Welcome and Workshop Introduction

Steven Hassan [00:00:04] Hi everybody. Apologies for the slide. I mean the projector thing, it's a little, makes my eyes a little crazy. But I always like to propose this question whenever I give any type of talk, like how would anyone know if they were under mind control?

Steven Hassan [00:00:27] Because when I was in the Moonies, I was sure I wasn't. I was sure I wasn't in a cult and I was sure I wasn't brainwashed. Everybody kept telling me I was brainwashed. Everyone kept telling me I was in a cult. But whenever they did that, I just did thought stopping as I had been trained to do in the cult. Crush Satan. Crush Satan. Glory to heaven. Peace on earth. True parents, true parents. To block out the doubts because satanic, you know, entities were trying to attack me.

Steven Hassan [00:01:02] But I actually did a TEDX talk. How can anyone know if they've been brainwashed? So I encourage you to check that out. I have on my freedom of mine.com website. If you look up recent media, I have my four TedX's right at the top as well as links to 100 or so other interviews I've done over the recent years.

Steven Hassan [00:01:27] And I will answer this. My recipe for reality testing. And it's a useful thing because one issue when people are exiting a high demand group or a authoritarian culture is the issue of trust and commitment and a lot of fear over getting into something else that might not be healthy. So to have a toolbox of techniques and strategies to reality test is really the recipe.

Steven Hassan's Story Inside the Moonies

Steven Hassan [00:02:06] So how many people honestly have heard of the Moonies before? Oh, I should ask it the other way. Who hasn't heard of the Moonies before? Me. Yeah. Good. So what I want, I want to say for you, this is a terrible projector. Okay?

Steven Hassan [00:02:24] It's the perfectionist that's left over in my. So that that man, Sun Myung Moon, and I hate when people call him a reverend because he's not, but he said he was. In fact, I was a reverend in the Mooney's too.

Steven Hassan [00:02:43] He claimed that Jesus Christ came to him when he was 16 and asked him to fulfill his unfinished mission. And he was looked at as the Lord of the second Advent, the sinless Messiah, the greatest man in human history. By the way, the Moonies believe Jesus failed by going to the cross. The Moonies teach that he should have gotten married, had sinless children, that John the Baptist should have brought all the Jews, they should have marched on Rome, taken over Rome and taken over the world.

Steven Hassan [00:03:20] And then God's original plan for creation would be fulfilled. There would be no more Satanic lineage, because they would all be perfected. Lineage, blood lineage, because the teaching is that Lucifer had sex with Eve, Eve seduced Adam, and that's how the fall came about.

Steven Hassan [00:03:43] So that's why we have Satanic blood. So this is a mass wedding of the Moonies, and Moon is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of marriages in one day. And it was 30,000 couples of true believers.

Steven Hassan [00:04:03] Most of these people never met each other before or even spoke the same language. Koreans, Japanese, all over the world. And Moon would line up the men and the women, and because he knew everything, he could see your spirit and read your mind. I can go on for a long time because John said, I have to finish the whole presentation in an hour. I'll speed it up. But the point is, really quickly say you and you.

John Dehlin [00:04:32] Oh, go ahead, go ahead. I was just going to jump in. So I was just going to say, I always think it's interesting to draw parallels. It's interesting that Mr. Moon, as he likes you, like us to refer to him, claimed to have received a visitation from Jesus around age 16 and that he was called to fulfill the work that didn't get completed by Jesus when he was here. I think that's an interesting parallel. And then I think another parallel that you may not be familiar with is that whether it's the Book of Mormon, the discussion about the pure blood of Israel in the Book of Mormon, or the lineages that you're all passed down that are all declared during your patriarchal blessings, that's all about the blood of Israel and lineage. And these are two very strong parallels.

Steven Hassan [00:05:21] Yeah. And you have the Book of Mormon and the Moonies have the Divine Principle book and lots of. And I should say that. So I was recruited in February of 1974. I was 19 years old at Queens College. My girlfriend dumped me. Three women flirted with me and lied to me and seduced me kind of to believing that they were interested in me. And that led me into this cult. I was not a joiner. I was not looking to change my life. My life was good, good.

Steven Hassan [00:05:56] But I came to be connected to Moon directly because I was selected as a leader to represent the American group. So I had at least 100 leadership meetings with Moon where he described the inner doctrine of the group and our plans to take over America and amend the Constitution and how democracy was satanic and all kinds of other horrible things. But I became a true believer and recruited a lot of people into the cult.

Steven Hassan [00:06:32] And I wanted to add this slide because one of his sons has a crown of golden bullets. This is the Mooney symbol. And he says that the line in Revelation about the rod of iron is an AR15 and that you need an AR15 to worship God.

Steven Hassan [00:06:57] So he has a gun cult and he has training compounds to kill people for civil war in the United States. Because a lot of people say the Moonies, you never hear about them anymore. Well, they're still around in very, very large measure. And that man brought busloads of moonies to January 6th and spread disinformation saying it was antifa. Mooney's newspaper, the Washington Times, said it was antifa. Just to let you know that my former cult is still a powerhouse.

John Dehlin [00:07:30] Steven, if I can just jump in really quickly, I'll be jumping in. Keep. Yeah, so one podcast I want to highly, highly recommend to you. It's from the New York Times, the daily podcast. If any of you ever watch the daily podcast, I promise you, you will value this. The podcast is called the Untold Story of Sushi in America.

John Dehlin [00:07:54] And it's a mind blowing podcast episode. And it talks about how Mr. Moon decided in the 70s and 80s, if I'm right, to seed and cultivate the sushi industry within the United States. And long story short. Yeah, in 74, long story short, something between 6, 60 and 80% of the fish sold to sushi restaurants comes through company or companies owned by the Mooney's. And it's a multi billion dollar organization.

John Dehlin [00:08:27] And so parallels between massive wealth through the accumulation of tithing and contributions to then grow a massive corporate empire is also a very significant parallel. And I promise you, you'll love that podcast episode.

Identity Disturbance, Dissociation, and Complex PTSD

Steven Hassan [00:08:43] Yeah, and I have, I have a list on my website of 71 pages, single spaced, of entities associated with the Moonies. 71 pages, single spaced. So this slide is from the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic statistical manual, version 5. There was this version 4 before it in a version 3, but there's a category called dissociative disorder 300.15, and I'll just read it. Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion.

Steven Hassan [00:09:24] Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion. And it's important I want to add that Coercive Persuasion was a book written by Edgar Schein in 1970. 61. And when you hear the word coercive, you think of violence like physical violence, but it does not. It can include physical violence, but it's psychological violence.

Steven Hassan [00:09:52] Okay, so subjected to intense coercive persuasion, for example, brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive torture, long term political imprisonment, recruitment by sects or cults or by terror organizations may present with prolonged changes in or conscious questioning of their identity.

Steven Hassan [00:10:19] And this slide is part of my foundational course for clinicians because most clinicians have never been trained and don't even know this exists. This that it's an actual thing that's been identified for decades.

John Dehlin [00:10:34] And another clinical diagnosis that I think is relevant and interesting here. It's a diagnosis that exists, I believe, in the DSM 4, but I believe they might have removed it for the DSM 5, but I think it still has relevance here. It's called complex PTSD or cptsd. Have any of you ever heard of CPT PTSD before? Okay. Whether or not it's in the current DSM 5, Steven and I have talked about the fact that what does and doesn't get included in the DSM 5 or the future versions of the DSM is often a political process.

John Dehlin [00:11:10] So it's not the one true manual for diagnosis. It's just a guide that psychiatrists and psychologists and mental health professionals use. The point is, is that CPTSD isn't necessarily about one major traumatic event that happened in your life, like an assault or a natural disaster, or seeing someone die or a car wreck. It's sort of chronic trauma that you experience over a prolonged period of time, often occurring at the beginning in your childhood. So these are a few types or flavors of diagnoses that if you're a mental health professional, you might be aware of. If you are seeking an expert to help you with your condition, these are some mental health diagnoses that you should be aware of as you're contemplating mental health care.

Steven Hassan [00:12:05] And most clinicians hate the dsm, but it's really useful for research and for insurance reimbursements. That's really. But back to the dissociative disorder. So for me there was Steven Hassan, who wrote poetry, played basketball, liked women, you know, wanted to be an English professor. Then I got in the Moonies. And then that other identity was evil. I was cloned in the image of Sun Myung Moon to think the right way, feel the right way, act the right way.

Steven Hassan [00:12:45] And so that cult self suppressed the real me. It didn't erase the real me, but suppressed the real me. And it was in the context of my deprogramming experience following a near fatal van crash where I fell asleep. I was sleeping three to four hours a night, every night, seven days a week, for years. But when I had that accident, I was up for three days straight and woke up as I was driving into the back of a tractor trailer truck at about 80 miles an hour and nearly died.

Steven Hassan [00:13:20] But I was away from the cult for two weeks in the hospital. I was recovering. I needed surgery on my ankle and that opened a door to my real self. That called my sister Thea. That led to an invitation to visit her and my brother in law and see my nephew who had been born. I hadn't seen my family or talked with them over a year and that led to the intervention.

Steven Hassan [00:13:51] But. And so then I snapped out and then I was totally confused, like it was me. Then there's this alien being that took over my body and my mind and now like, what did I believe? Like what?

John Dehlin [00:14:07] Huh?

Steven Hassan [00:14:08] How did I believe that? And so I. My first reactions were just trying to understand how my mind had been hacked. And I never imagined I'd be here 47 years later talking to you here and sharing my knowledge. But that's how my life has evolved.

Steven Hassan [00:14:33] I'm going to go quicker out of time. But I like this slide because it helps people realize that people can be involved with an authoritarian group but have very different experiences. And if you're a clinician and somebody says they were with the Moonies, were they fringe members? Did they live in a center? Were they married in a mass wedding, Were they full time fundraisers, Were they a leader and then they were demoted.

Steven Hassan [00:15:06] You really want to understand what they went through in order to most help them. Most people who have glorious wonderful things to say are fringe members or trained PR people. It was satanic for a Mooney to say anything negative about the church or the organization publicly, like, period.

Steven Hassan [00:15:37] And if you had a bad experience to tell someone else in the group was evil, much less to tell outsiders something negative about the group. They called it multiplication of evil. Anyway, that's part of the information control. So in the context of my deprogramming the work of this brilliant man, psychiatrist, who became my mentor, Robert J. Lifton, who wrote a book in 1961 on Chinese Communist brainwashing called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. He's gone on to write about 16 more books, really important, interesting books. One on the psychological effects of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the atomic bomb dropped on their cities.

Steven Hassan [00:16:35] One on Nazi doctors, doctors who were sworn to uphold life. How could they go to Auschwitz and do those horrible experiments? He wrote a book on psychohistory. Many, many interesting books. In any case, that first book was used as a reference point in my deprogramming Because I didn't think I was under mind control, I didn't think I was brainwashed. And as a Mooney, I was trained to believe that atheists were Satan.

Steven Hassan [00:17:07] So Chinese Communist brainwashing, satanic, something going on was Satanic. So when I was asked by the ex Mooney's who were there to help me reevaluate, would I be interested to learn about Chinese Communist brainwashing, I said sure. And so we went through these eight criteria together.

Steven Hassan [00:17:32] Number one, and by the way, he's still alive. I've done actual interviews, video interviews with Dr. Lift. And he's gone on to write other books. He wrote a book called Destroying the World to Save it, about the Japanese sarin gas cult, Om Shinri Kyo, taking these eight principles and applying it to that cult.

Steven Hassan [00:17:55] But number one, milieu control. He said if you can control the environment and the control of human communication within that environment, that's one of the major aspects of brainwashing. And he didn't understand about the dual identity yet, but he talked about how the group think got inside your head so that it would tell you how to think properly.

Steven Hassan [00:18:23] So I thought that was really interesting. Another criteria, he talked about mystical manipulation, which is essentially planned experiences that, that people mistakenly are made to believe or mystical or spiritual events like mind reading or you know, say prophesying something where you already know how it's going to turn out, but in the minds of the believers. It's like, I like that.

John Dehlin [00:18:56] A couple examples in the Mormon context that I think are helpful for mystical manipulation, patriarchal blessing, where they may interview you or know things about you, but then when they give you the patriarchal blessing, it's if it's as if God is communicating directly to you. And of course the things that you're told to do do in your patriarchal blessing are never. You're going to marry outside the faith and raise your kids outside Mormonism and not go on a mission, but become a successful, you know, career, you know, woman, right? It's going to be, you're going to serve a mission, you're going to get married in the temple, you're going to raise your kids in the faith, but it's given to you in the context of believing that that's God himself who's communicating through the patriarch.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] EFY is another example. Even testimony meetings, Father's blessings, there are a lot of examples of mystical manipulation. And it may feel offensive for people to hear me describe it or characterize it as manipulation, but even if unintended, I often look at religions as being in the.

John Dehlin [00:20:03] Being in the elation business of just generating very positive chemicals in your brain that oftentimes you're made to associate those positive experiences with divine providence and that seals your commitment to the organization. And that's kind of how in a Mormon context, your faith gets developed. And it doesn't even necessarily need to be pernicious. It can just be the way the system is constructed. Did you have a quick.

Guest [00:20:33] Is there something I could share on that too? Maybe this is just healing for me to speak on this in my patriarchal blessing. It spoke in all my life thinking God was speaking to me of how I've always struggled with righteousness. So for me, that defined who I was of not being worthy and. But I had to commit very hard to the church and those experiences, everything, so that I could get just kind of knock out that you're not righteous. But I am righteous. I gotta get there. I gotta get there.

Steven Hassan [00:21:07] Yeah. And that comes back to the perfectionism thing and what we're about to cover, which is one of Lifton's eight criteria called the demand for purity. A mind control environment expects perfection, but it knows that no one can be. So it creates an experience of shame and guilt where you're never good enough.

How Cults Control Language and Behavior

Steven Hassan [00:21:34] And so thank you for sharing that. And I'll just say we're human beings, we'll do the best that we can. We're going to flub up. But to pay attention and acknowledge if we flub up or we hurt. Hurt someone's feelings or we say something we don't really mean or whatever and apologize and move on and just get rid of this notion that we're supposed to have this, be perfect beings anyway. Rushing through some looking at the clock. The cult of confession, he said, was really critical. And part of that was like there's no privacy, you know, like you have to tell the other people in the cult everything.

Steven Hassan [00:22:22] And then they have that information. They can use it to manipulate you, especially if you ask, you know, if you start to have doubts or whatever. But this notion that you're not really allowed to have private thoughts and feelings, etc.

Steven Hassan [00:22:39] The next one he called the sacred science. It's basically that the doctrine is perfect with a T, truth with a capital T. You can't question it. It's ultimately moral and ultimately scientific, so just accept it no matter what. Which is the opposite of the science, the scientific principle, which says that we're just aspiring to learn more and that we test things experientially and improve Empirically to see whether that hypothesis stands up to scrutiny. The next one he said, loading the language, which is really a biggie, especially for former members because Lifton talked about this as thought terminating cliches that are known only inside of the cult.

Steven Hassan [00:23:32] The outsiders, when they hear it, they're like what? What the heck is. Is that what's a chapter two problem? Or what's a keen evil problem? Those are two loaded language things from the Moonies. But within the group, it. It has a very specific meaning.

John Dehlin [00:23:51] I would love to take a second for you to shout out this thought. This idea of thought terminating cliches can be new to people who are newly questioning. But some of the ones that are most prominent within Mormonism might be. What?

John Dehlin [00:24:04] Doubt your doubts. What else do you know better than ex priesthood authority? Sing your favorite hymn when you have a doubt or a question or something in your mind. Yes. Ask God, not Google. That's really good. Yes. Hold on to the iron rod.

John Dehlin [00:24:25] Prophets aren't perfect. The. The church is perfect, but the. But the leaders aren't. Right. Stay in the boat. No empty chairs. You could leave the church, but you can't. What? Can't leave it alone. Right. Lead not to thine own understanding.

John Dehlin [00:24:45] The learned. What? The learned think they are wise. Right. Where will you go? That's a very powerful one, Steven. Because it's not only a thought terminating cliche, but it's instilling the fear and the phobia that you like to talk about because it implies you can't be healthy and happy outside of the system. Three more.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] Pray and read your scriptures. Right. As if that's going to solve all your problems. What's that? Someday you'll understand. Put it on the shelf. Right. Milk before meat. Right. When does that mean? Milk before me. When does the meat ever come? Has the meat come yet? In the back.

John Dehlin [00:25:29] What's that? Yes. Correct. Sources. Right. Church approved materials versus like the filthy water that's downstream. Yes. Covenant path. Right. Don't fall off the covenant path. Yeah. Pray about it. But it. But. But it's only valid if it's endorsed

Steven Hassan [00:25:52] by the prophet soon.

John Dehlin [00:25:54] Yes. Even the very elect. Even the very elect will be deceived if a high level leader leads the church. That doesn't mean oh, there might be a problem. It means, see, we prophesied it. Even the very elect will be deceived. Worldly happiness versus true joy. Let's do two more. Is it a pertinent to your salvation? If it's a tough question, I guarantee you it's not pertinent to your salvation. We don't have all the answers. It'll. It's an unfolding revelation. Okay, one more. One more. Natural man is an enemy to God. Very good. Giving yourselves applause there. All right, go ahead, Stephen.

Steven Hassan [00:26:37] So it's very important to realize that words are the tools we use to think. And if an environment or a group controls your language, it's going to control your thoughts. In Scientology, they have a dictionary of their own words.

Steven Hassan [00:26:57] And Hubard, the head of that cult, said, if you don't agree with something you're reading about in one of the. The. The organization books or you feel confusion, it's because you missed a word, you didn't understand one of the words, you have to go and look it up in their dictionary. So it's called study tech in Scientology. So it's a technique to get people to indoctrinate themselves with an entire linguistic system that takes over their mind, Especially if they're born in the group. They don't know what normal words are. But here's the healing imperative. With former members, you have to learn what normal words mean.

Steven Hassan [00:27:43] You have to unpack the loaded terms and either abandon the terminology, like Cain, Abel, like, I never use that unless I'm talking to ex Mooney's or a chapter two problem. But what happens with the groups of ex members?

Steven Hassan [00:28:04] It's inevitable. They start saying something that triggers you back into the cult mindset. But the healing technique is really to catch it, name it as a loaded term, and then change it into a real concept or get rid of it, because then you can start controlling your own thoughts. Right? It's very important for your healing.

Steven Hassan [00:28:29] And the last two for Lifton doctrine over person. Lifton said a mind control environment says that no matter what your experience is, it doesn't matter. The doctrine is the truth. Like, suppress whatever you're feeling or experiencing or deny it, because you have to use the ideology that sacred science over your own knowledge and experience.

John Dehlin [00:28:59] And the perfect example of this in LDS context is the LGBTQ dilemma. Right? Like, nowhere in any Mormon scripture is same sex, sexuality or transgender issues mentioned anywhere. Because these scriptures were manufactured in the 1830s or the early 1840s, so it was not even envisioned. So it's not mentioned. And so now in, you know, it would have been nice to have a prophet who could have prophesied about the LGBT issues. Not that they didn't exist back then, but clearly they've come to a head in the past 20, 30, 40 years. It would have been nice to have a prophet that could have foreseen that and provided Scripture to accommodate for that, and even provided a sense of doctrine and theology for those who identify as lgbtq.

John Dehlin [00:29:45] But instead, we have literal silence about LGBTQ issues in the Book of Mormon. And so what is the what. What are the leaders to do if Joseph Smith didn't think about it with doctrine over person, it leaves the Mormon Church in this dilemma of having a literal epidemic of LGBTQ death by suicide, with the prophets having nothing to add. Because if any modern day 2023 prophet says in any way, that LGBT being LGBT is in any way okay, he's contradicting what Spencer B. Kimball or Boyd K. Packer or one of the previous prophets and apostles have said, thus undermining their own authority. And so what you have is, is a church that's willing to endure a literal epidemic of depression, anxiety, homelessness, and sometimes death by suicide, because doctrine has to always take precedence over the person.

Steven Hassan [00:30:40] Yes, I, I want to go and talk about Judaism, but I don't have the time. But I'll come back to that if you want to know, because Judaism is responsible for a lot of these bad beliefs that then got picked up by Christianity and Islam and other cults.

Steven Hassan [00:30:59] So I'm happy to come back to that. But I want the number 81 is probably the biggest, most obvious one. It's called dispensing of existence. And Lifton said that in a mind control cult, if you believe and you belong, then you have a right to exist. And if you leave, you have no rights anymore.

Leaving a High-Control Group and Rebuilding Trust

Steven Hassan [00:31:22] You don't have a right to exist anymore. They define whether you can be or not. If you're in a mind control call, of course, the minute you get out and you reject that framing, you're free. But if you're using that framing, there's no freedom to ever leave the group, because there's never a legitimate reason to leave from the point of view of authoritarian cult.

John Dehlin [00:31:48] And I'm sure all of you can kind of connect the dots, but when we talk about existence, we don't mean literally your existence, but in terms of your status. How many of you have lost significant status with your parents, with your siblings, with your friends, with your family because you've decided. Because you've decided to leave, Right? So when we talk about existence, we can swap for that social status. I like to say that you can win the Nobel Peace Prize and cure cancer, but if you leave the Mormon Church, you're still a disappointment to your parents, and that's just a fact. Right. You have no social legitimacy or. Or, you know, currency within the Mormon paradigm. How many of you have been cut out of text threads or no longer invited to family events or in any way shunned soft or hard by family members because you've decided that you no longer believe so.

Steven Hassan [00:32:39] Yeah, but in my work it includes authoritarian cults. So if you don't agree with Putin, you go to jail or you get murdered. Chinese Communism still has thought reform programs, so there's a continuum. And maybe the LDS isn't as bad as some of the extremists did you want to say something?

Guest [00:33:04] I mean, there is the term spiritual death, and we have all heard a talk saying, I would rather have my child leave their mission in a casket or die or whatever than leave the church. Church.

Steven Hassan [00:33:18] Oh, that's horrible. Heinous.

John Dehlin [00:33:23] Without naming names, would you be comfortable sharing the experience of the woman who came up to you after. After the thrive session yesterday? In. In.

Steven Hassan [00:33:32] Oh, I don't.

John Dehlin [00:33:33] In Lehigh.

Steven Hassan [00:33:34] I can.

John Dehlin [00:33:35] Without. Without giving any descriptions.

Steven Hassan [00:33:39] It was heartbreaking. A woman came up to me about before I left and said that her son had just left his mission early and came to her and said, it's all lies, Mom. I can't be in this anymore. And she did the Mormon thing and he took his life the next day. And she's living with that grief and that trauma.

John Dehlin [00:34:08] So.

Steven Hassan [00:34:08] So that happened yesterday. It was horrible. I'll make an analogy. I've worked with many people who are in the Jehovah's Witnesses, who, they're programmed to believe that if you have a blood transfusion, it's a violation, you'll lose your relationship to God and the future and everything else. And I've worked with people whose children, like, had a car accident or whatever, needed a blood transfusion, and they prayed over their child and the child died. And then they came to realize it was a mind control cult. And that whole teaching was taken out of context and mistranslated from the Torah, the Jewish scripture. And they're living with that reality that their beautiful child was dead for no reason other than the doctrine said. So. So there are some really horrible, horrible stories about that.

John Dehlin [00:35:15] So

Steven Hassan [00:35:17] basically, during the Korean War, after the Korean War, there was great interest by American intelligence to find out what is Chinese communist brainwashing. So some of the luminary researchers was Robert Lifton, this woman, Margaret Singer, Louis Jolly, and West. Another one was Edgar Schein, who became a major name in the world of business consulting and organizational development.

Steven Hassan [00:35:46] But Margaret Singer was one of the first to really do expert witness stuff. Really stand up against cults and say it really is brainwashing and mind control. Even before lifton he was a little chicken in the early days of 76 etc. So I'm just going to read you her six conditions.

Steven Hassan [00:36:09] Gain control over a person's time, especially his or her thinking time and physical environment. Create a sense of power, powerlessness, fear and dependency while providing models that demonstrate the new ideal behavior. Manipulate, rewards, punishments and experiences to elicit behavior and attitudes desired by leadership.

Steven Hassan [00:36:37] Manipulate, rewards, punishments and experiences to suppress the recruit's former social behavior and attitudes, including the use of altered states of consciousness to manipulate experience. Margaret was trained in hypnosis, something that I became an expert in wanting to understand.

Steven Hassan [00:36:59] How does that work? But sidestepping critical thinking and making people suggestible and implanting ideas. 5. Create a tightly controlled system with a closed system of logic wherein dissenters feel their questioning indicates something inherently wrong with them. Nothing wrong with the system, it's something wrong with you. You're just not spiritual enough or you just have bad karma or whatever.

Steven Hassan [00:37:32] 6. Keep recruits unaware and uninformed that there is an oops is an agenda to control or change them. Thought reform is impossible when a person is functioning at full capacity with informed consent. Memorize that sentence. Thought reform or mind control or brainwashing is impossible when a person is functioning at full capacity with informed consent.

Steven Hassan [00:38:04] Really valuable stuff. She wrote the forward to this by the way. For those of you who've read my book, you can reread her her Forward to the 1988 edition. Excuse me, I got a cold. So this slide is on my website. If you go go to freedomofmind.com learn about undo influence Influence continuum. You can download and print it.

John Dehlin [00:38:35] If you can't see this but you want to see what he's referencing, literally just go to Google images, type in influence continuum under images. It'll show up and you can just be looking at it on your handheld

Steven Hassan [00:38:45] while Google has it in their images. They don't have to go to my website. How dare them? Anyway, so the idea idea here is influence. Human beings are influenced all the time. We influence each other. We can't not influence each other. But I want to offer to you the schema to understand that there are ethical forms of influence including informed consent and the unethical. Where there's lying, overt lying, withholding vital information, information or distorting information is on the unethical side of the continuum. And when people exit high demand groups or authoritarian cults One of the big questions people always have is how can I, how can I trust myself?

Steven Hassan [00:39:35] Or how can I trust anyone else or any other group, pardon me, ever again? And what I believe is if you understand this model and understand my model of what I call the BITE model, standing for controlling behavior, controlling information, controlling thoughts and emotions and where are my plastic thingies?

Steven Hassan [00:40:09] I got it, I got it. So on my website you can download this too. But there's like a laundry list of variables that I've outlined for my 47 years. The more of these an environment has the. Did I just step on something?

John Dehlin [00:40:33] Keep going.

Steven Hassan [00:40:35] The more of the bit, the more unethical it is. So if. So if you find out somebody lied to you, you know, warning, warning, warning. Because you want to deal with honest people who are trustworthy. You don't want to find out there's a higher secret doctrine, an inner doctrine of something you want to ask up front.

Steven Hassan [00:41:04] Is this it? Or is there secret teaching somewhere? Thank you. And we did this version and there are many more I could add for individuals, many more I could add for leadership or organization. But just to get that sense that someone who's a leader, a good leader to follow, is psychologically healthy, they don't say they're perfect, they don't say you have to follow blindly. They empower other people. They're trustworthy, accountable.

Steven Hassan [00:41:40] Excuse me, but the number one negative profile you want to really be alert to avoid are what we call malignant narcissists. These are the people. No empathy. It's all about them. Everything's for their promotion. But the malignant piece is the psychopathological piece where they think they're above the law, they're pathological liars, they're often sadistic, paranoid. There's a whole. Again, go to my website, learn about undue influences. An entire list for malignant narcissists. 80 to 90% of every cult leader or predator or bad. There are one on one cults, by the way. Right. A man can control a woman or vice versa, having a cough thing

John Dehlin [00:42:38] really quickly. If. Let me give your voice a little bit of a rest. Yes, this, this malignant narcissist thing is, is kind of nuanced, I think within a Mormon context. I believe that if you, if we had 10, never Mormon, objective mental health professionals sort of read no man knows my history, kind of study the life of Joseph Smith and decide whether he met criteria for narcissism, I think you'd be able to make a pretty solid case that he did in Spades. And so that can be the founder. And I think even Brigham Young might have met criteria for that as well. If you fast forward to maybe David O.

John Dehlin [00:43:18] McKay or Spencer W. Kimball or I don't even know Gordon B. Hinckley, you may or may not decide that they would meet those criteria. The one thing I would say is, and Stephen, I haven't talked about this to you in advance, but I believe that an organization can operate like a malignant narcissist in the sense if you just look at doctrine over individual. Right. A narcissist doesn't care what anybody else thinks or feels. Oftentimes organizations can operate in that way. In other words, it's always the authority and the strength and the vitality of the organization that trumps the value of any individual individual.

Steven Hassan [00:44:07] Let me just add. So think about it. If you're, you're in a group that says your model of excellence is the cult leader and they're a malignant narcissist, everyone's going to be in their cult identity, a malignant narcissist. Want to be on certain levels and the healthiest people will be further away from the top.

John Dehlin [00:44:30] Very, very good. Go, go.

Steven Hassan [00:44:32] So avoid people who are elitist, grandiose, power hungry, secretive, deceptive, and especially people who say they know it all and claim authority. Yes, ma'.

Guest [00:44:45] Am. I'm so sorry. In your opinion, the current leaders of

Steven Hassan [00:44:56] the church, they know more than I

Guest [00:44:58] do and I feel like I know a lot.

John Dehlin [00:45:00] So do you believe that that would

Guest [00:45:02] be a malignant narcissist?

John Dehlin [00:45:06] So is your question, and this I believe you're asking the question that I most often ask, which is, do the current prophets and apostles of the Mormon Church know that the church isn't true, but still teach it as if it is? Is that your question? In other words, are they perpetrating and knowing fraud or deception upon the members? Yeah, in my opinion. Well, let's first, do you, do you have an opinion about just organizations in general, whether it's always necessary, let's just say David Miskovich, who's the successor to Elrond. Yeah, yeah. So what's your view on to what extent in the cults that you've experienced it, it's necessary for them to be knowingly perpetuating fraud versus just a victim of their predecessor or a victim of the organization as converts, potentially themselves. And then I'll, I'll share my thoughts as well.

Steven Hassan [00:46:01] Right. So it's a case by case basis, but if you met me as a Mooney leader, you would say I was a malignant narcissist. And I. That is not my personality or whatever, but it really. There's a difference between people born into something versus somebody who's like, basically healthy and then gets recruited and indoctrinated. But also, keep in mind, because we're social beings, we can be in an information and experiential silo where we're surrounded with people who are reinforcing a point of view or a set of beliefs or whatever, where there's no dissonance because everyone's going along with it and everybody's saying it's normal and healthy.

Steven Hassan [00:46:52] And so as a human being, I've made the decision to always try to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. And I err in the direction of not trying to label people people in. In a way of putting them in a box and saying they're bad people.

Steven Hassan [00:47:10] I actually believe malignant narcissists need therapy. They are frightfully insecure beings that have a big hole in their heart or in their soul, and they need love and they need. Seriously, I mean it. And so, and, and so, so. But the bottom line is I don't know. And it's case by case,

John Dehlin [00:47:39] Because this is the most common question I'm asked. I'll just give you a quick couple things to think about. Yesterday at the Lehigh event, weren't even there. There was a man who said that he came just off the street, noticed there was a group came in, started watching. He identifies as believing Latter Day Saint, and he decided to kind of commandeer the mic and bear his testimony to the Entire group of 250 prominently ex Mormons about why the church is true, why he's super glad that he paid tithing. And then he started lecturing the group about why the church has it right, about LGBT issues.

John Dehlin [00:48:15] And at that point, audience members started standing up and screaming at this man. And I've got the whole exchange on video, actually. But. But it's, you know, when we think about it, once we're kind of moving away or out from a belief system, it's hard to remember that we were once true believers ourselves.

John Dehlin [00:48:38] So if you go with Occam's razor of what's the simplest explanation is why is it hard for you to believe that the leaders are still true believers? If you were just true believers 10 minutes ago or three years ago or 10 years ago, there's a. There's a quote from Upton Sinclair's the Jungle, and maybe you've heard Me mention this on the podcast. It's difficult to get a man to see a point of view when his livelihood depends on not seeing it. And if you look at the tobacco executives who all lined up in front of Congress and said that they did, did not believe that their product caused cancer, you could say that they were all lying.

John Dehlin [00:49:19] But we all know that confirmation bias is an extremely powerful psychological influence. And if your entire reputation, your relationships, your family, your pension, your career is all based on upholding the validity and the truthfulness of the, in this case, the Mormon Church, those, all those social pressures combined with their genuine beliefs from birth and their 90 years of conditioning leads to the most likely scenario for most of the church leaders, which is that they're sincere. And I can say that my brother, who worked at the highest levels of church headquarters for many, many years, who interacted with the church leaders on a first name basis for many, many years, said that not only were they, in his opinion, true believers, but that they were actually pretty nice people.

John Dehlin [00:50:18] And you've all heard, maybe you've heard me say this quote before, that bad people may act badly and good people may act goodly. Sometimes it goodly, sometimes it takes religion to make good people do bad things. Right? And so I like to, I like to give the brethren, as we call them in our church, the benefit of the doubt that they're sincere and that they're not knowingly perpetuating a fraud. What's difficult to believe in 2023 is that at least at a minimum, they absolutely know that the perception that we have, that they speak directly to God and Jesus, and the perception that they try to foster and engender, which is a belief in them, that they have a direct communication line with God and Jesus.

John Dehlin [00:51:03] Jesus, they must know at this point that they don't have the level of connection and communication that they're trying to get us all to believe that they have. So I do believe that they know that the reality is different than the average member believes. And in that sense, there probably is some.

John Dehlin [00:51:23] There's some deception going on, but I believe that it. I'm sorry, Steven, I'm totally. One last sentence. I believe that they sincerely believe that the ends justifies the means. They believe that this church does good, that it helps people, that it makes the world a better place. And if they lie or deceive, it's either in a way that they can justify in their own minds, or they believe that protecting the good name of the church and its vitality, at the end of the day, is worth any sacrifices to truth or integrity that they might be sacrificed.

Steven Hassan [00:52:01] So in my intervention work over the decades, I have never approached it as I'm going to get somebody out of a cult or I'm going to persuade someone that they're in a bad group or whatever. For me, my frame has always been to provide a set of knowledge and experience experiences through psycho education so that the person can make an informed decision whether they want to stay in the group or leave the group. But it's up to them.

Steven Hassan [00:52:33] So to, to, what's the word? Jump. To add on to the comments that John was just making. I would say if one of these leaders sat down with me for three days and heard my presentations and watched my videos and at that, and because he wanted to, and he then said, no, I want to be in the church because I have my living there and my money there and everything else, then I would say he's doing it knowingly.

Steven Hassan [00:53:10] And then I would have a question about just how special spiritual he actually is personally. But what I'm trying to convey is you don't know what you don't know and, and, and, but learning these models, and especially in the context like Chinese communist brainwashing or pimps and traffickers, understanding how they recruit and groom and indoctrinate people to become slaves, then you have a burden of responsibility to that knowledge.

Steven Hassan [00:53:46] So I wanted to add that healthy organizations, there are legitimate reasons to leave. The unhealthy ones, there's never a legitimate reason to leave. You're always leaving because you're weak, you're stupid, you're not spiritual, you're doing sin, you're doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Steven Hassan [00:54:06] In my opinion, if you don't like being in a group, you have a legitimate reason to leave. If you're not happy there, if you find a different group that fulfills your needs better, that's a legitimate reason to leave. If you discover somebody's a liar or a pedophile, that's a legitimate reason to leave. The important thing is you need to have criteria internally, not use the group's criteria. You, you develop criteria based on human rights, on what is true and being, and being honest with yourself. So I think because of time I should end here. But I just will. I'm going to just.

Identity Confusion and the Recovery Process

John Dehlin [00:54:53] We definitely have another 15 minutes before there's.

Steven Hassan [00:54:55] We have another 15 minutes. So I'm going to. So I have a bunch of slides from my course about. And what I say to clinicians is don't expect someone to come into your office and say, I was in a cult, you know, help me. But they'll come in with a variety of symptoms.

Steven Hassan [00:55:15] Then you should do a good background history on. Tell me about your childhood. Were you involved with a religious group? Group? Were there strict, rigid rules and regulations? Was there corporal punishment? Corporal punishment, by the way, is banned in most civilized countries because they know that it's harmful for childhood development.

Steven Hassan [00:55:41] Has anybody been spanked or hit? Yeah, and I know, you know, spare the rod and spoil the child. Modern science says that's bs. There's much better ways to discipline children where you're cultivating a healthy sense of self and where you're avoiding creating a relationship of fear and to obedience, like, you have to obey or you're going to get hit.

Steven Hassan [00:56:16] And I want to cite quickly a book by a former social worker who's working to challenge all the laws. There's still, I don't know, 13 states that say it's okay to do corporal punishment. It's called the Holocaust Lessons. And I have interviews with him on my website.

Steven Hassan [00:56:40] And why he called it the Holocaust Lessons because he did us. He cited a study of people who resisted the Nazis demands to turn over Jews in their towns. And they all were not corporally punished. The ones who were corporally punished turned over their friends, their neighbors to the Nazis because they were trained to obey authority on a very, very fundamental, childish childhood way.

Steven Hassan [00:57:20] So common symptoms, identity confusion. Somebody stood up earlier and said, I don't know who I am. This is very normal. I wanted to tell that woman, this is normal. I was there. I felt I don't know who I am. What do I believe? What's up, what's down? Help.

Steven Hassan [00:57:41] And thankfully, I had loving family and friends who showed me pictures and videos and told me stories and memories of who I was before the cult. I had actually been trained and indoctrinated in my cult identity to believe I had a terrible childhood. And I was, was abused.

Steven Hassan [00:58:02] And it was just a lot of false memories, basically. And I, my sister, my friends challenged it. It's like, give me an example for that, you know? And it's like, well, dad did slap me once when I was 13.

Steven Hassan [00:58:21] Really? What happened? Well, I. He caught me lying. It was true. True story. I. I give. He had given me lunch money and I spent it on baseball cards. And I lied and said I lost the money. And he slapped me on the face like that.

Steven Hassan [00:58:37] It was that hard. I cried. But so my sister Thea said, so he slapped you once. Give me another example. I couldn't Think of any other time that my father had hit me. So it had to challenge that ideology in that in any case, different people need to do different strategies to figure out who they are and who they want to be.

Steven Hassan [00:59:09] But when you leave a worldview, an organization, a social network, you need to develop other social networks. You need to explore and identify other models for how people look at reality and learn and grow. And you're not alone. There are people who have left many years before you. And listening to Mormon stories and hearing other. That, you know, there is life after group is so incredibly valuable. When I got out of the Moonies, there was no Internet. We. We didn't know each other. It was really much harder to recover.

John Dehlin [00:59:54] Would you mind sharing the quote about healing and stories that you've shared a few times in the past few days?

Steven Hassan [01:00:00] You have to remind me about.

John Dehlin [01:00:04] There's a professional who, who said that the.

Steven Hassan [01:00:06] Oh, Judith Herman. So one of the world's first famous trauma psychiatrist. Her name is Judith Herman. She wrote a book called Trauma and Recovery. And it's a very important book. I encourage you to read it, especially if you're a therapist. But she basically said the number one method to help people recover is for trauma victims to tell their story and be believed.

Steven Hassan [01:00:42] You know, you're not alone, you're not crazy. It really. Someone else who came up said, I feel like I'm being gaslit all the time. That's what it's like leaving a mind control cult. Because. And I remember that feeling when I first left. I was going, okay, well all my. The entire, entire group thinks I'm satanic.

Steven Hassan [01:01:07] I have maybe 20, 30 family members and friends who know I'm a good person. But there are like millions of people who think I'm satanic, you know, and I had all these phobias in my mind. I didn't know about phobias as a specific thing for years after I knew I didn't want to be in the group at Satan Etc.

Steven Hassan [01:01:33] But once I learned that concept, then I had to think back. So at what point was the phobias really installed? And in my experience, Moon had taken all the New York members to see the Exorcist movie in Greenwich Village to watch the movie. Then we were brought to Tarrytown and heard Moon the Messiah say God made the Exorcist. This movie is a prophecy of what happens to you if you leave the Unification Church.

Steven Hassan [01:02:08] And from that moment on, every time I had a doubt or whatever, I thought it was demons trying to invade my mind. And I did what I was told to do, chant, pray, sing holy songs to, to cleanse my mind, to get rid of the doubt.

Steven Hassan [01:02:29] And I was deathly afraid of leaving the group. And that's also part of the trauma in my deprogramming. And in the early days of deprogramming, they would try to convince people to leave the group without explaining that they had these irrational fears that they would be possessed by demons.

Steven Hassan [01:02:52] So I try to explain up front before I talk about what the problems are with the group, about what is a phobia versus a legitimate fear and how to resolve a phobia and then how other groups put phobias in people's minds to control them as a beginning to help people realize that these are irrational fears, fears put in our minds deliberately to keep us dependent and obedient.

Finding Community After Leaving the Church

John Dehlin [01:03:23] Okay. As they're concluding their setting up, what I think it might make sense to do is pause the slide presentation for now and maybe spend 10 minutes hearing either a brief 30 second observation that you've made that something you've connected with that really that you would like to share, or a very brief question. We won't have time for long comments

Guest [01:03:50] or

John Dehlin [01:03:52] extended back and forths between us and Steven because lunch is waiting. But let's take a moment to hear a little bit from the audience. Is that okay? And I'm just going to run the mic around and we'll take turns.

Guest [01:04:05] Just earlier I was thinking that fasting, sleep deprivation, all of the work and stuff from contributing to that fasting, testimony, meeting, having kids and then having that spiritual bear testimony to gain a testimony, girls camp, trek, being exhausted, telling you like Moroni's promise itself is kind of gaslighting or this is what you're gonna feel. If you don't feel it, it's something wrong with you. So, you know.

Steven Hassan [01:04:35] So was fasting a thing in the Mormons? Because Mooney's fasted a lot. I did two seven day fasts with just water and four three day fasts. And you did full days of work when you were fast?

John Dehlin [01:04:49] Mormons fast once a month on the first Sunday of the month for two meals. Except for the hardcore may do more than two meals, but fasting is a monthly ritual within Mormonism.

Steven Hassan [01:05:01] So. Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:05:03] And you bear your testimony, right? Yeah, yeah. And you. And you contribute more real fast.

Guest [01:05:09] I was going to say I developed an eating disorder from the perfectionism and then the fasting. And I would do it like every week because I thought I was more spiritual. And then, and then leaders would like praise that.

Steven Hassan [01:05:20] So that was fascinating. Has anyone else. Can anyone else resonate with that one? Oh, we should. About developing an eating disorder from the fasting and thinking if I eat less, then I'll be a better person. I'll be more righteous. Did I say it right way?

Guest [01:05:39] Okay, so my connection was. Was the phobia and fear because I experienced a lot of that when I was divorcing my husband. I was told I was going to hell. I didn't deserve my children. I wouldn't be spend eternity with my family.

Steven Hassan [01:05:51] Family.

Guest [01:05:52] And I just needed to live with the unhappiness I was experiencing the marriage for the benefit of the children.

Steven Hassan [01:06:03] We're not clapping for what you were told. We're thanking you for sharing

Guest [01:06:12] what you. What you said about having being able to speak your story and be believed. I think a lot of us feel so isolated. Like we don't talk to anybody at all or we feel like alone or wrong or. And just it really struck me how important it is to come and talk and hear other people. And that's why, you know, Mormon stories and other deconstructions from other religions have been so important to me. Is that connection?

Steven Hassan [01:06:46] Yes. Yes, it.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] Thank you. Very beautiful. Yes. We are clapping for the vulnerability, not in celebration of pain and suffering.

Steven Hassan [01:06:56] And we believe you. We believe you. We validate you. You're here. Thank you for coming.

John Dehlin [01:07:03] One of the biggest issues that we won't be addressing in depth, but that everyone comes to understand is how to find community. Community after. Obviously, if you go to Thrive beyond religion, you can go to a map where you can find hopefully a local Thrive group in your area that you can connect to and make friends. The ex Mormon Reddit is a wonderful place for community. It you know, 250,000 subscribers at this point where you can go up there even though it's anonymous, and share your thoughts and feelings and get feedback. The Mormon Stories podcast. Facebook Facebook community has 15 or 20,000 people in it.

John Dehlin [01:07:39] There are some amazing support groups for women along the Wasatch front. One is called Waka Women of a Certain Age. You can go to Facebook and look up Waka Worldwide to find an amazing support group for women. There's also an amazing Facebook group called Faith Journey Meetups which is run by Chelsea Homer. It has almost 20,000 people at this place point. They hold monthly events along the Wasatch front. Again, Thrive is meant to be outside of Utah for those of you and. And Thrive is not just. And by the way, again, there's no money in Thrive. We're not trying to make any money. It's run at a loss.

John Dehlin [01:08:17] It's just a resource to help you either find community or create community. So if you go to the thrivebeyondreligion.com website, you can't find a local community. You can actually say, hey, I want to be a leader and start a thrive community in our area. And then you can be the hub or the. Yeah, the hub around which a community gets built. So there also is an incredible community called Marriage on a Tightrope. If any of you are in a mixed faith marriage and you're looking for support, you can join the Marriage on a Tightrope Facebook group. They do quarterly workshops for mixed faith couples with Natasha Helfer.

John Dehlin [01:08:57] That's an amazing resource. And they even have these amazing Marco Polo groups where like believing husbands can go to get support in a Marco Polo group, non believing husbands, believing wives, and non believing wives, all in a Marco Polo sort of setting. So these are just some of the community resources that we provide or that we know of because finding community is a huge part of healing and growth.

Steven Hassan [01:09:25] And I will just say that real life friendships and relationships are better than online relationships. So if there's a choice, find a real live human being you can sit down with and share a meal with and have a real life in real life.

John Dehlin [01:09:45] Okay, let's get a couple more. Raise your hand high. Okay.

Guest [01:09:51] I just kept thinking about when you're talking about Satan, like we're literally told in our temple that if we do not. And they look right into the camera, if you do not live up to the covenants you make this day, you will be in the power of Satan. And just a couple weeks ago, my kids, I mean they've. I'm brand new out, just got my name removed in January and trying to talk to my kids, they're kind of like in and out, they don't really care. But one of them said, why is this such a big deal? And I said to him, I have been told that I am now in Satan's power. And I'm trying to remind myself that I'm a good person.

Steven Hassan [01:10:24] So. So if I may, John, respond to that. So that is a universal with religious cults that use Satan as a tool of control. And I just want to share a healing technique. Now it's a little bit early, but I want to. And the thing is, is that when, when a programming thing happens like I described with the Exorcist movie and Moon said God made the Exorcist Exorcist movie, For me to uninstall that. That phobia, I needed to go back in my mind to that room in that space and time with the resources I have now, and imagine what I would have wanted to say and do if I had known then what I know now.

Steven Hassan [01:11:36] So what the way I. What I visualized, and I did it a bunch of different ways, but I imagined myself, and we were all sitting, kneeling on concrete floors, and he was up on a stage. I literally imagined standing up and saying, are you kidding me? A Hollywood movie was made by God. Are you freaking nuts? I'm out of here.

John Dehlin [01:12:03] Bye.

Steven Hassan [01:12:04] And I got up and walked out, and I called some of my friends to join me with me. It was in my mind. It was not the historical reality. But what I was doing was going into my cult identity and helping me exit it by naming that. That's a phobia indoctrination.

Steven Hassan [01:12:30] Keep it over there has nothing to do with me. That's a mind control technique. So this is part of how we recover, is to control our own minds by using what we know in the here and now and retrofitting it into our key moment experiences in order to liberate us.

Steven Hassan [01:12:53] Because we want to have integrity. We want to have connection. And if you know something's a phobia because you've heard it, that it's done in a thousand other mind control cults, why would you give any power to that?

Steven Hassan [01:13:11] Does that make sense? Does that work? To imagine you going back and going, what? Whatever. And I would like to add one more piece, and we'll do more about it later, but I'd like to do a piece today on the best ways to help our children, because there are some things in our adult processing that we need to keep separate from the way we communicate with our kids for their own protection and to help empower them the most.

Steven Hassan [01:13:50] So I just wanted to put a pin in that thing. I want to come back to it before the end of the day, please.

John Dehlin [01:13:58] All right, There were some hands back here, and then we'll come back forward. Okay. I want to make sure we get all the people that have already raised their hands. Hands. Who's next?

Guest [01:14:06] Okay, I have a question about a mechanism. I wasn't there yesterday, but I would put money on it that the people that were standing and screaming about LGBTQ people were the parents and the siblings and the cousins of those people. And I listened to your Mormon story, and you talked about that. The moment that moved for you was when your father said, what would you do if you, you had a son. So what I want to know is why, when we're in extreme pain, you know, we deny, deny, deny, but why will we do it for someone else? What's that for humans?

Steven Hassan [01:14:44] Good question. The first thing that comes to my mind is if you are in raised in a belief system that you're less important than others and your orientation as a woman in particular is to be a people pleaser and take care of others, then you may be on automatic pilot. And that's another piece I'd like to come back to with women's rights. It's like if you grew up and you weren't in a patriarchal, authoritarian system and you were taught that women have equal rights to men and women deserve it and are as smart as them. That's the environment I grew up in. In the 60s and 70s, women were burning their bras and I have two older sisters.

Steven Hassan [01:15:32] And it's like I had to think twice about opening a door for a woman because I didn't want her to be angry at me. I can open my own door, but it was that way. It was when I was younger.

Steven Hassan [01:15:48] But for those of you who didn't have that experience, to imagine growing up in a country where women have equal rights and women are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and of course that's normal and there should be more women in running countries and other things like that. Right? So thank you.

John Dehlin [01:16:17] And we have a couple questions here in the back.

Guest [01:16:21] I, I just had a comment. This is about with the Mooney marriages where you just line them up and, and put them together, though we weren't that extreme. There is a teaching in the church that any good woman and any or any good LDS woman and any good LDS man can make a marriage work. And if they're properly devoted to the gospel, if that was what they were both concentrating on, any marriage could work. Of course, they did prefer you to stay within your own race and social class and whatnot.

Steven Hassan [01:16:50] So yeah, yeah, a lot of parallels. But the marriages didn't work in the Moonies, by the way. Almost all of them. Somebody left and they might got, maybe got remarried to somebody else. But I did an interview with a young man, man who was born into the Moonies, recently lives in the uk. If you're interested in a perspective of someone who was raised in the Moonies. His name is Elgin Straight. He has a podcast also. It's a. Moonies are mind control cults. So Moon is perfect, the doctrine is perfect, the policy is perfect. So if you're not happy, or you happen to be married to a gay person who's not attracted to you and refuses to have sex. That's your fault.

Guest [01:17:53] One thing I made a connection to

John Dehlin [01:17:54] is the dispensing of existence.

Steven Hassan [01:17:57] Existence.

Guest [01:17:57] I can connected that to the temple when if we're not worthy of the temple and not worthy, we can't exist with our family eternally. And I think that's such a damaging thing that, like, it breaks families up. And so it's definitely part of one of the eight where dispensing of existence is dispensing of worthiness. And you're not. You can't exist within the church and the attorney eternity. So I thought that was pretty interesting.

Steven Hassan [01:18:23] That's great. I want to do another teaching point for recovery, if I may, and that is becoming really aware of your languaging. Because if you're out of the group, you should talk in the past tense and talk about they taught versus we or talk about it in the present. This is just my opinion as a therapist, having worked with this population, that a lot of times people talk about the past in present tense. And I'll say one more important teaching point. Are we almost ready for lunch? Not yet. Okay. But here's another very important teaching point, and that is human beings have the ability to remember things in two different modes, what we call associated memories or dissociated memories.

Understanding Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress

Steven Hassan [01:19:26] And how it was first explained to me is my teacher said, have you ever been in a roller coaster? And I thought back, yup. So when you think about that experience, are you in the roller coaster or are you watching yourself in the roller coaster?

Steven Hassan [01:19:55] So if you're in the roller coaster, you're having an associated memory. So therefore, some of the fear comes back in your body from that experience. But if you're standing, watching you going around in the roller coaster, you can see you going, but you're not feeling it in your body because you're seeing it from another perspective. Right. And basically speaking as a therapist, we want to recode all of our earlier traumatic memories and make it clear that it happened to the younger me.

Steven Hassan [01:20:38] Like, it's not happening to me in this moment in my body, in the here and now. So we want to make it a default that it's on a TV screen or over on the side somewhere. I do it on the left side, but some people may want to do it on the right side or up or down. And you can make the screen really big in color, or you can make it really small and black. And white. You can play with that, those modalities. But the critical thing is post traumatic stress disorder is typically you're getting triggered to have an associated traumatic memory.

Steven Hassan [01:21:20] That's what it's about. So a veteran hears a loud noise. The loud noise reminded them of when they were in war and a bomb, you know, blew up their best friend. But that sound was a trigger for that associated traumatic memory. The way to neutralize that trigger is to expose the person voluntarily to other loud noises where they have a new association to a loud noise, like a motorcycle backfire or, you know, something else.

Steven Hassan [01:22:00] But the important message I want to convey to you for the whole day is it's your mind. You should control it. Don't look outside for someone else to tell you what to think, feel, or act. Take responsibility. It's my life.

Steven Hassan [01:22:20] I want to live it to its fullest. And I want to understand how the mind works and use it in a way that serves my needs and goals and values and, you know, others.

John Dehlin [01:22:35] So in, in our podcast, in our podcast, did any of you listen to my interview with Steven Hittle? Did you guys catch the part where he called me out first? What did he call me out for? For what? Saying us.

John Dehlin [01:22:50] Right. We've already had a very interesting discussion by that. And it's even more interesting because I'm influenced by the Jewish tradition. So I just want to take a quick poll and have a very brief discussion about this because I'm curious. So when I was still a, a semi believing or a progressive Mormon, I learned about Reformed Judaism, which is the, as I understand it, a branch of Judaism where you don't have to believe in God. You don't even have to believe that the founder of your religion, Moses, ever existed as a historical person. But you're still a Jew. You can still attend Shabbat on, you know, attend the temple on Shabbat, and you can still have your kids bar mitzvahed and bat mitzvah, and that's totally legitimate.

John Dehlin [01:23:40] And to take it even one step further, there's a joke that I've heard fellow you know, Jewish friends make, which is, you know, what do you call, you know, what do you call a Jew who doesn't believe Moses ever existed and who doesn't believe in God? And what would the answer be to that? Steven?

Steven Hassan [01:24:00] I, I'm sorry, I spaced it out.

John Dehlin [01:24:02] I lost him. The answer is a Jew. Right? In other words, I've been told that, you know, I was taught by the Jewish people to think about identity as being something that's not necessarily tied to belief or affiliation. In other words, being Jewish could be a cultural affiliation. I don't like to think of myself as being cut off from the Mormon people. And because conveniently recently prophet President Russell M. Nelson has, you know, declared the identity of Mormon as being an evil bad thing that's a victory for Satan. I'm still okay identifying as a member of the Mormon people.

John Dehlin [01:24:46] And so that's why when I say us and I say we, I still feel a connection to, to the Mormon people. I still want to be a part of helping make the Mormon people healthier. And in some sense I still very much affiliate internally as a Mormon, not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, not as a believer, but as a cultural Mormon. Now I just have a question really quickly. How many of you do feel similar to what I just said? Raise your hand.

John Dehlin [01:25:16] So over half of you, how many of you don't want anything to do with the identity of Mormon? Okay. That's far less than half. Now I'm not saying that makes me right.

Steven Hassan [01:25:27] No, I'm saying people should decide for themselves. And I was just reacting, listening to you talk.

John Dehlin [01:25:32] Oh, I'm not calling you out. Yeah, I'm inviting to have a discussion because what I think is really, I'll

Steven Hassan [01:25:38] tell you more about Judaism and why I think it's different than the Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [01:25:42] Yeah, please. I'm curious. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:25:44] You want me to do that?

John Dehlin [01:25:45] Yeah, yeah, just for a sec.

Steven Hassan [01:25:47] Okay. First of all, Judaism was an oral tradition based on a animal sacrifice temple worship that modern day Jews all know their temples were destroyed. That's the end of that era. And there are a few Christian nationalists who want to bring back the temple and are trying to breed a red heifer and all kinds of other weirdo things. But for Jews, like our greatest figure Moses didn't enter the Promised Lands. Nobody knows where he lived. He was never held up. Like he, he was told to go and liberate the people from Pharaoh. And he's like, no, I have a speech impediment, not me. And it was like, well, we'll give you your brother, you know, go and do it.

Steven Hassan [01:26:52] So anyway, what I'm trying to say is that because it's such an ancient religion, what a lot of people don't understand is that there is been a tradition of rabbinic interpretation over the earlier scriptures. And what a lot of people don't understand is that when one analyzes it's called the Torah in the Jewish tradition, not the Old Testament.

Steven Hassan [01:27:21] What you need to understand is what you read in the Old Testament is not a correct translation of the Torah. And if you want to read a more correct translation, I would encourage you to be in touch with me and I can give you some, some more accurate translations. There are a bunch of words that still nobody knows currently what they mean or what it refers to.

Steven Hassan [01:27:50] But what else did I want to say, say so and even in Judaism, the, the right to like, call out God and say, you know, you're overreacting, that's not okay. You want to kill all these people and what kind of, what kind of God are you? And it's so clearly an anthropomorphism from the ancient times that modern day Jews don't believe in a man, you know, with a beard on, on a cloud. What else do I want to say?

Steven Hassan [01:28:28] There's nothing about gayness in the Torah. There is a line about men shouldn't lie with men. There's nothing about lesbianism. There's nothing about anything else. And there's even challenges by many modern rabbis that the whole homophobic thing is just not grounded in our tradition.

Steven Hassan [01:28:50] And it's a religion that has also been influenced by different countries because Jews were persecuted and they would go to different places and they absorb other traditions and things. And right now what's happening in Israel is a retro, you know, movement, movement by ultra right wing cults, mind control cults that would look at me and say, I'm not Jewish, period. Because I drive on Shabbat, for example, I flip a light switch. But anyway, going back to why I think there's a difference between Reform or Renewal Judaism and Mormonism. Mormonism is young, younger, newer, and Justice Smith, we know a lot about Joseph Smith. There's like facts about Joseph Smith.

Steven Hassan [01:29:45] And he really was not a good person, you know, he's just not someone that I think, how dare you, Stephen has like, like, like Moses.

John Dehlin [01:29:55] Who do you think you are?

Steven Hassan [01:29:56] Moses screwed up and he struck the rock twice instead of once one, once. But I mean, he was never looked at as the ideal person and he certainly didn't, he didn't even get to enter the promised land. So. And the whole thing with the religion is like, the Torah gets read and then we start over again, you know, and, and it's very interesting because I started formally doing Torah study 25 years ago ago. So over 25 years, you do the same stories, but you're, you're doing study with other scholars and lawyers and social workers, and everyone's bringing their own opinions to what they're reading in the scriptures that it has, it's alive, but it's, there's no dogma. There's no, like, doctrine. Like in Mormonism, there's this, this thing. At least that's how I understand Mormonism.

John Dehlin [01:30:56] And this is a dialogue.

Steven Hassan [01:30:59] This is the first time we're having this conversation.

John Dehlin [01:31:01] Yeah. And I, and I totally understand that you guys are older, that you have a rabbinical, interpretive, interpretative tradition, and that in many ways Judaism is centuries, if not millennia ahead of the rest of us. Right. What about the culture, cultural identity, though?

Cultural Identity and Loaded Language

Steven Hassan [01:31:20] Because even though I want to say something about the cultural identity, because I was raised after the Holocaust and what, what we were taught was when they were rounding up Jews, it didn't matter whether you had faith in a divine being or whatever. It just mattered your, your blood lineage. So that was kind of how I was raised. It's like, like I don't have a choice. My mother was Jewish. I'm Jewish, like, no matter what, because of that, that thing. But that, that was also like a Hitler thing, I think, as I'm reflecting on it. But I mean, the bottom line is you need to do what you want to do and what fits for you and everybody, really. There's not one way here.

John Dehlin [01:32:10] Can I be clear why I'm bringing this up, please? It's not because I, I'm trying to get you to help me or because I'm challenging you. What I love about what you're, what you're sharing with us is it's around trauma and healing from trauma. Right. And you know, it wasn't until last year, like, for many, many, many, for over a decade of the history of Mormon stories, I wouldn't even want to use the cult word on a Mormon Stories podcast. Podcast episode. And the most that I would do is say there are cults out there, but then there are high demand religions and within Mormon stories.

John Dehlin [01:32:48] We're going to talk about Mormon stories within the context of it being a high demand religion, not a cult. And part of that was because I didn't want to alienate or turn off the people that we're trying to reach with the podcast. Part of it was I wanted to be respectful. Part of it was I have so much affection for the church and the people and my upbringing that I didn't want to cross that divide and actually call it a cult. And it wasn't until I was sitting with my, I'm going to say a transgender, very close family member to me and my wife, Margi who's one of the nicest, kindest, most compassionate people that I know, who is just not about ever calling anyone any name ever.

John Dehlin [01:33:36] And this transgender family member. And Margi held me to account and said, if there was any other religious group that treated LGBTQ people or women or people of color or abuse victims. Right. Or that dealt with its history

Steven Hassan [01:34:04] or

John Dehlin [01:34:04] that hid information from prospective investigators or people raised in the faith, if there was any other church or religious tradition that acted in the way the Mormon Church does that wasn't Mormon, would you hesitate to call them a cult? Yeah. And that. And that was the first time in my life, and it was only like a year or two ago where I was like, oh, my gosh, have I been conditioned to. Where I won't even. Me Mormon Voldemort excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Right. Where, like, I'm still under the mind control. I. I'm still under the conditioning. What?

Steven Hassan [01:34:50] Go, Margi.

John Dehlin [01:34:52] Well, that's. I mean, I love it. Yeah. So the reason why I'm bringing this up is I want to thread that needle of being constructive with our people. Right. Of being respectful and of seeing what blind spots I. And we may have and in terms of the totality of mind control and or conditioning that many of us still are under. And that's why this is a discussion. I hope it's okay that we're articulating this and even exploring right now in front of you, but that's why I bring it up. Not because I'm challenging you.

Steven Hassan [01:35:30] I think that's very cool. And I really want to model that, you know, life is learning and growing and even, you know, public. Public figures and be like, you're right. I, you know, I need to rethink that one to. To model vulnerability and to say, you know, you're right, it's a great thing. I want to plug a book by Adam Grant called Think Again. I don't know if you've ever heard of Adam Grant. He's a organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business. He has a podcast that's. I listen to it every week. But Think Again is a fantastic book, and it basically says, separate your ego from your beliefs and be prepared to think again and change your mind if there's evidence. Yeah, it's great.

John Dehlin [01:36:21] So there's an amazing book. What's your name? Jamie. There's an amazing book that Jamie wants me to plug. It's by Luna Lindsay Corbden. The book is called Recovering Agency. Luna has done a multi part series on Mormon stories Podcast. Five or six episodes, two or three hours each.

John Dehlin [01:36:40] And what Lindsay did is. Lindsay, Luna. Sorry. What Luna did is that Luna studied Stephen Hasson's work, Robert Lifton's work, Yana what, Leilich's work, and. And all the experts on cults, and then applied that to Mormonism. And Luna identified 31 flavors of. Of coercion that are. They're really useful, using quotes and stories from prophet seers and revelators within the Mormon Church. It's a fantastic book. It's called Recovering Agency. Luna, Lindsay Corbden. And you can check out the Mormon Stories episode where Luna and I spend 12, 15, 20 hours going into this stuff. Thank you so much for that recommendation. Okay, let's do a couple more processing things.

Guest [01:37:42] My glasses officially came off November, so still really new. And when we were talking about loaded language in my blessing, my one thing from God, officially, because I'm someone who's like, is that me? You know what. What's this feeling I'm having? Very indecisive. I was told that I would be an adequate mother. And I remember at the time, I was like, that is, I was young, but I was like, that is. It doesn't seem like the right word. And I did all I was supposed to do. I've been saying, oh, mom, for 16 years almost. I got married young. My husband is amazing, but there's a lot of deconstruction happening. And so for me, maybe that's always just stuck there, that, like, I'm just adequate. I'm just okay. So.

John Dehlin [01:38:46] That's a beautiful example of. Of magical thinking, you know, inappropriate claims of divine communication that you've internalized as truth. For you, it's conditioning. Stephen and I talked about how. Thank you for being. First of all. Thank you for being so vulnerable. I was talking to Stephen about how.

John Dehlin [01:39:10] How many of you hated garments, hated them the entire time you wore them, and as soon as you threw them off, you never looked back. Raise your head. Mostly the women, right? Okay. Is there anyone here who actually grew to like wearing their garments and felt comfortable in them and it was hard to not wear them anymore? Okay, that was me. I lost my faith in 2001. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:39:35] I kept wearing my garments for another 12 years, 13 years. And when. When I stopped. When did I stop wearing my garments? Did you know that when you receive a letter notifying you of your excommunication, finally at that point, they tell you you're not allowed to two things. Do two things. Not allowed to pay your tithing, and you're not allowed to wear your garments. It's like, oh, really? Punish me, right?

John Dehlin [01:40:06] But believe it or not, for me, it was hard to stop wearing my garments. And I tried and went back to it and tried and went back to it. It took me two or three years to get to where I could feel comfortable, no longer wearing my garments without feeling cold, without feeling naked, without feeling vulnerable.

John Dehlin [01:40:25] And that's just conditioning. When Steven comes back, we can talk about Skinner and we can talk about Pavlov, and we can talk about the ways that psychologists and behaviorists have experimented with conditioning, where when you pair a stimulus with some sort of other trigger, you can be conditioned. Dogs can be conditioned to salivate when they hear a bell ringing. But as Stephen taught us just the other day, humans actually learn and become conditioned faster than dogs and other animals. The good news is there's more and more evidence that there's such thing as neuroplasticity, which was we can change our brains and we can uncondition ourselves.

John Dehlin [01:41:12] And I am so sorry that you have been conditioned to believe that the best you'll be is an adequate mother. And I hate the fact that my garments were a chain for me where I didn't feel like. I felt like I would cheat on my spouse if I didn't wear my garments or that I wouldn't be protected if I didn't wear my garments. But that was fictitious. And the beauty of. And the gift of a faith crisis is through conditioning, through reconditioning our brain. You can't unlearn something. The brain doesn't have a mechanism for unlearning. Did you know that you can't unlearn something once you've learned it, it's there, the wires are connected.

John Dehlin [01:41:54] And there's no mechanism for unwiring whatever got wired. The best you can do is introduce new learning to your brain. And what that means is, is. And this is true with phobias. This is true with anxiety disorders. This is true with obsessive compulsive disorder.

John Dehlin [01:42:12] If you've got some fear or some conditioning that is controlling you, the way out of that is to lean into whatever the other behavior is that you want to, or the other thoughts or the other conditioning that you want to become more associated with your brain. So in my case, what was the answer to my discomfort with not wearing garments?

John Dehlin [01:42:41] What? Burn them, get rid of them, and never wear them again. And just give myself time. And guess what? Over time, one, two, three years later, do you think I look back now and say, man, I wish I Could put those garments on. I don't now, but it took me some time. But what you'll see over time is whatever stimulus is that you want to override, whatever programming is that you want to rewire is if you give yourself enough time and enough associations with the new stimulus, you'll find that that voice in your head gets smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker. And that the new learning, the new associations, the new behaviors, the new habits, they grow and they grow and they grow to the point where it becomes just a distant whisper of a memory in the back of your mind. Okay, thank you for sharing. Can we give her more round of applause?

Steven Hassan [01:43:40] Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate you a lot. And so for me, my mom passed away unexpectedly when I was a boy

John Dehlin [01:43:49] and my father kind of became a

Steven Hassan [01:43:51] broken man at this time. And then later in life, after my mission, my ex father in law kind of became my father figure and told me I was his son.

John Dehlin [01:44:03] And he really just took advantage of my vulnerability to the point that, you

Steven Hassan [01:44:09] know, he was a ex or a former stake president, former mission president, where

John Dehlin [01:44:16] I would confess my sins to my ex father in law who had just, you know, he's still a true believing Mormon and, you know, still a prominent

Steven Hassan [01:44:27] church leader in the southeastern Idaho area.

John Dehlin [01:44:30] And that for me reading Combating Cult Mind Control, I realized, yes, there's the overarching cult of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but also there's this smaller cult that is my in law, ex in laws, and ex father in law who was and still is a cult leader. Very similar to the Lafferty.

Steven Hassan [01:44:54] If you guys have seen that, read the book or watched the movie.

John Dehlin [01:44:59] Yep. To, to the man who, you know,

Steven Hassan [01:45:01] led that small kind of strange fringe group.

John Dehlin [01:45:05] So anyways, it's just, it's opened my eyes to the fact that, wow, there's an overarching cult that was controlling me and hurting me, but also this very intimate relationship.

Steven Hassan [01:45:16] And as soon as I stopped believing,

John Dehlin [01:45:19] this man who said I was his

Steven Hassan [01:45:20] son, said he loved me, I was

John Dehlin [01:45:23] just kicked to the curb and it's very damaging. Wow. Can we give him a round of applause for his vulnerability?

Steven Hassan [01:45:34] So

John Dehlin [01:45:37] I just want to go back on the slide deck for a second. One of the things that I really love about this influence continuum, and again, I apologize that you all can't see it, but I invite you to bring it up on your phones. This influence continuum does not just apply to the Mormon Church. It doesn't just apply to high demand religions or cults. It applies to multi level marketing organizations, to unhealthy educational institutions, it can apply to your yoga instructor, it can apply to podcasters. Right. And I don't mind being held personally accountable to whether I am leaning more towards the more healthy, constructive side of the influence continuum versus the destructive.

John Dehlin [01:46:24] I had a troll reach out to me and say, isn't Mormon stories a cult? And instead of getting angry or defensive, I said, tell you what, Dan, here is Stephen Hasson's framework for influence. And what I want you to do is you analyze me and my behavior in Mormon stories by this continuum.

John Dehlin [01:46:45] And if I'm violating any of these principles, if I'm straying more towards the unhealthy than the healthy, I want you to tell me. Right? And one of the most important ways that this framework applies to so many of your lives is just in relationships, in relationships with the spouse, with the parent, with children, with friends. And you can analyze by that association as well. And if we look at your relationship with your ex father in law, and I'm sure you have tender feelings for him, and I'm sure in many ways he's a victim like us all. So this isn't to bash on him particularly, but as I think about, or as you think about this influence continuum, and I think it's a healthy exercise for us to do this.

John Dehlin [01:47:34] As you look at this continuum, can you identify any of these traits of unhealthy influence in your ex father in law? And I'm assuming that you can see. So once you stand up and tell me if any of these items stick out for you in how you were treated by your ex father in law, which name, name a few. A hundred percent conditional love.

Steven Hassan [01:48:00] Love is in quotes and that's so true.

John Dehlin [01:48:04] Solemnity, fear and guilt, so causing me

Steven Hassan [01:48:08] my mental anguish and internal pain and then being the solution, son, come and talk to me about your sins.

John Dehlin [01:48:15] I'm, I'm, you know, used to be the stake president.

Steven Hassan [01:48:18] I'm, I'm a mission president.

John Dehlin [01:48:19] I can help you, son. Help. Talk to me. I'm your, I'm your dad.

Steven Hassan [01:48:22] Right?

John Dehlin [01:48:23] So that's claims absolute authority. Right? There's a power issue there. There's an elitism and a grandioseness, as if he knows what's good for you, as he knows God's will, as he is. He's the authority of truth and righteous living for you.

Steven Hassan [01:48:39] Right?

John Dehlin [01:48:39] Right.

Steven Hassan [01:48:40] And also to really consider, condemn my

John Dehlin [01:48:42] own father, who was poor, who, you

Steven Hassan [01:48:45] know, was fired as a, as a seminary teacher for being divorced, my dad, I Was told by my ex father in law, your dad's just a loser. I'm your dad now. I'm the rich, successful, powerful dad that

John Dehlin [01:49:00] you always needed and you're going to become like me.

Steven Hassan [01:49:02] And he wanted me. I was on the fast track to become higher church leadership and then I just had to leave at all because I couldn't do it.

John Dehlin [01:49:11] And if we go to this idea of no legitimate reasons to leave, I'm guessing if and when you decided to leave and he found out it wasn't like fantastic, what's working for you now? I hope you're having a great time leaving the church, right?

Steven Hassan [01:49:24] Oh, totally. He would push books on me like I forgot the name of it, but

John Dehlin [01:49:29] reasons why the Book of Mormon couldn't have been written by Joseph Smith. How it was divine.

Steven Hassan [01:49:35] All, all of the stuff from Deseret book that would back up the the

John Dehlin [01:49:38] church, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Let's give this guy applause for his vulnerability. And I want to, I want to end this exchange with one last challenge, which I think may be the most difficult of all for all of us.

Applying the Influence Continuum to Yourself

John Dehlin [01:49:55] What if instead of applying this influence continuum to other organizations and to other people, what if we try and do the introspection to apply this to our own behavior? What if we ask ourselves in our relationships with loved ones, in our parenting, right? In our work as an employer, in the way that we operate in the world, to what extent are we offering conditional love?

John Dehlin [01:50:27] And can I just kind of get on a tiny little soapbox here? How many ex Mormons who once they no longer believe, once they know that the church isn't true, become the monster that they ran from and they believe that it's up to them to tell others what's not true, to make other people feel dumb for their continued beliefs and to then try and become the authority for what is best in their lives as an external locus of control for them, Right? And in that sense, the oppressed can become the oppressor. And how many of you look down upon and judge your believing family and friends.

John Dehlin [01:51:17] Friends from an elitist point of view, right? And so I would say let's not just get filled with the righteous indignation of now finding the truth and, and, and holding our believing family members as inferior? Let's try and offer the unconditional love that we're wanting.

John Dehlin [01:51:43] Is that fair? And that's hard because sometimes believing family members violate our boundaries and are abusive in ways that are very harmful. And so one of the things we're going to do when Steven gets back is we're going to get his perspective on boundary maintenance and on how to have healthy communication with not just believing family and friends, but sometimes abusive believing family and friends. Is that all right? Okay, let's just take one or two more, and then we're gonna fully break for lunch.

Guest [01:52:21] Who.

John Dehlin [01:52:22] All right, so one thing to add

Steven Hassan [01:52:26] on with your neuroplasticity, something that's been super helpful for me, is psychedelic therapy, right? So when we think about these neural pathways and the way that they have grown together for, in my case, 43 years, and then all of a sudden

Guest [01:52:40] be exposed to those pathways, opening up

Steven Hassan [01:52:43] and seeing in a very short period of time, a new perspective or a new reality, and then having the opportunity for those neural pathways to come back together. It's a phenomenal tool that we have in addition to everything else that you added and time to be able to rewire the neural pathways, pathways that we have.

John Dehlin [01:53:03] Thank you, Bo. How many. How many of you who have experienced some, who are comfortable disclosing, how many of you are willing to raise your hand and say you've tried some form of psychedelic assisted experience? So that could be ketamine, that could be psilocybin, which is mushrooms. That can be lsd. That can be.

John Dehlin [01:53:24] First of all, I would just to want, want to say, so that nobody thinks I'm trying to push drug use or illegal drug use. I've never had a psychedelic experience. I haven't even tried beer or marijuana or any type of alcohol. So please don't think that this is like, hey, break the law and use illegal drugs. What I am going to say is, just last week on Mormon Stories podcast, we interviewed a woman who was a believing mother of four, three children in what she would describe as a very healthy marriage at the time, with a. With a successful career, feeling as though she had everything she had ever wanted.

John Dehlin [01:54:04] And she was uncontrollably anxious and depressed in her early 30s. And this will be released in a week or two. On Mormon Stories podcast, she tells the story of trying mushrooms psilocybin as a believing. As a fully believing Mormon mom, not as an ex Mormon, right? Not as a progressive liberal Mormon. She had not heard any of the CES letter, Mormon stories, LDS discussions, truth claims kind of stuff. She was desperate to fix her anxiety and depression after seven years of psychotherapy and of ss, sri, or antidepressant medications that were not working for her.

Guest [01:54:49] She.

John Dehlin [01:54:50] She had several experiences with psychedelic medication, and she reports that for her, it was transformative. So that's not me saying go do that. That's not me saying break the law. I've never done it. So I'm just speaking out of anecdotal experience there. There is emerging science around the use of psychedelics, whether it's Johns Hopkins University and several other universities in late stage trials for psychedelics as a treatment for depression or PTSD or other types of conditions. But if you read the book how to change your mind by Michael Pollan and he also has a three part Netflix series on psychedelics, you, you can check this out for yourself.

John Dehlin [01:55:36] And as we're trying to encourage your own internal locus of control, if you feel like you want a more natural, experimental way to rewire your brain to gain new perspective, to have what some would describe as the most spiritual experiences and the most meaningful experiences of their lives, you know, Bose and saying check out psychedelics potentially, is that fair? Okay, let's do one more and then we're gonna break. Yes.

Guest [01:56:10] For me, a takeaway that's been really important. It was number seven, I think, where it talks about doctrine versus person and it talks about how the, the system, the organization can't be wrong. And if there's a problem, it always ends, the trail always ends at you.

Guest [01:56:29] This was, this was especially, this is especially potent for me and this is still something that I am in that I'm untangling, but this belief that it's always my fault if something isn't right. But why this is especially potent for me is because usually I've been able, I've been in a position where I can do something about it. I have, if I had a problem, I could usually actually address it, I could do something about it. And so like, like if I had a problem with another missionary or with a leader that I had or with whatever it was, I had a, I had enough position and trust that I could solve the problem in a way that I was okay with.

Guest [01:57:08] And so for, for most of the time I'm able to solve my own problems and that really feeds into. It's always something wrong with me. There's, there was always a way for it to resolve for me. And so when there isn't and there inevitably isn't, there are inevitably times where I can't solve the problem. And I'm, I'm trying, I have to find out where I am on the spectrum between doing something about something I can't control and not doing something about something I can control.

Guest [01:57:37] Just, it makes it really difficult to tell when I can and can control. Can't do something about something because. But being able to know that the problem doesn't always end with me is really helpful and really empowering.

Steven Hassan [01:57:56] Yes. And I want to. I just had lunch, so I'm back. I think what you said is really wise and I'd say it's really a valuable tool in your toolbox to always think what's within my control and what's outside of my control and put most of your energy and attention on things that you can do something about.

Steven Hassan [01:58:24] And when people put more of their attention on things outside of their control, that is a formula for anxiety, depression, frustration, anger, helplessness, and a million other adjectives. Not a wise move, but. So I would say put 90% of your attention on things you can control, but periodically think about things that are outside of your control and think, are there any creatures, creative ways or strategies or any other ways to bring one of those things that are outside of my control within my control?

Steven Hassan [01:59:11] Because there may be new information, new people you've met, new resources. And I definitely believe in aspiring to, to goals, but also not setting goals that are unrealistic or unattainable because then we're back in the perfectionism, demand for purity thing. And, you know, I just, I. I read an interesting business book called the Gap in the Gain. Has anybody heard of that book?

John Dehlin [01:59:49] Oh, a few people.

Steven Hassan [01:59:51] So he basically says, you know, in most successful executives, whatever they set as an agenda or as a goal, once they achieve it, it's not good enough anymore. They have the next goal and the next goal and the horizon keeps, you know, lifting. And they're perpetually feeling like they're not accomplished because of this perfectionism virus.

Steven Hassan [02:00:21] And his formula is that each day you should sit down and determine your objective for the next, for tomorrow. Three things that are within your control to accomplish. Yes, you can do a three month and a one year, you know, formula too, but pretty much you create the criteria for what you can achieve. And then the next day when you go to sleep at night, you can look at your list and you can feel good about yourself.

Steven Hassan [02:00:54] So it's like cultivating a very different consciousness. He calls that gain thinking versus gap, where you're constantly chasing the horizon and never feeling like you're wealthy enough or famous enough or successful enough. And I found that book very interesting and useful because it's a simple sort. Am I in a gap thinking or gain thinking on things? And it also, you know, it really helps to periodically reflect on what you've accomplished so far and feel good about it.

Navigating Life After Returning from a Mission

John Dehlin [02:01:32] How should this gentleman feel, feel about waking up to his life within six months of having returned home from his mission? How many of you would like to have.

Steven Hassan [02:01:41] Well, is that a question for him or for the audience?

John Dehlin [02:01:44] Yeah, good point. Go ahead, Steven.

Steven Hassan [02:01:47] No, I mean, I, I, I, I, I wanna, I always try to step inside people's shoes. Like that's part of my, my therapeutic, you know, methodology is to just try to be empathic and step inside people's shoes. And I'm not sure how, how he's feeling right now. And I could be because there's a group and maybe because this is so new, but I'm curious, could you, could

Guest [02:02:20] you ask it one more time just to make sure that I answer, like, productively?

Steven Hassan [02:02:24] Really remind me what you asked because

John Dehlin [02:02:27] maybe I was reflecting. How many of you here would have liked to figure out what, you know now, within six months of your 20th or 21st year, how many of you would like to look around? Will you look around? We look around. Okay. And so what I was saying is how, how impressed, how impressed I am and how notable it is to me that at your age, you're awakening to your own truths and realities and to maybe seeing the world a little bit clearer. And I guess Steven's wondering is, how do you feel about that?

Guest [02:03:09] I feel like I had a lot of advantages that a lot of people didn't have. I was always raised nuanced. I was always raised that if there's a prop that the truth will withstand scrutiny.

Steven Hassan [02:03:26] Bingo, bingo, bingo. Write that down. If it's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. That's really important criteria. Please continue. Thank you.

Guest [02:03:38] And another really formative experience for me was when I was in high school. I enrolled in speech and debate. And that was really important for me because speech and debate attracts a lot of people whose opinions don't usually matter. It gives them a place where you have to listen to them and they can destroy you if you don't actually put up a fight, if you can't actually back up what you're saying. And so it attracts a lot of people. I was the only straight white man in my entire, on my entire speech debate team. And for a time I was also the only Latter Day Saint.

Guest [02:04:14] And I wished, over the course of my mission, I wished again and again that my companion had had the experience that I had had of being at a debate tournament and being surrounded by people who weren't like me and who were my friends. But when we caught talking about the right subjects, eventually it came to the. They would ask me and everyone would be looking at me and they would ask me, why can't we get married?

Guest [02:04:39] And I wish, I just wish that more of my companions had that experience. And that's something that is really in this, I'm in this in between phase right now, between my mission and going to BYU where I can ask the person I'm spending a lot of time with. I couldn't do this with my companions and I won't be able to do it at byu, I don't think. Where I, I couldn't. I. Every line of questioning eventually ran up to. I wasn't just questioning the church, I was questioning whether I wanted to stay on my mission or whether I wanted to stay at byu. And I, the answer to that was always yes, I loved my mission.

Guest [02:05:12] It was a really good experience for me. And so, but in this in between phase where that's not a problem, the truth, I, I gave the truth scrutiny and I was disappointed and I was really glad that I did that. And I. And that's. That, that's, that's really, that's, that's really why. Those are a lot of the advantages that I've had going into this that I want people to be aware of, because it's really easy when someone, when somebody has, when somebody has something that you don't, or they've achieved something that you wish you had, or they've come to something that you wish you'd come to longer, longer ago.

Guest [02:05:45] It's really easy to think that it's something wrong with you when in reality there are just advantages that they had that you. You didn't.

Steven Hassan [02:05:52] Wow, this is a wise young man. You're very wise for your age. I'm going to be very excited to see what you do with your life and that. Mom and dad, awesome parents, awesome parents. And what you said about debate is really important. It's really a valuable debate skill and life experience.

Steven Hassan [02:06:20] And when I first started my doctoral training, that was one. I didn't do, debate. But in my doctoral training, one of the first things they were teaching me is if you're, if you're writing a journal article, you need to know what the other perspectives are and why they believe what they believe and what research they've done to arrive at the. Those beliefs. And the most powerful way to write a journal article is to recount all the other perspectives and what that was based on and then give your counter argument. So it's that kind of really taking the time to hear the other side of and what I want to continue if I may and just say, remember I said, how would you know if, if you're under mind control? And I'll explain the four step reality testing strategy. I'm just going to run through it real fast if I can right now.

Guest [02:07:16] Can I. I just had one comment real quick just about the successes and failures and like remembering to think about that and things that you have done. I know it can be really difficult for us and we tend to give credit to other people around us or, or to God especially.

Steven Hassan [02:07:30] Right.

Guest [02:07:31] Um, he's the one that helped us. This was all these things, this is something that I just realized recently was that I think some of my greatest successes were wrapped up in my mind with a lot of shame or a feel, feeling of failure about them specifically. So in, in my Mormon stories I, I talked about that I was Sterling Scholar for a, for foreign language in my high school and I just, I just threw it out there and someone commented like, oh, that, you know, like it was kind of prideful, like she's just casually tossing it out there that she was Sterling Scholar. And yes, it was an award, but I mean I got it for my high school, but I failed so miserably at the regional, you know, regionals for it.

Guest [02:08:10] I was embarrassed compared to the other Sterling Scholars that I was there against. So when I had mentioned it, it really was a small thing in my mind because I, I felt like the biggest thing to me was the shame and embarrassment I felt against, against the other competitors from other high schools. So I never, I wasn't thinking of that as still something awesome that I did, at least in my high school, even if I didn't do well later. And then same with getting my degree, I had undiagnosed adhd. And honestly, I think that's what one of the darkest times of my life was when I graduated.

Guest [02:08:43] And I just felt like I was getting it really basically on a technicality that I, I just barely showed up enough and I just barely turned in enough stuff that like, technically I hit this level. They got to give me the piece of paper. But I absolutely felt like I didn't belong there. I wasn't smart enough. I never should have gone to college. I was delusional to think that I, I was a peer with, you know, my peers. I, I just felt like I just, I got in here somehow and nobody noticed enough to be like, hey, you don't belong here. But now at this point point realizing like nobody else in my family, the first person, like first generation, and then Again, with the undiagnosed adhd, it really is just about a miracle that I got it at all.

Guest [02:09:24] And so it's something, again, that I should be proud of, but for so much of my life was a big source of shame. So I hope that helps people. Maybe if you're struggling to find what your successes are, they might be in your failures.

Steven Hassan [02:09:36] Yeah. Thank you. And if you're able to assess your feeling shame or guilt, ask yourself, where is that from? Is that something from inside of me or was that something that was being put on me by another person or institution?

Steven Hassan [02:10:00] Because it's. We shouldn't be ashamed for being ourselves. And. And I don't know. So my son was diagnosed adhd. And so I know a lot about adhd, but I've also come to kind of reject the medicalized definition of adhd because in fact, way before civilization emerged, people had to be like, all over the place doing 20 things at once to survive, you know, and it's. I don't see that as a defect.

Steven Hassan [02:10:39] I see it as something too, that could be potentially seen as a strength, you know, and such. So. But thank you for sharing that. But what I want to come back to this, this, this young man and learning other people's argument in order to develop your own argument, to debate with them.

Steven Hassan [02:11:02] So what I came up with in my reality testing strategy for how can I know if I've been brainwashed? Is number one, take time out from whatever. If you're in a controlling relationship or you suspect it's an unhealthy relationship or a group, just like, stop all the rituals, stop attending, take, go on vacation, go away, be in nature, sleep, you know, eat, listen to good music, et cetera.

Steven Hassan [02:11:34] Because for me, it was that those two weeks in the hospital, away from the cult, sleeping and eating and having women nurses taking care of me like that was so opposite the programming that women were eating evil and they were all trying to rape me all the time. Like, that's. I was not allowed to be with a woman in a room alone as a Mooney because I was so afraid of them that, you know, they were going to molest me. But just.

Steven Hassan [02:12:05] But in any case. So I, I had time away. Number two step is if the question is how would I know if I've been brainwashed or mind controlled is what's the definition of mind control? What's the definition of brainwashing?

Steven Hassan [02:12:21] And I'm offering you Lifton and Singer and my bite model of authoritarian control. So, like, expose yourself to those models and Then the third step is to seek out critics and former members and hear what they have to say and get over the fear that may have been put in your head that they're evil and bad and the information's toxic and all that. Take the position that I want to know the truth and truth will stand up to scrutiny. So let me invest some time and energy to really hear the arguments, like what are the facts about Joseph Smith, for example, if that's important to you, or what's the facts about the organization, etc.

Steven Hassan [02:13:16] Because when you're in a mind control group, as soon as a leader leaves, they're evil and they're satanic and it's spiritual pornography to read their books and whatever. Right? So you're, you're accepting their criteria for defining what's valuable or not. But if you want a reality, test the issue of mind control, really listen to all of the major arguments and then the final step is to really be honest with yourself and reflect over your experiences.

Steven Hassan [02:13:52] Are there bite model criteria? What about my experience experiences? And I have yet to meet anyone who had never had a negative experience while they were involved with an authoritarian group. I've heard people who said they've never had one, but then when they stopped and thought about, oh yeah, I remember when I was 13, this happened, or 12, or when I was 15, this happened. So really reflect honestly over your life experiences with, with knowing about the mind control models, listening to the former members. Did you want to say something else just now?

Guest [02:14:30] Yeah, just to add to the last

Steven Hassan [02:14:33] thing that you said come up. I don't know what happened. Oh, there's the other mic. I think you may have to turn it on.

Guest [02:14:45] A lot of the experiences that. I don't really have a lot of negative experiences either. And I was kind of wild when you were just.

Steven Hassan [02:14:52] I bet you have. And you haven't remembered them yet.

Guest [02:14:54] But most of the time when I think about experiences, most of the time when I think about experiences that are problematic for me, they're pretty much not. None of them are mine. But what's important is that they don't have to be mine in order to matter.

Steven Hassan [02:15:07] Absolutely true. So they don't have to be yours.

Guest [02:15:11] Like I'm not. I like most of my emotions emotional drive because like, like you said earlier, logically I don't know how long ago I disconnected, but emotionally it takes us a lot of time, a long time to catch up. And a lot of my emotional catch up came from other people's experiences, not my own. Especially like on my mission when I was talking to people who were former members, which we did a lot of.

Steven Hassan [02:15:35] Okay, cool. So you were listening to former members. That's interesting too. But let me just finish the paradigm. So you're reflecting back honestly over your experiences, having learned from ex members and critics, learning the models and ask yourself if I knew then what I know now, would I have wanted to continue to believe and to participate? And if the answer is no, then the conclusion in my mind is it's time to leave. Now you may stay because you're married, you have kids, your career, you may have other factors keeping you in, but the first step is just reclaiming your personal power of your mind and your body and your choices and your internal dialogue with yourself. So that's my formula for anybody to reality test. Did you want to say something else, buddy? So any reactions to that? Does that. Yes.

Helping Children and Family Members Still in the Church

Guest [02:16:51] I am glad that you said what you did at the end there about maybe you're in a marriage or you have kids because for a lot of us in the context of, of what you're talking about, you have a former self before the cult and for probably most of us here, we were born into it and our former self is just a younger version of our cult self. And if you were born into it and you are also a woman, then you, you, your body has been a slave to this cult basically. And my beliefs have changed 180 degrees. But I am living the exact same looking life because I am now a mother. I, I didn't make informed decisions to become a mother or to get married young. But that's my life now and I'm not going to leave my children.

Steven Hassan [02:17:44] Right.

Guest [02:17:45] And so the healing feels slower and harder and sludge like to try to reclaim or build for what feels like the first time a person when I am still stuck in roles that I was coerced into fulfilling.

Steven Hassan [02:18:04] Yeah, so I hear you. Yeah, I think that's honest. I think that's really honest. And I'm not sure what to say or what others may advice others might have for you in terms of how you choose to in a sense make your exit strategy. You know, and it may be a few years away, but on the other hand I. What also comes to mind for me is how many people I've worked with who because they were raised in an abusive mind control cult at the point they became parents when they started thinking about raising their kids in what they experienced that propelled them out of the group.

Steven Hassan [02:19:01] And that's another perspective to think about what's healthiest for your children so that you're not perpetuating, you know, the negative stereotypes and conditioning things. And categorically what I want to say to all parents is children learn by modeling, by your modeling.

Steven Hassan [02:19:27] And therefore you can can say words to them. But what's even more important is how they see you be and how they experience you act. And so especially for women, if they've been messaged that you're second class, only men matter and only men make the decisions to the extent that you can have a voice, reason, explain. That's the other thing with kids. They do much better if parents explain to them what's going on as opposed to keeping them in the dark. And I come back to studies even when during the World War II, where there were bombings happening in France and other places In World War II, the children who were not told why the Germans were bombed, bombing and all of that, they were distracted.

Steven Hassan [02:20:23] Or the parents thought they were protecting their children, but their children were terrified. But they did better when their parents could say, listen, we're under attack by another country that wants to take over us. They're bombing us now.

Steven Hassan [02:20:39] You know, we hope we're going to be okay. We're all going to stay together, but we're going to, you know, we're going to survive this and we love you. But to explain why somebody's bombing you, the kids do much better with that. And knowing that their parents are operating out of a sense of treating the children with respect and that they're intelligent too.

John Dehlin [02:21:08] Maybe. Let's do one more question and then we'll have a brief break. Is that okay? Great. Okay. Thank you.

Guest [02:21:14] So I, I'm totally in line with what you're saying. One aspect of that I do have a question on how do you navigate your young children who especially here in I live in Alpine, I'm here or close communities of the LDS faith. How do you navigate those impressionable children that have those social pressures? My children are just teeny tiny, so I'm thinking of this when they're getting older, especially as I'm seeing a neighbor girl, not lds.

Guest [02:21:45] She's in the young women age and her friends are all of the LDS faith. So she's feeling that pressure of going to young women's wanting to go to church. And her mom has shared the CES letter different things with her.

Guest [02:21:59] But she still comes back to her mom saying she believes what they're saying. She believes Joseph Smith is a good person. How do you navigate your kids through those pressures of what they're being surrounded by. Because I know as parents we have, we have some stance in our modeling and discussions with them, but friends sometimes have a little bit higher pull with such young.

Steven Hassan [02:22:22] I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:22:24] I've got some thoughts, but do you give your answer?

Steven Hassan [02:22:26] I was going to say people who've lived, lived it are going to be in a much better place to share their, their wisdom with you on this. But when I try to put myself into your shoes and whatever, I'll just be honest. I want to move out of Utah. I mean that's, I mean I'm telling you as an ex Mooney, you know, I don't know. But when I try to put myself and think about young kids, I want to get them away from what I think is not a healthy environment. And I know that I'm taking a risk by saying an extreme thing like that, but that's my reaction.

John Dehlin [02:23:10] But I think that's a valid reaction and I think it is a viable and a reasonable response for many. And some choose to leave the state. Others choose to just relocate to a different set of boundaries. There are obviously geographies within Utah that are more and less secular. Obviously Salt Lake county or Park City is going to have a very different composition of believers to non believers than Utah County. Where are you here in Alpine? Yeah. I was telling Steven Alpine is top 5 most intense cities within Mormonism. I'd say Rexburg's up there kind of Provo Orem, Bountiful is pretty intense. But like Alpine's up there.

John Dehlin [02:23:57] Am I wrong? Kind of right? You know, I think so. So any answer we give is going to be glib and is not going to really reflect the realities of what you're facing. What I can say for us us, are you in a mixed faith marriage or are you.

John Dehlin [02:24:15] So you and your husband are both out, but your kids are growing up here. So yeah, one option really is to sort of like plan. And your, your oldest kid is how old? 5 years old. So one viable option is to plan a relocation. Honestly, obviously, I'm sure that's not news to you, but for many people that's not an option. And for many people, where would they go? Like if all their families here and if they, their business is here, their friends are here and this is their people, many people don't want to have to leave. And the good news is in my opinion that, well, first of all, I love the Mormon people, believers or not.

John Dehlin [02:24:55] That's just who I am. Okay. But I've heard someone say the, the worst Thing you know about Utah is all the Mormons, but the best thing about Utah is all the ex Mormons. Right? Because there is no better place to find really cool friends and community outside of the church than Utah. You know, and sometimes there's a huge benefit in making friends with people who have never been Mormon. And I highly recommend that for everyone.

John Dehlin [02:25:26] That's just. There's just so many insanity testing and diverse thoughts and views and opinions that you're going to get through diversity. But having said that, how many of you feel like there's no one that gets you quite like an ex Mormon? How many of you feel that way? Yeah, because they've been through a lot of what you've been through, right?

John Dehlin [02:25:46] So when Margi and I lost our faith in 2001, I was still inspired by Reformed Judaism. And I thought, just because I don't believe anymore doesn't mean I have to leave the church. So we chose to stay in the church for another 13 years and raise our kids in the church consciously, intentionally, as 100 non believers.

Steven Hassan [02:26:10] Okay, now non believers.

John Dehlin [02:26:14] Okay, so is that what you said?

Steven Hassan [02:26:16] You know you're non believers, but you're kids were raised as believers.

John Dehlin [02:26:19] I'm getting there.

Steven Hassan [02:26:20] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:26:21] So no, I think it's wholly un. This is my personal view. I. I once met an accountant. He since passed away. He was a dear friend and he said, I no longer believe, but if I left the church, my wife would leave me. And so, and all my clients are in Utah. So for the benefit of my family, I'm going to just pretend that I believe and not let my kids know that I don't believe and raise them as believing Mormons because that's what I feel is right for me and my family. Now, of course, I'm one who believes in, in honesty and truth. And that decision violated kind of every fiber of my moral being.

John Dehlin [02:27:08] When he told me that, okay, but that was a decision he made. The biggest argument I have against that is, number one, if your kids end up being one of the marginalized groups that Mormonism tends to devalue and or target, and unfortunately that includes women, Right.

John Dehlin [02:27:33] There is a real significant problem with raising them, with all of this conditioning and all this potential baggage for what they're going to end up picking up regardless of what you teach them in the home, the messages that they get from their peers and other leaders is going to be much more influential and much stronger oftentimes than what you as parents are able to offer.

John Dehlin [02:27:56] So the last thing that I wanted in my life Was my kids to be raised in the church, to decide to serve missions, decide to go to byu, decide to get married in the temple, to make all those decisions about career and children, get into their 20s, get into their 30s, get into their 40s, then at some point realized that the church wasn't what it claims to be or that it was actually toxic to their feminist inclinations or their LGBT identities or their love for science or whatever it is, discover that the church wasn't true, and then turn back to me and say, wait, you knew?

Steven Hassan [02:28:36] Why didn't you tell me you knew

John Dehlin [02:28:39] and you didn't tell me?

Steven Hassan [02:28:40] You knew and you didn't tell me, Right?

John Dehlin [02:28:43] So no, we did not raise our kids. No, we did not deceive our kids about our thoughts and feelings about the church. And yes, we were honest with them. We, however, were under the conditioning that you could not raise happy, healthy kids outside of the church. And we felt very conflicted about how are we going to raise our kids here. If I want to do, if I want to stay in Utah and do this work, there's no better place to do it than in Utah.

John Dehlin [02:29:08] But how am I going to raise a happy, healthy, moral kid when they're excluded from all the activities, all the, all the social groups are scouting and young men's and young women's. They're marginalized at school and looked down upon.

John Dehlin [02:29:22] So why not just raise them as progressive Mormons? And so what that meant is, is a lot like, again, I, I learned from the Jews, right? You can be a Jew, you can go to synagogue and not believe in God or in Moses, right? So what we decided to do as parents is to raise our kids in the church, but to tell them we do not believe this is the one true church. Even though you're going to hear that at church. We do not. We believe that Joseph Smith taught some good things, but he did a lot of really bad things. And when the church pumps him up as the greatest man since Jesus, if not better than Jesus, that's not what mommy and daddy believe.

John Dehlin [02:30:02] The church is going to teach you that the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are scripture that are translated from ancient documents. Mommy and daddy do not believe that. And here's what we know about the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as, and their origins. We were honest to the point where the kids eyes would glaze over about papyrus and hieroglyphics and phallic symbols about, you know, ancient Egyptian, you know, papyru, right?

John Dehlin [02:30:30] We were probably over educating them in ways that was not even appropriate for their age. But we were trying to thread that needle of allowing them to have friends and community, allow them to fit into their surrounding area, allow them to have a cultural identity, but to also have a worldview that was grounded in truth and reality and honesty. And we wondered if there would be a side benefit, which would be the following.

John Dehlin [02:30:58] Regardless of what they do do, when they grow up and go out into the big bad world, they're going to meet people of all sorts of beliefs and ideas. And so in our minds, we thought, if we can raise them as non literal believing Mormons, but within the LDS tradition, how equipped are they going to be to be able to go out and meet Muslims and meet Jews and meet. Meet evangelical Christians and Catholics, and to be able to show empathy and understanding for beliefs that aren't their own, but still be able to exist within, within those realms with a, with a sense of respect, of differences and for other people's beliefs.

John Dehlin [02:31:38] And I would argue that in many ways, my kids developed a sense of maturity and an ability to communicate, to empathize and understand different points of view, to have more sophisticated concepts, conversations. I think in many ways it was actually helpful to them. And for a while, they were able to have their cake and eat it too, from the standpoint of being able to go to the youth activities, enjoy the dances, date, have friends, and not be completely shut out and marginalized. And that, that worked for us until I got excommunicated.

John Dehlin [02:32:15] And at that point, my wife and my children were just no longer interested in remaining in a church that would kick out their dad. And the one sort of end of the tale that's a little bit messy is even though I came out early in the lifestyle lifetime of Mormon stories as an LGBTQ ally, what I didn't know until after my excommunication was that I had LGBTQ trust children because in many instances, they didn't know that themselves.

John Dehlin [02:32:46] And now that we know that somewhere between 10 to 25% of the youth today are identifying somewhere along the spectrum of sexual or gender diversity? There's a high. If you have four kids, there's a very high likelihood that at least one of them are going to come out as, as bisexual or gay or lesbian or, or transgender or gender non binary.

John Dehlin [02:33:12] And as much as we try to be LGBT affirming as believing Mormons, we're taking our kids to gay pride parades, right? We're teaching them that other, other religions are to be respected, that atheism is. Atheism is A valid, you know, perspective. Right. In spite of all the deprogramming that we tried to do with our kids while raising them in the LDS environment, they still picked up a lot of messages around modesty, around body shaming, around sexuality, around, you know, spirituality that they would say now were very toxic for them, especially around body, shame, sexuality, and, and the like.

John Dehlin [02:33:59] So I can't say, say personally that in my experience, my kids were glad that Margi and I made that decision. And that's a very difficult, very, very difficult thing for a father who really was trying to do what was best for his kids at the time. It's a very difficult thing for me to now say publicly that we may have harmed our kids by making that decision.

John Dehlin [02:34:20] Now, having said that, I don't believe in regret and shame and we don't know what it would have been like to take that other path. And I can guarantee you any path you choose is going to have good and bad. Because the one wisdom that secular Buddhism shares with us all is that life is suffering. And no matter what path you take in life, you're going to have suffering and your kids are going to have suffering. So in some sense, it's almost pick your poison.

John Dehlin [02:34:47] But the best advice I have if you're raising kids within Utah is to find a pod. Find three or four or five couples with kids that are about the same age as your kids, that live in a geographically somewhat close area and have community and even family within a pod of your own construction.

John Dehlin [02:35:12] And that's why we do thrive. That's why we support Faith Journey Meetups and waca. That's why we have workshops and retreats because the more we can get to know each other and find people close to us, we can create the family and the community and the networks that will be optimal for our kids so we're not forced to hide and lie and raise them in an environment that maybe will be toxic for them. But you have to do the work of finding the community to be the friends, to be the ex Mormon cousins, the ex Mormon siblings that they may no longer have because their remaining cousins are still in the faith and now aren't wanting to associate with your kids because you've chosen to leave. I know I just gave you a whole lot, but that's what a little

Steven Hassan [02:36:04] bit I want to share a couple of. Thank you. But that's. John De Lynn, sixth generation Mormon, your relative was a prophet.

John Dehlin [02:36:15] Or how many of you are fifth or sixth generation Mormon? Please raise your hand really high.

Steven Hassan [02:36:21] Oh, that's A lot of people in this room.

John Dehlin [02:36:23] That's what we're dealing with in Utah in any case.

Guest [02:36:27] So.

Steven Hassan [02:36:32] I'm alert.

John Dehlin [02:36:32] He's thinking, I'm the exception here. It's just me.

Steven Hassan [02:36:35] No, I'm learning. But I really, I, I want to say a few things. So one I want to say is that things are changing dramatically and just the fact that you've been doing Mormon stories and way more people are coming out and having meetings like this and the Internet exists and people, young people, people on the Internet can find information really fast. And so I just want to caution people when they're listening to other people's decisions to remember what year was that and how was that time different from now. That's one thing to consider. But I guess I want to say something personally. I don't know you at all. I just met you. But you said your husband is out also or. Yeah. So your husband's out. You have two kids. Do you have, do you have a, a daughter by any chance?

Guest [02:37:39] Yeah, I have a 5 year old and then twin 3 year old. I think this question was more coming from my sweet friend, neighbor who is

Steven Hassan [02:37:47] not of the LDS I see has

Guest [02:37:50] a 14 year old or 12 year old. I see that is starting to get kind of pulled into the young women's even though they are not of the faith. She's saying, learning these things. Her, her parents have a glass of wine at the end of the day and she looks at them like that's not what the word of wisdom says.

Steven Hassan [02:38:10] You know, I, I, I'm not a parenting expert, but I've attended workshops, workshops by parenting experts and stuff. And I, I think the healthiest parenting is more communicative and authoritative versus authoritarian and much more treating children at their developmentally appropriate stage by not telling them too much that they're not ready to hear, but also not thinking they're dumb or stupid either. And again, I'm not you, but for me, I would not want to not, I would not. If I put myself in your neighbor's shoes, I would not want to

John Dehlin [02:39:02] keep

Steven Hassan [02:39:02] back from my 14 year old what I actually think and believe and what facts and explain the pressures. You are trying to create a healthy environment for them and not wanting to keep them from their friends as opposed to signaling kind of mom's having a drink and it's not Mormon and shame on mom and where they're judging mom or dad. I don't think that's healthy. Did you want to add something, sir? Yeah,

Guest [02:39:35] this is a really,

Steven Hassan [02:39:38] this is

Guest [02:39:39] a really interesting discussion for me because I just, I don't know, I'm at the tail end of being raised by parents who made, who had to make the same decision as what you're trying to make right now. And they, they can talk about it better and more intelligently than I can, but.

Steven Hassan [02:39:56] So you're just saying you should talk to your folks.

Guest [02:39:59] I'm recommending that you talk to these

Steven Hassan [02:40:00] people because they're, they've made this decision

Guest [02:40:03] that you're trying to make right now. And I think it worked out. Personal review. But yeah.

Steven Hassan [02:40:09] So I have a question to you, if I may. Go ahead, go ahead.

John Dehlin [02:40:15] I'm just saying after this, I was

Steven Hassan [02:40:17] just curious, mom and dad, if you're willing to be share a little bit for a moment. Just like at what point did you realize there were real problems and did you face an issue where you wanted to tell your son and you held it from him? Have you had that conversation?

Guest [02:40:35] So who. When my children were born, I was still really true believer. I really wanted to like, it was kind of like for these children, I've got to raise them in the truth. Like that's how approached.

Steven Hassan [02:40:50] That's a loaded language. Raise them in the truth.

Guest [02:40:55] And as things went along, I kind of would like, I would, I would do push back in small ways, I think. But I really had for the longest time the feeling that I needed to like, like we're told that there is no way to raise good children outside of the church and you, you're really afraid of that kind of thing.

Steven Hassan [02:41:16] You're indoctrinated. Yes.

Guest [02:41:18] And so it wasn't until later, when they're mostly grown that my shelf breaks and ah, I felt so much guilt.

Steven Hassan [02:41:29] So how old was he when your shelf broke?

Guest [02:41:31] He was on his mission.

Steven Hassan [02:41:33] Oh, okay. So relatively recently, right before it. Okay.

Guest [02:41:36] So he was, I was trying to be like supportive and in the middle of all of this, the turmoil.

Steven Hassan [02:41:42] Okay.

Guest [02:41:43] And his dad was still in and. Yeah. So I, I wish that I had been willing to look harder earlier, but I was so afraid to look harder at what I might find because I, I had these kids that I wanted to do the right thing for. It's complicated.

Steven Hassan [02:42:03] Good parents always want to do good for their kids.

John Dehlin [02:42:06] Thank you. Okay, really quickly, we've got three hours left, believe it or not. And we've got a lot of topics we haven't covered. So I. There are a couple topics we can go to next. One is communicating with believing, family and friends. Another is identity development. Let's just do a Quick show of hands. Who wants to do communicating with believing family and friends? Raise your hands really high. Who wants to do identity development? Okay. It's a little bit more communication than identity development. Yes. Steven, are you raising your hand?

Rebuilding Identity After Leaving

Steven Hassan [02:42:38] I want to do identity first.

John Dehlin [02:42:40] Okay, so can we move to that? Do you want to jump to the slides that will do that? Okay, so use your user. Okay, so let's do an hour on identity. Okay. And it's 2 o'. Clock.

Steven Hassan [02:42:52] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:42:53] So do you want to.

Steven Hassan [02:42:54] Yeah. So I'm, I'm arguing for identity first because I really believe that you need to work on yourself first and to be really clear and to control your own mind. And then you're in a position to learn how to be more effective, to communicate with other people, to help other people. So that's my reasoning.

John Dehlin [02:43:15] Okay. They're asking for a break. So let's take, let's take a 15 minute break and then we'll come back and do identity.

Steven Hassan [02:43:22] Great.

John Dehlin [02:43:22] Hey, can we have a round of applause for everybody? Thank you so much. Hope you enjoyed lunch. There were there. I think we were out of toilet paper at one point, but I did text, I did text the folks and I believe that the make sure check there's toilet paper. It sounds like there is. Okay. All right, we'll see you guys at 15. Steven's awesome.

John Dehlin [02:43:47] Okay, so make sure to take out your pad and your paper or your digital pad and write down the books that, that Stephen's recommending or the resources. I'm going to recommend two resources that are, I think, really important. And, and in the first case, I don't mean to be self referential, but there's a podcast called the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. You can go to mormonfaithcrisis.com and just to tell you about that, Margi and I, you know, know I was doing coaching for a long time. Margi is still a coach. Natasha Helfer has been a marriage and family therapist and a sex therapist for several decades now.

John Dehlin [02:44:25] And we just realized that we were specialists in this area. And if we both worked 40 hours a week for the rest of our lives, we could still never meet the demand that people had for the things we know. So we created a podcast called the Gift of the Mormon Family Faith Crisis, where we have shared 70 hours of our best coaching for people in a faith crisis for free on the Internet.

John Dehlin [02:44:54] So whether it's parenting after a faith crisis, communicating with believing family and friends, communicating with children, healthy parenting, revitalizing your marriage, healthy sexuality, we even did an entire two and a half days retreat that we recorded the entire retreat, including all the participation of the participants and just shared that for free on the Internet. 70 hours. A lot of the things that you have concerns about, you will find a lot of wisdom there and it's all free. We don't expect anything. If you want to donate to the Open Stories foundation to support that and other resources, we welcome it. But please check out that resource because there's 70 hours of free coaching and content there for parenting.

John Dehlin [02:45:41] There's a particular resource that's really close and near and dear to my heart and Margi's and I, I don't know if Steven will like this person or dislike this person or will have never heard of this person he can share. But the expert that we have found a lot of value in her name is Shefali. S H E F A L I Shefali Sabari TS A B A R Y I believe. But she has three books on parenting and families that are really, really excellent resources. We're not going to be able to dive into parenting today, but if you check out these books, her first book was called the Conscious Parent. Write that down if you want the Conscious Parent. The second book she wrote is called out of Control.

Steven Hassan [02:46:25] Control.

John Dehlin [02:46:26] And what that is talking about is moving out of a control paradigm in parenting into a child led child centered parenting paradigm. And then the third book that's Margi's favorite book on parenting is called the Awakened Family. And those are three books that can be transformational as you're trying to figure out how to raise your kids. And I really want to recommend those. So again it's now I have three

Steven Hassan [02:46:54] more books I have to read.

John Dehlin [02:46:55] Please, Steven.

Steven Hassan [02:46:56] No, I have, I've never heard of her.

John Dehlin [02:46:58] Okay.

Steven Hassan [02:46:59] And I want to read those and

John Dehlin [02:47:00] think of her as someone who studied secular Buddhism who, who really likes the wisdom of someone like Eckhart Tolle and, and Secular Buddhism is no. Rashad of the Secular Buddhism podcast and has taken the principles of, of secular Buddhism and integrated them into parenting in what Margi feels like is, is the best stuff out there. So check that out. Margi is my wife. So Margi's my wife. I think she's brilliant.

Steven Hassan [02:47:27] I'm brains of the operation.

John Dehlin [02:47:29] She is the brains and the heart and the spirit of the operation.

Steven Hassan [02:47:32] Teasing.

John Dehlin [02:47:32] It's true. Okay, so without, without any further ado, we're going to about spend about an hour on identity and Steven, I turn the time over to you.

Steven Hassan [02:47:41] It's all kinds of, of things Yeah, I try to read two to three books a week, and I did that before the Moonies. I didn't read anything in the Moonies, but if I could encourage people to develop anything in their kids is a love of learning, you know, to have a curiosity.

Steven Hassan [02:48:06] And I, in my journey over the decades, I've tried out many different things, including Buddhism and many types of Buddhism. And I don't really believe anymore that life is suffering. So I don't agree with that belief. So I just wanted to say that because John said that earlier and I know Buddha said that, but I don't know, I just feel like life's an amazing gift and an awesome opportunity to grow and learn and love and experience.

Steven Hassan [02:48:45] And I don't believe that there's an afterlife, but there might be. But if there is an afterlife, I think the quality of our life now is going to dictate our quality of life then. So if we're in shithole hell here, we're going to be in shithole hell later.

Steven Hassan [02:49:07] Because somebody was telling me, don't you understand? Mormons say deny now because you're going to be having your own planet and having a great time later. I just think that's a very dysfunctional belief. That's ridiculous and nonsensical. Honestly, I'm not judgmental at all on that.

Steven Hassan [02:49:30] But, yeah, love of learning, it's really, really valuable. So I. I'm going to talk about identity, but I. I want to talk about a few other key things that I think will help with this process of being and being true to yourself and figuring out what your self is or your authentic self.

Modeling a New Identity and Healing Attachment

Steven Hassan [02:49:58] So one of the things that. One of the most powerful things I learned, and it was back about a year after I got out of the Moonies, was a process called modeling. Have you ever heard of modeling? A couple of nods.

Steven Hassan [02:50:15] So I was first exposed to it in 1977. I was in summer school at Yale. I wanted to be a student of Dr. Lifton. And I was in a psychology class with a professor, his name was Robert Abelson, who first taught me about modeling. And I said, what is it? And he said, well, we're trying to figure out how humans are human so we can make computers that think and do more things like humans do. And he talked about his groundbreaking work on scripting.

Steven Hassan [02:50:57] This is, you know, has evolved in computer coding, scripting. But, you know, he taught me this notion that, that we do a lot of things on automatic pilot. And for example, we go to a restaurant, we typically wait to be seated or we seat ourself and then we look for a menu. There's like a sequence of expected things that are kind of automated.

Steven Hassan [02:51:30] And so much of our lives are, are unconscious or automated without us thinking about it. So what do I want to say about modeling? So the most valuable thing about modeling, and it's the basis for all of my books for anyone who's read my books, is if you think about a model of excellence and you compare it with a model of excellence, dysfunction, or a model of not as goodism, that's not a real word, but mediocrity, or, you know, if you start to identify what are the key variables that make this excellent versus not, you know, poor, like what makes a great tennis player versus a mediocre tennis player.

Steven Hassan [02:52:26] You can break the game down into everything from how you hold the racket, to your foot positioning to what happens inside your mind when you're playing, your internal dialogue, your visualization of where you want to hit the ball.

Steven Hassan [02:52:46] There's so many different variables, but if you can identify the key variables and you hone in on those variables, you can move most of the time from dysfunction or mediocrity to pretty darn good. You may not be champion, but pretty darn good at anything.

Steven Hassan [02:53:07] And much of my work, because I was exposed to this so early on, I really wanted to understand how did the Mooney's do what they did and what worked and what didn't work? When I was out recruiting, what worked and what didn't work. And then I wanted to understand social psychology mechanisms and try to put labels to the techniques.

Steven Hassan [02:53:33] So I was unpacking my lived experience as Dr. Lifton encouraged me to do so, what else did I want to say about modeling? So when I was interviewing people who got into different mind control cults and got out of them, I was very curious, like, what was it that got you in and what was it that helped you wake up and get out? And I started to see patterns. And so my work is based on patterns, but it's not necessarily your individual pattern, but just the patterns I've already been exposed to.

Steven Hassan [02:54:18] But there's some value in hearing about other patterns, like how did they get in, what were the most important things? And as I was helping people to reevaluate and exit, how they got in often gave me clues for what they most needed to get out, to help themselves get out.

Steven Hassan [02:54:41] And over the decades, what I've come to understand is that my best work is really helping people to take control of their own minds and counsel themselves out really, instead of me doing it. So I think of my work more in a coach like frame where I'm not the authority figure telling them what they need to do, but giving them up different patterns of what they might try and that they can try out on themselves and see is it working or is it not working, and is it working really good or somewhat. And a notion, if you're going to a model of excellence of what's missing, if I had it, could help me get there.

Steven Hassan [02:55:36] Or what's blocking me could be a belief, could be something physical, could be something environmental. But if you can just get into your mind the thinking of, I want to identify my goal and I'm here now, like, what do I need to get there and what's blocking me and what will enable me to get there.

Steven Hassan [02:56:02] And that's how I came up with many of these realizations. Like phobias are the big block for people to get out and feel like they have a future, you know, and then how do phobias get formed and how do we neutralize phobias? And there really is an incredible capacity for human beings to learn and to change and to grow.

Steven Hassan [02:56:29] When I first started doing this work, for decades, the first two decades, there was a belief that you couldn't grow new brain cells. And you know, like if you got drunk a lot, your brain cells died and you just have fewer brain cells.

Steven Hassan [02:56:48] So there was this really limiting belief. It turned out to be completely not true, that we actually can grow new brain cells and we can actually rewire existing brain cells and create new relationships neuronally. But what I realized early on in my work, when I was faced with somebody who was born in a cult, who was sitting there looking at me saying, I don't know who I am, I don't have an identity. I don't even know who my mother is or my father was. Because I was raised communally in the cult. What do I do? I was faced with a moral dilemma because I wanted to help.

Steven Hassan [02:57:30] But those limiting belief was there. But I was like, I'm going to keep trying different angles and different things and see if anything helps this person. And pretty quickly they taught me what worked. And what worked is deciding who you wanted to be and becoming it.

Steven Hassan [02:58:02] You know, like being in the here and now and not being limited by all the horrible messaging you got from the cult. You know, you're inferior, you're stupid, you're. You're not able to be stand on your own two feet. You need the group to survive or to feel valid or to have a spiritual life.

Steven Hassan [02:58:25] So what I'm trying to convey is that if you believe you're stuck forever, you're going to be stuck forever. And if you believe you can recreate yourself in the way you want to be and make a target for your excellent future, future self and work towards that excellent future self and think about, like, what do I need to be there?

Steven Hassan [02:58:56] And systematically go after it in bite sized pieces. People exceed their own expectations. If you asked me way back, you know, in 77, would you have two masters and a PhD, PhD and be at a Harvard Medical school think tank and do lectures for the State Department? I would be like, you know, I'm a little kid from Queens. My dad had a hardware store. You know, I'd be like, what?

Steven Hassan [02:59:28] You know, you're going to be on tv, Steven. You're going to be on major TV shows. Millions and millions of people will see you. I'd be like, what? But you don't know what you don't know. But if you think about your values and clarify, like, what's really important to you, and I would assert being honest with yourself is a core value that I want to encourage you to be and to aspire and inspire you to accept all the parts of your psyche, even the ones that you're not so proud of.

Steven Hassan [03:00:06] Excuse me, you're going to be in the right. You're going to be setting a foundation for a healthy future sense of self. My body is talking to me. It said, steve, you should have slept more the last few days.

Steven Hassan [03:00:28] By the way, how many of you people here sleep seven to nine hours regularly every single day? Great, because that's what human beings need for optimal functioning. And most Americans are chronically sleep deprived. No, that's a truism. So if, and it's one of the first questions I have when I get new clients, is, how do you sleep? I terrible sleeper.

Steven Hassan [03:00:57] What's blocking you from being a good sleeper? And you do like a checklist of sleep hygiene and no caffeine late at night, no vigorous exercise, and are you exercising? And you know, you can go through what's called a sleep hygiene checklist. Highly recommend it. Highly recommend a book called why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, who has a podcast also. But we do so much learning as well as we help our immune system by sleeping.

Steven Hassan [03:01:35] And turn off your cell phones at least an hour before you get into bed and like, reclaim your space. Like, seriously, people, social media is rewiring our brains in a bad direction. That's why I was Saying earlier, like, make real friends and not just look for followers on YouTube. I have a lot, but they're followers. But I don't know these people. A lot of them are bots, probably, who knows? But like, life is precious and having a real life connection. I can't tell you how touching it is for me when people come and look me in the eye and say thank you.

Steven Hassan [03:02:26] It touches my mind, at my heart, and it empowers me to keep going at my age and people are like, you're going to be 16 years old. You don't look 69 years old. I don't want to believe I'm 69 years old, but I also want to sleep and exercise. In any case, I digress. Forgive me.

Steven Hassan [03:02:49] Where was I? So I was talking about modeling and I really. In terms of identity, if you don't know who you are, you can start with what you don't want in an identity. You can look around at people you admire and respect, historical figures or actual people that you know and model off different elements of their of who they are and how they carry themselves.

Steven Hassan [03:03:22] But you get to choose, have an internal locus of control, know that it's not in concrete. You can change your mind and refine different things as you go along. What else do I want to say? So in the last 10 years, I was taught to do attachment repair by my teacher Daniel Brown, this forensic psychologist. Unfortunately, he passed away from colon cancer recently.

Steven Hassan [03:04:00] He was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and translator of Tibetan Buddhism. But anyway, he came up with the therapeutic intervention to aid us to reparent ourselves. And I want to share the text techniques with you. And essentially it's a process by which you are asked to go back in time to the younger you, to a traumatic experience with your parents, and ask yourself, if I had the ideal mother and the ideal father uniquely suited to my person personality, what would I have wanted them to say or do?

Steven Hassan [03:04:57] Did you get that? Should I repeat it? So I'm going to give you an example and then I'll repeat it, okay? So I watched the video demonstration of him doing therapy with a woman who was describing how when she was 8, she had screamed out with a nightmare and her parents yelled, shut the F up or we're going to come in and beat the shit out of you.

Steven Hassan [03:05:29] So that was her trauma. And so Dan had her go back to that moment where she was screaming, screaming in fear. And he said, I want you to imagine your ideal mother and ideal father uniquely suited to your personality and what you would have wanted them to say and do at that moment.

John Dehlin [03:05:56] So she's.

Steven Hassan [03:05:59] They'd immediately come into my room. My mom would turn on the light. She would hug me and rock me and say, oh, honey, dad and I are here for you. It was just a nightmare. My dad would sit at the base of the bed and be patting my leg and my mom would be humming back and forth and making me feel safe. And then my dad would go to the kitchen and warm up some milk and come back with trips chocolate chip cookies.

Steven Hassan [03:06:29] And she was going on and on in this incredibly beautiful healing experience that she was creating for her traumatized child self. And by doing that, she was rewiring this traumatic memory of abuse and neglect and putting in its place love and safety and security.

Steven Hassan [03:07:01] And I know I was crying when I watched the video because it was so beautiful. But the key is, and I've done this with clients, the key is that she woke up and she knew what had actually happened historically. It's not like she was forgetting that she had actually been traumatized.

Steven Hassan [03:07:23] But what's happening is she was beginning to learn a technique to develop what's called healthy introjects of a mother and father who are modeling all of those incredible qualities of patience and love, love and security and really child centered parenting. Like they put their needs second to what the child needed at that moment. Instead of, I'm tired, go back to sleep.

Steven Hassan [03:07:58] No, honey, we're here for you. I'll be with you in a minute, sir. And what Dan has proven is that if you do this over a couple of years with a therapist, you can actually change personality disorders. Now, for the first 25 years of my training, personality disorders, you couldn't fix them. They were immutable and unfixable, but they're now fixable.

Steven Hassan [03:08:30] Of course you have to want to fix it and you have to have a therapist who knows how to help you with this. And I'm just telling you the technique, you can do a certain amount with yourself, but in with people with actual personality disorders, you really need the personal relationship with a human being who can be in a sense, a surrogate father or mother figure where you have a real, an actual bond of unconditional respect and love for your beingness.

Steven Hassan [03:09:07] Your beingness. So when you're raised in one of these types of environments where there's authoritarian parenting based on dependency and obedience and being a clone of the parents because the parents were indoctrinated, the healthy side is parents realizing every child is unique at birth. And their job is to steward the child to become their best self and to individuate and parenting is done in a developmentally appropriate way.

Steven Hassan [03:09:46] Does that make sense? So I'm going to say the. Restate the question. It's like if you could imagine your ideal mother and ideal father uniquely suited to your personality, what would you have wanted them to say or do differently?

Steven Hassan [03:10:07] And then you invite your imagination to supply the answer. And I've yet to encounter anyone that instantly couldn't supply what they would have wanted them to say or do in this situation. So I'm going to call John. Can we use a microphone? This gentleman with the cap and then this woman with brown. Second.

Steven Hassan [03:10:33] Thanks. Just a brief question. That experience and imagining is that. How important is it that it's an associative or disassociative experience? Good question. It's very important. What I didn't say is that Dan would teach the person how to go into trance, to go inside first. And so it was an associational.

Steven Hassan [03:11:03] She was going back in her body, back to the trauma and putting the heat, healing, rewiring in there. So that's a critically important question. Thank you for asking it. Did everyone understand that question? That was very astute. Thank you for asking that. Go ahead.

Guest [03:11:26] Yeah, I was actually going to say that. So I'm a therapist as well.

Steven Hassan [03:11:31] And you were smiling while I was talking.

Guest [03:11:33] Yes, because. Because I've really seen that happen with my clients and I'm glad you clarified that. It is an associative experience where it's not a dissociative observing the self doing it, but you're actually in that place. And I do get pushback at times from my clients because I think as well from the conditioning in a religious context, everything is so concrete, it's black and white. But when they are allowed to create a sense of safety in their environment and know they're with a safe person, a person really can connect to this core in themselves and they naturally know what they need to feel better and to sight.

Steven Hassan [03:12:16] We naturally know what we need. If we can just open up, take away the limiting beliefs that have been in condition into us.

Guest [03:12:26] Yes.

Steven Hassan [03:12:26] And really be in our bodies and tune in. We all want to feel love. We all want to feel safe. We all want to feel meaning and connection. Like those are universal human.

Guest [03:12:43] Can I say one more thing about that?

Steven Hassan [03:12:44] Of course.

Guest [03:12:45] So, and again, this is the shift from taking it from an intellectual experience because again, religion and doing your, you know, your daily checklist is a very cognitive process. It's. It's almost like there's a cut off from our feelings.

Steven Hassan [03:13:01] There is.

Guest [03:13:02] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [03:13:03] Dissociation.

Guest [03:13:04] Yeah. And so this, this is an experience where you're reintegrating the body and the mind and the heart again. And it is powerful. So I just wanted to attest to that.

Steven Hassan [03:13:15] Yeah, it works. That's the other thing is like, people can make claims about different techniques and strategies, but the issue is, does it actually provide proof that it really works? Because then it becomes self reinforcing because it feels so good to be loved. And I want to share a personal story.

Steven Hassan [03:13:39] So my father, God bless him, had a father who was an alcoholic and pretty abusive with him, very perfectionistic. And my father was the eldest of three and his version of being a good parent was not doing what was done to him. So he didn't drink and he was never violent.

Steven Hassan [03:14:05] But he didn't know how to hug and he didn't know how to say I love you until in his 60s and 70s. And it took some help from his son to do some modeling with him. But there was this. I don't. I think I may have said it in the Mormon Stories interview. I don't remember now, but I had this incident in high school. I was maybe 15, 14, 15. I had skipped eighth grade, as you could in New York City if you passed a lot of tests.

Steven Hassan [03:14:41] And I had gotten a 97 out of a hundred on a statewide Regents and one other person in the State got a 97. No one got higher. And I was told most of the state flunked. And I was, I'm going to get, get emotional. I was so proud.

Steven Hassan [03:15:01] And I said I got an 87. And he was like, what happened to the three points? And I hated him for years until I started learning psychology and doing processes like this. And I had to get to the point of realizing my father was doing the best he could with what he was given as a child.

Steven Hassan [03:15:29] Nobody taught him how to be a father. And that if he had had a healthy mother and a healthy father, he would have probably responded the way I would have wanted him to do. So I got off the anger at him to look at the social context to cite this young man's wise comment before.

Steven Hassan [03:15:55] And then I imagined if I had the ideal mother and the ideal father and what my father should have, could have, he would have said, wow, give me a hug, let's go for ice cream. Like, that's what I wanted. But once I did it, I got what I needed.

Steven Hassan [03:16:16] It really was great. So the thing is, I know what actually happens. But what do I emotionally need to be a healthy person and a healthy, you know, parent. I need to nurture myself to the capacity that I can. And I understand these principles of how the mind works.

Steven Hassan [03:16:42] So let's see, what else do I want to say about identity formation? So I think it really helps when you are raised in a very closed system of ideological belief to expose yourself intellectually to other models, other religion models, other philosophical models, expand your frames so you're not just working off of that deck of cards that you were dealt and always referencing it back to that look at other models. And that's why it's so valuable for people coming out of one group to. To learn about other, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology and the Moonies and Chinese communist brainwashing, etc.

Steven Hassan [03:17:43] Because the solution to blind faith is perspective, right? If you don't want to have blind faith, what are your other possibilities of how to look at this, how to look at life? And. So I don't remember how old I was, but I remember someone telling me a story, and I have no idea if it's true, but I remember somebody saying that they heard from the secretary to Albert Einstein that he was once asked what's the most important, important question he's ever considered? And his answer was, is the universe a friendly place?

Steven Hassan [03:18:31] Has anyone heard that? But I learned that really, really early on. I was like, that's a really interesting question. Is the universe? Because arbitrarily, if I say no, then I walk around in fear. Fear and paranoia. Life is suffering, life sucks.

Steven Hassan [03:18:55] But if I choose the universe as a friendly place, then I get to have friends, I get to have love, all kinds of possibilities. And in the absence of any absolute delineation of what the universe is, I choose to believe that the universe is friendly.

Steven Hassan [03:19:17] You know, I just, just. That's what I did. Inside myself, I would rather walk around not afraid someone's going to attack me and maul me. I prefer to walk around assuming people are benign or friendly. And yep, there's an occasional crazy person out there, but for the most part, part, if I allowed my fears to run my life, I'd never be doing this work. I certainly wouldn't be doing this work for this long because I get a lot of nasty people. Not nasty people, nasty messaging from people who've been indoctrinated to. Not like, you know, me or my work.

Steven Hassan [03:20:02] But here's my superpower. My superpower is I need. Nearly died in that van crash. And the people who rescued me said it's a miracle that you lived. So I've always had that attitude that life's a gift like every single day from that.

Steven Hassan [03:20:24] That that accident is a gift. And it's. I get to do what I want with my life each day. It's a gift. And likewise, I also am very wary or weary or concerned that at any moment I could drop dead or you know, be hit by a car or whatever. So I try to generate as much content as I can to help as many people as I can because who knows, I may not be here tomorrow. So yeah, we get to record toward this and maybe it will help you and help the next people who a little bit maybe, hopefully. But that's. I really try to live and to quote old philosophical stuff, a Zen kind of mentality of just be here now.

Steven Hassan [03:21:14] That's what Eckhart Tolle comes from. I think a very like be here now. And this is reality. The past is a memory. The future is thought projections. But we only have what's happening this moment as we're in our bodies. And why not be the best self we can be?

Steven Hassan [03:21:39] So I share that thought with you too. And someone was was asking me during the break about, you know, when I think of other cults, Mormonism isn't as bad as some of the other cults. And I'm like, yeah, and there are other cults that are not as bad as the Mormons too. And you can choose where you want to make the relativism, but why use cult at all as a frame for quality of life,

Guest [03:22:14] you know?

Re-Parenting Yourself and Inner Child Work

John Dehlin [03:22:23] Okay, let's do two quick things and then I think we're going to switch to the next topic.

Steven Hassan [03:22:27] Okay,

John Dehlin [03:22:32] is it okay if I, if I jump anywhere, take it.

Steven Hassan [03:22:35] Totally.

Guest [03:22:36] There it is. I was just gonna make a comment. You were talking about the reparenting and the. The what you were talking about. And I have done a little bit of that. And I was just going to say that I read or was told that the brain does not re recognize time in terms of trauma. So trauma 50 years ago. The brain does not recognize that element of time. So I just thought that that kind of went along with what you were trying to portray with re parenting, which is actually a lot of work or I've tried it. It was a lot of work for me.

Steven Hassan [03:23:16] Yeah. So has everyone heard of Thinking Fast and Slow, the Nobel prize winning book by behavioral. Well, he was called to behave behavioral economist at the time, but he was a psychologist still alive. Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Anyway, so the Very quickly they talk about system one, thinking of the brain, and system two. System one is our unconscious, and we operate off of scripts unconsciously that go really fast. I'm going to keep it slow, I mean, short. And then system two is where we're analyzing and discriminating and it's slower and it's harder. But most of human activity is done on automatic pilot.

Steven Hassan [03:24:14] And what I'm trying to say is that if we consciously decide to rewire our unconscious scripts and experiences, we will, because it. What, it works. I mean, but if you believe that you can't rewire the brain, then you won't be able to rewire the brain. But I'm telling you, it works.

Steven Hassan [03:24:42] And so that's another thing about. Think about what you want in terms of your identity and what might be blocking you. And it could be limiting beliefs and it could be phobias. It could be other people in your world, you know, giving you negative messaging. But you can choose whose voice you amplify in your. In terms of what comes in.

Steven Hassan [03:25:10] And you want to really own your experience of being a human being. And you deserve. You have intrinsic value. I want to say this especially to women. You are every bit as worthy as men. And for trans and gender, different genders, trans, gay, whatever, you are worthy. You're a human being. Be in your bodies and be your best selves and help others and make you feel better too.

Guest [03:25:56] So should I move for just. I just. In February, I had a three strokes and I'm kind of miraculously recovered to this point. I may. They don't know why still. But how do you figure out identity or purpose when you've lived in that state of not being able to do anything except just lay there and be. And just be conscious, you know, because I feel like so much of Mormonism, even though I've been out for a while, so much of Mormonism was built off of productivity and how much you give and how much you can contribute. And so it was just this whole, like, wake up to, like, who am I if I can't contribute and if everyone else has to contribute to even take care of me. And, you know, like, it's just this whole philosophical.

Steven Hassan [03:26:59] Well, you're very young and you get to have a whole life ahead of you to figure out different things. But I do want to say there's a very fascinating story of a neuroscientist who had a very devastating stroke and she fully recovered. She wrote a book called Stroke of Insight. She did a TED Talk, and she shouldn't have been able to recover fully, but she did. And I have a new friend, a psychiatrist, who wrote a book, Cured.

Steven Hassan [03:27:31] I did an interview with him on my podcast, the Influence Continuum. And he spent 19 years studying people who were given terminal cancer diagnoses, documented, didn't get treatment, and got cured. And he became fascinated at how is it possible that people could get better when science said they should die.

Steven Hassan [03:27:59] And we have the capacity if we sleep and eat and exercise and reduce stress and extreme cortisol levels and find meaning forward, our body and our unconscious wants to heal itself. It's really an amazing thing to be a human being.

Steven Hassan [03:28:22] So all I can say is you have a gift. You're very bright and, you know, get excited and curious about how you want to spend your time and energy in this journey.

John Dehlin [03:28:38] Thank you.

Guest [03:28:38] I feel like it's almost my mind's like, doesn't care about recovering a ton as much as it is just kind of curious about, like, it sucked. But it also was like I just care about, like, feeling, you know, like experiencing life more than I care about, you know, it's kind of more of just like a nothing matters, so I get to create what matters, you know, type of a. Love it.

Steven Hassan [03:29:05] I love it. I have one more quick, quick thing, and I worked with this young man in the Moonies maybe 35 years ago, and very shortly, I'll just say he was a champion surfer. He got recruited in the Moonies, spent several years in the Moonies, got out and, and like, I could spend time teaching him about lifting and everything else, but I was like, go surfing, surf as much as you need. When you're ready, you can fill your head with what you need to know intellectually. So do what feels the most you. The rest will follow.

John Dehlin [03:29:53] Give Steven a hand. Thanks, Steven. We'll give your legs and your voice a bit of a break, but I also want to invite you to jump in at any point in this presentation. I also just want to say. What's your name?

John Dehlin [03:30:09] Kenzie. Yeah, like, I. I thought it was really interesting that that that book Stroke of Insight framed the stroke in a positive way. And when I think about my Mormon upper and when I think about the way that I dealt with my faith crisis, it was to hyper perform as an activist, to try and, you know, try and help others and to convert my pain and my grief into serving others and trying to solve the problem. But what Margi and my kids will tell you that for at least the first 10 years of Mormon stories, my work with mortal of stories could have been conceived as avoidance and running from the healing that I needed to do.

John Dehlin [03:30:55] And I can say that one of the most painful hours of my life was when I attended with Margi a Quaker service in Logan as we were church shopping after, you know, we had been kicked out. And the. The Quaker church service was to sit for an hour in silence.

John Dehlin [03:31:15] And that was the most painful hour, probably of my life. And not because I have to be talking, but because, like, to just sit there and there's no phone, there's no stimuli. I'm not talking, but I'm also not learning and listening. That was excruciating.

John Dehlin [03:31:32] And when you read Buddhism, secular Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle, and you. And you learn about the importance of mindfulness and confidence, contact with the present moment, you realize that if you ever want to make progress away from unhealthy lifestyles and towards something more healthy, learning to just observe your thoughts, be in the moment. Not be doing, but just be. Just be content being in the moment that is around you. As Stephen likes to say, getting in touch with your body, learning to listen to your body, that's really hard stuff. Tough for me.

John Dehlin [03:32:07] And I don't want to, like, explain you into telling you what a gift of an experience you had, but I can say I'm a little bit envious. I would love to be forced to kind of learn to be okay in silence for a while. And maybe I need to do mushrooms or whatever or take some time off of Mormon stories and retrain my brain to be comfortable in the process. Present moment.

Steven Hassan [03:32:31] You don't need mushrooms.

John Dehlin [03:32:33] I know. I was joking, but thank you for sharing. Okay, really quick, I'm ready to jump into the next section. Communicating. We've only got two hours left. Isn't that a crime?

Steven Hassan [03:32:45] No.

John Dehlin [03:32:46] For me, it's a crime.

Steven Hassan [03:32:46] I think it's been a very full day so far.

John Dehlin [03:32:49] Oh, yeah.

Steven Hassan [03:32:49] Have you enjoyed it? Has it been helpful? I think it's been.

John Dehlin [03:32:55] I like that. Reframe. So how's the feedback with Steven's microphone? Okay, will you turn your microphone off? And then whenever you want to jump in, just turn it back on and then turn it off again? Is that okay? Just because there's feedback coming, Is that. Is that better?

John Dehlin [03:33:12] Okay. Does he need to sit somewhere else? Would that be better if he sat somewhere else? Okay. Okay. And I'll remind you if you forget to turn on, but I do want you to please jump in at any point. Is that okay?

John Dehlin [03:33:24] Okay. You will. You will. Okay, really quickly, I want to begin by without microphones. I want 20 of you to, in one to two sentences, maybe one sentence, share with me the person or the scenario of the believer that you're here to learn how to communicate with better.

Communicating With Believing Family Members

John Dehlin [03:33:47] All right? So let's go. Just shout it. Stand up and shout it out really loud. Return missionary son. Okay. Well, who else? 15 year old, believing daughter. Okay. Believing dad who's a bishop. Okay. A wife who doesn't believe in the truth claims, but wants the kids to have community and identity.

John Dehlin [03:34:18] Husband who believes. That's. Those are really key words here. Husband who believes in the truth claims no matter what she shows them. Okay. What else? At the back, loud. Mother who retired from byu. Okay. Other scenarios. Wife. Wife. Like who. Who won't listen to what you have to teach her no matter what. Okay. Any others? Teenage step kids. That's a challenge. Yes. Siblings, believing siblings. Son who works for the church. Brother who she helped teach. Okay. Provo neighbors.

Steven Hassan [03:35:04] All right.

John Dehlin [03:35:05] Hat in the back. Believing mother in the basement. Beautiful yellow sweater. Yellow sweater, sweatshirt. Oh, my goodness. Did you guys hear that? A believing mother who's been asking God to kill her, believing that maybe by her death it will bring her daughter back to faith. Man in blue shirt in the back.

John Dehlin [03:35:44] In a divorce, children are surrounded by believing members and a believing ex wife. And you're the non believing dad who's not living with the kids. How do you have influence with your children when you feel like everyone else surrounding them. Them as believing? Yes, ma'. Am.

John Dehlin [03:36:05] Mother who is addicted to genealogy work. Good. Do I come out publicly? And if so, how? And gentlemen, in the shirt. Last one. Yes. Very good. Grandpa wants to teach his grandchildren critical thinking without making his children want to take the grandchildren away from him and not have access to him because he's scary and dangerous teaching critical thinking tools which are not always things that parents want their children to have necessarily. Very, very good. All right, give everyone a round of applause.

John Dehlin [03:36:49] Okay, so we're going to try and cover a lot in an hour. And the, the first concept that I want to share with you is from, I think he's a social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt. That's H, A I D T.

John Dehlin [03:37:04] He's out of, I believe, the University of Virginia. Maybe you know about more about Jonathan Haidt than me. He wrote a book called the Righteous Mind. And there's a really cool metaphor in the Righteous Mind that I think everybody needs to understand. And if you've heard me talk about this before, before, I apologize. But hopefully maybe some repetition will be helpful. Jonathan Haidt likes To liken the brain to a rider, a human rider on an elephant.

John Dehlin [03:37:32] And there's two parts of the brain that he's kind of referring to when he talks about the rider and the elephant. The rider, the human sitting on top of the elephant represents presents your cerebral frontal cortex, your. Your most advanced part of your brain, the logical brain, the part of your brain that is in charge of executive functioning and decision making. That's actually, in terms of evolution, the latest, the most recent part of the brain that developed that in many ways differentiates us as humans from other animals. Okay.

John Dehlin [03:38:09] The other part of the brain that is represented in this metaphor is the amygdala, the emotional center, the monkey brain, the lizard brain, the emotional brain, as it's called. And he helps us realize that the brain works a lot like this. And obviously it's an oversimplification, but when things are calm, when somebody doesn't feel threatened, when people feel safe, right?

John Dehlin [03:38:37] Then, if the rider is riding with the elephant and the rider wants to steer the elephant where the rider wants to go. In other words, when the logic self wants to be fully activated and steer and guide the brain where it wants to go, it's possible. So in spite of the fact that the elephant's way bigger, way stronger, way heavier, when everything's calm and everything's cool and everyone feels safe, the writer can be a little bit more in control.

John Dehlin [03:39:08] Okay? That's how the brain works. That's how reason and logic can work with the brain. However, when. When the person gets startled, when a mouse or a lion or some type of threat confronts the rider on the elephant and the elephant gets scared and the rider wants to go in one direction and the elephant wants to go in another direction, who wins?

John Dehlin [03:39:38] The elephant wins every time. The emotion, the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, is in the center of the brain. It literally has more power when push comes to shove than the rational brain. You've heard about fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. There's probably other adjectives there. But the point is, when you get triggered, you have evolved such that when you get afraid when you're hunting on the savannah and you hear a rustling in the bushes and you start to believe that a lion's coming after you to eat you, is it your logical brain that kicks in and says, hmm, I wonder whether I should hang out and try and reason with the lion or maybe I'll grab a bite to eat?

John Dehlin [03:40:31] No, it's your emotional center that gets triggered and takes over and wants to either fight or Run or freeze, right? Depending on whatever seems most safe at the time. And that's how the brain generally works. Okay? The emotion center wins every time. Now, here's the trick.

John Dehlin [03:40:52] We like to think. This is what Jonathan Haidt teaches. We like to think that we are rational, logical creatures, and in many ways we can be. But the truth is, what Jonathan Haidt has helped demonstrate is that often humans and actually arrive at their decisions emotionally first.

John Dehlin [03:41:15] What feels good? What feels right, what feels safe, what makes me feel loved, what makes what feels familiar to me? What's going to get me the best love for my parents, what's going to make me safest in my community, what's going to make me feel comfortable and safe in the world?

John Dehlin [03:41:32] They start out with how they feel, and then they use logic to justify the conclusion that they arrived at emotionally, thinking that they arrived at that decision logically. And that's how the brain fools us. And so when you're thinking about communicating with believing family and friends, you have to realize that emotions generally tend to rule.

John Dehlin [03:42:02] And so there's a saying that I like to say that some of you may have heard me say before. This is not original to me, but the idea is you can't reason someone out of a position that they arrived at emotionally.

John Dehlin [03:42:17] And do people gain their Mormon testimony through reason and logic? Generally, how do people get converted to Mormonism? Whether they were born and raised in the church or whether they're converts. Shout it out. How do they. What? How do they gain their testimony?

John Dehlin [03:42:36] Burning in the bosom, which is emotion. Right. What else? Holy Ghost, what the spirit. Right. Their parents. They get up and bear their testimony, and the parents pat them on the back and reassure them they're on their mission and they're getting all sorts of. Of kudos and accolades from their friends, their youth conference, or EFY and their bailer testimony. And everyone around them says how much they love and approve of them. Right? Conversion is generally an emotional experience.

John Dehlin [03:43:05] And so that's the first thing you have to realize when you're communicating with believing family and friends. Their position is emotional, primary emotional, primarily emotional. And that's why so many of you think, I just need to show them the CES letter. If I could just get them to listen to the Tom Phillips or the Robert Rittner episodes on Mormon Stories podcast. If they'll just hear the LDS discussions episode on Joseph Smith's failed Revelations, it'll be obvious to them that the church isn't true. Right? But what's the flaw in logic?

John Dehlin [03:43:41] What's the flaw? Their position is emotional, right? So already there are a couple of you that shouted out, why won't my spouse or why won't my kids or why won't my parents learn the things that I've learned? And the answer is, because they're terrified.

John Dehlin [03:44:02] Because their identity, their morality, their spirituality, their community, their friendships, their occupation, in some cases, 50, 60, 70 years of their lives have been invested with the sunk cost fallacy in their identity. And who at 40 or 50 or 60, wants to consciously decide to completely disorient and throw their entire life into chaos?

John Dehlin [03:44:33] You're raising your hand. You do. Well, clearly we do or we wouldn't be here. But that's why you can't use CES letter or church history or LGBT issues or whatever as billy clubs to try and bludgeon your believing family and friends into seeing your worldview. Guess what? You didn't see it until you were ready. And the point that often we forget is sometimes we. We think that it was. It was learning something that got us out of the church. But the truth is, if we were really to do a scientific analysis of loss of faith, I think many of you would find that an emotional disruption in your Mormon experience predated your intellectual disaffection from the church.

John Dehlin [03:45:23] Whether it's you weren't happy, you were feeling worn out, you were feeling like you were good enough, your marriage wasn't working, life wasn't turning out like you thought you saw someone else that you loved being hurt in that scenario. And it was the emotional feelings about something not being right that actually ripened your willingness to all of a sudden start learning. Because guess what? Before the CES letter and before LDS discussions, Mormon Stories. And before that was Sunstone. And before that was Dialogue. And before that was the Tanners. And before that was Fon Brody. Fon Brody's book's been here since 1945. The information's always been there.

John Dehlin [03:46:07] Why didn't you know about it? One answer is you weren't ready. And until you're emotionally ready to start asking questions you're going to, your defenses are going to be up. So that's the first thing I want you all to remember when communicating with believing family and friends is that emotion is almost always going to trump logic and reason. I'm going to pause. Would you like to add anything to this?

Guest [03:46:32] So far,

Steven Hassan [03:46:36] no. I agree with everything you've said, and I would just add that tuning in and a reception, respectful way to be. To be curious and interested and if anything inquisitive and asking a question and another question because you want to step into that person's shoes and get them to articulate their thoughts and their feelings is a really powerful technique to do. But you also have to be willing to listen and repeat back to them what they're saying but not be formulaic, be really present on the human level.

John Dehlin [03:47:23] I love that. So that's a technique of how to have these conversations and we're going to definitely make sure and try and cover that before the end of this presentation. Quick question or comment.

Guest [03:47:34] I was just going to add to that that having that conversation where you listen to another person and their experience and you see if you can validate it or that you understand it, you validate it, then I think sometimes it helps to just let a few days go by where the conversation is just about them at that time rather than you also trying to say, well okay, I hear what you're saying and this is what I'm saying. You know, it just let a couple days go by

Steven Hassan [03:48:09] if I can add, you know, people get in over time and it takes time and a process to re evaluate. And what came to mind just now as I was listening to what you were just saying, I often with my clients when they're feeling overwhelmed, I I asked them the question, if someone handed you a 40 pound watermelon, how would you eat it?

Steven Hassan [03:48:38] You have to cut it into smaller pieces and you don't eat the rinds but don't try to eat it all in one sitting. So like break it down into small pieces. And I talk to my clients about rapport and trust me building because a lot of when I was hearing everybody talking earlier, I felt kind of like they needed to do damage control first to rebuild a relationship where their loved ones weren't already waiting to be do battle to build rapport and trust and to in order to do a piece by piece approach.

John Dehlin [03:49:19] Beautiful. Thank you, Stephen. Okay, next concept I wanted to share with you is the following. If you liken a faith crisis in your family to a bunch of people being in a boat. Right. To being in a canoe. We're going to talk about the backfire effect for a second and I apologize if you guys have already heard a lot about the backfire effect. But I want to make sure everybody's kind of on the the same page. Let's just say that you're all in a boat and there are sharks swimming around in the waters and you know that it's not safe to fall out of the boat.

John Dehlin [03:49:55] And all of a sudden One person stands up in the boat and starts flailing their arms and shaking the boat and causing a huge disruption where you become terrified that the boat's going to capsize and you're all going to get eaten, right?

John Dehlin [03:50:12] What is the natural reaction of the people who are still in the boat to the person standing up and freaking out and destabilizing the boat? What is it? Arms out. What else? Go lower, right? Don't you go lower. You spread out and you go lower and you hold on tighter. Is that not right?

John Dehlin [03:50:34] That's what happens when somebody is destabilizing the boat. Well, life is an intricate system of people and thoughts and feelings and stories and relationships. And when you lose your faith, right, and you start saying, hey, Joseph Smith's a sexual predator and the Book of Mormon that you love is a total fraud, and you've based your entire life on a lie. That's like standing up and destabilizing what everybody is experiencing in the boat. It's terrifying, right?

John Dehlin [03:51:08] And the point is, is the more rabid you are, the more animated you are, the more excited you are, the more afraid they're going to be, the lower they're going to get, and the more tightly they're going to hold on. And that's called the backfire effect. Okay?

John Dehlin [03:51:25] So we all do it wrong because we're so traumatized, we're so angry, we're so. It's. And sometimes we're so full of joy at the truth and the beauty that we've discovered that we want to share it with everybody we love. Just like the Tree of Life and the. And the fruit. It's like, oh, I've partaken this beautiful fruit of ex Mormonism, and I want to share with everybody, right? And our joy can still be traumatizing and terrifying to the people in the boat, right? So what's your option then, if it's not to scream and yell and try and force your life experience into their face.

John Dehlin [03:52:02] What. What other alternative do you have? What do you have? Okay, Living. Living your example. Express your emotions. Shout some things out. Love them. Okay? Accept them. Okay, so Stephen Hasson has a really important story that he kind of shared with you, but I want him to slow down and tell you a really important part.

John Dehlin [03:52:35] And I want you to talk about the part of your sister and the role she played in your see, being able to see the Moonies more clearly for the first time, and what it was about your sister and your relationship with. With your sister that allowed some light to get through for You. Would you mind sharing that?

Steven Hassan [03:52:53] Do you want me to come up front?

John Dehlin [03:52:54] Please.

Steven Hassan [03:52:54] Can I be here?

John Dehlin [03:52:55] You can do whatever you want.

Steven Hassan [03:52:57] Is it okay to be here? No. Of all my family and friends, when I got into the Moonies and dropped out of college, they all freaked out and they all tried to yell at me and argue me out of it and tell me I was an occult and I was brainwashed, which I interpreted as persecution by Satan.

Steven Hassan [03:53:19] And my sister was the only person who just said, I love you and I don't understand and I miss you. And so she was the safest of anybody at that point where my mind was starting to reconnect to my authentic self, to reach out to. And when I do work with families, I'm always looking in a family system. It could be an aunt, an uncle, a grandfather, grandmother, next door neighbor that can be that person in the member's life that is safe so that if they are ready to. To talk or ask questions, and that person can even say, you know, if you ever want to talk confidentially, I'm here for you.

Steven Hassan [03:54:12] I'll listen to you. And listening is the key, the key point about that. That said, I'll also add, my sister guilt tripped me a bitch by saying, you have a nephew that you haven't met, and I want him to know his Uncle Stevie, and, you know, he's so cute, you should come and visit him. And then I made her promise not to tell my parents because they were evil. And she broke her promise, which was, she said the scariest thing she ever did because she knew she would lose me, you know, if it didn't work out. It was a big, high risk, but she said, I know you and that wasn't you.

Steven Hassan [03:54:58] Like, in her mind, she felt like there was no option because she did love me, to try to help me get out of it.

John Dehlin [03:55:06] Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, Steven. That's a really powerful story. Thank you. The number one piece of advice I have for you in relation to your believing family and friends is make them feel safe. Love them unconditionally. Show them the type of love that you want. You don't want to be loved if you continue believing in the church and going to church. Is that love? No. Well, guess what? They don't want to be loved if and only if they listen to your CES letter rants or listen to your favorite Mormon stories podcast episodes, or come to view the world like you view it. That's unconditional love.

John Dehlin [03:55:47] And nobody wants to be loved that way. And certainly you don't want to model unhealthy love. You want to model for them the love that you want to receive. And so my number one piece of advice to you is show them unconditional love and go overboard to make them feel safe, right? In other words, imagine the flip. Imagine that if this person were to sit down in the boat, get really, really low and maybe even, you know, put some anchors down so that the boat feels very, very safe and stable.

John Dehlin [03:56:21] If that person were to stabilize the boat and everybody felt like the boat was rock solid and safe, what do you think the other people might do? Relax and what maybe even move around a bit or maybe even get up on their knees and maybe even play around with standing up, right? Because they feel like the boat is safe. And I'm not saying do it in a sneaky way because you want to make them feel safe so that they'll want to leave. Like, honestly, I believe that everybody should have the right to self determination and that's got to be everyone's personal journey. But what I am going to say is if you go overboard and you say, let's say you're a grandparent, right?

John Dehlin [03:57:04] Let's say you're a grandparent and you're worried about your grandkids, I promise you shouldn't promise you. My professional opinion is that if you were to say to your children, hey, I just want to let you know something. I want you to know, child, child in law, that I respect your religious beliefs and even though you and I see faith differently, I want you to know that your children are safe with me. I'm never going to do anything to try and take away your children's faith. Pick at your children's faith. I they are going to be safe and I'm going to be supportive of whatever journeys they want to have and I'm never going to do anything to try and contradict your roles and responsibilities as a parent.

John Dehlin [03:57:54] Now that may seem like the last thing you want to do is explain grandparent, but what I learned from shefali saberry about parenting is your biggest power as a parent is influence. But if they're afraid of you, you have no influence. In fact, if they're afraid of you, they cut you out.

John Dehlin [03:58:17] So what, what you want to do over time is build in these believing family members a feeling of safety. Like you are just there to love them on their journey. And you're never going to try and mess with their job as parent and try and take their kids away. And over time you're going to maintain Influence and true love with them that I promise you, will bear positive fruits. And if it doesn't lead to them eventually being open to leaving the church, worst case, you have a great relationship with your kids and grandkids and you haven't made them want to cut you off and, and keep your grandchildren from you, which is what so many ex Mormons can do when they're angry and frustrated and panicky.

John Dehlin [03:59:04] Or, or spouses, frankly, or ex spouses, like dealing with, you know, it's so easy to ruin those relationships where you have no influence whatsoever. So make that them feel safe. Is that all right? Okay, quick question. Let's get you a microphone. Do you have a mic? Can't borrow that mic.

Steven Hassan [03:59:29] Just as I want it back.

John Dehlin [03:59:32] Oh, yeah, of course.

Steven Hassan [03:59:37] Thank you.

Guest [03:59:39] So I feel like I have a lot of the resources, sources to deal with, like setting boundaries with my family and respectfully having dialogue and those kinds of things. My questions around, like having relationships with believing loved ones deal more with disappointment and their disappointment in me. Right. Because I understand I can go make new communities and have other support systems that do celebrate with me on big days. But someday, you know, when I get married, it's not going to be in a temple. And that's something that makes me really happy, but it's going to really disappoint my parents.

John Dehlin [04:00:10] Right.

Guest [04:00:10] And my mom's still my mom at the end of the day. And so I guess as far as relationships go, how do you cope with the fact that things that are going to make you really happy in your life are going to be a major source of disappointment for the people you love?

John Dehlin [04:00:24] Can we have applause for that vulnerable question? That's a beautiful question. Okay, I'm a bit of a linear thinker. So, Steven, is there anything you wanted to react to to the previous comments I was making? And then we're going to come right to the topic of disappointment, but let's rewind a bit. The topic of making them safe.

Loving Believers Without Losing Yourself

Steven Hassan [04:00:44] Yes. So I in principle agree with what you're saying, and I have a guess, a different approach or different angle to suggest considering. But please know he has more experience with Mormons than I do. So you need to just hear what I have to say and then apply what makes sense to you. But for me, I think modeling being an honest, good person who's in touch with their thoughts and their feelings and their bodies, especially if you're a relative, grandparent, parent, or whatever, that's always going to be very influential in sharing life stories. I would also add with the stabilizing the boat, bringing up memories, positive memories with loved ones, where you did happy things together, adventures, skiing, other types of memories is always good.

Steven Hassan [04:01:48] And saying over and over again how much I love you. I'm so glad that you're my mom or you're my dad, if you can believe that. If you don't believe it, don't say it because that's not true. I'm a little leery about encouraging people to verbalize, reinforcing the group beliefs unless they're being asked.

Steven Hassan [04:02:17] For me to let you near my kids. I need you to promise me not to bring up critical things. And then that becomes a contract that's negotiated, but I'm nervous about because again, thinking they may get out one day, you don't want them to say back to you, why didn't you tell me if you knew there were real problems?

Steven Hassan [04:02:40] I looked up to you and I trusted do so that's, that's a little bit trickier. There are safe, non controversial subjects that I believe parents, grandparents, siblings can share with one another. And one thing that I really like a lot is Phil Zimbardo's Heroic Imagination project. Has anyone heard of Philip Zimbardo or the Zimbardo prison study? No. Yes. One person, two people, three people long. I don't want to get off on the Zimbardo prison study. I have interviews with him. But the HeroicImagination.org is a curriculum aimed for schools where they take small videos of different social media psychology lessons with a curriculum of questions. And the idea is to educate young people and old people how much we are socially influenced by others and with the goal of empowering them to be good citizens.

Steven Hassan [04:03:56] Now, disclosure, at the very end there's a module on cults, so you may not want to go the whole route with them. But for example, the Ash conformity study, the Milgram obedience study, et cetera, these are going to be just like scientific studies and that one can begin to cultivate an education about how much we can be influenced by one another.

Steven Hassan [04:04:25] So I think that's really valuable. And if I may respond to that woman, it's not exactly linear. Heroicimagination.org so I may not remember exactly what you just said about not going to be married in the temple and all that, but a principal principle of communication is always recommended that you're being a good listener to the point where you can repeat back to the person what they said with the same affect and appreciating that you heard them. I understand, mom. That you really want me to do X, Y and Z. And you believe, based on what you've taught, that this needs to happen and this needs to happen and this needs to happen.

Steven Hassan [04:05:20] And then you pause and then you say, and I love you very, very much. You know that pause. And I'm really having a struggle because I want to please you and I want you to love me and I want to be part of your life.

Steven Hassan [04:05:39] And I also need to follow my truth or I need to follow God, or I need to do what I believe I need to do. But I don't know how to negotiate that with you. But at least you're putting it on the table in a non emotional reactive way.

Steven Hassan [04:06:01] Pardon me, but for me, kind of really making them feel validated that you heard them acknowledging the strengths and then saying, I have a dilemma. And there's a part of me that would love to just do what you're asking me to do, but I would really feel like it would be betraying my love of God or Jesus or whatever feels right for you.

Steven Hassan [04:06:33] And that opens a crack in the door for consideration. The other thing you could say is I would really, as I want to step into your shoes and really understand your position. Could you please do your best to step into my shoes and understand where I'm coming from? And again, that's about communication techniques. So that's what I wanted to share.

John Dehlin [04:06:59] Well, thank you, Steven. That was really good. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Just one sec. I love that technique. I love those pauses and I love the idea of reflecting back to them what you, what you heard them say, because then they have to listen to what they said and actually think about it and think about the implications while they're staring you in the eyes. I love the fact that you, that you're modeling love and connection and expressing how important the relationship is to you and that you even have a desire to please them. But at the same time, you're then going back to your values and saying, I value truth or I value integrity, or this is what's feeling right for me.

John Dehlin [04:07:43] Because one of the fundamental principles of Mormonism is free agency. Right. And so that's a principle that. That's a principle that they can relate to. And if they really believe in that part of Mormon doctrine, that's going to cause a little bit of cognitive dissonance in for them. Go ahead.

Steven Hassan [04:08:01] You definitely want to quote that. If they're.

John Dehlin [04:08:03] Tell us what you mean.

Steven Hassan [04:08:04] If there are doctrines from the group like, we believe in free agency, you're Speaking to their cult indoctrinated self. They're going to have to agree. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [04:08:14] Yeah. That's good.

Steven Hassan [04:08:15] And. And such. So that's really valuable. There was one other piece I wanted to add, and I think I lost.

John Dehlin [04:08:20] We'll come right back to it. Let me. Okay, so let me go ahead and share my response to that, to that question, and then we can come right back. Okay. So there's this. There's this notion called the Nephi Effect. How many of you have heard me talk about the Nephi Effect before? Okay, a few of you. So one of the negative stereotypes, the false stereotypes about ex Mormons is that, you know, they were weak. You know, they wanted to sin.

Steven Hassan [04:08:48] Right.

John Dehlin [04:08:48] They never really believed to begin with. Right. My experience with the people that I work with is that these are the zone leaders and the APs and the sister leaders on the mission who are leaving the church over the issues that they're leaving the church over. These are Relief Society presidency members, young women's leaders, young men's leaders, bishopric members, Stake Relief Society presidency and primary members, even members of stake presidencies and Stake High councilmen. Raise your hand if you observed in any of the callings that I just mentioned. Right.

John Dehlin [04:09:23] In other words, what Marlon Jensen once said, who was our church historian of general authority. He said, we're losing our best and our brightest. That's what Marlon Jensen said. Said once he started digging into the faith crisis stuff. So our problem. Tell me if you relate to this. Our problem is we didn't believe too weakly or too feebly. Our problem was we took it too seriously and believed it too much. How many of you relate to that? Right. Okay. So what I call how many of you identified. I apologize that within Mormonism, there's no heroic female figure for those of you who are women to really look up to.

John Dehlin [04:10:03] Certainly it's not Emma. Right. So how many of you related to Nephi as a hero growing up as a kid? Raise your hand if you related to Nephi. He was the noble son. Right. He was the righteous child. And how many of you felt like you were the Nephi in your family to your parents?

John Dehlin [04:10:23] Right. And one of the most devastating things that I've seen in these workshops and retreats is this very heartbreaking dilemma that people bring, which is, I love my dad or I love my mom, and I love having them adore me. And I really valued being viewed by my parents as the most righteous or faithful, as a super righteous and faithful kid.

John Dehlin [04:10:52] And one of the most difficult things about this Faith crisis is I'm falling in status from these people who honestly, my self esteem and ego has largely been built upon, right? And it's devastating to my sense of self to be downgraded in value in their eyes.

John Dehlin [04:11:17] How many of you relate to that in some way? Okay, I call that the Nephi effect. And it is super, super difficult. And so the question is, what do you do if your faith crisis makes it so the people you love and care about most no longer respect and value you?

John Dehlin [04:11:40] And let's add to that. What if you actually are on the right side of truth in history? And what if actually your act of disaffiliating is an act of great courage and integrity that should be respected and honored, right?

John Dehlin [04:11:56] Isn't that an excruciating dilemma to be in? What is the way out? What in the world are you supposed to do with this scenario? So I can tell you what you shouldn't do for sure, and then I can tell you a recommendation.

John Dehlin [04:12:15] What people often do is they're so unwilling to accept that downgrade in status, right? That demotion in respect that they feel like what they need to do is have an extra sense of urgency to proselytize and convince their loved ones that they are on the side of truth and righteousness, right?

John Dehlin [04:12:43] It's like what they say is, I want you to know the truth. I want you to see the joy that I've seen. I want you to understand, you know, you know, so that you can live the life you want. But what you're really thinking and feeling is, is I don't want you to love me any less because I really enjoy your love and respect and I need your love and respect, right? But what we forget is so oftentimes we're now going back to that issue, the backfire effect, because you want their love and respect, right? But what you end up wanting to do to maintain their love and respect is standing up in the boat and flailing your arms and shaking, taking the boat that they are enjoying their ride in.

John Dehlin [04:13:32] And what you end up doing is Eckhart Tolle has the idea that what you fight, you strengthen and what you resist persists. And the stronger you fight to try and convince them that you're still that amazing child, you're still that Nephi, you're still that honorable son or daughter. The stronger you fight, fight to force them to come around to your worldview, guess what you end up doing?

John Dehlin [04:14:01] Not only do you make them afraid and terrified and create the backfire effect, you're actually going to accelerate the demise of their esteem for you and make them respect and love you less. Because you're going to go from, from, you're going to go from Nephi to that ranty ex Mormon Voldemort, John Galin person, Kori whore. Right? You become Kori whore. You go from Nephi to Kori whore when you try and solve the problem this way. So if the answer isn't to fight for their respect and esteem, because while they hold their worldview, it is probably irreconcilable for them to see you as noble and great and honest and amazing while you are abandoning everything that they know to be true and good and that they taught you.

John Dehlin [04:15:01] Because the most devastating thing of all for a parent, believe it or not, isn't that you leave the church, it's that they failed as a parent. And, and that's why you're leaving the church. That's really, oftentimes psychologically what's behind their demotion and respect and value for you is them feeling like they did a bad job as a parent.

John Dehlin [04:15:25] So this is hard. So what's the answer? If it's not to fight to maintain their respect and their esteem, what do you have left to do? Is this an impossible dilemma? Are you just screwed?

Steven Hassan [04:15:51] Yeah.

Guest [04:15:53] I deal with this a lot, but it's a narcissistic perspective tendency of parents to say, oh, I must have been a horrible mother. I did something, something so wrong for you to leave the church. What did I do? And stuff like that. And making it about them instead of about you. It's not about them, it's about you and your choices.

John Dehlin [04:16:09] Yeah, yeah. Here's the problem. A narcissistic system often breeds narcissistic parents. How many of you would call your parents or believing partners malignant narcissists? How many of you would say, that was your experience. Okay, not all of you, but they.

Steven Hassan [04:16:28] Some.

John Dehlin [04:16:29] So yes, that's true, but you didn't quite answer my question, and I'm saying that playfully. What options do you have if your loved, believing loved ones have lowered their, their esteem for you? What options do you have? Shout it out.

Guest [04:16:44] I left the church 24 years ago and left my children. I left the church 24 years ago. My children

John Dehlin [04:16:55] suffered.

Guest [04:16:55] The Mormon. You know, everybody's wonderful but your mom. I had to come to a point where I just loved and accepted them just as they are and I supported them in their church activities. They knew where they standed and I did a whole lot of crying and a whole. And I still to this day, I'm just starting to heal from that. But I wouldn't change my choice ever.

John Dehlin [04:17:24] Let's give her applause. Because we're short on time and I want to give you one last hour with Steven. I'm going to jump to. To the answer that I'm wanting to offer. Loving and accepting is always the answer. Unconditional love is always the answer. What I'm moving to is, is one of the core concepts of Buddhism starts with an A.

John Dehlin [04:17:49] Acceptance, okay? Like Eckhart Tolle says, what you fight, you strengthen. What you resist, persist. If you're trying to make them maintain or grow their respect for you, you're probably strengthening the outcome you don't want. You're probably creating resistance. So the key tenet of Buddha Buddhism is, and whoever came up with this idea, life is suffering, right?

John Dehlin [04:18:18] What an awful premise to a religious tradition. Life is suffering. But there's a psychological benefit to beginning with the premise that life is suffering, right? Because once you accept the suffering of life, right, that first arrow is always painful.

John Dehlin [04:18:37] But what you avoid. And if you listen to no Rochetta and secular Buddhism, when you learn to accept the first arrow, what do you avoid? The second arrow and the third arrow and the fourth arrow that you create by your unwillingness to accept what is.

John Dehlin [04:18:55] So I want to recommend secular Buddhism to all of you. And not as a religion, not as a. Not even as a form of spirituality. But there's this core teaching in Buddhism called acceptance. What if you were to consider practicing acceptance, that you have been downgraded for now in their eyes, and you just say, I am no longer daddy's special little girl. In that same way, for now, I'm no longer Mommy's heroic Nephi.

John Dehlin [04:19:29] Right? Now imagine meditating that. Imagining when you're suffering that your parents or spouse or kids no longer look up to you, try something very, very revolutionary and different, which is just accepting that that is what the reality is right now. It may not always be permanent, right? It may change.

John Dehlin [04:19:53] But I promise you that resisting what is is going to cause a lot more pain than practicing acceptance. And that's painful. I see some tears flowing right now as people contemplate no longer being viewed as special by their parents. And I don't mean to be glib about that, and I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but what I will offer as a final thought to that dilemma is this, that one of the challenges and opportunities of life is to mature and is to grow.

John Dehlin [04:20:30] And the extent to which your self Esteem is excessively tied to the esteem of your parents or to other loved ones is an opportunity for you to strengthen your esteem and your self efficacy. Because the truth is, you have all done amazingly heroic things. You have honored your parents or your loved ones and your pioneer ancestry, by the way, by seeking truth and making sacrifices for truth. So whether or not your parents or your grandparents or your spouse or your kids honor and respect that journey, I would recommend it would be very valuable for you you to do the work to get to the point where you, you value and respect the decisions and the journey that you've made.

John Dehlin [04:21:22] To the point where it doesn't matter to you whether your spouse or your children or your parents or your grandparents necessarily maintain that level of respect. You can get to the point where you feel so proud and so confident and so secure and so grateful for the courageous decisions that you've made to where if your parents don't quite love you as much and you find out, you rip off the veneer and you find out a lot of these relationships were built unconditional love because that's what was offered to them and that's what they learned by their parents and by their church.

John Dehlin [04:22:02] It's hard to see that reality, but what you end up with is a rock solid confidence and self efficacy that you are amazing and that you've done amazing things and that's an opportunity for growth. It's hard, it's painful. I'm not trying to be glib and minimize the importance of those relationships. But it's an opportunity for growth that will pay very, very positive dividends for you in the long run. So I'm suggesting you consider acceptance of the, of the esteem that may be lowered. Who is it that asked the original question?

John Dehlin [04:22:44] Thank you. You may have to work with a therapist or coach to help you with that. I recommend the Secular Buddhism podcast. Steven, reactions.

Steven Hassan [04:22:55] Wow. So are you her daughter? I'm very curious. Can I ask you a question? Having listened to what your mom said, would you have wanted your mom to do anything differently now that you know what you know?

Guest [04:23:16] Well, she left the church when I was 16 and I was really angry at her.

Steven Hassan [04:23:23] Yep.

Guest [04:23:25] But she did a really good job of not like pushing it on us and holding space for us. And sometimes it will just take time for your loved ones to get there. It's 24 years later and I deconstructed completely separate from her and now we're here together and I have so much respect for her, what she went through. Because she did it alone. There Was nothing like this.

Steven Hassan [04:24:06] Thank you. Thank you.

John Dehlin [04:24:11] Before you give.

Steven Hassan [04:24:12] Before you give the mic back, I'm just. I'm learning. So I'm just. I'm really curious about the process. So when she decided she didn't believe anymore. Did she say that to you? Like, I'm sorry, honey, but I don't.

Guest [04:24:32] I was in an abusive relationship with my husband at the time, but her dad.

Steven Hassan [04:24:39] Yep.

Guest [04:24:40] And ended up having an affair. Got excommunicated from the church. And at my bishop's court, I asked them, please do not have my husband there. I do not want him there. And I went there and he had my. And they had invited him to testify on my behalf. And that created so much anger in me. And then I had another counselor in the bishop's court that said, I don't know what your problem is. I treat my wife like that all the time. And I remember this huge amount of rage. And they didn't excommunicate me at the time. They disfellowshipped me. So I went out and had sex with the guy I was having an affair with. My ex husband had me followed and said, I know what you did. He goes, I'm going to have you excommunicated. And I said, don't worry, I'll call the bishop and I'll ask him to do it myself.

Steven Hassan [04:25:41] So your daughter wants to say something.

Guest [04:25:43] I was just going to say, so she never. It wasn't like she told us she lost her faith or anything. It was just like she went through that and we felt very betrayed and.

Steven Hassan [04:25:56] So may I respond and just say that I have a lot more experience with ex Jehovah's Witnesses and your story. I've heard maybe 50 times from women in abuse control. It's patriarchal cult. Also abusive. You know, marriage and survival was do something, something to break the rules, go out and have an affair, because it's the only way I can get out of this damn mess. I remember.

Guest [04:26:28] I remember where I was sitting. I was in the Schloskes parking lot. And I remember thinking, yeah, Schlotchkis, Yes, I. I know I can remember this moment vividly. And I remember thinking, I can either commit suicide or I can have an affair and I'll be spiritually dead, but I'll still be here for my kids.

Steven Hassan [04:26:52] So I just want to validate this was a survival choice in your mind, given how you were programmed. Like, this was a wise choice, even though it sucked completely and it did not create a frame where your kids could get curious like what's up with mom? And ask you questions about it. It was more like getting away from that abusive, controlling husband, it sounds like. Am I right?

Guest [04:27:23] Yeah. And from the kids perspective, we never saw that. So like it was going on between them, but to us, dad was like the hero, you know?

Steven Hassan [04:27:30] So, yeah. I'm so sorry that you've had to experience it, but I am also delighted to see that the two of you here together, it's really awesome. So can I go back to your slide? So in listening to your story, what my reaction is, there's no sharks. Those were phobias. If you were, rather than flail around and make everyone nervous, dive in, tread water, water's cool, it's great. And like that maybe, you know, well, you want to come and swim with me? And if you're too afraid because they're invisible sharks, I think I'm going to go swim to the shore and, you know, come join me or, you know, what I'm trying to say is like think outside the box and think about metaphors.

John Dehlin [04:28:37] Are you saying you don't have to stay in the boat? Is that what you're saying?

Steven Hassan [04:28:40] That's exactly what I'm saying. But everyone has to make their own decisions. And part of good decision making is based on my experience and information. I can try this and then what's the short term consequences? What are the long term consequences? I can try this and what are the short term consequences and the long term consequences. And in the end, you do the best guess you can and then learn from the experience.

Steven Hassan [04:29:14] But I can say categorically the phobia cure is for members to seek happy former members who are successful, who are thriving, who are creative, productive, successful. And they're modeling that there aren't sharks and that you can have a life.

Steven Hassan [04:29:38] And so I do want to say that. And I also believe in making more efforts at communication than it sounded just from my short listening to your, your frames, John. I guess for me I'm a more like what's within my control to do. And at the very least, you know, if you're exiting, you could say to family and friends, when you're ready and want to ask me any questions about what's going on, I'd like to share it with you. And if you want to put Mormonism in a box and put it aside, can we still talk about other things of interest and value, whether it's sports or weather or politics or something else?

Steven Hassan [04:30:42] And I'm like, I love to learn, so I love sharing podcast episodes that I've heard or books that I've read and asking members and cults their opinions, like, would you check this out and tell me what you think?

Steven Hassan [04:30:57] And a documentary I've recommended for years since it came out. I don't know, I'm going to ask how many people have watched it already. The social dilemma. Watched it. So this is a documentary where interviews were done of top social media executives on what's behind the scenes of these social media platforms and such. And these people are like exploring, explaining, algorithms are running things to, you know, to capture people's attention so they can get more ad revenue and how they won't let their kids on iPads and have these social media platforms. And it's not about cults, but it is because it's about mind control.

Steven Hassan [04:31:49] Because my experience, I've been researching this stuff over years and you know, human minds have never been in a digital environment until like 20 years ago. And it's the wild, wild west right now. And it's really toxic and dangerous and it's really harming people and polarizing people, installing phobias in people and all kinds of information warfare is happening right now. So for me, how having a discussion, if people are realize China is not friendly to the United States and they want to take over the world or Russia or whatever, to have conversations where you're still talking about substance, but you still can talk about undue influence in other ways and just like planting seeds. Did somebody want to ask something? Sorry,

Guest [04:32:52] I was listening to your podcast and you were interviewing a man who had done a book on.

Steven Hassan [04:32:59] It's called Rewired by Carl Morrison to

Guest [04:33:02] know the name of that book.

Steven Hassan [04:33:03] So Rewired, Protecting your brains in the digital age. He's a Harvard psychiatrist and social neurologist who did a developmental psychological evaluation on how toxic social media is to our brains. And young people are on 10 to 12 hours a day and they're missing out on like real life relationships and friendships and maturity, and it's shortening their attention span and they're looking for quickie solutions instead of like pondering deep problems and thinking about them. And I just want to like wave a flag and go, yo, this is really dangerous and we really need to, you know, think. Do we want these billionaires to be running our minds or. Or do we want to think about what are values and what we want to do with our life? Yes.

Guest [04:34:08] Yes, I have a question.

Steven Hassan [04:34:10] Sure.

Guest [04:34:14] Thank you. I've had a question all day and I think this is the appropriate time to ask it. I'VE been curious how I got to the age of 31 without hearing about undue influence. And, and when I finally left and I finally began seeing the Mormon churches, what I believe is a cult, I wondered why there's not a national cult registry or why this isn't something that we talk more about, you know, and

Steven Hassan [04:34:42] I, I welcome to my world. That's what I've been fighting for for 47 years.

Guest [04:34:48] How can one join that fight effectively?

Steven Hassan [04:34:52] It's, it's really educate yourself and then start educating other people. And I went and did my doctoral dissertation because I realized the law itself is a hundred years out of date with what we know about mind control and undue influence. The law currently says if you're under 18, then maybe you've been unduly influenced to do something, or if you're elderly with dementia. But there, there's everything in between is, they say, a slippery slope. But there's no criteria to evaluate undue influence. So I took Lifton and Singer and Shine and trafficking law, which is illegal fraud, force or coercion, did a quantitative study on my bite model, added a law professor, a medicine veritas social influence model that looks at influency and their, their vulnerabilities.

Steven Hassan [04:35:53] An influencer or predator or predatory organization and the who, what, when, where, how, which is largely the bite model, but also the results like do you have people making choices? Are they doing slave labor for no money or giving large amounts of money they can't afford to a multi billion dollar, you know, group?

John Dehlin [04:36:18] But why are you laughing?

Steven Hassan [04:36:20] There are so many, there are so many of these groups that like Scientology that have, you know, put politicians in Washington and are lobbying for religious freedom. And I say if you go back to the influence continuum, I don't want to start the thing again. But if you think about this, a legitimate religion gives informed consent.

Steven Hassan [04:36:50] A destructive mind control cult lies. Like if we adopted this framework in the law, then the Mormons would lose their tax exemption status and they don't want to do that, but they, they don't want to lose it. So they're going to fight like hell. They're going to put disinformation attacks on him, on me. They want to distract you all and everything else. But there are a lot of destructive groups that are using religion as a card to do criminal behavior and harm people psychologically.

Steven Hassan [04:37:27] And I'm going to just add one more piece that I think you need to know as Americans. Have you ever heard of new apostolic reformation churches? How many people? Okay, so These are, this is a relatively new movement, but these are people who self proclaim their prophets or apostles who speak directly to God and they speak in tongues and they presumably cast out demons and do faith healing and they do B I T E and make spiritual warriors. And if they say you vote for this candidate, they vote for that candidate because they're programmed. The other candidate is Satan and they're 40 to 50amillion Americans in these particular cults.

Steven Hassan [04:38:21] And you combine them with the Mormon Church, with the Moonies, with Scientology and a whole bunch of other cults and now, you know, with the base is of the Republican Party, unfortunately. Sorry if I went in a direction you said not to go in.

John Dehlin [04:38:41] We're not partisan here. All perspectives are to be loved and respected.

Steven Hassan [04:38:47] Right? But seriously, we need rule of law, respect for the Constitution, respect for the Constitution, rule of law. Don't trust pathological liars to a malignant narcissist.

John Dehlin [04:39:07] A third of our audience is about to leave and walk out.

Steven Hassan [04:39:10] Sorry about it.

Guest [04:39:12] I just wanted to comment on that because I've been researching the N and other organizations similar to it for the last couple years and like Stephen just said, it's huge and it has quietly infiltrated a lot of the Christian churches that look so beautiful. I have a dear friend who, who works really hard to reach out to Mormons but who believes in prophets today. And I've said, how can you. But they see a difference, but there, there is none. So a lot of the music that's really big in culture is all influenced by nar, so it's something to research and be aware.

Steven Hassan [04:39:56] And there's 150 million worldwide in NAR. And the media has been been saying there's popularism rising up around the world. It's not popularism, it's cultism. New Apostolic Reformation. Go to my website, put in New Apostolic Reformation. I've interviewed some of the top experts, including a man who pastored one of these, who's left and become a Bible scholar who's been speaking out about this. I'll just add, recently it's been reported there's a schism occurred that within NAR churches because some of them are sticking with their proclamation that so so and so won the 2020 election.

Steven Hassan [04:40:46] And then there's a whole bunch of others going, no, I don't think so. And they're trying to figure out how to negotiate that and still keep their power and control. So it's interesting. But the schism gives me hope that we might actually break free and say, you know, Legitimate religion should be based on love and charity and compassion and kindness and lifting people up. And I'm Jewish, but I will quote Jesus, you know, as you love them least in your kingdom you do. So to me, that's not what NAR and other. These other cults do. They want the rich and the powerful and the screw, the little guy or the immigrant or the divorcees or whatever. And it's just backward. It's just not the best of what religion should be, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [04:41:40] All right, thank you, Stephen. He did write a book called the Cult of Trump. You know, I try and steer clear of partisan politics on Mormon stories because I don't want to lose sight and alienate people that we're trying to reach. So if you're Republican, we still love you. And I'm a registered Republican in Utah, so I can influence the primaries. So, yeah, please don't. Please know you're loved and accepted unconditionally here, regardless of political affiliation. Okay, we. We have about 20 minutes left with Steven and then I want. We're gonna have some closing wrap up things for the last 10 minutes. So this is a time for a rapid fire round with Stephen Hasson.

Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin [04:42:21] We can't have long questions or long statements or personal stories, but what I'd like to do is to kind of do a rapid fire. You've got a pressing need that you think other people here are going to actually have value in hearing as well. And let's just do a rapid fire round for our last 20 minutes with Steven. Is that okay? So is there a topic or an issue that you have not heard addressed that you really feel like you need to get a little bit of insight on that you think that other people here are going to find value in too? And I'll say I want to give preference to the people who haven't contributed yet or spoken over those who have.

John Dehlin [04:43:04] But if, if none of you who have not contributed yet have anything to contribute, then, then we want to open the floor to everybody. So let's just see some hands and we'll do a rapid fire round.

Guest [04:43:20] So I feel like I have, as I am a gay person, I feel like I have a lot of legitimate anger against the church and the way that it's taught about people like me in my community and in the greater culture in America today, the way trans people are being attacked. And I keep finding that, like slipping its way, my anger of big picture stuff into like the situations with my family where I want to show that I'm happy because I know that being happy in situations as like a not member anymore is one of the best ways to get them to come around. But I just am trapped by this feeling of like, you're still being manipulated by this and it's hurting people like, like me and so many others.

Steven Hassan [04:44:11] I say be true to yourself and be true to your feelings. Your feelings are your friends. And, and, and I say in general people have a bias to help others and think of them, their own needs secondarily. And I think that's reverse in terms of healthy psychological functioning. So I would say be true to yourself and feel your anger. And I like activism for some people as a great form of expression of anger in a positive, positive socially constructive way to manifest your feelings.

John Dehlin [04:44:52] Or were you just saying.

Guest [04:44:55] It's just I want to have good relationships and be the happy person that I am Normally when I'm in situations where they bring up the church and then my brain goes like wide and sees like all the hurt that is caused by this organization that they see to love. And I want to respect and be kind and accepting and at the same time, like not have passive acceptance. Like I want to reach acceptance, but I don't want to like say it's fine and stay quiet because I've been quiet my whole life.

Steven Hassan [04:45:24] Yeah, I'm, I'm not like totally.

John Dehlin [04:45:29] How many of you relate?

Steven Hassan [04:45:33] Yeah. And if acceptance doesn't work for you, don't use it. Like I hear John, I respect John, I love John. But I kind of like have quotes around acceptance. Like acceptance for now, but wanting them to wake up and realize the harm that's being caused and if anything, acting as if one day they will wake up. And what can I do to help to help speed up that process? So I'm more.

Steven Hassan [04:46:06] My way is more active than I think John's way. What John has been suggesting that I believe that active planting seeds and doing things without, you know, but watching the reaction, is it helping? Is it developing rapport and trust, developing a dialogue, or is it hurting?

Steven Hassan [04:46:30] But the other thing I want to comment on is remember we started today and I talked about a measuring thing, a 1 to 10 and how resourceful you're feeling. There are times when you shouldn't engage with members of a cult if you're not feeling really resourceful.

Steven Hassan [04:46:50] So you can also self, you know, assess and regulate. I'm a big fan of going to the restroom if I'm losing my temper or feeling less resourceful. Throwing some cold water on my face, doing some deep breathing, saying a prayer in My mind, dear God, give me strength.

Steven Hassan [04:47:14] But I also want to talk about triggers for a minute, because if. If certain words or certain concepts or certain behaviors create an automatic negative reaction in you where you lose your sense of resourcefulness, then I would say that's worth figuring out how to neutralize that trigger so that you stay centered in your body in the here and now.

Steven Hassan [04:47:42] The trigger happens and it's over there, and it doesn't capture you. And so I'm a big fan with my clients of kind of encouraging them to do mental rehearsals of scenes. Like if they're going to go talk to a cult member and they don't know how it's going to go, I always encourage them to do visualizations of the best possible scenario, the worst possible scenario, and the probable scenario.

Steven Hassan [04:48:15] Because if they feel resourceful doing any of the three, then anything in between will be okay. But if you can't manifest a resourceful response to the worst scenario, don't go there later or bring a friend and let them do some of the, you know, speaking or something.

John Dehlin [04:48:39] Beautiful. And I'll just add that, you know, Oprah used to say, you can't have what you don't give. And I do like what Stephen said, that it's self care before other care. So that can mean downgrading the frequency with which you do try to connect with people that feel harmful to you right now or that don't feel safe for you. It can also mean not only modulating the frequency of time that you spend with them, but also the level of depth that you choose to go with them. In other words, if somebody's a two on safety, you don't want to be a five or a four on intimacy, because that's just opening up pain and suffering for you because they're not able to engage with you safely in that way.

John Dehlin [04:49:34] How many of you have those super superficial Mormon families where you can play games all day long, but never will anything substantive or relative ever be discussed? Okay.

Steven Hassan [04:49:45] Wow.

John Dehlin [04:49:45] It's. It's very, very common. It's not the Jewish way, Right? In the Jewish way. I know. There's not one Jewish way.

Steven Hassan [04:49:51] The Jewish way is king.

John Dehlin [04:49:53] Which is what?

Steven Hassan [04:49:54] That's Yiddish term. Nagging, complaining, criticizing. King. Isn't that a great word?

John Dehlin [04:50:01] Disagreeing, healthy, disagreement. Right.

Steven Hassan [04:50:06] No, there. So the whole tradition is about disagreement and asking questions and, like, back.

John Dehlin [04:50:13] Can you imagine? No. They're like, what? Yeah.

Steven Hassan [04:50:17] No, but it's beautiful.

John Dehlin [04:50:18] No, it's true. We have a lot we can learn.

Steven Hassan [04:50:20] I have one more suggestion for everyone. Based on that.

John Dehlin [04:50:24] Do you mind. Do you mind if I finish what I was saying? Really?

Steven Hassan [04:50:25] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [04:50:26] Sorry.

Steven Hassan [04:50:26] Apologize.

John Dehlin [04:50:27] No, no, I. With all the respect. Let me just finish. So modulate the level of intimacy in the depth that you're able to go. If you have to see these people less, spend less time with them, that's one option. If you want to keep things superficial and only talk about the weather or sports or the kids or politics, whatever is safe and healthy, you can just say, hey, you know what? I'm not feeling great about that conversation. Let's talk about something. Let's find some mutual interests that we have that we can talk about that aren't hurtful to you or me and. And that can allow us to enjoy our time together.

John Dehlin [04:51:07] Those are a couple of options that you have. And then of course, of course they're the extremely narcissistic types of individuals where you have to ratchet it down to a one or even a zero, where you see them very infrequently, keep things very, very superficial, and at times you may have to have seasons of not having them in your life. There are complications to that because cutting off close family members is a non trivial decision, especially if you depend on resources from them. But self care first. And those are just a few options that I wanted to offer you for consideration. Okay. Okay.

Steven Hassan [04:51:49] And. And you could send the short videos messages. I have to hold it up. No, I wanted to also just share a communication style that I found effective with my clients and that is giving a conflicted communication. In other words, there's a part of me that hears that you want me to be this way, this way and this way, and I really want to be that way because I love you so much. But there's this other part of me that really doesn't feel like that's being true to God or to myself or to the. And free agency, that's a new one you just taught me. That's very important. Learn more that quote and quote scripture on free agency. Because the Mormon Church teaches free agency, I feel a necessity to have to be doing this choice instead. So you're giving both sides, but I think it's an effective thing.

John Dehlin [04:52:49] All right, another rapid fire question. Anybody who hasn't contributed yet? Anyone who hasn't contributed yet. All right, Rod.

Steven Hassan [04:53:00] Thanks, John. When you were John earlier, when John was talking about he wants to stay in the community, he wants to maintain contact. I don't know if that is a feature that is in any other cult

John Dehlin [04:53:19] that you know of. Sure.

Guest [04:53:21] Okay.

Steven Hassan [04:53:23] I know that.

John Dehlin [04:53:24] I don't know that you would say,

Steven Hassan [04:53:26] I want to maintain contact with the Moonies. You know, I don't recommend it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [04:53:33] And, and, and I mean, so, you

Steven Hassan [04:53:36] know, with you, you, you, you just.

John Dehlin [04:53:38] I just want to get out of there with John. He wants to, to get rid of

Steven Hassan [04:53:45] all the bad stuff, but he wants to stay in.

John Dehlin [04:53:48] And, I mean, I think a lot

Steven Hassan [04:53:51] of us feel that way. And I have often told people I wish we were like the Jewish people, because you can be Jewish and you can be Orthodox and you can be nothing else, and you're still Jewish, and you can. You still are.

John Dehlin [04:54:09] At least my perception. I don't know a whole lot of

Steven Hassan [04:54:11] Jewish people, but people are still accepted. You're accepted as a Jew, they welcome you in, and you can maintain your heritage without being ostracized by the group.

John Dehlin [04:54:23] And it.

Steven Hassan [04:54:24] In Mormonism, cults in Judaism, by the way, are very. But I'm generalizing, of course, but I

John Dehlin [04:54:31] think there's a feeling that you, you can still be Jewish and not believe

Steven Hassan [04:54:37] and still be okay in the community. And I think in Mormonism, you can't be that way.

Guest [04:54:42] I mean, I think especially if you

Steven Hassan [04:54:44] live in a state controlled by them. Yeah, you're all in or you're all out. I think that's a dilemma. So what I'm asking you is, can you have both, and if so, tell us how? I don't know. I don't know. But it seems to me like efforts of really bright, creative people who are really done their homework, sharing that information with access to the Internet and such and having meetings like this. This is an extraordinary meeting for me in terms of 47 years more do more of these because I think it will help more people to wake up and realize there are choices and maybe, you know, ultimately there'll be more ex Mormons and Mormons, and then you can have an ex Mormon identity that's healthier and secularized or whatever. That's my thought.

John Dehlin [04:55:48] Yeah. And I love the question. I'll just say, you know, one of the things that the Jewish people have on us is about three millennia, right? But things are moving for Mormonism at a. At a meteoric pace. I. I had an actively serving Mormon bishop from Mexico come on Mormon stories and whistleblow, fraud and deception that was happening in his area as an actively serving Mormon bishop. And then I've got another actively serving Mormon bishop in Australia who wants to come on Mormon stories, tell his entire faith crisis journey, record it so that when he and his Wife step down as bishops. That story will have been recorded again while he was serving as an actively serving Mormon bishop. Why are you guys wanting to applaud? You can applaud if you want.

Steven Hassan [04:56:40] Yeah, thumbs up.

John Dehlin [04:56:42] Like, like we have stake presidents, stake presidency members, high councilmen, bishopric members all over the church listening to Mormon Stories podcast. I'll also add that if you look at what's going on, I attended an event called Faith that was called by the Faith Matters group, Faith Again Restoration. It was a conference held at the Salt Palace. 1700 people came. It's Terrell and Fiona Givens, it's Thomas McConkey, it's Jennifer Finlayson Fife. It's all these progressive liberal Mormons whose theological beliefs are probably more similar to Stephen Hassan's than not right, who are becoming embraced as a legitimate mainstream alternative to Mormon orthodoxy. And these are all people in good standing with the church.

John Dehlin [04:57:33] And this movement is exploding and it's going to take some time. But to say that the, you know, the ultimate destination for our people is purely in a route you can never stay in the church as a non believer, I guarantee you, I guarantee you 20% of the active membership in the United States are physically in and mentally ill.

John Dehlin [04:57:59] At least 10 to 20% for sure. And it's accelerating because of COVID So I'm not, I'm not arguing if you don't want to ever identify as Mormon again, bless you, I get it. And I, I don't want to ever give any power, influence to the institutional Mormon Church the way it harms people. But I believe that community is important and tribes are important.

John Dehlin [04:58:24] And I, I love my people and I love you. And these are my favorite people. So I want to find a way to stay connected. Call it ex Mormon, call it post Mormon, call it Mormon. Let's figure out a new identity. But I think we're going to get somewhere good with friends a lot faster than we're going to get somewhere good isolated and alone. And that's all I'm trying to do, and that's all I'm saying, but you don't have to follow that way. I just, I just love this, you

Steven Hassan [04:58:53] know, and support Mormon Stories podcast and

John Dehlin [04:58:58] John's work and a lot of other really good podcasts and things out there. Okay, how much time is left? Paul has not contributed yet. And Paul's a cool dude, so we'll let Paul, Steven's friend, on behalf of

Steven Hassan [04:59:13] all cool people everywhere, should I. Should I give you a backstory?

John Dehlin [04:59:17] No. No, don't.

Steven Hassan [04:59:18] I'll give it quickly. 20 years ago. 20 years ago, we asked Steven to come help. We were doing work to create a dialogue, provide services, and to heal members of the polygamous communities. And we needed help from someone like Steven to help us know how to do it. So at that time, I was getting a lot of grief from experts, polygamists, and polygamous critics who insisted that every other word be cult.

John Dehlin [04:59:46] You're a cult. This is a cult. That's a cult member.

Steven Hassan [04:59:49] And I found that that created a

John Dehlin [04:59:53] way that we had no dialogue, we had no community.

Steven Hassan [04:59:55] We had no way to have any

John Dehlin [04:59:57] sort of common ground where we could

Steven Hassan [04:59:59] stop the real abuses that were going

John Dehlin [05:00:01] on in the communities.

Steven Hassan [05:00:02] So Steven suggested, say, well, don't use that word.

John Dehlin [05:00:04] And when Steven came and spoke, the

Steven Hassan [05:00:06] political bigamists loved him.

John Dehlin [05:00:08] They loved him and, well, all of

Steven Hassan [05:00:12] them except the FLDS and the F. I met an flds, a guy about five years ago, and he said, yeah, at the time I thought Steven was the devil. Now I believe every word he said.

John Dehlin [05:00:21] I love that idea, Paul, of talking about undue influence, because I think if you. If you talk to a lot of believing Mormons, they recognize that there are things not going well right now. I have a really, really dear friend who lives in Washington who I met at college. He was a free thinker at the time, had left the church. He influenced me to start questioning. But then he got so converted to BYU that he ended up serving a mission, getting married in the temple, and living in an ultra orthodox Mormon life, which kind of blew my brain. And we haven't really been in touch for 15 years.

John Dehlin [05:00:58] And then all of a sudden the church does this stuff with the sec. And my friend Ron is getting up in sacrament meeting and saying, this is not a church I want to be a part of because the church violated his trust and its integrity. There's also a whole swath.

Steven Hassan [05:01:12] Does everybody know it about the sec? Okay, they know. Sorry.

John Dehlin [05:01:17] The other thing is there's a whole swath of conservative Mormons that are so angry that the prophet recommended vaccines, that the prophet recommended masks. So the church is getting pummeled both on the right and on the left. And these are all opportunities to be able to have dialogue in ways where you're identifying and sharing common values. So I want to challenge you with the. With the believing family member that you want to have a better relationship with, figure out what values you share with them, and like they talk taught you in the mtc, building on common beliefs, find ways to have conversations with them. About the church, about the things that could be improved or that are problematic. Where you're discussing that within the context of common values, that can actually be really useful. Okay, we have time for one or two more questions or comments yet from people who haven't yet contributed.

Guest [05:02:11] So we've talked, talked a lot about the people that we are having conflict with. I'm luckily, I guess in the other boat where my husband is. Whatever, he doesn't know what he is. I'm wanting to include him in this journey of mine, but I don't know how to do that other than yeah, I don't, I don't know how to do that and I want to include him, but I don't know how to do that because he doesn't have the framework of any religion. Do you have suggestions?

Steven Hassan [05:02:39] Never a Mormon than you were correct.

Guest [05:02:41] I met him on T Tinder so

Steven Hassan [05:02:44] I, so, so my general reaction is if you are dating or in a relationship with someone who is never involved with what you are involved with, I think it's really important for your relationship and your intimacy to share more details. And like I, I'm going to reference my book Combating Cult Mind Control. Like read it together because my prediction is he'll probably say oh yeah, I was in a multi level marketing group or oh yeah, I had a controlling boss or something. But at the very least you, I think you want to not keep it compartmentalized but share this very important part of your life with him on this journey.

John Dehlin [05:03:36] Also there's a lot of really great cult documentaries like Going Clear. I like Wild Wild Country State. It doesn't Holy Hell wasn't crazy about that either. Keep Sweet, Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey. There's one about Teal Swan. Was it called Going Deep?

Steven Hassan [05:03:58] I didn't like that one either.

John Dehlin [05:04:02] The vow is I'm sharing my recommendations and then you can share yours. The Vow is an excellent one. There are a lot of really good cult documentaries that are just fascinating. That can be a way if you also, you know, this isn't trying to be self referential. Sometimes on a road trip find a really good Mormon stories episode that you can play for them that you think they'll connect with and sometimes people really can bond over hearing other people's stories. So that's just a couple recommendations. Now what are the doc, what are the God forsaking cult documentaries that you do approve of and like Stephen Aston?

Steven Hassan [05:04:43] I haven't done any actually. No. So the problem with most documentaries are, are they are telling sensationalistic stories that are kind of eye candy to the general public, but they're not really teaching things that are actually valuable to help people understand mind control or social influence in a way that's actually going to be helpful to them.

Steven Hassan [05:05:11] So while Wild country was about the Rajneesh cult, the guy who had 92 roles, Rolls Royces in Antelope, Oregon, where they put salmonella poisoning in the salad bars to control the election. And people were ordered to have sex with anyone who wanted to have sex with them. And if they resisted, then they were in their ego too much. And so people were being raped, people were having, being sterilized. And the whole documentary, even though it was critical, had two true believers featured who still think that Osho Rajneesh was a great spiritual master, even plugging the book, no ex members and no critics in the whole documentary.

Steven Hassan [05:05:57] That's why I hated it. I recently was interviewed about a new Hulu documentary and I probably won't recommend that you watch it, but it's called Stolen Youth about the Sarah Lawrence Larry Ray cult. He was recently convicted and sentenced to 60 years. And I was brought to New York and filmed an episode with two victims. But if you are interested in pimps and traffickers and how brutal they are and how mind controlish they are, there's actual video and audio of these abuse that was filmed by these victims and.

Steven Hassan [05:06:40] But watch it with the pause button. Don't try to just watch it because honestly I was getting traumatized even though I'm out of the cult and all that. But it was just so hard to watch wonderful people being so abused. But it gives you a real window, actual window into what happens when people are being sex and labor trafficked in the extreme form.

Steven Hassan [05:07:04] So that last episode, I'm in it with two ex members talking about the mind control that was done, but there really needs to be better documentaries done. If anyone's a filmmaker or want to be a filmmaker, think about doing some educational documentaries in a way that's really, really going to convey something substance for people.

John Dehlin [05:07:29] I will say it's a tragedy that you haven't been able to create some documentaries with your world life's experience.

Steven Hassan [05:07:36] What can I say? Waiting for the right opportunity to show.

John Dehlin [05:07:39] All right, well, if any of you are out there, know someone. Also, God Forbid is a fantastic documentary about Jerry Falwell Jr. And Liberty University. It'll blow your mind. Check that out. Okay, we only have 10 minutes left.

Steven Hassan [05:07:53] I am going to mention one documentary I liked. You just sparked my my neurons about my former cult. If you want you want to know a little bit more about how crazy my cult was? It's called Emperor of the Universe. It's on YouTube.

John Dehlin [05:08:11] All right, all right. I want to go on forever. We have 10 minutes left. There are a few things I think we should plug before we go of yours.

Steven Hassan [05:08:22] Well, I can't help it, but Paul said don't use the cult word. And I see you dialed up my course and there it is. Understanding cults. So kind of feeling like I wasn't taking my own advice from 20 years ago.

John Dehlin [05:08:37] So in context.

Steven Hassan [05:08:38] In context in a conversation with a friend or family. I think it's a bad word. Yeah, I agree. Use words that work is what my advice.

John Dehlin [05:08:47] Let me just say that when I talked to Steven about his number one goal before coming out here, Steven said if I had one wish, it would be that people would would buy, pay for and watch this course or tell

Steven Hassan [05:08:59] their therapists if they are sick and tired of educating their therapists. Like, tell them to like, learn.

John Dehlin [05:09:09] And if there's a mental health professional here, coach or therapist, will you please stand up really quickly? Okay. Tell us your name. Just go for it. Faith Chris. Okay, you're in Salt Lake. Okay. And you can stay after, right?

Guest [05:09:38] Carolyn Memmott. I am in West Jordan and I do specialize in complex trauma and religious trauma syndrome. So.

John Dehlin [05:09:46] Excellent.

Guest [05:09:49] Carolyn Mehmet. My practice is centered counseling and coaching

John Dehlin [05:09:53] and they can stay after if you want to reach out.

Guest [05:09:58] I'm Amber Kimber. I'm a coach and in grad school to be a clinical mental health counselor. I'm in Davis county and you can find me on Instagram or Facebook.

John Dehlin [05:10:07] Excellent. Thank you. It's dealing with high demand religions and cults is a cult is a matter of expertise and cultural competence. So a generic therapist or coach is not necessarily going to get you what you need. So we first and foremost recommend seeking out mental health professionals or coaches or therapists that are experts in this field and that that practice ethically. Natasha Helfer has a practice called Symmetry Solutions here in Salt Lake. Julie Diazevedo Hanks is a great one, especially for believing family and friends. Jennifer Finlayson, Fife. There's so many really good mental health professionals or coaches. Check out the Mormon Mental Health association if you want to find an ethical therapist or coach that might be able to help you. Did you want to say something, young man? They were just pointing at me. I'm a psychiatrist. My name is Carl Martineau, but I don't have an outpatient practice.

Steven Hassan [05:11:06] I do inpatient psychiatry at Ironically LDS hospital.

John Dehlin [05:11:13] But also I want to just echo as your advocate Steven inside insist that your coaches are therapists or if you want to become a competent coach or therapist. Is there a better resource than spending the the money to watch this course? Nine hours of Steven's expertise and you get CE credits for watching this. So I'm sorry, I'm going to give you the plug.

Steven Hassan [05:11:35] You got to do the quiz and pass it.

John Dehlin [05:11:37] Exactly.

Steven Hassan [05:11:37] To get the ce.

John Dehlin [05:11:38] Anything else you want to say about this course?

Steven Hassan [05:11:41] It's just what I consider to be a foundational psychoeducation. So it's not like I'm going to Australia in June and I'm going to do more like hands on interacting with people and hopefully it'll be recorded and put online. So it's the beginning. But we need to scale people who are competent to address this issue for millions and millions of people. All those NAR people who are going to be coming out need help and they need to understand undue implants.

Guest [05:12:18] I would like to commend everyone for being here and getting your inoculation from undue influence. Both my husband and I had this experience where when we left the Mormon Church we had this huge void and we wanted something compelling and not believing in an afterlife anymore. We wanted to make the most of this precious life. So we signed up for a whole lot of large group awareness trainings.

Steven Hassan [05:12:44] Yeah. Danger.

Guest [05:12:45] Many of them were cults that we spend a lot of time and money in. One in particular here is impact trainings in Salt Lake City.

Steven Hassan [05:12:58] Landmark Life Spring in LifeSpring.

Guest [05:13:02] Yes.

Steven Hassan [05:13:03] And so the, the thing is is that if it's legitimate you can research them and they'll stand up to scrutiny and if they're not, they're going to lie and you're going to find out about it and. But no, do the research up front before you pony up any money or put your mind and your body.

Guest [05:13:21] And there's also a red flag if they won't tell you exactly what they're

John Dehlin [05:13:25] going to do at the training.

Steven Hassan [05:13:26] Oh, that is exactly. That's a good, very good point. They say they don't want to spoil the experience.

John Dehlin [05:13:32] It's confidential.

Steven Hassan [05:13:33] Yeah, it's confidential. Like. No, not interested. Thank you very much. What's that?

John Dehlin [05:13:42] It's sacred, not secret. That's. It's a Mormon thing.

Steven Hassan [05:13:46] By the way, humor is very healing. So comedy is really good. Laughter, joy, awe, awe inspiring experiences are really valuable.

John Dehlin [05:13:59] So Steven, you got two minutes to close. What do you want to say?

Steven Hassan [05:14:02] I just want to be. I'M very grateful for the opportunity. Thank you very much. And it's been very moving for me and I've learned a lot and I really want to learn more because I feel like I could use my expertise, with your help and your help to kind of, you know, adapt or transform what I do with other groups to what will work for you, especially here in Utah. So I hope to come back again.

John Dehlin [05:14:35] Wouldn't we love to have Stephen Hassan back? Tell them again the books that you offer and the services that you offer besides the course, please.

Steven Hassan [05:14:50] I'm really not, I'm really trying to scale down my practice. I do work with individuals who need intensive help or we're trying to get coaching on how to help a loved one get out. But if you want to read, this is an audiobook form Combating Cult Mind Control. This is, this is the updated edition. If people read the one with two T's in combating, that's 35 years old and it's outdated, so don't read that one, please.

Steven Hassan [05:15:20] And this is my book on my methodology for how to talk to people in high demand groups or cults or whatever. So I recommend this and then the Cult of Trump if you want to know what's going on currently in the world.

Steven Hassan [05:15:36] But I want to invite people to my podcast, the Influence Continuum. My website has tons of information. Freedomofmind.com freedomofmind.com and for those people who are interested in doing masters or PhD stuff, we want to do more scientific research and we want to, we want to keep showing there's a scientific and consensus that this really is a mental health crisis that needs help.

John Dehlin [05:16:09] The question is what fields should people pursue if they want to pursue research?

Steven Hassan [05:16:14] So some people go into psychology to do clinical work, some go in for research, and some want to become teachers. Right. So it depends on what you're interested in. I can tell you, Doc, if I may, that I recently a psychiatrist at McLean's Hospital, who himself was raised in an Amish controlling, abusive family environment and was excommunicated because he wanted to go to college. He's a clinical director at McLean and he took my course and he said, oh my God, I'm realizing so many people, people and inpatient were raised in authoritarian cults. I never realized that. We never, it was a blind spot completely. So he's, he's wanting to find the way to do a center at Harvard for trauma, informed therapy and spirituality, which I'm very excited if that happens.

Steven Hassan [05:17:14] We can use that as a research center as well as a training center as well as a clinical setting that hopefully will be excellent.

John Dehlin [05:17:25] But

Steven Hassan [05:17:27] John was telling me on the ride yesterday that I could actually ask for donations, even though Freedom of Mind is not a nonprofit. Never occurred to me before, but I'm doing most of my. I'm doing 80% of my time non confident, compensated. Just because I feel like there's a ticking clock in the worlds and going in the wrong direction real fast. So if you have resources and want to help out, maybe John and I can do a project together and want to pitch in. I would say talk to him. Talk to me. Thank you.

John Dehlin [05:18:06] Can we give Stephen Hasson a round of applause for the legend that he is?

Steven Hassan [05:18:21] Thank you. Thanks. Thanks to my parents. Thanks to my sisters. But I don't know if they want pictures taken. Okay, So if you want to see the pictures. And an interview with two of my 4D programmers. I did a blog on my 40th anniversary of my rescue on my blog. And thanks to Nestor and Glenn Lattice. She became a social worker, he became a psychiatrist. But it wasn't easy to deprogram because when they were getting to me, I would be like, who are you to play God with my mind? And they'd be like. And then we take a break, then we go to the other room. And Gary would say, so, Steven, what do you think? And then I tell them how to get me out. It's a very weird process.

John Dehlin [05:19:35] Thanks, Steven.

Steven Hassan [05:19:36] You're welcome.

John Dehlin [05:19:37] All right, thanks for coming. Hope you enjoyed it. We would love to do more workshops and retreats. We just need to figure out how to do it and manage it. But thanks for coming. Love you all. Thanks for your support. Be good to each other. We'll see you guys again soon. Take care, everybody.

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.