The second is the conviction that I don’t have to be broken, that healing is possible, and I am going to figure out how. I believe we are not here to suffer; we are here to grow—to find a way to heal and be happy and whole, despite the pain we encounter.
The third is the knowledge that I am not helpless; I can always act. I do not have all power, but neither am I powerless. I always have the power to change what I’m experiencing in any moment by focusing my attention on something good, and I can always choose to do so.
With these tools, I journey on the long road to healing. It’s the beginning of a new kind of openness to love and pain and fear and fulfillment. My tools don’t protect me from getting hurt, but they show me I always have a way to get better.
It takes my parents more than a decade after leaving the Family before they are willing and able to admit they were wrong and apologize to me for the abuses I suffered in the Family. My parents were always horrified by any accusation of child abuse in the news media. They saw themselves as loving, Godly parents doing everything in their power to raise Godly children. But I see it’s how they defined child abuse that makes all the difference.
My dad apologizes to me and his other older kids for the harsh spankings and punishments we received when we were younger. Some forgive him, some don’t.
He is a product of his upbringing, and there are many ways he still struggles from that. He never finished high school, had a formal paycheck, or held a job, and he can’t break the cycle of poverty mindset. He and Maria divorced after six years, so he’s a senior citizen with no income, living in a camper and raising four small children on social security. But his positive attitude of faith in God’s ability to provide never falters. He has gone back to the church and is very still entrenched in the Bible and Jesus, but from a more traditional perspective. With the benefit of hindsight, his youngest children experience a more mellow, loving father than the one we grew up with.
My mom similarly comes around. For years after we returned to the US, she and I spoke only every couple of months. She needed space to really examine her life and be able to recognize that her long-cherished beliefs were wrong and damaging to her kids. Davidito’s murder/suicide shook her up and helped her to reexamine things. The woman he killed had been her friend in her early days with the Family in Europe.
In time, she apologizes to me and my siblings. “I just want you to know that I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I’m sorry for what happened in the Family. I can see now that a lot of that was really wrong,” she says.
Despite everything, I applaud her for creating a new life for herself after she left the Family in her fifties, which few older-generation Family members did. She went back to school and earned a master’s degree and got a stable job as a language course editor, which she held for twenty years, socking away every cent she could into her 401(k) to provide for herself in retirement. When she was deciding to leave Dad and the Family for Ivan, her mother told her, “After I divorced your father, every time I took on something new and accomplished it, it gave me the strength to take the next step. It will be the same with you.” My grandmother’s words have proven true for both of us.
My mother is smart and loves to learn and is willing to change. She has an excitement about life and new things and new challenges, no matter her age. This openness to learn has allowed us to grow together in the last few years. I’m able to share therapeutic processes with her that have helped me, and she uses them to heal. We have honest talks about what happened in the Family and our new perspectives. So, it’s never too late.
Esther was the most dedicated disciple of all and never really left the Family. For thousands like her, the Family just disintegrated around them. In 2010, Mama Maria ended the communal living mandate, effectively disbanding Family Homes, leaving thousands of people nearing retirement destitute with no way to support themselves in their old age. For forty years, disciples were taught to never think about the future, but “be like the flowers and birds, who don’t sow or reap,” or save for retirement; they just expected that God would take care of them. Many former Family members in their seventies are left to live off meager social security benefits in mobile homes. While some of the young people born into the Family have managed to go back to school, many continue to struggle to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by their early lack of education.
Over the years, more of my siblings and their families settle in Texas. Most don’t decide to leave the Family; they just drift into greater independence. They are all doing their best to make their way in a world they were ill-prepared for. They have successes and failures and struggle with health issues, divorce, and financial setbacks and advances like most people.
As I discovered, there are stages of unraveling a strong indoctrination, and that can be the hardest journey. Some of my siblings still maintain Family beliefs, while others reverted to more fundamentalist church beliefs and laugh at the Family’s extreme doctrines. A few are on the journey of true questioning—the hardest path of all—where one is willing to recognize that everything they believe might be a lie.
The only way to logically determine what, if anything, is actually true is to be open to the possibility that none of it is. If it’s true, you don’t have to protect it—questioning it deeply only reveals more and strengthens it.
My parents tried harder than most to be good parents and good people, but this is the danger when you believe something false: you will act in ways that harm and violate others, even if you intend to do good. This is why we must actively check our most cherished beliefs against logic, against an accurate standard.
Our beliefs are mental chains that have been forged over generations. It is uncomfortable for us to question and test them with logic and discover that the conclusions that seemed unbreakable are made of clay, not iron, that crumbles with the slightest tap of the hammer of logic. I have not finished my quest for truth—it is continuous and joyous. Old ideas crumble as new truths are revealed through rigorous questioning.
I feel like I started life as an old lady. I was robbed of my teen hood, and by the time I was seventeen, I thought I knew everything about everything. But in the words of Albert Einstein, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” Now the world has become a massive amusement park filled with unlimited knowledge and experience. With endless opportunities, I keep getting younger.
And most importantly, even though I still deal with the repercussions, I’m truly grateful for every single experience. Without them, I wouldn’t have had the understanding I needed to create the framework that answers the questions that plagued me for years.
All things did work together for my good, but not automatically. I had to choose to create good from it and turn my traumas into strength.
Epilogue
I Own Me