I never imagined that my own battle with body dysmorphic disorder would lead me to share such intimate details, but here we are, peeling back the layers on a condition that's far more than skin-deep. With my partner's unwavering support, we delve into the realities of BDD, contrasting it with narcissistic traits, and shed light on the importance of recognizing this spectrum of disorder. In our first chapter, "Understanding Body Dysmorphia and Dysphoria," listeners will journey with us through the challenges and societal pressures that shape our self-perception, as we dissect the impact of our fixations and the supportive role loved ones play in the face of dysmorphia.
The conversation takes a holistic turn as we consider the unexplored benefits of chiropractic care for mental health treatment. Could this ancient practice hold promise for modern psychological challenges? We explore this potential alongside traditional treatments, including those for BDD, emphasizing a multi-faceted approach to wellness. Then, we pivot to a fascinating piece of history—Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and their unique standing in the Catholic Church. Their enlightening story adds an unexpected layer to our vibrant discussion, encouraging an open-minded view of inclusivity through time. Join us for an episode that offers not just insight, but a community of support for anyone grappling with body image and mental health.
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I never imagined that my own battle with body dysmorphic disorder would lead me to share such intimate details, but here we are, peeling back the layers on a condition that's far more than skin-deep. With my partner's unwavering support, we delve into the realities of BDD, contrasting it with narcissistic traits, and shed light on the importance of recognizing this spectrum of disorder. In our first chapter, "Understanding Body Dysmorphia and Dysphoria," listeners will journey with us through the challenges and societal pressures that shape our self-perception, as we dissect the impact of our fixations and the supportive role loved ones play in the face of dysmorphia.
The conversation takes a holistic turn as we consider the unexplored benefits of chiropractic care for mental health treatment. Could this ancient practice hold promise for modern psychological challenges? We explore this potential alongside traditional treatments, including those for BDD, emphasizing a multi-faceted approach to wellness. Then, we pivot to a fascinating piece of history—Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and their unique standing in the Catholic Church. Their enlightening story adds an unexpected layer to our vibrant discussion, encouraging an open-minded view of inclusivity through time. Join us for an episode that offers not just insight, but a community of support for anyone grappling with body image and mental health.
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
Want to see the video? Check us out on YouTube.
Dude, why did they do that? That is the exact reason why we're doing this so fair.
Speaker 2:Oh, my god, it's because they made them sound the same. Why do the words sound so similar? Yeah, exactly so. Today we are going to talk about dysmorphia, body dysmorphic disorder, which is a very, very specific mental health condition surrounding someone's relationship with their body. Now, this is very different from dysphoria, even though it sounds the same. We'll go into the differences more later, especially in a separate episode entirely about gender dysphoria. But just know, gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia are two very different things. So body dysmorphic disorder, which is something that I personally, you know, have been I don't know, I don't want to say suffering with, because that just feels weird. I don't know why, but yeah, I guess suffering with for many years, probably since puberty.
Speaker 2:It's a mental health condition characterized by an obsessive focus on one or more perceived flaws in appearance. So these perceived flaws can be minor to completely non existent, doesn't matter. They exist and they are the only thing that the sufferer can focus on. This can lead to things like cosmetic surgeries, lifestyle changes, even disordered eating and stuff like that. As of now, BDD cannot be cured. It can be treated with things like talk therapy, CBT therapy and medication like antidepressants are known very much to help body dysmorphic disorder, but as of now it doesn't have a known definitive like this will stop these feelings forever, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll talk more in detail about that in a minute. But body dysmorphia can affect any part. There are certain body parts that are commonly reported as the focus of dysmorphic concerns, but mainly it's the skin, the nose, hair is a big one, weight in body shape is also a big one. Anything on the face, like eyes, somebody can be a fix, a fixated with the lips or the jaw line, breasts and or chest. Both men and women may experience may experience dysmorphic concerns related to, like the size, the shape, the symmetry with their breasts and or, you know, their chest and then genitalia.
Speaker 1:But it's important to realize that body dysmorphia can manifest in in various ways and it can absolutely involve any body part, not just the ones that I mentioned. Absolutely. So body dysmorphic disorder, bdd, is a condition marked by a distressing preoccupation with an imaginary or minor defect in a facial feature or other localized part of the body, like we just described. I also feel like dysmorphia does exist on a spectrum, like not everyone experiences body dysmorphia the same, or that not everyone that experiences body dysmorphia meets the criteria for body dysmorphic disorder. So when I think about dysmorphia, it's akin to something like narcissism versus narcissistic personality disorder. Like you have narcissism, it's a trait, while narcissistic personality disorder is more reserved for people who have like that persuasive pattern of behaviors and it impacts all of their areas of life and how they function in life. So it's possible to have narcissistic traits or tendencies, I call them, and not actually meet the criteria to be diagnosed with NPD, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Which is similar to, yeah, how you can have like dysmorphic traits without actually having body dysmorphic disorder. I didn't even think about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I mean, when I was researching it I was thinking, okay, well, this is BDD, which I don't feel like I meet all the criteria for, but I've definitely had bouts of dysmorphia. I deal with that on a semi-regular basis, but I don't feel like it's to the point where it's obsessive. So I was thinking to myself hmm well, you have people that call other people narcissists, but they're not technically diagnosed NPD, but they have tendencies, they have their narcissistic tendencies. So I wonder if dysmorphia is kind of the same.
Speaker 2:I think it definitely could be that feels right.
Speaker 1:So a detail-oriented focus is evident in body dysmorphic disorder. So that's that fixation part and that's the hallmark of an impairing preoccupation with a perceived physical defect. So, in other words, you're obsessed with it, You're fixated on it. So, for example, my nose is big and bolus and crooked. So I mean, even for me, I feel disconnected from my legs. That's my thing. I feel disconnected from my legs because I don't see them as much in the winter. And then I get this feeling of being disconnected from them and then all of a sudden I refuse to wear shorts because I feel like my legs are ugly or they're too ugly to be shown in public and at the gym. Everybody will be staring at them and judging them, and the reality is nobody's looking at my legs at the gym and if they are, they're likely not seeing what I see. I'm looking in the mirror, seeing cellulite and seeing something that doesn't fit with the rest of my body.
Speaker 2:Oh, that definitely. I appreciate that I tend to personally have a lot of dysmorphia around my general stomach area and my thighs a lot too. It's actually funny. My partner was one of the first. My partner presently was one of the first people to get me to actually start to appreciate my thighs just as they are. He was like oh, you got anime thighs, Like what, Like that's what that is, and it always made me laugh.
Speaker 1:That's a nice compliment.
Speaker 2:Right and it always. It makes me laugh every time he says it. So it's definitely one of those things that has kind of helped over time. But specifically around, like my midsection and my stomach area, I have always had a lot of just general like I gotta make sure that I'm sucking in and I gotta make sure that I'm standing right, because if I'm not and the belly's hanging out, everyone's gonna be looking at it. Everyone's gonna be looking like it.
Speaker 2:Just the stupidest things, like what do you think about them? Logically, but in that moment, in that immediate, like everyone's looking, this is the ugliest part of me. I have to do something about this, or X, y or Z. It just it's immediate. It definitely flashbacks to years of waking up early and doing sit ups and stuff like that and trying to eat a certain way and I mean even still I struggle with disordered eating and stuff like that from years of restricting and binging and going back and forth, and it's something that I'm still working on healing from. But it definitely has a lot to do with that sense that my stomach is wrong and something has to be done about it. It can't look like that. It has to look like a board of wood Right, even though that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I had a friend several years back who made me aware of my self-talk. I was actually affirming these things out loud and she said to me one day she said, hey, stop being mean to my friend. And it took me back a little bit. I was like, oh my God, you know I'm saying negative things about myself, but meanwhile my friend doesn't think that at all. And it just kind of stopped me in my tracks and made me realize this is what I'm affirming out loud. So it made me kind of more aware and more intentional with what I was affirming out loud from that point forward.
Speaker 1:And it's not to say that those things still don't exist inside and I don't struggle with them. Like I said, going to the gym, I just went through this a couple of days ago. When I got to the gym I was like I am not wearing shorts and I hate wearing sweatpants on the treadmill. I hate it so much because I sweat. I'd rather wear shorts. But there's a part of me that's like I have to lose a certain amount of weight and be a certain level of fit before I will show my legs in public. And I have no idea where the disconnect is. And so when she said this to me, I was thinking to myself wow, this is amazing that somebody else is seeing me in a way that I wanna be perceived, but I'm the one who has the dissonance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I feel that, I absolutely feel that.
Speaker 1:So I feel like there is this cognitive dissonance piece in this and that's the discomfort that we feel when our behavior doesn't really align with our values and beliefs. So, like, cognitive dissonance is actually a psychological phenomenon, because the very definition of it means that you're holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time. For cognitive dissonance reduction, you know, to have a little bit more focus, you can change one of two things, or both things. One is belief, the other is your behavior. So to alter either requires choosing different thoughts. So we talked earlier about CBT, which is, which actually is short for cognitive behavioral therapy, because not everybody knows what that is.
Speaker 2:I can touch on that heavily. I've been through several intensive outpatient therapy programs that were all CBT therapy and, oh man, so yeah, cbt is it's cognitive behavior therapy and it's the idea of changing the thought to change the behavior. So the thought would usually be something along the lines of I'm worthless, I'm useless If you change the end. The behavior would be self-destructive behaviors. You know, being late for your job all the time, it's spending too much money and not saving up for rent, yada, yada, yada. The idea is, if you change that original thought of I'm worthless, I'm useless, whatever that original thought is, it will change whatever that self-destructive behavior that that thought is causing. And CBT definitely works. It works for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:I would say one of the best things that CBT helped me with really was defining boundaries. It was really helpful for me for recognizing where my boundaries were and where other people's boundaries are and how to navigate those boundaries properly without any being crossed. That is, I would say, the most helpful thing I personally took from CBT. But all in all, if for body dysmorphic disorder it can be extraordinarily helpful, it can be legitimately life-saving. I knew multiple people who went through CBT programs and came out the other side truly having a better relationship with themselves and with food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that several studies have found CBT to be really successful, especially in reducing the severity of BDD depression actually being one of the biggest results. We're gonna go into the over some of the symptoms and behaviors.
Speaker 2:So some of the symptoms of BDD this list comes from John Hopkins Medical Society or Medical Institute. It's constantly checking in the mirror, avoiding mirrors altogether, trying to hide whatever the perceived flaw is under large clothing, a scarf or a hat, consistently exercising or grooming, consistently comparing self with others, consistently asking others if you look okay. Not believing when others say you look fine, avoiding social activities. Not going out of the home, especially in the daytime, seeing many healthcare professionals specifically about appearance, unnecessary plastic surgeries picking skin with fingers or tweezers, feelings of anxiety, depression and shame. Suicidal ideation.
Speaker 1:So I wanna jump back up to constantly comparing yourself with others. I think that constant exposure to images of perfect bodies, like for example in media, can really fuel these feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness, especially people actually believe that they fall short of these ideals. And especially also in the advent of social media, people can post what they wanna post and they can create a certain image around themselves and their lives, and so it actually can kind of feed into this perpetuation of I have the perfect life you don't.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. It's insane how much specifically sites like Instagram have detrimentally affected the way that we view ourselves and the way that we view others and the way that we interact with people. It's a very it's strange. It's strange and it's kind of scary. Even like Photoshop and stuff like that the ability to take a picture and smooth out or remove whatever you consider would be a perceived flaw or whatever there's a lot of harm in that and even, like you know, Even with filters.
Speaker 1:what are filters saying? Oh, it's not good enough to have the original photo. You have to have better skin in this photo, you have to change the coloring of it, etc.
Speaker 1:Here's it to get rid of redness and, yeah, even in addition to social media. Now you have AI on the scene, which, by the way, I love AI because, if it's used ethically and appropriately, it can leverage your time in so many ways and give you back hours spent on nothing, right, so it allows you to leverage time. There are a lot of folks misusing it and I think that, like I said, you have to use it ethically. But I guess my point was that that sort of thing can lend way to people using it on ethically, using it in ways that kind of perpetuate this environment of here.
Speaker 1:I'm going to paint a picture of something and it's not exactly true, and then, when other people are using you to compare themselves against it could be detrimental.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to wrap it back to how people experiencing dysmorphia there's something called, you know, seeking reassurance and there's something called preoccupation with dissatisfaction, and it's basically, you know people that experience this dysmorphia can tend to seek reassurance from others about their appearance, and that can come in many forms, and online is kind of like one of the biggest culprits. But seeking reassurance this behavior can actually become really compulsive and it can actually serve to reinforce their preoccupation with their perceived flaws. So essentially what that means is like they're ongoing dissatisfaction with how they feel can actually perpetuate the cycle of distress and serve to reinforce these negative beliefs about their appearance. So that's basically why you know we're talking about this cognitive dissonance and how it's perpetuated by things in our environment. It's really important because we can go. You know, people can go to the CBT, they can get the cognitive behavioral therapy, but if they're going home to the same environment, then it presents another layer of a challenge for them to get well.
Speaker 2:I think a perfect example of that is and for anyone, if you know, you know anatumbler. There was an entire subsection of tumbler entirely devoted to anorexia anatumbler. There's the whole anisection. Even on Pinterest, to this day, you can find anisections of the internet that are entirely devoted to inspiration photos, to pictures of what they hope one day to look like after enough time of starving themselves, and tips, things to do to keep from passing out throughout the day. I vivid memories of being a 14 to 16 year old kid who was already struggling with the grief of losing my father and my own body issues from other people in my family and in my life and being inundated with images and advice on how to be a good anorexic. It was insane.
Speaker 1:And that also gives way to a lot of internal conflict, and that's another qualifier, if you will, for cognitive dissonance, because people with body dysmorphia can experience internal conflicts between their negative beliefs about their appearance and then also their desire to have a positive self-image. So you have these two conflicting things kind of living inside at the same time. You know Like, for example, someone might believe that they're unattractive or flawed in some kind of way, but then at the same time, like I said earlier, they want to also feel confident and attractive, or they want other people to perceive them that way. And so you have this internal conflict that sort of is born out of this dissonance and it creates more dissonance and more emotional stress and it can lead to some of the things like Kit was talking about earlier anxiety, depression, shame, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I actually wanted to add real quick, mind you, with those symptoms. There are definitely symptoms on there that individually themselves can be symptoms of other things. For example, the picking can be symptoms of the deathillomania I think it's called where the yeah. Yeah. There are plenty of symptoms on here that by themselves, or as only one or two, are symptoms of other mental health conditions. However, if you notice yourself having three or more of those listed symptoms, I heavily recommend contacting your healthcare professional.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like we were saying earlier there's a difference between having the disorder or being diagnosed with a disorder, or having those tendencies or just traits of dysmorphia. Yeah, that's really important to keep in mind.
Speaker 2:Even if you notice yourself just having some traits, I would still recommend contacting your healthcare professional. These are things that, without the proper therapy, without the proper help, if you're still in a bad environment, they can get worse instead of getting better. You don't have to do that alone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you want to jump into the risk factors.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Nobody knows really for sure what causes BDD. It's kind of one of those things that it just happens, usually begins around adolescence and continues into the teenage years and beyond and beyond. Sorry, I had to. People just believe that one in 100 people suffer from BDD and it can and does affect men and women equally, across the gender spectrum, even non-binary people, trans people, across the gender spectrum. A family history of BDD or similar mental health disorder, like a different eating disorder, abnormal levels of brain chemicals which I found very interesting personality type and life experiences it can't be cured, which do suck, you know. Welcome to the club. We got this. We're going to be together for life. We can do it. Just remember the BDD brain is stupid and wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as Kit said, with genetics, you might be more likely to develop the BDD if you have a relative or some family member that has it or has something else, like OCD or depression or some kind of brain imbalance like we just mentioned. But it also can be propagated by a traumatic experience in the past. So, for example, if you were bullied or teased or if you were abused when you were a child, it could be a coping mechanism or a response to that. There were interviews done and the transcripts or the findings from them actually suggest that the majority of the people that participated in the interview perceived their past self as what they call excessively attractive. So, rather than believing that the alteration of their current appearance would rid them of the BDD, they actually indicated that a return to their former or infantile or pure self that was devoid of the blemish, the defects and the emotional responsibility, would actually provide them comfort, which I found very fascinating.
Speaker 2:So I feel like that, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it just basically says to me that the findings were basically saying that the difficulties associated with appearance are less to do with beauty per se but more likely associated with narratives of loss, decline or aging death, more kind of deep, deeper emotional, layered type of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense. That definitely makes sense. Like thinking back, even with myself, on when I feel like I had the least amount of image issues I can pinpoint, a time that's before at least the major traumas. So that track.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like there's this cultural bias that we talked about earlier and societal influences, where those representations in media and advertising and how they can contribute pretty significantly to the development or the exacerbation of body dysmorphia. I feel like it's this idea of the nature versus nurture thing. If you're in an environment where you have these external factors teaching you that you're not lovable and they're reiterating and perpetuating certain belief systems, because that's what you're constantly exposed to it's the way your neurons begin to wire and then ultimately fire. In chiropractic we have this saying that neurons that wire together fire together, because we deal with the nervous system and neurological conditions and things like that. And actually it was first coined by this guy His name was Donald Hebb H-E-B-B, and he says this is why the practice of gratitude is so powerful, because, well, he first used the phrase I think it was like 1949 or early 1950s.
Speaker 1:He actually used it to describe how pathways in the brain are formed and then reinforced through repetition. So in talking about body dysmorphia, it's like if a person feels a certain way about a particular body part and they have excessive behavior patterns as a result of it, like magnifying it with a mirror or picking something excessively, for examples. Their actions are not actually making them feel better, but rather serving to reinforce an already faulty thought pattern. And that's the wiring of it. It becomes a cycle of crap that you can escape. That's insane, because you're wired that way that tracks. But it's funny how we are most influential when we're younger, so it doesn't surprise me that these conditions are popping up from childhood and adolescence, because that's when we're most influenced. No-transcript, we're most able to flex and we're taking in the world and we're processing it and we're trying to figure out our place in it. And this is when we're it's learned behavior. Absolutely, you know, it's just crazy.
Speaker 2:You know, even like kind of just having like the realization, whatever neurological pathways are most formed in childhood. That's what you'll kind of carry. I want to hug little, I want to go back and I'll give little me a hug like damn bitch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you made it, it's gonna be okay.
Speaker 2:You made it, but you made it Exactly, you know. But I appreciate hearing about that, you know that's, that's very fascinating.
Speaker 1:It's just, it's so layered, you know, you add in these other layers too, like we were talking about earlier, about, you know, standards of beauty because of media, and then, and then on top of that, you have objectification of women. Right, we can. That's a whole other episode we can talk about that.
Speaker 2:Or even like the standard of beauty that comes from white supremacy as a whole.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the pressure to conform.
Speaker 2:What? What is considered beautiful by white supremacist standards is what is considered beautiful by society standards at this point, like that, like we intertwined those.
Speaker 1:You're right Exactly, and I guess, all that being said, it's not. It's not linear, it's, it's complex. It could be a mixture of genetic, I say epigenetic, psychological, cultural, environmental factors. So you know, the treatment typically involves addressing both the underlying psychological factors contributing to the disorder but also the societal pressures that may perpetuate it. So that's kind of you know the way that I'm looking at it, because a lot of people talk about genetics and how, oh, this is, this was in the genetics, so it's going to be passed down.
Speaker 1:The old way of looking at things was well, if it was in your genes, then 90%, it's going to be in the next, the next generation's genes. But now they're finding that with epigenetics, only 5% of genetics is accounted for in passing down and 95% now is epigenetics. So in other words, what you choose to do in your lifestyle or the environment in which you're growing up in, that makes sense. Like we have more control than we thought we had. It's just another piece of it. I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's the solution. That's fascinating, but I'm saying that you know we have more control over things than we thought we had.
Speaker 2:So you know that's very interesting. I appreciate that I never heard about. I've never heard of that before. That is very fascinating. So what can we do about it? So many factors in your life are taken into account. It's different for everyone. It depends on your life experiences and on what traumas may have led to you having BDD, or even just what life experiences may have led to you having BDD. So a lot of the times it's talk therapy, and that is mostly CBT talk therapy. There are other kinds of talk therapy. There's a dialectical behavioral therapy which is often used for borderline personality disorder, and there's, I think, trauma based therapy is its own specific kind. That's a little different from CBT. There's many different kinds and I don't know the details of all of them because I'm not a trained mental health professional. So please go talk to your doctor about which kind of therapy. Yeah, go talk to your doctor about which kind of therapy they feel like would be best for you.
Speaker 1:Disclaimer for me as well, like I'm a chiropractor and I'm a doctor of the nervous system, so I need to stay in my lane. This is not any kind of advice or anything like that, it's just. You know, I know that the link between excessive focus on something like a body part and the perceptions of self throughout the life course has rarely been examined in studies, and so this is why we're taking this topic to the podcast, because, unfortunately, it's a topic that really hasn't been studied to a degree that makes it more understood, so that's why we're talking about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I appreciate that, but I'm sorry you're going to say something about medications, so medication is always an option. Antidepressants have been known to be really helpful for body dysmorphic disorder and, obviously, the lifelong use of acquired coping skills that you have noticed work for you. Coping skills are another thing that are very particular for every person. Everyone's got their own and they work differently for everyone. So find your coping skills and use them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really hard to know really what is the best treatment method, just in general but also per individual. I like the idea of CBT but I also feel that a lot of shopping around for holistic practitioners is the way to go, especially in the realm of mental health, because a lot of times their protocol is from a limited bag of tricks and a lot of times they just go straight to medications. They say what's your symptom, here's your script, and while that may be needed for certain people, it definitely I don't think it's the answer for everyone. And that's just my conservative, very conservative lens, because I'm a very conservative, more holistic practitioner. And in chiropractic it's part of our philosophy actually that we first need to remove interference from the central nervous system to have a place to start and this gives your brain and your spinal cord an opportunity to reconnect and give us a baseline that we can start building upon. So what we were saying earlier about, like this neurons, that wire and fire together thing we spoke about that could be influenced through the adjustment Now I'm not saying it's everything, I'm saying it could be a huge influencing factor for getting well. It's this idea that neurons responding to the same stimulus connect preferentially to form what they call neuronal ensembles. So it's really cool, like when we're better connected, we have we can start to affect change on how we perceive things, which means we have the ability to actually rewire our neurons and when that happens they fire differently. And it's just a cool concept because we look at things as an inside out, with an inside out lens, and a lot of times in modern medicine they look at things as an outside in. Oh, what are your symptoms? Okay, we'll treat that. Okay, cover this cover. That's kind of like putting fires out. You're just chasing the fires. So I like this holistic lens of you know, let's get to the root cause of the problem. Let's affect the central nervous system, which is the boss of everything.
Speaker 1:I guess I'll just say I also wish that chiropractic had more of a presence in mental health studies and treatments, because there's so many widely under underestimated benefits of incorporating chiropractic into mental health in general and even in practice.
Speaker 1:I see so many people that come in with depression or mood swings or something and they start getting adjusted and it's like that brainstem that sits, that goes right through the atlas, which is the top bone in your spine. It starts to function the way it should, because your depression centers live in the brainstem, and so I'm not saying don't take medication, just to be clear. I'm just saying that it's important to find a team of health professionals that are more holistic minded and they have this vitalistic approach to your health and your care and your well-being, because I think that really can make the difference between, you know, putting a band-aid on something and actually getting to well. So I just wanted to say you know, ultimately, treatment for body dysmorphia current day focuses on addressing underlying psychological factors and promoting healthier perceptions of body image, which is a great start, but I feel like we have a ways to go before we understand it entirely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely, I 100% agree. And at the end of the day, you know, obviously we here are not advocating for stop your meds. Exactly, exactly, take your medication, do what you got to do, find the doctors that work for you. So, kit, do you want to come to that fun fact? Yes, here we go, the fun fact today. So there were, until shockingly recently, gay saints in the Catholic Church. While in 1969, they were revoked of their st hood. Before then it was known that St Sergius, a Roman army commander, was united in a gay variation of a Catholic union known as an ad fosafalus I'll spell it so people can look that up if they would like A D E, l, p, h, o, p, o, I, e, s, I S with St Bacchus, his deputy. So both of them, up until 1969, were canonized saints in the Catholic Church. Wow, you.