Daniella Young has been studying intense, interesting, and sometimes horrifying cultures her entire life.

She was actually third-generation raised in one of the worst modern-day religious cults, known as the Children of God.

At the age of 15, she escaped this cult, got educated, moved her way into the army, where she became a captain in military intelligence. During her service, she deployed twice to Afghanistan, becoming one of the first women to conduct deliberate ground combat operations at a time when it was illegal for women to do this.

These days, she does organizational behavior, cultural strategy consulting and she’s a renowned international speaker including TED Talks, helping CEOs and business leaders develop and employee an intentional growth culture in their organizations.

Show Notes

TEDx Talk: Lost in Transition:    • Lost in Transition | Daniella Young | TEDx...  

Narratively Literary Journal: "I Escaped the Cult, but I Couldn't Escape the Cult Mentality": narratively.com/i-escaped-the-cult-but-i-couldnt-e…

cavnessHR: www.cavnesshr.com/

Daniella M. Young Website: www.daniellamestyanekyoung.com/

Follow Daniella on social media:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-young/

Twitter: www.twitter.com/daniellamyoung

Facebook: www.facebook.com/daniellamestyanekyoung/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/daniellamyoung_/

Theme music by: Ruel Morales: www.ruelmorales.com/

Brian Schoenborn 0:00
Hello, hello. Hey everybody. Our next guest today knows pretty much anything about everything with culture. She’s been studying intense, interesting, and sometimes horrifying cultures her entire life. She was actually third generation raised in one of the worst modern-day religious cults, known as the Children of God.

Brian Schoenborn 0:25
At the age of 15, she escaped this cult, made her way to San Antonio, where she inserted herself in a high school, graduated, got a college education, moved her way into the army, where she became a captain in military intelligence. During her service. She deployed twice to Afghanistan, becoming one of the first women to conduct deliberate ground combat operations at a time when it was illegal for women to do this.

Brian Schoenborn 0:53
These days, she does organizational behavior, cultural strategy consulting and she’s a renowned international speaker including TED Talks. She’s a leadership coach, and she’s a podcast host. She helps CEOs and business leaders develop and employee an intentional growth culture in their organizations. Among other things, she enjoys a nice glass of Cabernet. Give it up to my friend, Daniella Young.

Daniella Young 2:14
Absolutely. It’s certainly a bit of a complex tale. So let’s actually start way before I was born, in the very late 60s. Which was the middle of the course, the hippie era in the United States, a lot of young people rejecting the culture at the time and searching for something new.

Daniella Young 2:35
So this man who was from a family of preachers already started preaching on the beach to the hippies, of California, and he found a market for his message. And he started this group it was called “Teens for Christ” and then it quickly became called “Children of God”. Later became known as the “Family of Love” and the “Family International”. And it started off as, you know, leave everything in the world behind, love Jesus, love each other, live communally, and go out and preach the gospel — and of course, prepare for the end of the world.

Brian Schoenborn 3:13
So I mean, that sounds like a pretty good mission.

Daniella Young 3:15
It sounds okay. Yes. It very quickly became, you know, he began to preach that he was the anointed prophet of God, His followers were the army of God put on earth for the end times. So literally, the exact definition of a doomsday cult, and those usually don’t end well.

Brian Schoenborn 3:34
I mean, we’ve Jonestown and stuff like that.

Daniella Young 3:37
Pretty much. And actually, if you listen to some of the stuff on Jonestown, it was very similar.

Brian Schoenborn 3:43
Wow.

Daniella Young 3:45
The Children of God grew actually a lot bigger. So it lasted for about 40 years, it dispersed all over the world. It had up to about 100,000 members pass through it, but it was usually 10,000 strong at any given time. And slowly has message changed from being all about God’s love to being all about sex as a way to show God’s love. So this ended up including, you know, what they call religious prostitution or using sex to bring new members into your organization, new members or money.

Daniella Young 4:23
Children started coming along and it started introducing a lot of pedophilia, a lot of incest. As you know, really, people were trying to navigate a society that they had built that wasn’t liable to the laws or morals of any normal society. He then got a revelation from God that America was evil...