How Cults Harm People
I left 10 years ago. Why am I still talking about it?
In my last post, I explained what a cult is and how the group I grew up in matched that criteria. Today, I want to explain some of the ways cults harm people, or why I'm still talking about this 10 years later.
The experience of being in a cult is not something you can just shake off. I wish it were as easy as this:
In fact, it’s a little more like this:
It's not a piece of clothing you can just take off, drop on the floor, and never think about again. The rules and expectations create a real loss of mental and emotional skills that can affect people for a long time. This is called religious trauma:
The physical, emotional, or psychological response to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that is experienced by an individual as overwhelming or disruptive and has lasting adverse effects on a person’s physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.
The reason I'm still talking about this is that I've only just now learned, ten years after leaving, some of the ways that the experience still affects me.
Difficulty Making Decisions
Cults only want people to do what they're told. What the leader says is always right. So if your own thoughts or emotions or experiences don't agree, you have to suppress those. (Cults also usually have some way of taking up your time so that you have less time for thinking your own thoughts.)
Like many fundamentalists, TWI said that children's obedience to their parents reflected how they would obey God, and Wierwille’s standard for obedience to God was: “If God says ‘Jump,’ you don’t argue, you ask ‘How high?’”1
This means children were discouraged from thinking through things or figuring out how they felt from a very young age. I went into detail about how being taught to suppress my feelings of fear led to faulty decision making in this post, and I plan to post about other ways my thoughts and feelings were suppressed in the future.
Loss of identity
Similar to losing touch with your internal senses, there is a loss of identity in a cult. Our cult did this by emphasizing "who we are in Christ." It was only acceptable to be proud of or identify with the Christ in us, not our own personality or achievements, which at least for me made it hard to get to know who I was as person.
Anxiety
Even ten years later, I second guess everything I do. That may be partly my personality, but the cult trained me to constantly worry about missing God's voice. I didn’t even make this connection until I saw this post on Instagram last year:
This post connected so many dots for me, which I’ll discuss more in another post.
We also had a lot of rules (even though we said we weren’t like those other Christians who had rules). Missing one meeting meant being questioned. Women were supposed to be submissive to men. We were supposed to keep our things neat because a messy outside reflected a messy brain. I AM glad I didn’t live in constant fear of hell as a kid (since we didn’t believe in hell), but these rules still caused a lot of anxiety because it was never okay to mess up.
Difficulty with Friendships
We were always supposed to look at people as recruits, not equals, so friendship is still hard. I have a tendency to only give advice and not ask for it, which means I miss out on the valuable perspective of my friends, and the deeper relationships that come from that kind of sharing.
As much as I wish I could just “shake it off” as Taylor Swift says, it’s a little more complicated. Naming the ways I was harmed has helped me to have more patience with myself and to actively work on the skills I missed out on. I practice checking in with my body and feelings. I’m trying anxiety medication. I make a point now to ask my friends advice about things.
I never would have identified some of these issues if other people didn't write about their cult experiences. I’m trying to do the same with this blog and plan more detail about these things in future posts.
Edge, Charlene L. Undertow (p. 201). New Wings Press, LLC. Kindle Edition.