{"id":2406,"date":"2026-05-25T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T17:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/?p=2406"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:29:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:29:14","slug":"i-thought-leaving-would-destroy-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/i-thought-leaving-would-destroy-me\/","title":{"rendered":"I Thought Leaving Would Destroy Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I Thought Leaving Would Destroy Me\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/q4TYGJ3I5yI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">I Thought Leaving Would Destroy Me<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Opening<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Journal entry, May 7, 2025:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I will be more alone than ever before. I will look back on my choice and think: I left too soon. I was rash. I was afraid at the moment I should have had courage. I am rejecting initiation. This failure will lead to the next and the next. I&#8217;ll be powerless, trapped and powerless \u2014 forever.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wrote these words two weeks before leaving a high-control group \u2014and I was convinced I was making the biggest mistake of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was paralyzed. Crippled with doubt. Unsure if anything I was seeing was real.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was terrified to act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I didn&#8217;t know then \u2014 what I couldn&#8217;t see \u2014 was that the fear in those words wasn&#8217;t evidence that I was wrong about the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was evidence of how completely it had gotten inside me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Leaving Felt Like Losing Reality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>High-control systems don\u2019t just replace beliefs. They gradually replace external reality as your reference point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your sense of what\u2019s important, what\u2019s true, what counts as a problem \u2014 all of it gets quietly reorganized around the internal structure of the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a process I\u2019ve called <em>perspectival rebinding<\/em>. And when it\u2019s complete, the thought of leaving doesn&#8217;t feel like walking out a door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It feels like stepping off a cliff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because the system has become your epistemology. You can only ever think about your power in terms of the system. Every time I thought about leaving \u2014 because of the dysfunction, the mounting betrayals, the blatant corruption \u2014 I immediately thought of something else I hadn&#8217;t tried yet. Within the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s like when someone in a bad marriage considers giving couples therapy a fourth try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or when someone in a toxic work environment considers pursuing another HR process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What makes these moments hard is that sometimes you <em>do<\/em> need to have another conversation. Or examine your own reactions.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But when you can only ever imagine freedom <em>inside<\/em> the system \u2014 that&#8217;s when you know you&#8217;re trapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Mistake<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I did everything I could think of to get clarity before I acted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I analyzed. I journaled. I spoke with friends. I read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of it worked. I remained as confused and anxious as before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s not that analysis is useless, but I had already been inside this thing for eleven years. I wasn&#8217;t just a participant. I was a leader. I had about as complete a picture of this organization as any person was going to get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of it was helping anymore. Because I wasn&#8217;t analyzing to learn. I was analyzing because I was transfixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The question had stopped being: <em>Is this a good organization or a bad one?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It had become: <em>Am I going to act on what I already know \u2014 or am I going to abandon myself?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was my moment. And I almost missed it, because I kept waiting to <em>feel <\/em>ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Acting While Terrified<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I wanted my fear to change first. Then I would act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it was the other way around. I had to act while terrified. Then my feelings followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first step was resigning my role in the organization. I took it while gripped with total fear, convinced there was no ground on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The backlash was immediate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone I thought was a friend showed up at my door to seize my bank card and ask me not to come around anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A month earlier, I think I would have been destroyed by that. The shame of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the time it happened, the shame wasn\u2019t mine.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I was struck even more by the clarity that moment brought.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I had desperately wanted from months of reflection and analysis arrived on my doorstep the moment I made them react to me. What I feared would break reality actually revealed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I could see, suddenly and cleanly, exactly what kind of people I was dealing with\u2014and it was worse than I thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The hall of mirrors cracked. And that prompted me to go further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Complaint and CC<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Shortly after stepping down, I submitted a detailed complaint to the head of the group in the United States.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The complaint described multiple serious incidents of organizational dysfunction \u2014 documented, specific, illustrated with the offending individuals&#8217; own words. I filed it because I felt I owed the top leadership one final opportunity to see what I had seen and respond to it. But coming as it did on the heels of my stepping down, it was highly inconvenient for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My greatest fear was that they would take three months, hem and haw, and come back with something morally ambiguous. That was their pattern.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So imagine my surprise when they came back in 9 days and said they found no evidence of wrongdoing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the very least, I thought they would pull some people aside to clarify standards, maybe update some policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nope! They even cc\u2019d the main person I filed the complaint against!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When can you do?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I laughed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took ten minutes to write a resignation letter. And I was done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would never have expected that to be easy. But I can see now why it was. I had wanted truth and justice from this organization. What I got was something better: clarity that I was never going to find either there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What I Lost While I Stayed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the part that cost the most\u2014and the part I couldn\u2019t see at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Inside systems like this, people fall into roles: Golden Child, scapegoat, hero.<br>My role was <em>digesting darkness<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I lived in the parts of this organization most people pretended weren\u2019t there.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was the one who listened to the victims, spoke on their behalf, and pushed so it could never happen again. I carried the emotional weight of the harm this organization caused, and I told myself that was integrity\u2014that this was strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I didn\u2019t see was the trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Making yourself useful to a broken system isn\u2019t integrity.<br>It\u2019s how the system keeps going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it wasn\u2019t just the role I played in the organization. It showed up in my relationships too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was afraid to be honest with people close to me\u2014because I <em>knew <\/em>what it would cost. I didn\u2019t want to admit it, but I knew these people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I adapted. I filtered myself. I avoided certain topics. I learned where the boundaries were and stayed inside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It felt like maturity. Like restraint. Like being someone who could handle complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But all I was doing was suppressing myself to maintain the illusion of connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the system rewarded that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I finally did speak honestly\u2014carefully, compassionately\u2014it didn\u2019t preserve anything. The relationships blew up anyway. The backlash was immediate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what did all that self-suppression buy me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It didn\u2019t protect the relationships.<br>It didn\u2019t preserve my place in the system.<br>It just cost me 11 years of my own voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Happened When I Left \u2014 and What It Meant<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The first thing that happened when I left was that the symbolic world just \u2026 switched off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not gradually. Overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The rituals, the language, the mythology \u2014 it was all still there, technically. But it no longer <em>did<\/em> anything. It didn&#8217;t resonate. It didn&#8217;t illuminate. I had spent years thinking about this material, writing about it, teaching it, living it. And then, without any process of doubt or deconstruction, it was simply gone. Like a frequency I could no longer hear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I didn&#8217;t understand that at first. I even wondered: did I ever seriously believe any of this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I understand now is that this was perspectival rebinding releasing. The system had become the structure through which I organized meaning \u2014 what I noticed, what felt significant, what counted as a problem. When I walked out, that structure didn&#8217;t slowly loosen. It collapsed. What I had experienced as depth \u2014 this rich, interconnected web of significance \u2014 was self-referential all the way down. A hall of mirrors. When I stepped outside it, the reflections just stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What was left wasn&#8217;t a new interpretation. It was the absence of the entire interpretive structure. And that felt, at first, like nothing. A fertile void.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then reality filled the vacuum\u2014in the form of excommunication.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People I\u2019d been close to distanced themselves. Some mocked me. Some treated my leaving like a personal betrayal. I had anticipated losing some of that. I hadn&#8217;t anticipated how quietly and completely it would move through my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the same time, something else was happening that I hadn\u2019t accounted for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Spaciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Subtle but umistakable. Like I&#8217;d been wearing a heavy helmet for eleven years and had finally taken it off. I spent hours walking the city during that period, just letting my mind settle. And as it did, early memories came back differently \u2014 the excitement of those first months in the group, how quickly it had faded, how much of the years since had been spent trying to recover something already gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was grief in that. Real grief. Not just for the people, but for what I had believed I was part of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I hadn&#8217;t expected was the other side of it: that my way of seeing would change this much, this fast. When I imagined leaving, I had thought about what I would lose. I hadn&#8217;t thought about what it would feel like to think clearly again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Actually Replaced It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>In a recent interview, I said that when you leave a high-control group, you&#8217;re waiting for yourself on the other side. There&#8217;s truth in that, but it can be misleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I didn&#8217;t find myself immediately. There wasn&#8217;t a moment where everything snapped into place. What I found instead was the need to rebuild \u2014 deliberately, and over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That process has been uneven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I created a discussion group focused on collaborative inquiry and real dialogue. The kind of space where authenticity, careful thinking, and truth are the actual currency \u2014 not status, not degree, not proximity to the right people. The high-control group was where those values went to die. This is where they go to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I got back into performance through improv. In the other organization, performance was everywhere \u2014 the rituals, the initiations, the elaborate theater of rank and hierarchy. But it wasn&#8217;t fun. Every interaction felt predetermined by status. Improv is the exact opposite: collaborative, spontaneous, people genuinely supporting each other in the doing of something. It let me reclaim that part of myself without the cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I&#8217;ve been building my voice through these videos \u2014 working to say things that are grounded in my own thinking rather than in a framework I inherited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of it happened quickly. It&#8217;s still ongoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve come to understand: what replaced the system wasn&#8217;t a new system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was the responsibility \u2014 finally, actually mine \u2014 to build a life that reflects what I know to be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Closing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Before I left, I thought leaving would either solve the problem or create a worse one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s not what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I found is that action doesn&#8217;t just solve or create problems. It <em>defines<\/em> them in ways that thinking alone cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my moment of greatest fear, I was trying to solve a problem that was badly framed: <em>Should I stay or should I go?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t until I started moving that the real problem came into focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It became: <em>Do I act on what I already know \u2014 or do I abandon myself?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when I chose myself, the problem changed again: <em>How do I take responsibility for everything that entails?<\/em> Not how do I endure what this organization is doing to me \u2014 but how do I take back the power I gave these people over my life? Not how do I deal with betrayal \u2014 but how do I live now that I actually know what friendship is and isn&#8217;t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those were always the real problems. I just couldn&#8217;t see them before I acted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you&#8217;re standing where I was \u2014 terrified that you&#8217;re making a mistake, certain that you&#8217;re about to destroy something irreplaceable \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You might be right that you&#8217;re about to lose something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what you might be losing, when you look at it clearly, is a version of yourself you built in order to survive a place that was never going to give you what you actually needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What&#8217;s on the other side isn&#8217;t nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s you \u2014 thinking in a way you&#8217;d forgotten was possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I Thought Leaving Would Destroy Me Opening Journal entry, May 7, 2025: &#8220;I will be more alone than ever before. I will look back on my choice and think: I left too soon. I was rash. I was afraid at the moment I should have had courage. I am rejecting initiation. This failure will lead&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,506,505,67,66,488,487,2],"class_list":["post-2406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aleister-crowley","tag-cult-recovery","tag-cults","tag-ordo-templi-orientis","tag-oto","tag-oto-high-control-group-2","tag-oto-high-control-group","tag-thelema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}