CLOSER LOOK, E1: Get Over It, Kids are Resilient

And if things fill in certain, Shopify is there with 24/7 support and expertise on everything from inventory to payments.

“That kind of backup means a lot because some of the biggest questions usually aren't what if it fails, but what if it works?”

Don't you think it's time to turn those "what ifs" into something real? Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/nightmarers. People love to say, "Get over it, kids are resilient." And look, kids can be resilient.

They can grow up, get degrees, build careers, raise families, and look fine from the outside.

But resilience isn't proof that harm wasn't created. But resilience is proof that they adapted and survived. If you gain three pounds and you were damned to hell, and also if you could maintain your weight, then you knew you were getting into heaven. But in order for us to maintain our weight, they would force us to weigh in every day. And Carla or someone else would look at her number and then write it down on a chart, which is right next to everyone else's weight.

So we were directly compared to each other, and it was all about our worthiness to get into heaven.

The more you're over 100 pounds, the worse you are. Well, that can't reach you through layers of fat because that's your, like, kind of your gluttony. And lots of little power, you know, fighting you.

“Yeah, there was a time that I think I didn't eat for 10 days to make way in.”

That was one of the most psychologically traumatizing pieces was feeling like my value is related to the number on that scale. With all of our names and numbers and Arvan looking at it and analyzing and to see what we were doing. It was his idea and a direct correlation to our spiritual level, and whether or not we're going to get into heaven. Arvan had a strong belief that the spirit couldn't get in if we were fat, but it would literally bounce off of us. Even if it was a pound or two that we'd gain, the guilt would start.

Arvan had to believe that the spirit couldn't penetrate us, couldn't get in if we were just a few pounds overweight. It was horrifying. Today, we're talking about the long-term impact of child sexual abuse, coercive control, being raised in a closed society. I'm Mike King and this is Gardens of Evil, Inside the Science Society, a closer look inside the garden, get over it, kids are resilient. But before we go any further, I want to just give a quick content note here.

This episode involves child sexual abuse, coercive control, and cult dynamics. In my opinion, when people say kids are resilient, they're either being incredibly judgmental or they are compassionally expressing hope.

“I think we truly want to believe that a child can survive something horrible and still have a good life.”

Some do. Some continue to struggle. Most find a way to cope with the roller coaster of emotions that they experience throughout their life. But here's where we have to stop using the word resilient as a way to minimize the harm that many survivors, if not all survivors, have experienced. My experience investigating closed societies or high-control groups is that survivors, especially kids, don't just bounce back. They adapt, and many times that adaptation includes forms of compartmentalizing and disassociating the trauma, often through secrecy and learned compliance.

Those survival skills can look like strength, but it might include interpersonal disruptions in their relationships, parenting, self-trust. And I want to say up front that I'm not a mental health professional. My expertise is in studying criminal behavior, investigating these kinds of crimes, and looking at the corollary effect on survivor behavior. It's based on 40 plus years of studying these kinds of cases. Child sexual abuse is not just a bad event. It's an experience that can rewrite how a child's brain and body interpret safety, the world around them.

Coursive control is not just somebody being strict. It's a pattern of domination through the use of fear, shame, isolation and constant monitoring. That pressure can shrink a person's choices until compliance feels like the only safe option.

Now, in coercive control settings where faith isn't the control nexus, it might be something being used to force compliance, like keeping a family member from being hurt or keeping someone from hurting your favorite pet.

In social circles, it could be exposure of images, mean comments or inflammatory statements that result in compliance.

“So instead of us asking the question, why didn't they just tell someone, the better question might be, how are they trained not to tell?”

Because groups like the Zion Society, secrecy wasn't casual. It was trained and it was learned. And let me show you what I mean. Back in 2020, when I started talking with the original group of survivors, the memories didn't come back in a neat timeline. They came back in flashes. Andrea would say something, and then suddenly a NASA would remember the whole scene, the rules, the feeling in her body, and what kept surfacing wasn't the obvious crimes. It was the daily control.

The kind of control that trains a kid to believe their bodies are report card, and that approval is something you earn. And if you earn it, you just might make it back to heaven.

I was just going to say that was one of the, in my memory and experience, one of the most psychologically traumatizing things that happened to me there besides just told us probably what it was. Was feeling like my value was directly related to the number on that scale, and it was extremely traumatizing. And I was doing it. It was a chart in charge of weighing a sin and writing the number on a chart, all of our names and the number and our word look out it was parenting with like analyzed and see how we were doing. It was a direct correlation to our spiritual level was what our weight was.

“If we were going to get fat or gain a pound or two, then we were not with the spirit, the spirit couldn't get through if you were away.”

When you hear these kinds of things, I hope you're beginning to understand what was happening to the children in the Zion Society. Who were only aged six to 15 years old. And what you're hearing isn't disciplined from a caring parent. What you're hearing about is children being groomed to accept constant monitoring, shame, and performance as their normal course of life. I just think, remember, I've been having a meeting where he drew like a big Michelin man on a big construction piece of paper and like arrows and like he was trying to get in our head that the spirit of God will literally bounce off of us if we were fat.

Well, tons of starving and binging and laxatives and everybody should end them as horrible diets and like just endless. I feel like that is where just more child abuse. This explains why the children after years of coercive control adopted the religious language and the routines of the abuse they were involved in. The adult predators in the group were taking something sacred and they were using it as a weapon. And after months and years of coercive control, the children were taught to be the predators themselves.

And as these brave women and some men gain confidence in sharing their memories, the conversation shifted and they started remembering the small rules that really weren't small at all. The issue of being weighed every day and mocked or threatened when they gained a pound was a common thread. The Indian cancer threats also included looking perfect. Having their hair equally perfect, just in case the self-proclaimed prophet decided to choose them for his next sexual encounter. Remember, these children who are being forced to have these relationships with adults were between six and 16 years old.

Yeah, and I would do your hair at morning and which was like, you know, you're a little girl. I would have to curl your hair to make it look so perfect.

“I remember getting my hair cooled. It's funny because like now I was talking to Ellie and I was like, I don't really remember Amber. Why don't?”

And then I had this memory of hearing your name for the first time. It was the first time I've ever heard the name Amber and I thought it was so strange that a color would be somebody's name.

Well, I remember I felt like I remember getting my hair curled all the time. I also was the one that was told to take you through the SWL book. It was kind of the kind of way of life. I was supposed to sit down and it was my job like to read through this book with you and try to like point out examples while sharing stood by and guided me on make sure that I was, you know, keeping the spirit while doing it.

And then that had not been about it for years because you were just planning that.

I was I was I'll do, but I was an older, older than you were, and you know, I was a preteen and a teen and it just is like, I've always wondered like, what had happened to you wouldn't end and, you know, you've been, you've been in my heart for so many years. And Dawn adds a detail here that matters for context. She wasn't even living with her parents inside the group. She was six years old and had already been transferred into the children's dormitory where her cult indoctrination intensified. Her parents lived about eight doors away and yet she would go for months without ever seeing them.

Okay, but I was living like with I was living down in the group, not with my parents. Correct. So I was at least I was between. I was present six or seven. And then Dawn says something that hits really hard because it's the kind of memory that tells you how deep the control was in every corner of her life.

“I've never forgot like those mornings when because you were just so fun and so full of life when I burned you once at the curling iron and I remember that when you were so happy.”

Oh my god, I do remember this. And you were so mad about it. Yeah, so I mean, I had to take you around. You know, we also had a like a very tight schedule of like where where there's not a moment in between to even think we'd go to here to hear to hear curl the hair fix this do this to this go kidding go gardening go, you know, but just that I had been put in charge of taking you through that that booklet and pointing out specifics has haunted me. So let that go, but I also understand. It's ridiculous because I'm the oldest in my family and I've had over the years so much guilt for not protecting my siblings from being hurt at the group from being hurt during the raid and after and being traumatized by that because it was my job to protect them.

So I understand that and I as an adult, I know that I shouldn't feel that and I've worked through some of it, but I get that because you're like you are a child, but you're like, but I was an older child that should have done something I should have. But you can't because you're a kid like you're a baby too and we were all, well, you know, just uneducated young girls who had been taken out of mainstream society very young and taught like this that, you know,

“and I was always our billions, just wanted you to know that I remember you very clearly.”

This is a story about the type of control that existed, the appearance, the rules, the fear of not being just right, all wrapped into a child's daily routine. And with so many questions circling in my mind, I decided to lean on someone that I really respect a lot in this space, Dr. Ianya Lollick. She's a cult survivor herself and an emeritus professor of sociology. She spent decades studying coercive control, undo influence, and what it does to people long after they escape the cult. I'm going to play you a few short clips from a conversation that I had with Dr. Laylic and a survivor of the Zion Society cult Andrea.

So I want to start off with this first question about when people look at cults from the outside, they seem to always ask the same question.

How on earth could anyone possibly ever believe this? What are we missing?

“Well, I think there's a few things that's important to know. One is that two thirds of people who join cults are recruited by a friend of family member or a coworker.”

So right there, it's hard to say no to someone you know, right? So if that person invites you to the first Bible study or the first yoga session or the first book group or whatever it might be,

you're going to go because you're, you know, you want to be respectful to your friend. Once they get you to that first thing, then they zero in on you.

Cult recruiters are very good at what they do. And so they zero in on you. They do what we call love bombing, which is they make you feel very special. They invite you back, you know, they do whatever they can to get you to come back and you feel kind of, you know, this is one of the principles of influence. And there's this obligation feeling that well, they've been so nice to you and they're asked you to come back. You think, well, I guess I should come back. They've been so nice to me, right? So then you go back to the next thing.

So whenever societies are in turmoil, cults do very well at recruiting, right? And then on top of that, you know, I think all of us on some level are seekers.

And you know, people will say, oh, it's just seekers who join cults. Well, in a sense, we're all seekers. We all want to have a good life. We all want to have a purpose in our life, right? We're all social animals so that we want to be part of something.

“And most of us want to be part of something that's bigger than ourselves, right? That's why so many people just join healthy religions, right? You want to have that in your life.”

So that it's not a negative that you're a seeker. What happens with cults is you have to come across a cult whose message resonates with you, right? That has to be something that speaks to you. So when you're in those moments when you're kind of looking for something, you know, I always say, for example, I never could have joined a meditation cult. I can't that's still that long, but a political cult that was going to change the world. Oh, boy, that was it for me, right? So the message has to resonate with you. And that's why those of us on the outside may look at someone who is worshiping some god awful fat guru who's like sitting on some chair and blowing smoke out of his ears.

And you're saying, what, you know, how can they, you know, but that didn't resonate with you. So it's just highlighted my mother, essentially. I mean, she was a seeker due to her own childhood being traumatic and growing up trying to satisfy her own black hole. It was a slippery slope for her. And so she was a seeker. She, the message she was looking for was, you know, prepare for the last days. She was very drawn into the idea to look at me.

“So actually the Zion society was the second cult that she had been involved in. That's why I say I've been involved in them since I was about four or five. And I didn't have a choice. I was already brainwashed when I was a little.”

And so when basically the Zion society folks got a hold of me and tried to lure my sister and I in, I already thought that it seemed normal and that the love bombing that made me feel super special and more special than my parents or anybody else in my own home.

And I've never made any feel like I am as a 12 year old at just like fell in love immediately like the love bombing works.

Something I learned over the course of my career, my mentality initially was that that these are just, you know, demoted people that are going in, but these cults are not recruiting demoted people. They, they want people that are successful that have money that have something to offer. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I say this all the time and cults recruit the best in the brightest because they want you to run their businesses, they want you to bring in your contacts, they want your money, and all of, they want, you know, all of that lens legitimacy to the group, they want you to do their PR, whatever.

Cults don't want lazy people, they don't want stupid people, they don't want sick people. Cults not there to take care of you, you're there to take care of the cult leader and keep the cult growing and keep the cult functional.

“I think this matters in the Zion society case, we're talking about because a lot of these families didn't walk into this thinking, hey, I'm going to go join a cult.”

Walked into relationships into a group of like-minded people, they walked into belonging, but once they got inside, the rules started to change. When we say cult leader, what are some of the personality and behavior patterns that show up again and again? Well, the leader is obviously the person who comes up with the message, the idea, they are some special being with some special message, whether it's religious, political, you know, self-help, transformational, you know, whatever. The leaders are narcissists, meaning that everything's about them, it's all about their ego, it's all about everybody serving them, depending on their own personal proclivities, that will mark, you know, that will affect how what the group is about.

Whether primarily it's about sex, money, power, it's always about power because they're the ones who are in control. If it's about money, it might be a leader who wants millions, they're always very volatile, volatile individuals and very erratic and their behavior, like you never know who's going to walk in the room, is it going to be the nice sweet cult leader is it going to be the angry awful cult leader, right?

So that keeps people on their toes, right? You're kind of always walking on egg shells, you know, you're just living in a constant state of anxiety because you don't know what to expect, right?

A lot of them are just straight out con artists and started out maybe as a two-bit con artist and then figured out how to do this. The issue that gets people confused, I think, is the idea of charisma.

“People think that charisma is an attribute that an individual is born with, like, oh, he's he was charismatic, he's going to grow up to be charismatic, whatever.”

charisma is actually a social relationship. charisma is about how you respond to that person, right? So if you have a guy who's standing on a soap box in the middle of the streets in London and he's preaching and he's saying he's speaking for God and nobody's listening to him.

He's not charismatic, he doesn't have any followers, right? He's just, you know, some guy standing on a soap box.

So charisma is about how you respond to that person. That's why some people can be in the room with that guru who's blowing smoke out of his ears and think he's absolutely awesome and other people can go, what the hell he's like ugly looks, you know, what's at cigar and his mouth, right? It's it's all about how you respond, but by you responding, you're giving that person power. They now have power over you. It's an imbalance power relationship. And so it's on the charismatic person to keep that charisma alive. That's why they appear now and then and, you know, do magic tricks or do whatever it is they do holds giant rallies with the thousands of people get everybody revved up.

“They have to every now and then do that, but it's your obligation to be devoted to the person who you've granted this charisma to.”

So it's shift a little and talk about why coal leaders and cult life control everything.

Now, in the Zion society, control wasn't just spiritual rules. It was the food that they ate. They're individual weight or they're clothing, including the color of the clothes they could wear. The grooming and scheduling and where you stood, how you studied when you garden and when you slept, who you were allowed to talk to. And I guess the question I keep coming back to is why do these cult leaders push control this far?

“Well, you know, their control freaks. So the more they can control you, the more they know they have you at their back and call. So they want to control you in whatever way they can. And, you know, you have to remember that in these groups.”

They're not democratic groups, right? And there are no checks and balances. There's no way to hold the leader accountable to anything, right? So they see after after time, they get away with more and more and more and more and more.

And the more they get away with the more they try and the more extreme it becomes.

And that's some of the dangers of the groups that have existed a long time or the groups that are completely sequestered from society because nobody's seeing what's going on. We were completely controlled. There was we didn't watch television. There was no kind of any kind of material outside, you know, Babylonian material. So every moment, every waking moment. We knew where we were at. In fact, we had schedules on a piece of paper in half hour, if not even 15 minute increments. And a person older than us was in charge of us. So they would be no our schedule. We would do it together. They'd have a copy.

And you couldn't just randomly wake up at nine and then, you know, sit on the porch with your morning coffee for an hour and just pond or life and look at what's the birds like every 15 to 30 minutes you had to be somewhere and doing something. And we didn't leave the area like hardly ever. So it was basically just a, you know, the one block radius. And you know, it was house work personal grooming yard work sewing sexual activities, you know, pretty much every day. The structure study, more cleaning, more personal grooming, we had to bathe twice a day, which I ended up just despising, you know, it'd be prepared to have sex. If we were going to be in bed with somebody.

And to fortify that simple principle of coercive control, you got to separate them from any source of support that they might already have or that they might lean upon like a parent in the Zion society. Many of the children lived just steps away from their parents and still may not see them for months at a time. Some report even a year or more at a time. So my question becomes, why is separating children from their parents so common in cults?

I mean they just did a really good job at brainwashing, since you're not right away that those were no longer our parents, they weren't our guardians, they were just other members of the cults. So I didn't even, like a strong bond and even with my parents, I mean for obvious reasons.

And so I didn't feel that I should go home around the corner and check in with them.

It's actually quite common in cults for children to be separated from their parents. I mean I've seen that time and again. They're either raised collectively in some collective environment where maybe even in a lot of cases even the older children who are taking care of the younger children or they're literally given to different families. And that's the purpose of that of course is to break the familial bond. So if you're a child in a cult and you're a attachment figure gets cut off, you don't stop attaching is just a touch upward to whoever has power and it seems that this is how the Zion society system sustained itself.

The abused would eventually become abusers, but let's go a layer deeper.

“Why do victims sometimes cling to the leader even when the leader is the source of all their injury?”

The only loyalty you can have is to the leader. You don't have loyalty to your parents. Parents don't have loyalty to their children.

The loyalty only goes one way and that's up to the leader. So by separating people, it just reinforces that part of the belief system. And this could be exactly why the children didn't tell somebody about the abuse they were enduring. If their only safe place was inside the system, disclosure would feel like a self-destructive bomb. When people hear that the cult ended, they thought that the problem ended.

I thought that the problem had ended, but Dr. Laylic describes how leaving the cult doesn't change the person's identity and functioning overnight.

“If a person decides to leave a cult, I think it's one of the hardest decisions they'll ever make, because you're giving up your whole world and you're giving up your whole world view.”

And it's like suddenly the rug is going to be ripped out from under you and nothing makes sense anymore. So it's absolutely terrifying. There's this funny feel, I know for me there was this funny feeling of like freedom, like oh my god, I just been let out of prison. But at the same time, I was, I was afraid to cross the street. I mean, I was 41 years old. So I guess in reality, I wasn't surprised when the survivors told me in 2020 that the counseling didn't happen.

I wasn't surprised, but I was certainly angry. Without knowing, we, the law enforcement team, the child protective services team, the courts, walked away from a serious car wreck while the injured were still bleeding inside.

“So here's my last question, who has the harder recovery road ahead of them?”

An adult who joins a cult as a convert, or the child who's raised in a generational cult setting? Definitely the convert, in my opinion, because at least they've had some sort of a lifestyle that had to do with normal society we would assume. They know cultures, they watch a lot of television, they've talked to other types of people. Well, I agree with Andrew, I think it's much more difficult for children who were raised in a cult because they don't have, they haven't had a life before. They have no reference, they have no idea if some cases if they have other relatives out there or whatever.

And so there's nothing to fall back on. You know, whereas if you're, if you join a cult as an adult, you've presumably had some kind of life before them. But when your entire formative experience is, is in a cult, you've got to redo absolutely everything. And you don't have like old friends, you can go back to and things like that. And this brings me back to the episode title, "Kids are Resilient."

The reality is that a child raised under coercive control isn't just recovering from events.

They're rebuilding their entire operating system. So when we hear the phrase, "Get over it," "Kids are Resilient," "Remember what we've laid out here," because even after rescue recovery could take years, sometimes decades, and in some cases, a lifetime.

They were each around 14 years old at the time of the raid, and in just the last couple of months, I've reunited with them after they agreed to come to the ribbon cutting of a brand new children's justice center in northern Utah.

“Kerry, Shelley, I want to start by saying thank you, truly. Thank you for trusting me with your voices, and for trusting this audience of listeners from around the world.”

You know, it takes real courage to step back into a story like this, especially after 35 years.

So I want to start by asking what changed in your life in the last year that made it possible for you to finally talk with me after so many years.

I don't think I've ever had an abortion in just talking publicly about it. I mean, aside from, it's been a couple of years after I left the group.

“There was a lot of tumultuous stuff in that time, be figuring things out, things that didn't make sense, things that, you know, starting to question things.”

But once I realized that that group was wrong and it was abusive and controlling and manipulative, I've been talking about it ever since. I just talked about it to people who wanted to hear about it. And I didn't have any need, you know, I don't have any need to like tell the whole world about it. But I also just, I'm happy to talk about it. And I want the story to be out there. And unfortunately, my family has kind of tried to, especially my mom has tried to suppress any information. Carrie's answer stayed with me. She told me that she's been willing to talk for a very long time, but she felt pressure even within her own family to keep this thing buried.

Then her sister found my book deceived an investigative memoir of the Zion Society cold and it cracked something open. They decided to travel to the ribbon cutting of the new children's justice center. And what I took from that was pretty simple.

Control doesn't always end when the cold ends. Silence can keep going, even when the people enforcing it believe they're protecting you.

You know, when Shelley arrived at the ribbon cutting, she told me that she felt like that scared 15 year old all over again. I asked her to describe what it was like when she walked back into that group of people that she knew so many years ago.

“I think it's first off internally, I am incapable of handling it for a long time in my life. I was in such a big depression. I couldn't get out of bed. I spent a couple years just not even able to get out of my bed after I realized my mom.”

Because I really struggled, but once I found that inner peace, I was able to function and take care of things that one thing's come out and you now I'm able to support myself. And although I was in complete shock, I was there. I felt like I reverted a little bit and I was a little bit scared. I felt like a scared little 15 year old girl. I was capable of it. So, and I hadn't spoken to my stepmom. I hadn't spoken to her for a while. She was probably my biggest support. She really was there from me on a daily basis. It's not long. I couldn't have made it without her.

Basically, just put herself aside and to care of me. How do I tell her no? I couldn't. I said yes. If she would be there, I'd be there.

Well, what moved me about Shelley and Carrie showing up that day is that there was no performance to it. There was no spotlight. It was just two survivors stepping back into a space that held a whole lot of memories. And when people carry trauma and still choose to show up quietly without fanfare, it tells you something about their character. And it also speaks to something else that I heard over and again from the survivors of the Zion society. Many of them worried their role as children in that system, their compliance, their survival behaviors that it might have heard other children.

They wanted reconnection, but they didn't want to reopen wounds for someone else that had fought very hard just to survive. I think it's possible that bringing this up will retraumatize them in some way. I don't feel that way. I feel like it's been really cathartic for me to have this.

You, yeah, I just just kind of assumed I thought about looking you up. I just assumed that you would be dead for some reason. It's weird the image I have of you in my mind from when I was 15. But you were so vilified at that time to meet, right? And so you and you fit the mold that I was told you would. And so I was told that you were the bad and evil and I believed it. And so I have the memories I have of you are of some me threatening. And I remember you saying, I don't know whether you told me this or not, this could have never happened.

But I remember you telling me I would regret not talking to you. Like I would regret not telling because I never told anything to the police ever. I never broke.

Well, once they were there and they saw the faces of children they hadn't seen in decades, it brought back a flood of emotion. That's just how trauma works. It's not just memories. It's the body reactions, the sudden fear. Triggers that you didn't even know you still had. Carry worried that her presence might trigger somebody else. And Shelley, she told me that she came because of her stepmother Kate, who asked her to do so. And both women were just trying to do the same thing. They were trying to speak the truth without making somebody else pay for it.

At first, I was scared to death. At the moment, when I came to the children's justice center in Ogden, and I saw them, I just started shaking.

But part of it was because my mom had a lot of people from the group Carla, or yeah, and I have a lot of people from the group around her. That's how I knew she felt like she had never changed because I saw her surrounded by these women from the group. And so I wasn't sure who to trust. That's when I shut the door on her. I was like, nope.

“So when I saw those women now, I was like, who can I trust? I don't know. Are they with them? Are they outside the group?”

Are they, it took me watching them and seeing them at the table interacting and through our conversations and seeing their pain too to know their safe. And then you don't feel alone, you know, it's nice that I'm sorry that they were harmed, but it's nice not to feel alone. Well, when I asked Bolshellie and Carrie about their mothers exposing them to the cold, and I want to be really careful here, because in cases like this, there are parents who claim that they didn't know what was happening. And then there are parents who were proven in court to be a part of the criminal activity. So I asked this question in a way that kind of left room for complexity, but didn't dodge accountability.

“You've had the privilege of also being a mother. As you think about your own mother putting you in those circumstances, or as you hear parents today who try to minimize a child's trauma, what are your thoughts?”

I have a lot of anger and resentment towards my mom for the situation that she put me in, and then for lying about it, still she's still lying about it right now. I think it's a parent's ultimate sacred responsibility to protect their kids, to keep their children safe, and to put them first. And I know that my mom saw she had this extreme need to sacrifice. The god that I knew and she knew was a cruel and vengeful god who requires sacrifice of you, and so, and especially about the group that was about sacrificing your relationships with your family.

And I always, I always had the sense that if the group had told her they had to like sacrifice my life for God, she would have done it.

“I have, I have no doubt. I think because I did forgive her, I've had it forgive her twice. I forgive her once after she came out of prison, she went to prison for I think it was nine years and came out.”

And I forgave her hoping that she was fixing herself and me and her never talked about what happened. And I was around her for another, I don't know, I want to say nine years, but I don't know how long it was, but for quite a bit of time, we're surface again, we were very surface, but I was around her, she was off, she was strange, never really connected with her. And I just put it all the way so that she could heal. And so I did try and then in my eyes she hasn't, she's the same person, things have led me to believe that she's just hiding things.

Because I was scared to death that she was going to kill me. I looked through my windows and I was afraid that they were going to come into my home. I have things barricaded, I was scared.

Again, there's a point where you either deliver you don't, and I had to get out of bed and start just moving. And in order for me to move, I had to forgive her again, I will never have a relationship with her, I refuse, I will not put myself in a situation where I put my children next to her, I put me next to her, I put my siblings next to her, and I will never do that again, I'll never trust her again. Well, this is actually one of the hardest long-term truths about coercive control. It doesn't just steal their childhood. It can fracture the parent child bond for lifetimes. Shelly explained what it looks like for her today. She's close to her husband and children, and she's guarded in surface level with almost everyone else.

“Carrie walked me through the emotional roller coasters that can show up in adult relationships when your early model of love is tangled up with fear and control.”

I'm married to a really awesome guy. It's my third marriage, and I think I got it right this time. I had a tendency to choose partners who could be emotionally unavailable and cruel and even emotionally abusive, and I'd never, I don't think I'd ever had a successful relationship model. For what it was like to have somebody who really cared for you and saw you, who really saw you for who you were and liked you for who you were. And I always, you know, obviously growing up in the group in that situation really didn't prepare me for adult relationships for mature adult relationships anyway. And so it's been rough and a lot of therapy, but learning to know what it is I need an partner and how to trust someone else is something that has happened and it's been a positive thing and led to me having a successful marriage.

Carrie's comments point to something that survivors learn the hard way that trauma doesn't just politely stay in the past.

“It shows up in patterns and reactions and sometimes in the moments you wish you could just be calm and normal.”

And like every other Zion society survivor who participated in this podcast as an adult, parenting has brought its own challenges in that 2020 survivor reunion. I passed around a questionnaire, a set of questions focused on parenting and how the cult experience shaped the way that these kids raised their own kids.

72% described themselves as overly protective. They used phrases like helicopter parent or they made statements that they would never allow things like sleepovers.

Carrie described herself as a hypervigilant mother and she talked about the crushing reality of growing up in a world where adults couldn't be trusted.

“Shelly echoed that same posture from her own life.”

When my daughter was little, I just was so hypervigilant about protecting her, you know. I was so afraid she was going to get hurt or abused in some way and I just think it's it's a parents. That's your ultimate responsibility to do that. And when something happens to your child traumatic or abusive happens to your child and you can stop it. It's crushing. In a way, I inherently, I trust everyone completely in one sense, like I just take it at face value.

I trust almost everything. I used to get teased for it, but at the same time, I don't trust a soul.

So it's like with my children, I could never have them. I didn't want to sleepovers. I didn't want them sitting on anyone's lap.

I, if anyone took special interest in my child, I immediately had alarm bells and, you know, that person's a child, who has to keep my kids away from them, you know, because I just. So I had both. I know that sounds kind of congregative, but my head both.

Get over it. Kids are resilient.

“It's very harmful. I think it's harmful when people make comments like that.”

That, oh, you were the only there for a couple of years. Oh, look, you're clearly fine. Yeah, I am in order you're strong. Like, yeah, I am strong. And I am okay. If you are somehow, I don't know what they expect us to be living on the streets on drugs. If we've somehow turned out okay in society, like, we didn't have a choice. Like, what people say you're strong or. You don't have to be strong. I'm not sure what the other option would be.

You know, it's not, it's not anything magical.

“It's when I think a lot of trauma survivors of other types of trauma probably here, the same thing, and it's just like, that's not.”

You don't have a choice to not survive. Like, you just have to go on about your life and figure it out. So what advice would you have for a parent today who's tempted to minimize a child's trauma? Oh, I wouldn't definitely not do that. I would definitely put them in therapy too. I think therapy, even though that therapy may not help them today, it will help them down the road. Like, you might be forward even before they pick it up, but they'll pick it up. But no, I wouldn't minimize it.

I also wouldn't let them make it their whole world either, though. Like, I would take a child and let them have that chance kick and scream and, you know, follow your eyes out and have that moment, but you still need to go to school. You're schooling and moving, like, being moving forward while you're in therapy. So you have your therapy that you're moving forward. You're not stuck, don't get stuck. But so it's a heart, that's a hard one because you want the child to be moving, but you definitely need to validate how awful those things are because even as an adult, it happened to me as a child.

I still had nightmares that are from an adult that I sometimes wake up when I just had a dream I was in the group. It's horrifying.

And as you listen to the Zion Society Survivor Speak, you can see how hard they work year after year to build a functional life while carrying injuries that most people never have to imagine.

And their example is the difference between hope and denial. Hope says we're going to help you heal. Denial says quit talking about it, or better yet, get over it. Kids are resilient. Yes, kids can be resilient even after they've been harmed, but resilience isn't an end all that minimizes abuse.

“If you're a survivor of abuse, I hope this episode has offered you some hope. And if you're someone who cares about prevention, remember that data point that I mentioned.”

86% of the survivors of the Zion Society cult never got the counseling they deserved. If you need help, folks reach out immediately. And if you know someone who's experiencing sexual violence, contact the rape abuse and incest national network. It's called rain that's R-A-I-N-N-D-O-R-G. Or you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-Hope. Services are free. They're confidential and they're available 24/7.

In one more piece of context, the 32 children rescued from the Zion Society cult, were the first children to walk through the new Utah Children's Advocacy Center.

These centers provide child victims with a safe haven where they can be interviewed and supported as they work their way through the criminal justice system. And it gives them a place to start the process of healing. Please consider donating to your local Children's Advocacy Center by finding them at the National Children'sAlliance.org website. Inside the Zion Society, a closer look inside the garden was written, narrated and audio produced by me, Mike King, based on my book deceived an investigative memoir of the Zion Society cult.

I want to thank Aaron Mason who narrated the earlier episodes. I'd like you to know that I'm donating all of my proceeds from my book and this podcast to fund child advocacy efforts and criminal justice scholarship. Please check out my podcast Profiling Evil where I explore unsolved criminal cases and I examine the mind of predators. You can find Profiling Evil on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producers are John Goforth and Jeremy Sinein. Gardens of Evil is a production of the Gamma Podcast Network.