E67 She Thought She'd Left. A Panic Attack in Costco Proved She Hadn't. | Susan Stirling

She thought she had left. She had walked away from the church, built a career, created a new life. Then a panic attack in a Costco in the early days of the pandemic stopped her cold — and told her the truth. She had left the building. But the building had never left her.

Susan Stirling is the author of Velcro Kisses: Prophecy, Trauma Bonds, and Reclaiming the Narrative. Her memoir traces a journey that begins in childhood — growing up in the Canadian Rockies with a mother who became born again, attending house churches in the early 70s where end-times prophecy and rapture anxiety were the backdrop of ordinary life.

From those early years, Susan learned to split herself in two: a spiritual self driven by fear, and a normal self that got on with living. That split would follow her for decades.

The book moves through a frightening solo trip to Australia as a teenager with no plan and no hostel booked, arriving at a racehorse ranch with every internal alarm screaming and no language to act on it. It moves through the pull of a large group awareness training and the psychological fracture that followed. It moves through 25 years inside a prophetic church community, where Susan led a successful dance ministry, built a business fuelled by Rhema words and prophecy, and slowly lost access to her own discernment. From the outside, her life looked like a testimony. From the inside, she had almost no autonomy at all.

What Susan and Anne explore in this conversation is what so many people discover only in hindsight: leaving is step one, not the whole journey. The real work of deconstruction often doesn't begin until years later — triggered, in Susan's case, by a global pandemic, a supermarket, and a heart that finally said enough. Through EMDR and the practice of building what she calls a coherent narrative — taking scattered scenes and putting them in order so the brain and body can finally register that it is over — Susan found her way to something she had been looking for her whole life. Not transcendence. Not breakthrough. Just herself.

This episode is for anyone who left something and thought they were fine. For anyone who grew up with fear-based religion and still feels its weight. For anyone whose internal alarm system went off and they had no language for what it was saying. You are not alone. And you did nothing wrong.

Find Susan on Instagram @seeingsusanstirling or Substack @seeingsusanstirling

Resources mentioned:
Velcro Kisses by Susan Stirling — available on Amazon and wherever books are sold
Rachel Bernstein's resources and Healthy Healing group https://ilumn8.life/op/lgat-recovery-group/
A Practical Guide to Life After a Cult by Chris Shelton https://ilumn8.life/op/what-now-book-chris-shelton/
Beyond the Line Studio (Patreon): https://www.patreon.com/cw/BeyondtheLinesStudio

Confronting the Line is dedicated to the safe and ethical practice of personal and professional development. confrontingtheline.com

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/BeyondtheLinesStudio

Transparency and funding: https://isthisacultbook.com/confronting-the-line-pod/

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(70)

E73 | 50 Years Treating Trauma and Mind Control — A Therapist on Where Self-Help Crosses the Line

Susan Pease Banitt has spent nearly fifty years as a trauma therapist, including decades working with survivors of mind control and trafficking. In this conversation, she turns that clinical eye on th...

29 Syys 1h 23min

Getting Clear: A Preview from Beyond the Line

This episode is a sample from Beyond the Line, the companion space to Confronting the Line.Over the next few months, Beyond the Line is running a series on the clichés that show up all over self-help ...

27 Syys 15min

PART 2 | Inside a High-Control Coaching Culture: Who You Surrender Your Agency To (E72)

AUDIO FIXED - PART 2 OF 2: In Part 1, Garry Norman was told to erase what he filmed. In Part 2, he and Anne Peterson ask how a culture teaches good people to look away.CONTENT WARNING: This episode di...

21 Syys 33min

E71 Inside a High-Control Coaching Culture: What One Staffer Saw — and Was Told to Erase (Part 1)

CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses psychological and verbal abuse in a workplace and coaching setting, including a training exercise involving simulated strangulation, and references to historica...

14 Syys 53min

E70: Jen Coached People 30 Hours a Week for Free and Called It Integrity — 17 Years Inside Landmark

For seventeen years, Jen Coken was a Landmark seminar leader, coaching people thirty hours a week for free, leading sessions with a 103-degree fever, and calling it integrity. It took her more than a ...

6 Syys 54min

E69 30 Years Inside Transformational Coaching — Then She Started Asking Where the Guardrails Were

For thirty years, Vera Sheranova has stood inside the rooms where "transformation" gets sold. First as a language teacher, then as the person doing live, unrehearsed simultaneous interpretation of a h...

24 Elo 1h 15min

E68: 11 Years Inside a Buddhist Community: A Cult Researcher on Spiritual Abuse and Trauma-Coerced Attachment

A cult researcher spent 11 years inside a Buddhist community, rising to her teacher's inner circle, before a spiritual crisis broke it open.CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains open discussion of sp...

9 Elo 1h 16min

SPECIAL: Nobody Taught Us How to Keep Our Minds Safe — Until Now

Anne Peterson and Chris Shelton — author of What Now: A Practical Guide to Life After a Cult — are teaming up for a 21-week workshop designed for anyone who has ever found themselves in a group, relat...

28 Kesä 22min