Lessons on Leaving

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.

“Before I went on stage the producer was doing a pre-interview and asked me, point blank, ‘were you brainwashed?’” she said.

There was a long pause where both the interviewer and I stared into our webcams, mouths hanging open.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I finally managed.

“Nope.” Lisa shook her head and put her hand over her heart. “Swear to God.”

I must have audibly growled before muttering, “What a horrible question. That is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what thought reform is.” I might have also slammed my fist on my desk. “And what a horrible, shaming thing to say to a survivor!”

At that point 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 blog post instead.

Some of the tactics that the Unification Church use train individuals to use thought terminating clichés, like when someone is experiencing doubt, it is “evil spirit world invading,” so they stop engaging in critical thinking. 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.”

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.

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?

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 arenas 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 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.

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 write a post that other survivors could direct the curious public to, in case faced with a similarly impertinent question.

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.

Let’s start by defining religious trauma. According to therapist Sheri Heller, who specializes in treating complex trauma, addictive disorders, survivors of narcissistic abuse in addition to religious and spiritual trauma,

“Religious or spiritual trauma is a form of psychological abuse and brainwashing that inculcates the shameful message that we are sinful and must live in a constant state of penance and atonement to escape the ravages of hell and God’s punishment. This kind of fall-redemption theology uses fear to ensure dominance and control. Essentially it sets up Stockholm syndrome with the spiritual/religious leader and with one’s idea of God.”

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.

In their paper Creativity and Cults from Sociological and Communication Perspectives: The Processes Involved in the Birth of a Secret Creative Self, Miriam Williams Boeri, Ph.D. and Karen Pressley state that “Creativity […] is partially dependent on recognition of and acceptance by those who assign value to one’s creativity.”

However, for many people who have experienced high demand regions, groups, or abusive family dynamics, their creativity was diminished, or outright discouraged. This is because creativity is not only inherently an expression of our inner selves, but it is associated with the generation of new, perhaps divergent, ideas. Therefore, if our inner self and creativity are not in alignment with glorifying the abusers who seek to control those in their congregations, groups or families, then it is seen as a threat.

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?

Although media coverage of topics like cults and QAnon are important, in that they help us understand the very real threat of radicalization, I sometimes struggle with how the coverage is handled. Oftentimes the subject comes off as “crazy,” or is treated like a circus sideshow. Rarely is the coverage nuanced enough to help viewers understand what indoctrination is and how it happens. More often than not, we come away thinking, “at least that could never happen to me.”

The question “Why didn’t you just leave” is one I’ve heard more times than I care to count and, sadly, I think that’s something many cult survivors can relate to. This is also a question that many survivors of domestic abuse/intimate partner violence are faced with. As a survivor of both, I want to draw a direct line between cultic abuse and domestic abuse. Because the more that we understand about these systems of control, how they are similar and how they function, the better we can understand and support survivors.

Hello friends and kind strangers. After many years, I’ve decided to try blogging again about the things that have been rattling around in my brain. Right now it’s not quite Spring in 2021, and we’re inches away from the anniversary of when the COVID pandemic shut things down in the state of New York. Plus, we are all only a few months past the riots at the US Capital. This has me thinking about trauma, both collective and individual, healing and cults. So, that is what I will be sharing about.