Escaping Utopia

by Lalich, Janja; McLaren, Karla;

  But at that point, I still had absolutely no … I was so stupid and naive. I still didn’t know about birth control. There were still so many things I just didn’t know. I’d never been to a gynecologist. I didn’t even know what a gynecologist was, probably. Everything was just like, there’s so much to accumulate in just a few years, just basically everything. Just even normal day-to-day things—there’s just so much to learn to do. For example, straightening your hair, just simple things. Blow-drying your hair, for Christ’s sake. I’d never blow-dried my hair before. I had no idea how to work a blow-dryer! I had to figure that out. It was a really big thing for me to figure out how to work a blow-dryer. I saw it in a movie, didn’t know about, went and got it, read the instructions … this was like a whole day’s worth of discovery. And eating. For example, eating cold cereal. I must have bought every single kind of cold cereal and tried a box of each on all the shelves. I had jam in my fridge—my roommate used to tease me—I had every single jam ever. Because I had never had jam before. At first it was just the stupid things, like little kids’ stuff, that we were all discovering. I know all my friends tell me that they were the same way. When we first got out, it was just figuring everything out, the day-to-day stuff. Gosh. None of the girls in The Family were allowed to shave or wax or anything, so you had to figure that out, and everything else practical. And food shopping. You have to go food shopping, right? I didn’t know how to food shop.

  Matthew (12T): Once I started getting out, I realized I didn’t have enough money and I thought I needed to work, but at the same time I wasn’t really ready for work. My friend was telling me, “No, you really don’t have enough references to try to get a job. You know, working in the commune is different. You’re going to have to have a resume, and they’re going to do a background check.” So there were all these little hoops and I didn’t know about any of those and I had to learn about all of this.

  Our narrators dealt with many stressors as they learned how to manage in the outside world, yet each of them also had to deal with the effects of having grown up in an environment of prolonged stress and abuse. The pressures of growing up in their groups, and the ways in which cults interfere with normal development, have had long-term effects on each of them.

  Emotional and Psychological Aftereffects

  While each case of trauma or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) must be professionally diagnosed, healing professionals agree that “the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of ‘intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.’”4 Typical symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares, anger, floods of feelings or no feelings, a sense of powerlessness, risky behavior, thoughts of suicide, and slipping into dissociative states. Many of these symptoms were shared by our narrators, including thoughts of suicide as well as actual attempts. Among the sixty-five people Janja interviewed, 23 percent (or fifteen individuals) were suicidal at one time or another, either while they were in the cult (six) or after they got out (nine)—for some, it was a chronic problem until they got the help they needed. Of those fifteen, four individuals (or 6 percent of the sixty-five) attempted suicide, and one had a brother in the cult who committed suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the national average for suicidal ideation in the general population is 3.9 percent, while the rate for actual suicide attempts is 0.6 percent.5 The rate for ideation in the cult survivors we studied was nearly six times higher than the national average, and their rate for suicide attempts was ten times higher. In The Family, for instance, one of Jessica’s close friends committed suicide in a very public way.

  Jessica (FAM): So I decided to do an interview after Ricky died, because he was very near and dear to me, and I didn’t feel like his death should be worth nothing.6 I had so many other friends dying at that point, and I had even been hospitalized because I tried to commit suicide, because everything that I was hiding was just … all my emotions had been bottled up for so long, and I just pretended that I hadn’t been in a group for so long. I was an absolute wreck, constantly. And it was just getting to be too much. So I decided to go on TV and talk about it. At some point, I just had to deal with it. I had to come out and say, “Yep, these things happened.” And they happened to a lot of people. I started talking a while before that. I didn’t come out and speak publicly, but I started talking about it a lot. I started therapy, and I started realizing that I was really a mess, and my sister was in therapy, too. She was very depressed; I was very depressed, and it started becoming a real issue for me and for her.

  I would have to say that right after I had my daughter is when I started really realizing—and I’m sure a lot of it was postpartum depression—but I started realizing that I was really, really sad all the time. Yeah. I think I was about twenty years old at the time. I just started realizing that I was sad a lot. And my sister was saying, “You really need to seek some medical help,” because at that point she was a sophomore in high school and she was seeing the high school counselor. And he had recommended that she be on anti-depressants. “It’s really good. It helps you deal,” she was telling me, “You should go see someone.” But my ex-husband completely didn’t believe in that kind of thing. It was like I was a drama queen. I was really very, very emotional all the time. I had a lot of problems. I was doing really well in school and work, but I was a wreck. Everybody was like, “Oh, you’re doing so well,” but I knew I was an absolute, absolute wreck. And we were actually having a really bad time in our marriage. I’d just never seen any marriages at all, really. I had no idea how to be married. People were married in The Family, but it wasn’t what I would say a marriage is. So really in all honesty, I had no concept about sustaining long-term relationships.

  Lily (COL): I started to deal with emotions; I started to get angry. You know, I was dealing with everything since I left the group, you know, living life alone, and you have old habits that you try to get rid of. For example, I discovered that I have spiritual beliefs that aren’t true. Why do I think this way? It was her belief. It’s not really true. But I still think that way sometimes. And I try to get over it. And emotionally, now, I have trust issues. And sometimes I take it to the extreme. I sort of think that everyone is trying to pull the wool over my eyes, because my whole life was a lie with her. It took me some time to realize that I don’t trust anybody. It’s really hard for me to develop friendships. I have friends, but when I’m making friends and they’re like, “Hey let’s go out,” it’s really awkward for me. I don’t really know how to keep friends because I think I’m going to end up losing them. You know, I never really experienced close friendships as a child, and I didn’t really talk to anyone. I just wanted to get out.

  I was really depressed last year. I’m not a suicidal person and I would not hurt myself. But I didn’t want to live last year. I would think to myself, why the hell am I not one of those people that just swallows a bottle of pills? I fought with myself: why can’t I just do it? But I don’t have it in me to do that. I inherently want to live. I’m a person who wants to live. But last year it got to be too much, I couldn’t handle any of it. But one thing I did not do was think about going back. Never.

  Rachel (12T): Out in the world that was full of evil and killers and sin, the first thing my mom did when we left—and I don’t think she did it intentionally; I think she just wasn’t thinking—she put me and my sister in these little short shorts. Like spandex short shorts, with these little tiny tank tops that were like belly shirts. And that was the most horrible thing that a little girl could do was wear something like that on top of being out of the Tribes, and so my sister and I just stayed balled up in a corner for days, just sure we were going to die.

  I also remember when my dad left the group we had to go back to the cafe to drop off the keys. He was the manager of the cafe and so he had to drop off his keys, and there were some people there. It was at night and they were closing up. The elders heard we were there, and they came and told everybody th
ey weren’t allowed to look at us. Everybody had to look away because we were evil and they didn’t want us to defile them. That was just like, it was like, yeah, that’s it, we’re going die. We have been tainted by the world and God has turned his back on us and any minute now the fire bolt of lightning is going to come down (laughs). That feeling stayed with me a long time. Years. I don’t know, maybe still today. But the worst of it was the first year. After that, it got gradually better and better.

  Joseph (EB): I was not encouraged to make the best of my abilities or interests, and I was prevented from pursuing various types of education, including tertiary education, since this is another thing they do not allow. This has had an impact on me in many ways, including, for example, lower income than I would otherwise have likely had and a loss of self-esteem as a result. I suffered from very low self-esteem generally in the months and years after I left the Brethren, but found some assistance in self-help books. However, I still frequently find it difficult to like or accept myself, and feel somehow that it is unnatural and evil to pursue one’s own interests in any way, even when other instincts tell me that I should, for example, in my career.

  These aftereffects didn’t just affect our narrators’ emotional lives; they also affected their sense of who they were, where they belonged, and what they thought and believed. For many cult survivors, identity isn’t always stable and reliable; instead, their sense of self may fluctuate, and many struggle with basic issues of self-perception and personal integration.7

  Who Was I? Who Am I? Who Will I Become?

  In a cult, each member’s identity is shaped by the group’s indoctrination processes, and that collective identity is continually reinforced by the group’s systems of control and influence. Leaving a cult, then, can challenge and destabilize a person’s beliefs, values, ideas, and basic sense of self. These challenges can be intensified by lingering self-doubt, guilt, shame, and the loss of self-esteem that many people experience when they escape from abusive groups and relationships.

  Joseph (EB): I was also told to believe that I was evil—the Brethren believe in the Calvinistic doctrine of original sin and in a literal heaven and hell. So I experienced, and still sometimes experience, a strong sense of shame even in situations where I now logically know that I have done nothing wrong. I was taught to think of everything in terms of black and white or good and evil, instead of being helped to understand that there are many shades of grey and that individuals have a right to their individual conscience, and to tolerate difference in others. I still feel very uncomfortable with anyone when I know there is a difference of opinion or outlook, and now feel a lot of anxiety about unintentionally offending people with my opinions. In the Brethren, I was told what to believe about everything, important and unimportant, all the time as a child, and I was always taught that what a person believed was of the utmost importance. Thus, at times I find it difficult to express my own opinions or outlook for fear of disapproval. And I still feel considerable anxiety when I am not sure what I believe about any particular issue.

  It also took me a long time to learn how to approach belief systems logically, and to be able to feel that “I don’t know” is a valid answer to a question about what I think or believe, instead of being swayed by the most aggressive opinion holder or the most eloquent argument. All of this is in spite of me having been a rebellious child who questioned everything I was told.

  Rachel (12T): I feel like I am who they made me to be. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I felt like whoever I am at the core of me is who I was there. That was really hard for me to deal with because of the way that the world views groups like the Tribes—that they’re just really awful. And all the adults in the outside would really make a point to tell me how evil it was. I think that they thought they were helping by telling me that what I had gone through was really horrible, but it had the opposite effect on me. I felt like, well, if everything that I ever knew—the only world I ever knew existed, the only life I’ve ever known, the only people I’ve ever known loved me or whom I have ever loved—are evil, then where did that leave me? Or, they said that if the community condemned and shunned me, they couldn’t have loved me. So, if everybody I had ever known my whole life didn’t love me, then where did that leave me? What kind of person was I? Because that was my world, and if my whole world had been evil, then I must be evil.

  So I had a lot of fears about that and a lot of confusion. I felt like I either had to love them or hate them. I either had to think the community was perfect or they were awful. I didn’t know how to see them as being both; and the adults in the world seemed to really be telling me, “You can’t say there was anything good about them. You cannot.” I didn’t know how to deal with that and I thought: I know people there loved me. I know I was loved and I know that some people there were really horrible and really sadistic, but I know that not everybody there was.

  I always felt this suffering in people there and in a lot of the adults. This was real pain, and pain and suffering are not the same as evil and sadistic. I knew there was a difference; but then at the same time, being raised in the community and being told that adults are always right, adults always know and children are never right—well, I didn’t think I could be right. I had this huge doubt in myself, and I thought that if these adults in the outside world are telling me this, then they have to be right. There’s no other way. That’s just the way the world functions. That’s just the way it is.

  So I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to become a different person. I had a different name in the community, so when we left, my mom had me go back to my birth name, which is Rachel, and so I just thought of it that way: this is Rachel and she’s a new person and I’m just going to create this whole new identity and so that’s what I did. I created this whole new identity, this whole new person, and I really separated. I said, “This is who I used to be in the community and now I’m going to pretend to be this other person.” And I really saw it as a mask. And I was always into making up stories. So if somebody asked me, “Where did you go to kindergarten?”, I had my story all ready: “Oh, you know, we lived in Vermont and I went to kindergarten and I had this friend” or something (laughs). Or I just said I was home-schooled. So I came up with this whole separate person, and people really liked that—and I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know how to merge the two. And when anybody loved me or cared about me, I knew that they didn’t, or I thought that they weren’t really loving or caring about me because “me” was still the person who was in the community.

  Being married has really forced me to try and merge the two finally because now I’ve reached the point where I’m like … for a while I hoped this person over here, this Rachel person, would take over and this other person would disappear, the person from the community would just disappear. But I realized that that person isn’t going anywhere, because we are who we are in the first ten years of our lives, and that forms us. And even though maybe I was formed by forces that were fairly negative, I’ve learned that that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. I realized that this Rachel person whom I created out in the world, she was based on the person in the community. She wasn’t just totally a fabricated person. Obviously, I was using parts of myself that were really the good parts of me that had been formed in the community. Learning how to merge those two people meant shedding some of the bad things that I learned in the community and holding onto some of the good things that I learned in the world.

  Lily (COL): The first time I got out, it was relief. I was, like, I’m out! And it was like an adventure for me. But life kind of got, you know, I started dating and the guy was a nice, hot guy, and I’m, like, woo-hoo! I can do anything I want! And then it got hard. You know, I felt so much relief after I left, but I’m still dealing with it. It’s twenty years of my life and I’m still dealing with it. And I’m still trying to get over it. Nobody taught me how the dating world works and I learned the hard way, and I’ve had so many blunders. I just don
’t know what to expect and what role to play and it’s definitely affected me in the dating world. I have a difficult time getting into relationships with men. It’s led me to have a bunch of bad relationships because, let’s face it, I was neglected. So I choose men who neglect me. I don’t mean to, but… .

  As each of our narrators worked to develop their post-cult selves and their new lives, they found, created, or stumbled upon supportive resources. They didn’t find everything they needed, however, and only a few of them found people who understood their unique needs as cult survivors. This lack of understanding, resources, and support slowed their progress, but even so, there were bright spots in their stories.

  What Was Helpful?

  Our narrators found many things that helped them recover and get their feet on the ground. These included good therapy, developing friendships, going to school, and finding work. Across the board, one of the most helpful things was finding former cult member websites, discussion boards, or blogs, especially if the members were from their own cult.8 These online groups not only help exmembers share their stories and find validation, many also gather funds and provide resources for escapees, such as housing, clothes, transportation, help applying for services, jobs, schooling, and social and emotional support.