Perhaps you will have to look at the situation differently. There are many couples who come from diferent religious and ethnic backgounds and they learn to respect each other’s thing if they value their relationship. My aforementioned wife is German and I am American for example. It isn’t really a problem but we do sometimes have our “softspots”. You can’t talk to your wife about M, so be glad at least you can talk here. That probably isn’t all that helpful though, sorry. Perhaps there are other people who have a similar experience who might offer a suggestion.

But of course I’m not going to just leave it at that. When a premie leaves the fold, they need to talk about it. This is completely natural. The best candidates for this of course would be the people who were your friends at the time and also understood the situation -- i.e. your premie friends. So what happens? No way! Premies would (at least at the time) absolutely refuse to talk about it. Nothing nada forget it out the door go play in traffic fuck off. You could be lucky if they would talk to you at all. It was like being shunned by your Amish community. What is that? I mean imagine if you decided you didn’t want to be Catholic anymore. I think you could still talk to your Catholic friends about it and also your priest if he wasn’t a complete jerk.

So what were the choices? Either you talk to outsiders, who of course thought you were crazy and a fool. Or you could pay to talk to someone. Or you could try to forget the whole thing ever happened and repress it. As I couldn’t afford therapy I took the only option open to me and repressed the whole thing. This wasn’t sooo terrible I thought at the time, but I realize now, 20 years later, that it was pretty unhealthy. Finding the EPO website is the greatest therapy I could have, and allowed me to realize how many unresolved issues I had and most likely still have. Actually I went into a mild sort of depressive state for a few days after reading everything here. This has never happened to me in my entire life that I can remember, so it shows that something was going on. I imagine it its something like when you discover that you were sexually abused as a child.

So I have a question. I have a very strong feeling that M or his representatives told premies at the time (in the early 80s) NOT to talk to premies who left about M and K. Does anybody know if this is true?
I am reminded of one particular premie friend of mine. This guy would talk about anything. He loved to gossip. It was one of his great pleasures in life and he would tell me endless seedy stories about premies and honchos and finances or whatever else passed his frontier. Mind you M was always excluded from any disparagement. Otherwise nothing was sacred. After he got the picture I was out the door, he completely clammed up, like it was a directive he was following. Actually every now and then he would forget and something would slip, some financial scandal for example, then he would realize his mistake, get a slightly irritated look upon his face and dead silence. So how did M’s followers become so Medieval?