Eric Bannon is a recovering victim of Spiritual Abuse

As a survivor of an abusive spiritual cult, I wanted to create a safe space to share my insights, lessons learned, and continuing journey of recovery with a community of others who share similar experiences. My goal is to encourage others, listen to their stories, and shed light on some of the unspoken suffering that happens when we try to leave an abusive cult. Wherever possible, I will try my best to share some of the wisdom that I have learned through my own story. Additionally, this blog site will be an open place for others to comment and share their thoughts on their own recovery journey.

You are welcome here, and you are not alone

My Story

I am 34 years old now, and spent most of my 20s running away from the many demons that haunted me in my head and in my heart. This lead to 5 years of severe addiction to drugs and alcohol and many thoughts of committing suicide. In August of 2019, I got sober from drugs and alcohol after a near death experience where I was highly considering suicide. It was around this time that I found a church is Northern California. I will not mention the church’s name because it does not matter in the scheme of things, nor do I wish any harm to the church congregation, its leaders, or members. I am simply here to share my experience of spiritual abuse and what I later found out to be a spiritual cult with dangerous consequences for those of us who were sucked into the organization and went all-in.

I quickly gravitated to the community as a place that could support me in my sobriety, and within 3 months a leader from the church moved in with me and began discipling me in prayer and reading the word of God. Within 3 months of that time, 4 more guys were invited into our new dubbed, and official, "Discipleship Home" for the church. The leader quickly took over the goals of the group and made it an "elite" place of discipleship for people who wanted to "give their whole life to ministry". He personally groomed me and taught me how to incorporate his ideology into every aspect of my life. Over the 3 years I was involved in the cult, I sacrificed everything to follow him, and became very influential in the church. 

The word of God quickly became a tool to rebuke, correct, and control the men who lived in my home. Everything we did, we did as a group and only with approval of the leader. If we wanted to spend time with certain people in the church, it always had to be approved by him in order to make sure it was in line with what “we were building”. This created an attitude of “us” being better than the ordinary christian who attends church. If those people weren’t as committed to God or didn’t have the potential to be true disciple to the standards we were held, then they were disregarded and not to be associated with.

In Michael Langone’s book “Recovery from Cults”, he mentions an important phenomenon when it comes to group identity and involvement in the cult. This, he calls, is the dispensing of existence:

“When you have lost faith in the outside world, and have lost faith and confidence in yourself, and you come understand that you must be remolded by the processes and teachings of the cult (group), you are faced with a horrifying perspective when encountering the dispensing of existence. Hence, one has already lost the outside world, believing it is evil and also one’s self, believing it too is evil or bourgeois. The prospect of losing one’s affiliation with the group presents the person with a phenomenon of total annihilation of self. And all of this works to increase dependency on the group”

We were tied to the group, the groups identity, and the leaders demands and wishes. After some time, the fear of disappointing, underperforming, or not being obedient to the groups orders, would cause great anxiety in all of us. Unlike some of the others in the house, I was groomed specifically to be the leader’s second in command. This pressured me to mold myself, my behaviors, my understanding of the word of God, and every aspect of my life to his character. Essentially, he was trying to create a second version of himself through me.

I started to realize within about 2 years that it wasn’t just my leader and my home which was being indoctrinated, but the toxic culture of dependence on the group and its vision was rampant in the church as a whole. From being on the side of leadership I can clearly see now the undertone of the sermons which serve to promote, push, and indoctrinate the audience for the purpose of pushing the leadership's agenda and attachment to the group.

Steven Hassan, and expert of cult mind control techniques, describes a second phenomenon in cults that he calls “Sacred Science”. In his book, Combatting Mind Control, he describes Sacred Science a psychological boundary. In other words, truth can only be found within the group. This perpetuates a embedded doubt in the minds of its members whether this feeling can be found outside the group. Another way of framing this is the question: “Is there truth outside the group?” Over time, a psychological wall is built up that produces an internal censoring of outside information.

Steven Hassan calls this “Doctrine over Person”: The group's doctrine takes precedence over the member’s personality, interests, and health, over virtually everything.

I now see this in the church’s agenda and persistent challenging of members to forgo personal goals, sacrifice their time for ministry and church events. Each sermon and message implied that members are not seeing positive changes in their life due to a lack of commitment and faith. This vision that was repeatedly pushed eventually had the intended effect of leading vulnerable members like myself into a place of complete and utter dedication to the sacred science that was being spoon fed to us from the highest levels of leadership. I thought that I was getting closer to God through this process, but I was horribly mistaken, as I would find out later.

In spring of last year, I realized the incongruence of my experience with my true self and my heart. I was ashamed of how I was trained to cut people down with the word, and how self-righteous I had become in my "personal calling". It was around this time that I realized my leader had been taking advantage of me in every aspect: financially, psychologically, mentally, and physically, and how he was manipulating me for his own goals in the church. It was at this point that I completely dissociated and broke from my sense of identity. In a single day, I shut down physically, mentally, and spiritually

This is when I first retreated to my parents house in Colorado in the spring of 2022. For the remainder of that year. I was in and out of therapy/in-patient treatment centers, where my acceptance of my experience and the reality began. After treatment in September, I returned back to the group, and the church (although at this point I had kicked the leader out of my house in July). My dissociation and muted hostility towards the group and even my girlfriend for over-spiritualizing everything was subdued and repressed as I maintained a forced state of denial that it couldn’t be the group and I had to give it one more shot. This culminated into an utter hopelessness that followed me into the new year. I was so angry at what had happened to me, what had been done to me, and I saw no way out. My life was over, I could never recover, I didn’t know who I even was, and the hate in my heart was consuming me 24/7. The complete darkness in my heart with no sign of escape was too much to bear. I cried out to God day after day, thinking he had abandoned me, and all it took was one day where I finally bought into the lies that the enemy has been speaking to my soul.

And so it was on January 18th of this year that I attempted to take my own life. I lit a pile of charcoal coals in a large kitchen pan, swallowed about 30 pills, and then sealed off my bathroom cracks and windows with duck tape. I waited for the carbon monoxide to take its course while I clutched onto a cross necklace in my hand sitting in the bathroom. There were no tears, there was no fear of death, there was just a vast emptiness and complete indifference. I had given up and wanted out.

I woke up in the hospital to my parents, my sister and brother-in-law all around me. I did not know where I was or what had happened, but was later told that I spent 48 hours unconscious in a hyperbaric chamber, which is used to pump pure oxygen in a confined space to counter-act the effects of the carbon monoxide. The doctor’s were not sure at this time whether there would be permanent brain damage or not. When I awoke, I could not move the lower half of my body, which persisted for about 3 days until I could finally stand. Multiple tests from different specialists were run and everything appeared to be normal which can only be attributed to God’s grace.

I immediately checked myself into a 90-day inpatient program in southern California. The same dissociation was with me, the anger and hatred in my heart poured out constantly, and the despair of even just being awake was all that I could bear. It was a daily battle. An hourly fight. And it took blind faith just to hold on. I participated in the group sessions, and personal therapy sessions over the course of the 90 days, but I could still barely function or even hold a conversation. But in the midst of the storm, I never stopped believing that God was with me and was going to deliver me from the despair I had been experiencing.

I was begginning to accept the reality that I was indeed part of a cult, which meant I had to let go of the identity that had been holding me together for 3 years. To admit the truth, meant to admit that I was not who I thought I was.

As Michael Langone puts its in his book, “Recovery from Cults”:

“Even if cultists do understand thought reform, two powerful and fundamental emotions will emerge: joy at being free, and rage at having been violated. It is vital that ex-members' moral outrage not be treated as pathological. They have been wronged. They have been made to feel helpless. Their former sense of right and wrong - one of the most central elements of human identity - has been turned upside down. Rage fortifies the weakened remnant of their moral self against their lingering power of the cultic evil. The joy at being free and the rage that comes with understanding what happened, serves to clean the human spirit. These feelings must run their course.”

I was in the process of letting these feelings finally take their course. Step by step, and with the help of some very good therapists, medication, and support from family, I was crawling out of the pit that I was trapped in. I began exercising, praying and reading with authenticity and letting go of my religiosity; I began to form a relationship with God in the darkness and in the silence that showed me that underneath it all, who He created me to be was still there. And every day I walked closer to my true self, the more freedom I began experiencing. It did not happen over night, but it did happen slowly. And every day God increased my faith and my strength through trusting in Him.

I permanently relocated to Colorado and returned to work full time in June, where I have been doing well and “coming as I am” without the ego or the false self that I wore for so long. I finally started connecting with my boss and my coworkers on a deeper level, and I even received a raise 3 months into my return to work. God has restored my relationship with my parents, my sister, and I am starting to reconnect with old friends who I could not talk to while in the cult. Slowly my life is on track for full recovery and I intend to keep it that way. But I can’t do it by myself. I still am in regular therapy every week. I am still on the right medications that help me. And I still need to put boundaries in place to protect my self and my health. But I am learning with the right tools, and the right faith, that there is an end to the suffering we think will never end. There is hope. There is light. God has never left you and even if you dont realize it at the time, he is with you in the darkest of nights when it seems like you have nothing left. I look back now and I am grateful at what I have been through, because it drew me closer to God, and it helped me find out who I am really created to be. I love who I am. I love the bad, the good, and the ugly. I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

God has given me the charter in Matthew 10:27

What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight. What I whisper in your ear, proclaim from the roofs”

I am standing on this word and taking the leap of faith to begin sharing my story. What I learned in the dark, I need to speak in the daylight for others who may be suffering silently. I will proclaim God’s grace from the rooftops. Even in the darkest place, you are never alone. There IS an end to the suffering if we just hold on one more day. Don’t give up. Share you story here, share you heart, and let’s encourage one another to keep fighting and living the life we were meant to live.

You are not alone

Reach out. No judgement. No condemnation