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In Reply to: insanity, empathy, character pathology & sin posted by anovagrrl on November 02, 2003 at 15:46:02:
Anovagrrl, thank you for writing this. You have articulated this issue so well, and it’s something that is, to me, at the heart of the pain I feel in my relationship with my own parents and other people who were in parental roles within the Family.
I think I was about 8 years old when I realised that my parents didn’t actually love me. They didn’t care about what happened to me, but only what the other Family members thought of them as parents. It’s not that they didn’t know what was going on with their children, they really just didn’t care. Even though I realised this fairly early on, it’s taken up until just a couple of years ago to actually give up the fantasy of being a “real” family.
My sisters and I have often talked about the coldness in our parents and wondered why it was. One theory we have is that a person can only love so many people, and when you have a family of 8, 10 or 15 children, which is also compounded with the extreme poverty in the Family, people didn’t have the energy to empathise or care about anything but bare survival. When I was six my mother told me that she used to feel that she had to deal with everything that happened to me. She said that the only way she kept her sanity (and I was admittedly a handful) was when a Family “childcare expert” told her: “you have to deal with everything you see, but you don’t have to see everything”. While she has perfected the Not Seeing Everything to a science by now, I think there is something to this. The Family had no notion of healthy boundaries and being overwhelmed with constant interaction, scrutiny, drama and emotion does something to a person and eventually they just shut down and just don’t have the capacity for normal reactions.
Another theory we have is that in the Family we were all children to some degree, and simply due to the regressive environment and constant dependency on others, our parents never matured themselves. My mother is always in competition with her daughters, and even now, if we call her when things are rough, she is happy that life is hard for us too, rather than being able to be supportive and just be a mom. One of my favourite books is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (the book is much more complex than the film). It portrays this mother-daughter dynamic so well. Mature people don’t constantly need reassurance and are able to feel joy and pride in the success of those close to them, rather than feeling threatened by it. However, in the Family every single thing in our lives was watched and judged and every problem needed a scapegoat. We as children were pitted against each other, and even parents and children were as well. My sister and I once went to visit our parents (we were in our early teens, several years after we were separated from them) and their home was in serious financial trouble. We were shocked by the poverty and chaos, but were there to see them, and had a good time with our little brothers and sisters. We both were in serious trouble after leaders visited their home and found out we had not “reported” the situation to anyone else. Even for my siblings who were not “adults” at 12, the responsibility we were all given was completely inappropriate for our age, and in many cases equal to or above our parents. While it still hurts, I can understand the insecurity they feel.
What you described in the paedophile priest is exactly the attitude we get from our family who are current members. They talk to us as though we are strangers, and give us the PR lines, which if nothing else is very annoying. I have a friend whose father sent her a brochure of their “work with the youth”, which she put together herself before she left. That’s it’s “all about them” is so very true. With everything I have done, my parents are mostly concerned that I don’t embarrass them. They think that I don’t know how hard it is to be a parent, and am just being “critical”. (No one is perfect, and no one expects that, but it’s not rocket science, provide the basics of human rights for your children—education, health care, clothing, food—and don’t abuse them.) I was recently at a wedding where a friend who also grew up in the Family was getting married. This person’s parents attended, and all they could think about was having the bride and groom chauffer them around to do the things they were planning to do. I don’t think they even knew how insensitive and rude they were being. They just expect that because they are God’s elite, anyone who is part of the “world” owes them.
One thing I do perhaps disagree with is that they don’t know how much they have hurt others. I think Karen Zerby does know. A Liberty or a Stumbling Block was published in 1987 and this publication explained the trauma that had been caused by adult predators to girl and boy children in the Family. I think, like my parents, she doesn’t care. There is a priority list for her, and first and foremost, it’s survival, which for her is keeping control of the group. The ends justify the means, and if a few (thousand) children were hurt along the way, well, they were all winning the world for God so it’s par for the course. There was a joke in the Family I remember that talked about a gypsy (or Catholic?) family with yet another baby, and the father said something like “well we can always throw him out and try again if he’s not quite right”. What the Family, and our parents, did not bet on, is that we would not go gently, and that the things that seemed so trivial in the Family (like children and marriage), are much more of a commitment than they realised.
One of the key elements to the outrage I feel is that my parents and the people in the Family just don’t get it. On a fundamental level they just don’t understand what it is that hurts us. We’re not angry because they broke a rule in abusing a child, the abuse itself was evil in the most basic sense of the word. It’s not that we were “stumbled” by someone being overly strict, the callousness and absence of the most primal parental love is a deep wound. We don’t accept that it’s okay that our being their child is conditional on our being “favourable”, or else we become a “former loved one”. It’s not about appearances or what the “system” might think. It’s about them for once in their sheltered, warped lives having a backbone, thinking it through, no matter how painful the process, and doing the right thing.
