I didn’t leave OTO because I stopped caring about it or the people in it. I left because my care was being used against me.
For years, I believed loyalty and a commitment to personal growth meant staying in the room. I thought it meant working through conflict and being patient with the process. While I never bought into the bullshit that drama equals initiatory “ordeal,” there was still a part of me that thought the discomfort was fuel for growth. And I believed that if I worked harder, spoke more gently, gave people the benefit of the doubt, and “played the game,” things would evolve.
The problem is that in a high-control group, loyalty isn’t a shared value. It’s a one-way valve. The more you give it, the more it’s used to keep you quiet. In that kind of environment, a “growth mindset” is a tool used to make you complicit and to convince you that betraying yourself is an act of fraternal virtue.
The trap is that it doesn’t start that way. You enter an inspiring, symbolically saturated environment that catalyzes your imagination and development through interpersonal connection and service to something larger than yourself. So you show up. You volunteer. You adapt. You pour yourself into a community both for the sense of belonging and because you believe in the ideals it claims to represent. That’s what makes the betrayal so hard to name—and even harder to leave.
Because if you do speak up, set boundaries, or finally say “enough,” you’re not just called disloyal. You’re recast as the problem. You’re suddenly difficult, egotistical, and emotionally immature. You’re told you’re resisting growth. Or worse—you’re pathologized. Your pain becomes proof that you’re not evolved enough to understand what’s really going on.
That is how spiritual abuse gets spiritualized.
When I finally began calling out the patterns I had witnessed—manipulation disguised as process, harm reframed as initiation, silence demanded in the name of peace—I wasn’t applauded for being honest. I was treated like a liability and a threat. People who had once praised my leadership began speaking about me in hushed tones.
In OTO, your reputation is only safe while you’re useful.
I was described as a grifter by someone who had actually written a positive testimonial when I set up an online business (still on my store, btw). The National Grand Master dedicated the better part of an hour of an official meeting to talk about how I was suffering psychosis, and my ego couldn’t handle being in OTO.
In my 11 years in OTO, no one ever described me using these terms, but suddenly overnight they came to define my character. To the point where some random person in another part of the country—who has never met me and knows nothing at all about me—is commenting on my YouTube videos to tell me who I am.
Here’s the truth no one tells you: in a high-control environment, the more committed you are, the easier you are to trap. Your loyalty isn’t a shield. It’s leverage. And when you finally draw a line, the system treats it not as a principled stand, but as a personal failing.
The hardest part of leaving wasn’t the backlash. It was admitting that the loyalty I had shown—the service, the faith, and the forgiveness—hadn’t been mutual. That the values I lived by weren’t the values the organization protected.
In OTO, the bar isn’t just low. It’s in hell. And it’s set by the leaders and the sycophants surrounding them. They may talk a good game about lofty values, but the second it’s a choice between those values and their personal sense of relevance, they will go for their egos every single time.
Real loyalty doesn’t mean staying in place. It doesn’t mean absorbing harm in the name of harmony. And it doesn’t mean abandoning yourself for the comfort of others.
Real loyalty means aligning with truth—even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it costs you status, approval, or belonging. Especially then.
If you’re wrestling with that tension—if it’s been signaled to you that speaking up is betrayal, or that your boundaries mean you’re not “initiated” enough—I want you to know:
You’re not the problem, and you’re not disloyal.
You’re waking up.
And you’re not alone.