Ep. 186 - Carrie Sheffield ”Motorhome Prophesies” pt. 1

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[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Deconstructionist podcast.

[00:01:09] [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host John Williamson and we have an all new guest this week.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_00]: Before we jump into that as a reminder, our website has encountered a slight change.

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_00]: It was www.thedeconstructionist.com.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_00]: We just made a minor tweak.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_00]: It is now www.thedeconstructionist.org.

[00:01:28] [SPEAKER_00]: So, just a slight change from.com to.org.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_00]: Everything else on the site remains the same.

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_00]: You can still listen to our entire back catalog of episodes, read our blog,

[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_00]: link to us on social media or grab some swag from the web store.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_00]: All right.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_00]: Onto our guest this week's guest is columnist in broadcaster Kerry Sheffield.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_00]: Kerry is a senior policy analyst at independent women's forum

[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_00]: and earned her master's in public policy from Harvard University,

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_00]: concentrating on business policy.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_00]: She earned a BA with honors and communications at Brigham Young University

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_00]: and completed a full-bright fellowship in Berlin.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_00]: Kerry covered Congress for the Hill newspaper and was a founding reporter at Politico.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_00]: She won a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship and contributed on political economy

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_00]: at Forbes, wrote editorials for The Washington Times under Tony Blinkley

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_00]: and advised the Digital Millennial Women's site, Bustle.com.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_00]: Kerry has published in the Wall Street Journal time USA today, CNN opinion,

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNBC, National Review,

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_00]: The DC Examiner, Newsweek, Huff Post and The Daily Caller.

[00:02:39] [SPEAKER_00]: So basically, Kerry is an absolute killer and has a much longer bio on her website

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_00]: that you should definitely check out at www.carriesheffield.com

[00:02:48] [SPEAKER_00]: and without further ado, here is part one of my interview with Kerry Freakin Sheffield.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_00]: I'll write welcome to the D Constructions podcast.

[00:03:09] [SPEAKER_00]: Kerry Sheffield, thank you so much for spending some time today with me.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_03]: Hey there, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, just in the couple seconds we've been recording, I'm already realizing that my laptop was slowly dying.

[00:03:20] [SPEAKER_00]: Based on the last experience I had recording.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_00]: So this is exciting, you're my first one, like I said before, to record on the new computer.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_00]: Before we get started, again, your book is, I'm always very, very impressed with folks who write from such a personal place

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_00]: because it's got to be very sort of exposing to put your life story out there and yet you did so.

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_00]: So what inspired you to write this book?

[00:03:50] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, thanks, sir.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Let me share and if folks want to see the cover, let's call it about her own prophecies

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_03]: of journey of healing and forgiveness.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_03]: So I, and you're right that it is a personal book but the more I have been out there talking about the story

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_03]: and since it's come out, I really see that in a lot of ways it's a universal story.

[00:04:11] [SPEAKER_03]: And so that helps bring me out of isolation because that's a big thing when people are dealing with mental illness or abuse

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_03]: is that the ego wants to separate you and to draw you away and to make you feel like you're alone

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_03]: and that your problems are too big for God's grace, too big for any person to help you with them and those are lies.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I wrote the book because I want to help people come out of isolation, whether it's people who are suffering themselves from mental illness or abuse

[00:04:44] [SPEAKER_03]: or people who have not had that experience but want to support them.

[00:04:49] [SPEAKER_03]: I had a gentleman who recently read the book whose wife had grown up in a similar, very abusive kind of fundamentalist,

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_03]: Mormon environment as well and he said, I know so much better now how to love her.

[00:05:01] [SPEAKER_03]: He's like I understand so much better when she would try to describe things I couldn't understand her but now I too.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_03]: So it's really been wonderful and I had another just, just had people say when they read it,

[00:05:16] [SPEAKER_03]: like I had a woman from a church and she's in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy and she had suffered with suicidal ideation.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_03]: And she told me something specific in the book that was meaningful to her and she was so grateful because she feels trapped quite often in her body and that the books been helpful for her.

[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_03]: So I just have a lot of stories like that and so it helps me feel reaffirmed that this was God's will to help others.

[00:05:42] [SPEAKER_00]: That's incredible and what cool, like unintended, I guess side effects, I guess are like for lack of a better way to put it of the book.

[00:05:52] [SPEAKER_00]: Like I'm sure you did not intend for those specific things to occur as a result of writing this book so that's really, that's really cool.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no it's, it's really been a blessing and just having doors open and meeting new people and being able to share the story with just a whole range of people from different states and different backgrounds and was able to speak to a church of 30,000 people.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_03]: It's headquartered in Brooklyn, they've got three campuses so it was streamed out on satellite.

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's a predominantly black church of in Brooklyn and Denzel Washington goes there and so they have me sign a book to his wife, Paul Edda.

[00:06:33] [SPEAKER_03]: So that was kind of fun to write a book to Denzel Washington's wife which is you know never expecting that.

[00:06:40] [SPEAKER_03]: And then I also got to go down to Texas and fill in the Dr. Phil show and they asked me to sign a book out to Dr. Phil which was also fun so it's been a while grind.

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's very cool. Well, to kind of get started in your story really like as they say we gotta start at the beginning and so talk about just you know what was so unique about your childhood and and again you're one of them.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_00]: Quite a large family yet their eight kids total you were one of those eight and you fall somewhere in the middle there so talk a little bit about sort of what your childhood was like.

[00:07:20] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the name of the book is motor home prophecies because like you said it with the eight children and our two parents all 10 of us were living in the motor home, which is not very sanitary or fun.

[00:07:33] [SPEAKER_03]: You know it can be fun to take trips but not to live and so you're packing people in like sardines and I say my childhood had curing between first world and third world so sometimes we would have houses, sometimes we would be back in the motor home.

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_03]: My mom gave her to my brother when the family was living in a tent.

[00:07:56] [SPEAKER_03]: When I took my ACT exam to go to college we were living in a shed in the Ozarks with no running water, no furnace and the winters get down in the 30s down there on average so we had some space heaters plugged in with this electric system outside but it wasn't enough.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_03]: So just a really dismal experience but at the same time we were always moving so that was the only silver lining is if you hated a place you knew that we would be going somewhere soon.

[00:08:28] [SPEAKER_03]: Which if you loved a place then the downside is you'd be leaving somewhere soon so I ended up going to 17 public schools and home school.

[00:08:38] [SPEAKER_03]: So when people say where are you from I say I'm from America.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's pretty accurate.

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_00]: So explain what was it that caused you guys to move so much like I know a lot of people are like oh I moved to time and you find out you know their parents were in the military or in my case my dad was a pastor so we moved a lot but not 17 times so what was it about your dad's career or what was it about the family that caused you guys to move so frequently.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah so just casually when people ask they with a or you military brat and then just casually I would say no I'm a musician brat my dad's musician.

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_03]: But when you dig down into the many layers of it I didn't tell people this because I both was ashamed but when I was younger I believed all of it so.

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_03]: He believes he's a Mormon prophet that will become president someday so he.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_03]: He's 86 years old and has really been Alzheimer's now so he you know this this is all done he doesn't really travel and they actually gave him a home to one of my brothers a couple years ago so.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_03]: That part's officially over but the childhood was basically centered around helping my dad's prophetic call so.

[00:09:52] [SPEAKER_03]: In some ways I was a p-k it pastors kid but if it was an off shoot Mormon call it tradition.

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_03]: And by that I mean my ancestors helped to found the original church.

[00:10:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Mormon church and we were talking about you know eight generations going back.

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_03]: I have even now I have I've cousins that are old enough to be my parents and they have kids who are now having kids so it's just a long line of all the us.

[00:10:22] [SPEAKER_03]: And my dad's interpretation of the theology eventually got him ex communicated so it was not endorsed.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_03]: The thing she was claiming his prophetic mantle he was claiming and for me that actually eventually collided because so when I say musicians brought.

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_03]: My dad was incredibly gifted on guitar so I talk in the book about one of his mentors who hence elected him to be one of his protechias this mentor was named on that I said govia he was from Spain and so govia was knighted by the king of Spain for his musical genius.

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_03]: He has an asteroid named after him he had 10 honorary doctorates he had a lifetime Grammy to him in a word and so he just was this incredible.

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_03]: guitarist and so he hence elected my dad to be both you know a mentor or a mentee of him for both well guitar performance in guitar musical composition.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_03]: And then my dad also won a nationwide competition for the best up and coming young music writer and he also was a professor of guitar at Bergameon University and he has a masters and most of a doctorate in music composition so incredible gifting world class gifting.

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_03]: And so he took that combining that ingredient with childhood trauma himself so one of his first memories was being sexually molested by a Mormon babysitter from the community there in Salt Lake City and.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_03]: The data shows that if you don't get that treated childhood sexual assault trauma that you're likely to suicide compounds with time that it's not it's the opposite.

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Of time heals all wounds it gets worse and so combine childhood trauma with except for me so we go gifting and then radicalized Mormon interpretation of theology and then you get this home spun profit.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_03]: And so what he would do is he would take his guitar and go out on street corners and play this beautiful music and attract listeners and then he would pass out his brochures to try to convert people to be Mormon.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_03]: And eventually all eight of us were assigned musical instruments and with our mom she played piano and she sang and percussion so all 10 of us were there on street playing this music.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_03]: Well attracting people and passing out brochures to try to convert them to be Mormon and so that's why that's why we live that way basically like Mormon gypsies.

[00:13:02] [SPEAKER_00]: We're like the Mormon portrait family you know.

[00:13:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah we're the more like the Mormon osmons or the Mormon vanschaps.

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_03]: We actually knew the osmons a bit because.

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_03]: One point we had a building down in Branson might add had aspirations to have a musical theater down there.

[00:13:20] [SPEAKER_03]: You know they cut if you guys if you're new anyone watching a listen needs not familiar with Branson it's almost like Nashville but more family oriented it's like a smaller version of Nashville with music and.

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_03]: The osmon brothers the other brothers not Donnie so Doniam or Reed they're in Vegas and then the other brothers are in Branson.

[00:13:43] [SPEAKER_03]: I should look to see if they are now I actually haven't checked reason I think they are still but in any case Jimmy Osmon the youngest was my Sunday school teacher for a little while.

[00:13:53] [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah so we were kind of like the.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_03]: The off shoot Mormon performing family that had a lot of mental illness and sadly to my brothers develops schizophrenia just from all of the constant moving and then being.

[00:14:24] [SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to do trying to take us away and at one point we didn't have food and we actually a grass from the town park my mom boiled some grass and added it with you know little boot booyon cubes.

[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_03]: In gold wrapping which I thought were like fancy gold wrapping so you put that with.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Boyled grass from the town square when we were living in the motor home in a place in Missouri and yeah even though grass is not for human stomachs it's for cows stomachs you don't have seven stomachs but.

[00:14:54] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah it was not pleasant and so it was and the thing is I say in the book like there's there's no shame in poverty.

[00:15:05] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's about abuse combined with poverty in the name of God and so that's why I know this podcast is about deconstruction well as you might imagine eventually I deconstructed my faith because I was looking at it through these these wrong lenses that.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_03]: I for a long time did believe my dad was a prophet and then things I would see his behavior of how he would treat us versus how he would speak publicly and just saw this big discrepancy.

[00:15:33] [SPEAKER_03]: Eventually one of my schizophrenia brothers when I was 17 tried to rape me he broke to me and I was just traumatized and at that point I knew I wasn't safe and that I.

[00:15:45] [SPEAKER_03]: I needed to get some help and so I.

[00:15:49] [SPEAKER_03]: I call up my first investigative journalism project like is do I believe my dad's a prophet and I went through on this exploration and realize I don't think that he is and.

[00:16:01] [SPEAKER_03]: From some things that I found including his writings and my loyalty was colliding like I said between the official LDS church and my father because in the official LDS church which you know the big church had quoted in Salt Lake City.

[00:16:15] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like a pope they only have one prophet at a time and it's very orderly and he lives in Salt Lake City and he was not named Ralph Sheffield so I knew.

[00:16:26] [SPEAKER_03]: This is this is he's doing this outside the authority of the official church and so I had to make that choice and I so I chose the official LDS church.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And my dad spoke a prophecy over me he racist hand and he said I prophesied the name of Jesus you'll be raped and murdered if you leave.

[00:16:44] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I had already been attacked by my brother who had tried to rape me and so I'm just like.

[00:16:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Gallo's humor I'm getting raped.

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_03]: She was one catheter the other you know door and everyone door number two it's the same and but I'm number five in the birth order like you said I have four big brothers and they were all still at home.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_03]: So I I blaze that trail and I laughed as the first person in the first girl to leave home and my dad said my blood changed I was no longer his daughter and that.

[00:17:19] [SPEAKER_03]: I was basically you know I wasn't allowed home off their college because I was the 10 and that I would encourage my siblings to leave.

[00:17:27] [SPEAKER_03]: So that is why eventually I left the LDS church all together but then I also left God and I was agnostic I was angry I had seen evil things done in the name of God and so I thought either God didn't exist or it was a total jerk or completely indifferent.

[00:17:48] [SPEAKER_00]: I can't I mean I can't even imagine anyone coming out differently out of that scenario and what's interesting is you may be think of years ago back in 2016 on this podcast we actually interviewed a cult expert and some of the things he has a fascinating book that I read and a lot of things you just described are exactly the things that cults use to control the people within their organization you know and you know by virtue the fact that he was moving you guys around constantly.

[00:18:18] [SPEAKER_00]: You know he was probably inadvertently isolating you guys because I can't imagine retaining friendships was very easy at all so really you only had one another to sort of lean on I would imagine growing up.

[00:18:33] [SPEAKER_03]: Exactly well I don't think it was inadvertent I think it was but by design that's only thing I would say because.

[00:18:40] [SPEAKER_03]: That is one of the tactics of abusive controlling people is to isolate and my dad was able sadly to brainwash my mom against her own family also.

[00:18:49] [SPEAKER_03]: To the point where she did not go to her own mother's funeral she did not go to her sister's funeral and she thinks that her family's evil just like my dad thinks his family's evil so pretty much they're the only two non-evil people in their entire extended family which is part of why.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_03]: You know we weren't allowed to talk to them because in also they I've had long conversations with my aunts and uncles about like why didn't you do something why didn't you call child custody.

[00:19:18] [SPEAKER_03]: I might have been one of my aunts who called it back when we were living in Boston.

[00:19:23] [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know who was we still don't know who was who called them and I might have been a teacher and that's the thing.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_03]: There are mandatory reporters who if you're in uncertain professions you're required to report to specular realities with family members you are not required and so that's you know.

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_03]: My aunts and uncles have said well we didn't know how bad it was and it's like will you chose to not let yourself find out how bad it was and and they all had big families too like my aunts and uncle have 10 kids and another had 11 and another had eight.

[00:19:54] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, big family so they're busy I get it you know but but isolation is very much a key ingredient to control for sure and that's the same with narcissistic just in general with your dating and narcissistic abuse of person is they want to isolate you they want to keep you away from your support.

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[00:21:11] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah the tactic of of repeating this sort of mantra over and over again that if you leave you know you will die or your life will be in shambles you can't survive without us is just yet again another tactic that's commonly used by cults I mean.

[00:21:27] [SPEAKER_00]: So I can only imagine not only like having to pull yourself away or pull yourself out of this this her fix situation but being the first person and the family to do it.

[00:21:38] [SPEAKER_00]: And not even being the oldest being sort of the middle child how difficult that must have been how old were you at the time when when you started to ask these questions and start to realize that I might have to get out of here.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah well I I say in the book you know getting my the assault of my brother when I was 17 that was really kind of what got the wheels turning because.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_03]: I knew I wasn't safe and so I say in the book sometimes life's most wrenching crucibles can lead us to our greatest moments of freedom.

[00:22:08] [SPEAKER_03]: Because you know having your brother who's twice your size like I'm only five foot two and he's like six feet and like overweight like so he's like double my size like to grow and try to assault you like.

[00:22:20] [SPEAKER_03]: It's very jarring and so that was as horrible as it was it was actually the wake up call that I needed to start asking questions.

[00:22:30] [SPEAKER_03]: So I and then also just like a normal teenager I was getting resentful of the fact that I have no friends that.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_03]: You know I would I would have pen pals I would try to keep in touch with some friends and then.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And then like they would always fall off the map and I would just be like why why can't they just be my friend why did they have to stop writing me you know.

[00:22:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Although it was eventually the person who rescued me and took me out when I was 18 is when I left she was.

[00:22:58] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm still very close with her today and I credit her in the book her name was summer.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_03]: And she came and picked me up around three or four in the morning a couple of days after I graduated high school.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_03]: And we went to her parents house her parents were living another state it was a house they had owned because they left but in any case that's where we went.

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_03]: I I came back after a week though which is common for abused women they say on average it takes an abuse women seven times to completely leave an abuse her.

[00:23:31] [SPEAKER_03]: And but usually that's more for romantic partner so for a daughter I only ended up leaving twice and then that second time I left permanently so.

[00:23:39] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's hard you know and a lot of people say well why did you stay with the abuse or and it's like you can convince yourself of a lot.

[00:23:49] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah absolutely so you finally start to to ask the questions and question whether or not you're dear dad really wasn't probably imagine too like he's his brilliant musician and he's this parental figure.

[00:24:02] [SPEAKER_00]: And so why wouldn't you believe everything that comes out of his mouth so of course you get a little older and you start to ask these questions and you finally remove yourself from the situation.

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_00]: So like talk about because this is the most remarkable thing to me of your whole story is the fact that now you're jubound to round like a ton but you went to all these different schools including home school.

[00:24:27] [SPEAKER_00]: I can't even imagine trying to patch together any kind of education when there's no continuity there at all and yet you go off the college.

[00:24:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah I mean it was that I mean in some ways that was that's a that's like full credit to my mom in terms of she was the one who would get us enrolled she was the one who had all our transcript she was the one who had our health records.

[00:24:51] [SPEAKER_03]: So she was the one who would enroll in unemrolls that was her domain and she had an elementary education degree so she and she had taught us.

[00:25:01] [SPEAKER_03]: We all learned how to read before even going to kindergarten and that was things to her.

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_03]: But looking back now I see wow she was the enabler of this you know and she normalized things that should not have been normalized and that's to this day I'm 41 not married no kids.

[00:25:21] [SPEAKER_03]: It's because I have subconsciously and only this year has got helped me realize how much she had imprinted this behavior on me which is.

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_03]: It's okay to be with an abuser you know my sister ended up marrying a guy who was abusing alcohol like was arrested for drunk driving and taking a jail my dad had to bail him out which is like.

[00:25:45] [SPEAKER_03]: For Alshafields bailing you out and he my dad had been in jail in and out for street fights you know you've done something wrong and so.

[00:25:53] [SPEAKER_03]: He also physically abused my sister and so it's like my mom never said to her or to me.

[00:26:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Hey you should date a drug addict in my case like hey you should date a cheater is I dated two different men.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_03]: In long term relationships do two different times who cheated me cheated on me and we're serial cheaters they cheated on the other women too so it wasn't just me.

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_03]: But I accepted their verbal abuse their gaslighting their narcissism their lies.

[00:26:23] [SPEAKER_03]: I accepted and normalized that and that's what she did by unenrolling and enrolling us all the time that allowed him to put us in these environments that ended up causing.

[00:26:36] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm three of my siblings to attempt suicide and myself to fill suicidal as an adult and suffering in and out of the hospital for me with suicidal adhesion anxiety depression.

[00:26:52] [SPEAKER_03]: Fiber my knowledge also known as tension manicidous syndrome like all kinds of problems that I do believe would not have manifested if this did not happen.

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah absolutely that was actually leading to my next question which is you know you mentioned that you know during college you know after math of of removing yourself from this toxic environment that you struggled for a long time and and.

[00:27:18] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean I can only imagine like there's nobody that could could have come out of that environment without some scars like just impossible and so.

[00:27:29] [SPEAKER_00]: Talk a little bit about like how did you like what were some of the the impacts of of that situation first of all but how did you slowly start to kind of take control of your life you know for the first time.

[00:27:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah well what was interesting is that I'm sort of what I like like I like to call the book like I'm like this book is like my anti-roso me so I because I.

[00:27:53] [SPEAKER_03]: I had nobody is a safety net really who would have I mean I did have some aunts and uncles who were very supportive of me once I'm left but I was like I was going ahead to get myself out of there.

[00:28:07] [SPEAKER_03]: And you know but I still felt in immense pressure which was all self-induced enough to think about anxiety is.

[00:28:17] [SPEAKER_03]: It's not just victim shame but just to be aware that anxiety is a self-induced state.

[00:28:26] [SPEAKER_03]: But I became my coping mechanism if you will to the trauma was my career so that's really where I leaned in I focused on academics got almost perfect GPA.

[00:28:36] [SPEAKER_03]: I got a full scholarship to Harvard before getting my first journalism job I had worked at five different journalism internships in the scholarship that I got was a journalism scholarship for Harvard went to work on Wall Street, Echo of Insects and Moody's Investor Service.

[00:28:54] [SPEAKER_03]: And also worked at a few different media companies and media startups speaking in front of millions of people on these big shows.

[00:29:05] [SPEAKER_03]: So on the one hand I had this shiny resume and on the other hand I had this dark, very unstable anti-resummit of the shame and the guilt and the things I was trying to hide and suppress and it all just collapsed and kind of collated in 2019.

[00:29:20] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean because I had not learned to help the trauma responses in work environments and also just behaviors and choices that I made with a startup that I was running.

[00:29:33] [SPEAKER_03]: I have a chapter on how that all happened, I let the startup take over my life.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_03]: I was not running the startup the server was running me.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_03]: I ended up losing all my life savings and I'm almost dying from an electric reaction to a drug they had given me to try to treat the five or my house.

[00:29:47] [SPEAKER_03]: So it was just a lot and that's part of why wrote the book is because right now we do have the highest suicide rate since 1941, which is the great depression.

[00:29:58] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I call what's happening right now, the new great depression.

[00:30:03] [SPEAKER_03]: And we also have the highest depression rate ever and the highest number of suicides ever.

[00:30:10] [SPEAKER_03]: So the most recent statistics we have is 2022 almost 50,000 Americans killed themselves, which is almost 17 times the number of people who died on 911.

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_03]: And that's over year. So something's wrong and the more I looked into how my healing came about through faith community it really was I began to see that I was not alone so eventually after 2018 and I was a Christian at that point I was baptized December of 2017, but I had still not.

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_03]: I still was laboring under this pressure that I had to earn like I had to earn myself a steam or had to earn the approval of others.

[00:30:56] [SPEAKER_03]: I just couldn't just love myself and accept myself, I had to always be working in and getting credentialing and things like that.

[00:31:05] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's been that journey since then of getting plugged into healthy faith community that has helped me pray through very specific traumas and have that spiritual recovery.

[00:31:19] [SPEAKER_03]: And what I found in looking at the data is that overwhelmingly if you are in faith community, if you're going to services weekly, if you're praying daily, if all of these religious practices.

[00:31:36] [SPEAKER_03]: You are according to psychiatric times they did a literature review of almost 150 studies.

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_03]: 90% of these studies found a strong relationship between low substance abuse and high religiosity.

[00:31:49] [SPEAKER_03]: There is a study from Harvard School of Public Health that found if you went to weekly church service you were 68% less likely to die by suicide.

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_03]: I hope you had overdosed or drug overdose or alcohol overdose as a woman you were 68% less likely men were 33% less likely to die, which is interesting.

[00:32:08] [SPEAKER_03]: I have theories on why there's a gender gap but in any case both are highly statistically significantly less likely to die.

[00:32:16] [SPEAKER_03]: And same thing with the National Bureau of Economic Research they found states that had higher religious participation had lower suicides.

[00:32:24] [SPEAKER_03]: So it's just like scientifically there's overwhelming evidence that faith is good for your brain, it's good for suicidal prevention, it's good for your emotions.

[00:32:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And yet the psychologists are literally the most atheist profession that's according to Harvard study.

[00:32:45] [SPEAKER_03]: So they've done studies on one study found that psychologists are 61% of them describe themselves as atheist or a nonstick, which is totally not the general population.

[00:33:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Gallup says that 80% of people do believe in God, so 80% of people believe in God and 61% of psychologists do not.

[00:33:11] [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a collision here and actually Harvard, so that all these Harvard School of Public Health studies that I'm talking about are coming from this new research team that has devout Christians on the team.

[00:33:25] [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm just worried they're going to be canceled because they did try to cancel one of them for his Catholic faith.

[00:33:32] [SPEAKER_03]: But so far, I think they're doing amazing work and in fact we're actually if any of anyone listening or watching wants to come down here DC on June 12th we're hosting an event at the Museum of the Bible called the Bible and mental health.

[00:33:48] [SPEAKER_03]: And we're bringing in experts I have one coming from the Harvard School of Eram, this is a new Department of Neurology.

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_03]: And then I've got a pretty famous Christian therapist and professor from Baylor is coming in from Texas.

[00:34:05] [SPEAKER_03]: And another professor from Catholic University, a sociologist who's done some big survey data on how church is view mental health and he's going to talk about his data.

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_03]: And so really great lineup and I would love to have people because again the science is there we just have to get the culture to trust the science.

[00:34:34] [SPEAKER_02]: We have a body or even a name of the darkness that as we know, the armor life is God even here.

[00:34:54] [SPEAKER_02]: But as you can't let I down, as you can't let I feel something to me God will survive.

[00:35:11] [SPEAKER_01]: So take a breath, breathe in, the mystery that is this.

[00:35:22] [SPEAKER_01]: You never, sweet or lonely, I think a true face.

[00:35:36] [SPEAKER_02]: If God has a face, his face must look like yours.

[00:35:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Did God kill his kin?

[00:35:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Did he have to have blood before healing again?

[00:36:04] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we made a God that looks like us.

[00:36:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Does God know my name?

[00:36:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Is the aching my soldiers confined to my brain even so does that mean it's not real?

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_01]: So take a breath, breathe in, the mystery that is this.

[00:36:48] [SPEAKER_01]: You never, sweet or lonely, I think a true face.

[00:37:01] [SPEAKER_02]: If God has a face, his face must look like yours.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_02]: A face like a teenager, nomad or mild red, a russ and his husband, got some that you'd run.

[00:37:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Face like a kin, a TED or Tyrone, a little seaborn with an extra chrome song.

[00:37:40] [SPEAKER_02]: A powerful with legs he can't move by himself.

[00:37:46] [SPEAKER_02]: A girl born and a Daniel, whom now is then now, a pillage of evil.

[00:37:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Even white guys named I, if you ever harbored, you are the face.

[00:38:08] [SPEAKER_01]: To take a breath, breathe in, the mystery that is this.

[00:38:36] [SPEAKER_01]: You never, sweet or lonely, I think a true face.

[00:38:51] [SPEAKER_02]: If God has a face, his face must look like yours.

[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_02]: If God has a face, his face must look like yours.