1.1: Non-Coercion: The Third Option with Delia Tetelman

And that's the thing that you see when people deprogram, is that there's, there's a bridge too far and it's different for everybody and it really just is so individual. Like what, What's a bridge too far for you? You just don't know. It's hard to predict what's going to make the house of cards fall.

Yes. Welcome to the first episode of Untangling Ourselves. On today's episode we talk about high control religion, non coercion and unschooling. My guest, Delia Tetelman went from not being allowed to have an alarm clock as a member of a campus Christian cult to an atheist and unschooling parent advocating for disability rights. Telling people what they should do usually doesn't work. Delia shares how non coercive support can help loved ones find their own bridge too far, toppling the house of cards that is high control religion. We also talk about the intersections of neurodivergence and mentalization in mental health care. In the show notes, I'll add some links for learning more, some content warnings before we get started. This episode discusses cult deprogramming, emotional and physical abuse, high control religion and neurodivergent trauma. If you think you or a loved one might be experiencing religious abuse, please check out the resources linked in the show notes. Hi, this is Kaitlyn from the Untangling Ourselves podcast and today I'm here with my friend Delia. Delia is my co admin. We work with a team to run this group called Unschooling Every Family on Facebook where we support neurodivergent and disabled families who are interested in unschooling. Delia is an archivist. She's a really helpful, supportive coach for parents who are struggling. She is invested in anti racism and disability justice and neurodiversity acceptance. She also has a really interesting history where when she was in college she was part of a Christian cult and was professionally deprogrammed. Right?

Yes.

So we're here to talk about how she went from that experience to being the supportive and compassionate helper she is today. Welcome. Hi, Delia. Hi.

Thanks for having me. Yeah.

So to start off with, do you have a definition of unschooling that you. How would you define unschooling right now for you?

So right now, after all these years, I would say it's a lot of it has to do with non coercion. So to me that's like there are so many ideologies that kind of point to non coercion. In, in that direction. So like unschooling is basically saying you have liberty over your mind and what you learn and you can choose how to learn that. Like if you want to take a class, you can learn if you want to go to school, but also if you want to quit. So imagine like an adult saying, okay, I'm going to take a, you know, a continuing ed class and then they start the class and it's ridiculous and they don't like it and they quit.

Yeah.

Like, why wouldn't we give children that option?

Yeah. If the first grade class is ridiculous, Right? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's not really about necessarily being at home. And it's, it's structure or non structure. It's whatever the child needs and wants. And to me it's more about helping them learn self agency, that they have power and they can choose what happens to their mind and their body and in their time. Yeah. And they can follow their natural instinct to learn rather than an external demand to learn. And there are certain things that you know, are external. You know, you, we live in a society, you know, you just can't do anything you want. But that's a very, you know, inside of that kind of structure that you could have a lot of freedom and a lot of individuality. And inside of the coercive structure, there's a lot of control that people aren't even aware of.

Yeah.

So, you know, when, when I first started unschooling, it was more to solve a problem. I don't want to hurt my relationship with my kids, so I'm not going to do that. And we'll see what happens. And then I had to see what happens. And they learned, you know, without external control and they made a choice to go to college and et cetera, et cetera. So. And that's just two anecdotes.

Yeah.

That's not, oh, everybody should do this, or this is the same path. But then ideologically you start to learn and unlearn. Why is there so much coercion in the world? And that's like a rabbit hole. I go down myself, I say, why? You know, why isn't there. Why is democracy a thin veil? Why? I don't know. I could just go on and on.

Yeah.

And then how do I teach my kids about that? Yeah.

Well, and that's part of what, you know, if unschooling is non coercion, then all of a sudden the dominoes all start falling. If you really press.

House of cards.

Yeah, house of cards. Yeah. Yeah.

You can't just adopt this ideology of unschooling and just, okay, that's the answer. Goodbye. You have to deconstruct your own neurodiversity, your own sensory profile, your own trauma, and then how you need to parent. And there's no specific formula for that because every kid and every parent is different. So, like, you know, some of the parents say, well, I'm not very playful. Well, you have to accept yourself for that. You can't twist yourself into somebody else's idea of what it is to be a parent. Yeah.

And. And it's really the practice of it, because we can talk about it and you can say non coercion. But then when you need to get a kid in the car to go somewhere that you absolutely have to go, you know, what does that even look like? And then it becomes what we work on in the unschooling, every family group, which is this. How do you collaborate if you're not using coercion? How do you live in reality where sometimes you need groceries and stuff?

Right. And you can't leave your kids legally, you can't leave them home alone.

Right.

You know, so that there's a constraint.

Yeah. But then once you've gotten that down, you're a parent, you're an unschooling parent, you figured out collaboration, you've de. Schooled a bit, then. Yeah. You start seeing other systems that are coercive.

Right. Right. Yeah.

So do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're at right now and what you do?

So I'm 60. My kids are 21 and almost 25. I was working in IT for about 15 years, and then I had my first child, and it was kind of rough, so I stopped working. And I haven't. I didn't work since. We put our kids in elementary school, and that did not work well, so we pulled them out. And I did apply to private schools for my oldest, and we were rejected, I think, based on teacher evaluations, which were sealed. So I think they might have blackballed. Yeah. My child. But that was a good turn. Even though I. I didn't think I wanted to homeschool, I didn't know anything about it, and I thought it would be forcing my kids to sit down for six hours a day and do what I told them to do, and I could barely get them to do homework.

Yeah.

So I thought, all right, well, I'm going to give it a shot because it's the last option. And the first thing I did was I looked for Social groups. And I found one that was very casual social, not academic, and we joined that and it was full of eclectic and unschoolers. And it was just so amazing. So lucky. We made really good friends there. We showed up the first day and my oldest had a Minecraft T shirt on.

Yeah.

And it was such an icebreaker. Oh, you like Minecraft? I like Minecraft too.

And that's gotta feel so good if you. If they were really struggling at school. If school.

Yeah. And she's like hyper social, so she needed that social. She needed a replacement for the social friends that she was losing at school.

Yeah.

It just worked out so well. Yeah.

Before you went, you pulled out of school and found all these eclectic and unschooling families. What kind of parent were you? Like, were you using discipline? Were you already really focused on connection? Because I think of you as such a compassionate parent, but I've only known you, you know, 10, 20 years into unschooling, so.

Right, right.

What were those early years like when they were in school and you were figuring out how to parent?

So I was. I mean, like, my personality is more of a, like, kid friendly, peaceful parenting, like just naturally. But I didn't have, like the. The logical explanation of why I should do that. I just thought it was just my inclination. And I think I let my inclination get overridden by, you know, experts. So I definitely relate to so much of what the younger parents are going through. And it does motivate me them, because I feel like along the way, I worked so hard to try to figure it all out. Yeah. And like, even when we started unschooling, it took me like 18 months to deschool because it was me, like, just trying to grab information and trying to find, like, trying to find the logical reasoning that justified what my instinct was telling me to do.

Yeah, yeah. So you always had that instinct. You just didn't have any backup or any.

Yeah, right.

But I mean, yeah, people. People have this instinct and then an instinct to do what's right or connect with their kid or all that. And then if they don't have even the words to justify that, it's hard. It's very hard to do. You have to be very brave to say, well, I'm just gonna follow my instinct even if I don't have justification. And we were just talking about the person who said, I either have two choices I have. I can let my kid break all their siblings toys, or I can try to prevent them from having meltdowns by not confronting them. And that person just didn't have the language of co regulation. They didn't even know what that was. It wasn't in their vocabulary. Unless you have that instinct, and it's really strong and you are very brave. It's hard to even see a third option.

Right.

Outside of the, like, permissive or the disciplinary parenting.

Yeah. And. And she feels the responsibility not to let one child harm another.

Right, of course.

And. And I also have that incredibly strong experience of feeling responsible for that. Yeah.

So do you want to talk about your history with the. In college and the cult and with coercive situations directly? Because it's not just an abstract analysis of the news for you that you see coercion everywhere. It's something that you understand pretty deeply from your own experience.

Yes. So as a kid, I grew up in a very strict Catholic home with parents who were violent and hypocritical in a lot of ways, like, do what I say, not what I do. You know, I'm one of seven. I'm six out of seven, so. And I kind of lived in a lot of fear in my childhood. Walked on eggshells. My. My mother was, you know, I think my dad was autistic. And my mom has a lot of narcissistic tendencies. You know, in hindsight, I can see as, you know, reactive attachment disorder from her parents and their trauma. There's generational trauma from Ireland and the colonization and taking that population and imposing poverty on them.

Yeah.

Which displaced them. And they came over here and there's a whole history. Like, both of my grandparents, my grandfathers, got political jobs through the Irish political machine, which is basically like the Mafia, but it was also political.

Yeah, but that's also a very.

Yeah.

Coercive system.

Very coercive. Great. You know, they lived through the Great Depression, lived through the 50s of the fake housewife. You know, pearls at dinner. And my parents embraced a lot of that. So then, you know, I was born in 65, so I grew up in the 70s. And there was a lot of. Just a lot more questioning of racial things. And so I think my mom kind of went through partial. Like a partial women's liberation, but also kind of subject to the patriarchy and trying to. I don't know, it was just very weird. And she had weird moods, and we were kind of afraid of her. She was very capricious. And a lot of the influence that we had, like, she was extremely authoritarian. So if you didn't clean perfectly, you would just. We would just be in the kitchen all night. And she would come down and inspect, and then you had to reclean. And then she would inspect. And this was, like, at age 10. So there was a sense in the religion that you're sinful. Like, you're always sinful. That's all they ever talked about. And looking back, it was astonishing how much the priest at mass talked about what everyone was wearing. Like, the girl.

Like, the girls to that church day. Like, he would talk about.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That was a common theme.

Oh, my goodness.

Why are you wearing a sundress to church? Wow. Like, a lot of women, like, and girls were, you know, he policed. And then when I was a little kid, you know, I would go outside after church and see him smoking. And in my mind, I was like, that doesn't make sense. Isn't smoking a sin? Yeah. Because my parents said, smoking is bad. You can't smoke. You know, they quit, whatever. So in my little autistic mind, I saw all these hypocrisies between what they said.

You sound like you were pretty conscious of the hypocrisy from a really early age.

Yeah. And then my mother kicked my oldest brother out of the house when he was 16, and he went to live at the YMCA, and he still went to high school. And then he decided, you know, screw this, I'm going to go to Virginia Beach. And he was picked up by some evangelical fundamentalists, I guess, and. And then for three weeks, I guess, and they kind of indoctrinated him.

Wow.

And then he came here. Were you at the time about 10 years younger? So I was 6. Wow. The reason he was kicked out was he threw a party at our house, and he cleaned up the whole place perfectly, except for, like, one cigarette butt.

Oh, my God. Really?

Yeah. And then my mother had a meltdown and kicked him out of the house. If you can't live by my rules, you can't be under my roof. You know, the authoritarian. Yeah. You know, which kind of scared everybody else straight, too. So then when he came back, he believed that he had to obey his parents because it was one of the commandments. And then he would actually read my sister and I Bible stories and put us to bed. Like, our parents never read to us at bedtime. Yeah. So, like, he got us a children's Bible and read to us, you know, doing like, normal parenting kind of stuff with us, taking us to adventure parks and almost being, like, a parent that we didn't have, but with a slant of indoctrinating us in this religious thing and praying and teaching us prayers And. And he also did the authoritarian thing where he would spank us, like, if we didn't eat certain food. And like, he bought. He bought us the C.S. lewis, the Chronicles of Narnia. Because C.S. lewis was a Christian.

Right.

Just certain things like that at that point.

That sounds like that was your only safe option. Quote, unquote, or. Yeah, connection. Yeah.

And we had a connection with my brother Bill, too, who wasn't religious, and he was very, very caring.

Yeah.

But Matt took almost like, took a parental responsibility in the name of God kind of with us. And it was funny because my sister never fell for. For it, but I did. Like, I internalized all of that. And then my brother would bring us to these evangelical coffee house nights where there was like, Christian music and it was social. And so When I was 13, I went there and had the conversion experience, like, give yourself to God and be born again. So that was my experience as a 13 year old. And then when I was 14, I started getting rides from the other Christians, so. To the youth group, to the evangelical youth group. And that became like my social life. Yeah. So I was born again all through high school. And then at the end of high school, there was this weird thing that some of the people were doing at the church where they were. It's called mystical manipulation.

Okay.

Where. Where they say, well, some people get the gift of speaking in tongues. So is this mysterious thing that if you were spiritual enough, like, you would get this gift? So they said, well, if anyone wants to try, we'll pray over you and see if you get the gift. Like, it's this mysterious thing. Yeah, of course. I was like, okay, I'm waiting. So I'm like, yeah, that sounds like something good. Like, I want to be holy and love God. And, you know, this is another way to do that or become more spiritual, become closer to God or whatever the thing was. So then we'd go into the chapel and people would pray over you and they would start speaking in tongues. And I was like, okay, well, it's not happening. Like, I just thought something was going to happen. Yeah, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. So I was a little forlorn, like, well, I guess God didn't choose me.

Yeah.

To speak in tongues. Right.

And you were not. It just wasn't in you to lie about this or perform or anything.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Which I feel kind of an autistic angle. Right.

That I'm gonna take what you say word for word. Right, right.

Yeah.

If you say it's a gift God gives you then. Okay, it is.

Yeah.

It's not a performance, it's a gift.

Right.

And then every Sunday we went to youth group, and then we went to the evangelical worship at the high school. Like, it was like 2,000 people and it was fun.

Yeah. I was just gonna ask what you found appealing about it.

There was a lot of singing.

Yeah.

You know, it was just. It was teenagers. We were having fun and we enjoyed each other's company. And.

Yeah.

You know, we were hanging out and the leaders were kid friendly.

So at this point, the. The safe people you had in your life were maybe your brother Bill and this family felt safe.

Yeah. And my oldest brother Matt, who was very indoctrinated.

Yeah.

So then I. Then I started college and I said, okay, I need to find, you know, the same thing, the same safe space at college, you know, now that I'm in this new space. And there were literally like five cults just on my floor, not to mention the ones in my door.

Wow.

Yeah. And I got invited to all these different, you know.

Were they all evangelical?

No, like, one was Church of Christ and like, other. I don't know, it's. It's a whole thing. But. And I did go to their service, and then there was a church called Maranatha and there were a Christian campus cult, but everyone in the church spoke in tongues.

Okay.

So I think because of the mystical manipulation that happened in my senior year at the other church, like, speaking in tongues is a gift.

You decided they were all gifted.

They must be all be gifted. God must be leading me here again. Yeah. To give me this gift. Yeah. You know, and so the same thing happened. Like, I would sit in the dorm room with these two students, two women, and they would speak in tongues over me. And then one of them just was very frank with me and said, you just do. Doesn't just happen. You just imitate it. She didn't say it was performance, but she said, you. You just try it and you just get used to it and you just do it. And I said, oh, oh, okay. Like, at least she was honest about it. Right. So I was in that group for about two and a half years and tithed. So that was a new thing. Like, I tithed every. You had paycheck that I got? Yeah, I. Well, I had a part time work. When I did have a paycheck, I tithed. And there was. Every time that we had a service, a worship service, there was one sermon and then a tithing sermon. And both of them were almost equally as long and then the tithing sermon always had a Bible study associated with it. Like the worship services were like two and a half hours long.

Right. Every Sunday.

Every Sunday, yeah.

Yeah.

And it was extremely fundamentalist, like way more than the evangelical. And the. And the cult in college said, you can't date, there's no dating. And so I broke up with the boyfriend and said, God is telling me not to date. And then I went back further to college and we all met up there, including my boyfriend. And I pulled out the workbook and started like monotroping about all this new stuff, all this new fundamentalist stuff that I have learned over the past two months.

Yeah.

Like I was becoming completely indoctrinated by it. And I remember the reaction was like, you know, nobody said directly, like, that's too much.

Yeah.

But I remember their reaction was, that's weird. And I came in with this very fundamentalist ideology. Look, I'm like, I'm getting closer to God. Isn't this amazing?

Your motivation was to be closer to God or be right or be better and better be pure. Yeah.

You know, and I think I still have that kind of motivation to not like purity, but I have the motivation to know and a curiosity to know, like, what is real? What's the truth? What. Why is there hypocrisy? How do I make sense of all of this stuff? And looking back, like when I was 13, one of the, one of the things that drew me into the evangelical movement was I was saying, why are my parents so hypocritical? Yeah, like why, like why is the religion preaching love and they're not doing it? Why are they so mean? And then when you go to the evangelical Kumbaya meetings where they say, oh, we love each other and they have this like veneer of acceptance. And then your, my 13 year old brain says, oh, well, the reason why my parents are so mean is because they're not saved.

Right.

This is why you found a reason

for all of the cruelty.

Yeah, yeah. So for a 13 year old, the answer was easy. And if I just become saved, I can avoid becoming like my parents. I can be a better person and I want to be a better person. And I feel like I still have that motivation. I want to be a good person, but I have recovered from the trauma and I have training in the nuance and I'm not as vulnerable to indoctrination.

Yeah.

Like you said before, there's a third option.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to summarize it in A way.

It was just a way out, but also a way to have the connection that you never got.

Yeah. There's so many reasons why it's so alluring to someone who's traumatized, to someone who's trying to figure out why is there so much coercion. And also, like, looking back, that I didn't have the ability to do then. But now I say, well, you know, the fact that eight people who are ADHD get so much criticism, you know, you just have this experience, like you're constantly being criticized.

Yeah.

So why can't I remember things? Why do I work so hard and only get a B?

Yeah.

You know, on my grade, why did. Why do I keep losing my ballet shoes in high school? I kept losing my purse with my babysitting money in it and my license like six or seven times.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

You know, it was just so hard to learn those lessons and just. And it's hard to feel good about yourself.

And you had no language about why that was.

You had no language. You know, so the language was, you're a space cadet. That was the language. Not you are ADHD or autistic. And the language was, you weren't trying hard enough. The language was, you're smart. You can do this.

Yeah.

Why aren't you applying yourself?

That's still the language.

Yeah. Still. Yeah. You know, that a lot of what led to my embracing fundamentalism, you know, was trauma.

Yeah.

And totally feeling overwhelmed at college. You know, falling asleep every single day in my 8am class. Like calculus. Yeah. Like, why can't I stay? It just. No matter what I did. And the cult said, oh, you have to have faith that God is going to wake you up. You can't use an alarm clock.

What?

Yeah.

What? What? Okay, I was gonna ask you at some point, what aspects of it made it a cult? And that sounds like one of them.

Yeah. No, dating. Can't use an alarm clock. Not only that, you have to be

so pure in your connection with God that you don't need an alarm clock.

Yes. You have to have faith that God will wake you up. And not only that, but you have to appear. Appear like Tammy Faye Baker. So it was like a very Southern style fundamentalism where women had to. You had to have curlers. Wow. Your hair had to be done.

Alarm clock. But you could have curlers.

Yeah.

Like.

Yeah. You had to have.

Wouldn't God curl your hair? Just.

Yeah, exactly. You had to have the full makeup.

Yeah.

And it was funny because I was not really good at makeup. Yeah. And then I remember one of the cult members who was a friend said, why don't you wear lipstick? And I was like, oh, it never occurred to me. So I had, like, foundation and eyeshadow and mascara and blush.

Think about the lipstick.

And I just. Somehow lipstick was like, not in my. You. And so I was like, oh, my God, I better run out and get lipstick.

Oh, my goodness. Because God isn't just gonna naturally make your lips red enough.

Right, Right, right, right.

Oh, my gosh.

So then I didn't have an alarm clock, but I had to wake up at 6, so I had enough time to take a shower. Yeah. Curl my hair. I didn't have curlers. I had a curling iron blow dry my hair, curl my hair, put on full makeup, go have breakfast, and then get to my calculus class that started at 8am huh. So did you miss class?

Like, how did you possibly wake up at six?

Sometimes it worked. And then at some point it didn't work because the stress added up. And then I started using the alarm clock. But the whole idea that I had to appear as this messenger of God with makeup and my hair curled, that was part of what you had to do. And I know that it's in a lot of fundamentalist groups. Policing women and their appearance and their bodies is really a big part of that.

Yeah.

Like, you're not supposed to roll out of bed and grab a cup of coffee and make it to your calculus class, which would have worked so much better for me, like, for my education.

Right.

Anyway, so I. I went on and on with the cult, and the cult actually had me stay away from home for summers. And that was very appealing to me. And it was a huge hardship. We didn't have beds. We slept on a hard floor the whole summer. Yeah.

Wow.

Slept on.

You were still doing full makeup while you were sleeping on a floor.

Oh, yeah. But it appealed to me because then I didn't have to go home to my parents. And then fast forward to junior year. One of the roommates I had got set up in a marriage, which is what they do. They set you up. They set up people up. And. But God is speaking to me that you should marry. So. And so this was how it was put. Yeah. And so this was like one of the first cards out of the house of cards that got pulled because the guy that she was betrothed to was such an a hole. And, like, I just did not like him. And he was weird. And I loved her. Like, we were friends and I admired her and cared about Her. And I remember she was close to this other guy who left the group, and I thought that they were in love with each other. So that's the way they control you, is they don't even let you have a decision over who you marry or who you love or. Yeah. So I just had a really bad feeling about that. And then right after that, I went home for Christmas break, and I asked for curlers for Christmas break. And my mom saw that, like, this was, like, a couple months before, and my mom saw that as me getting ready to be engaged in the cult

about the setups and stuff.

Yeah. And my sister had sent her a Wall Street Journal article that went. That was on the front page with a picture of the cult leader. Oh. And talking about how it was a cult. Wow. And my mom freaked out. And so all summer, she was calling Cult Awareness Network and trying to set up a deprogramming thing. Wow. And that was back when the Kidnapping to Do program was still popular and still recommended. It's not recommended anymore. And also Cultural Awareness Network was taken over by Scientology in a lawsuit. Yeah. What they made. It's a whole story. And that was a couple years later that happened. Yeah. So they were a legitimate.

Yeah.

Support group for families who had members in cults. And so they set my mom up with a deprogrammer who actually had a PhD in Divinity.

Okay.

And he was a Christian, so it wasn't like he wasn't Christian, but he just knew a lot about cults and ideology and their tactics. And though my brother said, why don't you come with me to this friend, to this client's house. My brother was a lawyer at the time. And what was really strange was that he was drinking the entire time he was driving to this place. Yeah. And I was like, what the hell? Yeah. And drinking and driving wasn't, like, as big a thing. Like, this was, like, 1984. And I was like, geez. And he was so nervous because he knew he was driving me to this, like, safe house.

I see.

And so when I got there, this deprogrammer was there.

So basically, your whole family was ready to put you in.

Yes.

Yeah.

And my whole family wasn't there. But a lot of my family was there. My parents were there, and. And the programmer said, we're not trying to talk you out of anything. We just want you to listen. And so my mindset was, okay, fine. I'll prove to them that my faith is strong.

Right.

And then I'm not going to be. Ironically, I. My. In my Mind was like, I'm not going to be influenced by them.

Yeah.

Which is. He was just there to show me how I was being influenced by the cult. Yeah. So he had a suitcase full of videotapes. And one of them that I remember was the representatives of the cult being on the 700 Club and talking to Pat Robertson. And Pat Robertson saying, well, some people are concerned that your group doesn't allow dating. Right. So this was a big thing in the group that there was no dating and that just like your alarm clock, God was going to tell you who you were going to marry and you had to have faith in that. So that was a big thing that you swallow to stay in this group.

Yeah.

And there are all kinds of Bible verses, you know, that they've used to back it up and all that. So these representatives get on the 700 Club and say, oh, no, no, we date. We double date. Like blatantly lie about it. Yeah. To. Because they wanted to seem palatable to the 700 Club. You know, it was a spin.

What was the 700 Club?

You don't know the 700 Club?

No, no.

You're too young. Yay. You didn't have to live through that. The 700. 700 Club was this TV show on cable that was run by Pat Robertson. It was like the pre Fox News propaganda machine, like evangelical propaganda machine.

Okay. So they wanted to seem palatable not to just mainstream tv, but to general.

Yeah, it was TV evangelism.

Yeah. Okay.

And at that time they were not completely off the cliff for fundamentalist. Yeah, there was a little bit of mainstream, but also it was also political. So a lot of it was tied into like the Reagan administration. And the Reagan administration would drop these dog whistles for each evangelicals and fundamentalists like Manifest destiny. And then our cult published this like five page newspaper about how God was leading Ronald Reagan to bring in the second coming. So does that sound familiar?

Yes, it sounds. I was gonna say that sounds familiar.

Yeah.

It's loop time is looping through that again.

Yeah, yeah. And then that brought on the Tea Party. So anyway, so that was kind of the beginning of all of that.

So seeing this video is another card out of your house of cards. That.

Right.

Because you would, in your mind, they wouldn't lie. But here they are.

No, again, like it was hit that hypocrisy nerve of mine. Like if you're going to be dedicated to something, you got to say, you got to own it. And not only. It's not just one person saying it, it's Someone saying it publicly, misrepresenting the entire cult, that's not okay with me. And so seeing that lowered my defenses for proving my own faith. So seeing that wasn't a direct challenge to my faith. It was a direct challenge to the group. He wasn't asking me to give up my faith. And this was kind of the beauty of having someone who was very educated on the Bible and theology to do the deprogramming. So he spent a week with me going through the Bible and basically staying

somewhere in a safe house.

Yeah, it was a safe house. Yeah.

So they were keeping you away from the cult for that period of time?

Yeah, and I was away anyway because it was Christmas break.

Okay.

So this deprogrammer went through. Basically went through Bible studies all week, you know, saying, well, the cult is telling you this, you know, and he had a lot of the workbooks that they had. So the cult is telling you this. But, you know, there's contradictions of that in the Bible.

So he was still operating in that Christian framework for you.

Right. So he just had the skill to make it not black and white, even in that framework. And, you know, being a. I guess in theology, they do teach you how to do that, you know, if he's got a Ph.D. in theology. Well, it's not.

I mean, it's a text that is complicated.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of contradiction. So, no, there's no real black and white.

Right. So. And there wasn't a demand to unbelief. It was just examine the cult for what the cult is. Right. And what tactics they use to try to control you. So he was really pointing out the coercion. And so I could access some of those doubts with a new confidence that it was okay to doubt the group, that it didn't mean that I was doubting my faith. And then his videotapes of ex members and their stories and, you know, it was just like, oh, my God, no, no, no, no, that's not okay. You know, so that was a whole week. Were you.

Were they asking you or forcing you to stay in the safe house? Did you ever feel trapped or were you like, I'm gonna try this out, I'm curious.

Well, it was more like, I'm going to prove to them. Oh, yeah, at first. And then when the cards started to fall, then I was curious. Then I was like, I need to know this.

Right.

You know, I've been lied to. And that's the thing that you see in when people deprogram, is that there's There's a bridge too far and it's different for everybody and it really just is so individual. Like what, What's a bridge too far for you? And like I said, it just. Someone's bridge too far is just different. You just don't know. It's hard to predict what's going to make the house of cards fall.

Yeah. So yours was the lying.

Yeah, mine was a little bit easier because I was so logic oriented.

Yeah. Yeah. After your safe house, what happened? Did you go back and to school or did you have to.

So there was another two weeks of going to a place called Unbound in Iowa City. I don't even know if it exists anymore. Wow. But it was another like safe house. It was staffed round the clock by ex members of different cults, of all different cults. And so they had like a curriculum and you could, they had like this menu and they said you can choose anything from the menu or you could just sit and talk whatever you want. And. And I had this like upside down sleep pattern. So it was almost good that it was staffed around the clock because I would be up at 4 in the morning talking to whoever was on staff then and I, I kind of went around the clock. So I ended up talking to everybody. So there was someone. Ex Mooney, ex Evangelical, ex Hare Krishna, X. I don't know. I'm sure there were others. Like, I can't think of who else. So by talking to them and going through some of the curriculum, what you ended up doing was talking about how every single cult was the same. It was just all this pattern matching, which is like right up my alley.

Right. I was gonna say talking to every person on staff was perfect for you because you wanted to know.

You wanted. Yeah, yeah.

Instead of, I mean, for some people it might be better to bond with one person and talk to them emotionally. Yeah.

And I, I had like, I brought a tape recorder with me and I was listening to Amy Grant in my alone time, which was still like Christian music was like safe. I felt safe doing that.

Yeah.

But I was still seeing all of the patterns that are common between cults. And now learning about the patterns now is so accessible because of YouTube and there's a channel called Cults to Consciousness by an ex Mormon. Cults to Consciousness brings in many different cults and it's almost all women. And she's even had them all on at the same time. And they all compare and contrast like all the things that they do. And a lot of it is oppressing women and controlling women, controlling Women's bodies controlling what they say, and they justify a lot of emotional and physical abuse. So that kind of compare and contrast that I had at Unbound is now so accessible just online. Yeah. That someone could deprogram that way too. Whereas back in the 80s, it was hard to find that.

Yeah.

And what was kind of coincidental was when I went back to school, there was an ex member group run by Steve Hassan, who was an ex Mooney. And he was just starting to get his degree in psychology, his master's degree he was working on. And eventually he got his PhD and he is now, like, the foremost cult expert. Wow.

So, yeah, part of that group kind of processing and getting.

Yeah, I met him there and there were ex members who came and we were all totally traumatized. And they used to call it floating. There was like a subculture of ex members. And floating is kind of like when you're. You've left the cult, but you haven't fully deprogrammed, so you're just. You just feel completely unmoored. Like, I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't know how to process life anymore. And it's this feeling of being unmoored, and that is such a universal feeling when. And I felt that way over and over and over again in my life, you know, when we left school. What do I do now? Like, what. You know, and it's that feeling of not having roots and not knowing what to believe and not knowing what's going to happen and having to go through the deprogramming all over again for some other topic.

Yeah.

You know, and. And regret. Like, the regret is intense. Like, I didn't have to do all of this. I didn't have to go through all of this. There was a third option, you know, and you do you go through this intense feeling of regret and feeling bad about yourself and feeling stupid. You know, why did I fall for this? And also when I was in college, like, I went through this period of time where I was like, well, God will forgive me if I don't read the Bible. Like, I had to rationalize getting out of that triggered space because it was

too triggering to read.

It was very triggering. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so anyway, I was plopped into the real world, not into this isolated cult world. And I started to slowly let myself just be myself. And then there was this one point where I was praying because I was still, like, praying in my own mind. And I had this almost like a conversion experience. Like I'm just talking to myself and it just made a lot of sense to me that, that there was no one there. There's just nobody there. And I'm just talking to myself and I. I just had that sense. It was kind of all of a sudden, and then after a few months it just sunk in. And then I was like, I think I'm an atheist.

Was that scary or. We had you already experienced so much that it was a new way out and a new option.

Yeah, it was part of like deprogramming.

Yeah.

So that was an interesting experience. And then over the summer I had to make up credits and I took two philosophy courses at the college, at home. And that really put the nail in the coffin there.

Did you enjoy them? Was it like satisfying?

Yeah.

This way of thinking then?

Yeah. So it really helped me to logically frame, like atheism. It helped me frame that. Okay, let's do this thought experiment. Like, if there really is a God and Christianity really is the way. Right. That it's not impossible that God would want some people to be atheists. And I thought, I'm better at being a Christian as an atheist than I ever was as a Christian.

You mean in terms of morals or.

In terms of morals and ethics and sincerity? That probably Sincerity, yeah. And instead of caring about my own holiness, it freed me to not obsess about that. And I actually had energy to care about other people. And not because I wanted to get into heaven and just because for the pure reason that I care about people. It was almost like so freeing not to think, am I a sinner? Am I a sinner? Am I a sinner? Am I? Like, it's this for 20, 23 years

or something to be on the right track and following the rules.

Yeah. Like, my mind would drift off, you know, and then I'd be like, oh, no, I gotta get back to inventorying my sin, like all the time. Which is such an introverted, like self absorbed way to live life.

Huh.

And it wasn't like a natural thing for me. And also biting your tongue when you see hypocrisy anyway, like, is not something that comes naturally to me.

Yeah.

But then in the philosophy class I. So I came up with this other thought experiment that, okay, imagine that one person in the whole world is the closest to the truth about God or the universe or whatever. Right. Just imagine that that's that one person and they're at the top, they're at the top of the pyramid. And then the next person next to them naturally has a slightly different view of it. And then the Next person is slightly different, and the next person is slightly different. And if you keep going, at what point do you get to where the person's absolutely wrong? Right. So it's like a mathematical node. Like if the one node is the node. Yeah. Then how many spaces, like discrete math, how many spaces away are you absolutely wrong? And is the devil in control, which is always what they tell you to fear.

Yeah. So did that help you rationalize, like, why the cult would. Might be wrong, or did it help you rationalize being an atheist?

Help me rationalize understanding that having that faith is not about having the truth. That faith is, like, it's epistemological. So faith is so you don't wake up every day saying, well, I might die today, even though it could be true. I might get hit by a bus today. It could be true. But you don't believe that because you can't live like that. Yeah, but you don't have to go around saying your faith is the truth.

Oh, interesting. You don't have to go around saying, no, none of us are going to die today for sure.

Yeah, someone's gonna die today. And they're not thinking that they're gonna die today. Yeah, but they don't have to believe that they are. Like, you can't. You can't have a future if you keep believing that. So that's where, like, studying epistemology and philosophy helps to untangle, like, that idea that having faith is having the truth. And then there's this contradiction that, like, people believe that they have the truth because that's their faith. If you only believe, but you believe knowing that it may not be the truth, that's what faith is. So I can say, I'm an atheist. That's just what I believe. That's what feels believable to me. It doesn't have to be true. It's just faith. And I don't have to tell you you should be an atheist. I can tell you you don't have to believe that your faith is the truth. I mean, that makes more logical sense to me. But I don't have to tell you what to believe.

So you found philosophy, and that kind of helped. It sounded like that helped a lot with the floating after you left the. The cult.

Yes.

So that kind of leads to the other main thing that I wanted to talk about, which is the reflective communication, because I feel like that's something you're so good at. A couple of things that I think make the support group work and make it so that you do really Help people, whether you're commenting or you're one on one. And one of them is, I think it ties into what you talked about with this philosophy that you can have a belief or have faith and not need it to be the truth. So when you approach somebody who's having trouble, you're not asking them to buy into your truth.

Yes. And I try to be very careful not to turn it into this totalistic ideology. And I have training on how not to do that.

Right.

And then I go back to non coercion, free agency.

And the other thing that I think really helps you help people and which I find so impressive is the degree to which you can do this. Reflective communication. Do you want to talk about what is reflective communication?

Yeah. So my oldest has had a lot of behavior that has been really, really difficult to understand. You know, some of it is the masking. So when I researched bullying, I came across Ephraim Bleiberg's book about treating personality disorders in children and adolescents. And I started to read it, and it made so much logical sense to me. It was really hard to read. It was written from a point of view of a psychiatrist writing for other psychiatrists.

Yeah.

And then from a psychiatrist who professionally works with children who are in an inpatient setting because they were suicidal in all ages. So his question to himself or to his community at large was, how do we help these children and adolescents? And the way to help them is through mentalization. And so the book is called A Relational Approach. So relational is not coercive, to be reflective, to teach them how to mentalize, and then it explains why they can't

mentalize and what is mentalizing.

So mentalization is the ability to understand that other people have a different point of view and a different thought life and that you also have a thought life, and that through attachment, you learn how to identify your own thought life. So he talks about the genesis of how does a baby learn to have and understand their own thought life? So they start with the idea that a baby is. Has an undifferentiated thought life. That they have senses like, my diaper's wet, but they don't know the word diaper. They don't know the word wet. They just know they're uncomfortable. So they cry. It's like a discomfort cry.

Yeah.

And then there's I'm hungry discomfort cry. And then through interactions with the caregiver, they realize, oh, all these discomforts are different because the caregiver reacts differently to each one and gives me different words for each one. So, oh, you're dry. Doesn't that feel better? Oh, you're hungry. Let me give you something to eat. Yeah. Doesn't that feel better? And the caregiver reflects back the internal state of the baby over and over and over again for every different sensory experience. So it differentiates all the different sensory experiences for the child. It gives them words and meaning. And then it also works for positive experiences. Experiences like, look, you took your first steps. Yeah. And the child can understand that this wonderful feeling of being mobile is also exciting to other people. Yeah.

Than just playing with a toy, maybe, and laughing.

Yeah. Even just playing with a toy or saying a first word or smiling or first laughing or any kind of experience. The caring, attaching adult reflects back to them what that experience means and often what it means to them. You know, it's exciting to have a new toy. It's exciting to take your first steps. And then they develop an internal sense of self, like a. A self that is defined and differentiated.

Yeah.

So a lot of what the book was talking about was how that process, that whole process of a developing of a balanced personality and through transactions of attachment, thousand and thousands and thousands of them over time can get disrupted. And the book mostly talked about neglect and then how disrupting it can be to that process to have the mother attentive sometimes and not attentive at others. Like if the mother or the parent is depressed or the parent is on drugs, and when they're sober, they're attentive and attachment. And when they're not, you know, then the child is on their own. If the child is left to cry on their own, and they start to learn no one is coming for me. That's what they learn. So they don't get to learn the differentiation of their own sensory experiences. They learn no one is coming for me. And then the book teaches about how these belief systems are learned. Like, the child starts to believe that no one is coming for them, and then they start to project that belief onto other people. Like every. No one believes that anyone is there for them. So then it leads to these personality disorders where they believe everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves. And this is just a belief that they learn through their experience. So what struck me in the book and what they didn't talk about in the book is when you have a child who has a sensory experience that you have no words for and you can't bring them to back to homeostasis. So that's the transaction that he's talking about, bringing the child back to Homeostasis when they're in distress. That is the tr. That is half of the transactions of attachment.

Yeah.

So I look back on her life as a baby and I say there were thousands of times that she was in distress and I didn't know why and I didn't know how to bring her back to homeostasis or. It took me an hour to bring her back. She couldn't sleep. I couldn't calm her down. She cried and cried and cried. You know, so many in a way

that when we were talking earlier about how you had this instinct for how you wanted to parent and connect with your kids and you didn't have justification. It sounds like this book was some justification that gave you a foundation to do this and you added in basically a neurodiversity perspective on that need.

Yeah. I feel like it's the only original idea I've ever had and I've spent a lot of time looking for someone else with the same idea. Like someone more qualified than I am to cite. Yeah. And. Yeah.

Well, the only other person that I've seen express this in this way is Rain. Our co admin in the group talks about in terms of collaborative proactive solutions and problem solving. It's kind of a similar thing to what you just said about mentalization. If you don't know what the internal sensory experience is, you can't reflect that. You also can't problem solve that. You have to turn to other autistic adults who can explain their lived experience and what's going on. And that's what I've seen with this idea as it progresses for you as you deep dive into the neurodiversity movement and the input from neurodivergent people online, you can then apply that in terms of reflecting and problem solving. Both.

Yeah. Yes. And when you're a new parent and you're not even exposed to any of the disability community, you're just living in this quasi neurotypical world. You don't even know your own differences. Like, I don't know. Well.

And also I read it's called All Our Families. I read this book, Jennifer, Natalia. I think about how generation after generation after generation were disconnected from the disability community and from even in our own families, our connection to disability and neurodivergence. And the loss that that is, the huge loss that that is like multi generational every generation. Whoever's disabled usually gets cut off in our culture and the knowledge and you lose that perspective and everything. So it's revolutionary to have the connection online to the neurodivergent community and have people speak up and then have that available, at least for parents, even if they don't know to go find it until they have problems with school or get a diagnosis or something. Yeah.

Cut off is. It's true. And. And then the reflection too. The other part of the book was how important non coercion was to their practice and how they demonstrated. The psychiatrist gave examples of different examples of the children being in therapy. You know, they're in an inpatient hospital, but they have an hour of therapy every day with the psychiatrist. And different examples about how the psychiatrist was non coercive with them, even in the face of their behavior, them pushing away the psychiatrist, them not trusting them. So. Okay. Another really incredible aspect of the book that changed me was it also kind of detangles performance anxiety. So there's a ton of performance anxiety in parenting. Yeah. And you can, you can see it with people saying, I'm failing as a parent. I feel like I'm failing. I feel so guilty.

Yeah.

Over and over and over again. And these are people who are trying so hard and turning over every stone and doing every. Trying to grab every resource they can using every ounce of mental energy, emotional energy. And they're still saying, I'm failing. And they're still being pressured by external forces, their relatives, their, you know, criticism, shame, all of this stuff. And so in the book, here is a psychiatrist who only has to see the child for 50 minutes. Right. Only has to hold it together with this one child for 50 minutes. Right. And he said, I still lose my reflective function and I still become defensive and coercive. Yeah. And he said, when you're faced with a non reflective person, your defense mechanism is to become non reflective. And he said, the way I deal with that is I catch myself being non reflective and I talk myself back into a reflective state in front of the child.

Oh, like calling himself out.

Yes. And identifying his own mental states. And then that shows the child, that demonstrates to the child how to go from a non reflective state to a reflective state. Yeah. Like what is the mechanism for catching yourself becoming unreflective and then bringing yourself back? And that has stuck with me as such a guiding principle to accepting yourself for having those emotions and having that mechanism and being able to identify it and not holding yourself to like this perfect standard.

Yeah.

It also deprograms you from that religious. So you start out with this religious thing. You're a sinner. You have to be perfect.

Yeah. So reflective parenting could almost be like A dogma where you have to be perfect.

Yeah, yeah. And you're not. And there's this idea that there is such a thing as being reflective, you know, but there's a lot else going on.

Yeah.

And I thought, you know, if a trained psychiatrist who chose to be in this situation, who has years of clinical experience, says that they can become unreflective and they only have to deal with the one person for 50 minutes. Yeah. And you're there 24, seven for your kids, you know, on your own or whatever. You don't have a whole staff and a whole hospital there. Then give yourself some space for being fallible and just, you know, understand that.

Yeah. You know, it's almost the most non coercive thing you can do because you're not even trying to persuade anyone of any solutions. You're just simply mirroring, literally mirroring the person's needs and what they're feeling.

Right, right. And you're, I mean, it's almost like a discipline because you're controlling your own impulsivity to have a knee jerk response to say, I'm responsible for solving it and if I don't solve it, I'm going to feel guilty and I'm failing as a parent.

Right.

Which is all very thought terminating and all very impulsive. And so the discipline of reflective thinking and communication is that you stop and you say, what is it like looking out of the eyes of that person without judgment? That's the other part. And then for a child, sometimes it's what is that child's intention? So it's not just about feelings all the time. Because sometimes you could get kind of wrapped up in feelings all the time and then you just go in circles. I feel sad they're doing this. I feel sad they're doing this again, I feel sad. But if you can help the child evaluate their own intentions. For example, like on a playground, two kids get into a conflict. And so instead of, you can say like, okay, let me listen to your side, let me listen to your side. Okay. You're not judging, you're letting them air their feelings and everything.

Yeah.

And so you say, yeah, that doesn't feel good. And that doesn't. But what's your intention? Are you two friends? Yeah, we're friends. Oh, so you really want to have fun together? Oh, yeah, that's our intention. Okay, so can you guys work out a deal? Is that something that's good? Yeah. Like then they have the agency because they started to understand what is in their own mental state. So you're just defining their mental state for them a little bit better. And then they said, yeah, we started out this game intent intending to have fun with each other. Yeah. And then we came up into a conflict. But we have the power to work out a deal. And then if there's communication or if you think it's unfair, you can kind of say, well, you know, do you agree with that? You know, this one suggesting a deal and that one I don't know. And okay, what is your deal? You can pay, mediate it. Yeah. If they need, you know, that's scaffolding. But you're not telling them what to do. You're giving them the agency of working it out themselves.

Yeah.

So the other side of that coin is this kid has a conflict, that kid has a conflict. Are you friends? No. Then I don't think you're gonna work this out because you don't want to be friends. Can you agree to stay away from each other? Because that would benefit both of you. And so then there's this new intention. I'm not going to bug this person and they're going to agree not to bug me. And then it's their, their own agency to control their own behavior based on their own intention.

Okay.

But if you only live in the feelings, then sometimes you miss your own agency. And in that, like, you can reflect back the feelings. But it's not just feelings. It's feelings, beliefs, intentions. It's this whole group of what your internal, inner, inner thought life is.

Okay.

And the reflective communication is really just helping them define all of that. So it makes sense that you would feel sad. Your intention was to come here and have fun today. And now you're feeling excluded.

And that's making me think about even parents who come to you when they're struggling with parent guilt about you stuff. You're not just reflecting back. Oh, you're feeling guilty.

Yeah.

The intention is so important.

Yeah. And, and I, and it's almost always, I can go back to. Your intention is to take exquisite care of your child.

Yeah.

Your intention is to nurture and protect. Just because you made a mistake doesn't mean your intention has changed.

Do you think the mentalization and reflective communication is connected to your knowledge deprogramming and experience with that?

Yes. Because of the idea of the beliefs. So you form these beliefs without really knowing why or understanding it. And then the beliefs drive all of your actions and it drives your indoctrination. So, like, you believe you're a sinner and it drives your choices, your personality, your Performance anxiety, all of that. Yeah. If you can help yourself deconstruct beliefs, false beliefs, then you have so much more self agency. You can believe something different and then you can live more authentically. You can. For example, when the kids take college classes, you know, they run into a lot of frustrations. And I can say to them, they can still have the intention of finishing the class and getting a good grade, but they don't have to believe that their struggles are because of them. I can give them a balanced view of, okay, somebody somewhere decided that this is the pace that you're supposed to go at to learn this. So if you have to take this course and fail and take it over again, that's just because you need a different pace. That's not because you failed.

Right.

So think about the difference in the belief and then the difference in your agency based on that belief that it's not about me. Like I'm okay if I need a different pace.

Yeah. That's kind of gets to why I wanted to talk to you about both of these things, like your past and also the work that you're doing now is because I can see you doing that with people, even when they're just coming in and saying, I feel so guilty, I feel like a failure as a parent. You know, you're reflecting not only that feeling, but the beliefs that are driving that guilt and the opportunity to do a thought of experiment, like you said before.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Like, what if, what if you think about it this way, that you're prioritizing your child's mental health, that you're providing them a safe space even if they're having burnout. I can see this work in action when you're helping people. And it does feel really connected. The deprogramming and the mentalization, it comes across as compassion or as just a nonjudgmental. But I can see the work behind it. There's a whole philosophy kind of behind what you do.

Yeah. It's almost like a logical structure that you can. I think of it as like a lattice. And then when you have an experience or sensory or whatever, you have someplace to put those experiences. And that's the whole idea of like, how do you build a resilient personality? Well, first you build this lattice of meaning and structure and values and intentions and beliefs and. And then when something happens, you have this place to put all of that. It's not this undifferentiated confusion, like, why am I like this? When you're indoctrinated into a religion and you have all this cognitive dissonance. You don't know where to put anything. Like you don't have a lattice that makes sense. So then the lattice that you do have, it becomes more and more convoluted, you know, and you go more and more to black and white thinking because it's just so hard. You don't. You don't know where to put anything.

Or the religion gives you the lattice that they.

Yeah. The religion gives you this lattice that you just.

Contradictory.

Yeah. And you just have to ignore all the contradictions and sacrifice yourself, your body, your mind. Yeah. In order to have someplace to put things. So that's why we try to deprogram de school, detangle from all of this, and then rebuild, reconstruct your own values, your own intentions, your own behaviors. But if you can get back down to these basic ideas of mentalization, then you have the tools you need to build yourself back up again and feel like you can throw off some of the coercion that you feel from external sources like your family, your. The school, your religion, whatever is holding you back.

Yeah.

Yeah, it seems so. It's hard to describe in an abstract way. And that's why I kind of like with the group, where you can take one specific situation and then explain, like, how would mentalization work in that situation? And to me, that's like a much more practical way of going about it. And then someone else reading it who says, well, I'm not in that situation, so that doesn't apply to me. Like. Yeah, you don't have to apply that to your situation because it's different.

Yeah.

Well.

And then, you know, it's not just you answering the questions or me or. And it's so many people who have all these possibilities to offer in response to a situation and brainstorm.

Right.

What could happen.

Yeah. And a lot of times people can write these unbelievably eloquent responses, especially from lived experience that I don't even have. Yeah. And then I can reply to that saying, well, I can break it down into the mentalization.

What they just said.

Yeah. What they just said really tracks with all of the mentalization theory. Whereas I couldn't have been able to written the original comment that was so well written, like, and based on lived experience.

Right.

So that's where the crowdsourcing is really great. The benefit doesn't exist without that.

Yeah. And for neurodivergence, I mean, that's what it is. It's divergence. There's.

Yeah.

So many. And so getting A whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of versions of neurodivergence to offer. What if this was their story? This is what would be going on for them. You know, you can do a lot. You can go a lot farther with the mentalization, like you were just talking about having a baby and feeling like you couldn't reflect those sensory experiences, but that's just. Just a small, small piece of it. There's tens of thousands of other experiences that maybe with neurodivergence, not everyone is going to understand or be able to reflect or help you have words for. And having crowdsourcing is such a beautiful way to access some degree of that.

Yeah, yeah. And giving. Helping people know where to put something. I listened to Lady Gaga's interview with Stephen Colbert.

Okay.

And she talks about how hard it was for her coming up in the music industry, and she hinted at certain things, and it made me wonder whether she was being sexually harassed or assaulted or whatever, which you can imagine. And she was 19 when, you know, 17, and then 18, 19, 21 when she released her first album. And she talked about how much of a struggle it was at the beginning and how it just took her years to find her own safety and independence and. And how she used her Persona, Lady Gaga, to hide behind.

Yeah.

And she said that she used it to desexualize herself. And I thought that a response of, well, just get out of there. Don't do music or don't subject yourself to that kind of environment. It's. It's abusive or it's awful or, yeah, just get out. And I thought, you know, she has a talent and a passion that I would never be able to understand, and she survived it. So what I might say to my kid in a. In an abusive situation, you know, don't put yourself in that situation. Get away from those people. Wouldn't apply to her because she has a different trajectory. You know, I see that in the group. Kids are all different and they have different trajectories, and I have no idea based on a paragraph what that family's trajectory is.

Yeah.

And what might be best for them. So it's just a framework. It's not like unschooling may not be their trajectory.

Right. Yeah. It's not the truth.

It's not the truth. It's just option three. Yeah. Well.

And when you're talking about Lady Gaga, when you were talking about deprogramming, you said, everybody's bridge too far is different.

Yeah.

And when you're talking about her, I was also thinking that everyone's bridge in is different. Right. Because she has this talent and it's just so important to her to be in the industry even when it's abusive. And I'm thinking about your experience and your bridge into being in the culture was this the belief that you were a sinner and also the desire to know more and do more and be more pure and your own childhood of needing to be perfect to survive and have connection. And you also couldn't have been just told it's abusive, get out. That wasn't, they knew not to do that. That wasn't going to work because it ignores what brought you in. You know, and the same thing with school. I mean we do occasionally have people post and say this is happening at my kids school, should I unschool? And everyone in the comments is like, do it, get them out. But that also doesn't address, you know, there's huge reasons why people have their kids in school, whether it's practical or it's family support or you know, community connection or their own trauma and their own ability to make a break with it. You can't ever tell someone this is going to be the right answer for you.

Right.

Even if a system is really abusive or damaging.

Yeah. I kind of try to get down to your instinct to nurture and protect and you have permission to follow that instinct. Yeah. And I can't exactly tell you where it's going to lead. I can tell you that other people, it's led them to unschooling and it's worked for them. But I can't tell you that it's going to lead you there, that you have the self agency to decide for yourself. I am just going to tell you that most of us have never regretted father following our instinct to nurture and protect. Our regret is not following it.

Yeah.

And maybe that is a universal truth. I don't know. I mean maybe it's just self selecting. So again it's not even like universal, it's just a pattern that I notice.

Yeah. And the person who deprogrammed you didn't walk in and say you should do this.

Yeah.

And that's essentially the principle of non coercion that we've been talking about. And I think that sort of answers the question. But to finish this off, can you share an idea, a concept or a quote that guides you and helps you either find your purpose or your joy or something that centers you when you face tough questions like this?

So there's a song by Jackson Brown called My Opening Farewell and one of the lyrics is, every day there's a train leaving. Either way, there's a world, you know, there's a way to go. And it basically talks about, you know, leaving a relationship. But also in my life, there's been so many things that I've left. Religion, school, jobs.

Yeah.

Relationships. And it just makes me think about having self agency and not staying in something that's toxic.

Yeah.

But just taking the train in one direction or the other.

And also when you talk to other people, you know that they don't necessarily have to choose your train.

No, they don't.

There's so many options. They might decide to go. Yeah.

But helping someone see their own self agency is good too.

Yeah. Thank you. I hadn't really heard the details of the story, so it's. I'm glad to get to know more about it, about your story. I appreciate that.

Oh, thanks. Thanks for listening.

Gives me a lot of perspective. I'll talk to you again sometime soon.

Okay.

All right.