The Cult in my Grandmother's House - стр. 3

After all, when adults raise children incorrectly, the children cease to love not the adults, but themselves.

I wrote my story especially for my intended husband. And I was preparing myself for him to change his mind about marrying me after reading it. But that did not happen.

Could it be that if a person is able to coherently describe a situation, it means they have coped with it?

A CULT WITHIN A CULT

I used to get annoyed when friends and acquaintances questioned me about my childhood. Every time I started to answer, someone would immediately interrupt me, and from their very first question it was clear they didn’t believe me. Or the question was so painful that I got angry and snapped at them. And sometimes I myself began to doubt whether I was telling the truth: maybe I had embellished it, maybe my memory was distorted over time under the influence of emotion. More than once I tried to check by asking someone else who was in the cult with me as a child. Unfortunately, not only did everyone I ask confirm my memories, but they also added their own.

However, when talking with people who came to the cult as adults, I noticed their impressions differed from the memories of those who had spent their childhood there. Moreover, they can be divided into several types.

Some experienced guilt and did not hide it. It was obvious the memories were very unpleasant for them. In my opinion this is the normal reaction of a normal person.

Others avoided direct answers, answered inappropriately, or turned everything into an angry, sarcastic joke. They didn’t want to remember. My stepfather was one such. In principle, this is also a normal reaction, although it indicates indifference and a lack of empathy.

Still others, instead of actually answering, insulted me. This was the majority.

A fourth group rolled their eyes meaningfully, as if to say I must be narrow-minded and limited not to understand the deeper meaning of everything that happened there. Like I didn’t get it while I was there, and I never got it after that. They didn’t manage to cure me. It was of people like this that the backbone of the cult consisted. Everything rested on them. And it rests on them to this day.

Only now, having left Russia forever, am I beginning to realise that all those sectarian attitudes have spread everywhere, and continue to spread, like mould…

We left the cult, we condemned it in words, but it remained in us and with us; we continued to live according to its principles. We judged things in the same way, we treated ourselves in the same way, we thought in the same categories, we acted with the same attitudes and built our lives in accordance with them. Our fear of the unknown, of what we cannot control – mental disorders, physical illness and death – is primordial and nurtured by a system inherited from the concentration camp conditions of the Soviet Union.