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for creative writing classes didn‘t even touch upon my cult background. However, a
professor at U.B.C. urged me to write about my cult experiences. Eventually, I obliged him
by writing a short story titled ―Partings,‖ about two teenage girls who leave Calgary on a
bus trip to California, and, after they meet the Moonies, one of them gets caught up in the
cult, while the other returns home. At the time I wrote this story, I didn‘t believe that mind
control existed, so to explain the difference between the two girls‘ responses to the
indoctrination camp, I set up the story so that one girl was more psychologically vulnerable
than the other, and it was the emotionally needy one who got drawn in. The other girl
narrates the story. Here‘s the closing paragraph from ―Partings‖:
I got on the bus and sat by the window, and in the last light of the evening I
saw her walking up the hill again to join the group of people who were staying
for the week. They had formed a big circle around a campfire and were
singing a lot of loud, happy songs, with Jacob playing his guitar as usual, and
everybody clapping in time. As she got closer to them, she suddenly broke
into a little run, and jumped into the circle, clapping her hands in time with
the others. I think that‘s what she loved the best about them: just the simple
things, like holding hands and singing songs about the Ideal World and acting
out all the words like some big grown-up kids. For a moment the campfire
flared up and caught her little dark face in its glow, and she was really smiling
now, like I almost never saw her smile, and in that moment, I knew how
much I loved her, and that I might not ever see her again.
Later, I wrote another short story in which I sought to recreate, as accurately as possible, a
typical day in the life of a fundraiser on the M.F.T. That story was eventually published in
the Baltimore City Paper in 1993 under the title ―True Father Knows Best.‖ Even though it
was written before I understood mind control and therefore contains some logical problems,
it remains one of the best things I have ever written about my Unification Church
experiences. The story is shot through with the haunting refrain, ―There was no time to
waste,‖ and it records one very long day in the life of a young man fundraising for the
Unification Church in Baltimore. Near the end of his fundraising day, he is given a chance to
make an emotional connection to a young woman on his fundraising team who is having
problems, but he rebuffs the opportunity, because he is afraid of where this might lead.
Here are the final paragraphs of that story:
Reinhard turned onto the expressway and drove silently for some time. There
was a dull strain of tension in the air. Nobody joked, nobody told an inspiring
testimony. The pale wash of the streetlights swept repeatedly over the seven
faces in the van, first Reinhard and Harumi-san, then Hilda, then the
brothers. Everyone was thoughtful, or praying, or staring out at the lowering
landscape. When he finally spoke, Reinhard looked up at the rear view mirror.
Our eyes connected in the glass. His eyes were as gray and cold as I‘d ever
seen them, and his words were flat and toneless.
―Margaret wasn‘t at her pick-up point,‖ he said. ―I asked inside the restaurant
where she starts her run, and they said she asked for directions to the bus
depot. She said she was going back to her family in Chicago. She gave them
her flowers, and left. When I got to the depot the bus was already gone.‖
So that was it. Margaret had left. She‘d joined the ranks of the unbelievers—
the walking dead. To keep Reinhard from noticing the tears that came to my
eyes, I put up my hands and began to pray. Only now that she was gone,
could I finally let myself feel that I loved her. I prayed that she would realize
her mistake and come back to the True Family. I promised to God that I
would work even harder as a heavenly soldier for Father. And then I turned

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my thoughts to preparing the product for the next day. There was no time to
waste.
Both these stories were good attempts to process my cult experience, but they were
deficient because they were based on the false premise that mind control did not exist and
that people joined the Unification Church based solely on their emotional need.
However, in 1992, as I was planning a novel that would include a forcible deprogramming—
a procedure to which I was strongly opposed—I realized that I understood very little about
the rationale behind deprogramming and why anyone might attempt to do this. I decided
that even though I had an intense phobic reaction to the mere idea of reading books by
former Unification Church members, I was unlikely to be able to write convincingly about a
deprogramming unless I read something about it. So one day I noticed a copy of Steven
Hassan‘s book, Combating Cult Mind Control, in a bookstore, and after much hesitation I
reluctantly bought it and began to read. To my own amazement, I was completely won over
by Hassan‘s arguments. Reading that book opened the floodgates for me—soon after that, I
read Lifton‘s study of thought reform, and I began to devour all the published accounts
written by former Unificationists. I realized that mind control was a real thing that I had
personally endured, and I began to recast my writing to take this new understanding into
account.
It was only after I reached this key understanding that I stopped writing about my cult
experiences exclusively in fiction and poetry and also began writing about them in
non-fiction articles for the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Later, when it became clear that no
newspaper article or personal essay could answer all the questions people have about my
cult experiences, I decided to write the entire story from start to finish in a book-length
memoir. That project eventually became Heartbreak and Rage: Ten Years Under Sun Myung
Moon.
Conclusion
For twelve years, from 1980 to 1992, writing encouraged me to engage in emotional
expression in situations in which I was constantly being told, and I generally believed, that I
had a moral obligation to repress my deepest thoughts and feelings. This is not to say that
it is impossible to write entirely out of a cultic mindset, but such writing tends to read more
like propaganda than serious literature. Consider the artistic style known as Socialist
Realism, which was once the official style for artists in the former Soviet Union—and then
consider how little art of merit was ever produced using that style. Serious personal writing,
by contrast, puts a person back in touch with his or her real feelings, and therefore provides
the tools for him or her to escape the maze of cultic thinking and repression.
Henriette Klauser, PhD, in her recent book, With Pen in Hand: The Healing Power of Writing,
offers a number of helpful tips for using writing as an aid to emotional healing. The most
helpful suggestion for the purposes of cult survivors is probably the one that appears at the
close of Chapter 13, in which the struggles of Mike, a Vietnam War veteran, are described:
Consider writing a memoir about an important event in your life. Not for
publication, but for yourself, to name what shaped you, and perhaps to share
with a few select close friends and family members. Mike told the people he
shared his story with, ―If you want to understand me, here it is—this is what I
went through.‖
Be honest write continuously, without worrying about style or grammar. The
more you write, the more you will remember.
Just start. (Klauser, 218)