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United States of PTSD
Season One: Mental health concerns are on the rise in the United States. This podcast will look at the influencing factors contributing to the decline of our culture. With the rise of school shootings, political divisiveness, increasing levels of hate, and a chronic war of peoples' rights, we have entered a domestic war that never ends. Our podcast will look at whether this is done by design or is it an abject failure. We will discuss it from a clinical and common-sense perspective. Secondarily we will discuss ways to protect yourself from being further traumatized. Hosted by Matthew Boucher LICSW LCDP (licensed in RI) who has over 20 years of experience working with people who have addictions and trauma with a specialty of pregnant/postpartum women. Co-host Wendy Picard is a Learning and Development consultant with 15 years of experience, lifelong observer of the human condition, and diagnosed with PTSD in 1994.
Season Two: Is joined by Donna Gaudette and Julia Kirkpatrick BSW. Julia is currently working on obtaining her MSW and her LCSW. She is a welcome addition to the podcast.
Season Three: Cora Lee Kennedy provided research and worked as a temporary co-host. Dr. Erika Lin-Hendel joins as a co-host for season 3.
United States of PTSD
S:3 E 22 Holy Terror: When Faith Becomes Fear
Every survivor has a story that deserves to be heard. In this powerful conversation, we're joined by Amy, a social work student and survivor of religious trauma who shares her journey through high-control Catholicism and the devastating abuse she experienced, at the hands of a trusted priest.
Amy takes us through her childhood immersed in religious fear – developing religious OCD as she performed rituals, before bed, to ward off demons she was taught would possess her if she failed to pray correctly. This environment of spiritual terror created perfect conditions for exploitation when a parish priest, meant to counsel her through religious anxiety, instead sexually abused her at just 12 years old. Most chilling was how he weaponized her faith against her, describing his abuse as a divinely authorized "prayer."
When Amy finally disclosed what happened, the institutional response reveals a pattern familiar to many survivors – the church launched an investigation focused not on protecting her but on discrediting her testimony. A nun asked her, "What did you do to seduce him?" – a question that encapsulates the victim-blaming that enables abuse to flourish. Meanwhile, the perpetrator was quietly transferred to a military base, a common tactic employed to shield abusers from consequences.
The conversation expands beyond Amy's personal experience to examine how high-control religious environments systematically dismantle critical thinking and intuition, creating vulnerability by teaching followers to ignore internal warning signals. This conditioning extends beyond religion into other authoritarian systems, showing how these control mechanisms operate across different contexts.
Whether you're a survivor of religious trauma, working in mental health, or simply seeking to understand these complex dynamics, Amy's courageous testimony offers profound insights into both the damage inflicted by institutional betrayal and the possibility of healing through truth-telling. Subscribe now to hear the second part of Amy's story, where she'll share her journey of deconstruction and recovery.
Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests
Rhode Island Priest Abuse | Accused Priest List & Settlements
Palestinian American ambushed on family land and killed by Israeli settlers, cousin says | PBS News
The Goddess Diana and Her Association with Lucifer: Myths and Mysticism
Hela: Ruler of the Realm of the Dead - Mythical Encyclopedia
The Psychology of the Madonna Whore Complex - Modern Intimacy
Goddess Lost by Rachel McCoppin
The Myth of the Goddess by Jules Cashford and Anne Baring
https://www.tiktok.com/@ari_reacts?_t=ZT-8zXSz9ICn2N&_r=1
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die
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Artwork and logo design by Misty Rae.
Special thanks to Joanna Roux for editing help.
Special thanks to the listeners and all the wonderful people who helped listen to and provide feedback on the episode's prerelease.
Please feel free to email Matt topics or suggestions, questions or feedback.
Matt@unitedstatesofPTSD.com
This podcast is not intended to serve as therapeutic advice or to replace any professional treatment. These opinions belong to us and do not reflect any company or agency.
Speaker 3:Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the United States of PTSD. Erica and I are here with a very special speaker. That is special to me because she is a former student of mine, and I'm going to let you introduce yourself Amy.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, my name is Amy. Like Matt said, I'm a student of social work and I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3:Thank you, amy, and oh, go ahead, erica.
Speaker 1:Oh. So, amy, I would love for you to introduce what you would like to talk and share about with us today, because I think that you sharing your personal experience and what you want to talk about with us today as far as getting us started, is going to be the best introduction to it for our audience.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So the reason why I decided to study social work was because I wanted to work with people who were leaving high control groups, such as cults, such as a high control religion, and supporting them through the deconstruction process and kind of sorting all that out, sorting all that out. So that's what drew me to social work and the reason why I'm interested in that is because I have a very personal experience with deconstruction and with being involved in a high control religious organization.
Speaker 3:I'm glad you brought that word up, amy deconstruction, because it's such a pivotal part of getting out of any control group. People think of it same way that I think people think of domestic violence situations where it's just like get out. But it's not that easy because it's a whole process of changing the way you think and then when you do get out, I would imagine there's still a whole process that goes with reestablishing some level of normalcy and getting you know getting out of that. So I'm glad you brought that word up. Can you tell us, do you mind, starting off by telling us your history of how that impacted you?
Speaker 2:Specifically how deconstructing impacted me.
Speaker 3:Being involved in the high control religion first, and then the deconstruction part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So I can definitely talk about my faith formation as a child and just what that looked like for me. I grew up in a very mainstream religion. I grew up Catholic, and I think that what people might not realize about Catholicism is it's very much a spectrum. You have, like, people who will go I'll go to midnight mass on Christmas, maybe Easter, maybe do a sacrament here or two, and that's kind of it and then on the other end you have traditionalists, where the mass is still set in Latin. There's definitely a gender power differential between you know, where women have to sit in the back and they have to cover their hair and they have to dress a certain way, even like the music they listen to. They can only listen to Gregorian chants, so it's very high control. And while my family were not traditionalist, I think we leaned more towards that end of the spectrum. So growing up I was very involved in the church. My parents were very involved in the church. My dad actually worked for Cardinal Law at the Archdiocese of Boston. He was the head of maintenance at the Chancery. So for people who don't know, that's the mansion that Cardinal Law lived in and so my parents were well known within the Catholic Church.
Speaker 2:I had a really strong faith as a child. I sang in the choir and I became an altar server. When girls were allowed to become altar servers, I think I was like 10 or 11. I was like, yes, let's do this, cause I was so mad that only boys could be altar servers. You know, that was something that always bugged me. So I signed up right away and I was always at the church but I loved it, like I'm that weird kid that just loved going to mass. I had such this, a profound love for Jesus and um. But on the flip side of that I had this real fear of God that really made me a very anxious child. There's a huge focus on sin in Catholicism and so just being taught that you are inherently sinful and that you could burn in hell for all of eternity and the only way to be saved from that is to go to your priest and confess your sins and you get salvation through this authority figure. And I think that part of like the way my brain worked when I was a kid I think part of it was the indoctrination, but I also think part of it was my personality, where I just took things so literally, so seriously. The other piece of that is I was very hungry for adult approval and for external validation. I still struggle with that a lot now. But when you're taught that it's these people in authority that can give you salvation and they're the ones that tell you if you're good enough, I was constantly seeking that and this led me down into developing like a religious OCD, which is actually very common in Catholicism. There are a lot of studies and I think it's because of the ritualistic nature of Catholic um, catholic mass, and so this definitely didn't help this Um, my parents, we lived in a four family.
Speaker 2:My dad was a landlord. Anytime a tenant would leave, my mom would have a priest come over and do a blessing and it definitely was more exorcism-y um with the holy water and the crucifix and the Bible, and I would be there and I was like seven, eight years old and the narrative was that these were ungodly people living here and they've left like evil spirits. And there are these demons and we need to get them out of the house. And you know, I'm thinking like, oh my gosh, like what if we didn't get them all? And one of them crawls up the wall to my bedroom and crawls into my head. I was insanely afraid of demon possession.
Speaker 3:Was this Amy? Was this anybody that moved down? So this was the standard for any tenant, pretty much so. Every tenant that came in was occupied by demonic spirits.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so I just want to reflect a couple of things. Number one, the high control language. Like, I also really value that that's a new term for me as far as just naming it specifically as high control, which seems like the most authentic expression of what it is. It's very easy to understand and, I think, also relationing to this as far as a deep fear of, like the fear, control, like the connection between fear and control, and how that also is implemented in childhood, at a very vulnerable stage, and I think all of these things are something that go beyond religion as well, and we see it in other places too. See it in other places too, and so I really value how what you're bringing up right now, even though it is in the context of occults, I think that this is very applicable in so many situations and that really, yeah, I think that's very important. So, thank you.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And I just want to add one thing to that too I think this is important for the listeners when we're talking about trauma, but also, amy, when you're telling your story about this as well is that trauma, by definition, is a normal response to an abnormal scenario. So when you're being, you know, when you're in your formative years, and somebody is giving you this narrative about demons and all of this stuff, your reactions are not insane, they're normal. It's a normal response to an abnormal scenario. There is no way to react to that, right? So you could argue too and I think way back in season one I may have talked about this a little bit of how we do.
Speaker 3:We kind of set up the process by talking about things like Santa, the Easter Bunny, and we do this thing where we get kids to believe in these entities and then we reward them for believing in it, and that's the same time we introduce religion, and then what we do is we pull back on all the things that they're getting rewarded for and say like, oh, that's all fake. But there's one thing over here this is actually the real thing. All the rest of it was kind of BS, but this. But there's one thing over here. This is actually the real thing, that all the rest of it was kind of BS, but this is true. And so again, just it's not you, it's not your fault, right? This is a? It's a normal response, so continue your story, please. I just wanted to throw that out there.
Speaker 2:No, and thank you, and I appreciate that you're. I actually really appreciate that you're. You're pointing out how, how troubling this narrative can be. Pointing out how troubling this narrative can be and when you start telling kids what's right and what's wrong, and then on top of that, specifically what I think happens in religion is they dampen out your intuition, they dampen out that critical thinking. You're not allowed to ask questions.
Speaker 2:I had a therapist tell me years later like your alarm system was broken because I had been taught to not pay attention to that, to when things felt wrong, to not question it, and that takes a long time to undo, you know. So, yeah, so I developed a pretty bad religious OCD where I would mimic a lot of the rituals that the priest would do at the house, but I would do it in my room at night before going to bed. It was very disruptive. I wouldn't sleep because I would just be doing these prayers all night because I was so afraid that if I didn't do it exactly right, exactly the way God wanted, he would let a devil possess me. So that was like my childhood. My faith, that was that.
Speaker 3:And there's the whole. There's the irony behind here's this all loving entity, but if you don't do the right thing, you're going to get punished and you're going to get possessed by demons and you're going to go to hell and you're going to suffer. But I'm all loving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's funny because I realized recently I went my first abusive relationship was with this God that had been constructed for me. That was my first abusive, emotionally manipulative relationship. Whether it was real or not doesn't matter, it was very real for me. So I obviously I struggled a lot. I had really bad anxiety. I was a good kid though.
Speaker 3:Amy, can I just interject for one second? Because, erica, you looked like you had a response to it and Erica, I want to hear what just? Happened.
Speaker 1:I just think about a kid alone and that just breaks my heart.
Speaker 1:So, like I have high auntie energy we'll call it that the gender neutral term for it and I just got to meet a lot of my friend's kids at a wedding recently who I haven't gotten to meet and they're, you know, little toddlers and joyous, joyous human beings.
Speaker 1:And for me, to like I'm a little bit emotionally on edge in general with greater things in the world, but the the concept of a child alone in their room at night, afraid to that level, sleep-depressed, disruption it's incredibly distressing, just like when we think of all of the children in the world right now who are afraid and who have so much fear, and how dismissive adults on in general at times can take the fear of children right, and and this is this you know as like a person who works with animals and thinking about like the fear that animals have, right, there are animals that will die from fear, right, and so for me, I'm just having this move through me about that reaction around compassion. You know this is a response for my compassion and a distress of thinking about that younger version of yourself alone, and so that's yeah, that's where I am thank you for sharing that, erica.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that thank you, erica and I I I appreciate your compassion because that's something I didn't have, so so I do appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that when we yeah, I also I grew up in a high control household and I often think about how we heal by also thinking about you know the things that children need, you know when they got through it right and doing that healing work. So, yeah, I think that's a little message out to everyone listening, understanding that children are vulnerable, and also that our society puts very little thought into um children's autonomy and children like children's rights, like we literally have people being like parents are the 100% arbiters of what happens to their children, what goes in their body, you know, etc. Etc. And it makes no acknowledgement for the existence of abuse.
Speaker 3:There's no guardrails on that and, yeah, I think, to Amy before you continue the story. I think, erica, the reaction you had is what I want from people listening. So if, while Amy is telling the rest of her story for the listeners out there, if you could think about your either you when you were a child or, as Erica said, think about like your favorite niece or your favorite nephew, or just a kid, that a child that's in your life, and think about what Amy is saying in relation to what that same child would be going through. So, amy, if you could continue please.
Speaker 2:Thanks, matt. I do appreciate that you're emphasizing that. Yeah, so my parents being the good Catholic parents they were, by the time I got to like my preteens, it was pretty obvious I was struggling, they they reached out to our parish priest for advice and he offered to counsel me um that. So I saw him for counseling. I used their quotes um that process. He was very much grooming me and, um side note, not the first predator in the church that I attended, um, not the first time I was groomed by a priest, um cause the one that was there throughout my childhood was also actively grooming me. Nothing happened, but with this particular priest that came in after him the first time something inappropriate happened was actually on my 12th birthday and it took sorry, it took until about three years ago, so about close to 25 years, for me to allow myself to celebrate my birthday, um, because it was so directly linked to an event that changed the trajectory of my life. I apologize, maybe don't take your time.
Speaker 3:Don't apologize, just take your time. Trajectory of my life, I apologize.
Speaker 1:Amy, take your time. Don't apologize, just take your time. Amy, I am also a survivor of an event that happened when I was very young and it took until my late 20s so, like you know, decades to communicate about it. So first of all, I want to say thank you for sharing that. I understand that that is a big and it comes at a cost every time, yeah, and the importance of sharing that so people can like take that information and be part of the change is so powerful. So thank you for that as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you and I'm so sorry for what you went through Ditto. Yeah, I find a lot of strength in talking to other survivors. I just think there's so much unity and power there, so thank you for sharing that with me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing that with me. I'm just going to put a note. When I was on my first journey of processing, you know you have this initial moment in adulthood where you process that right. One of the people who really helped me was a member of SNAP yeah, was a member of snap. Yeah, um, and snap is an incredible organization. Um, that is basically about ending what was just described here I'm very involved in snap.
Speaker 2:Actually I've gone to a few of their conferences and, yeah, I've done a few of their meetings.
Speaker 3:Their support groups too, yeah, they're wonderful can you just explain to the listeners what SNAP is? Because when you first said SNAP, of course I'm thinking of the food stamp program. I'm thinking other people might be thinking that. So what does SNAP stand for?
Speaker 2:It's the survivors networks of those abused by priests, but it's really open to any survivors of sexual abuse either in your childhood as an adult. They have different support groups, but their main goal is looking to. They also lobby to change laws around child protection. To change, you know, make sure that there's mandatory reporting, even if you're a clergy member. So they do a lot of good work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just to add, thank you for sharing that. By the way, I want to add in something specific to our area. So, and and I'll put this in the notes, but I just looked it up really quickly because I had a friend when I was growing up who was a survivor of sexual assault from the Catholic Church and I know he was awarded a lot of money, so I was just looking it up to see if I could find it. He ultimately committed suicide after he received the money. So it I mean obviously money does not fix trauma, but it does look like. In 2002, the Diocese of Providence paid $13.5 million. 36 survivors of clergy abuse were involved. So I'll link that in the notes. But that's specific to the Rhode Island area and we know that that's a, that that's a national thing, it's not.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:International Absolutely.
Speaker 3:International correct. Thank you, yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's wild. I've probably watched every documentary about it, and there's a documentary for Spain, there's a documentary in Poland. It's all the same story over and, over and over again.
Speaker 1:So, if we thread this as far as spaces of control right, when we think about overlaying this from people who are coming from home situations of high control into a larger community, in which there are layers, layers of higher control and also authority figures within those systems that are able to be predatory, and it and and this is something that is in the greater context of cults overall, so, if you are feeling ready to kind of step into some of that phase of your journey, as far as you moved through, you know what happened to you and you know, however, you want to cover that, but that's, you were in a position where you were vulnerable and there was someone in a position of power and regard. That is part of this layering of what you're communicating to as a child, as like a vessel of God, right, in some ways. Oh gosh, I don't. I don't know how to finish that sentence, but I feel like maybe that's enough words yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 2:I um yeah, and it's. I apologize because I know it's emotional um.
Speaker 3:Amy, you don't have to apologize. We are going to do that every time. And I also want the listeners to hear this too, because people who have been victimized never need to apologize. That's part of the narrative that goes with. What they've done right Is to make it feel like you've done something wrong, but you've done nothing wrong, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you can continue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the abuse went on for about six months. It was March when it ended, but I think the most difficult part of it was because I had such a strong faith and because I was vulnerable in that way. He absolutely weaponized my faith against me to gain access, and the way he described what was happening was that it was a prayer and that God had told him to do it. Prayer and that God had told him to do it. And in my head I have been so desperate for salvation, so afraid of going to hell, that it was a moment where I'm like well, god recognizes I'm faithful and he's telling this priest who is a conduit to God, that's what I'm taught to believe that what he is doing is prayer and this is like special right. And so I wrestled with that. I wrestled with feeling like it was wrong but again I've been told to dampen that out, don't pay attention to that but also feeling really special and like maybe this is my salvation. The other piece of it and I feel like it's it's really hard to talk about, but I do feel like it's important to talk about, especially if there are other survivors of sexual abuse, because I do think it's something that some struggle with.
Speaker 2:I was 12. I had started puberty pretty early. Hormones are going and my body reacted sometimes to the stimuli and it felt good and that was very confusing. And then the other piece of it was well, if this is the Holy Spirit moving through me, that must be what the Holy Spirit feels right, right, like I had nothing to compare it to. I grew up in a very sexually repressed environment where I had no sex ed. I didn't know what was happening to me with sexual in nature. I thought it was prayer and I thought that was the Holy Spirit. But I didn't like it and I was really beating myself up for not liking it. And this was just this torment for a long time until I got to a point where I was suicidal and I had confided in a friend that I wanted to kill myself and she reported me to the guidance counselor. My parents came, took me to an ER for a psych eval. I ended up in an inpatient pediatric psych unit for two weeks.
Speaker 2:In that time I didn't know about this. In that time my parents actually went and confronted this priest and my parents did the best they could with what they knew. They were younger than I am now when this was going on, so I try to hold a lot of grace for them for that. And they went and they confronted this priest. That's a huge deal. His response was very smarmy. He actually said to them oh do you think this isn't the first time I've been accused of this? Like you know, your parents don't understand I'm trying to help your kids. That didn't really satisfy their curiosity, but I think they were ashamed enough to be like, okay, we're not going to push it. But they went to the Cardinal because remember, my dad worked for Cardinal Law and they sat down and they met with Cardinal Law and they asked him is there anything in his history that we should be concerned about? And he looked at them and he lied and he said no. Come to find out later. He had records going back to like the 80s of accusations against him.
Speaker 2:So I'm in the hospital for two weeks. I get out right before Easter. It's Good Friday and I remember this because I fought to get out because I was so scared of missing Easter mass. And at that mass this priest made an announcement that he was going to be leaving and he was going to California to go be a military chaplain on a military base and he was gone the next day. So that's kind of what they do they ship these people up. It was there were too many questions now, like we got to get rid of them. So I don't know if I should just go on from here. Okay, so I don't tell anyone what happened. I keep that to myself.
Speaker 2:Um, by the time I get to high school, I have some new friends who go to a different church and it's still Catholic, but it's a different church in the town and they have this youth program, um, called Life Teen, and I got program called Life Teen and I got involved with Life Teen. Life Teen was a Catholic-based organization with the goal to bring teens closer to Christ, but it definitely leaned more evangelical. It's actually really controversial in the Catholic church, like there are more traditionalist Catholics that don't like it. For that reason, the masses were really charismatic. They had a live band like. They were like three hours long. I loved it. I ate it up because it felt like a different, a different way to express my faith that wasn't so ritualistic, um, so life team would have a mass Sunday night. It would usually go on for two to three hours and then they would do this thing called a life night after, where they would do witness talks. Sometimes they just have a pizza party, but they would do these witness talks where people would come in and talk about these horrible things that they had gone through and how they found grace in God and how their religion and their faith brought them through. And sounds great, yeah, but within this like context, I don't.
Speaker 2:For anyone who grew up as a Christian, I feel like in the nineties and early two thousands it was like a really wild time because there was such a push to get teens to commit to being like a Christian soldier, like, um, purity culture was really huge. I went to this event called um the silver ring thing. My church kind of did a field trip to it and they used a lot of metaphors about virginity and about it felt very targeted to women, like it was more about us, like being pure and how the best gift we can be give our husbands is our virginity. Um, they would talk about like your body being a piece of chewing gum, like chewed up. Or my favorite was they would take a piece of scotch tape and put it on like a piece of felt and every time they put it on, that was like, oh, this is if you have sex and look at, you're not only dirty but you're totally useless.
Speaker 2:So this is the narrative I'm getting, and I'm sitting listening to this, um, um, going well, my God, like I'm not a virgin, like, not by my own choice, but like, what does that mean for me? What does this mean for me? Like, am I just damned? So at the end of that event, they have you, like, do a pledge, and you get a ring that you can wear on your, your ring finger, like your wedding finger, um, saying that you're going to commit to abstinence before marriage. I did not get that ring. I was the only person in my group and everyone was asking me why, and I just felt like, oh, I, I'm not comfortable, you know.
Speaker 3:Um, amy, can I just make one note about this?
Speaker 2:Yes, If you don't mind.
Speaker 3:A lot of what you're talking about and I think this is something that's also prevalent in modern day religion is how there's a lot of sexist behavior that happens in it to take power away from women, from women. So there's the whole Madonna-whore complex, which is where women are expected to be virginal but at the same time be sexy, and all this other stuff. So this is part of what religion does to feed into that complex, but also even hell itself. I meant to say this earlier. Even the word hell comes from the Scandinavian goddess Hela, which is pretty well documented. I mean, they did destroy most North mythology, but from what remains it does show that that was a. It was a female deity that was worshiped and they took that and turned it into a place of eternal torment, because it all kind of comes back to disempowering women. I just wanted to throw that out there as we were talking about this.
Speaker 2:Wow, thank you for sharing that with me. I didn't know that. And that checks out. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, the sexism, the feeling like you are responsible for men's sexuality and their behavior, that you don't want to be a stumbling block for them. You need to dress in a way that doesn't even make them think about it, because that's the other thing, it's that it's not just what you do, that's a sin, it's what you think and like, it's just this constant, like you're constantly going through a minefield of like, oh, like that was, oh, no, I'm going to go to hell, I got to go, I got to go say the rosary, like just that constant.
Speaker 1:So it makes you not want to think makes you just want to obey. Wow. So, oh yeah, really really powerful statement there. Um. So, as someone who grew up in a high control household, but not, um, not a religious one, I would say that this component layered together, which might be like a distinguishing feature of like don't want to think, so you just want to obey, because it's so overwhelming to navigate the chronicity of that internal self. You know, it's like fighting against loving oneself or being able to have a healthy relationship with oneself, and that being a vehicle to control and that being a vehicle to control. So I just wanted to note that because that really stuck out to me.
Speaker 2:Thank you yeah.
Speaker 3:Amy, is this still an active organization that exists to this day, the one that you're talking about?
Speaker 2:It's active. I think it's changed a little bit. The person the priest who founded it was actually he's excommunicated from the church. Um, he was actually accused of sexual misconduct as well, um, but he got. He didn't get excommunicated for that because they don't really that's not like a concern. He got excommunicated because he started this, um, like a schism. He started this praise and worship center that was not catholic and they viewed that as a comp competing like and they went you're out of here so sexual abuse is okay, just don't compete.
Speaker 2:That's the message matt if you look at the, the canon law about this and they purposefully use very difficult language. But if you really look at it and you look at the different things that can get you excommunicated or laicized or whatever it is, that abuse of children or anybody is not even in there. It's the number one issue is do not bring like bad press to the church number one, whatever you do. That's it. So, if you can, I'm like public enemy number one of the catholic church and I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, love that um so how did you get out of that group that you were in, the the teen one, or did you?
Speaker 2:it took a long time. Um, I actually I was all the way into my early twenties and I was still into it. I wanted to be one of the people the adult volunteers who like kind of run it are called core members. I wanted to be a core member. I was still in it. I think that I was just. I think I had cracks in the facade of my faith. But I think my response to that was to double down and I had a lot of cognitive dissonance and I just kind of kept going in stronger In the course. Like while I was in high school, while I was in this program, I ended up telling somebody what happened. They were it was my youth minister, they were a mandatory reporter, but they reported it to the church. Um, so I can talk a little bit about what that process was like.
Speaker 3:Um, to give a little behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I I also think I need to talk about why I told somebody, because this is like a really common thing that happens in these youth programs, where they kind of push you physically beyond your limits. They tend to use like techniques like sleep deprivation to get you into a very vulnerable place emotionally and then they like pounce on that moment by doing like let's do a Eucharistic adoration now, where we all sit in front of the monstrance with the host and it's Jesus and we're all crying our eyes out, we're fainting and it's like, oh, it's the Holy spirit. Um, I participated in a lock-in at my church and it was we were fasting for East Timor. So it was like in the 90 early, two thousands, whenever there was a lot of stuff going on over there and it wasn't we were fasting. The point of it was like we're going to suffer and give up our suffering to God for the people of East Timor. That was the mindset. So I was at this lock-in. I was very hungry, I was very tired. We were sleeping on this like hard linoleum church basement floor. I couldn't sleep.
Speaker 2:My youth minister was like, hey, what's wrong? I ended up talking to her in the stairwell and I confided in her because I felt like she had a very similar faith to me, like I felt like she was very much on the same page and it was really me asking like hey, is this like a form of prayer? Like I'm not sure. And the more I talked, the more I watched her like facial expression change and I just kind of was like oh crap, like it's not. And that's how it came out. I I think if I weren't in that situation I wouldn't have told anyone. But if I weren't in that situation I wouldn't have told anyone. Um, but I did, and she reported it to the church. They told my parents, um, like a week later I get up to go to school, it's like Monday morning, and my mom just says we're not going, you're not going to school. I know, I know what happened and you need to go talk to somebody at the church. So the first person I talked to, father Charles Higgins.
Speaker 2:I sat alone in a room with a priest wearing the Roman collar, which I hadn't said this. But the priest who ran the Life Team program never wore a Roman collar. That's the white collar that priests wear. So I hadn't seen one in a while and it is very much a trigger for me. I don't think I can even see it now without having a response.
Speaker 2:So he was asking me a lot of personal questions about what had happened. You know, where did he touch you? Just very detailed questions, I know he asked me to describe the room, um, and then I kind of dissociated and I don't really remember a lot more of that meeting. When we left he turned to my parents and said you know, hey, I believe her, we're going to do what we can. And remember my dad worked at the archdiocese. He knew father Higgins like personally. He saw him every day. So in the meantime I was also got set up with like a rape crisis counselor who was wonderful. She was also a mandatory reporter, but she actually reported it to the police. So now the DA's office is involved. Then two weeks later I get called in to talk to someone at the church again, and this time it was a nun, sister Rita McCarthy and I'm saying their names because I want their names to be known.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you. We sat in this room with this long table, all these chairs, and she was across from me. It was very dark, I remember that, very intimidating, and the first thing she had me do was sign a release form. To talk to this counselor that I had been seeing my parents weren't there. She had me sign this. I didn't know what I was signing. She said I had to. She didn't describe it, and then the line of questionings were. It started with you know well, did you maybe have a crush on him? Did you? Is it possible? You kind of liked it, didn't you? And, like I had said before, that was something I really struggled with and I was panicking, like I'm like oh God, like she knows, and then she said to me what did you do? And I was like I don't, what are you talking about? What did I do? I just sat there and she says no, amy, what did you do to seduce him?
Speaker 2:And even in my I was 15 at the time, even in like this 15 traumatized, indoctrinated brain. I knew that that was messed up and I shut the conversation down and I left and I said I'm not talking to anyone else uh, snaps to that 15 year old in you, right, yeah, uh.
Speaker 1:That is a powerful moment and I think that's why every parent should communicate to their children that if they feel uncomfortable with what an adult who is talking to them alone is in that line of questioning, to do exactly what? That 50, what you did at 15 to shut that down, say no and leave. That was that yeah that's amy it's.
Speaker 3:It's hard to listen. I mean, you know, obviously, because I know you and I care about you. So it's even harder to listen when you have a personal connection to somebody because of how much they re-victimized you over and over and over again. It's such a microcosm of how society handles sexual abuse all over the place, because at one point in time, this is how police interviewed victims as well, not just the church, and this is still to this day sometimes how we talk about victims and everything. It's really disturbing. So thank you for sharing this. I think it's important for people to hear. So thank you for being this vulnerable, disturbing. So thank you for sharing this. I think it's important for people to hear.
Speaker 2:So thank you for being this vulnerable. Yeah, Thank you for giving me the space to tell this story, Because it's not just me. This happened to so many other people just looking at the Catholic church and it's the same narrative. That's what's so frustrating. It's that's the narrative narrative. That's what's so frustrating. It's that's the narrative. The church has a very big powerhouse of attorneys. Um, once they found out that this had been reported to the DA, they began like their investigation of interviewing people at my like original church that I hadn't been involved in trying to get any information about me to discredit me. That was the point, and people in my church knew I was in a psych hospital. So the narrative there was that I was a very troubled girl, that I struggled with demons and that one of them said I was a devil worshiper because she overheard me talking about doing a Ouija board at a friend's birthday party. I'm like what A 13-year-old hasn about doing a Ouija board at like a friend's birthday party.
Speaker 3:I'm like what 13 year old, hasn't done a Ouija board. That somehow made me a devil worshiper. It's interesting how they twist the narrative, though right, because if you think about it from a different perspective, it would a hundred percent make sense that you went inpatient to get help because you were sexually abused. That would actually make more sense than using it the other way around, but they will twist anything they can to make it sound like they're doing what's right.
Speaker 2:And I think you know, I think part of that too is that a lot of these people they're parishioners but they've also been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that priests are the conduits to God and that they can do no wrong. So I think it's for their own cognitive dissonance. They have to convince themselves that I was the problem, that I must have done something, but that was, you know, I'm 15. And so now this is like in my town, like this is how I'm viewed this troubled child. And around the same time that all this was happening, the Boston Globe was starting their investigation on Father Gagan, that whole thing, and they were having trouble accessing files. Well, because the DA knew about something happening with me, that there was this complaint, the federal government I'm sorry, I got distracted the federal government because he got sent to a military base. He was now on like he was with the federal government. They got a letter from Cardinal Law saying like, hey, he's safe to work with kids, no concerns, blah, blah, blah. So they were suing to get his records released.
Speaker 2:And because they sued and because they won, the Boston Globe then had access to all of these records. And that's really like how that door opened and how so much stuff got made known about like what exactly was happening. So the Boston Globe did reach out to my family so my story is in there. Obviously my name's not used. But even in these newspaper articles because you know they get the, they get input from everybody that I was still portrayed as this troubled girl. And you know, I'm 15, I'm 16. I'm seeing, like these newspaper articles about me just talking about me that way, and I think that's really where I just kind of went down this road of self-destruction because I felt like I had such a visceral hatred for myself and, yeah, just a real hatred for myself.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say something here about the importance of being with people who share their stories of abuse.
Speaker 1:If someone has deigned that you feel safe enough to them to communicate that story, keep your compassion high and keep your compassion with them.
Speaker 1:Don't let them go through everything alone, because what you're describing, what allows that feeling, that misplaced feeling of hatred, to go, expand, so to expand within yourself, is the absence of community, and that community can just be another person that says this is not yours to carry, that says this is not yours to carry right, and that can point out the wrongness with the greater systemic and societal response that you're experiencing.
Speaker 1:And so I just really want to emphasize this, because what we, what we we've have, like how many layers of, of isolation through each of these points in times of people whose priority is everywhere else than the person who was most impacted, and, even more so, that violation of the person being a child.
Speaker 1:So I really wanted to say this because if we are people who are responding to trauma or historic things that have happened, that the lack of accountability, right, and the lack of, we see this mirrored in many scales in between interpersonal to within the context of, of this particular group, to a national level to a global level, of when we've put our focus on everything but the life and the human beings that have directly survived something and leave them in isolation to address it. The long-term consequences of that are carried more and more by the person who experienced something that requires healing and support, and I'm just so disappointed and frustrated and angry because I also know like how this, just like you, you said it's not just you, it it's happened so many times and we're trying to break those cycles and thank you for being part of of that goal.
Speaker 3:Amy, would you be willing to do like a two-part episode, because I I I want you to finish a story, because I think that's really relevant, like super important, and then we could do an episode about how you got out of it, like how and how you continue to process it, because I don't want you to be pressed for time and I think there's so much for you to talk about. So are you okay with that?
Speaker 2:I am, yeah, thanks. Thank you for giving me the time to do that, because it is.
Speaker 3:It's so important. It's so important. So if do you want to continue your story about like, how, like, where you went from that point?
Speaker 2:sure I can, um, kind of talk until up to the point that I left life team, yeah, um, because I didn't deconstruct until another like 15 years after that. So, um, you know, I like that. You said this about community and the need for that. Um, I think that's why I leaned so heavily into the life team program, cause that was my community and that was my support. Even if I wasn't explicitly talking about this, it was. You know, I got a lot out of it.
Speaker 2:It was really the other part about Life Teen that was very different was the music, and I'm I am a musician and I'm a singer and I actually wrote a couple contemporary Christian songs that are very cringy now when I look back. But I just I was so moved by it, but, but I think that's deliberate. You know, I think it's a very much like they're manufacturing this like spiritual experience that you feel like you're just like so close with God and, oh my gosh, um, but you can get that same feeling, that same dopamine release, when you go to a live concert. You know it's it's very manipulative and um, anyway, that was just a side note. So I was involved with life teen.
Speaker 2:I did, um, I did a lot of retreats with them. I, even I, even when I was 19, 18 or 19, I was like a, a leader for a retreat for that confirmation class. They, they were like in 10th grade and I did a witness talk and, oh God, I talked about what happened. But I talked about it and like it was so vacuous, because usually a witness talk is you talk about this horrible thing that happened to you and then you talk about finding God and how he helped you through everything. And it was, I was, I was lying through my teeth because I didn't find God in that I. It was more like I needed to prove to myself that I was still a good Catholic and that I oh, I'm not going to let this shake my faith and you know, just trying to be the good Catholic girl that I always wanted to be, that I always wanted people to see me as.
Speaker 2:But I struggled and I this was around the same time that I started questioning my sexuality and I had a crush on this girl and then her and I started dating and, um, as I was simultaneously like training to be a core member, um, I was also kind of in this relationship with this woman, because I don't remember explicit like homophobic comments being made in the life team program.
Speaker 2:I always thought it leaned a little more liberal, but I think they just avoided it altogether to not like they wanted teenagers to be involved and I think they knew that wasn't a popular opinion to have. But I was pulled aside by like the adults and basically told that I can't be a core member, I can't be a representative of their organization if I'm gay or dating a woman. Like that can't happen. And so I pretty much got pushed away and I lost that community and I think from there I just I became an alcoholic and that's kind of like where that goes, and then it's just really bad self-destruction for 15 years until I finally get to a point where I deconstruct. So I don't know if that's like a good place to kind of end it or what your thoughts are.
Speaker 3:Well, also to add to that, when you're talking about being, you know, having a certain struggling with alcoholism and being somebody who, as you said, was doing like bad, self-destructive stuff, those are also normal responses to an abnormal scenario, right? So I mean, it's not, those were forced on you. That wasn't something. You didn't just wake up one morning and say like, hey, I want to become an alcoholic. It didn't happen like that, like you were given this level of trauma and you know what's what's.
Speaker 3:I think this may actually help you to hear this too.
Speaker 3:Like I had a friend who went to a very similar organization that started with teen as well and it's still active right now and I'm sure you probably know what it is and they're national and he was in I think he was in Tennessee or Kentucky.
Speaker 3:He reported getting raped there multiple times and I have worked with multiple clients who were part of that same organization in different states and I remember one of them talking about being forced to go out in the woods and fast for so many days and she identified as bisexual and they told her that it was sins of the flesh and that she was going to be punished and they gang raped her repeatedly.
Speaker 3:I mean, these are all like stories to like, like rape the gay out of her, basically and these are stories I've heard over and over and over again from different people who are in those types of scenarios. So your story is certainly shared by many, many, and I think it's important to for people to hear that. And it became so upsetting that she actually started hallucinating about demons. She said at one point she was on the bus and everybody on the bus turned into demons because it had been so like drilled into her head that she like the regular population, where all these like awful, evil entities and only those who were following the way of god were were, you know, saved or good people. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's so awful and I'm glad that you're sharing that.
Speaker 1:I think that there's an important like how should I say the summary? Right, when we put these things beyond into frameworks of control, dominance, dehumanization and abuse of authority? Right, or any sort of what would you call pedestalization. Right, when you said earlier that these individuals are this position of authority, this priest of authority is a vessel of God and can do no wrong? Right, and you put that and like.
Speaker 1:I don't know, doesn't that sound a little close to idolatry?
Speaker 1:Right, like and this is the point that is brought up very regularly like as the whole thing idolatry and my understanding that which I preserve the right to be completely wrong, but like, because I'm not a theologian, but what I have come to understand from people like yourself as well as other people who study this, is a concept of idolatry. The reason for that being like a warning and a sin is the concept is, when we take a human being and attribute the inability to do wrong that they are always going to be right, you create a situation where someone can commit the most horrific crimes and that can continue to exist in the world and that can continue to proliferate because there is no accountability. So like, that is the problem with idolatry, not like worshiping a clay figure. Right, that's that's. That's my assessment of this matter is that the issue with idolatry is not, you know, worshiping a figure or some other image. It's the concept of creating someone who can do horrible things with impunity yes, with no consequence no consequence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and this is when, as a type of person, that I am looking at things on different scales.
Speaker 1:You know where we can see this reflected in interpersonal relationships.
Speaker 1:When Matthew was bringing up situations of domestic violence and control in intimate relationships, you talking about this in the context of a community structure, in the, both religious cults or other things, there are also other cult following. So I do recommend the podcast conspirituality as far as a podcast of a bunch of guys that go through this kind of cult mindset and deconstruct, because we can see it in the health in the um, health quote, health gurus sector, right, like how, how we engage with this concept of when, when people are like, oh well, this person can't be wrong, therefore any critique towards this person is going to be punished, right, we can see this overlaid in a lot of things. So I think that us taking this concept of what would make people more willing to protect people who are committing sexual abuse of children, whether or not that's religious power or monetary power or political power- I also wonder about the but to add to that I wonder about, like, when people go into positions of power intentionally, particularly in religious groups, if it draws a certain type or of character.
Speaker 3:Because I grew up catholic as well, I was out of it by the time I was 12, because it just it didn't like none of it resonated with me and I thought this is all kind of BS. But I did, you know, I, I I now identify as a pagan. So that's when I started exploring paganism and I remember as a young adult trying to find local pagan groups and I did find one that was run by a guy and he tried to use his position of power to engage, like to make the group engage in sexual activities. But this is a completely different religion. That's breaking away from organized resolutions.
Speaker 3:I I think it draws in a particular type of person. So then I left that very quickly because I was like this is not cool. And I remember trying to just start a group on my own where people could come and talk about their feelings and like their thoughts about paganism, and people specifically saying to me I don't know what to think, tell me what to think. And I was like I'm not going to tell you what to think, like you have to think about this on your own. So I think that it draws in a certain type of person that uses that power to manipulate people.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm glad you said that, because people often, when talking about specific, just the Catholic church but I know what happens everywhere of well, why, why is this so prevalent? Is it because priests can't get married? Is it because they can't have sex? And I just like, well, let's think, let's think that out People who are married married, you know, could also abuse children.
Speaker 2:It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with that this is a person who is sexually attracted to children and that will use that position of power to harm them. And I do think that it's not that the catholic church creates pedophiles. I think it attracts them because they know I'm going to have access to children, I'm going to have parents who are going to trust me implicitly, I'm going to have an institution that will protect me from any kind of like legal consequences of this. I am going to be completely protected and it's going to be really easy to have access, because you already have all these kids who have already been brainwashed and already effectively been groomed for this. So I do think it attracts absolutely I agree with you.
Speaker 3:Well said, amy. I just did a live with a guy that I met on tiktok erica, you would love him. His name is ari and he is pakistani. He lives in the united States and he is awesome. He posts a lot of stuff about Palestine and he's like calling out. He actually debated Zionist the other day and it was fantastic. I'm going to put the link to his TikTok video in the notes. We were talking about how, to me and this is just my opinion I think it's better for people to want to do good because they want to do good, not because they're afraid of punishment. And I think the whole concept of you need to be good because if you're not good, you're going to be eternally damned is not exactly the way to build empathy or to get people to have a great moral compass, because then it's about fear of punishment. It's actually not about becoming a good person and about just being nice because you want to be nice yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think there's that like debate of like do you need religion to have morality? And it's like I know, like I don't kill people because I don't want to kill people, exactly not because like I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn in hell, like it's. That's, that does not have anything to do with it let me actually.
Speaker 1:There's a recent study that came out not too long ago, um, about how, um, actually, people who are agnostic or atheist have a higher percentage rate of like ethical behavior. Um, in the context, hang on a second before I let me see if I can look. That is or um, um and I'm not. I don't want that. I don't want that to sound like contentious, like it probably does, but I think that it's very important that this is not a commentary on religion overall, but it is definitely a commentary on how very often people will perceive religion with someone who practices a certain form of religion as somehow more ethical compared to people without that's.
Speaker 3:There's actually scientific evidence and studies to show that that is not a reality um, while you're looking for that, erica, because we can put that, when you find it, just link it to me, we'll put it in the notes. I often wonder I've questioned this myself if the people who claim to be the most religious even believe in what they're talking about anyway. If it is just about control and they know it's about control I mean again we can talk about what's happening in Palestine and Gaza right now. I mean the whole thing is funded by the religious belief that one group is better than another group, et cetera, and the justification that they can then kill all these people. I mean that's all based in religion, right? I mean, this is what we've seen play out in history over and, over and over again, and I just saw you know who hind is, right?
Speaker 3:Um, amy hind is the little girl that was killed in the car with her family in gaza, where she was like hit with like 300 and something bullets. The car was there was because there's a movie or documentary that just came out about her and one of the people was referring to her not in the documentary, but one of the reporters was referring to her as a woman. She was a five-year-old girl. But that's what they do. They spin the narrative and they say like, oh, this woman, because then it elicits less compassion than calling her a five-year-old girl, which is what she was. And then when they're talking about there's been quite a few articles about this when they're talking about these horrific terrorist IDF soldiers that are killing people, they refer to them as young girls. When they get killed, they change the whole narrative around to make it better, right?
Speaker 3:So I think that's probably a good time for us to do our oh actually, I want to say one more thing. So when you were talking about and represented by a deer and the hunt and all that stuff, was also referred to as Lucina, which is referencing to the light. The light, the lightbringer and that is where the word Lucifer is loosely related was they took her worship and they made Lucifer the lightbrer into this awful thing. And there's actually a reference in the bible about the fallen angel falling in the temple of euphius, which was one of the seven wonders of the world, which was the temple of artemis, of euphius, which was the multi-breasted goddess who nurtured the world. So there's so many different nuances of where they've taken female divinity and they have turned it into like demonic practice, because they try to get rid of women's spirituality yeah, I think please like share as much information you have on that with me, because that really fascinates me I'm going to put links to some articles in the show notes as well.
Speaker 3:Um, but yeah, I mean, I've been studying that for decades, so that's why I said a lot of it's kind of off the top of my head, but I did look up some articles about it.
Speaker 1:I'll send them to you so I do actually have to issue a retraction and a correction so that it's basically very contentious in the research.
Speaker 1:We'll put it that way. So so, and I believe there are some discussions about whether or not having this conversation between altruism and discrimination. I think that's like what we can pull from this that has more literature associated with it as far as we have to ask questions about altruism versus discrimination and also how universal compassion, universal love rather than a particular religious, is the discussion that needs to be had. So apologies to our listeners for that initial misrepresentation, and so I think that I would probably have to spend some more time digging around, but that is the question that I think needs to be asked and also can be a question that we hold as we're examining these stories about altruism and humanist forward responses and accountability. Um, and this question of how does discrimination and um isolation, isolationism or rejection, taking someone who is a survivor of a traumatic experience and then pushing them out of a community space and recognizing the harm that comes from that type of punitive group think actions, and I think that's very important for people to be thinking about.
Speaker 3:Definitely. Thank you. So, amy, we will do a part two then, and I really appreciate that. And to wrap up, we are dedicating part of the end of every episode to Palestinians that have been murdered by the IDF. So I just saw this on TikTok the other day. I looked it up and what's interesting is I had to go through a couple of articles, because the original one I looked up was npr, and npr, of course, links it back to october 7th, and the minute I see that I shut down the article because I'm like it's just propaganda bs all over again. So pbs actually did a fairly decent job on this, so I'll link their article to it.
Speaker 3:I apologize if I get the person's name wrong, but this was two. One was a Palestinian American and the other was a Palestinian, who were beaten to death. The IDF prevented the ambulance to get there for three hours until they were killed, and the names are the Palestinian American was I'm so going to butcher this Saifullah Kamal Musallat I don't know if that's even close. And the Palestinian person that was 23-year-old that was killed was Mohammed Rezek Hussein Al-Shalabi, but I will put that in the show notes as well. It's a brutal story. It is, and of course, it's just par for the course with what the IDF is doing. So again, I say this very, very much so every single day If you are not talking about the genocide every day and if you are not talking about the Palestinian plight, you are complicit in genocide. There is no such thing as neutrality right now. Either you're fighting it or you're part of it in the end.
Speaker 1:That's my two cents on it you're part of it in the end. That's my two cents on it, um. So I just want to note, you know I'm going to emphasize, um, it also goes by saif, so, um, I was part of organizing a vigil, um and facilitating some other organizers in my town to hold a community vigil for saif. Saif is not the only American in the West Bank or Gaza who has been killed by either the IDF or Israeli settler terrorism.
Speaker 3:Erica, I'm so glad you added the word terrorism on, because I think even when we use the word settler, it is just changing the narrative, because they're not settlers, they're terrorists. No, they're invaders. They're actually invaders, they're war criminals. Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:The settlements are illegal. They're not even settlements right are violent people who are coming in, who kill people, who you know engage in stealing livestock, they contaminate water supplies, like it's longstanding, and even these, so these stories come up. So Saif was from Florida and in addition to that, there are other Palestinian American kids who are being held in IOLF torture camps. Basically there's currently I think I believe he's 16. Um, I have to look up the name. We're going to have to link this Um, but it's it's.
Speaker 1:It's really important to understand that if American citizens in the West Bank and Gaza are not cared about by our government, this communicates that our citizens are less, our lives are less valuable to our government than the lives of a military like like the military. The reason it's money and it's money and it's military money and the reason why American citizens, in addition to Palestinians, are being murdered in these spaces are for weapons testing and manufacturing, for the development of surveillance technology that is now literally being deployed in our own country. I live in Arizona, I'm at a border state. The surveillance technology that is from Israel is being deployed in Arizona and in border states. So it is no joke when we say that American citizens experiencing this type of violence, who are getting killed by the IOF and there's no accountability means that American citizen lives do not matter to the Israeli government or our own.
Speaker 3:That is really important.
Speaker 3:But I think they've made that abundantly clear. I mean all of our politicians've made that abundantly clear. I mean all of our politicians have made that abundantly clear. There's a woman God I can't remember who it was that said that America, she's an American politician and she said America is the greatest country in the world Ooh, second to Israel, right. So I mean I think they've made it very, very, very clear.
Speaker 3:I mean, you see that, from the homelessness in this country that's on the rise and all of the other things, healthcare out of control, they don't care about the American citizens. They don't, and they haven't in a long time. It is all about funding a war machine to take over the Middle East, and that's what it's about. And the more we dehumanize the Palestinians which is what people are doing the easier it is going to be to do that narrative. But they don't. I mean we're going to go to war and not them. They're going to send our soldiers out there, right, our kids, that's what they're going to do. So everybody out there needs to be fighting against this.
Speaker 3:I mean you can't. If we go back to Amy, all of the stuff that you just talked about, right, you could argue, religion is part of that surveillance state. I mean, think about the whole like elf on the shelf thing that they're doing now. Right, You're getting people used to the fact that there's something in your house that's going to be watching you all the time, just like religion, I mean. That is all the same narrative. It grooms us for a police state.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I feel that what religion does is it makes you comfortable with fascism, it makes you comfortable with authoritarianism, because you are told what to do, what to think, what to say, how to dress, who to sleep with, when to sleep with them. You're told that asking questions is wrong. I mean, that's authoritarianism, that's what that is, and I think it's making people comfortable with that that they don't know how to do critical thinking. They need that black and white.
Speaker 3:This has been a really powerful episode, really powerful. So for all the people out there listening, take care of yourself after this episode yeah Take a deep breath.
Speaker 3:Same with you, amy too. Thank you so much, and then we'll set up a time to do a second part of this so that we can talk about how you did the deprogramming and where that was like. So thank you again. I know our listeners are going to love everything you said, and you know, again, I can't thank you enough. So thank you, thank you and thank you, erica, as always, for being amazing.
Speaker 1:And thank you, Matt, for creating this space and continuing to do this and have these important conversations. And if you're not listening to podcasts that have this type of talking about serious things, there are plenty out there. Keep on.
Speaker 1:But make sure you continue to listen to us uh, you know, make sure that you're listening to things and sharing it forward, because people need to be having these types of conversations and people need to learn how to recognize, how to maintain their internal freedom from external dominant spaces. And then you know how we can also externally express that as long as we possibly can.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Thank you everybody, and thank you again for listening. This is just a reminder that no part of this podcast can be duplicated or copied without written consent from either myself or Wendy. Thank you again.
