TikTok is an interesting place. It is the place for viral dances, recipes, cleaning hacks but it is also the place where many content creators can find a platform to share their interesting life stories.
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A striking example of that is @yolandabadnaloy. On her profile, Yolanda shares anecdotes as well as educates people about her time in a polygamist cult. She has made countless videos on the topic and the ones we will focus on in this article are about the weirdest things she was forced to be a part of.
How did she end up in a cult?
In a video posted on 24 June, Yolanda gives an overview of how her story really started. It appears that her story started long before she was born, with her grandmother.
She says:
She (her grandma) was living in San Francisco, when Elias Mormon Missionary came knocking on her door.
Her grandmother then ended up joining the LDS. LDS is short for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints most commonly known as mormonism. Joining the LDS had her grandma relocate to Salt Lake City, Utah. This is where she met some men and then later moved with them out of Salt Lake City. And that is how Yolanda’s mom was born in the cult.
Yolanda's mother then married her dad but she was already his second wife. The two had 9 children together, all born within the cult. Yolanda didn’t grow up with her biological father but instead was raised by her mother and her second husband until she managed to leave the cult at 19.
@yolandabadnaloy A quick overview for the people asking. Sorry about the hat guys, I'm going through a hair transformation, and my roots are so light it looks ridiculous. #religion#cults#LDS#FLDS#mystory#mormons#ldsmissionary#utah#polgamy#polygamistcult#polygamist
♬ original sound - Y
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Life in the polygamist cult
As Yolanda shares, she spent most of her formative years within the cult and, as expected, her life was ruled by many unexplained protocols which she had to strictly follow.
The first thing she mentions is the religious aspect of the cult she was in. She explains:
We were forced to gather every hour of the day, top of the hour, and gather in the living room and kneel down in a circle, hold hands and pray.
She says that this had to be done everyday and that she can’t remember why this was something mandatory. Something else that was never explained to her and than she still had to do was follow a strict dress code.
The cult instores the belief that the bodies of women are temples and that they should cover it. That means that the dresses they wore had to have long sleeves, high necklines and go down to their ankles.
About this she says:
It was all about control at this point.
One of the craziest thing to wrap our heads around is not the dress code but the way the cult also controlled the procedure and steps to be followed when getting dressed.
We had to put the right side of our body into the clothing first. We had to put our clothing in the washer with our left hand and take it out with our right hand.
@yolandabadnaloy We also had about 3 or 4 layers under our dresses that we had to wear. I started sneaking out to wear so-called "evil clothes" as a teen because i hated the dresses. #cults#cult#cultsurvivor#cultawareness#polgamy#flds#escapingpolgamy#polygamistcult#mormon
♬ original sound - Y
Read more:Charles Manson: Here is everything you need to know about his cult, the 'Manson family'
This is on ongoing series on her TikTok page and we advise you to keep watching. Moreover, if the story of Yolanda interests you, it should be noted that she took part in the TV series Escaping Polygamy in 2015.
Sources:
TikTok
