Once Upon a Time in My Oceania

  Healing isn't pretty.  It's raw, it's emotional and it can be downright messy.  Often, healing is portrayed as moving on from a terrible time in our life and into a new happy, thriving chapter, filled with smiles and freedom. Rarely do we see the messy parts–the set backs and mistakes, frustration and tears, the moments where we're convinced we've gone backwards on our journey instead of forward. So often, the actual process, which is complicated, isn't highlighted. We only see the crushed victim, struggling to keep their head above the rising water and then suddenly jump to the part where they're a survivor and thriving on the shoreline. We don't talk enough about the swim, the days and nights of being able to only tread water, fighting to stay afloat. We show the rescue, but not the recovery. In many ways, the hardest part is starting that recovery and being committed to learning ways to help us process the old and navigate the new. It's about re...

With all the dizzying aspects of leaving a cult, I couldn't imagine a life of happiness and fulfillment, let alone a life where kind souls would enter my life and change it for the better. I was concentrating solely on the confusion, grief and surviving of all the years where I was owned by a manipulative and controlling force that was my past church and the movement it belonged to for some time. I was unprepared, so unprepared, and my personal circumstances only complicated my exit and the eventual few years afterwards. I'm thankful I left, but for me, leaving was just another traumatic experience to process. I'd go on to shut down, crippled by that grief, reeling from years and years of living in a constant state of survival mode. To say it was a dark time in my life would be an understatement. I once told someone dear to me that I was like the dead just walking around. I just existed. It felt like a lonely existence, too.  Coming back from trauma isn't an easy task. ...

If leaving a high control group was difficult, the steps afterwards are equally difficult, and trust me, they are. Taking that scary first step out will be the hardest and most emotional decision you will ever face, even if it is always the absolute right decision in leaving a controlling group, church or relationship. But the days after successfully making that exit are just the beginning of a long and sometimes tedious journey.  Recently during a conversation on trying to navigate life post-cult, the statement was made that every decision, every obstacle is a mountain. Something simple and ordinary to most individuals can seem as a mountain and one that, in order to move forward, a cult survivor has no choice but to climb. I've climbed a lot of mountains in my life. I've made that heartbreaking feat of surviving abuse, of fighting for a sense of justice. I told an unsavory character just recently, "I stared down my abuser at 12 years old, you don't...