Steve Sanchez has contributed this guest post. It is a tribute to the now-famous O.G. of the SRF dissidents. Steve's post speaks for itself. I would hope you will read it.
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The Mayor
I talked to ‘the Mayor’ today. The Mayor is Mason. It is a good name for him. As Mike intimated he is the Mayor because he was the first to leave the cult with a solid awareness of what it was. He was the first to take all the heat of standing up to the cult, and standing for his rights.
I found the letter he wrote to all of us who had left the cult (at thee funeral ceremony) to be challenging in a very good way. He wrote it only a week after Bill died. The letter is challenging today, even more so than the day it was written. Somehow he saw with clear eyes and a clear heart. It is challenging to me because of its compassion, confidence, composure, and fair-mindedness. How did he stay within himself enough to tell the story truthfully? The letter is remarkable to me because he at once did not minimizing the pain of the experience, and he did not speak from vengeful zeal.
The Mayor exemplified this same quality in the way he went about claiming his rights to parent his daughter. He went about his court business with intelligence and clear-sighted strategy. He methodically won what he needed, and at the same time was fair minded and reasonable toward his ex-wife, who chose to divorce him (at the behest of Bill of course).
One reason is this, unlike myself, Mason had a remarkable ability to not dissociate in the face of conflict. He handled the difficult business of court proceedings very well. For a long time after leaving I had the dysfunctional need to seek the approval of the abuser. I wanted to try and prove that I was OK to them, as a way to prove I was OK to myself. This is typical of abuse victims in many ways. The abuse from the outside may or may not be present, but the abuse continues from within. I had to work at unraveling this kind of dysfunction. The most difficult part of changing this is facing the truth of it. The cult had always banked on my (and others) tendency to dissociate in the face of conflict.
Most former members find it difficult to express compassion, confidence, composure, and fair-mindedness toward others, much less toward the cult itself; understandable so, they have been unjustly treated, humiliated, lost years of their life, and have a river of suppressed rage to deal with. Mason felt all these same things, and had his own dysfunctional way of dealing with things in some ways. Mason cared deeply about all of us who had left and were willing to be his friend, but he cared about one thing more than anything else – his daughter. He was able to subjugate all other motives and focus on this primary objective.
Mason was completely vilified by the cult in every way possible. He was constantly slandered by all the cult people. Bill built a massive propaganda program against him. He is still completely misunderstood by the cult and, no doubt, by many former members.
All this is not to say he walks on water. Everyone I have seen that leaves the cult suffers post-traumatic stress, and has a great deal of suppressed rage. Mason too. To be in denial of the rage only makes it worse. It will come out one way or another. For example, for me it came out in fits of anger, vengeance fantasies, and for the first few years, sexual misconduct. One ex-member makes it plain for all to see in his writing. Another adopted another righteous ideology. (I for one am glad she is Christian, but it seems to me she chose a very exclusive form). Mason had fits of agitation the extent of which I don’t know. Others I know became alcoholic.
One of the best ways to heal the trauma is to work in and be part of a new model that is good and functional. Mason has had consistency in his work throughout the cult experience and after. He has worked as a professional teacher for slow kids the whole time. This has given him consistency and discipline. He told me how he often has the responsibility of counseling parents who are first finding out that their kids are ‘slow’. Sometimes the parents are devastated and sometimes they are relieved. It is his job to deliver the news with skill and compassion. He told me that the suffering he underwent from the cult experience helps him to understand the feelings of the parents, and thus makes him an effective councilor.
I have experienced a similar benefit from my cult experience. I work now as a fulltime chaplain in a hospital. Everyday it is my job (and privilege) to visit patients in the hospital who are recovering from many different illnesses or injuries. I never know who will be behind the next door. Sometimes I visit with folks who have just learned they have cancer, people who are in end of life care, young or old folks who have been in accidents, or received wounds. In the program I am in, we learn psychological approaches to caring, and we learn spiritual and devotional approaches. It is process oriented, not technique, which primarily means that an essential part of the process is to examine ourselves, so that we can better serve others.
Our goal is to bring presence into the room for the sake of the service of the people. Presence can mean different things; it means to hold the Holy Spirit in our heart, it means to be fully present as a listener for another, it means to simply to be a companion. Sometimes it means to be a witness to what a person most needs to say to God. Sometimes I have to be able to handle huge emotions of release of grief or anger. At these moments I must stay with the person and not flinch, so that the person feels safe, held, and cared for. I like the people and I love the people. Some visits are one-time shots and some go on for weeks or months.
My own experience of suffering prepared me for this more than anything else. While writing Spiritual Perversion I re-experienced the traumatic episodes in the cult and gave myself the compassion no-one else was there to give me. Now I try to give compassion to other people’s stories to facilitate their self-acceptance, transformation, and hopefully their contentment in God.
