Cult Trauma and the Body: Why Leaving Doesn't End the Damage

Music Hello and 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-Brannum.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Dr. Amanda Thompson, former member of the message.

Amanda, it's good to have you back. We had great success with the first one we did. There were a lot of comments asking for more from you, and I saw your husband even got involved in the comments, so it was really good, and I was wanting to talk more. Last time we spoke, we got towards the end of it, and I was thinking, man, there's so many other topics I would love to talk through.

Anyway, the first one I wanted to talk through has to do with Colt Trauma, but I'm going to let you take lead, and let's explore the link between Colt Trauma and all of the various things that go with it.

I love that you mentioned that you got when my husband watched our video, so he actually asked what we were going to discuss today, and I told him the topic would be Trauma and Health, and he said, oh, you're going to talk about work, it's a day of the lines, and I said, oh, you could give my talk for me, so you know how much my husband is involved in my work, so I appreciate you having me back on.

I'm definitely really excited to talk about what is Trauma and how that's different from stress, and how we can recognize it better, and how that's related to our health, both mental and physical health, and how we can kind of be stigmatized that and get help.

And so we'll talk about, you know, trauma within Colt, but you know, trauma can be within a Colt, but also within families within Colt, and then it can trickle outside of that as well, so you're not just limited to Colt Trauma, and they probably interact, you know, both within a Colt-related environment and outside of that, so yeah.

Absolutely, and there's a lot that goes with that, you'll experience Colt Trauma, and that will put you into a state of trauma, and then you'll do other things that will augment or cause additional traumas, and so it turns into this widely repeating thing that turns into a mass, and I don't talk much about myself, I try to avoid it, but in the few times that I have gotten to explore trauma with my therapist, that's something that I have to work through, and largely because I was experiencing Colt Trauma, then when I left, all of the trauma that goes with leaving, which is excessive, traumatic, I can't even tell you how traumatic that was leaving.

So you experience all of that, but from what I have been able to tell you, Oh, from not only myself, but from all of the people who I talked to, you leave, you were in trauma, so you did leave.

You go through the trauma of leaving. And then what happens is it affects you so strongly that the first thing that hits you is, oh my gosh, that I make the right decision. So you go through all of that baggage and that causes additional traumas.

And for us who have escaped the message cult, it gets a little bit worse because we were in this divine healing cult. So when something happens to your health, number one, you're scared half to death.

But number two, everybody in it who's watching you leave starts pointing fingers. And that even causes more trauma. And trauma, from what I've been able to tell myself, and I'm no psychologist, I'll let you, the expert talk through this, but I have studied psychology quite a bit.

Trauma lives in the body in so many different places that people can't imagine. To stress hormones, the immune responses, you can actually catch more sickness whenever you're in trauma, digestion, sleep, pain, perception, pain, there are people who just experience pain all through the body.

So there's a lot we can talk through and I don't know that we could even cover it in one single podcast. Oh man, you're speaking my language, so like behind me and all around the office, I have books.

And one of my favorite of which is by Robert Spolskie and it's called Why Zebra, Don't Get Alters. I highly recommend this book. It is a little bit technical, but it's also written from a comedic perspective.

So definitely read it if you want to understand how that affects your body and the multiple systems that keep us running every day. But you're right when you mentioned, when you are in a high control group or a cult, you are experiencing trauma likely.

And they also tend to breed environments in which, particularly if you are a young individual or a marginalized individual or a woman, or just someone who might be more susceptible to be taken advantage of, but you are in an environment such that you are more at risk for aggressions towards you or abuse maltreatment neglect.

And so in the message that's equally true, you might be struggling to, I didn't develop a strong sense of self or identity and all of these things kind of compound on each other. And so then when you leave, you didn't develop the skills to really navigate difficult stressors in the world.

And you have this difficult time, which I'm kind of picking up on you describing as well. There's a really lovely article called Living in the In Between or in the Great. It's like, do I, I don't have a sense of self anymore.

My identity is completely tied to my cult. And so who am I now? And when you really have attacks on your identity development, so we have lots of literature related to gender, race, sexuality, et cetera, on how when someone really attacks you for your identity, it can be really, really harmful to your men.

So when your identity has just been kind of ripped out from under you, it really is bad for your mental health. And another great example is our military, because we're going to talk about trauma.

I think we typically associate war trauma as being the only thing that can cause PTSD. And that's totally not true. I'd love to talk about that, but actually a lot of individuals miss, you know, they kind of miscontribute that only PTSD and war veterans is from being exposed to really high intense combat situations, but actually the highest peak of vulnerability for PTSD is during retirement.

And this is actually found to be true in research related to police officers as well. And I actually think some of the research supports it's because their identity is changing when you retire. When you retire, you're not your profession anymore.

So who are you and what do you do? And I think that's really key to take home. So it's not just attacks on your identity, it's when your identity is kind of threatened. When you leave a cult, your identity is definitely threatened.

When you retire and your life is your profession, it's threatened. So I just, I hear you saying these things and want to validate, yeah, that makes sense. Oh, that was fun. Been there. Well, and I know from experience, whenever we left, I honestly, I didn't think I had PTSD.

And I've never actually been diagnosed. I am one of these stubborn people and I just refuse to go take the test. And I probably need to get over that, but it really hit me the first time whenever we had left.

Everybody was pointing finger at us, especially me because of what I do, but I was going through all of that trauma. And then my boys and I went and watched this movie, not going to name the movie, but it was a war movie and it was about a person in their experiences after the war.

And yes, it was PTSD that they were talking about. And they started showing the emotional signs that he was having, the struggles he was having, literally just laid PTSD out in the movie. And I'm sitting there bawling like a baby, my son to look at me like John or dad, what are you doing?

And I was crying, trying not to cry loudly in the theater, but I was crying because I could relate to every single aspect of PTSD that the war veteran was having. So it was painful for me.

I knew exactly what he was going through because I was going through it. And like I said, for us who escaped the message, we were in a doomsday call to destructive cult. We were in, it's much deeper than a high control group.

The programming in our head was, I would liken it more to if the, if the guy in the movie had escaped a POW camp in, I don't know, in Korea. And he had been brainwashed and going through all the trauma of PTSD from the war and the PTSD from the brainwashing because we had literally that combination.

thing that I came to understand is you can leave a high control group, but your nervous system may still think you're in danger after you leave. So I was struggling with that. And you know, the chronic fear that we had from the judgment, the punishment, the apocalypse, all of that's in the back of your head. And like you said, the identity crisis, we had the cult identity that was forced in us. I, the term that I've used and it's my own, it's not anything I've read. I, I just say basically our identities were hijacked because

they ripped ours out. They, they imprinted the cult identity and literally our identities. Those who came in later after they had formed an identity, their identities were erased. Mine was just hijacked from me and it developed because I was born and raised in it. So your thoughts, your instincts, nothing can be trusted. You don't know what parts of your identity came from the cult, what parts of your identity is authentic. There, there are so many things that cause trauma, but at all, for me, it all goes back to the central theme that trauma can sometimes cause other traumas and the root cause. If you can understand what that

root cause is and start addressing that, you can start to slow down all of the other traumas and work through them. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing your story. It's, it's a beautiful story of you being vulnerable to others who might also struggle to be a little bit more open and vulnerable about their lived experiences, which people who struggle with post-traumatic symptoms or trauma themselves tend to not want to be very vulnerable because we are afraid of being hurt, right? So I think it might be nice to start out with a little bit of shared vocabulary because I know some of your audience may not have a lot of, you know, educational

and what it is, what it looks like. And they may not have had that experience of watching this movie that I'm not sure what it is, but now I'm curious. But I think it's important that we have this stigma of trauma is only for severe, like, war or assault kind of tight events. And we've actually learned through research that that is not true. And we often tend to conflate the event or the stressor with the trauma. And so we have stress and we have stressors and stressors are the event. So for a person experiencing a stressor

that might be a car accident, it might be a shark attack, a hurricane, an actual disaster, which is becoming more and more common. And we might have things like repeated stressors, repeated traumatic events or potentially traumatic events. So that could be abuse, neglect, maltreatment, cruelty from appearance, you know, discriminatory actions, things like that. Things that you would see in a cult quite regularly.

excessively enforcing guilt or shame on someone, excessive punishment that does not fit the crime, especially for children. And there's something to be said for that because we tend to think the event is what causes PTSD. And when you think about PTSD, there usually is an event associated with it. It has a certain, it has an end date, and you know, not necessarily concrete. Let me put a little stopper here and there, but there's research to say there's something called complex PTSD.

And this is a little bit different in that it's more associated with repeated trauma, repeated events. So that is more likely what's going on with individuals who come out of a cult. And it's particularly common to start in childhood. And that has really profound complex effects on our biology, our brain, our neuroendocrine system, all of the systems that are built to help us survive are being pressure cooked in this environment that tells us, James Day is coming tomorrow. Brandon said the day of, you know, in times is tomorrow. So our biology starts to adapt to that, getting us prepared in ways

that might not be so adaptive outside of the cult. It's really not adaptive in general. So I think it's just important to teach everyone that the stressor is not the stress. The traumatic event is not the trauma, and everyone is different. Not everyone will have the same response.

So you can have a whole platoon of soldiers exposed to the same war event, and not all of them are going to come home with PTSD. And I think that's just important for everyone to recognize. So if you, I experience a level of symptoms that is different than someone else in your family who escaped a cold, that's okay. Everyone's different. It's the complexity that I really want to dive deeper into. Maybe not in this podcast, because I know we have a specific subject, but there's so many things that go with it that people don't think about. There is, and there's probably a better term

for this than what I'm coming up with off the fly, but there is like an authority trauma. You have this picture of what God is, and they have created this vision of God that is this just God of vengeance, God of wrath. It's not the God of the Bible, but they have linked that to the leadership. And so when you think about the leaders, you're thinking about their version of God, and you associate that same type of vengeance and wrath in the leader, and you can hear verbally almost every Sunday if you're going to these churches, right? And yet at the same time,

that wrath and that vengeance is tied to what you consider to be your safety and your safety net, your shield, right? So this, when you leave, this creates this long-term, I don't know, hyper-vigilance to try to escape all of this, and it brings you into a state trauma, just thinking about all of the things that might happen because of the way the world has been shaped in your head.

And it takes a long time to unshape that version of the world from your head. So all of that is, it's related to complex PTSD. It's just one attribute. Yeah, you're touching on a lot of important things.

One of which is you do change in response to this constant fear and that hypervigilance isn't just in your head in the way that we say, let's just in your head, like in our culture, right?

It's just in your head. It's just made up. It is legitimately in your head as in, it's in your brain. Your brain is adapting to prioritize hypervigilance in such a way that you grew up in a world where fear was the norm, anxiety was the norm.

And so your body said, I must live in a state of hypervigilance so that any given notice I can mobilize resources to parts of my body to get me up out of here to survive.

Like your fight and flight response systems are constantly activated. And you over time develop a predisposition to live in that state of hypervigilance. And in turn, the part of your brain that processes what stressor is triggering it starts to kind of take a back seat and the part of your body that says, press the gas and mobilize resources and live in a chronic state of being able to mobilize resources is the one that's in the driver's seat and it's pressing on the gas.

And that does take a toll on your body. And it starts to become the norm for your brain. And we have lots of research to support that. And I love that stuff. That's nerdy.

But some of us are more likely than others to adapt to this. And I think it's important to, we can touch on a little bit. However much you want to let everyone know that those of us who are more likely to change to our environment are more likely to change for the good and the bad.

So you're more likely to be affected by the negative events in your life as much as you are the positive. So if anyone out there is listening and you're like, oh, I am one of many children in my home who grew up in the message and I'm the only one who suffers with major depression and PTSD and all of these horrible things, no one else seems to suffer.

Well, just so you know, you're more sensitive. You're not more vulnerable. You're not, you know, suffering a greater deficit. You're just more sensitive. And so I think that's just something for the audience to take away.

You're just more malleable to the environment. You just need the right soil to put your roots down in. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about recognizing it because a lot of people don't, they don't even know they have these struggles, right?

I've got hit with something that was shocking to me. I do all of my own mechanical work on my vehicles. So among all of the other tech stuff I do in the music, I'm also an auto mechanic, believe it or not.

And I've changed, I don't know how many hundreds of times I've changed breaks of myself, my other car... cars, my cars we've sold and I changed the brakes one day of changing the pads and I put the pads on inside out which causes a huge problem right because the part that's supposed to squeeze the disc doesn't squeeze it and I always check it before I call it done so I drove around the block and it made the most awful noise.

Jacked it up, I took the brakes back apart and I could see that I did it wrong and I felt like my my head must have been numb because I did not really this is something I would never do right so put it all back together drove it around the road drove it around the block did the same exact thing again and I knew then something is bad wrong and I started thinking well I'm losing my mental faculties that's the first thought that goes in your head right well long story short I'm suffering trauma so badly that I'm starting to disassociate

a little bit I'm starting to feel numb in the head I can't think clearly people that I've talked to that are experiencing this they say things like I felt like I was watching my body from the outside and everything that I was doing I was I was somewhere else just looking at it or they say I feel like I don't know nothing none of the emotions are stinging like they used to sting whenever I'm angry I'm not as ain't not as angry as I was I'm not as happy as I was I'm just kind of numb and there are many things psychologically

that can cause this but the cult PTSD is definitely one that can cause this so there are several symptoms like this let's let's talk through some of the symptoms yeah and so I like that you're pointing out that there's a lot of things that can cause different symptoms and I just as a scientist want to pick on the fact that diagnoses are kind of arbitrary we treat symptoms and we treat people we don't treat diagnosis so just kind of picking on that and fun facts there are several hundred different diagnostic combinations from the current version of the DSM that can give you a diagnosis for PTSD and it would simultaneously

give you one for major depressive disorder so just keeping that in mind you are exactly right that's why it's really hard to kind of figure out what's going on and I just want everyone to keep in mind that that doesn't matter just remembering your symptoms and that you deserve treatment is what's really important some things that tend to be really characteristic of individuals who might be struggling with trauma you're kind of picking up on and one is brain fog or memory memory issues right and if you talk if you think about that hypervigilance and how it takes a toll on your body and your brain it impacts

your ability to actually form memories and one way in which it's doing that is it impacts your sleep individuals with trauma tend to not have great sleep they tend to have insomnia they tend to also have nightmares or night terrors and that is one of the things that is pretty characteristic but mood dysregulation so you might have this flattened affect or this kind of numbness, but then you also might be very easily frustrated or very easily aroused, because you live in this state of hypervigilance.

It doesn't take very much to get a person who's struggling with trauma to a state of high levels of anger. So what might make someone like my husband who I characterizes is very much, happy-go-lucky dandelion, is really hard to make him mad.

It might take him like a whole bucket of stress to get to a level five, and he can take me a drop in the bucket. And I'm in a level 12. I'm like, sorry, husband, I'm so sorry.

Just like, that's what the difference is. They live up here in this state of stress. So it doesn't take much to go from their baseline to this really high state of emotional expression. And it could be anger or sadness, but it's usually not a comfortable emotion.

I like to say comfortable instead of negative, because all emotions are welcome. In my world, they're adaptive. They have a place. You're like, me, and she's screaming and all of a therapy, yes, I am, but it's true.

So those are some fearfulness avoidance. And typically, you'll tend to also really want to avoid things that are distressing or setting and remind you of some of your past traumas. I know for me, and having lived in the message, it's been a really long time before I was comfortable revisiting Christianity and spirituality from more than just a research history type of perspective and revisiting what that looks to me.

Because I've always felt like my God was taken from me, and that's not fair. But that sort of avoidance is typical. Or you might have certain sounds that remind you of certain events in your life that you don't like, certain smells.

Or emotions are really common to be revisited. Or you might revisit those memories cognitively as well. So it's almost like a flashback. You replay those things. And I want to just practice something that my own therapist teaches me, we visit.

We do not live there. So when you catch yourself getting stuck in those thoughts, you want to try and not unpack your bags. It's like, hotel California. Once you unpack your bags, you're never leaving.

You can't check out. So we don't want to live in these memories. We want to try and acknowledge that they're there and move on to the best that you can, which often requires getting help and support.

But yeah, those are some pretty characteristic things. If you're seeing these, taking a couple of boxes, might be time to reach out and get some support. Yeah. I don't know if any of that resonates for you, John.

Absolutely. Yeah, and so I'll give the example of what not to do. And I can give it because I did it. There are people, so with what's a good example? Bipolar disorder. They're people that when they get in the manic state, they love it because they are just blazingly on fire.

They're bouncing off the walls with energy. They're getting 10 to 15 times the things done that they normally do. And then they go to the depressive state and everything stops. And they just... their world ends. And then they go back to the manic phase and their Steve Jobs was bipolar.

And so many of the things that we take for granted from Apple came because of his high energy moments and the things that he did. Well, whenever you have this kind of trauma and it puts you in this state, there are attributes of that state that kind of resemble that. And I can say, surely, you know, clearly I can say I'm not bipolar. But whenever I got to the point where the trauma was causing me to lose sleep, I was at the point where I would get two hours of sleep whether I needed it or not. And then the whole rest of the time, I was dumping it into all of this

research and building the website and the platforms and the books and the, you can't even imagine all of the things that I did. There are things that I did technologically to make all of this happen.

That most people would never even consider. And I did it because I didn't need sleep. Well, that's not the right way to handle that. I can tell you that. But there are health consequences that come with doing that. And a lot of people who are in this trauma and realize, hey, I don't need sleep. I look at all of the things I can do. Well, your cortisol stays high.

I have diabetes now. Many of the things that are caused by the trauma can also cause diabetes. I have a family history as well, but I did not have any of this until the trauma hit me.

So your immune system weakens over time because you're not getting enough sleep. Your inflammation increases. There are people who leave and they get into trauma. They have pain all over the body and they can't explain what it is. What is this pain I've got, right? Your digestion starts to break down. Your, the sleep causes a whole array of different things, different problems in your body. But for me, the biggest one was really the digestion because that's the root cause of all of the other pains that you have in your body. So if you are like me and you realize, hey, I don't

need sleep, but you're in this trauma and you're angry of what they have done to you, you can channel that anger and you can do a million things that you never thought you'd be able to do. It's not that healthy. It's better to go get some help. Yeah, so we can get real nerdy here. He brought science to study five guys. We get real nerdy here. I love that you're bringing up and sharing your personal experiences with diabetes. That is actually really related to your stress response systems and I have loved ones who do experience diabetes and when they're stressed levels are high.

So their blood sugar is also struggling despite they're not having any lifestyle or behavioral changes and that's really frustrating for them. But your body has kind of a long-term response system for handling stress and then it's got a quicker one. The quicker one being a neurotransmitter one and the longer response one being more glucocorticoids or for stress response hormones.

And so we'd like to think of cortisol as the bad guy, but I like to reframe that as it's someone that's keeping you going, it's keeping you alive, it does a lot more than just activate your fight or flight response.

But you have within your stress response system, you've got a parasympathetic nervous system and a sympathetic nervous system. And this is just giving you kind of degraded, but you know, a little bluet blunt.

But one likes to be the brakes, someone likes to be the gas. And your brake system, I like to affectionately describe as your biological self-care system. It makes sure that your stomach lining is well maintained so that you don't as likely get infections or ulcers.

That's why the bris don't get ulcers. Love that, Robert's post-gibotic lung droplet will see there. But your sympathetic nervous system is pressing on the gas. It's saying, nope, forget digestion. It's saying, dilate the pupils.

It's saying, make our lungs pump harder, so we can get oxygen to our muscles, get glucose going to, our muscles, hence diabetes is effective, right? So your sympathetic nervous system is activated. It's pressing on the gas.

This comes at a cost because you're not devoting biological resources to your biological self-care. This also is something that undermines reproductive success for women, or I don't want to say success, that sounds a little bit barbaric, but it makes it difficult to conceive when you're in a high state of stress.

And this is true for women and men, or those of us with egresses. So you have to remember that when you live in a high state of stress, your body is devoting resources to keeping you alive and being in a state of preparedness for fight or flight.

And that means you're right, inflammation is up. Inflammation is meant to protect you from infection. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But when you live in a state of inflammation, that's when we have a problem.

That's when we see cellular degradation. We see telemetric breakdown. And I like that you also brought up pain to go off on a little side tangent. So we're seeing a lot of really interesting research come out of the genetics literature.

And it seems like something that is really associated with self-harm, which is my background, is pain, chronic pain, from a genetics point. Like those of us with a genetic predisposition to have higher experiences with pain are more likely to struggle with those behavioral tendencies of self-harm.

So it's interesting. Blood work also seems to differ in ways that we don't really understand from a scientific perspective. And it's kind of suggested that there might be something going on in the realm of our sensitivity and reactivity to stress.

So something that we haven't really talked about is it's not just whether or not you're likely to respond to this stress and how you respond, but how long it takes you to come back down to baseline.

So many of us with trauma, we stay in that hyper vigilance, whereas those who don't, they have a system that helps them come back down to normal levels of whatever they're normal levels of alpha amylase and cortisol and all the good things are that help keep us regulated.

And so that is really bad for your health if you live in that state. But you can, you can get, you know, some supports to help you adjust that. And it is actually true.

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Part of the reason why I wanted to have this particular discussion, I have family members who have autoimmune disorders and I have friends who do. Lupus was a common thing. I don't know if it was in the message where you were, but I can count several people that I know of who have Lupus.

And I was thinking after leaving white, white is this. They weren't related, but yet it seemed to be more widespread. And so I began to study Lupus and I began to study some of the, you know, you can't really find a root cause with that type of disease, but you can find correlations.

And one of the correlations that I found was trauma and cult trauma is within the range of trauma. So there's a lot of problems that exist with relation to cult trauma. Before we go there, however, I want to also talk about another problem that the cult trauma causes.

When people are in this experience, especially in the pain, they tend to want to self-medicate. And when you try to self-medicate, that's a whole array of problems that people don't really think about and they don't associate them with the trauma.

Thinking, you can become an alcoholic if you have cult trauma, if you have pain, if you have any trauma or any pain, if you're not careful and if you start abusing any substance that you overdue, you can start abusing it.

One of the interesting things for me, like I said, I've studied psychology like crazy after leaving the message. And there came a point where I recognized that I had high anxiety disorders and it was worse after leaving.

And I recognized after leaving that I had it all along and didn't realize that I think we talked about this. But after leaving, I started to recognize that not only had I had it in the cult, it's now getting worse after I've left the cult.

Why is this? And that's what really drove me down the path of studying psychology as much as I could. And I was, I just happened to be at a business meeting. I don't know if it was you I shared this story with or somebody else, but they had an open bar.

I'd never drank in my life. I, you know, in the message it was wrong. We were, we were T totalers. And they had an open bar with nothing but top shelf liquor. And I'm sitting here drinking a glass of water in this business meeting.

And the lady next to me said, why aren't you drinking, John? This is like the best stuff you can get anywhere. And it's all open bar. And for the first time in my life, I couldn't say I don't drink for religious purposes.

And I didn't know what to say other than I just simply don't do it. And then the waiter came and they didn't pour just water at your table. They poured water and top shelf white wine.

And so here I am with white wine in front of me. I've never drank it before. And the anxiety was so bad for me at that point. This was around 2013. It felt like needles were going in my head in and out, in and out constantly.

So I was suffering with pain, unbelievable pain in my head. Well, long story short, I thought I would try just a little bit of the wine and see because I'd never tried it before.

And I drank just a little bit, not the whole glass, but it was just enough to take the edge off a little bit. And then the pain that I felt going in and out of my head stopped.

So in the hotel at night, I'm thinking there's no way that was the wine. The whole next day of the meeting, I didn't, I couldn't think of anything else. And I'm there on business, right?

So I'm struggling. I wanted to know, I want to try that again and see, was that really what happened? So my scientific mind kicked in and I did my own scientific experiment and I drank probably a fourth of the glass, not that much.

And sure enough, it took the edge off, my anxiety went down. I was on depression meds for the anxiety. I didn't realize that it, that was the anxiety, was the root cause. And I got back, I started drinking just one glass a week, that's all a drink.

I don't like to drink that much. But after about, I don't know, two, three months, I was able to come off my depression meds because the anxiety was cut. Now, I could have went without having studying and known that people will abuse.

I could have went just wild with this. So let's have it every night, let's drink two or three glasses and try to overdo it. And that would have actually made things worse for me instead of better.

So self-medication is a problem and alcohol is just one example. There are an array of things that people do from pornography to alcohol to drugs, etc. But it's this idea that you're self-medicating to solve the problem that you don't even recognize what is.

Wow, you're open up. Pandora's box. Just rip off the band-aid. I love this. Okay. That was really, I'm really proud of you for opening up that, because I know that in our culture there are some behaviors that are not healthy that we loved, praise, and reinforce and I'm actually going to open that Pandora's Box next, but substance misuse is not one of them.

We tend to highly stigmatize alcohol misuse and you're right to call that one out. So my understanding of the literature from those who have left cults, they have a high rate of substance misuse and addiction.

Be that for alcohol or other substances like marijuana or illicit drugs. You are exactly right. You are hitting a nail on the head and those are things that can be addressed and treated for first and foremost and so fun fact, I don't know if you know this, they actually have drugs that make alcohol not so fun.

It helps you actually not want to drink. Most people don't know that it's out there and it's actually very affordable. I love science, right? This is why we need to invest in science. We can literally give you a drug that if you're struggling with alcohol use and misuse and you feel like you can't stop, we can give you a drug that actually goes, huh?

I don't like this anymore, fun, right? So science, good stuff. But that is not true for everyone. Anyway, there are other things that are associated with cult trauma as well, particularly religious trauma. And that is, I'm going to tiptoe around this because if you're going to get flagged on YouTube for one thing, it's going to be this one, disordered behaviors relating to how you give yourself nutrition.

So that's my nice way of saying ED and I'm not talking about sexual dysfunction, funny, they won't flag you for that one, but they'll flag you for ED and I'm talking about A and A or B in, so anorexia or bulinia.

So these things are actually really common and they have a high rate of co-occurrence with substance misuse, particularly alcohol. So that is just something to be aware of. If you are struggling with these things and you've left the cult or a cult in general, that if you're struggling with these things, please seek help.

Those things are extremely dangerous and in fact, of all of the mental health disorders out there, the one with the highest mortality rate is actually eating disorders. So do not struggle alone and if you are struggling with both that and alcohol misuse, please get help.

You're not alone. Yeah, just want to make sure that that is out there, but it's funny that you talk about how it just takes the edge off and it's so easy compared to what you are getting as a medication and it's because it's an immediate reward.

It immediately takes the edge off because your dopamine response system is like, oh well, like this. This is great. I always joke when people feel so it's not a joke, but when people feel so stigmatized about struggling with alcohol, like if you give me an animal in a lab, which I would never do, I'm a vegetarian, I would never do this, I hate animal research, but it's true.

And animal addicted to anything, if you gave me a person and I gave them alcohol and they've never had it before, I can almost guarantee you that they're going to like it. So I am not at all surprised and you are exactly...

right when I was growing up, alcohol was absolutely no, no, no, no, no, I did not try alcohol until I was in college. So yeah, I'm not at all surprised that John and, you know, his business meeting was like, oh, this is nice. Oh, of course it was, especially was Top Shell.

Yeah. And the funny part is, you know, after leaving, I've watched my friends who have left and they're just, you know, they really, really like their alcohol. I actually don't like it. I do, from medicinal purposes and I, like, if I have a cold or something, I'll drink it with honey and they're, they're ways that I use it that are helpful, but I just, I'm not that big of a fan. It's, I like to be in control and it doesn't let me stay in control and that's, that's really the big thing. But so let's talk about the, the autoimmune disorders

and the other, the health issues that are related to trauma because I don't think people recognize this. I knew a lot of people who had migraines, for example, and it, it seemed like, you know, growing up, it seemed like, well, that's a thing that everybody's going to get when they get to be an adult. And I came to realize after leaving, no, not everybody suffered. Yes, people do, but not everybody suffers with it. And it just simply goes back to the unexplained pains. There are things that happen when you're in trauma that you just can't explain. Your

body starts doing it. And all of the treatments that exist for migraines, they'll say, well, that just doesn't work. This medicine, that it's no good for me. What's because they're treating the wrong thing? You treat the trauma to get rid of these pains that are plaguing your body. And they're, that's just one example. There's several other examples that I'll let you talk through, but it's all back to cult trauma. It's funny. I'm learning something from you. And so I want to be mindful of my lived experience and those in my life who are not here to consent to this information being given. But it's funny that you mentioned

Lupus because this is news to me. And yet Lupus runs in my family amongst individuals who were also in the message. And I spent quite a long time and it was quite stressful during graduate school at a cancer doctor, a hematologist, and even had to go back recently. And we cannot figure out what's wrong with me. And so that's my lived experience that I am permitted to share.

I do not have Lupus, but it does seem like my blood work tends to look like I might have it, but I don't. So it's just interesting. We do have a lot of science to show the individuals with mental health conditions that are pretty severe tend to have different inflammatory markers.

And they also have different blood markers that aren't related to inflammation. And then the reverse is true. More inflammation. You have, sorry, more trauma, more inflammatory markers, and more differences in your blood work. So both mental health conditions, even without trauma, your blood work tends to look different. And then lots of trauma, your blood work tends to look different. So what also might be going on that I think is important to talk about is a lot of, a lot of times I hear individuals just with This assumption that trauma equals Y, X predicts Y.

Trauma predicts lupus or, you know, or schizophrenia, or you can hear the word, like, shared religious psychosis, and I always go, oh, that's not how this works. So there is DNA, you have a genetic predisposition, for example, to lupus, right?

But you have what we call in your DNA methylation. So you wanna think of like your genome being covered by soil, and your environment is constantly digging at that soil, and it's digging at it in certain areas, and it's gonna make it more or less likely that something pops up and expresses itself.

Is this the seed that's gonna pop up through the soil? And so that might be what's going on for individuals with autoimmune disorders. If you are exposed to an environment that is shaping your stress response system to be more active and triggering this genetic predisposition to express itself, that's what we call phenotype.

But that might be what's going on, and I had never thought about this in relation to, you know, colt trauma, but I'm also not like a geneticist. So there's not a geneticist, but that might be going on there.

I know there's also some really interesting research since you talked on individuals with bipolar and psychosis, and substance misuse, there's some really interesting genomic research going on that shows individuals with a genetic predisposition towards these conditions who are exposed chronically to high THC levels are at greater risk for first episode psychosis, and that is through DNA methylation.

It's digging at that soil to make it more likely with that genetic predisposition is expressed. So I think it's a little bit of both. You're never doomed just because you got X and Y or whatever from mom and dad, but if it is such that you got that, and then you're putting this environment, you are more likely to have that expressed.

So that might be what's going on there with lupus. That's an interesting thing you've picked up on there, and then it just so happens that that runs in my family too. So, ha, go figure.

Yeah, and the science aspect of this, that's actually why I wanted to talk through this with you, because they're, like I said, it is not something that's directly caused by the colt trauma, but there is a correlation, and the correlation is through the trauma to be clear.

It's not specifically colt trauma. It is through the trauma. If I remember correctly, the study that I found, it was, the study began basically with some nurses study on high levels, what was it, childhood, childhood emotional abuse.

There's a correlation between childhood emotional abuse and lupus and other autoimmune diseases. And so I started digging into this, and I found the relationship between the trauma, which would include colt trauma, and the autoimmune risks that come with it, which would include lupus, the autoimmune disease.

So, I started to notice all of these, relations, and then I was thinking through all of my family that had not only lupus but other autoimmune diseases, and that's really what set this off. An interesting side tidbit, you mentioned bipolar, and I did earlier. Dr. Steven Hassan gave a, I think it was a TED talk, but he was talking about a person who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking, I don't know what it was, lithium or whatever is the bipolar medication. It wasn't working, it wasn't helping, and he was able to identify that it was actually the cult, complex PTSD

and trauma that they were seeing the same symptoms as bipolar disorder, but it was actually cult related. It wasn't bipolar disorder, and so they were able to get off of their, those meds and get, I guess, different meds, but it's a correlation between the symptoms and the trauma is really what I'm trying to say, and the autoimmune response, it's also a correlation to the trauma. So when I found this, I'm like, well, it suddenly starts to make sense. I remember talking to people who, and seeing photographs of people, when they were in the cult, you see the cult photograph, and you see the one after, and they look healthier.

And why is this? They actually are healthier in many cases, because they were under such stress and trauma that the body is showing this physical trauma response while they're in the cult. Then they leave, if they can break free from the cult PTSD that they have, then they start to blossom, and you can see it even in their photographs.

Yeah, I love that example that you gave, and you are exactly right when you aren't living in that state of hypervigilance, your biological self-care side can start to take more precedence. That is something that might be a nice kind of way to move in the direction, you know, how, all right, so we've been y'all as in phone, and what do you do with it? So you do have your prefrontal cortex, and that is how you appraise stressors, and that tends to take a back seat to our stress response system, like you're a migdala, when you do experience

trauma, particularly chronic trauma, it tends to say, nope, we're just gonna live in a state of hypervigilance that undermines our health. But if you can get out of that and start to learn to think differently, reappraise situations differently, then you have the advantage of not seeing the world as scary, as frightful, as anxiety inducing, and so that's when your biological self-care system can start to come into play. I think it's important to talk about how, you know, those who are grown up and raised in these environments, that can become especially more difficult to do compared to someone who has a much

more time-limited, stressful event, like PTSD that's more time-limited as opposed to complex or childhood PTSD, or these symptoms that are more chronic, because you don't really have, like, these skills to go back to that prefrontal cortex does change in response to these chronic stressors, so it's just kind of important to think about that. But you can, through things like cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, learn to appraise things differently. And so individuals who are a little bit less sensitive to their environment, like my husband, I tell him he's a band-line, you can mow him over in the hot door to heat with a lawn mower and he'd hop right back up. They are usually a little

bit better at re-appraising the world. Things seem to be a lot less stressful. They see the silver lining and a lot of things. And you can teach yourself, especially with how to do that. And that is actually a helpful way to adjust your stress response systems reaction to the world and help you to bring back yourself to baseline. I'm kind of like hydrating the conversation.

But those of us who are a little bit more sensitive were more like orchids. And if you've ever had one and you put more than three ice cubes in it, it's done. It's done. If you put it too close to the air conditioner, it's done. It's wilted or you didn't give it enough light. Now it's leaves are yellow and it's done. But if you give it exactly what it needs, it is beautiful. It's exceptional. It's extraordinary. So if you find that you tend to react more easily or more sensitively like to your environment, you just need the right tools and then you will be okay.

So don't feel doom and glam. I am definitely more of an orchid person. It does not take much to get me aroused and I will react very strongly. But I have gotten more tools in my toolbox to make sure I react to the things I want to and react in like the level I want to compared to what I used to. But yeah, I had your conversation there. Sorry. No, that's fine. I think we should probably talk some about what people should do if they have listened to this and they found some of those symptoms in their daily life because I'm certain that there are people that have. But before we go

there and I'll let you take that one. But before we go there, I want to also address the fact that when people have these kind of things, they tend to blame themselves. So especially if you've escaped a cult because cults train people to self-police or police others and there's a whole cult dynamic that comes to play. But you start to feel like if you can't get over this yourself, you're a moral failure. And that's simply not the case. There are times where the complex PTSD is so severe. You actually have to get help or you may struggle with it for years and years and

may all may struggle with it forever if you don't get help. So let's talk about what we do if we've recognized that we may have this. Where do we go? How do we get help? What steps do we take?

Yeah, I think that's a great way to kind of conclude on like all right, next steps folks because I know someone out there is listening and says, oh, I identify with a lot of these little checkmarks.

That excessive guilt that you mentioned too, I think is born out of a lot of individuals with complex PTSD have a negative sense of self or disorganized self. Or it's like a, there's different types of symptoms and a lot of symptoms with complex PTSD, actually overlap with borderline personality disorder, but they are different, but they're very similar.

And so it's not quite the same thing as emotion dysregulation, but they do tend to have a lower sense of self, lower self-esteem, lower self-worth and self-value, which me as a self-harm and suicide prevention researcher is big red flag, we want to boost that.

You need reasons for living, hope, you need a strong sense of self. But if you're recognizing some of these things ring true for you, I want to acknowledge that there is help out there for you and it is efficacious, meaning it works.

However, I also want to acknowledge that sometimes it's hard, it's expensive, it's time consuming. The first place to start I think might be if you have a primary care physician, you can reach out to them and tell them that you are experiencing these symptoms.

A lot of them are trained to give you some tools to take home with you while you wait to get in with a therapist or a mental health care practitioner because I do know and acknowledge depending on where you live or the resources you have, the wait list can be long and it can be very frustrating.

So that's a nice first step. I know a lot of apps now, like Xoctop or your insurance app, you can a lot of times type in what you're looking for, like a therapist, a psychologist, they'll even let you pick the gender or if you want someone who's trained to bring in religion into your therapy, there's a lot of APA, American Psychological Association credited therapist who also are trained to bring in spiritualities of strength into the therapeutic alliance, not just as a stressor because some of that is true for us.

So it can be something to be supplemental and not be a stressor. But that's another place to start. The APA also has like a website where you can look up accredited therapists in your area.

That's another way to go. And then there's also, many people don't know this, but if you live near a university with an accredited psychological program where they're training clinical psychologists, sometimes they have what's called a sliding scale, which means you can pay based on your income because therapy is expensive and insurance is don't cover it as well as they should.

And this would be you going and getting therapy from an individual who's still in training, but they are supervised from a much more experienced license professional. So that's also something to look into. So these are all great places to start and the internet's also a wealth of information.

I would say stay away from TikTok. TikTok's great, but not for this. But yeah, that would be a good one, but definitely reach out and get help. Yeah, the only thing I'll add to that is also stay away from AI because AI, if you have mental health disorders, it tailors its responses to you, to appease you.

And it will lead you into a path of no return. It really will. If you're not careful with how you use AI, so avoid it if you're struggling. But thank you so much for doing this.

No, it was a pleasure. I hope this was helpful for someone. So 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.

From 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.