Cult, A Love Story is an award winning memoir, which intimately and powerfully chronicles one woman’s journey from falling under the spell of a manipulative guru to the hard-won and triumphant break with, and recovery from, thought reform.

“This excellent memoir reveals how a charismatic, manipulative spirit medium can use love for God and neighbor as a hook to drag a small group of devotees into her cynical web of impossible goals for self-perfection. After a heroic struggle for insight, Alexandra Amor was one of the cult members who broke the abusive spell.”

Joesph Szimhart, Cult Information Specialist

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Read an excerpt from Cult, A Love Story.

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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 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!

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.

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.

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.

But I heard a phrase yesterday that succinctly summed up why I believe that work is SO important:

“The wound is the door.”

This phrase was spoken by Geneen Roth whose work is focused on healing emotional eating (something I’ve been challenged with my entire adult life). And when she spoke these words I realized they encapsulate one of the primary messages I try to convey in Cult, A Love Story.

On the surface it may look as though our cult experience was a painful waste of time. The years we spent being mind controlled are lost and we’ll never get them back and some of our personal relationships are damaged, if not destroyed, and we live with a tangled mass of grief, anger, fear and guilt taking up a lot of space in both our hearts and minds. We were manipulated and abused and who wants to spend one more minute thinking about that?

And yet….and yet….what if that pain, that loss, that wounding, could be a door? The door to our truest selves. The door to freedom. The door to divinity.

Roth also says, “The wound is the closest thing you have to God” and this I believe as well. For it is the pain of the cult experience, that upon examination, can lead us to our most authentic selves. When we rebuild ourselves, brick by brick, we are given a priceless and precious opportunity to decide what matters to us and what the truth is for ourselves, not for our parents or for our cult leaders. But for our own beautiful, unique selves.

But it’s all a choice. We can choose to simply move past our cult experience and write it off as a bit of bad luck. Or, now that we are free to feel and think what we want, we can choose to view the pain and the loss as a place of opening that is offering us a chance to know what our lives are really about.

Whatever you choose, I wish you only love and peace.

Bridges’ character, Bad Blake, makes the very difficult choice to stop living his life in a self-destructive way. As the story played out I was reminded of the choices that those of us who leave cults make and how, like Bad Blake, we often have to rebuild our lives from the ground up, brick by brick, and often very alone. But we do it and it is possible, as every survivor will tell you. The freedom we find on the other side of that journey is completely worth the hard work and tears it takes to get there.

Anyway…a good movie. I hope Bridges’ wins an Oscar for it. He deserved one for The Big Lebowski back in 1998 so maybe he’ll finally get his due.

Here’s my favorite song from Crazy Heart.

Several things profoundly resonated with me while I listened to and watched Zander’s 20-minute presentation about classical music.

The first was that he says, “We all know where home is.” Those six words made me cry. We DO all know where home is, and we can even define “home” many ways. We know what the truth is. We know when something is real or not. We know when we love something or someone. We always know where “home” is. Always. Even when our brains convince us otherwise.

During the talk Zander plays a piece of Chopin’s Ode to Joy, and he asks the audience to think of someone they have lost while he plays to help us understand what Chopin was trying to say with the music. I thought of the person I had lost to the cult I belonged to and wept. We all know loss.

And finally, Zander gave his definition of leadership and success. He said he doesn’t measure success by how much money he has or how well-known he is. He defines success by how many people around him have shining eyes. Isn’t that beautiful?

Let me tell you, in a cult, or in any abusive situation, no one has shining eyes. That’s how you know it is not home.

For the longest time, I felt like the dreaming part of me was broken. At the time, I was working for life and business coaches who are all about dreams and goals and visions. My clients the coaches would often ask me, especially if it was the end of a calendar year, what my dreams and goals were for the future. During this time the movies The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know also came out and several of the coaches I worked for were excited about the scientific (and sometimes not-so-scientific) discoveries related to quantum physics and our ability to create what we experience.

“What did I want to create in my life?” they wanted to know. “What were my dreams for the future?”

I felt like saying, but didn’t, “Fucked if I know.”

As I say, at the time I felt like the dreaming part of me was broken. I just couldn’t put my finger on any pie-in-the-sky, wouldn’t-it-be-fun-if…, type of experiences I wanted to have in my life. I felt sad that I couldn’t but just couldn’t force myself to make something up.

Now I look back and realize that indeed the dreaming part of me was broken. But I also see that it healed in time. I was so damaged from the thought reform that I had experienced in the cult, and I was so focused on putting my life and my self and my brain and my thoughts back together that there was no way I could have dreamed of the future. I needed to create a present first. For years I worked really hard, every day, simply to put the pieces of myself in place. Once that work had allowed me to establish a self again, only then did I find myself able to begin to dream.

I now dream of going to Paris and New York City. And the south of France (mmm, cheese and wine). And maybe Tuscany.

I’d LOVE to do a long walk, like the Coast to Coast walk in England or the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

I want to own a pair of dogs.

I want to fly in a helicopter.

I want to go on a silent retreat (I may do this one in 2010).

…I could go on. The point is, I’m thrilled to be dreaming again.