Between the Dim and the Dark...
Seeing the phrase “survivors of high demand environments” was the first time I really felt seen in the cult conversation. I am emerging from ten years of intense work in a high demand personal transformation environment that tracks with some of the popular LGATs (Large Group Awareness Trainings.
My story is about the gray areas that exist in the transformation business. For the life of me, I can’t find a black or white answer. Was this good or bad? Was I good or bad? Where did I lose my personality? Where do I go from here?
This essay has been asking me to write it for some time, as I digest my experience and emerge from high pressure into a more peaceful life. I am writing it for myself, not because I want to expose anyone, in fact, I think the training is really good (one of the things that has kept me “in” for so long -- thanks for reflecting that back to me, Sarah Edmondson, in Scarred) -- but as Sarah Edmondson said, training can be good as long as “the work” doesn’t become your life. And it did become mine.
Most of my adult life, I have been intrigued by cultishness and power dynamics. I even wrote an undergraduate thesis about rhetoric in well-known cult and how words can be used to send messages, keep people trapped, etc. I have always been interested in the influential power of language, particularly with regard to religion or even the “civil religion” of American patriotism. So, it’s deeply ironic to me that I ended up in a high control group fueled by language and groupthink.
In recent years, stories of folks who have escaped their cults have been less and less interesting to read or watch - I noticed that my defensiveness about my own situation would rise quickly, and then I would work hard mentally to justify the similarities in conversations with my colleagues.
I am still trying to parse out which parts of my over-involvement were “my own stuff” and which parts were culture - and how that culture, which, I still maintain, does not necessarily have nefarious intentions, but is born from a similar tradition of LGATs - well intentioned spaces for transformation that leave some of us very burned out on the other side. My therapist would disagree about the nefariousness - she has said multiple times to me that it is naturally nefarious because the structure relied upon underpaid and unpaid labor from a lot of people to keep itself going. She isn’t wrong.
I feel like I went through a washing machine that took up the larger part of my young adult life. Sarah’s account of her first few years in her cult really mirrored my experience: I was very young (mid-twenties) when I started at this program, and I believed what people said when they said with conviction that this place was the best, not for the faint of heart, etc. Right from the beginning I was determined to prove that I could handle it. And I did well because I was a very solid enroller. I also saw a lot of change in myself and I felt like I was moving through the world with a new power, separate from my normal stuff, beginning a coaching business, and finding myself able to do things I couldn’t do before.
One of the other issues, (I wonder how much of this is just outdated business ideas because it sounds like a 70s era MLM idea) is that when you start moving up the leadership track you are expected to lead a project to advance/grow the company in some way. This is in addition to your own coaching business and to the 15-20 hours of work per week that would be required, to be volunteering on the leadership team. I can trace it back to the moment in time when this program began and I can see how this idea developed in good faith and with good intentions for community development. However, it became an unrelenting requirement and reinforced the intense pressure to prove your commitment and give your time and best self/energy to the growth and development of a business that was not your own, with absolutely ZERO conversation among the group about how much time, energy and work it would take. This denial is a consistent theme in my experience here and was part of what felt abusive about the environment.
As the industry of transformation and coaching evolves, I look around and I see the conversations being had about capitalism, work ethic, misogyny, and white supremacy and how they are all tangled with time, energy, money, commitment, and, most of all, POWER. The idea that you would run a for-profit business and have part of the model be from people literally volunteering for it is just so harmful. Once I saw it, I couldn’t be part of it anymore.
What I wrestle with is that I can’t fully point a finger of blame and say, they made me stay, they held me hostage. What I can say is that there was a lot of social pressure to stay, to perform well, to keep going, and when you needed “support,” most of the “support” was inside of trying to get you to stay, trying to help you “make it work” to work here just like every other member of senior leadership had learned to.
After so many years of working my way up, not continuing once I got promoted seemed really dumb -- what had I worked so hard for?! Not to mention that most of my social network (people in normal jobs would have colleagues and coworkers, so these people were mine) were people who, like me, got overly involved in this program. There was a silencing effect around being straight up that you didn’t want to do it anymore. When you wanted to leave, it felt like being skewered. I didn’t want that kind of public humiliation so I just sucked it up for a long time.
Most of the cultishness seems to be based out of an overwhelming program with many details and poor business structure to support it. If your job requires that you enroll people to do work for you to run your program, maybe it is bad design (not to mention is it even legal to do so?). The job of becoming a leader is not even attractive, it’s not financially viable. I struggled once I got to the status of leader because everyone acted like it was this amazing thing and you’re so powerful and you transform people but also you work for nothing and it’s exhausting. And to even get there, you basically exhaust yourself to run everything.
Another issue I had was that I feel like I became a figurehead for the company and upheld a lot of practices that made no sense to me. What I can see now is that the job of being a transformational leader and the job of being an employee of the company are two different things with different goals, but here are packaged in the same way. I was also in the impact of being much younger than most everyone else on the leader team, so there was a lot of emphasis on “making stuff work” because that’s “how it works.” But I found myself constantly just straight up disagreeing with ideas, plans, and groupthink because they were inside of someone else’s values and the way that they wanted to live.
I did not sign up for this to rise up in leadership. I signed up for it to have a business, work for myself, and design my life.
Now I know that if any one place calls itself the answer to all of your problems, proceed with caution. If you want to sign up, do so with specific intentions and strong boundaries, so you can discern among the ocean of constant feedback/input what’s true and useful for you. In transformational environments, it’s really tough because if you put up boundaries around a certain topic or don’t want to engage with a certain person, your boundary actually gets HIGHLIGHTED and put on display and it’s often in the name of helping you expand. This is so tricky because it DOES expand you and your comfort zone but it leaves you with NO AUTONOMY and NO AGENCY over it.
This repeated stress over the course of a decade got me a business that had me feeling exhausted, a second job that was ridiculously demanding and paid nothing, and an autoimmune disease. My BODY told me something was off long before I could see it for myself.
At the same time, that repeated stress that kept me in business also got me into hobbies I care about, enriched who I was in my relationships (I even found my life partner during this time) and totally expanded how I listen to people and move through the world.
A little good, a little bad? I don’t know. It’s hard to wrap my head around.
The more research I do into the background of programs like this, the more I realize much of its practices are just all based on one leader in the New Age Movement’s way of creating transformation.
The physical exhaustion, long days, feeling of being monitored, being open to feedback from all angles all the time as a rule, taking other peoples’ experience of you as “truth” in service of you growing. It is a pressure cooker for sure. It also took on one specific approach to goal-setting and achievement - fueled by the values and production of neurotypical white men who tend to get what they want when they approach the world that way. That was very harmful to me and my self-image but was EXTREMELY harmful to a lot of people of color.
When I reflect on the last few years of my participation in this, I am reminded that I constantly worked hard to uphold my own values and be a different voice. I was not rewarded for doing so except for occasionally, people underneath me in the hierarchy would secretly tell me they were grateful for things that I did or said.
I also worked closely with one of the members of senior leadership who definitely has an abusive leadership style. Was it my job to change him? Take care of people? Stand up to him? I never knew, it felt so complicated and overwhelming. He had changed my life a lot in his own bullying way and I even felt tons of personal affection for him. Really weird and hard to wrap my head around.
Looking back through the years, I can’t remember ever saying “no.” Some would say that it would be my breakthrough to say no. That’s definitely true in multiple areas of my life.
But it does not take into account the social pressure, company culture and pressured groupthink surrounding us that made “yes” a survival conversation.
I reflect on my friendships from my early years there and I can see how much of what brought us together was an intense trauma-bonding from abusive leadership during that time. Eleven years later and many of us often bring it up in conversation, stuff that our senior leadership would say that would gaslight us into doing what they wanted. All in service of our “transformation.” AKA their opinion and having us sign people up for their program. Sometimes we’re realizing we YET AGAIN fell into a gross pattern when trying to enroll coaching clients that was manipulative and shame-based - we are STILL trying to extricate it from our systems.
Sometimes I think about the kinds of conversations I would have that had people end up enrolling in the program and it makes me cringe so hard but also feel a sense of shame.
Books and stories about MLMs and predatory enrollment tactics resonate hard. As I re-create my business from here forward it’s important to me that I am extremely straightforward about what I do/don’t do and that I believe people are ADULTS about how they spend or sign up for things, so I trust their decision making. If they don’t think it’s the right time to hire a coach, okay, it’s not the right time. I want my business filled with people who are very happy to be there. Not people who got swept up in some fantasy about their future and then “couldn’t leave” because their deposit wasn’t refundable (lol this part of Sarah’s experience with her self-improvement organization made me laugh so much because of how familiar it was).
Now I also know that if someone’s business model is based on someone else’s rising star and/or someone else producing results for your business………. that’s not a business model. That is codependent, predatory, and unsustainable for anyone involved. I truly don’t understand how people who run these things or run MLMs sleep at night knowing the system they’ve set up keeps others down.
My new coach asked me to consider that I am healing from being in an abusive environment and I often STILL fight that label. It has been beneficial to me, and it also has been abusive to me.
I wish I could boil it down to something simpler than that, something black or white, or write off everything that happened there as horrible. I can’t. But I can carry forward “the work” in a way that resonates with me and causes less harm, so that’s where I am going to focus from here.
I am also totally changing how I approach goal setting and running my business because there is a way to do it that is extremely aligned with my own values… I just need the courage to keep figuring it out.
The last thing I want to say about all this is that I can feel the difference between “in” brain and “out” brain. There is a definite desire to not be too close with people who are still “in.” I can feel the divide, so I know it means something.
Thank you for reading this and for healing with me.
~Anonymous
PS. One year after completing this essay, I am reflecting on two things...
One: how much all of this still rings true, and I’m proud of myself for the diligence with which I have been examining my experience and my industry.
Two: the more space I have from the experience, the more I am living in the “good.” I feel like my life is unfolding at a more natural pace and I am able to use the “good stuff” at my own leisure and benefit. So, that’s nice to see, and I hope it is encouraging to others!