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

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 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 t

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

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 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

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. 💫

Manipulation inside high‑control religion rarely looks like manipulation while you’re inside it. It looks like love. It looks like protection. It looks like “spiritual guidance.” And for many of us, it becomes the emotional atmosphere we grow up breathing — invisible until the moment we finally step outside it.

In this vulnerable episode, Tamara unpacks the four forms of manipulation and coercion that shape life inside high‑control religious systems:

• Emotional manipulation — love‑bombing, guilt, and conditional belonging
• Fear‑based control — divine punishment, vigilance, spiritual threats
• Humiliation and degradation — the subtle erosion of dignity and voice
• Coercive discipline systems — confession cycles, worthiness interviews, and self‑policing

She explores how these patterns settle into the body, how they create the fawn response, and how they quietly teach you to distrust your own inner truth.

You’ll also learn the early signs that you’re healing — pausing instead of appeasing, recognizing guilt as manipulation, allowing anger to become clarity, and rebuilding your own internal authority.

This episode closes with a grounding practice to help you return to yourself, reclaim your nervous system, and reconnect with the Divine in a way that belongs to you.

Freedom isn’t about having no influence. It’s about knowing the difference between guidance and control.

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

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 explores one of the most painful but least acknowledged wounds in high‑control religion: the loss of belonging when the Church decides you aren’t “worthy” to enter the temple.

From standing outside a loved one’s wedding while family gathers inside, to decades of everyday “just come to church” pressure, Tamara breaks down how exclusion becomes a spiritual injury that lives in the nervous system long after you leave.

Inside this episode:

• the truth behind “You can choose… as long as you don’t actually choose”
• why temple exclusion creates an attachment rupture, not a doctrinal disagreement
• how “just” language (just come, just participate, just bear your testimony) dismisses your inner truth
• the erasure of women inside the temple’s true order of prayer
• how coercive spirituality hijacks your sense of worthiness and belonging
• reclaiming direct access to the Divine—no mediators, no gatekeepers
• the freedom to raise your children outside a system built on fear, shame, and obedience
• how spiritual sovereignty feels in your body: safety, grounding, breath, softness

Tamara closes with embodied practices to help you release coercive conditioning, rebuild true belonging, and trust the inner voice that’s been leading you home all along.

You were never meant to earn love through ritual.
Your spiritual belonging was never meant to be conditional.

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

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 today’s episode, we’re unpacking one of the most painful and unspoken legacies of high‑control religion: financial fear that lives in the body.

For many of us, money was never neutral. It became fused with spiritual worthiness, obedience, punishment, and survival. And long after leaving, our nervous systems still respond to money as if danger is hiding inside our bank accounts.

In this episode, I share:

• how childhood scarcity formed the foundation for later religious control
• the subtle ways tithing, surveillance, and scarcity doctrine wire the body for fear
• why financial anxiety isn’t a personal flaw — it’s a survival pattern
• what shifted during my recent 4‑day nervous system reset
• how my body stopped interpreting money as danger
• why wanting financial well‑being is not greed — it’s regulation and sovereignty
• what true prosperity actually feels like in a regulated body

This conversation is tender, honest, and deeply validating if money has ever made you brace, freeze, or panic — even when the numbers are fine.

Freedom begins when your body stops treating money like a threat.
And you are allowed to have enough.

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. 💫

For 59 years, I thought I was making my own choices — what to wear, what to eat, when to rest, how to give, how to spend my time. But a few weeks ago, my body revealed the truth: I wasn’t choosing.
My dysregulated nervous system was.

In this episode, I share the most vulnerable story I’ve ever told — a four-day nervous system reset that completely transformed:

• my glucose stability
• my hunger and satiety signals
• my ability to rest without guilt
• my emotional resilience
• my relationship with my partner
• my sense of safety in daily life
• my lifelong fear of homelessness
• and the way people respond to me socially

This wasn’t a mindset shift.
It wasn’t a spiritual insight.
It was a physiological unwinding of nearly six decades of survival mode.

I talk about how religious control wires your body for fear, performance, exhaustion, and bodily override — and how that hidden wiring shapes every decision you make until your nervous system finally feels safe.

If you’ve ever wondered:

“Why do I do this when I know better?”
“Why am I still exhausted?”
“Why can’t I rest without guilt?”
“Why does my body react like this?”

— this is the episode that will help it all make sense.

And if you’ve been carrying survival patterns from high-control religion, trauma, perfectionism, or chronic stress… I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you. Your body has simply been trying to keep you alive.

This is the freedom that comes when your body finally says, “You’re safe.”

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

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. 💫