Religious Trauma, Cult Recovery & High-Control Groups with Hollyanna I Ep. 140

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hi, Warriors. Welcome to Beyond the Statistics. I'm your host, Ingrid. Last week we heard from a woman who recently left a single family cult. And today we're continuing that conversation about high control environments from a very different perspective. My guest, Holly Anna, was born into a high control religious group, the fourth generation of her family to be born into it. She shares what it was like growing up in that environment and ultimately building a life outside of it. We also get into Holly Anna's study of human behavior, the connection between body language and the mind, and an approach she developed called biocoding. And perhaps most importantly, Holly Anna is living proof that there can be a whole lot of life after abuse.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I'm excited to have this discussion.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, so this is a follow-up. Well, it's not a follow-up discussion. This is our first um episode. But last week I had an episode that went up about cults, and this is another story about that. Before we get into all of that discussion, could you share just a bit about yourself?

Growing Up With A New Personality

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yes. And you're right. Uh it is a story that stems from cults. And cults in this today's society are quite a fascinating subject to many people, aren't they? So I understand the interest. I myself grew up in what you would formally call a high control religious group, or informally called a cult. I was fourth generation born in, and so pretty much all my family friends, community, they were all cult members. And within that community, there's a lot of rules and control and ways that you have to be. So from a very early age, you are encouraged to adopt the new cult personality. So they even have a terminology for this, which is putting on the new personality, and your own identity is said to be inherently sinful or you know, inherently faulty. So from a really, really tiny child, you're taught that you are born bad, and that your personality is probably wrong, and that think the way that you think is wrong, and that you need to adopt this cult persona in order to be an acceptable person, which is a very difficult thing to do because it's one thing to control someone's behavior, but to internally control your own thoughts is a really difficult thing to do. So most of my life I grew up thinking I'm wrong, I'm bad, there's something wrong with me, because I didn't think the right thoughts. So not even just the behavior, I just didn't think the right thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

That's I d I had no idea that they started that when you're born into that kind of a cult. I I would think that would be something if somebody was coming into a cult as an adult or later in their life at some point, because everything that you've lived up until then, I could see someone saying was wrong. But to think that the way you were born is wrong, that's just I suppose that's a way to control you, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah. I mean, they had a talk not too long ago. It was after I left, actually. One of their governing body members, which is they don't have a single ruler, they have a group of rulers that they call the governing body. And one of their governing body members gave a talk where he was discussing this, and he was saying, you know, most of the time when we look at a newborn baby, uh, we look at this baby and we go, Oh, look at this innocent little thing. He said, What we should be thinking when we look at that baby is look at that little enemy of God because we're born enemies of God. And maybe we can just about become acceptable. So, yeah, that's the mentality that they are really conditioning you into from a very young age. Can you imagine what that does to the little child?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

That's horrific. That's how they keep you, though, too. Because so that also limits your ability to talk with other people because you're you're feeling so shameful for all the thoughts that you have in your own mind that I imagine you would be afraid to talk to anybody about that, too.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yes, exactly. So if you don't inherent if you're not born with their cult personality as your own personality, um, which I don't think many people generally are, because a lot of the ways that they encourage you to be, they actually go against your own natural human nature. So being, you know, thinking their way of thinking can be a struggle. And they know it's a struggle and they give you ways of dealing with that struggle. Um, lots of thought-stopping techniques. Um so a lot of people carry a lot of shame and inherent guilt, so that they kind of know that their personality doesn't line up to the cult personality. So they might behave in a way that is acceptable, but they inherently know they're not thinking things that are acceptable. And so you just feel constantly broken and shameful.

Shame, PTSD, And Discouraged Therapy

SPEAKER_01 6:23

There's a lot of mental health problems within that environment, and you'll find a lot of people who are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So is that allowed? I just I feel that anything, any kind of opportunity to help yourself, I feel would be looked down upon. But I suppose being medicated may make you more controllable as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah, medication makes people more compliant, so they don't have anything much to say about that, but they do have something to say about having therapy. And I remember at one point I um was suffering very badly with PTSD, so I was having nightmares most nights, panic attacks. I was um suffering with constant passive suicidality. So I would basically try to survive one day to the next by calling Samaritans at night at two o'clock in the morning and just saying, I just need to get through one more day, you know, because I had children and I didn't want them to bear the burden of losing a parent in that way and thinking, was I not enough? And they found out that I was having trauma therapy, which by the way, is not that effective when you're still in the environment. Because it's like trying to recover from being poisoned while you're still being poisoned. But you know, I was trying. Um, and they brought around a whole bunch of um information that they had printed off their own internal, internally generated information about how harmful trauma therapy could be to your spirituality, and tried to discourage me um from having this trauma therapy. And I think what they're in they're really ultimately worried about is that the therapist might find out that you're in a cult and try to um alert you to this fact and help you to understand that this religious environment is actually causing the trauma that you're having. And you know, there's a term for that which is religious trauma, but it's um I think that's what they're worried about. You know, they want to stop you from gaining access to any outside knowledge, and this is quite common in environments like this, it's not unique to religion. So you could have um let's say a narcissistic relationship where the partner will try to isolate you away from people who might say something bad about that partner. They might say, you know, I don't think that partner's very good for you. I think I didn't like the way they spoke to you. Um they don't want that, so they'll isolate those people away or discredit them um in some way, or make you afraid of them in some way, so that you don't gain perspective on the situation, then you stay with them and you don't leave. So it's not only something that comes in religion, it could be political, uh, it could be a particular community, it could be a company as well. I've seen it in corporations sometimes. And um yeah, in narcissistic relationships, they call that a cult of one, don't they?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah,

Defining Cult Dynamics And Information Control

SPEAKER_00 9:32

so okay, since you're talking about that, you and I had mentioned before we started recording that there is misconceptions about what a cult is, and that the term is used loosely and inappropriately. Same with narcissism, it can be also used loosely and inappropriately. But before we move on, can you just describe what are the actual um specifications for something to be classified as a cult?

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Yes. So that you might come across different classifications, but a cult will encompass certain uh distinctive traits and it will always have those traits. And one of the most important ones is that you will be prevented from questioning um the inherent doctrine or the narrative or the story, right? So if there's a particular narrative or story or doctrine, you are not allowed to question that, and you will be discouraged from reading or exposing yourself to things that are critical of that. And that's actually quite an important factor is information control. So, for example, um, in the cult that I grew up in, they would say you should only read what we um provide for you because we're providing the truth, we're providing the the correct things for you that will protect your faith. And if you read something outside, that might destroy your faith and then lead you to your own destruction. There's terms that they might use, you know, it's it's uh apostate material, so that you know, for example, that immediately discredits something. So let's say someone writes an article that is critical of the cult, they will immediately immediately say that's apostate material. If it's apostate material, that automatically discredits the material because you're saying the the person who wrote that wants to destroy your faith. So it's they discredit the the writer, and that happens a lot politically as well. So if I discredit the person who wrote it, it discredits what they wrote. And so you you don't read you wouldn't read it then and say, okay, well, maybe I don't like the writer, maybe the writer is against this, but actually what they said was true here. So then you just just it just throw away the whole article. So information control is a really important factor, and that is something that you will see politically, you'll see people shouting, oh, that that's fake news, um, that's this, that's the other. Um, and it happens on on all sides, it's not unique to one particular side. The other thing as well is about your ability to change your mind or leave that group. So if I left the group, which I did, then I would be shunned, which I am. So that again is a form of information control because if I leave the group, they can discredit me, they can say, uh, she is well, in my case, if anyone who leaves this cult, they say, you know, they're they have a diseased mind, they've been taken by Satan, they're worldly now. Um, now they are basically contaminated, and they'll contaminate you if you have any contact with them. That prevents me from being able to tell people who are still in maybe what happened to me, and um it keeps the they say it's keeping the congregation clean, and in a way it is, because it's keeping it uncontaminated from information that would that would otherwise corrupt their narrative, let's say. And again, that can happen politically as well. You know, you see people who voted a particular way who and then their family cut them off and they say, because you voted that way, we're not talking to you anymore, we're cutting you off, we won't have anything to do with you. So that we have terms in society don't mean cancelling, ghosting, shunning. Um these are all terms to say, because we don't like what you're doing, we're going to cut you off until you conform back to the narrative that we want you to uh work with. So these are really important. Um sometimes we talk about cults as having a single charismatic leader, but they don't have to. So everyone follows the one leader, but you could just apply that to a particular doctrine. So if you remove the leader aspect of it, um it's a particular script or story or a narrative or a doctrine that everyone has to read from, everyone has to follow, and you're not allowed to question. And there'll be controls on you know what you're allowed to say, so speak, control of your speech, um, control of your um your actions, maybe sometimes what you're allowed to wear, who you're allowed to speak to, um, who you might maybe who you're allowed to marry. So there's controlling your behavior basically. And if you step outside of that and you let's say uh I'm friends with someone on the outside or I date someone on on the other side of the fence, um, then that would be unacceptable within the cult environment. So you can see aspects of these behaviors around society, can't you? Not just confined to one uh religious environment.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Right,

Scripture Control And Snitch Culture

SPEAKER_00 15:07

which makes it relatable for those who have been in abusive relationships because those are the same kind of dynamics. Um, so yeah, I have a couple of questions, but one of them is you said they controlled what you could read. So yeah, I I know I was raised religiously, not in a not in a high controlled religious environment, but uh religiously and the Bible that we read, children were innocent. And so to be born as an enemy of God, did they like not have the Bible for you guys to read, or was it an altered form, or was it you just have to hear what our interpretation of it is?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yeah, I mean in the the Bible is open to interpretation. Um anything written is open to interpretation. Um I think that that's normal, and I think anything that's classified as a religion um in a genuine way would allow you um some freedom to interpret what you're reading in a way that's personal to you. A cult would not allow that, you have to accept their interpretation and only their interpretation. And so what most cults will do is cherry-pick um particular scriptures that support their doctrine. Um and anything that doesn't support the doctrine, sometimes they'll change the wording a little bit so they have their own translation of the Bible, which they can tweak wording so that it kind of directs back to their doctrine in a way that supports it. Or you know, some scriptures are just ambiguous and quite easy to direct towards what you want to say. So yeah, that it's it's quite easy to do um to sort of just twist things or angle things according to where you where you want the signpost to point. If the signpost is there, people can turn it. So yeah, they're they do have their own Bible, but that's that's how they that's how they uh use it as a form of control over their members. And you know, the Bible is not short of scriptures that are condemning that is true.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Yeah, that is very true. Do they encourage other members to uh report any kind of behavior that doesn't align with their doctrine?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Oh, absolutely, they they love a good snitching. Um they actively encourage members to report on other members because they say it's a loving thing to do, you know. You're you know, might use an analogy of like if you see them about someone about to step into the road, you know, you're gonna grab them and pull them back um so that they don't get hit by a car. And so they have like a I guess their own internal protocol, which is you know, maybe you go and speak to that person first, and if they don't listen to you, then go and snitch on them. But uh certainly that it's not that isn't always the case because people think for example, with women, um if uh if a woman is seen doing something she's married, you wouldn't go and speak to her, you would go and tell her husband. Um and there's been many occasions where you know perhaps uh someone didn't like the dress I was wearing, and so they would go and tell my husband what they thought I was wearing was um inappropriate or you know brazen or you know the color red is sinful or or whatever it is. And then I would he would have to talk to me and and uh I would get you know reprimanded by by my husband numerous occasions, you know, things like that happen. But yeah, they they do love they don't they do encourage it because it keeps again it's that control, it keeps control that people aren't stepping outside or you know doing things they shouldn't be doing.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

So

Recognizing The Cracks And Getting Out

SPEAKER_00 19:22

growing up fourth generation, being born into this environment and this being your normal from childhood, how yeah I'm and I'm sure you're probably not the only person who's ever internally questioned what was going on because we're not born, we are not born that way, like you mentioned at the beginning. How did you how did you get out? How did you start recognizing what was happening was not okay and what did you do to get out?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, well, as you said, I was not born with a personality that fit their doctrine at all. And I found that I just had a lot more nuance in my thinking than most people did. So they would more some people more easily accepted black and white thinking. Like everyone on the outside is bad and we're good. I found that very difficult to accept because the what I observed in people is that you could meet people that were really horrible but they were quite funny, or you could meet people who were uh not doing that well, but they were really intelligent, or you could meet people who were clearly in pain, but kind, you know, and so I I kept seeing this nuance and I I kept feeling like it must be more complex than this, surely. You know, how could your God judge this person who's in terrible pain and struggling and not doing well because of that when what they really need is support or what they really need is you know, patience. So I found it very difficult to get my head around and I don't think there ever was a time that I didn't struggle with that. Certainly with my own family, we had a lot of challenges within my own family. You know, I'm I ticked nine out of ten on the adverse childhood experience or and so I was exposed to a lot of challenges that you know were very harmful and painful. I just couldn't s I just couldn't see how God would would judge me as someone who he hated that was an enemy when I'd been through so much. And at the same time I had this other side of me condemning me because I had picked up the voice of the cult as well, telling me that I was this unacceptable person, that I was a burden, that I was broken, that I was wrong, that there was something wrong with me. So it was a very very difficult way to live. And there was it was always so full of tension. And I think the older I got, the more I was exposed to outside of my own family unit. And once I saw that it wasn't just my family, that there were other things going on outside, it got harder and harder to. tolerate because I kept feeling like I'm told that this is the loving environment, that we are the good people, that we are the the ones doing things correctly. But everywhere I look I see judgment, I see unkindness, I can see violence. And I just found it very difficult to tolerate. I used to go to towards the end I used to go to a one of their talks. I would listen for about 10 minutes or so and then I would run out and just throw up. Because my body was just literally rejecting what it was hearing and I I just couldn't tolerate it. I remember picking up my children and walking them out of their what they call Kingdom Hall. They don't call it a church walking them out of the Kingdom Hall because of what we were hearing in there where they were talking in graphic detail about things like pornography um what you're not allowed to do um but talking about it in a way that was completely unacceptable for much failed ears you know or violence showing videos like describing violence again like how everyone's going to be destroyed apart from us and demonstrate like showing this graphic violence on videos and I just uh I just could I just got to the point where I I just couldn't tolerate it anymore.

Shunning, Homelessness, And Smear Campaigns

SPEAKER_00 23:52

And you got out in that's your family your friends your whole life is within that system and how did how was that transition to get out?

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Yeah um well it was a it was a tough transition out I tried to make it work for a while I tried to find ways that I could stay which is what a lot of people do um I see a lot of women do that in challenging marriages as well they'll find ways to see if they can make it work because they know the devastation that's going to be caused by leaving and in the end I I I was at the point where I was so down on myself I actually felt like I was causing harm to others by being there and if I left I could leave um try to recover myself and make myself better because I did recognize that being there was causing me a lot of harm. My PTSD was just unmanageable and I thought I'll leave I'll recover and then I can go back so it's a bit like saying you know I'm black and blue and all my bones are broken. I'll go away and recover because then I'll be strong enough to go back and be beaten some more do you know what I mean there's like that kind of mentality and I'd been talked into stay I was in a challenging marriage I'd been talked into staying a number of times I tried to leave a few times and been talked back into staying and in the end I got out the way most people get out which is to self-sabotage and so I that's what I did. I I um had a fling uh self-sabotage and that what that does is it it's a clean cut and you're then expelled quite um rapidly and so literally overnight you know I had I had to leave my home um I lost my family you know they never spoke to me again say goodbye nothing just gone um lost the community lost my place of business my son and I were homeless for uh about nine months or so and I lost the relationship with my daughter as well which I was never able to get back that is horrible horrible I'm so sorry um but not not to dismiss that or minimize that that difficult um transition because that's that's horrifying and and that is even if it's not by definition a cult abusive relationships that's exactly why people don't want to leave there are all of those ties all of your support your children your family because you will quite potentially lose friends lose family when you do make that exit I've seen with um a lot of people who've left abusive relationships is with people who are very high in narcissistic traits uh they do cause a lot of damage to reputation before you've left so that right from day one to be honest um there'll be saying things that are kind of underhanded to people oh well you know she has a lot of problems what can you know I try I try my best what can I do um there'll be a lot of undermining comments or a lot of comments where they position themselves as this you know long-suffering person a kind of a martyr and they'll kind of insidiously destroy relationships with people around them so I've s seen people who have you know for example been um made out that um their partner had said something wrong and then like made a big deal in public about being hurt about something their partner had said so it's it's just this constant creation of a narrative that the narcissist is the victim and the other person is the villain and the perpetrator and so when that person finally leaves one of the things that they do just like the cult is they'll discredit the one that's left um so for example when I leave the cult or when anyone leaves the cult they're immediately discredited. So for example it was described to my son like this that he was told well you know when someone has COVID you know we want to isolate from them because they're sick and so we mustn't come into contact with them because they'll make us sick. But when they're better you know they can come back and we can associate with them again. So what he was being told is your mother is sick she's diseased and you know we want to limit contact with her I mean luckily he didn't listen but um that's the way that it's described and certainly I've heard similar situations with people leaving narcissistic relationships where that's exactly the same. They're discredited um so the narcissist is the one that has all the support and the person who has suffered in that relationship is ostracized by family and friends and and the community. And it's very difficult to speak out because as soon as you speak out about it um you you feel like you're the villain they've made you out to be because you're talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

You are so right they do lay that groundwork they reinforce it they can say things like well you know she's been acting a little bit strange lately. I've been really concerned they'll start that before you even say you're leaving because they can feel it. They they know that something's changing within you where you're becoming less compliant. So

Why She Studies Human Behavior

SPEAKER_00 30:02

something that you've done is you've you've studied a lot of behavior and the way people speak and that's become something that you've sort of really dove into and do you think that stems from your history definitely I grew up very fascinated by people generally my I had a uh sibling that was had some very severe behavioral problems and was very violent as well to the point where my mother and my sister and I we would have to lock ourselves in the room on a regular basis to try to um prevent ourselves from being harmed.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

And one of the things that my mother did with us is to teach us that this sibling with special needs like they're special they have difficult they have challenges they have difficulties you know we need to help them and show them compassion and so I grew up with this idea that that people who displayed behaviors like that were there was a lot more going on underneath that was more complex which is absolutely true right um and in some ways it's probably what contributed to my ability to really see nuance um but also for a long time it it also contributed to allowing myself to be in very close contact and in relationships with people who would also be quite harmful because I would have this compassion for them. But you know now when you bring it all together you you start to see a pattern across how how minds behave um and respond to different situations but also how how that relates to the body and how the body reacts to that as well because the way that I see humans is that we are a combination of two main intelligences. So mind plus body equals human rather than you know a mind with a meat suit and the body does have reactions and responses to the way that the mind is and and vice versa so either they're gonna be at war um or they're going to be very cooperative.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

So yeah there's it's uh I've had my I've had a very rich perspective on life and a very broad experience of the way people behave and because I was in some ways an outsider I was born into this cult but I was an outsider it puts you in this position of being an observer you know you're you don't you're not in the middle of things you're on the outside observing everybody else and watching people's behaviors and the interactions and that's that's certainly I think where I was well and that makes sense because your your mind and your body were at constant struggle for a long time of your life so what have you done with that that recognition of of patterns what have you developed I suppose yeah so having recovered from fibromyalgia and the PTSD that I was suffering from that experience alone just on its own um gave me a huge amount of information about how bodies adapt and respond and their c their capability from a very young age I did have this idea that the body was clever and was capable of more than we could than we possibly could uh access let's say and I was always really curious about how I could access more of it.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

I seemed to have I just had this idea there was more like there was there was something behind a door and there was more behind there and I I just needed to find the key to get to it. And

Biocoding And The Body’s Signals

SPEAKER_01 34:12

in my own kind of quest for recovery I I did I was I just ended up being my own one woman research project. You know I was both I was the scientist I was the participant and I was the one that kind of assessed the results of this and as I walked worked with clients I started to see similar patterns emerging in clients and when you put them all together you could see the body was really speaking its own language and it wasn't just this meat suit that had you know some healing capacity it was really intelligent and you'd watch the client speaking and the body would be saying something else at the same time and it formulated for me a very distinct language that I could read now when I started working with clients in this way I was getting very good results and I've worked out how I could trigger the body into having its own conversation and the conversations turned out to be incredibly reparative. So if the body got to complete a sentence um then a lot of other symptoms would drop or correct so you go the client would go away and you know they'd come up with their pain medication or their libido would return or they'd start sleeping again. And that was very interesting to me but I thought how is it that I'm doing this first of all and if this is something that's really useful how can I replicate this because it must be something that's teachable to someone else because otherwise it's kind of useless if I'm I'm the only one doing it. So I started to break down how I was doing it and what the mechanisms were that I would you I was using and how I was communicating with the body uh and what the body was doing and why the body was responding that way until I formulated it into you know a real uh therapy that was replicable and teachable. When you're saying the body would complete a sentence like what was the body doing that you could see well nothing happens in your body without movement you know it even a thought in your mind is movement from one neuron to another across the synapse. So because everything in your body happens through movement it makes sense then that you know any kind of recovery or repair also takes place through movement. Now this was an idea that was planted some years before when I was pregnant with my daughter about 18 years ago I plucked a book off my mother's bookshelf called What to do with your brain injured child by a chap called Glenn Domin who was a stroke patient physio but he started applying his um philosophy to babies that have been born with brain damage and were blind or deaf and when he used these movement patterns with these deaf or blind children they regained their sight or their hearing. So I was instantly intrigued about the relationship of movement and repair fast forward to when I begin observing clients in sessions as they're talking or as I was doing things with them you'd very often see the body twitching. So you'd see these little head tilts or a little cheek twitch or an eye twitch or a shoulder and you I could start watching these patterns until across clients you'd see the similar patterns repeating. So for example if I was able to bring the body back online what I call online what I really mean by that is that you're able to recruit bottom-up control rather than top-down control. So top-down control the mind is making rules for the body that it has to be restricted into bottom-up controls the body gets to make the rules and direct itself so to speak um so as I was doing that you'd see the body perform what I what I acutely call a boot up routine. So it would work from it at the peripheral first you'd see like finger finger fingers then the other hand fingers fingers fingers then the feet then the toes then the arms then the shoulder then the midline so it works from the peripheral into the proximal and it would it would look like to me almost like an electrician going around testing all the electrodes like is that on is that on is that on is that on it would do this until the whole body was covered and sometimes you'd see an area it was trying to do and it wasn't working. So I remember on one client for instance um she had uh breast cancer on her left side and it did this whole boot up routine except for the left leg. Now interestingly I had already noticed on this particular client she had atrophy on the ball of her left foot and muscle atrophy in a peripheral area is very often linked to um you know poor signaling in that area so that there's not enough signaling getting down and so the muscle begins to waste on that side. And I was really curious about this so I watched the body for a while and eventually right towards the end of the session it finally brought the left leg back online. It was the last thing to come online with her left leg. And I thought that's so interesting because that's the area that she has the muscle atrophy. As we progressed through sessions um gradually the tone started to come back on the muscle in that side I was very curious as to the fact that the breast cancer have been on that side because I'm always fascinated by the idea about why certain programs that we have installed don't run or the message shouldn't get through. So we have cancer cells in our body all the time but the body has a mechanism to deal with that called apoptosis and apoptosis is where the body detects um a cancer cell and it says to the cell right either you're going to need to repair yourself or you need to self-destruct and that deals with the cancer cell no big deal but with this with with certain people why is that not happening why do we have cancer if apoptosis is a program that we have pre-installed and so it was interesting to me that the signaling wasn't getting through properly on the left hand side and she had this muscle atrophy and that's the side she had cancer. So I'm not saying uh that there's any direct like a simple correlation but it was very interesting to me that those those things occurred um and my query about uh you know why why isn't that message getting through to uh signal the body to run that apoptosis program. This is absolutely fascinating did your clients know that you were studying them as they were with you was that part of their their therapy with you uh I I will often report observations so if if I see something um very often I will say um this is interesting this is what I'm observing and I'm curious about that and we don't have to read anything into it or you know come up with a you know diagnosis based on it of course it's not a diagnosis um but I might report on it sometimes I keep those things to myself and I just note them um and certainly I am an avid note taker I'm the kind of person that writes notes in my sleep that's no joke I've woken up in the morning and I've got oh that's very interesting what I thought in the night that is crazy. Yeah um that's been happening for many years but see I write notes absent mindedly and then I forget that I have made them and across about 18 months I had obviously been I had obviously started getting curious about these patterns that I was observing and I had been absentmindedly noting them. So I gone oh I must noted that that's very interesting kept the note but not not done anything with it. And then I can't remember how or why but at some point I I must have pulled two notes together and gone that's odd then pulled another one and I I spent an entire evening comparing all of these notes that I had made and it was a bit like collecting single pieces of a puzzle and going that's very interesting I'll pop that away and then all of a sudden having every single piece it seemed to put together the entire picture and it was a real eureka moment um I was so excited and I kind of got to work on this in a more structured way and eventually formulated and trademarked it into what I now call biocoding and it's a therapy I'm extremely proud of and I would love to take more credit for except that I feel like the body taught me well you you you listened at least you were a good student as the body was teaching you.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

Did you so once you recognized this and you would see the the rebooting process did you do anything to help facilitate that or did you just let it work its way through I think it it's really providing the environment and the opportunity to for the body to access that within itself one thing that gets in the way more than anything is the mind.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

And so I quickly worked out how to get the mind out of the way so I use a lot of hypnosis techniques actually to get the mind test Step down because otherwise, what happens is the mind will start controlling movements, or it will influence movements, or think that it has to perform, and so getting that out of the way was really important. And so I have a particular routine that I kind of go through with the client first. Even then, sometimes you have clients who their mind is so uh controlling and so rigid, um, that even then the body will you can see it's trying to access it's not getting any access. So that's when I started to uh develop exercises I can do with the client to start reducing the top-down control, increasing the trust between the mind and the body, that's really important as well. Because sometimes if they've been at war for quite a while, then neither has any trust for the other, and it's very difficult to get that cooperation. So building the relationship back up with the body and doing what I call either assisted um movements or priming movements. So I have I had a few clients where they were literally almost like they were paralyzed, you know, they just like looked like a dead body on the couch. Um, and with those clients, I started off with what I call assisted movements. So I'd already learned probably about 400 or so of these tiny movements that the body had showed me, and so I started making them on behalf of the client themselves, right? So I started to do these little tiny twitch movements, you know, little tiny movements for them. And that seemed to almost like a jump start to put the body back into action so you could you could bring someone into spontaneous movement through assisted. And the other one that I use is priming movements, so you get the client to start moving and keep the movement on repeat until eventually it became sort of absent-minded. So, you know, when you're moving in an absent-minded way where you're not really thinking about it anymore, and the movement's just going on its own, and then that's where you could kind of get the body to take over because their mind had sort of stepped down a little bit. So there's two different methods that I would utilize to bring them into spontaneous movement, but spontaneous movement was always the goal.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

I'm like blown away by this. Okay, so the patterns of speech, does that reflect what the brain is doing, or is that something that the body where does that fall in?

SPEAKER_01 47:13

Speech is a funny one, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 47:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 47:15

So um I do use some uh some talking in the re in what we're doing. If I find though if you get people to talk too much, um the body doesn't move as much. So you can get them to follow sensations. So like in somatic therapy where you allow the body to kind of show you a sensation, and then you go to the sensation, you have the client maybe describe it, um, what it feels like, you know, or it feels tense and it feels like a big lump of rock that's sitting on my body. And you can use that with some hypnosis techniques just to kind of get to the bottom of things that can be really useful actually, just to remove any limiting beliefs or any uh stored emotion or anything that is restricted and getting in the way of progress moving forward. And that is something that I use with clients, but I find that the best way is just to get them to relax a bit and maybe not feel like they have to say as much. And that's where the body will kind of take over.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Yeah, that makes sense.

Integration, Identity, And Final Encouragement

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Is this so with yourself? It it sounds like with you sharing your story and how I suppose you became an enemy of of your uh the program that you were raised in. Um do you do you feel you were more of a cognitive person? And do you feel like that you mentioned the fibromyalgia? Do you feel like that's what contributed?

SPEAKER_01 48:54

Um do you mean like more of a thinker?

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Yes, almost like that maybe your body and your mind were at war with each other or you were you were I don't know. Does it make sense what I'm asking?

SPEAKER_01 49:08

I I think so. Yeah, I I think my yeah, my own experience with being being at war with myself, um I think it definitely made me very aware of how multifaceted we are. So I I never felt like one thing, one person. Um because there was this war, you kind of split into different parts, um, which sounds a little bit um it sounds pathological, it's not pathological, but you become more aware of the the areas that are not cooperative or they're not in agreement. And because you become aware of them, you almost develop a strong meta-awareness of everything. So I can sort of see all of the different areas of what I'm thinking and how I'm thinking, and which which part of me you can almost personify it. Um a bit like the um therapy internal family systems. Have you heard of that? Yeah, so internal yeah, so the internal family systems is a model of uh psychotherapy which uh actually interacts with the different facets of your personality uh personified. So as if you know they are the the the gatekeeper or the the the mother or the you know the the victim or the whatever the different parts are. They've made a film um not too long ago, a children's film, which is an exceptional uh representation of that type of modelling called um Inside Out. Do you remember that film? Yes. Yeah, so the I I might have read this wrong, so don't quote me, but uh I I think the person that wrote it or the person that was involved in creating it had to study the internal family systems. So that's that's actually that movie is a really good way of thinking about the personality that we have these separate parts that are um either helping one another, incorporating or uh the well-functioning of a personality, or they're not odds, or they're at odds. Yeah.

unknown 51:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

So yeah, I think I was more aware of that within myself, definitely on a very conscious level. Um possibly more than most, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

I think I am similar. That is when I went into therapy. I've always goodness, I always spoke about my brain like it was a separate entity. And I I didn't really realize that until I was going into therapy and I was talking through it out loud with my therapist, and I was saying, well, my brain is this, and my brain's a funny place. And we would talk about a variety of different treatments, and I would tell her, just don't explain anything too thoroughly to me. I promise I won't look it up because my brain will stop anything from happening because I do tend to overthink. And so that was really a big recognition for me. And I do, and I actually I I at one point I did reference the inside out movie because I was saying, well, this part, this part of me is coming and saying this, and then there's this part of me that's coming in and saying this. And then there's almost like this peacekeeper person that's bringing everybody together and and calling, like you mentioned, the mother figure or the the parent figure of, okay, this is what we're going to do going forward.

SPEAKER_01 52:45

Yeah, well, the the interesting thing about that movie is that uh Joy, she was that character, wasn't she, that was trying to bring everyone together. But in a sense, she was almost she was also trying to control a particular narrative and a particular outcome, and that restricted the other emotions somewhat. And the restriction of those other emotions is what eventually caused that breakdown and the disruption of the system to the point where it had to rebuild itself from scratch. That's why it's such a a very good movie because it it's very cute and everything, but it's such a good representation of the suppression of the emotions in order to maintain a particular identity structure that is based on that it's based on something quite one-dimensional in a way, because if it was all joy, that's quite one-dimensional. Whereas when when you involve all of the characters, it becomes multidimensional, multifaceted. And one of the problems I see with clients a lot, and it does have an impact on their body, is that they're trying to maintain a specific identity, and when they themselves do not meet that identity, they try everything possible to arrange the environment or try to control the environment so that that can be met or it can be possible. But of course, it's it's it's not possible because we are not one-dimensional beings, we are multifaceted beings and we are complex. And to be human involves a wide variety of of experiences, and when we try to deny certain experiences, um it we start creating tension within the system, it's just it's just not possible. But this is what happens in cults, you know, they they try to uh cut off um very significant aspects of what it means to be human, and that creates a huge amount of tension in the system, and then that in turn creates pathology. So people end up mentally ill, but they don't just end up mentally ill because I've never seen anyone mentally ill who doesn't have some kind of corresponding physical illness, you know, whether that's autoimmune disorder or digestion or chronic pain. And these are the three really common ones, to be honest, um, are that are associated with that depression.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

I think you're absolutely right. And you can relate it also to abusive relationships where you will have joy, maybe trying to control the narrative and trying to almost rationalize that what you're going through is we can this is okay, or we if we change this a little bit, it won't be as bad. And then certainly when you get out of these situations of trying to normalize your new life, which is healthier, but then I think even comparing yourself to other people who have gone through the same thing. Well, this is how healing is supposed to look. So let me try to get everybody in my brain on board with this pattern. And we're just going to smooth things over and ignore these other pieces that are saying, like, I'm not feeling comfortable doing it this way. And you're absolutely right. It does end up pathological in in terms of chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

Yes, and I think it's very it's it's one of the most difficult things um for people who've been in environments like that. A lot of people that did get out are people who in some ways are are quite adaptable. Um because if you can survive that, it's because you it's because you are adaptable, you know. Um otherwise you you don't survive it, right? So and if you are adaptable, you will try to um chameleon yourself a little bit to fit into different environments. But the danger with that is that you can also suppress aspects of yourself and mask aspects of your aspects of yourself in order to kind of fit in and and get on with things. One of the things that I have really had to work on is this idea that um that didn't affect me, or that doesn't affect me. So when I was growing up, we went through some horrendous situations. And one of the things my mum used to say is, Well, that didn't affect you. You know, you're okay because we're resilient and we're strong and that doesn't affect us. And I internalized this conditioning. I know she meant well, she wanted us to be okay, so she told us we were okay. And having internalized that, there's this I would say a whole side of me. And in fact, when I investigated, it's it's a whole of my right side, it's almost solid with this idea of you just have to get on with things. Just get on with things. Like there's nothing you can do about that, so you just have to get on. You know, that doesn't need to affect you. The whole of my left side disagrees. So the whole of my left side, if I go, if I move from one side to the other, you can almost feel like two separate people really together like that. And so for me, it's uh one thing that I found extremely difficult is to integrate those two sides, and it has to be done very gently and very gradually and very carefully. You can't have an expectation that all of a sudden you're gonna have all of it flooding in because you you'd overwhelm the system. And so it's allowing time to have these this uh this gentleness and this understanding and this allowance for grief and the allowance of like maybe that wasn't okay, maybe you're not okay, maybe that's really sad. And um yeah, it's for most people, including myself, I'd say one of the biggest um hurdles to that is having the time to do that because like many people who have got out and survived, I'm very busy. Um partly very busy because I did get on with life and I did rebuild my life, and there's a lot of work involved in maintaining that. But there is another part I know I'm very busy because I probably do more than I need to do.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

I think what's important is for all of us, each of us, to pay attention to every piece of ourselves and to give space to each piece. So since you mentioned you being busy, I do want to uh let everybody know what you're up to and you know if there's ways that they can keep keep tabs on what you're doing. So let us know what you're doing and then drop any websites, socials, or anything like that so that people can keep up.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:02

Yeah, I love hearing from people. So I I do a lot of work educating. Last week I was speaking at the British Society for Lifestyle Medicine Conference in the UK, um, who I work quite closely with, on a team called the Voices of Lived Experience team. And that's a team that really bridged the gap between theory and lived reality of taking responsibility and using very natural lifestyle medicine protocols towards getting better health and recovery. So I do a lot of work with that. Um, I try to get around on the podcast circuits because I like talking to people, I like interacting with people, and I try and put bits and pieces out there. That's quite new that I'm doing that because it's really the first time that I sort of stepped into the uh the limelight and allow myself permission to speak about my experience. And uh obviously I have a website which is www.com. You can find me Hollyanavellicour on Instagram and on Substack as well. But yeah, just just ask questions because I'm always happy to answer.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:15

Um, this is so exciting. I don't want to keep you very much longer. So, in closing, and actually I would love to chat more with you in the future, but for today, in closing, do you have any parting words of wisdom or encouragement that you would like to leave with listeners?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:31

Yes, you are way more capable than you realize. And if I could encourage you to cultivate one skill that will set you up to be very powerful in the future, it's to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:52

That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Hollyana, for sharing your story and joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:57

It's really lovely to be here. It's lovely to meet you as well again, teach you again in Gregory.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Thank you again, Holly Anna, for joining me today, and thank you, Warriors, for listening. You can find the links Holly Anna was referring to as well as her Beyond the Statistics profile in the show notes. I will be back next week with another episode for you. Until then, stay strong. And wherever you are in your journey, always remember you are not alone. To learn more, explore episode resources, browse the collections, or register as a guest, visit Beyond the Statistics Podcast.com. If today's episode meant something to you, please share it with someone who may need it. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and follow Beyond the Statistics on social media. Beyond the Statistics is a.5 Panoy production. Music written and performed by Tim Crow.