What a great post Livia! newcomers need to know that it's not unusual to feel disoriented and lost after leaving the cult. It happens all the time and there are things we can do which sometimes may help things pass along easier.

Aside from the benefits of actively using this forum and reading EPO one of the best things that I have done to help myself recover is to consciously direct all of the same good intentions of faith and love back into myself that I once projected onto M.

Another thing which helped me is, I kept an ongoing personal accounting of my everyday experience which I logged in daily at first. Now I just keep an ever expanding documentary of my vast inventory of  feelings, emotions, affrimations and realizations written out from time to time as I feel the need.

This perpetual interpersonal dialogue put in writing may never mean anything to anyone else but it its quite enlightening and amusing to me. I think it helped me sort things out rapidly and proceed forward through the reconstruction stages of putting my life in order and once again feeling purposeful. 

I believe that staying busy and really getting involved in my new work on myself took much of the residual depression of grieving over the loss of a life dream out of play. It became clear to me at one point after I got deep into it that I was actually writing my new life script and I could architect my own design as long as I accepted total responsibility for my destiny from here on out. It helped immensely by observing and tracking the other major benefits I was experiencing by restoring my freedom of thought and choice over the sense of loss and grief so how could I not?

I shouldn't stay depressed too long over giving up this lost purpose now turned illusion. Not now after finally learning how to believe in myself, and how to have faith in my own instincts and realizations. Now I really have the chance to contribute to a noble purpose and live a better life. The most important thing is to live in integrity, I need look no farther than myself as a work in progress and I am my teacher.

I have now gotten to the point through all of my efforts, years of trials and tribulations with religion, gurus and spirituality etc, to where I fully trust my own answers and depend completely on myself to satisfy my own self realizations .

I only began to understand the possibilities for my own potential since leaving the cult and m. These were things I could never discover as long as I chose to surrender my personal power to the stifling dictates of m and his program.

I found out that I did not need a spiritual master or anyone resembling such a thing under any other name, title, or description, nobody does; this mysterious business of  who knows more than anyone else about the subject of life is a load of hooey.

We all have the same potential as the next guy, self knowledge is an equal opportunity explorer.