About the Book

Comments Off // August 2nd, 2009

The God Factor

Comment now » // June 22nd, 2010

I’ve been reflecting lately that of all the craziness that goes on in a spiritual cult, it is the cult leader’s ability to convince us that she speaks for God (or, in more extreme cases, that she is God) that is the cornerstone of keeping disciples in line.

When I left the cult I was involved in, that was the question I wrestled with the most. Did our cult leader really have an exclusive, high-speed, wireless connection to the almighty? Because if she did, then I was screwed.

I’d chosen to leave the group and the leader after recognizing that I couldn’t reconcile a number of things:

1. That the guru talked about how essential love was to God but acted in a very unloving and abusive way toward those who followed her.
2. That she used God’s name to do this.
3. That she touted “The Truth” as one of the most holy and essential principles required to serve God, yet she herself lied. I’d seen her do it with my own eyes and I’d further seen her teach others that lying was permissible under certain circumstances.
4. That she said that God would “turn His back” on those who left the guru’s service. (I couldn’t imagine God, the essence of love, turning His back on anyone, ever.)

So when I left the cult I wrestled with these questions for quite a while. Years probably. Until I was finally able to conclude for myself, with my own heart and mind and without influence from anyone, that I did not believe God would ever, under any circumstances or for any reason, have anything to do with abuse, cruelty, lies and coercion.

I realized recently that this dilemma that the cult member faces about God is the cornerstone of why we are willing to put up with so much abuse and cruelty and control. When we fully believe that it is actually God, our holy Father, the guy who created us and knows us better than anyone, who is directing the words and actions of our guru, then how could we argue with what she says? How could we think that she doesn’t have our best interests at heart? How could we leave that God who we love so much?

This is the dreadful paradox of the spiritual cult. The cult leader uses God’s name to ensnare us. And as soon as she has us believing that she speaks for God, we’re sunk. Sadly, it is our love for God that keeps us chained to the guru through health crises, marriage break-down, child abandonment, job loss, loss of freedom and worse.

As long as we believe she is God, we are not free.

I’m headed to the Grand Apple

Comment now » // June 20th, 2010

New York here I come!

(I can’t help calling New York City the Grand Apple ever since falling in love with Debbie Reynolds as Grace’s mother on Will and Grace. Remember Bobbie Adler?)

Anyway, the International Cultic Studies Association has its annual conference coming up July 1, 2, 3 in New York. I’ve been wanting to go to one of these conferences since about 2003 when I first found out about the association while doing my cult recovery work and research. They hold a conference every year, usually in the summer, and alternate between Europe and a North American location.

Each year, the conference presents The Phoenix Project, which is a display of art work by ex-cult members. This art work can include paintings, drawings, plays, works of non-fiction, like my book and other art work. I am thrilled to have an excerpt from Cult, A Love Story displayed at the Phoenix project, and am honoured to have been asked to give an author reading during the conference.

Those who attend the ICSA conference are exactly the audience I had in mind when I wrote the book. They are ex-cult members and family/friends of ex-cult members, and these were the lovely souls I wanted to reach out to with my story in an attempt to increase our understanding about the cult experience and the experience of recovering from a cult.

Stay tuned for photographs and correspondence about my trip and my experience of the conference.

Look out Manhattan, here I come!

Ripples

Comment now » // June 18th, 2010

I was reminded the other day of the sad fact that the number of people effected by any cult leader is exponentially larger than just the number of people in the cult itself.

The negative effect that a cult leader has ripples out past her disciples to the entire family of each disciple and then further, to their friends and loved ones. And even more sadly, the effect can last for years, even decades. Children, spouses, parents, brothers and sisters are abandoned and left wondering what the hell happened to their beautiful, loving spouse/parent/sibling/child. I’m certain that so many are left wondering what they’ve done wrong to elicit this abandonment. (Answer: nothing).

For this reason, I can say that cult leaders practice a particularly sinister brand of evil.

And, frankly, the only answer I can come up with in response to this problem is love. Love is the fabric of the universe and the thing that binds us together. There is always more than enough love for everyone. And all I can think of to do in response to my cult leader’s effect on my life and the lives of those I love, is to love as much as possible, and never, ever stop. Love my family. Love my friends. Love those I left behind in the cult. And love those who have been brave enough to leave it.

That’s it. Omnia vincit amor. Love conquers all.

The Dr. Phil effect

Comment now » // June 16th, 2010

Back in the first couple of years of this millennium I was deep, deep in my cult recovery. So deep, in fact, that I thought I’d never see daylight again. As any of you who have gone through the same experience know, cult recovery is painful, ugly and, unfortunately, there’s no way to rush through it. We can work at healing and recovering but we can’t rush the process.

At that time, I had become a big fan of Dr. Phil from the Oprah show. Tuesday became “Dr. Phil day” and it was my favorite program each week. Then The Mighty O tapped Dr. Phil for his own show, and I was thrilled to be able to get my psychological fix from him every week day.

I watched the show every day for at least three years. I’m sure I drove my friends nuts as one of the most frequent phrases out of my mouth became, “Dr. Phil says….”. Then gradually my interest wained and I found myself watching less and less frequently, until I found I’d missed entire seasons.

I was looking back at this phenomenon the other day and I finally realized what was happening to me during my Dr. Phil days: I was searching for mental health and emotional intelligence. My decade in the cult had turned my already emotionally immature and slightly unbalanced self into psychological scrambled eggs. When I first left the cult I didn’t even know right from wrong, because I had been told by my guru that the cult situation was “right” and yet it felt so wrong.

So I began building myself a new me, and Dr. Phil was a huge part of that journey. I was also in therapy (for years) and read every cult recovery book and self-help book I could get my hands on. I even read books on healthy spousal relationships, though I wasn’t married, or even in a relationship.

I just wanted to know everything I could about how to be a healthy, whole, happy, authentic person.

As I say in my book, I am actually grateful to my cult leader for being so cruel and abusive that she forced me to wake up and leave the cult and, consequently, jolted me into pursuing my own mental, spiritual and psychological health, which is my most valued possession.

And, I am grateful to Dr. Phil. He was there for me in the early 2000s, when I had lost almost everyone and everything that mattered to me. Along with my therapist, he was my rock and gave me hope every day that I could become the person I wanted so badly to be.

So, thank you Dr. Phil! You are a man among men.

The word “No”

Comment now » // June 14th, 2010

Gavin de Becker is an occasional guest on the Oprah show, and I always appreciate hearing what he has to say. The last time he was on the program, though, something he said resonated with me so deeply that it still pops into my head almost every day.

de Becker is the author of the book The Gift of Fear. On his most recent visit to Ms. Winfrey’s program he unveiled a new assessment tool, call Mosaic, that assists victims of domestic abuse determine how much of a threat an abuser poses to an individual or family. By answering 46 questions those completing the assessment will receive a score on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most likely to escalate into violence. (FYI the Mosaic assessment is available online for FREE from de Becker and Associates. Click here to go to their Mosaic web page for more information.)

Domestic violence can parallel the abuse one encounters in a cult. (The excellent book Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich and Madeline Tobias covers this topic extensively.) So whenever Mr. de Becker is on the Oprah show I always make sure to tune in. Here’s what he said recently that rocked my world:

“When you say ‘No’ to someone and they try to talk you out of your answer, that person is trying to control you.”

In a cult (or other abusive) situation there are so many complexities to deal with. Our logic, emotions and complex reactions to a difficult situation often do us a grave dis-service. We talk ourselves out of feeling uncomfortable with situations happening in the cult and we tell ourselves it must be our fault if we don’t understand, or worse, don’t like what’s happening.

But this simple statement that Gavin de Becker made, brought such clarity to me, that I smiled with chagrin at how I could have used this wisdom back in 1989 and 1990 when I was being swept into the arms of my cult leader.

“When you say ‘No’ to someone and they try to talk you out of your answer, that person is trying to control you.”

It’s that simple. I am entitled to own my “No” and if someone tries to talk me out of it they are trying to control me, plain and simple. I own my body and my brain and my reactions to things. If I say “no” I don’t need to justify it.

It’s that simple.

I can’t go back and fix the past but I can take this new bit of wisdom with me into the future.

And the IPPY award goes to…

Comment now » // June 12th, 2010

I am so pleased and proud to announce that Cult, A Love Story has won an Independently Published Book Award.

I submitted the book for consideration back in February, and with one thing and another, had completely forgotten about that. Then one day in late May I returned home from work and had the most wonderful voice mail from the organization letting me know that I had won a Bronze Medal in the category of Autobiography/Memoir.

I’m quite chuffed, considering this is the first book I’ve written (although it won’t be the last). I had realized several weeks ago that I’d exceeded all the goals I had for the book. While I was writing it, my list of most important goals looked like this:

1. Get the book finished. Not as easy as it sounds, but an extremely gratifying goal to accomplish. To have written a book from beginning to end and to be able to point to it and think to myself, “I wrote that,” was wildly satisfying.

2. Publish the book. Given how I felt after Goal #1 was accomplished, I almost didn’t publish the book. It felt SO good to get my story out onto the page and to tell it from beginning to end. I was so satisfied, in fact, that I did consider not publishing it. But in the end, I remembered that one of my intentions had been to use my story to help other cult survivors, so I did publish it (obviously).

3. Have my friends and family read it. Granted, they were somewhat obligated. When your daughter/sister/close friend/niece/cousin/step-sister writes a book you’re pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to have to read it. Thankfully for me, no one grumbled.

That was really it, in terms of lofty goals for my first book. Secretly, I had a couple of others that I admitted to myself only in a very whispery voice, late at night.

4. Have the book help an ex-cult member or family member of a cult victim. As I said, one of my intentions had been to use my story to help other cult survivors, but I had few plans, other than this blog, about getting the word out about the book. However, never underestimate the power of the internet and the power of the family-and-friend grapevine. Within 12 weeks of publishing the books I received several very heartfelt letters from some people who had either survived the same cult I was in or who knew someone who had been in the cult. These letters expressed a mix of gratitude for the new understanding that had arrived as a result of reading the book and, in some cases, forgiveness. Forgiveness for themselves for the feelings and experiences they’d had and forgiveness for those they had known in the cult. Words cannot express how this made me feel.

5. Have the cult itself become aware of the book. I thought it could take 2 or 3 years for this to happen. For word to trickle into the tiny community in remote British Columbia where the cult leader has her disciples trapped. It took eight weeks. Colour me surprised and VERY happy. Up your manipulative, abusive nose with a rubber hose, Lady Guru.

And then there are a couple of lofty goals the book has achieved that I never would have considered hoping for.

6. Winning an IPPY! Click here to read more about the award and to see Cult a Love Story listed as a Bronze Medal winner. (Category #27)

7. Being asked to give an author reading at the International Cultic Studies conference in New York City! More about this in a future post.

Divide and Conquer

Comment now » // April 2nd, 2010

A while back I wrote this post about one of the ways cult leaders undermine the relationships between the people that follow them. Cult leaders and other abusers always make a point of ensuring that their followers mistrust everyone but the leader. It’s a genius move because it keeps cult followers in the position of having emotional ties to just the cult leader – therefore, it is extremely difficult to leave the cult and the cult leader.

CNN has recently been doing a several-part investigation of The Church of Scientology and has interviewed several ex-members who were very high up in the church who are speaking out about their experience and the abuse they encountered there. (You can watch one of the more recent segments here.)

While watching the segments on CNN I was struck by the fact that Scientology has a term, a label, for behaviour I’d seen my cult leader exhibit that ensured that those in the cult were not only divided against one another, but were cut off from those outside the cult. In Scientology, anyone who speaks against the church is called a “Suppressive” and those who are in the church are encouraged not to have any contact with these people. If your daughter, son, mother, father leaves the church and speaks out against its practices they are given this label and you, as a faithful Scientologist, are required not to have any contact with that person.

From personal experience with cults I can tell you that this type of coercion goes a long way toward creating the environment of “Us vs. Them” that psychologists and sociologists agree is necessary to control a group of people. I can also say that my experience with this type of behaviour had a heartbreaking affect on my life that lingers to this day.

Before I left the cult I was involved with, I was dating someone in the cult that I loved very much. Eventually, our cult leader realized she couldn’t have my lover’s loyalty divided between her and me. She made him choose between serving her (she told us she spoke for God) and loving me. He chose God.

But because my boyfriend and I loved each other so much and had such a strong connection to one another, the cult leader had to go one step further to ensure his loyalty to her. So she further convinced him that if he had any contact with me, if he tried to “help” me get closer to the “God” the cult leader was speaking for, that he would be damaging any chances I had for redemption. In other words, if he helped me he’d be hurting me. Naturally, because this man loved me, he didn’t want me to be forever trapped in the darkness that his guru had convinced him I was flirting with, so he broke all ties with me. Though both our hearts were broken by being instructed by “God” to end our relationship, he believed that by staying away from me he was actually helping me to find spiritual redemption.

Is that diabolical genius on the part of the cult leader or what?

To this day, more than ten years later, I think back to that time and marvel with deep regret at our cult leader’s manipulative brilliance. She deserves a PhD in coercion.

When is a cult not a cult?

Comment now » // March 19th, 2010

I had the most interesting conversation last night with my Uncle Phil. He had just finished reading my book and had some comments about it and some questions about my cult experience.

Among other things he asked, “Why didn’t you tell us (meaning my family) when you were involved in the cult?”

You see, during my years of involvement with the cult I used to visit Phil and his family in Ontario on my way to or from visits with my grandparents. Last night as we chatted, he mentioned that he was puzzled that during those visits I didn’t say something about being involved with a cult or talk about the painful experience I was having.

But that’s just the trouble: to someone who is IN a cult it is not a cult. In fact, it is quite the opposite. To the person IN the cult it is the holiest place imaginable. It is the only place they feel they belong. It is filled with people who are, to the cult member, surrogate family. It is the answer to all their life questions and he or she cannot imagine living without it.

As I explained this, Phil came up with a fantastic analogy about cults. He likened being in a cult to having a job in a company town. In this analogy the job becomes all you know. It is your source of income, it is the source of almost 100% of your social interaction, you’ve been in it so long that you don’t remember what life was like outside it. And most importantly it feels like that job is your only source of security.

When the factory closes or lay offs occur or if there is even the threat of lay offs or closure the employees believe with every cell in their bodies that they will not survive without this particular job. And if the dreadful day comes that the factory does shut down, it must feel to those who are laid off that they’ve lost everything. Their sense of purpose, their reason to get out of bed every day, their social network and, not inconsequentially, their income.

That’s kind of what being in a cult is like. It takes over your whole world until you are unable to conceive of life outside of it. And most unfortunately, in the case of a cult, it has also chipped away at your self-esteem. You feel deeply flawed and the idea of leaving feels like admitting an enormous personal, spiritual failure. You haven’t failed. In fact you win by leaving, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re having the experience.

Unfortunately, the fact that those who are in cults cannot see what’s happening to them is one of the most tragic paradoxes of the cult phenomenon. And when you love someone in that situation, it can feel like trying to convince a drowning man to grab onto a life jacket, only to have him turn and swim further out to sea.

(The painting shown at the beginning of this post is called Heading Downhill. It is by Debra Lynn Carroll of the Loft Gallery in Clarksburg, ON.)

Writing and Healing

Comment now » // March 17th, 2010

I’m a journaler. (I’m not sure that word is officially a noun but I’m hoping Webster will cult me some slack today.) Almost always have been. I began journaling as a pre-teen and continued sporadically throughout my teens and twenties, including the ten years I was with the cult I belonged to.

I say “sporadically” because during those years journaling was something I did every now and then. It was an amateur pursuit.

On January 1, 2000 I turned pro.

That was the day my membership in the cult first really came into question. My spiritual guru, whom I adored and idolized, had suddenly proclaimed that I was the worst kind of spiritual pariah and consequently had forced my boyfriend (also in the cult), whom I loved very much, to choose between “God” and me. He chose “God”. Thereafter my “friends” in the group shunned me and suddenly the world I had known for my entire adult life evaporated.

I had nowhere to turn but to the page.

Writing saved me. Writing in a journal gave me something to do during the days and hours and years I was desperately alone in the first part of the 21st century. Writing gave me a safe vessel in which to place my feeling and rebellious thoughts, which were definitely NOT accepted by the cult. Writing was my soft place to fall when I was not in therapy.

Writing taught me to tell the truth about how I really felt, because when I told the truth on the page no one judged me or told me I was wrong or tried to talk me out of how I felt or told me that “God” disagreed with what I was thinking/feeling/saying. My journal welcomed me no matter how messy and awful I felt and never once told me it had to go because it had another appointment.

Most important, for someone in cult recovery, my journal was a place where I could untangle the knots in my brain and my thinking. Cult mind control twists our thoughts and beliefs into a tangled mess even the most dedicated seamstress would have difficulty untangling. But writing gives us a safe place to bring those thoughts to the surface, to examine them and to decide, for ourselves, with no one else’s influence or input, if they are true.

For some, I know, writing in a journal seems like a chore. Another daily practice we need to feel guilty about not doing. For me, it was a saviour, a friend, a blessing. I recommend it most highly. But only if you feel better afterwards.