“Sometimes walking away is the only way to stay away from yourself.” ~ Unknown
I was between sessions. My TV was on in the background – something I’d half-started watching was calling me The Secret Life of Mormon Wives on Hulu — while I went into the kitchen to make myself some lunch.
It’s about a group of Mormon wives who became famous on TikTok and got into what they call ‘soft swing’. In one scene, a young woman argues with her mother, who has a long list of rules about how her daughter should behave. Her daughter avoids church, tiptoeing through the threat of excommunication to keep her freedom without losing her family.
I stood there and watched, forgetting about lunch because something stopped me inside.
He struggles between who he really is and where he belongs. And isn’t that just the human condition?
We want a relationship. We are bound, for better or for worse. But connecting with the tribe comes at a price. It always is. You follow the rules. You take in the parts that don’t fit together – sometimes small, sometimes huge – and in return you belong. This is a transaction. Only without a dollar bill changing hands.
The implicit agreement is: find your place, stay in your lane, and the group will keep you. It is a kind of token economy. An unspoken loyalty contract. And most of us sign before we’re old enough to read the fine print.
I was in a cult for forty-three years
This was not a religious cult. There was no robe, no colony, no charismatic leader asking for his savings account. It was more subtle and penetrating than that.
It was called the Cult of Man. The cult of man is what most of us are born into.
It is the constant noise of other people’s needs, opinions and expectations.
This is the performance of the relationship—the search for external validation, the dependence on being liked, needed, accepted.
You organize your entire inner life around what the people around you can tolerate.
It makes itself small, tasty, pleasant enough to keep the peace and keep the people.
I was a dedicated member for forty-three years. I didn’t know I was in it. This is how cults work.
Seven years of deprogramming
I started going almost seven years ago. Not on purpose at first. It was a byproduct of things I didn’t choose—the pandemic, raising a child with special needs largely on my own, and the slow, unglamorous work of therapy. For the first time, I began to see how much I had achieved, sought, and stalled for most of my life. How much I hid inside myself to stay connected to the people who needed me to be treatable.
I didn’t want to earn more. But I didn’t know what and from whom I wasn’t looking.
So I figured it out.
Seven years of tears. Of loneliness that had no bottom. Huge anxiety attacks in the middle of the week. From the heartache and losses I didn’t see coming. I watch my nails get smaller and smaller, and I sit with the terrifying question of whether I somehow caused it. At times I felt like I was in hell.
I don’t want to paint this as something beautiful, because it wasn’t. But there was something. And it didn’t go to waste.
What deprogramming actually looks like
In actual cults, deprogramming requires distance. You must walk away from the group that demanded your betrayal—physically, emotionally, sometimes permanently—before you can begin to see the water in which you have been swimming. The same is true here.
When you start to distance yourself from the cult of people, a few things happen.
First of all, there seems to be something very wrong with you. You will be quieter. He stops acting. You decline invitations that you accepted out of obligation. Your circle is narrowing. Those around you – still in the cult – don’t understand this and some take it personally. Because in a cult, retreating is the most threatening thing you can do. The cult needs your participation to survive.
But something else is happening. Since you have already been abandoned by people who could not follow you in honesty, the abandonment loses its power. Stop lying to yourself to stay in a relationship. You begin to see the tacit agreements you’ve made throughout your life—all the ways you’ve made deals with the group, traded pieces of yourself for belonging, and called it love.
You’re starting to see clearly. And it turns out that purity is both a gift and a grief to this whole process.
The Both/And
Here’s what no one tells you about leaving the cult of man: It doesn’t immediately feel like freedom. It feels like a loss. Feeling lonely. He feels he has made a terrible mistake.
And at the same time, something else is growing underneath it all. Something quieter and more stable. A self that fails. A voice you can really trust. An internal compass that works because it’s not bothered by everyone else’s signals.
This is what healing really looks like – you are not either/or, broken or healed, lost or found. Both. Simultaneously. To break and break through at the same time. It’s sad and longing, and somewhere underneath, you know you deserve better. Making all the right decisions and still watching things fall apart. Hearing the voices in your head tear you down and still—still—lovingly holding on to the younger version of yourself.
It’s not a weakness. This is what it really looks like to be a human being in the midst of honesty.
The way to freedom
I’m not completely deprogrammed. I don’t know if that’s the goal. I’m still lonely. I still sometimes feel the pull to get back to rooms that cost too much. I still mourn the relationships that couldn’t survive me becoming myself.
But I feel better about the sadness than before. It doesn’t scare me like it did. I learned to sit with myself in a way I couldn’t before – not because the discomfort went away, but because I stopped running from it.
This I know now: the same thing that means no one will save you is also the same thing that means no one can stop you. Loneliness that feels like abandonment is also the open road. When you stop living your life according to what the group can tolerate, you realize—perhaps for the first time—what you really want. Who you really are. What you are actually capable of.
This is not a consolation prize.
This is the way to freedom.
About Allison Briggs
Allison Jeanette Briggs is a therapist, author, and speaker who specializes in helping women recover from codependency, childhood trauma, and emotional neglect. She combines psychological insight with spiritual depth to guide clients and readers toward confidence, boundaries, and authentic connection. Allison is the author of the forthcoming memoir, On Being Real: Healing the Codependent Heart of a Woman, and shares her thoughts on healing, resilience, and inner freedom. on-being-real.com.
