I Joined a Cult I'd Already Left...
Why would anyone want to rejoin a cult?
I was born and raised in the cult that my parents joined before they’d had any kids. I left as a teen to get an education and to get away from an organization rife with abuse and neglect, which functioned through forced labor of all members, including children. I’d been out for five years when I briefly (re)joined1. I’d only meant to go on an overseas trip with some friends, but I changed my plane ticket and stayed, telling myself that I’d finally found “home.”
There were a few obvious reasons. I wanted some semblance of “family.” During the 80s and 90s, when I was a child, the cult practiced communal living and had an ideology of “one big family” that demanded members sacrifice their biological family ties for the sake of greater unity with the whole. The leaders split up families and separated children from their parents. I was raised in peer groups by a rotation of people. My parents and siblings didn’t always live in the same communes as I did. Instead of bonding with them, I bonded with other people.
A decade before I (re)joined, my family had moved to the US and lived with a family who’d also moved there from South America. I grew close to the boys my age and to their mom, who was kind to me.
On that fateful trip, I found out this family was living in that very city. I was overjoyed. They invited me over for dinner and said that I could stay. I liked having a family to have dinner with and wanted to stay. I would’ve done anything to be with these people who I felt closer to than my biological family, so I did.
At the time I'd just lost everything, so I had nothing more to lose. I’d been working two part-time, minimum-wage jobs and couch-surfing, dumpster-diving, and plasma-selling to make up for the loss of a second income. I’d also just left my girlfriend. The relationship had already derailed me. We’d met at the beginning of my second year of university, bonding over late night conversations, our traumatic childhoods, and our use of alcohol to numb that. With the intense relationship on top of work and school, everything was too much. I dropped out. We moved to a small town to be near her family and got engaged.
One night she came home blackout drunk and had me pinned down on the bed choking me. I pushed her off and escaped, with a lump on my head from where she dragged me out of my car by my hair as I was trying to get away from her.
I stayed at a shelter for women like me, and wrote a poem about going back to an abuser. I thought I was writing it for a woman who was leaving the shelter, but it was me. I missed her. I gave her a second chance. It happened again.
Ironically, my work-study job had been at an organization dealing with intimate partner violence, so I knew this was serious and that I had to leave. She’d been my everything; my compass and my anchor. I was adrift.
I considered two possible options: doing a thru-hike for six months or getting arrested as a political prisoner. Considering my outlook on the future, (re)joining was easy. I didn’t have the money for a thru-hike and I’d never been to jail before, but I’d been in this cult before.
I didn’t believe in the devil or god at the time, but I started brainwashing myself all over again. I had to formally request to (re)join and tell the leaders in writing everything that I’d done since leaving, specifically if I’d had any contact with unfriendly ex-members speaking out. I jumped through all the hoops required, including an exorcism for the demons of lesbianism once it came out that I had an ex-girlfriend. I reread all the foundational cult literature for the zillionth time. Like old times, I gave up listening to music or reading material that wasn’t produced by the cult.
I underwent the too-familiar humiliation of handing out religious pamphlets to families and groups of young people relaxing in the park on weekends. I peddled cult materials door-to-door with the commune leader and sat through his quasi-therapy sessions with women from offices and nail salons. I got up early and spent the day collecting donations of half-moldy produce from the market and dividing it up to be distributed to all the communes in the city. Compared to the horrific abuses of my early years in the cult, it wasn’t that bad. Trading freedom for a sense of family was acceptable.
I wanted what my parents and their cult-joining peers did: to belong and to escape. Unlike their generation, I couldn’t escape student loans this way. A cult leader came to talk to me about my debts, recommending I go back to the US and declare bankruptcy. Once back, I found that wasn’t an option. It didn’t deter me. I was ready to work hard, and I did.
I’d just sent off the last payment and was debt-free for one day when an ovarian cyst ruptured inside me. I didn’t have insurance and I almost died in the hospital. While I was recovering, my ex-girlfriend sent me a link to a news article.
I found out that the cult leader’s son had recorded a video accusing his mother of child abuse, before he committed murder-suicide. It sickened me to know that everything he said is true.
Cults are like abusers: control and power disguised as love and family. The main reason I went back to my abuser and to the cult is because they took my power from me in the first place, so I felt like I needed someone to direct and control my life. I thought that’s what love and care looked like. It took a near-death experience, a murder-suicide, and the untimely death of the first boy I ever loved to save me from (re)joining.
For their lives, and mine as my own, I am impossibly grateful.
~Anonymous