Funding for “To the Contrary ” provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

Coming up, on to the contrary.

So I saw this next point of what was happening in our country with the struggles that I've had in my life and in my family.

And I said, I have some lessons here that I'd like to share.

And so I wrote the book with the hopes, of sharing.

I talk about the science behind mental health and proven strategies, proven tools, methodologies to help with mental health.

Hello I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, Carrie Sheffield, you know her as a regular panelist here on To the Contrary.

She's a policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, a journalist and a prolific conservative social and political commentator.

Now, she adds author to her list of accomplishments.

Carrie's memoir, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness, is about resilience.

She takes readers from her young life filled with abuse, dysfunction and fundamentalist brainwashing by her Mormon father through her legal and emotional trials, tribulations and finally, conversion to Christianity all the way to creating a new, fulfilling life.

Welcome, Carrie Sheffield, How are you?

Bonnie, thank you so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

Thank you so much for, allowing us to talk to you about your book.

So why did you write it first?

And what's the point you really want to make with it?

Yeah.

So I wrote the book because we're having a mental health crisis in this country right now.

we're seeing the suicide rate not seen since the Great Depression, since 1941.

And in particular, young women, it's one of the fastest growing blocks in terms of the rate of women committing suicide from ages 25 to 34. and so young people were harder hit from a mental health standpoint coming out of COVID.

So I saw this next point of what was happening in our country with the struggles that I've had in my life, in my family.

And I said, I have some lessons here that I'd like to share.

You know, I talk about the science behind mental health and proven strategies, proven tools, methodologies to help with mental health.

Because we had pretty much in the DSM manual, we had almost every disorder in my family.

I have two schizophrenic brothers.

I had multiple siblings attempt suicide.

I've been suicidal.

just the diagnoses of PTSD, depression, general anxiety disorder, fibromyalgia.

That's just my disorder, my diagnoses.

I was in and out of the hospital nine different times.

Seven of those were for fibromyalgia.

So I've experienced a lot.

And from that, to be able to get a full tuition scholarship to Harvard, to be able to work on Wall Street, I worked at Goldman Sachs and Moody's Investors Service, to be able to have a career to work with you, Bonnie.

I'm a testament to what's possible with the right mental health treatment.

And so that's why I wrote.

What gave you the strength.

And it's a lot of strength and dedication that's required to do what you did when you had all this bad stuff going on in your head.

Yeah.

So I talk about the book and, you know, in the title, it's Motorhome Prophecies A Journey of Forgiveness and Healing.

because I the reason it's called Motor of Prophecies is we grow up in a motorhome with ten people.

my seven biological siblings and I, my dad claimed to be a prophet.

that was going to save America from destruction and that he would be president someday.

He said that Satan himself had personally reassigned lesser demons away from our family, so that Satan himself would personally torment our family.

So that's his level of grandiosity.

he, you know, had all kinds of physical, psychological abuse, mental abuse.

he told us we were not worthy.

he did not feed us.

I remember at one point, we were our motorhome came to a stop in a small city park in Liberty, Missouri, suburb of Kansas City, and we didn't have any food, so we literally ate a broth from grass made in the park.

my mother gave birth to my brother.

We don't even have a motor home.

It was a tent.

She gave birth in a tent, almost like medieval times.

By herself or.

I'm sorry, you know, without doctors with my dad was there.

And she did give birth to my sister while she was completely alone.

my dad wasn't even there.

He was out playing his guitar somewhere on the streets, trying to convert people and pass out religious brochures.

So she was alone when she gave birth to my sister.

And he had had a very traumatic childhood.

I try to be fair to him in the book and explain he had a childhood rape by a Mormon babysitter and that deeply affected in psychology.

You look at the rates of suicide for children who grow into adults and are not treated for what happened to them with sexual assault as a child.

the suicide rate actually compounds.

You know, they say that time heals all wounds, but not for childhood sexual assault.

If it's not treated, you're actually more likely to kill yourself the older you get.

If you don't get treatment for your, childhood sexual assault.

So there is all kinds of trauma eventually, too.

My brothers developed schizophrenia.

One of them groped me and tried to rape me, and I was terrified I was able to send them off.

I'm not a very large woman.

Only five foot two.

And he's very tall.

Almost double.

At least double my weight.

I was, thank God, able to get him off, but that was actually my catalyst.

Really?

That was him assaulting me.

And so I say in the book that, you know, sometimes the most excruciating crucibles can be our catalyst for the moments of growth and 17.

And I knew I didn't want this life.

And so eventually, a little while after that, I told my dad, I want to go away to college, I want to I want to leave home.

And he raised his hand of the square and he said, I prophesy in the name of Jesus, you'll be raped and murdered if you leave.

And which something a cult leader would say, right, to try to coerce you.

so I left and the key disowned me.

Said my blood changed.

I was no longer his daughter, and in some respects, that was kind of like quarantine to keep me away.

But I do have to say, you know, running away, I, I he said that the reason why I had to be disowned and cut off was that I was satanic, and I would corrupt my siblings and have more leads.

Since I was the first to leave, it was easier to isolate.

I took that as fuel also to motivate me.

To answer your question of how did I get this?

I think I had positive motivation.

I wanted a better life for myself.

I didn't want as a woman.

I didn't want to be economically chained to a man.

But I also had a negative motivation.

I was like, I want to prove that old man wrong, and I'm going to I'm going up.

I'm going to outperform him.

I'm going to surpass him in my achievements.

So it was a very better motivation in some ways in that that ended up coming crashing down on me because I, I was in denial about how much trauma had affected me.

And so that's that's another reminder, wrote the book, is it doesn't matter how professionally successful you are, if inside you haven't done the work to heal from your trauma and your mental illness, then it's going to come crashing down and you're going to up in the hospital, which is what I did.

Where did you go when you say you left?

Where did you go?

How old were you and what, how did you make it on your own all of a sudden?

I had a friend come and get me around four in the morning.

My my best friend from high school, it was my 17th public school.

By that point.

I'd gone to 17 public schools and home school.

So it was just this hodgepodge of education was able to cobble it together.

And I should say, I have a chapter, one of the the chapters is about two of my schools were inner city schools that had the dishonor of being the first school district in the entire country to lose their accreditation.

It's in Kansas City, Missouri, terribly unstable educational experience, but my best friend from my 17th public school came to get me in her maroon Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible at four in the morning and sent me to her parents house.

and unfortunately, I went back a week later because I felt so guilty and I thought I was going to be raped and murdered.

So, spent the summer back, with the family called the mission, as my dad calls it.

And but eventually I said, you know, I this is not going to work.

He's not going to change.

And so I did, I went to a state university in Missouri for a year, and then I ended up transferring to Brigham Young University.

so I at the time part where I left at four in the morning, I didn't know how my dad was going to respond.

I was the first to leave.

I didn't know if he was going to get violent because he had been violent and other settings.

he had spent time in jail for street brawls.

he was known to just, you know, physically intimidate us and, you know, hit us.

And so I didn't know I was gonna respond, but in the end, he it was actually a peaceable departure because he took the spiritual route in his mind.

He said that, you know, in the, in the Book of Mormon and Mormon scripture, there's this concept of, and even in the Bible, like, dusting your feet off on someone if they reject you, you dust your feet off on them, you basically say, I'm done with you.

Then, and in his case, he took it to the extreme and said, okay, I'm dusting the feet off, and dusting my feet off on you.

But in his case, he said, that means you're no longer my daughter.

So it was in his way of trying to get a clean break.

And it's interesting because I think in some respects, what he did with his mission was almost a trauma response to his traumatic childhood sexual assault.

And so, in some ways, as an adult now, looking back for me to leave, I think was almost traumatic for him because I was undermining his trauma.

Response makes sense.

so that's another reason why I wrote the book, is to understand intergenerational trauma.

And I think that, you know, for example, this is a critique I have for conservatives.

They love to say, we'll just get married.

Just get married.

Like solution to poverty is getting married.

And, you know, unwed mothers, single mothers.

I agree with all of that.

But the the point that they miss is that if you have not resolved your trauma, you will pass that trauma on to your your children.

And so while I wish that I wasn't single and I wish I was a mom at this point, at age 40, it's much better than I am.

I believe unmarried and single and gone through the mental health treatment, then being locked in a toxic marriage with a toxic partner where I would have passed on that intergenerational trauma.

So I think, yes, we need to support marriage and we need to encourage marriage, but we need to have the intergenerational trauma resolved before we do that.

So how were you explain to our viewers how you were able to resolve the trauma, how much work it took, where you found, you know, therapy and why?

As a conservative, many conservatives don't believe in mental health.

or, or see it as some kind of mumbo jumbo.

so what gave you the strength to find it and to stick with it?

Yeah.

It's, I talk about the first time I got into therapy.

It was thanks to a very kind Mormon bishop.

he.

I was in college.

It was my sophomore year after I transferred from state school in Missouri.

And this Mormon bishop, he was from England.

his name was Bishop Layton.

which I said he was almost like a character from Pilgrim's Progress, where the characters are just named based on how they behave.

But like, he lighten my load.

He was Bishop Layton.

and he said to me and it really stuck with me.

And it's still.

That's today.

If you had cancer, nobody would think twice if you went to go to chemo.

If you need therapy, there's no stigma, there's nothing wrong.

It's a it's a medical treatment and you need to get it in.

It's true.

And the problem with and it's interesting, I know we've talked about on your show before in the past, Bonnie, about the suicide rate of men versus women and men are actually far.

I think it's three times more likely to successfully kill themselves.

The suicide rate for men is about three times that of women.

Even though women right now, the rates growing faster, they're still far behind men in terms of successful suicide completion, women are more likely to attempt it.

Men are more likely three times more likely to commit suicide.

Because women week.

And that's because I just like to jump in.

Women are more likely to use pills or something else, whereas men use weapons.

And yeah.

And I think also two women are more likely to get mental health treatment.

And so in Navy and to do the attempt and realize this is a cry for help.

And so I think in particular, men tend to be more conservative.

There's this notion that if you need mental health treatment, there's something wrong with you when the reality is you actually there is something wrong with you, and you need treatment so that getting the treatment is not the problem.

You are the toxic.

And so, but I think and I make the point in the book and there's a, he's a neurobiologist and a medical doctor and a psychotherapist.

He's fantastic.

Is leaves Kurt Thompson.

His work was transformative for me.

he's also a practicing Christian.

he talks about the neuro plasticity of your brain and that, it is a physical thing.

So in the same way that getting a broken leg, getting a cast on your leg, that's a physical thing, your brain, the chemistry of your brain, it is a physical thing.

When you have mental illness, the neurochemistry, the serotonin, it's a physical thing.

So getting you know, and I had been on antidepressants a couple times over the years.

but therapy and getting that treatment, the mental health treatment, I call it a combination of prayer and therapy.

Prayerpy, is so transformative to your physical brain.

And that's the neuroplasticity that is missing for conservatives or anybody who tries to poo poo therapy or mental health treatment.

It is a physical treatment, and it is the integration of body, mind and spirit.

And here's where I would challenge, you know, it tends to be more secular progressives.

And that is the issue of faith that there's a strong, strongly scientifically proven correlation between faith practice and mental health.

I talk about some of the studies in the book.

So, for example, the Harvard School of Public Health came out with the study coming out of Covid that found women who engage in regular worship going to church once a week.

Basically, they are 68% less likely.

That's a huge number, 68% less likely to die by suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol overdose.

And that's shocking.

And for men, it was 33% less likely.

So that was from Harvard.

There is also a study in the Psychiatric Times, which was a literature review of 93 studies on faith in mental health.

They found that 66% of these studies found a strong correlation between less depression and religious practice.

There was also another study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that found something similar that states that had higher religious participation had lower depths of despair.

So there's so much evidence for it.

So but the problem that I have with the industry is that within the field.

So Harvard did a study on this as well among the different disciplines of professors, psychology and biology, professors are the most secular.

They're the least likely to participate in field practice.

So I see a big disconnect here.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, the very life giving force that can help your mental health is alienated, in a strange way, from the practitioners who we're supposed to be helping our mental health.

So that's part of why I wrote the book, is that I, I want to have this fusion, and I do make a big distinction.

And I think this is something also very important God and human run religion.

I think a lot of people don't want to go to church because they see the evil behavior of religious people.

I say that that is like blaming Beethoven.

If somebody like somebody plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony badly, you don't blame Beethoven, you blame the musicians.

So when I see evil done in the name of God, whether it's the pedophile scandal or, you know, the Catholic Church or in my case, the Mormon church, that, you know, the Mormon leaders didn't do, I believe proactively enough measures to protect my, my family, or, you know, televangelists embezzling money.

I'm not going to blame Beethoven because of that.

I'm not going to blame God.

I'm actually looking at the science between faith, practice and a strong and a healthy, vibrant, safe community, which is what I have today.

I I'm very blessed to have a wonderful church community where they've become my family, even though I'm estranged from my family.

This is my family.

And scientifically, it's proven.

That's part of why I'm healed.

So you left the Mormon church and, you are now in the Christian church.

Tell us about how that happened and how that has affected, you know, you feeling much better about yourself and becoming happy.

Yeah.

So I talk in the book.

I spent about 12 years as an agnostic.

so I went from, you know, very fundamentalist cult member, Mormon to mainstream LDS church BYU student.

but when I was at BYU, I went on investigative, basically investigative journalism project into understanding more about the origins and some of the theology of the LDS church.

And I realized I could no longer be part of it.

And that was actually the first time in my life I'd ever felt suicidal, because to that point, it events so integral to my identity.

my ancestors helped found the word church multiple generations ago, and so it was very hard for me to go through that process of departing from the LDS church.

and eventually after that, like I said, I became agnostic, in part because I after I left Mormonism, I went to some Christian churches right after graduating from BYU and had really bad treatment of sin, both the way I was treated and some other people were treating each other.

So I left organized religion altogether and I said, I'm done with it.

This is just mumbo jumbo.

It's sociological constructs.

I'm done.

And so I spent about 12 years as an agnostic.

and that's really when my mental health was the worst.

I would say, because I talked there's a pastor and sadly, he passed away last year named Tim Keller.

and people called him the modern day C.S.

Lewis, who was one of the most prolific Christian thinkers, in modern history.

And so but Tim Keller was a pastor in New York and, he was instrumental in my conversion.

I went to his church.

He said his church was a welcoming place for agnostics and atheists.

It was a place to ask all questions that you had.

and one of the books that he wrote is a book called Counterfeit Gods.

And the concept of Counterfeit Gods is that there's a difference between the giver of the gift, which is God, and then the gifts themselves, which are the things that unfortunately people put in place of God.

and the reason why is because they're good stuff.

Usually like career, money, relationships, even, you know, for alcohol, like some healthy alcohol, you know, having a little wine.

But anything that you take in excess and you put that in the place of God, then it becomes an addiction and it becomes something that controls you instead of you having this as a gift in your life.

and so I, I heard another good analogy.

As you know, people that vacillating between having this be your God, you're worshiping it or you're garbage and you've clearly rejected.

So in my parent's case, money.

They said money was garbage.

And they but obviously they needed money.

That's part of why we start, because they were so extreme about it, you know.

So anyway, I realized that in that period of agnostic, I tried worshiping a lot of just thoughts, things like I tried worshiping my career, and then I got laid off and I was like, oh, wow, my God rejected me because this new management came in and cleaned house, and anybody from the old management was like, oh.

And so I thought I had nothing else in my life.

At that point, I had stopped going to church.

I had no family support, so all I had was my career.

And then I got laid off.

And so I became suicidal again because I had not had that healthy.

Like I said, understanding between my self-worth as a person, that it's inherent in my dignity, that I come from being a, you know, as a human being and someone created in the image of God.

and when you're, when you're traumatized, you lose sight of that.

So anyway, I kept trying these false idols.

I kept trying career.

I tried dating and marriage.

I got engaged and I ended up being very emotionally abusive, and I ended up getting out of the relationship.

But I was decimated because I had put relationship ads.

Another false god.

So eventually I thought I had settled on a God, and I wrote a piece in the Christianity Today about this that I thought would not not fail me.

And that was the God of politics.

And I was concerned.

Oh boy, is that is that a sinful God?

That's exactly funny.

And so by that point, like you said, I, you know, I had worked on Wall Street.

I had I had managed billions of dollars in credit risk.

I had by this point was appearing regularly on Fox News, prime time.

I'd been on the Bill Maher show, I'd been on CNN and MSNBC as conservative commentator and I called myself a secular conservative, and I worshiped at the altar of politics.

That was my religion.

I had put basically, in some ways, like I had gone to the Harvard Kennedy School, which is named after JFK, and I think I had kind of put him as almost like a messiah type figure, which is he was killed for his people, just like Martin Luther King sacrificed himself, and Abraham Lincoln, who was shot on Good Friday, very symbolic in terms of public service, sacrifice, Messiah figures.

That's what I had done with politics.

And I worshiped at that altar.

For me, it was conservative politics.

I called myself, like I said, a secular conservative.

and so then 2015 happened and Donald Trump happened, and I said, wow, I am not worshiping that.

So as crazy as it sounds, Donald Trump is part of why I became a Christian, because I realized I could not worship politics and it could not be my religion.

It could not be like my God.

So that is part of why I started to go to church, because I knew that my priorities were totally out of whack.

in my conversion class, my, confirmation class, they call it the Divine order and the Divine order is worshiping God, you know, serving people or, you know, working with people and then things in the way I had been living my life was disordered.

I was putting people ahead the first and then things, and I was indifferent to God.

And once I put it in order, my life's perspective changed and I, I also felt more peace about the politics.

I think that a lot of people who are, and I know this as a recovered agnostic, is if this life is all there is, that it is a depressing place.

but it's also in the other side when I say it's the two forces that brought me to faith were Donald Trump and science.

So right around the time when Trump was happening, I also started to study metaphysics, and I read a book that had been coauthored by Deepak Chopra and, a Ph.D. physicist from MIT, and has written a, an endorsement quote for my book.

He became a mentor of mine.

But the book is about how science and faith are perfectly integrated and how, mathematically speaking, it actually takes more faith to believe that the Earth mathematically happened by chance.

It is so unlikely.

I say it's unlike as unlikely as like a tornado.

Well, even more unlikely.

But it's similar to a tornado going through a junkyard and randomly assembling a perfectly fine tuned weapon system with a nuclear weapon system.

It's so statistically unlikely.

And some people say, well, that's because we have a multiverse.

So if you do enough experiments, well, guess what?

There's no evidence for multiverse.

And that whole idea also violates Occam's razor, which is the simplest explanation which speech must be true.

It says scientifically, reading about metaphysics gave me so much more confidence to believe in a creator that there was a God.

And then I had to reconcile, well, is this God evil?

Does he hate me because he put me in this horrible hell?

An abuser?

You know, I had to reconcile and wrestle with all that, and that was something that I was able to do within my Christian walk.

and I recommend that to, to anybody.

Well, thank you so much, Carrie.

You are, in many ways a model human being because of what you did over time and what you have done with your life.

That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on.

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Funding for “To the Contrary ” provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

For a transcript or to see an online version of this episode of To the Contrary, please visit our PBS website at pbs.org/tothecontrary.

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