During the past two years, the best way I coped with the process of leaving UBF was to watch movies.
I have watched many helpful movies, way more than the prior 20 years combined. I imagined myself as the main character. It was so liberating to see myself on the screen become untangled as freedom poured into my soul like living water.
Some of the movies were rather dark, but movies like “The 300” and “Iron Clad” helped me deal with the dark side of UBF that I had denied for so long.
Another movie I am re-watching is “The Village”. This movie tells a lot about how I lived in UBF, and says something about how I got free of the shepherd/sheep authority trap.
A good movie. When my wife and I saw that it in the cinema some years ago and we felt reminded of our time in UBF, too.
The line that stood out to me this week as I re-watched the movie was this near the end: “Your sacrifice has made our stories real.” The first generation who established the Village had to find a way to pass on the control of the Village to their children. They used real sacrifice to spin events into “real stories”.
This reminds me, looking back now, of what happened as I watched nearly 20 families leave UBF. Each time their leaving only took about 1 or 2 weeks, then they just disappeared. Various stories were then spun up that made it sound more appealing to stay in the UBF heritage and support it even more.
That explains a major reason why I’ve kept my “leaving story” going for almost 2 years now, so that people can see the facts and make up their own minds.
I really hope M. Night Shyamalan will make a sequel to this that shows how the young people threw off the lies and escaped the Village.