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In Reply to: Re: Guilt, guilt guilt posted by archivist on September 11, 2003 at 16:22:12:
I think FGAs were youth looking for ideals or escape from shattered lives in their youth. (No I did not say all FGAs had shattered lives when they joined.) The group was very different when FGs joined, many teens themselves upon joining.
The changes in the fam. occurred over time and I believe that FGs were taken advantage of, grossly. FGs have to deal with not only surviving the holocaust of the family, but with dealing with whatever they did while enmeshed in it.
SGs on the other hand, by the time they were grown or pre-teens, were experiencing something very different along with some of the same dynamics of control used from the beginning. It is natural for human beings to begin to question and rebel in their adolescence and then separate to become their own person. So the greatest difference, the way I see it, is that FGs joined what appeared to be a perfect solution without all the sex crazed stuff, at least without it being known, and entered a world that gave them love, acceptance that they left their disillusioned past for. SGs left the garbage that the family was made out of and had become which they were born into or brought into as small children. When they leave, they can rightfully point fingers at the people that hurt them without looking at their own lives and their own humanness if they so choose. ALL were damaged. ALL were under the pervert prophet who wrested scriptures to meet and satisfy his needs for control and for serving his own warped and corroded drives. We all suffered DIFFERENTLY. Whether FG, SG or TG or any G. And many of us suffered the same. I wish the exer community, while appreciating differences, could at least be supportive of EACH OTHER regardless of G-ism. I think the self-flaggelating is self-defeating. I feel no guilt for having survived the family and bettering my life. And the lives of my children. Neither do I feel a need to condemn those that stayed in a lot longer for what their children suffered. We were not operating in a system that allowed for independent thought, expression etc.
By the way, I have no skeletons of abuse in my closet. (Of having abused anyone in any kind of prosecutable way). But those that did, and were not true predators at heart, deserve a break too, when they break away.
