Learning to Love the Hardest Person; Yourself

By Fred Pollard

This weekend, I am attending a fundraiser in St. Louis for the release of Del Shores’ newest film, Southern Baptist Sissies.

Not having seen the stage play, I was not aware until talking to Del just how important the film really is. I was expecting another twisted classic a la Sordid Lives, but the more I learn the more I realize it is so much more. When discussing Southern Baptist Sissies, actor Leslie Jordan described a scene where “one of the boys said to the other one, as they look around the Baptist church where they grew up, ‘It was in these pews that we learned to hate ourselves.’”

Those words have not left my thoughts since I heard them. It made me wonder, how many unhappy people know just when they learned how to hate themselves?

I think people often minimize the impact our childhood has on us. We have the tendency within us to think that we are strong enough to walk away from whatever baggage there is and not look back, but it often is not that easy. Sometimes the hardest part is just cutting yourself some slack and seeing the struggle as growth, not failure.

In 1972, I was born into a well-known religious cult and remained there until my later teens. This group gained media attention in the 1960s and 70s, and notoriety in the 1980s. We were programmed to do everything we could to distance ourselves from “the world,” and trained to accept and trust the teachings of the organization’s leader (the “apostle”) without question, no matter how far-out his teachings became.

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Members of Charles Manson’s cult, ‘The Family’, in 1970.

I was the first member of my family to “defect.” For me, choosing to walk away from everything I had ever known and believed in at such a young age was one of the bravest things I have ever done, although at the time it seemed like anything but. Everything I did was colored with self-doubt, and while in some ways it felt like a blind person experiencing sight for the first time, I also felt alienated from everyone and everything around me. To be raised in a religious cult and then try to acclimate yourself into the real world is like picking someone off the street in Nashville and placing them in the middle of Berlin, with no knowledge of the German language or the culture.

And that feeling of being a stranger does not go away easily.

After a few years on my own, I found myself prey to a less radical (but no less damaging) religious group, and spent another few years surrounding myself with the familiar…unraveling much of the progress I had made since leaving the cult. I found I was desperate for someplace where I “belonged,” somewhere rife with that feeling of “us against them, and you are one of the ‘us.’”

After leaving that second group, it took me years to completely regain my identity.

There is a reason why people who escape from cults are called “survivors.” I believe that term should be broadened and widely accepted to include those who were suffocated by religious bigotry and then able to forge a life free of those chains.

When they learn about the book I am writing, many people ask why in the name of Sweet Jesus and the Baby Trees I am writing about Charles Manson’s cult, the “Family.” The answer is simple… because I believe many of those people are survivors, as well.

fredpollard_editorial_apr13And that is exactly why I feel the project is so important. Some of the former members I have researched and spoken with are some of the bravest people I have known. Many have had to overcome family rejection, social stigma, and the hatred of people they have never met, while simultaneously trying to “re-learn” how to function in society. And while most of the members never committed the crimes for which the group is so well-known, and have turned their lives around and do more good today than most of us could ever accomplish; they are hated, stigmatized, and judged every day for their past.

I am not ashamed of my past. I embrace it and speak about it freely. I use it to try and understand those around me a little better. I allow it to shape the book I am writing about the survivors of Manson’s cult. It is part of who I am, and if I accept myself as valid and valuable, then it is part of what made me that way. I am a cult survivor.

In the end, the toughest thing we survive is ourselves. To do so is the best revenge, the greatest accomplishment, and in the end, the key to real happiness.

For most of us, especially in our community, there is something in our past that “taught us how to hate ourselves.” If it wasn’t a church pew, then maybe it was a parent, a relationship, or a school or work bully.

Ask yourself, have you struggled through life? Are you still here?

Then you, my friend, are a survivor.

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