Latest / Clear Path Christianity / The Ongoing Effects of Growing Up in a CULT || CPC Podcast Ep. 18

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The Ongoing Effects of Growing Up in a CULT || CPC Podcast Ep. 18 · Clear Path Christianity

• Cole Crone: Drop at some point in this. Starting to make a bunch of noise if you're gonna sit near the camera. Okay, see how this goes. Now that I'm now that I'm warmed up here. Unique New York. Unique New York. ⁓ okay. So in the last episode, I talked a little bit about some of the immediate challenges, let's say, of leaving a cult. You have things like the confusion, the grief, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the sorts of things that often come within the first weeks or maybe even months of leaving a cult. And of course, as I said in the last episode, some of these things linger on for years and years and years. Well That's the kind of thing that we're gonna be looking at in this episode. What what is it like years later? I'm I'm coming up on my wife and I are coming up on about seven almost seven years outside of the cult that we were born and raised in. So so what does it what does it look like now? ⁓ what what happens after you've begun to build an a new life and actually make some real headway on that path? Maybe you found a new community, maybe you found new friends. Is there any sense in which you've moved on? Right? What does it look like this removed from it? So, in in my experience, some effects fade rather quickly while others take much longer. Some require ongoing awareness that you have been influenced. At the worldview level to the degree that you need some subsequent deprogramming, or you have things that are just in your day-to-day life repeat foibles that you're constantly having to fight against. One of the one of the things that I've said frequently since coming out of a cult is that you can take a person out of a cult. That's the easy part. You can take a person out of a cult, but it's far more difficult to take the cult out of the person. So in this episode, I want to look at some of the lasting effects now that I'm about seven years removed, but what are some of the lasting effects of coming out of a cult? So the number one thing we're gonna look at here is what I'm calling ⁓ hyper-vigilance and fear of deception. So you have a you have a fear of deception that often causes some kind of hyper-vigilance. Or because you have been deceived in the past, you have this, you carry this hyper-vigilance with you everywhere you go. So for me growing up. I heard things like Satan is everywhere, false teachers are everywhere, deception is everywhere, everyone is trying to take you to hell. So eventually I ended up believing that if you trust the wrong person, that could cost you literally everything. that there were eternal consequences of trusting the wrong person, and that I was the type of person that could very easily trust the wrong person. Now, as a result of that sort of upbringing, former cultists are often highly suspicious, they're often extra cautious, and they're often very hesitant. And I am ⁓ I am very often those things. But but one of the things that I frequently experience still to this day. And by frequently I mean Of late, let's say an annual basis. I have this baked in deep in my psyche, this fear of deception, such that to this day, and I I haven't talked about this. I think my wife's probably the only person that knows that I do this still, but I I frequently still have nightmares wherein I realize what I have done and in leaving my community and wake up basically in a panic. ⁓ going, what what have I done? What have I done? Why why did I I've I've had it let me give you just a more a little bit more of a specific example. I had a dead relative ⁓ come to me in a dream and basically tell me that I had thrown my soul away. ⁓ why did I do that? I ⁓ I I I thought you were better than that. You know, those kinds of things and woke up just going, Holy cow, what what have I done? And of course, you know, it only takes like 10 seconds, maybe 30 seconds for me to realize, ⁓ okay, all right, I have actually made the right decision. I'm not freaking out about it still, but like my subconscious still has this thing in it that says that leaving the cult that I came up in was the worst decision I could ever make. And now that I've made that decision. I still frequently experience some, I don't know if you call it PTSD, or I don't know, maybe you call it PTSD. I don't what you call it, but either way. Being a thoughtful and discerning person is a good thing. And that thoughtfulness and that discernment serve me well when I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thinking, what have I done? Now, the problem is oftentimes that pendulum swings the other way and you end up spending most of your life being totally paranoid. And that's that's not good either. We we tend to struggle, by we I mean we former cultists tend to struggle finding that balance. So the second thing I want to look at is that we often have difficulty trusting authority. Many, many, many former cultists that I know, both people who came from where I came from and and others, we we grow up in a place where leadership historically sought to glorify themselves, to put themselves up on a pedestal rather than to serve others. And when people Put themselves up on a pedestal for their own glorification, and then they do so in the name of God, they right, they claim to be doing so in service of God, you tend to have issues trusting leadership. If that's your experience of leadership, you're gonna oftentimes have trouble trusting leadership. So oftentimes this trickles into other things, right? So some examples of types of people that former cultists continually fail to ⁓ to trust are authority figures, all types of leaders, whatever that whoever that may be, ⁓ teachers, institutions. We are postured against these kinds of people because we've had such bad experience with them in the past. When you've been lied to most of your life, cultists can swing the other way such that they won't allow themselves to be taught anything by anyone. Because everyone's a grifter. Everyone's trying to get one over on them because that's their past. That's all that they have experienced. So the bottom line, one of the things that I'm continuously struggling with. even to this day, is realizing this simple fact that healthy authority and abusive authority are not the same thing just because you call them both authority. Learning the differences have ⁓ learning the difference has taken some time for me. The third thing that I want to look at is what I'm calling black and white thinking. And and I gotta be careful with how I'm describing this. So hopefully I'm I'm clear by the end of this. But most cults train people to think in absolutes. And it's like Obi-Wan says: only Siths, only a Sith deals in absolutes. So Least according to George Lucas, it is unwise to think in absolutes. But that is what cultists are trained to. We we we think in dichotomous fashion. So there's there's true or false, no nuance in between. There is us or them, no nuance in between. There is inside, outside, no nuance in between. Now While I personally believe that there are things that are binary, there are things that are true and there are things that are false. But not everything is either true or false. There are some things that need to be nuanced. There there are gray areas in life. For example, like you can't be married and be a bachelor at the same time in the same way. That's an example that I use. often on this on this podcast because as an example of something that is either true of you or false. It can't be both. Now there are things that are not so clean to distinguish, and former cultists don't often get that. They're so used to black and white thinking that they they are uncomfortable with nuance. ⁓ certain things like disagreement between two people can be very threatening to them. ⁓ Let me give you just a common example from the Christian church, which is my particular context. You have people who are bel who practice believers baptism or credo baptism, and there are people who baptize infants or paedobaptists. These people are both well meaning, Bible believing Christians, and they see this issue differently. To a former cultist, that means that you are practicing two different religions. You can't be in the same Religion. You can't be following the same God if you have two different views like this. ⁓ they're they're often suspicious of things comp ⁓ claiming to be complex, right? To to occultists, everything needs to be simple. Everything must be black or white. If an issue isn't cut and dry, then they're very, very, very skeptical or suspicious of that situation. that they're very quick to say, well, it's only hard because you're making it that way. Right? If if you were a more faithful or trusting person, then you wouldn't you wouldn't have an issue with that particular situation. So I struggle to remember that someone can be wrong about certain things and not be my enemy. Now of course I'm not knowingly holding any wrong beliefs. I don't know anybody who's knowingly holding any wrong beliefs. Of course I think I'm right about everything. We always do. I'm happy to be taught. I'm happy to be shown how I'm wrong. But I'm not like waking up every morning believing a bunch of lies. Like I I think I have pretty good reasons to believe the things that I believe. But I have I have to I have to have the humility to realize when I am So alt although I'm not like actively believing falsehoods, I have had to learn to have the humility to recognize when I've got something a little off. One, two, three. Point number four. So point point number four, the the the fourth thing, I guess, that I continue to struggle with as a former cultist is the fear of social rejection. So in in high control groups, it it's not only crucial, but it is conditional to belong. Belonging is not just crucial, but it's conditional. You you have to belong and it's very easy to not belong any longer. It's very easy to lose that belonging. So for example, if you don't look like everyone else, act like everyone else, think like everyone else, you will be excluded. So you feel like that, you feel like if you disagree with people, you'll lose relationships or you'll lose status or you will lose acceptance, whatever the case might be. And so oftentimes my wife and I, to some degree or another, either one of us or both, will make attempts to people please. Like we will find ourselves people pleasing. We will find ourselves avoiding conflict even when there's a need for conflict, right? Sometimes, sometimes conflict leads to resolution. Sometimes it's the only thing that leads to resolution. But we we tend to shy away from it to our own detriment and to the detriment of others. We have we oftentimes have difficulty expressing opinions. We're either too strong about opinions that we don't have any right to be that strong about. Or we struggle to even formulate opinions because we have self-doubt or all kinds of other things keeping us ⁓ from critically thinking. And we have a fear of standing out, right? Where where we came from, conformity was king. And so if you didn't conform, that was literally the worst thing that you could do. And so ⁓ w we often struggle that to if we don't feel like we fit in, that we're we're going to be slowly pushed away. That was number four. So so number four number four was ⁓ the fear of social rejection. Number five is kind of a step up from that, and it is the the fear of perpetual social isolation. So in the last episode, I talked a little bit about how my wife and I, when we first came out of a cult and became part of a new community. We felt like the rest of our peers were miles ahead of us in so many ways. In our case, we were leaving a cult and joining a local Christian church. And so in terms of our theological understanding, we were just we would we were never gonna catch up. With like people were always going to be talking over us. Like we people would be talking about, you know, something that happened 20 years ago in Christianity. And we wouldn't know what they were talking about. It was like, I don't I'm not sure what that means. Like you know, there's there's Christianese terminology and there's you know, there's with any community, like even in like most jobs, right, there's jargon, right, that everybody who's kind of in knows and people who are outside don't really. And so that's something that most of us don't even really think about unless you come in from the outside and you don't know what everybody is talking about. And so socially speaking, we often feel like we're always going to be the weirdos at the party. We're both both of us, my wife and I, to some degree or another, kind of always are always in fear that we are going to be the weirdos at the party. We we commonly fail to relate to the experiences of others because our experiences have been so different than most of the people that we interact with. And this kind of makes us feel like we can't really contribute much to social situations. And so this there's sort of this this kind of fear that we won't ever really feel like we fit in in in our in our community. We don't ever really feel like we're ever going to be the in group. We're always going to kind of be out group people. Some other some other examples just that my wife and I kind of came up with off the top of our heads. There I'm sure there's many more. ⁓ we commonly make excuses. For example, ⁓ we grew up in a cult. This is a really common one, ⁓ that we make and we we find ourselves kind of constantly bringing it up a as an excuse for why we're so weird in certain situations. ⁓ we often laugh off trauma, which a lot of people use humor to deal with trauma and It makes people uncomfortable. ⁓ who knew? We're like, ⁓ it's okay. We we grew up in a cult. And people are like, yikes. ⁓ hmm. You know, we'll something we'll talk about something from our past that we're obviously still struggling with and we'll make some joke about it. And people are like, yikes, man. ⁓ you ever thought about therapy? And that's just something that frequently happens with us. ⁓ we often this is a big one for my wife. ⁓ she often assumes that people have some kind of ulterior motive for everything that they do. She she struggled a lot when we were first like meeting real, genuine, nice, kind people. That she was always like, what why are why is that particular person being so nice to us? What what what do they have? What's in this for them? Because they can't just be being nice, right? Because where we came from, there was always an ulterior motive. There was always something behind the actions. Right. There was something in it for the person. It wasn't never just about being nice or kind or genuine or whatever, right? So there's that constant suspicion. And we we often feel embarrassed or inadequate in social situations. And it's kind of one of those things that we're just kind of still dealing with and hoping eventually goes away. Okay, so that was number what, six? Can you help me keep track of the numbers? One, two, three, four, five. This is number six. Okay. So number six is identity reconstruction. Now, I have talked a lot about identity. I would say identity is probably one of the top themes for me on this podcast. When you identify with a particular community for all of your life. And then you no longer identify with that particular community, you you don't really know who you are because of identity fusion, who you are apart from that group. Because cults make membership the the core of the cultist's identity, such that leaving creates this vacuum that is. At times very difficult to fill. And so without the cult, you wonder things as basic as who am I? Who am I without this? Who am I without these people? Who am I without this structure? Who am I without this rhythm in my life? What's left of me when you strip all of this other stuff away? I don't I it's hard to tell. It's very difficult. It's one of the hardest things to do is to reconstruct who I actually am apart from all that. Because I don't know anything apart from those things. So the second level of question you might ask is, what do I believe? I spent all my life believing all these lies. I spent all my life trusting these people that were either going along with the scam or Or weren't, or you know, like were victims as well, but I c I can't tell. I don't know what to believe. These people told me this, but what what what do they know? What do I know? Another level of question you might have is what is my purpose? Right? My purpose was always this place. My purpose was I was born here, I was raised here, I was expected to stay here, I was expected to. Be the person that I was told to be. That was my purpose. Without that, what is my purpose? I'm I'm st I'm still kind of asking that question. Well, a lot of these questions have answers. There are lingering effects here, even seven years later, of answering these questions. I can answer them better now than I could seven years ago. But it's still a struggle to answer them. ⁓ It seems to me that. There's another layer of this. As I've described before, many cultists develop a character. And and that character is one that is acceptable to the group. This is kind of how I've described my upbringing. ⁓ I couldn't be the person that I wanted to be, so I had to develop a character that was acceptable to my community. So rather than act out who I actually am as an individual, that was what I did. I I played my role. And I am still sorting out. What aspects of me are the role that I was expected to play, and what aspects of my character are actually me in the final analysis. So when when I became when I became a Christian, obviously my core identity became that I'm in Christ. I'm a disciple of Christ. ⁓ It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, in the life that I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Some of the earliest verses that I memorized when I became a Christian to answer these kinds of identity level questions. However, at the lower level, personality things, for example, these are still often a mystery to me. I was talking the other day with a group of my friends, sort of about this very same thing. They will, I will talk about something that I. Like or something that I've spent a lot of time doing, and they will ask me, Well, is is that the character that you were playing, or is that actually part of you? for example, I have discovered that I'm very uncomfortable in large groups, even though for most of my life I pretended that I wasn't uncomfortable in large groups. But recently, ⁓ I found that my love for golf was actually part of me. And not just something that was imposed on me by my former community. And so it it's nice to sort those things out, but there's a process of self discovery that is taking place even here seven years later. Make sure the computer gets plugged in as soon as possible. I'm just doing my conclusion and then I'm okay. Okay. So obviously growing up in a cult shaped me in many ways that I still recognize today. some effects faded quickly, others required years and years and years of growth. Some still require intention, attention, and ⁓ transparency, close friends. My wife and I are still working through things together. That's a process. If if you are a former cult member and you recognize some of these patterns in your own life, don't be discouraged because ⁓ awareness often feels like you're just spotlighting your failures, shining a light into the dark corners of your psyche and seeing what's actually there. Taking a flashlight into the closet to see what skeletons there are. But and and however terrifying that can be at times, trust me, I know, I've found that the awareness is actually evidence of growth. The more we become aware of the things that are holding us back, the more that we can, the more information we have and the more ability we have to overcome those things. For me as a Christian. The more things that I find out that are still holding me back, the more things I am able to take before the cross and and give to the Lord and to say, I can I'm powerless to overcome these things without you. And if you're not a Christian, I would urge you to get that tool in your tool belt because it has been ⁓ of infinite benefit. I wouldn't be a third of the way down this path that I am if I hadn't left a cult and became a Christian. So my encouragement to you is to at least Have the courage to shine the flashlight into those dark corners. Realize the things that are still holding you back because it's a process. Recovery is a process. We talked about this all last episode. We're still talking about it in this episode. Recovery is a process, but it is a process that we can get through. And so I hope that this episode has helped you to see how yes, there is some areas that are changing slower than others, but areas are still changing. There are still effects now, but there are fewer than there were before. And praise be to the Lord. Good? Yep. Okay. ⁓ sure.