She Didn’t Realize She Grew Up in a Cult Until She Saw It on the News

If you’ve ever fallen down a cult documentary rabbit hole at 2 a.m. and thought “how does someone survive that and come out the other side functioning,” Daniella Mestyanek Young is your answer. She was born third generation into the Children of God, one of the most notorious cults in modern history, and spent the first 15 years of her life inside it. Today she’s a bestselling author, a Harvard-trained organizational psychologist, and a US Army veteran who has become the go-to voice on how coercive control actually works—not just in cults, but in everyday life.

On Khloé in Wonderland, she sits down with Khloé Kardashian and goes all the way back to the beginning. Here are the highlights, adapted from the episode.

What was your childhood like inside the cult?

“I was born third generation into the Children of God. So my grandfather joined this cult in the ’70s and the Children of God is one of these cults that came out of the late ’60s, early ’70s—had a lot to do with blowback from the civil rights movement. We just had a lot of cults popping up at that time. So my grandfather joined in the ’70s. My mom was one of the first children born in. And by the time she’s 14, she is pregnant by my grandfather’s boss who’s the senior finance guy. My father is older than my grandfather…

…When I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, we were 10,000 people living in communes all around the world…we were completely cut off from the world in that we had no music from the outside world. We had barely any movies. We had no books. The only things we were allowed to read was the King James Bible and the stuff that our leader wrote and that was just our life…we were technically homeschooled, but the belief was that Jesus is coming back any day. So why do we need to waste our time with school? They focused a lot on teaching us to read and speak and perform in public because, you know, performance is really brilliant for trafficking children because when you see these shiny, smiley, dancing children, you don’t think, are they getting paid? Are they being abused?”

When did you realize something was wrong?

“Very, very young. I remember being six years old and I spent a lot of time in solitary confinement just for being a bad kid, which is to say a kid. And so in almost all cults, you will start to see ironfisted control of children because they have to. And one of the warning signs of kids is when you see all the kids in a row like that and they’re just perfectly behaved…three and four year olds that sit for four hours in the middle of the night—that’s not normal. That comes from abuse and fear.”

How did you get out?

“By the time I was 15, I had gotten pretty desperate. It was bad. The abuse was bad. We were living with very abusive men again and being just straight trafficked, like trafficked as a carnival clown through Mexico and lower Texas. And I was just done. And I really didn’t want to turn 16 in the group because that’s when you were expected to have sex with whoever wanted because they call it free love. I called it forced polyamory. You were supposed to have sex with whoever wanted it as a sign of God’s love. And they didn’t believe in birth control because the best way for cults to get new members is to birth their own. So watching my mom who had seven kids in 14 years, seventh child born when she was 30, and I was like, I can’t do this. So I ended up basically getting myself excommunicated just very dramatically climbing over the commune wall to go fellowship with an outsider. And then I got caught…

…I wanted my parents to be so mad at me that I could just yell at them, I want to leave the family. Because that’s the thing that’s hard to explain, which is like, yeah, I wanted nothing to do with that life, but it’s really hard to tell your whole family you don’t care if you ever see them again and if you don’t go to heaven with them. Just because you want your own life…my mom takes me on a walk outside the commune where nobody can hear us. And she just looks at me and she’s like, ‘Just go. Go. You’re not happy here. We have a place for you. Just go.’ She’s out of the cult now. We have a great relationship.”

When did you realize it was actually a cult?

“I had a moment when I was 17 and there was a murder suicide. The founder’s son killed one of his abusers and then took his own life. And so I had this extremely surreal moment where I’m watching the news and it’s saying Children of God cult, Children of God cult, Children of God cult. And I was like, ‘Oh, I grew up in a cult.’ And literally, I was like, ‘That’s what’s wrong with me.'”

What does your daughter know about your past?

“I’ve been completely open with my daughter, but obviously at an age appropriate level. It’s a constant conversation. Right now she’s 10, and the way she explains my life to her friends is she says, ‘Well, my mom just didn’t have a good childhood.’ But then she goes, ‘So she’s made me the best childhood ever.’…There’s a very interesting part of being a parent that was re-triggering, but also healing. It was actually when my daughter was about 1 years old that I was like, I need to do more. I need to tell this story because I need all of this pain in my life to matter for some reason. Maybe it can help other people because otherwise I’m not going to stay around and I have to because I have a kid.”

If you’re relating to any of this, pay attention

“I always say I have the benefit of the extreme story. Like, nobody argues that Children of God was a bad cult. I don’t have to define cults or defend anything and so I just tell my stories and then let other people…I always say, if you’re hearing a story of the girl who grew up in one of the worst cults and you’re relating, let’s dig into that. And it doesn’t have to be always that extreme…coercive control doesn’t just happen in cults. That’s just the most extreme version that gets our attention.”