Introducing the Episode and Guests

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It is September 6, 2023 and today we are going to be covering the next episode in our series on the recent eight passengers story that has come out with Jody Hildebrandt, the Mormon therapist from the organization Connections. For those of you who didn't catch it and don't know the backstory about what I'm talking about you, you can go to a previous episode of Mormon Stories where we basically discussed the Mormon YouTube vlogging family, the Frankies, that recently got into some legal trouble when one of the children of the Frankie family basically was discovered at a Neighbor's house in St. George with lacerated wrists and duct tape on their feet. And they showed up dehydrated and malnourished. And later when the police got involved, the police discovered that two of, I believe the six children in the Franke family had been basically imprisoned in the basement of Mormon therapist Jody Hildebrandt of Connections. Jody Hildebrandt is a local Salt Lake City Mormon therapist that the Mormon Church has been recommending to its members for decades. She claims to have worked closely with Mormon apostles and the Mormon Church to create their 12 step program on addiction and recovery. And she's been doing individual therapy, couples therapy, and running support groups for Mormons for a few decades now. She has a master's degree, I believe, in social work. And to those of us who have been around the valley for a while, we have known for quite some time that her approaches are very problematic. But anytime I personally tried to cover Jodi Hildebrandt, none of her former patients or clients were willing to go on the record, partly because they were afraid of her and partly because the things that they participated in with Jody, I don't know, were so embarrassing or troubling that they didn't want their stories told. Since Jody Hildebrandt has been incarcerated with Ruby Frankie, the mom in the Frankie family, more people have been willing to come out and we're going to be hopefully sharing two or three stories in the next few days of survivors or victims of Jody Hildebrandt and and her Connections program. Tomorrow morning we're scheduled to interview Jody's niece and then later we have a couple other of Jodi's former clients that are planning to tell their story as well. So watch for that in the coming days on Mormon Stories podcast. But today we are specifically going to be focusing on Jody Hildebrandt of Connections and Understanding what her approach has been and why it is deeply problematic. You know, one of the thumbnails that we put together was basically titled the Therapist that Ruined eight Passengers. We've since reworked that thumbnail because the truth is Ruby Franke and her husband were adults and parents and complicit in a lot that happened. So we don't want to put it all on Jodi Hildebrandt. But anyway, we're. What we plan to do for today is bring together an illustrious panel to talk about and respond to some of the videos that Jody and Ruby have put out and talk about them from a therapeutic or clinical or a mental health perspective. So joining us back in Mormon Story Studio is a dear friend, someone whose face will be familiar to anyone who has been following Mormon stories, the Natasha Helfer. Hey, Natasha.

Natasha Helfer [00:04:12] Hello. I'm so excited to be here talking about some passionate topics of mine. Yeah, passionate topics.

John Dehlin [00:04:18] Are you fired up?

Natasha Helfer [00:04:19] I'm fired up.

John Dehlin [00:04:20] Okay.

Natasha Helfer [00:04:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:22] So, Natasha, why don't you tell people really quickly, just really briefly, who you are and what you do and your background?

Natasha Helfer [00:04:28] Sure.

Natasha Helfer [00:04:28] I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I've been in the field for 27 years. I can say almost 30. That's kind of scary. And I've also been a certified sex therapist for the last 15 years. I have a group practice called Symmetry Solutions, and I'm the founder of Mormon Mental Health Association.

John Dehlin [00:04:45] Yeah. And we'll be talking a lot about the Mormon Mental Health association at the end of this program because it's a way for you to find an ethical therapist that's culturally competent in, you know, Mormon issues that are. That are common to people who are both in the church and who. Who are navigating their relationship with the church. So as just on the outset, check out the Mormon Mental Health association and Symmetry Solutions. If you want a competent therapist or coach, those are two great places to go. All right. Also joining us in studio today are my beloved partner in truth and righteousness, Margi Dehlin. Hey, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:05:27] Hey.

John Dehlin [00:05:28] Tell people really quick who you are and what you do.

Margi Dehlin [00:05:31] Okay, Sure. I am partnered with John Dehlin. I am a co host of Mormon Stories podcast. I work also as a certified life coach. Yeah. And I'm just humaning over here, deconstructing and humaning in real time. So that's me.

John Dehlin [00:05:52] All right. And we will be talking about, towards the end, the ethics of coaching and therapy. We'll be talking about it all along. And we'll be talking about the difference between a licensed mental Health professional and a coach. And I think all of us here have participated in one form or another of either coaching or therapy or both. Except for the fourth guest today, which is Gerardo Simano. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano [00:06:19] Hey John.

John Dehlin [00:06:19] Thanks for joining us.

Gerardo Sumano [00:06:20] Yeah, no problem.

John Dehlin [00:06:21] Why are you here? I'm just kidding.

Gerardo Sumano [00:06:24] Was pretty interesting topic. I helped put together this slide. So hopefully guiding everyone through what we're about to watch and react. There are some topics there about immigration and LGBT issues that I have some stuff to say about. So yeah, happy to be here.

John Dehlin [00:06:42] Yeah. Well, it's great to have you. Thanks for joining.

Gerardo Sumano [00:06:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:45] And of course we want to welcome our livestream viewing audience both on YouTube and Facebook. We have a healthy group here and we're. We'll be integrating your questions and comments. For everyone who is joining us, please do hit the like button. Please do subscribe to the Mormon Stories podcast Facebook group. That that really helps. And you know, the more people that are engaging and liking and sharing and subscribing, the algorithms will share this far and wide. Okay. So Gerardo, anything else you want to add to the introduction? In terms of what I said are the things that I'm missing. Ruby, Frankie and Jodi Hildebrandt are in jail. They weren't given parole. Anything else you want to add? Yeah.

How Jodi Hildebrandt Became Involved with the Franke Family

Gerardo Sumano [00:07:37] So it seems like a few years ago when Jodi Hildebrand became the therapist for the Franke family. So all eight passengers, the kids and mom and dad were started therapy with Jody and the Jody and Ruby became really good friends while the kids were going to therapy and stuff with doing therapy with Jody. And it ended up a couple years ago with a partnership between Ruby and Jody in which they were both involved in this company called Connections where they're kind of giving some kind of like it's kind of weird to define. Even if you try to find on their website what they're doing, it's hard. Like they don't call it life coaching, they don't call it therapy. It's kind of like something that they just came up with, kind of like a self improvement. But they claim it's better than therapy, better than life coaching and something that's going to help people in their lives and kind of like the true way to live your life and find joy in this life basically. And they sell, they sell courses, they do group therapy or group coaching and that kind of stuff making a lot of money. I mean I think it was found out and we talked about on the podcast that Jody Hillbrand has like this multi million dollar home in southern Utah.

John Dehlin [00:09:00] 3.1 million, right?

Gerardo Sumano [00:09:02] Right.

John Dehlin [00:09:02] Dollar home. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:09:03] Yeah. So they were making a lot of money. Their group was considerably large of the people that were following them. And especially, you know, it really helped Ruby bringing a part of their 2.3 million subscribers from YouTube to, you know, referring as referrals to this new company connections. So a lot of the clips that we're gonna be reacting to are from this coaching slash therapy kind of program.

John Dehlin [00:09:33] Okay, one of our viewers corrected me. It wasn't parole that they have been denied, it's bail that they've been denied. So they. Yeah, I wanted to thank you for that correction. Okay, Natasha, we're going to get into the ethics of Jodi Hildebrandt and her practices. Do you want to share, just briefly, kind of summarize the scuttlebutt that maybe you had heard over the years, or would you rather not share that?

Therapist Community Reacts to Jodi Hildebrandt

Natasha Helfer [00:10:03] Oh, yeah. Her name has definitely made the rounds through a lot of therapeutic circles. I have several comments from therapists that I've actually gathered for today, so I'm happy to share that as far as different perspectives. But yeah, it's been highly problematic and ethics have definitely been questioned as far as how she practices and especially her stances on pornography and sexuality and gender equality. And just very, very difficult when we have ethics as professionals, when one of our colleagues is very much unaligned with professional ethics and guidance and best standards of practice. And it's people like Jodi that really made me feel very passionate about having an association like the mmha, because these are not stories that are alone. She's not the only therapist. Right. That I've heard kind of not so great things about. I think we all make mistakes as therapists, as I've made mistakes as a therapist. We definitely learn from our mistakes. But when it's kind of consistent and. And chronic and people are not willing to learn from their mistakes or actually become somewhat delusional and think that their ways better than clinical approaches that have been tested and researched and from governing bodies that come down, those are very complex systems that we all adhere to because it is complex and it's been well thought out and the evidence is there. So when one person goes against that due to their own religious beliefs, their own religious biases, their own religious convictions, we have problems. And this is a problem that is fairly chronic in this state and other conservative religious states. I've lived in Kansas for over a decade now. I live here in Utah, and both with conservative Christian counselors and Utah therapists Mormon therapists, LDS therapists. I have seen this be a pattern. Now, that's not to say all LDS therapists, some of the best therapists in this state are Latter Day Saints. It's those who cannot check their bias and discrimination, apart from their ethics, professionally.

John Dehlin [00:12:18] Yeah. All right, well said. Well, thanks, Natasha. I guess I should add, I didn't introduce myself. I've been doing Mormon Stories podcast for those who are new to Mormon Stories Podcast. I've been doing this podcast for 18 years. But in 2009, I started my PhD in clinical and counseling psychology and I completed successfully that PhD. So I have six years as a formal psychologist in training. And I chose not. I intentionally chose when I got my PhD in 2015, to focus on the nonprofit in the podcast and not to actually pursue my license. But I have 100%, literally 100% of both the coursework and the research and the clinical training that a psychologist does. I just didn't get my. Didn't get my license, but I completed and graduated with the PhD. So Natasha and I are speaking with. With the formal clinical training perspective. And then. And then Margi is speaking again as a life coach in Gerardo, just as someone who cares about these issues. So. So without any further ado, let's go ahead and jump in. We're just going to play a bunch of clips and. And then we're just going to react to them and we welcome you all to come along with us for the ride. So the first video clip we have is an introduction to Jody Hildebrandt from a TikTok video that Gerardo's put together for us.

Background on Ruby Franke and the Arrest Affidavit

Gerardo Sumano [00:13:39] Yeah, can you just explain really quick about this one specifically? Just this is a tiktoker who's just going to give us a quick explanation of Ruby and her approach. And a lot of these words, like the meaning of Ruby or Jody. Sorry, Jody. The meaning of a lot of these words that we're going to keep hearing about the Jody and Ruby both keep bringing up on the other videos.

John Dehlin [00:13:58] But yeah, all right, here we go.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 [00:14:02] The affidavit of probable cause in regards to Ruby, Frankie and Jody Hildebrandt, has been released. And the craziest part to me is that Jody would not speak to the police, but she did say something. She said that the two kids, EF and RF should never be allowed around other children. I have been digging deep into her cult and I'm going to share another video on that. Jody believes in something called distortion. Living in distortion basically means that you are not living the way she thinks you should. And her main principles are impeccable honesty, rigorous personal responsibility and humility. Name me one child who is impeccably honest. And based on the punishment she used for adults who can use their voice and speak out, I can't imagine what she would do with children. They found the 10 year old victim in the bathroom and she initially refused medical care. It took them approximately four hours to convince her that is how brainwashed her mother has her. They asked that Jody not receive bail because of the severity of the crimes. The 12 year old's wounds and malnutrition were so severe that he was transported to the hospital and was put on a medical hold due to his deep lacerations from being tied up with rope and from his malnourishment. Jody was also well aware because she had used gauze on him and that was in her bathroom. Now, Ruby was seen on a YouTube video that was uploaded two days ago that was filmed from Jody's downstairs.

Video Clip 1 [00:15:17] It might be five years, 10 years. I might, I might even take it to the grave with me. My, my dirty little secret.

Video Clip 1 [00:15:23] So this observation also adds to the fact that she knew they are also requesting no bail for Ruby and hopefully they get the greatest punishment that is available to them.

John Dehlin [00:15:34] Okay, so that's some pretty dark stuff, obviously. Natasha, any, any initial thoughts

Natasha Helfer [00:15:43] other than just anger, which isn't a thought, that's a feeling. But it's interesting, this word distortion that's come up quite a bit in a lot of the videos that I've seen. There is a clinical term called cognitive distortions. They're very well studied, there's lots of examples of them. One of them might be black and white thinking. One of them might be catastrophizing. One of them might be overgeneralization or personalizations. You can look up cognitive distortions, Google it right now and you can get a pretty good list of thinking errors that we as humans are pretty vulnerable to. And I would say what's so interesting about this is that they're using the word distortion as they are quite themselves distorted in their thinking. With many of these fallacies that we can clinically point out.

John Dehlin [00:16:28] Yeah, we're going to talk about this in a second. But there is no sort of clinical term for being in distortion. And we'll cover this later. But in my six years of training as a psychologist, never once did any of my clinical trainers talk about being in distortion because that's something Jody either grabbed from someone else or made up. But anyone who's tried to pin down what being in distortion means, has sort of concluded that it means they're behaving in a way Jody doesn't like. You know what I'm saying? Margi, did you have a reaction to

Margi Dehlin [00:17:05] that or a thought to the video? I think it's more of a feeling. And that is just how absolutely there are still these places that you feel like abuse is more pervasive and allowable, I think. And this is just. This is an area where truly adults run amok. Do just have the opportunity to do so much damage, I think, on, you know, young souls that have no choice but to, I think, you know, exist and take it. It just. For me. Yeah, it just makes me feel for the vulnerability of children who have no choice and, you know, have to go to great lengths to self advocate or to escape. So that's just what I'm feeling.

John Dehlin [00:18:03] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:04] The trappedness.

Natasha Helfer [00:18:06] Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:07] Yeah, go ahead.

Natasha Helfer [00:18:10] This is a very well documented strategy that influencers and conspiracy theorists will use, is to use words that sound clinical. Like I just said, cognitive distortion is a word that's used in psychology. So they're going to take that word distortion and now they're going to use it in a way that sounds very professional, sounds very like these people must know what they're talking about and they'll use it and define it in their own terms in ways that are not clinically sound, that are not evidence based, and therefore leaving a public that isn't as trained vulnerable to these ideas. And of course, it's a lot of, you know, just fallacy. And also when we are drawn to already agree with people we already agree with.

Gerardo Sumano [00:18:55] Yeah, I just wanted to bring it just all back together with. I watched hours and hours of videos from Jodi and Ruby talking about this stuff. And basically it can all be summarized by what the girl talked about. Jodie explains it as like, you're either living in truth or you're living in distortion. She says it's not good or bad, it's truth or distortion. And if you're living in truth, she talks about this three principles, which I thought it was interesting. They are found on the pornography addiction program from the LDS church. Basically the same principles that she keeps talking about, which are being humble, being honest and being responsible. And that's living in truth for Jody. And basically everything, how you approach pornography, how you approach LGBT issues, how you approach immigration or anything, it all comes down to those three principles. So you're gonna see that on the videos that we're Gonna watch.

Natasha Helfer [00:20:02] Which seconds my point. Right. Those three words. Who wouldn't agree with those words? Most of us would have those words as values. I can be very truthful about my pornography viewing. I can be very responsible and ethical in my pornography viewing. I can be very honest about my pornography viewing. And Jody Hildebrandt is not going to agree that I should be viewing pornography, but I can be very. In fact, I am very ethical in my pornography viewing. But no, it has to be the truth, which is capital T, truth, according to Jody.

Moms of Truth and Jodi's Licensing Status

John Dehlin [00:20:33] And that's a good segue to our next slide. There's a slide here that shows the Moms of Truth sort of graphic with Jodi and Ruby. For those who don't know. At some point, Ruby Frankie just mysteriously shut down her very popular two point, whatever, 3 million follower subscriber YouTube channel. And people were just kind of shocked. And what she came out with as a replacement is this partnership with Jody Hildebrandt called Moms of Truth. And there's a Facebook group and. And Facebook page and an Instagram page and channel. And basically, I mean, in some sense, people that were concerned about the way that the Frankie family was exploiting their children were probably happy to see the YouTube channel come down, because that was one of the main concerns. Not just that they were monetizing, exploiting their children for personal gain, but also that they exhibited signs of abuse in. In some of the videos they released. And we covered that in our last episode. So I think a lot of people were probably happy that that channel got shut down. Maybe some of the voyeuristic followers weren't as happy, and maybe even people were happy that this Moms of Truth website was put up because it appears to be, you know, who can argue with moms who. Who are for truth. Right. And so these are two moms who are for truth. And of course, Jody is a licensed clinical social worker in the state of Utah. Really quickly, Gerardo, do you want to talk to this slide?

Gerardo Sumano [00:22:11] Yeah. So this is something we got. Do you want to talk about our source where we got this? But basically, it's just the proof that Jody Hildebrand still today, she is a licensed therapist by the state of Utah, and she's licensed to practice even though she's in jail.

Guest [00:22:34] But.

John Dehlin [00:22:36] Yeah, yeah. So there have been. We know that. And we may cover this in a bit. We know that, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago, her license was suspended or put on probation.

Gerardo Sumano [00:22:49] Yeah.

Guest 2 [00:22:50] For

Gerardo Sumano [00:22:52] she disclosed confidentiality.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:54] Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:55] Yeah. But I mean, for what period of time.

Natasha Helfer [00:22:58] I don't know the details of that. Usually a suspension of a license can take up to one to three years. You're usually required to be back in supervision. You're usually required to take more CES than typically you're required to do. There's a process there.

John Dehlin [00:23:14] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Natasha Helfer [00:23:16] And I'm guessing that was taken from Doppel, which is the Department of Public Licenses here in, in the state of Utah. Each state has a regulatory board. They have different names, but that's the name here.

John Dehlin [00:23:27] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, as of 2023, not only as of today, you know, as far as we know, Jody Hildebrandt is still a licensed therapist. But more importantly for me is the point I made earlier that the Mormon Church bishops, you know, pretty much everyone who reached out to me with an abusive story about Jody started by saying, I was referred to Jodi Hildebrandt by my Mormon bishop. So, you know, she has been a go to therapist and Connections has been a go to recommendation or program for Mormon bishops all along the Wasatch front for decades. And by Jodi's own report, she's worked closely with Mormon Church apostles in designing approaches to deal with pornography and sexuality. Natasha, I'm wondering if you have strong feelings about that.

Natasha Helfer [00:24:20] I'm already breathing hard. I was going to interrupt you, but I was waiting for you to finish your lovely sentence. Yeah. So let's think about this for a minute, right? My license has never been in any type of suspension. My license has never been revoked. And yet because I was public about my stances that are parallel to the American Pediatric association, the American Psychological association, that something like masturbation or being gay are parts of normative human development and sexual behavior and identity. I was off listed of the Mormon bishops list. LDS Family Services wouldn't refer to me anymore. Mormon Bishops, Mormon Stakes would not refer to me anymore. And yet you have on the regular here in the state of Utah, Mormon bishops and also nationwide and through LDS Family Services, people who are being referred to, who are basically part of why they're being referred to is because they're not going to have those sex positive and clinically sound, basically stances. So here's a church that is willing to refer to people who are not going to live by their professional ethics and instead are going to be professionally loyal to the church. To me, that is so. I mean, that is really at the foundation of what is happening unethically. And so many families and so many couples and so many individuals are affected in very Traumatic and negative ways for their mental health, their relational health, their sexual health. I mean, I cannot get more passionate about this. This is what pretty much my platform has been about for two decades, and I'm just livid about this. Yeah, this is a systemic problem. This is not a Jody Hildebrandt problem. Yeah, this is a systemic problem. And we could have 50 other names that maybe somebody could have gotten in trouble and we could be sitting here talking about them.

John Dehlin [00:26:18] Yeah, yeah, this is. You know, we often talk about. Sometimes it's popular to say systems, not people. And that's a way to try and not target and attack people publicly.

Natasha Helfer [00:26:34] Oh, I'm happy to attack them publicly, too.

John Dehlin [00:26:36] I was just going to say maybe sometimes we need to say systems and people. I never want to ignore the system at the expense of attacking an individual. Because the truth is, in this case, in this culture, it's the Mormon Church that sets up the rules. And the rules are for decades, if not centuries. Well, at least for 50 years, the Mormon Church typically has discouraged its members from seeking licensed mental health professionals and instead has just encouraged people to pray and fast and read their scriptures and maybe talk to your bishop as a way to deal with mental health issues. Since the Internet has really come full force in the past 15 years, I'd say the Mormon Church just reluctantly started to sort of say, okay, depression's real. Okay, you know, maybe there's a decent reason to seek mental health professionals. But within the culture, there's still a very, very strong hesitance to seek out licensed mental health professionals, especially psychologists outside

Gerardo Sumano [00:27:49] of the LDS Church.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] Right, for sure. Well, it's. It's even worse than that because then the next, you know, after, you know, decades of discouraging mental health professional use, the Mormon Church then put together sort of an approved list of mental health professionals through their family.

Natasha Helfer [00:28:13] LDS Family Services.

John Dehlin [00:28:14] LDS Family Services. And so this would be a list of approved therapists that bishops would recommend. And you know, Natasha, if you had to guess what the criteria was for a therapist to be included in that list from the church leadership perspective, what would you say that priority was?

Natasha Helfer [00:28:36] Oh, I know what it is, because they came to my personal house while I was having a private practice, asking me questions that were like, of a worthiness interview in order to refer to me. And I was very confused. I was like, I'm happy for you to refer to me. I'm happy to help LDS Family Services. This is when I was living in Wichita. But why are we sitting around like, I'm having to have A worthiness interview. Right. They asked me questions about my testimony. They asked me questions about my, you know, what would I do in certain situations as far as advice I would give or suggestions or resources I would give. I was a practicing believing Latter Day Saint at the time. I was still very uncomfortable. I understood that that was unethical behavior. That's not what makes me clinically sound. My testimony in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that does not make me a clinically sound therapist. That's not the reason why you should be referring to me. Now, we know through the research that people from all religious backgrounds do prefer a therapist that comes from their own religious background. Usually. There's been a long history between the field of psychotherapy and religion being somewhat controversial and somewhat conflictual. And that makes sense because a lot of the principles that have to do with psychology are about self determination. And a lot of the principles that have to do with religion have to do with community and external authority. So there are some values there that just kind of. That wrestle with each other. In the 1950s, 1960s, we had plenty of ecclesiastical leaders, including those from the LDS Church, that basically said psychiatry was evil. It was an evil thing. Do not go to a psychiatrist because really the field of psychiatry came before this field of psychology. As far as the literature and all of that is concerned. By the 1990s, we're shifting that. We're having talks about depression. I think it was Elder hall and Devend who talked about depression, or Ballard, one of them, who talked about their own depression.

Licensing Oversight and Accountability Failures

John Dehlin [00:30:36] I think that would have been in the 2000s, definitely not maybe early 2000s,

Natasha Helfer [00:30:39] in the 90s, Chico Kozaki was talking about this. We definitely had more awareness of mental health and definitely by the early 2000s. But yes, it's still kind of confined to, well, go to somebody, but only somebody who will agree with your values and your beliefs and the standards of practice that the religion espouses.

John Dehlin [00:30:59] And what would you guess some of the things that they would screen for? What would be some of the practices that if they knew or if they learned about you, Natasha, or other therapists who were operating ethically and empirically based. What were the types of things that would get a Mormon therapist off the LDS Family Services list?

Natasha Helfer [00:31:20] Well, for me, it was the blog post that I did in 2012 where I talked about masturbation being normative sexual behavior. It's different to have values against masturbation, but it. But to also know that it's considered clinically normative behavior. You should, as a therapist be able to hold those two realities. Many therapists cannot. And, and that's what gets us in trouble. We've all been through the same trainings, every single program out there, whatever program Jody Hildebrandt went to, to become a licensed therapist, she had to take ethics.

Guest 2 [00:31:52] And.

Natasha Helfer [00:31:52] And all of us have to take ethical training three hours every three years for the rest of our careers. That's all of us. So the fact that some of us can't sit in ethical spaces even though we've had all that training, goes back to your point of holding people responsible. I'm very happy to hold people responsible.

John Dehlin [00:32:11] And what other positions would get someone off the list?

Natasha Helfer [00:32:16] Well, the reasons I got excommunicated from the church was I supported gay marriage. The other reason is because.

John Dehlin [00:32:23] What about just being LGBTQ affirming?

Natasha Helfer [00:32:26] Well, I haven't necessarily seen that necessarily explicitly stated as being off the list, but that's going to flag you. And what does that mean? And when you're. I've heard of many people who've worked for LDS Family Services and they were told explicitly not to offer affirming services. And, and even for heterosexual couples to not even talk about sex. Can't talk about sex if you're in an LDS Family Services kind of therapy, therapy construct, which sex has a huge part to do with a lot of marriages. And so there again, are you abiding by your profession or are you abiding by the church? I mean, when you think about this from a medical perspective, right? So if I belong to a religion where I don't believe in blood transfusions, that's my personal right. But now am I not going to offer blood transfusions because I'm a physician? These are really concepts that affect the medical field in general, but in particular, mental health practitioners.

Ruby Franke Marketed as a Certified Mental Fitness Trainer

John Dehlin [00:33:31] To continue with the presentation, we have a quick screenshot of how Ruby Franke was being marketed on this new website. It said, Ruby Franke is a certified mental fitness trainer with connections. Natasha, what in the heck is a certified mental fitness trainer?

Natasha Helfer [00:33:51] I have no idea. And nor does she, probably. And this is another thing is that you have to. I mean, this is why I feel kind of like, I feel empathy for the public. There are so many credentials out there. Which ones are legit? People have all these credentials behind their names, right? Which ones come from governing bodies? Which ones come from people who've just developed a program on their own? And we have some of these. For example, Gottman, John Gottman, who is very respected, evidence based. But being Gottman Certified, That's a one person program. So there might be blind spots in that program. Right. And although I do hold him in very high regard, I do disagree with some of the things he has to say about sexuality because he's not really a sexuality trainer trained professional. So even though I recommend his book all the time and, and recommend his work, so even with people who are doing pretty good sound work, when it's a one person program versus my training, for example, that comes from the American association of Sexual Educators, Counselors and Therapists. That's a governing body that over decades has created criteria for somebody to be deemed certifiable. Certifiable sounds bad that you're able to get your certification through that organization.

Guest 2 [00:35:17] So.

Natasha Helfer [00:35:18] And that includes lots of research and studies and courses and supervision that comes from a diverse body of individuals and that's constantly being challenged and constantly being grown. And so it's clinically sound.

John Dehlin [00:35:33] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [00:35:34] That's also the difference between certified sex therapists and certified sex addiction therapists, which are called CSATs. CSATs comes from John Carnes, who was the founder of the addiction model. That's a one person certification. It's grown more than that over the years, but it still comes from that. It's not a governing body that has created that.

John Dehlin [00:35:57] Okay, really quickly, I'm just going to add that the idea of screening a mental health professional for their personal beliefs, I think that's unethical just in and of itself, and it's deeply problematic. Number one, they can lie. Number two, you can be an excellent therapist and be completely secular. Therapists are trained to not interject their own values into their interactions with their client. In fact, that's one of the most critical and most emphasized ethical principles, both for therapists and for coaches. And the flip is also true that if a therapist can pass a Mormon church temple, recommend, interview, and answer all the believing questions in the affirmative, but they interweave their personal religious beliefs or church doctrine into their therapeutic practice, that's highly unethical. In other words, if a kid is. If a Mormon kid's trying to decide whether or not to go on a mission and the therapist is like, of course you should go, the prophet says so. Or if somebody's struggling with scrupulosity and they're told by their Mormon therapist, well, just pray and read your scriptures more. And scrupulosity is religious obsessive compulsive disorder. You know, sometimes saying something like pray and read your scriptures is the absolute last thing you should be telling. But regardless, prayer and Scripture study is not an intervention for things like depression or anxiety, et cetera. So, so you, you, you have to, you know, I think a therapist's personal beliefs should really be off the table, either for or against. It should. It should basically just be, do they have a commitment to their ethical principles and do they follow them? And if they do, their beliefs just won't really enter into it. Now it will also be unethical for a therapist to promote atheism or promote agnosticism or to be negative about someone's religious tradition. But I can say just very comfortably, I was trained by secular non religious therapists and all of them would have kicked out any grad student that was unaffirming or critical of a presenting client's religious beliefs or sexuality or, or anything. So it's just another reason why beliefs of the therapist should really just be off the table.

Natasha Helfer [00:38:25] I have two points. So first of all, because you asked me the question about affirming, I think a lot of Latter Day Saints believe that they are affirming to gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender individuals with this idea that we love them, we just love this. We just hate the sin that is not affirming. So again, how is affirming being defined? Right. And you need to have quite a bit of training to consider yourself LGBTQ affirming in the therapeutic fields. The second comment I want to just make is the organization amcap. Another reason why I was so passionate about founding the MMHA was that this association that does exist is called the American Mormon. I think it's the association for Mormon Mormon Counselors and psychotherapists, I'm gonna guess. So when I went to join that organization, it basically again was a litmus test on whether or not I was a worthy member of the church. And again, even as a believing LDS therapist, I thought, this is not okay. So, yeah, that's, that's another. Or that's an association that's not okay.

John Dehlin [00:39:30] Got it. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:34] I was going to say just something really quickly about that slide that we just looked at with Ruby Franke and I think her being described as a Life Fitness.

John Dehlin [00:39:44] Was it a Life Fitness Certified mental fitness trainer.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:46] Mental fitness trainer. So one thing I was just going to point out about coaching in particular is just this idea of coaching being a relatively new emerging field and largely unregulated as well. And so what that means not to say that there aren't certification programs. There's the icf, the International Coaching Federation, there are certification programs. I went through one and in doing so you know, you're being trained in ethics, you know, you're abiding by professional standards. But what that means, and I'm just pointing out in that slide, is that anyone, because it's largely unregulated, can call themselves a coach of any kind. And it really falls on clients self advocating and being educated about what questions to ask coaches. I think coaching has incredible possibilities. They can work really well in tandem with therapists in a way that's very complimentary and it can be incredibly problematic due to how unregulated it is and can do a lot of harm as it's trying to help.

Natasha Helfer [00:40:57] Nobody's taking this license away from her, the certification. She can continue to call herself this in jail.

▶ Video Clip 2

Video Clip 2 [00:41:03] Yeah, that's right. Okay, this is a great introduction. Let's go ahead and jump into the next video and we'll start now the series of reactions. So here's the next video. I had a phone call yesterday with my therapist and she taught me about truth and distortion. Mom probably talks about about Jodi all

Jodi's Podcast and Harmful Coaching Claims

Video Clip 2 [00:41:23] the time, but I've mentioned Jody a few times. She has a podcast called Connections with an Ex.

Video Clip 2 [00:41:28] Anyway, what did you learn? Well, I learned about the three different types of pain.

Video Clip 2 [00:41:32] And we can feel pain in ways

Video Clip 2 [00:41:35] of our own choices, other people choices and just like random events.

Video Clip 2 [00:41:39] And it's our way to choose to

Video Clip 2 [00:41:41] see things in truth.

Video Clip 2 [00:41:42] So me deciding that my stomach ache was Chad's fault was not seeing things in truth. I really, really want to blame him

Video Clip 2 [00:41:51] because I just want to be able

Video Clip 2 [00:41:52] to eat my desserts again and Oreo cookies without stomach aches and so send

Video Clip 2 [00:41:59] me off to another wilderness camp again.

Video Clip 2 [00:42:01] I. I can't eat the sugar that I used to after taking 12 weeks off.

Video Clip 2 [00:42:05] She's numb now. I don't know if you're paying for therapy. If you're paying for therapy, I'd say I'm stopping. I'm not paying for therapy. I don't know what 21 year old can afford to go to therapy. You don't get to control what she says in therapy. But you can say I'm done paying for it. I don't know if she's being reinforced by her therapist. I don't know. I hope she's not, but she could be because therapists across the board are quite enabling.

John Dehlin [00:42:34] So that's Jody Hildebrandt. Gerardo, do you want to share why you shared that clip?

Guest 3 [00:42:39] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:42:39] So at the beginning is one of Ruby's kids talking for the first time on the 8 passengers vlog about Jody and saying that he had a session and learned about those principles that we talked about. And then the last part of the video is stitched with a video of Jody talking about giving this advice that parents shouldn't pay for their 21 year old therapy because who knows what she's being told in therapy. And then if they don't pay for it, then the 21 year old can't afford it.

Natasha Helfer [00:43:17] Yeah, exactly. So if the 21 year old is going to clinically based, evidence based therapy, they're probably going to be learning how to advocate for themselves, how to be self determined, how to pay attention to internal authority, which, yeah, I think goes against the big T of Jody Hildebrandt.

John Dehlin [00:43:36] Yeah. Why? What do you mean?

Natasha Helfer [00:43:39] Well, she's talking about enabling, right, that therapists enable. What are they enabling? I'm guessing they're what, enabling correct identity development. So if a gay or lesbian child comes to my office and if the parents who in this culture, we continue to want to be parents throughout adulthood, that's how the church parents and that's how LDS parents want to parent, to still have a lot of influence over a 21 year old, a 28 year old, a 58 year old, quite frankly. And so if you have an affirming therapist who's going to be saying, yeah, let's talk about your gender identity, let's talk about your sexual orientation, let's talk about your belief systems and where do you agree with your parents, where do you not agree with your parents? How do you have the authority, internal authority, to kind of start leaning towards your own belief systems? That's not going to go over well with conservative parents. That's not going to go over well with conservative unethical therapists.

John Dehlin [00:44:42] Right.

Natasha Helfer [00:44:42] Because their, their plan of treatment is conformity, conformity to their beliefs and their ideas.

John Dehlin [00:44:49] Right. All right, well let's go ahead and go to the next video clip which is basically Jody and and Ruby claiming that their program is better than therapy and better than the theories of men.

▶ Video Clip 3

Video Clip 3 [00:45:07] Jody and I are here to do is to invite people who were like me and who have been in Jody's place and have not found peace in theories of man and need something else. And that's what we're here to offer.

Video Clip 3 [00:45:23] Yes. So we'd like to actually share some comments that we have received from, from you and we want to address them. Here we go. Here comes good old Instagram.

Expert Analysis of Harmful Mental Health Advice

Video Clip 3 [00:45:36] These are sincere comments from some very sincere people and I think it's important that we talk about this. I want to Invite you to really consider, is this working for you? Are you getting the help that you need? These comments might reflect how you feel. So comment number one is, I've gone to multiple different therapists, and what seems to happen is that it initially feels okay, but as I keep going, I just get worse and worse until things are so bad I can't keep going. I've never gotten anything out of therapy that I couldn't get from just talking to people, people on the Internet, which

Video Clip 3 [00:46:14] actually has been more productive for me.

Video Clip 3 [00:46:17] Hopefully they're talking to people in truth.

Video Clip 3 [00:46:19] Yeah, yeah.

Video Clip 3 [00:46:21] So, yeah, so I hear that. And what I'm hearing is that this person is. Is desiring to feel some foundation under their feet, like feel some stability under their feet. And they've gone to different therapists, and I don't know exactly. Exactly what they're looking for. And they're walking away saying, I'm not finding what I'm looking for.

Video Clip 3 [00:46:44] Well, let me.

Video Clip 3 [00:46:44] Let me tell you, those of you who feel that way about life coaching, therapy, meditation groups, whatever modality you're going to, that you're not finding peace, if you are willing to come and learn about principles of truth and actually willing to humble and choose to be responsible and choose to be honest, you will find calmness. I mean, this sounds so, you know, kind of like, hey, you do this and you'll have. Have joy. And the truth is, if you actually do live principles of truth, you will have the fruit of joy.

Video Clip 3 [00:47:23] You will.

Video Clip 3 [00:47:24] So if you're trying to engage in distortion and still find joy, you. You will not be successful. It won't matter where you go. You must be willing to choose principles of truth, which is learning how to be honest, possible, and humble. And there's many other principles, like be compassionate, know how to clean up your side of the street. Another word for that is repent. How to forgive, how to be long suffering, how to be patient, how to be truly kind and genuine and sincere. These are all principles of truth.

Video Clip 3 [00:47:58] Yeah.

Video Clip 3 [00:47:58] Well, what comes to my mind is man is that he might have joy. Man is that he might live by principles of God.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:08] It's the same thing.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:09] Those principles of God bring joy.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:11] Exactly.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:13] A lot of.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:13] I think this woman, whoever wrote this, when you go to a therapist and you're being enabled and you're being caught, modeled, and you're being handheld, that after. At first, that does feel good.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:27] Yeah.

Video Clip 3 [00:48:28] And then after a while, when it doesn't fix the problem, it.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] So, Natasha, what in the heck is wrong with honesty? Responsibility, Being humble, being Kind and, you know, the. The principles of God and truth versus the principles of man. What's wrong with that?

Natasha Helfer [00:48:47] Well, I don't know. I haven't seen it cure schizophrenia, haven't seen it cure manic depression. There's nothing wrong with those principles. But the way that they're talking about is so simplistic and so like they're just supposed to apply to everybody in every situation. And quite frankly, it just sounds like a religious commercial. I mean, there's just no, there's no clinical soundness in this. It's the classic, well, buck up, little camper, just be happy. And I guess that will cure depression. We know through tons of research and of course, sadly, tons of completed suicides that buck up and be kind is not going to help you with a clinical disorder.

John Dehlin [00:49:35] Well, okay, just to push back, let's just say it's not as simple as buck up. It's learning to be honest, learning to be responsible and to own your things and learning to be humble that's going to cure you of being gay or your depression or your obsessive compulsive disorder.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:55] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [00:49:55] So all of those principles are actually used in therapeutic clinical interventions. You know, being honest with yourself, with others, being responsible. But yeah, it doesn't cure gayness, nor should it be cured. Right. So this is, this is of course, where, I mean, I've seen this from the beginning of my career, this tension between Christian theology and psychological principles that if you follow the atonement, if you follow the repentance plan, if you do the things like read your scriptures and pray and, you know, take the sacrament that will cure all ailments. We know that those things don't cure cancer. We know that those things can be helpful. Spiritual tools can be helpful to people, especially if they find them very useful in their lives. They can be comforting, but they're not the cure nor the treatment plan that's necessary for many of these clinical disorders.

John Dehlin [00:50:51] Margi, did you have something to add?

Margi Dehlin [00:50:53] Yeah. To me also, this feels like such an obvious echo to the Mormon Church kind of relationship around how transactional are expected experience can be. It's just sort of like if you're having an unpleasant experience or you're in pain, are you praying? Are you go to the list. If you're doing kind of the things that will list. And all they're doing in my mind is kind of changing the list a little bit. But she's still the owner of the answer. You know, Jody is the one that holds the keys and you have to Kind of go through her. And also. So to me, it's so reminiscent, I think, of. Of where many of us have come from in a way that's overly simplistic and actually really damaging to view reality and life in this transactional way, as well as repeating kind of this philosophical argument of like, we are born depraved and therefore, you know, using words like coddling and using words like, you know, being validated or as negatives. I feel like, especially in light of what we know now of Ruby's parenting style and abuse, it kind of reinforces this idea of, like, children are depraved, human beings are depraved. And unless you kind of do something aggressive and whip them into shape and. And really discipline them, they're gonna go astray, they're gonna not have whatever. Be worthy, be good, be moral, be all the things. And I really see that in kind of Mormon culture, Mormon doctrine as well. So to me, it echoes so much of where we come from. It's like a duplicate blueprint.

Natasha Helfer [00:52:49] And right along that, Margi, there's one result. There's the one way.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:53] Yes.

Natasha Helfer [00:52:54] Right. Whereas in good ethical therapy practices, there could be multiple outcomes. Whether people decide to divorce, whether people decide to go to a certain career choice, whether there's no one way that success is going to be measured.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:09] And using fear, using fear. About researched, actually research scientifically proven, you know, interventions that therapists use using kind of this tactic of like, don't trust that. Don't trust. Actually, the thing that go with us, I have the keys. I. I have the list for you.

John Dehlin [00:53:31] We'll be talking about this more, but one of the benefits of doing a clinical psychology PhD, you spend six years in grad school, minimum, and you actually run clinical trials where you target a specific diagnosis, like depression, like anxiety, like ocd, like ptsd, like an eating disorder. And then you study the past treatments, and then you come up with your clinically and empirically supported new intervention. And then you run trials where you literally administer this treatment to 30 or 50 or 60 or 100 different clients who. Who meet criteria for a specific diagnosis. And then you track that data over time. And if your intervention actually leads to positive outcomes, then you gather that data, you analyze it, you publish it in a journal, and then other people can replicate your findings. That's how clinical treatments get developed. And so for her to just say, hey, just trust me. Our approach pay 9.99. Our approach cures mental illness. Where's the data? There's a process for establishing. A treatment as being efficacious. And simply claiming on the Internet that your interventions are more effective than clinical trials is egregiously irresponsible. And again, she talks about mental illness. It's not like she's trying to sell just coaching for improving your life. She talks about mental illness on the site.

Natasha Helfer [00:55:20] And even something as simple as prayer might be helpful. Might be helpful for somebody who's suffering from clinical depression, not probably going to be helpful for somebody who's struggling with scrupulosity.

Margi Dehlin [00:55:32] Right.

Natasha Helfer [00:55:32] So treatment plans differ drastically depending on correct assessment. And what are the diagnoses that certain people are struggling with?

John Dehlin [00:55:40] Yeah. All right, let's go to the next. The next video clip about how to find a good therapist and about truth versus distortion.

How to Identify a Good Therapist

▶ Video Clip 4

Video Clip 4 [00:55:50] Number three. Unless something goes disastrously wrong in the first session, it's hard to tell if you're dealing with a poor therapist.

Video Clip 4 [00:55:58] I can vouch for that.

Video Clip 4 [00:55:59] Or rather a noticeably poor therapist. Even proponents of therapy will tell you that it can take a while to get an idea if your therapist is a good fit. So it takes a long time to even figure out if you've got a

Video Clip 4 [00:56:12] good therapist at all.

Video Clip 4 [00:56:13] Can we talk about what good therapist means?

Video Clip 4 [00:56:15] Yeah.

Video Clip 4 [00:56:16] Yeah. And good fit.

Video Clip 4 [00:56:17] Yeah.

Video Clip 4 [00:56:18] So everything in connections is broken down into truth or distortion. It's not broken down into good or bad. So I really encourage people not to use the words of, you know, this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. Instead, everything is looked at and scrutinized through the lens of truth or distortion. And that's why this is so powerful. So if I'm your trainer and you're sitting across from me, you can know exactly if I'm telling you principles of truth, because you can scrutinize principles of truth. You know what principles of truth look like? You know, when someone's being sincere, you can see it, you can feel it. You know when someone's being humble, when they're being authentic, when they truly are being thoughtful and compassionate towards you. You know, when someone's sincerely wanting you to be responsible for yourself or they're. They're taking responsibility for themselves. So this isn't about, like, is this person good for me? It's about, is this person teaching me principles that actually govern healing? That's what this is about. And so, you know, I hope that there's mental health people out there that aren't just doing therapy, but they're doing coaching and other modalities of healing that are teaching principles of truth. If you are receiving principles of truth, you will recognize it, and you will start changing the one thing that is consistent, Ruby, that I get across the board. When I was doing therapy, if you will, I was learning principles of truth. I had been taught them from a spiritual source, and I was sharing them with my clients. And I was not teaching them theories of that humans had created. I was teaching them about, you need to be responsible for yourself. And I watched people and my own life transform right before my eyes. This isn't something that I just believe in. I have watched thousands of people change as a result of them using their agency and choosing truth. So it wasn't like, oh, she's a. She's a good, good counselor. Most people didn't like me. And the reason didn't like me is because I was inviting them to be accountable. And a lot of people are not interested in being accountable. They're interested in just complaining. And. And I knew that that wasn't going to help them with finding joy or having peace.

Video Clip 4 [00:58:44] Well, what I was interested in when I was looking for a therapist, we went through a couple. When I say we, Kevin and I, my husband, and. And we. We weren't looking for a good therapist. We were looking. I was looking for some. Someone who would side with me, and he was looking for someone who would side with him.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:01] That's in a good therapist, somebody who sides. She's the best therapist we've ever had.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:05] She's the worst therapist we've ever had.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:07] She doesn't agree with anything.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:08] She thinks I'm the problem.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:09] Well, that's why I love her.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:11] Yeah. It's really common if you're a therapist out there watching that, don't you know that that's what goes on? But when you start teaching principles of truth, when you learn principles of truth,

Video Clip 4 [00:59:20] it's not about me.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:21] It was not exciting.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:23] No.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:23] And it's not about Kevin. It's about our choices that we're using and if our choices were in truth or in distortion. So there's no taking sides. It's.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:31] It's.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:32] Hey, I'm taking the side of connection. I'm on both of your sides.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:35] Exactly.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:36] And here's what. Where your choices are, and here's where your choices are. And it was very clear.

Video Clip 4 [00:59:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:41] Natasha, you're. You're covering your face with your hand. What's going on? What's going on for you in that clip?

Natasha Helfer [00:59:48] Oh, yeah. It's just difficult to listen to this kind of stuff. I mean, there's like, again, so sprinkles amidst a big pile of bullshit.

John Dehlin [00:59:59] What were some of the highlights? Lowlights for you.

Natasha Helfer [01:00:01] So. And even just let's talk about cognitive distortions. And she loves that word so much. She just did a circular fallacy, right? She's like, you gotta trust yourself because you will know. You will know if you feel, you know, like, this person is sincere and you'll. You'll feel, you know, great with them. And then she's like, but a lot of people don't like me. I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, trust that, please.

Natasha Helfer [01:00:27] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:00:27] I mean, there are truths here. Of course. Of course it's important to find a good fit. Of course we know that the number one way that therapy and coaching services are going to work for you is if you feel like you are somewhat joined with the provider and feel comfortable with them and feel listened to and feel attended to, to your needs. Are you working on the things that you want to be working on? Do you feel like you're able to disagree with your therapist and that they'll be able to. To tolerate that? These are very important things. But again, it goes back to the way that they're describing it. It's just, you know, I'm going to be the way. I'm going to be the way for you. And. Yeah, and then there's also untruths here. Like, if you're dealing with paranoid thoughts, you can't always trust your own ideas about whether or not somebody is sincere or. Or whether or not somebody's being thoughtful. And again, how are you gonna know? What truth are we talking about here? She keeps on coming back to this truth. Whose truth? Because her truth and my truth are diametrically opposed. Like, I couldn't be farther away from her truth.

Gerardo Sumano [01:01:36] Yeah. I think she mentions. I had to listen to that clip several times to understand what she was saying, but it was pretty clear. I'm sorry, it was pretty clear to me that she's. I mean, she gives it up. She says she learned its principles of truth, which are universal, from a spiritual source, which, I mean, that means her church, right? And then she says, and when I was doing my clinical trials, I stopped using the theories of men, and I started applying principles of truth. And all of a sudden all my clients started changing their lives to kind of saying, like, whatever mental health associations say, I don't care about it. Because these principles of truth that my church teaches me is what matters.

Natasha Helfer [01:02:22] And this is where people have to educate themselves on the concept of confirmation bias. We are all prey to that. You know, we're all vulnerable to confirmation bias. So, yeah, if you have a therapist who's espousing these truths that happen to align with your religious truths, now all of a sudden, that feels comfortable for you. But that doesn't mean that you're getting ethical nor clinically effective treatment.

John Dehlin [01:02:44] Yeah, I thought it was ironic that she made the assertion that you can always tell when someone's lying. Like, these two women had two of, you know, two of their children basically locked up in a basement. Could we have told that from their YouTube videos and from the things that they're sharing? What do you think, Natasha, about the idea that you can always tell when your clients are living in truth or lying?

Natasha Helfer [01:03:09] Nobody can tell. This is one of the first things that I talk to my supervisees about. They all come in all butthurt. They're all like, oh my gosh, my client lied to me. I'm like, of course they did. Of course they did. People lie all the time for all kinds of reasons. You have to be like, even very professionally trained forensic psychologists have a very hard time understanding if somebody's lying or not. And of course, why we've created things like lie detectors, and Even those aren't 100% efficable.

John Dehlin [01:03:38] I don't even think lie detectors are admissible in many courts.

Guest 3 [01:03:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:42] Yeah. Okay, this next clip is sort of a clip where Jody, in my view, kind of loses it. Gerardo, tell us really quickly why you included this and then we'll. We'll share it. Which one is it? It's the one about Jodi asking for better reviews.

Jodi's Harmful Claims About PTSD and OCD

Gerardo Sumano [01:04:00] Yeah. So this is. I think this is a recent one where a lot of people were leaving bad reviews on the group, on the private group where a lot of these videos are being taken from. And she's basically telling her followers that she needs better reviews.

John Dehlin [01:04:16] And you included it. Why?

Gerardo Sumano [01:04:17] I think it just shows just a little bit of her personality behind the scenes. Behind the scenes?

John Dehlin [01:04:24] Yeah. Okay, let's roll it.

Guest 2 [01:04:27] Because they get so mad that they can't control what's going on, they turn right around and go, give us a one star review. Now we've made it really easy for them to do that because we've been trying to make it really easy for you to give us a five star review. We've put the link on the bottom of every single post. So all you have to do is click the link and give us a five star review. That's as simple as it is. But you guys aren't doing it. I think we've had five people from the last time I asked, which is probably a month ago, five out of almost 9,005 people give us a review. That's five. And we've had probably 50 to 75 people give us one star reviews. So we started with a five and in three months we're down to like a two. Aggression and evil has dominated our world because there's too many of us that want to live in truth that are not standing up. So please, at a minimum, please, I don't understand why you won't do it. Go on to Moms of Truth. There is a link underneath every single video that says give us a review. Click it and give us a five star, please. It will get our rating back up.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:45] So living Principles of truth is go and do what I said, go and do what I told you. Five star review only. That is a principle of truth.

John Dehlin [01:05:57] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:57] You know, yeah, it's a little bit

John Dehlin [01:05:59] ironic because she's not saying rate. Rate based on your experience and your appreciation or value of the content. Give. She's trying to manipulate the ratings.

Natasha Helfer [01:06:10] Yeah, I think, oh, it's a temper tantrum and it's actually unethical. We as therapists are not supposed to ask for reviews nor testimonials. It's in pretty much every single one of our code of ethics, especially to

John Dehlin [01:06:24] pressure clients to give us a five star review.

Natasha Helfer [01:06:26] It's a power dynamic that you have with a client and if you ask for positive feedback in that power dynamic, that's unethical behavior.

John Dehlin [01:06:36] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:06:37] So we do send out anonymous surveys and most therapy practices do just to make sure people do have a way anonymously to share something they may not feel comfortable talking about with their therapist face to face. And the few I do get negative reviews, I don't get them often, but when I get them, I take them very seriously. I want to know, you know, where. Where was there a potential for me to have been more affirming, more validating? Was I off base in some way? Is this just a difference in kind of style or personality? I take that very seriously. I don't get all grumpy pants, be like naughty, naughty clients of mine. You need to like me because that's the truth. Even though I just told you to listen to your truth? Yeah, yeah, funky.

John Dehlin [01:07:27] I think it does. It is an interesting behind the scenes, just a glimpse of her personality.

Gerardo Sumano [01:07:32] She lets out a little bit of her maybe fanatical religious beliefs. You know, evil's taking over and people don't want to live in truth and that's why they're doing this and they want to, you know, destroy us, that kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [01:07:49] Yeah. It's almost like anyone who gives her a better view isn't living in truth. Is. What's the word out of is? Distortion. Is living in distortion.

Natasha Helfer [01:07:59] Okay. It's narcissism.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:00] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:08:00] I mean, she's exhibiting narcissistic traits, right?

John Dehlin [01:08:03] Yeah. That's good call. Good call, Natasha. Okay, so now we're going to go into a series of clips, Natasha, where Jody discusses various clinical diagnoses. And this is kind of shocking and alarming. And the first one we're going to share is Jody commenting on PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder. So let's see what Jodi. And you know, Natasha, you. You treat ptsd, Is that correct?

Natasha Helfer [01:08:31] Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:08:31] Okay, so let's just see, you know, how empirically supported her comments on PTSD are.

Guest 2 [01:08:39] What you're telling me is that you have not gotten into the truth, or maybe you don't want to tell yourself the truth. Maybe you have told yourself the truth, but you really don't want to stay in the truth. Maybe you like being a victim. Maybe you like the attention you get from being a victim. I don't know what your particular case is, but the question was, if I have PTSD and I keep getting triggered, is that a destroyed fear? And the answer is yes, because it's not the truth today. It's not the truth today. You know it.

John Dehlin [01:09:13] Okay, Natasha, any quick reactions to that?

Natasha Helfer [01:09:20] Just the fact that she talked about playing a victim in the same sentence where we're talking about post traumatic stress disorder is extremely angering to me now.

John Dehlin [01:09:31] Why someone, if they're a victim of assault or if they're a victim of rape and they have PTSD symptoms as a result. The term victim could be appropriate.

Natasha Helfer [01:09:42] No victim. But she said playing the victim.

John Dehlin [01:09:45] Okay.

Natasha Helfer [01:09:45] Which means I've been a victim of sexual abuse. I've been a victim of crimes. I've been a victim of a lot of things. I'm perfectly comfortable with the word victim, and I think sometimes in our society, we go too quickly to survivor. I think it's okay to be in a space where you're like, no, I was a victim. And I have a right to those feelings and to that processing before you start, you know, talking about being a survivor of something. But she's saying, you know, you're wanting attention. I mean, these are. These are also kind of classic parenting mistakes people make, specifically with ADHD kids, PTSD kids, OCD kids. You must be wanting attention. We can't explain this behavior doesn't make sense to us. Our ways of parenting aren't correcting it. So now we're going to just blame the child. And of course, this is what higher demand religions do as well. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has a great history of blaming people instead of what they've come up with as the solution. So if the prayer isn't working, if the fasting isn't working, if you're not getting blessed, there must be something that you are not doing correct. Which is one of the huge reasons why religion and the understanding of mental health and the understanding of being trauma informed are really oftentimes at odds. Now there are churches and religions out there that are doing incredible work around trauma informed work. High demand religions don't tend to be them.

John Dehlin [01:11:10] Yeah, I'll say really quickly that as soon as we start talking about mental health diagnoses like ptsd, ocd, eating disorders, you start to get, we're starting to talk about specializations. You, if, if you're going to a medical doctor who's an eye surgeon, you wouldn't go to an eye surgeon for open heart surgery. You wouldn't go to a brain surgeon for, you know, a knee replacement. There are reasons why the medical professions have specialists. And it's my personal view that a disorder like ptsd, like an eating disorder, like schizophrenia, et cetera, even personality disorders, they require a specialist, not a generalist. And a specialist is going to be trained in an empirically supported intervention for this disorder. And so sort of psychobabble, gobbledygook, pop psychology that's religiously infused and semi coherent is not going to be a treatment for ptsd. It's just not. And you don't just want to go to any old licensed clinical social worker or emergent family therapist or psychologist for a treatment in a severe disorder. You want to go to a specialist who's been trained in that specialty, who offers an empirically supported treatment and who has experience. I personally would never treat someone with an eating disorder that is such a severe disorder with very high, relatively high mortality rates. I would refer somebody to an eating disorder specialist. And it's the same with ocd, it's the same with ptsd, et cetera. And so, you know, that's, you know, don't even just trust a licensed mental health professional when it comes to these specialties. Get a specialist who's been trained to deliver that treatment. That's my view.

Margi Dehlin [01:13:22] I was gonna say one last thing about this particular exchange that really bothers Me. And it's this idea of there's a lot of shame in the way I feel like she's responding to this person around ptsd as opposed to like yes, of course, course you have ptsd. Yes of course it comes from this place. And in many ways this is what your body and nervous system are doing, trying to keep you alive. It's trying to like remember and in the future protect you. Right. That instead it's this idea she, you know, uses kind of playing the victim and that, that word again of truth and it's like weaponizing this, this word truth. And instead of sort of, it's just so in many ways anti therapy for me as opposed to like really what would I say, like holding this, this client of yours in a place of understanding and many truths. There's like one truth, I have it and I'm gonna weaponize it against you and shame you for this thing that, this, this defense mechanism and this way of coping and tell you, you know, basically that you're at deficit and playing a victim for it.

John Dehlin [01:14:38] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:14:39] Completely ignores all the information we have about physiological and psychological effects to trauma. And again it's going to go back to blaming the client like she did in the ratings. Right? Oh, this isn't working. Well, it's because you're not doing something right. It's not because my program or my ideas are flawed.

Margi Dehlin [01:14:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:14:58] When Dr. Stephen Hasson, one of the world's cult experts, talks about different categories of cults, he talks about self help cults, which can be retreats and workshops and gurus that talk about mental health, that talk about self improvement, but they act very much like a cult leader. And I'll just share one of the comments from you who are joining us through livestream. Sprinkle Glass Slipper or Sprinkling Glass Slipper writes Jody is the God of her group. So even things that are heinous are truth if she does them. And yeah, she does act like the supreme authority on truth in her therapy sessions, in her groups and on her Internet. And you should just beware of anyone that claims to be the ultimate source of truth. Because guess what? That's cult like behavior. Another classic cult tactic is what's called blame reversal. If the church's or the religion's recommendations work well, the church deserves all the credit. And guess what? If the church's or the religion's recommendations don't work well, you're not doing it right and the blame always gets put back on you. And you could literally go to Luna Lindsay's book on recovering agency, which is the basic cult techniques that are often used, or Stephen Hasson's book on combating cult mind control. And you can look at the classic characteristic traits of a cult and you can apply them to connections and to Jody, very appropriately, I believe. Okay, let's go to the next video, which is Jody talking about obsessive compulsive disorder, which is actually a specialty I was trained in during my psychology training.

Guest 2 [01:16:44] There's thousands and thousands of ways to act out obsessive compulsive behavior. And the catalyst of what's driving it in every single person is the same. And here's the catalyst. The catalysts are, I don't understand who I am as a being. Like, I don't understand my identity as far as being a child of God and the worth and the value and the importance and the love that God has for me. Like, I don't get that. And then secondly, I don't understand how to manage discomfort.

John Dehlin [01:17:26] So, Natasha, I saw you putting your hand over your face. Do you want to quickly give your reaction to that?

Natasha Helfer [01:17:34] I will tell you what your identity is. I will tell you. Right. And it's going to be through my religious lens and through my personal lens. That's. I mean, that's what she's doing. That's, that's like, like so antithetic to therapy. It's the exact opposite. It's like you have to make space for people's identities to show up in a way that is self determined. You cannot impose your ideas and your identity basically on the people who are coming in to see you. And to even have this be tied to ocd. I don't even get it.

Gerardo Sumano [01:18:05] Well, she's saying that the reason people have OCD or obsessive compulsive behaviors is because they don't understand their identity.

Natasha Helfer [01:18:12] Yeah. I mean, there's nothing.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:13] And there again is one identity. There is one truth. You are a child of God. Which is literally words from a religion. And this is set up a belief from a religion.

Natasha Helfer [01:18:24] Exactly. And it's set up to be anti LGBT immediately. Because if you identify as gay or trans or bisexual or pansexual or asexual, well, see, you don't know your true identity. That's why you're having problems. Actually, we're having problems because so many people like this exist that discriminate against people with their identities. That's why we're having problems.

John Dehlin [01:18:48] Yeah. And then I'll just say because I studied treatments for scrupulosity and OCD in my PhD work that scrupulosity is a classic form of OCD, which is religious OCD, where hyper religiosity or hyper rumination about worthiness and about religious righteousness can be its own form of ocd. So if you go to an OCD client who's got scrupulosity and you tell them, look, you just need to. You just need to remember that you're a child of God and study the scriptures and pray more, they may be praying four, five, six hours a day, that they may be reading the scriptures four, five, six hours a day. And they may be having ruminations constantly about their worthiness. And if you start putting pressure on them about other thoughts they need to be having to just magically cure themselves from their OCD by just remembering you're a child of God, you can actually exacerbate their ruminations instead of neutralize them and help them maybe free themselves from the ruminations they're having. So there is not a cognitive intervention for OCD that involves just introducing new thoughts. You're literally just piling on the intrusive thoughts that they're already having. And that's counterproductive in the treatment of ocd, in my view.

Natasha Helfer [01:20:23] Not just in your view, John, in the research.

John Dehlin [01:20:26] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So her stuff is super damaging from an OCD perspective, in my view.

Margi Dehlin [01:20:32] And don't you find, like, her. The way she uses her voice is. So what therapy is, is traditionally not about, like, you feel like she has this, she has the answer. And there is no process. It's just, here you go, here's why you have OCD in a line, as opposed to this sense of like, therapy is a process that oftentimes you. You go through together with a therapist you trust, where there's a lot of curiosity and there's a lot of researched tools and methods that are used as part of the process. But it's like this, again, is like a total blueprint of what I view, not to overstate it, but Mormon authority, stepping in, telling you in an external place, telling you what's wrong, and then back to the other video, telling you actually if you're in truth or in distortion, you're not deciding. She's deciding. That's why you're experiencing these feelings. You're in distortion. I'm here to tell you.

Natasha Helfer [01:21:30] Yeah, Margi, that's a great point. It reminds me of kind of one of the complaints that they talked about that people have. They go to therapy and they're like, this isn't helping. Sometimes Obviously you may not have the right fit, but a lot of times it's the expectation people have of therapy because a lot of people go into therapy expecting that somebody is going to tell them what to do, especially if they come from a high demand religion or culture where that's what they're used to. And that isn't what therapy is about. It's about offering a space where you can explore, where you can get hopefully some psychoeducation that's based on evidence based research. And with that information and that safe space to explore, you figure out what your next steps is. So it is a process. And if people aren't used to that, because those of us who come from high demand cultures are not, we are told, do this, do that, then you'll feel good. And oftentimes if you do that for short spouts of time, it does feel good because you're conforming and the conforming piece is what makes you feel good. But it's not really lasting, effective change in people's lives. So yeah, people need to understand what therapy is and what effective therapy is about really quickly.

John Dehlin [01:22:34] Shout out to one of our viewers. Susie M. Writes, the best treatment for OCD from her experience was exposure and response prevention, or as we call it, erp. The response prevention is the most important part. And yeah, that's one of our viewers and listeners calling out an empirically supported treatment. And it turns out that OCD is one of the most curable, if you can say, cure mental illnesses. ERP has some of the best success rates of all clinical interventions. And it actually doesn't involve changing your thoughts. It most often involves exposure to thoughts and to ideas that make you uncomfortable and then learning to act or behave or respond to the intrusive thoughts in more healthy and productive ways. So check out ERP if you are experiencing ocd. All right, let's. And Natasha, tell me if I'm wrong. Didn't your some of your early clinical training involve addiction? Is that right?

Misrepresenting Addiction and Personal Responsibility

Natasha Helfer [01:23:41] Yes, the very first two to three years of my experience was an opiate addiction.

John Dehlin [01:23:46] Okay, so Gerardo's pulled up a clip on this is Kevin Franke, Ruby's husband, talking about addiction. So do you.

Gerardo Sumano [01:23:54] So just really quick, this was grabbed from group therapy with Jody and couples therapy. So there's like all these couples and this is zoomed in into Frankie and, sorry, Ruby and her husband Kevin. Kevin talking about this addiction.

John Dehlin [01:24:13] Let's roll the clip.

Guest 3 [01:24:17] A very common misconception that's unfortunately supported by much of the psychological community today is this Idea that. That we truly are victims to things like addiction, to things like narcissism or whatever the diagnosis label is. In other words, in our minds, we believe that addiction is this lion that's lurking out there, and it finds a victim and it prances on it. And now that's a victim of addiction, or the same with narcissism or any of these. Of these labels. And the truth is. The truth is that addictive behavior is a result of consistent choices that are not made in truth. And that individual can choose to stop making those choices. Now, that doesn't mean it's easy. I look at you, Curtis, and I think, man, that was a lot of effort and work and stumbling and picking yourself back up and going and going and going. It was a ton of work. But you did it. You chose it. And I. I also had many addictions that I was choosing in my life that I needed. If I wanted recovery, I needed to stop choosing them. I was no victim to them. And so if you're in the other side of a relationship where you're saying, my spouse is addicted to X or Y, and you are viewing that and saying that in the sense of my poor spouse, I want to support my spouse, you are enabling your spouse if you're pouring gasoline on a fire. And the best thing, the most honest thing and most loving thing you can do for your spouse is to reflect truth as to what they're really choosing.

John Dehlin [01:26:25] So what do you think about that? Feedback from Kevin on addiction?

Natasha Helfer [01:26:30] Yeah, I mean, it sounds like they're really going down a path of just. All psychology is bunk. Diagnoses are just excuses. And we do live in a current cultural climate where this is actually very prevalent. I'm very concerned. Right. I mean, we saw this with the vaccines. We see this with a lot of things that people just, for whatever reasons are distrusting. Experts and medical professionals and mental health professionals. And of course, those professions do make mistakes. None of our fields have evolved without mistakes. But we're also kind of set up by the scientific method and everything to correct those mistakes over time and again, those governing bodies with much diversity, many people involved, to make sure that mistakes over time get corrected. And we're offering some of the best mental health and physical health treatment plans that we've ever had in the world in the current time, the current time we live in. So that's very problematic to me. And again, I see sprinkles of truth in ways that are just used to then either weaponize or to uneducate people or misinform people about certain aspects of addiction. Addiction is very complicated. We've, we've had podcasts on this. We could spend three hours on trying to understand even the term addiction. The terms around substance dependence is really where most of that addiction language has come from. It's been co opted by those professionals who believe in sex addiction and want to apply the word addiction to a lot of other things. And I think that term is just used incorrectly often. And so that's a very complex conversation that I don't know that we have the time on for today. But the other part that's really interesting there at the end is that if you lean towards your partner in compassion or empathy, that's problematic. And what you need to do instead is to give them truth, which again, sounds lovely until you realize that what their truth is, their truth is punitive. You see that in the examples of what they did with their children. So truth is, you're not behaving the way I want you to behave. You're doing something wrong or incorrect. You need to get aligned with my truth. And until you do, there will be severe consequences. That's really what this is talking about. But it's just so flowery and so beautiful and so pretty how they've presented it.

John Dehlin [01:29:12] Yeah. Do you feel like it's glib to say that, you know, the, the cure to addiction is making better choices? Do you feel like that's glib?

Natasha Helfer [01:29:22] Yeah, I mean, that's just, that's just ridiculous. If people could just make better choices, I mean, why doesn't anybody, everybody, why aren't they making better choices? You know, if they have so much truth, why are they abusing their kids?

John Dehlin [01:29:35] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:29:36] So, yeah. Choice is also a very complex thing. In some ways, we do have choice. In other ways, we have a lot of subconscious things going on. We have a lot of influences, whether it's genetic or environmental. Understanding our choices is a very complex process, which is why therapy takes a while and why the process takes a while. But what we do know more than any time else in the world, is that shame, Shame will consistently provoke choices that go against people's own values. Because when you are in a space of shame and disappointment and fear, your parts of your brain just go into survival mode and you will do whatever it takes. You will make whatever choice to help you feel better or to feel accepted in that moment. And so what they're espousing through their kind of consequence, ideas of how parents or spouses should behave towards an another person will actually exacerbate Those negative behaviors. Not to mention that when he talks about and you, Mark, or whatever his name was, you have been doing so much work to get past this addiction. I'm guessing what they're talking about is masturbation and pornography. That's my guess is that's the type of group they're in. Which also the truth that we're all subject to in regards to what we think about masturbation and pornography is highly influenced by the truth of the church. And so when you're asking somebody to fit into a box, that is neither natural nor accurate or sustainable. When you ask people to go to war with themselves and especially their sexuality, whether it's their orientation or their behavior, you are going to lose. That system is going to lose. And only people who are incredibly scrupulous or incredibly or just asexual or gray sexual can really win that game. Which means they're not really winning. They are exhibiting symptoms of mental health conditions or have an orientation that just isn't sexual, which is about 4% of our population, which is fine. But that's not because they tried so hard. That's because that's how they come wired really quickly.

John Dehlin [01:32:10] You know, putting aside a lot of times when we try to talk about porn and masturbation, people will interpret from the conversation that either a, we're advocates of pornography or think the pornography is healthy or that we're trying to promote masturbation or whatever. Putting aside the good and badness of any of that, what do you have to say about the practice within Mormon culture of calling masturbation as infrequently as once a month or twice a month an addiction and then having these addiction and recovery groups where the masturbators are self identifying as addicts and talking about the length of time it's been since they last masturbated in terms of weeks or months of sobriety or staying clean and relapses and that they, that they fell off the wagon or they relapsed. And even in Jody's case, she would have these support groups where you had to have an accountability buddy that you would text or call up to three times a day to either confess masturbating or asking them for help or assistance to not masturbate. What's your view of treating masturbation in the same way that Alcoholics Anonymous would treat meth or cocaine or alcohol?

Natasha Helfer [01:33:46] It's upset, absurd, and more than that, it's malpractice. Like if this is the clinical treatment that you've been offered, you Have a right to sue whomever offered you this treatment. This is malpractice.

John Dehlin [01:34:02] Why are you so fired up about this?

Natasha Helfer [01:34:04] Because it's happening on every corner in the streets here of Utah and Wichita, where I have lived. And then the rest of us ethical therapists get to clean up that PTSD disaster mess for the next five years. If they finally get to somebody who knows how to treat those issues appropriately, it's malpractice. I'd be fired up about any kind of malpractice.

John Dehlin [01:34:25] And why does it not, just really quickly, why does it not work?

Natasha Helfer [01:34:29] Well, first of all, you're not assessing anything. You're assessing an incorrect. You're making up a problem. It's not a problem.

John Dehlin [01:34:39] So if they've been taught by their religion, well, then it's a religious problem,

Natasha Helfer [01:34:43] but it's not a mental health problem.

Guest [01:34:47] We.

Natasha Helfer [01:34:47] We are conflating those two things in completely malpractice ways.

John Dehlin [01:34:53] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [01:34:53] And therapists are doing this. Jody's a therapist, right? This is not like, oh, just go to a. To a real therapist. No, she's a real freaking therapist.

John Dehlin [01:35:01] Okay, and then. And then. Okay, so label labeled appropriately or inappropriately. Let's just say somebody wants this behavior. They want to reduce or eliminate the behavior. Let's just say that's a religious person's goal, is to just reduce or eliminate the behavior. How effective are addiction recovery groups for masturbation at reducing and eliminating the behavior, in your view?

Natasha Helfer [01:35:28] There is no. There is no studies to show that the addiction model has any effectiveness in reducing or eliminating unwanted sexual behavior. 0.0Studies showing the effectiveness of this. Of this approach.

John Dehlin [01:35:42] Yeah. And I'll just say I noticed the opposite being true. That as soon as people are calling themselves addicts, being shamed by their partners as being unfaithful, as being cheat, cheaters as being dirty, as being unworthy, not being worthy to pass the sacrament or take the sacrament, the not being worthy to go to the temple. In Jody's case, she would encourage wives to tell their husbands, no more sex. No more hugs, no more touching. You sleep on a mattress in your office. And if you keep relapsing, we need to get separated and possibly divorced. That level of consequence and shame and stigma and control. And control, in my experience, not to mention the obsessiveness of thinking about it and talking about it all the time, it actually led to an increase in the undesired behavior or in the masturbation and porn usage, not a decrease.

Natasha Helfer [01:36:42] We have all seen this. Studies out of BYU have seen this when you are basically triggering the anxiety feedback loop, you are not gonna get better behavior. We see this in other areas of life, too. Most people who go on restrictive diets, that's not sustainable. They'll usually actually gain more weight in the long term. They may lose weight initially, but it's not as sustainable. And they're actually going to gain more weight. The minute you tell me that I need to feel shame and anxious about myself for some reason, I'm not craving broccoli. I'm craving my Krispy Kreme doughnut. When you're activating the nervous system in a way that's causing anxiety, fear, shame, trauma, you're not going to get people settling into their behaviors and their values aligning.

John Dehlin [01:37:33] Yeah, yeah. And just so people know, this isn't a Jody Hildebrandt problem, every Mormon church, ward or congregation in the United States, as I understand it, has an addiction recovery group that's modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. And, and bishops. Mormon bishops across the world are referring their masturbating teens and their masturbating adults to these addiction recovery groups where they're encouraged to speak about their addiction, you know, with. With the support group.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:09] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:38:09] Usually usually led by volunteer senior couples that have no, no mental health training at all.

Natasha Helfer [01:38:18] Well, and that's. Quite frankly, that's a critique we could give to all of the support groups out there, from AA to NA to sa. None of them are run by clinically trained folks. They're usually people who've been through the process themselves. That's not true in the LDS recovery program necessarily, because you're saying it can just be a couple, regardless of whether or not they've been through any type of addiction themselves or unwanted behaviors. So this is where I would really encourage folks to go. Look up both asect, aasect, and mmha. Both associations have a position statement on why the sex addiction model does not work.

John Dehlin [01:39:00] Yeah. And we'll have Julia and Maven include links to those statements in the show notes. Okay, so, yeah, so just if you're a faithful, orthodox believing Mormon, we're just telling you that if your desire is to reduce masturbation and pornography, these addiction recovery programs for porn and masturbation, in our experience, and that's with thousands of people we've interacted with, it makes the problem worse. So just remember that it's the wrong approach. Okay, let's go ahead and switch to parenting now and let's hear what Ruby has to say about parenting.

Controlling Parenting, Punishment, and Child Exploitation

Natasha Helfer [01:39:41] How do you know if you are a Controlling parent, what is it that you're going to look at? So we have this idea that controlling parents are parents who make their kids do something that the kids don't want to do. Did you know that a controlling parent is also a parent who doesn't expect anything from their children and allows the child to do whatever they want? That's also a controlling parent. Being a parent is a position of power. You have a responsibility and you have an obligation and a duty to show up being wise, being a guide, being an instructor for your child. And your children are showing up saying, I won't do that, No, I don't want to. If you're in a position of power and you turn your power and give it over to the kids, that is control.

John Dehlin [01:40:40] Okay, so this is an area where Ruby is most controversial. Her comments and theories about parenting, and I would say a lot of her philosophies clearly come from Jody Hildebrandt. But, but there's a fundamentalist Christian element to this that's, that's much bigger than even Mormonism. It's kind of the tough love and it's not new.

Natasha Helfer [01:41:02] It's spare the rod, spoil the child. And this is all over Christian United States in ways that are very, very problematic. Again, what she said, I probably wouldn't totally disagree with much of what she just said other than we do have a term that's called permissive parenting. So again, she's kind of coming up with her own terms. Um, but of course we're supposed to be guides. Of course we're supposed to show up with wisdom. Of course there's going to be some level of consequence or parenting styles and they can differ as far as how you're going to, you know, reward or have consequences or all of those things. But again, it's a flowery presentation that basically ended in severe child abuse. So you are not supposed to abuse your kids. And where does control and abuse, where do you blur that line? They're blurring it all the time.

John Dehlin [01:42:00] Margi. I know that in your coaching, but also just in your life, you've studied parenting extensively and I know you have really strong views about parenting. There are these clips of Ruby threatening to chop off her five year old daughter's, you know, Dolly's head if the daughter doesn't, you know, change some of her behavior. There's the clip of, you know, the, I don't know, six year old daughter forgets to make her lunch and you know, Ruby decides that the daughter needs to go without lunch and starve until she gets home as a consequence for forgetting to make her lunch. And then of course, there's the teenage boy that was forced to sleep on a beanbag for. For like seven or eight months because he did something wrong and that was his punishment to not have a bed and not have a bedroom. What's your take, Margi, on this control and punishment paradigm in parenting?

Margi Dehlin [01:43:01] Oh, I have so much to say about it. But in short, what I'll just say is it really reminds me of kind of the depraved, this idea that children come depraved of morality and ethics. They're like empty vessels that then we have to fill and we have to kind of. As opposed to this idea that kids come with a sense of wanting to do good. And as parents we're kind of shining a light and cultivating something that already exists. But what happens, I think, when you do that, when you go to sort of this control and particularly like a power. Power stance, I think in parenting, one of the things that I'm just noticing in watching Ruby is this. What happens when you start to view your children as these things, as depraved as, you know, oftentimes thinking the worst things about them as children, that slowly a dehumanization of them as human beings, as people you love comes into play. That it almost reminds me of like the Stanford Prison, honestly. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:44:17] Because you see like Lord of the Flies, basically.

Margi Dehlin [01:44:20] Yeah. You see over time, like, when she almost is smiling at pain or that her children now are no longer real to her. Like, honestly, they have become. It's to her that show up in this way of like, with control. You show up in a way I want in truth or your distortion. And when you're in distortion, I don't see you. You're not real to me and you're kind of cut off. And it's so painful, I think, to watch as opposed to parenting with this sense of like, connection and having your children have an experience of knowing themselves. This idea of. Of an authoritarian way of parenting disconnects a child from themselves. And whether they have the behavior, there's a loss if they show up obedient because then they're disconnected and they are now prone to being victims to other authorities that claim control or power over them in their life. Or you have kids that have a will and actually fight up against authority and then they're punished and suffer abuse and suffer. So there's like, no, there's no win here. And so it's heartbreaking. It's just heartbreaking to Watch.

Gerardo Sumano [01:45:41] Yeah, the golden ring video kind of illustrates what Margi's talking about.

John Dehlin [01:45:47] Let's jump to that next.

Natasha Helfer [01:45:50] Julie, when you turned 8 years old, do you remember? I gave you the gold ring when I was a little girl and you grew out of it because it doesn't fit you anymore. But I just enjoyed seeing on your hands so much. Every day when I would see on your hand, I would remember that you really are precious and that you really are a jewel. And it would remind me to treat you with a lot of respect and love. And so really that ring is for me. So when I see you wear it, it reminds me of yourself. To treat, to treat, treat you with love and to remember just how precious you are.

John Dehlin [01:46:26] Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [01:46:27] Some people thought it was disturbing that, you know, her mentioning that she needed that ring to remind her that she needed to treat her kid. Right.

Guest 3 [01:46:37] Yeah,

Natasha Helfer [01:46:40] yeah. I mean, I, I would really encourage people to go look up the Circumplex model again, something you can easily Google. What I love about that model is that it gives you some parameters about healthy family systems versus non healthy family systems. There's not just one way to be a healthy family system. There are parents who are maybe going to show up a little bit more authoritarian than democratic. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're abusive, but when you get to rigidity, when you get to inflexibility, when you get to loyalty tests that the only way to be the correct child is basically to be an image of myself and what I think is right and true, that's where you start getting into problematic parenting behaviors. And what I want to say about all of this things to do with parenting, it has grossly ignored mental health of children. Right. So in other videos I've seen like this egregious behavior, like the Santa Claus clip, right, where we're not going to allow our 8 year old and our 10 year old to have Christmas this year because of egregious behavior. And we see a lot of folks now starting to speak up just from the ADHD community of how even school systems would punish ADHD kids by keeping them in from recess. Probably the thing that an ADHD kid needs the most in order to regulate and in order to see sit still in an environment that their wiring is not really meant to learn in that environment. But because we didn't have understanding of that mental health issue, we forced so many people to stay in for recess, which actually is now actually linked to PTSD traits of ADHD kids. So we don't know if these Kids are on the spectrum. We don't know if they've got adhd. We don't know if they're clinically depressed. We don't know if there's been ptsd, which I think there has, and how that is showing up in their behaviors. And usually kids will go right into fight flight, freeze responses. And some of that is fight. That fight that is seen as rebelliousness is really just a way to try to survive. The system that they're in. The freeze is oftentimes more. More rewarded by parents because then a kid is just quiet. But a quiet kid doesn't mean that it's a healthy kid.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:10] So true. One last thing that I'm just noticing in the videos, and this ties back to a good therapist I feel like, too, is this idea that in that clip and in other clips that I've seen with Ruby with her kids, is this idea of her children don't even exist on screen. It's like that clip was just supposedly about that child. And all of a sudden it becomes about Ruby. Ruby's experience, what that means to Ruby. And this happens a lot in. With Jodie, too. Jodie will be in the. And then all of a sudden, it's all about Jodie. It's not even about. It's more about their real. Their emotional experience is reality. It is the one reality. And anyone else in the frame or who happens to be involved, they're either not real, meaning their emotions are not explored. And in that way, they don't exist. And to me, that is deeply, deeply problematic for a therapist that exists that way with a client. It's also deeply problematic in a parent child relationship if the parent literally is sucking all the oxygen out of a relationship, and they're the only ones whose experience is real.

John Dehlin [01:50:32] Yeah. Did you want to. Did you want to add something to that, Gerardo? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's deeply problematic. I've had several people, you know, we could probably do a full episode or a full season on just the exploitation of the Frankie children as it relates to their YouTube channel. But I had one person write to me that they were a wilderness camp counselor when, you know, to the son of the Frankie. So the Frankies sent one of their sons to a wilderness, you know, disciplinary survival kind of camp. And when the son had graduated from the camp, after I don't know how many months of being there, according to the counselor that oversaw the sun, when. When Ruby showed up, all she wanted to do instead of, like, celebrate her son, spend time with her son, get to understand what the son gained from the program. She wanted to film the whole thing for social media purposes and did and even violated the privacy of the other participants in the camp by. By filming them. And their faces showed up on the YouTube videos without their consent. I don't mean to just kind of be picking on her, but it just shows the dehumanization of not only her children, but anyone who got in the way of her camera, basically. And then another story was just someone who was in a high school musical with one of her daughters or sons, and all she wanted to do was to. Was to get good footage for her YouTube channel instead of just enjoy the performance of her child and of all the other students, you know, that were performing. So this point of dehuman, Humanizing her own children, I think is a. Is a really important one to highlight. And, you know, I guess anyone who does social media has to think about the ethics of, you know, what the impact on family members are. And Margi and I have these discussions all the time as it relates to our marriage and to our own kids. And it's tricky. So let's go ahead and go to the next clip about parenting where Jody talks about children acting out.

Guest 2 [01:52:56] So many of us that are parents, it's like, I don't want to have to track them down. I don't want to have to just, you know, like, take everything away from them. And it's like, human. You're not taking things away from them. What you're doing is you've handed them things that they're not managing. And so it's your job to make sure that the first thing they manage is themselves. Like, they understand how to manage themselves. They know how to be responsible for themselves. They know how to not blame. They know how to get curious, which means humble. They know how to ask questions. They know how to say, that doesn't feel right. Can you help me understand? They know how to do all that. And when you give them activities or you give them opportunities that they engage in where they can't manage themselves, they're only going to become more and more unmanageable inside of these activities.

John Dehlin [01:53:52] Any thoughts on that clip?

Natasha Helfer [01:53:56] So many thoughts. Again, there's sprinkles of truth in there. But again, the thing that comes up with humility, her value of humility, to me, that's very clearly translated to, you need to submit your power to me. That's how she's defining humility. So if a child doesn't agree or has a different idea, then you're now Breaking one of those three principles that she has. We know a lot about parenting and kids do need limits. Kids do need some level of management that should be developmentally thought through. Like a four year old is definitely going to need different management than a 17 year old who developmentally needs a lot more personal autonomy and privacy and even decision making rights. When she's talking about, you know, we give these things to have them manage them. I can see that from maybe like a Wii, you know, or like video game or even sometimes a cell phone or things like that. But a bed, like you can't adopt kids or foster kids in this country if you can't prove that you have a bed for them. That is not something that they need to manage. That is a given in regards to having appropriate care for a child, like shelter, food, clothing. Those are not things that you're helping them manage. That is your responsibility as an adult, as a grown ass parent to offer to your children. And the only reasons why you may not have some of those things are systemic poverty issues or things of that nature, but not used as discipline. We also know that long term discipline shuts down children. If you ground a kid for a month, for example, that's not really going to be as effective as grounding them for a day, believe it or not, because a month developmentally to a 12 year old or 13 year old is so far away that it just becomes this thing that they're anxious and upset about and will even find ways to skirt your discipline. So understanding how our brains respond to discipline, to consequences. And when you get to the point of being rigid, we actually have now research that shows it actually shrinks the brain. There are PTSD symptoms. You are like eliciting behavior that will either that child will more likely become a bully themselves or will be a victim of PTSD triggers. There's so much wonderful parenting research out there. And again they're using small snippets and language that feel kind of true. But what they're really saying is humongously problematic.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:01] Yeah, what I'm hearing is again, this, a really highly controlled approach to parenting. That in the end, you know, I am clearly for enlightened boundaries, not reactive boundaries, but also this. You oftentimes lose out on connection. You are disconnected from a child if your main go to is to control them. It's just, you know, how oftentimes, you know, the experience is lived with kind of human nature. I'll also say this idea of acting out is really interesting to me because so many times what you find Acting out is really any emotion or situation that makes a parent uncomfortable to hold. And that is deeply problematic. As opposed to a child feels a myriad of feelings as they develop. And in moments, what they deserve is to have a parent who is there for them to navigate those feelings, to be curious and to show up in a way of like, what do you need? What is it that you need and that you're feeling right now in your body for them to actually be able to connect, understand and integrate emotions and as part of what it means to be alive, as opposed to stigma, stigmatize shame, and have these kind of parcel parts of themselves, you know, locked away and punished and left alone, like abandoned in times when they're afraid or angry or disappointed or whatever might be uncomfortable for a parent to hold. Many times parents act out, by the way, in the way they react to a child who is merely going through age appropriate, difficult emotions.

Natasha Helfer [01:59:01] I couldn't second that more. And it's so fascinating to me that so many times I see parents who expect more emotional regulation, more emotional maturity than they themselves are exhibiting at ages 30s, 40s, 50s. And it does come from this philosophy that we've had in this country. You know, like, children are to be seen, not heard.

Natasha Helfer [01:59:22] Right.

Natasha Helfer [01:59:23] We have done a great disservice in regards to how we've parented and also how we were parented usually. So there's intergenerational trauma. And one of the things I love the most is when somebody says, well, I turned out okay and I was beat, like, did you? Because you're in my office, I can tell you five ways that you did not turn out okay.

Guest [01:59:43] Right.

Natasha Helfer [01:59:44] I mean, it's just. And again, it's a cognitive bias. And we also need to remember the incredible power of self fulfilling prophecies, which to me, that's almost a wrong term. It's community fulfilling prophecies. You don't get a self fulfilling prophecy by yourself. If you've been told you're lazy, you're stupid, you're seeking attention, you're naughty, those are community fulfilled. And then you internalize that and that becomes part of your identity because you don't have the, the mature developmental ways to manage all of that information coming in. That becomes a community fulfilling prophecy where kids will behave in ways where they're like, well, if I am lazy, this is kind of how lazy people behave. Right. It's so problematic on so many levels.

John Dehlin [02:00:31] Yeah. All right, well, let's go to the next clip where Jodi and Ruby teach us what words mean. Gerardo Is there anything you want to say before we show this clip kind of what topic it's addressing?

Gerardo Sumano [02:00:44] Just interesting what they're saying about words. And I, I think there was a problematic thing they said about that could be applied, for example, with when kids get bullied and stuff like that.

Guest 3 [02:00:55] But.

John Dehlin [02:00:56] Okay, all right, let's, let's roll the next clip.

▶ Video Clip 5

Video Clip 5 [02:01:00] This video, we are going to be talking all about words. Now words are literally letters that are strung together that make a sound. How do I know that that's actually what that word means? Well, I would go to the source of truth. I would go to God to know what is the meaning of this word.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:19] And I, I'm the one that places the meaning on it.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:22] Children today are communicating in a different way, using different meanings because we live in a world that's pushing this safetyism. And so to children are being taught that words really do hurt you, words really do harm you. And so that's the belief that's being pushed today. Hang out with a, a child for a little bit who, who has a cell phone. They're going to be using all kinds of acronyms.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:47] Yes.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:48] Like lol, tbh. I had to look that one up, to be honest.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:54] O, M, O. I didn't know what that was.

Video Clip 5 [02:01:58] N, O, Y, B.

Video Clip 5 [02:02:01] None of your business.

Video Clip 5 [02:02:03] Business.

Video Clip 5 [02:02:04] Yeah.

Video Clip 5 [02:02:04] With a smiley face.

John Dehlin [02:02:07] So Margi, you were, you had a head palm moment. What, what were you thinking?

Margi Dehlin [02:02:13] No, I'm just, I'm a little bit speechless. I'm sorry about safety ism, about that whole, that whole conversation, especially coming from this place where they're using truth so liberally and without any sense of like what they're talking about, you know, so. Yeah, yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:02:37] Even God's truth. I mean, a Catholic parent might have a very different idea about that than a Muslim parent or a Mennonite parent. Right. I mean, these. We're assuming that there's one God and one truth. And even within our own culture, I can talk to 10 different latter day Saint parents and they're going to have a very different idea of who God is and what the gospel truths are. This is why we have people who, you know, don't swim on Sunday and people who watch the super bowl on Sunday. I mean, there's lots of different ideas about what the gospel is, what truth is, what God is. So again, they just have the one and one and only way. I guess they have figured it out. It's amazing what they've been able to accomplish.

John Dehlin [02:03:23] What about this idea? They almost seem to be mocking the idea that words can hurt people.

Natasha Helfer [02:03:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:03:27] They seem to be saying it's a. It's. It's false teaching. It's unhealthy teaching that words can hurt. Did I get that wrong?

Natasha Helfer [02:03:36] No, I. I think that's exactly what they're saying.

John Dehlin [02:03:38] Can. Can words hurt?

Natasha Helfer [02:03:39] Absolutely. It's called emotional abuse with a smile, as they just said. They're very smiley about their emotional abuse.

John Dehlin [02:03:48] Yeah. I wonder why they would be trying to attack the notion that words can hurt children.

Gerardo Sumano [02:03:54] I think Jodi teaches this idea, you know, that you need to be humble, truthful, and responsible. And she teaches this idea that when other people make you feel bad, you have to be responsible for your feelings about what other people are saying, and you're responsible for feeling bad, and you're responsible for your feelings. So you shouldn't be affected by what other people do or tell you because you're responsible for what you feel.

John Dehlin [02:04:20] It's a whole choosing to be offended.

Gerardo Sumano [02:04:21] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:04:22] You know, someone can say words to you, but you shouldn't let that hurt you. You shouldn't choose to be offended. But when you're talking about that in the context, I mean, it's problematic to talk about that even with adults. But when you're. When you're a parent and you're talking about children, that seems deeply problematic. Right.

Natasha Helfer [02:04:41] I wonder if they're going to come across some words that hurt them in their current situation.

John Dehlin [02:04:46] Again, they're choosing to be offended.

Natasha Helfer [02:04:49] I'm guessing they're going to have some issues with that.

Margi Dehlin [02:04:52] Again, I feel like it's mic drop, Natasha.

John Dehlin [02:04:54] Mic drop.

Margi Dehlin [02:04:55] It's like another. It's just like another tool to dehumanize someone. It's just sort of like, I can say what I want. I. I can. And in light of what's happened in their family, with their children, it's really dark because it's kind of like this. If you have a problem with it, if. Oh, if. If you're suffering or you're having an issue, that's. You set yourself free. That's not reality. That's not what is actually happening. Which just. It makes it feel like the adults or the people who have power and control in the situation get to reality, make. And that's just not how existence works, you know, in the larger. It's kind of. It's an attempt to kind of dehumanize and escape accountability for other people's, like, experience of you.

John Dehlin [02:05:47] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:05:48] And again, there's some truths. I mean, obviously, all of us should get to a place where we can emotionally regulate when we get constructive criticism. Right. That's something that most of us probably need to work on, but that's not really what they're talking about. And also developmentally, we keep growing our brains until about 25, 26. When you're talking about an 8 year old, there's a lot of development left that we need to have patience and maturity to manage and not expect an 8 year old to be at our developmental level.

Deeply Harmful Views on Sensitive Social Topics

John Dehlin [02:06:20] Yeah. All right, well, now it gets even. Believe it or not, it gets way more disturbing.

Natasha Helfer [02:06:24] Oh, man.

John Dehlin [02:06:25] We're going to talk about Jody Hildebrandt's comments on rape. So kind of a content warning. Practice self care with yourself or with people who are listening or viewing because she's gonna be talking about abortion and rape in this segment.

Guest 2 [02:06:43] So if you don't want to have a baby, then do not use your agency to engage in sexual contact. Now, I know, know that nobody talks about that anymore. Like nobody, nobody. I don't hear that from anyone. Like abstinence, abstinence. That used to be around when I was a kid, abstinence. But nobody says that anymore because everybody feels like they have a right to just do whatever they want and then they have these, these consequences, these outcomes of STDs or pregnancy or, or, you know, rape. And they, they, they don't want to take any responsibility for their participation in it. Now when I say rape, what I'm talking about is you engage in a sexual relationship and then you may say stop. And the person's like, I'm not stopping. I'm gonna take what I want. I'm not talking about like someone attacks you and forces you. I'm talking about your participation. And then at some point you say, I don't want to, I don't want to do this anymore. And you know, because the person you're with just says, I don't care what you want because that's the kind of person you've chosen to hook up with. So Mom, I am saying this with a so much love to you. Now you already have your child. You've already.

John Dehlin [02:08:14] Natasha.

Natasha Helfer [02:08:14] Oh my God. I mean, I'm sorry, but this is just like this video alone, in my view, would be grounds for taking her license away.

Margi Dehlin [02:08:24] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:08:25] This is so problematic. So first of all, you do have the right to sexually develop. Most of us in high demand. Religions and cultures do not offer that right to children, adolescents and emerging adults, even adults. That's an ethical reality. I am trained to value folks religious values. And in a session, I will do that. That does not stop me from advocating against religious practices that actually go against normative, healthy human sexual development. So your children do have a right to sexually develop. And there's lots of research and lists even that you can go find about what is appropriate sexual development at the age of 8, at the age of 10, at the age of 13, at the age of 19. So that is a right that is espoused by the World Health Organization and the World association for Sexual Health. Those are rights that you are taking away oftentimes. So that's one thing. But when it comes to the concern of rape, first and foremost, this again, we're completely in non trauma informed rhetoric right here because you're ignoring that. A very common, a very common way to deal with stress with trigger is fawning and freezing. Those are very common ways for your instinctual body to start behaving and to cope so that you can survive. Those are survival mechanisms that are wired so instinctually in us that we can't even think. It is no longer a cognitive process. It is an instinctual process. Because unlike the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who once used to say it is better to die, sorry, better to die than to be raped, your body has never agreed with that. Your wiring as a human being has never agreed with that asinine principle that has caused so much trauma in so many people's lives. So when you fawn or flirt or freeze as a response to not knowing what to do in a sexual situation where your consent is no longer on the table, that is an appropriate way to survive. And as far as abstinence, lady, that's all we do, that's all this country offers, is abstinence based sexual education. We do not offer comprehensive sexual education. Countries that offer comprehensive sexual education have much less abortions, have much less rape and criminal sexual acts, have much more consensual acts and have later ages of sexual debuts, meaning penetrative intercourse. So get your head on straight and don't use your credentials to misinform and traumatize people. This is what makes me insanely angry. Because it's not her who she's hurting. It's all of you who are listening to her and who see her as an authority figure over people who actually have the actual studies and research and evidence behind their names. And we're seeing people fall for this kind of stuff all over the United States. It is incredulous and maddening to me.

John Dehlin [02:12:25] Yeah, yeah. And if you viewers and listeners think that this is just Jody Hildebrandt connections. Therapists like Jody Hildebrandt are very prevalent in Utah, Idaho, Arizona and anywhere. And I'm sure in other high demand religions. You know, Evangelical Christianity, the Bible Belt, Orthodox Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism. You're going to get the same incompetence. And Natasha, I just have to say I had this feeling when you were speaking so educatedly and passionately and with so much authority. And we alluded to this at the beginning, but I think about the difference between what you offer in terms of education on mental health and families and sexuality. I think about the difference between that and what Jody Hildebrandt is offering. And then I think about the fact that Jody Hildebrandt has been proactively recommended by hundreds of bishops all along the Wasatch front for decades as the go to person for mental health, relationships, parenting and sexuality. Jody Hildebrand has been the go to therapist for top Mormon leadership for decades.

Natasha Helfer [02:13:49] While I was excommunicated, I was excommunicated so that people would not trust my ideas, my thoughts. And they're not my ideas. They're not my ideas. I have just brought ideas to my community from trusted professional sources. And if you think that I can get a 2 million following or that I can charge what some of these people are charging. Yeah, no, it's very difficult because it's not popular. So this whole persecution complex, like, oh, we're the. No, you're the popular ones. Like, people listen to you because of that confirmation bias. I'm not popular. This is hard stuff. What I teach is difficult because it does go against sometimes people's beliefs or people's traditions or people's ideas of, you know, and when it comes to our kids, you're enacting the biggest fear of all. Right, all of us. Even I think most what I would consider abusive parents are in a lot of ways trying to protect their children. Like, this hurts me more than it hurts you is kind of a philosophy. And that can go awry in some really awful ways like we've seen here. But when you elicit the fear of a parent, parents have a hard time challenging some of those old traditions. One of my favorite, if we're gonna get Mormon, one of my favorite scriptures in the Book of Mormon is stop your father's shitty traditions. That's the Natasha Helfer version, not the new James version or whatever version the Book of Mormon is it. But that's actually a very wise. That's a very wise scripture. Do not continue traditions that we know harm. And it can Also be very painful to look at yourself as a harmful parent. Most of us want to think of ourselves as good parents. We love our children. You hear that all the time from this Ruby. Right, that she loves her children. She wants to do what's best for them. I think in some ways that's sincere. There's probably some sincerity in there. But it's difficult then to look at yourself in the face, which is the accountability that they're telling everybody else to do. And to say, this isn't working, I'm actually possibly harming my child. That takes humility. That takes more than just listening to one influencer. That takes being able to look at a variety of resources. What do a variety of resources say about this? How do I trust a variety of ideas? That's going to be much more beneficial than trusting one person, one idea of God, one religion.

John Dehlin [02:16:41] Yeah. And I just think it's a travesty that the Mormon Church had you as an asset with so much expertise, so much experience, so much knowledge and wisdom, and the Mormon Church leaders chose to excommunicate you, to silence you, to discredit you. And for decades, Jody Hildebrandt has been allowed to run amok without any that we know of consequence from the Mormon Church. It's just bewildering and deeply saddening for someone like me who cares about the Mormon people. Like I'm sure you do too.

Natasha Helfer [02:17:16] I care deeply about the Mormon people, about the Latter Day Saint people, about however they want to be termed. But this is happening at much lower levels of maybe what I want to say, frequency, not frequency, intensity, at every sex addiction center we have here in Utah, which the church refers to. That's why I'm saying this is a systemic problem. And people are taught to trust their church leaders and trust their version of God and their current doctrinal interpretations. That is not leading to relational health. The amount of couples that I've seen divorce and have true trauma around the pornography dilemma in my community compared to mainstream couples who are managing the pornography dilemma as well. But the ways that we have been taught to react to pornography viewing in a heterosexual marriage is so detrimental and leads to divorce more than almost anything else I've seen in my practice.

John Dehlin [02:18:25] Yeah, yeah. And so if you want a licensed marriage and family therapist, a licensed sex therapist, check out Natasha Helfer and Symmetry Solutions, and check out the Mormon Mental Health association, because you'll find therapists there who are not only culturally competent, but who have sworn an oath to uphold the ethics of their profession.

Natasha Helfer [02:18:54] Imagine that.

John Dehlin [02:18:57] Okay, now we're going to go to a couple more quick video clips that kind of just. Is Jody Hildebrandt going far beyond where I think any credible mental health professional should go who's acting in a mental health capacity. We're going to now have Jody show her, share her thoughts and feelings about, you know, a topic that is just crazy, her thoughts on immigration. Here we go.

▶ Video Clip 6

Video Clip 6 [02:19:28] And these people are not victims, by the way. I just want you to see that the people who are coming across the border illegally, they know what they're doing is illegal. It's ill legal, like stealing stuff from a store illegal. They're coming into America, America illegally. And so they're not victims. So don't feel sorry for the people who are being moved around the country. But there's other comments from the other side who are allowing these borders to be open. When they're in front of their house, they're like, this is so horrible that you are demoralizing human beings and using them as political pawns. It's like, no, no. You want them in here so you can use them as a political pawn so that they'll vote for you and all sorts of other reasons you want them in here. You're using them as a political pawn.

Video Clip 6 [02:20:16] That's what Desantis was doing. He's putting in front, literally in front of where Biden lives. Here. Here are your choices.

Video Clip 6 [02:20:26] Here are your choices. Here they are. Let me reflect to you and Jose and. And Esmeralda.

Video Clip 6 [02:20:33] And they're all there. And then they say they don't want to take accountability for their choices. And so they flip it and say, you're doing this to me.

Video Clip 6 [02:20:41] And they use their mind, they use their intellect, their language, their power, positions of power to say, how dare you do this to these poor people?

Video Clip 6 [02:20:51] Yeah, that's the lie. It is a lie.

John Dehlin [02:20:55] So, Gerardo, I want to give you the first shot at responding because, you know, you are an immigrant. Is that right?

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:01] Yeah. Yeah. It's hard because it's a very political topic, and it's a very complex but complex topic. And problem, I think what I would say is that. That it's complex and they are making it sound like very simple. It's kind of maddening the way they kind of just group everyone that crosses the border illegally as these people that are not victims. You don't know that a lot of these people actually have been victims of abuse in their countries and are actually looking for asylum. And believe it or not, it's really hard to come in legally into this country. I think most Americans are unaware and uneducated about how hard the legal immigration process is. How. Yeah. And how it's almost impossible for the majority of people who actually need to immigrate to the United States to actually come here. The people that end up making it usually are people who had the means to come and not maybe sometimes not necessarily even the people that had the worst. That doesn't mean that the people that came here didn't need to come or leave their countries. Right. But yeah, it's kind of sad that how they are. I mean, it's obvious that their group is an echo chamber and a lot of the people that follow them have these ideas and so kind of, kind of sad how they're encouraging this misinformation about immigration.

John Dehlin [02:22:54] To what extent, to what extent did you feel like she was speaking disrespectfully? Like when she starts mentioning Jose and what Esmeralda, like what, what feeling did that give you in terms of just her level of compassion and respect for. Oh yeah, for immigrants, obviously.

Gerardo Sumano [02:23:11] No empathy there. Like, I wonder if she's ever met an immigrant before or someone that actually needed to immigrate to the United States. No respect at all. Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:23:24] This is white privilege and white supremacy at its finest. I mean, if you're going to say the names, at least learn how to say them correctly. It's Esmeralda. Most people in the world know more than one language. And quite frankly, Americans in general are very ignorant and very uneducated when it comes to world politics, world religions having capacity to speak more than one language because we have given into this kind of narcissistic idea that English and Americans are just the best. And if we're going to talk about truth, big capital T, truth. Where's God in this? Where in the New Testament or in Scriptures? Can you show me anything that supports this kind of idea where it isn't more the likelihood that we're being taught to bring in those who are suffering and those who are refugees and those who are. I mean, Christ was a refugee. So this is what boggles the mind when people get so self righteous and use their religion to basically discriminate. I'm like, with what authority? And then the legal argument, I don't care if it's legal, I care if it's ethical. We've had tons of legalities. It was legal to kill Mormons. It was legal to keep people from marrying a black person from a white person. We've had all kinds of legal things that need to Be checked.

John Dehlin [02:25:00] Slavery was legal.

Natasha Helfer [02:25:01] Slavery was legal.

John Dehlin [02:25:02] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:25:03] I could care less about what's currently legal. We need to be having a conversation about what's ethical and do our laws reflect our current values and ethics. So this whole legal argument to me is just silly. It's just an excuse.

John Dehlin [02:25:17] I mean, it's important to obey the

Natasha Helfer [02:25:19] law, of course, but it's not an ethical argument for why we should or should not have compassion for immigrants. And you tell me the minute that your children are starving, not because it's self placed, but actually starving, you tell me the minute that your family's in danger and you tell me what you wouldn't be willing to do to survive or to thrive as a family unit. So it just lacks all kinds of Christian compassion. What I consider Christianity to be. I don't recognize American Christianity anymore. As far as, you know, what, what we're spouting in so many of these circles. Yeah, it's anti Christian.

John Dehlin [02:26:07] And oddly, the Mormon Church of all churches tends to be very pro immigrant, generally speaking. Have you had a different experience there?

Gerardo Sumano [02:26:18] The.

John Dehlin [02:26:18] Not, not the rank and file. I mean, the church itself, the leadership.

Gerardo Sumano [02:26:24] It's complicated because, I mean, there was a time when the church obviously encouraged people to come to Zion.

Guest 3 [02:26:33] Right.

Gerardo Sumano [02:26:34] And Europeans were coming here and the church liked that. But when the church started expanding into Latin America, then all of a sudden it kind of stopped and there was a prophet who said, oh, never mind, Zion is in your own country. Stop coming here, don't gather here anymore. So, yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of complex. But as far as, like, I mean, they don't prevent people who are undocumented to, to get baptized into the church. Right. And they allow them to serve missions, they allow them to serve in leadership and they don't count that as like against their worthiness. I mean, that's a positive. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:17] Really quickly, Natasha, what about this idea, you know, they're putting themselves forward as mental health professionals. What about the ethics of being so clearly politically partisan on such a polarizing issue in such a disrespectful way in the capacity as someone presenting as a mental health professional?

Natasha Helfer [02:27:43] Yeah, that, that's obviously very tricky because I know I take polarizing political stances when it comes to healthy sexuality because I play a role as an advocate. Right. But as a therapist in a therapy space, that is not to be had. You are not supposed to be, you know, eliciting your own views or values or belief systems onto the, onto the people that are in, are in Session with you.

John Dehlin [02:28:10] Yeah, the lang. The language I remember sort of conceptualizing is, you know, you put your mental health professional hat on. You're avoiding political discourse. You're avoiding polarizing or offensive language. You're all about the client, and you're client focused, and you're about helping them become empowered and develop insight. It's not about you. And then if you're going to get political, you take off your mental health professional hat and you put on your hat of Internet, you know, spokesperson. Now, it's a little bit complicated because many of the mental health professional ethical codes actually include advocacy, public advocacy as part of your ethical code. But that would be empirically based advocacy and mental health advocacy, not blind, gross, ignorant discrimination. Discrimination and partisan.

Natasha Helfer [02:29:09] The ethical code not to be discriminated, to not discriminate against all kinds of folks, including socioeconomic status, including immigrant status, including race, gender, including poverty, sexual orientation,

John Dehlin [02:29:21] all of those things, Gender identity.

Natasha Helfer [02:29:22] And again, going back to the medical model, a doctor cannot turn away somebody from a medical needed event because they're an immigrant. They can't say, oh, I have this belief and therefore I can't. No, you need to follow the medical model that anybody who walks into that room, including a criminal who just shot somebody or something. We see this in ER shows all the time that everybody gets treatment that's ethically humane. And so that's no different in mental health treatment. And yet how is a therapist like this going to sit with a refugee family? I mean, I wouldn't want her to sit with a refugee family. I wouldn't want her to be licensed because she can't sit with a refugee family and understand their needs and have compassion. She's pretty much just stating it.

John Dehlin [02:30:12] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:30:12] Yeah.

Dangerous Rhetoric Targeting LGBTQ Youth

John Dehlin [02:30:14] All right, so now we're getting to maybe some of the most disturbing and unethical clips of all. Believe it or not, it actually might get a little bit worse. This next clip is Jody talking about same sex sexuality or kind of the LGBT population. So let's roll that clip.

Guest 2 [02:30:36] Okay. I fear that he may have become corrupted, particularly the app Tick Tock that I hear from other women in my church is propagating homosexual lifestyle. Yes, that's true. It is. I hold myself partly to blame for this as I allowed him free access to his smartphone since age 15. Oh, mom. So you said I feel partly to blame. This isn't about blame. Blame's not going to help you. You are culpable. You are responsible. You put into that boy's hand something very dangerous. Much more dangerous than a weapon. Much more dangerous than a gun. You know, people say, well, guns kill. Well, cell phones will kill you spiritually,

John Dehlin [02:31:19] Natasha.

Natasha Helfer [02:31:20] Oh, you're going to me sorry.

John Dehlin [02:31:22] Because you're audibly moaning.

Natasha Helfer [02:31:27] Oh, so information, I guess, is deadly. That's really what she's saying. She would rather have her children conform to her beliefs with a gun toting, I don't know, holster. Than to offer information. This idea that the Internet, I mean, yes, of course, Internet. There's a lot of information on there. There's a lot of information that makes parents uncomfortable, sexually explicit materials, different ideologies, all kinds of things. But to think that you're going to go through parenthood, which is until the age of 18 in today's American culture, without handing your child a cell phone or having any access to the Internet, and then they're going to somehow magically know how to manage all of that when they turn 19 and leave your home or 18, is just ridiculous. Right? This idea that we can protect our children from information. You cannot protect your children from information. And she's right. Today, more than ever, all the information is out there. But you can manage. You can role model information. You can teach your own values as a parent. And yeah, if you're going to have discriminatory, racist, homophobic, transphobic beliefs, and you may pass those along to your children, which is tragic in my perspective, but more than likely, your kids may not have those beliefs. That's the trend. Sorry, sorry. Not sorry.

Gerardo Sumano [02:32:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:58] Does anybody note the irony of prominent social media influencers with millions of subscribers decrying the influence of social media on children as they're parading their children around on their social media accounts? Does anybody note that irony at all?

Gerardo Sumano [02:33:18] That?

John Dehlin [02:33:18] Just me. That was bizarre. Yeah. Go to the next clip and then we'll talk more about the LGBT stuff. It gets worse.

Guest 2 [02:33:29] Is your husband upset? Are you upset? Yes. You are. It's not just about that he's made this declaration. It's also that you've been being lied to. Your hard earned. You know, the evidence of how you've been taking care of him, like the. The money you've spent, the roof over his head, the work that both of you've done to give him the things that will make his life comfortable. He has exploited all of those things and he has been going places that are very dangerous and destructive to his little soul. Now, if he's an adult or when he becomes adult and he chooses to behave in whatever lifestyle style he chooses to behave in, that is absolutely his agency to do so. However, when he is a child, when he's inside your home, and if he's in your home until he's 27, whenever he is in your home, he is to abide and be obedient by your rules, in your home, by your expectations in your home. You are the guardian of your home. You are the gatekeeper of your home. And your son and your other son are to follow what it is that you ask them to do inside your home. Your job is to guide them in principles of truth. And your responsibility is to be really clear about principles of truth. And it sounds like you have thought you were teaching principles of by going to church. I don't know what the rest of your life is like. I don't know how connected you guys are. I don't know if you talk about truth, I don't know if you talk about response. I don't know all the details. And I, I. It sounds like there hasn't been a lot of that kind of discussion. And if there has, good for you. This young man has just chosen to be defiant. And in today's world, people would hear that and say, well, you can't say he's being defiant. This just who he is. And the truth is, is that that's not who he is. There's not a soul on the planet that was born towards something that is violates principles of truth. So none of us are born to kill. None of us are born to be attracted to animals. We're not attracted to, to want to be sexual with the earth. And we're not drawn, if you will, to the same gender. Now can we override that? Yeah, we can. And it's called lust. I can lust after anything. And lust is inside marriages between men and women. Lust is inside marriages between men and men and women and women. I mean, I call it marriage because now it's, it's legal on the planet to be married. People can be lustful with animals. They can be lustful with inanimate objects. You can lust after anything. It's, it's a form of selfishness and aggression and hatred. Hatred primarily towards myself and then secondly towards other people that are out on the planet. And people can change. I know many people who have been caught up in this world who have been deceived and gone into massive distortion and were lusting inside the homosexual world, the transvestite world, and they have said, you know what? I don't want to live like this anymore. And they use their agency to come back to truth. So your son is absolutely, absolutely capable of coming back into truth. And it is going to be really important that you and your husband learn how to live principles of truth and that you invite him through boundaries to come back to truth. So how can you do that? First of all, your husband has to stop acting out his anger. He can be angry, but he needs to.

John Dehlin [02:37:37] I'm going to stop it there, if that's all right. So, yeah, highly, highly disturbing and unethical rant about same sex sexuality. I've got a lot of things I want to say, but Natasha, do you want to take the first swing?

Guest [02:37:55] Hmm.

Natasha Helfer [02:37:58] I don't even know where to start. I mean, one of the things I'll say right off the bat is your children don't owe you anything for having provided shelter, food, clothing. If you don't want to do that, don't be a parent. Let's start with the accountability there. If you chose or are a parent, those are just your responsibilities. Your children don't need to thank you for that or owe you anything for that. And they definitely don't owe you their identity, which is really what she's conflating here with behavior. Sexual orientation doesn't start at the age of 18. Gender identity doesn't start at the age of 18. Even religious beliefs and ideas about just your own truth don't start at the age of 18. And, and just the misinformation is just rampant.

John Dehlin [02:38:52] Yeah. What about, what about rampant? Conflating same sex sexuality with like sodomizing the dirt or animals?

Natasha Helfer [02:39:01] It's just. So these kinds of arguments again are just, they're distortions, they're cognitive distortions. You can go look up what these distortions are. Clinically, they're fallacies. They're comparing something to something that isn't even applicable.

John Dehlin [02:39:20] But this highlights one really key difference in ethical based, empirically based treatment, mental health treatment and religion. Because the Mormon Church for 50 plus years taught that homosexuality was unnatural, that it was a perversion, that no one would choose it, that it's sin and that it's evil.

Natasha Helfer [02:39:42] It still teaches that. It just has changed from full blown teaching to behavioral teaching, but it still teaches that.

John Dehlin [02:39:49] Yeah. So she, a Mormon therapist, is sort of forced to go with what the prophet says or to go with what their ethical guidelines say. And if you're a believer, you're going to go with your beliefs every time over what your prophet says because you literally swear oaths and covenants in the temple to obey and follow the prophet.

Natasha Helfer [02:40:09] Yeah. I just gave a presentation, a keynote presentation at uamft Utah association for Marriage and Family Therapists. I've been a UAMFT member my entire career and I was bringing up these ethical considerations and some of the comments I got from people who sat through my presentation, which I'm glad they at least sat through that discomfort, were very telling. You know, one of them was like, well, so you're telling me I can't be LDS and be a therapist. I'm not saying that there's lots of LDS folks who are therapists, but you do need to figure out how to wrestle with this dilemma. This is a dilemma. Your church is having discriminatory misinformation spouted amongst millions of members. And how are you going to manage that as a professional ethical therapist? That is a conversation that was very uncomfortable as I presented just the just in May. Nobody wants to look at that. Well, not nobody. Many.

John Dehlin [02:41:15] And her rant is particularly egregious given the LGBTQ suicide epidemic that has hit Utah and other heavily Mormon populated states over the past 10 or 15 years. We all know that this population, highly religious, high demand religion, LGBT youth, are very, very susceptible to depression and anxiety and suicidality. And as a mental health professional, Jody is number one, violating the ethics of her profession, because I don't care which professional association, The American Medical association, the American Psychiatric association, the American Pediatric association, the American Psychological association, social work, marriage and family therapist, counseling psychology, it doesn't matter. They all affirm same sex sexuality as a normal and natural variant of human behavior. Not a choice, not fixable. By going to Jody's connection sessions to clear your distortions and following her truth, and any attempt to try and overtly change your sexual orientation leads to depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide. And the number one highly most highly correlated behavior associated with LGBTQ youth suicide is the lack of parental support and affirmation. If you go to the Family acceptance project by Dr. Caitlin Ryan, you'll find that youth that feel highly rejected from their parents for their same sex sexuality are something like three times more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, three times more likely to engage in risky drug use, and eight times more likely to have suicidal ideation and or complete attempt or complete suicidal actions. That's what happens when parents do not support their LGBTQ youth. And here Jody is calling being LGBT a choice, calling it a distortion, likening it to sodomizing animals or having sex with an ant hill. And she's encouraging lethal behavior on the part of the parents. As a professed mental health professional, this is deadly. It's not just unethical it's not just irresponsible. This is deadly advice she's giving people.

Margi Dehlin [02:43:52] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:43:52] And I would just say that if you are queer and you've listened to this just because you're listening to our program, please self care. Because even if you know that these are horrible things by a horrible person, it's still there. You still just heard it. It's still in your lived experience.

Margi Dehlin [02:44:13] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:44:13] In fact, turn some of this off. Don't listen to some of this.

Margi Dehlin [02:44:18] Yeah, yeah. There's this sense of, like, you don't belong here. The thing that really stood out to me about that video in particular is her sense of, like, she did it a little bit in the. Protecting kids from their phone or information too. But she really does assert this idea of, like, a different reality. It's like, there are no droids here. This does not exist. This isn't a real thing.

John Dehlin [02:44:49] It's a distortion.

Natasha Helfer [02:44:50] Right?

Margi Dehlin [02:44:50] Yeah. And that by doing that and then making it like the person involved, their character, it's like their character fault. It's this attempt to sort of mess with what is, like, what is actually reality. And then there is, like, one part in that video where she. Which is really disturbing, knowing that she is a therapist, where she actually says something to the effect of, like, I know your son. Like, I'll tell you who your son is and who your son is really attracted to. He's actually not attracted to. And it's just absolutely. In. In this context, the lack of curiosity, the lack of background, the lack of questions, things that normally you associate with kind of a therapist.

Natasha Helfer [02:45:38] The lack of decency.

Margi Dehlin [02:45:40] Yes. The lack of respect, the lack of, again, you know, humanity. A sense of humanity. None of that is here.

Natasha Helfer [02:45:51] And zero clinical soundness. Zero clinical soundness.

Guest 2 [02:45:55] No skill.

Margi Dehlin [02:45:56] And no sense of, like, basic education. The sense of, like, a basic education in the things she's talking about.

John Dehlin [02:46:04] And again, what does it mean that Jody Hildebrandt is one of the most referred to therapists by the Mormon Church in the history of modern mental health? Every single person that has written me a narrative about the abuse they experienced at the hands or the mouth of Jody Hildebrandt said that their Mormon bishop recommended them because she works with Mormon apostles and helps establish mental health policy for the Mormon Church. You know, really quickly, I just want to show that in. In any of the mental health fields, there are published guidelines for dealing with LGBTQ clients. As an example, I've got a, you know, document here called Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients. And, you'll see guidelines and, you know, they say things like, you know. Psychologists understand that homosexuality and bisexuality are not indicative of mental illness. Psychologists are encouraged to recognize how their attitudes and knowledge about LGBT issues may be relevant to assessment and treatment and seek consultation or make appropriate referrals when indicated. Psychological psychologists strive to understand the ways in which social stigmatization, prejudice, discrimination, and violence poses risk to the mental health and well being of LGBTQ clients. Psychologists strive to understand how inaccurate or prejudicial views of homosexuality or bisexuality may affect the client's presentation in treatment and the therapeutic process. And it goes on and talks about how psychologists are encouraged to recognize the particular life issues or challenges that are related to the multiple and often conflicting cultural norms, values, and beliefs that LGBTQ members of racial and ethnic minorities face. Psychologists strive to understand the special problems and risks that exist for LGBTQ and youth. And finally, psychologists are encouraged to increase their knowledge and understanding of homosexuality and bisexuality through continuing education, education, training, supervision, and consultation. And why. Why does Jody Hildebrand even need to worry about ongoing education? Because she has the truth and she doesn't live in distortion. And she knows what the truth, Capital T, truth is because her prophet, her Mormon prophet, her Mormon prophets here and revelators have told her the position. And that's why, again, we're beating a dead horse here. Gerardo, let's give you a chance to opine.

Final Expert Reactions and Closing Thoughts

Gerardo Sumano [02:48:41] I don't think I have much to say here.

Guest 2 [02:48:42] Someday, Zen.

John Dehlin [02:48:43] Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [02:48:44] Other than. Yeah, I mean, it's awful, but, yeah, it's deadly. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:48:48] Yeah.

Natasha Helfer [02:48:49] Well, and this is something I've been preaching to therapists for decades as far as ethical presentations I've given. Is that. That idea that you can refer to somebody else, that's not there for your bigotry, that's there for your competence. Right. So like you said, like, I'm not competent in treating eating disorders. I would refer, but I can't be like, oh, I just don't believe homosexuals should be homosexual. So I'm going to refer. No, those guidelines are not there to protect you as a therapist. You, as a therapist, are supposed to reach the basic expectations of professional standards. And that means that you are not to discriminate against LGBTQ folks. And if you don't think that you can do that, this may not be the profession for you. This is not the profession for you.

Margi Dehlin [02:49:34] Yeah, 100%.

Guest 3 [02:49:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:37] Well, I hate to say it, but fortunately, Jody Hildebrandt and Ruby Frankie are in jail. So assuming that they're.

Natasha Helfer [02:49:44] Hallelujah that's my truth.

John Dehlin [02:49:46] I don't, I don't take joy in people's pain and suffering, but as long as they stay in jail, they won't be able to harm more people. So I hope if they're found guilty, I hope they spend a lot of time in jail. But if they do, that won't solve the problem because the Mormon Church still has its list of recommended therapists and their therapists and coaches all throughout the Mormon Church and through other high demand religions that still don't behave ethically, don't follow the ethical norms of their professions. And good therapists and competent therapists are being kicked out and excommunicated and threatened and harassed. So that's the dilemma we're in. Today's Mormon Stories episode has been to at least shine a spotlight on it. We really appreciate the 3,500 people that have been joining us throughout this live stream. We have more to cover on this. We're going to be interviewing tomorrow morning Jody Hildebrandt's niece who was physically and psychologically abused by Jody. It's going to be a harrowing, harrowing story. We invite you to join us for that. And then we're going to also have at least one to two more victims of Jody Hildebrandt's therapy, marriage therapy, workshops and coaching. And you know, just to give you a taste for that, here's one, here's one example. I worked with Jody for over a decade, on and off for my own sex love addiction recovery. She told me to use a 9 millimeter gun to shoot my child's phone in front of them. She severely shamed me for chronic illness. Ruby convinced all upper tier women that I was a manipulative, medical attention seeking drug addict. I am still trying to work through that shame. I was shamed for not leaving my husband or kicking out my minor child for being gay. If my story can help, I would like to share. So we will be covering more of Jody Hildebrandt and Ruby Frankie's victims not because we want to pile on them, but because this problem is much, much bigger than Jody Hildebrandt connections and Ruby Frankie. This is a Mormon Church epidemic and we got to cover it. So Natasha, we know you gotta go. Will you please give a final sort of listing of ways that people can reach out to you or other competent therapists to get the support they need within a Mormon context?

Resources, Advocacy, and Farewell from the Guests

Natasha Helfer [02:52:17] Yeah, absolutely. So my practice is Symmetry Solutions. We can be found@ symmetrypath.com I'm the founder of the Mormon Mental Health association, which takes all of these issues very seriously. And we have trainings on this every year for professionals who join us. We want to support professionals who either want to be a Latter Day Saint or work with Latter Day Saints. We're not asking them their worthiness status, we're asking them their clinical status. Right. As far as where they stand on these issues. So we feel comfortable referring to these clinicians. I would also do a shout out for asect A A S E C t dot org you can find a sex therapist according to your zip code, as well as aamft, the Marriage and Family Therapy Association.

John Dehlin [02:53:04] Beautiful. All right, Natasha, we know you gotta run, so thank you so much for joining us.

Natasha Helfer [02:53:08] Thank you so much for having me. I'm very passionate, as you can tell. I think this is something that is very dangerous for our youth, for our marriages and for our own sexual health and identities. So it's really important for people to try to start listening to something different about this.

John Dehlin [02:53:26] Well, thanks for your work and for your advocacy. We love you and we wish you success and we hope lots of people reach out. Margi, I'm also going to just say that, you know, you're not going to be advocating for clients on a show like this and we haven't really tried to beat that drum of ever trying to generate clients for you. But I do want to say that you do great work and I know many therapists, actually, Margi, that go to. To you for their own support. And one of the things that we need to do is we need to highlight, and maybe in a future episode talk about the difference between therapy and coaching. Because on the one hand, therapists are to be sought after if you are seeking treatment for a mental illness. And a coach should never be treating mental illness. But coaches still can have a role and coaches do still operate, good coaches still operate under an ethical code. So, Margi, do you want to speak really quickly to coaching and the role that it can and should play in people? Like people in our audience or people navigating a faith transition?

Margi Dehlin [02:54:45] Yeah, I can speak to that really quickly. I mean, ideally a coach, if, you know, someone went to see a coach or when someone comes to see me, that's something I hit the first session when someone sees me. The difference between coaching and therapy in that I do not treat mental health diagnoses as a, as a coach. I can work in tandem with a therapist that is for a client that has, is. Is, you know, being treated for some type of diagnosis. But coaching is very much about assisting in Healing and wellness with practices and according to the client's values. The ethics that I was trained in my program mirror much of what is in therapy. And we can go into that if you want. But a lot of it is like dual relationships, why they're problematic. Ethics around, you know, I address in the first session what will happen if something in a session comes out that's out of my depth seeking support from a therapist and I speak to it right then and try to get the client additional help. You know, ethics around being unbiased, checking our biases and actually working with a client's values as opposed to our own values. Those are a few that kind of come up. Confidentiality, Confidentiality is huge. That's another one I hit in the first session. And this can allow for. I do believe in coaching as you know, something that can be tremendously helpful and motivating to people in their lives. I think this can help people self advocate and know what to look for in a coach that ideally when you're having a conversation with a coach that you're interested in seeing, they should be able to speak about this very easily with you. Something that is helpful too is you know, certification programs. Normally when they're icf, you know, certified programs that you go through, oftentimes it's because they do include these types of ethics and level like trainings around professionalism. So that's something else that you can decide if you want. But ultimately it's really up to a lot of the self advocacy of the clients for the potential clients.

John Dehlin [02:57:22] All right, well, Margi, thank you so much. Margi won't ever plug herself, but her website is beautyinthenow.org and she usually runs at a pretty full load. But if you need support, particularly as a, as a woman going through life transitions, faith transitions, grieving, relationship issues, parenting issues, Margi does great work. So thanks for joining us today, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:49] Yes, thank you.

John Dehlin [02:57:50] And Gerardo, you produced this episode in this episode wouldn't have happened without you. Do you want to give any final thoughts?

Gerardo Sumano [02:57:57] Yeah, well, I, I was really happy with all the people that were watching. Looking at the comments, I saw a lot of people saying, oh, this is incredible. I'm taking notes, I'm learning so much. So it's really cool how many people can learn more about this issue because we're not just react. We didn't just react, but you were able, you guys were able to just teach a lot of good science based information here. So really happy about it.

Natasha Helfer [02:58:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:58:26] Well, Gerardo, you do so much for us in the Opus Stories foundation, from doing our thumbnails and graphical design to producing episodes, to co hosting, to strategic work. So thank you so much for all you do. We couldn't do it without you.

Gerardo Sumano [02:58:41] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:58:42] And cinematography, all this great lighting and camera work is Hiroto's work. So thank you, brother.

Gerardo Sumano [02:58:47] Yeah, no problem.

John Dehlin [02:58:48] Thanks. Also huge thanks to Julia who does our time codes and show notes and our shorts on TikTok and Instagram. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel, our Facebook channel, our TikTok channel, our Instagram channel. Please like this episode. We've got 3,000 people. If 3,000 people like this episode right now, it would shoot it up in the TikTok YouTube. Sorry, the YouTube algorithms and would help this video gets shared with more people. So please subscribe and like our stuff. We always appreciate the super chats that we get. You can donate to us through super Chats. Thanks to Life Take Two. She writes, I suffered for 44 years with anxiety, depression, PTSD and body dysmorphia. Resigned from the church five years ago. Problem solved. Cured. Not a joke. Life Take 2 also has a TikTok channel that's worth checking out. Also, huge thanks to Carol Barnard for her super chat, Kayla Diane, and then finally Debbie Donovan. Religion and mental health are like vinegar and oil. That's her opinion. We're not anti, you know, religion on this channel. We're not anti Mormon, but we are pro informed consent and we're pro mental health. You can always donate through the Super Chat feature. The main way that we are financially sustainable is through the donate button on mormonstories.org so if you value content like this, if you want to see it continue, we pay our staff and we often pay for our co hosts and panelists to work on these episodes. So we need your money to keep this going. So if you value what we do, Please go to MormonStories.org, click on the Donate button, become a monthly donor and we'll keep doing this. We lose 10 or 20 donors every month because their financial situation changes. They move on, they lose interest, whatever it is. If we don't replace those canceling donors with new donors, then we have to start cutting services and shut things down. So please support us. Please become a supporter. If you can support all the other great channels out there. I do want to say that Jordan and McKay are doing some great work in this space. So check out what they've got going on. We really respect what they do. And yeah, just Mormonism Life. Yeah. Is it Wednesday?

Gerardo Sumano [03:01:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:01:13] Oh, and Mormonism Live. We shouldn't have scheduled today.

Gerardo Sumano [03:01:19] I forgot.

John Dehlin [03:01:19] Huge shout out to Bill Real and Radio Free Mormon. If you got more time, check out Mormonism Live right now. They've got great content every Wednesday night at 6:20pm Mountain Time. Bill Reel and Radio Free Mormon have great content, so go check them out as well. They do great work. Be kind to each other, be good to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks everybody. Take care and join us soon tomorrow morning for Jody Hildebrandt's niece. And then we're going to have more coverage on this topic in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks everybody. Take care.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.