The Unseen Divide
Years after leaving the Church of Bible Understanding, I began to notice something strange in ordinary conversations. I’d be talking with someone—maybe a coworker over coffee, or a new friend at a dinner party—and suddenly I’d see it: layers beneath their words that they themselves seemed blind to. A subtle shift in tone that masked insecurity, a performative enthusiasm hiding doubt, or the quiet way power dynamics played out in a group without anyone naming them. I’d understand things about people, about situations, that felt as clear to me as daylight, yet they sailed right past everyone else.
At the same time, I often felt like I was running to catch up mentally with the simplest things. Small talk about weekend plans or popular TV shows could leave me grasping for footing. The rhythm of normal life—its lightness, its unexamined assumptions—sometimes felt foreign, like trying to join a dance where everyone else knew the steps from childhood. I’d nod along, smile, but inside I was translating everything into a different language, one forged in sixteen years of hyper-vigilance, constant self-scrutiny, and survival inside a closed world.
This double-edged awareness became one of the quietest, most persistent after-effects of COBU. The group had trained us to read between every line—Stewart’s sermons were riddles wrapped in accusations, and every meeting was a minefield of unspoken loyalties and betrayals. We learned to detect the faintest sign of disapproval, to anticipate shifts in the collective mood before they surfaced. That skill didn’t vanish when I walked out the door in 1992. It stayed, sharpened, and turned outward.
Now I could spot manipulation from a mile away—not just the overt kind, but the soft, everyday versions people use without realizing it. A boss who flatters to control. A friend who guilt-trips to keep you close. A charismatic speaker who promises easy answers to hard questions. I saw the invisible threads pulling at people, the same kind that once pulled at me. And most of the time, the people caught in them had no idea the threads were even there.
But the cost was a kind of perpetual out-of-sync feeling. While others moved easily through the surface of life, I was often underwater, hearing echoes they didn’t. Celebrations felt muted because I couldn’t stop noticing what was missing or forced. Casual confidence baffled me—I’d spent years being told I had none, and then years more rebuilding it in secret. I understood depths that many people never have to visit, but I sometimes envied their ability to skim the surface without sinking.
If you’ve ever left a high-control group, you might recognize this. It’s not that we’re smarter or more broken than anyone else. It’s that we’ve lived with a different gravity. We know what it feels like to have your mind reshaped slowly, drip by drip, until your own thoughts don’t always feel like your own. That knowledge gives us eyes for certain truths, but it also leaves us standing a little apart, seeing what others don’t, and missing what they take for granted.
I don’t regret the seeing. Those hard-won insights have protected me more than once. But I do wish, sometimes, that I could turn the volume down—that I could laugh at a joke without also hearing the insecurity behind it, or join a conversation without translating every word into the old language of control and approval.
This is part of what it’s like on the other side. Not just freedom, but a new kind of quiet strangeness. A mind that won’t unlearn what it learned in the dark, even when the lights are finally on.
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