Her Horrific Childhood in the CHILDREN OF GOD Sex Cult ft. Daniella Mestyanek Young

it was growing up in a religious prison camp for the first 10 years of my life I saw my parents for one hour a day and other than that I was in dorms with other children we would work for most of the morning basically cleaning and doing manual labor in the communes my mom's married after the prophet when she's 13 and expected to sleep with whatever men demanded of her and suddenly they realized okay this is a problem she's pregnant the father's 39 years old if this starts happening a lot the cops are going to come shut us down hard [Music] hey my name is shalice ansola and this is Colts to Consciousness where we discuss leaving high demand religions or organizations and finding healing and Independence through awareness and true individual sovereignty if you're listening only definitely go to my YouTube where you can see our faces at Cults to Consciousness you can like subscribe hit the Bell so you don't miss an episode where we're trying to release more episodes per week so make sure that you don't miss that and it's just fun to join in on the conversation I love interacting with you as much as possible so today's guest this is someone who is recommended by one of you guys Gwendolyn on Instagram thank you for making the connection and it's something that has been requested also big shout out to Sunny McNair A commenter who introduced me to the children of God Colts through one of their comments so when Gwendolyn reached out on Instagram with someone who was part of the children of God I was really excited to do the interview I also want to take this moment to put out a very big content warning for this episode we will be discussing child essay and it is very heavy and it's one of those topics that can be hard to listen to so please make your mental health a top priority while listening through this this woman grew up in the children of God cult and they'll tell you they are fundamentalist evangelicals born-again missionaries who preach that the end is at hand but critics including some former members take a more Sinister view they describe a scary sex obsessed doomsday sect which abuses children and practices mind control and then as the years went by because he was perverted himself he tried to think of justifications so he got a revelation that God's only law was love that when Jesus came he fulfilled the original a lot of Ten Commandments and that his only law was love and in order to show God's love to normal people because they can't understand spiritual love you have to show it through sex I was subjected to two months of one of the most incredible ordeals of brainwashing of exorcisms of hard labor my personal effects were burned I was I was laid on the floor and then in a ritual exorcism where the spirit of my mother was cast out why didn't you just leave because after having been in that situation for four years I was under an immense amount of fear and guilt that God would strike me dead and I was ordered in the group to have sex with a 10 year old by the leadership of the group did you yes she was third generation in this cult mostly grew up in South America and at 15 she was able to escape put herself through school went to college uh just completely transformed her life took back that control that sovereignty and then found herself in the Army she was part of the first female engagement team and Rose up to the ranks and we're going to be talking a lot about that in another episode after we dive into her childhood but first thank you so much for joining us Daniela mestanek Young thank you so much for having me shelis I'm excited to be here absolutely and I forgot to mention one of the biggest parts of your intro you wrote a book called uncultured and oh my goodness I was speed listening to this because after we were introduced we decided to record pretty soon thereafter and I wanted to make sure to get through your book and so pretty much all day yesterday I'm just glued to my bed listening to the audio version listening to you tell it which was really beautiful and it just hit me in so many different ways I was crying at one point I'm cheering for you and other points it is just a heart-wrenching story as it is inspirational and beautiful and I just have to say from someone who is also a survivor of not only being raised in a cult nothing like yours but a survivor of that and also childhood abuse I just have to say thank you for sharing your story and for being so brave and for being so vulnerable it really touched me yesterday in a way that I I wasn't expecting I guess because you know when you're going through the traumas and you're like oh I'm fine I'm I've put that behind me and then something comes up and you're like well looks like I got some work to do so I just think it's beautiful that you're able to share your story so openly and allow other people to give them give them the permission to heal like you did I think it's it's just really beautiful so thank you thank you so much for saying that you know and I'm sure you talk about this a lot because of Cults to Consciousness but I think when you said you know we think we went through it and we think we heal but so many of us have the tendency to just walk away from these high demand religions and not try to think about it and not try to deal with it and this is sort of one of the themes of uncultured it was like I escaped them at 15 I walked away I got my education supposedly I was fine and I had this idea that I could just sort of out Perfection all of it right I could just not think about it and I could just keep doing what we're all trained to do and high control religions which is just be perfect and be number one and finally when you're a captain in the Army and you're still not healed and you still feel broken you know you kind of see the LIE there um and so I I appreciate that you know and I found so many other people's stories to be my guide when I finally realized I needed to start dealing with this and so it's really beautiful that now my story can do that for other people too yeah absolutely and I forgot to mention as well in the intro that you are about to graduate with I don't want to get this wrong a master of arts in organizational Psychology from a Harvard Extension School congratulations thank you so much it's really cool I mean they they conferred the degree this March which was literally 20 years exactly from when I walked away from the cult oh my graduating on my birthday they already sell uncultured at the Harvard bookstore so it's really really cool and you know I think so so many times we're like kind of going through our lives and doing things we're interested and now I kind of look back and it's like yeah I was raised on a cult and then I joined the army which is another kind of call and you know studied terrorists which is another kind of extreme group high demand groups and then studying group Behavior at Harvard you know sort of I come up on come out on the other side now as I like to say as a scholar of Cults extreme groups and extremely bad leadership and you know really I like to focus on the parallels in groups that we don't call Cults right like we all know Cults are bad and I grew up in one of the worst of them so I have this really obvious really extreme story but when we break down toxic group Behavior into parts we can see that those can be found in all kinds of groups right and you don't have to be considered a cult or a terrorist group or a gang to be like a group that uses coercive control and right for control on people yeah and I love that you bring that up and that's why it's also so exciting for me to talk to you because not only did you grow up in a very extreme cult but now you are educated in cult manipulation and so you have this clear bird's eye view perspective where you can go back and look at your life and go oh yeah that makes sense or I didn't realize that was going on when I was in it which is basically the tagline for every cult is like I didn't know that I was in a cult until I knew I was in a college usually you don't see it because that's what you grew up in and that's how you were raised and so on that note I would love for you to give an explanation of what children of God is kind of how it came to be and the basis of the whole religion yeah for sure you know there's a reason that I started off uncultured the epigraph just says the first rule of Cults is you're never an occult I love that one this has been in sort of a toxic group uh can understand that so children of God was started in 1968 by this kind of you know consistently failing wannabe preacher guy who then suddenly finds his moment on Huntington Beach during the hippie era and if we look at a lot of Cults we see this a lot right like someone that just hasn't had that much success in anything until finally they find their huge thing um Joseph Smith being a great example hey um um but so so he started you know along with his teenage kids using young pretty people and music to recruit followers and you know the other thing we know is that Cults pop up in time and space and that is because when like societies are getting very complicated when people are starting to realize that the systems are failing us and the groups are toxic and we're trying to pull things down and find new ways to be and new ways to do life um people can get drawn to Cults right and also when the world is confusing people are drawn to Cults because of clarity and so you know children of God starts in America in the late 60s 70s moves over to Asia in the 80s moves to South America in the 90s and not move spreads right and this was kind of how the path of Cults throughout the world went and my family went right along with them so my grandfather after a bad LSD trip where he claims he met Satan is sitting in a park he's a college-educated CPA and he's sitting in a park the next day trying to figure out what to do with his life because he's just had this very negative religious experience and uh up walk the happy bubbly children of God and off he goes with them um and brings in his young girlfriend as well who's my grandmother Margarita and her mother is so happy that her troubled daughter found something good to do with her life that she actually donates a house to the prophet um that's how my family became kind of important people and my grandfather also being one of the few college educated followers ends up you know being in the finances of children of God forever still runs the money of what's left of them today um and this is how my mother comes to be in 1972 like one of the first 10 children born into this group now I say that the children of God went sex love and Jesus kind of your basic Evangelical Christianity sorry not sex loving Jesus over to religious prostitution pedophilia for God and this constant preparation for the Apocalypse and the important thing to understand is like that takes a decade to happen right and in this decade is the process of a group becoming a cult because what we don't talk about too much is that occult is not just a list of qualities that a group is it's also this journey that a cult goes on um I'm really breaking this down in my neck no I Love It Up America oh yes and so you know so it's this process of isolating your followers and gaining complete control and then just slowly slowly slowly making it slightly more extreme and there's this thing that I am I'm coining the sacred assumption that I think is really helpful when we think about cults so like the sacred assumption in children of God was that this random man David Berg was truly the prophet of God and as long as you believed that everything he said makes sense right like you can justify anything in Nexium the modern day sex call it right the assumptions that Keith Renee was the smartest man in the world and he'd found this process for maximizing human potential that worked and as long as you believe that you can justify everything else L Ron Hubbard Joseph Smith the list goes on and on can talk about you know you know the idea of dying for the flag or even that America is a country Worth Dying For and if you believe that you can justify anything right so the sacred assumption is really this important part of getting to ends justify the means mentality which is kind of when you're in your end game when you're true really and truly occult um but it's this process right and so I say that really what set David Berg aside from just all your other kind of Hardcore high demand Evangelical Christianity that was coming up at that time you know his mother was an Evangelical revivalist in Florida and all he did was he took Purity culture and control of sex and he flipped it and he went from sex is bad sex is only supposed to be in marriage Sexes you know all the things that Evangelical Purity teaches you and he just switched it to No Sex Is Love right and God is love and God made sex and therefore sex is for everyone including children and you know it became this like free love thing and we just we just do what we do and the world doesn't understand it um but of course it wasn't free love it was forced polyamory and you know there's this other thing that we don't talk about too often but I think is pretty important is that Purity culture and pedophilia culture are two sides at the same coin right they are both obsession with the sexuality of young children and especially young girls you and I growing up me and the sex call and you and Mormonism likely had a ton of similar experiences regarding our sexuality and our bodies and how we were taught to think about it and similar impacts in our lives today even though we come from these sort of what seems to be opposite sides of the spectrum yeah I think the overlap there is the shame where you're just always you feel ashamed of your body you feel like it doesn't belong to you you feel like it's the property of men usually is how it goes and there's just no ownership there's no self-sovereignty which is what I'm I mostly talk about right as a self-sovereignty and I think that's the hardest part and so I'm I'm really interested to also get into more of this reverse Purity culture thing because we talk about purity culture so much on this channel and the damage and the harm that it causes I think it's important because there's such a fine Middle Ground where I often get comments of people saying oh what do you want does everyone go around and sleep with each other I'm like no that's not what I want I don't I don't want people to be super obsessed with sex I don't want people to think that sex is of Satan I just want people to have a normal normal healthy sexuality kind of like our own biology what we're programmed to do and so I'm I'm excited to talk about from your perspective what happens when you flip and you go to the opposite side because it's not good on the other side either guys we're not preaching one extreme or the other we're saying find that middle ground yes exactly um you know I I will say this all the time and it's a big theme in my book uncultured is it anytime a group is trying to legislate sex between consenting adults like it's complex it's problematic and that is basically every religion every branch of the military many many companies right like most universities and schools and just like you said people always go oh what so you don't think we need to have any laws protecting any people and it's like no but I have never seen a group legislate or regulate sex and put any emphasis on how complex this is and how easily it can be abused you know and especially when you know when we talk about similarities right so what is a huge topic Mormonism is Purity culture but what is a huge Topic in Mormonism sex you all talk about sex a lot yeah it's it is a sex cult I say it all the time you just talk about not having sex talk about not having sex and we were the opposite everything in our life was sex so even you know there were rules at some point put in that were supposed to protect the children which you know I always say is just so ludicrous that people believe that telling the pedophiles to stop raping the children work right but there were definitely some people that grew up whose parents protected them somewhat or who didn't get you know have to deal with some of the abuse that you read about me going through and uncultured but they were still being raised in a world that was obsessed with sex right the children of God is still the cult that produced what has been called the worst artifact worst cult artifact of all times which is the 762-page davidito book which is a manual on how to raise children with pedophilia for God oh my God and you know all of our parents read that all of the adults knew this right and and we had a another comic book and this is a thing Cults always have comic books getting into that in my next book too um because imagery is really useful for programming right and also boiling down arguments that don't have too much substance to them and so we had this comic book called Heaven's girl and it was you know like what Comics books are right she was a superhero she was fighting the Antichrist soldiers in the end time and she was also intended to train us how to be raped and or gang raped for God and submit and not fight and this was a thing we were reading from you know I don't even know we would we would play Heaven's girl when I was six and seven you know that was like our hide and seek game was your outside hiding from the Antichrist forces and when you get caught you are going to be raped and tortured and killed and that's the game we're playing oh my gosh when we call it a sex cult like it doesn't just stop at you know there was sexual abuse of children it was in the programming it was in the indoctrination and it really was like the Crux of the entire group was it was started by an incestuous narcissistic pedophile who gathered other people like Kim and you know radicalize them all into extremism exactly the way he wanted it to go oh going through your book I was just like I said speechless and stunned and just jaw to the floor of I can't believe this stuff was happening and it seemed like the adults were okay with it and I wanted to get your perspective on this like a two-part question because you are third generation so that means your mom was also born in it so that was all that she knew as well and she got pregnant with you at 15 and I'm wondering because it was so normal do you feel like from your perspective that the adults found it okay and or that they also kind of felt weird and off about it because you talked about this this birthday party of the Sun Signs where it's everyone in the the commune who had a birthday who was I think Gemini would celebrate together but it just seemed like a dress-up sex orgy and I my jaw was on the floor when I'm hearing from your perspective of I think seven wearing this negligee no panties and you're just expected to go around and adults performing sex acts there like everything was normal and I'm just I could not fathom it yeah um I mean it really was it was absolutely normalized right and and part of so so there's two parts here so there's two parts of the children of God one of the reasons you don't hear about the children of God that much even though it was one of the most heinous sex Cults is because they did a pretty good job of rebranding this came about in large part because of my birth so my mother at 14 gets pregnant right when my mom was 13 was when David Berg was full-on in his like it's okay to have sex with children phase he had 14 girls of all Daughters of his leaders sent to his house for special training um they ranged from 14 years old to three and he married all of them and he did you know sexual stuff with all of them and the mother of the three-year-old ran the ceremony oh my gosh right so oh my God like when when you will hear people try to say like we didn't know there was some bad stuff at the top there was some bad apples right which I really take aim at in uncultured like no you know people that just stop at saying there were bad apples and aren't looking for like where's the toxins right like why is this Apple going bad yeah that would be like someone being like Oh I have an ant problem and just killing the one ant and then stopping right like you're not worried about where this is coming in from so you know my mom's married off to the prophet when she's 13 and these were all just ceremonial they weren't really considered his wives yeah she is basically at the age of 14 his secretary and expected to sleep with whatever men demanded of her in the evening and so by the time she's 14 she's pregnant and suddenly they realize okay this is a problem she's pregnant the father's 39 years old if this starts happening a lot the cops are going to come shut us down hard right so that this is when they went into well now you can't have sex with girls once they start having their periods until they're 16. so before that it was implied that it was still okay um eventually bird dies there's some sorts of rules put in place but there's kind of a before and an after right when they realize that the world is out to get to get us they've called us a cult we're in danger they go all over the world they change their name to the family of love and eventually the family International and they become much more of a child trafficking organization and Cults are always about Labor so this is kind of always going to come up but the children of God really did it and in the 80s and 90s they got into childhood education videos really really hardcore um I'll I'll send you a link to one of the videos maybe you can share it with your followers [Music] [Music] [Music] oh thank you also the in the last days [Music] sort of from the age of one to ten I was used as a child actress little like apocalypse Lindsay Lohan oh boy and we would then sell all these videos both sort of your basic Evangelical Christianity fun kids playing around and also just generic educational not even religious at all videos even your dog's like I don't agree with this what's going on and we would also produce like internal videos just for the family right so we've got our our inside stuff and our outside stuff and we sold millions and millions of these videos Around the World um and that's really what the children were for is we were the workforce both to keep the the communes these huge communes going and to be the sympathetic little children making money on the street of course from Mormonism you understand using children as a Workforce yeah missionaries yes exactly exactly and I think Mormonism has a good parallel here where they once believed in polygamy and then at some point they were like okay well we can't do it anymore because of the outside world but we still believe that this is ultimately correct yeah right and so of course if you don't change your values you're not going to change the systems or what is going on in the group and that was exactly the same thing that happened with the children of God they were like well we believe in all this sex but we especially with children and whatnot but we can't practice it because of the outside world but we don't say our profit was wrong and we don't you know sort of apologize for anything that happened in the past we're just gonna we're gonna move forward and be better um and those of you that know I joined the military later if this sounds like the Army's attitude the military's attitude toward rape culture in the military yes oh my gosh yeah we're gonna say we're better going to say we have all these new values but in reality all of the same stuff is still going on under the surface yeah so you know back to then I would say your original question about like did the adults know you know I think that my mom grew up in all this stuff but she also grew up so isolated and so controlled that she kind of became this True Believer and stayed in the cult for a lot of her adulthood and so you know it's not till after she's read on cultured and you know there's some pretty intense scenes of me with a specific Predator named Uncle Jerry who was a famous guy in our cult and in the broader world too and you know my mom said to me like of course he was abusing me when I was a child but because the rules had changed it never crossed my mind that he was uh you know abusing my daughters right and I think really really this was the mind [ __ ] that the children of God did on people because everything was about love everything was about just kind of being that phony Evangelical God is love everything is great um which covered up some of the worst forms of abuse but you still walk away from that going but they were loving people who loved me right because that's all it seems to overlap with that almost narcissistic personality where they tell you no it's I do this because I love you and I'm hurting you because it's going to help you and it's for your own good and when I'm going through your book and hearing those stories of the punishments that you had to go through just for simply asking a question it blew my mind would you be willing to share some of the the rules and the strictness and kind of the environment that you were raised in aside from what we've already mentioned yeah no great question you know and and sometimes the sexual abuse from this cult gets so much Focus that we don't really talk about everything else so like I describe you know especially in the 80s and 90s when I growing up it was growing up in a religious prison camp you know really is kind of what it comes down to for the first 10 years of my life I saw my parents for one hour a day and other than that I was in dorms with other children we would work for most of the morning basically cleaning and doing manual labor in the communes which was called Jesus job time um and then we actually would be sent into our Ministries which was like Child Care Ministry kitchen ministry right or yeah out on the streets selling videos and doing all this stuff so it was all kinds of labor but the you know I think the biggest like to me the biggest form of abuse in the whole thing was just like growing up in two straight lines with no spontaneous moments of Joy like you could never be sure what the rules were what was going to get you in trouble what wasn't going to get you in trouble all right because it was just so many adults and you know we can think of just like one family with parents who are very authoritarian yeah and like when you're scared of your parents and you never know like what's going to make them angry one day or what's what's going to be fine one day now just compound that by 150 adults who you live with and all of them have complete control over you and all of them are encouraged to use very very extreme forms of discipline so David Berg famously advocated for spanking six-month-old babies and they would use things like silence restriction right if you've said something that was considered to be disrespectful or doubting or out of the spirit you would just not be allowed to speak to anybody for days sometimes weeks um and they would you know I talk in uncultured about how they would like hang these signs around your neck sometimes these cardboard signs it would say embarrassing things um so one of the examples I use in the book is don't talk to me I'm disrespectful right so that everyone in this commune knows that they are supposed to be actively shunning you and actively ignoring you and essentially acting like you're dead um as your punishment I will say one of the things I've done now that I put that quote in my book and copyrighted it is I have t-shirts that say don't talk to me I'm disrespectful and they're on my website I love that that's how you get revenge on the ant you make money on the the thing that was meant to silence you and now you're so good oh my gosh I love that you know I think it's it's pretty beautiful when we talk about like owning our stories in the process of healing but there's also this like you know I took four years I wrote down all of the worst most painful things that happened to me and like I own that now it's a product that not only helps other people but they pay me money for it yeah you know and the photo that's on the cover it's this photo of me as a two-year-old little girl dressed up in tinfoil armor you know being trafficked in Japan by religious extremists and I did not want the book to have a photo of me on the cover I was like it's not this kind of book um but eventually I sort of realized I was like you know what like I didn't get to control any of that but I own this photo and I am going to use it to tell my story to make to make money you know and obviously to help people right but I we focus on all of those other kinds of things that happen when you write your story or talk about your story and I just like to say that physically owning your story sometimes can be really really healing as well absolutely and there were so many times throughout your book where I was just cheering for you and your uh quote Disobedience which was actually just curiosity and wonder of the world and asking questions and I think one of my favorite moments was correct me if I'm wrong I think you were at six or seven you played a game of telephone and realized at the end of it how how twisted everything got yeah you know so what we were taught about history was kind of whatever David Burr copied from other old coercive religious leaders and so we were taught that you know the the whole book of the Torah right like everything that happens supposedly in the first 500 years of Christian history was just passed down by word of mouth until Moses wrote it down that is what we were taught and you're not supposed to question any of it so we play Broken telephone and you know I often get asked like how the cult didn't break me because they tried so so so so hard and I think it's just because I love logic yeah I'm very very likely not neurotypical and I just love logic and so to me it was like you just showed us proof that 10 people can barely sit around in a circle and pass a phrase and it was a verse that we all knew very well pass one phrase down without it getting distorted so I pipe up and I'm like well how can the Bible be true and um yeah that is the beginning of the very intense punishment scene that yeah you get to walk through alongside me in the book um but I also think it could just sort of description of how I was my whole life in the cult um and I now have that child so it's uh it's challenging really we always answer her questions oh I would say I have the daughter I deserve and one of the very hard and fast parenting rules that we have is we never ever say because I told you so like we have to explain ourselves to our child because she's a human and she deserves that and so much of parenting is just our whims or us trying to control our children based on what Society like approves at the time and so you know it's interesting for us uh my husband and I because we're very knowledgeable about the fact that we don't know how to be pair parents and in 30 years when she's a grown-up there's going to be 30 more years of psychology and everything and telling us we did it all wrong so the best we can do is just treat her as though she were a tiny human and not what a lot of people do and treat children like they are just objects to be controlled yeah oh that's so touching and I think the one thing that just really jumped out at me when you said oh I have a daughter that's basically like me it it's such a beautiful thing because you get to essentially re-parent yourself in the way that you weren't able to get as a child you're able to give her all the things that you couldn't have and show her the experience of what real love is and what boundaries are and what curiosity should be and celebrate that Curiosity and that just makes me want to cry I love it so much I don't think you got the daughter you deserved I think that you got the perfect daughter for you to be able to heal through her in a way do you ever feel that that's the case no I totally do you know and at the the end of the book is a an epilogue that I think is is pretty beautiful and that's when my daughter comes into it and you know she was born my mom was with me my mom who's no longer in the Cults you know was with me there and it's like 30 almost 30 years later this baby that looks exactly like her first child's right is placed in her arms and we sort of call her the do-over baby you know she's the she's the first one and four generations to not be born you know associated with occults and you know it's not like the impacts go away right of course we pass down generational trauma and also um just like we get triggered right like as parents we get triggered by the things we would have gotten in trouble for as children so it's a constant process of you know it's it's both beautiful what you're saying like it's like I get to do all of these things for her but I will also be like like I was at a school assembly the other day and her class did this little wrap for Arbor Day about trees and it was just so normal and beautiful and I'm sitting there in the front row with all this pride and I'm just trying so hard not to just burst into sobs you know in in the front row of this performance because it you know when when you see that beautiful childhood it also brings up like why didn't I get that and there's really no answer for that um one of the quotes I love about healing is healing is when we finally accept that there isn't a do-over you know like we can't go back and change it we can just only go forward with who we are now um and it's hard it's all hard yeah I think another part of the book that I was cheering for is when the female leader came into play because it seemed like she wanted to put a stop to a lot of the harmful practices that that the I guess you call him grandpa that Grandpa put in place the the prophet and the leader and I wanted to get your perspective on if you felt like she knew the whole time this isn't right and as soon as he dies I'm gonna turn [ __ ] around or what you think her intentions were with making all those seemingly positive changes um you know so what I will say about her Maria Karen Zerby is you know what's true about many cult joiners is like they are also manipulated you know David Berg got his hooks into her when she was 19 years old and manipulated her for decades before she took over however she wasn't necessarily better she was just her own brand of crazy um and so she did you know outwardly she's doing all these things to protect the children but you know she was having she was sexually abusing her own son when he wasn't even two years old you know so and and this was cataloged and this was documented and they were proud of this so again it's it's part of this greater Narrative of the organization that the founder was a little wonky and some people took his teachings way out of control but really we were just nice missionaries and then it all got better when he died and like that really couldn't be further from the truth um one of the things that happened was she codified things so she created this Charter of Rights and responsibilities now I believe this was the beginning of the end of the children of God as it existed kind of for 40 years with this with 10 000 members and this huge militaristic structure um and this is because once you give humans the idea of Rights they don't give them back without a fight right and so you're taking all these people who have given up all of their rights for 30 years right and all of these children who've been raised never to have any rights and all of set in you've given us some rights and so like for me it was the first time I was eight years old and it was the first time I had language for the fact that adults were not supposed to have sex with children right like I didn't even have language for that before that so in those ways those things really can change you know really to change some things and make it a big difference um and she put rules around punishments and those kinds of things right like you weren't allowed to use silence restriction anymore but she also brought in this concept of like having sex with Jesus in the spirit which meant that like every child then was just subject to hearing large orgies of hundreds of adults sitting around having Spirit sex with Jesus out loud oh so all this to say it didn't necessarily get better it just got different and it's one of the cases of occult with the leader dying and successfully passing over to a Founder who kept all of the same sort of command and control um that had been set up for her yeah and so you were in Brazil for the first eight years of your life were you eight was it eight when you moved to the other compound that was a little bit more isolated so I was in she was born in the Philippines and then I was in Japan until about the age of three until we got deported from there um a year in Peru and then a decade in Brazil um and so in the middle of that was when like we went from these huge communes of we lived with 100 to 150 people down to you know one of the things the new leader did when she took over was she said okay you can have a you know family children of God commune with only four adults and so and everything was to be decided on consensus and voting um so it was really just like a whole reorganization just like a company would go through and they choose the different leadership style or whatever so I was 10 when we moved into like a smaller commune which is us with another Brazilian family everything got smaller including the big walls that surrounded us right and this was when I started like learning the language and being sent out on the street a lot more to raise money but one of the significant things for me was like if I speak the language of this country I'm safer I have more freedom and you know if I need to run away I can because for the first six years I had just lived on a white people American commune and didn't you know didn't speak Portuguese at all um so that for me was really significant and I taught myself to read in Portuguese uh with a set of encyclopedias that I found that because they were in Portuguese hadn't been like you know usually they would take any books we had from the outside world and just get rid of all the pages that had like any stories from outside anything about Evolution anything with too much science right anything so I found these books that were like not destroyed because they were in another language and so I would like in secret with dictionaries and stuff um try to teach myself Portuguese um and I did I still speak it to this day that's amazing I loved watching the transformation of this little girl who was just wanting to be independent she just wants to learn you know you talk about taking a test in school and passing in a third fourth grade level and then they put you in first grade and you're just like no and you you're just this whole time you're cheering for this little girl that just wants to learn and so I loved in that moment where you're reading the dictionary you're learning the language you had someone in the household who was willing to teach you Portuguese as well which was awesome you're figuring out how to cook for the first time and just given the the responsibility of cooking for the entire house and you're just like how do I turn on an oven but the way that you figured it out and just kept pushing forward was so inspirational it just shows that when there's a will there's a way and you can figure it out I just think and I want to say as a disclaimer I know that's not the case for everyone not everyone has the opportunity to do that but in your situation where it seemed like and probably more than seemed like the odds were against you and you were able to poke your head up out of the dirt and just find the light and I just thought that was so beautiful thank you you know I give so much credit to my mom and there's this beautiful story in the first part of the book where I'm three years old and this is one of my first memories it's my mom sneaking me out of group time so we can have some alone time so she can teach me to read and she tells me you know what her father told her when she was young in her father's case it was like justifying like oh we're not going to send you to school in my in my mom's case it was just her giving her a tool giving me a tool that had helped her and what she said was you know the only thing you need in life is for someone to teach you to read and everything else you can teach yourself and that was just kind of one of those things that imprinted on me so young and that's not to as you said you know take away from the fact that like nobody can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps right like that's physically impossible to do um that phrase was actually intended to connote impossibility when it first came out and everyone needs help and I got so much help along the way but I definitely have always had sort of this determination and also just love of of Education um I'm probably still gonna accidentally get a PhD in sociology here that's amazing I think one of the most infuriating things about your situation is they were saying all this was because of what God wanted or it was something in the Bible or whatever religious texts you were looking at well what was it uh spare the rod spoil the child and they took it literally and just the way that they viewed even hospitals like you had these major accidents and you were terrified of going to what you called systemized hospitals because they were of Satan I think that's the most aggravating part is that people doing these horrible things in God's name like how have you been able to unwind all of that what was your perspective at the time because I know you were kind of rebellious about I don't even know if I want to believe in God which got you into more trouble but it seemed like you kind of ping-ponged back between wanting to hold on to this hope and also saying a big F you to the guy upstairs yeah you know I think like sort of for me it's always come back to the logic and so and and maybe this is a bad thing you know obviously humans come up with religions because they're trying to explain the supernatural because we need something more and maybe I'm just a person that never needed something more I kind of feel like I was always just like I was just born an atheist to religious extremists and I you know but when that's all you know it's not like you are sure either right so like since I was six I was like I don't believe in God but then of course I was kind of scared right like what if they're right what you know um and it it wasn't until you know for the longest time it was just me I thought something was wrong with me like I don't belong here this group is not for me and it wasn't until I had my moment of what I call the crack in the brainwashing right when that sacred assumption gets broken and this was on 911 this is a chapter in the book uh called Babylon the [ __ ] which is what we called America and you know on 911 I am watching live television for the first time seeing the towers come down hearing the term religious extremists but then hearing my people sort of like praising and thanking God for his long promise judgment on America like the same thing we hear all those TV preachers do every time there's a tragedy right oh this is a punishment for XYZ and I in that moment had my kind of like are we the bad guys you know like are we religious extremists too um and that was really the time that I was like okay you know I need to get away um but I do say that I think one of the saddest outcomes of growing up in the children of God is that for most of us like religion it's just not an option right like when you're when you're raised with something that you're taught to believe so intensely and then you realize that it's not right I always just kind of feel like you know short of being knocked off my horse on the road to Damascus and having some religious experience you know like what religion would I even choose what God would I even choose to believe in um and you know for most of the time that doesn't bother me when people that you love die it's obviously very challenging to not be religious and that's one of those moments where I can really understand that having some sort of faith is comforting [Music] I think one of the things that stood out to me as well was your Humanity regardless of everything that you had been put through and forced to do you had this this wanting to make people feel happy and and you were talking about that moment when the the 9 11 thing happened and you were forced to go out and continue to try and get money from people by singing to them and initially they were very happy to have someone singing these beautiful songs but then when you asked for money or donations they were upset and then you said can we just sing for people I thought that was really sweet and showing that your humanity is still there and you still care about other people and especially when you were able to form this really beautiful relationship with the boy that you were in the commune with the backslider as you called him I just loved seeing you redefine relationships and re what's the word you took control of your life in a way that made sense to you even though you had very little control all around you it was a beautiful moment of reclaiming yourself do you want to talk about that at all yeah so you know I don't remember sort of my first sexual experience that's how young I was right I was probably somewhere between four and five um just from like the mixed memories that I have the first time a man like did bad bad things to me and so when you're growing up with that you know I kind of describe how here I am hitting puberty and like against my will starting to become interested in boys which like I really don't want to happen because everything about sex to me is just torture and Punishment and wrong um also that was the only thing we knew how to do right so it was kind of like I I like this boy now what do I do well I'm gonna go ask him to have sex with me but you know it turned into a really beautiful scene like definitely my first love and it was just this moment of like me deciding like this is gonna be my first time you know like and definitely for years when I wasn't talking about the cult right whenever it was like oh when did you lose your virginity in college you know I would just be like oh when I was 14 with this boy and it was kind of like I was choosing a normal story you know like I didn't get to have anything like a normal life and one of the the things when you are sexually abused as a child is you don't get to have that normal sexual Awakening that teenagers are supposed to have similarly in Purity culture you don't necessarily get to have it either right because it's so loaded down with shame and it's so like you're not supposed to to have this and so it was kind of this decision and it was significant that it was with a boy who was no longer in the Cults you know because it was like I am making this decision I'm not doing what and you know if I if I got caught I would be in huge trouble uh for having sex even in the sex Cults but like I'm doing this I'm making this decision I guess it's that sovereignty that you talked about though I wouldn't have thought about it at the time yeah you're kind of taking a stand and saying like you said I'm gonna decide to do this and I'm gonna decide that this is my first time and I'm gonna decide how I want to proceed with it and it was just such a beautiful scene in the book so I appreciate you for putting it in there especially as a contrast to other things that we were able to be a witness to that you wrote about and I also found it interesting that when you moved to America this sort of invisible veil was lifted where you started to realize oh not everyone has walls around them things seem better like that you called America Babylon the horror but people were so nice to you and you're like are these supposed to be the ones that are ruled by Satan or you're supposed to be destroyed and it's good that you are able to start to put these pieces together and perk your head up a little bit more and start to question a little bit more and then you were sent to Mexico and I was like no she just she just got oh you know and yeah back to the communes yeah it was pretty significant in America like like even just describing like the shock of like seeing huge houses in America without walls around them like that is just not something you see in South America um and you know part of the reason the cult moved two places had huge presence in places like India and Brazil one was because rich people live behind walls with a lot of staff and so it maybe doesn't draw too much attention and things are hidden behind those walls but also because it's really easy to recruit people out of slums into your like nice white people commune um and then even if they don't like it you know even if they think it's toxic or abusive like what are they going back to you know so uh the the big walls were like a really huge part of keeping us separated of keeping us isolated and of keeping children especially who you can't really lie to and program in the same way you can with adults because they just keep asking questions and don't buy into their own programming so you have to keep them separate right so all of a sudden we moved to the U.S briefly but there are no walls right like we are just living in a house so like they they can't send us out on the streets in the middle of the day right like in Brazil a child begging on the streets at noon on a school day nobody is gonna bat an eye but in America like you're gonna have issues with that right so um it just literally like the walls came down and I got closer to the outside world and I actually kind of got this experience where I started to feel a little bit like a a normal American kid and then boom we go back um and you know of course to flash forward to part two really interesting when at 22 after I've worked hard for six years to put myself through high school and college and put my life together and get through some of my traumas and then what happens I joined the army and boom what is on any every army base really big walls right you are now back behind again um for this like really really intense parallel of Disappearing Behind the Walls of the commune you know and and I think the the thing that like everyone thinks they know what goes on everyone thinks they know they know what missionaries do and their little religious compounds and everyone thinks they know what happens to the daughters of America when they join the military and disappear behind the high walls of the con of the Department of Defense and unless you've read uncultured or one or two other honest and hard-hitting books like you don't know what we go through yeah yeah and that's what we're going to be talking about in the second episode so to wrap this one up I want to end on the story of you getting out and what made you decide to be like this is the moment I'm done I'm getting out and what that process was like of actually escaping back into America yeah so first I will say you know we talked about like I was I was that challenging child right like every parent that has one of these you know right like she's going to be a whippersnapper when she grows up but now she's difficult and they couldn't punish it out of me and so I even from the age of like six and seven I was hearing people say oh my God you argue so much you should be a lawyer which was not a thing in our world right like we were all to grow up and be members of the family that was the only option but sort of through accidents right I got this idea in my head that I was going to grow up and be a lawyer and so I knew I needed to go to high school I knew I needed to go to college did not end up becoming a lawyer but it did get me pretty far and so also 16 was the year you became an adult so when I have my crack in the brainwashing on 9 11. I've got about a year and a half until I turn 16. and I know I'll be pregnant at 16 right like at 16 you are expected to start having sex with everyone and not using birth control and my mother had eight children she had seven kids in 14 years and stuff you know she's probably had 10 pregnancies in 14 years and I was like I am not doing it and so I launched my little Rebellion um and I you know it took me about a year and a half um and what I will say is like I realized that if they thought they could save me they would try and there's some really horrific stories about ways the children of God tried um exorcisms are not fun uh and so I realized that I needed to break kind of like the top rule right like you have to make them think you're the Bad Apple and get you out really fast and so for me that climaxed in literally climbing over the walls of the commune in the middle of the night to go out and have sex with a boy that I had met in Mexico um and this would now make me sort of Untouchable um I get caught and it goes down in a way I didn't expect but it was sort of like this intentional process of like first and breaking small rules and then I'm just making everyone popcorn for dinner and then I'm refusing to speak Spanish and go out on the street and raise money and then I am you know breaking like the rule that they're not gonna get to keep me um and yeah so that was sort of how I got excommunicated and I'm like not quite 16 yet so it was it was March so it was you know I turned 16 in May so I was almost 16. I end up you know my parents don't know what to do with me I always thought it was gonna I was gonna have to wait till I was 18 to leave the cult because I didn't have anywhere to go because my grandparents are in the cult too um and fortunately you know I my mom is has been married off to a man who's 20 years older than her and he has some older daughters who've already left the Cults and so one of my stepsisters who had only met three times at that point you know 25 years old just out of the call herself struggling to get her life together and agrees like yeah the 15 year old can come live with me um and so you know she gives me a place to crash and I you know we go to enroll me in high school all I have is a social security card and a passport like no record I've just moved from Mexico um and they tell me they're like we can't enroll you you don't exist um which itself becomes a big theme in uncultured is kind of like me trying to prove that I exist and then wondering if I want to exist yes and so I went from no school to 4 000 students in one of the largest public high schools in Houston Texas oh my gosh which leads me to this very dramatic moment right in the book it's called Dazed and Confused and it's kind of like the scene in Mean Girls but extra it's you know so much of what we do when we come from these lives of extreme trauma is just try so hard to pass and that leads to the opposite of what you are talking about on this podcast right that leads to living a fractured life I call it closeted so the majority of my peers from children of God are still living in this closet still operate under the belief that if anybody knows about their past they will just be like voted off the island right like just completely socially rejected and one of I think the most healing things when I wrote uncultured was was realizing like I put on so much armor and I didn't need it you know most people in the world are lovely and want to help you and want to connect and as soon as I started taking off that armor I started integrating myself and meeting wonderful people um but there's a lot of hardship before we get there of course and I can't wait to dive into your high school years your college Years and then into the military and just as a disclaimer we're not calling the military occult we're saying it is cult-like let me say something about that because I'll also pitch my Tick Tock so any listener if you're interested you can find me on Tick Tock where I I just do a lot of content about this that we're going to talk about which is essentially to say groups do not break up so easily into cult not cult right so yeah the prologue of uncultured is me standing there in basic training holding this 50 pound duffel bag over my head and going oh I just joined another cult and I know that I'm about to have this sort of high demand experience again and so we're looking at the parallels right we're looking at where toxic Behavior can come in in the book I'm writing now it's called the culting of America and I do I share a lot of this content on Tick Tock I am actually building a cultiness spectrum right these 10 areas of group behavior that like if you do all of these things congratulations you're a cult however guarantee that every single person alive has experienced some of these things in some of the groups that they're in and that doesn't mean that your group is a sex cult that's going to traffic children but it does mean that these are the sort of threat areas where toxic control can grow and where narcissistic people can take advantage of you or can radicalize you yeah so yeah come join me on Tick Tock it's a lot of fun we're always like knitting and talking about cults yes what's your Tick Tock handle Daniella mestanek Young perfect I'll put it on the screen and in the description so people can find you and a couple things before we go I have a patron who has a question I like to bring the conversation over to patreon and give them an opportunity to ask questions to our guests who we're recording with and she wanted to know what are any physical issues you experience currently as a result of being in this cult if any um physical issues well this will be an interesting one uh because Cults always control I should just say toxic groups always want to control your bladder um I usually think of my bladder problems as part of the military not being great about women but definitely you know as young as two three four years old we were expected to go all night without using the bathroom um so that would be right like a certain physical issue I am large boned but very small and I'm from taller people so I believe that I am underdeveloped because we were just malnourished and essentially very very close to starving our whole lives um and one of I would say the biggest issues was that took me 20 years to realize after going from cult which Cults are always skinny worship um I'll be digging into that in the next book too uh to the Army which is skinny worship to realizing that like oh I have struggled with disordered eating for 20 years wow by accident right not even realizing it it was part of the perfectionism it was part of doing hard things it was part of being perfect in the Army and I eventually realized I don't I don't even know the right signals for Hunger right like we grew up under so so so much food control that that is a very big issue for me so for example when I feel hungry my first instinct is take a really deep breath and power through it it's not go get a snack right so those are some of the things that I am having to retrain myself on um because that was you know inculcated into me since birth wow thank you for sharing that I I can't imagine dealing with all that on top of the psychological harm that these high control groups cause and I think that's probably the thing that most people can relate to is the psychological control that is put on these people who are forced to conform whether it's the behavior your dress your sexuality so many of these things that we're still kind of unpacking and unwinding so I can relate to that part but thank you so much for sharing your story I just I know again as someone who is also a trauma Survivor and a cult Survivor that it takes a lot to be willing and be open as open as you have been and as you are in your book so I commend you for that thank you for sharing your story with the world in your book it's beautiful and I recommend everyone go get it uncultured and um we need our Linda listen moment before we go so spicy statement to someone who's pissed you off or any of advice for our listeners spicy statement to someone has pissed me off all right yeah um my spicy statement to the cult is you cannot traffic children film it and think nobody's ever coming for you I'm definitely coming for you and the way you put a church out of business is taking all their money oh that's my spicy statement I have a really good one for the next half amazing Linda listen she's coming for you I love it um any final thoughts before we go just you know thank you so much for having me for giving this platform for me to share my story for doing this work you know as you said like we have such different stories but such similar experiences and you know that really is the power of memoir and you will read about in uncultured about how not sharing my story almost killed me and sharing my story writing my story was so hard recording the audiobook was one of the hardest things I've done but getting to connect with people like you like listeners and readers right that say oh my God you described this thing that I went through you know like I'm being able to be the crack in the brainwashing for some people I'm able to give language to some people um and that's what so many books have done for me and so I just I love it so much and I love hearing from readers and thank you so much for having me on here of course thank you for saying that and you have inspired me to continue writing my Memoir which is difficult so I can relate I can relate on that um great well thank you again I will put your contact links below for anyone that wants to find you and for our listeners if you want to support the podcast it would mean a lot if you could become a patron a patreon.com Cults to Consciousness and until next time follow your highest excitement be conscious and be well thanks for listening if you like what you hear it would mean a lot if you could like And subscribe on YouTube leave a review or a comment to help with their visibility you can also find me on social media at colts2consciousness or Reach Out by email at colts2consciousness gmail.com

Channel: Cults to Consciousness

Views: 432,456

Keywords: cults to consciousness, cults, cult member, leaving cults, healing from cults, shelise ann sola, faith crisis, shelise ann, daniella mestyank young, children of god, children of god cult, the family cult, the horrors of children of god, sex cult, damaging cults, i survived the children of god sex cult, the family international, uncultured: a memoir, sex cult survivor, COG, army woman, female army captain, cult daughter

Id: Cu5zfuMxU_U

Length: 72min 7sec (4327 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023