Latest / Clear Path Christianity / What I Was MOST Afraid to LOSE || CPC Podcast Ep. 15
Transcript
- Cole Crone: Okay. If I can get my notes up. I'm gonna need a strip of tepee for blotting out my Swit etc. I'm gonna give me ⁓ me stopwatch going bruv. Alright, alright, alright, alright. Alright. So one one thing I will do 'cause I'm close is I will probably need to This Maybe even. that I mean it's barely it's barely in there. Should I bump it up one more, just to kind of put it? No, I think that's that okay. I don't know if we don't want the microphone to be front and center, but Okay, so do I do a better job when this is flipped around of looking into the camera? ⁓ maybe, yeah. If you look at that. I I do try as much as I possibly can, but I'm not freestyling the entire thing, so I do need to look at my notes a little bit. When I'm not looking at my notes I will try to look at the camera. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and try and start. Okay. So in the last episode I talked a little bit about ⁓ discovering so that something ⁓ let me start over. har the hardest part is getting started. Okay, action. So in the last episode, I talked about discovering that something was really seriously wrong with my community and and ⁓ some of that process, how the the evidence ⁓ against the claims of my particular religious group ⁓ sort of became overwhelming, right? My my church was totally unbiblical. the the claims of the whole system were collapsing. However, as I've as I've as I've said many, many, many well, I I'm not gonna do that because I haven't said that on here, but as I as I talk with people about what it was like to come out of a cult, one of the things that I consistently say is realizing that you're in a cult and having the ability to act on that realization. Are two different things. There's sort of three stages to this. The last episode we talked about coming to the realization that you're in a cult. This episode, we're going to talk about the things that I was most afraid to lose if I left the cult. Because the the biggest obstacle for me for leaving a cult was not intellectual. In in other words, Having the right information was not ⁓ was not all that was necessary to get me out the door. Right? It it is it was r rather, it was an emotional ⁓ it were there were they were emotional attachments to the cult that made walking out the door way more difficult. Now, ultimately, as we'll get more into in the next episode. this was this was ultimately a spiritual battle. But but in in in the moment it feels very ⁓ very emotional. You have a lot of emotional ties to the cult. That's what makes them so dangerous in the first place. So so in in other words, in in my experience, the hardest chains to break are not strictly theological, but relational. And so in this episode we're going to explore What I was most afraid to lose. So the first point I wanna make in in the first point I want to make in this episode is what I'm calling the myth of the instant exit. If if you don't have firsthand experience ⁓ leaving a spiritually abusive situation, you may assume that the exit would be a a clean transition from You you you you learn the truth, you break from the lies, problem solved, right? You break the wrist and walk away. If if you have exposed a group for what it really is, and it is obviously fraudulent, then the logical next step is to leave said group. but from my experience, it is not that easy. Unf it is unfortunate, but it's not that The more accurate portrayal, at least as far as from my experience and from the people that I have spoken to who come from a background like mine, there's the the the more accurate portrayal looks something like this. You have doubt, you have fear, you have rationalization. In other words, you do whatever you can to to get out of having to to leave, ⁓ because again, you have so many emotional attachments. Emotional and relational attachments to the group. So you delay, then there's more doubt, more fear, the cycle goes on and on. So the the truth is that I didn't leave, I didn't leave the day I realized something was wrong. In many ways, that was just the beginning of the real struggle. In other words, that first step. Is just the beginning of a longer series of steps. It's like if if you know anybody who, or maybe you are someone who has struggled with an addiction of some kind, realizing that you have an addiction isn't the same as overcoming the addiction, right? That's just the first step in a process that you have to go through. And that was this was a very similar thing. So this this idea that you would move from a realization that you're in a cult to leaving said cult in this sort of streamlined fashion, I wanna immediately debunk that from the outset. So the the second thing I want to do here is I want to look at ⁓ a series of fears, different fears that one goes through when considering moving from an abusive or high control religious group or a full blown cult. The first for me, and these are in no particular order, but the the first one that we're gonna look at here is losing my community. I was afraid to lose my community. So if you grew up in a normal religious organization, a Christian church or something else, but but that's normal and mainstream and has it has lots of adherents, those sorts of groups, ⁓ you probably had relationships outside of the community. There there are very few ⁓ religious organizations that I'm aware of that are big mainstream that that are not trying to proselytize outside the group. And so they often encourage you to have relationships outside of the community. Well, my community was not like that. For example, family was huge in my community. Family's huge in many communities. I understand that. But when it's but when you're in a closed community, family becomes even more important because it is one of the primary mechanisms that the cult uses to keep you there is the fear of your family breaking away from you or you breaking away from your family. So now of course no one chooses their family, but where I come from, we didn't even choose our friends. Your your friends were even something that was chosen for you. Even that was part of a path that was laid before me. And so you have these all these interdependent relationships that you have to forfeit in order to walk out the door. Now, one of the things that makes having relationships outside of the community difficult from the beginning is that there's this there's this shared history, this shared framework through which you see the world that you have between yourself and the other people within the community. And so it's difficult to relate to people outside of that community. So So I will s on this point, most of the people that I'm friends with, even to this day, that I've been friends with for six and a half or seven years now, don't know the half of what it was like to grow up the way that I grew up. So you can imagine if people already know what it was like because they lived it firsthand or they're living it firsthand, you have a safety. Right. There's a there's a safety in this kind of familiarity. And so when your entire world exists inside of one small closed community, leaving isn't the equivalent of just moving from this congregation to that congregation, right? It it feels like becoming physically, emotionally, and certainly spiritually homeless. It's it's like detaching yourself from everything that you've ever known on on a communal level. Good with that. Okay. When you pause back. You need to give it like one second. Okay. Because otherwise I'm catching you going You know, I can't cut it right. Okay, good. All right. Thanks. So fear number two that I want to look at is is the fear of being wrong, right? W what if, right? So even it even if you have a lot of evidence, like the sort of evidence that we looked at in the last episode, that led me to The realization that I was in a cult, you always have that thing in the back of your mind, like, W what if I'm wrong? What if I'm the problem? What if it's not everybody around me who's crazy? What if it's the whole world outside of this that's crazy? And and I'm being led astray by that craziness, right? In other words, you're constantly second guessing everything you think and feel and and all of that, right? Because you're raised believing, you know. that you are in God's church, that that these people have his truth, and that this your community is his plan for salvation. And so if if those you you you've experienced this on this strain, this stressor on two different levels, right? So this begins to get you to think, okay, well if if everything that I have believed to be true thus far in my life is wrong. What else is wrong? And so this for me, this thought process kind of took two stages. ⁓ initially I thought about the immediate implications, right? If my church is actually a fringe cult, what does that mean for my immediate situation? Was it always wrong? Did my parents know it was wrong and just not tell me? Or or their parents, right? ⁓ you know, did my grandparents know that this was a scam and just chose to play along, right? Where are my dead family members? If this isn't right, then where are all of the people that I have known and loved who are dead? ⁓ so you you start with those immediate implications. So in a sense, you don't want to be you don't want to be right. You want to be wrong when it comes to this, but you're also afraid of being wrong. It's this weird duality. And then that unravels into a then higher level of thought where you start going, Okay, if everything I grew up believing is a lie, is there a such thing as truth at all? Am I gonna just become a total nihilist that doesn't believe that anything that there is anything ⁓ objective in the world at all? So if and and if there is truth, if that is a thing, how can we know it? How can I know it? Because I've believed all these lies all of my life. So it it it isn't merely questioning a church, right? I was I was actually questioning the very framework through which I viewed all of reality. So point number one was I'm questioning my in all of my r relationality, the way that I relate to others, and and that the way the framework through which I view community, now I'm looking at do I even have a framework for understanding truth? At all. Pause for a break here. Okay, I'm doing pretty good. Okay, and then th fear fear number three, losing my identity. Growing up, I never identified as a Christian. I never identified as a disciple of Christ, or any other label that a normal run of the mill, you know, your Christian neighbor or any other follower of Jesus Christ might call themselves. I identified myself as a member of this church, my church. Growing up It was just about those four walls and the people within it. That was my identity. I was part of that story. I was connected to that tradition exclusively. So if if I disconnect from that, then I don't just not have relationships. I just don't I don't only not have a way of Viewing the world, but I don't have a way of viewing me because I don't even know who I am apart from this community. And so as I'm I mean, and I I grew up, I grew up around people that that this was their primary identity. I I mean I have family members who would tell me before I am a a husband or wife, before I am a father, a mother, before I am a brother, a sister, before I am any of those things, I am a member of this church. I'm a member of this. Community. So membership in the community that I grew up in was literally the most important thing about you. There wasn't anything else about you that really amounted to much of anything. So there really wasn't anything else that you would point to to say, yeah, that's me. And yeah, ⁓ that's me. Right? Because you have this identity collapse, this identity fusion into the group, you don't You don't really know who you are without the girl. ⁓ do I need to say anything more. Okay. So at this at this third, this third fear isn't just that I'm facing the loss of my community. I don't know who I am. I don't know who I'm going to be if I leave. I I I've I don't know who I am apart from this group. And so that's that's just another level of of fear. Because I had I grow, I I describe the way I grew up as playing a role, right? It wasn't about being myself. It was about being the person that I was told to be. So it's it's like an actor who's assigned a part, right? Here's your part. You play this character. This is who you are from action to cut. Now, action to cut was one's whole life in but so at some point the analogy breaks down. But nevertheless, I I always viewed myself as being an actor in a play Who had been assigned this particular role. And I did my best to play that role for as long as I could. And so I don't know how to play another character. Do I even need to play a character? Or can I actually just be me? I have I have no idea. And so if if I like if I leave, who am I? Who am I really? It's been seven years and I'm not really sure how to answer that question still, but that's we'll talk more about that later. But for now, again, you can kind of feel this this tension that I'm under where I don't know anybody outside of my community. I don't know how to view the world around me without this community, including myself. I'm not even sure how to view myself outside of this community. Yeah, I'm gonna get that's the next point. Yeah. That's the next point. Okay. Yeah. And we'll I've got eighteen minutes about. You probably have more than that, but 'cause you've been recording longer. Okay. Okay, so we've gone through my sort of my three biggest fears that I had. ⁓ when I realized I was in a cult and probably should get out. Though the three biggest things those are the three biggest things that that stopped me. So The the next piece I want to talk about is what actually happened, right? I was afraid of all of these things, but when I did leave, what actually happened? What actually transpired as I put that place behind me? So again, as I look back, I've I've faced all of those fears. They weren't irrational fears because I faced, I was able to face each one of them. So first Did I lose community? That's a tough question to answer because it's kind of a yes and a no. ⁓ I I did lose a lot of people, most of my family, virtually all of my friends, etcetera. Some people I was able to reunite with from the past, but certainly not everybody. The the biggest gain for me communally was that I found a healthier community. I found a community that wanted me to bring my individuality to the to the table. A community that believed that I was uniquely created with a purpose that. was to be a blessing to others. Right? I I I didn't I didn't have to I wasn't given like, here's the script, play along, like when I was born. I I was I was like, let's find out let's find out who you are. Let's find out what you can do. Let's discover your spiritual gifts. Let's figure out how to use those to bless other people. So while while I did lose community in one sense, I found that the Lord just poured out all of this new sort of community that I I really was not anticipating in any way, shape or form. So community, that's I feel like I came out pretty good. Well, was was I wrong about everything? One of my prior fears. Again, it's kind of a yes and no. I was wrong about a lot of things. I I I didn't know who God was. I didn't know what Jesus had done. I didn't know what the church was supposed to look like in its day-to-day life. I knew that my church wasn't what was being portrayed in the Bible, but that was about as far as I had taken it. So some things were totally wrong, but there were a few areas that that were right. But the most important things that I had wrong to to me, that didn't undermine the idea of truth full stop. The the truth could be discovered. So while while I was worried about becoming untethered from any type of reality, that wasn't that wasn't actually the case. It it was it was okay to be wrong. It was okay to have doubts and to have questions and all of these other things. But but truth actually could be discovered because I discovered it. I I found the real Jesus Christ, the the the true gospel, the truth of Scripture. I I found all of these things that I was worried that I was wrong about. And of course I didn't have the whole picture. And great people came alongside me and helped me to see my blind spots. But I I didn't I didn't have to give up the idea of truth altogether, like I was, like I was worried about. So did I lose my identity? Again, it's kind of a yes and a no. I I certainly lost pieces of myself. There's no way to be that connected to your family, to your friends, to your community, to your role within that community, and not feel like you lost something when you leave it. So just As an example, I did have a very large and very close knit extended family on both sides of my family. Now I live in a reality where I have basically zero extended family. And so that that change has been relatively tough. So it it isn't all just, you know, sunshine and rainbows on the other side. But I I was able to shed pieces that were never genuinely me in the first place. Again, I'm just I'm just playing a character really most of my life. I I was told who I was supposed to be. That wasn't something that I chose. So so Yeah. So I thought I was let me say, let me say this. So for example, growing up, I thought that I was a very social person. It it turns out I'm not, and and that's okay, right? social person was one of the attributes on my character sheet when I was given here's the role that you're gonna play. Because in the community, being social was Part of the fabric of what it meant to be out there. And so you didn't really have the option of being a more introverted, sort of homebody type person. So turns out I'm not, but but that's okay. But I think the most important piece of this is again that I I discovered that I had a purpose, that that me as an individual, that identity. which I call my divine design, was something that I could discover and use for the good of others. And in doing so, I found my calling, really. So looking back, of course, I understand why so many people stay in in unhealthy systems, right? The fear is real, the cost feels overwhelming. The the uncertainty can be terrifying. But I've learned that in pursuing truth it's it's worthwhile. The pursuit of truth is worthwhile, even if it costs you something. Maybe even if it costs you everything. The the irony is that many of the things that I was f afraid of losing were either things that I never really had in the first place, like the love of my family, the love of my friends. That was those the that was conditioned upon my continuing to play the role that I had been assigned. So that was never really that was a thing I was worried about losing, but I never really had that in the first place. Or there were things that were undoubtedly causing more harm than good, both to myself and others. So I was I was pretty happy to shed those things. So most of what I gained, peace, confidence, freedom, healing, etc., were things I didn't even know that I I didn't even know that I needed them, and certainly. Couldn't have imagined ever obtaining those things. So while there were losses, there were immeasurable gains. And so if you're wrestling with questions, don't ignore them, don't, don't suppress them out of fear. Bring them into the light and and test everything. Pursue truth wherever it leads. Because I've found that the thing standing between you and truth isn't always evidence. Rather, it's the fear of what pursuing that truth might cost you. Thoughts?