March 11, 2021
We’re diving into a girl chat all about relationships, heartbreak, rejection, sexual shame, and purity culture in the church, and SOOO much more with the adorable and sweet Kait Warman.
Kait’s an inspirational speaker, a popular relationship coach, and the host of The Heart of Dating podcast. She helps thousands of men and women on their journeys through the conversations on her podcast, social media platforms, one-on-one relationship coaching, and online courses. She recently released her book Thank You For Rejecting Me – which we chat about a little bit in the show – it’s freaking FIRE. She lives in the Los Angeles area and loves sunshine, walks, Jesus, and listening to Celine Dion.
Kait is about to be your BFF. She has such a way of making you feel not alone in your relationship struggles, so sit down, grab a glass of wine or your beverage of choice. And prepare for a girl chat with the incredible Kait Warman.
If you were to ask her what she would be doing four or five years ago, she would never have imagined what she does now. She never had the want to talk about her dating life in public.
People have platforms on specific topics because that is what God has brought them through. Kait ventures to say that God has not brought her through, but He is still bringing her through to this day. She is still single and working through it all.
It started at the young age of fourteen to twenty-four where she was in non-stop relationships. Basically, she was never single that entire time. This backs up into her childhood where she lacked feeling love from a male figure in her life, so because of that, she looked for it in relationships and by dating. And dating lots of people. One year she was like a serial dater, she moved schools, became a popular girl, and dated sixteen guys that year. It was ridiculous. Then that leads to a long-term relationship that then led into a few more relationships. Which ended with a relationship that was very toxic for two and a half years. Kait was in an abusive relationship, that was physically, sexually, mentally, and emotionally abusive. She was so latched on to needing male validation specifically it was hard for her to get out of that relationship because she put so much of her identity into men. Into what guys specifically thought of her and then she found herself ina relationship with a guy who wasn’t treating her well and convincing her that it was all her fault. The cycle of abuse and codependency, she was hooked on that merry-go-round for years.
Until she reached her lowest moment. Her final night of abuse that she didn’t tell people about because it was too painful and shameful. Taking a hard look in the mirror and asking “Who is Kait outside of dating, relationships, and MEN?”. Realizing she didn’t know the answer to that question it was a really hard reality that she needed to figure out who Kait was and what does God say she is as a single woman. She went on this journey pretty treacherously of a lot of healing, digging up and going through the piles of shame that separated her from understanding God’s love truly and her identity. Having to rid herself of men and validation.
Going through a season of no guys and no guy friendships even. Any guy’s attention was filling that void in her life and she needed that to be replaced and rewired in her brain. After a long season of mentorship, therapy, inner healing, and bringing her to later in her twenties, she wanted to do it right. Reading books and listening to sermons and diving into the love languages, the enneagram, and finding all the possible tools you could have.
How Kait got started was a few years ago when she was dating in a new way, she started dating this guy who she thought was it. Like marrying this guy, he was her person. Then suddenly he broke up with her and she didn’t see it coming. It was super painful and hard but it was in that time that she pressed so deep into God’s heart. Having a secondary crisis in her life where she didn’t know what she was doing with her career, as a single woman. It was then when God started speaking into Kait’s heart to start her podcast, which at first she was super afraid to do. But God was telling her that everything He brought her through was for this moment, He was going to walk her into this.
She started that as a hobby, never thinking it would be her full-time thing but am so grateful and honored that it is.
Rejection is hard and painful and yes her book is ‘thank you for rejecting me’ and will speak to the hope and the purpose through all the rejections she has been through and believe everyone can find as well. However rejection still hurts and sucks, we are not robotic. We experience all these emotions because God created us this way. He wants us to feel all the feelings and there is a reason He wants us to experience the pain. Not because he is a mean God, He is with us but also He is showing us things through it. The pain is going to be painful, whenever you go through rejection. This book isn’t that you will read it and then never experience fear or pain of rejection ever again. Nobody can do that. There is no magic vaccine for everyone that will make rejection disappear forever. It will happen and we have no control over them.
If we break down the verse in James 1: “If we consider it pure joy brothers and sisters when you face trials of many kinds because the testing of your faith produces steadfastness”. There can still be joy in the pain of all the rejections. In the pain of rejection, the pain through them is not for nothing. You won’t know the why in that moment when those things are happening necessarily. Oftentimes when we go down that slide of finding out the why, it usually leads to YOU. It is something to do with us or a terrible prophecy in our life that isn’t true. Instead, focus on what to do to move forward. Taking it every day by day.
The message in this book is if you have been through a rejection in your past that you haven’t faced, it will continue to eat away at you and show up in your life if you don’t properly heal from it. As painful as it may be if you go back and heal those things it will transform how you see yourself, how you show up, and how you show up in relationships. Even job opportunities! You will have a whole new view of yourself through healing of pain through your past rejections. And even facing future ones or current ones. You don’t have to know all the answers to why, but if you take the grief day by day in layers, understanding the character of God that is good and that loves you, then you can hold onto that and He will bring beauty from the ashes in some way and time. It may not be next month, next year, next five years. Some way somehow He will bring beauty from the ashes, He will turn your pain into purpose.
Kate believes if she had not been through some of those things, she wouldn’t have ever stepped into this opportunity. God redeemed so much of that by leading her to this place. It can be in a different way that God will redeem it beautifully and unexpectedly that you can’t even fathom. It will happen, through time. We are the only ones that will fight for ourselves in this process, and we can have the strength and courage to do that.
When Kait is a relationship coach they break it down into three categories. Your relationship with God, your relationship with yourself, and then your relationship with others, which includes dating. If you want a healthy awesome relationship we need to talk about that. Same thing with yourself. How do you see yourself? What do you want to work on within yourself? Spend more time on the God piece and the self piece than putting yourself out there. Once you can master some confidence in your own inherit being and understand truly how God sees you, and you are walking in your worth in such a way you can easily bounce back. Then you are really solid. Build that into your neural pathways so that you are confident in yourself.
There are two chapters in her book about self-rejection, one has to do with body shame and appearance, and beauty. For women that is the biggest trigger out there. We beret ourselves with our image, what we think about ourselves, what we think beauty is and what we’ve been told by culture, society, and media. All of this messaging is affecting how we are showing up, what we think about ourselves, and our appearance. The other has to do with all the things we are saying about ourselves in our heads.
What does your internal dialogue look like?
We are our own worst internal bullies. Meaning if you are telling yourself horrible things, you essentially rejected yourself and therefore are stopping yourself from putting yourself out there from an amazing opportunity that could lead to something or nothing and just leave you feeling good about yourself for having the courage of putting yourself out there. You are missing out on those opportunities because you rejected yourself before someone else had the chance. This is the biggest way that women are being held back right now, our internal dialogue. The things we think about ourselves and our body.
A few things that can help is we have to be our referee. Be real with yourself about what your brain is saying. Be on guard. Be the referee of the ping pong match going on in your brain, that is going back and forth of yes and no. Or good things and bad things. When you see something that is out of line you need to referee yourself and stop it. Say “this is a limiting belief, do I want this to define me? Do I want this label on my life?”. You are the only one my friend with the power to change it. No one is going to stop you from having that internal dialogue, you are the only one who can stop yourself from continuing to go down that road and bullying yourself consistently. It will bleed out in many areas of your life if you don’t take ownership and start the process of stopping those thoughts.
Then you have to be real with others. You might need to invite some people into your life with what you are struggling with. Tell them that when they hear you say those things or whatever it may be to stop you. Permit them to call you out. We have to invite others into the process with us.
Pay attention to what the media is paying tribute to your negative self-beliefs. Maybe that is a friendship or just media. It could even be you following someone on Instagram, who isn’t doing anything wrong, but you just need to work through what you see of yourself. Seeing that girl pop up with her perfect body, perfect makeup, and perfect life is not helping you feel good about yourself right now. So you need to just mute that person at that moment. Work on your scarcity mentality with God then eventually bring that person back in.
We need to be real with ourselves and start working and massaging through these layers consistently. That is the key, it is not overnight, it is a process that goes up and down. Are you aware, do you have the tools, are you willing to fight through them and fight for yourself within them?
We are not in control of the things around us. What is in our bubble that we can control and the things that sustain us? We need to hold those things because everything around us is potentially a big giant storm of chaos. The last thing we need is to add more chaos to our minds. We have to have a limit. We steward well the things that we can control, our thoughts, and our lives that are happening to us personally.
The biggest thing is we see a lot of people that have really happy lives. What we don’t see is what is going on behind those squares. People have asked Kait in recent months, “You seem so happy right now, but you just went through a breakup not that long ago?”. First of all, there is no way we could post everything that is going on and every emotion on social media. People may smile on there but being joyful doesn’t mean they didn’t cry this morning or that they’re not processing through layers of grief. You have no idea what is going on behind the scenes in so many people’s lives and a lot of us want to portray this picture-perfect image. We need to know that a lot of what we see isn’t real.
Who are the real people in your life? Who are in your everyday corner?
Those people are who will keep you anchored and grounded. You need to let people in on the ins and outs of what you are going through. Into the dark messy crevices. You need those people to be around you and you need it to be mutually opened. You need to be walking in life with people who you can see the good, bad, the ugly and remind you that you are not alone. That other people are going through these things.
There is nothing wrong with virtual friendships, they are awesome, but we also need the people who are walking alongside us. That knows all the crevices in our life, to bring us back to the reality that life is difficult.
The superficiality is tough because it leads to comparison and when we are in comparison we are led to scarcity and when we are in scarcity all we ever think is that there is never going to be enough for us. It takes you away from enjoying the present moment and what God is trying to do in your heart and mind right now. Fighting comparison and finding your core people to do life with.
Purity culture has good intentions, they don’t have bad intentions but some of the messaging became legalistic and very damaging to a lot of people.
Devine Sex by Jonathan Grant has this statistic, “69% of single Christian evangelicals say that they have had sex with at least one person in the last year”. That number may be even higher now, they have been taught purity culture and abstinence teachings, meaning they are going to abstain from sex before marriage are still having sex. Meaning that the church offers a plethora of purity teachings but there is a gap between what is being taught and what people are doing. This isn’t to say let’s shame all the people that aren’t following the teachings, but to say there is a problem here. How do we uncover this and figure out the roots of where this came from so we can rebuild it and have people walking in wholeness with their sexuality.
Having gone through a lot of purity teaching personally, Kait and her first boyfriend at sixteen were told by their Bible group that they couldn’t date without getting permission. They met with Bible leaders and who gave them a list of rules they recommended. Some were as follows: don’t sit next to each other unless two pillows are between you at all times, you need to keep twelve inches between your faces, you have to agree to never use blankets, never kiss, only hold hands on occasion, and only date in groups. They were encouraged to sign this pledge. Then they were also encouraged to attend premarital counseling to prepare us for marriage. They were SIXTEEN! Needless to say, they ended up doing some sexual things and ended up having sex but since they didn’t feel comfortable with everyone and their strict rules, they already felt shame. They felt like they had to figure this out together because the church might reject them or their friends.
That is still a message today, that when we find out our friends have slept together, or anything sexually we gasp! Even in churches if they find out they slept together they are immediately removed from all groups. The message is shame. We have raised the sexual sin on this pedestal that it is the biggest sin of all. Meanwhile, volunteers are probably gossiping and sinning in other ways, but somehow with sexual sin and temptation we put that on a pedestal and if somebody engages in it you get so much reprimand for it. It puts on so many layers of shame.
This led Kait to then be sexually abused in her life, where she blamed herself because she thought it was her fault. She should have known better, done better, as a woman she is here to protect a man’s integrity. Sexual shame can eat away at us so much and it separates us from God and ultimately the beauty that God created in our sexuality. Honestly, it is a beautiful thing that He created. He wanted us to experience pleasure and He would not have created it if He didn’t want that. However, we just have to have an understanding of what this is. Why does the body react this way? If we are going on the journey of waiting until marriage and want that sexual integrity, we have to understand why. If we do make mistakes we need soft shame-free places to land, talk and navigate that journey.
In the church right now, there is a lot of messaging that encourages people away from being honest and more to form this specific list of rules. Purity is a prize.
If you don’t understand the why, if we want the rules to stick, we need to understand the why. You need to figure out with the Lord what your sexual ethic is. Bring it to God, mentors you can trust, and then if you are in a relationship be on the same page. You have to be on the same page. If that is a problem those are conversations that need to be had. We need to unroot and unravel that our sexual desire is inherently bad or that we should just stuff it down.
When we go through abuse and even heartbreak, we are so afraid of our emotions and being honest with God that we are kind of mad at God. Allow yourself to get real with God. Letting Him into the depths of your guttural pain and saying you hate that He let this happen.
You have to feel the pain to heal from the pain. And it sucks. There is a gaping wound and you need to consistently day by day invite God into that whole so He can rebuild and mend your heart.
There is still hope in your future. Hope is not the absence of pain. We can still have hope even during the chaos because we know God will redeem us through this.
Rejection will still come. But God is with us and He is not afraid of our pain. We will learn how to be better, do better and love better. He wants to use that to create lasting change in the world.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
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