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This year, One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz has been opening up about her decade-long experience a part of a cult.
She credits her fellow One Tree Hill co-stars as major helping factors in her journey to recovery.
E! Online reported her thoughts: "I think they saw that in me and their confidence in my ability...they knew I was a smart person. I was a good actor. You can't be a good actor without being smart. You can't dissect a script without being able to assess things, but I had a big blind spot in my life, and everybody does and mine was something that I was gonna have to work out on my own."
"I feel like a lot of the people there, whether conscious or subconsciously, knew that just their presence and being an encouragement and letting me know that they still love and cared about me in spite of the fact that I was a little weird. That made a big difference."
"There is life after trauma," she noted. "It was 10 years of pretty intense mental, spiritual, financial abuse. I'm back at square one, and there's so much shame attached to that, and then so many people that don't understand. They hear the word, cult, or they think spiritual abuse, and that sounds real hippy dippy, but it is very real and people experience it, not just on a group level, but one-on-one relationships with a partner, or sometimes with family members."
She has also revealed that she plans to write and release a memoir, to go further into her story early next year.
Hear more from Bethany Joy Lenz ahead of her book release on the Drama Queens podcast below: