Understanding Cultic Relationships

Most people hear the word cult and immediately picture some scenario they imagine that they will never encounter. Perhaps a compound in some remote area. Or some bearded charismatic leader surround by a flock of zealots. People in matching clothes, disconnected from ordinary life. Something extreme. Something other. Something that happens to someone else. I used to think the same thing. Right up until after I was twenty years inside one.

After spending the better part of the past twenty-five years working with survivors, consulting with families, and doing the slow, unglamorous work of understanding what actually happened to me, I have come to believe that we have been thinking about cults all wrong. Cults are not the anomaly. They are just the extreme end of something extraordinarily common. Something most of us have experienced in our families, in our workplaces, in our most intimate relationships without ever having the language to name it.

I call it a cultic relationship. And I believe understanding it might be one of the most practically useful things a person can do.

A cultic relationship, as I define it, 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.

Notice what that definition does not require. It does not require a remote compound. It does not require a doctrine or a belief system. It does not require rituals or a leader who claims to speak for God. It requires only two things: 1) someone needing love, approval, validation, and a sense of worth, and 2) someone else who recognizes that need and exploits it.

This dynamic is not rare. It is everywhere.

It is the parent whose love always came with conditions, whose approval was always one performance away, whose disappointment was always available and whose pride was always provisional. It is the boss who makes you feel that your position is perpetually uncertain, that you are always one mistake from being cast out. It is the coach who breaks you down so completely that the only available reconstruction is the one they provide. It is the partner whose warmth is abundant when you comply and cold when you do not and not knowing which version you will face at any given moment.

Every one of those relationships has the same architecture as the one I was in with a group of people for twenty years. The scale is different. The specific mechanisms are different. But the underlying dynamic of one person’s need being placed in the hands of someone who uses that need as an instrument of control, is identical.

The reason the cultic relationship framework is more useful than the terms we currently use like codependency, toxic relationships and emotional abuse is that they name a type of dysfunction without addressing the role of power, control and hierarchy in relationships. They overlook the specific mechanism by which ordinary human desire to be loved and belong becomes the very lever used by one person to control another.

The cultic relationship framework says that someone gives someone authority over his/her sense of worth not because they wanted to, but rather because a need existed inside and someone came along who offered to fill it. Once that authority is granted, behaviors take shape to elicit approval, and the dynamic is in place. Whether they chose to exploit it gently or brutally is almost secondary. The structure itself is the problem.

I first encountered this dynamic not when I met Frederick von Mierers, the socialite who invited into his inner circle. It began with my mother when I was four years old.

I walked into our kitchen wearing my favorite red felt cowboy hat. My mother and her friends were having afternoon tea. They thought I was awfully cute which they made known when they saw me. Fussing, cooing, all eyes on me. I reveled in the attention as any four-year-old would.  Not five minutes after they were gone did my mother say, “Well, my friends think you’re just adorable.” I smiled, enjoying love expressed by proxy. Then her eyes narrowed and went cold as she completed the sentence, “Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing?”

I had no idea what I had done. I never found out. What I understood, in the wordless way that four-year-olds understand things that will shape them for decades, was that her approval was available but not reliable. That I could be adorable one moment and suspect the next. That there was a standard I didn’t understand being administered by someone whose approval I desperately needed.

I spent the next twelve years looking for someone who could give me what that moment took away - the uncomplicated experience of being good enough, just as I was, without conditions.

Cultic relationships are frequently the meeting of two people, each with unhealed wounds in a configuration that serves neither of them well. That does not excuse the harm. It does make it comprehensible. And comprehensibility is where healing begins.

The key to understanding cultic relationships is to understand that the entry point is always a line directly to the thing you most wanted and needed at some earlier time.

The cultic relationship is not a rare and exotic phenomenon that happens to other people in unusual circumstances. It is one of the most common and most consequential dynamics in human life. It begins in the most ordinary places: a parent’s kitchen, a coach’s locker room, a lover’s apartment. And it operates through the most ordinary human material: the need to be loved, the need to belong, the need to be told that you are, finally, enough.

Understanding the mechanism does not make you immune to it. But it gives you something I did not have for twenty years: the ability to see it while you are inside it. To feel the ground shifting beneath a relationship and name what is shifting and why. To recognize that the approval you are working so hard to earn is not actually available — that the target keeps moving not because you keep falling short, but because a moving target is how the relationship maintains its hold on you.

You deserved love. You still do. You always did.

That is not a therapeutic platitude. It is the very thing my guru offered me on a beach at sixteen. And then withheld it.

The offering resonated with me.

It took me twenty years to realize it was actually a manipulation.