Those We Leave Behind

Comment now » // November 26th, 2009

Now that my book about my cult experience has been published I have been contacted by some friends and family who have read it. And as I wrote on Tuesday, I have been in touch with someone I haven’t seen for 10 years who was also involved with the cult. I have also heard through the grape vine that others who were in the cult know about the book. And I recently started a job working for someone who knew members of the cult and our cult leader.

This flurry of activity around the topic of the cult and the people in it has made me think about the people I left behind when I left the group in 2000. In a couple of instances there are some people who I’ve recently found out left the guru a few years after I did. I find myself wanting to connect with some of them.

And then I wonder why this is.

I’ve concluded that it is for three specific reasons:
1. I loved the other people in the cult. They were amazing, heartfelt, generous people and when I left the cult their absence in my life left a HUGE void. The circumstances we were in were awful, and our guru was (is) an abusive sociopath, but that doesn’t mean that the people themselves were awful. On the contrary, they were wonderful.
2. These are the only people in the world who understand what I went through. I have talked before about my friend G who was also in the cult and how much I value our friendship because of this. She is the only person on the planet at the moment who intimately understands what my cult experience was like, because she was having the same one. (And vice versa.)
3. I’ve experienced a lot of healing because G and I are in touch, and I suspect that healing would also happen if I met with some other people from the group.

The question is, do I go ahead and get in touch with some of the old cult members? My greatest fear is that they will experience pain when they hear from me: unhealed pain left over from the cult days that my name brings rushing to the surface. However, I feel a strong enough pull to do this that I’m going to go ahead and try with one or two people and see what happens.

Stay tuned for more about this. Let’s call it The Reconnection Project.