Blinded. Deafened. Dumbed down. And sense-less. With Consequences.

"Don't leave before the miracle happens."

And please don't hit the "back button" until you've finished this. Because it may be a significant fork in the road; IDK4S, OC

I was steeped in the Kool Aid of a Four Square Gospel Pentecostal congregation until I was eleven. My parents suddenly woke up (sort of) and looked for something better, which turned out to be United Methodist. (TG it wasn't Free or old-school Wesleyan.)

But it continued to agitate the infections of SIN, evil, guilt, shame, worry, remorse, regret, endless morbid reflection and resulting stupidification in the besotted brain of a kid with a fast-processing, but badly programmed, 145 IQ. I spent decades in a F.O.G. of "fear, obligation & guilt."

I bolted when I was old enough to wear a uniform, and they were taking pretty much anyone who could breathe. Overseas in the wild and woolly tropics, I found (what I thought was) The Way Out, and dove in to a life of booze, nature's harvest & hot wimmin. My new addictions seemed at least to fix me, even if all they were really doing was masking off all my mental conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization to lingering, UNconscious deistic omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence.

So, by the time I believed myself to be "ten years clean & sober" in AA & NA, I was still chasing shiny things in a 300-horsepower car with six-sided wheels and lousy brakes. That car, of course, was bound to hit the crash wall sooner or later. And it did.

With devistating effect. Eleven psych hospitalizations, two suicide attempts, a total of 30 months in wretched Complex PTSD-induced panic; and the remainder of those nine years in manic run-baby-run-baby-run-baby-run-baby-run, three arrests for assault & battery, 28 days in the clink, a blown marriage & career, and $440,000.00 down the drain.

Once the Hindu (yup, Hindu) Goddess in the white coat got me on the right medication (after being on 14 wrong ones during those nine years), I figured I'd better get busy and find out how to stay out of it.

But it was only in the last few years that I began to realize how, where & why it all began, took the test, asked myself "Do I need Exit Counseling or Deprogramming?,"...

And moved on into A Suggested Program of Recovery for a Survivor of Religious Cult Abuse.

So. If the proverbial caca hits the fan anywhere near as hard for you as it did for me, you now know There really IS a Way Out.

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Addendum of 04-07-2020:

The vast majority of evangelical, fundamentalist and/or charismatic WASPs in California's SJ Valley are direct descendants of evangelical, fundamentalist and/or charismatic WASPs from the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio River valleys. And those people were the direct descendants of Puritan Calvinist and ultra-fundamentalist Lutheran -- as well as (very) Low Church Wesleyan Free Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as Southern Baptists -- from the post-Civil War / Reconstruction era "Old South."

Over the course of about 15 generations, many of them have been as deeply conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated and normalized to being blinded, deafened, dumbed down and sense-less (with consequences) as I was.

One can read about all that in any of a good seven or eight books in Recommended on Religion from Outside the Box.