Who Joins Cults? by Ali Raia

Daniella Mestyanek Young

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:34:07 UTC

"How I Escaped From a Religious Sex Cult and Ended Up in the Army"

Ex-member of Children of God

Guinevere Turner

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:35:24 UTC

"My Childhood in A Cult"

Ex-member of the Lyman Family

Lauren Hough

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:37:02 UTC

Leaving Isn't The Hardest Thing

Ex-member of Children of God

EMOTIONAL TRAUMA

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Mental Health Challenges

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Especially for those coming from a highly controlled, world-rejecting group such as Children of God or the Lyman Family, membership often includes an array of mental health challenges. A majority of these challenges included anxiety, depression, and PTSD stemmed from the sexual abuse and trauma that members suffered at the hands of group elders, or "aunties" and "uncles". For some children, including Daniella and Ashley, these often manifested in related physiological responses as well including bed wetting, panic attacks, and intrusions such as nightmares and flashbacks.

Maladaptive Coping Strategies

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:46:29 UTC

When someone is faced with such a large amount of traumatic experiences, emotional turmoil, and psychological challenges, it is very common to adopt certain coping strategies that may not be the best for you. These can be especially exacerbated when you have to hide behind the demands and expectations that members face every day as part of a highly controlled group. Daniella put it perfectly: "Behind those happy Family photos, behind the singing and praying and praising Jesus, there was a little girl who had already started fantasizing about her own death. Who, from the age of four, developed a nail-biting habit so severe that blood constantly dripped from her nail beds and cuticles, who couldn’t stop ripping and tearing her skin".

Internal Conflict

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:47:17 UTC

When people hear about the horror stories that ex-cult members went through, they assume that it must have been just that- a horror story. What they fail to realize is that, for many members, it was a relationship of conflict; of love and hate, of fear and safety, of home and isolation. When looking back on their times as cult members, all of the women reflected on their rocky relationship with the group and their feelings towards it. For Daniella, Children of God was a source of constant fear and abuse while simultaneously being her family and her safe place. While she constantly fantasized about life with "different parents, a family with money and real jobs who sent their kids to normal school, who weren’t punished for their spontaneous moments of joy", she also was constantly terrified of being taken away from her family. Though she wanted to feel like a hero and live up to the expectations of the group and was scared of being taken, she also "wanted to be far away from Uncle Jerry and all the other leering Uncles”.

Disintegration of Self

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:48:04 UTC

One common theme that I noticed across the women's stories was that they all mentioned, in a sense, losing their self-identity. This is especially common for members who are born into a cult or brought in at a young age by their parents. For young children who grew up in these communities, all that they have ever known about themselves is who they were as a member of the group. Their entire existence was shaped around service to the group's purpose and submitting to their leaders. After leaving, wether voluntarily or not, it is hard for individuals to identify any sense of themselves that was not tied to the group.

Lauren spends a lot of time delving into her struggles as a teenager after leaving the Children of God cult, highlighting the difficulties of finding herself and her place in a society that she had never been a part of. She wrote a lot about how she often felt invisible and misunderstood outside of the cult, feeling "like a ghost" with no ties to mainstream society or the people around her. "The distance between me and everyone around me, the disconnect, only served to reinforce what I’d learned in the cult: I didn’t belong" (pg. 177). It wasn't until she came across the obituary of the revered leader of the CoG, David Berg, in newspaper article that she was reminded that she was "real." I could quote so many of her words because she is such a beautiful and evocative writer, but one quote that really stuck out to me was this: "I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And what I thought, after the initial desire to find his grave and piss on it, was that everything I remembered was real. I was real. You can forget after a while, when no one sees you. I felt like a ghost, wandering the halls, sitting in class, memorizing facts to pass tests, wishing someone would just talk to me, just for a moment. But now I had proof—a page from the Amarillo Globe-News that said I was real" (pg. 179). For Lauren, the first sense of self that she was able to identify after leaving was when she was reminded of her past life, and that is the dangerous reality for many ex-members who leave these groups.

SOCIAL ISOLATION

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Separating Families

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Highly controlled cults thrive off of the control that they exert, and one of the main modes through which they achieve this is through isolating their members from mainstream society, or the "outside" world. Leaders often achieve this isolation through ideological reinforcement, convincing members that in order to survive Armageddon, gain God's acceptance, or fulfill the group’s mission, they must sever ties with family and friends and fully embrace their new “family.”

Building Dependency

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:49:45 UTC

This isolation from the outside world creates a strong dependency in individuals on the group for safety, family, home, acceptance, and a feeling of purpose. This dependency is especially dangerous, though effective for leaders, among members who grew up in the cult such as Daniella, Ashley, Guinevere, and Lauren. Due to this dependency, they learn from a young age that they know nothing different, developing a lot of fear towards the idea of alternative lifestyles out of the cult. In the words of Daniella, “I couldn’t survive in this world. But it was the only world I knew. At age six, these two truths were already at war inside me”. Lauren expressed similar conflict, stating, "The thing about being part of something like a cult is it fills something inside you. You have a reason and a certainty in that reason. You need that purpose because they take everything else, everything that defined you, down to your fucking name. Kind of hard to make friends when you don’t know who the fuck you are.” I don't think I could put it any better than that.

Myths about the Outside

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:51:04 UTC

Cult leaders not only attempt to separate their members physically from the outside world, but also mentally and emotionally, and they do this by creating and disseminating stories meant to instill fear and a distrust of people outside of the group. Children of God used the Branch Davidians Waco raid as a tool to convince members that "Systemites", or outsiders, killed children, brainwashed them, and would arrest their "aunties" and "uncles" if they found out the truth. Danielle notes that she was so afraid of the Systemites that, while she was so afraid she'd have to stay with CoG, she was also just as afraid of being taken away by outsiders. For Guinevere, she grew up believing that "World people- everyone but us, that is- were soulless" and that her soul would be sucked out if she came in contact with them for too long. It was through these myths and an "us vs. them" mentality that cults were able to isolate their members thoughts from the outside world, keeping their curiosity and desire to leave at bay.

CONFORMITY

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:51:41 UTC

Punishments

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:51:57 UTC

In addition to psychological and emotional coercion, cults often relied on physical punishment as a means of enforcing conformity. In her book, Lauren notes that she would often receive punishment for an array of issues, even some that she never could name. These punishments included solitary confinement, sexual abuse, physical labor, exorcisms, and more. Guinevere also notes that she was punished so often as part of the Lyman Family that "we were all used to being in trouble for nothing concrete: I was punished once for looking at someone “with that Scorpio soul in your eyes'". Members could be physically beaten, given the silent treatment, starved or locked in a closet at any moment. Any desires to act out, disobey orders, or even speak out of turn were immediately shut down and reprimanded by authority figures, physically enforcing obedience onto members.

Pressures to Succeed/Live Up

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:52:51 UTC

While an ex-member's time within a cult is filled with turmoil and tribulations, there also often exists a sense of wanting to fit in and be a model member. When someone is part of a group that defines their entire identity, they will do almost anything to not be outcast or seen as different. This need to conform and be accepted can turn into something even stronger, a desire to live up to the group's expectations and be the ideal member that they are always told stories about. For Daniella, Lauren, and other children among the Children of God cult, they grew up being told that they were chosen to serve God and defend against his enemies. Through Deceivers Yet True, a comic publication written to teach children how to defend the group against non-members by lying. These magazines taught them how to act in the case of police raids and questioning, instructing them to lie about allegations of child abuse in order to protect the people. To Daniella, the stories that she was told through these comics, of children who were "heroes" chosen by God were an inspiration. "I hoped and prayed that, one day, I’d be one of the chosen ones asked by God to defend against the enemy at the gates. I wanted to be a hero like Gabriella, like Abigail. I took the drills as seriously as every child in the commune." In environments such as these where an individual's identity is defined by the group, they can find great purpose in reaching to achieve belonging and becoming the hero of their story.

MIND CONTROL TACTICS

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:53:17 UTC

Thought-terminating Cliches

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 15:53:52 UTC

A very common manipulation tactic for cult leaders is employing thought-terminating cliches, or phrases meant to silence dissent among their members. These statements, such as "It is God's will" or "Everything happens for a reason" counteract doubts that members may have and helps to alleviate the conflict that they feel towards the group's beliefs and practices. For members of Children of God, the sexual abuse that they suffered was "from God and done with love". "Incest, that’s just the devil making you feel ashamed. God’s only law is love, man." When Mel Lyman's predicted date for the end of the world failed, members of the Lyman Family were told that they were the reason that the prophecy failed because their "souls weren't ready". Through these cliches, leaders such as Mel Lyman and David Berg were able to keep members' doubts at bay and continue to keep them conforming.

RECOVERY PROCESS

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IMPACT OF THESE PATTERNS

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 18:05:31 UTC

It is important for me to acknowledge the demographic of my sources as I analyze the patterns that I have observed throughout my research, and the limitations that accompany them. The four members who have sourced my research are all women who grew up in cults and were members from a young age. They did not choose to join the cult but rather their families brought them in. They were all members of world-rejecting, highly controlled cults that dictated every aspect of their lives up until they left. Based on these demographics, the patterns that I have identified are not representative of all ex members and therefore cannot be generalized.

These types of cults thrive on the ability to manipulate and control their members in every way, whether through social isolation, instilling fear through punishments, or deploying thought-terminating cliches, they make it almost impossible for their members to dissent or see a life on the other side of the group. People on the outside have many beliefs about what happens in cults and who is a member of them, but the reality is that anyone can fall victim to the draw of a charismatic leader offering a chance at acceptance, purpose, and safety. Furthermore, many of these individuals will go to great lengths to protect these values once they get a taste of them. Despite the horrors that they experienced daily and the traumas that they endured, every single woman who's testimony I read acknowledged the good times they had and the conflict that they felt between leaving in staying. Fear was a constant for them- fear of staying, fear of leaving. The truth is that the freedom that the outside world offers is much less appealing when there is nothing to tie you to it or its people, and once you finally achieve that freedom, you may realize its a lot more uncertain that you thought.

Recovery can look so different across individuals, and it is not linear. Leaving the abusive relationship that you endured doesn't mean that you're automatically happy and free. You are still shackled by the trauma that has been engrained in you, the fear that can creep up at any moment, and the separation you feel from those you cannot relate to. After leaving a cult, you may go on to join the army like Danielle and Lauren, or become a victims advocate like Ashley, or go on to be a renowned actress and director such as Guinevere. The common thread that we can draw between all of these experiences is that, even after leaving the cults that once defined their identities, former members continue to seek the same sense of family and protection that they were taught, even in spite of the atrocities they suffered.

Ashley Easter

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 18:51:14 UTC

"My Story: From Cult Survivor to Global Activist"

Ex-member of an independent Fundamental Baptist Church

Citations

ali23_15 — 2025-07-25 18:52:50 UTC

Easter, Ashley. 2024. “My Story.” Ashleyeaster.Com.

Retrieved July 25, 2025

(https://www.ashleyeaster.com/story).

Hough, Lauren. 2021. Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing:

Essays. New York: Vintage Books, a division of

Penguin Random House LLC.

Turner, Guinevere. 2019. “My Childhood in a Cult.” The

New Yorker. Retrieved July 25, 2025

(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-

childhood-in-a-cult?_sp=fd82b45f-7300-4ed5-9a40-

4d54d42b8070.1753453433889).

Young, Daniella Mestyanek. 2022. “How I Escaped from

a Religious Sex Cult and Ended up in the Army.”

Rolling Stone. Retrieved July 25, 2025

(https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-

features/children-of-god-cult-escape-army-

1388892/).

Sharing Their Stories

ali23_15 — 2025-07-26 01:01:24 UTC

When someone lives through something that is so different from the people around them, the idea of sharing their past can be incredibly daunting. There is a certain public fascination with the weird and the occult, but does that fascination extend to the people who live next to you? That you pass in the hall? Or is this fascination just with what you think can't touch you? These questions highlight the constant conflict that ex cult members face when trying to understand how much they can disclose in the new relationships that they form after leaving. For Lauren, navigating through mainstream society and high school was something that she struggled deeply with, especially when it came to making friends. She never knew what was okay to tell people about her old life, but she also had nothing to relate to them with in the outside world. And thats the thing about life inside a cult, "It’s fascinating because it’s so different. But it’s so fucking different. And no matter what I say, it’ll still be foreign to you." How do you tell someone that you constantly lived in fear, that you were punished for crying, that you never knew who may come into your room at night? This becomes an incredible obstacle for ex members as they attempt to create a new life in a completely different society.

SOCIAL ISOLATION VS CONFORMITY

ali23_15 — 2025-07-26 01:19:29 UTC

ali23_15 — 2025-07-26 01:21:51 UTC

Social isolation and conformity and two of the most significant factors in determining who joins cults, but even more importantly, who chooses to stay. While I picked up on strong patterns for both as I read through the different testimonials, I notices that a lot of the conformity aspects were fueled by the social isolation that was impose upon members. The main patterns of successful conformity tactics including feeling pressure to fit in and avoid punishments seemed to be done out of a response to the dependency that members developed due to their social isolation. For example, the main influence for members to want to conform to the group's practices is because they feel that they don't know anything else. The dependency that many of these members gained through their social isolation created an environment where members felt the need to conform and uphold the group's beliefs, instilling a desire for conformity out of a need for survival in the only place they felt they belonged.