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When Devon Price included my Values Based Integrative Process in his book on Unmasking Autism, the tool became known in the Autism world, and passed on within neurodivergent conversations and networks in ways that have blown me away.

Seriously – I love it!

But the thing about it is, the VBIP is good for more than just Autistic or neurodivergent folks.

In fact, it was developed with more than just Autistic or neurodivergent folks in mind. Because the thing about it is, at its heart what the VBIP does is it allows folks who have never had the chance to gain an awareness of their unique sense of self – or those for whom trauma has resulted in a loss of connection with their sense of self – to find their way back to agency, autonomy, and active participation in their life.

This means that along with a neurodivergent population, the toolkit has been tested on and is incredibly effective with those who come from High-Control Religious Environments and other spaces of childhood complex trauma. Today I want to talk a bit more about how and why that works so well for folks coming from these spaces (I still want to do another post on how the VBIP is a necessary addition/alternative to AA/NA groups for full healing for recovering addicts, but trying to keep this focused!)

Some of you know that along with being a coach I am also ordained and work as a pastor. I have also published elsewhere on the experience of growing up in Purity Culture as someone on the Autism spectrum. The religious spaces I grew up in were not as High Control as they might have been, but they certainly didn’t leave a lot of space for developing a sense of self.

The fact that religious trauma and abuse create a form of complex trauma has only very recently been studied and we have a long way to go in properly understanding and treating it. What we do know so far, however, is that healing from these environments requires the same types of complex trauma supports as anyone else with complex trauma requires. As with other victims of childhood trauma, that is especially true for those who grow up in these spaces.

Some people join – and experience trauma and abuse from – High-Control Religious Environments as adults. These individuals often lose their sense of Self in this process, and struggle to find it again. But for those who grow up in High-Control Religious Environments, the extensive and intricate rule-sets these communities create for every facet of life can result in a failure to ever develop a grounded sense of Self to begin with.

Finding a grounded sense of Self after that kind of a beginning in life is not always easy. The messages that created and formed the untenable life of High-Control Religious Environments don’t disappear when you walk out the doors of those churches. And it is rarely as simple as saying “this is a dumb way to live – I think I’ll live differently.” Many of the messages are so deeply ingrained in us that we aren’t even consciously aware of them, and – although screwing up our eyes and trying harder is a well-trodden path for many survivors of High-Control Religious Environments – neither this nor the decision to switch our authoritative allegiance from one person to another is enough to truly find our Self.

This is where the VBIP comes in.

The VBIP uses the neuroscience of embodiment to begin by helping us find our Self. What do we value, if we aren’t being told what we have to value? We begin this process through embodied storytelling – by isolating the times in our lives when we have felt most alive and then leaning into these moments to explore all of the reasons that contributed to that incredible moment. Rather than trying to guess what we value from a list of options (and only finding out what we think we’re supposed to value in the process), or trying to take on the values of someone new in the hopes that they will fit better, the VBIP gives us access to our own embodied knowledge, before we even begin the process of tackling the ill-fitting messages driving our nervous systems to trigger. Once we have discovered our values, they then provide the tools to identify, deconstruct, grieve, and reconstruct the messages that are no longer serving us.

What has been most striking to me over the past eight years of working with this material is not only that it works, but the ways that, as it works, through its very commitment to gentle embodiment, agency, autonomy and active participation at every step of the way, it serves to heal the nervous system and return us to ourselves.

It’s no small thing. But I realize I haven’t had a chance to train very many folks yet who work more with those from High-Control Religious Environments as I have with those who are working with Autistic and neurodivergent folks. So … figured it was time to start this conversation!