162: What if you grew up in a cult?
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I didn't know what normal was. So everything looked so scary. It was so foreign to me. Everything I was doing, I was learning for the first time. It was like my birth into the world. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 162. What if you grew up in a cult?

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. So my mom and dad met in high school. They were high school sweethearts. My mom got pregnant with me and so they got married.

I guess my mom did not realize how much of a troubled past my dad had actually lived through. My dad had a drinking problem. He had a drug problem. He would be gone for a week. And by the time he came back, he wouldn't have anything left from his paycheck. Two years later, my brother came home.

My dad was still an alcoholic, doing drugs, and I think everything she went through with my dad, beating her and drinking and crashing his car into things on purpose to try and kill himself, I think it was just too much for her to handle, and I think it really got to her mentally. So my mom decided to leave him.

When my mom got divorced and left my dad, I think it hit her hard because she knew that she was going to have to do this on her own. And I think it made her sad knowing that she wasn't going to have the family that she thought she was going to and that my brother and I were going to grow up without a father in a broken home.

My mom and dad had a friend in high school who they knew, and this friend had reached out to my mom, or my mom had reached out to this friend somehow after the separation and divorce, and told her that she might benefit from going to church. And so my mom agreed that she needed some guidance, and so she agreed to go to this church with her old friend from high school.

After a couple of times attending that church, her friends told her that there was this Bible study and the Bible study was led by this prophet of God who was the true prophet of God, similar to Jesus Christ, and that she should come along.

So the first couple of times that my mom went to these Bible studies, I guess she really enjoyed them. And there were probably about 20 or 30 adults and they would bring their children and the children would play in the room on the side while the adults listened to Ben, who is the true prophet of God.

So when my mom attended the Bible study led by Ben, I believe that she felt very supported both mentally and physically. There were a lot of adults that could help her with her children, help her with money issues. And in the beginning, everything was great. And we weren't considered evil when we first joined the

So before Ben started his own religious group slash Bible study, he was a hairdresser in Hollywood. He owned his own beauty shop in Hollywood. He did a lot of famous people's hair. He had a lot of clients.

Ben's appearance was very regal. He had very beautifully combed salt and pepper hair. He never took a razor to his face. He had a long beard. He was very big. He was very dark. And he was very pious when he walked.

He didn't allow anyone to take pictures of him. He thought that if someone took pictures of him, they could go to people in the outside world, quote unquote, and people would come and try to destroy him or try to hurt him.

One day he attended a church in Anaheim and it was called Melody Land. It was right next to Disneyland. It was a huge church and Ben was an usher.

And one day he said that the spirit of God came down upon him like a dove in a bodily form and that he was touched and filled with the spirit of God. And he was 100% pure. And he was attached by an umbilical cord that went from God to himself. And he was receiving the word of God straight from God's mouth. And he was to make us pure the way he was pure himself.

In the beginning, Bible study was typically held on Sundays all day long from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. Ben would preach and we would listen and we were expected to stay awake and not fall asleep. If we did fall asleep, we were told that it was Satan putting us to bed so that we could not hear the truth.

Everything that we would read in the Bible, he would add to it or deconstruct it and reconstruct it based on his opinions and his viewpoints. And basically that was him showing us that he was communing with God, that the words that he was getting from God were coming to him from this pseudo umbilical cord relationship.

There were times where Ben would preach and it would be raining and thundering outside. And to this day, I cannot explain how that man made the house shake and boom as loud and as hard as the house did.

I don't know how to explain it. I know that sometimes thunder can rumble and shake your house. But as he was emphasizing each syllable, the house was booming and moving and shaking and the thunder would crash. And I just don't know how to explain that in my head. And

During those sessions, there would be times where out of nowhere, the adults would just start speaking in tongues and crying and wailing in tongues. And then he would touch them and they would fall down and

It would just be so scary as a child to see all these things happening and know that we were supposed to respect this. But at the same time, we didn't feel safe because we didn't. Nobody was explaining to us what this was. So I know that as a child, I didn't feel like I was safe because I didn't know why this was happening before me.

There was one time where I was about 12 or 13 and I was allowed to sit out and listen to him during his sermons because I was showing an interest in becoming filled with the Spirit of God. So I was out with the adults. So he singled me out and he began to pray over me and talk about how there was going to be this big sneeze that I had. And when I did that, all the devils were going to be released from my body.

being and I was going to be free of all my sadness and all my weaknesses. It was going to bring me closer to God when I had that sneeze. And my nose kept running so bad that they had to get me a dish towel. And I could not stop crying and my nose could not stop running. And I still can't explain what happened to me that day other than I was scared.

And I didn't know what was happening to me. But I felt so special at the same time in that moment because I knew that from that point on for quite some time that people were going to treat me better, that I wasn't going to be the misfit. I was going to be one of his favorites. And I was. Whoever was one of his favorites at the time would get to ride home with him from wherever we were as an outing. And we would get to ride home in his Lexus.

It was like you were getting to ride with Jesus himself. In the beginning of any new member attending the cult, you were the favorite of everyone. Nobody treated you poorly. You could do no wrong. So you basically were inched into a new way of thinking when you first started going.

The progression of things would slowly take over day by day, month by month, so that eventually they could lay on you the real truth of what was going to be expected of you and what God would expect of you.

There would be times where there were certain adults that were not the favorites. And so if you were shunned by Ben, you were shunned by everyone else in the group and you were lowest on the totem pole in the cult and people treated you accordingly.

And other times, maybe a month later, you would be the cream of the crop. You would be everyone's favorite, your family, your kids. You would be doing something that was beneficial in the eyes of God because Ben would say how well you were doing or how well a family member of yours was doing. And so at that point, you became the favorite of many of the members of the cult.

And so we were always on this proverbial roller coaster where we were good and we were doing the right things and saying the right things and acting the right ways and

And in the eyes of God, and then in the next minute, we were scum, we were trash. And that was all dictated by Ben and then carried out by each one of the adults in the cult. You never knew really when you were going to be promoted in Ben's eyes or demoted in Ben's eyes. But he would always say it was God's decision.

After a while, Ben decided to hold Bible studies on Wednesday nights because we were not changing and being made pure as quick as we should have been. We were not striving and we were not becoming perfect. So we were then made to attend Bible studies on Wednesdays from about 5 p.m. till 3 a.m.

And we all had to go to work and school the next day, Mondays and on Thursdays, and it was very hard. The premise of Ben's Bible study was that we were inside the covering at all times when we were doing what Jesus would have us to do, doing what God would want us to do.

Anytime that we chose to step outside of the covering, if we chose to not participate in activities or in Bible studies, we were outside of the covering at that point. And anything could happen to us. Death, we would get injured. We would be shunned by God if we chose to step outside of the covering for any reason.

All of the children attended public school. And so we all learned how to live in the outside world and profess the word of God with our actions and be light unto the darkness. We were expected to sit down during the Pledge of Allegiance. We were not to salute the flag because that was worshiping an idol. If we were girls, we couldn't pierce our ears or dye our hair.

We had to listen to many adults that were not our parents and do whatever they said to do at all times. We were basically used as child labor. We never really had a normal weekend. We always were working for Ben and trying to make as much money as we could to give him at the end of the day money.

A lot of the cult members were real estate agents, and we were made to pass out flyers in many neighborhoods all weekend. We were made to make white chocolate roses and sell them at various restaurants at night. I just remember always wanting to actually be the family that was going into the restaurant rather than the peddler outside who was selling them a rose.

You were not allowed to converse or see or talk to or be a part of your real, true family members. So growing up, my brother and I were removed from my dad's family.

That whole side of the family was very close with me. And we would go over to my dad's family's house for Christmas every year. And one year, my mom told them that this would be the last year that she was bringing us to Christmas and that they wouldn't be allowed to see us again.

My aunts were devastated. They begged her to please let them see us still. And they knew that something was wrong because they seen my brother missing chunks of hair and they knew he was being abused. But no matter what they said or did, they couldn't get my mom to agree to not go back. And that was one of the last times my aunts ever saw us.

During any given Bible study, there were a lot of children and each group of children would be put in a different room.

The adults would come and check on us every now and then, but we were expected to always be quiet, never move around for hours, for hours and hours and hours, always be still and always be quiet. And that really never happened with a lot of the children. And so we were quite frequently beat by any adult. If they came in and saw that we were being unruly, we would be beat accordingly, because

anybody at any given time could come in and just beat us or take us into the bathroom and beat us and

They had really weird solutions to problems with the adults raising their kids. And they had very weird ideas of how to fix those problems. And the members of the cult would take opinions that they thought that Ben would agree with and tell parents to do these things to their children because it's what God would want them to do. And the children needed to fear their parents.

So my brother had a bedwetting issue until he was older. And my brother was made to sleep outside like a dog on the mat all night. And I was the one that found him in the morning. And I opened the sliding glass door and tried to get him up. And he was so cold from being out there all night on the mat.

That's what they said that God would want my mom to do, to teach him a lesson and to help him not wet the bed anymore. It didn't help him. Nothing changed. He still wet the bed. And so because he kept wetting the bed, they would have her put his underwear on his head in hopes that he would not wet the bed anymore.

They made him wear his soiled underwear on his head in front of me. And I just remember looking at my brother and just being so confused, but knowing that they told my mom to do this. And so my brother was obviously bad. And I just believed that he was bad and that this needed to happen to fix it. But I knew that I just wanted to save him. I just didn't want to...

him to be going through that. If we talked back, they would tell my mom to put soap in our mouths for hours and we would have burns on our lips because of that. And we would get beat by many adults with many different objects. We would have extension cords used on us, vacuum cords, jump ropes, hangers, belts. Many people would break the objects on us as kids because

Basically, anytime my mom would be putting away the dishes and we were just playing, we would sit up and get nervous every time we heard that drawer open because we knew that she had a spatula in there that she would use on us at any given time. There was one time where I was at a pancake breakfast at a park and my mom drove up and said, get in the car, we're leaving. And I didn't.

She left me at the park and I got so nervous. I started walking home and I must have walked about four miles to Ben's sports store that he owned. The cult members that were there at the store with my mom told her that when I got there, I was to be shown that I was to always listen to my mother and always fear her.

So instead of explaining to me that somebody could have stolen me or hurt me or a car could have ran me over, she took me into the bathroom because they told her to and broke two hangers on me. I was beat about 50 times or more and I couldn't sit down for about three days at school or anywhere.

You know, looking at this, like, if my daughter did something like that, like, I would explain to her why it was dangerous. I would never be her. Like, I would want to help them understand and not hurt them. I'm mad at my mom for that. She thought that that was okay. I never would do that to my daughter now.

I just don't understand why she never stood up for us. I don't understand why she thought that it was okay other than she was very brainwashed. When I was four, I went to this preschool that my mom put me in. And I remember somehow they found out that my mom hit us.

I don't know how, but they were planning to send a person from Child Protective Services to talk to me and my brother at school. And somehow my mom found out that this was going to occur. So she was told by the cult how to handle this situation. And she coached my brother and I on what to say if somebody came up to us and asked us if my mom hits us.

And my mom told us that we were to say, my mom says I don't have to tell you anything if I don't want to and walk away. And so one day I was with my friend in the play yard and a guy came up to me and asked me, does your mom hit you? Does anyone hit you? And I said very proudly, like my mom says, I don't have to tell you anything that I don't want to. And I remember feeling so proud that

I did exactly what she told me to do and feeling like I made my mom proud and I was proud of myself. During the next couple of weeks, the preschool burned down and basically they dropped the case.

There was documentation in their records against my mom. And the cult had told my mom that that was God protecting her. She was doing what was right for her kids, which was disciplining them. And so I always remember being afraid of that when I was older. And I heard that story because I thought it just confirmed once more that the cult was correct and that the powers of God could intervene.

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And I was the only older girl, so I was subjected to a lot of his grandson's experimental ages where they were coming into puberty at the same time I was. And two out of the three of them had sexually abused me.

I learned to stuff it down. I never told anyone. I actually thought that it was normal and that it was helping me to become a better person in the long run for my boyfriend when I finally got a boyfriend or a husband. But I was basically scared out of my wits. I was shaking. I couldn't stop shaking.

I didn't understand male affection at all, and I always wanted a dad. And so a lot of times when I was abused, I would secretly hope that it was bringing me and my abuser closer mentally and in the ways of the heart and in the soul because I was hoping that it would make them love me more. But it never, ever turned out that way.

It was always just a way for them to get what they wanted. But I always hoped that it was because they truly did love me.

None of the children knew the amount of abuse that was actually occurring between the children. And I didn't know that growing up. I just thought it was me. But finding out later that it did happen to the boys, a lot of the boys were abused by the older boys. And basically at one point or another, every one of the children got to one of the other children.

Not only did the abuse come from his grandsons and some of the other boys, but the abuse came from one of the dads in the cult. And at first I just thought he was being loving to me like a father would be to their child. And because he never, he always said he wanted a girl and he could never have a girl that I thought that I was really special in his eyes.

He started having me hug him or lay on his lap or be around him a lot more. And when I knew that it was wrong was when he started asking me to come in while he was showering. I was probably about 14 and I knew that that wasn't him showing me a fatherly love.

So I always wanted to hold on to that feeling of he was more of a father figure. But in the end, that feeling of him being a father figure was ruined.

So from about the age 10 to probably 14, 15, 16, I was gaining more friends at public school. I was branching out of my shell, so to speak. I was finding myself.

I always wanted to be part of the world, so to speak. My friends, I saw them, how they had normal families. They could go to their real family's functions. They knew their real aunts and uncles. And they had sleepovers. And they shaved their legs. And they had earrings. And they had all the stuff that I wanted. But I also was very scared to covet that.

The way that I learned how to cope and act out and become part of the crowd was to make people happy, make people laugh. And I wanted to please everyone because I was used to pleasing everyone.

And I never told any of my friends what I did on Sundays or Wednesday night. I couldn't even begin to tell them or explain to them. And so I essentially, as a child, as a young child, till I was about 17, 18, lived a double life.

I started hanging around the popular skater, surfer, punk rocker type crowd at school. I had a lot of quote unquote risky and evil friends that they would have considered not good influences in my life.

There were times in high school that I would participate in drinking. I would smoke weed all the time with those friends. And I just tried so hard to escape the guilt of

From that, just sometimes would just be so much that I would say no to my friends for quite some time after I was allowed to go, just because I didn't want God to look down on me or punish me. But at the same time, I felt so free that I was able to participate in a normal activity.

When I was 16, I told my mom that I wanted to see my dad and meet my dad for the very first time as an older child. My dad would run into us around town every now and then and would beg my mom to let him see us. And she would

always tell him that he was no good. And when we would drive away, she would tell us that he will hurt us because he won't follow through on his word. So she kept us from seeing him, even though he begged her for years. We begged her. I begged her. She always made the decision for us that it was going to be horrible. But I wanted a dad so bad.

My dad was not a good person. I understand. He was always on drugs, always drinking. He was haunted by his habits. But his love was so pure for us. I always knew that. He just didn't know how to escape his demons.

So when I was 16, I told my mom that I wanted to meet my dad and I wanted to invite him to Bible study because I thought that it would help him. And I thought that we could be a family again. He came to Bible study and met everyone and he met me first.

Everyone was judging me for wanting my dad to be there because they were thinking, aren't we enough for her? Why does she feel she has to bring her dad here? After Bible study, he hung out with me and my brother and we went to have lunch. And then I never saw him for five or six more years after that. When I realized he wasn't coming back again, I think I got pretty depressed.

This whole fucking thing just stemmed from my dad. And I know he felt guilty about it for years. When I was growing up, I always thought that if my dad just got his shit together and just was better to my mom, I would have never grown up like this. That I knew he was haunted by his demons. I just feel my dad's pain. I know what he was thinking when he hung himself.

He always regretted his actions and he always told us he did, but he couldn't help himself. My mom didn't make it any easier for him to not feel guilty about things. So as I got older, I started working at the medical group that my mom worked at since she was young. Her boss was my boss.

So there was this other coworker that I kind of fell in love with pretty quickly as I started to work there. And my mom started to fall in love with her boss. And so we were both seeing these guys who were friends at the same place of employment. Somehow, some of the cult members found out and they completely ripped us to shreds about that.

We were constantly belittled. Ben would find scriptures about our private parts that they were just going to fall off because we were outside of the covering of God and not doing what we were supposed to. And me and my mom would just have to sit there and take it.

But it was the one time where my mom and I started to gain our own lives and take charge of our own decisions and do something that we wanted to do, no matter what they thought about that. And that was not okay with them because I think they saw that we were starting to not care about their opinion. And that's around the same time they started trying to claim my mom's possessions, like her house,

My car, I had gotten a new car. Anything that my mom would buy, Ben would say that my mom doesn't know it, but that's really his item that he's gotten her to where she's at in life. And my mom one day had enough. And that was the breaking point for her that he kept claiming her items. Not that all these people did all these horrible things to her children.

I'm still so bitter about that. Like, I just can't fucking fathom that. Like, that just blows my fucking mind. So I came home one day and I put my stuff on the ground and she was selling the house.

And she said she was moving to Ohio with her boyfriend and I needed to find a place to live. And I asked her, what about my brother? He's 16. And she said, I've raised you guys for many years and you guys don't do what I say to do and you're rebellious. And so I don't want to raise you anymore. I'm done. My best friend's family had to take me in.

I remember telling my best friend, I can't go with you guys to this rave because I don't have a home. And she went home and talked to her parents and they said, you can stay here. And I literally moved my mattress and my frame in there, my dresser and my clothes. And we went out that night.

to the rave and I did a lot of drugs because I just wanted to escape and I was so sad that my mom abandoned me. My brother ended up staying in the cult because the cult members and the cult leader convinced him that we were evil and that he needed to stay where he was under the covering with the righteous people.

One day he acted out. My brother was a very angry child and they kicked him out of the cult and they said, you can't stay here anymore. My brother got sent to a group home because my mom didn't want us. He got in a fight there and he broke some kid's nose and he got put into juvenile hall.

The cult leader said that I had better be careful because if I was starting to go out into the world that God could strike me dead wherever I was because I was outside of the covering. So I instantly, when I left the cult, I became scared to drive my car. I thought I was going to die in it. It would just be terrified to get behind the wheel of my car.

So I felt hopeless. I felt like, well, I deserve what I get from here on out. And I just didn't go back because my mom didn't go. That was it. It was a very abrupt, weird ending to everything. When I was out of the cult right away, the first feelings that I would constantly get were unsure feelings. I never knew anything.

If the decisions I was making was number one, the correct decision for me or number two, if it was normal, I was starting to barely see that some of the things they were teaching and saying were off. But I didn't want to own up to the complete fact that they were wrong about everything because I was too scared to go against their word.

So little by little, I would become more free to feel my own feelings and make my own decisions. And then I would pull back and I would be like a turtle that would just go back into their shell and regret every single decision I made, not understand why I was making poor decisions. And so there was a constant tug of war in my soul.

That maybe I should go back to the cult or maybe I should continue this odd way of living in the world. I didn't know what normal was. So everything looked so scary. It was so foreign to me. Everything I was doing, I was learning for the first time. It was like my birth into the world as an 18-year-old.

It was very difficult to navigate around the right choices. And I didn't even know what was right and wrong about my choices. So I made some pretty bad choices. And I was lost a lot of that time. So when I was growing up, I was really close to one of his grandsons who was very sweet and

And we would always make fun of the adults or especially as we got older, we would share our frustrations. He always treated me respectfully and showed me true love. So one day I saw him walking down the street and I pulled to the side of the road and offered him a ride. And he got in my car and we talked and caught up.

I kept trying to tell him that if he would just leave and try to get out, that he would do well and he could make his own decisions. And he said, okay, well, I'll consider it. And then I dropped him off and I drove away. And then I found out a week or two later that he had hung himself in the park next to my house.

So it had probably been a year since he had died. And I decided that I was going to buy a plant and a card for him and leave it on his grave. And I pulled up to the cemetery and I saw that his grandpa and like four or five or six of the cult members were having a Bible study around his grave. And that pissed me the fuck off. And I wasn't going to take any more shit from,

And little by little, that started to creep out of my soul, my real personality that they had stolen from me for years. And I walked right up to that grave and I looked them all in the face in a circle and I put down his plant and I looked at him and I stayed there for quite some time. And they just stopped talking and were just staring at me. They couldn't believe that I wasn't saying anything or I wasn't bowing down to them or I wasn't scared.

I felt like I beat them and I showed them that I wasn't afraid of them anymore. You can't hurt me. I can do whatever the fuck I want. I remember thinking that I can do whatever the fuck I want. Immediately after leaving the cult, probably within that year, I met a guy who lived two streets down from my childhood home. I moved into this house together.

with this guy. And over the next four to six years was when I wild out and I did everything and anything that any person would want to do as a teenager in the world. But I did it 10 times worse. I got into drugs. I got into drinking. I got into heavier drugs. There were guns and knives and loud music and you name it. I was around it and I did it.

I would drink 32 beers and put my boyfriend to bed and lay in his room and just cry at the moon and wonder why my life was this way and wonder when I was going to have some normalcy.

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So during the four to six year period that I was living in this drug slash drinking slash partying house, little by little, I started to realize that things that they told me and things that they said and things that they made me do were wrong.

And it started to hit me and I started to let those thoughts in just a little bit more. And I would see the cult leader every now and then. And it would just trigger all sorts of hate in my heart. And I would just be bitter. And one day I just decided that I didn't believe in God anymore.

One Thanksgiving while I was living at that house, one of my friends that lived there that believed in God and I were doing the dishes from Thanksgiving night. And we were about to sit on the couch in the living room. And she had mentioned something about believing in God. And I had said, yeah, well, that's great. I'm glad you believe in God. I don't have any faith in him. And I'll never believe in God again.

And right before we sat down on the couch, a van from the street came through the living room and was inside the living room. And it hit the TV and the TV crashed itself into the couch that we would have been sitting on. And we would have got seriously injured or died from that TV.

We were in complete shock. And at that very moment, I retreated into maybe believing in God again because I thought that was a sign. So one day I had been on a binger for two days and it was a Sunday and I knew that they were having Bible study and I was driving around. So I decided to drive by.

So I don't know where this came from, but I got the idea to get out of my car, go up to the door, open the door and yell. Let's see what kind of brainwashing is going on in here today. And the first thing that I saw was all the children laying on their stomachs with their heads into the carpet, spread out all over the floor. Obviously, they had done something to get in trouble, like always.

So that was their punishment. And I became sick. I was so mad because I had raised a lot of those kids. A lot of those kids looked up to me. A lot of them, I felt bad leaving them.

One of the fathers came out and said, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing in here? And I said, I just came to see if he would come out and talk to me and actually admit what he did to me in my life. But I see he has to have his servants come out and speak for him. And I said, where is he? Bring him here to me.

And they said, we're not going to do that. You just need to leave now before we call the police. And they pushed me out of the door. And I remember even then feeling a little scared, but so much more. I think at that point I was so much more brave and I was so proud of myself. During my time outside of the Colt and for years to come, I struggled with anxiety. I struggled with nightmares about the Colt.

I didn't know how or where to place them or how to place them or how to think about them. And I was scared to even think badly about the cult members. I started to catastrophize every single situation in my life. If something small happened, it was the end of the world for me.

I don't think I was ever taught how to process a bad situation happening to me. I instantly jumped to, well, this is the end of the world and I'm going to die. When I left the cult, I was when I was 18 and my mom moved away. We really didn't talk a whole lot for about two years. I did my thing. She did hers. I was very upset at her for leaving. So we just didn't talk much.

And then one day we got in contact with each other. I wasn't doing so well emotionally. And as I was talking to her on one of those days that we were just catching up and we were starting to talk again, she kind of heard that my voice was slurring in and out and she didn't know why.

And she realized that I wasn't myself. And I told her that I had taken a bunch of medication that was laying around and that I was just going to go to sleep now. And she ended up calling the paramedics.

And they took me to the hospital, pumped my stomach, saved my life. And about a year later, she had a hard time with her boyfriend at the time. And she ended up trying to commit suicide herself in front of me. So I had to, in turn, call the paramedics for her and save her life.

And it kind of brought us closer as far as becoming more involved in each other's lives again and maybe forgiving each other for things that we did or said and forgiving my mom and allowing her back into my life. There was a guy that used to come to our parties and I started to get close to him as a friend. And I was bouncing around from house to house at that point. I was breaking up with my boyfriend that was at the drug house.

We started dating and I ended up marrying him and I got away from the party lifestyle. My life was already starting to change and the behaviors that I had learned all my life were starting to unravel. And I was starting to learn the new way of how we act as humans in this world and how I interact with people. I started to be around a more normal type of environment.

When I found out I was pregnant with my son, I threw away my cigarettes and I stopped drinking and smoking. And I was the best little pregnant lady you ever did see. And I loved being pregnant and I loved my new life. But I was very worried in the background that I wasn't going to raise them correctly because I wasn't following the ways that I learned as a child.

I was still so new in the world and the world was still so new to me. There would be situations that would come up

When I was raising my kids, where it would remind me of being in the cult and I would be at a crossroads like, well, the outcomes that I would have received as a child, I couldn't align them with how I felt about my children. And I would try, I would try, I would hear my mom and I would hear some of the cult leaders and I would be like, okay, yeah, that seems right to me. I need to do that.

And I have to constantly reel myself in to not yell, to not hit, to not belittle, to not want to completely make them fear me. There were times and there's still times where I think back on the decisions my mom made. And I can't even fathom doing that to my kids because there was just no way I could make them feel the way I felt when I was growing up.

I was married for about 14 years. We planned my daughter. I thought everything was great. I thought I was going to grow old with this guy. Everybody really thought that him and I were going to be together for quite some time. And he told me that he didn't want to be married anymore. He never wanted to be married. He wants to be on his own. And that he's leaving me for the secretary at his cousin's work.

Whenever something major had happened in my life up until that point, I did not deal with it well. And so that basically tore me to shreds. I could barely get up for work.

And then about a week later, after he had asked for a divorce and told me he was going to leave the kids and I, my mom had called me and she had said that the dentist had found that her tongue was quivering and that meant that she had ALS and she only had three years to live, maybe.

And so that broke me completely down even more to where I couldn't eat. I don't even know how I was holding a job down. I was crying every day at work. And then a week later, my brother called me and told me that he has double leukemia and it's a rare form and he doesn't know if he's going to get better. He doesn't know much about it.

I was probably about 34 or 35 when these three situations hit me in one month. And all the old feelings always swarmed back into my brain whenever some situation or catastrophe occurred in my life. Instantly went back to what have I been doing wrong in my life? I started to consider that maybe this was my punishment from God.

I was falling apart left and right at work. I was crying all day at work. I was living in a tent in my ex-husband's mom's garage because there was no room for us. And I just felt like my whole world was crumbling. And I just wanted a minute to breathe. I couldn't breathe. Everything was just cracking my heart little by little. And I just didn't want my heart to hurt anymore.

So my daughter was about to go into kindergarten and that's when my ex-husband's mom said, if anybody asks them where they live and they have to say that they live in a tent, your kids are going to be taken away from you. And at that moment, I snapped out of it and I said, you're right. I'm taking my kids and I'm moving. And I moved away and I started a whole new life here in the state I am in now.

My mom moved here to be around me and my family, and my brother moved here also, which made it easier for us to see my mom before she became bedbound.

All of us living in the same state, we started to have to take care of my mom more because her health was declining rapidly. And so I had to cram as much time as I could in with her.

When she got very sick towards the very end, she started to delve back into wanting to be more religious, watching the programs we used to have to watch, starting to listen to the old songs that we used to hear. I had to take care of my mother, but also ignore the triggers and the PTSD that it caused.

And it actually made me very bitter towards my mom during her last days. But I learned to accept it because she was scared to die. So my mom passed away and I felt like she was finally not suffering anymore.

Six months after my mom passed and we gave her a good burial, she left us some money, which allowed me to make my children and I more comfortable. I hadn't talked to my dad in quite some time because he was still drinking. He was still doing drugs and he wasn't very stable. He couldn't work and he was living in a junkyard and he refused a lot of help because he didn't want to be a burden.

He was very sick with osteoarthritis. He couldn't work, so he just called his sister and he hung himself on the phone in the junkyard with the chain and his sister heard it all. So it was very hard to, once again, not catastrophize and think that everything was horrible. And I just kept getting punched after punch after punch.

The thing I have the most difficulty with as far as healing is trying to navigate when somebody even slightly leads on that they might have a problem with me or the way I'm acting or what I'm saying. I instantly go to a place in my brain where I instantly feel PTSD come up.

And I instantly feel like I'm not good enough. And I'm triggered to remember things that the adults used to tell me. I can hear their voices still. I can feel their disapproval. I just am a person that can see everything so vividly still.

I can see every building I was near. I can see every moment of my life so deeply that I think that's why I haven't been able to let it go. Because I see it so often, so clearly, so deeply. Every single feeling. And I just can't escape. This is one of my struggles. I'm sorry. I just can't. I can't be normal sometimes. Like, this is what happens.

It frustrates me. I'm still learning how to actually believe people really do like me for me, that people love me even if I have faults. We were never taught that. We were always taught how to be perfect and strive for perfection and that we shouldn't have faults.

Now that I'm finding out more about who I am and what role I play in the world, I'm starting to see that parts of me and my tiny little personality, they never left me. They were gone.

stifled and they were held back but those little parts kept trying to pop out and they never really left me and now I find as I get older I can see that I was that little girl I had a pure soul and I was tainted but that doesn't mean that it's gone and every now and then I can see parts of those things shine through and I grasp them and I hold them and I hug them and I

I love them because they represent my untainted pure soul. I feel proud now that I know more of who I am and who I was meant to be and that not all of it was gone. Not all of it was taken from me.

that I was stubborn enough to hold on to some of it. And it's so funny because my daughter is exactly the way I was supposed to be. And I see a lot of who I was before in her. And I'm so happy that I can give her her own personality that I know I had, but people removed from me and my soul.

Eventually, I want to be the best friend and the best lover and the best human and have the most love and understanding that I can possibly have towards anyone I come in contact with. And I want all those distorted thoughts gone.

And I want to be able to catch them. And I want to adopt the new ways of thinking that I'm learning in therapy and that I've learned over the years.

So many people threw me lifelines with their little thoughts and their little how they overcame their struggles that I was able to put together a pretty damn fine raft to get through these hard times. And I feel like all of us are supposed to learn and grow so we can help the next person that's struggling grow.

Because life is fucked up and it's hard and we don't know why we're supposed to go through the things we are in this lifetime. But each time we learn a little more. And I think we're supposed to do that, go through so many hard things that I'm so strong. I'm like a rock and I can just carry many people to where they need to go so that there's less hurt. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein.

If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at ActuallyHappening. You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned. ♪

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once a facade falls away.

We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.

acts. To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.