This conversation with Vernique Esther went so many places, and I loved every minute of it! Vernique grew up in a beautiful and sometimes chaotic mix of denominations, cultures, and ideas about God, shaped by her Haitian and West African roots. Her journey eventually led her into a legalistic campus ministry that she now describes as “culty,” an early marriage that ended in devastating infidelity and divorce, and the political upheaval of 2016 that caused the cracks in her faith to break wide open. We talked about purity culture, patriarchal church systems, and the impossible burden so many women were taught to carry—the idea that we were somehow the “moral vessels” responsible for holding everything together. We were expected to suffer well, forgive endlessly, stay faithful, remain quiet, and somehow keep everyone else from falling apart, even when we were the ones being deeply harmed.Today, Vernique describes her faith as a Jesus-centered, non-religious spirituality. We had such an honest conversation about separating the character of Jesus from some of the violent and troubling portrayals of God we encounter elsewhere in Scripture, and what it looks like to keep following Jesus after so much of the religious framework around him has fallen away.Vernique also shared her powerful concept of “trauma languages”—the patterns our pain can create in relationships, including control and rejection sensitivity—and opened up about who holds space for her while she continues doing her own healing.