Power & Control in Collectives: Five Lessons from Domestic Violence that Apply to Controlling Group

“Things started out so great. But I don’t feel safe with him anymore,” the caller told me. “I don’t know what to do.”

I took many calls like this — and some more frantic — while working at a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis line in the late 90s. Lessons from my training and time in that advocacy center have been coming back to me as I have learned about high control groups (sometimes called cults).

​Not only because the literature on such groups makes clear that abusive relationships can be, in essence, one-to-one cultic relationships, with all the same dynamics. But also because the more I reflect on my own experience in a group I now regard as a high control group, the more I notice ways that many of the same elements of control that are present in individual controlling relationships showed up — and continue to show up — in my old group.

Image: Claudio Schwarz / Unsplash

Here are five of the lessons I learned as a volunteer and staffer in the women’s shelter, that translate to controlling group settings.

​Note: I typically refer to domestic abusers with male pronouns, and victims/survivors with female pronouns. This is the most common scenario. However, abusers can be any gender or sexual orientation, as can victims/survivors. The same holds true of the leaders and members of controlling groups. The important thing to pay attention to is the dynamic of power and control.

“He’s so well regarded, I just never guessed this could happen…”

The abusive partner may be a pillar of the community, just as the founder of a cultic group may have impressive credentials. Perhaps the abuser runs a business, practices law, or has buildings named for him due to his philanthropy. The group’s founder could be an accomplished scholar and gifted writer/translator who walked with a living saint.

Or they may have a more ordinary background; what the person lacks in accomplishments they may make up for in charm, the stories of their past experiences (real or fictitious), and their ability to read people and intuit how to connect and build trust with different people.

It’s likely that many people — particularly the ones they choose to be around, and who choose to be around them — find the person credible, likeable, even admirable. (Anyone who is put off by them, or sees through them, isn’t likely to stick around.) The abuser/leader/group may also deftly manage their public image, singly or with the help of skilled operatives.

So, it likely won’t be obvious from the outset that this person or group might be harmful. That’s no accident.

Lesson #1: Yes, even THAT person could be a controlling person — an abusive partner, or the founder/leader of an authoritarian group.

“Our relationship started out so great.”

In the early stages, a predatory person or group will often pour on the love. He may bring flowers and gifts and shower her with affection. He is considerate, caring, and complimentary. He pays attention to what she needs and responds accordingly.

Likewise, group members show interest in the prospective new member, offering things many people crave more of in their lives — attentive listening, warm connection, curiosity and interest about you, open-hearted sharing about me, especially where we have commonalities.

Image: icsilviu / Unsplash

Early experiences with the group bring real value to participants. These may include social connections as they bond with other newcomers and develop a sense of belonging; introduction to tools and perspectives that participants can use to develop themselves or improve their life experience; perhaps delicious retreat food, needed rest, beautiful scenery, or simply a break from the pressures of ordinary life.

If the group’s founder(s) are still present in body in the group, becoming the focus of their attention and charismatic charge may make one feel particularly special and cared for. This attention may be brief, but as a rare commodity that only makes it more precious. Tender regard by their deputies or other leaders in the group may have a positive effect too.

Such experiences can foster a genuine sense of well-being and connection, encouraging prospects to continue and deepen their affiliation with the group.

Whether the relationship is with a romantic partner, charismatic leader or high-minded group, it’s only natural that such early experiences of meeting essential human needs set one up to expect more good things in the relationship.

Lesson #2: While not every beautiful beginning will lead to a controlling relationship, most controlling situations start out feeling very promising. There may be little warning of what will develop in time.

“This love was irresistible. It changed me.”

Romantic love has a powerful effect on the human person. Falling in love has been likened to an illness, with physiological effects that alter daily experience, and that must simply be allowed to run its course.

The reward centers of the brain go on overdrive, obsessive thoughts can take over, and the cycle of anticipation, connection, and separation enthralls the new lover. Suddenly this relationship and all the feelings it brings is the most vibrant thing in one’s life.

These dynamics pertain in a relationship with a (someday-discovered-to-be) abuser, just as they do with healthy people. The abuser may even add an extra dose of charisma and intensity into the mix, making the relationship more addictive than usual with new love.

Group experiences can affect and shape a person deeply, too, as one is buffeted by forces beyond their conscious awareness or control. Consider the following:
Individuals may have opportunities to feel especially valued by the group / leader(s) as they continue their association. For example, if I am invited to special celebrations that are not open to everyone, I feel honored. If I apply to a program which has prerequisites and a vetting process, I will feel special when I am accepted into the program. If I am welcomed to stay on the residential grounds of the group’s inner circle, or to make personal pilgrimages to the sacred place, I will feel closer to the inner circle myself. Such steps may increase identification with the group and generate positive feelings of being cherished and included.

Image: Tim Marshall / Unsplash

Members of some kinds of groups — including therapy/encounter groups, religious or spiritual groups, and Large Group Awareness Trainings — may disclose deeply personal experiences to one another in the course of the group’s practices. Such emotional intimacy can form powerful bonds and encourage the person to remain open and vulnerable.
​
Certain group practices help to settle the nervous system and can even put you in sync with each other physiologically. This signals to your body that you are in a safe space, where you can relax and trust. As described in Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands, such practices include: singing or humming together; rhythmic activities done together, such as walking in sync, clapping in rhythm, or rocking or swaying to music; cooking and/or sharing meals together.

Image: Nagara Oyodo / Unsplash

​Though Menakem distinguishes between settling the nervous system and soothing the body through activities like prayer or meditation, the latter kinds of practices can certainly bring welcome calm, too. Meditating regularly — and meditating with others — may lead to deeper, more powerful experiences.

Margaret Singer (Cults in Our Midst) relays that “Trancelike states can occur during hypnosis, during complete absorption in reading or hearing stories, and during marked concentration” as well as through “meditation, guided imagery, drug use, fatigue, or sensory deprivation.” (I suspect certain kinds of dance — like whirling dervishes — and speaking in tongues fall into this category too.) In such altered states, everyday awareness of our surroundings and our relationship to the environment dissolves.

Indeed, participants may consider that one of the aims of their practice of meditation or other above-mentioned activities. “For many persons,” Singer observes, “entering a trance state is pleasurable. It provides a respite from thought about the woes of everyday life.” Meditators may spend weeks, months, or years taming the monkey mind, to achieve such a state of repose.

​Yet such altered states of consciousness have other effects, too; one is heightened suggestibility. Combined with facilitators’ “pacing and leading, exploiting positive transference .., and making indirect suggestions,” group members who frequently enter into trance states become more malleable to the worldview and aims of the group.

Image: Noupload / Pixabay

​Many high control groups also incorporate sermons or wisdom talks into the group’s regular practices. Meditation may be “followed by the viewing of repetitive soporific [videos], usually of the guru or swami lecturing.” Singer believed that “a number of speeches given by certain cult leaders, and some group chants, fit the criteria for producing transient levels of trance.” One study found that “speeches by cult leaders and fundamentalist evangelists had more hypnotic qualities than those of … mainstream church leaders.”

I am intrigued by Singer’s further observation that group or solitary readings of certain kinds of poems — including Romantic poetry influenced by “mesmerism, the opium-induced hallucinations of British writer Thomas DeQuincy, and Germanic authors’ stress on imagination” — can similarly generate “what are best called trance-augmented aesthetic experiences.” (Hmm, would the likes of Rumi, Kabir, Ramakrishna or Thomas à Kempis qualify? I’m guessing so.) The same qualities identified in this type of poetry “can be identified in analyzing the speech of many cult leaders, particularly when they are addressing groups of members or sympathizers.”

My fellow meditators-of-a-certain-kind, let this sink in: teachers with slow, soothing speech — and texts that drip like poetry from the tongue, slowly uttered in any voice (even your own inner voice) — are likely to induce hypnotic states.
The mechanics and chemistry of influence may be more subtle and gradual in a cultish group than in a new romance. Yet the shaping of identity, physiological experiences, states of consciousness, and heightened susceptibility to ideas and beliefs that others introduce — these are arguably more profound in a high control group.

Lesson #3: This is a two-parter:
· Early in your relationship — or better yet, before you start seeking — clarify for yourself what your goals are. How would you know if you found what you were looking for? Then as you gain experience with a potential partner or group, revisit your list occasionally. If your ideas about what you want change, consider carefully how and why they changed.
· Hold on to your individuality and your agency. These practices may help: when it comes to increasing your commitment level, go slowly; take breaks from the relationship (individual or group) so you have space to think for yourself; journal or otherwise “listen” to yourself; share what you are experiencing with uninvolved friends or other trusted individuals, and listen to their observations about your trajectory.

Take your time and stay grounded. (Image: Sergey / Unsplash)

​“There have been difficult periods, but the thing is, I really love him.”

Any relationship has ups and downs. If you are with someone long enough, you will start to see their shadow side. By this time you have already bonded with them chemically — with things like oxytocin and dopamine that make you feel good.

When couples have disagreements, they try to work through them. Conflict styles and skills vary widely. Any couple goes through a process of learning how to work through difficulties with each other.

Controlling actions often begin very subtly, making it harder to recognize and name them as a different class of conflict from the usual personality clashes. At the first unmistakable sign of abuse — such as physical violence — many a girlfriend or boyfriend may consider breaking up with their significant other.

This is often when the abuser turns up the charm and pulls out all the stops. He may beg you to take him back, convincingly promising it will never happen again. He may buy extravagant gifts, take drastic actions to prove he has turned over a new leaf, get down on his knees and profess his undying love.

And the thing is, the love between these two people may feel genuine, from one or both directions. If you love someone, if you believe they feel the same way toward you, and if they promise you they will change — well, many people will try to forgive and move forward.

The group parallel is a bit more complex here. A newer member may not agree with everything they hear from the group. In a democratic group that doesn’t matter; people don’t all have to think alike. But even in a group that turns out to be more doctrinaire, a participant may find enough of the teachings / practices beneficial and true in their own experience to want to continue with the group; so they brush aside any private disagreements or misgivings.
​
As relationships form with other people in the group, the relationships carry weight too. Individual relationships may be important to a participant — relationships which began in the group and make sense because of the group context. Whether you have connected with other newbies, long-time members, or the group’s charismatic leader(s), a similar cocktail of happiness chemicals can come into play as with a romantic partner.

Image: Kevin Delvecchio / Unsplash

​Plus, the collective relationship is its own thing. Belonging is a powerful force for humans; we are social creatures by nature. We all need community. We all need identity. To quote the theme song from the 80s sitcom Cheers, we all need places where “everybody knows your name.”

Yes, there are other fish in the sea, and other groups in the world. But when you are already emotionally attached to a particular partner or group, and have experienced how they can meet your needs for things like connection and meaning — those wonderful early experiences you had with them — it’s hard to walk away. Most people are going to keep trying, initially.

Lesson #4: Learn to distinguish who you care about — and even who may genuinely care about you — from who is actually good for you. One does not guarantee the other.

Love yourself enough to walk away if/when you realize a partner or group is controlling. (Controlling behavior rarely decreases over time.) Keep what you learned and get out while you can.

“He became the center of my world. Others fell away…”

Isolation is one of the classic signs that an intimate relationship is emotionally abusive, and at risk of becoming physically abusive, if it hasn’t already. I remember this wedge on the Power and Control Wheel graphic from training at Middle Way House.

Other people that the victim trusts could empower and support them to leave the relationship. But the abuser wants to stay in control. So he keeps her focus on him and their relationship. He might tell her that her friends don’t know what’s best for her, undermine her relationship with her mom or sister, arrange to move far away, even delete her social media accounts. Financial dependence may layer on top of emotional dependence in keeping her fixed in the relationship, serving his needs.

A couple months ago, as I was reading up on high control groups and noticing more and more of these parallels with abusive partnerships, I recalled the power and control wheel and wondered if there was an equivalent for groups. It’s much newer, but I did find one, in survivor-turned-trauma-informed-psychotherapist Laura E. Anderson’s 2023 book When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion. Below is her Religious Power & Control Wheel.

You can check out an interview with the author here

When I moved cross-country to work for the meditation center I’d gotten involved with — something a whole cohort of us then-young adults were cultivated to do — I put thousands of miles between myself and my long-time friends, my parents, my healthy church community, my choir, and other social supports. All I had in the new place were the people I knew from retreats. Even without moving into the ashram I had become much more isolated.
​
I decided not to spend all my spare time with fellow meditators, going to group meditation, spiritual talks, volunteering in the garden or doing the other things that many others did do. I felt that spending my entire work week there was enough of a leap in time and energy devoted to that community and its mission.

Fortunately for me, another member of my choir moved from my city in Indiana to the same area of California the same month as me. We quickly joined a local choir together, and hung out weekly after rehearsal. I also checked out the nearest church in my (non-extreme) denomination and began to build relationships there. I have no doubt I fared better than I would have otherwise because I had a web of relationships beyond the meditation group. I went home to see my parents at Christmas, as well. That made me different from the people who lived on the group’s communal living site; they rarely seemed to have contact with their families of origin or other friends.​

At Cliff House with Mom — last meal before heading back to the Midwest

There was a financial side to this too. I found I could barely make ends meet, even living in a small apartment with a roommate. My car was paid off, but in the future, when I had a car payment to add back to my budget, this scenario simply would not work. Not to mention, I wanted to be able to live generously — making donations to charitable causes (modest, but still, something) — to buy healthful food rather than the cheapest, less nutritious food, and to save responsibly for retirement.

I had done all those things before. But I could see none of that was going to work long term on the peanuts I was making at the meditation center. At the time, I saw this as a reflection of how out of touch the meditation community was with life for regular householders. Now, worse occurs to me: that the poverty pay was a kind of financial coercion to live at the ashram, where living expenses were considerably lower — and there was extensive “milieu control.”

In any case, I got a call from back east about a job opportunity, and began exploring that possibility. In the process, I realized that, for a variety of reasons, I needed to get myself out of this situation. All the official group email accounts of employees were monitored, I’d learned. So in job search communications, I was careful to only use my personal email address. It was only one of the forms of information control at work in the group — there were others I didn’t even recognize at the time — but it was unnerving.

Lesson #5: Stay connected with other positive people in your life. A social support network is important no matter what marvelous partner or group becomes part of your life. Anyone who wants to cut you off from that does not really want what is best for you. Be wary of financial dependence too.

I’ll share other lessons from the domestic violence field in the future. Next up: why, in a controlling relationship or group, it’s always your fault — never his or theirs.

Don’t want to miss a post? You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

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