When my sister reached out to me in an email in late Fall of 2020, my heart quickened in my chest. Once every year or two, she would throw out some little message or feeler. For the last decade, I had rarely responded, and the few times I did, the exchange was brief. It had been more than a year since she’d last sent me a message and several years since I’d last responded. Usually her message would just be a line or two about a memory from our childhood, maybe a song or a saying. Once or twice, she sent pictures of her kids.
By the Fall of 2020, I was lost in a sea of darkness with no way out that I could conceive of. My life was now under the total control of one person. Through the incredible duress that I had experienced over the previous 3 years, my connection to the Divine had deepened dramatically and I was in a continual state of prayer for help. When my sister’s email arrived this time, I knew it was no accident. I was asking for very real help in the days leading up to the arrival of her email and this time her message was direct. The subject line read: “I still care about you.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It was as if the Universe itself were speaking to me. It was a message of love and love was what I was desperate for. I knew by the hope and joy that leapt up in my chest that the Universe was offering me a lifeline.
I missed my sister terribly. I had missed her for years. That was why every time she sent some kind of message, it caused upheaval and drama for me. Over the previous 10 years, since I’d first cut ties with my entire family, I’d never once received a communication from them that I didn’t tell my life coach about. Everything went through him at that point. Usually he would tell me why the message didn’t meet our criteria for a genuine reach out and how sad, desperate, misguided or lost they were. Of course, it was completely up to me what I wanted to do with it, he’d say. But his message was clear and his approval was all that mattered anymore.
By the end of 2020, I’d seen enough of the truth of this man to be deeply disillusioned and to recognize that he was a terrible hypocrite. I no longer saw him as the end all, be all voice of truth. I was too afraid to say or do anything about it as my entire life was fully enmeshed and dependent upon him. But I was awake and desperate enough to make the decision, all on my very own, to write my sister back. It felt rebellious, even dangerous. Definitely surreptitious. I was doing something secretly, without exposing it to “the group,” and entirely on my own. How terribly divergent and egoic of me.
I did write my sister back, and although she was a bit hesitant to correspond at first, we began a gradual exchange. I know now that she was wary to get her hopes up that this newfound communication wouldn’t suddenly disappear again, so she was responsive but guarded. Since I had been trained by my leader to respond to all communications within hours, if not minutes, it was new and unfamiliar to me to have an email exchange that went days between replies. Frustrating as that was at the time, I understand clearly now how utterly devastating the total annihilation of our relationship had been to her when I’d severed ties a decade before. Her hesitance was entirely understandable. Her willingness to keep reaching out throughout that time and to keep her door open to me at all required great emotional courage and loyalty.
I kept our communication mostly secret. I told one person about it – the only person I could completely trust to keep it secret – and my sister and I began to gradually reconnect. I was questioning so much about the state of my life at that point because it had reached a level of constant drudgery, exhaustion and hopelessness in my high control group. I’d been running in survival mode for so long and my candle was burning out. The pain and duress of my life circumstances had far exceeded any benefits and the exposure of my “teacher” as a hypocrite allowed me to question whether my personal and spiritual growth were really at stake if I didn’t follow this man anymore.
When the life coach eventually found out about my interactions with my sister, he was pissed. (Surprise!) He was so pissed he stopped speaking to me, outright ignored me and pretended I didn’t exist for a couple of days. I was severely isolated which was his favorite form of punishment to use on me. He found out because I told him, point blank. It was March of 2021 by this point, several months had passed, and I told him because we were having a conversation about a recent realization he claimed he’d had around the topic of family. Due to what he was sharing, I optimistically thought he would be open to this information. I was mistaken.
He was outraged. He yelled, he interrogated, he accused and then he fell silent. He pretended not to have any issue with me talking to my sister — all his outrage, he said, was that I didn’t come to him about it first. I had acted on my own. I had not told him about it when it happened. Therefore, I had lied to him…therefore, I had betrayed him. This is how it went and this is exactly why I knew, when I decided to write my sister back, that it was not safe to tell anyone. After 13 years, I already knew what his response was to any and every communication I received from her. I was damned if I told him and damned if I didn’t.
I survived the usual mental and emotional torture that he inflicted and he made a big deal to all of his followers and clients then that it was OK for everyone to contact and interact with their family members. In fact, he made a big push that we should reach out and see how we felt about them now. No one knew why he’d suddenly had this change of heart except me and his wife. This new push ultimately ended up serving the same purposes of his early indoctrination: He would use any responses we received, and any interactions we had, as fuel to feed the belief that our families had nothing to offer us and that we, in fact, were the ones who wanted to disconnect from them in the first place. This was done tactfully, manipulatively and coercively, as usual, to reinforce the illusion that our choice to disconnect from the world was truly our own desire and choosing. Well played.
I’d seen too much and knew too much to fall for it this time, though. I did not stop communicating with my sister. I clung to my interactions with her for dear life. I was careful not to share too much about the details of my life or my day to day. I knew it would sound crazy. I knew I couldn’t really explain it to an outsider. And I also knew I couldn’t really hope for any future with her. How would I ever see her again? How could we have any real relationship if I had to keep my true life a secret? Since we lived a solid 5 hours away from one another, email communication afforded the distance necessary to portray my life as normal: Just a woman living and working in every day society.
In September of 2021, my sister and I spoke on the phone for the first time in a decade. I didn’t recognize her voice. She sounded weird to me. It was like talking to a stranger. She didn’t sound anything like I remembered at all. I didn’t even realize I had a memory of how she sounded. I didn’t bring it up, but then she did. She said the same things about me. It was surreal.
By December of 2021, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. My sister called to let me know she might be in my city with our mother the following February. Maybe, if I was open to it, we could possibly meet…? Here was the moment I had been dreading. How could I explain to her that there was no way I would be peacefully “allowed” to see her, and equally no way for me to do it secretly since I was under almost 24/7 surveillance? The only way to explain would be…to tell her the truth.
My heart longed to see my sister, but I couldn’t allow myself to even hope for it. I knew it wasn’t possible. At least, not under my current circumstances. I also longed to explain to her why. It was a relatively warm December morning and I was home alone – a rare circumstance. I took the chance. I went outside to the back patio to speak free from “security” cameras. I paced back and forth on the phone as I began to try to explain, delicately, why I didn’t think I would be able to see her even though I would like to.
My sister was so calm, so open and so judgment-less to everything I told her that I ended up going further and telling her more than I’d ever thought possible. She showed nothing but understanding and empathy. She never said “I knew it” at any point during that time or the months that followed. She never pushed me to do anything at all. She only offered me support. Her manner of responding to this conversation opened up a space of safety that I had never experienced before. She shared her own experience of being in a very similar situation when she was in her mid-twenties. It was an experience I’d known a little about before we’d parted ways a decade before, but I hadn’t known the full extent of it. I came to discover that she had traversed this path herself 15 years prior.
When I got off the phone with her, I was shaking from head to toe. I’d done the unthinkable. I’d spoken. I’d told an outsider what was really going on. Well, at least a little of it. And she’d done nothing but listen and let me know that she would always be there if I ever needed a place to go. A door had cracked opened….there was a dim light at the end of a very long tunnel.
My sister’s call to me, in my heart, was like the call of the wild to an untamed beast. She was in my blood and in my bones. She was the thing I could never really let go of and every time I’d turned my face away from her, my heart mourned. We walked through fire together as children and we were the only thing each other could depend on for all those years. She had not just been my sister, she had been my dear friend. And during all those years when my teacher taught me how family is manipulative and that society’s rules are the only reason we maintain any ties to these people whom we would have nothing to do with if we weren’t bound by blood – in spite of all this indoctrination that family has no inherent meaning or value – my heart yearned for the lost relationship with my sister and friend and it was that call to my heart that ultimately led me home.
It’s true that there were toxic patterns in my family relationships. It’s true that we had a lot to work through if we were ever going to have healthy interactions. I even believe that it was necessary that I step away from those relationships for awhile in order to grow, mature and reset healthy boundaries. But that should have been the goal and the distance should have been temporary. And that’s exactly how it was presented to me in the beginning.
The reality, though, was that it was never time for me to revisit those relationships, according to my teacher. The longer time went on, the more control he had and the less sway those people had over my life. In the end, we never actually dealt with my family of origin issues or any of the toxic patterns from those relationships. It was all just dismissed as “unhealthy” and I was presumed to be better off without them. This gave my group’s leader ultimate authority and final sway over all of us.
Now I understand perfectly why he didn’t want us to be connected to our families. Family is more than a random, arbitrary pairing of people bound by DNA. I believe that there are deep ties to the souls with whom we choose to walk through this life and I believe those ties are determined long before we are born. This doesn’t mean that family is inherently graced with love or meaning. There are many who experience nothing but abuse in their families and for whom the only responsible, loving act for themselves is to step away and stay away. But there is always a lesson in those relationships and those experiences and that’s where my teacher went so horribly wrong. He didn’t want us to look at that part at all. That might require reconnection and the deepening of genuine bonds, and it would definitely require healing, either way.
Thanks to my sister’s patience, her persistence, her empathy and her enduring love, I sit here today a free woman, at last. She always let me know she was still there in some small, unthreatening way. Despite a decade of rejection, she continued to reach out, even long after she’d lost hope of ever being in my life again. When, after a year of tentative communications, I finally confided a little bit in her, her total lack of judgment, condescension or accusation of the people in my life offered me a genuinely safe harbor and the first glimmer of hope I’d ever had in my present situation. She offered only support in any decision I might make which allowed the door between us to stay open, the door that finally showed me a way out.
If you have a loved one caught in a high control group or relationship, I write this piece for you. While so much (deserved) attention goes to the suffering of the victims and survivors of these groups, the pain and suffering that estranged loved ones experience is truly horrible and they are direct victims of these manipulators as well. I hope this story will give you some hope. You must know that, no matter what it looks like from the outside and no matter how much time has passed, when you hold onto the love you have for that person and continue to extend it despite all odds, that love will be felt, even if you never get to see it. That love can save them.
And if you are someone who has found yourself in a similar situation to mine and are starting to question or wake up to it, take hope that there is a life waiting for you outside of that place. Even if you don’t think that you have any family members, friends or loved ones on the “outside” waiting for you, please know that you have an enormous family of brother and sister survivors who are out here just waiting to help you, embrace you and support you in starting a new life while recovering from the past. You will not be alone.
The Journey 
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