The other day when I wrote about what it means to be A Quaker, we touched a bit on Authenticity, and why this is especially important to former cult members. I’d like to explore this a bit more today.

As I was thinking about this while walking to the bus this morning, I recalled a time when I was young and someone asked me a really simple question, perhaps what I might hand been doing, or where I was going. I answered with a lie. I don’t recall what the question was, or what the lie was, but I remember asking myself why I had lied. I remember at that point understanding a need to be always in control of the narrative about my life, even if I couldn’t actually be in control of my life. I remember how uncomfortable I felt not being truthful, even though the actual truth was utterly benign in this instance.

A more recent instance speaks to how much evidence I require when people make claims about miracles, or the power of the mind,or similar things. I have writhes outright fraud. I have been there and been a part of services where ministers used manipulative methods to elicit desired responses and emotions from congregants. Now, when I hear claims from preachers, spiritual leaders and gurus, and the like, if it is something I’m able to try myself I am often willing to entertain the idea. However, I need more evidence than simple claims. I need more evidence, for some things than even many claims. If someone claims that they can cure cancer or depression or ptsd with some simple meditation practice, this is something that requires a study. If it actually works, a proper study will demonstrate that it works. How it works, if it does, isn’t important at this stage, we just need to see if there is an effect. If miracles are happening, let’s see them! I’m not going to dismiss the miraculous, just as I’m not going to dismiss psychic phenomena out of hand, but I need to see some sort of evidence, something legitimate and verifiable.

Some will, indeed some have asked “Why can’t you just have faith?” The answer is that I used to. Sometimes I wish I still could. But I’ve had that faith used against me. All former cult members have had their faith used against them; it was weaponized. Some of us manage to come out of the cult experience with that faith intact. For some, as I was for many years, this is what keeps us moving from cult to cult.

Cult leaders are con artists. And a successful cult leader is the most effective con artist you will ever meet. Where most con artists seek to take your money, cult leaders want you, entirely: body, mind, and soul, along with your money and time, and whatever else strikes their ever voracious fancy.

When I was involved in cults I wasn’t myself. Not as a child, not as a teenager, not when I was in the Air Force, not when I got married, not when I got divorced, and really, not until a dear friend who has become a sister in every way except genetics, explained what cults are. Her sister helped me connect to the International Cultic Studies Association, through whom I was able to find a competent therapist who understands cult influence.

Cults demand allegiance, and members must represent to the world an image, both individually and corporately, that all is well, all the time, and that they are content, secure, and happy. Life in a cult is constant theater and perpetual performance.

Everyone in a cult has a role, and everyone has lines. The problem is that nobody has a script and the leader is making everything up, plot and parts, on the fly. And despite the lack of script, the consequences for the actress who misses a que, flubs a line, or, worst of all, goes off-script, can range from uncomfortable to dire.

As actors, recovered ex-cult members have a finely-tuned sense of performance. If someone is being inauthentic around us, we will soon recognize it. We might not know what they are up to, but we will know something is going on; we’ve seen this play out before.

Authenticity matters because it is the foundation of every relationship; business, personal, social, or romantic. We trust that people are who they claim to be, and we interact with them based on that understanding. This is how con artists so effectively exploit people; they use trickery and fabricate a false persona to gain the trust of their ‘mark’, of someone they intend to fleece. It is no different with cults.

My early years were spent in Bible-based cults, and within each of  these was a code of conduct, or rather two codes of conduct – an internal and an external code of conduct. Some things that might have been tolerated in private may be forbidden in public. But there were some universals.

The first universal was that everything was fine. No matter what, I was fine, I was happy, I was a faithful Christian. I wasn’t hungry, I want being beaten, I wasn’t being sexually abused, I was always getting appropriate medical care. Any problems I had in school, poor grades in some classes, or constant bullying, these were entirely my fault.

One of the largest problems for me was that I was “assigned” male at birth. While I knew that I wasn’t male, any mention of, or any behavior contrary to that position was promptly punished. And while I could learn my lines and play my role, while my parents could cut my hair and sign me up for baseball teams, they couldn’t make me taller, or more athletic; they couldn’t alter my genetics.

At puberty, things didn’t happen for me as they did for my brothers. While some changes occurred, others didn’t. My voice never really changed, I never developed an Adam’s apple, and I remained shorter than my next younger brother (the others would soon overtake me) . What I didn’t know then was that genetic testing decades later would reveal an intersex condition, but with family and church, that wouldn’t have mattered; what a doctor said at the time of my birth held the same weight as scripture.

I wish that I could tell you how many sermons I sat through where a preacher told the congregation that “feelings will follow action”. Being unhappy, depressed, hurt, angry, except of course for righteous reasons, and at the right times, was against the rules. There was an attitude of “fake it until you make it, but then if you never make it, keep on faking it.” For me, for all LGBTQIA people, this meant acting heteronormatively in accordance with who we were told to be. It was, and remains in some churches, and in most cults, imposed inauthenticity.

Another example of inauthenticity that might surprise people will be groups like the Mormons. Think of any Mormon you have ever seen and ask if you have seen them unhappy. I’m willing to bet you haven’t seen a sad, angry, or miserable Mormon who wasn’t a child in public. You won’t see missionaries seeming to have bad days. Mitt Romney always wears a smile. It’s the approved look. It’s the cult personality. And every Jehovah’s Witness knocking at your door, or handing out Watchtower magazines on street corners or train stations will be smiling, whether or not they really feel like smiling. Their authentic feelings in the moment aren’t supposed to matter. What matters is what Jehovah, the Heavenly Father, God, Jesus wants, as expressed via a prophet of governing body, or someone speaking with divine authority. And when God’s messenger tells us that we are supposed to be happy, whether we are happy or not, we will put on that happy face and begin faking it, hoping that we will make it.

The problem with this, of course, is that we get a false picture of who and what these people and their faith are about. We don’t have an opportunity to witness how the struggling faithful are supported by their community, because in a cult, the faithful cannot be seen as struggling.

This imposed inauthenticity wears one down. When recruiting, when at services, classes, or group activities, this near constant mandate to be who one is not eventually leads to a place, for those who join cults later in life, of forgetting who one was before they joined. For those of us who were born or raised in such groups, our personalities never developed in a natural and authentic fashion to begin with. As people begin to become disillusioned with cult life, a kind of cognitive dissonance begins to register. We begin to understand that who we portray ourselves to be to the world is somehow not who we know ourselves to be – even if we are not yet able to accurately define what we mean by “self”.

What matters in helping people to find their way out is two things: the first is relationships. In my own case, and in pretty much every other case I know of, there was someone concerned, or the person in the group was concerned about someone else. But that concern isn’t sufficient to break the spell; breaking the spell requires seeing the group and the leader(s) for who and what they are. We may not, and likely will not have the totality of that knowledge, but we can have enough to see them for the frauds they are, and the fraud they perpetrated on us and those we love.

We recognized that we were peddling something as authentic, but what we were selling was anything but. What we were living was anything but. And when we were fully awake to that lie, and the truth had become valuable to us, we could no longer remain. For some of us, authenticity means the loss of family, friends, and community. For some it means starting life in the modern world completely unprepared, with little formal education, no money, and few people on the outside to turn to.

I used to think that I was perepared for life. I wasn’t. Had I been, I wouldn’t have traipsed from cult to cult for 60 years. Had I been, I wouldn’t have ignored serious medical conditions for decades. Had I been, I might have understood, or at least begun to recognize, the extent traumatic abuse I had experienced in my childhood.

What changed for me was seeing others, now my new family, who learned how to be authentic. These people embraced me, loved me, and let me love them, authentically. There is no greater power than this.