TRANSCRIPT
Over the years, I have been accused many times of having a point of view that is cultish. Interestingly, I see the reality as being exactly the opposite. My website is attacking the basic prototype of the cult, which is the family system. And not just the family system in general, but the unhealthy sides of the family system. The ultra-powerful parents who are controlling their children, and they’re turning their children into cult followers. And the parents, of course, are the cult leaders.
What I find interesting also is that when I’ve studied cults and talked with people who have actually been a part of legitimate cults, that the leaders of cults and the organizations of cults are actually very similar to families. But the cult leaders are actually much more intelligent and sophisticated than the average parent because it’s actually much more difficult to take adults and make them into cult followers. An average parent can pretty easily make his child into a cult follower because children are so inherently powerless.
Now, of course, people can argue, “Oh, children have a lot of power.” I hear parents say that children can control the lives of their parents so easily. They can cry, they can drive their parents crazy, they can insist on being fed, they need so much attention. “You don’t know what it’s like, you’re not a parent. You don’t know how incredibly controlling a child can be.” And I would say that those generally tend to be parents who resent having had children. And it’s sad that people who would choose to actually create a brand new existence would resent that child’s existence.
And often, it’s the case that they do resent their child’s existence because deep down they had all sorts of fantasies about why they wanted this child. They wanted this child to be there for them. They wanted this child to love them as a parent. And what they discovered instead is that this child was just a bundle of needs and really didn’t have any realistic ability to give love. Yeah, they could write Mother’s Day cards: “I love you, Mommy. You’re so wonderful. Happy Mother’s Day, Dad. You’re the greatest in the whole wide world.” And children are trained to do that all the time and trained to make their parents feel good. But of course, it’s not a child’s job to make their parent feel good at all. It’s not a child’s job to take care of his or her parent in any way whatsoever.
The real reason to have a child is to bring someone into the world and nurture them completely toward independence and let them go. Not create a pet who’s going to be there to help you and be useful to you and serve your purposes and never really break away from you. And yet, lots of parents do that. On the other hand, lots of parents have several kids and they deem one child the one who’s going to take care of them and be there with them for the rest of their life. And often they find special ways of crippling that child so that child never does break away, never does grow up, never does find his or her independence.
And one of the easiest ways is to make that child mentally ill. And there’s all sorts of ways parents unconsciously do that. And that child never does grow up, never does become his or her own independent person. And to stay with the theme of cults, that parent who cripples their child that much creates a child who is a long-term cult follower. Of course, there are people who will argue parents can’t make their children mentally ill. And I would say they’re just incredibly in denial because that has not been my experience or observation at all. Parents actually have the most profound effect on their children in terms of creating mental illness.
But the second thing is parent advocates and parents argue, “How can you say that a parent wants their child to be mentally ill? This parent’s life has been ruined by their mentally ill child. They spend all their energy trying to take care of this child, and they’re a beleaguered parent. It’s torture for them to have this mentally ill child. They’ve even been hit by this mentally ill child and attacked, and it costs so much money.” And I would say, well, all that is true in a sense, but at the same time, so often I’ve seen that those parents get a huge secondary gain out of being beleaguered and putting so much effort into taking care of their children. And they get a feeling of saintliness. “Oh, if it weren’t for me, my child would just die or would just have nowhere to go.” And often that’s true, which is a really sad commentary on the state of our modern world and the state of our modern world’s mental health system.
Often, the very people who are accusing me of being a cult leader, if you look just at the surface of their lives, let alone at the deeper dynamics, it’s the most cultish people. And that’s not an uncommon defense in families. It’s, I mean, psychologically, it’s just projection. It’s basic projection, taking the sides of themselves that they can’t see and can’t identify and can’t acknowledge and own and take responsibility for, and projecting it onto someone else.
What I found about projection that’s fascinating is when people are healthier, on the healthier end of those who do a lot of projection, their projections tend to overlap more with reality. They find people that are very similar, that have certain qualities that are similar to the things they’re projecting. And so their projections actually make a fair amount of sense. They sound realistic, even though they are incorrect and they are projections. And when you get people that are really actually quite mentally sick, very psychotic even, their projections have very little overlap with reality.
So where my website can seem cultish is that, like a cult, I have a very strong point of view. I speak very confidently about my point of view. I don’t preface everything with, “Well, I think it might be true that parents are troubled. I think it might be true that parents cause mental illness in their children. I think it might be true that psychiatric medications are dangerous for you. Maybe parents shouldn’t have children.” I speak more like the cult leaders do in the way that I say, “This is wrong. This is bad. People shouldn’t have children if they’re not fully healed. That it’s inappropriate. They’re going to damage their children. This is just a basic setup for child abuse.” If a person has traumas and they have children, they are going to also traumatize their children.
Also, I define myself very strongly against the norm. And a lot of cults do that. They say the norm is very sick and I’m very healthy. So if you listen to a lot of cults, the strong fundamentalist Christian cults and some of the other ones, they really do a big us and them thing. And in that way, my website also does that too. I have a strong us and them mentality that I see them. The norm, conventional society, is extremely disturbed, and I see my point of view, the idealistic side of my point of view, is very, very healthy and a possibility to change the whole world in a positive way.