In Reply to: Re: Thoughts about choice (slightly revised repost) posted by Kinda Gentler on February 17, 2004 at 18:54:52:
Mainly it depends on the individual who joined as a teen or young adult and what sort of beliefs, attitudes, values, and needs they had at the time. I can't speak for a hypothetical person I've never met.
I can speak from my own experience. My ex-husband joined when he was 16. His mother signed off on him, naming Jane Berg as guardian. His mother figured it was better for him to be in the group than living on the streets. Also, his mother figured it would be better for him in the group than living at home, which was extremely chaotic and dysfunctional. She had too many mouths to feed and an alcoholic spouse.
So his mother made some choices based on her needs and what she thought were in her son's best interest. My ex-husband also made some choices: He chose to run away from his crazy home and live on the streets; he chose to fry his brains with street drugs, chiefly LSD, so that when TF found him, he was pretty much a basket case in need of some structure, three hots and a cot.
He also chose to leave TF when he was 21 because he got tired of being jerked around by the people over him. One day a leader, the next day a babe. What kind of career path is that? If he were a different kind of person, he might have stayed in TF because sex was readily available. But being the somewhat repressed Catholic boy he is, he was too puritanical in that department to value the employment benefits in Berg's doctrines of sexual freedom and sharing.
On the other hand, I joined when I was 19. I came out of the "free love" movement and had few problems with the sexual liberties of TF, which were always implicit in Berg's teachings. I came in with a fair amount of sexual experience and had an opportunity several months after joining (in 1972) to become a shepherd's concubine, second wife, whatever.
I refused because 1) I wasn't attracted to him, 2) his wife had just had a baby and I was enough of a feminist to think it's not good karma to rip off another woman/sister who is in a very vulnerable position, 3)I had other stuff I wanted to do in TF as God's servant and getting involved in a sexual relationship wasn't on the top of my list at the time.
As early as 1972 I also had reasoned that because "all things are pure for the pure," I could easily raise money for my plane ticket to Europe by turning tricks. Interestingly enough, one of the brothers at the colony where I was living at the time rebuked me for this logic and gave me a sermon on "Being a new creature in Christ." So I knew I wouldn't be turning tricks for my "great escape" while living at that home.
Point is, I wasn't an especially naive person when I joined, and I wasn't inclined to be blindly lead down a garden path. My ex and I were both alike inasmuch as neither of us were very good at neutralizing our consciences at the behest of an external authority figure like Berg, particularly when you consider the arbitrary uses and abuses of power that go on in TF.
A different kind of person than my husband or myself--a person with different beliefs about the importance of external authority, different values about relationships, different attitudes about God, and different emotional needs--would undoubtedly have made very different choices that we did.
Maybe something that set us apart from those who got sucked in, stayed in, were coerced, intimidated, manipulated, etc., is that neither of us had a major fear of God. Actually, my ex was pretty quick to blow off the whole notion of a personal god deeply involved in the affairs of humans, so that he had very little concern about whether he needed to please that god after leaving TF. If I had feared death, eternal damnation, lightening bolts from the sky, and everything else that comes with displeasing the particular concept of god that Berg represented and preached, I may have made very different choices.
I have made some choices that I now regret, and one of them was to marry someone I met in TF. If I had first gotten free of that system and then decided to marry, my choice of a life partner would have been very different. Part of the reason I was able to leave TF at all, however, was because of the relationship I had developed with my ex. It's easier to leave in a pair than alone. Also, easier to leave in a threesome. A good friend--another woman--joined us in the exit.
So I do live the consequences of my choice to join TF and then marry someone I met in TF, and there are times I feel sorrowful about how those choices played out for me, my ex, and our children.