Some years ago I used to have a radio show. I used to do a segment called the Practical Pagan, and a few other segments where I discussed things of topical interest. I’d also do interviews, music, book, and film reviews, and other items of interest to the Pagan community. Once, a listener asked how I was able to find something to write about every week.
I’ve spent much of my life journaling, and now I’m writing for this blog on a daily basis. I may not post daily, but I am writing daily. And I keep a backlog of posts started. When I come up with an idea, I list it as a title and come back to it when the time is right. I’ve also got a number of books in the works. But having something to write about, having a reason to write, even having a deadline, these don’t offer inspiration – they don’t give you the drive to write.
It’s the same with art or music; we can want to paint, draw, or playing am instrument.
In the video clip above we see Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John in the 1980 film Xanadu. Olivia is playing a woman named Kira, and Gene, a big band leader named Danny McGuire. The film also stars Michael Beck, an artist who finds himself struggling and unfulfilled, creating album covers rather than doing the sort of art that would inspire him.
Both men meet Kira, but Danny remembers her from long ago. Eventually in the film, Kira reveals herself to be the must Terpsichore, from Mount Olympus, and she was there to inspire both men. By the way, this was Gene Kelly’s final film appearance, and featured not only Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John, but the music of Electric Light Orchestra, and it features one of the best fusions of big band and rock that I’ve ever heard. The soundtrack album went double platinum in the US, so the film and the music are worth a bit of attention.
Of course life isn’t like film or Greek mythology. There are no Gods on a mountain waiting for the right incantation in order to help us. In my experience even having a regular spiritual practice is something we can struggle with.
So what is the answer? It’s going to sound really silly at first, but it’s the honest truth. Inspiration comes from doing what we want to do. But there is an important key, especially early on: do it without judgement. Certainly you can watch your progress, and at some point you can device whether you’re comfortable sharing your work with others. You will want to continue honing your craft of course, but the more you do, the more you’ll want to do. It becomes a matter of habit.
And worry not, dear reader, you in the back who thinks to stump me with your clever question. What of the writer, or artist, or musician, or anyone whose well has run dry? In general, I see a few reasons for this, though there may be more. In my own life this can happen when I left myself become too busy with other things, when I am forced to be creative with insufficient time to do so. It’s not that the muse has left, so to speak, but that my mind is too disquiet to relax and listen. I am too anxious to be inspired.
Another thing that can happen is that I can simply take a break for a while and allow myself to get out of the habit. It is easier to remain creative than it is to re-engage that productive creativity that has remained idle for too long. It’s kind of like Newton’s first law of motion applied to creativity; a creative person will tend to remain creative as long as they keep creating being creative and the act of creating reinforce each other.
Almost every writer can recall a project they began with enthusiasm, but at some point became distracted from, while we were engaged, the words and pages came easily, it might have seemed that rather than creating, we were merely reporting on things we were witnessing unfold in our minds. Then came the distraction. Work, children, illness, family emergency, it may have been utterly out of our control. But re-engagement with those characters or the project can be terribly difficult – much more difficult than the initial work. The initial work might have come about organically. Now, we need to rediscover a thread in a wilderness. But it can be done. One recipe for this is too avoid writing right away. Instead, I take some time and read what I have. I don’t try to proofread. I don’t try to imagine next steps. I try to feel and immerse myself into the story so that I can get somewhere near to the intimacy I once had with the characters and the plot.
Something you can try to avoid stagnant projects in the first place is to pull them out and read them periodical. If you’re a musician, or a painter, play them, put them on an easel every now and then, keep them fresh in your mind. It will make those projects much more easy to return to in the future.
The final reason I’ll offer for dry spells is this: being comfortable. It can be very comfortable to do what we’ve always done, to have a formula that had worked for us, a well from which we can draw that always yields success. But sometimes this sort of well might not be deep enough to last indefinitely. Sometimes we need to be able to draw from multiple wells.
For writers, if we’ve been limiting ourself to poetry, we can try our hands at prose. If we’ve been writing non-fiction, we can write some fiction.
Here’s an idea: Try taking a short story someone else wrote, one that you haven’t read and read half of it. Take the first half, and finish the story as if it were yours. Then read the original authors second half. How did you agree? How did you differ? What do you like about your work and the original author’s work.
If we write music, we can try another style. If we play an instrument, maybe we can learn another. If we’re am artist, we might try a new medium, or changing up a style, or trying to impose a limitation such as making a painting using only red, yellow, black, and white.
Getting out of our comfort zone helps us to think differently, and thinking differently is fundamental to creativity. Every engineering accomplishment that we benefit from has come about because somebody thought about a problem differently. The same is true for art and the written word. Every new thing comes about because somebody thinks differently.
The only people who dare say “there is nothing new under the sun” are those who look at things as they always have. If we’re willing to see things differently, there is always something new
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.
I bet you wouldn’t recognize me, I can be myself now. You can no longer tell me who I can, or who I can’t be. You don’t tell me any more what to wear, how to look, or how to act.
There are some things I wanted to talk about, some things I wanted to let you know. I wanted to talk to you about why I’m so angry and what I’m going to do about it. I wanted to talk about the things that you robbed me of. I want to talk about the things that I can never get back. You stole my childhood, my innocence, my chance to grow up with a loving family. You took those things from me and I will never get them back. I will never know what it might have been like to have a happy childhood, to have felt cared for, protected, or loved.
I have people in my life who’ve shown these things to me now, and seeing them hurts me so deeply because I know what I should have had when I was a child. I also know who is responsible for having kept that from me and I know who deserves to pay. I know what it has cost me.
If I could I would destroy you, but there are too many of you, you’re too large. I’m only one person, and I can’t destroy you, but I can do something just as effective. I can keep people away from you. I can tell people who you are, I can tell people how you ruin lives, I can tell them your plans. I can make you impotent. And that is what I’m going to do.
While you spread your false Gospel of Lies, I’ll be telling the truth. I will show your face to the world. My children didn’t have to grow up with the poison I was fed, and their children won’t either. And whoever I can tell, whoever I can reach, whoever I can help will be free from your poison. It doesn’t matter what name you use it doesn’t matter what mask you wear, because I can see you and I can recognize you now. Some people will tell me that it’s not my job to destroy you, and they’re right. It’s not my job but it is my mission.
When I began this blog I wanted to be able to post daily. What I’ve found is that while I can write daily, I am not able to fully explore my thoughts, particularly on certain subjects, in a way that let’s me complete a well thought out post in that short amount of time.
I could use writing prompts thst are relatively meaningless to me, (today’s is “do you see yourself as a leader?”), but I don’t think that people reading this blog are looking for answers to canned questions. On the other hand, if you do have questions for me, fire away!
I don’t always remember anniversaries. I remember the date I got married, but I don’t recall the date of my divorce. I know my daughters’ birthdays. But I don’t recall the actual date I became A Quaker. I do remember the first time I attended a meeting, the first time I showed up at Haddonfield Monthly Meeting, and I remember reading my letter to the meeting requesting membership. I remember too, one month later, being accepted as a member. I cheated and looked back, and believe that was December, 2021, and our meeting’s 300th anniversary.
There are those who say that an individual doesn’t become A Quaker, but instead discovers that she had always been one. I’ve also heard it said that older Pagans often become Quakers. Perhaps this is because Quakers and Pagans share many of the same values, or maybe it’s because of a sense of community with a solid footing. (I spent many years as a practicing Pagan, and I’m certainly not uncomfortable gathering with Pagans. I can honestly say that I made many dear friends during this period of my life, and the Pagan community has much to offer the world. There does seem to be something there. What I do know is that I’m home here, among Quakers.
So what does it mean to be a Quaker? At the most basic level, a Quaker is a member of The Religious Society of Friends, or a member of one of the monthly meetings of this society. These are the people who gather at the Quaker meetinghouses you might see in your town. But this obviously doesn’t explain a great deal.
There is That of God in Each of Us.
This is a song I wrote around the time I became Quaker to celebrate the 300th anniversary of our meeting. It speaks to at least some of the essence of what Quakers believe, chief being that there is something of God in each of us. Whether we are created by God, whether God’s spirit speaks within us, or we are children of, or posses a similar nature as God, as various religions might believe, this simple statement can be seen as true by most any theist, and by most any theist, can be seen to apply to every human being, if not every living being.
Beyond this, we come to what Quakers call the Testimonies. These are principles by which Quakers are expected to live our lives, and not offer mere intellectual assent. These testimonies, which can be helpfully summarized with the acronym SPICES, are Simplicity, Peacefulness, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. An understanding of these, from a Quaker perspective, can give a good idea of what it means to be a Quaker. I, however, am not a Quaker scholar, so the best I can do is offer my own understanding as to what these testimonies mean.
Simplicity is the first testimony. There was a time when most Quakers wore distinctive attire, known as plain dress. This was originally to not wear clothing that called attention to the persons. Some Quakers still feel called to wear plain dress. Likewise some engage in plain speak. This involves using, for example, thee and thou rather than ‘you’ when addressing people. This is done because the Bible exhorted us to not be respecters of people. Thee and thou used to be the familiar forms of address, and you was the formal, or respectful form.
Most Quakers in the English speaking world today recognize the change in language, and the familiar nature of ‘you’. I suspect that in French and other languages thst differentiate between familiar and formal forms of address, that this is more of an issue. This is something I will investigate prior to visiting Canada or France.
More importantly though, the concept of simplicity impacts our lives in how complicated we make those lives. Do we make things unnecessarily and overly burdensome for ourselves or others? Do we carry too much baggage – emotional, physical, financial, spiritual, or otherwise – that is complicating our lives? Are we drama queens? Simplifying our lives in all these areas is beneficial; it helps us to focus on what is truly important. This doesn’t mean that we need become recluses or live the lives of ascetics, but we can simplify enough to be able to focus on what is truly important.
Peacefulness is perhaps what Quakers are best known for. Indeed when a list of peace religions is compiled, Quakers are always among them, along with the Anabaptists, including the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Bretheren, Bruderhof and others.
To me, the testimony of peacefulness comes directly from the fact that we are all children of the Divine, by what ever name we choose to call the Divine. For me to take up arms against another is to take up arms against my sister or my brother, against my mother, my father, my cousin, my kin. It is abhorrent to me.
Can I say that to protect myself or a loved one, that I might not meet violence with force? I honestly don’t know. I do know that in the past I have gone to great lengths to avoid violence, and only once, when it was two against one, and there was no alernative other than being severely beaten, did I resort to fighting back (except, of course, as a child with siblings). And even then, the fight was ended before anyone was really hurt. Still, that altercation bothered me deeply for quite some time. I do not take pleasure in harming anyone. But I also despise seeing others harmed. This is a constant struggle for me and whether it is right to intervene when one has the means is not an easy question.
This also impacts my work. My job sometimes involves calibrating equipment for the government. I let my manager know my objection to calibrating any item, the purpose of which is to test or adjust some part of a weapon system – something specifically designed for weapon systems. I was assured that I will not be required to work on these items again. Had that request not been accommadated, I would has-been seriously considered finding another job.
Integrity is next on the list. There is a reason why products that had nothing to do with actual Quakers have the name Quaker attached to them, and that is because of Quaker integrity. Quakers have eschewed the taking of oaths, heeding the Biblical admonition to let our yeas mean yea, and our nays mean nay. When a Quaker gives their word, that typically means something (one former President, for one, excepted).
There is another aspect of integrity that matters a great deal to me beyond simply keeping one’s word, and that is being internally who we present ourselves to be to the outside world. As a child, my personality was hidden, it was a shameful thing. I was required to pretend I was someone I wasn’t. This is something that is common in many cults, and part of recovery is reclaiming one’s authentic personality. For those who joined a cult later in life, this takes work. For those of us raised in such a situation, it’s a much more monumental task. But there is a reason that this sort of authenticity is important to SGAs (Second Generation Adults are people who were raised in cults, from birth, or early childhood. The cult life is all we knew); growing up the way we did, we were surrounded by inauthenticity. We don’t have much tolerance, once free, for those who might wish to play us again.
For my part, among Quakers, I have found a group of people for whom authenticity is built into the culture, into the fibre of an individual’s character. This matters.
Next we come to Community. This is where a relatively small religion manages to get so much more than one might expect, for their size, accomplished. Quakers work together. This is in part because we have no clergy; we are all clergy. We are all ministers. If something is going to get done, we do it. If we come up with an idea, we spearhead it, and if our meeting chooses to support it, we might find ourselves with more on our plates than we expected. But Quakers make things happen. And this they do by working together.
There is another aspect of community that is perhaps more important, and that is the community we experience as a body gathered in worship, as a covenant community in which we have chosen to honor and support one another’s spiritual journey. The word community, as do all of these testimonies, hold great meaning to Quakers.
I know that I mention cults often in this blog. I do so because cults defined most of my life to this point. If I speak of my younger years, I am speaking of times in my life that were defined by one cult or another, some more impaction or damaging than others. But I speak of these things because I am not alone, because there were others who were hurt in much the same way. People think that survivors of cults are rare as unicorns. We aren’t. The sad truth is that there are many survivors, and countless people still trapped inside cults. Understanding cults will help everyone recognize them. Talking about them will help survivors feel less isolated. So if you see allot of this here, that’s why.
Since the earliest says, Quakers recognized equality between sexes. Unfortunately, universal acceptance of equality between races was a longer struggle. It took time, but Quakers became a force fighting for the abolition of slavery. Even today though, we recognize that it was wrong, and it troubles is that there were those in our communities or family ancestors who may have kept or traded in slaves. How to respond to this unspeakable crime remains a topic of deep consideration. We recognize the wealth that was created in this nation by the hands of enslaved people; a wealth they were not permitted to benefit from. We recognize the systemic barriers that stand in the way of mostly non-white minorities in this country, and it hurts us as well.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking about segregation, said that the practice harms us all. Certainly it has historically, and despite the claims by some that since the practice is no longer expressly codified in our laws, it is not explicitly prohibited. And though I would call no woman or man a prophet, Dr. King’s words still speak to our present situation with accuracy.
These are not the only ways to view equality. It’s important to recognize that in the eyes of any living God/ess, as in the eyes of any truly loving parent, all children are equally important. As Jesus explained in the parable of the prodigal son, the loving parent awaits and celebrates the return of their lost child. This was a recurring theme in Jesus’s ministry. We know from this story and others that each of us is important, valuable, and precious. Each of us has some gift to share, but many either don’t take, or aren’t given the opportunity. It’s important for us to discover our own gifts, as well as those in others, to share our own, and to nurture and encourage others to share their own, recognizing in the process that each gift is as valuable as the next, each person is of as great importance as the next.
Our final stop is Stewardship. When I first came across this, I thought of environmental stewardship. We are certainly paying a price for our brazen disregard of the world we share. Too many of us pay undue heed to the words of those who have a vested interest in further exploitation of nature and natural resources. We hear “no single person can make a difference, it is the industrial polluters that matter.” Well, it is consumers that drive industry. We are focused on recycling and not on consumption. We purchase something new instead of repairing something that is broken. We by electric appliances when a manual one might work just as well. And we can purchase appliances that might be overly complicated; a computer controlled toaster would be an example of a device that is over engineered, and adds more waste than necessary to landfills when it fails. We support the oil industry every time we use plastic instead of reusable, longer lasting, more recyclable glass. But as in other things, there is another layer.
Stewardship in relation to finances also matters, our own, those of our faith communities, and any other political or non political entity we are involved in. To me, stewardship implies that if I have a voice, that I exercise that voice, in an informed fashion. This means voting in elections, but beyond that, understanding the pertinent issues, who they affect and why, and understanding the candidates’ positions, and looking beyond the current positions to determine whether this is a sincere position, or one taken for political expediency.
The Bible speaks of tithes and offerings. Many cults and churches, and some of their leaders, have amassed unbelievable fortunes, fleecing gullible followers out of lifetimes of savings, often at the expense of their own security. Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of The Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, is worth an estimated approximately $50,000,000,000. Some investigators believe the true value of the investment portfolio to be double what has been reported. And this does not include church real estate, churches, or temples. The total membership of the church is just over 17,000,000. The wealth of the church, in proportion to the membership, is staggering. And this wealth is not used, not touched. Not for those in need, not for disasters, not for building new temples, but instead laid up for “when it might be needed” in the end times. As a former LDS, (Latter Day Saint), I don’t have a problem calling this church a cult. (Some cult members move from one cult to another, and another, in a process called cult hopping, before we leave for good. I’ll be discussing this, and my journey, in the future.)
Stewardship requires that we manage wealth wisely. This is what I’ve seen in Quaker meetings. In our meeting, we don’t seek to amass wealth. We don’t ask more of our members than they can afford, and as a meeting, we give to charitable causes. This is Stewardship. It is recognizing that here and now, we are the hands of God, tending God’s garden. We prepare for tomorrow by caring for one another today, by caring for the Earth today, by holding our leaders accountable today.
All of this is my own idea, what it means to me, to be a Quaker. I certainly don’t live these ideals perfectly, but I am constantly striving to improve. It’s a journey, and it’s not an easy one. But we aren’t called to perfection, we’re cashless to strive for perfection, to constantly improve. And those who can attain that can be assured of a life well lived.
You have undoubtedly noticed the numerous cult references in my posts. My therapist has encouraged me to be open. I’m telling my story not just for me, but for other survivors. It’s a sad truth that there are more cults than most people could possibly imagine, and enough survivors that we all likely know one or more. All cults are damaging, some more than others. It is my hope got this blog that as I discuss things thst are important to me, and share how cult involvement impacted my life, thst people will come to better understand cults, and survivors will feel less alone.
Cults aren’t the sole focus here, but my entire life was shaped by cult experiences. I can’t speak about myself without mentioning cults any more than I could speak of fish while ignoring water.
I hope that you are finding this blog thought provoking.
United Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, 9-11-2001
I’ll be discussing what I mean by the word “cult” in a future post, but today, on the 22nd anniversary of the attack on 9-11-2022, I wanted to address the power of indoctrination and extremism and it’s ability to influence people to do things that they otherwise might never have considered.
If there is one thing that most all extremist groups have in common, it is the use of fear in uniting members. Fear motivates and it bonds people. In extremist groups it can be used to control, it can be used to exaggerate real threats, and it can be used to fabricate non-existent threats out of whole cloth.
The United States has not walked blameless on the World stage. In our dealings, we have often backed those who have committed atrocities. And no matter who one backs in a conflict, the other side will consider themselves wronged; there is no way to please all when there are competing interests and insufficient resources. When the United States, or any nation, enters a conflict seeking first to bolster their own interests, it makes it much easier for detractors to build a case against their “enemy”. This isn’t to blame any nation who is attacked; I firmly believe that differences should be resolved through non-violent means. But when extremism is involved, anything that resembles a slight can be used as ammunition, but an actual, legitimate reason, with real-world consequences is solid gold to a leader.
When a leader can point to people dying and connect it to someone else – a person, an organization, a nation, when they can portray am attack against that entity as a just and holy cause, they can surely find somebody to carry out their wishes against that entity.
Apart from 9-11, we have seen it carried out in the name of anti abortion activism, in the form of cult murders and suicides – Jonestown, Waco, Heaven’s Gate. It has been happening for centuries, large scale and small.
The problem is that by and large, our governments don’t wish to consider undue influence. Here in the United States, we value “freedom of religion” so highly that we permit virtual (or actual) enslavement of people in the name of religion. It is appalling to me that in this country children, especially girls, are being forced into arranged marriages – notably in groups like the FLDS, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. If we can’t protect our own children or our own children because we are too afraid of confronting criminals posing as religions, then we are also doing legitimate religious organizations a disservice.
I’m going to go out on a really big limb here and make a proposal. I like the work that the Freedom From Religion Foundation does. I am certainly not an athiest, but I think that when religious groups overstep, their feet should be held to the fire. But I would also like to see a Freedom to Hear the Truth Foundation. People who are in extremist groups need to have access to the truth. Europe is making strides in identifying and curbing undue influence. Some countries are managing to shut down harmful groups that manage to continue in the United States under the guise of actually being a religion. And we can’t help, for the most part, people who are so trapped, at least here in the US – unless the group is named a terrorist organization. We need to help those who are in these groups hear the truth. Perhaps it could be proposed thst prohibiting members from accessing knowledge, threats of Shunning, forced marriage – especially of minors, and other acts, disqualify organizations from claims of protection as a religious group. I don’t know, but we need to do better.
We need to help members of cults and extremist groups find their way out. We need to be able to shut down groups that are exploiting and brainwashing countless people in the United States and elsewhere. We need to stop giving cover to hate groups and to groups calling for death to lgbtqia, or those who work at Planned Parenthood. We need, at the International level, to work as hard for peace and social justice as we do in preparing for war. We need to give young men, who are most likely to be caught up in militant groups or gangs, important things to do at the community level. We need to spend as much time, energy, and money community building as we do in policing.
International problems begin in neighborhoods. When a nation is struggling, it’s neighbors will feel it. Those struggles ripple. How we address them matters. If we permit extremist groups and cults to continue, there will be another Jonestown, another Waco, and, heaven forbid, another 9-11. It’s it about technology, it’s about extremism.
(I apologize that this and Monday’s post will be a bit late. I had a visit from my daughter and wanted to spend time with her.)
It was Sunday morning and I got on the Speed line at Lindenwold to go to Haddonfield for meeting. On each seat of the train was a Chick Bible Tract. This particular tract was titled ‘This Was Your Life’. The point of the tract is to convince readers that they are dammed unless they accept Christ as Lord and Savior.
I find it interesting that so many religions are so exclusive in their soteriology – or understanding of salvation. But this is exactly why we have had so many schisms and cults, or new religious movements for a more politically correct terminology.
Many people through the ages have thought that they had the one and only path to enlightenment, the one way to truth, the one path to God, the way to salvation, the answer. The writers of this tract and churches that pass them out will be of similar minds in this.
Some churches, such as some Lutherans, suggest that everything the Bible says is literally true, and that nobody needs any special knowledge or training to understand it. This is something that few scholars of the Bible would ever assert. There are reasons why people devote entire lives to studying scripture. It is impossible to understand a document without understanding the people and the context in which it was written. Even those who translate these scriptures bring their biases and preconceived notions along with them.
Beyond this are the claims that scripture alone should be out final authority. If we take this at face value, where does this claim come from? At least in Christian scripture, it is not scriptural. From A Biblical point of view, it is self – contradictory.
At one point, some years ago, I considered myself am atheist. Coming out of my last cult experience I wanted nothing to do with any god or goddess. The song Saved, which is the headline video for this post was almost an anthem for me. Another, while I was still a Pagan was Go Away Godboy by S. J. Tucker.
Go Away Godboy
I was tired of Christians trying to “Save” me. I remember being part of that crowd when ‘leading a sinner to Christ’ was a noble thing. I remember more than a few church services where the topic was leading others to Christ, and that being a part of being a good and faithful servant. A church I visited once had a sign above the door as one left that said “you are now entering the missionary field.”
In Christianity especially, this idea of spreading the gospel is built-into what it means to be a Christian; it’s part of the “Great Commission”. Some Christians are willing to die, and proudly, in this act,being utterly convinced they are doing God’s work. This is just one fruit of life-long indoctrination.
My own idea of salvation has been tempered a bit by many experiences, as has been my understanding of God. Having been a part of many cults, abused or used in multiple religious groups, I’ve come to see the Divine as something that cannot be related ‘to’ someone by another, but instead must be experienced individually. You don’t get to know God by reading A Bible, or Koran, or the Vedas, or the Upanishads, or the Tao Te Ching. But as we all have some connection to God, each of these can help us see some aspect of God that was seen by another.
I don’t have, unlike whoever left that tract believed them self to have, an answer for anyone save myself, but I am willing to share my thoughts and experience. With that, I’ll leave you with a song from Damh (it’s Welch, and pronounced Dave) the Bard, called Save Me. I did a Pagan themed radio show for 10 years, and Damh is one of my favorite musicians. I expect you’ll see more of my favorite music from those days popping in this from time to time.
When I was little I used to wonder what it would be like to have amnesia. I wondered how somebody could remember how to talk, how to eat, how to drive a car, but not know who they were. This went on until I was diagnosed with and began to understand Dissociative Identity Disorder and Complex PTSD.
I no longer need to wonder what amnesia is like because I realize I’ve been living with it for most of my life. As a child it sometimes got me into trouble. I would be advised of doing things I had no memory of doing, I would find myself in places and not know why I was there, and there would be blocks of time that would go missing. But when you grow up like this, you don’t recognize it as out of the ordinary, and when you see portrayals of amnesia on television, they are always seem as very distressing. I had no reason to believe what I was experiencing was anything out of the ordinary.
Our minds are extraordinary tools. For the most part, we all experience some amount of healthy amnesia; those rare individuals who can experience total recall can find it burdensome. The fact that we are able to relieve ourselves of the burden of hanging on to unnecessary memories and information makes our lives easier and makes it easier to access important information, it helps to keep our minds from being cluttered.
I Will Remember You
When I first came to understand my own amnesia, and to understand that with dissociative identity Disorder that I had been interacting with the world as more than one person, it was troubling. Therapists tried to help me by telling me that these ‘alters’, other aspects of myself, had formed to help me deal with traumatic events. But one day when I was looking through a box of old getting cards I found some things that hurt me. There were cards, addressed to me, from people whose weddings I had written music for, played at, people thanking me for my friendship, and I didn’t know who they were. I’ve had people tell me that I was known by a completely different name in a nearby city.
What I know today is that my childhood wonder about amnesia was perhaps naïvely prescient; I was curious about something that has been affecting me all along. And the interesting part with traumatic amnesia is that the memories aren’t really gone – they are just, to use computer lingo, in hidden folders, or inaccessible to certain users, or sometimes simply in the wrong folder.
When we have flashbacks, even if we don’t normally have access to those memories, something in our environment can trigger a link, open that folder, find that traumatic memory and hit “Run”, often with “repeat” enabled.
I think the word “triggered” is often overused lately. We hear it for anything that upsets someone. For those of us with PTSD, it’s something more than simply upsetting. When we trivialize the word ‘trigger’, we also trivialize the idea of trigger and content warnings. These aren’t there simply to prevent somebody from feeling bad; they exist so that people will be able to continue to function.
There was a time some years ago when I was triggered by an article I read. It affected me for days. It affected my ability te work, to sleep, to drive… I could be driving and see not the road, but the living room of an apartment in 1977 in Dover, NH, and I was just as much there as I was behind the wheel of my car driving to work.
Fortunately, we do have told to deal with trauma. There are therapists who deal with trauma, there are therapies that are effective. Nothing, of course, can erase the trauma; that’s effectively what amnesia tried to do for some of us. But we can learn to live with it. And one of the most important things I’ve been finding is to have good relationships, and to find a way to live a fulfilling life.
Sometimes finding people who love and accept you, especially if that was lacking in childhood, can be a double-edged sword. When you find these people, you begin to understand what you were missing. And it can hurt. Allot. But it matters so much. And it’s healing like nothing else can be. And healing is the point.
The best to of all, along with therapy, is to fill our present with good memories. They may not replace the bad ones, but perhaps we can overcome the bad ones with both quality and quantity.
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.
Morning Musings 