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In Reply to: Re: We were all victims of a manipulative and controlling posted by Sara on November 07, 2002 at 15:14:33:
In my opinion your statement "They want to feel that they are better because you chose to join and they didn't" is an oversimplification. Maybe you said it that way in consideration of your audience. But it doesn't properly describe my attitude or my SG friends'. Let me put it this way: we did not join the COG or the Family. We were born there. That's all. But that is a fact. -- A fact based on which people can arrive at different conclusions, it's true. But that fact is undeniable. There is an actual difference, opine aboput it what you will.
Some of us SGs left at 13, some at 30, and SGs' stories are different from each others' in various ways. I do not have warm and fuzzy feelings toward all other SGs. However, in the final analysis I do have profound empathy because we SGs were dealt pretty much the same rotten hand in life, though we admittedly played it in many different ways.
Conversely, some FGs did not torment me in The Family (though they joined the Family, which tormented me). I have positive feelings for some FGs and in some cases great gratitude for the rare ray of light they were in my dreary existence. In fact, in my case, as one of the very first batch born into the Family, there were precious few others in my age bracket when I was growing up and the only "friends" I had at all as a teenager were selected "Nationals" who coincidentally all happened to be less fanatical than your average gringo members. While these people might take me along when they visited a relative on the sly on a day out "tapenessing," I was being turned in by people my age for stuff like listening to the Beatles -- instead of being glad I introduced them to'm :( ! And some SGs participated in tormenting me the second they had any power, a trend that was just starting when I ran away so no SGs had a chance to torment me too much from positions above me (I am not including in the same category of harassment the telling on each other while not occupying positions of any greater power).
And then, some SGs had the slight advantages that made a world of difference in that brutish atmosphere, such as having parents in leadership, or simply not having an absent father, which could protect one from such egregious things as becoming sex toys for abusive FGs at the age of 12.
Many FGs were dealt a rotten hand in life too, but it was a different rotten hand.
I personally do agree that many FGs were victims of severe abuse that nobody should be subjected to, including my mother who joined as a teenager and remains in and who has shattered my heart. I love her and cannot speak about her these days without crying disconsolately, yet she is giving her allegiance to my torturers and denying it to me!
But as long as FGs deny that there is a difference between those who joined and the minors who were born there (and in many cases were utterly isolated from any outside contact such as relatives they might eventually turn to by fanatically "dedicated" parents), those FGs are holding on to a delusion directly related to Berg's and others' were when they said 12 year olds were adults sexually.
I would invite you to join the majority of society in recognizing the fact that for a period of time at the beginning of one's life every person is a minor! Even the law recognizes this fact. While in some places minors are punished for especially heinous deeds with the severity otherwise reserved for adults, this fact is observed with a kind of awed distress. The other side of this coin is that certain things that were done to us are legally different and punishable much differently from the deplorable abuses that you FGs suffered.
When I was in the Family, I only met about 3 adults who seemed to be aware that they had gotten to be children and maybe we should too, a bit. They unfortunately allowed their tentatively raised voices to be silenced.
Please, FGs, recognize that many of you had the opportunity to get at least one and a half to two formative decades of more typical socialization and schooling. Please recognize that we did not, and that the abuses you endured, we endured without even the benefit of that, as tiny and growing children. Most of you had childhoods, however rotten, and however nuts the members of the pre-baby-boomer generation who raised you may have been (I am not denying that some of you had terribly unhappy and even tragic family lives, my mother included).
In case it interests any FGs, I have observed those FGs who do manage to own up to the difference maintain mutually respectful communication with SGs.
Thanks for listening.
