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The night I chose freedom and succeeded in escaping from a high-control coercive cult.

Sixty years ago, a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, demonstrated something that it took me two decades to learn: the people most likely to end up inside coercive systems are not weak or gullible. Rather, they are ordinary rather than distinctive.

There is an important distinction between a cult and cultish behavior and it is one that is often misunderstood to everyone's detriment.

It took me twenty years to figure out that the people I became involved with had nothing to do with God. Rather, they were dark and dangerous.

A cultic relationship is any relationship, most commonly between two people, though it can involve more, in which an unhealthy power dynamic has become established. One person is seeking love or approval from the other. In doing so, they unknowingly place that other person an authoritarian position. And the other person, then, uses that position to control, influence, and sometimes abuse.

Learn how love bombing works and creates the unhealthiest kind of relationships. Knowing how the techniques operate is how to protect yourself from abusive relationships.

The pitfall of binary thinking is it presents the illusion that there is a possible system that can simplify the world into some very basic rules. When someone tries to convince you that they have found a system that not only works for them but it can work for everyone. Run.

The question I get asked more than any other is, "When did you finally know you had to leave?" My answer surprises people.