What leaving costs

What it is

The full price of exit — which is almost always underestimated by people outside, and which is the reason the exit question in evaluating a teacher or group does more diagnostic work than any other.

It comes in four layers, and they usually arrive together.

Social. In groups that practise shunning — Jehovah's Witnesses' disfellowshipping, Scientology's disconnection, and similar policies elsewhere — leaving means the simultaneous loss of every relationship, including immediate family. Even without a formal policy, if the group has been the centre of your life for a decade, walking out means losing your entire social world in a single afternoon. People do not have a spare one.

Practical. Housing, employment and income are frequently provided by or through the group. Years given to it may have produced no transferable qualification and a gap on a CV that cannot be explained without a difficult conversation. Some people leave with no savings, no rental history and no referees.

Cognitive. A total worldview answers a great many questions at once — what you are for, what happens when you die, what is right, who you are. Removing it does not return you to a neutral state; it leaves the questions live and unanswered, all of them at the same time, and usually while you are also homeless or unemployed. Former members frequently describe an inability to make ordinary decisions, having spent years in an environment where decisions were made for them.

Moral. If you recruited others, you carry that. If you stayed silent about something you suspected, you carry that too. This is often the part that lasts longest, and it is rarely what outsiders anticipate.

Where it came from

The academic study of exit developed from the 1980s onward, in part as a corrective to the anti-cult movement's focus on entry. Researchers including Stuart Wright and David Bromley studied how people actually leave, and found the process was far more ordinary than the prevailing picture suggested — most departures are voluntary, gradual, and prompted by accumulated disillusionment rather than by rescue.

The counselling literature developed alongside it. Marlene Winell proposed the term Religious Trauma Syndrome to describe the after-effects of leaving authoritarian religion. It is worth being precise: this is a proposed clinical framework, not a recognised diagnosis, and it does not appear in the DSM or ICD. It is useful as a description and should not be presented as an established condition.

The forcible "deprogramming" practised in the 1970s and 80s — abduction and confinement of adult members at families' request — is now regarded as both unethical and counterproductive, and produced criminal convictions of its practitioners.

How it is used

For anyone worried about someone else, the research points consistently in one direction, and it is not the intuitive one.

Confrontation does not work. Attacking the group attacks the person's judgement, which is exactly what the group has trained them to distrust in themselves, and it confirms the group's account of hostile outsiders. What works is unglamorous: stay in contact, stay someone they can call, do not make the relationship conditional on their leaving, and be there without a deadline. The single most valuable thing an outsider can be is a relationship that has not been withdrawn.

For anyone leaving, the practical order tends to be: somewhere to live, money, then one person who knew you before. The meaning questions can wait, and will insist on waiting anyway.

What we can and cannot say

We can say — and this is the most important sentence on the page — most people do leave, and most recover. Even in high-demand groups, retention is far from total; most members depart within a few years, largely under their own steam. The picture of permanent capture is not what the research shows, and it is worth saying loudly, because the belief that leaving is impossible is itself one of the things that keeps people in.

We can say recovery is real but not quick, and that the practical costs are usually resolved before the moral and cognitive ones.

We can say peer support — other former members of the same group — is consistently reported as the most useful resource, more so than therapy with a clinician unfamiliar with the territory. A therapist who treats the whole tradition as pathology tends to be experienced as one more person insisting they know your life better than you do.

We cannot say the transition is easy or that anyone should be hurried through it. And there is a particular thing not to say to someone who has left: that the years were wasted. They usually were not. People form real friendships, learn real skills, and have real experiences inside groups that also harmed them, and the two facts sit together uncomfortably but truthfully. Insisting they choose one is another way of telling them their own account of their life is wrong, which is precisely the thing they have just escaped.

Further reading

• Stuart A. Wright, Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection (1987) — the foundational study of voluntary exit.
• Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias, Take Back Your Life (2006) — written for people leaving, and practical about the first six months.
• Peer support networks for specific groups, which generally exist and are generally easy to find. For most large groups there is an organised community of former members.