So. Thanfiction.

[necromommycon]

I have that exhausted-before-I-start feeling that I shouldn`t even bother posting this, but I`m going to anyway, because I`ve been commenting publicly (at Turimel`s and Abbey`s posts), and I just want to clarify what I`ve been thinking lately.

Comments

Eh, go ahead & unscreen 'er.

[prettyh]

I don't mean to be harsh, but to me there's not a lot of difference between belonging to a cult, and being a true believer in the whole concept of brainwashing-and-deprogramming. I understand that therapy from someone who was trained in the whole "deprogramming" worldview was probably enormously helpful in exiting, and then recovering from, the sort of fucked-up perpetual-fiction of a relationship with Jordan. But that does not in itself constitute proof that there was a 'cult.'

Calling what happened a cult may be the most useful way to conceptualize it for other people, and is probably also the best way to explain it to herself. That's fine.

But as a distant uninvolved observer, I have to say that it doesn't ring true to me that a seventeen year old was actually consciously masterminding a cult, and deliberately brainwashing his friends. It seems far more likely that a creative mentally ill kid was jerking around his friends both as a means of externalizing his own inner conflicts, and as a doomed attempt to hang on to them.
THIS.