To be a survivor of cultic abuse is to rise from the ashes of systems designed to dehumanize and claim a seat at life’s table.

Throughout last week, I was an emotional wreck - obsessed with facebook postings and dribbles of messages coming from my friends in Western North Carolina. For five days, we didn’t know if they were alive. The morning of the Writing Symposium, I snapped off a news report, needing to keep my focus and not let fear take over. It was a couple more days before we began to hear details of how their idyllic home and land had been ravaged by Helene's catastrophic impact.

Robert Jay Lifton is 98 years old and he’s planning his next book. When he published his first one,  Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), he was unaware of its relevance for cult survivors, but it became a seminal book on coercive persuasion and ideological extremism. 20 books and 63 years later, he’s not done. His current project centers on “the attraction of factual reality” because, as he recently told Dr. Steve Hassan, “Facts Matter!”.

When was the last time you experienced a warm, lingering glow from having worked hard and completed a project that went really well? For me, it's today. I have to tell you: The Writing Symposium was so good. Yes, we had some glitches and I'll do some things differently in the future - but heck, it was darn good for my first writing symposium rodeo and I couldn't wait to tell you! 😊

Our timing was perfect. My grandson and I arrived as a massive beam structure - called a girt - dangled from the long arm of a backhoe. A black rope, held taut by my daughter, guided the girt to its resting place on its new foundation.

Hundred year old beams and their integrity inspire me. As a kid, I remember standing in an abandoned barn near our house and sneezing. Old hay hung from trapeze-like cobwebs. It was cavernous and I was small and from the back corner, my brother was shouting for help. Eric, our large German Shepherd was bleeding. Badly.

Deconstructing a barn and rebuilding it to different proportions involves creating new mortises*. I watched my daughter carefully place a large chisel into a squared-off hole in a beam, whack it with a wooden mallet, and flick away the newly released chunk of wood. She did this again and again and again. I was astonished to hear that she had spent the entire day creating only four such holes in the hundred year old beam she was working on. She - more patient than I - is a far better candidate for the tedious process of chiseling these navel-like cavities. 

I pulled up the driveway and thought … Where's the barn?!? Oh right! It’s GONE. 

My daughter is helping out on a project of disassembling a large old barn. The last time I stood in this spot, a post and beam barn towered over me. Today, only a freshly poured cement slab foundation exists in the original footprint. Beams and boards are stacked in tidy piles and each item is carefully labeled.