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Podcast: Religion on the Mind
Episode: Dobson’s Legacy: Trauma, Attachment & Shame (#348)
Description: I sit down with licensed therapist Emily Maynard—herself a product of Dobson-influenced parenting—to unpack what I'm calling one of the most consequential psychological disasters of the last fifty years. While James Dobson's death a few weeks ago has evangelicals reflecting on his legacy, Emily and I dig into the wreckage his teachings left in therapy offices across America.Â
We explore how his "loving discipline" and will-breaking methods created attachment wounds, spiritual abuse, and shame cycles that adults are still untangling decades later—and why parents who would never have hit their children became convinced it was the...