INTRODUCTION Why Children and Cults? “The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell. --- Nietzsche” (Woodman 47) As we enter a new millennium, there are more cults than ever before. Cults are everywhere among us, in every shape, class, and variety. From birth, I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. This experience was the most major influence in my childhood; it followed me, unwelcomed, into adult life. I have been searching for answers ever since. I have found that there are not answers, only revelations and clues into what happened to me then, and what action is needed now. I was disfellowshipped, which is the Jehovah’s Witness word for “excommunicated,” when I was sixteen years old for smoking cigarettes. This is something that Witness doctrine considers as reprehensible as murder. The punishment is the same for each crime: total obliteration at Armageddon when the birds feed upon the eyes and viscera of the dead children in helping to clean up the earth of filth and debris--namely non-believers--who are destroyed in the “battle.” Besides this gruesome futuristic fate, the punishment for disfellowshipped persons during this lifetime is very real, literal ostracism and silence. Former friends and family members are not permitted to speak with disfellowshipped persons, and if caught doing so, may be subject to the same punishment. Personally, I have been stripped of my relationships with two parents, three siblings, four nieces, and four nephews. Although they know in their hearts that I am not evil, their doctrine tells them otherwise. This has been a great source of pain and conflict not only for me, but for my family, as they try to abide by the rules and laws of “God’s earthly organization.” Absolute conformity and obedience is required at all possible cost, be it their own hearts or freedom. They dismiss their own discomfort as a test of faith. I do not intend, in my exposure of what takes place in the lives of Witness children, to point a finger at individual Witnesses, thereby making them out to be monsters. In fact, many Witnesses are extraordinarily nice, well-intentioned people. As Witnesses, they become part of a grand machine. This machine is well oiled and maintained by true believers who earnestly believe they are doing the will of God. The machine is the agent liable for many of the oddities occurring behind the walls of the Tower. The machine is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society (WTBTS) which is one of the largest publishers of all time. According to the videotape, Children of Jehovah (CJ), the corporation sells close to sixty-million magazines world-wide per month. In 1976, the active world-wide “publishers,” or members active in the ministry work, totaled only 2,248,390 (Harrison 338). The arms of the machine now reach an automatic market that in 1996 averaged 5,167,258 publishers according to the 1997 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (33). A great number of these active members are children. The videotape points out that the monthly magazines have “more people reading them than Reader’s Digest and the New York Times put together.” It is estimated that the society makes around $500,000,000 per year from literature alone (CJ). The yearbook reports that “[d]uring the 1996 service year, the Watch Tower Society spent $60,932,324.26 in caring for special pioneers, missionaries, and traveling overseers in their field service assignments” (33). Congregations are self-sufficient entities, independent of the mother organization. The society’s branch offices, headquarters, and farms, are staffed by volunteers who earn very small monthly stipends plus room and board. They are proud to be “servants of Jehovah.” Though it is highly unlikely, if an active Witness were to read these pages, they would look upon my writing as “apostate literature.” They might experience physical sensations including tingles caused from bodily hairs rising as they feel the presence of Satan in the words passing before their eyes. They may become angry, stating that the information presented is nothing more than lies. They may even pilfer the book from the library shelves thus twisting the act of theft into divine intervention. Their indoctrination is complete and total, not a stone left unturned. It is for the reasons listed above that I felt compelled to investigate the psychological implications of cult influence upon childhood. The research has required me to look into three fields of psychological study: adolescence, childhood trauma, and cults. There is scant description of these combined subjects in the research literature. Cult literature briefly addresses the traumatic nature of involvement. Here and there, in adolescent psychology books, a stray sentence occasionally addresses the means by which cults attract teens. While my focus is predominantly on women and girls, much that is presented will hold true for boys and men. However, women and girls in cults usually experience the most harm, and are somewhat more vulnerable to cult indoctrination for reasons which will become apparent. In addition, cults usually have more female members. My reasoning in looking at “normal” psychological development for adolescent girls is primarily due to the depth and scope of problems these “normal” girls face. I use the word “normal” because young Witness girls struggling to gain autonomy from family, and, at the same time perhaps, struggling to break free of the cult, refer to others as “normal,” not themselves. If normal girls living in “the real world” experience so many challenges, one can just imagine how these challenges are compounded by the added gripping intensity of the cult. Perhaps my focus on adolescence in this first chapter relates to that time in my life when my own “awakening” from the sleep of cult unconsciousness occurred. In this sense, I use adolescence as a platform for childhood within a cult. The focus of much cult literature is on the recruit. While the recruitment process is debilitating, and information about it is expository, evidence supports the belief that conversion into a cult is quite different than being indoctrinated by one’s parents during infancy or early childhood. The parents are not once, but three times the divine power over the child. In the case of Witness children 1) the child worships and obeys the parents 2) the child worships and obeys Jehovah God through the guidance of the parents and through the divine guidance of the Watch Tower corporation and 3) the parents in turn worship and obey Jehovah and the organization. The mother, under direction of her dominant husband who is the head of the household, must promise to love Jehovah first and her husband and children subordinately. In fact, in my examination of user profiles of Jehovah’s Witnesses subscribing to America Online (AOL), three out of the eighteen mothers profiled specifically indicated that their roles as mothers were secondary to their roles as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Under the heading of “Occupation,” one woman said, “Jehovah’s Witness all the time/Mom most of the time/insurance some of the time.” The parents and children are all required to place their primary allegiance with Jehovah. Family members are required to report each other to the elders in the event of “misconduct.” Dutifully, the parents must keep the child in line, or the parents’ affiliations, especially the father’s, may be diminished. Children’s allegiance must be tri-fold. They must also be obedient to the congregation “elders,” and to their parents. Children are unaware of the hidden dimension of allegiance to the organization. All Witnesses come to regard the society’s teachings as having been channeled directly from Jehovah God through the members of the “governing body” at the corporation’s headquarters in Brooklyn. But even children must pledge their first loyalty to Jehovah. If a parent misbehaves under Watch Tower tenets, the child must report the parent to the congregation’s elders. This sets the child up for a double-bind, in that the child must make the decision to risk one of two options: parental punishment, which is literal, temporary and probably not life threatening, or punishment from the Almighty, which is ostensibly permanent and life-threatening. These common dilemmas within the Witness community give a new meaning to the corporation’s choice of name, The Watch Tower. For it is a crime punishable by death to overlook the actions of miscreants and abusers of the faith. Children, when refusing to eat their eggs at breakfast, are warned that disobedience is sinful. Hence, their compliance is galvanized, their untainted minds erased. Children’s faith is exploited as their innocence is assaulted. Whereas the recruit can usually, within several painstaking months of diligent and carefully led therapy, be on the way to recovering her own personality, the cult-child has no former “pre-cult personality to awaken” (Langone 337) when and if exit from the cult becomes a thinkable course. “Thus, the cult environment can create an anxious dependent personality . . . . In the case of adults, this is a pseudopersonality . . . . For children, however, anxious dependency may indeed be fundamental to the child’s character” (337). When you have no freedom to think for yourself, when every personal or unique thought has an associated fear that Satan is attacking and poisoning you, when every decision is pre-determined, your brain, in a sense, becomes atrophied. This can take years to undo. Your mind becomes dull, and the simplest things become the grounds for utter confusion, especially for children. The implications of this are extremely significant and yet it is difficult to know just where and how to start dissecting the possibilities. As far as I am aware, there have been no scientific studies to date of such children. To perform such a study of children still in a cult would be impossible given the innumerable obstacles. Cult families are exclusionary entities and if truly devoted, would never permit such a close look. Also, the personality factors in each child’s unique development within individual families of various cultural mores prohibit such a study. What’s more, many cult organizations have ended numerous studies of their particular sects with threats of law-suits, personal harm, and more. I have drawn the dissimilar materials on cult psychology, childhood trauma, and adolescent female psychology together by searching past, personal experiences and researching current and ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. This has provided plenty of analogous information to provide the beginnings of speculative research on this tight field. Drawing these materials together was not paradoxically difficult for me since I lived the life of a girl traumatized by an authoritarian Christian cult for eighteen years. To brush up on Witness teachings, I have immersed myself in reading about experiences of other ex-Witnesses to re-familiarize myself with their terminology, doctrines, regulations, and idiosyncrasies. Since it can be said that the ways in which authoritarian cults psychologically affect their members are strikingly similar, my use of Jehovah’s Witness data is often interchangeable and largely applicable to cults in general. The years I spent as a believing child were primarily from the time I was born until twelve years old, and then again from about thirteen-and-a-half until six months after my immersion into the baptismal waters. I was baptized three months before my fifteenth birthday. Witness baptism is something looked upon as everlasting, a stringent devotion to the Almighty God Jehovah, leaving no room for unzealous behavior. At age fourteen, amidst much confusion that included somewhat suicidal behaviors, if not tendencies, I devoted myself to Jehovah for all eternity. Although marriage is mostly prohibited until at least eighteen years of age, baptismal commitment of young children is readily encouraged. For example, Barbara Harrison, in her book Visions of Glory, recounts her baptism at age nine (14). Soon after my baptism, however, I again became bored with the pedantic, gloomy, tone of the meetings, the monotone discourses, the hypocrisy, the gossipy behavior of both Witness children and adults, the subjection of women, and the lack of solid answers to my most simple questions. I found myself floating, daydreaming the time away in a thick fog. I was present only in body at the five weekly meetings, out in “field service” (proselytizing), circuit assemblies, the large international assemblies in summer, and all Jehovah’s Witness functions. The most I learned in this morbid fairy world, is that the (real) “world” is completely miserable, wicked, and awful. I found myself drawn to this real world because nothing could be more miserable or awful as the lies I was forced to ingest as truths. All I learned in “the Truth,” were the things in which I was not allowed to participate, and the destructive end I would come to if I did not submit. I had a very hard time believing that my friends on the outside were evil. I did not see why they deserved to be destroyed at Armageddon. The years I spent in mind numbing “meetings,” humiliating “field service,” “book studies,” and in feminine subjection, affected me so that years later, when I wanted to look back and remember the exact beliefs and experiences of this cult involvement, my mind recalled nothing clearer than a thick smoky fog, wafting across nicotine resin. I have not wanted to be a party to such deep immersion in the beliefs of this “religion”--my tormentor--until seeing the personal importance of structured closure. I fought for years to avoid reading any literature with the word “God” in it. Strangely, too, I shivered with fear at age 27 when I met a poet named “Pagan.” I was able to dispel my fear as I came to learn that the word pagan simply refers to country dwellers, pagnani, not the inherently evil and satanic, as I was raised to believe. During this study, there have been nights I’ve awakened at three in the morning only to burst out in tears. There have been days spent in debilitating depression. There has been mourning over my lost childhood and the deep scarring caused from loss of family relationships. As I read and remembered, my stomach became squeamish, my head ached, and I became flooded with memories. In many ways this study has acted as cognitive reinforcement for that which was previously unconscious within me. Articulation and re-surfacing have been the main rewards. This thesis is, in many ways, a very significant purging. Although there are many micro-cults in our society, there is much more intensity in the cults that get away with status as plebeian religions. This is because these cults position themselves steadfastly in society so much so that they become curiosities. While they manage to stay on the fringe, memberships grow rapidly. As certain individual cults grow in size, their main source of recruiting becomes the children born within. It may be that so few cult children have broken away that recovery from a childhood in a cult is actually a non-subject among most mainstream mental health professionals. There are few counselors significantly knowledgeable of cults or issues specific to ex-members, especially children. If my therapists had had more awareness, I wonder how this may have facilitated my healing. This particular question arises since I became involved with a cult-like business organization five years after leaving my parents’ home. I left my first marriage to be indoctrinated to the rules and means of a budding multi-level-marketing art gallery in which I was to spend four years, and eventually direct six stores. At the time I did not see that the condescending attitudes put forth towards people who chose not to get involved were exclusionary. I suppose I felt somewhat “at home” in this setting. I did not see that the pressure put upon me to produce more, more, more, lest I suffer verbal abuse, was the same as that used in destructive cults. Although this company was small and was not a full-blown cult, questions arise for me about enthusiasm versus dogmatism versus authoritarianism. Now I see that these behaviors and other control tactics used by this company are common among cults. I was likewise purged from this system, as I was slandered, belittled, and ostracized from what had become my second “family.” Since this second cultic experience, I have been extremely slow in warming up to any type of group involvement. As an eighteen year old, I left my parents’ house with no knowledge of the real world. From birth, I was shielded from, yet constantly warned of, the evil in the world. Like many cults, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in a millenarian doctrine. In particular, Witnesses believe the second coming of the invisible Christ began in 1914. Recently, Witness doctrine has been updated since all the predicted dates of Armageddon have passed without consequence. Many fresh converts are kept unaware of these aborted false prophecies. At the time of Armageddon, it is their belief that Jehovah God will destroy all the wicked, namely all non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christ will reign over the earth from heaven with the help of 144,000 faithful and discreet slaves. This period will last for one-thousand-years when the earth is restored to a paradise, and dying, pain, suffering, sickness, and imperfection become things of the past. The thousand year reign is a trial period for all Witnesses to prove themselves. If anyone fails this test, the possibility stands that he or she will be destroyed after this millennial period. There are no guarantees, even for those who would make it through nine-hundred-ninety-nine years of faithful service. For if, in the last year before the millennial period ended, someone sins without repentance, that person would still be obliterated in the end. Unlike many Christian sects, Jehovah Witness doctrine does not teach that all souls go to heaven. Except for the 144,000, no one has a soul, no one goes to heaven. They believe death is the final sleep. A child born into this sect is flooded with illustrated and verbal images of perfection, paradise, evil, chaos, and mass destruction, while the parents lull her to sleep by reading from WTBTS publications. Harrison says that as she was baptized, she “became drenched in the dark blood-poetry of a religion whose adherents drew joy from the prospect of the imminent end of the world” (14). The huge difference between these teachings and fairy tales of evil witches and goblins lies in the realism, solemnity, and dourness in which they are presented to the child. The teachings instill terror in the child. Instead of fanciful adventures, these images are presented as fact. The wide eyed expressions on the faces of the children so subjected are not from excitement; they quake and tremble with fear. There are no heroes, no knights in armor, no beautiful heroines. There is no one to save you from the “right hand of God.” These graphic images place children in a hopeless situation. They immediately learn to equate disobedience with obliteration. Children quickly learn that it is considered evil to think contrary thoughts. Original ideas are extremely frightening since children learn that the omnipotent god-head, Jehovah, can read anyone’s mind. Not only can he read one’s mind, he can read everyone’s collectively. In an instant he can read every thought you ever had. There is no escape from this vengeful god. Parents instill the importance of this fear in their children. Another woman in my AOL profile examination states her hobbies: “Jehovah’s Witness; preaching Good News; raising children who fear the Almighty God. . . .” Furthermore, children and all Witnesses are warned that Satan is constantly prowling the land in search of new victims to demonize. Individuality is truncated. Total conformity becomes the only choice. Extremes are instilled early and a nurturing childhood becomes an impossibility. Children are encouraged to begin the Jehovah’s Witnesses notorious door to door preaching activities when they are as young as four, five, or six years old. Young children often accompany each other as they approach the doors of strangers. In Combatting Cult Mind Control, Steven Hassan states, “Research in social psychology has shown that nothing firms up one’s beliefs faster than trying to sell them to others. Making new members do so crystallizes the cult identity quickly” (72). For the impressionable minds of children, who are equated to “new members,” these activities produce powerful results of doctrinal infiltration. Somewhere along the line, before these children were born, there had been a conversion. The children’s parents, or perhaps grandparents, were effectively approached and sold. As I hear of friends’ run-ins with “really friendly people” who strike up conversations with them on the bus and invite them to coffee only to start preaching the “word of the kingdom,” it becomes clear to me that cults are everywhere. And just as they are everywhere, they are tricky. They can be so smooth that one doesn’t even know one is being duped. In Cults in Our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer says, “A thought reform program is not a one-shot event but a gradual process of breaking down and transformation. It can be likened to gaining weight, a few ounces, a half pound, a pound at a time” (62). Recently, a woman called my office. She had gotten my name from a brochure I had scattered about town. Feigning interest in my business, I quickly realized she did not care about my services, but wanted to make an appointment with me to talk about “community” and “sharing ideas.” She was very vibrant and persistent. Her pleasant demeanor and enthusiasm piqued my curiosity as I agreed to meet with her. What was she all about? What did she want? She came to my office weeks later well dressed, pleasant, and energetic. For about twenty minutes, she talked and talked without saying anything. Her intent eventually became clear when she invited me to an introductory meeting and subsequent seminars. She also mentioned that the group’s male leader was “incredibly intelligent” and “spiritual.” It is only now, after intensive studies on cults and their methodologies, that I realize the possibility of this woman’s involvement with a cultic group. If my senses failed to detect a certain strangeness, or if I was lonely or in transition at the time of her invitations, is it possible I may have again been snared into something dangerous? It can happen to anyone. No matter how intelligent, educated, successful, or sophisticated a person is, research has shown that we are all susceptible to the traps laid out by cults. No one is immune. It is commonly perceived, as I noticed in my local newspaper’s articles on the Heaven’s Gate cult, that people go out in search of cults to join. Comedians joke about the “lunatics” involved in mass suicides. Celebrity figures make comments to the effect that the world is better off without these freaks which lends no understanding to a very misunderstood phenomenon. What they do not realize is that while people seek spiritual meaning and search for answers to questions of purpose and mortality, no one goes out in search of a group that will eventually control every aspect of their life. People don’t actively look for a cult to join, but cults actively seek people to recruit--everywhere. For people who are lonely or in a vulnerable position or transitional state, awareness is the key to avoiding cult entrapment. Mental health professionals acquainted with cults’ destructive capabilities and practices are needed to help cult survivors piece back their lives. Cult members, whether born or recruited into a cult, must be met as people who require help, who have feelings and minds first, and only then, as cult members. Before these people were induced to proselytize, they were first on the receiving end of beguiling mind controlling tactics. Their minds have essentially been stolen from them and they require a super-hero to assist them in the arduous task of regaining their minds. As the number of cults grows, and cult-like behavior becomes more insidious in our quickly multiplying world, collective awareness needs to expand greatly.
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