S5:E7 - Church Cults, Trauma, and Humor - with Shanny Payton Katherine Spearing

Shannon Payton (https://shannypantsshow.com/), known as Shanny Pants by many, is a content creator and podcaster living in Rocklin, California. Although Shannon has a successful career as a Realtor, she has equally enjoyed her hobby of sharing her humor through Instagram with friends and family. In 2020 her video about making school lunches went viral, it opened a whole new world for her. She now has many viral videos and hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

Her podcast, The ShannyPants Show is currently in its second season. In her interview style podcast, Shannon shares her struggles of growing up in a cult, battles through years of infertility that ended in a hysterectomy and finally her journey to parenthood through foster care and adoption.

She enjoys sharing the struggles of life in a humorous way as part of her self-prescribed therapy and through this, has connected with her fans. Her podcast topics include a wide range of subjects which in one way or another relate to something she has been through.

Shannon has been a guest on The Kelly Clarkson show and has appeared on local TV show GoodDay Sacramento multiple times. Shannon is currently writing a memoir and is looking forward to giving her followers a deeper look into her life. When Shannon is asked where she gets all of her ideas for her humorous videos she sarcastically states, “I’m married and have kids, that’s all the inspiration I need for some crazy content”. IG: @therealshannypants @shannypantsshowpodcast

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Transcript is unedited for typos and misspellings

[00:00:00] I'm Katherine Spearing, and this is Uncertain. Do you ever get to a point where everything is just too much and you just need to take a break? That is kind of how I've been feeling the past few weeks.

Around trauma recovery. And abuse dynamics and sometimes it just gets to be a lot and I just need to take a break. So I had to do that over the weekend a little bit. And this episode, I wanted to put this episode out because, uh, the guest today, Shani Payton is just a super funny human being and is comedian her content on social media is.

So funny and keeps me laughing all day long and I thought that this episode was going to be like this really funny episode because we recorded it. I think back in like December and I listened to it and I was like, Oh, it's not as funny as I thought it was going to be, but there is some laughter. Fear not.

[00:01:00] Shani Payton is a comedian and has hundreds of thousands of followers. So, so, so, so funny, but she has a darker origin story. She grew up in a church cult, and she has been on her own journey of recovery and healing, and humor plays a role in our healing process, and we do get to that at the end, but we also just talked about the dynamics of control and the impact that it has on us, it's just a really great conversation, and I really like Shani a lot.

I'm going to link to her website in the show notes so you can follow her on all the things. She also hosts the Shani Pants show, which is a podcast. I was recently on the Shani Pants show, I will link to that episode of my conversation with Shani Payton, also in the show notes.

Thanks so much for being here, and if you're having one of those weeks where you just need to take a break, then you know what? [00:02:00] You should. Take a break. Go for a little walk. Have a sip of water. And if you can take a break. for a couple days, sure, just do it. If you can. I highly recommend it. It's good to do that.

All of the abuse and trauma it'll still be here when you get back. Pretty sure about that. Alright, so here is my conversation with Shannie Payton of The Shannie Pants Show.

Katherine: Hello.

Shanny: Oh, it's so good to see you. Good to see you. I'm so

Katherine: excited. Me too. Talk about culty things. Talk about abuse things, but then talk about fun things too and ways that giggling and laughter and jokes help us on this amazing healing process. Where do you hail from right now?

Shanny: Northern California, right around the Sacramento [00:03:00] area.

Katherine: Yeah. I lived in LA for four

Shanny: years, so. Oh, did you? Okay. I'm familiar with the stomping grounds. Oh yeah. Just a quick, you know, nine hour little drive for me. Not

Katherine: bad at all. No big deal. No big deal. I know. I know every, every time I moved someplace, people would say, Oh, do you know so and so? Because they like live in the state and it's like, This is like a massive state.

Other than D. C. where people are like, Oh, my friend blah blah blah lives there. Like, D. C. is so big. No, I have not run into them in the grocery store. No. Well, whenever

Shanny: someone says, you know, whenever It seems like when people say, Oh, California. Oh, do you surf? And I'm like, no, no, I do not surf. Like,

Katherine: like, because

Shanny: it's like how the state is, how long it's like, I live more up in the mountains.

And, you know, versus the coast. And, and then even so there's. So many different [00:04:00] coasts as far as, you know, all the way down to the Bay Area. Yeah. So it's funny, but everyone that's like, Oh, do you surf? No, no, you would not want to see that all the time.

Katherine: Right? Yeah.

Shanny: Quick, quick little weekend trips

Katherine: every, every weekend.

Shanny: But yes, but I do love where we live. It's beautiful. And I, I. Yeah, I really love it. And I grew up here. I've never moved far from home, so I've always been in the area. Yep.

Katherine: Right. All right. Well, I would love to introduce you to folks by hearing your story. The group that you grew up in is very similar to the group that I grew up in with this just very fundamentalist dedication to interpretation of the Bible and I would love to hear what that was like for you growing up and process getting out questioning because you're [00:05:00] not, you're not in it now.

Right. Right. Right.

Shanny: Otherwise I would not be talking to you because you are

Katherine: of the world. I am. We could not communicate. No, no eye contact would be happening. So tell me, tell me a little bit about it. I know a lot of folks in our community are going to really

Shanny: yes, I, so I was born into this cult religious cult and up in Northern California. My parents were also born into it. So we had some generational, you know, fun things. We're just dragging around. And, you know, it started out as from as much as I can understand, talking to my grandparents and other older folks it started out as kind of like a, we're going to go not, not even nondenominational.

It was just like, we're going to do meetings in our home, basically. So I think it started out as a pretty innocent. Kind of fine thing like just Bible studies and in homes and then it's from what I understand. It sounds like in the [00:06:00] 70s late 70s to 80s The his son is now the current leader, but he took over And we'll call him RG.

He, and from that point on is kind of when it became more rule based, fear based and that's when kind of there started to be a lot more things that got put into place and people just kind of, I guess, followed along and went with it. And so in the mid, 80s, there was what we call the split of the 80s, where a large group of people were questioning some of the beliefs and rules and restrictions.

And there was a, we call it marking to be avoided, but like an excommunication. So there was a large group that were excommunicated from us in the 80s because they were questioning and you don't do that. And part of my family,

Katherine: like in a [00:07:00] group, or was it like, we call you in, into the office

Shanny: