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UnbrokenAuthor: Alexandra Amor
Creative Alchemy explores the healing properties of creative expression after a cult or other traumatic experience. Language: en-ca Genres: Life Sciences, Science, Social Sciences Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Healing with Music During Cult Recovery
Thursday, 29 October, 2026
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 isolatethemselves 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) Questioning the blind obedience in IBLP Leaving home at age 17 through a bedroom window How Matthew’s music was a threat to the Bill Gothard’s community How music became the one thing Matthew felt accomplished at How music brings us into our bodies How music gave Matthew his life back Assisting husband Paul’s writing and illustrating children’s books How music transcends language Transcript of the interview with Matthew Castle Alexandra: Matthew Castle, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Matthew: Thank you so much for having me. Alexandra: It’s so good to have you here. Please tell us about your background growing up in IBLP and those sorts of things? How you left? Matthew: My parents around the age of 12, and I don’t, yeah, I waffle on exactly what age because you know I part of my PTSD from my upbringing is is memory gap, memory gaps, memory holes, and so reconstructing my childhood has been a challenging process of trying to put together pieces and trying to to remember dates and times. So most of the ages I give are my best guess, my best memory. I’m not in contact with all my family, so I can’t reach out to them to say, “What? How old was I? When did this happen?” So, to my best recollection, sometime around the age of 12, my parents signed up for ATI, the Advanced Training Institute, which was Bill Gothard’s homeschool program. If we back up from there, IBLP, which was the Institute in Basic Life Principles, put on seminars across the country. I think it started in the ’60s or ’70s. Bill Gothard was traveling to major cities, speaking to tens of thousands of people in major arenas in your local city, whether it was Denver or Saint Paul or Minneapolis or Kansas City. Evangelical Christians of all denominations would show up and hear him speak for a week on God’s principles: how to live a godly life, how to raise godly children. All very inspirational stuff that everybody could use and apply to their lives, and that was kind of the gateway in. And my parents did that. I don’t know how young I was, but at some point they went to the Institute in Basic Life Principles Basic Seminar, and after that there was an advanced seminar. And so at some point my parents decided to go to the advanced seminar. You had to go to the basic one first, then the advanced, and again this was just for adults. So we kids, me and my brother and sister, were not part of it. But they went through a week of that, probably another city, another year. Bill Gothard’s third step in his program was the Advanced Training Institute. You had to go through the basic seminar, then the advanced seminar, and then you could sign up for his homeschool program called ATI, or the Advanced Training Institute. And somewhere around the age of 12, more or less, give or take a year or two on either side, they signed us up for that program. We began attending yearly summer conferences in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he held his big gatherings. I think at times there were maybe 50, 60,000 people in attendance, families from around the world and all over the country who came to be there for a week of teachings and instruction, and we started attending those. And then during the year, we received Bill Gothard’s curriculum. He wrote a series of wisdom booklets. I think there’s 50 some of them. I remember 59. I’ve looked it up online, and I think it’s online. There’s some different numbers out there, like 54. But there was a series of these wisdom booklets that he wrote, along with a whole bunch of other material. He was constantly publishing books and educational material. Families were supposed to basically apply everything that Bill Gothard taught to their families, and he had a lot of rules, a lot of guidelines for what you did and you didn’t do. Most of it was centered around protecting your family, your children from outside influences, influences of the world, secular influences, and to really make that work, he had a very strong teaching around authority, and the term that he liked to use was the chain of authority, and that was basically from God to the government, all the way down from national government to local government to the father of the home, to the mother of the home, and then to the children. Each of those authority structures was represented very visually in in a diagram that he would draw in front of 10s of 1000s of people, is all these umbrellas, and if you stayed under as many of those umbrellas as possible, you were more protected from harm, from danger, from outside influences. That really encouraged blind obedience, not only to him, but basically to any authority. Through that he was able to cultivate very loyal, very devout disciples of his of his cult through the homeschool program, and so that’s kind of the journey that got us into IBLP, and then into his homeschool program and kind of the basic teachings. Alexandra: Obviously it had a negative effect on you because I know a little bit about your story, and you ended up escaping from your family home through a window with your violin. Tell us what led up to that escape. Matthew: Yeah, it’s interesting. Through the years in IBLP, I always felt like an outsider. I was always questioning the blind obedience, the abuse of authority that I saw. Bill Gothard had these various training centers around the world that young people, in their teens, like me, could volunteer at. He was getting a lot of free labor, and families were sending off their children to these various events, either to work for him, to do work for him, or to attend training. As I went to these every year, I just started to notice like there’s this blind obedience, there’s this thoughtless conformity to whatever he says, without really thinking about it, without questioning it. That began to sow seeds of doubt in my mind about the program, and then I also witnessed personally some misuses and abuses of it, and an attempt to kind of force me into obeying through threats. There was one time when I was working at an IBLP program, and an accident happened, and the leader tried to blame the accident on me. Then also said that it was God’s punishment because I was not toeing the line, I was not doing exactly what I was told. I wasn’t. I was questioning some of the things that were being said, and that really struck me because I’m like, accidents happen to everything. Accidents happen to everyone. That that doesn’t mean that God is punishing you. It was funny because he said, “Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.” I wanted to quote back to him from the book of Job, where the most righteous man in the Old Testament has all these horrible things happen to him, where God is testing him, and there are all these things where I am [thinking] this doesn’t make sense. They’re cherry picking what they say always to try to get blind obedience, always to try to get people to conform to whatever it is they want to happen. So that was a number of years where I was really just questioning everything. There were things I liked about it, things that I enjoyed, things that were good, but there was a lot that really made me uneasy with the whole program. I also realized that we were very weird. It was a very weird group. There was so much that we didn’t do. We were not exposed to so much. I mean, popular music, TV shows, movies. You weren’t supposed to really expose yourself or watch any of that, and so we were very isolated. You weren’t supposed to really see other people in the cult to go to spend time with, you were supposed to find a church where mostly other people in the cult attended. So there was this real isolation from the world. One of the things that really kind of tipped it for me was realizing that I was gay, and that was an abomination. That was the word used by Bill Gothard. It was an abomination, and for quite a while I was struggling with that because I thought, hey, I’m a good kid. I obey my parents. I try to do what’s right. So I can’t be that. I can’t be gay because gay is an abomination. And that was years of kind of like wrestling back and forth. Like, well, what am I going to do? When I finally did decide to climb out the window, well, I should tell the story of that. So one of the things that us kids did was a silent retreat. My mother sent us on a silent retreat. It really didn’t have anything to do with IBLP or that program. It was separate from that. But there was a Christian run silent retreat that I went on, and it was during that time I was assigned a spiritual director, and it was a wonderful week. If anybody wants to do a silent retreat, I highly recommend it. Getting detached from everything digital and just being in quiet, out in the countryside was a transformative experience, and this was a journaling retreat. So your time was to be used to really journal out your thoughts and try to get past all the surface down to the core of what was really going on inside you. I had a spiritual director I would meet with once a day for about an hour, and he would see where I was at and direct me. And his direction was always to go deeper, get past this, really get to your deeper emotions, your deeper thoughts. It was during that silent retreat that I really confronted and came to terms with the fact that I was gay and that that was not going to go away. It wasn’t going to change. I came home with this beautiful notebook filled with my most treasured thoughts, and had been a time of such reflection and peace and self acceptance, and I didn’t want to get rid of it, but I was also worried that it would be found. But against my better judgment, I brought it home and I taped it to the underside of my dresser, thinking that no one would reach up under my dresser and find this little journal duct taped to the underside of it. But it was found. My mom did find that and she read through it, and that was kind of the beginning of the end. That’s when I knew that I would be leaving at some point. I would have to leave. And first, she asked me to go to a conversion or reparative therapy conference. So I went to one, and I was probably one of the youngest people there. And to my surprise, no one was converted or repaired. I actually expected that. I went thinking, like, oh, I’ll see people who this worked on, and testimony after testimony, people got up and spoke, and I was like, oh, this hasn’t worked on anyone. And then even the people I would meet and talk with between conference sessions, I also realized like, oh, this hasn’t worked. I went home, and she was like, “Well, I want you to read some of the books on it.” So, to buy more time, I read one of the books on it, and again, I came to her and I was like, there are no answers in here. There’s nothing. There’s nothing. I said this book basically says here are four reasons why you might be gay. There’s nothing here about how you would fix that or undo that or change your orientation. And the last thing she asked me to do was go to one-on-one conversion therapy or reparative therapy. And at that point, I said no. And that kind of started the beginning of the end. Things got pretty tense, and so one day, I realized like, oh, this is not a safe place for me. This is not good for me to remain here any longer. So I went to my bedroom. I had a little duffel bag packed with my things. Had my violin and I climbed out my window, went to my car and drove off and never returned. Alexandra: Wow, there’s so much there, and I’m so sorry for all the things that you’ve been through. It just sounds like such a challenge. One of the things we haven’t touched on too much yet is your violin is playing music. I want to go back a little bit because you were offered a scholarship to Juilliard at age 14 because of your music and you weren’t allowed to go. I’d love to know why you think you weren’t allowed to go, and what kind of a threat your music was to the cult that you were in. Matthew: I started violin at the age of three. It was a huge part of my life. As a homeschool child, it was very easy to work music into the daily curriculum. It was actually one of the foremost priorities every day was to get in a couple of hours of a violin, and so it was something that I excelled at. It was something I enjoyed, and it was really easy to make a part of our days. And my mother encouraged that to happen. My brother and sister also started the violin at very young ages. So the three of us were practicing every day. It was a very musical home. I tell people it sounded like music conservatory if you have ever walked down the hallways with all the practice rooms and you hear multiple instruments coming out of multiple rooms and you hear the cacophony of sound that was our house on any given day. There was sometimes two, sometimes three people playing in different rooms and the sound could be quite intense. So it was a very musical home. Interestingly enough, Bill Gothard, IBLP, encouraged music. I think Bill Gothard just had a personal affinity for classical music and especially for the violin, and he encouraged families to do that. If there was a family that had multiple children who played instruments, especially violin, they would be invited to come up on stage and perform at the summer conferences in Knoxville before you know tens of thousands of people. In fact, my brother and sister and I were offered that at one point, and I remember being so filled with nerves. I was nervous beyond belief because I’d never stood on a stage in front of that many people. But it was a really cool experience, and he had a lot of teachings about music-godly music, ungodly music-a lot of very strange teachings around music. As a non-musician, he taught that syncopated beats were of the devil, or even odd things like a song that kind of fades off. Some pop songs will just kind of fade away into nothing. He taught that that was satanic, that that was not a godly way to end a song-and that’s just a tiny glimpse in how he would kind of analyze every area of life and make decisions about what was good and what wasn’t. From I don’t know what you know, he wasn’t a musician, and so I don’t know where he was getting those ideas from, but they’re very entertaining to read now. If you Google search, I think Bill Gothard or IBLP’s teaching on music, there’s actually some really funny TikToks where people are showing some pages from his booklets and all the crazy things he taught about music. So, he encouraged music. He had strong views about it. I remember at a music workshop, as a teenager, there was the discussion about whether our little string orchestra would play any more Tchaikovsky anymore because Tchaikovsky may have been gay. And I remember some people that were like we shouldn’t be playing his music, we shouldn’t be listening to it. So there were very strong opinions around that. Despite all his love for music, Bill Gothard was very anti college university. That was where parents lost their children to the secular forces. Satan got in and took over, and that’s where people were led astray. So, under no circumstances, regardless of what your child wanted to do, should they ever go to college or university, because you would lose them to secular influences, and they would no longer be godly or living godly lives. So, when that opportunity came around, it really-I mean, for one, I was pretty young. It was the pre-collegiate division at Juilliard. So I was very young, but two, it just wasn’t going. It wasn’t encouraged. It was actively discouraged by IBLP and Bill Gothard. I was never a part of the discussion. I was never asked. There was a conductor from New York City who heard me play, and he talked to my parents, and I remember kind of overhearing the conversation and being quite happy that he liked my playing and he thought that I had potential. But I was not involved in any discussion. I was not asked what I if I wanted to or I didn’t or anything. It just was decided, and and that was pretty typical for an ATI family that children, things were just decided for them. A couple years later, I think maybe two years ish later, I had the same opportunity. At Bloomington University in Indiana had, kind of second to Juilliard, had a very very excellent violin program. There was a violin teacher there who was teaching pre-collegiate, and she offered to get me in. I had the opportunity to study with her. And again, that was also turned down. Again, I was not part of the discussion. I wasn’t part of the process. It was just decided that I would not be going to Bloomington. So those were the two big opportunities that I missed out on for really top training, and so instead of going to university, my parents would just seek out a local violin teacher. They were good at finding the best in whatever city we lived in. But they would start questioning me and my parents, being like, “What’s Matthew going to do? Is he going to go to even? Is he going to go to a conservatory? What is he going to do with music?” I would feel extremely uncomfortable because I couldn’t tell the teacher the truth because if I told him what was really going on, I felt that it would make me look way too weird and bizarre. If I told him, “Hey, we’re actually in this weird cult that believes that if I were to go to a conservatory, it would be evil. It would be like turning me over to Satan.” So I couldn’t explain that. I couldn’t say that out loud. I don’t even know what I would say. I would hem and haw or give very, very opaque answers because I was like I can’t tell you how weird my situation is, and I can’t. I’m not going to tell you that that’s hopeless. That I’ll never be going. That this is really it for my musical training. I do remember one of my teachers talking to my parents one time when they dropped me off, with quite a bit of like passion about the fact that Matthew should go to a school, he should go to a good school, and I don’t remember what they said. I’m sure they were very nice and listened, but they didn’t really give him an answer because they couldn’t say yes. So I felt this growing frustration, like okay, I have this skill, and if I’m going to follow down this path, I need to go to a conservatory. I need to get an education on it, but that’s not an option. So, what’s going to happen? Am I going to just fall to the wayside and all of those years of work just be for nothing? And so that was a very sad and frustrating time for me. Alexandra: Well, and it speaks to, to me anyway, about how important music is to you. That your violin was one of the very few things you took when you climbed out that window. Matthew: You know, it’s interesting. It was the one thing I felt accomplished at. It was the one thing I felt good at. It was the one thing I felt ownership over. Although after I did leave, I did go through a period of wrestling with it. I was like, I’ve played since the age of three. I was required to practice every single day for hours a day. Sometimes three, four hours. There was a summer I was practicing five hours a day to get to a higher level of playing. But I went through this period after I left, of like, do I even like the violin, or am I only doing it because I started when I was three? I didn’t have the option then, or I’m sure if I was asked at three, a three year old wants to do anything, so I didn’t know what I was getting to. And then I was really required to do it, so I actually put it aside for a little while to be like, I don’t know if I like this. I don’t know if this is really what I want to do, or if I was just forced to do it. I took about a two-year break, and it was during those two years that I realized, Oh no, I love the violin. Yes, I have a complicated past with it, but at its heart, I truly love music, and music speaks to my soul. I can tend to disassociate easily, given my PTSD from my past and all that trauma, disassociating is an easy thing to do. It’s a survival mechanism that you develop as a child to get through a lot of life’s harder situations. And one of the things I’ve realized was that music does the opposite of that. It brings me into my body. I’m feeling my body so much. I’m feeling my feelings. I’m expressing myself. One of the most beautiful things about music to me is that instrumental music, which doesn’t have lyrics, can speak to me or for me more powerfully than words can. It can say things. It can touch on emotions that I can’t put words to, or I couldn’t describe. So that’s one of the beautiful things about playing the violin to this day. When I pick it up and just play it, it’s connecting me with emotions, with feelings that words can’t adequately describe. Alexandra: Oh, that’s amazing! That was going to be one of my questions for you. Because you have an Instagram post that I saw that said your violin gave you your life back And that music is the only way you knew how to express yourself, and I thought that was really fascinating. Matthew: It’s really important to me, both playing music, listening to music. This week, for example, I have been listening to Bruckner Symphony Number six and seven, the slow movements from both symphonies, because they’re they’re speaking to me in these most beautiful ways that are touching on things that I don’t even know what they’re touching. But they’re so beautiful. They can cause exhilaration and bring me close to tears at the same time, and that’s what music has always done for me. And of course, when I’m playing and the sound is directly coming right, right from under my left ear, it’s incredibly powerful. With everything we do, unfortunately, I don’t have as much time for the violin as I wish, but I still get to play, I still get to perform, I still get to release albums whenever I can, and that’s extremely fulfilling. Just this last year, I got to do an album that’s called Simply Ghibli. It’s the music from Studio Ghibli, which has done movies like Totoro and Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. You could think of them as the Japanese Disney. They’re kids animated films, but they have this composer who does beautiful beautiful music. Last year I got to arrange and orchestrate a whole bunch of my favorite songs from those movies. Incredibly beautiful. I got to go in and record them, and because I crowd funded it. Thousands of people helped me fund the album so that I could actually hire an orchestra to play along with me, and that was a dream. That was a decades-long dream that someday I could perform with an orchestra. Those tracks are finished. They’re not out yet. We’re currently having CDs and vinyls manufactured, so that people will be able to to purchase the music and listen to them. But of course, I’ve heard them already, and three year old Matthew is just thrilled. Can’t believe that decades later this happened. I remember sitting in the studio, and the orchestra was playing, and I’m in the engineering room where the engineers is there with that huge board full of buttons and knobs, just listening to this unbelievably beautiful music coming through those speakers, and I had to pinch myself. I was like, “Is this real? Like, what is happening?” And it’s those moments that give me such joy, such peace, such a sense of fulfillment, and just remind me of how important music is to me. Alexandra: I imagine that 14-year-old and 16-year-old Matthew might be thrilled by that as well, because your dreams weren’t crushed. Matthew: Yes, very good point. We should not forget 14 and 16-year-old Matthew because they were devastated and thought that there was no future. I think they are quite relieved and happy to see that there was a future, an unusual past, a different past, a past not forged. I was recently talking to a very famous violinist. I won’t name her, but she is probably the most famous female soloist in the world. She is a phenomenal violinist, and actually, I met her through social media, and got to spend time with her. She was commenting on my unusual route to being a violinist and how special that was and how valuable that was. And she said, so many people think there’s only one route that you have to go to conservatory, you have to follow this. You have to do this, and she said, “You did it a different way. You did it a really unusual way.” She said, “I think that’s special, and you need to share that.” That meant so much to me, because she had been one of my idols since I was a teenager. I remember hearing her perform with an orchestra when I was in my teens, and just being wowed. I was like, “Oh my God, that is talent! That is incredible talent!” Years later, to actually sit down with her and get to talk with her, and she also gave me the biggest compliment of my life. She’s followed Paul and I on social media and not for my music but just because she came across us and she said one day she saw that I posted a video of me playing the violin and she thought oh he plays the violin and then she started listening it and she said oh he plays the violin, and I want that. I want that mounted up on my wall because there was no higher compliment than that. Alexandra: To hear that from someone you had idolized as a young person-that’s amazing. Going back slightly, when you set the violin down for those couple of years and tried to figure out whether or not it was something you wanted to continue with, were there any specific things that you remember about the healing process, like about coming back around to realizing you did love the violin? Matthew: What I did is probably something that many people do when they set aside something is they explore something else. So I went back to school to try something else, thinking I just picked the wrong thing. Maybe music isn’t for me. I need to try something else, and it was going back to school and trying a completely different field where I was like, oh, oh yeah, no, I missed the violin. Now I’m thinking of the violin and being like, oh, wouldn’t it be fun to just pick up the violin? This music now, and I think that’s so common for so many people is that sometimes you have to set something aside and try another path to know what’s right for me. So it was really that exploration and going down a different path for a little while that reminded me and made me start to miss it. Alexandra: I think there’s such mindfulness in that, isn’t there? You didn’t just sort of numbly carry on; you gave it thought by taking that break, and that seems like a really powerful thing to do to me. Matthew: I would love to take credit for that, but ever since escaping, I got a therapist. I had done years of therapy with the same therapist who’s been with me through this entire journey, and he’s been so instrumental and helping guide me along the way. Getting me to think about music, try a new direction, realize it was something I wanted to come back to was really something that he helped me with. He helped me understand that, or see that, or realize that, and so I’m very grateful to him for his years of patience with me. Alexandra: I’m so glad you had that support. That sounds so essential sometimes. The way that I found you was by following you on Instagram. Somehow the algorithm fed me your husband’s posts. Actually, your posts about your husband Paul and his dog Mr. Maple and Paul’s challenges with near blindness. And then I was bowled over, same as the violinist you mentioned one day, to see you playing the violin. It was really revelatory, and I loved it. The music was so amazing. Is there anything else creative in your life that feeds your soul? I know that Paul has written some books, and you’re involved in that as well a little bit. Matthew: Of course, music-both playing music, listening to music. I’ve done a little bit of arranging, composing. I still do that mostly for myself. There’s a lot of musical things that I do that no one will ever hear, but I do it because it feeds my soul daily. Outside of that, working with Paul on his creative projects is really enjoyable because I’m watching him in his art, which is illustration and writing, and able to support that, even though it’s not what I do. For example, anytime I’m working on something musical, I’ll run it by Paul. He’s not a musician, and at times I actually like that because he’s coming at it with no knowledge or background or prejudice, or anything-he’s just listening to it as a novice. And sometimes I feel like I can get a maybe a more instantly honest opinion. I do the same thing for him. It’s really rewarding and fun to help him with his creative project. He’s lost little over 95% of his vision to the untreatable eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, and that that vision is shrinking. It’s shrinking. He’s losing peripheral. So he’s down to really a very tiny amount in the center, and that amount is very blurry, even with corrective lenses. For example, he can take a photo that’s blurry, and he doesn’t know it’s blurry. I’ll tell him, like, “Oh, take another photo. That one was completely blurry.” He can’t tell, but despite that, he illustrates every single one of his books by hand, stroke by stroke, painstakingly. But he’ll miss things because he can’t see the entire image that he has drawn. He can only see little pieces of it. So as he’s glancing around that and zooming in and out, he’ll miss things. Usually, they’re just like accidental extra brushstrokes or a line. My job is to go in and be the cleanup artist. I think that’s what they call it. I’ll go in and I will either go and remove extra spots or dots, or or just I call them artifacts. I’ll be like, “Oops, artifacts! Got to go and clean up the artifacts.” I sit there and go in and clean those up, or I’ll go in with a red pencil and kind of do red line notes. I’ll be like, “Oh, I think you should adjust this, or the perspective’s a little off here, or you know the negative space on this one. I think you could play around with it.” That’s really enjoyable. One because it’s quick and easy. I can give all these strong opinions, and then I don’t have to do anything about it. That’s fun, but two, I’m helping his art improve or get to the next level, get to the finish line, just in the same way he does for me. I also get to do that with his writings. He’s pretty protective about his writing, but once in a while, I’ll get to read it and give some feedback on that too. That’s a really fun creative outlet for me is supporting him in his creative journey and helping him get his projects across the finish line. And then I would say together on social media as we share our lives, there’s some fun and creativity in that too. Not all of it, but there, there is some, being able to share our lives as an interabled couple and show that while we are different, we’re not really different from any couple out there in the sense that he and I have different strengths and different weaknesses. We have to be there for each other, and we have to accommodate each other, and we have to support each other as we pursue our dreams and our goals. While I think we provide a more unusual demonstration of that, I think everyone can relate to it because that’s what being in a relationship means. That’s what being a team, a teammate means. Alexandra: Oh, beautifully said! I love that. Thank you. I wanted to go back to what you said about the way that music affects our feelings, and that you can sometimes express something musically that maybe you haven’t expressed verbally. I know when I left the cult that I was involved in that was very true for me. There were a couple phases I went through. The first phase actually was I couldn’t listen to any music at all. I couldn’t have any sound around me. Period. That went on for several years. It was like someone was poking me with needles. Even the quietest symphony music did that to me. But then once I got through that I found different pieces of music very healing, and of course that’s something that people talk about all the time. What do you think it is about music that touches us that way? Matthew: I don’t know. First to relate to what you’ve said, I have gone through periods of times where I would not have music on. In fact, when Paul and I first got together, he remarked on how I operated in complete silence at home and in the car, absolute silence. There was never music on. I feel like as time has progressed, I have brought more music into my life. And sometimes it goes up and down a little bit. There’ll be times when I go through more where I just want quiet all the time, and then I don’t know. Maybe have more emotions to process, and then I’m bringing in more music. I don’t know. I don’t know, but I notice it change. My need for it vacillates, and I’m not 100% what sure sure what’s going on inside. But to your question, what does it do for us? I don’t know, but I have my own theory. I like to think that music is the language of angels. It’s speaking to us in this sublime way that words can’t. It’s transcending language. It’s transcending the barriers. Even if you think like within our world, there’s so many languages and there’s so many barriers to speaking and understanding people from various cultures, and music is so beyond that. It touches everyone, regardless of what language they speak or understand. That’s my own personal thing. Backed by zero science and zero data, but I think it is a sublime language that somehow communicates to us in a deeper way, in a way that transcends spoken language and written language, and has the power to bypass the brain and touch our emotions deeply, which is one of my problems with music that has lyrics. I do listen to music with lyrics and enjoy music with lyrics, but I feel like it stops a little short. Because it’s telling me what to feel, or it’s being a little more explicit, and I can feel what it’s telling me to feel, or what I know I should feel. But when you remove those lyrics, it’s not quite so direct. You have to sit with it, but then you can start to feel things that, to me, are deeper and more subtle. Alexandra: I love that music as the language of angels. Thank you. Matthew: I’ve never said that out loud before. Alexandra: Oh, I love it. That’s beautiful. As we’re starting to wrap up here, I just want to say thank you for being with me. Please tell our listeners where they can find out more about you and your work, and everything related to Matthew Castle. Matthew: There’s three main places. You can go onto your favorite social media app and just type in Matthew and Paul, and we should pop up there. You can see what all of our content looks like. If you’re interested in hearing me, you can go onto any streaming music platform, Spotify, Title, Apple Music, Pandora, any of it, and just type in Matthew Castle. I should pop up there, and you can listen to me play the violin. I do have some albums available for download, actually on my husband’s website because I’m too lazy to create my own. So if you go to paulcastlestudio.com, you’ll see a tab for Matthew, and if you click on Matthew, you’ll see my albums there. And then, once my new CDs and vinyls are available, they’ll also be listed there. If anybody’s curious about that, Alexandra: Say the name of the new album that’s coming out. Matthew: It’s called Simply Ghibli. Alexandra: Simply Ghibli. Okay, awesome. Thank you. Well, I will put links in the show notes to those things. Matthew: Thank you, thank you. Alexandra: Well, thank you, Matthew. It’s been a delight talking to you. Matthew: Yes, thank you so much. This was an honor. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Healing with Music During Cult Recovery appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.
