You're listening to a Mother Mea podcast. Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Hey there, Before we start today's episode, I just want to say that you are going to be hearing from some wonderful Mama Mea voices over the
next few weeks as I work on another project. Hollywayin wright Claire Stevens, a Nama Brown, who is the executive producer of this show, are all going to be sitting in my chair for a few weeks and doing the same wonderful interviews that you know and love from no filter. There are some great conversations coming your way about red and green flags in relationships, sex and porn, addiction, escaping from a religious cult, narcissism, sobriety, and more. You'll be hearing from me soon.
Enjoy. Instead of being a stay at home wife or mother, you were a stay at home daughter and practicing to be that wife and mother one day. So girls like me and we stayed home after we turned eighteen. We were supposed to serve our fathers and learn how to take care of him, kind of like a wife would. I was trying to learn how to be that kind of submissive woman by practicing with my dad, which is really fucked up in my opinion.
For Momma Mia, this is no filter. I'm naima Brown sitting in for mea Friedman. For most of us, turning eighteen is a milestone that marks the beginning of our adult lives. That's when we go off to UNI, or move into a shared house with our friends, get our first real jobs, go on a gap year traveling around the world. But for Kate West, turning eighteen didn't mean any of those things because she was raised in an extreme religious community that considered her to be what they
called a stay at home daughter. And that's just what it sounds like. Kate was expected to stay at home well into her adult hood until her dad, who was a courtship expert and practiced what's referred to as father led dating, had found her a suitable husband. Some stay at home daughters in this movement never leave home and serve their fathers into their fifties or sixties. But the thing is, Kate didn't even know that she had the
legal right to move out of home at eighteen. Kate didn't know a lot of things she'd been homeschooled her whole life and taught, as you'll hear in this conversation, some very questionable things, things like Martin Luther King was a bad guy, and that slavery wasn't really all that bad. But she wasn't taught how to drive, or how to get a job or manage her own finances. And that's
because she wasn't being prepared for adulthood or independence. She was being prepared for domestic servitude to an arranged husband and to the kids they might have, and to their church. Today, Kate refers to the movement she was raised in as a cult, and the story of how she came to feel that way is one of unlearning a lot of really toxic and trostic things, of seeking help, and a slow process of healing and making sense of what she'd
lived through, which was a lot. A note to you, our listeners that Kate understandably hit some very rough patches with her mental health, including suicidal thoughts, which we do touch on a bit in this conversation, so do listen mindfully. I start this conversation by asking Kate to explain to us just how massive and influential the Christian patriarchal movement in America is here's Kate.
I really need to get like a giant whiteboard and map out all the different branches of how this works, but.
That would be helpful.
It's very complex because it's not like a what we often think of as cult as one leader and then the people who follow that leader. Inside of Christian patriarchy, the fathers of each family are kind of like the cult leader of that family, and then they have church leaders that guide them in that work. But as a movement, it spread through small publications at first, and when I was a kid, there was a lot of audio tapes
being circulated and sermon tapes and magazines. My father got a magazine called Patriarch Magazine and it really existed and you can still find copies. I found a few copies on eBay teaching men how to be patriarchs, and so in that sense, it was a grassroots movement. So that's just an aspect of how this has spread to be into the mainstream under this perception that it's fringe, but really it's very popular, and I saw it spread a
lot through the homeschooling community. So eighties and nineties in the US homeschooling became more legal and accepted, and the only people who were doing it really were mostly religious families, and so homeschooling was a way of spreading these ideas through the Christian homeschooling. Tell me a.
Little bit about your parents and where where they intersected with this ideology. Were they raised within what you would call Christian patriarchal systems as well?
No, I think you know, they grew up in more the broader understanding of patriarchy. I think our society is built on patriarchy. And my mother grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, which wouldn't fall under this movement that I would call it, but it does have that patriarchal underlying idea of this is what women should do. It's just not as it's not as explicit or fundamentalist as the way I grew up. So my mom grew up Baptist.
My dad grew up kind of Lutheran. He became Catholic for a short time until he became born again by an evangelism team right after he married my mom. And so right after they got married they fell into Presbyterianism and became more and more fundamentalist. As time went on.
What was the denomination I suppose that guided most of your life and the decisions around child rearing and you know what your life would look like.
So early on, it was the Presbyterian Church of America, So the PCA, which surprises a lot of people because people think that Presbyterians aren't fundamentalists, but there is a branch of Presbyterians who are. And my family is very reformed, very calvinistic, built that belief system that God foreordained everything and you're either predestined for heaven or hell. So that was my early childhood. As I became a teenager, we joined a new Orthodox Presbyterian church in Colorado, and that
denomination is very similar to the PCA. But our pastor was very much a leader in both homeschooling movement and the Christian patriarchy movement.
The Christian patriarchy movement, the Christian patriarchy in general, really ruled your life from the moment you were born. You were raised in a very strict religious family. I want to talk about what that looked like as a child. Tell me about the area where you grew up and how integrated I suppose into your neighborhood into your community you felt as a family and as an individual.
Well, when I was five, I went to a Christian private school for a few months before my dad learned about homeschooling and decided to pull me out and start homeschooling with me. My two older siblings still went to a Christian school, but I was the one that they were going to practice homeschooling on before they switched all
the way over. And I remember that contrast of the first few months being in a classroom with other kids my age, and then being kept at home learning by myself with my mother and waiting for all those other kids to get home off the school bus so that I could see them when they got home. So I had this quiet you know. My mom was a very good early education teacher. She wasn't trained, but she was very invested in me learning how to read and gave
me a lot of books. So that was really great, and I really looked forward to having other kids around so that I could play after school. But then when I turned ten years old, we moved to Colorado into the mountains, became more isolated. Now my family was completely homeschooling, no outside school. We joined that very patriarchal church, and my life became smaller and smaller, so the only people I interacted with were inside of that world. And it
also just felt that way to me. It felt like my life was becoming smaller and smaller at the same time that I was being told I was created for these great things, that I was going to be part of this great movement to bring you know, godliness to the world.
Tell me a little bit about who comprised your family, who you were growing up around, and just a bit about their personalities and how they were interacting with this ideology. Because your sister was quite rebellious in some ways, wasn't she.
Yes, my older sister. Some people have described her as feisty, which I agree with, and I try to portray that in the book of Remembering Her, my older sister, she's about nine years older than me. Remembering her pushing back on some of these rules and boundaries that were being set on us that were they were very new, Like I remember when certain rules were unstated, and she always pushed back a little bit. But I also watched her being punished a lot and being confined to her room
or not allowed to see her friends. She was allowed to work for a while, and then my dad decided no more working and no more dating, and it was hard to watch her become quieter and quieter, and it felt like her light was dimming as these rules became more restricted. And so, yeah, I always looked up to her as that person who had that spirit, you know, and looking back, it's really heartbreaking to see what this did to her. And my older brother, he's six years
older than me. I was always told he was the rebellious one, and when he was seventeen he escaped our family life because there was abuse happening. And he joined the army when he was seventeen and got out and rejected all of it. And so in some ways I'm jealous of him being able to do that and getting out so early. And then there was me. I was watching those my two older siblings get in trouble and learning don't disobey or you're going to get harsh consequences.
So I was always well behaved and trusted by my father because I wanted to please him and make sure I didn't get in trouble.
Your life was governed by a lot of rules. I want to kind of go through a few of those and learn a little bit more about how you lived them. Talk to me about modesty.
So modesty, I think is very typical across purity culture of any kind, as you might know, like in the US during the eighties, was the purity culture movement or like this trend of purity rings and purity balls.
Can tell us what purity culture is.
Yeah, So this idea that girls, well especially girls need to stay pure before marriage and keep themselves sexually pure, and boys have a sexual drive that they can't help, and so women are the break system to make sure they don't sin before they get married. And a lot of the time it involves an abstinence pledge of I'm at staining from sex before where you get married. And in the eighties and nineties it was a lot about you know, teenagers and young people and dating and making
that choice for themselves. In the world I grew up in, I took it a step further to be enforced by fathers and to go even beyond sexual purity to emotional purity. So you had to not sin with your feelings either, So you had to not give affection to anyone until you were betrothed to get married, and so that's all part of modesty and covering up your body and not being not being too sexy, but not being too ugly either, because you want to make sure you get married to continue this whole world.
Talk to me about just that idea of the rule of being good.
This is something I still struggle with. I think because I grew up this way. My brain was formed around this idea of everything's black and white. There's good people and bad people, and you can be either good or bad and there's no gray area. And you know, you grow up with this idea that there's eternal hell waiting for you if you're not one of the good people. And so I was terrified my whole childhood of not
being one of the chosen ones. And so I tried really hard to be good and it never seemed to be enough. But that fit in with the theology too, of this idea that you are depraved from birth and you don't deserve God's love and you have to continue repenting and asking forgiveness for your entire life. That was really difficult as a young kid because I didn't want to lose my family. I didn't want to go to
hell without them. I didn't want to suffer, and I developed OCD through this just obsessing about praying and how to communion correctly and how to do all these things right. And that's where my OCD issues started with the religious stuff.
I mean, it's an extraordinary amount of self monitoring that's instilled in you, isn't it. Kate, tell me about this idea about being a witness.
So to be a witness means to shine a light into the world and show people who aren't in the church what it's like to be God's children and to share the gospel with them so that they will join
you in God's kingdom. And so for me as a woman, that mates mostly meant being modest, obeying, being submissive, and showing up as this quiet, meek girl in the world to show the contrast between me and so called secular girls and how they were dressing and acting, and so just my behavior was supposed to be a witnes to other people.
Did you ever feel jealousy, envy, curiosity, interest about those secular girls that were your age or you know, or even the way that young girls will look up to teenage girls and get kind of excited about what that might look like when it's your turn, or did you look at them through the lens that you'd been taught your whole life with a bit of scorn or a bit of you know, judgmental righteousness, or a bit of both.
Yeah, I think a bit of both. I think I had these conflicting emotions of desire for following my feelings and enjoying things like music. I remember seeing a Spice Girl's poster in a neighbor's house and I was like, who are they? And they look really exciting, but also something about them is really dangerous, it seems like, and so it's very intriguing, But I had never heard a Spice Girl's song. At the same time, I was really good at following the rules, and I would try to
like in state that on other neighbor kids. So when Halloween came along, I was very much preaching to the other kids that this was Satan's holiday and that's why I didn't go trigg or treating, and I pretty much I'm pretty sure all the kids hated me for being such a stuck up little girl, But really, what I was trying to do was fit into any kind of belonging that I could have because I wasn't really allowed to belong with the other kids.
So I imagine that your family didn't hand candy out on Halloween.
No, we were. We were told to hide in the basement and turn off the lights.
Oh my gosh, that must been scary. Yeah, what did you think was happening out in the streets.
I mean, I love Halloween, now it's I get a little nervous when people come to my door and ask for candy, But I'm trying to get over my instinctual fear of it. It's just kids in costumes.
You just throw it at them and run right. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about why homeschooling is so important to this movement and what you were learning and what you weren't learning.
The Christian homeschooling world frames it like it is protection and keeping children safe from harms like drugs and you know, early sex and STDs and learning about evolution. But really it's what's happening is indoctrination. There's no access to outside information, so there's no nothing to contrast what you're learning with.
And also I didn't have any access to things like mandatory reporters or support for any kind of special needs that kids would have in the homeschooling world that didn't exist, and so that was a way to control kids. And I learned a lot of things through the lens of Christian patriarchy, but also white supremacy. They would never have come out and said we're racist, but we learned that the Southern Army, the Confederate Army, was the oppressed side of the Civil War, and that slavery wasn't as bad
as you think. So those kinds of ideas were common. I grew up thinking that Martin Luther King Junior was a bad person until I got out and went to college, and so I didn't have any other I had no way of checking what I was being told.
I want to read a passage from your book that really struck me. There were many things I had yet to learn, how to use a tampon, how sex works, how to set up my own email account. I never heard the F word. I didn't know what kind of music I really loved to listen to, or if I actually wanted to get married and have children. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the knowledge I had and didn't have. Kate, that must have
been a bewildering state of mind to exist in. Did you share those thoughts.
With anybody, No, definitely not. I think I learned early on that questioning things or talking back to my dad and his rules was not going to end well. And so I did have a journal off and on throughout my childhood, and so I would write some of those questions there. But if I did something wrong in my perspective, like if I wrote about a crush I was having, I would go back and erase it all because I was told that's not okay to have feelings right, that
emotional purity thing. So I was always self policing and trying to keep it internal, which is very unhealthy. I think that's why I struggled so much with mental health, because I didn't have any of those outlets.
And your mother tell me a little bit about her in your book. She seems to have very an instinct for nurturing, an instinct for care, to be acting at from a place of love for you inasmuch as she could. But she also didn't seem like someone you could go to with these big questions or these big doubts.
I don't think I had the language for this, But I witnessed how my mother submitted to my father and that no matter what happened when he wasn't around, it would get back to him. And she was told to do that. It wasn't something that maybe she had clear choice about. So when we understand the coercive control, I think she had choice, and I think she made some
wrong choices. But also she was in this system that made it really difficult for her to be that outlet for us as kids, And so I knew that if I told her something, it would get back to my dad.
You didn't have a safe person or a person that you knew would hold your secrets or honor your vulnerability.
No. Yeah, And that's why I think I'm obsessed about praying to God, because I was hoping God might be forgiving hopefully.
After this short break. What exactly is a stay at home daughter and what did that mean for Kate stay with us. Tell me a little bit about the idea of a stay at home daughter and when it dawned on you that you were one?
So Vision four mean that idea really popular. I'm not sure if they created it, because I'm sure there were stay at home daughters probably in Bill Gothard's World. But the idea was, if women are only to be wives and mothers, why would we send girls to college if it's not going to help them with anything, and if they're just going to get influenced by the world or possibly assaulted on campus outside of the protection of their fathers. And so that's where the term stay at home daughter
became more popular. Instead of being a stay at home wife or mother, you were a stay at home daughter and practicing to be that wife and mother one day. So girls like me, we stayed home after we turned eighteen. We were supposed to serve our fathers and learn how to take care of him, kind of like a wife would, but I mean like hopefully in most cases without the actual wife part. So I would make my dad coffee, I would iron his clothes, I would help him with
his business. I was trying to learn how to be that kind of submissive woman by practicing with my dad, which is really fucked up in my opinion. And I stayed in that stay home daughter role until I was twenty five because years of indoctrination and isolation. I didn't know I had other options. I didn't have any resources at all. And so it took me a long time to realize that I was being trapped and to actually
figure out how to leave. But during that time, there was a lot of other state home daughters I was friends with, and it became this feeling of countercultural. We're changing the world. One day, we're going to get married and start the new generation. But that marriage never really came to be for me, and so it gave me more time to think about what I was really doing with my life.
And I do want to get to that. But you were sixteen and still very much under the thumb of your father and the strictures that have been guiding your life up to this point, and you decide to officially join the church. Can you explain what that means? Given obviously you were a member of this church guided every element of your life, but what did it mean to officially join.
And the Presbyterian world, you're baptized as a baby, and you become part of the Covenant, and then when you become old enough to make vowels to the church, then you become what they call a communicant member. So at that point you're allowed to take communion, but you have to take these four vowels at the front of the church in public in order to do that. But I was kind of a late bloomer. I most of my
friends had already joined the church earlier. I was dragging my feet because I had always had these doubts about me being chosen. It wasn't really much about the religion more as I was afraid that I wasn't loved by God, and so that must mean I wasn't if I was even having that thought. So it became this very OCD feeling about faith. So I push it off for as long as I could.
And it was around this time that you did develop OCD. What did that look like for you? How did that manifest for you?
It revolved a lot around anxiety and fear of if I'm not chosen by God, or if God doesn't love me. The instant I die, I'm going to hell and there's no second chance, right, So obsessing about safety, not leaving the house, making sure I had my seatbelt on, being terrified of going in an airplane, so just wanting to stay in my room all the time and praying constantly for God to forgive me. And so it just became like that repetitive ritual part of OCD, but it was
very religious. Now I understand there's a term called scrupulosity, which is what I was experiencing. It's kind of like an ethical or religious OCD where you're obsessing about making the right choices and being a good person.
Our father eventually became recognized as a courtship expert. Tell me what that means.
So in creation patriarchy, we don't date because that would be practice for divorce because you're not being modest, you're not having pure feelings. And instead we practiced courtship. And my dad he brought this version of courtship to our church that was created by a man named John Thompson. He wrote this pamphlet called Pathway to Christian Marriage. Still around. You can still get it on the internet, so I'm sure people are still following it. And it was very strict.
It had a lot of questions for fathers to moderate between the young man and the young woman. Always straight couple. I don't know if that needs to be said, but never anything but that. And there was never alone time. You always had to have a chaperone. No feelings. You weren't allowed to talk about a lot of things anything that would build an affectionate bond was off limits. So it was very much talking about theology and really basic small talk, so not really getting to know the other person.
And you would do this for a few months, and then your father would decide if you were allowed to get married or betrothed. So then once you said that, then you were allowed to get betrothed to each other,
but the woman. It was like this feeling of property because when you got betrothed, you had to sign a covenant that you were going to marry this man in like a vow, and then once you got married, your father would transfer his so called headship over to your husband, which really was more about property rights instead of any kind of protection.
An exchange of goods. Yeah, you also referred to this sometimes as father led dating.
Yeah.
You observed your sister, your older sister, Alison, experience what you could describe as an arranged marriage. Is that scary to watch that happen to her?
I think it taught me a lot of what could happen in this world. It was really difficult because I didn't understand how coercive control works. I was believing everything I was being told At the same time, I watched my sister get married to someone that I could tell she didn't really like that much. He was just like my dad. He wasn't very nice to me or my younger brother. We just fell off about him. And I remember my sister crying on her wedding day and it was really hard to watch.
Could do you mind if I ask if she's still married to that man?
No? So this was a long you know, it's been a while. She had five kids. She did the same thing that did. She homeschooled them, She did all followed all the rules, and her husband was still abusive. And I'm so proud of her because she got out. She got all of her kids out, and she has a full custody of her children and they have just like just watching them go from that abusive home to being liberated has is just breathtaking to me because they went through really hard time.
So you did stay home after you turned eighteen when most of your peers would be going off to college and getting jobs. You were waiting for your husband. You right that you didn't even know that you had the legal right to leave home at eighteen. How does somebody living in the modern world, you know, television and the Internet stay I suppose that that distant from what we would consider just the basics.
I mean, there's a lot of factors to that. There's the isolation, there's the indoctrination, the limit of information. There was the fact that when the Internet came out, we didn't have access to that unschaperoned, right or unguarded. So I didn't have access to internet by myself, even when I was eighteen, and I didn't have a driver's license at that point, I didn't have access to my birth
certificate or Social Security card. A lot of stay at home daughters never get that, or sometimes their parents never got them a birth certificate because they don't believe in government. So I was one of the lucky ones that I have some documents, but a lot of times you have nothing, and.
You almost don't exist in the eyes of the government or the state, so you don't even consider what rights right that government might give you right.
So you don't know as a kid growing up that you have those rights because you're told what your family believes as if that's you know, hard and fast truth for everybody. And then the government's perspective is you're an adult living choosing to live with your parents past eighteen, which does happen, right, I mean, there's lots of college kids who still live with their parents. It's not impossible.
But what they're not seeing is that kids who grew up in this kind of world, they don't understand that they can leave. So it's more of a coerced entrapment instead of I'm choosing to live with my parents.
So you eventually moved to Hawaii, and as you've described, you know your role at this time, you describe it as being a kind of perpetual girl, and that you were, you know, even though you were a young adult living at home, and you know, as you as you described, kind of practicing being a wife by serving your dad. Can you walk me through almost like a typical day in your life at this time. I really want to understand what the contours and the shape of your world was.
In some ways, waking up in Hawaii is a very privileged place to be. But also when I first we first moved there, I was eighteen and I didn't have a license, like I said, or a car or anything like that. So I would wake up my dad would be at his new job. I didn't have homeschooling to do anymore, and so I spent a lot of time by myself reading, feeling sad. I didn't understand why I was so depressed if I was following God's way, but I was really depressed. And I mean that day to
day changed over time as I got older. I had a courtship that didn't last. I became a pianist for the church. My dad eventually let me teach piano lessons, and so over time I built some of those skills that I needed to leave. But it took a long time to get that kind of confidence that I could be an adult.
You mentioned a brief courtship.
Tell me about will, So, I mean, it feels like a movie to me when I look back on it. It was like we had started this tiny church in Kawai with some other quote unquote like minded people.
And so this was kind of going back to what you had done in Colorado, right where your dad and a group of families kind of said, yes, we'll just do this ourselves, right, we know what we want. The church that we're going to isn't providing that back to basics under our own roofs, right, right.
We eventually got connected with a denomination that funded us. But at first it was just a bunch of people in our living room. So he showed up to church one day and we had a very tiny group of people. There were no other people. There were barely anybody my age, much less an eligible man that I could marry. And I was supposed to get married, so it was like, what am I even doing here? But I was told God will bring you a husband, right, And so one
day this man appears. He's got blue eyes and curly brown hair, and I'm like, oh, well, God brought me the husband. And he was really funny, and I loved being around him. He had all this energy, and he loved telling stories, and I quickly you really felt drawn to him. And he and my brother and I were friends, and so this was that was considered okay because there was three of us. It was friendship. It wasn't anything else, and we hung out a lot until one day he
asked my father to have a courtship with me. And this was a surprise to me because he had never mentioned that and he shouldn't have. He was not allowed to talk about that with me. So my dad informed me that Will wanted to have a court and of course I said, yes, I thought this was my way out, and we entered into that whole process that I mentioned earlier.
You did start to have feelings for Will, which your dad was not happy about and cautioned you about it. And I want to read from your book what he said to you as a bit of an admonishment or a reminder to you about what your role was here. Right, he said, the reason we do courtship is because it's supposed to prevent emotional intimacy until a marriage commitment. And you don't know yet if he's the one you're going to marry. What would you say to his future wife
if he's not the one for you? So much to unpack there. In this courtship model, feelings and emotions were never meant to come into play. You weren't even allowed to compliment each other.
Right, That would have been too personal, It would have made them like you too much.
And so a lot of chaperone, a lot of I guess, guided conversations or how did you get to know each other?
So once a week we had the moderated conversation with my father. We would talk about theology and how to homeschool kids and stuff like that, and then we saw each other at church. Those were the two main things that we would do. And then occasionally I was allowed to go spend time with him if my brother was around. My younger brother, so he got the scape he got to be a scapegoat of like hanging out with us.
I patronizing to have your younger brother be considered a suitable chaperone or a you know, to have that kind of power over you. Your dad did call off that courtship.
Why, Yeah, we had a very long considering my other friends courtships. It was a long courtship because different reasons, mostly because he didn't have the job that my dad wanted him to have, or a consistent job that my dad wanted him to have, and so that was all part of this process, was making sure that this new man can provide for you, and so that was a big issue among some other things. It just my dad
was like, this is not the right one. And I had spent months thinking this is the man I'm going to get married to, and I couldn't help feeling affection for him because I was imagining that and I was spending so much time with him and he was so kind to me. Now I know that we didn't know each other very well at all. So I was in
love with this idea of him. But when my dad cut it off, it was it felt devastating it And I mean I was twenty one and if already feeling like I my life was over because this one man didn't want to you know, wasn't going to get married to me. And now I look back, and I was so young and naive, but really it was so heartbreaking to know that I might never get to choose who I would be with.
And later you learned that Will was struggling under the patriarchal system and framework in a whole different way. Tell me a little bit about what you came to learn about Will.
Yeah, so I didn't know this at the time, but he is gay and he was growing up in the same kind of family that I was, where he was being oppressed for who he was or for who he is, and he was trying to follow the rules too, And I think we were both like parallel to each other, struggling with this, you know, these confines and never getting to know who each other was. And so i'm I know, I'm glad we didn't get married. I don't think either of us would have been happy in the long term.
When we come back. What finally convinced Kate to break free from her father and her church? And when did she realize that she'd been raised in a cult? Stay with us? Time went on, this courtship with Will ended. You're getting older, You're still a stay at home daughter, as you mentioned, your mental health is really declining. You develop a bit of a drinking habit at this time, and then one night you decide you're going to start
to search for some things on Google. Yeah, what did you enter into that search bar that first time?
Kate? So I finally got a laptop, and I was again I had been trained to self police, so I never looked anything up on the Internet. I only used it to write on Microsoft Word. So I finally was like really struggling with my mental health, like you said, And I started sneaking to my parents' alcohol and I
was feeling very suicidal. And the way my dad was treating me and talking to me, especially after that courtship, it just escalated and I was really struggling, and so I don't remember the words I typed there I must have typed in how I was feeling or the way
my dad was treating me. But I came across this article about different types of abuse, and I had only ever heard that word in reference to physical abuse, which I had always, you know, also experienced, but that was called discipline, right, So like the language difference, I had to learn the vocabulary of what abuse really is. And through that I learned about psychological abuse and emotional abuse and spiritual abuse, and I could check all the boxes.
And that was a little terrifying, to be honest, because it's hard to grasp this idea that maybe you've been abused. Nobody wants to be victimized, and so just having to like process that and think that my dad is doing these things to me, whether he is intending to or not, that's what's happening.
And that that awareness really broke your world right open, didn't it? And you you started to come up with a plan. Do you remember what those What was on your plan?
Yeah? It was very basic. It was I think, like, get some money.
I've got it here, I might I might read it to you and so you can tell me a little bit about it, because it's it's great and it's I mean, but it reflects so much of what you were struggling and grappling with. So you came up with a with a plan, essentially an escape plan. The plan was number one, don't tell anyone the plan. Number two save up money from teaching piano lessons, as you said, and babysitting. Number three by a plane ticket to Philadelphia where your brother
Kyle lives. Number four, move in with Kyle. And then you say, the plan got really hazy after that, Right, what were you going to do? Go to college, get a job, go on dates, you start a career. What did it feel like to put that plan in place? I mean that and of itself must have felt transgressive, dangerous, rebellious.
Yeah, and I don't think I ever wrote it down because my dad for sure would have found it. He was known to search all of our rooms and look through our journals just to keep tabs on us. So it was not something that I put on the talkboard. And so this is my plan for escape. It was just in my head, like these are the things I have to do to get out of this bad situation. That's all. It felt like. It was like surviving this situation. I just knew I didn't want to be in so much pain anymore.
You were getting closer and closer to trying to figure out what it might actually look like to leave, and then he met David. At this point, you're twenty four years old, still, as we know, living with your parents. How did meeting David change the course that you had just started to kind of map out for yourself?
He sparked in me this like for he was a good friend of mine from church, and so we hadn't thought of each other that way. But over time, as things happen, I started feeling really strongly about him, and I could sense that maybe he was feeling the same, and I was thinking about leaving. Ever since that first courtship, I had made this vow to myself that I will never let my dad prevent me from having a loving relationship again, and so I had just kept the back
of my head. And then I started feeling these things about David, and I wanted to follow my heart and not listen to all those authorities telling me how to behave and so I just let things happen and stuck around for that, and I put all that in the book because I wanted to show how complicated leaving is. I'm not even sure how that would have worked for
me to leave. Maybe eventually I would have figured it out, but so many state home daughters don't leave unless they get married, and so in some ways, having this relationship gave me the emotional support I needed to have the confidence to leave. And he went through all of that with me. He confronted my dad and stood up for me and was not okay with the abuse, and that gave me courage.
And what's so interesting about this part of your story is that on paper, David came from the church. He believed in the same basics, right, the basics were all there, and yet your dad disapproved. And it was a bit of a battle of wills because you defied your father, even just in the sense that you actually fell in
love with David, and yet you weren't quite ready. It took you a while to be able to make a decision for yourself, you and David that didn't involve your dad, even though you were at that point really locking horns, weren't you. What was that last straw for you where you just said, I'm going to go make my life with David.
Well, you know, I think I was of the two of us, of me and David, I was the more kind of losing my losing my shit a little bit and like I'm over all of this. And he grew up a pastor's kid. He wanted to do things the right way. He didn't want to cause trouble. At the same time, I knew he really wanted to protect me, So I think he wanted to start trying to do this through my dad's way. So he did ask for a courtship. My dad said yes, and then a week
later he changed his mind. And so for me, that felt like my dad might do this for the rest of my life, just saying yes or no, or never letting me get married, because maybe he just wants me to live here forever.
You're a fifty year old stay at home daughter.
Yeah, that literally happened. It does, And so I was over it and we ended up secretly meeting up with each other. He lived in the same neighborhood as I did, and I was just ready to go. I didn't know how now that I had this relationship, like, how do I make this plan work? And so he had to figure out what he wanted to do too. And we made a plan together which was a little different than my plan, but moving back to Michigan, which is where
he's originally from. He had some family here that we could stay with while we got our feet on the ground, and that's what we eventually went with. I moved here to Michigan from Hawaii. For me, it was the impulse to leave. Was my dad controlling me so much, not letting me choose, and I became more outspoken about what I wanted, and the reactions my dad gave me really told me that I was in an unsafe situation. It was no longer a tenable relationship with my dad, and
he became more and more aggressive. He would tell me things like you can think what you want, but you can't act on it, and I just started to believe that can't be true.
Was there physical violence at that time between with your dad.
No, there was not physical violence, but he has this overwhelming presence and he would bar the door for my room, so I would be trapped in my room while he yelled at me. And so in that sense, it was physical, but not anything that was like what we consider violence.
Your whole world changed pretty quickly once that ball started kind of rolling, didn't it. And you and David get married. As you say, you move away, your brother Chris comes out as gay as well, all of the children of your family start to really cleave away from how you've been raised and the systems you'd been raised in. And what's so interesting is that it wasn't until you'd kind of begun your own life as an adult, married woman that a lot of that trauma really started surfacing for you.
Why do you think that was that It wasn't until later.
I was very dissociated most of my young adulthood, like literally dissociated during times of stress with my father, and it didn't feel connected to my body or at home in my body. And when I left, all of a sudden, I didn't have any rules. I didn't have anybody telling you what to do. My husband's very much not a patriarch case, not like somebody who's going to tell you what to do. We were very much a partnership, and so I had nobody telling me what to decide on.
I had to make all these choices for myself, which is very overwhelming when you're not used to that. And I was in a safe place. I think sometimes when you're in a safe place, you can finally feel the things that you've had to survive. When you're in survival mode, you have adrenaline, you have all these hormones that are helping you get through it. And then when you no longer have to be in that situation, you can release all of that and you feel it all. And that's
when a lot of the PTSD came right. And so of course it's always post traumatic stress. It's not during the traumatic stress. So that's what I was experiencing.
When did the C word cult rise to the surface for you? When did that feel like the right word to describe what you've grown up in and what you'd experienced.
Oh, I can't remember exact moment. I just I love watching documentaries and it's kind of odd, but watching cult documentaries has always calmed me down and made me feel stay, which sounds really backwards, but I think it makes sense now that I understand that it's so familiar to me that it gives me some kind of resolution. Because usually a cult documentary starts with the problem and the group, and then people leave or it breaks down and there's
an ending. Watching these documentaries gave me that feeling of closure that I might never get with some aspects of my life. And I remember watching The Vow, which is about Nextium, a very different kind of cult, but the way they broke it down and talked about it, it started to really click for me. Of these aspects are exactly what was happening in my home and in my church, but just with the different context. It wasn't the Nexium
wasn't religious, but my group was. And that's when I started understanding the parallels, and that language gave me the confidence to use that word. Finally. I think it's a very complex. I don't want to simplify things, but it's also really empowering to use that word when you were in a place that caused so much harm.
Absolutely, you wrote your dad a letter after you left. Talk to me about what you said to him and what you tried to express to him and how he responded.
We had kind of a very surface level relationship when I left. I think what happened for him was he realized he couldn't control me anymore, and so he kind of stepped back a little bit and we could have a very basic conversation on the phone, and I did see him a couple times, and now that I was married, I was under the headshep of another man, So that's
in his head, that's how that works. When I started talking about my story online and sharing just tiny little things, and I try to focus it on myself and not my dad, but of course anything I said that was the truth was going to get him upset. And somehow he found me on Twitter and he sent me all these text messages in the middle of the night of how upset he was and how hurt and why would
I do this to him? And at that point I had learned all this you know language about course of control, and I was like, you are guesslighting me, this has really happened. And I was feeling like, you don't get to disrupt my night's sleep because you're upset about something I say. And I worked with a therapist on this letter. Instead of texting him back, I just emailed him this letter, and I wanted to explain finally how I felt about everything.
A lot of it I had already said in person when before I even left, but I just wanted to reinstate like, this is what happened, this is what you did. I will take responsibility for all my actions and maybe I didn't handle everything while. But if we want to continue a relationship, I need you to at least acknowledge it happened and take responsibility for what you did. And I want to figure out a way to still have
this relationship. This was about five years ago. Now, I know he got the letter, but he never responded.
What about your mom?
Yeah, I still have contact with my mom. I'm glad that I do. She's always been supportive of me having my own life. I think she's gotten stronger in the past decade and it's good to see that, and I like that we can still talk even though she's still with my dad. It just gets it gets complicated.
What's your relationship with God and religion and spirituality at this time in your life.
This is always the part where I want to joke about how I'm starting my own cult, But I'm not doing that. You know.
Look, I think if there was ever a time for us to have, you know, an extreme matriarchy movement, it might be now, Kate, I.
Know the playbooks, so I just have to switch the pronouns in the week. No, No, I still wanted to go to church for a long time. After I left my family. It was like a double heartbreak though, because I witnessed a lot of abuse in the church, or mishandling of abuse, me showing up as an abuse survivor and not being accepted that way, and patriarchy steeping in and becoming more influential this movement, like the leaders from my childhood. We had those books in Sunday School. All
of a sudden, I was like, what is happening. It's happening again, and so I left that church and just never went I've tried to other churches, and I just have never gone back because being in a church sitting really triggers my PTSD and it's just not a good place for my body to be right now. Once I saw I'm going to church, I was like, oh, I could actually feel good during the weekend and not stressed.
I don't call myself a Christian anymore, but I do work with a lot of people who do, because I work with a nonprofit that helps spiritual abuse survivors, and so I want to be sensitive to that. I'm never going to tell someone they have to heal a certain way, whether with religion or not. But for me, it's not a part of my life anymore.
I want to ask you about that kind of you know, I suppose it's almost like a sliding doors alternate reality kind of kind of experience, where you know, you write about the very real danger and violence that exists within this movement. We've interviewed other women who've lived under religious patriarchy who did end up marrying into that system and
suffered serious abuse. Do you ever wonder what it might have looked like for you if you had let your dad choose your husband, if you had let him guide the rest of your adult life and maintain that kind of control.
Yeah, I have thought about this a lot, and I know so many State Home daughters, and I've seen so many ways they've lived out their lives. Some of them have never gotten married, some of them get married and then divorced. Some of them are married and still in the movement. Some are married and left the movement. It's just been a lot of different ways that this has diverged for us. A lot of us have deconstructed the
whole patriarchy movement. I would say probably a majority of us, and a lot of abuse has happened, and that is really hard to stomach because our parents set us up for that, and we didn't ask for that. Nobody does. And it's hard to see my friends who've been in those marriages and knowing that that happened to them. There's no words, really, I do feel like I escaped some of the worst parts of what could have happened. There's never a way to compare trauma, but I do feel
I don't know what the word is. I feel grateful for where I am today.
You write something so poignant, which is that it had been a decade at least at the time of writing your book, it had been a decade since you'd left, but you sometimes feel like you're still leaving.
When I first left, I really wanted to wipe the slate clean and never tell anybody ever what my family had been like, and just pretend like I had dropped on the earth and could just pretend like I've always had a job and always knew what I was going on around me. But with PTSD and struggling with all that, I realized pretty quickly that you can't just get what happened, and you can't move on without dealing with the trauma.
I don't think it's difficult. Nobody wants to do that, but it's important to get to a safe place where you can go back and reprocess some of those things so that you aren't constantly in that nervous system disregulation that I was in. Is possible, I think, well, what I really.
Want to ask you about in these last minutes. You know, we're living through a very high stakes time for women in America at the moment the time of this conversation, right now, we are only a weaken to the results of of you as election and Trump being re elected,
and I want to know what you feel. I suppose not just about the election results, but there are quite a lot of white Christian, patriarchal, white nationalist men in government in the country that you're living in who would say that the childhood you grew up with and in is right and good and in fact should be the law of the land. How does that not trigger your PTSD and your trauma response?
I mean? Or does it does? Definitely does? I mean in the sense that it's such a reminder and it's it brings up that feeling of what it's like to feel closed off from other people and to feel oppressed and struggle to have decision making power. That feeling of helplessness. That's what's triggering for me, is like, are we going
to go back to that place? But I'm also in a different place now and I do have more power than I did then, and that's why I'm speaking up so much and doing what I can to educate people about what this really looks like. On the ground, I'm trying to stay grounded in myself and have my support system and using what extra energy I have to help with the problem. And that gives me freedom even itself.
I have freedom inside of myself, and then I have the power to use my voice, and I don't think anyone can ever take that away from me again.
Please don't stop using your voice and telling stories and sharing your wisdom. We need you now more than ever. Kate, we really do. Thank you so much for your time today.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
Wow, big story, right. I don't think stories like Kate's could have come at a better time. Really. You can probably tell by my accent that I'm American. And what's wild to me about Kate's story is that she and I are around the same age, grew up in the same country. But we may as well be from different planets. And that's the thing about these high demand organizations or these extreme religious groups. They're so isolating, which we know is kind of cult one oh one right outside influence
and information is the biggest threat to their power. When I asked Kate if she ever thought about the women from these Christian patriarchal movements who don't find their way out until things get even more violent and even more dangerous, I was thinking particularly about another woman that Mia interviewed
on this program called Tia Loving's. Tia and Kate are survivors of the same groups and ideas, but Tia did marry someone who subscribed to that really violent form of male dominance, and she came very close to not making it out alive. I'll be sure to link to her story in the show notes for you. I'll also link to our conversation with Megan Agnew. She's a journalist who spent the day with a woman named Hannah Nielman. You
might have heard of her. She's kind of considered to be the queen of the tradwives and is kind of selling some of the ideas and frameworks that Kate escaped from. But in this really soft and fashioning and instant way. There's a lot more to Kate's story and experience, including her fertility journey and more about exactly how her church operated. It's all in her wildly well written memoir Rift, which you can also find a link to in our show notes.
Mia Friedman is the host and creator of No Filter. The executive producer of No Filter is me Naima Brown, and you can find me on Instagram and pitch me your stories anytime. We get so many great tips from our listeners, so please do reach out. Audio production and sound design is by Jacob Brown. Thank you for listening.