How I Escaped a Cult and Found Myself

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to change my entire worldview.

I didn’t so much decide, as I did explore. My previous religious mindset was like a boxy knit sweater with several loose ends of yarn. As I began to pull on them to examine each one, more loose ends revealed themselves. Before I knew it, I had unraveled the entire sweater. All that remained was a pile of messy yarn.

It was gut-wrenching.

My former religion was a high-demand organization that I now consider to have many qualities of a cult. My identity, my life plan, and my understanding of the world were dictated to me by the organization. This was the only way of thinking I was exposed to from childhood through adolescence. I was told over and over not to question. To “doubt my doubts.”

Unraveling meant losing myself. It also meant risking the loss of my family, friends, and community.

But while I was unraveling, I was also rebuilding.

I started over as an adult.

My entire foundation had been destroyed. As if I had spent 20+ years of my life seeing through tiny binoculars and they gradually slipped away, revealing the world around me. A world that…

Now I had to figure out what I believed.

This terrified me.

I don’t know if many people have had the experience of realizing their entire belief system is a lie.

It’s like the ground is pulled out from under you. You’re freefalling. You don’t know where the bottom is. Or which way is up. There’s a lot of grasping. But carefully.

It’s better to keep falling than it is to latch onto the wrong thing.

It’s scary to reach into the unknown.

To no longer feel like you have solid answers to life’s biggest questions. My former religion made it a point to provide “answers” to these questions. Big philosophical questions like the purpose of life, the nature of the universe, and what happens when we die.

Ignorance is bliss, especially when founded on the belief that you have the truth.

Losing that naive comfort left me exposed and completely lost.

The process of deconstruction and rebuilding was tedious and all-consuming. There were days when all I wanted to do was to read for hours on end. I absorbed as much information as possible so that I would never again blindly dedicate my life to something. Hours of reading, thinking, and journaling, often felt like I was plunging deeper and deeper into an abyss.

Eventually, lights appeared.

My former religion told me that I could never find truth or happiness outside of their system.

Nothing could be further from my reality. I studied world religions, spiritual teachers, science, philosophy, and psychology. I traveled and met people from all over the planet and every kind of background you can imagine.

What I found outside my former religion was wisdom.

I gave up supposed “truths” for complexity, nuance, understanding, and a relationship with people and the planet that emotionally resonated with me, far more than anything I had experienced before. Rather than a single fixed source of dogma, I could now draw insight from thousands of years of collective human knowledge and experience. Rather than view myself as God’s most important creation, I began to understand that we’re one with nature, a product of millions of years of life, growing and evolving.

I learned to find the beauty in uncertainty. The growth in change.

I don’t mean to claim I’m more enlightened than anyone else.

Nor to portray myself as being on some sort of hero’s journey. It’s nothing more impressive than being born into a religion and stepping away from it. Thousands of people have done it.

But for me, it was one hell of a ride.

I had the opportunity to recognize I was wrong. To start over, with a new perspective on life as an adult. I gained a clearer understanding of myself and my relationship to the world around me.

It was fucking painful. Like an organ being slowly torn out of me.

But healing and moving forward, has brought more meaning and light than I ever could’ve imagined.

I have a new purpose, one that I’ve chosen for myself.

The old yarn still entangles me sometimes.

But I’m re-using it now, knitting something much better than that old boxy sweater.