Childhood/Cult/Pottery/Therapy
I grew up in a very chaotic family. There was a lot of unpredictability in my early years, and I was often alone and under a lot of stress. The adults that were closest to me were unpredictable, neglectful, and abusive. I had frequent panic attacks throughout childhood and into early adulthood, before I had any understanding of what they were or how they might be treated. Throughout childhood and into my early adulthood, the choices I made were limited by whether or not I thought I could do a certain activity without having a panic attack. It wasn’t until much later in life that I recognized that the panic attacks were a response to my environment and that I was suffering from complex PTSD (or CPTSD). It wouldn’t be until I was an adult, with my own child, and a licensed therapist that I fully understood what I’d been coping with when I was younger, and how to understand that experience in myself and others.
As a teenager and young adult, I was interested in meditation and spirituality, and I was looking for something that could provide structure and make things feel more manageable. At nineteen, that search led me into a highly structured religious community that, over time, became increasingly controlling. In a pattern I now understand to be common among high-control groups or cults, the community initially gave me a sense of hope, connection, and purpose. Over time, however, my life became rigidly controlled by the group. There wasn't much space for individuality, and the pursuit of anything as impractical as a craft was looked down on within the group. For several years I wanted to leave but didn't know how to. I remember praying that the leaders would say it was okay for me to leave the group, because I was unhappy and didn’t want to be there, but didn’t feel like I could cope with disappointing them by leaving.
At one point, between college classes, I made paint-your-own mugs with prescribed religious quotes, selling them as a fundraiser for the group. Looking back, it feels both absurd and resourceful. It was an odd use of my time because I was a full-time student, worked as an aid at a nursing home, a cashier, and cleaned houses, and was required to participate in a consistent schedule of cult activities. The mugs were time-consuming to make and only made a few dollars each for the group. Looking back, it seems like a very small way that I was able to stay connected to myself while in a group that intended for its members' identities to stay focused only on their connection to the group.
I left that community in my early twenties, without much more of a sense of how to move forward in my day-to-day life than I had when I first joined the group, except that I was five years older and had a nursing degree. Deciding to leave felt terrifying and destabilizing. Without much support, I immediately needed to learn how to function independently. Even though most of the time it was clear to me that the group was not what I had at one time believed it to be, life outside the group initially had moments that were so challenging I thought about going back.During those first few months after leaving, my mother died in an accident on her family’s farm in West Virginia while I was at a class in Boston. My relationship with my mom had always been enormously stressful, and I had only spent about 6 years of my life with her before her death. Her death felt like a kind of release, where, for the first time, I didn’t need to think about her or worry about whether or not to see her. Twenty years later, I’m still making sense of my relationship with my mom and processing her death, but at 24 that space in my mind was freed up for the first time in my life, because there was no longer any possibility of helping her or making our relationship work out.
Around that time I finished college with a nursing degree, and began working with porcelain. There was a pottery co-op near the school where I worked, and it was something that I had enough experience in that I could do independently and could imagine eventually building into a livelihood. Learning to work with porcelain required focus, consistency, and the ability to make and follow through on a series of small decisions that had concrete effects in reality. Over time, that became a way of building both a studio practice and a more self-directed life. Developing my skills as a porcelain artist offered me a lot of what I think a good ACT therapist might have given me at that time: a values-guided plan, specific committed actions I could take to move forward, acceptance of moments of inevitable failure, and practice staying in the present. When I became firmly grounded in my studio practice working with porcelain, my panic attacks went away.
Around two years after leaving the group, while living in Boston and working as a school nurse at a Yeshiva in Brookline, Massachusetts, I attended a mind-body medical conference put on by the Benson-Henry Institute at Harvard Medical School. I was there earning continuing education credits to maintain my nursing license, and I heard Stephen Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, speak. I don't remember exactly what he said, but I remember feeling like it seemed like a logical path grounded in research, which seemed inherently non-coercive. I imagined that if I'd been able to find something like ACT earlier in my life, I probably wouldn't have joined a cult and missed out on half a decade of my young adulthood.
I continued to work as a nurse while developing my ceramics practice, spending long hours in the studio and gradually refining both my technical skills and my approach to design. I worked as a nurse and a ceramic artist for about twelve years before becoming a therapist. Within a few years of beginning my ceramics practice, I established a studio in Boston's South End and began receiving recognition for my work.
I later moved to Vermont, where I continue to live and work. What I had expected to be a relaxing life change, and a kind of relief or reward for all the work I had done and what I had endured earlier in life, ended up being enormously stressful. Shortly after I arrived, I began being stalked by neighbors in the community. After not having panic attacks for several years, they returned, and for the first several years I lived in Vermont much of my life became organized around managing that experience. At the same time, I became increasingly focused on understanding what was happening, both in terms of the psychology of the kind of person who would engage in that behavior, and how I could respond in a way that was healthy and sustainable. I began to understand more about the people who raised me, as well as what was going on with the people who held power over others in the cult. Spending that time focused on mental health, combined with the recognition that there were practical therapeutic tools which would have been extremely helpful to me earlier in life, led me to begin training as a therapist.
As I learned more about ACT, especially once I was working with my own clients, I became more confident in the model as a flexible approach to therapy that incorporates individuals' unique values, goals, and life experiences, while helping clients to understand and adapt to common life challenges. Most importantly, my experience has been that this approach tends to liberate individuals to be more themselves and move forward in a direction that is unique to them; quite the opposite of my own and others' experience of being involved in high-control groups, where individuality tends to be discouraged.
I now maintain a counseling practice alongside my studio work, with a focus on ACT. I work with the general public, and also maintain availability to help people who are rebuilding their lives after coercive or highly controlling experiences, such as cult or stalking situations. When I left the group that I was a part of, my therapist at the time was very kind, but had no experience working with clients who were leaving cults, and I felt very alone figuring out how to take the next steps in my life. Although developing my skills as a porcelain artist offered me many of the tools I needed to begin moving forward, I initially missed out on a lot of processing what had happened in the group, support from someone who knew what it was like to leave a group like that, and help in learning to develop self-compassion specifically for what I had been through. Without a therapist who understood what I was going through, I also felt like I missed out on having a space to talk about what felt right or wrong about what the group taught, and to develop a sense of my own spirituality that wasn't prescribed by someone else.
My life now is deliberate and sustainable. I am a solo parent to a happy, thriving child, and much of my daily life is organized around steadiness, care, and creating a stable environment; things that were not available to me growing up. I appreciate my studio practice, therapy, and my connection with nature through gardening, all as ways that I was initially able to ground myself and cope with the effects of abuse, that, over time, became how I was able to reconnect with the world and create a beautiful life for my daughter and myself.