A young woman raised in the Church of the Living Word spoke of suffering for more than a decade with intense emotions that were addressed only when she found appropriate therapy:
Frankly, I tend to feel suicidal all the time, where I feel like I’m locked into a situation and then the only option is jumping in front of a train. I have control of it, but that comes up a lot. Suicidal, where I feel locked in: there are no options and I don’t know what to do. I get overwhelmed with how damaged I am, in relationships in particular. This is never going to work, I think to myself. I’m thirty-eight. It’s never going to work and I should give up on myself. And I have to cope with that. But I should say that I have been diagnosed with PTSD so I think that also adds to it. I had therapy throughout my fifteen years of being gone and I had lots of depression-focused therapy and grief and all that kind of stuff. But not until this year did I find a PTSD therapist and it changed my life.
Along with an understanding of PTSD and C-PTSD, familiarity with relational trauma can help cult survivors begin to integrate and heal. Leona Furnari, a licensed clinical social worker who has counseled cult survivors for decades, notes that family issues and trauma are linked for many of these survivors.15
Treatment usually focuses on the cult experience first, and then family-of-origin issues, if there are any. In the case of those born or raised in CHDGs [closed high-demand groups] the two are inseparable and must be dealt with simultaneously. Since the trauma is relational and occurs over time, the individual may be dealing with complex PTSD, and professional help may be important for understanding and decreasing the symptoms.
Healing is a process, and adaptation and integration occur over time. It is very important to remember that human beings are resilient. As one begins to experience small successes and builds a foundation of personal strengths and skills, one’s sense of safety begins to expand. As one’s sense of safety expands, so do self-confidence, autonomy, initiative, and identity, just as in the normal process of healthy childhood development.16
This resilience is a shared feature of the people you’ve met in this book. Though their young lives were painful and traumatizing, and their escapes were often grueling and destabilizing, our narrators found ways to rebuild their lives and reclaim their sense of themselves—even without the support they needed.
Resilience and Integration
Our narrators faced many struggles, issues, roadblocks, and difficulties on their way to healing—yet, heal they did. For instance, Jessica spoke about the discomfort she felt before she left The Family and began her road to recovery:
I felt like I didn’t exist. I felt like nothing I said mattered at all. Like I could be screaming at the top of my lungs about whatever I felt was going wrong, and what was wrong with The Family, and what needed to be changed. And it made absolutely no difference. And, you know, it was wrong. It was just … I didn’t belong there. And I just didn’t fit in with these people. I just couldn’t. I just could not ever … I just was not happy. It was such a huge thing. I just couldn’t. I didn’t believe in it anymore, you know. I just didn’t. It seemed like lying. All of it. It got so bizarre, and so ridiculous, and we were so limited in everything we did. And they had no trust. Nobody trusted us with anything because they knew once we started getting out there, we realized it was all foolishness. It was just all made up. And I think that’s what was so awesome to realize when I’d left … like I’d been so frustrated my whole life, just really frustrated, and I was stuck. And it wasn’t right, and it was all ridiculousness that I was trying to fit into this group where they were telling me these things, and I just couldn’t deal with it. I mean, I had tried it, and it just didn’t work. And when I questioned why it didn’t work, they were like “Silence.” And that just did not sit well with me. I’m sorry, I’d like to be heard. And like I said, speak out and make a difference, if I can. So … here I am.
When our narrators left their groups, they were suddenly faced with many practical issues, certainly; yet they also had to deal with sadness, anxiety, confusion, nightmares, moments of dissociation, and a flurry of emotions. Joseph described his experiences:
I feel a lot of sadness about seven years that were spent in a way that now seems like a waste of very precious time. And I have lost a few friends over it and grown more distant with many others. But I can honestly say that I have never consciously wanted to return to the Brethren. However, the subject has often arisen in dreams. I find myself mysteriously back in the Brethren or living at home again. And in my dream I ask someone or try to remind myself what has happened. And I find the answer that I couldn’t survive in the outside world and had to return shortly after leaving. At this point, I am horrified with myself. The dream sometimes ends there, or sometimes I find myself doing ridiculous or horrible things to try to force the Brethren to kick me out (such as beating my mother up), which, of course, it being a dreamworld, they refuse to do, no matter how bad my behavior is. I then wake up with lots of unwelcome emotions.
Fortunately, I have learned to deal with these now, but for many years they would influence the way I felt for the whole of the day. Like ripples on a pond after a stone is thrown in, the effects of my childhood reverberate on through my life. Am I free now of all unconscious influence from the Brethren? I would like to think so, but I feel I can never be certain.
Also, during the first few years after leaving the Brethren there was so much new and exciting that it drew my attention away from what had happened to me. Perhaps that was a good thing, as I don’t think I would have been able to endure those emotions if they had erupted at that time. That’s not to say that I didn’t at times feel awful—I did, and sometimes for quite prolonged periods. But looking back, it feels like the kind of adrenaline reaction you get when you’re under threat. I’ve met a number of other leavers from the group I grew up in and there seems to be a common pattern: they are very bright-eyed and excited in the first few years after leaving, and then they become saddened by the burden of a life alone in an alien culture and the feeling of guilt at leaving their family behind. Most learn to move beyond this to build a new life, fortunately.
Jessica experienced a great deal of turmoil after she left The Family, and she was justifiably skeptical of some of the counselors she met. However, she soon realized how important it was to start talking about her life in the cult:
They always looked at me like, you poor girl, and that was it. And have some Prozac, and have some Ambien to sleep, and here’s some anti-anxiety, and here’s some Xanax, and … seek counseling, you know (chuckles). And the counselor would just basically let me talk, and then just ask me questions about my life. But I think that it was just learning to talk about it that was my therapy. What I got out of that was just the first time I really talked about it all. And when I started talking about it all, it started getting a little easier. And I started talking about it a little more freely, too. And that really helped.
Being able to talk about life in the cult has been important for many survivors— whether it’s with friends, family, coworkers, or even the media. Samantha spoke about being interviewed about the FLDS:
It’s very hard, even after leaving, to speak against it, and it took me a long time. Someone interviewed me in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1997 or ’98, and that article paints Colorado City as this little utopia—only I didn’t want to live there. But I couldn’t speak against it because I was so afraid that that paper in little Kalamazoo, Michigan would find its way back to Colorado City, and I would be lambasted. I mean, I knew there was nothing they could do to me physically. In fact, I’ve heard of all the blood atonement,17 but I have never felt threatened by that. I mean, there was only one time I was afraid of being murdered as a child, and it was the same time as that incident that’s written about in Under the Banner of Heaven,18 where that woman and her baby were killed. That was very talked about in Colorado City, and I was terrified. But I was so afraid to speak out about the community because of the way they talk about yo
u when you leave, and especially if you speak out against it. Just in the last ten years, I’ve gone through incredible growth, an internal growth spurt of being able to see the FLDS more objectively and clearly and talk about it in real terms of what happened and what it’s doing to people.
Our narrators also found education to be vital for their healing—whether it occurred on their own, with others, or with a counselor. According to Shelly Rosen, “Psychoeducation can be the most stabilizing of all interventions.”19 That’s why books, articles, and documentaries on toxic groups—and especially former-member websites—are so important. Samantha found this to be true after she left the FLDS:
I don’t know how … I was just frozen when I came out of there. Studying, reading. I never went to college, and when people asked me where I went to school, I say Barnes and Noble. I read a lot.
The young woman quoted earlier who grew up in Scientology and left at the age of fourteen describes some of the internal and external turmoil she went through, and the importance of having empathic people around her:
So I felt kind of like Pippi Longstocking in a way. I felt like I was just on my own and I was going to make it. But I didn’t really have any of the social skills to pull it off. And so my first year in public school was really tough. All the other kids knew that I had come from Delphi [a private Scientology school], so there were all kinds of rumors about me. This was the first time where I really felt like, God, I really want to fit in. You know, I really want to belong; it’s really important to me. And over time, it got a little easier.
I had a social worker who got me involved with a school counselor who had a group of kids that got together. And I’d say that counselor had a huge impact on me by recognizing that I’d come out of a cult, that I was trying to get over things from that experience, and at the same time, that I was trying to assimilate into a world that I didn’t understand. I didn’t have any guidance to figure out how to do that.
In the midst of that, I had a father who was sort of nonexistent and a mom who was, um, not so great. So it helped me understand, I think, for the first time, what I had been through and what was going on in my life. Because, I think up until that point it was just about survival. It was just about making it through whatever experience I was getting through. And I didn’t really think about how it affected me emotionally. And I didn’t really understand why it was so hard for me all the time to make it, to fit in, to get along with other people, to understand what was happening around me. So, yeah, that was kind of a turning point for me.
But when I graduated high school and the older I got, and I looked back on what people really did for me, that was huge, you know. And I’m extremely grateful for the people who took the time to do little things … to give me clothes or to give me makeup or just to cut me some slack because they understood that I didn’t really know what the heck was going on. And the school counselor at the time knew of my family’s situation, which didn’t allow me to develop the ability to understand that feelings are okay. That it’s okay to have strong feelings. That it’s not going to last forever (laughs), and that it’s okay to express them. You know, I struggle with affection in a huge way. It’s extremely difficult for me to be affectionate. It’s very hard for me to be expressive of how I feel in any sort of consistent way. It’s very, very difficult for me to be confrontational, for me to express negative emotions. I have a hard time admitting, you know, that I’m feeling sort of a negative emotion to begin with, and then to outwardly express it. I’m more of a ruminator. That’s kind of my way of handling things. So, I think that’s a big part of it.
I think the other part of that is something I’m just now beginning to understand, which is the impact it has on me in my hopes for the future in being a parent. I would love to have kids, but I have no idea how I’m going to do that, um, with no memories of my own parents parenting me and no real memories of my childhood. I don’t know how I will respond when my kid goes through those kind of, you know, going to school for the first day and kindergarten, just everyday life. I’m petrified that I’m not going to have what it takes to give them what they need, simply because I just don’t have it. I haven’t experienced it in my own life. School was just something that I did because I had to. I didn’t get good grades; I didn’t pass a lot of courses. I think I got passed through. I think I got helped along. I think a lot of that is because people knew a little bit about me and I think that they were very empathic towards that. I also think that my counselor was a huge part of that. I’m sure he did as much as he could for me.
The traumas our narrators faced were often overwhelming, and the support they found on the outside was sporadic at best. Even though they all felt painfully lost and lonely, as we noted in Chapter 6, only one of the narrators considered going back to his group. The freedom they experienced after they escaped their toxic utopias was worth the struggle.
Advice from Our Narrators for People Who Want to Break Free
Throughout this book, we’ve focused on the stories of successful cult escapees. Each of them wanted and needed better support on the outside; nevertheless, even without that support, they persevered and built new lives for themselves. Their hard-won advice is useful for anyone who wants to escape from toxic groups or unhealthy relationships. (Note: In this section, we assign pseudonyms to some of the other narrators who share their helpful advice.)
Iris (TM): Find whatever it is inside yourself that you’re interested in. I don’t care what it is, gardening, sewing, astronomy … and pursue that, and then just build from there. Be slow and be patient with yourself. Just really slow. It takes years, but if you find that core part—even when you’re raised in a cult, there is some core part that is individual. And that’s what’s calling you to leave. And if you pursue that, auto racing, I don’t care what it is, you will meet other people who have the same interests, and then you can build your life from that.
Lily (COL): Basically, you need to follow your instincts. If your instincts are that this cult is right, stay. You know, because ultimately you need to be happy in life. If you love this place with all your heart and you don’t feel any conflict, stay. But if you feel there’s any doubt, follow your instincts, because that’s what I did. And then just remember it takes time. It’s not about getting out and feeling free; it’s about getting out and dealing with it, step by step. For me it’s been one baby step at a time. It’s been really slow.
David G. (FAM): Honestly, my best advice is if you’re thinking about it: leave. Do it. You know, there’s a reason you’ve been doubting. There’s a reason you’ve been wondering about these things all these years. There really is; it’s not right. Leave. That’s my advice.
Mark L. (Scientology): The biggest advice I would give would be not to give up. And not to doubt yourself. But to be careful. Because you’re vulnerable and you have to have a little bit of blind hope in that whatever happens, whatever you turn to, however you get out, it’s going to be better than where you’re coming from. And you have to just believe that, you know. Otherwise it’s really hard to get out and stay out. Because it’s not easy; it’s painful. And it can be lonely and scary. But if you just keep your hope that it’s going to get better, and that it’s going to definitely be better than where you’re leaving from, then you’re going to be okay. But definitely, I think it’s okay to allow yourself to grieve if you need to grieve. But if you can find someone on the outside whom you feel a connection with, then trust yourself and go for it. And just hang on tight and don’t give up.
Jason T. (Tradition, Family, and Property): Don’t walk—run! Don’t swim—dive! Get away from there as fast as you can. I mean, you’re right. If you have the slightest inclination that it’s what you think it is—it is what you think it is. I think that was a common thread through most of the children raised in groups—we had an uncanny awareness. We knew what it was, a little different from people who went into a cult and sort of got blinded into it. We knew the whole time what it was, but we d
idn’t know how to get out. Most people would go … they would leave and go home, but not when your parents put you in something like this. You can’t leave and go home because your parents are in it. But by any means possible, get out and find a lifeline because they’re out there. There are people who are willing to help. I just hope at some point we’ll be able … someone will be able to re-form a national organization like the Cult Awareness Network was so that people will have that lifeline. You know, I hate to think that people are finding Scientology as a result of searching for help.20
Granted, it’s hard. But I would like nothing more than to create a huge … sanctuary. I hate using that word because it sounds like a trigger word, but where kids who were raised in cults could go there and just be kids again. Have play rooms, have toys, have big toys, have little toys, teach skills, have computers, have people who can teach them, train them. You know, learn life skills, learn how to balance a checkbook. Get some basic accounting principles. These are all things that can help someone survive in the real world. It’s a real adjustment. I mean, my wife sees it. She finally sees it. It’s taken years, but she finally sees it. She says, “It’s just as if one of us was abducted by an alien spaceship and dropped in their world and now what do you do? I’m in this foreign element. How do I … I don’t speak the language. I don’t understand the customs. I don’t recognize the clothes they wear.” So that would probably be my biggest dream—to create something like that.
Adriana F. (New Early Christian Church): I’d ask, “What does your conscience say?” I left on the basis of my conscience not trusting anything that I saw there. So if a person is thinking about leaving, I think they should probably leave. If they are just thinking about leaving, give it a go. The cult wants you to stay, of course. They’ll tell you the outside world is horrible or that some horrible fate will happen to you. But if there’s any way to have the courage to just put that thinking on the back burner for a while and do what you think is right, just get out and think about it for a while. Then maybe some more insight will come along.
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