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Oct 1
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    • #23 – Lisa Kohn

    #23 - Lisa Kohn

    Lisa Kohn: Growing Up in the Moonie Cult

    #23: Lisa Kohn is a writer and author who was born in New Jersey, and grew up in the East Village of New York. She now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband of nearly twenty years and her two beautiful children. Lisa’s recent book, “To The Moon And Back: A Childhood Under the Influence” is a memoir of being raised in and torn between two conflicting worlds. There was the world she longed for and lived in on weekends – her mother’s world, which was the fanatical, puritanical cult of the Moonies – and the world she was forced to live in during the week – her father’s world, which was based in sex, drugs, and the squalor of life in New York City’s East Village in the 1970’s.

    She now owns a leadership consulting and executive coaching firm and spend much of her time speaking, writing, teaching, and presenting her ideas and approaches to life and to business. Lisa has been featured on Business Insider, Megyn Kelly Today, Daily Mail, Thrive Global, Marie Claire and more!

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    Show Notes

    2:19 – Lisa’s book: “To The Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence”

    3:15 – Lisa describes the foundations of her childhood

    12:00 – Taking care of her family at a young age + her grandfather’s depression and how that affected her life

    14:35 – Moving in with Danny (her father)

    16:25 – Lisa describes the beliefs of the Unification Church and why the “Moonies” are considered a cult

    22:19 – Why Lisa left the Moonies and where the abusive behavior was hidden

    28:57 – Lisa describes her suicide attempt, eating disorder and substance abuse struggles in college

    33:00 – Lisa’s relationship with her mom now

    40:30 – Lisa’s relationship with her dad now

    44:05 – Joining Al-Anon and the reasons that got her there

    50:43 – Describing her recovery and her now husband and children

    54:18 – Why Lisa feels Al-Anon saved her

    Buy Lisa’s Book

    Connect with Lisa

    ****

    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Welcomes Lisa Kohn

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello beautiful people. Welcome to the Courage to Change, a recovery podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. Today we are interviewing Lisa Kohn. Lisa is a writer and an author who was born in New Jersey and grew up in the East Village of New York. She now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband of nearly 20 years and her two beautiful children. Lisa’s recent book, To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence, is a memoir of being raised in and torn between two conflicting worlds. There was the world she longed for and lived in on the weekends, her mother’s world, which was the fanatical, puritanical cult of the Moonies, and the world she was forced to live in during the week, her father’s world, which was based in sex, drugs, and the squalor of life in New York City’s East Village in the 1970s.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She now owns a leadership consulting and executive coaching firm, and spends much of her time speaking, writing, and teaching and presenting her ideas and approaches to life and to business. Lisa has been featured on Business Insider, Megyn Kelly Today, DailyMail, Thrive Global, Marie Claire, and more. And now, she’s been featured on this podcast, woop woop. Lisa is rad and I hope you enjoy her story. Please check out her book To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence, a memoir. You can find it on Amazon. And episode 23, I was thinking, let’s do this.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Lisa, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Thank you for having me, I’m thrilled to be here.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I want to talk a bit about your life and your book. Can you tell us a little bit about, when did your book first come out?

    Lisa Kohn:

    It was published last September. September 18th, 2018, so it’s almost a year. It’s been a long year.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, I was going to say, how’s it been having that out on the shelves now?

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s been wild and it’s been wonderful and it’s been hard and it’s been emotional and it’s been intense and it’s been amazing and it’s been all of that and more. I like to say I was so doing it that I didn’t actually think through what it would be like when it was out there, kind of where I am if I do. So it’s been amazing, but incredibly intense and still tectonic plates shifting in my whole being. It’s been wild.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Your book is about being, your childhood, but part of your childhood was that you were part of, so I hear, I’ve read that this is a pejorative term, but it’s the one that I know, that you were part of the Moonies.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The Unification Church.

    Lisa Kohn:

    The Unification Church. As I like to say, when I describe my childhood, the best seats I ever had at Madison Square Garden were at my mother’s wedding, because I was a Moonie, I was best friends with his kids, and my mom did get married with 2075 couples in Madison Square Garden in 1981, and on the other hand, the best cocaine I ever did was from my father’s friend, the judge, because whereas I was a Moonie, I lived with my dad in New York City’s East Village, and it was, I like to say, a life of sex, drugs, and squalor, my dad’s life. Those were the two, contrasting, mildly crazy worlds that I grew up in at the same time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. And your parents, you have an older brother, Robbie.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I do.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And your parents were, you called them by their first names, Mimi and Danny.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yep, my father would still say, “I’m a person, I’m not a label, call me by my name. If you call me father, I’ll call you daughter. If you call me daddy, I’ll call you daughty, call me by my name.” So people would be like, “Does your dad know you call him Danny?” I’m like, “Yeah, he knows.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, he knows. How many children do you have?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I have two children.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you look back on this life that you had and you compare it to your children, because all of our childhoods, we have this feeling that it’s normal. Any of the abnormalities, I think, for the most part, most of us didn’t realize until we hit a certain point and we looked around going, “Oh, okay.” Mine wasn’t like that, but there were things about it that were definitely abnormal. When you think about your children in the context of what you went through, what comes up for you?

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s insane. As I always say, when it’s all you know, it’s all you know, so truly, I knew my childhood was weird, but it wasn’t, and I’ll fast forward and we’ll come back, until I crawled into AlAnon and I would tell my story and people’s jaws would drop. [inaudible 00:05:17] in this room of 100 people, and you tell your story and they all go, “Oh my God.” You’re like, “Oh, wow. Their lives are hard and they’re saying that about me, there must be something there.” I didn’t know.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I look at my kids, I still remember, many years ago, my older child, with a friend, had messed up my bed or something, in the bedroom, and I’m asking, “Guys, please make the bed.” The kids were complaining, and I wanted to be like, “Do you want to know what I was doing when I was your age, because when I was 10 I was shopping, and cooking, and cleaning.” And I was like, “Yeah, okay. Maybe it’s not the same.” My kids had this wonderful idyllic childhood with normal issues like can I have two desserts and Mom gave me rules and I don’t want to go to bed now, or I don’t want to leave, so it’s quite a contrast to look at compared to the stuff that I went through, yeah.

    Lisa’s Life Growing Up

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up in your childhood, maybe before you guys joined the Unification movement?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah, because what I like to point out to people that by the time we joined the Unification Church, it was a haven. My parents were babies having babies. They got together when they were 18, pregnant brother at 19, me at 20, so they were way too young, they were children of the ’60s, they were hippies, and life with them was, they split up when I was two. My dad moved out and I was traumatized and we lived in a basement apartment of a building and my mom would leave to walk down the hall to go to the laundry room and I would stand in the doorway screaming and crying, and to this day I think, “Why didn’t she just take me with her?” That’s how traumatized I was, and apparently my brother used to say, “Mimi’s going to leave too. Danny left, Mimi’s going to leave too,” because he was a good older brother.

    Lisa Kohn:

    She was into encounter groups and primal screaming and macrobiotic diet and we had no processed food and we ate on the floor. She had some mildly very dangerous boyfriends. My dad, on the other hand, was either traipsing the world and living in Morocco or Saint Thomas or living in New York City bartending and doing a lot of drugs and living a crazy lifestyle as a New York City downtown hippy. We were children of flower children and everything that that means with the instability and craziness. Again, by the time we were, the summer between second and third grade my mom bought a van from my father and we were going to drive across country from the East Coast to California to live on a commune and instead my grandmother, my mom’s mom, was diagnosed with cancer, so we drove across state to New Jersey and lived with my grandparents.

    Lisa Kohn:

    My grandmother passed, and my mom stayed. We lived with my grandfather for a while, and that’s when she discovered the church. That’s when she had her no talking days, and she was into Indian ashrams and Hinduism and Buddhism, and she was just a seeker. It was a lot of classic 1960s instability, I guess you would say.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Was it classic? Was it just that, and I don’t mean that to give you a therapy session or call you out on it. I just mean I don’t know. Was it classic or, I know it didn’t end classically, but was it classic in the sense that that was a common thing happening around you guys?

    Lisa Kohn:

    No. I think in the ’60s there definitely were flower children having children, but it wasn’t happening a lot around us. I always felt completely out of sorts, not fitting in. Mimi and Danny. People would say, “Did you say mommy and daddy?” And I’d be like, “No, Mimi and Danny.” I was very straight-laced and wanted to be conservative and wouldn’t cross the street at a red light, and my parents were just both very free spirits and, to this day, somewhat self-involved spirits. It was, I guess, a classic [inaudible 00:09:14] upbringing, but there weren’t that many of us around, if that makes sense.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So it wasn’t community, at least. You didn’t have the community aspect of that. That’s actually an interesting point and piece of your story, which is that this may have been normal for many children but you didn’t have it around you, which really made it stand out.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah, and so the story I like to tell, and how the Unification Church was a haven. A couple years ago I read Scar Tissue, I think, by Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I called my brother Robbie and I said, “You have to read this,” because his description of his life with his dad was our life with Danny only he was on the West Coast, we were on the East Coast, and his dad had him smoking pot at the age of eight, and Danny had Robbie smoking pot at the age of ten, but it was the first time I’ve read my life in someone else’s story.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Robbie reads it and he calls me and he says, “First of all, at least he had blanking consistency,” because we did go back and forth. Then he says, “Do you think if we hadn’t joined the church I would have been a heroin addict?” I’m like, “Well, you’re smoking pot at ten,” and what Danny used to like to say to us as we grew older was don’t ever shoot up smack on Second Avenue, because you’ll pass out. If you want to shoot up smack, come upstairs. Speed is okay to shoot up downstairs in traffic, but smack is not safe, because you’ll pass out and you’ll get run over, so come upstairs to shoot up smack.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Those were our guidelines, so there are good chances that my brother might have become some sort of addict into much stronger drugs if we hadn’t joined a puritanical church instead.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. It wasn’t looking good in that direction.

    Lisa Kohn:

    It wasn’t looking good in that direction. I probably wouldn’t have, because at that point I was so, there are many ways to react to crazy environments and mine was to hunker down and try and control and be as perfectionistic as one could be. When I was in fifth grade my teacher made up a grade, AWD, A with Distinction, because I got so many A++s she didn’t know what to do with me. I was the goody two shoes, hunker down, do it all right person, and my brother was the free spirit who would have gotten into more of that kind of trouble, probably, than I would have.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, and you talked about moving in with your grandparents and how the structure and the rules there actually felt like a very positive thing for you.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Absolutely.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Very comfortable.

    Structure & Rules

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah, I wanted rules. Kids need structure and rules, and that’s one thing we really didn’t have, was structure and rules.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When your grandfather, so when your grandmother died and then your grandfather, he starts to descend into depression and you’re taking care of your grandfather and your brother, cooking, cleaning, shopping, all of that. How old were you then?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I was 11. My mom met the church when I was 10, and by the time I was 11 she sat us down and said, “What do you kids think I should do?” We said, “You should leave.” So she left, moved into New York City to live in the church, ironically to work with the group that helped people who had kids and couldn’t move into the church, but she moved into the church and left us with my grandfather. I was 11 and he was slowly going into deeper, deeper depression. That’s when I was shopping and cooking and cleaning and running the house and getting AWDs and being the star in the school play and that kind of stuff.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. When did you move in with Danny, your dad?

    Lisa Kohn:

    My grandmother died and my grandfather got depressed, and my mom moved out and he got more depressed. He was a lawyer and a judge, and he stopped practicing his cases because he was depressed and then he got disbarred and then he got even more depressed and apparently the police were circling the block on a suicide watch for him, and it came to a point where, I’ve heard after the fact, he had to go to court because of the cases he hadn’t practiced, and he could have gone to jail, so instead of putting him in jail they admitted him to the psych ward of a hospital. That’s when I was in the beginning of seventh grade and they came and they got Robbie and I out of school that day. They kind of sent us to one neighbor and then sent us to other neighbors and kind of shuffled us around for a while, and his brother and sister in law came and took care of us for a little while until finally someone told Danny what was going on.

    Lisa Kohn:

    First they went to try and get my mom to come back and she refused to come back. She said, “It’s not my problem.” That’s brainwashing, she said, “It’s not my problem.” Finally someone told Danny what was happening, because we had never told him that my mom had left, and he came and got us and took us into New York City and that’s when we moved in with him, so the beginning of seventh grade is when I moved from New Jersey into New York City with my dad.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Just out of minor curiosity, did the police circling the house think he was going to come outside and commit suicide? What was the value?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I’m not entirely sure, and as I always tell that story, I think the same exact thing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, good.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Totally fair, but that is what I’ve been told, and I had no concept of that. A lot of this, by that time we were believers, so we supported my mom. When you believe something so fervently, your brain casts out anything else, so I had no opening other than this is the right thing. It’s a very good question, maybe I’ll call my cousin who told me that and ask that very question. “I got asked in a podcast, I’m not sure, just out of curiosity, what would that do?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Is that a technique? So you moved in with Danny, and you’re already a believer in the church, so when you move in with Danny and he’s not living that lifestyle, do you think that that kept you out of that, and how long did you stay with him?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I lived with him, so I moved in during seventh grade, and I lived with him all the way through high school. To me, he was Satan. He was living Satan’s lifestyle. I think it actually probably reinforced our belief in the church. We would spend the weekdays at home with him, and every weekend, or every holiday, or every summer, go to either my mom and the church, or when my mom was far away, just go to the church, anywhere to be in the church. I think the going back and forth was mildly crazy-making, but I think also in the long run, the outside world probably helped us leave easier than it would have been if we had never had it, but I think also living with my dad and his lifestyle and how much that terrified me forced me even stronger into the beliefs of the church, because again, that was my structure and my safety.

    Lisa Kohn:

    As I say, there’s nothing as intoxicating as knowing you have the truth, and if you know that you have God’s truth and you know what you’re supposed to do and you know right from wrong and you know you’re evil and sinful, I loved realizing how sinful I knew I was by the age of 10, how evil and sinful you are. I think it pushed us even stronger into following Reverend Sung Moon as my Messiah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Can you tell us a little bit about, I did a minor amount of research, I didn’t get as much as I’d like to, so I’m going to look to you to be my Wikipedia on all things-

    Lisa Kohn:

    Moonie.

    Understanding the Moonie Cult

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Unification. All things Moonie, exactly. What were the Moonies about? What do people know? Why was it a cult and not a church?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Okay, so the Unification Church is founded on the belief that all churches, all religions, all people should be unified under God. It is based on Judeo-Christian thought combined with a bunch of Eastern philosophy and dualism. It basically says Adam and Eve were created by God, and then Lucifer, the Archangel, seduced Eve, had sex with Eve, and that’s the fall of man, and then Eve seduced Adam and they had premarital sex before they were supposed to. They were supposed to grow, mature, and become a family and have the family of God, kingdom of heaven on earth, but they didn’t, they fell through this sex and this original sin and so then since then, God has been working, trying to get people to come back, to make mankind pay for their sins and come back, and everybody keeps failing and then Jesus comes, and Jesus is supposed to not be crucified, but stay on earth, marry, have a family, and create the kingdom of heaven on earth as well as in heaven, but instead Jesus is crucified, so the Messiah needs to come again and, if you read the Divine Principle, there’s a lot of explanations and calculations that explain how the Messiah can only come from Korea around 1920 or 1930, which just happens to be where Reverend Moon is from and when he was born.

    Lisa Kohn:

    So they never actually say he’s the Messiah, but everything points to that. What makes it, the difference to me between a cult and a religion, and it can be a fine line and people debate it all the time, but it’s the extremism. It’s the us versus them, it’s the we are the chosen ones, we are the saved ones, we have the truth, everybody else is sinning and going to hell. It’s the control, so we literally were taught that if we ever questioned anything, it was Satan trying to win us back, so as soon as your mind begins to think or to question, you have an idea for yourself, you’re like, “Get out of me, Satan, get out of me, Satan, get out of me, Satan.” You are controlled that you don’t think, how you think, what you think, what you believe. It’s that structured control of this is the absolute truth and therefore the Messiah can say the sky is green today and the sky is blue with yellow polka dots tomorrow and go kill people because they’re making the sky red, and it’s true because it comes directly from God.

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s that extremism, that control, that separation, the way it keeps, you can look at a lot of different religions and see at what point, in my mind, it crosses over. There are specific definitions of cults, but that is truly it. It’s that control of what you think, it’s the control of what you do, it’s the control of what you believe, it’s the control of where you live, it’s the control of how you live. It’s that extreme control, whether physically, mentally, and/or emotionally, that makes it about more than faith and about faith in a person or a belief versus just faith in God, whatever that is.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did that look like in the Unification Church? Did you have to give up all your worldly goods to the church or that kind of thing?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I did not have any worldly goods to give up, but yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    At 10, you didn’t have any worldly goods?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot, no. But I gave up my mom, literally.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did she give up anything? Any of her stuff?

    Lisa Kohn:

    She didn’t have a whole heck of a lot either, but she moved in, she gave up whatever she had, and she spent her life living in the church. She gave up her kids. She moved in and spent much of her time in the church actually raising other people’s children, because in the church, the big mass weddings are called blessings. People would be matched by Reverend Moon, he’d point to this woman and that man and say, “You two should marry each other,” and they go and get married, and they’d be called blessed, and their children were called blessed children and they were born without original sin, the sin from Adam and Eve and the fall of man. So people would have children in the church and then they’d go and they’d put them in a church nursery and go out and do a mission. Travel, go, fundraise, raise money, witness, proselytize, work somewhere, travel to a third world country to spread the truth, and my mom would work in this nursery and raise all these other children.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Invariably now, there are groups for people who were born and/or raised in the Unification Church and I run into people and they’re like, “Your mom took such good care of me.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I know. Not me, but you. Yeah, I know.” It’s a fascinating experience.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Why didn’t she bring you guys?

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s a very good question. When my grandfather went to the hospital and they moved in with my dad, there was a process where they were deciding where we would go and I was begging to live with my mom, begging both my parents. My mother says she thought we would be safer and more secure and better cared for with my father, which is kind of really nice and kind of very ironic. She just thought that the church was less stable. I’m pretty certain that the people who were in the church probably said, “Your children will be better off with their father than living in a church center,” because it would lessen my mother’s ability to give all of her time and energy, but I don’t know that’s exactly what was said.

    Lisa Kohn:

    In the church there’s this concept of indemnity, where the individuals, you pay indemnity. You suffer to pay for the sins of your ancestors and you suffer so that your descendants don’t have to suffer, so the individual sacrifices for the family, family sacrifices for the society, society sacrifices for the nation, nation sacrifices for the world. My mom gave us up, and in us giving my mom up, not only did she move out, but we were told so many times how lucky we were not to live with her, [inaudible 00:22:01] out and you can’t miss her and you can’t be sad and you can’t be mad because that’s sinful. It’s just this kind of windup in your brain of control of emotions and it was my gift to God to not live with my mom.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That makes sense. Why did you, so far it sounds like not something that I would want to do, but doesn’t sound abusive, and I know there was. What were some of the things that ultimately led you to leave?

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s funny. There’s a lot of layers in what you just said. In this process of the book going out there I reconnected with my best friend from fifth grade. She said to me, apparently we would take her in with us on the weekends. “I used to love going in with you, everybody was so sweet and wonderful.” So as a kid, it was this really warm, welcoming, wonderful place, and you had hope and everybody loved us because we were young and we were cute.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And compared to living with your dad, that’s what I’m thinking. Compared to living with Danny.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah. There was a lot that was wonderful, absolutely safe and more stable than living with my dad, which is part of what’s great, like yeah, the cult is better.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, which is the insanity piece.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Right, which is part of the insanity piece. If you read the beginning, the foreword to the book, my brother does say, well, first of all, he jokingly says I got it all wrong because memory is a very funny thing, but he also says I was way too nice on everyone, and I’ve had many other kids, born and/or raised, second gens, we’re called, who say the same thing. I was best friends with Reverend Moon’s kids, with one of his daughters. My experience was crazy, was painful, was emotionally…If you read the book, I have a dear friend from when I was in school in Scotland, and he read the book and he was like, “What was with all those men in the church?” I definitely was emotionally incested by a number of people.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh yeah, and you talk about that. You talk about your dad’s friends who looked at you. It was interesting, because when you talk about, “He looked at me and I had that squirmy feeling,” and I kept thinking to myself, “I wonder what she doesn’t remember, I wonder what that’s about,” because as children you feel things that maybe you can’t articulate.

    Lisa Kohn:

    The same thing happened at church. The very crazy thing about my childhood is I had a number of older brothers, 9, 10, 12 years older than me, who were completely inappropriate with me when I was 14, 15, 16, and didn’t know, but at the same time, their love for me, as messed up as it was, was part of what kept me from really crashing and burning. I do not remember explicit sexual abuse in the church, I did not experience explicit physical abuse in the church. There are many cults where that exist, there are many people in my church and outside of my church and not having been in a cult at all who have much more explicit, abusive, traumatic experiences than I did. It was mostly the mental, emotional.

    Were You Brainwashed?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I was on Megyn Kelly when the book came out, and in the backstory the producer said to me, “Were you brainwashed?” I’m like, “That’s a good question.” And actually what I said was I wasn’t brainwashed because I didn’t have a brain to be washed, I was pickled. There’s research that shows what growing up in an environment like that does to your brain and how it carves it in very traumatic, addictive behavior, warped thinking, lies, kind of ways, and my brain is just a product of everything that happened compiled with the strict control of the church. But was I beaten? Not that I remember. Did anything abusive in that way happen? Not that I remember. So there you have it.

    Lisa Kohn:

    What finally got me out was twofold, which talks about some of the hypocrisy of the church. The summer between my junior and senior year of high school my dad sent me to music camp, I’m convinced to keep me away from the church. He would do anything to keep me away from the church, because he didn’t like spending money on us. It was money for drugs, and money for, at that point, his baroque recorders, and for his lifestyle, but he sent me to music camp, and for the first time I had friends who were gay or bisexual that I knew, were out. That’s a huge sin in the church, a huge sin. So I write to my mom and I say, “What should I do? These are my friends, they’re wonderful.” She says, “You have two choices. You can convert them, or you can stay away from them because they’re evil.”

    Lisa Kohn:

    For the first time, the very first time, my brain goes, “I don’t know if I agree. These are wonderful people. I don’t know.” I come back from music camp, and again, I had been best friends with Reverend Moon’s daughter, and another friend of mine who was a blessed child, was my age, our Sunday School teacher, one of those inappropriate people in the book, our Sunday School teacher seduced, raped her, she’s 16, he has an affair with her, and in order to get the blame off of her, the focus off of her, and because she was incessantly jealous of me, she spread rumors about me, and Reverend Moon heard the rumors and believed the rumors and made a decree that only blessed children, children born in a marriage that he arranged, could play with the true children, his children, in order to keep me away. As I like to say, my Messiah said I was bad and banished me from his children.

    Lisa Kohn:

    So you put those two together, and I went to my senior year of high school, and I made a conscious decision. I thought, “Okay, I came into the church as a 10 year old, as a child. Just following my mother. I want to spend the rest of my life here, but in order to do that I need to make an adult decision, at the age of 17, an adult decision to join and never question, so I’m going to pull back a little bit so that I can decide to come back all the way.” For the first year, I start to hang out with people at school more, I have friends who are still my best friends to this day, and I get more involved in school and I find more unconditional love there than I had in the church, and more freedom, obviously.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Then I experimented with little things here and little things there and got very drunk at a party and kissed a boy, and then I had a boyfriend, which is the big sin. Premarital sex is the big sin, so I have a boyfriend and all hell breaks loose and everybody’s screaming at me and worried about me and confronting me and locking me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because you’re still going back to the church?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I’m still going back to the church on the weekends?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And you told them about the boyfriend?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah, I must have done that, because everybody’s like, “You’re going to fall, you’re going to sin.” So then I decide I will break up with him because I have to, because I can’t let God down. I go off to school and he stays in New York, and I go to upstate New York, and I don’t break up with him, and then it becomes a process. As my brother says, I never left, I just slowly drifted away. But in my slowly drifting away, which leads to the recovery, my freshman year I almost jumped off the bridge, because I was at Cornell and so there’s a number of bridges. Freshman year I almost jumped off the bridge, sophomore year I became anorexic, junior year I developed what some people call a mild cocaine addiction, whatever that is, and senior year I just got into more and more abusive and destructive relationships, until I finally was not in the church, got engaged to a man who drank a hell of a lot. Worked for my father, drank a hell of a lot, and was very mean when he drank, and someone pointed me in the way of AlAnon, and I crawled in, please excuse me saying, “Tell me he’s an alcoholic, because there’s no way I would ever be with an alcoholic,” only to realize, besides the church, there’s a myriad of reasons. It’s all over my dad’s family at least.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I also would look at all these people in the rooms, and this is so awful to say, and I’d think, “These poor people with such low self esteem, oh my gosh,” having no clue how battered and damaged and self loathing I was, and self-punishing, even though I had almost jumped off a bridge, been anorexic, did a lot of drugs, and let people be really mean to me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Let’s go back a little bit. You drift away. When do you think, how old were you-

    Lisa Kohn:

    Like between the age of 17 and 20, 21. 17 I was a Moonie, 18 I was a Moonie, but I would drop his hands when we were walking in Little Italy and see someone carrying flowers. 19, I’m starting to do other stuff, and I would say I had been a Moonie. 20, but it’s still very deeply ingrained in me.

    Lisa’s Relationship with Her Mom

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did your relationship look like with your mom during that time?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Oh, it was bad. First, she was locking me up in rooms and screaming at me, “You’re going to die, you’re going to die, you’re going to die.” She hated my boyfriends, perhaps understandably. Because of all of this, we got very distant and it was tough, because in her mind, I was dying spiritually, I was all but dead. She would have done anything to save me, and we also had a very, the summer before my father sent me to music camp my music sent me out to Seattle to proselytize, to witness for the summer, because she spent all this time saying, “Lisa, you’re angry, you’re angry at me for leaving you. We have to talk about this.” I would say, “I’m not angry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not angry.”

    Lisa Kohn:

    So when I left the church, on top of all that there was all these, at that point, a decade of pain, anger, sadness for the times that she wasn’t there and wouldn’t be there and wouldn’t come see us. There was one point where she lived in a building and we were no longer allowed in the building and we would come to the building on a Sunday morning to say, “Can Mim come down and say hi for a minute?” And she would send out a message, “I can’t come down, I’m busy.” And we’d leave and maybe come see her the next week, so there was a lot of layers of stuff that still gets worked out.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, and what was Robbie doing at the time? Your brother?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Robbie, so I went to school up at Cornell, he went to school at Drew, in Madison, New Jersey. He’s a year ahead of me. Drew had a seminary, and in the seminary there were Moonies going to school to become ordained as reverends, whom he knew. I was at Cornell, which was huge, and there were Moonies there, but there wasn’t really anyone who knew me really well. At some point someone came, but at that point I just stayed away from him, but Robbie was surrounded, in a very small school, by people who knew him, so as he likes to say he could not do anything. As soon as he was done, as soon as he was graduated from Drew, he sat my mom down and he was like, “I’m out. I’m out, I’m out, I’m out.” Whereas we jokingly say I still haven’t told my mom I’m out. I think she knows, but I never did the, “That’s it, I’m done.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Just slowly.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I just stopped showing up. Slowly disappeared.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my gosh. What’s your relationship like with your mom now?

    Lisa Kohn:

    That’s such a loaded question. It has gone, over the years, close, really distant, close, really distant, close, really distant. My mom had a history, someone referred to it as ambivalent attachment. She’d get really close and freak out and run away, and get really close and freak out and run away. You layer that on top of someone whose mom left, so every time she’d run away it would be like, “You’re doing it again.”

    Lisa Kohn:

    I will say that very recently I finally said, she’s a very good grandmother, she’s been in my life since the kids were born, she’s been great in many ways, but I finally said, “I can’t do this anymore, because you’re going to say or do things that I would never say or do to my kids, and when you do it, maybe it’s my bad, but I get so cut and so hurt and so scarred and devastated because it lays right on top of so many scars that I can’t do it anymore.” Because she used to say things like, “Well, I hope you get over that sometime soon,” and stuff like that.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Then with the publishing of the book, I think somehow my mom is more able to see the impact of the choices she made and what she did, because she would say things like, beforehand, when I was on Megyn Kelly, they interviewed my mom and a couple people to make sure I wasn’t lying. And they said to my mom, “Your daughter says that you abandoned them. Is that what you think?” To which my mom said, “I know that’s what my kids say. That’s not how I saw it at the time.” As the kid, you go, “What other way is there to see it?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Can we please discuss all of the ways in which you may or may not have seen these bad actions, yes.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Right. She would also do this thing, she would connect with some of the kids that she took care of when they were babies, and she’d call my brother, she’d call Robbie and I and say, “They’re so traumatized from their parents leaving them,” and we’d say, “Yeah, they are.” I finally got to the point where I thought, I don’t think she can get it, because if she gets it it will probably crack her, and I don’t need her to crack. I don’t need her to crack.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s a really good point and something that I did a lot of work around as well in therapy, which is that I came into program, as you did, and did all this work, did all this therapy, and then I turned around and asked the people around me to admit things they had no tools to admit. I wanted them to dive into these, the depths of these truths, and something I could have never done had I not had those coping tools. I had to, over time, realize that was an unfair thing to do, that cracking someone open without them having those tools to get through it and the nurturing and all the things that I had really wasn’t actually a loving, kind thing.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah. That’s what I thought. I didn’t need her to crack, but I also didn’t need to put myself out there to get it. Then I will say, with the publishing of the book, something in it cracked. She has apologized in a way she’s never done before. She has taken responsibility in a way she’s never done before. She has shown up for me in a way she’s never done before. She recently said to me, because we are incredibly close at this very moment, and she turned to me at one point, and she said, I don’t remember what words she used, “If I mess this up, that’s it, right?” I’m like, “Yeah, that probably is it.” Because you don’t have to be perfect, if you flip out or do something or go away, that’s okay, but just talk to me about it. If you say or do those things and have no realization of what you just said and how much you, those things you used to do, yeah, I probably can’t ever try this again.

    Lisa Kohn:

    But we are, at this very moment, knock on everything, my therapist is like, “Okay, we’ll see,” with the fingers crossed. Like, let’s all be careful here, but she is showing up in a way she never has, and actually only a little while ago, she said to me, “Do you think I was brainwashed?” And I said, “Do you think?” You wouldn’t have done what you did, you wouldn’t have left us, you wouldn’t have let people not let us see you, you wouldn’t have let people treat us like they did if you had full mental capacities, right? Not that that gives you a free slide, but you weren’t well. You weren’t whole, you weren’t you. So of course you were brainwashed. Call it what you will, because it’s very hard to admit one had been brainwashed. It’s very hard for any former to admit that, but you wouldn’t have said, “No, I’m going to take care of these babies instead of asking someone else to watch them for two minutes so I can give my kids a hug for the rest of the week.” You wouldn’t have done that if you had the ability to think as a person.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, because it’s not that she was a sociopath. Obviously there was a change in thinking. What is her relationship with organized movements or religion at this point?

    Lisa Kohn:

    She don’t believe in them very much either.

    When Lisa’s Mother Left the Moonie Cult

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When did she leave?

    Lisa Kohn:

    She left when my oldest kid was born. As she likes to say, “I couldn’t even be a good Moonie. I couldn’t do that well.” She lived down in DC at the time and I lived up in Connecticut, and I had my first child, and my mom was not working in the church, but she was living with the church and was a Moonie, but she was not working in the church and she told her job, “When my daughter has a baby I’m going to take a week off and go help my daughter,” and she did that and she came back and they fired her. Then she was trying to figure out what to do. She’s always worked with kids and she’s run nursery schools and preschools for the church, and there was a Master’s in Early Childhood Special Ed at NYU and I said, “You should apply,” so at the age of 55, 56, something like that, if I thought about it, 53, she went and applied to NYU and got her master’s in special ed and moved up north and started working in the Head Start program and slowly drifted away from the church.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I used to say to people, “Anything can happen,” because if you had told me when my mom was in that she would ever leave, I would have said no way in hell would my mother ever leave the church, but she did. After 22 or so years, she pulled herself out and started a new life.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She did get married, right?

    Lisa Kohn:

    She did get married, yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did she have more children?

    Lisa Kohn:

    No, thank God. She was pregnant once, and thank God she miscarried. I mean, it would be wonderful to have a sibling, but it would have added to the pile.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. The husband? Did he come with her out or did they stick around?

    Lisa Kohn:

    No, they got divorced before she left the church, so already it was all slowly falling apart. I have no idea where he is at all.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Are there people practicing now?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Heck yeah. Reverend Moon died a number of years ago and the church has splintered into three groups. His wife, Hak Ja Han, runs one faction of the church. I believe two of his sons run another faction of the church, and they’re all arguing over who’s right, and then another two sons, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Sanctuary Church, they’re the ones who have a church in the Poconos in Pennsylvania and they bring AR-15s, rifles, to their wedding ceremonies and ceremonies overall because Reverend Moon’s sun, Sean Moon, believes that the “rod of iron” in the Bible means you should be armed with a rifle, so I like to say here’s people who believe that this man is the Messiah and they’re armed with rifles. That’s scary.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, so she leaves, and what about your dad?

    Lisa Kohn:

    My dad. My dad lived his crazy life of sex, drugs, drink, all of that. Again, and I crawled into AlAnon and I’m like, “There’s no way.” My grandfather had been sober for the last five years of his life, I never knew this. My dad’s dad. My dad and my grandmother used to say that he was nice now because he had friends, because he was in AA. My grandmother was addicted to every pill under the sun, from what I’ve heard, and my dad drank and drugged and drank and drugged and drank and drugged until, many things happen, but he was 64 and he had a stroke, and when he finally got to the hospital, took him a couple days to get to the hospital, because it did, and when the doctor said, “What happened?” My dad said, “I partied too much.” Too much cocaine, blew out a divet in his brain, and now he’s a very old 76 year old man in a nursing home in New Jersey living a very sad, sad life.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yes, when I see him, I do give him alcohol and I do give him cigarettes, because at this point it’s all he’s got, right? I am his primary caregiver. It’s funny, many years ago, when he had the stroke and my mother in law said, “Well, you have to take care of him.” I’m like, “No I don’t, Mom.” Then she read the book and she’s like, “No you don’t.” I’m like, “No I don’t.” I adore my dad. I understand where his disease comes from, I understand why he is who he is, and he’s a not nice word a lot of times, but he’s also got a huge heart, but he just hides it really really well. Right now he’s about an hour away from me and I’m working hard to try and move him closer so we can actually see him a little bit more. He’s just not an easy person. He’s in a nursing home because he was in an assisted living facility and he smoked in his room so many times and lit so many fires and burned so many holes in the carpet that they finally had to put him in a nursing home. When they put him in the nursing home, they put him in a wheelchair and he lost all ability to move.

    Lisa Kohn:

    For a while he wouldn’t shower, so he just looked like a homeless person living in a nursing home in Princeton, New Jersey. It was a very sad, sad thing. Luckily I have compassion. He can be very cutting, but I have a lot of compassion for him, so I’m graced with compassion for him.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s amazing what we can do when we do intensive work on ourselves, right?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yeah, you can. I have the ability to love him. I have some physical issues going on and now he’ll call me and leave a message, “I want to know you’re okay,” at which point I cry, and I tell people that he called and they’re like, “Oh my God, he called.” So then I call him back and he’s completely selfish and couldn’t care less about me when I get him on the phone, and you’re like, “Okay, I got both.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Peter Loeb:

    Hi, I’m Peter Loeb, CEO and co-founder of Lionrock Recovery. We’re proud to sponsor the Courage to Change, and I hope you find that it’s an inspiration. I was inspired to start Lionrock after my sister lost her own struggle with drugs and alcohol back in 2010. Because we provide care online by live video, Lionrock clients can get help from the privacy of home. We offer flexible schedules that fit our clients’ busy lives, and of course, we’re licensed and accredited and we accept most private health insurance. You can find out more about us at lionrockrecovery.com, or call us for a free consultation, no commitment, at 800-258-6550. Thank you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So you ended up in AlAnon in your senior year of college, is that right?

    Lisa Kohn:

    No, I ended up in AlAnon just as I, so I graduated in ’85, started dating my alcoholic fiance in ’86, ended up engaged and in AlAnon in ’87, so yeah. November of ’87, when I crawled.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you crawled to AlAnon, talk to us about getting to AlAnon and why AlAnon and how that happened.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I was living with my fiance and he was working for my dad, he was a chef at my dad’s restaurant. He was working the day shift, which was bad, but then he worked the night shift and he would go out and drink to all hours of the night and he’d come home and wake me up and we’d fight, or I’d go out looking for him and I’d drink with him and I did drugs with him. It was that insane, I’m not an alcoholic and I’m not an addict of substance. I play with that many times in my mind, but I’m really not, I can stop. That’s not my addiction, although many times I don’t drink for a lot of reasons, but I was in that “the alcoholic is clinging to the bottle and I’m clinging to the alcoholic.” I was not sleeping and my body started to get weak and go numb. Half of my body shut down. I’m thinking, “Maybe something’s not right here.”

    Lisa Kohn:

    My cousin, my mom’s cousin, he shows up many times in the book, he was engaged to a woman who is now in recovery, and he sat me down. We went out to lunch and he said, “Go to AlAnon.” And I’m like, “I don’t need AlAnon. I would never be with an alcoholic.” “Go to AlAnon.” It was shame, absolute shame. Fear, shame, I should know better, I have a degree from Cornell, I’m smart, I have a good job. I looked so functional on the top, and again, I did not realize how absolutely cut into pieces and the level of shame and self loathing that still can erupt that is just what I learned. What I learned from everything that happened was I deserve to die. That is the deepest lie truth in my brain.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I was terrified to go. It was right after Thanksgiving, because his sisters came for Thanksgiving, and when he went out to buy something they said, “He’s an alcoholic and you need to get him sober. We need you to get him sober.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You were like, “Oh great.”

    Lisa’s Experience with AlAnon

    Lisa Kohn:

    Oh great. Yeah, so then I crawled into AlAnon. First of all, they don’t tell you if he’s an alcoholic. They don’t. You’re like, “Give me the rules, give me the list,” and they don’t.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I know. Especially for those of us who come in from a thriving in the academic background. We’re like, “Okay, where are the worksheets? I need the rules, who’s in charge here?”

    Lisa Kohn:

    Who’s in charge here?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Lisa Kohn:

    All I knew was that my life was unmanageable and I felt safer there. To this day, I still have my One Day at a Time book, my ODAT, with a bazillion names and phone numbers, because everybody gives you their first name and your phone number, and you call people and only one of them do I know where they are because I happened to connect this person outside of the room and I know their last name, but everybody else saved my life and I don’t even know where they are. But I crawled into the rooms, and I felt better when I was there. I knew my life was crazy. I was engaged to be married. I had, at that point, I think, postponed the marriage, and I did my first unofficial 90 in 90, 90 meetings in 90 days, and my second unofficial 90 in 90, and even if I could go for five minutes, I would crawl out of the office, because I was working a crazy job and go for five minutes and cry and cry and cry and learn truths that, to this day, first of all, I teach in my leadership program.

    Lisa Kohn:

    People write them down. I have a leadership consulting and executive coaching company and when I teach these things, people write them down, I’m like, “Just go to 12 step, it’s fine.” Learn these truths. Learn expectations or premeditated resentments. I didn’t cause this, I can’t control this, I can’t cure this. Acceptance is the answer to all my problems. All these things that, to this day, I still need to know. I learn these truths and start to feel better, but I am, it’s not necessarily a good thing about me, but because of the way I grew up and who I am, anything you put in front of me, I will do no matter what. I was, “I’m going to marry him. I said I’d marry him, I’m going to marry him. I can do it. I have AlAnon. I’ll be fine.”

    Lisa Kohn:

    I was at a meeting lunchtime at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. He came home, he woke me up, crazy, crazy, crazy, complaining about my qualifier, sharing my story, and somebody came up to me and he said, “There are no victims, there are only volunteers.” All of a sudden, I thought, “Maybe I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life. Maybe I don’t have to prove how strong I am by marrying my alcoholic.” I decided to move out and was told not to tell him until the night before. Told him the night before, everything blew up, and then the next day, people to this day, who I will always be grateful for, literally came and picked me up and carried me out. Carried me out, because I could not. They were like, “Is this yours?” “Yes.” “Is this yours?” “I don’t know.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I’ve been to that party.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Exactly, and that began the process of, as I said, I think, to you in the beginning, when you go into the rooms and you tell your story and people’s jaws drop, you’re like, “Oh, I guess it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of a lot.” That became the process of first looking at myself and thinking I was only damaged. I was just damaged material. I was only my pain, I was only my suffering, I was only my scars, I was only my abandonment issues, I was only my low self esteem. That was 1986 and on, and I’m happy to say now that I know that that’s not true either, right? That was as much of a lie as anything else. I am so many more things, and I have scars, but I am not my damage. I have damage, but that’s okay.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It really feels that way when you come in. I am all this stuff. I remember getting out of treatment and being early recovery. It was all I knew how to talk about, really, because-

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yes, all.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You know? Oh hi, I’m Ashley, I’m in recovery, these were my drugs of choice. At the grocery store. That’s all you are, you don’t have anything else. Over the years, you build that self esteem, you build the sense that I have scars, I have damage, and I am Ashley and I am all these other things, and it’s a really incredible feeling.

    Lisa Kohn:

    It’s an incredible feeling. My progress, recovery has changed and grown in so many ways, through so many processes and trauma work and all of that. Recently, there are definitely ways I respond to certain things because of my specific trauma and the church and a lot of stuff, and my husband will say, “I wish it were easier for you,” and I finally said to him, “You know what? I don’t even wish it were easier for me anymore, because I no longer need to recover better.” If this is all it is, this is fine. There’s not a better I have to be or a more healed I have to be, because again, my demons, if you go someplace and people say, “What are the 10 worst things that happened to you?” I’m always like, “Only 10?” Then I’ll give it to someone, I’ve done this in certain types of trauma therapy, and I’ll give the list and I’ll be like, “But just so you know, I’m fine. When you hear my list, I don’t sound fine, but I’m fine.” I have scars and when it rains they hurt, kind of thing. I have a bad knee, that’s all. I have a bad knee. I’m not a bad knee, I have a bad knee.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And it takes a long time to get there. It makes sense that 33 years ago-

    Lisa Kohn:

    I didn’t think of that, thank you. Wow.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Sorry, I was born in ’86.

    Lisa Kohn:

    That was easy for you, huh?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, that was easy for me. I’m pretending I can do math. But it makes sense that you’ve grown to be so many more things. You left the fiance and you ended up getting married and having children. What’s the relationship, you found someone you love and who respects you. How old were you, or when did you guys get married?

    Lisa Kohn:

    I got married, I like to say when I was in my 20s, because it was two weeks before my 30th birthday. In my 20s. It was a friend of one of my best friends from high school who we met, and he’s a good person, it’s a good relationship. There’s always issues in anything. I like to say if you have enough of a story that you can write a memoir, it’s very easy for the relationship to be built on, well, you’re the one with the issues. That was an interesting thing that took a long, because I went into it thinking, “You have the rules, because I’m messed up,” and it took a long time to iron that out a bit.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Got married in 1993, and then I had my first child in ’96, and my second child in 2002 with a big gap of trying in the middle, which is also an interesting process. I will surely say that I healed through loving my children. I could be wrong, and a lot of therapy and EMDR work, and a lot of mindfulness and a lot of tools and a lot of program and a lot of stuff, but I did not know that I could be a good mom. When I got married, my husband was like, “What if you leave? What if you leave the kids?” We were both terrified that I didn’t have good role models, that I wouldn’t know what to do.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I always say to my kids, the only goal was that my kids would know they were loved. To which, you’ve got to know my 17 year old, but he’ll say, “I don’t know you love me. I know Mimi loves me and I know Papa loves me, and I know dad loves me, but I don’t know you love me.” Which means he absolutely knows that he’s adored and he’s totally safe and secure in that love. That’s my only goal, is that they knew that they were loved, because I didn’t. I just didn’t. Everything that happened and everything went down and who they were, I never knew they loved me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Last thing I want to cover is why do you think AlAnon saved you and got you to recovery? And was it coupled, did you do therapy first?

    Lisa Kohn:

    No. When I crawled into AlAnon, I think I ended up in therapy, but it wasn’t with a therapist that really worked for me. At the same time, I think I was also in group therapy, and I still remember the group therapist saying to me one time, we had a single session, she said, “You know you have to integrate the church into yourself, into your life, in order to heal,” and I said, “No blanking way.” But she was right. But at that point, the only way I was alive was, “This never happened, I’m not going to talk about it.”

    Lisa’s Rock Bottom

    Lisa Kohn:

    AlAnon was the first place I went, and why did it help? I hit my bottom. My life was unmanageable. I was engaged to be married to someone who was not very nice. I was not sleeping, I was losing my body, I was totally not functional anymore, and it was, at first it was just a place where I felt better when I went, and then I, by mistake, stumbled into an ACoA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, meeting, and they read the laundry list and you’re like, “Yes, yes, always, doesn’t everybody, no, yes, absolutely, oh my God.” It was even bigger when I heard the list of what being a cult does to your brain, because I was like, “Oh my God, that’s my brain,” but I remember them reading that list and being like, “Isn’t everybody like that?”

    Lisa Kohn:

    That’s when I first realized that it’s not just my fiance, it’s my family. I began to look at some of it, yes, my father drinks and drugs everyday, yes, his behavior changes, yes, he’s actually nice when he’s drunk, he says he loves me when he’s drunk. No, he says, “I have to love you, that doesn’t count. I like you and that’s all that matters,” is what my dad liked to say.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Then the tools, the slogans, the support, the people, the community. The sense that you’re not alone. Granted, I was still alone, because, again, I would tell my story and people’s jaws would drop. Like you said, “Is AA a cult?” People would walk in and be like, “Oh my God, I came to AlAnon. What is this, the Moonies?” And then I would burst into tears. Even in this safe space it’s not safe, because that was the ’80s, and they were still always talking about the Moonies. But it was the experience, strength, and hope. The 12 steps. I grew up with a God, when I left I could not have a belief in God, when I got into AlAnon, I’m a very spiritual person, and I could find a higher power. It’s god with a little g and I use the pronoun they for god as well. I could bring that back into my life. I could bring so much that I had to shut down, and again, all the slogans and all the readings and all the things that could, I teach a lot of my clients, our brain is a muscle. We think it controls us, but we can control it, and it taught me how to recognize my stinking thinking, stop my stinking thinking, get help of my stinking thinking.

    Lisa Kohn:

    All of that. It just gave me a way to live life that made sense and it gave me hope. I didn’t even realize I was without hope, but it gave me hope. When people ask why I wrote the book and why I’m putting it out here so strong, I do have three messages which are related to this. One is, which is not related, that extremist situations exist, they’re prevalent, they’re extremely intoxicating, and they’re extremely dangerous. And they’re there. They’re all over, they’re more prevalent now.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Two, for anyone who feels hopeless or damaged beyond repair, there is hope. So often there is hope, even when we feel we have no hope. And three, from my own life, from my friends, from the work I do as a coach, I believe, as a species, we’re so hard on ourselves, we’re self-critical and self-judging and self-lambasting and all these things we would never say to anyone else. They say in AlAnon, “Would you say that to your best friend?” We just need a huge dose of self love and self compassion, which is what I learned. I learned in AlAnon that I didn’t have that and how to have that.

    Lisa Kohn:

    That’s what I got in my recovery, a huge sense of, I was watching Tara Brach, a meditation teacher, and she’s like, “I put my hand on my heart and say, “It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay.”” Because so many of us did not hear that when we were kids, in whatever way, so I learned to put my hand on my heart and say, “It’s okay, you’re okay, it’ll be okay, let it go.” All that stuff that stops the crazies in my brain.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Well, you are an amazing woman, remarkable. I am so impressed and just find your story to be, I see so much intergenerational trauma, and I love that you were able to get out and then do the work and then have the children and you didn’t pass this stuff on to your kids, and that’s so cool. That’s such an amazing gift, that you gave them that piece of recovery and to have a parent in recovery. You’re amazing, thank you so much for being here.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Thank you, and I have to say, you get into program and they say, “The disease stops here,” and that was my mantra. The disease stops here. That being said, I’ll tell you two things. One is it doesn’t stop all the way. I know your kids are young, but I’m going to tell you. Literally, my oldest kid ended up, after a while, seeing my therapist, and I was like, “Why does my kid have my issues? They have this idyllic childhood. They have everything. I had all this trauma, their worst trauma,” maybe this was something else, “but their worst trauma was do they get a second dessert.” My therapist said, “It’s called generational trauma. It’s epigenetics.” My trauma is at 15, theirs is at 7 or 5. And I say that because I was devastated-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But that makes a difference.

    Lisa Kohn:

    I say that to the second gens from the church. Don’t think that you’re going to be so healthy that nothing will affect them. That’s why Holocaust survivors’ kids have issues about it, right? No matter how healthy we are, it’s in our DNA, it’s epigenetics, and it’s in how we, I probably overnurtured my kids. Absolutely I did. But that being said, my kids, my second kid will just only tease me, but my older kid says, “Yes it did. The disease stopped. You stopped it.” So thank you, because that was my goal, to not unintentionally, or to not just pass it all on.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s never going to be perfect. No one gets out of their childhood without some sort of trauma. I think it’s really about making it, the best we can do is not repeat the same mistakes and try really hard to make our new ones as small as possible.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Exactly, and to love. My god is love, it truly is. I love my kids and they know it, and then I’m good.

    Lisa’s Book

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I’m really grateful to know you, Lisa, and thank you so much. Your book is called To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence. It is available everywhere books are sold. I bought it on Amazon.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Yes, it’s on Amazon, it’s at Barnes and Noble, you can go to your local bookstore, you can go on indiebound.org, and they will tell you where to get it at a bookstore, support your local bookstore. Kindle Unlimited. I’m trying to spread a message, so anything, and anybody who wants to connect or talk about it or have me do a reading, I will do almost anything to spread my messages, just to be clear. Almost anything.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I like the boundaries. Your Instagram, do you want people following any social media?

    Lisa Kohn:

    Absolutely. My website is lisakohnwrites, and it’s L-I-S-A K-O-H-N W-R-I-T-E-S.com, and all of my social media. I’m on Instagram, @lisakohnwrites, I’m on Twitter, @lisakohnwrites, and I’m on Facebook, Lisa Kohn Writes. If you Google “Lisa Kohn” L-I-S-A K-O-H-N, I will be the first three or four pages that come up, because there were such media hits when the book came out because cults are hot, so it’s easy to find me and I encourage people to find me if they want to. I love to connect, I love when people reach out and share their stories and we all grow and heal together.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s awesome. Thank you so much, Lisa. I appreciate it.

    Lisa Kohn:

    Thank you for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The Courage to Change, a recovery podcast, would like to thank our sponsor, Lionrock Recovery, for their support. Lionrock Recovery provides online substance abuse counseling where you can get help from the privacy of your own home. For more information, visit www.lionrockrecovery.com/podcast. Subscribe and join our podcast community to hear amazing stories of courage and transformation. We are so grateful to our listeners and hope that you will engage with us. Please email us comments, questions, anything you want to share with us, how this podcast has affected you. Our email address is podcast@lionrock.life. We want to hear from you.