March 4, 2025 • 58 mins
In this conversation, Daniella and Katie Keech explore the intersections of cult dynamics, mental health, and neurodiversity. They discuss the misdiagnosis of mental health disorders in cult survivors, the authoritarian nature of the DSM, and the importance of self-definition and community support. The conversation delves into the complexities of plurality, trauma, and identity, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of these issues in a world that often seeks to categorize and control individuals.
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You can read all about my story in my book, Uncultured-- buy signed copies here. https://bit.ly/SignedUncultured
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Other Podcasts
Daniella's other podcast: Hey White Women
Takeaways
- Many cult survivors are misdiagnosed with mental health disorders.
- The DSM can serve as a tool for control rather than understanding.
- Neurodivergent individuals often face unique challenges in cult environments.
- Self-diagnosis can empower individuals to understand their identities.
- Cults and fascist dynamics share similar control mechanisms.
- Community support is crucial for those navigating identity issues.
- Plurality is a valid identity that challenges traditional notions of self.
- Trauma impacts individuals differently, and not all trauma leads to DID.
- Cultural perspectives on identity can vary widely and influence understanding.
- The importance of flexibility in thought and understanding human behavior.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:25):
Hello everybody and welcome to Cults and the Culting of America.
And if you're wondering who is this chick and where is Scott with his awesome radio voice,you will know that I'm sorry, Scott is unavailable today.
I am Daniella, scholar of Cults Extreme Groups and extremely bad leadership, also known asKnitting Cult Lady.
(00:48):
And today I'm really, really excited about our guests.
We have so much stuff to talk about.
It's going to be a very relevant conversation.
So I am going to let Katie introduce themselves.
So I'm Katie Keech.
I have been working with mental health in different ways for about 20 years.
I used to do program management for forensics and emerging adult programs.
(01:10):
I've been helping American Association of Marriage Family Therapists write theirtransgender guidelines and I've been focusing on neurocomplexity.
I used to help stuff with ISSTD.
That's a complicated thing because I came out with my plurality and they didn't like thatI was the first person to do that on the board.
since they were started in the eighties and I got.
(01:32):
So, but I did write some of the emerging adult guidelines, which is soon to be publishedin 2025, if they get their act together on that.
And I, I'm writing a book on working with autism and dissociative identity disordertogether.
That's Rettleidge has gotten me the contract for that.
And I'm also about to hand in my rough for.
(01:53):
chapter on working with plurality from a neurodiversity affirmative front with NickWalker, who was pioneering the neurodiversity affirmative movement among other people, not
the only person.
So that's probably enough.
Yeah, so immediately my audience is gonna have 15,000 questions for you and I hope we canget to some of them, but.
(02:15):
We feel like a lot of, so a lot of people who are cult survivors have been diagnosed withdifferent kinds of mental health disorders.
And dysentery identity disorder is a common one.
And I think it's commonly misdiagnosed, but I think it's also commonly diagnosed.
(02:40):
Could you just tell us a little bit about the experience of that and like,
also coming out with your plurality.
Yeah, I mean, think a lot of it is, is there's so many layers.
It is generally misdiagnosed.
I think there's a statistic that it takes people up to eight years to get a correctdiagnosis if they have DID.
And that's usually they usually get other things like bipolar and schizophrenia andborderline personality disorder and this like whole sandwich of things.
(03:05):
And me managing programs with young adults, I saw this and tried to like, saw people whohad clearly more dissociation or DID and tried to narrow it down and even
as a program manager, people, I would have to fight with the psychiatrist or differentpeople to like actually narrow down what was happening.
Cause they would even want to have them say they have intractable depression.
(03:27):
And now, you know, even though they're 19, we should send them to have ECT.
I'm like, no, no, no, absolutely not.
This is not necessary.
But the eight is an average.
So I've seen people who have been working.
to try to get a correct diagnosis for over 30 years.
And maybe some people have 10 years, but I think it's also important and you might agreewith this, that the DSM is kind of a authoritarian construct.
(03:55):
Like a lot of times, some of the stuff in the DSM has been put in there to controldifferent kinds of people who didn't fit constructs.
probably know that the original diagnosis of schizophrenia was put on women in the 1950s.
because they didn't want to be housewives and they weren't meant to be.
I mean, like you didn't get a choice.
(04:16):
You're just, and then you get Valium.
And then if you didn't like the Valium and the little pink box and you were losing yourmind, they'd be like, you have schizophrenia.
Let's, let's lock you up or put you in hospital.
And then later it was defined as a black man who were saying that we don't like racism andthe effects of racism on us.
(04:36):
And this isn't acceptable.
And so the white culture redefined the DSM to outline the structures of schizophrenia tosay that's a definition of psychosis.
therefore, you know, so it, the DSM is.
It just sounds exactly like when you don't fit in the cult, honestly.
(04:57):
I am neuro-spicy in a neuro-spicy family with a neuro-spicy child, and I constantly lookat my spouse and say, now just imagine trying to raise them in a cult.
Duh.
my experience and so so many of the kids who come out of cults, I feel like are theseneurodivergent ones.
(05:24):
And I don't know.
I think it's it's the nature nurture question, right?
Like I was always in trouble.
So then I didn't get the small acts of kindness that is the, you know, important part ofbrainwashing.
Or I was always in trouble because I didn't fit.
So then I I hated it.
(05:44):
You know, but in many ways, I did have a worse experience in the cult than someone whofits.
Because what I've discovered, whether it's a cult, whether it's a military, whether it'sany kind of total institution, right, a mental health institution, a prison, your number
one job is don't stand out.
(06:08):
Right?
we
say this in the army, we say, all you have to do to be successful is be in the right placeat the right time in the right uniform and don't volunteer for anything.
Right?
Don't stand out.
And I feel like so much this is the message.
my gosh, especially to white women in America, right?
It's just like, don't stand out.
Don't rock the boat.
(06:30):
a car going by.
Yeah, so, you know, I, of course, I'm writing a book called The Culting of America, whichit's almost everything I find.
Of course, my job is to compare everything to cults, but there's the comparison, right?
(06:50):
It's like you're using these disorders and systems to control people that don't fit, thataren't toeing the line that you want to be toeed.
Yeah, and I think that's an important point of what you're writing and something that mademe consider is it stuff like fascism and cults aren't really an on or off thing.
Like we like to say, well, it's not a call or it's not fascism until it crosses this line.
(07:14):
But then like then that's used as the denial so that people can then kind of make peoplemore and more entrapped in the line.
And then before you know it, you're all stuck when you can say, well, this is these arecult dynamics or these are fascist dynamics.
And I love it, and I've spent quite a bit of time talking about this lately that I loveour expression is line in the sand, right?
(07:38):
It's not line in concrete.
It's not a moat that we've dug.
It is a line in the sand.
And maybe the most defining thing about a line in the sand is it's really easy to erase,right?
It's not there the next day.
It's easy to be like,
Here's the slide, I will never cross.
(08:01):
But reality is really like.
And it's a lot of ways to get people to buy in, know, whether you're a little kid orwhether you're an adult, it's like the constant saying, you've seen this, the larger
people saying this, like, no, you're not seeing this, that's not happening, that's nothappening, that's not happening until like it absolutely is happening.
That's not an accident.
(08:22):
It even strikes me that like all of the, this is definitely a tangent, but like all of thejobs that people come to me saying are really culty, medicine.
We don't let you know what it's like in medical school to actually be in medicine.
We could, but we don't.
(08:44):
When you're doing initial training in the army, you don't know what it's actually like.
When you're in law school, you don't know what it's actually like.
And I've started to wonder like how much, because I know in cults, like basically for thefirst six months, for that identity breaking indoctrination process, they're actively
hiding from you what you've signed up for and what it's like.
(09:07):
And I just wonder like how much of that is in our culture.
I think that's true.
mean, I do know with medicine, they kind of do a lot of hazing and exhaustion and lack ofsleep and all of these things.
My father really was a doctor.
graduated from University of Maryland and he, I mean, I'm not like hiding that my family'smessed up.
(09:32):
He hurt too many people, so they made him be a pathologist instead.
But then he moved to California because then he could still be a doctor in California.
So, you know.
But there are ways they protect their own.
they could have entirely cut somebody like that out.
And I guess if you invest a certain amount of time and money or whatever, you getprotected.
(09:56):
You just get kind of siphoned or attempted to be siphoned.
I mean, psychology and mental health is not dissimilar.
especially if you're looking into areas of complex trauma work, it gets pretty culty.
And you know, I get asked about this a lot.
And of course, there are a lot of therapist led cults.
(10:19):
And I think so to me, there's two things.
One, I seem to find that anywhere in the space of personal transformation, predators aregonna show up.
absolutely.
I mean, I think there was a study in the 70s that showed a large amount of therapists hadMachiavellian tendencies.
(10:41):
And that's the other thing where I'm like, you know, I always tell my audience, like,beware of anyone that knows a lot about the bad guys.
And then it's so interesting, right, because I'm like, cult leaders are always studyingthe bad guys.
That's how they know how to do it.
Dictators studying dictators.
There's a reason Trump had Mein Kampf on his bedside table.
(11:03):
But then people's reaction is always to be like, so should we be afraid of you?
And I'm like,
Yes, yeah, right?
If I wanted to manipulate you, if I wanted to build a cult, odds are I would know how todo it better than other people.
So maybe don't come to my compound when I invite you, right?
(11:25):
But like this, I think the more and more I really look at cults and like really, you know,I spend hours, you know, thousands of hours doing this and trying to like really pinpoint
things.
And one of my things is just like a tool is a weapon, right?
Surgeons are, you want surgeon that's really good at cutting you up, but also surgeons arereally good at cutting people up, right?
(11:54):
So like psychologists, of course, are people that know how, they know how the human psycheworks.
Yeah.
if and when they want to, it's relatively easy to manipulate people.
lot of them go into it to feel in control, not necessarily to help people.
(12:16):
The idea is to help people, but I mean the vast majority of people honestly, and I'mhoping this changes, I don't know, but really do it to feel superior.
I mean, as I I joke that it's amazing that I became eventually a therapist having had somany bad experiences with therapists, like not even just from like as an adult, but I mean
(12:38):
I grew up with a very weird
therapist who was pretty well known who wasn't really good with ethics and boundaries andyet I still somehow decided to persist.
I don't know why, but it did make me think every time somebody screwed up really badlywith me that I would never, it was an example of something I would never do with somebody
else.
(12:58):
So.
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of where I formed my whole career was like, we can learn, you I've hadmore bad leaders than good ones.
And I've learned about the kind of leader I wanted to be as much from learning who Ididn't want to be as from learning who I did, you know.
(13:20):
But also just this thing you were saying about the like the group protecting its own, youknow, and
yeah.
This is one of those things that I wonder like, is this a fundamental problem withcapitalism?
Or is this a fundamental problem with humans?
That we always expect the individual to take the hit for the group to maintain its goodname.
(13:45):
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think it's like more power and ego in some ways, because as someone who's alsoAudi HD, I tend to have a justice oriented thing.
I, when something's wrong, say it, which tends to get me into shit more often than not,unfortunately.
Um, but like when I was on the board of ISSTD, which is the international society oftrauma and association, um, I was the only board member who spoke up against this.
(14:13):
training that they did that has now blown up among the DID community in a huge manner andit's going on and on and on that said that this training saying that going against
self-diagnosis and then picking people who have TikToks who are having just on TikTokexpressing their own lives and just trying to picking having professionals pick them apart
(14:39):
and say this isn't what DID look like is wrong and cruel.
And I got slammed.
I got, cause I was going up against people who had, and I was right.
Like I told them, you know, you do this, it's, it's going to be bad.
And, and I got yelled at and, eventually got, you know, among other things kicked out, butthey redid it with the Robinson McLean.
(15:04):
I don't know if you followed this fiasco at all.
It's kind of a big deal in the DID world.
Then Robinson.
did the same thing, the same exact presentation and he did it on YouTube and he pickedapart.
I the initial one, which was so horrible, picked a person who had committed suicide in anNHS hospital because of her condition, but they were saying this isn't what it looks like.
(15:33):
And I said, that's wrong.
And when I got back, the person who put it together screamed at me, said,
Well, maybe TikTok killed her.
I was like, that's bone chilling.
But then when Robinson did it again, it devastated the community because it was sayingthat all these people they looked up to as people who were public to make them feel less
(16:01):
shame about who they were and how they are and about their lives, which is a big dealabout the condition and feel less lonely.
feel like maybe all of these people were wrong and then all of these people got targetedby people who don't like the diagnosis and don't believe it anyway and bullied and
threatened.
(16:22):
And I actually had to go a little bit messily and risk my face by saying, you know, peopleare getting suicidal on this.
This thing is causing my clients to be suicidal.
This thing is causing these TikTok
people who didn't ask for this to get targeted and death threats, we need to take it downright away.
(16:44):
And people were aghast that I said that in a big form of many of it, big, big, you know,the big names of trauma.
It did get taken down and now it's gotten remade into a paper again.
And it's devastating again, because well, the whole thing that they keep putting forwardis that we don't have a right to
(17:07):
Self-diagnose which I think is culty because if you know who you are Why do you need torely on somebody who's the expert to tell you what's going on with you?
That's like
So it's so interesting, know, I always, I always, or we joke that I got crowdsourceddiagnosed because it was like readers of my book that suggested to me that maybe there's
(17:31):
another reason I always felt different, right?
and, but as soon as I actually considered it, right, as soon as I let my brain form thequestion, like, could I be autistic?
I immediately knew, cause I know what the inside of my brain looks like.
And it looks like that Chris Pine meme with a million things posted up on a poster boardand all this red string connecting everything together.
(17:59):
And I had a whole career where colonels and generals just loved to show off my littlecomputer brain, right?
So it was like, but it was so interesting because I went through this whole process oftherapists being like, but we don't know if it's autism or if it's trauma.
(18:19):
And it wasn't until it took me about a year until I realized like, sometimes my clotheshurt me.
And they were like, okay, that's ASD, right?
But I knew, I knew because I was like, I know the inside of my brain and I know that theworld has felt right side up for me for the first time when I, so I read the book, Third
(18:43):
Culture Kids and the world got like halfway right side up.
And then when I realized I was neurodivergent, it was like, for the first time, this makessense.
Yeah, no, there has been so much pressure when I started to look at neurodivergency in thetrauma field, there was so much pressure like, no, no, no, all this is trauma.
Why are you looking at this?
You're misclassifying.
So when I did a deep dive, actually made a, I made a chart that showed how you can tellthe difference between and then the overlaps, because obviously there's so much like
(19:13):
Catherine Rubin and I partnered together doing a research about paper that she did.
Obviously, there's so much
trauma that happens with neurodivergency so there is overlaps but there are ways to tellthat there are differences and they're not exactly the same thing.
So it's even so interesting in my case, right?
(19:33):
Because most children that have horrifically traumatic backgrounds don't have 7,000 otherchildren that also had that kind of almost very similar background.
So like, I know that I experienced a bunch of trauma and all of this and blah, blah, butalso I know hundreds, if not thousands of children of God survivors.
(19:55):
And like, it's the Mestenex that are pretty sure they're autistic, you know?
So it's like, I get the trauma and I of course have that and I of course have all thesedifferent things.
But I mean, I've also had therapists tell me that there are certain parts of my book wherethe trauma is so intense that it's amazing that I didn't develop multiple personalities
(20:20):
and that...
the neurodivergence probably helped me, like the ability to just kind of go away in mymind and disassociate, you know, just a bunch of these different things.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, a lot of us who are, created a group of clinicians and researchers and nurses anddoctors who have a background of plurality of either they fused or they've not fused.
(20:44):
And a lot of us are coming to the structural theory of dissociation doesn't work for us.
And even like people who are big in the field who aren't part of us are also coming tothat.
It really doesn't, it works for trauma, but it doesn't work for plurality.
And what a lot of us are coming to is that there may be its own neurodivergencies cluster.
(21:05):
like you get autism and ADHD, and then you might even get like some of the biology stuff,like HEADS and MCAS and things, and dyscalculia and all these different things kind of
cluster.
And it seems like the ability to manage trauma, and even the researchers have said this intheir papers, like I've done some,
(21:27):
lectures on this recently because I just did a deep dive that there is some it's its ownneurodivergence that you can be born with it and then it carries trauma impacts
differently so it splits differently and some people can do that and some people can't dothat it's not better or worse it's just different but what it's always been called in the
papers of like Dr.
(21:47):
Lowenstein has said this Dr.
Brand has said this like every big person in the field
I said that you can't have DID without somebody who's born without high hypnotizability.
And I was like, huh, what the fuck is high hypnotizability?
Because from my understanding, every single one of us is absolutely able to be hypnotized.
(22:08):
It sounds a little bit like a BS.
They never explained it.
And I was trying to figure it out.
One of the things I found was really interesting with high hypnotizability when I waslooking at the biology was that there are certain areas of the brain
that are wired to do monotropism.
And that was found in high hypnotizability.
And I was like, well, maybe there's like a little overlap, the overlap between likeautism.
(22:32):
I don't know if you know what monotropism, yeah.
Monotropism is the ability to hyper-focus on something for a very long time, like specialinterests and things like that.
And so if you can do that somehow that allows you to have
hypnotizability, but that seems to also allow you to start to split cells.
(22:55):
I think there is there's so many autistic people who are TIT, so I think there's somethingabout the lack of pruning that must be in there.
There's not really research in this, so we haven't looked at this besides a couple ofresearchers I've collected in my group and we're starting to parse things out, but it's
just a blank area where we have a lot of questions, but it does seem to be like an Occam'srazor thing where like
(23:20):
Some people have really severe trauma and they don't do this and some people have kind ofI don't like to trauma rank like I think that's kind of stupid but but some people have
what a lot of traumas that a lot of us experience it and do have cells and Like dr.
Ved at SAR said that sometimes people will have very small systems of four or five peopleand there will be no rate or physical trauma or
(23:48):
You know, it will just be some neglect and some dissociation within the family and I thinkthat got lost into just like everybody must have Capital T trauma from birth onward and I
think that's wrong
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even like what you're talking about with high hypnotist ability, you know, like I, I getasked all the time about if neurodivergent people and autistic people are easier to be
(24:14):
pulled into cults or is like there's more of us.
And, you know, my sort of anecdotal answer to this is like, it seems like
on the one hand, we are very drawn to high structure groups, because they give us rules,they give us, know, uniforms sometimes, explanations of ways to do things, systems of
(24:40):
justice, supposedly.
But then I also think we like spot the holes and the lies and the patterns faster.
But the hypnotize ability is interesting.
Because I also see this with cult hopping, you know, like I don't
one person that came up in a high control group that hasn't been in another one.
(25:00):
Like, I kind of think that part of what we do is we go hopping to like, lesser and lesserharmful high control groups until we finally deconstruct.
But it's almost like, I don't know, sometimes they refer to like, once your brain has beenin extremism, it's like you're a cancer survivor, and it can happen again more easily.
(25:25):
Yeah
you know, we all these people came out of children of God, which by the way was an Americahating cult, right?
We called America Babylon the whore.
And now they're all MAGA, make America great again.
Right?
And it's like, they just went back into another form of extremism.
Or like I sometimes like with everything going on right now, I feel like I'm doing thesecular version of like, begging God not to choose me to lead the revolution.
(25:54):
Because I'm like, I don't, you know, like I could too easily throw myself back into this.
You know, I look at people like Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself, right, in indefense of Palestine, who like grew up in a bit of a cult and then was in the military.
(26:14):
And I was like, in in not judging in any way, I was just like, yeah, that makes sense tome.
You know, that like once you've been sort of prepared to die for an extreme idea, likeit's easier to fall into those patterns again.
Yeah, it's familiar and so you know what to do.
I think you've spoken to that in different ways.
(26:36):
You know, if your brain is structured so it's an easy expectation, even if it's not acomfortable expectation, you're gonna do it.
Could you explain plurality for the listeners and then if anything you could share aboutyour experience of coming out with that and why and how that impacted you?
(27:00):
And I call it plurality because Stronghold who started the plural association they createdthe term they created it because they got diagnosed with DID in the Netherlands and the
person said Congratulations, you have DID now you are on a six-year wait list to have atherapist and they're like Fuck I need a therapist now.
(27:21):
What do I do?
Also, you can't work you you have this diagnosis.
You're not allowed to work and they're like
So what they did was they created this very big support network and they used the termplural because they didn't want to gatekeep and they didn't want to use medical labels.
They didn't want to use DSM labels.
So they didn't want to say, you are, you don't have DID or you have to prove it.
(27:42):
was just whoever you are, if you feel like you are more than one in a body, you areplural.
We will accept you and we'll just make a community.
And it's been a huge deal.
It also helps because some of us like me, we get diagnosed with the ID and then we workthrough stuff and it doesn't cause us distress anymore.
(28:08):
But we don't want to fuse into one singular self, which some of us are kind of likening.
Some of it works for some people.
Like some people want to fuse into a single self that's kind of been considered the goal.
a lot of us are, that is often a drive from the establishment that we didn't pick.
and they pick for us.
And it feels a little bit like ABA, like Applied Behavioral Analysis Therapy for autisticpeople where you are autistic, but you have to pretend you're not autistic and that causes
(28:35):
more problems.
So a lot of people who are have more than oneself in the body, they want to please thetherapist and then the selves or the they just mask everything and it doesn't actually
blend into oneself.
It's just performative because the therapist wants that.
So we're trying to be good.
clients are trying to do the good client role.
(28:56):
And it's actually really damaging to the whole system of selves.
And selves get hurt or selves hide or selves get angry.
It creates a disharmony within the selves.
There's sort of this concept, I think, by people that selves have to be in a humansingular, because that's how we know them to be because we've been taught that.
(29:19):
historically,
even in European cultures and different indigenous cultures from Africa to India todifferent native First Nations people in America.
That's not how cultures have viewed identity.
They have often viewed identity from group to group as potentially plural in a human.
(29:39):
It's not unusual.
It's more current and Western model to think that you have to be a singular consciousness.
And there's really no scientific
measure why that should be our brains are so complex even different animals i don't knowif you know that octopi have nine brains and they don't always work together.
(30:03):
I think it's wonderful and lovely they have different brains and some of them think onething about something another thing and they have to kind of.
Combine and there's been cases where even.
People have had heart and lung transplants from somebody else and they will take thosememories and likes and dislikes from that person.
one woman got a transplant from a young 19 year old who died in a motorcycle accident.
(30:27):
She was very straight and sis and suddenly she had a taste for beer and was very attractedto curvy blonde woman.
And she didn't know why until she met the family and found out that was some of histastes.
There are different ways consciousness can be shared and I think it's a little scary forpeople to think that maybe our consciousness isn't as concrete as we would hope it to be.
(30:53):
It's messier.
I don't really have, you know, spiritual explanations for that.
It's just...
I mean, this comes back to something I find in cult stuff and brainwashing stuff all thetime is that we really believe we are rational as human beings.
Like we believe we're rational, but the reality is we're not.
(31:13):
We make most of our decisions based on recency bias and social proof, what everyone elseis doing.
And one of the statistics that like changed my life and stood out to me so hard ingraduate school was they said, you know,
on our best days as adults, we understand probably 30 % of our emotions.
(31:37):
And I was like a new mom at the time.
I was like, imagine we expect children to like understand what's going on, you know, withtheir emotions and like,
theories.
We don't even really, we're just putting names on things and we don't actually know.
And I think part of this goes back to why it's so easy to manipulate people because, youknow, nobody wants to think like they're gonna fall for this or like they're this type of
(32:06):
person.
We are rational, right?
I think therefore I am.
like, no, we're actually very much like pack animals and just so influenced by everything.
And we don't really understand how we operate entirely.
We have these theories.
We like to feel like they're very concrete.
We like to like quote them to other people and feel very serious behind them.
(32:27):
But if you scratch them a little bit, they don't really hold a lot of water.
I mean, one of the things I think is the most bizarre thing with DID theorists, who theyoften say people who have DID will have children who have DID, but they will also say that
those people have never had abuse.
Like those kids don't, but they'll say like, but.
(32:47):
Can you call them DID if they haven't had any abuse and they're doing fine, but they stillhave like, so what do you make of that?
How have you studied that?
What kind of sense do you have of that?
It's been repeated in the literature over and over again, which it's kind of like thisdrive by.
Consciousness is messy.
It's really messier than we like to think that it is and that's okay.
(33:11):
But I think that's the fascism is.
We like to package things and we like to package things as male and we like to packagethings as female and we like to package things as we have one brain and one consciousness
and that's how it works.
And it's just an easier way to market things too and it's easier way to like put us intojob roles and it's an easier way to control us.
(33:32):
And it's not true.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is fascinating because cult leaders.
So first of all, like, I just think like, I really suspect that coercive control ispatriarchal.
And that patriarchy is kind of the OG cult.
(33:54):
But like, so, so often, these male cult leaders
will eventually, no matter how they start, right, Keith Renieri, self-help group,executive success, surrounded by smart advanced women, ultimately giving classes on proper
gender roles.
You know, and when I saw this Facebook story that like a lawyer quit Facebook overZuckerberg's like toxic misogyny and toxic masculinity and like talking about proper men,
(34:25):
and I was literally, I was like, my gosh, it's just,
It's just like Keith Raniere.
And I think part of this is like it's the black and white.
And I see we're thinking it and the freaking out about the trans, right?
Like it just makes people so uncomfortable.
You are supposed to be one or the other.
(34:48):
And by the way, that has a hierarchy.
And I've heard people be like, you don't.
you wouldn't be bothered by not knowing what gender someone is unless you knew you weresupposed to treat them differently based on their gender.
And I've even heard this from people who are mixed race or like sort of white passing whowill then say that when white people find out that they're mixed, they'll be almost like
(35:15):
offended, right?
That they like treated them too well.
And it's like really sort of revealing.
But I...
There's, as we know, right, if you try to define a woman, it's immediately aboutcontrolling her.
And that is the general stuff is such an important part of cults.
(35:36):
And like, you must be this proper type of man or woman.
Yeah, I mean, I would take it beyond just like patriarchy in terms of the whole fascism,the whole construct of taking everything and putting it into boxes and objects and jobs,
know, the separating into animals don't really mean anything.
(35:57):
I mean, the plants don't mean anything.
The earth is, you know, it's just, it's just like taking things out of relationship witheach other so that you can monetize it and you can then also put it into stratifications
of power.
So then there will be somebody on top, but then there will be somebody on the bottom, andthen there are people in between who think they can somehow go up, which never happens.
(36:23):
Do we think, sometimes I just sit around and wonder if the ultimate human disease is justthat we have to stack rank ourselves and then we tend to always kill the ones at the
bottom.
I'd hope not.
mean, there have been cultures where that's been something people fought against.
(36:43):
I don't know if you've looked into the research around different power structures.
You probably have seen this causing mirror neurons to turn off.
So it causes basically something akin to brain disease.
If you have more power, you don't have to reflect.
You don't have to empathize.
You don't have to.
you just have to receive it.
then parts of your brain that would do the empathizing back and forth shut down.
(37:06):
And it's easy to shut them down, but it's really hard to turn them back on again.
And it's the same with risk.
Like you'd think if you survive something with risk, you wouldn't want to do more risk,but it turns out that that makes you want to do more risk.
So putting people in these structures is actually unkind, even though people crave it.
(37:26):
And I think we've had cultures
in the past where people recognize that.
I can't remember, it's in a group in Africa and I can't remember specifically where inAfrica and I apologize, but there was a paper written on a group of people that
specifically worked on knocking people down a peg whenever they felt like they were too,you might have heard about this, whenever they felt they were too high, because not
(37:51):
because they wanted to hurt them, but because they felt it was the kindest thing to do.
for their mental health to keep everybody on an even keel.
I think we've lost some of that.
We get marketed it away or something.
Yeah, I mean, it's even so interesting because, you know, when you study organizations andsystems, it's this whole concept of like human beings always naturally grouped themselves
(38:21):
in 150 to 250 people.
Because that and they think it's because that is the number of relationships we can keepin our head.
Mm-hmm.
people that we know your name and basically how to treat you.
And it's funny because the children of God's largest commune topped out at about 250.
And it was so interesting during social media, right?
(38:43):
There was people were asking like, is this gonna fundamentally change the way that humanbeings have relationships and you're gonna have like 5,000 friends?
And like it didn't, right?
Not until they came up with the follower system, but.
You know, I think that as we get into these larger and larger groups, it's like we can't,you you can't know everybody in the city you live with anymore.
(39:11):
So then how do you decide who you hang out with?
And like, who are the 250 people that you see as people?
because they're your people, they're your village, you know?
And then how much, this is almost something I think about groups too, that like onceyou're a member of a group, all you have to do is define member, and then you've also
(39:35):
defined non-member.
So you've kind of immediately created this us versus them.
Yeah, an out group for sure.
Yeah.
These are the kinds of things I sit and think about.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I was sort of thinking also in terms of we don't have spaces that we can easilycollaborate in anymore to collect as community.
(40:01):
think in Oakland, we used to have a lot of artists warehouse spaces.
And then when the Ghost Ship fire happened, do you know about the Ghost Ship fire?
Yeah, it was a big warehouse fire.
I mean, it was a disaster waiting to happen, but I was also watching fascist boards at thetime organize around it.
and they were excited and they were specifically targeting, trying to use Google Maps tofind artists' warehouse spaces so they could get them shut down because they felt that
(40:28):
they were gathering spaces for creative thinking and they didn't want that.
And that was really hard to watch.
I mean, I tried to warn some, I was just watching because I have so many friends and I wastrying to warn friends.
It wasn't, I don't.
the worst use of my time, but it wasn't a very nice use of my time, but to watch thosepeople and try to warn people.
(40:52):
Yeah, there is, wow, there's so much going on right now.
What advice do you have for people right now?
Advice in what specific way?
That's a very broad question.
I know.
all right, so people who have identities that are different from the norm are very afraidright now.
(41:19):
I think reasonably so.
Do you have thoughts?
you?
Sometimes I'm at a loss of what to tell people other than it's it's terrible.
What's happening right now?
it's been a historical thing to kind of crack down on somebody who deviates from the norm.
We know this from the Third Reich.
They attacked autistic kids first.
(41:39):
You probably are aware of that.
That was the first thing they tested with Hans Osberger and then kids with disabilitiesand things like that.
To know that I think
I think that's where self-diagnosis and the leaning on self-diagnosis becomes a problembecause I think that that that medicalizes it makes it a problem, whereas it's just is.
(42:06):
And I do think that we have power in being able to self-define.
And I don't think that we should give that away from for other people.
Like being gay was in the DSM and it was considered a disease and you would have to havesomebody diagnose it or being transgender was in the DSM and still kind of is.
But some of these things we know that they
aren't necessarily a disease.
(42:26):
Maybe they cause us problems because the world isn't built around us for this issue, butthat doesn't mean that it's a disease.
It's with difference and it doesn't mean that it's easy.
But to be able to have that ability to contain, continue to have our own locus of controlto define ourselves is extremely important and keep that and have community where we can
(42:49):
have that reflected with each other.
Cause we're
going to need to rely on each other more than these ranking power structures.
They're not going to hold us.
And I also think this idea of like the binary can be wrong is really important.
You know, so when you were saying like, it's not an injury or an illness.
(43:12):
So in the military, you can be made by a superior to do physical things, right?
Drop and give me 20.
So if you have any kind of physical condition where they wanna protect you from that, theygive you something called a profile, right?
So my husband right now is a broken arm.
So he would have a profile and there's two things you can have a medical profile forinjury or illness.
(43:38):
So when I got pregnant in the army, I found out that they classify pregnancy because theydon't want to classify it as an illness, they classify it as an injury.
And those are your only two choices.
And then they literally say you're like on this profile until the pregnancy is terminated.
(43:59):
we couldn't choose better words.
But the whole point here was like, you're being forced into a binary.
So you're calling it the best thing you can, and it's not correct, right?
The pregnancy wasn't an injury.
Like it was its own thing that should have, it should have its own category.
(44:20):
But when you're trying to force things into these like nice, neat, tidy binaries, it's notusually the correct classification.
and from what I understand it can feel, even though you need it, feel shaming.
Like it's almost a punishment.
absolutely.
And that is just a whole can of worms also about cults and medical care and how cults, youknow, an interesting thing in my life and then doing this work has been, I realized at
(44:48):
some point, like if they did it in the cult and they did it in the military, then I'mpretty sure it's either about programming and influence or power and control, you know?
I mean, we work with like a lot of child trafficking.
That's part of my background too.
And with groups that are grooming kids to be in groups of, to groom them a specific way.
(45:12):
One of the punishments, which is almost military style is to take one kid and then treatthem better.
And then that kid invariably feels horrific because they left all of their other kids inthe cold and they're not with them anymore.
Even though none of this should happen.
is so, I mean, so military stuff, for those who don't know, right, listening, militarystyle, sometimes when you mess up, they'll make you smoke the group.
(45:40):
And smoking is when you make the whole group do, you know, nonstop physical exercise tillthey're in tremendous amounts of pain and smoke is coming out of their ears.
And like, you don't have to do it.
You get to stand there and just feel super horrible as, yeah, exactly, you're watching.
perpetration, which is probably the worst form of torture on some of the people that Iwork with.
(46:04):
Yeah.
And it's another thing about cults, right?
In cults, everyone ultimately becomes a perpetrator on each other because you all have touphold the system and the system is harmful to all of you.
And I think this is, you know, if anything, maybe a good takeaway from tonight'sdiscussion, like black and white doesn't work.
(46:26):
Black and white, you know, aren't real colors, don't, black doesn't occur that often innature.
And like the real spectrum is so much more, like it's so much more complex and diverse.
This is one of the like signs I give people all the time is like nothing works foreveryone, nothing.
(46:49):
There's 8 billion people on earth, right?
People are allergic to water.
nothing, anyone claiming that something works for everyone.
is trying to cull you or is trying to con you or just doesn't understand the issue.
they're trying to package and market you and it makes it easier for them if you don't haveflexibility in thought.
(47:13):
Yeah, so much of this I think is just about being able to put us into categories so thatthey can message to us more easily.
I think that is exactly it.
That's actually every time I talk to psychologists or doctors that get into, like yousaid, like the history of medicine and treatment and how much it's changed.
(47:34):
Like that's something that really stands out is how much sort of control but like societalnarrative there is around what we accept.
it's changed, but it stayed the same.
Like my field is an MFT field and LCSWs.
We got created to get away from the DSM and ranking people and creating people in diseasebrackets, but in order to gain, you know, awards and write papers and be recognized, are
(48:02):
that, that's that cult hierarchy.
We had to step in line.
So then we ended up all popping in and like bowing down to the DSM.
That's not what we were built for.
but we got broken over time.
That's why they're trying to say TikTok is giving people this as you know, identitydisorder.
Because like I think, you know, part of what's going on now in a larger way with all ofour systems is people are just being like, no, I'm not going to play this game anymore,
(48:30):
right?
Like, I'm not going to play this cult game and finding their own ways to do things as youmentioned, right?
Creating a new way of treating people that doesn't have to work inside the parameters ofthat system.
And who the fuck cares if people think they have DID and they don't?
Like, I really, I mean, as I was saying, somebody was asking me, I was doing a lecture.
(48:53):
I have been trained as a community mental health person.
Like people are always going to, and I don't do that anymore because the hours just brokeme, but people are always going to come and have an idea that they have a diagnosis that
they may, that you might not agree that they have.
that's, and we have procedures and protocols of how to like do that kindly andconsiderably and respectfully with people.
Not everybody takes us on and does it, but that is taught.
(49:14):
And so like, if somebody thinks that they have DID and they don't have DID, it's not acrisis.
It's being painted as a crisis, but like, I don't really fucking care.
I do care if kids are getting sold and hurt and trafficked.
Like that's where the attention should be.
If somebody thinks that they have DID and they don't, then we can talk about it.
(49:35):
They're curious.
I'm totally happy to have them in my office.
I would rather the papers, the research and the attention be on how
to not have harm to humans.
Yeah.
This is such a good parallel.
I feel like this is part of how you and I started talking because I say this about cultsall the time.
I'm just like, I don't care what you call it.
(49:57):
You know, newsflash as a cult baby.
I hate your cult definition anyway.
I hate mine.
It's like not inclusive enough.
It's not complete.
There's always more to the story.
But like, you know, one of the things I've started saying to some of these big groups likeAA or, you know, Mormons or the military.
any of these groups that wanna fight with you so hard about the definition is like, okay,I don't care what you call it, right?
(50:26):
But your people are coming to me for my help with all the same trauma as the cultsurvivors.
And this was even something in the, like the intelligence community discovered in thefight in Afghanistan that like it didn't.
(50:46):
matter naming all the different groups of insurgents and this foreign fighters and who itwas and what the at some point it was like they're all insurgents we're focusing on the
tactics these people are using these tactics and this is what we're trying to avoid andthis has been kind of like how I now come at this and the naming and the labeling
(51:14):
I I felt like that.
Eventually I went and got a diagnosis because I'm online and because I wanna cover mybases and because it was easy-ish for me.
I knit for 12 hours a day and only talk about cults.
But I was like, does it matter if this is how I see myself?
(51:34):
It has helped me see the world is right side up.
It's helped me understand myself, find a community, feel more comfortable.
So like, it's...
I'm writing a cult musical and we're gonna do a cadence with the audience and it's gonnabe, it a cult?
And the response is gonna be, call it what you want, call it what you want too.
(51:57):
Because at the end of the day, it's the tactics and every...
cult expert has said in some way or another, like, it doesn't matter what the beliefs, itliterally doesn't matter.
It's the actions, like, what are you doing?
And how is that causing?
They all use the same tactics when you break it down, like from trafficking to like wewere going to talk about family cults, to, they just, they use the same things on
(52:27):
different scales, but it's really the same thing over.
It's kind of boring if it wasn't so horrific.
I, when I read Mike Rinder's Tell All, which by the way is the book we're doing in bookclub for this week, which you can find out more about on our Patreon.
So high level Scientology wrote this book and it was a tell all.
And when I read it, I was like, I am almost disappointed at how pedestrian they arebecause like they're, you know, I think the only difference when you're 10 out of 10 call,
(52:58):
like the only difference is time, money and impunity.
of how far you will get.
And this is also, I think this is one of the cool things that the new generation of cultscholars or children who grew up trafficked or in these communities getting into the
scholarship is like, I knew that AA was cult-like because children of AA sponsors havecult baby stories.
(53:28):
And so it's like,
I know the experience and part of why I even wrote Uncultured the way that I did wasbecause a psychologist had said to me, we study the extremes to understand everyone else.
And I was like, what I have is an unquestionable diagnosis of cult survivor, right?
(53:50):
Nobody's arguing with the children of God, was a cult.
But all these single family cults, like they're never gonna get that.
all you one-one cult relationships, narcissistic relationships, you're not gonna get that.
And so I can tell my stories and be like, if you relate, yes.
(54:13):
And I think this is also what makes just conversation and nuance an important part ofdoing this work, of doing mental health work.
Yeah, no, I get forever frustrated with my colleagues who can't really manage the nuanceand have to have it in this neat box or in this neat like diagnosis or in this neat
(54:34):
behavioral row and can't understand things blend and things overlap and things get messyand miss a lot of things.
Miss a lot of things.
Yeah.
And even just like, it's always evolving.
Like we're always sciencing, we're always finding out new things, we're always tweakingand making progress and understanding better than we did before.
(55:00):
And that's the way it's supposed to happen.
And that's why I think it's like so frustrating sometimes when these things are socontrolled, because it's like, well,
We only know what we know now because of the people that have gone before us, but then weshould be able to learn more and then point out the holes in their diagnosis.
(55:22):
a frustrating loop because people who study things, especially it's a thing in mentalhealth, like people in groups who study a mental health specific pocket, it's well known
that they'll start to mirror the population they serve.
So whoever that happens, like, so it might be, you know, it might be
(55:43):
this is true with cult exit stuff.
think like people that do that work, I have so much respect for them, but I can't do itbecause they still got to have one foot in the cults and it's, you know, still so kind of
intense.
And it happens with like the extreme complex trauma groups that they do mere cult dynamicsbecause they're often dealing with cults.
(56:07):
And so it ends up getting paranoid and exclusionary and ranking and weird, mean.
Yeah.
Wow.
Katie, such an intense and interesting conversation tonight.
Thank you so much for coming here to share your insights with everybody.
(56:33):
I would love to know and our listeners would love to know how they can get in touch withyou, how they should follow you, how we can support you.
You can reach me at, I have a website, katikeach.com, K-A-T-I-E-K-E-E-C-H.com.
That's pretty easy.
I'm also on TikTok at NeroQueer Therapist.
Although TikTok is probably going away, so, you know, who knows?
(56:57):
That's gonna go.
And then I'm on Blue Sky as KeachMFT, so.
Amazing, we'll put all those links in the show notes.
Don't have an ask me anything from Patreon today because I did not get my act togetherbecause someone dropped a pallet of 500 books on my doorstep today.
What?
(57:17):
I'm back in sale.
I recently sold Jeff Bezos out of books, you know, no big deal.
They're back now.
You can get autographed copies of Uncultured in the show notes.
Uncultured is also now free for Spotify premium.
subscribers so you can listen to it and I still get paid.
Thank you all so much.
(57:38):
Please like and subscribe.
If you're not on the Patreon yet, what are you doing?
That's where we do the book club and the Stitchin' Bitch and all the fun stuff.
and if you're wondering, I just started editing chapter nine of Culting of America.
So like almost done eating the first round of the elephant.
I know you all have been waiting.
(58:01):
Thanks for coming on with us today, Katie, and thank you all for listening to Cults andthe Culting of America.
Hello everybody and welcome to Cults and the Culting of America.
And if you're wondering who is this chick and where is Scott with his awesome radio voice,you will know that I'm sorry, Scott is unavailable today.
I am Daniella, scholar of Cults Extreme Groups and extremely bad leadership, also known asKnitting Cult Lady.
(00:48):
And today I'm really, really excited about our guests.
We have so much stuff to talk about.
It's going to be a very relevant conversation.
So I am going to let Katie introduce themselves.
So I'm Katie Keech.
I have been working with mental health in different ways for about 20 years.
I used to do program management for forensics and emerging adult programs.
(01:10):
I've been helping American Association of Marriage Family Therapists write theirtransgender guidelines and I've been focusing on neurocomplexity.
I used to help stuff with ISSTD.
That's a complicated thing because I came out with my plurality and they didn't like thatI was the first person to do that on the board.
since they were started in the eighties and I got.
(01:32):
So, but I did write some of the emerging adult guidelines, which is soon to be publishedin 2025, if they get their act together on that.
And I, I'm writing a book on working with autism and dissociative identity disordertogether.
That's Rettleidge has gotten me the contract for that.
And I'm also about to hand in my rough for.
(01:53):
chapter on working with plurality from a neurodiversity affirmative front with NickWalker, who was pioneering the neurodiversity affirmative movement among other people, not
the only person.
So that's probably enough.
Yeah, so immediately my audience is gonna have 15,000 questions for you and I hope we canget to some of them, but.
(02:15):
We feel like a lot of, so a lot of people who are cult survivors have been diagnosed withdifferent kinds of mental health disorders.
And dysentery identity disorder is a common one.
And I think it's commonly misdiagnosed, but I think it's also commonly diagnosed.
(02:40):
Could you just tell us a little bit about the experience of that and like,
also coming out with your plurality.
Yeah, I mean, think a lot of it is, is there's so many layers.
It is generally misdiagnosed.
I think there's a statistic that it takes people up to eight years to get a correctdiagnosis if they have DID.
And that's usually they usually get other things like bipolar and schizophrenia andborderline personality disorder and this like whole sandwich of things.
(03:05):
And me managing programs with young adults, I saw this and tried to like, saw people whohad clearly more dissociation or DID and tried to narrow it down and even
as a program manager, people, I would have to fight with the psychiatrist or differentpeople to like actually narrow down what was happening.
Cause they would even want to have them say they have intractable depression.
(03:27):
And now, you know, even though they're 19, we should send them to have ECT.
I'm like, no, no, no, absolutely not.
This is not necessary.
But the eight is an average.
So I've seen people who have been working.
to try to get a correct diagnosis for over 30 years.
And maybe some people have 10 years, but I think it's also important and you might agreewith this, that the DSM is kind of a authoritarian construct.
(03:55):
Like a lot of times, some of the stuff in the DSM has been put in there to controldifferent kinds of people who didn't fit constructs.
probably know that the original diagnosis of schizophrenia was put on women in the 1950s.
because they didn't want to be housewives and they weren't meant to be.
I mean, like you didn't get a choice.
(04:16):
You're just, and then you get Valium.
And then if you didn't like the Valium and the little pink box and you were losing yourmind, they'd be like, you have schizophrenia.
Let's, let's lock you up or put you in hospital.
And then later it was defined as a black man who were saying that we don't like racism andthe effects of racism on us.
(04:36):
And this isn't acceptable.
And so the white culture redefined the DSM to outline the structures of schizophrenia tosay that's a definition of psychosis.
therefore, you know, so it, the DSM is.
It just sounds exactly like when you don't fit in the cult, honestly.
(04:57):
I am neuro-spicy in a neuro-spicy family with a neuro-spicy child, and I constantly lookat my spouse and say, now just imagine trying to raise them in a cult.
Duh.
my experience and so so many of the kids who come out of cults, I feel like are theseneurodivergent ones.
(05:24):
And I don't know.
I think it's it's the nature nurture question, right?
Like I was always in trouble.
So then I didn't get the small acts of kindness that is the, you know, important part ofbrainwashing.
Or I was always in trouble because I didn't fit.
So then I I hated it.
(05:44):
You know, but in many ways, I did have a worse experience in the cult than someone whofits.
Because what I've discovered, whether it's a cult, whether it's a military, whether it'sany kind of total institution, right, a mental health institution, a prison, your number
one job is don't stand out.
(06:08):
Right?
we
say this in the army, we say, all you have to do to be successful is be in the right placeat the right time in the right uniform and don't volunteer for anything.
Right?
Don't stand out.
And I feel like so much this is the message.
my gosh, especially to white women in America, right?
It's just like, don't stand out.
Don't rock the boat.
(06:30):
a car going by.
Yeah, so, you know, I, of course, I'm writing a book called The Culting of America, whichit's almost everything I find.
Of course, my job is to compare everything to cults, but there's the comparison, right?
(06:50):
It's like you're using these disorders and systems to control people that don't fit, thataren't toeing the line that you want to be toeed.
Yeah, and I think that's an important point of what you're writing and something that mademe consider is it stuff like fascism and cults aren't really an on or off thing.
Like we like to say, well, it's not a call or it's not fascism until it crosses this line.
(07:14):
But then like then that's used as the denial so that people can then kind of make peoplemore and more entrapped in the line.
And then before you know it, you're all stuck when you can say, well, this is these arecult dynamics or these are fascist dynamics.
And I love it, and I've spent quite a bit of time talking about this lately that I loveour expression is line in the sand, right?
(07:38):
It's not line in concrete.
It's not a moat that we've dug.
It is a line in the sand.
And maybe the most defining thing about a line in the sand is it's really easy to erase,right?
It's not there the next day.
It's easy to be like,
Here's the slide, I will never cross.
(08:01):
But reality is really like.
And it's a lot of ways to get people to buy in, know, whether you're a little kid orwhether you're an adult, it's like the constant saying, you've seen this, the larger
people saying this, like, no, you're not seeing this, that's not happening, that's nothappening, that's not happening until like it absolutely is happening.
That's not an accident.
(08:22):
It even strikes me that like all of the, this is definitely a tangent, but like all of thejobs that people come to me saying are really culty, medicine.
We don't let you know what it's like in medical school to actually be in medicine.
We could, but we don't.
(08:44):
When you're doing initial training in the army, you don't know what it's actually like.
When you're in law school, you don't know what it's actually like.
And I've started to wonder like how much, because I know in cults, like basically for thefirst six months, for that identity breaking indoctrination process, they're actively
hiding from you what you've signed up for and what it's like.
(09:07):
And I just wonder like how much of that is in our culture.
I think that's true.
mean, I do know with medicine, they kind of do a lot of hazing and exhaustion and lack ofsleep and all of these things.
My father really was a doctor.
graduated from University of Maryland and he, I mean, I'm not like hiding that my family'smessed up.
(09:32):
He hurt too many people, so they made him be a pathologist instead.
But then he moved to California because then he could still be a doctor in California.
So, you know.
But there are ways they protect their own.
they could have entirely cut somebody like that out.
And I guess if you invest a certain amount of time and money or whatever, you getprotected.
(09:56):
You just get kind of siphoned or attempted to be siphoned.
I mean, psychology and mental health is not dissimilar.
especially if you're looking into areas of complex trauma work, it gets pretty culty.
And you know, I get asked about this a lot.
And of course, there are a lot of therapist led cults.
(10:19):
And I think so to me, there's two things.
One, I seem to find that anywhere in the space of personal transformation, predators aregonna show up.
absolutely.
I mean, I think there was a study in the 70s that showed a large amount of therapists hadMachiavellian tendencies.
(10:41):
And that's the other thing where I'm like, you know, I always tell my audience, like,beware of anyone that knows a lot about the bad guys.
And then it's so interesting, right, because I'm like, cult leaders are always studyingthe bad guys.
That's how they know how to do it.
Dictators studying dictators.
There's a reason Trump had Mein Kampf on his bedside table.
(11:03):
But then people's reaction is always to be like, so should we be afraid of you?
And I'm like,
Yes, yeah, right?
If I wanted to manipulate you, if I wanted to build a cult, odds are I would know how todo it better than other people.
So maybe don't come to my compound when I invite you, right?
(11:25):
But like this, I think the more and more I really look at cults and like really, you know,I spend hours, you know, thousands of hours doing this and trying to like really pinpoint
things.
And one of my things is just like a tool is a weapon, right?
Surgeons are, you want surgeon that's really good at cutting you up, but also surgeons arereally good at cutting people up, right?
(11:54):
So like psychologists, of course, are people that know how, they know how the human psycheworks.
Yeah.
if and when they want to, it's relatively easy to manipulate people.
lot of them go into it to feel in control, not necessarily to help people.
(12:16):
The idea is to help people, but I mean the vast majority of people honestly, and I'mhoping this changes, I don't know, but really do it to feel superior.
I mean, as I I joke that it's amazing that I became eventually a therapist having had somany bad experiences with therapists, like not even just from like as an adult, but I mean
(12:38):
I grew up with a very weird
therapist who was pretty well known who wasn't really good with ethics and boundaries andyet I still somehow decided to persist.
I don't know why, but it did make me think every time somebody screwed up really badlywith me that I would never, it was an example of something I would never do with somebody
else.
(12:58):
So.
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of where I formed my whole career was like, we can learn, you I've hadmore bad leaders than good ones.
And I've learned about the kind of leader I wanted to be as much from learning who Ididn't want to be as from learning who I did, you know.
(13:20):
But also just this thing you were saying about the like the group protecting its own, youknow, and
yeah.
This is one of those things that I wonder like, is this a fundamental problem withcapitalism?
Or is this a fundamental problem with humans?
That we always expect the individual to take the hit for the group to maintain its goodname.
(13:45):
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think it's like more power and ego in some ways, because as someone who's alsoAudi HD, I tend to have a justice oriented thing.
I, when something's wrong, say it, which tends to get me into shit more often than not,unfortunately.
Um, but like when I was on the board of ISSTD, which is the international society oftrauma and association, um, I was the only board member who spoke up against this.
(14:13):
training that they did that has now blown up among the DID community in a huge manner andit's going on and on and on that said that this training saying that going against
self-diagnosis and then picking people who have TikToks who are having just on TikTokexpressing their own lives and just trying to picking having professionals pick them apart
(14:39):
and say this isn't what DID look like is wrong and cruel.
And I got slammed.
I got, cause I was going up against people who had, and I was right.
Like I told them, you know, you do this, it's, it's going to be bad.
And, and I got yelled at and, eventually got, you know, among other things kicked out, butthey redid it with the Robinson McLean.
(15:04):
I don't know if you followed this fiasco at all.
It's kind of a big deal in the DID world.
Then Robinson.
did the same thing, the same exact presentation and he did it on YouTube and he pickedapart.
I the initial one, which was so horrible, picked a person who had committed suicide in anNHS hospital because of her condition, but they were saying this isn't what it looks like.
(15:33):
And I said, that's wrong.
And when I got back, the person who put it together screamed at me, said,
Well, maybe TikTok killed her.
I was like, that's bone chilling.
But then when Robinson did it again, it devastated the community because it was sayingthat all these people they looked up to as people who were public to make them feel less
(16:01):
shame about who they were and how they are and about their lives, which is a big dealabout the condition and feel less lonely.
feel like maybe all of these people were wrong and then all of these people got targetedby people who don't like the diagnosis and don't believe it anyway and bullied and
threatened.
(16:22):
And I actually had to go a little bit messily and risk my face by saying, you know, peopleare getting suicidal on this.
This thing is causing my clients to be suicidal.
This thing is causing these TikTok
people who didn't ask for this to get targeted and death threats, we need to take it downright away.
(16:44):
And people were aghast that I said that in a big form of many of it, big, big, you know,the big names of trauma.
It did get taken down and now it's gotten remade into a paper again.
And it's devastating again, because well, the whole thing that they keep putting forwardis that we don't have a right to
(17:07):
Self-diagnose which I think is culty because if you know who you are Why do you need torely on somebody who's the expert to tell you what's going on with you?
That's like
So it's so interesting, know, I always, I always, or we joke that I got crowdsourceddiagnosed because it was like readers of my book that suggested to me that maybe there's
(17:31):
another reason I always felt different, right?
and, but as soon as I actually considered it, right, as soon as I let my brain form thequestion, like, could I be autistic?
I immediately knew, cause I know what the inside of my brain looks like.
And it looks like that Chris Pine meme with a million things posted up on a poster boardand all this red string connecting everything together.
(17:59):
And I had a whole career where colonels and generals just loved to show off my littlecomputer brain, right?
So it was like, but it was so interesting because I went through this whole process oftherapists being like, but we don't know if it's autism or if it's trauma.
(18:19):
And it wasn't until it took me about a year until I realized like, sometimes my clotheshurt me.
And they were like, okay, that's ASD, right?
But I knew, I knew because I was like, I know the inside of my brain and I know that theworld has felt right side up for me for the first time when I, so I read the book, Third
(18:43):
Culture Kids and the world got like halfway right side up.
And then when I realized I was neurodivergent, it was like, for the first time, this makessense.
Yeah, no, there has been so much pressure when I started to look at neurodivergency in thetrauma field, there was so much pressure like, no, no, no, all this is trauma.
Why are you looking at this?
You're misclassifying.
So when I did a deep dive, actually made a, I made a chart that showed how you can tellthe difference between and then the overlaps, because obviously there's so much like
(19:13):
Catherine Rubin and I partnered together doing a research about paper that she did.
Obviously, there's so much
trauma that happens with neurodivergency so there is overlaps but there are ways to tellthat there are differences and they're not exactly the same thing.
So it's even so interesting in my case, right?
(19:33):
Because most children that have horrifically traumatic backgrounds don't have 7,000 otherchildren that also had that kind of almost very similar background.
So like, I know that I experienced a bunch of trauma and all of this and blah, blah, butalso I know hundreds, if not thousands of children of God survivors.
(19:55):
And like, it's the Mestenex that are pretty sure they're autistic, you know?
So it's like, I get the trauma and I of course have that and I of course have all thesedifferent things.
But I mean, I've also had therapists tell me that there are certain parts of my book wherethe trauma is so intense that it's amazing that I didn't develop multiple personalities
(20:20):
and that...
the neurodivergence probably helped me, like the ability to just kind of go away in mymind and disassociate, you know, just a bunch of these different things.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, a lot of us who are, created a group of clinicians and researchers and nurses anddoctors who have a background of plurality of either they fused or they've not fused.
(20:44):
And a lot of us are coming to the structural theory of dissociation doesn't work for us.
And even like people who are big in the field who aren't part of us are also coming tothat.
It really doesn't, it works for trauma, but it doesn't work for plurality.
And what a lot of us are coming to is that there may be its own neurodivergencies cluster.
(21:05):
like you get autism and ADHD, and then you might even get like some of the biology stuff,like HEADS and MCAS and things, and dyscalculia and all these different things kind of
cluster.
And it seems like the ability to manage trauma, and even the researchers have said this intheir papers, like I've done some,
(21:27):
lectures on this recently because I just did a deep dive that there is some it's its ownneurodivergence that you can be born with it and then it carries trauma impacts
differently so it splits differently and some people can do that and some people can't dothat it's not better or worse it's just different but what it's always been called in the
papers of like Dr.
(21:47):
Lowenstein has said this Dr.
Brand has said this like every big person in the field
I said that you can't have DID without somebody who's born without high hypnotizability.
And I was like, huh, what the fuck is high hypnotizability?
Because from my understanding, every single one of us is absolutely able to be hypnotized.
(22:08):
It sounds a little bit like a BS.
They never explained it.
And I was trying to figure it out.
One of the things I found was really interesting with high hypnotizability when I waslooking at the biology was that there are certain areas of the brain
that are wired to do monotropism.
And that was found in high hypnotizability.
And I was like, well, maybe there's like a little overlap, the overlap between likeautism.
(22:32):
I don't know if you know what monotropism, yeah.
Monotropism is the ability to hyper-focus on something for a very long time, like specialinterests and things like that.
And so if you can do that somehow that allows you to have
hypnotizability, but that seems to also allow you to start to split cells.
(22:55):
I think there is there's so many autistic people who are TIT, so I think there's somethingabout the lack of pruning that must be in there.
There's not really research in this, so we haven't looked at this besides a couple ofresearchers I've collected in my group and we're starting to parse things out, but it's
just a blank area where we have a lot of questions, but it does seem to be like an Occam'srazor thing where like
(23:20):
Some people have really severe trauma and they don't do this and some people have kind ofI don't like to trauma rank like I think that's kind of stupid but but some people have
what a lot of traumas that a lot of us experience it and do have cells and Like dr.
Ved at SAR said that sometimes people will have very small systems of four or five peopleand there will be no rate or physical trauma or
(23:48):
You know, it will just be some neglect and some dissociation within the family and I thinkthat got lost into just like everybody must have Capital T trauma from birth onward and I
think that's wrong
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even like what you're talking about with high hypnotist ability, you know, like I, I getasked all the time about if neurodivergent people and autistic people are easier to be
(24:14):
pulled into cults or is like there's more of us.
And, you know, my sort of anecdotal answer to this is like, it seems like
on the one hand, we are very drawn to high structure groups, because they give us rules,they give us, know, uniforms sometimes, explanations of ways to do things, systems of
(24:40):
justice, supposedly.
But then I also think we like spot the holes and the lies and the patterns faster.
But the hypnotize ability is interesting.
Because I also see this with cult hopping, you know, like I don't
one person that came up in a high control group that hasn't been in another one.
(25:00):
Like, I kind of think that part of what we do is we go hopping to like, lesser and lesserharmful high control groups until we finally deconstruct.
But it's almost like, I don't know, sometimes they refer to like, once your brain has beenin extremism, it's like you're a cancer survivor, and it can happen again more easily.
(25:25):
Yeah
you know, we all these people came out of children of God, which by the way was an Americahating cult, right?
We called America Babylon the whore.
And now they're all MAGA, make America great again.
Right?
And it's like, they just went back into another form of extremism.
Or like I sometimes like with everything going on right now, I feel like I'm doing thesecular version of like, begging God not to choose me to lead the revolution.
(25:54):
Because I'm like, I don't, you know, like I could too easily throw myself back into this.
You know, I look at people like Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself, right, in indefense of Palestine, who like grew up in a bit of a cult and then was in the military.
(26:14):
And I was like, in in not judging in any way, I was just like, yeah, that makes sense tome.
You know, that like once you've been sort of prepared to die for an extreme idea, likeit's easier to fall into those patterns again.
Yeah, it's familiar and so you know what to do.
I think you've spoken to that in different ways.
(26:36):
You know, if your brain is structured so it's an easy expectation, even if it's not acomfortable expectation, you're gonna do it.
Could you explain plurality for the listeners and then if anything you could share aboutyour experience of coming out with that and why and how that impacted you?
(27:00):
And I call it plurality because Stronghold who started the plural association they createdthe term they created it because they got diagnosed with DID in the Netherlands and the
person said Congratulations, you have DID now you are on a six-year wait list to have atherapist and they're like Fuck I need a therapist now.
(27:21):
What do I do?
Also, you can't work you you have this diagnosis.
You're not allowed to work and they're like
So what they did was they created this very big support network and they used the termplural because they didn't want to gatekeep and they didn't want to use medical labels.
They didn't want to use DSM labels.
So they didn't want to say, you are, you don't have DID or you have to prove it.
(27:42):
was just whoever you are, if you feel like you are more than one in a body, you areplural.
We will accept you and we'll just make a community.
And it's been a huge deal.
It also helps because some of us like me, we get diagnosed with the ID and then we workthrough stuff and it doesn't cause us distress anymore.
(28:08):
But we don't want to fuse into one singular self, which some of us are kind of likening.
Some of it works for some people.
Like some people want to fuse into a single self that's kind of been considered the goal.
a lot of us are, that is often a drive from the establishment that we didn't pick.
and they pick for us.
And it feels a little bit like ABA, like Applied Behavioral Analysis Therapy for autisticpeople where you are autistic, but you have to pretend you're not autistic and that causes
(28:35):
more problems.
So a lot of people who are have more than oneself in the body, they want to please thetherapist and then the selves or the they just mask everything and it doesn't actually
blend into oneself.
It's just performative because the therapist wants that.
So we're trying to be good.
clients are trying to do the good client role.
(28:56):
And it's actually really damaging to the whole system of selves.
And selves get hurt or selves hide or selves get angry.
It creates a disharmony within the selves.
There's sort of this concept, I think, by people that selves have to be in a humansingular, because that's how we know them to be because we've been taught that.
(29:19):
historically,
even in European cultures and different indigenous cultures from Africa to India todifferent native First Nations people in America.
That's not how cultures have viewed identity.
They have often viewed identity from group to group as potentially plural in a human.
(29:39):
It's not unusual.
It's more current and Western model to think that you have to be a singular consciousness.
And there's really no scientific
measure why that should be our brains are so complex even different animals i don't knowif you know that octopi have nine brains and they don't always work together.
(30:03):
I think it's wonderful and lovely they have different brains and some of them think onething about something another thing and they have to kind of.
Combine and there's been cases where even.
People have had heart and lung transplants from somebody else and they will take thosememories and likes and dislikes from that person.
one woman got a transplant from a young 19 year old who died in a motorcycle accident.
(30:27):
She was very straight and sis and suddenly she had a taste for beer and was very attractedto curvy blonde woman.
And she didn't know why until she met the family and found out that was some of histastes.
There are different ways consciousness can be shared and I think it's a little scary forpeople to think that maybe our consciousness isn't as concrete as we would hope it to be.
(30:53):
It's messier.
I don't really have, you know, spiritual explanations for that.
It's just...
I mean, this comes back to something I find in cult stuff and brainwashing stuff all thetime is that we really believe we are rational as human beings.
Like we believe we're rational, but the reality is we're not.
(31:13):
We make most of our decisions based on recency bias and social proof, what everyone elseis doing.
And one of the statistics that like changed my life and stood out to me so hard ingraduate school was they said, you know,
on our best days as adults, we understand probably 30 % of our emotions.
(31:37):
And I was like a new mom at the time.
I was like, imagine we expect children to like understand what's going on, you know, withtheir emotions and like,
theories.
We don't even really, we're just putting names on things and we don't actually know.
And I think part of this goes back to why it's so easy to manipulate people because, youknow, nobody wants to think like they're gonna fall for this or like they're this type of
(32:06):
person.
We are rational, right?
I think therefore I am.
like, no, we're actually very much like pack animals and just so influenced by everything.
And we don't really understand how we operate entirely.
We have these theories.
We like to feel like they're very concrete.
We like to like quote them to other people and feel very serious behind them.
(32:27):
But if you scratch them a little bit, they don't really hold a lot of water.
I mean, one of the things I think is the most bizarre thing with DID theorists, who theyoften say people who have DID will have children who have DID, but they will also say that
those people have never had abuse.
Like those kids don't, but they'll say like, but.
(32:47):
Can you call them DID if they haven't had any abuse and they're doing fine, but they stillhave like, so what do you make of that?
How have you studied that?
What kind of sense do you have of that?
It's been repeated in the literature over and over again, which it's kind of like thisdrive by.
Consciousness is messy.
It's really messier than we like to think that it is and that's okay.
(33:11):
But I think that's the fascism is.
We like to package things and we like to package things as male and we like to packagethings as female and we like to package things as we have one brain and one consciousness
and that's how it works.
And it's just an easier way to market things too and it's easier way to like put us intojob roles and it's an easier way to control us.
(33:32):
And it's not true.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is fascinating because cult leaders.
So first of all, like, I just think like, I really suspect that coercive control ispatriarchal.
And that patriarchy is kind of the OG cult.
(33:54):
But like, so, so often, these male cult leaders
will eventually, no matter how they start, right, Keith Renieri, self-help group,executive success, surrounded by smart advanced women, ultimately giving classes on proper
gender roles.
You know, and when I saw this Facebook story that like a lawyer quit Facebook overZuckerberg's like toxic misogyny and toxic masculinity and like talking about proper men,
(34:25):
and I was literally, I was like, my gosh, it's just,
It's just like Keith Raniere.
And I think part of this is like it's the black and white.
And I see we're thinking it and the freaking out about the trans, right?
Like it just makes people so uncomfortable.
You are supposed to be one or the other.
(34:48):
And by the way, that has a hierarchy.
And I've heard people be like, you don't.
you wouldn't be bothered by not knowing what gender someone is unless you knew you weresupposed to treat them differently based on their gender.
And I've even heard this from people who are mixed race or like sort of white passing whowill then say that when white people find out that they're mixed, they'll be almost like
(35:15):
offended, right?
That they like treated them too well.
And it's like really sort of revealing.
But I...
There's, as we know, right, if you try to define a woman, it's immediately aboutcontrolling her.
And that is the general stuff is such an important part of cults.
(35:36):
And like, you must be this proper type of man or woman.
Yeah, I mean, I would take it beyond just like patriarchy in terms of the whole fascism,the whole construct of taking everything and putting it into boxes and objects and jobs,
know, the separating into animals don't really mean anything.
(35:57):
I mean, the plants don't mean anything.
The earth is, you know, it's just, it's just like taking things out of relationship witheach other so that you can monetize it and you can then also put it into stratifications
of power.
So then there will be somebody on top, but then there will be somebody on the bottom, andthen there are people in between who think they can somehow go up, which never happens.
(36:23):
Do we think, sometimes I just sit around and wonder if the ultimate human disease is justthat we have to stack rank ourselves and then we tend to always kill the ones at the
bottom.
I'd hope not.
mean, there have been cultures where that's been something people fought against.
(36:43):
I don't know if you've looked into the research around different power structures.
You probably have seen this causing mirror neurons to turn off.
So it causes basically something akin to brain disease.
If you have more power, you don't have to reflect.
You don't have to empathize.
You don't have to.
you just have to receive it.
then parts of your brain that would do the empathizing back and forth shut down.
(37:06):
And it's easy to shut them down, but it's really hard to turn them back on again.
And it's the same with risk.
Like you'd think if you survive something with risk, you wouldn't want to do more risk,but it turns out that that makes you want to do more risk.
So putting people in these structures is actually unkind, even though people crave it.
(37:26):
And I think we've had cultures
in the past where people recognize that.
I can't remember, it's in a group in Africa and I can't remember specifically where inAfrica and I apologize, but there was a paper written on a group of people that
specifically worked on knocking people down a peg whenever they felt like they were too,you might have heard about this, whenever they felt they were too high, because not
(37:51):
because they wanted to hurt them, but because they felt it was the kindest thing to do.
for their mental health to keep everybody on an even keel.
I think we've lost some of that.
We get marketed it away or something.
Yeah, I mean, it's even so interesting because, you know, when you study organizations andsystems, it's this whole concept of like human beings always naturally grouped themselves
(38:21):
in 150 to 250 people.
Because that and they think it's because that is the number of relationships we can keepin our head.
Mm-hmm.
people that we know your name and basically how to treat you.
And it's funny because the children of God's largest commune topped out at about 250.
And it was so interesting during social media, right?
(38:43):
There was people were asking like, is this gonna fundamentally change the way that humanbeings have relationships and you're gonna have like 5,000 friends?
And like it didn't, right?
Not until they came up with the follower system, but.
You know, I think that as we get into these larger and larger groups, it's like we can't,you you can't know everybody in the city you live with anymore.
(39:11):
So then how do you decide who you hang out with?
And like, who are the 250 people that you see as people?
because they're your people, they're your village, you know?
And then how much, this is almost something I think about groups too, that like onceyou're a member of a group, all you have to do is define member, and then you've also
(39:35):
defined non-member.
So you've kind of immediately created this us versus them.
Yeah, an out group for sure.
Yeah.
These are the kinds of things I sit and think about.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I was sort of thinking also in terms of we don't have spaces that we can easilycollaborate in anymore to collect as community.
(40:01):
think in Oakland, we used to have a lot of artists warehouse spaces.
And then when the Ghost Ship fire happened, do you know about the Ghost Ship fire?
Yeah, it was a big warehouse fire.
I mean, it was a disaster waiting to happen, but I was also watching fascist boards at thetime organize around it.
and they were excited and they were specifically targeting, trying to use Google Maps tofind artists' warehouse spaces so they could get them shut down because they felt that
(40:28):
they were gathering spaces for creative thinking and they didn't want that.
And that was really hard to watch.
I mean, I tried to warn some, I was just watching because I have so many friends and I wastrying to warn friends.
It wasn't, I don't.
the worst use of my time, but it wasn't a very nice use of my time, but to watch thosepeople and try to warn people.
(40:52):
Yeah, there is, wow, there's so much going on right now.
What advice do you have for people right now?
Advice in what specific way?
That's a very broad question.
I know.
all right, so people who have identities that are different from the norm are very afraidright now.
(41:19):
I think reasonably so.
Do you have thoughts?
you?
Sometimes I'm at a loss of what to tell people other than it's it's terrible.
What's happening right now?
it's been a historical thing to kind of crack down on somebody who deviates from the norm.
We know this from the Third Reich.
They attacked autistic kids first.
(41:39):
You probably are aware of that.
That was the first thing they tested with Hans Osberger and then kids with disabilitiesand things like that.
To know that I think
I think that's where self-diagnosis and the leaning on self-diagnosis becomes a problembecause I think that that that medicalizes it makes it a problem, whereas it's just is.
(42:06):
And I do think that we have power in being able to self-define.
And I don't think that we should give that away from for other people.
Like being gay was in the DSM and it was considered a disease and you would have to havesomebody diagnose it or being transgender was in the DSM and still kind of is.
But some of these things we know that they
aren't necessarily a disease.
(42:26):
Maybe they cause us problems because the world isn't built around us for this issue, butthat doesn't mean that it's a disease.
It's with difference and it doesn't mean that it's easy.
But to be able to have that ability to contain, continue to have our own locus of controlto define ourselves is extremely important and keep that and have community where we can
(42:49):
have that reflected with each other.
Cause we're
going to need to rely on each other more than these ranking power structures.
They're not going to hold us.
And I also think this idea of like the binary can be wrong is really important.
You know, so when you were saying like, it's not an injury or an illness.
(43:12):
So in the military, you can be made by a superior to do physical things, right?
Drop and give me 20.
So if you have any kind of physical condition where they wanna protect you from that, theygive you something called a profile, right?
So my husband right now is a broken arm.
So he would have a profile and there's two things you can have a medical profile forinjury or illness.
(43:38):
So when I got pregnant in the army, I found out that they classify pregnancy because theydon't want to classify it as an illness, they classify it as an injury.
And those are your only two choices.
And then they literally say you're like on this profile until the pregnancy is terminated.
(43:59):
we couldn't choose better words.
But the whole point here was like, you're being forced into a binary.
So you're calling it the best thing you can, and it's not correct, right?
The pregnancy wasn't an injury.
Like it was its own thing that should have, it should have its own category.
(44:20):
But when you're trying to force things into these like nice, neat, tidy binaries, it's notusually the correct classification.
and from what I understand it can feel, even though you need it, feel shaming.
Like it's almost a punishment.
absolutely.
And that is just a whole can of worms also about cults and medical care and how cults, youknow, an interesting thing in my life and then doing this work has been, I realized at
(44:48):
some point, like if they did it in the cult and they did it in the military, then I'mpretty sure it's either about programming and influence or power and control, you know?
I mean, we work with like a lot of child trafficking.
That's part of my background too.
And with groups that are grooming kids to be in groups of, to groom them a specific way.
(45:12):
One of the punishments, which is almost military style is to take one kid and then treatthem better.
And then that kid invariably feels horrific because they left all of their other kids inthe cold and they're not with them anymore.
Even though none of this should happen.
is so, I mean, so military stuff, for those who don't know, right, listening, militarystyle, sometimes when you mess up, they'll make you smoke the group.
(45:40):
And smoking is when you make the whole group do, you know, nonstop physical exercise tillthey're in tremendous amounts of pain and smoke is coming out of their ears.
And like, you don't have to do it.
You get to stand there and just feel super horrible as, yeah, exactly, you're watching.
perpetration, which is probably the worst form of torture on some of the people that Iwork with.
(46:04):
Yeah.
And it's another thing about cults, right?
In cults, everyone ultimately becomes a perpetrator on each other because you all have touphold the system and the system is harmful to all of you.
And I think this is, you know, if anything, maybe a good takeaway from tonight'sdiscussion, like black and white doesn't work.
(46:26):
Black and white, you know, aren't real colors, don't, black doesn't occur that often innature.
And like the real spectrum is so much more, like it's so much more complex and diverse.
This is one of the like signs I give people all the time is like nothing works foreveryone, nothing.
(46:49):
There's 8 billion people on earth, right?
People are allergic to water.
nothing, anyone claiming that something works for everyone.
is trying to cull you or is trying to con you or just doesn't understand the issue.
they're trying to package and market you and it makes it easier for them if you don't haveflexibility in thought.
(47:13):
Yeah, so much of this I think is just about being able to put us into categories so thatthey can message to us more easily.
I think that is exactly it.
That's actually every time I talk to psychologists or doctors that get into, like yousaid, like the history of medicine and treatment and how much it's changed.
(47:34):
Like that's something that really stands out is how much sort of control but like societalnarrative there is around what we accept.
it's changed, but it stayed the same.
Like my field is an MFT field and LCSWs.
We got created to get away from the DSM and ranking people and creating people in diseasebrackets, but in order to gain, you know, awards and write papers and be recognized, are
(48:02):
that, that's that cult hierarchy.
We had to step in line.
So then we ended up all popping in and like bowing down to the DSM.
That's not what we were built for.
but we got broken over time.
That's why they're trying to say TikTok is giving people this as you know, identitydisorder.
Because like I think, you know, part of what's going on now in a larger way with all ofour systems is people are just being like, no, I'm not going to play this game anymore,
(48:30):
right?
Like, I'm not going to play this cult game and finding their own ways to do things as youmentioned, right?
Creating a new way of treating people that doesn't have to work inside the parameters ofthat system.
And who the fuck cares if people think they have DID and they don't?
Like, I really, I mean, as I was saying, somebody was asking me, I was doing a lecture.
(48:53):
I have been trained as a community mental health person.
Like people are always going to, and I don't do that anymore because the hours just brokeme, but people are always going to come and have an idea that they have a diagnosis that
they may, that you might not agree that they have.
that's, and we have procedures and protocols of how to like do that kindly andconsiderably and respectfully with people.
Not everybody takes us on and does it, but that is taught.
(49:14):
And so like, if somebody thinks that they have DID and they don't have DID, it's not acrisis.
It's being painted as a crisis, but like, I don't really fucking care.
I do care if kids are getting sold and hurt and trafficked.
Like that's where the attention should be.
If somebody thinks that they have DID and they don't, then we can talk about it.
(49:35):
They're curious.
I'm totally happy to have them in my office.
I would rather the papers, the research and the attention be on how
to not have harm to humans.
Yeah.
This is such a good parallel.
I feel like this is part of how you and I started talking because I say this about cultsall the time.
I'm just like, I don't care what you call it.
(49:57):
You know, newsflash as a cult baby.
I hate your cult definition anyway.
I hate mine.
It's like not inclusive enough.
It's not complete.
There's always more to the story.
But like, you know, one of the things I've started saying to some of these big groups likeAA or, you know, Mormons or the military.
any of these groups that wanna fight with you so hard about the definition is like, okay,I don't care what you call it, right?
(50:26):
But your people are coming to me for my help with all the same trauma as the cultsurvivors.
And this was even something in the, like the intelligence community discovered in thefight in Afghanistan that like it didn't.
(50:46):
matter naming all the different groups of insurgents and this foreign fighters and who itwas and what the at some point it was like they're all insurgents we're focusing on the
tactics these people are using these tactics and this is what we're trying to avoid andthis has been kind of like how I now come at this and the naming and the labeling
(51:14):
I I felt like that.
Eventually I went and got a diagnosis because I'm online and because I wanna cover mybases and because it was easy-ish for me.
I knit for 12 hours a day and only talk about cults.
But I was like, does it matter if this is how I see myself?
(51:34):
It has helped me see the world is right side up.
It's helped me understand myself, find a community, feel more comfortable.
So like, it's...
I'm writing a cult musical and we're gonna do a cadence with the audience and it's gonnabe, it a cult?
And the response is gonna be, call it what you want, call it what you want too.
(51:57):
Because at the end of the day, it's the tactics and every...
cult expert has said in some way or another, like, it doesn't matter what the beliefs, itliterally doesn't matter.
It's the actions, like, what are you doing?
And how is that causing?
They all use the same tactics when you break it down, like from trafficking to like wewere going to talk about family cults, to, they just, they use the same things on
(52:27):
different scales, but it's really the same thing over.
It's kind of boring if it wasn't so horrific.
I, when I read Mike Rinder's Tell All, which by the way is the book we're doing in bookclub for this week, which you can find out more about on our Patreon.
So high level Scientology wrote this book and it was a tell all.
And when I read it, I was like, I am almost disappointed at how pedestrian they arebecause like they're, you know, I think the only difference when you're 10 out of 10 call,
(52:58):
like the only difference is time, money and impunity.
of how far you will get.
And this is also, I think this is one of the cool things that the new generation of cultscholars or children who grew up trafficked or in these communities getting into the
scholarship is like, I knew that AA was cult-like because children of AA sponsors havecult baby stories.
(53:28):
And so it's like,
I know the experience and part of why I even wrote Uncultured the way that I did wasbecause a psychologist had said to me, we study the extremes to understand everyone else.
And I was like, what I have is an unquestionable diagnosis of cult survivor, right?
(53:50):
Nobody's arguing with the children of God, was a cult.
But all these single family cults, like they're never gonna get that.
all you one-one cult relationships, narcissistic relationships, you're not gonna get that.
And so I can tell my stories and be like, if you relate, yes.
(54:13):
And I think this is also what makes just conversation and nuance an important part ofdoing this work, of doing mental health work.
Yeah, no, I get forever frustrated with my colleagues who can't really manage the nuanceand have to have it in this neat box or in this neat like diagnosis or in this neat
(54:34):
behavioral row and can't understand things blend and things overlap and things get messyand miss a lot of things.
Miss a lot of things.
Yeah.
And even just like, it's always evolving.
Like we're always sciencing, we're always finding out new things, we're always tweakingand making progress and understanding better than we did before.
(55:00):
And that's the way it's supposed to happen.
And that's why I think it's like so frustrating sometimes when these things are socontrolled, because it's like, well,
We only know what we know now because of the people that have gone before us, but then weshould be able to learn more and then point out the holes in their diagnosis.
(55:22):
a frustrating loop because people who study things, especially it's a thing in mentalhealth, like people in groups who study a mental health specific pocket, it's well known
that they'll start to mirror the population they serve.
So whoever that happens, like, so it might be, you know, it might be
(55:43):
this is true with cult exit stuff.
think like people that do that work, I have so much respect for them, but I can't do itbecause they still got to have one foot in the cults and it's, you know, still so kind of
intense.
And it happens with like the extreme complex trauma groups that they do mere cult dynamicsbecause they're often dealing with cults.
(56:07):
And so it ends up getting paranoid and exclusionary and ranking and weird, mean.
Yeah.
Wow.
Katie, such an intense and interesting conversation tonight.
Thank you so much for coming here to share your insights with everybody.
(56:33):
I would love to know and our listeners would love to know how they can get in touch withyou, how they should follow you, how we can support you.
You can reach me at, I have a website, katikeach.com, K-A-T-I-E-K-E-E-C-H.com.
That's pretty easy.
I'm also on TikTok at NeroQueer Therapist.
Although TikTok is probably going away, so, you know, who knows?
(56:57):
That's gonna go.
And then I'm on Blue Sky as KeachMFT, so.
Amazing, we'll put all those links in the show notes.
Don't have an ask me anything from Patreon today because I did not get my act togetherbecause someone dropped a pallet of 500 books on my doorstep today.
What?
(57:17):
I'm back in sale.
I recently sold Jeff Bezos out of books, you know, no big deal.
They're back now.
You can get autographed copies of Uncultured in the show notes.
Uncultured is also now free for Spotify premium.
subscribers so you can listen to it and I still get paid.
Thank you all so much.
(57:38):
Please like and subscribe.
If you're not on the Patreon yet, what are you doing?
That's where we do the book club and the Stitchin' Bitch and all the fun stuff.
and if you're wondering, I just started editing chapter nine of Culting of America.
So like almost done eating the first round of the elephant.
I know you all have been waiting.
(58:01):
Thanks for coming on with us today, Katie, and thank you all for listening to Cults andthe Culting of America.
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