Why you still can’t trust your own signals
They taught you they came from the Adversary
I want to say the thing that horrified me most about the Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet was the abuse. The children. The men handing their daughters to a man who called himself a prophet. Him handing them to other men. The girls as young as nine. Christine gathering evidence in real time, carrying what she knew, trying to get anyone to listen.
All of that is unconscionable. I want to be clear about that.
But that’s not what made my body react first.
I was in bed watching with my husband when it happened. A girl on screen, speaking softly about how blessed she was. How fifty times happier. How she’d come to understand what a beautiful, holy thing she got to be part of. Her voice had that particular quality. Soft, certain, unhurried. Like she was teaching a room full of children something simple and true. And her eyes. Wide and searching and completely, serenely sure.
I know that voice. I know those eyes.
I didn’t grow up in Utah. But I grew up Mormon, which means Utah came to me. Through family, through friends, through every testimony meeting and girls camp and general conference broadcast I ever sat through. That voice came out of all of it. It’s been called primary voice in Mormon spaces. The gentle, childlike cadence women learn to use when speaking about sacred things. The reverence stare is what the rest of the internet calls the eyes that go with it. Wide. Earnest. Lit from inside by certainty.
I felt sick before I understood why.
And then I understood why.
It wasn’t that the girls in the documentary sounded strange. It was that they didn’t. They sounded like family. Like women I loved. Like a version of myself I barely remember.
Same tree. Different fruit. But I knew the bark.
Here’s what that voice is for.
It isn’t just a speaking style. It isn’t regional accent or personality or the natural cadence of a woman who is soft-spoken. It’s trained. It’s the sound of a person who has learned that certainty delivered gently is more persuasive than certainty delivered with force. That wide-eyed sincerity signals truth. That the self, presented as small and grateful and submitted, is a self that cannot be argued with.
It’s the voice of someone who has been taught that she already has the answers. That the answers came from God, through the prophet, through her husband. That her job is not to question but to receive and to radiate.
And here’s the thing about that voice that made me feel sick watching a documentary about child abuse.
It works on the person speaking it too.
One of Sam Bateman’s wives describes her path to marrying him in three movements. First, she resisted for a very long time. Then she committed, submitted herself to it. And then Heavenly Father gave her the courage and the strength.
Read that again slowly.
She resisted. She knew something was wrong. Her body was sending every signal it had. And then she submitted anyway. And the moment she stopped fighting, the system had a name for that. Not capitulation. Not exhaustion. Not the extinguishing of her own protective instincts.
Heavenly Father gave her the courage and the strength.
Her compliance became a testimony. Her surrender became evidence of God.
This is the mechanism. This is the thing I need you to understand.
It’s not that these women were stupid or weak or naive. It’s that they were living inside a system that had a specific word for every signal their own minds and bodies sent them.
Doubt was the adversary. Fear was a lack of faith. Grief was selfishness. Resistance was the natural man that must be overcome.
When a girl cried, Sam Bateman told her to cheer up. To fervently exert positive energy until the feeling went away. And the framework she’d been handed her entire life agreed with him. Your feelings are not data. Your discomfort is not information. Your body’s alarm system is the enemy of your spiritual progress.
Cheer up, babe.
I have heard softer versions of that sentence my entire life. Said with more kindness, more genuine love, more distance from anything criminal. But the architecture underneath it was the same.
Your inner voice is not to be trusted. The still small voice that matters comes from outside you, delivered through the proper channels, confirmed by the right authority.
Which means the part of you that says something is wrong here was exactly what the system was designed to reach first.
I want to talk to the people who watched this documentary and felt what I felt.
Not just horror. Recognition.
You probably don’t have a Sam Bateman in your story. Your version was almost certainly legal. Loving, even. The people who handed you this framework believed it themselves. They weren’t grooming you. They were giving you the most valuable thing they had.
That doesn’t change what it built inside you.
Because the architecture doesn’t require a predator to function. It just requires a system that teaches you what to do with your own signals.
Belief isn’t created by a single dramatic moment of conversion. It’s created by repetition. The same phrase said the same way enough times until it stops feeling like a phrase and starts feeling like the shape of reality. Like home. Like the sound of truth.
That’s how primary voice gets installed. Not in one sitting. Through ten thousand testimony meetings. Through every time a woman you loved and trusted tilted her head and softened her voice and told you she knew. Through every time your own doubt got labeled before you could finish the thought.
That’s the adversary. That’s the natural man. That’s pride. That’s selfishness.
Your brain was trying to protect you. It sent signals. And every single time, the system was ready with a name for the signal that made you the problem.
Cheer up, babe.
You learned to cheer up. You learned to exert positive energy until the feeling went away. You learned it so many times, in so many small moments, that eventually you didn’t need anyone to tell you anymore. You did it to yourself. Automatically. Before the feeling could even finish arriving.
And then one day the system fell away. You left, or it left you, or it collapsed under its own weight. And you waited for the relief.
And what you found instead wasn’t freedom. It was the absence of a system that had been quietly running everything.
And you found that the internal voice — the one that was supposed to be yours — still sounded like the system.
Still organized your thoughts. Still told you what counted. Still decided what was allowed. Still called your grief selfishness. Still said cheer up when you needed to fall apart.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s not weak faith or incomplete deconstruction or proof that you didn’t really leave.
That’s what ten thousand repetitions sounds like when the source is gone but the recording keeps playing.
Here’s the only hopeful thing I know about this.
Belief is built by repetition. Which means it can be rebuilt the same way.
But I want to be honest about what that actually means, because the self-help version of this idea is almost as harmful as the original problem. It’s not affirmations. It’s not deciding to think differently. It’s not cheer up, babe with better branding.
The new thought will feel wrong first. Not a little wrong. Completely wrong. Like lying. Like the adversary, actually; which is its own particular cruelty, that the path out feels at first exactly like what you were warned about.
You will try to trust yourself and it will feel dangerous. You will try to rest and it will feel like failure. You will try to let the grief be grief instead of selfishness and your whole nervous system will resist it.
That’s not you doing it wrong. That’s the repetitions not being outnumbered yet.
She knew she was mourning the rest of her life. She knew it. Her body was completely, accurately, correctly afraid. And the system reached her before she could finish the thought.
The work is learning to let the thought finish. To stay with the signal long enough to hear what it’s actually saying instead of immediately reaching for the framework that explains it away.
That takes longer than anyone tells you. It’s less dramatic than you want it to be. And it doesn’t feel like courage at first.
It feels like the adversary.
If this essay named something you’ve been carrying, I made a free workshop for exactly this stage.
Not deconstruction. The part after.
You Left. So Why Aren’t You Okay Yet? is a free 45-minute session that explains what’s actually happening when you did everything right — you questioned, you walked away, you rebuilt your beliefs — and you’re still waiting to feel okay.
Not in crisis. Just not quite right. Like freedom arrived but the floor didn’t come with it.
This isn’t a fix. It’s the explanation nobody gave you.
When something finally makes sense, the shame loosens. And that loosening is where everything else becomes possible.
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