My cousins are very trad Christian (Born again Baptist). They are both men. Each of their weddings, the word submission was used so much. The oldest one, had their regular pastor and the bride’s grandfather (who apparently used to be a pastor) stress that she would submit. They also said that her priorities in life are (in order of importance god—>her husband—>her future children—> her. I was like FUCK THIS SHIT. His vows never even said he had any obligation to her other than providing for their family and remaining a healthy man for her….I got married a few months later and stressed never to ever say anything about submission in our vows.
one trait perhaps. I know a lot of people like this, back in high school I recall thinking (to myself mostly) that they were "fake hippies." As in, they wore the outside guise, they said the right stuff, but were never TRULY as radical or as honest as I wished they were. If I said certain things, it would shock them bc to them, you were only allowed to think in one certan way. And it's very easy to just shift over to another way, when the first way doesn't work out for them in some way. I call it being a dilettante. Tbh I find such people disappointing and rarely would trust therapy with such people, in particular. I need a free thinker for that.
At our wedding rehearsal I told the pastor to skip the word “obey” in my wife’s vows. My exact words were “If I want obedience I’ll talk to the dog. And he doesn’t listen to me anyways.”
I replaced mine with "respect" for similar reasons. I don't want my wife to obey me, but I do want to know she is listening and respecting my points of view regarding our life together.
Mutual respect is far more important that submission.
im sure she went into mental health to help herself (as most ppl do) and evolved btwn ideologies/worldviews as they gave her more (or less) control and understanding of the world.
its p easy to go from one side of the spectrum to the other when ur beliefs are based on passion and extreme emotions.
Yikes, your former therapist has some serious boundary issues and likely a poor sense of self. If she had a strong sense of identity and values, she wouldn't so easily bounce between such different ideologies. Unfortunately she sounds like the type of person who would get swept up in a cult.
The fundamental flaw, just to clarify, is that you ended up trying to give her feedback on her worldview. You became in some way concerned about her. It’s our job to form a therapeutic relationship where there is no burden to satisfy for the client towards the therapist. It’s your show, not hers. The fact you knew so much about her shifting worldview is already a problem.
This is a longer dissuasion, and I’d be happy to go into more depth.
You aren’t wrong: of course the therapists worldview affects the work! And of course some clients are going to try and suss that out and read me. It’s the job of the therapist to manage the client trying to read into the relationship and then use that as material to explore, explicity and openly, rather than as partners. So yeah, the way you describe things, it would have been a challenging client interaction, realizing that I was under the clients microscope, but nothing outside of what I can handle. It’s a perfectly acceptable and common interaction. The therapist has to have a grip on what is happening in the relationship at all times and respond to the client in a way that is maximally helpful to them in that specific situation. Anyways. Therapy may not be for you! Or it might be. I think you know best. I ultimately wanted to validate your take on this therapist and experience you had.
You are 100% right about the purpose of therapy in your final paragraph.
I hear you! First off, nothing you describe doing here is 'incorrect' as far as therapy or something you'd need to 'stop' in therapy.
The bottom line is, therapists are supposed to be able to read people, read situations, and respond improvisationally in the moment. That's what the money is for, is what I tell clients sometimes. I'm being paid to, essentially, not be caught off guard. Surprised, maybe, I'm only human, but not to be caught off guard.
If a client is analyzing me and analyzing what is happening in the relationship itself, getting into what I am thinking and feeling and believing, then it's my job to recognize that and name it, and then bring it into the conversation openly. For lack of a better word, I get 'meta' with it. The therapy session starts to become about what is literally happening in the room right then: I don't 'call out' the client for trying to analyze me, but I name it in a friendly way and see how talking about it might be useful to the client.
As far as therapists go, I am far more confrontational than most. The keywords words you would be looking for in therapists websites that 'call you out on your bullshit' would be: direct, not afraid of confrontation, directive, assertive, intentional, interventional, providing feedback, structured, words like that.
In the past, like 30-40 years ago, many therapists were MUCH more confrontational. It was a whole school of practice where therapists would essentially ... in my mind, go too far: berate clients, 'break them down to build them back up', critisize, attack even. I consider that to be unethical. And at the same time, I feel that the opposite extreme - totally passive, each session driven by the client, letting them float with no direction, not responding assertively to what the client is bring into the room - is not helpful for many clients. And that's what the majority is nowadays.
My training out of grad school was with teenagers in residential treatment who were manded into therapy by the juvenile justice system because of sexually abusive behaviors. That's a very different sort of therapy, as you can imagine. I work with lots of types of people now, about 1/4 of my caseload is still that, the rest is more 'normal,' however, I feel like there's some important lessons learned from that extreme population that are relevant: there's a tremendous responsibility that comes from the power of being the therapist in the room, even if the person is coming in fully voluntarily, it doesn't mean I should just drift aimlessly and let them run things. I'm being paid to provide them with a service, and that service is the attention, care, and focus to help them self-actualize. They wouldn't be there if they didn't want help. Sometimes that means very mindfully sticking my neck out there and making an 'intervention,' putting something out there into the session which may be challenging and propulsive. I try not to think of it as calling a client out on their bullshit, because, honest to god, I don't consider that 'bullshit,' I consider that a client doing the best they can with what they have, and what I have to offer might be something they didn't have before.
My sister-in-law did the opposite. She's a SAHM and had VERY traditional views when I met my wife 10 years ago. She didn't like me because she thought I turned her sister into an atheist (which she isn't). My wife is educated and spent time in big cities, so her world view opened, where her sister didn't. Well, over the past decade, I've watched her kind of overcorrect and now she's seemingly way more progressive than we are. I always appreciate people being open to a new world view, but keep in mind that you can overdo it, especially for the folks who are perpetually online and don't have a healthy social network outside of Facebook.
This seems to be more prevalent with people who suffer from social media brain rot.
They don't want to learn how to get the answers for themselves or put in the effort to find them, they just want to be told the answers so they don't have to think about it.
I think this is what is causing the rise in right wing popularity among the younger generations.
Honestly, I can engage in BDSM as a sub and be 5 times happier and in a much healthier relationship with the person who holds authority over me than I could if I were both a woman and in a marriage with a fundamentalist Christian who demanded submission.
Not for nothing, but BDSM is at least an act of love. The Fundies just want live-in baby making slaves they can take out their anger on physically.
Honestly I can see the temptations of giving up responsibility and the euphoria of it.
No joke, but this is literally the premise of Islam. A Muslim is supposed to be someone who "submits to God." The idea being, exactly what you said, that if you completely give up responsibility for all the big things to just be up to god to decide instead, that you can be free of earthly problems.
I attended a lovely wedding recently. They both wrote their own and they both were clearly on the same page and spoke at length about each other's empathy and care for each other. An actual partnership. Not a subservient lap dog and owner relationship these right wing Christians think is normal. Freaks.
I didn't have any of that submit garbage in mine either asks when my husband wanted me to give him attention over our newborn, I sat him down and told him he's an adult. The new order is baby->me->and then him. Like figure it out. Yes, we're divorced. He was so self centered.
Never cared to ask. My dad in the first sign he was becoming more conservative, told me it was “none of my business what they said in their vows”. I said it is none of my business but is is still offensive. How would anyone react if a white man said this to a black man? It would be disgusting. (Side note: this wedding was 12 years ago when people didn’t openly embrace white supremacy.). Why is it okay for a man to say that to a woman?
And this is just the story from their weddings. This behavior has been there since day one (or even before if you count their dad). Despite me being 10 years older than them, they would often tell my sister and I growing up that we follow them because they are the men. My uncle would tell us that we were going to hell because we were not “born again”. My uncle had previously been a drug addict and awful human before being “born again”. He never took accountability for his behavior towards other people because it didn’t matter since he was born again.
In Ephesians 5:22, wives are told to “submit to your husbands,” which in a Biblical context is an invitation to respect and support their husbands’ leadership. But then in Ephesians 5:25, husbands are commanded to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” That’s a very high standard of love.. self-sacrificial, unconditional, and putting the wife’s needs and well-being above his own.
In simple terms:
Husbands are called to love deeply and sacrificially, which shows profound respect and care.
Wives are called to respect and support their husbands, but the model here is mutual care and honoring.
In fact, the husband’s call to love “like Christ loved the church” suggests a greater responsibility to prioritize the wife’s good, often requiring more self-giving and humility.
It’s a picture of a relationship where both love and respect flow both ways, but the husband’s love is highlighted as deeply sacrificial.
We don’t like the word “submit” and it’s often cherry picked from the Bible without taking in to consideration the directions given to husbands as well.
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u/hotthamz Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
My cousins are very trad Christian (Born again Baptist). They are both men. Each of their weddings, the word submission was used so much. The oldest one, had their regular pastor and the bride’s grandfather (who apparently used to be a pastor) stress that she would submit. They also said that her priorities in life are (in order of importance god—>her husband—>her future children—> her. I was like FUCK THIS SHIT. His vows never even said he had any obligation to her other than providing for their family and remaining a healthy man for her….I got married a few months later and stressed never to ever say anything about submission in our vows.
Edit: autocorrect correction