ex-culties, copy, and breaking chains

Here’s a story I never wanted to tell.

CONTENT NOTE: This email mentions cults and child abuse.

I’ve never talked about this before, and my skin is prickling as my fingers move across to the keyboard just to type that sentence. This topic has become such a big part of my growth these last few months that not talking about it would feel weird.

So here goes…

*deep breath*

I am a cult survivor. 

In fact, I’m in a special category of cult survivors because I was “born in.” That means I didn’t join of my own free choice, I was indoctrinated from birth. 

We got out when I was fifteen, or so I thought, but the truth is I’ve been exchanging one system of influence for another my whole life. 

I mean, I teach PERSUASION for a living, for chrissakes! 

The thing about cults is that people don’t know when they’re in one. For most of my life, every time I told someone I was raised in a closed group called The Brethren, they’d say to me, “Wow, that sounds like a cult Tarzan.”

It was easier to shrug it off, like, “Yeah, I guess it was weird but whatever. Isn’t everyone’s childhood hard?”

It’s taken me a lot of brave work to face the truth that my childhood wasn’t like other people’s childhoods. That my mother, my siblings and I weren’t just poorly treated and highly controlled, we were abused. 

That’s a hard truth to admit.

My brain is still looking for ways to disprove it, despite incontrovertible evidence. In the bathtub just the other day, I picked up a book I paid $56 for on Amazon about kids who were born into cults. There it was right there in chapter one: Plymouth Brethren. 

Wanna hear something even more outrageous? 

Cult books refer to the work of Robert Cialdini all the time. 

[To catch you up, Robert Cialdini wrote the book Influence, which many copywriters, myself included, consider the manual for writing sales copy.]

Some days it feels like I am in the very early stages of getting myself free, but other days I realize I’ve been doing this work for years, I just didn’t have a word for it.

There are many ex-culties like me out there, and probably at least a few on my email list. If that’s you, I’ve been reading several books by sociologist Janja Lalich and finding her work very helpful.

Chain-breaking is difficult, sweaty work. But living in chains is far more difficult, so I’m choosing to do that work, and every day I feel a bit stronger. 

Thank you for being a witness to my work.

We are so brave. 

xo,

Tarzan