Purity Culture, Somatic Awareness, and Embodiment w/ Jenny McGrath
The following comes from an online interview I did with licensed mental health counselor, somatic psychotherapist, and movement educator Jenny McGrath on the topics of purity culture, somatic awareness, and Christian Nationalism.
Andrew Lang: How has purity culture impacted or shaped your understanding of physicality and how to trust/not trust your body?
Jenny McGrath: I think I’d have to answer this question in two ways: 1) before I started deconstructing purity culture and 2) as I deconstruct purity culture.
(I say as and not after because I really do believe this is a life-long journey of untangling all the indoctrination that happens within purity culture).
Before I started the journey of deconstruction I did not trust my body at all. I would literally say “my body is a machine” and I treated her that way. I lived in a very dissociated state and often was disconnected from basic needs my body had.
I see the beginning of my deconstruction, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, as when my body started speaking back to me.
I’d been a missionary for several years, primarily in Uganda, and my body was going through a long stint of boils; I got shingles; my immune system came to a halt. There was no way at that point I couldn’t listen to my body anymore.
Through a very long, slow journey I’ve come to honor the messages that my body had been trying to tell me for a really long time, and I think a lot of nuance is important here.
I’ve seen a lot of folks in the post-purity culture world saying “just trust your body” and “your body is never wrong!”
I actually disagree with this.
Not that I think there is a “right” or “wrong”, but I think that our bodies are not separate from the ways we’ve been socialized. Affect Theory is the idea that there is so much that happens at a visceral, unconscious level in our bodies due to the objects and stimuli around us. So I think we should always listen to our bodies, but I don’t think that should come at the expense of also holding the messages of our bodies in dialogue with other bodies – primarily those that are most oppressed from systems like purity culture.
Andrew: Often when I talk with folks about purity culture, the tangible things get focused on: purity rings, vows to wait to have sex until marriage, etc. What are some examples of the more subtle violence that purity culture instills/invites to emerge in individuals and communities?
Jenny: One of the most devastating things to me about purity culture, and abstinence only education which was an offshoot of purity culture, is that often there was no teaching about consent. The idea was that if you teach kids about consent they’ll have sex, and they aren’t supposed to have sex, so just don’t tell them about consent.
This creates such damaging experiences for folks of all genders and sexualities.
The purity culture world is unfortunately teaming with stories of sexual abuse and assault, and victims often never tell them because they don’t recognize it as such. The shame and guilt are internalized by the victimized, and often predators never are called to account.
In less extreme examples, but also still devastating: folks who perhaps aren’t committing abuse or assault, and yet there is still an absence of communication and nuanced consent which can cause all parties to distrust their own and one another’s bodies. This also leads to higher rates of STI’s and unwanted pregnancy for those in the purity culture world because there aren’t conversations about status, contraceptives, etc. It is seen as “more forgivable” if intercourse “just happens' ' rather than it is something that is mutually agreed upon beforehand, which inevitably leads to less-safe sex practices.
Andrew: How do somatic awareness and somatic tools fit in here? How do they help folks heal from this purity and anti-body culture?
Jenny: I came into somatic work because of my own journey within purity culture and experience of dissociation, and also years of working with primarily white, cisgender women who grew up in purity culture. I saw time and again how disconnected this population was from their/our bodies.
There is a phrase in neuroscience [from Donald Hebb] that says:
“What fires together, wires together.”
When sex, desire, arousal, or any other normal thing about being a body fires together with shame, fear, and guilt from a young age – often the safest place for folks to go is away from themselves.
In this way the shame can act similarly to chronic stress or trauma in the body. Trauma research affirms that we can’t heal from trauma by just thinking about it or talking about it. Trauma is experienced in the body and must be engaged in the body. I’ve had a lot of experiences where clients came to see me not even knowing consciously the impacts of purity culture. They came because of sexual abuse or other traumas that we were engaging, and then through our work together they became more aware of how early the experiences of shame were.
As a somatic practitioner I often say that my client’s body is the wisest person in the room, and I’ve yet to experience a client who grew up in purity culture whose body doesn’t eventually say in some way “I need us to tend to this!”
My work is to listen to that and tend to what the body is saying.
Andrew: There’s this other piece you talk about that I’m fascinated by – Christian Nationalism. Coming from a progressive Christian upbringing, this was actually a fairly consistent part of my childhood. (My childhood church would often preach about American Empire and the rise of the Right.) That said – I’m curious what connections you might see between the Christian Nationalism and purity culture and somatic body work. What is the somatic work to be done as individuals as well as in our communities?
Jenny: I immediately think of one of my favorite quotes by Minna Salami who says, “Tyrants have always known that the more robotic people are, the more easily manipulated they are.”
I see purity culture as a system of disembodiment that enables folks within that system to remain compliant and complicit in the system.
For most of my life I didn’t question the things that the white, religious males in my life said. I was told they were the spiritual authority and I believed that. It wasn’t until I started to listen to the wisdom and knowledge of my own body that I experienced more and more dissonance with the messages I’d so blindly accepted.
I think the somatic work to live more freely from the inside out is part of the labor of disempowering autocratic systems such as Christian Nationalism.
Andrew: What is Indwell and who would benefit from engaging with your work there? If someone wants to support you and your work, what’s a good first step?
Jenny: Indwell represents my “why” of what I do – I want people to live more freely from the inside out.
Indwell does this through separate businesses:
Indwell Counseling, which houses my private practice as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor.
Indwell Movement where I offer educational online courses and movement classes.
I have a course called “Embodied Story” that I think anyone who has a body could benefit from! It looks at how our stories are impacted by our bodies, and how our bodies impact our stories.
Another course is called “Embodied Sexuality” that is primarily for cisgender, white women who are in the beginning stages of deconstructing the impacts of purity culture on their relationship to their bodies and sexuality.
One of the greatest supports for me is folks spreading the word about the work I do and the resources I offer – so I also want to say THANK YOU so much for inviting me into this conversation and sharing my work with your community. I don’t take that lightly!
