π How I Learned To Not Ask Questions - ADHD, ASD, Cult Indoctrination and Parental Abuse
Last Updated: 3Β months, 3Β weeks ago
Masking my Struggles as a Neurodivergent AFAB Person raised by Abusive Parents and a Patriarchal Cult
I have had to unlearn the habit of masking my struggles and neurodivergent symptoms for reasons which seem obvious in hindsight.
Part of this is due to the lack of accommodations or outright abuse for me, which are standard as an ADHD/autistic person.
But there are other reasons, which I especially attribute to my parents' abuse and to the conservative fundamentalist environment and organisation I grew up in, which was unambiguously a cult1
Being raised as female in conservatism, and as the oldest child (can you say parentification?), didn't help either.
Parental Abuse: Psychological Abuse, Performative Parenting, Shame Culture, Patriarchy and Guess-Culture
Narcissistic Parenting
My mom is someone I now classify as a non-traditional narcissist, a lot like the character Lila from Miraculous Ladybug.
She presented herself as someone who was incredibly supportive and fawning towards others. This was unfortunately often performative, however. Situations which threatened her ego, such as questions which might expose her limitations as a parent, she would turn into accusations against the other person, and thus I grew up believing I was spoiled, ungrateful, immoral, and selfish and (as gaslighting was also something she would do fluently) that my parents knew me better than I knew myself - something I believed even into adulthood and up until coming out.
I recall that when I came out as transgender she kept telling me how difficult I was making her life, and how heartless I was, while simultaneously telling me that she felt as if her child had died, and while I was reeling from the onslaught of one abusive statement after the next, without a beat, she immediately successfully managed to convince the rest of our relatives that my process of coming out had been cruel to her2, while I was still combing through my text messages looking for my alleged cruelty.
I recall one of my sisters (who recently again made a point of telling me she doesn't "fly my flag" - not the one I recently reached out to) coming after me immediately after I came out via text, with angry texts of her own for making my mother cry, declaring that that was utterly inexcusable.
Being a "crybully" was something my mother was well accomplished at, and thus, asking questions which might expose her as an imperfect parent or cause her uncomfortable moments of self-reflection were swiftly shut down.
Performative Parenting under Patriarchy
I grew up with performative parenting, with my parents holding the hope that I'd become a trophy child. Being autistic and ADHD and thus struggling to perform neurotypically or anticipate people's wants or "read the room" very well really didn't help.
We were taught to not say embarrassing things or ask uncomfortable questions (which I now know was due to how it might reflect on her as a parent), whether they be asking favours from other people, making references to the existence of sex as something people did (children and young girls weren't supposed to talk about such things), reminding my parents of promises they had previously made that hadn't been kept, pointing out a double standard ("talking back") or being assertive ("unladylike") etc.
Minimizing my needs and avoiding raising issues which might embarrass someone else became normal for me, with my own well-being being secondary to that, something both I and my parents saw, not simply as a necessary sacrifice, but generally as no real sacrifice at all, if it even registered on our radar.
We, as all female-raised children, were of course also raised in general patriarchy and all that entailed: repressive purity culture, learning to minimize ourselves and the parentification of young girls - myself in particular as the oldest female-raised child and thus meant to "set an example" (and my mom was surprised and acted shocked and disappointed when I told her I am not going to have children3 - I had had enough parenting by the time I was old enough to have my own free and independent life and I intended to finally live it!)
I was also taught implicitly that I had to live up to the expectation of free emotional labour expected by girls, which came with a lot of guess-culture in itself - being expected to intuit and anticipate people's emotional needs without having to ask, as a future wife-of-somebody, mother-to-somebodies and empath and counsellor, as women were expected to be.
The pressure to do this, too, was immense.
Masking my Struggles At School
Unsurprisingly, my struggles to perform neurotypically gave me performance anxiety, learning that visibility was synonymous with judgement, that being exposed was being mocked or looked down on, and that hypervisibility or any visibility was something to be avoided!
During my school days, being called upon in class was something I feared.
ADHD combined with autism made me feel unprepared for school and life, and I was constantly trying to hide this because wrong answers tended to lead to ridicule or angry outbursts from those who noticed me whether socially or at school.
Being at a religious and fairly conservative all-girls school, the pressure to intuit emotions and be highly emotionally intelligent and perform aforementioned emotional labour was a significant part of performing one's expected gender. Being autistic and also (though I would only realise later) not actually female4 didn't help.
Asking questions in class carried a heavy cost too, risking being yelled at by teachers or the all-too-obvious disappointment as they revealed how far I was behind the rest of the class in understanding what was going on, or how far from the conventional questions my own questions were.
This hypersensitivity to emotions I suppose I learned from my parents' psychological abuse first, so I had already internalised the notion that questions and attention from teachers were best avoided. As a result, the only attention I received was negative and public attention from teachers was when I was caught out with a question or clearly confused, which trauma only reinforced the avoidance and masking behaviours rather than encouraging me to seek help earlier.
My missing information shared in class due to ADHD was probably chalked up to not paying attention or not trying hard enough, likely as I had been a gifted child in my younger years and thus not learned the skills of studying, and thus my later struggles as one assumed to be intelligent were assumed to have no problems with school except of my own choosing.
My performative parents held firmly to the notion that all of their children were highly intelligent. It was only after I struggled through university that my mother shocked me by mentioning (as a way to try to win an argument) that she'd always believed I had a learning disability and was surprised I had succeeded thus far. (It also contextualises why my relatives would go out of their way to reassure me that I didn't have to do well in school or university and just needed to achieve a passing grade. For my ADHD and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, this lack of faith in me or in academia in general only made motivation for studying harder!)
The fact that she'd never told me this or showed a wish to address it in order to improve my learning prospects sadly no longer surprises me. Needing psychological help was seen as shameful among my relatives, with my aunt, who had sought help for schizophrenia, being belittled for as long as I can remember behind her back, with this constantly weaponized against her, so this avoidance I suppose is to be expected.
Cult Shame-and-Shun Culture - Programming against Asking Questions
Cult programming compounded on this fear of visibility and stigmatizing of questions with shame culture.
From school, I learned the fear of being seen as ignorant, "weird" or "holding other people back" in class with my questions.
In the church/cult, I learned that questions could be immoral. Shame culture was blasted at anyone who asked challenging questions of the leadership. Shaming someone who asked such questions carried the implications of judgement into the asker's personal motivations, and also taught everyone listening that you really didn't want anyone to see into your heart and personal motivations, because, God knew, you were filthy inside, and that was the whole reason you'd needed salvation to save you from your sins.
Further questioning would lead to stronger and stronger implications and then outright accusations of having sinful and impure motives as the speculated "cause" of why one would "nitpick" at God's apparently "clear-cut", "self-evident" and "unambiguous" commands.
To further insist on clarification or even imply that these answers were not clear-cut and universally understandable by everyone5, something which risked undermining the church leader or pastor's teaching and came dangerously close to encouraging doubt in his supremacy, may escalate to stronger accusations, until the asker fell silent.
If you still did not stop asking challenging questions of your leaders, this would escalate to outright declarations that the asker had some demonic spirit of division, possibly even shouting to exorcise you and prayer for "warfare" against your evil spirit, which you'd, of course, be expected to raise your hands and accept prayer for as an acknowledgement that your questions were immoral and harmful and not based on faith or from God.
The notion was that you still had an exit if you gave in to the pressure to "submit" to the "Holy Spirit's" "urging" or "correction", ie the phenomenon of peer pressure or intimidation from spectacle, to listen quietly and obediently and to show yourself submissive to the authority of the leaders and thus, no longer a threat to it.
If you still did not "submit" and asked questions then or revived them later on, your actions thus attributed to evil motives or an evil spirit, any persistence later on would be escalated further - now seen as willful sin and willful unrepentance, leading to you becoming the target of gossip and avoidance or covert shunning if your questions persisted.
Possibly at this point your "rebellion" could lead to your being excommunicated from this community. Bear in mind that if they'd been successful in full indoctrination, this was the only community you'd been allowed by the cult to truly rely on, in being conditioned to separate yourself and not get attached to other communities, being "in the world and not of the world".
So, in a nutshell, the price of asking questions was heavy and could cost you your very security.
The Wombo Combo
Thus, I learned instead to observe others, mirror their behaviours and avoid standing out, and often quietly figure out what had actually been taught later on in my own time, thus holding off all questions out of fear of asking "the wrong one".
As such, I'd become a master of invisibility behind my one-way mirror. In fact, I really relate to Kuroko, from the anime Kuroko no Basket, the basketball player who can make himself so unnoticeable he can "turn invisible".
Unlearning Not Learning - and Learning to Learn
So this is something I've been working to unlearn in gradually taking up space and actively asking questions and seeking answers instead of masking and hiding as I used to.
Fortunately, I now have access to the most awesome support system of friends and chosen family who genuinely love me as I am, and working my way through free therapy resources online (like Dr K aka Healthygamergg, whom you'll notice I post about a lot) has been really helpful!
Learning what healthy boundaries are and stopping masking has been an immense help. Asserting these boundaries and communicating my needs without apology for having them has also been crucial, as I have finally learned that while abusers will make you feel like you are not entitled to this, or that having needs or expressing hurt is somehow violent, this is not true. In fact, these things are necessary in order to be healthy, and you have the right to be yourself and to take up space.
Sadly I have had to sever ties with most of my relatives, due to the pushback and influence of my mother, but as I realised when I came out - nothing compares to the immense joy I found in being my true self! And I would sacrifice any and every good relationship just for that privilege, because, unlike when I was in the cult, now I know what it is like to truly live!
So for anyone else struggling with questions that aren't being answered the way they need, who are on a quest for truth, and with finding the courage to be themselves - it is truly worth it, and you will find the type of people who love you for who you are! Don't give up being yourself and don't give up seeking truth! It gets so so much better as you find answers and find yourself, and that makes it easier to find other people who get and accept you, the real you, too!
1 According to the BITE model's basic definitions, which is confirmed by other survivors who have also left the organisation.
2 Funnily enough, all I'd done was put my foot down and remain unswayed, no "cruelty" involved.
3 and she finally believed I was serious and wouldn't "come around" when I got to my late 20s! (So, not actually that a surprise, though I'm not sure how much of that was an act, given her character!)
4 It's not actually "scientifically accurate" to call trans people "biologically" the opposite sex - that's actually based on TERFy rhetoric and problematic debunked pseudoscience centred around conversion therapy. One day I'll write an article summarising and linking all the research on this, but for now, Julia Serano, biologist and author of Whipping Girl has a great comprehensive explanation of this.
5 If morality was universal, I, as an autistic person, certainly didn't get the memo on some of the more finicky details. The Bible could be pretty vague and confusing, some of the rules laid down by the church pastors weren't necessarily listed in the Bible, or the Bible didn't necessarily lend itself to those interpretations. Further undermining it was the different translations, all of them in English rather than the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
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