|
Post-Cult After Effects
Margaret Thaler Singer, Ph.D.
After exiting a cult, an individual may experience
a period of intense and often conflicting emotions. She or he may feel relief to be out of
the group, but also may feel grief over the loss of positive elements in the cult, such as
friendships, a sense of belonging or the feeling of personal worth generated by the
group's stated ideals or mission. The emotional upheaval of the period is often
characterized by "post-cult trauma syndrome":
- spontaneous crying
- sense of loss
- depression & suicidal thoughts
- fear that not obeying the cult's wishes will result in God's
wrath or loss of salvation
- alienation from family, friends
- sense of isolation, loneliness due to being surrounded by
people who have no basis for understanding cult life
- fear of evil spirits taking over one's life outside the cult
- scrupulosity, excessive rigidity about rules of minor
importance
- panic disproportionate to one's circumstances
- fear of going insane
- confusion about right and wrong
- sexual conflicts
- unwarranted guilt
The period of exiting from a cult is usually a traumatic
experience and, like any great change in a person's life, involves passing through stages
of accommodation to the change:
- Disbelief/denial: "This can't be happening. It
couldn't have been that bad."
- Anger/hostility: "How could they/I be so
wrong?" (hate feelings)
- Self-pity/depression: "Why me? I can't do
this."
- Fear/bargaining: "I don't know if I can live
without my group. Maybe I can still associate with it on a limited basis, if I do what
they want."
- Reassessment: "Maybe I was wrong about the
group's being so wonderful."
- Accommodation/acceptance: "I can move beyond
this experience and choose new directions for my life" or...
- Reinvolvement: "I think I will rejoin the
group."
Passing through these stages is seldom a smooth
progression. It is fairly typical to bounce back and forth between different stages. Not
everyone achieves the stage of accommodation / acceptance. Some return to cult life. But
for those who do not, the following may be experienced for a period of several months:
- flashbacks to cult life
- simplistic black-white thinking
- sense of unreality
- suggestibility, ie. automatic obedience responses to
trigger-terms of the cult's loaded language or to innocent suggestions
- disassociation (spacing out)
- feeling "out of it"
- "Stockholm Syndrome": knee-jerk impulses to defend
the cult when it is criticized, even if the cult hurt the person
- difficulty concentrating
- incapacity to make decisions
- hostility reactions, either toward anyone who criticizes the
cult or toward the cult itself
- mental confusion
- low self-esteem
- dread of running into a current cult-member by mistake
- loss of a sense of how to carry out simple tasks
- dread of being cursed or condemned by the cult
- hang-overs of habitual cult behaviors like chanting
- difficulty managing time
- trouble holding down a job
Most of these symptoms subside as the victim mainstreams
into everyday routines of normal life. In a small number of cases, the symptoms continue.
* This information is a composite list from the
following sources: "Coming Out of Cults", by Margaret Thaler Singer, Psychology
Today, Jan. 1979, P. 75; "Destructive Cults, Mind Control and
Psychological Coercion", Positive Action Portland, Oregon, and "Fact
Sheet", Cult Hot-Line and Clinic, New York City.
| 
