I decided to make a space to rant, discuss, review and just get things off my chest. Please note that mental illness and addiction are things I live with, so this might be triggering to some. I'm holding nothing back.
So hear is my crazy-ass religious upbringing story.
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As unbelievable as it sounds, I grew up in an actual, Jim Jones style cult. Nobody drank the Kool-Aid and went off the edge, thank God. But my childhood was forever marred by my experience growing up inside a cult. This was only my early years (0-10 years). After that, we left the cult, my parents turned to drugs and alcohol full time, our family fell apart and I became the human being that I am today complete with all my baggage.
First of all, what is a cult? I have done some research on this but basically it comes down to a few things: a charismatic leader (ours was an old man named Ben Williams who lived in New York, opened weird churches there and sent our church long letters about how to live life every couple weeks), consequences for trying to leave the group, harmful rules, etc.
Did I know I was in a cult? No. I knew my life was very different from other "normal" children, but I just figured it was because everyone else was going to hell and we weren't. Some of the rules we had growing up were:
1. No school (homeschool only) - probably to block the voice of reason and normality from our lives. Every child in the church was homeschooled. Furthermore, we did not live in neighborhoods where perhaps we could be influenced by other children. All the twenty or so families in the church lived in secluded locations in the Oklahoma countryside.
2. No Christmas trees (pagan)
3. No magic (pagan) - including Disney movies, books with talking animals, books about dragons and fairies... basically the fun stuff. We read books like "We Help Mommy" (which is actually a very sweet vintage Golden Book but I digress...) and "played house" (pretending we had a husband and babies to take care of, because that was the only future available to the girls).
4. No or very limited interaction with those outside the church. We were friends with the kids in the church. They were the only kids we knew.
5. If, God forbid, a family left the church, we could no longer interact with them. We lost several childhood friends through this.
6. Any "sin" at all, real or imagined, was handled with a switch. We would have to go to the bush outside and pick our own switch with which to be beaten. Some families froze theirs in a freezer, possibly to stiffen them for maximum pain; I'm not sure. The switching left welts for days to weeks. Some of the families were under investigation by DCF for child abuse. No one was taken away, though it probably would have been best for a few of those traumatized babies. One kid was so damaged he talked with a terrible stutter. Others were silent with trauma, staring with huge, terrified eyes. One child burst out crying when his parents told him they loved him (because this was what was said to us before we were beaten). It was the saddest thing I've ever seen. This small, maybe three-year-old kid crying in terror as a response to the words "I love you". The adults in the room laughed like it was funny. As for myself, I learned that not crying helped the beatings not be so bad, so I took it in silence and bore my punishments without fighting back. Fighting back was pointless. I was often beaten for things I never did or things that were perceived as "wrong" but I had no idea why and I meant no harm when I did them. No one explained why I was in trouble. It was just the way it was.
