Triumph: Life After the Cult--A Survivor's Lessons

by Carolyn Jessop

  Then, to make matters worse, my doctor prescribed bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy. Audrey, one of Merril’s daughters, was a nurse practitioner. She understood that Harrison and I had life-threatening conditions that were not being taken seriously by anyone in the family, least of all Merril. Audrey, who was kind, competent, and smart, agreed to help me with Harrison’s care so I could stay in bed. She also promised that if I had to be hospitalized during the pregnancy, she would keep Harrison alive. This was a huge relief. But it was only a stopgap solution.

  I was plummeting into a deep depression. Nothing I did and nothing anyone said gave me any comfort at all from the anguish. But if I continued to spiral downward, I wouldn’t be able to make the decisions necessary to protect Harrison and my unborn baby, let alone my six other children. Being confined to bed gave me a lot of time to think, but that only made things worse.

  So much in my life filled me with resentment; so much should have turned out differently. Instead, I was trapped in an endless cycle of pain. I craved stillness and peace and wondered if I’d ever find them. From the moment I married Merril, peace had felt distant and remote, like a far-off country I’d heard of but knew I would never visit.

  Then I remembered the acupressure teacher from several years before. She had had an aura of perfect peace. Even when she talked about her sexual trauma and then a later bout with cancer, she radiated calm. She had faced betrayal and the threat of her own death, yet she still knew peace. Why couldn’t I?

  I remembered her holding up that book. I couldn’t remember the title. I had a vague memory that it had to do with forgiveness and healing. Maybe I could learn something from her saga.

  The anger, hatred, and rage that I felt were completely justified. I believed that then and still do now. But my rage was propelling me into such a downward spiral that my survival was on the line. Something had to change, and it had to be me.

  I had never before considered changing my relationship to my rage. I didn’t think it was possible. But I had to face reality. Merril wasn’t going to suddenly see the light and own up to his abusive behavior. My sister wives were not going to morph into different people.

  The pain I felt was real. Terrible things had happened to me that I knew were not my fault. But I learned that I didn’t have to hang on to the pain anymore. I could stop nurturing it and feeding it like a stray kitten.

  I scoured my bookshelves desperately searching for that book. When Warren Jeffs banned outside material, nearly all of my books had been destroyed, but I still had a few left. This book wasn’t among them. I collapsed next to my bookcase in defeat. But then an image came to mind: I saw myself taking the book off my nightstand and putting it in the locked cabinet in my room.

  Even though the cabinet was locked, family members could find the key and get into it. The cabinet had been searched many times. I took the key from its hiding place and opened the cabinet. I slowly removed one item after another. No book. I kept going until I reached the bottom, and there it was: Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. I was shocked. Maybe I’d intentionally hidden it at the very bottom in the hope that anyone searching the cabinet might not look that far.

  I was confined to bed, but I held salvation in my hands. I devoured the book in one sitting. Its impact was profound. The author outlined a series of steps that I could follow to “re-script” my relationships to those who’d harmed me. Step by step I faced what each person had done to me. I had to remember it, feel all the harm and ugliness it triggered, and then consciously replace that negativity with other feelings. At the end I had to let all the painful emotions go and forgive. Sometimes I would dredge up emotions with Merril and Barbara that were so powerful, I could barely breathe. But I kept at it throughout my bed rest and continued for months after I gave birth to Bryson, my eighth child. The process was incredibly liberating.

  I no longer wanted to fix the people who had hurt me. I released them all to their miserable and mean-spirited worlds. I worked with the book for months, “re-scripting” my relationships with everyone in the family, even Merril’s daughters. I also worked through my complicated relationship with my mother.

  I didn’t have to forget. I couldn’t and shouldn’t. I will always remember what happened to me. But by forgiving the people who mistreated me, I took myself out of any relationship with them and pulled all of that energy back into myself. At times the emotions I experienced felt like they were going to tear me apart. But I kept going. After working through the script several times with different people and feelings, I began to feel emotional relief. I was setting myself free, and the effort was empowering.

  By letting such volatile emotions go, I wasn’t letting anyone off the hook; I was taking their hooks out of me. I wasn’t justifying what they’d done; nor did I think I had a religious duty to forgive. It was simply that those negative feelings were sapping my power, and I wanted it back.

  As I progressed, I could see that I needn’t take things so personally. What Merril and his wives did to me, they did to everyone else, too. That was just the cruel way they wielded power in their nasty lives. It wasn’t because they hated me or wanted to hurt me. What was revealed in their abuse was their character, not mine. I had done nothing to “deserve” their harsh treatment and hence had no reason to feel shame.

  In the “keep sweet no matter what” world of the FLDS, forgiveness meant you accepted what had been done to you, you weren’t angry, and you trusted the perpetrator not to do it again. I’d had no idea there was another way to forgive. But now I was learning it: by letting go of anger, never trusting my abusers again, and by seeing them for who they truly were, I achieved genuine forgiveness.

  In the FLDS, if someone harmed you and you refused to have anything further to do with that person, you were the one committing a crime by holding on to bad feelings. If you ever complained again, you were the offender. This twisted logic created a kingdom of sociopaths, because no one was ever held responsible for harm except the victims. The FLDS notion of forgiveness had been used in such hurtful and damaging ways that it became a way for an abuser to maximize the damage he or she could inflict without any consequence. It certainly guaranteed that a victim would remain powerless. To forgive in the FLDS seemed completely masochistic. Now I was wrapping my mind around a new reality: forgiveness had nothing to do with trusting a person who’d injured you. It involved letting go of the anger you felt and making space for new emotional growth.

  But knowing all this was one thing; putting it into practice was another. Despite the huge impact the book had on me, it was excruciatingly hard for me to forgive Merril and my sister wives. Still, I was determined to do it. I had to free myself from the storm of rage that was churning inside me. I remained furious at what had been done to me and my children. I wanted vengeance and vindication, which are driven by a craving for justice. But that craving had trapped me in an out-of-control cycle: I wouldn’t let go of my victim status until justice was done.

  I wanted Merril to stop rationalizing cruelty as “necessary.” I wanted him and the other wives, especially Barbara, to understand that there was absolutely no justification for their treating me, or anyone else, the way they did. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Merril Jessop would ever apologize to me. But I wanted some acknowledgment that what had happened to me was not my fault. The fact that this was never, ever going to happen didn’t make me stop wanting it.

  In truth, my insistence on justice in an unjust world was really holding me hostage. Forgive? Me? I thought forgiveness might make me more vulnerable to my abusers because it might make me appear more pliant.

  I was beginning to grasp that forgiveness was about breaking the chains that bind you to your captor. Being in a relationship with someone dangerous is self-destructive. Holding on to your anger at someone dangerous is self-destructive. The only way to break free is to sever all the emotions you have toward that person. For so long, I thought that unless justice was done, I could never heal. But some
times justice is impossible, so the choice becomes to remain unhealed or to let go of the anger that the lack of justice has aroused. It came back to exercising the power I had: I couldn’t control whether justice would be done, but I could control my attitude toward the injustice.

  It’s been said that desiring revenge is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. I believe that. It took discipline and work for me to release all the anger I felt toward Merril. But nothing I’d ever felt compared to the relief of dumping one bad emotion after another. Go. Goodbye. Gone. I had no more expectations. I no longer had to fix anything. Once I forgave Merril, his power over me evaporated. Nothing externally had changed in my world; we were still married, but internally everything had been transformed. Forgiveness was the key that freed me from years of psychic imprisonment.

  Forgiving Merril and the others did not mean that they “won.” What is winning, anyway? What I gave up was nothing in comparison to what I gained. The liberation I felt was exhilarating.

  Let me be clear about the kind of forgiveness I’m talking about. Sometimes one forgives in order to remain in a relationship with someone she cares about, even if the person has caused her pain and anguish. It’s not a blanket pardon; it’s the trade-off one is willing to make when preserving the relationship is more important than correcting the injustice. Allowing people to be human and make mistakes, even though those mistakes have hurt you, is important. You don’t want to eliminate the person from your life simply for hurting or disappointing you. This kind of forgiveness is far more common than the kind I used to change my life.

  The forgiveness I practiced enabled me to move ahead and start making my life more about me. It renewed and deepened the strength I needed to deal with the challenges facing me. Most dramatically, it changed my need to remain in Merril’s family. From that point on, I was no longer emotionally or psychologically engaged with them. Justice was up to a higher power; my job was to discover a way to protect myself and my children. This meant, of course, that I’d eventually have to leave the FLDS. In the meantime I continued to appear as a relatively obedient wife. But my decision was made. I escaped psychologically long before I fled physically.

  During my book tour for the paperback edition of Escape, I made an appearance in Salt Lake City. After my reading, a man asked me to name the single most important factor in my getting away, and staying away, from the FLDS.

  I talked about the liberation of forgiveness. I explained that letting go of my anger did not mean that what had happened to me was okay. It will never be okay, but I refuse to let the past sabotage my life or curtail my energy, purpose, and joy. I wanted no ties to my perpetrators; forgiveness cut them all.

  That same night in Salt Lake City as I was signing books, an older woman came through the line. When she got to me, she started to cry. “I have been involved in an abusive marriage for more than thirty years. I have tried and tried to leave but never could stay away from him,” she said. “The piece that has been missing all these years is what you talked about tonight—how through forgiveness, you can break the link between you and your abuser.”

  I like to think that the woman went home that night and began packing her bags.

  An Education in Education

  When I reflect on what made it possible for me to survive—and eventually flee—the FLDS, one word always comes to mind: education. When I think about the damage currently being done to FLDS children, the same word says it all. By pulling FLDS children out of public schools and forcing them to be homeschooled, Warren Jeffs effectively guaranteed that these young people would remain hostages of the cult. Academically abysmal, the FLDS “schools” fail to teach the basic knowledge and skills that people need to get by in the outside world.

  I attended public primary and secondary schools, then married Merril at eighteen. That was the price I had to pay for going to college. Still, I managed to get my degree; the day I was handed my diploma was one of the proudest of my life. I majored in elementary school education with a minor in teaching reading. Although I did not get to fulfill my original dream of being a pediatrician, I found deeply rewarding work as a teacher and have strong feelings on educational issues, especially homeschooling.

  My college education transformed me in profound ways. I took classes in psychology and child development that enabled me to see my life in the FLDS in a dramatically different way. In my psychology class, for example, I learned that mental illness is often hereditary but, even more important, treatable. Merril’s second wife, Ruth, was mentally ill. (Years later she was so out of control that then-prophet Rulon Jeffs ordered her to be taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed as bipolar.) The FLDS believed that Ruth’s illness was her fault because she had invited false and delusional spirits into her life. Merril accused her of feeling sorry for herself. When he slapped her mercilessly, it was understood in the family that he was trying to bring her under control. That was what passed for treatment.

  I hated seeing not only Ruth’s mental distress but also how frequently Merril lashed out at her. Until I went to college, I had no idea that even the most severely mentally ill could be treated with therapy and medication. It was revelatory to me that something so harsh and ugly in my life didn’t have to be that way. If medical help was available, why wasn’t Ruth getting it? Why was she left to languish in her suffering? The religion I had been steeped in said she was bad for being sick, and that Merril was the good martyr for trying to discipline and control her “bad” behavior. It was widely known in the community that Ruth’s mother had similar problems. When I learned that mental illness can have a genetic component, I really understood that there was no way that what was happening to Ruth was her fault. This was one of my first steps toward seeing the FLDS in a new light.

  My courses in child development were also eye-opening. I studied the impact of violence on children, recognizing behaviors that I saw being played out on an almost daily basis in Merril’s family. My classes introduced me to the masses of research detailing how detrimental abuse is to children and how abused children can become angry and shut down and sometimes act out in violent ways themselves. Both physical and sexual violence have a lifelong impact on children. This was something I did not appreciate in a major way before I went to college. Every fiber in my being said it was wrong to hit a child. But now I had hard evidence for the truth I knew in my heart. Mothers who beat their children to make them obey were “righteous” in the eyes of the FLDS. Studying child development and psychology, I saw that they were anything but.

  College was also transformative in teaching me life skills that I otherwise might have missed. Not only did I learn how to drive, I mastered city driving. I figured out how to budget the little money I had to make it through the week, and how to make daily decisions on my own. Activities that might seem routine to anyone else, like registering for classes and talking to professors about my coursework, gave me a real-world competence that many FLDS women never get a chance to acquire. If nothing else, I knew how to fill out paperwork. That was an enormous advantage after I escaped. Navigating the benefit systems and applying for welfare and Medicaid took a monumental effort, but governmental bureaucracies did not intimidate me. Without the life skills, self-respect, and confidence I gained at college, I am not sure I could have succeeded on my own as well as I did. Imagine if I’d never gone beyond junior high, was functionally illiterate, and had never had any contact with a world beyond the FLDS. Tragically, that’s a common reality for many FLDS women today. Even if they do escape, they lack the tools they need to make it on their own. I did make it, and for that I am eternally grateful for my education.

  When I was married to Merril, I taught for seven years in the public schools of Colorado City, Arizona. During my six years as a second-grade teacher, I developed a reputation for being able to teach almost any child to read. I did so by combining a variety of approaches. A child who is a visual learner is going to master reading differently than a child who�
��s an auditory learner. The trick is to understand each student and to find a way to reach and teach that child. The only children who can’t read, in my experience, are those with severe learning disabilities or similar challenges.

  One of my strategies was to invite the parents of my students to come in and read a story to the class. Several came each week. They’d show up after recess, and the kids were always excited to come back in and see whose parent was there. They were thrilled to have their parents in the classroom. It was one of my greatest successes as a teacher because that kind of individual attention is so rare in the FLDS, where families are so large. The moms—and sometimes dads—felt proud to be in the classroom. I did have a few parents who were illiterate, but I invited them to come in anyway and tell a story. The more involvement parents have, the better their children’s education.

  When I was a teacher in Arizona, parents who chose to homeschool had to pass a basic competency test—essentially, the same one given to teachers—before they could legally homeschool. If they weren’t literate and didn’t have basic skills in math, they were not allowed to teach. How could anyone argue with that?

  But as the homeschooling movement became more sophisticated and better funded, it was able to successfully fight to remove regulations in many states. I saw this happen in Arizona, which went from having well-regulated standards for homeschooling to having almost none. The same thing happened in Utah. Politically, homeschooling became the third rail here in the West. Politicians who wanted to stay in office learned to leave homeschooling alone because its supporters were a substantial voting bloc.