Is God Punishing Me?

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, “Is God Punishing Me?” I speak with Dr. Ernie Jouriles, professor and director of clinical training at SMU.  Now, we know that many people of faith take great comfort in spiritual support after abuse.  And we also know that for many children in teens of faith, that abuse calls up the key existential question: why did this happen to me?

But what about those children and youth whose understandable fears, doubts, and questions, turn in an even more painful direction. How often are kids plagued by thoughts that God has betrayed or abandoned them? To what extent do children mistakenly perceive their abuse as divine punishment? The tragic answer is more often than you would like to think, and knowing that we owe it to these children to understand their worries and address them in our care, support, and treatment.

I know you’ll find this conversation as thought provoking as I did. Please take a listen.

Hi Ernie. Welcome back to One in Ten.

 

Dr. Ernie Jouriles: Thank you for inviting me.

 

TH: So how did you come to work examining the relationship between spirituality and child sexual abuse? It’s a kind of an interesting area of exploration, I think.

 

EJ: I’m very interested in the mental health of children and adolescents after traumatic events.

Sexual abuse is a very, very traumatic event for people who experience it. But there’s a lot of variability in mental health symptoms after sexual abuse,  and what I wanna do is to try to understand what is contributing to this variability. In the sexual abuse literature, there’s a lot of attention on aspects of the abuse experience.

For example, how severe it was, was coercion involved, was there an injury?  There’s also a lot of attention directed at, you know, basically is this adolescent getting emotional support from individuals in their environment? How are people reacting? Are they blaming the adolescent? And I think that that’s one of the things that we were actually talking about during our last visit.

 

TH: That’s right.

 

EJ: Also, how adolescents think about what had happened seems to be important. And self-blame in particular has gotten a lot of attention. In reading in the child development literature broadly, there’s actually a large literature on  religion and spirituality that a lot of people in the child maltreatment area have not paid much attention to, and one of my former graduate students actually is a leader in that area and is an author on the paper that you invited me to talk about.

Her name is Annette Mahoney, and I was talking with Annette a little bit about this. I brought the idea of spirituality and in particular spiritual struggles to the Dallas Child Advocacy Center. I was talking with family advocates. I was talking with therapists,  and I was told these issues do come up.  I was told this by a number of people and that it surprisingly comes up quite often.

And I was thinking, well, if they do come up, if these children and adolescents are struggling with it, let’s see how does it relate to their adjustment after sexual abuse. We did a study back in 2020 and quite honestly, I really doubted anything was going to amount of it. I talked with others that are authors on this paper.

We added a four item measure of divine spiritual struggles, and we found that this was one of our strongest predictors of adjustment in that first paper.

TH: So you wanted to follow this up a little bit?

 

EJ: Exactly. We wanted to follow it up. We wanted to follow it up with a longitudinal investigation. But I think in that first paper, we were surprised that variables like self-blame were as strongly related as the divine spiritual struggles.

And again, it was just intriguing to me because again, these variables often aren’t looked at. In this study, what we were looking at were trauma symptoms over the course of time. At the Children’s Advocacy Center that we work at, there’s a forensic interview, and then shortly after the forensic interview, usually within a week there’s a family advocate screening where they screen on mental health adjustment, but they also do other things to help the family during that screening.

After the screening, there’s a triage and they make a decision, what are they going to do with the families? But many of these families are referred to treatment, which is also offered at Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center. And we were able to follow the families from the Family advocate screening to their first therapy session for those that engaged in therapy.

And basically what we know from the child trauma literature is that often trauma symptoms are peaking at a time shortly after the traumatic event, but there’s a decrease during the weeks and months that follow. It’s just that decrease doesn’t happen with all adolescents. I mean, some of them basically maintained the trauma symptoms at a high level.

Some of them even increased further, and what we were interested in was predicting from the screening assessment, can we tell which adolescents are going to have the highest trauma scores right before they’re entering therapy?  We introduced two spirituality variables. One had to do with turning to God for support.

The other had to do with divine struggle. And divine struggles, what I’m talking about would be thoughts as if God was punishing them because of what happened. Thoughts as if, oh, they were abandoned by God.  We also looked at self-blame because in a prior study, self-blame was a strong predictor of trauma symptoms.

And again, what we found was that divine struggles did predict trauma symptoms over the course of time.

 

TH: Alright, Ernie. You have said a lot of things and I feel like we need to unpack a few of them for our listeners who may be less familiar with the literature than you are. So that was a great summary.

But before you got too far into your findings, I kind of wanna back up a little bit to ask about a few different things. One, in your own review of the literature, you talk about how little literature exists on this component around spirituality, and I’m curious about what you think that’s about. I mean, there are not, I’m not gonna say there aren’t lots, but we know a lot about child sexual abuse and not that there’s not plenty of ground to explore, but I just was a little surprised at the rarity that this area has been looked at as closely as you might like.

And why do you think that is?

 

EJ: Teresa, I’m surprised at it as well. I think that most graduate programs, when they talk about child psychopathology, for example, they do not include material with regard to religion and spirituality.  There are a few graduate programs that do do that, but there are few and far between.

I think also, and this is kind of reflective of the situation. When I go to scientific conferences and I present information on religion and spirituality, and these are sort of  broad scientific conferences. These are not scientific conferences that specialize in religion and spirituality, and I talk about it within the context of child maltreatment and predicting mental health.

Very, very few people show. When I do this with practitioners, it’s a huge group.

 

TH: Yeah. Because they’re hearing about it in therapy with clients. Yeah.

 

EJ: I think that for some reason it, there’s just been a slow uptake in terms of the potential importance of religious and spiritual issues in the lives of some of these adolescents.

 

TH: You know, one of the things that struck me in reading the paper was I don’t even know that I would have predicted that, something like what? 91-92% of these teens identified that they believed in God. You know? And so I wonder if that even surprised me, and I know that these things do come up in forensic interviews and with victim advocates and other things.

I wonder if many individuals are just making a false assumption that teens are somehow less interested in spirituality or less spiritual or less connected to religious community or something than they actually are.

 

EJ: That may be the case. Also, one thing to keep in mind is that where we’re doing this, we’re in the Bible belt, so we may have higher rates in terms of believing in God than in other parts of the country.

On the other hand, surveys of the United States, there has been a decline in religious service attendance.

 

TH: Mm-hmm.

 

EJ: That’s not necessarily meaning that there’s a decline in belief in God. But I do think that, yeah, I do think that a lot of adolescents do believe in God, and I also think that a lot of adolescents turn to God or the relationship to God when something bad happens.

And that’s not research. That’s all research.

 

TH: Yeah. Speaking of that, also as a part of your lit review, you were making some connection between what we know about spiritual support and how it contributes to mental wellbeing after abuse. And so can you talk a little bit about that? Like, first of all, what do we mean by spiritual support and secondly, when we say that kids may turn to God or seek spiritual support after abuse, or while they’re experiencing abuse for that matter, what exactly do we mean by that? What are we talking about?

 

EJ: Well, I think the way I think about it has to do with something similar to, let’s say, turning to a friend. It might be that you know, they’re asking for help in terms of coping with what had happened, it might be that they’re asking for help with respect to just trying to understand, trying to make meaning about what had happened.

But that’s what I’m thinking about with regard to the support, and that’s similar to how we measured it with respect to the items that we used.

 

TH: And then you started to define spiritual struggle as well because you, you looked at that, you know, like the converse of spiritual support is what? Spiritual struggle.

And for folks who would be trying to sort of figure out what are we talking about there? Can you again explain its connection to mental wellbeing, you know, what were you trying to sort out about spiritual struggle and how it pertains to how kids think about themselves and function after abuse?

 

EJ: Well, what we were interested in was a particular type of spiritual struggle that we call divine struggles.

And this again, is something that’s been looked at largely with adults.  We wanted to look at it with adolescents and specifically adolescents who’ve experienced sexual abuse.  And basically it was the idea that, you know, how could God let something like this happen to me? How could God who’s supposed to be protecting me, have this happen?

And just wondering, did I do something wrong? Am I being punished  for what had happened? Have I been abandoned?  But this is a particular type of spiritual struggle again, that family advocates at the Children’s Advocacy Center, therapists at the Children’s Advocacy Center, were indicating that they hear in their sessions, they hear in their conversations with these children.

So we focused on divine struggles and there are other possible types of struggles, and I think that that’s one area that we’re gonna try to expand in. But the divine struggles was the focus of this research as well as the prior study.

 

TH: I was really struck by some of the terms that you all used in the paper in terms of the way that kids might perceive this, like being abandoned by God or feeling betrayed by God.

I think these are very strong, not just strong feelings, but they would create a very strong reaction, you can imagine, if you really actually believe that, right? If you believe that God has abandoned me or I’ve been betrayed by God, I think that you can see the way in which that could affect one’s mental health. Right?

 

EJ: Teresa, what you’re talking about is you’re talking about it in a way that we were thinking that, you know, think about an adolescent who has been sexually abused, who’s dealing with all of that.  Then they’re wondering about, you know, has God abandoned me? I mean on top of dealing with the sexual abuse.

And we were just thinking that, you know, if this is indeed going on with some of these adolescents, I mean, that is an awful lot to be coping with all at once.

 

TH: I think that we all know, of course, about all the trauma that attends to child sexual abuse, but I think that we’re not always paying as much attention to the sort of existential questions that arise in the minds of even remarkably young children actually, not even just looking at teenagers around what that causes them to think about.

And you know, that sort of like, why am I suffering? Why was I selected to suffer? Those kinds of questions, I think children and teens really wrestle with.

 

EJ: I think you’re absolutely right. Our research has so far has been focused on teens, the 11-to-17-year age range.  One of the things I’m very curious about though, is how far down does this extend?

 

TH: Yeah.  Yeah.

 

EJ: And it is one of the things that we’re gonna start looking at.

TH: I’m excited to hear that because I think, you know, just as you’ve been hearing anecdotally, we hear anecdotally that surprisingly young children, I’m not talking about four- and five-year-olds, but you know, school age children, in fact, bring these issues up in forensic interviews, in other settings related to the Children’s Advocacy Centers that they and professionals need to know how to respond to those things too when they’re asked, because that’s with younger kids, that seems to be how it’s coming up. That is less statement and more question, you know, does this mean… or is this why…

And I think that that’s, these are questions that would be very hard for an adult to struggle with. Much less teenagers and perhaps even younger children.  I’m just wondering, you know, let’s turn to your findings here. First of all, remind us again what your hypotheses were going into this, and then I wanna hear both what your findings were and also what surprised you, if anything about them.

 

EJ: What we were hypothesizing based on other research was, first of all, we were hypothesizing that there was going to be a decrease in trauma symptoms over time.  The screening assessments were going to yield higher levels of trauma symptoms than the assessments that took place right before therapy, which was on average a month and a half later, and we did find support for that.

We were also expecting that several variables that we were measuring during the screening assessment would predict the level of trauma symptoms during the therapy assessment. We thought that turning to God for support would predict lower levels of trauma symptoms, but that self-blame and divine struggles would predict higher levels of trauma symptoms.

What we did not find is what we hypothesized for the support, but we did find that higher levels of self-blame predicted higher levels of trauma symptoms. And we also found that higher levels of divine struggles predicted higher levels of trauma symptoms.  As far as what surprised us, well, again, we thought that turning to God for support would be beneficial in terms of the predicting lower levels of trauma symptoms.  We did not find that.  I’ll tell you what though. I suspect that turning to God for support often happens when you’re really suffering.

And I think that for some adolescents, it probably was beneficial. For other adolescents, it was more a reflection that they were really hurting and they were turning for support and I think that may have canceled each other out.

 

TH: I was very curious about that as well. You know, your hypothesis one finding, I guess. I think that there, there are a few things there that I’m curious about.  One is, I wonder if one reason that that was the finding is also that, and I’m not saying this at all flippantly, so I wanna be clear that I am not in any way making light of people’s religious beliefs. I’m a person of faith myself.  But if someone could pray away trauma symptoms, there would be no trauma symptoms.

Do you know what I mean? If 91% of teens believe in God and pray when terrible things happen. I think that did not necessarily surprise me. And also because as a professional, we say this all the time, that people find great comfort from it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna sleep better at night.

I think what I’m trying to say is, I wonder if there’s a disconnect maybe between what prayer and seeking divine spiritual support, what that is acting on, and maybe it’s not trauma symptoms, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t contribute to wellbeing in some way or some ability to cope that isn’t measured in trauma symptomology.

I’m not saying this clearly, but do you know what I’m saying?

 

EJ: First of all, trauma symptoms is just one sort of sliver of adjustment. And adjustment is very, very broad. And it may be that turning to God for support helps with certain areas of adjustment, but not trauma symptoms as much.

 

TH: That’s right. You said it so much better.

So much better.

But I think that’s right. And I think that sometimes when we think about a whole person, right, these kids, when they come to us, I want the whole person to be treated. I want them to get healthy across every domain that they have, and if they are a kid who has personal faith or are spiritual in some way, then I want that to be that too.

But I also feel that we can’t ask one thing to do another part’s job. And I think sometimes there is this sense maybe that we’re asking, either the spiritual side to do more heavy lifting than it can do, or we’re asking mental health to do more heavy lifting than it can reasonably do when kids are needing maybe a more holistic approach.

So I realize that was a statement and not a question. So I apologize. But I do wonder that it’s like, how much can we ask of any particular side of the care and support that we’re bringing to the table to carry the whole load for helping kids get better universally.

 

EJ: Yeah, and from my perspective, I’m not sure if, I think a lot of different things can help.

And I think that you are absolutely right that if we expect, let’s say just the spiritual side to solve everything, we’re probably going to be disappointed that that’s just not going to happen. On the other hand, if this does provide comfort, and you combine that with, let’s say, support from caregivers and friends and all of that adds up.

That could be real, real important. With respect to the healing process.

 

TH: Oh, absolutely.

And I think that to your point, this is the piece we’re not paying attention to. You know? And in CACs we’ve done a great job of paying attention to trauma focused treatment. And I think what you are really talking about is layering on this piece where we really acknowledge that for many families and for many kids, their spiritual life is very important to them, period. But also it can be very important and instrumental in helping them feel healthy and well and whole. But let’s turn to your other hypotheses for a minute, and one that really struck me was this connection to self-blame. So we know that kids do worse. They blame themselves. And sadly, most child abuse professionals, if not every single one, have heard kids sadly and erroneously blame themselves in the forensic interview and therapy, talking to victim advocates.

This just comes up so much.  What I’m curious about is that connection between self blame and divine spiritual struggle. So can you just make that connection for our listeners? Like how do these things relate to each other?

 

EJ: Okay.  From a technical standpoint, we are seeing a positive correlation, and by that what I mean is that, the more the adolescents blame themselves, the more they also had spiritual struggles.  Now in terms of trying to explain, well, why are those two connected?  Our data doesn’t give us any answers, but I can certainly offer some speculation.

I do think that if a person is blaming themselves, or if a person is thinking that God has punished them, I think either one of those could cause the other. Especially, well, we’ll take one of those directions.  If they think that God is punishing them, they may think very naturally that I did something for God to punish me.  And again, that would be potentially the link between sself-blameand divine struggles as we measured them in this study. The correlation was moderate, so there were a lot of people who had, let’s say, divine struggles but not self-blame and vice versa. But there was enough overlap where  it really, really could be connected and it could be one causing the other.

 

TH: Yeah, that’s interesting because as you say, some of it, it just, no, you haven’t tested it yet, so you’ll have to find out. But it makes some intuitive sense that if someone feels that God is punishing them, they would naturally ask the question, well, why is that? And that takes you down a potential road where you might come to yet another erroneous conclusion about that, right?

That you’re like, well, then I must have done something. Why else would that happen? What this did make me think about, and I’ll be curious about this ’cause you did provide a breakdown about those folks who did have spiritual beliefs, like sort of how did that pan out of, were they Protestant, Catholic, whatever.

And I don’t necessarily wanna get into that, but it raised a question for me, which is some faiths more than others have a sense of fatalism about them.  And some faiths more than others believe, I mean, in divine punishment, honestly. So I’m curious about whether you would find, not that your paper looked at this, so I’m not suggesting that.

But I’m curious if you had different compositions in your sample and you were able to look at that, I’m very curious if you would find that there was any sort of additional contribution made there. Yes, maybe there are some kids where this is more likely, but are kids who come from a faith in which that’s an underlying tenet of the faith, is that more likely to yield kids who are going to have some additional propensity toward this that we should attend to or think about or maybe have communication with clergy about in terms of help us understand how to talk to kids about this in a way where they’re not blaming themselves or think that they brought this on themselves, or whatever the case might be.

 

EJ: And you’re forecasting another direction that we’re planning on going with some of this research.

Again, my research, my interests, my expertise is primarily kids who’ve been exposed to violence and really trying to understand the different reactions that these children and adolescents have.  I am just starting to learn much more about some of the religion and spiritual issues that these adolescents are experiencing, at least in our research and how it’s affecting them, I know that there’s a lot more going on.

And I think that different religions have different teachings. This might be a very, very important contextual variable to start looking at whether or not, let’s say we’re getting different associations when we are dividing our sample up into, you know, what religion they identify with.

 

TH: And one of the reasons that I was thinking about this was that I’m not aware of any faith tradition, I mean, I don’t know them all, but I’m not aware of any faith tradition in which  there’s any blame that is purposely placed on children who’ve been sexually abused. Do you know what I mean? Like, so I don’t want anybody to mistake or think that I’m implying that I think that there’s any underlying, and you know, tenet in some faith that says if children are sexually abused, this must somehow be divine judgment or their fault, or any of those things.

What I do think is that because different faiths, whatever they are, Hindu, Judaism, Christianity, whatever. They do have some sort of differing underlying tenets, and because of that,  I wonder if people can sometimes misinterpret that, especially kids, they don’t have the logic of adults. And so hearing something in one context.

Could they decide that that must be talking about what I’m going through or what I’ve experienced or those kinds of things. So I’m really in, I’ll be interested as you further explore some of this, what it turns up, because I think that it could give us on a practical level, because you know, our podcast is in part about that too,  and when we’re turning to the sort of practical application of it, do we have appropriate relationships with faith community leaders who can help us better understand what some of these implications may be when children and teens present themselves who are adherence and how might we help them and engage with them in a way around some of these issues that can be very helpful for those teens and point them to allies within their own faith tradition to say, and if you need somebody to talk to about this, you know, here’s a person that you could talk to who could help you understand the spiritual implications of that in a way that doesn’t reinforce this idea that they’re being punished by God or that they should blame themselves or those kinds of things.

 

EJ: And I think, again, the questions that you’re asking, the directions that you’re suggesting are important next steps. How do we best address this in treatment? Do we address this like we would address other cognitions, like self-blame or do we really have to go in a different way? And right now, I don’t know the answers to that, but it’s something that I’m very, very curious about and I’m gonna start consulting with people and trying to figure out, what might be the best way?

 

TH: Well, you know, I’m wondering what you see as the implications for the research you’ve done to date. You know, you’ve been working with one CAC and I’m sure they’ve peppered you on lots of questions, post-research about what does this mean for us.

But thinking about this audience, which are all child abuse professionals, what do you think we should take away from it when we are interacting with teens?

 

EJ: A few things right now. I do know at the Children’s Advocacy Center that I work with, and I not only work with Dallas, I work with Safe Harbor in Tennessee as well.

And during their screening assessments, they are measuring for self-blame.  They are measuring for spiritual struggles. They’re going into triage meetings considering these variables when they’re deciding, okay, well what is the best course of action for this particular family? So I do know that these things are being measured and being considered, and I think that that is one takeaway.

We do know that self-blame, we do know divine struggles is related to higher levels of trauma symptoms. And we know that it’s related, not just cross-sectionally, but longitudinally over time. And I think that that’s useful information, particularly knowing that trauma symptoms is related to suicidality and other things.

So. That’s one takeaway that we should perhaps be considering some of these other variables, particularly if we’re trying to manage a wait list with respect to the care.

 

TH: So thinking about the acuity of that, and that might move someone up on a wait list if they scored, you know, highly in those domains, but also once you enter treatment, thinking about what gets addressed in treatment first. Right. And some of those underlying themes that you’re talking about with self-blame or thinking that God is punishing you, et cetera, might be things you need to address early.

 

EJ: Right. And it’s just going back to one of the comments that you made.

It’s not just, let’s say, maybe moving them up on the wait list. It might be that if we can’t give them immediate care here, we really do need to perhaps find a place that can give them immediate care. Because this is a person whose trauma symptoms are not going to  do what on average happens.

 

TH: They’re not going to just naturally decline over time, is what you were saying.

 

EJ: And in terms of, let’s say, naturally decline, I think that there’s probably a process there that’s also not been researched very well, but I think that this decline may happen as a result of, let’s say, being in a supportive family, having supportive peers. The decline happens. We’re just not measuring the variables that might be related to that.

 

TH: And there’s probably so many, right? Social support beyond your family, how your peers responded when they found out. Just on and on.

 

EJ: Again, trying to make sense of what had happened, reaching out to others, asking questions.

 

TH: Yeah. And also probably if you’re getting messaging from your family and from your peers and from whatever your social support network is, faith, community, whatever, that’s saying this is not your fault. You did nothing wrong. That can be very powerful. Whereas, you know, if either you don’t receive those messages or there’s something, whatever that is, that’s making you feel that that’s not the case. Then to your point, you’re still back in this area and where you have these elevated feelings of self-blame and other things that need to be attended to. What do you think are the implications for this for folks who may have this kind of, you know, beyond their professional relationship, have this connection to faith communities?

I mean, I think to myself, there’s some prevention messaging a little bit in this, too. And I just wonder, you know, do you have some thoughts about the way we should be connecting to or talking to faith leaders about what you’re finding?

 

EJ: Well, I think that  faith leaders certainly would have something to say with regard to what can be done potentially to help a child or an adolescent who is struggling with faith questions, and again, particularly thinking about how we measure divine struggles, looking at things like, is God punishing me or have I been abandoned?  I also think that sometimes in terms of changing these cognitions, adolescents have to hear messages maybe from multiple people.

 

TH: That’s right.

 

EJ: I think that hearing it perhaps from someone in the faith community in addition to someone at the CAC, in addition to their parents, might be very, very helpful, particularly if it’s a consistent message.

 

TH: I was thinking about the fact that so many faith communities now do prevention education, and part of the prevention education often includes kind of postvention, honestly.

It’s like, and if this happens to you, what you need to do or what you need to know, and that has been an interesting, and I think just long overdue and helpful development. But I’m now curious about whether any of them talk about this dynamic.  You know, that if you are providing prevention education to parents, to kids in a faith community setting, how great would it be for it to include information like make sure that you’re also reinforcing the point that this is not happening to you if it happens, because God decided to punish you or you are not to blame for this and our faith community is not going to think that you’re to blame for what happened to you and those kinds of things. It just feels like, I always think about and that kind of messaging that you can never be too concrete because of the way kids think.

 

EJ: Everything you’re saying I agree with, I’m not gonna give you very much to respond to because I, again, what you’re talking about makes a lot of sense to me. What you’re talking about also makes me think that what might be very useful for me and others to do is to talk directly with people in the faith community as far as what we are finding.

 

TH: Yeah. Oh, it’s such a good point because while maybe when you go to some conferences and you present this information, you don’t have a full room. I’d be very curious what would happen if you went to something that had faith leaders. I think they might be very curious and very interested and what you’re finding because you wouldn’t become a faith leader if you weren’t interested in pastoral care and didn’t have some heart for that.

And so I think that, and this has been a hot topic, honestly, child sexual abuse has been a topic of discussion in so many religious forums for some time now. So anyway, I think I digress from your paper, but I think it’s been such an interesting discussion in terms of how this plays out and how we can really help kids.

I’m wondering, just finally, is there any other question I should have asked you and didn’t, or anything else that you really wanted to make sure that we talked about today?

 

EJ: I think that one of the important points that I would like to make is that, again, we were only looking at divine struggles.  We also looked at divine struggles with only four items.

I really wonder if we’re measuring this as well as we should be measuring this from a scientific perspective. If our measure may have only been getting sort of, part of this issue because again, in the adult literature  there are much more elaborate measures of spiritual struggles that get into questions about, oh, belief in the devil, and that the devil may be doing this, ultimate meaning questions, the religious community.

And I’m wondering if we broaden our measurement of spiritual struggles to include some of these other types of struggles or even to get a better measurement of divine struggles. I think with better measurement, we may get much stronger findings. In other words, our findings may be an underestimate of what that true relation really is.

So I think that, again, one direction and one thing for others to consider is, okay, divine struggles seem to be important, but that’s, again,  just one type of struggle.

TH: So interesting, so interesting. Well, I think you have so many more things to dig into and so many other areas to continue to explore, and I hope that some of our listeners continue to partner in that research with you and other researchers as they explore these things because they’re just so important for kids and families ultimately important to us in doing quality work that really addresses all the concerns that kids and teens have. So thank you so much for coming back and sharing your knowledge with the listeners. And if you do these follow up studies, please keep us informed. We’d love to have you back again.

 

EJ: Teresa, thank you so much again for inviting me.

Thank you for your kind remarks with regard to the research, and again, it is very intriguing to me and I’m becoming more and more convinced with regard to just the importance of religious and spiritual issues for adolescents, and I do plan to continue digging in.

 

TH: Glad to hear it. Thanks again.

 

EJ: Thank you.

 

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And for more information about this episode or any of our other ones, please visit our podcast website, oneintenpodcast.org.