Hitting Rock Bottom

The question I get asked more than any other is this: when did you finally know you had to leave?

My answer surprises people. Because the moment I knew I had to leave, and the moment I understood what I had actually been involved with, were not the same moment. They were about eighteen months apart.

When I finally escaped the group, after three failed attempts, the force pushing me out the door was not the recognition that what I was living inside was dangerous and had had enough. I wish it had been. The truth is harder than that.

I left because I believed I was not worthy of staying.

In my mind, the group’s members were the true seekers. The true spiritual warriors. I had fallen so far short of their standards for so long that I believed I had become dead weight. I was holding the group back from the important work they were trying to do – in my mind. Every night for nine weeks, the group’s leader orchestrated what they called slam sessions which were hours of condemnation focused entirely on cataloguing my failures as a human being. And after a certain point, it becomes part of you. I wasn’t being abused – in my mind. I was being punished for my lack character and poor attitude. I was being accurately described. In my mind, I was broken and unfixable. I reasoned that the selfless thing I could do for the people who had invested so much effort in trying to save me was to stop wasting their time.

So I left. And for the better part of a year afterward, I walked through my life convinced it would end badly — that I deserved exactly whatever disaster was coming, because I had turned my back on God and on the only people who had ever truly known me and cared about me.

It wasn’t until I crossed paths with a former member who had left four years before I did. that things began to shift. I could see immediately that he was still struggling. It is always easier to see someone else’s wound than your own. We became roommates. We began, almost daily, deconstructing the years we had both spent inside the group, that with some distance, we could start trying to make sense of.

When you finally exit an abusive environment, it typically takes twelve to twenty-four months before your mind can even begin to consider the possibility that the way you feel about yourself might not be actually true. The environment you survived may have had something to do with it.

Every person who had ever tried to tell me I had dismissed them all. I was too proud, too defensive, too invested in the story I had been telling myself about what I was choosing and why. I had the answer now, sitting alone in my bedroom with a book in my hands. And the answer was everything I had refused to hear for two decades.

Receiving a “diagnosis” was not a relief. It was a reckoning, because the diagnosis came with a question that would determine the success of my recovery:

Can you admit not only that you were deceived, but that you played a role?

I dismissed every person who had ever tried to wake me from my stupor. I was too proud, too defensive, too invested in the story I had been telling myself about what I was choosing and why. I had the answer now, sitting alone in my bedroom with a book in my hands. And the answer was everything I had refused to hear for two decades.

Getting the diagnosis was not a relief. It was a reckoning, because the diagnosis came with a question that would determine everything about success of my recovery:

Can you admit not only that you were deceived, but that you played a role?

Sitting with that truth, without using it to destroy myself and without using it to excuse what was done to me, was the hardest work I have ever done.