Hi, I am new to this. Never really considered reaching out to a group or forum with people with similar experiences.
My life I can only really described as being cultlike and stylised in a very strange way. The subject of Satanism played a large part in my 'bunk', despite myself and my family being hardcore Atheistic. I held many of these beliefs until a couple of years ago when I managed to get out.
I have believed in conspiracy theories since I can actually remember. I even remember having a conversation with my dad when I was maybe 5 years old, he told me that the government was evil and want to do bad things to me and my family. Occasionally if a particularly horrible news story would come on my dad would explain sometimes in excruciating detail what happened in these stories, even when I was much too young to understand things like murder or paedophillia. Around this time both my parents were very much on the 9/11 conspiracy theory, I got my first taste of the living meme Alex Jones when I was 8 or 9. Occasionally they would mention weird cults, worship of devils and demons and human sacrifice, kinda a weird thing to think about when you're at an age where you can barely get your head around death in Film. Sometimes they would be really weird about films and say they heard "messages" that were being sent to "elites", I remember they really tried to discourage me from watching The Simpsons because of the "messages", we also didn't have a TV and I wasn't allowed to play video games at time because of the "subliminal messaging" that they believed would make me want to join the army or become violent. At this time my parents were nuts, but they were going To get a lot worse. Keep in mind, I was an only child so I had no sibling to get an outside view from.
When I was about 10 my parents and me went to live in the countryside, my dad had been talking a lot about Global Warming and how it was a hoax. He had quit cigarettes recently, so he decided he was an expert and wrote a book, which, of course linked conspiracies with smoking. Because he had written this book he decided he was an Author now and he began writing a book on Global Warming called C02 The Debate Is Not Over. The book was a terrible alternative explanation to Global Warming or Climate Change, full of contradictions and Ad-Hominems, basically if you didn't agree with him, you were either an idiot or a liar. He spammed this book on multiple forums, attacking everyone who dared to criticise him or the books contents. Despite this book's flawed contents I believed he was right, at the time he was my hero and I believed every word, I even stood up in the middle of a class about global warming at school and explained everyone in that class why they were wrong and they had been lied to by the shadow government when I was 12. I went back into home education shortly after this.
For the following years, my world beliefs, or my imposed beliefs consisted of: 9/11 being an inside job, a satanic shadow government were controlling all of us who worshipped an owl god which was somehow related to a jewish deity and sacrifices children to it, world war 2 never happened, the moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrik and there was clues to it in all of his movies, all entertainment was directly connected to the secret shadow government and they put messages in everything, I believed there were government assassins looking into my window with snipers at night, chem trails, population control, everyone is a "gatekeeper" even the people who agree with you and too many more to name.
As the years went on and I got older, went to university and made friends I experienced something very foreign to me, people who were smarter than me challenging my views. This began to open my mind to alternative possibilities. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I had been lied too. I eventually went back up my ass and stopped listening to other people's views, I just stopped talking about it when I was with my friends. At home my dad was becoming more unhinged, as I was becoming an adult he seemed to be more comfortable being physically abusive to me, this made me obviously want to distance myself from him and his views, but this was a slow process. It started with the anti-semetic stuff he would say, I became very uncomfortable with his generalisation of such a large group of people and his rhetoric stopped making sense to me, then I realised many of his quotes that he would rely on to prove his point were either miss quoted or accredited to the wrong person. During the first lockdown he was obviously on all the conspiracies, from "it was manufactured" to "it's not real and doctors are killing people", he even came up with a couple of funny ones he managed to relate to covid such as "the commies are turning the paint grey", still a mystery to me that one. I also educated myself on vaccines and in doing so disregarded my previous anti-vax opinions.
The last big thing for me was Satanism. My dad had mentioned a video called Frazzle.drp, he talked about it as if he had seen it, but when I asked he said he hadnt. The video is supposedly meant to be Hilary Clinton and her Campaign vice chair in 2016 killing a child and wearing it's face. This genuinely scared me so much I can't even explain, but as all my other previous conspiracy views were crumbling with every new piece of information I found, i decided i needed to see if it was real, so like a genius I went looking for it. Instead of finding a horrific video of satanic proportions, instead found a very sad and seemingly quite racist smear-campaign, I found an article debunking the content and the claims about it, the content being a grainy video of what looked to be someone wearing a Halloween mask, and a picture from an Indian Restaurant called hush, which had been edited into a sepia tone. Considering Huma Abedin is from Indian and Pakistani descent and the image in question was supposed to be of her, this comes across as very racist to me. After seeing this, the most scary thing that I could possibly have imagined, and found out it was a load of bunk, I think I must have just internally given up and stopped believing in it, it was so exhausting believing this and such a waste of time and emotion.
Shortly after this my dad overstepped yet another personal boundary and I ended up moving out. I miss him and my mum in a lot of ways, but I don't feel I really knew who they really were. Their entire existence is made up of conspiracy theories. I genuinely don't remember a day when they didn't talk about it. I'm currently in therapy for what they put my through and it has left me with a Lot of anxiety, depression, ocd and led me to having very severe suicidal thoughts. I am doing much better compared to how I was around 5 years ago when I was deep in it, but this stuff leaves a mark and I don't know if it will ever really go.
Thanks if you got this far. I know this is sadly not rare, and I really want to help people with this, escaping the rabbit hole really helped to put a lot of my past in context, and it has inspired me to try to help people too, I'm currently making a video on the Satanic Panic, I hope it can possibly demystify one of the many topics that has haunted me for so long.
Thanks again for reading and I'm excited to be part of this.
My life I can only really described as being cultlike and stylised in a very strange way. The subject of Satanism played a large part in my 'bunk', despite myself and my family being hardcore Atheistic. I held many of these beliefs until a couple of years ago when I managed to get out.
I have believed in conspiracy theories since I can actually remember. I even remember having a conversation with my dad when I was maybe 5 years old, he told me that the government was evil and want to do bad things to me and my family. Occasionally if a particularly horrible news story would come on my dad would explain sometimes in excruciating detail what happened in these stories, even when I was much too young to understand things like murder or paedophillia. Around this time both my parents were very much on the 9/11 conspiracy theory, I got my first taste of the living meme Alex Jones when I was 8 or 9. Occasionally they would mention weird cults, worship of devils and demons and human sacrifice, kinda a weird thing to think about when you're at an age where you can barely get your head around death in Film. Sometimes they would be really weird about films and say they heard "messages" that were being sent to "elites", I remember they really tried to discourage me from watching The Simpsons because of the "messages", we also didn't have a TV and I wasn't allowed to play video games at time because of the "subliminal messaging" that they believed would make me want to join the army or become violent. At this time my parents were nuts, but they were going To get a lot worse. Keep in mind, I was an only child so I had no sibling to get an outside view from.
When I was about 10 my parents and me went to live in the countryside, my dad had been talking a lot about Global Warming and how it was a hoax. He had quit cigarettes recently, so he decided he was an expert and wrote a book, which, of course linked conspiracies with smoking. Because he had written this book he decided he was an Author now and he began writing a book on Global Warming called C02 The Debate Is Not Over. The book was a terrible alternative explanation to Global Warming or Climate Change, full of contradictions and Ad-Hominems, basically if you didn't agree with him, you were either an idiot or a liar. He spammed this book on multiple forums, attacking everyone who dared to criticise him or the books contents. Despite this book's flawed contents I believed he was right, at the time he was my hero and I believed every word, I even stood up in the middle of a class about global warming at school and explained everyone in that class why they were wrong and they had been lied to by the shadow government when I was 12. I went back into home education shortly after this.
For the following years, my world beliefs, or my imposed beliefs consisted of: 9/11 being an inside job, a satanic shadow government were controlling all of us who worshipped an owl god which was somehow related to a jewish deity and sacrifices children to it, world war 2 never happened, the moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrik and there was clues to it in all of his movies, all entertainment was directly connected to the secret shadow government and they put messages in everything, I believed there were government assassins looking into my window with snipers at night, chem trails, population control, everyone is a "gatekeeper" even the people who agree with you and too many more to name.
As the years went on and I got older, went to university and made friends I experienced something very foreign to me, people who were smarter than me challenging my views. This began to open my mind to alternative possibilities. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I had been lied too. I eventually went back up my ass and stopped listening to other people's views, I just stopped talking about it when I was with my friends. At home my dad was becoming more unhinged, as I was becoming an adult he seemed to be more comfortable being physically abusive to me, this made me obviously want to distance myself from him and his views, but this was a slow process. It started with the anti-semetic stuff he would say, I became very uncomfortable with his generalisation of such a large group of people and his rhetoric stopped making sense to me, then I realised many of his quotes that he would rely on to prove his point were either miss quoted or accredited to the wrong person. During the first lockdown he was obviously on all the conspiracies, from "it was manufactured" to "it's not real and doctors are killing people", he even came up with a couple of funny ones he managed to relate to covid such as "the commies are turning the paint grey", still a mystery to me that one. I also educated myself on vaccines and in doing so disregarded my previous anti-vax opinions.
The last big thing for me was Satanism. My dad had mentioned a video called Frazzle.drp, he talked about it as if he had seen it, but when I asked he said he hadnt. The video is supposedly meant to be Hilary Clinton and her Campaign vice chair in 2016 killing a child and wearing it's face. This genuinely scared me so much I can't even explain, but as all my other previous conspiracy views were crumbling with every new piece of information I found, i decided i needed to see if it was real, so like a genius I went looking for it. Instead of finding a horrific video of satanic proportions, instead found a very sad and seemingly quite racist smear-campaign, I found an article debunking the content and the claims about it, the content being a grainy video of what looked to be someone wearing a Halloween mask, and a picture from an Indian Restaurant called hush, which had been edited into a sepia tone. Considering Huma Abedin is from Indian and Pakistani descent and the image in question was supposed to be of her, this comes across as very racist to me. After seeing this, the most scary thing that I could possibly have imagined, and found out it was a load of bunk, I think I must have just internally given up and stopped believing in it, it was so exhausting believing this and such a waste of time and emotion.
Shortly after this my dad overstepped yet another personal boundary and I ended up moving out. I miss him and my mum in a lot of ways, but I don't feel I really knew who they really were. Their entire existence is made up of conspiracy theories. I genuinely don't remember a day when they didn't talk about it. I'm currently in therapy for what they put my through and it has left me with a Lot of anxiety, depression, ocd and led me to having very severe suicidal thoughts. I am doing much better compared to how I was around 5 years ago when I was deep in it, but this stuff leaves a mark and I don't know if it will ever really go.
Thanks if you got this far. I know this is sadly not rare, and I really want to help people with this, escaping the rabbit hole really helped to put a lot of my past in context, and it has inspired me to try to help people too, I'm currently making a video on the Satanic Panic, I hope it can possibly demystify one of the many topics that has haunted me for so long.
Thanks again for reading and I'm excited to be part of this.
