On this episode of the Bespoke Parenting Hour, host Julie Gunlock talks to media superstar and political analyst Carrie Sheffield on how she survived a childhood of abuse, hunger, and neglect to find peace, stability, and professional success as an adult.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey, everyone, I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to the program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves and, most importantly, their kids.
Today, I’m going to be talking to my friend, Carrie Sheffield. Carrie is a senior policy analyst at IWF. She’s had a long career in DC as a reporter and broadcaster and commentator on all sorts of TV stations. She’s earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Berlin. She began her work in the investment and finance sector, and then began a career in policy in Washington, first at the American Enterprise Institute, and she’s been at several other think tanks around DC, eventually coming to IWF and working with me there.
I love working with Carrie. Carrie has received dozens of awards for her policy and media work, much deserved. Really glad to have you on, Carrie.
Carrie Sheffield:
Julie, thanks for having me, and I love working with you, too.
Julie Gunlock:
We worked even before you came to IWF. You used to interview me on your talk show, so that was always fun, and I’m thrilled that you’re with IWF now. You know, when I was preparing this, I was going through your bio, and I have to say, your bio is enormously impressive, but I think sometimes when I read these bios, I think, what are people thinking. I think a lot of people might hear that bio and say, “Boy, she must have had a ton of connections before she came to DC,” or, and I feel like this happens quite often in DC, “She might be from some wealthy family that was well connected to have landed where she did.”
Again, you have this incredibly impressive bio, but in reality, you are an incredible policy analyst, but also have a lot of media experience. But that’s really not the case with you, is it, in terms of being from some big family with connections to get you started in Washington? That wasn’t how it happened, right?
Carrie Sheffield:
Well, I am from a big family with seven siblings, but not from a family that was connected in Washington, and certainly have really worked my butt off for everything that I’ve gotten in life, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes that I deeply regret, but as I… There’s an author who, she says, my mistakes were legendary, but God’s grace was even more legendary, and that’s how I feel. I’ve made a lot of mistakes that I regret, but having leaned on my faith, that’s how I’ve gone through them all, in addition to the trauma that I had as a kid.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, let’s dig into that a little bit. You had an unusual childhood, and some people would say quite challenging. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up, how you grew up, and some of the challenges you faced.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, so I just signed with a book where I’m going to be telling the full backstory. Well, I want to respect the privacy of my siblings, so that’s… I’m there, making sure that the story is really focused on the struggles that I went through, while being empathetic, so it’s sort of this dance that I want to be respectful in talking with my siblings about it, but we were raised in a very abusive environment that I would describe as a cult environment, where my father believes that he’s a prophet and, in order to satisfy the prophetic call in his life, he basically… He was doing it before he got married and had the eight kids, that he lived the life of an itinerant street musician. He has an incredible resume of a classical guitarist. He was self-taught. If any of your listeners know about Andres Segovia, he was probably the world’s best, most talented classical guitarist that we know, and he hand-selected my father to be one of his masterclass students, and mentored him with his guitar music compositions.
Julie Gunlock:
Wow.
Carrie Sheffield:
My father won the National Young Composers Contest, and this was all just through his own. He ended up being a professor of guitar at Brigham Young University, but he gave that all up, he said, because God called him to be a street preacher, and so he would play his guitar on the streets, with a little amplifier, and then people would come, and he would pass out Mormon brochures, to try to convert them to Mormonism. Then, eventually, as we grew older, he made us all do it with him.
We had the whole family, 10 people, playing on street corners. We lived in a motorhome, so the name of the book is called “The Motorhome Prophecies.” It was a very stressful and traumatic environment, to the point where two of my brothers developed schizophrenia, even though they had no signs of it when they were younger.
It’s an ongoing debate. I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but everything I’ve read about schizophrenia, and being close to two people who have it, it’s usually a combination of nature and nurture, that you could have chemical imbalance tendencies, which we do have on my dad’s side, but certainly the nurture, or the lack of nurture in our case, I have no doubt, contributed to their schizophrenia.
One of them tried to sexually assault me when I… or he tried to rape me. He sexually assaulted me, or he groped me, when I was a teenager, and that was really a catalyst to me to say, “Okay, do I believe my dad’s a prophet?” Because when you grow up, you believe in your dad.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
I believed he was a prophet for a long time, but then, as I got older, I started to see how things he would say would not square up with what the LDS church would say. I want to be careful and clear to say that what our family did was cultish, but the Mormon church is not a cult. I don’t believe that.
Julie Gunlock:
Of course.
Carrie Sheffield:
[inaudible 00:05:58] will hear me say that, and they’re like, “Oh, you’re saying Mormonism’s a cult.” I’m like, “No, it’s not.” In fact, my parents were excommunicated from the Mormon church, the official LDS church, for being so extreme.
Julie Gunlock:
Interesting.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, and I’m sad. I’m sad. I think they should’ve been excommunicated years earlier. They were excommunicated after I was an adult, but because he was so good at running away, basically, the justice didn’t catch up with him. I ended up going to 17 public schools and homeschool with-
Julie Gunlock:
Carrie, let me stop you one sec, because I wanted to talk to you about being a young child. You have a number of brothers and sisters. Were there other family members involved that could’ve helped and didn’t? I’m just curious about you’re in this situation where you’re clearly in an unstable family environment. I think a lot of people wonder, at these moments, where was social services?
Honestly, Carrie, we have talked. I’ve had guests on this show and, certainly, at IWF, we talk a lot about the problems with the foster care system, but were there any attempts of state intervention in your family’s situation? I know that you’ve talked about, also, sometimes being on government assistance, which is something I think, on the Right, we tend to be like, “Oh,” but there are families, who actually really do need to bridge the gap between maybe when they have a job, or when they don’t have a job, so talk to me a little bit about that, growing up, and what the role was, and if anyone tried to help. Anyway, I’m going on, but you get my question here.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, no, and it’s something that I’ve thought a lot about just over the years. Yes, when I was in… I was pre-K, so it was before my kindergarten. I was either four or five, around that age. We were living somewhere in suburban Massachusetts. The town was called Marlborough, like a small, working-class town, and I distinctly remember the social services trying to take us away.
They showed up, and my dad really coached us beforehand to say, “I’m great,” like tell them how happy you are and how great I am, and I was very loyal to him, and we all were, because he was our dad. It’s like you circle the wagons and you feel threatened. I do remember, they took us to their offices, and you know those little wiry bead mazes that they’re on a little platform?
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
And you… I loved those things, and they had one there, but I remember being like, I’m not going to do it. It’s like a temptation, and they’re trying to take me away, and they hate my dad, so I’m not going to touch it. I want to, but…
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
But we either convinced them enough to not take us away immediately, or we just… I mean, we disappeared. We went to Utah, and so they never took us away from there. I do remember, also, that apparently they, some of my… I have four older brothers. I’m the first girl, and I guess some of my brothers had told them about how he said, he told us later, our father, that we were too poor to have a television, so I would entertain my kids by telling them stories of my street fights, and so my brothers told the social services about his street fights, and they were like, “Oh my gosh, he’s a violent guy. He’s getting into all these brawls,” because he would play his music on the street corners.
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
He would have fellow buskers or bums or homeless people. They didn’t like him sometimes, and so he would get in these fist fights, and sometimes he landed in jail, and he said… He had all these wild stories, and I’m sure he embellished them, but they were entertaining. My dad’s an entertaining guy. The thing is, his father was a politician in Utah, actually, so he came from, actually, a very strong family. My dad’s sister was Miss United States, Miss USA.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, wow.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, she was Miss Utah, USA, and then Miss USA. Funny story… She was actually the first runner-up, but then the winner, it was determined it was a fraud, because she was married and had two kids, so my aunt lost her crowning moment, but she got it later.
Julie Gunlock:
Wow.
Carrie Sheffield:
She got the crown shipped to her. But, yeah, so he came from a good family, and his father was a really savvy… They didn’t have money growing up, but his father was a savvy real estate investor. He bought up some land in Utah that appreciated exponentially, so by the time we were adults, it was worth a lot of money, but they never saw it, growing up, and I never saw it until I was 23, and I got some inheritance, not a huge amount, but it was like… But I had no idea what to do with it, and I ended up giving it to my uncle, who destroyed the investment. I was like, what’s wrong with, like I have… Yeah.
He had siblings, and my mom, and they all were really set. On my mom’s side, it’s all sisters, so very strong women, and they were all really sad, because my mom, growing up, was always kind of shy, and I think my dad really exploited that to really just-
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
Charm her. He’s a very charismatic guy, when he wants to be, at least for the short term, but… and just took her away. That’s one of the classic abuser tactics is to take an abusive woman away from her family and to brainwash her, and he… They brainwashed her to the point where she would not tell her family where she was, and so they were left with this choice: Do we call the cops on our own sibling and risk an escalation of maybe he gets violent or maybe he does something to the kids? Then, half the time, they didn’t know where we were, because we were in motorhomes and mobile homes and tents. My mom gave birth in a tent, which is just insane to me.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
But she hated her family. She believed that her… She didn’t go to her own mother’s funeral, because she said her mother was a slut, because she had had a child out of wedlock before she got married, and so she refused to go to her funeral. That was part of it, where it was like a Stockholm syndrome or just a-
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
Willing obfuscation of where we were. Then, on my dad’s side, I just found out more recently that some of his siblings were trying to do things to take us away, and they tried some different things, and it didn’t work. The way they ended up just trying to make it better was that they ended up just taking some of my grandpa’s inheritance and giving it to him, so that we didn’t starve, and we didn’t have to go on welfare anymore. To me, it’s kind of like giving money to Iran, where they use the money to suppress the people even more.
Julie Gunlock:
Right. Now, once your father received that money, was he able to improve your condition? Did things get better, or was it wasted?
Carrie Sheffield:
Well, it was marginally better. We didn’t go on welfare as much. We were on public welfare, but we more often were on Mormon welfare, which, to the LDS church’s credit, they have this amazing system of private charity, which I’m just giving a plug. Utah has the top social mobility in the entire country. They have strong families, and they have this amazing private welfare program, and it’s called The Bishop’s Storehouse. We ate from there all the time. It’s just generic, Mormon brand anything. Usually, we most commonly got cereal or pasta, and I do remember we had this cracked wheat that had weevils in it, which was disgusting, because it’s in this storehouse, and it was like we’d eat it, and there’d be like weevils moving in the milk.
Julie Gunlock:
And your mom is screaming, “It’s extra protein; just eat it,” right?
Carrie Sheffield:
Well, I’m like… That’s now come in vogue, I guess, to eat bugs now.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, exactly. Yes, you are very in vogue, but this is the thing. I think a lot of people… I think we’re in a situation right now in the United States, where kids are going to be recovering from the COVID shenanigans for a lot of years, certainly not the same. I’m not saying that, necessarily, these children were abused or starving, but there has been this sort of upheaval in what we would consider a normal childhood and the normal trajectory of education and that kind of stuff. It strikes me as you could provide some information to even kids going through this, not that kids are necessarily listening to this podcast, but you certainly went through a tough time in your childhood, and yet obviously have recovered.
I don’t know your relationship, necessarily, with your family, but you have a great life. How do you… How, as a child, do you come out of that? I mean, when you went to college, and I see that you got your master’s degree at Harvard; you were a Fulbright fellow in Berlin. How does one, while living in these conditions, probably in high school… I mean, you lived with your family all up until you left for school, correct? I do know that, so I mean, what happened? When it was time to leave, or when you were thinking about college, did you have the support of your family? If not, how does a child actually self-propel like that?
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, well, I haven’t read the book “Educated” by Tara Westover, but I’ve met her, and our stories are very similar. I don’t know all the details of how she did it, but her story has been on, and I have no deluded grandeur that I’ll sell even a fraction of the number of books she… She sold eight million books, and Barack Obama endorsed her book on his reading list, and Michelle Obama did, as well, but it’s a story of growing up in a Mormon abusive environment in Idaho, and she didn’t set foot in a classroom until she was, I think, her senior year.
She and her brother got their hands on some standardized testing prep books, and she put herself through BYU and got a full scholarship to Cambridge for a PhD. When I took my standardized testing, I was able to get some software and use it on a very ancient computer and be able to… The first time I took the standardized testing, I was like, wow. I am actually… because they put the average score up there that someone in your range went to, and I was like, wow. I could maybe go to Johns Hopkins, or I could… I’m actually pretty smart, even though I had been told that I was an evil slut my whole life, pretty much.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, Carrie. I want to… Okay-
Carrie Sheffield:
But I was [inaudible 00:16:56]-
Julie Gunlock:
So you take this test and you see-
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, so I took the test and, at the time, I was going to homeschool. When I took the ACT, we were living in a shed in the Ozarks of Missouri, because my dad had this dream to have a theater in Branson, Missouri, because there are a lot of Mormon families down there.
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
Like the Osmonds and the Duttons and the Hughes family and the Brett family, so we tried to get a theater down there, but, because my dad’s so mentally ill, that it was a total failure and a waste of everything, and we were living in a shed. I was like, I… Then my brother had tried to rape me, and I was like, I don’t want this life for myself. Oh, and also, the other catalyst was my brother trying to rape me, and then, at that point, I was like, you know, I’d have to decide if I believe he’s a prophet or not, because my four older brothers were still living at home. They still believed he was a prophet. Well, one of them had schizophrenia, but he still was part of the mission, he called it.
I was like, I don’t know if I believe this mission anymore. What I did was it was actually an investigative journalism project, kind of my first. I decided to investigate my father and whether I believed he was a prophet. What I did was, he, at that time, was… Actually, for many years, his whole life, he’s talked about wanting to write his autobiography, and so he had a few boxes of papers and things and letters that were stored in a fiberglass trailer attached to the back of our motorhome.
I said, “You know…” At that point, I had been writing for the local newspaper, which they had a weekly column. I didn’t do it every week, but they let, every week, a young person write it, and it was called “Young Voices.” It’s actually the same newspaper where Brad Pitt’s mom wrote an op-ed that went viral.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
Because he went to my rival high school, where I ended up graduating, down in the Ozarks, years ahead of me; I never met him. I was like, “You know, I like writing. Maybe I can help you,” and so I sorted through his boxes to really just understand who he was. I was typing them up into this really ancient word processor, very basic, to put it all in ink for him.
As I was sorting through it, it became very clear to me that his family was very disturbed by him. There were letters from his mom, and it was back in the day when they had carbon copies of letters, so she had the letter, and he had his copy. His letters just grew. Some of them were when he was a Mormon missionary over in England, an official LDS name tag, in London, and he just got so preachy to his parents, and telling them how sinful they were and all these things. His mom would write these very concerned letters to him, and he was just getting radicalized. I just was like, wow. I love my grandma. I was really upset by that.
Then, the straw that broke the camel’s back and the moment where I was like, he’s not a prophet, I found some handwritten revelations that he had written down, and they were written in Elizabethan English, like King James Version Bible English, which is what the LDS church taught, all King James.
Julie Gunlock:
Wow, yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
They were written… The LDS church has four books of scripture. They have the Bible; they have the Book of Mormon; the Doctrine and Covenants; and the Pearl of Great Price, so they have four, basically, Bibles, including the Bible.
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
Doctrine and Covenants is what they believe is kind of like Muhammad, where he hand-wrote down revelations from God or from the angel. The Doctrine and Covenants is Joseph Smith’s handwritten revelations from God that were about how to run the church. These handwritten revelations that I found, written in Elizabeth English, were to my dad, and they were from God, and they were using his God name, which was Daniel Strong, which he had told us before that that was his God name was the name Daniel Strong, and my mom was Joan Strong.
It was like, “And thus, the Lord said to my servant, Daniel, ‘Thou shalt take thy wife. Thy will be… Thy family will face persecution,'” and all, like this was his own version of the Doctrine and Covenants, and my hands started to shake, and I was just like, he’s a false prophet, because I was still very devout LDS, and I was like, he’s trying to be… because in the LDS church, there was only one prophet, and he lives in Salt Lake.
I was like, he’s trying to do his own thing. He’s a rogue prophet. I was like, I don’t believe this. I knelt down. It was winter, and there was this little heater that I had going to keep me warm, and I knelt down. I was like, “God, I don’t believe he’s a prophet. If You want me to stay, please show me. Otherwise, I’m going to leave.” I just left that there. God never showed me anything to keep me in Missouri.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Carrie Sheffield:
I told my dad I wanted to leave, and what he did was he raised his hand in a square, and he prophesied, and he said, “I prophesy in the name of Jesus, if you’re raped and murdered, that…” or I’m sorry, “that if you leave, you will be raped and murdered.”
Julie Gunlock:
Good grief!
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, so I was disowned, and so I-
Julie Gunlock:
How old were you, at this point?
Carrie Sheffield:
I was 18. I was 17 or 18, right around that time, and so I was like, “Well, either my brother’s going to rape me, or if I leave… I’m going to be raped,” and so I just, it was like I had a decision to make, and I chose freedom. I guess, to answer your question, I’m sorry, it was like advice I would give to people… Because, then when I left, I was disowned. In some ways, it was like a quarantine because he wouldn’t allow me to come home, because he’s like, “You’re full of Satan.” I was the first to leave, you know?
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
He’s like, “You’re going to corrupt your siblings. You can’t come home.” I was disowned all through college, which, like I said, in some respects was good, because it kept me away from much of that insanity, but I also felt this deep rejection and sorrow, because my mom also had a… She prophesied I would get schizophrenia, so there’s all these false prophecies spoken over my life.
Then, my dad also told me later on, when I was in college, that God told him I had an abortion. I was like, “I don’t know how that’s possible,” because I was a virgin. I was like, “There’s no such thing [inaudible 00:23:01] an abortion, so no, I didn’t have an abortion.” I was like, so okay, yeah, if I ever thought he was a prophet, and now he’s telling me this thing, which is a biological not reality, like I know he’s not a prophet.
I think that there is room for therapy, like a good therapist. If you’re a believer, get a believer therapist. The way I got through all of it, I like to say, is a combination of prayer and therapy, prayerapy.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh.
Carrie Sheffield:
Along the way, I have made a lot of self-sabotaging mistakes. I have been diagnosed with PTSD, depression. I had severe anxiety to the point where I was hospitalized seven times, and I had fibromyalgia, which is a whole other thing about how I feel about Western medicine. It’s been totally divorced from body and mind and spirit, and they try to pump you full of drugs. Two of my hospitalizations were from drug reactions that they gave me the drugs because they had no idea what the hell they were doing.
This was pre-COVID, so when COVID hit, I kind of felt this schadenfreude of like you all are horrible people and you almost go-
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Carrie Sheffield:
Like you kind of deserve this.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s a whole other podcast, Carrie.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, right.
Julie Gunlock:
But I do… This is one thing that I think is interesting, and maybe you can sort of, we can conclude by talking about you did turn yourself away, not just from the Mormon church but, in general, God. You turned… You said you had become agnostic at one point. I think we do need to have you back on, because I do want to talk about this a little bit further, but one of the things, and I bet this would be part of your… I’m not you. I don’t mean to speak for you, but I bet part of your advice to people would be to not turn your back on God, in fact to figure out ways to strengthen your relationship with God. Tell us a little bit about that journey.
I know that’s terrible to say, “And quickly, tell us about your entire faith journey,” but I do think there was a point, and I think that everyone could, after dealing with that sort of childhood, which was definitely wrapped up in religion obviously, turning your back away and becoming agnostic. What made you turn back to the church? And not necessarily the Mormon church; sort of give us a little bit of information on that.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, well, I think my biggest takeaway is, first, understanding the very big difference between religion and relationship, like divine really… God is not religion. I think that we’re at this moment in our society where young people, especially, are turning away from institutions, be it faith… I mean, trust across the board in our institutions is crumbling, whether it’s government or schools or medicine, and faith is a big one where we’re also seeing the decline in trust.
For me, as someone who was deeply abused by very religious people, yes, I walked away from faith. I was agnostic for almost 12 years, because the way I thought about it was, if God exists, He’s probably a jerk, because He allowed this to happen to me, or He’s just indifferent, or He’s someone who is proactively trying to hurt people, because people who use his name to do horrible things, they give God a bad name. I like to say it’s sort of like a knock-off purse with a Gucci with a big G on it. That’s a knock-off. That’s not God.
It took me a long time. I’m writing a whole book about the journey of how it happened, but it was a combination of really surrendering and being through… I know this is going to sound really funny, Julie, but there’s a great book that I recommend called “Counterfeit Gods” by a pastor named Tim Keller, who’s fantastic. He has cancer right now. He’s older, but he had a really long career in New York City, building a church called Redeemer, but he’s a very well-known author. People compare him as like the modern day C.S. Lewis.
Tim Keller’s book is all about each chapter is a false idol that we pursue, that we put as a counterfeit god, be it career, sex, power, money. It’s like, I pretty much tried all of those, and they kept failing. I tried my career, and then I got laid off from a company. I tried dating relationships, getting married, and I was in just a really bad engagement situation, and I broke it off, was heartbroken, and it was just… Then, finally, I thought I had settled on a god that wouldn’t fail me, and that was the god of politics and public policy. I went to the Harvard Kennedy School, which was named after JFK. I think, in some ways, I had kind of put Kennedy as sort of like a Messiah type figure for me, kind of like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr.
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Carrie Sheffield:
To me, that was my religion. That was my higher calling, my higher purpose in life. I think a lot of, especially secular, liberal young people have this, too. I was a secular conservative. That’s what I called myself, and I had done that in the same way that a lot of progressives do. It’s less common for conservatives to do, but I was certainly one of those people.
Then, so this is the funny part, then Donald Trump happened, and I was like, “I can’t worship that!” That was an existential crisis. I was never a Trumper until the end. I didn’t vote for Hillary either. Of course, there was no way in hell I’d vote for Hillary, but I wrote in Ben Sasse as my protest candidate.
Julie Gunlock:
No!
Carrie Sheffield:
Which I deeply regret now.
Julie Gunlock:
No. Oh Carrie, I’m going to make fun of you for that, but go on, okay.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, but it was this existential moment, so I actually have Donald Trump to thank for turning me to faith, in the sense that, because I was sitting on the sidelines, and I had built my whole career toward working on a campaign or working in the White House, that was the pinnacle of what would’ve been success for me. Then to be like, I can’t get on board with this guy. He says these things about women. He donated to Hillary. He has no track record. To me, there wasn’t any daylight between him and Hillary. I just didn’t… I didn’t have faith that he would do what he said he was going to do, and that he’d done all these terrible, said terrible things.
I was just like, I need something else in my life to fill this void of purpose and meaning, since the Republican Party’s not going to do it for me. That’s when I started to go to church, and I started to go to Tim Keller’s church in New York, and then just I kept showing up for God, and God kept showing up for me. Each week, I either went to church or I went to small group, and yeah, that’s how it started.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, and I think that a lot of people, young people, go through that, and that doesn’t necessarily take a terrible childhood. You can have a pretty great childhood and still, in your early adulthood, turn away, but I do think that as people get older, they need that, not only structure, but they need to believe in something bigger.
Carrie, I think you’ve talked a lot about… I’ve read some of your writing on the subject of family and your hopes to someday have a family, and get married and settle down and have kids. If you were to pick a parenting style, or maybe you’re like me, and you sort of do this patchwork quilt of different styles that sort of fit your family, but is there someone in the parenting realm, or someone you admire or you look to or you think is a… or someone, who like you, recovered from a very difficult childhood and is trying to figure things out as she raises her own family? Is there someone you sort of admire and maybe would employ in your style of parenting, if that day comes?
Carrie Sheffield:
Well, I have to admit, I haven’t read parenting books, really. I do like Emily Oster.
Julie Gunlock:
Yes, of course.
Carrie Sheffield:
She seems like she makes a lot of sense and is very logical. Two of my brothers are married, and they each have two kids. They don’t want to pass on generational curses.
Julie Gunlock:
Of course.
Carrie Sheffield:
I guess, I have to be mindful of not being reactive of like, okay, I know what I don’t want as a parent. When I had my startup that used to come on Bold TV, it wasn’t… They weren’t my children, but I mentored and had a lot of really young college students and young people on staff, so I felt like, in some respects, it was sort of like… I’m not saying that career-
Julie Gunlock:
Of course.
Carrie Sheffield:
But I just had a taste of like-
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, really, you know, patience. I want to be a patient parent, and I definitely… I think explaining to kids the importance of faith and being with faithful people in church, to me that’s very important, but understanding that your own relationship with God is far more important, but it’s not about control. I think God is not about controlling us. He gave us freewill, and as a parent, that’s what I want, too. I want to give my kids freewill, but I also want them to know that there are rules.
Julie Gunlock:
Yes.
Carrie Sheffield:
I think that’s a problem, when I see parents go way too far in the other spectrum. There’s a phrase that, I think, is really interesting, and I think it might apply to parenthood, which is that you cannot break God’s commandments. You can only break yourself on them.
I think that good parenting is teaching your kids good principles and good rules, but letting them make some mistakes. I think that that’s part of why I made so many mistakes later on was because I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes when I was a kid. It was just such a sheltering and abusive and traumatizing environment that I really didn’t have those normal high school experiences of like, oh, this boy, this and this. It was like I’m in a motorhome, and I have to figure out how to not be frozen this summer and get my homeschool done in the mail, like there’s-
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Carrie Sheffield:
I made some… I didn’t, I was like a feral cat when I left home.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, yes.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, so I think those are some big ideas of how I would think about parenting.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, Carrie, I think you had… I always feel bad saying this, but you’ve revealed pretty much here. You had a tough childhood, and you really have created a life of meaning, of doing great works, and I admire you a lot for coming out of that. I know you still have a good relationship with your siblings and your nieces and nephews, and that is also a wonderful thing to see. You’ve got a really encouraging story. Tell us about your latest book, or your new book. I’m sorry, your new book coming out. I don’t know if it has a title yet, but you just reveal what you can here.
Carrie Sheffield:
Yeah, the title is called “Motorhome Prophecies,” and it’s… The manuscript’s due January 2nd, and so my guess is it’ll be… I mean, we’ll see. I’m learning this new publishing world. I’m hoping possibly next summer for it to come out. The publisher is Hachette, which is a publisher out of Paris and New York. I have a fantastic agent, who helped me arrange it. He’s Jonathan Bronitsky with Athos.
I think a big message I want to leave with people, again, is that even if you were from a traumatized background, you don’t have to pass that trauma onto the next generation. That’s like, and even more societally, when there’s all this talk about CRT and intersectionality and all these heteronormative assaults, I wasn’t that far Left, but I was also really angry at Judeo-Christian systems for a long time. I think that part of my journey was to understand the healthy parts of [inaudible 00:34:52]. That’s actually a human-made thing. It’s not from God, and that we need to [inaudible 00:34:59]. Also, my father was sexually abused by a babysitter, and I know that that traumatized him, and I know that he passed that on to us, but we can break that cycle. I think that that’s the difference from believing in the systemic destruction of your life.
That your identity is based in systemic oppression is so counter to the idea that the individual and connection with God, that’s empowering. You are not… You’re not going to get crushed by the system. I am a testament to the fact that even though I was in a horrible system growing up, I [inaudible 00:35:36] God, because I put my faith [inaudible 00:35:39]. I didn’t put my identity as an abused person at the forefront of my mind. I think that that’s what’s happening to society today is that people, they think, I’m abused. I’m abused. I’m abused. I’m Black; therefore, I’m abused. I’m a girl; therefore, I’m abused. If that’s how you go through your whole life, then you will remain there. You have to reject that, and you have to view yourself as an individual, not as someone who’s solely trapped in a specific role.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, Carrie. I can’t thank you enough for spending some time with me and talking about this. I feel like this very small conversation we’ve had is going to launch 1000 podcasts or 1000 episodes, because there’s so much more I want to explore with you, so I hope you’ll come back, and we can tackle some of these other issues, but thank you so much for sharing your story today.
Carrie Sheffield:
Thank you, Julie.
