It hasn’t been easy, but Bethany Joy Lenz has managed to reconnect with her faith after ten years in a religious sect.

“I was done. I left that group and questioned everything – my entire upbringing, all religions,” Lenz, 43, said. We weekly in an exclusive interview ahead of the publication of her memoir on Tuesday, October 22, Dinner for Vampires: Living in a Cult TV Show (While Also in a Real Cult!). “I am a very deep thinker. I spend a lot of time using reason to try to understand behavior patterns and belief systems. And I was done with God.”

In the book, Lenz, who was raised Christian, describes what she calls a “supernatural” moment that solidified her foundation with God. She was 19 years old and had been sitting in a cafe in New York City’s Union City, quietly wondering if this “Jesus thing” was real.

“In the empty cafe, in my empty stall, someone was sitting next to me. There was no meat. No body to touch. There was only the deep and familiar presence of someone leaning forward and speaking tenderly into my ear,” she wrote. ‘The voice was gentle and masculine, cheerful, heavy, and… did I feel breath? ‘Never doubt that I am real’, I heard.’

She claims the moment cannot be explained and returns to the feeling after escaping the cult.

“I absolutely couldn’t explain it with any sense of reason,” she said Usnoting that she returned to that event after leaving the in-demand group. “It was almost as if God was saying, ‘Are you going to trust your instincts for the first time or are you going to keep denying it? Are you going to deny what you know to be true again?’ So instead of abandoning God, I just got extremely angry at God, which at least I was honest about. And I think from that moment on I was able to grow in a really authentic faith that I’m still growing in.”

Lenz wrote about her anger at God as she fought a three-year custody battle with her ex (one of the cult leader’s sons) after her departure from the group around 2013.

“Every day of those three years was emotionally draining. Every day I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into a tar pit of fatigue. At my lowest point, I stood on the balcony one night after smoking a cigarette, stuck two middle fingers in the air at God and shouted, “F-YOU!” Tears were streaming from my eyes,” she wrote. “I couldn’t control my anger anymore. … ‘I did everything right. I have done everything you asked me to do. And this is what I get!? Well, that. And f- Jesus and f- church. ”

Lenz experienced emotional and financial abuse during her decade on The Big House Family, but she believes the mental abuse was the worst.

“If you mess with someone’s ability to trust God — to trust that there is a greater power that loves you and can contain you and hold you — then you are left wavering in your humanity,” she said Us. “I’ve never been an atheist, so I don’t know what the mentality of someone who doesn’t believe in God is. But for me, the idea that I have to trust my flawed humanity to be the thing I generally trust is esoterically unsatisfying. To me it is flawed logic. I don’t know how to go through life being like, ‘Oh yeah, my feelings and my instincts.’ I know how flawed I am.”

Lenz explained that she is still “unlearning” many of the things she learned in the group, but the first thing she had to do was “reestablish my trust in God.”

“That took years and I’m still working on it,” she said. “I continue to discover areas in my life where I hold on so tightly to control and realize that it is because I do not trust that God actually has me (and) that I can let go. And if I make a mistake, it’s a mistake and there is a plan B. And if I don’t make a mistake, great, I made the right choice.”

Dinner for vampires is now available.