What’s Love Got to Do with It? Attachment and High Control Dynamics

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]

types of attachment as described by pioneers of attachment theory, like John Bowlby; initially, a high control group will behave in a way that makes a new participant feel secure

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.

Image: The Digital Artist / Pixabay

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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I wanna run to you-oo-oo
I wanna run to you-oo-oo-oo-oo
Won’t you hold me in your arms
And keep me safe from harm

​We’ve all seen this: the child who falls down toddles to a parent to have the boo-boo kissed and made all better. Once reassured, the little one feels safe enough to go off exploring again. An adult going through a rough patch, such as an unexpected divorce, may turn to peers, or reach back to their family, for support. If a person has let those relationships atrophy, or outright cut them off, and is engulfed by a high demand group, though, reconnecting with those people from the past may not seem like an option.

A cult will have positioned the group (or its parent-like leader) as the source of safety. So when they become the source of threat, a person is trapped by their biological attachment system. The fear makes them instinctively turn toward… the group — who will not ease their fear, because at this point they are its cause. Since the person never feels safe and secure, they cannot exit the attachment process. Instead, they remain triggered.[7] I envision them in a position akin to an animal chased to the edge of a precipice by a predator. The group is not just a bystander, it is the predator, creating the threat.

This helps me understand the behavior of loyalists in my old meditation group, during a particular period in the 1980s. The founder was publicly confronted by female students about his sexual and spiritual abuse, setting off a crisis of faith in the community. These events were critical in the history of the group — both for those who stayed, and for those who left.

Some people clung desperately to the teacher and their ideals about him, even in the face of evidence that he did not deserve their loyalty. But others began to question the teacher. They started to look upon their own experience with new eyes, taking seriously doubts they had previously squashed. An emotional earthquake was ripping through the ashram.

Image: Macblu86 / Pixabay

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]

Image: Philippe Murray-Pietsch / Unsplash

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]

Image: Maksym Tymchyk □□ / Unsplash

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.

Image: Geraldine Dukes / Unsplash

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.

Image: photosforyou / Pixabay

But with so much evidence confirming their intelligence and even social skills in every other way, newcomers could easily dismiss those gut questions that might arise about what was going on there. As Stein notes:

“followers may be able to think about other things quite clearly, but not about the traumatizing, disorganizing and dissociating relationship.” [18]

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.

Image: Pars Sahin / Unsplash

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.

Image: Thomas Kinto / Unsplash

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.

Image: Mohamed Nohassi / Unsplash

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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.