kind of thing? that s why i say honor academy is not for everybody. beating your body, according to teen mania, would be to ignore any discomfort from, like, exercise. basically, if you re not beating your body and making it your slave, you re not a good christian. all of that stops you from critically thinking what are really my needs, what are my desires, what does got want for me in this situation? the thing is dave hasz says you have to think critically. think critically. so it was very confusing and critical. it was like, be a critical thinker but follow us. don t question anything. right. we re trying to train young people to think critically. some of the ways we do that, for example, anytime i teach, i tell the young people don t just listen to what i say and think that it s true. you need to think about what i m saying, you need so say is it in the bible what i m saying?
have some of these symptoms. i think it s the whole avoiding the thoughts. like even the thought of teen mania. i think i m just now realizing that, that that s what it was. the purpose of esoal is to create an environment that is safe yet pushes people physically where they are beyond and emotional. by that i don t mean we don t want people to have problems after esoal. but in terms of the process of thought reform, all eight of them were active and are active at teen mania. great. it pisses me off that i fell
inside this broken, messed up kid, just do it to them. if you could just change them the way you changed me, their life would be a million percent better. educating people is the first step on the road to recovery, learning how this happened, you know, how they did it. that s the first part of it. you know, how old were you when you first heard about teen mania? the first acquire the fire i went to i was 18 and i actually got saved. that s really pretty much the classic age for recruitment into groups like this because, you know, it s right at that on the cusp of, i m about to go out
how are you? i m good. how are you? you doing okay? so far, so good. all right. cool. i left teen mania 12 years ago, and the first six or seven years coming out of teen mania there was a lot of turmoil, a lot of confusion, a lot of condemnation. and i started to get into therapy after a couple of years and started to work through the issues and really dig and go through the recovery process. and the last five years are i haven t really thought about teen mania all that much, i was working and got married. and then a friend of a friend got me to go to a cult seminar, about how cults work. and i thought that s interesting. i ll go and listen. i was really surprised that what they were describing was what i experienced and the recovery process and the symptoms of coming out of a cult life were all things i had gone through. and that was a real light bulb moment for me.
when i think about who i was in high school and before teen mania, it s it s almost like i m in mourning, and that s been a huge part of my own sort of recovery process, is this idea of grieving for who i was, because so much of who i was i feel was taken away from me or in some cases suffocated to the point where i just didn t think that that part of who i am was ever going to come back. when i m doing things that are going to cause problems that was ten years of my life, you know? all of my 20s.