January 21, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode of Cults and the Culting of America, hosts Scot Loyd and Daniella Mestyanek Young engage with Tara and Floyd, who share their experiences growing up in the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI). They discuss the complexities of deconstruction from fundamentalist beliefs, the emotional toll of leaving a cult, and the impact on family relationships. The conversation also touches on the importance of emotional awareness in parenting and the healing journey after leaving high-control groups. Tara and Floyd reflect on their participation in the documentary 'Shiny Happy People' and the challenges they faced in sharing their story.
Tara and Floyd:
Instagram: @advocateaverage
tiktok: @advocateaverage
Daniella's Links:
You can read all about my story in my book, Uncultured-- buy signed copies here. https://bit.ly/SignedUncultured
For more info on me:
Patreon: https://bit.ly/YTPLanding
Cult book Clubs (Advanced AND Memoirs) Annual Membership: https://bit.ly/YTPLanding
Get an autographed copy of my book, Uncultured: https://bit.ly/SignedUncultured
Get my book, Uncultured, from Bookshop.org: https://bit.ly/4g1Ufw8
Daniella’s Tiktok: https://bit.ly/3V6GK6k / KnittingCultLady
Instagram: https://bit.ly/4ePAOFK / daniellamyoung_
Unamerican video book (on Patreon): https://bit.ly/YTVideoBook
Secret Practice video book (on Patreon): https://bit.ly/3ZswGY8
Other Podcasts
Daniella's other podcast: Hey White Women
Takeaways
- Deconstruction is a personal journey that varies for each individual.
- Cults often use contracts and strict rules to control members' lives.
- The emotional cost of leaving a cult can be profound, affecting family relationships.
- Parenting styles can be influenced by past experiences in cults.
- Finding peace and healing is possible after leaving a high-control gro
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:25):
Welcome to Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Loy along with my friend, Daniella Mestenec Young or the Knitting CultLady.
Daniella, good to see you again.
Nice to see you too, Scott.
I'm excited about this episode.
Absolutely, and we're going to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves.
(00:46):
But if you've seen the documentary, I always get the name wrong, Happy Shiny People orsomething of that nature.
Tara and Floyd are with us tonight and we'll give them an opportunity to introducethemselves and tell us about that connection.
First of all, I'm sure I got the name of the documentary wrong.
(01:09):
No, shiny happy people, you got it.
Yeah.
I think I said happy shiny people but shiny happy people gotcha.
Okay.
No joke, that's the way our son has said it for a couple of years, so I probably didn'teven hear it.
Yeah.
I'm used to hearing it that way.
my god.
an honor to have you both.
So tell us a little bit about yourselves and your story and how you ended up in thatdocumentary.
(01:33):
my gosh.
Well, my name is Tara and this is my husband Floyd.
Hello.
We have been married this year is going to be 20 years and thank you very much.
It's a miracle.
Yes, it is.
And we were both homeschooled our entire lives.
Well, you were homeschooled.
I was basically just home.
(01:54):
That's the ongoing job.
And our lives were both deeply impacted by Bill Gothard and IBLP.
Floyd was raised in it, his family kind of accepted everything Bill Gothard had to say,hook, line and sinker.
They signed up for ATI, which was a homeschool group through IBLP.
(02:16):
Whereas my family pretty much used the curriculum that Bill Gothard had to offer, thewisdom booklets, the character sketchbooks.
We had several of the games.
I went to...
couple of children's institutes and attended conferences, but Floyd's family really justkind of hook line and sinker.
We were, we were blue and white, IVLP slash ATI all the way.
(02:40):
Yes.
And just for our listeners, you threw out a lot of letters there.
Why don't we unpack what each one of those means?
Absolutely.
So IBLP and I've had to do this for strangers in Knoxville, Tennessee during a that wastheir largest homeschool conference.
(03:03):
Every year we took over a camp at the University of Tennessee campus and people would belike, what the heck are you guys?
And I would hold up my little bag that had the logo on it.
We're the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
And if you ask me any more than that, I would probably freeze.
Yes.
I had that on the bag.
could read that out.
Bill got there.
was a sucker for an acronym.
(03:24):
We loved acronyms.
Yes.
And ATI stands for the Advanced Training Institute, which was the moniker for theirhomeschool program.
So IBLP was the, basically the head organization and they had all these little programsunder the IBLP umbrella.
ATI was the homeschool version.
Yes, in order to join ATI, you had to sign a contract with IBLP where you would give uphaving a television in your home.
(03:54):
You would commit to living your lives specifically the way that Bill got there to want it,you know, principles by their principles secular music, homeschool your children.
It was it was a whole thing.
He also loved contracts.
I signed a lot of contracts.
Yeah.
and Floyd, you mentioned an umbrella and speaking of umbrellas, I think most people wouldrecognize Gauthard's teaching from that meme, that chart that probably a lot of us are
(04:20):
familiar with where you have the umbrella who is, I'll get this wrong, but it was God andthen under that was the dad and like a hierarchy protecting one another.
I think it was God, Gothard, and then the dad.
We would joke with that.
But yeah, the umbrella of authority.
And to this day, umbrella is kind of a trigger word for me.
(04:44):
just, I have sensory issues.
I hate being wet, but I don't use an umbrella.
You maybe will be happy to know that in my musical there's gonna be a Bill Gothardcharacter and at some point he's gonna do a little singing in the rain bit with an
umbrella, all right.
that is brilliant sign me up for row one you'll be in the spot yeah
(05:09):
okay.
First question I want to ask you.
So first of all, I just want to say it sounds exactly like my life in the boat guidechildren of God cult, right?
We were basically unschooled until they adopted different homeschooling programs, notelevision, right?
The first time I saw television on live was on nine 11 when I was 14, completely cut off.
(05:31):
Also lots of contracts.
Cults love a contract.
yeah.
We do.
so how do you feel about people calling ILBP a cult or homeschooling a cult, whichsometimes also gets called.
I mean, that is definitely, I will say that of the entire cast of Shiny Happy People, Iwas probably the, that as far along in my deconstruction as everyone else.
(05:58):
So filming for the documentary made my delightful little stroll down deconstruction go,meh.
Free fall.
Yeah, I was free falling into it.
And I bring that up just to say, in answer to your question,
That was so hard and it was incredibly hard for you to swallow.
was very hard for him to swallow.
(06:19):
But I have like my journals from that timeframe where like I went through, you know,researching what what makes a cult.
And then I'm like, my goodness, the Western Church, you know, Western theology can fallunderneath that that category.
So it was something that I couldn't even I couldn't really argue with anymore, especiallywhen you
(06:44):
acknowledge just how deeply Christian fundamentalism, you know, lines up with that.
Yeah.
Well, and for me, my deconstruction process started kind of in secret.
And I was, had a two hour commute and I spent a lot of time listening to YouTube andpodcasts and starting to soak in information that had been deprived to me in my childhood.
(07:08):
And I had ignored in my young adulthood and
Just on a whim, I had clicked into a video that I was listening to and I think he wastalking about some other group.
Christian.
Yeah.
think Mormonism or Jehovah's Witness or something like that.
And he's like, well, what is a cult?
And he lists off the 14 characteristics.
(07:30):
I forget who, but some professor had come up with these quantifiable terms of what a cultis.
And to meet that criteria, you had to have at least 10 of the 14.
And by 13, I had checked all of the ones off from my childhood.
And that's when I stopped saying quasi cult and just started calling it a cult.
For years, he just said, yeah, I was raised in a quasi cult.
(07:54):
Yeah.
And then he came home from listening to this and he's like, I think it might've actuallybeen a cult.
It was like, okay.
and you know, this is what I really hoped to do with my book and even with my social mediachannels, which is that like, I have spent 20 years now in the US being told that like my
(08:15):
life in a cult was so impossible to understand.
But then I meet people like you and people like Scott who grew up in these like ordinaryChristian groups in America.
Yes.
And I'm like, no, but I recognize what you're going through.
And honestly, now I have this theory that if you say like, I grew up in, and then the nextwords are not geographical information, like you have some deconstructing to do.
(08:44):
that's really interesting.
Well, my first experience with Gothard's material came later in my life.
And as Daniela mentioned, I grew up in an obscure Pentecostal cult, the United PentecostalChurch, which was very similar, dress codes for women, prohibitions on television,
(09:05):
entertainment, things of that nature.
And when I went to my organization's Bible school, so I graduated from public high school.
And then I went to a Bible school that they sponsored.
It was there that Gothard's basic life principles were introduced to us.
we were, especially as young men, were taught to embrace this idea of a complementarianrelationship, although they didn't necessarily use that language back then.
(09:40):
This would have been the 80s and 90s.
But you know the idea that that men are responsible for their home They're responsible forleading their their wives and their children and then also I do recall a lot of Gothard's
teaching had to do with with finances and debt and Things of that nature as well.
That was a that was a big deal When when I was learning of all of that for for us youngmen And I think it goes to the heart of what a cult does right a cult
(10:09):
as Daniela has rightfully pointed out, is about exploiting labor, free labor.
And so a part of that, right, is learning, teaching people how to manage their finances sothat then they can give more or all to the group.
Yep.
Because you'll end up with more the more you give, right?
(10:31):
You're going to get the blessings that's going to just pour into your household.
And oh my gosh, I remember subscribing to that so heavily and just really looking for thesigns that meant that 10 % was really coming back tenfold into my household.
So yeah, I never did.
Yeah.
Honestly, I found so much more.
(10:52):
What do you say, Sweet Pea?
I just said the promise of the cult is always a lie.
Right.
It is.
And I what's crazy to me, too, is on this side, like where we're at in our deconstructionnow, I like has it I hate using the word blessed, but I've never felt more like just I've
never felt more blessed.
I've never felt like just without even searching for it.
(11:16):
It just found sense of gratitude.
Yes, we have.
Yeah.
For no other reason than having it.
Yeah.
Today I stood outside and it was a blue sky with no clouds.
And I literally just was like,
feeling the sun and I spun in a circle and it was like stupid and cliche but it would justfelt so good to be joyful and not have to owe it to something or someone or feel bad for
(11:40):
feeling good.
It was just...
You just were.
I just was and it was good.
Yeah.
And that's beautiful.
That's a beautiful expression of, what it looks on, the other side.
so Floyd, you mentioned that you started listening to a podcast, other things, and you, itsort of dawned on you that, that, Hey, we, we're in a cult.
(12:04):
Tara, were you already there or did it take some time for you to, for both of you to geton the same page?
And what did that look like?
my gosh, the fact that we're sitting here together never ceases to amaze me just becausewe weren't on the same deconstruction timeline.
I said I kind of did it in secret, there was a reason.
(12:27):
When we got married, both of us were, we were no longer within the constructs of IBLP, butwe were still very heavily involved with Christian fundamentalism.
That was the only worldview we had ever known.
Right.
mean, we naturally continued that into our young adulthood and marriage.
I mean, and our plan was to, you know, be fruitful and multiply.
(12:50):
I wanted to have five kids.
I wanted to homeschool them.
I wanted to raise them the way that I had been raised, because I just thought that it wasthe right way.
Right.
The right way.
And so Floyd really, I mean, from when I first met him, he was struggling with the conceptof his faith and just religion as a whole.
(13:11):
And
when we came together, we kind of healed each other in a way and we were kind of able toput a bandaid over it.
And what would then transpire over the next decade would be Floyd really searching foranswers and trying to like rationalize what we were believing.
(13:31):
And a lot of it was just numbing.
There were so much stress.
and frankly cognitive dissonance that you have to maintain to live in a fundamentalistworldview and there were core aspects of Christianity and fundamentalism that I was never
(13:51):
able to fully rectify.
When I met Tara I deeply, I believed in God but I believed that God was cruel andcapricious and angry.
I was a little bitter and the first literal ray of sunshine into my life softened that upa little bit.
(14:14):
those doubts and that nagging thing at the back of my head that said there's something notright about this never went away.
And it took a great deal of effort.
I had books on creationism and to explain away science and reality.
(14:35):
because frankly you have to abandon reality in order to fully subscribe to thisfundamentalism.
And that was just objective reality, and there's all of the morality that never, the ideaof eternal conscious torment never sat well with me.
And- Weird.
(14:56):
Yeah.
And so for over a decade, I struggled with that and poorly.
mostly with numbing, and eventually it got to a point where numbing, mean that he's beensober for almost 10 years now.
So I'm married for 20.
(15:18):
Yeah.
And it was, that was a huge part of just his survival mechanism.
Cause he didn't, didn't have any coping skills.
That's the things that is stripped from you.
And yeah.
I mean to, to, I,
to put it as succinctly as possible, we both were on very different journeys at verydifferent times.
(15:41):
And I was so close to my family.
And I would say that my upbringing, as many people's upbringing, I couldn't imagine aworld where I would survive without them.
And so if they believed this way, like there was never a question in my minds.
And ultimately he was...
(16:02):
further on our marriage, he was kind of on this secret journey of deconstruction withoutthe use of numbing.
And he was genuinely researching.
And we have one child, his name is Walter, and he's autistic.
And that autism brought in a whole realm of not being able to parent the way that I hadbeen parented.
(16:24):
So that automatically made it so that I had to try to adapt and change things.
it, was really struggling and just behaviorally Walter was with, with just anger and,know, being a kid, but also handling autism.
And I realized one day I'm like, why is he getting in trouble?
(16:45):
He's getting in trouble because being angry is bad because when he's getting mad, he'sgetting a consequence because mad is bad.
that's me.
Feelings are bad.
And I realized I have to.
I didn't know how to explore it, but I had to delve into this and figure out, are thesefeelings that God made us with really so bad?
(17:12):
And that was the threat for me.
the wedge.
Yeah.
truly could not.
I had to examine it.
was around the same time frame, he had been misbehaving and I remember thinking, okay,he's old enough.
comprehends enough that I can sit him down and say, Walter, what you're doing is sinningand this goes against God because you're disobeying and you're, all these things and these
(17:42):
concepts that I was raised with and I sat him down and I was going to try to thisconversation.
And I looked into this beautiful human's eyes and I was like, how on, how on earth am Isupposed to tell this human that is just experiencing these feelings that
he's going to go to hell because he's doing something like I just couldn't do it.
(18:04):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I started ice.
That's how my deconstruction started.
And then we kind of somewhere in there.
So, well, I love this story because it's funny now.
She had had brain surgery in Houston, Texas, and we were driving home and she was in awheelchair and we stopped at a
(18:27):
museum that was open, it was free that day.
And we wheeled through it.
I like I am secretly now believing in evolution.
And like, my mind is open to all of these things that were closed off.
And we rolled through this museum, and we went through the natural history exhibit.
And on the way home, she said something that made me think it was okay to say,
(18:54):
man, it's really cool to not have to believe that the Bible is literally true.
And that is not what she meant.
So I accidentally outed myself and a very tense conversation later.
mean, and honestly, it's so terrible because in that time frame, I'm like worried for hissoul.
I'm worried like what on earth is going to happen.
(19:16):
And I'm worried what my family, if my family finds out, like we've made it through, youknow, substance abuse.
We've made it through like being homeless as a result of substance abuse.
We've made it through all these things that like my family didn't disown us over.
And now this, my God, I could never tell my father that my husband believes that evolutionis real.
(19:42):
Like dear God up above, that would be a complete deal breaker.
And to this beautiful.
ridiculous, but that's how we were all raised.
Like that's the worst of the worst, right?
It's none of the other.
It's denying what the Bible says or saying it's not true or evolving in your faith.
it would have been better off for me to say that like Floyd had committed some sort ofterrible murdered someone murdered someone.
(20:09):
And that would have been a better off.
think they could have forgiven him and moved on and like figured that out.
But to say, my God, they can't hand is wrong is tantamount to being excommunicated.
Yeah.
And so
We got through that and it took a little time, but as I explained the things that I hadlearned, she started to see it and we came to be pretty much on the same page.
(20:39):
And what is very painful for me is that while I was understanding and trying to be asloving to him as I possibly could while still trying to poke holes in everything that he's
telling me, I was so
fear-filled that I wasn't a supportive human to him.
(21:01):
I was a Christian fundamental wife to him going, my God, what are you doing?
And when I went through my deconstruction, I got to have this man hold me and hug me andlove on me and be like, yeah, we don't know what the answers are.
and it's okay.
And I'm like, I wish I could have done the same thing for you, but here we are.
(21:23):
It all worked out.
Yes.
sure you know that it is rather rare for a couple who got together in their cult to comethrough it and still be, you know, so seemingly strong, especially on the outside.
And that was beautiful what you said, but I love that Floyd went through it first and wasthen able to like help you through your journey.
(21:49):
You know, I had this, I had a deconstruction, but it was more of like patriarchy and
misogyny and kind of everything at once.
Meanwhile, my husband is still in the military.
And I remember he said to me at one point, he said, you know, it feels like you'rechanging a lot.
(22:10):
And you're leaving me behind.
And I said to him, you know, babe, I read 60 books a year, and every one of them changesme.
And I left a whole cult that wouldn't let me leave.
And like,
I challenge you to keep up with me on this journey.
(22:30):
And at some point, when I'm saying to people, I'm like, at some point, our relationshipwas tense.
And then at some point, we just kind of committed that we were gonna be on this journeywith each other.
And we both know.
And it's funny, because now he's four years out of the military.
So he's the one changing so much, right?
And I'm here just like, it's gonna be cool to see who you are.
(22:54):
Yes.
Yeah.
No, that was, there was this like kind of, it wasn't necessarily something that wasverbalized between us, but it was just this like, I've got you.
Like we're gonna, we're in this now.
We'd already gone through the worst that you could.
This was, it was hard, but it wasn't the worst we got, we got through it.
(23:16):
And I will say that the
when he accidentally outed himself and I'm having these conversations with him and I'mlooking in his eyes and I'm like, well crap, I see peace and love and just gratitude in
his eyes that I have not seen in the turmoil and the lack of coping skills over the courseof our marriage.
(23:41):
How can you argue with that?
I can't argue with that.
20 year for.
That's a beautiful story.
really is.
And Floyd, congratulations on your sobriety.
And you mentioned that.
And so I'm wondering, was that numbing process, a lot of people describe it as a necessarypendulum swing when you leave these high control groups.
(24:08):
I know for me, there was a lot of...
activities, we'll just leave it at that, that you know, hey, I'm going to engage in all ofthis now because I was denied it in my youth.
And so you sort of swing the other way.
that part of what you were experiencing?
Because I know I grew up in a home that alcohol was forbidden, as was everything that wasfun.
(24:34):
Right.
I will say this.
I'm a pretty boring person.
I didn't really get a party phase.
I don't think I really for me, it wasn't about the fun.
was it was 100 percent about not feeling the way that I felt when I was sober, which wasfreaking miserable.
(24:59):
And the minute that I started to put down
the baggage of garbage that I had been taught and I no longer felt compelled to carry allof that, that need to numb, virtually, it virtually disappeared.
(25:21):
mean, stress is still a big trigger for me.
But there's different coping, know, there's- can cope with that now.
It's not all consuming.
And there's a certain amount of, you know,
when you put down that baggage, you're putting down the shame and you're able to getexactly what I was saying in regards to my son, figuring out that these feelings aren't
(25:42):
the enemy and that getting in touch with yourself, there's gonna be more healing on theother side of it than ignoring it and trying to just...
And it's okay to feel bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially rebuilding our relationship.
One of the things I had to learn was it's okay if she's upset.
She'll, I'm gonna do something rude or stupid.
(26:07):
thinking, yeah.
not do anything wrong.
Yeah.
And she'll feel some sort of way about it.
And that's okay.
Yeah.
And prior to all this, that's something, that was something I was not able to cope with.
So.
This is even something that I really recently learned about trauma and especially aboutCPTSD.
(26:28):
Right?
So I think of like my husband who has your classic typical PTSD from being at war, right?
He's the kind of veteran that doesn't appreciate fireworks, et cetera.
Right?
There's specific, right?
It makes him think of specific trauma being shot at while flying at war.
But for me, someone who has CPTSD, it's like,
(26:51):
you don't even know what your triggers are.
But knowing that is so helpful because anytime I just find myself just like irritated, youknow, I'm being snippy with my husband or my kid or I'm just...
And then it's just like, okay, you know, this is not me.
(27:13):
There's nothing wrong with me.
But also like...
like you said, right, like these negative feelings are okay.
And actually, I have soon, I've written a children's book, and it's called Mommy, lost mysmile.
And it's for children dealing with grief and trauma.
But literally, every time I would talk about it or read it or anything, I would startchoking up.
(27:41):
And that was when I realized I was like, this book, like is as much for me.
Yup.
of us first generation parents, I call us, that were never taught that our emotions weresafe.
And there's this one line at the end where she says, my smile is mine and so is my frown.
And I love that, right?
(28:02):
Because like we weren't in the children of God cult.
Like if you were upset, you had the demons of depression and you were down in the dumpswith the devil and how dare you.
Absolutely.
You're no longer being a light in the world.
You're no longer showing the goodness of God.
you're, if you're upset or angry or, know, you've got an attitude to be a good witness,you have to be, you have to bear witness and be the light on the hill and all of the
(28:29):
things.
And this is exactly...
Well, this is, I've been back editing my chapter on self-sacrifice, which for listeners,you can go back and check our episode four or five about self-sacrifice.
And, you know, what's really important is that all of this stuff, the emotionalsuppression, the attitude control, all of it is about breaking you.
(28:58):
Like, that's the point.
Yep.
cults have to separate you from your individual identity, or if you're being raised in it,they have to, you know, make it so that you don't develop an individual identity.
And I just love it that it was like a moment of you basically being told by your religionto quash your own child's individuality, that you were like, I'm not gonna do this.
(29:26):
I couldn't do it and it begged the question, why could my parents do it?
Like it was, and I, it falls right in line with what you're saying in the sense of it'sfor control and it makes you so much easier to handle, right?
(29:47):
Cause if we look at it just from a parental perspective, if my child is never upset orangry,
That's a really easy kid.
That's someone that you can control and it makes your life so much easier.
And that's really what it boils down to even there for the parents.
This, will have good little pod children that behave, make me look good and make my lifeeasier.
(30:11):
I vividly remember once we participated in a weekly Bible study with much more liberalpeople than us.
And my mom getting into an argument with one of the ladies that ran the thing, who herchild was a couple years older than me.
He was a teenager and she's like, teenagers will be teenagers.
(30:32):
You know, they're gonna be rebellious.
And my mom got mad at her and she says, no, they will not.
You raise them the right way.
Raise up a child in the way they should go.
And hate to break it to you, mom, but all of her kids were a little rebellious.
I'm also gonna have a line in my musical where she goes, I am what I am, cause you trainedme.
(30:57):
And then the chorus is gonna say, aren't these the fruits that you've been raising up sowell?
man.
my gosh, front row right?
I get front row.
I've claimed it.
Yes, tips.
was literally procrastinating something like two weekends ago and then I just wrote anentire musical concept for Uncultured, the Cult Baby musical.
(31:19):
So now we're all gonna hear about this until I write it.
love it
So Tara, you mentioned...
just like, all of the sorry, once at the end, all of these cult leaders and differentcharacters are going to be like taking off their pseudo personalities.
And the final song is going to be a song called living with it.
(31:42):
And I'm not even going to touch writing that until like I've casted the whole thing.
Because I'm just like, I want a 16 person written song by all these cult babies.
Because
I think this is the answer and I'll ask you the question, like, how?
How are you doing it now?
How are you, are you okay?
(32:03):
How did you get here?
And I think obviously, right, the answer is living with it, but like, how are you livingwith it?
What does that look like for your family right now?
well, I would say that I am in a lot of EMDR.
(32:23):
I'm doing, I'm doing therapy.
as a result of participating in the documentary, I was ostracized by my entire family.
which means that my autistic child who only grew up with my family as like his bestfriends, lost his best friends, lost his grandma, lost his grandpa.
(32:44):
And, we, we lived directly next door to my family and, they let me know via email thatthey were no longer going to be having a relationship with me.
They could have literally yelled it from the porch, but they chose to email.
(33:04):
Yeah.
and this was all the years I spent making sure this didn't happen.
And I knew.
the day that we sat down to record, like when we left recording that day and like made itdown the steps and like around the corner, I like lost the ability to stand.
(33:26):
My knees gave out and Floyd like grabbed me and what's wrong?
And I was like, if my family ever see this, they won't love me anymore.
And I knew it to the core of my being.
And my family would say, yes, we love Tara.
but we can't condone what she's doing.
She's lying.
(33:46):
She wasn't raised in a cult.
know, she's, she's.
Bismarching the Christian message.
Right.
She, I, they have to choose Jesus over their daughter.
And they feel like I made choices that, you know, no longer supported Jesus.
So that was a process of the most insane pain that I've ever been through in my life.
(34:11):
And.
that's been about a year and a half ago and we've moved and I call this house our, myhouse of peace because of the healing that is taking place here.
And you know, my son is, we're, finding our chosen family.
My son is in, in high school now and public school.
(34:35):
And you know, there's, there's so much good that has come as a result of.
so much pain, but we we're still in a place of healing and growing.
And you mentioned the relational aspect of it, and we did an entire episode on the exitcost of leaving these cults, and you obviously have experienced it with your family.
(35:06):
In a lot of respects, the most difficult part of my journey is figuring out how I feelabout those relationships.
and navigating those relationships.
And I haven't experienced what you folks have experienced and your fortitude and yourability to navigate through all of that is amazing.
(35:33):
But I would think that for a lot of people, and I know this from experience, just havingconversations with people that...
even when they are confronted with the lies of the group or the lies of the cult, theystay because of the relational cost in exiting.
(35:54):
And has that been your experience?
I mean, yes, I know that initially when Floyd, like I shared earlier, when Floyd told mewhere he was at, you know, with using evolution as an example and being so scared that my
family find out, I didn't ask the questions right away.
(36:19):
You know, I didn't start exploring it because I was just trying to play defense.
I was trying to
you know, protect Floyd to the best of my ability, because I didn't feel like what he wasdoing was wrong.
And I still knew that I needed to protect him, protect myself from your family, from myfamily.
And I, I just, the cost is so high.
(36:44):
The cost, the cost is so high.
I paid the price for it to have freedom.
the craziest pain, I think, of mourning someone who is still alive.
And I think for some reason when they sit there and say, like, we love you, right?
(37:07):
Like, we threaten to sue you, but we love you.
But you don't, right?
And it's just, it's so hard.
I think...
broken from a very young age because the way my childlike brain looked at Jesus inscripture, I translated his love to be unconditional.
(37:32):
And then I tried to like mirror that in my life and I would get in trouble for it.
You know, no, no, no, you can't, you cannot be accepting of this minority or this, thisgroup because
that Jesus wouldn't have done that.
You know, this is how the Old Testament God would handle this situation.
(37:53):
And we're just gonna, we're gonna sit back and we love them from afar.
I'm like, that Jesus's love was active.
He was in it.
He was in the thick of it.
It was, it was relational.
And I just, got, I felt like there was something wrong with me my entire life, because theway that I loved people,
(38:15):
was not the way that I saw it in the church or with my family.
And it made me feel like I was the one that was broken.
Yeah, you know, one of the lines that I really relate to from a Alanis Morissette song, soof course I'm stealing it and putting it in the musical, is, we'll love you just the way
(38:37):
you are if you're perfect.
And I remember listening to this at 14 years old, Secret, I had a religious CD on top ofthe other CD.
Yeah, because you could do that finally in these disc events, it was so exciting.
And I remember being 14 and like listening to this line and being like, oh, that's ourlife.
(39:03):
And I think you all will appreciate that in the musical, it's this song called The Makingof a Cult Baby.
And it's gonna be her showing, growing up being indoctrinated, but the whole time they'relike, smile, click the camera, perform.
And then at the end of the song, she's gonna stop performing for the camera.
And then the Trouble Teen Institute is gonna come take her away.
(39:23):
And it's like,
I always felt like that and I am also autistic and ADHD and maybe this is just the logicpart of my brain, but I was just like, we say we love unconditionally, but we don't
because we as children, we're growing up knowing that we only get love if we're perfect.
(39:45):
Yes.
And there was this moment after my family sent me the emails.
And since we live directly next door, this is a silly example, but it it cut it cut sodeep.
Since we live next door to each other, my dad mowed my lawn.
And the first time that my dad mowed the lawn, like, oh my god, it's so silly, but it wasjust such a and he went down the property line.
(40:10):
He went down the property line.
And there was this line in the
between the two yards and I sat there on my side of the grass and I just looked at it andI was like, this is what conditional love looks like.
Like there was no conversation, there was no talking about it.
For the year and a half from us filming to the documentary airing, I would like verygently try to ask my parents, hey, can I tell you about what I did?
(40:37):
And can I tell you about the experience?
Do you guys have any questions?
Nope.
Nope, never gonna watch it.
We're never gonna watch it because they were afraid to see what their evil daughter wouldhave said.
When I called my mom after filming for eight hours, I called her and I was like, we justgot done.
(41:00):
I'm so excited.
She was like, well, that was a really long time.
Did they make you renounce Jesus?
Yeah, for eight hours.
That's all we did.
Yeah.
It's going to be one heck of a documentary.
Goodness gracious.
it just, I- But that was the only question she ever asked you.
The only question she ever asked.
And I, I just-
(41:20):
there's also this trend in cult memoirs and cult story sharing that when the parents doread the book or listen to the thing, they're often surprised that it's not as bad as they
thought it was going to be.
Which leads me to flip that around and be like, so you know it was worse.
(41:41):
You know there was worse things we could have said.
Yes.
Yes.
I remember in filming, you know, they ask you so many questions.
They covered so many, like just topics upon topics upon topics.
And they started to go political.
And I was so like, you know, just baby into my deconstruction.
(42:02):
And I whispered, I was a state away from where my family was.
They were nowhere near me.
And I was like,
Like I was petrified to say something that would put liberals in a positive light and inthe category of humanity.
(42:23):
Yeah.
And and my parents, my mom, you know, I said to her because I had that realization that ifthey saw it, they wouldn't love me anymore.
And I said to my mom, was like, I was honest.
I was like, I'm nervous for you to see it.
And she took that like as an excuse to.
to never talk about it and to never, and, but I just remember being like, the thing I wasnervous about you hearing was that I thought Democrats could possibly be good people.
(42:53):
It wasn't that I outed you as terrible parents.
wasn't that I renounced Christ.
It was this very honest, you know, trying to share this story.
There was nothing bad or evil in what Floyd or I did.
Even if you slandered your parents,
renounced Jesus and signed up as a Democrat on camera.
(43:20):
Nothing, a point that I've made to her multiple times.
How many serial killers or child murderers do we watch televised?
Court cases.
Court cases, thank you.
You see these people in court being
(43:42):
Accused of these heinous crimes directly behind them is their loving supportive parentswho often say we're horrified, but what's happened, but we love our child and we want
justice Not when it comes to a cult.
Yeah, not when it comes to
And the irony is, you mentioned that you told your parents about what you were doing, andthen they said, well, we're never going to watch it anyway.
(44:10):
So the irony is, if you would have never said anything about it, would the situation beany different?
You know what I'm saying?
Right, right.
mean, they would have been a little surprised.
Technically, my mother watched it and that was the crazy thing is going to be his.
had no idea that his mom was like, I guess that technologically savvy to be like aware ofthings happening.
(44:37):
And she we discussed it with his his siblings, like, should we let your mom know?
And everyone was like, no, she's never going to come across this thing never in millionyears.
And then there she was just watching the documentary and there's her son on it.
And she was so cool about the whole thing.
Yeah, she was.
And you know, what's interesting to me, what's interesting is obviously I'm older than youguys are, but in my journey, I've been very vocal on social media and my family, they just
(45:11):
basically have decided, I think to ignore it, right?
Every once in a while, if I post or write something, they'll come out of the woodwork andpush back a little bit.
But when we're in person, when we're together,
I've made overtures.
Let's talk about this.
Let's discuss this.
They don't want to.
Right.
don't want to have to set down their cognitive dissonance.
(45:34):
Like they have to keep those beliefs have to be so, you know, protected because therecould be that thread one day that pulls it all apart.
It's an addiction to certainty, right?
And it's an addiction to having the answers.
It's an addiction.
It's an addiction.
It's addiction.
Like it so is because I know I went through withdrawal.
(45:56):
Yes.
and it's also the addiction to feeling superior.
You know, I think that's the thing we need to be well into deconstruction to let ourselvesadmit.
But it's like, you know, I realized that I was like, well, I grew up being told we werethe best.
So then I went out chasing that for the rest of my life, I had to be the best.
Otherwise, I was worthless.
(46:20):
Which of course, is just a form of self hate, right?
But
yeah, wildly, yes.
I like what you said about addiction to certainty, you know, because that's the otherthing we hear from a lot of cult survivors is it's so scary.
It's so scary.
I'm so afraid to make decisions.
And one of the things I tell them is like, again, like this, ultimate promise of everycult is you do things exactly our way, and we give you perfection.
(46:47):
Usually after some space travel, we're going to go to another planet somewhere and thenwe'll give you perfection.
Yeah.
And I just tell people, I'm like, you're no more likely to have anything happen to youthan you were before, right?
You're no more likely to live happily ever after than you were before.
Actually, probably are more likely now.
(47:09):
But that is such a powerful point that I've been really mulling over recently is when youmeet someone who's deconstructing from having been raised in it, you're meeting people
who've never considered, never considered the fact that like, there could be no heaven,there could be no hell.
There are people who have not looked at their own mortality because it was all taken careof.
(47:34):
I mean, that was a really- You're technically gonna live forever.
Right, right.
I didn't have my first existential crisis until the other side of major deconstructionbecause I was fine, right?
I was, like he said, gonna- the ticket.
I've got the golden ticket.
I'm better than everyone else.
I've got it handled and figured out.
And now I'm walking around like, now I know why everyone's got anxiety.
(47:58):
And we're walking around, okay, it's because we're on this mortal coil and we don't knowwhat to do with ourselves.
I got the golden ticket in the musical.
Love it, love it, love it.
You know, one of my favorite anti-cult mantras is just there are many valid ways to live alife.
(48:23):
And I think for me, that's part of like my living with it.
It's just like, you could do it this way, you could do it another way.
And you know, we're also addicted to the idea that if our lives are good, it's because wemade this one good choice, right?
And like, pick the right person or did this.
And if we were on a...
a different path, it would have been miserable.
(48:45):
Instead of realizing like, no, it just would have been a whole different life.
And we will never know that.
But you know, when when you're raised in the way that all of us were, and you're onlygiven one way to be, it's just, it's so hard, I think, to just relax and live and let
(49:07):
live.
But once you do, life is awesome, you get to meet all kinds of people, you get toparticipate in all kinds of cool things and fun and happiness.
yes.
I've never met.
I've never met more accepting, loving individuals than on this side of a church building.
Yeah.
Which
(49:27):
that resonates so much.
It blows me away.
My son has found acceptance.
I've found acceptance.
I've found love.
I have this chosen family.
They have no reason to love me and they love me unconditionally.
Like that's what it was supposed to be with my family.
(49:50):
Just out of curiosity, how did the documentary come about?
How did you guys get involved with that?
So one of the...
benefits of COVID was I got to work from home for the first time in, well, ever, really,which was really transformational for us and our relationship getting to heal a lot of the
(50:14):
damage that I had done.
But one of the perks of that is my wife, who's addicted to certain types of television,will put something on and, you know.
Lula Rich.
I put Lula Rich on the documentary.
And I got sucked in.
Yeah.
And we watched it it was great.
And a little while after we watched it, she yelled from, I was working on the couch andshe yelled from the bedroom and said, my gosh, the people who made Lula Rich are going to
(50:43):
do an IBLP documentary.
Or.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're going to do an IBLP documentary.
Yep.
And I was like, and immediately.
Googled the production company, found their website, found a random email at the bottom oftheir, not that easy to get a hold of.
But I just emailed this random- He was just like, I want to help.
(51:05):
I want and I said, hey, I did this, this, and this.
I was involved these years.
If you need people to talk, I would love to talk.
And then I kind of forgot about it.
It was so, he emailed them and we totally just forgot about it.
And then-
maybe a couple weeks later, he gets an email.
They want to do an interview.
(51:26):
We interviewed with them and less than three weeks later we filmed.
it was, mean, and the crazy, everyone who participated in that documentary, their storiesare so much bigger than what the documentary was able to share.
But like Floyd's involvement, he went to Russia for Gothard.
(51:46):
He smuggled money into the country for Gothard.
You know, he, his,
brother was at alert and which was their paramilitary organization like there's just somany stories that would just blow people's mind that this was happening you know just
behind some shiny happy faces yeah technically I didn't smuggle the money I was a moneymule I'm sorry money mule let's get the yes it was
(52:11):
Don't worry, I forgot or didn't realize that I had been deported because of a cult severaltimes as a child when I did my top secret clearance interview.
Literally years later I'm deconstructing and my husband's like, so, But you know what,criminal, I always say a big huge thing that people miss because we get so tied up in a
(52:39):
cult and is it a cult and what is it?
is that cults are criminal enterprises.
Like that's what they are.
At the end of the day, that's what they are.
They're here for your labor and traffickers are criminals.
That being said, documentary, what are you all doing now?
How do people find you?
(53:00):
When does the book come out?
Well, we are on pretty much every platform as Advocate Average.
And that is just a name that applies to so many things in our lives.
know, we, the average things, yeah, we're here for the normal average things and findingthe joy in it.
(53:23):
you know, on the other side of deconstruction in our journey with Artistic Sun.
You know, there's so much beauty to be had in the average things and it's important toadvocate for those things for yourself.
We are still in the process of healing from a lot of loss and we are in the process ofwriting the book.
(53:46):
To be now.
Yes.
To be written.
favorite deconstruction quotes, my listeners have heard me say this a lot, is that we knowwe're healing when peace and tranquility no longer sounds like boredom.
And it sounds like you two are doing it.
Yes, that is how I feel about this home.
(54:08):
Like I walk through this house and it just, what had to transpire, because remember I livedirectly next door to my family and we had to make this decision like for our mental
health, emotional health, we've got to leave now.
I can't walk past them.
I can't have my autistic son see, like we had to leave and the entire process happened inabout three weeks.
(54:31):
We made the decision, we found the house, we sold.
It happens so like, what's happening?
If there is no God, what is this?
know, like it just, it felt, it felt crazy.
And so this house is just, I am so wildly grateful for it.
And that what you just said so accurately describes the, the piece here.
(54:51):
I'm thrilled with that piece.
Yes.
Well, Tara and Floyd, thank you so much for sharing a portion of your story.
I feel like we've just scratched the surface.
Perhaps we can do this again in the future.
But we encourage all of our listeners to find you on social media, to follow you.
If you haven't watched the documentary, Happy Shiny People, do that.
(55:14):
And what platform is that on again?
Shenni Happy People is on Amazon Prime.
Okay, yeah, a gr-
the biggest debut ever on Amazon on Prime because that's how many people related to yourstories.
It's really convenient now when people are like, why are you so weird?
I can just be like, go watch this documentary.
(55:37):
It's so much easier than trying to explain it.
Yes.
we could all benefit from that.
That would be great.
that's the like, that's the number one reason to write a book if you're a cult kid or ahomeschool kid.
that like, I literally when I sign books to people in my military unit or from college orwhatever, I'm like, I hope this finally explains why I'm so weird.
Ha!
(55:58):
Nice.
it.
Tara and Floyd, thank you so much.
And we appreciate you sharing a portion of your story.
We invite everyone to go and check out that documentary because it was very helpful andinspirational to me.
So thank you for sharing your story.
you guys so much.
Thank you.
And for Daniela, I want to encourage all of you to buy and read her book if you haven'tdone so already, Uncultured.
(56:25):
It's a great book as well as it's available in audio as well as also on as an ebook.
So there's all kinds of ways to access it and you can get a signed copy if you follow heron social media and hit the link.
So that's a really, really cool thing.
Yes.
(56:46):
Exciting!
It's now on Spotify's subscription, so if you pay for Spotify's subscription, you canlisten to Uncultured!
Congratulations!
Yeah, that's great.
Fantastic.
And so until next time, I'm Scott Lloyd for Daniela Messenek Young.
We'll see you on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
Welcome to Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Loy along with my friend, Daniella Mestenec Young or the Knitting CultLady.
Daniella, good to see you again.
Nice to see you too, Scott.
I'm excited about this episode.
Absolutely, and we're going to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves.
(00:46):
But if you've seen the documentary, I always get the name wrong, Happy Shiny People orsomething of that nature.
Tara and Floyd are with us tonight and we'll give them an opportunity to introducethemselves and tell us about that connection.
First of all, I'm sure I got the name of the documentary wrong.
(01:09):
No, shiny happy people, you got it.
Yeah.
I think I said happy shiny people but shiny happy people gotcha.
Okay.
No joke, that's the way our son has said it for a couple of years, so I probably didn'teven hear it.
Yeah.
I'm used to hearing it that way.
my god.
an honor to have you both.
So tell us a little bit about yourselves and your story and how you ended up in thatdocumentary.
(01:33):
my gosh.
Well, my name is Tara and this is my husband Floyd.
Hello.
We have been married this year is going to be 20 years and thank you very much.
It's a miracle.
Yes, it is.
And we were both homeschooled our entire lives.
Well, you were homeschooled.
I was basically just home.
(01:54):
That's the ongoing job.
And our lives were both deeply impacted by Bill Gothard and IBLP.
Floyd was raised in it, his family kind of accepted everything Bill Gothard had to say,hook, line and sinker.
They signed up for ATI, which was a homeschool group through IBLP.
(02:16):
Whereas my family pretty much used the curriculum that Bill Gothard had to offer, thewisdom booklets, the character sketchbooks.
We had several of the games.
I went to...
couple of children's institutes and attended conferences, but Floyd's family really justkind of hook line and sinker.
We were, we were blue and white, IVLP slash ATI all the way.
(02:40):
Yes.
And just for our listeners, you threw out a lot of letters there.
Why don't we unpack what each one of those means?
Absolutely.
So IBLP and I've had to do this for strangers in Knoxville, Tennessee during a that wastheir largest homeschool conference.
(03:03):
Every year we took over a camp at the University of Tennessee campus and people would belike, what the heck are you guys?
And I would hold up my little bag that had the logo on it.
We're the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
And if you ask me any more than that, I would probably freeze.
Yes.
I had that on the bag.
could read that out.
Bill got there.
was a sucker for an acronym.
(03:24):
We loved acronyms.
Yes.
And ATI stands for the Advanced Training Institute, which was the moniker for theirhomeschool program.
So IBLP was the, basically the head organization and they had all these little programsunder the IBLP umbrella.
ATI was the homeschool version.
Yes, in order to join ATI, you had to sign a contract with IBLP where you would give uphaving a television in your home.
(03:54):
You would commit to living your lives specifically the way that Bill got there to want it,you know, principles by their principles secular music, homeschool your children.
It was it was a whole thing.
He also loved contracts.
I signed a lot of contracts.
Yeah.
and Floyd, you mentioned an umbrella and speaking of umbrellas, I think most people wouldrecognize Gauthard's teaching from that meme, that chart that probably a lot of us are
(04:20):
familiar with where you have the umbrella who is, I'll get this wrong, but it was God andthen under that was the dad and like a hierarchy protecting one another.
I think it was God, Gothard, and then the dad.
We would joke with that.
But yeah, the umbrella of authority.
And to this day, umbrella is kind of a trigger word for me.
(04:44):
just, I have sensory issues.
I hate being wet, but I don't use an umbrella.
You maybe will be happy to know that in my musical there's gonna be a Bill Gothardcharacter and at some point he's gonna do a little singing in the rain bit with an
umbrella, all right.
that is brilliant sign me up for row one you'll be in the spot yeah
(05:09):
okay.
First question I want to ask you.
So first of all, I just want to say it sounds exactly like my life in the boat guidechildren of God cult, right?
We were basically unschooled until they adopted different homeschooling programs, notelevision, right?
The first time I saw television on live was on nine 11 when I was 14, completely cut off.
(05:31):
Also lots of contracts.
Cults love a contract.
yeah.
We do.
so how do you feel about people calling ILBP a cult or homeschooling a cult, whichsometimes also gets called.
I mean, that is definitely, I will say that of the entire cast of Shiny Happy People, Iwas probably the, that as far along in my deconstruction as everyone else.
(05:58):
So filming for the documentary made my delightful little stroll down deconstruction go,meh.
Free fall.
Yeah, I was free falling into it.
And I bring that up just to say, in answer to your question,
That was so hard and it was incredibly hard for you to swallow.
was very hard for him to swallow.
(06:19):
But I have like my journals from that timeframe where like I went through, you know,researching what what makes a cult.
And then I'm like, my goodness, the Western Church, you know, Western theology can fallunderneath that that category.
So it was something that I couldn't even I couldn't really argue with anymore, especiallywhen you
(06:44):
acknowledge just how deeply Christian fundamentalism, you know, lines up with that.
Yeah.
Well, and for me, my deconstruction process started kind of in secret.
And I was, had a two hour commute and I spent a lot of time listening to YouTube andpodcasts and starting to soak in information that had been deprived to me in my childhood.
(07:08):
And I had ignored in my young adulthood and
Just on a whim, I had clicked into a video that I was listening to and I think he wastalking about some other group.
Christian.
Yeah.
think Mormonism or Jehovah's Witness or something like that.
And he's like, well, what is a cult?
And he lists off the 14 characteristics.
(07:30):
I forget who, but some professor had come up with these quantifiable terms of what a cultis.
And to meet that criteria, you had to have at least 10 of the 14.
And by 13, I had checked all of the ones off from my childhood.
And that's when I stopped saying quasi cult and just started calling it a cult.
For years, he just said, yeah, I was raised in a quasi cult.
(07:54):
Yeah.
And then he came home from listening to this and he's like, I think it might've actuallybeen a cult.
It was like, okay.
and you know, this is what I really hoped to do with my book and even with my social mediachannels, which is that like, I have spent 20 years now in the US being told that like my
(08:15):
life in a cult was so impossible to understand.
But then I meet people like you and people like Scott who grew up in these like ordinaryChristian groups in America.
Yes.
And I'm like, no, but I recognize what you're going through.
And honestly, now I have this theory that if you say like, I grew up in, and then the nextwords are not geographical information, like you have some deconstructing to do.
(08:44):
that's really interesting.
Well, my first experience with Gothard's material came later in my life.
And as Daniela mentioned, I grew up in an obscure Pentecostal cult, the United PentecostalChurch, which was very similar, dress codes for women, prohibitions on television,
(09:05):
entertainment, things of that nature.
And when I went to my organization's Bible school, so I graduated from public high school.
And then I went to a Bible school that they sponsored.
It was there that Gothard's basic life principles were introduced to us.
we were, especially as young men, were taught to embrace this idea of a complementarianrelationship, although they didn't necessarily use that language back then.
(09:40):
This would have been the 80s and 90s.
But you know the idea that that men are responsible for their home They're responsible forleading their their wives and their children and then also I do recall a lot of Gothard's
teaching had to do with with finances and debt and Things of that nature as well.
That was a that was a big deal When when I was learning of all of that for for us youngmen And I think it goes to the heart of what a cult does right a cult
(10:09):
as Daniela has rightfully pointed out, is about exploiting labor, free labor.
And so a part of that, right, is learning, teaching people how to manage their finances sothat then they can give more or all to the group.
Yep.
Because you'll end up with more the more you give, right?
(10:31):
You're going to get the blessings that's going to just pour into your household.
And oh my gosh, I remember subscribing to that so heavily and just really looking for thesigns that meant that 10 % was really coming back tenfold into my household.
So yeah, I never did.
Yeah.
Honestly, I found so much more.
(10:52):
What do you say, Sweet Pea?
I just said the promise of the cult is always a lie.
Right.
It is.
And I what's crazy to me, too, is on this side, like where we're at in our deconstructionnow, I like has it I hate using the word blessed, but I've never felt more like just I've
never felt more blessed.
I've never felt like just without even searching for it.
(11:16):
It just found sense of gratitude.
Yes, we have.
Yeah.
For no other reason than having it.
Yeah.
Today I stood outside and it was a blue sky with no clouds.
And I literally just was like,
feeling the sun and I spun in a circle and it was like stupid and cliche but it would justfelt so good to be joyful and not have to owe it to something or someone or feel bad for
(11:40):
feeling good.
It was just...
You just were.
I just was and it was good.
Yeah.
And that's beautiful.
That's a beautiful expression of, what it looks on, the other side.
so Floyd, you mentioned that you started listening to a podcast, other things, and you, itsort of dawned on you that, that, Hey, we, we're in a cult.
(12:04):
Tara, were you already there or did it take some time for you to, for both of you to geton the same page?
And what did that look like?
my gosh, the fact that we're sitting here together never ceases to amaze me just becausewe weren't on the same deconstruction timeline.
I said I kind of did it in secret, there was a reason.
(12:27):
When we got married, both of us were, we were no longer within the constructs of IBLP, butwe were still very heavily involved with Christian fundamentalism.
That was the only worldview we had ever known.
Right.
mean, we naturally continued that into our young adulthood and marriage.
I mean, and our plan was to, you know, be fruitful and multiply.
(12:50):
I wanted to have five kids.
I wanted to homeschool them.
I wanted to raise them the way that I had been raised, because I just thought that it wasthe right way.
Right.
The right way.
And so Floyd really, I mean, from when I first met him, he was struggling with the conceptof his faith and just religion as a whole.
(13:11):
And
when we came together, we kind of healed each other in a way and we were kind of able toput a bandaid over it.
And what would then transpire over the next decade would be Floyd really searching foranswers and trying to like rationalize what we were believing.
(13:31):
And a lot of it was just numbing.
There were so much stress.
and frankly cognitive dissonance that you have to maintain to live in a fundamentalistworldview and there were core aspects of Christianity and fundamentalism that I was never
(13:51):
able to fully rectify.
When I met Tara I deeply, I believed in God but I believed that God was cruel andcapricious and angry.
I was a little bitter and the first literal ray of sunshine into my life softened that upa little bit.
(14:14):
those doubts and that nagging thing at the back of my head that said there's something notright about this never went away.
And it took a great deal of effort.
I had books on creationism and to explain away science and reality.
(14:35):
because frankly you have to abandon reality in order to fully subscribe to thisfundamentalism.
And that was just objective reality, and there's all of the morality that never, the ideaof eternal conscious torment never sat well with me.
And- Weird.
(14:56):
Yeah.
And so for over a decade, I struggled with that and poorly.
mostly with numbing, and eventually it got to a point where numbing, mean that he's beensober for almost 10 years now.
So I'm married for 20.
(15:18):
Yeah.
And it was, that was a huge part of just his survival mechanism.
Cause he didn't, didn't have any coping skills.
That's the things that is stripped from you.
And yeah.
I mean to, to, I,
to put it as succinctly as possible, we both were on very different journeys at verydifferent times.
(15:41):
And I was so close to my family.
And I would say that my upbringing, as many people's upbringing, I couldn't imagine aworld where I would survive without them.
And so if they believed this way, like there was never a question in my minds.
And ultimately he was...
(16:02):
further on our marriage, he was kind of on this secret journey of deconstruction withoutthe use of numbing.
And he was genuinely researching.
And we have one child, his name is Walter, and he's autistic.
And that autism brought in a whole realm of not being able to parent the way that I hadbeen parented.
(16:24):
So that automatically made it so that I had to try to adapt and change things.
it, was really struggling and just behaviorally Walter was with, with just anger and,know, being a kid, but also handling autism.
And I realized one day I'm like, why is he getting in trouble?
(16:45):
He's getting in trouble because being angry is bad because when he's getting mad, he'sgetting a consequence because mad is bad.
that's me.
Feelings are bad.
And I realized I have to.
I didn't know how to explore it, but I had to delve into this and figure out, are thesefeelings that God made us with really so bad?
(17:12):
And that was the threat for me.
the wedge.
Yeah.
truly could not.
I had to examine it.
was around the same time frame, he had been misbehaving and I remember thinking, okay,he's old enough.
comprehends enough that I can sit him down and say, Walter, what you're doing is sinningand this goes against God because you're disobeying and you're, all these things and these
(17:42):
concepts that I was raised with and I sat him down and I was going to try to thisconversation.
And I looked into this beautiful human's eyes and I was like, how on, how on earth am Isupposed to tell this human that is just experiencing these feelings that
he's going to go to hell because he's doing something like I just couldn't do it.
(18:04):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I started ice.
That's how my deconstruction started.
And then we kind of somewhere in there.
So, well, I love this story because it's funny now.
She had had brain surgery in Houston, Texas, and we were driving home and she was in awheelchair and we stopped at a
(18:27):
museum that was open, it was free that day.
And we wheeled through it.
I like I am secretly now believing in evolution.
And like, my mind is open to all of these things that were closed off.
And we rolled through this museum, and we went through the natural history exhibit.
And on the way home, she said something that made me think it was okay to say,
(18:54):
man, it's really cool to not have to believe that the Bible is literally true.
And that is not what she meant.
So I accidentally outed myself and a very tense conversation later.
mean, and honestly, it's so terrible because in that time frame, I'm like worried for hissoul.
I'm worried like what on earth is going to happen.
(19:16):
And I'm worried what my family, if my family finds out, like we've made it through, youknow, substance abuse.
We've made it through like being homeless as a result of substance abuse.
We've made it through all these things that like my family didn't disown us over.
And now this, my God, I could never tell my father that my husband believes that evolutionis real.
(19:42):
Like dear God up above, that would be a complete deal breaker.
And to this beautiful.
ridiculous, but that's how we were all raised.
Like that's the worst of the worst, right?
It's none of the other.
It's denying what the Bible says or saying it's not true or evolving in your faith.
it would have been better off for me to say that like Floyd had committed some sort ofterrible murdered someone murdered someone.
(20:09):
And that would have been a better off.
think they could have forgiven him and moved on and like figured that out.
But to say, my God, they can't hand is wrong is tantamount to being excommunicated.
Yeah.
And so
We got through that and it took a little time, but as I explained the things that I hadlearned, she started to see it and we came to be pretty much on the same page.
(20:39):
And what is very painful for me is that while I was understanding and trying to be asloving to him as I possibly could while still trying to poke holes in everything that he's
telling me, I was so
fear-filled that I wasn't a supportive human to him.
(21:01):
I was a Christian fundamental wife to him going, my God, what are you doing?
And when I went through my deconstruction, I got to have this man hold me and hug me andlove on me and be like, yeah, we don't know what the answers are.
and it's okay.
And I'm like, I wish I could have done the same thing for you, but here we are.
(21:23):
It all worked out.
Yes.
sure you know that it is rather rare for a couple who got together in their cult to comethrough it and still be, you know, so seemingly strong, especially on the outside.
And that was beautiful what you said, but I love that Floyd went through it first and wasthen able to like help you through your journey.
(21:49):
You know, I had this, I had a deconstruction, but it was more of like patriarchy and
misogyny and kind of everything at once.
Meanwhile, my husband is still in the military.
And I remember he said to me at one point, he said, you know, it feels like you'rechanging a lot.
(22:10):
And you're leaving me behind.
And I said to him, you know, babe, I read 60 books a year, and every one of them changesme.
And I left a whole cult that wouldn't let me leave.
And like,
I challenge you to keep up with me on this journey.
(22:30):
And at some point, when I'm saying to people, I'm like, at some point, our relationshipwas tense.
And then at some point, we just kind of committed that we were gonna be on this journeywith each other.
And we both know.
And it's funny, because now he's four years out of the military.
So he's the one changing so much, right?
And I'm here just like, it's gonna be cool to see who you are.
(22:54):
Yes.
Yeah.
No, that was, there was this like kind of, it wasn't necessarily something that wasverbalized between us, but it was just this like, I've got you.
Like we're gonna, we're in this now.
We'd already gone through the worst that you could.
This was, it was hard, but it wasn't the worst we got, we got through it.
(23:16):
And I will say that the
when he accidentally outed himself and I'm having these conversations with him and I'mlooking in his eyes and I'm like, well crap, I see peace and love and just gratitude in
his eyes that I have not seen in the turmoil and the lack of coping skills over the courseof our marriage.
(23:41):
How can you argue with that?
I can't argue with that.
20 year for.
That's a beautiful story.
really is.
And Floyd, congratulations on your sobriety.
And you mentioned that.
And so I'm wondering, was that numbing process, a lot of people describe it as a necessarypendulum swing when you leave these high control groups.
(24:08):
I know for me, there was a lot of...
activities, we'll just leave it at that, that you know, hey, I'm going to engage in all ofthis now because I was denied it in my youth.
And so you sort of swing the other way.
that part of what you were experiencing?
Because I know I grew up in a home that alcohol was forbidden, as was everything that wasfun.
(24:34):
Right.
I will say this.
I'm a pretty boring person.
I didn't really get a party phase.
I don't think I really for me, it wasn't about the fun.
was it was 100 percent about not feeling the way that I felt when I was sober, which wasfreaking miserable.
(24:59):
And the minute that I started to put down
the baggage of garbage that I had been taught and I no longer felt compelled to carry allof that, that need to numb, virtually, it virtually disappeared.
(25:21):
mean, stress is still a big trigger for me.
But there's different coping, know, there's- can cope with that now.
It's not all consuming.
And there's a certain amount of, you know,
when you put down that baggage, you're putting down the shame and you're able to getexactly what I was saying in regards to my son, figuring out that these feelings aren't
(25:42):
the enemy and that getting in touch with yourself, there's gonna be more healing on theother side of it than ignoring it and trying to just...
And it's okay to feel bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially rebuilding our relationship.
One of the things I had to learn was it's okay if she's upset.
She'll, I'm gonna do something rude or stupid.
(26:07):
thinking, yeah.
not do anything wrong.
Yeah.
And she'll feel some sort of way about it.
And that's okay.
Yeah.
And prior to all this, that's something, that was something I was not able to cope with.
So.
This is even something that I really recently learned about trauma and especially aboutCPTSD.
(26:28):
Right?
So I think of like my husband who has your classic typical PTSD from being at war, right?
He's the kind of veteran that doesn't appreciate fireworks, et cetera.
Right?
There's specific, right?
It makes him think of specific trauma being shot at while flying at war.
But for me, someone who has CPTSD, it's like,
(26:51):
you don't even know what your triggers are.
But knowing that is so helpful because anytime I just find myself just like irritated, youknow, I'm being snippy with my husband or my kid or I'm just...
And then it's just like, okay, you know, this is not me.
(27:13):
There's nothing wrong with me.
But also like...
like you said, right, like these negative feelings are okay.
And actually, I have soon, I've written a children's book, and it's called Mommy, lost mysmile.
And it's for children dealing with grief and trauma.
But literally, every time I would talk about it or read it or anything, I would startchoking up.
(27:41):
And that was when I realized I was like, this book, like is as much for me.
Yup.
of us first generation parents, I call us, that were never taught that our emotions weresafe.
And there's this one line at the end where she says, my smile is mine and so is my frown.
And I love that, right?
(28:02):
Because like we weren't in the children of God cult.
Like if you were upset, you had the demons of depression and you were down in the dumpswith the devil and how dare you.
Absolutely.
You're no longer being a light in the world.
You're no longer showing the goodness of God.
you're, if you're upset or angry or, know, you've got an attitude to be a good witness,you have to be, you have to bear witness and be the light on the hill and all of the
(28:29):
things.
And this is exactly...
Well, this is, I've been back editing my chapter on self-sacrifice, which for listeners,you can go back and check our episode four or five about self-sacrifice.
And, you know, what's really important is that all of this stuff, the emotionalsuppression, the attitude control, all of it is about breaking you.
(28:58):
Like, that's the point.
Yep.
cults have to separate you from your individual identity, or if you're being raised in it,they have to, you know, make it so that you don't develop an individual identity.
And I just love it that it was like a moment of you basically being told by your religionto quash your own child's individuality, that you were like, I'm not gonna do this.
(29:26):
I couldn't do it and it begged the question, why could my parents do it?
Like it was, and I, it falls right in line with what you're saying in the sense of it'sfor control and it makes you so much easier to handle, right?
(29:47):
Cause if we look at it just from a parental perspective, if my child is never upset orangry,
That's a really easy kid.
That's someone that you can control and it makes your life so much easier.
And that's really what it boils down to even there for the parents.
This, will have good little pod children that behave, make me look good and make my lifeeasier.
(30:11):
I vividly remember once we participated in a weekly Bible study with much more liberalpeople than us.
And my mom getting into an argument with one of the ladies that ran the thing, who herchild was a couple years older than me.
He was a teenager and she's like, teenagers will be teenagers.
(30:32):
You know, they're gonna be rebellious.
And my mom got mad at her and she says, no, they will not.
You raise them the right way.
Raise up a child in the way they should go.
And hate to break it to you, mom, but all of her kids were a little rebellious.
I'm also gonna have a line in my musical where she goes, I am what I am, cause you trainedme.
(30:57):
And then the chorus is gonna say, aren't these the fruits that you've been raising up sowell?
man.
my gosh, front row right?
I get front row.
I've claimed it.
Yes, tips.
was literally procrastinating something like two weekends ago and then I just wrote anentire musical concept for Uncultured, the Cult Baby musical.
(31:19):
So now we're all gonna hear about this until I write it.
love it
So Tara, you mentioned...
just like, all of the sorry, once at the end, all of these cult leaders and differentcharacters are going to be like taking off their pseudo personalities.
And the final song is going to be a song called living with it.
(31:42):
And I'm not even going to touch writing that until like I've casted the whole thing.
Because I'm just like, I want a 16 person written song by all these cult babies.
Because
I think this is the answer and I'll ask you the question, like, how?
How are you doing it now?
How are you, are you okay?
(32:03):
How did you get here?
And I think obviously, right, the answer is living with it, but like, how are you livingwith it?
What does that look like for your family right now?
well, I would say that I am in a lot of EMDR.
(32:23):
I'm doing, I'm doing therapy.
as a result of participating in the documentary, I was ostracized by my entire family.
which means that my autistic child who only grew up with my family as like his bestfriends, lost his best friends, lost his grandma, lost his grandpa.
(32:44):
And, we, we lived directly next door to my family and, they let me know via email thatthey were no longer going to be having a relationship with me.
They could have literally yelled it from the porch, but they chose to email.
(33:04):
Yeah.
and this was all the years I spent making sure this didn't happen.
And I knew.
the day that we sat down to record, like when we left recording that day and like made itdown the steps and like around the corner, I like lost the ability to stand.
(33:26):
My knees gave out and Floyd like grabbed me and what's wrong?
And I was like, if my family ever see this, they won't love me anymore.
And I knew it to the core of my being.
And my family would say, yes, we love Tara.
but we can't condone what she's doing.
She's lying.
(33:46):
She wasn't raised in a cult.
know, she's, she's.
Bismarching the Christian message.
Right.
She, I, they have to choose Jesus over their daughter.
And they feel like I made choices that, you know, no longer supported Jesus.
So that was a process of the most insane pain that I've ever been through in my life.
(34:11):
And.
that's been about a year and a half ago and we've moved and I call this house our, myhouse of peace because of the healing that is taking place here.
And you know, my son is, we're, finding our chosen family.
My son is in, in high school now and public school.
(34:35):
And you know, there's, there's so much good that has come as a result of.
so much pain, but we we're still in a place of healing and growing.
And you mentioned the relational aspect of it, and we did an entire episode on the exitcost of leaving these cults, and you obviously have experienced it with your family.
(35:06):
In a lot of respects, the most difficult part of my journey is figuring out how I feelabout those relationships.
and navigating those relationships.
And I haven't experienced what you folks have experienced and your fortitude and yourability to navigate through all of that is amazing.
(35:33):
But I would think that for a lot of people, and I know this from experience, just havingconversations with people that...
even when they are confronted with the lies of the group or the lies of the cult, theystay because of the relational cost in exiting.
(35:54):
And has that been your experience?
I mean, yes, I know that initially when Floyd, like I shared earlier, when Floyd told mewhere he was at, you know, with using evolution as an example and being so scared that my
family find out, I didn't ask the questions right away.
(36:19):
You know, I didn't start exploring it because I was just trying to play defense.
I was trying to
you know, protect Floyd to the best of my ability, because I didn't feel like what he wasdoing was wrong.
And I still knew that I needed to protect him, protect myself from your family, from myfamily.
And I, I just, the cost is so high.
(36:44):
The cost, the cost is so high.
I paid the price for it to have freedom.
the craziest pain, I think, of mourning someone who is still alive.
And I think for some reason when they sit there and say, like, we love you, right?
(37:07):
Like, we threaten to sue you, but we love you.
But you don't, right?
And it's just, it's so hard.
I think...
broken from a very young age because the way my childlike brain looked at Jesus inscripture, I translated his love to be unconditional.
(37:32):
And then I tried to like mirror that in my life and I would get in trouble for it.
You know, no, no, no, you can't, you cannot be accepting of this minority or this, thisgroup because
that Jesus wouldn't have done that.
You know, this is how the Old Testament God would handle this situation.
(37:53):
And we're just gonna, we're gonna sit back and we love them from afar.
I'm like, that Jesus's love was active.
He was in it.
He was in the thick of it.
It was, it was relational.
And I just, got, I felt like there was something wrong with me my entire life, because theway that I loved people,
(38:15):
was not the way that I saw it in the church or with my family.
And it made me feel like I was the one that was broken.
Yeah, you know, one of the lines that I really relate to from a Alanis Morissette song, soof course I'm stealing it and putting it in the musical, is, we'll love you just the way
(38:37):
you are if you're perfect.
And I remember listening to this at 14 years old, Secret, I had a religious CD on top ofthe other CD.
Yeah, because you could do that finally in these disc events, it was so exciting.
And I remember being 14 and like listening to this line and being like, oh, that's ourlife.
(39:03):
And I think you all will appreciate that in the musical, it's this song called The Makingof a Cult Baby.
And it's gonna be her showing, growing up being indoctrinated, but the whole time they'relike, smile, click the camera, perform.
And then at the end of the song, she's gonna stop performing for the camera.
And then the Trouble Teen Institute is gonna come take her away.
(39:23):
And it's like,
I always felt like that and I am also autistic and ADHD and maybe this is just the logicpart of my brain, but I was just like, we say we love unconditionally, but we don't
because we as children, we're growing up knowing that we only get love if we're perfect.
(39:45):
Yes.
And there was this moment after my family sent me the emails.
And since we live directly next door, this is a silly example, but it it cut it cut sodeep.
Since we live next door to each other, my dad mowed my lawn.
And the first time that my dad mowed the lawn, like, oh my god, it's so silly, but it wasjust such a and he went down the property line.
(40:10):
He went down the property line.
And there was this line in the
between the two yards and I sat there on my side of the grass and I just looked at it andI was like, this is what conditional love looks like.
Like there was no conversation, there was no talking about it.
For the year and a half from us filming to the documentary airing, I would like verygently try to ask my parents, hey, can I tell you about what I did?
(40:37):
And can I tell you about the experience?
Do you guys have any questions?
Nope.
Nope, never gonna watch it.
We're never gonna watch it because they were afraid to see what their evil daughter wouldhave said.
When I called my mom after filming for eight hours, I called her and I was like, we justgot done.
(41:00):
I'm so excited.
She was like, well, that was a really long time.
Did they make you renounce Jesus?
Yeah, for eight hours.
That's all we did.
Yeah.
It's going to be one heck of a documentary.
Goodness gracious.
it just, I- But that was the only question she ever asked you.
The only question she ever asked.
And I, I just-
(41:20):
there's also this trend in cult memoirs and cult story sharing that when the parents doread the book or listen to the thing, they're often surprised that it's not as bad as they
thought it was going to be.
Which leads me to flip that around and be like, so you know it was worse.
(41:41):
You know there was worse things we could have said.
Yes.
Yes.
I remember in filming, you know, they ask you so many questions.
They covered so many, like just topics upon topics upon topics.
And they started to go political.
And I was so like, you know, just baby into my deconstruction.
(42:02):
And I whispered, I was a state away from where my family was.
They were nowhere near me.
And I was like,
Like I was petrified to say something that would put liberals in a positive light and inthe category of humanity.
(42:23):
Yeah.
And and my parents, my mom, you know, I said to her because I had that realization that ifthey saw it, they wouldn't love me anymore.
And I said to my mom, was like, I was honest.
I was like, I'm nervous for you to see it.
And she took that like as an excuse to.
to never talk about it and to never, and, but I just remember being like, the thing I wasnervous about you hearing was that I thought Democrats could possibly be good people.
(42:53):
It wasn't that I outed you as terrible parents.
wasn't that I renounced Christ.
It was this very honest, you know, trying to share this story.
There was nothing bad or evil in what Floyd or I did.
Even if you slandered your parents,
renounced Jesus and signed up as a Democrat on camera.
(43:20):
Nothing, a point that I've made to her multiple times.
How many serial killers or child murderers do we watch televised?
Court cases.
Court cases, thank you.
You see these people in court being
(43:42):
Accused of these heinous crimes directly behind them is their loving supportive parentswho often say we're horrified, but what's happened, but we love our child and we want
justice Not when it comes to a cult.
Yeah, not when it comes to
And the irony is, you mentioned that you told your parents about what you were doing, andthen they said, well, we're never going to watch it anyway.
(44:10):
So the irony is, if you would have never said anything about it, would the situation beany different?
You know what I'm saying?
Right, right.
mean, they would have been a little surprised.
Technically, my mother watched it and that was the crazy thing is going to be his.
had no idea that his mom was like, I guess that technologically savvy to be like aware ofthings happening.
(44:37):
And she we discussed it with his his siblings, like, should we let your mom know?
And everyone was like, no, she's never going to come across this thing never in millionyears.
And then there she was just watching the documentary and there's her son on it.
And she was so cool about the whole thing.
Yeah, she was.
And you know, what's interesting to me, what's interesting is obviously I'm older than youguys are, but in my journey, I've been very vocal on social media and my family, they just
(45:11):
basically have decided, I think to ignore it, right?
Every once in a while, if I post or write something, they'll come out of the woodwork andpush back a little bit.
But when we're in person, when we're together,
I've made overtures.
Let's talk about this.
Let's discuss this.
They don't want to.
Right.
don't want to have to set down their cognitive dissonance.
(45:34):
Like they have to keep those beliefs have to be so, you know, protected because therecould be that thread one day that pulls it all apart.
It's an addiction to certainty, right?
And it's an addiction to having the answers.
It's an addiction.
It's an addiction.
It's addiction.
Like it so is because I know I went through withdrawal.
(45:56):
Yes.
and it's also the addiction to feeling superior.
You know, I think that's the thing we need to be well into deconstruction to let ourselvesadmit.
But it's like, you know, I realized that I was like, well, I grew up being told we werethe best.
So then I went out chasing that for the rest of my life, I had to be the best.
Otherwise, I was worthless.
(46:20):
Which of course, is just a form of self hate, right?
But
yeah, wildly, yes.
I like what you said about addiction to certainty, you know, because that's the otherthing we hear from a lot of cult survivors is it's so scary.
It's so scary.
I'm so afraid to make decisions.
And one of the things I tell them is like, again, like this, ultimate promise of everycult is you do things exactly our way, and we give you perfection.
(46:47):
Usually after some space travel, we're going to go to another planet somewhere and thenwe'll give you perfection.
Yeah.
And I just tell people, I'm like, you're no more likely to have anything happen to youthan you were before, right?
You're no more likely to live happily ever after than you were before.
Actually, probably are more likely now.
(47:09):
But that is such a powerful point that I've been really mulling over recently is when youmeet someone who's deconstructing from having been raised in it, you're meeting people
who've never considered, never considered the fact that like, there could be no heaven,there could be no hell.
There are people who have not looked at their own mortality because it was all taken careof.
(47:34):
I mean, that was a really- You're technically gonna live forever.
Right, right.
I didn't have my first existential crisis until the other side of major deconstructionbecause I was fine, right?
I was, like he said, gonna- the ticket.
I've got the golden ticket.
I'm better than everyone else.
I've got it handled and figured out.
And now I'm walking around like, now I know why everyone's got anxiety.
(47:58):
And we're walking around, okay, it's because we're on this mortal coil and we don't knowwhat to do with ourselves.
I got the golden ticket in the musical.
Love it, love it, love it.
You know, one of my favorite anti-cult mantras is just there are many valid ways to live alife.
(48:23):
And I think for me, that's part of like my living with it.
It's just like, you could do it this way, you could do it another way.
And you know, we're also addicted to the idea that if our lives are good, it's because wemade this one good choice, right?
And like, pick the right person or did this.
And if we were on a...
a different path, it would have been miserable.
(48:45):
Instead of realizing like, no, it just would have been a whole different life.
And we will never know that.
But you know, when when you're raised in the way that all of us were, and you're onlygiven one way to be, it's just, it's so hard, I think, to just relax and live and let
(49:07):
live.
But once you do, life is awesome, you get to meet all kinds of people, you get toparticipate in all kinds of cool things and fun and happiness.
yes.
I've never met.
I've never met more accepting, loving individuals than on this side of a church building.
Yeah.
Which
(49:27):
that resonates so much.
It blows me away.
My son has found acceptance.
I've found acceptance.
I've found love.
I have this chosen family.
They have no reason to love me and they love me unconditionally.
Like that's what it was supposed to be with my family.
(49:50):
Just out of curiosity, how did the documentary come about?
How did you guys get involved with that?
So one of the...
benefits of COVID was I got to work from home for the first time in, well, ever, really,which was really transformational for us and our relationship getting to heal a lot of the
(50:14):
damage that I had done.
But one of the perks of that is my wife, who's addicted to certain types of television,will put something on and, you know.
Lula Rich.
I put Lula Rich on the documentary.
And I got sucked in.
Yeah.
And we watched it it was great.
And a little while after we watched it, she yelled from, I was working on the couch andshe yelled from the bedroom and said, my gosh, the people who made Lula Rich are going to
(50:43):
do an IBLP documentary.
Or.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're going to do an IBLP documentary.
Yep.
And I was like, and immediately.
Googled the production company, found their website, found a random email at the bottom oftheir, not that easy to get a hold of.
But I just emailed this random- He was just like, I want to help.
(51:05):
I want and I said, hey, I did this, this, and this.
I was involved these years.
If you need people to talk, I would love to talk.
And then I kind of forgot about it.
It was so, he emailed them and we totally just forgot about it.
And then-
maybe a couple weeks later, he gets an email.
They want to do an interview.
(51:26):
We interviewed with them and less than three weeks later we filmed.
it was, mean, and the crazy, everyone who participated in that documentary, their storiesare so much bigger than what the documentary was able to share.
But like Floyd's involvement, he went to Russia for Gothard.
(51:46):
He smuggled money into the country for Gothard.
You know, he, his,
brother was at alert and which was their paramilitary organization like there's just somany stories that would just blow people's mind that this was happening you know just
behind some shiny happy faces yeah technically I didn't smuggle the money I was a moneymule I'm sorry money mule let's get the yes it was
(52:11):
Don't worry, I forgot or didn't realize that I had been deported because of a cult severaltimes as a child when I did my top secret clearance interview.
Literally years later I'm deconstructing and my husband's like, so, But you know what,criminal, I always say a big huge thing that people miss because we get so tied up in a
(52:39):
cult and is it a cult and what is it?
is that cults are criminal enterprises.
Like that's what they are.
At the end of the day, that's what they are.
They're here for your labor and traffickers are criminals.
That being said, documentary, what are you all doing now?
How do people find you?
(53:00):
When does the book come out?
Well, we are on pretty much every platform as Advocate Average.
And that is just a name that applies to so many things in our lives.
know, we, the average things, yeah, we're here for the normal average things and findingthe joy in it.
(53:23):
you know, on the other side of deconstruction in our journey with Artistic Sun.
You know, there's so much beauty to be had in the average things and it's important toadvocate for those things for yourself.
We are still in the process of healing from a lot of loss and we are in the process ofwriting the book.
(53:46):
To be now.
Yes.
To be written.
favorite deconstruction quotes, my listeners have heard me say this a lot, is that we knowwe're healing when peace and tranquility no longer sounds like boredom.
And it sounds like you two are doing it.
Yes, that is how I feel about this home.
(54:08):
Like I walk through this house and it just, what had to transpire, because remember I livedirectly next door to my family and we had to make this decision like for our mental
health, emotional health, we've got to leave now.
I can't walk past them.
I can't have my autistic son see, like we had to leave and the entire process happened inabout three weeks.
(54:31):
We made the decision, we found the house, we sold.
It happens so like, what's happening?
If there is no God, what is this?
know, like it just, it felt, it felt crazy.
And so this house is just, I am so wildly grateful for it.
And that what you just said so accurately describes the, the piece here.
(54:51):
I'm thrilled with that piece.
Yes.
Well, Tara and Floyd, thank you so much for sharing a portion of your story.
I feel like we've just scratched the surface.
Perhaps we can do this again in the future.
But we encourage all of our listeners to find you on social media, to follow you.
If you haven't watched the documentary, Happy Shiny People, do that.
(55:14):
And what platform is that on again?
Shenni Happy People is on Amazon Prime.
Okay, yeah, a gr-
the biggest debut ever on Amazon on Prime because that's how many people related to yourstories.
It's really convenient now when people are like, why are you so weird?
I can just be like, go watch this documentary.
(55:37):
It's so much easier than trying to explain it.
Yes.
we could all benefit from that.
That would be great.
that's the like, that's the number one reason to write a book if you're a cult kid or ahomeschool kid.
that like, I literally when I sign books to people in my military unit or from college orwhatever, I'm like, I hope this finally explains why I'm so weird.
Ha!
(55:58):
Nice.
it.
Tara and Floyd, thank you so much.
And we appreciate you sharing a portion of your story.
We invite everyone to go and check out that documentary because it was very helpful andinspirational to me.
So thank you for sharing your story.
you guys so much.
Thank you.
And for Daniela, I want to encourage all of you to buy and read her book if you haven'tdone so already, Uncultured.
(56:25):
It's a great book as well as it's available in audio as well as also on as an ebook.
So there's all kinds of ways to access it and you can get a signed copy if you follow heron social media and hit the link.
So that's a really, really cool thing.
Yes.
(56:46):
Exciting!
It's now on Spotify's subscription, so if you pay for Spotify's subscription, you canlisten to Uncultured!
Congratulations!
Yeah, that's great.
Fantastic.
And so until next time, I'm Scott Lloyd for Daniela Messenek Young.
We'll see you on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
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