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.....

I am 8 years old. My heart is firmly planned in my throat. The warm breeze from the open front seat windows hits the thin plastic of the dry cleaning bags and makes them buzz like a nest of angry hornets. I am all at once terrified, heartbroken, and confused. My stomach starts to hurt. My chest gets tighter with each passing mile. I sit, sweating and smothering, between a full rack of plastic wrapped dresses  and a poorly designed quadrilateral backseat car window that folds out instead of rolling down.  The Dallas suburbs gradually give way to open Texas prairie before performing a subtle  transformation into the hills and pines of northeastern Texas.  My pulse is racing. This is the familiar route to our assigned feast site of Big Sandy, but the Feast of Tabernacles is still  months away.  My mother hangs on every word of an unfamiliar voice emanating from our car's cassette player. The man speaks words I can't quite make out over the sounds of buzzing pl...

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 ...

 When I started this blog, I never expected it to be more than just a place for me to open up about my experiences. Being contacted by former or current members of the WCG and/or its various splinter groups wasn't something that had even crossed my mind when I began writing about Herbert Armstrong and the financial, spiritual, emotional, and physical damage that he caused in so many lives.  My blog was and is a kind of therapy. MySoCultLife.org is a big part of my process to shake loose the dark shadows of a doomsday cult that cling to my id / ego / superego and render me not quite capable of relating to a "normal" life.  Some echoes of cult life are funny little eccentricities (like the overwhelming urge to read the ingredients on a packet of crackers that come with your soup at a restaurant, to see if they are made with lard); and others are severe enough to require medication and therapy to help control them (including, but not limited to  recurring nightmares, ...

  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...