Will I ever recover from cultism?

I often wonder when I will ever fully recover from cultism, if ever. I was in the International Marxist Tendency for only two and a half years, but those years were the most traumatic and psychologically damaging of my entire life. I have never had such an intense experience in my 22 years of being on this planet. I hazard to say that it might have been even more traumatic than my father’s premature death the year before I went to university. I had never had any real social experiences prior to my joining the sect, being socially isolated, friendless and bookish. To have entered this terrifying environment when I was so emotionally vulnerable, and to have escaped to tell the tale, is somewhat awe-inspiring. It is a bit like recovering from a hangover, but the hangover lasts every single day for years. I am assailed with thoughts and feelings from my time in the organisation, and I am filled with anger and hatred at how I was betrayed and brainwashed.

IMT members will say things like ‘Why are you so obsessed with us? Just live your life and stop slandering us on a daily basis.’ Others outside the cult, including family, have told me that I’m out now and I should just ‘get over it’. But this is like telling a woman who has been raped that she just needs to ‘get over’ the rape. It is really a form of gaslighting. Cults rob us of our critical faculties, manipulate us emotionally and subject us to a degree of psychological subversion that is unlike anything we would experience in daily life. I am filled with disgust and horror when I think about how much I left down my guard when I was interacting with all these ‘comrades’, and was filled with such joy to be part of this wonderful community. I now see how all that was an illusion, and how all these people subjected me to shunning and slander when I dared to walk away from the herd. How could I have made myself so vulnerable to people who were really utter strangers? And how dare they not tell me that I am not allowed to feel anger and grief over my experiences, but that it was alright for them to manipulate me emotionally when I was in the sect?

I do not think I will ever ‘get over’ my experience. It haunts me day and night. I have nightmares about the IMT. I still come across old papers and magazines and throw them in the bin. I still possess books by the organisation that I have cleared away to put in my shed. I wish I could simply forget about this disgusting organisation and how it ruined my life, but I simply cannot. At least this blog is performing a valuable service in helping me to express my thoughts about my experience and expose the truth about this loathsome sect.

There is nothing these cults hate more than people speaking out. When I dared to say something critical on Facebook shortly after leaving, a member of the cult told me that I should ‘Go quietly’ and stop ‘insulting’ my ex-comrades. ‘Go quietly’ is what all cults want ex-members to do. In Scientology, ex-members are threatened with being ‘declared suppressive’ unless they leave in a programmed manner, which usually means paying the organisation more money for ‘courses’ that they didn’t do. Sometimes this is not enough to stop the capricious organisation from declaring them ‘suppressive’ anyway. IMT cultists have been known to turn up en masse on Reddit forums and silence any criticism of them by parroting the party line and linking furiously to their website. The IMT did the equivalent of declaring me suppressive when I left the sect, and being a suppressive person, I do not deserve human treatment in the eyes of the members of this satanic groupuscule.

The IMT, like all cults, says dishonestly that people are ‘free to leave’. But this is like telling an abused woman that she is ‘free to leave’ her abusive partner at any time. It is yet more gaslighting and victim blaming. Being in a cult, one experiences what Janja Lalich calls ‘bounded choice’. A cult member has all sorts of phobias and threats implanted into their mind to stop them leaving. Are you really ‘free to leave’ if leaving means being shunned, slandered and demonised by your former comrades? Are you ‘free to leave’ if it means an incredibly painful separation from your cult, and the subsequent social isolation? When you have years of trauma to cope with?

One thing that is particularly informative is reading studies of cultism, groupthink and mind control. It helps me to process what happened to me, and how I can help prevent it happening to others. This blog has already had thousands of views. I hope that it has helped to save people who otherwise would have thrown themselves into these horrific groups.

A common objection to cult analysis is that cults just mirror the evils in society has a whole. That is a half-truth, and an argument especially beloved of Marxist apologists for far-left cults. After all, it means they can absolve Marxist doctrine of any responsibility for encouraging the formation of such loathsome groups. However, the fact is that cults are not simply a product of their environment, but have their own internal logic and prey upon timeless human nature, which so many Marxists either don’t believe in, or claim is inherently good. Simply speaking for myself, I can say that however bad the world may be in general, being in a cult is ten times worse. All the toxicity that exists in normal life – bullying, abuse, authoritarianism, groupthink, gossiping, backbiting – exists in cults to an even higher degree. After all, when you think about it, the stakes are so much higher for members of a cult than for the average person just trying to live a normal life and make it through this crazy world in one piece. Everyone is on edge, and everyone is in earnest – to attain more power and influence within the group, to please their superiors, to ‘build the organisation’ and make the revolution before it is too late and humanity perishes. We already know that human beings react badly to too much stress. Magnify this for cults, where the slightest deviation from the mores of the group is seen as a mortal threat to its existence and to the future of the planet. Cults must be analysed in their own right as independent social organisms with their own rules and structures, so they can be more easily combated. There are Marxists who are willing to begrudgingly acknowledge the existence of ‘special oppressions’ of women, racial minorities etc instead of the standard class reductionism. They struggle to do the same for cults. They should consider revising this attitude.

Meanwhile, my recovery from cultism continues. It will be some years in the making.