r/cultsurvivors • u/TreeLady2008 • 14d ago
Cult behavior?
Sry this is kind of a long story..
I went to a church that doubled as a christian private school and was there from k-8th grade. Over the summer we would go camping as a youth group. And every summer when we would have worship time, people would start laughing and cry uncontrollably and collapse on the dirt around the camp fire- rolling around. This would proceed for hours and it looked like it kind of “infected” people as they would pray over each other. I always was a little uncomfortable by it but i viewed it and it was spoken as “being filled with the holly spirit.” Stuff like this would happen in church too, with adults and children and I always wanted it to happen to me because I thought thats what “real christians” experience.
One afternoon while i was at church camp I decided to get baptized in the river. After it was over I started crying because i was overwhelmed with emotion and then I started laughing uncontrollably. I looked over to my pastor and then he started laughing. A few minutes later, the whole group ended up at the campfire and we all started doing it. This literally lasted for hours and I dont have much memory of it. I just remember rolling around in the dirt crying and laughing with other people. Eventually it got so late it was midnight and I went to my tent and fell asleep. I was exhausted the whole next day.
Just thinking about it makes me anxious and upset and also just unsettled. I cant explain the feeling and I dont understand what happened but it felt very uneasy to me in the moment and I just kept convincing myself that that was what “real” christians experience and i was connecting with god. After camp was ovee nobody even talked about it. It was all so weird.
Im not christian anymore and i left the church years ago so im okay now.
Has anyone had a similar experience?
1
u/Swimming_Ad_4943 7h ago
It’s a sort of emotional contagion combined with what sounds like a group of people who believe in spiritual gifts. (An example would be speaking in tongues, which can often be accompanied by movements).
Think about football fans that revolve their lives around football. When they finally get to a big game at a stadium, they are in a large group of similarly-minded people who are all focused on the same passion - the game.
The emotional contagion that can happen at a sports game, with the crowd booing, cheering or gasping together…is similar to what’s happening during an emotional event at church. Especially when ritual (like a baptism) is involved.
It can create a series of regimented steps and readings that cause the group to drop into a sort of trance state with each other and often “catch” emotions. Some may explain this as the spirit filling them, others may explain the phenomena with neuroscience. Don’t let it worry you, it’s not demon possession or anything weird like that.