Life After Leaving A Cult - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

If you have just stepped into life after leaving a cult, congratulations!! It is by no means easy to recognize and then accept that you have been in a cult.

And accepting that you were in a controlling group is not enough either. You have to overcome all the manipulation to actually get out and stay out. This is a major feat, in and of itself. So well done again!

Being out of the group is the good part.

Leaving the cult is just the beginning. Unfortunately, there is a bad part and an ugly part as well.

You may still be very confused, angry, frustrated, upset, with guilt and shame and you may even feel regret at leaving. What if you are missing out on something really important or significant? This is all part of escaping a cult and can be very distressing.

In order to make sense of life after leaving a cult, I think it's useful to first give some background...

 

The leaving

People leave cults in three general ways. They may be thrown out, they leave on their own because of some dissatisfaction with the group, or they are counselled out.

The first situation is the most traumatic. In such cases, the person expelled from the group typically wants to get back in. They want to know what they did wrong and how they can make amends in order to be accepted back. Because of the nature of mind control, the victims are made to be dependent on the group (more about this idea later) and they often feel that they will not be able to manage without the group. Hence the desire to get back into the good books of the leadership.

The second situation, where somebody 'voluntarily' leaves because they do not like some aspects of the group, while it may not be as traumatic, it does bring it's share of problems and difficulties. For example, many people do not recognize the group as a cult until years later.

They think that because they are out of the group that the group is no longer influencing them. Therefore any problems that arise are considered to be an issue of the person themselves and they are not associated with the group, when, in fact, they should be. This is actually a major issue for many ex-cult members.

The third way of leaving is to be counselled out. This smoothes out the emotional turmoil of adjusting to life after leaving a high-control group, it minimizes much of the cognitive dissonance and is obviously the easiest way to leave a cult.

As I mentioned, simply leaving a cult does not mean that the cult no longer has any influence over you.

This is the bad part!

Cults use very strong influence techniques to control and dominate the lives of the members. These techniques are used daily for months, years and even decades on the members.

The problem is that the members are not aware of many of these influence techniques. They do not recognize that they are being manipulated. It's all done outside of their awareness and certainly without their consent.

Because the members are not aware of what is being done to them, that means that they cannot mentally resist. In fact, it's somewhat worse than this. The cult members think that they are making their own decisions! They think they have choices while in the group.

This has far reaching ramifications. The member believes it was their choice to do many things. Therefore they feel at least partly responsible for these actions.

The member also thinks that it was their own choice to adopt certain beliefs and ideas. They do not recognize that they were coerced into it. Therefore they do not think there is any need to undo many of these ideas.

The danger with this particular issue is that the individual may not be aware of how many of their beliefs were changed in the group.

Controlling groups change the members beliefs to those that are beneficial for the leadership and often cause the individual to go against their own best interests. Again, lack of awareness means that the individual does not realize that these beliefs are running. And they will continue to run until the individual deliberately changes them. These will obviously cause problems in life after mind control.

As I mentioned above, ex-members may not associate these beliefs with the day to day problems they are having and think that there must be something wrong with themselves. This further compounds the problems people have in life after leaving a cult!

But that's not all. There is the ugly part...

(Don't despair just yet. There is a solution!!)

 

Life after leaving a cult - the ugly part

Controlling groups change the members perceptions, thinking, decision-making, attitudes, values, likes, wants, desires, emotions and behaviors and even their psychological defence mechanisms.

All those changes basically add up to a personality change.

This is why people say that they felt like they lost themselves in the group, they no longer knew who they were. It also explains friends and family members claiming that they no longer recognized the person after they joined the group. They literally became different people. The same thing happens in abusive relationships, by the way.

Cults basically change people at their core. They change how people perceive themselves and how they perceive their relationships with the world. The psychological effects of cults are profound (and have an important impact on recovering from a cult experience).

Now many cult leaders may not think in such terms, but nevertheless this is what they end up doing with the group members.

Changing a person's personality in such a manner is illegal in most countries. It is also immoral. In fact, if you wanted to set up a cult as a psychological experiment nowadays, you would have severe difficulty persuading an ethics committee to allow such a thing. What cults do to people can be considered evil.

 

The pseudopersonality

This idea of the false personality, or pseudopersonality, is a very useful way to think about what happens to people who are recruited into a cult.

The cult personality, the pseudopersonality, is imposed on all the members and is basically a clone of the leader. This is why all the members have the same ideas, the same jargon, the same behaviors, the same style of dress or hairstyle, the same approach to diet, exercise, relationships and so on.

The major difference between the pseudopersonality and the leader is that the pseudopersonalities are submissive and obedient to the leader, while the leader is allowed to treat the members as he or she wishes. This is totally non-negotiable!

The leader is considered by the pseudopersonalities as a superior being, even to the point of having super powers! The pseudopersonalities are programmed to consider themselves as inferior to the leadership but all the time aspiring to be 'as good as' the leaders.

 

The nature of the pseudopersonality

The pseudopersonality is programmed to trust and believe in the leadership. It is programmed to follow instructions. It is programmed to put the wants and needs of the group (i.e., those of the leader!) ahead of it's own wants and needs. It is programmed to think that the work of the group is so much more important than anything else. In fact, many cult members feel that if they are not doing 'the work', then they are actually wasting their lives.

The pseudopersonality is also programmed to be dependent on the group. They basically need the group to know who they are and that they are ok. This is a huge aspect and I will come back to it again later on. You can read more about this dependency in this article about abusive husbands.

The pseudopersonality is also programmed not to be able to hear criticism of the leader or the group. It will defend the leader, often aggressively. This is why it is so difficult to introduce the idea of cults to cult members. They have basically been inoculated against such ideas as part of their indoctrination into the group.

Think of the pseudopersonality as having a master program. This master program is based on the doctrine of the cult, or more specifically, the leader. This master program runs the decision making, thinking, perceptions, emotions and actions of the member. If there is ever any doubt, the question in the member's head becomes, "What would the leader say or do here?" Then the member knows exactly what they should do or say in the situation. In this way any doubts or confusion in the mind of the member are rapidly resolved.

Keep in mind, too, that this pseudopersonality is put in place without the knowledge of the member and is reinforced for years with very strong influence techniques. However, it never completely destroys the real personality. It simple represses and dominates it. But it does become the default position for the cult member. It is basically running the show for the vast majority of the time, without the member even being aware of it. The depth of control that the leader has over the members is enormous. That's why I say this is the ugly part.

 

Life after leaving a cult - first steps

So what happens to this pseudopersonality when someone first leaves a cult?

The short answer is - nothing! It does not away. It continues to function.

Remember, the now ex-cult member does not know it exists. The ex-member believes it was it was his or her own choice to join the group, to engage in the activities, to take on the new beliefs etc.

And this is where the problems start.

The pseudopersonality is programmed to be in the group. Remember that dependency thing?! It needs the group to feel ok. So the ideas about maybe missing out start to kick in. The ex-member wonders if he or she made the right decision in leaving.

At some level the ex-member has wanted to leave. The real personality has resurfaced here and has recognized that there is something wrong with the group. This obviously causes a conflict. People will typically describe the situation such that one part of them wanted to leave, but another part wanted to stay.

The dependency can make the ex-member feel so bad that the only way to alleviate the distress is to actually go back to the group. (This is also why battered wives go back to the abusive husband!)

This is just one of many conflicts that arise because the real personality sees things one way and the pseudopersonality is programmed for another.

It is fair to say that, for all intents and purposes, it is not possible to resolve these conflicts as long as the pseudopersonality is in place. Remember that ideas and motivations of the pseudopersonality were put in place for the benefit of the leader and not for the benefit of the individual.

Very early on, too, the ex-member is going to want to stop some of the activities of the group for obvious reasons. However, the patterns of the pseudopersonality run very deep. They have been installed at a profound level.

The individual decides to stop doing some activity. They have difficulty stopping and end up doing it again and again. This can become a problem. Then the ex-member talks to others about the situation, friends, family members, even therapists. These people then tell the ex-member to 'just stop'.

Now the ex-member feels really bad. Other people are saying it should be possible to stop the activity but the ex-member cannot do it. So the ex-member feels that there is genuinely something wrong with them. Then their thoughts go to, "Maybe the cult leader was right after all! I am defective. I am the problem!" This kind of thing is very distressing for someone recovering from cult abuse, but all too common.

Now the person feels that they have to start working on themselves. They have to change in some way in order to function well in the world. Again, this is a disaster for the individual. They cannot fix the pseudopersonality. The pseudopersonality was programmed for the benefit of the leader.

 

A good post-cult trauma recovery

The idea should not be for the individual to change, but for the individual to undo the changes that were imposed upon them in the cult. In other words, you have to undo the pseudopersonality, not try to fix or modify it in some way.

But, unfortunately, that is not what usually happens.

The pseudopersonality is also programmed to believe that if there are any problems, it is responsible not only for what happened but also for fixing things.

So when something is not working, the pseudopersonality feels personally responsible. The person also has difficulty asking for help.

Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created that problem. Therefore, using the thinking of a cult to try and sort out the problems that the cult created is a recipe for disaster. This is why it's practically impossible to undo a pseudopersonality alone. You need help and support.

 

Other issues in life after leaving a cult

I mentioned the master program earlier. This was designed to control the members' decisions, activities, emotions, perceptions of reality and reactions to that reality.

In a cult, the members live in a constructed reality. A reality that is actually made up by the leader. The master program works well in this reality. After all, it was designed for the members to live within and maintain that reality.

The master program may not work very well in the real world.

When the ex-member thinks about doing something new, or finding a hobby, or buying some furniture or decorations for the home, they may quickly run into difficulties. There is no provision in the master program for such decisions. It can be very distressing for the ex-member to try and figure out what they want or even like.

Some people who are healing after cult abuse even struggle with deciding what clothes to put on in the morning, what to have for breakfast, whether to have a shower or not, and so on. This torment can go on for months or even years, if not dealt with.

Another major issue is that of relationships. Mind control 101: isolate people from their support networks.

Very often cult members have lost friends while in the group. They may have lost contact with family members. There are even many divorces that occur because of involvement in controlling groups. These relationships may need to be fixed or re-established.

PTSD after leaving a cult can also be an issue. Flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, unexplained anxiety, sudden flooding of emotions, hypervigilance and so on can be problematic for many.

In life after leaving a cult it is very common for people to have difficulties with:

• memory, concentration
• difficulty finding or keeping a job
• difficulty finding or keeping a relationship
• trusting other people
• sleep disturbances and nightmares
• feelings of dependency
• identity issues
• fear
• guilt
• depression and anxiety
• “floating” or trance states where you are transported back to cult mode
• contradictory feelings or very mixed emotions towards the group and the leadership
• fear of retaliation from the group
• feeling that you are missing out on the group's goal, which is typically some supposed noble endeavor

to name just a few!

Another issue that is worth mentioning is that many people leave cults without realizing it was a cult. They simply don't like or agree with what they have seen in the group or the leadership.

The beliefs of a cult are often stronger than normal healthy beliefs, so they persist, of course. These can be religious beliefs, ideas about personal development, martial arts, dietary supplements and so on. So the member goes looking for another group with similar ideas.

There is that dependency again, plus the idea that the ideas of the group are super important. Many of my clients have ended up cult hopping for years in this way.

 

Life after leaving a cult - what you can do

In recovering from cult abuse the basic idea is to undo the damage that was done to you, rebuild your own identity and then start to do things that are aligned with who you are.

1. Undo the pseudopersonality. This means learning about mind control, psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. You have to study influence techniques. Which ones were used against you? Why those ones? What effect did they have on your thinking, your emotions and your behavior? Professional help is invaluable here (from someone who understands mind control!)
2. Understand how the dependency was created. How was it kept in place? How did you respond in certain situations because of this dependency? What decisions did you make because of it?
3. Begin to build your own identity again. What were you like before? What were you like in the group? What kind of person do you want to be in the future?
4. Assess your previous relationships. Which ones are worth recovering? Were there other abusive relationships in the past? Do you need to deal with those?
5. What kind of relationships do you want in the future? What criteria and values are you going to insist on in future relationships? What are the dealbreakers from now on?
6. Learn to spot manipulation and manipulators in real time, so that you don't get caught again.
7. Get professional help. It will save you time, money and suffering.
8. Get a job, or change job, if necessary.
9. Start new, healthy relationships.

 

 

Life after leaving a cult - further reading

You can read more here about

• mind control tactics
• how to brainwash someone
• cult psychology
• cult contradictions and
• the characteristics of a cult leader

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