Healing with Music During Cult Recovery

When Matthew Castle was 17 he took a small duffle bag and his violin and slipped out of a bedroom window of his family home. He was escaping a life in the high demand religion, the Institute of Basic Life Principles. Music had sustained him while he was growing up in IBLP and it would continue to do so once he was free and living an autonomous life.

In the introduction, I talk about how I could especially relate to part of Matthew’s story where he talks about taking a break from the violin after he left IBLP. He wanted to see if his love for the violin was truly authentic and the way he found to do that was by taking a break from it. I went through a similar process post-cult where I examined many (many!) things in my life to determine if they were things I liked because liked them or because the cult told me I should like them.

I also talk about this week’s Memoir Monday blog post where I explore the creative healing that can come from a psychological practise called Internal Family Systems (IFS). I will be doing a series of posts about IFS and creativity over the coming weeks.

Matthew Castle is a violinist, creator, and advocate based in Seattle. He was raised in the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), the fundamentalist Christian homeschooling movement founded by Bill Gothard, where authority was abused and families were encouraged to isolate

themselves from society.

Today Matthew and his husband, author-illustrator Paul Castle, share their life and advocacy with a large online audience and publish children’s books together.

Learn more about Matthew Castle at PaulCastleStudio.com/pages/Matthew

This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the audiobook version of my award-winning, Amazon best-selling memoir, Cult, A Love Story.

Readers call the book ‘compelling’ ‘gritty’ ‘intimate’ and ‘not boring’ – which is what an author loves to hear. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of that subscription at alexandraamor.com/spotify.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

Growing up in Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP)