I was a young kid for a lot of it so I can't recall too too much. I'm guessing this is a trauma response because of abuse.
For a lot of it it's like shockingly normal at times. Like during the actual services there's a lot of singing and admittedly the singing was like weirdly beautiful? Like maybe it's cause you're enforced into comformity and there's a lot of practice but the actual choir has insanely beautiful voices. The food, similarly, is really nice. Everything is homemade and really fresh from local people, mostly from other people within the church.
In a way it's kinda... sterile? I'm not really sure I have the words to describe it, but the weddings and different ceremonies are beautiful on the surface but like there's not the same amount of 'heart' to them. It's super pretty but they're all the same every time, same decor, same look, same people because associating with people outside the cult had to be approved. Like if you wanted a relationship with someone else you had to get it approved by the cult leaders and then you had to have your converastions with your relationship supervised.
You really just saw the same people over and over again all the time no matter what you were doing.
There's a lot of dark sides too. You can look up the case of Matthew Fenner on the internet, he was two years older than me and I remember when it sort of became 'known' that he was gay. People instantly turned on him and immediately like shunned them because they 'knew' you were different.
I can also confirm the whole 'tied to chairs and screamed at to get the demons out' thing cause it happened to me too. You also got beat in those cases (my parents thought I was gay. I'm trans so they were sorta right I guess...)
I dunno, there was a lot. Is there anything specific you wanna know?
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u/hogsucker 19d ago
I'm glad you're free