Snapping Out of It

Tiffany Day talks about the constant manipulation she faced over the 50+ years she spent in the Living Word Fellowship. She talks about the early days of the church school, Marilyn’s pre-JRS multilevel marketing business, Rick’s aims to seize control, being threatened with retaliatory rent-hikes if she went on a vacation for her birthday and many great/sad/funny stories. CORRECTION: Mike was wrong about “word salad” being a part of the DSM criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The tactic he described is commonly used by narcissists but not exclusively by narcissists. Also the tactic described is not called “word salad”. That term refers to something totally different. Also Mike has been practicing and is now capable of saying the word “compartmentalization”Send us an email at [email protected]

Sisters Jennifer Eckstrom and Steph (Eckstrom) Hardman talk with Charlie and Mike about growing up in The Living Word Fellowship cult. They discuss the cult's control tactics and emphasis on "submission", the intermittent love-bombing and discarding treatment from the Leaders, an interesting letter the sisters found after their mother's sudden passing, and how everyone was depleted, anxious, and depressed for many years leading up to the Great Implosion...yet despite causing many of these mental health problems in the first place, the leadership's stigmatization of going to therapy led to many of them going agonizingly undiagnosed. The story at the end about their Mom's memorial will make your blood boil. To come on the show or just chat, reach us at [email protected]

Growing up working in the audio and video departments of the Living Word Fellowship Cult, Scott Barker was trained from a young age to go to great lengths to preserve "The Word of God" spoken by the church's leaders. Now that training has come full circle as he, along with fellow cult-buster and previous Snapping Out of it guest Charity Navalesi, use those recordings and literature in their podcast to hold those same leaders accountable for the abuse that lead to the cult's demise. In this conversation with Scott we got to hear about his experience growing up in the cult and how he decided to create podcasts and documentaries to expose the cult he grew up in. Check out their podcast: Oops! I'm In a Cult Podcast | Former Members discuss The Living Word Fellowship and John Robert Stevens | Oops! I'm In a Cult (oopsiminacult.com) Support Thier Podcast here: Support our Podcast | Oops! I'm In a Cult (oopsiminacult.com) Message us at: [email protected]

Tim, Charlie, and Mike talk about growing up in the Living Word Fellowship in Los Angeles and try to make sense of their widely varied experiences despite remaining so close the whole time.

Warning: This episode, while not going into explicit detail, does discuss the sexual abuse of minors. Dawn talks about her memories and the confusing emotions she felt as a young child seeing pastors of her local church being celebrated as they were sent to “do their thing” in new locations. It wasn’t until many years later that memories began resurfacing of the abuse she and others had suffered as small children at the hands of these “shepards”… and the abuse didn’t stop there. Reach us at: [email protected]

Charity Navalesi, host of Oops I’m In a Cult, discusses moving between all the major centers of The Living Word Fellowship, from Shiloh IA, to Los Angeles, to Honolulu, to Brazil looking for acceptance and belonging. Only to find, decades too late, the only place she ever needed to go was outside the barb-wired walls of the cult.

From his background of having been born and raised in the Living Word Fellowship cult, Evin discusses battling with repressed intuition, blunted education, shame around love and sex, as well as the cult's promise of immortality and the crisis of discovering, too late in life, that time is limited. He also shares the some of the great tools he's found for winning those battles, including: therapy, journaling, meditation, psychedelics and more. Leaving the Cult Talk: https://youtu.be/6N2RqHcyvcI Music: https://soundcloud.com/kissiejr The Gram: https://www.instagram.com/kissie.jr/ The Music Video Evin Made That Blew Our Minds As Kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6KvcV9nokw One of Charlie's Favorites: https://youtu.be/jB0GLXiGw6w?si=GXT-IrwXQE20zRv2 One of Mike's Favorites: https://youtu.be/_9FPgm3cQew?si=QRv-bosoW1pNe677

Autumm Bradley shares her experiences as a teacher at The Living Word cult's Los Angeles area school. She describes some of the ways in which she was micromanaged and coercively controlled, not only in her duties as a teacher (where she was harshly reprimanded for offenses like replacing her classroom's waste basket with a cuter one), but even in the most private areas of her personal life.

...wherein Charlie and Mike beseech you, don't be like Jerry Hardcakes Send stories, love-mail, hate-mail, or requests to be a guest to: [email protected]

Charlie and Mike discuss Dr. Steven Hassan's BITE model, a framework to describe specific methods used by cults and authoritarian groups to recruit and maintain control over people. As they go down the list, they get specific about ways each method was used by the cult the grew up in. If you have any additional examples about The Living Word Fellowship or any other group, please email us at [email protected] Learn more about the BITE Model at freedomofmind.com If some of our "walk-talk" lingo made no sense to you, check out this excellent lexicon put together by the "Oops! I'm In a Cult" Podcast https://oopsiminacult.com/blog/loaded-language-thought-reform

Leandra Hays shares her experiences being born into The Living Word Fellowship where overwhelming and unwelcome responsibilities were heaped on her from a bizarrely young age, up through adulthood where she was being groomed to be a part of "Marilyn's Army".

Steven Caples grew up in the Living Word Fellowship Cult and, although he didn't exactly intend to "blow out", he found himself on the outside after having been in an unapproved/"un-submitted" relationship and found himself cut off from the community where he grew up. He talks about trying to find that same sense of community on the outside and trying to learn how to live without the guidance of "shepards".

Jeremiah Gruenberg draws on both his background as an academic, with a Masters in Divinity and a PHD in Theology, and his personal experience in the The Living Word Fellowship to perform a post-mortem on the movement's roots, what went wrong with the movement, and why.

Charlie Hajek Interviews Mike White on his experiences growing up in The Living Word Fellowship in LA and moving to Hawaii to join "The Boney Crew". Mike shares, step by step, the events that made him start to have doubts over the years. He also learns from Charlie during the interview that one of the cult leaders in LA, while posing as friendly, had been publicly dragging Mike's Reputation through the mud in his hometown for years.

Mike Interviews Charlie about his life in The Living Word Cult. Charlie shares some interesting coping mechanisms he developed for getting by in that environment.