Trauma in Dystopia
Trauma in Dystopia
Erin Hung
On High Demand Groups, Cultish Secrecy, and Science Fiction
In chemistry, the sense of smell is the result of compound molecules making contact with the olfactory nerves inside our noses. The alluring scent of a jasmine tree or the mouth-watering aroma of a home-cooked stew find their way into our bodies long before our eyes see the physical evidence of their existence. Our bodies are innately adept at experiencing realities in multiple sensory ways. “If it smells like it…” the saying goes.
I distinctly remember the day I read the victim impact statements in the aftermath of Ravi Zacharias’s unfolding scandal. The fragrance of courage infused with the devastation of soul-crushing trauma wafted into my being and lodged itself into my psyche. Not long after, our church board, which I was formerly part of, would use the devastating story as a springboard to discuss our own culture, and ways we could safeguard our pastor from the devilish temptations of the world. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but something smelled familiar. The hairs on my body stood up, tugging on my skin like a thousand tiny alarm bells—it smelled uncannily like a musty blanket of secrecy that I was long acquainted with.
In the days, weeks, and months after, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” by Christianity Today was released, and I devoured every episode like a mouse following the scent of crumbs in a meandering maze. I was fascinated by how our gospel of salvation could become entangled with such insidious abuse, and I tasked myself with learning about the dizzying characteristics of High Demand Groups (HDGs). Defined by their subtle coercive control methods—the “BITE” model coined by Dr. Steve Hassan—and contrary to common opinion, HDGs are not only the domain of kool-aid drinking hippie communes, but have become widely acknowledged to encompass a larger scope of thought-reform and secrecy within the most sophisticated systems—including that of Christian organizations.
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I drew my mind back to the few years during my teens, when I had delved deeply into the world of dystopian literature, captivated by the worlds of apocalyptic injustice that I had never experienced in my own relatively privileged life. At the brink of the millennium, the seminal cyberpunk film The Matrix (1999) was released, and it posed the possibility of the existence of a morbid unseen reality that diverged from status quo. Never would I have suspected that it would become an allegorical framework for my own understanding, and a lens that my friends and I would use decades later to evaluate corrupt systems of HDGs posing as gospel churches.
Like the artificial intelligence system in The Matrix, the HDG ideology becomes a parasite inside the mind of followers, all the while disguising itself as the ultimate reality. Unbeknownst to its hosts, it reshapes one's sense of autonomy in order to integrate the individual into the hive mind. In the case of faith-based contexts, it sinisterly hijacks biblical ideas, and adopts the warm language of the family, with members of the group seen as possessing the same “DNA.” “This here, around us, is thicker than blood,” my former leader often gestured towards us from his platform. A God-ordained leader, sometimes self-professed as “apostolic” or “prophetic” is heralded as the HDG’s father. He is the patriarchal glue that holds the family together, and without him the group has little identity. I remember the warm fuzzy feeling of being affirmed by a father figure like this, believing I had found a place of belonging in which I would be known. Yet, I would also sense an incongruence deep inside me, of fear mixed with awe, as if being in the presence of this person would somehow expose my inner shame. Later on, I would learn to name this as cognitive dissonance—I was trapped between two realities: the one that was taught to me contradicted another felt within my body.
In this kind of setting, an individual’s need for belonging—a legitimate, natural desire—is malleable for manipulation. The innate need repeatedly fuels a magnetic pull back to the system, until a person’s identity, and even sense of survival, are robustly fused to it. To that end, any criticism towards the system is seen as a threat and an affront to their very own personhood. Groups like this are often accused of financial, sexual, and spiritual abuse—the notorious triangle of money, sex, and power—but perceived cracks or systemic flaws are quickly cloaked in shame and hidden from view to protect the dominant narrative. “A mature son of the house covers his father’s nakedness,” is a lesson often misappropriated from Noah’s nakedness in Genesis 9. The uncanny parallel to the fabled cautionary tale somehow never came to mind during my time there: whenever the Emperor is naked, surrounding leaders fawn about with imaginary threads to cover up his foolish secret.
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“If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name,” observed George Orwell in his influential work 1984. Orwell perceptively notes the power of denial as a central force within the dystopian reality. I had hidden this secret from myself, until other stories of abuse uncovered the corner of its well-camouflaged covering. A burgeoning scent rose up and revealed a stench. Buried and long-forgotten, the secret had a name, and its name was trauma.
KJ Ramsey, author and licensed therapist, insightfully perceives that trauma is what happens in the absence of a witness, or a “withness.” I would come to learn that trauma is not necessarily the instance of harm, but the lack of empathetic witness in its event and aftermath. Stories of trauma that happened in my own place of belonging, some almost decade-old, started to rise to the surface. I gave my attention not only to the words being told to me, but the scent that permeated between the lines. I would sit in the presence of freshly excavated stories, once buried by people who had lost hope of being heard, their smells swirling up to fill the room. One by one, told to me in the privacy of safe spaces; in homes, over dinner or coffee, on Zoom calls and messages; of mistreatment, mishandling, misogyny; of control, coercion, and gaslighting, each giving an insidious scent with the same baseline note. I grieved at the thought that these stories ever had to be buried. Caution from the book of Hebrews rang in my mind: do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2) What if we allowed these words to take us beyond the surface of offering meals and warm blankets, leading us to the depths of welcoming the broken-hearted within our own heart? What if radical hospitality means going against the grain of comfort to see the lives and trauma of the spirits and messengers who have lived a reality differently from ours?
At one point, I lived in a finely-tuned system that turned the harm and hurt of others either into a project we must fix or an anomaly to be eradicated, rather than generously enlarging our circle of comfort to include it as our collective experience. I imagine the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan crossing the street to avoid the vulnerable, because confronting their own complicity would have tumbled their own house of cards. Orwell may as well have been describing the devoutly religious: from now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst. To keep going, one must keep grief at bay as if it was a cyst.
The eclipse of grief and suffering is a grave personal cost to pay in exchange for the narrative of unique hope and victory. Within HDGs, one can marinate in the exceptional belief that the group holds the purest form of gospel truth, thus forming an us-versus-them mentality towards the world. If I was truly honest with myself, there was a period of time when I believed my faith to be more pure, and my walk more upright than other Christians outside of our group. I was devoted to hours of intimate prayer and worship daily, pursued biblical knowledge deeply, and fasted regularly. I believed I had God on direct line. In such a state, nothing felt quite so piously potent, even attractive, than the idea of being ridiculed by the world for being chosen by God.
In 2021, it came to light that a British discipleship group had apparently devoted themselves so fervently to the memorization of scripture, that any mistakes resulted in different forms of sexual grooming. My husband and I heartlessly chortled at the ridiculousness of this, until we remembered our own discipleship groups where members amassed “punishments” of hundreds of push-ups for not being able to deliver perfectly memorized Bible verses. The realization was a sobering moment. I recalled people passing out or vomiting, having videos filmed without consent and sent to the staff chat groups. I was next to a staff member when he received one such video of one of our mutual friends from a mandated morning work-out. I heard the low, pained groans through the audio. We joked that he needed the exercise, while I felt my stomach churn with discomfort. Regrettably, I could not pinpoint or name what that feeling was, nor did I have the courage to investigate it for the fear of being told I had an orphan heart. Fever-pitched fanaticism and the underbelly of sinister abuse are often two sides of the same coin, revealing both traumatic histories and our quest for belonging at whatever the cost. Until we fully come to understand trauma-bonding, a dynamic that most notably manifests as “Stockholm syndrome,” it would be near impossible to recognize our own place in its web, much less to be untangled from it.
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Fear and shame, as I experienced, are effective precursors to excellence and an essential component to victory. It is baked into the system as a necessary means to a purposeful end. An efficient totalitarian state, Orwell mused, maintains a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. If we were groomed to believe that our belonging was conditioned upon our servitude and sacrifice, it ensures that the system can continually be sustained by those who fear the loss of belonging if they ever stopped sacrificing. That is a heart-breaking thought, especially when we know that Jesus has already given us belonging that we could never lose.
The road to radicalization is paved with subtle, almost unnoticeable departures from orthodoxy. Having studied trauma and addictive behavior for almost a decade, I know too well that every cataclysmic outcome is a culmination of hundreds of minuscule subconscious decisions, made from untended trauma and unresolved pain. Dystopian fantasies are based in futuristic societies for this very reason—to serve as a looking glass into what might become if we do not faithfully seek out tools that untangle ourselves from trauma. The Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale did not transpire out of thin air, but out of a backstory of war and militarization. The story’s foretelling of the extreme subjugation of women serves as a chilling warning for us all: Misogyny is often a prominent piece of the puzzle that tells a bigger picture—a whiff of the odor of toxic institutions.
The way we treat vulnerable groups of people, namely women, is deeply revealing of our trajectory. The binary tendency to pigeon-hole entire groups of people into categories of “good” or “bad” indicates a sinister departure from the gospel’s way of seeing people as complex image-bearers of the Divine. I recall the soul-crushing devastation to have been demonized as “Jezebel” by church leaders behind closed doors, and labelled as “that kind of girl” accompanied by knowing glances.
Girl—the undertone was that of dismissal, directed even toward a fully-grown woman, mother-of-two, in her mid-thirties. Was I not worthy of defense as a multi-faceted person loved by God, as opposed to being reduced to a convenient caricature and a straw-woman to be beaten? In “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast, an episode called “The Things We Do to Women” gave me deeper insight into this dynamic. Although Mark Driscoll, the former leader of the now-dissolved church, was often personally coming to the aid of women as damsels-in-distress, the theology he preached revealed he believed women to belong in the home and to their husbands, for the purpose of having more babies. He saw life as inherently hierarchical, with the group he identified as at the top of the structure. Though he dressed it up as “covenant headship” Mike Cosper offers, “it was as though the only thing that could stop a bad, violent man from subordinating a woman was a good, violent man subordinating the same woman.” In the structural confines of hierarchy, women are called “free” as long as they remained inside their appointed positions in the hierarchy, dictated by those in power.
The color-coded uniforms in The Handmaid’s Tale may feel alien to us, but they are not a far-fetched metaphor for the truth within many HDGs. “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze,” the protagonist Offred observes. To categorize people may simplify the way we see our world; it may even bring order and productivity. Yet, in exchange, we strip ourselves and others the humanity we all deserve.
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The discussions on AI art and self-portraits happening within artistic circles posed for me a thought-provoking parallel to the HDG, and a fitting machinery-versus-humanity narrative typical of the dystopian genre. If portraits formed by human hands are a culmination of the artist’s experiences and perceptions of the world, AI portraits are compelling examples of the counterfeit. This work can strip the authenticity by imitating likeness but offering no comparison in substance. AI portraits tell an apparent story of a person, all the while suppressing the fullness and actuality of said story.
In what could be an interesting parallel, Jesus encounters a fig tree in Matthew 21 that imitated the likeness of a healthy, full-leaf tree, and yet produced no fruit. In a normal fig tree’s life cycle, the fruit came before the leaves; but this one was deceptive, and Jesus cursed it saying it would never bear fruit again. In an alarming sequence, not long after this, Jesus would charge into a temple to overturn the tables that represented fruitless religion. Like the cursed fig tree, religious deception was the kind of rage-inducing fruitlessness that Jesus hated.
I often pondered what Jesus meant in explaining what happened to the fig tree, when he told his disciples that the mountain of religion would be moved into the sea. I believe that one day, we will see it with our eyes. Fruitless, toxic religion will be completely destroyed. I suspect, as with much of what he said, Jesus was not mainly alluding to systemic reform, but to issues of the heart. He has been and always will be the one who destroys the toxic mountain inside of me.
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Encountering the secret of trauma, I had the decision to keep walking as the religious did, or to stop for the sake of the presence of the one suffering. Either way, I instinctively knew that the decision would pivotally inform the trajectory of everything going forward, and that nothing would ever be the same again. I remember whispering to God in the dead of the night, “What should I do?” The answer I received astounded me, because the voice that answered back told me that the choice was mine; and whatever I chose, I would be his beloved. Love handed me back my autonomy, for without the option of no, my “yes” would not be freely given. It was a deeply comforting reassurance, like a key that unlocked my millstone to religious submission. I was not coerced, I was free. In a rare moment of clarity, I remembered my deep formative desire to know his heart, and to go where he is—abandoning religion towards the broken-hearted, the marginalized, and the often disbelieved. Once uncovered, in the absence of secrecy and shame, the stench of trauma dissipated into the air. I would be free to wholeheartedly heal.
Erin Hung
Illustrator & Author
Erin is an illustrator, letterer, and workshop writer exploring how creativity can be used to foster, nurture and heal communities in our ever-isolating and fracturing times. She founded the “A-Z of Trauma Recovery,” a community of creatives seeking healing. Follow @erinhung_studio and #atozoftraumarecovery for the July release of art prompts. Erin is passionate about advocating for minority and marginalized voices, mental health awareness, and emotional wholeness through her illustration work and community art.
Photography by Zac Wolff
