At 6pm on Monday night I’m driving up to an Airbnb I rented in Driggs, Idaho. My sister texts me:

“I love you, goodnight.”

As I put my truck in park I’m fighting an odd feeling. One I’m all too familiar with.

Grabbing my luggage bag and getting set up for the week is the best avoidance I have. But it works.

As soon as I sit on the couch an insane foreboding settles over my body. Impending doom. It feels like that undeniable gut moment when you know someone is going to die. Maybe me. Maybe someone else.

My heart races for a moment. Then it slows with my breath. I feel like texting a few people and just saying I love you.

I want to stay up late. Why wouldn’t I with this feeling?

Morning comes a bit slower than usual. The chore of work seems a little insulting to the importance of what felt so heavy last night.

By noon it feels like everything is okay. Night comes and I call a friend. Dinner cheers me up.

Then Everything Changes

Two weeks go by. My mom and sister feel sick. As I sit on my couch Friday night, that same feeling.

What’s going to happen? I remember in my childhood when this exact feeling came over me after my Grandmother dying.

Now I feel it deeper than ever.

17-Year-Old Me

At 17 I still can’t see beyond the FLDS cult. It’s the only world I know.

It’s a sunny Saturday in June. My uncles are visiting my dad in prison.

At 10am I start feeling a strange intensity in my gut. Something’s going to change.

Later that day we get the call. No one in the family is supposed to talk to my mom, my sister, and me. The feeling was right. I somehow knew it before it came.

Packing my bags on my way out seemed to lift the feeling. At 17 years old that movement felt so good. Like the worst had passed.

Rejection gave me an inner calm and peace from some unknown place. The doom lifted. It was all up from here.

12-Year-Old Me

I’m on the FLDS compound in Texas. The skid steer I’m doing some maintenance on has its usual loud engine fan as I walk behind it.

I head to men’s prayer at 1pm, and the same exact gloomy feeling hits my gut. Impending doom. Something is about to change.

Later that day my brother comes and gets me. I feel a bit of relief. The doom isn’t death or anything. I’m just being sent away.

As soon as they read me the message from my dad, the gloomy feeling lifts. The same sense of peace fills me with determination.

A few hours later I’m enjoying the ride away to Colorado.

I’m 22. It All Changed

I’m in my bedroom in Fargo, ND. Doom and gloom have been staring my existence down for weeks.

For a year I’ve been watching all kinds of videos about my dad being an evil man. I laugh at them, dismiss them.

But my pain has brought me here. My dad forced me into this situation of constant lack of human interaction or connection.

A cloud of inevitable darkness is surrounding my mind like a million spiders from every direction.

I usually avoid this by going back to my father that I’ve heard so much evil about. Back to my religion. To my God. To my cult.

But that has been punishing me severely. I’m tired. I’m lonely. I’ve gone back to my roots hundreds of times and my logic and basic human needs always lead me to this massive dark hole that surrounds me from every direction.

I’m too tired to go back to my father again. He seems to hate me. So I choose the black cloud that swirls around me like a thousand of the devil’s hands trying to crush me.

As I enter this dark space my heart starts pumping faster. All the darkness and gloom I’ve felt in my life seems concentrated around me. I try turning back but I can’t.

My heart rate increases. My head is so confused and heavy that I can’t seem to keep it from falling on my bed.

Five minutes go by. Then ten. I go from a mental crisis to a physical breakdown of curiosity to ensure I am still alive and within existence. As this darkness slowly leaves, my eyes become watery and I seem to be crying.

Recognition of my existence returns completely. Tears pour from my eyes for about five minutes.

Then I start laughing. What in the hell was that, I ask myself.

I still don’t know what happened that night. It was a low point in my life. My laughing didn’t last long, I still had a long way to go to get myself in a better mental place.

But my intuition for danger from that time forward was more and more incorrect.

My Mom Feels Like My Sister Will Die

“I feel like your sister will die,” my mom said with deep concern. Both my mom and I were working towards leaving the cult.

I paused. I’ve felt the same worry about the same sister before.

“These feelings don’t lie,” my mom explained, they have always been accurate for her. They always predicted correctly in the cult.

But now they aren’t. My sister was just fine.

She wasn’t about to die. It’s been a few years now.

Here’s what I noticed. Whatever cues my body was getting in the cult environment were dead accurate for that environment. I grew up there and could feel it coming from a mile away.

I told myself it was revelation.

But now those extremely strong gut feelings are repeatedly wrong.

And here’s the crazy part. In the cult they were relieved. First of all, they were right. Second of all they got relieved by something bad actually happening. Not death. But usually some kind of separation from your family.

Today when I get those gloomy feelings, they don’t get relieved by anything. So they can get so strong that they feel intensely like imminent doom or something bad about to happen.

Often when I get the text “I love you” it hits me with this gloomy feeling about 10 minutes later. Because my body never got those kind of love cues unless serious separation was happening.

Intuition Is Extremely Right. And Wrong.

Today I rarely rely on intuition for sound judgment. It’s almost always wrong for me.

My intuition was almost perfect until I left the cult. So perfect I thought it was God. It always predicted perfectly when I would be separated from family or something would happen.

Here’s the thing: your intuition only works in the environment you are familiar with.

It’s wrong everywhere else. You might think it is right. My intuition is still extremely accurate when it comes to human nature. Because human nature doesn’t change in or out of a cult.

My intuition is so extremely far off in sensing danger. An “I love you” text can send me insane spiritual feelings of doom and gloom that feel like God is speaking to me.

But they are wrong. This recognition has helped me overcome these gloomy feelings in a matter of a few minutes now. I feel doom and I ask objectively if everything is okay. If it is I laugh and get rid of that nasty doomsday feeling.

This Strengthens The Cult Mentality

When you are in the cult, intuition feels like revelation. You grew up there, everything about it seemed right.

The insane darkness I felt that night was my body finally escaping the intuition I had trained myself in from the time I was born.

Before this happened I couldn’t differentiate between my intuition and reality. I mean I couldn’t really separate them. It’s why even though I had watched every single episode of bad things about my dad, I couldn’t swallow it.

And in that moment I did. I couldn’t see it then but my glass box got shattered that day. I was still a few years finishing it off but that was an insane experience.

This is why escaping a cult is harder than most people think. Not everyone has this happen to this extreme. But there was me before this happened and me after.

Conclusion

The most scary thing when I look back is to see that I could have stayed there forever. Because I did have to run head first into a brick wall to get my mind outside of that.

I think one reason this was so extreme for me (and sometimes still is) is because of the intense degree to which I studied my own intuition from when I was a very young boy.

Intuition was my chief focus from when I was 5 years old. I didn’t think about anything more than intuition and revelation. My dad inspired that in me from his spiritual teachings, but as a boy I found it very curious to see how right my intuition could predict the future. So everything I did became a test of that. The older I got the more accurate it became. The more accurate it became the more intensely I studied and followed it.

At 13 years old, my brother and I were staining a fence. We were leaving for men’s prayer and I said that the sprayer would go off and spray stain while we were gone. When we got back it had done just that.

The crazy part is that when I made the prediction, neither before it happened or after did I even realize it was abnormal until my brother called it to my attention.

I just had a subconscious realization (intuition) of what could possibly happen and then said it sorta like a joke. But it was my obsession with my intuition that made it so I would do this kind of thing without realizing it. It had just become subconscious habit to recognize the future and that didn’t always occur to me as abnormal in the moment.

But breaking that religious intuition was absolute insanity, and I’m really really fucking lucky that I had enough pain to push me into that imaginary brick wall that was so so real.

What I didn’t know is that my intuition was only correct because I was extremely familiar and observant with my world. My intuition had become perfectly correct about my existence in the FLDS.

It’s still correct to the degree my existence hasn’t changed. Otherwise it’s wrong all the time.

You would also enjoy this article: Helping a Friend Leave a Cult: What Actually Works

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My podcast this week was a review of Netflix’s documentary: Trust Me The False Prophet

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