334- Growing up and Living in a religious cult 2

I previously stated that growing up and living in a religious cult was an isolating experience. I explained some portions of this indoctrinated lifestyle, and I'll continue today. As usual, trigger warnings apply. 

Before I go on, I want to share the second component of the above image, for higher detailed wording, corresponding to things that are forbidden in most religious cults, and which I experienced on a daily basis. Remember that you can click to see these JPG's even bigger, and that this list isn't exhaustive, but part of today's topic.

I want to discuss ways in which this experience was isolating. What you must realize in regards to a life in a cult, is that all kinds of rules of obedience are used to fully control you, taking away your freedoms as a person, with the goals making you so depersonalized that you literally loose your identity. For this goal, the rules a normal parent would instil in children are multiplied exponentially. 

Some of these rules are those meant to disconnect a person from any contact, with the attempt to stifle curiosity - as curiosity can inspire a person to leave a religious cult (or any other manipulative person) - by the sheer example of other types of lives. I experienced these vividly. 

Religious cult leaders try their best to close all venues and influences from any external ideas, by presenting the world as outside of their group, asking, in most cases, the followers to break all ties from their friends, family members and so on, in order to create a vacuum around the disciple.

As I was born into this cult, the break with family was done without my knowledge : at the time of my kidnapping, my father had taken me away from my mother and entire maternal side of the family. I was de facto orphaned from my real mother for many years, but this was compounded by a series of lies, whereas my father's new wife was presented to me as if she was my mother, with no other explanation.

That isolation was further forced upon me, by applying operant conditioning (as explained) by first rewarding my errands and good behaviors, by allowing me to watch TV (albeit filtered, as it couldn't have been anything anti-god) and reducing, over a period of time, these rewards, replacing them by additional tasks, but which eventually became totally one-sided, with no rewards to expect.

I was told to keep to myself - adding to my already budding social phobia (perhaps causing it to begin with) - I was told that since others wouldn't understand the gift god was sending them in the form of my so-beloved father, that Jesus 2.0, that I had to avoid talking to anyone about what was going on at home. This lasted my entire school years.

In my teens, I was told to preach "the good word" to my classmates, leaving both me and them with the same possibilities : if they follow, we stay in touch (as they'd be malleable to the cult), or I have to cease all interactions with them, cutting any ties, never explaining them why. 

Proselytising with background threats are common to almost if not all religious cults, as means of control, robotizing people's minds to repeat only what they are told to discuss. This is achieved by a lot of indoctrination and droning ; drilling into a person's mind all the precepts and beliefs presented as soul-saving spirituality.

I was forbidden talking with girls for any purpose, not friendship, and certainly not for romance. Boys and girls were always segregated in the schools chosen for me by my father, to reach this very goal. He furthered this prohibition with threats of physical punishment. 

Additionally, and very logically in view of bans regarding girls, I was never to initiate any kind of romantic or sexual activity, not with girls and not masturbation. He told me that he would, one day in my adulthood, chose a bride to unite with me spiritually, and that in his position of god/the messiah, he'd perform the wedding ceremony, by sanctifying it and making it okay. In that union, sexuality would only mean procreating children to follow his teachings. Procreation would be performed while chanting his religious mantras (another form of droning and indoctrination). 
Straying from this spiritual path of unity under his guide and rule of thumb came with a death sentence, of which he reminded me often.

With this Damocles sword above my head, I was unable to pursue romantic feelings I had towards any of the girls, and later of the young women that I'd met and was "interested in". I'll tell some stories resulting from this threat in another post. 

Books were highly filtered, leaving me the right to read only school books (my last school was a religious one, though not dependant on the cult, as this cult wasn't big enough to have it, at least back then), and... religious books selected by my father, of course. Apart for his own stuff, they were about "prophets who came before him" and thus I had to learn about his previous forms, to better "understand him" and his designs. What these did, in reality, was adding layers of religiosity and droning.

Reading books that weren't allowed was totally out of the question, though I did break that rule more than once, in secret. I received many beatings for my transgressions, though he never knew of them. He only thought that I'd been lazy and late to come back from my Cinderella tasks*, while I was actually either in a book store, or library, reading books, or, possibly worse in his views, playing video games in the arcades. (* I discussed these in more details in the first part of this topic). 

These games were forbidden, because they often depicted some form of nudity (or potentially could) ; they usually had some violence (at least the fighting games that he didn't know I was playing) ; and all, with no exception, were deemed materialistic temptations of the devil, and distractions away from god, and of my father, both his representative, and god himself in the same body (yup, I kid you not).

Books are knowledge and knowledge is power. Forbidding them in a religious cult is rather standardized procedure, though some allow the followers to read, but with absolute control of which ones. In my case, these books weren't allowed, just about for the same reasons as the games. 

Interrupting TV privileges, limiting and later cutting my links to people, limiting or forbidding cultural examples and references, all served the purposes I announced above:

• Limiting my access to that outside, sinful and dangerous world, where, alternately, but never named, satan/ the devil would tempt me into sin and my soul had to be protected by all means.
• These limits in turn, were designed to stifle curiosity, and seeds of rebellion against his godly authority. 
• They locked me in an intellectual and emotional prison, and I had little exposure to examples of other lifestyles. 

What my father failed to imagine was that one of my classmates would invite me to his home, where he introduced me to tv, music, and the example of a caring, loving family's communication - as stated before, despite being a family of deaf/hard of hearing, and some were mute. 

Despite his attempts, my father failed to choke my natural curiosity. I spent hours in libraries, and in book stores, reading forbidden fiction and non-fiction. 

As all my gifts, including money, had been confiscated, I'd read these books for free, just by staying in the library (not borrowing, which would've meant a subscription and a traceable card), and sitting on the floor in book stores, devouring every bit of information to nourish my grey-cells (=brain), and every fiction that I laid my eyes upon offered escapism and fantasy that sparked and sustained hope of a better life. 

He also failed to guess that his own father had told me the truth about my mother and step-mother, awakening in me the desire to break away and reunite with my real, biological mother. My grandfather had shown me the truth, through videos and photos of my younger-self, and this spark, added to the hope gained from books, united into a drive that led me, years later, to reunite with my mother, as told in the entry uprooted returned home.

Upon returning to my birth-country, the full blow of my isolation hit me in the face, like a thousand bricks.

My cultural knowledge had been severely limited, though not as much as my father had wished. My curiosity had partially won, but the traumas that I'd experienced left me psychologically scarred. My overall cultural references were limited to those I'd managed to find in my teens, and thus lacked in broader international basis - outside of my fields of interests of ancient civilizations and archaeology, I knew little of the newer world into which I'd been born and into which I walked back in, after my sojourn in that religious prison.

From photos of my ~5-7 year old self, I know that I'd already been depressed and socially anxious for some time before. I know also that the cult's presentation of a dangerous and sinful world surrounding me, left me with no proper knowledge of social interactions, norms and polite company. I had to learn what I could despite lacks of points of reference, only once I got back home. 

Social phobias that had been present before, became far more powerful. I arrived to a country that was mostly strange to me, with different climate, customs and even language family. I had to re-learn my native tongue, as it had been set aside for so long. I knew no one here, and this is why my mother would introduce me to relatives, co-workers and some of her friends. Later on, one of them told me of one of her friends, introduced us to one another, and we became friends, or so I thought. I'll tell this and other stories, in an entry regarding one-sided and toxic friendships. What I want to discuss here, in this passage, is that my lack of references, my growing CPTSD and isolation effects from my life in this cult, was that these difficulties left me vulnerable to such damaging relationships, and are therefore part of the isolating nature of this cult's depersonalization and conditioning techniques.

It took me many years to learn how to discern these one-sided and toxic relationships ; to learn to stand up for myself and put an end to such interactions, and that I deserved better.

Once back in my native lands, I had to work hard in learning my native tongue, to create bonds of friendships, learn to discern the good ones from the bad, to cut out toxicity and abuse, to develop social skills, and I developed a sort of addiction to overcompensating my lacked areas of life in reading, listening to music, playing games (not just video), and watching anything that I could - within limits of tastes and triggering material.

In doing so, I've regained some of the lost parts of myself, but not all. I may be less isolated in the fact that I now have circles of friendships, but I'm still isolated in experiences of life, and in sharing the same recovery path as I don't know other survivors of religious cults - though I do know people who survived their religious dogmas in more mainstream belief systems.
I didn't find support groups with this specificity, mainly because I haven't really searched for them. 

In the past few years, my recovery from CPTSD had been slowly progressing ; I have finally understood certain aspects of my life circumstances, and healing from religious mindsets took me many years. Some of this recovery is in form of embracing that free, critical thinking that  was so stifled, and which is now fully awakened. I'm an atheist, and unashamed to have gone away from dogmas and religiously-induced fears of gods, godly wrath and punishment, hell and afterlife damnation. 

I am now free from all these. I read, play, listen and watch, what and when I want. I am no longer a slave to my conditioning, although parts of it shall take a while longer to change to more positive outlets. 

Recovery is possible, though in cases of multiple cptsd's, including those of religious indoctrination - not just in cults but even in mainstream religions- are tough to break, to alter, and regain one's personality and freedom of thought. 

Every day, I fight, and invite you, if you share such experiences, to fight one day at a time. Both you and I can make it.