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Because of the enormous success of Dr. Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism and the way the Values Based Integration Process (VBIP) is highlighted in that book, VBIP has been highly connected to its success as a strategy for those who are Autistic.

What I have talked less about is the ways that VBIP was designed intentionally to support those who have come out of High (Religious) Control Environments – especially those who have grown up in these spaces – or those who have had Adverse Religious Experiences such as Purity Culture. (I speak about the intersection of my own experiences with Purity Culture as an Atypical Autistic here).

VBIP is effective in both of these situations – and so many other trauma-based experiences – because it offers an embodied means of discovering a sense of self when the self-hood discovery process has been interrupted, constrained or violated by controlling social and/or religious forces, especially in early childhood.

In her new book When Religion Hurts You : Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion, Dr. Laura Anderson outlines the ways that adverse religious experiences can cause hurt and harm to individuals within these systems through religious abuse – coercion, intimidation, emotional and spiritual abuse, isolation, blaming, patriarchal privilege, gender and sexuality definitions and constraints and economic control. Together with the Religious Trauma Institute, Anderson has developed the Religious Power and Control Wheel, as a way of demonstrating how these various elements of power and control are maintained and enforced within high religious environments.

What is clear from Anderson’s work and the work of many others in the field, is that re-establishing bodily agency, autonomy, and active participation – the basic building blocks of VBIP – is crucial to healing from these wounds, and I couldn’t agree more!

In my own experience and work, here’s why.

When you grow up in a High (Religious) Control Environment you are taught what to think, what to feel, what your body can and should be allowed to do. In the church I grew up in (as in many others, I suspect) there was a song we used to sing:

O be careful little eyes what you see

O be careful little eyes what you see

For the Father up above is looking down with love

O be careful little eyes what you see

It sounds harmless if you haven’t come from this environment, but growing up in this space – especially as someone read as a girl – leads to a constant sense that there are authorities above you to whom you must acquiesce everything you might want or feel or look at or need or desire. It is always ostensibly done “for your own good” but that doesn’t change the fact that it is done.

The result is a world where you have no access to your values – to any intuitive sense of self, in fact. All you have access to is a lifetime of messages and requirements put on top of you, forcing you to conform yourself to a very narrow and rigid way of living and being in the world.

And after a lifetime of authorities telling you what to think and believe, it doesn’t really work to simply shift from one set of authorities to another when you realize the environment that you’re in is toxic and abusive. For one thing, if you actually want to leave toxic and abusive it will require moving to a place where the new people in that world aren’t authoritatively trying to tell you what to think and believe. That’s the whole point.

But for another thing, the very idea that someone else could tell us who we are or what we value – although our norm at this point in our journey – is actually impossible. It simply doesn’t work. If we want to know who we are, we need a way to uncover that in our own lives – a way to uncover it that goes beneath all of the messages to find out what truly makes us come alive.

This is the work of the Values Based Integrated Process.

And this is why it is so much more than just an “autism” therapy.

Anyone who has lost their sense of self growing up – for any reason – will benefit from VBIP. And I really hope that will include you!

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