Cortney and Shana can’t remember exactly how they first became aware of the New Age promises and anxieties that would come to dominate every aspect of their lives. Their mom brought it into the house and their daily rhythms bit by bit.As kids in the early 1980s, they would fall asleep to visualizations by the self-help guru Wayne Dyer, on audiocassette. Or mom would read passages from Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, after tucking them into bed. Cortney remembers an eerie photograph of the yogi’s corpse in a glass coffin in the mortuary. The lore was that he just wouldn’t decay. “Mom had a real fascination with beating death,” she told us. When the girls were still in elementary school, mom took them to an “attunement”, which must have made them the youngest Reiki Masters in Green Bay, Wisconsin—if not the whole midwest. “She was on a search,” Shana told us. And at some point the local massage training, the flyers in the health food stores, and the mail-order books weren’t enough. Mom started going to events, a long way from home—all the way out in Washington State. One time she came home with a VHS tape and played it for the girls. It showed a woman named J.Z. Knight transform into someone she called “Ramtha,” who she said was 35,000 years old, and carried the wisdom of the ages. She also brought audiocassettes of Ramtha, which they played in the car. This was their introduction to “channeling.” They were young teens, and didn’t know what to think. Was it magic? Was it funny? Ramtha sounded like the Great Gazoo, after all. When mom wasn’t home they’d show the VHS tape to their friends and giggle. But they also felt strange about it. Embarrassed. “I remember yelling at my mom, ‘Why can't you be normal?’” Shana said. What they understand now is how much she desperately needed to find something that was meaningful. “She was really struggling in the Catholic religion,” Shana said, “And her marriage,” Cortney added. “And midlife. It was the perfect storm.” Matthew sits down with Cortney and Shana as they share their story publicly for the first time.
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Leaving Ramtha's Ranch with Courtney and Shana.
Yeah.
So far on the show we've looked at how QAnon reaches deep into the well of human nightmares to recycle cursed content.
It boosts the blood libel, which has its origins in 12th century England.
It re-ups the ghost of the gothic vampire and how in the 19th century that ghost merged with the spectre of the doctors who practiced the newfangled dark art of vaccination.
QAnon goes Orientalist with Madame Blavatsky, racist but spiritual with Rudolf Steiner, and gets into yoga and natural health with early 20th century fascists.
QAnon remembers the Cold War, blends it with the Satanic Panic, and parties with David Icke.
Eventually, QAnon winds up in the social feeds of Jay-Z Knight, the channeler of Ramtha, and she downloads it like a skin pack to upgrade her high-demand group game.
In March of 2019, Night's annual spring retreat at the Romtha School of Enlightenment on her 80-acre ranch in Yelm, Washington was headlined by QAnon rocker JT Wilde, who opened festivities with his hit song, Where We Go One, We Go All.
It was a good fit, because what is Q if not a channeled entity?
But all of this content recycling is only one part of the story.
It's an important part, because fever dreams change history, pushing people down pathways they wouldn't otherwise have taken.
The subtler part of the story, however, is to bear witness to those people in their complexities, and how they push back, using resources that existed before QAnon entered their scene.
Data forensics and disinformation expertise can point to how a brain worm hijacks lives, but when you talk to people, sometimes you find out that the conspiracy theory or moral panic didn't change everything for them so much as it exploited and accelerated vulnerabilities that were already curdling in communities, marriages, and families.
Today, we get an intimate look into a narrow wedge of that reality as I sit down with Courtney and Shana, who were 17 and 14, respectively, when their newly separated mother brought them to the Romtha School of Enlightenment in the late 1980s.
While there, an erstwhile normal teenage experience morphed into a high-stakes boot camp for the apocalyptic days to come.
The sisters were taught that they must control their thoughts, that they should try to walk through walls and bend spoons, that they should heal people of cancer by the laying on of hands.
They stored up canned food and they couldn't make friends outside of the ranch because all of those kids were going to die.
They've never shared their story before and I'm really grateful that they have here because it starts to fill in some essential pieces about the understory of QAnon and conspirituality more broadly.
The recycled content works to the extent that it finds a weakness in all our relations, in the paranoid community of a cult or in the intergenerational trauma of a family.
What Courtney and Shana also show is that fascist movements should never underestimate the power of a teenager rolling her eyes.
So that's the thumbnail.
Before I rule the conversation, I'd like to flag a few other things.
Firstly, we're withholding Courtney and Shaina's family name at their request for reasons of privacy, and I think you'll find this appropriate for another reason, too.
A certain anonymity here might make the themes of this story a little more universal for listeners and relieve it of any kind of finger-pointing vibe.
None of this is breaking news anyway, and as you'll hear, both of the sisters are really focused on understanding and forgiveness.
Secondly, I want to point out that this conversation was really initiated by Courtney, who reached out with a synopsis of the family experience after our full first callout for stories.
And at that point, it wasn't as clear to us how important their piece of the conspirituality puzzle is.
How, without the full and clear integration of QAnon into 1980s cultic structures and their echoes in the yoga and wellness world, it just never would have taken off the way that it did.
The Ramtha School of Enlightenment was a vector for QAnon, and so was Guru Jagat's Rama-Kundalini offshoot school.
But when Courtney reached out again to tell us that our work on Joe Dispenza was on the right track to the extent that we linked it to his former membership within the Romtha School of Enlightenment, the connections became a lot clearer.
Courtney was explicit in Instagram messages.
Joe Dispenza's content is a direct echo of Jay-Z Night.
And while Dispenza hasn't gone full QAnon, his quantum healing bullshit represents a normalization of the Ramtha scene.
And for Courtney and Shana, it's like watching the local Yelm News from 1989 suddenly streamed on Netflix.
Or, I guess, Gaia.
Now, you're going to hear them talk about an intense and rare experience they had as teenagers, and from which they've had to recover over many years.
Where I think everyone might find overlap is in the general feeling that we've all been dragged into something we didn't choose by forces beyond our control.
Many of us woke up to a new landscape in 2020 in which communities and friends were suddenly in thrall to a different world, and yet we had to manage.
So maybe another point of resonance that gives this story a broad reach is that there's something about individuating as a teenager that we might all remember and keep alive in relation to these powerful influences.
So, keywords for this episode are normalization, routinization, externalization, and digitization.
The seamless progress from Jay-Z Knight's magical healing ideas to Joe Dispenza on Gaia is really about media platforms and how new-age storytellers upgrade and streamline So there is a double entendre in the title.
Courtney and Shana have left Ramtha Ranch in the dust, but Ramtha has also left the ranch in a way as well to expand out through the Digiverse.
But again, this is all on the level of content.
Because on the interpersonal level, what Courtney and Shana provide is a kind of canary in the coal mine vision of how fever dreams burrow into lives and family systems.
They also prove something I think should be a rule, which is that if you're going to join any group or follow any teacher in the new age or wellness space, try to find out what the teenage children around that leader or around that group have to say because they'll spill the real tea.
Second to last thing, you're going to hear this, but I want to underline it as well here, which is that a key turning point for Courtney and Shana happened when they found themselves watching over Courtney's husband in the hospital when he nearly died.
Suddenly, all of the magic they grew up with became not only useless, but distractive.
And meanwhile, they witnessed good care from people who weren't making shit up and who didn't make money with false promises.
Now, we wouldn't wish this on anyone, but we can't overemphasize how important exposure to good, trustworthy medical and institutional care is for breaking the spell of conspirituality.
Finally, we recorded this on a Saturday morning, Pacific Time, and they were, after we finished, going to meet up in Seattle later that day, for the first time in a while because of COVID, and they were going to go hear Esther Perel give a talk somewhere.
And I thought that was just such a great way to cap the day for them, because you know that Perel will be quoting Simone de Beauvoir, not channeling her.
That it will be bona fide feminism, not the fake kind.
That the ideas will be complex, but not designed to spark cognitive dissonance.
And all of that is a long way from Yelm.
Courtney and Shana, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
How old were you when you first became aware of Jay-Z Night and Ramtha and the Ramtha School of Enlightenment?
And what were your first impressions?
Maybe Courtney, would you like to go first?
It's really hard to remember exactly how old we were because it kind of blends into our early childhood.
You know, we were raised Catholic.
I went to a Catholic school for eight years.
That seemed very stable and normal in a small little community.
And maybe around the time that I was, you know, middle school age, You know, our mom started to, she did some massage.
She became acquainted with Reiki.
She attuned us to become Reiki masters at very young ages.
And so it was just this sort of slow feed into I think we heard a lot of this for a long time before we were actually exposed.
So it was just this slow slide into awareness.
And she began to go to events a couple times a year.
You know, I also remember her listening to the early tapes, the little dialogues while we'd be riding in the car.
So I think we heard a lot of this for a long time before we were actually exposed.
So it was just this slow slide into awareness.
And Shana?
Yeah, I agree.
It was pretty gradual, and from my memory, Even before our mom was introduced to Ramtha, she was, you know, playing guided meditations for us.
Wayne Dyer, I remember we would fall asleep to his voice a lot.
I was talking to Courtney earlier.
I remember her reading us autobiography of a yogi to fall asleep to when we were in like elementary school.
So it was definitely, she just, she was on a search.
I do remember her bringing back a video of Jay-Z transitioning into Ramtha.
And it was kind of, I remember it just being like intriguing, entertaining.
We would show our friends and we would laugh about it.
And then that progressed into, you know, her being gone a lot.
And then when we did have the opportunity, it was presented as, There's this school and, you know, there's not as many rules and, you know, there's a lot of freedom.
The kind of, like, entertainment value of it became much more serious, coupled with, like, the idea of the days to come, which kind of fueled our move and kind of fueled, like, Kind of everything we did after that.
It's an amazing progression.
I mean, first of all, I just want to nail the years down.
We're talking about the mid 80s.
Am I right?
Mid to late 80s.
Yeah.
Yep.
Mm hmm.
And I mean, mid 80s was kind of the beginning.
Late 80s was when she started to go out to the school.
Yeah.
And then you are both attuned as Reiki masters in Wisconsin in the mid to late 80s.
Mm-hmm.
You must be the youngest Reiki masters in Wisconsin at that age or that time period.
Very possibly, yeah.
So you're a cutting-edge family.
That's right.
And it's kind of extraordinary this gradual blending of this material into your life to the point at which it's going to cross over into a threshold into upending everything.
Even that there's a VHS in your house that is showing Knight transitioning into Ramtha and it's kind of a fun thing that you show to your friends?
What did they say?
I don't remember.
I mean I think we just kind of like laughed and I remember I remember feeling I think I used to get upset a lot and I would I remember yelling at my mom, why can't you be normal?
Without really understanding her for like finding something that meant something to her.
She was really struggling in the Catholic religion and I think just in general.
In her marriage and in midlife and all of those things it was like Yeah, it was the perfect storm.
When you saw that transformation on the VHS tape, did you buy it?
What did you think was going on?
That's so hard because as younger people, without a lot of, you know, Shana and I talk about this a lot, without a lot of world experience being introduced to this sort of phenomenon, there's this kind of Conflict, right?
You know, like, when you're younger, it's like, ooh, is this kind of some sort of magic, you know?
But yet, there's this, and I was, I'm the oldest, so there was a part of me always from the get-go that was just like, hmm, I don't know.
Well, there's something about her transitioning from Jay-Z Knight to Ramtha that Would be, I don't know, if you were at the Harry Potter stage of development, it would be, oh, that's kind of cool.
Totally.
But then maybe if you're 17 years old, you're like, that was cool, and that's kind of Harry Potter, and that belongs back then.
Yeah, that must be strange.
So did you, you might have had different responses?
Shayna, you're younger, right?
Yeah and I'm trying to kind of think back to I think it was you know that feeling of like kind of being embarrassed for somebody a little bit like I think I remember feeling that but yeah also maybe because my friends are watching it too and they you know know that my mom is um
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to remember how I felt back then, and everything's a little fuzzy, honestly, but there was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the whole thing, because it was a lot of very paranormal, impossible ideas and we were practicing to do impossible things.
And so as a kid, you take things so literally.
And I just remember always being kind of afraid of like, I can't do this.
I'm going to fail.
And then that means I'm going to die.
Oh, wow.
On one hand, I fully, fully believed in it.
On the other hand, I didn't and had doubt.
Well, I can imagine being torn between believing in it because you're at a developmental stage and also your mother is very influential, but also you're not able to channel somebody, or you're not able to bend a spoon, or you're not able to...what were some of the things that you were trying to practice to do?
Oh wow.
Yeah.
Once this is, I mean, this was, you know, we were just talking about before we started the school and, um, there was cognitive dissonance then, but once we were in the school that a lot of the disciplines were walking through walls, manifesting things in our hands, um, this like wild and crazy paranormal, yeah.
Bending spoons, all of that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
I kind of made up bending spoons, but you were actually trying to bend spoons.
People were.
Okay.
And I mean, just the concept of evolving out of our bodies, ascending.
Ascending.
Ascension was a big part.
And a big part in our, I would say, in our family, because that was a big bent that our mom had.
And so, kind of fear of death morphing into this need to ascend.
So, at a certain point, decisions are made, plans are set in motion, and you all move to Yelm.
Not all of you, because I understand that there's also a separation and eventually a divorce.
Yeah, there is, I think, a really, you know, dissolving marriage for a long period of time.
You know, being in a small community, our family was very close-knit.
People didn't get divorced.
We were Catholic.
I think our mom saw it as a way out.
Really, truly believing that the world was ending, that there was huge earth changes happening, was the out she needed to swoop her kids off and make this separation.
Real.
And so that's, you know, we were told our parents were divorcing and it was, the timeline was crazy.
It was very, very close after we were told that we were getting ready to move.
Yeah.
And I mean, for me, I remember it being a choice to move or not move.
And I think it was a little bit different for you, Courtney.
I do know, I don't want to speak for our younger sister, but when we found out Courtney was deciding to move with our mom, that was our decision.
Because we knew we wanted to stay together as siblings.
Yeah.
And the choice, and yeah, you're right.
I can't even imagine that this is still done but I remember sitting with a couples therapist and and her point-blank asking us if we wanted to move with our mom or stay with our dad and we were closer to our mom and really not very close with our dad and so it wasn't really a choice.
It didn't feel like a choice.
It's kind of incredible the way you put it that in a close-knit community that I'm imagining you're talking about many friends being in the same Catholic parish where divorce is not really very common and if it is, there's probably something disastrous or shameful about it.
To think that the kind of promise of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment being an out, being a way to justify what would otherwise be a very difficult choice, instead of having the opportunity to say, actually, I just want to remake my life, or I need to be alone now, or I need to take some time, or this wasn't a right decision and I'm going to build something else.
I haven't actually considered that, the way in which a high-demand group Can provide an escape valve for that, especially in relationship to like a more traditional communitarian structure.
Yeah, and I would say that, you know, we were friends with multiple numerous families of single moms with kids who were in a very similar situation who left to come to the group.
And to come to a community.
And I think like the entanglement of self-help, self-realization, Gets mixed up with like, my marriage isn't, you know, we're not growing together.
We're not on the same path.
You know, I think that's kind of hard.
When I think about our mom, I think that was really hard for her to untangle.
Was there something that Jay-Z Knight recognized in that demographic and appealed to directly?
And was there something about women can come here because they are in unfulfilled marriages?
And I mean, I'm wondering whether there's something sort of like, I don't know, perhaps pseudo-feminist about the pitch or the marketing.
That's a good question.
I would say my first reaction, I've never thought about that, but my first reaction would be maybe there's a sense of pseudo-feminism in a female channeling a powerful male personality.
Right.
You know?
Right.
Yeah.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Right.
I don't know what Jay-Z's strategy was.
I think she's a fairly good businesswoman, and I feel like I can speak to the people that were in our community.
They were smart, diverse.
One of the biggest things is, like, wanting more.
Searching for meaning?
Yeah, this life can't just be it.
There's got to be something more is like a motto that we've heard so many people say, our mom too.
And I, and I think, you know, oftentimes people are searching for that meaning when they are vulnerable.
And perhaps, I mean, just speaking for myself, And resonating with the fact that at least one of the high-demand groups that I was in was very much on top of that message as well, that the conventional mundane world that you have been mired in can't possibly be all there is.
It's not only not all there is, it's not even real.
Sickly, it's so anemic, it's so unimpressive, it's so unfilled with miracles it can't possibly be right.
I also think, so the way that I've processed my attraction to that is that I just simply wasn't in a place where I could invest my actual life with meaning.
But I was an adult when I went to these groups and you're in a completely different situation coming in at that stage of development.
But you met other kids there.
Yeah, actually one of the first places we stayed, I'd say the first year that we moved to Yelm, we did a lot of couch hopping and house hopping.
But the first place we landed had two teen girls that were around our age and it was It was great that that was the case.
We became really good friends.
There was a definite, I think because of that demographic of moms and kids, there was a definite teen constituent there.
You know, I mean, there is there's a bunch of us.
We were in the same situation.
Maybe it felt like a choice, maybe it didn't, but we were there.
Yeah.
And I think when we first moved, we were also trying to kind of straddle the line between the normal life and life at the ranch.
So I did go to high school.
And I tried to be one person in high school.
And then, you know, we did connect with other teens and kids at the ranch.
And there's a difference in, like, I think bonding.
I'm still very close with a lot of the teens that grew up in the ranch.
Having friendships outside of it, there was a weird kind of disconnect.
I think because we were like lying about who we were or who we believed we were at the time, what we believed in.
And also, Just kind of, I think we had to emotionally detach a little bit because they weren't in the school.
They were going to die in the days to come.
So that's this like through line, this through line that kind of like was the, um, like just the basis of everything.
It's like, you know, when we moved away from our friends in Wisconsin, We kind of were told that we were saying goodbye to them forever because we were, the earth was changing.
We, you know, everyone we knew was going to die.
Um, and so that really prevented us from, like Shana was saying, like really connecting with, um, people outside because, you know, it was this kind of like prepper situation where it's like those people who, who were not, you know, Lucky enough to know the secret.
Yeah, lucky enough to know all of the secret truth, right?
Don't get too close to them because they're not going to be around very long.
Just for the benefit of myself but also the listeners, this is a real sort of end of days theme that has been central to the Ramtha School of Enlightenment for I suppose the days haven't ended yet, but it's been a long time.
A very long time.
Can you just give a sense of what the teaching was?
Why was the world ending?
Why were some people chosen and not others?
That sort of thing.
Jay-Z, as Ramtha, would call it, uh, the days to come.
So that was what we were waiting for.
The days to come.
You even did the accent there a little bit.
Did I?
Oh god.
You did.
Shayna, did you hear her do the accent just a little bit?
I didn't notice.
I was panicking just for a sec.
You were just for a second.
You gotta be careful.
Oh my gosh.
You're going to get a letter from a lawyer.
But that was kind of the through line.
It was the hook, I think, that kept everybody there.
If you were learning the disciplines and doing them correctly, You were safe.
You were focused on transcending your body and ascending.
We were encouraged to have underground bunkers to protect from the days to come.
The days to come were supposed to be earth changes in the forms of weather and earthquakes.
It was just this kind of looming Fear, you know, and it kind of, you know, how it's funny because I think it was, you know, you think about like the late 80s, early 90s, like, there's a lot of like, all of California is going to drop into the ocean, you know, like, that was kind of, you know, part of that whole timeframe, too.
You know, apparently Yelm was going to be a super safe place to be.
You know, just all of that was, I feel like, the hook that kept people there.
And, I mean, even Court, when you moved to California.
I moved to California to chiropractic school and I had people, like, actively discouraging me, like, you're, like, you're gonna die.
You're gonna fall into the ocean, you know.
I was just going to say, you know, at the time there, we really didn't have internet.
We were even encouraged to stay like within the Yelm city limits.
Even going to the next town of Olympia was Kind of a big deal.
So, and at the same time we were going, I was going back to stay with my dad and that was fine.
And I, yeah, it was just confusing.
And I feel like some people, some people it affected the fear of it.
Some people it didn't.
Some people had enough money to prepare.
Some people didn't.
And some people really, that was like their thing that they really focused on.
And I would say our mom was one of those people, you know, as we were As we were preparing to move, she was frantically, you know, dehydrating apples and canning food.
And, you know, and so like a bunch of the stuff in the U-Haul as we were leaving was like food prep.
So, you know, we were, we were getting ready and saying goodbye to our friends.
And it was this whole crazy thing of like, you know, I remember I had a library book and, and, you know, I was like, do I take this back?
And she's like, there won't be libraries.
Don't worry about it.
You know, just take the book.
So yeah, a lot of this kind of, yeah, doom and gloom, but kind of co-opted with this like, but, but if you do all this stuff, then you'll be fine.
And also like a lot of, oh, you guys are so lucky.
You're so young.
I wish I knew this when I was younger.
You can do anything.
So I mean, it's a mixture of like having Knowing that it's different socially, being in the school, having this belief, but also like, wow, we are like, we're so lucky.
We're going to be able to do anything.
And so that kind of feeling of like, we are special, we're better than everybody else.
This theme that you're leaving people behind in Wisconsin, you're never going to see them again, the library is going to be gone, so you don't have to bring the book back.
I'm sure it's soothed by this promise that you're actually lucky and you're going to be able to gain insight and power and wisdom and what have you.
But I'm wondering if, it also sounds terrifying.
There's a part of me that's wondering, what does the 14-year-old, what does the 17-year-old do with the thought that they can't, and when you get to Yelm, that you're not really going to make friends with the kids at the high school because they're going to be dead.
That just seems very stark and terrifying to me.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, and I think at the time there's a level of just kind of dissociating.
Oh, for sure.
We just kind of disconnected, I think.
And, you know, we didn't actually start processing through some of this stuff, for me, not until my daughter was the age I was when we moved.
And I am raising her and I am thinking about my experience at her age and just thinking, there's no way in hell I would put her in that situation at all.
And then realizing, oh, that was like, that was different.
That was different for us.
And so connecting with some other kids We just started, the last five, six, seven years, just started, maybe even a little bit longer, comparing stories.
Because at the time, even the kids didn't talk to each other about it, the kids from the ranch.
Like, I'm just finding out some of their moving to Yelm stories and how they felt, because it was a big level of just disconnecting.
And we were taught to disconnect.
We were taught to dissociate.
Yeah, most of the things were around dissociation, I would say.
And I would say, you know, I didn't tag this as a trauma until, like Shana said, much later in life.
You know, I was in my 30s.
Having experienced, for me it was having experienced a major trauma with my husband being in a really near fatal accident and I was doing some therapy around trauma and then all of a sudden all this stuff came up and I realized like, wow, I just like tugged on the thread in the sweater and it all started going.
It was like, that was trauma.
That was major trauma.
Yeah, and I think for that experience, when Courtney's husband was in the hospital, we were battling our belief systems because we didn't know if we should pray.
We felt responsible for healing him.
Like, there's just such a level of, like, responsibility from The teachings of the ranch that it's all up to you.
I was going to say that, Shana, when you were talking about how, and Matthew, you're talking about how, you know, this kind of disconnect of like, okay, all this bad stuff's going to happen, but you can do something about it.
The flip side of that is you are responsible for saving yourself.
And we were kids, you know, it was like, you are responsible to do this with your mind, these things that feel very impossible.
It's up to you.
And I would also add on to that, you know, with the idea of creating your own reality, there was a huge focus on your thoughts create reality.
Everything you think creates reality.
So the meditation was oftentimes clearing your mind to think of nothing.
And if you have a thought, so I think as a kid going through this process, we were terrified of our thoughts.
We were so terrified of creating every thought that we had.
And we're kind of anxious people to begin with, which was just such a disaster.
There was a lot of years of just being terrified of How did you feel that you were anxious before this?
Because earlier, Courtney had said that the process by which this ideology sort of crept into your life was so gradual, it was hard to tell.
Do you feel like you remember a pre-Ramtha School of Enlightenment self?
I think I probably do the most.
I was the oldest.
I was definitely an anxious kid.
I was definitely one of those worried kids.
I would say, you know, now being a little bit more savvy, I was definitely an anxious attachment style.
I was just kind of an anxious kid.
So putting that sort of responsibility on someone who has a baseline level of anxiety is really honestly disastrous.
I mean, we really had to do so much unlearning from this whole thing, yeah.
I remember having a sense of self for sure before in a kid, you know, in my kid brain.
um But I definitely, like, recognized what my personality was.
And I, like, it's taken me a while, but I recognize now that I had OCD as a kid, which Then I think that's why having that philosophy of creating what we're thinking is terrifying.
Because in the best of circumstances, any kind of OCD would be like an adaptation to quell anxiety.
But if you couple that with, okay, well, not only am I soothing myself, but I'm also making everything happen, Yeah, I can understand that that's like the worst possible combination.
Yeah, it was not ideal.
And it's interesting, like there's such a difference between people who wind up in high demand groups that are run by these ideologies as adults and those who have no choice really and are kind of thrown into the midst of it as though it's just the world because all of these
You know, the notion that your thoughts are creating reality might have some therapeutic or, I don't know, cognitive behavioral therapy value to the person who is prone to negative mentation or the person who He has been dealing with, you know, just recursive negative self-talk or something like that.
I was hooked by that premise.
I was hooked by, you know, look at what you're doing to yourself and look at what you have made of your world that your brain keeps doing this thing and can't you make another choice?
And so I can see that hooking the adult who has already grasped something about their internal life and wants to, and maybe they don't have access to therapy.
I know I didn't.
It wasn't in my family culture.
So I was interested in this idea that, oh, perhaps you can be responsible for a better internal state.
But if you're told from, you know, your teenage years that you're actually in that ultimately creative position, that's totally different.
Totally different.
Yeah.
And like, it's so different To think of that like concept from kind of like an adult perspective where you can kind of see like, oh, I have a pattern of thinking this way and that's kind of creating these behaviors.
As a kid, it is literal.
It's literal.
Every thought is going to create.
So yeah, I think we just weren't, we weren't, our brain development wasn't ready yet to, to like handle that.
Yeah, it's kind of blowing my mind, actually, because there is a, you know, as far as I understand, the little I understand of developmental psychology, there is a magical phase in which what you think is going to happen happens or that, but this is supposed to be well over by the time we get to 13, 14, 15 years old.
And it's sort of like you slam into the ideology and it turns you around into a second childhood in a way, right?
Where somehow that magic has to be palpable all the time.
And there's just such a, you know, I think I would just, you know, emphasize too, there's such a responsibility for such a young person, you know, taking this stuff literally and then just feeling like, oh God, I have to like create all of this stuff on my own.
You know, I mean, that's, it's wild.
Yeah.
And I kind of want to touch on like, we were treated as our own people.
Kids, kids were, And I don't know if this was really like a spoken teaching, but it was pretty general across the whole community.
Everyone was on their own journey.
Parents were, like it was acceptable to focus on themselves, their journey.
And we created this ahead of time in a previous life or whatever was before this.
We agreed to this, yeah.
We agreed to this and this was our journey.
And I mean, it kind of resulted in a lot of just kids gone wild.
A lot of neglect because it was, you know, well, one thing Shane and I have talked about, this is like, you know, early nineties, like the parenting style was already kind of like bordering on neglect.
And then this is just like blew the lid off, you know, it was just like, well, you know, you guys are on your own.
Everybody's creating their reality.
You guys signed up for this in a previous life and it's all good.
and Yeah, so I mean, I think there was not only this kind of like serious, we do our disciplines, we're going to like create our life, whatnot.
But there was also a huge like party culture in the community that it was just kids with no supervision.
One aspect of this that I recognize from my own group experience is that There can be a justification for parenting of neglect that is mobilized there, but the other side of that is that the parents themselves have been infantilized by the group or by the leader.
They can't really be in a position of authority because often they're taking instruction, or they're doing the jobs that are assigned to them, or they believe the story that they're being told by the leadership about how their life is unfolding.
The parent is being told that they're not actually parental anymore at the same time.
Absolutely, 100%.
Yeah, and then with it being a small community, there's a level of trust, too, that our parents trusted that we were with other ramsters and that we were fine.
Because it was all a like-minded community.
Now, tell me a little bit more about the party culture.
You know, are we talking about loose bedtimes, or, you know, you have the run of the ranch, or were there clubhouses for kids, where there was low supervision, were there after-hours activities?
Like, in some ways it sounds like it might have been really liberatory, but I'm sure there's other dynamics as well.
How it kind of worked was we were only at the ranch for required events or optional events.
There was like two, well, there was like the March retreats.
So that was a week long.
And then there was like a couple weekend.
There's really was probably about three or four weeks total a year.
But this all of this culture is happening outside of the ranch in the cohort of kids that we knew from there.
So a lot of house parties, you know, the Like we kind of said in the beginning, this, you know, everybody sort of banded together in this small community because we sort of had to, right?
We couldn't really, not a lot of interaction with the townsfolk, right?
You know, the people who, who were living in Yelm, but not, yeah, the locals, the people who are living in Yelm that weren't in the school.
So there's sort of this like dual thing happening in the town.
And so, you know, the teens who all met, you know, in the ranch were friends outside of the ranch.
And I would say the notable thing about this group was that it went from 14 to 25 maybe?
30?
Older than that.
40?
I mean think of some people.
We're all partying together so there's a lot of opportunity for underage girls in situations with much older men.
Now, the older men are also part of the second generation of the group, or some of them are original members?
Some were original members.
It was kind of a mix.
It was a mixed bag.
Shayna just said, like, there is no age, right?
So that's the part of this thing, too.
It's like, you know, it doesn't really matter how old people are.
It's like, there's no real age.
And everybody, you know, and like, for example, our mom and, you know, many others, it was like, you're going to this party by kind of peripherally know all these people doesn't really matter.
They're all good, you know, spiritual people.
So that's yeah, that was the culture.
It sounds like it could have been dangerous for girls and younger women.
Yeah, I mean.
Looking back at it now, I have a whole different perspective on it.
Like a parent of teen girls.
At the time, it was awesome.
I mean, we were like young girls going to party, we're underage, we're drinking, like there was drugs that went through the community.
At the time, it was fun.
And at the time, there was a lot of young girls who didn't really have A whole lot of like attention or like a sense of kind of like attachment or love.
Well, we had love, but just attention, I think.
And so there was a real kind of like, as I look back, I can recognize that a lot of us were just wanting attention.
We were kind of on our own and there was a lot of people who were willing to give us attention.
Now, it's pretty common for brick-and-mortar cults of this era, in the same line of this topic, to be sites of financial and labor abuse, as well as sexual abuse.
Was this in the air?
Was this part of your experience?
Was it something that you came to recognize later?
To whatever extent you're willing to disclose.
Not really.
I mean, I don't know.
Like if we're talking about while at the ranch, you know, there's opportunities for people to work off their event cost.
I'm not sure that that would be considered like labor abuse, but it was definitely not great.
I mean, it was like, you know, cleaning bath, cleaning toilets, you know, that sort of thing.
But you did, you did get a trade.
So you, you did get your events at lower cost.
I don't know.
I don't really know of anything else.
What would you say, Shayna?
The people that I know who have worked personally for Jay-Z, I feel like they got paid pretty well.
So there wasn't really that aspect of it.
There's stories of abuse.
Nothing I can, like, really speak on because it wasn't in my, like, personal... I mean, I... There was definitely Problematic behaviors that bordered on assault at the like parties, but that was kind of outside of the actual school that had really nothing to do like on Jay-Z's part.
Now tell me about the relationship between the group and, let's say, medical care.
There's a number of quote-unquote disciplines that we learned there.
You know, some breath work, some other exercises that were meant to show us that we were in real time creating our reality.
And alongside all of those was a healing technique focused on, you know, kind of distance and hands-on healing, which we were already Reiki masters, so I guess we were good at.
Did you get credit coming in?
No!
Did they boost you ahead to the next course?
Not really!
That's unfair.
Yeah, so that was actually one of the disciplines and, you know, there's a big emphasis on energy healing, right, in general.
And so we would do these exercises there, we would do healing circles outside of formal events.
Most, I would say, people relied on that modality for health and wellness.
And what that meant is that we, as kids, knew a lot of people who died.
You know, we knew a lot of people who got very sick and Tried very hard in these healing circles to get well and ultimately didn't.
Can you describe a healing circle for me?
Like, what would that be like?
What was the ritual there?
So, it was a discipline that we learned in the ranch, kind of coupled with this breathing exercise that we were taught and a visualization that went with the kind of healing modality, the energy healing modality.
So it was a visualization and breath work and we would typically, you know, have a person who needed healing in the center of the circle.
Sometimes hands were on, sometimes they were not.
And people could do that with themselves as well.
You know, they could focus on healing themselves.
And yeah, that's a lot.
I would say a lot of people really relied on Yeah, and I just want to add on to that.
Experiencing people close to us who kind of were in denial and refusing medical care kind of increased that urgency of needing to control our thoughts too, because we were then Getting all of these fears of cancer and all of these like things that we're watching people dying from and terrified that we were going to create it.
Yeah, because obviously if they had cancer, they created it, right?
You know, and like that was our belief system.
So we had a friend of our mom's who actually lived with us as she was dying of ovarian cancer.
And it was super traumatic now in retrospect that, you know, we were actively trying to heal her.
We really believed that she created it.
And I remember thinking as a teenager, like, and I think I even asked her at one point, like, how do you think you created that?
So that I, you know, like, I have such like, oh, for my younger self, because, you know, I was just like, trying to figure out, like, if she created that, how did she do it?
And how can I not?
And also, that was kind of the go to bypassing of And victim-blaming, honestly.
But that was the explanation why these people were dying.
They created it on some level.
Their issues, you know, they just couldn't get over their issues.
If it was that ironclad, the sort of victim-blaming loop, what was the purpose of the healing circle?
Like, why did you bother?
That's a great question.
If she had chosen it, if that's what was going to happen, if she was there for that journey, what's the purpose of gathering around and pouring all of that energy anxiously into feeling like you're not making it worse?
Because I imagine too that if she continues to get sick, you have to bear some of that responsibility too, right?
Yeah, that was all built in.
Well, you know, I think, yeah, I think it was that, like, anything can be changed, you know?
Like, you can do anything.
You got to just, like, focus hard enough.
And then, oh, oh, she died.
Oh, well, she just wasn't, you know, she just couldn't get over her issues.
So it was, yeah, I think it was, like, you can change anything.
You can do anything.
You can be on death's, you know, doorstep.
Miracles can happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But if you cross over, then that was your responsibility.
And I mean, that's true though, Matthew, like that level of cognitive dissonance was just...
Ever present, right?
You know, like, like there was never any logical through line that we could be like, well, if she's creating the, you know, like that wasn't available to us.
We never would have had that thought.
Well, and also like, I, I want to touch on the fact of like being kids in this, at the ranch, um, you know, looking back, there was a lot of like practicing to like, Get rid of boundaries, practicing to disregard your critical thinking, that's your monkey mind thinking.
So there was a lot of identity breakdown and there was a lot of like groupthink, there was a lot of Kind of like teaching us to be enmeshed with other people.
I mean, we would stand face to face staring in people's eyes, strangers, you know, like random people.
So there was that level of like... Breakdown of boundaries.
Breaking down your identity also, which we didn't even really have a firm identity to begin with from our ages.
So... That's a really good point.
It sounds like there's an inconsistency though in the pattern between, or in the movement between merging and then cutting yourself off from other people that's really exemplified by this, anything is possible, let's gather in a healing circle, let's lay on hands, we can really do this if we channel our minds and our energies properly enough.
Oh, she died.
That's hers.
That's on her.
She wasn't ready.
It seems like that particular threshold of being preoccupied with thinking that you can save somebody from cancer without chemotherapy and without being a doctor, that that preoccupation then kind of has to just sort of dissolve instantly into a kind of self-protective, well, it's really on her.
It's on the other person.
You know, I think that that breakdown is what started happening for me and I think for all of us when my husband was in the hospital.
It was like all of a sudden I was like, you know, and this is like I'm in my late 20s.
I mean, I was not aware of how enmeshed I still was in all of this, but it just became so clear that he was fighting for his life in a trauma center and nothing was going to save him except for that medicine.
It didn't matter What people were doing and it was just all of a sudden this it just hit me that you know this I can't do anything for him in this situation.
It just I don't know that that really was the the beginning of the unraveling for me.
Shana did that impact you in the same way that particular family experience?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah that I remember being confused because it felt like too much responsibility to focus or to do our kind of like what we had been taught.
And we were already out of the ranch by that time, so we had given up our disciplines.
But then when you're faced with somebody possibly dying that's really close to you, like you want to do something.
And I just remember like, okay, if I like meditate, if I like pray to Jesus, if I talk to Buddha, like I'm just like, whatever, I don't know what to do.
Like I, I just like at that point I was like, God, I really wish I had like a belief system that I actually believed in because I, At that point, after leaving the ranch, I didn't have a belief.
I still don't have a belief.
Although in this moment of real crisis, the tools that you had from this earlier experience were the ones that came to the fore.
Of course.
Of course they were they were what we were entrenched in for so long you know and and I think this brings up a good point actually is that these are designed to help people feel in control right like to help you feel like you have the power to do something in these really uncontrollable situations and I think that's what I realized and what I have continued to realize is that
illusion of control, especially in these situations.
And I think that's what, you know, this really, this crisis brought up for me.
It was like, I have no control.
He's potentially dying, and I'm 100% relying on this hospital to save him.
And it was, yeah, it was a turning point.
Did you also have the contrast of somebody from the RSC world coming into that hospital room with the old messages as well?
Yeah, yeah, we did.
I'm not going to name any names.
Because your husband grew up in the group as well?
Am I right about that?
Yes, we did.
We met, all three of us sisters met our husbands there and it's actually been a really helpful thing for all of us to kind of like detox, you know, all of this together and to unravel this stuff together.
Otherwise, who do we talk to about it?
You know, nobody else understands.
It's also, I just have to say it's unique because I think the relationships that are formed while in high demand groups amongst adults are far different, much more fragile.
But I would imagine that meeting as teenagers in this shared eccentric environment, there's a real possibility to actually use the relationship as a way of defining yourself outside of the group.
Or having some sort of secrecy.
Having some kind of like, oh, private world in which we can laugh at the leadership or we can have our own sort of alliance, right?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, and just a level of understanding, and I think we just really bonded with the other young people, most of them.
I would venture to say it probably was a trauma bond, but at the same time, it has evolved into something very real and very healthy.
And yeah, to answer your question, there was that dichotomy when my husband was in the hospital.
Our mom actually went Back down to Yeoman and was a part of a little focus prayer group while he was in the hospital.
And we did have some people who were still involved doing their thing.
And it was really at this point where I was just like, fuck that.
Like, I am just like, I am talking to surgeons, you know, I am talking to people who are, you know, actively trying to save his life.
So.
It's an amazing moment, actually, because I can imagine, yeah, I don't know, in so many high demand group recovery stories, there's a moment of realization about who the leader is or what the ideology is, but This is a new one for me.
I haven't really heard about this moment in which you realize that everything that you were given actually is just immediately irrelevant because life has intervened and, you know, the tools that you have are like just plastic toys in your hands.
And that's an amazing moment.
Yeah.
And I can imagine being irritated as well.
Please stop.
Please I was actually really angry because there was one person who was kind of an inner circle person who was like, I'm going to step in and I'm going to, you know, you know what I mean?
Like, I'm going to make sure that all the right things are done.
And I was just like, no, like, no.
There's also something incredibly disrespectful about it, too, because it's grandiose to think that you're going to step in and use deep breathing techniques when the surgeon's standing next door.
It would prevent the person from connecting with your husband actually.
It would actually prevent the person from regarding your husband as being actually vulnerable and in danger and a real human being going through a mysterious thing that is terrifying.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think that we're in touch because of the fact that what's happened over the last couple of years throughout the pandemic and the rise of certain figures who I'll name in a bit might have given you both a sense of deja vu that as conspirituality has exploded into the popular imagination and mainstream social media
Am I right in thinking that you're seeing many of the ideas that you just grew up with in this very cloistered community, now they're suddenly just sort of everywhere and well monetized?
Is that fair to say?
Absolutely.
I mean, where our mom would have to go to some, you know, fringe new age bookstore and, you know, find all of the old school conspiracy theories in these old books, you know, now it's like right in front of everyone.
And it is, it's mind blowing and honestly a little terrifying.
Well, and it, it was, it's kind of ironic and triggering, um, because, um, when this all kind of started, I mean, prior to even COVID, well, now I'm getting like- It's all a blur.
Timelines are kind of, I don't know, but like, With like the rise of QAnon, it's just so interesting because we were pretty ostracized by a lot of people, a lot of our relatives, because of how crazy, you know, my mom's or our belief was at the time.
And to see a lot of those same beliefs now held by those relatives that ostracized us and... Oh, you're kidding.
Well, because they're more aligned with, yeah, they're more aligned with the right wing type things that is now crossed over, right?
Like we've watched this happen where it's crossed over.
And so, yeah.
It's just so interesting.
My brain is melting.
Wait a minute.
OK, so you leave Wisconsin in the late 80s.
Because your mother is drawn to the Romtho School of Enlightenment, where you basically get a prototype of the QAnon worldview in a brick-and-mortar sort of high-demand group.
You free yourself from that.
Uh, you have a life path that grows out of that, you can see your way clear, and then when you start to look back home to Wisconsin, uh, the people that you left behind are red-pilled by QAnon?
Yeah, some.
I wouldn't say, like, fully, um... But they're circling the drain.
They're tearing on the edge.
They're circling the drain of QAnon.
Oh no!
We're laughing about this, but this is like really, I don't know what else to do but laugh because one of the things that's like an axiom in cult recovery circles is, you know, when you're readjusting to normal life, go back and find people who knew you before your high demand group experience.
So what happens when you go back and they're more melted than you were?
That was mainstream.
Yeah.
That's wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah.
And I think, like, the interesting part was the level of, like, feeling, like, as kind of an outsider back then and, you know, knowing that there was judgment and stuff.
And then, yeah, I would say not even an outsider, like crazy, right?
I mean, we were like, it was like, you people and your mom are crazy.
And, you know, and now, and rumors are like family was saying, well, they weren't rumors at the time we were Well, there was rumors that we'd move to a nudist colony and stuff like that.
Was that the most transgressive thing that they could think of?
Probably.
Everybody was going to be nude, right?
That's right.
If only they knew what we were really doing.
That's right.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that was definitely, it was just kind of like, oh, like just confusing.
Exasperating, I think is what it was.
So you were the crazy ones who were going off to the nudist colony.
And now you come back and they're like, you know what?
The storm is coming.
Yeah.
Totally.
Oh my gosh.
Gosh.
Well, okay.
So I think you've probably already answered this question, but was it a surprise to you to find out that Jay-Z Knight was actually an early adopter of QAnon in the new age world?
Honestly, like, I have to say kind of a little to me.
Not in the sense of, like, the conspiracy theory aspect of it.
Yeah, she had been Democrat-Liberal the whole time we were in.
She funded the Democratic Party.
She donated a lot of money.
Yeah.
And then flipped, I think, and this is all rumor.
I don't know the facts, but yeah, there was some issue with returning some fundraising money back to her.
What happened was she donated a bunch of money to some, you know, local Democrats in Olympia.
And once that tape got leaked of all of the racist and her big drunk tirade.
Anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitic, yeah.
Those people returned her money.
And so that's when...
Shortly after that, I think she flipped to Republican.
So in that sense, it wasn't surprising.
And then it made sense because they all aligned with these same conspiracy theories.
So it was like, oh, it wasn't easy.
I think, like, yeah, the surprising part with all of this, with our relatives and QAnon and everything, was, like, these two opposite ends of the spectrum really converged.
Yeah.
And split almost, you know, it was crazy.
Amazing.
Amazing.
I think that part of it is just kind of mind-blowing to me.
Yeah.
Now, everything new is old in these worlds and one of the other reasons that we're in touch is that we've been doing some reporting on Joe Dispenza, who was the, I think we could say the ranch chiropractor for a number of years and who I think you knew, your family knew him And I think you got adjustments from him as well, way back.
And so, can you tell us just a little bit about that?
Yeah, I mean, again, it was almost a small community, you know.
You know, I think there's like maybe one other chiropractor in town, but he, you know, he kind of had this, like, used to work out of a barn on his property and, you know, kind of had a box on the wall, pay what you can sort of situation.
And so he was always really busy and he was just, you know, you move to Yelm and someone needs a chiropractor, that's who you go to.
So, um, he eventually though, you know, moved to like a, an actual practice in an office building and, um, was, you know, Just like the town chiropractor.
So yeah, we all went to him as patients.
Now, my understanding was that, like, they were standard straight adjustments.
We've done some episodes on chiropractic that show that there's this real distinction between people who try to add other aspects of alternative health and therapy in, but he just did the spinal adjustments.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, like, yeah, I am a recovering chiropractor myself.
Yeah, so straight chiropractors believe the power that made the body heals the body.
So it's a very, you know, easy comparison with, you know, self-healing and all of that.
And so it was like the idea of straight chiropractic is you remove the interference from the spine and the body does the rest and that's the kind of chiropractor he is or was.
And was he the chiropractor for Jay-Z Knight herself as well?
I don't know.
I think so.
He was definitely in the inner circle people there, yeah.
Yeah, I can't imagine Jay-Z would have gone to his office.
Yeah.
That would have been.
She, yeah, fraternized.
Fratnized with the commoners.
I can't say they're fraternized, yeah.
Now, I think Courtney, you remarked that Joe's current kind of teaching style and his lecturing style is kind of familiar.
It rings some bells.
How would you describe that?
Yeah definitely rings some bells.
So even towards the end of my time there and probably yours too Shana, he was already starting to do some teaching there.
He was kind of like the quantum brain guy and so he would do teaching about you know like How thoughts create reality in the brain, the actual mechanics of it.
And so, a lot of what I heard then is when I see videos of him now, it's just a continuation of that.
So, I just want to note to the listener that you did air quotes around quantum brain.
But it sounds like Ramtha would make claims about reality and then Joe's idea was that he was going to explicate those claims with some kind of scientific framework.
Yes, pseudoscience, right, yeah.
And did that go over well in the community?
Was that seen as as complementary or was it competitive with the original message?
I would say he was, yeah, I would say it was definitely like Swallowed whole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know, these lectures would be sometimes like four hours long.
I mean, it was a lot of information.
It was lengthy.
Word salad.
Lectures.
Lengthy word salad.
Lectures by Joe that were four hours long?
Both.
I, you know, honestly, I don't remember being at the events.
I'm sure I was.
He would, he would kind of be like the guest, the guest, you know, but like Jay-Z would, I mean, it was, it was.
It was full.
Yeah, very long, very full.
On quantum physics!
Okay, you're talking about an evening event where he's a speaker on the roster along with her, or it's just him?
What I remember is him stepping in and doing some additional teaching.
And, and as I remember, he was doing some outside of the ranch too around the time that I was leaving, leaving the group.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was, there was quite a few like students who started teaching.
There was quite a few guest speakers that would come for like evening events.
So it all kind of blended together.
And certain sort of students, senior students like Jo would be given Jay-Z night's blessing or promoted by her or I imagine that a kind of pecking order would emerge from that.
Yeah, I mean that was really happening towards the end of when I was Sort of leaving the group.
And so I just know that that became more prominent after we left.
It was pretty much only Jay-Z, you know, and smatterings of Joe starting when we were leaving.
But my understanding is that after we left, there's a lot of like student teachers.
I mean, Jay-Z is getting older.
Right, right.
And somehow there has to be, you have to hold on to the baton and you have to pass it at the same time.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there was a definite hierarchy.
Oh, for sure.
And a definite inner circle.
And Joe was definitely in the inner circle, 100%.
Yeah.
There would be people that were invited up on the stage.
Towards the end, we'd have these wine ceremonies, another whole topic.
And there would be the special people who would always get invited up on the stage with Jay-Z to be a part of that inner circle.
And he was up there.
And just for the listeners, the wine ceremonies are sort of teaching events in which there's a lot of red wine being guzzled.
Yes, guzzled is the right word.
Yeah.
Right.
Was it good?
Was it out of boxes?
Was it?
It was B-Y-O.
Whatever you could afford.
She didn't lay it out, huh?
No.
Oh my gosh.
Okay.
Yeah, we always had to bring all of our supplies.
It was a empty barn arena.
Yeah, horse arena that was kind of sectioned off into how big were the spaces?
I would say like three by six.
Maybe six.
I don't know.
I'm tall.
Yeah.
Little tiny spaces that you would exist in for your entire week and sleep in that space.
Yeah.
You get random seating except for the inner circle was always up front.
Must not have been very random.
We were in the back a lot.
You know, rounding up, there's a wonderful book.
I don't know if you've heard of it.
It's called Leaving Utopia and it's by Janja Lalic.
I think it's probably the sort of most comprehensive study of the lives of children who have grown up in various high demand groups and how they've managed and what they experienced and so on.
And one of the things that has haunted me most about The stories that she compiles is that in most cases, she says that children and teens who grew up in groups like this manage in some way to create some kind of secret space or reality or world or imaginative fantasy for themselves that is
Outside of the group or that provides some kind of safe refuge, a place to retreat to.
And I just wanted to ask you if that rings a bell for either of you, if there was a way in which you created or you could retreat to something that was sort of beyond all of this very difficult to understand material.
You know, I think, at least for me, I feel like we had A protective factor of leaving and going to my dad's.
And I know I was probably the one that went the most.
And I think for me, that was my way of kind of gaining some space.
I didn't always want to go, but on some level I must have because I always went.
Whereas I think, I don't want to speak for you, but it was a little bit different for you.
I was older too.
Yeah, I was older, you know, so things are a little bit different for me.
I think my way of creating that outer world was to start going to community college.
And so, you know, like starting to like, I, I had we, Shayna, when we moved went to the local high school with the local Yelm people and I moved my senior year.
And I didn't want to do that in a small little, you know, school.
And so I got my GED.
And Waited a couple years and then started community college.
So I think we kind of had a couple things that were an outside world that sort of tethered us a little bit.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think back to that because I also did Running Start, which I think a teacher actually really kind of like, I think back to that time, and it's so foggy to me, and I just, I kind of felt like I was floating through.
And I don't know how, like, that teacher got to me, but she really encouraged me to do Running Start program at the community college.
And, like, sometimes I think back to that, and I think, how did we do that?
How did we?
Because it was really...
Kind of going against what we were being told.
Education was villainized as dumbing you down.
There's no point.
Why would you get an education?
You won't need it in the days to come.
So I think back and I think all those little things really were protective factors for us.
It's really interesting because there's a kind of laissez-faire quality to the parenting within the group where Well, you're on your own and you chose to be here and you're on your own journey.
And that's not going to necessarily provide a barrier against, you know, the attraction of community college or a high school teacher who says, hey, you should maybe try out this.
Like, you did have a certain amount of freedom, it sounds like.
Yeah, and I think, you know, we were kind of insulated in that small community, but it wasn't a commune situation.
So if it had been more of, yeah, a commune situation, I think we would have been stuck.
But yeah, we had the freedom of being, you know, living in the world, right?
Yeah.
Well, last two questions.
I just wanted to ask if you're willing to Share a little bit.
how is your mother doing with all of this now?
She, um, that's a hard question.
So we, we, we, we, we both kind of, she, she left the, She left the ranch many years ago and was not actively going to events, and I think we all kind of assumed that she was still interested in some things.
But recently, especially I think since COVID, it's been tricky.
And, you know, I think one of the things I want to say about all of this is that, you know, although our mom was the one who You know, kind of brought us into this situation.
It's it's very complex.
You know, it's a very complex situation.
We love our mom and we're very close with her still.
And we have had to set some really strong boundaries because she still exists in that world.
And we have slowly removed ourselves.
And so I think, you know, for for listeners who I think it could be applicable for people who, you know, may have lost a family member to QAnon or It's a really tricky balancing act to love someone and to know that they are living in a completely different world than you are.
So just learning to kind of like navigate and I think, um, I've really been focusing on just being very transparent and talking about, there was a lot of, um, a lot of years where I felt like I had to be careful what I was saying and be protective of her.
Because she was different when we would mention the trauma that this experience was for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's a tricky, yeah.
She has a different perspective and a different experience of it than we do.
And so, being able to openly talk about it and have a little bit of an understanding, even though we don't believe in the same things anymore.
Yeah.
It's an ongoing process.
It is an ongoing process, absolutely.
I can imagine.
I'm quite moved by that notion that in order to be transparent, you have to describe and be honest about how you feel coming out of that situation, whether that accords with her view of the reality of it or not, and to also be able to say, And nevertheless, I still love you or I still feel very connected to you.
That's kind of extraordinary.
That's a leap that, you know, perhaps only love can make is we're living in two different worlds.
And yet, yeah, you're my mom.
Yeah, absolutely.
How is it going for you both now?
Well, I am just so...
Ever grateful for my sisters to process all of this with, you know, as we mentioned earlier, like, I could not have ended up where I am now having processed through, you know, a lot of the trauma without them.
And so I just I'm so grateful for that.
I think I'm in a great place because of that.
Yeah, me too.
I think processing through it has led me to like a whole new adventure of my life and I...
Um, kind of like embarking on, um, uh, career where I am like wanting to help people from high demand groups.
I'm in a MFT program right now.
So I just feel like it's kind of coming full circle.
So it took us so long to process through with the help of, you know, my sisters and some friends and with the help of podcasts like yours.
I mean, definitely.
Actually, there's been a few podcasts that have really kind of like opened up our conversations and helped us dig a little bit deeper.
So I'm very thankful for the work that you guys do.
Yes, yours is definitely one of them.
And your experience in particular, Matthew, has been really helpful.
Yeah.
Thanks for the kind words.
I'm really glad that it's been helpful.
I can say, Shana, if you're getting licensed as a marriage and family therapist and you're going to specialize in cult recovery, you are going to be fucking busy.
Oh yeah!
For a very, very long time.
Yes, very.
You're going to be a top breadwinner in your family.
You will be the manifestation principle for all those around you.
That's right.
And you know, and also I just want to say too, that having listened to your story a little bit and the, The nuance with which you're able to tell it and the distance that you have, I think it's really important for there to be therapists in the world who can hold how complex these stories actually are.
There's a lot of, I would actually put myself in this category a little bit, there's a lot of cult recovery and cult research people who tend towards the sort of crusading end of the spectrum and that's You know, that has its place with regard to education and general cultural awareness, but I think it gets old fast on a personal level and I don't think it's very therapeutic.
So, I'm excited for you.
That's what I want to say.
That's the main thing.
I'm excited, too.
And I completely agree.
I mean, it is so complex.
And I mean, even the stigma around cult followers or students or whatever the term is.
There's just such a misconception about who, you know, end up in high demand groups.
And yeah, I mean, there's a lot to everyone's story.
Thank you everyone for tuning in.
For regular listeners, we'll see you next Thursday, same time.
And for Patreon subscribers, we'll see you on Monday.
