Newsletter: Cults Take More Than Just Your Time
Viktor Frankl called it an existential vacuum, and cult survivors know it well
Imagine standing in your own kitchen, completely free, for the first time in years, after leaving a group that forbade coffee. Now you feel you can do anything you want.
But you realize you don’t know how you take your coffee. You don’t even remember whether you like it or want it. You don’t remember.
Coffee used to feel comforting and warm. The smell woke you up and signified a new day. Now you stare at the cup, frozen.
That moment is what the loss of a meaning system can actually feel like from the inside. Sometimes it’s just standing in front of a coffee maker, not knowing who you are anymore.
This week’s article, When Cults Burn the Roadmap, goes into exactly this experience.
Cults and authoritarian environments don’t just take your time and community, but your entire interpretive framework for living. The work of Viktor Frankl teaches us about rebuilding oneself from the ground up.
We’re living in an unprecedented time, where meaning can feel hard to hold onto.
If you’ve ever watched someone you love come home from a group and seem like a stranger to themselves, or if you’ve lived that experience from the inside, this piece is for you.
Paid subscribers have full access to the archive, including extensive resources, comprehensive guides, expert interviews, and insightful articles, such as:
Betrayal of the Spirit: Krishna, Cults and Healing — A conversation on healing after exit, the realization after having left that the group was corrupt, and navigating uncertainty.
Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD by Jason Kander — A conversation about post-traumatic growth, choosing recovery, and why healing from trauma is worth pursuing regardless of its source.
Surviving Our Catastrophes: Robert Jay Lifton on Renewal After Trauma — Lifton’s work on “survivor power” and “survivor wisdom” provides a framework for finding hope and meaning after devastating experiences.
Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult with Michelle Dowd — Michelle’s journey from a restrictive cult to a successful author and academic demonstrates how creativity and critical thinking serve as pathways to freedom and empowerment.
Today, I was a guest on The Mark Thompson Show’s livestream, where we talked about Trump, the war in Iran, and what it takes to break free of cultic belief systems.
This week’s regular livestream will be on Wednesday, March 25th, at 2 pm EDT, and we will have a special livestream with neuroscientist Dr. Frank George on Friday, March 27th, at 2 pm EDT, whom I interviewed this past January.
Missed last week? Check out both recordings here.
Trump, Iran, and the Psychology of Control: How Crisis Shapes Republican Loyalty
Wednesday, March 18th
Opus Dei Exposed? Journalist Meets Pope Leo in Rare Private Audience
Friday, March 20th, with special guest Gareth Gore, author of OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church
This Week’s Podcast
Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths — And How We Can Stop!
Bill Eddy, LCSW, JD, is a therapist, lawyer, mediator, and co-founder of the High Conflict Institute.
His work on narcissistic personalities in conflict situations is some of the most practically useful thinking I’ve encountered on why authoritarian leaders keep finding their way into power, and what we can actually do about it.
Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Read my Substack post about the interview here.
As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!
I was in a cult group for 14 years. I remember clearly the moment when I realized that if I left it would feel like I was stepping off the edge of a cliff into the void. That was about 2 or 3 years in.
I've just spent the greater part of a decade+ digging myself out of an existential hole in which non-dual teachers made the agreed-upon decision…across the *FULL* non-dual teaching spectrum to place the *ENTIRETY* of the burden for their lies-and-deceptions on these shoulders…and the shoulders of my family literally ripping my family apart…silencing me (under a death threat) for a decade+…to ensure those lies would *never* become public knowledge.
This criminality has been described as a ‘Soul murder’ akin to being ‘buried alive.’
Those are absolutely accurate descriptions of the *feeling* of what occurred here.
There has been *zero accountability* and no one who said “this is not right.” Not a single one in that entire tradition.
Now at seventy-five I find myself with a family separated and, by far, the vast majority of friends in the non-dual space who have split the scene upon my reporting…a reporting which was utterly necessary for my own self-respect, for my family and for the actual Truth of the situation.
The utter weight of that ‘cosmic betrayal’…and the feeling of the realization that those teachers essentially and *quite literally* took this life ….lands in my heart and mind on occasion with FULL-FORCE.
It's the feeling of what has been described as being “buried alive.”
Warmly…
~Leslie@ Integrity in Truth:
www.integrityintruth.com
…and on Substack:
https://leslieread.substack.com/publish/posts/published