The One Who Was Excommunicated - Part One

00:18 - Sam (Host)

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work the Gundagara land and people. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I also want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you, our listeners, are joining us from today. I recognise the deep connection that First Nations people have to this land, their enduring culture and their commitment to the preservation and care for their country. This land was never ceded and it always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Hey there, and welcome to Beyond the Surface, the podcast where we explore the stories of people who have survived religious trauma, left high control or cult communities and are deconstructing their faith. I'm your host, Sam, and each week I'll talk with individuals who have taken the brave step to start shifting their beliefs that might have once controlled and defined their lives. Join us as we dig into their experiences, the challenges they've faced and the insights they've gained. Whether you're on a similar journey or you're just curious about these powerful stories, you're in the right place. This is Beyond the Surface. Hey, listeners, Sam here, Just a quick note about today's episode.

01:44

Craig's story is one of many layers, and so after the recording, I asked him if he would be up for a second episode, and he kindly agreed. So, if you like, I did get to the end of the episode feeling like it was just a little bit rushed and left with even more questions about where his story went next. Never fear, Be sure to come back next week for part two. Until then, enjoy part one. Welcome, Craig. Thanks for joining me.

02:14 - Craig (Guest)

Thank you, good to be here.

02:17 - Sam (Host)

I'm really excited about this episode. I will admit that I am currently halfway through your book at the moment and I have been on an absolute rollercoaster of emotions throughout so far, and there is a little part of me that was like oh, I really wanted to like reschedule this recording because I'm going to get spoilers, but it will just mean that I'm going into the second half of the book with advanced knowledge. But I really love the blend of your experience but also the historical experience of your family. I think it's a take that a lot of memoirs have not done and I think it's really, really cool thank you.

03:05 - Craig (Guest)

Um, that was a really important point for me, I think, when Harper Collins first approached me about writing a book, um, I said no in the beginning because I didn't think that telling one person's story captured the full impact of a multi-generational situation.

03:23

Um, and I think there are situations, um, I suppose like your situation, where, um, the the impact of a religious group is contained to a single generation, whereas in my case I was born into the exclusive between my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, that have been going on for 200 years, and that that intergenerational trauma is something that I thought was really important to capture. Yeah, and I said to the HarperCollins reps I was talking to, I said, but telling my story alone doesn't capture that impact, because I'm just a result of what happened to my parents and they were a result of what happened to their parents and so on, and I was really lucky as well that my family had kept such good records over 200 years and that they'd had such strong opinions and different generations leaving and rejoining, and I think for me it just painted a picture of how complicated association with some of these groups can be.

04:32 - Sam (Host)

I think, yeah, one of the biggest things that I I took away from the, the parts that I have read so far, is, um, just how like baked into the system it is and like, even just um, like going against what, uh, you know, not being able to go to weddings that you would want to go to, and and things like like it is just so baked into the system. Um, okay, so the question that I generally start with is going to feel a little bit loaded, considering, you know, we talk about the like you've talked about the historical context, but generally I start with where does your story start? So you can start that wherever you feel led to start that, but, yeah, where does your story start?

05:27 - Craig (Guest)

Well, there are several ways of answering that question. In the context of the book, I suppose I start the story 200 years ago with my great, great, great great grandparents, but I think that's probably an impossibly large starting point for a conversation like this. So I think for me personally, my story would start around the age of five, I think, when I started at school and growing up in the exclusive brethren, we had no contact, no social contact, with the outside world, and so that meant that my entire life, up until the age of five, was in a community that I thought was normal. So all my friends, all my cousins, my family were in the exclusive brethren and the only people that we talked to were other brethren and we went to church. They had church every day of the week and four times on sunday, um, so it was a very tight-knit sort of very close community, and I knew that there were people out there that weren't brethren that we called worldlies, um, but my baseline was that we were the normal ones and the worldlies were the outliers.

06:50

And then I started school at five and, um, there was just me and one other exclusive brethren kid in the class my cousin and I realized at that point and it was like quite a shock that actually most people in the world were not brethren and that we were the odd ones out. And suddenly I was the strange one and there were all these kids living their lives and I wasn't allowed to have lunch with them and wasn't allowed to go home with them, and I wasn't allowed to accept invitations to birthday parties, all those sorts of things, um, and we were very much, um, marked as being different from the other kids which we knew and they knew, and so I think that sort of very early awareness that we were different was, I think, where my story would start.

07:51 - Sam (Host)

I found it really interesting when you started talking about school in the book, because I think most people naturally think that exclusive brethrens have always had their own schools, because I feel like it's been for so long but you didn't start schooling in that space and so do you look back at that going. I'm really grateful that you were able to. I guess you know experience mainstream secular school.

08:27 - Craig (Guest)

Rubbing shoulders with the world. The brethren called it. Yes, I was lucky. So the brethren started their own schools, started in Sydney in the 90s and sort of spread out from there. And I was. I had the first eight years of my education in the public system and by the time I started high school the brethren were pulling their kids out and putting them through correspondence. So there was a period of about 10 years where brethren kids were doing their entire high school through the correspondence learning system and then they organized and started their own schools and so I did a year of correspondence in my first year of high school and then a year of sort of mixed correspondence and teacher learning and then they were fully into the brethren's schooling by the time I was in year 11.

09:23

But, I was very lucky to have that experience.

09:27

Talking to or having teachers and, more importantly, classmates who weren't from the brethren, I learned a huge amount about how the world operated.

09:37

Um, it was a very um difficult experience because you're constantly the other, you're constantly the weird religious kids, um, and so when you're in that system you just want to be out of it and because you know, um how unusual, how sort of bizarre you are to everyone else, and so, in a way it was, it was a relief to leave the public education system, but looking back, I can see what a huge benefit it was. And same thing when I went to work in the family business which was a tire shop, um, a retail tire shop um, which involved a lot of contact with non-church people. And, yeah, my family subsequently got rid of the business because retail was frowned upon by the exclusive brethren for the very reason that it involved a lot of contact with outsiders yeah um, and so I think those two things having eight years in the public education system and then working in a retail environment exposed me to a lot more worldly contact.

10:46

Yeah, and then what kids would now have in the brethren? And so that was an advantage for me yeah.

10:55 - Sam (Host)

I I'm wondering whether I mean I obviously know a little bit about the exclusive brethrenthren for two reasons obviously, from a professional stance in terms of working in this space, but the church that I used to call home was considered an open Brethren church and so I knew, because they were considered to be I mean, we were supposed to be the more progressive, the more open, the more you know, enlightened of the Brethren. I would probably counter that with a lot of information, but I'm wondering whether, for people who are unfamiliar with the exclusive brethren and kind of only know them based on the fact that generally they're fairly easy to spot in your town, they tend to have a similar aesthetic. But I'm wondering whether you can speak to a little bit of like, what sort of messages did you grow up around? Like, what were the beliefs that you grew up with about yourself, about the world, about god? What was that like?

12:15 - Craig (Guest)

so the brethren were, um, very conservative christians. They've shifted over the years and this is the brethren have no, the exclusive brethren have no official rule book, no official doctrine, and so their doctrine evolves and changes constantly. They have one world leader who they now refer to as the man of God, and basically everything the man of God says is considered equal to the word of God, and so it very much depends on what the current man of God says is considered equal to the word of God, and so it very much depends on what the current man of God is saying. But generally speaking, they're socially isolated. They don't have TV, they don't have radio, they believe in the rapture, they believe in the second coming, they believe that they are in the world, but not of the world, and a lot of these sorts of things.

13:08

e religious groups was around: 1960

14:03

And so everybody who was in the sand and said you're either in or you're out, and so everybody who was in the exclusive brethren at that point had to cut off everyone in their lives who wasn't, and so there was this huge cleaving of families and communities. Um, and since then that has been the bedrock of what the exclusive brethren believe. So they have a very regimented separation from the outside world. So you wouldn't have a cup of tea with your neighbour, you wouldn't socialise with people at work or on the street, and anyone who is excommunicated from the exclusive brethren is cut off from the entire community. So that means that your friends and your family stop talking to you. You're not welcome at church services, you're not allowed in their houses, they won't eat or drink with you. Most of the time they won't even acknowledge you. So you could be walking down the street and people that you've known your whole life would cross the street to avoid making contact with you.

15:08

And once you're excommunicated, basically they remove all trace that you ever existed. So pictures come down off the walls and in the official church records. They have photo books with all the members and underneath each family photo it says who the kids are and if there are any married kids, who they're married to and where. So in all of those records, anyone who's excommunicated is just um expunged, and so my grandma, for instance, my, my dad's mother, had six children, but two of them were excommunicated. When I was growing up and so, and all of the official church records that you looked at, she was shown as only having four children, and unless you knew a family, and unless you listened to conversations that were happening sort of quietly behind closed doors, you'd have no idea that there were another two children in that family.

16:06 - Sam (Host)

So that is probably the most extreme and defining feature of the exclusive written yeah, I often, when I'm sort of trying to describe what excommunication is like to people who perhaps have no idea, I often describe it as it's considered worse than death, right? Uh, like it would be more favorable for for them to physically die than to leave the fault, so to speak.

16:38 - Craig (Guest)

right absolutely, and they're quite explicit about that. So I was. I remember being at church meetings with Bruce Hales, who's their current man of God, and he said you know better to die than to go on sinning yeah and there's, there's very much that attitude.

16:57 - Sam (Host)

So for them to go out into the world as they see it and to forsake the position and so on, that is, in their eyes, a fate worse than death yeah, I'm curious what and I ask this question of most of my guests and it always tends to take people back but, um, I'm curious what it was like for you in a very rigid, conservative and fundamental belief system, what that was like for your personal relationship with God.

17:34 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, that's an interesting question. What I suppose? When I was a child, there was no questioning of what God meant, because it was so clearly defined for us who and what God was. And when I say God, the, the mind's eye, um idea of God that the brethren had was an old white man who was all seeing and all knowing, um, and who loved you but at the same time would throw you into hell fraternity if you didn't follow the rules. Um, looking back, um, it was terrifying, yeah, and we, you know, I remember.

18:25

The interesting thing for me is that I was never I was always more afraid of the brethren than I was of God, and I was fairly confident that if push came to shove, I could bargain with God or rationalize with God.

18:44

But I hadn't. I was much more afraid of what the priests would do and in that sense I suppose they were the acting as the arbiters of what God wanted. And when there's another, when there's a third wheel in your relationship with God, you know all bets are off. Yeah, and people would be put in the situation of you know that that's sinned, and they would be trying to put it right and come back to the assembly and so on and the priests would say, oh well, the assembly can't forgive you until God's forgiven you and we don't think God's forgiven you yet, and when you have other people passing, what God wants, you know, that's much more of a threat than you being able to go and talk to God directly.

19:41

But I think the other thing that went hand in hand with the idea of God for us was that we believed that the rapture was going to come, and, like a lot of other similar groups of brethren, you know, we know not the day nor the hour, and so it could come at any moment. And I remember having these nightmares as a kid that the rapture had come and that all of my friends and family were floating off up to heaven and I was stuck on earth like trying to jump off the ground so that I would go up to heaven with everyone else and I couldn't and I'd just be stuck.

20:16

Yeah, and it's a terrifying thing when you believe that at any point everyone could vanish and you hope you'll vanish with them, but you're not quite sure. Yeah, and what if you get left behind? And what if you're not good enough? And I think so. There was that existential fear that you lived with, but then, at the same time, there was a fear that also, at any moment, anyone you loved could be excommunicated from the church, and I'd seen this happen through my family, like both of my grandfathers were excommunicated and a number of uncles and aunts and other relatives, and so you became very accustomed not just to the idea that people could disappear to heaven, but also that they could disappear on earth as well. Yeah, and that when they disappeared, you immediately stopped talking about them, at least in public.

21:14 - Sam (Host)

Yeah, now I want to ask this question, even though I don't actually know how this part of the story pans out, but I'm curious around. You know there's a part in your book where you talk about a period of time when mum was quite ill and dad was going through a lot of mental health challenges that you know, I guess from a therapist, looking in looks like major depression and scrupulosity and you know all of those things. But you know what was it like for you as a teenager to have to be the man of the house and to not be able to have any feelings about what is happening in your own home.

22:01 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, so I think one of the biggest challenges in the brethren was that there was no ability to properly process pain or suffering, and they believed that pain and suffering were part of what brought you closer to God.

22:18

And so there was no. When you were going through these and and everybody was going through this trauma, like everybody had lost people, everybody was living with this tremendous grief and pain, and there was no acknowledgement of the root cause of that suffering, which was excommunication and the doctrine of separation and so on, and so my dad spent years believing that the reason that he felt like shit was because he wasn't close enough to god. Yeah, and it's easy enough now to look back and say, well, these terrible things had happened and you lost your dad and you lost your grandparents, and you lost several of your siblings and all these like terrible traumas that happened that were never addressed and never processed, and there was no um, no ability to get professional help for things like this, and so you were left to just sort of exist in misery and, if anything, that pain that you were experiencing became a badge of honor. Yeah, and like, it's not just the brethren that say this, like, but they said it, that whole thing of god only gives you so much as you can handle.

23:36 - Sam (Host)

So therefore, if you've got this mountain of shit piling up on top of you, it means that god believes that you're strong enough, which is like a really messed up way of completely sidestepping any ability to address where it's coming from and whether it is okay, which it clearly isn't absolutely, and I think that goes hand in hand with um you know the really, really awful notion that suffering is godly and that somehow, you know, not only should I be able to handle it myself, but I should be grateful that you know God is testing me and giving me this, but also you know the saying that you know God helps those who help themselves, right.

24:24

So, like you know, you're supposed you're supposed to be able to do it on your own because, like you said, um, god will never give you anything that you can't handle. And so it's just this vicious cycle where you are just stuck in a hamster wheel of suffering and you don't know that you can get off it, and you don't even know that you should be even thinking about trying to get off it no, exactly, and I saw I wrote about this in the book.

24:52 - Craig (Guest)

My great-grandfather was dying of cancer in his 40s and um, and the doctors had told him that, you know, he'd been through years of treatment and they'd finally reached a point where there was no more treatment and he was going to die and the doctors told him to go home and make his peace, and and he refused to accept that and he was convinced that god was going to heal him.

25:17

And but he had these. He had all his medications, you things to help you sleep, and pain relief, and so on. And then he decided and this is a very breather in mindset, decided that taking all of those medications was proof, you know, was proof that he didn't believe in God's power to cure him, and so he tipped all his medicine down the drain. He tipped all his medicine down the drain and so, like, wracked with pain, not being able to sleep, as his body's dying, and he's also, at this point, embarking on a 40-day fast to show his faith in gods um, I think he tipped his medicines out on day 12 of the 40-day fast, as he's dying of cancer, and so you just imagine him. He's like, dying of cancer and starving to death, with no pain relief and no sleep medication, and he's busy writing in his diary about how pain is purifying.

26:16

Um, and it's, it's not purifying at all, it's just dreadful yeah but these, you know, the brethren and groups like them, have sort of painted pain and suffering into this sort of exalted corner where it's something that you should be seeking, and I think it's. Yeah, you know, it's tragic that my great-grandpa died like that and like agony, thinking it was what God wanted, and the same thing for my dad, decades later, to go through this situation where he believed that the suffering that he was going through was somehow a moral failing rather than a pretty expectable result to the trauma that he'd experienced. Um, and the breathing were very, in a way, they they never didn't really deny how bad life could be, but they believed that the suffering that you were experiencing now was sort of the investment that you made for your eternal reward yeah, and so it's the price we pay.

27:26

Yeah, if you ever put that argument forward. Well, our lives are demonstrably shit and there are people out there who are living much better lives than us. They would say oh yes, but what's their eternal? Path. And you end up back in that place. You know, I forget what the saying is.

27:45 - Sam (Host)

Now, that's good um, you know, but wide the road never the path.

27:52 - Craig (Guest)

Yes, we all know that one it's funny.

27:55 - Sam (Host)

I, um, I often celebrate with my clients when they forget, you know, bible verses or song lyrics and things that just used to be second nature. But I had a moment about a week ago where I forgot a song lyric and I was like, no, that's so annoying. I find that so annoying because it was like so baked into, like my identity, but it is. Yeah, there is a relieving aspect for a lot of people when they don't remember those things. I guess I wanted to wait a little bit to ask this question because I wanted, particularly for people who didn't really know a lot about the environment of the Exclusive Brethren, to paint a bit of a picture of the environment that you were being raised in. Um, so what was it like for you to start realizing like, hey, I'm not attracted to girls the way that all of my friends and cousins and, you know, everybody else's- so that was a gradual process.

29:07 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, I think I always knew that I was different, from a very young age, um, but the question is being able to put your finger on how or why. Yeah, um, and I knew, when I went through puberty and the other boys started talking about girls, that I was not interested in girls, that the way they, the way they were, um, I knew that, but what that meant I wasn't sure. Yeah, um, and there was no.

29:39

The brethren were so isolated from the normal social experience that I had no concept of what gay meant or that same-sex attraction might even be a thing yeah um, and ironically, my first awareness of um gayness in the gay community was when the brethren campaigned very strongly against the civil union bill which went through in New Zealand.

30:12

I would have been roughly 13, so between 12 and 14, and the brethren came out really strongly against the civil union bill which was going through in New Zealand at the time, holding prayer meetings to pray against it and submitting to Parliament and talking about how evil these same-sex couples were. And it was a very toxic environment in which to learn that there were these labels that applied to same-sex relationships, um, but that they were very bad, probably the worst that you could be. And then that next sort of realization of horror, I suppose well, maybe this is a label that applies to me, and so to to find something that describes who you are, at the same time as realizing that that label is the worst possible thing you could be, um, is not a healthy environment in which to start realizing your identity.

31:27 - Sam (Host)

It's not the greatest environment for exploration. No.

31:32 - Craig (Guest)

And your first reaction is just to like completely suppress it.

31:36 - Sam (Host)

Shove it down.

31:37

Yeah absolutely, I mean. But also you know you're young and what else are you going to do? Right, because you know it is, it's the you know, age-old irony of you know, there not being a hierarchy of sin, quote-unquote. But there absolutely is a hierarchy of sin and like homosexuality is like really rampant right at the top and um. And so you know, when you have, like you sort of enter through the gates with like extreme cognitive dissonance, what else are you going to do but suppress and shove it down because there wouldn't have been the ability to even, wouldn't have been the ability to even hold opposing things and go like, well, what do I think like, what do I believe, what you know, that's just not there at like 13 and 14.

32:35 - Craig (Guest)

Oh, totally. And the thing is like you don't even you haven't even fully formed your own realizations and thoughts, let alone being at a place where you would share them with other people yeah um, so you spend, you spend quite a lot of time at least, either going like am I gay?

32:59

what? What does that even mean, um, and how can you say that you're gay when you've never had any sexual experience? How can you, like you're completely cut off in the bedroom, you're cut off from you know, as a teenager, in the bedroom, you're certainly not having sex, there's no exposure to internet or porn. Or, you know, there's no physical contact, no kissing, not allowed to be alone with people. You know other young people from the opposite sex, and there's a huge risk that goes with any kind of sexual physical contact or experimentation with anyone of the same sex.

33:47

Yeah, um, because the risk in a, in an environment like the exclusive bedroom, was that, um, firstly, if you found someone to experiment with, um, you had to be pretty sure that they were going down the same track as you before you showed your hand. And secondly, you ran a huge risk if it was someone else in the church, that they would be overcome by guilt and confess to the priests and turn you in. Yeah, um, and so there was a huge amount of fear in an environment like that and when all of the avenues for sort of exploring who you were and trying to figure it out work. You know, when all those avenues are cut off, sort of, the only option left is to kind of sit there alone with your thoughts and try and figure it out yeah, which of course you can't really.

34:42

It's been years yeah, yeah.

34:45 - Sam (Host)

What was it like internally? Because I mean, I know from myself and from talking to a lot of other people that, um, the, the self-inflicted, um suppression and internalized homophobia, and you know, all of that was just as much self-inflicted as it was externally inflicted by the people around you. So what was it like in your own head during that time going? What the fuck is all of this?

35:16 - Craig (Guest)

well, in the beginning I didn't spend a huge deal of time on it because there were so many other crises happening in my life. So dad was severely depressed and mum nearly died.

35:30

She had um surgery that went wrong, um, and so there was these huge pressures bearing down on our family, and for a couple of years my immediate focus was on survival, not like sort of. I suppose ruminating on my inner identity was a luxury that I didn't have. Yeah, and so that was, um, I suppose all these other pressures for me were a coping mechanism of just pushing it to one side. Um, it wasn't, excuse me, um, it wasn't in the top three things that I was most concerned about. So, um, and really it wasn't until some of those other pressures started easing and our family got back on a bit more of a stable footing.

36:27

That, um, it came back to the forefront for me, um, by which point I'd had a few years to sort of ruminate on it, and um realized that things weren't getting better and they weren't changing and that sooner or later, this was going to be something that was going to be a problem. So I suppose there's I mean there's different stages to it, and I suppose everyone goes through these stages. One is realizing realizing that you're different but not being able to define it, and the next is, um finding the language to explain why you might be different, and then there's sort of rejection and bargaining and acceptance, and that's before. You then go through all those stages again with telling other people.

37:20 - Sam (Host)

Yeah and and so I, like I obviously know that, uh, someone did come into the story in terms of, like, you did tell somebody about this, and so what was that experience like for you to have to say that or write that to somebody else?

37:41 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, so I finally came out when I was 18. Prior to that, I had confessed to a sexual encounter, but I didn't go as far as saying that I was gay. Yeah. Because that, to me, was sort of a line that couldn't be uncrossed.

38:01 - Sam (Host)

Before that it was just like a experimental mistake.

38:05 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, yes, and the brethren had this system of confession, um, as for a lot of churches had this um, a lot of people would associate the catholics with confession, but the brethren um had this belief that you needed to get clear of your sins, which meant confessing them to priests, and so, as young people, you were really encouraged to go through and think of every sin or misdeed that you'd committed, or even the evil thoughts that you'd had, and confess, confess, confess, confess, bring them all out to the priests, confess, confess, confess, bring them all out to the priests, and if they were bad enough, the priests would bring them to the attention of the whole assembly, at which point they would have a discussion about where the excommunication proceedings needed to begin. I was lucky that for me, this happened in a relatively liberal age, in the brethren um, where, um, things were tending not to go to the whole assembly. There was a day of grace, as they called it, and so, typically, things that were confessed to the priest were just, um, they called it covered, covered by the priests, privately, whereas in previous generations your confessions would be made publicly. You know, back in the 60s, even the 70s, they would have church meetings that went until midnight as members confessed sort of every last little sin that they'd committed, including their sexual activity, and sort of every last detail of the sexual activity would be drawn out in these public confessions in front of hundreds of people, including children. Yeah, and I was very, very lucky that that practice had stopped by the time I was a teenager.

40:14

So for me, when I confessed and I refer to it as confessed, because I believed that it was a sin and that the way to address it was to confess it to the priests and to um seek help for what was happening to me or what I was going through, um, because at that point I did believe that it was a sinful experience and something that I could um, that I could fix, or at least that God could fix. Yeah, and I was um very drunk at the time. Um, this was a feature of the Brethren Confessions was you'd see a priest, you know, maybe one priest, maybe two, sometimes three, if you were really unlucky, um, but they would just. You'd just sit there giving piss, drinking whiskey I just think it is the most irony yeah you'd just be like half cut I mean alcohol reduces that filter.

41:24

So it's you know totally, and this was and the birth women encouraged heavy drinking. Um, they had all these sayings around alcohol like um drink makes a strong man stronger and a weak man weaker. Um, therefore, like, if you couldn't handle your booze, yeah, it was a moral shortcoming. Um, and I knew like you'd have to drink. Um, you went to these special church meetings where it just went into overdrive and I knew people who would like go through basically alcohol endurance training ahead of these church meetings, where you'd try and drink more and more alcohol every day to build up your tolerance so that when you got to these church meetings you could drink. You'd run under the table and show how much piss you could handle and like that as though that was some kind of moral achievement. Like it's pretty, it's like it's ludicrous, goodness.

42:29 - Sam (Host)

Oh, I'm curious. What happened, um and I feel like now I'm about to get some spoilers, but that's okay um, but I'm curious, uh, what happened between that confession and also how long it was between that confession and where you started the book which was coming out to your siblings. What happened between those two periods of time?

42:57 - Craig (Guest)

Yeah, so there was more than I need to go back and check my dates now, but there was more than a year between those points, probably more like a year and a half. So, to cut a very long story short, I came out as gay to one of the priests, and the brethren at that point believed that their views on homosexuality had evolved somewhat, so they'd gone from believing that it was demon possession and immediate excommunication to that. It was something that people needed compassion for and that they needed help with, which is just as toxic in a slightly more insidious way, yeah, in a slightly more insidious way. Yeah, um, and so they encouraged me to work through attempting to change my sexuality. Um, that took all the usual forms the prayer and the casting out and the you know all the, all the things anyone who's been through this would recognize.

44:04

th him at the end of December: 2007

45:01 - Sam (Host)

I mean, that's a great saying in comparison to pray the gay away.

45:04 - Craig (Guest)

I like that and I was sort of quite. I was very taken aback when that didn't happen. Yeah.

45:14

And that he, rather than waving his hands over me, told me that I should never accept myself for who I was and that basically, I just needed to struggle against my sexuality and just constantly fight back and suppress it. Yeah, which was a pretty terrible thing to hear when you were hoping that it could just be fixed, and it's like, oh no, this is something that you're going to wrestle with for the rest of your life, um, and at that point he also referred me to. He said he wanted me to see a doctor, a bretuan doctor, um, who was a relative of his and also a senior leader in the church, um, and so I saw that doctor over the next I think it was the following day and that was a very invasive process. So the weird thing was when you saw these brethren doctors and there weren't that many of them, because the brethren banned university in the 60s, so any doctors that were still around had trained prior to that, um. So it was a sort of ever-shrinking circle of old white men, and this one was no exception dr kirkpatrick um, who has since died, um.

46:42

But there was this weird overlay when you saw these doctors, because they were giving you medical advice, or at least what they dressed up as medical advice, but it was overlaid with this sort of massive spiritual context where they held not just medical authority as a doctor, but also spiritual authority as members of the church and as leaders within the church and also, specifically, as people that you were seeing on the orders of the man of God. And so you weren't just there seeing a doctor, you were there as part of God's plan. Yeah, seeing a doctor, you were there as part of God's plan. Yeah, um, which is a massive sort of massive power imbalance. Um, in that doctor patient scenario, and this particular doctor, um had all sorts of questions, um, including. So they wanted to know what I had done sexually and with who, and it got right down to whether I preferred penetrating or being penetrated and whether I preferred a penis soft or hard. And I think the most egregious question, looking back, was whether I was sexually attracted to one of my local priests.

48:03

Um, and so I left that encounter feeling, as you could imagine, um dirty and yeah um, looking back, I would use the word violated, but that wasn't something that I would have had in my vocabulary at the time, and I believe that the reason I felt so dirty, so unclean following this encounter was because my sin had been exposed. Yeah.

48:35

And so you just push it all back on yourself, and at that point I was like well, and at that point I was like, well, I feel terrible and I've been told that there actually is no way of changing my sexuality. I'm just going to have to fight it for the rest of your life.

49:01

And so a few days later I packed my bag and tried to run away and hadn't planned it, hadn't put any thought into it and ultimately failed. So the church tracked me down and found where I was, pulled me back, um, and it's a the love bombing that a lot of people will be very familiar with, where, um, at the first sign of crisis, there's this sort of overwhelming attention on you, everybody's telling you that you're special and everybody's telling you how much you mean to them. And just come back and just do this and just do that and, like you know, they'll move heaven and earth for you.

49:39

And they will, and in a way, when you've been going through what has, I suppose, been a relatively private process, and then it blows public yeah and there's this huge focus of love and attention on you and that can be really um, overwhelming and also flattering, um, because suddenly you're like, oh, maybe maybe I am special and maybe it is a place for me and maybe they do all care about me and maybe I can be part of this amazing thing and I'm not just this single person struggling alone, like you know it's, it's um, well, it's a tried and tested tactic for manipulating people back into your community.

50:31

Yeah, and it worked on me at 18 yeah, um so, following that, I was um sent to live in Sydney, which is where the man of God lived, and this was another thing the brethren did was they called them encouragement trips, where you would be sent to live in a different place.

50:55 - Sam (Host)

Right.

50:57 - Craig (Guest)

a few months. This was early: 2008

52:20

So I saw another church doctor very similar encounter. This one actually prescribed medication to suppress my sexuality and said that he'd been. So he hadn't. He said he was experimenting with other young people in the church and hadn't yet found a way to change sexuality. And so, in the meantime, shocking, yeah. And so, in the meantime, shocking, yeah.

52:51

Um, in the meantime, he recommended a hormonal suppressant that would completely suppress my sexuality, um, the idea being that they couldn't stop you being gay, they could stop you having any sexuality whatsoever. Um, so the drug he prescribed was called cyprostat, which is a hormonal suppressant that's usually used to say that cuts off the supply of testosterone, and they would usually use it, say, for people with prostate cancer or maybe for sex offenders. Um, definitely not something that you prescribe to a healthy teenager, yeah, um. And so there was that. That was a fairly major part of my time in Sydney, but I think the other thing that had a huge impact on me was spending a lot more time in the presence God on earth, we believed, and realizing that he was ordinary, and not just ordinary but fallible.

53:55

And I had one. So the big privilege was to have a meal with the man of the big privilege was to um, have a meal with the man of god. That's. This was a huge um honor.

54:11

And I remember one night I went out for dinner and I was at my cousin's place in sydney and man of god, bruce hailes, was there and so I was and I was sitting beside him, was there, and so I was sitting beside him for at least the first half of the evening. So they do this thing where you sit around the lounge in the living room in a circle sort of, with snack trays and drinks and so on, before you have the main meal. And so I was wedged in with the man of God on one side and the church's PR guy on the other side, and the man of God was he was drinking whiskey, as you did, but his idea of whiskey was you'd have a tumbler like a glass and you'd put ice in it and then just fill it to the brim with scotch, like no mixer, just and definitely not just a shot yeah it was like just a bit of ice in the glass, then right to the brim.

55:16

And so he, he was drinking these glasses of neat scotch and he had five of them before we even got to dinner. And it's just like we were heavy drinkers in the church. I knew that, and we drank a lot, and even by the age of 18 I, you know, you'd think nothing of drinking half a bottle of whiskey and then driving home, but it was just what people did and so, anyway. But I'd seen him be drinking, but not at that level, um, which fed into that whole idea of the more spiritual you were, the more piss you could handle. And so, like, like he's the most spiritual man drinking the most alcohol I've ever seen someone drink before dinner, um, but it didn't occur to me to question it because it just fitted with the narrative that we were taught, um, and then he continued drinking wine during dinner and then carried on drinking after dinner and it was a colossal amount of alcohol for anyone to be consuming. But I was really at the time impressed and looking back, still kind of impressed I was like I'm a little impressed.

56:41 - Sam (Host)

Mixing alcohol is not an easy feat.

56:44 - Craig (Guest)

Right To go from scotch to wine is a recipe for disaster but he wasn't drunk yeah um, like mary maybe, but not mary, not drunk, um, but we had this um um.

57:02

Later that evening we were standing around the piano, um, and the brethren aren't the only people who do this, but you know like you gather around the piano for a good old sing-along yeah and so we can't have pre-recorded music, so there's no music going on at this party, like it's pretty boring looking back, um, and so there was this you didn't really have any musical entertainment until you started playing it physically.

57:31

So there was this huge importance on standing around the piano and playing, because that was the beginning of the entertainment, and so we were all standing around the piano and belting at, you know, the old rated cross, oh shit, yeah, yep. And then someone, you know, there'd sort of be a pause after each song, and then someone would suggest another song, and then we'd on, we'd go, and then a song ended and someone piped up and it's like, oh, let's sing candle in the wind. And this was, um, we knew that we were not supposed to sing elton john songs. Elton john had been like strongly discouraged, discouraged because he was a gallery digitor and so nobody should be singing Elton John songs. This was something that Bruce Sayles had said, and so it was this very awkward moment when someone was like let's sing Candle in the wind, and we're all looking at each other sort of furtively going what's the man of god gonna say?

58:48

that's another john song yeah and I thought that maybe he would be like well, let's sing something else. Um, and to my absolute shock, the man of god was like, yeah, let's sing candle in the wind. And oh way we went. But I just had this like utter cognitive dissonance. Um, as I stood there watching the man of god belting out candle in the wind, knowing that he had banned us from singing that song, and there was just like no way that I could square that off in my head yeah um, it just made no sense yeah um, and then you start saying what's like, well, if, if he said that and he didn't mean it, then why did he say it?

59:46

and if he said it and it's flexible, then what else has he said that's flexible? And if he said that and it's like but, and then you just go around, what's like? It's like pulling a thread yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's like well, how much of this is all just bullshit? Yeah, all of this, yes now I'm.

:: 00:04

I feel like I'm jumping a little bit because I want to get to something after this, but, um, obviously the title of your book is called excommunicated. So tell me a little bit about what it was like for you, uh, the day that you actually left your community, because there is a bit at the beginning of the book where you're standing in front of your grandmother and I'm just like almost at tears, like it was just heartbreaking. And so what was that day like for you to be like numb out?

:: 00:40

Yeah, so that was a few months later back in New Zealand and I had realized that I had no future in the church and had started the process of severing connections within the brethren and building new connections on the outside, and it's all of the little things that people don't necessarily think about. It's like you need to make sure that your health records are in order and you need to make sure that you've got copies of all the photographs that you want, and you need to make sure that you have seen people that you want to see and made your peace with things that need to be addressed. You know all of these, um, like it's not just a decision to leave a community. There's a huge amount of personal admin that goes with it.

:: 01:35

Yeah, um, and so I've been working through a lot of that personal admin and the crunch point for me came came when I told my siblings that I was gay, and I couldn't really even tell you what prompted it. So it was pretty clear that I was planning to leave. But it came to a head when I came home from work one day and told my brothers and sisters that I was gay and that sort of blew things up for the family and the priests, because it was sort of a public declaration, a line that had been crossed in a way. I think they were fine or more fun alternative, but fine, so long as it was just a dirty little secret off to one side. It's like well, you can have your dirty secret, but don't talk about it yeah um, and so long as we were keeping up appearances, yeah, it didn't matter.

:: 02:54

um, and I think coming out to my siblings was what forced it into the open and I was no longer willing to accept that it should just be a dirty little secret on the side until I sort of slunk off into the darkness with my tail between my legs and I could just tie it all up neatly and wipe it under and pretend that it never happened and I just I wasn't going to go out like that, um, so I came out to my siblings and, um, I went out that night, with some friends actually, and came home late, didn't think anything of it, and I woke up in the morning and my siblings had all disappeared. Yeah, um, and it emerged that they had been uplifted from the family home the night before, um, and sent to live with other people, other breathing families, because I was seen to be an evil influence and it didn't matter, like I think they were fine with me being gay and living the secret life so long as it was secret. And as soon as I came out to my siblings, suddenly that was the threat. And I saw my parents in the kitchen that morning and, um, they said that the priests wanted to see me immediately. Um, and it was clear to me that that meant that they were moving to the first stage of excommunication.

:: 04:32

Um, and so I used that day, um, I said that I would see the priest when I was ready to see them, not when they wanted to see me. So I think that day driving around Invercargill saying goodbye to people so that was friends and my uncle and auntie and my grandma, as you mentioned all of these people knowing that when I said goodbye to them, I would probably never see them again. Yeah, and yeah, there's a sort of a it's like death, but it's worse than death because they're still alive. Yeah.

:: 05:22

So you know, in my grandma's case, she knew that I was about to be put in the first stage of excommunication and so she wouldn't let me into her house because she didn't think it would be suitable yeah, think it would be suitable, um. But I asked if she would at least hug me, because I still wasn't excommunicated at that point and so she like she still technically wouldn't be breaking any church rules, um, and so she agreed to that and we just stood there on her doorstep like hugging each other and sobbing for 20 or 30 minutes. And it's the most dreadful, dreadful experience.

:: 06:09

And that's, I guess, why the book started there, because it just boiled down, sort of into a nutshell, the cruelty of what happened yeah, I'm curious what it was like for you the the first day that you actually had left and you had the language that everybody who was not an exclusive brethren was a, and now you were one of those. What was that like for you?

:: 06:43

Well, it took the whole leaving process sort of dragged out over a few months, but I think for me I was spending more time focusing on immediate survival than on any ratio philosophical reflection of who I was, cause you suddenly put into the situation where you're having to cook for yourself, feed yourself, take care of all these things.

:: 07:17

Like there's just hundreds of small practical decisions yeah that you're having to make every day, and I think the enormity of what's happened to you is is so huge and the loss is so great that the only way you can survive is by focusing on the small things, like what am I going to eat my next meal um?

:: 07:44

yeah, every time I've spoken to people who have left really fundamental high control groups or cults is that the initial stages of that reintegration process is the most extreme form of compartmentalizing, because there's just so much that you have no idea about. You know how to do anything. Um, that that's all. All of your energy has to be directed in that capacity that dealing with the emotional side and the spiritual side of it is just not at the top of the list 100.

:: 08:21

I didn't know how to turn a radio dial, yeah, and I didn't know how to eat in a restaurant and I didn't know what the etiquette was in bars, and I didn't know how to have friendships. I didn't know like. I lived with a couple and they had a dog and I'd never lived with a dog before, because the brethren weren't allowed pets oh, that's hard to me.

:: 08:46

I was like a huge. I mean my, I love dogs. I'm a huge. I like dogs more than humans. Um, and that's just like heartbreaking oh, they were.

:: 08:58

Just it was dreadful. They banned pets in the 60s and everyone had to kill their pets.

:: 09:04

Oh, oh, my goodness.

:: 09:07

Yeah, my grandma's family went and drowned their cat in the river and but I think, going back to the emotional, sorry, that was a really heavy thing. No, that's fine. To just drop and move on Right.

:: 09:25

That's okay.

:: 09:28

But I think like just sticking on that for a minute. There are all of these terrible, terrible things that happened in the breathing room, like everyone suddenly had to kill their pets.

:: 09:36

Yeah everyone suddenly had to kill their pets. Yeah, but they were just by sign, normal for everyone in the brethren, and I often find like I'll just like this, I just casually mention these like awful things. Yeah, to me and to everyone I grew up with they were just normal, so you drop them without a second thought. And I found this when I was writing the book. Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but when I was writing the book and I put in the first draft of the manuscript and the publishers came back being like there's just this one sentence here about this really fucked up thing that happened and I like.

:: 10:12

I think that should be at least a few pages, not just a sentence yeah.

:: 10:17

I didn't like I suppose now that you say that that is pretty messed up, yeah, I didn't think like that was just normal, yeah it's life of complex trauma, hey, but like it's only, it's something that I feel like only people who have like navigated pervasive, ongoing things that would be traumatizing, um, to just be like, even you know, I will be talking about something so casually and, um, someone will go, that's like batshit crazy, you do realize, and I'm like, yeah, I guess, like like, yeah, I guess.

:: 10:55

But it just comes down to it's normal, like if you are raised in that environment, um, it's normal yeah, I'm not a victim yeah, yeah, yeah it's just normal, yeah yes, and I think the emotional side of things to just close off that circle of thought was that, um, that day, like that process of saying goodbye to people, and then, um, after those goodbyes, I had a meeting with the priest.

:: 11:26

That was pretty confrontational, but I came home at the end of that day and I lay in bed and just like, cried and cried, and cried and then at the end of that, um, there was nothing left yeah like my emotions had gone right to the edge and been tipped over and after that point, like through a lot of this, I didn't really experience any emotions probably for a good six months, um, and it was like a sort of a safety valve had been tripped and so anger and grief and sort of all of those things were kind of flipped off for a while, um, because they had gone to such an extreme place and I was fortunate for me that my, um, my coping mechanism and dealing with a loss of emotion was to go to a place of logic and rationalism and um, so I was very methodical through that leaving process yeah um, and for me the one emotion that I didn't lose through that process was humor, and so I sort of joked my way through a lot of it.

:: 12:54

And I mean there's a sort of dark humor that goes with a lot of people who have had intense trauma. And I see this I'm a journalist now and I see this working in newsrooms and reporters who are having to deal with this sort of really complex, traumatic side of humanity, and there's definitely dark humor that comes through with that well, you should say joking between therapists like it would be like mortifying um, but it is very much a coping strategy for sure um, yeah, and, and for me, looking back, um, it's not necessarily that humor was the best way of dealing with some of those things.

:: 13:41

It's just that it was the sort of the sole remaining emotional tool I had in my in my toolkit yeah, yeah, and so that was what I used, yeah yeah, um, but yes, I think, going through that process very logically, um, probably even coldly yeah um, and I suppose ultimately it worked.

:: 14:26

Yeah, yeah, here we are how long have you been out? 15 years now okay, and are your family still in the church, like, have you had any contact with them since?

:: 14:41

So my immediate family are all still in the church, except for one of my brothers. So I'm the oldest of seven and the brother immediately down from me left eight years after I did. So we are back in contact, but our five younger siblings and her parents are all still in the church. Um, have I had anything to do with them? Short answer no, yeah. Um. Long answer still no, really. Um, I've had occasional contact with them over the years that when my grandma was dying, um, and I again, nobody told me that my grandma was dying of cancer.

:: 15:24

I heard from someone, from someone, from someone, and rang mum up and um, and she confirmed that it was true, um, but there's, there's. No, oh, sorry, we didn't tell you. You know you must be upset or anything like this. It was very cold, very sort of perfunctory politeness although you'd be lucky if you even got that and I said that I wanted to see grandma before she died and mum said, oh, she doesn't want to see you. Yeah, um, and I said, if that's how she feels, put her on the phone and she can tell me herself. And until you put her on the phone and I hear it from her, I'm, you know, I'm coming to Invercargill to see her unless she personally tells me she doesn't want to see me.

:: 16:21

Of course that didn't happen and we eventually negotiated that she would agree to see me on her deathbed, so long as I agreed not to come to the funeral, because this is a massive thing for the brethren they have. They don't like non-Bithyn turning up at the graveside, and there have been all sorts of scenes in the past, like when my great-grandma died. There was like a physical altercation over her grave when her excommunicated children tried to come forward to pay their respects. Um, so they're very keen to avoid that if they can, and they've done all sorts of things over the years, including telling you what time the funeral is going to be and then just whipping it through the day earlier in secret. And then you're like oh, did we not tell you that the time changed? Oh, sorry, that must have been like, oh yeah um but um.

:: 17:26

I was fortunate that they engaged in relatively good faith and I think by this point I'd been in the news a lot and I suppose from the inside it was easier for them to just engage and do the bare minimum and run the risk of it blowing up into something bigger yeah but so I saw grandma on her deathbed very, very cold experience seeing my parents for the first time in years.

:: 18:03

My uncle and auntie were there and, um, um, grandma, she was well, she was.

:: 18:11

I think it was a week before she died. She was in hospice, yeah, and she woke up and said goodbye and I'm standing there crying and it's like my dad and mama in the room and my uncle and auntie it's like not one of them, like no sympathy, no, um, gesture of love or support or anything like I'm not brethren, so I'm not worthy of their emotional support, and so I'm just left to stand there like crying over my dying grandmother, while they all sort of arms crossed watching me. It's like pretty messed up looking back, um, but again, it was just a normal experience for that situation and I realized coming out of the hospice after that that my grandma had been dead to me for a long time, yeah, and that there wasn't. There wasn't nearly the residual emotion that I was expecting. Of course, this is a challenge when you go through these traumas is you don't know how you're going to react in certain situations until they happen, yeah, and sometimes it brings up massive unresolved emotion and sometimes you're like, oh, the fact that, that comes up, yeah, um.

:: 19:36

But then I find myself second guessing and it's like yeah is there? Is there no emotional reaction to this? Or have I suppressed it so deeply that I'm carrying on sort of? So you can never ever be quite sure that you're over something yeah um, and this is the hardest thing is that things can just come back and whack you in the face at any time, and I saw my parents maybe a year after that, when I was back in Mpukago saw them again, and that was the last time I saw them, but a very strange encounter.

:: 20:19

They wanted to apologize.

:: 20:22

Um, so they said they felt they had been overly harsh with parents and that they were very young and that I was the oldest since I born, the brunt of all their parenting mistakes, and so on.

:: 20:36

But it was a like the kind of apology that just sort of rubs a bit of salt into the wound, where it's like oh, we're very sorry for this and we're very sorry to that, and it's like but you're still not welcome in our house and you still can't talk to your siblings and we still don't want to have anything to do with them, and so, and it's like this apology like, for me, an apology is the starting point in a process of reconciliation, whereas this kind of apology and I would call it the brief apology, because this is how they see apologies, is their way of saying sorry is okay, we've fixed it. We can tie it up with a neat little bow and forget about it now because we've squared it off. And it's like no, you haven't squared it off, you've just tied your little bow on it to make you feel better about yourself you don't give a fuck how I feel.

:: 21:34

You don't want to go through any process of reconciliation or healing or addressing how I feel about the hurt that I've experienced as a result of what you've done, um, and so, of course, I said the things that you're meant to say, like you don't want to be sorry, and so you weren't that blah, blah, blah. Um, and they had heard, but I just felt sorry for them. They were so broken and they had heard through the grapevine that I no longer believed in God which was. That's a fun thing to gossip about.

:: 22:17

That's a fun thing to gossip about.

:: 22:22

So they had heard through the grapevine that I no longer believed in God, a thought which was more distressing to them than my sexuality, and they pushed me on it and I kept sort of evading the question, not because I'm afraid of giving an answer, but because you're very aware, when you engage with people who are still in these groups, of how much significance they attach to certain things, even if you don't.

:: 22:55

Yeah, um, and so they kept pushing, pushing, pushing whether I believed in god. And I keep feels like you're asking a question you don't really want to know the answer to. Um, and I have a lot of sympathy for my parents in this situation, because even after I'd been excommunicated from the brethren, they still held onto this hope that, even though they weren't seeing me in this life, there was still a chance that I could be saved and they would see me in heaven. And when you don't believe in God anymore, you're not just pulling the rug out on the earthly connection, you're pulling the rug out on any hope of an eternal connection, which is far more of a blow to people with that belief system.

:: 23:53

And so I was sort of very aware of the the ramifications for them, if not for me yeah um, and I just didn't want to straight out say that I didn't believe in god, because I knew how upsetting that would be to them. Um, so in the end I said to dad um well, look, I'm not comfortable saying that I believe in God, but I am comfortable saying that I believe in love. Yeah. And your Bible says God is love, and for me that was just a. It's the bridge.

:: 24:36

Yeah, I suppose a respectful way of squaring off the discussion, yeah, sort of not being authentic to what I believe, but at the same time leaving just enough wriggle room for them to have something to hold on to, you know, um, because there was just no need to be a dick in that moment and say no, there's no, god don't be stupid yeah yeah, and, and I think it's easy to think that, you know, in those moments, you know, our instinct is like, you know, we don't owe them anything, we don't owe them that response, that respect and all of that sort of thing, and that's often just born out of, like, pure rage and pure anger, but which is, you know, if that's somebody's response, then you know that's fine, but it's trying to trying to say something that feels, um, authentic for you, without just being an absolute asshole for the sake of being one.

:: 25:46

Um, yeah, oh, I feel like I could. I feel like we could talk all day and all night. It's night, but, um, I am conscious of time and so I want often I finish these episodes with asking what would you say to someone who is fresh in their deconstruction, but I'm going to alter it a little bit which is what would you say to somebody who's just been excommunicated?

:: 26:20

somebody who's just been excommunicated. I think the most important thing is to um approach life in achievable chunks. Um, there's no point like, you can't get too preoccupied with what am I going to be doing two years from now, because who you are changes so much. Like who you are a month from now will be a different person to who you are two months from now, three months from now, six, twelve, um, and so it's not so much about figuring out the destination as making sure that you're on a really solid journey and being open to the final destination. Not that there's a final destination the final destination of death but in the meantime, those destinations in between.

:: 27:12

So I think, giving yourself a break, don't be too hard on yourself.

:: 27:20

Like when you're in that position.

:: 27:23

You've just been through probably the biggest trauma that you've ever experienced in your life and it's it's a level of trauma that would floor most people, and so just the fact that you're surviving it and that you're able to put one foot in front of the other and carry on living is a huge achievement in itself.

:: 27:44

Um, and I say to people who have just come out and I'm like worried about what they're doing and what about this and I hadn't achieved. Then I'm like, yeah, but six months ago you were in this religious environment where you couldn't do this and you couldn't do that, and you were, you were dreaming of being free of it, and now you are free of it. Like that is the single biggest achievement that you will ever make in your life. And so I think, like just take time to like pause and sort of acknowledge and respect yourself for that huge um achievement, um and like take a bit of time to sit with that before feeling like you need to rush on to the next achievement, like go easy on yourself yeah, yeah, I love that.

:: 28:42

Easy on yourself, yeah, yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for being so open and vulnerable and thank you for sharing your story you're very welcome thanks for tuning in to this episode of beyond the surface.

:: 28:54

I hope you found today's conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from these stories. Stay connected with us on social media for updates and more content. I love connecting with all of you. Remember, no matter where you are in your journey, you're not alone. Until next time, keep exploring, keep questioning and keep moving forward. Take care.