Bethany Pleasure Lenz is opening up about her enjoy being in a cult.
The actress, 43, spent ten years in a tiny, ultra-Christian workforce all over her date starring on “One Tree Hill.” She advised PEOPLE in an interview printed Monday that she defended being within the cult to the alternative actors at the display.
“I could see it on their faces,” mentioned Lenz, whose memoir, called “Dinner for Vampires,” comes out Oct. 22.
“But I’d justify it, like, ‘I couldn’t possibly be in a cult. It’s just that I’ve got access to a relationship with God and people in a way that everybody else wants, but they don’t know how to get it,’” she recalled.
Lenz mentioned that co-star Craig Sheffer, who performed Keith Scott, as soon as outright advised her she used to be in a cult.
“I was like, ‘No, no, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid. That’s not what we do!’” she defined.
Lenz joined the non secular workforce next assembly the supremacy pastor at a Biblical studies that she joined when she moved to Los Angeles at pace 20.
“I had always been looking for a place to belong,” she mentioned, explaining that the gang to begin with concerned making a song, worshipping, and having conversations about God and moment’s which means.
Then again, Lenz began getting suspicious when a visiting pastor (who she known as “Les”) satisfied participants of the Biblical studies to journey to a “Big House” in Idaho.
“It still looked normal,” she mentioned in regards to the cult. “And then it just morphed. But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to notice. Plus, I was so young.”
Lenz in the end left the cult in 2012, one age next she gave beginning to her daughter Rosie. She crack from her husband and fellow cult member, Michael Galeotti, that very same age.
“The stakes were so high,” she mentioned about escape the cult. “They were my only friends. I was married into this group. I had built my entire life around it. If I admitted that I was wrong … everything else would come crumbling down.”
Endmost age, Lenz mentioned at the “Biscuits & Jam” podcast that the “One Tree Hill” forged — which incorporated Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton, Chad Michael Murray and James Lafferty — supported her next she left the non secular workforce.
“I feel like a lot of the people there, whether consciously or subconsciously, knew that just their presence and being an encouragement and letting me know that they still loved and cared about me in spite of the fact that I was a little weird, that made a big difference,” mentioned Lenz. “It made me feel like there was a safety.”
“When it came time for me to leave that group, I did still feel like there were many open arms and that felt really, really good, and it was very helpful,” the “Guiding Light” big name added.
In line with the description of Lenz’s book, the actress discovered the “courage” to drop the cult next changing into a mom, to “spare her child from a similar fate.”
“After nearly a decade, she finally managed to escape the family’s grip and begin to heal from the deep trauma that forever altered her relationship with God and her understanding of faith,” the outline reads.
“Dinner for Vampires” comes out Oct. 22.
