Every so often someone asks me: what was it like to be raised in a cult? The least sexy but entirely true answer is that it felt completely normal.

CW: discussion of coercive control

When you're a child born and raised in a closed system like a coercive and controlling group, what you are experiencing feels like the only experience that's possible. The life of going to church at least three times a week, often more; of having parents who openly put an organization before your and your siblings' well-being; of being isolated and kept separate from the rest of the world "for your own good"; and the experience of wondering what else is possible while not being able to imagine it—these are all things that feel familiar to me.

When I talk about immigration, and think about it and feel into it, it feels very similar to leaving a cult. And now, as I have the experience of leaving an abusive marriage, I recognize it as another layer of the same onion.

One of the ways that I left the cult that I was raised in was by pursuing education, and I find myself on that path again as I leave a marriage that I thought was safe, only to discover that my life was in danger.

The thing that wasn't normal about leaving a cult was the 9 years that I struggled, wondering why life was so hard, then waking up one morning in 2021, unaware that a simple statement made by a friend—"I think you may have been in a cult"—would melt my reality down into a puddle at my feet.

I tell people now that I had a kind of nervous breakdown, and plant medicine healed me. "In 2021?" you may think. "But I thought you left the cult 15 years ago?"

Well, you see, I did leave the cult 15 years ago, and I spent the next 9 years in a kind of continuous survival mode. But for those first 9 years, I did not realize I had been in a cult because of the way that cults are talked about in the media and in research that makes it sound like only white people are in cults.

Since I discovered that I had been in a cult, I've been profoundly curious about how it happened that I was born and raised in a cult for 23 years and did not find out that had been my experience until I was 31 years old. And what I discovered is that because the media representation of cults is so profoundly white, it was hard for me to contextualize the information I had heard about cults to my personal experience, which involved being a Black American in a multiracial group of people. Now, after doing some of my own study of cults, I understand that my experience is highly representative of many peoples in destructive cults, but that isn't what the mass media portrays. And I didn't know what I didn't know.

I really love the Emergent Strategy element of fractals, and it feels like it applies in this situation. A coercive and controlling family system, sometimes called a narcissistic family system, is a concentrated layer of control. Adjacent to that familial layer of control may lie a coercive and controlling group. In my case, the non-institutional churches of Christ. And overlaying that experience was the coercive and controlling authoritarian country, also known as the United States of America. I have spent my entire life—I now realize—trying to escape coercion and control of patriarchy at the family level, the group level, the country level, only to end up almost immediately after immigrating in another coercive and controlling abusive relationship. Which, of the four, was the one who posed the most immediate danger. However, the others also posed a danger to my life because of the broad networks of control within them.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It was just something I was thinking about: how, no matter how many layers of the onion I peel back, I can't seem to find liberation behind any of them. I end up in another dynamic of control that often takes me years to see.

However, none of them have taken as long as 23 years, which is the one that I was born and raised into and really set the tone for what I expect from interpersonal dynamics and group dynamics. And so I feel very sensitive now about reentering into any sort of close dynamic with a group or person because I see how easy it is to slip into a controlling dynamic when my nervous system has been conditioned on every level against my own liberation.

What my hope for the organizing that I do is that I would be able to organize among a group of people who can carve out a little microcosm of liberation that can expand light and fractals beyond our community and into the larger society, eventually connecting with other fractal nodes of liberation around the world. I do believe this is already happening, but because it's still relatively early in this process, it's hard to see. I can only see things from my very limited individual perspective and the shared perspectives of people who trust me enough to share a fractal node with me. So I move at the speed of trust in the arc of justice.

I have found, over the course of my life, that keeping secrets never served me. That it mostly served to benefit people who were causing harm to me and others. And so, as I move forward out of these various dynamics with individual relationships, family, systems, organizations, and even countries, I've chosen not to keep secrets.

Earlier today, I said to someone: I do the opposite of keeping things close to the vest. I pretty much tell everybody everything, or I tell a part of everything to everybody. There's a song that I like by an artist I haven't followed in a while, and the name of the song is "Secrets Keep You Sick." That's really stayed with me. I think it has stayed with me because I found it to be true. Coercive control thrives in secrecy. But when you expose it to the light, you're able to get another perspective from whoever it is you're sharing with. And to me, it has seemed more advantageous to tell the truth. That doesn't mean that I tell my entire life story to every single person that I meet, of course. However, it does mean that when asked a direct question, I'm more inclined to give an open answer than I am to hold the truth close or keep it a secret, even if it's something that doesn't paint me in the best light.

I've also spent many years working somatically on my experience of shame, pride, and growing my capacity for humility. None so much as when I first left the cult I was born and raised in, and recently when I chose to leave an abusive marriage. These are two experiences that could, and often do, result in shame within the social sphere, because people associate having been controlled or abused with being stupid, naive, or gullible, even though all of the evidence that we have about coercive control says quite the opposite—that anyone could be susceptible to control and coercion under the right conditions.

Maybe it's not that most of us are living our lives without ever having been coerced and controlled, but that most of us don't talk about it because we don't want other people to know. And that creates a scenario where having experienced these things feels very isolating and alone, even if you're not in the situation anymore. I want to know what I could do to contribute to dismantling that, and my best idea right now is to live as the type of person who I imagine already exists in the world that I want to create. That being truthful and honest is my act of creation. That expressing myself, my emotions, and being open about my experiences is building the open, shame-free, liberated world that I want to live in.

Share Your Reflections

Let Evvie know what came up for you.

Contact

Connect with Evvie for dreaming experiments with somatics during climate collapse.

Email

Stay Connected

evvie@climatesomatics.com

© 2026 Climate Somatics by Genevieve Habet. All rights reserved.