ESH: SIX FROM THE FIRE 🔥
Six Ex-2x2 Cult Survivors Share Real Stories of Recovery and Reclamation
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Before I became a woman who bought Korean snail goo at 2 a.m. and forgave ToddWithaY (twice), I was a teenage girl in a prairie dress trying not to go to hell for wearing pants.
Here’s a short list from my cult girlhood:
We couldn’t cut our hair.
So we looked like Jesus, but only sadder.
We couldn’t wear pants.
Only knee-length dresses. Or jean skirts. In 1969. While the rest of the country discovered miniskirts, we discovered shame.
We couldn’t wear makeup or jewelry.
Apparently, eyeliner was a gateway drug to eternal damnation.
We couldn’t watch TV.
We missed the moon landing, Watergate, the Challenger, pop culture milestones— but we got detailed updates on the Antichrist.
We couldn’t listen to the radio.
At one point, workers snapped antennas off car roofs. No word yet on how they plan to exorcise Spotify.
We couldn’t go to the movies.
But we did sit in silence while a man in a wrinkled suit told parables with the emotional range of burnt toast.
We couldn’t roller skate.
Too worldly. Too happy. Too close to dancing.
We couldn’t join sports or clubs at school.
Character-building was fine—unless it involved fun, movement, or recognition.
And still, they said we were the chosen ones. Chosen for what, exactly?
Sainthood maybe—if sainthood includes disassociation and a really weird relationship with denim.
ESH1 stands for Experience, Strength, and Hope—a phrase rooted in recovery circles. This is the second edition of ESH—you can read the first one, From Rock-Bottom to Badass, here. Each edition highlights a different theme of recovery, voice, and return.
The writers featured here, Six From the Fire, are all former members of the 2x2 church, a high-control religious group I was born and raised in, known for its secrecy, authoritarian leadership, and spiritual abuse.
Each essay reflects a journey of reclaiming the self after escaping spiritual abuse.
Recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. There’s no universal formula, no guru with all the answers. The truth is, the only “right” way to recover is the way that actually works for YOU. Send your 500 word flash essay on how you recovered (from anything), found your badass, kicked ass, and aligned with your true self to thompsonk@substack.com to be featured in TNWWY Quarterly ESH.
Join me Tuesday, June 3rd at 1 p.m. MDT for another TNWWY Innovative Conversation - Live!
https://open.substack.com/live-stream/29457?
If you missed it, I had the privilege of being in conversation with psychotherapist
about her phenomenal book NIGHTBIRD: A MEMOIR on my debut TNWWY Livestream. Here’s a clip, Growing Up in a Fundamentalist Cult, from our amazing talk:
Tune in to TNWWY Livestream Tuesday, June 3 at 12 pm PDT. Bookmark!
I’ll be talking with a fellow born-and-raised cult survivor , who spent 21 years preaching “the truth”—the same message I escaped as a teenager, and the one he finally walked away from in 2023 at age 43.
You won’t want to miss the kind of raw, resonant dialogue we’re creating through There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was.)
🔸 Part One 🔸
A Winding Road to Freedom
by C. Jacobs
It’s funny how quickly life can change. I was born and raised in a group I thought I’d always be part of. Now, I believe it was a cult—and I left in disgust and disappointment. It’s not like quitting a bowling league or a fantasy football team. Those are things you join or don’t. “The Truth” wasn’t just something I did; it was who I thought I was. I went from devoted to disenchanted—and I’m sure I’ll never go back. It’s probably like that Hemingway quote people often use: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
After revelations of abuse and preacher inaction, we gave up attending meetings—and eventually, our membership. I moved from believing in a punitive God, to a merciful one who saves Christians, to no religion at all. I’ve let go of all of it, including the idea of pleasing a deity. Now I aim for honesty, integrity, justice, fairness, kindness, and care—not to win favor with some unseen, possibly unheard, omnipotent being. I used to twist myself up trying to interpret scripture, to live the way the Bible prescribed. Some verses helped me become someone I could like; others made me judgmental and condemning. I don’t read it anymore, and I’m not interested in trying to fit myself into it like I used to.
Over the past few months, I’ve started taking an antidepressant and seeing a therapist. I battled severe depression for years before we left, but I used to think it might be darkness sent to punish me for not being enough—praying or reading enough. I’ve gone from passively wishing for my life to end in a hundred quiet ways to actively trying to figure out who I am, what I like, and what I want to do with the time I have left. I’ve likely lived more than half my life already, so I hope I get to know myself soon. I’m not sure there’s anything after this—and I’d hate to go through this life without ever truly meeting myself.
I’ve probably struggled with a negative self-image all my life. I don’t know if that’s just me or the cult’s emphasis on our supposedly hopeless, inherently wicked nature. Now, I write my Substack. With each piece, I get a little closer to my full voice and true self. The old restrictions and arbitrary standards are gone, so maybe the me I’ve been waiting to meet has been hidden behind everything I avoided doing because “we don’t do that.” I want to like him.
I’m learning how to better read people’s trustworthiness. The low boundaries in our old group left my radar off—either too paranoid or too naive. I should be more active, but I do walk the dog sometimes. Things are quieter now, without the buzz and frustration of constant meetings. My wife, the dog, and I are creating new rhythms. We’ve got a long way to go, but so far, things are working—and the hope for more joy is growing.
Find at where he writes ramblings and wonderings about current events, interests and life in general.
Lamentations (And Laughs)
By Jared Snyder
As I get my post-church bearings, I'm learning that I'm not a serious person. I'm not a serious person - but only because I am a deeply, oppressively serious one. I oscillate between silliness and seriousness with metronomic reliability, and I don't think I'm entirely to blame.
Over a year’s worth of internet wanderings has shown me that my story is both rather pedestrian and uniquely insane. Enough people have run screaming from evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity to make my own exodus quite yawn-inducing. There has to be a scientific truth behind the phrase "Sometimes all you can do is laugh," because at some point, I have no more capacity to be horrified and instead become giddy and giggly. I frequently recall some random fragment of church life that is simultaneously infuriating and hilarious.
Like, for example, the casual, common use of the word ‘overseer’ among 2x2s. The number of times I have talked to another human being about “needing to ask my overseer” is comically absurd. Obviously, the past and present suffering created by the seven-headed church trauma beast is not something to take lightly. And, the many ongoing struggles to find a way forward, along with the high likelihood of unnecessary future suffering, are more than enough to keep one up at night. But maybe I’ve at least earned the right to laugh at my own experience.
I picture the whole heavenly realm looking down, over the course of my twenty-one years in 'the work' (what we called full-time ministry) placing bets on 'Will he walk or sign up for more?' after being shit on and told, 'God’s will is best'. Then I watch the Angels of Common Sense and Self-Respect get up from the table in disgust, having lost money on me again. If they ever learn that I did finally walk and come to collect, I’ll tell them I'm broke and remind them that God’s storehouse is abundant.
For years, I sang deeply reverent praises for the top of the 2x2 hierarchy, in perfect harmony with the rest of the church. I remember the day I realized the church was living in an alternate moral and spiritual universe, and the overseers were a clown parade. Sometimes I wonder, is it real when I see the same circus in every facet of society, or am I projecting my fool-me-twice-shame-on-me fears onto everything I look at? The absurdities of the real world can seemingly be found in an abundance rivaling that of God's storehouse. Is everything being run by overseers, those self-appointed guardians of righteousness and repression? Sometimes I'm tempted to stick my head back up the ass (mine) from whence it came. But...
If there's something that thrills and inspires me, it's the freedom to face the discomforts of reality arm-in-arm with ALL of my fellow human beings. We are a generation that is taking on the serious task of healing from generational trauma and daring to reimagine God, government, goodness, grace, and great balls of fire. We can permit ourselves to laugh, and sometimes we can't help it.
Find
at for little thoughts about life in and out of the 2x2 church.Cry About Everything We’ve Lost and Everything We’ve Found
By Laura McConnell
I’m sure people want something uplifting, generous - the sort of words that will encourage people inside cults to be strong enough to leave and rebuild. The words that give survivors hope.
I’m not sure if I can do that.
Truthfully, leaving is traumatic, rebuilding never ends. I left the Truth 2x2s at nineteen, young enough to get an education, make friends, build a life outside. People who leave later find it harder.
That is to say, I know how privileged I was to leave young.
Even so, the truth is I have a limited support network. My family is deeply broken and dysfunctional. Even though many people have left Truth 2x2s over the past decades, the relationships, especially within families, are still deeply toxic and broken. Even though many have left Truth 2x2s over the past decades, the relationships are deeply toxic and broken. Identifying why is complex. It’s a mixture of failing to deconstruct, lack of access to quality therapy, and the uncomfortable reality that many were complicit in abuse and can’t face that truth. The lack of a support network leaves me vulnerable. I’ve been out for twenty-five years. My trauma should be gone by now. Finished. Healed. It never is, unfortunately.
I’m flying about the world with a blindfold on a lot of the time, without sounding boards and advisers to help me work through backlash. Often, the backlash to my work, speaking publicly on Truth 2x2 abuses, comes from the very people who should be my support system… my family. Surviving that, building a badass life becomes incredibly complex,
Nonetheless, I do have a wonderful life. I make sure it's wonderful. It’s an act of rebellion to live beautifully.
They’ve called me a “troublemaker”, “selfish”, a “problem” all my life – so I simply live up to that. These days, I loudly proclaim what they did to me. I write, I create, I say it – on TikTok, Substack, Instagram. It’s powerful to say what they did. I’ve extended the storytelling recently to a podcast, Truth 2x2 Cult Kids. I don’t envisage a future where I stop telling the stories. I’ll always be here, telling the world what they did (still do) in that cult.
I live a wild, beautiful life privately behind the public-facing work. I co-founded a sleep and bedding brand that consumes a lot of my time. I swim in a squad four times a week. I ride a motorbike. I laugh raucously and loudly. I quietly explore alternative relationship structures, my queerness, my gender non-conformity. I split my time between my yuppie terrace in Melbourne’s inner north and a tumbledown shack three hours north near the Murray River. In the country, I have a garden, grow vegetables, listen to magpies and cockatoos.
I cry. A lot. I didn’t cry for decades; crying only made the abuses in my home worse. I stopped crying around age eight. I discovered feelings and tears again in my forties.
It feels good to cry about everything we’ve lost and everything we’ve found. Maybe that’s the message I’ll leave cult survivors with – have a good cry occasionally. Allow yourself to grieve. What we’ve survived was never okay, and it’s okay to cry about that.
Meet — Writer, activist, and ex-2x2 cult survivor, Laura is the fierce voice behind her Substack, where she unpacks life after high-control religion with radical clarity and queer joy. She’s also Co-Founder of #GoKindly, a social enterprise supporting women experiencing housing insecurity. And she’s the creator and host of the Truth 2x2 Cult Kids podcast, a groundbreaking series featuring unflinching conversations with those raised in the so-called “Truth.”
🎙 Listen to the podcast:
Truth 2x2 Kids @ Apple Podcasts
Truth 2x2 Kids
ONE THING
🔸 Every There’s Nothing Wrong With You post includes a daily ‘One Thing’—a simple, practical action readers can take to apply the message to their lives.
The first step in healing religious fear is making a decision:
To seek your own understanding of reality—or of “God”—beyond indoctrination, beyond fear, beyond the old inherited ideas of what that even means.
Last year, in a conversation on Unconditioning Love with Ex2x2 member Lydia Keening, I shared a near-death experience I had at nineteen, a moment that pierced the veil of my inherited beliefs and gave me a glimpse of something beyond. It wasn’t handed down through doctrine or dogma, or filtered through the secondhand knowledge I’d been indoctrinated with in childhood. This glimpse was immediate, direct, and deeply real, the beginning of a lifelong journey of setting aside what I’d been told to believe, and seeking my own direct experience. We each deserve the dignity and grace to have our own experience. This was mine.
Though I rebelled and left the cult at fifteen, that glimpse was the beginning of losing my religion. It set me on a path of rupture and reinvention. True liberation and growth aren’t a one-time act; they’re a lifelong cycle of questioning and becoming.
You can listen to an excerpt here and upgrade to hear more of the story of my Near-Death Experience (NDE)—the glimpse that set me on a lifelong path of seeking truth beyond belief.
🔗 Relevant Links
For those seeking more information, community, and ways to contribute, here are key links:
Mike Prussack and his wife Abbi, along with Kylie and Kari Hanks, co-founded the Ex2x2 Support Group on Facebook.
Here’s an interview with Mike about how the 2x2 church was exposed and how a public disclosure on their group’s Facebook page opened the floodgates, revealing widespread child sexual abuse and assault. This led to an FBI investigation that is now global in scope.
🎙️ Listen to “Opening the 2x2s Floodgates” – Interview with Mike
Note: Includes discussion of sexual abuse.
For information about the ongoing FBI investigation or to provide information:
🔗 FBI Victim Services – 2x2 Investigation
For more historical background and survivor resources:
🔗 Telling the Truth – Cherie Kropp’s Archive of 2x2 History
📚 Preserving the Truth: The Church without a Name and its Founder, William Irvine by Cherie Kropp-Ehrig
To support my ongoing advocacy and amplification of voices in recovery donate here or subscribe for less than the cost of a monthly cup of coffee, or the cost of a book annually.
🔸 Part Two 🔸
Unshackled: Breaking Free from the 2X2 Cult
By Wilbur Turner
When I was a child, I was taught that obedience was the highest virtue. If I so much as called a sibling "stupid," I would find myself with a bar of Ivory soap being scrubbed across my tongue, my mouth filled with the taste of artificial purity. Clean on the outside, clean on the inside—that was the rule. But that was just a dress rehearsal for what was to come.
I grew up in a religious cult referred to as the 2X2s. They proudly don’t take a name but often refer to their group as “The Truth.”
By the time I was a young man, I had mastered the art of looking the part. Polished shoes, pressed suits, a neat necktie, and a leather-bound Bible and hymn book tucked carefully into their zippered case. I knew how to find the right verse to speak on, how to pair it with the perfect hymn for Sunday morning meeting. I learned the cadence of reverence, the unspoken rules of submission, the way to bow my head just enough to show humility but not so much as to invite suspicion. And yet, despite all this, I was never truly one of them.
They had a poem they loved to repeat: "Dare to be a Daniel." Stand apart, resist the world, be set aside for God. But what they never mentioned was what happened when you dared to be different in a way they couldn't accept. When you didn't just resist the world, but also resisted their rigid framework. For all their talk of standing alone, they never meant it in the way I needed it to. When I finally dared to be myself—a gay man who would not live in shame—I found out what it really meant to be cast out.
Leaving wasn't just an exit; it was an exorcism. The guilt clung to my skin for years, seeping into my pores, poisoning my sense of self. Sunday mornings left me paralyzed with fear, my body trembling as I resisted the instinct to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness. I feared stepping outside, convinced that if I did, God would see me and strike me down for my wickedness. We were taught that those who "lost out" would face divine retribution—disease, misfortune, an untimely death.
Fear was the weapon, the motivator, the glue that held it all together.
But one day, something shifted. The "cloak of righteousness" I had seen draped over the faithful no longer looked divine; it looked like a costume. I saw them clearly for the first time—not as chosen ones, not as vessels of truth, but as terrified people desperately clinging to the idea that their compliance could save them from the unknown. I had spent my whole life believing they were strong, only to realize that they were the ones who were afraid.
And suddenly, I wasn’t.
That realization was like stepping into fresh air after years of suffocation. The sky was wider, the colors brighter, the weight on my chest finally gone. I did not need their salvation. I did not need their approval. I did not need to fear.
I was free.
is a writer, community leader, and 2SLGBTQIA+ advocate who lives in Kelowna, B.C. Follow him at
for advocacy news and opinion. Founder Advocacy Canada. Proud Father and Grandad.Becoming Seen: Breaking Out of the 2x2 Mold
By Kristen H. McLeod
Here’s what I’d tell you if we were on a restaurant patio on a hot summer night, maybe not even a glass of wine in, still waiting.
For years, I shrank myself small. Planned quietly. Dreamed safely. Stayed where no one could see that I didn’t fit the mold.
Then I learned about strength from the woman we bought our house from—83 years old, her gnarled fingers flying across piano keys as she played Rachmaninoff.
Do you know Rachmaninoff? That music isn’t just skill. You have to be strong.
For her 85th birthday, she rented the Shubox Theatre. She booked the $250,000 piano that has its own full-time staff member and she wore a floor-length black dress and let her grey hair wave around her shoulders and played the shit out of the Rachmaninoff and then we all went out into the atrium and drank iced tea and coffee and ate cake in the sun and she had crumbs all over her dress and was the most beautiful person in that room.
It was spectacular.
I decided I wanted to do something in that room. And I didn’t want to wait to be 85.
Within weeks, I left for Halifax and pitched my book project to a room full of strangers and famous writers, my pulse thrumming in my ears. My voice was calm and measured even as my insides shredded. And I realized—ahhhhhh, I like this.
I flew home and signed up for improv with a room full of not quite twenty-somethings and fell madly in love with playing. When it ended, I enrolled in stand-up comedy. Thing is, I learned I have to fight for room for me, so I needed a receipt and a schedule to get it.
I practiced while the kids mostly went on their phones. I showed up alone at open-mic nights; spotlight hot, palms damp on the mic. I watched audiences turn away. I watched them lean in. I took notes, adjusted, practiced like my life depended on it.
I performed in New York at a club where the manager became an internet friend. The comic I worked with still emails, once sent me a book. When strangers approached me afterward, I felt my chest expand with warmth I’d denied myself for too long.
The improv final was a 3-minute bit in the Shubox—like I’d called it down just like that. I stood on that stage, adjusted the mic, took a breath, and did the thing almost without trying. The silence before a laugh is electricity. And fuck, I was magic inside.
I’m doing it. All of it. What-ifs and somedays, I’m making real. I’m the Velveteen Rabbit — shabby, but alive.
This is my way out and through: not waiting for permission, not waiting to be healed. Leaning into fear and discovering I actually like it there. A long time ago, I broke free from the cage others put me in. And since, then, I’ve been breaking free from the cage I then built for myself.
The safety of silence taught me nothing. The risk of being seen? That taught me everything.
Kristen H McLeod writes Cultivated, a literary memoir of resilience and reinvention after life in a cult where Satan’s clutches were not—unfortunately—designer handbags. In addition to stories of breaking free, she shares essays on parenting, ADHD, and marriage, chronicling the messy, magnificent work of building a life on her own terms.
Journey to Self
By Renee Hills
It was a brave bid for personal growth. A sunny summer morning in 1996, Brisbane, Australia. I dropped my husband’s and my exit letters into a red post box. My heart thumped. My fingers were sweaty. A moment of courage after months of agonizing discussion.
This I knew: we’d been deceived from birth. The ‘Truth’ did not come from the time of Jesus. It was not the one true way. The silent rules kept me in a box of self-doubt and poor self-esteem. I have to grow. I have to grow. I had to do the unthinkable: leave meetings, step outside the fold, and almost, as a consequence, sever my most precious social connections with my sisters, brother, parents and others in my 2x2 tribe of origin.
I stepped onto a new landscape littered with discarded beliefs. The one true way to Heaven is a lie. Hell is not a place. Maybe God, too, is a fiction. What is my guide now? Is the universe meaningless?
Look what you’ve done. This is all your fault, screamed my internal critic. Confusion, anxiety, fear, and despair fogged my mind. I desperately looked to my fragile sense of self and a tiny whisper of intuition for direction in this strange new reality.
‘Worldly’ friends, parents from our daughters’ alternative school, helped me negotiate the initial internal chaos. One listened for hours as I tried to explain the weird world I’d just left and my emotional maelstrom. Another, too late, advised me not to throw the baby out with bathwater. She said the 2x2 rules were legalism. I was embarrassed to admit I’d never heard the word.
I read books on self-help, religion and philosophy. Some yielded brief insight glimmers. Wayne Dyer described attending a Unitarian church in one book. At a local fellowship, the simple candle lighting rituals touched me and the songs moved me to tears. I studied counseling and psychology. I learned more about the human condition, including my own, as a counselor.
Mindfulness meditation led the way to what teachers Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield call presence. In a regular morning practice, I accessed peace and calm. From this transcendent gift of presence, it was a natural progression to link with the Self of Internal Family Systems when I discovered IFS on YouTube a few years ago.
Self is that innate healing, loving, compassionate part of us, our birthright (original sin is a myth). Self can never be broken, damaged, or ruined even by the worst abuse, but it is often obscured by other parts of our psyche that have been hurt or abandoned. These parts can be helped to heal, take on new roles, or step back to allow Self to lead an integrated, functioning internal system. I’ve found IFS to be a compassionate, respectful, and effective therapy.
I have arrived at the place where I started. Full circle. Twenty-nine years of seeking meaning, only to find that what I was seeking all along was the Self, the very same essential part of our humanity that 2x2 imprinting denigrated and despised. I hope my story can help others short-circuit the process!
My delight now is to meet and understand my parts from a Self that is connected, calm, curious, and kind. To quote TS Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
is a writer, mama, and nonna. She writes about reconstructing the psyche through memoir, meditation, IFS therapy, and other discoveries - after being B&R and exiting the Truth, a high-control fundamentalist Christian sect. Follow her writing at Retruthing with Renee.🎶 ON REPEAT:
“Love Can Build a Bridge” – The Judds
Because healing isn’t just personal. It’s collective.
These six voices remind us that love—real love—asks nothing of you but to be yourself.
Don’t you think it’s time?
SHOUT OUT
Wildflowers Grow, A Healing Journey found me—or perhaps I found her.
That’s the beauty of Substack Notes: unexpected discoveries that feel like soul connections. It led me to this beautiful, powerful post by : A Love Letter to Survivors of Spiritual Abuse—on Easter.
Dearest Brave Souls, her words feel real and honest, the kind of truth that can only come from someone who’s been through it and come out the other side. It speaks to me not just on Easter, but every day. If you’re looking for a voice that knows what it means to heal and grow, I hope you’ll read her work.
Before I go further—if you’re new here, or if you’ve been reading for a while and find yourself resonating with this kind of honest, human storytelling—consider upgrading. Your support allows me to keep showing up, telling the truth, and doing this work. Thank you for being here.
ESH stands for Experience, Strength, and Hope—a phrase rooted in recovery circles.
Thank you for making me cry over my morning coffee (a good cry) 😿
This is a beautiful post, Kelly. Thank you so much for sharing voices of those who had been silenced. It means so incredibly much. ❤️🩹❤️