Why Relationships Feel Impossible After Leaving A Cult

Music Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Branum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher and friend, Jenny McGrath, founder of Indwell Movement. Jenny, it's good to be back and to talk about relationships, which isn't interesting and I'll admit it's a little bit of a scary subject for me, but one of the things that we kind of touched on this a little bit in the past, but one of the things that everybody tells me is that when they're in the

high-demand group, they really have trouble forming solid relationships. Yet at the same time, while they're in the group, they feel like some of the relationships they have are solid. And when they break over, you know, when somebody leaves, everybody cuts you off or sometimes you can just say the wrong thing and that relationship is so thin, they begin to realize and after leaving, they just recognize that the relationships that they thought they had weren't real, some of them were, they felt solid and they weren't solid, but then after leaving, there's a whole new world because you have lost trust,

you've lost all of the relationships you had, and some people I've talked to in the support groups just don't even build relationships. So I wanted to unpack that a little bit and I'll admit I will be walking a little bit outside of my element because this is an area I'm still working on for myself and I'll be a little bit transparent. It's hard for me and we'll talk to that, but anyway, good to have you back and let's talk through relationships. Yeah, I really resonate with what you're sharing. I also struggle with it and don't at all consider

myself someone who has relationships figured out. I often tell my clients, I'm the biggest to learner of what I teach. That's what drives me to learn more about psychology and embodiment and relationships. As you were talking, I was thinking about a conversation I had 10 years ago with a woman who was at our church who was writing her dissertation about teaching math and she was talking about communal ways of teaching math and she introduced me to this term called pseudo community and it has been a really helpful term for me for understanding this world because at the time I was actually on staff at a church

and I was thinking about leaving thing. And my husband and I kept having these conversations of, are we really ready to lose our community? And then the conversation shifted to, if we lose our community because we don't go to a church or a building on Sundays, is that really community? And is that the type of community that we want? And it's tricky because while you're in it, this community can feel so strong, you know, the meal trains are there immediately, the visiting in the hospital, the praying and financially donating if you are ascribing to everything

within that ideology and those high controls. But the moment that you start to deviate, you actually realize how precarious that community was from the beginning. Exactly. And you know, the community is a big problem when you think about relationships.

As a child, I was growing up in a doomsday cult. And so when I was making relationships with other children, even though we really didn't think about the fear in the back of our minds, it was relationships based on fear. They're constantly talking about the end of the world and things that no children should ever hear. That's how I grew up. But then as I entered into adult, becoming an adult and going through that change in life where suddenly you're going beyond the mentality of fear, you're going into sort of an elitist mentality. We're the chosen ones. We're the ones who are going to make it through. All of the other Christians

are not. Why would I make a relationship with the outside world Christians? Because they're going to die. Why not make just relationships with these people? And the sad truth is, some of these people I would have never made relationships with in the first place. We really had nothing in common. It reminds me of these movies. A good example is, say you're watching a movie about 9-11. The people in the towers, they know the towers are going to fall. They just watched the other tower fall horrifically, tragically sad situation.

But there were people who instantly bonded for the last moments of their life because of fear. That's the reason that they came together. And we were sadly in that same mentality. So as sad as I get about things like these tragic events in the movies, that same sadness applies to every single person who is in a cult. Because their bonding is really based on things that are so wrong, so horrific. And yet at the same time, I escaped this. Then when you leave, now whenever that is lifted, it's really hard for me because all of my life

for 37 years, my training on how to form a relationship was based on trauma, fear and elitism. Now I struggle because what do you do? How do you make a relationship? How do people come together?

And it is a problem. It's a problem not just for me, but for many escapees of a cult. Totally. Yeah. I feel like I often use a similar phrase of trauma bonding. And I have seen that.

I experienced that largely in Y-WAM where you're constantly exposed to life-threatening situations, places, events. And it produces a lot of adrenaline and cortisol in your body. And we can get addicted to cortisol and to stress because our body is producing natural opiates.

It feels good. It's the state of a high. And so it can be really hard then to retrain your body a new sense of normal and really growing a sense of a new homeostasis that feels boring.

And I talk about this a lot with my clients and I've been working on this on my own is how do I grow my tolerance for what I feel is boredom if I have been so conditioned to be in these constant states of sympathetic activation. And it takes time and it's hard work to learn how to slow down and move at a gentler pace in relationships. I never got to experience missions whenever I was in the group. After leaving, however, I started thinking about just the organizational structure of the group itself. We had, I don't know what's best way to say this, we had a different culture

about us. And that cultural aspect that we had, it was really weird. It was unique to our group and it was a result basically of the cult hierarchy, the way that people adopt the themes that were used by the central figure, basically the personality of the central figure. And Dr. Stephen Hassan's book, Combating Cult Mind Control, he mentions this a bit, how you take on the identity of the cult leader and you become a person that you wouldn't really have become in the first place, which is odd. And had I known the background of the cult leader himself, I probably would have

never, I know I would have never ever chosen that identity. But people who are in this type of group and in this mentality, they adopt the central figures, persona, his themes, his likenesses, his dislikes. And that becomes part of your relationship. It's really, really odd when you think about it. I would have never, for example, I'm a tech guy and a musician, right? I'm not a hunter.

I have never wanted to be a hunter. But that was part of the themes. That was the way that the stories were told by the central figure that That's what he adopted and many people who are in the group.

They form these relationships around hunting, which is really kind of funny. I know that's different from what you experience in youth with a mission, but I'm thinking as an organizational unit, that's what we had in our group.

Now youth with a mission has a different type of organizational group. They have different themes, different likes, different dislikes, and the way that they take on the identity of the group itself, of youth with a mission, that culture forms a bond, forms a relationship.

So it's yet another dynamic of relationships that I don't think many people really think through, especially when you leave the group. Once you leave, you're no longer part of that dynamic. You're no longer in a world where that dynamic even means anything to you.

Yet at the same time, you're trying to form relationships. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, the culture aspect plays a huge factor in the relationships that you make, and you would have never made some of those bonds in the first place.

Yeah, and it makes me think, and I know some people will have a difficulty with me saying this phrase, but please stay with me if you can. I think that this is an important reason to look at whiteness, because a lot of these organizations, as we've talked about, are primarily white organizations.

And this phenomena of cutting people off is part of how whiteness operates. I have spent time with various folks of color in various communities, and that's not to say people of color don't cut people off.

But to the degree that white people have been conditioned in this hypercapitalistic sense of self and individuation, we have both the privilege and the detriment of being able to just cut people off, where in a lot of interdependent communities, cutting someone off is existential and physical death for that person.

And so when I was working in Northern Uganda, there were people that had been forced to kill community members as part of being abducted into the Lord's Resistance Army, and they were doing reintegration rituals with these people to bring them back into community.

And my very final trip to Uganda, I was like, how is it that this community is strong enough to withstand things like killing and death, and most of the white Christian communities I am in can't even handle open conflict without that just turning into a complete rupture of the relationship.

Whatever I was in the group. We had what I felt was strong relationships with people internally. In other words, if we were of like mind, like faith, if we believe the same prophet, et cetera, we had these what I felt was strong relationships. I learned later our paper thin, but with those outside it gets a little bit complicated.

I tried to form relationships with people outside, and usually if they were, they could be Christian, but if they didn't believe the same way that I did, I would try to witness to them. Did you know God sent a prophet? That kind of thing.

In some ways, I know it's a little bit different than what you had, but in some ways, that was my mission. That was the mission field. If you picture me in the mission mindset of what youth with a mission would have, I looked at people who were outside the group as I guess targets.

They were potential converts. That's a better way to say it. The people who I would form a relationship was, they were a potential convert, and if I built up to this telling them of what I believe, which took a long time, because we believe some weird things, when I got to the point where I could finally tell them, hey, here's what I believe, and I would like for you to believe it too.

That was such an awkward conversation, but yet at the same time, it was a make or break relationship type conversation. In other words, I would go through all of this effort to make a relationship, and then if they didn't come to agreement that my views were correct, then there was no relationship at all.

They were just an acquaintance, and nothing more. The same paper-thin relationships that I had when I was in the group with people that I thought were strong, they were even thinner to people who are outside of the group who, looking back, some of those might have been really strong relationships.

And again, I was never in anything similar to youth with a mission, but in that, I think there's some similarities because if you're on the base, and you see outsiders, you see potential converts, these are people who, it's the same way. They're your target. If you can form a relationship with them, it's usually around your religion or your ideology.

And so, you know, looking back, I'm so saddened of the relationships that I could have had, and some of those might have been really strong, long-lasting relationships. And now I put myself into the mindset of somebody who's on a base with a mission. As you're going through the period of life when you should be forming strong bonds and strong relationships, you're instead looking at potential convert targets.

And I'm wondering how that plays out. So... for you, what was this like? Yeah, it makes me think about how I've shifted viewing people from projects to sovereign beings. And you know, I think about youth of the mission. It was always a mission. If someone wasn't a part of the mission, they were a project. And they needed to figure out the quote-unquote right way to follow God and to hear the voice of God and all of these very, very particular cultural ways of being. And so, you know, it turned people that I had spent my whole life with

into projects. And I didn't have just like an open relationship with them to just be with them. And hear about what they were passionate about because what they were passionate about was competing with what I thought they should be passionate about. And so, I could never really just rest in being with someone. And, you know, this is true for a lot of the people I've interviewed as well as myself that there was this sense of like even on an airplane, you should like sit with your Bible open so that maybe the person next to you would ask what you're reading,

and it could be a chance to witness to them. Rather than like maybe you're exhausted and you just need to take a nap on the airplane. And so, I think then the flip side of that becomes, you become resentful of people because people get so associated with obligation and compulsory work that you never get to just enjoy laughing and just spending time with people in a kind of unefforting way. I hadn't really thought about that until, gosh, it's probably two or three years after leaving. So, my family, we left the group and we started attending regular churches. And I

formed some strong relationships after leaving in those churches. In fact, we have left one of the churches where I formed one of those relationships. And yet, we still have a strong relationship with members of that church, which is so odd when you think about where we came from. But the point that you just made, you know, this uneffortless aspect of it, when people form relationships, they form relationships because they can both both sides can sense that there's something more here. There's a spark to a relationship, right? And yet, whenever I was in the group, that spark

didn't really exist, we were coerced into thinking that because we're all of like mind, we must have a relationship. We had people who, as I said, we wouldn't have normally formed relationships with, but it was a heck of a lot of effort. Whenever you have two people that are incompatible with each other and they He tried to try to work things out as friends.

There's always this friction that exists. And I'll remember thinking clearly after I started making my new relationships with new friends and the churches that we attended, there was no effort at all in it.

Like suddenly we just realized, hey, I like this guy and he said he liked me too. And as a family, we both go together and we will spend time with each other. And there was no effort at all in making that bond.

And that's, it's one of the long-lasting bonds. I don't have many of them, but I do have a few. And that the lack of effort tells me that when I was in the group, there was just something wrong.

It was so hard to form relationships with people that weren't quite compatible. I think that's the best way to say it. And yet at the same time, so youth with a mission is quite a bit different.

It's very high demand from what I can gather and understand. From our side, many people call it a high demand group because they had demands of you. But in youth with a mission, you were actually, if I'm understanding it correctly from you and others, you were worked quite a bit.

So high demand for you meant you were actually exerting a lot of effort. High demand for us meant we had a lot of demanding rules and regulations, boundaries, et cetera. We had to keep ourselves into this hypersense of hyper-vigilance on our faith and our belief sets.

And the world around us was a evil out to get us. Thinking through the high demand nature of your group, however, I'm wondering how relationships can even form. You can obviously form it with people within the group.

And those have all of the complexities that we've talked about. But what about people outside of the group? How do you even have time to develop a relationship when you're so exhausted from all of the things that you're doing?

Just in terms of schedule. Like you are busy from first thing in the morning until you go to bed at night. And you have work duty, you have meals together, you have classes, you have outreach, you have all of these things that you're doing.

And then you probably maybe get the weekend off. And so there's not a lot of time to cultivate relationships with anyone outside of the base. Even if you are close to people, it's not that they're necessarily disparaged.

And they say, like, don't be friends with people out of the base. But practically, the way that the base is operating and the ways that scheduling operates, you just can't. You really can't have a lot of time.

And even it was common for people to go to churches, because that's one of the things. Why we have this quote unquote, not a church. So you are encouraged to go to a local church.

And yet... Most of the bases are far from churches, so you have like the bases shuttling you and your group of 10, 15 people to church and you all walk in together and then you all leave together, and there's not a lot of time to really connect with people outside of there at all.

And then especially I think when it comes to community you maybe had before with friends or family, there's a lot of emphasis on kind of like renewal and being a new creation, and so your family's not going to get it, your friends you grew up with aren't going to get it.

And there are these very, very highly emotional experiences that then sever a lot of the relationships that you maybe had prior to Y-Wam, and so it is this insidious thing that you don't realize until all of a sudden everyone you're in relationship with is in Y-Wam.

It was the same for me, I began to realize after I left that all my eggs were in that basket. In fact, I think that's one of the boundaries that keeps people in it. If they were to leave, they lose everyone, and that's really the sad part of this, and why is that? I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why did I have friends who were only in the group, and I came to realize that at least for me, I think it was a lot of effort that, I think it was a lot of effort.

That I shouldn't have had effort in making relationships. In other words, so we had our set of ideology, our set of beliefs, we believed in the profit of the last days, all of that stuff.

Other people who were potential targets we could have went after, they didn't believe that way, but they were a project, we could help them learn about the things that we believed, but our guard was always up.

Because what if they suddenly didn't believe, they weren't brought up like this, and so relationships became, relationships are always effort, no matter who it is, but it was exceedingly difficult effort in our case.

We had to not only have the effort of making the relationship and keeping maintaining it, but we also had the effort of watching to make sure that they weren't doing anything that required us to break that relationship.

Our guard was always up, our friction level was always quite high. People just simply, they didn't know that they were supposed to act a certain way to have enough favor with us to keep that relationship.

So what happened over time, it just became so difficult to create and maintain relationships outside of the group. I think myself and a lot of other people, we just simply decided, this is too much work, let's just have friends within the group, and I think that's what happens a lot of times.

But I look back at that and it makes me sad because there were some really good people that I probably could have had a good relationship with through the years. I left at age 37, look at all of the people that I encountered and could have made solid friendships with for 37 years.

Take it a step further, look at all of the family members that I could have had relationships with. And while we weren't in youth with a mission, you're on a base and that's much more difficult.

In our case, we were in a compound of our mind. We mentally, we were cutting people off. Mentally, we were isolated. So in some ways, there is some similarity, but it was just so much work to go outside of that.

And now I look back at all those relationships and I'm sad and what do you do with this? The family members, I would love to have spent most of my years with. I didn't, but what do I do? How do you move past this?

Yeah, I think it takes a lot of time to figure that out. And for me, it's looked like doing a lot of repair work and apologizing to family members and saying, I'm really sorry that I turned you into a project. And I'm really sorry that I couldn't just see you for who you are.

And in newer relationships, it has looked like growing my awareness of my mind's agenda and this desire to fix or save or heal people that I think has been so conditioned in me. And I think it's going to be a lifelong, I say I'm a recovering white savior and I think that that's going to be something that is a lifelong journey for me to really trust that people are on their own path.

And I think more and more, a big part of relationships is just tolerating the things that we love and don't love about people. And there's no one in life that's going to not have particularities that stress us out or make us frustrated.

And those same people are going to maybe make us cry with love and joy. And it's that ability to grow our capacity to bear all of it and to know that relationships are like seasons.

And we might have different seasons that we have to weather. But I truly am more and more believing that people are just really sovereign, beautiful beings and are really trying their best. I had a therapist once asked me many times like what if you believed that everyone is just doing the best they can with what they have.

And that has been something I've tried to really hold on to. It doesn't mean that I don't hold people accountable or responsible for where there has maybe been harm or rupture, but I also try to hold nuances and complexities for people might not do things the way that I want them to, and that becomes a point of dynamics in our relationship.

Yeah, it took me a while to understand that we had the mindset that to have a relationship, we have to see eye to eye. And the sad truth is that most people don't see eye to eye on every single thing.

Opposites often attract that kind of thing, but people won't have an aligning viewpoint. And so what happens is whenever somebody detects that there weren't seeing eye to eye, suddenly there's more than friction, now you have a reason to sever that relationship.

That's how thin the bonds were between the people. And I started to realize after leaving that that just doesn't even make sense. No two people see eye to eye on every single thing. And the world would be a very unhealthy place if they did.

If you had everybody seeing eye to eye on every single thing, there would be no innovation. There would be no advancing in technology, in culture, etc. It takes two people who are in somewhat of a conflict to come to an agreement of how to work out and resolve the conflict and become better for it.

And true relationships, very strong relationships, will often have conflict. So for me, that's a concept. It was a little bit difficult trying to learn that, especially after leaving, you're scared, you're going to lose a new relationship.

These relationships for us are so far more valuable than to people who grew up in a normal life, because for us, we lost every single person. I can't lose another. That's the mindset you take.

And so the first time that a conflict arises within a relationship, you're like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to end, please, please, don't have a disagreement with me. But the truth of the matter is, disagreements can be healthy.

It's all in how you come to a resolution after that disagreement. So for me, I came to learn that relationships, for me, it was a lot of work in a different way after leaving.

I had to work on what I viewed as a relationship. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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I just thought about the difference of dynamics between people who form relationships in these high-demand groups and people who are in what I call the normal world. And I realize that I'm air quoting normal because I haven't yet found a normal person.

Maybe they exist, but I don't think they do. Everybody has their unique individual problems, but they all come together in a society where people with all sorts of different ideas can come together and form solid relationships, which is something that I'm still trying to grasp because we were in a world where there was almost forced relationships.

It's really weird when you think about this. So for me, I'm a little bit out of my element, but we had this weird social ladder that existed within the high-demand group that did not really exist when I left it.

And whenever we formed relationships, for example, there were those that were holier than the rest. And you always wanted to gravitate to those people and form a relationship. So the relationship, it goes beyond complex because instead of just forming a relationship with people who are in your group because they're in your group, now you've got this ladder that you try to go up and ascend and form relationships just simply based on what you thought was their spirituality, not even your own.

So it gets to be levels of complex when you think about it. Exit this and go into the real world. There are people that do this in the real world and they're unhealthy. There are people, for example, who might be in the business world and they target relationships based on how can I ascend the corporate ladder, for example.

Yes, there are people do it. Yes, they do well at it, but in the end, they will probably end up going through counseling because that's not a healthy way to form a relationship. You have other people who have a desire to help people, which I'm thinking through why I'm in trying to think of the intricate details of those relationships.

I know people who will form relationships just because the person is in need. Is it bad? I don't know. I can relate that somewhat to somebody who's in the mission field. I'm forming a relationship as they're my mission target.

But in the end, is that a true relationship? or is that just you trying to help somebody? So as I'm trying to evaluate how you form a real relationship in the real world, all of this complexity is overwhelming to me.

I'll just admit. So I'm trying to decide how do you move forward in this world? And I have several people who are asking me the same things who have been in this type of religion.

So as I'm thinking through youth with a mention and thinking of my past, I'm trying to think about just simply the social ladder that was in youth with the mission. How hard was it to make friends and after leaving, how different is it from that social ladder?

Yeah, so many thoughts are coming to mind. For me, it was interesting. I think I've mentioned this before, is that I went straight from Y-Wam to graduate school and was warned in Y-Wam that my graduate school was liberal and I should be careful.

So to protect myself, I ended up at Mark Driscoll's Mars Church and was there for several years. And it was a very similar dynamic, very high control, very toxic space. And I found myself, I think it, like the old saying goes, you know, you can take the woman out of the cult, it is much harder to take the cult out of the woman that I just kept finding myself replicating these patterns of being drawn to intensity.

And so whether or not that was an organization or certain relationships with people that maybe didn't have such a stable sense of self or relationship, I would be like, moth to a flame to those people.

And it would be like, I'm the one who's never gonna leave you. I'm gonna be the one who will answer the phone call at 3 a.m. And I just kept burning myself out over and over and over again.

And so one of the things I've come to see and that I often tell my clients is that we are relational beings. And we first actually need to work on our relationship with our self and our own body.

And I've said before, you know, for many years, I would say my body is a machine and I treated my body as such. And so I have had to come to see if I honor my own body as a sovereign, living, breathing, moving being.

And I start to know what I need, what I like, what I don't like. And then I trust that I can build relationships and have more space and more mobility in relationships for people to like and not like what they don't like and what they like.

And there gets to be more messiness and more complexity, but more humanity, rather than thinking, I need to perform a certain way and that's why I'm going to keep finding myself in these dynamics with churches or organizations or people.

The other thing I'm thinking through is simply when you talk relationships, you almost can't exclude the familial relationships that develop. There were people who I fully felt were incompatible who got married because the choices of who to get married is narrowed down, right?

And I know this is something that you've talked about with youth with a mission. You have these people who are youth who are of age to try to find somebody and you've got this shallow pool of individuals to choose from.

We had the same exact thing and at the same time, I don't know if you had this doctrine up but they would take the verses like be not unequally yoked but they would take this to whole new levels.

You could not be unequally yoked with another Christian who didn't believe like we do. You could not be unequally yoked with somebody who didn't have the same ideology exactly. So whenever you consider all of that, now you're forming relationships that are solely based on your ideology and your understanding of theology.

And what happened was people got married who just really were not that compatible. They weren't that happy and you could tell the couples that weren't. Fast forward, after some of them leave, the first thing that they do is separate because oh my gosh, the only thing holding us together was that group.

And then once I leave the group, I realized I would have never married this person anyway. What is that similar to what you experienced in youth with a mission? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think I've mentioned before there was this tagline that Y-Wam actually stands for young women after men or young warriors after women.

There were so many little phrases that it was the sense of as soon as you do a DTS, you should be starting to look for who you're going to marry within Y-Wam. And it also, what is not maybe as well known, but it was really an undercurrent of the culture, specifically in certain bases, was that Y-Wam is so big on calling.

What is the calling that God has on your life? But really the minutia of that was that a man has a calling and the woman is called to her husband. And so it led to a lot of resentment, a lot of burnout, a lot of women not getting to fulfill whatever they wanted to do because they were just supposed to follow whatever their husband was supposedly called to, which just so happened to be that ladder like you were talking about.

It was like everyone just seemed to be like, to always be called to whatever the next role of power is in the organization. You very, very, very, very rarely have someone go, yeah, God's just calling me to like take a sabbatical and just chill for a while. And so yeah, it definitely creates, I think, this environment where there's not a lot of choice. It can feel like choice, but the choice is based on a very limited ability you have to be relating to people. And you know, a lot of times I think that people would

get married for ministry opportunities as well. Maybe they wanted to start their own base or they wanted to go to a particular place. And the organization says, well, you have to have a partner, you have to be married to do that. And so people would kind of get married as means to an end to do what they wanted to do or especially women to think that they could get maybe more positions of authority. But then as soon as they were married, actually, their own authority got really subverted in the gender roles of the organization. One of the most common things that people say

whenever they contact me talking about their journey out of the cults and into the real world and all of the relationships that they had is simply trust. How hard it is for them to trust new people. And it's understandable because if you're in a group that practices shunning and everybody cuts you off instantly, what have they done? They've betrayed your trust. You trusted them. You had a relationship and suddenly they betrayed that trust. When you have a mass betrayal of trust, it makes it very difficult to trust new people. And so when people reach out to

me, they say, how do you how do you approach this, John? I can't trust anybody. And my response is usually, I am the same way. I know how hard it is. And yet at the same time, there has to be some sort of an element of trust because if you want to form a new relationship and you don't enable your trust in the new relationship, you really haven't made a relationship in the first place. So for me, trust is a huge issue. It's an issue that we've talked about. It's an issue for pain and trauma. But as it relates to relationships, it is a fundamental building block of a new

relationship. So how do we take somebody who has gone through this? Their trust has been violated. They some people will tell me, I will never trust again. And what do you say to this?

How do you tell a, how do you teach a person that trust is a good thing, betraying the betrayal of your trust was a bad thing. But you know, people need... to trust each other in new relationships. How do you approach this?

Yeah, I would say that makes so much sense and you're not alone. And I would come back to, um, I think we can trust people from a safer place when we have more access to ourselves. And if we have been in a world where we have been conditioned to gaslight ourselves or deny or not listen to our spidey senses, it can be really important to work with a therapist or a coach or learn some resources for trusting your body. Because not everybody is trustworthy.

And there are people that are incredibly trustworthy. And so learning to enter into those places from a place of trust of your own body, I think it is a gentler and, unfortunately, maybe a slower process than we often want it to be. And I think it's part of how we subvert these, uh, these types of trauma bonding or fear bonding that we're so used to is like, how do we enter into a bonding that is, um, gentle and kind and slow and compassionate? And I kind of like fruit of the spirituality, like how do we find those relationships? I think that really starts

with tending to our own really good bodies. Exactly. You basically show people how you would want to be treated and they will in return feel comfortable around you because that's how they would want to be treated. It's part of how relationships work. You, you find people who are compatible with your way of thinking. I'm a person who likes somebody who's laid back casual, doesn't get easily angered or excited. That's just my personality. And I find people like this, um, very, very more compatible than somebody who's just flying off the handle at all times. And yet I have friends

who that's that's their life. That's how they want to be. So you find people who are compatible. But as it relates to trust, the thing for me is I keep people on a short leash. And what I mean by this is I will let people earn my trust, but I will keep guard rails around them so that if they betray my trust, my world doesn't come crashing down. And I think really that's the key because when you're in one of these groups and you're you find that your trust is easily betrayed. You find that your relationships, the bonds that held you together are paper thin. You fear that your

new world after leaving is going to completely come crashing down. And what I argue is try not to put yourself in a situation where that can even happen in the first place. Let people earn your trust.

And what you'll find is there are some very trustworthy people out there. And there are new relationships to be made. Even though I have these struggles, I have made new relationships. I find that I can trust. And it's a healthy thing. You find relationships that form bonds that are so far stronger than what we ever had in these groups. So thank you so much for doing this.

Yes, thanks so much for having me. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org and indwell-movement.com. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.