Inside YWAM: Grooming Children for Purity, Power, and Control

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my very special guest, Jenny McGrath, former member of Wyham. Jenny it's good to finally have you on here. We've communicated a little bit through email but I told you I was very excited to have another person from Wyham. I've been wanting to get more and get a broader picture into this sealed box that is Wyham because I hear so many stories. A lot of the

stories I hear the people do not want to step forward and talk about it which is sad. So I know that there's more than meets the eye but brave people like you who can step up and talk about it. This is fascinating. The whole thing is interesting to me and it will help a lot of people. So thank you so much for joining the podcast and if you could just take a moment and tell a little bit about yourself. Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to be here and I feel like I'm entering this conversation both from a very personal

experience and I'm also entering it from my professional experience. I grew up in Colorado Springs and so for those who don't know that is the epicenter of white evangelical fundamentalist Christianity and I was homeschooled most of my life and I grew up in the height of purity culture. I begged my parents to get me a purity ring when I turned 13 and really bought in hookline and sinker to that movement and to that culture. And when I was 14 years old I saw the film Invisible Children which was a documentary style film about three young white men from California that went to Uganda and quote unquote

discovered this war that was going on that didn't need discovering but that's the way that it was framed and it was this highly highly emotional and erotically charged film that sort of pulled on all of the levers that I had been socialized in in purity culture and so I experienced that film as God calling me to be a missionary in Uganda and I begged my parents to let me drop out of high school and move to Uganda. They did not let that happen.

And when I graduated high school, Y-WAM was sort of a compromise with my parents between going to university and just moving straight to Uganda. And so I did a discipleship training school with Y-WAM and ended up joining the organization and doing other schools.

I did a school of biblical studies in South Africa. And then I did another school of dance later on in Montana. But most of the time in Y-WAM, I was on staff in Colorado Springs, but I was technically a field worker in Uganda.

So I spent a lot of my time on my own as a 19, 20, 21-year-old in Northern Uganda. And then various teams would come out or would be sent out to help me establish a ministry that I was establishing there.

And over the years, my body got sicker and sicker. I had boils all over my body. My immune system stopped working. I would have what I would probably call a psychotic break. I was just like hysterical.

If the printer wouldn't work, I had no tolerance for anything going wrong. I was working every day from 6am to 1am, whether I was in Uganda or I was in Colorado Springs, trying to fundraise.

And what I noticed was the sicker and sicker I got, the more and more I was praised, and the more and more, the people that were my leaders were telling me, this is proof that you are doing what God wants you to do.

And I had pretty much a goal of being martyred. By the time I was 23, I did not see myself living beyond the time that I was 23. But my body just kept getting sicker and sicker.

And so I actually ended up long story short in graduate school, going for a master's degree in counseling psychology. And I thought at the time, I'll get this degree in counseling and I'll learn how to take care of myself so I can go be a missionary longer.

And my body will stop quote unquote failing me. And through my graduate program, it was the first time I was confronted with white privilege and why I was able as an 18, 19 year old to step into an entirely different culture and context as a professional and establish a ministry.

And I got to the point where I couldn't any longer engage in Uganda in a professional setting with integrity. So I ended up starting a private practice and getting into mental health counseling. And because of the world that I have been a part of for a long time, most of...

the clients that find me are white women who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity. And so for the last 10 years, I've continued to see these same themes of martyrdom and being socialized to abdicate ourselves.

And really the culture of purity culture infusing itself into our vocations and the roles that we take. So five years ago, I started a research study on what I call the transnationalizing of purity culture.

And I look at the psycho-effective impacts of purity culture on young white women and how those impacts led to us being groomed to be martyrs. Whether that is in the role of moving as a missionary to the global south or motherhood or running nonprofits or the various ways in which this world conditioned us to suffer for others.

And so I look at the personal aspect of that, but then in my particular research, I also looked at the soft imperialistic power of people like myself bringing the ideals of Christian fundamentalism to countries like Uganda and all over the globe.

Wow, there's so much there. As you were talking, I was thinking, well, I want to do a podcast on that. I want to do a podcast on that. There's probably 20, 30 different ideas that I want to talk about.

But I'll try to narrow it in. And I want to talk about one thing that you said. You started talking about how your body started telling you that something's wrong. Your body started, yeah, I think you use the word failing.

Not many people realize how common this is and not many people who are going through it actually recognize that it's happening to them. I have had in the support groups that I've worked with, I've had people share with me there before and after photos.

Here's when I was in a high demand group. Here's when I've left. Look at the difference, John. And you look at it. And the person who's in the cult looks really sickly and the person who's left, it's like suddenly they have found the fountain of youth.

It's a little bit crazy. And it's because of the toll that the high demand group has taken on their mind and it manifests itself in the body. So people don't realize the significance of that, but that is a real thing and I have, like I said, I've seen photos before and after.

It's unbelievable. The other thing you're talking about the white privilege, I know that we have a wide swath of our audience that the moment they heard that, their brain started shutting off because of all of the politics surrounding it.

But this is very real. And what they're not telling you whenever these people, these big names in the NAR, charismatic movement, Pentecostals, when they go to these other countries, and they say, it was glorious.

We had 100,000 people. We had all these big numbers. These, it's, when you understand the concept. of how the cultures has developed and what they see when the white person comes over to their country.

It is not what you see whenever you go to a revival here. It is different. And there's a reason why. And again, it's more than this podcast can hold. That's probably worthy of 10 to even explain this.

But don't be turned off by the term white privilege. When you hear it, it's not the political nonsense that they're spouting. This is a real problem too. And it's one that is used as a tool of manipulation by the cults.

Yeah, I share in my book an example of one of the first cracks for me that existed in Uganda. This was actually before I was in graduate school. I was standing there preaching to an entire congregation.

And I stopped and I don't know what came over me. I don't really honestly understand to this point. But I asked, do you all think that I am smarter than you? Why else have you all come here to hear what I have to say?

And there was this really old gentleman from the village that stood up and he said, we are black people. And so we are cursed because of what Ham did to his father, Noah. And because of that, we need white people to come tell us what God wants.

And I did not know at the time that the story of Ham and Noah was used by early inslavers and early missionaries to Africa to subjugate people by saying you are cursed indefinitely. And so we are actually bringing the blessing of Christianity to you despite this.

And so it comes from this long lineage of imperialism and colonialism that I didn't know. And yet my body was still replicating by stepping into this same role as someone who was bringing the truth and what God wanted for a people that are very different than me.

And live a very different life than me. Yeah, it's something that I actually go through that in my book as well. The Christian identity movement as it was spreading, they were trying to say that there were two bloodlines, a good one, a cursed one.

And if you're a part of the cursed one, you really need us as your saviors. That's really essentially what they were saying. You need us as your saviors. We're the ones that can help you, but you're still cursed.

And there are Charles and I have talked through this a little bit whenever we went through the Revival History Series. But there are churches that are openly preaching behind their pulpit that they are the cursed ones they're made to serve the white people.

And when you're in the United States, you don't understand that that's going on and how widespread it is. But these missionaries go over there, they take advantage of those people, and then through the testimonies of the people they're taking advantage of, now they come back and they take advantage of the minds of the people in the states.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think everyone in that cycle is dehumanized because everyone just becomes a means to an end. Absolutely. So you went through terrible things to go on your journey and become the professional that you are. What was it like whenever you started to realize that your body was the troubles that you're having with your body was actually a consequence of the things happening to your head through the cult?

It was really challenging and it took a lot of years for me to unpack that. I went to a Christian graduate school and at the time from where I was in Y-Wam, it was considered a pretty progressive school.

Even in my graduate program for the first few years, I was continuing to feel like I had to be a missionary to these sinners in Seattle. Seattle was this dangerous, liberal city that was going to lead me astray.

And so I continued to really, I would literally say my body is a machine and I would treat my body like a machine because that was sort of how I had been conditioned. And so it took these small and large cracks of learning that my body was actually communicating something to me.

And I remember when I first read about dissociation, it was like my whole life made sense. Starting in high school, I would ask my parents, what does it mean when you feel like you're dreaming?

And they were like, I don't actually know what you're talking about. And what happens is when our bodies don't feel safe to be present, they won't be. And so we will literally feel maybe an out-of-body experience or a dream-like quality.

And what this is often insinuating is that we are in what is called a dorsal vagal complex or a freeze complex. So our nervous system has gone into this energy consumption state to keep us alive.

And our nervous system does not know the difference between I am being chased by a lion and I am being chased by high control religious rhetoric. And so what it says is our body says let's just play dead. And so then maybe eventually we can escape this.

But what happens when we are in those energy consumption? function states is that our ability to produce fresh blood cells decreases, our immune system decreases, our digestion decreases, and all of the metabolic processes that our body needs for long-term survival go quiet because our body is saying, we don't have time.

We don't have the luxury of digesting our sandwich that we just ate, we are in a state of survival. And so once I started to understand, wow, these symptoms I've had for my entire life and that got exaggerated when I became a missionary actually make a lot of sense.

And so I started the process of coming back into my body and learning how to feel sensations, learning how to feel when I was hungry, learning how to listen to when I was tired and not just keep bypassing.

I have mentioned this a few times on the podcast, but I'm fascinated by psychology and if I had my life to do over, I probably would have become a psychologist. So I studied this in areas that most people will never study.

But one of the things that this association, the disorder itself, is often caused by trauma. And yet it's also common among the cults and cults escapees. They mention symptoms that that's exactly what they're describing.

And they don't even realize that they have gone through severe trauma, severe enough to cause a disorder. So whenever I began to piece all this together and I too was going through trauma, especially as I was bridging the gap between my family escaping and which one of my friends are going to leave me, which ones of my family, going through all of that disconnection, it was traumatic, extremely, excessively traumatic.

After you go through that and you come to the other side, you start to realize that things about your mind and your body are different. And one of the fears that hits you is, oh my gosh, this is Satan.

I've left the cult, I've left God, you know, that's the first thing that comes in your head because that's what they have grilled into your head. And it took me a while to realize and recognize, no, that's not Satan, that's actually something they did to me and I'm feeling it because of the trauma that they caused me.

Absolutely. Yeah. Often in the somatic psychology world, we say trauma isn't always about an event. It's about not having a safe place to go in the midst of or after an event. And so our nervous system can actually tolerate a lot of overwhelm if we have a safe place to go to discharge and to move through what our nervous system needs to process.

But if we are in these worlds where anything that I'm actually feeling or questioning or wondering, is putting at risk my connection to this entire community, maybe my livelihood because I have raised support and I don't know how to do another job, and all of these very real consequences, that in itself becomes a type of chronic trauma in the body. Part of the reason why I really wanted to get you on here, especially with your expertise, all of this trauma, I experienced it, I've worked in the support groups with others who have experienced it, and what we describe is very much what you would expect if you are talking to a person

who went to Vietnam and came back. Yes, they didn't have to kill people, yes, the trauma is different, but it's still trauma and it still hurts just as badly. The part that scares me so much is the fact that there are children involved in this case. There are children being traumatized, when an adult is traumatized, the healing path is different. They had a solid ground to begin with, they were traumatized, they have something to go back to. One of my fears is the children that are in Y-Wam, if this trauma is widespread, the trauma is actually molding and shaping their

personalities, and that really scares me. Yeah, I think it's absolutely devastating, and I think for me, I often tell my clients, I wouldn't do the work that I do if I didn't believe that we have the capacity to change and heal, and I'm in the camp that likens that type of complex developmental trauma to more like having diabetes, where it's not actually something you're probably ever going to get over, but it is something that you will learn how to manage, how to take care of, you'll learn, okay, this is where I start to get really triggered,

this is where I start to feel really safe, but I also like to normalize with people, it makes sense, if you're still having trauma responses and you left this organization or this ministry 10, 20 years ago, because our nervous system doesn't register time, and we are context dependent beings, so when we are in a certain context that reminds us of something, sometimes our body can forget that we're not actually right back in that place again, and I think that that's part of the insidiousness of why we am, and many of these use missions organizations, is that our brains were literally

still developing when we joined, most people joined at 17, 18, 19, is old. I remember I joined when I was 18, but I was applying for my DTS before I had even turned 18. So my parents had to co-sign on this form that said, if I die on my outreach, why am I not going to pay for my body to come back? My parents have to be responsible for that. And they're like, this is a horrible thing to be signing as a parent. And I'm just all, well, if it's what God wills, it's what God wills. I have to go. He's telling me to do this. And I was 17 years old. And so

I think about if a 17-year-old now was telling me that I would go, hey, let's go get some coffee. And let's really talk about this and really see what's going on. And maybe how your experiences have shaped your understanding of God and what you think, quote unquote, he wants you to do.

Yeah, it's just so unbelievable when you think of children being exposed like this. I had to go on a mission to help a cult victim with the cult expert. And that's where I got my crash course on cult psychology, how it works. I had to go through a week-long training session of, this is how cults work, this is how mind control works. And I'm a sci-fi fan and I thought that all of this mind control is science fiction until I went through this crash course and started to realize and recognize, wait a minute, I was myself under mind control, had no idea that I was.

And since then, having studied the psychology of what happens after you've been in mind control and come out, it has an effect on you. And it has a long-term effect. Like you said, it is very much like diabetes. There are things that I may never get over. I just have to learn to cope with them, how to deal with them. I actually did a podcast series with my cousin who is a psychotherapist in Florida. And we talked about ways, tools to help through that. But you have to learn to cope with it. It's bad. And especially to think that there are children involved. Then I did a study on the

history behind these children movements. And it becomes even scarier. So in the study that I did, in this week-long study, they were talking about how Hitler was able to manipulate and program the minds of the Germans to the extent that they could take the life of another human and think that they were glorified in doing this, that they were justified in doing this. And it was a type of mind control he was using on an entire nation. After he did this in the United States, the government wanted to weaponize this. How did he weaponize it? We need something to fight this

fight that type of mind control. So there are these studies and you can read about that history if you want online. But bottom line- is one of the programs that Hitler established was the youth programs because if you can manipulate the minds of the youth as they are most moldable, you can literally take their minds and mold it like clay into the way that you want. So when you combine mind control with very horrific ideologies, this is a mess. This is a recipe for ruining the lives of the children. Now, fast-forward into the United States after they're watching this happen, there was this weird movement

by the Christians and you had multiple children programs. You had Billy Graham had a program for the youth. In fact, Jim Jones came in through one of these programs, right? And they were trying to combat the Nazi ideology with Christian ideology. The problem is many of the people who were involved with this, their version of Christianity was either slightly off or way far off the mark. Some of them were white supremacists. So you had all of this weird mess in the United States developing and I still am trying to put Y-Wam into a category. It's definitely not the Nazis,

it's definitely not Billy Graham's thing. But in the end, for me, they're really no different. You have children who are being susceptible to mind control under a high demand group. That is the bottom line for me. Now, whether it's destructive doctrine, I don't know, the doctrine itself even doesn't matter. The fact that you're doing this to kids, for me, this is very dangerous. Yeah, and I think it is for lack of a better word really brilliant, because again, I didn't know, as an 18, 19 year old, the history of imperialism and colonialism.

I didn't know the connection between the organization, the family and leaders in Uganda. And I didn't know the connection with instilling anti-gay rhetoric in the guys of purity culture. So what I specifically look at is how even purity culture is a world of mind control.

And so if folks don't know what that is, essentially it was a response to a lot of different things, but primarily sex education and children learning about consent in schools. And so in the early 1990s, you had this huge movement where around 200,000 abstinence only pledges were staked on the national mall in Washington, D.C. And Professor Sarah Malas-Linner calls this the great white hope.

These were primarily young white children who were learning abstinence on the education. And what that actually meant was racial segregation. It meant heteronormative relationships. It was James Dobson's focus on the family. It was a very, very specific vision of what the family that was being protected was.

And so for folks who, like myself, were inundated with these messages, you know, in youth group, my youth pastor would have a handful of M&Ms. And he would say, this is you. And if you hold a guy's hand, you give him a few M&Ms.

And if you kiss the guy, you give him a few more M&Ms. And by the time you meet your husband, if you've been with multiple people, you have no value to give your husband.

And so I look at how those messages actually groomed us to become missionaries because if my body is nothing more than a vessel for my future husband or God, it is going to make me that much more inclined to follow those really dogmatic, tyrannical ideas about who God is and what he does.

And by the time I was 21 years old, because I was establishing a new ministry in Northern Uganda, I just so happened to be there when they had discovered that there was oil in Uganda.

And I was in hotel boardrooms and Colorado Springs being introduced to oil tycoons to talk about how I could figure out how to let them come to Uganda to dig oil wells for Jesus.

And so there is no stop. I think even in that you're like, where does Y-WAM fit? I think it actually really depends on how deep you get. There could be someone that goes and does a five month DTS.

They have a great experience. It's almost like the summer camp thing and then they go on and do their life. But the closer and closer you get to the belly of the beast, I think the more and more you see how they're using youth as tools of imperialism across the globe.

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There is so much in what you just said and so many things that some of which I'm scared to talk about and probably won't. But I think the thing I will talk about is this, whenever the Pentecostal religion started spreading into Africa, there's a lot of very nasty history as to why it went there.

And if you study the history of John G. Lake and the things that he was doing, it's unbelievable. The guy, he's a con man working with other con men. Well, they go into Africa and one of the things they discovered was the diamond mines.

And there, like you said, once you get into the belly of the beast, you start to see that there's a lot more going on here than just religion. And William Brannem, as he's going there, he even talks about it on sermons.

He says, there's so many diamonds that you walk down the street and you can just reach down and pick up a diamond. And, you know, he's telling this to people, very poor people in the United States who would love to be able to walk down the street and grab hands full of diamond because they could buy the food that they need to survive the rest of the week.

But these ministers were going there. And what they set up was a little bit odd because it is spreading Christianity. They're at least their version of Christianity. They are sending missionaries. And not all of the missionaries may have agendas.

They may not even be bad people. But what they're also setting up is a conduit. And when you understand how the conduit works and understand both sides of that conduit, you have on the one side, we'll fund your ministry, but we want this other thing.

Can you, when you go there, can you give us this other thing? And then vice versa, it is a conduit. And there are a lot of people who see the religion for just a religion.

And when they study a cult, they study a cult just simply for its doctrine. And so they see all of these groups as desperate, completely separate groups. But when you understand that all of this is kind of working together, it's just one cog in this big machine.

When you understand that the machine exists not so much for Christianity, but for an engine that helps drive Christianity, that's when this turns into a thousand conspiracy theories, which is fascinating to think through.

But some of this conspiracy theories can be tied to factual information. So again, that leads me to all of these questions that I have about why I am, many of which I can't even say on the podcast, but I can see the potential for it to be such a...

Can't do it. Absolutely. And I think that when you are indoctrinated into an ideology that you are part of a kingdom of God that is beyond above kingdoms of this earth and even more so that certain kingdoms of this earth, if they aren't Christian or evil, then you can justify going into countries illegally, you can justify a million different things because you are doing it for eternity.

And that is more important than these religious organizations or these states you override. Like I said, it's fascinating to me. But the devastating toll that it takes on the people is more problematic than the conduit itself.

And again, we're talking about children. Whenever you were starting to understand that this was a high demand group, it had taken the toll in your body, now you're starting to understand the psychology. What signs did you think back through?

What moments could you go back and identify where other children were suffering now that you knew what was happening to your head? I thought about how it thrives on people being in a state of fight, fight, or freeze.

Everyone was constantly busy and working because Jesus was going to come back any time and so we needed to save as many souls as we could. The Great Commission couldn't wait. And so everyone was always in a frenzy or a crash, a frenzy or a crash.

And I don't know, I mean, I think maybe the only people I knew that seemed well-rested, if I can say this were those that were leaders of basis. And there seemed to be a difference in the people who held the most power and the people who were what I might call the foot soldiers and the people that were doing the work on the ground, that it was, yeah, it's a system of people being unwell.

And there is a certain type of way in which the services that are held often on basis lead people into what a meal door kind would call collective effort of essence. It's everyone together singing and moving and dancing and you start to feel euphoric, you start to feel really good because we've actually evolved to sing and dance and moved.

together with other bodies. And that's a beautiful part of how our brain works. But then in those really vulnerable and receptive moments, immediately comes these really heightened scare tactics about what's going on in other countries, about the devil getting a foothold about all of these things.

And so you're constantly in these whirlwinds of hormones and neuroreceptors that just don't ever let you stop. Part of the reason why I'm fascinated with psychology is because whenever I started to escape the cult and I started to recognize that what they were doing to my head was wrong, I wanted to know not just that it was wrong, I wanted to know how they did it.

And I went back and you would laugh at me if you saw how many of these sermons that I analyzed. I actually listened to more sermons after I left than when I was in it because I'm going through and I'm systematically studying the emotions, the structures, the strategies.

And I started to, after you do this, you start to notice these patterns that emerge and the pattern that was most common was people would be welcomed with this opening, heartwarming, very connectable story which brings their guard down.

And they say things that are very relatable. Do you remember Brother Jed? Whenever you did XY and Z and Brother Jed, oh yes, I remember that. It's that connection, right? If you feel a connection and what it's doing it's bringing the critical thinking down.

Everybody's welcomed their warm opening songs, et cetera. Starts out with a sermon, let's read a verse. And they build up to this really climactic, emotional, break you down and scare you hype. And what they have done is they have literally hijacked your head at that point.

And if you go even deeper with this and study the tent revivals that were happening right down to the organs, the strategy for the music made you turn off critical thinking. And even the pulsing of that organ, there, I read a few studies on this and I wish I could find them again, but there's this thing that happens whenever the pulsing of the organ happens at a certain frequency and then the minister speaks with that same kind of pulsation and it matches your heartbeat.

When it matches your heartbeat, this opens up the doors to literally to take over the emotions of your head. It's a hypnotic effect that is happening. And they build up to that, after the hypnotic effect they build up to the thing that they want to inject in their head and they start to put it in there.

And once I learned a strategy of all of this, I'll be honest, I was going to churches that weren't cult churches. And some of it is just normal human speech technique. over time, humans have developed this pattern. But the difference was, when I was in a non-destructive cult, the things that they were injecting weren't ever agendas. It was usually from the Bible passages. Instead of the agendas, the emotions, the fears, the doomsday, the Lord is coming soon, so be ready or else, that kind of thing. So I started to notice that there are ways that you can

excite people and motivate people, which are good, but there are ways that you can manipulate their heads, which is using some very, very scary techniques that are bad. And then this is before I even knew why I am or any of the history of the children's movements. I was thinking how wrong that was. Me as an adult, I can't believe I let this happen to me. I had to get my kids out of this.

I cannot let my kids be part of this. And then I discovered these movements like Y-Wam, where children are widely subjected to this, and they have no defense. They've never encountered this. They don't know that they're being manipulated. And that just, again, I can't say it enough.

It really scares me. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, we can't overestimate the impact that that has on the bodies that have gone through that. And I have seen many people experience autoimmune diseases and really serious health complications because of extended years in these worlds.

Absolutely. I know several people who have autoimmune diseases. In fact, I have direct family members who do. And it's really sad, especially in the cults that we escaped, which were divine healing type cults. You are trained to believe that if you have one of these diseases, it's either because A, you don't have enough faith or B, because you have done something wrong. What have you done wrong? Get it out of your life. It rid the center of your life. And so the thing that you have, which was literally cause can be caused by the cult, I guess in some cases they weren't, but could

be caused by the cult. The thing that you have is now even more dehabilitating because you're problems that you have with trying to find what did I do wrong? What caused this? What did I do to cause this? And it's taking a problem and making it even more aggravated. Yeah. And I think there's it it exposes just how and how much even I think ableism can can show up in these movements where if bodies are being bodies, it is often interpreted as a curse or a sin or something and not just a normal part of existing in a body that

they have various elements to it. And I think also there's the physical part of it and there is, you know, we live in a world of capitalism and when you convince young people like me that I should become a missionary and not go to university, many people by the time they're 40 years old, they have been professional Christians their whole lives and they think I don't have a 401k, I don't have skills that compute to a market economy.

So I better just stay in here and I can really empathize with that that there are very real reasons why people become trapped when they have been conditioned into these places and we don't live in a system that has many nets for people to transition out of spaces I'll never forget whenever I left the cult and I started to do through the process of deprogramming and trying to understand what happened to me and why.

I was sitting in the theater and we were watching, I can't even remember what movie it was, but it was a movie that had a moment in time in the movie whenever there was a person who was experiencing the after effects of having severe trauma and I started bawling like a baby.

I was thinking of what they did to me, how they did it, why they did it and I hated the fact that this happened to me and I started to feel very negatively about all of my time in the cult.

However, it took me years to kind of get over that. Like you said earlier, you have to learn tools to try to overcome, you have to learn tools to cope with the things that are traumatizing you.

It took me years to kind of get over that but I began to understand I have a lot of fond memories that I will never be able to replace. They're really good fond memories but they're also mixed with really traumatic memories and the odd part about all of that is if you had have asked me before I left the cult, did I have any traumatic memories?

I would have said no and I came to terms with the fact that yes, I had them, yes, they were suppressed but I also had good ones. How do you deal with that? I think honestly it's partly why I pivoted to my research and my writing is that I'm a really firm believer that for a writer nothing is wasted and because I know there are many, many, many, many stories like mine, I think that there is power in being able to transmute my experience into sharing with others.

They are not alone and I think also part of the complex of Y-WAM is that I might liken it to an abusive relationship where there is absolutely intermittent positive reinforcement and some of the best moments of my life were on the mission field and on mission spaces and the things we did as 18-year-olds all living together. We had a ton of fun until we didn't. And so I don't think that it is all one thing and I think that's also part of the tragic complexity to it is that for most people like myself, once you leave, you lose all of those people that you dearly love and that

you've had incredible intimate moments with and that you've had so much fun with and in their eyes you are a pariah that is going to lead them down a slippery slope to hell. And so I think that's also part of the entrapment of these worlds is that it's not all bad or horrible, it's actually really beautiful and in some ways they actually know how to do community really well, but it is a very pseudo-community that as soon as you start asking questions, as soon as you start challenging, you realize very quickly how volatile it is. And so I hold it with a lot of tenderness

and similar to how I've held leaving other abusive relationships that actually the biggest ache is because of the beautiful moments and the lack of connection I have with those people to be able to go, remember when we did this, remember when we did that, it feels like a big loss because there's not really anyone to share it with that gets it and that was there. I can talk to my husband or my friends about it, but it's different than when you were sort of like being in the trenches with people. If you could go back in time, whenever you were 18 years old, your head

strong, you're into this y-yam and you're going on the missions and your parents are scared because, oh my gosh, what happens if she dies when she's there and we have to go get her? And you could give some advice and encouragement to yourself, what advice would that be? I think for me, I was so, so, hungry for being seen and feeling cherished and feeling like God was proud of me and I think I would want that 18-year-old to know she doesn't have to work so hard and that she's actually sovereign and glorious just as being a human being.

And it's okay if she's messy, and her body doesn't belong to her future husband or God, her body is hers, and it's her birthright to live into her body, how she wants to, and it's okay to make mistakes and learn and have successes and learn.

And I would just want to teach her how to breathe and how to literally come back to her body and to be with her in those moments that felt really dissociated and really absent from her body.

Well, that was very good, and thank you so much for doing this. This has been incredible fun for me. I really like to talk to these things. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate your work, and it's been fun for me to talk to you as well. Awesome. And tell people where they can go to get your book. Yeah. So it is in publication right now, or it's on the way to publication.

So it's not quite out yet. I do have an article version of my book, which is the Pure to Purpose Pipeline. And you can find all of that either on my website at indwellmovement.com or on Instagram at indwell underscore movement.

And I will keep you updated if you follow along with my newsletter about when the book will be coming out. Well, thank you again so much for doing this. Thank you. 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-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.