K. Gordon Neufeld on Recovery
K.
Gordon Neufeld spent ten years in the Unification Church. After leaving he
wrote several articles about his cult experience, including
Moon Madness Remembered and
It's Not Easy Escaping Moon's Gravity. After leaving, he completed an M.
A. in creative writing. He details the benefits in "
Writing Down the Pain: A Case Study of the Benefits of Writing for Cult
Survivors", (a paid article in the ICSA library). Eventually he wrote a
book putting it all together,
book,
Heartbreak and Rage: Ten Years under Sun Myung Moon, a Cult Survivor's
Memoir. The
introduction to the book has an excellent
explanation of mind control that discards the image of "mindless robots" and
incorporates instead the very helpful concept of "mental roadblocks".
Dave Sable describes one aspect of residual Assembly mental roadblocks in
his article, A Healthy Assembly Afterlife.
Neufeld also wrote an article about
totalism in modern
fiction
in which he compares the varieties of totalitarianism in the
following books: Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), Darkness at Noon (Koestler), One Man's Bible (Xinjiang),
Three Continents (Jhabvala), Oyster (Hospital), Heavenly Deception (Brooks),
and Heart of Darkness (Conrad). He also mentions Cat's Eyes and
The Handmaid's
Tale (Atwood), Invisible Man (Ellison), Imaginary Friends (Lurie), A Darker
Place (Laurie King), Animal Farm (Orwell), Foreigner (Rachlin), and Mind Games (Spinrad).
So there's a nice depressing reading list for you. Our daughter recommended
The Handmaid's Tale to me soon after we left the Assembly. I hated it, at
the time, but she got it, and she was still a teen! I've also read A Darker
Place. Books like this shed light on what was wrong with the Assembly system
itself, as distinct from what was wrong with G & B.
Note from Mr. Neufeld: "Dear Ms. Irons, Thanks for doing this. Your website looks very professional and I am happy to have these pages available for public viewing."