Hey, everybody. My name is Eric Squisinski. I'm the host of the Preach Boys podcast. And on the show, while I do talk about physical and sexual abuse, I also talk about mental and spiritual abuse that happens within independent fundamental Baptist churches. But as always, what I'm about to go into today can apply to any organization, religious or not. I want to talk a little bit about unhealthy relationships

and how to determine if you are in a healthy relationship or an unhealthy relationship. I'm not

speaking strictly romantically. I do want to dive into the relationship you can have with clergy,

with other members of your congregation, with coworkers, et etc. Now, one person who I think has really

done a good job defining healthy versus unhealthy organizations, information, influences, et cetera,

is Stephen Hassan. Stephen Hassan is the cult expert. He wrote the book Combating

Cult Mind Control. He runs the organization

Freedom of the Mind, which if you haven't already, go to Freedom of the Mind, or sorry,

freedom of mind.com. And if you want to go to the particular section I'm going to be talking

about today, go to freedom of mind.com slash bite, b-I-te-e-model, M-O-D-E-L. That's freedom of mind.com slash bite, B-I-T-E-M-O-D-E-M-O-D-E-L. That's freedom of mind.com

slash bite-d-model. And you can see for yourself we're about to go over. Now, for those

you don't know who Stephen Hasson is, he used to be a part of the Mooney cult and he has since left obviously and has helped

really, after a lot of research, really helped craft out some great resources, including the book

Combating Cult Mind Control, to help people out of cultic situations or cultish situations.

In the Bight model, he covers behavior control, information control, thought control,

and emotional control. All of these are very helpful and definitely encourage you to read it and

just examine some of the things around you to see if you're in any of these situations.

But I want to focus specifically on emotional control. I received a pretty troubling email recently

from someone who has basically had a very close friend within the Independent Baptist movement cut ties with them over a secondary doctrinal issue.

And this is someone who was expressing a ton of care, a ton of love, and really just showing a lot of interest in this person's life until they had a disagreement over

this one thing. Now there's been a cutoff in communication, text not being responded to, calls that

were made almost daily have been cut off. And I want to talk a little bit about this because one of the

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