TRANSCRIPT: The Cult You Don’t Know You’re In: Rose Owen

Read the full transcript of Rose Owen ‘s talk “The Cult You Don’t Know You’re In” at TEDxAberdeen conference [Feb 21, 2025].

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

A Surprising Discovery

ROSE OWEN: I’m cycling along the Deeside Way, a gorgeous old railroad that winds from Aberdeen to the Scottish countryside. The air smells like pine and the low autumn sun is dancing through the red and gold leaves. But I can’t get distracted.

I’m on a mission. I’m looking for something very specific. And then I see it and my heart starts to race. I ease my bike to a stop, awkwardly swing my leg over, waddle up to it, snap a selfie and send it to the WhatsApp group. Bloop! This is going to really cheer up the girls. The replies flood in instantly. “No way, Rose, we thought that you were joking. OMG, this is hilarious.”

You see, my friends did not believe me when I told them there’s actually a place in Aberdeen called CULT. Now you might be wondering, why has this pregnant lady cycled miles just to take a frankly unflattering selfie with this vine?

After all, CULT is a beautiful Gaelic word. It means wood. Harmless, right? But for my friends and I, we had just been through hell and back again, learning that this word has another lineage, from Latin origin, and it means something far more sinister. It means worship.

So when I found out that Aberdeen had a CULT hotel, a CULT academy and a CULT church, I had to tell the girls. And it did make them laugh for a moment, until my German friend Sophia, the sweetest of all of us, sent a message that made my chest tighten. It said, “I wish all abusive relationships came with a sign like this.” And it really hit me, standing there in the woods, just how much we’d all learned since leaving the CULTY organisation.

Because Sophia was right. Whether it’s romantic, family, or even professional, abusive relationships are two-person CULTS. Because it’s not that outward appearance that defines a CULT. It’s the subtle and often unseen dynamics between those in power and those who worship.

The Unexpected Face of Cults

I wonder if any of you can relate to this. I used to think that CULTS were obvious, you know, extreme religious groups where people lived in communes and wore funny robes, the kind you see in the movies. But I’ve since learned that there’s many CULTS that don’t fit this sensationalised stereotype, and they can exist in everyday places, like corporate cultures that demand a family-like devotion, or social media gurus expanding their influence.

Anyone else think it’s weird that you literally press a follow button on many of these platforms? Or, there’s like what happened with me. A personal development programme promising to transform your life. It all started so innocently. It’s 2015, and I’m just a regular teenager. Spotty, insecure, anxious. I start seeing a therapist who really helps me, teaches me mindfulness tools to reduce my anxiety, and coaches me to become more confident and outspoken and emotionally articulate. Over the next few years they invite me to join their group workshops, and then their advanced retreats, and then their training programmes, so that I could teach their workshops too.

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But wait, hang on a second. I didn’t set out to become one of their trainees. I was just a teenager looking for some help with anxiety. But that’s the insidious nature of CULT recruitment.

Nobody joins a CULT on purpose. They join something good. So how did I get drawn in deeper and deeper and deeper?

The Stages of Cult Recruitment

Let me break it down for you. The first stage is manipulation. Have you ever had someone be overly complimentary to you?

You know, with a lot of affection and eye-gazing? Careful. That could be love-bombing, one of the many manipulative tactics used in abusive relationships. And at our workshop, it was just one big squishy love-bomb. People would come and bare their souls, share their deepest fears and wounds and desires. It wasn’t therapy. It was emotional heroin, and it’s what made people come back again and again and again.

The second stage is isolation. Who needs a residential commune? It’s the 21st century and we’ve all got Zoom. With every online training, my language became more and more coded. Here’s a small example.

Instead of saying, “I feel sad,” we had to rephrase it to “I make myself sad.” And in theory, it was about taking agency over our emotions, but in reality, I just sounded like a weirdo. Can you imagine going up to someone and saying, “Hey, how are you doing?”

And they reply with, “I’m making myself sad.” You’d be a little confused, wouldn’t you? Eventually, a distance started to grow between me and people outside the group who didn’t share our language, including friends and family, and a subtle us-versus-them mentality crept in.

The final stage is control. From the outside, I looked free. I was happy and healthy. No physical chains keeping me to the group. But that’s the crux of cultic influence.

The prison is psychological. Remember all that love bombing that I just told you about?

Well, here’s how it gets weaponized. If you didn’t do what the groups wanted you to do, that love would coldly withheld. And remember, you just isolated yourself from your friends and family. This is your only source of love and connection, and you’ll do anything to get it back again. For me, I worked for free for years, creating content, marketing and advertising workshops, all for my therapist’s validation and for the greater good of spreading their teachings to the world. It was worth it, right? No.

I was being exploited by cold growth. You know, it’s funny. I thought I was being open-minded. Yeah, right. Turns out, I was being so open-minded that my brain had totally fallen out.

Recognizing Cult-like Patterns in Everyday Life

Now, some of you might be wondering, Rose, I’m not in a cult. None of this applies to me. But look around.

Maybe you know someone whose world revolves entirely around their job, or is brainwashed by political extremism, or lost to an online echo chamber. The culty patterns of manipulation, isolation and control don’t just exist in extreme stories like mine. They can creep into our everyday lives, into our offices, our homes, our screens.

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Take social media, for example. You know those likes and comments that feel so good when you get them? Classic love-bombing. But connecting with people across the world while ignoring the people across the table? Isolation. And an algorithm that dictates what you see and how much exposure you get depending on your behaviour on the platform? That’s control.

I hope all these examples plant a little seed of awareness, because for me, it was a little seed that helped wake me up.

The Wake-up Call

It’s Christmas, 2022. I’m seven years in the cult, and I’m visiting home for the holidays. The table is set for a beautiful family dinner, but the mood shifts when I start explaining to my confused parents how their holiday stress is actually unresolved childhood trauma. My dad pauses, fork in mid-air. My mum looks at the ceiling. She’s holding back words. My older sister, a clinical psychologist, sets down her wine glass and says so gently, “Rose, I think you’re in a cult.”

A surge of defensiveness flows through me. “If by cult, you mean a group of people committed to transforming and transcending their experience to become conscious creators of the world, then yeah.” My sister shares a look with my parents. You know the kind of look I’m talking about. In fact, most of you are looking at me like that right now. It’s the kind of look that says everything while saying nothing.

I had taken her well-meaning and concerned voice as a personal attack on my identity. Because that’s how cults work. They don’t ask for worship outright. It happens slowly, over time, until you can’t remember who you were before and you’re explaining trauma theory over Christmas dinner to a family who just want their daughter back.

You might be wondering, why couldn’t I just listen to my sister? But our minds, they don’t like to be wrong.

We have this powerful ability to deceive ourselves. And even though her words didn’t land straight away, they did plant that little seed of doubt. Next time I logged on to my trainings, I asked my superiors about her comment, hoping that they would reassure me that she was wrong.

Instead I was shut down and belittled, told I needed to work on my authority issues. But speaking up did get me noticed by a group of other members who’d been questioning things too.

And soon I was added to a secret WhatsApp group with Sophia and the others, and we started sharing resources and stories about cults that exist throughout the personal development industry and beyond. Soon the pieces of the jigsaw began to come together and I could suddenly see the whole horrifying picture. Cults are everywhere. They don’t look like they do in the movies, and we needed to get out.

Building Resilience Against Cults

As my world crumbled around me, I still had one question. How could I make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone I love, or to me, ever again?

Because we’re all susceptible, especially when we’re feeling vulnerable or lost. We need to find a way to still be part of groups, yet able to question them. Our sense of self, our identity, it needs to be flexible, not fragile. We need an identity that is resilient.

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The best way for me to describe this is using a rubber band. And maybe some of you have heard this analogy, where the band represents our ability to stretch under pressure and bounce back again. But I have a problem with this analogy.

I don’t think these things are resilient at all. Just look at it. It’s so flimsy. If this is meant to represent me, I mean, sure, I might be resilient at first as I learn new things and take on new forms. But over time, rubber becomes rigid, and the more I’m stretched, the more brittle I become, until eventually the pressure is too much.

It’s broken. I’m broken. Where’s the resilience now? When you leave a cult, it’s like leaving an abusive relationship. You think leaving would be the best part, but it’s often the hardest. When you’ve been enmeshed with them for so long, and then you finally leave. For many of my colleagues, the pain and confusion was just too much, and they just ran straight back into the familiar arms of the cult, unable to see the truth. And I empathize with them, I really do. But I was not going to let that happen to me again.

And this is what I learned. Having an identity made up of one band is not resilience. But having an identity made up of many rubber bands is.

Just look at this thing. It’s extremely solid, still very flexible, and really bouncy. I’m so glad I caught that. This time, when I rebuilt my identity, I made sure to make it from many sources, so that if one snaps, I still have a stable sense of self. This time, my identity is made up of red for my passion for sport, purple for the joy of motherhood and family and all the chaos that that brings, green for the artist groups I’m part of, blue for the seaside community, and finally, a little bit of yellow for personal development. Because it’s still there, but it’s not one flimsy rubber band anymore.

Conclusion

Two years ago, I sat at my family Christmas dinner a stranger. This year, my parents have their daughter back, and my sister has her best friend again. These pictures are taken from her wedding a few weeks ago. I was made of honour, and I didn’t bring up childhood trauma once. She was delighted.

As you leave here today, look around. If you notice someone’s world shrinking to one rubber band, gently invite them to add another. And for yourselves, check in. Is there anywhere you could be being manipulated, isolated or controlled?

Thank you.