There is something I didn't tell you when I first shared this story twelve years ago.

In Episode 33 of JournalTalk, I introduced my guest, Shirley, as "a friend of mine."

That was true.

It just wasn't the whole truth.

And perhaps, given what this episode was about, there's something wonderfully appropriate about finally telling the rest of the story.

But first, I want you to meet Shirley the way my listeners met her back then.

A Little Girl Who Was Terrified of God

Shirley was born to poor Jewish immigrant parents who worked extraordinarily long hours. A loving Christian neighbor offered to help care for her and became, in Shirley's words, a second mother.

There was genuine love in that relationship.There was also fear.

Her second mother belonged to a small fundamentalist Christian church that taught a stark message: unless Shirley believed in Jesus and experienced salvation in the correct way, she—and the Jewish parents she loved—would spend eternity in a literal hell.

Shirley was about nine years old, and she believed them.

She prayed. She cried. She worried that she wasn't good enough. Even when she experienced something she understood as a spiritual encounter with Jesus, another terrifying question immediately appeared:

What if my experience wasn't good enough?

The promised escape from hell offered little comfort when you could never be certain you had qualified for it. The fear followed Shirley through adolescence and into adulthood. 

Eventually, the world began complicating what she'd been taught. She met a Catholic math teacher who seemed unquestionably kind and decent. She met an atheist who was also a good human being. She even joked during our interview that, surprisingly enough, she eventually discovered some Jews who were good people too.

The humor matters.

Because people are wonderfully inconvenient when our beliefs require them to fit neatly into categories. Shirley gradually returned to Judaism and developed a spiritual life that felt more authentic to her.

But her deep-rooted fear didn't get the memo.

Decades later, now in her seventies, she could still find herself lying awake at night terrified by beliefs planted in childhood.

Today we have language for experiences like this. We might call some of it religious trauma. Back then, I referred to it as "spiritual bruising." I still rather like that phrase.

When a Belief That Was Supposed to Save You Becomes Poison

Religious trauma is a complicated subject, and I want to preserve something Shirley herself was careful to say at the beginning of our interview. Her story was not an indictment of Christianity or Christians.

In fact, she talked warmly about the Christian friends who continued to bless her life. Her experience involved a particular fundamentalist environment and the way its teachings became encoded in her young mind.

That distinction is very important. Faith can be a profound source of resilience, community, meaning, identity, comfort, and love. But beliefs can also wound us. And this isn't exclusively about religion.

Sometimes we absorb ideas from parents, teachers, partners, cultures, communities, or painful experiences and accept them as truths:

• I'm not good enough.

• Love has to be earned.

• If I disappoint someone, I'll be abandoned.

• My needs are selfish.

• Good people don't get angry.

• I have to be perfect to be safe.

• There is something fundamentally wrong with me.

We swallow these beliefs because, at some point, they seemed like medicine. Only years later we discover that some of them have been poisoning us. One of the great challenges of psychotherapy is figuring out which is which.

The Most Cliché Tool in the Journaling Toolbox

A psychologist friend eventually gave Shirley an assignment: Write a letter to Jesus.

If you've spent much time around journaling, or watched any psychological drama in movies or television, you've probably encountered the unsent letter. It's practically a cliché.

Write to your ex. Write to your younger self. Write to your deceased parent. Write a letter that you'll never send.

I've taught this technique for years. Kathleen Adams includes it among the approaches in Journal to the Self, a book that profoundly influenced my early work with therapeutic journaling.

But Shirley's version of the exercise was anything but ordinary. Her psychologist wasn't asking her to write to an annoying coworker. She was asking Shirley to address the figure whose very name still frightened her.

Shirley thought the idea was audacious. Who was she to write a letter to Jesus?

Still, she began.

It took days.

She repeatedly wanted to stop—not because writing was bringing immediate relief, but because it was stirring up fears she had spent most of adulthood trying to keep safely in the background.

When I asked what kept her returning to the page, her answer was just one word:

Hope.

Not relief. Hope.

"Dear Jesus, I Have Always Feared You"

Shirley's letter began:

"Dear Jesus, I have always feared you."

She wrote about feeling ashamed and inadequate. She described the Jesus she had internalized—not as kind and gentle, but as demanding, stern, and intolerant.

Then she did something extraordinary.

She wrote his name.

Jesus.

Again.

Jesus.

Again.

Jesus.

The word itself had carried fear for most of her life. So there on the page she confronted it.

She explained that she had sincerely tried to make the right spiritual choices. She apologized in case she'd gotten them wrong. She acknowledged that rationally she no longer believed God or Jesus would want her to live in terror.

But then came the sentence that reveals something important about emotional healing:

"Sometimes my old fears leap up." Exactly! We can intellectually reject a belief years before our emotional system stops reacting to it.

Anyone who has ever said, "I know this doesn't make sense, but I still feel it," understands what Shirley was describing. Insight matters. But sometimes the frightened part of us hasn't caught up yet.

Then Her Psychologist Suggested Something Even More Audacious

After Shirley finished her letter, her friend proposed part two: Now let Jesus write back.

Shirley was aghast. Writing to Jesus had seemed presumptuous enough.

Writing as Jesus? "I can't do that."

But once again, hope persuaded her to try.

And this time something very different happened. The first letter had taken days. The response flowed. Shirley told me she began experiencing relief almost immediately. And what appeared on the page was almost the exact opposite of the voice that had frightened her since childhood:

"Dear suffering soul, Shirley. Dear child, don't be frightened of me."

Then:

"You are good. You are good. You have tried your best."

And:

"Don't let those who speak falsely for me have power over you."

Then perhaps my favorite line:

"We are both Jews."

The letter ended not with punishment, judgment, or a theological test. It ended:

"No retribution. Just acceptance, love, and peace. Peace, peace, peace."

And it was signed: "Your friend, Jesus."

For a woman who had spent more than sixty years frightened of him, those three words were astonishing. Your friend, Jesus.

Now I'll Tell You Who Shirley Really Is

When I recorded that interview, I called Shirley my friend. I kept a professional distance between interviewer and guest. What listeners didn't know was that Shirley was—and is—my stepmother. She married my dad and entered my family when I was about seven years old.

At the time, I lived with my biological mother and had limited contact, and very little emotional connection, with my father. So Shirley and I didn't immediately develop the kind of relationship people might imagine when they hear the word stepmother.

That came gradually. We shared time. Interests. Stories. Questions. And eventually something much deeper.

By my late teenage years, I was wrestling with my own religious wounds. My story was very different from Shirley's, and it belongs elsewhere, but the questions underneath our experiences overlapped. Who are we in the eyes of God? What place do we occupy in the spectrum of eternity? What obligations do we have to the world, to the people we love, and to ourselves?

And perhaps the question that has fascinated me ever since: How do we actually know the things we think we know are true?

When I eventually moved in with my father and his family, Shirley and I had a lot to talk about. We still do. Part of our bond grew from what I can only describe affectionately as the mess in our heads and hearts around these enormous questions.

So when you listen to that old recording and hear me say, "Wow" again and again as Shirley reads her letter, you're not hearing a podcast host politely reacting to a guest. You're hearing a stepson listening to someone he loves describe making peace with a terror he knew had followed her for most of her life.

I just wasn't ready to tell you that yet.

What Was Actually Happening on the Page?

Today, as a psychotherapist, I find Shirley's two-letter exercise even more fascinating.

I don't think we need to decide whether the second letter came from God, from Jesus, from Shirley's unconscious mind, from her imagination, or from what I called during the interview her "deep inner wisdom." (Shirley herself believed the words were influenced by a divine source.) I'm comfortable leaving that question open.

Psychotherapy does not have to settle theology in order to become curious about an experience.

What interests me clinically is the shift in voice. For decades, Shirley had carried an internal representation of Jesus associated with terror, condemnation, inadequacy, and eternal punishment. Then she allowed another voice onto the page. Compassionate. Protective. Accepting. Peaceful.

Whether someone understands that voice spiritually, psychologically, symbolically—or some combination of all three—the exercise allowed Shirley to encounter a possibility her frightened childhood mind had scarcely been permitted to imagine:

What if the person I fear isn't actually saying the terrible things I've been told he is saying?

That's an extraordinarily powerful question. And you don't have to have religious trauma to ask it.

Who Are You Still Arguing With Inside Your Head?

This is where the unsent letter becomes useful far beyond religion. Perhaps the person you need to write to is your father. Your mother. An ex-partner. Someone who died before an important conversation could happen. A teacher who humiliated you. A younger version of yourself. Your body. Your anxiety. Your anger. Your grief. God. Or even a future version of yourself who has survived what you're currently going through.

The first letter gives your own voice room to speak without interruption. But the second letter is often where things get interesting. Let the recipient answer.

Not because you possess magical knowledge of what another person would actually say. You don't.

But because imagining the response can reveal expectations, fears, longings, internalized voices, and sometimes a form of wisdom that becomes easier to access when we temporarily stop speaking as ourselves.

I said something similar to Shirley during our original conversation: when I've used this technique after a conflict, I know I'm not literally transcribing the other person's words. I'm exploring what I expect them to say—or what some deeper part of me imagines might be said. That imagined dialogue can reveal information about my own internal conflict.

Today I would add an important caution. Not every painful experience should be excavated alone. As I've written elsewhere about expressive writing and psychotherapy, journaling can sometimes become rumination rather than resolution. Writing may be therapeutic, but it isn't automatically therapy. For trauma in particular, pacing, emotional regulation, safety, and support matter.

Sometimes the most useful writing happens alongside another human being who can help us recognize when we're discovering something—and when we're simply hurting ourselves again.

The Great Unanswerable Questions

Perhaps that's also why I've never lost my fascination with journaling. The most important questions in life rarely have tidy answers. What happens after we die? What does God expect from us? Why do terrible things happen? Am I lovable? Can I forgive someone without excusing what they did? Can I belong to my family without sharing their beliefs? Who am I if I stop believing the story that once defined me? What do I do when the people who taught me right from wrong were wrong about something important?

Psychotherapy doesn't hand us an answer key to these questions. Neither does journaling.

But both can offer something I think is more useful: a place where we're allowed to ask them honestly.

That's the kind of expressive writing that interests me most today. Not filling pages. Not documenting every detail of our day. Not trying to manufacture a breakthrough.

Writing as a way of becoming curious about the stories, voices, beliefs, fears, values, and longings living inside us.

Twelve Years Later

Listening to Shirley's voice today, I'm struck by something I couldn't fully appreciate when I recorded the episode. For most of her life, religion had given her a terrifying question: What if I'm wrong?

The letter didn't finally prove that she was right. It did something better. It gave her permission to imagine that uncertainty didn't have to be terrifying. She could sincerely seek truth. She could make mistakes. She could remain Jewish. She could love Christian friends. She could wonder about Jesus. She could say his name. She could even imagine sitting with him someday as a friend. And she could sleep.

That last one matters to me.

Because after all our lofty discussions about theology, eternity, meaning, psychology, and the nature of God, sometimes healing looks wonderfully ordinary: A frightened person finally gets to rest.

Listen to JournalTalk Episode 33

In this episode of JournalTalk, Shirley and I discuss her childhood religious fears, the beliefs that followed her for decades, and the journaling exercise suggested by a psychologist friend that helped her relate to those fears in an entirely new way.

You'll hear Shirley read both letters herself.

And now, for the first time, you'll know something listeners didn't know when the episode originally aired. The woman speaking wasn't simply my guest.

She was one of the people who helped shape my own lifelong curiosity about belief, fear, meaning, healing, and the strange, wonderful things that sometimes happen when we put the mess in our heads and hearts onto a piece of paper.

She was my stepmother.

She was my friend.

And she still is.