When Connection is the last thing that feels safe but the only thing you can think about
The longing for connection after leaving a high-control group can feel consuming. So can the fear of it. For survivors of religious trauma and cults, both make complete sense: you were wired for belonging, had it taken away catastrophically, and now carry the entirely logical aftermath of what connection has cost you. This piece sits honestly in that gap between hunger and flinch, and explores what rebuilding actually looks like without shortcuts or false comfort.
After the Church: Rebuilding Belonging When the Community That Shaped You Is Gone
This blog explores two of the most persistent and underaddressed dimensions of recovery from high-control communities: the identity disorientation that follows losing the container the self was built in, and the challenge of rebuilding connection when community was also the mechanism of harm. It holds the tension between wanting to belong again and fearing what belonging might cost, and explains that rebuilding after a high-control environment rarely means finding a replacement, it means distributing belonging across smaller, less totalising sources of connection while developing a self solid enough to participate in community without being consumed by it.
Born Into It: The Unique Experience of Second-Generation Survivors
Second-generation survivors of cults and high-control groups face a distinct experience: the group wasn't something that happened to them, it was the world in which their entire self was formed. Recovery isn't a return journey. It's a construction project, often begun in adulthood without the foundations most people built in childhood. This piece explores the unique impacts of growing up inside a high-control environment and what genuine recovery looks like when you're starting from the beginning.
It Didn’t Look Like a Cult: Understanding Coercive Control in High-Demand Environments
This blog challenges the popular image of cults as fringe, obvious, and easy to spot, arguing instead that high-control environments are defined not by their beliefs or appearance but by their structure and methods, and that those methods appear across religious communities, MLMs, wellness groups, political movements, and therapeutic contexts alike. It maps the core mechanics of coercive control; information management, identity reshaping, relationship restructuring, and the high cost of exit and explains why survivors typically couldn't see what they were inside from within it.
Caring for the Advocate: Vicarious Trauma and Burnout
The people who show up for religious trauma and cult recovery survivors are carrying something significant, and it's rarely talked about honestly. Vicarious trauma, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and the particular complexity of being both survivor and advocate are real occupational realities in this space. This piece names what advocates are actually holding and what genuine care looks like in a field this heavy. Because sustainable advocacy requires more than good intentions. It requires real support.
Helping People Leave Cults: What Exit Counselling Is, What It Isn't, and Why the Ethics Matter
International Cult Awareness Month is a moment to go beyond the basics and ask harder questions about what actually helps survivors in the aftermath of leaving. Cult exit counselling has a complicated history, and even well-intentioned practice can replicate the coercive dynamics it aims to help people recover from. RTC Co-Director Elise Heerde's research confronts this directly, introducing an autonomy-protective framework designed to keep client self-determination at the centre of recovery work, alongside the trauma-informed practice that effective exit counselling can't function without.
Your Story Is Evidence: Why Speaking About Religious Trauma Is an Act of Advocacy
This blog talks about how survivor testimony is not merely personal or anecdotal; it is primary evidence of harm that would otherwise remain invisible, and it is how systemic change in response to religious trauma has historically been built. It holds the full complexity of speaking out, naming the real costs of disbelief, family fallout, and re-traumatisation alongside the significance of what testimony contributes. It broadens the definition of advocacy well beyond formal or public contexts, and offers a practical set of considerations for survivors weighing whether and how to share their story.
How High-Control Groups Use Language to Keep You in Line
High-control groups use loaded language to shut down thought before it can fully form. Robert Lifton called these phrases "thought-terminating clichés," and they're one of the most effective control mechanisms deployed in totalistic environments. The real damage happens when survivors internalise this language and it becomes the voice in their own head. Understanding what these phrases are and where they came from is part of reclaiming the right to think for yourself.
Reclaiming Sacred Space: Queerness, Religious Trauma, and the Right to Return
The forced closure of Divine Playhouse, a queer-led arts venue in a deconsecrated Sydney church, raises questions religious trauma practitioners work with every day. Drawing on clinical research and lived experience, this article explains why queer reclamation of religious space, language, and ritual is a recognised pathway of trauma recovery — and what it costs LGBTQIA+ survivors when that recovery is blocked, shamed, or shut down. It examines the evidence on religious exclusion and mental health, the theological scholarship, the plurality of Christian views, and the long history of deconsecrated churches in secular life — naming a pattern survivors know well: when objections shift from the correctable to the categorical, the objection is to the people.
Finding the Words: Why Language Matters When You’re Trying to Name What Happened to You
This blog explores the particular loneliness of carrying an experience you don't have words for and what shifts when language finally arrives. It traces the practical consequences of namelessness for survivors of religious harm, unpacks the specific work done by terms like 'religious trauma', 'spiritual abuse', 'high-control group', and 'deconstruction', and addresses the common uncertainty about whether these words apply to one's own experience. A practical section guides readers through finding their way into the language, with the central argument that naming is not the whole of recovery but it is often what makes recovery possible to begin.