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In their life.

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How to everybody, and welcome back to the Cult next Door podcast.

We have a new podcast guest for this week and the next couple after.

Her name is Mindy Ashley and I had a really good conversation with her for several hours, so I think that you guys will really enjoy it.

You'll laugh, you'll cringe, and there's lots of really interesting and funny and good moments in these and I'm excited for you all to hear it before we jump into that.

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So, as I said earlier, we've got Mindy a new guest.

I think you guys are going to really enjoy it.

So let's jump into episode one with Mindy.

All right, thanks for being here, Mindy, thanks for having me.

Yeah, we're really excited about this.

We obviously we had that exploratory call and we got just a tiny taste of your experience, so I think we're both really excited about exploring all of this with you.

And you know, before we started this, we talked about where do we start, because a lot has happened and transpired, and I think starting from the beginning is good, you know, because our childhood experiences basically shape who we are today and kind of lay the foundation, you know, for how we see ourselves and how we interact with the world around us, how we handle all the challenges you know that you went through in your life.

So not exactly sure where you want to start in your childhood story, but we're ready to listen.

Okay, I guess I'll probably just start close to the beginning.

When I was born, I grew up the fourth of six kids.

There was four girls and two boys, and so I'm kind of just plopped right in the middle there.

My mom had all six of us by the time she was twenty eight, so that's pretty wild to me.

But she started.

My oldest sister was born when my mom was eighteen, and so also in those ten years of having children, she lost a few in there too, so she was pregnant perpetually, and I think she was early on.

I think she believed a lot of the quiverful kind of things of like just however many children God will give you is what you should have.

And I think when I think back about my upbringing and really listening to your podcast has kind of given me some revelations about things in my own life too.

So I always just thought we were part of a cult, But listening to you guys, I realized that we actually were the cult as well.

Like my family was a cult and then my parents were also cult leaders.

So my dad, I don't think he was really answering to any you know, higher power.

I think that he made the rule, he interpreted the Bible, and he enforced it however he wanted to.

My mom backed him up and carried that out in the home.

He wasn't home a whole lot.

He worked several jobs and we traveled on the weekends to other churches.

It was like a evangelist kind of thing before he became a full time pastor.

But they created a system in our household that just controlled every single aspect of our lives, what we wore, what we said, like literally words, you know, they said, every single word is so important.

They would use the scripture verse life and death are in the power of the tongue.

And so like one time I said something to my mom, she said, like, thank you for something, and I said, oh, no problem, it's the least I could do.

Like that's just people say that, right, And she like reamed me out, what do you mean it's the least you could do?

Why would you do the least?

Why wouldn't you do the most?

You know, your words are really important, say what you mean kind of thing.

So it was like, you know, everything was just very controlled, and everything we did was very criticized.

Any attempt to challenge them led to severe punishment.

It was spiritual, it was emotional.

It was often physical.

I'll probably get into that a little bit with the physical abuse a bit later in the story, But a big part of this story is my mom's death and so my feelings surrounding her part in all of this are really kind of confusing, and I think two things can be true at the same time.

I think that she was a perpetrator of the abuse, and I think she was also a victim of the abuse.

And so it gets a little, you know, complicated how my feelings about her, because when like when she died, that was such a trauma and so hard to lose her, and you know, everybody needs their mom, so that was really hard.

But then now.

After processing through some things and realizing, you know, she was a part of all of the trauma that happened, it just it's a little messy in my head about how I feel about her.

Yeah, of course, because I love her, you know, and I don't think she deserved what she had to go through.

And I'll get into that too.

And then there are some times where I think about that was pretty bad what she did or what she said, or what she didn't do, you know.

Ye.

So we moved around a lot.

We never lived in the same place for more than two years.

That was sometimes we were moving just to a different house in the same town.

Sometimes it was you know, a different town.

Sometimes it was a different state, but just constantly moving and.

I'm sorry, Yeah, what was the reason that, like why you moved around so much?

So I can only speculate, and my opinion on that is just I think that well, I think there's a few reasons, but I think there was some instability financially, and so I think maybe because we were renting houses and so I think maybe he couldn't pay the rent, so then we had to move.

Potentially that was some of it.

And then I just think there were some reasons of Like our first move, I was five years old.

We lived in Minnesota.

My parents, both of their families are from here, like very established here, but we moved to Michigan.

I was five years old.

That was the first time I moved, and that was because my dad had gotten a job.

So my grandfather owned a car dealership and my dad worked for him.

But he wanted to be some sort of you know, fivefold minister, and so he had gotten a job for Jimmy Swagert Ministries.

And what his job was, I think it was called like a visitation pastor.

So technically he went to people's homes who were partners of Jimmy Swagert Ministries and he would collect offerings from them.

I mean he would go pray for them in their homes, That's what I meant.

Yeah, if they happened to give an offering after he prayed for their prayer request, then I mean, how do you say no to that?

But yeah, he was supposed to be an extension of Jimmy Swagert.

And so if these partners requested, you know, a visit or prayer or whatever, then there were it was it was a sales position, you know, and they were traveling salespeople, and they they had regions that you know, each person had.

Each of these visitation ministers had their own regions.

So we moved to Michigan so that he could work for Jimmy Swagert Ministries, and then we moved to Arizona a few years after that to help start a church.

That didn't work out, so we moved back to Michigan then eventually back back to Minnesota.

And but there were a lot of moves in between two.

So there were big moves that had reasons, and then there were a lot of you know, just moving to the next town or whatever.

And that also translated for me specifically.

I went to a different school almost every single grade.

There were several grades where I went to two different schools in the same grade, and again we weren't allowed to go to public school.

So I have a suspicion that the reason why we switched schools so often was because they didn't pay the bill and so they wouldn't let us come back the next year.

I don't know that as a fact, but that's my presumption, because there was six kids.

Private schools not cheap.

I mean, granted, we weren't going to any of the nice, prestigious private schools.

We were going to tiny, little one room cult schools, right, So that was there was just always some sort of instability or chaos.

Really Arizona.

We only lived in Arizona for a year less I think, maybe even less than a year, and we had moved there, I guess, to help start a church or something.

I was like nine years old at the time, so I don't remember a whole lot of that, but I do know we lived in two different cities and we went to probably three or four different churches before we ended up moving back to Michigan.

So I don't remember all the details of like what happened to the church plant.

We were going down there to help with and why didn't like, did that stay open and we just split off, Like, I don't I don't know any of that stuff.

I have a question.

Yeah, so your dad, your parents had all of these rules about what you could do and what you could say.

Was that of your dad's own making or was that influenced by, you know, a different ministry.

I think both.

I think early on a lot of it was just my dad putting rules because he just liked to control people.

And then I think as time went on, he adopted more rules from other ministries that he followed.

To me, it seemed like he was always trying to be like the big you know, evangelist, like the Joel Ostein well, not him specifically, the ones that my dad looked up to and tried to emulate and be like would be in the early days, it was Jimmy Swagert, and then he kind of moved on to people like Rod Parsley and Lester summer All and Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, like just those big ministry people.

Kenneth Copeland.

Kenneth Copeland, Yeah, that was a big one in the later years.

That didn't start until later on, But yeah, as time went on, he got more and more extreme.

So yeah, Kenneth Copeland was a big one.

So did I answer your question, yes, yes, Okay.

So by the time, so after we moved from Arizona, we moved back to Michigan and back to the evangelism where we would go and speak at different churches on the weekends.

And then eventually I think by the time I was around twelve, he found his first senior pastor position.

So I think before that he had been a youth pastor.

That was before I was born.

He was an associate pastor, so he was always trying to get to this, you know, his own church thing.

So finally he did, and that was in Chelsea, Michigan, and it was a tiny, little country church.

We used to joke around that once we came there, we doubled the church attendance because of our family was so bid eight more people, we doubled it.

We can relate.

So we were there for a couple of years.

I in my memory and looking back in my feelings about my life, that was one of the places that I enjoyed the most.

I felt like I had some sort of freedom, like I could get away from the rules.

Sometimes I could break out of the bubble.

We actually lived in a neighborhood, which was the first.

Typically we would like of like we had like a hobby farm with twenty acres or like just kind of out in the middle of nowhere.

And I think a lot of the reason for that was my dad didn't want to follow rules that neighborhoods have, right so like how many cars you can park in your driveway, or like when we had lived in neighborhoods before, he would get very upset when they would the city would come and knock on his door and say, you have to clean you know this up out of your yard.

You can't have that many cars in your driveway.

So it's easier to live out in the country where nobody cares how messy your yard is or how many cars you have, because that was always one of my dad's side jobs was he would work on cars, like on the side, so he would have maybe he worked at a car dealership where after Jimmy Swaggert before he got his first church, like in between there we were still doing the traveling minister thing.

But then he also had an autobody and mechanic shop at our house and he was managing car dealerships, you know, wherever.

So when we moved to Chelsea, we were in a neighborhood and I loved that.

I had a next door neighbor that was my best friend.

We could walk into town and I don't know how or why, but my mom let me do that sometimes.

And so it just felt a little bit like the bubble was breaking, you know, And I, even though I was only twelve, I could feel that, and I could sense, you know that this is different.

I don't have as much control.

But then, you know, they would give a little rope and then yank at that kind of thing of like we would get in trouble for things we didn't even know we were doing wrong.

The rules were just constantly changing, and they were stupid things too, Like you could get in trouble for what you wore, but like they bought me those clothes.

So that's confusing, you know.

Yeah, So my dad what That church was non denominational when we got there, but my dad was ordained by the Assemblies of God, and so he eventually brought that church into the denomination.

So that was I think it grew more after that.

But again, I think in the whole time.

We were only there for like two years, and I think it only grew to be like maybe one hundred people.

But the building was really small, so that meant we had two services on Sunday mornings then, so that seemed, you know, like you were making it, you were getting.

But inside of our house we had it was like he ruled with an iron fist.

We had no privacy.

And some of that comes with just six kids, eight people.

That's a lot of people in one house.

And I don't care how big your house is, and ours wasn't usually very big, so a lot of times I had to share a bedroom with my three sisters, and we a lot of times had one, maybe two bathrooms in a house for eight people, so you know, you didn't get to take a shower by yourself.

People were coming in to brush their teeth and go to the bathroom.

So like no privacy in that regard.

But also they would not let us have our own you know, like if they would go through our stuff all the time, just so that we knew we had no privacy.

If they found a diary or a journal or a note from a friend, or even if somebody mailed us a letter, because again we were moving a lot.

So sometimes our friends from the place we just moved from would send us a letter or a postcard.

They would always read it first to decide if they would even give it to us or not.

So they also were very critical, like I said, about our clothing, and my mom would always make comments about my body and like that, I, you know, didn't look good in those clothes.

Or I remember one time I was about twelve years old.

I had gotten a new pair of shorts.

And again when I'm talking shorts, they were bermute a shorts, okay, because they had to touch our kneecaps or below, we weren't allowed to wear like normal shorts.

So I thought they were cute.

They had some polka dots and a little puppy dog on them or something like that.

So I went to try them on, and I think we had some friends over and my mom was in the kitchen, so I walk out there to show her my new shorts, and she like made a derogatory comment about my chubby knees having dimples.

And I was so humiliated because there was people around you.

It wasn't like she just told me, like those don't fit you.

Right, you know, or something like that.

But like no, like just a comment about my chubby knees, and I was just like, wow, that's embarrassing.

So I went back to my room took the shorts off.

I didn't wear shorts again for like three years because it was just I felt humiliated.

Yeah, so let's see, I'm getting lost.

Oh.

They would also listen in on our phone conversations.

So you know, back in the day, we had a landline attached to the wall, and we did have one with a really long cord, but there would be another phone in the house and you could hear when it would, you know, click, and you could hear somebody was on the other line, so that they were just listening to your conversation.

So even if I could stretch the cord long enough to like go in the bathroom and shut the door or something, for it didn't matter.

You didn't.

You didn't.

Privacy wasn't a thing that was ever allowed.

I do remember when I was growing up, I would hide a lot.

I remember climbing trees in the yard.

The tallest highest I could get up in a tree, and I would just stay there the whole day because I think that if I wasn't around anybody.

I couldn't get in trouble.

I couldn't get a beating, you know.

Yeah, you were like creating safety for yourself.

Yeah.

I would hide in the back of my closet.

There were my dad had built shelves in there and they were pretty There was pretty good space between the shelves and they were pretty deep, so I could get into one of the shelves at the back and like put things in front of me so people couldn't find me too.

So I just I remember always trying to hide and like get away from the abuse.

We were controlled what we could watch on TV, which was almost nothing.

We could watch, you know, Christian things.

We could not watch Disney movies because there was magic.

We weren't even allowed to go to movie theaters.

We couldn't play card games, we couldn't read comic books, we couldn't play with Barbie dolls, we couldn't everything, oh, puppet even in churches, like we were traveling to minister at different churches on the weekends, and if there was a children's church program that actually did puppets in their program, we couldn't go.

And that even extended to like my dad's parents and his sisters were normal people and they would just like have a beer at a barbecue or something like that.

We couldn't go if they brought out alcohol, we had to leave.

We couldn't go to a wedding reception if they were serving alcohol.

So like never grew up even seeing or knowing what it was like with if people would drink, like drinking was you would go straight to hell if you drank.

Definitely struck by lightning as you're taking a sack.

Yeah.

Wow.

And we weren't allowed to have friends with people who didn't attend the same church as us, like not even other Christians because like sometimes at the private schools we went to, like there were other Christian people there and we really weren't allowed to be friends with them because they didn't go to our church.

Yikes.

Yeah, So it really was like every single aspect of life was heavily controlled.

So we only lived in Chelsea, Michigan for two years, which was sad for me.

We ended up moving back to Minnesota, and initially when I heard we were going to I was actually pretty excited because our grandparents, you know, cousins, aunts, uncles like all of that were he were in Minnesota, so I was like, yeah, cool, we get to go back to our family.

But then I realized, like it felt so heavy to me that we had to leave my friends again.

And I remember like making this sort of inner vow of I am not going to make new friends at this new place because it's just too hard, it's too painful.

I can't just keep losing people all the time.

Back in that day, there wasn't social media to really like keep in touch with your friends either when you left, and it would be like writing letters, but that sometimes that would happen for a little while, but that would fade out pretty quick, so you just really didn't keep in touch with people.

I also think that one of the reasons we moved so much was so that people wouldn't see what was going on inside our household.

You know, like my mom wasn't really even allowed to have friends.

She was a very friendly person and she would always make friends wherever we went, but my dad would be really controlling about letting her, you know, go in time with them or talk to them on the phone or things like that.

He was just very very controlling of those sorts of things.

So I think, you know, if you don't stay in one place for very long, people can't really read your mail.

So I think that could have been a big part of it too.

It's like if people start asking questions or whatever, like time to go.

Yeah.

So when we moved back to Minnesota, though we moved to a it was because my dad got another pastoral position at a different church.

I don't think that that's what his intention was.

In the beginning, his sister went to this church in Elk River, Minnesota, and they had a pastor who was being shady and having affairs with women when he was supposed to be counseling them in the office.

And so there were you know, he obviously got let go, and then there were a bunch of lawsuits and different things.

And so my aunt was on the committee for people trying to fill the pulpit, like while there was an empty space without a pastor.

So since my dad was a pastor, she just asked him, would you be willing to come and preach on this Sunday that we don't have anybody to preach for.

He said sure.

So apparently they liked him enough that after that they asked him to actually come back and do a I guess an audition trial.

I don't know, but like where he preached again and then the congregation members would vote whether they wanted him to be the pastor or not.

So they voted yes, and so we were moving back to be in that church.

So it had some issues, and it had been one of the larger Assemblies of God churches in the state before, and there was still probably I don't remember, but maybe somewhere between five hundred to one thousand members still, so it was pretty large, and of course that's getting my dad closer to his goals of being a famous megachurch pastor.

So we moved there.

I was just turning fourteen and going into high school.

In my teenage years, I was extremely depressed.

I was suicidal.

There was actually a time where I did attempt suicide.

I took every single pill I could find in the house.

Being young and naive, it was mostly over the counter medications and vitamins.

I just I guess I was just thinking, like, if I take enough thing and enough different things, maybe just the amount and the interactions will do something.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I was obviously in a very desperate spot.

Yeah, didn't work because I'm still here, but I was.

I just ended up vomiting all of the pills, and so my mom heard me, like in the middle of the night, came in the bathroom and noticed it was pills in the toilet, and she said, do I need to take you to the er and get your stomach pumped?

And I said nope.

She said okay, and she went back to bed, and she never never spoke of it again, which to me, I have kids.

My child is only a couple years older than I was at that time, and I could never imagine.

But I think, you know, there was always this image thing of like, if you go to the emergency room in the town that I'm a pastor in, then people are going to talk bad.

People are going to say stuff about our family, and it's going to look bad on us.

So if you're not going to ask me to take you to get your stomach pumped, then I guess let's just pretend this never happened.

I don't know, it just bizarre.

So I was always kind of the black sheep and the scapegoat.

My younger brother was too, and I think sometimes maybe he got worse physical abuse than I got.

But we would.

My mother took her parenting advice from Bill Gothard, James Dobson, and later on Michael and Debbie Girl.

So the trifecta of evil.

Yeah, I mean I was the strong willed child that James Dobson wrote his books about, and my parents did their best to break me.

I some of my other siblings had, you know, they had each other or like my younger brother, who got probably worse physical abuse than I did, my mom would kind of advocate for him and stick up for him to my dad.

But I didn't really have that.

My brother and I were close, but he was younger than me, so he couldn't really do anything to like protect me or anything.

And I think both of my parents really didn't like me at all.

My mom would tell me things like, one day you'll have a child that's just like you and then you'll see like how bad you are kind of thing.

And the truth is, I do have a child that's just like me, and she's amazing.

She's she's brilliant, she's bold, she's kind, she's empathetic, she's artistic.

There's so many things that she is.

And she's feisty and she's fiery and she's got a strong will, and I think that that is wonderful.

And so what I see is not how difficult I was to love.

It's not that I was too much or too dramatic or too whatever.

It's that she didn't have the capacity to love me the way I needed to be loved.

Yeah.

And the problem, well, you were, it wasn't Yeah, I mean you were not easy to control.

Yeah, that's what it feels like to me.

It's just that you weren't easy to control, and therefore it sounds like shame was kind of heaped upon you, like, well, oh you're bad, you're defective, and that's why we can't control you.

I'm just I hate that so much.

I'm sorry that you went through that.

But I'm really glad that you have a child like you, you know, because you're going to be I'm sure you already you are, you know, empathetic and understanding and like embracing of all of those qualities actually are good qualities that were rejected by your parents.

And you and both of my kids are a lot like me in different ways.

Yeah, And so it is very interesting from that perspective of seeing how it's not that hard to just work with your child's strengths and encourage them in that way.

And my early parenting was rough because I was doing what I was taught.

And it's changed a lot now my kids are older, and you know, it's kind of one of those things like I hope it didn't change too late, but I think it still counts.

You know, even my son is twenty one and my daughter's sixteen, so they're older and the changes have been more in just the last probably handful of years that the changes have been really dramatic.

But I still think it matters.

And I talked to them all the time about before and how you know, I'm sorry and this was wrong.

I shouldn't have done that, and we're going to do it different moving forward.

So that's so good because you're making you're making repairs too, like you're changing it, but then you're also repairing with them, which I think is really key, you know, with our kids, like that's what they're going to remember.

It's something I didn't get right.

I never I never got an acknowledgment that they did something that was wrong or hurtful.

I never got any of that, And I do think those things are really important.

It matters, It changes things, I think.

So, Yeah, because you are creating safety in this new type of relationship that you have with him, I think it is super important.

Yeah.

Well, and I think it sets the precedent to I've noticed this with myself, and I don't think this is just a like ex cult member type thing only.

I think this is just societal but the getting an apology type thing, like I remember I think one time ever, I don't remember what it was, but like one time ever from Dad.

But otherwise that was not a thing because it was meant to be like they're an authority and infallible to a certain degree.

That was the whole idea, like there's nothing to apologize for type thing.

But that idea kind of perpetuates that that's what strength is.

That strength is just never admitting that you're wrong.

And of course we're seeing that on a real grand scale right now, which we won't get into you everybody who's listening, that's what I'm talking about, Yeah, but kind of breaking out of that and understanding like, no, that's actually the opposite.

That's when you're weak.

Is this fake pounding of the chest bravado stuff like I'm not wrong I'm not gonna say sorry that type of thing.

So that has been like a revelation for me, never that I was never really that way or like Dad in that way or anything, but kind of in the last five years since we've left, kind of shifting and saying like, actually, real strength is over here and it's being able to say sorry.

So just that flipping that and then thinking about like our raising being the opposite of that, like the work that you have to do as an adult to change that, you know, those things that carry over, which I hate that.

Now than never, and building on that.

Maddie, I don't know if this was true for you, but I think because Dad was never able to admit any fault, I think that carried over into at least for me, how I viewed making mistakes.

Like I think because of the narcissism, he didn't actually think he was making mistakes.

Yeah, so his conscience was clear.

But for people who do not have that pathology, you know, you're feeling guilt and shame when when you do something that you feel is not right, is not wrong, And so I think that added extra shame because it's like, why can't I get this right?

Like why do I keep making mistakes, like I don't know, that was more probably my teen years, but it's like we were taught not to make mistakes, and Dad is the example of that, you know.

Yeah, yeah, we experienced that in our family too.

Yeah.

Nothing he did was ever wrong, there was right.

I can't recall a single apology ever.

Yeah, never, No, And he I mean, similar to what you're saying, he definitely set himself up as the authority on all things.

He kind of put himself in the position of God, you know, like we had to go to him for things, like we had to ask him for advice on everything.

We really, even as adults, you know, and I'll get into that more, but even as adults, we really weren't allowed to make our own choices for ourselves, like they always had to tell what.

To do.

Like even you know, later on, it was kind of they would give recommendations that they expected you to follow, even about like who you would get married to.

And that didn't happen for me as much as like some of my other siblings, because that just wasn't something I would have listened to.

I don't think back then, even though I did listen to a lot of things I was known as the rebellious one, so I don't I don't think I was nearly as rebellious as they made me out to be.

I mean, I did a couple things that they didn't want me to, so I guess technically that could be rebellious.

I feel like they were developmentally appropriate things for my age.

But right, yeah, we're.

Just three black sheep here.

Yeah, right, yeah.

What do you think your moniker was?

Shendy is the rebellious one?

What what were you?

Oh?

I mean I was told that as a kid that I was like rebellious and obstinate, stubborn, like willful, you know, and that was the whole James Dobson thing.

You've got to break the spirit of the child.

And like they they talked about that, you know, the church dad talked about that as if that was like, you know, something you should be really proud about, if you were able to break your child.

So gross.

Yeah yeah, but like but.

The cool thing is that we weren't broken.

It might have looked like a yeah, me too, but meaning that that's still that was still in there.

We had to like adapt, you know, so as not to allow that like rebellious, like you know, stubborn spirit to show so that we could survive, but it didn't die.

I guess that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, so that I always like to look at that like he tried so hard, but he couldn't couldn't fully break me.

And I feel like that's obvious for you too.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think one of some of the ways they tried to break us was and I've heard you guys talk about some of this too, but like very intense physical punishment.

We would have to there was a ritual to it, which is also really weird, you know, but it would be we would have to pull down our pants, grab our ankles, and they would swat us with an object.

So most of the time it was a wooden spoon.

Sometimes it was plastic paintster stick that had little holes in it, and so you could hear it whistling through the air as it would be coming at you, and they would count out loud ten swats, and if you flinched, if you cried too much, if you didn't cry enough, you know, they would start over at number one.

And so often, you know, I was left with welts and bruises, and they didn't just hit my butt either like it was on my legs and my back, and you know it was and those spankings would spankings would be for anything, nothing like if you talked back, if you had, you know, in their opinion, right, if you had an attitude with them, if you wear sassy, if you know, it didn't even have to be anything that bad.

But then also sometimes there were things like growing up with a lot of siblings, you get into little scuffles and things like that, and so a lot of the time we weren't really being supervised that closely.

And like I said, we had, you know, twenty acre hobby farm.

We had motorcycles and ATVs and stuff like that.

So we would just be out there.

And this was the case in the eighties too for most kids.

Right, you're just if when the street lights come on, go home.

So we were just out there, and you know, so if they didn't know what happened, but somebody went home and was tattling, then both of you would get beat.

So it was just sort of sometimes you would tattle because you wanted the other person to get in trouble.

But then you were real careful because you weren't ever sure like am I going to get travel too.

Yeah, I noticed you did the air quotes around spanking, and I'm curious if that has been a difficult thing for you to like go through the process of like naming that what it actually is, because forever I kept saying spankings, but that doesn't really describe what it was, you know, like it was actual physical abuse.

But I do still have a hard time shifting that perspective from a spanking, which has its whole you know, connotation and meaning to like, no, we were being beaten with belts and you know for you objects.

Yeah, I mean to the extent that my mother actually would buy wooden spoons in bulk because they would they would hit us so hard they would break them, like the wooden spoon would bust and go flying, and so then she would buy them in like ten packs.

I mean, yeah, that's not normal.

That's that's physical abuse.

And also they're taking down your pants, like that's not something we've talked about a whole lot, but that is you know, it didn't always happen, but enough, Yeah, so humiliating.

That's a whole other, like to me level of abuse.

That's psychological abuse as well as physical.

And that wasn't just when we were little children either.

Yeah, Like, you know, it's bad enough to make an eight year old, a ten year old pull down their pants, but once you're like going through puberty and stuff.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

The last time that that my dad tried to do that to me, I was fifteen years old.

Oh my gosh.

There, and I actually developed early permonally.

I you know, was like pretty young, like twelve when I started showing the physical signs of changing.

So like I was, yeah, fully a woman body at that point.

And he I don't even remember what my sin was that day that was so terrible that he said, you know, go to my room and assume the position.

And it was like the house that they lived in at the time was pretty large, and to get from the main living area of the house to his bedroom was a long It was the Green mile.

It was, Yeah, it was walking the Green Mile.

And the whole time I was thinking, this is not going to happen.

I'm not getting beat today, No way in hell I'm pulling my pants down for this guy, Like, not a chance.

So I'm just trying to figure out the whole way down, Like how I'm gonna get out of this.

And so we get to his room and he like turns to go get the belt or whatever he was gonna beat me with, and I just took off running.

I was gone.

I was out of there.

And I almost almost made it to the front door.

I literally had my hand on the door, and he got me and he tackled me and he pinned me to the ground.

He had like one like my neck was in this side of his arm, and my knees were in this side, and he just had me like this, like my knees were to my forehead basically, and he had me like this.

But I'm screaming, I'm thrashing.

I'm saying I'm gonna call the cops.

I'm calling CPS on you.

You know you can't do this.

This is wrong.

I actually even had a friend over that day and she saw it all happen.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, And he looked at her while he's got me panned, and he says, you're probably gonna want to leave, and she was like okay, and just like left and because like, what what are you gonna do?

And so I don't.

I eventually got out of the hold he had me in, and he told me like, go ahead and call the police.

They're just gonna take you away, which I should have, but I didn't like because he let me go.

And then I don't remember how anything you know, transpired after that, But yeah, I didn't call the police, and I probably should have, but I maybe I was scared that they would take me away.

I don't know.

Maybe I believed him.

Yeah, but he never touched me again after that day in that way.

Yeah, So I don't know, maybe he realized like, whoops, maybe this is too much, or or just if somebody's gonna fight back, then he's done.

I don't know, but I think that was, like you said, like they couldn't break me.

They tried real hard, and it never I mean it did to an extent, right like it was.

It's been hard emotionally to deal with the wounds of that as an adult, but as a kid, I definitely I was stubborn and strong willed and I didn't just I didn't just believe everything that was said.

I had questions and that was never okay.

You know, you can't ask questions.

We also had to deal with purity culture.

I don't know if you're familiar with that book, called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, but that was one that they passed around.

Yeah, yeah, did you have to read it, Matthew Many, Yeah you did too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, and anybody listening, please send us an email or a comment or a voice message about your experiences with that book, because I know there have to be Almost everybody who's coming to this right now is familiar with that in some way.

Yeah, so that was sort of the expectation that was put out there of Like you know, also, I think maybe a cultural thing that a lot of people are familiar with is the Douggers and how they could only you know, the Dugger family, and how they were supposed to only court and they had to have a supervisor like chaperone, like they were never to be alone with somebody from the opposite gender, even if you were just friends, like that wasn't allowed.

You know, they live in our area, sorry, I work in which.

Is where.

Yea and our aunt.

Our aunt used to live Springdale Townytown, and you had to pass their house to get to her house.

So like the Vans and stuff, I haven't seen them, but I know Liz has seen.

I forget the mom's name at the sands club or whatever.

Yeah, mom was on a plane with them from either to Florida or from because she texted She's like, you will not believe it was on this flight.

Oh that's so weird.

Yeah.

Yeah, So I think I was not real good at following those rules.

I will say, so that's what was expected of us.

And I'll say like there were a couple of relationships where I was like, all right, fine, I'll try this.

We'll see what happens.

Like I've put the boundary up there of like, Okay, if we're courting to get married, then I want to you know, keep our physical interactions to a minimum and no kissing, and you know, we can maybe like hold hands.

But like at this point, actually I'm skipping ahead in the story a little bit, but at that point I was actually like in my twenties, I had already been married and divorced, and so like that's just weird.

That is really weird to just.

Be like Okay, no no holding hands, no kissing, no nothing, like I've been married and divorced or I don't know.

It's just bizarre.

Yeah, but I guess.

And that's another purity culture story, is I got married when I was nineteen, because you're not allowed to really have a long term relationship.

And in my own family cult, like the rules were you can't you can't start seeing somebody, courting, dating, whatever you want to call it, until you're eighteen, and then it's double dates.

Like you again, you can't be alone.

Well that just didn't work for me really, so technically my mom said I wasn't even allowed to like boys.

I wish I would have said, cool, no problem, I like girls, but I didn't think of it.

I didn't think of that.

Then.

Unfortunately, hey, I'll follow your rules, no problem.

I mean, not that it's a choice, but if it was, I might have made that choice.

Well yeah, so I would just keep it a secret, right, And I feel like that's super harmful too.

That's a rule that I changed with my own kids right away, was like, if you like somebody, I want to know and let's talk about it, because how else do you learn and when you get to be older, like I've seen this with some of my nieces and nephews who grew up in the cult and you know, had to live under those rules.

They weren't allowed to have relationships, and then so then they get to be an adult eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, and it's like the first time they've ever even had a significant other when you know, that kind of happens around like nine to twelve, fourteen years old maybe somewhere in there, and it's it's little and it's not so impactful on your life, and if it if it's over in a week, like your heart isn't shattered, you know, And then you build up from those little things to then when you're an adult and it's a serious relationship, you've had practice and you kind of know how to handle it and you've kind of learned some red flags already, maybe like I don't I had a relationship that was like this, and I don't want that for my future.

Where Like when you wait till you're in your twenties to even start trying any of that, I feel like that puts you way behind the game.

So with my kids, I just didn't do that.

Like I was like, if you like somebody, that's awesome, Let's talk about it.

Let's discuss why do you like them, what do you like about them?

You know, really think about it.

And I think that's been beneficial and my kids, you know, my older kid, he's been in a relationships and I think that's helped him figure some stuff out.

My younger one not so much, but that's just not her thing, so that's okay too.

But yeah, I was I had basically the same the same guy that I liked from the time that I was fourteen to eighteen, and we were on again, off again a little bit.

But and when we were off I probably liked somebody else, but I generally probably tried to keep that a secret from my parents so I wouldn't get in trouble.

The guy that I liked from fourteen to eighteen, his dad was on the board at our church, so like that was kind of okay, but again we weren't really allowed to like hang out just the two of us, was like in youth group things or you know, they really controlled a lot of that too.

But then his parents left the church and that happened because well, this is a whole other story.

So, like I was saying earlier, how my dad kind of wanted to be one of the big time preachers, so he would have like he was really always chasing revival and whatever that meant to him, and so he actually like bought a coach bus, like a big, huge bus, and he would load anybody from the church who was willing to go, and we would drive down to like Florida or Ohio and we would just go to like meetings like I don't know if you ever heard of Rodney Howard Brown or we went to like rod Parsley camp meeting stuff.

Rodney Howard Brown was back in the nineties and he was big into Again.

I don't know if this is anything you guys have heard of, but Holy laughter, like the Holy Laughter movement, and it well.

I need to hear more about.

Just let's pause, right, Holy Laughter episode title for starters.

There we go.

What the hell is Holy laughter?

It sounds better than the move though, doesn't it.

I don't know, let's hear it.

It's weird.

Let me just start.

It's weird, okay.

So the so we went to, right, we went to Florida, and this preacher's name was Rodnie Howard Brown, and he was South African, very very heavy, thick accent, a big dude, real big dude, like probably over six feet maybe three hundred pounds, like big guy, booming voice, and so he would just literally walk back and forth like pacing, and he would just go ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, and then people in the in the crowd would start doing that, and then pretty soon everybody's just laughing, rolling around on the floor, running around in circle, just chaos, just weird chaos, but you know, it was the Holy Spirit making everyone laugh.

Well.

Then, also around that same time in those movements, like there started to be this thing where they would say that gold dust was falling from the sky, and so then everybody would look at like their hands and be like, oh my gosh, I have gold dust on my hands.

It's like your makeup.

I'm sorry it was your eyeshadow, but that's okay.

It was, you know, the Holy Spirit glitter on your hands.

Didn't Bethel?

I need to look it up.

I think Bethel said that that happened at one of their churches.

Like gold this was coming down as a theme.

That was My dad would find things like that and just copy them.

So he would copy like Kenneth Hagen's sermons or even the cadence of his speaking, like he just was always, you know, copying, and so I do think that was part of why we were going to these you know, we would go to like Benny hin Services or the Brownsville Revival, or like if Lester Summer All when he was still alive was speaking in Ohio.

They'd load up the bus and go listen to him speak.

So our Rod Parsley, like I said, he's got a big World Harvest church in Columbus, Ohio.

So my dad was always just like following these things, and then he would come and copy that stuff and try to bring it back into our church.

Well, there were a lot of people who thought it was weird and were kind of uncomfy with it, and so they would reach out to At this point, we were still in a denomination, the Assemblies of God, so they reached out to like the higher ups, and we're kind of being like, what's going on?

Can you do something?

So they would call my dad and they would be telling him like, you're getting too far off the mark here.

This isn't what our belief system is.

And so then at that point he decided he didn't want anybody telling him what he could or couldn't do.

You know, I'm following the Holy Spirit.

How dare you tell me I can't do this?

So he decided at that point to disaffiliate with the Assemblies of God, and that's a thing that you can do.

But there's procedures in the by laws, and you know, there's the church has to vote, the board has to vote, all these things.

Well, you know, my dad doesn't want anybody to tell him what he can or can't do, so he just he actually, allegedly, I have heard from people that he forged their signatures, board members signatures on things to just force this to go through because he wanted to own the church for himself.

So that did happen.

He got the church under his own personal name instead of the Assemblies of God.

But there were lawsuits to follow.

The Assemblies of God sued.

I think there were former church members who sued.

There was one guy in particular who was pretty upset because he had donated a bunch of stock in his company and then he was like, this isn't what I want to support.

So he wanted the company stock back.

But you know, I technically you can't do that if you give an offering that it's a gift and you don't get to ask for it back.

But he was suing, and I I remember telling my dad one time, I was like, why don't you countersue, and he said no, because that would open it up to discovery.

He would be allowed to ask for my financials and I don't want to do that.

So I was like, oh, weird, but okay.

So.

Yeah, I guess then he has no guardrails right now.

He's his own thing.

He doesn't have anybody who can keep him in check or in line.

He did end up finding a what he ended up calling his spiritual mentor leader head.

I don't know whatever word you want to plug in there, but spiritual mentor named Ed Dufrain.

He came across him at one of those Rod Parsley camp meeting meetings.

Apparently there's a video that shows him walking on air or something.

I've seen the video.

It didn't look like that to me.

I can't no idea, no idea.

We have to look that up.

Yeah, I think to see the gold does too.

I need to see all of this.

Yeah, so that was I think again, that supernatural thing was always like what my dad was chasing.

He always wanted the weird.

I don't know what else to call it, just the weird stuff of people, you know, the old school what they would call holy rollers, and like you know, people literally were would like roll around on the floor.

They were dancing, not the way you guys did, Maddie, not like slow romantic.

Dancing, but like like none of that, more of like we would laugh because it was literally like a jump kick, like they would.

Do a little hop and then kick and then hop and then kick and then hop.

I'm just imagining like roundhouse kicks.

Boy Church, that would have been better.

Well even sometimes because it was just ridiculous, right, And so sometimes I'd be sitting on the front row with my mom and I would just look at her and I would be like party laugh and she'd be like okay, And so we would just make up ridiculous sounding laughs, like just weird laughing noises.

You just do that because again, everybody is it's chaos.

Everybody's running around screaming, laughing jump like, okay, let's just play a funny game.

I don't know, it's bizarre.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

So I think I got a little off the topic that I was talking about there, because I think we were talking about baty culture.

So I don't know how we got here.

I side tractice.

I wanted to know more about the Holy laughter that's where.

That's how we got here.

Yeah, that's fun times.

I mean, actually it wasn't that bad because a lot of times it would be like our services were long, like I'm talking five to six hours plus like long, and sometimes I don't want to just listen to a sermon that long.

That's real boring.

So at least we're just sitting here watching people be ridiculous, like people watching at its absolute finest.

For sure, there would be like I remember one time where there was this kid who was crawling on the floor looking for chicken nuggets.

That was the Holy Spirit.

I don't who are we to question what the Holy Spirit does?

The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways.

Correct, you can't understand it, so you don't need to ask any more questions.

Do not question it.

I'm surprised you even asked me what holy laughter was.

I mean I assumed, but I yeah, I needed to know for certainty.

Yeah, I didn't know there was an actual like term for it.

Yeah there was, you know.

What that Actually, I'm not going to get a sidetracked.

I was just remembering we had, uh, I think she's probably in her nineties now.

We had a woman in the church I mean I think they came in like two thousand and five and we're there until we left.

That would do that sometimes, like on a Friday night worship service.

She would pray and she would kind of get into like a little bit of a hysterical crying prayer type thing, and then they would be the laughter.

And I'm betting that she's probably from that old school of thought.

What you're talking about.

That was probably a thing that she learned elsewhere.

And because I always wonder like what is that, Like why the laughing?

But like now it makes sense.

I guess I have experienced.

I just didn't know what it was, where it came from, what it was called.

Yeah, well you remember, like I think this was Benny hen was It was he the one that would call people up and just like push them on the forehead.

And there was a lot of that too.

Yeah.

I was gonna ask because that's what I think of when I think of some of these gatherings.

Yeah, you know, doing like this with your hand and a bunch of people fall, that type of thing, like not even touching them.

I've seen that stuffy.

Yeah, I talked to a girl the other day.

I talked to someone the other day who grew up in that, and she was saying that she would just pretend to pass out just because like that was what you're supposed to do.

So she's like, okay, well, and also sometimes if you didn't, they would just keep pushing you, like they're handles on your head, and that you would be like and then.

Finally I'd be like, fine, I'll just lay down there.

Yeah.

I was just say the spirit of rebellion is strong in this one, to push.

A little harder.

Yeah, that's probably.

What was happening.

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