Morning Musings

In tuesday’s post I mentioned something I learned while in a residential trauma program for women. This took place at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. This trauma program was a turning point (one of many) in my healing journey. While there, my diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder was confirmed, and I will talk about that in some posts. I also became ready to face some of the trauma of my childhood.

Before this stay I had at least eight psychiatric hospitalizations, and I had seen numerous therapists, but I hadn’t been ready to truly face the trauma that had happened to me.

What I did know was that I wanted to be loved and accepted by my parents but that had always seemed unattainable. Still I tried, and tried, and tried. Then, during a workshop, I recall one of the facilitators say that “Love is not a sufficient reason to remain in a destructive relationship.” When I heard this, I immediately recognized many in my birth family as destructive relationships. I was certainly not a full and equal part of the family; for starters, I am intersex and for some reason, my parents and two of my brothers view this as a choice rather than a genetic fact. They see me as morally weak and spiritually deficient, and not as someone who was born with a rare set of genetic mutations.

When I was younger I had once told my parents that I didn’t want to live as a male, but their response was a threat to institutionalize me in the state mental hospital. This has happened to an uncle years prior, and while I was never told the reason he was sent there, the career of a brilliant young MSN was destroyed. My uncle has been a local celebrity as an artist, and had been gifted academically. By the time he left the hospital years later, he couldn’t play board games.

Even after this, I still tried to forge a closer bond with my family, but it was to no avail. As a child, I had been forced to live as male, and I had made it a practice to perform music at family events such as weddings and funerals. This continued for a time after i decided to live in a way that better aligned with my own identity, as a woman, but it caused a riff between me and my family.

It became increasingly clear that most of my family didn’t want ‘me’ there; they wanted their idea of me – they wanted who they wanted me to be rather than who I was. It became clear when I was prevented from singing at my Godmother’s funeral. It became most clear when my mom passed away and I wasn’t granted the privilege of being referred to by my own name in her obituary, with my family instead choosing to use a name for me that hadn’t been my legal name, let alone my chosen name, for decades. What was absolutely clear was that if I couldn’t be a son or brother, I wasn’t welcome. It didn’t matter that I am who I am because of a genetic condition. What matters is their beliefs about the situation. And an intersex daughter or sister isn’t part of the equation. The choice became one of harming myself to be accepted by my family, or finding another way. I chose the other way. I remembered the words of that counselor, and while I love my family, the price of being with them is too high.

Some stories aren’t as dramatic as mine, others are much more dramatic. We exist on a spectrum. Each story though, it’s equally valid – yours is a valid as mine. So you have relationships that are costing you more than they should? What steps can you take to make them more equitable?

And remember, while that counselor said that love isn’t a succubus reason, she didn’t say there were no other reasons.

Caution and trigger warning. For those who were members of abusive cults, this post may be triggering, especially so the included video.

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in a cult. Most of my family would vehemently deny it was a cult because I grew up ostensibly Roman Catholic, but it was a cult. Many evangelicals would claim that “of course it was a cult, you were in the Catholic Church and they believe so many wrong things.” Beliefs alone don’t define a cult, and there are plenty of evangelical cults out there.

So if the churches can’t define cults, why is that, and what, exactly then, is a cult? The first part of this question is simple: we’re actually discussing different things. In the Catholic Church, there are devotional cults, where the word has an entirely different meaning; it often applies in Catholicism to veneration of a particular saint, for example. This isn’t (ostensibly) the same thing as worship (the Catholic Church recognizes a difference between veneration, or dulios, and worship, hypetdulios – isn’t it nice to know some Latin words?, which is reserved for God alone. I have a great-grand-aunt, long deceased, who has been declared venerable by the Catholic Church. The religious order she founded, and the ordinary people who revere her could be considered the Cult of Catherine Aurelia. (Whether or not this is a cult in the next sense would depend upon how it would stack up to certain criteria.

So what then is a cult? How can we know one when we see one? Is there an easy way to identify and avoid them?

What a cult is can be tricky for most of us to spot. Most of us think of religious organizations, but this is only a part of the cult ecosphere. Cults come in many flavors, from martial arts groups, multi level marketing, Yoga and fitness groups, political and civic groups, and there are psycholgical and even one-on-one cults.

What common thread do all of these groups have? The one thing they share is undue influence. Every cult takes over an individual’s life. They begin to affect our behavior, our emotions,  our world view, they make us fearful to leave the group, they cause us to discount any information presented against the group or it’s leader,

Cults are dangerous because they hijack our identities and artfully use the best parts of who we are against our own best interests. They isolate us from our lives prior to joining, and if they can’t assimilate our families and friends along with us, they will isolate us from them to keep them from pulling us away. Their goal is to make dedicated servants, and nothing less. To what end depends upon the leader.

Some people think that they could never be caught up in such a thing, they feel they are too savvy. Well, are you intelligent? Are you passionate? Are you idealistic? Do you value your faith, the environment, fitness, diet, financial security, a political candidate or party? All of these, and more, are ways people have got involved in cults. Nobody joins a group because they wish to have their life hijacked. They join for a positive reason, either personal, or for a greater good. Cults prey on our ideals and thrive on our zeal.

Cults recruit and survive, for the most part, by not looking like cults. After all, if they advertised as being “most notorious”, or “best rated cult in the borough”, they wouldn’t do quite well. So cults look like ordinary churches, Yoga studios, therapy groups, MLMs (multilevel marketing companies) and other legitimate groups. When you first get there, they make you feel welcome, part of a family, like you belong, and always have. This is called “love bombing”, and it’s a very effective recruitment strategy.

Some groups will purposefully hide part of their doctrine or training from new members. (There are initiatory groups that teach in stages, which aren’t cults, so not being public with everything doesn’t automatically suggest that a group is a cult.) Some groups will dissuade seekers from looking for information about the group from unapproved sources. This IS a red flag.

Most groups will look exceptionally appealing at first blush – especially if you’re not looking out for cult-like behavior. It’s when they have you involved and invested that the demands start to pile on. These groups want you to feel dependent on them, that you need them, that your life revolves around them, and it is at this point that they will feel they have you safely hooked.

So what can you do to insure you don’t get stuck in a cult? The first thing that I would recommend is that you make sure, absolutely certain in your mind, that it’s always a possibility. Even a well established church can become a cult if the conditions are right. So it’s very important that we have constant vigilance and continuous evaluation of the groups we are a part of. We need to be willing to challenge the practices when we see them going awry, and we need to be willing to leave if those groups are unable to adequately address our concerns. This can be more troublesome for married couples and couples with children; while communication is always important within a family, if you begin to suspect undue influence from a group you belong to a a family, or from a group that one or more of your family members belong to, seek out someone knowledgeable about cult influence. It is important to be able to make your loved ones aware of that influence in a way that doesn’t harm your existing relationship. If, however, your loved one(s) refuse to leave, you are faced with a dilemma. Should you leave alone, or should you stay? And why? Staying should be for the purpose of trying to mitigate the harm done by the group, with the ultimate goal of freeing your loved ones from their influence. Gentle reminders of things pre-cut which you might have once enjoyed, or of people they knew on the outside may help stir memories, and may help to initiate a conversation about the negative aspects of the group.

But in the end, if you feel that you have exhausted all possibilities of extricating your loved one(s) from the group, it may be time to ask if you might be better off on the outside.

A very important lesson that I learned in a trauma program was that “Love is not a sufficient reason to remain in a destructive relationship.” your suffering does not mitigate their unknown or unacknowledged suffering. Not does it ease their felt suffering. And your exit might help them reconsider their reasons for remaining. But remaining helps neither them, nor you. On the outside, You, may be able to do more to expose the group than you could from the inside. But there may also exist the very real  possibility that your family will be lost to you. Some who have left have waited for many years for family members to join them; some have waited in vain.

This is the briefest look at why cults are so incredibly dangerous and destructive,and what an individual alone can do. It’s also  more reason to stay away in the first place, or to get out as soon as possible.

I am building a list of trusted resources in the curated links section of this web site. If you feel a need to reach out to someone, this can be a starting place.

Since I stopped driving to work I’ve become very aware of my feet. It takes a while to get used to walking 8-10 miles per day when you had grown used to walking 2-3 miles on an average day. Your feet, and the rest of your body need to adapt. Your feet may get some blisters at first, then they will develop callouses to better handle the task, and soon that walking is no longer as taxing as it seemed at first.

This is true for anything begin either anew, or after a prolonged hiatus. And it is just as true when this change is beneficial or necessary for us. We human beings seem to be excellent examples of Newton’s laws of motion. We are resistant to change, and when faced with it, it often takes multiple attempts before we find ourselves successful. We often need repeated pushes, the first moving is a bit, the second a bit easier, and after a few more we might be able to keep going. For others it can be much more difficult if it’s achieved at all. Change, for some, might seem a task reminiscent of Sisyphus and his stone.

I recall a very dear friend who suffered with addictions to alcohol and cigarettes. She was able to overcome her addiction to alcohol, and although she knew that the cigarettes were destroying her lungs, she couldn’t let them go. We had many conversations about this. She told me many times that she wanted to quit but couldn’t. The truth was that her desire to quit wasn’t sufficient to overcome that addiction. Like Sisyphus, each day when she pushed the stone of desire up the hill, the stone of addiction rolled back down and she found herself smoking again. My friend was not a weak person; she had overcome much in her life, but for some reason she couldn’t take the steps in her life that would enable her to live smoke-free. She couldn’t take the steps that would let her live. And the saddest part was that she knew this.

We all face challenges and nobody escapes life without experiencing some amount of trauma. This is why I chose Emily Autumn’s song One Foot in Front of the Other for today’s post. She asks, as we all do, so many questions when faced with one trouble and difficulty after another, but answers each of these with action placing one for in front of the other, taking each next step on the road to something better.

None of us were presented with guarantees when we entered this world; some of us were handed decidedly raw deals. Some of us were born in war torn regions, in parts of the world lacking in resources, into loveless families, as orphans, into poverty, some are born addicted to drugs. We do not choose this, but it is our starting point. Our job is to make, step by step, something of the life we were given. We are like architects  builders, carpenters. We begin with our life,which is the job site. We discover our talents, our dreams, our hopes, our wishes, along with our limitations and dislikes; these become our design criteria. And then we begin, usually in our twenties, construction. For some of us this means making a career, a family, or a home. Some choose a religious vocation. Some wander. Some don’t choose until much later in life.

Building that life, or rebuilding it, requires steady work, focus, and dedication. Caring and wise counsel from dedicated friends and family can be especially helpful, as can spiritual advice from trustworthy religious leaders. But you are the architect and lead contractor; this is your life and you are responsible for it in it’s entirety. The grand part about that is also the scary part; the success or failure, your ultimate joy or sorrow, is up to you. But here yet again lies another secret: most people who fail needn’t have done so. Many of us set our sights too high and deem ourselves failures for not achieving unattainable goals. Sometimes this comes from parents who demand perfection, but whatever the reason, measuring your worth by whether or not you are the best at something is ultimately pointless. It can give us something to brag about for a time, it can give us an ego boost, but there are very few records that will never be broken. We are unlikely to be the best at anything for very long.

If we wish to be happy and satisfied, if we wish to overcome our trauma, to eliminate our suffering, then we need to look at goal setting in a different way. I’ll use what I’m doing here as an example.

I could have said that I want to have a blog site that is top rated and able to support me financially within a year, and if I can’t do that, I’m a failure. That’s unrealistic, and I would likely fail if that was my goal. On the other hand, I can say that my short term goal is to produce a daily post that some people might find interesting enough to read. From there, I can start building this site, adding links to people I trust, building connections. I can register a trade name and have the blog as part of a business and when I publish my next book, I can use my own imprint, and I can help others who wish to publish – either to self publish, or if it’s a good fit, to publish with my imprint. And the measure of success will be the people that are helped, the lives made just a bit better. But what I do will be done, as Emily Autumn put it, but putting One foot in front of the other foot in front of the one fooot…

If you’re reading threes morning musings and they are helping you, or giving you something to think about, then I’m doing my job. I can say that today was a success!

Some people claim that religion has caused more harm than most anything else on earth. Indeed, many wars have been waged in the name of religion, and many people have been killed for defying some religious mandate or other. Some people have, and continue to use religion to enrich themselves at the expense of others, or to use religion as a means to exercise control and influence over people. Does this mean that religion itself is necessarily bad? I don’t think so, and here is why.

The Oxford dictionary defines religion as “the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods.” The first thing we want to know as humans is ‘why’, and that is the one question that science really doesn’t answer. Instinctually we know that our lives have meaning, but a purely materialistic view of the universe claims otherwise.

Likewise, science has given us much. We understand our origins through the science of evolution, and evolution helps us understand and prepare for the adaptability of disease organisms. Those whose rigorous adherence to literal interpretations of ancient scriptures do themselves and their followers as much, if not more of a disservice as those who decry religion when they speak out against science. Too often we hear preachers denying evolution, denying the age of the Earth or the universe, or other scientific principles that somehow threaten the inerrancy of their sacred texts.

Clearly there must be a middle road. Can there be a way to acknowledge the possibility of the supernatural while at the same time embracing science? Can we not keep the wonder of ‘why’ while honoring the discovery of ‘what’?

The photo for this post is of Haddonfield Friends Meetinghouse in Haddonfield, New Jersey. This is where I worship. It is A Quaker meetinghouse, and this is where I gather with Friends each Sunday morning. It works for me not because I think Quakers are right and others wrong, but because the Quaker religion doesn’t have a mandated system of belief that people must adhere to, there are no creeds, no priests, no official doctrine or dogma. They don’t even claim to be the only “right way”. If there is such a thing as an anti-cult, it’s the unprogrammed Quaker meetings. Unprogrammed refers to meetings that have no ministers and services that are generally silent unless someone feels led to speak – and in my experience, these are the least dogmatic of any religious groups I’ve found.

But my purpose here isn’t too promote Quakers, I might just as well have found myself in a number of other pacifist religions, but here is where I landed. What I found here was a community of people who are passionate, who sometimes struggle with each other over how best to live our core principles (those being simplicity, peacefulness, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship), and in the end recognize that being part of a community sometimes requires our personal desires take second place to what is better for the greater good. (An interesting thing thing about being a quaker is that everyone has an equal voice, and even a single dissenting voice on a proposition will often delay or derail that proposal. Again, we don’t have leaders, we must work together.)

I spent many years as a practicing Pagan, and I certainly do not regret them. Indeed I still find comfort in being connected to the circle of the year, and I am moved by the cycles of the moon. The old Gods remain familiar friends, but my life has taken a different path, a healing path, and religion played an important part in that.

I grew up in a Christian church, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned that the ‘church’ I grew up in would be much more accurately called a cult. This was certainly a case of religion being hijacked to serve the wicked purposes of a few men. But part of my healing required me to be able to separate what those men did from the God they claimed to serve. Part of that healing came about when I heard a Mennonite choir sing We Are Not Alone

To heal myself, it became important to heal my relationship with the God of my childhood. In the process I learned that the god of condemnation I had been taught about is a fiction; instead, I found A God whose desire is to comfort, to bring peace, and to heal.

I’m certain this is no less true for the Pagan Gods, but in my case, I didn’t have a relationship in need of mending with them. They did though bring me comfort for quite a few years while I was unable to be ready to heal this relationship.

What religion brings us in all of this is a body of people who can be there for each other, who can lift each other up. In Quaker terms we often speak of holding someone “in the light” which is a kind of deep prayer and meditation. We wish to be involved, if not physically, then at least spiritually in each other’s lives, and it shows. Quakers, by our numbers, are a very small denomination, but this tiny denomination has accomplished a great many things.

But that’s what religions are about, or at least what they should be about; a group of believers with shared purpose, coming together to accomplish great things, and in the process, healing and strengthening and building up the souls of the individuals.

If you’re missing something in your life, maybe you might look for a group of like-minded believers. Please be sure that it’s a healthy group, that it’s not run by some iron fisted leader, and that people aren’t pressured to stay if they find its not a good fit – this will help you rule out many abusive religious groups. Don’t be afraid to do a web search and find reviews, try to talk to former members as well as current members. And remember – you don’t have to stick with the first place you find. In fact, you would do well to visit at least a few places to help you clarify what, exactly, it is thst you are looking for. Remember, you aren’t looking for a building that you visit once or twice a week; you are looking for people who will become very much like family to you. Some people call this a covenant community.

Religion is family to the orphaned, it is healing to the broken, comfort to the afflicted, and a compass to the lost. It does this through the strength that members gain from their faith.

I know that I wouldn’t be here writing today if I hadn’t found such an amazing community and it’s my hope that everyone reading this can have a similar opportunity.

The other day my car died. The thermostat housing failed and I lost coolant and it overheated. I’m still not sure what it will take to get it on the road, but as soon as this happened I realized that it was an opportunity to do more writing. If I’m taking public transportation instead of driving, I can write while commuting. It was during one of my commutes that I was working on an article about forgiveness and I came up with a definition of forgiveness that meant something to me. I sent it to my therapist and she suggested that I start a blog and post it. The definition was this: “Forgiveness is the act of letting go of guilt that rightfully belongs to someone else.”

When most of us think of forgiveness, we get an idea that we have bought into that suggests a clean slate and a fresh start – let bygones be bygones, we should pretend that something never happened. That is simply wrong. When someone has betrayed trust, when someone has committed sexual crimes, especially against children, forgiveness cannot be a cause to reinstate trust. Sadly, in some cases – in some churches – forgiveness has led to just that, with disastrous consequences.

No, forgiveness can be granted, but forgiveness shouldn’t imply freedom from consequence or penalty, especially for criminal acts, or acts of broken trust. Rather, forgiveness is every bit as much for the one who was harmed as it is for the one who committed the offense.

In my own case, I was harmed, as a child, by abusive clergy. It has affected the entire course of my life. It is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking so much about forgiveness. The particular clergy persons who harmed me died years ago, so I will never be able to see them, but I do need to be able to let go of the resentment that has stifled me for many, many, years.

There is something called Complex PTSD, or Complex Post Traumaatic Stress Disorder. Most of us recognize that PTSD results from stress induced by a traumatic event. Complex PTSD comes about when someone is in a prolonged stressful situation and there is no way out of it. The difference is like being in a terrible battle, or being a prisoner of war for many months or years. It can happen to children who are being abused for many years. It can happen to people who spent prolonged time involved in cults.

I may never completely heal from my childhood, I will never know what “normal” is, because I never experienced a “normal” childhood, or anything remotely resembling it. But if I am to move forward with my life, I need to let go of what ties me to a painful past. I don’t mean by “letting go of guilt” that I feel guilty for what happened to me, rather, I mean that I’m holding on to “their” guilt – “their” responsibility – a responsibility that I have no means to hold them accountable for. It doesn’t serve me.

Every bit of energy I expend on the pain of the past is energy that I can no longer put to use for my present or my future. It is energy that cannot go toward my healing. Certainly I needed to feel this pain to understand it. I needed to feel the anger to understand it. I needed to hurt to know I had been hurt. I needed to feel the rage, the betrayal, the isolation everything that had happened to me. My mind had done an excellent job through traumatic amnesia at shielding me from much of this.

But now I can let go of all of that; every bit of it. And that is what forgiveness is. It doesn’t mean I forget. It doesn’t mean I pretend nothing happened. It doesn’t mean I would ever trust these people again. It does mean that I get my life back, that I no longer carry their burden for them. They may not carry it either, but that’s not my concern. They may not even feel miserable – that’s not my concern either. What is my concern is my own state of mind, and when my focus isn’t on them and the harm they did to me, I can focus more on doing what’s right for me and for those I love. And that, my friends, is what life is about.

My name is Deirdre and I’m here to talk about trauma, recovery, and how to live a life filled with joy in that recovery. At the moment, this isn’t an area where I’m a professional, but it is something I have a great deal of experience with. Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

I grew up in a cult in New England. That might sound strange and harsh, but I think that there are quite a few people who are in cults today and don’t even know it. But I’m not here to tell anyone to leave their church – I’m not anti-church at all! As a matter of fact, I’m quite involved and very happy in a Quaker meeting in New Jersey where I live – in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

What I am here to say is that freedom matters. And if there is anything in your life that is keeping you trapped and not bringing you joy, that is a problem, and something that deserves a second look. This can be your own thoughts and emotions, your use of substances, a church, political group, relationship, civic organization, fitness group – literally anything that is more draining than beneficial.

When I was quite young, I used to think of 60, 80, or 100 years as a very long time. But after I left my first cult, I went into another, and another, and another, and yet another. It wasn’t until just a couple of years ago that I finally realized that my entire life to that point had been spent under the control of other people, and I had never been allowed to explore who I was, or what I wanted. Now, in my 60s, I’m discovering that 80 isn’t very far away at all, and it’s up to me to pack in what joy I can find in whatever time I have left.

I could look back on my past with resentment and anger, but however much time I spend doing that is time that I’m not spending enjoying now and planning for my future. Of course there is still sadness, and there are still things about my past that I must deal with in the present – some of these are legal, some have to do with mental health. Few of us who go through some of the things some of us do can escape without long-term consequences, but while we must deal with these things, they don’t need to be the primary focus of our lives, any more than our physicians or jobs do. They are, of course, part of our lives, but we don’t live “for” these things – we have these things so that we can do the things we wish to do.

The image for today’s post was taken just days before I moved from New Hampshire to New Jersey. It’s a reminder of leaving things behind that were holding me back.

I started this blog because my car recently died. It forced me to take public transportation to work. I said to myself that it would give me time to write. I’m a writer, and I wanted to use the time I was commuting to write. One of the things I wrote this morning, I sent to my therapist, Esther. She recommended I start a blog. This is it – begun as a result of my morning musings – a result of a defective automobile.

I’m beginning to think that even if I get my car fixed, I might continue to take public transportation to work. It’s good for my health, good for the environment, and good for my writing. It will be good, too, to see what sort of community I can build here.

So, welcome to this journey!