When Personal Development Goes VERY Wrong...

What matters the most to you in your life? What would your life be like if you had greater levels of self-confidence, self-expression or more love in your life? Imagine you have all of these things along with the time to focus on what matters to you. Picture your life with you being successful, breaking through your perceived constraints and limitations. Are you creating big things in your life, or do you want to see positive change in the world? Do you have goals to reach extraordinary levels of performance or just a niggling feeling that surely there is more to life? If this is you, welcome to the next step of your life.

Inspiring pitch? It is exactly the kind of language that seems to see inside a person’s thoughts, language that helps a person feel seen, understood and full of potential.

Millions of people worldwide are participating in our programs, from CEOs of multinational companies, athletes, scientists, students to stay-at-home parents. These participants report exponential growth across the board in their lives, with major results in the areas of relationships, finance and career. Participants experience a deeper connection with their purpose and power thanks to the technology used in our programs. 

Sound convincing or like a bunch of word-salad, overreaching cliches? 

Your life is happening right now, every moment passing by. Will you stay daydreaming about your goals or take action right now to begin living a powerful, fulfilling life? Look, things may be OK in your life now, but what else is possible for you? Stop wondering if you will ever be good enough, stop putting it off and do something amazing for yourself. Take out the form from your leaflet and register now. 

I got out of two cults. One duped its members with promises of personal development through Large Group Awareness Training, the other duped its members with promises of love and connection through meditation and sexual practices. This following extract is taken from my forthcoming book Enough! Healing from Patriarchy’s Curse of Too Much and Not Enough.

The Hook

I wanted to be good enough. How did they know that this was my problem, always feeling like I didn’t belong, sometimes believing I was too much for people, but mostly feeling I was simply not enough? I hugged my friend who had invited me to this open evening at Olympus Seminars (not this cult’s real name), took out the little white card from inside the leaflet, hurriedly filled it in and rushed over to one of the registration tables. In black pen, I filled in the flimsy credit card slip with my details and handed it over to the total stranger behind the grey desk. ‘Old school,’ I thought, ‘no credit card machines’. 

I have ruminated on and replayed this moment zillions of times. Watching it play in my memory as my late thirties self, I want to teleport into that exact moment when the credit card slip was still in my 24-year-old self’s hand, calmly take it away from younger Sarah and tear it up. Linking arms with her, I would get our coats and say,

‘Give it a miss, babe. There is nothing for you here.’

Off we would stroll into the warm evening. 

You might have guessed that, in actual fact, I did not stroll off into the summer’s evening. Instead, I paid a £50 deposit to book my spot in a weekend ‘course’ which was touted as personal development combined with an enquiry into the nature of being human. It sounded fascinating to me. I had always been a searcher, voracious to understand the weirdness of being human ever since I said no to religious Sunday School at age seven. I was convinced that being alive was more complex than what had been written about a man called God by some ancient dead men thousands of years ago. I was also relatively new in town, and I was looking for like-minded people to hang out with. The weekend course sounded perfect for me.

Human beings have always wanted to improve themselves and have a deeper understanding of why we are all here on this blue and green planet. People want to know the meaning of life. Surely there must be more to my experience of being human than the outdated corrupt system that I live in? Is this the only reality? There is nothing wrong with pondering these questions that have bugged humans for time immemorial. Many spiritual traditions such as Yoga, Eastern Tantra, Gnosticism and, more recently, Reiki explore the essential practice of connecting us humans with our original, spiritual nature as fractals of the Universe. The quest for personal growth and self-development is often the portal many seekers like myself step through before these larger, more head-spinning kinds of ponderings about our place in the Universe and connection to all beings start to reveal themselves. 

The problem is that the fundamental desire for self-improvement is the entry level or metaphorical shop window to deceive and entice people through a cult’s shiny, spinning glass doors and marbled entrance halls. The next minute you’re hearing the hard sell, which encourages participants to act right now to buy course after course, inevitably taking participants closer to the toxic centre of these organisations, deeper into indoctrination and the tiptoe into being abused by the high-demand group (cultic group) similar to the ones I found myself in. These cults that lure people with glossy guarantees of self-improvement and more confidence may focus around personal development, group therapy, business mentoring, multi-level marketing, spirituality, modern mystery schools, yoga, and tantra, to name but a few types of content that cults use to scam and abuse people. 

Let’s take a beat here so I can myth-bust. Think you are too clever/alert/sceptical to get drawn into a cultic organisation? I definitely thought I would be able to spot a cult coming for me a mile off! Turns out I couldn’t, because every person who is not in a coma is vulnerable to mind control techniques and indoctrination. Everybody is susceptible to the love-bombing, manipulation, loaded language, thought stopping, coercion and duplicity enacted by charismatic leaders and the cult followers whom they collect to do their bidding. We are all susceptible to the undue influence which cults bear over the lives and minds of their members. If I asked you if you wanted to join a group which would definitely abuse you in these ways, I’m guessing you would either politely decline or ask me if I had lost my shit. The thing is, nobody knowingly joins a group that will harm them; people sign up for courses and retreats that they have been manipulated to believe will benefit them. People want to join groups which promise to offer all the answers to life’s complexities, which promise a sense of community and hope through the realisation of the group’s grandiose promises. Let’s be real though, no group, religion or person has ALL the answers. Communities can be turned into emotionally toxic environments and hope can be used to manipulate members to stay in a group to prove their beliefs and test their loyalty. You probably wouldn’t want to join a group where this is the hidden reality. Of course you wouldn’t, because it is a scam.

Ending up in a cult is not the survivor’s fault and nothing to be ashamed of. Mic drop.

Cults Feed on the Curse of Not Enough

While everybody is vulnerable to the psychological abuse carried out by cults, from my personal experience on the inside, hearing the stories of people who have stayed in the group I joined and those who have thankfully left, along with research into other cult recruitment techniques there is a theme. I signed up to the course they offered because I thought I was fundamentally flawed, while I was also incredibly motivated to improve myself. I was a cult recruiter’s dream!  I thought I was not a good enough woman, thanks to patriarchal society. I did not feel at home with who I was, and I just wanted to believe that I was OK. I thought I needed to be more go-getting but also more chilled, more confident and less emotional, so I could save my then boyfriend from my anxiety and tears. I was scared I was driving him crazy because he had said numerous times that I was too emotional. I believed I needed to get a handle on myself, put a lid on what he called my ‘negativity’. This negativity was, in fact, a set of mental health issues all under the umbrella of an eating disorder. I did not need to be going to preachy, ass-kicking, fervour-inducing large group seminars. What I needed was care, empathy, and medical intervention for my illness. But my shame towards my ‘too much’ emotions coupled with my core belief that I was not good enough drew me towards abusive organisations, which mirrored my own unconscious habit of abusing myself. I would hear similar stories to mine time and again from women I was tasked to recruit while I worked in the sales departments of the organisations I was duped into; I need to believe in myself more, I think I’m failing at my life, I need to get promoted, I want to know how to attract a man. Women who believed that something was wrong about them, and they needed somebody or something to fix them. Truthfully, I would hear the male versions of the ‘not good enough’ beliefs too; I need to get to the next level in my career so I can impress my parents, I want to find a super hot girlfriend because all my mates have that, I need to learn how to be more positive, to stop letting my emotions slow me down.

I took my first ‘course’ in the early 2000s. A wave of nausea just came over me as I typed that date. I had to pause to soothe and send Reiki to the ache in the pit of my abdomen, my womb space. This was clearly a message from myself to myself that my body remembers the accumulated stress of being around this organisation for four years. This course marked the gateway into four years of being subtly and not so subtly mind controlled, being coaxed into believing I would fail at life without the organisation and their ‘training’, of overriding and gradually losing my trust in myself and my body’s wisdom. This cult is damaging to anybody who stays around long enough to get sucked in, but I am absolutely clear that the ultimate damage I endured during my time there was the eroding of any felt sense of my Feminine nature. 

The organisation was not patriarchal in the sense that there was any explicit favouring of men over women; the patriarchal aroma was more subtle than that. However, during the time that I worked there, this aroma became a foul stench the closer I got to the inner circle of senior leadership. Both men and women were in the upper echelons of the group’s hierarchy, and during my time working there in a paid role (thousands of people do unpaid work within this group, a sure sign of a high-demand group), I often took direction and what was termed ‘coaching’ from women in superior roles to mine. I would be coached so that I could handle any lack of performance around my sales role. The underlying vibe of this coaching was getting me to reject my connection with anything other than what I needed to do to perform. In this case, performance meant how many seats in a course I could sell.  This target was micromanaged through to how many sales calls I could make every hour. I needed to submit my results to my manager every two hours so that she could check that I was keeping my targets and daily sales results. If I had missed my target/result, coaching would occur to see what my problem was that I wasn’t delivering the sales results they pressured me to produce. The coaching told me that it was always my fault. I now understand that this ‘coaching’ was in fact mind control to keep me obedient. After all these years away from the group I still have an aversion to the words coach and all things coaching!

Let’s break this down against the context of the whole organisation: the sales environment in the cult echoed the teachings of its seminars, in short, that there is zero reason not to perform at a high level all the time, and I mean all the damn time. No justifications, no explanations, no reasons. Anything that a participant thought was a reasonable obstacle to their ability to produce results in their life was just an excuse or an example of their constrained, small thinking. You see, in this place, everything had to be big and bold all the time. There was no place for subtlety, ebbs and flows, the inevitability that life sometimes goes one step forward and two steps back and this is not a reflection on the individual’s abilities or intrinsic worth. Example:

You want to be in the relationship of your dreams in the next six months. Promise it to your course leader or coach. What actions you will take every day to produce this result. How many dates do you promise to go on each week to fulfil on this result? Not had a date this week? Do you care more about feeling sorry for yourself and staying single or actually achieving results Or: you want to lose that weight. How many minutes of exercise do you promise every day? Tell your coach so they can keep you accountable (this meant text/call you all the time to check what you are up to). Not done your exercise this week? You clearly are not committed to improving your fitness but you are committed to your excuses.

There is so much to unpack in this example, all of it with a flavour of undue influence. The abusive system of this organisation was focused on pressing participants to keeping their word by delivering results; intensely praising the participant in a short burst of attention if they kept their word then immediately pressing them to set and achieve the next big goal without any time to regroup, rest, reflect and nourish oneself. Course participants and staff were influenced not to think, but to always be taking action. It was a stressful environment because everything was portrayed as urgent. Predictably, as is the hallmark of cults, the next big goal would only be achievable upon paying for the next program run by the group. If the participant did not achieve their stated goal then they would be invalidated as per the loaded question in the above example, and forced to admit the reason for their lack of success. The coach or course leader, with zero empathy, would deconstruct the participant’s insights into an excuse.

What passed for coaching in the culture of this group, from my own experience of being ‘coached’ both as a participant and staff member, along with coaching I was trained to give course participants, was more like harsh, coerced confession time. The coachee would be encouraged to look back into their life and revisit some painful memory which might be stopping them from living their best life. Participants were encouraged to share private information about themselves, which was often traumatic for them to revisit. Inevitably, it would be implied by the leader or coach that their emotional pain was more important to them than their goal and not a valid reason for failing to manifest the results they wanted in their life. Yep, vomit. I was trained to do this by the group, and I could not see that this methodology is abusive. I had some serious shame about behaving in this way toward people. Neither could I see that this organisation, supposedly based on empowerment, was in fact a cult whose goal was to get people in and keep them in.

Patriarchy loves high production, which is achieved by single-mindedness employed to relentlessly pursue a forced result. Imagine a male, cane-wielding, moustachioed Soviet factory boss from an Orwellian nightmare, ready to beat his workers if not enough potatoes are packed per hour. This is the unbalanced Masculine blueprint for approaching life; find it, chase it, get it, squeeze out what you want from it no matter what. This version of Masculinity has been promoted by patriarchy as a means to an end for perpetuating itself as an oppressive force upon all things Feminine. Being in this cult felt like I was being monitored by an invisible, threatening, cane-wielding force day in and day out. It was utterly draining and unsustainable. Other women who have left the inner circles (paid staff and senior level course leaders) of this organisation have shared with me that they were left exhausted, ill from the fear of not producing the results they were pressed for. I am still deprogramming from the overly productive, unforgiving all-Masculine way of living that was promoted by this group. 

Starving

When I finally left, I was vulnerable, confused, exhausted and starving for the Feminine. Four years on an emotional rollercoaster induced by the back-to-front, upside-down doublethink of a cult really fucked with my mind and body. It is ironic that this emotional roller coaster was caused by a cult which teaches that feelings (particularly those aching, intuitive gut feelings) were not something worth bothering with. Part of the manipulation used by the group persuaded women members to ignore our emotions, to override the pain in our bodies caused by overwork (it’s all in your head!) and pretend we did not need regular rest. The coaching for all staff to produce results on the hour every hour caused me so much distress that I would head to the bathrooms and cry. Literally, I would run because the fear of time away from working at my desk and missing my target caused my body to move fast and frantically. I was traumatised. The organisation thrived off the unhealthy aspects of toxic masculine work ethic and leadership. There was no healthy Masculine here, the supportive Masculine energy which holds space for and wants to serve Feminine energy so that She may move with Her cycles, brewing, creating and birthing accordingly. Whatever I did there, it would never be enough for them; that much is true, but because of their unrelenting press for results and encouragement to abandon a healthy sense of self, I was indoctrinated to believe that I was not good enough. Not only not good enough but too much, wayward if my results did not improve quick-sharp. I was told that I deliberately, wilfully failed at my job so I could be destructive. WHAT??? This frequent gaslighting meant that I struggled to keep a grip on my reality. I remember one of the higher ups apoplectically raging at me one day when nobody had booked the course I was selling. To paraphrase:

‘If you refuse to perform then you can just get the fuck out.’

One of the junior members asked if I was OK. I pretended it was all in jest but on the inside I was terrified and in shock. I wish I had got my coat and just fucked off but I had been trained to be obedient.

The reality was that I was being disconnected from my inner sense of safety, struggling to hear my Feminine wisdom telling me that I was being abused by a covertly patriarchal system.

Abusing the Feminine

You see, life goes well when we balance structured, action-oriented commitments, which are intrinsic to Masculine energy, with cyclical, creative, feeling-centred, introspective subtleties intrinsic to Feminine energy. Back to the earlier example of a person who wants to lose weight:

You want to lose some weight. What kind of exercise feels good for you, what movement do you enjoy? What would be an inviting amount of movement you could work toward each week? Listen to your body’s needs so you can be compassionate to yourself if you need to skip a day if you feel unwell or want to rest on your period. Do you have somebody you feel comfortable with who could support your ongoing fitness journey if you ask for some encouragement? 

How does this example feel compared with the first iteration of coaching to lose weight? It is a combination of Masculine and Feminine approaches: action and structure combined with compassion for the body’s cyclical needs. This is the type of guidance that helps a person stay connected with their own wisdom rather than overriding one’s needs in favour of smashing out a result of the patriarchal, production-driven, no matter what vibe. 

Let’s remember, though, that cults abuse people whether they rely on singularly Masculine-style or purely Feminine-inspired teachings, or both. The content of a cult is irrelevant because what damages people is the systematic erosion of one’s self-worth, the essential connection with and belief in our enoughness, that we will be just fine without the group’s supposed pearls of wisdom. A sure sign of cultic dynamics from a group or individual is any implication that your life won’t be as enjoyable/successful/fulfilling/whole without them. Both of the cultic organisations I survived dined out on this fallacy; the premise that you need to belong to the group to be happy, that they are the only ones who know and appreciate you and only they are the ones who have the answers you seek. When a person hears this manipulation frequently, or it is implied strongly again and again over an extended time, the person in the cult will favour this lie. I used to listen to it as truth over and above my own Spidey-Sense or inner voice saying that something was off, and ignore the uneasy lurching of my tummy when I entered my office at Cult HQ. My body was showing me every day that something was indeed amiss, toxic, dangerous. This severing of the connection between mind and body is an attack, an abuse upon the Feminine. The Feminine is the subtlety of body sensation, the niggles that niggle us in gut feelings, the wisdom to pause and say, ‘NO, what is happening here is wrong’. Cults try to destroy women’s ability to listen to themselves, the cues from our bodies, even the cults which pride themselves on female empowerment. It is toxic power dynamics 101 and patriarchy loves itself some toxic power. 

I harboured A LOT of anger towards this organisation which is rotten at its core but I never felt anger toward my immediate colleagues. These are brilliant, warm, committed people who, like me, thought they were changing the world.

BITE Me

I was in and out of two cults for about six years. Cult A promised an Incredible Life and Cult B told me that I would learn how to be an Irresistible Woman. There has been a lot of unlearning and recovering from the harm done to me. During those six years, I returned twice to Cult A, which focused on personal development via large-group awareness training. During my time working there, I became incredibly sick with horrendous stress-related migraines to the point where I would suffer temporary one-sided paralysis due to this condition called ‘migraine with aura’. My body knew that something was deeply wrong, and manifested this as physical illness. I was off work for a month or so, but still within the control of the cultic antics. They called me every day and told me that my recovery was too slow, adding that I was not ‘causing’ my recovery. That is one of the many problems with cults; they make out that you are deficient at everything. On one of these long manipulatory calls, one of the bosses said to me:

‘You’re just chicken shit.’

That was enough. I sent in my resignation that same week. I quit working there and stayed away for a couple of years, and, of course, my migraines stopped, and I got stronger, but I had not fully accepted that I had been duped and emotionally abused by this organisation. I returned to the courses a couple of years later. I was in a very low place and was recovering from being raped. I wanted that influx of positive energy whipped up by the group’s courses, the fervour which had sucked me right in that first time. This just shows how hard it is to totally extricate from any kind of abusive relationship, particularly this relationship with the group I had invested years of my life in. Thankfully I left for good around seven years after joining.

Cult A professed that it wanted to empower people to be in love with their lives. My experience as a woman in this organisation was one of being coerced out of my Femininity and into being an obedient, corporate, emotion-dodging, harsh, gaslighted, cold, exhausted droid who was indoctrinated to believe my life would be a shit show without them. That’s what they do: make members think they are not enough without the group. My life was a shit show WITH them and gradually became bloody ace without them. Cult B has been under investigation by the FBI for sex trafficking. ‘Nuff said.

What both of these groups have in common are the abuse tactics which are what makes a cult. This criteria for recognising abuse in a high demand group/cult is called the BITE Model (The Bite Model of Authoritarian Control™, Combatting Cult Mind Control 2018 by Steven Hassan) and it’s the work of ex-cult-member and cult expert Steven Hassan. The BITE model includes behaviour control, information control, thought control and emotion control. The tactics also feature in any coercively controlling relationship. Cult A and B feature fuckloads of these tactics, too many to list in this book, but here is a flavour:

Behavior Control

Cult A banned staff and leaders from engaging in any other personal growth courses or modalities outside of Cult A.

Cult B coerced members to pursue sexual contact with people they did not find attractive, as a method of overcoming the supposed binds of personal preference.

Information Control

Staff and leaders at Cult A were given a list of Corporate Answers to learn as responses to any questions we were ever asked by lower-ranking members or non-members. We were tested on these answers to make sure we represented Cult A the way it wanted to be perceived, for example, as not being a cult!

Cult B kept sensitive information about course participants on spreadsheets e.g., struggles to connect with women, so that the sales team could use this as intelligence and guide manipulatory sales conversations.

Thought Control

We were told to always be vigilant about our thoughts; mindfuck.

Cult A wanted staff and leaders to be in constant communication to their manager and report any thoughts they were having that could hinder their sales performance. For example, thoughts about being tired or thoughts doubting you should call this person for a fourth time to see if they wanted to register for a course yet. On reporting these thoughts, we were told to make a more empowering thought.

Cult B would run an exercise where the coach would ask endless questions to a participant. The answers were the participant’s private thoughts which they were encouraged to share so they could ‘keep their lines clean’. Yeah, sorry for the word salad, cults are full of bizarre language.

Emotion Control

Cult A had a total disregard for emotion. Emotions were apparently our excuses for our poor performance. However, because we were coached so harshly by upper management, inevitably people would break down in tears on the regular, which made for a poisonous work environment. On crying, this was invalidated, and a person would be reminded by a coach or manager that this was behaviour of a junior course graduate, not a leader.

They also used fear and threats to control us. I was threatened that I would not get my full monthly wages if I did not register enough people into courses. My wages were never meant to be performance related.

Cult B

When I was sexually assaulted at a music festival, having taken a weekend away from cult activities, one leader told me this was the kind of thing that happens when you go away. What a way to victim-blame? I was made to feel guilty for going away and fearful of the outside world – correction, even more fearful as I was already traumatised by the assault.

Cult A and Cult B feature on many online search results for lists of recognised cults. Cult A asserts informational control by strongly suggesting that new and long-term members do not read these online analyses! I am not naming these cults because, frankly, I do not have the money to hire a lawyer if they decided to sue me or go after the publisher! That’s just another trick from the cult playbook: litigate and financially abuse till kingdom come.

If you think you or somebody you know has accidentally become involved in a cult, help is out there.

Take Your Power Back And Get The Fuck Out.

I am enormously grateful to the following sources which help support my ongoing recovery from the cults:

#igotout, Freedomofmind.org, the work of Dr Ramani Durvasula on narcicism, A Little Bit Culty Podcast, IndoctriNation podcast and my therapist Cathryn Deyn.

~Sarah Wheeler