Children of God, The Army, and Harvard: Systems of Control that Shaped My Life

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[00:00:00]Today for Devotions with Daniella, we're reading from the second book of Daniella, The Culting of America. This is, before we even start, the author's note.

[00:00:09]Content notice. This book explores cults and other high-control environments, including emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical harm they can inflict. If you are a survivor of such an experience, please know that some of this content may be triggering or emotionally activating.

[00:00:25]While this book and its accompanying workbook, Unculture Yourself, draw from research, lived experience, and the insights of others who have walked similar paths, neither is a substitute for professional help. Everyone's healing journey is different, and it's important to have support from professionals trained in the specific dynamics of cultic and high-control trauma.

[00:00:46]If you're seeking guidance, a valuable resource is the International Cultic Studies Association, icsahome.org, which offers information for referrals and referrals for survivors, families, and professionals. Please take care of yourself as you read. Step away when you need to. You are not alone.

[00:01:05]On perspective, privileged privilege, and the limits of experience.

[00:01:10]I am a white woman raised in a global sex cult, trained by the US military, and educated at Harvard.

[00:01:17]These three institutions, despite their differences, share an affinity for hierarchy, myth-making, and charismatic control.

[00:01:24]Each one taught me something about power and the ways people are trained to follow it. That training lives in my body, and it shapes the lens through which I view the world.

[00:01:34]But as much as I've tried to expand my lens, to learn from the stories of others, to challenge the boundaries of what I was taught to see, I know it still has edges. I write this book as a cult survivor, a researcher, and a woman navigating systems that were never built for our full humanity.

[00:01:50]But I also write it from a place of whiteness, of access, of being granted the benefit of the doubt in rooms and systems where others are not.

[00:01:59]Whiteness has been my shield and my sword. It opened doors that never should have been closed to begin with. It softened the edges of my rebellion and made my critiques easier for mainstream America to swallow.

[00:02:10]It also, for a long time, let me believe I was the exception. That I could walk through these systems and stay intact.

[00:02:17]That I could win the game without questioning who the game was built for.

[00:02:21]We also need to state that the field of cult studies itself has long been shaped by white western academics. People who consciously or not framed the definitions and thresholds of extremism through their own cultural lenses.

[00:02:36]That legacy has skewed which groups are studied, which abuses are taken seriously, and which voices get believed.

[00:02:43]It is literally so hard to find a memoir written by a non-white cult survivor.

[00:02:48]And we are still reckoning with the reality that many of the tools used to analyze coercion and control were built inside the same institutions that have exercised it.

[00:02:58]I now know better, and I know that knowing better isn't the same thing as doing better.

[00:03:03]So, while this book examines cults and high-control systems with as much rigor, honesty, and lived experience as I can bring, it is not the final word. It can't be.

[00:03:14]This is not a universal survivor story.

[00:03:17]It is not an exhaustive account of how cults harm people across lines of race, gender, class, ability, or faith.

[00:03:25]The There are stories I cannot tell and patterns I cannot see. Not because they aren't there, but because my perspective is incomplete.

[00:03:33]My co-writer, Amy Reed, also brings her own set of limitations and perspective.

[00:03:38]Different from mine, but present nonetheless.

[00:03:41]As a queer woman and the granddaughter of a Filipino immigrant farmer born to a biracial mother on one side and a white rural working-class lineage on the other, her experience stretches beyond whiteness and heteronormativity in ways mine does not. At the same time, her worldview is shaped by a liberal middle-class upbringing, femme presentation, and often being read as white.

[00:04:04]Together, we've done our best to include a broad range of voices, but we recognize that even our most intentional efforts have boundaries.

[00:04:12]We are deeply grateful to Rebecca Slew, known professionally as White Woman Whisperer. Go follow her.

[00:04:18]For her guidance and for lending her voice to this book with the grace and gravity it calls for. Her words offer more than reflection. They serve as a companion, deepening the conversation around whiteness, complicity, and what it might mean to choose another way forward.

[00:04:33]And while writing this book, we have added another level of perspective, yours.

[00:04:38]So many of you helped me stress test these ideas as I was developing them, offering your personal stories of the cults you survived, and the nuanced systems of behavior control you encountered in families, fandoms, companies, churches, and more.

[00:04:54]You revealed patterns I never could have seen on my own. This book is stronger, more honest, and more expansive because of you. Thank you.

[00:05:03]I hope this book offers language and clarity for those seeking to understand their own group experiences. I hope it disrupts some of our most sacred assumptions. But I also hope it invites you to seek out the voices this book cannot contain, to learn from black, indigenous, disabled, queer, and global survivors whose insights stretch far beyond my own.

[00:05:25]Because if we are going to dismantle the systems that control and divide us, we need all of us, and we need to start by listening.

[00:05:33]Daniella.

[00:05:35]You can get signed copies of The Culting of America attached here, or listen to me read it to you anywhere you get your audiobooks.