Cult Recovery Lesson: I Have the Right to Make Mistakes and Not Have to Be Perfect

This is the third installment of a series on "Basic Rights" by the Blog Owner. 


Overcome! Don't Slack! Or It's the Lake of Fire for YOU!

From the time I was a toddler, just able to hear - these are the words I heard (perhaps, without understanding - but heard, nonetheless). When I was old enough to understand by hearing and by reading - the expectations, subconscious or blatant - were clear. The life I was to lead was very special, as a child of my parents called out of the world. A life of continual overcoming.








I am not saying it's wrong to overcome. "Overcoming" means to clear hurdles and change from ways that are bad for you - like addictions, trauma, depression, pride and greed, for example. It's what you do when you realize you are in a pattern, for whatever reason, that is causing you, or somebody else, negative impacts - that may be in your relationship as a husband or a wife, as a son or daughter, or a father or a mother. Overcoming can be a good thing in these examples.

Overcoming can also be a truly bad thing - if it's abused.

When you are forced to change your individuality - and told to overcome the basic person of who you are - then it's not overcoming. It's control. When you are forced to conform to a mold that is not who you are - then that's not overcoming. It's dictatorial command. When you are told to overcome every aspect of your life that has no relevance to anything spiritual or harmful - than that's not overcoming. That's unauthorized power. And all of it's a form of abuse.

Our expectations in the cult (in my experience - each person has a different story) were to overcome everything that made us individual and unique. Our hairstyles, dress, mannerisms, speech, and what we ate were strictly regulated - things we had to overcome. We had to overcome "worldly" friendships, the fear of tithing over a quarter of our income, and our basic common sense when a ministerial order simply was the stupidest thing you ever heard in your life - but because "it came from a minister of God", obedience was mandatory, and God would "take care of it" in His own time.

Our idea of overcoming was becoming perfect as God is perfect by being as close to as perfect as possible in obedience to the Law, which we interpreted as the expression of holy love - Law keeping. Therefore, when we fell short on our expectations, we fell short on our overcoming - and we risked "not qualifying", or "not making it". We had to expend tremendous energies to simply try our best, not slack, to try to become "good enough" to hopefully qualify to "make it", and somehow have worked hard enough that God would see our efforts and His grace would then grade on the curve and we'd be accepted in His sight.

This caused - for me at least - an intense fear of extreme failure, and a perfectionist nature that made me have an extreme phobia of wrong-doing, of any sort, no matter how minor or trivial. You may see this as extreme. And it is. That does not change it's reality. It is only through years of de-programming and understanding reality that I am beginning to realize, slowly, a realization that is like a ray of light. I'm not there yet in grasping this. But it's this realization that:

I Have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect. 

I do not have to accept condemnation on my shortcomings and my downfalls, or take them internally as I have on a lifelong basis. I do not have to accept the harsh criticisms of those who pridefully and arrogantly assert themselves as unqualified experts. More than this - I have had to learn, and am learning, that making mistakes is a part of life, and it is not going to disqualify me from any future reward - so long as I don't engage in harmful activities that go against the golden rule - "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

When you grow up in an environment where you believe that you will be cut off from God for accidentally doing something illegal on the Sabbath one minute before sunset, or forgetting your offering on a Holy Day, or accidentally having a sip of water on the Day of Atonement - or leaving a crumb of bread in the sofa during the Days of Unleavened Bread. When you grow up being judged on your appearance, on your clothes - or you are condemned because you slipped and said "Darn" or "Fart" instead of stinker - (yes, I know - but it's what it was) - and your expectations were to be nothing short of the best role model of the Kingdom that you can be in life and in the Church - you don't believe you have the "right" to make mistakes or the "right" to not be perfect.

And a person never discovers the reality of who they are, individually, or who they can become or what their talents or abilities really are. They simply become a drone in a sea of drones, acting and behaving and seeing and hearing only in ways that make them a conformer, not an individual. It is better to be and live who you are in truth and reality then pretend you're someone you are not in a lie.

Yes, Jesus told us to overcome. But that did not counteract the right we have to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, and to accept our imperfections. The environment of the cult that I grew up in did not believe that. And the harm it is causing people stifled under their oppressive regimes cannot be underestimated.

Learning who I am as a person takes time and patience. I'm not there. But discovering my individuality and freeing myself from the mind control of the Cult Drones - that's freeing. It's one of the lessons I'm trying to grasp in my ongoing journey of recovery.


Basic rights adapted from The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook by Eugene Bourne (Oakland, CA, New Barbringer Publications, 1995)