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

• (#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  Anyway, it was just a really extreme sexist outdated sort of living, like she wouldn't be allowed to pursue a partner unless she told the head of the Jesus Army and then they would set them on a date, and if they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."
• (#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."
• (#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."
• (#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."
• (#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."
• (#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."

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