I Wasn’t Brainwashed. I Was Worse.

My Confession

Opening

It was 2019. 

I was home when one of the senior leaders of my group—a friend—texted me asking to talk. Now we’re on the phone with one another.

“I noticed the post you made to Facebook this afternoon,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “What about it?” 

“Well,” he replies, “I really appreciate everything you do for our community.”

Here it comes.

“I’d just hate to see something bad happen to you.”

I don’t feel fear. I feel anger. 

The head of the group in the United States was controlling who members could associate with outside the group. How could I not speak out against this? 

The voice on the other end of the line is calm, reasonable.

“Say we have a member on the editorial staff of a newspaper,” he suggests. “A columnist there is writing hit pieces on us. Shouldn’t leadership use that connection to get the columnist fired?”

I fire back. “What are we, Scientology now? Of course we shouldn’t do that.” 

Further back and forths. Eventually, the call ends. The heat dissipates. I’m alone with my thoughts. 

I’m convinced I’m right. I am right. But … what? 

Silence. And then—fear. 

I log into Facebook. I take down the post.

And I stayed. Another 6 years.

Not only did I stay — I helped make a place that contained people like this appear safe and spiritually serious. 

I thought what made me different from them protected me from becoming part of the problem. 

But I was wrong.

I Thought I Was Different

For the 11 years I spent in this group, I was not a blind follower or a fanatic. 

Very few people who joined this group showed real interest in its spirituality or wanted to be challenged by it. The conference they did every two years was usually remembered for its sex parties and drinking, not the originality of its lectures. 

I came to believe early on that there was a lot more depth in the organization’s spiritual teachings than most people realized. I translated these insights into lectures, articles, and videos, because I thought they were legitimately transformative when understood. 

The entire time I was a member, I witnessed immaturity, licentiousness, outbursts — violence, threatened and real — and sexual predation. I began vocally opposing that very early on, and eventually became a force for safety standards and seriousness. 

I differentiated myself intellectually and morally from those around me. Over time, I came to view myself as in this group, but not of this group. 

But I remember vividly one night this self-concept was put to the test.

It was an evening late in 2020. I was sitting in the backyard of some senior members—the folding chairs spaced appropriately so we didn’t risk transmitting COVID.

I brought up the unfair treatment a critic of the group had received from national leadership. The conversation started to become heated, one person insisting the treatment had been deserved. 

I pushed back. Suddenly, he said, “If I ever get my hands on him, I’m going to fucking curb-stomp him.” [pause]

My trusted friends know I have a dark sense of humor. We will sometimes joke about violence with one another. This didn’t feel like that. This was said with vehemence. 

I don’t recall my reaction at the moment. I remember the drive home. I felt shame. I thought about how much I had probably frustrated this person for him to say that.

The following day, I felt sick. And then angry. Angry at the intolerance. Angry at the fanaticism. 

Eventually, the experience became another piece of evidence in my argument—not for why I should leave. 

But for why I was better than most of the people around me. 

I genuinely believed that because I could see the problems clearly, I was fundamentally different from the people enabling them. 

But seeing clearly and acting ethically are not the same thing. 

The Trap

The group I was in did not present itself as authoritarian. On the contrary, its highest values were things like freedom, tolerance, nuance, anti-dogmatism, and above all else, individual freedom — of interpretation, of one’s path in life. 

The easy explanation for a group like this is hypocrisy. But the real mechanism was more sophisticated than that. 

Because a group like this doesn’t primarily control people overtly. It works by turning those very values of tolerance and freedom against you — so that the more you embody them, the more trapped you are. 

When I stepped down from my leadership role, my replacement — coincidentally, the person who threatened the curb-stomping — convened an emergency meeting. 

In that meeting, he reassured people — repeatedly — that “no one was in trouble” for having accepted a meeting with me. And everyone was encouraged to continue to be friends with me.

Think about what that implies. 

If no one is in trouble for meeting with me this time, what about the future? If someone is giving you permission to remain friends with someone, that implies they can withdraw permission. 

In the first initiation ceremony of this group, new members were reassured the organization neither knew nor cared what their intention was with regard to the group. Even if they wanted to harm the group, they were free to do that. But — cause and effect are still real, and they would have to face the consequences. 

The implication became that if you suffered social or institutional consequences, the mature response wasn’t to question the system. It was to question yourself. To do otherwise is to lack maturity or worldliness. 

This group didn’t demand high fees. The standards of conduct were so loose, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a cosplay religion. 

It’s not just that the reality of the group contradicted the appearance. The group did become more controlling of members as they progressed. But it was more complex. 

The atmosphere of permissiveness was itself a covert way of manipulating people. Control wasn’t presented as control. It was exercised through the language of freedom. 

So that when you were punished, it wasn’t abuse or control. It was your failure of personal responsibility. It wasn’t the system’s dysfunction. It was your lack of maturity and common sense. 

Which means that if you wanted to succeed in this, you had to embody certain qualities. Not conformity. Of course not. Savviness. Not blind belief. The ability to see things from “multiple perspectives.” Not control over who you’re friends with. But the wisdom to keep clear of trouble-makers. 

This wasn’t a system optimized for gullibility. It was optimized for intelligent self-regulation. 

But in the context of a group like this, intelligent self-regulation also kept you obedient to its power structure. 

And when you think about leaving something like this, you don’t think of yourself as escaping something that was harming you and others. You think of yourself as leaving power on the table. 

Because you were winning. [pause]

My Role In The System

In the group I was in, I was a winner, not a loser. 

I was a winner intellectually. I understood things about the spirituality no one else could—and I could put them in words and teach others.

I was a winner morally. I refused the worst forms of excess. I never threatened or harmed anyone. I spoke on behalf of victims. I organized a space I thought was safe. 

I was a winner politically. 

At the national meeting where I was appointed to a position of local leadership, a mid-level bureaucrat with a bone to pick stood up and challenged me. I calmly defanged him in front of 30 people. People came up to me afterward saying how I embodied the self-control they wanted to see in all leaders.

By the time I stepped down, I was running a thriving local community, and I was on track to reap all the rewards the organization offered people. Some people were against me. I welcomed it—knowing my intelligence and character made me impossible to stop. 

I was proud. And I was arrogant. 

But here’s the thing about pride in a system like this.

Nobody — no matter how smart or moral they think they are — gets to participate in a system like this without paying a price. And the price is yourself. Because in order to be in something like this, you have to conform to a role.

It’s very similar to dysfunctional families, where people aren’t whole people. They’re the Golden Child, the Hero, the Scapegoat. 

With my ability to reframe situations and tolerate negative emotions, my function was Digesting Darkness. I was the one sitting with the crying victim while others were saying, “That’s none of my business.” Which again, made me feel morally superior. 

I was the one confronting the darker aspects of the religion, because I could tolerate complexity, and because I could tolerate being attacked. 

A few years before I left, I discovered that the founder of the religion wrote in his diary about sexually molesting a child. I brought this topic up to two good friends of mine in the group, and they both refused to take it seriously. They wouldn’t even consider that it might be true.

I pushed on it. Finally one of them said, “Let’s say that is true. Then what are we doing here? How can we be part of this?”

I thought to myself, “This person is too weak to look at the truth.”

And maybe they were. But the question they posed was actually reasonable, but I refused to take it seriously. Because if I did, it would force me to confront my own pretense. 

It would force me to see that the role I had contorted myself to fit — the one who can tolerate all this dissonance without flinching — was not a source of power. It was an elaborate form of self-harm, and it kept me weak and obedient. 

Because the reasonable thing to do when you’re confronted with as much darkness as this group served up on a regular basis — is to leave. 

But in my mind, it was flipped upside-down. And so I became proof — not just to myself, but to everyone around me — first of all that the darkness was contained. That it was being managed. Because I was there.

And secondly, that it wasn’t that bad. Because a human could absorb it without being destroyed by it. 

People saw someone thoughtful, articulate, psychologically aware, morally serious — and assumed a place capable of containing someone like that must itself possess depth and integrity. 

My presence made people think: this must be a good group. 

It didn’t make people ask, “Why is there so much darkness here in the first place?”

The Realization

What finally broke the illusion for me wasn’t defeat. 

Shortly before I left, one of the newer members I was mentoring told me he was impressed by how functional our local group was — that in his year as a member, he hadn’t witnessed anything weird or unsettling.

Meanwhile, during the same period of time, I had absorbed personal attack, months-long manipulation and drama, ostracization, overreach into my personal relationships, and spying. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was proud of the experience I had created for this new member.

The experience of safety and depth I had created was real. So was the endless emotional labor and political endurance required to create such an experience in an organization so thoroughly corrupt. 

It happened gradually — over about three years — the slow, growing sense of what it felt like to deform myself for this thing. 

I stopped seeing my ability to tolerate it as a virtue—as a sign of my superiority. 

And I just started to see tolerance as a form of self-abuse—and as enabling abuse.

And once self-loyalty reached critical mass, there was a shift in perspective. The system I was in wasn’t surviving despite people like me. It was surviving partly because of people like me. 

I wasn’t the maverick I imagined. I was a dues-paying member of an organization that had entrusted me with running their branch in a major American city. The path in front of me was wide open. 

How could that be the case if I was such a rebel? 

And then I realized: If someone thoughtful, articulate, morally serious, and self-aware could remain inside this thing…it appeared safe. 

It appeared serious. 

It looked like it had something real at the center of it rather than just egos and power.

I was never lying to people. 

I genuinely believed everything I said.

But I was helping generate an experience of depth that prevented people — including me — from seeing what the system actually was. 

I had given elaborate lectures on refusing bullshit. I was one of the biggest bullshitters in it.

Closing

After I got off the phone with the senior member who had threatened me, I took down my Facebook post. I didn’t delete it. I set it to private.

I see it every year now in my Memories when that date rolls around. 

It’s a reminder. 

Not of cartoonish evil. 

It’s a reminder that the qualities I’m often most proud of in myself — my intelligence, my ability to hold contradiction, and my ability to hold space for people who have been harmed — don’t belong to me. Not absolutely.

They can be captured by systems larger and more powerful than me, and they can be put in the service of harm. 

You don’t have to be a fanatic or a bigot.

You don’t have to be threatening or committing violence.

You don’t have to agree with a system’s worst tendencies to help sustain them. 

Sometimes all you need to do is help make a system feel deep and survivable — just like I was doing for the new members of my group. 

That’s what that private post is, every time I see it: not a monument to how far I’ve come, but a reminder of what I’m capable of — and what I have to keep watch over.