Meliesa joins Sam to share what it was like to grow up inside the Two by Twos — a high-control religious group where conformity was everything and the gap between outward appearances and internal reality was vast. She speaks honestly about the psychological toll of an upbringing built around compliance and fear, and the hidden dynamics of abuse that can thrive in environments like this one. What makes Meliesa's story particularly compelling is what she's done with it — she's channelled her experience into creating adult picture books that explore identity and self-acceptance, and the conversation takes a genuinely moving turn when she talks about creativity as a way of reclaiming your own narrative. It's a warm, grounded episode about survival, agency, and finding unexpected ways to tell your truth.

Who Is Meliesa?

Meliesa Tigard, writer, educator, and survivor advocate. Her work sits at the intersection of cult deconstruction, civic organizing, and the long road back to a self that belongs to you.

A survivor of the Two by Two (2x2) high-control religious group, Meliesa is the author of two allegorical picture books for adults: Little Mouse and the Purple Door — an allegorical picture book for adults about leaving a cultic community — and Little Bea and the Golden Key, for LGBTQ+ survivors. Both books have companion healing journals. Her Substack series explores mind control, financial abuse, and recovery for survivors of high-control communities.

She is the founder of FocalPoint Learning Center in Wenatchee, Washington, where she has taught literacy and math for 25 years, and of Confluence Indivisible, a civic advocacy organization.

The through line of all her work is the same: teaching people to recognize when their thinking is being controlled, and giving them tools to think freely.

Connect

• Find out more about Meliesa here - http://www.purpledoorjourneys.com
• You can also connect via Facebook

• You can find out more about Sam on her website - www.anchoredcounsellingservices.com.au
• To connect with Sam on Instagram - @anchoredcounsellingservices
• Want to contact with Sam about the podcast or therapy? Use this contact form.
• Also check out Religious Trauma & Cults

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work, the Gundagara land and people.

I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I also want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you, our listeners, are joining us from today.

I recognize the deep connection that first nations people have to this land, their enduring culture and their commitment to the preservation and care for their country.

This land was never ceded and it always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Welcome to beyond the Surface.

This is a space for conversations that sit at the edges of faith, identity, power and recovery, especially for those of us who have been shaped so stretched or harmed by fundamental religion or high control systems.

Some episodes are personal, some are reflective, some are educational or curious or quietly disruptive.

All of them are grounded in lived experience and a deep respect for the complexity of leaving, questioning and rebuilding meaning.

We will be talking about religious trauma, various forms of abuse, cult dynamics, queerness and recovery.

Not in neatness answers, but in honest conversations.

In listening to these conversations, some parts might be heavy or activating for you.

Please take care of yourself while listening and feel free to pause or step away if you need to.

I'm Sam and I'm really glad that you're here with us.

Just a quick heads up before we dive in.

For transparency reasons, this episode includes a short paid message.

At the beginning, I'm conscious to only ever share things that feel aligned with the values of this space and as always, I appreciate you being a part of it.

You've lived under fear, shame and silence long enough.

If you've left a high control church or cult and you're still carrying the weight, you're not making it up and you're not alone.

I'm Elise Hurd, a mental health practitioner and certified coach specialising in religious, trauma and cult recovery.

I support people worldwide through one on one online coaching and online support groups.

Whether you're questioning, leaving or rebuilding, you deserve support that actually understands where you've been.

My work is built on one foundation.

You are already good, whole and worthy.

You can learn [email protected].

Welcome Melisa.

Thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

It's good to be here.

I'm so excited to have you.

We just very quickly had to hit record because we've been talking for 15 minutes and I was like shit, if I don't hit record we're going to talk for the entire time and not record any of it, which is always a good sign.

So for my regular listeners, they are so used to storytelling episodes, we're going to do a bit of a mixture today in terms of we're going to talk a bit about your story, but we're also then going to move into, I guess, some of the mechanics and the behind the scenes of a particular high control group.

And I have had some wonderful guests from this group in past episodes.

And so people will know a little bit about the two by twos or the truth or the way or whatever name you are used to using for that group.

So before we get into the story, because we're going to be talking about some of the mechanics, I would love you to give, I guess, just who are these people?

What is this group?

Well, that's a big question because who they are, what they raised me telling me that they are is a completely different answer.

I was raised in the one true way of God that goes all the way back to Jesus in an unbroken line from the time that he sent the 72 apostles out and told them not to take anything with them.

And they went in pairs.

And from Matthew 10 and the time of the apostles all the way up until the present day, there's an unbroken line in church leadership.

And we are the real Christians.

And the Catholics broke off from us.

Here are the books, the verses in Acts where Peter and Paul disagreed with each other and went separate ways.

That's where the schism happened.

That's where the Catholic Church begins.

And we are the original Christianity.

That's what I grew up with.

Fast forward years and I get a copy of the secret sect and find out.

And Cherie Crop Ehrig has got the best history of the two by twos.

It's called preserving the truth.

She goes into all of the details.

It was a man named William Irvine.

He was converted by a Presbyterian minister, then went to the faith mission and got trained and apparently was still taking Faith Mission funds while he was off in Ireland starting his own religion.

And after they kicked him out, they stopped talking about him.

And when new converts came in and they had this story about how they were proceeding, just like the apostles did in Matthew 10, they allowed the new people to create the mythology that they went all the way back historically that far, and they deliberately did not correct it.

And then people, the workers and the leadership started telling that story that I grew up with.

Okay.

And so like, if we sort of like Move into your story a little bit.

What did you grow up with?

What did you know about the world?

What did you know about what you were supposed to believe about yourself, about other people?

What did that look like?

Well, two by two, children are allowed to go to public school.

So I did go to public school.

We were supposed to be the only Bible that those children would ever read.

We were supposed to be an example.

There was a lot of pressure on us to dress the part.

And that was a very strict religious, particularly for girls.

No cutting the hair, no makeup, no jewelry, dresses.

Looking very religious.

And that this was our piety was going to convert other people around us.

I was there.

Most of our social interactions were with other people who were part of the religion.

It's very insular that way.

But when I was seven years old, my father, who was fourth generation, third generation in, in the two by twos, he decided that he was going to quit going to meetings.

And this was a big moment for me because this is when I realized you could leave.

Because before that I didn't think they'd let you.

I mean, what is that even like to realize that at such a young age?

Well, you know, the thing is that children all think that their childhood is normal.

So for me, you know, and two by twos are very big on presentation.

The way that they look is one thing, the way that they actually are behind closed doors is another.

So my mother is sewing three matching dresses for all three of us girls so that when we come to the convention on the farm, three little matching girls in their beautiful little dresses are gonna tumble out of the, of the station wagon and we're all gonna look like the picture perfect little family.

That's that it's the selling of the simple life that's very alluring to people who've ever been a part of a, of a high control group.

And that's what it looked like on the outside.

Now as, as we know, the underneath of that is all kinds of different levels of abuse.

Yeah.

And one of my biggest gripes of people who don't understand high control systems or cultic systems is that they videos, photos or just, you know, footage essentially of the kids and they'll go, my goodness, they're such well behaved kids.

How beautiful is that?

And I go, actually that's not beautiful, that's horrific.

Because they're not well behaved, they're well trained.

And so what, what is it like to be the good kid, so to speak?

And if you're listening, I'm in inverted commas.

Like the good kid in a system like the two by twos because it's not well behaved, it's well trained and compliance.

Right.

I have seen a seven month old baby taken out of the same one hour meeting three times and spanked for making noise.

And at seven months there is no concept whatsoever inside of that child as to what this is about.

We've talked about in the exes groups about how we would play meeting with each other when we were children and we would do all of the pieces of the meeting together with each other, which the workers, our clergy talked about as proof that this was the spirit of God working within us.

But one of the things that we would do is we would take our dolls out of our little pretend meetings and beat them.

That's how you get those quiet children.

So again, I just mentioned there's this outer facing perfection.

There's these very perfect, very quiet children.

And you said that's horrific.

And you are absolutely right because what creates that is a level of abuse that is horrific and we should all be aware of, of what that pretty picture looks like from the inside.

What did you think of that so called pretty picture as you sort of moved into, I guess a developmental age where you actually have some concept of that in terms of like, you know, your middle sort of teenage years where you're not, you know, the 5, 6, 7 age anymore, but you were still baked into it.

You still like that's still the most normal thing in the world for you.

Was there any part of you that went, what is this?

Even as a teenager?

What I know is that from the time my father decided to quit going to meetings, I took that knowledge that I could leave and sort of tucked it away and I wanted to leave.

And that was inside of me from that moment forward.

And what I did with that is redouble and really get serious about the religion, which is often a reaction that people have.

And So I was 8 years old when I stood up and professed at Chelan Convention.

And that's, you know, an example of letting children make adult decisions.

You tell the child that they're responsible for their immortal soul and that this is appropriate and that that's how it went for me.

Then as I moved into my teenage years, there was always this push, pull.

I tried to leave the church twice.

The first time was when I was in middle school.

My dad was out at the time, so we were a divided home.

Mom was going to the meetings, dad was not.

And so there was a little more leeway in my home.

On the upside, you know, a little more freedom for me and my sisters.

On the downside, no high quality professing boy would ever date us because we were from a broken home.

So there's, it's definitely a stratified society.

So in the, in seventh grade, my sister and I talked about it and we both decided we didn't want to go to meetings anymore or we didn't want to profess.

Um, and we went and got our hair cut and we started, you know, looking like other people that were our age because at 12, 13 years old, those things matter an awful lot.

And I believe appearance and self esteem are closely related.

And it was hard for our self esteem to have to look different.

That only lasted a few months.

I wasn't able to really keep going with it.

There was too much, I guess, guilt maybe inside of me.

When I was 16, I tried again.

At this point my father had come back to meetings and so now both parents are united and I wanted to not go, not attend.

And they told me that I could not take part and you know, do the things that a professing kid would do in the meeting, but that I had to go and I had to attend.

And it's in a person's living room, there's 10 people.

So your lack of engagement is going to be noted.

And so about the second or week of this, the elder comes over to me with tears in his eyes and says, we just wish you'd come back.

And again, the guilt and all of that, it was just I didn't have the strength to do that.

So there was always a push, pull.

Also there was an additional layer for me because when I was 14, I had a conversation with the overseer of my, of my state and I was questioning whether I was being called for the work.

We were always being told that the work was the highest calling and the best and what we should aspire to.

And so I questioned that and he said, left me with the impression that absolutely 100% yes, God was calling me for the work.

And now I couldn't date and I couldn't be part of any sort of normal growing up because I needed to already start living like I was a worker now and then, wait until the time came and go into the work because I was now set apart and sanctified and gonna be part of God's ministry.

And I look at my own 14 year old daughter and I think that's who I was, that is the age that I was.

And putting that kind of an adult responsibility on that child is just wild to me.

Why did that man not have the wisdom to say to me, you know, it'll still be here when you're 25, go be a kid.

Yes.

I mean, like I, I think about my own 14 year old self and I was like very knee deep in my space as well.

And, and I very much still had this idea of.

Yes, you like, I would have used the term ministry, going into ministry, but I could barely decide on a fucking outfit to wear on any given day or like what I wanted to eat, let alone like, you know, this concept of like eternity or like the next decade or even your whole life is just unfathomable for someone of that age to think about.

I want to ask a question around that because I think this, I didn't actually.

Are all of the workers single?

Yes.

Goodness.

Even I didn't know that.

No.

Yeah, it's.

It is a poverty, chastity and obedience.

Right.

So it's basically like an extension of the Catholic Church of like the priesthood or the nunneries.

Right.

Okay.

A nun is really the closest parallel.

Yeah.

Right.

And so you know that they go in tattoos, you know that they stay in people's homes.

Well, that's why they can't have a relationship because they're living in this itinerant lifestyle for all of their lives and it's, it does terrible things to people's mental health.

Yes.

So, yeah.

So what does a 14 year old think about the fact that like now you've just been told that there is like a calling from God, that you are now supposed to be celibate for the rest of your life?

Well, number one, I believe that sounds.

Like really unfun to me.

Exactly, exactly.

So, number one, I believed him.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't you be?

Truth.

Right.

I've got no framework that would question that at all.

That's the thing that I'm grappling with when I'm 16, when I decide I'm going to quit professing because I have a boyfriend.

Right.

So for me there what happens is the.

I want to have a normal life.

I want to, you know, date, I want to do this or that or whatever.

And it's either that or the church.

And it's never, there's, there's this complete split for me between what I want and what, what the church has told me I have to do and where my life is heading.

And I didn't want it.

I didn't want to go in the work, I didn't want anything to do with that kind of a life.

But I believed that that was 100% my calling and it had been confirmed by an authority figure and there was no way for me to get out of it.

And this is what I had to do.

Yeah, and so, I mean, we talk a lot about, like, fear in high control religion and like fear based ideology or fear based indoctrination.

And so, like, you're talking about like essentially someone who is like God ordained, who is essentially like an extension of God themselves, telling you that this is what your life is to look like.

What did you think would happen if you didn't follow that path?

Like, were you terrified of something?

Like, was there fear there if you didn't follow that?

Yeah, I mean, we were absolutely bathed in fear from our very earliest memories.

I mean, meetings were always about, you know, if you lose out, you go to a lost eternity and consider your soul.

And all of you know, the specter of hell was part of every single day of our childhood.

And I'm sure if you talk to other two by twos, that that's the way that it tracked for them as well.

On Saturday of convention, there would be the meeting that they would test and give you.

It's like an altar call.

Give you the opportunity to stand up and make your choice.

And that's called professing.

That meeting was always full of sermons about people who died suddenly in a car accident.

People who were young, they were healthy, they thought they had their life in front of them.

They decided to take their own way.

Now, oops, they're dead and they're.

And they've gone to hell and that's going to happen to you too.

And so many of the exes have said things like, I was afraid that I was going to get in a car accident and die on my way home from convention, because that's how this was going to go.

And so our entire childhood was just fear, fear, fear, fear, fear.

You know, obey and conform, because if you don't, you're going to hell.

Wow, that is fun.

Right?

Come join.

You can tell everyone else that they're going to hell too.

Gosh.

I mean, like, hey, it's.

I was gonna say it's funny that you say what you just said, but it's not funny.

It's ironic.

I remember the very first conversation that I had with somebody from the two by twos.

Laura McConnell Conti, who is like, she's fabulous.

And I remember her saying in the episode that I recorded with her, I think it was, like, two years ago now, that she had a very visceral, real fear that if she actually just left the two by twos, she would die.

Like, it wasn't just that your life would be bad or that you would be miserable, but that if you left, that equaled death.

And so, like, that is the most palpable fear, right?

Yeah.

And.

And also I had a fear that I would die at a moment that I wasn't being true, because even if I had been true 100% of my life and five minutes before I died, I lost my faith.

I was going to hell for all of eternity.

And I would sit in the convention meetings and think, I believe right now.

Strike me dead right now.

Yeah.

Because right now I believe.

And I can go to a saved eternity.

And when I read that, I was like, I get it.

That is exactly what I was like.

And it's there.

It's very.

Some of my friends have called it a death cult.

And I think that this is consistent across your high control groups.

There is an obsession with death.

Yes.

There is an obsession with telling everybody, you gotta get, you know.

And this.

It's so urgent you have to do this right now.

It has to be the most important thing in your life.

The urgency.

Urgency.

Urgency.

Yeah.

And I think this is, like, for people who are listening, who are not from, like, a closed, insular group, like the two by twos.

This is not unique to that group either, because, like, I, like, people will know my story in terms of, like, the space that I grew up in.

And a lot of my guests have come from evangelical Christianity spaces.

And they will understand if I say the book Rachel's Tears a lot of the time in terms of, like, the Columbine shooting that happened.

And I remember I was.

I grew up reading that book.

And I remember just wanting so desperately to be killed for my faith, because then at least I knew I was certain in that moment.

Right.

Which is, like, the wildest thing for teenagers to grow up thinking that, like, you should.

You need to be thinking about how you die and when you die so that you can be so certain that your faith is solid in that moment, because otherwise you're fucked.

Yes.

Like that's a terrifying concept for anyone to grow to have, but particularly for people in that sort of very vulnerable developmental stage, it's wild.

And that is why you are activating their nervous systems into a fight flight and keeping them in that state over and over and over for years.

And I don't know about you, but now I have complex ptsd.

Yeah, we all do, I think.

Two autoimmune diseases.

Yep.

Chronic pain.

Yep.

There's a, there's a whole list of trauma related symptoms that all come downhill.

And specifically the things that I have are all specifically highly correlated to adverse childhood experiences and long term trauma.

Yes.

Yep.

It's never great when a medical specialist says to you there's no medical reason for this.

And we go, yeah, we know why.

It's never fun to like.

But the reality is it is so.

Is so like common among complex trauma survivors, particularly like cult or high control survivors?

I think it's.

Yeah, it's wild.

Now I know you did become a worker for a bit.

Right.

So tell us a little bit about what that looked like because like, I've had a few people sort of mention that, but not necessarily like, what does that actually look like for you?

Ugh.

Well, you give up everything.

So here I am in my sophomore year of college.

I am at univers, I'm at the university.

I have a four year tuition fees and books scholarship, which is a really big deal.

I am two years into a four year program and they come back to me and say, okay, time's now.

And it was the summer following my semi second year and you know, I had said I wanted to go do this and now they were like, okay, time for you to go and do it.

So I was 20 years old and I had, I was up for a scholarship to go to Germany for a year.

A candidate, it was a Rotary scholarship and would have sent me abroad for a year.

Who knows how my life would have gone if I'd have done that.

Gave up the scholarship, gave up my additional two years at university scholarship and then got rid of everything I owned.

I pared it down to what was in my.

A couple of suitcases.

I remember getting down to where I had 14 skirts and then being like, oh, that's just way too many.

And then paring it down further from there.

I remember putting all of my possessions on the floor of somebody's living room and going through them and who was getting this and who was getting that?

And I had a car and that.

My dad sold it.

And I don't remember what we did with the money on that because I gave away all my money too.

So it kind of sounds like you're preparing for death.

Right?

Like, it's like what happens at the end of life when someone knows that they're dying and they're dispersing everything that.

I owe or when people get suicidal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So then I went to Oregon because I was.

That's what I was told to do, was to go to preps in Oregon.

Now, from this moment on, none of your decisions are your own.

Live where they tell you to live.

You eat what's at the table.

You get up when people are getting up.

Everything about your schedule, everything about your day, everything about your life is out of your control.

This is what it's like in the two by two ministry.

I go to preps.

They're like, do this job, I go do that job.

They tell me, do another job, I go do another job.

Preps is preparations.

There's a lot of.

We're on the farm getting it all ready for a convention that's gonna happen a month from now.

And we're all doing jobs and work and all of this stuff for a month in preparation for this.

So I go and I do that.

And I'm living in a sort of a dormitory with other sister workers and there's a couple of other ones that are just going into the work.

And it's kind of cool because we're going into the work together and da, da, da, da da.

And so that's where I remember just feeling like I wanted to cry all the time.

And then the list comes out and you find out where you're gonna be and who you're gonna live with, and you have no control over that as well.

So now I've been stationed on the south coast of Oregon, and I'm from Montana, and I was stationed with somebody that I know.

So great.

My older companion is gonna be somebody that I know who I actually liked.

Then we have that convention, we go to a second convention, which is where the young workers all speak for the first morning.

And this is how this is done.

There's lots of tradition around it.

And so I'm at this convention and I speak on Saturday morning.

And from there I get in a car with the woman who has been assigned as my companion.

And from here on out, every choice in my life is hers.

And my job is to follow her and to do what she says and to stay where she tells me to stay.

And we, of course, we go stay with you.

Know some of the members of the group.

And we're going to live here for a couple of days.

And she has set up where it is that we're having our gospel meetings.

And I show up at the gospel meetings and I preach my part of it, and she preaches her part of it.

And there's no directions, there's no seminary, there's no theological training.

You're just sent out into the work is God's gonna teach you, and you just do what they tell you.

And I start to get sick because I'm eating other people's food.

And I don't have any control over what it is that I eat.

And so I get sick.

And there's some.

A med that I've taken before that has worked for me, but my companion doesn't want me to.

She has a different plan.

And she wants me to do this.

This particular homeopathic sort of remedy thing that happens to make me actually quite a lot sicker to the extent that I ended up having to have surgery and permanent effects from that.

Once I needed the surgery, the decision was made that I would go home and stay with my parents for the surgery.

And the two months that it would take for me to get better, you know, recuperate.

And so it's about nine months or so after I've gone into the ministry that I head back to go back to Oregon, and I stop in Missoula, Montana, where I had been at the university.

And I spend a day and I go and see people and I stop in at the honors college and they say, your tuition, fees and books, your scholarship is back today, no questions asked.

I go to the financial aid office where I used to have a job and I was a work study.

And they're like, your job is back today.

No questions asked.

I stopping at residence halls because I was an RA because my parents made too much money for me to afford to go to get any financial aid.

But.

And I didn't qualify for any help and they wouldn't help me go to college.

So I was in this big canal.

And because of my scholarship status, financial aid had pulled strings and got me into a resident advisor job as a very.

At 19, which was very young.

But I go back to residence halls and they're like, your.

Your RA job is back.

Your tuition, your room and board, today done.

You just let us know, say the word.

Now, I haven't even been looking for this input, but I stop in to see people and all of everything is now back in.

In a day.

But I Continue on.

I continue on to Washington.

I meet up with my companion and it's really interesting because my, the particular woman who was my companion had done some self help, personal growth therapy kind of work and.

I know, I know.

Well, it's, it's odd because everyone is like so anti therapy in these groups, right?

There were other people who were like, oh, I hate this self help movement because people start getting self help and then they leave the truth.

And, and so, so I get into the car with her and she's like, how was it at you at the university?

And I tell her could have had it all back, but I'm going to buckle down and I'm going to go forward and I'm going to do all, all of this stuff.

And I, it was her opinion that 20 years old was too young to be, it wasn't the way they used to do it.

The, the overseer was an elderly man who was making questionable decisions.

She had an opinion about that and she said to me, what if this is God's way of letting you go back to the university?

And she didn't have to tell me twice.

No, I bet.

And again, permission from an authority figure, right?

Yes.

It's an authority figure that tells me I have to go into the work.

And as soon as an authority figure gives me permission to, to choose to leave the work, I went right back to the university.

So, and I'm that that's really lucky for me because people who've been 10 or 15 years in the work think about what a trap this is.

You have no job, you have no resume, you have no possessions.

You are about like a person who's been homeless on the street for 10 or 15 years and you have no resources whatsoever.

And when you leave the work, there aren't necessarily people who are going to help you get started because you left the work.

And you know, one family member said to me, well, I'm afraid if you were my daughter, I'd tell you you were on your own, you'd have to go figure it out yourself.

And this is because when I went back to university, this family member was grouching about the fact that my father was giving me a car that was a nearly a 20 year old car because I had sold mine a year prior when I went into the, into the work.

And this was too much, too, too much generosity.

Yeah, right.

I mean I even think like as you're sort of describing it as, like it's as if, you know, homelessness, I sort of go coming out of that at least there are services and people who understand homelessness, like, coming out of that is.

Is so niche that, like, there are very few people who actually understand the, the complete disorientation and reintegration that that requires into society, that it just makes it like, borderline impossible, I think, for so many people.

And ask yourself this.

The situations in which you are the most vulnerable, the most likely to be abused, you have the least amount of power and you give away all of your financial resources, those are held up as holiness in these groups.

Let's talk about Tradwise.

Yes, let's talk about the work.

All of these are situations where you, as proof of your holiness, give away all of your things and put yourself in this vulnerable position.

And you are told that this is going to be the thing that'll make you the happiest.

It will be the most fulfilling.

It will.

It gets pulled up on this pedestal, right?

All of it, to get you to go do that.

And once you're there and the abuse starts, you're stuck.

And that's the con.

Yes.

And yes.

When it is, like, spiritually sanctioned, it's like you just.

It's so hard to separate those two things.

Like, until, I mean, you can obviously, like, we're sitting here talking about it.

You can, but man, it takes so much work.

And as you were sort of describing what, what it looks like to be a worker in that space, I know the answer to the question that I'm about to ask, but I imagine other people are thinking it as well.

And so I'm gonna ask it still, which is how on earth do they say that that is not controlling?

Just like, because you control.

Yes.

And, you know, we heard all of these stories about God's people are not conformed to this what world, but they are transformed by the renewing of his spirit.

We just happen to all look alike because we've been transformed by the spirit of God.

It's not control.

There's so much about.

There's no rules in the two by twos, but oh my gosh, are there rules.

Go break one.

And let's talk about how no rules there are.

And the same thing about the control.

Go, go do something that's not sanctioned and not okay.

And let's talk about how it's not controlling.

You know, just my sitting in a, in a Sunday morning meeting and not being someone to verbally give, speak a prayer and verbally stand up and give a testimony brought my elder over with te in his eyes doing a whole emotional manipulation thing in order to get me back, like, I couldn't even just sit quietly and enjoy other people's contributions.

I had to be part of it.

I had to be confessing every week.

Because that's what those testimonies are, Confessionals.

Yeah.

Okay.

I want to move into, like, some of those terms that you just said in terms of control and manipulation and things like that, and to before we sort of get into, like, the mechanics of it, like, what was it like for you to start have having some of that language?

Because I like we, I talk about it all the time in terms of, like, the power of having language to describe what happened to you is absolutely invaluable.

Because until that point, it's kind of just.

Is this just a me thing?

Is this specific to me?

And there comes a point where you are able to sort of separate that and go, oh, no.

This was like a systemic, ongoing thing that was done to me.

And so what was it like to be able to start using language of coercive control and everything that comes from that?

It's so great.

Yeah, I'm so, I'm so grateful for where my life is now.

It happens in pieces.

It's layers of an onion, and you deconstruct a bit at a time.

So when I went back to the university, I befriended a young woman, Amy.

And Amy, not long after she met me, took her first cults class.

And she went on to get her degree in sociology, majoring in cults while having me as a best friend.

I think I inspired her.

Yeah.

Why not?

Just right.

Exactly.

So she clocks it early and she has this conversation with me in the student union building.

And she starts explaining how cults work and has a conversation with me where she's kind of direct.

And I'm telling you, I noped out so hard, I can't remember that conversation.

She remembers it.

I have no idea.

I, I, I just blanked it right out of my head.

When she saw my reaction, she decided to take a different tack.

And so she just kept giving me all of this information about cults because that's what she studied and that's what she was into.

And for seven years, this young woman doles out information to me on cults.

She arranges for me to have an interview with the cults professor at University of Montana.

And I'm not sure exactly when that happened.

Maybe that' there was a guy that she had met that had briefly joined the two by two.

She arranges for me to meet him and have a chat about all of the things he Knew about the two by twos.

This was after I had left the church.

So my understanding that I grew up in a religious cult doesn't happen until well after I've actually left the church.

I read the whole secret sect to myself, oh, they could have faked this, they could have faked that.

And I'm just extremely skeptical and slow to really come to the realization.

So it's around five years after I actually leave the two by twos that I call her up one day and go, I think I grew up in a religious cult.

And she goes, yeah, I've been trying to touch.

That was lime.

I'm so glad you've joined the conversation now.

Yeah, that was a slow unrolling.

And the thing is that there's so many layers of mind control that you can't blame yourself that it took you a while to get it because they did that to you deliberately.

And if you were born at Renius, they did it to you before you had speech or critical thought.

That's why they like kids, they want to get before they can actually no different and teach them that this is capital R reality.

Because then you have no other self but the one that the group built.

So if you're out there and you left one of these high control groups, you are trying to build a self as an adult that never got built when you were a child because you weren't allowed really individual identity.

This is a huge psychological project.

Do not underestimate.

I say to other members that left the church.

What we did is the Mount Everest of church leaving.

Don't underestimate how extraordinary it is that you got out.

And whenever you start saying, why did it take me so long to get it?

Look at the people who still don't get it.

What you did by finally getting it.

Even if like in my case, it took seven years of somebody telling me when you finally get it, you actually got it.

That's the thing to.

That's the take home here.

Because it was so much harder than anyone can really put words to.

To this day.

It is the hardest thing I ever did.

And I am sure that I am not alone in saying that that is how it feels.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in ter, like once you did, like once you sort of saw it and you couldn't unsee it from that point, did you then go into.

I might.

What is it like then for you to sort of place those ideas of mind control, thought reform, coercive control, indoctrination, all of those like big ticket things that we now have Understanding for did you then just go like this is like everywhere in this system.

Like it's what it's built upon.

It is, it is everywhere in this system.

It actually took a little longer for me to really put together the pieces that it's Fractals from the individual and the abusive relationship to the cult to the authoritarian government is all the same set of dynamics.

It's the small and the large and it's the same things.

And we should all be wary because authoritarianism has on the rise worldwide and we need to be aware that that is the situation.

It took me a while to really be able to put those pieces together, but certainly it is a freedom to be able to do that.

I did a don't ask, don't tell with my family for a long time and my, my bestie Amy, the one I referenced, said it was as though she watched me for 30 years dance on the head of a pin in order to maintain those relationships.

And when I finally had to go no contact, her statement to me was, you would have been well within your rights anytime in the 30 years that I have known you to have gone.

No contact.

And the fact that you only did it now is a testament to how loving you are and not how good they were to you.

I, I would love you to talk a little bit more about that.

Cause I really hate the idea that no contact is selfish or is cruel.

And I think the idea or is done on a whim because it almost never, it is a long, arduous, often painful time that creates and causes more or new trauma.

And it is the culmination point of like, I actually can't do this anymore.

And so what was that like for you to make that decision?

Well, first let me say the Dean Brewer scandal broke open a few things and it sent me into a mental health crisis.

And then we got retreats that were available for people who were survivors of the abuse and the two by twos.

And I went to one of them.

I can tell you I've been to a couple of them and I know a fair number of women who are survivors of the abuse of the two by twos.

Every single woman is no contact with her mother.

Everyone that I know from the retreats, no contact with the mom.

That tells you something about what two by two women are doing in relation to their daughters when their daughters get abused.

It's not you, it's not an individual thing.

This is very clearly systemic.

So you gotta let go of any kind of guilt that you've got around that the reason the process of my going no contact was awful.

What happened was the Brewer scandal erupted.

There were, there were several conversations with my mom, who's still part of the religion.

Um, the first one, she advised us about the Brewer scandal and let us know that it was just this one guy this one time.

And they were being totally transparent about it and they were handling it and it was awful.

But you know, it's all done now.

And also, by the way, there's some allegations against another brother worker, but they don't actually make any sense.

But he stepped aside from the work just in case and they're just like really on it and really being serious about it.

And then, and then she said, what do you think?

And I said, you don't wanna know what I think.

And she said, go ahead and tell me.

And I said, you have an abuse problem.

You've had an abuse problem for a long time.

I know what happened to me.

I know there's other people.

I know that there is an abuse problem in this group.

And she said, well, I know that you've been bitter for a long time now.

Bitter is a two by two code word.

And, and that's what I answered her.

I explained to her this is a cult code word.

I don't think I used the word cult, but I did say that it's a code word and that what it means is that I am asking you to be accountable and you guys level that at anyone who speaks up or holds you accountable.

And that's what you do.

And the reason that you do that is to silence the voice of anyone who's going to actually hold you to account for the kinds of behaviors that you're choosing to do here.

So that was a rough conversation.

And then a few months later, so I did go to the first, I went to the first retreat and I'm not sure I'm trying.

I'm kind of mixing up the timeline here a little bit.

But what happens ultimately is I actually call the crisis line and give them names because I've got several.

And so I came to the realization that maybe even though my stuff is old, it could be background in active investigations.

So I gave them names of perps and dates and incidents and then was talking to my mom and I was at her house.

We're in the couch, sitting in the, in the living room.

And she says, I got a call from this counselor who's part of the church and he sounded upset and he left a message.

Do you know anything about that?

And I said, mom, do you want to know what I know?

And she said, yes.

Now, by this time, I was following court cases.

I was following the crisis line.

I had names of people she knew who had been in our home, and I knew what they had done to kids, and I knew who had covered it up.

And I gave her data, and it was a hard conversation.

And I said, these are people, you know, and this is what they did.

And I said, I know that this is hard for you because it's people that you care about, and it's really hard to wrap your mind around somebody that you love has done something terrible.

And I gave her a parallel from my life and said, I know how hard that was for me, and I understand that this is hard for you, but there are going to be criminal charges, and this is.

This is a big deal.

So I'm trying to, like, build bridges between her and I.

Now, my daughter at the time was living with her, and she's in the kitchen.

She makes eye contact with me, and her eyes are like this.

And then the conversation is over, and I leave.

And I did not realize this, but she starts calling the people that she knows, saying, I'm bitter.

I hate what she loves.

I attacked her.

That I accused her of being at fault for what happened to me when I was a child, which was not any part of what this conversation was about.

And she would have these conversations where she would just on and on and on.

On the phone while my daughter was present, and then get off the phone and be like, okay, do you want to go to dinner now?

And my daughter got so upset about it that she actually moved out.

She moved back to.

To live with me.

Um, and then it was just like, this series of events where she's just like, anytime she does get ahold of me, she does so in order to do.

To exact some kind of revenge.

Yeah.

She'll call me up, and I'll be like, oh, my mom called me.

Isn't that great?

Hi, Mom.

How are you?

Only she's calling to be.

Make threats about some new thing that I've done wrong that is, you know, on and on.

And this goes on until she texts me and says, all of us were planning on having Thanksgiving at your house, but we forgot that we were all gonna have.

This is a holiday dinner at your house, and we're all going to another family member's house, and I'm not invited.

So this was the final straw for me.

It was just one event after another of the.

Of the threats and whatever.

And by the time she was just like, you know, we all forgot that you were planning this for us, and we're all going somewhere else, and you're.

You're not invited.

I was.

I.

That was the same week that I got evaluated for clinical depression, and my husband's mother died.

And I was just like, I can't.

I can't know when she's gonna come in with one of these things.

Yeah.

And.

And it's so devastating and upsetting for me, and she deliberately is coming in and throwing something that she knows is gonna hurt me and then running off again.

And then when she comes back, she.

And I don't know whether it's gonna happen today or tomorrow or next week.

And I need to take some control over this.

So at this point, I send her a letter and say, I just.

I need to take a break.

I need to step back, and that's gonna have to be how this goes.

At which point, it was a month later that she and my sister were writing up a bunch of charges against me, claiming that I had come into her home and verbally assaulted her.

When we had this conversation on the couches, when I gave her the information about who was doing what for which my daughter was present, and that I had been siphoning money out of her bank account into my business account, and she actually took me to court.

And the court, she told my daughter, I have the bank statements.

It shows your mother's business on there.

I can see that she's been stealing my money secretly.

And when she did all of that, what she actually presented to the court was bank statements that showed payments to Intuit, the company that owns Quicken, the financial software.

So probably like an accounting software program.

So maybe she had a subscription because it was, you know, similar every month.

And this was her proof that I had done siphoning money out of her account.

That.

And yeah, so it was.

The whole thing was awful.

Obviously, after that, there's no going back.

There isn't a there.

And the judge very helpfully told her that now, even though he was denying her the restraining order, she was trying to get against me, which is ironic, to file a restraining order against someone who has not showed up in four months.

And saying.

Claiming that you've changed all of the locks in your house because you're so afraid of this person who said, I need time and space away from you, and then didn't come back.

And so she's, you know, making all of these.

These claims.

And the judge says, well, you know, now that you've been here this is all on public record.

And so if at any point she ever contacts you again for the rest of her life, you can come and get a restraining order because it's on.

On record now that you've told her not to contact you.

So I'm off the hook.

I don't have any feeling that I need to go back and re.

And amend that fence because the judge told her as soon as.

As soon as I, you know, even I. I know someone who got a.

A.

A mom who's done some horrible, abusive things, and she's still thinking about answering the letter and still thinking about, you know, trying to.

To.

To make that reconnection.

And I don't have any of those thoughts at all.

I'm.

Yeah, I feel like I have.

So I could say so much around all of that, but I feel like my.

Like, the two biggest things for me that stand out, like, hearing you talking about that is one, like, the absolute, like, visceral rage that I feel.

Hearing the count about people choosing systems and doctrine over fucking human life.

Yes.

Thank you.

And, like, tangible harm that is happening is just like, I cannot, like, understate the rage that.

That builds in me.

But also, like, hearing you talk about how, like, almost like you were so gentle and so, like, understanding and compassionate with how you were telling this to her, going like, I know these are people that you love and that you care about, and I'm listening to you say that, and I'm going, why are you not the person that she loves and cares about?

Like, that just was, like, breaking my heart hearing that.

Going like, you're her daughter.

Going like, I know you love and care about these people who are really harmful, abusive people, and yet that's not being extended to you.

And I just.

That breaks my heart.

And that's.

Yeah.

And obviously that had been the dynamic for a long time, which is why my bestie, Amy was saying, I've watched you dance on the head of a pin in order.

And part of what happened for me is that completely set me free.

That's when I started writing.

That's when I started, like, you know, I had already written Little Mouse at the point at which I went.

No contact with my mom.

She never got a chance to see it.

I had told her about it and told her that I wanted her to see it.

And it was in process of being with the illustrator, I think, at the time.

And so.

So what happened for me was I, at this point, have no person who is close to me who is still in the group, and what that means is I can speak about the group, and I can speak about it freely, and I can tell you exactly what it is that they're doing.

And I'm not trying to maintain any relationships.

When I met with the cults professor at University of Montana after I had left the church and this again, Amy set this up, he offered me to come back every year and talk to his class and tell him about being from a cult.

And I said that would end my relationship with my parents.

I can't do that.

I can't speak publicly because I'm trying to maintain these relationships with people who are still in the group.

And, you know, I was concerned that they would find out about it and that would be the end of my relationship with them.

Well, that relationship is over.

I'm never gonna see any of those people again.

I've cut them all out completely.

So I can now speak the truth, and I can help other survivors, and I can do the things that my particular set of gifts is good for at so that other people get access to healing materials, which is exactly what I decided to do after having a conversation with a friend where I was saying, there's all of these things that are messed up in the world.

And I was talking about coercive control at all of the levels, from the political all the way down to the personal.

And I was saying, I don't think I'm doing enough.

And my friend was like, you realize that all of these things that you're doing are the same project.

You're fighting coercive control in all of them.

My learning center, my political work, also my.

My book.

And I looked at this, and I said, well, then I need to scale it up.

Which one of these things could I scale up and reach more people and do more good in helping people recognize systems of coercive control and how they work and being able to free their minds from it.

And it was Little Mouse in the Purple Door.

Little B was already in production at the time that I had this conversation.

I was already working on the journals, and I was like, well, then why don't I just start putting some time into making sure that people know that they're out there?

Little Mouse has been out there for a little over two years, and it's never really done much.

And all of a sudden, Little Mouse is selling.

And that's just because I'm doing the work of getting out and talking about it, which that's.

I want to see the things that I've created be out there as resources for People who are coming out of high control groups because we need resources and there aren't enough out there.

Many of the people coming out of these groups are already adverse to going to therapists.

Some of them are in therapy.

I totally recommend it.

Any of the books in the journals that I've done work together with therapy, I have people who've taken them to their therapists.

But there's just not enough materials that speak to the specific kind of wounding that we have or help us unravel what the mind control did and how it, it distorted our view of reality.

It's really helpful to have some kind of materials out there.

And so I decided to build them.

And, and I want to talk specifically about your books in a moment.

But there is one particular part of the coercive control piece that I want to hone in on because I don't think it gets enough airtime.

I don't see enough people talking about it, or I see them talking about it like broadly and lightly.

But, but I want to talk about financial abuse and like economic control because that is like so prevalent in insular and particularly like closed communities.

We see elements of it in, in more mainstream controlling spaces as well.

But it is, it is different and it is not the same.

And so I would love you to talk a little bit about like the role of money in the two by twos, how it actually moves around, how it is controlled, how it is manipulated.

Like what is, what are the expectations like all of that sort of space.

There's a lot to this.

So let me try and go over some of the points.

As a child, very frequently the experience is being neglected and there aren't financial resources for you.

This is me wearing dresses that my mom made or clothes that came hand me down from three other kids before they ever got to me.

It's me not having any resources to go to college and other people, you know, picking up up that.

So, so there's abuse of, of children in the denial of resources to them.

And the reason that children are denied the resources is because all the resources are going to the church.

So when my grandfather died, he left about 800 grand to the church.

That's his whole estate.

And it turns out that's their game plan.

There's actually one of the overseers had a codicil that he would give you to put into your will so that you, you could leave your whole estate.

And the language was all written out so that they could just give it to you.

And they could be like, this is how you Lead your church, your, your whole estate to the homeless ministry so that God's ministers can continue to do the good work.

And that is always the way that is presented.

Homeless, penniless, ministry, by the way, leave them everything you own.

And so they're getting older people to leave their entire estates.

Same thing.

When my dad died, part of what my mom is mad about is that she sold the house, gave the group, the church, hundreds of thousands of dollars, then gave me some money for my math program, which was a hefty chunk of change because it's an academic program.

And then the Brewer scandal hit and then she felt differently about me and differently about the money that she had given me.

So.

And also the two, the specific way that she dealt with me, where she took our entire relationship and she made it about money.

She's sitting there to the judge saying, I bought her this and I did that.

Some of it was accurate, some of it wasn't.

But literally what she had done is she had taken everything that I had done together with her to spend time with her and tallied up the money that she had spent and said that this was me financially manipulating her.

Like I was spending time with my mom.

She was ultimately made a whole list of it and said that everything that she did was.

And one of the things that she did, my adult daughter, who was I think 21 at the time, she says, and her daughter lived with me and she never once offered to pay me rent for her daughter living with me because my daughter was 21.

And that would be a conversation you would have with my adult daughter again, like all of this stuff.

And there's the, the blamey, I'm not gonna give you any kind of resources.

When I left the.

I was still driving that 20 year old car that my dad had given me after I came back from the ministry.

And he then started trying to use it to get me back in touch with two by twos.

If I was gonna have that car, I had to go here, I had to go there, I had to do this, I had to do that.

And so I sat him down and had this conversation where I left it open to him whether he wanted to give me the car and the title as he had promised to do when I graduated from college, which I had now done a 20 year old car for a graduation present.

That's really generous and that he could either do that or I'd give him the keys.

And it was either way it could be fine.

And the things he went on about, about how I was so Full of self.

And he had done this and this with his dad.

And never once would he have demanded the title from his dad because I was being so demanding.

And finally I just took the keys off the keyring and I said, so it sounds like your decision is made.

And I handed it across the table.

And then my mother starts to go off about, you two are just both so stubborn.

And she goes out the door and walks around the block in her flip flops and comes back and says that she has blisters on her feet now, because it's my fault because I gave the car back and how was I gonna get to work tomorrow?

Was I cutting off my nose to spite my face?

And of course, I had a whole plan which I looped her in on at this point.

And I had a car by noon the following day and it was already in process.

Money is used as a form of coercive control.

And I cut ties with my dad financially at that moment.

And there wasn't any financial doings between me and him, because if I let him do anything for me like a parent would, like a supportive parent does, he was going to then use that as a tool to try and force something on me.

And that's.

I think it's that money is the tool of coercive control is a big part of.

But the two by twos are kind of fascinating because all the money is in cash, of course.

So when I went to that first convention that when I was in the work, I was asked to turn in all of the money in my wallet, which I did, because then it was part of my testimony that I had given everything away down to the change in my wallet, right?

And then there was a redisbursement and someone quietly came and gave me an envelope with some money in it.

And now this was the money that I was taking away with me from this convention.

Now, transaction out conventions are a money making opportunity because people from hundreds of people come in and they.

They often bring a big cash donation with them.

And.

And they turn that in at convention time.

And so the overseers and the people that are higher up are, are bringing in all of this cash money at convention time.

And there is a situation where I think it was the Minnesota Canada border, where one of the overseers was headed out of the United States and into Canada and got stopped and searched and had $20,000 his car.

So we have older brother workers with large amounts of cash.

When Dean Brewer died, there were envelopes full of cash in his hotel room.

There are plenty the women in the work have a lot less money than the men in the work because people give more money to the men than they do to the women, even.

So I do remember one time when I was in the work of showing up at somebody's house and having them have, like, hundred dollar bills on our pillows.

And that was given to us when we got there.

I opened a car, and somebody had given me a large amount of money because they didn't realize that my surger had already been paid for, and they thought they needed to help me pay for surgery.

And I took some of that money and I sent it to a worker in another country.

And she wrote back to me, and she said, yes, this is how the work is financed in other countries.

This is the right thing to do.

Keep sending money to overseas workers in envelopes, cash.

That's how it's done.

And so I would walk into a gospel meeting, and a member would walk up to shake my hand and palm cash to me in their hand.

When they shook my hand on their way in the door like that.

It's always secret.

It's always these ways that, like, I was probably in my late teens when I found out that they were.

That my grandfather's estate was going to the church.

Like, I had no idea that this was even a thing.

But it turns out that it's actually something that they're doing a lot of.

Yeah.

And I would love.

I can hear.

And I've heard this said so many times in conversations around financial abuse and exploitation, which is.

It's a really, like, uninformed thought.

But if people want to leave their money to the church, that's their choice.

And so I would love you to talk about why this is both not a choice and also why this is not an individual thing.

That this is, like, systemic financial control in a whole system and group of people.

Right.

There's no rules until you break one.

See how they react.

It's the point at which you.

Which I say to my dad, you can either give me the title or I'll give you the car.

And he starts to go off about how I'm.

And all of these judgments against me.

So it's not gonna come at you directly.

You didn't leave this money to us.

And we're angry about that.

It's.

You are gonna lose your status.

So that meeting that was in your home.

Oh, it's gone now.

Cause you're.

Yeah, you're not really in good standing.

There's something about your spirit, and we're not sure You.

So it's going to always be indirect, but you're going to be punished.

That's, that is how it works.

And so there's coercive control thrives when these things aren't spelled out, when they aren't told said directly.

But you will absolutely lose status and be punished and find people responding to you in a whole different way if you are not giving than if you are.

And there are people who have status, they get called royal guilty.

And I know that when my grandfather's money was given to the church that my father was the person who took care of that trust.

So grandpa's money goes to the church.

My dad has it in his name for the use of the workers when they come and ask for it for this or that or some other thing.

I also know some things that my dad bought that came out of that money.

Money.

But there's no accounting, there's no system that is going to make sure that the person who can takes care of that trust is a person who's using it 100% for the work.

And you know, there's some royalty families who seem to be doing very, very well financially.

I can imagine.

Yeah, you know, I mean there's no accountability.

And when my dad died, the couple who are were on the Chelan Convention grounds, who were the ones who had the trust that my dad's money was supposed to go to, met with my mother consistently right up until the point that she wrote all of those checks.

When she was done writing the checks to her, to them, they weren't showing up and having to have coffee with her and all of that sort of thing.

So as you get older, there is definitely a concerted effort to spend time with you and go see you and da da da da da da da and make sure that you have that codicil in your will and have it done that way, et cetera, et cetera.

And after my dad died and my mother was in charge of my dad's finances, they made sure that they connected in and that they.

And it was present on her mind that she needed to get that money given to them because it was, it had been promised in her husband's lifetime and that she had a responsibility and it was absolutely her responsibility to go and do that.

And it was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Dollars.

I know that we both want to talk a little bit about recovery and I'm going to use this question as I guess a bit of a bridge between the financial conversation and the recovery portion of this episode, but what does the aftermath of being in a system with tightly wound financial control where nothing is your own look like when you leave that system and you have no financial resources because you have been so dependent on the system that you have come from.

What is the, like, what is the financial impact that follows you out?

Well, I'm 55 years old and I don't have a retirement.

Yeah.

And the financial effects.

You know what I said to my mom?

Your choices have put our family two generations behind in the acquisition of wealth.

You need to understand, the way the middle class class transfers wealth is that they buy property and then they transfer it to the next generation.

And that's how wealth accumulates.

Not in one generation, in three.

And that's how it's done in the United States.

All of that in my family went to the church.

So I'm starting over from scratch in my generation plus which I'm the only one of the three to have gotten a college education because of the whole constraints of them making too much money for us to get help and also refusing to help help.

Then there is, you know, the situation.

You come out of the work, you've been in it for 10 years, you have nothing.

People have had to start over in those kinds of situations, and it's not, it's not good.

And you know, there are, there are people who have helped one person or another, and there are some funds that have been set up to help people exit the work who want to.

But you have to realize that anybody who's considering leaving the work if they've been in there 10 or 20 years, is in a really big bind.

Especially if everybody in their family is still active in the religion.

They're just.

Many of them are just gonna stay in the work because they can't figure out how to get out and how to start a life outside.

So they're trapped.

So that's one thing.

Another one is that a lot of people, like, don't have any financial literacy, didn't get taught anything about how to get or make money.

I was headed to the university and had one of the elders take me aside and say, you know, you don't need to go to a university, just need to learn how to take care of your man.

And, you know.

Right, exactly.

And, well, and then I get to the university and everything that I'm interested in is like radio, television, it's like drama.

It's, you know, I'm interested in performing arts.

That's like who I am, it turns out creativity and all of that stuff and everything that I'm interested in is not appropriate for a two by two girl.

So I get my degree in history for really no good reason other than that I enjoyed history class, which I did.

That was great.

I'm glad I have a degree in history, but it wasn't anything.

And then of course I niched myself into education, which is again, that's one of the very few appropriate things for women to do.

So there's this whole side of women in the two by twos do work, but generally teachers, nurses, caring professions, very, very limited.

There's a lot of men who are blue collar construction, that kind of stuff.

There's families, it does depend by family.

Some families are completely anti educ education and their kids don't go and go to college.

Other ones are like go to college, just you know, don't get turned, whatever.

Yeah.

So there's there's many, many, many layers of fine financial issues in the two by twos.

But I think one of the big ones is that the money that is funneled into the work is done so, so quietly and behind door closed doors that there's no accounting for any of it and there's no transparent currency at all.

And so what they're doing with it, where it goes in any of that stuff, it's just, that's just completely a, a mystery.

Yeah, there was a big fund set up for survivors here in the western part of the United States after Dean Brewer's scandal broke.

But things have kind of changed and the investigation seems to have slowed down and suddenly there just isn't money in that account anymore.

And there's.

Yeah,.

You mentioned creativity when you were talking and I, you know, you've also mentioned.

We both know and I've talked with a few other people around like the power of creativity.

I think for a lot of people in, in any sort of trauma recovery in my opinion.

And you've mentioned your books, but what people, if they haven't seen your books, may not know at this point in the conversation and that those books are picture books.

But they are not children's books, they are adults books.

And like I said to you before we hit record, I would love to normalize the shit out of adult picture books because is so fun, right?

Yes.

And so I'd love you to talk I guess a bit about like how creativity helped you in your own recovery, but also how the creativity that you've poured into the books has then been able to help other people because I love the flow of.

Thank you.

Creativity is the healing space.

Yeah.

Every Retreat that I went to.

That's what we were doing.

And the reason is this coercive control starts with.

With don't trust your inner voice.

Trust me, listen to what I say, Obey, conform, do what I say.

The one thing that I can't let you do if I want to control you is have you have thoughts of your own.

So I'm going to shut down and I'm going to call it the world, the Flesh and the Devil.

In the case of the two by twos, your group may have had a different word for it, but it always is what's inside of you, that inner knowing that's got to shut down.

You got to only listen to us and only believe what we tell you.

That's what makes you controllable.

So the antithesis of that, and the therapists know this, and this is why they're doing the work that they're doing, is that every time you get in creatively involved, you have to get reconnected to that inner self.

You have to make choices that work for you.

And that is.

That is the.

What the recovery process looks like.

Reconnecting to your own authentic inner self, whatever that is, and then finding your way to the self that belongs to.

To you.

Yeah, that's why creativity is so important.

And so in the second book, the character is a character who has been taught to paint over her tail all of her life.

From the very early memory, she's been taught to paint over her tail.

And we're about halfway through the book when we discover that underneath the paint is a rainbow.

And she's living in a binary world where you have to either be red or blue and that nothing else is allowed.

And that it's when she finally uncovers, takes the paint off of her tail and walks boldly home with the rainbow, showing that her parents don't even let her in the house.

They meet her at the door and they throw her through the purple door and into the.

Out into the world, because they're not gonna have that.

The first character, and in that scene, Little Bee is given a key by her dad to get back if she to.

Wants.

Wants to.

Little B doesn't use it that way.

Because you know what creativity means that you do.

You take the key and you use it for your own purposes.

What Bea does is she takes it and she waits.

And one day she puts it in an envelope and she mails it to her little sister Ellen.

And the first book, Little Mouse and the Purple Door, very early on, starts with Little Mouse getting a key in the mail from her sister and not knowing what it's for.

For.

Yeah.

And she's very into.

The early part of the book is what it's like to live in a high control community.

Yeah.

And this is what we miss.

If we miss.

If people are listening.

Go to YouTube and.

And look at the video because we're saying it.

We miss the community and the connection and all of those things that were the good parts of the religion.

We gotta start there and talk about what it felt like to really be part of.

And she thought that this was wonderful.

And she thought that this was.

Was gonna be her path.

She gets the key from her sister.

She's found out somebody else has disappeared.

Ophelia.

She's worried about her, but she's not allowed to go after her.

That's not gonna be acceptable.

And it's not until something bad happens to little Mouse and they blame her for it.

And her fear of attack becomes greater than her fear of leaving.

And at this point, she uses the key and she goes through the door.

And after she goes through the door, she meets a guide.

There's.

There's the dark night of the soul.

It happens.

It is part of all of our stories.

We don't skip across that.

And she's dark and cold and alone.

And she doesn't know if the sun will ever come up.

But the sun comes up.

That too is part of the story.

And she meets the guide.

And the guide character tells her the kinds of things that therapists tell us.

The kinds of things that our friends tell us.

The kinds of things.

Things that supportive people that we love tell us.

They don't tell us how to think.

He just explains to her that the city is a whole lot of villages put together.

And you just get to pick the one that works for you.

And you can try out this and you can try out that.

And what he shows her is radical acceptance.

And right in the middle of that, the parts of herself that she's been trying to edit all of her life because she thought that she was wrong.

She has a transformation.

And.

And it was self.

There was the acceptance from the other character was the thing that led to her transformation.

Because no amount of self editing is ever going to get you there.

It's the connecting to your inner knowing and your creativity.

And the journals are all written for you to take a creative path through your own story, to explore how all of these dynamics worked for you and to retell your own story.

And you can write it, or you can drive or you can.

You can tell it on TikTok.

It doesn't matter what you do, but you find a creative outlet way to interact with the questions and that's where the healing happens.

It's not in the question, it's in your answer and you're telling your own story.

I love these so much and I like they're not only that they're beautiful and the messaging in them is beautiful but I just know how.

How accessible they will feel for people when they first leave an all consuming totalistic system or any high control system.

The accessibility of being able to read a book about a mouse, not read a book about a survivor or a memoir like the accessibility of that to be able to.

To read something that feels separate enough for your of yourself but that is not separate at all is just so beautiful.

And I love that.

And yeah, I just think that's incredible.

Thank you.

And one of the things about allegory is that you bring your own story into it.

Yeah.

Allegory is, you know, the second character, I see her and modeled her after some queer friends of mine and the experience that they had.

But who, how many people have had an experience that something about their authentic self wasn't accepted?

It's the same experience.

So you read the character, the story of having to paint over who you are and you go through the journal about the parts of you that.

And it could be anything.

Yeah.

And a friend of mine said that she had had experience that was very different than mine, but it was a coercive control experience.

And she read the attack sequence in Little Mouse and completely identified with it in an experience that she had had that was very different than mine.

So that's part beauty of allegory is that it allows you to access it and then bring your own story into it.

And then creatively you tell your own story, you explore your own story and that's where the healing happens.

Beautiful.

Now I feel like I've not asked you a single normal question that I would in any other interview today.

But that's okay.

But I am going to ask this one because I think it's always really nice for people to sort of like hear here.

Like before I get to my final question I want to ask this, which is that I like to be able to ask this.

So people sort of go like is it okay that I've landed where I've landed essentially because so many of us think that we still need to land in a particular place or in a particular system, particular belief and I.

And so I want to ask around what spirituality looks like for you now and what you think.

And I remember in preparation for today, I saw, I heard you say in another interview, you, that I certainly don't believe in a white male Republican God with a bad sense of humor.

And that is probably my favorite sentence I've ever heard because the bad sense of humor bit really hones in on it.

I love that.

And so what do you believe now after coming out of that kind of system?

Believing that there's a God that cares about whether you date this guy or take that job.

Job is like an ant sitting on an ant hill, looking up at a human and thinking that human cares whether, whether I take this path or that path back to the nest.

I think it's ego.

I don't believe in that kind of God, but I do believe that the entire universe is sacred.

I believe in the, in the fractals and that from the whole universe all the way down to the microcosm, that all of that is connected in a very deep way that we only are beginning to understand.

I try to not get ahead of science and just to say there's things that I don't understand.

But the way that I look at it is this.

We know that matter and energy never begin or end.

They only change forms.

So to me, it seems plausible based on the law of conservation, the way it works everywhere that it works, that consciousness never begins or ends, it only changes form.

And so to me, the way that what feels comforting to me me is to think of it like a cup which is the body and the water inside of the body is the soul or the spirit or the essence of that which calls itself Melissa.

At some point we're going to take the cup and we're going to throw it back into the river.

And the essence of that which calls itself Melissa will go back into the rest of it.

It's still there.

It's just not coalesced into this particular form.

I, I think that there's nothing that we know inside science that negates that as a possibility.

I call myself a soft agnostic because I'm kind of in this place of we don't know, maybe someday we will know and maybe we'll get to where we understand that.

But it seems to me like there is something deeper than the physical world that we understand.

There's certainly a deeper experience that we have.

And I think that this thing about getting in touch with our inner knowledge is getting in touch with the divine spark within.

I think it's inside of everyone.

And what that Means is if you're part of a tradition that says that only your tradition has the capital T truth, that's not true.

Because every person all over the world and throughout history has had access to the inner spark, to the divine within.

And they may have had different solutions for problems than you did.

They might have things that work for them that don't work for you, that's okay.

And if you just allow for the possibility that we all have the ability to access the inner spark inside of ourselves in our own inner knowing, and then just leave off whether, you know for somebody else, you can give them your ideas and you can influence and you can say, if you do this, that will happen.

And then you sit back and say, now I'm going to let you experience that and see how that goes for you.

And wait seven years until they call you up and say, I think I grew up in a cult.

That's what it is to connect to your inner knowing.

And that to me is what's divine.

I believe that there is the divine, there is the sacred.

And that really comes closer to pantheism than anything else.

I think there's a lot of good in Christianity and there's many things that when you read the New Testament and you take Walter Wink's non violence passages through the New Testament, there's lots of good stuff there.

Christianity is not the only tradition where people got in touch with their inner knowing.

I think there's a lot of good to be discovered in reading and studying what other people have figured out.

And I think that once you start closing the door to a tradition because you think yours is capital R right, that that's a mistake.

Yes.

And that you shouldn't do that.

Yeah, yeah.

Because when.

Yes.

And also because when you think that you are right, everybody else is wrong.

And so that is like in itself a hugely problematic.

Okay.

I ask an encouragement based question to end these episodes all the time.

And so I would love you to offer some encouragement of what you would say to someone who has just left that system.

They're not seven years down the track.

They're not three years.

They might be just a matter of weeks out of the system that they have come from.

What would you say to that person?

You did the right thing.

There's a reason that you left.

And it was brave.

Don't undersell how brave that was.

Was.

It's so big and it's so painful and it's so hard.

You did the right thing.

And it gets better.

The sun comes up.

The sun always comes up.

Beautiful.

Thank you so much for joining me.

This has been an absolute pleasure.

Thanks for listening.

To be on the surface if this episode resonated, challenged you, or named something you've struggled to put words to, I'm really glad you found your way here.

You'll find ways to connect, learn more, and explore further in the show.

Notes as always, you are good.

You have always been good and your story matters always.