I feel for everyone losing friends and family to the QAnon cult.
I lost several new friends to it recently, people I had come to love deeply and was somewhat dependant on. I thought I had discovered a new tribe of open-hearted, loving souls who embraced me and my family and were on the right side of history on matters of human rights. It confused me, scared me, and cut me deeply when I discovered that these people had become QAnon believers and started saying things that were so clearly elitist, racist, mysogynist, and transphobic. I tried several times to reason with some of them, to no avail.
My attempts to understand the QAnon perspective and to try to find ways to preserve our connection caused trouble in my partnership. My partner had plenty of prior knowledge of Q and saw this cult coming. He watched this decline in our friends and my attempts to stay connected to them and worried he would lose me to the same cult. We had a few conflicts where I thought he was being too judgemental against our friends and he thought I was being too forgiving/accepting of QAnon’s teachings and their supporters.
It took me a while to give up on these people and it broke my heart to do it. I was so hurt and offended that supporting trump and defending his transphobia and other evils was more important to them then our friendship. Sometimes they even tried to debate with me and convince me to accept Trump. I tried to ‘agree to disagree’ for a while and eventually these “friends” pulled away from us…probably at least in part for being “evil Democrats who support pedophiles” (direct quote from one of them). I finally accepted that they were lost to this cult and the only thing I could do was to get some distance and hold strong boundaries with them so I could stop feeling angry and hurt by their words and posts. Once I did this, a lot of tension lifted off my life and my relationship with my partner.
The experience caused me a lot of confusion and fear over my own discernment and character judgement. If I’d let myself love and trust and become dependent on people who then reveal themselves to be transphobic Trump supporters, how can I create a good life for myself and my daughters? How can I trust anyone!!?
Reading about the QAnon phenomena has helped to heal the hurts I felt from these experiences and to forgive these friends and myself. As I’ve been hearing more about this rise in QAnon followers, I have come to understand that it’s not personal. QAnon is a shrewd cult, exploiting sophisticated psychological methods to draw in people from the New Age community. QAnon believers have had their reality so rearranged by this cult that they truly do not realize that they are furthering efforts to hurt already marginalized communities and are actually impeding true efforts to stop child trafficking. The ones I’ve tried to talk to don’t seem to even be able to comprehend how they are hurting me and my daughter. They just feel sorry for me that I can’t “wake up to what’s really going on” like they think they have.
It’s still heartbreaking to lose beloved friends but I am grateful that QAnon didn’t pull me in, hasn’t ruined my partnership, and that I haven’t lost longtime friendships or family to it. So far. To my friends who are going through intimate relationship ruptures, I feel for you. My advice is to hold strong boundaries around your own reality and heart-knowing, and enforce these boundaries with compassion for those lost to the cult. You can’t save them by going in after them. I hope they all find their way back to the light and the right side of history in time.
