How A Family Can Be A Cult

[BellaCella]

There is a term called the familial cult that describes the issues you are bringing up. Whether a group leader or family leader, the leader is typically a malignant narcissist or sociopath. There are two extremely helpful books I can recommend here: The Wizard of Oz and other Narcissists by Eleanor Payson and also The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. The familial cult behaves like a larger cult or high-demand group. Religious doctrine, etc are simply one form of tools exploited by the leader to control their subordinates in an unhealthy manner. Excommunication is the ultimate relationship price for standing up to the leader, whether in a family or other group.
The good news is, the book by Eleanor Payson gives specific advice on how to stand ones ground and speak ones truth with success in these highly dysfunctional, destructive relationships. I was able to leverage her communication techniques to salvage a family relationship that I previously had zero hope of salvaging.

 

[mumstheword]

I've described my ex as a "cult-leader" type.
He is most definitely narcissistic and sociopathic.
He uses pot as both his object of power, his main cultish fetish and his primary weapon of domination. He used to be a band leader too (of which I was his long-standing faithful side-kick, back-up singer girl) which which he could espouse his ideology and justify his cannabis-and-self-centic lifestyle with (yes, of course it was a reggae band, what else would it be?).
He couldn't really maintain the following that he truly coveted, but I provided him with lots of children that he could drug, groom for slavish subservience and also keep me in line with by using as kind of hostage-type manipulation objects (to stop me leaving him) and weapons (hurt them to hurt me, after I left, primarily) and I stayed for a long time with terrible abuse, isolation, deprivation, gaslighting, drugging, psychological and emotional torture, induction of slave-like subservience etc., just to keep relationship with our children and be the buffer zone scapegoat instead of them.

I had to leave eventually as it was physically killing me like a frog being slowly boiled. And my time was running out fast, if I didn't change and gain my own personal power, sanity and health, impossible to do from within the family dynamic.

So I had to leave my children (I also can't yet drive yet, because my childhood was also abusive, deprived and dysfunctional and I left very young, thus trapped with babies as a teenager and easy unable-to-escape prey for pedophiliac anti-social disorder ex) so leaving with 7 young people got roo hard.

Of course I was ex-communicated, I also gave up pot, shock, horror, sin of sins in his eyes. I was painted as a crazy immoral evil bitch for leaving, who "should have died [instead], that would have been the honourable way out" (his words).

It was excruciating, and the worst of any psychological torture I've ever experienced (& I've had plenty from as early, and even earlier than, I can remember) to leave my children with that man, knowing what kind of a state, his treatment could leave one in.

Most of my children were too old to get primary care of through the court system by then though (courts are only concerned with 12 & under, even if the father is a gaslighting drug-f*cking narcissist, it seems) and too brain-washed and drug addicted to fight for, care for and maintain relationship with, but I went to court for my 2 youngest and was awarded care of them, at least.

I've finally regained varying degrees of relationship with all my 5 older teen to young adult children (7 years after leaving) but not before 2 have had stints in psych wards, one has now developed a psychotic condition and is the ward of a guardianship, 2 have also been suicidal, 4 have indulged in self harm, all have mental health problems and out of the 7 only the youngest doesn't have a cannabis dependency. Although my autistic/psychotic son has recently cut down after his time at his dad's has been reduced by order of his psychiatrist and independent guardian.

So yeah, in my experience, a family dynamic can be like a cult and have similar effects on the individual and the relationships between members. Propped up, in our case, by the "alternative" "counter-culture' subculture that I grew up in and we live amidst, and elements of the Rastafarian and Reggae cultural phenomena, in our case.

 

[shimmerz]

just to keep relationship with our children and be the buffer zone scapegoat instead of them.

Yes, I did this as well. It didn't work out well for me.

Am thinking on this link. Lots of good information there.
Cult Characteristics

 

[mumstheword]

Yes, I did this as well. It didn't work out well for me.

Am thinking on this link. Lots of good i...

It didn't work out well at all for me either. But I think I did the best I could, given the circumstances.
Anyway my ex is losing power over our children's mind's. I had to wait it out a lot, excruciatingly.
The abuse of me has never been addressed though. It was "normalized" and I was completely stigmatized as being a "crazy" instead.
I've had loads of validation other places though, so things are coming clearer for me and I tread verrrrry carefully with my kids.

I think my ex is moving on to another power platform as a Medical Cannabis big wig, here in our pot obsessed and front-line-of-the-drug-war-town.

My kids have my genes (too) and have too much of their own mind and my support, to think for themselves, to be endlessly caught up in his power plays.

So my family is looking less cultish every day.
In one way it is simply a narcissistic sociopaths family dynamic, which I've worked very hard to offset.

In another way it's evidence of the cultish sub-culture here, that revolves around much virtue signalling, substance abuse, and legitimate reactions to draconian laws around banned substances.

But, if you don't smoke weed, you're out of the club.
If you don't look scruffy and "alternative" enough, you are one of the "others".

Lots of paranoia, laziness and craving to be "special" and "more enlightened and spiritual" but instead it's just another herd-mentality special interest group in lots of ways (that's my cynical assessment of it, anyway).

BTW I'm referring to the wider context of the Australian East coast "hippy" culture I was encultured into my whole life (my mum's mentally ill brand of it set me up) and a very common theme in my current home town . I think my lifetime of abuse and neglect has given me too much of a trauma lens to view it all through though.

That is what made me susceptible to my ex's particular brand of ideology and lifestyle. No he's not a cult leader, he's just a narcissistic drug addict and dealer with a hard-wired sociopathic go about him. He craves adoration and can't feel empathy, love or concern for anyone but himself and his insatiable craving for power, and being an object of worship and slavish devotion, at any and everyone else's expense.
But again, trauma and abuse lens, that I'm viewing through.

Apparently he's an awesome guy, people like to tell me, which is one reason I avoid going out in this town, where he has busily been building yet another following, until he burns them as well, anyway.

I hope his Cannabis panacea works better for all of his new followers, as it made me wayyy more mentally ill and stuck, so it was actually torture for me.

Oh yeah and i hear he does make money out of it, charging very ill people huge sums of money for his home-cooked, substandard "products" but that's more just an illegal business than a cultish extraction of funds.

Anyway, enough of my bitter brush with cultishness and the criminalization of stoners and sick people who find benefit from an illegal herb and how sociopaths and anti social types take advantage of that, I am interested in hearing of others, particularly you Shimmerz, experience of cultish family dynamics. Care to share more?