It's In the Code Ep. 96: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult - Part II
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In Dan's second conversation with Michelle Dowd, author of Forager: Fieldnotes for Surviving a Family Cult, they discuss the ways patriarchy and authoritarianism often mix in high-demand religions, how trauma from these experiences lives in the body, and the lifelong practices of healing from the mistrust of self that they teach.
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Welcome back once again to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
As always, my name is Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and glad to be with you.
You can reach me, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, and always welcome your thoughts, insights, feedback, questions, all of those things.
I take some time to get back to folks, but I do respond to all the emails as I am able.
And if you listened to the prior episode, you know we were talking with Michelle Dowd, author of Forager Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.
And Michelle has graciously come back to us for a second episode.
Episodes in It's in the Code are a little shorter and we wanted more time.
So, Michelle, thank you for joining us again.
Thanks for having me back, Dan.
It's good to see you again.
And so if folks didn't catch the prior episode, I invite you to go back, take a listen.
It gives a little bit more background of what she's talking about when she talks about being in a family cult, a literal cult started by her grandfather and everything that was involved in that.
And we talked about that.
We talked about sort of decoding some of the religious language and the ideas that were used within this.
We talked about high control religion.
And we concluded with a talk about unity and the kind of social mechanism that unity can be for maintaining a certain notion of social order, social authority, and so forth.
And right at the end, as we were running out of time, you invited us to come back to the idea of trust.
And I had concluded by talking about the clients that I work with, with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, Often have trouble trusting their own judgment.
They've come out of context where you're supposed to doubt your own judgment.
You're supposed to defer to others.
If your position is out of line with others in the name of religious unity or authority or whatever, you should question your own judgment and so forth.
And people have trouble trusting themselves and I think trusting beyond that.
And that word trust sort of rings some bells for you, I think.
And so we're gonna do a couple things this episode, but one of the things I would love to open up and hear what it is that you're thinking about trust, or when you hear that kind of story, or you hear questions of unity, what that brings you to with this idea of trust and how that operates within a community like this.
Well, I think I was actively taught not to trust myself, and when I had questions, to not find the answers, but instead listen to the answers that I was being told.
And later in life, I think it took me a very long time to really separate myself from this mentality, and I started taking yoga classes.
And I am a yoga teacher now, but at the time I was just taking one at LA Fitness of all places, and they would do Shavasana at the end of yoga class, which many of you have seen or experienced.
And I kid you not, I left every single time before Shabazz and I would roll up my mat and leave because being alone with my thoughts was so uncomfortable for me.
Even though I had been out of the cult for quite some time and I I was attempting, you know, to think my way through.
I was a professor and I still couldn't listen to myself.
But, you know, being a professor, I learned to interpret text and the way to do that in historical or sociological context and also, you know, Foucault or, you know, to look at deconstructionism.
And it felt like it was a game that I understood the rules.
But being with my own thoughts, I couldn't.
And I took at least a full year before I could make myself stay on the mat.
And the very first time I did it in Shavasana, I was lying down and I really gave myself over to the experience and said Namaste at the end and left.
And I just started weeping in the car before I could even drive away.
I was just bawling.
And I'm not an easy crier.
So this was very dramatic for me.
And I drove a little and I kept crying and I pulled over and called my mom.
The very first time I took Shavasana for myself, I called my mom and we had a really difficult conversation.
It was very short.
And I said, Mom, I am not judging you.
I'm not blaming you, but I feel that I need to get the answer to a question.
And I can share the question, but more importantly, when I asked it, she said, that was a long time ago.
Why are you bringing it up?
Why are you trying to hurt me?
And I said, Mom, because I've never known what happened.
And she literally hung up on me.
And I did not talk.
She didn't.
I mean, she didn't answer the phone when I called back and she didn't speak to me again for a couple of years.
And it was just an inappropriate question that I asked.
And what led me to ask the question is really getting quiet with myself and realizing that there were things that I hadn't faced that were still affecting me.
And I think that's one of the things a cult does really, really well is it doesn't allow you to do the work of growing up.
And in our particular cult, to follow and to have unity is to stay a child and to have, you know, whoever the father figure is, and it usually is a man, that father figure, also like God or approximating God, is the one who keeps you in line, who Thank you for sharing that.
who gives the carrots and the sticks, you know, who gives you the ice cream, who decides what you can and can't celebrate.
And it doesn't matter how old you get, if you stay in that unity, you are always staying a child.
And it's very painful to grow up.
We call them growing pains for a reason.
And it took me a very long time to grow up on the outside and take responsibility for my own life.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
I can see and hear how profound an experience that was.
And a couple of things that I think you're highlighting, I'll just throw out there, is number one, and we can't get all into this, it would be its own sort of series, but it's worth thinking about is the embodied nature of these, right?
We talk about these ideas, we talk about language, we talk about religious beliefs, but they inhabit our bodies in so many ways.
And everything you're talking, I find it fascinating that it was an embodied practice That began to sort of break through this for you and you talk about this profound embodied reaction that you had, this kind of unbidden.
And again, I'm working with my clients.
This is just such a, it's sort of like straight out of a textbook on this is what religious trauma does and how it works.
I think the other piece that I'm hearing here a lot is the way that things get twisted so that to question is to attack.
Posing a question Questioning unity, departing from the norm.
I mean, there can't be dissent.
There can't be like a minority party within a community like this.
And so, any questioning is an attack.
It's personalized.
Leadership is often very personalized, in your case, literally through the person of your grandfather.
But I think in lots of churches, the personality of the pastor, this charismatic leader or what have you, So that any questioning becomes a challenge or a threat.
Family structures where any questioning becomes a challenge or a threat.
Tied in with that, I think one of the themes that I think we have to talk about, right, is the gendered You mentioned, obviously you've mentioned your father, you've mentioned your grandfather.
You mentioned, whether it's not a literal father, a father figure, a typically masculine authority figure who is responsible for moral development and teaching and maintaining unity and Meeting out those social sanctions or whatever form they are, whether it's some form of physical punishment or it's shunning or it's just, you know, casting you as not a good religious person or whatever it is.
Can you talk about what gender, what role gender played and specifically as a female identifying person growing up within this context?
Well, our particular group liked to quote that God ordained that a woman shall not speak in public and that the marriage contract, which we took literally and I did not get married in the cult, but I was going to and then didn't.
The cult had the language that we use, some people still use to this day, where the wife is to obey her husband and she promises to obey.
The husband traditionally does not promise to obey the wife.
It's, you know, only the female identifying figure in the relationship that is required to do this.
And so that was something that I grew up understanding was the responsibility of a girl was to Be required to get married and then to be obedient to her husband.
And that was the social structure.
So in our particular cult, which was a very masculine cult and maybe unusually for church style, had far, far more male members than female members.
And that had to do with the way it was structured as a sports organization.
So most of the female members were either born there or they were the sisters of the successful boys who were part of this.
And then they were trained or we were trained to be good wives and mothers.
So obedience was very important and also not to tempt the boys.
And the way you could tempt a boy was by talking to him, obviously showing any skin whatsoever, a smile, a laugh, anything that could be perceived as flirtatious.
My mother was very clear that I should never allow a man to think that I'm smarter than he is.
Not just, I couldn't tell him I was smarter, but even to act in such a way that he might feel that I was smarter, that that was a challenge to male authority.
And that it was very important in any interaction with a man of any age that I always knew.
Make him look smarter than I am.
And that was literal.
Like, I was trained to do that.
I'm really quite good at it.
Even today, if I want to be, you know, I can serve a sort of a deceptive role, I suppose.
But I think that there are still men who are very threatened.
The male ego can be threatened because it's culturally indoctrinated, at least in religious context, to To be, the lack of subservience in a woman can be really threatening to men who have been trained in this particular way.
And in our cult there was no, and I think this is also common, there was no acceptance of Any range of gender.
There were two clearly demarcated genders, like absolutes.
And also there was no same-sex partnering.
We were not allowed to spend time alone with members of the opposite sex.
But even inside our own girls group, there had to be three girls together at once.
We weren't allowed to just partner off.
In any sort of, we weren't supposed to have a special friend, like you couldn't have a best friend or whatever.
But we were supposed to, especially as girls, to not compete with each other for men because we would be assigned a man.
So in our particular case, it was just about waiting for the leader to tell us which man we were assigned to.
And I think that that's pretty common in high control groups, depending on how much control they have, that if you allowed a person to choose a partner, it's possible that those partnerships would then be inherently dangerous because they would be at the heart, right?
They would be like the part of you.
It's not even just the lust or the sexuality or anything, but it's like the idea of forming a bond that is separate from the group.
And one of the whole principles of unity is that everyone is equal and that nobody is, you know, more important than another, except for, of course, the people at the very top.
But that's just kind of an unspoken reality.
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So this was the structure that you were socialized into.
It's the structure that, you know, your mom raised you into and modeled and so forth.
And this I know that this is one of the contexts, again, that for outsiders can be really, really difficult to try to get their heads around.
If it feels very foreign, if it feels if they grew up in a household, you know, certainly they grew up in a household with like, I don't know, two moms or two dads, or they grew up in a household where they were empowered and told that you can do anything and you should, you know, achieve this.
And girls can be good at math or whatever the stereotypes were.
Even when I was growing up, sort of general social stereotypes about women is can feel very foreign.
But going back to what we talked about last episode, that sometimes giving over that control, giving over that choice can feel good.
It can feel sort of ironically or paradoxically or something.
It can feel empowering to give away one's power.
Would you say that, is that a fair description of how some of the women in this movement experience that?
There are obviously people like yourself who didn't go down that path, who didn't experience that, who didn't feel that.
We've talked about people who sort of press that down or maybe sort of just deny it or kind of box it up and stick it on a psychological shelf and just kind of don't look there.
But were there others that you would say, again, we can't read people's minds or hearts, but who really, as it were, leaned into that, felt good about that, that that was a source of comfort to them to know all these dynamics and to experience what you're describing?
Yes, I think that it felt very safe.
So in my case, I was born within one month of two other girls who were born into other families, but we were raised very much like siblings, even though I also had biological sisters.
And those two girls who are my age are still there.
They married the men that they were assigned to, and they I mean, they came to my mom's service and I went to my mom's funeral and they were there and I saw them and I spoke to them and they still feel very safe and they feel that the life I live is very dangerous.
I think in my case, one of the things that I found so hypocritical is that my mom, partly because she was born To a man in power.
She had a lot more power than most women had, and it was incredibly deceptive what she said out of her mouth versus what she did.
And she was very strong.
She clearly ran our household, even though, you know, I mean, it is kind of this idea that my mom was the neck and my dad was the head.
But in her case, I mean, she really got away with a lot of personal agency, and yet she would teach us not to have that personal agency.
But I could see that she clearly, she clearly did.
And my grandfather's wife, who was my grandmother, she also had a great deal of agency.
And she, she is the person who supported the family financially.
So my grandfather never earned money.
I mean, later in life, you know, he would ask for donations, but he never had a job his whole life.
And she actually earned money to support her five children and to help her cult leader husband get his cult off the ground.
And I knew that because I watched her do that.
And I knew that she kept all the little books.
She kept track of all the finances.
And yet everyone pretended that she was following this man who was in power.
I saw that in both the cases of my mom and my grandmother, that wasn't really what was happening behind closed doors.
And I think had I not been raised watching that, and there was plenty of women who weren't doing those things.
But in my case, seeing that made me think that there was just so much division, so much like it was discordant.
You know, there was this There is just no way that I could believe that what they were saying is true because I could clearly see that it wasn't.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think my sister to this day feels much safer.
And I would even say she feels that she's been spared the tension that the rest of us experience by having to make decisions.
The school that she runs, the people who teach with her at the school, she's the principal at this cult.
You know, it's a little bit less of a cult now, I think, but they all married each other.
So on her list of like, and again, I saw this at the funeral, every single name is the same name.
They're just the women married all the men.
And they just, it's exactly the same people I grew up with.
And they have all the kids and they're all named after each other.
I feel psychotic to me now, but you can see that that's, yeah, you just get to stay within the context of a family.
And as a woman, especially, there's just very little asked of you other than to just not question.
Don't question the system.
That's all you got to do, right?
Just don't question.
That's it.
Yeah.
I'm going to say, just sort of on the side as you were speaking, you said it's a little less of a cult now.
I was sort of like, that's kind of a low bar, really, all in all.
It's like, you know, it's a little less culty than it was.
Maybe a sort of final direction to go here.
I know that you are in communication through your work, through your life, with lots of other people who have left high-control religious contexts like yours, different from yours, of different kinds.
What are some of the sort of long-term or lasting effects of that?
So I can say there are some themes that I think are pretty common that I hear, in addition to experiencing myself.
So I'll start with one that There's a loneliness, I think, and alienation, and where we used to maybe have the alienation from ourselves.
Sometimes when we're with other people who haven't been raised in this sort of extreme situation, we feel that we sort of missed a whole generation maybe of ways that they bonded.
So in my case, and in many other former high control, you know, survivors, there's this sense of like, You don't respond the same to the music of your generation.
You may not have heard it.
Like, I know that the music from the 80s and 90s sounds like, but I didn't experience that in college, you know?
So in the same way, because I wasn't, I didn't even know how to tap into it until I was much older.
And so then I'm listening to it as a history lesson or something.
But it's not just the music or the film or the language, but it's also those bonds that you don't get to carry with you.
People have friends and you're just like, wow, they have a friend from like first grade or from like high school.
And they also have the experience of resiliency in terms of relationship.
Like they have a little bit more trust.
I think people who were raised on the outside, that you can lose a friend and get another one.
Like they're not irreplaceable.
They're like, they're, you know, they can be replaced and that people can serve functions that are healthy.
They can come and go and you can have mutually reciprocal giving and receiving and you can form that at any time in life.
And I think that coming out of a high control group, if you've lost people who you trusted so deeply, whether those are family members or people who were Acting as family members, it's really difficult to trust intimate relationships, I think.
And we tend to be a little bit more self-protective and to feel that we have so much to lose because it hits, I think the grief hits in all the layers of the ways in which we felt abandoned prior, whether we were kicked out or we chose, there was still that abandonment of those relationships.
So there's that and I think that is, it's a, you miss the closeness and you're afraid to form it.
I'm much better with this now, but it took me a very, very long time to even figure out how people made a friend.
In my case, I literally had never had to make a friend because I was born in the circle of people my age and then all ages, and I didn't go through the sort of dance.
It's sort of a courting dance.
Friendship is very much like romance in the sense of like, you know, as you get to know each other, you take things a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper, the trust builds, and I never had that experience.
It was all in from the beginning, and I didn't know how to do that dance.
And also I happened to, not happened to, I chose very young to marry a man who also came out of the cult.
And he will say now when we were very close in a different sort of way now, but he would say that his experience, he said it was, it was like an anti-sex cult so that he really was separated from his body and separated from his desire.
And especially as a boy, it was very, very, very beat out of them in ways that we were never expected to have desire.
You know, like, so it was repressed in that way, but it was not, um, It was not forced upon us to not have it because we just were assumed not to have it.
And we were told that it would come later.
And I think that because I happened to marry someone who also didn't have a normal life, then I think that we reinforced those fears and we were very isolated for a very long time.
And to recognize that I needed something outside of that.
And to fall in love for the first time really in my 30s, you know, was a very new experience for me.
And it's very scary to do it that much later in life.
Yeah.
One of the themes that I often bring up with my clients, I'm sorry I keep bringing in my clients, but so much of what you say is sort of matches this, is the themes that you're saying resonate with what a lot of them have, and one of the things, a model I often use is sort of talking about, it's almost like a second adolescence, like, or having to go to middle school all over again, if people remember the middle school experience, and like, Why is middle school pretty universally awful for everybody?
Because you're learning about sexuality, and you're learning about desire, and you're learning about friend relationships that are complex, and you're losing friends that maybe you had in grade school, and you're making new friends, and you're doing the dance that you describe, and you're having those first, you know, flirtatious conversations.
You're trying to read the social cues of what other people are Are telling you or, you know, or doing and not saying and so forth.
And you miss all of that.
I mean, you said in our earlier conversation about how it sort of maintains you in a certain childlike state to always be deferring authority, to be deferring those decisions and so forth.
And I think that It's I think there's something more than a metaphorical description there of this it's really hard nasty work that we all not we all that most people go through in these kind of life stage development that gets kind of arrested and then you're thrown into it often without guidance because you don't have a community now you don't have trusted other people to have to figure it all out again in a world where most people have figured out at least some of it right they they have
You know, dating might always suck, but I think for most of us it, like, was probably the low point in, like, middle school or high school.
And, you know, we have some sense of who we are and what works and what doesn't, and it sounds like what you describe as this process of having to rediscover all of that.
Together with all the baggage of, I really desire close relationships, but I'm terrified of this, these really conflicted kind of bonding, you know, experiences with folks.
So just what you're describing, those dynamics are things that I also hear about from a lot of people in those same experiences.
And then add layers like, People who identify as queer and we're in a context where that just wasn't a thing.
Like it didn't even enter on a horizon that that could be a thing.
And they've got to figure that out or trans or whatever those different identities are.
Really profound, profound things.
Which to bring full circle I think becomes yet another incentive for folks.
To try to return to some of those communities.
And that happens, as you know, people who sort of leave for a period of time and then make whatever amends or reparations they have to make to be brought back into that community because the cost can be really high of leaving that.
An existentialist philosopher once talked about, you know, that we're condemned to be free.
And I always sort of think of that of this, you know, we desire freedom and autonomy and so forth, but it can be really costly to learn how to exist that way and how to use that and the thin line between, as you say, alienation or isolation and autonomy.
So thank you so much for sharing all of that.
Any sort of final thoughts?
I'll just mention that if anyone wants to communicate with me, you can find me on Instagram under Michelle Dowd C. I also do a weekly newsletter.
It's through Substack, but you can, it's substackmdowd and you'll see my author photo.
And I love responding to readers' questions, and so if you reach me by email or you reach me on my Substack, there are a community of people that I have been gathering together on Substack who are at various stages of these journeys of trusting other humans and finding their people, their their clan in a different and more deliberate and mindful way.
And we encourage conversation and dialogue that is obviously so different than the way we were raised to think about community.
And I'm very grateful for the people I have met since I left and all the different types of ways that people have found themselves and learned to trust themselves again.
So yeah, find me on Instagram or Substack and I would be happy and honored to answer your questions.
And I receive your Substack newsletter and love it.
It's very insightful.
So, yeah, I really encourage people to check that out.
So, again, we've been talking with Michelle Dowd.
Her book is Forager, Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.
She's just here.
You can find her on social media.
If you find the book, you can find her.
If you find her, you can find the book.
You can find the Substack.
And as always, I'm happy as well if people reach out to me, Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S-W-A-J, to point folks in her direction as well.
So, gonna wind this down.
As always, thank you for listening.
Thank you for taking your time and doing this.
As I say in a lot of my email responses, I know there are a lot of other things that people can be doing besides listening to me or listening to Michelle or thinking about these things.
So, thank you for that.
If you are not a subscriber to Straight White American Jesus, we invite you to consider doing that.
If you are a subscriber, we thank you.
We're always trying to expand what we do, what we're able to say, the different programming we can put together, and you are the folks that make that possible.
So, as always, thank you, and as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.
Thank you so much, Michelle.
Thank you, Dan.
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