A Thousand Wishes

How could life post cult have been different?

What do I wish that I knew when I left the Truth 2x2 Cult?*

Yesterday, 18 November, was Cult Awareness Day. What better day to release this?

I wish that people in ‘the world’ had said ‘I believe you and I’ll always be here’ when I disclosed that I had been in a cult and had experienced abuse. Often they were embarrassed, maybe didn’t know what to say. Often they giggled nervously and never discussed it again with me. I wish they’d had the vocabulary to ask me questions, to support me.

I wish I’d had affordable housing, so that I wasn’t living in poverty in the years after I left.

I wish I’d had access to social security benefits earlier, in my mid teens, so that I could have left earlier, had access to support from the age of 16.

I wish I’d had access to high quality, affordable counselling and cult deprograming services, from councillors who knew who the Truth 2x2s were. I wouldn’t have had to flounder around for 15 years, trying to find support. I wish I hadn’t had to repeatedly explain to social workers what ‘a cult’ was and the nuances of the cult I came from. I wish they could have at least googled it.

I wish there was trauma informed legal support for me when I started contemplating reporting grooming and CSA. I wish there had been police officers trained to support cult survivors, who understood the layers of trauma involved in being from a cult, how its not only CSA and grooming we experienced.

I wish there was easily available, high quality peer support and family violence support – especially when I was 16 to 19 years old. When I was first identifying that my home was abusive, I wish I’d had people to talk to to help me understand that. Instead, I was silenced by medical professionals, teachers, school counsellors.

I wish I’d had high quality career mentoring and sponsorship. I didn’t come from a community or family who could help me build a career, and the decisions I needed to make were exhausting. I wish I had people in professions willing to sponsor me and help me learn how to navigate a corporate career ‘in the world’.

I wish I had ongoing affordable (or funded) medical care. Dentists, GPs, pain specialists. I wish medical professionals had helped me identify earlier (or maybe identified themselves) that I had CPTSD and chronic pain as a result of my cult upbringing. I wish they hadn’t dismissed me with phrases like ‘all the women in your community are depressed, there isnt anything I can do about it’.

I wish GPs had taken the time to understand me as in individual, not just dismissed me as ‘another girl from that religious family’ – and misnamed / misidentified me as my cousin.

I wish people had told me that it was ok to be suicidal sometimes, to feel that there was nothing to live for and no hope. I wish I hadn’t been shamed for feeling that – I wish I’d been taught earlier that is ok to live with that feeling, to know it will come sometimes and you need to learn to live beside that. Its ok to feel hopelessness.

I wish I’d had space and money and time to learn who I was. I didn’t have an identity of my own, I wasn’t allowed one. I was another McConnell/Kemp girl – another one in a long line of them. I wasn’t allowed to be a human being with my own interests, hobbies, friends, personality. I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard, fight so hard in the first two decades, to escape poverty. I wish I’d had space to explore my sexuality, gender, strengths and weaknesses. I wish it hadn’t been so consumed by poverty and survival.

I wish I’d had support to build solid and healthy relationships – to know how to identify controlling, manipulative and toxic people. I wish I’d walked away earlier from relationships (family, intimate, friendships) that were not healthy. I didn’t know you could do that, I didn’t know I had choices to walk away.

If I only had one wish (clearly I’d be screwed, because I’ve got a thousand) I would ask, maybe I’d even stoop low enough to plead: Believe us. Believe us. Say you believe us.

*Thank you to the people who emailed, DM’d, zoomed and called me to help build this list of things that we ‘wish we knew and had’ when leaving the cult. Please leave your own wishlist in then comments, your own thousand wishes for people leaving cults.