Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to One Good Thing Media, your official podcast review channel. We search the vast digital landscape on a daily basis to discover the best shows that podcasters have to offer. Are you ready to discover new favorites to add to your playbook? Stay tuned and listen to host Gerald Spears' latest podcast reviews.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Trigger warning. This episode contains mentions of child abuse and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Hello, lovelies, welcome to One Good Thing Media. For those of you who are new to our show, my name is Gerald Spear and I am the creator and host of our podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:20

This week is the second interview that we've remastered since it first aired in early 2024. We are playing the interview today because we've grown so much since then and most of our followers joined us after this episode had dropped. Honestly, it's an amazing interview filled with information about what it was like for one person to be raised in the Institute of Basic Life Principles, or IBLP, the religious cult that was made famous by the Duggar family as part of their reality TV show 19 and Counting, where they practiced the teachings of this religious cult. I included a trigger warning at the beginning of this show but, just to remind you, this particular interview is not meant for children or anyone who is triggered by the topic of sexual assault. All right, folks, it is showtime.

Speaker 1: 2:52

I am here in the studio with Amanda and Kyle Briggs. They are co-hosts of a podcast called the Cult I Left Behind. Besides sharing information about their podcast, amanda is here today to talk about what it was like growing up in the IBLP. So, amanda, in terms of your family situation, were you born into it or did your parents actually convert after you were born?

Speaker 3: 3:14

Yeah, so my biological parents joined IBLP either before I was born or when I was a very young child. I'm not real clear on the start date, this whole cult experience, but I mean it's tied up in my earliest memories of life and from a young person perspective you think about. Well, what's it like to be in a cult? It's a lot of rules. It's a lot of rules, and the most important thing you could do as a young child in a cult, or a young person in the cult, was instantly obey your authorities with a smile and a cheerful attitude and especially for females, we were very controlled.

Speaker 1: 3:56

I'm curious what was it like when you finally got into your?

Speaker 3: 3:59

teens, there's something called courtship commitments that both males and females had to participate in. In my family we had a ceremony when we turned 15. I had to pledge my virginity to my father, which is really creepy when you look back and think on it. Yeah, so you know. You start to get hips and boobs and grow up a bit.

Speaker 3: 4:26

Yeah, so you start to get hips and boobs and grow up a bit, and the teaching very quickly becomes focused on how anything bad that happens to you is your fault, because you are a temptation and you might cause a man to stumble with your winking eyes Winking eyes, yes and how we might cause men to stumble. So we had to be modest and basically anything that happened to us that was harmful was usually our fault. We'd be blamed for it, and there were young women who would experience a sexual assault, and the leaders in the cult would analyze that young woman's clothing to make sure it was modest and if it wasn't modest enough, then the sexual assault was her fault. So you had a lot to look forward to, you know, hitting puberty in the cult, basically, amanda it's all your fault.

Speaker 1: 5:18

Isn't everything Right off the top of my head. I can honestly say that I don't think that you were meant to be a member in good standing of the IBLP as a woman or as a girl living in the IBLP. If you reported sexual abuse, would it be looked into?

Speaker 3: 5:39

It was just hushed up. What happened with the Duggar family? Was it? For anyone who's watched the docu series on amazon about them, you know it talks about how eventually jim bob took josh the oldest and he had to like confess to a state trooper. That was rare, like the fact that any law enforcement, any disclosure to the authorities occurred generally. It was just hushed up and swept under the rug and we moved on like it never happened.

Speaker 4: 6:07

Yeah, they would try to keep it in the family or within the cult or the church cult. They never reached outside the law enforcement so it was interesting that it was they kept it internal. But once you hear all the stories of how they were running the cult and the oppression that was happening, it's like of course they would have kept that to themselves.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Amanda, were you homeschooled like the Duggar children?

Speaker 3: 6:33

I was, I had to use ATI. So Advanced Training Institute is an arm, or was an arm, of IBLP that produced homeschool curriculum called wisdom booklets. That were a farce. It was supposed to prepare you for a medical degree or to become a lawyer and it was just pseudoscience and a lot of Bible stories taken out of context, usually about how everything was your fault as a woman. And then we used some other curriculum. We used a Becca book, which is very heavily Christian, slanted curriculum, inaccuracies with historical incidents and stuff like that. And then I think we used some Saxon textbooks for math. But I mean it wasn't to get us ready for college, because college is evil and satanic and we weren't Women definitely weren't encouraged to go to college.

Speaker 3: 7:33

No, we were supposed to be keepers at home and make babies and bake bread and take care of the home, and we definitely did not need to be prepared for life beyond that.

Speaker 4: 7:45

I've looked at online and just looked at some of the wisdom booklets and there's like literally pages in there and it's just like you know a drawing or a sketch of like a woman and you know it's got like multiple choice answers of like what's an eye trap on here, like what is wrong with this woman or this girl?

Speaker 1: 8:03

I'm jumping in just to let you know what an eye trap actually is. An eye trap is anything that draws a man's attention away from a woman's face, going way beyond things like plunging necklines or micro mini dresses. Eye traps in the IBLP are things like having see-through lace on the shoulders and the arms of your dress, wearing a long necklace, wearing patterned stockings that draw attention to the legs and even having a V-shaped collar.

Speaker 3: 8:40

That was part of our academic education. I was not taught anatomy and for anyone who listens to our podcast, you'll find out pretty quickly that I did experience sexual assault growing up in that home and the lack of a proper education was definitely a barrier to explaining what had happened to my body and the ways I had been assaulted, because I didn't have a vocabulary for it, we weren't taught that stuff. Nope yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:10

You couldn't protect yourself because you didn't know what you were protecting yourself against. You had absolutely no understanding. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Considering everything that you went through as a child and from the time you took your first breath, you were being indoctrinated into this cult At what point did you say I have to?

Speaker 3: 9:31

leave, and this started before I turned 10. And that didn't go over real well, especially being female and getting in debates over Hebrew and Greek with adult males. Yeah, that was not super fun, so I questioned a lot of it. There was a period of my life where I tried really hard in my teens to just buy in and blend in so I could be part of the family and not be the outcast, and it just didn't work. There were too many logical inconsistencies that I could not live with. So it was a very slow fade for me from about the time I was like nine into my 20s.

Speaker 1: 10:20

So your awareness was self-taught then.

Speaker 3: 10:23

Yes, it just didn't logically make sense.

Speaker 4: 10:26

Interesting thing about Amanda is like she's incredibly smart, but she's a rule follower like to the T, and so you put her and maybe that's from the cult but like, you put her in that situation when there's a million different rules, like she's going to follow all of them, but she's going to be like why this, why that, like this doesn't make any sense. You told me this and then you told me this and they're conflicting Like, and so I could see her in the cult, just like asking a million questions and like challenging everything, while also like simultaneously following.

Speaker 3: 10:59

I'm so glad you like that about me, Kyle, because nobody liked that about me when I was a kid.

Speaker 1: 11:04

At what point did you realize? You know I have to get out of here. This is not making sense and furthermore, they've lied to me.

Speaker 3: 11:18

It was, you know, I think, okay. So eventually I did go to college, realized that having bright eyes and a ministry smile and working at the cult headquarters wasn't really cutting it for young adults to be able to get jobs, particularly the males, because you had to have a job and a way to support a woman before you could court her. It's a whole thing, anyways. So they realized it wasn't working and, as women, I had an older sister. I have an older sister I'm not in touch with her, but she's 10 years older than I am In the cult.

Speaker 3: 11:45

Optimally, you were married by 24. And 24 had come and gone for her and Rick and Chris were like what do we do with her now? Because she is unwed and they decided she needed to have. Well, she started looking into career paths and it was like you need a degree. So she was allowed to go to the Moody Bible Institute, which is a very, very conservative Christian college, and then that opened the door for the rest of us because she's the oldest. So I was given one option for college and it was the Moody Bible Institute and I studied theology there, as one does at a Bible college, and In her next comment, Amanda talks about Bill Gothard.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Bill Gothard was the founder and leader of the IBLP. He was ultimately disgraced and dethroned because of multiple sexual abuse allegations.

Speaker 3: 12:42

The impetus for me really finally walking away from the cult fully, I think. Well, I was in the library because I'm basically Hermione and I was researching something in Hebrew and Greek and I realized that this one verse that Bill Gothard used that had hung over my head my whole life. He had mistranslated it. It did not mean what he thought at all or what he said, what he told us. It meant. It didn't mean that at all. And then I started researching more and more and more of the Bible verses that Bill Gothard cherry picked in IBLP to force his ideology down all of our throats. And again and again it was like nope, that's not what it means in context. That's not what it means in context. That's not what it means in context.

Speaker 3: 13:25

And I had an existential crisis in the library. I didn't know what to do. I felt like my whole world was falling apart, but also like I was free at the same time. And I looked over and there was a young woman that I kind of sort of knew just a tiny little bit, like we weren't close friends but we'd been in some classes together and I walked up to her and I think I said something like hi, I know, we don't know each other really well, but my whole world just fell apart. But I'm also like really excited because I just figured everything out and I just needed to tell someone and she looked at me and she was like OK, amanda, and I walked out of the library a different person I had known my whole life. Something was wrong, that there were logical inconsistencies, that things just did not add up, that I was always creeped out by Bill. His teachings never really fully made sense to me, it just didn't feel right.

Speaker 3: 14:16

No, it didn't, and it didn't logic right. And that day in the library, I think I was like a junior in college when it all finally like oh, this is why it's wrong. Because it's wrong.

Speaker 1: 14:30

When you finally left the cult, how did you handle it?

Speaker 3: 14:33

It was slow. I mean, I had already started to back away from my biological family. They hated the fact that as an adult, as a young adult in college, I started getting help for the sexual assault, that I started going to counseling and just basically I was speaking about it how dare I? And they were very harmful in their responses to that. So I had just slowly been stepping back from them for years and you know, it showed up in small ways, Like I'd wear a strapless dress to an event like a wedding, a family wedding.

Speaker 4: 15:13

How dare I?

Speaker 3: 15:14

Amanda's evil now. Or a Thanksgiving with the relatives who were not cold. It was just my immediate family that was in the cold. My relatives and extended family were not. I would have a glass of wine, definitely demon possessed and going to hell.

Speaker 4: 15:29

So I think they just kind of saw it in my life choices as I aged, I think getting out of the house when she moved off to college was, I mean, as most people do. You learn a lot and you find out a lot about yourself when you move away to college and she wasn't living at home.

Speaker 1: 15:46

The distance was good. That was their mistake.

Speaker 4: 15:49

Yeah, pretty much. That's how I see it. They'd agree with you. They let her out of the house and the rest is history.

Speaker 1: 15:55

Look what happened when you were younger. Were you isolated enough that you sort of looked at the outside world as something foreign?

Speaker 3: 16:04

Yes and no, yes and no. We had pretty unlimited access to our cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and they were very normal. My cousins played with plastic dinosaurs and the cult taught that dinosaurs weren't real. So we would get into these debates. We were five, so there was a lot that I heard of through my relatives, but there's a lot of stuff I still like Pop culture from the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s.

Speaker 3: 16:47

I'm hopeless, it's fine, I just own it, I roll with it and accept it. Obviously, I knew nothing about sex other than sexual assault. I knew nothing about what healthy relationships look like or partying. Oh gosh, yeah, I tried alcohol for the first time when I was 23. Oh gosh, yeah, I tried alcohol for the first time when I was 23. Wait, no, for my bachelorette, my girlfriends took me to a club because I'd never been to a club. I was what? 33? So, yeah, there was everyday life stuff that people do in college as young adults that I never experienced, and it's okay.

Speaker 3: 17:26

I've seen a lot of people make really extreme choices to go back and reclaim that time and I just accept that. My life trajectory, it is what it is and the things that really matter to me. I circle back and go do. But the rest of it, yeah, I was isolated and I just accept that that's how it went down. And Kyle explains stuff to me as we go and I'm like what is that movie, what is that song? Who is that rapper? You didn't have a television in your home. Well, we could only watch parts of that. If there were any scantily clad women, we had to turn it off. We could watch approved portions of the Olympics, where there were no scantily clad women. We could watch stuff to do with presidential elections, but no, we didn't just watch TV and the movies we watched were heavily monitored, heavily.

Speaker 4: 18:26

Yeah, they would make them look away at certain If someone kissed In a 1940s movie.

Speaker 3: 18:31

If someone kissed, we had the eyes down because impurity.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Kyle, you must have had to share a lot of information with Amanda and probably still do.

Speaker 4: 18:50

I try not to do it too much but for not having experienced all that stuff and not grown up watching classics, she still will. Every now and then we'll throw one in or she'll. I'll just watch an old movie that everybody knows and she's never seen before. But I don't try to like, oh you haven't seen this and this and this and this and this, and binge watch 90 movies. I get to point out the good ones that were worth going back and watching.

Speaker 3: 19:14

Oh fun, you show me an old movie. I'm like well, there's Rampant Racism. Look at the inherent misogyny that was in there. From when I was a child. Yeah, that was still. That still permeated Hollywood.

Speaker 1: 19:27

Okay, let's talk about your podcast. As I mentioned at the beginning of our interview, Amanda and Kyle co host a remarkable podcast called the Cult I Left Behind. I have to admit, I couldn't help myself. I binge watched all the episodes that were available up to the point when we started our interview, and now I'm finding myself going back like every two or three days. Oh God, have they dropped another podcast episode? Have they dropped another one? I'm obsessed. Oh wow, we're honored. Let's talk about how it got started. What was the epiphany that you decided? I think I'm going to turn my life experience of living in a cult, start a podcast, like most people think, and that was years ago.

Speaker 4: 20:31

We're just thinking, oh, it'd be cool to do a podcast. But, like, what do we do? And Amanda works, you know, professionally now she does a lot of work talking around sexual assault, sexual harassment, domestic violence, all that kind of stuff, and obviously that was a big part of growing up in the cult. Those things existed. And I think we were just driving home one day and I was like why don't we just talk about the cult? Everybody loves cults. Your story is horribly messed up, but I wouldn't have recommended that if that was still very traumatic for her or she hadn't like spent the time to like process all that. But professionally, like she can, she goes out and she talks about really difficult things, um, and so I I brought it up and I think I think I brought it up.

Speaker 3: 21:20

I think we were. We were out to dinner, it was over pizza, and I think I was joking. I think I said, well, I could just tell all my cult stories and I was kind of kidding and you were like oh, and then I was like, oh, no, what did I just get myself into?

Speaker 1: 21:36

Has it been a cathartic experience for you?

Speaker 3: 21:39

You know people ask me that I I get asked a lot like is this hard for you to do or does it feel good for you to do? Yeah, I think it's very educational for me. Regarding myself, there are certain parts of my story where, you know, it's a very neutral emotional experience for me, like talking about all the sexual assault and the harm that I grew up in. I do speak about that professionally. I own a business where I'm a consultant around sexual assault and suicide prevention and a bunch of other stuff, and so I'm very accustomed to sharing those things. Now in the podcast we go into a lot more detail than I share during a keynote or during a workshop and I cuss a lot on the podcast, which I definitely don't do professionally, but I would say those are very emotionally neutral to positive experiences for me harmful marriage and cult ideology and how that shaped it.

Speaker 3: 22:43

I think that one was harder and we've talked about I don't remember which episode at the moment, but there have been times where we've ended recording and I go huh, I know what I'm talking about in therapy next week Because I can tell it brought some stuff up for me and I wouldn't keep doing this if it was harmful to my mental health, but I learn a lot about where I am. So I mean, I really enjoy it. I really enjoy it and if you know, if I'm not ready to talk about something, we don't talk about it on the podcast. So if I'm talking about it, I feel like I can handle it yeah, sometimes we'll shuffle topics around like we've got a list of like.

Speaker 4: 23:29

Here's all the things we're going to do for the next three months or whatever, um, and so we do prioritize some of those topics just based on how emotionally draining it might be to talk about.

Speaker 1: 23:41

From the outside, looking in, I really see you two as a power couple. You work together seamlessly and together bring two different perspectives oftentimes to your podcast. Bring two different perspectives oftentimes to your podcast. I think people are going to discover a lot about cults, about sexual abuse and, honestly, what constitutes a healthy relationship.

Speaker 3: 24:02

I think we do. I think we do. I am the boring logic let's go to the library and research stuff. But I also think I'm absolutely hilarious and Kyle's like actually funny. I mean, he's from Oklahoma. He's a salt of the earth kind of guy. Everyone loves him. My parents, my adoptive parents, like him more than me. Now it's fine, I've accepted it, but he's just great at bringing levity and great at comforting me behind the scenes and holding my hand when we talk about hard stuff.

Speaker 1: 24:40

I know listeners can't see it. Before we sign off, I would love for you to share about the special room that you make available in your home for people who need shelter, understanding and, I think, above all else, a safe place.

Speaker 3: 24:50

Oh yeah, the guest room, the safe space. So we talk about this in one of our episodes, but something that's very, very important to me is having a safe space in my home for people who need it. I am insistent that my home is a safe space. I kind of got the idea in late high school, early college. I was a choir nerd.

Speaker 3: 25:11

We traveled all the time, and late high school, early college, I was a choir nerd.

Speaker 3: 25:15

We traveled all the time and we would stay in host homes and it was usually folks who, a lot of the times it was folks who were retired who would open their homes up to us and I just I felt so safe in those spaces.

Speaker 3: 25:29

They had the big fluffy pillows and the big fluffy towels and good food and they were so sweet and attentive to us and anything you need, you're just here to rest, and I was like I didn't see that modeled growing up. That was definitely not part of the cult. Plus, no one had a spare room because they had 85 kids. But that was something I just loved experiencing and it was so helpful and healing for me when I got to be in those safe spaces and I decided someday I was going to do that in my home. So we have a room like that with fluffy pillows and it's beautifully decorated and the guest bathroom has all the fluffy towels, and we just try to make our home somewhere that when people come into it they know that this is a place they can let down their guard and they can talk about things that might be hard to talk about in other environments and they know they're going to be loved and cared about and heard and seen and not judged.

Speaker 1: 26:29

Have you ever invited a cult member into your home who was seriously thinking about leaving their situation?

Speaker 3: 26:36

You know, I have never specifically had someone leaving the cult and that's largely because I moved away from everyone I knew in the cult and then I only started talking about growing up in a cult somewhat recently. It's not even something I talk about in my professional capacity at this time, mostly because it's just never been relevant. I don't hide it. It's just never been relevant. So I've never gotten up and done a keynote about cults but I think I'm open to now. But yeah, I've just never been geographically co-located with someone who needed that kind of space. Now they have never needed to stay with me, but I've definitely. I hope the feedback is that they felt loved. I've had people leaving other cults. Just, you know, come over and have coffee and talk and process through the weirdness and hang out and that's really meaningful.

Speaker 1: 27:38

Speaking about the IBLP. If they ever reach out to you, I want to hear about it.

Speaker 3: 27:44

If they ever send us anything, don't worry, we will blast it all over our platforms.

Speaker 2: 27:50

I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting for it.

Speaker 3: 27:51

I have a business lawyer for the company I own. I probably need to just brief him on all of this.

Speaker 1: 27:58

Eventually, Amanda and Kyle. It has been an absolute blast spending time with both of you. I know that we will have a future conversation about your progress. I really believe that your podcast is going to blow up and you are going to enjoy extreme success.

Speaker 4: 28:22

Thanks for having us on. We appreciate it. You're the first podcast we've been on as a guest, so thank you for reaching out. I know we connected over Facebook, so, yeah, thanks for reaching out and inviting us on.

Speaker 1: 28:38

As you're listening to this podcast, I encourage you to check out the show notes, because I have many links that you can click to learn more about Kyle and Amanda. Amanda, let's close our podcast interview with a piece of advice that you like to give to your listeners.

Speaker 3: 28:58

I tell everyone don't join a cult.

Speaker 1: 29:02

I love that and I promise you, Kyle and Amanda, I will not join a cult and besides, they probably wouldn't have me. I would probably have one of those one hour turnarounds in the door and kicked out. That's a wrap for this week. If you haven't done so yet, please give us a follow and make sure that you hit the notification button so you'll know when we drop our next episode. We'll be returning with our regular programming next week. Until then, always remember you know we love you. We'll see you soon.

Speaker 2: 29:51

One Good Thing Media is brought to you by our host and creator, Gerald Spear. All things technical are by David Dodd and our announcer is Robert Spear. Our theme song is Force by HGST. Thank you,