Growing up in a big Italian Irish Catholic family in Dutchess County, New York, Gerette Buglion had heard of cults. The stories of Jim Jones and his fatal Kool-Aid and of the Manson family’s murder of Sharon Tate reached her in her pastoral upbringing among cows and sheep, but they were disparate tragedies. These were worst-case scenarios where people were drugged, isolated on communes, sexually exploited, and even killed. Despite her parents’ divorce, bankruptcy, and the mantle of being the middle child, Buglion had an intact childhood and a successful career as an elementary school teacher. Her parents had taught her to think for herself. She wasn’t the type to succumb to a cult, right?

But at 33 years of age, alongside her husband, Frank, Buglion didn’t see any of these traits in Doug (a pseudonym), the leader of the Center for Transformational Learning (also a pseudonym), an example of what Buglion has coined an “everyday cult” in her 2021 eponymous memoir, An Everyday Cult. After retiring from teaching and owning her own business, she is now a full-time cult educator and survivor advocate, but the journey getting there was slow and long.

Unlike the indoctrination of Capitol insurrectionists via QAnon or the malevolent ashram of guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, she says, many cults exist in plain sight without recognition as such. She was not sexually assaulted, nor was she forced to move away from her family or kill, but for nearly 20 years she remained entrenched in the emotional abuse of what she describes in the book as “a sleight of hand…just as slick as wellness retreats at capitalizing on the promise of redemption, enlightenment, and freedom from ‘everyday drudgery.’ ”

“I’m an educated, caring person. How did this happen,” she says, “that I got involved in that and for that long?” Hindsight being 20/20, she realized that not every cult was as extreme as Heaven’s Gate or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. She had, however, experienced emotional, psychological, and financial manipulation. “But the techniques are disguised to look less obvious; that’s part of what made it be less recognizable, less identifiable. We would banter about the fact that we couldn’t possibly be a cult.”

As Sarah Edmondson, a former member of the much-covered NXIVM cult, writes in the book’s foreword, “we are obsessed with cults.” Streaming services like Netflix are bloated with probing documentaries on their inception, their popularization, their pathology, and, hopefully, the courage of individuals to leave. Buglion’s experience likely won’t be picked up for a limited series, but Doug’s emotional manipulation and coercion to defer to himself and the mythical “Animus” god were just as effective in keeping his members dependent on him. 

For Buglion, she was a new, exhausted, and vulnerable mom in 1996. Her daughter, Layla, was 6 months old and had survived a bout in the NICU after a traumatic birth. Buglion was shaken and seeking answers. It was her friends who introduced her to Doug and the insidious control techniques he called “the work,” through which he created a reliance on him while preventing Buglion and her fellow members from taking the time to investigate what was really going on. The end goal, enlightenment, was never supposed to be attainable.

“I was always second-guessing myself, [and] I had to always have my ‘homework,’ which is what we call in the recovery world a ‘thought-terminating cliché.’ It’s a way of actually stopping yourself and disassociating from your critical thinking,” she says. “I did not leave because I had any increased understanding about cultic abuse at all. It was very much an internal experience of recognizing that one of my beloved colleagues had been so emotionally abused by this man whom I had put on a pedestal.” 

It is precisely this subtlety and supposed mundanity that Buglion says makes everyday cults viable and enduring. She writes with insight that feels hard-won that:

…in everyday cults, the leader and organization around them depend on continued loyalty. Dependence is woven, consciously or not, into policies and decisions….There is subtle tension between empowerment and dependence. With no overt system of control, opportunity for authentic progress is essential to keeping people engaged, though never enough to set them free.

Kirkus Reviews praises An Everyday Cult as not only a chilling personal story, but also a resource for fellow survivors or those starting to question their circumstances. “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….”

Structured in five parts to plot Buglion’s journey into and out of CTL, the memoir reads like a case study of how people like Doug ensnare the vulnerable. Readers should expect less of the “what” of cultic abuse dynamics and more of the “why” and “how.” All but a couple of names have been changed, and Buglion made it a point not to include her children’s experiences, as “their story is their own.” 

After leaving CTL in 2014, Buglion has tried to create traction for awareness online in the years since. In October 2020, she created #IGotOut. It could have been pandemic-induced isolation; it could have been a true-crime streaming glut; it could have been the increasing polarization of the 2020 election, she says, but this hashtag stuck. It has since become its own organization, inspired by the #MeToo movement and the realization that the pandemic-induced isolation was making it possible for unsuspecting everyday cult members to step away from their entrapment. The book followed in 2021, and Buglion also hosts a podcast, support group, and writing workshops for fellow survivors. 

While the work is just beginning, she does believe in silver linings. Doug and his teachings did help her confront dormant insecurities and develop a new capacity to withstand intense emotion. She says, understandably, that comes up a lot now.

“I learned a level of self-awareness that I was oblivious to before. Even though it was tainted, I was learning about myself. So by really giving myself some space to explore that, I came to a greater understanding of my past and my childhood. And that practice is something that helps me today.”

Amelia Williams is a writer living in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.