For the last 14 weeks, we've been deconstructing—naming what high-control religion stole from you. Today, we're turning a corner. We're moving from what was stolen into what you can build.

Welcome to Communication Intimacy—the sacred art of listening deeply to God, to yourself, and to others, and speaking your truth with courage and authentic expression.

This is the bridge between deconstruction and reconstruction. Because you cannot communicate authentically until you've named what silenced you. But you also cannot stay in the naming forever.

In This Episode, You'll Discover:

• Why Communication Intimacy is the perfect bridge from the Sacred Freedoms series into the Sacred Intimacies framework
• The definition of Communication Intimacy and why it matters right now in your journey
• The two streams of Communication Intimacy: Vertical (with the Divine) and Horizontal (with yourself and others)
• How high-control religion trained you to apologize before speaking, soften your opinions, and wait for permission
• Why your voice doesn't come back overnight—and how to reclaim it deliberately and sacredly
• The difference between performing holiness and having honest, sacred conversation with God
• How learning to listen to God transforms every other conversation in your life
• What it means to speak from your soul instead of from survival

Key Quote:

"Communication Intimacy is the capacity to listen deeply to the Divine, to yourself, and to others—and to speak your authentic truth with courage, clarity, and compassion."

This Month's Focus:

We're spending four weeks exploring Communication Intimacy:

• Week 1 (This Episode): Definition & Why It Matters Now
• Week 2: Core Markers & Recognition
• Week 3: Light Problems & Gentle Practices
• Week 4: Stories & Integration

Reflection Question:

When was the last time you spoke your truth without apologizing, softening, or waiting for permission? How did it feel in

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

In this episode, Tamara names how high‑control religion—especially in its LDS expression—turns money, sexuality, and safety into tools of control, all in the name of obedience and love of the gospel.

She weaves together whistleblower reports on LDS finances, mental‑health statements on worthiness interviews, and domestic‑violence research on strangulation risk to show that what many were taught was “faithfulness” was, in fact, systematic exploitation.​

You’ll hear about:

• Economic exploitation:
  • Tithing as a de‑facto requirement for worthiness and temple access, taught to be paid before rent, food, or medical bills.
    ​​
  • The Bishop’s Storehouse as “help” that actually reinforces dependency and keeps financial control in the bishop’s hands.
  • How this wires your nervous system to associate money with danger, shame, and power—even long after leaving.​
• Sexual exploitation:
  • Worthiness interviews where untrained bishops ask minors explicit sexual questions in closed‑door settings, documented in thousands of accounts and challenged by clinicians in the Mormon Mental Health Association.
    ​​
  • Why this is best understood as spiritual sexual abuse, especially for children already carrying sexual‑abuse trauma.​
• Physical exploitation:
  • How patriarchal teachings and “eternal marriage” messaging keep women in unsafe relationships, even when strangulation—a major homicide predictor—is present.​
  • Tamara’s own stories from abusive marriages, and how religious authority figures told her to return and “work on it” instead of prioritizing safety.

Tamara then introduces Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE Model (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control) to show that this isn’t just “imperfect people”—it’s a high‑control system that owns every part of life.
​

Finally, she offers gentle, nervous‑system‑aware practices to begin reclaiming:

• Your money (small “sovereignty” steps and new money scripts)
• Your body and sexuality (simple somatic affirmations: “This

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

In this bonus episode of the Reclaiming Your Sacred Freedoms series, Tamara names one of the most invisible forms of religious abuse: the theft of identity and the right to grow into who you really are.

She shares how high‑control Mormonism shaped her personality, choices, and life path—from marriage and motherhood to callings and clothing—until there was no space left for the 18‑year‑old artist who first discovered she could draw. For 41 years, her love of art was diverted into the “Plan of Happiness,” and her sense of self was measured against worthiness, obedience, and group expectations.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• The art story: discovering drawing at 18, feeling “this is me,” and then burying that spark for decades to be the “righteous Mormon woman.”
• How group pressure chose her first marriage at 23, and how “temple‑married Mormon woman” became more real than her right to be unharmed.
• Leaving the Church and walking straight into a nine‑year abusive marriage, repeating the pattern of handing identity and authority to someone else.
• The 10‑year spiritual blackout after leaving Mormonism—feeling outside the reach of God and not knowing who she was without the role of “faithful member.”
• Early acts of rebellion and autonomy: tattoos, piercings, tank tops, coffee, and paint‑by‑number kits as first steps toward meeting herself.
• Choosing Yogananda and Kriya Yoga as the first spiritual path she selected because it resonated with her inner experience, not because it was approved.
• A before‑and‑after moment with her current partner, who said, “You MUST put yourself first,” modeling what autonomy‑honoring love looks like.

Tamara then offers gentle, trauma‑informed practices to begin reclaiming your freedom of identity and self‑development—giving yourself permission not to know who you are yet, making small autonomous decisions, journaling your “borrowed” vs. “authentic” identity, and finding at least one safe relationship where you don’t have to perform.

Stay close to this work

If today’s episod

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

This episode is a deep breath after the heaviness of the Religious Freedoms series. Tamara turns toward the timeless teachings of the masters—Paramahansa Yogananda, the Bhagavad Gita, and Patanjali—to offer core spiritual principles that don’t require permission, performance, or perfection.
​

You’ll explore:

• Why the second coming of Christ is an inner awakening of Christ Consciousness, not a physical return
• How high‑control religion trains you to believe “spirituality is a transaction”—and why spirituality actually can’t be bought with tithing, service, or sacrifice
• The four big lies: you are a sinner, spirituality is pay‑to‑play, spiritual experiences need institutional approval, and meditation is dangerous—plus their impact on your nervous system
• How meditation and action together create direct contact with the Divine, and why your intuition can become a better therapist than any you could hire
• What Yogananda’s view of superconsciousness reveals about your own capacity for direct knowing, peace, and inner light
  ​

Tamara also guides you through a grounding practice—breath, affirmation, and a simple prayer—to help you feel the light within your own body and begin rebuilding trust in your intuition.

If you’re ready to step out of fear‑based, transactional religion and into a living, daily spirituality that honors your agency and inner wisdom, this episode will meet you right where you are.

Stay close to this work
If today’s episode spoke to your heart and you’d like gentle support for your own sacred intimacy with the Divine, you’re welcome to join my Inner Light Companion email list. Each week I send a brief reflection, a simple spiritual practice, and a question to pray or journal with—so you can keep deepening your relationship with God in the middle of your real life.

Work with me 1:1
If you’re longing for a soul friend to walk beside you in this season—someone to hold quiet, sacred space as you

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

In this bonus episode of the Inner Light Companion, Tamara slows the series cadence to one Tuesday bonus episode for the next three weeks so she can honor her body, her nervous system, and the sacredness of this work—while giving you more space to integrate. She then names what so many raised in Mormonism and other high-control religions have felt but struggled to articulate: the invisible abuse of psychological harm wrapped in spiritual language.

Tamara walks through four forms of psychological harm in high-control religion—emotional suppression, induced fear and anxiety, shame and scapegoating, and constant criticism and humiliation—and shows how they sever you from your emotional reality, your body’s wisdom, and your sense of direct connection with the Divine. She shares powerful personal stories from temple marriage, missionary culture, worthiness interviews, and public “correction,” alongside research on trauma, perfectionism, and mental health in high-control systems, to validate that the harm you experienced was real and not your fault.

You’ll also hear how religious trauma lives in the nervous system as chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and why regulation is such a subversive act of freedom. Tamara offers concrete somatic practices (breathwork, gentle movement, vagus nerve support, grounding), reframes emotions as sacred feedback rather than sin, and names therapeutic modalities that support recovery from religious trauma, including EMDR, IFS, somatic work, and narrative therapy.

The episode closes with a guided reclaiming exercise to help you come back into your body: placing hands on heart and belly, breathing slowly, naming suppressed emotions, and practicing new internal statements like “My emotions are my friends” and “My body is a safe place.” This is an invitation to name what happened to you as abuse, rebuild self-trust, and remember that the Divine has been loving your whole, unperformed self all along.

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

After nearly six decades of living in shutdown and over‑functioning, Tamara shares a tender update on a surprising nervous system reset that began just one month ago. She describes how a new tatami mat, a co‑regulating dog, and a night of deeper rest led to a spontaneous, interoception‑led stretching and prayer practice—without any “shoulds” or spiritual performance.

In this short, story‑driven episode, you’ll hear how comfort, co‑regulation, and nervous system safety even showed up in Tamara’s continuous glucose monitor, and why that matters for your own healing if you’ve been trained to override your body in the name of devotion. Together, you’ll explore a radically different way of understanding spirituality: when the body feels safe enough, the nervous system doesn’t resist God—it leads you toward connection.

In this episode:

• A real‑time nervous system reset after decades of shutdown and over‑functioning
• How co‑regulation (with a dog!) and sleep environment support safety and repair
• Interoception‑led stretching as a form of embodied prayer and devotion
• Why many spiritual disciplines are actually survival strategies—and how that can change
• A new lens: when we are safe, the nervous system leads devotion, not performance

If you’re healing from high‑control religion, spiritual abuse, or chronic over‑functioning, this episode offers both language and lived example for letting your spirituality finally live in your body.

Stay close to this work
If today’s episode spoke to your heart and you’d like gentle support for your own sacred intimacy with the Divine, you’re welcome to join my Inner Light Companion email list. Each week I send a brief reflection, a simple spiritual practice, and a question to pray or journal with—so you can keep deepening your relationship with God in the middle of your real life.

Work with me 1:1
If you’re longing for a soul friend to walk beside you in this season—someone to hold quiet, sacred space as you heal spiritually, disentangle religious wounding, and learn to trust your own direct connection with the Divine—you can learn more about my 1:1 spiritual counseling sessions and inquire about working together through Guiding Light Spiritual Counseling.

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

• A simple, 3‑story‑house explanation of the nervous system (ventral vagal, sympathetic, dorsal) and why your body reacts before your theology does.
• How “we alone have the truth,” fear‑based doctrine, and love‑bombing create chronic threat and shutdown in the body.
• A breakdown of the “breakthrough weekend” arc—hope, high, crash—and how it can overload your window of tolerance.​
• Why not feeling anything in worship, prayer, or meditation is often a sign of dorsal vagal protection, not a lack of faith.
• Practical red flags and green flags for churches, spiritual communities, and retreats, seen through a nervous‑system lens.
• A closing grounding practice you can do in real time to help your body feel just a little safer again.​

Stay close to this work
If today’s episode spoke to your heart and you’d like gentle support for your own sacred intimacy with the Divine, you’re welcome to join my Inner Light Companion email list. Each week I send a brief reflection, a simple spiritual practice, and a question to pray or journal with—so you c

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

A quiet invitation to Grace's World appears in this episode.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫

In this episode, Tamara exposes how high‑control systems erode the most sacred space you have: the private interior of your own mind. She breaks down how surveillance becomes a lifestyle — youth interviews, modesty policing, emotional monitoring, ward council “care,” snitch culture, and the internalized bishop that follows you long after you’ve left.

You’ll learn:
• how self‑policing replaces intuition
• how betrayal becomes normalized as “love”
• how confidentiality collapses across leadership, family, and community
• how high‑control religion trains your nervous system to stay braced, watched, and judged
• how this destroys psychological and spiritual privacy
• and how to reclaim the private inner sanctuary that belongs only to you

Tamara also shares a powerful personal example that reveals exactly how confession, gossip, “concern,” and leadership communication create a surveillance web that harms individuals and families — and how recognizing that pattern can be the beginning of reclaiming your sovereignty.

This episode ends with a grounding nervous‑system practice to help you return home to the truth:
Your thoughts are yours.
Your feelings are yours.
Your intuition is yours.
Your inner world is yours.

Privacy is not secrecy.
Privacy is sacred interiority — the birthplace of intuition and direct connection with the Divine.

If you're ready to reclaim the parts of yourself that high‑control religion taught you to fear, this episode will meet you right where you are.

Stay close to this work
If today’s episode spoke to your heart and you’d like gentle support for your own sacred intimacy with the Divine, you’re welcome to join my Inner Light Companion email list. Each week I send a brief reflection, a simple spiritual practice, and a question to pray or journal with—so you can keep deepening your relationship with God in the middle of your real life.

Work with me 1:1
If you’re longing for a soul friend to walk beside you in this season—someone to hold quiet, sacred space as you heal spiritually, disentangle religious wounding, and learn to trust your own direct conne

Send us a text

If your nervous system feels tired—and you’re longing for a deeper, more embodied connection with the Divine—I’d love to invite you to my free Sacred Intimacy Snapshot. In just a few minutes, you’ll discover which area of intimacy in your life is asking for care right now—and you’ll receive a gentle four-part mini-course to help you tend what’s next on your journey. You can take it at innerlightcompanion.com

Tamara is developing a four‑week online retreat called Awakening Your Inner Light, created specifically for people coming out of high‑control religion who want to learn meditation, trust their intuition, and rebuild a direct connection with the Divine. If you’d like to be on the Early Access list for this retreat, email her at tamara@innerlightcompanion.com.

🌿 The Inner Light Companion is hosted by Tamara Ridge, LMFT — guiding spiritually curious souls into deeper connection, intuitive healing, and divine remembrance.

💌 Connect with me:
Website & Guest Submissions: www.innerlightcompanion.com
Spiritual Counseling: www.guidinglightspiritualcounseling.com
Instagram: @innerlightcompanion

🎧 Subscribe for weekly stories, tools & reflections to help you reconnect with your inner light.

However you show up on this path, your story is sacred.
Let’s walk it together. 💫