My So Cult Life

  A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of sheep,  because rarely are they in the same ecosystem. It would be a huge waste of time.  – Anonymous CS Lewis gave us the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Herbert Armstrong (he and his followers would have you believe) gave us The Lion, the Lamb, and the Little Child. In part one, I took you through the verbiage used in the logo for the Worldwide Church of God. In this post, we’re looking at the image itself to find some interesting clues as to what Herbert was really showing us in that illustration.  

There's a Monty Python skit called "The Four Yorkshiremen" that is reminiscent of a common feeling among cult survivors.     Four rich sophisticated men sit around and discuss the hardships they faced growing up in poor working-class families. Each one trying to outdo the other three with increasingly elaborate stories as to which of them had the worst childhood.   That sketch feels oddly familiar to people who were in cults. The media's penchant for salacious sadistic stories makes living as a cult survivor much more awkward than it ever needed to be.  [Which, let's face it, is pretty damn awkward even without animal sacrifices and elaborate robes]   Me:  I was raised in a cult. Them:  How horrible was it?? Me:  What do you mean by horrible? Them:  Did you have to like, kill babies with a special kind of spoon, or something? Me: Did I WHAT?!??? Them:  Were there orgies every day?  Me: Why would you even.....

If you were to talk to my and other family members of Armstrong Cult Survivors who still hold strongly to that faith, you'd hear the same argument over and over again. "I love them too much to ever hurt them. None of what they say is true. We aren't in a cult, we just have the truth." But being "loved" by family members loyal to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong is often a very painful experience. For some, that "love" was even LETHAL. Sometimes it's easy for people to forget that CHILDREN of cult members are often the ones who suffer most. Below are some highlights from firsthand accounts of what life was like in the WCG and its resulting splinter groups. I don't know what it's like for you to read these, but for me it has a kind of reassuring comfort coupled with intense fear and dread. Like wrapping up in your favorite blanket and watching the scariest movie imaginable alone in a pitch black room. The familiarity of the blanket ...

  I took a break from blogging for a bit. I was concerned that my posts about my cult upbringing had me coming off as more of a “victim” than I had intended. That is to say that they showed any shred of victimhood whatsoever. In the process of worrying about how I was being perceived, I got a much clearer lens on the process of recovering from gaslighting . Recently, I started to notice that I have been teaching my daughter not to accept everything I taught her as automatically being a fact. There was always an underlying message there of “don’t trust me just because I’m your mommy.” Now that she is getting older, she is really starting to own the question “why?” And although she hasn’t asked the question itself yet, she has been building up to it over the past few weeks. “Why shouldn’t I trust my mommy?” Oh… uh… I think I may have screwed this up. After a bit of reflection, it became clear to me. I’m teaching my daughter not to trust me because I shouldn’t have trusted my mom. M...