YWAM & Indoctrinated Obedience: "Hearing God" to Control Youth

Hello, 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 co-host and friend, Jenny McGrath, founder of Indwell Movement. Jenny, it's good to be back and to go through talking about all of the psychological issues that you and I kind of grew up with and the things that plague our minds. I get so excited when I talk to you because it's almost like therapy for me, which is helpful in a way. But of so many things that are

happening right now, I don't know if you've seen it, your first podcast has now come out and it's got excellent feedback. In fact, I've got emails in my inbox that I'm still going through to digest and answer. People who are wanting to be anonymous, but from Y-Wam and they're wanting to hear more. So just like me, they're excited to hear more and I'm excited to record with you, but this this is great. This is turning out really good and feedback, like I said, it's it's mostly positive. We have a few haters out there, but for the most part

it's positive and good to be back. Thank you for coming back. Thank you so much for having me. I know I know I was at a conference last week and I really felt the absence of our conversation. I was really looking forward to being back today. So as you talk, the way this works for everybody who is not familiar with me, I'm very impromptu with everything that I do. Most conversations I never prepare for because they'd never turn out really good if you do. So I literally come up with a topic, I hand it to Jenny and she says, okay, that sounds great. And today I

come up with the things that I have written down in the past conversations we've had, but the big one for me is the consequences of indoctrinated obedience. There are many things that as an adult, whenever I became a parent, I never really thought about how difficult it was for myself. And then that cascades forward to my children because because I'm programmed like this, I think this is the way it should be. I do the same thing to my children. And it turns into a nightmare, especially after your escape, because after your escape, you're in this weird world where you want to do

it because that's the way I was raised. And by golly, my parents did it to me. I'm going to do it to you. But on the other hand, it really limits growth and there's a lot of consequences. So I wanted to talk to those consequences, but first I wanted to ask, is this something that is related to your experience in Y-WAM, youth with a mission?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think there was this really big influence in Y-WAM. It's one of the values of Y-WAM is hearing the voice of God. And that is very precarious. If you don't have a very solid relationship with yourself or if you're in these situations that are based on hierarchy.

And so a lot of times it was not that I was supposed to hear the voice of God, but that I was supposed to listen to my leaders who were hearing the voice of God on my behalf. So if a leader said, I had a dream and this is what you were doing, it really was unquestioned for me.

Whether or not it was actually something I wanted to do or not. I think I mentioned in one of our episodes, I had a stint working in the preschool at Y-WAM, which I never wanted to do.

But I had a leader that said, I had a dream and you were leading our preschool. And that was that. Like there was no, well, I don't want you to do that because consent and what I wanted to do was not part of the equation. It was what does God want to do, which more often translated what do your leaders need you to do and what do they need from you in this moment?

That's such a good point. And actually when I was thinking through this topic, that's something that I didn't think of and I'm like shocked that I didn't because that's so indoctrinated, it should be at the top. Because we were indoctrinated like this, I can already foresee, because I'm a prophet, I can foresee the comments that will come into the feed, obedience is a Christian thing. You can't be blasting this. They go with all of these insults and comments. But the problem is they have been indoctrinated to the extent that they mistakenly think that the leadership is also God. In the way that it has presented, it's much like if you

study the ancient religions, the ancient pharaohs, they were seen as the God to the people and the worship God through the pharaoh. Ironically, when you look at the types of movements that have sprung from all of this mess, it's the same thing. The leadership is God. And whenever they want you to do something, they will say I had a dream, I had a vision, or even simply I had this feeling.

It felt like God was telling me that you need to go do X, Y and Z. And that's literally how it works. They're playing the God card. And so you think it's God and you think, well, I must be obedient to God. But in many cases, it's not. They're misusing their authority. So it creates this multifaceted problem that, like I said, I just am fascinated to explore it. On one hand, you're being spiritually abused and you're thinking that God is is controlling you through this person.

But on the other hand, that cascades down, if you're a parent, it cascades down to your children. Now you actually start to do things like this. I know I never did with my kids that I remember, but I know that my parents did with me and they would play the God card.

And I know other families who their parents would do that. You start to mimic the cult leaders when you're in this type of environment. And so you too are doing it. The irony is, if you're a Christian, it's pure blasphemy.

I mean, it is. It really is creating a sense of idolatry of people. And these people become what you think you're listening to. And I'm thinking about, there's a band I really love called Bird Talker.

And they have come from a world of unpacking a lot of high control religion. And in one of their songs, they say, tell me again how you can talk to God and how he tells you what to do and how you know it's not your own thoughts disguised as something absolute.

And I think it can be this very dangerous thing when we create these systems of authoritarianism and those that are on the top just so happen to somehow have special ears tuned to the frequency of God when I am a firm believer that if we are people who believe in a spirit or a God that we may also have communion and some way of connecting to that God that doesn't require us to go through a third party to get there.

And I think that that's a really dangerous place. And I think that's how a lot of these high control spaces get formed because we may not feel the confidence to trust our own relationship to ourselves or what we may consider a higher power.

Absolutely. And it really breaks down trust. If somebody is manipulating you like this, sometimes whenever you are being threatened with this thought that God is telling you to do something and then you find out that you're doing the wrong thing.

Well, then you're faced with the question suddenly, well, did God tell me to do the wrong thing? Is God an impassile? I've seen this happen in certain situations. So your views of what is God and your views of what is obedience changes significantly.

And from a, you know, from an indoctrinated perspective whenever you're in this type of movement, you're being taught that you must yield, you must submit. And I'm saying that very delicately because there are passages in the Bible that talk about submission to God.

But people in the movement have associated that submission to the leadership, not... to God. So they've been taught that by submitting to the leader, you are also submitting to God. By submitting to your pastor, you are all submitting to God. But there's nowhere in the Bible that says you must submit to the human authorities. In fact, there are many passages that completely overturn that idea. But when you're in trained in this manipulated in this type of environment and you're doing this, now your submission is basically breaking your will. And that's a thought that really hit me hard after I left. I went back through, we had all of the recordings of our

central figure, so it made it really easy to do. But I went through all of the statements talking about breaking the will. I think one of them I told you there was, there was this pseudo-parable that he would tell how a good shepherd will break the legs of his sheep so that they don't wander astray. That's submission to whole new levels, man. That's, it's horrific that they would say something like that. But that was a common doctrine. The leadership can actually break you, and they wanted to break you. And being on the side where I saw, I knew the leadership a lot

better than most of the rank and fall members. I would see situations where if somebody was really headstrong, they would focus their doctrines on that person to try to break their will. Because that mindset flows from the leadership. We must break the will of the people because if we do, and they submit to us, then they're submitting to God. When I was in Wyam, I think I had a very a cleaner break than a lot of people did. I sort of just disappeared. But I, I'm thinking about this quote. I love from Rosa Luxembourg that says, those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

And I think I didn't even notice how authoritarian or manipulative it was because I was so hungry for a sense of like God being proud of me and doing what I thought would make God proud. And so that was just the easiest thing, the easiest carrot for people to say. Like if you do this, it's going to make God really happy. Or if you do this, God's going to get really excited that you're doing this. And so it was really quote unquote easy. Of course, it was so taxing and so harmful to my body. But my, my will was so conditioned to go, okay, I, you tell me to jump five

feet. I'll jump 10 feet. You tell me to run a mile. I'll run three. And it's more from folks who then are those movers or those resistors or why are you telling me to do this that those chains become really loud and the ways in which why I'm tends to try to pressure people into not leaving.

You know, a lot of people end up kind of taking a discipleship training school as sort of like a gap year. It's like, I'm going to go do this. well for five months and then I'll go to college.

But there is a lot of not so subtle pressure of why would you go to college? God can teach you everything you need. Oh, you're interested in that. We have a school for that.

And so it becomes like, you have all these tendrils on you and you don't even know that you're necessarily being manipulated because it's not presented in this very aggressive way. It's often presented in this like shiny happy people way that I think in some ways can be a little bit more insidious.

It does. And as an adult, unfortunately, I was, I think age 37, if I remember correctly, when I left my group. As an adult, when you're being trained in that obedience mindset that you must submit, you must break your will, and it doesn't eventually break your will, it almost puts your brain into an infant state.

You start to look at the ministers or the prophets apostles, et cetera, as though they're the father and mother figures. You were the infant figure. So you start to basically bottle up. You don't trust your own judgment.

You instead have to trust their judgment. And in the worst cases, I've actually been to, I've not been in the churches, but I've been with the people from the churches where that progressed to the level that they were not able to even purchase a car unless they go ask the leader.

That's how bad this got. They were literally controlling everything. I actually have one of my best friends was not able to get married until they got the approval of the pastor. And the pastor had to approve the person.

They couldn't choose the person. And the person chosen for this person, my friend, didn't work out. So he ended up with the person he really wanted. The whole thing is just such a mess.

So in its extreme levels, it can go that far. But even at the early stages before it becomes that destructive, you are submitting to the level that you want to ask the leader of these things.

Inwardly, you're an infant, basically. And that's one of the problems with this type of obedience. When it is hyper obedient, you become hyper-vigilant to try to obey, to try to please the person who is giving you the commands, which is the pastor, the prophet, the apostle, et cetera.

It's making me think this is a little side tangent. But it's making me think about many people maybe familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the idea that after we have our quote-unquote basic needs met, the final thing is self-actualization and coming into who we are.

But what I've recently learned is that that was actually a misappropriation from his time working with the Blackfoot Nation. And what he observed was that in the Black Flit Nation, they actually believed we actually come into the world as self-actualizing beings and it is the community's job to help steward this self-actualizing being and give them their needs so that they can continue growing into their truest self.

And I can't think of a more antithetical way of looking at a human being than a lot of these high-control religions that are so, you know, if you are conditioned to think that at your core you are dark and dirty and sinful and everything of you needs to be expunged so that you can somehow only have something that's not of you, then that creates this pattern of shame and self-deprecation that will really, I think, force you into doing terrible things to your own body and it will, I think, you know, I think of a lot of things fractally so what we do on a smaller scale will

always grow to a larger scale. So then we end up in fandalizing the people that we're going to serve as well and saying, well, you know, I know that I don't know your culture or anything about your situation, but I'm still going to tell you what you should do and I think that that begets this the opposite of self-actualization, whatever that word might be.

Absolutely. It changes your frame of mind such that if you can't trust your own instincts, if you can't make your decisions for yourself, you must submit, you must be obedient. Literally, you can't trust yourself and so people, so when people leave this type of environment, I face this too and I'm embarrassed to say this, but it is quite common. You start to have racing thoughts. You start to have things that were spiral out of control in your mind because you can't trust your own mind is the devil planting that thought in my head. I don't know. What is that of

the devil or is that God? And it's always this good or evil. There's not really a, well, I just simply had a thought and that's what came into my brain. It must be God or it must be the devil, it must be one or the other when you're indoctrinated like this. So you can't trust your own mind, you can't trust your own body. And when you make mistakes, now those mistakes in your head, they will spiral even further out of control. And I've seen in the worst cases, when it spirals out of control to a certain level, people just suddenly give up and they will go do things that they would

never do had they not spiraled out of control. And it creates a lot of problems in the family, the marriage, sometimes people actually get in real trouble over it. And it all comes back to the fact that if you manipulate people to be hyper obedient and and Basically you're misusing your authority to make another person submit to your will so that they don't have their own will. When you do this, you're essentially breaking a person and the consequences for that breakage continues long out even after they leave the group. People will suffer with this for a long time. What's coming to mind is, you know, I was when I was in YM. I was back

for a few months and I went into a store and I wanted to get a CD and I have this this like flailing thought that's like, I don't want you to get that. And I was like, wait, is that God telling me? God doesn't want me to get that. Is that me saying I shouldn't spend money on this? And I got the CD and I sat in the car in the parking lot sobbing and agonizing.

Like, should I take this back? Should I not? And it was like that with so many things and it was this idea that God was somehow micromanaging every single decision that I was doing and it was going to have dire consequences if I wasn't 100% obedient, whether I knew what it was or not.

And so I think that's that's where I keep using this word precarious because it's like I don't personally think God probably cared if I got a CD or not. But I was so, so, so afraid of it. And when you don't have a solid relationship with yourself and you have all of these influences, it becomes I would liken it almost to and I don't mean this diagnostically but there almost can be a schizophrenic aspect to it where you start to feel that there's so many different voices, there's so many different people inside your head and that can feel really

disorienting and really scary. And I think that that's a really common issue for a lot of folks in these worlds because the it's talked about from the pulpit as if your leaders have a very easy time deciphering what the voice of God is. So if you have any struggle or you're not really sure, then it just starts to spiral in on itself. Absolutely. You reminded me I'm a music lover and it's really odd because growing up I could only play a certain genre of music, not even just simply gospel like you would think. It had to be a subset of gospel. So as a musician, as an artist,

it was like if I was a painter, I was being told I could only paint with a color green. And then after I left, it was a lot to explore and I realized after I left that I had put myself in this musician's box that everybody else around me had grown and they were so much better at music than I was. It took me a long time to catch up and I'll never probably catch up but whenever you're at box and you're trying to be told that that is obedience, that is obedience to God.

It just, it has consequences that go far beyond even just human makeup. But the other thought that hit me is once I did start to experience new music, one of the songs that shocked me so much because the band kiss, everybody has put this weird label Knights and Satan service and all of this weird stuff. The band kiss has a song called Beth.

And the first time I heard it, I was like, this is so beautiful music. This is awesome. It's not what you would expect from kiss. And so I heard this music and I realized at that moment that not only was I putting everything into this weird box, they had literally trained my brain to believe that it must be good or evil. It can't be just because it is. In other words, kiss can't be of God. So it must be of the devil. Kiss can't, you know, they put all of these frames of reference that's either black or white, good or bad, good or evil, angels or demons.

And kiss were the demons. And I started to realize that I don't like all of the kiss songs, but there were a handful of songs I just really, really liked. And I started to listen to those in my playlist. Well, then I explored other music and other artists and I realized that it's much the same. I was being told that it's like this gate that you can't open if they don't match your criteria, that you are being trained to obedient for. And again, as an adult, I can't trust my own decisions on the music. I like, do I like this? I'm not

supposed to like this. All of those thoughts are going through your head. And what's interesting is those were going through my head after I left because when I was in it, I never even, I was so obedient, I never even wanted to explore that music. So I'm facing this as an adult.

And out of the cult, post-cult, I was experiencing it at work and one of my clients. And I was, they were listening to music and I just got really excited. So they asked me, have you never heard this? We've heard this all of our lives. What's wrong with you? And I explained a little bit, you know, I didn't go too far. And they started giving me lists where you got to hear this song, you got to hear this band, you got to hear this. And so I was coming home with pages and pages and pages of music that I had to learn. Yeah. And I think about how stifling can be for

brains and for self-actualizing beings, especially when you have this special interest that you really love. And you're only able to do like one percent of it or engage one percent of it. And how much of our human experience we don't get to have when we're in that world. And so I do think also that one of the impacts can be, if someone who's been in that world for a very long time, and they start to question or they start to doubt or they start to think a different way, The amount of grief that they may end up going through or needing to go through, to

feel and move through the cost of being stifled for so many years, I think that some people reach a point where consciously or unconsciously they actually decide not to question or not to challenge or not to leave. And I think one of the reasons is because they don't want to have to feel the grief that they will feel for the years, decades that they have missed when they've been living in these environments. And so it's almost like it would be more painful for me to know what I've been missing out on than to just keep bearing my head in the sand. And for me,

that is just, I can honor and respect someone making that choice. And it's such a devastating choice for me when someone decides to do that and not go through the grief of what it is to leave these worlds. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandham.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery,

John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-Brandham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. So let's talk a little bit about urgency.

One of the reasons why I was so excited for you to come on and talk about youth with a mission is that I received long before you even contacted me. I've been receiving emails constantly about why I'm asking, is it a cult? Is it a cult? And it's really hard to put a label on something that is so diverse. Even for the Brandhamites, for the Brandham message, it was really difficult for me to come to terms that it was a cult. It was a destructive cult, because there are so many different units within Brandhamism, different branches, different sects. Some of the sects are

somewhat benign. Some of them are very destructive. And so how do you label something like this? But one of the things that made me come to terms with the fact that it was a highly destructive cult was the manufactured sense of urgency. It was a doomsday cult, had different doomsday dates that was being pushed out, like kicking a can.

And then what happened is when the last one failed and our cult leader died, the leaders would say things like, we're living on borrowed time. We were supposed to have died back then. The rapture could come any day, God could come any day.

You must be obedient because if you're not, you're going to be one of the ones that's doomed. And we're going to actually walk out on your ashes. And they had all of these insulting words, like in phrases like cannon fodder, different things that we would say to the people who we were going to either kill or who would be killed.

So there was this manufactured sense of urgency. And I look back after leaving, and I mentioned I talked to a few different people and gave them basic details. The first question always asked is, well, why did you submit to that?

That's nonsense. And you really can't fathom how difficult it was not to submit to it while under that urgency. Did they have a similar manufactured urgency in youth with a mission? Yeah, I find myself first just like taking a moment and being like, oh, just, oh, it never sees us too amazed me when we weighed into these territories.

What these worlds will create for our minds and our bodies. And that just sounds horrifying. And so I would say similar to the idea of obedience, there was a spin on it. So it wasn't Doomsday necessarily.

But one of the primary, quote unquote, reasons that Y-Wam exists is to fulfill the Great Commission, which was Jesus saying to his disciples, go and create disciples of all nations, baptizing me. And so we took that to say Jesus was talking to us.

We were supposed to go and make disciples of all nations. And the idea was that as soon as the Great Commission was fulfilled, Jesus would be coming back. And so there was constantly this sense of, what if this village is the last village that's never heard of Jesus, even though we were in places where people had heard of Jesus for centuries?

But the idea and the frenzy around it was, and I remember I would be on airplanes. And I would just sit there with my Bible open, maybe reading it, but mostly just hoping that the person next to me would ask me about it.

Or maybe I would bring up a conversation with them. And any time I left any interaction, and I hadn't quote unquote preach to the gospel to someone, I felt immense shame and immense guilt.

And I was like, what if that was the person that needed to accept Jesus, and then he was going to come back? And so there really was this sense of, you need to go.

and make disciples of all people, and you always need to be hyper-vigilant about who the people around you are that are lost. And so, you know, I could never be around family or friends and just be.

You know, I always had the sense of how do I manipulate this into them asking me about missions and me telling them how great Jesus is. And it was just, and people always became a project.

And so, it was a really hard time to have just genuine authentic relationships. Because I saw everyone as sort of an ends to, a means to an end for their salvation, but really it boiled down to my salvation.

And if I just did the right things and said the right things, then I would have a bigger crown in heaven or God would give me a more special place. And so, there was so much of this energy around eternity.

And, you know, the often what got quoted was Paul saying, our light and momentary suffering is nothing compared to the glory that awaits us. And so, there was always this sense of, you know, I would be in worship services most often, like in a puddle on the ground, because I was so exhausted, I was so overwhelmed, I was not doing well.

And everyone would just say, like, you're doing good, you're doing God's will. This is exactly where you need to be. And so, it just was this kind of happy spin on a sense of urgency.

And I do think, you know, it's maybe part of the complexity is that it is a lot of different things, you know. And I do think that there are people who go do their gap year and then go to college and maybe had a good experience and liked the countries they went to.

But I do think it is different as soon as you maybe join staff on a place or as soon as you kind of find yourself in more of these inner circles, that there becomes more and more of a control around your life and the decisions that you have.

Absolutely. At some point, and I have this in my long list of things, I want to ask you, but at some point, I want to go through some of the loaded language that youth with a mission had.

I get all of these emails from all different kinds of calls. And so, when people send me these phrases, I can sometimes detect when they use the phrase, if it's not used in a natural flow of words.

I can sometimes detect its loaded language. And one of the questions I had with a mission in particular, when they mention the great commission, it's almost as though that phrase has been overloaded to mean far more than what it means in the Bible.

And if I remember correctly, somebody said that there was a date that it was supposed to happen by, like was it 2030 or something like this, is all of that real? Is this loaded?

is there some sort of a date that they're looking for? I don't remember a date. I would not be surprised if there were certain people in Y-WAM and certain bases that said there was a date, but it was all encompassing.

And my sense is that if you looked at probably any random Y-WAM bases website, it would probably have the great commission on the first page that you look because it is so much a part of what the founder, Lauren, cutting him, and then subsequent people said that they were fulfilling the great commission.

Even though that was said in a very specific context to very specific people, and yet that verse was taken to mean Jesus was talking to us. And so 2,000 years later, we're going to listen to him and do what the 11 men were around him didn't do.

And that goes back to something I've been trying to unpack so that people can understand it. When British Israelism came into the movement and people were trying to take specific passages from the Old Testament and say that this applies to us today, they would call it prophetic scriptures.

This is a prophetic scripture. They're writing about who knows, Russia, or whatever, in today's world, which isn't at all the truth. It was written to an ancient people. Well, over time, what happened is because if you can do that to the Old Testament, why can't you do the same thing to the new, and people would do that?

They would take the New Testament passages out of context, apply it to certain things. And to some extent, it's legitimate because if Paul is given an instruction that you need to be kind to the widows, for example, well, that's something that you carry forward.

But there were specific things like you're talking about that it's kind of a gray area. Go and make disciples of all nations. Does that really mean everybody who becomes a disciple should also make disciples of all nations?

So that's that gray area where I'm not going to get into that debate some Christians believe it, some Christians don't, but within the realm of that is the problem that what happens in these movements when they start to use one of those phrases over and over again, they'll start packing new things into what is the Great Commission.

So the Great Commission itself becomes much broader than what it was simply stated in scripture. Is that the case with youth with a mission? Yeah, because I don't think you can separate youth with a mission without dominionism.

And so the Great Commission isn't just make disciples. It is make leaders in the Seven Mountain mandates of society. And I do think it is sort of a all roads lead to

Christophashism in a sense that what we're all What I'm intimately looking for is having our ideals as what we think people should live like in these very specific interpretations of scripture, and we should be applying them to all people in all contexts.

So, you know, when I was on my DTS outreach in Thailand and Malaysia, we spent many days like prayer walking around Buddhist temples and like proclaiming spiritual warfare to these lions and saying like we're going to tear down the spirit of Buddhism in Thailand and Malaysia.

And it was always the sense of so that Christians can take their rightful place as leaders of these countries where it was illegal to be proselytizing and doing what we were doing. And yet there was no sense of respect for other nation's laws.

Yeah, and that's the gray area where obedience, now what do you do? If it's violating a law, but the God figure is saying I must be obedient or I should say the proxy to God says I must be obedient.

Then what do you do with this, right? And again, it comes back to the fact that when you do this, it breaks the will. And now you have the more complicated problem. We're talking about youth, youth with a mission. They are being raised in an environment where their will is continually being broken, much like mine was, maybe to some additional extent because they're also separated from their parents.

Whenever you're separated from your parents, now you must submit to the will because you must to survive. You must be with the people who are leading you. And what happens is over time when you're in that type of environment, you stop making decisions for yourself.

When we left the brand name called my wife will kill me for telling this, but there was a point of time in which we almost couldn't make a decision. Every decision that that faces was just heavy, we were struggling with it.

Even to the extent we would have long sessions trying to even figure out what meal are we going to fix for dinner. And I wrote this software program where my wife had come in and push a button on the keyboard and it would spin through and it would randomly generate the main course, the side dishes, etc.

And it would come up with crazy things like let's eat spaghetti and okra or something like this. So that's how bad it got. And that's just me in an environment where I was mostly self brainwashed.

I would go to the religion, I would go to the services, but then at home I was listening to the recordings, I was reading the propaganda, I was brainwashing myself. I wasn't a child or a young teenager who was going off.

to a remote area away from their parents submitting to the people. I can't even imagine how many levels worse it would be for children that this is happening to. This is awful when I think through it.

Yeah and this is it's interesting because I think it's also very complicated in that you have children leading children and so there's also people who manipulate it in the other way. Like I'm thinking about I was 21 probably leading a team of parents and their young young children like from one years old to six years old to a remote area in northern Uganda.

And there was a couple on the team who didn't have kids that wanted to go out to this like party and it was not a safe environment and I was a 21-year-old. They were both older than I was and I was like no you can't go to this party like it is my responsibility to try to keep this team safe and I remember the husband being like well God gives us free will so we should be able to do what we want and it was this weird thing where it was like that's true and like we are in such a precarious position

and I think that that's also kind of intentional where it then kind of put me in a position to be authoritarian and I was like yes and you can either choose to listen to me or you can go home back to a united states because I'm not going to have you on my team and not be listening to me and I didn't love that but at the same time I was like I things have happened really horrible things have happened and and that's one of the things that why I am doesn't talk about like people have died on outreaches people have gotten kidnapped people have lost

limbs like people have gotten deathly ill people have gotten lifelong diseases like really horrible things happen I think more common than people even think because it all gets kind of wrapped into a testimony and like wow this is what happened so look at how much God wants to use you because he let you go through this and all of this gaslighting that I think I think I've used this analogy before that it really did feel like the Stanford prison experiment where it's like even if I didn't want to be an authoritarian person and all of a sudden I'm like no you better

listen to me because you're not gonna go out in the middle of the night in like you know and so it just it feels like it's such an impossible situation and I think whether that is intentionally designed or not I think it continues to foster this Um, this slipperiness of what is safety, how can I trust myself?

How can I trust the people that I'm with? Yeah, absolutely. I, I know kids that that would just go straight to their head and immediately it would be a, there would be a problem child.

So hopefully there's some kind of a strategy to weed out the problem child's from leadership. But the whole thing is still, in my mind, it's still problematic because you're enabling this to happen. And yet at the same time, there's a level of obedience that occurs just simply because they're away from their parents.

And that, that gets added on top of all of the other obedience from the religious standpoint. Whenever I do podcasts, talking about the complex problems within Christian environment, pseudo Christian cults and environments, I get all of this feet negative feedback.

Well, you've gave all the problems. You haven't given any answers. And my answer is usually we'll go, go find a church, go to a pastor and ask them. The interesting part about what we're doing is I get the same kind of feedback whenever we have conversation.

In fact, I've got some from the last one we did. People are looking for answers, looking for help. But in many cases, they're indoctrinated such that if they go to a psychologist or a Christian counselor, even any kind of counselor, they're actually breaking, they're breaking out of the obedience training that they had.

They can't go there. So I thought maybe I've mentioned a few things that are problematic that people suffer from in this. Maybe at the end of our conversations, we should probably talk about what do you do if you have thoughts that are spiraling out of control?

Because this is one of the most common things for people who leave a cult. They, they have runaway thoughts. And for me, learning how to ground myself and there are our techniques that you can do, it, it really changed my life.

Whenever you're spiraling out of control, you almost can't function. What are your thoughts on talking through just some helpful tips? Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a great point, very valid.

I use this phrase a lot with my clients that we are feeling beings who think, not thinking beings who feel. And the idea of that is that most of what we think is based on the messages we're receiving from our nervous system and from our body.

And so another way to say that is we can't often think ourselves into a state of rest, but we can do things in our bodies that can hopefully allow us to feel a little bit safer.

And so one of my favorites is low and slow breathing. And so it's sending your breath all the way down through your nose, seeing if you can breathe into your belly and then breathing out through your mouth as though you're breathing through a tiny coffee straw. And so you're letting your breath take as long as possible. And the reason for this is that our exhale triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest system. So we actually want to try to have a longer exhale and then inhale. And then if we breathe in all the way down to our belly, we're telling our

interic nervous system in our gut. And we're telling our vagus nerve, I'm not being chased by a lion. I'm not needing to run away from something it's okay for me to settle. But what I like to tell people is that this might take time. Like this is a practice. You know, I have been out of why I'm for over a decade now. And I still use these techniques to help myself calm down to learn how to become in the present moment. And so I would say taking 10 low and slow breaths could be a really good place to start. I'm also a huge fan of using

if you are a seeing person using your eyes to just roam around your space. And I like to imagine that, you know, my eyes are like a little kite. And my head is like the string of the kite. So a lot of times we might be used to moving our eyes in our head. But if we let our eyes take the lead and start to kind of roam around, that can also start to settle our nervous system.

And if we use our eyes to look around where we are, it actually inhibits our default mode network, which is the part of our brain that roommates. And so research has shown that that part of our brain actually gets quieted down when we kind of, I like to say, imagine you're a toddler in a room for the first time. And your eyes are just like, what's that?

What's that? What's that? And if I could give a shameless plug, this is also partly why I've created my online movement studio where I literally have hundreds of hours of movement and mindfulness practices and breathing exercises. Because I think our bodies have suffered the most in these systems. So if you are listening and you're like, I need more of this. I can't just listen to this and do this. Come check out the intro online movement studio because I think that that I know that that has been a support for a lot of people coming out of these religious

systems that's who I mostly created it for. Absolutely. I've not done yours, obviously. But whenever I started, I struggled with this. I struggled heavily. And I just started reading because I'm a researcher. I wanted to know, okay, this is a problem. It can't be a unique problem.

How do I conquer it? And I can assure the people who are listening that the breathing techniques, it's one of the many tools that you can use and it is great, especially for those who struggle with sleep.

Where you struggle with sleep, the breathing techniques, essentially what you're doing is you're telling your brain to stop thinking about the thing that's spiraling out of control. Let's think about something else. Let's think about your breathing.

And usually there are other techniques for me. I would also focus on, as I was breathing, I would try to focus on some other thought that is, brings me to a happy place. The other thing that we've mentioned is the decision-making problem with, it is the biggest consequence of this obedience type of indoctrination.

People cannot make decisions for themselves after leaving it. And you'll have your techniques I'm certain and I'll let you get there, but the thing that works for me is quite funny. Whenever I started trying to break free from that way of thinking, I would just take the most absurd thing that I would never do.

Something obviously picks up in this legal, it's not going to harm you, but picks something that you would just never, ever do and force yourself to go do it. Because then you're showing yourself that you can make a decision.

You can, I can choose to do this thing. I may not like it, but I chose to do it. And I can choose to decide whether I like it or not later. The thing that we did, and my wife will probably kill me for this, but I took her to this, we've got a casino boat here in New Albany, Indiana.

So out of the blue, I took her, we're going to go to the casino and we're going to play one slot. I'm not a gambler, I hated the whole idea of going to a casino because it goes against everything that I believe in, not from a religious standpoint, just because I'm not a person who waste money.

So we did, we went through all of the layers of the levels of this boat and we found the penny slots and I put a dollar in and lost a dollar like you're going to do if you go to a casino.

I'm not recommending that people go to a casino, but the experience was that, okay, I did this. I decided to do this. I absolutely hated it when I was there. I looked around at all of the faces of the people who were addicted to gambling.

I absolutely did not enjoy looking at anybody who's addicted because half of the crowd is addicted, but I did this and now I know that I don't like to do this ever again and we never did.

I love that example. Yeah, I think that's, that's what I would say is like, you've got some time to make up for. So let yourself go and explore and I like to say, you know, toddlers don't learn to walk immediately.

You might stumble and you might find, no, I don't want to do that. You might discover something that you absolutely love and you're like, wow, I wish I had found this 30 years sooner.

For. He, a huge help on my journey, has been in provelessence. And I've just loved one, it's really a practice of trusting your brain and your spontaneity and whatever comes up. And it's usually in a very supportive environment that you can take a risk and you can say the silly thing or the mean thing or whatever comes to mind.

And then the person across from you is going to yes and it and they're gonna come back. And so it's this thing of like, oh my gosh, I can actually like put on these characters that maybe I have been afraid to give voice to, give air time to in a way that is playful and safe and consensual and supportive.

And so I am a huge huge fan of improv and has a way to explore maybe the different parts of your personality and your style of relating that you haven't been able to explore in these worlds that you've been living in.

And there are hundreds of other techniques like people, like you said, people can go to your website. You can also just do some Google searches and just find techniques for mental health issues and you'll find all kinds of things.

That's where I began. I ended up reading a few books and I don't recall the names of them or I would give the names, but this is something that you can do self-help. If you need a therapist, I recommend you go get a therapist because it's much easier than I thought whenever I went my first time.

I too was indoctrinated to think this is where you get a demon and I go and they're just an average person like me wanting to help me. Same as going to a doctor, it's just a doctor for your head.

So highly recommended if you need it and you can overcome this after leaving. So this is the good part. You can get over this, get past this. So like I said, I'm so excited to talk to you and learn more about youth with a mission and all of the things that we're bringing up, it's bringing back memories of whenever I was in the group and then I started to escape.

I feel a lot healthier than I did back then and I'm hoping that people can listen to us and get healthy just the same. Agreed, yeah, I often tell my clients, I wouldn't be in the line of work I do if I didn't think healing was possible because it is hard to sit all day in these difficult spaces and I've been a therapist for 10 years now and I've seen dozens of clients work through exactly what we're talking about.

And so while I think it's really important to talk about the difficult things, I also appreciate you bringing it around and like yes, we're also doing this because there is another side into these worlds that you've been navigating and moving through.

Absolutely. Well, hopefully somebody has heard something that can bring them to the other side. So thank you so much for doing this. Yes, thanks so much for having me. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web, you can find us at www.William-Brandom.org and www.indwell-movement.com.

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.

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