I like learning about creepy stuff, so I like learning about cults and I've learned a lot about them over the years. Scientology, Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, Waco but also lesser known and smaller cults, or cults with no singular leader. I lectured my friends about their tactics and most importantly, about how no one is really immune from falling under their spell.
A year or so ago I first read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. It opened up a floodgate of unresolved trauma and peeled away several layers of denial that had been preventing me from completely falling apart, but also from ever moving forward or growing as a person or healing. I had been stagnating completely since I entered my early 20s, in part because I pretty much immediately became a raging alcoholic, then almost died and had to sober up. But also because my entire perspective of the world had been founded on denial, denial of my own life, denial of the world around me, denial of the things I thought and felt.
When I read Trauma and Recovery all I was thinking about was my monstrously fucked up childhood, my relationship to my mother, and my relationship to myself. But something was missing and I could feel it, like I could physically feel that there was something huge I was not seeing, a massive elephant in the room but my blind spot was still bigger.
Over the last few days I've thought a lot about what Judith Herman wrote about double think. Even before recognizing that my early childhood been so traumatic that it had prevented me from developing one coherent self, I related strongly to what she wrote. I could feel that I had been split apart into so many fragments, so blinded by double think on so many levels and in so many ways that my perspective of the world was always woefully incomplete. To survive I'd had to become many different versions of myself, and those versions had to be unaware of each other.
Judith Herman writes about child abuse,
"In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safety with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring, or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environment in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs, as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave."
"The child victim prefers to believe that the abuse did not occur. In the service of this wish, she tries to keep the abuse a secret from herself. The means she has at her disposal are frank denial, voluntary suppression of thoughts, and a legion of dissociative reactions. The capacity for induced trance or dissociative states, normally high in school-age children, is developed to a fine art in children who have been severely punished or abused."
I was 15. So, so unwell. A bisexual girl trying to reckon with her sexuality in a homophobic environment, agoraphobic and debilitated by symptoms of OCD and severe dissociation. Living with my abuser in a hoarder house infested with fleas. Completely alone. That's when I got involved in transfeminism. I felt I had found the place that I belonged. I hated my disgusting girl body and all the unwanted attention it brought me, I hated the way men looked at me and how I felt around them and the things they did to me and I wanted to escape it. I dressed like a boy and quickly realized because of my body shape and features there was no way in hell anyone would ever consider me anything but a girl. So I created another layer of denial. And another. And another.
I don't think it's a coincidence that like most cults, a massive portion of people very involved in transfeminism are also victims of abuse and childhood trauma. We have already spent our entire lives training ourselves to dissociate from reality, to reject what we see with our eyes in order to survive it. Before I could even free myself from the grip of the abusive authoritarian I was living under I was already being enmeshed into a cult-like community where these adaptations that my brain had made in order to survive extreme abuse and negligence were simply the norm, expected, rewarded even.
Over these past few years I could feel myself hitting this ceiling of awareness, and especially over the last year or so. After reading Judith Herman's work I had discovered the wealth of psychological information like it bubbling under the surface of mainstream therapy culture and I went through so many changes in mindset but I could feel that there was something, something very big and important that I couldn't see, an invisible wall in front of me. For all of my interest in cults, my adherence to this one had been so ingrained for so long that questioning it was unthinkable. The me who understood how cults operate, the me who reads Marxist theory and values critical analysis of the world around me, and the me who defended transfeminism were dissociated from each other. They had to be, because they simply could not co-exist. And so no matter how hard I tried to heal myself, I came up against that wall.
This is what cults (or perhaps in this case, high control groups) do. They trap you, not just physically within them but mentally and emotionally. You can't move forward when there are barriers of denial everywhere you turn. You can't become until you can see reality for what it is. You can't self-actualize, grow and evolve if a significant chunk of your brain power is devoted to denying the world around you and maintaining a false reality that feels more comfortable to live inside of than the real world.
And you are dying. You are dying because you are trapped in the same mind that once allowed you to survive as a child but now ruins every good thing in your life, and you have to stay trapped in it or you will be ostracized and lose all of the things that once saved you. You are dying because the amount of effort the denial takes is so great that there's no energy left for the things in you that bring you joy, like your creativity and your passion. You can never express your authentic thoughts or feelings because they're dangerous. You are hooked up to a virtual reality machine while your body and soul wither away.
And in the case of transfeminism, you are disconnected and isolated from the people who would understand you the most. You are surrounded by men and malnourished by their under-developed personalities, vulnerable to their immaturity, sexual sadism and abuse, required to give them endless emotional support, love, affection, and devotion while your needs fade into the background. An environment which defines you as a whore and a slave.
