Snapping Out of It

Snapping Out of It

By Mike White, Charlie HajekSociety & Culture
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Snapping Out of It episodes

  • Tiffany Day - Snapping Back Into 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]

    2 hr 4 min
  • Steph Hardman and Jennifer Eckstrom - Off Doing Thier Own Thing

    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]

    1 hr 37 min
  • Scott Barker - Still Preserving The Word But For Better Reasons

    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:


    1 hr 43 min
  • Tim Rice - Get Behind Me Satan

    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.

    1 hr 53 min
  • Dawn - A Pervasive Culture of Yuckiness
    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]
    1 hr 24 min
  • Evin Wolverton - 15 Year Slowburn Crisis
    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
    2 hr 6 min
  • Autumm Bradley - "Friendaholic"
    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.
    1 hr 49 min
  • Dr. Steven Hassan's BITE Model
    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
    1 hr 17 min

About Snapping Out of It

From the publisher's feed

Stories from former members of cults or other dogmatic organizations and/or belief systems about what it was like to live that life, what made them finally start to question things, and what it feels…