What I Told a Sold-Out Room About Surviving a High Control Group

Recently I appeared on a panel at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) alongside Anke Richter (founder of Decult, journalist and author of Cult Trip) and Sarah Steel (host of Let's Talk About Sects).

We talked about coercive control, high control groups, and what it actually takes to leave one, because "cult" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and most people have no idea what group-based coercion really looks like from the inside.

Content warning: this post touches on abuse, recruitment tactics, death and illness.

Anke Richter on how cults recruit — and why the title was a trap

Anke's session was cheekily titled 'How to Start a Cult', and she played it beautifully in a sold-out, packed-out room.

How many of you came here today to start a cult, and now realise I'm selling you something else?

That's exactly what high control groups do. They reel you in under false pretenses, then slowly redefine what you thought you signed up for.

Anke covered coercive control, children raised in cults, and the fact that high control groups aren't always religious.

You can see tiles from her presentation on the Decult socials.

• Cults have a hidden death toll. Survivors experience illness and disability at higher rates than the general population. I'm not alone in navigating multiple health issues; it's a common story for cult survivors.

• No one is immune from recruitment. We all go through 'situationally' vulnerable periods — seeking community, connection and meaning isn't a terrible thing. We need our communities to be safe ones.

• There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about cults and cult survivors. Busting them was a big part of the panel.

The trauma-porn problem: how media gets cult survivors wrong

This is something I'm genuinely passionate about. Survivors being treated with dignity and respect in storytelling. Until recently, media coverage of cult survivors leaned hard into trauma-porn: salacious, one-dimensional, and often disrespectful of the deep, complex trauma survivors carry.

Most coverage fixates on sexual abuse. It's a real and serious problem, but it's only one of many issues that leave survivors with complex PTSD.

Cults get treated as a joke online too. I've seen TikToks: '5 reasons I'd like to join a cult', 'all the reasons I'd love to be in a cult'. Cults are not a joke. The only people who get to joke about them are the people who've survived them.

I also get people who want to argue with me about whether my own experience 'counts' as a cult. That's dismissive. Survivors get to do their own work to figure out whether what they lived through was coercive and high control, without a stranger's approval.

Born-in vs joiner: busting the biggest cult myth

There's a persistent myth that people 'join' cults. That needs busting.

No one joins a cult. People are deceived and love bombed. Or they're born in. 

Both experiences — born-in and joiner — are equally difficult and valid. The harm inside high control groups happens regardless of how you got there.

The multi-generational, born-in experience needs urgent research, in my opinion. Many of us carry intergenerational trauma and face uniquely complicated exits. If you're born in, you have no 'previous' identity and often very few outside touchpoints for relationships or culture.

I had no idea how to use a TV, buy jeans or choose jewellery. I had almost no trusted relationships outside the group, and I missed nineteen years of pop culture — no movies, no TV, no pop music. That's not an unusual story for multi-generational women and girls raised in fundamentalist high control communities.

Leaving as a born-in, multi-generational member is complicated by trust issues with the outside world and by simply never having had your own identity. Many of us have never had hobbies or explored our own opinions. Conformity to group norms was all we knew.

Understanding the joiner experience matters just as much. I spent time understanding why my own family joined generations ago — and found it's the same thing that draws people in now: a search for belonging, meaning and community.

People are 'made vulnerable' in times of economic and social upheaval. We need research into this process too because understanding and tackling it stops people getting into cults in the first place.

The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry recommendations that moved me most 

We spent a good chunk of the panel on the recommendations from the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into cults and high control groups.

You can read my earlier breakdown of that report in this Substack post.

You can also listen to Sarah Steel's recent Let's Talk About Sects episode with Patrick McIvor, which gives a great survivor-perspective breakdown of the findings and recommendations.

The recommendations that hit hardest for me were the focus on harm experienced by women and girls in high control groups, and the push for upskilling front-line services and dedicated research into survivor experiences.

What to do if someone you love is in a high control group 

This question comes up every time I speak publicly, and it came up again in the FODI audience Q&A.

My perspective is that this is difficult but try to stay connected with them, even in small ways.

People in high control groups often think in black and white, distrust outsiders, and can be genuinely difficult to be around. They tend to push away anyone who challenges or disagrees with them.

Keep yourself safe first — but look for safe, low-key ways to stay connected. Even small windows of 'outside' relationship give someone a thread back, if and when they're ready to leave.

You can't 'save' someone from a cult. Using coercion to cult-bust someone doesn't sit well with me. People in high control groups already carry enormous trust issues and breaking that trust further doesn't help anyone.

People need to gradually untangle themselves, with the support of people they trust. As an advocate, that's the role I try to play, helping people untangle and connect with services. Which brings me to the next issue: there aren't enough front-line services to help people leave safely. We need better access to housing, medical care, employment support and counselling for people exiting high control groups.

In summary: stay connected in small ways

Don't be afraid to gently name specific examples of high control behavior when you see them. Saying 'you're in a cult' outright doesn't work — no one believes they're in a cult. But naming specific coercive behaviors gives someone a vocabulary to describe what might be happening to them, in their own time.

Teaching kids to spot high control groups

An audience member asked what we could do to educate children, so they don't end up in cults later in life — a great question, and one a lot of advocates care about. There's real scope to teach 'safe community' in the school curriculum, the same way respectful relationships are taught. It's exactly what the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry recommended in its findings.

I run two Substack newsletters. One for the Truth 2x2 Cult Kids Podcast, and another called Smart Mouth for a Gurl, essays from my memoir. You can read my most recent essay, on leaving the 2x2s in 1999, here. Hit subscribe if you'd like more of those stories in your inbox.