Escaping A Cult After Hitting Rock Bottom

The question I get asked more than any other is, "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 I had been living inside a dangerous group and had had enough. I wish it had been. The truth is much 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 he called slam sessions, which were hours of vicious verbal attacks and condemnation focused entirely on cataloguing my failures as a human being. After a certain point, it becomes part of you. I wasn’t being abused – in my mind . I was being punished for my lack of character and poor attitude. In my mind, I was being accurately described. 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. In my mind , I was broken and unfixable.

So I escaped in the dark of the night.

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

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 actually be the result of an environment that had a significant role in contributing to those feelings of low self-esteem and worthlessness.

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 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. With some distance we were able to start trying to figure out what had happened to us.

And then, sitting alone in my bedroom one day with a book about cultic mind control, I finally had my answer.

I had escaped a cult.

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 also 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.