In 2019, I wrote
a review of a book by Amber Scorah
titled Leaving the Witness about a woman growing up as a
member of a cult-like religion. People in that group were
taught to avoid talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that
might call into question its belief system. As with most cults, people who
broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were completely shunned by family
and friends.
My interest was how
people routinely convince themselves of the most outrageous beliefs - ones
that could easily be seen as preposterous even if thought about briefly - and
hang on to them for dear life in order to avoid an almost unbearable feeling
of groundlessness (also called existential
groundlessness or anomie). The roots of this are from the biological effects of an
evolutionary process called kin selection. In my review I said I thought the
author had written the most elegant descriptions of that experience I’d
ever read.
Well, Ms. Scorah has met
her match in Tara Westover. Furthermore, Westover’s book talks about what
happens in a case in which the “cult” consists ONLY of the members of someone’s
family of origin. They were ostensibly Mormons, but the vast majority of
practitioners of that religion did not subscribe to many of the clearly bizarre ideas of this particular family, especially those of the author’s father.
Westover writes that he may
have had bipolar disorder. Of course I have no way of knowing for sure, but the
consistency of her descriptions of him argues against this. In true bipolar,
the person thinks normally when not in a manic or depressed state, which is
usually most of the time. Some of the father’s strange ideas did not seem to be delusions
per se but were based on conspiracy theories that are now widely believed.
Included were dramatic ideas about the “Illuminati” and an anti-Semitic tirade
called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Other of his beliefs were even more far out: the public schools were all agents of Satin, so none of the seven children in the family attended public schools. All doctors were all part of this conspiracy, so no one was taken to a hospital.
Mother always went along
with whatever ideas were expressed by the Father, but when alone with the
author, she would sometimes seem to indicate that indeed she knew better.
One of the biggest issues
for the author was her relationship with her older brother Shawn, who was
sometimes hyper-involved with her but at other times physically abusive
to her. If she mentioned this to her parents, they did not seem to believe her,
so she quickly learned to keep it to herself –sometimes even by
telling herself that maybe she had dreamed it or that she was crazy so what had
clearly happened was a figment of her imagination.
Strangely, Westover was able to get into BYU despite a paucity of education by studying for the college entrance exams, through books and other recommended sources from people she knew at her church. Most of this reading presumably would have been highly disapproved of by her father. It took her two tries at the test to get the requisite score, but she somehow kept at it. Her father has always said he thought that women should just get married and run a household, but as I will mention later, some of his behavior was inconsistent with that idea.
Once she got to BYU, a
Mormon school, almost none of the students had the same belief system she did.
They could hardly believe she had never even been to high school. She did not
share anything about her unique family experiences. She frequently told herself she was
not qualified to be there. Nonetheless, she was able to persist with the
encouragement of some of her advisors who saw how bright she was. And she was bright enough to eventually get into highly competitive and prestigious graduate programs
at Cambridge University in England, and at Harvard!
She frequently returned
home and usually fell back into old family patterns, but something pushed her
leave again and again to continue with her “satanic” education.
At school, the feelings and thoughts produced by her sense of groundlessness almost tore her apart, despite her ongoing successes. The way she experienced groundlessness was brilliantly described in a variety of amazing (and rather horrifying) ways throughout the book. Examples: she writes, “It was not that I had done something wrong, but I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.”
When she started to experience her clique at Cambridge as a sort of family, she felt damned by those feelings: “No natural sister prefers a stranger to a brother…and what sort of daughter prefers a stranger to her own father? That feeling became a physical part of me.” Later she had the thought, “It seemed like I made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family.”
The blow that stopped
her from making frequent return home visits was after, in private e-mails, her
mother admitted she should have protected her daughter from Shawn. And then her
older sister admitted to her that she had been through many of the same things
with Shawn that the author had. Even Shawn’s ex-girlfriend confirmed how he
was. Surely now her Dad would believe her. Except in his presence, her mother
and her sister started lying again, denying that they had said anything of the
sort!
So how was the author able
to break through the powerful effects of family dynamics and achieve her
educational accomplishments? Again, I have no way of knowing for sure, so I'll speculate based on the available descriptions as well as my psychotherapy experience with other families. I could of course be completely wrong..
I suspect that her parents, despite any insistence otherwise, were both secretly highly conflicted about education, family roles, and religion, so she was getting a mixed message. The author does not tell us anything about her grandparents that might clue us in to where this confusion came from originally, but some of the parents' behavior seemed to scream it out.
Some examples: as mentioned, father preached about traditional gender
roles, and his only other daughter followed them. But somehow, when he had been
injured and couldn’t run his business as before, he allowed his wife to develop
her own business selling alternative medicines that brought in more money than
he’d ever made, and he was supportive of her doing this. Also, when Tara
started singing in local shows as a teen, he would always come to hear her
sing, and appeared to be as proud as punch.
Mother, while not overtly telling the author to get educated, would often subtly push her into getting on with it – as long as Dad was not around.
