Hi Jeanna, thanks so much for your story. It really does help. It's so unbelievable that there are such predatory people out there...

Daytripper: That's cool that you related to that! I TOTALLY agree with the whole respecting the law thing. I guess that IS one sort of "rock" we can cling to without any doubt: trying to do the right thing, not hurting others and rather trying to do good by others. And that's definitely something we can check against our own experience rather than against the words of "self-appointed experts".

Yes, exactly!

Respect for authority and law but not for self appointed leaders! Yes exactly. I have tried to put it in those terms. I call self appointed leaders 'self righteous'. They just use their own desires, likes and dislikes, to determine what is right. No thanks. Who made them an authority. I'll stick to the basic universal laws you know... don't steal, kill, etc. They can all keep their self made petty rules... you know... light a candle , chant, connect with the spirit of the moon.......whatever.......

And the worse thing about these 'mind control' people is how they judge, actually judge your thoughts. It goes on in main stream churches even. You know, the psycho babble. You have a car accident or something and some spiritual guru is telling you how you should have ''thought'' more possitively prior to the accident...and then the negative event would not have occured. No lie. People do that. Psuedo-therapists, phony religious leaders....they judge your THOUGHTS. How ridiculous! Did I kill someone? Did I steal anything? Am I cheating on my spouse or slandering my neighbor? No. So I'm good. I don't need any guru telling me what to think.

You are sooo right keep on thinking for yourself and NEVER set someone else up as an expert over you life!.

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Fishbulb
I'm sorry for your terrible experience, rickety.

You're in the right place. Coercion and mind control are also issues covered on this board, as well as abusive relationships. These are not necessarily marriages only; your relationship to your mentor would also fit into this category.

Read lots on here, keep posting and hang in there.

Hi all!
I've just visited this forum. Happy to get acquainted with you. Thanks.

Rickety, I think the biographies of most cult-leaders show that they started out as "one-member cults" because they share the same personality traits of severe narcissism, control freaks, etc.

You can count yourself strong for having recognized the problem while it was still "one-member". When I went to a psychologist for help because of cult issues in my family, I did not recognize that I was facing a cult and neither did the psychologist. But he did once exclaim that my family was the closest thing to a cult he had ever encountered. He was not willing to go further, and I eventually got help from a specialist, but I am grateful to that first psychologist for his honest exclamation because he tipped me in the right direction. The cult patterns of the family seemed to predispose us all to victimization in actual cults. I fell into NatLFed, one of my sisters got into just about every MLM and self-help guru cult going, and other relatives have been the victims of some fanatical religious cult stuff that goes on inside the Catholic church (but is not supported by it.)

My own cult experience is rooted in a "family cult". This is still a problem because of all the members of the rather large family who continue the pattern, which is particularly nasty.

I blame it on the fact that my mother, (who is now in Heaven, all forgiven) relied on my eldest sister to raise the rest of us and so she (that sister) became locked into a control pattern at an early age and never really grew up. She became a very successful person in life but she operated as a controller through all kinds of manipulative tactics of siccing one relative on another. I went into a real cult partly because I did not have a healthy family pattern from which to grow out into the world, and so when I looked for companionship outside my family, I found it in a cult that reflected the control techniques I already knew.

The family goes after the children if you separate from them but your adult children do not understand what happened in the past. I tried to warn my daughter not to accept an invitation to my sister's house but she did not take me seriously and she went, and I never saw her again, although I had several conversations trying to get her to protect herself. My brother saw what happened, but he wants to protect the family.

My daughter was mob-attacked and broken down. She went into hiding after that.

We cannot put our families in jail for something like this. I have been assured that if a few witnesses would come forward, it might be possible to put my sister in jail because she is known to the police to have intimidated witnesses, but as I say, she has been successful in life, and her victims mostly live in some form of hiding, and are too damaged to be witnesses against successful upstanding citizens who enjoy the protection of better-placed relatives.

If we do put my sister in jail, her children will attack the witnesses and the children of the witnesses.

And I would say that my sister started out as the leader of a one-member cult because she still keeps another sister as a psychological prisoner, they have been like that all their lives: my controlling cult-leader sister never actually had to punish anyone directly. She always had the next-eldest do anything she would have gotten in trouble for. Then as the rest of us grew up, we always faced that kind of thing from the two of them, before we were even old enough to have words for it.

I do know from the therapy that saved my life that my sister has severe narcissistic personality disorder, the hallmark disease of the cult-leader personality. The only comfort I can take is that I forced other members of my family to think about what they did to me and this enables the younger ones to protect themselves, even if they outwardly hate me for being outspoken.