Rebecca’s Story

Rebecca Ishum, a blogger who was affiliated with IBLP as a teenager, says she’s still mentally recovering from her brief experience at a training center that left her “brainwashed.” Although her upbringing wasn’t as strict as the Duggars, and she wasn’t forced to wear skirts or grow her hair long, her parents enrolled her in an IBLP-affiliated training center called EXCEL in 2001 after being lured by a brochure. “Our parents were sold this bill of goods where if they did XYZ, then they would successfully raise the perfect Christian family,” Rebecca told In Touch Weekly in an email. “I still grieve for all of the kids … mainly the girls … who are trapped or have spent their lives trying to rewire their brains once they make it out. Most of the girls who are still in that cult don’t even realize how trapped they are. It’s taken years to get so much of that crap out of my head, and I still have to be a guard against it.”

Fortunately, Rebecca’s parents pulled her out once they realized the organization was teaching things that were questionable. To this day, she doesn’t blame her parents for enrolling her in the center and says IBLP intentionally misled them. “Unmarried, childless Bill Gothard had enough charisma that he managed to convince hoards of families that he knew the only right way to raise kids,” she said. “Parents were told that if they put their kids in the training, followed the rules and did all the right things, that they would turn out perfect Christian kids. Friends of mine from back in the day have since told me that I came back from my time in the training center as a totally different person. I imagine my parents saw the shift and decided that it wasn’t in our best interest to continue.”

Back in 2014, Rebecca shared her story about IBLP on her blog. We reached out to her to elaborate on her experience and condensed her story to the major points below.

IBLP had a long list of rules that it enforced, from skirt-wearing to victim-blaming.

“I was conditioned to believe anything that anyone in authority told me without question,” she said. “Because of that, I internalized all of the teachings and brought them back home with me. So, for example, there are a lot of physical requirements with IBLP. The physical requirements weren’t enforced to that degree at home (I wore shorts as a kid), but by the time I got home from my time in the training center, I was wearing skirts all of the time because I had been told that I was immodest otherwise, and I didn’t want to cause myself to be raped. There is a lot of victim and women-blaming in that cult.”

The center enforced their rules by controlling outside communication.

“We were allowed two 15-minute phone calls a week home to our parents. The phones were kept out in the hallway so that we couldn’t have a private conversation with them. That was how they monitored what was being said. Snail mail and packages were subject to being read. No communication was allowed between us and any men unless it was a brother or father.”

The teaching sessions were a way to scare and threaten others through scripture.

“I remember learning things like … if I [were] ever raped, then it would be my fault. If I didn’t commit to doing certain things like reading my Bible daily, then I was in sin. But if I committed to it, and then failed, it would be a worse sin. They would tell us to make five to six commitments a day by raising our hands in agreement and then watch to make sure that we were doing that even though ‘every eye was closed.’ In the mental state they had us in, that was a binding action without recourse.”

“We would also have checklists that we had to fill out daily to record our actions, and reports were sent home to our parents letting them know how we measured up. At one point, I was called to the director’s wife’s office and was told that I had a ‘root of bitterness.’ I was made to confess and repent before I could leave. It was my 17th birthday. Other girls who didn’t measure up were confined to their rooms. And, believe it or not, these stories are mild because I was a VERY good kid and a rule follower all the way.”

Unsurprisingly, IBLP teaches women to be “keepers of the home” and nothing else.

“Higher education was frowned on because we were created to raise up a Quiverfull of children to be the salt of the earth. Our main objective was to be the helpmeet (translation: servant) of our husbands and have children. Cooking healthful meals, knowing how to sew, being able to decorate cakes, arrange flowers and change the car oil … all bonuses. EXCEL was more or less a finishing program for young women who were just becoming eligible for marriage.”

She continued, “My parents did not agree with all of this stuff. They strongly encouraged me to go on to college and complete as many higher degrees as I wanted to. I’m grateful that they saw the benefit of higher education.”

It’s important to note that IBLP and Christianity are not the same.

“I cringe when I hear IBLP and Christianity put in the same sentence. I am still a Christian although many IBLP survivors have walked away over the years. IBLP is a man-made, rule-centric, patriarchy-controlled cult that thrives on taking scripture out of context to fit the narrative that Bill Gothard has created. … Real Christianity allows people to thrive in a place where they are encouraged to be real and vulnerable instead of being forced to shut down their emotions and act like a robot. People who are still trapped in the IBLP/ATI cult are missing out on a whole lot of freedom and life. That type of thinking is a prison. Sadly, most of them don’t know it.”

Rebecca advises the Duggar women to “dream bigger than the box they’ve been given.”

“[If I could talk to the Duggars,] I would start by just listening. You can’t go into a situation like that and announce that the belief system that has been created for them has actually trapped them in a box. That is a surefire way to get them to completely and totally shut down and stop the flow of communication. So I would start by listening to them. They have goals, desires, passions, interests and abilities that haven’t had a chance to surface underneath all of the rules and regulations that have been heaped on them. I would just sit down and listen to them talk until I could start to get an idea of who they are at their core. And then I would tell them to dream bigger than the box they’ve been given, because they can remain a Jesus-follower but do so in a way that enables their freedom. These girls need help seeing their worth and value for who they are, not what they do.”

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.