[empath75]

Someone I knew was raised in a similar UFO cult. Her mother died when she was young, her dad was a neglectful drug addict. There were times where she and her brother were abandoned for days, and she’d literally survive by eating dog food.

At some point, her dad met and married a woman, who happened to be in a UFO cult like this, where they thought many of them had been abducted or had had close encounters of various kinds. This woman, who I met many years later, was funny and kind and took care of my friend and gave her unconditional love in a way that she had never experienced and treated her like a daughter. Her real dad disappeared again and went off to Canada permanently, leaving her with the cult as her only family. It was a distinct step up as a family situation from how she was raised.

In 2000, when my friend was 17 or 18, the whole cult went off into a compound in the mountains waiting for the world to end and go off into space. My friend, who was super intelligent and curious, at that point was skeptical, but she went because it was the only family she had.

The world didn’t end, and she turned 18 and moved out on her own.

I met her a few years later, and we started dating, not knowing any of this back story — she was remarkably normal, all considering — and at some point, she told me the story of going off into the woods, and I laughed and just sort of assumed she was as cynical about that as she was about everything else — but her eyes flashed with anger and I realized I had stepped on a land mine.

It wasn’t that she really believed in aliens, or that she had been abducted by aliens as her foster mother had convinced her of, when she was younger. She just wanted to believe that this woman who loved her and had saved her wasn’t crazy, so she held open the possibility in her mind.

Cults are complicated, and so are families.

[ordu]

> I met her a few years later, and we started dating, not knowing any of this back story — she was remarkably normal, all considering — and at some point, she told me the story of going off into the woods, and I laughed and just sort of assumed she was as cynical about that as she was about everything else — but her eyes flashed with anger and I realized I had stepped on a land mine.

My guess, that it is nothing to do with her cynism or beliefs. You can be sceptical about Christian God, and at the same time you may be angry with people who make fun of sacred items and rituals. It was a real emotional experience for her and for others, it is something that you seem to miss, and your laugh offended all of that. The land mine was not a belief system, but a narrative, while you thought of that as of funny adventure of stupid people, she thought about people whom she knew empathically.

[sequoia]

How true. If one's parents skinned puppies and sold their pelts for a living and one grew up to be a vegetarian who hated them for it, one would likely still have a hard time tolerating other people later in life ridiculing or criticizing them.

I think it's because we see our parents (usually) as ultimately good people, and when people criticize or ridicule our parents it feels like they are suggesting the parents are not good people, even if that's not what they mean.

[marktangotango]

Nice perspective, thanks for sharing.

[ascur]

There's a great passage in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King that touches on this. A character finds that when he's home, he finds his parents' conservative views frustrating and backwards and constantly argues with them about it. But when he comes across those views in his daily life, he finds them oddly comforting and reassuring on some level.