We were much more always of a forced polyamory group meaning you were expected to have sex with anyone and everybody that wanted to have sex with you okay and they considered It sharing God’s love except not those guys out there or those guys only the people in
The group deserve God’s love to my father I said in two months I’m going to be 16 at which point I would have just been on the menu for every man in this place and you would have had no issue with it my first job as a lieutenant is
When I Googled children of got Cults for the first time wow about 10 seconds later was staring at a picture of my father’s face on a well-known pedophiles page really and that’s how I found out my father’s legal name speaking of the after part that’s always a fun cocktail story to tell Hey my name is chalice an Sola and this is Colts to Consciousness or we discuss leaving high demand religions or organizations and finding healing and Independence through awareness and true individual sovereignty if you’re only listening and you want to see our faces go to our YouTube channel at Colts to
Consciousness where you can join in on the conversation leave those words of encouragement for our guests who are bravely coming on and sharing their stories and become a subscriber really helps boost the algorithm get these stories out to more people and become advocates for again those who are coming
On and sharing their stories so today’s guest we have had her on twice before she’s awesome we all love her she is from the children of God cult we did an entire Deep dive on her childhood today we’re going to focus a little bit more on how she started to realize the
Brainwashing was happening and pushed back from that rebelled from that how she got excommunicated and then really her transition afterwards and the unexpected consequences of leaving this group and kind of going off on her own which was a really scary thing to do now she’s written an entire book about it
Highly recommend she has an audio book which I listened to was awesome but she’s also releasing the paperback it’s called uncultured it was just mentioned in the The New York Times she’s kind of a big deal and she’s also a scholar of Cults she’s just all the things so thank
You so much for joining us again Danielle must neck young thanks so much for having me it’s nice to see you again yeah yeah it’s great to connect and I follow you on social media and girl you’re posting like every single day on social media and it’s so awesome and
Inspiring every time I see your content I’m like man I need to get on this CU she has some great stuff so we’ll put all of the links to her Instagram her Tik Tok on the screen at the end and in the description below but we are also
Going to do a little giveaway with her book so stay tuned to the end to find out how you can win one of those so Daniela when where do you want to start as far as your story I mean maybe actually let’s start and give context
For the children of God cult like a brief overview of what they’re about and why they’re so harmful and how they’re essentially very much like a cult yes uh children of God is the one that most people don’t argue about anymore uh fortunately for us survivors so the
Children of God was started in the late 60s early 70s which was sort of the last you know big way of Cults in the US uh which something interesting to know is that Cults happen in time and space because they pop up during times of social turmoil so when all of the stuff
Of the late 60s was going on and all of these hippie children really are running off to go find their own individual sovereignty lots of them found drugs or other things going on this sort of failed Preacher Man goes to Huntington Beach California and just kind of starts collecting people into his Jesus
Movement and so the children of God initially was sort of your conservative evangelicalism you know out of that tradition which his his mother was a revivalist in the 30s so he’s coming from this Christian Evangelical tradition and the way I explain what he did is he took kind of your conservative
Control of sex and he just flipped it and so he called it open love free love and I call it forced polyamory is really what it became so you know the children of God ultimately was this closed off separatist group that believed that David Berg was the prophet
Of God sent to usher in the end time and prepare the world at one point he predicted you know Armageddon in 1993 the world world ending and you know so so sort of real time apocalyptic preparation but then also with this undertone of all of the sexual stuff
Which is really what it becomes famous for in the 70s and 80s he’s using women as religious prostitutes um not even being shy about it right calling them hookers for Jesus and uh recruiting all over the world they estimated 200,000 people were fish um which meant you know sometimes they
Would join the group more often was giving money and support to this cause and then ultimately his beliefs really turned into what I can only explain as pedophilia for god um which is you know now bringing oh all of this free open sex stuff that we believe this is now
Going to include the children yeah and I I say it in this way to sort of reemphasize for people to that it happens in stages you know so in the beginning people believe they’re 15 to 18 year old hippies really and they believe that they are going off to join this Jesus
Group they end up sometimes 10 20 30 years later in the one of the world’s most notorious sex Cults and that’s how my family got involved was my grandfather was one of these hippies that had a weird drug trip where he swore he met Satan and the next day as
He was sitting with his hand in his hands in a park wondering you know what he was going to do with his life upw walk the happy bouncy shiny singing children of God and off he goes with them as far as we know never looking back and because my grandfather is one
Of the few college educated people he’s already a CPA he becomes very important to the sort of international finance Ing and movement of this cult which then goes Global around the world and my mom was I believe one of the first 10 kids born into the children of God and then I
Was born to her when she was 15 okay some of the things that stand out to me after reading your book and doing the interviews with you is for one they keep everything really isolated so they basically leave the states there’s still some people who remain in the States but
Mostly they get out of there so that they can go unnoticed in these big compounds with high walls that no one’s really checking in on they don’t value education as much for kids and that’s something that you consistently talked about in your book was how you were just
Yearning to learn more and learn more and getting pushed back and pushed back and not being able to really get to your full potential and luckily your mom is the one that taught you how to read so you were able to kind of sneak books whenever you could and then the third
Which is the most obvious and you’ve touched on it already is the fact that they thought children should be sexually liberated in this way and they actually wrote this really disgusting handbook on how to do it with children and so obviously that creates a lot of issues
And a lot of abuses and it’s just supposed to be normal you talk about a scene in your book where there’s this huge sex party happening and the kids are just there and walking around naked or mostly naked and it just it’s really shocking the imagery that goes on in
These groups because they are so insulated yeah you know it wasn’t until a early reviewer of my book actually pointed out the geographic abuse that goes on that really kind of struck me you know that yeah yeah they you know I had looked at it as of course we were
Fleeing they were fleeing the United States he was fleeing you know culture getting a bad rep in the 70s um and so all of a sudden of course our Prophet says well go around the world but it was also making it that much more difficult for people to leave
Especially once you start having these large large families right because we’re isolated and people are on average having let’s say 10 to 15 children per family because as the children of God ceases to be a prostitution ring and it rebrands as the family of love in the
80s we’re going out to evangelize and win the world for Jesus it really just became like a child labor child trafficking ring where we made childhood entertainment videos you know I specifically was one of the actresses on these videos but then also we had thousands and thousands of children that
Would sell these around the world you know go out and sing and perform places and then sell these videos some of them were you know sanitized Evangelical Christian videos and some of them were actually made to just be generic childhood entertainment videos um which of course is very ironic since we
Ourselves had almost no education right um but you know we were being trained from birth to be these Shiny Happy performing children because this is all part of it right it’s like what you look like from the outside I’m so glad that you brought that up because it’s so
Common for the regular person who’s never been in a cult to look at groups like this or like more for example the one that I grew up in and be like but they look so happy look at the kids they’re all smiling they’re clean and like all the things it’s like okay what
Does that actually mean nothing it doesn’t mean anything you don’t know what’s going on when they get home it’s just a huge wakeup call to people and something that I want to draw a lot of attention to which is just because they present a certain way does not mean
Everything’s fine in fact it could mean the exact opposite in many cases exactly exactly exactly and sometimes I think it does mean something but it’s not what they are trying to message you know so I say all the time as a cult scholar if I could just if I could just get every
Incoming freshman in every University in America to know that like if a group wants you and all of their recruiters are like happy and shiny and bouncy like go away right because that’s not how a large group of people naturally shows up right like I I get my
Daughter and two of her friends together and all three of them are not smiling at the same time ever right so like when all of the children are happy and smiling and perfectly groomed you can almost bet that there’s a lot of attitude and appearance control going on behind the
Scenes um and think about think about your Happy Shiny groups that are recruiting on campuses right they’re fraternities and sororities and other cult-like kinds of organizations right you know and it’s it it really is one of those signs but that’s how they get away with it right
And the children of God is so good at this that they go from being in Time magazine in the 80s as a sex cult to performing twice at the White House in the 90s again Happy Shiny Young people yeah white white that’s also something that we should look at when it comes to
Children because like you said when you get kids together they are not normally just straight laced well- behaved do anything you say and what we see often within the Amish for example or any High control group is when you have kids that are so obedient like that not to say it
Doesn’t exist but a lot of times it’s because they’re terrified to act out in public because they’ve been trained submissive and quiet not do whatever mom and dad say and it’s out of fear and so again that’s not to say that a well- behaved kid is abused at home always but
It’s something to watch out for if you see an entire family of 10 perfectly well behaved it might be something to look into yeah and it’s a sign that so many First Responders Miss right or or people that are supposed to be the ones on the lookout so we see this most
Heartbreakingly in the case of Waco where you can see where the FBI and the ATF who have taken some of the children are just so overwhelmingly impressed with how well behaved the children are outside the commune but also inside the compound how they will sit for hours in
The middle of the night watching David preach and you know anyone looking who knows what they’re talking about is going no those there aren’t well behaved D they are as you said terrified um and you know another example of this is the Duggers right like when I had just come out of the
Children of God in 2003 and like the Duggers is on television around this time I just remember being shocked that Americans are just watching a cult on TV and nobody could realize what it was and in the you know Happy Shiny People documentary they talk about this like Jim Bob Dugger
Was so confident on the control that he had on those children that he knew none of them would break rank in front of the cameras and talk about like the abuse that went on behind closed doors yeah right like that and and that makes total sense right because in the children of
God I mean we would have argued against our own rescue passionately yeah right and I I even try to show this in the book where I say you know I was as afraid that we would get raided by the cops and taken away you know I was
Afraid I would have to leave as I was that I would have to stay because they do such a good job of training you that this attitude and this view that we present to the world is crucial and that if we let our masks slip for even a
Moment you know the big bad outside world is going to come and get us um which is a concept really relevant to to leaving the cult later on yeah and that’s something that I actually wanted to talk about so can you give us some examples of things that they would say
To you in these training sessions to how to respond to police or anyone who came investigating the cult yeah so and you know most high control groups have some version of sort of condoned lying MH right where you’re you’re never supposed to lie to people inside your your group
Or your circle or circle of trust or whatever you call your group because nobody calls it a cult but it’s there’s one thing for our group and there’s this other story for Outsiders and so we had a whole Doctrine called deceivers yet true and they made
Comic books for the kids and it was all these different like Bible stories and Christian stories of times when people had to lie for God you know and and we were very much sort of drilled in the you know what do you say if people ask
You if we’re a cult or if they ask you if you’ve ever been abused and it’s you know it’s almost weird to explain how you can take children who are getting beat every day but then still get them to not only say but actually believe like no these
People love us and they would never harm us because you’ve both trained us that what you’re you are doing is love and as for our good and then you’ve also made us so afraid of the outside and what will happen to us if we are you know
Found out and caught and taken away that’s the thing that’s so Insidious is a lot of people think well why can’t you just leave obviously in the case of a child that that’s just not an option but when it comes to adults if it’s so bad why don’t you just leave because they
Have you believing that the pain and the suffering that you’re enduring is actually fine compared to what you would get if you were to leave so the fear is so intense that they don’t even realize it doesn’t have to be this way it doesn’t have to be painful yeah I mean
Exit costs like that’s kind of the biggest thing and I even just think even normal people who’ve never been in anything High control you know when they say that question I like to push back on people you know do you love everything about your job no like why don’t you
Just leave and they’ll be like but well I can’t I have like H you’re like yeah exactly like except in a cult they make sure that every part of your life is tied up into that group and so every part of your life will be affected yeah
You know hugely High Stak I describe it I describe it now sometimes as like what am I going to lose if I’m not a part of this community anymore which is yes hugely high stakes and when you’re a child of course you can’t even fathom you know you’re just told that all these
Horrible things are going to happen to you in the outside world and that your people love you and so that’s what you believe MH so let’s talk about the moment for you then when you realized even if the outside world is worse I want out when did you start to
Understand that you could no longer be a part of children of God so I have two very specific moments in my childhood Looking Back Now I don’t know that I ever like believed in God or felt that it wasn’t like some sort of game or thing that we were playing but I guess
You can only you know go along with what the people around you are telling you at a certain age so when I’m six years old I have this really really bad moment that begins with us playing broken telephone and like sort of understanding this concept of Word of Mouth being
Problematic and so then I question you know well we’ve been taught that the Bible was handed down for 500 years until Moses wrote it down right so like maybe there are some things that are not true so this leads to like a very very intense punishment section um that we
Did put in the book because we are trying to show like the depths of things that people uh will do in the name of God yeah anyways in sort of the aftermath of this really traumatic experience of pro probably approximately 10 hours in the basement with the
Pedophile I have this moment where I just say like I don’t care right like if this is love I don’t want this if this is God I don’t want this and in my six-year-old brain the way that came out to me was you know I’ve been told that
If you’re not in the family in the children of God like you’re going to hell and so at six years old I was like well hell’s gonna suck wow but you know like I’m not like I’m not doing this you know I don’t want this so that was kind
Of my my first like honestly really big moment at a very young age and at every point after that I just felt one I’m playing the game but two I’m just biting my time until I can get out of here a lot of this I think also comes about
Because I never fit you know I am now in my mid-30s getting diagnosed as ADHD and likely on the Spectrum somewhere and you know so for all of these reasons I never felt like I fit therefore a lot of the group programming I think is not going to work
As much um so I was always the questioning the why kid and just biting my time and thinking that I have to make it to 18 because all of my family is also in the children of God so a lot of my peers when they would become
Teenagers they would be able to get out of the cult because they would be able to go live with their grandparents you know and their grandparents who have themselves lost their children to a cult 30 years before are very happy for this opportunity to like get to know their grandchildren and
Take them in and help them I didn’t have that as my grandparents are part of the leadership so you know then of course the conundrum becomes well at 16 you’re an adult in the children of God um because it some point they settled down and like tried to formalize the laws of
Their sex Cults so there would be a very uh uncomfortable two years of being like considered sexually a full adult and being 18 and being able to sort of get out on my own but before any of that happened was like when I had my second moment that I really describe as my
Crack in the brainwashing of just all the programming that you’re receiving in this environment and this was on 911 and we are watching live television on for the first time in my life I’m 14 years old you know we’ve just recently moved to the US for the first time and we’re
Watching the destruction and disaster and my all of the people in The Cult are sort of doing the thing that extremists do when disasters happen which is telling us that it is God’s will praising God God you know this is the promised judgment on evil America and meanwhile you know as young
Teenagers were just fascinated by the television because we haven’t seen this before and I hear the words religious extremists as they start talking about you know who like getting information on who conducted this attack and I just remember having this moment of being like huh
You know I wonder as here we are like praising God for his judgment on evil America like are we maybe also religious extremists yeah so the way I kind of defined this for me was like I I always knew from at least six on that this
Wasn’t for me I was getting out of there as soon as possible you know I don’t think I really believed in in God or any of it but I still just felt like it’s me not these people are wrong right so it was like me I don’t
Fit here yeah and then when I actually had this other moment of being like Oh no I think maybe you are bad like we are bad and so that was when really I was like okay now I need to get away and now I have about a year and a half until I’m
16 which as mentioned quickly becomes more problema for me yeah what would have happened at 16 would they have did they marry like legally marry people within the group or do they just start having families having sex so they very much encouraged marriage and you would definitely have people like my mom still
Is married to the man that the leaders told her to marry when she was 20 you know and they hide behind the idea that they don’t tell you Jesus tells you right or Jesus tells them um but they certainly got involved in marriages and there were a lot of very young marriages
But we were much more always of a forced polyamory group meaning you were expected to have sex with anyone and everybody that wanted to have sex with you okay and they considered It sharing God’s love right oh right so in the same way you might have an Evangelical Church
When like single brother so and so falls on Hard Times like let’s go all bring him some casseroles it would be like single brother so and so needs you to share the Lord’s love with him tonight right and actually that brings up a question because through reading your
Book and with your interviews and what you’ve talked about it seems like yes God’s love is for everybody but was there any emphasis on God’s love specifically for a woman’s pleasure or was it only for the man’s pleasure so it was definitely an extremely sexist petrarch organization and there was definitely like the
Prophet personally did not enjoy going down on women so suddenly that becomes a thing nobody does right and there’s reasonings for it I don’t think he ever like specifically prohibited pleasure for women because that’s going to not work with his other goals but it was very telling the way he dealt with
Homosexuality for example which was you know there was absolutely no male and male homosexuality that was accepted at all however women if they wanted to be together with another woman that was okay as long as they weren’t excluding men of course and so it essentially was the you know well men
Enjoy two women together so we’re going to come up with a way to say that you know God has told us that women sharing love with other women is totally fine but you can’t be a lesbian right um and here’s where this becomes really interesting too because this is very
Parallel to what I saw later on serving in the Army under don’t ask don’t tell which is as soon as you start defining sexuality and like what people are allowed to do you can use it as a weapon right so suddenly any woman who is not getting with the program and
Doing what people want can now be accused of being a lesbian and we see this weaponized both in the children of God and in the US Army where you know the threat of being considered uh dword for lesbian is ever present if you are a woman doesn’t matter your actual proclivities but
Because you have these sort of arbitrary rules and regulations on sexual activity it can get weaponized in a group environment very quickly yeah because I’m wondering then how that would translate to the kids because I know that a lot of young girls and a few other people that we’re going to be
Talking to soon on the podcast as well were expected to pleasure these men or the men expected them to pleasure them but I’m I’m wondering if that same thing would translate to young boys or if young girls were almost exclusively the targets for this type of abuse
So if you are asking if young boys were also sexually abused it definitely happened um it was definitely more tab okay like there was there was a time in the group’s history where young girls yes were being openly given to the older men and you know my mom was a part of
That my biological father is one of these older men and it wouldn’t have been openly happening in that same way with boys but of course when you have this kind of environment right sexual abuse is never about sex it’s about power um and so of course there were
Also boys being sexually abused but another interesting thing what I thought you were asking first is also the way these patterns of abuse get handed down because a big thing we also had by especially by the younger second Generations or the third Generations like me was you have your you know your
Predators the uncles in the cult but then you also have the boys that are just a bit older than you mhm doing a lot of the same things you know and this is I think part of the answer to why we don’t have more books by about cults by men you know something
We see as you mentioned like with the Amish um they it’s in that women talking movie and they say you know the boys are learning their role from the men and the boys have learned their role well and so when we you know an uncultured telling
The story of a girl growing up in this cult I show you how very effectively we have been programmed we the girls to be submissive you know we are being programmed from birth to be these bable women that serve the men of course the boys growing up next to us are coming
Under extreme amounts of physical abuse the same amount of brainwashing the same amount of programming but they’re being PR programmed to be our Predators right to while we are being submissive they are being programmed to dominate us yeah and so we also see this you know very difficult to discuss like
Abuse by victims of the cult abusing just the next one on next ones on Down the Line yeah that makes sense I I just realized for the first time when we were talking about how it’s all about sex but then you don’t really hear of you know
Sister young is having a hard time why don’t these boys go and help sister young so I wondered if that was the case so now that I know that yeah that makes sense and we do talk about how boys are often victims as well victims of the brainwashing and the
Programming because they are being trained to become perpetrators essentially and that’s not to say that all their actions should be wiped clean there needs to be accountability but we also need to take into consideration what they’ve been taught is reality and what they’ve been taught is how you do
Things so then you are 16 right when you decide okay I’m going to rebel and essentially get myself kicked out or was that the thought process or were you just not caring anymore I would say okay so when they move they move us to Mexico
When I am not even 15 yet um so we’ve had this like short stint in the us where we kind of experienced a bit of Freedom right literally for the first time not living behind Giant walls I have a boyfriend I’m happy and all of a
Sudden we are going again to Mexico back to another commune at which point I was just rebelling I was done right like I didn’t care for example I just started refusing to be Shiny Happy People so I refused to speak Spanish and there wasn’t really anything
They could do about it other than all of the thing the Cults do which is shun you and and punish you but that had been happening to me my whole life anyway um you know so part part of it is just seeing the holes in it right it’s like
Well I try so hard to be good but I’ve been working full-time in a kitchen since I was 11 right like I’m not it’s not like I’m going to win some sort of Freedom Yeah by doing the good thing playing the game you just get used more
Yeah by them so I’m just gonna sort of slowly stop playing the game um so for example I had been a yeah kitchen slave since about the age of 11 so one just for a month I just started making giant salad bar and popcorn and that’s all I made for
Dinner everybody loved it except for the uncles um but it was hard to complain because they were really good salad bars so I started doing all these little things uh and it’s it’s not like I made a specific decision like oh I want to get kicked out it was
Just it’s so hard to explain it was like it needed to be something so big and so bad that I would have the courage to look my parents in the face and just say I don’t want anything to do with your way of life yeah and you know all I
Could think at the time was I didn’t want to hurt my parents and so I would get in trouble for these smaller things and I could never just do it and so finally I was like okay I have to do something like really big you know I say
Now all the time that if they think they can save you they try to save you and exorcisms are not fun so I realized like okay I just need to break like the biggest rule there’s always one big bad thing you can’t do and in the children
Of God it had become sleeping with an outsider because you know there was this period of course that they did the the prostitution stuff but as soon as you know AIDS basically started going on and nobody knew what was going on he closed off his community so all of a sudden now
We have this open open love situation going on with 10,000 people who are constantly circulating the globe with each other but nobody outside so very much having communion with the outsider was was not allowed um so I just end up at not quite 16 sneaking over the walls like literally very
Dramatically like climbing out of my bedroom at night up onto the roof out over the commune neighborhood scaling back down to uh to go you know have sex with a boy that I have met because we sometimes have a little bit more contact with the outside world it’s part of the
Problematic situation for the cult leaders is that you need your young teenagers going into the outside world to raise money for you but then they go into the outside world and experience the outside world and want more of it or meet people who help them get away and
So in my case I I sneak out a couple times then I fall asleep at his house one night and I just wake up with bedum going on outside and it’s you know my sister’s just ringing ringing the doorbell of the house where I’m at you
Know the second you wake up and you see the Sun’s Up you’re like oh no I have to get out of here and my sister’s like yeah they they all know you’re gone and so I was walking back going like what am I gonna do am I gonna like
Lie and tell them that I just snuck out to smoke a cigarette which would be bad but not quite as bad and then I was just like no I think this is my chance and I was just so angry so angry that finally
I was able to like you know as my dad is like storming up into my room and calling me all the names that religious fathers call their daughters when they do things that their fathers can no longer control yeah and I was able to just look at him and just scream
The words like I want to leave which is pretty convenient because it was an excommunicate yourself to God and do all of The Hazing that God through the leaders require of you or you’re out on your own at 15 yeah which is a fun choice and also it’s kind of ironic and funny
That the whole cult is about God’s love and expressing God’s love and everyone deserves God love God’s love except not those guys out there or those guys only the people in the group deserve God’s love I find that really interesting and I said this to my father you did in the
In the month and a half that I was grounded to my room in a commune so literally could not leave my room for about 6 weeks what and I said to my father I said in two months I’m going to be 16 at which point I would have just
Been on the menu for every man in this place you had no issue with it on the menu literally oh my gosh Dani like you would have had no issue with it the only reason you care about my supposed virtue is because I I embarrassed you yeah oh
What did he say to that just yelled and quoted Bible verses and stormed off yeah I mean that’s logic right there little firecracker Daniela and the things that you know the parents in these situations don’t even realize right so so my dad really I do think always felt uncomfortable with his daughters being
Given to men but he couldn’t say anything because those were the rules of the Cults but as soon as he could say something about mine and he was allowed to go all protective dad figure over 15-year-old daughter he did but then what did that say to all of his other daughters whom
He had never protected yeah you know so I’m here just angry teenager like you’re so unreasonable and his older daughters are like oh so you care about about her but you didn’t care when it was us I mean it really does kind of show you just how ridiculous and arbitrary all of
Their their rules are and the way they sort of control the actual feelings you’re allowed to have yeah you know like you’re just you’re just not allowed like his one of his daughters got pregnant at 17 and she was with a guy in the cult and he was just not allowed to
Be upset about that um just had to be happy about it so he was that’s so much to take in at that young of an age especially with everything you’re dealing with being isolated the urge to be free kind of having a taste of the outside world you
Came to the states at one point so you knew what life could have been like without high walls and restrictions in communes and so it just seems so terrifying how did you actually get yourself out of that situation and get back to the States okay so and this is
Just very luckily for me we were living in Mexico because I had just come from Brazil for example which would have been significantly harder like you know they always say oh you’re free to leave anytime groups that don’t want to be considered Cults yeah and sure the
Children of God had a great you’re free to leave any time you just got to pay your way back you know so would have been a 15-year-old you know at this point I think I had to raise the money for the bus fair for the three of us to
Go to from guad lahara Mexico to Houston Texas which is where my mother so my mother who had me at 15 was married off at the age of 20 to a guy who was 40 who had already had some eight children 10 children before for this wow and so one
Of my stepsisters who I had met exactly three times um agreed to take me in it’s just 15 and a half year old do you want her which is just a whole other issue of parentification that these cult parents did to all of their older children who struggled and got themselves on their
Feet were then just expected to and usually did open up their homes and their lives to help the younger ones so I have this 25-year-old sister who’s been out of the cult for three years you know she’s bartending at night trying to get her life together and she’s like
Sure yeah she can come live here so we take a bus my parents Dro me off I will say yeah I had no concept like it’s just so huge that you really have no concept of your life and how it’s going to change and at the time the only thing I
Was focused on was like I wanted to go to college so badly which I knew meant I should go to high school yeah um because it would be so much easier if I went to high school and so I was just focused on I just want to go to high school I just
Want to go to high school I definitely did start wavering you know in my choice like they realized my family is pretty important and I was well known and having one of your oldest third generation well-known members leave isn’t going to be a good look yeah so
They started trying to offer me kind of cool new assignments if I would just you know rededicate myself to God and go with the program and this is where I’m very grateful that my mom you know takes me on a walk outside the commune and she’s like look just go she say like
You’re not happy you I’ve talked to her about it as an adult and she was like I just remember you you never seemed happy you know so even though it would take her like another eight years to get herself away she was like No just go
Like we found you a place just go and so that’s how I came to be dropped off in Houston Texas with zero dollars and one passport and one social security card and one little suitcase yeah I I’m sure you couldn’t even comprehend like you said what was going on
Because you’re kind of in survival mode and just get me out of here I don’t care what it takes but I’m out so let’s talk about those unintended consequences then when you are out and you’re in the world and you’re like oh now what so I have sort of as someone
Studying this like I’ve broken down leaving a cult into three stages and so I always say the first stage is this crack in the brainwashing the decision to leave and the like physically and mentally leaving the cult and everything that that takes right so it’s like getting yourself away getting
Yourself established all all of the things when you say leaving a cult that people think of like that’s just phase one it’s just like where you have to go um and get yourself stable and for me like I was a 15-year-old with no money in education like getting myself stable
Was going to take uh about six years yeah you know and during that time it’s not like you have that much bandwidth to do like your second phase which is deconstructing you know I I’d call it figuring out why you were in a cult and what impacts it had on your personality
And actually either you know figuring out how to return to your pre- cult self if you had one or much more complicated if like us you were born and raised in that system you have to like figure out who you are for the first time yeah but
It’s almost POS impossible to do most of that while you’re still struggling for survival yeah so you just have this whole phase which for me was kind of these six years so I did high school in two years and then college and four and then ended up in the military
At which literally at which point I got through my training and I was at my first job as a lieutenant is when I Googled children of God Cults for the first time wow and about 10 seconds later was staring at a picture of my father’s face on a well-known pedophiles
Page really and that’s how I found out my father’s legal name so you know speaking of the after part that’s always a fun cocktail story to tell so all this to say right the the most difficult part is you don’t know how to fit into the
World but you don’t know that you don’t know how to fit into the world right and it’s funny because later as an intelligence officer we use this quadrant and the corner that you don’t know what you don’t know is the dark dangerous quadrant right so I’m 15 I
Think all I have to do is like show up right so I show up at high school I have a Social Security card and a passport and they’re like I’m sorry we can’t enroll you here because you don’t exist but but now that we know you exist
And we have your address if we don’t know that you’re enrolled somewhere and 5 days we have to call the cops what so like we can’t enroll you here so I get really lucky at this point that my sister’s boyfriend has gone to regular high school and college and it’s kind of just
This Brash rough talking Texan that is like oh hell no you’re not telling me that a child in America can’t go to school yeah and of course I also get very lucky that I am right and everyone just assumes that I am like innocent and
Like want to do well so we end up having to go all the way up to like the city level to get me not only get me enrolled in school but get me tested out of like 22 subjects at which point I am like so strongly relying on my ability to just
and be hyper hyper leive and tell stories um because I certainly haven’t been educated in most of these topics ICS um but with the exception of math and science I pass most of them and then I’m able to like somehow fold in everything I need into two years of high
School no plans to go to college at that point because of course I knew I wouldn’t know how to pay for it and so I was talking with the Marines actually when I got the attention of my high school counselor because I wrote an essay that talked about growing up in a
Cults yeah and then she was the one that was like look you need to go to college just with with very I don’t want to say minimum effort because obviously it’s amazing that she saw me at all but with just a few things she changed my entire life and like set
Me on this track to go to college but this whole time like these whole six years it’s so hard to describe like you’re just trying to do everything you can to seem like a normal kid but you have no idea what that is because you’ve been held separate from
The world for your whole life so it’s like honestly this really heavy version of autistic masking or I mean it’s it’s a form of being closeted with this fact or this identity that you have that you’re a cult Survivor but you don’t really know what that means you just
Know that you’ve grown up in a cult and if you talk about it everybody’s going to judge you and so you don’t talk about it and you just try to like Perfection your way through life because that’s what you’ve been taught to do in a high control
Environment and this was kind of I feel like a a good treadmill I put myself on for about 10 years which you know takes me into the military and and into kind of a a breakdown a lot of people get to do the the running pretending to be perfect thing till they’re about
Mid-30s I did it on steroids in the military so I got to 27 and then I I broke down really hard at which point was kind of like yeah you really got to start deconstructing and there’s so much in all of that that I just said but now I know that
All of the best psychologists and people working in the post cult industry agree that like you can’t recover from the experience without understanding how Cults and coercive control works yeah and it this comes back to this like you have to understand the impacts it had on
You it’s not just as simple as walking away and like get surviving yeah and there’s so many things that happen in that process because there’s the dissolution of your former self which is essentially the cult identity not necessarily your identity but if you don’t really know how the world Works you’re basically in
Survival mode so you don’t really have the opportunity to create who you want to be or because you may not understand the boundaries of yourself or the world or how it works you may overcorrect and do things that you normally wouldn’t have done if you weren’t trying to rebel
Against the rules in this dissolution of your former former self and also just being able to recognize what happened to you in a really profound Deep Way once you understand that that wasn’t okay and wasn’t normal also takes a hugely emotional toll and we did an entire
Episode about your time in the military and guys I highly recommend that you go check that out we’ll probably put it on the end screen or put a card up or in the description because this was not just like a a normal breakdown she was completely incapacitated physically as
Well all the trauma just kind of resurfaced at once and it really stopped her in her tracks and there’s a lot to that story that we won’t get deep into this one on with but I just want people to understand there’s just so much that goes into leaving a cult like in this
Phase that we’re talking about well and there’s this additional level too as you were talking made me think of the like we also don’t have a cult which is part of why I wrote I titled my book uncultured yeah and in in my situation it’s extrem so it’s easier to
Understand like I am American by birth but I was born in the Philippines to a mother who couldn’t remember America and I spent you know all of my life growing up in Asia and Latin America coming to the US was my biggest culture shock and then
Moving to the US to Texas going to a school with 4,000 students like who am I supposed to be so what I what I look like the boxes that I seem to check is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Texas girl but I I don’t know how to be her because I didn’t grow up
Here I didn’t learn that culture right and so for me it has been many years of understanding that like I I don’t have a culture there’s there’s nowhere that actually is home for me except the place I have chosen but it’s it’s equally true for you it’s just not as
Pronounced because you also have rejected sort of the micro culture that you came from but if you grew up in any sort of high demand group you were held separate from the world you were held separate from your culture right so you are not the same as another girl from
Utah who didn’t grow up heavily Mormon right and so there there are all of these levels of unpacking and realizing that like I don’t know anyone that has an answer it’s just we don’t have a culture and so we have to defy we have to choose humans think they’re
Rational they really believe it but in actuality we make most of our choices based on what we’ve seen done before and there’s a huge recency bias too so if we’ve seen it done recently we go with that one and so and this is my my third stage of leaving the cult is moving
Forward with no models and when you’ve grown up in a high control group like you don’t have models you don’t have a culture you like at any time I go to say even to my husband like we’re going to do something parenting I can’t be like well
When I was a kid yeah well noos throw all that out yeah you know and so you have to you know the way I always explain it it’s like you’re stuck in between you know I know that the Cults version of everything about how to raise children was wrong
But I also know that America’s concepts of nudity are are weird and puritanical and I don’t like them you know yeah and so it’s like it’s there’s just not an easy answer you have to think about everything you have to choose your culture on everything and
That’s so much work and it requires so much change and this is one of the reasons I think people choose not to do the deconstructing because they think it’s just easier to wear a black brazer and not a cheat a spot Blazer and Fade Into the background yeah so that nobody asks
Questions so that you don’t have to think about answers yeah just live within the boundaries that are given to you even if you want to push those boundaries you’re still within the boundaries and you can say you’re Progressive but really are you because still someone is making your decisions
For you whether you realize it or not it’s coer of control and it is difficult but it’s also really exciting and fun because I think it provides us opportunity for critical thinking at its finest when you really get to choose the culture you want to be
A part of choose your own morality or your standards or your family values whatever is important to you that means you actually have to look at it critically and hopefully in an unbiased way this time because you generally what happens is you’re like well I’ve been
Wrong before so let me really dive into this and see what I want to do and it really provides so much room for expansion of thought awareness perspective understanding that you’ve never been given the opportunity to have before when someone is telling you this
Is the answer this is how it has to be and you just have to go with it so it’s equally scary as it is exciting but like you’re saying yeah it takes a lot of work my analogy for this is shopping in a thrift store which by the way after
You should go check out my Tik Tock Thrift Store Hall video like this this cheetah spot Blazer was one of them but so like when you go shopping in a shopping mall there is a message somebody has thought about what they want you to purchase right even when you
Go grocery store shopping right they they know for example that when you walk through the produce you buy more non produce that’s why they always put the produce in the front of the store did you know that no I didn’t know yeah so yeah people reward themselves for
Getting a bag of oranges by getting like chocolates and chips later yeah so so but in a thrift store nobody is is messaging to you what they want you to buy you just have to walk up to a cheetah print Blazer and go do I love
This or do I hate this yeah you know and you it’s scary I tell people this analogy from high control groups because actually playing with your appearance is a great non-threatening way to learn to do this with like your ideas and and your mind and stuff but it’s like you
Know instead of dressing the way you’ve always thought you’re supposed to dress wear something crazy just in public for a day and like just notice all of the things that are different but it’s like the freedom to do that is equally freeing and terrifying because we are
All so afraid of getting it wrong or you know making some sort of cultural FAA but one of the reasons people join Cults and high control groups is because it seems easier to have someone tell you what to do than it is to like make your
Own choices and have to live with the consequences of being wrong yeah I remember just the act of getting a third piercing which I had two piercing it’s like a whole story when I was a kid I got my my second piercing at like I
Don’t know 10 or 11 and around that time the prophet of the Mormon Church came out and said that women can only have one piercing and I did the brave thing and took it out and I was so rightous and proud of myself and then when I was
Older I ended up putting it back in but for me it was only in 2019 and I was like I’m going to get a third piercing it was like this whole rebellious quote rebellious stage of my life where I was like I’m going to write a book about my
Experience growing up Mormon I’m going to cut my hair in an asymmetrical cut I’m going to get a third ear piercing and I’m going to get a tattoo which is about like an inch tall and it’s white and still like it’s so tame and laughable and you’re going to sometimes
Wear tank tops yeah oh I definitely that was the first thing I did when I left the cult I love the ex Mormons that just like have to have their shoulders showing oh my goodness I’m going to invent like a fuzzy turtleneck and I’m
Going to call it the X Mo but it’s going to be sleeveless that’s going to be amaz you have to but honestly that’s such a big push back because when you’re Mormon that is an expectation of you is cover your shoulders and if you’re not covering your shoulders what are you
Even doing it’s a huge judgment thing when you see someone who’s Mormon wearing a tank top as a Mormon you’re like oh guess she doesn’t want to go to heaven like it’s really that serious and people may push back and say that’s not true but it kind of is well and if
You’re a woman you get the two for one benefit that like the misogynist will come out of the woodwork as soon as like they cannot understand why you are wearing what you are wearing like I just I just do it on Tik Tok for fun now like
I just wear a crown some days because just like the sexists just come out swinging and you realize like how much they are used to it’s attitude and appearance control right especially of women and like as soon as you start being loud and start being colorful and
Like stop being the skinny white woman you know people like start coming for you high control groups do not want you there anymore yeah and you’ve been out for quite a while now would you say that your personality because I know it was always there that little firecracker
Daniela but when you were able to really come into yourself and be I don’t know show your true colors or create your own true colors when was that was that after the military or before uh in the middle in the middle you know I spent I definitely spent a decade under this
Belief I feel like that I would like one day just out Perfection my trauma right like I was going to run faster jump higher do everything and one day I was going to be so successful that my past wouldn’t matter and then I was a captain
In the US Army with a medal from the president and like I was falling apart right so this was like the lie for me um but definitely like when I was about 24 25 on my first deployment was when I had a a very close call with dying by
Suicide and that was when I realized like I need to I need to talk about it like I am living behind this mask that like doesn’t allow anyone to get to know me because I’m so worried that people will reject me when they get to know me you
Know one of the things I always tell survivors now people are so afraid to share their stories and I say when you hear a story of someone who’s come through something incredible do you judge them or do you feel like more connected to them right if people always
Like no yeah I think they’re amazing a I’m like okay so when you share your stories of trauma that you’ve come through more than likely people are not going to respond to you with this terrible terrible thing but I I really think like that is of all of the things that the
Cult programmed into me like the biggest one that I absorbed was this idea like the outside world is awful and if people know what you really like what we really do right like they will reject you turns out I’m kind of cool um you’re pretty great took
Me took me like another decade though still you know because you just you start talking about it a little bit and then you know for me I almost say I got lucky because if I’m going to talk to you at all like it’s gonna come out so
You know my husband jokes now like when I’m not in the mood for peopling I say I’m from Texas and my husband just laughs you know because it’s like oh she really doesn’t want to talk right now yeah because any question you ask me like you know how many siblings do you
Have oh I have 25 like we’re getting into like we’re getting into the story and as soon as it’s honestly part of why people don’t want to talk about their stories is because they’re so complicated but that’s because we haven’t put them into order ourselves
Yet so this becomes you know in the book educated I pointed out and like the part where she’s going around like trauma dumping at all the dinners and just like being the entertainment telling her family story like I know notice that phase like that’s the point where we are
Learning to tell our stories we’re learning to like sort out like who we are right we’re like doing that work of figuring out how to tell it and then you do finally get to a point where I’m still the crazy cult girl at parties but it doesn’t stop the party anymore like
I’m just good at telling my story and and just being like one of people in the group or like you know how in friends like Phoebe is still the unique one that comes from the traumatic past but she also fits nicely into this group of six
People yeah and I think a big part about telling her story is learning how you want to tell it and learning the things that are okay to keep to yourself that you decide this is a little triggering for me to talk about I’m not going to
Talk about this part but I’ll let them in on this part and that’s totally okay to decide what you’re willing to share and what you’re not willing to share yeah and also understanding that sometimes like one of the most triggering or difficult things is not having stories to share you know when
Everybody is sitting around talking about childhood this or like you know what they did for summer camp growing up or like anytime I go to an event at my daughter’s Elementary School you know it’s kind of like I didn’t have this I’m never going to feel like I had this acknowledging
That for me right like that has been a big part of the healing one of the best quotes I’ve heard about this was we know we’re healing when we stop wishing for a doover you know so it’s like there’s no amount of anything I’m going to do in my
Life I actually like I’ve checked every block I have set out to check I have accomplished every Mission I I have um it doesn’t magically give me a childhood you know it it doesn’t magically mean that I’m not going to have those moments in a group setting where I just look
Around and I’m like oh the rest of you are moms and I’m playing a mom um but I think we learn that to just like meet those feelings and like dance with them a little bit and then move on instead of like having it like the fear of that
Happening and then there’s always more to it right like we’re afraid we’re not afraid we’re going to have like a moment in a in a group setting that’s going to make us feel sad we we feel like we have that moment and then the whole group’s
Going to laugh at us and kick us out of the building and like no it’s you’re just going to have a moment and then you’re going to turn back to your people and they’re going to accept you back if they know though so like that’s honestly the
Biggest thing that I’ve done for myself is I just I don’t have anyone in my life that has off limits topics or like doesn’t want to talk about difficult things and so everybody who’s in my life knows that I’m a scholar of Cults this is what I talk about that I have a
Traumatic background like it’s gonna come up sometimes and they accept that and so you know they they give me other beautiful things and they’re also accepting of me when I’m not like always healed and put together yeah that’s another big I I think that would be maybe phase four is finding a new
Community people who you feel safe around who you can talk to who you can really bond with without having that fear that they’re going to reject you if you believe or think a different way than they do and it takes time to find that find that community and to be able
To trust your story with somebody else and and really be open with them and I wanted to talk a little bit about your community as far as your family because I know you met your husband in the military and you have a beautiful daughter now and I would love to know
How you touched on it a little bit but how your background has translated into the way that you parent and things that maybe come up for you that you didn’t expect yeah I mean there’s just always the feeling of like I don’t know how to
Do this um I joke that there hasn’t been a mother in my family in Generations like how did I just think I was going to know how to do it so my husband was retiring from the military in 2020 and we he was actually retiring in the part
Of the country he was from and we made the intentional decision to look for a different place to live um where we were maybe divorced from most family drama you know something you said about finding the new community is like also when you’re in this process of taking off the high control group
However long after you’ve come out of it right but like my husband being in the military coming out of the military he’s a different person to his family people from your old life decide if they are going to be accepting or not of your kind of transition and deconstruction
And figuring out this new person that you are and in some cases it’s easier to just leave and find your own community so that’s what we did we ended up on this epic uh RV trip around the country in the summer of 2020 um and we ended up moving to
Maryland uh it’s like near DC which is amazing because I say everyone everyone comes to DC eventually so just get to like live here and and people come through and we you know one of the things we were specifically looking for was a diverse community and just putting
That marker on the board I think we ended up in a place where we were going to be able to find a really good group I mean I learned this back in college I guess when I fell in with the international chess team but like when there’s no majority no Norm you’re not
Weird you’re just individual yeah and so we found this super great community that is walkable like we love it we want to stay here for the rest of our life and ever since we moved here we have been who we are so I was already this lady who’d written a book about my
Memoir or about my cult life so it seems like it would be awkward but in some ways it was just incredibly freeing to move to a different community and be like this is who we are hey you can not many people get to have all their new
Friends just like read a book about them and be like oh okay cool um you know but the thing we’ve made is is like we’re just open we’re like we are doing the work to deconstruct ourselves our programming our biases learn to be good
People and if you want to be in our life and in our community cool we want you here and if you don’t like we we decided we were done spending our time and resources trying to be part of like groups that just didn’t want us
To be part of yeah them yeah that’s so awesome I love that do you have any tips for people who may be in that position where they need to find a new community and they don’t really know where to look or did you just let them kind of come to
You naturally I mean have a kid yeah honestly a lot of uh the the kid opens up the community a lot but I mean I think the for me the tip was just like like figure out what things you want to have in your life like what
Things and what kind of people you know so we did this from like what we wanted our like our living space to be like for example we want a sauna so we made it happen in our tiny townhouse but like you know we want to we want to live
Somewhere for us it was this like International right access to diverse communities this kind of stuffff and we wanted walkable we wanted so just like defining the things that are important to you and if you are of course if you’re physically moving this is very convenient right because you’re picking
A place to live where other people probably want similar things to what you want but even like if you’re physically staying the same and you’re just trying to find new people in your community just this kind of idea we’ve been talking about of like slowing down deconstructing figuring out who you are
Why like why are you going to this event instead of another one you know what are your actual interests versus what you think soci wants you to do I cannot explain to you how much Community I have built from knitting um all the time and everywhere yeah so she’s been knitting this whole
Time if you’re only listening yes I always joke with my followers I’m like 10,000 of them just are there to watch me knit and like talk to me about knitting and see patterns but like as soon as you figure out like who you are it’s it’s easy to find people that like
Either want to be in your life or don’t and I I take it now as a comfort when we do like a play date or we talk to someone we have one interaction with people and then we never see them again and like okay cool right like that
Sorted itself out yeah and we still get to be who we are so this kind of I guess just like just like on on apology ically being yourself yeah and instead of like all of the ways that high control groups tell us exactly who to be what to think
How to look all of that but like Society does too cultures do too right like that’s what a culture really is is kind of all the rules that a group has come up with to organize itself so as soon as you just decide like I’m going to do
This because I want to and I’m free I’m a grown woman and I do what I want to do I couldn’t agree with that more that’s so good and I think it’s the same with me especially I think that’s why one of the big reasons why I chose
California is because it’s just this Melting Pot of everybody and anything goes and it’s just be who you want to be and anytime I go to Utah I physically feel uncomfortable because I feel like I’m walking back into this box as someone who doesn’t fit and I’m just
Like H it just feels weird even though no one’s going to stop me in the street and be like what are you doing young lady you can’t wear that tank top I still feel them thinking it when they look at me with those judgy eyes so and so being yourself finding the
Environment where you can really Thrive I think is just so important if you have the option I know that’s not the case for everybody you can’t just pick up and move somewhere but if you do have the option I think that’s a really liberating thing as you’ve been talking
About but even and even on this point because this is such a good point right like you’re always going to feel uncomfortable when you’re the one doing something different and everyone else is doing something the same and when people don’t believe that I just say just picture yourself on a naked beach but
You’re wearing clothes like you’re going to feel uncomfortable even though you’re the one wearing clothes you’re going to feel like you’re the one naked because you’re the odd one out so go find a place where you’re not the odd one out and it can be if you can move of course
That can be very liberating right to like physically go be in that place but even if you can’t like move somewhere different just understanding that you will it will be harder to be yourself in a place where there’s like a very controlled like uniform way of being and
So it will be that much more traumatizing it will be that much more exhausting it will be that much more difficult so find at least your spaces where you can just be yourself yeah little also and then also be kind to every minority around you because they
Live with that every day yeah I think that’s so good if you can’t move your environment find those little pockets those meetup groups or whatever it is that you enjoy doing find your people in that way and surround yourself with the people who do make you feel special for
Being who you are and this has been so great I need to get your Linda listen moment your sassy statement as the viral video with the Toddler goes or something inspirational up to you yeah uh oh gosh I love that video so much yeah I mine is
Just gonna be this quote that I heard recently anytime someone is telling you what your identity is you’re in danger oh right so just do what you want to do right if you are not hurting somebody else dress how you want speak how you want do the activities you want because
Like that is part of being an individual and you’re gonna you’re just gonna find so much that we neither of us could predict yeah so that’s great that’s awesome thank what you want to do you’re an adult nobody needs to give you permission to live your life I just
Think we all need to hear this more often you know yeah I agree so awesome thank you so much for coming back on and sharing even more with us do you have any final thoughts before we go anything we might have missed nothing that we’ve missed I just wanted to tell everybody
That uncultured is now out in paperback it has been newly released and it is also on sale in the audible for only 10 bucks right now so either of these are great options especially what uncultured is good for is getting people to question their groups that they haven’t questioned
Before so if you’re already questioning it’s a great gift to give to somebody for Christmas who you just like want to nudge into questioning and you don’t you don’t have to tell them what the book is about yeah it’s very sneaky you can just be like there’s sex there’s military and
Then like the book will get them to do their own questioning I love that and so check that out and of course come join me on Tik Tok where I am every day making videos about cults and knitting and talking about group Behavior yes so
First of all we are doing a giveaway one lucky person will get Daniella’s hard copy book for free all you have to do is go to Instagram write something or a little video about what you like the most about this episode tag me and Daniela I’ll put our tags and all the
Instructions in the description and then we will draw a name of someone to receive a book and so to find her on Instagram your handle is Daniela mou youngor on Tic Tac Tic Tac on Tik Tock Daniela messan young and I will also put the links to her book on Amazon in the
Description as well and if you just check out if you check out the hash group Behavior gal on any platform you will find me also because my name is complicated well this has been so great thank you so much again I always love learning more about your life and just
Going back and forth because you are just a wealth of knowledge it’s so great to talk with you so nice to see you have fun in Costa Rica oh yeah guys if you want to go on our Costa Rica trip it is available now I’ll put the link in the
Description on how you can sign up and see the full itinerary we are going next year end of August so excited to meet you guys in real life and have adventures together and if you want to get some of our holiday merch we have some holiday sweaters um that I just put
Out I think are kind of fun they’re like holiday theme there’s an ugly Christmas sweater that says too naughty for your cult and I think it’s just awesome and you can find that at our our um on our website Colts to consciousness.com under the merch tab if you want to become a
Patron you can do so at patreon.com to Consciousness and if you like these videos check out these two below and until next time follow your highest excitement be conscious and be Well
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