The Cult of Family

There are three well-known cults that have the word family in their names: The Family of Charles Manson, The Family International also known as Children of God, and the Australian cult simply called The Family. But this video is not about these cults, it’s about your own family. By the end of this episode, you may start wondering: Is my own family also a cult?

Now the idea might seem far-fetched at first, but it’s no coincidence that all cults – explicitly or implicitly – want to resemble a family. In some cases they want to become your second family, while in others they want you to cut all former ties to become your only family. So, it’s worth to give a second look to the very thing they want to replace: your old, average, normal family.

But a family is never average, there’s always something peculiar about it. Maybe it’s the language you use, the way you relate to each other, or the small rituals you practice regularly. The very reason you see one thing normal and another strange, is because you were brought up in that specific family of yours.

If your dad regularly cheated on your mom, then you’ll consider it being part of life, and you’ll probably also do the same. If your family was so poor that as a kid they sent you begging on the streets, then it will also be extremely hard as an adult to consider better carreer options. If you were raised up in a cult where incest was part of everyday life, you won’t find anything bad about it later either.

If your family is like a cult, then your parents are its leaders: the original mother and father figures. And when you start your own family, you also start your own cult, which can be uncannily similar to or entirely different from the original. Now, let me go through all the features of the family cult one-by-one in detail.

For the young mother and father, a new child is like a new recruit. And what do you do to a member who just joined your group? You shower him or her with love, affection and appreciation. In the language of cults, this is called love-bombing, and it’s exactly what a typical newborn baby receives in the first few years of its life.

Two other common cult tactics are isolation and information control. An infant is of course totally isolated from the rest of the world first in his cradle, and later in his bed equipped with bars like a prison. If as a teenager he doesn’t behave as the parents wish, he gets grounded, or ordered to stand in the corner, away from his friends.

During your transformative years, the only source of information is your parents, your whole world is defined by what your care-givers say, show and share with you. Just like in a dictatorship, your parents censor what you can read, listen and watch, in the name of proper education, because apparently they know what’s best for you.

Especially in the first few years, they have total authority over your life. They are always right, and they can’t be argued with, criticized or blamed. If you rebel against them, you must be put to your place, because you’ll always be just an ignorant child in their eyes. It’s not surprising then, that the average cult leader thinks of his followers as lost children who need his wise guidance.

Just like in a typical cult scenario, the abundant river of unconditional love dries up after a while, and the so-called proper education of the child takes its place. And the most potent weapon a family or a cult has is exactly the withholding of love that the subject got so addicted to. This is how the honeymoon phase ends, and the recruit, or in our case the child, has to face the cruel reality: he either obeys or dies.

Every parent uses a very simple and crude carrots and sticks strategy. If you do as I say, you’ll be rewarded, but if not, you will be punished, and it will hurt. I find this an especially disgusting form of emotional manipulation, which creates fear, shame and guilt in the child, and leads to inauthenticity in almost each and every case.

Your parents literally condition you to be fake, and that’s the biggest reason you can’t find yourself ever after. Just like in a cult, they threaten you if you dare to leave, at times they make you feel bad for bringing shame to your family, and they guilt you for being disobedient. Like I explained in a previous episode, you are made to believe that the family is sacred, and that disowning, denying or leaving it is the greatest sin there is.

For many people, childhood is just as traumatic as living in a cult. Literally everybody is abused mentally, most are emotionally, and some are even physically. As I mentioned elsewhere, unless both of your parents were enlightened, you need therapy to deal with your childhood wounds. Just like a deprogrammer would rid you of the cult mentality, a therapist’s job is basically to raise you out of the parental patterns.

Speaking of parental pattern, if you want to recognize yours, you should listen to my guided meditation with the same name. If you’re successful, your whole life will suddenly make sense, it will be like an awakening from the dysfunctional and often self-destructive modes of thinking you subconsciously inherited from your family.

A child of course learns best by imitation, by noticing the subtle clues hidden behind the words. Most of the time, you learn what your parents show you instead of what they tell you. But this doesn’t stop them to try to educate you, which in cult language is equal to indoctrination, programming, brainwashing and mind-control.

They attempt to ingrain the various moral, cultural and social values and norms deep into your mind. They give you a ready-made belief system, and tell you how you should think and what you should value in life. They suppose they are right about these things, or at least they educate you according to their best knowledge.

Only when you grow up do you realize that your parents weren’t always right. But many times, it is often too late, or what’s worse, you may not realize this at all. Right now, you may live your life based on an unrealistic, distorted, one-sided and unhealthy view of the world, and you wonder why things don’t go as they should.

Cults face the enormous task of replacing your old beliefs with their new beliefs, but your parents had a much easier task. As a baby, your mind was a blank slate, ready to be imprinted with any garbage, thirsty for knowledge. You still had a childish naivity, a natural curiosity towards the world, and a lack of critical thinking. You were still innocent, vulnerable and open.

Research has shown that people are the most likely to join a cult during some kind of transitional phase in their lives: after moving to a new city, starting university, a breakup, a death or other trauma. And what could be a bigger transition than being born and learning to live in a totally unknown world in the first few years?

The human baby is totally dependent on its caregivers during this time. Not only physically, but emotionally and mentally, as well. It literally craves the proximity of attachment figures, because its survival depends on it. Besides, the child has a natural inclination to worship its parents; the boy his father, while the girl her mother.

Another common tactic among cults is to break down the old identity of its members and give them a new one instead. Again, the cult of family is at an advantage. The new family members don’t even have an identity to begin with. Your parents define your genes, your name and your nationality. While raising you up, they also affect who you become and what you think about yourself.

I’m not saying that every family is equal to a cult, but all of them resemble cults to some degree. In general, the more narcissistic the parents, the more a family turns out to be cult-like. We all know how destructive the cult of personality can become. But what can prove to be even more harmful, covert and evil is the cult of family.

In this free report, I’ll reveal my number one secret to spiritual enlightenment that almost nobody else speaks about. Download it now below, to find out what it is! I can guarantee you, you’ll be surprised!

Memento Mori!