Summary
Joe and Brett explore the tension between healthy group cohesion and cult dynamics — a question that emerged after Joe watched “The Vow” documentary about NXIVM and experienced a crisis about whether personal development work inevitably devolves into cult behavior. Joe initially wanted to quit coaching entirely, fearing any group would become a cult.
Through research and reflection, Joe identifies key distinctions: cults require surrendering power to someone else, while healthy groups support individual autonomy. Brett reframes the community’s tongue-in-cheek cult jokes as a healthy self-awareness mechanism that keeps the tendency in consciousness rather than letting it operate unconsciously. Joe recognizes that dismissing deep community as “just cult behavior” actually diminishes the possibility that authentic intimacy and connection can be a natural way of living.
The conversation reaches its deepest point when Brett suggests that cult dynamics are a projection of our internal structure — each of us is “a cult of one” with a guru (the voice in the head) we believe without questioning. Joe finds tremendous joy and nervousness in this insight, recognizing it as the death of his identity as “someone who can see through belief patterns.” The episode concludes with a liberating reframe: we all swim in water we can’t see, and accepting this with humor and humility is healthier than defending against it.
Key Concepts
- Cult dynamics exist on a spectrum present in all human groups
- Self-referential humor about cult tendencies keeps groups self-aware
- Each person is a “cult of one” with internal belief structures they can’t fully see
- Dismissing deep community as “cult behavior” diminishes the possibility of authentic living
- Surrendering to the ineffable is fundamentally different from surrendering to a guru
- When groups subjugate individual needs for group cohesion, it creates trauma not healing
Key Quotes
“To me the essence of a cult is where you’re handing over your power to somebody else, which is the antithesis of the work that I want to do in the world.”
“When people get involved in these programs… to say this is like cult behavior diminishes it. It’s saying that we can’t be this way naturally.”
“I’m a cult of one and that’s okay.”
“We have a guru — that’s the voice in the head that says things, and we believe it without questioning whatsoever.”
“No matter what you do, humans will make it a cult. And by humans I mean me.”
“I will never be able to see the water that I swim in.”
Transcript
I want to bring people to their own wisdom and I don’t want to bring people to my wisdom or somebody else’s wisdom or group wisdom welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson we’re talking about the vow and Cults and some of the people coming back into AOA from from having done ESF and other other kinds of work and there’s like a tongue-in-cheek thing that sometimes people joke about like oh I’m back in the culture this is a culture this is not a cult or a question for you that somebody asked that was tongue-in-cheek was like What if you just stopped resisting that you’re a cult leader it’s funny like as soon as you say this and I know that it’s being recorded I become self-conscious and I become and I’m like I don’t even want to put that thought in anybody’s mind and I don’t know if it’s a semantic thing if like what other people use the word cult it means one thing and in my mind cult means another thing like I don’t know if it’s even generational but to me the essence of a cult is where you’re handing over your power to somebody else which is the antithesis of the work that I want to do in the world by the way I I don’t think that all cults are bad and I actually think that there are things that are Cults that we don’t call Cults like I mean I’ve definitely been in companies that have a very kind of cult-like thing where it’s like very hard to leave and it’s it’s there’s only one way of thinking and descent is is not appreciated and so I’ve definitely seen it and in places where people don’t like political systems of like some deep cult-like behaviors but it’s such an antithesis of what I want to be doing in the world that I’m just like I just don’t want an association with it which is there’s something in it for me in that yeah for sure there’s there it brings me back to something that you said once about like when we did our one-on-one session that was recorded there was a thing that you said where I was feeling a lot of tension you were like well tension if you took all the tension out of a cell it would die attention is part of the system and I’m seeing this here like in in any group there is there’s like a desire within the people of the group to start to surrender to the group be like please just solve my problems meet all my needs make my decisions uh make make life easy for me and heal me change me especially in personal development type groups uh there’s there’s that particular Force that’s like kind of driving towards group cohesion and towards group healing and as it does that there’s some some levels of like critique and critical thinking or personal wants and needs can start to slowly fall to the Wayside and so then there’s this other opposing Force which is I think the one that you’re living in a lot whenever somebody brings up aha this is a cult and you’re like oh I don’t even want to use that word um which is like no no no we want everybody to have their own autonomy we want everybody to have their needs met and not sacrifice a large portion of their needs so that the group can as a whole get like a small sliver of needs met and then completely be unhealthy and whatever in other ways right um so yeah there’s this there’s a tension I also see that when groups subjugate themselves for the group there is no healing that happens like as people in a group subjugate their needs for the it’s like it just creates trauma it doesn’t actually create healing and yeah I think there’s a tendency for it I think it’s very similar to the same tendency that two people get into a relationship and both of them start making sacrifices to their authenticity to make sure the other person is happy or stays happy you know walking on eggshells or saying the exact right thing or you know doing whatever they need to do so the other person doesn’t get upset with them or angry at them or it you get sad or whatever it is and I think it’s the same thing that happens and I think it’s really unhealthy in a relationship and I think it’s really unhealthy in a group at the same time there’s no judgment towards it in my system but there is an a deep dislike for that kind of like dislike as in I don’t like the taste of that yeah like just like I don’t know yeah I don’t like cooked fish yeah and I don’t want to eat cooked fish I’ll eat raw fish it’s like that there’s that to it I think the other thing that bothers me about the cult thing and I’d love to just to explore this because like I said I know there’s something in this for me is that what I notice is that when people get involved in these programs they have a way of interacting with each other which is deeply fulfilling people come and say I really miss doing the work I really miss the groups you know people who do this work together stay friends for now five six years and they get to know each other in the community builds and there’s nobody telling them what to do no leadership in it they’re just enjoy it and it feels to me that like to say this is like cult Behavior it diminishes it’s saying that like we can’t be this way naturally we can’t just be happy naturally we can’t just be deep and intimate naturally it’s oh it’s only okay because we’re in this cult there so there’s there’s something about that tongue-in-cheekness which I think dismisses the idea that this can be your life this is my life right this is many people I know his life who’s never done this work there’s something in me that’s like hey hey don’t dismiss don’t nah like don’t like like oh that only could happen in Vegas no it can happen any goddamn place you want it to happen it’s like this is your life so there’s something in that that also kind of I get a little defended towards I’m like wait hey oh so there’s a there’s this idea that can happen when you when you find a group and a set of tools that brings you to a deeper place of self-acceptance and self-love and your life starts changing there’s a stage in that where you believe that these tools and these people are either required for it or just that you’re far more likely to get it if you’re with those people so it starts to create the sense that there’s a boundary between us and then everybody else who’s not on this page and that’s that that is the thing that just happens anywhere in any group a sports team you know fans of the Browns anything it’s like these are our people those are the other people you know like our religion is the ones that eat chicken the other religion is the ones that eat pork and so it starts to create this boundary and there’s something in the way that you relate to this which is well like even if we’re playing with the idea that this is a cult or not a cult or you know letting ourselves play with the idea of you know letting the concept of cult show up in our jokes so that we are at least self-referential and self-aware of the tendency that we might have to become insular um but that there’s also still this I’ve never hold on I’ve never thought about it that way I’ve never thought about it that way so what you’re basically saying like on some level the jokes are potentially the jokes are a way to it keeps it in Consciousness that like it creates an awareness of it so that it doesn’t get out of hand potentially yeah and that actually makes me really appreciate it in a different way I hadn’t thought about it that way yeah I think it also kind of puts a little bit of a framing around the kind of behavior that might occur if you if you show up like for for a group of us that moved to Hawaii recently and we moved to Hawaii and we have a particular way of relating with each other and they have these tools and some people would come and hang out with us and they would just see us doing things like differently and we would like go deep into emotions and with this particular techniques and like we actually had a couple people sort of be like are you guys a cult and so it’s like if we were just like defensive like no we’re not a cult like then that would be like sort of uh I don’t know maybe a red flag so what’s the answer what do you say I mean the answer is like well I don’t know like if if things got out of hand we could let ourselves accidentally devolve into a cult if we weren’t actually careful because it is easy to recognize that you know this group has something that I need and that I want that seems to be filling my needs more than I found other places and then I start getting attached to the group and then my fear my control mechanisms start coming in and then somebody might start trying to control a group and then people might sacrifice themselves for the group cohesion because the group is so important and it feels like you’re not going to get it elsewhere which goes back that thing where you were saying which is buying into the story that all of life can’t be of work right right right right and so there’s there’s a tendency that that could just happen if you’re not watching for it and so there’s I think there’s a way that being kind of self-aware of like well we have a different culture developing in this group of people than is the broad culture out there and that might mean others project called onto US and that might also mean that we accidentally start exhibiting those behaviors yeah what’s interesting to me here is that so I watched the The Vow thing and some of the tools that the values are similar to some of the tools that we use and so like I remember the immediate response I watched it with Tara my wife and our immediate response was just like mine more than hers as like I just don’t want to do this at all I don’t like give up the business like maybe I won’t even coach like I don’t want anything to do with this and I was having a hard time and I remember watching it I’m like well where does the cult began and where does it call end you know and I was like looking okay so then I started doing the research on the cult stuff and and the high control groups and then I started seeing it everywhere like and I remember this one scene in The Vow where the Dalai Lama is talking to Keith Ranieri and the Dalai Lama has a problem with the thing and everybody’s like oh this is a problem then he gets you know talked out of the fact that it’s a problem and he goes oh and then everybody goes ah and I’m like wow it’s like one cult talking to another cult yeah now obviously there’s huge differences between the two and and I really like what one has done in the world and I like some of what another has done in the world and some of it I dislike but I saw it in companies I saw it in political groups I just saw that that this Behavior kind of almost everywhere and and I remember after watching it there was kind of a this thing that happened to me is almost like a oh there’s just no way to do this that was kind of like a giving up or something there’s something in me that was just like no matter what you do humans will make it a cult like no matter and by humans I mean me I’m not I’m not excluding me from that um so I was just like well no matter what you do like this is what it devolves into because or evolves into but it because people like to have clear understanding of what’s going on they like to have rules they like to have hierarchy and so that was like that was the Arc of my Adventures watching that and somehow or another in there when I started to really research I remember I I like 25 things that let you know that you’re in a high control group or a cult and I was like oh we don’t do that we don’t do that we don’t do that we don’t do that we don’t do and all of a sudden I saw oh this there is a distinction and this is the difference and that’s the only thing that actually I think got me interested in doing the work again because it was so much like not wanting to I sometimes don’t see my own wisdom I see the group wisdom or someone else’s wisdom like it’s something that is impossible to completely let go of so it’s it’s it’s an interesting Journey for me and I wonder how much of the word is like charged I think about like the word narcissist the words narcissist and victim they were like they were bad words in my head like if you’re a victim that’s a like and or you’re a narcissist and then seen like oh no we’re all narcissists we’re all victims there’s no bad word here and I haven’t found the place where cult isn’t a bad word like in my world like there’s I don’t see the place where um giving up your will to a group is not a a bad thing the funny thing is the thing that hits me first is that giving up your will generally is a beautiful thing as a matter of fact I think that that level of surrender is like one of the most enormous gifts I’ve ever had in my life but it wasn’t to a guru and it wasn’t too uh a group of people and it wasn’t too uh and so I think about something Gareth who runs this thing conscious culting says is like what happens if you’re surrendering consciously with the full understanding that there’s imperfection on all sides of it even there I would say it’s far better to surrender to the ineffable than it is to a person well the the ineffable that’s one of those things that I could imagine somebody hearing can be like what the fuck does he even mean by that but I I I see something here that you’ve said before like surrender but like you this this way you have this feeling about this word surrender that it’s like well I don’t like the way people use it normally because it’s like what are you surrendering to and so I’m seeing maybe a distinction between surrendering to something outside of yourself that is not tapped into your wisdom and some surrendering to whatever is actually coming from within you and through you and so that that brings me into something that actually really relates this sort of unavoidable phenomenon of group cohesion into cult behavior that just exists in all humans even if you become part of the cult of personal development gurus who doesn’t want to be a cultist um which could be its own cult right yeah no way out no way out and so on on some level there’s this fundamental pattern in life to self-organize into structure structure becomes control becomes rigidity and that can occur on a group level but it can also occur on an intra-personal level inside us and that’s actually what a lot of this work is to recognize where in some sense we are a cult of one with our own beliefs and our own sub selves and like parts that are colluding in some cult-like way to be us against the world and the the work itself is to be swimming Upstream of and finding what’s underneath it and relaxing those constraints and finding and letting letting a broader intelligence come through right so that that’s just I heard so much joy in me right now hearing that like that I love that how you’ve turned shown that the cult is a projection of the internal cult and how our internal structure is very cult-like we have a guru that’s the voice in the head that says things and we believe it with a without questioning whatsoever I just love the whole thing so if I if I want to take the principle and say okay so if if my internal world is that of abuse then I look outside and I see the external world as abuse if my internal world is one of love then I look outside and I see that the external world is one of love like I see that how love Acts so the question I have for myself is if I am rejecting the cult externally if I’m rejecting the cult externally because I’m not sure if I’m entirely rejecting it but let’s just assume that I am or the charge to the word I’m definitely rejecting one of those things then I’m rejecting that in myself I’m rejecting so what does it mean to reject the cult in myself like because the fact is if there wasn’t that cohesion if there wasn’t like this is the world view that I hold then there’d be like a deeper level of collapse it would almost like feel like you lose your Center anyway hold on yeah which I mean every major transformation has been losing of the center or the fear of losing of a sinner so there’s some level that each of us is afraid of losing the center for a reason because we could just fully dissolve and yet dissolving is exactly the direction that is most healing for most of us to go yeah not all of us so the way I’d be thinking about is like I’m a cult of one and that’s okay there’s like a tremendous amount of Joy with that statement and there’s also like a a nervousness huh I’m a cult of one and that’s okay is it’s like somehow I Define myself incorrectly somehow I Define myself incorrectly as as someone who can almost entirely see through my own belief patterns so it’s like it’s almost like an acknowledgment and a okayness and a love of the fact that I can’t see through my own there are ways that I can’t maybe every way I can’t see through my own belief patterns I was like I’m sitting with that I want to see what that does to the I’m going to say it again yeah what turns in me is like it’s almost like there’s no group of people who don’t have a set of beliefs that they it’s like seeing the humanity of cult and it reminds me of this thing when I saw the whole The Vow when I saw it the first time or the only time I remember thinking to myself a couple things like wow they get so much good goodness out of this there’s so much goodness out of this and then the next thought was like why do you have to mess this up you know like why why did anybody and and then the other thing that I saw was like oh everybody is in a cult like the cult of materialism The Cult of you know the cult of Technology the cult like there’s there’s just major thought processes and and if you went out into society and said I’m gonna just give up all technology you would just the society would be like what the fuck and they would call you a cult and they wouldn’t see that they’re the cult as well and so yeah I think there’s a freedom that comes with this of saying that oh I’m a cult of one and that’s okay that I no matter how hard I try I will never ever be able to see I will never be able to see the water that I swim in a characteristic of the experience of being in a cult must be that there’s parts of you that are aware that you’re being controlled or that you’re allowing yourself to be controlled and those parts are being resisted and dissociated so I’m curious in you in this I’m a cult of one like you have this belief that I will never be aware or I don’t see through but what about the part of you that does see through whatever sliver of the structure you think you have oh that’s how I identify it’s the destruction of that identity that is I think that cult meaning that like I identify as somebody who can see through it it’s the death of that identity and I agree I mean I agree that all of us see through it and I also agree that all of us are ignorant there’s definitely just some stuff that we can’t like we don’t know what life would look like if we didn’t have eyes but we had different sensory organs like we are limited in our ability to understand by the nature of our organism if nothing else by the colors that we see but that that’s an extreme version there’s so yeah that’s it’s an interesting thing it’s just literally it’s like the death of the identity of yeah I can see through stuff and I can’t see through stuff that there are there are ways in which I am open-minded ways in which I’m not open-minded and that I can’t even see the ways that I’m closed-minded in some cases and I can see the ways I’m close-minded sometimes and I’m trying to ignore them yeah which is a necessary thing to do in order to weave our experience together into any cohesive story that can even have any consistent plot line at all there has to be information that’s lost and that is essentially some micro level of cult Behavior inside ourselves yeah okay so let me test it say give me a cult joke or something like that about this work being a cult and I wanna I wanna feel what happens in my system yeah so we’re getting a bunch of shirts made with your face on it and like we’re gonna save the world uh one Joe at the time oh so you got you got the double duty on me yeah even the saving the world part of it uh there’s more humor in it for sure I can laugh at it I couldn’t laugh so easily at it recently so that’s that’s a good sign yeah I had this idea though if we ever did have a center if if there was ever a place where everybody was coming together to do this work consistently that we would have a picture of a guru on the wall in like five or six places but every month it would change so we would just pick one of the people and like put them in the guru picture so and at least two of them would be cartoons or like some mythical animal yeah yeah awesome yeah that’s great all right thank you thank you thank you thank you for that that was really fun yeah enjoyed it thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com foreign