One of the key ways high control groups capture people for the long haul — regardless of the intelligence, the social supports, and other resources people have when they first get involved — is by creating disorganized attachment in participants. Trapping people socially, emotionally, and biologically, disorganized attachment is the secret weapon of a cult.

The Illusion of Safety

How does a cult deploy this psychological weapon? The three elements that must be present to spur disorganized attachment, according to Alexandra Stein, are isolation, engulfment, and the arousal of fear.[1]

This begins in early stages of someone’s involvement with a cult (or totalist group, as Stein calls them, since they provide total answers for all of life, and colonize a person’s total life). Leaders create the conditions for positive experiences. The aim is for a participant to come to feel that the group is a place of safety, comfort and possibility — what Stein calls a “safe haven.”[2]

This process of developing trust and a sense of safety can go on for weeks, months, or as it did for me, years. If a participant is then coaxed to increase their level of involvement with the group — and perhaps, in time, to step back from old ties — they may become engulfed socially, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes physically, with the group.
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Arousing Fear

Once a person has come to relate to their group as a safe haven, a place of love and security, the next step is to arouse fear. If a person has been successfully isolated from past relationships and immersed in the group and its world, the arousal of fear can lead to what attachment researchers call “fright without solution.”

The fear-stimulus may take the form of physical threats, actual physical abuse, sleep deprivation, over-stimulation of the senses, or emotional abuse, including ostracism before others.[3] After I moved cross-country to work for my old meditation group, it came in the form of more subtle environmental factors. That included immersion in a pervasive, quietly judgmental culture, being (mysteriously) stymied in my job for the group (which eroded my sense of agency and effectiveness), and the effects of the deep insecurity of the long-time students, and the attendant mistrust and control they aimed at others — a pattern of feelings and behaviors which had been cultivated in them by the founder, and which outlasted him.

What’s more, long before I moved to work for the group, negative seeds had been sown — like coming to think in the binaries of selfish/selfless and to regard the ego / self as the enemy… to aim for perfection and be hyper-aware of all the ways one was (inevitably) falling short. What had started out as an idealistic viewpoint that had a largely positive impact on me grew into a pernicious force. That was only exacerbated when I relocated to the community.

Further, my mind-body had started doing unexpected (to me), unpredictable, sometimes painful things when I tried to meditate. (I detailed this in a post on my kundalini experience​.) Meditation had ceased to be a reliable means to settle my emotions and nervous system; indeed, it more often seemed to create agitation instead. My group neither prepared me for these adverse effects, nor had anything useful to offer to address them.

All of this had the cumulative effect of making me feel not-safe in a visceral, primal way. I believe this contributed to my weird meditation experiences and to, first, vigilance, and later, shutdown of my nervous system. I was not isolated and engulfed fully, and left within a year of my arrival — so I was not successfully captured socially. Still, the effect on my nervous system and well-being were deep and long-lasting.

The Dilemma of Mixed Signals

Kindness plays a role in the process too, perhaps counter-intuitively. Stein explains that “Once in this state of terror or fright without solution, even small gestures on the part of the group begin to feel benevolent and caring, increasing the sense that it is the group that will protect one, the group that will save one from the threat.”[4] Reassurance is exactly what one is looking for when under threat, so it makes sense that when it comes under those circumstances, it carries even greater weight than in ordinary life.

Others who study human social dynamics have pointed to this pattern, too — not just in moments of difficulty, but as an ongoing part of group life. What Judith Hermann calls “capricious granting of small indulgences” can reinforce the story that a person/group is the source of care, and create inner confusion, since the group sometimes causes stress or harm too. Benjamin Zablocki similarly writes of a “cycle of assault and leniency”; the alteration scrambles people’s ability to understand what is happening to them and to make choices on a rational basis.[5]

In my old group, during the formative first few decades of the ashram community, I suspect the control mechanism in operation most often was disapproval or withdrawal of positive attention. Undesired behavior resulted in less access to and affirmation from the charismatic teacher, and negative evaluations by him. This would result in a downgraded social position in the group as a whole, as the community followed suit.
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In my own experience, positive messages, such as a spiritual belief in our inherent goodness as persons, were the teachings emphasized out loud; (self) assessments of all the ways we fell short of our perfect potential were cultivated subtly. For the first generation, my hunch is that the alteration of compliments and criticism, direct from the guru, were more overt. Always framed, of course, as for one’s own edification and spiritual progress. I’m reminded of this feeling wheel that caught my eye last year. There at the intersection of trust and fear — of support and threat — is submission.

When I worked at a women’s shelter and rape crisis center in my twenties, I was trained to recognize this as a common cycle in domestic abuse. In a relationship that starts with love bombing, intense connection, and tender attention, the boundaries are stretched over time to include small indignities, insults delivered in honeyed tones as “jokes,” inconsiderate demands, shoves, and eventually much worse. After a violent incident that makes the victim consider bolting — perhaps even in the act of doing so — the abuser circles back around to the flowers-and-candy behavior. He may have sprinkled some of that in along the way, too.
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Whether it is in a controlling relationship or a high control group, the key to trapping a victim is the alteration of love and fear. This is what keeps alive the hope that the loving person is the real one, and that the hurtful behavior will end. But conditional love is not love at all. Love that is unreliable is a set-up.

Run to Me

So a person has found a wonderful group, accumulated good experiences, and developed a felt sense of safety with the group. Then things start happening that pose some type of threat, be it emotional, social, or physical.

What do humans do when we are afraid? Like other mammals, our instinct is not just to run away from the threat, but to run to a source of safety.[6] It’s what Whitney Houston sang about in the song “Run to You,” from the 1992 film The Bodyguard:
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The teacher’s response? He threatened to return to India. When his people were already frightened and confused, the guru, like a hyena pack on the prowl, cornered his prey (emotionally, that is). The idea of losing their teacher, their father-figure, forever, triggered existential fear in many of his students.

Most in that generation had cut themselves off from their families, convinced by the teacher that this was in their own best interests for their progress on the spiritual path. Thus, they had no one else to turn to, no other safe havens waiting to shelter them. Many of those who did leave as a result of the shake-up were those who had managed to surreptitiously form genuine emotional bonds with another member of the group — a new, alternate safe haven — and they left in pairs together.

As I interpret it now, the threat of the guru’s departure had flipped some sort of biological switch in the loyalists that defined the “traitors” as an existential threat to them. Their attachment to the teacher was so strong and defining in their lives, that they could not face the reality of his harmful behavior. And they had no one else to turn to.

So, instead of holding the teacher accountable for his own behavior, they blamed the truth-tellers and truth-believers for the panic and terror they felt. By threatening to abandon his loyal students, the guru increased the fear factor and cemented their submission to him.

Frozen Bodies

Normally, the attachment mechanism built into our biology works well — the arousal system and comfort system balance each other out. Under threat, one returns to the attachment figure (or group) for comfort and/or tangible help, more successfully survives the threat, and then can separate again after the threat has passed and arousal dissipates.

The biochemistry behind this process is significant. Arousal stimulates the production of cortisol, while the “felt security” from the attachment figure leads to a reduction in cortisol and a rise in opiates produced by the body. That’s what makes an upset toddler feel better after Mommy or Daddy has given them a cuddle. Upon completion of this cycle, the individual who sought the grounding attachment can now disengage and go on with life.[8]

Alas, if the one you turn to for support under stress is also the source of stress — if there is no resolution available to the threat — the cortisol keeps on coming, and you cannot break away from your “safe” (or not-so-safe) haven. Both the approach and the avoidance systems remain on.[9] Your attachment instincts have been used to trap you.

One might wonder, if the impulse to attach and the impulse to flee are both present, why does the attachment instinct tend to prevail for so many? In babies, the need for support outweighs the avoidance drive. A baby cannot survive without their caregiver, even if that caregiver might harm them. That baby is likely to grow into an adult with disorganized attachment — someone who never stops looking for reassurance, but who also has a hard time believing that anyone will prove worthy of their trust.

Stein observes that adults in extremist groups appear to experience something similar. When threatened, staying with the group is usually perceived as the safer course by group members; without somewhere else to turn, the idea of leaving the group terrifies people.[10]
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Thus, when the attachment system is hijacked, people can become stuck not only socially, with the group, but biologically. “The structure of totalist isolation prevents alternate attachments, thus setting in place a feedback loop of unresolvable anxiety and need for proximity,” writes Stein. “It is this process of unresolved fear arousal — chronic anxiety and hyperarousal of cortisols — that causes the strengthening of the bond to the group.”[11]

Learning about disorganized attachment, and realizing that almost anyone with a long-time association as an ashram resident / worker would develop disorganized attachment patterns through their association there, goes a long way to helping me make sense of what happened. This is why the long-timers, the students who lived so long with the teacher, didn’t trust anyone — us newbies, themselves, each other, probably not even the guru (given his unpredictable behavior patterns), even though it appeared to me like he was the only person they trusted.

Because the teacher had not proven to actually be a reliable safe haven, they had learned not to expect anyone to be. They would not be able to verbalize that, or even acknowledge it internally. But that is what their behavior told me. That was how the well of that community’s culture was poisoned.

I managed to get out of my group relatively quickly, within a year. Most of my peers got stuck at the ashram much longer. A substantial number of the teacher’s original students — also largely young adults when they first joined him — lived out the rest of their lives in the purview of the guru and his community, still members there when they died in the 2000s or 2010s. That is the likely fate of those who yet remain at the ashram now.

Fragmented Brains

So, in a typical cult scenario, a person will, at some point, be aroused to fear. She will turn to a (presumed) safe haven — the group or leader. As the source of threat, however, the group or leader cannot provide the grounding to the person that would allow them to exit the biochemical cycle. Instead, the gas pedal is still pressed to the floor, so to speak, the cortisol flooding them.” What happens next inside the person?

Normally, when a person is under threat, in addition to following the instinct to seek comfort and support from an attachment figure or group, they will also fight or run away to protect themselves. But in the situation of “fright without solution,” that is exactly what they cannot do. So instead, like a cornered animal, they freeze.
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Their bodies shut down metabolically, saving resources for a moment when something might shift in the situation and fighting or fleeing becomes possible. When no such opportunity arises, they become fixed in the frozen state, with both arousal and comfort systems stuck “on.”[12]

If this goes on long enough, they will eventually dissociate. Brain science has brought increasing insights into what is happening during dissociation. It particularly affects the right brain and that part of us that integrates the holistic and emotional right side with the rational, thinking left side.
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In the absence of this cross-hemisphere communication, a person is no longer able to think about their feelings and to use the information provided by their feelings to make sound decisions for their own well-being. As a result, the person becomes passive.[13]

This helps me understand what happened to me after I had been at the ashram for half a year. I remember being in a state with almost no feelings. It was hard to sleep, but neither was I motivated to get out of bed. The minutes ticked by slowly. I wasn’t exactly miserable — misery, after all, is a feeling. I had no goals, no hopes, no purpose. The world was drained of meaning. This was not me at all, and I knew that something was wrong. But I didn’t understand it. And I had no idea what to do about it.

I shudder to think how long I might have stayed in that state, had I not gotten a call from a board member at my previous employer in Indiana, telling me a position there had opened up, and encouraging me to apply. That is what broke through my frozen shell and got some movement happening internally again. (That, and the death of my pet.) As I began to explore one way out, I gained back energy, and agency, and clarity of thought. And I determined that one way or another, I would be leaving.

When I was saying my goodbyes some months later, a friend who was considering making the move to the ashram area asked me what I had experienced — why was I leaving? The words that pop up over and over again in my emailed reply to him are STUCK and TRAPPED. I described how that was true socially, financially, spiritually, emotionally, and cognitively. I felt immobilized. I literally had been stuck and trapped, biologically.

Sadly, while I shared what I could with my inquiring friend, I did not understand enough at the time to be able to tip him off that this was not just my unique experience, but rather, it was likely to be the experience of anyone who spent long enough in such a place.
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If the sense of being trapped and the dissociation continue in such an environment — what Stein describes as a situation of “chronic relational-induced trauma and the consequent cognitive paralysis and inability to advocate” for themselves — a person may go on to develop complex PTSD.[14]

Blind Spot

Consider that in a state of dissociation, a person becomes unable to interpret what is happening around them, and inside them.[15] Furthermore, into this vacuum comes the group or leader, who will tell the paralyzed follower how to understand what is going on, and how to behave henceforth.

The expectations of groups vary as to whether people should put on a happy face or be stalwart and solemn. Stein’s political cult was like the latter; in my old group, smiles are pasted onto otherwise frozen (and vaguely irritable) people.[16]

​Notably, people retain their previous capabilities in all areas other than the disorganized relationship to the leader/group. Stein shares that she served as a skilled machinist and then a senior computer analyst, even while she was emotionally shuttered in her old group.[17]

I may not have been able to find words for what was happening inside me, before I broke free, but I still functioned quite capably in my job at the ashram. I was like a shell of a person, inside. But my professional skills were intact. The friend who moved there around the time I was leaving progressed in an impressive high-tech career, before and during his seven years living at the ashram — in peak entrapment.

This helps me understand how my old group could be full of people with PhDs, who wrote book after book and published in respected journals and even started a non-profit doing good work on nonviolence education (as did one whose work drew me in), while being rooted in life at the ashram. There were hints that something was not quite right emotionally, and that the long timers did not turn their critical thinking skills — which they obviously had — onto the group or its leader.

In the Struggle
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In earlier stages people are fed propaganda — the palatable, even genuinely helpful, ideas and practices that draw them in and make the group seem trustworthy. But once dissociation has been induced and cognitive faculties handicapped, a deeper indoctrination can begin. The cult will tell people what to think.

I actually remember one of the leaders of my group coaching us not to think except when necessary. (I think I was pretty deep in by that point.) It was couched as a spiritual practice, to conserve energy for where you want to focus it, rather than, for example, frittering away energy in anxious rumination.
There may be something to that, if you are living in a healthy context. But below that surface level, in the context of ashram life, is a message and practice that would actually make a follower more manipulable. If you are not even trying to do your own thinking, dissociation may be locked in, and you may uncritically receive whatever ideas are imparted to you by the group.

In the most severe situations, Stein explains, “the follower accepts (or is forced to accept) … more extreme, and often incoherent, ideas as a kind of lifeline through the dissociated confusion that the group has induced.”[19] This helps make sense of the behavior of people in the extreme groups Stein often looked at — how a child plucked from a war zone can be turned into a soldier himself, or how an ISIS recruit might eventually override their own survival instincts and become a suicide bomber.

This is not to say that people don’t try to resist ideas that don’t seem correct to them, or actions that they deep down know are morally wrong. They do. But the cult leaders that succeed are excellent at pacing people and overcoming resistance. Unless they get out first, eventually a person’s resilience wears down, and they surrender.[20]

One of the examples Stein gives is of a young woman, Helen, who has several children after she is put into an arranged marriage in a Bible-based cult. The leader made her act against her own maternal instincts and literally kick her children away. It felt wrong, but Helen also felt compelled to comply, and did.
It was only after she escaped the group that she was able to have a healthy, loving relationship with her children. That capacity had always been within Helen. But it had been overridden by the demands of the cult while she was kept in the “fright without solution” state of disorganized attachment there.[21]

Getting Free

There can be life after a high control group; people do escape. Notably, if not all previous relationships have been severed, a person can return to those. This is why isolation and engulfment are so important to the cult. Stein believes that an alternate, secure attachment is the most common way out of such groups — with comfort provided, the arousal system can calm down, and the frontal cortex comes back online.

In other cases — but usually only “after many, many years” — members may start to see through the failed promises of the leader after they have pushed past the point of exhaustion.[22]

In my old group, it was more than a decade after the formation of the community when a significant exodus occurred. Public accusations of abusive behavior by the teacher came first; that appears to have broken the spell of dissociation, allowing some people to reintegrate their brains and think critically about the leader — or to voice aloud for the first time doubts that had been accumulating privately for some years.

Some recognized that the leader had continually moved the goal posts on what his meditation program was supposed to do for them — increasing the length of time they could expect it take for them to reach enlightenment, always somewhere in the future. They began to see through the manipulation and induced dependence.[23]

In times of extreme stress, the most powerful, comforting attachment may be our “actual attachment relationships.” Here Stein seems to mean one’s caregivers from childhood or other pivotal figures from one’s life, ties that pre-date the group, if they are positive, secure attachments. She also observes that getting out of the group’s orbit, even if temporarily, and into the company of other caring people, sometimes makes it possible for a person to realize, in contrast, that something is not right in their usual milieu with the group.[24]

Such a situation played a role in my own story. During my year working at the ashram, I went home to Iowa over Christmas. There, in the safe haven of my family and childhood home, I realized that I had been “putting on a happy face” at the ashram, while inwardly I had been growing deeply agitated and depressed. I recall noticing more things that didn’t add up, after that, when I returned to the ashram. Re-anchored in my family of origin, I regained some trust in my own powers of observation and assessment.

Subsequent events that I have already referred to here — the death of my canary, and encouragement from an old contact to apply for a job where I used to live — finally spurred the realization that I needed to leave. I knew the ashram wasn’t healthy for me, and once I saw one concrete escape hatch, I began to get energy and brainpower back to make a concrete plan. Which I did, secretly over months, until I could announce my departure with details set.

Most of the people in my cohort got free eventually, at least physically. Only one person from my generation remains at the ashram. But leaving physically does not guarantee that one fully wakes up or heals. In the years after I left, I was successful in reestablishing a life of my own away from the ashram, with various safe havens among my friends, church, and later, the family I created with my husband. I stabilized myself physiologically to a certain degree with those solid relationships. Body work, private ritual, and a lot of time with the ultimate attachment — Mother Nature and Spirit — were vital to me, too. I have been in a process of intermittent deconstruction of spiritual ideas for many years.

But while I did a lot to recover from my ashram year, it was only in 2023–2024, when I learned about the sexual abuse by the guru — and dug deeper and began to find other details that did not add up — that I realized I had been deeply deceived. We all had.

Learning the truth has changed my perspective dramatically. With a flurry of study around high control groups, and much reflection, it has made a greater degree of freedom possible for me. At this point, I have spent many more years getting free — cleansing the traces of trauma from my body-mind, and sifting through implanted ideas — than I did drawing close to the group in the first place.

The Upshot

Isolation and engulfment are critical steps for a high control group to turn recruits into long-term members. This is what sets the trap, separating people from alternate safe havens. But the most crucial weapon in a cult’s psychological arsenal is — mixed with apparent care — the arousal of fear. The disorganized attachment that results keeps a person frozen and dissociated in the group.
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They are then malleable to deeper indoctrination, and can be manipulated to further the real, hidden purpose of the cult — the glorification of the founder or group. In the worst situations, people may be deployed in ways that contradict their own previous moral code, that undermine their own well-being, that override their parental instincts, and that can even threaten their own survival.

People can get free from such situations. Most often, they do so through the escape hatch of a relationship that functions as a (truly) safe haven. Survivors can heal the harms done to their bodies, minds, spirits, and capacity to trust.

My hope is that society will not only provide support and resources, rather than stigma and judgment, to survivors. My hope is that we will also start to routinely educate the public about high control groups — including the secret weapon of disorganized attachment, and how it is created. This is how we can equip more people to avoid getting entrapped in the first place.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.
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Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇

Seeking Safely: Tips for Meditators and Other Seekers … How Cults Are Concealed (part 1) … How Cults Are Concealed (Part 2)

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

​[1] Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (London: Routledge, 2021), 76.
[2] Stein, 39. The concept comes from attachment theory, where the caregiver is the safe haven for a child.
[3] Stein, 83–85.
[4] Stein, 85.
[5] Stein, 85–86.
[6] Stein, 85. Stein is building on the work of John Bowlby and others who developed attachment theory.
[7] Stein, 85.
[8] Stein, 87.
[9] Stein, 87.
[10] Stein, 89.
[11] Stein, 88.
[12] Stein, 89.
[13] Stein, 92.
[14] Stein, 90.
[15] Stein, 93.
[16] Stein, 94
[17] Stein, 94.
[18] Stein, 95.
[19] Stein, 95.
[20] Stein, 98.
[21] Stein, 98.
[22] Stein, 99–100.
[23] See John Hubner, “A Split at the Razor’s Edge,” San Jose Mercury News, April 30, 1989.
[24] Stein, 100.

Similarly, high control groups often move among us, unrecognized for what they are. I have written elsewhere about the Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance that allow cunning cults to stay hidden in plain sight, as well as how they remain concealed through Surprises, Blinders and Lies.

Let’s look at another aspect of a high control group, its onion-like structure. This structure does two things:

1 — The layers create a pathway for pacing people through successively deeper levels of indoctrination and submission over time.

2 — The structure also facilitates the creation and maintenance of the illusions that are so critical to the group’s functioning. With tight information control, only those closest to the center may have access to unsavory truths about the founder or group — and they are unlikely to be able to see those truths directly for what they are, as it would blow up their world in every way. Instead, they have become adept at denial and rationalization as a matter of survival.

Layer by Layer

To illustrate the onion concept, I will flesh out the layers of my old meditation group. My understanding comes from the particular period of my peak involvement (~2001–2006), with insights gained from publications and conversations that speak to earlier eras, as well as tidbits shared by others (all included with permission). The layers might look a little different during various eras of the group; that is typical for any group, which will be fluid as it builds its empire and adapts to circumstances.

Keep in mind that other groups may parse the layers differently. They may have fewer, or more, layers. They may have front groups more disconnected from activity at the core. They may have more or less churn of members or lieutenants.

Regardless, a layered structure following similar principles will be found in a high control group of any kind, be it Eastern, Christian, New Age, commercial, therapeutic, political, etc.

This structure also appears in extremist groups — think ISIS — and political totalitarian regimes. The onion concept actually originates with Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish and American political philosopher who theorized on the origins of totalitarianism, after herself fleeing Nazi Germany.

At the Heart

The leader / founder / teacher / guru sits here, at the heart of it all. This person is the driver of the entire enterprise. They are the source of charisma and authority that grows and controls the group. Arendt writes:

“In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his ‘intangible preponderance.’ His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel.” [i]

Relationship Zero

Social psychologist and cult survivor Alexandra Stein uses the term Relationship Zero to indicate the first person captured in the thrall of the leader. This first relationship creates the model for the leader-follower relationship generally; any subsequent followers will replicate those patterns established in the original dyad.

For the founder of my old group, Relationship Zero was a young southern woman. I’ll call her Katarina here. She had already been dabbling in occult and mystical circles for several years when the future founder of my group appeared on the scene. She had a more enduring appetite for meditation than most of the other young people who first attended his lectures and meditation sessions in the Bay Area.

​I imagine Katarina in those early years as demure and malleable, the perfect devoted helpmate to a man who needed continuous affirmation (and perhaps visa help too). Katarina was his everything, from wife to chauffeur to business manager. At first, she worked full-time in the city, while the itinerant guru gave talks at no charge.

Before they had barely begun to get organized in the U.S., the couple returned to his native India together for several years. He supposedly became more “established” in illumination during that time. There may have been practical, immigration and bureaucracy- related reasons for this detour from building a proper following in the fertile fields of flower-child California.

In any case, this sojourn on the other side of the globe surely isolated Katarina more completely from her family, friends, and culture, engulfing her in his world and worldview. These years in a foreign land would have made her completely dependent upon her husband, the aspiring guru.

One could only speculate as to whether, in addition to isolation, other elements of the Power and Control wheels associated with controlling 1:1 relationship or similarly controlling religious groups came into play (religious wheel featured here).

I imagine she embraced the teacher with the same idealism that later students would, feeling privileged to be part of bringing the sacred science of meditation to the West. Her own personal history and psychology may also have influenced in meaningful ways how she responded to the attention of this charismatic figure, and why she attached herself to the particular person she did.

(Notably, women who suffered sexual abuse as children are far more likely to be revictimized later. I wonder if a similar parallel exists for those who have grown up in the shadow of narcissists or psychopaths.)

Given the era and their backgrounds, the couple probably largely shared ideas around gender roles that worked in his favor. While they built his public image as a teacher of Eastern wisdom, Katarina was content to stay behind the scenes. To what extent she deferred to his goals and decisions, and gradually lost faith in her own intuition and critical thinking abilities, I could only speculate.

Katarina did wield considerable power in the group they built — and seemed to those who later left to have relished all the perks of power, and been complicit in the abuses of power on the part of the teacher that went unchecked. This kind of both/and reality — she was both a victim and a perpetrator of harm to others — is common in a high control group.

Whether the teacher’s control over Katarina was subtle and largely voluntary, or more dramatic and deftly orchestrated, the result was the same — her agency and individuality were subsumed to him as she became, first, his helpmate, and later, his most trusted surrogate within the cult.

Altogether the couple spent four years in India. During this time, as his group would later tell it, they lived with his ancestral family. Without the need to earn a living or attend to practical matters, they focused on immersion in meditation and other spiritual disciplines.

Geographic isolation, cultural-religious engulfment, and long hours every day of mind-altering practices — all of this would have made for a potent setting for Katarina’s indoctrination.

Surely, by the time the obstacles that had prevented their earlier return to California “fell away,” Katarina’s conversion was complete. From this cult of one, the guru would soon expand his reach.

Ring Around the Ruler

When the couple came back to California — now a more consolidated unit — the would-be spiritual teacher picked back up with his efforts to gather a community.

He had a handful of supporters from his earlier campaign in the Bay Area who had kept the faith. Most notable was a woman I’ll call Carrie, who provided the home that would shelter not only the guru and his wife, but additional early students.
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As the guru’s audience grew, an inner circle of close students and housemates developed. Eventually the group would obtain a rural property on which to establish a commune. The idealistic young adults who surrounded him there built the compound with their own hard labor.

​While the teacher continued to commute to the city to give public talks, he carved out a traditional guru-student role for himself with the young residents of his new ashram. There was a bait-and-switch tactic here that could make a used car salesperson proud.

In public talks previously, the eminently humble teacher had told eager meditators that he merely pointed the way to enlightenment; each person would have to do their own traveling. Once the young seekers were firmly ensconced as residents at the ashram, however — increasingly isolated from their families and the outside world, increasingly immersed in mind-altering spiritual practices, increasingly talking and thinking in the loaded language he supplied them — the teacher changed his tune.

Now he beseeched the eager seekers to surrender to him as their guru, if they truly wanted to attain enlightenment. The students had been acclimated over years of life with the guru before this pronouncement emerged. As one escapee told me emphatically, “I never would have joined a group where the leader said, devotion to the teacher IS the path.”

The guru’s inner circle at that time would have been drawn from this group of communalists, made up of those who were most loyal, deferential and compliant. At a later stage of his life, when he struggled with the health challenges brought by age, this inner circle would include his direct caregivers.

Within that inner circle, closest to the guru and his wife were lieutenants that enforced norms on their behalf. In some groups, these positions would have formal titles (like lieutenant). I don’t think that was the case in my old group; but the function was the same, carrying out the will of the leader within the group.

It probably made the holder of such a position feel special to be so trusted. Alas, there is typically higher turnover in these positions, who are exposed to more of the ugliness at the heart of the onion, and more at risk for disillusionment, burnout and misconduct, or grabbing power for themselves, any of which would make them a threat to the leader — and thus get them removed. No one but the teacher is irreplaceable.

Among those who were enforcers for the couple at the heart of the onion, one man got into trouble with the law when — repeating patterns of the founder, only outside the group — he attempted to serve his own sexual needs with an underage girl.

As I saw myself when I worked at the ashram, and have consistently observed from afar in the twenty years since, the Board of Trustees for the organization has always been stacked with loyalists. The organization scores poorly with external bodies on things like the independence of its governing board and the transparency of its financials. This kind of insularity is a red flag that a group is likely controlling in nature. It shows that even when the leader is gone, the onion remains intact, inner ring and all.

Residents & Workers

While the inner circle would, I expect, have drawn primarily from those who lived and/or worked at the ashram, not everyone there is equally on the inside. This larger pool of people created a community that could engage with the wider world.

Some resided at the ashram, worked in the nearby community, and helped the ashram run through their contributions of labor in the kitchen or the gardens, or in maintaining the buildings and grounds.

Others took up specialized roles to support the mission of the outward-facing organization. The founder was their brand — when I was there, they even went through a rebranding phase where the web site, emails and everything else consisted of his name. That felt uncomfortable to me at the time, as I was still holding to the “he only points the way” side of the group’s propaganda.

No doubt the young enthusiasts over the decades were lauded for giving selflessly (largely anonymously, to the public) to the group’s work. Ultimately the group’s real function was to serve as a vehicle for glorifying the founder.

Students of the guru worked as volunteers or low-paid employees for public-facing programs. It began with his talks and lectures throughout the Bay Area; expanded to include a press that published a journal, and later books; special projects, such as those in the fields of health and conservation; and in time, overnight meditation retreats.

This ashram layer includes a group that doesn’t fit neatly into the schema — people who show up strictly as employees, live locally, may develop friendly relationships with the residents over time, may interact somewhat with the wider public served by the organization, but are not themselves meditators or students of the teacher. They are not exposed directly to the programs and teachings of the group.

I’m not sure how many there are in that category currently, or when it started. During my peak involvement, it included a local woman who cooked meals for the retreats, and perhaps some people who helped ship books from the press’s warehouse. This in-but-not-really-in group is depicted in my graphic as a shoot that touches all the layers from meditator-workers through the public.

Ashram Associates
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The next layer out was created later, sometime after a program of meditation retreats was well-established. What I’ll call here the Ashram Associates program was geared toward young adults when I started going to retreats. I’m not sure if it existed in some other form before that.

It used the social lever of scarcity — we have a limited number of spots, and you must apply and make your case for why you should be included. It offered the opportunity for a greater sense of intimacy within the participating cohort, and between those participants and the ashram long-timers. And it promised spiritual rewards for the deeper exploration in which we would be guided, over six months of intermittent in-person retreats, at-home work, and online connection among participants.

I participated in this program, along with many other young adults of my cohort. It proved an effective means of deeper indoctrination into the community. And it was a gateway to the next layer in — most of us ended up, sooner or later, moving to the area and living and/or working at the ashram.

For some this was a move from southern to northern California. For others, like me, it was from another region of the U.S. to the Bay Area. Still others came from other countries, even another continent.

Later a similar model was used, with the same name, but minus the focus on young adults. I suspect not enough of us “stuck” — young adults, after all, tend to be in a time of transition. Easy come, easy go. (I mean, not *really* easy — it upended my life! But we childless, early-career YAs were less tied down elsewhere.)

Subsequent cohorts included folks who were later in their careers, or even retired. Well-established and, I think, largely past the child-rearing stage. The ones I know of were professionals who had the resources, of money and time and skills, to be able to help carry out the work of the group. Most of the married ones seem to have been in relationships with people also practicing the group’s methods; they progressed inward in the onion structure together.

Participation in this program promised mature adults a sense of purpose and closer relationships, similar to the appeal for YAs. Only these folks would not soon conclude, as I had, that there was no way they could save for retirement adequately while working for the group. No, they already had that taken care of.

An overlapping category here may be those who would become program presenters. This is a structure that was developed after I left the group. The aging first-generation students were looking for ways to sustain retreats, while reducing reliance on themselves. For those offered the opportunity to serve in this way, it would have seemed a great honor to be so trusted. I gather their training was quite controlled, with scripts that required strict adherence.

Similarly, some people would come closer in other kinds of volunteer capacities, such as serving on the editorial team. They would work closely with — and be closely guided by — loyalists who were deeper/longer in.

Some of those later associates and presenters did end up moving to live near or at the ashram. As with my YA cohort, however, there was plenty of “leakage.” People who moved back outward again are seen in outer layers of the onion, or are made invisible beyond it.

The group was left with a challenge at the opposite end of the age spectrum from the one at which I entered — how to prevent older ashram associates, ones who had taken the leap to living on group property, from becoming a net drain on resources as they aged out of their productive years. I understand that some years ago, leadership adopted a rule — “voluntarily” embraced by all to whom it would one day apply — that associates would retire, and cease to live on group property, when they hit 70 years of age.

I wonder how many waves of these special programs there have actually been over the decades. Each time, the organization netted some short-term free or cheap labor and donations. Each time, one or a few people may have stuck and become long-term residents / workers, replenishing the heart of the onion that would keep it all going.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t seem to be enough. I don’t see the ashram community or the 501(c)(3) program provider surviving past the dwindling population of current residents. The remaining stalwarts may themselves have come to terms with this; those who fully embrace the teacher’s story of reality may expect that they will be reunited with him in future lifetimes, when all are reincarnated and can pick back up with the work in same way.

Retreatants

The guru expanded from public talks to overnight meditation retreats sometime in the mid-80s. These began in an existing retreat center in the Bay Area. Over a decade later, the group would establish its own retreat house, much closer to the ashram.

The guru was aging by this time, and was purposeful in training hand-picked students to learn to present his program of meditation and related practices. (When the long-timers did likewise with non-residents, they were simply replicating the train-the-trainer model.)

You can get pretty deeply indoctrinated just from retreats, which provide a focused period in a controlled environment, a closed community. Meditating together in person seems to amplify the effects of the practice. That in turn makes one more suggestible to teachings presented in that time.

(If they haven’t already, I expect someday scientists will measure how our minds affect each other. We know that our nervous systems can do this — children cue off their parents’ responses to surprising events, to know whether to respond with alertness or calm. Perhaps our alpha-states are somewhat contagious, just as emotions of various kinds can spread between us humans, who are such social creatures.)

Over time, a variety of options were developed in the retreat program. In person near the ashram, for a weekend, or a whole week. Special pilgrimages of one’s own to this sacred site of the guru. Regional retreats, held for many years in major cities throughout the U.S., and even overseas. More recently, especially since the pandemic, online retreats.
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After the guru’s death, the retreats continued, with his long-time students facilitating workshops, and playing recordings of his talks. As a retreat-goer, after all the talks viewed, not to mention books read, and stories shared around the retreat house dining table by long-time students, it felt like I knew the teacher myself.
​​

​I was taking in his words daily in one form or another, even at home. Within a couple of years, I could reel off any of the spiels on various spiritual topics myself, using the group’s own language, as if it were second nature. Such restricted use of language is a sign of increasing control over one’s mind.

Satsangs

A program more recent even than retreats are satsangs, local groups of people that meet weekly in their city to meditate together, based on the methods of the teacher. Coordinators follow guidelines provided by the ashram, and focus on the teachings of its founder. I remember my old satsang sometimes watching and discussing videos together, too, of the teacher’s recorded talks.

In retrospect, I see how the organization tried to establish boundaries, keeping satsangs only for those who were faithfully doing their method of meditation. In practice, some folks just interested in reading or viewing the materials, and sharing fellowship with others who have spiritual interests, could turn up too, depending on how rigorously the coordinator of that particular group enforced the intended boundaries.

The satsangs were framed as a way to provide fellowship and support where you live for your meditation practice. And they did do that. Along with nightly reading of the founder’s books and journal articles, frequent home viewing of his videos (via a DVD of the month program, or later, an online video archive), periodic retreat attendance, and volunteer work for the ashram, the weekly satsang in one’s own community added yet another touchpoint in one’s life that reinforced the practices, the identity, and the relationships tied up with the founder and his ashram.

The result is a category of people that I see as in a gray zone of indoctrination. They might never identify themselves as having been part of a high control group, even if they someday learn how such groups work, and learn previously-withheld hard truths about its founder. Because they didn’t get in *that* deep. From the outside, they would seem to be leading normal lives in their communities, with work and families and friends.

However, on the inside, it is quite possible to be plenty indoctrinated while living far from the ashram. It’s all a spectrum.

Someone who just read some books, took to the meditation practice, and perhaps plugged into a local satsang might recover relatively quickly from the shock of contradictory new information about the founder. In contrast, it might be much more world-shaking for someone who had become more deeply enmeshed relationally and spiritually with the group, through years of retreats, perhaps personal acquaintance with the guru or core first-gen students, perhaps going through an ashram associate program or serving as a presenter or getting in deep as a skilled volunteer who is virtual staff, and being deeply invested in one’s own identity.

Readers

It’s been over a half century since the founder of my old group started teaching meditation in this country, and building an organization to further that work. And the most common way people come into contact with his work now is his books. (I say “his” books, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say books published in his name, since virtually all of them were, I now understand, ghost written.)

Perhaps a hundred people have resided at the ashram over these 50+ years.
Thousands have surely come to public talks and retreats. And who knows how many have watched the videos of the founder’s talks that are, by now, available online.

But books and other publications bring the teacher’s exposure exponentially higher.
​

Millions have read the books or translations published in the founder’s name (or read e-books or listened to audio-books). The translations in particular, I’ve heard, are on the shelves of yoga studios hither and yon.

This is the most common point of entry into the onion. Many people will stop at that layer. But without the books, some who end up deep inside might never have even heard of this particular teacher and meditation practice.

What the Onion Structure Accomplishes

The layers of my old group illustrate fairly well how these onion structures tend to work for high control groups generally.

Moving Down the Pipeline

The layers provide the group a means of cult-ivating people into deepening levels of involvement.

The books are a feeder for the retreats — I recall postcards that came in them, by which one could be added to the mailing list and indicate interest in learning about programs. The retreats further funnel some people into special programs, volunteering, and even, eventually, living and/or working at the ashram. This may have been true of other programs that came and went before my time in the group. Human resources are drawn from the periphery in toward the center of the onion.

​​All publications and programs also provide some level of income to support the ashram. I suspect, though, that such income might be a wash, financially, if not for the charitable donations of the most committed supporters. Especially, the estate gifts that are surely “maturing” with increasing frequency in this decade.

There is an element of choice in this process. Individuals are encouraged and/or self-select to go deeper — or not. As I explored in Who Joins Cults?, this process is akin to a non-profit’s systematic cultivation of donors. If done with full transparency for mutual benefit, such a process is ethically sound. Transparency, alas, is usually spotty at best in a high control group.

The self-selection part of the process is evident. I chose to try out this particular method of meditation after I learned about it from a fellow traveler. Later I chose to read book after book by that meditation teacher, and eventually to go to a regional retreat. Later still, I decided to attend a weeklong retreat at the headquarters. Further down the line, I applied to participate in the Ashram Associate program. This is part of how the illusion of choice is created — this is the part we know about.

A high control group quietly influences participants throughout the process (part 1 ​part 2), not least by withholding critical information for individual’s decision-making. I certainly would have made different choices if I had known the truth about the founder and his community.

In addition, puppet-masters in the group are making unseen choices about who gets to go deeper — and who doesn’t.

Any steps the group takes to encourage or bar participation may only be visible to the individual involved. I remember interactions with several different long-timers from the ashram who encouraged me to feel that I had something valuable to offer as a potential employee, should I choose to draw closer in that way. These were private conversations. No doubt others who made the move had their own experiences of love-bombing or gentle nudging.

On the other hand, the group could quietly decide who to prevent from moving further inside the onion. The Ashram Associate program I participated in seemed open to anyone with a genuine interest and ability to make the commitment. However, I now understand that there were other criteria applied to admission decisions.

I recently learned that one woman who had gotten involved with the community was barred from participating in young adult programs, despite falling within the indicated age range. She was told that she was not eligible because she was married. She was crushed! It really hurt. She didn’t understand what her marital status had to do with why she should or should not have access to this opportunity for spiritual growth.

I would guess that had her spouse been a fellow meditator, and had they both applied to participate together, the outcome would have been different. As it was, her relationship with her uninvolved spouse would have made her harder to indoctrinate into the group. So they chose not to invest in her. That piece of the process was not publicized, of course.

​Similar gatekeeping between layers may have been carried out, based on whether particular individuals had skills needed by the organization. For example, desirable skills in my old group, at certain points in time, included everything to do with publishing (copywriting, editing, graphic design, translation, marketing); fundraising (annual fund, grants, major donor development); digital editing of the teacher’s old talks, administrative and HR skills, web site management, presenting, and so on.

And of course, closer to the center of the onion, going back to the guru’s lifetime, those admitted to the innermost circle would’ve been those who most met his needs, be they practical, psychological, or otherwise.

Gradual Conditioning

The more time passes, and the deeper into the onion one goes, the more one’s whole life becomes colonized, from the inside, by the group and its worldview.
First, the way they behave becomes the way you behave — doing the practices, whatever they may be in a given a group.
​
Through this immediate experience brought on by behavior, as well as through instruction, the way they think becomes the way you think. (Or the way you don’t think — the suspension of thought is a big part of the process.)

Likewise, you learn what are appropriate ways to feel and you perform accordingly, restricting and denying even to yourself feelings that are outside the bounds of permissibility. Janja Lalich calls this bounded choice. [ii]

The concept of bounded choice helps me greatly to understand the apparent blindness of the long-timers in my group to what it has become, from its promising beginnings as a group of idealistic young people, to a community riddled with shameful secrets that no one signed up for — and no one still left seems willing or able to look at.

While I understand there are groups that quickly isolate and strip away the identities of new recruits, my experience in my old group was much more gradual. It happened as I came closer, layer by layer.

One of my old friends from my YA cohort observed something that illustrates a deliberate aspect of this process. The information shared by the group is geared to the particular layer you are in — and perhaps even, at times, what they read you as an individual to be ready for, open to.

For example, the videos of the teacher’s talks are curated and calibrated to meet a person where they are at, in their particular layer of the onion. When he was alive, he would have done this calibration himself, of course. Now those exerting leadership in his absence continue to do the same with his videos and writings.

Some talks viewed by ashram die-hards would never be shown at an introductory retreat — only a fraction of the talks archived would be considered suitable for the public. Potential recruits and newbies are kept on a diet of palatable propaganda, until moved deeper into the onion.

The spiritual practices and ideas which draw them in can be found in various teachers and traditions, and are artfully expressed by this particular teacher who speaks charmingly to their time. No one says at the outset: “Once you come to trust this teacher, this community, the message will slowly change. Loyalty will start to mean something different.” No, that has to be worked up to over a long period of time.

Alexandra Stein explains, “propaganda plays an important role in what we might call ‘voluntary’ recruitment.” These are “the ideas, messages, images and narratives that are used specifically to communicate with the outside world… those to whom propaganda is directed are not yet isolated or only partially so… Propaganda can be seen as the softening up process that gets the recruit to the point where indoctrination processes can start to be implemented… As recruits enter more fully into the life of the group the language and messages change.” [iii]

I have described elsewhere an evening ritual after meditation that was orchestrated at the end of the Ashram Associate program for my cohort. In our highly-suggestible post-meditation state, within the shared circle of identity of the cohort, we were invited to ACT OUT a kind of reverence and submission toward the guru (see the end of The Roots of Control).

This is something I would NEVER have imagined myself going along with before I took up this method of meditation. I was not someone who had started down this path seeking a guru, nor a devotional relationship, much less SURRENDER. I barely remember the experience, which may be partly because of the twilight mental state (and literal darkness in that garden — it feels like a dream). But that may also be because it’s not consistent with my self-understanding, so I didn’t let it up to the surface. That whole cognitive dissonance thing.

I guess that was my generation’s version of the bait-and-switch that the guru’s early students had experienced regarding the role of the teacher.

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

At the innermost layers of the onion, in my old group, the real world is not regarded as terribly real. This is not the highest reality; no, from the plane of enlightenment, where the guru presumably is and everyone else has been conditioned to want to be, this reality is no more real than a dream is to waking consciousness.

Perhaps it is more than coincidence that illusion plays such an important metaphysical role. It certainly plays an important practical one in the group.

​Consider Hannah Arendt’s concept that each layer in a totalitarian movement (or in my case, small, non-political cult) serves a double function. It protects the inner core from too much contact with the real world, from which they have grown disconnected and out of touch.

And it protects the outer layers from the weirdness at the heart of the onion. Including the truth underneath the mythology of the founder, and his less-than-morally-exemplary behavior.

Alexandra Stein puts it this way:  “the deeper you go toward the center of the system, the more distant from reality you become … The life and beliefs of the innermost circle are so extreme that the outer circles must be protected from it until they are ready and have moved through the intervening layers, becoming sufficiently conditioned along the way. On the other hand, the inner circle must also be protected from the reality that might burst their fictional bubble… the group employs secrecy and deception to maintain the separation between layers.” [iv]

At this point, I’d guess the long-timers still remaining at the ashram are so deeply embedded in the guru’s story of the world — and so far entrenched in betrayal blindness, if they’ve made it this long — that there’s little risk of their bubble being burst. They can hole up on their ashram, in their insular community, reinforcing these illusions for one another, until their dying days.
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That is, as long as they push away knowledge of the people who have left and WHY they have really left.

So I suspect that in my old group, it was the guru himself, at the very heart of it all, who most needed to be buffered by his inner circle. Once he created that community, he was surrounded by devotees always. This meant he was never confronted by normal people without his most enthralled supporters there to reinforce his positive self-conception, and shield him from anything that might disturb it.
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The books and retreats of my old group serve an important function for both sides. Stein explains, “Front groups allow rank-and-file members [ashram residents] to feel ‘normal’ as they have channels to interact with the outside world — although these interactions are rigidly scripted and controlled. They also present a benign face of the group to the outside world while nonetheless being a way in, a wide-open entry point into the no-exit lobster pot of the group.”

Any Way You Slice It

Any way you slice it, the onion structure of a high-control group reveals layers of conditioning and control.

In sum, “The attributes of the structure — its closed nature, the fluctuating hierarchy, the highly centralized, onion-like layers, the secrecy and deception, internal and external isolation, duplication, and endless motion — ensure power and control remains in the hands of the leader.” ~ Alexandra Stein [v]

The leader of my old meditation group has been dead for decades, yet thanks to this onion structure, he is still somehow calling the shots. The group continues to glorify him and cement the legacy of his teachings. No inconvenient truths about his dark deeds of the past — or their own complicity in manipulating people and information — will be allowed to change that.

I hope, though, that if the truth gets out more widely, fewer new people will get drawn in, unawares.
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​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
Seeking Safely … What I Found … What Is A High Control Group?

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] From The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, as quoted in Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[ii] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich (University of California Press, 2004).
[iii] Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.

In my last post, I described why I started meditating, and continued to get more involved in the meditation teacher’s group — until, within five years, I moved cross-country to work for them.

I was looking to contribute meaningfully to their work, and have a new adventure, presumably while continuing to benefit from my own spiritual practice. What did I actually find?

Welcome to the Left Coast

For several months after I first moved out to work for the group, I was just taking in new experiences. Every new job has a learning curve, so I didn’t expect to find things easy immediately. Getting to know my co-workers was interesting. The setting was lovely and different. I was also exploring the nearby community where I lived, on long walks, and settling into an apartment with a roommate. (She moved out around the same time to work for the group.)

​I came in with positive expectations, of course. All my visits to this place had conditioned me to associate it with deep peace, warm community, and learning opportunities. The whiff of eucalyptus trees, the sight of the “golden” hills, the foggy mornings, the beach on the bay — all these triggers and more told me I was in one of my happy places.

In my first months in the office, I remember having a surreal feeling. I was kind of high on the idealism, through the evocative imagery and poetic speech that I was now exposed to even more as I acclimated to my new setting — particularly via the uplifting words of the founder. This high-minded language now was not only part of my nighttime spiritual reading or occasional verbal teachings, but also permeated my workday.

At the Center

Gradually I acquired a different set of lived experiences in that place. I’d been having a variety of weird, sometimes painful side effects of meditation. It started not long after I decided to make the move, and escalated while I was in the energy vortex of the ashram.

I write elsewhere about the dark side of meditation, which I had had no warning about; the important thing to share here is that it interrupted my meditation and got in the way of going deep. So I had lost the thing that I had considered my anchor before I decided to make the move from Indiana to California.

(I still sat down to meditate faithfully each morning. I longed for what I used to get from it, and presumed that this was just a phase. Anyway, I knew that the most basic form of loyalty in that community was doing the practice faithfully; I would be an imposter there if I wasn’t meditating. But it was at best ineffective and at worst, a source of serious pain.)

I also felt like I couldn’t talk publicly about the sometimes difficult or strange experiences that my devoted meditation practice had set off — woo woo stuff was frowned on in that community. And we’d been discouraged from discussing our personal practice with others, lest people lapse into unhelpful comparison. I was cut off from something precious — pining and grieving for it — yet isolated from others by the obligatory silence.

​When I was on my way out a year later, a friend asked me to share how I had experienced the community up close. I wrote:

“The most concise way I could describe my experience is that I have felt STUCK. In [spiritual practice], diminished ability to hear and trust my own inner voice; professionally immobilized; financially squeezed; and socially crowded and isolated simultaneously. I can identify these separate aspects but it all runs together in experience to create this psychological feeling of being TRAPPED.”

Frustrations accumulated in the work I had come there to do. I wanted to support the group’s mission in the wider world. I didn’t come there just to be there. I wasn’t looking for tighter community or more support. I wanted to accomplish something that mattered.

Yet it was hard to get things done. My patient efforts at building relationships with colleagues and creating collaborative processes didn’t seem to amount to much. I would run into walls and just couldn’t figure out how to move things forward; or something that had already been decided through a solid team process would suddenly, mysteriously come undone.

In time I came to feel that I was spinning my wheels and wasting my time. I asked for more work and was assigned some hours in another department, lest I wind up just staring at my computer screen. There was a period later in the year when the refrain “wasting away again in Margaritaville” went around and around in my head in my office at the ashram, voicing my sense of listlessness, loneliness, and inevitability. Oh Jimmy, if a salt shaker was all I’d lost, I’d be just fine. But I seemed to be losing much more — my sense of purpose, my sense of agency, my sense of self.
​
I began to have a sneaking suspicion that they hadn’t really wanted all these young people to come out to do necessary jobs, so much as they wanted to lure people further in, to living at the ashram — something I had known from the outset I was NOT going to do.

What else? The leadership culture was very top-down and lacked transparency. Some of the long-timers were speeded up and scattered. (Despite sooooo many years of meditation. Oh the irony!) And the community was conflict-avoidant, often favoring indirect communication. This meant that there was a continual undercurrent of annoyance and … hostility? Something. I wasn’t entirely sure.

The atmosphere of suppressed conflict made for a stressful environment for a Highly Sensitive Person like me, who can hardly help but absorb other people’s emotions. They also had trouble delegating, because they didn’t trust newbies like me; tenure was loyalty and loyalty was the ultimate proof of trustworthiness.
​
Rock Bottom

The hardest thing that happened, only a few months in, involved a supervisor assuming that in a conversation with a supporter, I had tried to pressure that person. (In reality, I had been trying to do just the opposite — to ease the sense of pressure she was clearly feeling.) He made a quick recovery when he realized there was another explanation. But the damage was done.

I realized that these people really did not know me at all, if he could so quickly jump to that conclusion. I saw that they were not capable of the kind of basic trust that I had taken for granted in every other job I’d ever had. No matter how many mantrams I repeated to dissolve my hurt, it would not change this basic reality.

I was also forbidden to speak with the supporter. The misunderstanding was left dangling, and others who had been in the loop continued on with a false — and negative — impression of who I was.

In an earlier 3-part series comparing controlling groups with abusive partners, I described other factors contributing to the stuck-ness and trapped-ness I felt. They included: the cessation of love-bombing, mind-altering practices, isolation, paternalism, conditional care, gaslighting, dissociation, undermining self-worth, blurred boundaries, hijacked sexuality, paternalistic attitudes, and the self-centering of the group leader(s) as the ultimate arbiters of truth.

​Why had I come to this inscrutable ashram? What was I accomplishing? Very little, it seemed to me. Nor could I envision any change of functioning on my part making a dent in the unhealthy culture of the place. I’d have to stay put for a good decade before they’d trust me with anything of consequence. Meanwhile, I was just hanging out, out there in the sticks, with only dairy cows for neighbors.

It was after coming home to Iowa to visit my parents over Christmas, then returning to California, that it sank in that all was not well for me there. I became depressed — probably clinically so. I was functional when I needed to be “on” with others, but was sad, numb, dulled inside. I was shutting down.

The low point was when my canary — the dear friend I had brought with me, a sweet sweet creature — died. A vet told me it was caused by a nutritional deficiency. But I felt (I still feel) that it was more; my little songbird absorbed my malaise from that place, and bore that burden in his tiny feathered form. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone as I did the day I buried him beneath a pine on the ashram grounds.

A Way Out

What a relief it was when I got a job that took me out of there. The process took months, and at first I wasn’t sure what I wanted. But as I explored one possibility, I started to get some energy back — to get some life back, to get a sense of self and agency back. I started with one option and came to consider many. One way or another, I would make an exit plan.

​Over the months it took to go through the job search process, I said not a word to anyone at the ashram. Not until the way was secure. I wasn’t sure how they would relate to me once they knew I was leaving.

As it turned out, I got a position in the same organization I had left when I came to California. Back I went to my previous stomping grounds, normal work environment, and all the social supports I would need to have in place as I metabolized that bizarre and difficult year.

I didn’t fully understand then what I had experienced, or how it had affected me — I just knew I needed out.

I’ll share what I’ve eventually come to realize about What I Lost, in my next post. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

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