Welcome to indoctrination, a weekly conversation series about protecting yourself from systems of control.

I'm your host, Rachel Bernstein.

I'm really happy to have you hear the second part of my conversation with Audrey Brewer today.

Audrey works in marketing by day and lives in

the Carolinas in a tiny suburban farm. She is the founder of an organization in her home city that

serves as a resource for homeless women and girls. And she's an artist and spends her free time

gardening, painting, and doing farm chores. Like many people around the U.S.,

Audrey spent multiple years in a mostly female MLM multi-level marketing scheme, ascending through the ranks

and loving every second of it until she didn't. As she simultaneously removed herself from the ultra-conservative

religion of her childhood, she quickly felt herself questioning many of the practices of the

MLM, of which she was a part. MLM's support, she found a silent void of information and stories.

Though she knew there had been many, many people who

had left before she did, the absence of these stories made her feel isolated and concerned

that there were others out there feeling the same shame and or confusion that comes from leaving an MLM.

It is her hope that someone, through the telling of her own story, will feel less alone

in their own MLM story.

Here's part two of my two-part conversation with Audrey.

Thank you. of my two-part conversation with Audrey.

Well, I think because there's the sense that if you just stick with it, you know,

what you're going to be working so hard for is just right around the corner.

You don't want anyone to stop you before you're just about to get whatever they're promising you. And people in MLMs are always so close. And so that is something that is so addictive. And so it keeps people hanging on. And there is this notion of intermittent

gratification. It's the thing that actually makes gambling as popular as it is,

...