She Spent $115K in a Wellness Cult with Brandie Hadfield
A new mom, an autistic baby, and a decade lost to a commercial cult and MLM
A wellness MLM does not announce itself as a cult. It arrives as a smoothie recipe, a flyer of smiling mothers, and a promise of working from home while you take your health back.
My recent guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Brandie Hadfield, lived inside one for a decade. She is a Registered Psychotherapist and co-founder of the peer support nonprofit Flipping the Pyramid, and she spent roughly ten years selling supplements for a wellness MLM before she understood she had been recruited into a commercial cult.
Brandie was a new mother in 2011, isolated and exhausted, when the pitch found her. I invite you to notice how ordinary the entry point was, because the same machinery now drives coaching programs, prosperity preaching, and the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrency, which I consider a form of multi-level marketing. A small group sells the dream, recruits everyone else to buy in, and the people at the top profit while almost everyone below them loses money.
What makes her story matter to anyone outside the supplement world is the mechanism. A wellness MLM uses the same tools of undue influence I have studied for decades. The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ maps how a group controls Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion, and the Influence Continuum© shows how the same human relationships sit on a spectrum, from healthy and empowering on one end to coercive and deceptive on the other. Brandie did not meet a man in a robe. She met warm, credentialed people who looked successful and told her she was doing everything right.
How a Wellness MLM Recruits a New Mother
Her recruitment began with a parenting book by a famous pediatrician and a home-based coaching certification. She paid for the courses, the workbooks, and the materials. Then a package arrived in the mail from the pediatrician’s daughter, inviting her into the MLM the family sat near the top of. Brandie saw it later for what it was. The supplements gave the business a product she could sell on automatic renewal, and they gave her a reason to stay.
She is intelligent, devoted, and the kind of employee who gives more than anyone asks. Recruiters prize those traits. Her ADHD, undiagnosed at the time, sharpened her focus into something the group put to use. “My kind of tunnel vision and focus and tenacity, which can be a beautiful aspect of having ADHD, was really exploited,” she told me.
Why Neurodivergent People Face Greater Risk
Brandie was a mother with undiagnosed ADHD raising a son later identified as autistic. Isolation, a hunger for belonging, and a tendency to commit fully to a mission left her exposed. Her graduate research examined narcissistic leadership in commercial cults and its impact on neurodivergent people, and it filled a gap she had felt firsthand.
I have warned about this risk for years. Near me in Boston, the Association for Autism and Neurodiversity (AANE.org) runs trainings I have taken part in, where I met Tony Attwood, Isabelle Henault, Steve Silberman and many other experts.
Many neurodivergent people feel anxious in face-to-face settings, so they connect online, where love bombing and tailored attention land hard. My friend and colleague Jon Atack, a neurodivergent former Scientologist and I wrote a chapter on Lone Actor Terrorism for an Oxford University Press textbook focusing on online radicalization.
We cited case studies of individuals who were on the autism spectrum who were radicalized to do terrorist acts. Brandie pointed me to Dr. Devon Price’s book Unmasking Autism, which addresses susceptibility to cults, extremism, and hate groups. This is not about gullibility. A wellness MLM, like any authoritarian group, studies what a person needs and offers a counterfeit version of it.
Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Phobias Keeping You In
The longer you stay, the harder leaving becomes. Brandie has written about the sunk cost fallacy, the pull to keep investing because you have already invested so much. In an MLM the trap is engineered. “The numbers just haven’t caught up to you yet,” her uplines repeated, looking her in the eye and telling her she was perfect. The promise was always one convention away, and so, she gave it everything.
“The worst-case scenario would be $115,000 that I would end up over the course of a decade spending on product,” she said, a figure she faced only a year after leaving.
At her peak she reached the top 1.6 percent of the company and still would have earned more working a minimum wage job. Doubt was treated as a threat. The group leaned on a medical authority, a paid advisor presented as a famous doctor, to close difficult cases.
“If your doctor says no, he doesn’t know,” he would say.
It is a thought-terminating cliché, the kind of repeated phrase used to shut down questioning before it starts. The diet rules followed the same logic. Cut dairy, gluten, sugar, and packaged food, or fear the consequences. This is behavior control and phobia indoctrination, the practice of instilling irrational fears about leaving or questioning the group, dressed up as clean living. When she finally left, the silence told her everything.
“When you leave a group and you’re dead to them, that’s like tell me you’re a cult without telling me you’re a cult,” she said.
A legitimate employer holds an exit interview while a high-control group treats departure as betrayal.
Brandie now runs a free online monthly peer support group through Flipping the Pyramid, because people leave these groups broke and ashamed, and shame keeps the wider problem hidden.
Her work, and mine, rests on a simple idea. Understanding how influence operates protects you and the people you love. The same patterns repeat across supplements, coaching seminars, prosperity religion, and crypto pitches, and once you see the structure, you see it everywhere.
If you have ever wondered why a smart, capable person stays in something costing them money, time, and relationships, Brandie’s decade inside a wellness MLM is one of the clearest answers I have heard. Listen to the full conversation and ask yourself where else these tactics might be working on someone you love.
Further Reading
Talking MLMs with Douglas Brooks
Attorney Douglas Brooks explains how MLMs drain ordinary people and why 97 to 99 percent of participants lose money.
LuLaRoe and the World of Commercial Cults
The leggings MLM Brandie’s mother watched in the documentary LuLaRich, and how it used cult tactics on women.
Autism, Extremism, and Protecting the Vulnerable with Dr. Tony Attwood
The article Brandie credited for clarifying the line between neurodivergence and recruitment.
The seminar machinery behind the positive-thinking and law of attraction sales pitch.
How a coaching MLM founded by Keith Raniere graduated into a criminal cult.
McGill University in Montreal Debunks the “Science” of Juice Plus+
The article Brandie shared that explains how the science that was sold to her was exaggerated. Information control meant that she was told “Big Pharma” paid for these types of hit pieces to be written.