Hoyt Richards

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.