u/Character-Signal5587

I understand that ISKCON is rich and and that they have a strong PR/‘shush critics’ department but surely so do other cults that have recently been exposed on Netflix documentaries. Like the Twin Flame cult, the one on Osho, most recently that guy from the LDS church that started his own cult.

There’s so much horror and literal crime that’s gone down, surely good journalists/producers/film makers would have a full plate putting together a documentary to expose these charlatans.

Hi all, i found this sub today. I’ve been looking for a community like this for years.

My parents are direct disciples of Prabhupad. They joined Iskcon in the early 70s. My mum was 14 when she moved into a temple and my dad was 18. They were arranged married and had my older siblings whilst still living in the temple. My older siblings were gurukulis and my brother is likely to have been sexually SAd at the gurukul in New York in the early 80s.

My mum suffered endless years of abuse and trauma living in the temple with small kids, at times they put her and other women to live in basements with small kids in precarious conditions sometimes going hungry, whilst my dad and other men lived in fancy apartments. She had to sell books in the street for hours and hours every day and had all money collected taken my temple presidents. I have so many stories she’s told me about that time, it’s all really sad.

We’re brazilian so most of what we went through happened there. But my parents also lived in the US before I was born and I travelled to many countries as a devotee so experienced the movement from different perspectives. Now I live in the UK, i finally left the movement 8 years ago when I was 30 years old.

Even though I didn’t go to gurukul i experienced a lot of SA growing which I don’t feel ready to go into. Also the majority of friends i grew up with were also SAd, some cases are brutal. The sad part is that lots of them are still devotees.

My story with Iskcon may be different than most here because when I was 15 my parents left Iskcon and joined Gaudiya Math which is a different sector of the same thing, but way less westernised than Iskcon.

At the time, Iskcon leaders and gurus were enraged at anyone leaving Iskcon to join Gaudiya Math, especially those taking initiation from the person that eventually become my Guru. There was so much hate from Iskcon towards us that at that age I developed a lot of resentment towards Iskcon and everything they put my family through. I ended up coming across a lot of information regarding all the messed up shit that happened in Iskcon, and did a lot of digging regarding the poisoning of Prabhupad. If anyone is interested I can talk more about it.

From birth I believed all the passtimes and stories. At 15 I was fully brainwashed. I ended up getting married at the age of 19, lived in and out of temples and after a lifetime of trauma I finally got brave enough and left it for good. Now, 8 years later, I still struggle to appreciate things in life, I worry i’ll get punished for feeling pleasure and that bad things will happen to me if i stand up for myself against ‘superiors’.

She had a review and they decided to stop it, we asked them to reconsider the decision, and they maintained their decision. We thought of going to a tribunal but I had to have surgery last month and all our focus went into that so we ended up missing the deadline.

Now we are losing all hope of her getting PIP again.

Do I need to make Universal credit aware? We receive the disability and carer element of Universal Credit, and losing that on top of having lost PIP will be a lot.

I was looking at the options of ‘report a change’ on UC and can’t see anything that is related to PIP changes.

Also looked at old Journal notes and I can’t see notes that connect the disability/carer element of UC to the PIP starting (I don’t remember if we even made them aware when PIP began - it’s been a few years) but they have reviewed our bank statements in the meantime so they must’ve seen she was receiving PIP.

From notes and from memory, the disability/carer element started after they had their own assessment with my partner and made the decision to grant it.