This is the text of my IPS Core Training final reflection, which was shared with my training cohort at the final day of the course. I will write more about how IPS has radically altered my approach to peer support and relationships in general eventually, but I wanted to share this here first.

In the late 80s I was born into a religious cult in coastal Virginia. I was home schooled, isolated from others outside the group, mistreated, and told exactly who I am, and how my life would play out. I became anxious and depressed from an early age and survived by reading dystopian fantasy novels with an enduring hope that one day I would move far away, get an education, and live a free life.

For 5 years I planned my escape. I still did not realize I was in a cult for 9 years after I successfully left. But in 2020, a new friend who had watched a docuseries, called Cults and Extreme Beliefs, told me she thought I had been in a cult. As I binge watched these episodes, I felt my entire reality beginning to collapse in on me. I suddenly had words for my experience, but did not know how to move forward. Having an entire lifetime's reality unexpectedly melt into a puddle of confusion and terror at my feet left me wondering what was real and who I truly am. I became a shadow my myself for nearly 2 years.

At the same time, I was developing a chronic illness which later was diagnosed as rare autoimmune disease, Sjogren's, a cousin of Lupus. Unable to function and work, for a time I became nomadic.

Mercifully, during that same time, I found my first online peer support group for cult survivors. These were mostly people in Europe, with a handful of North Americans. In that Zoom room, for the first time in months I felt normal and clear. I shared my story with people who nodded with understanding. I was not alone in being shunned by my family of origin for leaving their cult. I did not have to justify being unable function in normal society for a time after finding out I was born and raised in a cult.

This experience of peer support completely changed my life. After starting as a participant, I’ve volunteered much of the last 5 years co‑facilitating this informal peer support group with other cult survivors around the world, and last fall 7 of us decided to start a new formal organization together.

IPS training has been another experience of profound discovery, because it has given me a framework to understand how to do peer support work in a way that is inherently anti‑cultic and abolitionist, without an orientation of being the helper. The four tasks of IPS- Connection, Worldview, Mutuality, and Moving Toward -are the opposite values of most cults many survivors were harmed in.

My co-facilitators and I are still figuring out how to do peer support work formally, but very committed to doing it without replicating the hierarchical organizations that have harmed us – including cults but also workplaces, other charities, law enforcement, medical and mental health institutions. I do not want to create another institution that harms people.

IPS has given me clarity on how I can operate with values that align with recovery from institutional harm. Like mutual relationships, not hierarchy. No fixing or rescuing, while learning to sit with discomfort. Not shunning people because their reality or worldview is different, but exploring how to stay in relationship when fear shows up. Not erasing my needs to belong, but inviting me to be present and allow my needs to matter too. Not needing to have all the answers to feel worthy of being a meaningful support person. Receiving mutual support without having to earn it through self-sacrifice.

Lately I have come to realize that denying my needs has been making me sick. For my own survival and health, I can’t afford to pretend I don't have needs or push past my boundaries anymore. IPS validates me in making these changes.

I am the first member of my co‑facilitator team to do this training, and very grateful. IPS makes me hopeful of more spaces where survivors like me can feel normal among other humans who will not focus on fixing or dominating me, but will desire mutuality, consent, and non‑hierarchy too. What I have learned is already impacting my relationships with others in many areas of my life.

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