21 VOLUME 9 |ISSUE 3 |2018
are risky. However, ultimately, if you are unable to let go of
intense anger, you may be prevented from establishing a loving
relationship and enjoying your life.
• Might I be holding onto my anger because (consciously
or unconsciously) I believe that letting go of my rage
would mean that I am forgiving others for their harm to
me?
• Letting go of intense anger does not mean that you
are not remembering abuse or neglect. You always
will remember but if you can, try to find ways to move
away from the intensity of your emotions to improve
the quality of your life today, for your own good.
Your parents failed in many ways: They might have failed to
protect you from being harmed by cult abuse or neglect. They
might have failed to respond with encouragement and pride
when you displayed emerging personal abilities, or to show
empathy when you needed help. They might have stood as
bystanders disconnected from you and under the leader’s spell
when you needed more from them. You may feel they did not
want to see your pain.
Some parents did not have adequate parenting themselves,
which might have contributed to their difficulty in knowing how
to adequately parent you. This knowledge is not necessarily a
reason to excuse your parents, but it might provide a context for
understanding them.
• How conflicted were my parents when they submitted
to the demands of the cult leader? And what do my
parents feel now? Are they distraught and heartbroken
now about how I was treated in the cult? Or do they
continue to hold onto the belief that my cult treatment
was for my own good? Are they such true believers that
they are unable and unwilling to see how they harmed
me?
Your responses to these questions can make a difference in your
ability to process and determine how you will deal with your
parents. Some parents may be so overwhelmed with guilt that it
is too painful for them to acknowledge and face the enormity of
the harm they inflicted upon their children. This is not a reason
to excuse them, but again it might help you better understand
them.
You Can Change Only Yourself, in the Present
You have a right to feel angry and saddened. Your past has
affected you, and you might feel continued hurt, resentment,
and a desire for restitution. It is human to have those feelings.
It also is human and sometimes even helpful to have a desire
for revenge. Wanting revenge allows you to turn the tables, and
this response may help you to feel less as if you are a passive
victim. Revenge can give you a sense of mastery and enhanced
self-esteem. Allowing yourself to feel and fantasize a wish for
revenge on your cult leader or those who abused you may be a
positive step, particularly if you could not allow yourselves to feel
anger in the cult.
Unfortunately, some individuals cannot even enjoy fantasizing
about revenge. They might continue to blame themselves rather
than the true culprits. However, to blame and want revenge
might be a step in the direction of healing. Those who have been
exploited by others might be prone to forgive attacks and hurts
too easily. They do not permit themselves to register anger at
their victimizers instead, they tend to minimize or deny their
anger altogether and are inclined to turn the other cheek. They
are too ready to try to forgive and forget. I believe that true
healing must involve coming to terms with the depth of one’s
feelings about the extent of the other person’s offense. At the
same time, there are crimes so horrible that forgiveness may not
be possible.
Further questions that are important to ask yourself include
these:
• Can I have all these feelings along with an acceptance
that I can change only myself in the present?
• Can I free myself from continual rumination and allow
myself eventually to move on for my own sake?
• What do I owe myself?
• When is “long enough,” and when is the time to move
away for the good of my present life?
In cases in which suffering has been great, there have been few
(if any) positive experiences, and you must avoid further contact
with those from the past to avoid further harm to yourself, the
most realistic result you can achieve might be to make sure you
are in a safe place to live your own life. You can then work to
understand that continued intense rage and resentment might
prevent you from moving on.
• Am I spending too much time focused upon anger
toward those from the past, without resolution?
This hating can become self-punishing and self-destructive if it
consumes you and interferes with experiencing pleasure in your
present life. Continual rage can indicate that your cult still has a
hold on you and you are too attached to the leader and/or your
parents. This lack of resolution and ongoing attachment can
interfere with your ability to love yourself or others in the present.
You cannot change your
past. But by increasing
your understanding of that
past … you might, in time,
be able to change the way
you live your life today.

22 ICSA TODAY
• In time, can I free myself from continual rumination
and allow myself to move on—again, for my own sake?
To improve your life, you might consider participation in
therapy, where you can learn the multiple meanings of your
anger and acquire different strategies to help you gain more
control over this powerful emotion.
You cannot change your past. But by increasing your
understanding of that past and allowing for all the complex
emotions that you begin to feel after you leave the cult, you
might, in time, be able to change the way you live your life today.
Part 2:
Understanding Intention (by Ann Stamler)
My parents were both children of immigrant families. They were
artists who left their homes in a New York suburb to pursue
their art in Greenwich Village. They met each other and began
studying with Eli Siegel, a poet and philosopher in the Village,
as the United States was becoming engaged in the Second
World War. In fact, my father was on a troop carrier off Normandy
waiting to land in the Allied invasion that helped end the war
when I was born. He did not meet me till I was about a year and
a half old.
In the years after World War II, my parents were part of an
American era called the “period of adjustment,” when soldiers
returned from war to wives and children they barely knew
and tried to pick up lives in a postwar world. Some of my early
memories are of listening from my bedroom late at night as my
parents called Siegel on the telephone to mediate the fierce
arguments the two of them had that almost tore our family
apart.
Siegel’s basic philosophy, which he called Aesthetic Realism (AR),
was that art contained the answers to life problems. In personal
sessions he talked about how what made a poem or painting
beautiful could help people understand their families and also
world events. I think his teaching offered my parents a sense of
rationality and hope in a frightening and tumultuous time in the
world and their own lives. Siegel was not yet, as far as I know,
the demanding narcissist he later became, claiming that he had
discovered the Truth sought by man throughout history. As he
moved in that direction, my parents were caught up by their
early commitment and their sense of indebtedness to him, which
I think blinded them to his growing irrationality.
As I grew up, my mother led efforts to promote Siegel’s
philosophy. She started an art gallery near Greenwich Village
with exhibitions illustrating Siegel’s theory of beauty and public
readings of his work. At one point, she had an exhibition of her
own paintings in the gallery. The New York art critics praised her
paintings, but belittled Siegel they basically said she was better
than Siegel’s philosophy, and that she needed to detach herself
from him in order to get ahead. She realized she had to make a
choice between promoting Siegel and advancing her career as
an artist. She chose to be loyal to Siegel. To me she seemed noble
and courageous. I admired her, almost to the point of worship.
Yet, even though my mother was such an outspoken supporter,
Siegel treated her in ways I could not understand. He would
criticize her scathingly in front of other students. He once
made her read a statement in public about all the ways she had
failed him. He even told her that her efforts in his behalf were
motivated by guilt. When she wanted to start the Aesthetic
Realism Foundation, which she actually did, and which still exits,
he told her it was a substitute for showing her gratitude to him.
What confused me was that she seemed to accept his harshness
as if it were deserved. She seemed to have an underlying
sense that she was inferior. Whenever she spoke about her
childhood, she chose sad incidents that reflected on her family as
suffering. She did grow up during the Depression, and her family
struggled—but they owned their home, her father worked, and
her two younger sisters who faced the same adversity had a
much more positive attitude to life.
To some extent I internalized Siegel’s attitudes and excoriated my
mother for being ungrateful to him. But I also felt, though I could
never say this, that she was horribly mistreated—after all, she
had done more than almost anyone else in his behalf.
At times when Siegel was criticizing me most fiercely, and I
was miserable, I could tell that my mother struggled between
agreeing with him and wanting to protect me. I actually
sometimes had a sense that she was more sympathetic to me
than supportive of him.
During the years just before and after Siegel died, I began to
recognize that people around me, even those I had grown up
alongside, were acting more and more like a cult. There were
meetings about how to protect our school and its beliefs from a
hostile press. People attending public readings of Siegel’s work
were often screened before they could come through the door.
We assumed anyone who criticized Siegel was really driven by
envy of his greatness and wanting to destroy it. Control over our
everyday lives, our work, our families, where we lived, and whom
we talked to was absolute.
I sometimes shared with my mother my feeling that people were
acting irrationally, and she agreed with me. She was a skeptical
…I still find it hard to
accept that she would
renounce the bond we
shared for all those years.
…did she really lose any
sense, however buried, of
the outside world?