When I was young I thought I had friends. I certainly has people who I was fond of, but retrospectively I realize that I never had actual friends. When I was young, and until I was about forty years old, I was playing roles – I was trying to be who my parents wanted me to be, who my church wanted me to be, but that wasn’t me. While I had people who liked who I was, they were in a sense being cheated because the person they knew was a fiction.

Friendship, true friendship happens when we have the ability to show others who we are. The unspoken challenge in this is the ability to be honest with ourselves about who we are.

For most of us, when we’re growing up, we have friends who help us discover ourselves. We can try out versions of who we are. Friends help us by giving feedback, letting us try things out, helping us to discover who we are and who we wish to be.

In cults things work a bit differently. Cults tend to eschew individuality. Individuality involves people thinking for themselves, and that individual thought can be a wrecking ball to a cult’s ability to control am individual. While there are core parts of our identities that will remain, the goal of cult leaders is to keep members so engaged, confused, worn out, or indoctrinated that the core part of who we are is always overshadowed by the cult persona. But that core part remains, and this may be one reason why so many friendships and marriages that were entered into while people were involved in a cult endure after they escape. That, and of course the shared bond of surviving a difficult time.

When people leave cults out offten takes time for them to discover, or rediscover their own identities. When you join a cult, the cult works hard to replace your personality with a cult personality. Think of the folks in orange robes decades ago that you might have seen in airports. Think of Mormon missionaries and how they dress the same, smile the same, talk nearly the same. It really is much like society in the book and film The Giver.

On leaving a cult, one doesn’t automatically rid oneself of the years of decades of programming it took to bring about that uniformity. And for those of us who were raised in cults, and never had an opportunity to find out own individuality as children, the task is exponentially more difficult.

But at some time in each of our livesI hope we all come to a point where we are ready to be honest about who we are. We decide to throw caution to the wind and show ourselves – warts and all.

It’s when we can trust someone else enough to share who we are with them, and more than that, when we can trust ourselves enough to be able to do so, that we have found true and honest friendship. In my case, my closest friends are my family. I know that I can trust them. I know they will be there – in ways my own family could never have been there for me. I know I’m loved, and my love is accepted in return.

When I call someone “friend”, it’s not something casual, it’s not a euphemism, or a synonym for acquaintance. It’s a commitment, and a bond as strong as I wish my own family’s bond could have been with me. My friends are my family.

To me, the saddest possible words are “she’s just a friend”. To me, someone who chooses to love is every bit as important as one who is compelled to do so because of genetics.