In Reply to: Re: Did u experience something cult-like after TF? posted by Mr. Don on August 23, 2007 at 12:37:32:
I figured as much which is why I wrote what I did. It was more about commenting on the mentality of connecting something being wrong with a person because they get ill.
And it isn't always about choice. Which I realized you know that. ;)
But I was sincere in asking if others experienced anything cult-like, when looking back at their life after getting out of the Family.
You know how people who are raised around alcoholics escape home and then wind up marrying one? Or a person that is abused winds up with a charmer that turns out to be an abuser?
It's more a question of patterns in life-after-the-family.
Seems most here have their lives on a path that is satisfying for them, not without problems that people deal with in life, but what did it take to get to that point? Did you get out and get right into university and that helped?
Or, did you spend an extended period of time re-living similar situations with different people?
Just after getting out of the family I worked at three or four places where I was re-living family like stuff.
The first job was at a restaurant with a horny old owner who treated the women in his restaurant like garbage. He even slapped one woman in front of her mother (who also worked ther) and made her sit at a table in front of a bunch of dirty dishes because she wasn't clearing the tables fast enough.
I learned to stick with the survivors, but I was pretty young when I got out. They were the ones that seemed "mean".
I would freeze at first around this man, scared to death and then I learned from the "mean" ones how to talk to him and realized he left me alone after that.
Then I went to work at a humane org. with people running it who had just converted to Christianity and were going to a Charismatic church and they brought religion into the work place. Being six mos. outside the family, I was still in the mode of talking about having been a missionary and, well, they were "Christians". Their church had very intrusive counselors and I was dealt with like in the Family. Long story, so won't tell it all here, but I went to work for a dog grooming shop, different setting, same insanity. Also, I got together with someone that had been very very abused in the past and was around her abusive family because I was estranged from any family of origin.
Later I became a dog groomer myself and worked for a woman who dealt with me because of my personal life (being in a relationship with another woman.) And I lost my job when I was offered being set up in my own shop and managing hers but I would have to leave the person I loved.
I didn't leave. I went thru a lot of crap after leaving. I won't say it was entirely about choices. Yes I made "choices" but they were based on life experience and it took quite some time for me, at least a decade, to start realizing that there was another way to live and I deserved it!
When I first started going to classes, I felt like you did. It was exhilarating to be at the top of my class when I had been a classic under-acheiver pre-family.
well, enough for this post, but I am liking this discussion because it isn't about who has the right opinion, it's just about life after the family, the good, the bad, the ugly and how we survived it in spite of varying years of being beaten down.