0109 Raised in a Cult: Escaping The Way International | Luna's Story

We talk with Luna Westish about growing up in The Way International and how it shaped money, relationships, and control over her body. We trace what it takes to leave a high control religion and rebuild boundaries, community, and a sense of self. 
• growing up with questions that get shut down 
• learning later that the group is widely labeled a cult 
• recruiting tactics, love bombing, and financial manipulation 
• sexual coercion, abuse, and the danger of offshoot fellowships 
• boundary violations in childhood and how they echo into adulthood 
• the “coffee” invitation moment that clarifies danger 
• leaving as a decision that takes years to form 
• responsibility versus culpability for adults who choose the system 
• rebuilding life through work changes, mutual aid, and self-trust 
• healing in phases, chronic illness limits, and listening to the body 
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Transcript

Luna’s Story Begins

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And there was a lot of sexual abuse and sexual coercion. This is not coffee. This is like something else. This is creepy. I am like 12 years your junior.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Can you recall some moments or instances where you felt like your boundaries were not being respected?

SPEAKER_01 0:15

We do not have to use our body to apologize for things. And I swear I cried my way through that entire book. If you were four, if you were 14, if you were 16. Like you had no say. Can you tell us a little bit more about life outside of the cult? A lot of people's lives were destroyed. I know 100% that this isn't working for me. And he said, if you weren't my daughter, I would have no reason to know you. You have a responsibility to heal.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Luna, welcome to Multispective. I'm really excited to have you on air today and share your story with us. Uh so why don't we just begin from the very beginning? Like, where does your story begin? Like, tell us about your childhood.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Yeah, um, Luna Westish is a pen name that I chose. I'm a fiction author, and I'm sure we'll we'll weave that in some more later. But um, I uh grew up in a cult. I grew up in what we call um a high control religion because sometimes when when we use the term cult, people think uh, oh, that's something like that I couldn't experience or like I couldn't fall prey to. And I think that when we when we use the term high control religion, it gives people a little bit more of a perspective on like you probably know somebody who's in a high control religion. You probably um possibly have experienced that yourself. And so I grew up in an organization called The Way International, which was this international cult that I think at its highest had something like 40,000 members worldwide, um, mostly in the United States, but not exclusively in the United States. My childhood was pretty normal, but always having a lot of questions about religion that were often really shut down and um not answered, not entertained, really told to kind of um keep my questions to myself, that kind of thing. And um I ended up leaving the church, uh, or what I thought of as like the church when I was around 22 years old. And I had kind of been um falling out of love with it uh for all for like kind of my whole young adulthood, um, and finally left in uh when I was around 22. But at that time I just really felt like I was leaving my parents' church, right? Like a lot of people do. Like it, you know, your parents are Methodist or Catholic, and then as a young adult, you say, like, okay, that's not for me. I'm not gonna keep doing that. Um, but being in a cult, I was excommunicated by a lot of people. It really um really destroyed my relationship with quite a few of my family members, including my parents, and we've been no contact off and on for like to almost 20

Realizing It Was A Cult

SPEAKER_01 2:46

years now. But I didn't actually know that I had left a cult until about five years ago. And um, I found an article um from like the late 80s. Actually, this was from the early 80s. There's some stuff from the late 80s too, but from the from the early 80s before I was even born, that called the Way International a cult. And that really like blew my understanding of what had been going on my whole childhood and young adulthood and even now, really wide open because my parents always have this line, which like in retrospect, if you have to have a line about this, that's probably a red flag, right? But they would have this line, like the way international wasn't a cult when we were there, it became one after we left. And so in like the late 90s, uh the groups sort of split in half when the founder died, and my parents left, as did a lot of other people. So my parents' line was, oh, like after we left, that's when it became like a little cultish. So then for me to find this article from I think it was like USA Today or the Washington Post, which is a huge US newspaper. This was not some like regional free press. This is a huge newspaper saying the way international is a cult. And um, what was so fascinating about it was that it actually like referenced like people that I knew, people who I had grown up with, and like one person who went to like our home church was like at that time the spokesperson for the way international, which I didn't know. And so I was like, if my parents were seeing this before I was even born, and then for years and years and years of my childhood were saying, Oh, it like didn't ever become a cult until we left. Like that created a lot of questions for me. So I uh read a lot of books, I watched a lot of documentaries, I started learning more about like cult studies, which I didn't even know that was a thing, like actual sort of scientific studies of like how cults form, how people leave. And I started writing about it as well, um, just as a sort of a nonfiction personal essays. Like, here's some things that came up from my childhood, and here's how they have come up again now that I know you know what was going on in my childhood. Like, um I actually haven't written about this, but my parents were like apparently like apocalypse preppers, and I didn't know that. Like the way that they framed it was like, oh, my my dad likes to hunt, and oh, my mom has a bunch of food in case of like an emergency, but actually, like that all came from the cult, and they were like trained in weapons and trained in prepping because they thought that the apocalypse was coming.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

That's really, really interesting to begin with. Like, I do want to get uh more into the actual cult as well because I've never don't recall ever hurt hearing about the Way International. Um, so I I would like to sort of know a little bit more about

Beliefs, Education, And Recruitment

SPEAKER_00 5:30

that. Like, what is the premise? What is their belief? What is their ideology here? And uh what do they sort of like preach generally to their followers?

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Yeah, so it's very interesting because um the like the premise of the church was that like other churches didn't know what they were talking about, and that like the Trinity, which is like part of a big part of Christianity, wasn't real. That like Jesus, uh God, and the Holy Spirit were like three different things, that the Trinity wasn't real, and this was like a big basis of um of the of the way international, but also that like only people who were trained by way international teachers to like read the original Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew, um, those were the only people who were like really knew what they were talking about. And so um there's a lot of uh things were basically just like the way international kind of argues with other churches about things. So, like how many um how many criminals were like crucified with Jesus, or like what were Jesus' last words? Like whatever, you know, Church A says the way international would say, like, no, no, no, it's it's it's different. Um, and so basically it was like this interesting positioning as though, you know, kind of like the one true religion, but like through a lens of academia that I feel like is not true of a lot of churches. So, one thing that's really interesting about the Way International is that they were very um uh friendly with and like pushed uh higher education, which is actually really unusual in cults. That's not a normal sort of cult uh marker. And so a lot of people, my parents included, like were introduced to the Way International during college. They actually did outreach on college campuses. And one of the reasons that they did this, like now knowing more, is that like if you're going to college, especially like um my dad went to Northwestern uh and and then uh also UW Madison, these are very expensive schools. If you're going to schools like that, you probably have parents supporting you, right? And so one really interesting thing about the Way International was that they would kind of get you in, they would get you coming to what they called fellowships, they would basically like love bomb you and like welcome you into their circle and make you feel like part of the family. And then they would basically like really quickly immediately demand money from you: money for classes, money for tithing, money for supporting. And then, like, if you bought into that, then like the next step was to move into like what a way home. Uh, so like a group of like anywhere from like, I don't know, six to ten people, all sharing like a pretty crappy house and all having to pay rent to like whatever the local fellowship was. And and but you also like in some cases weren't allowed to work, so you were required to have your family support you. So it's really interesting because there was a lot of financial manipulation, but like of 18, 19, 20, you know, 22-year-olds, these were not people who had a lot of money, but their families had money. So in the these early um articles about uh the cult, even from like the the like 1981 to like 1987, um, these really early articles about the cult, they're noting like the the financial manipulation that's happening of these kids, but of their families' money. Um, or like um kids will be like pressured to sell their car um uh to like be able to, you know, live in a way home. Um uh but then they can't get to work, right? So that like makes them even more isolated.

Financial Control And Sexual Abuse

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Uh but the really interesting thing is like when you dive into some of the more strange elements of the teachings, um, it was like very sexually promiscuous, and like you were expected, if you were like the wife of a fellowship leader, you were expected to provide sexual favors to anybody who was like above your husband on the totem pole. And there was a lot of sexual abuse and sexual coercion and child abuse as well, and child sex abuse. And um, there were actually like attempts uh like sort of between like like in the 80s to justify this biblically and to like say, here's why the Bible says that you should do this. Um, unfortunately, the the consequences of that were like a lot of people's lives were destroyed. There were several instances where um the leader or his underlings um raped women and then they those women went on to commit suicide. Um, interestingly, the way international is not uh pro-life. They are pro-choice. And one of the reasons is like the way, one of the ways that you maintain power structures is like if you get your mistress or the person that you are coercing into sex through those power structures, the way that you keep those structures without having a lot of fallout is making people get abortions. So there are a lot of abortions of illegitimate children that like the leaders didn't want around. And so there's just so many little like weird things that happen. And in one of the really interesting things about the way international, I think one of the things that's so pervasive and problematic is that when half of the people left, like in the late 1980s, early 1990s, they all sort of established their own um home fellowships. So they called these fellowships or like twig meetings, like there's like the branch and then the twig. So they call these twig meetings or fellowship or um like home, you know, home fellowships, things like that. And a lot of the really abusive power structures were maintained in those settings. But because they were no longer part of the Way International, they kind of fell off of like the cult academic uh tracking maps. And so there are a lot of instances where the people who started those, like um what they call offshoots, um, uh were incredibly abusive, abused dozens of people, um, people uh committed suicide or had died under certain suspicious circumstances. But because they don't all have the name The Way International anymore, they're not being tracked by like cult studies anymore. And that's so dangerous. So, one example of this is River Road Fellowship. Um, if you Google that, you'll find unfortunately lots of stories and evidence about how um this guy who started his home fellowship after he left the Way International abused lots and lots of women, um, at least one of whom went on to commit suicide as a result of her trauma. When I started writing about five years ago about my like ex-cult experiences, like, oh, here are some things that I realized that were like coming out of my childhood that were really problematic, in particular around consent and bodily body autonomy. Um, my mom sent me an email, like in between the first and the second uh second uh article. So the very first article that I wrote, which I did not send her, right? Somebody else sent it to her, somebody from my family or somebody who knows me on Facebook, so clearly sent it to her. And she said, I didn't do any of these things. You're lying. Um uh you will never hear from me again. And so I basically haven't, you know, seen my or talked to uh my parents in in over five years. Um and that's like basically their choice. I mean, I kind of don't really want a relationship with them anyway, but I was open to sort of maintaining a line of contact so that my kids could get to know them a little bit. But it's really interesting how my kids have basically been like from the stories that you tell us, even though you tell us good stories and bad stories, like that's not somebody that we actually want to like nurture a relationship with. Because they also see how badly I'm still treated by those people, and also how those people um project their expectations of like childhood obedience onto my children, right? So, like when uh we went to see uh my sister, who is still in the cult, but had but like I've been able to maintain a relationship with her, she has four kids. So, like we took our two kids to um you know the northeastern US for a summer to go spend time with them because we were moving abroad and we knew we might not see them in person for like years. So we wanted to spend some time with them. And my my mom like organized this event so that uh we could all get together. But basically, she just wanted to take a picture of all of her grandkids because she didn't have a picture of all of her grandkids, even though my kids at the time were like seven and ten. So she had never had a picture of all of her grandkids in one place. So we're at this like waterfront, kids are running around, everybody's messy, we're like eating cupcakes, and my mom's like, okay, we're gonna take a picture now. And she says to my child, like not to me, to my child, um, like you should brush your hair before the photo. And my kid was like, No, like that's not something that I would ever do. And then uh, like two minutes later, she says to me, like, you should brush her hair. And I said, No. And then she goes back to my kid, can I brush your hair? And I and my kid's like, no, like I already said no. Do you know what I mean? Like, my kid is drawing boundaries. And then my mom's like, but but you could just like flatten it down a little bit. And I literally had to say to her, like, are you really going to like ruin this photo shoot that's clearly so important to you by like continuing to harangue my seven-year-old child about their hair? Like, just take the picture, or I'm gonna pull my kids out of it. Like, the it's just like a little thing, right? Like, it's not like that's a big deal. It's not like in out of context, you'd be like, it's not that big of a deal that she asked your kid to brush their hair. But the fact that she made a thing of it, asked four times, did not respect my child's answer, did not respect my answer, and that I had to like basically like put a foot down like really strongly for her to even stop talking about it, like that's just emblematic, emblematic of like our relationship. Like my boundaries are never respected. Like any kind of boundary that I try and draw around my body or around my children or around like what's appropriate to talk about in front of my children, those kinds of things, never, never respected. So even though I tried to keep that sort of line of conversation open, um, my kids kind of shut it down. They were like, this doesn't really work for us. And actually, they're like not really in contact with any of their grandparents because even though their other two grandparents were not from a no-contact religion, they're still from that same gener, I'm sorry, a high control religion. They're still from that same generation of like, I'm the adult, so I know best. So like you have to do what I say, and like you have to agree with me almost, um, like about everything that I say. And it's so uh damaging to like interpersonal relationships when one person is approaching the relationship in that way. So unfortunately, like my kids don't really have a relationship with any of their grandparents because they lack that self-awareness, that capacity to change and examine their own behavior and be like, you know what, I did this wrong. Let's try again. I did this wrong. Let me start over. I did this wrong. I'm sorry. And that like that capacity seems to be just like so incredibly missing from like the 50 to 80 year old like uh

Boundaries, Consent, And Family Fallout

SPEAKER_01 16:48

generation.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Can you recall some moments or instances where you felt like your boundaries were not being respected when you were younger? Uh and part of the cult, like what were some things that you experienced where you felt like you were, you know, you felt triggered by it?

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yeah, I mean, one thing that happened a lot was like if you like let's say uh you were having fellowship at your house, right? So like all sorts of people were coming in, everyone was entitled to hug you or pull you onto their lap for like an under any circumstances, like through the time that you were like 18 years old. So, like if you were four, if you were 14, if you were 16, like you had no say in who hugged you and who touched you and who you were talking to. Like, if someone was talking to you, you had to be respectful and like just kind of stand there and like nod your head. Um, even if they were being inappropriate or touching you inappropriately. So I was in in graduate school in London and I went back to New Jersey to visit my sister for spring break. I was going to New Jersey and then I was gonna go to the Caribbean for a few days. And I remember um I think I was like 20, 21 or 22 at the time. And the guy who used to lead my um like children's fellowship, basically, uh, who was like at least 10 or 12 years older than me, invited me over for coffee. And I'm like, okay, sure. Like I've known this person for years and years and years. Well, he was inviting me to his apartment, which was a studio apartment where there was like nowhere to sit except for like on the bed. And he sits on the bed and like taps the bed next to him, and he's like, come sit down. And I was like, this is not coffee. This is like something else. This is creepy. I am like 12 years your junior. You've literally known me since I was in like a training bra. Like my hackles were just like so raised. And I think part of the reason that they were so like able to be raised was because I was like on my way out. Like I wouldn't have been able to articulate that I was on my way out. But there were a bunch of different things happening that like kind of pushed me out at that point. And um, I just was like, oh, you know what? Like I have to go. Like I forgot. I told my sister that I have to like be somewhere and just made my excuses and left. And had it been like three years earlier, I probably would not have felt empowered to even leave at that point, right? Like I would have gotten into a lot of trouble and uh uh probably would have been abused. And the thing that like just creeps me out so much is like I knew at that time, like somebody else had told me that he was like looking for a wife, right? And it hadn't registered that I could even be part of that consideration because he was so much older than me. But in that moment, I was like, oh, so either he wants to have sex or he wants me to be his wife. And either way, no, I am not into this. But like less than a year later, he married a girl that was like my age, so like 21, 22, brown hair, blue eyes, like literally could have been my like a sibling of mine, and so young. And I was like, he was just looking for some young thing, like it wasn't me, wasn't like my intellect, you know, or something like that. Like he was just looking for a young wife, and that just creeped me out so much, and I was just like, I can't believe this. So that was actually one of the things there was like a series of things kind of all at once that helped me to leave. That was one of them. Another one was that I finally, for the first time in my life, had started actually dating a guy who was part of the church, and he kind of treated me badly and then ghosted me. And I was like, wait a minute, if this is how somebody like within the church is gonna treat me, and I've been told my whole life that I have to like wait to have sex until marriage and that I cannot marry somebody unless they're part of the church, but this guy's a dirtbag. Like, why what am I here for? Like, why am I waiting? Why am I like waiting all this time for somebody who's like not actually going to be like good to me, you know? Also creepy, he ended up marrying my sister's husband's sister. So, like, we're talking about just like a lot of uh six degrees of separation here, a lot of like I've known you since you were four and now we're going to get married kind of thing. Um and then the last thing that really helped push me out was that um I found out that my dad, who like I mean, I my whole life I had had, you know, challenges with and arguments with and things like that, was like very depressed, was like in the midst of like a major depressive um episode and was like in therapy and was doing cognitive behavioral therapy and stuff like that. And not that there's anything wrong with that, all those things are amazing. But the fact that my dad, who was the most devout person that I'd ever met, who prayed like 10 times a day, couldn't manage his own mental health in a way that I had also seen people not be able to manage their physical health, even though we had been told over and over and over again that like if you just pray hard enough, you can like pray the cancer away. Can pray the depression away. Like it's up to you whether you're healthy. That like broke me in a way where I was like, if my dad, who's so devout and who's so um who believes more strongly in this system than anybody that I've ever met, if he can't heal himself, this is all wrong, right? Like those three things together, uh, my dad's mental health uh issues, my uh, you know, the creepy pastor who like wanted me to be his wife, and then like the dirtbag Christian dude who I was pinning all my hopes on, right? Those three things uh in quick succession really opened my eyes that like all these questions that I had that I had put aside, and all of these, like those sort of like um things in the back of your mind that are like this isn't right or this doesn't feel good, um, all those things that I had pushed aside kind of came up. And I was like, oh, um, this doesn't work for me anymore. And I um ended up meeting my now husband like three weeks later. Like it was very fast. It was not a very like um clean transition. Like he was caught up in a lot of like the drama of me leaving and my parents like treating me really badly, and one of some of my siblings also treating me really badly around me leaving. And uh I remember just when I was a teenager at one point, I was like 14, and my dad was like, I'm gonna spank you. And I just turned around, I was like, No, no, you're not. And I just walked away, and that was the last time. I think a lot too about like the next generation, like the the I was like second generation, you know, where like I didn't have a choice in this growing up, and now a lot of people my age they have kids and they are doing the same thing and repeating the same abuses and justifying it as Christ-like when it's actually I consider that to be sexual abuse on top of child abuse. If you're touching or hitting a child's bare private parts, like that's really screwed up. Like, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you. I've never had the instinct to pull a child's underwear down and hit them with something wooden. I can say that for myself. So the fact that like that that comes naturally to people or that they're able to justify that as somehow being Christ-like, I just find that to be so wild.

Leaving And Relearning Bodily Autonomy

SPEAKER_01 24:21

But a lot of, I would say, like, some of the most harmful things for me have been around um consent and bodily autonomy. And basically, like I was taught as a young person like that I didn't have any control over my own body, that other people had control over my my body, and that they could kind of do whatever they wanted to it. Um, and that was incredibly harmful in relationships, right? Really screwed up my conception of like what I owed the other person in a relationship. And I'll call out a book here. There's a book called The Body Is Not an Apology, and it literally changed my life because um it sounds like you're saying I'm not gonna apologize for my body, but that's not the premise of the book. The premise of the book is that we do not have to use our body to apologize for things. And I swear I cried my way through that entire book. It could not have been more impactful for me. It was basically like the opposite of everything I had ever been taught. That like my body is mine, I get to do whatever I want with it, I don't have to apologize. Like I remember being in, I mean, literally, I think I was like 13, and I wouldn't have sex with my boyfriend. So instead, to like make him happy, I would give him blowjobs. And like I didn't want to give him blowjobs, but I knew that like I was um uh withholding something from him that he needed or wanted. And so it was my job to apologize with blowjobs. Like that is the most insane thing for a 13-year-old to have like running through their head, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:50

There's a concept of like this ownership, this responsibility that an adult has to take when you know they make a decision as an adult. Joining, you know, you mentioned your parents joined the cult when they were already at like college level, which means that everything that's ever gone wrong with their kids or with their decisions, they would have to take 100% ownership for choosing to make that decision as a fully formed adult. Whereas as opposed to like a child being born into it, a lot of the conditioning is sort of like built so deep within the child. Yet at the same time, like there have been a lot of episodes that I've done with um with people who were born into a cult, and they kind of like at one point realize that this is not where I should be, this is not right for me, and they've come out of it and like are able to accept so much more that that was wrong, that the environment that they were in was wrong, partly because they never really had a choice from the beginning. There was never a concept of like responsibility necessarily needed because they never made that choice for themselves. Um, and so I wonder whether it's it's kind of that as well. Like um, an adult who kind of slowly eases into something like this. Of course, that the every small decision kind of gets it's spit, it just kind of spirals, right? It snowballs into something bigger and bigger. And the deeper you get, the more you're kind of stuck in that decision, uh, the more denial that comes in as well, in in place, but also partly of like knowing that they made that decision as an adult, well knowing what they were about to get into.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

Yeah, I was just gonna say it's really hard for me to think about my parents and try and parse out what they are um responsible for and what they're culpable for, and those two things are a little bit different to me. Like you have a responsibility, for example, to like treat your children well and like uh listen to them and listen to what they're saying about their bodies, but you're then culpable if you like beat them for it, right? Like there's kind of these two different levels of like responsibility, responsibility and culpability. And um, I think about the fact that like uh if you leave the cult, you are excommunicated, you lose all of your friends. If you uh there are situations a lot of situations where people have left the cult and lost custody of their children, and their children stayed within the custody of the cult. Um, and there are also a lot of situations where because of the decisions that you were really pressured and manipulated to make within the cult, you have no money to leave with. So I think about the fact that like um uh when I think about people who are in cults, I on some level I'm like, yes, it's their responsibility, it's their culpability, but also the whole point of cults is that they're structured in such a way to massively disincentivize leaving. And there are actually like uh instances in the way international where it's alleged that somebody left and was murdered. So, like, there's real consequences for leaving. For me, they were somewhat small because I was in graduate school, like I wasn't planning to move home, um, and I didn't need my parents' support at that time. But like there's a there's a reason I left in graduate school and not in college, right? Like, there's a reason that I finally at 22 had the could give myself permission to leave, despite the fact that I had always had questions. And especially I would say, like, in middle school and high school, I had a lot of questions, none of which were satisfactorily answered. Um, and so I think about people who have stayed, and like I I was talking about somebody in my family who has stayed recently, and somebody was like, I absolutely blame them for staying. And I was like, I really don't think it's that simple because if they left, they could lose custody of their children, they could lose whatever money they have, which is not very much. Um, they would lose their entire social circle, their family, which I didn't know that I was risking losing my family when I left. Had I known that, I'm not sure that I would have made the same decision. Or, or maybe it would have made it differently or later on, but like I was a little naive to the consequences, and that was like a good thing that I didn't know because it allowed me to leave. Whereas if I understood like the depth of the consequences of leaving, I might not have felt empowered to leave. And I also think about this in this in the context of people who were raised in the cult and then stayed or stayed for a you know a period of time. And I think about myself in college because when I was in college, I ran Bible studies on my college campus. And I've actually written amends letters to several people who were heavily involved in those, like at kind of at my request and like um at my proselytization, right? Um, and like apologized for introducing them to this system that like at the time I did not know how damaging it was, but also I had questions that were not answered. And I was like one foot in, one foot out. So, like I do think when I was leading these Bible studies, I was picking and choosing the things that I liked from the religion and only like sharing that kind of stuff, right? Like, I was not just parroting the whole system, right? I was just sort of being like, here's the thing I like about, you know, like taking care of your community, you know, something like that. And it's really hard to leave.

Responsibility, Culpability, And Cost Of Exit

SPEAKER_01 31:14

It is really hard to leave a cult. Like, I think that one of the things that How was it for you?

SPEAKER_00 31:19

What was the process?

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Um, I think for me it was it actually wasn't hard once I made the decision, but it was hard to make the decision, if that makes sense. Like it was hard to get to the point where I was like, I I know a hundred percent that this isn't working for me, right? Like I had sat at like 50% for several years where like I didn't want to go to fellowship anymore. I made excuses as to why I couldn't go to fellowship. If I was like flying home, I would try and fly home like after fellowship was over, those kinds of things for probably two years, maybe. And then like I mentioned earlier, the series of things happened like pretty close to one another, where it was kind of just like the straw, straws plural that broke the camel's back, where I was just like, okay, this is not working for me. And I remember having some like quote unquote believers that I didn't know, but that like my parents knew their parents. They came and stayed with me in London, like slept on my floor. I had never met them before. And I took them out to dinner, and the last night there was there, I was like, I'm leaving. And it was like they were like, you can't, that's not like a thing. And I was like, but I am like, I'm not doing this anymore, I'm not going to fellowship, like I'm done. And uh they were just like flabbergasted, but it was great to have that opportunity to like tell somebody who was involved in the cult, but not actually part of like my personal circle that I was leaving. It was like a little bit of a practice. And then I called my mom a few days later and I was like, um, I'm not doing this anymore. Like, I'm uh I'm not going to fellowship like ever again. Haven't been in like a year. I don't miss it. I don't want it. And my mom was like, Don't tell your dad. Um, let's keep it secret from him until you come home over the summer. We'll tell him then. I have no idea why this was like her approach. I don't know that it was necessarily intentionally harmful. But um, in the interim, I met my now husband. So when I came home that summer, I was not just leaving the church, but also dating a Jewish guy. So it was like my dad was not happy. But I think what made it like so crystal clear for me that I had made the right decision was that summer. I think I had only been home for like a week or two. I think I'm a very interesting person. I'm a very intelligent person. I have a lot of curiosity about life. I have a lot to offer, right? Like, you don't have to like me. That's totally okay. But my dad, I was sitting with him on like the patio of his house, we're just like drinking coffee, and I said something like basically like in the gentlest way possible, like I don't really like how you've been treating me since you found out that I was leaving. Because again, I didn't know that this was these were going to be a consequence. So all of this was new for me at that time. And he said, Honestly, if you weren't my daughter, I would have no reason to know you. And I was like, okay. That tells me more than so many years of you know, indoctrination or or the experiences that we've had together. The fact that like my only relationship to you is as your child, and frankly, as somebody that you can control, that's the only way that you value me. You see no value in me as a human being. Like we couldn't be friends or have overlapping interests or like get a cup of coffee if I wasn't your daughter. Can you imagine saying that to your child? Like, you have no value to me except that you're my child. Like, I just think that that is one of the most screwed up things that you can say to somebody. And so that just was like honestly a gift that he gave me. Like it was so harmful, so traumatic, but it was like such a gift because it just was like a point in time where I was like, if I had any qualms about leaving, which I didn't, they would be gone, like nothing. Like I am never going back. My sister, who left the church like years after I did, and so is like kind of 10 years a little bit of like behind where I am and trying to reconcile all of this, was like, how do you deal with the uncertainty? Like what religion gives you is certainty, like certainty that you are doing things right, that you are right, that you, that your values are the right values. And I was like, I'm not sure. Maybe my personality doesn't require that kind of certainty, first of all. I do think that there are people who really cling to that, like that's part of actually what attracts a lot of people to high control religion religions, is being told what to do. And I'm kind of the opposite. I'm like, do not tell me what to do. And I've always been like that, even as a kid.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

It's also really fascinating how they encouraged higher education, they encouraged people to study yet. At the same time, they wanted to kill any aspect of like critical thinking, you know, questioning at the same time. Like they want people to be blind believers, yet at the same time be educated. In a way, like educating maybe your parents as well, being educated, empowered them to have that control over you guys and be so like, I know what I'm talking about, I know what I'm talking about, but yet at the same time, they they don't have the answers to certain questions and they don't want to even consider those questions, even like look for those answers, which is kind of really fascinating. It's like they take pride in the fact that they educate people, yet at the same time don't want people to question things.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Yeah. And there's a parallel too where like they believe that they shouldn't have to pay taxes, but that they should give some of their own earnings, like to charity or to people who need it. But that conception of charity is very much like we'll give you um like a place to stay in a homeless shelter, but you have to be clean, you can't be drinking, you can't be doing drugs, you can't have a dog, you can't have a partner, you can't have a kid. And and under these very, very specific circumstances, we will help you. And that was very much the type of charity that my parents like espoused. But I always would like they'd be like, Well, we're gonna vote Republican because our taxes will be lower. And I would be like, Doesn't the Bible say that we're supposed to pay taxes to the people who are like ruling over us because that was the context? And they'd be like, that's not what that means. I'd be like, you can't say, like, we should take care of our community, but we are unwilling to pay taxes to take care of our community. Like, that doesn't make sense. I really had to do a lot of internal work on reunderstanding like how to actually be in community, how to be part of community, how to help people. Um, and during the um pandemic, I helped run a food is free table, which really like opened my eyes to a lot of things. Like the people who were taking food were not necessarily the people in the community that you thought were poor, but there were a lot of people who had like lost their jobs or their hours had been drastically pulled back because of COVID. And so it was like everybody is using this table. And even if somebody comes by and they have like millions of dollars, but they want a granola bar, cool, they should have that too. And so in the United States, in particular, we have this idea like poor people shouldn't have these things. They shouldn't have universal health care, they shouldn't have universal basic income, they shouldn't have universal child care. And the things that they do get, they should have to fight for them. They should have to fill out hundreds and hundreds of pages of forms to get them. But also, if you're wealthy, you shouldn't get those things either because you're wealthy, right? So it's just like a very weird system where we're like no one should have nice things. Like maybe if you're middle class, you start to get things sort of more comfortably. But like if you're too rich and too poor, then like you shouldn't have access to either of it. Whereas like the concept of mutual aid, or the concept of like, honestly, I think a fully functioning society is that like everyone should have access to it for free or cheap, depending on like what thing we're talking about. Education should be free, healthcare should be free, et cetera. Um and then the people who need it the most get it. And then those people in the middle class who maybe like kind of needed it, but probably could have figured something out, they also get it. And that brings up the the quality because we're paying, we're giving more government funding to schools that more people are taking. And then the more um students at those schools, the more likely those wealthy students are to also go to that school because the school is you know considered quote unquote good. And then you just have this sort of rising tide lifts all boats. But instead in the United States, you have this like perspective of like you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which is used as a saying in the United States to mean like, oh, you have to do it yourself. But actually, that saying originated because you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Like, that's the whole point, is that like it's impossible if you're on the ground, you can't just be like, I'm just gonna work really hard and pull myself up. Like, that's not how it works.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

Yeah. Yet it yet they still advertise, like they advertise those few individuals that made it out of nothing. And they say, look, like, look, these are the cases that we've we've seen of like individuals who started out with nothing, they were like living in you know poverty and homelessness, and they have pulled themselves out of it. So if they can do it, then you can do it. And you're like, well, that's just not how it works for the majority or like the masses of people.

SPEAKER_01 40:31

How do you condemn the next generation to live in that same poverty that that person had to rise out of? Like, that's what doesn't make sense to me as like a society. And this is especially prevalent within cults, but it's definitely not just within cults. Like a lot of people think this way that like I had it hard, so everyone else can have it hard too, or like I didn't have childcare when my kids were little, so you shouldn't have it either. My uh student loans weren't forgiven, so yours shouldn't be either. And I just find that to be such a strange position to take because it's like I had a really hard childhood, so I should I want other people to have to go through a cult upbringing just because on the other side of that there is like maybe some semblance of a healthy family and travel and um uh some level of prosperity or like you know, having enough money. Like, no, I would not wish that on anybody. I want everyone to have a healthy childhood where they can eat what they want and they have control over their body and they can read what they want and um and like dream for themselves. It's so strange to me when people who had nothing or who had a hard time look back and are like, because I had that, everyone else should too. To me, it's the opposite. I'm like, I had that, I went through that, it sucked. Let's get everyone else out of situations like that.

Building A New Life And Healing

SPEAKER_00 41:54

Can you tell us a little bit more about life outside of the cult, like getting out of it? Did you have to do some kind of therapy, you know, like unraveling that stuff, you know, navigating your own relationship as well, your own marriage? Like how how has it been with jobs and with everything?

SPEAKER_01 42:09

The jobs thing is really interesting to me because I had like a pretty um like good trajectory after after grad school. Like I kind of kept getting promoted and like headhunted, and um I was like seen as kind of this rising star in my industry, and I was absolutely miserable. And um looking back on it, like I was just never like meant for like corporate work. And it at the time I was actually doing nonprofit work, which really is very corporate in a lot of ways, like sort of power structures and rules and things like that. And um, my husband and I worked really, really hard from like the very beginning of our relationship to save money so that like when we had kids, one of us could take time off and like for at least six months or maybe a year. And so I had my first child, and I was literally three days after they were born writing press releases in bed, like in the hospital, because like my company like didn't respect my boundaries, right? Like I was like, I have to be done, you know, two weeks ahead of time. And they were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they actually didn't support me in doing that. And I was literally, you know, on bed rest having to like write press releases and do like lobbying from bed, like it was miserable. And so I uh exited that really quickly, and um, I was like, okay, six months. Six months is sort of how long I'm gonna take to um uh you know get myself, get my bearings, like, you know, sorry as a big kid, and then I'm gonna go back to work. We'll do daycare, everything. And my kid didn't sleep. So like by the time six months rolled around, I was like, my brain is jello. Like, I cannot go back to writing like scientific reports. I'm sorry. So I was getting all these job offers and like consulting offers and stuff like that, and I was just turning them down left and right. And it was a big risk because I was basically leaving. My industry and um like the you know I knew that the dry offers were going to dry up if I didn't go back to work, but I just couldn't. And I ended up starting a small business in part because I think I wanted something for myself that was like outside of my my relationship and outside of raising a child. I think I wanted something that felt fulfilling, like just for me. And that changed my life. So I started a small, like vintage resale business, and um that uh sort of led itself into building a jewelry company that was very successful for about 10 years. And then that turned into um small business consulting and um uh teaching to uh business to teens and things like that. And um I wrote an article recently, uh kind of in between like an article and a personal essay, about how um I only recently sort of came out as non-binary, like sort of publicly, but that this is something that I felt for a while, like maybe four or five years, is sort of how long I've been like mulling over it. Um, but that I could never have come out as non-binary in if I had kept on that trajectory of my career. Because part of that career was being constantly sexually harassed. Like being a woman in the workforce in the United States is constant sexual harassment, constant referrals to your gender, constant referrals to what you're wearing or what makeup you chose or how you did your hair, um, possibly even sexual assault, but like constant, constant, constant reminders of how other people perceive your gender. And it wasn't until I was able to work for myself and I realized like I didn't really want to work with men. I was working with um uh women, non-binary folks, transgender, transgender women, transgender men. And so I think that uh if I would like say anything to somebody who's maybe in a similar situation of having left a high control religion and feeling down in yourself that like you're not in a moment where you feel empowered to like go to therapy, or maybe you don't have money to go to therapy, let's talk about that as an issue. Um it's okay to have like different like different versions of acceleration when it comes to your healing. Like sometimes you accelerate really quickly and that can be really hurtful, right? Like it brings up a lot and it can be really hard and really painful, but also you come out on the other end and you've grown a lot. But I think it's also okay to have these periods of time where you're fallow or where you're like doing like little nibbles, little nibbles of healing, like you're drawing more, you're reading more, or you're walking outside more, or you're maybe you're taking a little bit better care of your health. And as someone with chronic illness, I will say it is very hard to like heal from a traumatic childhood and like manage all of the time that that takes on top of chronic illness. So, like when my chronic illness is really bad and like I'm in a flare, I'm not like actively doing healing stuff. And so it's only when like I can kind of get my chronic stuff under control and it's not like healed, but it's like at a stasis where I can be like, okay, I actually have the mental capacity now to maybe like do a little bit of work on myself.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

Yeah, I mean, I was I was just about to ask you, but you've already answered, uh, you know, sort of like just kind of some advice for someone else that's kind of come out of a cult. Um, but I feel like um the healing, the advice that you've given on sort of like healing and sort of taking a step back where you need to, taking that rest where you need to kind of coming back into it when you when you are ready for it and allowing your body to sort of like um tell you what you need in that moment and and and you know choosing the the different parts of healing that suitable for you and where you know you can kind of handle it in that very moment is is really, really sound advice because I think, yeah, I mean we do generally tend tend to think like, oh, I just come out of trauma, I need to go and do this, I need to go and do that, I must go and especially when you've come out of a culture where you've kind of always been told, shudder, you know, you should do this, you should do that, you it's very controlled, that it's natural for us to kind of feel like I have to kind of control my healing process too as much as I can. But to release, I think when you release that need to control or the you release that need to like work your way out of it is when that healing actually happens because it's like your body is telling you, hey, right now you don't need it, you know, you just need to relax, and that's what you need to listen to. So, yeah, just listening to your body being really important.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Yeah, I mean, listening to your body is so key because if you were raised in a high control religion, that was probably one of the first things that you learned to suppress. And so part of your healing should actually be reconnecting with like what your gut tells you, how your heart feels. Like, do you feel like you want to be productive and do stuff today, or do you feel like you need rest? Or like what does your body tell you about eating that milkshake? Like your body knows. Um, I mean, not always, obviously, but like there are some instances where like you meet somebody and your body goes, no, no, no, and we override it. And then six months later, we're like, oh, my body was actually really clear with me, and I ignored that. So I think that reconnecting with your intuition or your gut or like your sense of self is so important for healing. I think if you can't do that, you're never really gonna heal. It's it's gonna be like the superficial version of healing. But um, sometimes like what makes me realize like that I had a homophobic thought or something is basically my intuition is my body going, like, wait a second, what did you just think? Right? It didn't come out of my mouth, but it's this thing, it's just like little, like little spark in my brain. Um, and I'm like, oh, I have to work on that. Um, like maybe not right this moment, but I'm like logging that as like this is something they need to work on. And I think that there's also the other thing that I would get, the other piece of advice that I would give is that like you have a responsibility to heal, especially if you are in a relationship or you want children or have children.

SPEAKER_00 49:49

That's amazing. Linda, thank you so much for being on Multispective and sharing your story and sharing your work and sharing, you know, everything that's kind of got you to where you are today. So, like, I really appreciate you and even just your vulnerability today.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Thank you so much for having me here.

Closing And Support The Show

SPEAKER_00 50:05

If you enjoyed the episode and would like to help support the show, please follow and subscribe. You can rate and review your feedback on any of our platforms listed in the description. I'd like to recognize our guests who are vulnerable and open to share their life experiences with us. Thank you for showing us we're human. Also, a thank you to our team who worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

Lucas Theory, Stefan Menzel.

SPEAKER_00 50:29

The show would be nothing without you. I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and you're listening to Multispective.