Cult I was born into finally exposed.

@dj2becker said
Probably because FMF was just using the cult to have a dig at me.

Perhaps you interpreting grown-up discussion of what happened as being merely "having a dig" at you is a lingering effect of what the cult did to you. Just a thought.

@moonbus said
Where the abuse is of a psychological nature, and it disguises itself as a means to a higher goal (e.g., as penitence on the road to salvation), people may not recognize it as abuse, or the effect it is having on oneself (imagined immunity), while it is going on. The most insidious form of torture is the one which calls itself "love" and makes the victim want more of it.

...[text shortened]... deconstructing a toxic, dysfunctional mindset and reconstructing a more healthy and functional one.

Yes, I do agree with that. In Becker's case, however, he showed insight into the abuse carried out by the cult (having escaped himself) and described the long term psychological abuse he witnessed around him during his years inside the cult. - But he then completely divorced himself from the effects of this psychological abuse as though a fly on the wall for all those years. This jarred with the insight he was reporting to show.

@fmf said
I disagree.

When religious ritual is incorporated into sexual abuse it seems to often take the form of the perpetrator suggesting they are somehow dealing with evil located within the victim.

You may see this as being tackled by talking about how "cultures need a moral, spiritual, possibly religious philosophy that makes it possible or even likely people will speak o ...[text shortened]... ons of shame, guilt and judgement" will occur in the wake of changing practical facts on the ground.

I am sure your work relating to domestic violence has given you an awareness of the amount of time it takes a survivor to leave a violent home if they succeed at all. The problem is that before they manage to leave there will often be children in the home so the longer they remain the longer those children have been exposed to the emotionally abusive impact of daily witnessing domestic violence and often fearing for their mother's life. This is where demands for moral judgement of survivors who were non-protective of children runs into difficulty in the real world of service provision. If it feels that all you can expect from the outside world is a moral judgement for being non-protective it becomes far harder to leave. That can mean that abuse goes on for longer. The danger is that the longer you have been non-protective the more determined you become that secrets must be hidden from the outside world.

@dj2becker said
Probably because FMF was just using the cult to have a dig at me. All I’m saying is that many people got off worse than I did. You are free to read into that what you wish.

The first time you ever brought up the fact you had been in a cult, you did so in order to apologize to me and to blame your trollish forum behaviour on the damage the cult had done to you.

You then went on to describe exactly how that damage had been done to you. You even, at one point - again when you were making a bit of a fool of yourself asking people the same question about raping babies again and again and again and again - suddenly talked vaguely about having gone to a neurologist to address the damage.

Only later, when it turned out to be inconvenient for you to have revealed what you had been psychological abused, you then started insisting that you somehow hadn't been subjected to psychological abuse after all.

Then you told a story about your sister. Then you forgot that you had told the story about her. Then you remembered, just in time. Then you told it in a certain way which led to a long and detailed discussion about the morality of your family's inaction when the incident happened.

And then, on this thread, all of a sudden, you now tell the story differently with a new previously omitted detail that presumably seeks to cauterize any further discussion about the morality of your family's inaction.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
Yes, I do agree with that. In Becker's case, however, he showed insight into the abuse carried out by the cult (having escaped himself) and described the long term psychological abuse he witnessed around him during his years inside the cult. - But he then completely divorced himself from the effects of this psychological abuse as though a fly on the wall for all those years. This jarred with the insight he was reporting to show.

I would have thought maintaining a detached position when describing significant past trauma would be quite a common way of dealing with the task of giving the description. That would not be a task that would be easily undertaken whilst in connection with the impact on yourself. In general dissociation is commonly seen when interviewing survivors of trauma. Times of greater connection and times of complete disconnection would be anticipated.

@petewxyz said
This is where demands for moral judgement of survivors who were non-protective of children runs into difficulty in the real world of service provision. If it feels that all you can expect from the outside world is a moral judgement for being non-protective it becomes far harder to leave.

And these "demands" are something you have discerned as being present in my essentially secular proposal about medical services, counsellors, properly trained police, rape kits, halfway houses? Do you think I am proposing that "the real world of service provision" should be judgemental of the victims that enter the processes they running?

@petewxyz said
I would have thought maintaining a detached position when describing significant past trauma would be quite a common way of dealing with the task of giving the description.

We were given a "detached" description of psychological abuse and emotional deprivation. And then, later, a "detached" insistence that it hadn't been a description of psychological abuse and emotional deprivation. I think the tale may have been wielded as a bit of forum manoeuver rather than something shared in good faith.

@fmf said
And these "demands" are something you have discerned as being present in my essentially secular proposal about medical services, counsellors, properly trained police, rape kits, halfway houses? Do you think I am proposing that "the real world of service provision" should be judgemental of the victims that enter the processes they running?

I am not commenting on that proposal, but referring to your earlier comments about moral judgement and they way they impact on that proposal. I don't know if I have said that I am a retired consultant psychiatrist who specialised in working with teenagers and I was a part of the services that you describe for thirty years.

Essentially I am saying that a culture of passing severe moral judgements on non-protective adults who have lived through abuse does not facilitate productive engagement with services in the real world.

@petewxyz said
Essentially I am saying that a culture of passing severe moral judgements on non-protective adults who have lived through abuse does not facilitate productive engagement with services in the real world.

You believe that looking at the morality of something that happened at least 20 years ago - and a moral prism today casting its view back over those events - and also being clear-sighted about what the moral obligations of parents are - on a forum like this is somehow going to undermine my own prescription regarding medical services, counsellors, properly trained police, rape kits, and halfway houses?

Weren't you yourself talking about parents being "unfit to parent" and "complicit" with a cult a few pages ago?

Do you also think it is counter-productive for you and I to be criticizing, here in this discussion, "a parent who believed that child abuse was okay and a part of proper religious rituals" on moral grounds?

@fmf said
You believe that looking at the morality of something that happened at least 20 years ago - and a moral prism today casting its view back over those events - and also being clear-sighted about what the moral obligations of parents are - on a forum like this is somehow going to undermine my own prescription regarding medical services, counsellors, properly trained police, rape kit ...[text shortened]... ent who believed that child abuse was okay and a part of proper religious rituals" on moral grounds?

I think your moral righteous stance is generally unhelpful and something that irks me after years of seeing different reactions to abuse, but I suspect you will simply say that I have a moral righteous stance rather than reflect on that so I will leave it there.

Edit: I should add that you and I both know that you have selectively quoted me in your above post in a manner that constitutes a serious misrepresentation.

@petewxyz said
I would have thought maintaining a detached position when describing significant past trauma would be quite a common way of dealing with the task of giving the description. That would not be a task that would be easily undertaken whilst in connection with the impact on yourself. In general dissociation is commonly seen when interviewing survivors of trauma. Times of greater connection and times of complete disconnection would be anticipated.

In this instance, however, it was less a case of disconnection and more a case of contradiction of information already given and an attempt to row back on that.

@petewxyz said
I think your moral righteous stance is generally unhelpful and something that irks me after years of seeing different reactions to abuse,

Are you qualified in abuse counselling or social work?

@divegeester said
Are you qualified in abuse counselling or social work?

I was a UKCP registered psychotherapist working with survivors of abuse before I became a consultant psychiatrist. A large part of my working life involved working with survivors of various forms of abuse in therapy and consultation to other agencies supporting them. There is a big overlap when you work with teenagers with a lot of people dealing with Post Traumatic Stress.

Edit: Or more simply, yes. I hold a postgraduate diploma in psychotherapy that included work with abuse survivors.

@fmf said
The first time you ever brought up the fact you had been in a cult, you did so in order to apologize to me and to blame your trollish forum behaviour on the damage the cult had done to you.

You then went on to describe exactly how that damage had been done to you. You even, at one point - again when you were making a bit of a fool of yourself asking people the same question a ...[text shortened]... t presumably seeks to cauterize any further discussion about the morality of your family's inaction.

My story hasn’t changed I think you are mistaken, I have no reason to lie at all about what happened. The chance of you remembering the exact details of something I described to you years ago aren’t that great in comparison to me who actually experienced the events first hand.

@fmf said
The first time you ever brought up the fact you had been in a cult, you did so in order to apologize to me and to blame your trollish forum behaviour on the damage the cult had done to you.

You then went on to describe exactly how that damage had been done to you. You even, at one point - again when you were making a bit of a fool of yourself asking people the same question a ...[text shortened]... t presumably seeks to cauterize any further discussion about the morality of your family's inaction.

Do you need reminding how Dive (and possibly you as well) trolled me by saying I made this all up?