Snapping Out of It

Tiffany Day talks about the constant manipulation she faced over the 50+ years she spent in the Living Word Fellowship. She talks about the early days of the church school, Marilyn’s pre-JRS multilevel marketing business, Rick’s aims to seize control, being threatened with retaliatory rent-hikes if she went on a vacation for her birthday and many great/sad/funny stories. CORRECTION: Mike was wrong...

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 d...

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 podcas...

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

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

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

From his background of having been born and raised in the Living Word Fellowship cult, Evin discusses battling with repressed intuition, blunted education, shame around love and sex, as well as the cult's promise of immortality and the crisis of discovering, too late in life, that time is limited. He also shares the some of the great tools he's found for winning those battles, including: therapy,...

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

...wherein Charlie and Mike beseech you, don't be like Jerry Hardcakes Send stories, love-mail, hate-mail, or requests to be a guest to: snappingoutofit@proton.me

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 snappi...

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

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

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

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