How to Find a Cult-Informed Therapist (And How to Know If You’ve Found One)

Red flags, green flags, and what to do when treatment isn’t helping

Many of my clients have had the experience of working up the courage to sit in a therapist’s office to get some help with healing. It is often a great act of courage to even admit you need assistance and to risk trusting a stranger who might not understand at all. Most ex-members find themselves spending time trying to explain and teach what happened to them. This is certainly no easy task, given the societal stigma many cult survivors experience.

There they sat, bravely describing years inside a group that controlled where they lived, what they read, who they loved, and what they were permitted to think.

Somewhere in the first session or two, they watched the misunderstanding settle across their therapy experience and within their clinician. The therapist asked about their mother or father. Some suggested they might have some sort of personality disorder that caused this. Some wondered whether they had simply made a poor choice and now needed to take responsibility for it. Others put an inaccurate label on it: bipolar, schizoid, complex PTSD, or something else. Some thought medication was needed when it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the therapists who failed these clients were most likely clinically competent in a generalized sense, kind, and genuinely trying to help. A therapist trained to look for internal causes of distress will go looking inside you for the source of your suffering.

A therapist working with ex-members must be trained to take a thorough history, ask non-threatening questions, and research the name of the group, its founder, and ex-members. Often, unless they do additional research and scour cult-watchers’ websites for information, they will miss key details. That is why I went to the effort of creating an online course that provides foundational information for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors and offers continuing education credit (CEs).

Cult trauma is simply not part of standard clinical training, and many, perhaps most, graduate programs devote no coursework to undue influence, thought reform, or the specific aftermath of leaving an authoritarian group.

This gap is so common that one survivor described the experience as being tired of paying her therapist to teach her about cults (a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by countless former members).

In these circumstances, the responsibility falls on the most vulnerable person in the room to educate the professional who is supposed to be helping them.

Recognize the Errors

Let me name the errors I have seen most often, both in my clinical practice and while supervising other clinicians, so you can recognize them quickly if they occur within your treatment. Fundamentally, I do not believe that it is your responsibility to train your therapist, but I do believe in an educated consumer.