Dreaming in the language of cults

when coercion is my mother tongue

I’ve been told that dreaming in another language signals fluency, but my dreams still speak the language of the cult. It’s been over 20 years since I left that tiny community in New York—20 years of determined labor to carve new neural pathways in my brain, 20 years of physical distance from the landscapes of my childhood—but I cannot forget that coercion is my mother tongue.

Communities create shared vocabularies. Families have running jokes that morph into short-hand and curious phrases so far removed from their origins that they become lost. Professions use jargon and abbreviations that mean something completely different outside that context. (When I search for SAA using an unfamiliar computer, the search engine delivers South African Airways and Sex Addicts Anonymous instead of the Society of American Archivists.)

For many people, family is an innocent word. In my mother tongue, family is God’s weapon for victory. Selfish is another word that drags complicated baggage into the room.

Selfish
means many things in my family.

Selfish
is being shy.

It’s refusing to have kids.

Selfish
is wanting your own room
or personal space
or any space at all, really.

Selfish is wanting attention
and not wanting attention.

Selfish is many things.

It turns out
that selfish is a word
that means
“Whatever behavior mom doesn’t like.”

Strange
how that’s not selfish.

As a homeschooler, I fulfilled my foreign language requirement with Koine Greek. Dead languages don’t require halting conversations, but I faced my own version of language immersion when I entered college.

Comparing my past and my present doesn’t just feel like crossing into a foreign country; it’s an alternate universe where abuse is love, wrong is right, and up is down.

Our country is immersed in the language of an alternate universe right now. It’s a universe where diversity, equity, and inclusion are “discriminatory” and where we’re enjoined to fight cancer with “clean eating.” Language immersion is disorienting, but the native speakers are here to help.

Survivors like Tia Levings break down fundie baby voice and explain the evangelical fundamentalist obsession with genitals. Elena Cecilia Trueba highlights the unholy alliance between homeschooling and Christian Reconstructionism. D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield provide incisive commentary on the impacts of religious authoritarian parenting. Cait West offers honest reflections on the stains that Christian patriarchy leaves on the ground beneath our feet, while JayMallow writes about conservatism from a philosopher’s perspective.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that survivors are the best interpreters of the language of coercion and control. We desperately need them right now.

Someday I may dream in a language that isn’t bound up in a cultish past. Until then, I’ll be an interpreter.