Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003, Page 23
Writing Down the Pain: A Case Study of the Benefits of
Writing for Cult Survivors
K. Gordon Neufeld
Calgary, Canada
Abstract
Cult survivors are often urged to write down what they remember about their
cult experiences as a way of resolving the ongoing harmful effects of those
experiences, yet little has been written about why this is helpful. In this
paper, I will demonstrate the benefits of writing by providing examples of how
doing so assisted me in my own life.
I was a member of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon‘s Unification Church, popularly known as
the ―Moonies,‖ for ten years. The Unification Church is the organization more properly
known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, which was
founded in Korea in 1954 by Moon, a charismatic evangelist who claims to be the Messiah.
In reflecting on my life during and since my time in the Unification Church, I can definitely
see that writing benefited me greatly, not only after I left the cult, but also for a period of
approximately six years before my decision to leave.
In 1976—the same year I joined the Unification Church—I graduated from the University of
British Columbia with an undergraduate degree in English. I chose that university
specifically because it has a Creative Writing program. Yet, as soon as I got caught up in the
Unification Church, which I encountered by chance while passing through San Francisco in
August, 1976, I put aside all my ambitions to become a writer. Church leaders told me that
when the Ideal World came, and everyone believed in Unificationism, then there would be
time for me to develop my writing talents but in the meantime I should dedicate myself
100 percent to carrying out the will of ―True Father‖ (that is, the Reverend Moon). So I
abruptly stopped writing, and for the next four years I wrote only letters to my family and a
few fairly prosaic essays for my classes at the Unification Theological Seminary in upstate
New York. The first part of this article deals with this period when I had few opportunities
for writing or creative expression.
But, as I will relate in more detail later, during my fourth year as a Unificationist, which was
also my second year at the Seminary, a seemingly insignificant event suddenly reopened
my urge to express myself in ways that put me sharply at odds with church authorities. For
the next six years, then, until I finally quit the Unification Church, I wrote often—beginning
with sermons for the Seminary, and then journal and diary entries, and finally articles for
two grass-roots Unificationist publications that briefly flourished in the mid-1980s. I will be
quoting from some of these sources to show how writing helped me clarify the single
biggest issue within myself: that is, the question of whether I should permit myself to feel
my real feelings, or whether I should obey the demands of church leaders by completely
repressing them. The second part of this article deals with this period of vacillation, when I
was still a Unificationist but had started to pull away.
Even after I finally concluded I could not hold back my real feelings, and that therefore I
must leave the Unification Church—which I finally did in 1986—the struggle was not over,
because I still had not settled the question of whether my choice was the right one—the one
that God wanted me to make. It took me another six years, and a near-return to the
Unification Church, before I could settle that question.

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003, Page 24
In the third part of this article, then, I will look at the role that writing played in helping me
to reconcile myself, post-cult, to my decision to leave the Unification Church. Indeed,
initially it was not writing itself, but merely the goal of becoming a writer, that helped me
resist on that one occasion when I nearly returned to the Unification Church. And,
subsequently, it was writing in all its forms—not just autobiography, but also short stories,
poems, and a novella—that helped me to be able to see that I had, indeed, made the right
decision by leaving the Unification Church.
Part One: Repression As a Way of Life, 1976 to 1980
Ironically, the reason I was traveling through California in August of 1976 when I
encountered the Unification Church was that I was investigating primal therapy, a therapy
first described by its inventor, Arthur Janov, in his famous book, The Primal Scream. I had
gone to California to look at Janov‘s original Primal Institute and also some other
organizations that offered imitations of Janov‘s techniques. The situation was ironic because
the whole idea behind Janov‘s therapy is to break through emotional repression, yet, after I
became caught up in the Unification Church, I was required to engage in near-total
repression of my feelings.
Repression, therefore, became a way of life throughout the first four years of my
involvement with Moon‘s organization. And although I was not aware of this at the time, the
thought-reform techniques that the Unification Church used on me at the indoctrination
camp in Boonville, California conformed in every respect to the eight criteria for a thought-
reform program identified by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 study, Thought Reform and the
Psychology of Totalism. The use of these techniques quickly changed me from a
nonreligious person into a dedicated believer in Moon and his teachings, the Divine
Principle. I came to believe that my feelings were liable to be ―invaded by Satan‖ and should
be treated with utmost suspicion. I was urged to work frenetically from early in the
morning to late at night, to pray and chant constantly during my waking hours, and to fixate
all my thoughts on Reverend Moon and his wife, whom we called the True Parents. We were
to think only of how to please Father, and it was presumed that God could not be happy
unless we expended every effort to serve Father. Members would often counsel each other
to ―just cut‖ from their feelings, and when they said this they would use a karate-chopping
gesture to demonstrate the idea, similar to the hand-chopping gesture that Moon often uses
in his public speeches.
Under the pressure of my newly frantic schedule, I stopped writing almost completely
except for occasional letters to my family in Calgary. During my first four years as a
member of the Unification Church, I was sent all over the United States, first to Los Angeles
for the International One World Crusade, then to New York to do recruiting, and then to
Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to do full-time fundraising (which in the Unification Church
is called M.F.T., meaning ―mobile fundraising teams‖). Such teams would travel all around
in vans to sell flowers, candy, and costume jewelry at greatly inflated prices in parking lots,
residential neighborhoods, and commercial districts.
It was during my time on M.F.T. that I experienced emotional repression in its most
complete form. Such repression was essential just to survive the M.F.T. This is how I
describe my own M.F.T. experiences in my new book, Heartbreak and Rage: Ten Years
Under Sun Myung Moon:
I had finally achieved what Father demanded above all else from his
followers—I had become total action without reflection—pure doing.
This, in fact, was what Father had in mind when he insisted that Seminarians
should first go to the M.F.T. He wanted them to have the experience of totally
emptying their minds, and of thinking of nothing except obedience to him.