Posted by C-T Dummy on March 27, 2008 at 12:20:13
In Reply to: Re: Leaving religious groups - your experinces posted by Helena on March 26, 2008 at 08:47:23:
Good questions, Helena.
Regret can mean a lot of different things. I'm not a big fan of regret in the sense of wishing things had been different had I known better, because I simply didn't know better, and you can't always know better and you can't learn without making mistakes. I would like to think however that I do learn, and I take responsibility for my actions. So the type of regret I do have is
about the things I did to hurt myself or others by being involved with the cult, such as: wasting the best years of my life, wasting my sizeable inheritance, callously (as modeled after Berg) imposing my self-serving ideas about relationships on others in pursuit of my egoistic exploration of free-love ideals, meting out harsh discipline on my children in accordance with The Family's teachings on how to raise children (the physical scars are nothing compared to the permanent emotional scarring caused by damaging their self-esteem and the impairment to development during formative years), etc.
Yes, the wasted years of my life in a period critical to education and career do give me a lot of trouble. I've learned ways to overcome that handicap, but the lack will always be there, and I will always be playing catch-up, probably till the day I die: once The Family has stolen your best years, there's no getting them back.
The Family has been touting itself as an organization that helps drug addicts. It's a big lie. See "Berg's specific advice on how to hype up the drug issue to the media" () to find out where they really stand on the issue. Most people who come off drugs do so because of a very strong internal decision to do so for themselves, and the support system if there is one, is a secondary or minor factor in their success. Most Family members who have supposedly come off drugs "thanks to The Family," if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they have customized their stories to give The Family (or the "real Jesus" via the Family) credit for it, when in fact it may have little to do with them. I know this to be true in quite a number of cases (for example they tried a bit of weed and then told glorious tales about "coming off drugs"), but I will speak for myself: I got off mainlining heroin as a result of my own decision to do so, as a result of my own spiritual relationship with Jesus/God, and was already totally clean for a year and a half before joining. And after joining I catered my story to fit The Family's cookie-cutter script that Jesus via the Family got me off drugs.
Yes, I made many decisions and sacrifices based on my belief system at the time, and yes, they still affect me now, mostly negatively.
Benefits? Berg had this saying about rock music: "it feels so good when it stops!" That sums up how I "benefited" from my time in The Family cult: it was so good to finally get out of that hellish lie, and together with all my family too.
At the most The Family was a crutch I could lean on at times when I was afraid to stand on my own and venture out into the world for myself. The only problem was they try to disable you as a human being so you need their crutches/clutches forever; the price I paid for what little boost I may have had in return for my association was far too high -- I gave far more than I got. Being in The Family however did let me play out my whacky utopian dreams until I got it out of my system and knew they just weren't possible in real life. I learned I had to grow up and leave them behind.