You still haven't left the cult

Part II

There’s a growing wave of ex-therapists, ex-clinicians, wellness influencers, and healing rebels making viral claims about mental health, trauma, and the nature of reality.

“Mental illness doesn’t exist.”

“You don’t need therapy, just natural law/nature.”

”All illness is caused by disconnection from your true self.”

“It’s not you, it’s the system.”

This piece expands on what I explored in You Haven’t Left the Cult Until It’s Left You, unpacking the psychology behind these shifts and what we need to be aware of as both seekers and practitioners.

You haven’t left the cult until the cult left you

I want to give some context to why I’m writing this. I too was not a fan of SSRIs and other psychiatric medications. I tended to lean more heavily into the emotional, interpersonal, and spiritual influences behind suffering and illness. It wasn’t until I started dealing with my own medical mystery that forced me to dive into the physical reality of things to address some deficiencies and imbalances in my physical body despite believing I was healthy and doing all the right things. This definitely got me to check my ego and examine my deeper resistance to the devaluation of the physical dimension over the spiritual one.

I know and support many people who have and do struggle with their mental health, but it wasn’t until I was faced with the day-to-day reality of a loved one in a mental health crisis that woke me up again.

While some of these perspectives offer valid critiques of over-diagnosis, over-medication, and systemic harm, that doesn’t mean we need to throw everything away or burn it all down. Discernment is essential. Remedies and practices marketed as “ancient” or “natural” doesn’t automatically make it more trustworthy while clinical or modern doesn’t automatically make it untrustworthy. The effectiveness of any intervention often depends not just on the method, but on the integrity, skill, and presence of the person facilitating the healing or recovery process.

Leaving the cult while keeping the mentality

In the wake of disillusionment, many who leave traditional systems don’t simply walk away — they reconstruct. They abandon the institutions, language, and frameworks they once upheld and replace them with identities rooted in grievance, spiritual certainty, and a hunger for coherence. What often emerges is a new kind of dogma, cloaked in spiritual rhetoric, anti-establishment sentiment, or radical self-sovereignty. Though these frameworks may appear liberatory, they can replicate the very dynamics they claim to resist: hierarchy, control, and moral superiority. This is why discernment is essential, as it asks us to recognise when critique stops being an honest search for understanding and starts becoming a performance designed to reinforce authority or identity.

The signs are clear when you know what to look for. There are red flags that signal unexamined psychological patterns masquerading as truth, as well as ideological shifts. I want to be clear in saying that these shifts and expressions of unconscious material are mostly unintentional, not malicious. They often stem from unresolved grief, buried shame, or the human impulse to regain coherence after an identity collapse. When left unchecked, they can create echo chambers and power structures that become just as rigid or damaging as the systems they reject.

What might underlie some ex-clinicians’ sweeping claims is a response to disillusionment. After stepping away from traditional systems that once gave them structure and status, some rebuild authority through strong statements, moral conviction, and spiritual language that conveys confident certitude, yet leaves little room for complexity.

What’s often missing in these professional-to-spiritual conversions is humility. In many cases, the awakening occurs right after leaving the profession, or around the time they enter a spiritual/lifestyle community or adopt a healing modality. Rather than pausing to study, train, and question their own frameworks for the next 7–10 years, they begin speaking with the same confidence they once used in their former role with new language. What would it look like if they left their profession quietly, spent a decade in sincere practice and deep apprenticeship, and only then began to share what they’ve learned without proselytising the dogma of their new community? Instead, many simply swap belief systems, borrow the credibility of their past profession, and start offering guidance with barely enough time to metabolize their own disillusionment.

Beneath the ideological shift lies a deeper psychological process. The collapse of a professional identity often triggers deep shame, grief, and uncertainty. Without integrating that loss, the psyche compensates by constructing a new identity rooted in superiority - moral, intellectual, or spiritual. Superiority becomes the ego’s defence against shame, employing certainty to replace suppress vulnerability. The need to feel special, wise, and awakened masks the disorientation lurking underneath. Instead of confronting the full weight of disillusionment, many recreate the same dynamics they thought they were escaping.

Much of this behaviour reflects narcissistic patterns that stem from buried distress rather than malice, often masked by spiritual bypassing. These are often unacknowledged wounds that get masked by conviction and charisma. The superior posture, the messiah-like tone, and the certainty all serve as ego defences against the shame, fear, and existential vulnerability that come with losing identity. When distress is left unprocessed and bypassed through spiritual ideology, it shape shifts into performance, self-appointed authority, and persuasion.

Fantasy and reality

When healing rhetoric falls short

Not everyone is willing, ready, or even sufficiently aware of the depth of their distress to engage in trauma work. Many aren’t drawn to excavating their past, participating in ceremony, or decoding the intricacies of their nervous system, let alone consider that what they’re facing might not just be rooted in physiology or DNA. For many, especially older adults, the desire is simply to return to the familiar rhythms of daily life, but they find themselves caught in a kind of crisis that can’t be resolved through journaling, spiritual healing, natural remedies, or cultivated self-trust alone.

They could be living with psychosis, gripped by beliefs and perceptions that feel real, while undergoing identity collapse. It’s possible too that they’re possessed by something dark, ancestral, energetic, or deeply fragmented. But until a skilled healer arrives who is capable of performing the equivalent of an exorcism, whether psychological, spiritual, or medical, or until a convergence of science and spirit intervenes, they remain on a slow path toward destruction. This is where the oversimplified rhetoric begins to fall apart.

I’ve always felt an aversion to the term mental illness because it tends to flatten the complexity of a person’s experience and bypass the multiple contributing factors within their personal ecology, including relational dynamics. But to confidently claim it doesn’t exist and that it’s the result of our enslavement by systems of oppression minimises the reality of those who are suffering in ways that defy language, logic, and willpower.

You can call it a spiritual emergency, possession, unresolved trauma, or fragmentation, but it is misleading to suggest that it will always resolve through reconnection with nature, trauma release, accessing the body’s innate wisdom, or learning to feel safe in the body. Some conditions require deliberate intervention, including pharmaceuticals, while others call for a nuanced integration of tools, traditions, and timelines…processes that might also be shaped by forces like karma, which operate beyond human control. To suggest otherwise is to romanticize nature as inherently good or healing, when in reality it also contains poison, parasites, predation, and decay. Harm is not exclusive to humans, healing is nonlinear, and not everything natural is benevolent.

The dominant narrative in many psych-spiritual spaces glorifies the individual and vilifies the system. It frames healing as an act of sovereign rebellion and promotes the belief that all transformation must originate from within. While this holds truth in many cases, denying the value of system-based support, especially the kind someone still trusts, is both shortsighted and irresponsible, particularly when you position yourself or your paradigm as their only path to healing. Some voices in these spaces suggest that if you are still suffering, it’s because you haven’t done enough inner work. But this mindset quickly unravels in the presence of someone truly at the mercy of forces they cannot name or hold alone. In those moments, what matters most is not certainty about the cause, but the humility to admit you don’t know and the willingness to support them through it anyway.

What I learned about suffering and support

I’ve been at the coalface of human suffering and mental anguish over the past month, and many of the beliefs I carried into this experience have been thoroughly challenged—some entirely dismantled, others quietly reaffirmed. What has become unmistakably clear is that suffering is complex, multifaceted, and deeply personal. Some experiences may align with what we call mental illness, while others resist diagnostic categories altogether. Humans are inherently multidimensional beings, and while many of the influencers I’m critiquing would claim to agree with this, their rhetoric often dismisses or devalues the medical dimension. True multidimensional care honours the biological, psychological, relational, spiritual, systemic, cultural, and medical aspects of a person’s reality without reducing suffering to a single explanatory model or path to healing.

I have witnessed firsthand the profound effect of someone beginning to trust a medical authority again, prompted by the presence of a psychiatrist, mental health nurse, or occupational therapist who helped them feel at ease and offered a more compassionate reflection of who they were. When that interpersonal presence is combined with clinical knowledge and a genuine belief in the person’s capacity to recover, it becomes a powerful intervention in itself — what some might even call the placebo effect. This alone can significantly reduce anxiety and rekindle the motivation buried beneath the weight of severe depression.

Some people are suffering in ways that ideology alone cannot reach. Unless we are willing to confront that reality without flinching, we will continue to replicate the same patterns of unexamined hubris dressed in different language.

Red flags of cult leader wannabe behaviour

• Blanket statements like “this doesn’t exist” without nuance or evidence

• Declarative, messiah-like statements that imply omniscience and present slanted, villain-based narratives (“I’m here to tell you there is no... and there definitely is...”)

• Black and white thinking that paints institutions or individuals as entirely good or evil

• Simplified cures that promise healing through one path (usually theirs)

• Moral hierarchy: messaging that implies “we who see the truth” are more evolved than others

• Unquestioned loyalty to a charismatic figure or belief system, even when it contradicts itself

• Emotional manipulation dressed up as insight, such as lovebombing, subtle shame, or soft control tactics to pressure someone into corrective action.

• Anti-establishment branding that still depends on audience validation and power dynamics

• Superiority of knowledge, belief system, or spiritual advancement as a defence against shame for past affiliations

• Language that sanctifies victimhood and frames you as powerless or inherently oppressed by all systems.

• Romanticization of nature as inherently good or healing, while ignoring its capacity for harm

• Statements that appeal to hurt, betrayed, or disillusioned parts of you, then subtly recruit those parts into their ideology

The cult in different clothing

Many of these influencers have left the system. They burned their old notes, disavowed the frameworks they once upheld, renounced their professional affiliations, unfollowed their former mentors and gurus, and announced that they were done.

Except, the need to be right and the confidence of certainty remains. The need to be seen as someone in the know doesn’t disappear when the uniform and professional titles come off. The void left by the discarded identity is filled with a new narrative that restores a sense of stability, even as the same patterns continue beneath the surface. The cult inside simply received a new makeover.

I know because I have done it too.

I walked away from roles I once believed in and then spent years disowning every trace of them, unable to see the value I had once brought because I was too focused on everything I thought I had done wrong. I replaced that identity with a new one that still felt respected and needed. I believed I was free, though I wasn’t, and the applause felt too good to stop.

This is what many of us do when we have not metabolized the shame, regret, or grief of who we used to be. We reject the old version of ourselves so completely that we swing to the opposite extreme, discredit the paradigm, glorify the self, and spiritualize the entire process.

They will say it is all the system’s fault, that healing only happens through sovereignty, intuition, and nature, and that therapy is a trap and mental illness doesn’t exist.

Perhaps there is some truth in those claims, but something else is happening underneath: a reenactment, a performance of liberation that still depends on the same dynamics of control, hierarchy, and specialness.

You might have left the institution, but maybe you brought the cult with you.

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

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