The Big Empty
This is the fifth post in a series on the state a person may find themselves in after leaving a cult. It's in part my own personal experience and in part the result of reading several books on cults and seeing the biographies of ex cult members and their remarks about life after the cult. I recommend that all the posts in this series be read in order from first to last as several build on points made in the earlier posts.
Note: here is a link to my blog archive by topic which has almost all my older posts at the blog sorted into categories for your convenience.
There is an obvious question for one after they realized that Scientology is a harmful fraud. If this occurred after having been manipulated and indoctrinated deep into Scientology, so deep that one was made into a mental pseudoclone of Ronald Hubbard and a fanatical zealot whose beliefs and identity are shaped by Scientology you went through a thorough process.
Hubbard wrote, "We may err, for we build a world with broken straws." In The Aims of Scientology, 1965
In the gamesmaker tape, the 39th taped lecture from the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures given in 1952, Hubbard described how he intended to make his game of Scientology and that his pieces and broken pieces aka his broken straws, would be made in a very specific way. A way that would require making a game and hiding the rules from the people he intended to make into pieces and ultimately he had to "break" these pieces to get his broken pieces.
I did a breakdown of that taped lecture in a blog post.
Hubbard made his intentions quite clear as I have described at length in earlier posts in this series.
So, the big question is what is the state that you are left in after you have realized Scientology is a pack of lies and a fraud?
I want to give a description of that. Remember, you have rejected your deepest beliefs and most certain underlying assumptions about everything. You had been tied up with contradictions and the feeling that the only way to resolve cognitive dissonance, particularly dissonances caused by contradictions regarding Scientology and the behavior you should have and the beliefs and even feelings you should have was to set aside the dissonances and submit to the authority of Hubbard and the infallibility of his ideas. You just gave up yourself, your independence, your judgement, ultimately your identity as an individual to Hubbard.
And then, after decades, you can't do this anymore because you finally, somehow, some way realized Hubbard was full of bullshit.
You arrive at a place where the mechanism you used to avoid mental and emotional discomfort is gone. It's destroyed.
But the feelings of being wrong if you did one thing or an alternative to that and being wrong either way are not gone.
The feelings may have been denied and dissociated from hundreds and thousands of times. You can have immense dissonance buried under years of trance logic that come forth, perhaps in an unbearable and overwhelming way, as you break the Scientology trance.
The feelings may be of worthlessness, failure, uselessness, and a deep all encompassing shame. A shame that is that of a desperate, confused, and scared child that is hurt and desperately needs love and compassion but simultaneously feels disgust for himself or herself and unworthy of the love and compassion that is needed. This can trigger a deep, even destructive, hatred of self and cold and ruthless treatment of oneself.
It is a terrible trap. The feelings of being hurt, and lost, and betrayed even can bring forth a deep and persistent blame. This can be a blame that Daniel Shaw described in his book Traumatic Narcissism. He described this:
"This is of course a perfect double bind (Bateson et al., 1956). Unable to be anything but dependant, yet still attempting independence, the child of the traumatizing narcissist parent is condemned either way. She comes to associate dependency with shame and humiliation, and independence with rejection and abandonment. Unless she can adopt the counter-dependent, shameless stance of the traumatizing narcissist, she lives instead in a post-traumatic state in which her sense of inescapable badness is cemented."
Daniel Shaw Traumatic Narcissism page 35
Shaw described how both children who experienced sexual abuse and ex cult members have this deep, seemingly unresolvable shame in common.
They both can feel the combination of deep shame that needs understanding, acceptance, safety and security from others, and simultaneously feel that this need is an unacceptable weakness, a weakness that is intolerably mortifying.
Mortifying as Shaw uses it describes a fear that is so terrible that death is preferable. In fact the history of cults includes several leaders who have committed suicide rather than face the reality that they failed and could not maintain an illusion of being absolutely superior to humans and infallible.
Rather than face their flaws and failures many cult leaders choose death. And the horror of being wrong, only human, and vulnerable can make a cult member shudder in terror.
When I was deeply indoctrinated in Scientology I was certain my knowledge of Scientology made me superior and would have preferred death to losing that status in my mind.
If being sexually abused as a child or a cult member teaches you anything it is that you can't control the behavior or character of others, but you can hate yourself for making yourself emotionally vulnerable, for having trusted people who would violate you, trusting someone who would abuse and degrade you, trusting someone who would deceive and exploit you callously, cruelly.
They can teach you that being vulnerable to others is the betrayal of self, but without the effort to be understood, to be loved and have compassion how can the need for compassion and empathy from others be fulfilled?
This leads to the unresolvable problem of shame that never is alleviated.
And that is where a long term, heavily, deeply indoctrinated Scientologist may end up.
Shaw described this and how the relational system of the traumatizing narcissist as he described them and their victims works in extreme detail in his book Traumatic Narcissism. I highly recommend it for anyone who want to understand abusive relationships and cults. It covers aspects of the subject nothing else I have seen describes, and it does it very well.
I wrote a couple blog posts on the book that elaborate on these points in finer detail.
- Traumatic Narcissism: part 1 Scientology and Hubbard
- Traumatic Narcissism part 2: The Relationships in ...
Shaw also elaborated in an article that I have posted on this site as well. This goes into extreme details on the subject and has a wealth of information that supports my own opinion.
It's not an exaggeration to say that for some ex cult members (but certainly not all) the overwhelming and persistent shame that is held in place by the double bind of not feeling worthy of any help that could resolve the shame can define the life of the ex cult member. They can feel that nothing they do is of any use. They can feel, for example, like they are no good and never do anything good at all. They can feel like crawling under the ground and hiding forever and never participating in life at all. They may feel like the world would be better off if they never existed. They can feel that the only positive contribution they can make to the world and humanity is to leave them.
I am not a doctor or scholar or expert on mental health but it's easily observable that some ex cult members have serious mental and emotional issues and problems for years after leaving a cult.
Some, but again not all, experience depression and anhedonia, some experience suicidal ideation. Some have persistent and frequent negative thoughts. It is hard to describe to people the phenomena of a person thinking negative thoughts about themselves hundreds and hundreds of times each day.
Sometimes these may to a greater or lesser degree resemble ideas or statements from the cult doctrine or something else the person heard or said. They may not.
It's worth noting that many children of Sea Org members have sadly been mistreated, some physically, many neglected and tragically reports of sexual abuse by caretakers have been presented enough to warrant serious inquiry and concern.
The sad reality is many second and third generation Scientologists had childhoods that involved reports of abuse, neglect, mistreatment, and it's resulted in the fact that numerous people ended up being abandoned or homeless or addicted to drugs or in some cases suicides.
The frequency of this is reportedly a part of the reason that the Sea Org no longer allows parents of young children to remain in the Sea Org. The horrible reality that the children of the people who are supposed to be saving the world are actually abused, neglected, mistreated and often cast aside like garbage and end up frequently, perhaps routinely, in situations of homelessness, poverty, prostitution, depression, or suicide is not the image Scientology wants the public to see.
David Miscavige wants that reality hidden. But the accounts of hundreds of ex Scientologists and their family members unfortunately are telling that story over and over.
I believe the book Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein also offers unique insights into the cultic relationship between followers and leaders and followers and each other that is a great compliment to the work of Shaw and a vital piece of the puzzle.
I wrote a series of blog posts analyzing her book.
I hope that this series helps to give my impression of the state that an ex cult member may end up in. Now I must emphasize this is just one possible example that occurs and not every single ex cult member will go this route or experience this exact outcome. But some definitely will.
The Big Empty
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