From Cult to Happily Ever After

When I say I was raised in a cult, people perk up. They want to hear about that experience, but the truth is—day to day—it didn’t seem so different from everyone else’s lives. My sisters and I still wore trendy clothes (though on the modest side, and always a season or two too late to actually be trendy). We still went to public schools and ate what we wanted. But we didn’t go to college and were restricted in media and thought.

We had Bible meetings three times a week and proselytized on the weekends, with donuts at Cork’s on Santiam Highway afterwards. We only associated with each other, socially, so my “clique” of friends were co-ed and ranged in age from thirteen (that was me) to twenty-two. We had game nights and movie marathons and Super Bowl parties all together. We flirted, safely, in groups with chaperones. We had pie at that place on Pacific Highway that kept changing its name after Bible meetings and I still broke my 10:00 p.m. curfew, much to my mother’s irritation.

I had afterschool jobs and watched MTV and soap operas while my mom and dad were at work.

But, in elementary school, I had to leave my classroom to sit in the library, alone, while the rest of my peers celebrated birthdays and holiday parties. And I dropped out of high school (later earning a “diploma” from an accredited correspondence school) so that I could get married at seventeen. I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore.

We were “no part of this world.”

Strangely, it was more the aftermath than the everyday that created conflict for me—the adaptations I made as an individual to cope with not fitting in, not belonging, and then not being accepted by, kicked out of, that very group that originally isolated me from the non-cultish life.

No part of this world.

It sounds almost alien.

It was the lying to fit in. The internal shame of being a liar—even though most of the time I pretended the lies so well, I thought they were true. It was the continued fear and shame of never being able to be myself, because then I’d be alone. No one would want me. No one had.

No friends, partners, lovers, husbands. Not even one of my sisters wanted me to be me. And if I did? If I showed up as me? Against the grain of what they expected? Accepted? I was shunned for it.

They didn’t come to my weddings.

Didn’t invite me along.

Cut me off.

Divorced me.

Eventually, I fought back. I did my own behind-the-scenes defiance. Let young men touch me and pleasured them in secret rendezvous. I explored my own needs and desires. I did the leaving. I developed my own belief structures and uncovered new-to-me values. I expressed myself with clay, and glass, and paint. And words. Always with words.

I became a spiritual seeker. I meditated and used hypnosis and past-life regression to understand myself. I channeled my angels and spirit guides and connected with parts of me I hadn’t known.

And I danced.

I made shaman friends and brewed kombucha and jün in my kitchen.

I befriended myself.

I learned to trust myself.

I felt pride in myself.

And when I became Real again (or for the first time), when I remembered who I was, I met a man.

And it was the Truth.

And it still, after eleven years, continues to be my happily ever after.

You can read more about my experience of reversing the lying and learning how to tell the truth (but not until I was thirty-nine!) in my latest book, You Can’t Dance a Lie: A Memoir of Stepping into My Truth.