What IS your Opinion? 🔍

Trigger Warning: These swinging kids are experiencing freedom, but this essay explores a different childhood reality. 

I am finding myself in a deep dive. I'm learning so much from clients, writing-to-reckoners, and through reading your email replies as well as a can't-put-it-down memoir, All Who Believed. Like layers of an onion, the importance of having and expressing one's opinion is being revealed to me, word by word, through those who were denied that birthright. 

“The free-association test was excruciating for me. I had been trained not to think.” says Dr. Genevieve Dale*, a beautiful writer and psychologist who was raised in a fundamentalist, controlling cult, describing her first experience with a therapist, after leaving. When thinking is suppressed, so too is creativity, freedom of expression and the possibility of discovering or even having a preference. What do you like? Or What’s the opposite of dark? are simple, yet profoundly disorienting questions for someone raised as she was. ✨

A similar parenting approach is detailed in “Train up a Child” - a grueling chapter in the memoir. Author Tamara Mathieu presents her thirteen years of parenting in the Twelve Tribes in a straightforward, practical tone that adds to its emotional impact. “Dolls weren’t allowed, and little girls couldn’t ‘play baby’ by wrapping up a pillow in a blanket. 🪆 That was fantasy and was a disciplinable offense.” 

She goes on to say, “Children, from toddlers on up, were to be … doing a task that parents instructed them to do at all times and under the supervision of a designated adult. They were not to voice their own opinion. No amount of independent thought or action was allowed for the children.” Even the adults in the Twelve Tribes, were taught that their disciplined life included “never taking one thought for yourself,” because that means you have strayed from the pressing need to be “gainfully occupied at all times” in order to abide by the ‘Father’s will’. 

I had to read this chapter in small doses, as I had a strong visceral reaction to the use of 'the rod' and the excruciating demands placed on child and mother alike. Required spankings are doled out even to infants.

I often work with adults who grew up in controlling, high-demand religions, spiritual groups and households and I’m oddly grateful for how this chapter provides me with new devastating insight into the dehumanizing demands that can be placed on children in fundamentalist "religious" groups. 

What IS the long term impact of being raised in such conditions? In the Twelve Tribes and in so many other controlling religious and spiritual groups, the personality of the growing child is blatantly and cruelly pruned back. There is no safe place to express even an opinion, much less, one’s creative and unique individuality. 🌟

When I emerged from the cultic grip after eighteen years, I had my previous identity to reclaim, to re-align with. This was a profoundly helpful orientation for me in my healing process. But what about those of you who, like Dr. Dale and the thousands of Twelve Tribes children who are raised in a vacuum, stripped of your unique child brilliance?

How do you heal and grow and discover who you are? 

I have been awed by your extraordinary resilience as you write and speak and stretch and grow. I am honored beyond measure to accompany this journey, word by word as you discover and claim agency, autonomy and beauty. ✍🏼

In small doses and in a non-linear and uniquely personal path, healing takes its time. The driven sense of urgency that defined cult life must be severed from, again and again. We need to slow down. Trust the circuitous journey that allows the body, mind and psyche to integrate. 

What has helped you the most? How has healing unfolded for you?What will be most helpful for you in the days and years ahead? Please let me know. I have so much more to learn from you. 

I am continually growing through my own healing process. And like layers of the onion, I’m peeling back into childhood, reflecting on my life with my father who was on the authoritarian spectrum. I'll hold off for now and share some of this exploration next week, as it compares and contrasts with my friend Sharon’s experiences. The journey continues. 

*Genevieve and everyone else I quote in these newsletters have given me permission to share, even when I’m protecting their identity. Giving credit where credit is due is one of my core values. Special thanks to Tamara Mathieu, author of All Who Believed, who lives in Vermont and we’re making plans to meet in person soon! I hope you will check out her book. I can't tell you how grateful I am for her book. If you haven't read it yet, you might appreciate my recent Op Ed about the raid on Island Pond, a Twelve Tribes community. Expressing my opinion was so helpful for me! I'd love to hear yours!