I grew up in a charismatic church in the UK that was by most standards definitely a cult. my dad was a church elder - not elected, but chosen by another elder, because he had so-called "spiritual gifts" of leadership. I planned to write examples of what was common forms of 'worship' in this church but I can't put it into words. I was sexually exploited as a child by elders in this church including my father. only men could be elders and only men with special spiritual gifts who could prophesy and speak in tongues. Whatever they said went because they were supposed to be a direct link with God and Holy-Spirit filled. women were inferior. my dad had affairs with many other women and my mum was expected to be loyal to him (unless another elder wanted his way with her then that was ok but she had no choice in the matter). in worship sexual behavior was encouraged as an expression of the holy spirit. parents were advised to hit their children with a stick and advised to hit in areas where welts wouldn't show. I had my bones broken. I left when I was 14, I was shunned because I developed mental illness, at first my mum accused me of being a witch or a satanist because I was cutting my arms, they took me for deliverance ministry to try and drive the demons out of me. in the end it was easier for my parents not to make me go. I shamed my family and my dad left because of this but continued to abuse me even though he'd left (but not as badly). he got scapegoated by the church and shunned as well because of me. I don't speak to them any more and got my dad arrested, but nobody else at the moment, my sisters and cousins etc, are wanting to speak out about any of this. I don't blame them.

I now even ten years on still find it difficult to fit into normal society. my social life as a child was far from normal and revolved around the church/cult. I find myself being very afraid that I will go to hell for leaving and have even had hallucinations related to demons etc when I have been so afriad. Sometimes I am so confused about what is true and what isn't. I am spiritually in pieces and swing from hating God to denying his existence to praying and begging his forgiveness. I don't know anyone who has been through anything similar except my sisters and cousins who refuse to talk about it. How can I move on and live my life and be a regular constructive member of society? Can anyone offer me any advice on how to deal with my upbringing? I'd be greatful. thanks.

Hi there
I was really touched by your post and have been thinking about it quite a bit. I can't believe what you have been through and I think you must be really brave and strong to have survived all that. I hope that there can be some good that comes out of it all for you, one way or another. My heart really goes out to you and I am amazed at what the human spirit can take.

I didnt have the sexual or physical abuse that you had but I certainly had the mental and spiritual abuse in a big way. My group followed an Indian Guru who considered himself to embody Christ and all other spiritual masters as well as being better than them (naturally for a cult leader!) I joined in my late teens at a really impressionable time and I fully took it all in and tried to really please God and sacrifice myself to God in accordance with the group rules. I tried so very hard to give up my self to God however I wasnt able to completely become just a robot for the leader. I blamed myself for this and since leaving the group I have also struggled to fit in to regular life again.

In my group the idea drummed into us was that there are so called 'hostile' forces which you are protected from in the group. Once out of the group these forces will 'get' you via the unsafe world around you. So only people in the group are safe to be around which makes it very hard to act naturally when everyone you talk to is not in the group. My leader told people they would get cancer or be hurt by these forces and for me I got the idea that this would most likely happen thru someone attacking me. This has had the effect of me feeling frightened at night and hearing noises; thinking someone is breaking in to attack me. At times it has been very real. I havent completely overcome this yet. So I can relate to what you said about hallucinations about demons.
I also heard an ex scientologist saying that they were taught that aliens could enter their mind and affect them. It helps me a little to hear the other groups' ways that they were tied to their group by fear because it gives some perspective.

The other issue I have that sounds similar to yours is that of my relationship to God. The group taught me how to see God and that there were many things I had to do to be accepted by God and not suffer when I die. So after leaving there is a huge challenge to separate the groups' illusionary idea of God and my own idea of God because they were totally intertwined. For me I was taught to always be praying and mediating and that to do anything for myself was going against God. So I felt guilty and afraid at everything I did practically. I am now learning to overcome this slowly. But I have been so tortured by fear of God and it has been just so hard.

I spent a lot of time writing down my beliefs from the group and analysing them and trying to work out what could be true and not true to try and find something that I could believe that would also give me peace and allow me to live. Various things have helped and one of the biggest is hearing from others with a similar issue.

I feel that I understand the pain you are going thru because I also know that agony very well. Knowing that you are not alone is hopefully of some comfort.
Wishing you the very best in you journey,
Pegasus

Hi Bea,
I know how you feel. I know what you mean about thinking that no one else has been through the same thing. Ironically it is that feeling that most of us survivors have in common...feeling alone...like the experience was so unique. Like Peagasus, my cult was a little different than yours but still, I really understand how you feel. I also had/have a hard time separating my own idea of God from the group's. Fear of death, hell and bad spirits plagued me for a very long time. Very long.
Being so afraid that you have hallucinations may seem like an incredibly strange thing but it makes perfect sense. There are therapists who could be a big help as long, I think, as you tell them about the cult....I was helped tremendously by a therapist. I wasn't so forth coming with my cult experience at first but finally, when I told her about it she was able to help.
There are wonderful books about dysfunctional families(I love Bradshaw), and they can help I think because in a way, a cult is just one huge dysfunctional family.
I got a tremendous peace in my life after I read the Bible for myself and I started in the end..you know...Jude, 1Peter and 11Peter and 1John, 11John, 111John etc. These are letters which warn very strongly about false teachers and preachers and that is just what these cult leaders/elders/preachers are. It's ironic I think that the very book they pervert has such clear warnings against them. That helped me. My cult also went through a brief ''tongues'' phase in its early years. I did a word search on a web site for ''tongues'' in the Bible. It means language. Period. Tongues and Language are used interchangeabley. A person who speaks in a different tongue is just speaking in a different language...period. It's that's simple. The only reference made to the ''tongues of angels'' is a hypothetical statement made by the Apostle Paul. No one babbled like an idiot (no disrespect intended) but..if someone is babbling incoherently than they really need a mental health check(my opinion...again, no offense), and those of us who feel ''disturbed'' by it are really the healthy ones I think.
I also went through many years of my life, like you, where I would waver between anger towards a god I really didn't believe in and...wanting forgiveness from a God that I wasn't sure even existed.
I finally just decided that whatever god the cult preached was not my god. Period. Then when I did seek after God and wanted to pray or inquire about God, I would keep saying ''I don't believe in the god of the cult''.
Don't worry about not fitting in to normal society. Now-a-days everything goes and nothing is normal. Everyone is dysfunctional in their own little way.....being abnormal makes us normal. You know the expression....''insane in an insane world makes you sane''......
I really hope that you are helped by this and by other posts and knowing you are not alone.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/13/2009 03:53PM by Sallie.

You make some great points there Sallie. I have to say, I still feel fairly alone and different to other people around me. In part this is probably because the cult taught me to feel different -we were the chosen special ones and anyone else was somehow very different to us and not spiritual. As well as that I feel different because I am - everyone I mix with is not really able to understand my experience, or doesnt know about it. That can feel like I have a secret, or that people dont know the real me.
The thing is in the cult we were all the same, clones. Now actually everyone is different and that takes a bit of getting used to. People have all different issues and life challenges and we are not all the same anymore. I find myself often wanting to find people the same as me, but really that is not possible. The challenge is to feel entitiled to be the individual that I am and allow myself to show that without trying to fit in and be the same as whoever I am with. We are now allowed to be different from other people and nothing terrible is going to happen to us.
Somehow there needs to be a new form of relating whereby we can be friends with people who are different from us without having to make ourselves the same as them.
In the cult it was a conditional friendship - there were signs that if you didnt make yourself dress the same, talk the same, show the same feelings etc you would not be accepted.

I think it is great if you can find a good therapist - Im sure we can all benefit greatly from good help like that when we come out. As well as that it seems that many counsellors do not understand cults and can minimise the impact the cult has had. I had a useful counsellor who taught me a lot about boundaries but didnt really understand the cult. She was great though, invaluable. Later on I went to a well respected therapist who had had a book published and was well established and I was traumatised by my experience there because she seemed to be saying that just beacuse i had been in a cult for a few years was no reason why I had to hang on to the problems i was having. That was a really upsetting experience because I thought she must be right and that I was doing something wrong again. I did learn from that to trust my own experience and now I would not believe something that didnt add up with me, no matter who the person is.

thanks for your helpful posts. I have had some counseling and support workers etc, but I didn't tell them much about the cult. In fact, I only recently was able to call it that - a "cult". but it was by every definition of the word. I still feel like a fraud or someone who is over-reacting or some kind of traitor when I say that. For a long time, I just thought that's what christianity was. Through reading online it becomes more and more apparent what it truly was. I have just got a new counselor who helps survivors of sexual abuse and I might be able to talk with her about it, I hope. I wonder though if it will stress her, I don't want to put on her etc...I know that's her job but does she really expect to deal with things like this? I don't know.

I relate to what you say about learning to accept that we can be different, this not being allowed within the cult. It's scary leaving or being shunned because you are suddenly thrown into a world where everyone is different to you and you've no idea who you are any more as before the cult defined you. I've got my head round that a bit in the last ten years, I know myself better but it's still a struggle and I constantly think about the deeper meanings of things that other people wouldn't give a second thought to. Also I swing from believing loads of weird outlandish things to being totally skeptical and not believing anything. Sometimes I detest religion and sometimes I feel empty without it and read different types of religious texts fanatically.

I guess it's a step forward that I've realised what it was - a cult, a twisted version of christianity that probably even most charismatic christians wouldn't agree with. It was not christianity and it was not normal and there is nothing wrong with me for rejecting it. If I hadn't I might still be there, taking part in the recruiting of others and abusing people the way I was abused. At least I will be more wary of being drawn into that sort of thing in the future.

It sounds horrible thinking that people will attack you. I don't think most people realise how much these groups can mess with your mind, how terrifying it can be and how it affects you. I think from what my partner has said, being part of the military is similar. Even if you've never been in conflict, leaving can mess your head up because your whole life revolves around it, you know nothing of an adult life outside of it, it controls the way you think and act and it defines you, for years. Then suddenly you are out and you are a 'nobody', like everyone else, your rank means nothing, you don't wear a uniform, nobody needs an employee who knows how to target laser guided missiles etc. you must feel you don't have a place in the world and don't know what to do with yourself. So I guess through my partner I can find some understanding too as I think the military, by the sounds of it, operates like a giant cult. anyway I am goingon a tangent...

thanks for your replies they were helpful...and thank you for your understanding.

It took me a long time to see my group as a cult too. I felt kind of embarrased at first, as if I was over reacting, making some kind of drama out of it when it wasn't that bad. But slowly I have realised it was pretty bad and it does meet the characteristics of a cult. Now I feel that cults can be one of the worst perpetrators of abuse - mental and spiritual abuse and to have your mind messed with to the extent that cults can do, is a serious thing - it can be truly torturous. That is no drama, it is just simple truth. But it takes time to metally adjust to seeing the truth about our groups. Now I feel more that I am a survivor of a cult and I kind of accept it more. So I know what Im in for - that old habits and fearful beliefs are still there and I have to deal with them regularly. I spent so many years thinking the fearful thoughts of the groupthink, that I suppose it is going to take time to change to new and healthier ways of thinking.

I also felt afraid sometimes of stressing people or putting things on to them, the way you mentioned with your counsellor. I have that problem in part because of the way I learned to relate in my family as a child and the expectations and inappropriate boundaries I learned there. I have re-learned a lot about boundaries, some of which was new to me but may be just common sense to other people. Now I feel that I am entitled to raise an issue or say something and the other person is entititled and able to say if they dont want to deal with it. I dont have to be so careful about things because they are capable of setting their own limit. Actually we don't stress people just be asking for something, that is a false idea that one of my parents put onto me -making me responsible for their feelings; blaming me inappropriately.

It is a good point about people who come out of the military - I also heard of a friend of a friend who had a hard time adjusting to the world after coming out of service. It must be like going to a whole new world and you would need help to make the adjustments to that.
The trouble is when we leave a cult, if we dont know what has happened to our thinking, we can continue to be ruled by the cult thru our beliefs, even if we are out of the group. Thats what happened to me. Then when you realise you dont want those old beliefs what do you do? You whole entire philosophy and way of seeing the world has been thrown upside down and you dont know what to replace it with. I think everyone does need some kind of belief system, some things that you believe are true, in order to make sense of the world and have some sanity in how to deal with life. Regular people already have things they believe in, but coming out of a cult it is unclear how to make sense of pretty much everything. And of course we dont want to jump into something else and make the same mistakes. It is a challenge to find a new way of looking at things that suits us when the cults do such a good job of teaching that you should not have your own individual way of looking at life. so fear and doubt come in so often when we start to hesitantly make our own ideas. That has been my experience so often.

I think after ending up in the kind of situation where your life is shattered because of these groups, you have to live in a different way. What they try to do to you is get you trapped and bonded to some mind patterns and when you come out you are still trapped in these. It then can feel like you need some other mind stuff to replace their stuff with. I actually think you should try and live through your soul and so then you don't have to be caught up or bonded to any mind-stuff. What that means to me is that there is part of me that knows what to do and how to behave and doesn't need any cultural or informational input. It can seem like a fight between the two parts but I think after cult damage you have to live through something deeper.

Thanks for your response billy. I wrote that post over three years ago and it has got easier. I've found doing a lot of reading and research into various cults and charismatic churches has helped me a lot. I've also started getting therapy and that's really helped me too. I agree with what you say about the part of you which just "knows" how to behave without the cultural input...like an instinct. I have come to realise this and it's become sort of a spiritual thing for me (not religious). I like the taoist texts because they seem to follow this...that there is some sort of instinctive force within us that tells us right from wrong.....not a book or another person. and that right and wrong is different for every person as an individual.

Thanks for understanding.

Yes it's some deep thing that everyone can access. I feel that I only want to function through that now. I just can't get into another situation where I am having to live through some conditioned mind patterns for their benefit. I wish the people I had seen early on afterwards had told me to connect to that instead of all this head stuff. I think they don't have a clue some mental health workers. It was hard for me to realise that.. Some of these people also get this idea that you are hanging onto this or this idea of being a victim, but it's not so simple like some choice to have corn flakes for breakfast.