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Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune
Margaret Hollenbach
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. ISBN 0826334636
(paperback), 184 pages, $16.95.
Reviewed by
Alexandra Stein
In 1970, Margaret Hollenbach spent a few short but
formative months as a member of The Family, a small commune in Taos, New Mexico
(not to be confused with the much larger and well-known group of the same name,
previously known as the Children of God). Something about this experience stuck
with her so that, although soon after leaving the group she wrote about it for
her master’s thesis in anthropology, she still felt a compulsion to come back to
the story and publish this new memoir three decades later. As she says in the
Preface of this book, in relation to why she felt she needed to return to this
experience:
While I am satisfied that I wrote
an accurate description of how The Family worked at the time I was a member, I
tabled a discussion of why I joined, what really happened to me on an emotional
level, why I left, and what I learned. My experience in The Taos Family remained
an undigested lump somewhere in the back of my mind.
For years I was ashamed of myself
for having chosen [...] a group that turned out to have millenarian beliefs that
I thought were foolish and a charismatic leader who, in spite of all that was
said about his reluctance to lead and his voluntary giving up of power, wielded
considerable authority and gave the group the characteristics of a cult (p. ix).
Hollenbach’s lively and quite gripping memoir is a useful
and honest study of a small, loosely organized, and yet highly controlling
group. Although the analytical portion of this book isn’t particularly strong,
her personal narrative is a helpful and interesting addition to the
cultic-studies literature.
Hollenbach recounts the details of cultic control with
which we are, in a general way, familiar. The leader, Lord Byron (leadership
personnel, oddly, were given titles such as Lord, Lady, Mistress, and Sir), is
an ex-con who, she suggests, may have learned his manipulative techniques while
doing time for armed robbery in San Quentin prison. She describes Lord Byron as
both charismatic and authoritarian, with an underlying violence that he
seemingly consciously suppresses. Lord Byron uses sex—he sleeps with all the
women in the commune—as part of his system of control. Assuring his dominance in
the group, he breaks apart couples who have “special bonds” because a “tight
couple takes energy away from the group.” In a similar vein, parents could be
sent away from their children, supposedly to show them how others in the group
were just as able to care for their kids, despite the chaotic and unreliable
reality of the group’s care for the youngsters.
In the spirit of the early 1970s, the core group activity
is “the Gestalt,” wherein any member who is having “problems” might be called to
the hot seat and grilled by the community. Along with the complete lack of
privacy (55 members live in a three-bedroom house in Taos), financial or any
other independence, and breached personal and sexual boundaries, “the Gestalt”
is a key tool in Lord Byron’s manipulative arsenal. Here, the group cajoles,
criticizes, and generally enforces Lord Byron’s will, leaving Hollenbach in
tears and a state of confusion. Perhaps this induced confusion is the
“undigested lump” Hollenbach was still grappling with when she set out to write
this memoir.
It is now well demonstrated that creating a narrative of
one’s cultic (or other traumatic) experience has clear benefits in resolving
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Although certain scholars of new
religious movements dismiss this type of account as an “atrocity tale,” it can
undoubtedly be more usefully looked at as part of a personally helpful
“digestion” process. It is in this process that one can step through and
understand the fear, confusion, and dissociation induced in the cult, thus
helping the former member to integrate and gain mastery over his or her
experience. In this sense, these personal narratives can have a two-fold
function: first, to provide data for future scholars, and second, to help the
writer resolve a difficult and usually frightening experience.
Hollenbach tells us that “it was physically easy but
emotionally excruciating to leave.” Luckily for her, her father stays in touch
with her during this sojourn, and with the help of the monthly checks he sends,
she is able to leave when she gets pushed beyond her limits, despite having
given up all her possessions to the group. When she leaves the group after her
short tenure, Lord Byron curses her in a kind of frightening, cult-leader
cliché, prophesying that “You will end by killing yourself” and announcing “I am
the Messiah!” These are quotes he must have taken straight from Cult
Leadership for Dummies, a bestseller which, though yet to be written, is
apparently already widely read.
Hollenbach’s final analysis, however, is cloudy. She states
that The Family was “founded and organized with good intentions.” Given Lord
Byron’s criminal background and manipulative behavior, one wonders what evidence
she has for this statement. Certainly the members seem to wish to do good, and
to this end they staff various enterprises such as a free clinic, childcare
center, and general store. But one wishes Hollenbach would differentiate further
the motivations of followers from those of Lord Byron who, ultimately, makes all
the decisions, controls all the money (at one point squandering so much that
followers are forced to scavenge wild asparagus to supplement a rice-and-beans
diet), and controls all of his followers’ relationships.
In the Afterword, Hollenbach writes, “The fact that I
experienced the group as coercive had as much to do with me as with others.” She
continues, “A person always has choices about how to deal with coercive
situations,” yet she immediately follows this statement by retelling how her
father “persisted in writing me his newsy letters with checks enclosed.” The
fact she had help from her father is in stark contrast to others in the group
who had no external resources and therefore far more limited options. One
wonders what happened to these members who perhaps didn’t have as much “choice”
as she; unfortunately, Hollenbach isn’t able to shed light on this. While I
greatly appreciate her telling of this story—and from my own experience I have
some understanding of the effort required to remember, relive, and, finally,
write such a narrative—this cloudiness of analysis could play into the hands of
relativist scholars who see only benign alternative lifestyles where
manipulative control and dominance by charismatic authoritarian leaders is
actually at work.
Lost and Found is a good read and a useful addition
to the personal-narrative cult literature. What it lacks in clear analysis is
compensated by the lively and honest telling of an experience that is both
reflective of the unique period of the early ‘70s and demonstrates the classic
dynamics of coercive persuasion within a cultic environment.
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