Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Mormon Therapists

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

What happens when a church treats teenage hormones like a moral emergency… and then appoints its own therapists to fix it? This week, Amanda and Reese are joined by John Dehlin (@johndehlin) of the Mormon Stories podcast (@mormstories) to unpack the deeply culty world of Mormon Therapy, where normal human behavior gets pathologized and sexual shame is framed as “treatment.” Join us as we unpack how Mormon teachings around sex, purity, and control have led to widespread sexual dysfunction, guilt, and fear and how “therapists” trained to protect doctrine (not patients) can do real psychological harm. From compulsory confessions to the pipeline that produces figures like Jodi Hildebrandt, this episode traces how moral panic masquerades as mental health care. Also, fair warning: if you take a shot every time John says the word masturbate, you will absolutely need to lie down afterward. Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube! Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles.  Thank you to our sponsors! Join the loyalty program for renters at https://joinbilt.com/CULT= Order online or download the free 1-800 Contacts app today at ⁠Https://1800contacts.com To save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain Head to ⁠https://www.squarespace.com/CULT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. Have you ever had that last pair of contacts panic? May I please introduce you to 1-800 contacts? They're the only major contact lens retailer that lets me renew my prescription online so that I can get my contacts fast.

1-800 contacts has fast, free shipping, and delivers the same contacts that my doctor prescribes right to my front door. All without ever having to leave the glorious comfort of my own home. I absolutely hate dealing with vision issues, and 1,800 contacts really takes the hassle out of all of that for me. Getting contacts doesn't have to be a hassle. Let 1,800 contacts get you the contact lenses you need right now. Order online at 1,800 contacts.com or download the free 1,800 contacts app today.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. I am a longtime user and lover of Squarespace, and updating a Squarespace website is so incredibly easy thanks to a few key features, including their design intelligence. Also, you can very easily sell content on a Squarespace website via subscription or one-time-only purchase. And if SEO is important to you, rest assured, Squarespace websites are optimized with SEO tools. Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The views expressed on this episode, as with all

episodes of Sounds Like a Cult are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It's almost like every month there seems to be another Mormon therapist arrested and charged with, you know, fondling a patient, having a sexual relationship with the patient, being a sexual predator on male patients. And weirdly, people who have sexual dysfunction are often drawn to this field. I believe it 100% hurt people, hurt people. There are definitely been many, many Mormon therapists who were unethical, treating both homosexuality, quote, unquote, and porn and masturbation addiction. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host

Amanda Montel, author of the book Cultish, now out in paperback. And I am Reese Oliver. Sounds Like a Colt's Resident Rhetoric Scholar. Every week on this show, we discuss a different group or guru that puts the cult in culture, from Disney adults to digital marketing scams to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watcher back, or a get the fuck out. After all, not all cults look like apocalyptic sex on 408 compounds, okay?

That was sex, S-E-C-T-S, not S-E-X, okay, homonyms. Regardless, sometimes in the modern age, cultish influence hides in plain sight, and this show is all about unpacking and sometimes even joking about the freaky ways in which humans attempt to find community and meaning these days, as well as how cultish exploitation can show up in places you might not think to look. And today, we are looking in one of my favorite places, to look. We are talking about the cult of Mormon therapists, church-sanctioned mental health counselors

who are seemingly there to help shepherd little Mormon followers along their personal or family healing journeys, but sometimes actually in service of empowering themselves or other church leaders in positions of power. And the especially wild part is in the social media age, even if you're not Mormon, you still might be under the influence of a Mormon therapist. That's scary. To help us unpack this uncanny convergence of religion, wellness, and clout, we are simply honored to be joined by John Dillon, an expert in supporting people in religious crisis

with a PhD in Clinical and Counseling Psychology and the host of the iconic Mormon stories podcast, the single most popular and longest-running podcast within Mormonism and low-key without Mormonism. This episode was actually inspired by a panel that John and I both participated in about a documentary covering the notorious Ruby Frankie case, a.k.a. the Mormon mom fluencer who went to prison for child abuse. But the thing is, this particular documentary really shed light on how Ruby's Mormon therapist and collaborator

Jody Hildebrandt was actually the culty mastermind behind her abuses. So that story laid the foundation for today's episode, and we're going to get way more into the ins and outs of it. John, welcome to Sounds Like a Cold. Amanda and Reese, what an introduction. I don't know if I've ever been called iconic before, except by Amanda, but I'll take it. You are iconic. You're humbly iconic.

Okay, I'll take it. I can't help myself. But also, like, your work is deeply important, and you present it in a way that is so accessible and also very reverent, and I just really appreciate you and have been a fan for a long time. Well, it was so fun to meet you in L.A. a couple months ago. That was super fun. L.A., one of the many headquarters of this fair nation at Utah being another. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Depending on headquarter for what, right?

Exactly, exactly. There are Mormons in Los Angeles, but we're here to talk about a specific subculture within Mormonism. We are here to talk about a very strange little pocket of the Mormon internet that has popped up in the recent past year or two maybe, and that is Mormon therapists. But before we get into something so specific, obviously we know you're iconic, John. But can you introduce yourself and your work to our listeners? Sure. So maybe a little bit of background. I'm a sixth generation Mormon and I was born into the church. I did all the things. I was faithful. I served a mission. I was married in the temple. And I was active and faithful for most of my life. And at some point, I started learning things

about the church's history that I had never been taught before that were really problematic. And also, I started becoming sympathetic for LGBT Mormons, Mormons of color and women in the church. And long story short, I started to really doubt my Mormon faith. So in 2005, I left a tech career working at Microsoft, and I started my podcast to try and help Mormons through the mess. I started my PhD in 2009, focusing on the nexus of mental health. and religion and specifically Mormonism. And I graduated in 2015. That was the same year the church excommunicated me, largely for my work. I stop bragging. I know my good year. Yeah, it's,

it's been a party ever since. So that's a little bit about me. What else you want to know? Oh, so much. I just have to say for the listeners and like, excuse the gushing and it's really not love bombing. I come by it earnestly. I really, really love your podcast. I have listened to so many episodes at this point, and I appreciate how you make each of your podcast really serviceable, even if it's about a super niche group. I was just watching your episode on YouTube about the two-by-two church. It's this really, really interesting religious sect that has no real headquarters. But I just love how even when talking about a group as niche is that, you manage to apply this cult analysis to it to show how we can all empathize and relate to people, even those

who've been through things that seem really freaky and distant. So I really appreciate you for that. And yeah, since you hinted at it, before we get into the topic at hand, could you talk about some of those red flags from Mormonism's origin story that really, like, got your spidey senses tingling and that inform your work now as a counselor? Yeah, absolutely. So when you're raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-A Saints or the LDS Church, that's how they call themselves these days.

You're not told a lot about the church's darker history. You just think, oh, we love families and we love Jesus, and we love helping people, and, oh, we had a prophet named Joseph Smith, and he was next to Jesus, the most righteous man, whoever lived on the face of the earth. And believe it or not, most Mormons are raised knowing that maybe their ancestors way, way, way back practice polygamy, but that was done away with long ago in the 1800s. And we've stopped that. And God had his reasons, but God fixed it.

And now we're just normal, all-American, white bread, Donnie and Marie kind of citizens. The truth is that our history is a lot more interesting and a lot more controversial and shocking than that. When I was at Microsoft, in my 30s, so imagine this. I attended three hours of church every week of my life. I attended seminary for four years where every morning in high school, before school. I do an hour of religious instruction for four straight years. I spent two years teaching the Guatemalans, the gospel of the church. I went to BYU, where I took a religious class every semester.

And then I, you know, was married the temple. In all those 30 years of being a faithful, devout Mormon, no one ever told me, for example, that our founder, Joseph Smith, had over 30 wives. In fact, he had so many wives, the church doesn't know how many wives he had. But he didn't just have 30 to 40 wives. He married 12 women who were already married. to men. Many of them were faithful men in the church. So why is Joseph Smith marrying women who are already married? And he also married many teenagers. So Joseph Smith married at least one or two

girls as young as 14 years old. And he did most of this within the span of like, let's say, three years from like 1840 to 1844. And ultimately, controversies around this polygamy led to his martyrdom. So long story short, is he denied being a polygamous. He denied it to members of the church, the public. And once some of the insiders found out that he was doing it and then he wouldn't stop, they published in a local newspaper in Navu, Illinois, basically saying he's married a bunch of women. They even accused him of the equivalent of sex trafficking because he would send missionaries to England and to Western Europe. And they would convert a lot of poor young teenage girls and young women. And then they would be told, go to the United States,

not even speaking the language or forsaking their family. And then as soon as they got there, they would be told, well, you're assigned to this husband. And they would become the plural wives of men when they were poor and couldn't even speak the language. And this happened from 1840 up until the church would say 1890. But the truth is, this kept happening into the 1910s, 1915s. And so I, my grandmother, Karma Benson Parkinson, is the daughter of a third wife in a polygamous marriage. And so I knew my grandmother and my grandmother was in a polygamous marriage. So that's how close it is to me. I'm 56. So anyway, that's just one of the many things.

And so I could say a lot of good things about Joseph Smith. He did a lot of amazing things. The data suggests that he was likely a sexual predator. Latter-day Saints hate to hear that. It's one of the most offensive things you could say. It'd be like saying Jesus was a pervert. You know, you just don't say things like that, especially, you know, to a Mormon. But the data show that. And it wasn't until the internet really came online where Mormons started learning about their own church's history, because for a couple hundred years, if anyone talked about this stuff, the church like me would excommunicate them. And so that's the dilemma is it's just in the past 10 years, 15 years, where Mormons are starting to learn about their own profit,

believe it or not. So now we're all just trying to pick up the mess. And the last thing I'll say is we're going to be talking about mental health and therapists. Think about the sexual dysfunction that would come out of a people that for 50, 60, 70 years were hiding their private sexuality, lying about their private sexuality, running from the law, feeling persecuted because of their sexuality. It's dark and it's seedy and it's a horrible traumatic history, mostly for the women, but also for many men and for, children, even my great grandmothers that were in polygamous marriages, some of them have horrible

stories to tell. So just think about that being the first hundred years that your church is built on. And then, yeah, the church kind of slowly over a couple decades kind of put it away. But just think about all the seedy underbelly of sexuality that's going to emerge in the 20th century that grows out of families that for generations were hiding and lying about their secret subversive sexuality. Well, first of all, I want to say Jesus was a pervert sounds like the name of a punk song I need to listen to, but that's beside the point. I also want to say that, yeah, a population that grew up in a community with this origin story and this culture of secrecy and suppression, it sounds like a group of people who would be hardcore in need of

some therapy. And so, as I know, the Mormon Church offers a form of therapy to its congregate. could you share with us what is a Mormon therapist exactly? What is their purpose and how are they different from secular non-Mormon therapists? Okay, to be honest, in our culture, it's not like there's this idea of a, quote, Mormon therapist. An active faithful Mormon wouldn't think about there being one type of Mormon therapist. The way it would work is a married Mormon man would get caught masturbating and look at porn and they would feel guilty and they would feel like they needed to talk to their Mormon bishop, which is like a priest in a congregation. And at some point, the wife is feeling like it's infidelity. He's cheating on me.

Porn is horrible. It might be that a Mormon bishop would say, well, you need to see a therapist. And so the Mormon bishop historically would have a list of church approved therapists and would refer that member. But over the years, there has been a formal church approved list of approved mental health professionals who promise to conduct their mental health services privileging Mormon doctrine and theology and moral standards, even above their own ethical standards or the scientific literature. But like Mormons wouldn't even understand this idea of Mormon therapists. They would just think, what therapist does the bishop recommend? Does that make sense? Completely. So most of the dysfunction in the Mormon mental health community grows out

of sex. And given the history we've already talked about, that kind of makes sense. But most of you will know that the Book of Mormon is considered for Mormons superior to the Bible. So, Mormons definitely believe in Jesus. Mormons definitely believe in the Bible. But they are taught that the Bible was corrupted by priests and monks and bad people over time. But the Book of Mormon is the pure word of God that came to God through Joseph Smith, its founding prophet. And the Book of Mormon teaches about Jesus. So it's viewed as a companion to the Bible, but really superior to the Bible. It's Bible fan fiction. It really is. People who have studied it from a secular perspective often because it's basically telling the story of the Native Americans from 600 BC to 400 AD. This is

allegedly. And it culminates in Jesus dying in the old world, but then traveling to America and visiting the Native Americans that were Christian that were here. And there's no historical basis for any of at all, but that's why people call it Rocky Mountain Bible fanfiction. But in the Book of Mormon, there's various books, just like in the Bible, and there's a book called the Book of Alma. There's like three women. There's like hundreds and hundreds of men named in the Book of Mormon. There's like three women named in the Book of Mormon. I'm not exaggerating, and one of them is a harlot, okay? This book is not passing the Bechdel test. Only three kinds of women, and one of them is Harlan.

So Alma's good after his son for being enticed by the harlot. isabel it wasn't him she enticed him here's the big verse in verse five know you not my son these things are an abomination in the sight of the lord yea most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the holy ghost so it's basically saying in the book of mormon that sexual sin is what bad murder and then there's the real bad stuff uttering innocent people and then look next. Bill's boning. Literally.

Yeah, so that's a fact. This isn't a joke. Like, I was taught on my mission, and this is a quote from a Mormon prophet, it's better to come home from your mission in a pine box than without honor, meaning having had sex as a missionary. And I'm not exaggerating. Google me, if you don't believe me, there's another prophet that taught better dead than unclean. There's another prophet that taught that a woman should allow herself to be killed over being

raped. Like, these are all quotes. I believe it 100%. Well, I don't even know if you know this, Reese, but years ago, I was invited to give a talk about language and gender based on my first book Word Slut at an event called the Rocky Mountain Sex Summit. And it's an event for sex educators in Utah, most of whom are ex-Morman. And the hodgepodge of sort of like knowledge levels and education levels in this room was really fascinating. And I heard some stories from the event organizers that sent a chill down my spine. They did not seem real. Like, of course there's the stories about like temple garments and stuff like that. But like just the amount of secrecy and suppression specifically of like women's sexuality. I don't know. I remember something I took away from that was like there was the

acknowledgement that homosexuality is real and you can't be punished for it unless you act on it, but women have no sexuality. Is that correct? I mean, the most accurate way to discuss female sexuality and Mormonism is that it doesn't exist. It's men that masturbate. It's men that are horn dogs and they want to go after women. And this is typical purity culture stuff. It's not unique to Mormonism. But a Mormon woman's job to dress modestly, to not show her shoulders, to not show her knees and to be a guardian to the man's chastity. But never is it like women masturbate. Mormon lectured every week, it seems, don't masturbate, don't look at porn. It's just never brought up with women, as if women would never even think to do anything. Exactly. Which I was just like,

okay, we're able to like hide in plain sight. Pretty much. The things that are told to women are like, just be a good object. I think of all of the food metaphors of like the unlicked cupcake or the unchewed piece of gum. Like, you are just to essentially remain untouched in an object of admiration only. Yeah. Those metaphors, chewed gum, lick cupcake, that's all in Mormonism. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. At least refer to me. Well, I remember, again, this was something that I discussed in words slept, but like there's a lot of literature analyzing the food metaphors that are applied to men versus women in and outside of religion, how like women are often framed as tarts or cookies. Whereas men get to be beefcakes, you know, a full meal with more nutrition.

Substance, protein. Oh, God, another chilling thing I remember picking up from that Rocky Mountain Sex Summit, which like shout out. I actually, I loved being a part of it, but was like the idea of the mixed orientation marriage. Big deal. Where like the man is gay. And like, yeah, that's real. But like just, you know, you can overcome, you know, you're just in a mixed orientation marriage.

No, we'll get to that. That did my history a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. It's a big deal. Get you and your crew to the big shows with Go Transit. Go connects to all the main concert venues like TD Coliseum in Hamilton and Scotia Bank Arena in Toronto. And Go makes it affordable with special e-ticket fares. A one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel across the network on any weekend day or holiday for just $10.

And a weekday group pass offers the same weekday travel flexibility from $30 for two people and up to $60 for five. buy yours at go-transit.com slash tickets. Have you ever had that last pair of contacts panic? Have you ever been stuck wearing your glasses when they really didn't go with your fit? If you can relate to either of these conundrums, may I please introduce you to 1-800 contacts?

They're the only major contact lens retailer that lets me renew my prescription online so that I can get my contacts fast. 1-800 contacts has fast, free shipping, and delivers the same contacts that my doctor prescribes right to my front door. Maybe you've already heard of 1-800 contacts, and that's because for over 30 years,

they have been the leader in online contact lens delivery with millions of contacts in stock and award-winning customer service. What sets them apart from everyone else is their fast-free shipping, they're over 100 million contact lenses in stock, and their unbeatable perks

like free torn lens replacement. I absolutely hate dealing with vision issues, and 1-800 contacts really take the hassle out of all of that for me. Going to the eye doctor feels really unnecessary and low key it is thanks to 1-800 contacts. Getting contacts doesn't have to be a hassle. Let 1-800 contacts get you the contact lenses you need right now. Order online at 1-800 contacts.com or download the free 1-800 contacts app today. So Mormon therapy in large part grows out of the extreme sexual dysfunction within this community.

So there's a Mormon apostle named Bruce McConkey who wrote a book called Mormon Doctrine. It was first published in 1958. And it's like a dictionary, right? So here's the entry of psychiatry, okay? No doubt psychiatry, the study and treatment of mental disorders, has some virtue and benefit in certain cases. But in practice, in many instances, it is in effect a form of apostate religion, which keeps sinners from repenting, gaining forgiveness, and becoming candidates for salvation.

To illustrate, an individual may go to a psychiatrist for treatment because of a serious guilt complex and consequent mental disorder arising out of some form of sex immorality. Masturbation, for example, it is not uncommon for psychiatrists in such situations to persuade the patient that masturbation itself is not an evil, that his trouble arises from the false teachings of the church, that such a practice is unclean, and that therefore by discarding the teaching, of the church, the guilt complex will cease and mental stability return. In this way, iniquity is condoned and many people are kept from complying with the law whereby they could become clean and spotless before the Lord. So other Mormon prophets and revelators taught that masturbation leads to homosexuality. And if you think about that context for then the emergence of Mormon mental health in the 70s, 80s and 90s, you can see the train wreck that starts to happen. And so in the

1970s, as an example, we have BYU professors that are psychologists applying behavioral psychology to the treatment of gay and lesbian Mormons. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And a lot of religions do this, that pathologizing deviant sexuality or whatever, using the Okara mental health vernacular or whatever. A gay way of a student would go to a lab and he would sit down and literally he would be shown gay porn, and he would have electrodes plugged into his genitals or into his skin, and they would be measuring his arousal. And every time he was shown an erotic homosexual, quote, image, he would be

shocked. It was called aversion therapy. And this was absolutely approved and practiced at Brighamian University. And ironically, the Mormon Church's Prophet just died like last week or the week before. The man who succeeded him, his name is Dalai Chokes. He's the current Mormon prophet. He is the man who approved the IRB for aversion shock therapy at BYU in the 70s. Same guy. Oh, my God. Well, wasn't it true anyway that at the beginning of the 70s, homosexuality was like still in the DSM? Yeah, it was a disorder up until like 1973. Yeah. So the Mormon Church is taking this to an extreme, but like the stage was set for anyone who wanted to pathologize homosexuality to. Orthodox Jews did this. Evangelical Christians did.

this, it was not just Mormons. Conservative Christians were each sharing notes, sharing therapists, sharing techniques, sharing practices, inspiring each other, holding conferences together. And I think the most important thing to talk about next is the treatment of homosexuality in Mormonism, because the church did move away from aversion shock therapy for the most part. But in the 80s and 90s, what it moved to was reparative therapy or conversion therapy. And so that's basically where you use therapy to try and un-gay somebody, right? And it's unethical. Like, if you look in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, every single legitimate mental health association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, all of them, Marriage and Family Therapist Association,

they all denounced conversion therapy or reparative therapy as unethical, as damaging. And, you know, for those who don't know, it was like, go into the woods camping with a bunch of gay men and chop would and throw the football and talk about how your dad was distant and your mother was overbearing and this is the weird perverse part hug each other sometimes nakedly and over time you will reorient your brain to be more masculine and you'll hear from your childhood traumatic wounds and you'll all of a sudden be straight again wow that sounds really effective no it was a disaster and it wasn't of course and this was a whole cottage industry in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. And what you'll get is whenever someone gay comes to a Mormon bishop in the

70s, 80s, 80s, it's like, that's a sin. It's demonic. You need to go to a approved therapist who will help fix you. There was an association called Evergreen, which was put together as an association of Mormon therapists to treat gay Mormons. And there were basically a few options for gay Mormons. Stay celibate for the rest of your life. Marry someone of the opposite sex and enter into a mixed orientation marriage or be excommunicated from the the church and or kill yourself. And unfortunately, there have been decades of suicide epidemic disproportionately per capita in Mormonism because most people thought, I tried conversion therapy, I tried marrying a woman, I tried being celibate. I prayed and prayed and prayed.

It wouldn't go away. The only way it's going to go away is in heaven. So I may as well accelerate that process. And I'm not joking. I don't mean to be glib. But the reason why I got into psychology, partly, was the epidemic of suicides I was noticing in the world of Mormonism. You would just read the obituary every week in the Salt Lake Tribune and Desiret News. Little Tommy served a mission, was in drama, loved his mom, and he was taken too soon. And it would never describe why, right? But we all kind of knew. And so for my PhD and my dissertation, I studied the LGBTQ Mormon experience.

And that was a big part of my training. And fortunately, we've been able to get the church to stop encouraging celibacy, to stop encouraging overtly mixed orientation marriages, and to stop teaching that it's sin or a choice to be gay. That doesn't mean the church is doing well on this issue, but it's doing better in 2025 than it was doing in 1990. That's all a background for someone like Jody Hildebrand. I hope you're seeing how they're starting to come together, right? Yes.

Absolutely. So can you talk a little bit about the Mormon church in the digital age? age and how the internet has reshaped the Mormon approach to therapy? So separate from the plague of the way the Mormons have treated LGBTQ members is the plague of masturbation. And so one of the worst things for the Mormon people has been the rise of the internet, which led to the rise of the accessibility of pornography that also was accelerated by smart devices and cell phones and iPads and stuff. And so one of the worst things that ever happened was the church believed that sexual sin, including masturbation, is next to murder

and severity. And pornography is a gateway to masturbation, which is a sin in of itself, but also it's a gateway to homosexuality and just straight on sex. So what you'd get is in Mormon chapels in the 90s and 2000s and 2010s. Like I mentioned, the Mormon church would just harp on this every single week. Don't look at porn. Don't masturbate. Stay off the internet. It's evil. And just Just think about that. You've got these 12-year-old boys that are, like, showing up with their pimples and they're hearing every week in church, don't masturbate. And they're like, huh? What's that, you know, and don't look at porn. And they're like, porn, what's that? What the church did unintentionally was create an epidemic of internet pornography use within Mormonism because it couldn't stop talking about it. And- Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. And you go to Pornhub. Pornhub would sometimes release. its statistics on per capita use by state. And for many years, from what I've understood, Utah has sometimes led the nation in per capita pornography use. And it makes sense because if you're talking to kids about it from the time they're 11 and 12, if you never shut up about it,

and if you make them so stressed, they can't do it, don't look at it, it's evil. We all know how the brain works. Don't go in the closet. Like, don't think of the person. Right? Exactly. And so that's what has caused an epidemic of pornography use. But then there are these therapists that have arisen to treat the disease. And so I don't believe the church did this intentionally. But we all know that the sickest organizations are the ones who create the disease and then offer themselves up as the cure. And so that's what Jody Hildebrandt literally was. She's like, I can solve this masturbation porn problem, but I've also lost my license. So I'm going to create my own coaching practice. called Connections. And by the way, Jody Hildebrand, before she ever started Connections,

was the approved therapist for a network of masturbation curing therapists called Lifestar. So if you Google Lifestar, Mormons, Therapy, you'll find that somewhere in the 1990s, 2000s, a network of Mormon therapists emerged who promised that they could cure husbands and teenagers of porn and masturbation. use. Jody got on that list and was the approved Lifestar therapist for porn and masturbation in Utah County, which is like ground zero Mormonism where Brigham Young University is. And she did that for many, many years. And so that's how she built her name and she built her reputation by being listed on the internet as an approved porn and masturbation addiction therapist. To give some exposition

here. Could you actually explain who Jody Hildebrandt was? And are there other people out there like her at large right now? Yeah. So many people will know and some won't that once upon a time there was a really prominent Mormon influencer family that had a YouTube channel called Eight Passengers. And it was Ruby Frankie, who was the mom. Her husband, Kevin, was an engineer and a BYU professor. And they had six children. They had millions and millions of YouTube subscribers. Long story short, over time, Ruby got more and more stringent and discipline Aryan to her children, specifically her son Chad, and somehow inexplicably, Chad was no longer sleeping in his bed, but on a beanbag, and it was for like nine months, and Chad was sent off to a wilderness camp,

and all the followers were like, why is their son, 16, 15-year-old sleeping on a beanbag and being sent off to a wilderness camp? Well, it was partly because behind the scenes, what nobody understands is that Mormon wives start to get really strict and tense when they believe that their husbands or sons are masturbating and looking at porn. And so at some point, people started to report Ruby as being an unsafe and an unhealthy parent. At that point, she lost all her following. But during that time, to her had been recommended a therapist named Jody Hildebrand. She was raised Mormon. She lived in Utah in her adult years and got a name for herself as a woman who could cure pornography addiction or

masturbation addiction. Now, weirdly, she had been divorced from her own husband. Many would say she gives off lesbian vibes, which may or may not be offensive to say. I'll let you respond to that. I'm going to say she seems gay to me. I think each of us are permitted half a response? It's giving gay. That's what I would say. Yeah. So Jody lost her license by behaving unethically, but also for like terrorizing young Mormon couples and becoming way too close to the wives and shaming the husbands for porn and masturbation.

And it just always seemed like at the end of the day, Jody would recommend separation and divorce when the husbands couldn't stop masturbating and looking at porn. And after she lost her license, she decided to become a coach. because then she wouldn't have to operate under a license. And so she started an organization called Connections and started these porn addiction support groups where she could make a ton of money, not just having individual therapy and coaching, but couples therapy and coaching and group therapy and coaching

and retreats. And long story short, by the time she's arrested, she has a $5 million home in St. George, Utah, and is super wealthy. And she made all that money, not just off of, quote, treating porn masturbation addiction,

but off of being referred clients to her by Mormon bishops and by top leaders of the Mormon church. And two months before she was put in jail, she met with two of the top, let's just say 100 leaders in the Mormon church. And that's in Ruby Frankie's diary. So weirdly, she was abusive, unethical, and she had the ear of the top leaders of the Mormon church. Because I think they don't know how to cure masturbation. Can you all guess why the Mormon church hasn't figured out how to cure masturbation? I don't know if it might not need to be cured. I mean, mental health profession would say it's healthy normative behavior, right?

Yeah, I mean, so I've experienced, you know. So it would certainly sing. So it would seem. Wow, yeah, these people are so obsessed with porn. It's like really creepy. So was Jody Holderbrand like a one-of-a-kind figure or people still jodying all over the place to this day? No, there are definitely been many, many, Mormon therapists who were unethical, treating both homosexuality, quote, unquote, and

porn and masturbation addiction. I don't want to name names because I don't want to get you or me sued. And thank you for that. But it's almost like every month, there seems to be another Mormon therapist arrested and charged with, you know, fondling a patient, having a sexual relationship with the patient, being a sexual predator on male patients. And weirdly, people who have sexual dysfunction are often drawn to this field as well. And again, part of the problem is the Mormon church has been in a pickle because like that quote that I read you, you know, from the 1950s, top church leaders have said, therapy is evil if it follows its ethical, scientific-based practices in any way that contradicts

church doctrine. So if you want to be an accepted therapist along the Mormon corridor, the morridor, as we call it, and you want bishops to recommend you, a requirement is that you abandon your ethical commitments to privilege the church's moral standards. And so, yes, many, many, many Mormon therapists have been uncovered to be frauds, abusive, sexual predators, and you just start Googling it, and I think you'll find name after name after name. And they still exist because it's not a thing. You can't cure masturbation, and it shouldn't be cured.

And anyone who tries to cure masturbation is unethical. to start with because there's zero mental health association or training program. And I have a PhD in clinical and counseling psychology from a licensed APA accredited university. There are zero professional associations or universities who would recommend trying to treat masturbation as an addiction. So my definition, you have to violate the code of ethics just to be accepted as a practitioner in Utah. So then filtering this through a cult rubric, a cult, lens. You have the us versus them divide of scientific approaches to mental health and Mormon approaches to values. You have the incredible cognitive dissonance of being torn in two directions of like where

your training told you to go and where your faith told you to go. And then I'm sure so many coercive and thought-stopping techniques applied to make people go in the direction of the church and then a direction of faith, creating the problem and solution in one breath, power hierarchy, not being able to skip rank. I mean, it's just really chilling. And something that haunted me about the Jody Hildebrandt and Ruby Frankie docu-series that you and I were on that panel for is that because connections and eight passengers had these internet followings on YouTube and, you know, Jody and Ruby were really leveraging the internet

to spread their mission, I remember there being a small part of the documentary where someone said that they had converted to Mormonism because of Ruby. And so, like, these principles and these values are reaching people who aren't already in the Mormon faith. Because in a way, they are compatible with a lot of the conservatism and puritanical nature of American culture in general. Absolutely. And what I learned with the conversion therapy, reparative therapy stuff, is that behind

the scenes, evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, conservative Catholics, all working behind the scenes to teach each other, help each other, and figure out how to how to fix these scourges. So it goes way beyond Mormonism. I just want to make that clear, but it's definitely an illness here. Mormons are just more aesthetic about it. That's the thing that I think makes Mormonism such a subject of rubbernecking and fascination is that from my understanding, the Amish, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and so many other sort of high-control religious sex don't encourage the embrace of aesthetics the way that Mormonism does. And I think that makes... Are you saying we're hot? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Saying y'all like a matching outfit.

Literally, like there's the phrase like Mormon face. The what's it called the Utah curl? The Utah curl. Well, and I think the MLM overlap is a huge part of this because like something like 75% of Utah women are involved in an MLM, most of which are going to be oriented around some kind of gender normative beauty standard, all of that. Yeah. Here's what I'll say, dancing with the stars doesn't lie, right? We've got, who is the Mormon wise? Whitney and Jen are dancing it up right now.

And their beauty is standardized. That makes it feel almost more relatable. It's like, oh my God, like I use a curling iron, you use a curling iron. Oh, shit, but your culture is actually very different from mine. I think it's what makes the social media a lot more electric for Mormons, too, is because they have found ways to brand their weird. Like, we don't just not drink alcohol. We have cute little swig drive-thrus. And if you want to come to the swig drive-thru and pose with your cute little drink, you have to do the Mormonism thing, too.

Mormons are just like hot branding masters. And if they're not talking about that in these Illuminati conversion therapy meetings, then they're doing it wrong. Say more about how hot we are. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand. Squarespace makes it super easy to build a beautiful website, connect with your audience, and sell absolutely anything,

from products to content to even your valuable time. I am a longtime user and lover of Squarespace. I'm going to be making some very exciting updates to Sounds Like a Cult.com in 2026. And updating a Squarespace website is so incredibly easy thanks to a few key features, including their design intelligence, which combines two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI technology, to unlock your strongest creative potential.

Also, if you're an artist or a photographer, a teacher, you can very easily sell content on a Squarespace website via subscription or one-time-only purchase. And if SEO is important to you so that when someone Googles you, your Squarespace website pops right up. Rest assured, Squarespace websites are optimized with SEO tools, so you show up more often in more global search results. Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that and enjoy. Via rail, love the way. So, in talking about MLMs and Mormons and all of the ways in which they overlap, a lot of the time I find fun to point out. out in Mormon MLMers is how a lot of the church tactics bleed through into the multi-level marketing. So I'm wondering if this ever happens similarly in the therapeutic space and well-meaning coaches become kind of mini-profits or accidental cult leaders because they are embodying the values and structures of their church. Yeah, perfect example. You know, you could say Connections was a

Mormon therapy MLM because Jody was at the top. She had Ruby and other assistants. And she would always seek out influencers, like Jinnay Thompson, who was married to the YouTuber King of Random, like Mormons are really good at having large networks of friends and community members. And then they're really good at leveraging celebrities, whether it's the Osmond's, David Archiletta, Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, Steve Young, the football player, Mormons love their celebrities. And so if you combine, I'll say, attractive people with large networks of friends and community members with lots of celebrity culture. And then you add to that almost all Mormon women staying home to raise the kids, but not having enough money to support a

large family of kids needing a job that they can do on the side for which their social network would be advantageous and desperate to make money because they're poor to begin with. That's the making of an MLM capital. In Utah, as I understand it, is the MLM capital of the nation. And I think these are some of the main ingredients. Yeah. And if you have an expired therapy license to go with it, you don't even need to come up with a product. It's right there for you. But also you need.

And this, again, I don't want to say this is intentional, but you need the illness. And so like with connections, the MLM, if we're going to call it that, needed the product. And the product of the connections MLM was shame and specifically sexual shame. And that's why a lot of the TV shows that I did interviews with about Jody and Ruby refused to get to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter was, remember those quotes that I read you from the Book of Mormon at the beginning of today's show and from Bruce Armaconki and those may have seemed kind of silly or ridiculous or extreme? They are the sources of the origins of Mormon sexual shame. And then that becomes the product that the Mormon sexual

shame and the alleged snake oil, unethical cure for sexual shame that becomes the equivalent of the MLM. If your wife is pressuring you to say you're cured, you say you're cured, and then you tell other people, Jody cured me, I'll help cure you. And maybe by trying to cure you, I can stay, quote, sober. And it rippled into this massive wealth creating moneymaking organization until it all imploded as a fraud, which it was. Yeah. And if you have a fundamentally incurable situation, like the need to masturbate, then much like an MLM, you're just going to like stay on this path forever until it implodes. Yeah. Jenny pathologized anything. She pathologized vanity. She pathologized anger. Like in the end, it was just shame. And she would pathologize whatever shame she could

find. If you wouldn't endorse sexual transgression, she'd get you for pride. She'd get you for anger. She'd get you for depression. All of it was addiction to her. And none of it was empirically based. None of it was supported by the mental health associations and none of it was ethical. Well, because if it were, then people could start making other connections about the legitimacy of the religion and their practice. And we can't have that. We need to keep everything within our control. It had to be outside. It could not fit in with any other mental health systems that are in place. It had to be completely outside of it. And Jody Hildebrandt as a cult leader figure, because as I understand it, church leaders are probably the ultimate cult leader here. But some

therapist like Jody Hildebrandt are their own cult leaders of sorts. And she had the perfect disposition for it because she herself was just riddled with shame. Hurt people, hurt people. She obviously had some kind of personality disorder. Cluster B, probably. I don't know. I'm not a therapist, but I can definitely see some of that. This like obsessional quality in her. And that plus shame, plus money, plus internet clout. That amounts to a modern day cult leader if I've ever heard of it. Yeah, and, you know, the stereotypical evangelical preacher who's super homophobic, who's also gay, if I had to guess, I would guess that part of what drove Jody Hilderbrand was her internalized homonegativity. Yeah.

So she was a victim, too, and also the perpetrator. Exactly. She was just trying to get in front of the narrative and took it so far. Like, not everybody would take it that far. Just a couple more questions. I mean, I want to take the quotes that you read from the Book of Mormon seriously. I mean, I take language seriously. that's my life's work. And I know that loaded buzzwords can really disguise a lot of cultish harm

all the while creating a culture of understanding. And so I'm wondering, how do certain Mormon therapist Jody Hildebrand, being one of them, use loaded language to create cultish manipulation? And do you think that that language also shows up outside of Mormonism? Absolutely. The two biggest examples of loaded language in the Mormon sexual addiction, area and in Jody Hilderan specifically would be number one, like I said, sit next to murder. How could something be more loaded than being told you're basically a murderer if you do this thing? Honestly, it's hard to think of something more loaded, especially to a religious person that's trying to make it to heaven and trying to do good. A 12-year-old kid finds out that

they're almost a murder already at 12. Think about the psychological damage that that could do. The other thing that's super loaded is demonic or satanic. And if you look at that quote, that I even shared from Bruce Armacanke and from others, the word evil, the word demonic. It signifies that they're literally Satan's demons waiting to tempt you to have an impure thought or to touch yourself or to touch somebody else. But why that's particularly pernicious or damaging in a mental health context is because my expertise is in anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder. And absolutely the worst possible thing you can do to someone who,

is ruminating and obsessing around a thought or an idea is to tell them to never have that thought or idea. And if you do, if you say, don't think of the pink elephant. If I were to have you do that exercise, you would think of the pink elephant 60 times in a minute, if not the entire time. And so if you amp up those stakes by not only saying never think of a woman or never think of a naked man or never think of pornography or never touch yourself. And you say demons are constantly trying to get you to not to have all these things and it's a sit next to murder you're literally going to get people who can't not think about sex all the time i was a therapist to students at utah state university for almost six years when i was getting my phd i met a young

mormon return missionary who was masturbating so often multiple times a day that he was injuring himself like chafing no like exhaustion bruising oh jesus for hours wow hours in place purple tunnel yes because that's what happens when you're having anxiety disorder and you're told never to have a sexual thought and then it's been next to murder and that satanic demons are constantly tempting you it leads to those types of extreme behaviors our brains just can't coalesce like how it knows that we as human beings are supposed to behave with what we're being told, and it just short circuits, that's crazy. Oh, and I'll add that his bishop had told him, anytime you have the thought of masturbating, please text me. Ew. That's weird and voyeuristic. But I was just saying

Jody Hilderbrand would assign sponsors to the addicts, and the addicts in Jody Hilderbrand's sex addict program would have to call their sponsors daily, sometimes three times a day, and report or confess their relapses to their sponsors. And so just think about how many times you're likely to masturbate when you are constantly fearing that you have to confess to your sponsor. They want you to be obsessed with it. Yeah, they do because it keeps them in business. I mean, this is so disturbing. I think it leads us to want to understand recovery. path forward. Yes, I have to ask, what steps can someone take to unlearn some culty therapy habits, whether they come from Mormonism or if they come from another manipulative

healing group? There are a lot of them these days. Well, since a key theme for today is mental health, let me start there. So I got my PhD in clinical counseling psychology because so many of my listeners needed help with depression, with anxiety, with eating disorders, with trauma, with abuse, with scrupulosity, which is religious OCD. And guess what the church did the very same year I graduated with my Ph.D. They excommunicated me. There is another therapist that Amanda, I'm guessing you met at that Rocky Mountain Sex Therapist Association.

Her name is Natasha Helfer. She's been a partner of mine in many ways for many, many years. She started talking about normalizing Mormon masturbation literally in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And she got more and more popular over time teaching ethical, informed, evidence-based sexual health. Guess what happened to Natasha a few years ago? She was excommunicated. So, like, the Mormon Church will often excommunicate public mental health professionals who advocate for ethical mental health treatment. And so I don't mean to get sidetracked about that other than to say the Mormon Church is complicit in raising up unethical therapists, nurturing and encouraging on.

ethical therapists and punishing and denouncing ethical therapists. So the biggest thing you can do if you're caught in some of these negative cult cycles is seek out a licensed ethical mental health practitioner who is an expert in the field that you need help with. If you have religious scrupulosity, find an ethical OCD specialist who has a psychology degree and who is trained as an OCD specialist. If you can't stop masturbating and you want to talk about this with someone, find a PhD counseling psychologist who can maybe talk to you about why, if you really do want to decrease your masturbation, it's possible that the best way to do that is to stop trying not to masturbate. Because let's just say a Mormon has the goal of masturbating less. Well,

guess what? You're going to masturbate less, the less you're trying not to masturbate. Does that make sense? Yes, totally. There was this like allegory or like a little story that my elementary school librarian told me that I think about all the time that put forth this metaphor of trying to pop a bubble with an axe. Sometimes the solution to something is actually like scaling back, bringing things back to basics. It's like a finger trap. Is that a problematic name? Explain the finger trap. Why that's a good metaphor. I love it. Oh, well, the finger trap. trap is that toy where you put your two index fingers in this woven tube that if you try to pull your fingers out, the harder you pull, the tighter it constricts on your fingers. And it's also

like the devil's snare in Harry Potter. Like you have to relax in order to survive it. And the bubble metaphor is like there was this big bubble in this kingdom and like people didn't know what to do with it. It was like this, you know, problem. And so people were trying to like blow it up with TNT and like pop it with an axe and then this little boy came up to it and just tapped it and it popped. And so like all is to say that like the simpler, more relaxed, more generous, more accepting technique can often work much better than the harsher, more shame-ridden constricting technique. And I think that is important to keep in mind whether we're talking about Mormon therapy or the skin care industry or wellness or fitness or like all the fandom, all the cults that we talk about

on this show. Amen. In the words of Jamima Joke Kirk, I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much. Yeah. Yeah. The self-scrutiny can go overboard. Yeah. So the answer your question, Reese, find a licensed, competent, ethical therapist who's an expert in whatever disorder you're trying to fix. And that's your best bet to decultify your mental illness, right? Oh, I love that phrase, decultifying your mental illness. That's so important to hear at this particular time in history and always. John, thank you so much for joining this episode of Sounds Like a Colt. If folks want to keep up with you and your work, where can they do that? So, Mormonstories.org is my YouTube channel podcast. You can find me on YouTube and Spotify and

Apple Podcasts and all the places. I do want to shout out the Mormon Mental Health Association. So that therapist, Natasha Helper, that I mentioned, long time ago, she teamed with a bunch of ethical Mormon and ex-Mormon therapists and created a network of actual ethical Mormon therapists. And if you go to the Mormon Mental Health Association website, you can find an ethical Mormon or ex-Mormon therapist near you and get the help you need. And by the way, if you're a Jehovah's Witness or a Scientologist or an evangelical Christian, my experience is a good ex-Mormon or ethical Mormon therapists can often really be helpful even if you come from a different high-demand religion or cult. Because for whatever reason, we've got our shit together in various ways. One of them is social media, and I think the other is in mental health. I think there's a lot of great Mormon and ex-Mormon mental health providers.

Just don't let the Mormon church recommend your Mormon therapist. Let the Mormon Mental Health Association recommend your therapist. Yeah, you've got to catch them right before they get excommunicated. Or just go ahead and have an excommunicated Mormon therapist, and that might be your best bet. Totally. John, thank you so much. This was so useful and important. Really appreciate it.

All right, Reese, out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Which do you think the cult of Mormon therapists falls into? Wow, it's hard. Because, like, Jody obviously is like, a get the fuck out. But I fear for the Mormons, there's not really an alternative. And, like, I have to think some therapy is better than no therapy. Because, like, at least if you're inclined to seek a. church recommended therapist, you can at least go and then realize how inadequate the treatment

is. And maybe that's the first thing on your shelf to break it, so to speak. So for that, I want to go maybe watch your back because you got to make sure that if they're telling you to abuse your kids, you don't listen to that shit. But therapy's good in theory. I think there's like a spectrum within Mormon therapy. And some Mormon therapists, yeah, are 100 percent, like cult leaders in the most classic sense. And then there are probably Mormon therapists in the database that John recommended that are 100% live your lives. So then it's got to average out to a watcher back. But that's what I have to, I have to assume. Wow. What a wonderful conversation with John. I hope the culties appreciated it. And that is our show. Thank you so much for listening.

Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. Let that too, Coddy. Sounds Like a Colt was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of The Podcabin. This episode was hosted by Amanda Montel and Reese Oliver. This episode was produced by Reese Oliver. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot.

And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book. cultish, the language of fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Oversthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality, and Wordslet, a feminist guide to taking back the English language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult pod, or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad-free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult. Thank you.