138. Healing Childhood Trauma Through Christ & the Orthodox Church with Christina Taylor138. Healing Childhood Trauma Through Christ & the Orthodox Church with Christina Taylor
Raised & Redeemed
Michaela and Christina share their experiences of growing up in chaotic, traumatic homes and how they came to find healing through Christ and the Orthodox Church. Their conversation reflects on forgiveness, lifelong healing and the assurance that God holds a special love for those who feel orphaned.
1:43:13•23 Sept 2026
Feeling Like an Orphan, Finding Home in Christ: Michaela & Christina on Trauma and Orthodoxy
Episode Overview
- Childhood trauma can leave people feeling like emotional orphans, even when parents are physically present, and this often shapes identity, trust and relationships.
- Forgiving parents begins with understanding their own wounds and histories, while still being clear that abuse is never acceptable.
- Orthodoxy presents salvation as an ongoing process of healing, where confession, prayer and the sacraments slowly transform the heart over many years.
- Spiritual fathers and the wider church community can become a context for healing damaged views of authority, family and God as Father.
- The Orthodox Church teaches that God has special care for those who lacked basic parental love, and that no wound is beyond His patient, steady mercy.
“God has a special love and care for orphans… whenever we're missing something that we kind of have a right to as a child, then God is going to give us extra care.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol, abuse, and chaos and instead lean fully into Christ? This conversation brings together two women who know that story from the inside out. Host Michaela Nikolenko sits down with Christina Taylor, an Orthodox Christian wife and mother behind Orthodox Family Life, to talk about healing childhood trauma through Christ and the Orthodox Church.
You'll hear them share frank memories of growing up in homes marked by addiction, instability, mental illness and poverty, and how that left them feeling like emotional orphans.
Christina recalls becoming the functional adult in her home at just 11, caring for her heavily medicated mother and navigating silence and anger: "From that moment forward, I felt very alone… like an emotional orphan." Michaela mirrors this with her own history of abuse, abandonment and generational addiction, describing how she turned to promiscuity and New Age spirituality while still carrying a deep, childlike awareness that she was "God's kid".
Together they unpack what forgiveness of deeply broken parents might look like, without ever excusing abuse. Psychology helped Michaela first see that "hurt people hurt people", while Orthodoxy later framed healing as a lifelong process rather than a one-time fix. Christina explains that Orthodox life is about sick people becoming healed, not bad people trying to become good, and that every confession, every "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me", every liturgy is "actively participating in healing yourself".
They also talk about spiritual fatherhood, learning to trust priests after damaged relationships with fathers, and slowly discovering the Church and the Theotokos as true family. With gentle humour and honesty, they reassure anyone who grew up feeling unwanted that, as Christina puts it, "God has a special love and care for orphans." If you've ever wondered whether God can really mend what childhood broke, this conversation might give you language, hope, and a few tears in the best way.
Where might Christ already be quietly stitching your story back together?
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