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Anika and David Maintain Harsh Conscience
The harsh, perfectionist conscience that Anika
internalized from the cult remained a part of her
personality after she left. Her conscience revealed itself
by demanding that she always be productive, eat right,
and not “waste time” having fun.
After leaving the cult, Anika worked as a hatha yoga
teacher. Early on, she was insensitive to the rigid
demands she placed on her students—suburban
women who had never been in the cult. She felt
judgmental towards them if they attended classes for
exercise rather than a spiritual awakening, appeared
superficial, wore excessive makeup and jewelry, or did
not take their yoga studies seriously. While training
in India to become a yoga teacher, Anika devoted
herself to memorizing each yoga pose’s Sanskrit name.
Students she was now training to be yoga teachers were
not similarly dedicated to learning these Sanskrit terms
their lack of studentship surprised and disappointed
her. The harsh judgment that she experienced in the
cult had become a learned pattern that was repeated in
her post-cult relationships, making it difficult for her to
find friendships and intimacy. Over time, Anika began
to see how she was transferring her cult’s attitude of
perfection and purity to others. Anika also realized she
should not make assumptions about others based on
their appearance.
was using and exploiting me if the sexual
touch I had received was not a special
initiation but rather sexual abuse experienced
by many others if the purpose of my life,
which I believed was to become enlightened
like the cult leader, was no longer something
I believed in if the philosophical teachings I
had built my life around were simply leading
me to dissociate if many of my friendships
were not true, but rather a means to rise in the
hierarchy of the cult if, basically, every single
belief I had built my life around was a lie and
a cultic manipulation used to control me, what
do I have left? What is true? In what can I put
my faith? What do I believe? Who can I trust?
Can I trust myself when I cannot even identify
my own emotions because I am so deeply
dissociated?
Anika carried this cult-learned, judgmental attitude
into her marriage and judged her husband harshly.
Her husband had entered the cult as a young man and
had not been in a dissociated state before joining the
cult, so he was able to access his emotions long before
she was in touch with hers. He struggled with a variety
of feelings after the cult, and Anika initially judged
that he was less spiritual than she was and, therefore,
looked down on him. After leaving the cult, he felt
lost, anxious, frustrated, and angry. He dealt with these
feelings by consuming too much alcohol and exhibiting
poor self-care—going to bed late and eating poorly. Her
husband’s response can be seen as a continuation of the
harsh cult conscience that attacks the self for having
become involved in a cult. As an individual who was
raised in a cult, Anika did not attack herself for joining
in the way that her husband did. As a young man,
he traveled to India in search of a place where people
lived an elevated way of life, a place where they realized
the 60s’ ideal of the Age of Aquarius. He continues to
grapple with a profound sense of betrayal because the
cult promised love, light, and a direct experience of
God, but harbored a dark underbelly.
Like his mother, David initially judged people through
the lens of harsh cult views. After his parents gradually
began to leave the cult, he remained in a dissociative
state and tended to either surrender to others or
attempt to control them. However, after graduating
from college, David reports wanting to take ownership
of the direction of his life. To understand different
perspectives, he began reading and listening to podcasts
to explore how he wanted to live he felt free to agree
or disagree with each message. He was inspired to take
charge of his life after reading Extreme Ownership by a
former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink (2015), and The Art
of War by Sun Tzu (n.d.). Although David continued
to set high standards for himself, he believed he could
pick and choose what inspiration to take from each of
these individuals’ philosophies. He was determined
to incorporate their principles rather than taking the
ideas as rules he must live by without question. David
knew from his cult experience that feelings of certainty
could be comforting, but he now wanted to try
tolerating a degree of uncertainty. He was experiencing
the freedom to use his own judgment to accept or reject
other people’s opinions. David was determined to live
his best possible life, defined by himself rather than
some external teacher.

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Lorna Goldberg |Intergenerational Transmission of Cult Trauma
David notes the lingering harsh moral conscience he
learned from the cult and his parents. He states,
Anika’s Shift in Perspective Impacts David’s
Perspective
When David’s mother disclosed to him that the prior
cult leader had sexually abused her, David severed
his ties to the cult. However, Anika made the choice
not to tell her parents she had been raped because she
reasoned that they were elderly and had dedicated
their lives to the cult. She worried that revealing her
experience would cause them to have intense guilt
about her abuse, and managing their guilt would
place an added burden on her rather than healing.
Furthermore, her parents seemed comfortable, as the
cult provided them with a house, food, and practical
help at its facility.
In contrast, David wished Anika had told his
grandparents the truth. He believes that his relationship
with his grandparents deteriorated because of the secret
he was asked to keep from them. By his late teens,
David had spent many years attending a second cult
with his grandmother, whom he now views as a “serial
cultist.” He believes his grandmother was seeking
another charismatic leader. This second cult taught
a healing modality like Reiki. David now believes he
continued looking for certainty and status in this other
cult. However, upon visiting the cult’s headquarters in
Japan, he saw a giant gold statue of the leader, similar
to the statues worshipped in the first cult, which caused
him to break with this second cult immediately. This
break further undermined David’s relationship with
his grandmother.
Over time, David began to realize that his thought
processes were built upon cultic thinking he began to
consider the damage that this way of thinking had done
to him and his development. He had felt disgusted
with himself his entire life. He had harbored hatred
We lose humanity in trying to be perfect and
attain impossible standards. We are always ‘on’
and engaged if we try to meet high standards
in everything. There is no sense of shared
humanity—the focus is only on perfection.
There is no compassion, only contempt and
disgust.
for himself because of the cult teaching that he had to
be “perfect,” and he had failed to attain this goal. He
now realizes that because of cult indoctrination, he had
viewed his imperfections as disgusting and nonhuman
and had also dehumanized others for not being perfect.
Anika and David Begin to Recover from the Cult
After fully leaving the cult, Anika spent her next twenty
years reassessing, redefining, and re-aligning her beliefs.
She has struggled in unimaginable ways to come to
terms with what happened to her. She examined every
experience, belief, and perception from her time in the
cult, reassessing and reconstructing them in a radically
different way.
In recent years, Anika and her husband joined two
support groups: a smaller one with former members
of her cult and a larger one with former members
from various cults. In the smaller group, participants
explicitly agreed to state that they had been members
of a cult. This was the first time Anika acknowledged to
herself that the organization to which she had devoted
her life was a cult. In this group, Anika discovered that
others were struggling similarly. In the larger support
group with former members from a wide range of cults,
Anika learned that each cult used a particular form of
control and jargon to exploit people in ways similar
to her former cult. As she listened to participants in
each group describe their experiences, Anika became
increasingly aware of the numerous negative aspects
of her years in the cult. She found it life-affirming,
healing, and supportive to hear about the commonality
of experience across cults and the similarities in residual
effects on post-cult daily life. Herman (1997) explains,
However, Anika initially continued to hold herself to an
unrealistically high standard—she was determined to
recover from the cult in the “right” way. She suppressed
any feelings that would humanize her, refusing to
acknowledge her own fallibility. She took a while to see
that part of recovery was to allow herself to be fallibly
human. She began to feel more connected with herself
Trauma isolates the group re-creates a sense
of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes
the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma
degrades the victim. The group exalts her.
Trauma dehumanizes the victim the group
restores her humanity (p. 214).