A woman describes her experience of leaving what she calls “the cult of people” after 43 years, a process she compares to deprogramming from a religious group.
The writer explains that she was watching the Hulu show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives when a scene caught her attention. In the show, a young woman argues with her mother about rules for her behavior. The daughter is avoiding church, facing possible excommunication, and trying to keep her freedom without losing her family.
The writer says she saw a struggle between being true to oneself and belonging to a group. She argues that people are wired for connection, but that connection comes with a cost. The cost is following rules and hiding parts of yourself in exchange for belonging.
The writer defines “the cult of people” as the constant noise of other people’s needs, opinions, and expectations. It is the performance of connection, the search for external validation, and the addiction to being liked and included. It means organizing your inner life around what others can tolerate and making yourself small enough to keep the peace.
She says she was a member for 43 years without knowing it. Nearly seven years ago, she started leaving. This came from the pandemic, raising a child with special needs largely alone, and therapy. She began to see how much she had been reaching, earning, and contorting herself to stay connected to people who needed her to be manageable.
The writer describes seven years of tears, loneliness, anxiety attacks, and heartbreak. Her circle got smaller. She felt like she was in hell. She says deprogramming requires distance from the group that demanded self-betrayal.
When you create distance from the cult of people, the writer says, it first looks like something is wrong with you. You get quieter, stop performing, and decline invitations. Your circle shrinks. People who are still inside the cult do not understand and some take it personally. Withdrawing is threatening to the cult because it needs your participation to survive.
But something else happens too. Abandonment loses some of its power. You stop lying to yourself to stay connected. You see the agreements you have been making your whole life, trading pieces of yourself for belonging. Clarity becomes both a gift and a grief.
The writer says leaving the cult of people does not feel like freedom right away. It feels like loss, loneliness, and a terrible mistake. But underneath that, something quieter and steadier grows. A self that is not performing. A voice you can trust. An internal compass that works because it is not being scrambled by other people’s signals.
She says she is not fully deprogrammed. She still gets lonely. She still feels the pull to earn her way back into rooms that cost her too much. She still grieves connections that could not survive her becoming more herself. But she is more comfortable with sadness. She has learned to sit with herself.
She concludes that no one is going to save you, but no one gets to stop you either. The aloneness that felt like abandonment is also the open road. When you stop organizing your life around what the group can tolerate, you find out what you actually want, who you actually are, and what you are actually capable of. She calls that the road to freedom.
