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Cult experience shapes book
More articles on this topic: The Family : Lord ByronAuthor tells of life in Taos marriage commune
Margaret Hollenbach dropped out.
She abandoned her master’s degree in cultural anthropology and joined The Family, an apocalyptic cult that believed its members were the vanguard of the revolution.
Hollenbach wrote Lost and Found about the three most intense months of her life when she left her name and possessions to join a marriage commune in Taos in 1970.
“I really wanted to drop out,” she said. “I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to go to extremes and find out what it would be like to be completely different from what I had been brought up to be.”
She was 25. She met Lord Sean and Lady Samantha at a conference in Colorado. The next day she was packed and ready to go.
“What the group did was play on my own uncertainty and lack of self-esteem and niceness,” she said. “I was so worried about hurting their feelings by saying what I really thought. That’s something I shared with a lot of women.”
Hollenbach said though the ’60s were about change and idealism, the paradigm of patriarchy had yet to shift.
“We wanted to change society, but we didn’t want women to be fully powerful and equal to men,” she said. “That would be really scary.”
She said she was drawn in by the mystery of the landscape, the sexuality and the spirituality The Family offered. She said she wanted to know herself better.
Instead, she got more confusion.
“In some families - in any family - you get trained to see what you’re supposed to see and to not talk about things you’re not supposed to see,” Hollenbach said. “I had heavy training that way.”
The Family was made up of a core group of 10 people who had been together for three years, though many came and went. Hollenbach said the group fed on her insecurities and told her she was confused, training her not to trust her own perception.
Lord Byron, the group’s leader, “was telling me basically, yeah, lie down and roll over.” Byron, she said, had a firm financial and emotional hold on the group.
She said Lord Byron would tell them nutrition is B.S. - it doesn’t matter what you eat. Marriage is just a way for a woman to get control of a man, he would say, and art is junk.
“I would argue with him and he would say, ‘You have to trust me,’” she said. “And that kind of trust I didn’t have and didn’t want.”
Still, Hollenbach said she had some positive experiences with The Family too. She said she learned to trust because of a man named Noah whom she spent a lot of time with, and that she loved and was loved by a lot of people.
“I made close friends,” she said. “Because of the way it was set up, those aren’t long-term friendships. I don’t know where they are or what their real names are.”
Since then, Hollenbach has become interested in how people leave oppressive situations. Social psychologists, she said, have shown people will do amazing things for a sense of belonging.
She said a group like The Family could believe the world was going to end at a predetermined date and time.
“They could go to the top of the mountain and wait for the world to end,” she said.
When it didn’t happen, you would think they would say they were wrong and go into town for a cup of coffee and a job, she said.
“But they will cobble their beliefs together,” Hollenbach said. “I think it’s really healthy that I couldn’t do that.”
She said her urge to leave was physical.
“My body was saying, ‘You’re leaving,’” she said. “Intellectually I was all confused, but I had some core understanding.”
The Family was $20,000 in debt, and members deserted their home in Taos in the middle of the night a couple of months after she left.
But she still doesn’t know how she managed to get out.
“Do you believe things could be better and you deserve it, and you leave?” she said. “Or do you stay?”
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