AN EVERYDAY CULT

A survivor’s account of the seductiveness of an “everyday cult.”

This book is part memoir, part warning. Buglion, a cult-awareness consultant, devotes her debut book to her experience with a group she renames the “Center for Transformational Learning.” It initially appeared benignly therapeutic, she says, with its focus on “the work,” which “included a lot of longing, learning about myself, and a whole lot of idealizing,” and its use of Jungian psychology in the apparent service of healing and growth. Specifically, the author sets out to refute the notion that the methods of cults are always easy to spot. The style of the book itself demonstrates how slowly warning signs appear, and when Buglion reveals an experience with the cult’s more overt methods of control—an incident involving strangling—it’s genuinely shocking. The author takes care to explain how, even after experiencing such red flags, she remained so invested in the group. One thread about her own house-cleaning business, and the influence that the cult had on it, illustrates how cultists taught her not to trust her instincts—until a frightening discovery awakened her to the necessity of doing so. She also speaks about the ill effects of her membership on her family relationships, as when she missed her own brother’s funeral to attend a cult retreat. The book’s searing honesty does a service for cult survivors, and will also be informative to those who don’t understand how thin the line can be between a benign organization and a dangerous one; the most telltale sign of the latter, Buglion points out, is that you can never graduate from it. She also provides a thorough examination of the stages of cult participation, from “Falling” and “Drifting” to eventually “Snapping” out of its control, and, with luck, “Waking up Again and Again.” Near the end, the book becomes somewhat polemical in its discussion of cults’ authoritarianism, but it still provides good insights into how such control works.

A hauntingly honest and revealing memoir.