My So Cult Life

 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...

  In a previous blog post, I posed the rhetorical question, "What did Herbert W. Armstrong do that was so wrong?" That post was shared on the  Banned By HWA  blog (which I HIGHLY recommend you check out at some point) and generated the following comment from one of its readers. " Tonto said... The post said...." So, really, what did he do that was so bad?" MY RESONSE: ARE YOU KIDDING?? * People DIED from the no medical treatment concept, including children! * Multitudes of happy marriages were wrecked because of D and R * Retirements and Financial well being were severely wrecked by endless hounding of money. * A culture of submission and minimizing denied 100s of thousand of people the opportunity to grow , explore and prosper * The promotion of child abuse and beatings. AND MANY MORE! Incidentally, the poster fantasized about "confronting HWA to his face". At least from 1970 on, it was impossible to gain access to HWA face to fa...