Are There Any Good Cults?

As a religious trauma therapist, I have received an interesting question over the years outside of the therapy room: “Are there any good cults?”

The people asking me have never been in cults before, or perhaps they have (or currently are) in a cult, and they don’t know yet. Documentaries about cults gripped their curiosity and appealed to their desires for simplicity, community, and structure. They were remembering the highlight reel, the utopia that drew members into the cult in the first place.

If cults were dark from the start, finding membership would be incredibly difficult. The beginning of joining a cult often feels like you’re the luckiest person in the world. You find friendship and/or romance with ease. Conversation flows easily. You don’t have guessing games in social situations anymore because you experience certainty that everyone around you shares the same values. It’s not just a one-off connection either. You get to see your favorite people at least once a week.

Having this experience with one or two people would feel like a full-life for many. Now multiple that experiences by 10… 100… 1,000… 10,000… 100,000 people. Serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin ruches at high levels for people in these cults to experience what feels like the dreamiest life— until one day.

When the Utopia Grows Dark

First, let’s define what a cult is: a web of abusive relationships, connected by a special person, strict belief system, or authoritarian ideology.

Cult survivors are abuse survivors. Like other abusive relationships, very rarely do relationships begin as abusive. First, a person is idealized by their perpetrator. The idealization begins through love-bombing, which leads quickly to co-dependency. And the perpetrator of abuse is seen as irreplaceable in your life. They’re highly attentive and reflect your needs back to you. They seem to deeply understand you, but it often comes from mirroring you. The compatibility feels electrifying.

Subtle control starts to appear after the idealization. When you show your individuality or lack of dependence upon an abusive person, they may devalue or degrade you.

It may sound like negging. They’ll say, “It’s just teasing!” And you question whether you’re being overly sensitive.

An abuser may critique your actions in a way that seems caring. I want us to focus our time together. You don’t have to post us online to be in the moment.

Abusers may ask you to share your location with them in the first weeks or months of knowing each other because they mention concern for your safety. And yet… they are still a stranger. You’ve hardly known them.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

After abusers have worn down your confidence and autonomy, the erosion and isolation begins. Life as you knew it before you got into a relationship with them begins to erode or crumble. And you find that your life revolves around the abuser. Abusers are always in your orbit, or so it seems.

An abuser will give you positive attention, just enough to prevent you from losing interest in the relationship but not enough to nourish you.

You begin to learn that the more interested you are in not upsetting your abuser, the more interested your abuser is in you, and the more positive attention you receive. When people doubt whether your relationship is good for you or criticize the relationship, it feels like they’re jealous and don’t want you to be happy. They seem like the unhealthy relationship in being critical so you distance yourself from them. And your abuser praises you. One by one, your friends and family that were close to you before the relationship are kept at a distance from you until you are isolated with your abuser.

Finally, abuse escalates once your support system has become distant from you. Your support system before getting into a relationship with your abuser feels like a lifetime ago. There’s moments of happiness that you experience, but it’s dependent on the happiness of your abuser.

The abuser seems to be in control, but every so often, you catch glimpses of cracks in your abuser’s powerful image. You notice that at times, they feel helpless and try quickly to gain control. In their frantic attempts, there may be more intensity .

I share this process of abuse with you because not only is it a familiar pattern for people in a relationship where there is domestic violence, but cult members experience this too with cult leaders. The idealization, subtle control, erosion, isolation, and escalation happens in a wider scope for cult members as cults are an expansive network.

Appealing to Good Senses

People who join cults often don’t know they are joining a cult. They are vulnerable people with unresolved fears. Their most common fears are uncertainty, chaos, meaninglessness, aloneness, moral failing, shame, rejection, abandonment, responsibility, corruption, or lack of safety.

I’ve heard, “Cults are so fascinating, but I would never join one.” Never say never. Every person has experienced a core fear that drove a person to become a cult member. When a fear is unaddressed for a long period of time, a person’s chance of joining a cult may be more likely.

When people join cults, there’s a temporary relief from fear because of the false promises given to them by the cult doctrines. Over time, dissociation develops for cult members as they are being controlled by cult leadership. The cult member’s emotions and intuition are masked by dissociation until a person is no longer able to ignore the abuse because of the accumulation and magnitude of their suffering.

The Bottom Line

There’s no such thing as an abusive relationship that’s good. There may be positive memories from the relationship, but that doesn’t mean the relationship itself was good. It just offers clarity about why the person stayed in the abusive relationship in focusing on the highlight reel of the relationship.

This is what happens to cult members.

Cults appeal to people’s good senses, but it breaks down members’ self-esteem with the abuse. With low self-worth and frequent dissociation, cult members lose access to their awareness, insight, and judgment.

There are many ways to join a cult, just as there are many ways out of a cult.

Recognizing that there is incongruence with cult leadership’s teachings and their behaviors is a great first step for a person preparing to leave a cult, but people can’t leave a cult on their own. While it can feel embarrassing to reach out to people that were distanced from, that’s a wonderful place to begin in preparing to leave a cult. Courage and strength are found when realizing that people don’t feel burdened in helping you leave a cult, but rather— they find joy and meaning with taking part in helping you find liberation.