How Being in a Cult Prepared Her for COVID
(And if you think COVID isn’t a cult, no offense but* you haven’t been paying attention.)
*from an earlier substack I couldn’t help referencing:
But back to cults.
Jenny Glick is a coach, therapist, and now—I’m honored and delighted to say—friend. I didn’t know Jenny until she submitted this essay to Yankee Doodle Soup and I love it more than bedazzled fuchsia pumps that are also remarkably comfortable yes I own a pair of these and if you stick around to the end I’ll prove it. In the meantime, enjoy Jenny’s marvelous essay.
How Being in a Cult Prepared Me for COVID
By Jenny Glick for Yankee Doodle Soup.
Many years ago, I joined a cult. An actual cult-cult.
But like most people who join cults, I didn’t know it was a cult until I was thoroughly indoctrinated. Cults are tricky that way!
I was deep in CultLandia as an ordained minister when I finally allowed myself to see what would have been obvious to someone with two eyes-wide-open to the shenanigans that I was embroiled in.
It started with a conversation with my beloved husband one evening before bed.
Me: “Hey babe, I just Googled, ‘How do I know if I am in a cult?’”
Babe: “Hon, you know that you are in a cult if you need to Google, ‘How do I know if I am in a cult.’”
Right.
But BEFORE I caught the whiff of CultDom that was literally oozing through my entirely black wardrobe that was the cult uniform, I believed that I was an esteemed member of a jolly gaggle of spiritually-awake, well-educated humans doing the right thing for humanity and the world.
Our CultTropolis membership included:
● doctors—who are known for their exceptional ability to discern truth from fiction!
● engineers—they are logical fellows, to be sure!
● psychologists—I mean, these people sniff out narcissism and personality disorders for a living. There’s NO WAY they would be a part of a cult.
● entrepreneurs, teachers, bankers, attorneys, and people who listened to NPR and read the New York Times!
Because SMART PEOPLE could never be duped. Right?!
We made meals together, read spiritual texts, coordinated public park clean-ups, and committed to regular personal reflection. We were open to and affirming of all backgrounds, races, and orientations and always considered other people during our efforts to spread kindness, love, and goodwill in the world. Our ethos was to take care of others before ourselves. Altruism and selflessness were of primary import, which further blurred the lines of CultTown for me.
As I moved from community member to student to initiate, I began to unconsciously conform to the group’s principles in order to belong to the collective.
Cultish rules are rarely spoken aloud or written down. They are conferred to the group members through unspoken agreements and languaging energetically, which makes them opaque and difficult to identify.
Here are seven ways to know if you have stumbled into CultVille:
● You cannot question authority under any circumstance.
● Questioners will be shamed.
● Shamed questioners will be guided to polish up on studying the TRUTH in order to release them from shame’s grip.
● Your independent thought and individuality will be seen as a lack of commitment to the whole and a danger to the collective.
● Those who choose to leave CultTopia will be exiled, delegitimized, and banned from the community.
● Skepticism of cult teachings will not be tolerated and will be seen as a failure on the member’s part to not fully grasp the lessons or perspectives of the group. The remedy is for the cult member to come back into the fold by committing more fully to their own indoctrination.
● There is a paranoia or quiet obsession about the outside world that the cult is working to prepare for (i.e., the End of Times) that keeps group members in a mildly anxious state and also promotes affiliation with the cult because… um, I don’t want the End of Times to come and not be prepared like the rest of you!
The difficult thing about CultBurg is that eighty-five percent of what many cults teach or promote is often good! My cult was all about love, personal development, getting closer to God, helping others, and living a clean life of service. It was also about authoritarianism, groupthink, lack of personal differentiation, and righteousness… but those parts were tucked deep underneath those “helping others and living a life of service” parts.
In March of 2020, when I first spoke with a friend who parroted back to me programmed phrases that created an “us” versus “them” paradigm, an authoritarian single-solution answer, and an unequivocal banishment of anyone who did not follow that single solution, I was wise to what was up.
I also knew that my friend was not stupid, bad, or wrong.
I knew that she was like me all of those years ago. She believed what she was being told. She thought she was doing the right thing for the collective. She had her own human feelings of fear, anxiety, and overwhelm and was doing her best to get through those intense feelings in the way so many of us have been taught: by giving her power and authority to someone who she thought knew better than her.
The only difference between a cult and a culture is its size.
We are all part of cults (definition: a group of people with intense devotion to a subject, principle, or practice). But the difference between a good cult (like yoga) and a bad cult (like the Manson Family) is how we foster a sense of belonging through supporting individual thought, respectful discourse, and the amicable honoring of difference.
Our invitation in these times is to create collectives that are mature enough to hold the differences of their members. When we nourish a diverse environment, it fosters creativity, belonging, and connection, which promotes health, well-being, and visionary-level solutions to seemingly impossible problems.
Wanna be an annihilator of bad cults? Start today by checking out when and where you can be the authoritarian in a relationship, your marriage, or your business. Do you delegitimize those who disagree with you or promote fear or anxiety to those who do not adhere to your perspectives? Have you shamed a questioner lately?
The tricky thing about cults is that when you leave one, you are liable to create another that is against the very one that you just left. So, look sharp, cowboy. Commit to personal self-reflection, mature yourself up enough to not be taken down by human difference, and surround yourself with people willing to stand up to your tomfoolery. You might just be one edict away from your own Heaven's Gate if you aren't careful.
Jenny Glick, MA, MSC, LMFT, CST, is a former traditional marriage and sex therapist gone rogue. After seeing the many ways that conventional couples counseling did not serve her clientele, she created her own method for dissatisfied married women: radical responsibility. Jenny's counter-culture approach guides women to shed the victim narrative that strangles many marriages but doesn't replace it with any psyop-y-feminism either. Rather, the Grown-Ass Woman Approach is one of maturity, steady wisdom, boundaries, and honoring safety and pleasure in a woman's life. From this grounded place, a woman can organically shift the marital experience entirely, or it will naturally come to its completion without all of the scripted dialogues or forcing your man to go to therapy when he'd rather have a colonoscopy. A wife of twenty-five years, mother, entrepreneur, and questioner-of-everything, Jenny lives in Southern Arizona with her hubs, their dog Jane, and a whole lot of wide-open space. You can find her at @jenny_glick on Instagram and at JennyGlick.com.
Another new friend, Bill Lamb, wrote this blushworthy review of Yankee Doodle Soup for the The Times Examiner. If you’re so moved, YDS is available in eBook and paperback formats and makes a great gift *wink wink*.
Jenny’s fantabulous essay immediately made me think of the Cult of the Controlled Oppositionists. What did it stir up for you? LMK in the comments!
Loved everything about this post and the photo (lol on the "careful snakes and poison ivy"). You know you're an adult when you can see the cults you've been a member of. Mine were the Democratic party and, oddly enough, a local garden club! No deviation from the groupthink. (Gosh, most HOAs fit in that category as well...) Thank you so much for this!
Good article. Makes a person think. And when this person thinks about it, based on the definition, of cult, it's obvious that we're living in a gigantic one in the U.S. We're in the US cult, masquerading as good, eliciting evil wherever we go.