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This explores the developmental and psychological impact of being raised in cultic environments, addressing a critical gap in research that has largely centred on adults who join and later leave.

INTERNATIONAL CULTIC STUDIES December 18, 2025

This article was originally published in ICSA Today, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016, 17-22

This is a summary version of an academic article written by Ashley Allen, MSW, LSW. The article draws on two papers the author wrote for ICSA’s New York City Educational Outreach Committee, as part of the committee’s series of model presentations on cultic issues. The committee’s work was presented at ICSA’s 2015 Annual Conference in Stockholm. Illustrative examples used in this paper include some from the author’s own experience and some from experiences recounted to the author by others (details have been changed to protect their identities).

Read the full academic article on the ICSA Today website, and the summary below.

Drawing on clinical literature, survivor accounts, and developmental theory, the author describes how cults function as totalizing social systems that profoundly distort normal family structures, identity formation, and emotional growth. Unlike adult converts, children have no pre-cult reference point, making them uniquely vulnerable to control, abuse, and developmental harm. However they leave, second- generation former members are not only losing an entire relational support system but an entire world. They are losing the only belief structure and worldview they have ever known.

Suppression of cognition, emotion, and creativity

Independent thinking and emotional expression are actively discouraged in cultic environments, often through punishment or shaming. Children learn that questioning authority or expressing grief, anger, or sadness is dangerous or immoral. The article highlights how emotional suppression directly undermines critical thinking, since reasoning and emotion are neurologically intertwined. Creativity—particularly play—is also frequently prohibited, despite being essential for healthy brain development, emotional regulation, and identity formation.

“Independent, autonomous thinking and feeling on the part of children in cultic environments is severely suppressed, which hampers normal cognitive and emotional development.”

Unpredictability and hypervigilance as control mechanisms

A defining feature of cult leadership described in the article is behavioral unpredictability. Leaders alternate between praise and punishment without clear standards, forcing children into constant hypervigilance. This instability trains children to monitor the leader’s moods rather than develop internal guidance or self-trust. Over time, this dynamic produces chronic anxiety, insecurity, and an impaired ability to assess risk or form stable expectations in relationships outside the group.

“None of the children knew what to do when faced with the simplest of choices… Having never been allowed the basic choices that most children get to make as they begin to discover what they like and who they are, they had no sense of self” (Perry & Szalavitz, 2007, para. 44).

Leaving, recovery, and long-term consequences

Second-generation members leave cults in different ways—voluntarily, with family, or by expulsion—and the manner of exit significantly affects recovery. Regardless of how they leave, they lose not only relationships but an entire worldview. Practical barriers such as lack of education, documentation, or social skills compound psychological challenges. Recovery often involves trauma, grief, dependency issues, harsh internalized moral judgments, and profound culture shock as former members attempt to construct identity and meaning in a world they were taught to fear.

Conclusion summary The article concludes that being raised in a cultic group constitutes a distinct and severe form of developmental trauma, fundamentally different from the experience of adult converts. For second-generation individuals, leaving does not involve abandoning a belief system they once chose, but rather losing the only family structure, social world, and moral framework they have ever known. Because cults shape attachment, cognition, emotion, and identity from birth, recovery requires far more than ideological deconversion; it involves constructing a sense of self, autonomy, and trust for the first time. Recognising this distinction is essential for clinicians, educators, and policymakers working with those born into high-demand groups.

Who this article is for This article is particularly relevant for mental health professionals, educators, social workers, legal practitioners, researchers in cultic studies, and policymakers, as well as adult survivors seeking language to understand their childhood experiences in high-demand groups.

Ashley Allen, MSW, LSW (d. 2025), was a social worker, therapist, and researcher whose work focused on trauma recovery, coercive control, and the experiences of second-generation adults raised in high-demand groups. Having spent her formative years in a religious cult, she brought both lived experience and clinical rigor to the field of cultic studies. Ashley completed her Master’s in Social Work at Monmouth University, presented widely at mental health agencies and universities, and served on the International Cultic Studies Association’s New York Educational Outreach Committee. Her writing and program development contributed significantly to survivor-centered understanding and professional education in cultic studies.

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In remembrance of the author Ashley Allen, MSW, LSW passed in November 2025. She devoted her life to advancing trauma recovery and systemic reform, weaving together a career that spanned emergency response, social work, therapy, and international advocacy. Her professional path reflected both extraordinary breadth and profound compassion, marked by a commitment to supporting survivors of coercion, violence, and trauma across multiple contexts.

Her early service as an EMT and social worker in hospice and emergency settings grounded her in the realities of crisis care and human resilience. These experiences shaped her trauma-informed perspective and fueled her passion for recovery work. Transitioning into the role of therapist, Ashley provided direct support to survivors of domestic violence, veterans navigating complex transitions, and individuals impacted by incarceration. Her therapeutic practice was distinguished by empathy, clarity, and survivor-centered innovation.

Ashley’s contributions extended far beyond the clinical sphere. As a staff member at the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), she created programs specifically designed for those harmed by cults, ensuring that survivors had access to resources and pathways toward healing. She also authored and contributed to several articles and other materials that illuminated the lived experience of cult involvement, helping professionals and survivors alike to better understand the dynamics of coercive control.

Her work was interdisciplinary and global in scope. Ashley collaborated on initiatives addressing extremism, prison reform, and veterans’ affairs, bringing her expertise to bear on some of society’s most pressing challenges. She developed programs that bridged research and practice, coordinated international efforts to expand awareness of coercive systems, and consistently advocated for survivor voices to be centered in policy and reform.

Across all these domains, Ashley’s legacy is defined by her ability to integrate professional rigor with deep compassion. She was not only a therapist and program developer but also a visionary advocate who recognized the interconnectedness of trauma across cultic studies, domestic violence, incarceration, and systemic injustice. Her writings, programs, and collaborations continue to influence professionals worldwide, offering both practical tools and inspiration for those committed to healing and justice.

Ashley’s career stands as a testament to the power of interdisciplinary work and survivor-centered advocacy. Through her dedication, she left an indelible mark on the fields of trauma recovery and systemic reform, embodying a legacy of compassion, innovation, and unwavering commitment to those most in need.

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The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), established in 1979, is a nonprofit educational organization committed to the study of psychological manipulation, thought reform, and high-demand environments. ICSA serves a wide range of stakeholders—from survivors and families to researchers, educators, and clinicians.

Dr. Margaret Singer’s 6 conditions for thought reform

ICSA TEAM

These conditions create the atmosphere needed to put a thought reform system into place:

Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time.

• Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. • The goal may be to make them deployable agents for the leadership, to get them to buy more courses, or get them to make a deeper commitment, depending on the leader’s aim and desires.

2. Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time. • Through various methods, newer members are kept busy and led to think about the group and its content during as much of their waking time as possible.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person. • This is accomplished by getting members away from the normal social support group for a period of time and into an environment where the majority of people are already group members. • The members serve as models of the attitudes and behaviors of the group and speak an in-group language. • Strip members of their main occupation (quit jobs, drop out of school) or source of income or have them turn over their income (or the majority of) to the group. Once stripped of your usual support network, your confidence in your own perception erodes. • As your sense of powerlessness increases, your good judgment and understanding of the world are diminished (ordinary view of reality is destabilized). • As group attacks your previous worldview, it causes you distress and inner confusion; yet you are not allowed to speak about this confusion or object to it — leadership suppresses questions and counters resistance. • This process is speeded up if you are kept tired–the cult will keep you constantly busy.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity. • Manipulation of experiences can be accomplished through various methods of trance induction, including leaders using such techniques as paced speaking patterns, guided imagery, chanting, long prayer sessions or lectures, and lengthy meditation sessions. • Your old beliefs and patterns of behavior are defined as irrelevant or evil. Leadership wants these old patterns eliminated, so the member must suppress them. • Members get positive feedback for conforming to the group’s beliefs and behaviors and negative feedback for old beliefs and behavior.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. • Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, he or she is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning. • The only feedback members get is from the group, they become totally dependent upon the rewards given by those who control the environment. • Members must learn varying amounts of new information about the beliefs of the group and the behaviors expected by the group. • The more complicated and filled with contradictions the new system in and the more difficult it is to learn, the more effective the conversion process will be. • Esteem and affection from peers is very important to new recruits. Approval comes from having the new member’s behaviors and thought patterns conform to the models (members). Members’ relationship with peers is threatened whenever they fail to learn or display new behaviors. Over time, the easy solution to the insecurity generated by the difficulties of learning the new system is to inhibit any display of doubts — new recruits simply acquiesce, affirm and act as if they do understand and accept the new ideology.

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. • The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing. • Members are not allowed to question, criticize or complain — if they do, the leaders allege that the member is defective — not the organization or the beliefs. • The individual is always wrong — the system, its leaders and its belief are always right. • Conversion or remolding of the individual member happens in a closed system. As members learn to modify their behavior in order to be accepted in this closed system, they change — begin to speak the language — which serves to further isolate them from their prior beliefs and behaviors.

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ICSA

Empowering Minds. Advancing Research. Supporting Recovery.

The Drama Triangle and the Power & Control Wheel Walk Into a Church

Kathryn Keller, Ph.D.

In this presentation, we will explore the Karpman Drama Triangle and the Power and Control Wheel and how these two models can be used together to conceptualize religious trauma for and with our clients. We'll examine how the models intersect, resulting in harmful dynamics, and how our clients can be empowered to recognize these dynamics as they continue to heal from their painful experiences.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the three roles in the Karpman Drama Triangle

2. Identify abuses of power

3. Identify how the Drama Triangle and abuses of power can intersect in high-control environments

Daniel Shaw

I left Siddha Yoga, the religious community I had lived and worked in for more than a decade, in 1994. Almost simultaneously, I began my training for a master’s degree in social work with the aim of becoming a psychotherapist. I asked my psychoanalytic supervisor at my clinical internship for some psychoanalytic reading, and she recommended two books: Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child,1 and Heinz Kohut’s How Does Analysis Cure?2 In the first book, I began learning about narcissism; in the second, I began learning about empathy. I perceived that the guru I had just left fit the profile of a narcissist, but I wanted to understand more clearly what that meant.

As I studied more, particularly the work of Erich Fromm in The Heart of Man3 and Escape From Freedom,4 I was led to formulate the concept of the traumatizing narcissist, based largely on my observations of my former guru, Gurumayi. Once I had left the cult and begun to reclaim my critical-thinking abilities, Gurumayi became a human being to me, not a deity. What I couldn’t find in her was real compassionate empathy, real unselfish giving.

I believe that the development of compassionate empathy had been aborted in Gurumayi by her guru, the late Swami Muktananda, who has been credibly accused of many abuses of power, including predatory pedophilia and multiple sexual assaults. In the time I spent working for Gurumayi, what I observed in the place where empathy could have been was contempt for whomever she could not control, and contempt disguised as “the grace of the guru”5 for the many people she did control. My first effort to theorize about the traumatizing narcissism of cult leaders—the shame they conceal from themselves and others behind their contempt, and their traumatizing impact on followers—became my final paper for graduate school, titled Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, which can be accessed on the ICSA website.6

Fast forward to around 2015. My psychotherapy practice was going well, but I realized that my training had not taken me as far as I felt I wanted to go when it came to helping my most severely traumatized clients, some of whom had extreme dissociative symptoms.

I began to study the work of contemporary traumatologists, clinicians who are developing trauma treatments informed by research in neuroscience. This research changed everything for those who had been focused on treating PTSD: It informed the work of Judith Herman7 and Bessel van der Kolk,8 Alan Schore’s research linked to psychotherapy,9 Onno van der Hart’s theory of structural dissociation,10 Dan Siegel’s model of the brain and affect regulation,11 Patricia Ogden and Janina Fisher’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy,12 and Richard Schwartz’s theory of internal family systems.13

Read more here...

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International Cultic Studies Association, Inc. 100 Bull Street, Suite 200 Savannah, GA 31401

Post-Cult Problems: An Exit Counselor's Perspective

Carol Giambalvo

Classification of Ex-Members

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Tools for Recovery

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Common Issues in Post-Cult Recovery

Pachuca de Soto, Hgo.- Hasta nuevo aviso, la suspensión de clases es oficial para los institutos de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades; de la Salud, Ciencias Económico-Administrativas y de Ciencias Básicas e Ingeniería, para garantizar la seguridad de los estudiantes y preservar la protección de las instalaciones. Así lo confirmó en conferencia de prensa, el rector de la Universidad Autónoma del…