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Hopeful Soul
eye witness accounts and experiences will build understanding of what is really going on in Bluffdale, UT. This is posted in that spirit.
And continuing in that spirit, I decided to post my experience with Impact:
A few years ago, my first child was born. It was a wonderful time at first, however a week after I gave birth, my hormones went crazy and I was overcome with severe Post Partum Depression, anxiety and Panic Disorder. I went into deep despair, depression, anxiety, had nightly gory dreams and constant panic attacks. (Very similar to what "sane again" described in a recent post.) The birth of an expected child is a cause for celebration, not deep despair, and there had been no recent tragic events in my life so it was obvious that I was sick solely due to fluctuating body chemistry. Because of this, most of my own efforts to get better were futile and luckily, antidepressants prescribed by my obgyn were a great antidote. Within a couple weeks I improved and within 4 months I was able to stop taking the antidepressants and I was pretty much back to normal. However, I did have a lingering problem. I had, a shaken faith in religion, feelings and spirituality. The problem was that my logical mind was the only thing that kept me remotely sane for awhile, and I didn't trust my feelings anymore. Also, my previous and flawed understanding of religion was that if you were living it right, you were happy. I was living a good life, yet I had temporarily been as far from happiness as I'd ever been. I struggled over the next few years to trust spirituality and my emotions, but wasn’t making any headway.
Anyway, fast forward 2 years. A friend of mine was convinced to attend Impact by a friend of hers, and returned from quest highly recommending it. She thought that Impact could help me recover the trust in my feelings and spirituality that I had lost after dealing with my post partum issues. She also said it could help better parts of my life that were already good, heighten my self confidence and I could meet new friends. I was very skeptical at first, but when my Mom offered to pay for it, I decided to try it out.
When I was at Quest I followed all of the instructions to a tee in hopes that I could attain all that was promised. This of course, had me unknowingly turn off the logical part of my mind, so I didn’t have a real chance to analyze what was really going while I was there. I am naturally a shy person, and I've worked on this over the years, and while I was there I put my most confident and friendly self forward. Whenever I had a question or comment, I stood and spoke, after which, Justin usually made a fool of me. I ended up in a generally mean, cliquish, and contentious group. When Justin told one person to leave because they weren't open, the group started yelling "Get the hell out, we don't want you here!" and some started to get up to physically remove him. I was ripped to shreds during the feedback arcs. (Things were said like: you are a loser, I couldn't be in a relationship with you because you wouldn't be worth the work it would take, you’re weak and I would walk all over you, you’re a scared little girl, you sucked all the energy and joy out of this space when you entered it, etc) I listened as Justin said things like "I'm not talking about religion here" and then 5 min later "There wasn't a war in heaven because heaven is unconditional love". The "screaming and beating of the chairs" to release past hurt, was almost pointless for me because I didn't have any major lingering problems with my parents or other relationships. So I didn't have the release that many others did.
After graduation, I was excited to be home with my family again, and the euphoria from that was stronger than anything from Impact. I left kind of confused, but I found myself recommending it to a couple people (I’ve talked to all of them recently and told them not to go). I wrote down everything that I thought I learned from Quest and implemented the teachings into my day-to-day life. Being the "real me" all the time was feeling pretty good at first, but I started hurting people's feelings because I wasn't being as sensitive to others as normal. The other "tools" just weren't working, and I started noticing that all they were doing was making me blame myself instead of the "tool" when it wasn't helping.
Then one day, when I was playing a computer game with my competitive brother-in-law, he was egging me on and said something that hurt my feelings a little bit. It wasn't something that should have been a big deal, but on the way home I started sobbing. That night, I had a nightmare about being back in the feedback arcs. The next day I noticed I had anxiety whenever I was talking to someone I didn't know very well. Whenever someone inadvertently used an "impact word" I also noticed that it was an anxiety trigger. Because of my experience with anxiety and depression before, I recognized these feelings pretty quickly, and it really scared me that anything to do with Impact was triggering this kind of stuff. I was reluctant to answer the phone or talk to anyone, because I was afraid that my group’s impressions of me from the feedback arcs, were a reflection of everyone’s honest opinions of me. If that was what people generally thought of me, when I was trying to be my best, I wondered why I should even try anymore. I realized that my "walls" that impact had tried to take down in Quest, were mostly there to protect me, and that all it was really for was to have me be more open to their "processing" and as a side effect, I was open to reckless psychological damage.
That's when I first joined the rickross board. Reading throught it confirmed my fears that Impact was psychologically reckless, but I also saw that Impact was even worse in the upper levels. Around that time was when the full realization hit me. I was shocked at how easily I had accepted there now obviously flawed and dangerous beliefs. It sickened me how so many people in my group were completely convinced that Impact had life's answers, and that their life was changes in the space of four days. I recalled a person in our group who was a convicted sex offender, and since he thought he had been "cured", he nor anyone else saw a problem with him bonding with the 17 year old girls in our group. (I don't mean that to sound so judgmental, however, it showed me how potentially dangerous their philosophies were.) I saw how easy it was for someone to be brainwashed without them having any idea it was going on. I started noticing similarities between Impact's mind manipulation, and techniques used by: my parents raising me, church, school, peer pressure, etc. All of a sudden it seemed as my reality had become an illusion and I had no idea what was truth or real anymore. When someone's reality seemingly crumbles before them, it is a very psychologically damaging experience. I had a relapse of the deep despair I'd experienced with post-partum depression and I could barely function for a week. My self-esteem was shattered, my feelings had "betrayed" me again, and my trust was non-existant. (Ironically, when I did the "trust exercise" at Quest, I told almost everyone I trusted them.)
Since then, I've been talking to a therapist, to friends and family, and researching a lot. I'm starting to find out the difference between mind manipulation and parenting, religion and school. Reality has started coming back into focus. I am now able to recognize "cultish" behavior fairly easily, and conversely also recognize healthy methods of teaching, parenting, religion, and self improvement. For example: I recognize more ways that authoritarian parenting can damage a child, or how some people can essentially be in a cult, (even when what they belong to isn't necessarily all that cultish), simply because of the fanatical way they treat and view their the organization or belief system. I still have a lot to work through, though, I'm still reacting psychologically to "impact triggers" and I have trust and self-esteem to rebuild.