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Healing Process
The Healing Eve three-stage process leads the woman to identify and replace the toxic beliefs of religious fundamentalism with an authentic life of integrity, meaning and joy.
Acknowledging Your Programming is the stage in which the individual begins to become aware that she has buried important parts of her authentic self beneath the worldview of the fundamentalist church and community. While every child is born into a particular sense of the world, some worldviews – like those made by religious fundamentalists -- are more invasive than others. In this first critical stage, the individual gradually becomes aware of the fallibility of the promises of religious fundamentalism, and catches a glimpse of her authentic self beneath the layers of doubt and anxiety.
Healing Your Reactivity begins when disillusionment with the fundamentalist worldview reaches a critical mass, carrying with it rebellion, anger and ultimately, traumatic departure from the status quo. This is a transitional stage in which the recovering fundamentalist feels the pain of no longer fitting into either her self-conception or her culturally-ordained role. At the same time, she has a growing awareness of her more authentic dreams, yearnings, feelings and wishes. As the psychologists consistently inform us, healthy psycho-spiritual growth depends on a period of disorder out of which the reconstituted authentic self emerges. In this critical stage of the journey to healing, the woman is shown how to experience the pain of transition not as a problem to be solved—but as an indication that she has seriously begun in earnest the initiation of a period of promising and fruitful personal growth.
Through a series of simple but profound exercises, the reader is guided to recognize a “moment” that crystallizes and ultimately transcends her accumulating unhappiness with fundamentalism. The stories of the women interviewed for the research project serve as vivid illustrations and points of identification for the reader, providing consistency and inspiration.
Reclaiming Your Wisdom, the woman who has left fundamentalism makes peace with her past, retrieves aspects of value and integrates them into her new beliefs as a tool for understanding and liberation. This is the healing of Eve.
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