The Vow: Why Should I Care?
By: Sara Zarr
Tags: The Vow, Cults, Family Dysfunction, Recovery, Nxivm

A careful reading of the NXIVM story reveals some familiar truths.

Photo by Alex Eckermann on Unsplash

A few years ago while my husband and I were fully absorbed in Leah Remini’s A&E show, Scientology and the Aftermath, I turned to him and said, “And so what? Why do we care about this?”

Fair question, and one I’ve also found myself sometimes asking about the HBO docuseries, The Vow, about a small group of escapees from a cult or community or group or company — depending who you ask — called NXIVM. Why do we care about this small subset of mostly white, mostly privileged people who get unwittingly caught up in a particular kind of promise of success and enlightenment and power?

I’m a Gen-X kid, born right on the dot in 1970. I grew up in San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s. That meant I was there as Jim Jones’ People’s Temple ramped up in a big way. The shadow of Manson was all over California. I heard more about the “Moonies” than any kid needs to know, and was wary of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and anyone else who came knocking on our door to sell a belief system.

At the same time, my mother and sister and I were deeply engaged with our Jesus Movement church in the city. It provided a structure to life, community support, and a framework for dealing with the fact that my father was an acute alcoholic in ways that affected our day to day lives as well as our bigger existential challenges.

I’m 50 years old now and it took me until oh, about age 45, to start to really reckon with the morass of dysfunction I was in from both the problem of the alcoholic family system, and the solution I’d invested in (the American evangelical church). That is a lot to go into, but I’ve written about it here and here and here, for starters, as well as indirectly in most of my novels.

The thing about The Vow, the Remini show, and the numerous documentaries and books on cults I’ve gotten into is that they speak to something I experienced in microcosm. In much more common and mundane ways, yes, but ways that nonetheless have lasting impacts on how I navigate the world and myself in it.

In a way, every child of an alcoholic family system (or one that is otherwise chaotic, or one that is rigid, religious, or bubbling with mental illness) has grown up in a mini-version of at least some of what we see in cult narratives. The messages that your feelings and perceptions are wrong, the messages that you have to adhere to a certain set of beliefs and behavior or you will be rejected (or even kicked out, excommunicated, shunned), the being stuck in a place where you exist to get approval and/or avoid disapproval, the being at the mercy of a mercurial “leader” — often Dad, could be Mom or another family member, or a pastor, a coach, etc.

If people watch and hear these cult narratives carefully instead of immediately identifying themselves as someone who would “never fall for it,” many would recognize the traps of giving your critical thinking skills over to someone else, signing on to a set of beliefs that others could think are weird, the codependence, the orientation to the leader’s approval, and the gradual but profound erosion of a core identity that gives us a sense of being okay with or without that approval and the ability to trust our own gut and experiences.

These bigger and more dramatic stories help me stay in touch with an essential human vulnerability that we all more or less share — the desire to be a part of something, the longing for a mentor or guiding figure we can trust, that parent who, maybe this time, won’t abandon us. Cults are usually dealing with a much more sinister and calculated figure at the center of it all, but the end results can feel familiar.

I think we invest in these stories for the same reasons we might get into superhero stories or zombie stories or dystopian stories. The dramatic and exaggerated versions of these experiences can echo and amplify truth in a way that may actually help us finally see it.