Lessons on Leaving

Cult survivors make great little worker bees (and I say this with a lot of love, respect, and a huge dose of sarcasm), at least in the minds of bosses; especially second and multi-generational survivors. But this is because we spent years working in an exploitative and abusive system that formed the basis for our work ethics. While I think that many bosses probably do admire the work ethic of their survivor employees (and they usually are not made aware of the employee’s survivor status, because we often keep it hidden for fear of stigma), I think that there is little recognition of how the culture of the American workplace taps into and triggers the old wiring of survivors. So I wanted to do a post that explores and examines these things.

Some resources mentioned:

During a recent podcast interview, my friend and fellow survivor Lisa Kohn shared that while she was on tour to promote her memoir To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence, she had the opportunity to be interviewed for a popular daytime talk show.

She said that before she went on stage the producer was doing a pre-interview and asked her ‘were you brainwashed?’

I was tempted to completely derail the conversation and delve into a treatise on what thought reform is, and why asking a survivor if they were brainwashed is a stigmatizing question - at best. But I refrained and decided to explore those issues in this episode instead.

Resourced mentioned:

Some of the tactics that the Unification Church use to train members rolls up into the thought terminating cliché: that if someone is experiencing doubt, it is “evil spirit world invading.” These thought stopping techniques, also called a semantic stop-sign, are a mind control technique wherein loaded language is used to quell the cognitive dissonance that one experiences when encountering contradictory information or thoughts. It allows a person to remove the stress of the cognitive dissonance by avoiding all further consideration of a matter.

The concept was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, where he also referred to this technique as the as "The language of Non-thought.”

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Members of the second generation ex-Unification Church community are beginning to speak out about their experiences, going so far as to coin the phrase “first love trauma” in online conversations. It wasn’t a phrase I’d heard before, even as I’ve studied the intersections of purity culture and religious trauma. But boy could I relate to it.

So it made me wonder if there was any research on second generation adults who have left cults, and their first experiences with romantic love. I looked at the psychology of first love to see if I could make connections to what I’ve learned about the psychology of and abuses within cults.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sometimes I struggle to recall things from my childhood in the cult. There are long blanks in my memory, or when I do excavate memories, I have to sit with them for a long time and ask “did I hallucinate that experience?”

These days, I’ve been talking to a lot of survivors, many of whom are actively sharing their stories online. But the theme of doubting our experiences is something that seems to come up again and again. I began to wonder why that is.

Could it be that many of us blocked out memories simply to survive?

Resources cited in this episode:

The term “love bombing” seems to have come into the cultural consciousness in a big way in the past several years, perhaps because of the prevalence of toxic behavior in arena like online dating. Culturally we’re at a point where the term gets tossed around quite casually. A quick Google search on the term brings up cautionary articles from sources as varied as Cosmopolitan to Business Insider and Psychology Today.

Many articles highlight the fact that love bombing is a control tactic, and so go as far to say that it’s generally used used by people on the narcissistic personality disorder spectrum, especially in dating. They point to signs like constant compliments, showers of gifts and things moving quickly in relationships as being potential red flags. But many of these articles seem to miss the mark in terms of diving into how sinister love bombing really is.

Resources discussed or cited in this episode are:

A few years ago someone commented on one of my social media posts, asking me to explain why I felt that growing up in a cult was such a bad thing. So I wanted to take the time to answer the question fully. And to be clear, I don’t think that it should be the survivor’s job to take on the emotional labor of educating the public about childhood trauma in cults. But this is an area that I’ve been diving into a lot lately, and so I wanted to create content that other survivors could direct the curious public to, in case faced with a similarly impertinent question.

Cyndi H. Matthews' study referenced in this episode can be found here: Second-Generation Religious Cult Survivors: Implications for Counselors

And I also mentioned Alexandra Stein's book “Terror Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems”

In focusing on art as a healing tool, I want to hone in specifically on religious trauma because that area of focus is where my personal experience is rooted. However, I believe that many of the resources shared in this post apply to other areas of trauma as well. I'll start by defining religious trauma, then go into the developmental considerations of that trauma, and finally share some of the research around art as a healing and integration tool.

I believe we are all born creative, or at the very least, with the capacity to be creative. If we’re lucky, we grow up in an environment where the adults around us encourage and foster that creativity. But what happens if you grow up in a cult, or a similarly abusive structure? In this episode I explore what happens to creativity within the cultic milieu, using my story as a lens.

Overlaying bounded choice framework onto the biological need to survive within the human group, we can see that there is only the illusion of choice for people within cultic systems. At every crossroads, where my intuition was screaming for me to not take a prescribed path, my conditioning told me that total abandonment and death awaited down the other path. Even if I was told that I had a choice, did I really?

Resources mentioned in this episode: