Hey friends, this summer we wanted to do something really special and give you a behind-the-scenes look at some of our classic episodes.

But before we do that, we have a quick announcement. We're planning a conference called Gather.

There will be this September 15th and 16th in Pro-Yutah, and the event is being performed by a coalition of people that exist in the LGBTQ-Iresane space.

Yeah, it's going to be Christ-centered and church-positive, and it will also be really expansive, including people on a variety of paths.

So some of the speakers we have planned are Steve Young, Tom Christopherson, Liv Mendoza Haynes, Megan Decker, Jesse Wilson, Michael Soto, Allison Dayton, Ben Shalatti, and Charlie Bird.

It's going to be great. You can get more details at gather-conference.com and come and gather with us this September.

And hope you enjoy these classic episodes.

Alright, well today we're talking about what are the stages of coming out? One of my very favorite episodes.

Yeah, with Scott Christopherson, I was listening back to this, and I was like, my first note was, this is the most important thing.

It's really good. So the diversity and belonging class I taught at BYU for three years, I had all my students listen to this episode.

And some of you will ask, how do I help my friends who are LGBTQ and what I tell them is it depends.

It depends on where they are and what they're experiencing and where they're at in the process, because different people need different things at different times.

Yeah, it's such good practical information. It was interesting because I did that chapter in my book, where I like deep dove into this.

And I remember using this podcast episode as a reference for that, but I really looked more into the theory itself,

and tried to pull in a lot of experiences from client patterns I'd seen in therapy.

And it was interesting because as I was listening to, when we recorded this podcast, this was the first time I'd heard about this model, really.

And I would actually move a lot of the experiences I talked about into different stages of the model.

Because you were just learning it as we were talking.

And I was like, oh, in this stage, I was doing this. And now I'm like, oh, younger Charlie, that's definitely a stage one thing.

And you're talking about it in stage two. And I guess when the end, it doesn't really matter.

But I remember talking about like in stage four, which is like, I was talking about like stage five, identity pride stuff.

And I was just like, why are you saying that? That's the wrong state.

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