Member-only story
The Conspirituality Report
What a Cult Steals from You
Money. Time. Bodily integrity. Relationships. Opportunity. Altruism.
Recently I had a conversation with a brave person I’ve known for some time. We discussed the memoir they were working on, recalling their years of involvement in a high-demand group. In it, they referred to feeling sick when they thought of the amount of money they had spent on the leader and their corrupt and useless programmes.
I asked if they would be willing and able to bear with that nausea enough to give readers some details. I suggested that hard numbers can really put things into perspective. They agreed, dug into their receipts, and pulled out a pretty nauseating number.
Staring at that number, so cold, so abstract, unleashed a flood of emotions about what this person lost that can’t be measured. And it brought to mind the intangible things I had lost in the six consecutive years I spent in two different cults.
I got out of the second one almost twenty years ago, so the accounting is lost. I remember dollars flowing through my hands like sand. I remember time and money feeling like a mirage to me, while I framed it as a source of love and source of service to the leaders.
