I didn’t expect going into therapy for depression that I’d end up talking mostly about the cult. I assumed that it was history and that dealing with depression was simply learning to cope with my new life. It was very strange to me that in order to move on I had to go back in time and heal the schism in my past and reunite the pre- and post-2008 me.

The one thing that hasn’t changed since going through therapy is the dreams. They still come just as frequently although I admit that when I talk about my past and religion that I provoke dreams about the church just like seeing spiders on TVs is guaranteed to make me dream about spiders.

I went for a walk with my dad on the weekend — we’ve started talking more since I sought help from my psychologist in deciding what to do about my relationship with my father. He asked me if I had considered going back to the church, seeing many people who leave do because they cannot cope or adjust to life outside the cult. My answer was emphatically no, I had not considered going back.

The one thing that does distress me a little is that in my dreams about the cult I’m always back there amongst those people. The good thing is that there’s no self-doubt expressed in my dreams. I always see myself as the outsider, but just being there stirs up some anxiety.

Last night I dreamed I was at an off-site prayer and fast — you know, where you spend all day (or two) praying and going without food for 24 (or 48) hours. In my dream I knew I wasn’t part of the church but it’s like I was escaping all over again, trying to get away but bumping into all these people who were asking me where I was going.

I have this weird sensation in my dreams where I feel like I’m still forced to go to church and go through the motions of being a Good Little Christian and it can be terribly disconcerting when I wake up and have to remember that I am actually out and completely free.

I would prefer if I could stop having these dreams but they’re really not that significant and if that’s all the lasting damage or consequences I have to live with then I’m happy with it. As I’ve mentioned previously I know people who’ve left who suffer from nightmares, years after leaving. Drug addictions and alcohol abuse — they struggle to stand on their own two feet and move forward as a whole person.

I’m thankful I’ve come out relatively unscathed, but I know that as I start working on my book again it’s likely the frequency of dreams will increase — I’m not looking forward to it, but hopefully it’ll help inspire me to write about feelings, thoughts and situations I’ve forgotten and put behind me. Ah, the sacrifices I make for you, my dear readers!

I’ve realised this week that while I’ve come a long way since leaving the cult I still have a long way to go. Perhaps I’ve been getting complacent or a little hard on myself, but I’m feeling relieved in the knowledge that I’m still on a journey and should be diligent to not forget the magnitude of spiritual abuse and damage done by the cult.

As I said to my psych in yesterday’s session, just five years ago I was the complete opposite of the person I am now. I was just at the start of the period where I began to doubt the teachings of the church and my understanding of the world through that teaching. I was very much a believer; I despised sinners and those outside the church, I believed my purpose in life was to preach the Word of God and convert sinners to Christianity, I believed the church was about love and grace and I could not understand the stupidity and foolishness of people who left the church. That’s me just five years ago.

Now I’ve come a complete 180 degrees from that and what a head-trip it has been! Three years of struggling alone with doubts, terrified of judgement and eternal damnation for even questioning the truth, becoming detached from reality, retreating within myself to a point where my body was a mere puppet that I manipulated into being whatever I thought the current situation expected of me.

Every couple of weeks I’ll come across situations that remind me of something from my previous life, things that challenge me and make me realise there are still parts of my life I live according to that old mental model and belief system that I need to evaluate and make up my own mind on.

There are the really big things that I’m still struggling with such as whether or not I believe in a God at all and whether there’s an afterlife but I don’t want to make my mind up about such things based on fear and so I’ve been working with my psych the past few weeks dealing with this fear so I can live my life peaceably and then decide what I believe in from neutral ground.

It’s not possible to make a hard cut-over from such a deeply superstitious, hierarchical, imposing and fear-driven way of life that embeds itself all the way into your mental, emotional and spiritual being across to a new, free and independent life; it takes time to slowly disassemble one and build up the other. My therapy is in part about acknowledging that I did have a life before June 2008 and I can’t ignore it because it is a part of me.

It’s not easy; I’ll admit I don’t think I’ve made it through one session yet without getting teary. It’s painful experiencing that anger, frustration, loneliness and anxiety again but it’s necessary and already after five sessions I’ve felt a merging of my “before” and “since” life, becoming a whole person, healing the hurt, releasing pent-up and unhandled emotions and stress.

But it’s very much one piece at a time, bringing across the things I still have use for and discarding the bits I no longer want.

I’m still trying to figure out who I am and my own opinions on things. Some days I feel at the mercy of the winds, thrown around because I have no firm grip on my sense of self and identity. But I’m working on it.

I don’t really feel anything … I feel like my life is portioned off into pieces, and each piece I share with a select group of people; and I have to keep each piece and each group of people separate from the other. And to maintain this separation, I have had to suppress my emotions and my personality, and become just a being of logic.

The main separation here of course was between people in the cult and people on the “outside”: friends, co-workers, people I knew through various social networks. It wasn’t just about not swearing in front of church members and then being able to relax amongst true friends – the division was much deeper than that. I became two, three, four different personas and the toll was heavy. I was just a man behind the scenes and the personas were my puppets. I had retreated from the world and many emotions I expressed were simulated. I laughed when I knew it was expected of me, I went through the motions of empathy when it was appropriate … even though I didn’t care about most people and rarely found anything amusing.

I had no one I could talk to. I couldn’t share my true thoughts with people in the church because it would mean disclosing things I didn’t want to share; things that would have seen me put out of the church. I couldn’t talk openly with my friends on the outside because that would mean telling them I went to church … and I absolutely hated talking about that. Very few of my friends even knew I went to church and only one or two knew some of the details.

There was not a single person on the planet I felt could understand me and help me.

In my diary on 17 June 2006:

I feel depressed. I cannot afford to succumb to depression – I know what that does to me. It’s bad for my mental and physical health – it’s a terrible place to imprison one’s self in. And it is self-imprisonment, because the cage is created by your own mind. Must break free – must do something. Even running a knife through my hand would help; pain is real, it would give me a reference point to the reality in which I wish to exist – a reality more lucid, sharper, clearer – not this fuzz that envelops me now.

I hated that I was stuck in the cult. I hated that I could not just believe in God like everyone else. I hated that I was free to go whenever I wanted and that I could not bring myself to do it. I hated my weakness. I hated that I did not understand the Universe. I hated that I did not know if there was an afterlife, if Heaven and Hell really existed.

It drove me to some really dark places. At a church camp over Easter in 2006 I wrote a poem accompanied by illustrations of Hell. How I felt that weekend and what I wrote scared me and every time I flip through my diary I quickly skip over that page because it reminds me that I stood at the brink of insanity, morbidly depressed to the point where I saw the world in shades of grey, lifeless. For the first time since then, I read that poem.

Two of the verses:

Why cannot I be told the truth?
Why must a choice I make?
Vague the clues, the facts … unbelievable.
I want to curl up and die.

But die I cannot,
For even that
Is all wrapped up in this choice.
For to choose wrong
At the worst,
May see my soul
Forever ripped apart in
Eternal agony & pain.

Imagine being told to make a choice of this magnitude that affects how you will spend eternity – either in bliss or torture – and not having any reliable information to make that decision? I didn’t want to stay, didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to live and didn’t want to die.

My poem also referred to making a gamble … and when you’re making the biggest decision of your life that extends beyond your death it’s not really a decision you should be gambling over. I could not move … yet every day that passed was another day closer to the deadline of either Judgement Day or my death. Can you begin to understand why I was depressed?

After finally leaving the cult in June 2008 I stayed with friends for a few weeks until I found my own apartment. For a month I lived on my own … and I was terrified. I had no one to distract me from my thoughts. Every flash of bright light would stop my heart – I believed it was the flash of a nuclear blast signalling the start of World War 3, the end of the world and my life, and Judgement Day. This happened again and again.

Even now, nearly two years on this is still prominent in my mind. I’m happier that my workplace is away from the city center because it might just be outside the blast radius of a thermonuclear warhead. I hate the cult for putting that fear in me. Some days I have an absolutely homicidal hatred for my parents for raising me with that fear and fucking up my life … possibly permanently.

But now I have accepted that I am living with depression and after nearly breaking up with my partner a month ago I am committed to doing something about it.

I have been on anti-depressants for four weeks now and have been going through a depression and mood workbook Mood Mapping by Allison Miller. I am also about to head off for my first appointment with a psychologist for counselling. My partner has been trying to get me to see a psych for over a year now and I’ve obstinately refused. I didn’t want help, I didn’t want to open up to someone.

I don’t know what to expect. The only other time I’ve received counselling has been from pastors in the cult, some of whom never even went to college and none of whom had professional training in counselling … which resulted in some pretty confusing and underwhelming experiences.

I have now finally accepted that I need to address my depression and seek help – not just for my sake, but for my partner and for my friends. They deserve it.

I don’t know if it’s my genetic personality or my upbringing and environment but I tend to follow rules and stick to the path. Maybe not so much in recent years because I am deliberately trying to break out of that headspace, but I do feel comfortable within structures; yet even I struggled living inside the small regulatory box defined by the church and was constantly bumping up against the walls and boundaries without even consciously trying to expand the floorspace and grant myself additional freedoms. It was simply impossible, yet I persisted in trying to stay on track.

I first started drinking when I was 21. I didn’t drink often – every few months, except towards the end of 2006 where it became a weekly thing – and every time I did it gave me cause to record it in my diary because of the effort and planning that when into it to try and keep it secret, balancing peer pressure and maintaining friendships whilst making sure I didn’t attract suspicion at home. The other element though was the inner battle, knowing what I was doing was wrong yet trying to understand why I kept doing it.

I wasn’t discovered until several years later in August 2007 thanks to a photo a friend from Sydney had posted on the Internet that some church snitch had found. Normally, people would have been put out of the church (out of “fellowship”) immediately for around 6 months – but not me, which was a remarkable exception to church policy. I suspect this was partly because by that point I had managed to stay sober for almost a year and could demonstrate that I was making an effort … I had even resigned from my job in order to escape peer pressure and end friendships – although to be fair to my coworkers, I didn’t need much convincing to go out for a drink, and why? My diary entry from 27 September 2006:

If only I knew what I was refusing the world for. I turn the world away and I feel like I’m left with nothing – and with that prospect, saying no is pretty damn hard.

Was I weak and spineless? No. The reason it was so difficult was because living within the prison-like boundaries of the cult was contrary to my nature. I was continually having to fight against my instincts to have fun and enjoy life in order to cram myself into that box. Though apparently enjoying life was a sin too.

Whenever a prayer and fast was announced I would try and convince myself I would enjoy going without food for 24 hours (or more for two-day fasts) and doing nothing but praying and listening to sermons from 9-5 on my weekend when I would rather be relaxing after a week at work. My diary is evidence of this struggle. From my diary of 10 September 2006:

If I don’t want to wind up downstairs in this lake of fire then I’m going to have to start making some changes in my life, and soon. Changing jobs isn’t going to do it. Cutting off friends isn’t going to do it. Selling all my possessions isn’t going to do it. Those are all works … my works, things I would do.

Three weeks later I resigned from my job. It continues …

The change must happen here first, in my heart. I’m scared – I don’t like not being in control. But it’s the only way. I can feel the edge of the cliff, I know where it is – I feel the void beyond, just this … dropping away. I know I must go over.

The cult was big on following your heart. Apparently when you receive Salvation and are baptised in water you get a new heart which is meant to be pure, God-given (unlike the one you’re born with?) and is then an instrument God can speak to you through and is always meant to lead you along the right path.

Apparently I never quite got the hang of the whole “follow your heart” thing. Like faith, whenever you screwed up you were to blame. You either didn’t have enough faith or were led by your own thoughts instead of your heart. Because both faith and heart are so vague it was a convenient way to convincingly validate both concepts because it could never be disproved. Ah, I lacked faith therefore a miracle was not performed. Ah I didn’t really listen to my heart therefore I failed. I am to blame.

3 February 2008, just four months before leaving the cult:

I have felt a couple of times over the past few months [...] that I’m a fraud, a fake … that I’m hamming it all up to try and feel spiritual or something.

The walls started to fall, the illusion of freedom through imprisonment, the need to suppress my nature in order to comply with the commandments – it all turned inside out. No longer was the world the dark place outside the castle of the church where dogs roamed, but instead the world became my home and I put on a show for the cult whenever I had to venture outside amongst those Christians at home and church.

It wasn’t simply crossing the line and switching camp. It was years of back and forth oscillation of broken resolve and futile belief. I am fortunate I came out with only a few scratches. Many turn to drugs or go skulking back to the cult because they can’t handle the shame and fear. I often considered suicide as a way to end the war and did reckless things like driving my car at over 200 km/h not caring if I lived or died. Luckily, I lived.

In June 2010, I will celebrate my second birthday.

As if living wasn’t hard enough with 99.9% of the world’s population being sinners, all bent on tearing us away from God’s grace not to mention the insanely high criteria for actually being accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven on Judgement Day.

Philosophy was banned from the cult, mostly due to this single scripture (and I’m quoting the KJV because that was the only version allowed, having been determined to be the most accurate translation):

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

There were of course many other scriptures which were used suppress free thought but in regards to philosophy this was the most explicit. We were taught: Don’t think, just believe. Don’t trust your own mind, trust God – and thus trust the man up the front preaching his interpretation of the Bible.

I’ve already mentioned previously A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things which I kept hidden under the drawers in my bedroom, but the start of my discovery of philosophy started some time before that with a film trilogy I have already mentioned in my blog, The Matrix.

I know some of you will groan when I mention The Matrix and roll your eyes but please bear with me. While I admit I’m a fan of science-fiction and a special effects junkie my love of The Matrix trilogy is grounded in the depth of it, the philosophy, the symbols and metaphors. It was my Philosophy 101 disguised as an entertaining movie about virtual realities, robots and war which is probably why I got away with owning the box set – although my mother did not approve of the “high” frequency of swearing.

On the bonus DVD Roots of The Matrix, several philosophers including Dr. Cornel West, Richard Hanley, Dr. Rachel Wagner, Ken Wilber, Mark Rowlands, Colin McGinn comment on the deep themes intertwined into the plot of The Matrix. I had never heard of many of the names and theories they mentioned apart from the obvious ones such as Plato and Socrates. Causation, Descartian dualism, metaphysics, critical reasoning, fatalism, Kant, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Nozick, Berkeley and more.

I think my head exploded a little bit watching that DVD, overwhelmed with new concepts. For me, watching that DVD was like taking the red pill. I felt foolish afterwards for the transgression which I immediately knew had irreversibly changed my life – it opened my eyes, in a sort of Adam and Eve, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil way. I immediately wanted to be ignorant again, but it was too late.

I knew it for what it was. I had just been given access to the tools that I was going to use to make sense of my world, to draw my own conclusions, to ask the right questions. It took me quite a while to figure out how to use those tools, and I went barking up many a wrong tree.

It’s funny, because in my diary entry on 10 March 2006 I wrote:

I was given the red pill at birth; fated to always have the knowledge of the truth and be apart from those outside the lie from the very start; one of those born in Zion

Complete opposite to reality. I had gone full circle at that point, believing that I had broken free and arrived back at the beginning – that in my original state I was already free, that it was everyone on the outside who was in bondage.

The cult placed a big emphasis on freedom, that we have a free will and follow God freely. That outside the walls of the church everyone was in bondage to Satan, that their notion of free will was false.

I did some weird things to try and figure out which side of the fence I was on – free or not free. In February 2006 I tried self-hypnosis, sleep deprivation and other techniques all with the intention of just breaking out of normal, to just cause ripples in the pond and see if something would break and reveal the truth; to separate the mind from the body:

As Morpheus describes the program contained in the red pill: “it’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal”. That’s what I was attempting to do – to free my mind from the world as perceived through my senses.

If you think that experiment was weird then wait until I tell you some of the other things I tried. You have to understand that I didn’t know if I was upside down, in or out – I didn’t even know how to pose the question to determine what it was I wanted to know. Everything became so slippery, going around in circles, doubling back, dead ends.

And all the time I knew that these thoughts, these forays into philosophy and my mind experiments, were eroding my faith and making it harder and harder to just believe and follow God in simplicity. I was overthinking it, overanalysing – but I could not stop. I had to know, I had to get to the bottom of it.

I will be exploring faith in another article soon but I can see why people like faith. It’s like a nice big box where you can place all your doubts, all your unanswered questions, everything you don’t know … just throw them all in the box, close the lid and proclaim “I trust God” and be done with it. I can see the attraction in that – and it’s something I asked myself many times. Do I really need to ask the questions, will the answers actually help me live a better, more fulfilling life?

It didn’t help that King Solomon in Ecclesiastes had pursued such questions and nearly gone mad in the process, arriving back at the beginning, not to mention others like Descartes and even Blaise Pascal to some extent. I didn’t care – I pushed on. I had already gone mad and the urge was too strong. The more I learned about philosophy, the greater the sense I had that not everything was as it seemed – and yes it took quite some time for me to even realise that my reality (and the church that entirely subsumed it) had a seam, something tangible that I could leverage as a variable in my equations.

In my diary entry of 28 February 2006 I accepted that the state of my life and my knowledge had been deliberately crafted by the church:

It’s fair to say I’ve been brainwashed. Even looking at it at a totally objective and unbiased way the evidence is there to show that ever since I was born I’ve been force fed the Christian doctrine. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I don’t know. It does mean that I have a perspective of the world that’s different from most other people.

I also set myself an ultimatum:

If I am to follow God, then I must put off all desires to partake of the things of this world. Completely. If I am to heed the unrelenting call of the world and the Devil, then I must somehow dissolve all the religious teachings and memories of experiences relating to the church in order to live a life outside the church without fear of eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

On 3 March 2007 I listened to an interview on Alan Saunder’s The Philosopher’s Zone radio segment with Mark Colyvan – I remember because I copied part of the transcript into my diary. The most important part of that discussion was when Alan posed the question “Does God exist?” to which Mark replied definitively “No”. That really got my attention. Up until then philosophy had been incredibly complex for me to come to terms with and just wasn’t delivering the solid answers I was looking for – but that single word answer gave me hope. Of course, I didn’t accept the answer – I absolutely believed in the existence of God at that time – but nonetheless it changed the game for me. The tools of philosophical theory were beginning to take on real potency, not just fluffy toys and plastic hammers but something of value that would inflict real damage on the bubble of lies I finally realised I was living in.

I still have much I want to learn about philosophy – but having achieved what I wanted those tools for, to break me out of captivity, it’s now just a hobby, something for my spare time rather than being intricately involved in matters of life and death, sanity and insanity.

Another entity was the Giant Clamp.

I used to be very superstitious, understandably while growing up I was led to believe that God was behind everything, responsible for everything. Some things He supposedly controlled and micromanaged like the seven ages of the creation of Earth and some things He had just planted the seed and let it unfold like a fractal – events like the Big Bang, planetary weather systems, the rise and fall of nations (except Israel of course). But He had His hand in everything. Thus when I came across new experiences that I couldn’t explain my first assumption was that it was His doing.

For several years leading up to me leaving the cult I would experience these strange sensations whenever I wrote anything in my personal diary that questioned the church or God that felt like a crushing pressure on my body that made it very difficult to continue writing and would distract me. No doubt it slowed my progress in reasoning my way out of the cult.

Even once I left the cult I still experienced this as I continued to work through my recovery. In a diary entry as recent as 11 February 2009 I described the sensation as:

… this weird oppressive sensation like a massive G-clamp around my chest, squashing me.

My superstitious mind had me believe that this sensation was God expressing his displeasure at me questioning Him, for not having faith, not believing – and because of my paranoia I would often abandon whatever I was thinking or writing about at the time and rebuke myself for wavering in my faith.

In a much earlier diary entry on 20 August 2007:

I have that feeling again. That clamp, that coldness, oppressive presence – like a giant monster is looming behind me. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have; thought things I shouldn’t have. But I can’t help what I think or how I feel.

Experiencing the Clamp was terrifying. I stopped working on the first draft of my book last year in 2009 because of it. I would often be so scared afterwards believing I had annoyed God that I would be very apologetic and undo all the good work I had done in progressing towards leaving the cult.

Even though I suspected and hoped that the sensation was purely psychological it took quite some time before I could actually believe that. It didn’t help that this was all tied in with various phobias such as my fear of flying and fear of spiders – both which were grounded in a fear of God’s anger. In that same diary entry on 11 February 2009 I added:

I’m fairly certain that it’s just my own guilt or conscience …

I don’t experience the Clamp nowadays. I’ve managed to overcome that – which proves it wasn’t God hurting me or punishing me for being an unbeliever. It was all me, all in my head. I had been brought up to have the utmost reverence for God and fear of Hell that the Clamp was my mind reacting strongly against any thought that threatened the pedestal on which I held God or compromised my opportunity to enter in Heaven in the next life (thus condemning me to eternal torture in Hell).

Rationalising such a strong and frightening physical sensation to being the product of my own mind was hard – but considering it was the result of a strong and frightening fear of Hell and the wrath of God it balances out and finally I accepted the truth and could move on.

One aspect of the church’s pre-formation history that stayed a strong theme was its roots in the British-Israel-World Federation at the turn of last century. The cult was a strong supporter of the British monarchy although they attributed the demise of the British Empire to the people of Britain and particularly their leaders losing their way and turning away from God.

We endured many sermons on how the various tribes of Israel migrated across Europe to Scandinavia, England and Scotland and the history of the UK which then led to the colonisation of Australia. As Australia was determined as being at the end of this chain it then followed that Australia had been chosen by God to carry the torch of the Gospel throughout the world – although they never did particularly well with evangelising overseas and setting up new churches.

I mentioned in a previous chapter that before even considering leaving the cult I had already rejected their stance on homosexuality. Another part of the church’s doctorine that I had also rejected many years before as outright immoral was their view on Israel’s role in the world, particularly when it came to their migration from Egypt to the Holy Land and how they were commanded by God to destroy everyone currently occupying those lands (and most of the people they came across during their 40-year journey). As if it wasn’t bad enough that tens or hundreds of thousands of people would have died in such conquests the church also translated that commandment to modern times even going so far as to say that the British should have utterly destroyed the indigenous population of Australia during the colonisation in the 18th century! The cult claimed that the early history of Australia was similar to biblical stories such as that of Saul and the Amelekites and so because of England’s disobedience in failing to wipe out the Aborigines we now suffer just as Israel now suffers from failing to wipe out the Palestinians, although without the rocket attacks and suicide bombers. How outrageous!?

Luckily that’s about as far as the cult’s racism went. They didn’t deny people entry to the church based on race – but you would have to accept the church’s British-Israel message and beliefs. All or nothing.

I’m not sure how people can feel comfortable with supporting this belief. I used to be a good little Christian, I was in it for the long haul. Highly suggestible, totally brainwashed … yet even I couldn’t accept God-sponsored genocide.

So, the rest of the story goes that when God returns to Earth on Judgement Day Jesus will reclaim the British throne – yes, the actual throne in Westminster Abbey – because of its history and link back to the Old Testament and King David and various scriptural references that were tied to the passage of the stone that’s under the throne from Israel to Scotland to England, etc.

I bought a book several years before leaving the cult The Meaning of Things by modern philospher A.C. Grayling. Blasphemous, by church standards, but it contained alternative views on various topics and I needed some footholds to try and grasp the truth. The book was one of my most guarded possessions for I knew that discovery of that book would result in immediate expulsion from the church. We didn’t really have a blacklist as such – although a few books and films were explicitly mentioned – but everyone knew the basic principles and the penalties.

I have this same book sitting beside me while I write this article and I just wanted to share a quote from it:

This prompts the question: Why are the churches given a privileged – almost, indeed, an exclusive – position in the social debate about morality, when they are arguably the least competent organisations to have it?

It took years for me to even entertain the possibility that the church might be fallible, but in some places where my moral compass (augmented by such books and reading commentary from my covert atheist friends) was stronger than the church’s teachings and brainwashing, cracks started to appear and I could then wedge my lever in and after that it all tumbled down within the space of a few years. Even now there are parts of that wall that I am demolishing, remnants of lesser or trickier falsehoods.

This is the first time I have revealed anything of substance from my diary – this will be the first of several passages I intend to quote on my blog as evidence for how evil religious cults are. I am thankful that I managed to burst through into the daylight of the real world relatively unscathed in the long term. Many ex-cult members suffer for years with nightmares, drug and alcohol abuse and some even suffer mental illnesses.

This is an entry from my diary, 10 May 2007, just over one year before I left the cult:

Back in reality, anger surges through me and I clench my fist so hard I think the skin on the back of my hand is about to split. Let it go, don’t hold onto that anger and resentment. Yes, you know you have it in you for if the time comes and you need to draw the line. That next remark, toxic, inappropriate, unconsidered; no – put an end to it. [...] I let everything slide to ensure peace. But no more. Draw the line. Open the curtains. Sheltered life indeed – but no more. This is war. No, don’t you interrupt – you stay the fuck out of this one. I will not put up with your shit any more.

I am there – hands planted on the table, the voice; it won’t let me down – I have it in me. It is all still there, deep down, enslaved by the voice of reason and peace, many, many hours of meditation, thought, reflection, determination – bring that monster to it’s knees and cage it. But it is still there, and it is fed by the things that I choose to not digest myself.

My reference to a “voice” took several forms over the time between 2005 and 2008 as I attempted to identify something within me that was at odds with what I thought I should be. A few months after this I named the voice Jim and even had conversations with the personification of my suppressed rage that came from not being able to make sense of my world. Speaking of mental illnesses I’m surprised I didn’t develop schizophrenia.

It continues …

The evil warmth of that flame in the darkness, the reminder – what will it take; when will it happen; when will that beast be unleashed and how much destruction will it take before it’s appetite is satisfied? Just a comment? Just one loud retort? An argument? Violence? Injury? Death? Serial murders and arson? I don’t see an end – I see all as possibilities; but what beyond those scenarios I’ve imagined? Do I give myself up? Or does the monster take over, and go on to commit genocide? Leave a trail of destruction in it’s wake. I have felt it’s strength and it’s drive – the magnitude of which far exceed anything I can muster up by will alone.

It scares me, haunts me – my duty is to ensure it stays behind bars for as long as I can last; for as long as I will take it lying down, but it will have it’s day. It will have its day.

Powerful stuff. There’s plenty more where that came from.

I am so happy I am in a far better place now.

This claim was then used to empower the ministry to tell people how to run their lives.

It still surprises me how the network of pastors and other members of the upper echelons of the church seemed so disorganised yet still managed to impose such a tight command and control regime. Their disorganisation was one of the reasons why I found it so hard to believe they were a cult. Pastors didn’t go and study theology, they weren’t professional leaders, they weren’t very sophisticated yet they still managed to pull it all together into a manipulative front just as efficiently and effectively as non-religious cults such as certain multi-level marketing schemes do.

Pastors effectively had the power to change your destiny. If you chose not to obey them they could excommunicate you from the church and thus condemn you to Hell. You really didn’t have a choice even if the reasoning behind their instructions seemed unrelated to your relationship with God.

Some of the things that either myself or others were counselled by the cult ministry about included:

• Length of hair: Men weren’t allowed long hair. Even my haircut was deemed too long.
• Brand-name clothing: Curiously, only an issue at end-of-year church camps.
• Colouring of hair: Men weren’t allowed to colour their hair.
• Cars: Nothing expensive. Someone even got in trouble for buying a car in their favourite colour. Ministry deemed they were obsessed with that colour and it was interfering with their relationship with God.
• Houses: Nothing fancy. Just the minimum you need. Can’t be living too comfortably in this life.
• Business: I closed my business in 2007 on advice from the pastor because he decided it wasn’t good for me.
• Holidays: Had to ask permission to go on a holiday and it almost always (with the exception of honeymoons) had to be to a location where there was a church presence, which severely limited the options.

When I say “counselled” I mean instructed under the pretence of having a choice with the outcome that non-compliance would result in reprimand or ejection from the church for a period of time, usually up to 2 years or sometimes permanently for multiple errors.

There were other things I could mention on that list but I want to save them for dedicated blog posts later on.

Once you got sucked into the cult you were stuck in that city for the rest of your life unless God sent you somewhere else. The reasoning is that God must had chosen you to be witnessed to in that city and thus it is your job to then spread the Gospel to others in that city.

When I was growing up I wanted to be a meteorologist but I had to abandon that idea because it would have involved study in Melbourne and even though there was a church presence in Melbourne it would have involved too much time away from my home church.

Besides getting involved in many of our life decisions, the cult was also set up to keep you away from socialising with others outside the church and having your own time. There were meetings every Wednesday evening and all day Sunday with activities most Saturdays and public holidays plus the occasional Friday night prayer meeting and of course continual encouragement to spend time with each other during the week.

And you had to come to every single meeting and activity. The only exception was the Young People’s meetings where church members over 30 didn’t have to come unless the pastor specifically asked you to attend. If you failed to show up then you had to have a good reason – and being at home gravely ill was not an acceptable reason.

Other activities on weekends included “working bees” – compulsory slave labour to do things like help church members move house, church renovations etc. There were outings either local or meeting up with interstate churches for the day or whole weekend. Evangelical activities such as hostile take-overs of local parks and public areas handing out leaflets and preaching to unfortunate pedestrians.

The most dreaded weekend engagement was the days of prayer and fasting. Because of the significance of those days I want to reserve the details for later, but that was a very effective tool in blotting out members’ weekend calendars in order to distract them from the world (which could potentially lure them out of the cult) and enforce the power of the ministry.

Part of it was because of a misconception of what a cult was – the word is often associated with Satan worshipping, goat slaughtering, blood, pentagrams, hallucinogenic drugs etc. The other part of it was that it felt gravely wrong. Even though I had reached the decision to leave it took some time for me to actually believe that the church was not of God. I felt that to throw words like “cult” around was blasphemous and at that stage that wasn’t something I was at all comfortable with.

However over time I came to the realisation that the church was not godly, that it was wrong, false, created by man and not God and that if there was a God that He had nothing to do with that place. It was hard, because I had experienced things in that place that I could not attribute to my understanding of the natural secular world. Some of those things I still can’t explain and some I still don’t want to talk about though I hope that through authoring this blog and eventually the book that I will be able to explore those things and put them in neat, orderly boxes.

One thing that did help me was the checklist in the book Recovering from Churches that Abuse (Enroth, R., 1994, Zondervan) that my partner lent me. All my answers were consistent with the characteristics of cults.

1. Does a member’s personality generally become stronger, happier, more confident as a result of contact with the group? No, people feel beaten into submission, depressed, anxious, living in fear.
2. Do members of the group seek to strengthen their family commitments? You have nothing to do with family outside the cult.
3. Does the group encourage independent thinking and the development of discernment skills? Absolutely not. You don’t have your own thoughts. You don’t think. You just do as you’re told.
4. Does the group allow for individual differences of belief and behaviour particularly on issues of second importance? No, you conform to the doctrine, the teachings of the ministry even the personal opinions and preferences of those in the ministry.
5. Does the group encourage high moral standards both among members and between members and nonmembers? On the surface, the absolute highest morals.
6. Does the group’s leadership invite dialogue, advice, and evaluation from outside its immediate circle? Yes, but no. The pretence of openness – but if you ask questions you are reprimanded, sometimes even put out of fellowship.
7. Does the group allow for development in theological beliefs? There is only one way.
8. Are group members encouraged to ask hard questions of any kind? No.
9. Do members appreciate truth wherever it is found, even if it is outside their group? There is no truth outside the church. The world is considered an evil cesspool of sin full of dangerous people who are just waiting to drag you down to Hell with them.
10. Is the group honest in dealing with nonmembers, especially as it tries to win them to the group? Many people come expecting one thing based on what they’re told initially – but once they’re inside those walls they find a different story. Many don’t come back the following week.
11. Does the group foster relationships and connections with the larger society that are more than self-serving? The church is an oasis of purity, the world is something that should be kept at arms length. You don’t make friends with those outside the cult, you have the absolute minimum contact you need in order to work to earn money and to preach the Gospel. That’s it.

The checklist gave me something a bit more solid, but still – why should I believe someone just because they’ve published a paper or written a book? This was a very tumultuous time for me psychologically with me going through a complete upending of everything I knew about the world. Leaving a cult isn’t like giving up yoga classes.

If you’ve seen films like The Matrix or The Island perhaps you might be able to grasp just how significant the transition is and how different the two sides of the fence are. When you’re going through such a massive life change you’re not so keen on accepting things on face value because everything you thought was solid fact turns out to be utter lies.

I believe the turning point for me where I finally came to truly accept that I had come out of a cult was simply bringing the two ends together, closing the loop and cross-checking what I knew of the world and seeing what added up. Why did we exist? If God truly had created us then what is the purpose of us enduring a lifelong test of our love and commitment when everyone’s situation is different and some people are placed in circumstances where they are set up to fail His success criteria? Why did attending the church meetings, listening to sermons, tolerating fellow churchgoers and doing everything else required by the pastor and church doctrine feel so contrary to my nature?

It didn’t add up. I know people can come up with explanations for those questions – I know because I listened to them for 25 years – but when I really considered it, it did not make sense. If we are made in the image of God then following Him should not be a chore. If we are being tested then the test should be fair.

For example, take homosexuality. Not tolerated in the cult. If you’re gay then God hates you and you will be put out, condemned to eternal damnation in Hell. How is that fair? If that’s the DNA you’re born with then no amount of prayer or wishing is going to fix that. Or people born with mental disabilities who will never be able to grasp the complexities of the Bible and how to find Salvation. How is that fair?

The church had instructions from God to go and preach the Word to all humanity … which of course is an impossible goal as there was only around 5,000 people worldwide in the church and most of the members were very reluctant when it came to evangelising. But it was taught that those people who die never having heard the Gospel would go through a different judgement. They would be judged on the state of their hearts rather than those who had been unfortunate enough to have been preached to by members of the cult who were then condemned to Hell automatically unless they then attended the church, repented of their sins and so on.

So it sounds like you’re better off if you never hear the Gospel, doesn’t it?

I’ll go into more detail on some of the topics touched on by that checklist in later blog posts, but I just wanted to look at it briefly now as one of the tools that I used to help convince myself that the church was indeed a cult which helped me distance myself from it.

Some of the things I mentioned here such as the church’s stance on homosexuality – that’s something I had made a decision on years earlier before I have left the cult. I had already realised that that the church’s strong anti-gay position was wrong and was one of the many, many factors that resulted in me eventually leaving the church.

Even though I had physically left I did for some time later still believe that I had turned my back on God and was going to Hell. I’ll also go into more detail in later blog posts about what I went through in the month following my escape because it was quite traumatic but that turning point where I accepted it was a cult, from then on the rate of recovery increased dramatically. It was no longer a church, a holy place, a place of God … it was a cult, something wrong, something damaging, a thing not to be respected and revered but rejected.