That Time When I Was in a Cult and Got a Loving Letter from a Friend
How RM Vaughan (d. 2020) Looked Out for Me
Am I losing you? Is the world? Please accept my love.
One of the hardest questions I get asked by friends or family of people in cults is about how to talk with them about their experience. How do you have a conversation with someone who you think is being deceived, who has become dependent on a power structure you suspect is harming them? What if they say they’ve never been happier, and you can’t shake the gut feeling that there’s something off?
The QAnon Casualties subreddit now has 140K members. People who have lost parents, children, spouses, and friends to QAnon. As moderator Mike Rains told me, they are asking the same questions.
There are no easy answers.
So much seems to depend upon the trust you share with the person, how well you make them feel heard, the state of their basic life-resources. In all of the stories I’ve heard about people extricating themselves from cults, there never seems to be any single decisive factor that pried them loose. But often, people will say that a key exchange with someone helped them change course.
I once had an exchange like that.
