Navigating Narcissism with Dr. RamaniNavigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani

Abducted in Plain Sight - Twice: How Jan Broberg Survived

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Published Aug 10, 2023, 7:01 AM

Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani

We all have to deal with narcissists. Now, it’s time to heal from them. In this groundbreaking series, clinical psychologist and world’s leading exper… 
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Jan Broberg survived the unthinkable: being abducted and brutally sexually abused by a family friend - not once, but twice. Jan bravely reveals the details of her headline-making story, how she learned to thrive and the impact on her relationship with her parents who were also groomed by a psychopath hiding in plain sight.

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Guest Bio:

Jan Broberg is an American actress, singer, and dancer. As a child, Broberg was kidnapped on two occasions by a family friend, at ages twelve and fourteen. The experience has been documented in her mother Mary Ann Broberg's book, Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story, the documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, and the drama miniseries A Friend of the Family.

She later founded The Jan Broberg Foundation, which provides resources and direction to those that might need help in regaining their life and healing from sexual abuse.

Guest Information:

This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and/or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Jada Pinkett Smith, Ellen Rakieten, Dr. Ramani Durvasula, Meghan Hoffman VP PRODUCTION OPERATIONS Martha Chaput CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jason Nguyen LINE PRODUCER Lee Pearce PRODUCER Matthew Jones, Aidan Tanner ASSOCIATE PRODUCER Mara De La Rosa ASSOCIATE CREATIVE PRODUCER Keenon Rush HAIR AND MAKEUP ARTIST Samantha Pack AUDIO ENGINEER Calvin Bailiff EXEC ASST Rachel Miller PRODUCTION OPS ASST Jesse Clayton EDITOR Eugene Gordon Eric Tome POST MEDIA MANAGER Luis E. Ackerman POST PROD ASST Moe Alvarez AUDIO EDITORS & MIXERS Matt Wellentin, Geneva Wellentin, VP, HEAD OF PARTNER STRATEGY Jae Trevits Digital MARKETING DIRECTOR Sophia Hunter VP, POST PRODUCTION Jonathan Goldberg SVP, HEAD OF CONTENT Lukas Kaiser HEAD OF CURRENT Christie Dishner VP, PRODUCTION OPERATIONS Jacob Moncrief EXECUTIVE IN CHARGE OF PRODUCTION Dawn Manning

A young girl abducted and sexually abused by a family friend, not once, but twice. That is the jaw dropping headline of the Jan Broberg story, which is chronicled in a Netflix documentary and a series featuring Colin Hanks. On Peacock Now, Jan is opening up about her experience, revealing details she's never shared before. How was a friendly church going neighbor able to infiltrate Jan's loving family? What led to her being kidnapped a second time by the same person? How was her abductor able to evade authorities? Today? Jan shares her captivating story of surviving a psychopath hiding in plain sight from Red Table Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia. I'm Doctor Rominy and this is Navigating Narcissism. This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This episode discusses abuse and suicide, which may be triggering to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia, or their employees. Jan. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have you here to meet you. My sister and I have been following your journey. My sister in particular, who said you really need to talk to Jan Broberg. We've read your book, We've watched all the shows. It has been profound, it has been impactful. But above all else, I cannot tell you what a blessing is that I get to have you right here live.

So thank you, oh doctor Rominey, thank you for having me because I really admire what you do.

Thank you quick headline of your stories. It's almost impossible to imagine you're a young girl. You were abducted not once, but twice by a close family friend. What happened is so much deeper than the story of this perpetrator and what he did. He not only groomed you, he groomed your entire family in a campaign that the likes of which most of us have never seen. So can you share that just to bring everyone listening up to speed in case they don't know your story.

I'd be happy to because I often find that people are very unaware of what grooming is. Yes, So when this man and his wife and his five children moved into our neighborhood, I was nine, and for three years we didn't know it was genuine on our part. We grew to love this family. They were like our best friends. His oldest son was my age, and then he had two other sons that matched my sisters in age, and we became close close friends. We went on our bikes, we went up to the park, we went swimming together. He had a boat, he had a snowmobile, he had the trampoline, things we didn't have.

And so we were always at their house. His wife was.

Always, you know, in the kitchen making cookies. We were just having that Camelot childhood that I think a lot of people don't get.

I did.

I had parents who loved me, who we talked around the dinner table every night. Because we didn't have cell phones, we actually communicated and they listened. We were never spanked or yelled at. We were only told that we were wonderful and amazing and.

That we could do anything.

And so he looked just like how my dad was. He was fun, he was nice to everybody. Everybody in our neighborhood, in our congregation just loved him. He was a leader in the church. He was the new furniture store owner in town. There wasn't anything that looked scary at all about this man, and certainly not his wife and his five children. We truly became the best of friends. So over three years, we did hundreds of activities with this family, took vacations together, all the things that brought us closer. And then one day he picked me up to take me horseback riding. It was one of those things that we had done before. And he handed me my allergy pill, which was drugged, and I fell into a deep sleep. And the next thing I knew, I was strapped to a bed by my wrists and my ankles in the back of a motor home that was moving.

And I woke up.

It was dark to a high pitched, monotone sounding voice. Now this is the seventies, it's the space Age. All of our shows on TV are I dream of Genie. You know they're lost in space. You know they're the Twilight Zone. He would take all of the kids to the science fiction movies. He would tell these stories. We all were just kind of like, oh wow, And then there'd be a UFO siding in the newspaper in black and white. This is a really important part of the story because all of those little seeds of grooming that were being planted weren't directed at me. They were just stories did he'd tell my mom and dad or around the kitchen table. But all of that to that nine, ten eleven year old is processed in there like this could be real. And then he related that to some of our religious beliefs at the time, like Armageddon and the Second Coming and people are going to come from other planets. That when I woke up to that high pitched, monotone voice as a twelve.

Year old, I was terrified.

I believed one hundred percent that I had been taken by a UFO. And then over those couple of days, as that voice kept coming on and as I was in and out of a drug induced sleep, eventually it was like, Okay, now you're unstrapped, you can go get something to eat. We've been watching you since you were born. And all my favorite foods were in the little refrigerator, the cooler, you know, all these little details that he had thought of and had obsessed over, I guess for those three years.

So that right there is a really important part of your story for people to understand that you were in an RV, you were drugged, so you didn't even understand how that transfer took place. You had spent years hearing all this amped up kind of UFO stuff. But in those first three four days in that RV, in that motor home that is stocked with the foods and the snacks and the things you like, you did not see the perpetrator. Yeah, Birt Shoulder, you didn't see him. Now, that part of that is so important because you were in the middle of nowhere. You're hearing this kind of voice out of a tiny speaker saying, we're the aliens, We're here, and that's the only voice you heard for three or four days. It was almost like taking the grooming to this horrific level, because now you're almost being groomed by this disembodied voice, right that carried on what he was saying.

Yeah, they've been calling me female companion. You are a very special person. You have a special mission to perform. I didn't understand what any of this meant, I didn't know that this was going to be the basis for all of the rape and the abuse that happened. And then after those several days, they said, okay, now it is time for you to meet the male companion. And so when that partition between the backbed and the rest of the motor home was taken down, I was then to go to the front of the motor home where I would meet the male companion. I mean, I was terrified. I didn't know who that was going to be. If it was an alien, who was it that I was supposed to have a baby to save a dying planet. I'm very scared to meet the male companion when I walk to the front of the motor home and there's be that person that loves me. He's like my favorite uncle that I know so well. I'm so relieved you've.

Put a clarification on the story here that they don't think we've seen and heard anywhere else. We really haven't. Because you thought you'd been abducted. The surroundings, the voice, your age, and everything you'd been told to that point makes sense, and that they've been watching me since I was born, and they read your thoughts because they knew what to feed you and give you to drink. This partition is removed to meet this so called male companion. And when you see someone who you still think is safe in your mind, is not the sense that you have been kidnapped or taken against your will. This is a multiplier on grooming because now he is a safe person. He can completely control you at this point.

Right And when I see him, he's covered in blood, he's literally cut himself and he's passed out. I think he's dead, So I immediately I'm shaking him.

I'm crying.

I'm like, be Bee, wake up, are you okay? And he wakes up and the actor or that he was, you know, oh my word, what happened?

I saw this white light, the car went out of control. Are you okay?

Dolly That's what he used to call me, that was my nickname. And I'm like, yes, I'm scared, okay. And then then he becomes that person that we're in this together. And ugh, when I watch that scene in the series with Little Hendrix as Little Me in that motor home and he's telling her what he's heard and what he's seen, I was so angry. How does an adult construct this and terrify that little innocent twelve year old who really was just so scared and then lived that for the next four years of my life.

And I am so sorry because twelve is so young. It is and the whole situation is scary. We can sit here and think it's far fetched, but not to a twelve year old's mine. It's really not. And again, the twelve year old of the seventies, not of the of twenty twenty three, where I think kids might have a slightly different savvy now because of the tools they have versus no way in the seventies. Now, it's sort of like this really exploitative gas slighting. Now you've also been told the male companion is going to be on the other side of this wall.

So I don't even know what that really means.

You wouldn't know what that means exactly.

I was so relieved to c B and I was told he was the male companion. He just knew all of the next steps to open up a cupboard one day. This isn't in the series. I haven't said this to anybody either. Opened up a cupboard one day and here's five or six books on sex. You know, one hundred and one sexual positions or something like that. And I've never seen anything like this. I was so innocent. I mean, I knew what sex was, but I'd never seen a book like this.

And he's like, oh, I think maybe.

We're supposed to look at these because you know, the baby to save the dying planet. I think this is a part of it. I'll do it with you, Dolly, so it won't be scary and opening these books and looking.

At these pages.

Of course it was scary, but he was there.

At least it was with him.

See, that is just so eugh, it's just so disgusting and nefarious. And that's what it was. That's how he unfolded the rest of the story of what.

Was going to now happen.

Well, he bonded you to him. You were only a child. There is no consent for a child, right. Every behavior you were engaging in jan was about safety. How do I keep myself safe? How do I keep the world safe? How do I keep my family safe? That was what motivated you was safety. That's all that motivates a child, safety and attachment. And in a way you were trying to also have attachment to be because he was the only safe adult in that moment, and with someone you had grown to care deeply about. So those primal needs of a child were really mobilizing against the backdrop of this terror of these disembodied alien voices. I think that you know to give context to it, because I get really frustrated when I hear people saying, oh, come on, aliens, and that disbelieving is what keeps all survivors in the shadow.

Yeah, thank you for saying that, because I feel sometimes like I'm always trying to explain myself and it's really hard for me to keep doing that, and it's hard for a victim. And I feel like I'm definitely a survivor and a thriving human being, But for a victim, when they're a child, you never get over the need for the base.

Somebody else has to do that for you.

It's why children their abuser is their parent, or their nurture, their you know, grandparent, it's someone close to them, and they don't tell because who would feed me?

Correct?

Will I be okay and have a home? Will they take me away from my family?

Exactly right?

And I just wish people would realize that.

One thing that struck me about your story is that you always had a close, loving bond with your family. So one thing I'm sure though, is people are listening to this. They're wondering, you've gone horseback riding. Obviously now it's been days, is anybody looking for you? What is happening on the side of your parents?

So when I didn't come home that night, the first person they called was his wife, Gail, like, have you heard you know from b has he made contact? Of course we don't have cell phones either, and she's like, no, but I'm sure you know, you know how he can be with his mood swings and you know, up and down, and he probably just got lost in time and they'll be home. And eventually they're like, we think we better call the police. And she came immediately down to our house.

Please don't call the police. You know that he'll be back.

He would never hurt her. And of course my parents were like, well, right, we know that, but what if they were in a car accident or what can we do? So eventually they did call the highway patrol of the police department and they said, has there been a car accident? We don't know what to do because you don't know what you don't know, And so they put out an APB to look for.

Nothing was found. He had hidden the car.

So now it's the next day and it's a Saturday, and they're like, okay, well, let's call the relatives. So Gail starts calling relatives like, you know, have you seen Bee? You know, have you seen Bob, Robert Birchild. And they're all like, no, he hasn't been up here. And she's still begging my parents, don't call the police.

We don't want to cause a fuss.

You know, he'll be back, you know how he gets that he has these depressive episodes. And of course they don't even have the right words for all the things that we talk about today. There's no such thing almost as mental illness or whatever you would call his depressive experiences. And so now it's been a day and a half and my mother does call the FBI.

She calls the.

Number that's in the phone book, and it's not in our hometown. It's in a like it's a regional office, and an answering service type of thing picks up and says, we're closed. We'll be back on Monday. If this is an emergency, call your local police department, which they had already done. But it wasn't that they didn't call the police. It's just they don't know what they're looking for. They're certainly not looking at their best friend having kidnapped their daughter, right, not even a remote possibility in their head, right.

I think is very important to note and that your parents had been groomed. And it's not beyond the pail for a perpetrator to groom entire systems, school systems, families, camps, churches, pick something and a groomer will work that system, and in this case, in a very cold, calculated, callous way, groomed your entire family. And his wife, whatever her motivation was, did not want this to be known for what she very likely knew it.

Was right and her own self preservation.

For herself and her children.

That's why, and even today in twenty twenty three, we don't see nearly enough women who come forward to say, I know something's going on with my husband and my children, or with my father, or I believe this school teacher for this coach or the USA Gymnastics doctor. They don't do it because there's something to preserve for themselves and the people that they care about, well, my daughter wants to be an Olympic champion.

This is how you get it.

So even if I have a funny gut feeling, I'm going to ignore it.

I have to say, as somebody who is very focused and identified with the trauma of a child in this situation, I felt a lot of strong negative emotions against him because she felt like a huge impediment to this getting found out. But it's now four or five days in the FBI is involved. You're in this motor home with somebody who is now sexually assaulting you. How long did that last?

We were found by the FBI and the federales in Mazolan, Mexico about forty five days later.

Forty five days, six and a half weeks. That is a really long time.

And it's a long time to be hearing the voices yes constantly, And I think there's a lot of guilt in this, what I'm going to say. But then to be gently being abused and having to go further and further, and not that it ever felt good, because it really never did. But there is something different when the abuser is someone that you love and that they are on some level. Well, I'm not trying to hurt you, but we have to do this because we have to deliver on the promise or we'll be vaporized. You know, if we don't have the baby to save the dying planet before your sixteenth birthday, we're going to be vaporized. Or your little sister will have to do what you're doing. Now.

That was the threat.

That was what kept me, which keeps most children in line. Yes, yes, many survivors that I have interviewed, it was always the threat of, well, if you don't do it, I'll do it to your.

Little sister or your little brother.

Right.

One of the biggest mistakes I think we've made historically in the field of psychology and even in the field of medicine is we view children as small adults, and they're not. They're entirely different entities, with very different nervous systems and very different ways of interpreting the world, very different needs around attachment and safety. So none of those rules that apply to adults apply here. So forty five days in you're found this is six weeks without communication. Did you have no communication with your family during that time?

No, there was one time where a phone call happened and I was allowed to talk to my family, but of course everything was fine, and I couldn't say anything about never about the aliens, and nothing about that abuse, which I wouldn't have even called it that at the time, Nothing about those things. But I was so homesick. And it was when I got to call home and basically beg my parents, like, we can't come back to the United States.

Be says we can. Hadn't come back.

Because now all the police are going to arrest him, but he hasn't done anything. He just was sad and we just kept driving. And he keeps that story going for like the next year and a half, like, why did you get the FBI involved? Why in the world would you do that? You know I would never hurt her. I just couldn't come back because they think, you know that I kidnapped her. I haven't kidnapped her.

Birch told claimed he was having a depressive episode and just kept driving with Jan. That's how they ended up in Mexico. At the time, there was not much understanding around mental health, and Jan's family empathized with his plight. As a mental health professional, I must stop to clearly say depression would never explain or excuse an abduction. So what was that like to see your parents after that period?

It was wonderful.

But before they got there, Birch told gave the guard his gold ring, his wedding ring, and had that guard bring me to his cell. I've been stuck in this little six by six foot little room, you know, with really nothing to eat. It was a scary situation for me as well, being separated from him. He had me come to his cell and he said, Zaida and Zethra, the name of the aliens. They've come to me and told me that if we talk about these things, we will be instantly vaporized, and that we will have to continue the mission at some point.

This story is so much pain, so much harm came to the manipulativeness, the gold ring, bribing the prison guard, bringing you in there to further again groom you and silence you. But here's the thing, Jen is, he wasn't talking alien talk to the other people. He wasn't talking aliens to the cops. He wasn't going to be talking aliens to your family. That capacity to keep these two narratives so separate, right, The narrative about the aliens with you and the narrative I'm so sad, I'm depressed with everyone else. That feels a lot like psychopathy to me. There's a skill to that, because most people are not great liars. The more emotion involved in, more anxiety involved, more we're going to crack under the lies. We're not going to get our story straight. But his ability to just shape shift like that between the alien story with you and the sad I was sad story and being misunderstood with everybody else, and without missing a kind of a.

Beat, It's so true.

That's the psychopathy.

An amazing way to explain him. That was exactly what it was like. And I knew what the real story was. That we had a very important mission to accomplish, right, I had no doubt about it. I never thought otherwise. And I would do whatever I was told to do to protect my family. Karen, my middle the next sister younger than me. If I did X y Z, she would go blind.

You know.

He had some kind of threat that came through the aliens for every member of my family.

And hears something about the story. I never even connected this to dots until now. In the case of many perpetrators like him, they issued the threat, if you talk to anyone, I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to hurt them. So now the child knows the perpetrator is a dangerous person. Right, depth of the manipulation you were exposed to, which was he couldn't be the bad guy, so we constructed these aliens and this box and this speaker so he could remain a wonderful person, and that it was going to be these aliens that would harm your family. We e went further than that. He had to be kept safe or they would issue you a new male companion. Right, So this was the way you were uncomfortable. You were not consenting, You were being abused. You wouldn't have used those words, but the unknown alternative to that farwards would have been terrifying. So it was these stacked up manipulations, and you didn't even want him to go to jail. You were worried about him.

Well, right, and then how do we finish the mission if he's in jail?

How long is this going to go.

On until this can be accomplished? Yeah, I couldn't do that without him, and I certainly didn't want somebody I didn't know that would have been horrible.

So you come back from Mexico, your parents come down to Mazulan, they pick you up, they bring you home. How does your family feel about birch Child after all of that.

Well, what's so interesting is the amount of time that it takes for anything to happen legally. So he is back and now he's at home with his family and back in church with us. We're showing up and there he is.

Yep.

Because as the FBI is trying to put a case together, and as my parents are like being threatened by birch Hold's lawyer, like going to say that you're unfit parents and take your children away from you, and then we're going to express that you know, the bos my dad is a homosexual, which he was not. But you know, that's the threats that they made at that time in the seventies that were so horrific for my parents. And a lot of people don't get that. They're like, your stupid parents and they just were protecting themselves. I'm like, no, they were trying to make sure that their children weren't taken away from them. So that's one of the things that a lot of people miss. They don't know that he called my house when we were at school, trying to talk to my mom every.

Day, multiple times a day.

You don't have a caller ID, you don't know who's on the other end of the line, and it was always Mary Anne. Don't hang up, Mary Anne, please. I just got to tell you exactly what happened. You know that I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you since the day I met you.

And he had flirted with my mom and.

Given her all the compliments, and you know, a lot of ladies found him to be quite charming and handsome. And you know, my mother loved my father very very much. But anybody can be swayed by the right set of circumstances.

Bob birch Toold went to extreme lengths to groom and gain collateral from Jan's family before he abducted her. The first time, he manipulated her father into performing a sex act on him. In between the first and second kidnappings, he preyed upon Jan's mother, seducing her into a three month sexual affair. He then used these transgressions as proof that they were unfit parents. This textbook grooming and manipulation further isolated the person who was hurt worst of all in this jam, and is consistent with the pattern of psychopathic behavior exhibited by birch Told. I think that every one of us is manipulatable, and every one of us has been manipulated.

And I love that you've let me tell that part of it, because my father never let him back in the house.

He hadn't really told my mom.

He said, was I'm taking care of it, and I'm gonna repent, and I love you, and I'm just so mad at myself for ever, you know, having a weak moment in my life. It's very interesting because I think those two pieces of my story were part of the you know, this is so shocking and how could they have done? And I'm like, really, most people in the world without a master manipulator calling the shots and stringing you along, have made a sexual experience mistake.

Yes, almost everybody, but I know.

However, what birch Told was doing was getting collateral on your parents, right. That was a very calculated maneuver on his part. Going back to what the show is about, I think when we hear about people interacting with people like birch Told, people who are psychopathic and they're coming into contact with someone like your father your mother who have absolutely no roadmap for this. People view this as at encounter of equals, and it's really not. It's sitting down to play a twisted game of chess with a twisted grandmaster. They're going they already won the game. Birch told went into this with an agenda. Your father went into it thinking it was a burgeoning friendship. And I think that's where we often blame your father in this and your mother in these kinds of scenarios, because they're viewed to think, how could you not see this? Because the idea of grooming is if we could see it, then it wouldn't happen exactly. We will be right back with this conversation. Okay, So now you're back and you know, getting into a rhythm again. He is not in prison, he's living his life in the community. How does he insinuate himself back into your lives again?

Well, really, he was never in my home again. Eventually, what happened was that my mother, soon after I was found, when she went down and agreed to meet with him where he was going to tell her exactly what happened. And it was in that first communication in his motor home that you know, she stayed too long. He told her, you know, every time I would look at jan standing at that little sink, I was thinking of you, and why don't we just figure out how we can be together, and I'll break the news to Gail that I'm in love with you and that I you know, all these things that he was saying to my mother, whether was on the phone when he called, you know, two or three times a day to get her to listen. That was the first time that she met with him in private, and that's when that first happened. And then she told my dad and he basically got divorce papers and put them on the table. He said, I think he's an evil person. I don't think you're seeing it, and you're putting our girls in danger.

And my dad.

Said it was the worst day of his life when he put those divorce papers on the table, because he loved my mother so much. And my mother has basically said, that was the worst day of my life too, except for the day you were kidnapped the second time. That's the time when I felt like it was all my fault, that if I had seen through him sooner. So she went down and spent some time with her own mother and sisters, and came back within ten days and just fell into my dad's arms and they sobbed, both of them. She said, it's over, it's done. I see through it. I do think he's been manipulating me, and I do want this family, and I want you and I love you. You know, even though it was only that little two week period of time, it was very life changing for all of us.

It's interesting because what it does seem is that what Birch told was trying to do was make your family system a weaker place that would have given him even more entry in right to her access. The calculated scheme around this is one of the biggest webs I think I've ever heard. Although it's involving so few people. This is the kind of stuff you'd read in an espionage novel, right, and it involves entire countries she's doing it with in one family system. And so your parents have come back together, but you still believe there's this possibility the world is going to vaporize on my family's going to get destroyed. How are things unfolding? Because we're still building out to you being kidnapped a second time. Nearly two years after she was drugged and driven to Mexico, Birch told coerce Jan, based on instructions he said he'd received from aliens, to write a note to her parents and climb out her bedroom window where he'd be waiting for her. Jan was fourteen years old and missing once again. This time, he took her to California.

He enrolls me in a Catholic boarding school in Pasadena, California, Flintrich Sacred Heart Academy.

So the first time it was forty five days. The second time, how long were you gone?

I was missing for over three months?

How did law enforcement? How did the police? How are they conceptualizing this case?

This time they treated it as a runaway because of the note that I had left that you know, I was going to go and be, you know, on my own.

I was grown up.

I was fourteen and pre pubescent, and the note was how they decided. I guess they all knew it was him, but the FBI would not sanction getting involved with it at the beginning until there was more proof.

I just want to make a comment though. Here you are someone who's been abducted before, they know this, and they go right to that idea of a runaway. I still don't think we get it right. I think in too many missing young people's cases that's where people go. In some cases that may be true, but as far as I'm concerned, who cares? A fact that someone ran away means that they were distressed?

And side note that I think is very interesting. When he spent from the kidnapping with time served and the conviction, his fifteen days in jail. Fifteen days, it was after he'd already taken me to California. It was after Jan's a runaway. Now he goes and shows up to serve his fifteen days jails.

Were from the original abduction. So you were abducted for forty five. Huh, he only has to do fifteen and he hasn't served it yet and has managed to kidnap you again, right, And.

Then he goes to serve it and says, well, I don't have her. I mean she's in communication with me. She just she can't possibly go back to her terrible parents in her terrible home.

And yet he managed to enroll you in a private school.

By telling those wonderful nuns who ran the boarding school that he was a CIA agent, that we had escaped from Lebanon, that my mother had been killed in the Lebanon crisis, and he basically showed them, I mean proof, and he said, oh, I'm sorry, I've got to go. I have a meeting with Jerry Jerry Ford President, and he's like, and really, the most important thing is that you've got to protect her. And if anyone comes looking for her, I mean, they may pose as police officers or FBI or whatever, but if you tell them that she's here, they will get her and they will torture her to get to me so that they can find me.

This is sort of like a navigating narcissism hack for everyone listening. If anyone ever tells you they are CIA or in the Witness Protection program, don't spend time with them. They are lying to you. You're not supposed to tell if you're in the Witness Protection program, right, And you're not supposed to tell if you're in the CIA. It is amazing how often psychopathic people weaponize the whole CIA thing. I guess it seems intriguing and it seems like someone's got to be a CIA agent. They're not talking about it. And they're definitely not enrolling kids in the private school like that.

You know, there's something sexy about that on some level or something that people are just like, Oh.

I think it also makes the other person feel special, right, like I'm part of this sort of thing being brought into it. So how would he see you?

He would come on the weekends and he would pick me up and we'd go in the motor home and he'd take me for two or three days and then I'd go back to school.

Okay, and that's when all the abuse happened.

So he would s actually assault you. Tell you note that weekend. So now though they do finally find you at this private school, so you then go home again.

Go home again.

I'm still fourteen, but still one hundred percent believing that we have not accomplished the mission. So I know that the mission is going to somehow have to continue. Yeah.

After abducting jan a second time, Birch Told evaded charges by claiming he had a mental defect. He ended up serving five months at a psychiatric facility before being released. What was your attitude towards your parents?

My mom describes that day when because I was listed as a run away I had to be processed through the system. I literally spent a night in jail, in my own hometown jail. It was horrible. I am so angry at my whole life and my parents that when they processed me and then they drove me home. Now I haven't seen my family for all these months.

I've been homesick for them.

There was definitely sure all of that, but I did nothing.

My mother sees us pull up.

I walked through the back door, and I look at her, and she looks at me like she wants to put her arms out, she wants to hug me. And I walk down the stairs. I never say two words to her. I walk down to my bedroom in the back. I closed the door, and my mother says, I still didn't have the words or the what or how to get you to.

Talk, and I wasn't talking.

And then the whole abuse and meeting up with birch Hold happened for another two years.

So you've come back, you're in your parents' home. The abuse continues.

Yes, when I go and meet up with him, even though he was totally not supposed to be in our county. I mean, there was a whole court order that he could never you know, but I would meet up with him, the abuse would continue. We're trying to make sure we have this, you know, this baby to save this dying planet. And I am going further and further down into a loneliness and a state of desperation that I can't really describe fully. But I put on the happy face, just like all the just like all the kids do that are being abused, come to school and they act like everything's fine.

Bearing the burden of sexual trauma, having to carry this sort of catastrophic secret that you truly believe that the world is going to be destroyed because you have been indoctrinated into this belief system since you were about ten years old. Yeah, and so now you're six years into being told that this is it would be like being raised in a doomsday cult.

Yes, where you don't have other information.

You don't have any other information, right, I don't know what's normal what's not.

At this point?

Is there anything that's going through your mind? Is there's something wrong about somebody who keeps pulling me away from my family?

The only disconnect was the requirement that I was not to have a relationship with my father or any other boys. And that was so hard for me because I was so close to my dad.

He was just my life. I loved my father, we all did.

And you know, to his credit and to any parent listening out there where your child's behavior has.

Changed so severely.

My dad, when I would push him away, when I would ignore him, when I would turn away, when I'd never let him touch me, my dad would just say, I don't know what's wrong, Jenny, but I'm here whenever you need me.

I love you.

I would die for you. And it was so unconditional and it.

Was so real.

And it was right before my sixteenth birthday that I knew I was going to be vaporized. That I made a plan. I started to test the waters. I started to talk to boys at school. As school started, I accepted a date to a dance with a boy that I didn't really know. And when I came home from the dance and my dad was asleep in his lazy boy chair waiting up for me, and I walked through the door and I looked at him and I sat and he woke up and he say, oh, Jenny, did you have a good time. It was my first aid, and I was like, I did Dad.

And I sat on the.

Arm of that chair and talked to my dad for like the first time since basically after the first kidnapping, when I had already been told you can't have any relationships with any other men, including your father.

And we talked about.

The date, and I gave him a little kiss on the forehead, and I walked down the hallway and there my mom's asleep, Karen's asleep, Susan's asleep, everybody's safe. And I just went, I don't think you're real. I don't think this is real. And I did not have a clue what I was going to do next. I didn't know what to do next. I didn't know if I should tell somebody or even how to do that. And it wasn't until my best friend Caroline and Karen, my sister, basically dragged it out of me within a couple of weeks of that experience.

It absolutely is a process. One of our experts was a cult expert, doctor Yanya Lala. She uses this example of a shelf in the back of your head, and one day you see things in a way that they pile up on there that you now see what this really is. Yeah, the shelf breaks.

Oh my gosh, that's a great way to say it, because it has to come to that.

All that stuff piled up more, more experiences, and then ultimately it was that you did make a leap of faith. And so that leap of faith to allow something as simple as a boy a dance and the world didn't stop to me is one of the most profound metaphors for healing I've ever heard, because there are moments for many people will say, but if I do this, then this terrible thing will happen, And you know, they just have been so brought into the structure and one day they do the simplest thing and the world doesn't stop spinning. For many survivors, it's the idea that if I speak out, then all these terrible things will happen, my family will fall apart, or I'm going to end up on the streets or whatever. And then they do the thing, whatever it might be. In someone situation file for divorce, speak out about abuse, and while it does take them to a different difficult phase of their life, it's now from a place of clarity and the healing can begin for you that shelf break moment, as doctor Yanya would call it was starting to see things. All the things you were told would happen didn't, And now is when healing could start, slowly, slowly to begin. Once you realized that everything he was telling you about about the aliens and all this wasn't true, did you connect to the idea that Birch told this whole time had been abusing you.

I did.

It was pretty quickly, so hard, it was, it was terrible.

In her book The Jan Broberg Story, Jan estimates that Birch told sexually, abused or raped her approximately two hundred times over a four year period.

Even when many many years later he died by suicide. I had people calling me and I said, it's so weird because I'm crying, like I'm sad, but I'm so relieved. But I'm I guess I'm sad for the little girl, and I'm sad for his children. And I don't even know how to process the fielding.

That I'm having. Why would I be at all sad for him?

Because I was also relieved and elated, and I had all these various feelings. And I think that was the same way it was when I started to unpack what he had actually done and it took me a long time to talk about the abuse. I just called it the icky stuff, and I said I don't want to talk about it, and my parents just kind of honored that. I said, there was ikey stuff and I don't want to talk about it. It wasn't really until I was in college and I was writing an English assignment about a period of time in your life that was significant and it had to be long, fifteen twenty pages, and I would call home and I would.

Be like, Okay, I want to talk about this. Why didn't you know this? And that?

You know?

When people asked me, how did you forgive your parents?

I said, look, I had wonderful parents.

First of all.

That was the foundation luckily that I had.

It wasn't my parents, Thank goodness.

I don't know how kids survive that, but they do. Also, every time that I would call and I would be upset, they just acknowledged my feelings. They didn't try to defend themselves. They didn't try to if anything, they just said, we're so sorry, we wish we had known, we were so sorry.

What can we do?

How can we help you know what's next? Because we just we love you always. It was just unconditional from my mom and my dad, and I'd experienced that before and I experienced it again as I tried to begin healing, and that was really a big, huge plus for me. For those that it was parents or grandparents, you know, somebody in the family, Ugh, I do have a huge empathetic heart because they were supposed to be protected and nurtured and they didn't get that correct correct. You know.

Doctor gebro Matte talks about the idea that equally horrific as the trauma that happens to the child is the sense for the child that they weren't protected, especially when it's happening within the family system. I have to say, though, when I heard your mother say that your parents never attempted to defend themselves, and that was a big part of your healing. One of the hardest things is when people are part of a traumatic system. They themselves were not perpetrating per se, but they were part of a system that may have sort of allowed something to happen. Most people, when we are having to face up to our contribution to someone else's pain, our first go to is to defend ourselves. Well, you need to know that this was going on and you need to know that this and I didn't know that, and I didn't know this. I agree that their willingness to say I am so sorry, you know, how can we be here for you? There is no excuse like that, even though many people say, well that's frustrating too. It's a much more towards the right direction of healing than somebody trying to defend their position when it was your pain. How has it affected you long term, your relationships, how you entered life as an adult woman and lived and loved as an adult woman.

Yeah, well, a lot of trial and error because I didn't really have a guide necessarily to say, oh, this is how we deal with trauma, this is what you can do. So for me, I went through many relationships, multiple marriages. I was looking to reclaim somehow that twelve thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old experience. So I was not operating out of a fully formed, you know, adult woman mind set. I don't know if I was just lucky, but substance abuse or drugs, alcohol, that never was a part of my struggle. But it was definitely relationships that were a struggle for me. And how do I, you know, let go of what happened and be able to have, you know, a good sex life.

How do I be able to have a.

Good relational life that is an adult relationship that can grow. It's been a struggle for me my whole life. And then I really feel like some certain things that became very transformative for me are basically those twelve transformational breakthroughs that I can now identify that happened in my life for me to become the person that I am today, where I am a very happy person, I'm a very healthy person, and I feel like I just want to help other people get there faster and sooner. That's really what I've kind of created in my own kind of twelve step program for sexual assault and abuse survivors, especially child abuse survivors.

You said there was sort of twelve transformational points moments. Yeah, don't expect you to list all twelve, but what were some of those?

Telling my story for the first time and a friend of mine had a little book club and she said, come tell your story. And as I told my story and the questions they asked me, I was like, oh, yeah, I have an answer for that, or.

I can tell you something you know that.

I realized not only was it good for me to get it out side and to have other people hear me, but it was good for them. And so step one telling your story being believed is really important and not blamed. Finding that person or a group where you can be safe to tell your story and know that you will be believed. So that's when I started an online community. It's called Thrivevers Survivor plus Thriving is thriving, so you're a thriviver and in that community, those are the ground rules.

It's a safe place.

There's no judgment here, you are always believed, you will never be blamed. And so having a space like that, if you can't find that with your parents or with someone else, is really a big key because I believe that just festers, especially adults that it happened when they were children. They say it takes on average twenty one years for a woman to come forward and disclose, and that most men never do.

And most men never do. I say that as a clinician, and I don't think we can put you find a point on that is that many men never speak out about it. I think the shaming for men is it's a different process. It's not a worsom, whether it's a different process, and how men are taught to sort of manage those kinds of emotions and experiences, how they're received by the world. In terms of you telling your story, that's one of the hardest things for trauma survivors because you got almost view. Trauma's got these different elements to it. I think for some people, the telling the story is hard, but then there's this whole experience they're having, and then there's the fear, there's the shame, there's the disbelief, all the things people come up against.

My mom and I had been asked to speak at an educational conference and the other gentleman who was a keynote speaker, he said, I've been a superior court judge for a number of years, but I was an attorney for children and children's rights, and all of my cases had to do with criminal pedophiles, and your story contains all of the elements every case I've ever worked with. It's in your story. And he said, there will be millions of people that will resonate with your story because even if it isn't, you know, the same exact thing, they've been groomed. It was somebody they knew, and it doesn't look like a scary stranger. So those basic things are so important for someone to feel that they can share in a safe place and that they can survive the blowback that may happen, because it is that first place of putting it in words that are outside of your body that you can examine. I studied brainwashing. I studied the tactics that he.

Used on me. I have names.

Now, yeah, you know that makes a big difference.

Does make a big difference. I mean so glad you said that, because these things do have names. Right. Gaslighting is a psychopathy, is a thing, Grooming is a process, and these have been substantiated. They are things that are designed to bring a person to the point where they no longer trust themselves and are more likely to trust someone outside of them even more. It can happen to any of us. It doesn't happen because someone is foolish. It's often based on the establishment of trust. And then on top of that, when we throw into this all of these mechanisms that are based in manipulation and exploitation and learning about someone's vulnerabilities and infiltrating a system. None of this is against the law, and so our systems are designed to react to this. So something terrible has to happen. Someone has to be sexually abused, or assaulted or raped. Somebody has to be manipulated and exploited the way you were with these unfounded beliefs, and you know, having that belief system be hijacked. And even none of those things, the sexual abuse, sexual assault is illegal, but a lot of the things that still happen to someone in these experiences still fly under that radar. So we have all this data on what's leading up to it, but there's not a single legal place you can act on this. Does that make sense? Total a porities, We go to the law enforcement that justices they got nothing right, so when it gets over that line that they can do something about it, so much harm has now already happened to this person that from a mental health perspective, the amount of work we need to do is extraordinary. And then on top of that, because these things aren't illegal, they're not talked about enough. The world looks with suspicion at the person who is perpetrated against rather than at the perpetrator, which not that I'm saying that they're signing off on the perpetrator. What I'm saying is that to believe that there had to be something wrong with and I hate the word victim, I'm going to use it for a minute, but that there had to be something wrong with the victim makes the world safer because otherwise we are all potentially susceptible to a birch hold, and that makes the world far too terrifying to live in. So it's easier to say what's wrong with Jan? What was wrong with Jan's family? And that story repeats every single damn day.

It does, and it repeats by the thousands.

Yeah, because we would rather talk about murder, We would rather talk about children that are kidnapped, in sex trafficked in another country than we would talk about the one hundred thousand children that are being perpetrated right now for every one or two of those other victims, which is a terrible thing, and murders terrible and all of that, But the number of people, it's twenty five percent of the world has gone through childhood's sexual assault and abuse. Those are facts and figures of those that have reported to those organizations that can tell you these are the.

Numbers, correct, correct, and that creates people who often don't get the help. We do not have the support, especially if it happened either within the family or the family just doesn't get on board. It wasn't a healthy family system to begin with. I remember hearing that Elizabeth's Smart story had a major role in you speaking out about yours.

She'd been missing for nine months.

Of course, I'm glued to the TV, and I knew when they showed the pictures of her exactly what had happened to her, because she was downtown Salt Lake, you know, she had the little like veil and stuff on, and I was like, Oh, yeah, she's been brainwashed for sure. That day was a woman that came on to the television in her car where the newscaster was going down the street.

Hey, have you heard the news? Have you heard the news?

And the people are like, oh, we're so grateful, We're so happy for her family, we've been praying for them, blah blah blah. And then this woman in this car, he said to have you heard the news that Elizabeth Smart's been found? And she took her hands off the steering wheel, she folded her arms in front of her. She looked at the newscaster, and she said, I think this is ridiculous, this is disgusting. Didn't she know how much time and money we were spending trying to find her? Her picture was everywhere she was right downtown. Why didn't she run in the street and start screaming? At that moment it codified h what is missing in this conversation is people do not understand grooming and who the predators are. No, I knew why she didn't run in the street and start screaming. Even if her mother had been standing right beside her, she may not have said anything or lifted up the little veil and said, mom, it's me, help me. The missing piece of this conversation in my mind that day was the grooming and how that leads to the brainwashing and why people don't run in the street and start screaming.

That sort of cold face of public opinion, which absolutely is not trauma informed, that doesn't understand what happens in these kinds of circumstances of her petration and abuse in somebody who is young, who is a child or an adolescent. That that is something that literally should be taught to every educator, every cop, every judge, every attorney, every lawmaker, everyone needs to understand this and realize that something is happening and that we would all be at some level vulnerable to that. Yeah, I understand that Oprah's gratitude journal has really worked for you.

Can you talk a little bit about other round of my transformational breakthroughs. I was around a table with a bunch of other friends women. We were complaining about everything. I got home and I thought, no, I don't want to be the person with the saddest story, because I could top all of theirs. I don't want to be that person. I actually want to be the happiest person at the table that people want to be with me because I have hope, I have joy, I have that. And then I had heard Oprah talk about keeping a gratitude journal, you know, and I was kind of exploring, like how can I actually shift that in myself, and so committed that I would do it for two years and I wouldn't miss a day, and it had to be different.

You could never repeat, you know.

After you ran out of the obvious things like you know, I'm so grateful for my son, or you know, all the people, you had to start looking and that was the process that allowed the shift to happen in doing that work of taking that thirty seconds to actually think through my day or as I'm going through my day, what am I going to write? And so it was the day that my stepdaughter passed away in a car accident that i'd been keeping this gratitude journal. And when I got back with all the other kids, her three sisters and my son, we were all devastated, and that little journal was sitting there, and we'd all been crying, and you know, it was just a really heartbreaking day. And I looked at it and I was like, no, nope, I can't think of anything not today.

It's not fair. I don't have to do that. And I didn't have to do it.

But then I remembered going to pick up her sister as I was trying to take them all from you know, southern Utah down to Salt Lake where she had been life flighted and was in her seventh surgery, trying to get there before she passed. Didn't make it, got about halfway there and they said turned around and go home, and I had to tell all the kids that she had died that were in the car. I'm sorry, Oh it was a day it was so hard.

But I remembered when I went to pick.

Up Melissa, her sister that's just younger than she is. She was at a friend's house. It was Labor Day weekend, and it had been raining and the road was muddy, and I thought, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get stuck in the ud.

I'm not going to get to Melissa. I gotta get her.

I gotta get her, you know, I gotta get her in the car.

We gotta go, we gotta go.

And all of a sudden, I hit gravel on that road and I could get to the house.

To pick her up.

And so that day, that night, I remembered that there was gravel, and that's what I wrote, I'm grateful for gravel. And I know that the exercise, the practice of doing that for those two years, it changed who I was. It had a true psychological and physiological change, but I had to practice. And so knowing that things can shift for you in such an extraordinary way for me on a day like that, to me is evidence that we can We may not know how, but we can choose to get on the path to healing, to get on the path to finding the right therapist to get on the path to finding the right exercises, the right things to do for us in order to come back to what I call our perfect record that we were born with. It has our own music, and it's very unique to us, and it's our own playlist, and it's our own soundtrack to our life. And then somebody puts this huge scratch on your record with that abuse, and what you really have to get good at when the needle gets stuck, you have to get good at picking it up and moving it past the scratch, and you do it over and over and over again throughout your life. Scratch doesn't necessarily go away, but you can form a new.

Groove that I love that and it's music, and you still get to keep the song you do.

It's your unique music, your soundtrack, but you have to choose it and then you have to.

Do the work.

And it may take medication, it may take all kinds of things. I'm not saying it's easy, but to stand up for yourself, to take the time to say I am worthy of healing. If you were to give advice while I get to be here with you today, what would be your advice for people that are still dealing with so much shame, which is so misplaced. They didn't do anything wrong. How do we get past that so that we can get to the point of going, Okay, I'm going to stand for my healing. I'm going to get involved in a group. I'm gonna read the books, I'm going to do the exers, I'm going to do it.

My conversation will continue after this break. It's a multi step because it's going to be a little different for everyone, depending on what they endure, the kinds of supports they have. I'm sitting in front of someone right now who went through a very very severe, pervasive, persistent, developmentally significant trauma. Right so that's capital T, no question about it. But I want you to imagine you're carrying a messy backpack or a messy bag, and I'd say, let's dump this thing out, and i want to see what we've got here to work with. And in doing that, I'll say, okay, look there, actually there's like seventeen crumpled dollars in here. You's out you had no money. There's actually a little bit of money here, and this stuff we don't need. Let's let's figure out a way to get rid of this, and I see what we don't have here, right, I don't see your driver's license, or I don't see you know, whatever else you might need. My point in this saying this is in everyone's bag is something different. In your particular case, you had the very complicated space of family. And I say complicated because the first twelve years of your life were unconditionally loving and securely attached, and you felt confident and in yourself. Right. That is not often the case for a lot of trauma survivors, right, but you had that. But then your parents obviously you've forgiven them and all of that. But there may very well have been a moment in time when you thought, why didn't you keep me safe? For right, going back to doctor Gabromante's point of not feeling safe, not being protected and the support's there, it might have been this access to therapy. It was your willingness to say, okay, there are things like the gratitude journaling process that Oprah had talked about. Was that forcing yourself of you every day? You can't say that I woke up like you get to do that. Once that you've got to move on. It's almost like this retraining of the brain. It's like the clearing of the groove into a mindset of growth, of noticing joy, because joy is something that trauma survivors often are afraid to notice. It feels like it could be taken away. There's almost like a safe it feels unsafe exactly. So I would say that it's understanding everyone's story is different, because the one thing I always want to tell folks is that there's no one size fits all. Your journey and healing is going to be very different than someone else's. And people might sometimes say, look, I can't even heal right, you know, so it's adding up that shame of like, look, they're doing fine, and I can't even think of a thing to be thankful for what's wrong with me? And I think that it's getting away from the what's wrong with you. Some people just need education. They need to understand what a psychopath is, they need to understand what grooming is, they need to understand what those processes were. When we think about what trauma informed work looks like, it's things like safety, accountability, empowerment, choice, And the key for a trauma survivor is to recognize there is choice because all of that was taken away from anyone in the moment of trauma. There was no choice. So sometimes it's even I can choose to write this thing in the Gratitude Journal, there are choices I can make. Each step of this is a choice. Therapy is essential. I do think that you know, without therapy, there is really not a path for with someone who knows sexual trauma. And if it's early life trauma, who knows child sexual trauma. To be with a therapist who gets that, who creates that safe, non judgmental space, is absolutely crucial. And there are people out there who do absolutely extraordinary work in that way, and that becomes a lifelong process, and the life longness of it is also Listen, we do lots of things for our health lifelong. We make healthier food choices, how we sleep, the movement, we engage in, whatever it may be. This is no different. It's just that it's a little bit of a steeper climb. And then there are the leaps of faith, like having a family, you have a son, how did your experience impact how you've mothered your son.

Wanted always to have the communication part because that became such an important part of my recovery with my own parents and my own family. So I remember having deep, really truly deep conversations with my five year old, like the first time he ever asked me about where babies come from or said something like that. I mean, we just you know, laid it out, you know, and and he didn't seem scared of it. I know there's this age appropriate thing that you have to be aware of, but for me, it was like, whatever he asked, I'm going to tell him the truth. And that is why I think that we are still so close today. We have very deep conversations about all kinds of things. He knew that I was never going to be mad at him, that he knew that he could tell me anything. But I kept thinking, if I'll tell him at the right time, my own story, if he can know that I'm doing my best, and there's been trauma that I have passed on, you know, to him, because of my multiple marriages and things that I you know, it's taken me a long time to figure out.

I don't know if I still haven't figured out.

But yeah, I was more cautious in some ways, but maybe not cautious enough in other ways. You know. It's interesting I look back and I'm like, why was I as trusting as I was? That was one of the key pieces for my own healing. I couldn't go through my life not trusting people. That was a miserable existence. And I made a very firm decision that unless somebody gives me a reason not to trust them, or I have that gut spidey sense feeling that something's off, I'm going to trust people.

Amazing because a lot of people listening to this will say I experienced trauma and I can't trust to which I'd say, and that's okay too. Of course, those are the processes that people might say, I'm still very tentative, and you know about your son. We actually had the opportunity to talk with Jewel on our show. She talked really beautifully about something called an emotional inheritance that we get. And you know what I loved about that model is we are given that emotional inheritance, good, bad, and indifferent, right, you know, from our parents. But it's an intergenerational inheritance because that emotional inheritance is also based on what the generations before us have gone through. We went through something, and for all the things we do for our kids, they get the whole thing and certain wisdom that comes from that. But there's also a certain difficulty that comes from that. We know trauma is intergenerational, and so there is that generation though that says I need to make sure I do everything I can to keep my child safe, and then with the hope that that just keeps getting paid forward. A lot of people will say a lot of their healing happened through parenthood.

Yes, oh, definitely.

For me, it's definitely been one of the best things that's ever motivated me or made me want to, you know, look a little harder at what could I be working on. You know, it takes a lot of trial and error or trying different things and going, well, that didn't work, let's try something else.

Something else exactly. And I think that's every human being. I don't think that's unique to people who've been through trauma.

Don't either.

What would you say to parents listening to this episode who might have a suspicion, as you call it, spidey sense or intuition about a friend or their child has come to them about something that's happened. What would you say to parents under those situations?

First of all, I would say listen, trust what you're feeling. I know that we live in a world where we really want to give a lot of grace to people. We want to not be judgmental of people.

I am so.

About all of that, I really am. It's a huge part of my own life. But when you have something that hits your gut like something is off, it's something is wrong, or the way my child responds when he's around that family member or that person at school, or that you dance teacher, or whatever whatever it is, you have to listen to that because your subconscious, you know, your computer system that is taking in all this data, It's got a lot of unconscious reasons for why you have that feeling, I think, and so often we can't even consciously understand why listen.

We have a vision of what a perpetrator looks like, right, we have that vision in our mind. There's a look. The problem is a lot of perpetrators don't have the look. They Birch Tol didn't. Nope, he did not have the look. In fact, he was considered attractive and people welcomed him into the church and thought he wasn't great. Think it's the hiding and plain sight of it all as the wolf in sheep's clothing and the grooming process. It's about really that psychopathic ability to sort of worm your way in. And most people want to believe human beings, human relationships, human societies can only exist on the basis of trust. If we don't trust anybody, there's no You really can't leave the house. The fact of the matter is is it's listening to kids. It's believing them. It's trusting your gut. It's maybe erring on the side of being conservative. It's doing your due diligence saying, hey, my kid's going to hang out here, I'd love to come by and spend some time here. Who else is in the house. It's asking the questions. We often don't even give ourselves permission to ask those questions, and so kids do not make stuff up. It is too terrifying because children have to believe the world is safe, right, even more than adults do. So to make this up, knowing the stakes, they need the social ties. When a child speaks, talk to them, pay attention to them. And I think from time immemorial we have not accorded equal rights to children. I really have not in paying attention to what they're saying, hearing them and if anything, more than anything, we now know there shouldn't be equal rights for children. There should be more rights for children because they don't have the capacity to advocate for themselves. And while there have been glacial movements in that direction, obviously the world doesn't look like the nineteen seventies. We're still not there. People say, what's the most important thing we could do in the world. That's a top three and that means everything. Ensuring they're well fed, ensuring they have shelter and reading, they're well cared for, and frankly, jan, if children were kept safe and free of trauma, I wouldn't have a job anymore and I would be thrilled.

Right, That is the core of all this other stuff, the other things that come, you know, the criminal activity, the substance abuse, the cutting, the anarexia, the bolima, the mental health issues. I mean, it stems from this, And I'm like, why are we not spending all of our money trying to create awareness campaigns for adults and educational campaigns for kids with all the appropriate words, so that that six year old who's grown up with this abuse, at some point in school goes, oh, This isn't the way all the kids in my class get treated at No.

No, and the shame and the fear and all that. I want to double back to birche Told for a minute. He continued to contact you for decades after the abuse. Can you talk about the last time you saw him?

Yeah, So this was same year that Elizabeth Smart was found. It was in two thousand and three, and I'm doing some conferences and I get asked to speak at a university that's an hour away from where he was living. I had no idea he was this close to me and my family, no idea he'd remarried and he's about an hour away. Sees my picture on a poster, my face that I'm going to do this conference telling my story. Well, little did we know that birch Told had been making threats against this university, like you can't have this girl talk, she's made up this story whatever. Well, because all of that was happening, they almost canceled me, and so I went and filed a stocking injunction now knowing that he's like an hour away from where I live. And then what happened was you have to go to court if the person on the other side contestsct it, and he did, and I was I was shocked, though he actually wanted to go into a courtroom.

So anyway, I had to show up in court.

And there I'm sitting like he's as close to me as you are, you know, three four feet away from me at a different table. The courtroom is full of my friends and family, and he's defending himself and at one point, I mean, I'm shaking like I'm twelve years old.

This whole thing is just like, oh my gosh, he's right here.

I haven't seen this guy for twenty seven, twenty eight years.

At that time.

And he says this thing to the judge in response to it, what is your defense against this stocking injunction being placed in force? And he said, well, first of all, she's made up this story. And I hear that ABC wants to tell her story, and I just want to know how much money she's getting from telling her story. There was something about that particular comment, because I've really never made any money significantly on telling my story, and anything that I've made I've put back into trying to start organizations and other things that I think will help people. At that time, though, in life life, some mother Mama Tiger took that little girl that was shaking for the whole first like forty five minutes of that proceeding, and just wrapped her big claw arms around that little girl and was like, I'm going to.

Keep you safe. I'm going to protect you. You don't need to worry.

I'm right here, and I'm going to tell him to his face exactly what I need to say to make you feel safe. I mean, it was just like it happened in an instant. And I turned to him and pointed at him, and I said, mister Birch, told, the only reason that I have ever told my story and will continue to tell my story, is to protect other children from monsters like you. Now, if you were really sorry, you would stand up, tell the truth, and serve your.

Time in jail.

And I sat down, and I was done being scared.

But chan, you know what he said, because I just watched it again last night.

Yeah, go ahead, you tell everybody.

Sorry you feel that way.

Yeah, put it all back on me.

Okay, sorry you feel that way is a narcissist's apology. It is a psychopath's apology. There is no responsibility taking there It is sorry you feel that way, as though you don't have a right to that feeling. I heard that. I was one of those moments. I mean, we had established, beyond a shadow of doubt, this dude's a psychopath. But I was like, right till the bitter end, listen, I've never met the man. Now he's dead. So this is speculative, but based on the behavior, everything we saw, how it unfolded, the intensity of the grooming, the systematic nature of it, the callousness of it, the unwilling, the absolute and utter lack of remorse, right to the bitter end, zero remorse, zero accountability, the parasitic nature of him, finding a family member to work with, finding the way to bribe the guard with his wedding ring. All of that stuff that screams psychopathy to me. And there's a difference between a psychopath and a narcissistic person. A narcissistic person can experience guilt and shame and negative emotions and remorse, and all of those things. Certainly narcissistic, particularly malignant narcissistic people can be capable of really horrible things in the context of a relationship. But the systematic nature of Birch told the impunity, the way he could work systems, all of it that smacks of psychopathy, and even more so in something we've called the dark tetrad, which is psychopathy meets narcissism meets machiavelianism, which is exploitativeness meets sadism. And he was very sadistic. The whole alien thing, putting you in such a place of fear and terror for so many years, that's sadistic. You know, doctor Fry, who I spoke about, has this model called darvo. They deny, they attack, and then they reverse victim and offender. You know, I'm the one who's the victim here. You're all coming at me. I didn't do anything wrong. I'm just trying to live my life. And then Jan in that courtroom, he twisted it and you said, like you made up these stories to a little girl about aliens, like and he said, well, what's wrong with you? This sounds crazy, judge. Can't you see what she's saying? And I thought, I mean gaslighting right there in real time in a court. It showed not only how pervasive, but how terrifying. And you said there were other victims, Oh.

Yeah, I know.

There were two before me, and I know there were at least four after me. There was no remorse effort.

The fact of the matter is is that people with these personality styles psychopath really narcissistic people, these don't change. His personality styles don't change. They will forever perpetrate, which really Birche told did until he went out on his own terms, basically, and so the unchangingness means that the entire onus of prevention is on all the rest of us. How to protect our children, how to protect ourselves, which goes back to a point you were making earlier. Sadly, we do need to be a little less trusting. That's what it comes down to. I have kids, they're adults, and I still don't trust people because there's nothing that's going to stop the perpetrator side. Nothing. So it's all about everyone else having the information to say themselves. But what you're doing, though, you're healing all the things you've done, from therapy to gratitude journaling to fostering supports doing the work you've also it's paying it forward. I want to talk a little bit more again about thrivivors. Thing I want to understand is thrivivors is it designed for people who experienced sexual abuse, trauma, assault, rape in childhood, or is it for a person who's experienced that at any point in their lives.

You know, because childhood has its own special like ramifications. I mostly am speak from that point of view. However, I would not necessarily discourage someone from joining our community up to the age of twenty five. I consider you, I do a child a team between because you don't have the mental capacity to have maneuvered through so many things.

This is high burnout work. Oh yeah, you know, it really really is.

Jen.

I'm sure you get tired, and that's the one thing I want to you know. It's your story reminds me that for many survivors, paying it forward and thrivers, paying it forward is an important piece of their healing. But it's also about pacing yourself because I think some people out there they're like, Okay, I'm going to go help someone else. I'm like, okay, let's slow down. Let's make sure you're putting your healing first. You're doing your stuff first, and then you give yourself permission to step back when it becomes too much. Because to hear these things over and over, that is its own form of re traumatization. It's not easy for anyone, not even a mental health professional who sometimes needs to sort of step back, and so for people who've gone through it. While there is a validation and hearing other people's stories, learning from other people's journeys, there's also the risk of burning oneself out and do healing yeah right now, compassion, fatigue, call it what you will. So it's very clear the things that you know that have helped you heal, what are still some of the barriers for you healing.

I think you just brought up one of them, and I think it's self care, which is another transformational breakthrough r that you absolutely have to know that your self care is not selfish because so often that's where we have lived in that shame piece for so long that if we take care of ourselves first, that somehow we're being selfish because that was just like integrated in every aspect of somebody else having control of you and doing whatever they told you to do. So I think that that whole self awareness, self actualization, self care, to really be mindful in that process and to develop mindfulness for your own self every day correct is hugely important.

Well, we see this in complex trauma survivors. It's that ability to listen, to get into your body because that's where again, our bodies hold the trauma. You know this much more than anybody else does. Then it's listening to this font of information that is our body and taking information from that and learning when sometimes like I need to pull back, or I need to not do this, or I do need to do this, Like there is this, you know, the pain of your body holding or trauma is also the exquisiteness of what you learn from it and being in tune with that. But to that end though, is that you know again, it's all the things you're saying that could be barriers for any form of healing from any kind of relational trauma. How can people join thrivivers.

You can go to thrivivers dot com, you can go to thrivivers dot so there's several ways to get to the community itself. But if you want to have a conversation, you can write to one of my social media places. I read everything and I reach back out to people who are really interested in you know, I'm ready for this. I'm ready for some healing and some guidance there and to be around other people that already get it. That's very safe.

Yeah, that's what it is. It's finding other people who get it. And we'll obviously have all of this information in the show notes for folks who want to look into this. And so I'm going to as one last question, I know your father passed a few years ago. How's your relationship with your mom?

Really wonderfrid Yeah, she's older, yeah, yeah, and there's some memory things happening, and that's hard, you know, because she's been such an independent force. She went back to school after all of her daughters graduated from college and got her degree in social work and worked for the state of Idaho and also worked in Utah for a period of time and placed a large number of children in good foster care homes and in adoptive homes the family couldn't be or unified.

And you know, and.

She's done a lot. She's lobbied for back in the day. I just found the letter that she wrote and then she stood up and lobbied to have Idaho be a part of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It was one of the last states to join. And when she told our story that happened, and that was back in the eighties early nineties, and I'm like, looking at these things that I now have, I'm like, wow, you know, just little moments throughout life that you can make a big impact and you don't even realize it at the time. So you know, I hope I can make a difference for somebody and that you know, one of these things either my podcast where we do talk to survivors and then how are they getting through the next steps of their own healing and thriving, And we talked to experts and we have those experts are on my community as well that come in and do great.

Well again, everything you're doing, it's amazing and just you sharing your story and showing everyone that there's another side, and not just another side, but a place of growth, a place of thriving, a place of supporting other people and helping other people and reminding people that the shame is where we get hurt and to bring these stories out of the darkness into the light. So again, I cannot thank you enough.

This was one of the highlights of my telling my story and being acknowledged. Thank you for being that person.

I just want to.

Acknowledge your sister who apparently has been following my.

Story, and it was the beginning.

It's just so sweet.

And I got to meet her briefly through a little face.

To make you meet her again. Yeah, so she again. She was the one who brought your story to my attention, and in the minute I heard about it, I said, oh my goodness, we absolutely you know, with oh my gosh, do you think we could get Jan Ferberg? And she said you should try, and here we are. So we did and so blessed. So thank you, thank you, thank.

You, thank you, thank you. And her.

Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Jan. First, Jan's story is a reminder that grooming, the building of trust, seeking of vulnerabilities, isolation, and then cultivating opportunities isn't just an individual phenomenon, but it can happen within systems. He groomed her family, he groomed their community, He even groomed his own family. And all of that, coupled with society's tendency to not believe children and to believe perpetrators, especially perpetrators such as Birchtold who held privilege within society, meant that perpetration can last years with few consequences for the perpetrator, but a lifetime of consequences for the survivor of the trauma. Next. Over so many conversations on navigating narcissism, one theme has become clear that, whether it is betrayal, blindness, or cognitive dissonance, or self preservation or straight up denial, so much perpetration is kept in place by other people in the system being afraid of challenging the status quo. A groomed system is a vulnerable and distorted system, and that desire to not rock the boat sadly often overrides intuition and instincts that something isn't right. Perpetrators count on this and are basically taking advantage of a very basic human drive to keep things the same and not have to face the devastation that shifting a worldview can bring. In this next takeaway, the patterns and behaviors of the perpetrator, Birch told the systematic grooming, the lack of remorse, the entitlement, the grandiosity, the relentless and obsessive menace, continuing to send no living close to her, the tactic of behaving like a victim and setting complex ruses playing upon a girl's fear and sense of responsibility with the alien story, but then flipping when he talked to adults and making it about mental illness. The shifting identities, claiming to be a CIA agent, the capacity for constant deceit, the callousness. It all points to psychopathy, and people with this kind of antagonistic personality style, which is far more dangerous than narcissism, will often exploit systems like the courts to play out their entitled beliefs that after brutally harming and traumatizing Jan, that she had no right to share her story. The entitlement is so unfettered that they genuinely believe that they can control that person in perpetuity. These stories never end. Folks like this perpetrate in perpetuity, and sadly, our court systems keep giving, giving them an arena within which to keep perpetrating. For our next takeaway, Remarkably, after the acute period of returning to her family past, Jan found a place of peace and connection with them again. Many people watching or listening to Jan's story were angry at her parents for not acting faster, for not protecting her more, for not seeing it sooner, for getting pulled in. Jan went through her a process of understanding, but she did point out something that she said helped her as they went through the period of healing that her parents never defended themselves, that they shared that they were sorry and wanted her to heal. While Jan's was a unique story, an important takeaway is that when we are supporting someone close to us who has gone through something and maybe we didn't get it right all along, that we don't fall into the cycle of defending ourselves but simply face in to supporting the survivor next. Jan shares that she experienced multiple transformational points in her process of healing. Some of these included telling her story in safe places, paying it forward to other survivors, which in her case was establishing a platform to give survivors a safe place to share, practicing gratitude, reminding survivors of their strengths, and teaching people about these patterns so they are aware and can protect children. Everyone shares their story in their own way and in their own time, and it can take some time to determine what those safe spaces are. It may be therapy, it may be a support system, it may be a support group. Whatever a survivor finds sharing your experience in a way that feels safe, in a space free of shame and judgment, and beginning the step by step process of healing is essential. And lastly, Jan uses a beautiful metaphor, I want to come back to here. She talks about her experience of trauma as a scratch on a record that causes a favorite song to skip, but that with time and healing, that the groove becomes less deep and this song can play again, and the skip may slowly become less perceptible. Seeking out joy and not allowing trauma to steal joy are key elements of trauma healing, But again, it takes a minute. The metaphor of the scratch on the record reminds us that initially everything that is beautiful can seem spoiled and disrupted by trauma or abuse, and while the scratch may never completely go away, the song can still play again

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Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani

We all have to deal with narcissists. Now, it’s time to heal from them. In this groundbreaking serie… 
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