Sarah Edmondson: Free from the grip of a cult.

[Music] make this happen so this month's theme let me get this out of the way for you is free which i i mentioned um and i have a few words for you on on on what free might mean um what is free comes in many flavors free to come free to go free to love free to deliciously inhabit our own skin free to try on all the possible versions of ourselves free as in not charging a single cent free to speak truth to power free to say no to what's on offer however to be free to dream to create to imagine requires freedom from freedom from to be free from want and fear to be free from censoring forces to be free from com oppression to strive for true freedom is to honor our obligations to each other to fight for our mutual liberation when someone is free to achieve their fullest creative expression they become a beacon for us all how will you make space for your own flourishing and that of others so that the world around you might also bend towards freedom our charlotte chapter chose this month's exploration of free and livonia parks illustrated this theme and we're very grateful for both okay let's do this so we have a speaker here today uh sarah who whom i know and i will uh i will tell you how i know her i think the first time i met her was when i attended a nexium um [Music] introductory get to know you event and i did subsequently take nexium training so i have some insight into what that story was like for her but not nearly the experience of course that she had some of which she'll tell you today but you all have heard her bio she's an extraordinary actress and writer and podcaster and advocate and activist and mom and oh my gosh on and on but here are a few things i asked her last night to share with me she had her own business cards and business by the time she was 10 years old her business cards were pink she made hair wraps and jewelry on the beach on hornby island during her acting career she has helped william shatner memorize lines and babysat david hasselhoff's children i don't think she got a credit for that one and finally her brother's in law and now this is true her brothers-in-law are named hughie dewey and louie and sister-in-law is named daisy so basically she married into a family of deaths so ladies and gentlemen i with that give you the one and the only sarah edmondson i forgot about that those little nuggets that i gave you mark made myself laugh thank you so much for having me and for inviting me here today um i really wish that this could have been in person before i get started everything sounds good yes amazing so yeah when mark asked me to come it was around the time when we thought it could be in person and then i got the call saying we're back to zoom and i was like damn it omicron oh nope doesn't that feel a little bit like a transformer does anyone else hear that or maybe it's just my voice over career kicking in omocron virus in disguise no anybody okay i can't like interact with you so i don't know if that's that's resonating jordan says yes okay amazing anyway not here to uh show off my voiceover skills today i'm here and mark if we would please show that first slide okay october 17 2017. there i am on the cover of the new york times that was just the beginning after that came the cbc podcast escaping nexium with 25 million downloads the val a docu-series on hbo somewhere around 200 interviews i've lost track and a memoir but that's not what i'm here to talk to you about today i'm here to tell you about how i healed from this [ __ ] show and yes i just found out that i could swear which is true freedom for me thank you mark how i healed from that and how i reclaimed my voice but uh you know every healing story every healing journey does have a backstory and since you can you can google most of it i'll just i'll kind of give you the cliff notes just to summarize how i got into nxim how i got out and how i use my creativity to to find my voice and to heal again thank you mark we could get rid of that image and i'll talk more about it later so my story i grew up here in vancouver i know not everyone's in vancouver but we are in vancouver here creative mornings vancouver and in the 70s my parents were therapists and still are actually but they were in the in the 70s and 80s they were social activists we marched across the bridge the broad bridge for peace and i was always instilled with this message of leave the world a better place and make a difference and that was something that i would always stroke a stroke i strived to do and my mom i consulted with her about this speech i said what was i like as a creative person she was like oh you were so creative from the moment you were born you were this creative spirit and apparently when i was around three and people started asking me you know what do you want to be when you grow up as adults do it was four things one is i want to be an artist two i want it to be a mummy three i want to be a princess and contradicting contradicting to the princess i also want to be a french maid because i really like the little aprons and the little black and white outfits i uh managed to i think hit all of those career goals i think and i also was a kind of girl or a young you know child who would gather the kids together at a dinner party and and put a put a performance on at the end of the night and i was always into various classes i was an arts umbrella which is the local children's art program here i did all the classes there pottery and dance and ballet and jazz and photography and acting i was very very artistic but i chose a path as an actor when i graduated um high school and went to university of concordia and got my bfa my bachelor of fine arts also known as a bachelor of [ __ ] all theater performance but i was very excited about becoming an actor and using my voice as a platform for change that's what i thought i was going to do and i moved back to vancouver in the early 2000s and was auditioning and was very much the stereotypical actress slash waitress living in the basement suite and i found that even though i was technically a working actor doing beer commercials and vampire tv shows and all of these um you know things there's nothing wrong with those things and they certainly paid the bills but it wasn't filling my creative cup and it wasn't meaningful to me and i felt like there was more i always felt like there was more and around this time i started the artist's way group i'm sure many people have this book this would be like 2003 or so put that away and i gathered up a group of gathering again gathering up a group of my um girlfriends mostly actresses and we got together every tuesday morning we talked about our goals and we did the morning pages and we gave each other feedback and we ate muffins and it was very productive but not productive enough for me and i always felt like even though my parents were therapists i love to help people and gather and build community i wasn't really able to help people through their issues because guess what i wasn't a therapist and around this time i met um a man named mark vicente he was the director of a film called what the bleep do we know and at that time in the early 2000s this film blew my mind and it was kind of catapulted me on my more spiritual journey and i was really into setting intentions and i wanted to figure out my purpose and i had the opportunity to meet him at a film festival because my boyfriend at the time was a there still is a director and we got to go and mark vicente was the guest speaker the guest of honor and we met him there and we became fast friends i really though truly i really admired him i put him on a pedestal and i thought that's what i want to do like with the bleep i want to make conscious shifting media i don't want to do beer commercials and vampire tv shows i want to make films and media that shift people's consciousness and help people have a different understanding of humanity so when he said to me well if you like my film you may like this workshop that i just took i jumped at the opportunity to work with him and to figure out who this team of humanitarians were that were changing the world like it was the most exciting thing to me and the other thing i wanted to add when i met him before i went to that film festival i had set the intention of finding my true purpose so i felt here it was the universe provided leap and the net will appear and there it was so i felt like everything was very serendipitous and i jumped in i signed the contract and i something i remembered recently is that i actually backed out a couple weeks before the training which happened to be in vancouver a few weeks after i met mark and i called the headquarters i called the mother ship and i was like and i'd put a deposit down for hundred dollars by the way for a two thousand dollar program so for the actress living in the basement suite this was a big a big ask and i said you know i'm an actor and i i don't think i can take five days away and i spoke to a woman who had never met before who would later become a mentor and she said do you always want to be waiting for your agent to call or do you want to be the captain of your own ship and she got me there because i didn't want to be the captain of my own ship i didn't want to be waiting for my agent to call so i jumped in i jumped in i took the five-day training and i was a mixture between you know the keener the front row taking notes and i found out that americans don't say keener so i'll say the keen person the goody two shoes he was like trying to get it all in and also being like my parents are therapists what are you going to teach me so i was skeptical but also open and that first five-day training that first day was a really a bizarre mix a mixture of really helpful life hacks and really bizarre uh rituals and i had so many red flags so many uncomfortable things and this is something people always ask me like when were the red flags and what did you see all of it all the weirdness came after a very brilliant preamp by the facilitators which was that you're going to feel uncomfortable we're here to work on your [ __ ] we're here to work on your issues so if you're feeling uncomfortable or have the urge to leave that means you're doing it right because you're hitting up against stuff and the fact of the matter is is there's some truth in that if anyone's ever been to counseling or therapy or even an acting class it's uncomfortable to be vulnerable and to expose yourself but it also and i didn't really understand this stuff about 15 years later i was right from day one overriding my gut instinct to get the [ __ ] out also because i trusted mark on that first day i caught i went home and i googled the company for the first time and there was some [ __ ] online not like there is online about nexium now but there was enough stuff to be like what the [ __ ] did you get me into mark and mark said as someone had done for him nothing against mark he didn't know what was going on either and he said to me well um do you believe everything that you read online there there's lots of things that people can write about anyone anytime does it mean it's true and i thought well no of course not i don't believe everything that's written online not that naive and he said why don't you trust your own experience i know it's weird wait till day three and just see how it goes and why would you trust someone's experience who's never even taken our curriculum and you're there get your money's worth and i did i trusted him and that's something that's important to know is that all the red flags from that point on were always outweighed by the goodness and the trust that i had in the people around me and especially the people above me that i respected that authority ranking system played a huge part in why i stayed anyway i stayed till day three and i didn't know this at the time but you can actually indoctrinate someone into a new way of thinking in three days if they're focused and if they're open and there's enough repetition and emphasis on certain concepts and i was that person and on day three i did have a huge shift i had a huge shift because i went to next in trying to figure out why i was so stifled as an actress and what would it take to get me to the next level that was one of my goals i had some relationship goals as well but in terms of that shift i had huge core awarenesses which are difficult to explain in this type of context but understanding that i got in touch with what was holding me back in terms of my own relationship with myself my self-worth my confidence and how that expressed as an actor and let's just say by the end of that five days i was totally bought in i felt like this veil had been lifted i had total clarity on my whole life and understood why i wasn't able to communicate with certain people why i was able to ask for what i wanted i was able to see the world so clearly in such a way that i felt like i'd been given the secret handbook for living and i wanted everybody to have it because i felt so good didn't understand that i was literally having that massive dopamine hit for all the awarenesses if you think about uh what it's like to have an awareness and therapy and i was there for five five days for 12 hours a day having probably three to five awarenesses an hour i was just mind blown so let's just say um by those end of the five days i'd you know i found my tribe i found my way of life and i felt like you know if everyone in the world had these tools that they'd have more honor and more integrity and they'll be able to achieve their their goals in life and i really also felt like if the leaders all the world leaders had this curriculum there truly would be more no more back to the meaning of marching across the bridge for peace in the 80s so it all came together for me and if i could summarize the next 12 years it would be something like this i took more classes i went to albany that's where the mothership was albany new york yes armpit of america no offense to anyone who lives there and i used the tools the tech as they called it to break into the voice over community here in vancouver that was a much coveted very cliquey cliquey spot to to find my way into finally and i used the emotional tools to deepen my experience and my work as an actor and i played a role in a film that got in toronto film festival which was like i just felt like i was really hitting all the markers of the reason i joined nexium in the first place and it was exciting it was glamorous i rode on the bronfman private jet to go teach in training in alaska i was traveling to mexico into the u.s i felt like wow how lucky am i to be in my late 20s and and working with all these incredible people who are actually changing the world or so i thought but all of us were following the company's ranking system this ladder which if you've seen the value you've seen the sashes and it was called the stripe path and one of the things i really liked about that as an actor was that um and most of you know this as artists as i'm like you can do all the things but if you're not producing your own content you may not get the job so i was you know i was in acting class and i was in shape and i could you know i was off book i've been my lines memorized for auditions but i wasn't always booking whereas the stripe path was or so we thought was boom boom boom if you do this then you can get promoted and you can go up the the ranking system it was very similar to a martial arts system like karate that's how it's explained and i really like that it felt like it was good for my self-esteem because i was in control of my path of growth and that's what it offered measurable growth and guaranteed it got to the end enlightenment which now i know is impossible but all of us we're going for we want to be more joyful more successful more purposeful i proudly opened the first center in canada here in vancouver kept going traveling on missions to help other people have the same transformational experiences and i felt like i had this new world view i had look at all the answers to life questions but also more importantly for me i had a community a community of like-minded artists and entrepreneurs and all these young people who were really striving to be the best versions of themselves and in addition for me to how did she start achieving my own goals i was learning to coach and helping other people achieve their goals i thought this was amazing i thought it was this like i was the luckiest girl in the world but as you know because you know the story it wasn't all peaches and cream there was so many things like i said from day one that were problematic but i didn't understand what i was seeing and some of the inconsistencies right from the beginning so as i mentioned i started to achieve these goals and then i was tacitly punished for being attached to my career and i couldn't wrap my head around that because i thought this is a success program most people know it as nexium but here in vancouver we taught just the personal development part of it which is called executive success programs and i thought i'm using the tools to become more successful but now i'm too attached they always wanted me to move to albany and they would say well i guess you're more attached to your materialism in your career somebody actually said to me once when i was deciding whether to do a film or to go to albany for another training and they said well what's more important hallmark or saving humanity and that's how it was presented it was never no one ever told me what to do but it was a tacit enforcement of making sure that personal development was your highest value for me when i joined there was a exercise and i actually recommend this to people still but for different reasons i couldn't make decisions to save my life that's one of the reasons i joined nexium is to like get more clear on who i was and my values so i could decide and i always felt like i was choosing between things um and i couldn't didn't have a tool set to make those decisions so they had us write down uh your values prior write down your values in priority order so at the time it was acting in creative expressions number one and the rest were things like um humanity and joy and family and financial security personal development and slowly over time in nexium personal development started moving up i realized that you couldn't really go up the strike path or get promoted or do anything unless personal development was number one so my creative goals and my expression started to take a back seat and i didn't realize that was happening it was it was a slow burn but that was one of the inconsistencies i saw in the company is that people were putting aside their own goals for the mission of the company um the other thing was is that we were supposed to be building humanity building community but we were also very righteous towards anyone who was not willing to jump in and i am sure there's people on this who i know from vancouver who were invited by somebody and maybe they took a training like mark did or maybe they didn't but they probably got a sense of that there was this like and people did say to me later i was interested but there was something weird about it like you guys were just so happy so i feel like the combination of the righteousness and the happiness also known as toxic positivity which is a real buzzword that's going around right now a term that i i'm now talking about when i when i speak because i didn't know that's what was going on for me i was supposed to be engaging in critical thinking but we weren't allowed to look at anything negative that was ever said about us in fact we weren't allowed to express anything negative at all because that would mean that the tools don't work so if you'd met me during this time and said hey sarah you know how are you it would have been like i'm so good i am amazing my life is so incredible and i truly did feel that but i also had this thing in the back of my mind i couldn't share like i'm also struggling with this or oh i'm a little worried about money or whatever you could never say anything like that so the inconsistency of like portraying somebody that wasn't actually authentic started to wear at me and all of these things like look understanding um that i was learning a new doctrine i didn't understand that it was actually an indoctrination and all of these things were things that i was witnessing and moments and experiences like didn't always feel right but i couldn't wrap my head around it and there's a metaphor that we use in in cult recovery that many times there's an experience or a moment that you have and then you like put it on oh there's a shelf behind me you put it on the shelf right and it's the same thing in an abusive relationship the first time the partner is you know violent verbally or says something that doesn't align with the previous personality you go whoa did that just happen and you put it on the shelf and all of my things that i shelved over and over again the toxic positivity and like how the company was operating and the fact that we weren't getting paid for certain things and um the righteousness that which later became a very much an us versus them um an us versus them feeling that i had in the community all of these things were just shelved shelves shelved but the thing that was the most uncomfortable that i didn't understand at the time and what i'm very passionate about now when i speak is that any time that i had a concern or anytime i had a fear come up and any time that i wanted to express something to anybody i couldn't go to my downline like anyone who is below me in the ranking system because that would mean i'm not a solid leader or that i don't have my [ __ ] together so i would go to my upline to mark or somebody else above me my coach or my sponsor or nancy the the um the head of the school and someone's phone just came on or someone's someone just unmuted and i'm hearing something i don't know where that's coming from i hear like papers wrestling hello okay it's gone for great we're good just a heads up on time sarah we're at 9 25 so another 10 10 minutes or so would be great okay great i'll try to speed it up so they just talked about oh yeah so if i brought something like that to a facilitator it was always met with what i now know is gaslighting so if i brought something up they would say well what are you making that mean or you seem really reactive about that you may want to journal on it or sit with it or why don't you go get an em and which is like a process to unpack a whole other that's a whole other talk but basically work with the facilitator to figure out why i was triggered versus maybe there's a reason i'm triggered because i'm seeing something that's not right and all of those things made the shell so heavy and i think one of the things that made it the heaviest is that i had really developed the recognition that my self-worth was attached to my acting and i pulled that apart so that i didn't feel so dependent but now i was dependent on this other thing and dependency was taught to be bad but all of us were just worshiping the leadership and we were fully dependent we couldn't we couldn't do anything without running it by the by the leadership and that was something that really started to wear on me and just before i woke up i my husband and i had our first child troy in 2014 and i started to re-prioritize my values and i think the company shift uh sense that shift because they offered me an opportunity to level up and join a secret sisterhood if you've seen the vow you know the details of this i'm not going to go too much into it because it's very complicated but i was joined asked to join the sisterhood um badass boot camp for women essentially and i was supposed to have a secret ceremony where i get a tattoo this is a very trigger warning very disgusting violent part of my story but long and short of it is on that night i was not given a tattoo i was branded like what farmers do to cattle and crazily enough that in and of itself didn't wake me up it was finding out weeks later that the symbol on my body was not the four elements as i've been told but it was it was the leader's initials in a cryptic monogram steered into my flesh right here on my pelvis keith renee kr that's what woke me up and finally mark and i finally started to speak freely and share what he knew and i shared with him what i knew for the first time after i signed an nda because we're both so afraid of being sued and we figured out what was going on and that the the branding was a disgusting deceptive attempt to lock down loyalty keith realized that people were leaving and he wanted he wanted people to stick around and he was basically set up a blackmail mlm structure for him to essentially have the women in his organization and that was ultimately woke me up realizing that everything was built on lies the whole foundation i'd never researched who keith was i didn't know that he was a complete con man he wasn't a celibate monk he was had a harem of women anywhere from 12 to 20 women available to him at any given time to meet his needs and ultimately this this is what woke me up and this and triggered the catalyst for me to decide to expose the company become a whistleblower and go to the new york times so all of that to say is i woke up pretty quickly i realized this was not a healthy community um but it was a self-sealing system with zero accountability and no room for personal opinion no autonomy thus no creativity because creativity at this point i realized and i've you know in preparation preparing for this talk if you cannot be creative if you're not if you cannot can't connect with your true self and my true self had been overridden a long time ago with what they call the cult identity also you can't create anything new any divergent ideas unless the ideas is in line with the leader's mission and any anything creative had to be to like support him and to get his his message out there so my my creativity was was long long gone needless to say i figured out it's true i was in a cult and this is something that if you've heard of next game or esp over the years some people would say that's a bit weird or it's culti but like nobody really knew what we were doing that was that made it an actual cult and i would even joke with my agent about it when i went to albany he's like oh here she goes again i'm like yeah murray shaving my head i'm drinking goat's blood because that's what i thought a cult robes and flavor aid and mass suicide i had no idea that the most called especially now are in what's called a large group awareness training and many of you listening maybe and i can't even tell you how many times people in my circle of friends would be like well i would never fall for that or i came to an esp intro session and i could totally tell it was culti i love landmark that's what they would say or i'm i'm landmark's not occult or psi is not a cult or course in miracles or i just do transcendental meditation i've since learned that all of these things are hugely problematic and i personally am massively allergic to any large group awareness training because the the ability or the ripeness for abusive power is off the charts and we can talk more about that later so i was on a cult and i know that's loaded you can call it a high demand group it doesn't matter i was out the most important thing is the eastern district of new york called it a criminal organization and put keith behind bars for 120 years so that's the good news and that's the back story sorry it took me a little longer than i thought i went i went on some tangents there but my main thing to share with you now today is like healing and many of you i hope most of you have not been in a cult but i think that everybody can relate to having some sort of trauma or some sort of significant life event that causes you to shut down and you have to figure out how to like reconnect with yourself to find that that pain or that vulnerability to start expressing again so i'm just going to go over a couple things real quickly and then we'll get into the creative aspect woohoo yes i see that yes 120 years hashtag 120. okay so quick things for healing one for me was self-care i did a lot of um things to make sure that myself my body was okay i put extra locks on my doors just for my safety but i did things like epsom salt baths grounding foods walks in nature forest bathing is a real thing um i also had to learn how to sleep again we'd been trained that we only needed five hours or six hours a night and i was massively sleep deprived then i had to do a lot of self-education luckily this is the golden age of cult awareness so there's so many podcasts and books and documentaries we've got going clear holy hell the vow wild wild country all these things by the way are on a resource list that i have on my website sarahvinson.com resources i'll type that in there later and uh that really helped me understand what the [ __ ] had happened to me but i also need help from a therapist and i found a trauma therapist and also a cult expert i have a couples counselor i have a whole team highly recommend therapy but you have to work to find someone that doesn't trigger you which took me a long time the fourth is very apropos for today it was finding healthy community that was so hard for me because i was just so skeptical and untrusting uh for so many years and one of the things that was important for me in terms of expression is that in my old community and i didn't realize at the time is that i was so suppressed because we couldn't express anything negative the first time we got together with members of the community and and was able to share freely what was really going on for me and to say something like for those of you who've seen the vow nancy's keith's right-hand woman she was like she was mean you know i also called her my bonus mother and totally revered her but behind closed door she was or even publicly she shamed people one time she got mad at me for recruiting too many people from vancouver who were gluten free to her trainings and i was like really like rice crackers are gonna break your budget but she got mad at me for that and so in this group of friends former next team members for me for me being i can't even say it for me to be able to say you know nancy's a [ __ ] oh like just the the level of freedom and the weight off my shoulders to see how i really felt felt was unbelievable number five reclaiming time values and goals so for me when i was in axiom i had so many for example conference calls i had hour blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks of the proctor call senior proctor call coaching call executive call when i cleared my schedule i all of a sudden out of this free eye calendar and being like what am i going to do with my time what who am i what do i even like i don't know i did i had to get back in touch with that again and my family and i have spent a long time developing new traditions i never had a free weekend when i was a nexum ever there was always a training or something to go to and all of a sudden i go to the farmers market and do saturday pancakes and spend time with the family in nature and that's been imperative in my healing and finally learning how to deal with emotions properly in exium we always suppressed everything and overrode it with this toxic positivity and like if you were feeling low or down you weren't allowed to be there you'd have to do a state change and pick up and like everything is great and so great so to actually go into that shame and the feelings of betrayal and anger and fear and actually feel them what do you do with all that well that's where the creativity comes in and i'll be totally honest at the beginning i had zero interest i was so in fight or flight my ptsd and cptsd was so uh rampant i could you know barely get by i could barely sleep i wasn't eating i was not in good shape and luckily my mom dragged me to this creative writing workshop called the wild women writing circle and this would have been in the fall of 2017 so a few months after i got out and i loved it because there's all these these older women in their 50s 60s and 70s and there's me who's like got my journal just trying to figure out how to cope and she gave us the space she'd give us like a a theme or a structure and we did this creative writing and i wanted to read to you something that i wrote at this time that um i think kind of is very special to me because i wrote it in in this workshop and it was surrounded by these supportive women and i never edited a single word and i feel like the poem captures where i was right at that time not where i am now and i can look back at it and go wow i've like totally moved past that point but this point was still very much um where i was still in a lot of pain and trying to grapple with my loss of friendship of all the people that i left behind and also you know the scar that i was left with so this poem is called the scar it's fading now reminds me that he never owned me their silence erodes the memories of our friendship and leaves me naked where was i before i met you floating and eager too young to catch the flags my heart open and pure i have love around my neck me too their voices merged around me and held my hand so i could speak before i leave to heal i plant barbed wire between us and wrap myself in cashmere sheets i'm back ready for the leaves to turn and to start again so that was the that was the beginning for me of my my healing was that um was that workshop and stuff just flowed out of me and if you told me then that i was going to write a book i never would have believed it because i was still so fragile but the space in my creative writing allowed me to tap into stuff that i i couldn't even articulate in words not even in therapy yet it was so good for me to write down especially my dreams i had so many dreams where i would be confronting people because i didn't get to have closure with so many of these people i just left and all of a sudden people were at my wedding were now my enemies and they were shunning me because i destroyed the company i've had i've since had a lot of reconciliation but not with everyone and i probably never will but i i did all these things um at the beginning just to like get you know get my grounding and then a year a year later uh i decided to write a book because one of the silver linings of being public is that people would come to me and say let's do this so a lit agent came to me and said i think you should write a book i will help you she helped me find a co-writer um and this was a i have a mixed feelings about this book i i did find it overall very cathartic to tell my story in my terms the problem was i had a publisher who's also thinking about you know how to get the book out there and she wanted it to come out at the time that keith was sentenced so it was in the news again and that put a deadline on it that i was not ready for because i also had a newborn my second child and honestly i barely even remember the writing of this book but i did it there it is and um i'll talk about a little bit more about the scar in a minute but there's scarred and i i don't recommend um writing a memoir on under a tight deadline that being said if i didn't have a deadline it probably never would have been uh written at all so um hard to say but i think that the thing that really blew up my whole reconnection to myself and my creativity again was when the vow came out which is another year later and the vow was wild because maybe partly with the pandemic and so many people watching but i my inbox got flooded on social media and personally and people just reaching out to say any variety of things like i watched the vow and i left the toxic church i was in or i watched the vow and i realized my you know my husband was gaslighting me and i ended the relationship or i watched the vow and i realized what the red flags looked like and i didn't join this group that i was invited to or i watched the vow and i was able to process something happened to me 20 years ago i didn't know that's what it was and that connection with complete strangers about what had happened to them fueled something in me that i i'm still trying to articulate but i feel like that is my main source of creativity is being able to help people because that is what i that's what i wanted out of nexium that's what i thought i was doing and obviously i bet on the wrong horse and we know that now but now is actually able to to connect and that's really why i want to become an artist in the first place i have a very vivid memory of being in montreal when i was getting my theater degree and seeing a michelle tremblay play and having like a huge i mean i cried i cried i'm a big crier and i had a huge like cathartic cry at the end of the play and i thought that's why i'm an artist that's why i'm a storyteller to give people these experiences and now i was a subject and i was not a producer of the vow the subject who just like the story was out there and now people were having experiences and waking up for themselves and sharing that with me and i was just like so fulfilled more than anything i'd ever done in my in my entire life um and that led to somebody reaching out to me who saw the vow and said um we're then they were ex-evangelical this uh partner uh husband and wife team and they said citizens of sound and they said uh we think you should do a podcast because we want to hear more and we want to produce it because like a podcast like everything isn't about what could you possibly want to know so i put it on social media and said you guys want a podcast and everyone was like yes we want more we have more questions i was like okay and this is cobid time so you know my husband and i are like it's pretty easy thing to do we're having these conversations with people anyway why don't we record them and share them so that our wisdom from what we've learned from the [ __ ] show can become content for other people and somebody actually wrote to us and pitched us a little bit culty which was the name of the podcast and she outlined what we could do and how she would help us if we chose her to be a producer which we did so everything kind of just organically came to us in such a way that like maybe i talk about nippy's my husband um that one is not named after a duck but nippy's another story and i'll share that later we talk about how like the whole cult experience was so dark you know we were we were really enmashed with some really dark awful forces as soon as we got out the light and the people that came to us to support us and um you know show us another path out and that's been the path of my creative healing is all of these things the writing the the memoir the vow the podcast and and then on a whole other level um advocacy has been a part of that for me because i got aligned with an organization called hashtag igotout similar to hashtag metoo it's a group of people survivors experts and whistleblowers who are unified by that hashtag and it's really encouraging people to tell their story to share their story blow the shame off the whole stigma of cultic abuse and abuses of power in general and hash that hashtag it's also uh oh there's the podcast thank you thanks mark um and by the way quick thing take back your life is the book that is kind of the the template first a lot of this talk in terms of healing from cultic abuse um quick sidebar i love this book when i got out i had a hard time reading so i harassed yanya lalich who's become a friend and also one of our guests in our podcast and she let me narrate this book so if you know someone who's recovering from cults or abusive um anything this is a great book and it's also an audible narrated by me um so it's a wonderful book it's on my resource list it's the thing i i recommend to everybody and all of the key points for healing except for the creative stuff are in here thanks for that mark um let's see where was i trying to wrap it up so we have time for questions um let's see okay um so i think that kind of summarizes it i think the the thing with the podcast and the vow and i think the one of the nuggets i want to share with you is that the irony is not lost on me if you remember that when i met mark i wanted to make conscious shifting media and every now and then mark and i virtually high five like yep did it i feel like the vowel pulled all those things together for me and now i'm able to um really own my story and tell my narrative of my own terms and i continue to do that with the podcast i wouldn't say that i am healed but i'm healing i am i'm doing okay i've got two beautiful boys a very supportive husband that i met in nexium so that's the major silver lining i also wanted you to know that i had this removed with plastic surgery there's just a thin little white line like a cesarean scar now so it's completely well almost 90 99 gone and i really truly feel like i've reclaimed my voice and i believe that the creative process comes from being free to think for myself truly which has obviously been a huge journey to not care what i wouldn't say what anybody thinks but not what everybody thinks to get over what they would call my like me disease because going public certainly challenged that and learning to trust my gut again i think that if you can put shame and doubt which i think we all have whether you've been in a class or not put it in the back seat and let the creativity of truth and freedom and expression that is everyone's birth right take the wheel there's no limit to where you can go you can take back your creativity and you can take back your life so thank you for your time and let's answer some questions how's that perfect thank you that was great um okay we're just going to dive right in is that cool so yes dive in i saw a lot of questions coming through but i don't know so i have a whole bunch and i have some that can get through the back door so um right off the bat i'll just ask i'm going to go ahead and just read these so we can move quickly annie asks where is sarah sitting where are you sarah oh i'm in a little jail cell that market for me to show how truly free i am now i am sitting mark created this for me because i am at home with two kids and i would not have the style i'd have like mommy i need my bottle if i stayed at home so i'm i'm at mark's where are we your in your co-work space yeah it's like our amenity room in my building amenity room yeah so you see that wall right there she's on the other side of that wall right there yeah we're right there there we are okay cindy and annie a different annie both asked a similar question so i'm going to summarize uh paraphrase it for you um they both would like to know and i think everybody here would like to know given all the negative press and keith's reputation and uh his sort of notoriety for going after people with litigation and what have you and all the fear from the from the powers that be and and and the re potential repercussions how did you prepare and what was the process and what how did you go public with this like what what was that process like a little bit i'm sure you've talked about this before but people yeah no problem must have been terrifying it was terrifying in fact the the first two-thirds of this book i feel like are kind of boring to be honest but the last third where i wake up and figure out what the [ __ ] to do read like a crime novel like it's it it's when you think about like being in your 40s and like working with the fbi it's horrific because we didn't know um what was going to happen we thought for sure we would be sued and i think being in canada protected us somewhat keith claire bronfman did come to vancouver and spent three days with the vancouver police department trying to set up a case to get me arrested of course we know that failed but we knew that it was happening and we knew that it was um imminent and that she did try to you know come up with a smear campaign um we've since talked to people who stayed after us and claire would said to them like okay give me the dirt on sarah and nippy like what can we use and um they tried it you know honestly it and i think the book documents this well more so than the vow because the vow just can't like cover everyone's waking up process it really went from holy [ __ ] like i have to get out and then oh my god i have to like bring my friends um and oh oh oh mark low power how is that possible oh andrea can you help her i had it plugged in but maybe unplug that hold on maybe it's not plugged in pop properly i plugged it i got it oh no unless plugged in it says it's not plugged in properly we'll save you keep talking we'll save you wait wait wait why is it working i don't know go fix it oh no i'm plugged in andrew i'm good don't worry okay andrea the star behind the scenes hi andrew no i'm good it just wasn't it wasn't like plugged in properly oh glad i caught that um so i didn't really prepare it was more just like like as i got as i was waking up and getting out i was finding out more and more what was actually going on and even still it was even like a tenth of what we found out in the trial which was was a year later so ev what everyone knows now about what keith was doing we didn't have that full picture yet so um yeah sandra saying there's still people who support him and are out there thinking that i'm the bad person and i'm i'm the one that should be in jail truly um but they're deep deeply deeply indoctrinated and i unfortunately understand where they're coming from because i used to be there uh but yeah no i didn't prepare yeah um let's just let's keep moving forward so we got ten more minutes um oh my gosh david newman says looking south of the border trump republicanism is often referred to now as a cult how accurate do you think that categorization is does that fit your definition i try not to get political in our podcast but i we what we do is we look at processes of what like defines a cult and what defines a narcissist and what defines a sociopath and if you look at those checklists you know so yeah but i also have to say that there's extremism on both sides and um one of the things we talk about is like if you feel like you are righteous towards the other side and there's an us versus them it's problematic there's like there's cultive behaviors and abuses of power on both sides is that's what i'm saying but i think um we'll probably all have similar opinions about trump maybe christine asks um what is your relationship to self-help now do you still use any of the tools you learned or have you turned away from most of it now generally i'm allergic to self-help um i don't like the word coach i don't like the word goals i don't like the word success it's all very gross to me but i that's still part of my healing um one of the things i've done though is look at the tools that i got and figure out where i got them from so that i can i'm sorry where keith got them from because he mostly stole his whole curriculum and so if i can figure out where i got them from i don't have to say thank you vanguard after using it um and that's a real relief for me so it's that and that's taken time okay this one's a little long and it's really good this was actually the first person who quietly texted me and said i want to ask this anonymously because i was okay it's interesting how many people uh don't want to identify as nexium right no why would you want to be related i mean you know so anyway before you ask to say that mark i want to say something i think it's awesome that you said that you were involved because most people don't understand that if you just took the curriculum on the outside you didn't you weren't harmed and you weren't part of the sex cult the sex cult stuff happened in albany behind closed doors and i'm like how did this size call happen and i only had sex with my husband like what what did i miss everything anyway exactly yeah so this person anonymously says at the begin so beginning in the beginning of the pandemic uh they realized that that they were in a cult situation and watching your documentary and following uh the follow-up documentaries seduced made them aware and they went to the police one of the leaders is now unfortunately dead and the woman supporting him was just like your story is still out and currently doing teaching under a different persona that she created the police couldn't do anything about months of investigation there wasn't enough evidence or laws in the this person is in the uk in the uk regarding this as the events happened in two different countries and so now this person and their best friend from the cult are just left with this experience no justice can't talk about it anywhere and constantly thinking to themselves and asking what the [ __ ] do i do with this experience do you have any ideas or suggestions for this person yeah i mean our path was like before we went to the new york times we did go to authorities so i think if you if there's somebody that that you can go to there's a fbi hotline i don't know where this happened but in the u.s you're going to be a hotline um i have a couple of contacts there that i could connect somebody with um still if anybody wants that but i think ultimately the the authorities didn't know what to do with it it was then going to the new york times and doing expose that caused the authorities to act so um you know unfortunate like i have a mixed feeling about the media i really appreciate what they did for us and at the same time like sex cult is like really unfortunate for so many people so it's you have to find the right outlet but going public with your story is not for everybody it takes incredible strength and in because you go under public scrutiny but it's what we had to do anyway to get it shut down does it answer it is i just asked this person um if they wanted to share their email address with me can i can i connect you to them yes of course okay yeah um eleanor w says how has your creativity blossomed since you managed to get the cult out of your life hi eleanor i love you eleanor who's also decluttered my home by the way oh great um yeah she's incredible i was i mean what people don't really get about being in a cult is that like you can't express yourself right you you really can't unless it's unless it's like in tribute like you can sing a song if it's in tribute to the leader you know what i mean but there's no room for anything new um so it's taken me time to like really figure out how to express feet freely because the gas lighting also gaslighting works because you tend to gaslight yourself you know you start to have the same inner voice going like is that true and like are you just doing like one of the things that people said about me when i laughed to discredit me is that i was doing all of this for attention you know and that discredits me and like say oh just doing it for the book deal like yeah really waiting for that to pay off guys you know we're doing it for the money and that voice of so of like punishment and self-criticism is very strong and both nippy and i have had to take a long time to like dismantle that um so it's it's it's an ongoing journey oh i forgot to mention in my healing process that um i do microdose psilocybin and that's really helped me to like kind of reset the neural pathways and i also eat gummies for my creativity a little bit of thc a little bit of legal gummies just a little bit and that's helped me with my creativity okay totally totally i'm stoned out of my tree right now sure yeah yeah yeah i just see a lot of people mentioning things like um asked and somebody saying like they had a good experience with landmark and i just want to say like i'm never here to say like that's a call and that's a call and that's a call a lot of these things especially landmark and esp like i said for you mark there's always good [ __ ] on the outside of these groups if you look at it like an onion the rotten core is in the middle and on the outside of the group is good stuff that lures people in if you did landmark and you had a good experience [ __ ] great take the tools and put them in your life but don't make it your life don't put all your time into becoming a coach and that's when it becomes problematic and culty and all of those things that people mentioned i've done deep dives on people got hurt abuses of power happen people gave too much money but you don't always see that stuff just because you had a good experience doesn't make it a cult so that means doesn't mean it's not a culture does that answer that one that's great um just scanning over the questions so we have um uh let's see attraction we have the folks we have more cult questions um here's what happened yeah well okay let's ask this one so suzanne rushton wants to know about the other people that stayed in nexium and now that it's all been blown apart dude have more people realize the truth after renewing was found guilty and what's the status of it yes many people you and i have a friend who still we've lost that friend he he won't come back to us right yeah no he won't come back he i mean there's people who read the transcripts or attended the trial and they're like holy [ __ ] the evidence is there and then there's other people who are still so bought in they're doubling down tripling down and they're saying well all that evidence was planted by the fbi you know like there's always there's always a way to keep changing the you know changing the bar of like well clearly the justice system is corrupt you know he didn't get due process no he got due process he had six weeks trial with a jury of his peers and the evidence was overwhelming that's why he got 120 years they can't see it they can't see it because there's he's so good and so noble that the world is not ready and they had to shut him down is what they think we have questions about the the cultivars uh the role of influencers and social media um questions about ethical storytelling lessons uh for other survivors of crime worth sharing uh there's a i've got at least six other questions but we're at time now so i'll tell you what can we make a deal sarah if i post questions to uh perhaps to twitter and to facebook would you would you answer them would you respond to them yeah of course great i will do that and we will make sure everybody's questions get passed along um and with that we're we're going to conclude now so everybody uh please a round of quiet applause for for sarah edmonton for for uh being so brave and so generous with her time and sharing her story and insights thank you also for really focusing on the creativity and the healing part of your story i really appreciate that thank you all thanks so much for having me this is such a joy and actually just preparing for the talk with a creative creative endeavor and helped me to put some pieces together so thank you for the opportunity to continue to grow and to share that and like you said at the beginning hopefully be a little bit of a beacon amazing

Channel: CreativeMornings HQ

Views: 10,169

Keywords: Sarah Edmondson talk Free Creative Mornings CreativeMornings VAN Vancouver

Id: UUTEMXUttzg

Length: 60min 35sec (3635 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022