The Healing Is In the Pain

An astounding Polaris Project study on needs of survivors of human trafficking had us asking if adults who were born into cults and those who were trafficked have similar needs. Join Whisper and her trusty sidekick Jemima as they discuss the study, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the stigma surrounding "big stories". You know, the ones that make the room go quiet.

Transcript

Welcome to Butterflies and Bravery. I am Jemima and I'm here with my dear co-host Whisper, who has a cough today, , and yesterday and the day before and probably tomorrow.

poor thing. She hasn't had a cough forever. So now all the coughs for the last 10 years are catching up to her and giving her a big bomb cough.  . I'm pretty sure I probably did pick it up in the hospital, had a bit.  I better Rough week last week cuz we didn't put out an episode last week.

Yeah. Yes. Because Whisper was in the hospital. I was in the hospital and doubled over in pain,  and then consequently drugged up. . Yes. You were pretty loopy when I called you.  As soon as they knew what I had, they went straight to the  Dilaudid, . Yeah. And I was looking it up and

it's way stronger than even morphine. And I've always thought that morphine was like the strongest pain killer at shit like, man

  But yes. I survived yet another stint in the hospital. My body trying to kill me.  pancreatitis? Is that what the official diagnosis was? Yeah. But just like  the last time I had it, , they believed it was a complication from a surgery, but they did the same thing, all the tests and  nothing's showing up like inflamed.

 Never ran a fever, . They've  diagnosed it  based on  my blood,  and , the first time I had it they told me I had a  high white count.  A really high white count. And this time I had. Really high lipase. But they did an ultrasound, they did the CAT scan, they did an mri, , and the doctor  he's the doctor of internal medicine, which I always thought that was funny. Even as a kid, internal medicine isn't all of medicine internal.

Um, ,, topical

But he was like, yeah your scans are  showing nothing  your pancreas your liver,  everything's healthy. . So I'm one of the 15% of people that, I forget the word for it, but it's  basically  undiagnosed, no reason whatsoever. And I'm like probably it could have to do with 20 years of basically being a prisoner of war.

Yeah, exactly. That could probably be   what it might be. ,  today we're going to talk about a study that was done by Polaris. Yes. It's called the polaris project.org. They are the organization that manages and runs the National Trafficking hotline  service here in the United States.

 It's an 800 number  a free number that anyone can call , to ask for help or report trafficking. And in the human trafficking world, a lot of  the data that gets processed or that gets looked at tends to come  from that hotline. Cause,  they're getting the calls from everywhere.

   . We've talked about the need for programs, the need for help, the need for support for survivors, and because I work in a nonprofit anti-human trafficking organization.   We work with survivors of the more, quote unquote traditional. Type of trafficking that people think of. Most people think of sex trafficking, but there's also labor trafficking.

There's organ trafficking.       I guess in our case you would call it cult trafficking. . 

So what Polaris did is over the course of , a year and a half actually, they gathered survivors of human trafficking, both labor and sex trafficking, and did research and surveys for as many survivors as they. Possibly could.

It was word of mouth project. So  as far as is it all encompassing? Yes and no, because not everybody knows about, the National Trafficking Hotline and the  the polaris project.org  but the people who do know, who have been out of trafficking, do know. They ended up with almost  500 survivors that participated in the survey, and it's, to date the largest and most significant  report that's ever been done on.

what are the needs of survivors of human trafficking? And in doing my work and going through it,  when I pull down the report  I'm looking at the responses and they're key findings. And, I don't think that there's any thing that runs as close  to our experience than trafficking survivors.

Because,  you have prisoners war but as far as starting life over.   it runs very close  in parallel because these survivors,  when they get out,  they're out on the street. It's not like there's programs for them to, give them housing or  have jobs lined up for them. Nope, nothing. Stop, stop p trafficking. So then go figure out what you're supposed to do now without any help.

So the need has been very big  and .

In reading through the stats and the findings that they had most of the study came back , very similar to us, like what our greatest needs are, what the greatest needs are mental health,  financial literacy or  help with getting out of debt education, job searches, that sort of thing.

,  there was almost no one who said, yes, this program helped me get out. Nope. They got themselves out . What was interesting about this is it makes it very clear that the real fight for human trafficking, , if we're gonna talk just straight up human trafficking in the United States, the issues, or at anywhere in the world actually the issues of human trafficking alone.

Not having to do with us as a cult, not having to do with anything else. Just the labor and sex trafficking, human trafficking,, 80% of the programs are set up for the rescue missions, like getting the people out. But the truest vulnerabilities are  before  and the directly after, very much like us.

Yeah. 

 Everybody wants to, go and be the rescuer because that's flashy and , I'm your knight on the white horse riding in to save you. Like that's, everybody loves it. Save the children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But,  the percentage of kids that are trafficked by their own families is more than half well, more than half, well, more than half.

, I mean, it's like they just keep putting band-aids on band-aids, on band-aids, on band-aids, and are not training the infection whatsoever. And I feel like that's  a similar situation that we have when we walk out into the world.  of we're just slapping bandaids all over ourselves.

trying to, , cover up the places that we're wounded and.

at the same time trying to figure out how to treat the infection,  if the devastating numbers from , this report   were things like employment status

 The annual household income in the United States.  26% of the general population sits at less than $25,000 a year of income, and this is household income by the way, which is  poverty that's, what is that $2,000 a month ? . so 26% of the American General American public get less than $25,000 of in income a year, but of human trafficking survivors, 43%.

Wow. , once they're back out into the workforce and back out into the regular  employment status, 43% are making less than 25,000. Wow. A year. , when you jump up to the next, tax bracket,  from 25,000 for income between 25,000 and 50,000 a year 16% of the population fall into that and only 30%

of survivors.  So you're seeing like on the low end, right? 25,000, you got 26 versus 43 way, way more that are under 25. Then you go to the next block up, right? 16% of the nation is making that income.

But still 30% of human trafficking survivors are making that but the next jump you make,  everything shifts and from , 50,000 to a hundred thousand a year, 25% of the population make that much, which is actually a lot, but only 21%. Of human trafficking survivors do. And then for a hundred thousand dollars or more, and this is household income  for a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, which is frankly what you need to get by sometimes in the United States is 32% of the population make that and only 6% of human trafficking survivors do.

So the disparity in that is pretty incredible. Yeah.  In my work in, in the job that I do, this is what gets discouraging for me because  we are trying to help get these survivors back into the workforce or into the workforce for the first time, depending on whatever their situation is.

but there's just, there's a lot of stigma around it. And I think this is,  where we divide a little bit from what human trafficking survivors are dealing with, labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and then, cult trafficking.  Of that 40, what was it,  43% of survivors who are making under 25,000, within the first two years of them getting out, 70% of survivors are making that.

So for the first two years of getting out of their, trafficking situation, 70% of these survivors are making under 25,000 a a year. And  if they've gotten out over seven years ago, , 29% are still making $25,000 a year. So that's,  what do you call it?

Like the

The poverty wheel.  It's just keeps going around and around, and these people, to stand strong and not go back into a work that even though you were being exploited, gave you money that takes a lot of strength to sit there for seven years at 25 k a year.

But that's, I think where things are a little bit different for us because  I've never done the demographic in the cult but the majority of cult ex members that I know of are,  majority of us are white. Would you say anecdotally, anecdotally, we have that privilege  and then  we don't necessarily have that stigma attached to it  

it's like wearing the scarlet letter, right? , just in general the world sees you as one way as soon as you say you're a survivor. . Yeah. That's why some people never tell anybody, I guess, right? Yeah.  And then we get stuck back and,  perpetrating the whole sort of story over again, because we're not talking about it.

 We shame the victims. We shame the survivors. Yeah. And who knows solutions better than the survivors themselves. So by shaming survivors, we're compounding the problem, trying to silence people. And that is something that we deal with a lot as ex-cult kids, is that shame them into silence.

sometimes it comes from, within our own community of the whole, like, why don't you just get over it? Kind of a silencing or, sometimes it can come from our family. And a lot of people that are like, don't rock them out,

but, The things that start leaking out in your life when you do this, that you're gonna end up paying for it in the long run? One way or another. Yes. It's reminds me of  what Brene Brown said, if you don't spend a reasonable amount of time dealing with your emotions, you're going to spend an unreasonable amount of time picking up the pieces.

right? Yeah. I was, I thought that was like, oh yeah, actually that's a very good, and it's  same thing, right? Absolutely. Spend a reasonable amount of time. And again, this is where I think  we do differ because we come out dropped into a place , that we don't know and have to figure out our own way to thrive and, rebuild ourselves basically.

But

this kind of goes back a little bit to ,  what we talked about on this podcast before of what makes. , some abused children, take certain directions in their life. And then , what are those ingredients that can point them in one direction or another?   In Idaho they have this thing called the Idaho Industrial Commission. And they basically check that worker's comp and everybody is doing their job, apparently. Okay. So the lady comes over here and then asks me a bunch of questions and then goes to my workplace and asks them a bunch of questions and then talks to worker's comp.

when the lady was here was talking to her about my cult stuff a little bit, and she said that when she was in school for her dissertation, she did a study on that exact same thing, why some kids turn into abusers  and why others' become, More kind and empathetic and whatnot.

, and it came out, she said the exact same thing that we said was, it has to totally to depend on who you relate to, whether you relate more to the abuser or whether you relate more to other people.   So I thought it was interesting that she did the study and came up with the same conclusion.

Yeah. I was like, yep. That's interesting.  And it shows too, from our experiences , a lot of people that were removed from others  or the oldest child, and then a bunch came younger.

Those were the ones that tended to relate more to their abusers and the adults.  Instead of the protectors. Like what a lot of us became. Yeah, even kids that have come out of  the long-term foster care situations where they've, been together for long periods of times they,   end up unfortunately   and the juvenile system because of poverty.

But as far as  the protective side of things,  Yes.  Very similar thing too.  They usually tend to try to protect other people.  It is interesting. Yeah.

Because the stats from the human trafficking  report are really  really bleak. So here in the United States there's this thing called  ACEs, a c e, and it's, it stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. And it's 10 different types of things that could happen,  basically 10 horrible things, that you had to deal with as a child.

And a lot of health professionals and , even medical doctors , will ask.  someone about their childhood and, , to fill in the ACEs, and the higher number of ACEs that you have, supposedly, the more likely you are to have all these problematic things. I know  I've gone through the ACEs and I have all 10 of them, eh,

Me too. And probably  a lot of us can say that.  And again I keep going back to that, we're just like a whole new fucking breed. We're just a new breed of people,   

so  the human trafficking survivors, when they asked them about their ACEs 83% of them lived in poverty. 96% of them dealt with abuse, physical, sexual and emotional. 93% of them had drug abuse or mental health issues in the home.

93% of them had another family or household instability.

So the numbers on there  they don't give the percentage for all 10 of the ACEs, but then the numbers on there are just like  incredibly high. Incredibly high for that. And it's very easy to look at that outcome and say this is what you're destined for.

Yeah.

Another big, funnel into the human trafficking world, unfortunately is the juvenile justice system. Yeah. And the child protective services or, foster care.

The percentage are in the eighties and nineties  of the kids who were either fostered or in the juvenile justice system.

And the thing that's interesting about that is

there's some conversations or some talk

in different arenas about the tti, right?  So TTI is troubled teen institutions and they're were these camps, right? That kids would get sent off four months to years at a time that were just horribly abusive in every single way.

And  they were also being trafficked and. .,  again, it goes back to the coercion.  How do we take this information and create laws, create, you know, safeguards, create labels  so that there's a place to go to ask for help, whether it's the after help or the help getting out, whatever it might be, yeah.

   These are the top 10 needs   in ascending order of survivors when they first got out, when they very first exited.

The number one was accessing behavioral or mental health services with providers that understand my trauma. Yeah. Sound familiar? , . mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . . Two was finding people I trust that care about me and could help me. Three, finding a safe place to stay. . Four. Getting a stable living wage job. Five.

Getting a job that is a good fit for me. Six. Accessing a healthy, supportive community. . Seven. Accessing quality trauma informed medical services.  eight is repairing relationships with safe friends or safe family members. Nine, dealing with others who stigmatized or shamed me for being exploited or abused.

And then number 10 was getting an education or job training. Now when I say that it was number 10 on the list  there's percentages that the people said that the, the survivors said that they needed, and getting an education or job training was still 60% of traffic survivors needed help with that.

 That's the 10th,  in succession it's still like 60% of them needed that help. And then what was interesting is they asked them what is your,  biggest needs now currently, I think anybody that was over five years out or something  , the top 10 reported needs for them currently was, number one, accessing behavioral or mental health  services with providers that understand my trauma.

 Number two was accessing quality trauma informed medical services. Three, paying off debt for finding people I trust that care about me could help me. Five, getting a job that is a good fit for me. Six, establishing or repairing credit. Seven. Managing chronic or long-lasting health issues. Eight.

Accessing alternative therapies such as art, music, et cetera. Nine is accessing a healthy, supportive community and 10 was dealing with others who stigmatized or shamed me for being exploited or abused

So what jumped out at me immediately,  was.  I could sit there and say every single one of these,  every single one of them. Yep. That was exactly like the same means I had when I first got out and yeah.  All of the percentages are way less. They're not like up in the , seventies, eighties, sixties, seventies, and eighties percent that need help.

After the five or seven years.  It's still like 39% needed. Want mental health help?

There's all these babies out there, just trying to deal with the trauma on their own. Yeah. Looking for help, looking for communities. . That's why I'm excited about building a more inclusive community of survivors. , yeah. From many different, from many different cults or any other type of extreme, coercive, controlled environment.

Yeah.

  There's a lot of things that are different for us then from traffic survivors but,  some of the basic needs  those are still there at whatever level that we're able to access them or not? It's still there.

They have a table here of the most valuable sources of support and then a table of the most harmful sources of support. The most valuable sources of support at the very top was my own  resourcefulness, . Second is counseling and therapy. Third is other survivors.  and then , it goes on.

And then I think way down number nine was a faith community. Now the most harmful sources of support, number one talk was an intimate partner. Number two was family number three, faith community. So that's interesting. There's a lot of programs that,  churches wanna run and stuff, but  that's probably why that number is up there  on the helpful list.

But it's also way up there on the harmful list. . I think we'd agree with that as well. Yeah, for sure. , I certainly do.

  The barriers to achieving economic stability, that is something that they deal with and I think all of us have had to deal with in a lot of ways, because that's one thing that survivors have. They'll come out of their situation that maybe they've been in since they were 12 or 13, and they don't have bank accounts, they don't have credit cards, , some of them don't even have identification, and so they're running around trying to do that as well.

 Which is another  very similar,  story  that we've seen in ourselves, that we've had to, deal with. And , it's been especially difficult in financial institutions because , there's the things you need to have a bank account,  you have to have money to meet the minimum balance.

You don't have a personal, so you can't open a bank account. Bank account fees,  all that type of stuff.  It can feel  insurmountable to a survivor and they end up defaulting sometimes to the emergency services, which.

Unfortunately, the more you access emergency services, the deeper you end up going down the rabbit hole. 

True. That. , their conclusions, their findings was that

the existing systems , that are supposed to both prevent trafficking and support survivors are not working. And in every direction they're confronted with barriers to achieving financial stability. That's right. 

But again  it's the same story that we face  , you know, like we're our own, rescuers Mm-hmm. , but then where do you go from there? Yeah. that's the journey that a lot of us end up on and have difficulty with, have struggles with. I remember when  we were here in the States and somebody that we knew from Thailand they had an American father, but they'd been born overseas. Because they were born as the cult  and then they'd had a child born. Overseas, and

Being able to get a citizenship for that child was like jumping through a million hoops. , I remember trying to help with a few of the situations and it was bad because  the parent can't, be there to produce their ID to show that I'm an American citizen, which they can't, because in some cases they're still back in the cult.

They're not gonna fucking help you  , if they don't have that, you can access  school logs and that kind of a thing. But for us, where is that? . What? I would never, I would have no clue where any of my relatives went to school, or actually, , I wouldn't even know what city most of them lived in or state.

 

I would be interested in doing a survey like that.  for us, , what was it that we needed the most when we first left? What do we need the most now? , what our current situation is. That'd be really interesting see  uh, study on that. Yeah,

true. It's, It's so weird that there's such a stigma out there about survivors because, almost to a fault, they're resilient  , to a fault, are resilient, usually . If you need something to  happen, ask a survivor because that's the very nature of the way they lived is in surviving, but.

people still get scared of the big story. It's

like that silence that comes into the room after , you make a joke or you've asked something about, your friend's dad, and they're like, oh yeah, he was murdered  or young himself in Mike Garage. And so everyone freezes  . And sometimes it feels like that when you're telling your story, whatever it might be, whether it was, like actual, sex trafficking or human trafficking or, coming out of a cult, surviving on your own, trying to tell people, they're like, I'm sorry, what?

You remember that I was in that

uh, it's a Business development group for a while. Yeah. And Anyways, long story how I got involved in that and , why I was in there.  It was so weird being in that group.

Cause it wasn't just there was a wide range of experiences.  They were almost all, they're all wealthy women. I was the charity case, right? Like a kid that gets the scholarship  to the private prep school, like that was me. And anytime I open my mouth to talk about anything

that the response was , I don't know what to say to you.  Of course, they always come back with the whole like, oh my God, you're brave, blah, blah, blah. But, after a while, like it's just,

 if you don't wanna hear that over and over again you want somebody to say, it doesn't matter where you're from, coming to our community.  That's  literally  what we're waiting around to hear. Yeah.

And it's probably a lot like that too for people that have had  tragic accidents. Accidents or big losses or deaths or whatever, some big tragedy trauma. It's so common.  Trauma is so common  everyone gets exposed to trauma at some point in their life, but everyone is so afraid of it.

Yeah. So afraid of it.  Very true. I read this thing the other day and the thing that stuck in my head was  the healing is in the pain. And I was like, huh. But the point of it was that basically, you have to feel the pain.  You have to know the pain.

You have to sit with that to be able to find the healing. But it is so scary and everyone's  so afraid , to go there.  That's why we latch onto to all these different things like, heal me this way, heal me that way. Let me focus on this. Let me focus on that.

whatever it is we end up chasing, like  stroke, the furry walls, what's that movie? Get 'em to The Greek where she's like, anything can be your heroin, yes. Anything in the world can be heroin. Yeah. And sometimes that's a little bit like what we do. Yeah. Whether anything not pouring ourselves into a partner or a job or a project of constantly running from having to deal with our trauma.

Anything not to hurt . Yeah.  I do it too.   There was a few really   keystone things , that I would say  was a big leap in my healing. There was lots and lots of little things for sure.

And that's always been what I will tell anyone is  always focus on the small things, the little steps, little ways forward. But there were a couple of big things that I was able to let go of. One of them was pretty much just surrounding my family when I finally realized stop hoping or wishing or having any expectations whatsoever for their love, for their, remorse for anything.

Literally drop them. , that was fucking liberating. But the other one was laying go of going back to something. Now I know we talk about like , as  kids born into a cult, we don't necessarily have a  before our childhood trauma. . But we came out some of us, guns  blazing, right?

 We just fought our way out, fought our way through  and there was  our trauma when we were in the cult, but then once we got out  we spent so much time  in survival mode,  over the course of the years we faced. , different traumas and different things.  We've told some of our stories and so much of my focus on my life, actually even though I didn't have a, before,  I still thought that I had to find it.

 There's this place that I have to go back to, like the innocence or the knowing or   there's this place I have to go back to, as in unlearning all the things that have been programmed into me. And while there's an element of that, certainly that we can.  when I finally was like actually  there's not a, before, to go to.

And instead of trying to unlearn things, I need to learn how to live and how to thrive  with who I am today, with who I am in this minute, this moment right now. That's what I need to do.  Those two were probably  some of the biggest, 

what I guess the kick burdens that I was carrying around in my healing that I was having a really hard time letting go of.

I have no idea how we got off onto that

 We've been talking a bit here and there with some of our other communities and some of the other people that we work with. And  it's snowballing like the, this same voice, this same cry out of how can we help,  what can we do not just for ourselves, but for those that will be coming after us?

And it's chaotic out there right now. Wouldn't you say? It feels chaotic to me. ,  people are doing things  that are important, the Lalich center and the Counter Cult coalition and  the Safe Best Passage Foundation.

But even within our own small community, there was all these like

things  let's start this, let's start that. And all wonderful things and all very helpful things, but it still is there's an element of chaos in there, . What's the direction where do you go? And it's interesting because  our parents were boomers, right?

So we grew up with the boomer generation and their stories, were directly out of, the Vietnam War and the hippie area where  advocacy and that was a huge thing.  You could just go out there and be an advocate and. . It was purposeful and it was important,  but like we talked about before and what Janja told us that one time like you have to have, you have to be healed, to be able to advocate, otherwise it's gonna crash and burn and yes, we see that over and over again.

Replay it over and over again.  And  I don't want to talk myself  into a, there's no solution  mode, but where this whole group of people that  have spent  or are still spending all this time in survival mode, just trying to scrape ahead.

Or even if you're out of survival mode you're just, you're still in a place where,

 it's all you can do to keep your own personal shit together. And you can't advocate from a place like that. You just absolutely cannot.

So

How do we advocate for ourselves? , some people within our community, right? The children of God done amazing work by doing, the T F I C O G survivors that we're sending around as signature. But even just trying to get a signature

that is such a hard time even just getting people to fucking sign their name to say, yes, Zerbe needs to be locked up and a horrible person and blah, blah, blah.

 Because it. . It's just, it's so much to be an advocate, not only do you have to have some of your own shit sorted out, logistically, mentally, emotionally , you're gonna wade into the problems. When you're an advocate, like  , you're pulling the deep galoshes on 

and  especially some of us that have come from deep trauma, we know what that means to have to go back there. We know what that means to have to see it in someone else.

And it's absolutely fair of every single one of us to be like, yeah, no , like

unfortunately.

We need more people to understand and know what we face as kids that were born in a cult. Because if you have people who understand it, a lot of times they can then turn around and become advocates.  It's such a deep subject that  it's hard to know where to go.

That's where I am at with this whole thing. I don't, where do you go? Yeah, we can show up the conference. And be like, hi, we wanna say that,  adult, children born in cults. Need to, we need a voice. We need to be listened to.

We need support. And then you're left to just hope somebody picks that up and agrees. Peach agrees. Peach definitely agrees. Peach is like, yes, we need a advice.   We need a advice.   The needs of those who were trafficked are very similar to the needs of ex cult kids.

And

is there something that we can do about it on a bare stick scale?  Not just to help curb suicide rate, which is awful, but Right. Like what they did in Fucking Australia, that, that kind of  that kind of helped. Yeah. That I would like to see. very true.

  Next week we'll be, yeah. Digesting some of the garbage that we used to digest on a weekly basis.  . Next week we'll be rehashing some trash , not our trash. The cogs. Trash . Exactly. . All right. Should we say goodbye to everyone? And yeah. Thanks for hanging with us. Sorry about my voice,

but yes, thank you for hanging with us and stay brave and always remember that butterfly was once a caterpillar that's wrap.