“Why Don’t They Just Leave?”: How Cults Hijack Your Attachment System

Dr. Natalie Fabert from the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion Offers Her Insight

By Katie Pocock

Your attachment system is a deeply embedded framework for how you relate to yourself and others – and cult leaders know exactly how to exploit it.

Cults capture our collective fascination, but our understanding of coercive, high-control groups is usually limited to what we see on TV. It’s all too easy to shake our heads at the screen and wonder why people didn’t just leave at the first sign of trouble – but the reality is that any one of us can find ourselves in the same situation. In fact, cult survivors will tell you that the less vulnerable you think you are, the more vulnerable you actually are.

Cult leaders have a variety of tactics to take someone from a sharp, autonomous person to a completely dedicated follower, and many of them rely on manipulating your attachment style. In this article, we’ll look at how cults induce attachment disorganization, how this affects cult members during and post-cult, and what you can do to support yourself or someone else who might be entering into a coercive dynamic.

First, we need to make sure we’re on the same page about what cults actually look like.

Most Cults Don’t Look Like Cults

A cult can also be called a totalist or high-control group; broadly, it includes any group with one charismatic, narcissistic leader and at least one follower – yes, you can have a cult of just two.

When you think of cults, you might automatically think of TV cults: religious robes, grand temples, prayer circles. While many of the most infamous cults are religious, or spiritual in other ways, cults can revolve around just about anything. Political groups, self-improvement collectives, and even commercial businesses can all be particularly high-risk for turning out to be cults or cult-like in their behavior.

It’s often said in the cult survivors’ community that “nobody joins a cult”. Cults don’t advertise that they are cults; when presented with the opportunity to devote your entire life, sacrificing family, freedom, and individuality to a single cause, very few of us would jump at the chance. But the opportunity to find community and purpose? It might be a bold statement, but there is likely not a single one of us who has not, at one point or another, joined a new group or community in search of something meaningful. This is all it takes to join a cult.

“…there is likely not a single one of us who has not, at one point or another, joined a new group or community in search of something meaningful. This is all it takes to join a cult.”

It might be tempting, comforting even, to think that you are exempt from vulnerability when it comes to cults. When we hear about the things people in cults are led to believe, we think we would never fall for it. However, we’ll soon see that it’s not as simple as “falling for” extreme ideologies – cults take over gradually and insidiously, weaponizing your attachment system so that your brain doesn’t function like it normally would, and turning you into someone you wouldn’t even recognize.

“There Is A Cult Out There For All Of Us”

Cults can be complex operations, and they need people who are intelligent, persuasive, and confident to help run those operations. That’s why they don’t always target the most vulnerable among us – in fact, they frequently target people who are successful and highly educated, but who might just happen to be looking for something more.

Dr. Natalie Fabert, licensed psychologist and board member at the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, says to The Attachment Project:

“The risk of joining a cult is situational, not dispositional, and there are many different types of pathways to cult involvement. First, it is important to recognize that many people never actually ‘joined’ but were born into the system or brought in as children and had no choice to begin with. For those who enter as adults, they are usually brought in by a trusted friend or relative. Many are explicitly targeted because of a specific skill or resource they can bring to the leader. Others are simply at a crossroads in life, looking for community or a sense of purpose. They get unlucky and find a movement that pretends to be exactly what they’re looking for, but turns out to be a coercively controlling environment. I always say that while not everyone is vulnerable to any one particular group, there is a cult out there for all of us if we are unlucky enough to cross its path at the wrong time.”

Once you’re in, cults have a range of methods to wear you down. One is “love-bombing”, overwhelming you with praise and security so that you bond quickly to the group. They might also pair you up with someone more experienced, to guide you and make sure you only hear one perspective, and ask you to dedicate more and more time to the group.

As you dedicate all your time and energy to the cult, you become physically and mentally exhausted – cult survivors sometimes report working 80+ hour weeks and having to be available 24/7. The more tired you are, the less you’re able to think critically about what’s going on. Even the most intelligent, street-wise person can have their critical thinking skills incapacitated by chronic stress and exhaustion.

“…there is a cult out there for all of us if we are unlucky enough to cross its path at the wrong time.”

While cults are breaking you down physiologically, they’re also already working on creating a disorganized attachment system.

What Is A Disorganized Attachment System, and How Do Cults Exploit It?

Your attachment system, or attachment style, influences how you experience your relationships with others. There are several different ways psychologists explain attachment styles. In this article, we refer to the Adult Attachment Interview‘s classification of an unresolved or disorganized attachment style: one associated with significant trauma (via loss or abuse) that makes it difficult to form a coherent narrative about the relationship.

In other words, we find these disorganized attachments difficult to understand. Cult leaders typically induce disorganized attachment by making themselves the source of both safety and danger – they can convince us that they’re our only savior, the only person we should love, while purposely humiliating and exploiting us to induce a state of reliance.

Our brains cannot process that the fear exists alongside the safety; that trauma exists alongside attachment. According to cult survivor and psychologist Dr. Alexandra Stein in Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, this disorganized attachment is a form of trauma that collapses your cognitive functions.

Under these traumatic conditions, the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex (which is associated with threat-processing) fails to interpret threat signals correctly – your “gut instinct” is overridden, and you miss the red flags that might be apparent to others. To survive the trauma of both frightening experiences and a disorganized attachment, you disconnect from yourself and your previous reality, taking you even deeper into the cult.

“Whether you want to call this a disorganized attachment or a coercively controlling relationship, what we are talking about is an unhealthy relationship dynamic,” says Dr. Fabert. “Some of the warning signs would be a preoccupation with pleasing the coercive controller, weakening ties with other relationships, and an erosion of the person’s self-confidence and general mental health. Internally, the person might not notice that they have a sense of hypervigilance when they are around the coercive controller because their body intuitively knows that the person might not be safe, which is why the defense mechanism is often to “fawn” to increase a perceived sense of safety.”

“Fawning” describes a trauma response that is common in abusive relationships. Because the threat is constant and relational (it comes from another person), we try to appease the threat so that it might not hurt us. This can look like people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, and an excessive awareness of how the threatening person is feeling or behaving.

“A good friend would want you to have more love in your life, not less, and they would not be jealous of or tear down your relationships with other people.”

If we’re starting to think that our attachment to someone might be disorganized, Dr. Fabert suggests reflecting on your overall well-being:

“I’d say to pay attention to how you feel emotionally and even physiologically around the person and pay attention to whether or not we feel overall healthier and happier with that person in our lives or overall less healthy and less happy. I would also pay attention to whether or not that having that person in our lives results in having fewer strong, healthy relationships overall in our lives. A good friend would want you to have more love in your life, not less, and they would not be jealous of or tear down your relationships with other people.”

“Some examples of what you can do to try to stay grounded and healthy is really anything that is good for your mental health… return to hobbies or activities that help you to feel like yourself and be in the moment, rest and take care of your body, spend time with old, good friends, engage in basic self-care… all of the typical things to help to clear your mind and return to yourself.”

The Power of Secure Attachments

Although disorganized attachments to cult leaders can be very powerful, an organized attachment to anyone else – even an insecure attachment (marked by anxiety or avoidance), according to Dr. Stein – can give you back your cognitive capacity and enable you to start thinking critically about what’s happening.

The bad news is, cult leaders know this too. In order to keep you unquestioning, the cult leader needs to make sure they are your only attachment figure.

They do this a number of ways. One, and perhaps the most well-known, is by isolating you from your family and friends. They might do this by convincing you that your family holds you back, or that they’re bad people for not believing in the same cause or faith that you do. People are sometimes encouraged to write letters to family members stating that they will be going no-contact, or they simply become unreachable.

This leaves only cult members to form attachments to, but even this poses a threat to the intentionally created disorganized attachment system. Remember, any organized attachment to a specific other person can give your brain room to process, even if it occurs within the cult.

One well-known feature of some cults is non-traditional romantic and sexual relationships. These might serve several purposes for the cult leader, including fulfilling their own personal desires, but they’re yet another tool they use to break down healthy attachments. Attachments are inherently defined as strong, specific bonds, meaning they occur between one person and another (although you can, of course, have several different attachments to different people).

Therefore, the practice of plural marriages can be used to prevent attachments from becoming stable, secure, and specific enough to mitigate disorganization. This often takes the form of men within the cult taking multiple wives. Crossing boundaries physically, such as encouraging or enforcing sexual contact between cult members, can also disrupt attachment bonds and lead to significant trauma.

“The practice of plural marriages can be used to prevent attachments from becoming stable, secure, and specific enough to mitigate disorganization.”

In groups where traditional marriages or deep two-person relationships are permitted, or even encouraged, these relationships can be intentionally sabotaged. We see this exemplified in Escaping Twin Flames, in which members were encouraged to find their “soulmates”, but once in committed relationships, they were pressured to engage in unhealthy relationship behaviors that disrupted any attachment organization.

Even if relationships are allowed to flourish, it would likely still be reinforced that the relationship to the leader is the primary relationship. This would be expected to be prioritized above any love and trust you might have for a spouse. This, again, undermines the attachment spouses or committed partners might have to each other.

The intentional disruption of attachment bonds even goes as far as separating parents and children. For instance, children born or brought into the cult could be raised by the group without a specific attachment figure (other than the leader). It might sound harmless, ideal even, to have children “raised by a village”, but remember that attachments are specific – having no designated caregiver still prevents organized attachments from forming. In extreme cases, parents can also be encouraged to separate from their children entirely; Dr. Stein describes that this was the final straw in her decision to leave her coercive group.

“One of if not the most protective factors is when people have pre-established, healthy relationships outside the cultic system,” Dr. Fabert says, “This is exactly why coercive controllers (whether in one on one relationships or cultic group leaders) work so hard to break down those relationships and isolate the targeted victim. As Stein says in her book [Terror, Love, and Brainwashing by Dr. Alexandra Stein], cultic systems result in “triple isolation” for the cult victims. Isolation from members outside the group (whether this is a physical isolation or more of a psychological isolation), isolation from group members (e.g., you might see other group members 24/7 but cannot really be yourself with them, cannot discuss your doubts, are pitted against them systematically… to the more extreme end where mothers are separated from children to break down those bonds), and isolation from yourself (not allowed to have certain types of thoughts and feelings, eventually becoming dissociated).”

An example of how a secure attachment figure can disrupt the disorganized attachment can be seen on Netflix’s Trust Me: The False Prophet, in which cult survivor and psychologist Dr. Christine Marie becomes a trusted outsider and a safe base for its members. Eventually, this enables one member to open up to Dr. Marie about their doubts, leading them to leave the group. This experience of a secure attachment no doubt helped other members in coming forward and making the same decision to leave the group, as many of them chose to do, during their own individual journeys.

What Does Life Look Like After Leaving A Cult?

Trauma and the disorganized attachment bond take a long time to come back from. Cult survivors can find it difficult to trust, or conversely, trust others too easily, for a long time after they leave.

Restoring previous attachments and building new secure ones can help cult survivors to recover. It’s common to feel tremendous amounts of shame for what you might have believed and things you might have done under coercion. Shame, too, can be weaponized to lead us into submission, according to psychotherapist Daniel Shaw (The Role of Shame in Cults, from Recruitment to Recovery). Having one person accept you with compassion and without judgment can be a powerful reminder that you are worthy of respect and kindness, from others and from yourself.

Shame is also a common experience in complex trauma, which Dr. Fabert explains can often result from abuse within cults:

“The experience of cultic abuse can be seen as a type of complex trauma (trauma that is prolonged, more insidious, and typically of an interpersonal nature) which, for many (but not all) people can result in symptoms of complex post traumatic stress. This involves the classic PTSD symptoms (e.g., avoidance, hypervigilance, intrusive memories), but also additional symptoms that are more interpersonal/intrapersonal in nature, in which people’s sense of self is greatly affected and in which people might have a sort of hypervigilance to certain relationship dynamics. This can cause a lot of interpersonal issues, especially when friends and family are not aware of what is going on.

What To Do If Your Loved One Is In A Cult

If someone you care about is in a high-control group or cult, maintaining your connection to them could be a lifeline. In an article for Netflix’s Tudum, Dr. Christine Marie gives advice to anyone looking to help their loved one out of a high-control group:

“The relationship with the person they’re worried about is more important than trying to change their beliefs,” she says. “Keep that relationship strong. Rather than criticize their leader or their group, find out what’s good about it and what is keeping them there. Let them know that you’re there for them without judgment, no matter what – even if they stay. That way, if they want to leave, they can feel safe coming to you.”

— Where Are the Survivors of Trust Me: The False Prophet Now?

This touches on an important aspect of understanding behavior that is, to an onlooker, unhelpful: it serves a purpose for the person engaging in it. Think of the last time you coped with something in a way that you knew was ultimately not good for you – maybe you went on a shopping spree after a rough day at work, or you spent a whole day in bed instead of dealing with overwhelming responsibilities (we’ve all been there).

Although you might have felt some shame around these coping mechanisms, there was still a reason you chose them – they still offered you something positive, like relief, or a sense of safety, or control. We can think of our loved ones in cults the same way: in what way does this group offer them something they need? Do they feel protected, valuable, or hopeful in the context of the group? The things they gain don’t cancel out the things these groups take away, but taking this perspective helps us to look at our loved ones with empathy and without shame and judgment.

Cult expert Dr. Steve Hassan describes this in the Strategic Interactive Approach, a non-coercive alternative to deprogramming (deprogramming practices involve forcing the cult member to undergo “therapy”, often involving false imprisonment, with the intent to shock them or “break” them into changing their thinking. It’s very risky and typically unsuccessful.)

The Strategic Interactive Approach aims to integrate the cult member’s new “cult identity” with their authentic identity, so that they can understand and grow from their experience. To do this, the family’s open-minded, non-judgmental support is crucial. Nurturing a curious and patient family dynamic, learning how to ask open-ended questions that encourage the cult member to question their situation for themselves, and reconnecting them with their pre-cult identity support the gradual reintegration process.

The Aftermath of Cultic Manipulation

Once your loved one has left a cult or high-control group, they can still go through a period of adjustment as they come to terms with their traumatic experiences.

“My advice to someone with a loved one who is recovering from a coercively controlling group would be to just have a lot of patience with that person and try not to take anything too personally during that person’s recovery,” Dr. Fabert advises: “Read as much as you can about cults and cult recovery. Validate their autonomy and their ability to make their own choices to help them get back in touch with their sense of autonomy and self-confidence. Just keep showing up for them consistently and help them to remember what a healthy, non-abusive, non-exploitative relationship can feel like.”

Any of us can find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you think you might be involved in a cult, know that this isn’t your personal failing – it’s your circumstance. Lean on pre-existing relationships and the hobbies and activities that make you feel like yourself, and be gentle with yourself while you figure out your next steps. If someone you care about is in a high-control group, remember the advice of Dr. Marie and Dr. Fabert: maintain a good relationship without judgment, be patient, and show them a healthy, secure relationship in which autonomy is encouraged.

For more information and support regarding high-control groups and cults, visit the Lalich Center website.

Sources

The Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion | https://www.lalichcenter.org/
Alexandra Stein (2021) Terror, love and brainwashing: Attachment in cults and totalitarian systems. Routledge.
Amanda Richards (2026) ‘Escaping Twin Flames’ Is a Sinister Love Story for the Digital Age. Tudum.
Daniel Shaw (2023) The Role of Shame in Cults, from Recruitment to Recovery, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 33:6, 779-795, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2023.2263056
Troy Pozirekides (2026) Where Are The Survivors of Trust Me: The False Prophet Now? Tudum.
Freedom of Mind Resource Center | https://freedomofmind.com/