Ex Cult Members Share their Creepy Stories - AskReddit

[Music] warning disturbing content viewer discretion is advised ex cult members what is your story a friend asked me to come with her to New Mexico to reunite with her family she hadn't seen in about a decade that were all still part of the cult she got out of just as support as far as I gathered her mom was in too deep to get out but recognized that my friend was in physical danger from her stepdad who was a pretty high-ranking member of the cult so she sent my friend then 11 or 12 to a boarding school as far away as possible and my friend just never went back weirdest part was going to family dinners with him everyone was so normal but they'd talk about going to practice which was what they called the transcendental chanting sessions they wouldn't eat certain things because the leader told them not to we drank only goat's milk farmed by their neighbor while there they gave him a huge portion of their income to this guy be part of the group was kind of surreal how normal they seemed until you got to know them a little better was born into the unification Church aka Muniz my dad was abusive towards my mom church members told my mom to pray and that she would sin if she left him family didn't want to have anything to do with her due to the cult in the end she spent her 20s on missionary work in fund raising / moonlighting created two children with a crazy person and then ended up as a single mom with no recourses after some time she forced us to rejoin with the cult basically I learned that my sense in life was to create children with a designated partner by my parents or the Messiah / leader of the cult and that I was worthless if I would have romantic / sexual relations with other people before marriage or that were not in the cult not to mention that mental illness and homosexuals were thought to be diseases caused by demons / evil ancestors clinging to the living my mom still believes in some of their ideologies but is not involved anymore the whole thing is less strict now but I would still never step a foot in one of their buildings anymore ex-scientologists my story is nowhere near as bad as a lot of what you hear about Scientology as I didn't get very deep into it I only really dealt with the DIA net exporter of Hubbard's fiction I was a trained Ian's etics auditor at 15 or 16 which can probably tell you all you need to know about how ridiculous the whole thing is when I was 14 I was talked into joining what they call Sea Org which would have involved moving to their headquarters in Clearwater the Sea Org is made up of the most fanatical members of the church they have a contract that you sign when you join that is quite literally for a billion years once you join them you aren't allowed to have premarital sex work absurd hours if I remember correctly its upwards on 90 to 100 hours a week live in communal housing and even though you were allowed to marry you have to give up your membership if you want to have kids giving up all of the benefits of being part of the organization I signed the contract not thinking that the billion years thing was actually legitimate not knowing that joining men I would no longer be able to see my family unless they could afford to come to see me or if I was lucky enough to get stationed back in my home Church I was 14 years old and I was lied to and talked into joining this elite and exclusive organization with honeyed words from an adult who I liked and trusted thankfully I was able to get that undone but that was the beginning of the end for me with Scientology I started to doubt everything about the church but stayed with it because my mother was and still is part of it eventually I was just completely done with everything to do with Scientology and decided to get out thankfully I didn't have any trouble leaving the church like you hear in all the horror stories that may be due in part to the fact that our church was quite small and that my mother was one of the higher placed church staff members there all I had to do was sign a contract saying that I would never speak ill of the church or Scientology and not to lie about the church's beliefs or teachings I'm still close with my mother but she knows not to bring up Scientology with me and I know I'll never convince her to leave I have had no contact with anyone else involved with the church in close to 10 years I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness yes absolutely a cult I wasn't allowed to celebrate any holidays as a child when they would have holiday parties at school I was pulled out of class to sit in the library saying the Pledge was forbidden as was standing for the national anthem I was not allowed to play on any sports team or join any after-school clubs any contact with non witness kids was extremely limited because they all are a bad influence I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter books or watch the movies I had to wear a dress or skirt to services but they had to be extremely modest I wasn't allowed to watch anything rated hour or play most video games because they portrayed violence I was not allowed to listen to rap or anything that sounded remotely like rap I was not allowed to date until I was at least 18 and even then it had to be chaperoned at all times and it had to be within the religion dating and marrying someone who was not a witness was strictly forbidden if you disobeyed any rules you would be punished by being disfellowshipped and no one in the religion is ever allowed to speak to you again including your own family I downloaded bumble started dating a normal dude moved in with him two months later and now we're engaged in planning our wedding would you consider Hillsong a cult I don't know but that [ __ ] was weird it's not like your normal church services they scare you into becoming a Christian always talking about eternal hell always contradicting themselves being told getting tattoos is a sin yet the main preacher is covered in tattoos being told Hillsong is accepting of the LGBTQ yet they band a gay couple from being church leaders when they came out so many expensive conferences that happened five times a year so unnecessarily expensive dollar $200 six hundred a ticket depending on what conference oh yeah and the guy who started it all his dad went to jail for sexual assault on children I was brainwashed for a while for sure still got mental scares from that whole experience I was part of this nondenominational church when I was in high school I didn't have a choice in the matter so I went with my parents three to four times every week Wednesday service Saturday rehearsal and service and the two services on Sunday the church was all about money the 10% tithe was never enough and always asked that you donate more they preached the more you donate the more God would bless you like blessings were just a transaction my parents were very involved in the church and once we left they claimed to have given ten thousand dollars to the church over the course of four years we only left when my parents finally realized they were being used the church banished us and we lost a lot of people we thought were our friends and my long-term boyfriend at the time I haven't set foot in another Christian Church since not me but I met a woman once who told me her cult story I don't remember which cult it was but they were living in the Midwest and one day her dad came home and told the family he joined a cult and they would be moving the next day so the next morning at 9 a.m. they pulled their truck out of the driveway and moved to California there were numerous brainwashing initiation sessions where they'd have to sit for hours watching videos without food or drink or bathroom breaks she said the only thing that kept her sane during that time was singing songs one of her friends from before had taught her at age 12 she watched her dad beat her twin sister to death at age 16 they sent her to Germany to recruit people which not surprisingly she wasn't very good at she loved Germany because she got to explore the beauty there and didn't have much supervision after a while though they brought her back because she wasn't recruiting enough people two weeks before her 18th birthday she ran away from home and basically lived in the desert of California until her birthday when she was finally free she's made a good life for herself now I know there's even more to her story that would be even more horrifying to hear but honestly the most amazing thing was to see how normal she turned out cults are evil and we don't even realize how much [ __ ] goes on inside jehovah's witnesses i was born and raised in it and while some of my siblings opted out as teens parents weren't super strict so we had a pretty normal childhood compared to others i didn't want to disappoint my mom so i threw myself into it and stayed because the community is so insular that I had no one outside that I was close with even my worldly family members were to be kept at arm's length the fatal mistake I made was getting baptized as a teenager that means I could never leave without the risk of being shunned by my family an entire community I'm trying to quietly leave now but I am being shunned by people I thought were my friends and I haven't even formally been disfellowshipped excommunicated I'm in my 30s now no education for cult influenced and spent so much time doing meaningless door-to-door work feeling guilty that I was never good enough for Jehovah to bless and knowing I could never advance in the organization because I was limited by my gender I'm trying to build relationships outside which is hard because my spouse is still in I've also been rebuilding my confidence and self-worth there are a lot of doctrinal issues I have but seeing the amount of child sexual abuse being covered up the destructive cancel culture JW's half the misogyny that is rampant and the fact they believe God will kill all non witnesses at Armageddon which they believe is imminent are just a few things that began to eat at me they're anti LGBT although they try to pretend it they're not they proclaim they are the only true religion and that only they have real unfailing love you can be punished and disfellowshipped for celebrating a birthday having a blood transfusion for voting you can be labeled bad association to others in the congregation for having non Witness friends speaking to someone who has left the cult or for wearing something considered questionable a woman wariness slacks - meeting / Church dyeing your hair a funky color exposed knees or shoulders or even for not participating in the ministry enough they tick every box on the bite model and will not speak to people who disagree with their beliefs and consider anyone who leaves and no longer believes to be apostates they're very good at playing the victim and putting on a veneer of politeness but if you scratch it that enough you'll see it's all fake in that it's a dangerous repressive cult I was a Jehovah's Witness I was raised into it but I knew something was up when I was told I couldn't talk to my own aunt ever again just because she had different interests I was maybe seven I couldn't see my dad much and the religion is pretty much made to tear families apart they teach you good moral stuff but instead of don't steal because it'll make you a bad person it's don't steal because Jehovah's gonna [ __ ] kill you you also weren't allowed to take blood transfusions you literally were supposed to throw away your life for jehovah if you had some reason to need blood I'll never forget the day my own cousins stopped talking to me because I accidentally said [ __ ] near them if you had a problem you weren't allowed to tell the elders either there was two kids that got molested once and they got threatened with being disfellowshipped if they told anyone because it will make Jehovah's name look bad so they literally had to live their whole life silent about being raped there's so much brainwashing it's crazy and hard to explain sorry I couldn't give a better response ex-mormon here did the missionary thing back when it was much more strict than it is today assigned to live in a random country that I didn't pick for a year and a half sent to a training center where we were not allowed to leave the campus for 12 weeks during training only allowed to phone my family twice a year not allowed to text anyone allowed to email family only once a week outside of preparation time from 11:30 to 6 p.m. every Monday our only time off we were not allowed free time activities or even basics like going grocery shopping or napping and less on preparation time for a year and a half told what underwear to wear mid-calf solid color skirts and solid color button up top sewn ly no TV or computers or movies or music that was not from the hymnal given a partner that I had to be inside of at all times assigned by my leaders not allowed to sleep in separate bedrooms I thought it was normal because so many other people I know did the same and family encouraged it on the bright side such force Total Immersion and isolation in the program did give me some amazing friends and language skills in the language of the country where I was assigned Mormonism might not be a cult but the mission sure is nobody knew it was a cult until it was too late it was a perfectly innocent group interested in the paranormal working as investigators and ghost hunters and teachers of others there was a TV show we all had to watch I didn't but all the others did I ended up having to watch it later when I was a ghostwriter of fanfiction I made over $20,000 basically writing gay porn anyway also some people started legally changing their last names to the names of the leaders of the cult who didn't know they were being paid to run a cult I thought it was weird but it was mandatory to make it seem like a family business so I did it ironically to cult members set up their own folk cult worshiping an actor and chicken nuggets when I realized the whole was a cult I was one of a few to start spreading the rumor I don't remember how I figured out the whole system was a cult but I fled and so did most others I fled while pretending to work for the cult overseas I was not working for them overseas I was hiding there eventually it broke apart from the inside and others fled to but not before some serious mental damage had been done some of us are still in danger I shouldn't have legal ante anymore I had a fake passport I used for a while now I have a real one and a fake one from two different countries I missed out on years of free health care because legally I wasn't allowed to exist because it was dangerous I still can't do certain things online which in a way work to my benefit but most of the time is inconvenient I can't have a bank account I don't want one but still the main headhunter is close to death so we should all be safe soon some of us didn't survive to see it but the cult wasn't to blame for the death you [Music]

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Id: cn86NjVBTxE

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020