In Carolyn Jessop’s book, “Triumph, she writes about Mind Control.
“I started studying mind control after I escaped. I truly had had no idea that I’d been in a dangerous cult. I’d seen the FLDS referred to online as “the largest polygamous cult” in the United States and dismissed that as ridiculous. But as I read and studied more, I realized that’s exactly what I was born into.
One of the books I encountered early on was Robert Lay Lifton’s “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalitarianism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. It was a revelation. Lifton articulated the most common criteria of mind control. When I considered them in the context of the FLDS, I knew all of them applied. Just as in a totalitarian system, the FLDS took steps to control our environment, demand purity, claim scientific and moral truth for the cult dogma, destroy personal boundaries, require confession, and insist on the supremacy of the group belief over individual thought. Language was manipulated to keep everything in black and white. We were to follow the teachings of our leader and no one else- least of all women, whose submission was essential for polygamy to thrive.
Arbitrary limits are the horizons beyond which we cannot see. Sometimes they are self-imposed, but in my life the FLDS controlled everything. For years, I accepted the limits and assumptions without question.
Keep Sweet! It is a matter of life and death. You have had the teaching regarding what is required in order for us to survive the judgments, sufficient of the Holy Spirit of God that we can be lifted up and then set down when it is over. That will be the remnant which will go to redeem Zion. The wicked will be swept off the face of this land. The wicked are they who come not unto Christ. There is only one people who comes unto Christ, and that is this people under His servant. FLDS Profet Rulon Jeffs, Sandy Utah, December 4 1992
This religious doctrine created and enforced the arbitrary limits that defined who I was. With no genuine and sustained exposure to the outside world, I had no way to challenge my indoctrinations, which is how mind control thrives. I believed I was being protected from the destruction of God and a dangerous, frightening world. It never occurred to me that this ‘protection’ was in fact destroying me.”
Further on she writes,
“In the ‘keep sweet no matter what’ world of the FLDS forgiveness meant that you accepted what had been done to you, you weren’t angry, and you trusted the perpetrator not to do it again. I’d no idea there was another way to forgive. But now I am learning it: by letting go of anger, never trusting my abusers again, and by seeing them for who they truly were, I achieved genuine forgiveness.
In the FLDS, if someone harmed you and you refused to have anything further to do with that person, you were the one committing a crime by holding on to bad feelings. If you ever complained again, you were the offender. This twisted logic created a kingdom of sociopaths, because no one was ever held responsible for harm except the victims. The FLDS notion of forgiveness had been used in such hurtful and damaging ways that it became a way for an abuser to maximize the damage he or she could inflict without any consequences. It certainly guaranteed that the victim would remain powerless. To forgive in the FLDS seemed to be masochistic. Now I was wrapping my mind around a new reality: forgiveness had nothing to do with trusting a person who’d injured you. It involved letting go of the anger you felt and making space for new emotional growth…. I wanted vengeance and vindication, which are driven by a craving for justice. But that craving had trapped me in an out of control cycle: I wouldn’t let go of my victim status until justice was done.
I wanted Merrill to stop rationalizing cruelty as ‘necessary.’ I wanted him and the other wives, especially Barbara, to understand that there was absolutely not justification to their treating me, or anyone else, the way they did. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Merrill Jessop would ever apologize to me. But I wanted some acknowledgement that what had happened to me was not my fault. That fact that this was never, ever going to happen didn’t make me stop wanting it. The truth, my insistence of justice in an unjust world was really holding me hostage. Forgive? Me? I thought forgiveness might make me more vulnerable to my abusers because it might make me appear pliant.
I was beginning to grasp that forgiveness is about breaking the chains that bind you to your captor. Being in a relationship with someone that is dangerous is self-destructive. Holding on to your anger at someone is self-destructive. The only way to break free is to sever all the emotions you have toward that person. For so long I had thought that unless justice was done, I could never heal. But sometimes justice is impossible, so the choice becomes to remain unhealed or to let go of the anger that the lack of justice has aroused. It came back to exercising the power I had: I couldn’t control whether justice would be done, but I could control my attitude toward the injustice.
It’s been said that desiring revenge is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone to die. I believe that. It took discipline and work for me to release all the anger I felt toward Merrill. But nothing I’d ever felt compared to the relief of dumping one bad emotion after another. Go. Goodbye. Gone. I had no more expectations. I no longer had to fix anything….
Let me be clear about the kind of forgiveness I’m talking about. Sometimes one forgives in order to remain in a relationship with someone she cares about, even if the person has caused her pain and anguish. It’s not a blanket pardon; it’s the trade-off one is willing to make when preserving the relationship is more important than correcting justice. Allowing people to be human and make mistakes, even thought those mistakes hurt you, is important. You don’t want to eliminate that person from your life simply for hurting or disappointing you. This kind of forgiveness is far more common than the kind I used to change my life.
Forgiveness I practiced enabled me to move ahead and start making my life more about me. It renewed and deepened the strength I needed to deal with the challenges facing me. Most dramatically it changed my need to remain in Merrill’s family. From that point on, I was no longer emotionally or psychologically engaged with them. Justice was up to a higher power; my job was to discover a way to protect myself and my children. This meant, of course, that I’d eventually have to leave the FLDS."
Carolyn Jessop
I M Perfect lady 