305: Surviving the Troubled Teen Industry and Becoming Unsilenced | Meg Appelgate
Preacher Boys Podcast
Eric Skwarczynski
4.6 • 701 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2024
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Meg Applegate, the CEO of Unsilenced Project Inc., a non-profit on a mission to stop institutional child abuse by empowering self-advocates to promote lasting social change.
At the age of 15, Meg was abducted by two strangers in the middle of the night from her California home and was told that “she was coming with them.” 8 hours later, she found herself at a lockdown treatment facility in Boise, Idaho. Then, 6 months later, she found herself in an additional behavioral modification program in northern Montana, where she spent the next 3 years.
After graduating college with a degree in psychology, completely oblivious to the abuse she had experienced, Meg spent the next 17 years dedicating her life to serving on various non-profit boards to help them with board development and recruitment and expanding their programs to further their impact. It wasn’t until she was well into her non-profit career that she woke up to the abuse and brainwashing that plagued her childhood and the effect it had on her entire adulthood. It was then that she became determined to pair her love of giving back and helping those in need with her dedication to empowering other survivors of institutional abuse.
Meg brings to Unsilenced an extensive background in non-profit management, board development, and fund development. She is currently the Vice President, Trustee, and Managing Director at the Gochnauer Foundation. In addition, she is actively involved with and serves on the Board of Directors at Laura’s House in Aliso Viejo, CA, and The Shea Center in San Juan Capistrano, CA. When she doesn’t find herself fully immersed in new ideas for fundraising and development, Meg loves traveling to see new places with her husband and 4 children.
✖️✖️✖️
Support the Show: Patreon.com/PreacherBoys
✖️✖️✖️
If you or someone you know has experienced abuse, visit courage365.org/need-help
✖️✖️✖️
CONNECT WITH THE SHOW:
preacherboyspodcast.com
https://www.youtube.com/@PreacherBoys
https://www.facebook.com/preacherboysdoc/
https://twitter.com/preacherboysdoc
https://www.instagram.com/preacherboysdoc/
https://www.tiktok.com/@preacherboyspod
To connect with a community that shares the Preacher Boys Podcast's mission to expose abuse in the IFB, join the OFFICIAL Preacher Boys Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1403898676438188/
This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/PreacherBoys and get on your way to being your best self.
Our Sponsors:
* Use promo code preacherboys at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/preacherboys
Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/preacher-boys-podcast/donations
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Trigger warning. This podcast contains descriptions of various abusive situations. Listener discretion is advised. |
| 0:09.2 | You are listening to the Preacher Boys podcast, a podcast shedding light on decades of mental, physical, and sexual abuse within the independent fundamental Baptist movement. |
| 0:20.4 | The testimony shared on this podcast are told from the personal experience and perspective of the survivors. |
| 0:26.8 | Not all legal outcomes are known or final. |
| 0:29.8 | Any suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. |
| 0:34.4 | Now, here is your host, Eric Squarsinski. All right, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Meg, |
| 0:42.1 | thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Yeah. Now, for people that |
| 0:47.2 | are listening, this episode is dropping on a Tuesday, which my episodes never drop on Tuesday, |
| 0:52.4 | but that's because your book just launched today. |
| 0:55.8 | If someone's listening to this on its release day, your book has just come out. |
| 0:59.8 | Just before we dive deep into it, just give us the 10,000 foot view, like elevator pitch of the book. |
| 1:06.7 | Awesome. |
| 1:07.3 | This will be my first time doing that. |
| 1:09.0 | So let's see if I get it right. |
| 1:10.8 | So basically, |
| 1:11.6 | it's a memoir and it's called becoming unsilenced, surviving and fighting the Trouble Teen Industry. |
| 1:18.5 | And really, it's about my journey, you know, throughout my Trouble Teen Industry programs, |
| 1:24.1 | but then also how I had to learn to become unsilenced. I had to learn to use my |
| 1:29.7 | voice and what kind of things I had to go through in order to learn that lesson. That eventually |
| 1:34.9 | led into finding unsilenced and being able to, you know, create a organization that was going to be |
| 1:42.8 | working within this movement and kind of a little bit |
| 1:45.2 | about what Unsilance does. But in reality, it's really about my journey to Unsilenced and how I got there. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Eric Skwarczynski, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Eric Skwarczynski and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.