Breaking Free From Patriarchal Rule: Cait West’s Escape from Spiritual Abuse

Welcome to the For The Love of The Matriarchy series where we’ll explore all the different aspects of women working to embrace agency and celebrating their worth. As we celebrate the power of women and their accomplishments, we’ll also look at the challenges women have faced in a patriarchal society (and still face) and what that means for their bodies and autonomy.

Cait West is an author who grew up in an extreme patriarchal Christian community. She was taught from a young age that her sole purpose was to become a submissive wife and mother. This pervasive sense of having no agency or control over her own life, combined with the constant messaging that she was inherently sinful and unworthy, took a profound toll on Cait's mental health, causing severe anxiety and depression from a very young age. Jen and Cait delve into how families can fall into toxic belief systems, and what recovery can look like.

Jen and Cait discuss:

• The impact of being raised in a fundamentalist, patriarchal environment that severely restricts a woman's autonomy, education, and life choices.
• The healing power of finding community, sharing one's story, and reclaiming agency after experiencing spiritual abuse and trauma.
• The difficult but important choice of breaking free from oppressive systems, even when it means severing ties with your own family

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Thought-Provoking Quotes:

"[My husband] has always been my steady companion because he experienced some of that verbal abuse from my dad, and he knew what it was like...When I would have anxiety attacks, he didn't understand what was going on either, but he would just sit with me until I could get through it and come back to regulate my nervous system. He just was there with me through it. And that meant more than having someone try to fix it or totally tell me what to do." - Cait West

"I realized I had a story to tell. Going to writing conferences and learning from other writers like you who were talking about speaking up for injustice, I decided to tell part of my story online. I started doing that around 2018 and realized there's a lot more people who've been through this and they've just been silenced or afraid — people who if they say something, their family's going to cut them off. That's what happened to me in 2019. I had an interview and I started talking online about my experience and my dad decided not to talk to me anymore. I understand that fear but once I lost that relationship, I felt liberated to tell my story. Because somebody has to. Somebody has to say something." - Cait West

"Cait's my real first name, and then West is my grandmother's — what we call the maiden name. It's always resonated with me, my mother's heritage, because they're Southerners, they grew up in poverty. The women in my family have always been the leaders and the strong people of faith. And so to me, it's kind of like calling back to that heritage and recognizing it and trying to hold on to some kind of legacy after losing so much of my life." - Cait West

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Christian Patriarchy Movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_patriarchy

Tears of Eden (Nonprofit for survivors of spiritual abuse - https://www.tearsofeden.org/

Rift: A Memoir by Cait West - https://www.caitwest.com/book

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.caitwest.com/

Twitter - https://bit.ly/3UytS9l

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/caitwestwrites/ ...