Mind Wars by Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman

Author:Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2015-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

Cult Stories: 3 Survivors Speak

A Cult Experience

By Pearry Teo

Growing up in a cult was perhaps a very strange experience in my life. Certainly, I did not go about being fearful, nor was I ever placed in a position that would be harmful to me as a child—physically. Throughout growing up, I was never in a situation where my family was poor or hurting for food, but I was certainly denied the luxuries of the outside world. Things like television were banned in my house, I could only hear gospel music, and every single book I read had to be screened by my parents first. Of course, I felt this helped contribute to my creativity once I got older, as being deprived of sensory enjoyment through media, I resorted a lot of my entertainment through my own imagination.

When my mother and father were divorced, it was during the same time the church decided to split up into two as well. They quickly made my parents choose sides and as I grew older, I began to realize that they used God’s name in order to make sure my mom and dad did not get back together, because who can deny that they tithe really well? Mind manipulations such as coming to my house and praying over my mom until she cried made me uneasy [so] that one day I decided to chase them out of the house. Since then, they have manipulated my mother’s train of thinking to believing I was possessed by the devil and to this day, she still feels embarrassed by my existence because I did not follow this church.

There’s nothing wrong with being non-denominational as a church. But it definitely irks me to see them worship some prophet whom they believe to be the last prophet before the second coming of Christ. They seem to worship the man more than God himself. Church go-ers were subjected to lengthy studies of his sermons. We were told never to date outside ‘The Word’ and consider everybody else evil. Within the church, they have scammed money (out of my father eventually) millions of dollars into properties, producing audiotapes of sermons and the church choir to be distributed freely among church go-ers. Within the church is a complicated system of family boarding to the point they have set up a school behind the church (a non-charter school) where the kids can get their education all year long.

As I grew up, I begin to see a very psychologically unhealthy trend of trying to keep everybody within the family. We only addressed each other as brothers and sisters (but encouraged to marry each other). Of course, how all this has affected me didn’t do much the minute I decided that I wanted to have nothing to do with it. They didn’t make much effort to stop me. They did send people over to my house to pray and try to get women to take me out on dates to attract me back to the church.

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