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Dealing With Threats

© Svali

I am at work, and one of my responsibilities as office manager is to answer the phone. In this age of privacy, almost one fourth of my customers have 'private' or 'caller unknown' as their identification on my caller i.d. machine. So I think nothing of answering the call identified as 'caller unknown'.

''Why aren't you dead yet?'' the voice asks, then hangs up.

I sit there, feeling as if I have been kicked in the stomach. It hurts most because the call comes from a source close to me: my mother, a leader in the group that I left, who is very angry with me for my decision. Apparently she would rather have her child dead than out, and this hurts.

One of the issues that most survivors leaving an abusive cult must face is that of receiving threats from the group. These threats can take various forms, including:

-Hang up calls. These can occur in sequences meant to trigger a survivor, or else the cult escapee may be literally flooded with dozens of hang up calls, one after another. The message is obvious: the calls communicate to the survivor silently that the cult knows where they are.

-Phone threats: these are verbal messages meant to intimidate and harass. For instance, when I first considered leaving the cult, I got a phone call from San Diego. There was a baby crying in the background, then the sound of a young child screaming. The caller, a man, then said, ''Isn't it nice to know that your children are still alive?'' My children were in San Diego, living with my husband, and I was being told that there safety depended on my decisions.

-Accessing calls: these are similar to the hang up calls, but when the survivor answers, tones are played, music may be played, or a name spoken which is meant to trigger an alter to come out. For instance, the person calling may ask, '' Is Karen there?'' This is an alter created in the person who is supposed to be triggered out. If for some reason the alter is not triggered out (i.e. the survivor is working in therapy to break this programming) then the caller will say, ''I'm sorry, I have a wrong number.'' This makes it sound innocent, but a survivor should be suspicious if there are 50 'wrong numbers' in the period of a day or two.

Phone threats and messages are the first level of threats that a survivor will face. But if for some reason they anger individuals in the group, or if the group wants the survivor back badly enough, then the next level of threat can occur. This is abduction and harming the survivor.

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