McLean describes her upbringing as living in a cult-like situation. “I’ve been drawn to books and documentaries about cults and part of the reason is because I really see something familiar,” she says. “It’s this feeling that there’s one person who is completely in charge and who’s almost supernatural, who knows everything and who has all the answers and who is somehow in charge of the world. And you are constantly trying to please that person. And it’s not that you just want to make them happy; it’s that you feel like your survival depends on it.”
One of her earliest memories of the abuse she says her father inflicted came when she was around two, she tells Rolling Stone. “My dad couldn’t find a key to a piece of furniture and he thought that I hid it and he was just screaming in my face,” she says. “I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know where the key was and I was just trapped in that moment having to endure the fear and the trauma until it ended. That was just a normal kind of thing that there would be screaming and yelling.
I didn’t read the whole thing but the parts I quoted above seemed to ring a few bells. Anyone who got in the firing line of certain elders, or even hyper-diligent parents trying to prove themselves to the elders, might also relate.“You’re conditioned to feel like he has power over you… like he had ultimate power,” she says of the atmosphere in the household growing up. “I really felt like he was some sort of God. So, it’s not just that I’m worried that he’s gonna yell at me. It’s like he has … enough power over my life that if he’s angry at me he can do anything to ruin my life.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... n-1187117/