Amanda Householder sues Circle of Hope, Agape Boys Ranch, Berean & Agape Baptist Churches, as a Birthday Gift to Herself

Welcome back to Troubled, a podcast by/for Survivors of Institutional Youth Abuse. 

THANK YOU for being here for the third season of our Independent self archival project. Two seasons bootlegged together over a cell phone, recorded in an old Prius wasn't too much for you? Well, masochism may pay off here as we embark on our most personal missions yet and play the cards we've held closest throughout the collective crucible of advocacy in a time of Covid.

Super quick 31st birthday catch-up with Amanda Householder, who just filed a lawsuit against her parents, Boyd and Stephanie Householder, owners of Circle of Hope Girls Ranch AND their complicit and culpable cohorts - Agape Boarding School for Boys, Agape Baptist Church and Berean Baptist Church. We won't be getting into the nitty gritty of the details today, out of respect for Amanda, but we HIGHLY recommend you read the Kansas City Star Article "I was born into this." Daughter of Missouri reform school sues parents over abuse" by Judy Thomas and Laura Bauer, two rare gems of journalistic integrity. It is incredibly difficult to find ethical media allies of this caliber and we would just like to thank these women for how they have treated Survivors of Institutional Abuse throughout the last year of consistent coverage in Missouri. We wish they weren't an exception, but we are infinitely grateful they're both committed to exposing this crime against humanity as it plays out in their backyards. 

Forgive us our ADHD and self-defense, in this and every episode. We look forward to exploring the specific traumas of ourselves and our peers who were forever altered relationally by peer-on-peer attack therapy, but we'll also briefly address it in this update. 

We hope that Survivors will see other Survivors making moves and taking names as invitations or challenges to do so themselves. We hope that you will join us on the frontlines at every fork in the road. We also understand that for a historically invalidated community, and collectively gaslit community, that it can be triggering to see the mic passed to the next advocate. Often we can feel as if we are being spoken for, or over, or disregarded entirely. But every opportunity for a Survivor to speak, is an opportunity for Survivors to be heard. If we believe that we are stronger together, then we cannot continue to allow our community to reenact our trauma. MANY Survivors are neurodiverse, many of us experience RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria) - especially since it's the most common symptom of ADHD. Even if we don't have RSD dialing up the perception of rejection, we HAVE been abandoned, excluded, silenced, and otherwise pariah-ed to the point where you don't even need 'confirmation bias' to perceive the world as wholly unsafe, as well as the people in it. I dig it. I'm living in this world with you. 

PLEASE let us be aware of how we deflect and project ourselves onto the world around us. We cannot move towards an exclusionary policy as we curate our collective movement.

Please join us in advocating for youth rights to liberate all kids in cages, from the border, through foster care, to the ToughLove so-called Troubled Teen Industry.

Until next time, #iseeyousurvivor and THANK YOU to all of our allies