I don’t know if I dare see you again, which is odd considering how drawn I was to you. Yet I think of you often and wonder how you are in your new life. I was only a teenager when I started going out with your son. I didn’t understand your initial cautions about how difficult it would be for us because I wasn’t part of your religion.

In fact, my relationship with him was against the rules of the cult, but you were open-minded (and, as I quickly understood, struggling to commit yourself) and our teenage love was so strong. I didn’t care about religion. To me, you didn’t seem religious and strict; you seemed energetic and fun and keen to break rules. Time spent with your family felt exciting – we swam in the sea at night in winter and drove fast to our many holiday destinations.

I had no idea where my involvement with you would take me and I don’t now know how much you were to blame. I admired you and followed your recommendations, dutifully going to a Bible study class that I had never chosen to start. You said it was to help me better understand my boyfriend, but surrounding me with your family friends and discouraging me from seeing my own took me away from my world and sucked me into the one that even you struggled to confine yourself to.

I think you loved me for contradictory reasons. I was outside what your religion bound you to and I dared to question what was gradually imposed on me. At the same time, my struggle to “come into the Truth” paradoxically gave you faith to stay there yourself, which is what you felt you had to do. We were trapped together, but, instead of courageously acknowledging that and extracting ourselves, we allowed the endless, twisted religious logic to wrap more tightly around us.

My parents hated you for taking me away. They knew what was happening, but could no longer reach me

I lost a lot at a key age: friends, concentration and conviction, the confidence my high-achieving, tolerant upbringing had given me. Some of my family relationships changed for good, as I was branded untrustworthy. That shouldn’t have happened; I was young and impressionable. My parents’ long and stable marriage almost broke down and they hated you for taking me away from everything they had provided for me. They cried when I was baptised into something in which I had no belief. They knew what was happening, but could no longer reach me. I think you knew too, but allowed it to go ahead. I don’t understand why you didn’t find the courage to take me aside and force me to be honest with myself, to resist what you had had the misfortune to be born into.

Thankfully, neither of us is there now. Once alone abroad, separated from your confused son, I had the strength to get away and worked hard to find myself again, albeit an isolated, changed and muddled version. You wrote, expecting me to come back and stop being stubborn. I succeeded in blocking contact with your family and found a way back into my own world, leaving my time with you as a parallel universe that had swallowed up my teens. I had psychotherapy, but the subtle effects of those years will linger inside me for ever.

I only found out a decade later that you had got out of the cult. You finally admitted that you didn’t believe the things you had let be imposed on me for many years. I resent that you didn’t somehow let me know of your escape, considering the effort you put into drawing me in. Telling me would have been a way of acknowledging the errors you made, which would help me to look back more kindly.

I have always felt sad that you were constrained and manipulated, missing the life you could have had. Despite my anger, I am happy for you and proud that you, too, saved yourself. I don’t know if I can forgive you, but I hope that, for the first time in your life, you enjoy the freedom you always craved.

Anonymous

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