cutting off relationships with people outside the cult
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.