On a Friday afternoon, Sarah Mettrick cracks open a bottle of beer, sitting in the sun outside her Lyttelton home. Such a leisurely indulgence would have once been unthinkable for the 37-year-old who runs her own cleaning business. “I’m a really late bloomer,” she says, laughing, but it sounds heavy. “I was so oppressed; I had no autonomy. Every single minute of the day was planned out for me. It felt like I couldn’t even breathe fully.”
Mettrick was 15 when she attended free meditation classes at the Sri Chinmoy centre in Christchurch, a worldwide cult with a public front of peace work, marathon running and vegetarian restaurants. Her older sister had brought her in. Within a year, the teenager was wearing a sari and working full-time at the Lotus Heart restaurant – for $7 an hour, plus two hours daily for free. She quit school and moved into a shared flat above the restaurant.
The rules of engagement as a good disciple saw her suppress her sexuality. Celibacy was the dogma for everyone – which their Indian guru did not necessarily adhere to. Before and after Sri Chinmoy’s death in 2007, a number of former disciples alleged that his controlling influence extended to sexually exploiting young female recruits. For those within the organisation, reading the testimonies of his victims online was declared as “poison”. He visited New Zealand twice, met with 1980s prime minister David Lange and gave a concert at Christ Church Cathedral.
The ink art on Mettrick’s arm shows a tiger, a naked girl and a snake tongue, wrapped around a Sanskrit name that once was hers: Ujjwala. She got the tattoo after she left Sri Chinmoy, desperate to integrate the stumped person she had been “inside” with her newly emerging but deeply confused self.
After 12 years in a cult, Mettrick felt lost. It had taken her three years to exit, burnt out from her long work shifts and the relentless pressure to conform, afraid of being ostracised. “You were regularly brought to tears in front of everyone.” The rules were exacting: she says a woman close to her was forced by the leaders to have an abortion. “She’s been through hell.”
Mettrick was still a virgin when she re-entered the secular world at 27. She didn’t make eye contact with men, never listened to “outside music”, let alone partied.
“I was such a weirdo,” she says. “Tried to seal the cracks.” Her mother had to buy her clothes. Not only because Sarah was broke and had no savings, but she had no idea what to wear.
Although the former disciple hadn’t been sexually or physically abused like many others who come out of high-demand groups – the academic term for cults – she still needed help. But New Zealand doesn’t have an agency – either state or independent non-government organisation – to prevent cultic influence across the board, unlike countries such as Israel, Germany, France and Finland.
Nor are there specialised services for those who’ve come under the coercive control of a charismatic leader. Unless they’re looked after by the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust or the new charity Olive Leaf Network, which is mainly focused on ex-members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (Exclusive Brethren), cult victims of non-Christian spirituality or the self-help scene fall through the cracks. They usually leave without any money or direction but plenty of emotional scars.
‘Tens of thousands’
It’s difficult to gauge the number of people affected by cults, but in the case of Gloriavale alone, about 200 people have been given assistance by the support trust in the past 10 years.
Lindy Jacomb, from Olive Leaf Network, estimates tens of thousands of New Zealanders have been negatively affected by experiences with a cult-like group or harmful religious or spiritual community. That number would include larger high-demand religious communities such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Brethren and Gloriavale.
Mettrick felt immense shame for following a questionable guru, for recruiting new members, and for not having an education. But there was no resettlement programme for her, no help hotline, support group or retreat shelter. “When I quit my community,” she says drily, opening another beer, “there were only other culties who felt just as bad.”
One of them felt even worse. Her friend from Lotus Heart, Emma Davies, left during the Christchurch earthquakes in 2011, finally overcoming her fears that she wouldn’t be able to survive outside.
But when she was unable to get the right help after the veil lifted, her mental state deteriorated. “I had to deconstruct the illusion,” Davies, 42, says, fighting back tears as she describes her deep despair after 13 years of spiritual mind control while she also had untreated depression. “If you weren’t happy, you weren’t grateful.”
In the end, she checked herself into hospital during an emotional collapse. “I urgently needed a safe place for my transition, with people who understand. The gap I was in felt so scary.” Two years later, Davies tried to kill herself and spent two weeks at Christchurch’s Hillmorton mental health clinic, in the grounds of the city’s original mental asylum, Sunnyside.
Calling for help
Jim Goodwin was a psychiatric nurse at Sunnyside in the 1980s. Before Neville Cooper, aka Hopeful Christian, moved his flock to Gloriavale, he evangelised weekly in Cathedral Square. Some of Cooper’s disciples became patients on Goodwin’s ward. He remembers a relative of Cooper with acute psychosis who later died by suicide. No one came to visit the young man in the rehab unit. “Mental problems were seen by them as weakness, so he was shunned,” says Goodwin, a member of the survivor advisory group for the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry. “They grow up in this weird place, and there is nothing for them outside.”
He also treated a Jehovah’s Witness who had sat in a chair for days, not moving or eating, and wetting himself, until an ambulance was called. “It was an act of self-punishment.” The former Youth Line trainer thinks the public has come to understand abuse and trauma better, especially the judiciary and police, but still has a long way to go. “I would like to see something like a New Zealand cult commission that has a hotline.”
If there’s a strange cult in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call? In recent decades, it’s often Mark Vrankovich. The Auckland software architect and hobby fiction writer started Cultwatch in 1989. Initially, his team offered exit support, but now six volunteers from various churches give advice by email to everyone asking – “irrespective of belief system or other affiliations”, says Vrankovich. His current pet dislike is Destiny Church.
Cultwatch calls itself a “ministry” on its website and lists conservative Christian beliefs, including that “there is a personal devil”.
Although not related, the organisation often gets confused with the equally religious (and dated-looking) site cults.co.nz, which has an A-Z glossary of problematic groups or beliefs, including Halloween. Islam is branded a “false religion”, but new-age cults that have recently come on the public radar don’t get a mention.
Wrong vibe
None of the cult leavers contacted for this story felt drawn to either platform. The fire-and-brimstone vibe also turned off Laura (not her real name) when she disentangled herself after five years from the South Korean Christian cult Shincheonji, also known as Mount Zion.
Like Mettrick, the Auckland woman felt alien to the normal world when she left and overwhelmed with restarting her life. She met with two different counsellors, whom she found “not particularly helpful” because they didn’t seem to understand what she was going through.
Ultimately, Laura contacted the Family Survival Trust in the UK, run by a cult expert. But her deprogramming mainly came from books. “It was a lonely process,” she says.
In the end, she found a compassionate and competent person locally: a former member of self-styled guru Bert Potter’s Centrepoint who had been instrumental in shutting that community down. The octogenarian had helped other cult leavers selflessly until she died earlier this year.
Throughout the decade that I spoke to dozens of cult survivors for a book, therapy was a touchy subject. Teenagers at Centrepoint had it “shoved down their throat”, as one victim told me. She still hates therapy jargon. And because many psychologists went through Potter’s encounter workshops, there was a lack of trust in them after everything fell over. Since the NZ Communities Growth Trust succeeded the Centrepoint Trust by High Court order in 2000, it has paid counselling and medical bills for former residents. But one girl who had been severely sexually abused had received a mere $1170 payout from ACC, only to learn about the trust’s funds through our interview in 2014. It took her another seven years to seek therapy for the first time.
There are other barriers for different groups, but the themes are not dissimilar. Scientologists believe psychiatry is evil; leavers from other religious cults have been indoctrinated that seeking professional support – even in a suicidal state – shows a lack of faith. In general, cult leavers often find that regular counsellors don’t understand their special circumstances or even ask inappropriate questions to satisfy their curiosity.
Training gaps
Breakdowns, such as in Emma Davies’ case, are common when the deception and exploitation suddenly become clear. The dynamics of cultic abuse resemble domestic violence, but still require special treatment, says Liz Gregory, of the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust, whose team has trained five social workers. “It’s all trauma, but another sphere. And those coming out of Gloriavale have huge issues with trusting people.”
This dilemma is echoed by Dr Janja Lalich, whose US nonprofit Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion runs online groups for survivors of cults and other abusive relationships. “Many were born into a high-demand group and don’t even know their real names, don’t have a birth certificate or can’t drive,” says Lalich, a professor emerita of sociology at California State University, Chico. “They end up sleeping on the streets; they end up selling themselves or taking drugs.”
She calls it “a horrible public health issue” that is completely unrecognised worldwide. Lalich has started offering courses for therapists as well. “They don’t know how to work with these kinds of clients, and they should. There is such a need.”
Her next students could be from New Zealand. West Coast clinical psychologist Jess Reedy put out a call in April to gauge interest in upskilling in cult awareness and therapies and received interest from 30 peers around the country. She has since scoped international courses and is compiling a resource base for self-directed learning, including talks by Lalich and other experts and a handbook from the International Cultic Studies Association. She says this “living document” will be available for every psychologist.
Whoever leaves Sri Chinmoy or Shincheonji in the future should be in better hands.
Cult radio
When Caroline Ansley started the Centrepoint Restoration Project in 2016 to help other former children of the Albany community share their stories, it was a daunting and lonely mission. Five years later, the Christchurch doctor went public in a television documentary and with an open letter published in the New Zealand Herald and on the project’s website.
Last month, she launched another project into the cultsphere, “Cult Chat”, a new podcast on Christchurch-based access radio station Plains FM, which she hosts with two other passionate educators who have plenty of cult recovery expertise.
One is former schoolteacher Liz Gregory from the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust (GLST) in Timaru. Since 2013, the GLST team of four has helped resettle more than 200 people who left the fundamentalist Christian enclave, inland from Greymouth on the West Coast, offering them a tailored transition plus housing and legal support.
The other is Lindy Jacomb, who was excommunicated at age 20 from the Exclusive Brethren community she grew up in and shunned. In March, the Wellington mother of two founded Olive Leaf Network, not just for ex-Brethren but everyone from similar high-demand religious groups. Her fledgling volunteer organisation was inspired by GLST and groups such as Pathways, in Melbourne, for those leaving Orthodox Judaism.
The strengths they share in producing Cult Chat, they say, include not only their common ground as advocates for victims, but also the balance in world views they bring to the microphone: “We can respect each other’s differences,” says Jacomb. Their discussions with experts and survivors will focus on coercion, control and red flags across the spectrum, even where listeners wouldn’t expect them in Aotearoa.
“I’m tired of people saying we don’t have a problem here,” says Ansley.
Jacomb, who belongs to the Network of Survivors of Abuse in Faith-based Institutions Aotearoa, agrees. “Kiwis think your beliefs should just stay in your own backyard.” She is worried that the response to the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry – whose recommendations are due to be presented by March 28 next year – will be inadequate and handed to the institutions that abused victims.
Gregory believes the government is “litigation averse”, and for too long had no idea what it was dealing with when faced with a sweet-looking gulag like Gloriavale, where human rights and labour laws are constantly violated. “Now, we’re making some noise.”
Their combined knowledge and media platform could be the precursor for a national initiative like an anti-cult agency, although the women are careful not to promise more than a website at this stage.
Gregory is still “on cloud nine” after a judgment in the 10-week-long Gloriavale employment law case, where six former Gloriavale women claimed they were treated like slaves. The Employment Court ruled this month they were not volunteers, as Gloriavale argued, but employees.
It’s a huge win, says Gregory. “Other high-demand groups in New Zealand and internationally will be watching this ruling closely.”
For her, the case highlights once again the need for more education about the dynamics in play when religious beliefs, obedience and working relationships are intertwined. “The issues are power and control.” She has called for an apology from government agencies that failed to do their job.
Expect more noisemaking from the trio.
Anke Richter is the author of Cult Trip: Inside the World of Coercion & Control (HarperCollins, $37.99) and is appearing at WORD Christchurch on August 26.
Where to get help:
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