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In Reply to: Re: A question to Porcelain Doll about mind control posted by goth88 on October 29, 2002 at 20:33:57:
Personally, I got a lot out of Margaret Singer's book, it helped me a lot. I know for a fact I never, ever, ever, would have done half the things I did if I had not been under the influence of Berg and his dogma's. I think what you are saying has a lot of truth to it. Our conscience was replaced and became numb, because we became conditioned to think whatever it said was the devil talking to us. For me too, it took a long time even after leaving the F. to not think that everything that happened to me was somehow my fault and God was punishing me or trying to teach me a lesson. That's very similar to spousal abuse, the victimizer blaming everything on the victim and making them feel like it's their fault when bad things happened or things didn't go right. Only this is spiritual abuse. You know, it goes on in other religious areas too, not just cults, but cults are the worst because you have no other outlet and there are a lot of other abuses going on. Just the other day I got one of those going around emails from someone very close to me. It started off with a typical guilt paragraph. It was Christian oriented and stated that if you can read long jokes and stories, you should be able to take the time to read this. Oughto - red flag, red flag. That's a guilt trip coming at me and I run like a bat out of hell when I see those. I barely read the rest of it, I just kind of skimmed through to see what it was all about, then it ended with, send this to 10 people because if you don't you won't be blessed - some kind of crap like that. I madly deleted it. People abuse each other with this stuff. Berg just took it to the limits and got us to do things we wouldn't do in our right minds using fear and mind-control tactics. Grant it, yes, we could end it and we finally did, but not without a lot of suffering and unnecessary damage being done first. Usually, we had to come to a place, either through getting so burned out we just leave in disgust, or some trauma happening that we leave. It is hard to leave when the people you have come to love and trust look at you like a leper for leaving. There's a lot of dynamics involved.
