Andie Redwine: We Are All Spiritual Abuse Surviviors

Andie Redwine has written a great piece about being spirituality abused and what it does to people.  Just reading the comments here lately you quickly see what that abuse has done to so many.  To see that abuse perpetuated in Flurryism, Packism, Meredithism, and all the other COGism's out there is appalling.  How many more need to die because of Armstrongism?

Andie is the former COG member who made the film Paradise Recovered about life in a cult which, was loosely based upon Armstrongism.


Andie writes:

Life can really be hard at times for human beings.

We all experience vulnerability in difficult emotional times.  Most people find some sort of support to see them through.

Sometimes that support is healthy, and people learn to grieve, learn, and grow.

But sometimes when people are vulnerable and need answers, someone pretends to give support by exploiting the needs of hurting people, using their ‘answers’ as a recruitment tool to get people to do their bidding in the name of God.

This is what happened to us.

We aren’t crazy, naïve, foolish, stupid, or lazy.  We are human, like you.  We have needs, like you.  And, unfortunately for us, someone took advantage of our human needs for their personal gain.

We thought we were specially called by God.  We learned later that we were just a means to an end, with the end being the elevation of our leader.

Or we were rigidly raised to believe that everything on the outside of our group was bad.  That only our group alone understood God, salvation, and the keys to living rightly.

We were taught or reconditioned to fear everything that contradicted our leaders’ edicts.  We believed dissent to be wicked, evil, and Satanic.

Read her article here:   We Are Spiritual Abuse Survivors