About 4 years ago, my father happened to mention that he had been in a cult in college.
I mean, he claimed that it wasn’t a cult, at least not when he was working with them. According to him, they were a charity that helped addicts and troubled youth through talk therapy. He said that they would sit around and talk about each others’ life choices and personalities, and that it was a enlightening and fulfilling experience. He conceded that the organization later became kind of weird and violent, but by them he had moved on with his life.
I looked the organization up when I got home:
… and boy, did that explain a lot about my childhood.
I knew what organization you were talking about when I got to the second sentence of your second paragraph. Synanon was pretty notorious when I was a kid. And for years after the organization pretty much crashed and burned there was a gas station I wouldn’t go to, because it was the “Synanon gas station.”
Have you ever seen the “Synanon” movie? TCH has aired it. It’s OK.
Factoid: A rural California weekly newspaper with a peak circulation of about 1,500 won a Pulitzer Prize for their exposure of Synanon, after the cult relocated to their area.
No, but it came out just a year or two before my dad started working with them, so I assume that’s when the organization was at the height of its respectability.
Well, for one, those looooooong conversations we would have, which mostly consisted of him talking for what seemed like hours, where he would analyze and criticize every aspect of my life, past, present and future. Don’t get me wrong: Dad was a good man, an attentive and affectionate parent who was as generous with the praise as he was with the criticism (and who was as tough on himself as he was on me), but man did I grow to hate those talks.
He was also an inherently argumentative person (he was a lawyer, of course), who would challenge any opinion I had just for the sake of a good debate. I think he saw it as a compliment, as a sign of respect for my intelligence. It’s one of those things I’ve been realizing about our relationship now that he’s gone.