After the Call - by Jenny McGrath (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Therapist, somatic experiencing practitioner, and former evangelical missionary Jenny McGrath shows you how healing from purity culture is possible--body, mind, and spirit.

Includes body-based tools and exercises to help you reclaim your voice, step into your autonomy, and untangle the damaging messages you may have internalized about pleasure and your body

As a young woman, purity culture doesn't just ask for your service to God: it demands total abdication of your agency, desires, and sovereignty. And it starts early: from church pews to purity balls, tools like shame, coercion, and dissociation drive home messages like my sole purpose is the Call. My body exists in service to Christ, the church, and my family. My highest calling is to spread the word of God. And Sex is wrong; my pleasure doesn't matter.

Through a provocative blend of personal memoir, current events research, and somatic psychology, this book teaches you how to come home to your body--and into your authentic healing, embodied joy, and true solidarity. McGrath also introduces critical discussions on missionary work, exploring the harm that happens when evangelical churches mobilize armies of young women to proselytize in the Global South.

After the Call is a pathway home to a new self: liberated, empowered, and permitted to grow beyond the confines of what the church told you was possible--and what was "good." Each chapter brings you back into your body, with exercises designed to help you heal from trauma and reclaim your "soul muscle." After the Call is for any woman who's ever been told that your body is a vessel for someone else's glory...and wants to learn how to reconnect with a true-to-you spirituality, live out your desires, and inhabit a life that's fully yours.

About the Author

Jennifer McGrath is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing(R) Practitioner, and movement educator with over a decade of experience helping women heal from religious harm and sexual abuse. Raised in fundamentalist evangelicalism's purity culture, McGrath became a missionary in Uganda at nineteen, believing she would be martyred by twenty-three. That experience launched a long journey toward learning to listen to and love her body rather than see it as sinful, dirty, or disposable. Through her private practice and online movement studio, McGrath helps clients, students, and readers reconnect with their bodies and untangle the residue of religious trauma. She travels full-time in a van with her husband, Sean, and their dog, Amari.