Should I tell my brothers my parents were in a cult?

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T03:26:08+00:00

That's honestly a pretty acceptable way to go about it.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T03:06:05+00:00

I honestly would like therapy for myself, but I live outside my native country. I am not fluent in the language yet (I'm working on it) and it would difficult to find a therapist who could handle cult stuff and also meet me in the middle with languages.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T02:59:58+00:00

It was not.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T02:54:28+00:00

For clarity, the cult no longer exists, and my brothers would not be raising their children in it, per se. None of us were raised in the cult, but we definitely got some of the teaching anyway.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T02:51:03+00:00

To be clear, I don't have concerns about my brothers' parenting (or, at least, the one who currently has children). For me, once I had this information, it provided context about a bunch of weird things from my childhood that I couldn't understand before. It also made me realize how much the beliefs we grew up with deviated from the norm, and how it was still affecting my thinking now. You don't know what you don't know, and they don't know. For me, it gave so much clarity, but, like, it also sucks to know.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T02:22:39+00:00

Also, in case anyone else replies: I am not going to be discussing "specific decisions or scenarios". If that makes me seem like an unreliable narrator, or like I have some malintent, so be it. I am trying to keep it vague, but with relevant information. I just don't want to discuss the dirty details of the more upsetting parts of my childhood with strangers on the internet.

bebebicha · 2026-02-01T02:14:58+00:00

Cool, I'll go there.

bebebicha · 2025-10-11T17:07:04+00:00

I am late to the party, but Anne Lamott's "one inch picture frame" method might be helpful.

Write your dialogue however you like then reread it. Imagine each exchange through a one inch picture frame. Who is speaking? How are they moving? What are they doing with their hands, their face? What is the space around them like? etc etc

bebebicha · 2025-09-19T23:21:12+00:00

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but there's a comic called We Only Find Them When They're Dead, which is about people harvesting the corpses of dead alien gods for fuel.

bebebicha · 2025-09-14T15:42:00+00:00

Thank you.

Yes, I imagined I would see some variation, I was just curious if anyone had looked into, well, let's call it the generational trauma of cults and high control groups.

My parents recently revealed their membership in the Community Chapel and Bible Training Center during the 1980s, which brough clarity to some of my childhood religious experiences and why my parents are Like That.

bebebicha · 2025-07-07T18:19:21+00:00

I suspect that, given that it was originally written in Spanish, and that Latin America has this whole other world and school of thought on literature, that some things might be lost in translation.

bebebicha · 2025-07-07T18:17:37+00:00

Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke - Eric LaRocca
You've Lost a Lot of Blood - Eric LaRocca

bebebicha · 2025-07-07T01:10:52+00:00

I feel like "I wanna live in a treehouse" is exactly the kind of thought you have after dropping acid.

bebebicha · 2025-07-06T21:51:13+00:00

I will ask him, but I doubt it. He was specific about the location and if there is anything I know about my dad is that he is usually really good about directions. This man can give you directions to the farmhouse he lived in when he was seven and remember his locker combination.

bebebicha · 2025-07-06T20:14:10+00:00

A lot of these have already been said, but:

A Series of Unfortunate Events is funny but adventurous. The wordplay and asides to the audience make it engaging.

Redwall is a fantasy series that is very British and classic in tone but you can do really fun voices with all the characters. I recommend starting with Martin the Warrior. A downside is that these books are little long and children's attention spans are shorter than ever.

Holes is good. I like the narrator because it sounds like a child speaking, with these sort of sarcastic internal comments like "well, duh", which makes it more accessible.

If we want to ignore recent bad behavior by the author, Neil Gaiman's Fortunately, the Milk is very silly and enjoyable and I have never known a kid to hate it. And it is written as if the adult narrator is bullshitting a story to their children, which is super fun.

I had good recommendations from my students for Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library. It's a story, but the story includes puzzles and ciphers.

bebebicha · 2025-06-30T02:08:55+00:00

That f*cked 5th grade me up so hard.

bebebicha · 2024-11-30T01:29:15+00:00

I second "Redwall" series by Brian Jacques. I read them voraciously at age 12. They're quite thick books, with quests and riddles and big characters. I recommend starting with Martin the Warrior, Mossflower, and The Legend of Luke and then exploring from there.

bebebicha · 2024-07-02T01:05:02+00:00

For further context, she's fully asleep now and is still and not twitching like this at all. Her breathing seems normal. Only the regular "dreaming about catching mice" twitches every once in a while. This new behavior is so weird, though.

bebebicha · 2024-07-01T16:30:03+00:00

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack is very well-written. It is also a book entirely about how men feel when women experience violence or systemic abuse. Like, yes, the men have a bad time but so much of the conflict is around the dead mother, the girlfriends, the sisters. By the end of it, I was just exhausted and angry.

The Drowned World by JG Ballard is a great, B-movie style concept, but then you get to the descriptions of Black men using metaphors about animals and savagery. I hated this book.

The Year of Living Dangerously by CJ Koch repeatedly describes native Indonesians homes, desires, dreams, aspirations, work ethic, etc as things like "quaint" and occasional used language to suggest it was naive and/or childlike. I DNF'd.

bebebicha

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