Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: Lucky on September 27, 2009, 08:12:15 AM
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I don't see much difference between a cult and a N family.
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q4.html
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Actually a book I read, "If You Had Controlling Parents" by Dan Neuharth, has a chapter on Cult-like parenting and its affect on people. I highly recommend his book even though it doesn't discuss whether most of the parenting styles he covers are Narcissistic. You will recognize most of them as such.
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Hi Lucky,
I think there is a real similarity between N families and cults. I have therapy on a weekly basis and have been for ten years now, on and off. Recently it's been becoming noticeable to me that my mum and step-dad did an incredible brain washing job on me. I was talking to my T about parenting. My parents were strongly critical of parents who were 'nice' to their children. They thought it spoilt and over-indulged them. They used to mock parents who played with their children, read to them, hugged and kissed them if they hurt themselves. They were scandalized by parents who let their children paint their own bedrooms or choose where they wanted to go at the weekends. My mum was always aghast at parents who helped out adult children by babysitting the grandkids or doing laundry or other household chores for them. What was really odd was that, even though in my head I know their way of doing things wasn't good and that loving your children and being affectionate towards them doesn't make them spoilt, I still feel like I'm 'doing it wrong' by being nice to my son and making sacrifices for him. It's amazing how deeply entrenched those beliefs are and how hard they are to throw them off, even when you know they're wrong. It does show the power of good messages, though - I'm sure a child who grows up thinking they are important and cherished must be a more 'complete' adult?
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My parents also did not read to me, did not hug me, did not say kind and loving things to me and I really got the message that I did not matter and that I just had to be and act just the way my mother wanted because else...
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Hi Lucky,
I think you've hit the nail on the head there - the message I received loud and clear was that I did not matter. That's stayed with me throughout my life - it's very hard to make yourself feel like you matter. I tried in my twenties to assert myself and form a new, more honest relationship with my mum, but once she realised she couldn't play me like she used to she discarded me like an old pair of shoes that don't fit any more. Over the years I've wondered from time to time if I should tolerate a low level relationship with her, but if I'm honest I want more than that in my life. I find I can only cope with knowing that I didn't matter if it's not thrown in my face every day. I was talking to a couple of old friends at the weekend, chaps I knew as a teenager but hadn't seen for years. They asked after my mum and I said I didn't see her anymore and that we didn't speak. They both visibly winced and said they couldn't imagine not having contact with their mums. They asked why and I said it was too much to explain, but it was serious enough for me to cut my ties with her. They both agreed with that and said it must be bad to have no contact at all. It made me feel odd, seeing people so close to their parents that they can't imagine not having them in their lives - whilst I find having even limited contact with mine unbearable.
Sorry, I've wandered off the point a bit - but I think growing up knowing you don't matter is tough and very hard to put right again. xx
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This is an excellent point. The secrecy, the superiority, the feeling that you are an exception to the world....
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Hi Lucky,
I think you've hit the nail on the head there - the message I received loud and clear was that I did not matter. That's stayed with me throughout my life - it's very hard to make yourself feel like you matter. I tried in my twenties to assert myself and form a new, more honest relationship with my mum, but once she realised she couldn't play me like she used to she discarded me like an old pair of shoes that don't fit any more. Over the years I've wondered from time to time if I should tolerate a low level relationship with her, but if I'm honest I want more than that in my life. I find I can only cope with knowing that I didn't matter if it's not thrown in my face every day. I was talking to a couple of old friends at the weekend, chaps I knew as a teenager but hadn't seen for years. They asked after my mum and I said I didn't see her anymore and that we didn't speak. They both visibly winced and said they couldn't imagine not having contact with their mums. They asked why and I said it was too much to explain, but it was serious enough for me to cut my ties with her. They both agreed with that and said it must be bad to have no contact at all. It made me feel odd, seeing people so close to their parents that they can't imagine not having them in their lives - whilst I find having even limited contact with mine unbearable.
Sorry, I've wandered off the point a bit - but I think growing up knowing you don't matter is tough and very hard to put right again. xx
I understand , Twoapenny! Ami
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The book "If you had controlling parents" was the book that opened my eyes to all of this. I finally understood that I really did have controlling parents and then as I did more research I stumbled upon Narcissism and this site. It has been a life line for me!!
The Cult Like parenting style was indicative of my parents' style. They both were born again right before they were married. Each had had an earlier failed marriage. I think they felt forgiven for their failure and raised us in a very strict Christian home. Way back when I truly believe that only I was going to heaven and my poor Catholic friends were not simply because my parents instilled in me that you have to think exactly like us to be right.
Everything was measured against........church......and not drinking........and not smoking........and not cusssing......
I have often said I was brainwashed. Maybe that is why it took me so long to get better......I had to be deprogrammed.
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Overcome,
My family was Catholic and we went to church when I was younger but not later on. They had their on brand of morality that never mentioned God while still enforcing the premise that their was always some moral "law" we were breaking. I can still them staring down on us with that "you are sooo wrong to do, think or feel, that look." The thing that popped for me was the complete and total lack of privacy. No closed door was respected, even when I was home from college. They could invade your space anywhere, anytime and in front of anyone.
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When we were in out twenties, me and my husband and 2 friends stayed with a family and bunch of people who had done the EST thing. (My husband works with a variety of people from time to time and he thought they were OK at first)
They invited us to stay for the weekend at their house in the country miles from anywhere. It was a very unpleasant and weird experience. We were picked up from the nearest station and consequently we couldn't really leave until we were driven back at the end of the weekend.
They were all obsessed by the EST training and talked about it constantly. We were made to feel uncomfortable in all sorts of ways. For instance, we are vegetarians and the 'hostess' said she was also a vegetarian. She then proceeded to eat an entire pound of pork sausages in front of me. I imagine this was to make me feel disconcerted (it did). The EST family and their friends who were also staying got up in the night and left us in the house. They went hunting rabbits by driving over fields completely in the dark in the hope of killing them. This was in an ordinary car AND with their 10 month old baby!
Weird, unpleasant, selfish and dangerous. Describes them and describes an N family alright!
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Binks,
That was horrible. Remind me to never be without my car. I have house bunnies as pets so I think they are twice as horrible. They only thing they are likely to kill like that are tiny baby rabbits in their nest and for what??? To make their mother's mourn??.
I think it is interesting how religious zeal of that sort always creates a "god" to go along with it who makes everything they do okay. What they don't do is consider the question of what possible deity would see anything worthwhile in humans who acted as they did. Its like this big blind spot caused by focusing too heavily on "rules" to the exclusion of common sense...which we should all hope a supreme being would have.
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What is EST? I always keep my car. My mom will say things like, "you want to ride with me?" I usually say no because I do not want to get stuck anywhere.
My mom actually said to me yesterday, "I wish you and Jack could come back to my church instead of going to that large church where you don't know anyone." After all these years.....I just said......that will never happen.....we like our church better.
Never stop trying, do they?
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EST is Erhard Seminars Training. I don't think people do it any more, but I was told it involved breaking down all of your barriers and then building them up again. To achieve this, ESTies went through a training programme where they were locked into a room and shouted at and verbally abused for hours on end. How true this is I don't know but this is what the ESTies told me.
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binks I heard the same. It is classic mind control and still operating under a new name. Mr. E sold it.... Beware of the new group that is using the same tactics. It is thought be VERY bad stuff for anyone who was ever abused....
http://www.cultnews.com/archives/000101.html
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http://pw1.netcom.com/~ncoic/brainwsh.htm
There are progressive steps in exercising control over an individual and changing his behaviour and personality integration. The following five steps are typical of behaviour changes in any controlled individual:
1. Making the individual aware of control is the first stage in changing his behaviour. A small child is made aware of the physical and psychological control of his parents and quickly recognizes that an overwhelming force must be reckoned with. So, a controlled adult comes to recognize the overwhelming powers of the state and the im- personal, "incarcerative" machinery in which he is enmeshed. The individual recognizes that definite limits have been put upon the ways he can respond.
2. Realization of his complete dependence upon the controlling system is a major factor in the controlling of his behavior.The controlled adult is forced to accept the fact that food, tobacco,praise, and the only social contact that he will get come from the very interrogator who exercises control over him.
3. The awareness of control and recognition of dependence result in causing internal conflict and breakdown of previous patterns of behaviour. Although this transition can be relatively mild in the case of a child, it is almost invariably severe for the adult undergoing brainwashing. Only an individual who holds his values lightly can change them easily. Since the brainwasher-interrogators aim to have the individuals undergo profound emotional change, they force their victims to seek out painfully what is desired by the controlling individual. During this period the victim is likely to have a mental breakdown characterized by delusions and hallucinations.
4. Discovery that there is an acceptable solution to his problem is the first stage of reducing the individual's conflict. It is characteristically reported by victims of brainwashing that this discovery led to an overwhelming feeling of relief that the horror of internal conflict would cease and that perhaps they would not, after all, be driven insane. It is at this point that they are prepared to make major changes in their value-system. This is an automatic rather than voluntary choice. They have lost their ability to be critical.
5. Reintegration of values and identification with the controlling system is the final stage in changing the behaviour of the controlled individual. A child who has learned a new, socially desirable behaviour demonstrates its importance by attempting to adapt the new behaviour to a variety of other situations. Similar states in the brainwashed adult are pitiful. His new value-system, his manner of perceiving,organizing,and giving meaning to events, is virtually independent of his former value system. He is no longer capable of thinking or speaking in concepts other than those he has adopted. He tends to identify by expressing thanks to his captors for helping him see the light.Brainwashing can be achieved without using illegal means.Anyone willing to use known principles of control and reactions to control and capable of demonstrating the patience needed in raising a child can probably achieve successful brainwashing.