3 Reasons Cult Survivors Get Recruited Again
Why so many survivors end up in another high control group, and how to break the cycle
You told yourself it would never happen again. And then, two or three years later, you look up and realize you are once again giving your money, your time, and your loyalty to a group or individual that has quietly taken over your life.
Perhaps it is a political movement that has an answer for everything or a wellness community with a charismatic leader and a strict set of rules. The second cult trap may even be a new relationship that started as the most intense connection you have ever felt.
If you were fooled once, you can tell yourself you didn’t know any better. But twice? Now the story you tell yourself becomes maybe the problem is me. Maybe I really can’t trust my own judgment.
Getting drawn into the second cultic control situation is not evidence that you are, or were, weak, or hopeless. It is often a predictable outcomes of leaving the first one. Understanding why it happens is the first step toward making sure it doesn’t happen again.
The Void the Cult Leaves Behind
When you leave a destructive group, you do not merely just leave a set of beliefs. Inside the group, you were handed certainty, a “loving” community, a clear identity, and an overriding sense of purpose.
One allure of this community is that each day was accounted for, and every big question had an answer. You never had to sit with ambiguity, because the group did your thinking for you. When you walk out the door, all of that vanishes at once, and what remains is a void.
In one of my earlier posts on identity after the cult, I described the strange grief of leaving. In the Moonies, I had a sense of purpose and certainty, and rejoining the real world meant losing all of that. You also may find yourself missing the feeling of being special and the comfort of having all the answers. This is a very human reaction.
The problem is that a new void does not want to stay empty for long. A new group or a new all consuming relationship can rush in to fill exactly the space the old one occupied, and it can feel like relief. Your nervous system, which spent years organized around belonging and obedience, recognizes the shape of the thing and reaches for it.
The 3 Vulnerabilities That Travel With You
There is a persistent popular myth that only weak, gullible, or uneducated people end up in cults. Law professor emeritus Alan Scheflin calls this “the myth of the unmalleable mind.”
It is a comforting lie, because it lets people believe that becoming entangled in a high control situation could never happen to them. In reality, we are all susceptible to social influence, and the single greatest vulnerability is simply a lack of education about how undue influence works.
However, survivors do carry some specific vulnerabilities out the door with them, and these are what make re-recruitment more likely.
The first vulnerability is an external locus of control. This is the psychological term for where a person believes that the successes and failures of their life are driven by outside forces like luck, fate, or powerful others rather than one’s own actions.
