In my last piece, I wrote about love bombing and how it’s one of the ways people get manipulated in cults. I just had a birthday this week and my Facebook memories for that day from about 2013–2019 are full of love bomb-y, syrupy praise and devotion to my awesomeness…

I’ve asked myself the question a million times and sometimes I still can barely bring myself to say the words: “I was in a cult.” It feels mealy and gritty, sort of like a cross between sand and oatmeal. I’m careful who I say it to, too. I know that…

There is no school for cult leaders. But there may as well be. Over the past year and a half, I’ve done a lot of learning about cults, coercion, undue influence, the illusion of choice and more. I’ve done this for a simple reason: I was in a cult. In…

Influence is unavoidable. From the time we are children, we’re influenced by others-typically our parents and our siblings and then our friends. Our parents have influence over things like what religion (if any) we practice, at least while we are young. They also influence the foods we eat, the activities…

When I left my part time job and subsequently closed my business in the dog training industry, I foolishly deleted a lot of the work I had done online. I had run a business for 3 years and removed my website and almost all of the blogs it contained. Being…

This piece was originally published on Medium in May, 2020 (It’s also only ever been edited by me, so all errors, grammatical or otherwise are my own.) I moved it to a personal blog that I eventually realized I had no interest in maintaining, stuck it into a file, having…