In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with KJ Ramsey, trauma therapist and author of The Place Between Our Pains, for a conversation about what happens when the faith language you’ve published books about stops working—and why joy might still be available in the middle of a medical crisis that isn’t resolving.

Topics Covered

* What happens to us spiritually when every complaint has to come with a caveat, and why that splits us in two

* Why being a trauma therapist didn’t spare KJ from trauma, and why she thinks that’s actually good news for the rest of us

* How to be in your body when your body is the site of the pain, starting with how you’d talk to a five-year-old who skinned her knee

* Why she stopped judging her own silence when she lost the ability to pray or describe God at all

* A definition of joy that doesn’t require your life to get better, offered from a seat where things are actively not better

Timestamps:01:00 When Hope Functions as a Gag Order04:00 Why It’s Still Hard to Let People See You10:00 Having the Language and Still Being Battered by It15:00 Embodiment When Your Body Doesn’t Feel Safe17:00 Your Body Is a Person, Not a Problem to Fix24:00 When the Words for God Stop Working28:00 Forsaken as Loosened for the Sake of Expansion33:00 Joy as the Presence of Love37:00 For Anyone in Something They Never Would Have Chosen40:00 Finding the Book and KJ’s Work