# 98 PART 2 of Understanding the difference between a church and a cult + Anna KitKo

This is part two on cults, coercion control, and manipulation within the church. And I have a cult expert with me, Kitco. So what actually helps in recovery? Like, what do you prescribe to your patients?

You need to learn that because distress arises in your nervous system, you're not going to die. Another person can't use your distress to control you. It's always an invitation. It's never a you must or else.

It's that come follow me. You do not have to attend a church service every Sunday in order to be safe.

How would you frame this to a congregation?

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Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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I'm your host, Cassian Blaino, and I've got a repeat guest. If you didn't know, this is part two of an entire episode on cults, coercion control, and manipulation within the church, and I have a cult expert with me, Anna Kitko.

And if you have not heard part one of this, you might want to, just because the first episode, we were focusing on, you know, what does fear and manipulation look like, both in Jeremiah 5, but also in modern day NAR and other cults that we see today.

What does fear look like? What does a church, what are the red signals in a church that might make you start questioning, and what you should do when you wanna start questioning a church? A lot of good stuff there that might be helpful, because today we're going to be doing a part two, focusing more on recovery, leaving, how do you have resources?

What are those resources in leaving that cult or coercive controlling church that you think you might be in, and hopefully you're not in, but we're gonna talk more about hope and recovery and moving on in this episode.

But for those that want to stay, Anna is the cult expert. This is your dissertation. You are the go-to person for this. You have a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary.

You're under supervision for your license as a clinical pastoral therapist, and you have a Master of Science in the Psychology of Coercive Control from the University of Salford, Manchester, UK. Welcome back.

Thanks. I love it.

I'm so excited. Anytime I get a chance to talk about this stuff, I just, I'm thrilled. So this is really fun to have the opportunity. Thank you.

You really can just flex all day on this. This is like your lifeblood. Like what, you're seeing clients after this, you know, that need therapy in this, and then you talk about this, you go on shows with Frank Turek.

This is just your life.

It is.

You know that tool that you find at a flea market, and it's like old, and it's wonky looking, and it's like really specific, and you're like, what the heck was that designed for? I'm like that tool. Like it's one thing.

I'm really good at the one thing. Everything else, like everybody else has gotta handle. But if you need this one thing, then yes, I'll go ahead and flex on that one. I can do that really well.

Well, it's an interesting topic. I mean, how lucky are we that you're willing to come on the show, and you're busy. So thank you for the time. We were talking a little bit about, like before the show started, is kind of recent cults, and I just watched that new Netflix thing on False Prophet, which is about the FLDS community.

And you know, we talked about Mormonism. We talked about Jehovah's Witness, which I feel like as a Sunday school Christian, it feels a little spicy to hear you like say like, well, that is a cult. You know, I feel like I was raised to be like, they're like a different flavor of Christianity, but I would never hate on my brothers and sisters, but you're very clear on, no, there is very specific things happening in those groups that are indicators of a cult, because I mean, just on a baseline level, they're saying go through me, don't go through Jesus.

Correct.

Correct, and they're preying upon, and I think that's part of the reason why I feel so strongly about being clear about that. It's not just to throw shade. It's because the method by which they are predatorily working on Christian believers and believers who are just individuals who are trying to be genuine about searching for belief is they're using that murkiness and the kindness of the Christian disposition to give a lot of grace and a lot of margin.

Like, oh, well, maybe they're just, you know, maybe they're just using the language differently, or maybe they're just misunderstanding, or maybe all that kindness and that compassion and that margin and that grace is being used as the mechanism by which they abuse you.

And so I want to be really clear about the pathology of perpetration when it comes to religious and spiritual abuse, so that well-meaning individuals who are just trying to live their life and have families, they can identify when they're being preyed upon and that that's being used against them.

Right, and I'm gonna, and like within Jeremiah 5, both biblically but also modernly, I think that this Netflix documentary is such a good example for today's discussion, because in summary, you know, the first half of this is what it looks like.

You know, these poor women, just kind of like, you know, I don't actually really know that much about Warren Jeffs, I'm gonna be honest, but like since I just watched the documentary, I know a lot about Sam Bateman, and it's kind of like the post-Warren Jeffs, he's in jail, Warren Jeffs is like, no more sex unless I'm around, but then Sam Bateman, Loserville, comes out of nowhere and is like, well, actually, I'm cool with it, and Warren Jeffs is speaking through me, and he pulls that old move, and then starts taking like his friend's wives and his friend's daughters, and his friend's wife's daughters, and these women, majority are underage, and there was a lot of indoctrination, and then it slowly comes out through the documentary that there was a lot more sex happening and a lot more predation and control, and then kind of what I wanna focus on in this episode is like once he's in jail and these women wake up, like, you know, what is it?

The real life of Kimmy Schmidt or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? It starts with like the stepboard wives breaking out of their calls, and they're like, well, no, the police officer, you're my husband, you know, like what does recovery look like?

But before we get to recovery, back it up into Sam Bateman. You were saying before this episode what he was doing specifically was very gross compared to Warren Jeffs. What made what he did grosser?

So from what I can tell is why I kind of went there in my headspace. The quick summary is that he was going after the youngest iteration of the family members as a grooming profile, whereas if you look at like the overview of Warren Jeffs, he began kind of top tier up here with like just an idea.

It seems like he really believes himself to be the extension as a prophet. And he begins this kind of pathology that ends up naturally adopting every single woman as a wife as a result of his excessive prophet character, right?

Whereas Sam looks like he saw an opportunity to prey upon a very, very, very vulnerable group. He doesn't believe what he's saying when it comes to him actually being a prophet. He's just wielding lies to be able to form a network where he can be pedophilically oriented and get away with it.

So it's one of those like, he's an opportunist. That's my side process of Sam. Whereas Warren Jeffs looks like he really believed he was this extension of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young's pedigree. So like even in jail, he's still operating when it doesn't actually help him at all, he's still operating in that headspace.

Whereas Sam has abandoned it. It no longer works for him. He's moved on to the next iteration.

So from like psychoanalytical standpoint, would you say that Warren Jeffs, for lack of better word, is psycho, is like living in a delusion, whereas like Sam Bateman is more narcissistic?

Correct.

That's what I'm gonna argue based on what I've seen. Now it's easy for me to sit here and do armchair psychoanalysis based on a Netflix documentary. So I can't know this for sure. And certainly nothing clinical being said here, but given how many cases I've observed over the course of my career, now I've seen this before and he has all of the markers that I've seen.

Like the patterns are similar. It's that jump into a new, as soon as he sees a new opportunity to get what he wants again, he jumps into the next identity to do that and do that well. And his goal is to be able to have sexual access to any and all human beings he desires.

He's gonna reinvent himself no matter what.

And going after the women that are under 18, that are nine years old even, that's opportunistic. It's because they are looped in, because he can.

Yeah, he has an appetite. He knows he can get away with it if he just invents himself into an identity that the women will trust and boom, he's in and he's accomplishing his goal. So if he ever gets out and hopefully he doesn't, he will do this again in other iterations.

I don't think he will try to set up some belief that he's continuing to be an FLDS extension of Warren Jeffs. He might, but I'm gonna say he's gonna look for the next group of people who don't know who he is.

He's going to adopt an identity that is going to hopefully accomplish the goal in his mind of what he's going after, which is sexual access to minors. And then he's gonna run with that until it stops.

Do you think, I mean, we're going down this rabbit hole a little bit further, but like what built Sam to think that that was okay? Like, do you think it was abuse in his childhood? Like how is he in his head existing in a reality that makes sense to him?

Oh my gosh, yeah, that's so complex because I don't know enough about his background. We should expect to see that we have some sexual abuse in his childhood at some point. I think that it would be, it'd be unrealistic for me to say that if, let's say he were to sit in my office for treatment for the narcissistic personality disorder side of his personality, I would be preparing to hear some really, really awful stories about things that were done to him, where he learned to develop an appetite towards that side of the disordered spectrum.

That doesn't mean it has to be that way. It's just that when you've done this long enough, you can see things in the personality of the human being and go, I wonder if that's underlying some of this. I don't know though, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I could talk about it all day.

Just like what in his mind justified that? And I think one of the most heartbreaking things about the documentary, and I don't want to spend this whole episode talking about Netflix, but it makes me kind of like think about the people in Jeremiah 5 and like what they were going through.

It was like, you were adopting into a life and one of the women who was like, number one, like the mom of all the girls, you know, he had like nine wives. And she's like, I saw Sam as my key to salvation.

So I was going to do whatever he said, because if I said no, he could take away my salvation. And I wasn't going to risk that. Like, it wasn't like she was an idiot,.

Who was like, whatever.

Like, she was like, I'm

Making an informed decision, yeah.

Right, and now she, like she's out. And of course, like they painted it as a happy ending. Like now she's studying psychology and like, oh, it's like, this girl's screwed. Like this girl has lost her childhood.

Her social norms are like totally out of whack because she didn't have any, like her normal was so different than my normal. How is she going to integrate into like the society that I was built for and like exposed to my whole life, where she was like purposely excluded?

Do you feel like those in Jeremiah 5, kind of like exiting Babylon, like they felt very similarly?

I think so. What's hard about this, and when you think about the folks in Jeremiah 5, remember that the units of information that your nervous system processes every moment of every day, we call memory.

And those units involve not only like what we're thinking, the cognitions, the thoughts that we have about how the world works and what's going on as we observe it, then the emotions that arise in our nervous system, either they correlate with the cognition or they don't, but we don't always, we're not always able to identify that that's the case, which is part of why therapy is so effective is that you have another brain identifying, oh, my emotion didn't do that.

I wonder if there's a break, what happened here? And then you have the sensation, so that that feeling that like the experience of the emotion and the cognition in your body. And there's nobody to really tell you how to identify those things when you first encounter them as a little kid, right?

You're kind of like mirroring what you see and whoever you're around. And those units, as you interpret them, settle in your body as normal or expected because that's what you've experienced. So these women who grow up in these FLDS compounds, all of their sense, all of their felt sense of what is normal is also an experience of predation.

Right, they're being used.

Normal is being compliant. Normal, so that felt sense of like peace. Normal is pleasing. It is never bringing confrontation. So to then exit, go out into a world that does not behave like an FLDS compound or like what the folks were experiencing in Babylon as normal to go out and then try to get a grasp of what is normal, like what is predation versus not?

What is abuse versus not? That takes so much time and so much experience and healing and grappling that it's nearly overwhelming. And that's part of the reason why folks often don't leave cults. It's too overwhelming to imagine.

Why not stay? I've made it this far.

Right, and then it's the opportunity cost of like, well, this is like my normal and I'm okay with this even though it feels a little controlling. It's like, I can't even like, how do you even do taxes?

Like what? Don't even like prompt me with that.

Yeah, yeah, maybe I don't want that much complexity. Maybe I need the simplicity of being compliant to somebody who's telling me what to do all the time.

Yeah, so the cost there is like, well, I'm gonna grit and bear it and I'm gonna go out into that world. It probably takes a lot, a lot to get to that point of it doesn't matter because I can't bear to stay here.

And with that recent Sam Bateman exercises, well, he got caught and like he had people kind of working on the inside to catch him. So these women had no choice. They now are in the world, kind of like unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, that like hilarious sitcom is like, these women didn't want to be free, but they ended up free and they almost like clung back to their abuser.

What about the people that hit a tipping point and then they sneak out or like the wife who like kind of sort of worked, like when I'm basically the insider who was filming a documentary to catch Sam Bateman, she was able to access all this information because one of the wives kind of turned and was like something, what typically is that moment that pushes that wife to turn against her husband that she is clinging to is like, you know?

Yes.

And that, so what typically is it is I kid you not, and this is just Anna talking. I don't have any studies to prove this. This is just 20 years of experience. What it is, is a mom watching, getting the idea that their kid is gonna get abused and the mama bear aspect to the experience of being a mom, nobody can touch it, even the cult leader.

And they just go, I cannot bring myself to allow my child to get abused. I can be abused, right? I can be in a domestic violence loop where I'm protecting my kid, I'm running interference, but I'm not gonna let you hurt my kid.

And it's this wonderful, I really believe this, that design by God in the heart and head space of a mom is so sacred that false prophets can't touch it. And it ends up being the end of every single made, compound that I see explode or just fall apart.

It's always a mom. It's a mom who can't handle it. And she's willing to sacrifice herself and go to hell for all of eternity to make sure that her kid is safe.

Where else have you seen this?

So there are lots and lots of compounds in the woods across the US and Canada. So when I say this, I'm not trying to withhold information. I just have to say HIPAA compliant. I have seen this over and over and over again in these little, like it's a movement, like a small group or a home church or a splinter off of a church.

Some charismatic leader is just like, y 'all are nuts. And then they start to believe, they leave a church for maybe a good reason, maybe kind of like a weird reason. They get offended and they start their own movement and they start to believe that they are the true church, right?

Classic, all the other denominations are wrong. I'm the only one that has it right. Come study under me. I'm not Jesus, but like I'm close, right? They start to behave like that. And then they move out and they buy property and they have everybody's kind of, and they're like gonna live this little idyllic existence, living out an authentic Christianity in their headspace.

And that rapidly turns into something really scary. The Western hemisphere, so Canada, America, more America than anybody else. But then South America has some really, really interesting compounds post-World War II where this happened.

And there are some movies documenting it. I can't, I'm trying to think what it's called, but like they're like South American documentaries. So it's in Spanish, you can take a look, where this happened regularly.

And the stories, these harrowing stories about like how torture started as a compliance measure post-World War II because they had a knowledge of how POW camps work and how you can insist on high discipline compliance with those methodologies.

We still see those today.

And in those places, it's when the women, it's the next generation. So the first generation makes it into the compound, they're operating, the next generation is born. And it's kind of that state where you're going from single woman to married woman to motherhood.

And that it's in that moment where it's like the motherhood overwhelms the whatever the teaching of the prophet is. It ends up becoming a stronger measure for what is good and right and prudent than whatever is coming out of the mouth of the teacher.

And the mom can't get away from it. It's beautiful, I love it.

Wow, I mean, yeah. I talk about like egocentric, like I had no idea that this was happening in those parts of the world.

Wow.

Very common, very common. We're called the kingdom of the cults by the Eastern side of the pot. As far as like European studies and academics, yeah, the kingdom of the cults is the US and the extensions that go out into the rest of North America.

Amazing, love that.

The things we don't realize about ourselves, yes.

That is good to know. Okay, so what actually helps in recovery? Like what, you know, I'm thinking about those girls that have no idea, any social norms, they don't know how to perform like a job. Like all they know is how to kind of be obedient to their husband.

What actually helps? Like what do you prescribe to your patients in like breaking their mind in a way that doesn't overwhelm them?

Yeah, so we do a lot of distress tolerance things like exercises. Because, yep, because you need to learn that because distress arises in your nervous system, you're not going to die. You don't automatically have to respond to it.

You can sit in distress and notice that you're not dying. And the strength training in your nervous system that happens after that means that another person can't use your distress to control you. Because basically that's what's happening in a brainwashing scenario.

All across, in every iteration, in a brainwashing scenario, they're going to make distress erupt in your nervous system, and they're going to immediately offer a way out that works. And over time, because you're not, who is going out into the world being like, I'd love to join a cult?

Nobody.

They're just trying to live their life, and they're trying to be genuine, and they're looking for a reason to live and a grand narrative, just like the rest of us. So all this person has to do is offer that, make distress arise in your nervous system, and then offer you the way out so that you feel relief when you perform.

And all of a sudden you have an engine, and that's a compliance engine. And as they increase distress, they can control you even more, because your brain will incentivize you to continue to comply, because it's easier to comply than to increase your distress by fighting it.

That's how a POW camp works. That's how brainwashing works. That's how coercive control works in religious environments. It's just that coercive control in religious environments are using God language to make the distress happen and the relief happen.

Can you, simply said, can you walk through an example of what that engine would look like?

Sure, okay. Let's use right now, we'll keep with the Mormon theme, okay? Their new prophet also happens to be a trained attorney. So right now in the world of cult studies, we are watching the Mormon church go through a pretty major identity change.

The new prophet wants to drop the word Mormon, and he wants it erased from the history of the church. They are Latter-day Saints, and anybody who reminds the world that that is not the case is somebody who's going to be attacked.

And so we're noticing that even the missionaries who grew up saying they were Mormon are now being tasked with behaving like, nope, this is new revelation, I'm supposed to act like that entire chapter of my life doesn't exist, and moving forward, I am now just a Latter-day Saint, Mormon doesn't mean anything to me.

And so in that moment, what the prophet is doing is he's arising cognitive dissonance, which is the state of distress, right? You're being asked to hold two things as true at the same time, your experience that you've grown up your entire life Mormon, and the new thing you're being tasked to do, which is you are not to use that term anymore, you're not to identify as Mormon anymore.

Those are two, they're contradictory. Then there's no why being offered, it's just that new revelation has come down from the prophet, okay? So he's now going to, instead of you sitting there like, oh, wow, that's weird, this feels like 1984, like, I don't, why are we doing this?

Critical reasoning, that's contradictory. Instead of that, he wants to stop that from happening and he wants you to comply. So what he does is he says, I am the prophet, and if you disagree with me, you now risk being cast into outer darkness because that's what our theology teaches.

Outer darkness, there's no way out, you can never inherit when it comes to your, everything you've invested as an individual Mormon all the way up to this point. The whole point is that you get a planet someday and that you get called to be able to produce and produce more iterations of Mormons on your own planet as your own God.

So if you don't comply in this dissonant state with the new narrative, the thing that you risk is that forever you never get to do anything that you've invested your entire life up until this point doing, and your future.

That's too big a risk. So what does your nervous system do in a dissonant state? Well, it's comply, obviously, because even to risk debating this could mean outer darkness. So that massive, the magnitude of God language coming down into the nervous system space of a person forces compliance.

And that's what we're seeing in the new missionaries coming out in the last, say, six months, is this rote compliance.

That's crazy.

I mean, that's crazy in so many ways. It's crazy that they're trying to erase Mormonism, that's crazy how that works. But how do you, like in your counseling, you're a Christian woman and you're counseling people out of this, how do you say Jesus is not that?

How do you instill faith in being like, listen, the whole concept of heaven and hell is not what you experienced before, but there are consequences and there's a lot of crazy things you gotta buy into to become a Christian.

Resurrection is a crazy concept. How do you get people over to that side without kind of doing the same thing?

Yeah, usually. I will point out all of the ways that their leader was contrary to Jesus's behavior.

Got it.

Jesus actually presents as the worst cult leader you could imagine. He's incredibly effective because he's authentic, but he doesn't try to control anybody ever. Like it's always an invitation. It's never a you must or else, right?

It's a come follow me. And then what does he do with it? He lets you then still be you while you're following him. He rejoices in your design. He reminds you of your uniqueness and how you were made, right?

So there's a collaborative emphasis with Jesus that is non-collaborative with cult leaders. And so I try to put their cult leader up, measure them. Usually the people can identify some hypocrisy in the life of their cult leader.

They were just asked to ignore it. And once you're in a safe space where you know you're not going to get clobbered by saying that out loud, that can be a really fun and very therapeutic headspace because they're actually allowed to tell the truth for a minute.

Having to live a lie, having to walk out a manufactured delusion is extremely difficult on a brain. It hurts. So that cognitive dissonance. So to just tell the truth, he has weird hair. Can we just say that out loud?

Is anybody else bothered by the fact that he can't whistle? I'll try to humanize the person a little bit. And usually the relief that pours over a nervous system that's had to not point that out, I'll hear they'll say something like, and he had really bad breath.

Don't tell him I said that. Human things, things that we all observe in other humans. He ate his squash weird.

Like, and then we'll talk about that, right?

So that, and it's in that relief state that then they can start to see themselves and they can start to see, I'm allowed to tell the truth now. And wouldn't you know it, God's not lightning bolting me.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow, is there, I've like, I've spent this last week talking a lot about women in the Bible with the amazing Dr. Lynn Koek. And we talk about the women at the well. And that, and you know, like the whole focus was on women and like how Jesus actually loved women and how he empowered women.

And I bring it up because like, is there a story about Jesus that you use to humanize him? And like, he is not your cult leader because check out this story. Like the woman at the well, like he trusted her theology to become the evangelist in that community.

Like he wasn't shaming her. He was highlighting her role and he was like empowering her. And obviously go listen to the episode because Dr. Lynn Koek talks about a lot better than I do. But is there, like that wouldn't, I don't assume that a cult leader would look at the woman at the well and be like, check her out in a positive light.

So is there a way that Jesus does that you refer your clients to?

Yes, I mean, Jesus behaved in a way that was anti-celebrity the whole time he was on earth prior to the crucifixion. So like, I like to point out that Jesus is regularly telling people not to talk about what they experienced, right?

Like this, you would think like, oh, this is a major miracle.

I love you.

You didn't have to pay anything for this. I took the time to pour into you as an individual, right? And now just like, just enjoy it, right? Please do not go tell everybody that I'm gonna start a podcast because I'm not gonna do, you know what I mean?

Like Jesus wasn't trying to do any of the celebrity things. And then the other cool thing is that he was regularly risking his reputation contrary to celebrity. He was going to places like the Samaritan woman, right?

The woman at the well, like that's already a huge deal. He's risking being looked at by his entire base as now unclean because he's even speaking with her. He's humanizing her. The moment with the woman who touches Jesus's robe and he could feel, he could feel it happened.

He says, why did you do that? Like the fact that he's speaking to her and she says something along the lines of, even the dogs get to feed from the crumbs from the table. And she's referencing Samaritanism being called dogish.

It's horrible. It's a horrible, sad part of church history. And Jesus doesn't refer to her as that. And then invites her that she's welcome to the table.

I mean, that's just

Yeah, calls her daughter.

Have you noticed that cult leaders don't like the most, how do I explain this? The most marginalized people groups, so like handicap, high medical care individuals, people who can't have children, all those, the folks who I would imagine are like the most marginalized people groups, cults, the dangerous cults and the gross cults, they don't like them.

They kick them out. Have you noticed that?

No, I haven't noticed that.

Is it because there's like nothing to gain.

From them?

Correct.

You're only serving. You're only serving.

Wow.

You're only washing feet. Yeah, where is the cult of the homeless addicts?

Right?

Where's the cult of the people who go out and serve the folks who live under the bridge?

Wow.

Do you see what I mean?

Like, because there's so much service and concern and care that needs to go into that dynamic in order to bring about a healthy representation of what healing would look like, that the leadership is having to pour out of themselves and they're not receiving.

It's not reciprocal. Like that's Christ. Christ pours out and it's not reciprocal.

Right. And as you're saying that, I'm thinking like, well, what about, what about, but you're kind of already like correcting me in that because there's this cult, you know, similar. There's a, it's a woman, she has really long hair.

It's really dark. She's got a crazy name, like Onyx or something. I have no idea. I'll send it to you later. But she brings in people and like, again, like makes them talk about their trauma. So you could argue like she predates only on like the mentally unwell.

She predates only on the people that need help, but those people are paying her. You know, those people, if they're not paying for a session, then like they're not affording her services. That's not like she's taking charity work.

Right.

And is she claiming that the power that she's using, right, to bring people in,. A, are they coerced in? Like, is it like more like a forced thing? B, are they paying for something that she's claiming is actually the Holy Spirit?

That's a huge tell that you're in a cult. Somebody who claims by the power of the Holy Spirit, I'm going to X, right, where I'm going to deliver you of a demon. I'm going to heal you of a trauma.