'It took 22 years for me to be free physically and it's a lifelong journey to be free mentally.'
‘I didn’t have a life plan,’ says‘If you think about growing up, pretty much every three years was some deadline for when the world was going to end or Armageddon was going to show up.’
‘The Family International has had a zero-tolerance policy in place for over three decades for the protection of minors, and is diametrically opposed to the abuse of minors in any form, whether physical, sexual, educational, or emotional,’ it added., under the watchful eye of leader David Berg, whom Petra and her siblings were told to call ‘grandpa’, despite never meeting him before his death when Petra was 13 years old.
Berg’s theory, and the foundations of the cult’s birth in 1968, was that ‘a generation protected from the influences of groupthink would be protected from being moulded into society’s view of what life should be and would be able to think for themselves’. ‘So by the time you’re saying “oh I don’t know about this” or “this doesn’t feel right”, you already have the counter argument in your brain, because it’s been there from birth.’
‘You could leave at any time, and they would tell you so, but then in the messaging you would receive daily, it was people who left, God punished, so if bad things happened to them it’s because they weren’t listening, which would make people afraid of leaving’.She adds: ‘For me and my siblings, we didn’t go to school, we didn’t have an education, we thought the world was going to end imminently, so everything out there was painted as other or evil.
In time, she learnt healthy coping mechanisms to better manage her trauma. Now, as a full-qualified mental health practitioner, Petra wants the people who read her book to understand our ‘wellbeing, focus, plans or tactics can change over time’.
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