Holding Out HELP 12 Days of Freedom Q&A

But to get started with this conversation, we really just wanted a chance to... talk about what community means and especially when leaving these groups what it means and how you find community outside of such a tight-knit group and a lot of times you're losing your entire community right amanda do you want to speak a little bit to that of what community what it was like to leave your community and what it was like to try to find one on the outside

Yeah, it was, I feel like leaving the Kingston's and maybe most polygamist groups is the same story where you kind of lose your entire community overnight.

And some people get really shocked by that.

Like not realizing how much their family really is going to cut them off.

I knew that mine was going to do that.

Well, I knew that the majority of the people I knew in the cults were not going to talk to me again once I left.

So I kind of... made my secret goodbyes or you know having those last conversations with the people that I cared about most but it came down to that decision of you know are you going to choose yourself and your freedom or not live slowly bleed out right but it's a hard decision to make um and so coming out you really feel like a fish out of water it's it's almost like you're you're yes you're free and you're out here in the real world but you don't know how to it's like it's like learning a new language so it's really hard to connect with people out here because they're the the life you lived in the cults was so different than the world out here the things we talked about in there were so different than things out here.

So it was really hard to find a community.

It was hard to find my people, but it was also hard to find myself because you're also rebuilding who you are.

And so for me, now that I've been out It's been over 10 years for me.

I've been able to rebuild a community, but it's mostly been ex-members, really.

A lot of being able to reconnect with lost family members that have also left.

And I started doing a women's retreat.

We're actually doing one this August, where it's a bunch of us ex-members getting together.

The last one had 21 women in the retreat, and now this one's even bigger.

So it's been exciting being able to, you know, kind of build a community that you once lost and thought that you would never have again.

But yeah, it is hard.

It's still hard even for me now.

Yeah, I just want to point out, Amanda, that like you said, like building that and the strength that you have for being one of the first people to leave.

And I think that sometimes that can add that extra layer of scary, right? When there isn't those people, but for every person that leaves, there's somebody else or someone to reach out to.

There's somebody else that's able to give resources and say, Hey, holding out help is here.

And they helped me in all of these fantastic ways.

And it really is truly like word of mouth.

We hear that all the time, right? Where someone leaves and it's like, where do I go?

And when I'm pretty sure that a ex-member was the first one to tell me about holding out help, like we don't know how to research it.