We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rachel Hunt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rachel below.

Hi Rachel , thanks for joining us today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

There are so many stories. Some of the most heartbreaking stories are from clients who are young or otherwise dependent on family. They often feel trapped, pretending to believe things they have doubted for a long time. People are forced to fast for days on end, evangelize for beliefs they don’t subscribe to, submit to corrupt authority, even marry someone chosen by their parents or church. I remember one young man who called on the RfR Helpline. He lived in a remote area with just his very religious mother. She didn’t have a car, but she would occasionally go to town with neighbors, leaving him alone in the house. That’s when he would call us. He had no transportation, no friends, no job and very little opportunity to contact anyone outside his household. He couldn’t even imagine how to ever escape his situation. He was so terrified of being discovered that he asked us not to even take notes on his call. We don’t know what happened to him.
Another client told us her story during a women’s support group meeting. She left an abusive spouse after the Church told her it was her own fault for not being submissive enough. He took their young daughter and refused to let the mother speak to her. The woman is now middle aged and has not spoken to her child in over 20 years. It’s heartbreaking.

Rachel , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a volunteer for Recovering from Religion. RfR is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 by Dr. Darrel Ray.
Dr. Ray is a PhD level psychologist who has written four books, two on organizational psychology (his career) and two about the psychology of religion. The God Virus sparked a lot of interest when it came out. Dr. Ray received a lot of emails saying things like “This explains a lot, now what do we do about it?” What he did was to invite them all to an IHOP in Kansas City. Eleven people showed up that day. They talked about their personal experiences: their religious backgrounds and what happened when they began to doubt or stop believing. That was the first RfR Support Group Meeting. Fourteen years later, we now offer over 30 Support Groups every month.

I joined RFR at the tail end of 2020. Exhausted from the pandemic and the US election, I wanted to do something positive for the world. I had heard of RfR from various atheist YouTubers and decided to look into it. What I found was the most amazing group of people I’ve ever met. It was like a dream. I had worked in local politics a bit and had been shocked at the petty infighting, chaotic energy, and the Sisyphean nature of the work. None of that was evident at RfR. On the contrary, everyone was working toward a common mission: to offer hope, healing and support to those suffering from issues of doubt or non-belief. The training was incredibly valuable too. I use the reflective listening skills I learned that first week all the time now.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Tigger warning: suicide The first RfR Fall excursion I attended was in September of 2021.
A couple of weeks before that a new client contacted the Helpline and found out about the Excursion. Her name was Judith. I met Judith there at the Excursion in North Carolina. She was a character. She appeared to be in her mid to late seventies, blonde, in colorful clothing, and talkative. Judith was thrilled to be there. She had lived a very hard life: shunned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, stuck living in a mobile home owned by her abusive ex-husband, with no friends or family who cared about her. Judith was over the moon to have found people who cared what she’d been through and wanted to hear her story. She flitted from group to group, meeting everyone and talking about her life and her situation. She made quite an impression.

Later, after we had all gone home, Judith joined our Slack Online Community and began to talk to people there. She joined a study group I run and had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use the links. She ended up talking to me on Direct Message quite a bit. As happy as she was to find us, she was not a happy person. She often spoke of how difficult her life was, how little support she had, and how much opposition she encountered as an unpopular person in a small town. Once, she was so upset that she asked if she could call me. I gave her the Helpline number and promised to pick up the call. She sobbed in my ear for over an hour, feeling overwhelmed by some legal form she had to fill out. I did my best to comfort her and she seemed to feel a bit better after a while.
Some time went by and I tried messaging her a few times to see how she was doing. The last time I did so was on January 28th, 2022. I did not hear back.
On February 20th, I received the following message in a Direct Message from her Slack account:

Sorry to have to tell you this but judith took her life on the 13th of January She is Greatly Missed

I was devastated. I went outside to avoid waking my husband. But I was sobbing so hard that he heard me through the walls. He helped me calm down enough to reach out to the volunteers to tell them what happened. Darrel saw the messages and called me. He offered to give me a session with a licensed therapist to help me cope. He gave me the number and I was able to speak with a wonderful therapist who is a member of the Secular Therapy Project. She helped me to process my feelings and offered to meet with me again in two weeks. After speaking to her, I was calm enough to talk with Gayle Jordan (the Executive Director) to decide how to tell the rest of the volunteers. We also made sure that Judith’s account was deactivated, since someone else clearly had access. This was for the security of the other clients, of course.

I want to stress that I was not asked to pay for either of the two therapy sessions. Dr. Ray had an arrangement already in place to support volunteers who needed emergency therapy related to their RfR work. The Secular Therapy Project is a sibling organization that vets licensed therapists to make sure they do not use any religion in their treatments. (This should be the norm, but sadly in the US, it is not. ) Some of the therapists have further offered to be available to RfR volunteers on an emergency basis. It’s an incredibly valuable support that I’ve never been offered anywhere else.

While I continued to grieve Judith for months, by the time the next Fall Excursion came up, I was able to talk about her without crying. We did a brief memorial for her there. Many people remembered her. She was definitely mourned.

This question was about my personal resilience. To me, resilience is not some innate trait that we are born with or not. My ability to bounce back from this devastating experience is directly related to the support I received. I got many layers of support: first my husband, then my fellow volunteers, Dr. Ray, the therapist, the Executive Director of RfR, and the rest of the leadership. The memorial at the Fall Excursion 2022 was an additional way for all of us to support one another. At every step, I was given the opportunity to express my feelings, others took care of the logistical issues and offered as much help as they could. I can only imagine what this would have been like if it had happened anywhere but RfR.

Resilience comes from appropriate support — from our peers and from professionals. That was a huge lesson for me. It’s also really what RfR is all about. We offer peer support and the STP makes sure that your professional support is evidence based and non-religious. My experience was a dramatic example of why RfR is so important.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Since we’re talking about RfR, I’ll share a time I had to pivot in my volunteer role.

I started out as a Helpline agent. I took my first Helpline client on January second, 2021. It was incredibly rewarding. After a year, I was heavily involved in a number of roles and had become a bit of a fixture.

One day, I got a rare phone call from Dr. Ray (the Founder and Chairman of the Board for RfR.) He wanted to talk to me about possibly taking over the Support Group Directorship. This was a shock as the current director had not given any indication that he was planning to step down. Also, I didn’t think of myself as a leader in the Support Group program. I was a relatively new support group host and didn’t really know any of the other team members.

In any case, Dr. Ray wanted to gauge my interest before bringing me to the Board for an interview. I felt completely unqualified and unprepared, but I was also flattered and excited. I said yes. I met with the Board for the interview. They approved me for the position and I went to work.

The previous director, Eric, was incredibly generous and helpful. He met with me several times to explain how everything worked, made sure I had access to all the files and gave me the password to the official email. I’m not gonna lie — it was a lot of information. I was completely overwhelmed. There were all kinds of procedures, documents, databases, software programs. I’m not nearly as technically inclined as Eric was, so this was scary for me. We were hosting about 25 support group meetings every month, most of them over Zoom. I knew almost none of the volunteer meeting hosts. I didn’t even know for sure how many of them there were. Many of them were not used to communicating on Slack and kept texting Eric with issues long after he was no longer in charge. Each meeting had to be scheduled on the calendar, promoted on Meetup, and hosted on Zoom. I had no experience with any of this.

Fortunately, there were two volunteers who were in charge of the Zoom accounts. They made sure the meetings got started on time, which was the most urgent work. I spent my time familiarizing myself with all the systems and trying to do all the work that Eric had done by himself. This turned out to be a mistake.

I became so stressed that I got upset whenever anyone suggested that I hold a department wide meeting. “I have so much to do”, I said. “I don’t have time to spend in more meetings. That’s what Slack is for.” Finally, noticing that I was starting to drown, Dr Ray called me again. Remember that he had a decades long career as an organizational psychologist including having published two books on teamwork. He told me point blank that my job as Director was to cultivate my team. The work gets done by the team, he said. You take care of them. This was a hard lesson for me. I had spent most of my professional career catching balls dropped by other people. In my small business, I got used to doing pretty much everything myself. If I did hand out a project, it usually wasn’t done correctly or on time. I often had to do things at the last minute that someone else had neglected to do. Also, it really looked like my predecessor had done most of the work himself.

It took a while, but I eventually got it through my thick head that I needed to get my team together. We had a meeting and it started me on the road to relying on them. Over time, we worked out ways to share the burden and dramatically increase communication and the efficiency of the systems. In the first year, we did a number of needed changes and added several more new local support groups.

Now, I have a wonderful core admin team that does pretty much all the work, including training new volunteers. I focus on developing the admin team (we meet twice a month now), troubleshooting, and developing new local groups. I’m proud to say as of December 2023, we have 36 RfR Support Groups meeting each month. We’re starting or reactivating an average of one new group per month.

It wasn’t easy, but with excellent guidance and a small bite of humility, I was able to pivot. Apparently, I did a competent enough job eventually. Because a year later I was invited to join the Board.

More about Rachel

Personal life: I am married and a mother of two adult children. I’m from Texas.

Day job: I own and manage a small Ballroom Dance studio. I also occasionally substitute teach at the school where my husband is the Theatre Teacher.

Hobbies: I ride a motorcycle (a Honda Rebel 500.) I enjoy reading science fiction, especially Solarpunk . I used to do a lot of performing. I competed professionally in Dancesport Ballroom dance competitions. I also used to perform, choreograph, and co-direct for various local community theatres.

Why RfR: I was attracted to Recovering from Religion because where I live it’s just expected that everyone goes to some sort of church, usually Protestant. I was once contacted by someone asking if my business wanted to participate in a “Find a church home” expo in town. The idea was for people who were new to town to wander through tables represented by various churches to find where they would like to join. When I asked if they would be including Muslim, Jewish, or humanist organizations, they said it was only for Christian churches. I declined to participate. Being non-Christian is just not understood here. Everyone says “they’re good Christians” as if that means they’re necessarily good people. I find that frustrating and sad. RfR is there to help doubters see that they’re not alone. Lots of people come to the conclusion that faith is not a reliable path to truth, and that’s ok. It doesn’t make you a bad person.

RfR’s Mission: Our mission is to provide hope, healing, and support to people struggling with issues of doubt or non-belief. We also support people who have suffered harm from religious people, institutions, or ideas. We offer peer support, not professional therapy. For clients in need of therapy,  we refer people to the Secular Therapy Project (our sibling organization). Our goal is not to deconvert, but to meet people where they are. We want to support them as they decide what they believe and what kind of lives they want to build. Sometimes that includes helping them to find a new church or philosophy that matches their current beliefs better. We’re not out to make everyone an atheist.
Our Clients: People who reach out to us could include anyone from a teenager asking if the end times are near, to a lifelong pastor wondering how they will make a living if they leave the clergy. We talk to young people from Muslim majority countries hoping to avoid arranged marriages, and to college students forced to pretend to believe as long as they are dependent on their parents. Many people suffer from an intense fear of hell or armageddon, even after they decide it no longer makes sense to them. LGBTQIA+ individuals suffer a special kind of pain, as many of them are told that who they are is unacceptable to God.  At the extreme ends of almost all denominations, children (and sometimes women) are often extremely sheltered and raised in a closed, highly controlled community.They can emerge with very little understanding of themselves or the world. Many have never been allowed to choose anything for themselves. Most were taught that they are born sinners who are worthless, doomed to constant anxiety over their salvation or that of their loved ones. This can cause confusion, fear, even severe trauma sometimes.

My Role:  I volunteer as the Director of the Support Group Program. I also hold a seat on the Board of Directors. The Support Group Program offers peer led, small group meetings for people wanting to share their experiences with others on the same journey.
We have over 30 meetings each month, adding more all the time. Most of these groups went virtual during the pandemic. Many are still meeting over Zoom. Some have gone back to in-person. Most of our groups are centered in the United States, but we also have one in Canada, two groups in Australia, one in New Zealand, one in Europe, and one in the UK. We are working hard to expand to other places. There is a need everywhere. These groups welcome all types of people from all religious backgrounds. We also have several monthly specialty meetings. These include Chapters specifically for Women, Men, LGBTQIA+,  and Suicide Loss Survivors. During the Holidays, we offer extra meetings on American Thanksgiving and Christmas.
My job is to oversee my team. We have about 35 volunteers who host the meetings. We also have a core admin team who train new volunteers, manage the Meetup pages, our Calendar, and the Zoom accounts. There are a lot of moving parts and it takes constant vigilance to keep everything running smoothly. We’re staffed completely by volunteers. They’re quite amazing.

Meaningful interaction:  One of my favorite things to do is to meet people who want to help us out. I was privileged to speak to the Houston Oasis last March. I was there to help our founder Dr Darrel Ray explain what we do. The previous evening, we did a social event with the members at a local bar. There I met a wonderful woman who was looking for a new volunteer opportunity. It turned out that she actually lived in Dallas. I got to train her personally and she is now a treasured friend. She’s now volunteering as a co-host at the Collin County (Dallas area) monthly group. She also sometimes helps run the Women’s Virtual Chapter meetings. I’ve met so many really great people at RfR. There’s something about the community that is so much more functional than any other non-profit I’ve worked with. Maybe it’s because everyone is screened for compassion and well trained in peer support. Maybe it’s Dr Ray’s expertise in corporate teamwork. In any case, I feel that working with this RfR has made me a better person.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rfrorg
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RfRSupportGroupsProject
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/RfROrg
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RecoveringfromReligion
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@recoveringfromreligion

Image Credits
Recovering from Religion