Yeah, it is a rude awakening when you finally realize what they did to you.
My closest buddy got married about ten years ago. So this was 14 years after we had graduated. He told her about the place and she said, "It was a cult." And he tried to defend it but couldn't. And then when he told me, I was like.... well, not a cult! It was strange and all but a cult? And then as we discussed it, how absolutely bizarre it all was and how none of it was based in reality I finally had to accept that I had attended a cult, based on the cults Synanon, EST, LifeSpring, concocted by a furniture salesman to make money.
It also took hearing people tell of their own experiences for me to realize I went through that too. I mainly had focused on the friendship I had made while I was there. We "talked" about our time there often over the last 24 years, but we never really "discussed" what we did until he tried to explain it to his wife. She heard his description and without any reservation, from a completely neutral and rational viewpoint, said CULT. And as we began to really talk about it, and read other peoples statements, it became so crystal clear so quickly. We didn't really need to be convinced, we just needed to hear someone else, someone we could trust, tell us what we had felt deep down for years.
And it is because of feelings of guilt I suppose. Feeling like you were supposed to have been cured, but knowing you weren't, but assuming everyone else was and you were somehow the only one who just didn't get it.
But what truly made it clear for me is the complete inability to be able to describe the place and the things we went through so someone who was not there could actually understand. And because it is so impossible to easily explain something we were so familiar with, in language an ordinary person could grasp, sealed it for me. I knew it was a cult because only a cult would be so odd as to defy normal description. (Not to say a cult is the ONLY thing that is hard to describe.) Just that the experiences we went through were so far from normal, so far out of touch with reality as others understand it, that you are left feeling like you are describing being abducted by aliens. Nobody believes you. The things you are talking about defy both accurate description and therefore accurate understanding. Like trying to tell someone how it feels to be water boarded and they don't think what you are describing could possibly be THAT bad!
The CEDU Documentary did a good job with Raps. They said, "You really have no idea what it is like to have fifteen people get up, move across the room from you, knowing they are all about to scream at the top of their lungs at you." And most people don't have any idea what that is like and would have trouble truly understanding.
And NOT being able to clearly explain CEDU, RMA or any of the other places leaves you feeling awkward and a little helpless. Like you are trying to describe in detail a nightmare you had a couple of nights before where you are saying, "And you were there, but it wasn't really you. I mean it was, but you looked like someone else, but I knew it was you because when you told me to grab the grapefruit... or was it the sewing machine?..well anyway, you were there and we were running for some reason, trying to get to the bus station but I can't remember why, but they needed grapefruits. And I just remember you kept getting your feet stuck in wet cement and you kept sinking deeper and deeper and I kept trying to help you because we were in a hurry, but every time I tried to scream at you to hurry I dropped the grapefruit and it kept rolling across the freeway, which was weird because we were at school and there's no freeway there, and your mom kept driving by us and she wouldn't help..."
That's how I feel when I try and describe RMA and the stuff we did there. Like I am trying to describe a dream I had that is hard to remember and full of such nonsense nobody takes it seriously.
