Random Stories of People Who Joined and Then Escaped Cults (14 items)

• (#1) Teen Rehab Camp Forces Slave Labor on Young Addicts

  "My younger brother was in [Teen Challenger] and they kicked him out for arguing with the leaders about religion and science and making people think too much and was preventing what the leaders were trying to do to the people there to make them 'productive members of society'.

  From what I can tell it was really a slave labor camp where they would work long hours all day and get almost no sleep and would be pretty much brainwashed into believing some really weird form of Christianity. Very close to Pentecostal. Most of the people there were court ordered and if they didn't finish or left they broke their probation and went to prison.

  They ate rotten or expired food and when any food was donated the counselors and leaders took what they wanted and left everything else for the 'students'. If you were obedient and bowed down like a dog they'd let you do the easy jobs like work in the kitchen or clean or whatever. If you were rebellious like my brother they would put you on hard labor. They would work for like 18 hours a day making these crosses out of wood from lumber companies where they would sell them cheap lumber they couldn't sell and sell the crosses outside supermarkets and malls.

  They made him work at a car wash one day for 12 hours straight in the middle of the summer in Mississippi. He has pretty bad scars from the sunburns. No sunscreen, no soothing lotion after, no tylenol. God will heal your pain and illness. A man cut his thumb off working in the wood shop making those crosses and they wouldn't let him have any medication. Just pray your pain away. A man died of complications related to liver cancer because they wouldn't let him go to his chemo treatments or take any of the drugs he was prescribed.

  The guy who was at the top drove a brand new Ford F150 and his wife drove a brand new Cadillac Escalade. His job at Teen Challenge was the only one he had and his wife didn't work. It is a corrupt organization that takes advantage of people that."
• (#2) Parents Hire Reform School to Kidnap Kids in Night

  "Not exactly what most people would see as a cult, but it's what it was.

  The Family Foundation School was based off of the East Ridge Cult. Many of the teachers and staff had been part of East Ridge. East Ridge was based off of the concepts of All Addicts Anonymous, which was essentially the beliefs used by Synanon in the 70s/80s I think. Essentially, this was a 'recovery' cult that made use of the twelve steps to brainwash people.

  I was 15 when I was sent to the 'school'. Most kids who went there had an escort service, essentially their parents paid people to kidnap them. I wish I was exaggerating, but escorts of this nature snuck into the kid's rooms in the middle of the night, woke them up, and if they don't cooperate, put them in chains and dragged them off to the school. I went willingly with my parents. I wasn't a particularly bad kid, but I was suicidal and depressed, and it badly affected my grades and ability to do school work. I had been hospitalized three times, so my parents were desperate and willing to try anything to get me help.

  So I went willingly. I didn't think it was going to be bad or abusive. I thought I was just going to get some intensive therapy on a longer term basis than my stays at the mental hospital. I realized pretty early on that there were a lot of techniques that were used that were not okay. I ran away after two weeks, and was found in about 10 hours

  I refused to submit to life there in the beginning. They verbally abused kids in front of each other, used exercise and deprived kids of food as a means of punishment and coercion, and the religious aspects were pretty horrifying. They used tactics such as 'exile' and shunning to get people to submit. I recall in my life skills class there, hearing about how brainwashing isn't bad, how it's good that they were reprogramming us to be model, productive citizens.

  Phone calls with family were always monitored and if you tried to say something about how you were being treated, they would tell your family that you're being manipulative and not to believe you. I only had alone time with my family once in the eight months I was there. I was allowed to go to dinner with them once. I remember the entire time thinking that I should tell them, but I knew they wouldn't believe me. Even to this day 13 years later, I don't think they believe me. I know they do, but there is still something that nags at me about how no one should trust me, since it was drilled into me there that I'm a liar and manipulative, and that no one should trust me.

  I got out because I got kicked out. I had a mental breakdown. I had been cooperating and following the program. But my aunt had been diagnosed with cancer at some point along the line, and it took her quickly. My parents wanted me to go to the funeral, school said no, so parents said that I couldn't go. I went silent for a few days and then I just started flipping out. Every day. I mean, I had anger problems, but I lost my shit and I flipped out on everyone. I don't remember it too well, but I spent a lot of time in isolation and I would literally just attack anyone who tried to touch me. I had no control and it was horrifying. I am honestly not an angry or violent person. The idea that I acted like this still haunts me.

  I thought I was going to go to a mental institution for the rest of my life because that's what they said would happen if I left. My mother sent a letter saying that if I was kicked out, that I wouldn't go home and they would send me someplace where I would be locked up 24/7. None of it mattered to me. One day, I saw my stuff was packed and I was terrified. I thought I was going to be sent to a mental institution. But my dad was there, and he took me home, and I cried.

  The effects of it, and what really happened there. Well. I didn't realize how fucked up it actually was, and that it was actually a cult that focused on 'You will die without us' until I was 19. I'm in touch with a few survivors. We're all at least still a little bit f*cked up. Sometimes the only thing I can do is laugh at how f*cked up it was. The good news is that the school announced that they were closing this past August."
• (#3) Girl Tells Cult About Her Abortion to Get Kicked Out

  "I was forced into a cult around age 8 by my extended family, after my parents were pretty much convinced to let them partially raise me....

  We'd attend a group for girls once or twice a week, where we learnt to be good wives, were forced into very strict gender roles, and had to make snacks or put on Bible skits for the boy's group. We were told that they'd end up our husbands, and to little kids we didn't really question it much. We were pretty tame, and going to a hippie school, my life had this big rift between what I was taught there, and what I was taught at church. I remember getting into an argument with my teacher on an assignment about world religions about how Christianity was fact, and spouted off a bunch of my beliefs, and everyone looked at me like I was f*cking crazy except a few girls who were in the group as well. We discussed it at the group, about how I stood up for the church in the face of scorn, etc etc.

  My parents probably thought it was just normal Christianity, but as my parents got deeper into poverty and drugs, my extended family tried to take me from their custody to further indoctrinate me into it. It was not normal religion, and I sort of knew it on some level. I said no to going to live with them, as they scared me, a bunch of family bullsh*t ensued, it happened again, I said no, but eventually I was just given to them unofficially because it was 'good money' to do so. My in-laws were rich. They were not.

  I was given to a boy my age, at the Age of Mary, which is when I went to live with him, and he raped me for four years. I still attended school, sporadically. I lived an entire double life. Young '80s/'90s teen, and the woman to birth an effigy of Jesus, a reincarnation of the Lord. 

  I mean, imagine sitting on your best friend's bed, who is clueless, thinks you live with your parents (you only stay with them for a few days at a time, rarely), and is blasting Metallica while drinking cokes on a hot summer day, and not being able to tell her that you are being raped, abused, and threatened daily by a boy we both went to school with, because no way in f*ck would she believe you. I did tell her eventually, when we dated in the late '90s/early 2000s for six years. She said it made sense in terms of the weirdness that was my cluelessness about things like fast food or pop culture.
  
  I did get pregnant, at 16, and ended up enlisting a friend to help me get an abortion, as it was legal to have me married to my rapist due to the pregnancy, with court permission (or so I was told). I was kicked out immediately after informing them of it. I walked home to begrudging parents and a little brother who had no clue. I never saw anyone from that place again, besides my aunt, and it's dissolved since."
• (#4) Father Convinces Family and Followers He's a Powerful Priest

  "I was born into it. My dad is, or was, a priest for an East Asian religion. He claimed to be the only one authorized by the temple association to teach outside of China, and attracted a large following of students. These students are doctors/lawyers and aimless drifters, male and female, Christian/Jewish/etc. - and are all head over heels in love with him. As I grew up, I was surrounded by his students, who all proclaimed their undying love for their master's wife and children.

  I grew up extremely conservatively, never dated, never made friends with guys, barely had sleepovers, etc. Even now, I have a huge inferiority and anxiety complex, even beyond what is considered part of the normal experience for Asian children. When I was younger, around ten years old, all of my best friends were my dad's students, usually middle-aged women, and I relied on them hugely, especially when my father divorced three times and remarried twice. I idolized my father even though he was gone for 75% of the year, and barely present at home for the other 25%. I fully believed his story of growing up in the temple and mystical origins.

  When my dad remarried for the third time, it was to a Caucasian woman who didn't fully buy into his whole story. She thought there was something off, but she didn't pry into it right away. She ended up staying for us children (my sister and I, and later, my brother), for which I'm forever grateful. The next ten years were...tumultuous, to say the least. My father's following grew and grew, mostly in part [sic] to my new stepmother's business acumen. We went from barely scraping by on $30,000 a year to netting over $400k a year. The more successful my father became, the more arrogant, narcissistic, and emotionally abusive. He would claim powers of seeing people's auras, and told one girl that he could see the color of her panties. He broke couples apart to suit his own power games, and 'counselled' troubled children, despite the fact that he barely knew his own. There was physical violence, too, which I had to break up at the age of fourteen, when he struck my mother while she was holding my infant brother. Somehow she was the one who went to jail.

  Despite all this, I clung to the image of the man, the master, that all of his students saw, and thought that all of the fault was with us kids. If only we could be better children, more loving, more understanding, more patient, maybe we would see the master. It was only three years ago that I found out the truth from my biological mother. He never grew up in the temple. He never studied with his master.

  His entire origin story is just that - a story. That's when my eyes cleared and I knew better. Despite a huge number of texts and emails between me and him, condemning me and calling me a traitor, I severed the ties and left.

  All those students with whom I grew up? They cut me off. My family in China? They cut me off. That's fine by me. Now I have a burning desire to find a way to bring down his entire so-called temple."
• (#5) Father Saves Daughter From Being Inducted into Scientology Sea Org

  "Ok, so my mom got involved and brought us into [Scientology]. One of the first Christmases my mom was married to my step dad, he got my sister and me the scientology communication course. You need a partner for the course, so my sister and I partnered up and had a blast with it. One key thing they teach in the course is a lack of response to upsetting words. During the course, my sister and I took turns saying purposefully funny or nasty things to each other in order to get a response. The other had to look straight ahead and not respond at all. This is called bull baiting.

  For another holiday, my step father bought me a 'group processing' (no kidding) auditing session. This is auditing meant to bring you into the present time. Basically, our auditor stood at the front of the room and said 'look at object A. Thank you. Now look at object B. Great job!' for 3 hours straight. You feel really great afterwards because you're literally being hypnotized.

  Now, onto the Sea Org stuff... My sister was really excited to dedicate her life to scientology at 13 years old. My mom and dad split custody of us, so when my sis expressed an interest, my dad asked to check it out. We drove down to Clearwater, FL together (divorced parents, me and my sister) to check everything out. They showed us where my sis would sleep (a motel owned by the org with 3 sets of bunk beds in each room), where she'd go to 'school' (they assured us she'd get a HS diploma, but most school was learning scientology stuff), but they never mentioned where she'd work. (You could be placed on a boat, work in the hotel scientologists came to stay at, or pretty much any other placement.) They said it'd ALL be free. Not only would she be able to do all the course work and auditing she wanted, she'd also be getting a small paycheck! All my parents had to do was sign away their parental rights and my sis would sign a BILLION YEAR contract. (Yup, that's actually what it says on the contract.)

  My incredibly analytical father started doing his research as soon as we got home. He researched for weeks and ultimately made the decision to not sign away his parental rights. He showed my sister and me 20/20 videos, stories from ex-scientologists, etc. I left after that. My sister was devastated. My mom was pissed. The great relationship my parents had turned very sour. And my mom had to pretty much force my sister to go to our dad's house on his custodial time. My dad even took my mom back to court and changed the custody agreement they'd been using for YEARS to include 'all decisions about school, religion, and medical procedures must be agreed upon by both parents.' Soon after, my dad spotted people going through his mail, watching his house, calling and immediately hanging up...

  My mom started getting frustrated with the church when their promises of helping her get sober didn't really pan out. She'd been an alcoholic for years and scientology said they could help that. The final straw was being held against her will. My step father had asked her to take a course in Cincinnati - he'd pay for it! And pay for her travel! AND pay her to take it! Though she was separated from him, she was tight on money and went. Once in Cincinnati, she was locked in a room. She still hasn't opened up to me about the whole story, but she has said she kept asking to use the phone and they said no. They did call my grandparents, though, to ask for $10,000 to 'help' my mother. Once released, she said 'f*ck this sh*t' and hasn't been back.

  They still call my mom and sister occasionally trying to get them back in, but the calls have slowed over the years. Also, my mom and step dad did have a child together, who is being raised semi-in the church. We have to be careful about speaking about another sister's depression and ADD meds around her. If she found out and told her dad, he may not let my youngest sister see us at all."
• (#6) Cult Leaders Know Where Members Are at all Times

  "My parents were in a cult called 'The Way' while I was growing up, they met just after they had both joined, so for the first 12 years of my life, it was all I knew and what I knew as 'normal.'

  Every Sunday we would go to someone's house (never a church because churches were bad for some reason), have a gathering of about 12-15 adults plus their kids, and mass would consist of one person speaking from the King James version of the bible about whatever the topic of the week was.

  I wish I could remember the lectures, but even as a child I never really believed in Jesus or God in general. I spent a lot of time feeling bad about that, but that's another story. I do remember having to sit very very still and not speak unless I was spoken to. The general rule for children was that they were better seen and not heard.

  After the congregation or whatever, people would spend about 30 minutes to an hour hanging out and during this time frame, if it was the beginning of the month, you had to fill out your 'calendar' and turn in your pay stubs.

  The cult had you turning in monthly calendars with exactly where everyone in your family would be at any given point (this was far before cell phones were common, talking early to mid 90's) for reasons I was never privy to. The pay stubs were to make sure that you were truly tithing your 10%.

  My entire family got kicked out when I was 12 because my 16 year old brother had stopped attending 'church' on Sundays with us and word somehow had gotten out that he was questioning the teachings and entire bible in general.

  I haven't talked to my brother much about this, but from what I understand they had him brought in for 'questioning.' Asking him why his belief was wavering and what exactly had triggered it. I remember him saying that he told them it was because in other churches people were allowed to talk and have fun and he didn't understand why that seemed like such a foreign concept to him as a church.

  The cult had us ex-communicated. I had actually made friends with a girl there and we had exchanged AOL usernames, I remember sending out a chain email and having her name as one of the many (probably like 3 realistically) I was sending it to, only to have a message come up immediately saying something about her blocking me or something. I asked my mom what it meant and she warned me to never try to contact anyone from there again.

  Not that bad by some really weird cult norms I'm sure, but last I had heard was somewhere up there was a sex scandal and maybe even something involving children. I'm just grateful that that's all I know about that weird collection of people."
• (#7) Seventh Day Adventists Indoctrinate the Children

  "I was raised by seventh day Adventist parents going to church every Saturday etc. This particular denomination is super stealth, at face value they just seem like a regular church but holy moly do they indoctrinate like crazy!

  The worst part of it is that my parents are pretty skeptical by nature (they eventually pulled us out of the whole thing when I was about 14) and they had no concept of how much us kids were getting indoctrinated.

  When we went to church they would go to the adult section where they had EXTREMELY boring sermons while the kids were left in the 'responsible' hands of the sabbath school teacher. We were told all sorts of nonsense, some of it was down right weird. We were told you must NEVER EVER EVER physically put ANYTHING on top of the bible, we even had lessons and practiced how to stack books placing the bible at the very top and even had to practice doing it. We were taught all kinds of very specific things that had literally no reference whatsoever in the bible. Watching movies like Shrek was totally off limits since it 'was against the bible because God didn't make the fairytale creatures'. That particular part was one of the hardest to deal with since all our friends and school groups would go to watch movies and we had to stay home. Anything with magic or super human powers was out of the question. Sci Fi was a no go since it was apparently made by the pawns of the devil to spread the evil lies of evolution (these guys are the major power behind the concept of creationism).

  The most wtf thing was that they would read passages out of books written by some woman called Ellen White who was supposedly connected to God. She wrote some batsh*t crazy stuff and they would take is as gospel (literally) even when it blatantly contradicted the bible. When my parents called them out on this they got EXTREMELY aggressive, at one point refusing to answer a very basic question at a bible 'study' and physically forced my family out the front door. Most of their counter arguments to any kind of objective logic was 'but Ellen White said blah blah blah which makes your statement wrong.'

  When they saw we were asking difficult questions it became truly cultic. All our family friends that we had known for decades immediately cut us off with threatening statements and general aggressiveness, these are people I grew up with and called auntie/uncle, it was a very jarring experience.

  My parents tried to contact some of them to try and sort out our differences but they didn't want a bar of it. It very quickly became the whole church against us and they all treated us like we were the plague, even us children. Overall I consider myself a skeptic and an atheist, though I struggle to fully accept evolution as a rock solid concept I definitely don't subscribe to creation. I do believe there are being with higher intelligence though not in a god-like form.

  All in all, if you're in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and you're beginning to ask logical questions, save yourself the trouble and bail now, they will never be answered."
• (#8) Young Girl is Abandoned at a Cult, Finds Phone and is Saved by Father

  "I've never been in a cult, but my mom was abandoned at a cult when she was 11 with her 16-year-old and 7-year-old sisters. My grandmother was mentally ill and somehow got connected with these people in Iowa...they were from the deep south. Anyway, my grandmother didn't stay. No one knows where she went during that time.

  My mom and her two sisters were left there for around 6 months, until my mom got to a phone and called her stepfather. He somehow arranged to pick them up with the local law enforcement. He wasn't allowed to just walk right up and get his kids, so he showed up in the middle of the night and mom and her sisters had to hide and sneak away with him. Law enforcement hung around and gave them an escort out of the state. I think that the worst part for my mom and her sisters was not only were they abandoned by their mother, but they were never allowed to confront her with it per her psychiatrist. She was a pretty sh*tty mother and an absent grandmother to us grandchildren.

  I can also add a few more details. Mom said that she and her younger sister did not experience any physical or sexual abuse, but she is not sure about her older sister because she was separated from them. They also worked in a cucumber field in the mornings. They told my mother that she had an aura around her at all times and she said she felt like she was being prepped for some sort of religious ritual.

  Unfortunately both of my aunts that were with my mom have passed away in the last 6 years. Neither really talked about it around me, although they both acknowledged it. My mom is very vocal about it. This would have taken place in 1967-1968 in Iowa."
• (#9) Redditor Asks to be Saved From Quiverfull Cult

  "I grew up involved with the Quiverfull movement, a type of Christian Fundamentalism that involves having a bunch of children, home education, extremely modest dress including headcoverings, the practise of 'courting' and 'bethrothals' (basically semi-arranged marriages taking place as soon as the girl was old enough to marry), and something called 'Christian patriarchy,' wherein the father is viewed as a sort of mini god.

  I grew up attending a small Christian school run by the local Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, where every student was Quiverfull. We were required to wear extremely modest clothing (ankle length skirts, hemlines that covered the base of our necks, etc. We had wardrobe checks multiple times each day.)

  Each morning we pledged allegiance to the Christian Flag and to the Bible. It's been years, but I can still recite both pledges by heart. Then we recited the chapters of the Bible we were working on. Yes, I did say chapters. We memorized several books of the Bible (Jonah, all of Paul's epistles, most of Genesis, Daniel, a decent amount of Leviticus and I think the Gospel of Mark.)

  Our schoolwork was primarily books published by Abeka, BJU Press and ACE. Our textbooks claimed that:

  no transitional fossils had ever been found
  the Loch Ness Monster had been proven to be real and was a plesiosaur
  the Great Depression never happened but was just a myth made up by the socialists
  slavery was a win-win solution for all involved
  dinosaurs breathed fire
  the KKK were great dudes who got a bad rap
  the trail of tears was actually super great
  outer space wasn't real because if you blew on a pile of baby powder, a new planet wouldn't form (this was demonstrated)
  the Liberals don't believe in personal responsibility
  the world is about to be attacked by the floating Space Jerusalem

  We never covered much actual math, science, etc. Learning the truth about the government's plan to kill Holocaust the Christians [sic] was seen as much more important.

  For one year the girls also took Christian Charm. This was primarily about how God really, really cares about whether your chest is 10 inches largest than your waist or not. Girls were forbidden from standing with their feet parallel, 'like a man's', instead having to keep our feet at ridiculous and painful angles. We couldn't walk without being careful to 'glide gracefully' and avoid 'swishing' our knees. We were forbidden to not smile, but our smiles were never big enough, or they were too big.

  There wasn't much time for real schoolwork anyway, since we were all so busy being punished for having an ungodly facial expression, and forced to spend the rest of the school day standing on our tiptoes on one foot in the corner.

  In fourth grade my parents chose to pull me out and homeschool me. We joined a local homeschool group filled with Quiverfull homeschoolers. My parents had gone to a different church, one which was very Charismatic (we spoke in tongues, exorcised people, 'healed' with prayer) but not necessarily quite so extreme as the IFB school I had been sent to. However, as my father became more violent (he had a lot of mental issues and was an extreme hoarder), my mother (who was a borderline hoarder and very depressed, so much so that for the first ten years of my life she barely left her bed except to use the washroom) became more and more heavily sucked into this subculture.

  My parents had already gotten rid of most TV channels over concerns about evil spirits and only allowed us to read a few classic books, but after this my mom first stopped allowing us to read anything non-Christian, then banned novels altogether. We began being forbidden to see anyone who did not go to our church or homeschool group. Since my parents never really started teaching, and I had little access to books and at the time no internet, this left little to do all day aside from copy out Bible verses and stare out the window for hours. Time sort of stopped meaning anything.

  We became more into the Biblical patriarchy thing, where my father was seen as the head of our household and a sort of direct representative from God who women were to serve and obey in every way. You weren't supposed to express any kind of wishes or desire, but leave it up to your husband/father to make all decisions for you. (If you were his daughter, this included selecting your husband - girls were expected to be stay at home daughters, serving their fathers, until marriage). Biblical femininity was emphasized, which in this case basically meant long skirts and not having opinions or desires, except to serve whatever man God chose as the best 'helpmeet' possible.

  For a couple of years my mom, who was herself a nurse, stopped allowing us to take medicine, believing it to be witchcraft. She became more and more crazed about the idea of demons trying to attack her and our family.

  Unfortunately, I was born with a birthmark on my leg. She believed that this made me Satan. My father and mother both searched for ways to fix this. I've been exorcised, had oil poured over me, had everything I owned burned, etc. It apparently didn't work.

  After my father died we were at least spared his extreme violence, but my mother became only more unhinged and depressed. We shifted from being Quiverfull to being Charismatic - we'd been both for a while, but my dad's death pushed us all the way from one to another. She mostly gave up on her idea of me as Satan, but became absolutely obsessed with the idea of Satan attacking our family. This belief is reinforced by our church and all the Charismatic material she reads. She even abandoned our homeschool group, believing it to not be concerned enough about how demons are possessing everyone.

  Our church is obsessed with spiritual attacks, which are seen as stemming from absolutely everything. Anne of Green Gables? Witchcraft! Christian music? Actually sung by Satanists, filled with subliminal Satanic messages! Cabbage patch dolls? Demons who stay still when we look at them! (I'm 100% serious) The only way to ward this off is speaking in tongues, making prophecies, etc. A few people in my church believe they hear the voices of demons in their head, and said demons are chasing them. I've been there as we've all laid hands on people and prayed for them to be liberated from the demonic oppression in their lives.

  I still live with my mother and sister. I still go months without seeing anyone who isn't from my church. I still have no real education."
• (#10) After the World Doesn't End, Redditor Gets an Education and Leaves

  "I was raised in the Family Radio Fellowship. It has/had ties to the Quiverfull movement and carries an apocalyptic message.

  For those of you lucky enough to not know, Family Radio was/is an evangelical Christian sect that has predicted the end of the world a couple of times.

  Family Radio didn't gain a lot of traction until about a month before its last prediction of May 21, 2011. However, I was born and raised in the movement, and was completely absorbed. Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - in my life was to lead up to that day. It was considered a sin to consider living after the rapture, so we weren't allowed to make long term plans. As a young person, this usually meant dropping out of high school or not going to college. Yep. Kept us dumb enough to keep following them....

  I gave Family Radio (and their sister organization EBible Fellowship - which is still going strong) all of my money. I gave them my life. When the world didn't end, I got two jobs, put myself through community college, and am now almost done with university. I am pretty rare - most young people never got to earn an education. Many of the families sold their houses, as they planned to go on road trips to spread the Word. Plenty of families ended up with nothing, homeless and jobless. Some people were separated from their families. One woman joined the movement, and her husband realized how crazy it all was, he took their kid and vanished. I don't know if she ever found them after the prophecy failed....

  There is a lot of crazy shit. And a lot of sad stories. Sometimes, I still have nightmares about it. It was abuse, plain and simple - although I've worked hard to move past it and built a life.

  I just ask that you empathize with cult followers. I know, I know, how the f*ck can I ask you to do that? I feel like I have a unique viewpoint, because I know what it's like to be sucked into a cult and now I know what it's like to watch cult followers from the other side. There were assh*les in our movement, but we also had individuals who were genuinely lost and looking for a community - people who really thought they were doing good. Were they? Hell no. But they were brainwashed. It's just sad."
• (#11) Jesus Army Causes Girl to Develop Eating Disorder that Lands Her in the Hospital

  "My best friend is part of the Jesus Army in Britain. I don't know a lot about other Jesus Army groups throughout the UK but this particular one forced her to drop out of college - she is extremely clever and wanted to be a nurse - and come and work for their church, an office job of some sort.

  So she dropped out, moved in to their large community home and I visited a lot. She didn't get her wages, they were pooled into a communal pot sort of thing, and she had to ASK for HER money from the head of the household to go buy things, but only things the Jesus Army permitted like modest clothing or ingredients for the cooking (it was automatically assumed if you were a female and lived with these people, you cook meals for 20+ people every night, but you can't sit at the same table as the men, and you aren't allowed seconds but the men were), but say if she wanted to go buy a chocolate bar, this wouldn't be allowed.

  Anyway, it was just a really extreme sexist outdated sort of living, like she wouldn't be allowed to pursue a partner unless she told the head of the Jesus Army and then they would set them on a date, and if they got on they would have to spend a year apart to 'pray about each other', and if they still liked each other after a YEAR of no contact, they can marry.

  Anyway the whole ordeal stressed her out and now she's in hospital because she has developed anorexia, her food being the only thing she feels she can control. She doesn't live at the community home anymore, which I see as a good thing. Lots of other shady stuff went on but those were the things that made me the most angry. She is still pretty deluded about all of this."
• (#12) Manipulative Guru Asks Member to Hand Over Phones, So They Research Cults on the Internet

  "I grew up in a 'Hindu' cult. It was the Truth, exemplified in our guru, with his lifestyle of 6 cars, 2 mansions, 3 businesses, and international vacations in first class, together with annual celebrations of his and his family members' birthdays. All of which we were solicited to pay for and sponsor from the bottom of our pocketbooks and into debt, to prove our devotion. We were the elite, destined for self-realization, and were only to have limited association with the rest of the world, even our own non-believer families.

  Disobedience meant shunning and expulsion. We celebrated our birthdays only by decorating the guru's home and giving gifts to him and his family. I was homeschooled and attended university by distance learning, all so that I could stay in the group with our strict timetable of daily morning and evening prayers, communal meals, and morning and evening sermons by the guru (unless you were 'spiritual enough' to work unpaid in his businesses or doing chores at his home). We had mandatory purification baths every morning and evening, and if we touched something 'polluted' (a menstruating woman, an unbathed person, old food, dirty clothes, a thread from these clothes, had marital relations, etc.) we had to bathe and change clothes all over again. Menstruation meant seclusion for 3 days; birth or death in the family, 11 days.

  We asked the guru's permission for every step in our lives -- going to the doctor or into town, buying appliances, visiting family and hiring someone for home repairs, to education, career, marriage. Vaccines were frowned upon and if you got chicken pox or cancer, or had an accident, it was due to your bad karma or ego. Girls had to wear their hair long and both sexes had to wear old-fashioned traditional clothes that covered us from shoulder to ankle. We had to be vegetarian. It was easy to control people -- we lived in rental accommodation owned by the guru's organization, overseas disciples had visas sponsored by him, and he handled our utilities, phones and internet. These were occasionally cut off or destroyed (once or twice by bulldozer) to discipline erring disciples, in addition to the public shaming during the sermons, yelling at or 'blows' that also included physical 'correction' aka 'purification' (being hit) by the guru -- which was considered a blessing as it was his guidance and sacred touch.

  Teens were strictly supervised; we got in trouble after a group of teens went out (chaperoned) to a local temple's dance and music program, and more seriously when we went the beach, since the cult provided 'everything we needed in life'. Romance was forbidden and marriages arranged by the guru between group members. The more the couple was opposed to each other, the more ideal, 'to put the guru first always in your marriage'. Even those young people who vomited in disgust, or swore they would rather die, were gently coerced into marriage; gays, too, with the opposite sex. Several disciples were encouraged to and did break off their engagements or divorce their significant unbelieving others who would 'block the light' and 'drive them insane'. Two girls eloped and no one, including their families, attended the wedding.

  We were also told that natural disasters and manmade tragedies were due to our impurities. To offset these we made huge donations to the guru's temple. He even had a (badly) hidden camera to film worshippers who thought they were alone. We were told that in fact nothing would be immoral if the guru 'the living Truth' asked it, whether financial transactions, plagiarism, lying or stealing.

  Information was strictly controlled: gradually, movies were banned and our library was disbanded. People were told to stop talking to one another 'gossiping'; new babies were secluded at home. Disobedient disciples were sent out of town and shunned for several days as punishment.

  Around the point when we were told to cut off our mobile phones (both private and group-sponsored contracts) give up our wifi and Facebook, and abandon our pets ('do not try to understand the guru's orders but just trust'), I read up on cults on the internet and decided to get out. I sold my jewelry to finance my plane ticket, driving lessons, return to university classes, and cult recovery workshop. In my recovery group I discovered how similar our cults were. My friends and family in the cult have cut me off; my other family and ex-cult-members have welcomed me with open arms."
• (#13) Church of Satan is Too Emo for One Member

  I briefly joined the Church of Satan as a teenager/early 20-something. The doctrine of the CoS is designed to draw in people who feel disenfranchised, ostracized, or otherwise 'shoved aside,' and leave them feeling like they're as good as everybody else - but only if they follow LaVey's philosophy. It's every bit the collection of immature freaks and misfits that it sounds like it should be.

  I met a 30-something EMT, a man who at least claimed to be a police officer, and another who claimed to be a lawyer (Lawyer in the Church of Satan... it's almost TOO perfect). They sounded like what I'd now refer to as 'emos,' a term I wasn't familiar with in the 90's/early 2000's. There was a lot of whining about how society didn't understand/ hated/ was afraid of them. There was a lot of furious gesturing towards the doors leading out of the room in which we met, as though people were waiting outside to stone us. Ironically, one time, there were a few protesters outside, at which point everybody threw up their hands as though they'd had to deal with this all the time for years.

  The food was terrific. Junk food orgy. I think there was an episode of Robot Chicken, a while back, which parodied the CoS meetings: a bunch of very fat Satanists chanted "OmmmNommmNommm" as they gorged on delicious, processed fat and sugar. I sometimes wonder if the people who wrote that episode knew just how close to the reality they were. College is ultimately what got me out of this; I actually felt like I had a future for a while, and hanging out with a bunch of people twice my age who acted like they were about half my age suddenly became pretty exhausting.

  That, and my particular grotto had a loud and obnoxious male member, somewhere in his thirties, who was borderline obese and (not unusually, for this lot) loudly emphasized perceived and/or imagined social oddities as making him somehow superior to the 'less unusual,' the inversion of what everybody felt 'on the outside.' In his case, said oddities included his supposed bisexuality. One too many hover hands from him."
• (#14) Survivalist Compound Convinces Member of An Impending Apocalypse

  "I'm gonna fess up to 'Cult Lite,' in my case, Survivalism. Survivalism is essentially a religion, that believes that if you are good and prepared, and hoard your guns 'n' ammo, and are ready to skin your neighbor alive to survive etc yadda yadda, then when the Apocalypse comes, you, even though you may be a mediocre or even awful person in real life, will end up on the top of the heap.

  In my own case, when the economy collapsed, and I'd been reading about peak oil and such matters for a couple of years, I fell for it. I lived on a 'survivalist compound' for a few years. The guy who had the place was as much of a hoarder as a 'survivalist,' but, in fact, many of these types are hoarders and not terrifically good at life.

  Once, I'd cleared out a lot of trash and in general decreased the trashiness of this 5-acre place, the guy who owned it started, as I privately put it, to hoard people.

  First, he moved one useless, obnoxious guy in, then in decreasing time-intervals, started moving more people in. The first obnoxious guy was OK I guess, except the time he threatened to stab me with a knife. Oh, and it was my fault he threatened to stab me with a knife, because I'd sneezed - one of those sudden ones that there's little preparation for. It was my fault because Mr. Head Survivalist had known the guy longer than he'd known me.

  Well, next came the weaselly guy, and the snoopy guy with the psycho wife, and toddler. Keep in mind, this place is essentially a junkyard, with 30-odd junk vehicles, rusty iron everywhere, and at the time of this writing there are two toddlers there. And they've waved enough red flags in front of the authorities that they're under the eyes of a few gov't agencies...

  How could this have harmed me? What do I consider an 'escape?' Well, I had a place to live there, with quite a bit of stuff, I didn't have to pay rent, and as far as the basics go, I had all the elements of basic happiness. But, the rest being shirkers, I was put under a heavier and heavier workload. It got to the point where being homeless in one of the nice towns about 30 miles away was looking really good. I came upon a chance to get out, and did.

  Mr. Head Survivalist told me that he, and the rest of his 'pets' can't believe I left. Free rent, plenty of good garden food (the food there was quite good), how could I possibly want to leave?

  I'm glad I left. I no longer think the Apocalypse is nigh. Those people are going to be the most dangerous thing around if things really do get bad, they'll be shooting each other over old, corpsy-tasting cans of SPAM.

  The head guy loooooooooves to talk about shooting cops. Loves to tell everyone and their dog all about how he's a survivalist and had all this stuff, which means if times get like he wishes for, there will be an army of freeloaders headed his way. Head guy says he'll die surrounded by used bullet casings, after his final glorious shootout, which he'll not survive.

  As cults go, it's not an extreme one, but I do feel I fell for a cult, was in it for a while, and then got sense and got out."

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