Untold: Opus Dei - The Retreat, Ep. 1: Dear Madison

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Madison Marriage receives an email from a desperate father named Stephen. Over the past five years, he says, his twin daughters have changed drastically. They were bright and outgoing, with exciting plans for their future. But over their early twenties, they became increasingly distressed, struggling to eat or sleep and disassociating from normal life. Stephen believes the root of his daughters’ problems is a particular network of intensive meditation retreats.For support or more information about adverse meditation experiences, take a look at the Cheetah House website.If you are in need of urgent mental health support, please contact your local emergency services or reach out to a mental health helpline, such as the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US or Samaritans in the UK.Note: This podcast previously included a YouTube clip that described a Vipassana meditation retreat that was not linked to the Goenka network, as originally implied.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek support if you need it. In January of 2023, I was sitting at my desk at the Financial Times, when an email popped into my inbox. The subject line immediately caught my eye. It read, Meditation Colts and Mental Health. My name is Madison Marriage, and over a year ago, I took on a new role

running a special investigations unit for the Financial Times. Our goal is to expose abuse of power, institutional failings in any field, business, education, politics, you name it. Our publication normally covers financial journalism, so meditation cults are not the kind of thing I usually write about. But there was something about the author's tone that made me sit up and pay attention.

Dear Madison, he started. Media coverage of meditation is almost universally positive, yet the strong evidence that it can cause serious mental health issues, especially in the young people who are drawn to it in a search for some form of spirituality. My interest in this is due to the terrifying damage done to the lives of my twin daughters, now age 27, over the last five years, due to their involvement with the Vipasana organisation. They are now recovering, but still fragile. nonetheless they would be prepared to share their stories. Happy to chat whenever.

I knew next to nothing about meditation and had never even heard the word Vipasana before. I don't meditate. I've known people who meditate, just as I'm sure many people have. But still, that would hardly qualify me as an expert. But Stephen's email sounded articulate. It felt genuine.

I felt concerned for his daughters when I read it. I know lots of people who have experienced mental health challenges. Depression, anxiety and addiction are not unusual among my peers. And many people I know are trying alternative methods to feel better. So even though I didn't understand exactly what Stephen and his daughters were going through, their claims seemed relevant. So I replied, cautiously. I asked for more information.

And then I began to research the organisation Stephen referred to, something to do with the word, Gwanka. The focus of this group is a specific type of meditation called Vipasana. It offers 10-day silent meditation retreats to participants all over the world. You're going to hear those two words pretty interchangeably, Gwenka and Vipasana. Gwenka is the name of the man who founded this network of retreats, a kind of guru at the heart of the network, and Vipasana is the meditation technique he adopted.

You hear Gwankas' voice at every retreat. This technique will help you to explore the truth of the entire field of metal. Gwanker's method involves systematically scanning your body from your head, head to your feet over and over, observing the sensations you come across. Body sensation is so important. And as you proceed on the path, it will become clearer and clearer. As soon as I started researching it, I saw how popular Gwenka retreats are. So I just recently came back from the Vipasana meditation retreat.

10-day Vipasna course. Where you can't speak or make eye contact with anyone. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey raves about Gwanka retreat. Thousands of people go on them every year. Getting off the wait list for one of these retreats is a bit like getting Glastonbury tickets. People love them, and they're fanatical about their experiences online.

Guys, it is all true what all these people say about these depositing courses. I would recommend a retreat to anyone, even if it's just to see what you're made up. Gwenka meditation centers are everywhere. From Scandinavia to Latin America, central Europe to far-flung corners of Southeast Asia. People within the meditation world all seem to have heard of it. It's respected, maybe even revered.

Gwenka's technique supposedly allows for the, quote, total eradication of mental impurities and the highest happiness of full liberation. When I scrolled down a bit further on the results of my Google search, there were a handful of articles that detailed personal experiences at Gwenka Retreats. Some of them read like horror stories. There's a rabbit hole of Reddit threads where people detail physical pain and psychological breaks. People referred to the retreats as being like a voluntary prison sentence

and accused the teachers running them as exhibiting irresponsible behaviour, bordering on malpractice. Before long, I was corresponding with the author of the email I had received a few days earlier. His name is Stephen. He's the one who urged me to look into this group in the first place. From the start, he was not shy about voicing his opinions on the Gwanker organisation.

The organisation is based on a false premise, which is that ultimately intensive meditation can help people and maybe it does help some people, but it's like a very strong drug, and it has side effects. Stephen was adamant that the meditation group his daughters had become involved with was dangerous, that it warranted scrutiny,

from me and from the authorities. The Gwenka organisation is registered as a charity in many of the countries it operates in, and it's pulled in substantial government grants. He felt the whole setup should be questioned. Because we don't understand the human mind, people like this are selling what in my mind amounts to quack cures to vulnerable young people, including my daughters.

Frankly, initially, I was sceptical. Stephen said his twin daughters had become a shell of the people they once were, that they were fragile, that they were in recovery. I kept thinking, recovery from what exactly? How could a meditation organization that promises spiritual bliss end up causing such, in Stephen's words, terrifying damage? Was he right? Did this organisation bear any resemblance to a cult?

This was the starting point on a 12-month journey, attempting to understand the world of one organisation. A world that advertises self-improvement and spiritual awakenings, and allegedly, has caused real psychological and physical harm. It's a journey unlike any other story I've worked on before. From the special investigations team at the Financial Times, this is The Retreat. The Retreat.

The retreat. I went into what I would consider a psychotic break. It was like being in a torture chamber for my mind for six months. The retreat. The final goal is to purify the mind. Episode 1, Dear Madison. Stephen told me his twin daughters had experienced serious mental health episodes after getting drawn into Gwenca retreats.

But I struggled to understand why and how. So I set off on the train from Paddington in central London to meet the family. The twins don't want to be named for men. be named for many reasons, so we're using pseudonyms, Sarah and Emily. Emily was the first of the twin sisters to discover Gwanka. When I met her, she was lodging with her boyfriend and a woman in her 50s, who was a vicar at a nearby church. Emily told me the vicar had agreed to take the couple in after learning about her difficulties. She had tried to live with roommates her own age, but she found it too difficult

living in a lively house share with other 20-somethings. Her nervous system was different now, she said, and extremely sensitive. I have to be careful now. Like, I can't go out partying. Like, if I start to push myself too hard, I'll feel it immediately, and then I have to take.

I just, like, everything gets fried and I just have to stop, and I have to, like, go and garden for a couple of days just to, like, feel okay again. So it's like, I have to go very easy. Emily is tall and slim with kind friendly eyes and a bookish look about her. She's outgoing and gregarious

and seems at ease with herself. She comes across as warm and generous. So just tell me a little bit about your childhood. You know, I was very lucky to grow up and a lot of material comfort and yeah, I went to really good schools and had lots of opportunities with lots of music. I wanted to know whether there were any underlying issues

in the family that led to the twins' sons. spiral. Did they have any conditions they could point to, or past trauma, that might make them particularly susceptible to severe mental health problems? Yeah, I definitely found teenage years pretty rough. Like, I was happy sometimes, and sometimes I felt lonely and excluded. But Emily said their house was overall a happy one growing up. That outside of the usual squabbling between the siblings or the occasional fallout with their parents, they didn't have significant. problems. In fact, there was kind of an idyllic quality to their lives, as Emily tells it. They come from a very musical family. Their mum is a music teacher and pianist. Their dad,

Stephen, works in finance, but at home he's also quite musical. He started playing the trumpet when he turned 50, and he sings. We go out walking a lot. We'd always go to cello classes. We have cello classes. We used to play and we always had nice gardens. We'd always kind of play. The twins and their brother were each given a cello at the age of four. And weekends growing up, they spent their time playing in quartets as a family, singing together, going for walks in the countryside, cooking.

We'd have dinner together. Dad would always cook a Sunday dinner, roast. And mum and dad were always really strong together and definitely cared about us a lot. By the end of 2014, Emily's future was looking bright. She'd been a straight-A student in school, but she still had fun.

She worked a job on Saturdays and went to parties on the weekend, fretted about her love life, and went on holidays with friends. Like, I was pretty work-hard, play hard. Like, I would go out partying until 4 o'clock in the morning and then get up and do my weekend job and then go back to school and do my A-levels.

But it was fun. I kind of thrived off that, I think. When she was 18, Emily got a place to study French and Spanish at Oxford University. She was really excited for this chapter of her life to begin. But when she got to Oxford, she found it tough. Tougher than she'd expected. I just really struggled through it when other people didn't. I felt like I didn't have time to kind of breathe.

And, you know, I felt like it was just too much. Emily decided to take a year out of her studies just to catch a breath. She could go back to Oxford the following year, and in the meantime, she'd travel. Just before she set off, a friend gave her a book on mindfulness. This book was the first time she had come across the word, Vipasna. She found the meditation principles in it, exciting. I remember reading and be like, this is what I've been looking for, because this is all about finding peace inside and, like, coming out of mental complexes.

and, like, I was just really, like, fascinated by the whole thing. As Emily backpacked with a group of strangers, she learned more about meditation and a particular retreat, a special 10-day silent meditation program, founded by the spiritual leader, Satya Narayana Gwanka, in the 1970s. Gwanker was a businessman from Burma, who got into meditation in his 30s to help with intense migraines. He really really,

took to the practice to the point where he gave up his business to move to India and teach meditation full-time. Let people believe in this God or that God or this philosophy, that philosophy, that philosophy, don't quarrel, but don't forget the essence. Over time, he began teaching this method to individuals all over the world. He went on to establish a global network of over 240 Viphasana centers and an intense and rigid method of his 10 days people have to spare, which looks too much, oh, 10 days, how can I give 10 days? But once you pass through it, you find these are the best days of my life.

One of the most unusual things about this organisation is that all of these courses are completely free. This helps drive their popularity, and the whole Gwanka network depends on donations and volunteer work. Gwenca passed away in 2013, but recordings of his voice still boom across Vipasana meditation halls around the world today. And his meditation system, a rigid timetable that starts at 4 a.m and finishes at 9.30 p.m., remains identical in every country his organization operates in. It's hardcore. Some people call it the Marines of meditation. Emily actually signed up to a Gwenco retreat while she was travelling in India. But she had second thoughts after realizing

the course structure sounded pretty intense. I was like, no, that sounds a bit full on. I'll do that later on in life. So I went and did other staff and just have fun. I just travelled loads and had a travelling romance and, you know, just like forgot about Oxford and how stressful it was. But Emily did learn a lot about medicine.

while she was travelling, and she started to meditate from time to time after she returned to Oxford in early 2016. That summer, Emily signed up to her first Gwenka retreat at a centre close to her parents' home in Herefordshire. This time, she felt ready. She wanted to continue to better herself, to keep finding ways to cope with stress.

I did not think that it might be risky. Absolutely no thought of that at all. The retreat centre in Herefordshire is called Darmadipa, and it's in an old remote farmhouse. The setting was tranquil but isolated. Darmadipa is very lovely, very pretty. And I stayed in like an old farmhouse in a shared room with one other lady, which was very simple.

I had that sense when I arrived, like, oh, this is such a nice, like, lovely, you know, lovely environment. I felt like I associated meditation retreats. like safety and nourishment and like good food and like lots of sleep, lots of time to like feel well. But it just wasn't really that experience. Emily soon realized that the intensity of this retreat was unlike anything she had ever experienced. On the first day, she was given a warning.

In the first night, they kind of tell you you should surrender to the whole process. They say it's like an operation for your mind. to make your mind healthy. It's like a medical procedure, they told her, and you mustn't leave in the middle of it. Because if you leave in the middle of it, it's dangerous. It's like leaving during an operation, which is in the process of happening when you're all cut open.

Over the next 10 days, silence would be mandatory as she embarked on a grueling meditation regime, starting at 4 a.m. She had to meditate what felt like all day, every day, and it physically hurt. And so it would be fine for a bit, because I was used to doing a bit of meditation. I found that calmate. But then it was like just having to carry on. I was like, oh my God, this is so hard.

Emily wasn't sure if she was supposed to be feeling so unpleasant. She wanted to leave at one point. But the teachings during the retreats encouraged her to keep going. So she did. They say in the teachings like your mind is full of impurities and like you've become a slave to all your impurities so now you need to learn to control your mind

there was kind of the sense of like I should do this and I must do this and I'm a bad person if I can't do it Emily stayed through 10 days of meditating for 10 hours a day in silence and with no communication with the outside world

the hardest thing for her was that she stopped being able to sleep I couldn't sleep at all. From day one? Yeah, from day one. Emily says that she never had sleep issues before this retreat, aside from a couple of restless nights ahead of a big exam. I just thought it was my fault and it was because of my mind I wasn't able to sleep.

Some aspects of the retreat were positive, exciting even. Emily began to have almost transcendental experiences. There will be moments which have felt. felt really good and felt like this is what I'd been looking for. Like feeling a sense of connection to everything and like, it's a really interesting state of mind that was like very above for every day. Like massive rushes of serotonin would definitely happen at certain points. On the 10th day, the meditators could finally talk to each other

and compare experiences. Many seem to have reached some kind of higher plane. Supposedly, if you've applied the technique correctly, you are meant to feel a harmonious flow through your body. But Emily hadn't quite gotten there. The overachiever in her felt like she'd missed the mark. I just felt like I'd failed. I felt like I hadn't got it right, or I hadn't,

there was something that I hadn't experienced or like everyone was talking about, like, this will happen, that will happen. I was like, I can't even do it. I can't even, I can't even feel my body as a whole, as everyone's saying what I should do. She thought maybe she just wasn't that good at this. Maybe she needed to work harder. So I felt like, okay, I need to come back and try again.

That was how I felt, because I felt like I just failed. I felt pretty cut open. More after the break. Emily left the retreat feeling a little downcast, but determined to do another Gwenka retreat soon and get it right. She also had a slight buzz. The trippier moments during the retreat carried over and helped her feel calm as she headed off to study overseas.

The sleeplessness aside, she felt it had done her some good. While she was abroad, Emily found herself with time on her hands. So she signed up to work as a volunteer at a Gwenko retreat. Even though she had only been through a single retreat, she was deemed qualified to work as a volunteer. Volunteers at the retreats are called servers. An unpaid position, but your board and lodging is free. You do less meditation, around four hours a day, and otherwise help out around the venue,

preparing meals, cleaning toilets, making beds, and socialising with the other servers. Emily's serving experience during the first retreat was okay. But then, she signed up to be a server for a second retreat, and that retreat was different, horribly different. It really started to fuck me up. So I stopped sleeping. So I'd have major emotional, like big, big emotional reactions to things. And I now would have, like, lucid dreams. I was like, I was like a fish swimming through the ocean and like, like, almost hallucinatory dreams and stuff like that, which I never had before.

But the whole narrative there was like, oh, it's good. You know, that's what we're here for. We're here to, like, get all of our stuff out of us. So if you're feeling anxious or upset or anguished or whatever, you know, it's part of the process. Emily told me the retreat she volunteered at did something to her mind, something she could not reverse. It set in process a chain of events that completely overturned the next five years of her life. Her next few months were tough. She was supposed to be studying abroad, but she couldn't focus or think rationally.

She moved several times. Eventually, she dropped the university course and started hitchhiking on her travels, oblivious to any personal safety risks. She was meditating for several hours a day. This is what the Gwanker course recommended Emily should do after the retreats. Keep up the program. Keep meditating. Emily followed the recommendations diligently. Sometimes she sat with her eyes closed on the side of the road,

meditating while waiting for a ride. Other times, she meditated while sitting in the bus. back of a stranger's car. My brain was, like, falling apart and I wasn't sleeping, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. I was kind of, like, slightly tripping the whole time, in that my state of consciousness was very, like, being forcefully elevated.

She finally returned to the UK in mid-2017, a total wreck. When she came back, she was clearly very unwell. She wasn't sleeping. This is Emily's mum, Kate. describing her daughter when she first returned home. She was stick thin and she looked at Ashen. I was frightened.

Tried to get her to see the doctor and she wouldn't. She just looked almost like an old woman. You know, she'd lost all the bloom in her cheeks. She just looked grey and not herself. She just looked like a bag of bones. I went to meet Emily's mum, Kate, and her dad, Stephen, the one who sent me the email, at their home in Herefordshire, not long after I met Emily. Kate's a lovely lady. She came to pick me up from the train station and drove me to their farmhouse, which overlooks a field of sheep. This is the house Emily returned to from her studies abroad. Kate and Stephen told me how shocking her return was.

This is Stephen, Emily's dad. She didn't seem unhappy She came across as not there And obviously on one level She was there physically And she could talk But it was as if her personality Had been removed

Emily says when she returned She felt awful All the time Every day So I felt absolutely dreadful I was still kind of like tripping I felt like I'd just been split in half She didn't know what was wrong with her

So she signed up to do another retreat the only thing that seemed to provide her with any relief from what she describes as a dreadful day-to-day experience. Her parents, at this point, were supportive of her going on the retreats and meditating at home. Stephen thought that meditation was perhaps a remedy for the insomnia and detachment his daughter was displaying.

He thought that I was just mentally ill and the meditation would help, which was my general narrative as well. But Emily says, she didn't have any mental health issues before she started meditating. In autumn 2017, a little over a year

since her first quenka retreat, Emily returned to Oxford to start what should have been her final academic year. But it was hell. She became hypersensitive to noise, sickened by food, and suffered from extreme sleeplessness

and irritability. Any sensory input would be like, torture us. It was like being tortured every day and every night non-stop. I felt like it didn't even exist anymore. I felt like there was just no one. It was like I was like an empty body.

Somehow, she got through the academic term. But by the time she came home for Christmas, she seemed to have entered a psychotic state. She wasn't like a normal human being. She was like a ghost. She was expressionless. She had nothing to say. She did nothing except sit in her room and meditate or go out wandering around the fields at any time of day or night.

Face like a thunder cloud. And then there were bouts of mania. Sometimes she would come and talk to me and there'd be a strange look in her eyes, a kind of mistiness and a kind of faraway look in her eyes. I remember saying to me, Mum, I am the Messiah, I'm going to save the world. She said, I'm going through the dark night of the soul. And I said, what's that? And she said, don't you know what the dark night of the soul is?

Everyone goes through this. But I'm the Messiah and I'm going to save the world. After several weeks of watching Emily get worse and worse, she started looking through Emily's diaries. That's where she found some things Emily wrote about taking her own life. I found her journal where she talks about contemplating suicide. And she didn't see a doctor throughout school?

No, she wouldn't and she was an adult and I couldn't make her. For Kate, the change in her daughter was difficult to reconcile. Emily had gone from being an outgoing grade A student at one of the best universities in the world to dropping out of university and withdrawing from society. She had become practically unrecognisable since her first Guenka retreat

18 months earlier. Kate knew she had to take action. By now, she suspected that the meditation might be doing her daughter harm rather than helping. And she started digging around on the internet for information about the Gwenka organisation and Vipasana meditation.

She learned that there were centres all over the world where 10-day retreats were held, and that the retreats were all based on the teachings of this one man. Eventually, she found blog posts suggesting the whole Gwenka network was like a cult. And that it was pulling the wool over people's eyes, that what they were offering was some sort of bogus, pseudo-religious experience, but that they were essentially cultists. This is when Kate started to seriously panic. She told Stephen, her husband,

that she thought their daughter might be in a meditation cult. Kate started reading books about cults and how they operate. And giving to me and saying, look, you've got to read this. And that actually caused various forms of scales to fall from my eyes. Terrified, Kate and Stephen started to look for. for ways to help get their daughter away from this organisation. And Kate came across a group called the Cult Information Centre. And I phoned them up and started describing to them what was happening to my daughter.

And they said this state of psychosis can be brought on by meditation. And you need to get a very specialist help. Kate didn't even know how to go about finding a specialist for this sort of. of thing. It's like looking up a ghostbuster. You don't even know you need one, until you do. The Cult Information Centre made some recommendations, and that's how she found Graham Baldwin. You know, groups work to try and stop people thinking for themselves, and so our job is to rekindle those critical abilities. Graham's the director of Catalyst, which is a charity that helps families and individuals that have been damaged by abusive relationships and groups.

He remembers the call he got from Kate. She described the way her daughter was behaving. She was cutting herself off, sitting in her room all the time, unable to sleep, having paranoid episodes, and the usual sort of signs of a psychiatric breakdown. Graham's worked with lots of families who have made. calls to him just like this one. Families who think their loved one has become involved in a cult.

But Graham thought the important issue was less about whether Emily was involved in a cult and more about the fact she was involved with such intensive meditation. He told me about the first time he heard of people having difficulties from meditation. It was back in the 90s and he had been asked to go to India

to try and track someone down who'd become involved in a cult there. So I decided to talk to people locally and I went to a local psychiatric hospital. The doctor said to me, I'm glad you called because the problem we have here is something that we term the English disease. And I said, the English disease? What's the English disease? And he said it's people that have psychiatric breakdowns because they've got involved with meditation groups in India. And so these people come over here, they get involved in a meditation group, they do excessive meditation, and then they have breakdowns.

So when Graham heard about Emily, he wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time he'd been asked to help someone who'd been intensely practicing Vipassan meditation and fallen into difficulty. And this is a problem with some meditation groups. You know, groups like Vavasna presented that meditation is the sort of, solution to everything. You know, it will help you to become a better person and etc., etc. Graham says, from his own personal experience,

not everyone becomes a better person from intensive meditation. About a third of the people that do meditation, it works, and they feel that it does make them feel better. About a third say it doesn't do any good one way or the other, and it's useless, and people stop doing it. it, and another third, develop problems as a result of the meditation. I was taken aback by what Graham was saying, that effectively it was well known that intensive meditation could harm people. And Graham says there's often a reluctance for meditation

groups to accept the meditation is just not good for some people, even bad for them, like it was for Emily. Now what's interesting about that is that when the groups see this problem of people having psychiatric breakdowns, they claim that it's just sort of clearing out the rubbish in the pipes. You know, it's something people have to continue doing and get over it. And in my experience, all ever does is make the person worse. And the biggest thing in putting them back together was getting them. and to stop meditating, which was quite difficult when they'd been told it was the only answer to their problems.

Graham told Kate and Stephen that it sounded like their daughter was in a state of psychosis from too much meditation. They needed to get her to stop meditating right away. But this would not be easy, and they needed to tread lightly. Kate created a plan to try to convince Emily to get on a call with Graham. I said somebody on the phone wants to talk to you. He's very interested in your experience with Vapasna, would you talk to him? And amazingly, she agreed. And so she spent, I don't know, it was like two hours talking to him on the phone.

And afterwards, she was completely exhausted. And we went on like this for four or five weeks planning phone calls where she would talk to him. And by the end of about, she must have had five or six long sessions of conversation with this man, she started doing things like picking up the Sunday papers, commenting on an article, listening to something that was said on the radio and responding to it, having a conversation with us. She started basically coming back into touch with reality. And that was the beginning of her recovery.

Graham's intervention seemed to work. But the progress Graham made didn't reverse things back to normal. Emily was still on a very different trajectory to two years earlier. She had dropped out of Oxford, was living at home, and still wasn't able to function in society. but at least she no longer seemed suicidal or completely detached from reality. Kate and Stephen thought they were beginning

to get their daughter back, that things were about to improve. But then something else happened. unbelievably, Emily's twin sister Sarah started to get into meditation as well, ultimately becoming hooked on the same form of Vipasana meditation taught by Gwanka.

Sarah had seen her sister meditating as a way to feel better. So she thought she'd try it too. I do feel a sense of responsibility and a great deal of guilt and shame and embarrassment and horror because of the way that I encouraged her to go to do the past up. But I also concede that I was only acting on the information that I had available to my conscious kind of self at that time. Sarah went to her first retreat, then another, then another.

Soon, Sarah started to exhibit the same behaviour as Emily had, only more severe. She was being plagued by memories of rape, war and murder, events that had never happened to her. Kate now had two daughters in serious psychological distress. and the common variable were the Guenka retreats. It was horrific. She was hallucinating some of the time. I remember her crying. She's going.

I'm losing her. She's gone. I needed to understand what happened to Sarah. And whether these frightening experiences were unique to the twins. Were there others who'd had this experience too? Just how widespread were these issues? That's in the next episode of The Retreat. The Retreat is the first season from Untold,

a new Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced by The Financial Times with Goat Rodeo. The series lead producers are Rebecca Seidel and Persis Love, reporting by me, Madison Marriage, writing by me, Megan Adolsky and Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright. Executive producers for the Financial Times are Tofa Forges and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolsky.

Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive Once Answers by Kaleen. Additional music from Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel, and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and production assistance from Paul Afflalo, Joshua Gabert Doyon, Petros Guillaume Passas, Andrew Georgiades, Sittarth Venkata Ramakrishna and Laura Clark. Thanks also to Alastamaki. If you've been affected by anything in this series, there are some useful resources highlighted

in the show notes. And if you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison. at madison.marriage atft.com. Thanks to you for listening and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me.