“Sometimes walking away is the only way to stop walking away from yourself.” ~Unknown

I was between sessions. My TV was on in the background—something I’d half-started watching called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on Hulu—as I walked into the kitchen to make myself some lunch.

It’s about a group of Mormon wives who became TikTok famous and got into what they call “soft swing.” In one scene, a young woman argues with her mother, who has a long list of rules about how her daughter should behave. The daughter has been avoiding church, tiptoeing around the threat of excommunication, and trying to hold onto her freedom without losing her family.

I stood there watching, lunch forgotten, because something in it stopped me.

She’s struggling between who she truly is and belonging. And isn’t that just the human condition?

We crave connection. We are hardwired for it, for better and for worse. But connection to the tribe comes with a price. It always has. You follow the rules. You tuck in the parts of yourself that don’t fit—sometimes small parts, sometimes enormous ones—and in exchange, you get to belong. It’s a transaction. Just without a dollar bill changing hands.

The implicit agreement is this: earn your place, stay in your lane, and the group will keep you. It’s a kind of token economy. An unspoken loyalty contract. And most of us sign it before we’re old enough to read the fine print.

I Was in a Cult for Forty-Three Years

It wasn’t a religious cult. There were no robes, no compound, no charismatic leader asking for your savings account. It was subtler than that and more pervasive.

It was called the cult of people. The cult of people is the one most of us are born into.

It’s the constant noise of other people’s needs, opinions, and expectations.

It’s the performance of connection—the seeking of external validation, the addiction to being liked, needed, included.

It’s organizing your entire inner life around what the people around you can tolerate.

It’s making yourself small enough, palatable enough, agreeable enough to keep the peace and keep the people.

For forty-three years, I was a devoted member. I didn’t know I was in it. That’s how cults work.

Seven Years of Deprogramming

Nearly seven years ago, I started leaving. Not intentionally, at first. It came as a byproduct of things I didn’t choose—the pandemic, raising a child with special needs largely on my own, and the slow, unglamorous work of therapy. I started to see, for the first time, just how much reaching and earning and contorting I had done most of my life. How much of myself I had tucked away to stay connected to people who needed me manageable.

I didn’t want to earn anymore. But I didn’t know what or who not earning would make me.

So I found out.

Seven years of tears. Of loneliness that had no bottom. Of massive anxiety attacks in the middle of ordinary days. Of heartbreak and losses I didn’t see coming. Of watching my circle get smaller and smaller and sitting with the terrifying question of whether I had somehow caused it. Of feeling, at times, like I was in hell.

I don’t want to paint this as something beautiful, because it hasn’t been. But it has been something. And it hasn’t been wasted.

What Deprogramming Actually Looks Like

In actual cults, deprogramming requires distance. You have to step away from the group that demanded your self-betrayal—physically, emotionally, sometimes permanently—before you can begin to see the water you were swimming in. The same is true here.

When you start creating distance from the cult of people, a few things happen.

First, it looks like something is very wrong with you. You get quieter. You stop performing. You decline the invitations you used to accept out of obligation. Your circle shrinks. The people around you—still inside the cult—don’t understand it, and some of them take it personally. Because in the cult, withdrawing is the most threatening thing you can do. The cult needs your participation to survive.

But something else happens too. Since you’ve already been abandoned by the people who couldn’t follow you into honesty, abandonment loses some of its power. You stop lying to yourself to stay connected. You start seeing the implicit agreements you’ve been making your whole life—all the ways you made a deal with the group, traded pieces of yourself for belonging, and called it love.

You start seeing clearly. And clarity, it turns out, is both the gift and the grief of this whole process.

The Both/And of It

Here’s what no one tells you about leaving the cult of people: it doesn’t feel like freedom right away. It feels like loss. It feels like loneliness. It feels like you made a terrible mistake.

And at the same time, underneath all of that, something else is growing. Something quieter and steadier. A self that isn’t performing. A voice you can actually trust. An internal compass that works because it isn’t being scrambled by everyone else’s signals.

This is the both/and that healing actually looks like—not either/or, not broken or healed, not lost or found. Both. Simultaneously. Breaking down and breaking through at the same time. Sad and longing and also, somewhere underneath it, knowing you deserve better. Making all the right decisions and still watching things fall apart. Hearing the voices in your head that tear you down and still—still—holding the younger version of yourself with kindness.

That’s not weakness. That’s what it actually looks like to be a human being in the middle of becoming more honest.

The Road to Freedom

I’m not fully deprogrammed. I don’t know if that’s even the goal. I still get lonely. I still sometimes feel the pull to earn my way back into rooms that cost me too much. I still grieve the connections that couldn’t survive my becoming more myself.

But I’m more comfortable with the sadness than I used to be. It doesn’t scare me like it did. I’ve learned to sit with myself in a way I couldn’t before—not because the discomfort went away, but because I stopped running from it.

This is what I know now: the same thing that means no one is going to save you is also the thing that means no one gets to stop you. The aloneness that felt like abandonment turns out to also be the open road. When you stop organizing your life around what the group can tolerate, you find out—maybe for the first time—what you actually want. Who you actually are. What you’re actually capable of.

That’s not a consolation prize.

That’s the road to freedom.

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