, from seven to 10 for me, and I lost my parents pretty much at the same time because and even Though they were there, they didn't know what to do with grief. They didn't know what how to handle it. And I would say that religion really plays into that.
Josh Lavine 7:12
How old were you at the time?
Kalla Mort 7:14
I was between seven and 10, so I'm still in concrete stages. I'm still kind of like getting an understanding of the world, no very literal understanding of the world. And grief was not that's a complicated emotion, and my parents had no idea how to I to help with it themselves, let alone how to help their kids through it as well. And so I became a pretty big helper and validator of everyone around me, because that's how I coped was making sure everybody else was okay. And this was a this solidified for me, a strong I think my three fixes is next to my six, so I'm 639, yeah, and I think that the three, two space in me could really, like, sit back, look at the room, and really see what would garner success for me and my little sixth brain, then strategized, and, you know, did the strings and the chalkboard, and I'm going to figure it out, and I'm going To become this person, and part of that was becoming very sold out in my religion, because when people die and you're in a high control religion, it's, they're in a better place. This is good celebration. It's a celebration of life. It's, there's nothing, no no dark emotions, nothing bad, just it's all good, everything's good. And the preoccupation with it's all good, everything's good. And very like white picket fence life and for six on the white I, as I as I started growing up, I know enter into puberty, I started doing theater, and I was involved in Christian theater that I think even furthered that push into the cult into this high control religion. There was not a lot of room for personal creativity. There was not a lot of room for me as a as a person, as an entity. I was very shell like in. And mostly just completely anxious, hugely socially anxious. But I would, I would sit back and I would look, and I would observe, and I would find the success and in this Christian youth face I one. I had always been a singer, and I always sang with my dad, but I realized that I was actually kind of good at it when I entered into a social space that wasn't just church my family at this point, I'm about 13 years old, and I this is where my queerness comes into play. I purity culture is very big in the sect that I was a part of. And now, actually, years later, I know that if you were raised in purity culture, you can actually, it's actually classified as a PTSD. It's sexual trauma. Oh, okay, which is, which is very fascinating. Now, I think there's still a lot that I'm unpacking in that regard, but there's a lot of control around who you can like, what they can be, who they can be, what it is, and it's all very, very based on gender role and upholding very traditional values. And, you know, as a six I was very latched on to these things, and I found my structure through the performance of my gender, through the performance of being the good girl and liking somebody who was not the traditional man that was, for me, the like Clark Gable of the world. Like that was what I was supposed to like. It was supposed to be very much So raised to be like a politician's wife kind of thing where it's like, you know, you smile and wave and you look pretty, and you make sure that you know the right thing to say and and never make men feel less than and never like it's all very centralized on The male experience, not my own. Nothing about me um. And, um, I have a quick question. And, yeah, yeah,
Josh Lavine 12:49
so, so how much is this just given the fact that you're in in your phrase, again, high control religion territory, and you're saturated, and I mean the going every single night to some religious event. And then now it seems like you're expanding at around 13 to different extracurriculars, but still being in this really intense world, how much of what you're describing in terms of your all the stuff that you're supposed to do is explicit versus you're just reading it between the lines of your culture,
Kalla Mort 13:25
I would say it was very I don't know if you know anything about IVLP or Gothard, anything like that. Nope. So there's a fun little documentary on Amazon that's called shiny happy people, and it goes through Bill Gothard and IVLP Holt, and my upbringing was like, I would say, like three steps adjacent to that world and close enough that there are people in that documentary that my sister debated against when we did public speaking and Speech and Debate every extracurricular that we did, my parents made sure that it was a Christian fundamentalist organization, making sure that there are values that they adhere to, and the infallibility and inerrancy of The Bible and just very, very much so structured around that and focus on the family, which are two pretty big within the Christian world. Big thing, yeah.
Josh Lavine 14:49
Is that like, was she debating Bible topics and things like that, or was it more traditional? Okay,
Kalla Mort 14:54
yeah. So it was both. We did actually. A something called ncfca. It's a homeschool National Forensic League. And, oh, that's a that's a great thing to add as well. I was homeschooled my whole life. Oh, never went to school. Yes, me and my siblings. There's four of us, and I had two older sisters and a younger brother. My older sister, who's like the shares the middle space with me, was very into and successful in this speech and debate world, and it was somewhat politics and somewhat religion. If you've heard of the Heritage Foundation, there is a lot, a lot of the people who we were with ended up going to be a part of the Heritage Foundation. It was very much so kind of expected that if you were going to be invested in this way, that you are going to try to be in the government in some way shape, or which is another kind of layer to why I call it a cult, we would debate apologetics, and which is All basically biblical topics. Why is the Bible Correct? Why is Is God a good God? Can we call God a good God? You know, things like that. And as much as that wasn't the world that I wanted to be in. I had a lot of success in it. I was a very good public speaker. I was very charismatic. I knew what people wanted to hear, and that was my was both my social success and my survival, making sure that I had a testimony how God saved me, how I'm different. I'm set apart. I'm unique. I am intended for a very specific purpose, which now, in hindsight, another reason I say it was raised both high control religion and the cult is how much white supremacy rhetoric was just woven into all of it. I'm different. I'm better because of this religion that I practice. I am superior because of what I know, and I have to spread that message by any means necessary. And
Josh Lavine 17:59
so when you say you're, you're intended for a very specific purpose. It was, it was, it was not based on you as an individual. Is through a collectivist lens of being a spokesperson and a mouthpiece for this set of values that you're being kind of indoctrinated into.
Kalla Mort 18:16
Yes, absolutely, yeah. And indoctrination is a really good word, her, to give you an example of like, even the nuance, my mom was raised, and she actually converted during a Billy Graham like revival meeting. And she, she would actually talk about how even Catholics, even though they like share a God, the same Abrahamic god, they're not the right kind of they're not the right kind of this. And if you don't follow this set of doctrine, or you're not this kind of X, Y and Z thing, you're not the right Christian. If you're not sold out for Jesus. And there's a kind of like, extreme, but like, if you're not willing to die, like, we would have used events where they would give the sermon, they would kind of, it would be very emotionally manipulative thing you would get to the space, and they would, they would reenact. These are, like, real unique events that I was at, reenact people coming in with guns and masks and saying, you know, you have to renounce religion. You have to renounce Jesus. Will you renounce Jesus? If you don't, then we will kill you. And so it's like this really intense, emotional experience, and you're supposed to be. Supposed to say absolutely, absolutely, and say, no matter what, I don't care. My life is on the line, and I'm willing to die for this. And to the extent that that kind of thinking started permeating everything for me, and I became very obsessed with death and, like, you know, kind of like putting myself on the line, like, but it's a good thing, because it's for Jesus, and putting myself in very, not like, very dangerous situations, even socially, but it doesn't matter. It's for Jesus and so.
Josh Lavine 20:50
And just on that, there's some, yeah, something about that, I just want to point out about sixness is that, you know, sometimes sixes are painted as the security seeking type, and security means so many different things to different people, right? And so this idea of being willing to literally put your body and your life on the line for something that you are, a belief system that you're adhering to, that's really the the quote, unquote security of six is in the sense of, or actually, what would you would you put to it? Well,
Kalla Mort 21:20
yeah, yeah. Well, I found security in the fact that the people around me, even no matter how uncomfortable I was, no matter how much I had the cognitive dissonance or the physical, visceral unsafety, I was safe because I was socially safe because I belonged? Yes, I there was something that I could attach myself to, an ideology that the people around me were practicing as well. Yeah, and it was safer for me to stay in this ideology than it was to ever question it, to ever learn about other belief, right? Yeah, what
Josh Lavine 22:16
about the debate thing? It's, I'm just, I'm so fasci about that too, because, like, you have these you're debating these questions that seem to have, like in debate, every debate, every high school debate, person knows you have to be able to argue the Pro and the con, and so you know, is God good or Is the Bible True? You have to be able to argue both sides. But through this practice, you're supposed to sort of know the truth is actually the answer is yes, the Bible is true. So what was I mean? Do you have words about that?
Kalla Mort 22:46
Yeah, it definitely was a Yeah. Make sure you know both sides. But it was more so and like we were told that we need to know the other side, so that we know how to combat it, so we know what to expect. So we know, you know, well, these people are going to say this, and these people are going to say this, and you just role play as that person when, when we're, you know, debating the pawn. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and a lot of times it would come down to, you know, the judge and the merit of the person. And so it's not always that the person who's for the Bible and Jesus would win. It was and so it was kind of like, No, we're being objective. You know, there's nothing we're not a one minded about this. There isn't a right answer, right, but there's a right answer, right? And you know the right answer because you know, you look around and you see how people are reacting and responding, and you go, okay, that's the right answer. I see
Josh Lavine 23:59
there's something like just worth commenting on about that, like how the mental center creates a sense of security for itself by having almost like a there's like an overarching belief system or set of assumptions or fundamental truths that are unquestioned, but within that there's a lot of room to jostle and play and debate, as long as those fundamental premises aren't actually questioned. And that gives the mental sensor a sense of security, and it prevents mental types, or anyone with the mental sensor from confronting the fear of the mental sensor, which is that actually I am not perceiving reality correctly, and that if I don't have this over structure of fundamental beliefs or set of assumptions, then I will be lost in madness and confusion in the void. And so it's just interesting how an entire culture organizes itself around that with this
Kalla Mort 24:56
in the way you're describing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I it's, it's even kind of funny, because how I even came to the Enneagram was through the Christian college that I went to, and I immediately pegged myself in the six. Immediately was like, oh, yeah, this is, this is correct. And I then spent the next four years questioning my type and typing is multiple different things, very much like a six and I've typed with each of my fixes for a while and so, and somewhat of the wings so, you know, got to try it all out. Gotta make it, make sure. Yeah, and this very, like six nature, this is, like a good kind of segue into this story that I have um about me starting to realize and question my queerness and
I was in this theater group that I was a part of and still a Christian organization when I first started experiencing this, like social pressure of, who do you like? Who do you have a crush on? Who do you, you know, what? What do you do? Like this person. Everybody likes this person. You know, it was a very, very common thing that was talked about. And I didn't I, and I saw that that was something in me that was different and that I didn't understand. And so I knew that I had to protect and so I would pick the guy that nobody else had a crush on, that everybody was kind of like, yeah, they're okay, just like, they're like, the outcast. Would always pick the outcast guy and be like, yeah, it says that guy, that's for sure. Um,
Josh Lavine 27:21
first time you you really were aware of pretending. Is that true?
Kalla Mort 27:26
Yes, definitely. Um, most of my life is pretty, like blurry. I, I would say my, my go to coping mechanisms, dissociation, and so there's a lot of just kind of fog. And as a Bermuda type as well, there's that kind of like swirly fog already, and then we're just very lost in the people around me. And this was the first distinct event, I think, because my identity came into play, and it wasn't as much like my identity as a Christian or a religious person was never questioned. It wasn't different from the people around me. It was easy to attach to it was like, we're set, we're golden. I'm good to go there and I sing so I can lead worship. It's great. Everybody loves me. I'm, I'm, you know, speaking words over people, very various things like that. But this was something that was unique to me, and I was different. It was different than everyone around me. It was very much so not okay, and I knew it was not okay, and I could tell that I shouldn't be that based on my framework of the world. And so I'm coming up against my super ego I have, should and shouldn't, yeah, and my identity of but there's not really like, I can't. It was such a big like, awareness and open for me, right? And I was within this, like, specific story or framework. I didn't realize this at a time, but my I, I had a crush on this girl, and she liked this guy, and I did not like this guy. I thought he was not good for her, whatever else, whatever friend excuse that I had. So when all of that didn't work, I said, Oh, well, I like him. You can't have him because I like, oh, okay, yep. And that's how I, you know, kind of keep her away from it. And so I'm, you know, now I'm fully invested. Am this like character that I have decided to be totally who is very invested in this guy, and I definitely want to I like this guy, and want to be with him, and he and I start art talking, and in the meantime, I'm involved in my first show outside of this Christian theater, and I this girl, and I'm confronted immediately with queerness. Oh yeah, I'm bisexual, I'm lesbian, whatever. It doesn't matter. It's the theater world. We're common, we're all clear here, kind of a thing, and I was the goody two shoes Christian girl who was terrified and didn't know how to operate in this world and didn't know what to do. My dogma doesn't work here, and unless I'm evangelizing, so time to become an evangelist. And I'm 17, I think at this point, okay, seven, yeah, 17 or 18, somewhere around there, um, and we go for the show, you know, make friends. You kind of become a family. It's a six week run of a show, so we really got to know each other. And this girl, who's different girl from before she after the show closes, she writes me a letter, and she says, You know, I know that this isn't your belief system. I understand and I see your belief and I respect it, and I would regret it the rest of my life if I didn't tell you that I had feelings for you. And I read this letter and I freaked out, like I can I even now in my body, I'm like, remembering how I felt, where it was, just like my arms went numb, and I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know how to respond, and all of this rhetoric that I had been practicing was just like, well, I have to say this, and this guy that I'm talking to at the time, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this person just, you know, wrote me a letter. Haha, isn't that funny? And he was like, that's disgusting. And, you know, full laundry list of that's terrible. How could that person do that? You're not even this X, Y and Z. And I took that message and I copied and I pasted it into a text message to her, and, you know, kind of edited it to make it sound like me. But this is how terrified I was to even interact in that world. I was not able to be honest with myself and I, I lost that entire group of friends. She, you know, it was a whole thing. All the friends around was super mad at me, and understandably so, because my response was, Oh, that's terrible. You're terrible. You're actually going to hell. And I believe that. And you know, as she receives this message, she messaged like just texting back and forth, and she said, I disagree with you, and I see it differently, and I forgive you, And I like the emotion is even real. Now, I had no idea what to do with that. This person, who was supposed to be the scum of the earth, the like the most terrible thing that you could be, did something more than what I could give as a Christ who was supposed to be a beacon of love and truth and the I could not reconcile the visceral truth that I started feeling in that moment, and it was a huge turning point for me, and it really started my deconstruction. Mm. Hmm, and I have since reconnected with this person, and I told her that she changed my life, um, because my assumptions about her and the framework that I had filtered her through, just by her showing me love and forgiveness when I didn't deserve it at all was more of the Christian experience than I had ever felt in my life, and I was so saturated with it my whole life, up until that point, 70 years of saturation, day and night. And this person, one person, completely shattered for me. And it wasn't an immediate like I've spent the next, I would say, and now I'm how old, no, 29 so I've been out of religion for maybe three to four years. Okay, like, it hasn't been a long time. So it's like, I still was like, okay, I can still function in this culture and and I can, I can make it make sense. And I went to college, went to Christian College, and I was so uncertain. I was so freaked out that I was like, that, have to go to Christian College because I can't, I can't not
Josh Lavine 36:37
your defense, your own. Yes, it's, it's Yeah, absolutely,
Kalla Mort 36:40
yeah, and I ended up going to this teeny tiny Christian College in San Diego, and it was connected to Shadow Mountain and David Jeremiah. So anyone who's familiar with Christianity, or specific like very culty Christianity spaces. Well, no David Jeremiah is um, and they had rebranded themselves as San Diego Christian College. And um used to be Heritage Foundation. Sure, like heritage college, so it was like, okay, very similar to the Heritage Foundation, very connected to, you know, this kind of, like, similar spider web that I was like, Okay, I know how to operate in this world. Let's go here. But in San Diego, it's like, oh, well, there's a little more modernness here. There's, you know, it's not, um, I was born and raised in a small town in Idaho in the United States. So it very like, I want to say we have, like, it's like an 85% white population type thing, like, very teeny, tiny and so moving to San Diego, it was like, Wow. This is a whole different world. This is my first time going to school around other people. Like, I Yeah, yeah, I know. Wow, okay. This is my first exposure to mental health services as well. My parents did not believe in that because I was being raised and so I kind of guess that myself, my whole life, you don't have depression. You're okay, you're good. Cast your cares on the Lord. You know, all very much. So if the Bible or Jesus isn't fixing it, then, well, we don't pop and or it's not real. And this school was, it's kind of funny, because I went for musical theater, but this school was so conservative that they didn't even allow dancing. Didn't allow dance. So any dance classes that we had to take, or the shows that we did, were off campus, and unless it was for credit, it was, like, there were certain loopholes that we could like, Okay, well, it's, it's exercise. So if it was exercise, then we can do it in the auditorium, and then it's, but, like, it was kind of like kind of odd um. And so I, I am now exposed to queer Christians
Josh Lavine 39:36
and and also, actually, let me, I want to put a pin here real quick, because I want to just zoom out for a second, tie some things. So this is the first time you're you're in that you're exposed to this more diverse dance theater culture, but you're on your own. And previously you were with, you were still embedded in. You were 17, right? So you were so you weren't even. Not legally an adult yet, I guess what I was wondering about in the back of my head, as you were talking for this like when you went to theater, when you were 17, that first time, and you were confronted with this diversity perspective and sexual expression, did you were you kind of confiding in your parents or your siblings or your friends about like, how the how bizarre. How strange. These, these, these people who don't know the way of the Lord or something like that. Was that part of the way that you were processing during that time?
Kalla Mort 40:39
Not really badly enough. Okay, I, I think because it was so engrained in me, I and I would also add I would very isolate, and I isolated myself. I didn't let people get too close. I didn't really like my relationship with my family was very performative. And like, the only place I was really me was, like, on my own in my bedroom, and even then, God was still watching. So like, yeah, it's kind of like, you know the three fix, or three, you know that image Center, where it's like, Okay, do you know that someone's watching you at all times it's like, well, yeah, and I know who it is. And so just like, adding this extra layer of pressure, of like, make sure that you're not just attaching to the people around you, but also this higher being and they could smite you at any moment. So make sure you're performing at all times. So I didn't even do a lot of like. I uh, conscious processing, okay? Because I was terrified of a specific verse in the Bible where it says, like that your words will be recorded and like you will be shown them at the end of your life. Oh, my God. And so I was like, Okay, so I'm not going to think at all. I'm not going to, you know, I'm going to really limit myself, yeah, and my expression, because, well, I don't want that to happen, like I can't be thinking of, that's what, you know, the very six solving of what that was going to be for me. And so it was not. There was so much dissociation involved, like to the extent that now I've even been like, gosh, like, I feel like I've had different lives. Because as my awareness comes back, I'm like, Oh, what was I doing there? So that's actually an interesting question. I hadn't really thought of it before, but I really wasn't. I was kind of just in whatever was happening in front of me, and I would kind of, I was very social, but it was I was not allowed there. Yes. And there's something very unique, I think, for queer kids in general, but definitely queer kids who are raised in high control religion where you're not allowed, and even on a deeper level, you're not allowed. So culturally, you're not normal. You're not allowed. It's not okay. And then additionally, religiously, if you let anyone know, including yourself, that that exists, you're going straight down is forever burning. And so there's, there's active like you're spending energy to not think about things, yes, and really putting up a lot of walls and barriers and things. I've had to work a lot in therapy to even now my defensiveness and well, if I wasn't the one who thought of it kind of thing, there's a lot that comes into play because of those, those walls that I had to put up, right? And so it was definitely like, oh, wow, these people around me like they have sexual expression. It's different. Well, that's them, and I'm a loving person who's understandable. That was my identity at the time. I'm an understanding level, loving person, and so it didn't matter what they were doing, because that's because my job was to love them, and it wasn't like. Like, I would say, even throughout all of that, my natural connection to spirituality and my genuine care for human beings, like was a through line that that was like, this is a part of me that is me that gets to be here, but it has to be under this guise of so many other things and so, like
Josh Lavine 45:29
I see, so that was the that was what. That was a tether. You actually had an authentic tether. You had to this world view that you were in was it was a way to channel and express your genuine love and care for humanity for other people. And it was through a safe channel. Because through this channel, you also got social belonging and the approval of God, yeah. And then, yeah. So that makes sense. And it was, it was like, this is the only show that you had sort of explored. But why explore anything else? Because this was, this was sort of the safe way. Absolutely, I just want to say this story that you're saying is incredibly profound on a lot of levels. And I want to just comment on a couple things. First of all, we typically think of dissociation as a word associated with nine, and I've been thinking recently about how all three attachment types are doing their own version of dissociation, right? So nine is dissociating through numbing and not taking action to manipulate or affect its environment in a way that actually could be sort of accepting whatever is given, right. Three is doing the same thing in the heart center, sort of dissociating away from its own identity to just be and be whatever will be the most
Kalla Mort 46:51
admirable I'll be, whatever you want me to be. Maybe, yeah, yeah.
Josh Lavine 46:54
And six is dissociating away from its own inner compass, right, its own ability to discern. It's actually, it's dissociating away from its own discernment, right, and ingesting sort of, it's, yeah, the the the social constructs, or whatever that are in your atmosphere that provide a sense of safety and belonging, as especially The Social six. And so this, this split that you experienced when you first noticed that you had a crush on someone that was not the prescribed, traditional male archetype that was sanctioned by your culture. That was, like, the first time you notice like, oh shit, I'm not. I don't actually fit this thing that I've swallowed wholesale, and then I'm performing into. And your private, your privacy around your family, makes sense in that context, too. And actually, just the fact that you were a private person, and you were kind of living in a fog for so long, because it's like your true self was just in this private chamber. You couldn't even admit it to yourself, because you even by admitted, by admitting it to yourself, you ran the risk of being criticized by God and so like that would be a first step to even let the words come in here now a mouth to confide in someone else about what we were thinking. But you can't even get that past that step because of the kind of religious orientation that you've, yeah, been in anyway, but this point about your your first noticing of the the split between your authentic body response to a person, or your heart going To a person and not fitting. That was like, in order to live with the split, you had to double down even further on what you were clinging to and suppress that, right? And then perform, oh, I'm into this guy. I'm not into this. I'm not into kind of, yeah, let's see. It's almost like you're you're doubling down to commit to the social performance, and the mask that you were wearing itself wasn't even a conscious choice. I mean, on some level, it might have been, you know, and I relate to this being also a triple attachment, social three, like periods of my and I could talk about this later, if you want, but like periods of my life where I did the same thing that you I did the same thing that you did, but you had a sense of like, I am performing. I'm not really being myself as a result of that. I'm living in a state of total fog. I'm not really in myself. I'm like, I'm dissociating through life, and I'm not even realizing that I'm doing that because dissociation, one of the symptoms of it is that you don't realize you're dissociating. And so I'm just fast. I'm just amazed and fascinated by this, and then this person who demonstrates love that's more consistent with your ideology than anything you've ever experienced. Against and also actually touches your heart, you know, not a mentalization of the heart, not a not an abstraction or a performance of the heart, according to some doctrine, but what
Kalla Mort 50:13
I call it, yeah, the heart, yeah.
Josh Lavine 50:17
She actually reached in and, like, saw you, and put a finger on your partner, and it got in, you know, and the terror of that. And then what's amazing about that is like you had this profound experience, and it freaked you out so much that you doubled down again. You like you were like, Oh, I can't even, I can't even allow myself that. So I have to go back. I have to be even more serious about my religion, and go to this religious college and all this stuff. So that's
Kalla Mort 50:44
which is a great segue for the next part of this college offered mental health services. There we go, okay, um, I knew that I needed to be in that space, yeah, um, and it was free, because with tuition, and so I started seeing this counselor, and I actually requested that we do conversion therapy. So I was meaning, um, make me straight. Okay, got it make me, this is probably just a mental health thing. That's how dated I was in my understanding of the queer world was, oh yeah, it's just like, it's a mental health thing, and I'll get over it. It's probably due to me being a terrible person somewhere, and so and we could actually be kicked out of the school that I was going to if we were a practicing homosexual, or what was called like locally was same sex attracted okay? And so you, and it was you specifically had to say, I struggle with same sex attack like that. Is my sin. Is this thing? But if I make the choice to live how God wants me to live, then I'll be okay, and it'll be fine, yeah, and for me, I was, I'm bisexual, so I it's not that I don't have attraction to men. It's just generally a lesser attraction and but it was the one that I like grasped onto because, well, you know, if, if I'm bisexual, then like, boy, I fall in love with a man, and then, like, I don't ever have to worry about it, and it's fine. And, you know, with being a bit of my own, like erasure of my own identity was was trying to happen. And I was actually paired with another person. I got an accountability buddy because I was also actively self harming at the time, and so I in this therapy thing was partnered with another same sex attracted person who also struggled with self harm, and we were kind of like each other's accountability partners and, um, like, it's so, I know it's so funny, like, in hindsight, it's I'm so far removed from, like, what is normal.
Josh Lavine 53:40
I i It's just so fun. I'm also just laughing, like, oh, let's take these two girls who are attracted to girls and then make them accountability partners too. It's just
Kalla Mort 53:50
they didn't, actually. So it was a guy that it was partnered with, like, he was attracted to men, and it was kind of like, okay, maybe we can, like, straighten each other out, kind of
Josh Lavine 54:00
thing. Got it okay
Kalla Mort 54:03
with one of my good friends in school. I hope he's well. I hope you recovered from that experience. We haven't talked in probably since then. But one thing I forgot to mention, as I was realizing, you know, there was this person that, through my high school experience, I had such a unique reaction to this person, and I was so resistant and like, didn't like this person, And they're, you know, I can't hang around them. I can't do this, and I have them, and they're just so socially awkward. And, you know, I always found some way to distance myself, or, you know, find a way and specifically, like, pull my friend group and say, You. What do you think about this person while they're this this, okay, that's what I think. And just trying to keep myself as much distance to this person as possible. And at the same time, I was so drawn to them. God,
Josh Lavine 55:13
that's so interesting. Let me real quick just on that it's I was, yeah, I was thinking about this with, um, ah, man, that's so interesting. This polling of your friends, like, what do you guys think? Okay, cool, let me Okay, well, that's what I'll and this, and and, and that being literally motivated by I'm not sure what I think, because if I were actually to discover what i It's like fear of fear of discovering what you think, because you kind of, on some level, know that it's not going to be what these people think you know. Or another way to put it, would be like when you did when you so when that person reached out to you after the theater show and she said, I you know, I like you. And you took that to, who did you take it to? Again? Was
Kalla Mort 56:04
it your, your the guy that I was, you know, had a crush on,
Josh Lavine 56:08
that's right, that's right, yeah, and, and he had this sort of vitriolic response in the style of your religion, um, and then, literally, the copy paste, you know? I mean, that's just such it's so perfectly metaphorical of structure, right? It's just like, let me take his words and make them my words, because I can't even find the words of myself because I've short circuited, right? Yeah, I don't I'm no longer actually tethered to the mental models that I've ingested from outside. I have to go find another spokesperson to give me the words, you know, to actually put them into my phone and send because I can't even get the, I can't even access them in myself. Um, and
Kalla Mort 56:51
I'm not allowed to say, Yeah, I don't I, I'm scared. I don't know what to say. I, you know, I have to respond,
Josh Lavine 56:58
Yes, that's right. That's right. Because, because admitting that you're scared means that you're not doing it right. You're, you're sitting, you're, yeah, I've been affected
Kalla Mort 57:07
in some way, yeah. And there's something about this, like, set set apartness, like, I can't, I need to be in control that, like, kind of really big control piece, which has to do, I think, with a lot of the, you know, other childhood trauma that is happening simultaneously to the the greater theme, you know, sure, yeah, um, yeah. And this, this other person. So this other person is, like, spoiler alert, it was my now partner. Um, we met in the youth theater that
Josh Lavine 57:44
we now is in Today, modern day, January, 20 today, yeah, 25 okay, got it. You
Kalla Mort 57:48
got it. Got it, um, and we had such a tumultuous relationship. And I called them my best friend, but at the same time, would be like, hey, my friends think this. What do you think? Like my my friends think that we shouldn't be friends. And my friends think this, or these people think this. I'm just kind of, like, hoping to get a different response from them, but I couldn't, it couldn't come from me, like, I couldn't just be like, well, you know, fuck what they think I'm gonna do this because I like this person. That's right. Yeah. It had to be some sort of external validation. And, you know, our tumultuous friendship, all this, all this, and you know, we I end up going to college, and I'm like, Okay, bye, probably, you know, this is like, goodbye, and maybe we'll still be friends when I get back. I don't know, I'll be a different person. And as I'm at college, one of my good friends is a gay man, and he is out. He is Christian, and he doesn't care like at all, and had a very different upbringing. He's out to his family all of these things. And I was bored. I did not know that was something that was even possible. I didn't even fully know that like being queer and gay was like a thing that happened naturally, and not just something that was chosen or wasn't like a trauma response in some way. And this event with, I would have so many conversations with this guy, and just I like trying to figure it out, like, how can you love God? God and love men like that's that it just didn't make sense to me. And one of the things that he said to me that ultimately was like, okay, he said, I do not believe in a God that would create me this way and not still love me and and all of my, you know, loving person, loving God, spirituality, my innate connection was like, Okay, that makes sense, and for whatever reason, because it made sense to me that a loving God would not create me to be queer, and it's not just a trauma response or whatever else. I had been told that it was completely opened so much for me, and I wasn't even able to admit any of this verbally like, I think back to my college self that was at probably the worst mental health place of my life, struggling massively with eating disorders and self harm and, you know, just like so overwhelmed trying to make it make sense. Yeah, and his words just being like, Oh, well, God loves me, right? So I'm gay, and God loves me, not in spite of me being gay, but because He created me gay. And I was like, Okay. And it started like opening, opening things for me and and allowing me to have realizations of like, Oh, I I might have had a crush on this person. I see. I might have had feelings for this person in this way. I even could have explored a relationship with this person who expressed feelings for me. And I'm like, in college, I'm, you know, 22 I think was so. I'm like, fresh, 22 year old, like the world is like, I'm trying to make sense of the world. And it's still within my structure that I was raised with, but like, maybe there's more. Maybe there's more than just this teeny, tiny thing that I was given and learning about, like Methodist churches that have always been very accepting of queer people, and a really big help for me. And this actually is a later on segue, when I moved to New York, actually the Jewish faith really, really helped me, because it's that like, because of the specific cult I was raised. I was also, I think it's also important to say that I was raised evangelical Christian Zionist as well. And so because of that instillment of the Jewish people as God's chosen people I see, and that being this kind of like, okay, well, you know, I'm piecing, I'm trying to teach these things
Josh Lavine 1:03:22
together. You're finding ways within the within the framework of indoctrination, like little moments, little hypocrisies, or little or little little ways, little ways to extend the mental model that you had. Or, let me think, uh, little roads out of it into not like vast leaps across mental chasms, but bridges that you can walk across. You know,
Kalla Mort 1:03:48
I would describe it as trying to expand this, that very limited force field, like, if I had my ideology, was a force field, and the idea was out here on the other side of it, it's like, okay, how can I make this expand to include that very well said, very holonically trying to like, okay, I can keep this if I just expand it a little bit and like, just try like, yeah, That makes sense. Like, I can make that work. Um, hmm, just happening, I stopped going to the mandatory checks because I start having autoimmune responses. So my physical health is so bad at this point that I'm so far removed from myself that if I try to step foot in a sermon, I immediately get nauseous and start throw up, whoa,
Josh Lavine 1:04:55
oh, my God.
Kalla Mort 1:04:58
Like viscerally. Be having so much cognitive dissonance and trying to ingest new information, trying to keep the old, like positioning and patterning and like my relationship to death and the feminine experience, and all of these things that would help me with this renewal process that I now have. I didn't have. It was all very like, no death happens at the end of life, and so you can't, you can't remove these ideologies. These ideologies can't die. There's like, just this full on mental turmoil that was just completely affecting my identity and my body, yeah and yeah, very extreme ways, not understanding like my my, you know, I would Get a blood work and it would be normal, or they'd say, Yeah, you're healthy as a horse, you could run a marathon, you know, stuff like that. And I'm having these responses that are just like, inexplainable and inexplainable, apart from, like, demon possession, which is like what I was raised with something, you know, so like, I'm trying, and I'm like, I don't think it's bad. I don't, I don't feel this way. And I'm, I'm trying to salute it, trying to solve it, very mental center me, um, and I don't know what happened or what energies came together and aligned, but I came home for a Christmas break, and my birthday and Christmas are all kind of the same, like week, and I was home on Christmas break, and I was my high school best friend, Who was this person that I had a very like full relationship, very complicated relationship with. I came home and she was living with my sister, and I was so upset about this. I didn't know why. I didn't understand, and now I know it was jealousy. I wanted to be with this person
Josh Lavine 1:07:37
I see, yeah, yeah,
Kalla Mort 1:07:39
and I didn't trust my family, and I didn't know, like I didn't have a lot of I was trying to keep them safe from my Family, not even really knowing at the time that why or what it was about it, and it was all very just. It was the happening of what was going on. But I came home and our thing was we did sleepovers for my birthday, me and my best friend, and they they're now non binary, and we're both very out now, but at the time, they were probably even more so In the cult than I was, because they were raised more isolated on the side of a mountain and the edge of a reservation Montana, and like, didn't have, like, any social connection until the theater group that we were a part of when we became friends, and So it was equally confusing for both of us, and both of us are experiencing physical attraction. We don't know what it is, because we are in purity culture. That's not something that's allowed, that's not something that's explored or educated about in any way, and especially not someone of the same sex. That's definitely not a part of the equation. So I come home for Christmas break. We've had our we've been communicating on and off, but I'm in college and busy. I come back and I'm immediately again flooded with all of these, like this emotional location that my brain is like, I so dissociated. I don't have any this framework is not going to make sense. I can't make any sense of it. I don't know what's going on. I'm going to start taking actions. I start making these actions, and I don't even really know, like in. In hindsight, why, apart from just like an innate trust in myself that I didn't even know I had, and so we're at this sleepover, and so tense. Both of us are, you know, we're picking fights. We don't really know why we're upset at each other. There's this there's this charge that's happening, and the only thing that we have to label the charge with is anger and hate. And, you know, there that's, that's what this uncomfortable thing in my body is. And, you know, we're kind of, like, pushing through it, pushing through it, and then it gets late enough that we're tired enough and like, we're kind of like, chilled out. We've resolved some things. We think we're good. And I immediately become overwhelmed. I and I think the most cheesy thing that could ever be thought in that moment, and it's a line that I'll remember forever. And then my partner still says to me to this day. And I looked at them, and I said, if I kissed you, would you run away? And they looked at me, and they said, No. And so we did for the next six hours. It was, it was this whole experience and awakening and like that, I had never thought would be possible or real, and it It was like a moment suspended in time, and a lot now in looking back at that moment of the the push, pull, vitriolic relationship that we had as it started to make sense to me, I was like, Oh, I liked you, and I couldn't like you. And it wasn't just this like thing, because I was navigating like, as like, a mental construct, yeah, no, I was attracted to this person. I was sexually attracted to this person. There was a poll in the belonging that I felt with this person, that I could be creative, I could say stupid things, and they didn't care, and they wanted to know more. Actually, they wanted to know more about me. They were very curious about me. And I have never had anybody who is curious about me, apart from the things that I did or the identity that I put out, and they just didn't they were just curious about me, and they wanted to know me deeply, And that was such a like world shattering moment and it was a very like, positive kid moment of like, okay, that was great. Now, what happens when we wake up in the morning, right? Yeah, and you have to go to work and we have to live life, and what do we do? And there was series of miscommunications, misunderstandings, and they thought it was just a one night thing. I got it out of my system, and we're done. That was their perspective on me. And I was like, Oh, we're grading okay, because that's in my world. You know, you only kiss people that you're gonna date like that's yeah, or have the intention of marrying like, that was a whole thing. I
Josh Lavine 1:13:54
just real quick on this. Let's put pink, because I want to come back right to this moment. But yeah, all things I want to say here. It's just so funny how at each of these beats of the story, there's this referencing of it's like there you were in this moment trying to make sense of what you're experiencing. And there's this referencing of the mental concepts that you have to make sense of it. And it's kind of like what you see depends on the theory you're looking with, and it just including your emotional life you don't realize, yeah, like when your emotion vocabulary is limited, when your emotion concepts are limited to within a narrow band of if I only have anger and frustration and demon possession in my mental concept library, when I feel something strong, those are the only things that I can reference to make sense of my experience, as opposed to things like when you start expanding, like attraction, love, other kinds of feelings. And so it was just so striking hearing you talk about this, how the mental sensor can be like a. Prison for the heart, when it's when it's closed, but when it opens up to a kind of sense of curiosity and actually really wondering, what is this without referencing predetermined or a priori mental concepts, then a new discovery can be made. And so that that was just really, really clear and striking in your story. And also that moment of you saying that, of if I kiss you, would you run away? That is amazing. I mean that. I mean, I know you clarify, or you your disclaimer was that it was cheesy, but I got goosebumps when you said it, and just just the lead up of your life to that moment, yeah, and what that meant for you, and the leap of faith to say that you know to to, where did that come from? How like as you take yourself back to that moment? What what happened?
Kalla Mort 1:15:59
I have no idea. I i i would think that I had had enough experience letting my mental center rest that I and I was and I was pretty daring. I, yeah, I, you know, I didn't think that I was at the time. I thought I was kind of just, like, scared, social, like, you stay away from me. But when it came to things I really cared about, there was this, like, I don't know, this ability to hold my own fear and know that it was going to be okay, like the words I would have, like the language that I have now, is that I knew that I wasn't going to abandon myself based on whatever their answer was, and so there was a boldness that that gave me Yeah, because I knew where I stood, even though it was contrary to everything that I knew or understood, but because I knew it and I felt it in my body, yeah, yeah, and there was no denying what My heart was experiencing like it was a moment, like, all my center just like came. It was like my centers aligned, and my body was able to speak for maybe the first time and say, Hey, I know you're freaking out head, but I think you're gonna be okay. Yeah. And so I just posed a question, because that was only thing I knew how to do. And it wasn't like, yeah. It wasn't like I had been, you know, thinking on the plane ride home and, like, planning it or anything. It was just like a moment in time that I was able to be present for a second, yeah? And, you know, something about nighttime for me, I think because I was like, everyone was asleep, there was no external there was no way that anybody but me and this other person could play into it, yeah? And I didn't need them to, and I had developed enough boundaries that, like an understanding of God in a new way, that I was like, Okay, then I'm just Okay, right? I'm okay,
Josh Lavine 1:18:56
yeah. And there's that six virtue of courage, which is sort of textbook, Enneagram, and also the essence of six is, well, I call it truth, which is not sort of, you know, capital T in the way that a fundamentalist religion might use it, but in a the sense of being fundamentally supported from within that that kind of align, alignment of body, yeah,
Kalla Mort 1:19:18
the difference between Objective and Subjective Truth, yeah, an honoring like religion being like, yeah, yeah. There's an objective thing that everyone kind of comes to, versus a subjective in individual, heart centered
Josh Lavine 1:19:35
Yeah, and then a willingness to take a real risk based on that,
Kalla Mort 1:19:39
yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, it's funny, I have, like, like, to wrap up to the present moment. There's like, several big events that happen, okay, um, I go back to school. My school discontinues the music program. Yeah? I'm completely derailed and like, don't know what I'm going to do. I don't want to go back home. I have realized enough about myself that I'm like, I do better away from that environment, and I still go back home. It's the only place I have to go do I to get back home my best friend who came with me like I've never been on a plane before. I my family bought them a ticket to come down and drive back up with me. And in my mind, I'm planning a coastline, romantic adventure up the coast, just me and and them, switching back and forth driving in my little convertible bump that I have up the 101, yeah. And they didn't know that we hadn't broken up, that that was like done, in their mind. They didn't want it to be done. They weren't done. But they thought, I thought. So there was a lot of, like, conjecture, a lot of lot of misses, because we didn't have language at all. I think that you notice about, like, the there's a quote that's actually, I don't remember who said it, but it's the limits of your language is the limits of your world. That's right, and that is so true to both of us. And, um, you know, I'm trying to initiate physical contact. And, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm doing the best I can to, like, be very romantic. And, yeah, let's, I'll take you on a date to the aquarium. But I didn't, I couldn't say any of that explicitly. There was none, none of that could happen explicitly. And in the meantime, at college on my dry campus, I had developed an alcohol problem, because it had to be like, it had to be a secret, and it was the only way that I could, yeah, I could only access, I could access certain parts of myself through alcohol that I couldn't otherwise, because it quieted my my brain and and the amount of just like overwhelm that was happening for me. And so as we're going up the coast, I'm also drunk most of the time. You know, not as I driving whatever I would say was pretty functional in my abuse of alcohol. But it would be like I would have a whole bottle of wine to myself, and that would be like I needed it in order to interact this person, because, because of just everything, the complications of everything I was being, yeah, and we go up the coast, and as as we're getting closer and closer to getting home, I'm getting more and more terrified, More and more shut down more and more scared to be seen with this person. And yeah. And it's all very like, Okay, we have to be we're going back in the closet, and we can be together. We just have to perform in the closet. And and at the same time, I was very split, because I was like, we could just run away. We could just not go back. We could just stay in any of these places. We could move away. Let's plan on moving away. So we planned all this, this whole big plan of, yeah, we're going to go, we're going to move to California, and we're going to get to be together, we're going to be away from our family, and it's going to be fine, and at the same time, we're both shows shut down, that no real plan is happening. We're just kind of dissociated bodies moving through space, and both with a lot of religious trauma, and we get home, and that just makes everything worse and very toxic. We had hugely toxic relationship, and I eventually they messaged me and say I had to tell my sister about about us, and I'm so mad. I'm so angry because I've just been outed. I I'm freaking out, and people are going to find out, they're going to know I, you know, horribly limited. COVID world. And so I go and I tell my sister, my oldest sister, who is also our, like spiritual mentor, which is like, kind of weird, she was our Hebrew teacher. She taught us Hebrew she like, was situated as an authority in our lives. How much older and she? She's five years older than me, okay, um, so not a huge age gap, but enough, yeah, that in the system that we had, it didn't really matter, because she was our authority, and she was already married, she had kids, and initially she received me well, and I thought Everything was fine. I thought it was gonna be fine. And a week later, I don't remember the exact timeline, she messaged me and my partner, and was like, We need to talk. Let's meet at this place. And there I freaking out. My partner is freaking out that like, oh, it's gonna, you know, they don't trust my sister with good reason. I was very delusional. And was like, No, it's gonna be fine. It's probably, you know, whatever thing, whatever it is, what it is, but I'm already pretty disassociated. And we go, we meet at this board rock at in our local town, and my sister brings tea, and like random, it's just like so, so funny thinking back, and none of us drink the tea. There's so much tension, and my sister says, You know what you're doing is wrong, and you guys can't talk to each other anymore. And I've been praying and fasting and tearing my clothes, and God told me that you can't be together. And I completely shut down, to the point of even I was in shock. I had no words. I was just sitting there in the cold, like what I can't How are we supposed to argue with you saying that God told you? And you know, all of this positioning. And my partner, you get super angry, and they're much more expressive than I am, and are a little bit more aware of their boundaries and when they've been infringed on. And the only thing that could come out of their mouth was, I disagree with you, but because you're my spiritual authority, okay? And we I was, I don't think, I don't even know that I said anything at all. And we start walking to the car, my partner and I had drove together, and my sister separately. And my sister was like, Hey, you're coming home with me. And I was like, Okay. And I gave my partner hub, and we said, See you later. And in our mind, we're like, Okay, after a year, because that was like the timeline that she had, my sister had given like, okay, you can talk again. Do this fine, um, maybe we will. And I then I was so I was so unwell. I was so shut down. I get home with my sister and, um,
her husband's uh, CNA in nursing school, and he he looked at me, and he was like, You Are you okay? And like, did the whole like, flashlight in the eyes? Like are like you were not okay, physically. And my sister starts having this real emotional reaction as well, and like, what I would call her body, rejecting what she just did. And it was so like. Like, I was just like, this isn't real. This isn't real. We're gonna wake up tomorrow and we're gonna talk. It's not real. And her sister ended up reading the Bible to me so that I as I fell asleep and like, just the weirdest, most violent in position of some like, a face that I shared, kind of that I was already kind of on the pathway to deconstruction. So it's like, I don't, I didn't know what to do, because it was my family, yeah, yeah. And I shut down, and I went with it. And I said, Okay, I'm not allowed to talk to this person or and I went for three years. We went for three years. Oh,
Josh Lavine 1:30:49
my god, wow. Oh, I didn't know that
Kalla Mort 1:30:53
you have Yeah, and this whole time, you know, we can't talk about it. We can't talk to anybody else about it. And any talking that I'm doing with my sisters or my family is just, oh, yeah, you're right. They were they were not a good person for me. They were toxic, they were abusive. You know, a lot of Yeah, what do you think about them? Okay, okay, that's what I think, too. Same and the same exact pattern, the same exact pattern, and just jump right back into it. And every time I would see a picture of my partner or see them in in person, I would have a panic attack, or I would have the same thing that happened to me when I tried to step into a chapel, which was I would immediately start growing and just like my body completely rejecting, yeah, whatever it was. And three years happen. In that three years, I moved to New York, I start going to school for musical theater. This is not a Christian affiliated school. I begin deconstructing my sister in the middle sister with me starts deconstructing with me. I'm thinking like, like, I'm my world is expanding, and but at the same time, this belief that my partner had been abusive had solidified. And so I was like, okay, so they're just a toxico, abusive person and that,
Josh Lavine 1:32:24
and the form of abuse, according to the the framework is, is that she, or they, pardon me, um, helped you on a corrupt yourself, or something like that? Is that a way?
Kalla Mort 1:32:38
Yeah, and I would say, because we were exploring like we the way that we explored even religion together was like opening to new concepts. And so because of that, and because both of us had really abusive child like I would say, we had mental disorders that we did not know about. And I think now as well, both of us are on the spectrum, or at least, like really highly assumed on the spectrum, neither that forgotten the diagnosis, but the amount of tumultuousness, even just from over stimulation and then an emotional outbreak or an emotional thing, and it and we would tend we kind of beat each other up with our emotions a lot. And so it was like looking back, I would say it was a pretty toxic relationship, but none of it was like our fault. It was just the fact that we were regurgitating the toxic systems that we had been a part of, and it would be like, but there
Josh Lavine 1:33:45
had been enough, there was enough emotion, emotional storminess, that in that state, you were able to ascribe that to the word abuse in a way that didn't feel like a total self abandonment and departure from it was like, Okay, I can, kind of, I can kind of see how that is. And so you can kind of swallow
Kalla Mort 1:34:05
it, yeah, yeah. And the and the, my sister, middle sister, she had gone to school for psychology at a Christian university, but she kind of like purported herself as an expert in in these ways. And so, because she was the one who gave me the language, I was like, oh, okay, you're an authority in this language, so you would know. And no matter what I feel, the tumultuousness, the storminess that I was feeling, okay, so that's what that story is. I see that word, yeah, as I'm in New York, I'm, I'm actually starting to pursue slow mental health. I get a counselor like, you know, I start, I'm, I'm starting to. Really deconstruct, I start a spiritual practice that was not religiously based. I'm following a lot of queer people who are deconstruct, like ex angelical people, and I'm starting to kind of really increase my language and my capacity and my understanding, and this whole three years we have so the website Tumblr, which is like pictures and you could post poetry and stuff like that. We had secret tumblers that the whole time we were communicating with one another, oh, inexplicitly, so we would post a vague, like poem, uh huh, and it's like the most sapphic thing ever, like,
Josh Lavine 1:36:00
not, not a DM, right? Like, no,
Kalla Mort 1:36:03
no. It was like, this is a secret. Like, my name is not attached to this Tumblr at all, but I'm going to try to find a way for you to stumble upon it. Yeah, yeah. Not so that you don't know it's like, this whole complicated and we're in the meantime, like posting, like poetry to one another and having to decipher, like, do you still want me? Do you still is there something there still is that? And like, they actually start dating man pretty immediately after we're broken up, and I'm heartbroken, infuriated all of this, their rhetoric goes really into Jesus world. And like, you know, we're meant to be with men like we, when we were together, would be like, we would have sex, and then we, like, would look at each other and they'd be like, you know, this is wrong, right? You know, we're supposed to be with a man, and so it's like all the like, the yummy, like aftercare feelings that can exist were just completely eradicated by this worldview that was totally just like shadowing over everything.
Josh Lavine 1:37:24
And they snapped. And so as well, this is what, yeah, they
Kalla Mort 1:37:29
did, um, and they actually my sister. I didn't even know this until years later, my sister continued being in their life and speaking into their life and saying, you know, you have to maintain distance. You have to do this, like, actively, a part of their life where I stopped talking to my sister, whoa, I was not and I didn't even, like, I was not involved, like, barely at all with her. And she was like, Okay, well, then I'm gonna go attach over to the other person and make sure they're staying on the street. And it's just this whole web and the amount of detail in this story, like we've been told we should write it into a movie or a play or something, because thinking that, yeah, there's so much here. But in New York, I make these friends. I'm like, Okay, I'm not Christian. I actually say for the first time that I'm not a Christian. Wow. And I start looking into astrology and tarot and all of these things that like were part of a spiritual practice that feel much more aligned with me and less dogmatic. It's just a system that I can use to help me make sense of the world. And I'm starting to heal from my religious trauma, and I'm making friends who have been atheistic their whole life, or agnostic their whole life, or I'm just experiencing the world in a different way. 2020, happens. Um, George Floyd riots began happening, and I start becoming radicalized. Um, as I'm in New York, the I start listening to rabbis and like I'll listen to their podcasts, or talks, and they are the first people who really open my world view of like, okay, there is, there is a different way to hold everything that I was raised with, and it looks so much richer and not as
there's a word for the difference in the kind of religion like Judaism is, is a like a cultural religion, versus Christianity being a dogmatic religion. You. I can't remember. There's a word for it. That was a helpful tool for me as well, to be like, Okay, I was taught and indoctrinated when I cut out, like my fascination with culture and wanting to understand multiple kinds of people, and I'm living, living in Manhattan, in New York City, like the amount of people that I'm being exposed to is just like the force field that was my world view just completely, just shattered and opened up, and COVID happened, I had to come home. It was severely traumatic. My family
didn't believe me. Didn't believe that COVID was real, very intense, intensely against what I had been deconstructing and like starting to invest in like I was starting to become more politically active and understanding
the difference between my experience as a white person in the United States and the experience of marginalized and black communities in the United States and just so many other world views and spaces. And the last show that we did in my school before as I'm in studio and the studio received the call that Broadway is closed, and thus our schools closed because of the various once Broadway shut down in New York. I don't know if you were there or I was it was like, yeah. It was like, the city was like, Okay, we've gotten like, if the people who say the show must go on. Are saying the show is over. Then, okay, I think it's serious. It was like this interesting pulse in the city, and I called my mom and freaked out, and she said, No, no, no, don't worry about it. And, you know, I have an autoimmune My sister has auto immune. My family has terrible health, like the it didn't make sense to me, and for the first time, I was like, Oh, this might be a cult, okay, I might have been raised in a cult.
Josh Lavine 1:42:40
Okay, yes, that was your Yeah,
Kalla Mort 1:42:43
yeah, yeah. COVID was a really big awakening for me. And I came home small town, Idaho, and it was like it wasn't real. It was like all of the grief and cultural experience that I had held and been a part of in New York City, wasn't allowed to come home with me, and it was huge culture shock, and I eventually had A friend come stay with me from that school, and he was like, you're like, experiencing my family and experiencing this whole thing as, like, he got to experience the New York me that was very different, and then come home and experiencing the me around my family. And he was, like, they don't even, they don't even know who you are. Like, what is this? What are you doing? And and I can't stay here, and I love you, and you're, you're gonna have to figure this out. And I, I again like, slowly but surely, my world is shattering amidst chaos and my oldest sister, all of my family, the women of my family, together, so it's like my mom and my two sisters for a tea. She said we're gonna check in because, you know, just, we just, I don't know, we just need to get together. And my middle sister has been like, she's now practicing witchcraft, and I'm practicing witchcraft, and we're posting on, so, like, over posting politically active things and Black Lives Matter, and, you know, all of these things that are just very outside of what we were raised with. And my sister, the oldest sister, was very concerned about that, and she calls all together, and it was kind of like a trick. And my my two oldest sisters have always, never really gotten along. And. Uh, they kind of shout across the table at each other the whole time. And I'm just kind of like sitting there, my mom and I are sitting there, like, what is going on and and, you know, my sister Katie, who was the person who brought up, broke us up to begin with. She was like, You guys are stepping too far away from the fold. And you know, it's my responsibility, my job, you know, to say, Well, gee, this is, you know, structures are this, and you should be adhering to this. And yeah, kind of took that upon herself and my sister, my other sister, was like, You are weaponizing your faith. This is horrible. How can you not see how this has traumatized us, and it's violent faith, and you have weaponized it against people. And my oldest sister is like, No, I've never done that. I'm a loving person. I you know all of these things, the identity was so strong, right? And I was like, hey, you know, it's like, the first thing I said, I was like, Hey, I actually have an example of you weaponizing and what you did to me and and my partner was not okay, and that was violent, and I am still dealing with that trauma to this day. And she said, and I would do it again. And I said, Oh, and we wrapped up our day. I went down to my bedroom and I texted my old partner that we hadn't talked for three years. Hadn't talked. We had been secretly in communication, not really in communication, trying to talk to each other, but resisting it, and so many things in the way, and it was finally my first direct we need to get together. And we did. And a month later, when we were talking, they were like, Hey, this is about the time that I would see if you wanted to be my girlfriend. And so we were like, Okay, let's do it, and the rest is kind of history, and there's so much more, and I'm still like, my this conversation with you. Me telling this to you is the first time and I am really telling this story in its glory from a position of self awareness that is outside of that. And I recently went no contact with my family. I have tried. I tried. I spent a lot of time. My partner and I have been together now for like, three years, four years since that time, yeah, and my family never came around. They tried, tried, and I thought that they were coming with me. I thought that they were seeing it. I thought that at least my mom and my middle sister were were getting out of the cult, but they were just doing what I did in college, which was, I'm going to stay in the cult, but I'm just going to expand it enough so that I don't have to leave the cult, which would also probably mean Leaving my friend's family, like everything that I know, and I'm going to keep it just enough that I can convince you that I'm coming with you, but really I'm not. Yeah and, and so yeah, that's that's like the freshest, and now we're here. Whoa, yeah,
Josh Lavine 1:49:30
I feel speechless. That's an incredible story.
Kalla Mort 1:49:35
Thank you. It's been a crazy life, yeah, and I'm like, coming into my 30s, and I feel like it's the first time that I'm getting a try at life outside of.
Of attachment, obligation, right? Yeah, and
compulsion, and I've done a lot of somatic therapy to get to where I am and even to be able, like my partner and I still have issues that come up from the trauma that we experienced together. Yeah, and it's still very real, but at the same time, I feel it feels nice to lay it out in a like capsule, to kind of be like, Okay, I experienced that, and it has shaped me. And I now have an awareness of me in a new way that I can start making sense of the capsule that I've been like holding on to so I can make sense of it. Yeah, you know, yeah,
Josh Lavine 1:51:07
wow. I just have to say I was like riveted the whole time you were talking. That was an as just an amazing story.
Kalla Mort 1:51:17
Thank you.
Josh Lavine 1:51:19
And in the way that, I mean, God, just so heartbreaking, how, how you felt like you had no choice but to go back, you know when your sister confronted you and kind of split you guys up, and then, and then, three years later, your confrontation with her and and then you realizing in that moment that there wasn't any flexibility there, that she wasn't, she wasn't going to change or open to hearing your perspective that. And I would do it again. Oh man. I mean, I just felt the dagger of that and, and just realizing that you were far enough outside the wall of the confines of where you started from, that it was like, You're not going to find any anchoring or solace within those walls anymore. And so, and you couldn't, you couldn't get yourself to go back. So, I got too big, yeah, you got too big. Yeah, yeah, um, yeah. And just, I mean, it makes sense to me, like right away that was, that was when you, when you texted your former and then again, now partner, yeah, but I just the the twists and turns that are just so brutal, you know, and You talk about, yeah, those are just the highlights. Yeah, I can imagine, yeah, just somatic therapy. Yeah. I guess it makes sense to me that somatic theory was a has, has been useful, sort of an as an anchor for you, just given my lens, but I'm wondering if you could talk about just what maybe you know, where are you now and what has supported you in this process of being independent of the capsule, as you put it, that You came
Kalla Mort 1:53:11
from? Yeah, good question. My spirituality as I has been a consistent through line of the person that I am. Even when I was within the high control cult space, I was still very spiritual, and I use the word spiritual and religion differently. I think it's important to distinguish the two, because I think that there can be religion that is also very spiritual and that it's like a very connected place, but there's also religion that's just dogma. And I don't think if I hadn't had that spirituality as a pull to get me where I am. It was a security that my mental center had knowing that, you know, I believe in energies, I believe in spirit. I believe in consciousness, and what that looks like gets to be mutable. And I would even say now that I practice, so I practice what I was raised with, more authentically now than I ever was given. It's like the moment where that person reached through all the bullshit and touched my heart and forgave me like that's the poll that I've been like following, um. Of getting out of that. So like now, I practice therapy and somatic therapies in a very spiritual way. It's very interconnected for me,
and having a framework like I got into astrology, and have used that for a therapeutic tool for myself and for self discovery and all of that, as well as, Oh my gosh, I forgot I was even going to mention this. The I was a part of an acting class that I would call somatic therapy, getting really in touch with like your felt sense and you know, who are you when you don't have your frameworks to rely on and everything is allowed in the space. And it revealed to me how rigid I was. It revealed to me how scared I was and how unwilling I was to see all of that. And it was a pretty incredible experience, because it was all so sad. Subtle puzzles like very subtle space. And it was very much a confusion and to get the HUD center offline, um, you know, one of the even phrases was, um, that he gave us was, I'm in my head, or I'm up as a I'm not in whatever this felt. Grow to know sense of being presence is that in my head is not that. And so there's this like, kind of like practice, like it was. It was a consistent practice that I had every week for over a year that I was involved in this class. And in the meantime, I'm seeing an energetic healer and Reiki practitioner. I begin to get my Reiki certification, I start moving into the esoteric healing spaces and the esoteric world. The narrative Enneagram was a big part of the like moving into those spaces where it was like, Oh, we can go to a conference and hold space for one another, and there's this beautiful social, gushy feeling and space, and it's not connected to any or affiliated to any religion in any way. And so was this really beautiful opening for me, of like, okay, I can experience these things that I know to be true, that are not so far outside of my framework, that I'm like completely rejecting it and, you know, dismissing it entirely, but because of my mental centers, willingness to be in esoteric spaces and and and Understand the body. My partner, while we had not been talking, got really into trauma and trauma therapy at Gabor Mate and Alice Miller, couple other people that was all about, you know, trauma being stored in the body, and how, how how we can not just do the whole, you know, talk therapy thing and get coping strategies, but we can actually heal it. And they also were interested in a in a thing called TP, that is a somatic therapy that's a French practitioner that developed it actually, and they actually translated the whole thing from French. And we have a translated notebook because it's not available in English translations. They translated it themselves, the only reason we even have some of the tools. So, like a lot of my beginning and getting into somatic therapies and healing in general was because of my partner and getting back together with my partner and I had had some interest in it because of the Enneagram and how the narrative tradition frames the Enneagram as an inner work tool. I had been using that for a really long time, and I was identifying as a nine, mainly due to the disassociation aspect that we talked about earlier, right? And just seeing how much I had disconnected from my life. And then I found big hormone, and that branched me into even more esoteric spaces. And like, Oh, great. This is okay. I actually found them because of the episode they did on astrology, because I was looking at astrology podcasts, and I found I was like, oh, astrology and the Enneagram, that's like, my two favorite things, and that's, that's how and they were talking to a six, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I relate to this. And so cool. And then really started developing more from there. But really the the energy healing and that acting workshop were, oh, they changed my life. Changed my life entirely. I've done past life regression sessions. I've done group healing. I've done breath work meditation. My partner is a certified yoga instructor and breath work instructor, like we've done a lot of alternative healing things. You did a lot,
Josh Lavine 2:01:08
you done a lot of stuff, done a lot of stuff. Yeah,
Kalla Mort 2:01:11
yeah. I tried really hard to I knew that I wasn't going to get to exist in the world in the way that I wanted to if I didn't, and there's a lot of grief and anger about that. Of like, if I had, like, if I had gotten to have a normal childhood, if I had gotten to have x, y and z, then I could have been X and but, like, even now, as I'm sitting talking to like, outlining so many things that I have done, I wouldn't be who I am without any of that, and I I am so I'm even grateful for a lot of what I experienced within the cult, because now as a an American, I get To recognize I the way that I see cult framework now, is very unique, and I am able to see white supremacist ideology and various things that is so covert normally, but because of my experience and like, oh my gosh, yeah, that that feels like this, and I think it might be the same. And so it's very interesting, and it's given me a very, I think, a very unique perspective, certainly
Josh Lavine 2:02:33
true. Yeah. What's coming up for me is it's also, let's see how to put this, because you it allowed you to develop a really clear sense from inside yourself of when something isn't isn't resonating. You know when, when you've ingested something that isn't actually you, and when you're actually anchored in yourself
Kalla Mort 2:02:59
and
Josh Lavine 2:03:02
for for listeners who are interested, we did that coaching session thing, that live coaching session, I was just gonna mention that, yeah, I was thinking about that because it was, like, the kind of the funny insight from that whole thing was you showed up and you're like, okay, great, I'm here. I'm ready to be coached. And we started, and then you just kind of went inside, and you were doing your own self hold. You're holding yourself and and then, actually, I would love for you to I have my own theories about it, but what do you Yeah, yeah.
Kalla Mort 2:03:32
I um, it's funny because I, I was a little disappointed with myself because I didn't reach the like place of presence that was available to me through that acting workshop. And so there was a little bit of that that was happening and like the disappointment and I was judging myself a little bit, being hard on myself, noting those things, but really the impactful thing for me that actually changed a lot for me, and opened up a lot for me with you. At the end of all of it, after witnessing my my own navigation of my tools that I had available to me, you just said it seems like you're scared of your head center, like you're afraid of your own head center. And that was just like, You're You're right. I am. I'm terrified of my head center. Why? Why am I so scared of my head center? Because it, it is, it is a such a big part of me and how I've navigated the world. So why? And I think religious trauma has a really big role in that, and not trusting myself in my own thoughts, when you are programmed and you are trying to come out of programming, it. Um,
it really sucks with you, and you don't always know what is real. Um, like a pop culture reference that I think of, that I actually use with my partner sometimes, is in The Hunger Games at the end of the books, spoilers, she gets a little traumatized at the end, Katniss, the main character, and she, you know, goes back and forth and does the real or not real? Is this real? Is this real or not real? And there's so much of that that I have to do all the time, even within my sensorial experience, and I question everything, is this sensation? I mean, it gets pretty granular, of like, am I having a big experience? Because I'm in a framework that is telling me that I should have a big experience, and it's a head driven thing, or is it a genuine am I? Am I really having a big experience? Is this not okay? Am I good and like the intimacy that I've had to have with myself to get to those spaces and be able to answer those questions, honestly, have been very intense and interesting, and you opened a lot of that exploration, even in the last what it's been a year since we did that? Or has it? Was it just over the summer? I don't even know when it was. I'm not sure, yeah, yeah, but it's enough time has passed that I'm like, Yeah, I've really invested, and I don't. I'm like, I don't really even have a lot in my life that I do because I'm so invested in myself and my healing, because I have to be Yeah, and I refuse to, I refuse to let them win and take my life from me. And even recently, when I went no contact with my parents, I realized that I was just waiting, and I was I don't know what I was waiting for. I for them to be gone so that I didn't disappoint them, for I see, yeah, then with me to absolutely still,
Josh Lavine 2:07:38
a hope that they would come around, and the distancing yourself is some way that maybe they will, you know, and then still living from within that front that's amazing, yeah, and,
Kalla Mort 2:07:48
and I wasn't, I wasn't making steps. I was I was taking no action, um, because I was trying to maintain attachment, yeah, and I was so stuck, and trying various things, tools and otherwise. And I think a lot of the pursuit of therapy even was this like, I'm not a whole person until I'm healed, which is just that carryover from the cult of like you're not a whole person until you're clean. Once you're clean and saved, then that's when the real life begins. And I've slowly been realizing that life and death are intimate partners, and it's okay to I'm not not experiencing life just because I'm not doing something that I deem as important or valid, I'm not participating in culture in a way that then that means that I'm living a life, or I'm a person. There's just like this idea that I was disconnected from my personhood, because I wasn't perfect, because I was traumatized, because I was mentally ill, because I was less than in some way, that I was like, Not that I didn't have a life. Yeah, and I even still like have to pause myself and go, No, even if you did absolutely nothing, talked to no one in a day, you're still human. You're a person. You're living a life, and that's important, and it matters, and,
and, and you don't have to be so hard on yourself. You don't have to mentally self harm to get yourself somewhere else, to be somewhere else that isn't here, like this ascension idea of like, one day I'll reach it, one day I'll get there, and then I'll be a person, and then I'll get to and then I'll live, and then I'll have a life, and I'll be a person.
Josh Lavine 2:10:44
It's what's really striking to me about that is that it's like you used to relate to your queerness from the point of view of this is the obstacle God has put in front of you to overcome in order to be holy. And you know, and then when your your friend who's gay said that thing about, well, actually I it's not that it's an obstacle to overcome. I just have to realize that this is how God created me and loves me anyway. There's that sense of self acceptance from like the fountain, the inner fountain, of who I am, as opposed to trying to earn some exogenous validation or or sanctioning, through some through overcoming, some inherent thing that is just an inherent quality of yourself, and kind of copy paste that same architecture, different content, to the way that it's to this moment of Your life in a certain sense, where it's like, there's a it's like the temptation to in, to invent or ingest some ideal of what a person is and should be. It's like six and three collaborating in fixation together. You know, it's like three wanting to be valuable. And six, looking for what you know, what's the recipe, what's the framework you know, like, what do I? What am I supposed to do? And those two coming together in a in a way that takes you out of yourself, as opposed to just letting who you are arise from from the depths, and then just be that and, and one of the things that what, other than the thing that you said about the mental sense, your fear of your mental center, the other thing that struck me about our coaching session, thing was there was this kind of cognitive dissonance happening in the moment where you were like submitting yourself To my coaching as the quote, unquote ennegram authority, but you were in touch with your own what you needed more than I was in that moment. And there was this, there was this kind of difficulty in the moment of just being like, hold on. I got it like, I know what I need for myself. You know you were sort of like in the coaching session as, like, a good coachee, trying to be a good coachee, 100% right? Absolutely. Because that was like, yeah, the the framework and orientation and underlying assumption of this interaction, you know, but then to to sort of blow that up and to be like, actually, I'm good, like, I got this, you know, like, I know how to sense my own inner resonance and give myself what I need right now. That was, that was, to me, that was kind of the crux of that whole
Kalla Mort 2:13:30
thing. Oh, and this idea that you had something that I didn't, that I needed. There it is, yeah, that this like, like, that I had bestowed some part of my own authority onto you. Like, yeah, that's
Josh Lavine 2:13:44
a good way to put it. Six projects its own inner authority onto and then try, yeah,
Kalla Mort 2:13:50
yeah, yeah, because it was like, I wouldn't have known, like, without all the tools that I had to navigate that experience. It was like, oh. But like, if Josh is the one doing it, then it's better, which is, like, the inherent, like, six kind of, like, self depreciation,
Josh Lavine 2:14:10
that's it. That's it. Yeah, yeah. Of
Kalla Mort 2:14:13
like, yeah. But it doesn't really matter that I'm actually good at this, because, because this is the authority here, yeah, yeah, yeah, I couldn't possibly, and I'm gonna disavow, yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't possibly be that I'm, I couldn't, you know, I've, I've listened and I, and I appreciate Josh's thoughts and locations. So that means something else, I've bestowed, some sort of ideological something,
Josh Lavine 2:14:44
yeah, yeah. So I guess it's funny, because this is where it comes to this, after this radical transformation that you've had, and this, this incredible life that you've lived in, the in the just the journey you've gone on, yeah. You're in this place now where the project is to be constantly self remembering and to watch for these, these subtle ways that you abandon yourself, or you give your authority to weigh to someone else, or you subject yourself to some exogenous orientation that you actually didn't realize you ingested and isn't actually quite in resonance with yourself, and then learning how to just tune back again and again and again to that inner compass and live from inside, live from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in. So, yeah, it's just amazing. I mean, it's to me, it's just amazing how far you've come from, just like the the place you started, and then where you are, yeah, and your your fluency with all these frameworks and how much you've explored, and your loyalty to your own healing journey. Um, yeah, it's just amazing. And actually, to that, all to that, all that's culminating for me, and kind of this question of, Do you have a sense of I
I'm really, let's see catching myself with this question, because it kind of plays into the dynamic we were just talking about. But I guess my question is, do you have a sense of when you will have arrived? I
Kalla Mort 2:16:20
actually think that that's something that I'm coming into, is my arrival is arriving at the awareness that I will always be growing and changing and and moving, and that there isn't a pinnacle.
There's nothing up there, and that my arrival is actually humanity, not this demi god, Yeah, space of affection. And my goal is actually to get Messier, to get less rigid, to get less
to get off my own back and that there is there is more of a shedding and a remembering than there is an adding and like, there's something out there, I don't know that's going to solve it. It's Oh no. Actually, I I don't know, and that's okay. And this whole time I've never known, and I'm tea it, and I made it, and sure I stand by most of what I, you know, I stand by some things, and I and I don't stand by others, but that's okay, and that's part of the human and that there was never, there was never an objective truth that was going to solve it for me. Um, despite being told over and over and over and over and over again that there was and that
my biggest savior is the biggest sin, which is subject to thee, and that my subjective experience is important and is allowed to influence other people, and that I don't have to have this set thing that's like approved for everybody, that I can take out and gift To the world like I was taught, but that I bring my mess, and that's okay, and in healing from CPTSD, understanding that rupture and repair is normal, and that somebody disagreeing with me or I, having a different location than me is actually a good thing. Is normal is okay that I don't have to wash myself out and just be the same as everyone in front of me, because that's the problem to begin with, because then I. They lose their humanity as well, and I, without realizing it, project onto them and like if I don't hold that back into myself and let myself be me and have my thoughts, responses and otherwise to the people in front of me that I won't get, the connection that I crave, the authentic community that I know is there for me. I Yeah, it's a stop trying so hard and practice the unknown. It's okay that there's unknown, there's always unknown. And something that I have been as like a little sentence or quote by somebody, one of the people I follow, she said that fear is a careful being. It's a being that is full of care. And you can go out into the world and care about the cars crossing the street, and then, if that is that, and you know, you can have your you're full of care and not have an ounce of love in that care, and it can become debilitating, and I think I was practicing care most of My life, and I'm ready to open to love because love encompasses anger and holds so much more space than what I had been allowing in my care, because love doesn't care as much. Love doesn't care. It does care, but not in the same way that fear cares, right? And this like creative battle and journey I'm having in like awakening to my own inner critic and disassociation and all of these things I must remember when I'm simply going through the motion as a careful being, because I'm not, I'm not okay with it capping there, because I've experienced so much More, and it's important for me to get to have all of my experience be welcome at the table, and especially in the social place that in doing so, the people around me will also feel that that knowing the thing that I was told as a kid that, you know, if you're in this cult, you're going to radiate something, and everyone's going to want it and and it's going to be beautiful. And I'm finding that, and finding that that is true, but not in the way that I was right. Yeah,
Josh Lavine 2:24:04
wow. Oh, my God. I'm just, I'm laughing because it's that was so unbelievably well said, so wise. I've just, like, blown it's just blown away. It's really amazing what you're saying. And it's, yeah, you're welcome, thank you. And what comes to me too is it's like that moment of when you said, if I kiss you, would you run away? And then she said no, or they said no, and then six hours later, like, oh my god, sort of, what is tomorrow gonna what's gonna happen tomorrow? You know, yeah, that sense of, I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, because I'm not playing by predetermined rules anymore. It's just open field and and having the self trust to navigate. That stuff, I said that to me, that's the virtue of the six, that's the courage, and you are just embodying that so beautifully. It's really amazing me
Kalla Mort 2:25:08
too. Yes, my acting coach said that it's the feeling you grow to know that was the only thing that he ever gave us for structure. And he said, Follow that it's the feeling you grow to know. It's the feeling you grow to know. Well, what is it? What is it? It's the feeling you grow to know. And so I have made a commitment to become intimate with feeling. Yeah, that presence, yeah.
Josh Lavine 2:25:43
Well, that feels like maybe the right place to settle and end. Thank you.
You're You're You're so welcome and thank you. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Calla. If you liked this conversation, then please click the like button or hit subscribe on YouTube, or if you're listening to this as a podcast, and you can leave up to a five star review and some comments, those are very effective and helpful ways of supporting me and my work and what we do here at The Enneagram School. And so if you'd like to support us even more, you can go to the Enneagram school.com and get on our email list. That's where we announce upcoming podcast episodes as well as upcoming workshops and retreats and courses and things of that nature. On that note, we have an intro course that I would love for you to check out. If you're a beginner in the Enneagram, then it's a great place to start. And if you're an advanced person to Enneagram, then it's a great place. Enneagram, then it's a great place to go for a review and just to see how all of the disparate concepts the Enneagram tie together into a coherent framework. Finally, if you think that you would be a good candidate to be on this show, then I'd love to hear from you. You can go to the Enneagram school.com and shoot me a message through the Contact Form preference goes to people who have been officially typed by the typing [email protected] the typing [email protected] is, in my view, the world's best Enneagram typing team, and you can go check out their services at their website. Okay, that's it for me. Thank you very much. I'll see you next time
Unknown Speaker 2:27:14
you
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