There’s a sad story right there, to which I’ve alluded several times on this blog, and will eventually go into more detail, but now is not the time
[Note: A friend pointed out that the bulk of the plastic out there is on a
molecular scale, “Not the big glops of baggies and fishnet they show on the website. ” Here’s more information .]
Yet another email came from a European concerned about a sibling who had gone off the deep end with Access. I won’t print this one verbatim; I’ll just summarize. The person’s sibling, who had just turned forty, had been married for more than a decade and a half and was the parent of two young children. Apparently the sibling had undergone a radical personality/behavioral change since attending an Access weekend event. The whole family was worried. One of the correspondent’s other family members had paid a visit to the infatuated Accessory’s home and reported that throughout the visit, the latter remained sequestered in a locked room in the house, “ignoring the children, just reading these weird books and CD’s from the Access Consciousness. laughing strangely and behav[ing] as if on drugs.”
And this was apparently after only a relatively brief involvement with Access. The sibling was now also demanding a divorce and reportedly wouldn’t even talk to the dismayed spouse without first calling Access buddies so they could give advice over the phone about what the sibling should say to the spouse. The new Accessory had already spent thousands of euros on Access courses, books, and videos — and even worse, was taking the young kids to some Access youth classes.
I added that I knew the point was moot since it was, after all, Access that the person had chosen, but I wanted to gently help put things in a larger perspective for my correspondent
That last part is pretty disturbing but not surprising. Access is trying to capture the kiddie ple, here and here and here. (That last link is to the Access True Knowledge Foundation, which includes among its Board of Directors Houston heiress Curry Glassell. )
Anyway, my correspondent tried to reason with the sibling in an email, but only received a strange reply, the main message of which seemed to be that the Accessory’s kids “had never been happier” after being told about the divorce. “I am horrified to discover how much a person can be brain washed only after spending such a short time with these people,” wrote my correspondent.
The writer wanted recommendations of support groups or groups that work against cults and groups like Access. I recommended Rick Ross’s site as a resource, wishing there were a dedicated, Access-specific group. [Note: There is now; see addendum at the end of this post.
CC] Apart from that, my response was much like the ones I printed above, except I also suggested that maybe the sibling was unhappy to begin with or at least discontented — suffering from a bit of a midlife crisis, perhaps — and it was possible that Access merely provided a convenient stepping stone out of the old life and into a new one. Had it not been Access, it might very well have been someone or something else.
Cult or not, the results are often the same. Anyone who knows anything about cults or cult-like groups knows that the story my European correspondent shared is a very common one, as are the Access tales I’ve heard from others. There is nothing extraordinary about these stories, nothing really shocking to cult experts or observers. And whatever damage Access may have done, it certainly isn’t on the large scale of, say, Scientology (from which Access founder Gary Douglas almost certainly got some of his inspiration).