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Chapter 1

Little Cult Of Horros

By Keana LambertPublished 2 years ago 6 min read
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Sometimes the scary and the ugly is small, hidden, tucked away, festering like the bite from a poisonous spider.

I grew up with a large family that all lived under one roof. There are many reasons for that, the main one being that I grew up in a cult- a large one- one of the biggest in the world, but that is a story for another time.

We had to cook for our family and it had to be done “with love” or we didn’t “get the blessing.”

While I don’t make light of a very real and scary reality, over time the scars have healed and we have come to a point where we try to find that rainbow and the beauty in every storm.

One of those rainbows is how we jokingly refer to meals as “made with love.” You see the cult mentality affected my whole life. It integrated itself in ways that I never realized. It’s beliefs, values, and memories that wind their way around my heart and soul, till they almost choked me to death.

You know that saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know, if you don’t know it”? Well, I grew up with not knowing a lot, or having a lot of cognitive dissonance in the face of what was set before me and it wasn’t until I had an life altering event, that I would even come to terms with the trauma that I had hid from my life and from myself.

I was born in South America. In Guayaquil, Ecuador to parents who by this time in 1982, were well ensconced into one of the biggest cults in history and that still exists today.

In the beginning they were called the Children of God.

Later they went by other names like The Family, or Family Christian United.

It was all the same group, who just changed names and rebranded as one does when the layers start to get peeled back and reveal the truth of what they were doing to people.

For starters, they preyed on lost souls like my parents who as teenagers were lost, lonely and looking for anything to call home, or any one to love them.

My father used to tell me when I was a child about the horrible things his father did to him growing up.

They used to make me cry as I was only a young child. It never occurred to me until much later than it should have, that it was wrong to tell me those stories so young and that it affected me my whole life.

My father was severely abused by his father who used to beat him, throw him against the wall till he lost consciousness.

He burned him with cigarettes.

He would shave his head and make him walk down the street naked to shame him.

My grandfather would tell my father he was no good and would never amount to anything.

My father told me he would smoke marijuana, sniff paint, and a myriad of other drugs before the age of 15. It was the only way he could cope with life at his age, so when this cult came along and promised a “family” where all they had to do was “leave all their family and worldly goods behind and follow Christ.”

He told me he had run away from home and would go to the beach to sleep and would get sexually assaulted by the rest of the people on drugs there. While this story is tragic and with its own lessons, I find it hard not to be grateful that he was rescued in some sort of way.

There are many sides one can look at any given situation and for this one, it was his escape from his monster and fell into the arms of a disguised Christian organization. I appreciate that it saved his life I guess I should say.

I should mention that while it is an interesting conversation for later, My Grandfather was homeless when he was 15 and lied on his Service Application, so he could join the military and have somewhere he could get food and sleep. He did this to escape his own monster in the form of his own father who used to beat him the same way he beat my father.

You can really see what they refer to as the Pattern“ when you start looking at how behavior is passed down through generations.

While my father was a terrible parent, I know why he was and is the way he is. Sometimes, the nightmares don’t go away, but fester and get worse until we’re the monsters we tried so desperately to hide from.

My mother, well she didn’t communicate with us all that much when we were children, but told us when we were older how she grew up with an Alcoholic father and a bi-polar mother.

My mother told us she met them in the park, singing songs about love and Christ in the 70’s and ran away from home to “follow Jesus.”

She always told us that growing up, her parents would tell her if she joined the Cult, they would disown her and leave her out of the will.

I laugh as I write this because we grew up poor and she didn’t have any money to shake a fist at, so threatening to “cut us out of the will” didn’t make any sense to us other than we felt that a mothers love was equal to what was left to us in a Will.

It is most likely what she felt when her parents said the same thing to her and part of what affected her growing up, so I don’t blame her for running to the Cult either, but I don’t think it did anything for her mental health. So, while it saved my father, it didn’t save my mother.

She told me that it was not long after she joined the cult that she was forced to “share the love of Jesus” through her body in return for “donations.” She would blow off most things as if they were nothing to her, but there were breakthrough times where I could see that it affected her. When she told me this, it was one of those times. Her eyes staring far away before bursting into tears over the pain and trauma that she still suffers from.

My mother is a narcissist and we all have some of that in us, but she fell into the more selfish category. My father did as well. They both put themselves, their wants and needs before our own in various ways throughout our lives and while they did the best they could, they fell far short of healthy parents.

I never used to blame them, or anyone and knowing how each ripple creates another, but there are days where I do blame the Cult- because I can and because they still exist today and while my life is far from ruined, they spun a million lies, into a million webs that has affected thousands of people, myself included. They wound clocks in my parents that created my inner scars before I was born and caused a pattern of unhealthy choices throughout my life and throughout many lives just like mine.

Childhood
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About the Creator

Keana Lambert

Humanist. Mom of 3. Trauma Survivor. Activist. Artist. Adventurer. Lover of Life. Lover of Love. Grateful and Thankful for Everyday. Here to do my part in making our world a better for future generations.

Thank you for reading my words,

HUGS

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