Three cult-related exercises with a wider application

Steven Hassan's books Combating Cult Mind Control and Freedom of Mind contain much good advice about supporting and rehabilitating people who have escaped from destructive cults. People who want to help cult leavers and cult leavers who want to help themselves will find these books very useful.

I have mentioned some of Steve Hassan's suggestions in previous articles inspired by his books. Some of the techniques and practices that he promotes have a wider application: for example, people who have escaped from dysfunctional families - some of which can be very cultlike - and are trying to process the past and rehabilitate themselves may also find them worth trying. 

This article features and expands on three pieces of advice that are best followed in sequence: tell the story, rework the story and salvage as much as possible from the time spent in captivity. 

1) Telling the story
Steve Hassan says that cult leavers are stronger for being able to share their personal stories. He also says that the written word is a powerful medium of communication, and that writing the entire story down helps the writer to process and gain a better perspective on the experiences.

This is all very true, but the story-telling exercise may be very time consuming and it may be difficult to know where to start. 

This applies even more to people who are trying to come to terms with and move on from many years of neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of their families. People who are both cult leavers and members of dysfunctional families will have a lot of material to process.

A spreadsheet for topics and timelines provides a good structure and framework for the narrative, and using it to record key elements in someone's life may save time in the long run.

There are so many variables and different stories to tell that it is impossible to design a 'one size fits all' template. 

A good way to get the ball rolling is to set up column headings and sub-headings for basic, useful and important information. It is advisable to start with key items such as people, addresses, dates and milestones. Lists of elements such as food and clothes, schools and jobs, toys and pets, books and music, entertainment, outings and travel will help to fill out the picture of the past. Other categories could include accidents, illnesses and painful incidents such as a family breakup. Political events and news items that made a big impression may also be worth recording.

It is best to concentrate on one aspect at a time and follow it through in sequence over the years of dependency and captivity.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the poisonous old green book covers

When I first trawled through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's essay collection Through the Magic Door in search of article-inspiring material, I noticed that there were many references to the colour green.  After taking time out to create a whole string of articles about this colour using material from other sources, I returned to the Magic Door to have another look at the green items. 

Conan Doyle several times invites visitors to his library to make themselves comfortable on his old green settee while he talks them through his book collection, many volumes of which have green covers.

This may seem harmless enough, but I recently found some unexpected and alarming information: it is not just green shirts and green kirtles that have both good and bad aspects and associations, green book covers do too.

The good side of green book covers
Conan Doyle knows how just looking at the cover of an old book can trigger associations and trains of thought and bring back fond memories of what is inside.

He says this about the books in his library in general:

“There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.”

He says this about a book of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe:

“And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe.”

He calls his books his noble, silent comrades, his dear personal friends, and is very grateful for what they have done for him:

“...and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.”

He is not the only one to feel this way; I felt very nostalgic after looking at an online image of the old green cover of the copy of Treasure Island that I once owned.

Conan Doyle has a lot to say about Sir Walter Scott and his works, which he thought very highly of. He makes several references to his collection of books by Scott; he mentions a line of olive-green volumes and the long green ranks of the Waverley novels. 

Here are a few early-edition volumes from the Waverley series:

More quotations from Dion Fortune's occult novels

I have found Dion Fortune's occult novels worth reading more for the occasional neat summaries and thought-provoking, commentary-inspiring remarks than for the plots and people and elements such as robes and rituals, magic and mystery, temples and ceremonies and the Old Gods. 

The quotations in this article come from The Goat-foot God (1936), in which there are descriptions of both occult and everyday activities. The contrast can be very amusing: people invoke the god Pan and fry sausages for example!

Some spot-on comments 

“An empty mind's as uncomfortable as an empty stomach.”

Some people's unsatisfied hunger for knowledge, for food for their minds, does indeed make them very unhappy. The article about the 'eat or buy books' dilemma is relevant here.

“You don’t know what you do want, but you do know what you don’t want.”

This is exactly how many dissatisfied people feel, and not just when  they have not got the right people to interact or share their lives with: it could apply to someone who is trying to find suitable work or the right place to live for example. They don't know what they want because they have never seen or experienced it, but they do know that whatever is currently available to them is not what they want.

The Goat-foot God describes how it feels when someone starts to get an idea of what it is that they have been wanting all this time:

“Doing your best to carry on on wrong lines till you feel you will burst, and then suddenly getting the clue that opens everything out to you.“

I know from experience how liberating it is when the answer finally comes and an escape route from a life that is all wrong opens up: “That's it! That's what I'll do! That's what I want!”