Hey everybody, welcome back again to Close to Consciousness. My name is Shalise Ansela and we're joined again today by the one-only Amanda Ray.

You're never going to get rid of me.

So a lot of you are probably like, wow, has Amanda been living at your house?

Yes, she has. We're working on something pretty big. We've hinted at it, teased it before. We can't give you details, but she's been here for over a month.

Has it been a month? It's been more than a month, I think. Yeah, over a month. Or we're approaching that.

And more time to go. So the funny thing, well, it's not the funny thing, but when you're with somebody who's left a cult and you're working on something cult related, a lot of topics get brought up.

And then we're like, let's write that down. We should do it live about this.

And so this is one of those topics that kind of came up naturally in discussion and we realized that we should probably broadcast it because there will probably be people who

resonate with it, who can understand what we're talking about, and maybe we can give some

clarity around some of those things, not that we're experts, but we're going to try.

But we're definitely going through the motions of it all.

Yes, we're going to be talking about our experiences with having to go back into the belly of the beast of the funerals and seeing those same people over again and what it does to your mental health after you've done so much work in leaving. So first of all, positive thing for our mental health. We've been hanging out with David Archelaneda this weekend, which is so fun. If you

are familiar with him, we just did an episode or released an episode, I think it was our most recent

one, go watch it. He grew up Mormon in the church. He was on American Idol. He was actually

a finalist, top two. And he's the exact same age as me. And so he was both a part of our upbringing growing up in some way. And he went on a mission. The whole thing, he was kind of like the Mormon poster boy. And he ended up coming out as queer, leaving the church. And so he's doing a book signing in Austin tonight. So we're going there after this if you want to come and you're in

Austin. But we've been hanging out with them. I think it's been cathartic for both of us and healing

and like going to clubs and dancing. He was, yeah, to be able to like get it down on the

dance floor, but then also be like, so how are you guys doing in your healing? You know,

to be able to have both worlds in one person is really, it was really healing.

And to see the growth that we're all trying to get to through.

And you'd think that I think a lot of people don't relate so much to me because my experience is so extreme.

But in those moments, there was a lot of relation

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