The residual machinery of a decade spent in a high-demand group does not simply vanish the moment you stop turning up to the park or hand in your resignation to an apocalyptic broadsheet. It lingers in the neurological wiring, hiding inside the tiny, mundane corners of a suburban existence in Christchurch. You might imagine that escaping a messianic narcissist who claims to control the cosmos would leave you feeling entirely unburdened, breathing the crisp South Island air with the easy posture of a liberated man. In reality, the deprogramming is an ongoing, daily autopsy of minor psychological defects that reveal just how thoroughly your internal operating system was corrupted.

Take, for instance, my absolute inability to exist inside a quiet room.

To an ordinary person, quiet is a desirable commodity. It is something people seek out after a long day at work, a soothing absence of friction. To my brain, however, pure silence is an immediate, high-stakes threat environment. For over thirteen years, silence in Falun Gong was not peace; it was an exhausting, high-intensity spiritual battlefield. Silence meant sitting in an agonising double-lotus position for an hour while holding your arms in rigid hoops until your shoulders felt as though they were being scorched with a blowtorch. Silence meant “Sending Righteous Thoughts” four times a day, staring at the wall or closing your eyes while mentally chanting formulaic incantations to eliminate invisible, shape-shifting cosmic demons in other dimensions. Silence was where your internal thoughts were subjected to rigorous self-flagellation, where every fleeting memory, every normal human desire, and every flicker of doubt was scrutinised and discarded as a filthy “attachment” or “demonic interference”.

As a consequence of that prolonged mental gymnastics routine, my post-cult brain views silence as a vacuum that must be filled before the old paranoid rhetoric crawls back into the void. Today, my flat in Christchurch functions as an ongoing broadcast studio. From the moment my feet touch the floorboards in the morning, something must be producing sound. The television hums quietly in the corner, a podcast drones through a speaker in the kitchen, or the radio babbling away in the background while I make a cup of tea. It is not that I am paying strict attention to whatever commentary or music is playing. It is simply that the ambient noise acts as a protective shield, an auditory fence that prevents my thoughts from running wild into the dark, chaotic undergrowth of my own mind. If the background noise stops, the stillness becomes instantly overwhelming, and the internal volume of my own nervous system turns up to a deafening roar.

There is, curiously, exactly one exception to this rule. I can endure total silence if I go tramping on my own in the backcountry. Put me on a track in the Arthur’s Pass or deep in the Canterbury beech forests, miles away from another human being, and the silence suddenly feels clean. Nature does not demand that I eliminate my karma, it does not expect me to save sentient beings before nightfall, and it certainly does not care about my xinxing. Out on the trail, the quiet is just air moving through tussock and water running over greywacke stones. It is the only place where my brain recognises that the universe is not actually trying to interrogate me.

The second lingering structural flaw is the complete destruction of my ability to read a book.

Before I fell down the spiritual rabbit hole in the late 1990s, I was an avid reader. I enjoyed books, digested ideas, and appreciated the quiet rhythm of turning pages. The cult, however, systematically ruined that basic human pleasure through the sheer, brute-force repetition of “Fa-study”. In Falun Gong, you are expected to read the primary text, Zhuan Falun, for up to two hours every single day. You do not read it for intellectual engagement, literary appreciation, or critical analysis; critical analysis is explicitly condemned as a dangerous, ego-driven defect. You read it to absorb the Master’s instructions on a subatomic level.

You read the exact same nine chapters over and over and over again, in a continuous, endless loop. You read it individually in the evening, and then you sit in a circle with other practitioners at weekend study groups to read it aloud, paragraph by paragraph, for hours on end. Naturally, when you force a human brain to process the exact same dense, repetitive, pseudo-scientific cosmic assertions for two hours a day, seven days a week, year after year, the organ rebels. My primary coping mechanism during those endless study sessions was micro-sleeping. My eyelids would grow heavy, the text would smudge into a grey, meaningless blur, and my head would nod forward as my consciousness mercifully checked out to escape the monotony.

Decades later, that reflex remains permanently hardwired into my physiology. The simple act of picking up a book now acts as a powerful general anaesthetic. I can be wide awake, brimming with energy, and genuinely interested in a topic, but the moment I sit down and open a bound book, my brain instantly recognises the physical cue and assumes we are back at a mandatory group study session in 2004. Within three pages, my eyes begin to glaze over, my focus evaporates, and an overwhelming wave of lethargy sweeps over me. It is a deeply frustrating form of neurological vandalism. The movement took one of the most fundamental tools of human learning and enjoyment and transformed it into a Pavlovian trigger for immediate cognitive collapse.

Perhaps the most absurd and revealing example of this lingering conditioning, however, occurred just recently on my dining table.

I needed a new winter jacket. Christchurch winters are not gentle; the southerly blasts come straight off the Antarctic shelf, slicing through the city with a damp, bone-chilling cold that makes proper layering a matter of basic survival. My existing cold-weather gear was battered and threadbare, so I did something entirely normal for a forty-nine-year-old adult living in Aotearoa. I went online, found a suitable, smart-looking winter jacket, saw that it was marked down in a forty percent off clearance sale, and entered my credit card details.

It was a sensible, mundane, and heavily discounted transaction. Yet the moment I clicked the final confirmation button, the old spiritual alarm bells began to ring inside my skull.

In the twisted moral economy of the cult, spending time, effort, or money on your own physical comfort and appearance was viewed with immense suspicion. We were taught that resources should be hoarded and funneled exclusively into “clarifying the truth” or supporting the movement’s media tridents. Self-care was labelled as selfishness; buying nice things for yourself was framed as a pitiful indulgence of the human ego, a clear sign that you were sliding backward into the dirty, illusionary world of “everyday people”. For over a decade, I had lived in drafty, overcrowded apartments, sleeping on top bunks in Bed-Stuy or dining on cheap legume paste and donated takeout, all while convincing myself that personal discomfort was a noble badge of spiritual purity.

A few days after I placed the order, the courier arrived and left the package on my doorstep. I brought the grey plastic courier bag inside and set it down on the dining table.

And there it sat.

I could not bring myself to open it. Every time I looked at that plastic parcel, a wave of intense, irrational guilt washed over me. My internal narrative, conditioned by years of systemic gaslighting, immediately started prosecuting me for the crime of buying a jacket. Who do you think you are? Why do you need a smart jacket? Is your ego so fragile that you need new clothes? That money could have been spent on something necessary, something productive. It was utterly irrational, a completely unhinged reaction to a forty percent off coat, but the emotional mechanism was entirely real. The unopened package sat on the middle of my dining table for seven full days like a piece of unexploded military ordnance or a radioactive isotope. I walked past it every morning to make my tea, staring at the white courier label, feeling the absurd, crushing weight of an institutional trap that I had formally escaped over a decade ago.

It took me a week to finally pick up a pair of scissors, slice open the plastic sleeve, and pull out the jacket. It fitted perfectly, it was warm, and it looked smart. Yet putting it on felt less like getting dressed and more like executing a minor act of political defiance against a ghost.

This is the unglamorous reality of cult survival. The grand, cinematic moments, the high-stakes international deportations, the high-court circuses, and the dramatic escapes make for compelling prose when you are writing a memoir. But the real work of reclamation happens in these quiet, ridiculous struggles with a courier bag on a dining table, a hum of background radio noise, or three pages of an unread book. The trap does not just catch you by the ankle when you are inside it; it leaves its rusted teeth embedded in your psyche long after you have walked away, forcing you to dismantle the machinery piece by piece, one mundane afternoon at a time.

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