Divorce Coach Heidi Wells Addresses the Hidden Cost of ‘Love and Respect’ Culture

Wells brings attention to how belief and fear intertwine, keeping many women loyal to harm long after they leave it.

AUSTIN, TX, UNITED STATES, November 3, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Divorce coach and Master Practitioner of NLP and Hypnotherapy Heidi Wells is drawing attention to the emotional impact of high-control faith systems that teach women to “love and respect” their way through harm they didn’t cause.

“I grew up in purity culture, where the responsibility for marital health fell on women,” Wells said. “Leaving felt like death.”

Wells' professional focus examines how early religious conditioning around obedience and loyalty can leave a lasting imprint on the nervous system. “It takes time for the body to believe it’s safe to have wants and needs,” she explained. “Once the nervous system learns safety, intuition starts to flow again.”

Across many communities, professionals in trauma-informed care are seeing similar patterns. Messages that once promised stability or "spiritual favor" often resurface years later as guilt, anxiety, or hesitation to make decisions independently. Researchers note that women who leave high-control faith environments frequently struggle to separate moral identity from self-neglect, making recovery a process of unlearning as much as healing.

Wells' work explores how belief can train the body to override it's own signals, and how learning safety is what allows desire to return. Her coaching practice integrates tools from NLP and Hypnotherapy to help women identify the unconscious rules that keep them in a state of survival, even after they have left destructive environments. “The patterns that once kept us safe can quietly hold us back,” she said.

That survival instinct, Wells explains, is not a flaw, it’s an adaptation. “Many of the women I work with learned to equate compliance with safety. Their bodies remember what was required to stay loved, accepted, or spiritually ‘right,’ even when their minds have already walked away.”

In recent years, the growing visibility of religious trauma recovery and nervous system education has brought new language to what generations of women experienced in silence. From therapy offices to online forums, former church members are describing how purity culture shaped their relationships, sexuality, and sense of self. “Freedom can feel terrifying at first,” Wells added. “But it’s the beginning of fully living.”

She hopes that by naming these patterns, more women will recognize that their hesitation to trust themselves is not weakness... it’s conditioning. “When safety returns, self-assurance returns with it”.

For Wells, this isn’t just professional. It’s personal redemption. “I’ve seen how quiet resilience can live beneath years of misguided loyalty,” she said. “When women recognize that their devotion was never the problem, it was where they placed it, everything starts to shift.”

Heidi Wells
The Heidi Wells
heidi@theheidiwells.com
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