Dear Hannah:

I am glad you posted. If you would like to elaborate on the following, please do and I will respond:

1. How does your family judge you and how do you judge yourself (“My family haven’t completely rejected me, but I know they judge me. I judge myself”)?

2. What was in that journal your father read and shared with other people (what a shame, a betrayal of you)?

3. What is haunting you about your last moment with your mother?

anita

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Hi Anita, thank-you for replying. I’ll elaborate below:

1. Based on my experience of growing up in the cult, I know that people who leave are seen as foolish. I know that my family see me as ‘too emotional’; acting on impulse without thinking things through. I know this because they told an ex-boyfriend of mine and he then told me. When I started to leave the cult, my mother wrote me a letter expressing how upset she was and how she didn’t understand why I was leaving. She felt that I was choosing a very difficult life for myself. In the past, I have been excluded from events because I no longer attend the religious group. Some people I knew from the cult removed me from social media sites. I judge myself because my moral compass was built around the teachings of the cult. For the most part, I see that some of these morals are not beliefs I uphold anymore, but I still feel ashamed when I am around my family, and I would not admit certain parts of my life to them because of this.

2. In the journal I wrote about how I was feeling and some of the people I was dating. The cult I was part of does not agree with sex before marriage and I had written about having sex with the guy I mentioned before who I am obsessing over. It felt very humiliating for my father to read this and share this information with my family and his acquaintances. He used what he had read in the journal as justification for kicking me out of the house; although he was already bagging up my possessions when he found the journal. This is another thing that hurt me deeply. He bagged up all of my things whilst I was at work and left them on the doorstep for me to collect. He has never apologised or acknowledged how hurtful this was. He has never attempted to contact me.

3. Losing my mother was one of my biggest fears. She had cancer for six years and the fear of losing her was constant during that time. She was scared and hurting and I wanted to make things better but I couldn’t. When she didn’t say that she loved me back it made me feel that maybe she was disappointed in me and that maybe she didn’t love me. I felt that maybe I could have saved her in some way; I had nightmares for months afterwards involving me trying to save her before time ran out.