what do you snemean? i had no needs or wants or desires or goals outside of what teen mania told me that i had. a good way to put it would be to be a soul murder. that may be extreme but i think that s a good way of defining it. when i think about who i was before teen mania, it s it s almost like i m in mourning and that s part of my own sort of recovery process, 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.
you know, how old were you when you first heard about teen mania? when 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 on my own. how did you become involved in it? how did you hear of it? acquire the fire, i went with my youth group from the time that i was a sophomore through senior year. so i was used to it, looked forward to it every year, would wear my wrist bands for like months after ward. i went to it when i was 13 and didn t think about it again until i went to an atf when i went my senior year and so it was pitched to be like, hey, find out god s calling on your
i just had a lot of avoiding symptoms. i can t stomach a worship service anymore. it s not like anything bad happened in worship necessarily but it just reminds me of that and i can t stomach it. i m just looking at the check list and thinking, yeah, di do 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 what it was. the purpose of esoal is to create an environment that is safe and pushes people physically where they are beyond and emotional. by that i don t mean we don t waus people to have problems after esoal.
but in terms of the thought of process reform, all eight of them were active and are active at teen mania. great. it pisses me off that i fell for it all. is that your fault? no. no, it s not. i think the one thing that we re all guilty of is wanting to be good people, wanting to be good christians and wanting to help other people. yeah. that s what we re guilty of. they took that and used that against us and there s no reason for us to feel. yeah. bad about that. exactly. we were just kids. this is a lot to swallow, isn t it? yeah. but it wasn t your fault.
jesus, quite honestly. there are things that don t teach followers of christ, being known as those who are identified with him, then we need to be able to go, you know what? not everything in this culture is going to be good for me and it s like, it s like candy with poison in it. it really looks good but it s going to kill you. robert lived and wrote really the basic book. in that book he described what he called the eight conditions of a thought invoking environment. we re going to see if teen mania met those conditions at all. if they did, you can call it thought reform. you ve been through thought reform. you ve had that done to you.