When Someone You Love Is in a High-Control Community
You may have a person in your life who seems increasingly unlike themselves.
Maybe they have become deeply involved in a religious group, political organization, spiritual community, multi-level marketing company, or relationship where someone else appears to have unusual control over their choices. You may spend a lot of time trying to understand what happened, searching for information, checking their social media, replaying conversations, and wondering whether the next conversation will finally be the one that gets through. Meanwhile, the person you are worried about is still your daughter, brother, friend, parent, or partner, and you still have a relationship with them that you are trying to navigate.
When Someone Is Still There, but the Relationship Has Changed
One of the hardest parts can be explaining your loss to other people. The person you love is alive. You may still text them. You may see them at Thanksgiving. They may call you on your birthday. Yet something about the relationship may feel profoundly different. Clients sometimes describe missing the person they knew while sitting across the table from the person who is there now.
This can create a particularly confusing kind of grief because there is no clear ending. You cannot point to a funeral, a breakup, or a move and say, “This is when I lost them.” There may be moments when the old relationship returns, followed by conversations in which you barely recognize the way they think or speak. You can feel relieved by a good afternoon together and devastated again a few days later.
Researchers have described this experience as ambiguous loss, a form of loss in which someone remains physically present while the relationship, role, or person you knew has become uncertain or altered. A 2019 study of families dealing with cult involvement found that this kind of ambiguous loss was part of the psychological process families experienced as relationships deteriorated. More recent research with family members and friends affected by coercive controlling groups and relationships similarly found substantial experiences of anxiety, grief, fear, anger, shame, and relationship disruption.
You can love someone who is still in your life and still grieve what has changed.
You May Spend a Lot of Time Trying to Figure Out What Is Happening
Clients in these situations have often amassed an enormous amount of information. They have read books, watched videos, searched the organization’s history, found former members online, examined financial arrangements, and memorized terminology. Sometimes they have spent months trying to determine whether the situation really qualifies as a “cult.” They may feel that if they can just understand the organization well enough, they will finally know what to do.
There can be real value in learning about coercive control. General information about isolation from family, control over finances, surveillance, threats, punishment for questioning, manipulation of information, pressure to sever outside relationships, exploitation, and fear of consequences can all be important information. At the same time, religious groups, political organizations, businesses, and intimate relationships have very different structures and risks, so they should not automatically be treated as interchangeable.
The research can also become part of the cycle that keeps you mentally attached. You check one more discussion board because you are looking for the piece of information you missed yesterday. You reread a message because you are trying to determine whether your loved one sounded different. You look at their social media because you are hoping to find evidence that something has changed. The checking provides a brief sense that you are doing something, but it is temporary.
When Research Becomes a Way of Staying on Alert
You may recognize some of these patterns:
checking your loved one’s social media repeatedly
monitoring websites, posts, or videos connected to the group
searching for signs that they are becoming unhappy or questioning things
rehearsing what you will say if they suddenly ask for help
reading former-member accounts late at night
checking your phone frequently because you are afraid you will miss an important call
feeling guilty when you go several hours without thinking about the situation
There is a psychological trap here. Worry can begin to feel like responsibility. If you stop researching, monitoring, or thinking about the situation, part of you may worry that you have stopped caring.
That is something worth bringing into therapy. We can get curious about what your mind is asking you to do, what those actions actually accomplish, and what they cost you. You may still decide to stay informed. The difference is that information can become something you use when needed, rather than something that occupies your attention all day.
Guilt Can Keep You Working on the Problem
Another experience that comes up repeatedly is guilt. Parents wonder whether they should have noticed earlier. Siblings wonder whether one argument pushed their brother or sister further into the group. Friends replay the conversation when the person first mentioned the organization and think, “I should have said something different.” Sometimes there is guilt about having introduced the person to someone who later became important in the situation.
Once something frightening has happened, the mind can make the past look much more predictable than it actually was. You know what happened next, so earlier decisions can seem as though they should have contained information that you could not reasonably have had at the time.
Guilt can also create an exhausting bargain: if you can determine exactly what you did wrong, perhaps you can determine exactly what you need to do now to fix it. That can keep you searching for the perfect conversation, the perfect question, or the perfect strategy.
Therapy can give you somewhere to examine that guilt without immediately turning it into another problem you have to solve. With Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, you might begin to notice different parts of yourself taking over at different moments. There may be a part that wants to rescue your loved one, another that is furious with them, another that is terrified of losing them, and another that believes constant research is the only responsible thing to do. These parts can have very different ideas about what you should do next.
Clients sometimes find it relieving to recognize that internal conflict without having to decide immediately which part is right. You can become more curious about the part that is working so hard to prevent another disaster, while noticing the cost of letting that part run your entire life.
You May Be Angry With Someone You Still Love
There is often pressure in conversations about high-control groups to focus entirely on understanding the person who has been influenced or controlled. Understanding is important, but it does not erase the effect their behavior has had on you.
Your loved one may have lied to you, borrowed money they did not repay, insulted you, disappeared from your life, exposed your children to something you consider harmful, or repeatedly turned ordinary conversations into arguments about the group. You may understand why they are behaving this way and still feel angry about what they have done.
Clients can feel ashamed of that anger, particularly when they have been told that confrontation will only push the person further away. They may start policing their own reactions so carefully that there is nowhere for resentment to go. Over time, the relationship can become strangely one-sided: every conversation is evaluated according to whether it might help the other person, while the client’s own hurt receives very little attention.
Your relationship with this person matters, and so does your experience of being in it. Therapy can make room for both.
When Families Disagree About What to Do
The situation can become even harder when other people in the family respond differently. One person wants to confront the loved one directly. Another wants everyone to remain friendly. Someone else wants to cut off financial support. Another family member thinks the entire concern is exaggerated.
These disagreements can create a second problem on top of the first. Relatives begin arguing with each other about strategy, and the person everyone is worried about becomes the subject around which the family organizes itself.
I sometimes hear clients become increasingly certain that they have to convince everyone else to handle the situation correctly. They may spend hours sending relatives articles, explaining coercive control, or defending decisions they made months earlier. Sometimes the family disagreement becomes another place where the client feels responsible for preventing a bad outcome.
It can help to separate decisions that actually belong to you from decisions that belong to other adults.
Questions Worth Bringing Back to Your Own Side of the Relationship
You might ask yourself:
What contact am I willing to have?
What behavior will I not participate in?
What financial support, if any, am I comfortable providing?
What do I want holidays, birthdays, or family gatherings to look like?
What information do I actually need to know?
What would I do if my loved one suddenly asked for help?
Which decisions belong to me, and which belong to another adult?
These questions are often more workable than trying to settle the larger question of how another person should live their life.
Staying Connected Can Become Complicated
You may have heard that keeping communication open can be important. There is some support for the idea that maintaining trust and avoiding unnecessary criticism may help preserve a relationship with someone involved in a coercive controlling environment. Research with affected families has identified staying connected and building trust as potentially useful strategies, while also making clear that there is no guaranteed formula for communicating with someone in this situation.
This matters because clients can become frightened of making a mistake. They may scrutinize every text message. They wonder whether saying the wrong thing will cause the person to cut them off permanently. They may tolerate conversations that leave them shaken because they believe any boundary could close the only door they have left.
You can care about preserving the relationship and still have limits. You can decide that you will talk about ordinary parts of life but will end a conversation when you are being insulted. You can decline to participate in recruitment or financial requests. You can tell someone you love them without agreeing with everything they say.
Sometimes the relationship becomes easier to maintain when it has room to be an ordinary relationship again. You might talk about a movie, a recipe, a dog, a family story, or what happened at work. Those conversations can feel almost too ordinary when you are worried about someone, but they can also remind you that the person is more than the current circumstances.
Being Available Does Not Mean Being on Call
Some clients have made some version of an emergency plan. They know where their loved one could stay. They know whom to call. They have thought about transportation, money, documents, or a place to sleep. If children, dependent adults, threats of violence, or an abusive intimate partner are involved, the practical safety considerations can be very different and may require specialized safety planning.
Having a plan can reduce some uncertainty. Keeping yourself psychologically tethered to the phone every hour of every day is another matter.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can be particularly useful here because this situation contains an unusually large amount of uncertainty that cannot be resolved through thinking. In therapy, we can notice the drive to obtain certainty before you allow yourself to pay attention to your own life. You can practice making choices based on your values while still carrying unanswered questions about what your loved one will eventually do.
That may mean deciding what you will do if they call, writing it down, and then returning to whatever you were doing. It may mean setting limits on how often you check for updates. It may mean giving yourself permission to go to dinner without your phone in your hand.
The fear may still be there, but your life can contain other things alongside it.
What Happens If They Leave?
Families often imagine the moment their loved one finally leaves as the end of the problem, but the actual aftermath can be much less straightforward.
Someone leaving a high-control environment may be frightened, disoriented, financially dependent, embarrassed, angry, or unsure whether they made the right decision. They may miss people they left behind. They may continue to defend parts of the group. They may return. They may leave again. They may want help one day and distance the next.
You may also experience relief alongside anger. You may be grateful they are home and furious about what happened. You may want to hear everything while simultaneously wishing you could stop talking about it. You may have spent so long preparing to rescue them that you are unsure what your relationship looks like when rescue is no longer the central task.
This is another place where therapy can become less about managing the other person and more about understanding what has happened to you. After months or years of organizing your attention around whether someone else will change, it can take time to reconnect with other aspects of yourself and your life.
Your Life Still Has to Be Yours
Clients sometimes feel guilty when they begin enjoying things again. They go on vacation and think about their loved one. They laugh with friends and then wonder whether they should be doing something more useful. They have a good day and feel almost disloyal for not being worried.
This guilt can sometimes manifest as a type of “waiting.” You may continue making decisions as though the person could leave at any moment. You avoid committing to plans. You stay emotionally prepared for a phone call. You keep the situation mentally active because some part of you believes that being less vigilant would mean abandoning them.
Over time, this can become an identity. You are the person who researches. You are the person who knows what is happening. You are the person who will answer the phone. You are the person who has not given up.
IFS can be useful in exploring what that identity protects. A part of you may believe that if you stop trying, something terrible will happen. Another part may be exhausted and want permission to live normally. Another may be afraid that having a life outside the situation means you care less about the person.
Those conflicts usually deserve more attention than another hour of internet research.
You Do Not Have to Know How This Ends
One of the hardest adjustments is accepting that you may never get a satisfying answer about what your loved one will do. They may leave. They may stay. They may change their mind repeatedly. They may eventually see the situation very differently, or they may not.
You can still decide how you want to behave in the relationship you have today. That might mean keeping a line of communication open. It might mean reducing contact. It might mean setting firm boundaries around money or abusive behavior. It might mean deciding that you will respond when someone reaches out but will stop monitoring for signs that they are about to do so. The right choice depends on the relationship, the behavior involved, and the safety of the people affected.
What clients may discover in therapy is that they have been waiting for information from the other person before allowing themselves to make ordinary decisions about their own lives. They are waiting to know whether they should be worried, whether the relationship will come back, whether the next conversation will change something, or whether they will eventually have to intervene. There may be no moment when all of those questions are answered.
You can love someone whose life has become difficult to watch. You can remain open to them while having boundaries of your own. You can grieve what has changed, feel angry about what has happened, and still care about the person.
At some point, you may also start making room for your own life again. That can be as ordinary as making plans without wondering whether you should keep the time open in case your loved one needs you. It can mean going to dinner, taking a trip, spending time with friends, or getting through a workday without checking your phone every few minutes. You may still worry about them while you are doing those things. The worry does not have to determine what you do with the rest of your day.
Clients sometimes discover that they have been postponing parts of their own lives while waiting for something to change. They have been waiting for the phone call, the realization, the apology, the decision to leave, or some other sign that will tell them what happens next. Therapy can help you look at what you want to do with your life while the situation remains unresolved, including what you want your relationship with this person to look like if nothing changes for a while.
Powell is a therapist who offers individual therapy for adults in Georgia, California, Colorado and Florida.
He offers individual therapy, but also specializes in Gender Identity, Life Transitions, and Self-Worth.
