The Destructive Dynamics Inherent in Post-Cult Marriage

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ex-l

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The Destructive Dynamics Inherent in Post-Cult Marriage

Post30 Oct 2009

From: The Destructive Dynamics Inherent in Post-Cult Marriage
Cult members identify with their leaders, and these identifications supplant previous identifications made with parental figures early in life. Because cult leaders generally are paranoid individuals, they indoctrinate their members into a paranoid vision of the world. (Tobias & Lalich, 1994) That is, cult leaders tend to ascribe the worst motives to the behavior of others. When individuals leave the cult, some may continue to have the paranoid feelings of the cult leader. For others, an awareness exists that their trusting nature prior to the cult made them more vulnerable to cult recruitment. For most former cultists, at a time that their sense of self is quite fragile, this paranoid attitude protects them from being unduly influenced by others.

However, in marital relationships, this paranoia can be destructive. When an individual who has been in a cult starts a relationship with someone with no prior cult involvement, the former cultist might interpret his or her partner’s behavior suspiciously or see negative motives behind the partner’s behavior. When two former cultists are in a relationship, this situation intensifies.

Former cultists also often fear that their present partner is going to use them as they were used in the cult. A cult leader may have told his or her followers that they were loved, but this was a hollow word used by a narcissistic and/or antisocial individual who lacked a true capacity to love or feel concern for another human being. Additionally, as mentioned previously, the cult leader destroyed the connection between love and sex, and former cultists may find it difficult to link the two.

Many former cultists also rely on the defense of projection ... Projection more recently has been defined as “a mental process whereby a painful impulse or idea is attributed to the external world.”

That is, if there is a conflict about certain feelings, those feelings experienced but forbidden often are projected onto the marital partner. The cult leader made members feel as though they were selfish for any expression of self-interest. The leader’s attitude that a cult member should have no self-interest can be projected onto the marital partner. Former cultists may believe that their partners do not want them to have pleasures in life or that their partners will be unwilling to consider their desires. In part, this also is a projection of their own conflicts about the enjoyment of pleasure after the cult. They believe that they want pleasure, but because it was forbidden for so long in the cult, they unconsciously place their discomfort about their desires onto someone else. In effect, they think, “Although I want pleasure, he/she does not want me to be pleased.

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