Interview with Heather Heath on Shiny Happy People
In light of the recent documentary Shiny Happy People, which calls attention to abuse within the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a religious organization started by Bill Gothard and known for being connected with the Duggar family, we had the honor of interviewing survivor Heather Heath about her experience growing up within the organization and leaving as an adult to find freedom and healing on the other side. First, a bit about Heather:
Heather Heath was raised in the extreme fundamentalist homeschool organization, the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI. Despite having no accredited transcripts and being told girls didn’t need to go to college, she graduated from Connecticut’s paramedic program and later earned an A.S. while parenting infant identical twins . . . which led to her tendency of skipping mugs and sticking a straw directly into the coffee pot. Out of pandemic necessity, she has now been on both the student and teacher sides of homeschooling and would not like to relive either experience.
Heather has been a guest on the podcasts Leaving the Village and Escape: Leaving Hell Behind. She was interviewed in the New York Post, as well as for the book Dear Sister by M. Wooding. She has interviews on the podcast Leaving Eden and The Dr. Oz Show, and most recently, Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People. Heather is a popular blogger and (mostly) enjoys an ever-growing community on social media as @BacksliddenHarlot. Heather was raised in Connecticut, her husband’s career previously brought the family to live in Maine, and currently, they reside in New York where Heather works as a paramedic. Lovingly Abused is her first book (and she’s really excited about it).
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Cait West: What led you to start writing your memoir about growing up in IBLP/ATI? How long did it take to write the whole book?
Heather Heath: It started out as a blog to try to explain to people why I was so weird, and then a curiosity of my own to discover why I believed the things that I did. I started diving into the reasons behind the rules for everything I wasn’t allowed to do, such as celebrating Halloween. I discovered a whole world that had been hidden from me. From there I just kept learning and writing as much as I could. I’ve rewritten Lovingly Abused several times, my first version being very similar to Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo, and evolving as I did. The entire process took me about five years and a whole bunch of Prozac.
CW: How did writing your story impact your own healing journey?
HH: I used to think healing was linear. To be fair, I used to think a lot of things. Even after having written a book and taking part in a docuseries, I’m still not finished healing. I learned during the process of writing that I don’t have all the answers; I don’t even have most of them. But I’ve discovered that healing isn’t just about moving on; it’s an active, exhausting process. Writing and reliving my whole story brought up memories I didn’t know I had. I’ve kept a diary since I was seven, so writing is an ingrained part of my healing. Lovingly Abused is essentially a journal of my healing process. I think out loud on the page. I think this is why some people have said it feels “scattered” or “disjointed.” That’s because what’s on the page is pretty much how it sounds in my head all the time. I would go into a chapter knowing a general idea but then genuinely be surprised by the memories that would pop up as I typed. Lovingly Abused is a picture of where I was on my journey in 2021. I’ve healed more since then, and I’ve become angrier about things as I dive deeper to write a prequel. There is hurt I didn’t know existed and hurt I didn’t know I’d caused. It’s eye-opening to try to arrange all the pieces and discover that many times the victim is also an abuser, and the abuser is sometimes a victim; the lines can be very gray. It’s helped my healing sometimes to understand the reason behind the hurt. It’s not an excuse, but an understanding of where people were in their own trauma.
CW: What are some of the most damaging teachings, in your opinion, of Bill Gothard and IBLP/ATI?
HH: My husband and I played a “game” one day with a Wisdom Booklet. I was going to put a Post-it on every page that had false or hateful information on it. Then, my husband, who attended school, traditional undergrad, and is now a physician, would go through and put Post-its on all the false or hateful information I missed because I hadn’t yet deconstructed that teaching and didn’t even know it was erroneous. My chest is covered in stress hives just typing and considering which of his teachings were the worst. That should speak volumes on its own.
I’d say the worst for me was the dismissal and prevalence of rape, incest, molestation, and pedophilia. It’s not even just a cover-up; it’s full lessons and studies on how and why to blame the victim, usually a woman or a child, for their abuse. There are diagrams and tests on why your countenance enhancements weren’t enough to deter your attacker. They are gaslighting the women and grooming the men.* No one walked away from Bill without damage.
*I’m using binary terms based on Bill’s teachings.
CW: Did you have a particular moment when you realized that what you’d experienced was spiritual abuse?
HH: My real “ah ha” moment was at the church at the college I had planned to attend. While this church wasn’t IBLP affiliated, many students overlapped and many of the teachings were the same, if not stricter than Bill’s. I had been having seizures, and they tried things like praying, laying on hands, and even an exorcism. Not once did someone say, “Hey, I bet a hospital would be handy right about now.” Later I began to dive deeper into IBLP/ATI’s “medicine resources” in the Wisdom Booklets, and I truly wonder how many have experienced disability and/or death due to these teachings. Not once have I seen a medical provider demand that a seizure patient renounce God in exchange for some Valium, yet my spiritual leaders were withholding life-saving care because they believed that my neurological damage was in fact spiritual.
CW: What did it feel like to leave IBLP/ATI?
HH: Terrifying. It was all I’d ever known, and I didn’t have very many options for moving forward since I didn’t have any credible form of education. I ended up dating abusive guys because in my mind, it wasn’t abuse, it was orderly discipline. I was an easy target for scumbags. The crossover of being attractive via learned helplessness was convenient in that I was let into social circles, but I had no idea how to determine who to trust anymore.
CW: After leaving IBLP/ATI, what are some of your favorite things to do that you weren’t able to do before?
HH: Wear pants!
Being able to get into a car full of people without having to do the math of who was going to tempt whom if their hips touched. Just get in the car. I can’t explain how freeing that feels to just be able to find a seat and be done with it.
It’s taken nearly two decades of deconstructing all of this, but I finally feel like a whole person, not an object.
CW: What practices and resources helped you process and understand your experience?
HH: One of my favorite books is one my therapist gave me—The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s helped me understand so many of my visceral responses to seemingly normal things.
I love being able to be still. In IBLP/ATI I had to be active all the time. If I wasn’t night sleeping or actively eating, I was supposed to be serving someone. I couldn’t walk to a different room without doing something helpful on the way. While small habits like putting things away as you go can be useful, it’s incredible to stop carrying guilt around if I walk down the stairs without grabbing the laundry on the way. It’s taken entire therapy sessions just to learn how to be still, and that in so doing, the devil doesn’t automatically set up camp in my soul.
CW: How has your experience leaving IBLP/ATI impacted your own parenting?
HH: Oof. How much time do you have? It feels like being thrown into parenting completely blind. I grew up thinking I had every single answer on how to raise a child, and then I discovered that I couldn’t use any answer I thought I had. My husband had zero experience with kids, and mine always ended with abuse, so we are basically figuring it out as we go. My kids are seven, and I tell them all the time that I’ve never been a mom to a seven-year-old before, so sometimes I need some moments to figure it out. My kids know the watered-down version of my story. They know I don’t know what it’s like to go to school or participate in sports. I very actively try not to overcorrect and push them into things just because I wish I had been able to do them. I’m sure they’ll be able to grow up and write their own books about their childhood, but at least I know it will be entirely different, and hopefully for much better reasons.
I have been trying to separate the time I spend working on IBLP exposure content and the time I spend with them. I do let them see me work, but right now they are young, and I’m never going to get that back. I can’t waste their childhood trying to heal from mine.
CW: What has it been like to speak publicly about the way you were raised?
HH: It’s indescribably freeing. I kept video diaries during my first watch of Shiny Happy People because I was too nervous to write. In one of them, I talk about how the only way I can explain this feeling is to say I think this is how an exorcism is supposed to feel. It felt like that scream I’d been trying to scream for nearly two decades finally made it to listening ears.
Speaking publicly is easy. The public will forget about you after a while. It’s much more difficult to go to your parents’ house for Thanksgiving and hand them the memoir you wrote about child abuse. I’d say I’m one of the lucky ones. My parents not only read Lovingly Abused and watched Shiny Happy People, they gave their written permission to have their faces shown in both. My mother even has a cameo at the end.
For many of my friends, this is not the case, and they had to make a choice between their family and their truth. I was surprised when I wasn’t cut out of my family’s lives. My friends have experienced the opposite, and my heart aches for them. But I’m so proud of them.
So many people have been writing to me now to say how similar their story is and how validating it is to hear they aren’t alone. There are hundreds and thousands of us. I made the ripple, but they are all going to make the wave.
CW: What would you like survivors of spiritual abuse to understand?
HH: There is no right way or right stopping point of deconstruction. Deconstruction does not equal atheist devil worshiper, and it doesn’t look the same for anyone. You don’t have to stop believing in God. You can, but you don’t have to. I didn’t.
The thing that scared me the most about leaving IBLP/ATI/fundamentalism behind was the possibility of losing my faith. I think Jinger Duggar was very close to giving a good analogy by using the word “disentanglement,” but she loses me when she is so adamant that there is only one correct endpoint. It’s okay to ask questions, be angry, feel guilt-free, and be unsure. Those are things we may have never experienced in our lives, so it can be scary.
You’re not alone. Your story is valid.
Cait West is a member of Tears of Eden’s Editorial Board. She focuses on writing about the patriarchal movement and how patriarchy influences Spiritual Abuse. Find her at caitwest.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @caitwestwrites.