Creative Alchemy

One of the big takeaways I have from this conversation with Renee Linnell was when she reminded me that shame dissipates as we tell our stories. When we tell the truth about an experience we feel shame about, that act of speaking up breaks up the shame, the same way a frozen river’s ice breaks up in the spring. Telling the truth is like sunshine and warmth on that river of shame. Even when we just tell the truth to ourselves. Perhaps especially then! It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It can be scary and it can make us feel vulnerable. But it is always worth doing. Renee talks about her journaling practice and how full of anger it was when she first left the cult. I’m glad we talked about that because expressing those feelings is SO important, especially after a cult situation where we’ve been told our thoughts and feelings and our very being don’t matter. It’s healthy to get the river of feelings flowing again. Another thing that Renee points to in this conversation is that writing a memoir about a traumatic experience like being in a cult is difficult. If you’re trying to do that – to write your story – and you’re finding that it’s hard, you’re right! It is hard! But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Just because something is hard or has difficult moments doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort. Ask anyone who’s ever raised a child. Renee Linnell is an author, inspirational speaker, entrepreneur, and lifelong adventurer. She has been featured on The Today Show, BBC, NBC, NPR, and numerous other media outlets. Before becoming a writer, she traveled the world as a surf model, danced tango professionally, earned an MBA from New York University, and founded or cofounded six wildly different businesses—from tango shoes and dance companies to fitness, fashion, tech, and publishing. Through her writing and speaking, Renee explores freedom, self-trust, and what it means to return to who we were before the world told us who to be. Learn more about Renee Linnell at ReneeLinnell.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. This free ebook guides cult and other trauma survivors into the healthy and healing practice of journaling. With a gentle hand and relying on her decades of writing experience, cult survivor Alexandra Amor encourages readers to develop a journaling practice as part of their healing path. Click here to get your complimentary copy. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Knowing early on that a punishing deity didn’t make sense Starting a spiritual quest at age 15 Creating the perfect life and still feeling empty and sad Falling under the spell of a toxic teacher Beginning to write as a way to deal with the difficult emotions after leaving a cult Finding that shame dissipates as we tell our stories Lessons learned about how to write a personal story Working with an editor and getting what was needed from that collaboration Moving through the painful process of working with edits Resisting suggestions to change the book for a publisher and telling the true story How writing helps us to see our part in what unfolds in life Remembering the joy of creativity for its own sake Resources mentioned in this episode Renee’s books The Burn Zone and Still On Fire The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron Transcript of the Interview with Renee Linnell Alexandra: Renee Linnell, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Renee: Thank you. It’s so nice to be here. Alexandra: It’s nice to have you here. Why don’t you give us a little potted history, as they say in the UK, about yourself and about your time in the Buddhist cult? Renee: I lost most of my family when I was young, and my father died on Thanksgiving Day when I was 15. And so there had just been so much death around me that. He was like my best friend and my hero, and so I just was like, there has to be more out there than what I’m being taught in church and in school. I was raised very Catholic, and I remember sitting in church when I was like five, and I was like, “It doesn’t make sense.” I loved American cheese slices, and so when they said Jesus, I thought they were saying cheese-us. So I pictured like this big American slice of cheese in the sky, and I just remember thinking like, if Jesus, like if God made me and made all of us, then He would love us. Like we’re not sinners. That doesn’t make sense. We’re not flawed. So I was like, okay, the adults have holes in their logic, and so even from a young age, I was like, “Doesn’t make sense.” And then when everyone was dying, I was like, “It doesn’t make sense that we would fall so in love with people, and then they would die, and we’d never see them again.” Like that’s just cruel and horrible. When my dad died, someone gave me the book *Many Lives, Many Masters* by Dr. Brian Weiss, and that introduced to me the concept of reincarnation and souls constantly finding each other, and loved ones always being reunited. And so that was like, okay, that feels good to me. I started, without realizing it, a spiritual quest at that age, and then I started to question everything. My mom was very Catholic, and she said, “You don’t have sex unless you want to please the man, and that’s the only reason women have sex.” And I was starting to learn about my body, and I was like, that doesn’t seem right. I mean, I think sex is probably going to feel really good. I want to go out and have as much sex as possible. Then I started traveling. And then the more that I traveled around the world, the more that I realized what I was hearing on the news wasn’t really accurate. And so I became a mystic more or less. I wanted to know for myself what was real. I ended up creating this great life where I was surfing, traveling around the world surfing, and I was a model, so free surfboards, free bikinis, free trips, lots of pro surfers to play with. Then I became a professional dancer, and I was dancing Argentine tango and traveling dancing, and I was still unhappy inside. I was well educated. I graduated magna cum laude with a double degree, so it was like I had everything from the outside looking in. My life was perfect, and I was empty and sad, and I felt like everyone else out there had it figured out, and I didn’t. And so I read all kind of self-help books. I studied all different religions. I traveled all over the world. I slept with all kinds of guys. Nothing was filling the void inside, and nothing was answering the questions. Then I walked into a meditation seminar, and which is the opening of my first memoir, *The Burn Zone* I sat in front of the teacher, and we started to meditate. And I realize now that I went into samadhi, which is the highest mind state you can go into meditating, apparently, according to books I’ve read. I erroneously attributed that to the teacher, and so I was just hooked, like hook, line, and sinker. I was in. I didn’t care who she was. I didn’t care what she said. I was going to be her student for the rest of my life because that peace that I felt inside my mind, I realize is what I’d been searching for my whole life. Alexandra: Wow! Take us forward to when things went sour with that teacher. Renee: Well, they went sour. Okay, it’s like after I’ve done so many interviews with the book for the book tour and everything, I compare it to any toxic relationship where it’s like, well, if you went on a first date and somebody verbally abused you or hit you, you would get up and leave the table. You have nothing invested, but they love bomb you and they make you feel like loved and seen and cherished. And adored and safe. Then slowly over time they start removing your foundation and the things that empower you and the things that make you you, and then slowly they start introducing the self-doubt, the gaslighting. So it’s like in hindsight, I could say things started turning bad like within the first three months, but I would say, well, I am an extremist, so I became the number one student. I ended up kind of running the company and working with the teacher, who was a woman, with her right hand man, who ran the company, and then he and I were together all the time. He was 15 years older than I was. He started seducing me, and I became his consort. So that’s when it really started to turn ugly. But at the time, I was-I don’t know-I-I also was raised with an abusive mother, so the love pattern that I learned was like neglect and abuse followed by love bombing. So this was just all these patterns were being mimicked and recreated. But it turned when I became his consort was about a year in. Alexandra: When did you end up leaving the group? Renee: Well, I got thrown out of it, which saved my life. Alexandra: Me too! Renee: Did you? Yes. Probably not for the same reason I did. Maybe not. It turned out that the right hand man was her boyfriend and her lover, which I didn’t know. So my joke is, if you want to get thrown out of a cult, sleep with the leader’s boyfriend or girlfriend. But I it saved my life because what happened was I think, let’s see, I joined in 2006 in September. Oh, it’s probably this is probably today might actually be my 20-year anniversary. It was probably summer 2010 when my teacher called me and she said, “I have a new task for you. Your task is to go get into one of the hardest business schools in the country”, she said. “That’s not the task, though. The task is to then graduate and make $10 million profit after taxes, and once you do that, you can come back to the group.” And she said, “But you have 48 hours to say goodbye to everybody and to leave.” At the time, I didn’t have anybody outside the group, but I was such an extreme student that I said goodbye to everybody, and I left and I went to the East Coast. I was living in California, and I tried to get into Harvard, Yale, Columbia. I ended up getting into NYU, and that was fall of 2011 is when I started, but so I was technically kicked out in 2010, but I stayed completely loyal until 2013. So like seven is that that’s about seven years. Alexandra: When did it occur to you that you might want to write your story in book form? Renee: It didn’t really. I had a great therapist, and she because I was like, well, everything happens for a reason, and I know that this all happened for a reason. Because of the cult, I ended up in a business venture in New York, in which I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I ended up smeared all over the tabloids. It was a disaster because I was no longer listening to my intuition, and so my whole life shattered. I was suicidal. I didn’t know who to trust. I didn’t know what to believe. I remember talking to my therapist, and I was like, “I know everything happens for a reason, and I know that it’s all part of the divine path.” And she said, “Renee, you’re trying to handle this kind of like a spiritual bypass, and you have so much emotion that needs to come through and out and be felt and expressed.” She talked me into journaling, into screaming into pillows, and into pounding my mattress, like getting the rage out. So I was journaling and journaling and journaling, and a lot of it was like vitriol. Just I hate her and f bombs. You know, mother effer, like screw that woman and hundreds and hundreds of pages. I ended up with over 1000 pages of my processing. Then I had so much shame around the story, so I wasn’t telling people about it. But then I slowly started to tell. It’s funny. I have a twin brother, and he’s my only living family. And I, of course, distanced myself from everybody while I was in this group. And he, at one point, said, “He said, I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t care how weird you get. Just don’t cut me out of your life. I won’t reach out to you. I won’t contact you. I’m not going to question you. But please don’t cut that lifeline to me.” And so I finally called him and I said, “Okay, I have something to tell you. I was in a cult.” And he goes, “I know you were in a cult. We all knew you were in a cult. You’re the only one that didn’t know you were in a cult.” But when I told him the story, he was like, “That’s incredible.” So a little bit of the shame went away. And then the more I told the story, the more people reacted the same way. Like, “That’s incredible! You should write a book. This should be a movie.” And that’s when I realized I had over 1000 pages of journal entries that I had actually been writing a book. One of the tasks-the task to get my MBA-I was at the NYU Executive MBA program, and one of my colleagues was the editor in chief of Penguin Random House. I went to lunch with her one day, and I told her everything that had happened, and I said that I had been journaling, and that I was maybe writing a book, and I had no idea what I was doing. And then she said, “Okay, it sounds like you need an editor.” So that’s how it started. Alexandra: You didn’t have any experience at that point writing? This was the first memoir you’d ever thought about writing. Renee: I didn’t have experience, but I always loved writing as a child and in school. And one of my favorite teachers was my English teacher, and he was really strict. He actually has a cameo in my first book, and he was really strict about learning all the rules and everything, and then once we learned them and did well on his exams, I remember the day he called us in. He goes, “Now I have a new assignment, and now that you know all the rules, you have to break them, and I want you to break them because you have to develop your own writing style.” And so, people tell me that my writing style is really conversational. It’s like sitting in my living room, or just having a conversation. And it’s because of Mr. J. I loved writing because of him, because of the freedom he gave us to express ourselves. And then I did in 2004, right after my mother passed away, I found a whole box of my father’s letters from World War II, and so I had all of those transcribed, and I wrote an intro and a conclusion and created a book that was published. But that’s the only writing experience I had had. Alexandra: What a gift from that English teacher, to teach you that to follow the rules and then to break them Renee: To give us the freedom at such a young age to express ourselves however we wanted to. Alexandra: Yeah, and find your voice. That’s amazing. What were the biggest hurdles do you think you encountered when you began thinking about turning it into a book? Renee: Oh my gosh, so many. The first one was definitely wondering, thinking too much about the reader, and wondering how will this be received, and then censoring myself or doubting myself. Once I decided I wanted to have a book, it took all the free form. Like I tell people now for advice, I’m like, just vomit it all out. Everything that you have inside you, vomit it. Make it a mess. Say the same thing over and over. Don’t worry about punctuation, don’t worry about spelling, don’t worry about redundancy. Like, just get it out. What I had done is I had written my rage over and over and over, so it was like I don’t know 100 pages of kind of the same certain events, and so then that seemed like such an unbelievable mess that it was like, well, how do I even turn this mess into a book? So, at that stage, if I didn’t have a writer, an editor, I don’t know if I would have been able to move through it. She was incredible. Now it’s funny because I just discovered Chat GPT. I was super anti AI, but for my third memoir, I have another about 1000 pages of its vomit, and it’s been so daunting going through it without an editor, and then I finally was like, oh, I fall into ChatGPT. I had to immediately say, “Do not write for me. I cannot have my own writing changed. It’s very important that it’s my voice and my energy.” But that is such a good tool for taking all the vomit and pulling out the gold. The hurdles were self-doubt, worrying too much about how it would be received, and the redundancy of expressing myself over and over, trying to get the same concept out. Alexandra: I interviewed someone a few weeks ago, and she introduced me to this Terry Pratchett quote, which is, “The first draft is for you, the writer.” I love that takes the worry away of it doesn’t have to be perfect when it comes out the first time. Renee: Well, and the truth is, it’s never going to be perfect, right? Like, isn’t there another quote? Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good or something. Alexandra: Yes. Renee: I remember getting to the point where I had printed the whole manuscript out, the first kind of like real manuscript, and I was reading through it, and I got so upset. I threw it in the trash, and I dumped all my coffee grounds on top of it, and I quit. Then I went to school because by then I had moved here to Colorado, and I was commuting to New York every other weekend to finish school. I was talking to one of my colleagues at school, and he said, “How’s the manuscript going?” And I said, “Oh, I just threw it in the trash and dumped all my coffee grounds.” I had quit school. I had a total breakdown and quit. Unfortunately, I made myself go back. He was like, “Renee, what is the deal with you quitting when it gets hard? You’re not allowed to quit. You’re going home to Colorado and you’re pulling that disgusting thing out of the trash with all the coffee grounds, and you’re finishing this book.” I’m just so grateful. When I was quitting NYU, my colleague said because my last class was world economics. It was so overwhelming. I was with all finance, Wall Street guys, I didn’t even understand the lexicon, and they were like, “You are not quitting. We will carry you to the finish line.” I just feel like these angels showed up each time to not let me quit. Alexandra: Oh, that’s so beautiful! I love hearing that. What do you think the editor that you worked with was able to help you with? Renee: I think I really needed validation, and so she was really able to validate me that it was a fascinating story. I didn’t understand how to create how to create a book. For example, some of the hardest, darkest mind states that I was in, or childhood trauma, for example, she was like, “Renee. Every time you bring up your mother abusing you, you apologize for her immediately after. I need you to take the reader on the journey of what it was like growing up with your mother.” Or with the male teacher. She said, “You keep saying how repulsed you were by him, but I don’t believe that you would have ever ended up in a romantic situation with him if you were truly repulsed.” I had forgotten that I was originally attracted to him, and so she was like, “I need you to pull the bring the reader through that journey. I need you to remember what it was like when you did find him attractive.” And then towards the end of the book, when I moved to Colorado, I thought I was going to heal, and I was going to write, and I was going to be a best-selling author, and everything was going to be fine. And instead, I fell apart like totally and completely. Life came with the sledgehammer and hit me a few more times. And so I had all of that in the book. She was like, “Renee, your reader really needs you to heal. Your reader is exhausted at this point, and I know these other things happen to you, but we have to take them out of the book. They can come in at a later book or a different memoir, but right now your reader needs you to start to rise.” Those things I never would have known without her. Alexandra: Oh, such a good point. And so then you wrote Still on Fire. Did you include some of those things in that book? Renee: Yes. Alexandra: That’s such great advice. It’s so great to have that second pair of eyes that can just help you to see because we’re so close to it, we can’t see what’s happening. Renee: It’s interesting because when I first sent her the writing, no one had seen it, of course, and it’s like the deepest, darkest secrets of my heart. And then when she would return it to me with her edits, I would get furious. I was like, she doesn’t know me, and she doesn’t know what I’m been through, and she doesn’t know my voice, and she doesn’t know my story. Unfortunately, I would sit with it. I think I had two weeks to turn it back around, and by the end of the two weeks, I would realize that she was right in 95% of her edits. But it took the whole process of every time I got that editing back, it just hit my heart, and I went straight into defense. I also learned through the process of that and Still on Fire, don’t show a bunch of people. Don’t talk for me. Don’t talk to a bunch of people about it. Pick one or two people who I truly trust, and only show them because everybody has an opinion. And when it’s something that’s so personal, it’s like we have to trust our own inner guidance. I think, on how it gets delivered out into the world. Alexandra: That is such a good point. I made the same mistake sharing it far and wide initially, and then realizing, oh no, no, no, this is not the way to do this. Such a good point. One of the things I love about your book is that you interweave. It goes back and forth between the past and the present in the cult, and you weave in your childhood and your 20s, as you said, in traveling the world and becoming a dancer and all that stuff. How did you come up with that structure? Renee: I knew what I wanted the opening of the book to be was that scene when I first sat in front of my teacher. And then I knew I loved the story about the sandbar with the sharks when I was 10 years old. That’s such a great story. I think when I presented it to the editor, because she said send me 15 pages because the editor was the editor in chief of Penguin’s Plume division and she had just started freelancing so it was a really big deal that she took me on as a client, and the timing once again was incredible. When I only had 15 pages I could send her as my audition, and so I think I sent her those two back to back. I feel like she was the one that decided to interweave the flashing back and forward. And another thing I do want to say is that the first publishing house I went to, they really wanted me to sanitize my story. Make it a Christian cult that I joined, which I never would have joined. And they wanted me to change my writing style because they wanted to appeal to a larger target market. I started having so much anxiety and crying all the time. And I was like, “This feels like the cults all over again, where I’m trusting experts who to guide me, and I’m ignoring my own inner guidance.” And so I made the choice right then: I’m not doing this to be a best-selling author. As of course, I feel like it’s probably every author’s dream. But I realized it was more important for me to tell my story my way. Singer-songwriters who we truly love, they’re not thinking about a target market. They’re expressing what’s deep inside their heart, and people are resonating with that because it’s truth. And so I made the choice then that I’m writing my truth, and some people will love it, and some people will hate it, and that’s going to have to be okay. I think that’s an important thing for writers to hear: forget about the target market, and write from your heart. Give your gift out into the world, and trust that the people who are the who will benefit from receiving it will find it. Alexandra: Great advice. I absolutely agree. Because if you had changed it, changed those important details, the authenticity bleeds out of it, and then nobody would resonate with it. Renee: And you think about those of us who are seeking, or those of us who would end up in a cult. We do so because we’re super sensitive. I have a feeling we’re probably evolved to the point that when we incarnate here, we’re like, this place doesn’t make sense. There’s something wrong with the mainstream paradigms, right? Like, where do I fit? I kind of feel lost. I just want tribe. I just want family. I don’t want to feel like an alien. So we’re already turned off by what’s fake, and we’re already desperately seeking what’s true and what’s real, and so then it’s like, well, if we’re going to write our stories to help others, they’re going to be attracted to what’s real, so we cannot dilute it just because some person tells us that it will sell more books. Alexandra: 100% Totally agree. You talked a little bit about what I’m calling it the first draft, the beginning origins of the book were the were journaling. Did you develop a writing practice in order to get the book finished? Renee: I didn’t. I tried to. I read the Writer’s Way. Is that what it’s called? Alexandra: The Artist’s Way. Renee: The Artist’s Way. Yeah. I tried to do the morning pages, and what I realized is it didn’t work for me. What happens to me is when it’s time for me to write, I can’t stop. It just comes through me, and I like I’ll forget. I’ll sit down at my computer at eight a.m. and I’ll look up, and it’s two, and I haven’t even had a glass of water. And then otherwise, I’ll go months or years, and I can’t even write at all. I’m thinking about what I’m writing, and I’m living the experience. But when I go to write it, if I force it, it’s crap. It took me through two memoirs to understand that when I’m in flow, I’m in flow, and when I’m not, I’m not. And trying to force it when I’m not just doesn’t work. So for me, I stopped with any type of routine. Alexandra: I love that too because I think it’s so easy when something works for us, for Julia Cameron, for example, with The Artist’s Way, it’s tempting to try to put that onto other people. This will work for you too. But it’s so much more important to help people to trust themselves and their process. Morning pages every day might not work for everybody. Renee: Well, and also we have now we have the cell phones where we can dictate right, and so that’s another thing. I can just be going about a normal day, and then suddenly I’m washing dishes, and a whole like two chapters is coming through me. So then I’ll just grab my phone, and now and I’ll dictate, and it’s a mess. But now I’ve captured that whole idea. Alexandra: That’s amazing. My follow up question was going to be: Does your practice is it different now? But we’ve sort of covered that. So you don’t have any kind of regular routine of journaling or anything. Renee: No, because when I was journaling so much, it was so dark and so much agony and so many mind demons. And then when I would go back to read it, it just was so sad. I kind of have a bitter taste in my mouth about journaling. And then the rigidity of my meditation practice was an hour every morning, an hour every night, sitting in the same spot, not moving. And then the whole group I was in was like a it presented itself as personal professional development, like corporate development. So really rigid rules, and so for me now, it’s like anything that’s rigid, anything that’s structured, feels like a cage. So I can’t. It’s like I have to allow. Every morning for two hours I give myself total quiet before I interact with my cell phone or the world. Even if I have to leave at six a.m. for a flight, I’ll wake up at four, and I slowly make a beautiful breakfast, and I luxuriate over coffee. And then, if I can be outside, if it’s not dark, I sit outside. Those two hours are my time in pristine quiet. I think that is kind of like journaling, where it’s like I’m just in touch with my thoughts, and I’m feeling my feelings, and but that’s about as structured as I can get. Otherwise, it just reminds me of a cage. Alexandra: One of my favorite questions to ask my guests is: Was there anything that you learned about the cult by writing about it? Renee: Definitely, I learned. The writing process made me forgive everybody, and my first drafts were so filled with hate and anger. I had to keep writing, and then I had to keep editing, and then I had to keep reading, and then I had to keep revising. Then I had to share. Then I became quite desensitized to some of the really painful stories and then I was able to see them from a much higher perspective and. It’s interesting because I say, like, at first the book was about hate and anger, and at the end it was about love, and I realized all my hate and anger wasn’t. I mean, for I was I hated the cult teachers, I hated my upbringing, I hated God. As I started to heal, and as I had to keep reading what I was writing over and over, I realized I was really angry at myself. I was angry at myself for allowing myself to be so taken advantage of, and to not love myself enough to have the boundaries to get out. But it’s so interesting because I wrote two memoirs about healing and being totally healed, and then I finally felt healed enough to enter into a romantic relationship. He turned out to be the cult all over again, just disguised as muscles and tattoos, which is what my third book is about. I realize it’s an underlying pattern of self-abandonment in order to be loved and accepted and included. The writing process has helped tremendously because it helps me see my own part in everything that unfolded, and so I could no longer truly blame. And then when I stopped blaming, it became so empowering to go. I made the choice to stay. I made the choice to give all my money. I made the choice to burn everything I own. I made the choice to start a business with no operating agreement with some thug guy that I met in the karate dojo in New York, and that’s incredibly empowering. So yes, it was so cathartic. It was very cathartic. Alexandra: Was it easier in any way writing Still on Fire, your second memoir? Renee: It was still just as hard. But what I realized was I understood the process better, and what the process taught me was that, like I said, just vomit it all out, and then trust that the book ends up taking on a life of its own, and the people that are meant to help actually come out of the woodwork and help. If you just keep going, it’s like the book ends up as a book. It’s an incredible process. I did start with the same editor, and then because she works with so many famous clients, I kind of got bumped further and further back, and then I started with the same publisher, and they messed up my publishing date by a year, and then another six months. Being the rebel I am, I was like, “Well, screw them! I’m just going to publish my own book with no editor.” I love the book, and it’s great book, and I’m proud of myself for doing it. But it definitely, I wouldn’t do it again that way. And in fact, I’m now doing a revised version because it does need an editor, it’s kind of like Renee gets the microphone and doesn’t put it down. An editor could come in and be like, “You made your point. You don’t need to make it 67,000 times. Your poor reader is ready for the next.” It does get easier as you go because the self-doubt kind of goes. I trust the process. I’m just going to keep going, and I’m not so attached to having a perfect result. Alexandra: How far along are you in the third one? Renee: Well, and then that’s the crazy thing about discovering this Chat GPT help because I had been writing the third one off and on for five years. Because there was so much trauma around the relationship with the man, every time I went back to sort through it, I just was like, I feel great now. I don’t want to relive all that crap. And then when I got the idea one night, well, I could take all 1000 pages and put it into ChatGPT and have her sort through it for. I call her a her, yeah, because I’m already so attached. It’s like I don’t need to start making her a man. I had five years of spurts of writing, like in a cafe, in an airport, on a plane, and then months and months of I can’t even look at it. I have no inspiration. This book is probably never even going to happen. And then it was three weeks ago when I had the idea to load it all into ChatGPT, and then it was 12 hours a day every day for three weeks. And not only do I have the third book ready to present time, I also have the revision of Still on Fire. And I have another book based on all my blogs. So I went from no motivation, no energy to I can’t even get up to go have something to eat. So the third book, I’m at the point now where I can send it to a publisher. But it’s time to live the plot because I realize I created such a safe cocoon in my healing that my cocoon became a cage, and so now my task is to go out into the world and live, and live the plot. Alexandra: Wow! Oh, that’s nice. Wow, amazing! Renee: It’s fun. Alexandra: I love hearing about all this creativity and inspiration, and you are on fire. It sounds like. Renee: Thank you. Alexandra: So, just as we start to wrap up here, is there anything that we that you’d like to share about creative alchemy, creative expression that we haven’t touched on yet? Renee: I think I would like to say that I believe we are here on this planet to create. I think it’s vitally important that we create. That you think of the joy we had as children with our little whatever it was, dances and drawings and finger paintings, or like picking up the mud and putting it all over our faces and in our hair. I think as adults, it’s just a shame that we’re taught as we grow up that if what we create isn’t perfect or isn’t beautiful, or doesn’t appeal to the masses, that we shouldn’t create. I think it’s so important for us to return to that childhood bliss of just going, “I don’t care if it’s ugly, like I don’t care if it’s not perfect. To me, it’s beautiful.” You think of like the joy that children share their creations. They’re so proud, and so I do think it’s really important that we create, however it is, and I think our souls start to sing again when we do it. Alexandra: Beautifully said. I totally agree. I noticed a theme on your website is about rewilding, and regaining touch with the wild parts of ourselves. Renee: Yeah, especially as women, because I think that feminine energy is scary to the patriarchy, right? We’ve been taught to hold it in and shut it down and turn off the light and all of it. I think it’s up to us to just turn that light on bright, and if people don’t like it, let them move away because the people who love it will come closer. Alexandra: Yes, absolutely. Well, this has been such a pleasure, Renee. Please tell us where we can find out more about you and your work. Renee: You can find me at reneelinell.com and my beautiful website designer. She’s so lovely. She is upgrading my website right now, and I just created free downloadable readers’ guides and companion journals for both books. Alexandra: Nice. Renee: She’ll be adding them to the website, I think, this week. Alexandra: Okay, great. I will put links a link in the show note to your website. Yeah, thank you so much. Well, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. Renee: It’s been lovely to talk to you. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Burning to Write the Truth with Renee Linnell appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.

We all want to belong. As I’ve said previously on this show, we are wired to look for connection and community. That very natural human need is what led today’s guest, Tamara Mathieu, into the Twelve Tribes. Fourteen years later, Tamara and her husband realized they needed to leave what had become a controlling, high-demand situation. One that Tamara would end up writing a book about and telling the truth about her experience. In the introduction, I talk about how personally satisfying for me to hear a cult-related story from someone who had got involved with her partner and then survived the cult with that person and then got out with him as well. And they’re still married now! I don’t know how many partnerships or marriages could survive that kind of journey. Tamara Mathieu joined the Twelve Tribes religious cult in 2000, with her husband and young son. In her memoir, All Who Believed, she tells her story in depth from how she became drawn to the group, what the next fourteen years were like, and finally how her family left in 2014 as a family of six. Writing became a way for her to heal and share her experience in order to educate others about this insidious group. Tamara lives in Vermont, works with adults with disabilities, and now has three grandchildren. Learn more about Tamara Mathieu at TamaraMathieu.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the audiobook version of my award-winning, Amazon best-selling memoir, Cult, A Love Story. Readers call the book ‘compelling’ ‘gritty’ ‘intimate’ and ‘not boring’ – which is what an author loves to hear. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of that subscription at alexandraamor.com/spotify. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Searching for answers after the Columbine school shooting On being introduced to the simple lives of those in the Twelve Tribes Discovering that the reality was very different than the initial impression of the group Connecting online with others after the Twelve Tribes experience and beginning to write about it Finding freedom in telling the truth about the experience Working on a follow-up memoir about the experience after leaving the Twelve Tribes Resources mentioned in this episode Tamara Mathieu’s book, All Who Believed Tamara on TikTok Transcript of the interview with Tamara Mathieu Alexandra: Tamara Matthew, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Tamara: Hi, thank you for having me. Alexandra: My pleasure. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background in the Twelve Tribes. Tamara: I live in Swanton, Vermont. I am a mother of four children. I now have three granddaughters as well. I grew up in Vermont, and I met my husband in 1995. We were both UVM students, University of Vermont, and around let’s see, it must have been 1998. I found out that I was pregnant, and so our lives just took a very different turn. We were still in college and everything, and now we have a baby on the way. And I took that responsibility very seriously that I was going to be a mother. We bought a house, we planned a wedding, and I really started to consider being a mother. What kind of mother was I going to be? I wanted to be a good mother. I really wanted a secure and stable family for my child. You know, all those things. Once my baby was born, I remember an event that really just is in my mind, as one of those moments that I feel like I started searching for something more was when the Columbine shooting happened. My baby Emmett was only five weeks old, and I was very affected by that event. Now that I would potentially be sending my child to school in a few years, and that was so scary. And I thought, am I going to be able to do that? Am I going to feel safe? Is this going to get worse? Is this kind of thing going to be happening more and more? It just was very unsettling, very scary, and I really started at that point to just desire just something safe, something different, something secure, just something wholesome for my child. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and I had mom friends, and we had play group. I had a good support in that way, but still, the majority of my day of my time was just me alone in our home with my baby. That was just awfully lonely considering that I was 22 years old and I went from college student. We lived in an apartment with like seven of our friends. There was always something going on, and just carefree and fun. And then all of a sudden, I had this drastic, drastic life change. And I think it’s often in those times where anybody could be susceptible to the message of a group such as the Twelve Tribes, because it was kind of in this state of mind that I met the Twelve Tribes. I was so drawn to their simple life of being together. From the outside, the appeal was so strong. I just saw families living together, working together, mothers helping each other out-a really simple and wholesome lifestyle that I felt like I would not, in and of myself, be able to provide for my child. Like, how am I going to have this simple farm lifestyle? We lived in Burlington, Vermont. My husband was a software engineer. Everything in our lives was kind of driving us to a certain lifestyle, which would have been probably most young women’s dream. We probably would have ended up fairly wealthy with my husband getting into that field in the late ’90s. It was a really upcoming field. He already had a really good job. We were homeowners at 22 years old; that’s unheard of. It was in that place that I was lonely and just looking for something more. I will back up a little bit. My husband’s aunt, his mother’s sister, joined the Twelve Tribes way back in its beginnings in Island Pond, Vermont, in 1981. He grew up always knowing about the group. His family lived in Benson, Vermont. He’d been up to Island Pond to visit his relatives, and so I was introduced to the group through him, meeting his relatives. What really stood out to me, I’d met some people in the community prior to our wedding, but the day of our wedding, he had relatives that came up. Twelve Tribes don’t go into churches, and they don’t go to ceremonies such as weddings, so they came to the reception afterwards, and they just pitched in. We didn’t have fancy caterers or anything like that. It was just all hands on deck. And so they just saw that there was a need, and they pitched in and they started replenishing food at our buffet and making sure everybody had water. And they stayed afterwards, and they cleaned our entire reception hall. We were expecting to have to go back and do that basically ourselves. And we show up, and there they are, and they’re cleaning. I was really affected. It’s like, wow, this is amazing. These people are so wonderful. They don’t even know me, and their work. It was a really hot day, and one of them had a baby in a front carrier. And then the next day, a whole bunch of Twelve Tribes members came over to my in-laws’ house. There’s a community in Rutland, Vermont, which is nearby, and a bunch of people from there came over. I was just surrounded by probably four to five different Twelve Tribes families, and I just spent hours asking them questions and talking to them. There were a couple of other young women that also had babies, and I just remember being envious of them. They’re all going home to this wonderful life together. And the next day, I had to just go back to Burlington to our lonely house. And my husband was going back to work. We had a three month old baby. He had just started a job at a new company, so we weren’t going on a honeymoon. It was just like okay, I just met this amazing group of people. I want to find out more. I want to get to know them more. So I started visiting any chance I could get. I went with my mother and father-in-law to Hyannis, Massachusetts, for a whole week. My husband didn’t go, but you know he felt fine sending me and our baby with his parents to visit the Twelve Tribes. No harm was going to come out of that. But the more time I spent there, it was harder and harder for me to go home. I started reading all of their literature. And my mother-in-law would get that they have like a monthly newsletter for the group. It’s called the Intertribal News, and every single Twelve Tribes community around the world each month submits like just a little synopsis. Here’s what’s going on in our clan this month. Because she was good friends with a lot of the people in the Rutland location, she became privy to they would let her take and read these newsletters. She would give them to me, and I’d be so excited to read it, and my husband was not excited at first. About the thought of the Twelve Tribes. He was happy with our life, and he was raised Christian, and he really wanted me to be a Christian. This is another aspect of it. He wanted me to go to church with his family, and I was never drawn to religion at all. I had all these questions; it never made sense to me, and I felt like, well if if there was something that was the truth, and God wanted me to believe that, then, like surely I would have some type of internal response when I did finally find what I was looking for, and I felt like that’s what had happened. I never went to church and had that sense of like, oh my god, I can’t wait. Next Sunday, you know that was a great sermon. It was amazing. Can’t wait to go back. Maybe we can get together with some people. I’ve been to different churches with friends or family. I did go to my husband’s to his family’s church with him one time, and I never felt anything. But it was so different with the Twelve Tribes. It became an obsession. It was like all I could think about. I wanted to be there more and more, and I could only see all the beautiful things. I think my family and friends were all pretty concerned, and didn’t understand what was going on. But the more I talked to them, or showed them different things, I think most of them eventually became supportive and maybe thought of it as a harmless group. Sort of like the Amish or something, but with cars and phones, and they probably didn’t really understand. But because I was so excited about it most of my family and friends outwardly eventually supported it. There was one time initially that some of my relatives on my dad’s side tried to get in touch with some deprogrammers, but they’re so ridiculously expensive. It was going to be thousands and thousands of dollars, and my family just doesn’t have that kind of money. I remember just reassuring everybody like this isn’t a cult, this isn’t dangerous. I’m going to be raising Emmett with families, and we’re all living together and taking care of each other, and it’s the way that we’re supposed to live. It was really romanticized in my eyes at that time, so it took about a year and a half, and then my husband was on board, and we joined the 12 Tribes in August of 2000. Alexandra: How long were you involved? Tamara: 14 years. Alexandra: You started to doubt and eventually left the community. How did that happen? Tamara: The life is very very controlling. You can’t even imagine it unless you’ve been in it. Every aspect of your life is controlled, and your children, especially. Our older two were teenagers, and that’s a really tough time in the Twelve Tribes. There’s zero autonomy, there’s zero independence, there’s zero ability for them to have any kind of dreams or aspirations. They’re so streamlined. This is the only way that you can think and believe and behave and dress and eat and talk and everything. And undoubtedly, so many of them start to resist that. When that happens, the blame is put on the parents. Obviously, it’s because we failed because we were not able to pass on the faith that we were supposed to, and if we had only cried out our father would have given us the grace. And there must be something stubborn or selfish or rebellious in us, and that’s the reason. Like our heart was not turned to our children. So it’s the biggest shame for a parent if your teenagers don’t just fall into line and go through their bar or bat mitzvah and be baptized, and then just be completely obedient. We were told that after the age of 11 or 12, there should be no more conflict. Conflict should be done. You should have a compliant and obedient and surrendered youth. And if you don’t, it’s because you failed as a parent. So there’s just so much pressure. And then if your child leaves the Twelve Tribes, they might as well be dead. They’re going to go to the lake of fire. You’re going to suffer in death for your failure, and it’s the biggest shame that a parent could face. So you have this just weight of guilt on you all the time. We’re encouraged to really crack down on them for all these like normal things that teenagers want to do. So that was becoming really difficult. My husband was a leader. He ascended into leadership fairly quickly. After we joined, he became a fairly young leader. So by the time we left, he was responsible for our main industry in Cambridge, New York, which was the big soap shop, Common Sense Farm, and he was what you know they call community coordinator. He was in charge of that location, so he was privy to a lot more behind the scenes stuff than I was. He’d go to the different leaders’ meetings and things like that, and I think he was just becoming disillusioned with just seeing some of the behind-the-scenes things that went on with different leaders, and the hypocrisy and the power struggles and those kinds of things. But he felt very responsible because he was in charge of this very lucrative industry that not only supported Cambridge, not only supported our community, but they were able to help some of our South American communities, like Brazil and Argentina. They’re pretty poor down there, and so money was being sent to those communities that they depended on, or money was being sent all over. But then some word got around our family’s not doing well, so they did send some people that he felt could take over that industry, and then they sent our family to Florida, which is kind of like one of those tactics where family’s not doing good; they’re afraid we might leave. Like, well, let’s send you somewhere totally different, fresh new star. But we were like, okay, we’ll do that. So, we did go down to Florida, and we lived there for about six weeks, and then we heard they were going to ship us back up to Rutland. The community we moved to had five people, where we were used to a community of like 80 people, and so for the first time ever, we had more freedom than we’d ever experienced in our family before. We were actually doing things that we enjoyed with our children. It was just so nice to be out of that scrutiny of so many people constantly judging you for everything you’re doing. But it was still happening. There was a community in Fort Myers, and people would be sent down to have meetings with us. It was like it was just getting exhausting, and we finally were just said, “That’s it, we’re done.” Alexandra: Good for you. At what point did you start to think about writing a book about your experience? Tamara: Not too long after leaving, I got in touch with other ex-members through Facebook groups and things like that, and I started writing out. We’d talk about something, and I’d be like, oh yeah, I had that same experience, and I’d write down this little story. And at one point, I just had pages and pages of these little stories, things that stuck out to me, things that had really affected me. It was just really therapeutic to get all that stuff down on paper. I’d be writing, and then it would jog my memory, and like, oh yeah, I remember when that happened. And then a friend of mine published a memoir, one of my best friends, and it was about her childhood growing up here in Swanton, Vermont. It was very well written and there were chapters of us as little girls, and I just remember reading through it, and it was wonderful. It was like I didn’t want to put it down, and because everybody has a story, right? So I was like, okay, look what she did with her seemingly normal upbringing in a small Vermont town. Maybe I could do this also. Maybe people would enjoy reading about my years in the Twelve Tribes. I already had quite a bit of stuff written at that point. So I just started to add on to my stories; add detail, started putting things in order. I just really started to think could I turn this into a memoir? Could I come up with the resource that I wished had been available when I was 22 years old and just meeting this group? But it was in an age where the internet was around, but it wasn’t like it is today. You just type in something. I didn’t really have a way of connecting with people who had left at that point, which there were fewer of then anyway. So I thought, well, maybe this could help people. Maybe I could get my story out there. That’s one of the main things people ask me: how did you get sucked into a cult? You seem like a normal person. I was like, yeah, normal people get sucked into cults. It’s not just like fanatical religious zealots, or you know what I mean. I was no different. I was probably the last person that somebody might be like, “Oh yeah, I bet she’s gonna go off and join a cult someday.” So I wanted to have that out there. Like how do people get drawn into groups like this? I thought it’d be good for family members to really know my story and to really know what my day to day life had been like all those years. That’s how that’s how it came about. Alexandra: Had you written much before? Was it something that you did other than the little stories that you were writing? Tamara: When I was younger, I loved writing. I used to think I’m going to write a book when I was really young. I remember I won a writing contest my senior year of high school, and I don’t even remember what I wrote about now, but I won this writing contest. The prize was a Barnes and Noble gift certificate. I went and I bought The Handmaid’s Tale, of all things. I did always enjoy writing. Alexandra: Were there any sort of internal hurdles that you needed to clear when you were thinking about turning this into a book? I know for me, there was a bit of feeling of not tattling exactly, but telling my side of the story was a little bit dangerous. Tamara: I did experience that to some extent, and so many people asked me, like, “Are you going to get backlash from the group?” A couple people have written books about the Twelve Tribes. A couple men had written a few years before I published my book, but there wasn’t anything by a woman. So I was a little nervous. And there are still relatives of my husband’s that are still in this group. My own grandmother was actually in this group, and she passed away in 2019. I wouldn’t have probably published the book if she’d still been there, because I was still able to maintain a relationship with her. She joined in 2008, after I had my fourth child. There’s a lot of different webs in my story. I do remember when I submitted my manuscript, it was accepted. It was going through the editing process, and then they sent it back to me, and they were like, “Okay, this is your final chance. You can go through it one more time and make any changes you want, and then that’s it.” I remember texting my friend and being like, “I don’t know that I can do this. I don’t know that I can look at this one more time. I’m terrified.” She was like, “No, no, no. You can do it. But I did have a little bit of of fear of what what would happen. Would people in the group retaliate in any way shape or form or be outspoken against my family or anything like that I I did have those fears Alexandra: Did any of that come true? Tamara: I even had book signings like in Cambridge and in Rutland. That was a little nerve wracking. It’s open to the public. Is anybody going to come in? But nope. I don’t know if they didn’t know about it. I didn’t receive any type of negativity personally from the group. There had to have been. I know people in the group know of my book because I’m in touch. I had a mother contact me whose son had joined one of the communities in Vermont, and she mailed him my book. And then she emailed me one day, and she said, “I just had to email him another copy of your book because somebody else in the household asked to borrow his.” I’m thinking, like, oh my god! Picture my book circulating. I’m sure just it wasn’t for everybody. Maybe certain leaders would read it so that they know what’s being said out there or whatever. But I just thought that was kind of funny. Alexandra: That is funny. That’s great. We should say your book is called All Who Believed. I just wanted to mention that. You mentioned that it was therapeutic to write some of the stories that you were writing. Can you expand on that a little bit and tell us what it was about writing that helped you? Tamara: I would just go into this other mode when I was writing. I’ve said the book almost wrote itself. I would sit down to work on a chapter, and it was before I knew it, two hours had gone, and I’d written thousands of words. Once I got into the story, it just all came out. I wasn’t having to make anything up. It was just remembering. It was just getting it all out there, and it was freeing. I’d feel a weight had been lifted off. Like, all right, I got that down. That’s documented. I can move on from that and go on to the next. Alexandra: You’ve made me realize. So, in high demand situations or cults, there’s the tension of pretending that everything’s okay. Pretending that we’re not noticing the hypocrisy, or if we feel like pushing back against things, there’s the tension of holding that back not protesting. The tension of following the rules. What I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that there’s a freedom in finally being able to just say that stuff. Tamara: We’re always told to doubt ourselves. We were never to doubt the teachings or doubt the authority of the leaders. If we had an attitude or a hard time with something, it was because of our own resistance and our own lack of faith. And deep down, it was because of our own flesh and our own selfishness, and we just didn’t want to surrender and serve and be saved. We were resisting salvation, so there could never be a problem that was legitimate or validated. Was always like, what are you lacking in your life that you’re not able to just receive this direction or this correction or this new revelation of something we were supposed to wear or not wear, or eat or not eat, or there was just constant rules and changes. It’s like anything could come down the pipeline. We were told sometimes our father only tells us to do something just to test our willingness to obey, and then once he sees our heart to obey, then we might have more revelation of the why, or maybe he’ll be like, “Nope, you don’t need to do that.” That was just a test because our father is going to remove the wheat from the tares. But the wheat and the tares grow up together. We wanted to be the wheat. Whenever we heard a new direction, like they were the ones questioning and contradicting, and but we wanted to be the ones that just said yes to whatever our father. Which we know was the leader was telling Alexandra: I relate to a lot of that. That’s for sure. That demand for perfection and anything that’s a problem is your fault. Not anybody else’s fault. One of the things that I keep coming back to is this idea that when I wrote my book, I learned a lot about the group that I was involved with. So, in other words, by having to explain it to other people, there were things that occurred to me that I could see. I could see, the cult leader did that thing, so that six months later she could do this other thing. I saw it like a chessboard almost. Was there anything that you learned or were able to observe newly when you started writing your book? Tamara: Well, I did talk to a lot of people. I had a lot of conversations with other people that had left, and even people who’d left long ago, and people that were there in the beginning, and the Twelve Tribes tells their own version of events of how you know they started out in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and this is what it was like, and this is what happened. But then I got the other side from other people of different things that happened that we weren’t told about, and learning different things that other families went through, especially leading families that I would have looked at as like, oh, well, they’re the perfect family. They don’t really have too many bad things going on. But then afterwards, you talk to them. It’s like everybody was going through the same thing. We were all suffering under the same oppression. We just didn’t have that freedom to talk to each other about it. We did have to encourage each other in faith. And if a woman comes to you complaining about her husband you don’t enter into that complaint. You encourage her to be a submissive wife, and that’s where her grace is. That’s you know that’s how she’s going to be redeemed. We don’t enter into that fellowship of complaint. So then to have that freedom to talk to somebody and just be like, oh my god! Do you remember this person? Oh my god, I hated that person. That person was so yeah, me too. Meetings in them were terrible, and to have those, it was so freeing and amazing to just get that validation. Alexandra: Were there any particular parts of yourself that you felt like were healed? Any catharsis that came from writing your book? Tamara: Just like I said, just being able to speak my truth. Also I did end up writing some letters to people there who I was really intimidated by when I was there, and who were hard in different ways on my family or me. It was so freeing to be this is how I feel about you. You don’t have any power over me anymore, and this is how you made me feel living with you. To just be able to say that, and oh, I’m not going to get dragged into a meeting tomorrow and get cut off and get told how disrespectful I am. I can just say what I need to say now and there’s not going to be a repercussion in some big public repentance afterwards. Alexandra: Have your children read your book? Tamara: I think that they have all read parts of it. I don’t know that any of them have sat down cover to cover. Because they’re in it so much I had them read different parts. I’m putting this out there about you. Are you okay with this? My older children did come to a couple of my book signings, and my older son Emmett, he’s 27 now. He was 15 when we left, so he was there the longest, and he has done podcasts. We just did an interview together the other week. He’s very vocal. He loves to share and talk about his experience. My older daughter, she’s just two years younger than him. She went to my book signings, but she wasn’t going to be like, oh yeah, I was raised there, and field questions like that. She’s not so much open about her experience as he is. And then my younger ones, they were six and nine when we left, so it’s like they’ve had the most normal childhoods out of my four children. They remember things, but we did leave young enough that they were still able to enjoy some age-appropriate things like playing with toys and having birthday parties and having Easter egg hunts. Just kind of little children things that my older ones missed out on. Alexandra: At the moment, in addition to writing your book, you share information about the Twelve Tribes on TikTok and about being a cult survivor and all those kinds of things. I’m guessing you find that creative. Tamara: Absolutely. Alexandra: Is there anything else you do in terms of creative expression that’s helpful for you? Tamara: I’ve written another book. Alexandra: Oh my goodness. Okay. Tamara: I actually just submitted it to my publisher last week. Alexandra: Nice. Tamara: I’m hoping that maybe in about a year from now, my next book will be available. It is a continuation from my first book. It picks up when we left, and it really focuses on those first six months after we left the Twelve Tribes. This book is not written in a linear fashion, so I have different flashbacks because I couldn’t fit 14 years in one book. So there’s a lot of stories that didn’t make it into my first book. So this book goes back and forth. We’re leaving, what’s happening, and then a flashback story. And then back to where we are in our process of getting reestablished out here, and then a flashback. I add in a lot of commentary of things that I’ve learned over the years. Just leaving a cult knowing we’ve helped a lot of people leave the Twelve Tribes, also. Now I have a better idea of what people need, and what it’s like, and what children go through. I’ve been able to write about how do you help people that are leaving high control groups like this? What can you expect? These aren’t going to be the same people that you knew before the group or while they were in the group, and like their worlds are upside down. So I put a little bit of that in as well. Alexandra: I love hearing that. That’s so great. I imagine that your perspective is different, of course. It’s almost like looking at it through a different lens. The same but different. What a great opportunity. That’s amazing. Tamara: That’s been my latest creative endeavor that I’ve been working on for a while now. Alexandra: As we’re starting to wrap up, is there anything else that you’d like to share that we haven’t talked about? Tamara: Yeah, people will ask me what’s your takeaway, or what do you want to tell people? For me it always just goes back to what is true freedom. I don’t take any day for granted anymore. I still take pleasure out of just the small freedoms. I have to make choices but I realize true freedom is literally just having the ability to change your mind about something. I might feel really strongly about something, but then I come across different information or talk to someone, and then I can change my mind and think different. Or I might like a certain hairstyle or way to dress, but you know what? If I get bored with that, and next week I want to wear something different, do you have the freedom to change your mind? If there’s an area where you don’t have, no, I not allowed, or I’m going to get in trouble, or I’m going to get like that’s really not true freedom. In a high control group you don’t have the freedom to change your mind or to formulate your own opinions about anything. Alexandra: So true. Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that. Please tell us where we can find out more about you. Give us your TikTok handle. Is that what they call it? I’m not on TikTok. Tamara: Okay, so it is author dot Tamara Matthew or that you know that little at at author dot and then Tamara Matthew all one word. That is my TikTok. Alexandra: I’ll put link links in the show notes to that. Tamara: I have a website. tamaramathieu.com. Alexandra: Okay, great. Tamara: I am on Instagram, but I’m really bad at keeping up with Instagram. I’m TamaraMathieu4, and then I do have an author page on Facebook, Tamara Matthew author on Facebook. Alexandra: I’ll put links in the show notes to those things. Thank you so much for being with me here today, Tamara. I really appreciate it. It’s been good to connect with you. Thank you. Tamara: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much. Alexandra: All right, take care. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Writing About the Cult Next Door with Tamara Mathieu appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.

Here’s what I was reminded of during this conversation with writer and playwright Dennis Hawkins-Bogle. No one’s going to hand you the opportunity to tell the truth of your experience and tell your story. There is no validation and acknowledgement fairy who’s going to come along and anoint you with her magic wand. If telling your story matters enough to you – if you feel the pull to tell the truth about your experience, whatever it is – you are going to have to be the one that makes it happen. And here’s the good news: it is within your power to do so. In the introduction, I talk about my experience of watching Dennis perform his play, The Blue Taffeta Party Dress, and how I was struck by his ease and comfort on the stage, and both the joy and poignance I experienced while watching it. I also mention my new blog series, #MemoirMonday. Each Monday I’ll post a short article with a tip or some advice about writing your best memoir. Memoir is one of my very favourite literary forms and I believe everyone has a story to tell. I want to empower writers like you to tell their stories and tell them well so that readers have a good experience as well. You can find all the Memoir Monday posts listed on this page. Dennis Hawkins-Bogle is a writer, performance artists, and culture worker living and working on the unceded traditional territory of the Ligwilda’xw people in Campbell River. After 30 years working in public education administration, which took Dennis to live and work in Lower Post, the most northerly community in BC, and Grise Fiord, the most northerly community in Canada, Dennis now devotes his time to creative pursuits. Dennis’ involvement in community theatre began in Williams Lake, where he played Ricky Roma in Glen Garry Glen Ross and won best supporting actor at the Interior Zone Theatre Festival. He has been involved with Rivercity Players in Campbell River as an actor, director, producer and board member. Dennis is a writer and storyteller, most notably for Where is Grise Fiord? Tales from the High Arctic, and the Blue Taffeta Party Dress and Other Stories. Dennis won the Readers’ Choice Award and North Island Pride Community Champion Award for The Blue Taffeta Party Dress. Dennis has also organised reading and writing events for local and visiting authors in Quesnel and Campbell River. Dennis is published in the Caitlin Press anthology, Queer Country Crossroads. Connect with Dennis on his Facebook page. This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the audiobook version of my award-winning, Amazon best-selling memoir, Cult, A Love Story. Readers call the book ‘compelling’ ‘gritty’ ‘intimate’ and ‘not boring’ – which is what an author loves to hear. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of that subscription at alexandraamor.com/spotify. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes On teaching at the northernmost school in Canada Growing up in small town British Columbia and feeling like an outsider Recognizing that being oneself can open us up to social ridicule Turning a collection of short stories into a one person play Breaking free from internalized stigma and shame via artistic expression Working with a director to stage a one person performance How writing and performing can bring new layers of understanding to an experience Telling stories that involve other people and being respectful while also telling the truth Writing prose vs. writing for the stage Memorizing 8,800 words to be performed The importance of getting our stories on paper Finding the courage to tell our stories Resources Hollyhock Retreat Centre on Cortes Island, BC Murray Hill, drag performer, actor and comedian Transcript of the Interview with Dennis Hawkins-Bogle Alexandra: Dennis Hawkins-Bogle, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Dennis: Thank you very much, Alexandra. It’s nice to be with you today. Alexandra: Good to see you. Tell us a little bit about your background and who you are. Dennis: I am a retired public educator in British Columbia. I worked for 33 years, primarily in education administration, school principal. A couple of interesting notes about my educational career is I was at one time the principal of the most northerly school in British Columbia, in Lower Post. A little two-room kindergarten to grade four school called Denatia School. That was my very first principalship. I was also the principal of the most northerly school in Canada, at Grice Fjord Nunavut Umingmak School. Umingmak means muskox. Another interesting thing about my educational career is that I was my last principalship for seven years. I was the principal of the high school that I graduated from in Quesnel, and that really was an amazing opportunity to close a circle, because I grew up in Quesnel. I was born and raised in Quesnel. I came of age in Quesnel in the the 60s and 70s. I reflect a lot on my upbringing in Quesnel about the socialization process and how in the 60s and 70s boys were socialized to to be one way, and of course girls another way. For those of us that didn’t quite fit that mold, there was an incredible amount of dissonance and distress, trying to figure out ourselves and trying to figure out where we we fit in. Quesnel is a lumber town in the middle of the province was a great place to grow up, but the distress that comes with being an outsider, being gay, and growing up in this kind of small conservative environment, and I think it’s probably the same in any environment, even if you’re in a not so conservative environment. I think the socialization process is pretty intense on people to comply and to fit in. When you can’t fit in, then there is all this distress. So after I finally graduated from high school and moved away, I was able to go to university, and I was able to come out of the closet, and I was able to embrace the person that I am. Embrace who I am, challenge the distress, replace some of those negative images with some positive thoughts and imagery. So that is who I am. Alexandra: I have a follow up question. When you returned to Quesnel at the end of your career, was that deliberate? Was it a choice on your part, or were you transferred there coincidentally? Dennis: No, it was a choice on my part. I had left. I had finished my three year tenure in Nunavut, and I owned a small house in Wells, which is just outside of Quesnel, and so that’s where I went. I didn’t have a job to go to. And then there was a principalship in the Quesnel School District, and I thought I’m about halfway through my career. I’ve got another 15 to 20 years of my career. I think I can do it in my hometown, and so I purposefully applied for the principalship and got that, and then transferred to another school, and then transferred to another school, and then finally transferred to the high school where I finished my career. It was a purposeful move back to Quesnel. Alexandra: We’re here today mostly to talk about The Blue Taffeta Party Dress. So talk to us about the origins of that. Dennis: My mother came home one day, and she was thrifting, and there’s six kids in the family, so thrifting was a great thing to do. And my mother came home; she was thrifting, and she bought a bunch of stuff for us kids to play with. And she brought this beautiful blue party dress, and. I remember her bringing it home, and I remember myself and my sisters, who I was closest to in age, being fascinated by this party dress. I remember wanting to wear it, and then I remember wearing it and putting it on and twirling. I remember the real joy that came from that. The internal comfort and joy of twirling around in that dress because it was layered crinoline and it was a party dress. And so when I would spin, it would flare out around me. I remember that dress. But the other thing, Alexandra, that I remember that is really poignant is I remember knowing that I’m doing something that a girl does. I know that I am putting myself out there for social ridicule. Had anyone, whether it be my sister, my mother, my brother, my father, whoever saw me do this, I knew that I was potentially opening myself up to social ridicule by someone saying, “You’re doing a girl thing, or why are you acting like a girl?” I was very much aware of that. I was probably only about eight or nine years old, and that awareness of being different and treading on thin ice socially, I was very aware of it as a child. Alexandra: When did you start writing the short stories that highlighted the things you went through growing up? Dennis: Well, the blue taffeta party dress story. I wrote that about 15 years ago, and I wasn’t in a particularly prolific writing period. I was still working as a school principal. I didn’t have a lot of time, but I because that story was so poignant in my life. I wrote it over a weekend, and then I just edited it over a course of time. So that one was written about 15 years ago, and then it just sat. It just sat in my portfolio. And then once I retired, my husband Stephen and I, we went to Cortes Island, and we did a program there called Yoga Ritual and Meditation, and I did a ton of writing in my spare time out there. All these stories were just coming to me, and I just spent all my spare time writing. We came home to Campbell River. Summer ended. He went back to work, and I just sat down and wrote story after story after story. I probably wrote about 70 stories in a two-year period after coming back from Hollyhock. Then some of the stories I realized this makes a great trajectory. If I compiled all these stories together, it creates one story, and that’s and and so the very first story in that collection of stories is the blue taffeta party dress. Alexandra: Did you publish them anywhere at that point? Dennis: No, I haven’t published. I’ve only published one story of that collection, Alexandra: Did you show them to anyone else at that time? Dennis: I showed them to my husband Stephen. I showed them to one friend who would come over. I’ve always written stories. Then I would when I’m gathering with my friends, I would say, “Hey, would anyone like a little story time?” And I’d read a story or two because I always had a few little stories on the go. So during this time I shared them with a couple of friends, and that was it until I approached River City Theater in Campbell River to produce the actual present the stories. Then I really had to bring them and show them to someone who I really didn’t know who was going to help me with this project. Alexandra: Okay, so tell us about that. When did you get the idea to maybe turn them into this one person show that you do? Dennis: So, when I was working in Grice Fiord, I didn’t have a lot of things to do with my spare time, so I kept a journal and I journaled the weather, where the where the light was at that particular time of year. Comings and goings. Who was in town? What sort of things were happening? What was going on in the community. I kept this journal, and then I strung together a bunch of stories from my time in Grice Fiord, and I presented them to River City Theater, and I said, “This is a this these stories could be a play.” I performed them in Grice Fjord or I performed them in Campbell River. I performed them in a number of other locations. It was sort of like a I hate to say a travelogue story because the stories were so unique and and just my perspective on some of the things that I witnessed. For example, the annual migration of the whales, seeing the whales coming by, and the community so exuberant and so joyful watching these whales come by, and I could hear these whales singing. I’d never heard whales before, and there were thousands of them. They just kept swimming by and swimming by and swimming by because they’re on their annual migration. And after about 10 or 15 minutes of watching the whales swim by, I realized what was happening. I realized that this was an opportunity, or not an opportunity, but the lifestyle was to harvest whale. The boats came out, and the guns came out, and the hunters came out, and the shots were fired, and everyone on the beach was exuberant and happy, and it’s so full of excitement because the whales were coming by and they were going to get harvest some of them. They harvested 13, and they pulled them up onto the beach with four wheelers. So, I presented this collection of stories, and my director Heather Gordon Murphy, she said to me one day, she said, “Well, that was a great story. You know that Grice Fiord. Those collection of stories were very good,” she said, “But there is something more in there, and I want you to think about that. I’m not sure what it is, but that you’ve got another story in you, and I want you to think about that.” For me, that was just the impetus to that was just the reinforcement that I needed to dig a little deeper into my own personal story, and start to write those stories. And like I say, I came back from Hollyhock. I had so many stories, and I pulled out about 25 of them, and I sat with Heather and I said these 25 stories go together really well. Working with Heather over a course of about a year, we narrowed it down to 19 stories, and that’s the that’s the play that I do. Alexandra: Wow! For the listeners, what would you say would be the theme of the play, The Blue Taffeta Party Dress. Dennis: The theme would be it’s a coming of age story. It’s challenging our internal ideas about who we are, because when I growing up in Quesnel in the in the 70s, I experienced a lot of name calling, a lot of taunts, and and a lot of you know aggression and some violence. Because homosexuality was illegal, it was it was also in the DSM one, the Manual of Mental Illness, and so there was great social stigma attached. And what I did, unbeknownst to myself, is I internalized that disdain about gay people. I internalized it, and then it became a reflection of how I saw myself. And so then I am later in life looking back at that and thinking, I really have to correct this misinformation because it was embedded in me. It was a really a part of how I saw myself, and so I had to crack that open and really challenge the misinformation and the disinformation and replace it with facts and lived experience. And with a very supportive community around me, I was able to do that. Alexandra: That’s so beautifully said! A lot of my guests and a lot of our listeners are cult survivors, and I think they’re really going to be able to relate to that idea of internalized disdain because that’s something that cult leaders. embed in their followers as a way to control them and that kind of thing. Thank you for being so transparent about that. Dennis: You’re welcome. I definitely see the parallels there between what you just described. Alexandra: So you started working with Heather. And what did that relationship look like? You took the stories from 25 to 19. What was that process like? Dennis: Well, it was a fairly simple process because I realized these two stories that I wanted to tell one after the other were exactly the same. The themes were the same. The themes were dealing with a situation where I was quite concerned about the social backlash that would come not if I got caught, but if someone were to say something, and so there were two stories that were identical to that. So it was very easy just to take one out because it followed the themes. The 25 stories made the play too long, so I realized I had to cull some back. I had to take some back. One of the one of the struggles as a writer is, but it’s a real joy for me, is streamline it, take words out, cut it back, get that word out, get that word out. This is superfluous. You don’t need this. You don’t need that. I just love taking things out in the editing process. So, taking some stories out actually really made the story much more succinct and much more on point. Alexandra: When it’s a performance like that, you’re right. I think it does need to be much more concise than you might have in the written word. Dennis: Absolutely. Alexandra: One of the things we talked about when I met you on the night that you performed it, when I saw it, was the staging stuff that you had to go through that you worked on with Heather. Can you tell us a little bit about that as well? Dennis: Heather Gordon Murphy directed and she staged this play. Heather and I have done two plays together, and Heather pays attention to the directing and the staging, and she leaves the writing to me. It’s difficult sometimes when you’re in a creative collaboration with someone. I don’t correct her direction or her staging, and she doesn’t correct my writing. Now, when I say that, that’s absolutely not true because we do banter back and forth about the staging and the writing and everything. But she respects the fact that I’m the writer and these are my words, and I respect that she’s my director and she’s my stage manager, and we have those two two jobs or two roles to fulfill when we bring this play to the stage. Heather’s just lovely to work with. We see things in a very similar eye. She really pushes me along a lot in my acting. I can remember when she said to me one day, she says, “I want you to raise that music stand. Just bring that music stand up about seven or eight inches.” Well, how difficult can it be to raise a music stand? I thought, well, that’s pretty straightforward. So I went and raised the music stand, and she said, “Oh no, no.” She says, “I’m going to show you how to raise the music stand.” That whole lesson about being purposeful and where your hands are and where your eyes are and how you take the time to raise that music stand so that the audience can see how purposeful the movement is, instead of sort of, well, I can easily lift that, or I can easily do that. She really helped me see the way you would do movement for the stage, which I didn’t have a lot of experience with. Alexandra: One of the things I’m really interested in is when people are involved in creative projects, what those projects teach us. So we might be telling a story that we think we already know, but very often something can come out of us that we didn’t realize. Did you have any moments like that either while you were writing or while you were preparing this set of stories for the stage. Dennis: That’s such a great question because I had thought that I had finished this project, and lo and behold, so much more has been coming to the surface. I had always thought to myself, this project is not about kissing and telling. It’s not about blaming. It’s just about sharing my experience. I realized in many ways I presented almost a too sanitized version because I realized oh there’s a few more brutal things that took place that are really important and really worth telling, and those things didn’t surface until well into the project. I always relived them. They were always part of my makeup. They were always part of who I was, but they then started to come up to the surface. I could hear that little voice in the back of my head, you need to include this piece in there. This is an important piece, so the whole process just continued to evolve. It continued to crack open once I started writing the stories. Alexandra: Was there any part of you that was resistant when you felt that sort of feeling? Dennis: There was because I mentioned about kiss and tell, because I never wanted to kiss and tell, but I wanted to tell some stories that involved other people. So I had to take a really good look at a couple of those stories and ask myself, why am I really wanting to tell this story? Because it involves another person. How can I tell the story so that it shows my respect for that other person. It shows my care and my tenderness for that other person. It’s almost like telling someone else’s story a little bit, but I mean it was my story as well, and this involved a few people from my hometown. I really wanted to be careful that I told the story in a respectful way that didn’t breach some kind of ethical standard or some kind of moral standard, because I didn’t want to put anyone else into jeopardy. I want to tell the story from my point of view, but the other characters in the story, if we can call them the other characters in the story, I didn’t want them to to be able to identify themselves, or I didn’t want them to feel like they were being treated unfairly, so it was a tricky situation. But you change the change things up a little bit, change names, change perhaps locations, change circumstances, but tell the same story. Alexandra: You anticipated my next question. I was going to ask how you handled that. That’s great. In terms of challenges from turning it into a series of short stories to a play, what were the challenges that you experienced? We’ve already talked about the emotional ones. Were there technical ones or practical ones, anything that that you found was challenging for you? Dennis: Yeah, when I write, I often hear my own voice, and I often hear my voice delivering my writing as I’m writing it. I often imagine that I’m delivering it on a stage to someone, and that’s my writing process. So while I write, I’m performing in my mind. That’s super helpful for me. It gets a bit tricky because writing for a piece of literature and performing are two different things. So I had to take a look at my short stories, and then ask for each one of those short stories. I had to ask myself: Is it written for the stage? What do I need to do to change this so that it’s written for the stage? What I found out was a lot of the transitions while I’m on the stage could be a lot harder because I could act the transitions out, and I could emphasize where I wanted to put emphasis, I could use my voice to create different mood. The written word was one thing, and then performing it was another thing too. Alexandra: And you’ve said this wasn’t your first take at performing something; you had performed before. Is that a fairly comfortable place for you to be on the stage? Dennis: Ah, yes, it is. I do like it. In high school, I loved theater. I loved acting, and I loved being on the stage. As a school principal, I really relished in those roles where I had an opportunity to stand in front of the school and deliver a message or instill values around what our school meant. I really enjoyed being in front of the crowd and delivering those kinds of messages, speeches, or what or whatnot. I’m never nervous around that. I always look forward to it. I don’t know what it is. I guess I really enjoy the energy of that. I get super nervous now when I’m officially doing a play. I don’t quite get so nervous if I know that I have to make a speech in front of a group of people, I can prepare my speech. But when I actually have to have words memorized and I’m performing, I get really nervous. Good nervous energy, I think, helps me. But I’ve always enjoyed theater, and I’ve always enjoyed acting and performing. Alexandra: It was so great when I saw you perform that night, and you seem like such a natural. And the thing that really blew my socks off was that, and I guess this goes along with performing, but you just had the whole thing memorized. 60 minutes of a solo performance, and you’re talking essentially the entire time. How long did it take you to build up to have that memorized? Dennis: Well, I will tell you, it’s 8800 words. It probably took me about four months to memorize it. Now it took me a long time to write it, so that writing process and the editing process was super helpful because those words then become just sort of embedded in me. Very shortly after writing a story and working with it a little bit, I knew the flow of where this story was going, how the action might have been rising, and what the resolution was was. When I started to memorize, actually word for word, I already knew the structure of the story, and I already knew the trajectory of the story. I knew where the story was going and how it was going to end, and so then it just became memorizing those lines. What I do is I read the lines into a recorder, and then I wear my earbuds and I go for bike rides and I listen and I listen and I listen, and then I stop quickly, and I say, “I need to edit this story. It doesn’t quite sound right. I need to take out this little chunk and maybe move it over here.” The whole memorization process also is an editing process. It’s really interesting when I did the story with Heather, we edited The Blue Taffeta Party Dress right up until opening night. I kept changing things and changing things and changing just a word here or there. I’m like, oh, this word doesn’t quite work, but this word works much better. I’m doing that show on Wednesday in Penticton, and I haven’t done the show for about three weeks. I did it in the living room the other day, and I only made one mistake. So it was wow, super happy. I’m rehearsing every day now until my show on Wednesday, and then I have a show again in Cumberland on September 25th. I’ll just keep it fresh from now until then. Alexandra: Oh, that’s beautiful. It was actually somebody who gave a TED talk say that she did the same thing, recorded it so that she could listen back to it, and then memorize it that way. That’s amazing. Who do you perform the play for, generally? Dennis: I perform this play, I would say generally, my audience is allies of the queer community and members of the queer community. I get so many people, so many people have come up to me after being an audience member and saying, “Wow, you just told my story. I’m not gay. I’m not queer, but I dealt with this growing up.” I understand how we internalize messages that we hear about ourselves. I lived that struggle of unraveling the onion and getting at the core of myself. So when people ask me who I wanted, I really want young queer kids to come and see this show, because right now trans kids-I just can’t imagine what it would be like to be a young trans person in our society with the the rhetoric and the the language that people are using when they talk about transgender people, you can’t help but hear that. If you’re a transgender person, you have to either have some heavy armor on to deflect it, or it’s going to get into you, the way it did when I was a child when I heard all the homophobia. I have a lot of gay men come to my shows as well. They can relate to a lot of the stories that I share. I’ve done this show in three high schools in Campbell River. I just modified it slightly. I just took out a couple of stories that I didn’t think were appropriate for the high school audience. When I’m asked, I tell people this is a good show for kids 16 and over. It’s not because there’s any particular language. It’s just because the concepts are fairly sophisticated. I’m talking about the socialization process. I’m talking about internalizing homophobia. I’m talking about collective psyches, and I’m talking about going on a healing journey and how you how I accessed that. It’s not a children’s story. It’s a good story for youth as long as they have a bit of maturity about them. Alexandra: And the upcoming shows, where are they being performed, and to what kind of an audience? Are they in schools as well? Dennis: No, the next the show on Wednesday is actually going to be in Penticton as part of the Ryga Festival. Now the Ryga Festival is in Summerland, but because of the fires in Summerland this summer, they’ve really had to pivot. I just give the Ryga Festival Trista just huge kudos because they weren’t able to host the festival this year. It’s supposed to be a three-day festival all in one town, and people buy your weekend pass, and there’s lots of different art to see. There’s music, and there’s theater, and there’s readings, and there’s dance, and there’s just a whole range of art, like a little community festival. And of course, that can’t happen this year because of the fires in Summerland. So they’ve had to pivot. So I’m being hosted at the Elks Club in Penticton on Wednesday, September 16th at 7o’clock. And the other amazing thing that the people at the Ryga Festival have done is they’ve made their shows that they’re offering free of charge to people. Somehow they were able to offer these free of charge. So I’m hoping that this would entice some people to come, knowing that they don’t have to pay for it. I’m hoping that I get a real cross section of people at my show. I love getting a cross section of people. I love it when I see youth in my show. I love it when I see allies, men and women allies coming to my show and hearing my story. I love it when I see other queer people, gay and lesbian men and women coming to my show, that’s part of my community. So that really inspires me and gives me a lot of comfort when I see my community show up for me. I’m hoping that there’s a real diverse people in the audience on Wednesday. The next show I’m doing is on September 25th. I’m doing it at the Weird Church in Cumberland, and I’m being hosted by the Queer Center of the Comox Valley. This show is a fundraiser for the Queer Center of Comox Valley. The Queer Center of Comox Valley is raising funds so that. They can provide a physical location to be a resource center in the Comox Valley. Comox Valley is just down the highway from where I live in Campbell River, and the show at the Weird Church. The tickets you can get online at I think it’s queercomoxvalley.ca, and you can go online and get tickets. Unfortunately, they’re doing it as a fundraiser, so they’re not making it free like they are in Kelowna or Penticton. Alexandra: One of the things I’m really struck by in your story, Dennis is the healing that comes from this kind of work. Any time we take a chance and tell our own story, it can seem personal. But what I’m hearing is that the ripples go out more than we probably can even expect initially. You’re talking about them going out to the ally community and to trans kids and reaching out. Did you mention that there was a grandparent that came up to you when you had given your performance once? Dennis: It was a cousin. It was a cousin in Powell River. She had seen the poster around Powell River, and she recognized my name. And she’s a cousin. She’s considerably older than I am, so as cousins, we didn’t know each other very well. We knew of each other more than we knew each other. I certainly knew her parents because I knew them as my aunt and uncle. But she was considerably older than me. She knew my brother, older brother, growing up. I’m in Powell River in this beautiful venue, this beautiful community hall, and it’s packed. And I’m delivering my stories, and I see this beautiful woman in the front row. She’s in the front row, and she’s staring at me and smiling. And she has a beautiful wrinkled face and all of this gray hair. And during the intermission, I go outside and I go into the back, and I’m rubbing my neck just to release some tension off my neck. I see this woman approach me, and she’s rubbing her neck as well. I say to her, “Oh, it looks like we both have sore necks.” And we kind of laugh a little bit about that. And then she comes up to me and she says, “I think you and I are cousins.” I said, “On my mom’s side or my dad’s?” She said, “On on your dad’s side and my mum’s side.” She told me her mum’s name, and we just gave each other a huge hug. It was just so warm and loving, and it was so nice to see my cousin there to watch my show. Her and I have been writing back and forth now, sharing family stories. I’m hoping to get back to Powell River soon so I can see her again because she’s just lovely and it’s so nice to connect with my cousin that way. Alexandra: Oh, that’s such a nice bit of connection. So as we start to wrap up, I just wondered if you had any other thoughts or anything you’d like to share about your experience of creating this play from these short stories. Any creative lessons or anything that you’ve learned or reflected on? Dennis: I’ve had a number of people approach me and say, “Oh, I would love to do that. I have a story to tell.” I said to both of these people, I said, “Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to write your stories down. You need to get your stories on paper.” I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I’ve enjoyed writing. I’ve always been writing short stories. I wrote The Blue Taffeta Party Dress about 15 years ago. I have other stories that I’ve written 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and I just keep them in my portfolio. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. Now I’m starting to see myself as not only as a writer but a performer. I’m also seeing myself as an agent of change, which is like a culture worker, which is like a promoter. I’m promoting myself, and I’m speaking to organizations like the Comox Valley Queer Center, for example, and I’m saying his is a really important story that the community needs to hear. It’s not just because it’s my story, but I think this is an important story that young kids need to hear, older folks need to hear. As queer people, our voice has often been marginalized. We have never always been given the full range of opportunities to share our stories. Things are certainly getting better, but we need to tell our stories. Queer people, wherever people are on the gender or the sexuality spectrum, we need to tell our stories. Everyone needs to know what it was like for us. We need to know what it was like for our neighbors. We need to know what it’s like for each other, so that we can celebrate in this collective humanity. Because if we don’t celebrate the diversity in our community, then people become invisible. That’s the last thing I want is that young people, especially, go through these teen years or adolescence or young adult years feeling like they’re invisible and feeling like they don’t have a community. Sometimes I feel like I’m a culture worker, like I’m getting the message out there, and I’m sharing with people that we do have a community and we do have a voice, and we need to be collective in sharing our stories and sharing our voice. Alexandra: That’s so true. And two things I want that makes me think of one is it takes courage, right, to step out and do that. The other thing I’m reminded of is, do you know who Murray Hill is? He’s a transgender man, artist, an actor, and performer in New York City. I know him because he was on the HBO show Somebody Somewhere, and just a delightful guy. He has this lovely expression that he says all the time: “If you don’t see yourself represented, represent yourself.” Dennis: I love that. Alexandra: Isn’t that great? Dennis: Yes, it is. Otherwise, you’re invisible. Alexandra: Exactly. And I’m going to sound a little political, but the big companies that own television stations and that make movies and all that stuff… the change isn’t necessarily going to come from the top. Dennis: Right. Alexandra: It feels like it has to come from individuals like us, like you, telling your truth and saying what’s important, and the change comes from the bottom up. Dennis: Oh absolutely! I mean, Stonewall was a riot. Let’s not forget that. It started with the entire spectrum of the community walking out onto the street and saying, “No, you’re not going to do this to us, and we’re going to fight back.” We’re not achieving equality and basic human rights because of their largess. We’re achieving them because of our fight. Alexandra: Yes. Oh, so well said. Thank you, Dennis. Well, this has been a delight. I don’t think the Blue Taffeta Party Dress has a website or anything, does it? Dennis: I’m sort of promoting myself here and there where I can. I don’t have a website. Alexandra: I think the shows will be over by the time this comes out, but I’ll put some links to whatever I can find so that people can learn more about the show. Dennis: That would be great. Would you be able to put a link? Because I’m open to people contacting me if someone wants to have a conversation. So if there’s a way that you can include my email or my way to contact me, I’m okay with that too. Alexandra: Okay, great. I will do that for sure with your permission. All right. Well, thank you, Dennis, so much again. This has been great. Dennis: Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you very much, Alexandra. Alexandra: All right. Take care. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post From Experience to Stories to Stage with Dennis Hawkins-Bogle appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.

When we leave a high demand group, there is a reckoning that needs to happen. As survivors, we need to come to terms with so many things; among them, why we were drawn into the group in the first place and how we were affected by that situation. We need to deal with feelings that might include grief and loss and trauma and guilt. There’s so much to unpack! My guest today, Gerette Buglion, understands this intimately. She herself is a cult survivor. And she hosts a writing program called Writing to Reckon which is specifically for cult survivors. In the introduction, I talk about the phenomenon of scapegoating that happens in cults. In the interview, Gerette mentions her own experience of being labelled a ‘loser’ by the leader of the cult she was involved in and I reflect on my personal experience with similar treatment of myself and others in the cult I belonged to. I also talk about how complicated it is to unpack these traumatic experiences that happen to us in cults. Gerette Buglion wants to live in a world where cult leaders, narcissistic abusers, and unethical, manipulative techniques are spotted, called out, and silenced, creating more opportunities for nourishing relationships to flourish. She is the author of two books: her memoir, An Everyday Cult, and the Writing to Reckon Journal – for Survivors of Spiritual, Religious, and Cultic Abuse. Her work as educator and consultant centers on liberation from coercive control and supporting the integrative power of writing for survivors of cultic relationships through Writing to ReckonTM programs and Reclaiming Autonomy Through the Written Word – a bi-annual writing symposium for survivors. She is Co-founder and Executive Director for the nonprofit Living Cult Free. You can learn more about Gerette Buglion at GeretteBuglion.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the audiobook version of my award-winning, Amazon best-selling memoir, Cult, A Love Story. Readers call the book ‘compelling’ ‘gritty’ ‘intimate’ and ‘not boring’ – which is what an author loves to hear. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of that subscription at alexandraamor.com/spotify. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Getting involved in a cult that taught dream analysis How the appearance of autonomy is often woven into cults On the interpersonal neurobiology work of Dr. Dan Siegel Creating a “coherent narrative out of traumatic or confusing experiences” Using writing as a way to reckon with a cult experience Resources mentioned in this episode Gerette Buglion’s book An Everyday Cult Dr. Dan Siegel Writing to Reckon classes Daniel Kenneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow The Living Cult Free project Living Cult Free also has a podcast Reclaiming Autonomy Through the Written Word symposium Dr. Laura Anderson and her book When Religion Hurts Robin Boyle Lazier Hoyt Richards and the HBO documentary Bring Me The Beauties Transcript of the Interview with Gerette Buglion Alexandra: Gerette Buglion, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Gerette: I am so glad to be here. What a pleasure! Alexandra: It’s great to see you. Tell us a little bit about your background and about the cult that you were involved with. Gerette: I was born into a large family and grew up in a, I would say, a normally dysfunctional family. Nothing, you know, dramatic there, and I grew up in New York State of the United States, and when I was in my 30s, I got involved with a group that was centered on working with dreams. I had been interested in dreams, and I had a couple colleagues. I taught in a Waldorf school, so I had kind of a spiritually oriented bent much of my adult life, and a couple of my colleagues were doing this work, and so I got excited, and I got involved. At first, it was really lovely. I learned a lot. It was an opportunity for inner growth. And then over the years, I was involved for 18 years altogether. My daughter was born six months before I started. I had been interested in starting working with this teacher. I call him Doug in my book. I had been interested in working with Doug actually before before my daughter was born, but I put that off a bit because I felt it wasn’t good to start something new when I was you know preparing to welcome a child into the world, my first child. There was a lot of anticipation in working with him too. But the first five years, I think, was fairly light involvement, and then that grew gradually over the years, as I became more and more, as the work we called it, became more and more a central focus in my life, and as my children grew. I bought a business based on my ex teacher’s advice. Of course, he had no training in business consultation, nor did he have a marriage and family counseling license, but I also did couples work with him. My husband was also in the same group. He was involved for 16 years, and he left actually while doing his training to become a licensed clinical mental health counselor. That was part of his waking up to the fact that this was not a cool thing to be doing, because some of his professors started pushing him a bit. He had a few experiences with Doug that were really questionable and made him think again, and so he left, and then that gave me an opportunity to go even deeper. So my last two years in the cult were actually the most intense for me, and even the few years before that had been kind of growing in intensity. Do you want me to just share briefly how I left? There was a crisis in the organization, and that crisis was that six of the head teachers left on the very same day. That was like this earthquake, it was a massive, massive rupture. I had this question, this burning question of like, why would they all leave on the same day? Because so much of what this group was about in terms of personal growth was that we got to make choices based on what was being revealed to us through our individual dreams. So it was one thing for one teacher to say, “Hey, I’m I’m done”. That would be a hard thing, but totally acceptable. And in fact, that’s something that would happen. People would come to a place that they’re like I’m done, but then they would often come back. That actually is something that I did a couple of times. So we had this appearance of autonomy and choice being stitched into this organization, but it was really a ruse. And so, when all six of the top teachers left on the same day, there was a major, you know, WTF. What is really going on here? That led me to have an experience in a final meeting that we had with those teachers. One of them, literally in the last five minutes of our meeting, shared things, shared how she was being verbally beaten down by our teacher, and so that’s what created the cognitive dissonance in me. It’s like, wait a minute, this man that I’ve put on a pedestal is doing that to this beloved person who I know, who’s an artist and a poet and a deeply sensitive person. It was really that cognitive dissonance that made the opening, that was the crack, that really allowed me to free myself. I had a very sudden snapping. I call it my snapping out of the cult, and my husband was really waiting for me. He had recognized that if he started pushing me in those two years to come out, that I would have left him. And I would have, because I was so completely indoctrinated at that point. So he really held the space for me, welcomed me back, as did many of my friends who had watched me kind of disappear for 18 years into this group. Alexandra: You mentioned your book there, which is called An Everyday Cult. Once this happened and you decided to leave, how did you use writing to help you with that part of the journey? Gerette: I love that question because writing is a huge part of my life. As I mentioned, I had good friends who really welcomed me back with open arms. One of them handed me an eight CD pack of Dr. Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology. Have you ever heard of Dr. Siegel? Oh gosh, I cannot recommend his work highly enough because it was deeply important for me. Because there are many things he focuses on, as I said, interpersonal neurobiologists. He’s a psychologist who has a neurological understanding and also a deeply relational understanding of the human experience. I listened to one of those CDs probably a dozen times, and the one that I listened to again and again, and this was in 2014 is when I left the group. The one I listened to focused on what Dr. Siegel calls the importance of creating a “coherent narrative out of traumatic or confusing experiences”. That was like gongs going off for me. I have always been an educator. I was a teacher of elementary students, and also did parent education. And I had even, as I was a special educator, so I had an orientation towards brain development and healthy human development. So hearing Dr. Siegel’s work was very impactful for me, and so the coherent narrative became like this. It’s hard to describe it, Alexandra. It almost was like a guiding impulse in my psyche. I felt like one of those homing pigeons. Wherever I was able to to actually speak to people in a safe space, that was part of creating a coherent narrative. I had also been a journaler my whole life, and there was an aberration of journaling that took place in the group, where we had to write about our pathology is what we called it, and the deep delving of how how broken we were, and how the guidance of our teacher was setting us free. So that was part of what was actually required. When I started writing for myself, there was this powerful reclamation of my own voice, because in the cult, I was one of the members of the group that was always the loser. I was one of the ones that was just never going to get it. There were others who would go up the ladder pretty quickly in understanding, and I might take a few steps forward, but then there’d be a slide back. That was my trajectory was a pretty rocky one. So to actually recognize that there was something of value, not only for myself, but also even for one or two other people, the writing just became this pathway, this doorway to finding, refinding my own voice and what I thought, how I think, what matters to me. Alexandra: So this idea of coherent narrative-you said that was kind of a homing beacon for you. Were you writing to find that coherent narrative? Is that the right way to describe it? Gerette: There was, and continues to be a continual kind of opening that takes place. The written word is leading me to deeper and richer, more nuanced, and more relational richer, actually, understanding of not only myself but also of the world. So, yeah, I think that the writing just kept opening, kept, and continues to open these these doors. Does that answer your question? Alexandra: It does. I’m just not understanding the connection between Dr. Siegel’s work and writing. Gerette: The coherent narrative is where it actually intersects with therapy, with healing through therapy. So, when I was immersed in the cult, I believed that I understood who I was and what was most important, and how I could learn and grow, and what my role was in the world. But that was my cult identity that had actually been formed by my ex teacher. He harnessed my dreams, and harvested various images and experiences from my dreams to get me to believe that I was someone who was other than who I was. I believed, like I said, I was a loser. I was someone who was so damaged and so filled with pride, that was part of my cult identity persona. So that pride was something that he would continually berate me for. That I needed to become a humble servant of the animus in dream language. To have the experience of recognizing how detrimental that was, and how opposed to my true self Doug’s narrative was, leaves me with a well, then, who the heck am I? The coherent narrative is an opportunity to tug at those strings and bring those questions and hold them long enough to discover what words might actually emerge, and the words that emerged … some of them were very confused. There’s no question. I mean, you’ve written a book too, you know. Like there are, there were swaths of my writing that when I was editing, I would go back into and say, “What the heck is that? But that, that, that writing process was part of finding the coherence. Alexandra: Got it. That’s yeah. I get it now. Thank you. Gerette: Thanks for the question. Alexandra: When did it occur to you that you might want to write a book about this experience? Gerette: I was about five years out of the cult, and I was sitting with a new friend and colleague, who was a writing coach. We were actually in a business group together, and just having a coffee chat, and she like just implored me to write. I was like, I don’t know. I was really uncertain at first. We actually started a process together where she assured me that she would be able to support me in that process. She also had had her own experience of cultic involvement, so that being seen in that way was very important for me, and that was a big part of what helped me to realize the value of writing. When I first started writing, I’m a diehard educator, so I wanted to write something that was going to help people. So I was writing. I was actually with her when we were talking about genre and stuff, and to realize that I was starting to write a self-help book, and I was like, “Oh no, that’s not what I want to be doing.” Because the cult that I was in was part of the self help movement, self help world. I worked for a couple years on it in that way, and I was struggling to find my voice because I could feel like even in terms of what tense to use and how to form these questions and responses. One day, I was sitting with a fellow cult survivor, I call him a cult buddy. So I was sitting with him, kind of angsting about it, and he looked at me and he’s like, “Gerrette, what if you just wrote your story?” Again, that was just like gongs, and then that was the turning for me. Then it was relatively easy, because then it wasn’t like I was trying to convince anybody of anything, or show that I was smart or had something of value. It’s like, oh, actually, this is what happened to me. And as far as that coherent narrative goes, that’s where things really started to crystallize because I saw the different phases of the cultic involvement that I had experienced. Of course, my experience was going in as an adult, rather than someone who was born in, and so to reckon with those choices that I had made as an educated, caring woman in my small community here. There was a lot of reckoning to do there, and what emerged was a deeper and richer understanding of the forces of indoctrination and the mechanisms of control, and of course that combined with I was very fortunate to find a good therapist within a year of leaving, and that helped me dramatically. I was also able to kind of weave that work into my book as well. Alexandra: You’ve touched on something that’s always really fascinating for me. When I wrote my book, I learned a lot about the cult. I started writing it eight years after, and the way that I say it is by having to sort of go up to 30,000 feet and explain it to people so that they would understand, I learned a lot about what was going on with the manipulation by the cult leader. Was there anything that came out of your writing your book that was like that? Gerette: Oh, absolutely! Yeah, understanding dreams as something that is so deeply personal, and how a dream, they’re ours, you know. We have them at night. They come to us. They don’t belong to anybody. But how a dream could be manipulated. That mechanism of the twisting of meaning, which is something that I see living in the United States, I see that in a deeply disturbing way in the in the current administration. I was actually writing my book during the first term of his administration, and Alexandra, I actually had the naive belief at that time that, oh, this is so great! People will see on such a big scale how narrative can be twisted. We get to recognize this. We get to see it. We get to wake up to it, and we get to say no to it. I wrote one of my early blog posts was “Thank you, Donald.” Well, that was my own naivete, obviously, and yet there’s something there. There’s something about the recognition of how something of value, something of integrity, can be turned against us individually, and can be turned against us on a societal level. So there’s definitely a profound, I would say, interweaving today of what I have come to terms with in my own lived experience, and how that manifests today in the wider societal authoritarianism that is ravaging our dear planet. Alexandra: What challenges did you experience writing this book? You’ve talked about one already about how you had a little bit of trouble finding your voice. Was there anything else you encountered that was challenging? Gerette: One thing that just pops up when you ask that question is the publishing process. I worked with a hybrid publisher. It was very thrilling and empowering for me to be accepted by this small hybrid press that doesn’t publish everything. They decide what they want to publish, and so it was affirming. It was really empowering to have them choose my pitch, and bigan to work with them. There was a point in that process close to the end where we’re finalizing things like book cover and design, and those final details, the blurbs on the front and back, and all of that kind of stuff, and there was something really wrong with the art that was used for. It was actually the photography of the art that I had. I actually had someone design the art for it. When I brought that to the attention of the publisher, they pushed back, or this one person in particular pushed back really hard, and started bullying me, and really like it was actually a recreation of the kinds of language that I experienced in the cult, and that was deeply destabilizing. It took me a little while to realize what was going on. It also was an opportunity for me to see it. Name it, and say actually, it’s not going to happen that way. We are going to rephotograph the artwork because the color and the quality is terrible in what you’re proposing to use. It’s not right. I held my own, and that process was actually really affirming. So that’s an example of a major challenge that ended up positive. There’s, I mean, there’s the process of promoting the book. I’d say that is oh, isn’t that fun? That’s a challenge. I discovered that I actually really love doing readings, but scheduling the readings and the organizational stuff I find challenging. Those are a few things that come to mind, anyway. I’m sure that there’s definitely more. Alexandra: Those are some great examples. What advice can you offer to those who are thinking about writing a book about a cult experience or a traumatic experience, about where they can begin, because you work with writers. Where do you recommend someone start? Gerette: It’s so individual, isn’t it? Because we all have our unique triggers, and we all have our unique openings. I think learning enough about oneself is most important. I highly recommend finding a good therapist, someone who really understands coercive control. I know people who have been in therapy for years and years, but they don’t know the coercive control piece. And I feel like there’s still some arrested development where in a cultic environment, our development gets stopped. So having a therapist who really understands trauma and really understands the mechanisms of coercion can be incredibly helpful. As a starting place, I would definitely recommend that. The other piece that is really big for me is understanding how cultic trauma is ultimately relational trauma, and so finding environments where there can be some relational healing is also very important. I didn’t know when I started Writing to Reckon, the classes and workshops that I offer, I didn’t know that that’s what I was offering.But over the years that has become more and more clear to me that what takes place in a small group where there is an understanding that everyone there has experienced some version of coercion or manipulation, or cultic abuse, or religious trauma. There’s enough of a container that people get to find their own words and dare to share them with each other, and through that process, there is just this incredibly life affirming, like if I can use the word soul, soul growing experience in the personality. The whole being of the person gets to heal when you’re seen by people who get it, people who you don’t have to explain yourself to. There’s there’s an understanding there. It’s an incredibly beautiful experience that I have the privilege of experiencing every Friday in the Writing to Reckon class, and then whenever I do workshops. I’m not saying that you have to come to a Writing to Reckon class, although of course anybody is welcome to. It’s more finding the places where you can exercise that atrophied muscle of being in relationship with others. We’re a social species. We need each other to grow, to be the most human we can be. We need each other. We can’t do it in isolation. Alexandra: You mentioned your Writing to Reckon classes. What does reckoning mean to you and to your students? Gerette: I love that question. Reckoning is an opportunity to get really honest with what is, what happened, what exists in the moment, and in a certain way, to hit the pause button on all the ideas that our brain, or the internet, or all of the books that we read, or our therapist, even or our family and friends, or even our most trusted ones. It’s like putting a pause on all of that noise and just saying, “Okay, I see this moment. This moment.” What I’m talking about here, Alexandra, is that we work with a writing prompt, and that prompt. I mean, you don’t have to work with prompt. There’s no requirements at all. But we come together around a certain concept. For example, I’m a nerdy educator, and it might be. So I’ve got all these people. I love the work of Daniel Kenneman, the book Thinking Fast and Slow. I love the work of Robert Chaldini, influence. Robert J. Lifton is my hero, who I came close to meeting, but unfortunately didn’t. So, I might take a little snippet of one of their concepts, and then bring it into something that’s happening in the world today that reminds me of the cultic experience. It’s like there’s a little nugget that we kind of plonk in front of us for a moment, and then we see where that takes us. The opportunity of just trusting the words that come, and then having the next opportunity of sharing those words and hearing ourselves speak them out loud by reading our writing, reading what we. Even the next step of actually hearing others who just heard our writing offer their feedback about what they loved, that’s what reckoning is. It’s like we’re taking a lived experience, exploring it, and also getting some feedback on it. There is a kind of alchemy, actually, that happens in that experience that just allows us to become more autonomous through that process. I watch people become better writers through this really simple process. I watch people grow and integrate, and their voices strengthen. And you’ve experienced this too, I’m sure. Like it’s just an exquisite experience, Alexandra: Something that comes up a lot on this podcast about creating and using creativity as a part of the healing process after a cult experience is how powerful telling the truth is. It sounds like reckoning in your definition is really telling the truth. That is built in there as well, and people have the experience of telling their own truth and finding their voice in that, and then getting positive feedback about it from others. Gerette: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s just that this is what happened. There’s something about the reckoning process that encourages us to strip away all those narratives of justification that we may have built in to just allow ourselves to kind of sleep at night. When we strip away those justifications or the narratives that other people had told us, or their explanations, or whatever, not only do we get to sleep better at night, we actually get to stand up a little taller, because we know who we are in an unfiltered way, and it’s amazing. Alexandra: Oh, that’s so lovely. Another part of your work is the Living Cult Free project. Tell us about that. Gerette: Oh, great! Living Cult Free is a nonprofit dedicated to exactly that, to cult-free living, and specifically in finding supporting individuals through education and empowering them to autonomous living in whatever ways. We’re a small nonprofit and we have big hopes and are working towards really growing more and more. One of the ways that we’re growing right now is actually through our partnership with a project that I started in September of 2024, which is offering a writing symposium. The writing symposiums bring speakers, all of whom are survivors and authors and writers in a variety of ways, meaning memoir writers, screenwriting, even graphic novelists come. So there’s a wide variety of of writing. Creative expression through the written word in all of its manifestations. Living Cult Free has a scholarship fund, and so people get to attend the the symposium, the writing symposium. The name of that symposium is “Reclaiming Autonomy Through the Written Word for survivors of spiritual, religious, and cultic abuse”. Because of this beautiful partnership with Living Cult Free, we’re able to offer scholarships for those who would otherwise be unable to attend. Scholarships have also been given to attend other educational resources so people can apply to receive a scholarship. It’s a beautiful organization that is dedicated to growing slowly and organically, because of the dangers inherent in creating an organization. You laugh. Do you know anything about that? Alexandra: Maybe something. Yeah. Gerette: Exactly. We’ve been through a lot since the organization began back in 2020, but we feel there’s a wonderful board of directors. People can look at the Living Cult Free website and sign up to be on the newsletter. What I should say is that that newsletter is twice a year. If people are interested in a more substantial newsletter, I do send out a weekly newsletter that is educationally oriented. So my nerdy educator self gets to play every week, and for me that’s one of the ways that I get to keep growing. I know that I went on three different tangents there, but I hope that’s all okay. I hope it made sense. Alexandra: Tell us where we can find more about Living Cult Free. Gerette: Living Cult Free can be found at livingcultfree.org. Alexandra: Perfect. And then the symposium. Tell us more about that. Gerette: Reclaiming Autonomy Through the Written Word. We actually have one that’s coming up really soon. October 3 is the next one. The symposiums happen twice a year, and this symposium is featuring three different speakers. One is Dr. Laura Anderson, who is the founder of the Center for Trauma and Recovery Resolution, and she’s also the author of When Religion Hurts. Do you know that book? Alexandra: That rings a bell with me. Gerette: It’s a wonderful book. She is just an absolute fount of passion and education for survivors of coercion, especially those who have experienced religious trauma. I’m thrilled to have Dr. Laura Anderson speaking. I also have Robin Boyle Lazier, who is a legal scholar who just wrote a book on the title is “Taken No More: Protect Your Children Against Traffickers and Cults”, and she has worked for many years with ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association, and she’s on the board of ICSA. Robin has been a colleague for a number of years, and I am thrilled beyond measure to have her as a speaker. Also, and the third speaker is Hoyt Richards, who is a one of the founding board members of Living Cult Free, and he is also a featured in an HBO documentary that just came out. I don’t know if you can get that documentary in Canada yet. I know a Canadian friend who found it somewhere, but it’s called “Bring Me the Beauties”. It’s a really interesting three-part docu-series. And it’s actually just-I don’t know what it is right now-but a couple weeks ago, it was rated as HBO’s top documentary. It features his story, and Hoyt, what’s unique about him is that while he was immersed in a new agey spiritual cult, he was also a rising star in the modeling industry. He became one of the very first male supermodels. That was happening while he was in the cult. It’s a very interesting story, and the real story is the human story of what has taken place since he left, how he has healed with his family, and how he is growing individually. So, to have Hoyt be a speaker, he is also a screenwriter, and has written a number of films, so he will be speaking more from the screenwriting perspective. So I’m thrilled to have him at the symposium as well. Alexandra: Is there a website for the symposium? Gerette: You would just go to my website, which is gerretbuglion.com, and click on symposium, and all the information is there. Alexandra: Okay, perfect. That’s a great segue into you telling us where we can find out more about you and your work. Gerette: Well, that’s the spot, gerettebuglion.com.You can contact me, sign up for my newsletter. I am always happy to do what I call a 20 minute chat. You can schedule that any time because I’m always happy to not only just connect with fellow survivors, but also see if I can offer resources for people in whatever way that might be a good fit. Then also to see if any of my services, the writing support that I offer, might be a good fit or not. I want to also mention that the symposium, I really try to keep it affordable for people, and it’s $39 for this three hour symposium that’s very rich in content. Like I mentioned, people can apply for scholarship funds too, and I do pay my speakers. That’s part of why that’s part of why I charge for it because and that’s really important to me because I value the time. So many of us were abused through volunteerism in our various cultic experiences. So I do pay my speakers as well as possible. Alexandra: Oh, that’s amazing! Well, thank you, Gerette. I’m going to put links in the show notes to all those things so that people can find them going forward. Thank you so much for being with me. This has been a really rich conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Gerette: Yes, it’s been my pleasure. Absolutely, thank you so much. Alexandra: You’re so welcome. Take care. Bye Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Writing to Reckon with a Cult Experience with Gerette Buglion appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.

Kimber Young can trace her Mormon family lineage directly back to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormon church, she points out, was her whole life and her whole family was involved. And yet, somehow, Kimber was able to begin questioning the church doctrine and dogma while also retaining a sense of her own spirituality, which was so important to her. For anyone who’s ever left a high demand situation, you know that this is an extremely difficult needle to thread. It is one I was particularly interested to talk to her about. In the introduction I talk about my experience with how challenging it is to question a group or religion that we’ve become bonded to (or, in Kimber’s case, were born into), partly because this questioning is so threatening to our identity. Who are we without the group? It takes courage to ask that kind of question and the other questions that arise when we’re challenging our beliefs. Kimber Young is an artist, writer, and creator of Something for Sundays, a weekly Substack newsletter and a monthly illustrated zine exploring religion, spirituality, meaning, and the big questions of being human. After growing up in a religious tradition and spending years questioning and reconstructing her beliefs, Kimber became fascinated by the ways people across cultures make meaning, practice spirituality, and understand the world around them. Her work is an invitation to stay curious, and build a spiritual life outside of the box. Learn more about Kimber Young at SomethingForSundays.Substack.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the audiobook version of my award-winning, Amazon best-selling memoir, Cult, A Love Story. Readers call the book ‘compelling’ ‘gritty’ ‘intimate’ and ‘not boring’ – which is what an author loves to hear. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of that subscription at alexandraamor.com/spotify. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Growing up in the Mormon church Some of the benefits of belonging to a tightly knit religious or spiritual organization How and when Kimber’s questioning of the church began Navigating asking questions of a high-demand religion without giving up God How questioning a religion or spiritual group can threaten the parts of ourselves that we like Processing and disentangling through writing How posting writing publicly opened up conversations with family and friends Dealing with pushback about public posts Exploring other religions to see what might fit How audacity is more important for artists than talent Becoming comfortable with the mysteries of life and not knowing the answers How writing can help us to learn to think critically Resources mentioned in this episode Kimber’s Substack, Something for Sundays Kimber’s post Done, Not Perfect East of Eden by John Steinbeck The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steve Hassan We don’t discuss it during the interview, but one of my favourite books about someone wrestling with the Mormon religion is Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck Transcript of the interview with Kimber Young Alexandra: Kimber Young, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Kimber: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Alexandra: I’m so glad that you agreed to come and talk to me. Give us a little bit about your background as we begin. Kimber: I was actually born in Oregon, but mostly raised in Utah, and I grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the official name, but colloquially known as Mormons. My background really is about that because it just informed every aspect of my life, and I come from Latter Day Saint descent on both sides. My great great great great uncle is Brigham Young, who brought all the people over to Utah, so it’s very ingrained into our family culture and identity, and my identity as well. And when I think about my upbringing, it really is a lot Mormonism. Alexandra: I was just reading a post. I had a few minutes to kill before we started, and I was reading a post that you wrote recently on Substack, and you were talking about how devoted you really were. Like you were all in; it was everything to you. And we’re going to talk about what your recent exploration is in that direction of asking questions. Tell us what that looked like for you being all in. Kimber: That’s a great question. I’m trying to think of some good examples, but I would say a big example is I served a mission for the church. If you don’t know what that is, it’s just going out. You get assigned a place and a language. You don’t get to choose, and you just spend for girls, it’s 18 months. For men, it’s two years of your life. Just the sole focus is teaching about Mormonism and trying to convert people to Mormonism. I was a pretty effective missionary. I feel like I’ve always loved people, and I love talking to people. I was called to serve in New York City, speaking Mandarin Chinese. So, I am fluent in Mandarin, and I ended up minoring in it in college. And it’s a really big passion of mine. I was in it my whole life, but that was a part where it just consumed my whole identity, and I think back of other examples of me being devoted, and I think about meeting people who weren’t members and not knowing how to interact with them, unless it was in a teaching setting. It was so easy for me to be nice to someone and talk to them, and because I had something to share, but when it came to just regular conversation or not having this pressure. I would just always have this pressure of I need to share the gospel with them. I need to help them understand what they’re missing. I remember one of my best friends who she assisted me a little bit on my journey, my faith journey. But she has never been Mormon. Didn’t know anything about Mormons, and when I met her, I remember being like, “Oh no, I’m goint to have to invite her to church.” It was just this feeling of like, and I did. I invited her to church within a few weeks of knowing her, and I think it was a really big part of my life. I helped a lot of people get baptized and join the church, and yeah, it’s interesting having conversations with those people now. Alexandra: It makes sense if you were raised that way, and as you say, both sides of your family going way way back, that totally makes sense. Kimber: Yeah, and all of our important family conversations at home, extended family, was always centered around church. That was like how we connected and how we could think deeply about things. And if we weren’t talking about church or gospel related stuff, it didn’t feel as important, and so that was really a big conversation topic in our home. I think part of the reason why I still continue to be really interested in religion. Alexandra: I get it. The cult that I was in, I had that same feeling. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but when we were together, we could talk about the deep topics, and that felt so important. Kimber: It’s a cool feeling like you’re all on the same team, and you all have values and goals. And in Utah, I mean, it’s super integrated into the culture, and so it wasn’t just my family; it was very reinforced by my neighbors and the people in church every week. I was praised for doing things that, looking back, I’m like we’re a little bit intense. I would go up and bear my testimony about not wearing a bikini and how that was so important to not wear a bikini, and I’d speak that to the whole congregation. And then afterwards they’re like, “Wow, you’re so amazing.” I would talk about how I would tell people, you know, in Sunday school that I didn’t date boys who watched rated R movies, and everyone would praise me for that, and so it was a way of like I felt always in the right. And I think that’s kind of a damaging mentality to grow up with, as I’ve learned, to feel always that you know the answers to everything, and you get to teach everyone else. And I think even within Mormonism, I tried to be the very, very, very best example of that. Alexandra: When did your questioning begin, or your exploration? Kimber: I was thinking about this. There’s there’s a few points that stand out to me. One, I continued to study Mandarin Chinese in college, and I had an opportunity to go to a study abroad in China. I was pretty pretty much the only religious person, let alone Mormon person. I was with a cohort of students that were around my same age, like early 20s, and we all went out and lived in China for two months during a summer, and it was then that I kind of started realizing. I was just so far removed everything. I couldn’t go to church. There was no church. You weren’t allowed to talk about the gospel out there. I got this paper they sent me. The church sent me that’s like you cannot proselyte because that will get you in trouble with the Chinese government, and so just all these things were stripped away. I couldn’t proselyte, and I couldn’t really talk about my religion, and I also couldn’t attend or or practice in the way I was used to. And on top of that, I was surrounded by all these people who were never Mormon and didn’t really know what it was. And I feel like that was a time I started to doubt some stuff, and I started to really think about things. I would just try to shut it away, try to shut it away. But I think that was the first time that I really started seriously thinking about things a little bit more. The other thing that comes to mind is getting married. I got married when I was 25, which is pretty old for a Mormon. Everyone’s usually getting married at like 20 or 21. In Mormon theology, in order to get to heaven, like the highest level of heaven, you have to be married, and so that was so consuming in my mind. Once I got married, it kind of felt like I’d done everything I needed to do, and I was 25, and so I’d checked off all the boxes. I’m like, great. I get to go to heaven now. Suddenly I had all this mental space to think about other things, and I think my my partner feels the same way. Once we got married, and we moved away immediately from Utah, we moved to Texas actually, and then it kind of gave me some space, similar to China. It gave me space to start thinking about things, and that’s when the questioning began. Alexandra: Is your partner Mormon too? Kimber: Yeah, he is. Alexandra: One of the things in your explanation that you talk about, we’re going to refer to your Substack quite a bit because that’s how I learned a lot about you. On the about page, you talk about navigating a high demand religion, which you would describe Mormonism as, and then but without giving up God. So tell us a little bit. That’s a big question. Tell us a little bit about why these two things are important to you. Asking these questions, but also not giving up God. Kimber: When I first started questioning the truth claims of the Mormon Church…I guess for listeners who don’t know, Mormonism is very much founded on these certain truth claims that the LDA, the Latter Day Saint Church, is the only true church on the face of the earth. That’s one. Two is Joseph Smith was is the founder of the church in 1830 was called by God to be a prophet, and there’s a lot that goes into that. And then also the Book of Mormon is the word of God, and the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. So, which is like you can only know if it’s translated correctly by if the church tells you it’s translated correctly. I started questioning these truth claims and looking into the history. I’m a huge researcher, and so I started researching a ton, and I still haven’t stopped. There’s so much to learn. I think I’ve been on Substack about three years, which is when I started writing about this. What was really scary to me about even being able to question the church was I was really afraid of losing the parts of myself that I really loved, and that was the spiritual side of things. I loved having conversations about the meaning of life, and I loved thinking about how God could work in my life, and that my life had purpose, and that there was that I wasn’t solely in charge of. I don’t know how to describe it, but I wasn’t just left alone in this world. I had a benevolent being that cared for me, andand so it was really hard for me to start even questioning because I was scared of losing that special relationship I had with God. I think a lot of people in my situation feel that way. They’re like, well, I see all these people who question Mormonism, and then they have no religion at all, and don’t do anything, and that’s not a bad thing. But it was just something that I’m like I was scared of losing it all, I guess. When I started writing, I really tried to focus on on God and tried to focus on this relationship with God and feeling like I belong to God and and I’m going to figure this out with God and then all this other stuff, I’m going to sort through it I guess it’s important to me because I used to think that the church, the Mormon Church, and God were synonymous, Alexandra: Right? Kimber: And now I’ve separated the two, and it’s a very clear distinction to me now. But I think for people who read my Substack who are Mormon or in a high demand religion, I want to be approachable for them in a way that’s like, look, if you have these beliefs you care about, you get to keep them. Your relationship with God doesn’t need to be contingent on a belief in an institution. So, anyway, that’s my answer to that. Alexandra: That’s awesome, and that’s so clear. It is possible to pull those two things apart, and my experience is it can be painful and confusing, and really puzzling and it will really challenge a lot of our beliefs, of course. But it is possible. I can see that in your writing that that’s what you’re doing. Kimber: I think I was scared of the word deconstruction for a long time because I didn’t want everything to just fall, and so I used the word disentangling for that reason. I’m disentangling Jesus out of this, or I’m disentangling God out of this. There’s goodness here that I want to keep. And it is really hard, like you said, to separate what you’ve been taught about who God is and what God cares about, and what you you feel to be more true as you like expand your worldview. Alexandra: Yes, what’s important to you? What feels good to you, to the individual, to hang on to. How has writing helped you to do this? Kimber: I would say it’s helped me quite a bit. I think a lot of my processing happened through writing, and then I would clean it up a little bit and make it more palatable and less angry, I guess, and more empathetic, and I would post it. I think what really helped me was connecting with other people who are going through the same thing, and even having people in my life who weren’t going through the same thing, being able to read it and realize it’s something I’m taking seriously. I think in Mormonism there’s a lot of phobias around people leaving, and there’s things that leadership says about well, they are choosing the easy way, or they just want to drink coffee, or they want to wear cute clothes, and it’s like, oh, they’re so worldly. I think that for me, writing began as a way of like, hey, if you want to know what I’m actually thinking, you can go and read this. I posted it on my personal Instagram and Facebook, and and my family started reading it, and I think it opened up a lot of conversations with family members, and I think it provided the space for people to be to realize like, I don’t know, they they could see that I want people to see this is not an easy thing. It is a really hard thing to leave this mindset and framework, and also like leave a religion that I really loved and devoted my life to. It helps me internally process what was happening, and I also think it helped me find support in my life because if people want to know, they could just go read. Alexandra: Right. When they have done that, what’s the response been like? Kimber: The response overall, I would say, is positive. I think I actually wrote about this a little bit a few weeks ago. I wrote a piece called Disentangling Jesus, and it was an essay. And I was just talking about how I’m having to leave behind my certainty to follow God and some of my family members saw as me leaving the church at that time. I was still attending and everything. I almost accidentally said I was leaving, and so people thought that by me saying I’m leaving my certainty, they thought I was leaving my worship. I think that became kind of a scary thing for people in my life. I think specifically, one family member, I actually did write about this later too, but one family member like sent me like super long texts about how I’m deceived by the devil and stuff like that. It’s classic, but you know it was validating to get it. I’m like, oh yay. It feels like a big deal. So when everyone is like cool, you’re like oh man, it’s a big deal. So then when my family member kind of like fought for me, I was like okay, I feel now. But she was like, God lost one of His most valiant soldiers, and all this stuff, and I get it. It brings so much pain for people. I would say at the beginning, I think it was a little bit more polarizing, but now people are more used to it. I also took some of my family members off my mailing list because I think it was causing them distress. So I’m like, this isn’t for you. You don’t need to read that every week. Alexandra: I’m curious when you go back to Utah to see your family, which I’m assuming you do. Do you go to church? Do you have those conversations at the dinner table? Kimber: So we just actually moved back to Utah like a few months ago. I’m in Utah currently. We were living in Asia for about a year, and then just moved back. And there have been some conversations. I don’t go to church normally, but I’ve been exploring different kinds of churches because I think there is something in me that misses the routine and stability that came with being part of a faith community, and so I’ve been going to a lot of different churches. I’ve been to Baptist and non-denominational and Unitarian Universalist, and I can’t remember all of them. Orthodox and Catholic and Episcopal and yeah, so many. I’ve learned so much and it’s really fun and Methodist and whatever. I’ve learned so much from it and it’s been really fun. But as far as being here, we haven’t really been going to to the LDS Church. Sometimes, if my family is wanting to go, or there’s a special event, then we’ll go with them. I think overall, it’s helped us have better conversations around things like that, where they don’t really try to persuade anymore, and I also don’t get so reactive about things. Alexandra: That’s such an interesting position to be in because you’ve really announced, via your Substack, where you stand, and what you’re exploring and what you’re questioning. So your family is aware. I just find that really fascinating. Kimber: It’s interesting because when I think back to my childhood, it’s like yes, we were super devout, and my parents did this thing that I think really was good. I don’t really know why, but for this certain year, we all started going to different churches every week. We would go in addition to the Mormon Church. Mormon Church was three hours, and then we would go to another church, and it was like another hour or two. So it was like five hours of church. But all my siblings and I, we all loved it. We loved seeing how different people were. I think my parents do have a sort of openness because they are curious. They’ve modeled this curiosity towards other faith traditions. Even though my parents are very devout and strong in their own beliefs and and practices, I do think there’s a certain level of of acceptance and openness and that, and it hasn’t been like that from the beginning, but has turned into that. Alexandra: That’s really cool of them, and that you didn’t lose them because of this. Kimber: I know. I think people have different experiences, and right now in Mormonism, there’s a lot of people leaving, and so it’s becoming way more common for families to learn how to navigate it in healthy ways, and I think that’s really positive. But I had an aunt and uncle who left when I was a teenager, and their experience was totally different in my larger family. I think they’ve been great at being able to support me, and sharing like, yeah, that’s it’s really hard. Like we get it. It’s just been kind of a funny dynamic of being with them and being like, wait, like what side am I on? It’s almost like there’s a divide in my family. Like am I on the believing or not believing? And I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle, but it’s just interesting to. I don’t know. It just totally changed how I view my family as well. It’s interesting. Alexandra: What you said about exploring other religions, I love that too. When I left the high demand group that I was in, it was actually a therapist who recommended I do that because I was experiencing a lot of loss and grief around not having a faith community or a spiritual community, and so yeah, did a similar thing. I went to Anglican Church and Unitarian Church and United Church, and tried all different kinds of stuff. It was a really good experience, like yours. I really, really enjoyed it, and what lovely people I met, and and then I think, just to talk about myself for two seconds, the caveat I had in the end, I realized that any time spirituality becomes institutionalized, like any time there becomes this group think, I guess you might call it, about what God is or what spirituality is, it put me off. In the end, I just couldn’t be a part of any sort of religion. But it was really fun exploring for sure. Kimber: I think for me, it’s helped me be okay with the weirdness of Mormonism. I always kind of felt the shame, like, oh wow, being a Mormon is so weird. There’s always weird things, like rituals and doctrines and whatever. And then I go to like another, like a Catholic mass, and I’m like, why? Wow, there’s kind of some weird stuff there too, and I don’t even know all the ins and outs. Eeven like some of these more chill. I guess I don’t know if you want to say chill, but like like Unitarian Universalists that are more like accepting, and I go there. They have some weird stuff too. So for me, it’s been very validating and helps me feel okay, like we’re all kind of weird. I think it’s because, like you said, we’re trying to capture this feeling and this essence, and trying to make it into an organization, and that’s really gets messy. And yeah, when humans are involved, it just gets more complicated because humans are complicated. Alexandra: Absolutely. And you’re so right. If you didn’t know anything about Catholicism and you observed a mass, I mean, you’d just think it was the wackiest thing. And yet, as you were saying that, it feels like simply because it’s been around for so long, it’s just become normal,. Mormonism hasn’t been around that long, so perhaps that’s why it feels a little kookier. Kimber: I think about that a lot. Where I’m like, okay, Mormonism is only, however, like what, 200 years old, maybe a little less. And then I think about that like I don’t know, just in thousands of years from now, how are we going to? But also, Mormon is like we’re so close to the founding story because it only happened in 1830, right? So it’s like we have documents. We have people’s affidavits and testimonies and whatever court, whatever. There’s so much to Mormon history, but I’m able to read all these primary sources, and that’s just something that we don’t have when it comes to Christianity or Judaism. We have these traditions that have been passed down from years and years and years, but we’re not engaging with the source material. I think about that with Mormonism as like, this is how all religion started, and now it’s just become more normalized, or is this like a special case? I don’t know. Alexandra: It’s such a good question. I think I think we’ve hit on something there. I wanted to ask: your Substack is called Something on Sundays, correct? Kimber: Something for Sundays. Alexandra: Something for Sundays. Thank you. Is there something about that format that really works for you in terms of the writing that you’re doing? What I mean by that is you could have chosen to write a book or to host a podcast, or so. What is it about Substack that works for you? Kimber: I think overall, what I really have liked about being on Substack is I’ve always written a blog since I was like 12. I just have always been writing something. My Substack used to be called Kimber Was Here, and I was compiling all of my writings, like poems and past blog posts. I’ve kind of just been in different spaces on the internet, and I’m like, okay, I’m just going to put them all together on this substack. Then I started writing more regularly about some of the traveling and everything that we’re doing, and then when all this questioning started happening, it just became a natural outlet for me. I majored in English, so I’ve just really liked writing. I chose the name Something for Sundays because Sundays was a very special day to me all growing up. It was always filled. I always knew what I was going to be doing on Sunday, and I had a very specific routine of going to church and coming home and taking a three-hour nap and then eating family dinner. Then when I started to distance myself from the church, I found like you were describing a loss and a grief around Sundays. Like what am I going to do this Sunday, or what am I going to go to a different church, am I just going to lay in bed? Am I going to listen to a sermon or online? There’s so many different things you do. So I started to write Something for Sundays as kind of a thing of being like, okay, this is something for my Sunday, and it’s something for your Sunday if you’re in the same position as me. It’s kind of turned into something special. Every week I give little recommendations; something to read, something to watch, something to try, something to make. I’ll choose a few each week, and so that gives people something to do on Sunday. With Substack. I also have been really enjoying doing more illustration, and so I create illustrated essays. I do them like I try to do it once a month. They take a little bit more time, so it just depends. I started illustrating some of my experiences, and I started exploring different ways of communicating what I was going through, and also just what I’ve been thinking about. I think Substack has a platform that can hold all of that, which I like. Alexandra: I was reading your post from yesterday. We’re recording this on a Monday, and it was about a sidewalk chalk event that you had done with your sister, which was really cool. The post is called “Done, not perfect.” You talk about how completing things and how doing them is more important than making them perfect. And I really encourage people to read it because it was really deep and thoughtful about what it means to be perfect versus good. You talk about that and refer to East of Eden, which you say is one of your favorite books. The thing that really resonated with me was how easy it can be to not try to do something because we think it has to be perfect. I just wanted to bring that up and point it out because I think when people are new to writing, they can stop themselves because they think it’s not going to be good enough, it’s not going to be perfect, and that kind of thing. One of the things I like about blogs and places like Substack is that it feels like there’s less expectation to be perfect. Would you agree? Kimber: Yeah, for sure. I think because of the frequency of it, if you choose to write weekly or monthly, like there’s definitely times where I’ve been like, this is done, not perfect. Just send it out there. I think kind of what you’re saying, like feeling not good enough to start or not good enough to to put it out there. One of my favorite books is East of Eden, like you mentioned. Another favorite book is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Have you done that? It’s just amazing. I did it last year, and she talks about audacity is what brings an artist to the center stage faster, or even more so than talent. It’s all about audacity, and that has just really resonated with me in all areas of my life. When I was reading that book, I applied to Harvard Divinity School, and I did all these things. I had all this audacity of I’m just going to try it. I’m going to paint. I’m going to do this and that. I’m going to write, and I think there’s all these things I did and I tried that I would not have tried if I was so caught up in it has to be perfect. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is I think I just try to intellectualize everything. I’m intellectualizing like okay I want to paint an oil I want to get into oil painting for example and then so I’m going to watch a bunch of tutorials and I’m going to sign up for a really expensive class. I’m going to research all the materials to buy, and then I’m going to buy them, and then I’m going to buy better ones. It’s like I keep procrastinating the actual doing of it, and I feel like that’s totally how it can be with writing too. I started buying writing courses and started buying like books and all this stuff, and then I kind of stopped writing as frequently because I started feeling like, wait, I’m not doing all these things that they’re suggesting, and I’m not having a perfect writing routine. I think there’s value in those kind of books, like teaching you how to write or teach you how to be creative, but I think when you use that as a form of procrastination from starting the actual thing is when, at least for me, I start to get really anxious. It’s like all this pent up potential with no outlet, and so that’s what I have to think about. I think with writing, like you’re saying, it is a really cool way to process. Same with drawing, like process and just make visual and make real what’s happening internally. I definitely feel it’s important to just just do it, just go for it. Alexandra: Exactly, and we can’t get better until we do. So if we prevent ourselves from doing the thing, then we won’t ever improve. Kimber: I fall into that a lot. I don’t know your whole experience with the cult you were a part of, but at least in Mormonism, there’s a very high focus on perfection, and it’s like they are constantly telling you like you will never be perfect, but you have to try. I get that. But then, if you’re hearing that, and that’s the core message every single week for 20 years, it just gets in you, and it manifests itself in the culture a lot. Plastic surgery is like the highest per capita in Utah. Alexandra: Oh wow! Kimber: Yeah, so it’s like that’s just an example. GLP one, plastic surgery, all these cosmetic things. I think it’s a reflection of this belief system because everyone is yeah. Anyway, we can go into Utah culture, but I do think it’s an internal thing for sure, like perfectionism. Alexandra: My experience with the cult I was in was there was an expectation of perfection, but the goalposts were always moved, so you could never actually get there, and any fault that occurred was always with the person, the individual. Kimber: Totally. Have you ever read “Combating Cult Mind Control” by Steve Hassan. He talked about that, about how that’s like a common thing that cults will do is like make it be your fault, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. What’s the use of that? The use of that is they create a problem, and then they also create the solution, right? And that’s like a common marketing tactic. I think about I see all these billboards everywhere of plastic surgery and it’s like you know it’s like they create a problem like oh my nose isn’t like this turned up thing you know and then it’s it makes me feel like oh maybe I need to get a nose job because I have the solution as well. I think I think a lot of high demand religions work in that in that same framework Alexandra: Yes. I think that’s a classic manoeuvre for sure. I had this question that I had sent you in advance about what you’ve learned about yourself and your beliefs. We’ve talked about that a little bit with this exploration that you’ve been on. Is there anything else you can think of that really come to light for you? Kimber: I think the biggest thing I’ve learned about myself, my beliefs. The biggest thing I’ve learned about myself is that I can show up for something again and again, week after week, for a few years, and I can be really consistent. I think that’s something that I’ve learned about myself. I didn’t know I was really capable of that. I’m really proud of of being able to show up for myself and show up for the people who read Something for Sundays, and I think as far as beliefs go, I think I’ve come to really value uncertainty in the sense of, I really value the mystery of life, which was definitely not the case before. I think when I was really in Mormonism, like really fully in it, I felt better than everyone because I knew everything about the inner workings of the world and the universe. Now I’ve really become more comfortable with this mystery and being curious. I think I really value people who are curious as well, and kind of what you were talking about when you were saying that you went to the different faith traditions and ultimately decide that wasn’t for you. I think that I get that because whenever I’ve gone somewhere and they say something like so definitive, it instantly is like a red flag for me. Where I’m like, wait a second. How do they know that? What are they basing it on? I’ve really learned how to think critically, and I think writing has helped me with that. That process of if I’m going to write something, and you can kind of see it if you read my really early things. I’m a little bit more preachy, which is just how I was back then, and I’ve definitely through the years have become a lot more like less willing to just be like, well, this is what I believe, and this is why it’s right. It’’s been yeah, it’s been interesting. Alexandra: That’s so cool. We are just about out of time, so as we start to wrap up, is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share with our listeners? Kimber: I think one other thing is recently I started doing a zine, so it’s like a mini magazine, and it has illustrations and writing in it, and that’s been a fun new way, a new creative pursuit that I’ve done. That’s kind of brought Something for Sundays into a physical subscription form. I did that one because I didn’t want to turn on paid subscriptions on Substack, but I was getting to the point where it was taking a lot of time, and so I was trying to think of a new way to maybe supplement some of my time with money and and so I started this this zine. It’s been really fun and exciting. I send it out to people all over all over the country and actually internationally as well. So that’s something I think is my creative pursuit recently. That is fun. I think along those lines, I would want people to know that you don’t need to box yourself into one thing. If you are creative in one way, you can be creative in another way too. Like if you really like singing and playing music, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to enjoy painting. You don’t have to be good at it. You can just try it, and you might be surprised that that can actually assist in your music. That’s just an example of I think as you use your creativity, it benefits other areas of your life as well. Alexandra: Well said. Yeah, that’s amazing. All right. Please tell us where we can find out more about you and your writing. Kimber: My Substack is Somethingforsundays.substack.com, and I’m also on Instagram, Something for Sundays, and my mail club is something for Sundays club. So it’s all something for Sundays related. If anyone is interested in the zine, something for Sundays club is where you can learn more about that. Those are my main three places that I update. Alexandra: Awesome. I’ll put links in the show notes to those three things. Kimber: Thank you so much. Alexandra: Well, thank you, Kimber. This has been a delight. It’s been so nice talking to you. Kimber: Nice talking to you too. Thank you for having me. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Disentangling Religion from Personal Spirituality with Kimber Young appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.