What Growing up in Sex Cult taught me

Part 1 - Chosen vs. Blood Family

I began this series on my Instagram using reels, but the problem with reels and IG is that you are limited by what you can say. And there is so much more to say with each of these posts. So I am now migrating my series to Substack, where I go a bit deeper without the cutting of sentences and worrying about word count.

Your chosen family teaches you about love and care. Your blood family teaches you patience and forgiveness.

With yet another interview out about me, I was asked an interesting question. The podcast host asked me what I would say to my parents if I saw them.

I’ve seen my parents over the years, and I’ve had many interesting talks with them, often futile. I’ve often been asked about the relationship with my parents, but to be honest, I never had a relationship with them. They did not raise me, and they were strangers to me as a child. They were also terrible parents and highly abusive. But they taught me valuable lessons about myself and the type of person I want to be. 

My parents are my greatest teachers. They taught me strength, adversity, empathy, compassion, vulnerability, authenticity, truthfulness, resilience, independence, and so much more. But most of all they taught me forgiveness and patience. Forgiveness to be able to set myself free from the terrible abuses of my childhood that they inflicted on me. Patience to allow them to show up as the people they are and understand that they will not change unless they want to.

This is what my blood family taught me.

My chosen family, however, taught me respect, camaraderie, community, confidence, sisterhood, support, overcoming, joy, friendship, trust, loyalty, communication, love, and care. They taught me what it means to have a true bond as either a friend, a partner, or mentor. From them I learned what healthy, loving, caring relationships look like in the way they show up in the world for their own family, their friends, and me. 

Without true love, without knowing someone cares, what do we have? All we want is to be seen, heard, love, accepted, and respected. Without that we have nothing.

So I want to thank both my blood family and my chosen family for teaching me about life, about what it means to be human and providing me with so many valuable experiences and opportunities to learn and grow in this lifetime. It’s both my blood family and my chosen family that I am a better person today than I was just a year ago. 

At times I’m thankful for the pain and suffering I’ve felt through life because each time I refuse to let it bring me down, even though many times I wasn’t sure if I’d pull through. Other times I fucking hate the pain because what’s the point?

But hating something that happened to you which you had no control over is no way to live. I can either allow the pain to help me grow and evolve, or I can wallow in it, reminisce, and sit around waiting for someone to save me.

I tried that and it really didn’t work. So now I’m doing it another way. I welcome it. Any pain, not just from my childhood. Any suffering that is coming my way, I run into it, not away from it. I’m choosing to feel, and feel it all, regardless of the pain.

There was an interesting question I heard on The Diary of a CEO. And that was, “If you had the ability to remove pain from life forever, would you?” It took me awhile to ponder this question as with pain comes so much other stuff. Sickness, heartbreak, disease, mental issues, and more. So could I remove those as well?

I came to the conclusion similar to the podcast guest. Which was that without pain, I don’t think we’d truly appreciate joy. It would just be. We would probably go through life a bit numb, because when everything is pain free, you have nothing to compare it to. What does joy mean when you don’t know pain?

You must be alive to feel pain, and to feel joy. That’s the balance of life. Ying and yang. You cannot have one without the other. If I didn’t feel pain or suffering, I wouldn’t be alive. And I truly feel alive.

So thank you to my parents and the Children of God Cult for teaching me about pain, teaching me about kindness, teaching me about healing. While I may not have wanted those lessons, I feel blessed that I was able to turn them into something valuable and beautiful.

For that I am grateful.