I’ve often wondered what was wrong with my mother. I was raised in a cult, so I know how they got me. She was 21 — certainly old enough to have a little skepticism, or to make lifelong decisions with a teensy bit of care.

One of the answers came, of all places, from Edgar Allan Poe.

When my daughter was doing a homeschool high school English class, she had to study Poe.

Poe is a master of the unreliable narrator. He writes from the perspective of a character so deep in delusion that the reader is left guessing which parts of the story happened and which were in his head. It’s fascinating to read.

It’s considerably less fun to live through a childhood narrated by one.

That was my mother.

The Stories

She was deep in magical thinking. The Two by Twos have some strange religious beliefs on their own, but my mom also believed in ghosts and spirits and psychic phenomena that was pretty dubious.

I want to say from the outset that I don’t discount that there may be more to the universe than what we can measure with our instruments. I believe firmly that tapping into our inner voice is how we connect with the divine, and I’ve seen how hard every high-control group works to shut that off. I believe we all have an inner knowing, and that it’s in our interest to be aware of it and to listen. If nothing else, it teaches us what is authentic to us.

However.

I do not believe that my grandmother’s ghost psychically attacked my mother and tried to take over her body, and that my nonverbal infant sister witnessed it and confirmed the whole thing.

I do not believe that Sasquatch had a nest on my mother’s property overlooking the Entiat River — that she found the spot under the tree where he had spent the winter, unbeknownst to anyone, and that at that very moment he was headed over the ridge and she heard the whoop that Sasquatches are known to make.

In that story, and in another one set thirty years earlier, she felt the “psychic sniff” of Sasquatch checking her out. Never saw him. Heard the tell-tale whoop.

I do not believe any of this.

I believe these stories were told to me by an unreliable narrator.

And if that’s unreliable — what else is?

What That Question Does to a Child

It’s like I grew up in Wonderland – full of odd, crazy, and also not that fun, unpredictable weirdness. I lived the psychology long before I had the words or the capacity to understand it.

In psychology, this is called epistemic trust. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Allison describe it as the capacity to accept information from another person as trustworthy, as generally true, and as relevant to yourself. A child learns how the world can be known through other people.

Children build it through caregivers who reliably and accurately reflect reality back to them. That’s the mundane, invisible work of parenting — this is a dog; that was thunder; it hurts, but you’re okay; this man is safe; that man is not.

When the caregiver is unreliable, the child develops what researchers call epistemic mistrust, or epistemic hypervigilance. This means you automatically suspect any incoming information, or you obsessively fact-check to know if what you’re told is true. When you grow up in Wonderland, with your own story narrated to you by the Queen of Hearts, this is a completely logical response.

However.

That response is expensive everywhere else.

It’s expensive because you cannot trust any reality narrated to you by another, and you’re not entirely sure what’s inside your head and what’s outside it. The ability to perceive reality is actually built through relationship, by an adult who confirms or corrects. A child handed Sasquatch on the ridge and a grandmother’s ghost as facts doesn’t learn to test reality against the world.

She learns that reality is whatever the narrator says it is. Off with his head. So the queen says.

Then She Turned It on Me

When I was about kindergarten age, she would pick me up, then pick my sister up, and say that we weighed the same on the scale but that I just felt so much heavier.

That was the beginning of her comments about my weight.

I’ve gone back and looked at the pictures from my early childhood: she was definitely an unreliable narrator. I was not an overweight child.

When my daughter was about six, mom commented that she was going to have a hard time learning cartwheels because she was so heavy in the buttocks region. By then I knew to dismiss her, and I pushed back. My daughter was not overweight. I had not been overweight. My mother was spinning a story in order to cause harm, and I was unwilling to paint white roses red to accommodate her.

Even so, it affected me because our sense of self comes first from our parents. Mine told me I was fat and lazy. That I was so smart I was weird. That I was oversensitive. That I couldn’t believe the evidence of my eyes and ears. It’s still hard for me to trust myself without checking another source.

That’s the thing about being raised by an unreliable narrator. You don’t just inherit wrong facts about Sasquatch. You inherit wrong facts about yourself, and those are much harder to check.

Looking for the One Right Way

My mother grew up Presbyterian. She tells the story that the Presbyterian church gave her one of those little bibles with the New Testament and Psalms. She liked to say that it was the worst mistake they ever made because she read it.

She was looking for the One True Way of God and became convinced that the Presbyterian church was not it. When she met my father, she asked him about his religion, and he answered, “I know what’s right, but I’m not willing for it.”

She was floored. She could not understand how anyone could know what was right and then not want it because all her life she had wanted to know what was right.

When he eventually decided to go back to Meetings, she went with him.

She said that she was looking for The One Right Way. If that’s what you’re looking for — then you’re looking for fundamentalism. They’re the only ones making that claim.

The rest of us say we believe this or think that and just allow that there might be others who have inner knowledge or wisdom. That worldview requires some humility.

My mom wanted so badly for someone to tell her what was true that she never checked the accuracy once she found him.

She wanted a reliable narrator.

She settled for confidence in an unproven claim.

A Terrible Way to Raise Children

My grandmother went to high school with a Two by Two girl.

Nobody liked that girl. She was made strange by the rules and the clothes and everything she wasn’t allowed to do. My grandmother didn’t especially like her either, but she was kind to her.

Years later, that girl grew up and named a daughter after my grandmother because she was the only person in that school who had ever been nice to her.

Whenever the Two by Twos came up, she would say to my mother: “Those people are Jesus’ Way. It’s a terrible way to raise children.”

She was raised with that statement on the Two by Twos.

And then at 21 she joined, married into it, and raised me in it.

She made me that girl in high school. Made to look different, act different. No television. No idea what anyone was referencing. I didn’t fit and I couldn’t.

What I got were lectures about my personality defects. Why I had social problems. What was wrong with me.

Not one word, ever, about being raised in the “terrible way to raise children.”

Sasquatch was something she believed. This she had been told, plainly, by her own mother, many years before I was born. Then she chose that very religion — and when I paid the price for that choice, she told me it was a flaw in my character.

The Reliable Narrator

My best friend of thirty years, whenever I’d come back with some horrible thing my mother had said, would answer the same way every time.

“Well, Kathy’s mean.”

And that was that.

She gave me permission to use the word for the thing I was seeing. She let me see the pattern — that this was not, and had never been, about me.

She was being my reliable narrator.

The research has a name for what she was doing, too. Attachment researchers talk about an earned secure pathway. When you find that one dependable relationship, you can begin to repair what an early one broke. There is a path to wholeness, and I had stumbled upon it.

It was my friend, saying three accurate words, over and over, for three decades that made the difference. And I went to therapists, too. This kind of damage takes deep and sustained work to undo. Not magic. Work.

Learning That the Dead Stay Dead

Mom believed in psychic phenomena, and she always told me I came from a line of psychics and was one myself. I’ve never heard of this being common among Two by Twos. But this was how reality was related to me.

When I was in middle school, a girl at our very small rural high school died by suicide. I sat there at the funeral praying to bring her back, fully believing I could if I just had faith as a grain of mustard seed. That belief was a combination of my mother’s magical thinking and Two by Two preaching.

But the dead stay dead.

I had to learn that from experience, because the person in charge of raising me hadn’t told me that the laws of physics are laws all the time and we can’t bend them with our minds.

Around that same time, I developed bulimia because I believed I was far too fat for anyone to ever love me. I can look at the pictures of my 14-year-old self and have a much more reliable sense of my body size than I had then. It was a setup by a hypercritical parent. The unreliable narrator.

It has taken a lifetime to undo the negative relationship with my body.

The Rebuild

Around the time I left the Two by Twos, my sisters called to tell me they’d found a crystal stand at a market and that crystals buzz. I bought a book called *Crystal, Gem and Metal Magic* and started a journey into New Age spiritualism. I read Louise Hay on using affirmations to become young, beautiful, successful, thin, and happy. Magical thinking was familiar to me.

Reading them, it struck me that most of the goals were pretty superficial.

I dedicated myself to affirmations and crystals and New Age magic and found myself underwhelmed. I also met people who were clearly confused about where their psychic ability ended and their imagination began. I met a gal who had all kinds of information about the Zeta Reticuli, the gray aliens who abduct people, and how they’d issued an apology for it that was channeled through a person. I even saw a psychic who told me I was “meant to be” with the abusive guy I’d crossed the country to leave. I listened to predictions from very confident psychics, and then heard their reaffirmations when those predictions did not come to pass.

Someone close to me went further into it than I did. I watched a person I love lose the thread between what was happening and what she believed was happening, and there was nothing I could do from the outside.

Unreliable narration isn’t just something that’s done to you. It’s something that you can learn and pass on.

Inner knowing has to be grounded in reality. Otherwise it’s just imagination gone wild.

So I moved toward a rationalist perspective. I like things you can prove. I like being grounded in facts. My undergraduate degree is in History — research and sourcing and accuracy checks. I studied Women’s History, which is the discipline of asking the questions the male narrators never thought to ask. Later, in my career, I moved to math. Consistent. Provable. Reliable.

That progression looks like an intellectual preference. It isn’t. It’s what happens when the daughter of the unreliable narrator becomes hypervigilant, grows up, and gets a job. Alice grows up and needs to check the facts after a childhood in Wonderland.

2023

So in 2023, when the Dean Bruer scandal broke and the crisis line went online, I followed the facts.

I read the court cases. I found names I knew. I learned that church leadership in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand knew about the abuse of children in Two by Two homes, and that they moved male Workers to new places without warning anyone. Two by Two ministers live in the homes of the congregation. That means they were deliberately not informing parents that they had scheduled a known predator to live in their house, with their children.

For decades. I went back to therapy for support with this.

When my mom asked, I told her. I had names of people we knew. I had court cases with graphic details of what children had experienced because of decisions her clergy made. I tried to be gentle, because it is horrific news, and it was deeply disturbing to me.

She sat there, quiet, kind of shell-shocked, while I told her.

My daughter made eye contact with me from the kitchen. She was shocked I was having this conversation with my mom at all.

She Told a New Story

I heard my mother’s version of that conversation — when she told it to a judge.

She said my daughter had not been there. No witnesses.

She said I had come into her home screaming and yelling, accusing her of being at fault for the sexual violence I experienced as a child.

She said she was now afraid of me. She asked for a restraining order for the rest of her life, so that I would never be allowed to see her again.

I had gone no-contact five months earlier.

If she wanted no contact, she already had it. I had made no attempt to renew it. Not once.

So that wasn’t what she wanted.

Here is what I think happened in that living room.

Somewhere in that conversation, she felt the conviction of her own conscience. I had been describing the Elder at our meeting — how we used to stiffen our arms when we shook his hand, which was a big deal, because refusing outright wasn’t done. How we tried to keep him from pulling us into a hug. Groping. Or worse, kissing us on the mouth.

Her solution had been to coach us in the car afterward about how to politely decline an old man’s advances.

With partial success. She saw it happening. It continued to happen.

She knew.

She raised me in a church full of predators and unsafe men. They were in our living room and we were in theirs, and my childhood is full of experiences of fending off the inappropriate advances of old men.

You can’t not see that.

So she did what she had always done.

She told a new story.

She made one up and sat in a courtroom telling a judge how frightened she was of her daughter, who had attacked her Christian faith.

A woman who had narrated Sasquatch on the ridge and a ghost in the bedroom and two little girls who weighed the same but didn’t, narrating one more time — and this time the story was about me, and this time it was official, and this time a judge was writing it down.

I think the problem was never that she didn’t believe me.

I think the problem was that she did.

Because I was quiet, and upset, and I had facts. One after another. Events she knew about. Court cases she could look up. I peeled away the magical world she had built to keep herself from knowing what she knew. Alice – pulling the Queen of Hearts into the real world.

And it was more than she could stand. The Queen wanted my head off.

Reliable Narration

I spent a long time angry, and bargaining, and moving through the other phases of grief. I worked it out in therapy — somatic work, EMDR, CranioSacral — all of which rely on creativity and imagination and connecting to your inner voice.

I’ve done imaginative exercises in therapy that led immediately to a reduction in anxiety and helped me move through grief. So I don’t reject inner knowing in favor of “just the facts.”

I embrace the divine within me that is connected to all that is, and that helps me move toward greater mental health.

But there’s evidence alongside it. Fewer symptoms. Better health. Something I can check.

That’s the whole distinction. Not intuition versus reason. Intuition that answers to something, versus intuition that answers to nothing.

No, I don’t believe in Sasquatch.

I look for evidence when someone tells me a story. I need my relationships grounded in facts and logic as well as emotional experience.

And for myself — I give myself the gift of reliable narration.

A Question for You

Whose account of reality did you inherit? And what have you never gone back and checked?

*If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms.*

*If this resonated — share it with someone who grew up being told what was true by someone who didn’t know.*

*This piece mentions a death by suicide. If you’re struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24 hours a day.*

*National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline, 1-866-662-1235.*

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org

Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and anyone who ever angled toward the back of the stage.

August 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I am sitting in my house with three air filters running.

It’s August 3rd, and I’m breathing smoke from fires near Manson and Chelan.

Yesterday a friend of mine spent forty-five minutes tracking her daughter’s escape from a wildfire by text message.

The girl was at a volleyball tournament near Spokane. The messages started normal — how she was playing, who was winning. Then: there’s a lot of smoke on the hill near us. Then a phone call, her daughter running to her car, everyone evacuating the complex. Then the line went dead.

Then: nobody is moving. The parking lot is gridlocked. The fire is five minutes away.

Then a FaceTime, and her mother could see the flames behind her.

Then silence, long enough to be terrifying, because the sirens were triggering her daughter’s PTSD from a previous accident.

Then: it jumped the river. It’s three minutes away. I can see it.

She got out. The fire reached the complex.

Her mother said afterward that the worst part was the helplessness — watching it happen through a phone screen from somewhere else, tracking a map, waiting for the next message.

Spokane is burning. Three fires, zero percent contained. More than 600 structures gone. Sixty thousand people evacuated. The mayor is calling it the worst disaster this region has faced.

I can smell it as I sit here in the living room — like being outside at a campfire, but way less fun. My chest hurts and I’m starting to get dizzy sitting down.

And I know — as sure as I smell the smoke — that I live in a community with people who will do anything to deny the actual causes.

The Final Command

My last article was about 1984, and it applies here too. Orwell explains, through the words of the state’s own enforcer, that the Party’s final and most essential command was that you reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

This is not the victim speaking. It’s the Party’s doctrine, stated out loud, without even the good sense to be ashamed of it. It’s not an accident. It’s not a byproduct. It is how authoritarianism works.

Everything else is downstream from this command. When a person cannot trust even their own perceptions, when they rely on you to curate reality itself and serve it to them, then you don’t need to censor.

You don’t need officials checking when you can get people to do the checking inside their own minds. That’s far more efficient and cost effective than outside controls.

Amathia

The Greeks called this amathia. It is the confident possession of false knowledge.

It’s not an absence of understanding — that would create a void that would seek to be filled. It is a wrong understanding, so completely believed that the person holds it fully and rejects any correction.

It is precisely because the slot is full that you cannot teach the amathês. There is simply no room.

Bonhoeffer Got There From a Prison Cell

Writing from a Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to nearly the same conclusion in 1943.

He said it was a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. You can expose malice. Resist it. Use it to motivate the other side. But we are defenseless when facts get dismissed as untrue — or, if they can’t be dismissed, get waved away as simply irrelevant.

Sound familiar? Bonhoeffer is writing about Nazis in 1943, and I think anyone who has lived through 2026 America will find it eerily familiar.

Bonhoeffer gave us an insight that’s particularly helpful to us right now: that this is a sociological defect and not an intellectual one.

Intellectual deficits make some kind of sense. But this is a movement that gathered power, where individuals surrendered their inner independence, stopped thinking for themselves, and morphed into slogans instead of functioning, reasoning adult humans.

You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. And if we’re going to do anything about it, we need to understand it. Fascism doesn’t create people who cannot think: it manufactures them. Through the propaganda and the us versus them and the loyalty to the cause, people surrender to the movement and become unteachable.

And that is why every one of these movements creates structural hostility toward anyone who could expose them, out-think them, or turn the tide they’re deliberately creating. They attack universities. Journalism. The courts. The civil service. Science. Even expertise itself. This is essential, because any person and any institution with that capacity can say, “you might be wrong, and here’s the fact-check.” Authoritarianism relies on unquestioning obedience, and that means incapacitating anyone who can question and then back it up with facts.

Authoritarians build their own schools and their own media.

It’s not enough to control the government — they want to control the mind. They want to control the ego that controls the mind. They want it to be impossible to think your way out, because you have been trained to think in ways that will always loop you back into the total certainty of the authoritarian.

I know what that’s like, because I spent years trying to think my way out of the cult that had done exactly that to me.

What My Lungs Know

I live in Washington state, where we still have reliable data. Washington documents increasing wildfire severity and cost in RCW 76.04.505. In the 1990s, an average of 86,000 acres burned here annually. In the 2000s, 189,000. In the five years before that statute passed, more than 488,000.

My daughter was born in 2002. That’s five and a half times higher in her lifetime. That’s insane.

I want to be clear that there are outliers, like 2022, which was the mildest season in a decade. But the trendline is what to watch. A mild year now is what a bad year used to be.

Here’s the comparison that stays with me. In September 1991, wildfires around Spokane burned 114 homes, and the region called it a catastrophe. People still talk about that year. This weekend, the Old Trails Fire alone destroyed 640 structures in about thirty-six hours.

I’ve had people tell me this is a forest management problem. That we need to log it, graze it, or watch it burn. But look around you. Are you surrounded by forests?

This is central Washington, and this biome is called shrub-steppe. It’s grass and sage. It’s not forest. Tell me how forest management changes the fires we have locally.

Here’s how it actually works in grassland. A wet spring grows a heavy crop of grass. Then extreme heat cures it to tinder, earlier every year. The window when this country is ready to burn used to open in August. Now it opens in June.

Dry grassland is the powder, and the climate is the match and the wind that spreads it.

This Is What Amathia Looks Like at Scale

I’m sitting here breathing smoke while the agency that fights these fires is being taken apart.

The Forest Service has lost roughly 5,800 employees since 2025 — 16% of its workforce in a single year, according to USDA’s own Inspector General. The current budget proposes cutting another 26%. Meanwhile, more than 3.3 million acres have burned nationally this year, roughly twice the ten-year pace.

And the people in charge believe what they’re doing. They believe that cutting a fire agency during a record fire year is efficiency.

You’ve got to ask: efficiency for whom? Less money for them to spend, at the cost of our homes and our health and our lives? Who is this for? Who benefits?

They believe the smoke in my house is weather. That the science is a scam and the scientists have been captured, and that somehow this is all a story someone made up in order to raise their taxes.

I want you to be crystal clear that these are not stupid people. Some of them may be extremely intelligent. My biological family is filled with high-IQ people who are deluded by a cult.

Amathia isn’t stupidity, and it isn’t a deficit. It’s a mind filled with propaganda so deep that it becomes a character condition. They don’t think they’re the villain, even while they enable the cruelty to continue.

I was once this person, and I know what it is to run this cognitive programming. When I wanted to leave and began feeling mixed feelings, I said, “God is not the author of confusion.” When I looked in the mirror at my pretty face with my new makeup, I saw someone who was going straight to hell. When I graduated college with nearly a 4.0 grade point average, I skipped the graduation ceremony, sent no invitations, and did no celebrating. Because I had left the One True Way of God, and there was no room in my heart for celebrating what is arguably a gigantic accomplishment.

Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

It works on a church. On a party. On a country. And even on a valley full of people whose homes are going to burn.

Which Obligates Me

If I’m going to write about people who won’t check, then I have to check.

While I was working on this piece, I came across a post about how the Spokane fires were tearing through communities that had voted down their own emergency services. That sounded plausible.

So I looked it up. Fire District 3 — where the Old Trails Fire destroyed 640 structures — passed its levy in 2023 with over 65% approval. Others were similar.

They didn’t vote down their emergency services. They approved them. The post going around about it was misinformation.

Even if it’s something I’m inclined to believe — especially then — I need to check. I need to be teachable. I need to care about what’s accurate more than I care about scoring a point.

The Counter-Move

When I was deeply in a cult, you couldn’t have argued me out of it. There is no argument that reaches amathia. Every fact will be perceived as an attack, as oppression, as persecution.

It’s really important to reach people before they get sucked into culty thinking, not after. And when you do, encourage them to reconnect with their own inner voice.

This can happen in many ways. It can be therapeutic, like asking whether something feels right to you. It can be any activity where you choose the way you want things to go and nothing you choose is wrong. That’s just connecting with your inner self.

It can be any kind of art. Or self-expression. Or personal choice.

It’s not about the argument. It’s about reinstating the witness — so that there’s someone in there who can speak up. Whenever the day comes that they’re ready.

Every high-control group shuts down the inner voice in order to control you. The antidote is always to reopen the connection. And it can happen in fun, in play, in any context that works for a person.

That’s how you get people to stop rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. You get them to reconnect with something they see. Anything. You get them to listen, and to say what they hear. Whatever it is.

For me, I believed my body and I went to the coast for three days. It’s August 8th now, and I’m back, and the air is clear enough that I was able to ride my bike today. I’m still here. I’m still fighting for my health and my world. Through accepting the evidence of my eyes and ears.

A Question for You

What has your body been telling you that you haven’t been listening to? Who benefits from you ignoring the communication from your body?

If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms.

If this resonated — share it with someone who’s been told that what they can see with their own eyes isn’t happening.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door
Little Mouse Journal
Little Bea and the Golden Key
Little Bea Journal

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth
Telling the Truth
FBI Tip Line

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation
Religious Trauma Institute

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities, and for anyone who has been told not to believe their own eyes.

August 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I grew up in a cult. And when I read 1984, I got it.

Orwell wrote about a dystopian society where people were surveilled, their thoughts were controlled by the Party — and through it all, they were supposed to love their oppressors.

That’s the combination: I oppress you, and I demand you adore me.

I saw a lot of adoration toward the Workers when I was a kid. They had special places at our conventions. Special food. We were supposed to look out for them and treat them as set apart. A hundred little ways the hierarchy was enforced — and every one of them dressed up as love.

The Surveillance Was Preached

Orwell needed telescreens. We didn’t.

We heard it in the gospel meetings: we were a light unto the world. We were an example. We were 100% on display, always, and others were watching. Before I did anything, I ran it through my head: is this something a professing girl would do?

I remember going to a play with a friend in college. At the end, everyone went up and danced on the stage after the final number. I went down with my friend — and then I angled myself toward the back of the stage. Just in case there were any Two by Twos in the audience. Hopefully they wouldn’t see me dance. Because dancing wasn’t something a professing girl would do. I was in college and creating some autonomy from the cult, but still going to Meetings. I chose to break the rule. But I broke it the way a surveilled person breaks a rule: aware of the cameras, angling for the blind spot.

There were no cameras. That’s the point. By then the watcher was installed in me.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote the definitive framework on thought reform, called this milieu control — the group controls what you see, hear, and read until the group’s eyes become your eyes. Orwell called it Big Brother. I called it being a light unto the world.

Same same.

Doublethink Has a Track A and a Track B

By college I was living a two-track life. Track A went to meetings and was the good professing girl. Track B had college friends and watched movies and television.

Orwell had a word for this — doublethink. Holding two contradictory realities and believing in both. Orwell describes this incredible scene where the government swaps its ally for its enemy in the middle of a rally. Even though everyone knew Country A was the ally when they walked in and Country B was the enemy – they claim that they have been sabotaged and pull down all the posters that claim Country A as the ally and Country B as the enemy. In live time, they make the switch, all believing that Country A is the enemy – and always has been. Country B has always been the ally.

I have often said that denial is when you both know and don’t know the same piece of information. Cognitive dissonance is when you know two things that can’t be true at once and you just flex the muscle of your mind to make that work.

Every survivor I know had their own Track B. And every one of us paid the toll of running two selves at once. Living a double life isn’t freedom. It’s the most exhausting form of captivity there is.

Thoughtcrime Was Real at Our House

In Orwell’s world, you were guilty when you thought the thing.

I remember being a teenager afraid to even think about sex, because thinking it was as bad as doing it. Professing girls didn’t have sex — not in body, not in mind. God saw everything, and the surveillance from God was total and constant. Every waking moment, I needed to exist internally as a wholly pure professing girl. I would lie in bed at night, convinced that God knew every thought that went through my head – and judged me for it.

Lifton called this the demand for purity: the world divides into absolutely pure and absolutely impure, and the impure includes your own thoughts. No court in history ever policed a jurisdiction like the inside of a teenager’s head. Ours did.

That’s the difference between a strict religion and a high-control group. A strict religion tells you what to do. A high-control group tells you what you’re allowed to think — and convinces you that someone is checking.

The End of 1984

The part that really sticks with me is the end of the book.

Winston has rebelled. He saw through the lies, wanted out, fought for it, lost. He’s been through the re-education. And in the final scene he sits in a café, believing all the way through his being that he loves Big Brother — while he waits for the bullet to enter his brain.

Many readers find that ending bleak beyond bearing. I found it familiar.

I had many moments like Winston’s. Moments when I was fully on Track A, perfect, believing completely in The Gospel. And those — those exact moments — were when I wanted my life to end. Because if I died right then, I’d go to a saved eternity. If I lived, there was always the fear: I could be perfect for years, make one wrong choice, fall away, and die at the moment my heart wasn’t pure. And then Hell. Forever.

The moments I most believed were the moments I most wanted to die.

Sit with that. The system’s greatest success — total belief — and its subject’s response is to hope for death while the believing lasts. That’s what loving Big Brother actually feels like from the inside. Orwell knew. The bullet isn’t the tragedy. The love is.

Those were the rules.

Why Make Long-Term Plans?

High-control groups are obsessed with death. We heard about it constantly — people die young, you never know when, keep your mind right because it could happen any moment. That’s how I lived. Ready to die at any moment.

So why make long-term plans?

If it’s not death – it’s Jesus coming back, and then everyone dies. I remember the first time I saw the sun come up, bright orange due to forest fires and smoke in the air. I didn’t know what it was. I thought Jesus was coming back right then. I stayed glued to the window, watching a break in the clouds, for his ethereal form to break through and descend to earth.

A person who might die tonight doesn’t build a career that threatens the group’s claim on her time. Doesn’t save money that would make leaving possible. Doesn’t invest in outside friendships, outside education, an outside future — because there is no future, there’s only readiness. The obsession with death isn’t a quirk of cult culture. It’s the fence.

Lifton called the endpoint the dispensing of existence: the group decides who really counts as alive, and life outside its terms isn’t life at all. Convince someone the outside is death and the future is forfeit, and you never have to lock a single door.

The Machinery Doesn’t Need a State

Orwell published 1984 in 1949 as a warning about the totalitarian state. But the machinery he described — the surveillance that moves inside you, the language that deletes the words for your own thoughts, the crime of thinking, the demand that you love what controls you — doesn’t need a state. It runs fine in a living room. A gospel meeting. A convention tent in a field in Washington.

I grew up in schools that told me I lived in the land of the free and that this country was based on individual rights and freedoms and that was why we were so much better than those Godless communists. And, at the same time, I was completely surveilled. Completely controlled. Not one moment of freedom in my youth in the land of the free. And I wasn’t even aware of it.

I grew up inside that book. It took me thirty years to walk out of it.

And here’s the one thing Orwell didn’t give Winston, the thing I want you to have if any of this sounded like your life: the ending isn’t fixed. The watcher can be uninstalled. The two tracks can become one true one. I’m proof, and I’m not the only one.

The Party told Winston what he could see, think, feel and believe.

Deconstruction is when we take all of that back, make our lives our own, heal the past.

And finally turn our attention toward building a future.

A Question for You

Where did the watcher get installed in you? And what’s one thing you still do only while angling for the blind spot — even though no one is watching anymore?

If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching. Truly no one.

If this resonated — share it with someone who still runs the rules through their head before they dance. They’ll know exactly what you mean.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org

Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and anyone who ever angled toward the back of the stage.

July 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

That’s what manipulation looks like when you are watching it in real time. It’s the normal emotional response, then that short pause where the mind recalculates, and then the script takes over. Once the script is in hand, the emotional response is cut off, as though it never existed in the first place. We’ve taken the blemish and papered over it and now we will pretend that it was never there.

This student was empathic. I had seen that many times before. But this moment was her shutting off that empathy as an automatically learned response. That moment has stayed with me.

This is a trained response

What we know from research is that people do not lose their ability to feel empathy, they just learn to shut it off in specific ways in response to specific situations. When this happens, a kid, or an adult, can learn not to feel empathy for specific groups of people – or animals. And they’ll consistently have that response whenever that group of people or animals is brought up. They’ll stay consistently empathic with this hole in the fabric that just stays there.

Dehumanizing language is a specific manipulation that brings about this response. It works like this: use dehumanizing words for a person or a group of people. Call them vermin or animal, cockroach, rat, monster, infestation, parasite or subhuman. Use these metaphors consistently whenever you refer to that particular group of people. Over time, the disgust people feel toward parasites or cockroaches transfers over to the people who are described that way.

This tactic has been around for a long time. The Nazis used a lot of dehumanizing language toward the Jewish population well before they started physical violence toward them. In Rwanda, similar language was applied to the Tutsis before the genocide there. Normal people will not support cruelty toward other humans, but normal people can become disgusted through this propaganda language to the extent that they then will support all kinds of ugliness, violence, and cruelty. It’s the disgust – get them to feel disgusted whenever they think about this group, and you can manipulate them into supporting violence. Disgust blocks empathy internally. And regimes intent on committing violence use this language to soften up the population in advance of the physical violence. Because it works.

Now, let’s consider the Grace City Pastor’s quote about the LGBTQ: “We wanted it to maintain its proper ick factor... demonic... the nadir of wickedness and depravity.” And, “I didn’t want my kids to know that like two women can pretend to be lovers. Like — no. That’s disgusting.” He even uses the word. Once you see it – it just cannot get more clear what he is doing. This is why I said at the panel on Monday that this language is the opening move in a genocide and that we should not discount the severity of it.

Right now, the Trump administration uses these kinds of phrases about immigrants. They describe immigrants “infesting” the country – which implies a swarm of insects and gets the expected emotional response from their listeners. The authoritarian regime follows a consistent game plan: mark a particular group as vermin or disease, deny them the human traits of thought and feeling, then justify eradicating or exterminating just as you would do with vermin or a disease.

Let’s be clear where this is heading. As I said on Monday – we need to take this seriously now because this leads to the kinds of violence we’ve seen repeated across history toward villainized minorities. We cannot let this stand.

I have experienced manipulation like this

I have written extensively about the Two by Twos, who abused children and whose clergy sexually abused kids across the continents for decades without consequence. Yet, this community is full of sincere, kind human beings – not monsters. Normal people can become like this, and I want that to be the warning here. The takeaway is not that you are different: the takeaway is that people can become this, including you. I didn’t grow up around monsters. I grew up around sincere, committed people who loved their church and were sure that no brother would commit such acts and went to great lengths to keep those beliefs despite all evidence.

Empathy gets turned into justification. Josh McPherson, lead pastor of Grace City Church, has said directly that empathy is dangerous and will “align you with hell.” He seems to believe this, so let’s take it at face value. He is encouraging people to become exactly as I described above – with their empathy shut off. That opens the door to justifying all kinds of atrocities.

When I was a child, my family said that I was oversensitive and that I cared too much. When they were verbally abusive, they called it humor. When I protested, they told me that I could, “dish it out, but I couldn’t take it.” That’s a good one – it redirected the blame right back to me when they were abusive and I spoke up. Whenever I saw the injustice and the unkindness, I was described as the problem. For whatever reason, I was just never able to fully train myself to shut off those feelings. Honestly, I think I shut them down partially and then went back and reclaimed my emotional health as an adult.

As I have reclaimed my emotional health, I have come to the conclusion that my empathy is a superpower – and I’ve spent 25 years building a business that succeeds because of it. Not in spite of it. I sit across from a child and naturally see things from their point of view and create learning strategies that I’ve never seen before because I feel the source of their confusion and seek to solve that for them. And it works.

I’ve built my professional life around seeing from the other perspective and creating solutions for problems. Of course, that spilled over into my political beliefs. I said to a friend recently: they always find a way to judge us for fighting injustice – because they don’t want us to do it.

I have seen this in every social justice movement that I can name. You know how it would go if politicians just blatantly said they don’t want women or immigrants to have equal rights. So that’s not how they do it. They take every good thing we do and find a way to turn us into the bad guys for seeking justice. Reframe the empathing responses, turn it into the problem, and then you can get those pesky social justice warriors to stop social justice-ing.

How Manipulation Works

What is interesting about this is its specificity: you don’t turn the empathetic person into a monster. You just mock sensitivity, call them too emotional or weak, and make fun of them. You get them to step back to defend themselves. You just get them to shut down that empathy in the exact way you want at the time you want it. That means the empathetic person still thinks of themselves as a good person. They can even give you a list of all the empathic things they do and have done and prove to you that they’re a good person. And they can sleep at night. Sure in the belief that they have done nothing wrong. And the wrong perpetuates.

Pre-Bunking and How to Use It

Once you know how the manipulation works, you can arm yourself against it. You can recognize it when you see it. You can point it out to others.

And the time to do this is BEFORE they have succumbed to it. It’s much harder to debunk than to prebunk – and that is why we need to be out ahead of this now and in every social justice movement we join. Pre-bunking needs to become our norm – anticipate that those invested in injustice will judge us, say it out loud, predict it.

Then, when it comes, you can call it out for what it is: manipulation.

Let’s get to pre-bunking and go forearmed into the next movement.

A question for you:

Is there a group of people you’ve noticed your own empathy go quiet around? Not because you’re a bad person — because manipulation like this is all over our culture and none of us are immune to it. What’s the canned phrase you reach for?

Resources for survivors of high-control religious communities:
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Recovering from Religion — recoveringfromreligion.org
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse Journal and the Little Bea Journal are private spaces to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching. Both available on Amazon and at purpledoorjourneys.com.

Series: Understanding What Happened to Us | July 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com | TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

TRIGGER WARNING

This article contains a firsthand account of violence against children, including a detailed description of a physical attack. It also contains discussion of the psychology of people who harm children. If you are a survivor of childhood abuse, please read only when you are in a safe and supported space. Resources are listed at the end of this article.

| Series: Understanding What Happened to Us

I am fifty-five years old. And I am still affected by the things I witnessed as a child.

That is exactly what this series is for. I know that, if these things still affect me – they affect other survivors as well. In hearing my stories, others can approach their own.

I often write about high-control religious communities and what they do to the people inside them. Usually we talk about the theology, the information control, the submission requirements. Today let’s talk about what happens in the rooms where the theology is enforced with a body and a weapon. This is a hard topic, and many of you may have experienced things like I’m describing here. Please be gentle with yourself and read this when you have the emotional support and bandwidth you need.

I was staying at a family’s home. I grew up Two by Two, so I had been spanked with a wooden spoon and a belt. I had witness other children being spanked. Adults put us across their laps and spanked us. That was the established pattern. These boys were about my age.

What I witnessed this day was different. The boys had not done what their mom had told them to do.

She went and got a metal arrow she kept for this purpose, went to their room, and began chasing them around the room. They ran. She swung the arrow and it connected — and when it did, you could see that it stung. I heard the concussion every time she connected. Every time. They screamed and cried and ran. But they couldn’t get away. There was no exit that worked. The chasing was part of it — she was terrorizing them at the same time as the physical attack. And she called it spanking.

When it was over, she walked out of the room. She made eye contact with me.

She was smiling. She was trying to hide it — you could see that she knew she shouldn’t be smiling, that it was the wrong expression for what had just happened. But she was smiling. She had liked it. And the eye contact felt like it placed me on her side. That feeling was extremely complicated for me because I didn’t want to be on her side, but I didn’t want to be on the other side getting hit and terrorized. And, somehow, in that eye connection, I felt responsible for what had just happened to my friends. Like it was now my fault for being on their mom’s side.

I was a child. I didn’t have language for what I had witnessed. I only knew that something had happened that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong — and that the wrong thing wasn’t just what she had done to her boys. It was also that look on her face walking out.

Over forty years later, I can describe those scenes in detail because they are seared in my memory. I can’t think of them without feeling the emotions of that moment.

What the Smile Was

Let’s talk about that smile.

Physical violence against someone you have power over produces a neurological event. The tension that preceded it — the anger, the frustration, the feeling of being out of control, whatever drove the person to pick up the weapon — discharges in the act of violence. What follows is a brief period of relief. Sometimes something close to euphoria. The body has released something it was holding, and it registers that release as good.

That’s what it was. She felt relieved.

There is also a power component. For someone who feels powerless in some dimension of their life — and in high-control religious communities, adult women often exist in a rigid hierarchy where they have very little power — exerting physical dominance over a child who cannot effectively resist produces, in some personality configurations, a genuine sense of control. A sense of being, briefly, the one who decides. The one who cannot be questioned. The one who cannot be stopped.

The chasing mattered. It wasn’t incidental. The terror and the physical attack were fused together deliberately, even if not consciously. The power was not just in the hitting. It was in the running. It was in the knowledge that there was nowhere to go. She was not simply punishing her children. She was demonstrating to them, and perhaps to herself, that she was absolute in this room.

And then she walked out smiling because she liked how it felt.

What I Know from Having Been There

We don’t like to think about this. In my experience of being around abuse — in a high-control religious community, in households where physical punishment was normalized and routine — the people who hurt others often enjoyed it.

The woman with the metal arrow was not in a rage she couldn’t control. She wasn’t past herself with anger. She was deliberate. She chased. She aimed. She watched what happened when the arrow connected. She heard the terror in her boys’ screams. And she walked out smiling.

She enjoyed it.

I know this is an uncomfortable thing to say. Our narratives about abuse tend to prefer the version where the abuser was out of control, didn’t know what they were doing, was themselves in pain, needed compassion and understanding. And sometimes those things are true. People who abuse were often abused themselves. Cycles are real. Trauma is real.

But the preference for that narrative — the version where the abuser couldn’t help it — serves the abuser more than it serves the survivor. It removes intention. It removes accountability. And for the child in the room who watched it happen, it asks them to hold a story that doesn’t match what they saw.

What I saw was enjoyment.

Enjoyment that she knew she needed to hide. Which means she also knew, on some level, that enjoying it was wrong. The hiding of the smile is important — it tells us that she was aware enough to know the response was inappropriate. She wasn’t absent from the moment. She was fully present in it, and she felt something she couldn’t quite suppress when it was over.

The research on people who commit violence against others documents this. Neurologically, physical dominance over someone who cannot resist can produce genuine reward responses — relief, satisfaction, a sense of power and control. For some people, in some configurations, causing fear and pain produces something that registers in the body as good. This is not speculation. It is documented.

And in communities where physical punishment is theologically endorsed, publicly modeled, and socially normalized, the inhibitions that might otherwise suppress this response are reduced. The enjoyment can develop or deepen because there is no social check on it. God approves. The community approves. The child deserved it. There is nothing to suppress.

I am telling you this because I think survivors deserve to have their perceptions validated.

If you were in a room where someone hurt you or hurt someone near you, and some part of you understood that the person doing it was not simply out of control — that they were getting something from it — you were not wrong. You saw something real. You knew it. You were right. You are not crazy to know what you know.

What you saw was real. You were right to know it. In the knowing is the beginning of healing.

What I Was, Watching

I was a child standing in that room. And I want to name something about what it is to be a witness to violence against other children, because this too is a part of the story that rarely gets told.

When children watch other children be punished — really punished, chased and hit and terrorized — there is a complicated emotional response. There is fear, because what is happening in front of you is frightening and your body registers it as a threat even when it isn’t aimed at you. There is relief, because it isn’t you. And that relief is not a small thing. In the nervous system of a child who has grown up inside a community where punishment is regular and public, the relief of not being the target is enormous. It discharges as something that can look like laughter, or stillness, or a strange and wrong-feeling calm.

That calm doesn’t mean you weren’t affected. I was affected. I am still affected. The image of those boys running and the look on her face when she walked out has lived in my body for five decades.

Witnessing harm is its own form of harm. The children in that room who were not being hit were also being trained. They were learning that this is what power looks like. That this is what adults do. That there is no appeal and no exit and no one is coming.

Why Communities Protect This

What happened in that room was not a secret. It happened with a witness present. It happened in a home that was embedded in a religious community. And that community — like most high-control communities — had no effective mechanism for naming it, stopping it, or protecting the children inside it.

This is not incidental. It is structural.

High-control religious communities are specifically organized to remove the tools a person would need to name harm and demand accountability. The theology of submission means that a mother’s authority over her children is essentially absolute. The theology of forgiveness means that any harm, once committed, must be released rather than addressed. The information control means that outside perspectives — including perspectives that would name what happened in that room as abuse — are preemptively discredited.

The smiling mother was protected by every layer of that system. Not because the community approved of what she did — I cannot know what anyone around her thought or knew. But because the system was specifically designed to make naming it nearly impossible.

I’m telling this story now – but I’ve never told it before. It did not occur to me to tell at the time, and I never told anyone the story later, either. The boys and I never discussed it – and we were close. They were some of my closest friends in the sect.

Children do not generally report abuse in high-control communities. Not because they don’t know something is wrong. They know. I knew. I simply had zero belief that anyone would do anything about it or respond in any kind of helpful way. It was more likely that I would get blamed for talking about it, and I had already learned not to talk about these things.

The community had already told me that my inner voice — the one saying something is wrong — is the flesh, the will, the enemy of God. And so I stayed quiet.

What Stays

I am fifty-five years old and I can still feel the quality of the air in that room.

This is what childhood trauma does. It doesn’t live in the mind as a story you remember. It lives in the body as a stored event that the nervous system keeps available — keeps accessible — in case it becomes relevant again. The body doesn’t know it’s fifty years later. The body knows that something dangerous happened in a room like this, and it wants to be ready.

For survivors of high-control communities, this kind of stored experience is not unusual. Many of us carry rooms we can still feel. Faces we can still see. The specific quality of fear in a particular place at a particular time that the nervous system has decided is too important to release.

Healing is, in part, the slow work of telling the nervous system: you are not in that room anymore. The danger that was real then is not present now. You can put it down.

That work takes time. It takes support. And it starts with being able to say clearly, without minimizing, without explaining away: what happened in that room was wrong. The boys running from their mother with a metal arrow were being harmed. What I saw on her face when she walked out was real. And it has haunted me because it was traumatizing. The body was right to hold it.

It was worth remembering. It still is.

A Question for You

Is there a room you can still feel — a moment of witnessed harm that your body has held for years? What would it mean to say, simply and without qualification: that was wrong, and I was right to be affected by it?

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

If you are in crisis or need immediate support:
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741

For survivors of childhood abuse:
RAINN — rainn.org | 1-800-656-4673
Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — 1-800-422-4453

For religious trauma recovery:
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org

Two by Two Survivor Resources:
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info

Series: Understanding What Happened to Us | June 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com | TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

I went through religious trauma before we had a name for it. Before there was a framework for understanding what leaving a high-control religion does to the person who leaves it.

I’ve been best friends with Amy since we were 20 and 22. I left the church at 24, so she knew me before, during, and after. One of the things that still surprises me is when she’s surprised. I was talking recently about the breakdown I had the summer before I left, and she said, “Meliesa, you never told me that.” I’ve heard some version of that so many times over the decades.

All I told her at the time was that I couldn’t stop crying and I didn’t know why. Now I can give her the events that led up to it, connect the threads, show her the trend lines. But I didn’t know it myself at the time. I didn’t have the language or the framework — and even if someone had tried to show me, the Two by Two’s information control had already taught me not to trust any outside source. No outside therapist or clergy could understand us, because we were the exception.

Except all the high-control groups are the exception.

They’re all the only one. They all just happen to be the one true way of God.

What I know now is that leaving a high-control religion leaves people traumatized, and that it can take decades to recover. When I was experiencing it, all I knew was that I couldn’t stand to be alone. I’d come home, look around my place, and go anywhere just to be with someone — anyone — because the solitude felt unbearable.

I made choices that were deeply incongruent with who I was, who I’d been, and how I’d navigated the world until that point. Drugs. Alcohol. Relationships that made no sense. All of it. Some of my friendships didn’t survive it. Looking back, those people loved me — they didn’t want to see me hurt myself. But I received their concern as judgment rather than love.

File that away if you’re supporting someone coming out of a high-control community: make sure they know you’re coming from love. They may need to hear it said plainly, because they’ve been trained to expect punishment when they deviate, not compassion.

Amy survived it because she just loved me. However I showed up — in dresses with long hair and no makeup, or with a new haircut and modern clothes and a gin & tonic — she loved me. That’s what love actually works like.

When I left, my critical thinking was impaired. The church had taught me what to think and had controlled every aspect of my life. When I left, I had nothing but my own judgment to rely on — but I’d been taught for years that my own judgment was not to be trusted. That gap between having nothing to fall back on and not trusting the one thing I had left is, I believe, what drove a lot of those choices.

I’ve been told many times that my standards for myself are impossibly strict — that I experience intense frustration and self-blame when I can’t live up to them. Perfectionism, they call it. In a high-control religious context, perfectionism makes a terrible kind of sense: you were raised to believe that falling short of the standard had eternal consequences. The community enforced that belief from the time you were old enough to understand what it meant. Of course it didn’t disappear when you walked out the door.

I spent years in extreme stress, hypervigilance, and fear. I couldn’t walk outside without a low-level terror of being attacked. I had recurring nightmares that I was in an elevator when the floor dropped out. I started my business and raised my daughter in the middle of my own anxiety and hypervigilance, and I see the effects of that to this day. I tried to be the perfect mother and the perfect business owner, and I failed at that impossible standard the way everyone does — because no one can do it. And my internal monologue, trained for years to demand perfection, never let me forget it. I have a verbal tick that still goes off when this internal monologue starts up. My daughter recognizes it and asks me if I mean what I just said under my breath or if I’m having anxiety.

I went through periods of depression — from light to profound. Someone who loved me once said that when I went into one of those states, it could be months before I returned. I would simply drop out of contact with everyone I cared about.

That’s another symptom of religious trauma: estrangement and isolation. It’s the relationships with the people closest to us that have often damaged us the most, so relationships feel unsafe. People feel unsafe. The only safety is in closing the door and getting away from everyone — even the ones we love.

And then there’s the constant experience of not fitting in.

I grew up in the United States, but I have more in common with ex-Two by Twos in Australia and Ireland than I do with the people I grew up around. Being in the world outside the community is constant code-switching, and it feels inauthentic and uncomfortable in ways that are hard to explain.

I remember walking with Amy into a friend’s house and looking in the window. It was just young people enjoying an evening – but I looked in there and felt the absolute certainty that I did not fit in – could not fit in – and I shut down. Who knows if I could have had a good time. I was so prepared to be disliked that my demeanor went from me to shut down and I could not connect with anyone. There were so many times that I didn’t know the music or the TV show or the reference when in a social setting that I sabotaged myself in advance. I’ve had so many encounters like that — reaching for a cultural touchstone that everyone else shares and finding nothing there. The community groomed me so thoroughly that I wouldn’t fit in outside it. That was the plan.

Now I know that there isn’t a part of my life — financial, social, health, career, relationships — that hasn’t been shaped by having grown up in a cult. Not in a good way. I’ve been navigating the negative effects of my Two by Two upbringing while raising children, building a learning center, and being married. Doing all of it from inside a body and a nervous system that were formed in an environment of control, fear, and information suppression.

I was just talking to my therapist about where I am in the process. I’ve built a life where I have emotional safety in my relationships. I have many things in place to create safety. And yet my nervous system hasn’t quite received the message. That’s the work now — learning to let myself sink into the safety of the life I’ve actually built, and into the beauty in the world around me.

So today I’m going for a bike ride. I ride because I can — I can’t walk very far without pain, but I can ride. I have an e-bike because, with my chronic pain, I need that level of support. It’s not perfect.

But it’s a life. And I’m learning to enjoy it.

Because after everything I’ve been through — I deserve that.

What Religious Trauma Can Look Like

If any of this resonates with your experience, you may be dealing with religious trauma syndrome — a recognized pattern of harm that emerges from sustained exposure to authoritarian, high-control religious environments. It can affect every dimension of life.

In thinking and decision-making: Difficulty trusting your own judgment after years of being told it was unreliable. Black-and-white thinking that makes nuance feel dangerous. Perfectionism and intense self-blame when you fall short of standards that were never realistic to begin with.

In emotional life: Persistent shame and guilt that feel intrinsic rather than situational. Hypervigilance and anxiety that don’t match the actual threat level of your current environment. Depression and grief for the community and identity you lost, even when leaving was the right choice.

In relationships and social life: Isolation — withdrawing from people because relationships have been the source of so much pain. The experience of being a stranger in your own culture, missing the shared references and memories that bind other people together. Complicated feelings about physical intimacy, rooted in shaming messages that don’t disappear when you leave.

You are not alone. These responses are not character flaws. They are the predictable aftermath of a specific kind of harm — and naming them is the beginning of healing from them.

A Question for You

Was there a moment after leaving — or while still inside — when you realized your responses weren’t what you expected of yourself? When you couldn’t explain what was happening to you?

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

For survivors of Two by Two specifically:
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Crisis line: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

For religious trauma recovery broadly:
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com
The BITE Model — freedomofmind.com (Steven Hassan’s framework for understanding high-control groups)
Tears of Eden — tearsofeden.org (survivor-centered community and resources)

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and for anyone trying to understand what happened to someone they love.

Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com | TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

I just found out I have F3 liver fibrosis. Bridging fibrosis. That’s one stage from cirrhosis. A cirrhosis diagnosis comes with a life expectancy of 5 - 15 years.

It’s not because I drink It’s non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. I also have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. I have C-PTSD. I have ADHD. I am probably autistic, which nobody identified for 55 years because I learned to mask so completely that even I couldn’t always see it. I have soft tissue pain all the way up and down the non-dominant side of my body that has not resolved in years of physical therapy.

I grew up in a high-control religious cult. I left in my mid-twenties. I have spent the thirty years since then building a life — a business, books, advocacy work, a civic organization, a platform — on the foundation of one core belief: that the inner voice they told me was dangerous was actually the one telling the truth.

My body has been keeping score the whole time.

What the research says about what was done to me.

In the late 1990s, researchers at the CDC and Kaiser Permanente conducted what became one of the most significant public health studies of the 20th century. They called it the Adverse Childhood Experiences study — the ACE study. What they found was this: childhood trauma, measured across ten specific categories, predicts adult disease with statistical precision. Not as a soft correlation. As a dose-response relationship. The higher your ACE score, the higher your measurable risk of heart disease, liver disease, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, cancer, depression, addiction, and early death.

The mechanisms are documented. Chronic stress — sustained, inescapable, beginning in childhood — dysregulates the body’s stress response system. Cortisol stays elevated. Inflammation becomes systemic. The immune system starts attacking the body’s own tissue. Metabolic function degrades. Over decades, these physiological changes accumulate in organs. They show up on scans. They show up in bloodwork. They show up in diagnoses like mine.

Growing up in a high-control religious community is a sustained adverse childhood experience. Not metaphorically. Physiologically.

When a child is taught that her inner voice is the enemy of God — that her instincts, her desires, her doubts, her questions are spiritually dangerous — she learns to suppress them. That suppression is not a spiritual achievement. It is a chronic physiological stressor. The body is designed to respond to threat by fighting or fleeing. When neither is permitted — when the threat is the community itself, the family, the only world the child knows — the body stays in activation. For years. For decades.

That is what happened to me. Research on adverse childhood experiences documents this pathway precisely: sustained childhood trauma dysregulates the body’s stress response system, producing chronic cortisol elevation that drives systemic inflammation. That inflammation triggers autoimmune responses — in my case, Hashimoto’s, my immune system attacking my own thyroid. The cortisol dysregulation drives insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. And metabolic syndrome, over decades, produces fatty liver disease and fibrosis — regardless of diet, regardless of alcohol consumption, regardless of how hard you work to take care of yourself in the years after you got out. The source of my disease cocktail is not lifestyle. It is what was done to my nervous system before I was old enough to leave.

And it is what happens to children in high-control religious communities at statistically significant rates.

This is why I have pointed people to the work of Rev. Christie Love, who is compiling the statistics on the long-term effects of religious trauma. You can find her on Substack at revchristielove.substack.com. If you haven’t answered her questionnaire, please do. We need to compile the data so we can make changes based on it. Survivors of religious trauma show elevated rates of autoimmune disease, metabolic syndrome, depression, anxiety, and PTSD compared to the general population. Our bodies record what our theologies demanded of them. We see this in our community. Documenting the data will allow us to push for changes.

You will know it by its fruits.

Jesus said that. In Matthew 7. You will know them by their fruits. A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit.

A theology that teaches children their bodies are corrupt, their inner voices are dangerous, their authentic selves are the enemy of holiness — that theology has fruits. They are measurable. They show up in ACE scores and FibroScan results and autoimmune panels and the bodies of survivors who got out and spent decades trying to rebuild what was taken from them.

I am not saying every person who grew up religious is sick. I am saying that the specific mechanisms of high-control religious environments — the suppression of authentic self, the training of chronic fear and hypervigilance, the isolation from outside support, the requirement to deny one’s own inner experience — these are physiological stressors with physiological consequences, and the data on their effects is not soft.

If a theology produces chronic illness in its survivors at statistically significant rates, it is just not Godly. It is not persecution to say so. It is not an attack on faith to say so. It is reading the fruits.

What heals — and why that’s also not a coincidence.

Here is the other side of the research, and this is the part I want you to hold onto.

The things that measurably improve outcomes for survivors of childhood trauma are not complicated. Connection to authentic self. Creative expression. Meaningful work. Real community — chosen, not inherited. Agency over one’s own life and body. The restoration of the inner voice as a trusted source of information.

These are not soft wellness concepts. They are documented physiological interventions. Creative expression reduces cortisol and inflammatory markers in measurable ways. Authentic self-expression is associated with improved immune function. Meaningful work and genuine community produce measurable changes in stress hormones and inflammatory pathways.

The things that heal are precisely the things that high-control communities suppress.

That is not a coincidence. That is the fruit of two different trees, and anyone willing to look can see which one is which.

I left the community I was raised in. I built a learning center where children are taught to discover truth for themselves rather than accept it handed down. I wrote books about walking through the purple door and into a life that actually belongs to you. I write every week about the mechanisms of coercive control so that people can recognize them before they spend another decade inside them.

My liver still has F3 fibrosis. The body records what happened to it, and fifty-five years is a long time. Leaving doesn’t erase the record. But it stops the recording.

And there is real, documented evidence that F3 fibrosis can be halted and sometimes reversed with aggressive intervention. I am in motion. I have good medical care. I have a platform and work that matters and reasons to be here for a long time. I intend to use all of it.

Yet – at the same time – I am preparing for the worst. I am writing and building at a furious pace. I know that, underneath the drive, is the worry that I won’t be here long enough to complete it. I need to write my math methods thoroughly and completely because this (probably) autistic, pattern-recognizing brain of mine also pioneered new ways to teach math that are highly effective. I need to tell my story and write my books and healing journals. Maybe it’s just because the Two by Twos taught me to be obsessed with death and I’m going to beat this and have another 30 years to be a thorn in their side. But, if I don’t, I want to get as much done now while I can.

What I want you to do with this.

If you grew up in a high-control religious community — or any environment that required you to suppress your authentic self in order to belong — I want you to take your health seriously. Not as punishment. Not as more evidence that your body is the enemy. As information.

Get the bloodwork. Get the scans. Know your ACE score. Find out what your body has been recording, so you can make informed decisions about what comes next.

And then do the things that the research says actually help. Find the work that is genuinely yours. Say the true things out loud. Make something. Connect with people who know you without requiring you to perform. Listen to the voice they told you was dangerous. Find the tools to calm your nervous system. I spent decades in high alert. I’m paying for it now. We can’t afford to do that to our bodies.

My body was telling the truth then. It is telling the truth now. I was taught not to trust it, but it was always right.

You will know it by its fruits. The fruit of suppressing your authentic self over decades is measurable and it shows up in bodies. The fruit of reclaiming it is also measurable. Both trees are real. You get to choose which one you tend.

I am choosing. Every day. With F3 fibrosis and a full life and a lot of work still to do.

A question for you:

What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been trained not to hear? Not as an accusation — as an invitation. The body is always keeping score. It is worth finding out what it has written down.

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse Journal and the Little Bea Journal are private spaces to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching. Both available on Amazon and at purpledoorjourneys.com.

Resources:

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor
ACE Study: cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Recovering from Religion — recoveringfromreligion.org
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

In, “Not My Will but Thine,” I told you about the high.

The relief — sometimes the joy — that came when I finally surrendered my own will and gave the community what it wanted. The night I decided to give up the idea of ever marrying or having a relationship. The moments when I stopped fighting and let go. The feeling, in those moments, that I had done the right thing. That God approved. That peace had finally arrived.

I want to talk about what that actually was. Because the high was not a sign that you chose it freely. It was not evidence that you were where you were supposed to be. It was not God telling you that you had finally gotten it right. Even though the cult told you all those things were true. That’s just one more lie.

The truth is: it was your nervous system responding to the end of a war.

The War You Were Already Fighting

Inside a high-control community, you are in a constant, low-level conflict between your own inner voice and the community’s demands. You want something the community forbids. You feel something the theology says you shouldn’t feel. You sense something is wrong in a context where sensing something is wrong is itself a spiritual failure.

This conflict is exhausting in ways that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it. It is not like the ordinary stress of wanting something you can’t have. It is the stress of wanting something and simultaneously believing that the wanting itself is evidence of your spiritual failure. Every time your inner voice speaks, the theology answers it. You are never at rest.

When you finally surrender — when you give up the wanting and say, with full sincerity, not my will but thine — that conflict stops.

The relief the nervous system feels when chronic conflict ends is not subtle. It registers as something close to peace. Sometimes as joy. The body does not distinguish between the end of genuine spiritual struggle and the end of coerced psychological exhaustion. Both feel the same from the inside. Both produce the same neurological response.

That was the first component of the high. The ending of a war your body had been fighting for a very long time.

The Brain That Loves Certainty

Making decisions is metabolically expensive. Uncertainty is stressful in a measurable, physiological way. The brain, given the choice between a difficult decision and no decision, reliably prefers no decision — not because it is lazy, but because managing uncertainty costs real resources.

High-control communities offer total certainty in exchange for total obedience. You don’t have to decide what is right, what is true, what you believe, or what your life should look like. All of that has been decided. The elders have the answers. The theology covers every case. Your only job is to submit.

When you fight against this — when you maintain your own will, your own discernment, your own sense of what is right — you are carrying the full cognitive burden of making your own decisions inside a system that is actively working to convince you that your decision-making is spiritually dangerous. That is an enormous weight.

When you surrender it, the weight lifts. The brain rewards this relief with genuine neurochemical satisfaction — the same response it gives when any difficult, unresolved tension finally resolves. It doesn’t know that you surrendered to coercion rather than arriving at truth. It only knows that the exhausting work of maintaining uncertainty against pressure has ended.

This is the second component of the high. Not peace. The absence of exhaustion. The brain could not tell the difference.

What the Community Gave Back

When you surrendered your will, the community noticed.

The warmth that had been withheld — or threatened — returned. The approval, the belonging, the affirmation that you were right with God and right with the people around you. Someone said something kind about your spirit. The gathering felt warmer. You were included rather than observed.

This is not a small thing. Human beings are social animals for whom belonging is not optional. The threat of exclusion is a genuine threat, physiologically indistinguishable from other threats to survival. Being welcomed back from the edge of that exclusion — even partially, even temporarily — triggers real responses: oxytocin, the neurochemical of bonding and trust. Dopamine, associated with reward and motivation. The warmth of belonging is not a metaphor. It is a measurable event in the body.

The community gave this back to you when you submitted. And the timing was just right. Submission was followed by warmth. Resistance was followed by coldness. The pattern was consistent enough to become conditioning. And you learned, below the level of conscious thought, that surrendering your will was followed by feeling good.

This is the third component of the high. The restoration of belonging — and the body’s genuine, biochemical response to it.

The Manufactured Spiritual Experience

There is a fourth component, and it is the hardest to talk about — because it requires naming something that felt the most real of all.

High-control communities are very good at producing what are sometimes called spiritual highs: altered states of consciousness that feel like genuine encounters with the divine. The conditions for producing these states are well understood: communal singing, repetitive language and movement, emotional intensity, shared belief, the sense of something larger than oneself. These conditions reliably produce elevated neurochemicals. The experience feels transcendent because something is genuinely happening in the body — the same something that happens in meditation, in moments of awe, in certain forms of prayer.

The community frames the moment of surrender as the moment when this transcendence arrives. You gave up your will — and now you feel the peace of God. You submitted — and now you feel the presence of something holy. The experience validates the theology. The theology provided the framework. The framework demanded the submission. The submission produced the experience.

It is a closed loop. And the experience at its center is neurologically real.

This is the fourth component of the high: a genuine altered state, produced by real conditions, attributed entirely to submission.

Why the Community Needed You to Feel It

None of this is accidental.

A community that has taught you to suppress your own protective instincts needs the suppression to feel good. If surrender only ever felt like loss — if giving up your will only ever produced grief, confusion, resentment — people would leave. The high is what makes the suppression sustainable. It is what convinces you, each time, that you made the right choice.

The communities that most insistently teach “not my will but thine” are the communities that most need their members not to trust their own inner voice. The high is not a gift. It is maintenance. It keeps the system running by making submission neurologically rewarding.

Every time you felt that high, you were being trained. Not consciously. Not cruelly, necessarily — many of the people around you believed in what they were doing. But the training was real, and the effect was real: surrender was associated with reward, often and consistently enough that the association became deeply embedded.

This is what makes leaving so hard. You are not only leaving a community. You are leaving behind a reliable source of neurological reward — one that the community controls, and one it will withhold the moment you begin to question. Leaving means choosing uncertainty, loss, and the full burden of your own discernment over a system that had been, at least chemically, making you feel good.

What This Means for Recovery

If you felt the high — if surrender sometimes felt like peace, like joy, like God’s approval — that does not mean you chose it freely. It does not mean you were in the right place. It does not mean you can’t trust your memory of what happened.

It means the system was working as designed.

Recovery from this specific form of harm involves more than healing the wounds. It involves recognizing that your nervous system was conditioned — that you were trained, through consistent reward and deprivation, to associate your own suppression with wellbeing. That conditioning doesn’t end when you leave. It comes with you. It shows up in the way you respond to conflict, to authority, to the moment when someone expresses disapproval.

Part of recovery is grieving what the high was. Not because it wasn’t real — it was — but because it was manufactured, and it cost you something genuine: the chance to experience peace that actually came from safety rather than from surrender to coercion.

And part of recovery is learning to build a different relationship with your nervous system. Learning that the signals your body sends you are information rather than spiritual failure. Learning that the discomfort of maintaining your own will — the difficulty of trusting yourself in the face of pressure — is something your system can be trained to tolerate, and eventually to prefer.

The high told you that surrender was the right thing. Your inner voice — the one the theology taught you to suppress — was telling you something different the whole time.

It was right.

A Question for You

Can you identify a moment when surrendering your will produced something that felt like relief, peace, or joy? Now that you understand something about where that feeling came from — what do you make of it?

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Two by Two Survivor Resources:
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources:
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

Books from Purple Door Journeys:
Little Mouse and the Purple Door | Little Mouse Journal | Little Bea and the Golden Key | Little Bea Journal
All available on Amazon — links at purpledoorjourneys.com

Part 2 of Not My Will but Thine | Series: Understanding What Happened to Us | June 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com | TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

I heard it hundreds of times growing up.

I stood up in meetings and, with tears in my eyes, pledged, “not my will but Thine.” I sang the hymn whose chorus was these exact words. For me, this was often my struggle with my belief that I was called to The Work. When you go in The Work, you give away everything, pledge your life to the church, and submit to go where they tell you for the rest of your life. You’ll never marry or have a career or a home. It’s a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and I was just 14 when I was told by an oversweer that God was calling me, specifically me, for this life.

I heard those words in testimony. In sermon. In the quiet correction of a leader whose voice never raised but whose meaning was never unclear. In the way adults talked about the people who had left — their will had gotten in the way. They had chosen themselves over God. They had failed the most fundamental spiritual test.

Not my will but thine.

I watched a documentary about Gloriavale recently — a high-control Christian community in New Zealand where matching blue dresses and farm life create the wholesome aesthetic while something very different happens behind closed doors. There was a sermon in the documentary on exactly this theme. The surrender of self. The danger of personal will. The spiritual imperative to submit your desires, your instincts, your inner voice to the will of God. Let’s be clear that the “will of God” is always and only interpreted by church leadership.

I’ve never been to Gloriavale, but this could have been a scene from my own youth.

Today, I want to talk about what that teaching actually does to a person. Because it is one of the most effective tools of thought suppression I have ever encountered. Just like it’s supposed to be.

What “Your Will” Actually Means Inside These Communities

On the surface, “not my will but thine” sounds like humility. Surrender to something larger than yourself. The releasing of ego in service of the divine. In certain spiritual contexts, practiced freely and without coercion, something like this could be meaningful.

But inside a high-control religious community, the phrase means something very specific. And it is taught with that specific meaning from the time children are old enough to understand language.

“Your will” means your inner voice. Your instincts. Your gut sense that something is wrong. Your desire to leave. Your need to protect yourself. Your feeling that what is being asked of you should not be asked. Your reading of your own experience.

All of it — every signal your body and mind sends you about your own safety and wellbeing — is categorized as “your will.” And your will is the enemy. Your will is the flesh. Your will is what stands between you and God.

So when a leader does something that makes your skin crawl, and every cell in your body is saying run — the theology is already there waiting. That feeling is your will. Surrender it. Not my will but thine.

When the community asks you to stay silent about something that hurt you, and every instinct you have says this is wrong — that instinct is your will. Lay it down. Not my will but thine.

When you want to leave, and you know in your bones that leaving is the only way to survive — that knowing is your will. Crucify it. Not my will but thine.

This is not a side effect of the theology. This is what the theology is for.

The Most Elegant Suppression I Have Ever Seen

There’s something else that I know from the inside: there is a high associated with giving up your own will and forcing yourself to do what you don’t want to. I’ve felt it. It’s hard to explain. It happened whenever I gave up something big – something I wanted – but I chose to give it up for the church.

Human beings come equipped with a remarkable early warning system. It is built into the body, not the mind. It speaks through a tightening in the stomach, a crawling sensation on the skin, a sudden sense of wrongness that arrives before conscious thought. It has kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years. It is very good at its job.

The teaching of “not my will but thine” takes this early warning system and rewires it. Instead of receiving the signal as information — something is wrong, I need to act — the person who has been trained in this theology receives it as a spiritual problem to be overcome. The feeling itself is the failure. The right response is to suppress it and surrender.

By the time a child has heard this teaching for ten years, the rewiring is largely complete. The inner voice speaks. The theology answers automatically. The voice goes quiet. The person remains in the situation their body was trying to warn them about.

And the people around them — who have received the same training — affirm it. You’re having a hard time? Surrender your will. You don’t feel at peace? You’re holding onto something. Lay it down. Not my will but thine.

There is no appeal. The inner voice has already been categorized as the enemy. Any attempt to name what is happening is reframed as spiritual failure. The system is closed.

It Is Not a Collection of Bad Ideas. It Is a System.

I want to name something that has been building across this series of articles.

The theological tools of high-control communities are not random bad ideas that happen to cause harm. They are a system. And the system is specifically designed to remove every faculty a person would need to protect themselves.

The modesty doctrine removes bodily autonomy and pre-blames victims before harm occurs.

“Not my will but thine” removes the inner voice — the early warning system that would tell you something is wrong before you can name it.

The forgiveness requirement removes the right to name harm after it occurs and requires the survivor to release the perpetrator from accountability.

Shunning removes the social support system that would make leaving survivable.

Each piece works with the others. Together they create a person who cannot trust their own body, cannot name their own experience, cannot demand accountability, and cannot leave without losing everything.

That is not an accident. That is architecture.

The communities that teach “not my will but thine” most insistently are the communities that most need their members to override their own protective instincts. The sermon you see in the documentary is not spiritual guidance. It is maintenance. It is the community reinforcing the suppression that keeps the system running.

What Healing Sounds Like

For people who were raised on “not my will but thine,” healing requires something that feels profoundly counterintuitive at first.

It requires learning to trust the voice that was systematically trained to be the enemy.

Not recklessly. Not without discernment. But genuinely — learning to receive the inner voice as information again rather than as spiritual failure. Learning to sit with the feeling that something is wrong and ask what it is telling you rather than how quickly you can surrender it.

This takes time. The rewiring goes deep. Many survivors describe spending years in therapy specifically learning to trust their own perceptions — to believe that what they felt was real, that what happened to them was real, that their reading of their experience is a valid source of knowledge about their own life.

That process is the opposite of “not my will but thine.” It is the slow, patient recovery of the self that the theology required you to give away.

Your inner voice was not the enemy. It was the only part of you that was telling the truth the whole time.

Learning to hear it again is not a spiritual failure. It is the beginning of spiritual freedom.

A Question for You

Was there a moment when your inner voice said something was wrong — and you suppressed it because the theology told you to? What do you think it was trying to tell you?

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and for anyone who was taught that their own inner voice was the enemy.

June 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I got to thinking about my dad this week — the entitled way he acted — like we all existed to serve him. And I watched my mom play that game with him and then turn the same entitlement against us kids.

I grew up in a high-control religious community. And the first thing I learned, watching the men who led it, was that the rules were not for them.

The rules were for us. We were required to be humble, obedient, modest, and accountable. We confessed. We submitted. We accepted correction. And the men at the top — the ones who preached these virtues most loudly — exempted themselves from all of it. They went where they wanted. Did what they wanted. Hurt who they wanted. And when anyone tried to name what was happening, the theology was already waiting: to question the leadership was to question God. To demand accountability was pride. To see what you could see with your own eyes was a spiritual failure.

There is a word for people who believe the law — moral, legal, civic — simply does not apply to them. Scofflaw. I grew up in this. I was raised by it. And I’ve seen the dismissive way they flout authority and do their own thing. With their entitled attitude comes the sense of inevitability. They act like they own reality. Because that’s what they actually believe.

The Divine Mandate That Supersedes Everything

Psychologists who study cult leaders document a consistent pattern they call entitled exception-making. The leader operates at a level that transcends ordinary accountability. The rules exist for the community — they are, in fact, essential tools for managing the community — but the leader is exempt because the leader’s authority comes from a higher source.

This is not rationalization after the fact. It is a coherent worldview. When your authority is divine, human law is subordinate. When you speak for God, accountability to other people is, by definition, a lesser obligation than your obligation to the divine mandate you carry. And when consequences arrive — when someone tries to hold you accountable — you don’t experience it as justice. You experience it as persecution. You are being attacked by people who do not understand, or who are spiritually opposed to what God has called you to do.

The framework of victimhood is already built in. Every accountability attempt becomes evidence of the spiritual war you are fighting. Every legal consequence becomes proof that the system is corrupt and arrayed against righteousness.

This is not unique to cult leaders. It is the operating system of Christian nationalism.

What Christian Nationalism Actually Teaches

Christian nationalism — documented extensively by researchers including sociologists Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry, and Philip Gorski — is not simply Christianity in politics. Christians in politics is not new and is not inherently authoritarian. Christian nationalism is a specific ideology that holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, that it should be governed according to Christian law as interpreted by its leaders, and that the authority of that divine mandate supersedes the democratic processes, legal structures, and rights of people who fall outside its definition of belonging.

I grew up inside this darkness, and I know it from the inside: divine authority interpreted by leaders, descending through hierarchy, exempt from the accountability it demands of everyone else.

The research is consistent. People who score high on Christian nationalist ideology show a strong correlation with support for authoritarian leadership — leaders who claim a special mandate, who treat legal accountability as persecution, and who believe their role is to impose God’s order on a fallen society. The rules, in this framework, are for the people being governed. Not for the people doing the governing in God’s name.

This is the scofflaw made theological. It is the entitled exception-making of the cult leader elevated to a national political platform.

I’ve Seen This Before. Right Here.

Wenatchee is a mid-sized city in central Washington state, and it is my home. It is also a place where I can watch Christian nationalists organizing in real time.

Dominick Bonney has documented it painstakingly over the past year. Confluence Indivisible is circulating a list of candidates with Christian Nationalist connections so the voters know what they’re getting. It’s here. It’s growing. And we need to be aware now before we’re actively being governed by it in every facet of our lives from school board meetings to the sherriff’s office to city council chambers to our state legislators.

This is the slow, patient work of people who believe they have a divine mandate to reshape civic institutions according to their interpretation of God’s will. They believe the rules of democratic process apply to the people they’re governing, not to the authority they’re exercising. When they lose an election, it was stolen or corrupted. When a law constrains them, it is unjust. When accountability comes, it is persecution.

This should absolutely scare you.

The Scofflaw at the Top

A man who has faced 91 criminal indictments and experienced each of them as an attack on himself rather than a consequence of his behavior. Who has spent decades testing how much deference institutions will extend him and learned the answer is: more than you’d believe possible. Who stood at the White House and said that if Washington D.C. elected a mayor he didn’t approve of, he would take over the city — and when the mayor-elect responded that threatening home rule because you don’t like how people vote is an attack on democracy itself, he received it as insubordination.

This is the scofflaw made president. This is the entitled exception-making of the cult leader given the machinery of the federal government.

Researcher Steven Hassan, who developed the BITE Model for understanding high-control groups and later applied it to this political moment in his book The Cult of Trump, has documented the structural similarities at length. The claim that consequences are persecution. The belief that personal loyalty supersedes institutional rules. The sense of divine or special mandate. The community organized around the conviction that their leader is different — chosen, exceptional, above the ordinary rules — and that anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.

I am not making a partisan argument. I am making a structural one. I know what this looks like because I grew up inside a smaller version of it. And the smaller version did real, lasting, documented damage to thousands of victims.

What the Research Tells Us Happens Next

Communities organized around leaders who believe the rules don’t apply to them follow a consistent pattern. The accountability structures that could constrain the leader are gradually delegitimized — they are corrupt, they are biased, they are the enemy. The community is trained to see any external check on their leader as an attack on themselves. Loyalty to the leader is reframed as righteousness. Questioning the leader is reframed as betrayal.

Meanwhile, the rules are enforced with increasing rigor on everyone else. The people who are not chosen, not inside, not sufficiently aligned — they face the full weight of a system that exempts its leadership while doubling down on accountability for everyone beneath them.

I watched this happen in the community I grew up in. The elders preached humility and submission. The submission was ours. The humility was ours. The accountability was ours. And when people were harmed, the harm was explained away, the victims were blamed, and the leadership continued.

When this pattern operates at the scale of a nation rather than a religious community, the consequences are proportionally larger.

What We Do About It

I am a civic organizer. I am a cult survivor. I am a person who spent decades learning to recognize this pattern from the inside and learning what it takes to name it and resist it.

What the research tells us is that the mechanisms of high-control systems — including the scofflaw leadership pattern — require community support to function. They require the people around the leader to explain away what they can see, to defer past the point that deference is warranted, to believe that this leader’s special mandate exempts him from what they would hold anyone else accountable for.

When the community stops doing that, the mechanism breaks.

This is not hopeless. I have watched communities break free from high-control systems. I have watched people who had been trained for decades in submission and deference learn, slowly and painfully, to trust their own perceptions again. It is possible.

It requires, first, being willing to name what you can see. Not to explain it away. Not to find the innocent interpretation. To say: the rules were never for them. And that is not leadership. That is a con.

We are seeing the same pattern, in miniature, that I watch operating at every level of our civic life right now. I am not going to pretend I don’t recognize it.

I grew up inside it. I know exactly what it is.

A Question for You

Have you watched someone claim a divine or special mandate that exempted them from accountability they demanded of everyone else — in a religious community, in a workplace, in civic life? What did the people around them do when someone tried to name it?

Resources and Further Reading

On Christian Nationalism:
Taking America Back for God — Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry
The Flag and the Cross — Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry

On High-Control Groups:
The BITE Model — freedomofmind.com (Steven Hassan)
The Cult of Trump — Steven Hassan
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

For Survivors:
Little Mouse and the Purple Door | Little Mouse Journal | Little Bea and the Golden Key | Little Bea Journal
All available on Amazon — links at purpledoorjourneys.com

Two by Two Survivor Resources:
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info

Series: Understanding What Happened to Us | June 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com | TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

I grew up in a cult.

When you look at the pretty families with the well-behaved kids and the wholesome aesthetic, you might think that nothing bad could come of that. It’s family-oriented. It looks like a beautiful, simple life. Modest women. Orderly children. Men who talk about God.

Doesn’t seem like it fits with the sexual abuse of children and women?

That is exactly the point.

I have been watching the Gloriavale documentary. Gloriavale is a high-control Christian community in New Zealand — matching blue dresses, farm life, the whole aesthetic. Its founder was convicted of sexual offending in 1995 and continued to lead the community. Multiple members have since come forward with abuse allegations spanning decades.

The Two by Two — the group I grew up in — reported over 900 documented perpetrators to a crisis line in its first months of operation in 2023. The aesthetic: simple farm conventions, modest dress, no instruments, no ostentation. Just quiet, God-fearing people.

I want to say something that I have been building toward for a long time, and I want to say it as plainly as I can:

The modesty doctrine is not a spiritual framework that predators occasionally exploit. In high-control religious communities, it is frequently the predator’s primary tool — built deliberately, enforced systematically, and designed specifically to make abuse possible and survivors invisible.

This is not an accident. This is the con.

How the Con Works

Modesty theology does three things for a predator:

First, it controls access to women’s and children’s bodies by controlling the narrative about those bodies. In a community where women’s bodies are the source of male temptation and therefore the responsibility of women to manage, the theology has already established who is accountable when something goes wrong. It is never the man. It is always the body that he found attractive.

Second, it pre-blames the victim before the assault ever happens. The theological framework — immodesty leads to sin, sin leads to harm, harm is the natural consequence of immodesty — is already in place. When a survivor comes forward, the community doesn’t need to construct a defense for the perpetrator. The theology already built it. She was not modest enough. She invited it. She should have been more careful.

Third, it protects perpetrators through the forgiveness and reconciliation framework that modesty theology always travels with. The survivor is required to forgive. The perpetrator confesses, repents, and is restored to standing. The community moves on. The survivor is left alone with what happened to her and with the theological instruction that her continued pain is a spiritual failure.

A predator who understands this system — and many of them understand it very well — is not exploiting a spiritual framework that was designed for something else. He is operating a system that was designed, in part, for exactly this purpose.

The Aesthetic Is the Recruitment Tool

The wholesome aesthetic is a deliberate public relations strategy.

High-control communities that practice the most severe internal control — over bodies, over information, over the ability to leave — consistently present the most carefully curated public face. The farm. The matching dresses. The well-behaved children. The simple theology. The rejection of the gaudy, commercial, compromised outside world.

This face is crafted. It is maintained through community-wide enforcement of appearance standards that ensure every member who is visible to the public presents the right image. It recruits new members by appealing to the genuine human longing for simplicity, community, and meaning. And it provides cover — to outsiders, to authorities, and to members themselves — that makes the abuse that happens internally very difficult to see and even harder to report.

You fall for it because of the aesthetic. And the aesthetic was a carefully crafted plan.

I wrote a book called Little Mouse and the Purple Door. In the book, an Elder Mouse invites Little Mouse to his home under the pretense of needing help. He tells her he is old and weak and could never hurt her — at the same time that he attacks her. When she runs for help, the evidence is all over her. The merchants see the evidence of what was done to her and close their stalls. Elder Mouse is nowhere in the scene. He plays innocent. She is the one who looks wrong.

I wrote that scene from my life. That is exactly how it happened to me. And the modesty theology of the Two by Two is why the community could read that scene the way it did — seeing the tea on Little Mouse and drawing the obvious conclusion that she must have done something to deserve it.

The aesthetic of the wholesome community is what made it possible for the Elder to be the Elder in the first place. His modesty, his humility, his simple faith, his advancing years — all of it was the cover. All of it was the con.

This Is Consistent Across Groups

Gloriavale. The Two by Two. The FLDS. The Independent Fundamentalist Baptists. The Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Catholic Church. The Boy Scouts. Every institution that has produced systemic, protected, multi-generational sexual abuse of children has also produced an aesthetics of wholesomeness, an ideology of modesty, and a theology of forgiveness that protected perpetrators and silenced survivors.

This pattern is not a coincidence. It is not a failure of otherwise good systems. The people who built these systems, or who found them and rose to power within them, understood that this is the perfect cover for abuse.

I am not saying every person in a modest religious community is a predator or is complicit in abuse. I am saying that the modesty theology and the wholesome aesthetic create conditions that are extraordinarily favorable to predators — and that predators know this and exploit those conditions systematically. Some of these communities were founded by such a predator. All of them attract predators. They also raise a statistically significant number of predators.

We need to stop giving communities a pass based on how they look. The prettier the presentation, the more carefully we should look at what is happening inside.

What to Look For Instead

The aesthetic tells you nothing. Here is what actually tells you something.

What happens when someone reports abuse? Is there an external reporting mechanism — law enforcement, child protective services — or does the community handle it internally? Internal handling is the predator’s best friend.

What happens to the person who reports? Are they supported, believed, and protected? Or are they shunned, questioned, required to forgive, and eventually pushed out while the perpetrator remains?

Can people leave freely? Are there financial, social, or theological penalties for leaving? Is leaving framed as spiritual failure or apostasy? A community where leaving is costly is a community where predators can operate without fear of exposure.

Who holds the authority, and who holds them accountable? Is there external oversight? Are leaders answerable to anyone outside the community? A self-governing community with no external accountability is a predator’s ideal environment.

These questions have nothing to do with the dresses or the farm or the quiet theology or the well-behaved children. They are the questions that reveal whether the community is what it presents itself to be — or whether the presentation is the point.

Be skeptical. No church, no community, no institution deserves to be given a pass and the assumption that it is a safe place for children and women based on how it looks to the outside world.

The wholesome aesthetic is not evidence of safety. In the communities I have studied for the last several years, it has often been evidence of the opposite.

That. Is. The. Con.

A Question for You

Was there a moment when the aesthetic of your community stopped matching what you were seeing inside it? What was the something that didn’t fit?

If this article brought something up — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and for anyone who wants to understand how coercive systems hide in plain sight.

June 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I was having coffee with a friend recently and she was talking about her relationship with her mom. Like every single woman I know from ex-2x2 retreats, this woman is no contact with her mom. She is thinking of writing — and perhaps sending — a letter. It bothers her that her mom keeps saying they are past the abuse and need to move forward now.

Her story is not mine to tell. But I want to be clear: the abuse in this case is real and severe. It’s the kind of thing that haunts your nightmares, and it still upsets me when I think about what she’s shared. This is a mom who never defended her daughter — not when she was in the room where things happened, not later when charges were filed, and certainly not now. This is a mom who has never said she’s sorry. Never acknowledged that she failed to protect her child. Never tried to make it right.

This is a woman who goes to church every week. Her husband — a convicted felon — still has standing in that church.

And her daughter is being told to forgive.

In high-control religious communities, survivors of abuse are told — consistently, explicitly, and often immediately — that they need to forgive. Not someday. Now. As proof that they have a right spirit. As evidence that they are truly one of God’s people and not someone who has allowed bitterness to take root.

If a survivor is still in pain — still struggling, still not okay — the community calls it spiritual failure. A bad spirit. Not enough faith. The message is clear: if God had really healed you, you would have moved on by now. Your suffering is your own fault.

The community also has a very specific picture of what a good survivor looks like. She is devout. She places no blame on the church. She sees the person who hurt her as a wounded soul who needs compassion. She has no needs of her own.

Let’s talk about how this works, why it causes harm, and why the word healing — not forgiveness — is the word that actually serves survivors.

We Live in an Abuser-Aligned Culture

Our culture routinely holds victims to a higher standard of behavior than the people who harmed them. We examine the survivor’s response — did she forgive quickly enough, did she have the right attitude, is she still bitter, why is she still bringing this up — while the perpetrator’s actions get minimized, explained away, or ignored entirely.

The demand for forgiveness inside high-control religious communities is not unique to religion. It reflects what the broader culture already expects of survivors everywhere — in churches, in sports organizations, in families, in workplaces. When an institution closes ranks around an abuser and asks the survivor to demonstrate grace, it is not doing something theologically unusual. It is doing something our entire culture is set up to make easy.

The Two by Two simply adds religious language to a demand the culture was already making. Both are saying the same thing: stop being inconvenient. Stop making us look at what was done. Show us, publicly, that you have resolved this — so the rest of us don’t have to think about it anymore.

The Perfect Victim

High-control communities need what I call the perfect victim.

This person was hurt, absorbed the hurt quietly, showed no disruptive grief or anger, expressed immediate willingness to forgive the person who harmed them, and made everyone around them comfortable as quickly as possible. The perfect victim causes no trouble. She does not demand accountability. Her suffering has a beginning and an end, and the end comes on the community’s schedule and when the community finds it convenient.

This is not a description of a real human being who went through real trauma. It is a description of what the institution needs the survivor to become so that it can keep functioning without disruption.

The demand for forgiveness — immediate, unconditional, publicly demonstrated — is how the institution creates the perfect victim. It is not spiritual care. It is the institution protecting itself, dressed up as spiritual guidance.

How Forgiveness Gets Weaponized

When forgiveness is demanded rather than freely chosen, four things happen — and all of them hurt the survivor.

First, the responsibility shifts from the person who caused the harm to the person who survived it. What the perpetrator did becomes less important than how quickly she is getting over it. The conversation moves from “what happened to her” to “why isn’t she over it yet.” She — not he — becomes the one whose behavior is under scrutiny.

Second, her ongoing pain gets reframed as a spiritual problem rather than a completely normal response to being seriously hurt. This is mind control with a theological wrapper. It tells her: your suffering is not evidence of what was done to you. It is evidence that your faith isn’t strong enough.

Third, the perpetrator gets let off the hook — not because he did anything to earn it, but because she was pressured into saying the words. The community hears “I forgive him,” decides the matter is closed, and moves on. He stays. She stays alone with everything that happened.

Fourth, she gets silenced. Because if she has forgiven — as she has now publicly stated — there is nothing left to talk about. Any future expression of pain or anger becomes evidence of bad faith. You said you forgave him. Why are you still bringing this up?

Now here is the part that isn’t getting said — even when forgiveness comes from a well-meaning therapist with no religious agenda at all, it still causes harm in religious trauma work. Here is why.

Forgiveness researchers have done real work. Their studies show that letting go of anger toward someone who hurt you — putting down the weight of carrying that resentment — lowers anxiety, reduces depression, and helps people feel better. This is true. It matters.

But look closely at what they are actually describing. In their framework, forgiveness requires no contact with the perpetrator. No statement to anyone. No restored relationship. The survivor never has to say a word to him — or about him. She simply stops organizing her life around her injury and starts putting her energy toward her own recovery instead.

That is not forgiveness. That is healing. They are describing the same thing with a different word.

And that word choice has consequences they may not have fully thought through. For a survivor of religious trauma, the word forgiveness does not arrive as a blank clinical term waiting to be defined. It arrives already carrying years of meaning — meaning the community has been hammering into her. Restore the relationship. Absolve him. Perform grace in public. Stop talking about it. A therapist’s redefinition does not erase that history. It just adds another layer on top of it. And abusive communities are quick to use the therapy language as cover: even the therapists say you need to forgive.

The researchers were not wrong about the process. They were wrong about the word.

Why Healing Is Different

Everything the forgiveness research actually shows — setting down resentment, redirecting your energy toward yourself, getting free from what happened — is already part of healing. The word healing describes the same inner shift without dragging all the harmful baggage behind it.

Healing puts the survivor at the center.

When the goal is healing, the question is not “have you forgiven the person who hurt you?” The question is “what do you need?” The focus is on her experience, her process, her timeline. The perpetrator is not the center of the conversation. What happened to her is not minimized or rushed past. Her pain is treated as real information about what still needs attention — not as evidence of a spiritual problem.

Healing respects the process exactly as it is. Some days are better. Some days the old wound opens without warning. Some years feel like going backward when they are actually her mind and body finally feeling safe enough to face what they couldn’t face before. None of this is failure. All of it is part of getting better.

Healing means listening to your own inner voice. High-control communities teach people to distrust their own experience — their feelings, their instincts, their sense of what is real. We were told our inner voice was the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and that we needed to pray more and go to more Meetings. Healing asks you to listen to that voice again. To trust that what you feel is real information about what is happening inside you.

Healing has no deadline. No one else gets to set the schedule. There is no point at which a survivor can be told she should be done by now. It takes as long as it takes. Which is as long as it takes. Any pressure to hurry serves someone else’s comfort — not hers.

And healing does not require anything from the perpetrator. It does not depend on him. It belongs entirely to her.

This is why I am arguing — specifically and deliberately — for replacing the word forgiveness with the word healing in all religious trauma work. Not because the process the forgiveness researchers describe is wrong. It isn’t. But the word causes real harm to survivors that the research doesn’t account for — because that research wasn’t done specifically on people who came out of high-control religious communities, where the word forgiveness has been used as a weapon for years. I work in that community every day. I know what the word does when it lands.

The process is real. The word is the problem. And when a better word already exists -- healing -- that describes the same process without the damage, there is no good reason to keep using the one that hurts.

Retire the word. Keep the work.

Everything You Need

Everything that forgiveness is supposed to give you — release, freedom from the past, the ability to move forward, peace — you can get from healing. Every single one of those things. And you can get them on your own timeline, through your own process, without producing anything for the person who hurt you, without performing anything for the community that is watching, without meeting a standard set by someone else’s comfort level.

Healing releases you from what happened — not because you’ve decided to make it smaller than it was, but because you’ve processed it enough that it no longer lives in your body the same way.

Healing frees you from the past — not because you erased it, but because you’ve integrated it. It happened. It was real. It shaped you. And it does not have to run you.

Healing lets you move forward — not by leaving the person you were behind, but by bringing her with you. She gets to come. She is not the problem. She is the one who survived.

When someone tells you that you need to forgive as a required part of your process — that’s simply not accurate.

The word is healing. And it belongs entirely to you.

A Question for You

Has the demand for forgiveness ever been used to silence you — or someone you love? What would it have changed to have the word healing available instead?

If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and anyone whose healing process has been hijacked by someone else’s demand for their forgiveness.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I wake up between four and six in the morning with my mind already spinning.

Not gradually. Not gently. I come out of sleep into a body that is already on high alert — already scanning for what needs to be handled, what could go wrong, what I haven’t done, what I should have said. The anxiety is there before I am. By the time I’m awake enough to notice it, it has already picked something to worry about and handed it to me like an assignment.

I have two autoimmune diseases. I have chronic pain that runs up the right side of my body — my knee, my hip, my back, my shoulder, my neck, all the way up. I have pain in the muscles deep in my pelvis, on both sides, that radiates into my groin. I have metabolic syndrome, Type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver disease. I have a condition called geographic tongue that sounds minor and isn’t.

I am telling you this because I spent decades being told that my childhood wasn’t traumatic.

My mother told me it wasn’t traumatic. The community told me it wasn’t traumatic — that their way was perfect, ordained by God, the one true path, and therefore how could I have been harmed by it? The theology was correct. The structure was correct. The suffering, therefore, must be coming from somewhere else. Something in me.

I believed this for a long time. Parts of me still believe it sometimes. And I have all the evidence in the world that it isn’t true.

The Mind Control Doesn’t Stop When You Leave

When someone is repeatedly told that their own experience isn’t real — that what happened didn’t happen the way they remember it, or that if they’re suffering it must be their own fault — that is mind control doing its job. High-control groups are built on this. They have to be. A community that controls through fear and shame and confession can’t survive honest accounting. So the distortion gets built into the groupthink: the group is perfect, God ordained it, and your suffering is your own spiritual failure. Pray harder. Have a right spirit. Endure hardship like a good soldier.

What makes this so hard to shake is that it arrived before you were old enough to question it. Your mother’s voice, the leaders’ voices, the community’s version of reality — all of that landed when your brain was still building the framework it uses to understand everything. It went in deep. It became the thing you measured everything else against.

So even now, with a therapist, with a diagnosis, with a whole community of other survivors who share your exact story — even now, some part of you takes all that in and still whispers: but was it really that bad?

Yes. I am here to tell you that it was.

What My Body Has Been Saying

Starting in 1997, researchers tracked thousands of people and found a clear pattern: the more difficult or harmful your childhood experiences, the higher your risk of autoimmune disease, metabolic disease, heart disease, and chronic pain as an adult. More harm, more disease — consistently, measurably, across tens of thousands of people. This is now one of the most well-supported findings in all of health research.

My immune system attacks my own thyroid. That condition — Hashimoto’s thyroiditis — is one of the autoimmune diseases most consistently found in people with trauma histories. My body doesn’t accurately recognize the difference between itself and a threat. For most of my life, neither could I.

My stress hormones have been running high for so long that my body started storing fat in my liver, stopped responding to insulin normally, and developed the cluster of conditions that doctors now understand as the long-term effects of a nervous system that never got to fully rest.

The deepest muscle in the body — the one that runs from the spine through the pelvis — is the muscle that curls you inward when you sense danger. It’s been called the muscle of the soul by some body-focused therapists because it’s where fear lives in the body. Mine hurts on both sides, all the time. It has been bracing since I was a child. It is still bracing. It has not yet gotten the message that the threat is over.

I am telling you all of this because I still have to convince myself it counts.

I still wake up at 4am in threat mode. And still I hear the old voice: you are making too much of this. Other people had it worse. You weren’t beaten. Other than 2x2 approved beating methods. You had food and shelter and people who loved you. You are being dramatic.

My body has two autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, metabolic syndrome, and a fear muscle that has been tensed for five decades. And some mornings I still have to talk myself into believing that counts as evidence.

That is what the mind control does. That is how durable it is. That is why I am writing this.

If I Am Still Questioning — Maybe You Are Too

I have spent years studying this. I have written books about it. I have built a public platform around helping people recognize when their thinking is being controlled. I have sat with researchers’ frameworks and applied them to my own history and watched them fit, point by point.

And I still question.

Not always. Not as often as I used to. But the question is still there: was it really that bad? Did it really happen the way I remember? Am I sure I’m not exaggerating?

If I am still asking those questions — with all of this evidence, all of this work, all of these years — then I think you probably are too. Whatever your history. Whatever your tradition. Whatever the specific shape of the control that was used on you.

The questioning is not evidence that you are wrong about what happened. The questioning is evidence that the mind control worked. Those are different things.

You are allowed to be exactly where you are. You are allowed to know something in your head and still struggle to feel it as true. You are allowed to have done years of work and still wake up some mornings unsure. That is not failure. That is how deep this goes.

The Animals

I watch videos of animals being rescued. There is no reason to be embarrassed about this -- and no reason to be embarrassed about whatever your thing is, either.

A dog pulled from floodwater. A bird untangled from netting. A cat lifted out of a wall where it had been trapped for days. I watch them the way some people watch sports — with full attention, with something that feels almost like relief.

I understand now why. When an animal is rescued, the whole cycle completes. The danger was real. Someone came. The animal is safe. There is a clear before and after. My nervous system watches that and borrows it — because my own arc, the one that started in childhood, has never fully completed. The rescue happens on screen and my body responds to it as if it is happening to me. Because in some way, it is.

The animals don’t have to confess. They don’t have to perform gratitude or prove they deserved to be saved. They just get to be safe. And someone with power used it to protect rather than harm.

That is not a small thing to watch. That is healing that my nervous system is doing on its own, in the only language it knows right now.

I am learning to trust that. I am learning to let the things that help actually help, even when I can’t fully explain why.

Self-Editing Doesn’t Bring Transformation. Acceptance Does.

In Little Mouse and the Purple Door, the moment of transformation doesn’t come when Little Mouse gets better at following the rules. It doesn’t come when she confesses more sincerely or resolves harder or finally earns her place in the village.

It comes when the Capybara accepts her.

Not when she fixes herself. Not when she proves she’s worthy. When she is seen — exactly as she is, a Nervous little mouse covered in tea and confusion and the evidence of what was done to her — and accepted anyway. That is when something shifts. That is when real change becomes possible.

I wrote it that way because that’s how it works. Therapists have shown me exactly that kind of radical acceptance and I have transformed in their presence. That piece of the story is autobiographical.

The community I grew up in taught me that fixing myself was the path — confess, improve, suppress, conform, deny your own inner knowing until you’ve finally become what they need you to be. That path led nowhere except to a body that has been bracing for fifty years. You know it by its fruits, and this high control group produces harm in so very many ways.

Acceptance is not the same as approving of everything that happened. It is not making peace with harm. It is being willing to look at what is actually true — about what happened, about what it cost, about where you are right now — without flinching away from it or talking yourself out of it.

It is letting your body’s evidence count.

It is letting the 4am waking be what it is — a nervous system that learned too young that danger can arrive without warning — instead of a character flaw to manage away.

It is watching the animal rescue videos without apologizing for needing them.

We Rescue Each Other

I am in this work because I am still healing. Not because I have arrived somewhere you haven’t reached yet. Not because I have figured out something you are missing. I am in it because writing it is part of how I find my way through, and because the finding-the-way-through turns out to be something other people can use. We teach what we need to know.

That is the fractal. The same pattern of control repeats at every level — the high-control group, the coercive relationship, the authoritarian political system. And healing works the same way too — in the small moments and the large ones, in one person and in a whole community, in the animal pulled from floodwater and in the survivor who finally lets herself say: yes, that happened, and it was that bad, and my body has been telling me so for decades.

I am not trying to rescue you. I am trying to heal myself. And it turns out those things happen in the same direction.

You are allowed to be where you are. You are allowed to question. You are allowed to know something and not yet feel it. You are allowed to need the animal videos and the 4am stillness and the slow, unglamorous work of teaching your body that the threat has passed.

You are allowed to be Little Mouse, Nervous, covered in tea, standing in the market, not yet knowing that there is a Capybara somewhere who will see you and hold all of you with radical acceptance.

There is. I promise you there is.

A Question for You

Has your body ever been telling you something your mind was working hard to dismiss? What would it mean to let that evidence count?

If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms, with no one watching.

I talked about this on a recent podcast episode with Mike Prussack — it dropped yesterday. The conversation goes deeper into the transformation moment and what acceptance actually looks like in practice. Link in bio.

If this resonated — share it with someone who is still trying to convince themselves that what happened to them counts. It counts. Their body already knows.

Resources

Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon

Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and anyone whose body has been keeping score longer than their mind was willing to admit.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

Last night I dreamed I was standing at my mother’s door.

I was not asking to be let in. I was not crying. I was standing there with the full weight of everything I know now, and I was saying the thing I have never been permitted to say directly to her face: I deserved so much better than this. And you failed me.

She wasn’t there. The door was closed. I was speaking to a door that represented her — to the idea of her, to the relationship that never got to be what it should have been. Like you might speak to someone’s grave after they were gone. Speaking to the silence on the other side.

I woke up and sat with it for a while. And then I thought: that dream is about more than my mother. That door is the church. That closed door is what the system does to every conversation that might threaten its survival. It is never there to receive what needs to be said to it. It just stays closed, and you stand in the hallway and say the true thing anyway.

So. Let me say some true things.

I keep minimizing. And I’m not alone in that.

I have been writing this series for months. I have shared my story in pieces — at a retreat, in print, in this Substack, in conversations with survivors from Australia and New Zealand and across the United States and Canada. And something keeps happening that I want to name.

People react to what I describe with shock. And then I feel surprised that they’re shocked. Because I had normalized it so completely that it stopped registering as shocking to me.

The emotional abuse. The bullying and the ugliness. Being told to be ready for the ministry as a child. Being responsible for my immortal soul at age 8 without the legal capacity to consent to the decision. The loss of my scholarship. The loss of my car. The loss of my plan for my own life. The decades of therapy it took to have anything resembling a functional relationship with my own perception. The two autoimmune diseases and the chronic pain that live in my body because my body had nowhere else to put what happened to it.

I describe these things and then I watch myself hedge. But I know people who had it worse. But the community also gave me things. But I loved the people. But I don’t want to be unfair.

That hedging was installed. I did not arrive at it through reflection. I was taught, from the time I was old enough to absorb teaching, that the appropriate response to harm done by the system was to minimize the harm and protect the system. To look inward at my own failures. To remember that God’s way is perfect even when the people are not.

I want to talk about that particular teaching today. Because I think it is an extremely durable piece of the installation. People still inside the Two by Twos are running it right now, in response to everything that has come out since 2022.

“God’s way is perfect. The people aren’t.”

This is the sentence that does the most work in defense of the indefensible. It sounds humble. It sounds theologically sophisticated. It sounds like the speaker is acknowledging human fallibility while maintaining faith in something larger.

What it actually does is sever the system from accountability for the outcomes the system produces.

If God’s way is perfect and the people aren’t, then every instance of abuse, exploitation, cover-up, and harm can be attributed to individual failure rather than systemic design. The system is protected. The institution survives. The doctrine that required those people to submit to those authorities without question — the doctrine that made those authorities unaccountable — is never examined. And the next generation of children enters the same conditions, overseen by different people, and the same things happen.

This is not a theological accident. It is actually the design feature.

The Two by Two’s doctrine of submission, silence, and outsourced moral authority did not produce abuse despite itself. It produced abuse because of itself. It is, in the end, an abusive system.

A system that tells people their doubts are Satanic, that their inner knowing is not to be trusted, that the only safe path is deference to an untransparent, unaccountable, itinerant clergy — that system is not a good system that attracted bad actors. It is a system whose design selects for bad actors and protects them once they arrive.

The fruit of the system is not a few bad apples. The fruit of the system is over 900 documented perpetrators, thousands of victims, and decades of cover-up by leadership who knew all along, suppressed evidence, and sent abusers to stay in your home. And mine.

You will know them by their fruits.

The Two by Two taught us Matthew 7:16. It was used to distinguish true believers from false ones, the remnant from the world. You will know them by their fruits.

Let’s use it.

What are the fruits of a system that requires homeless, itinerant clergy to be housed alone with families — including children — in private homes, with no background checks, no accountability structure, no reporting mechanisms, and no ability for families to refuse without social consequence?

The fruits are documented. The Two by Two’s own crisis line — established after the Dean Bruer scandal broke in 2022 — documented over 900 perpetrators. Thousands of victims. Children raped in the homes where the Workers were given unconditional access. Overseers who knew, who moved perpetrators to new territories, who did not warn the families in those territories what was coming into their homes.

The FBI investigation. International law enforcement involvement. This. Is. The. Fruit.

What are the fruits of a doctrine that teaches children their inner knowing is not to be trusted, that their doubts are the Devil’s influence, that their natural appetites and curiosity and questions are spiritually dangerous?

The fruits are complex PTSD. Chronic illness. Autoimmune disease. Decades of therapy. Broken families. Addictions. Adults who cannot trust their own perception.

Survivors on every inhabited continent who found each other on the internet in the tens of thousands because there were so many of us, and we had all been taught we were alone.

The fruits are people like me, standing at a closed door in a dream, saying the true thing to an absence that will never receive it.

“I just love my little meeting.”

I want to speak to the people still inside who say this. Not with contempt. With grief, and with directness.

I know you love your meeting. I loved mine. The belonging was real. The friendships were real. The sense of being part of something larger than yourself was real. I am not asking you to deny that those things existed or that they mattered.

I am asking you to look at what your love of your meeting is costing.

When you say I just love my little meeting in response to the documented abuse of thousands of children — you are centering yourself. You are making the conversation about your experience of comfort and belonging rather than about the experience of the child who was raped by a Worker who stayed in a home like yours.

That has happened and is happening still.

The children who were abused inside the Two by Two did not have the option to decide that the good outweighed the bad and stay anyway. The harm happened to their bodies. It lives in their nervous systems. It shaped their capacity to trust, to form relationships, to feel safe in the world. Some of them did not survive it.

You loving your meeting does not undo that. The leadership structure has not changed. And staying in a system that produced that outcome, without demanding accountability, without requiring transparency, without naming what the leadership did as what it was — is not a neutral act. It is a choice to protect the system over the people the system harmed.

The Two by Two taught us that you will know God’s people by their fruits. By that standard: what does your continued membership, in the absence of accountability, produce? Who does it protect? Who does it leave unprotected?

It is not God. Because what is happening is not godly.

I want to be clear about my own position, because it matters for how I’m making this argument.

I do not consider myself a person of faith. I left the Two by Twos, explored spirituality, and eventually landed at pantheistic or soft agnostic. Hence, I am not making a theological claim about God. I am making an ethical claim about the system.

But for those of you who are still inside, or who left the Two by Two but retained your faith — I want to offer this:

The argument that God’s way is perfect and the people aren’t only holds if the system itself can be separated from the outcomes it consistently produces. It cannot. The “Truth” hurts people. Kids and vulnerable people get abused in “The Truth.” When you believe you’re the One True Way, you have to stay, even when you get abused. Even when kids get abused. When you believe your doubts are the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, that keeps you from questioning. Unquestioning submission endangers you and others.

If you believe in a God who is good, you cannot attribute a system with these fruits to that God without indicting either your theology or your God. Something has to give.

The prophets of the Hebrew Bible understood this. Isaiah 1:17: Learn to do good. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

The Two by Two did not defend the oppressed. It protected the oppressors. That is the fruit. By the system’s own standard — you will know them by their fruits — the fruit condemns the system.

What minimizing actually costs

I minimize. I still do it, even now, even knowing what I know. I describe abuse and then I immediately soften it. I give context that wasn’t given to me. I am careful not to overstate, not to seem like I’m performing victimhood, not to take up more space than I’ve earned.

I want to say clearly: that minimizing is the installation still running. I did not decide to be careful. I was trained to be careful in ways that protected the system.

The people still inside who minimize, who say it’s not that bad, who center their love of their meeting when children are named — they are doing the same thing I do. The installation runs in all of us. The difference is that I’m trying to name mine and override it. They haven’t gotten there yet.

But here is what minimizing costs: it costs the people who were most harmed the experience of being heard. When we minimize, we participate in protecting the perpetrators — we’re saying what happened wasn’t bad enough to act on, wasn’t severe enough to report, wasn’t real enough to take seriously.

The children who were abused inside the Two by Two were already being told that. They don’t need us to add our voices to that chorus.

I deserved better. The child I was deserved better. Every child in every home where a Worker stayed deserved better. Every person who was told their doubts were Satan, their questions were dangerous, their inner knowing was the enemy — deserved better.

The door stays closed. But I am going to keep saying the true thing anyway.

Before you close this article

Take a few minutes with this question:

What have you minimized? Not what happened to others — what happened to you. Write it down without the hedges. Without the context that softens it. Without the instinct to be fair to the system that was not fair to you. Just the thing itself, named plainly.

Then ask: what would it mean to take it seriously? Not to perform your suffering for anyone. Not to make it more than it was. Just to let it be as bad as it actually was, without flinching.

That is not self-pity. That is accuracy. And accuracy is where healing begins.

The Little Mouse and the Purple Door companion journal has space for exactly this work. The door is open.

Resources

• Amazon Links

  • Little Mouse and the Purple Door

  • Little Mouse Journal

  • Little Bea and the Golden Key

  • Little Bea Journal

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info | Historical documentation of the Two by Two

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

• FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

• Purple Door Journey Products — purpledoorjourneys.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I grew up in a shame spiral.

The cult reinforced shame at every level and so did my parents. I remember my mom telling people to pick me up and to pick my sister up and claiming that I felt sooo verrrry much heavier, even though we weighed the same.

This was a subtle dig. We weighed the same. But she was taller.

And I, a 5-6 year old girl, was not thin enough. “Stop eating,” she would say, “I don’t want a baby elephant for a daughter.”

Being skinny is prized in cults. It’s a constant theme: girls and women on diets, trying to be skinnier, never happy with their bodies. As much as this is a theme in our larger culture – it’s exacerbated in cults.

Shame was my parents’ major discipline strategy – even though they were both educators and had been taught many ways to impart a lesson. But – with me – they chose shame.

That same 5-6 year old girl would be told, when she asked for a new tooth brush, that she didn’t need one because she didn’t brush her teeth as often as the dog.

You don’t deserve resources because you’re bad. Don’t ask for anything.

As an educator, I know how to teach small children to brush their teeth, and that isn’t it.

That’s shame.

Sometimes the shame was reinforced with a belt or a wooden spoon – but shame was always their preferred strategy.

Shame them into compliance.

I want to tell you something about sunflowers.

Look at the center of a sunflower — the tight spiral of seeds packed into a circular head. Count the spirals going clockwise, then counterclockwise. You will almost always get two consecutive numbers from the Fibonacci sequence: 34 and 55, or 55 and 89, or 89 and 144. Every time. In sunflowers all over the world, in every climate, in every variety. The same numbers, over and over. The Fibonacci sequence can be found throughout the Universe, from the shells of marine animals, to the human body, to galaxies to hurricanes. It’s not magic: it’s math.

The sunflower doesn’t know about Fibonacci. It doesn’t choose this pattern. It simply grows in the way that fits the most seeds into the least space — and Fibonacci is what maximum efficiency looks like in a circle. The math is built into the physics of the situation. Change the physics and you get a different pattern. But given those constraints, the spiral is inevitable.

I have been thinking about this in relation to the coercive control shame spiral. Because coercive control is also a fractal — a pattern that emerges not from design but from the logic of unconstrained power. And understanding that changes how we think about both the problem and the solution.

Why the fractal doesn’t require a conspiracy

When survivors begin to understand the full scope of what was done to them — in the Two by Two, in any high-control community — there is often a moment of wondering: did someone plan all of this? Was it deliberate? Did the people at the top sit down and design a system specifically to trap us?

Sometimes yes. Often no. And the “no” is in some ways more disturbing than the “yes” — because it means the system doesn’t require malice to replicate. It requires only the absence of constraints.

Coercive control scales the same way Fibonacci does — by following the path of least resistance for the situation. Once you establish that your authority cannot be questioned, that questioning is itself dangerous, that belonging requires compliance — those mechanisms self-replicate. A parent raised in a high-control community doesn’t need to be taught to use shame to enforce compliance demands on their children. The pattern reproduces because it works. It is efficient. It accomplishes the goal of maintaining power with the least friction.

The Roman church didn’t sit down and decide to suppress inner knowing for seventeen centuries. It followed the path of least resistance for institutional survival — and that path always leads to the same place.

• Suppress individual conscience.

• Centralize interpretation.

• Make leaving cost everything.

The fractal writes itself, given the right conditions.

This is clarifying rather than discouraging, once you sit with it. It means we are not fighting a master plan. We are changing conditions.

What shame does to the conditions

The specific tool that makes coercive control most efficient — the one that allows it to replicate most cleanly across generations — is shame.

Shame is not guilt. Guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am something wrong. Guilt is about behavior that can be changed. Shame is about identity that cannot. A child who feels guilty about lying can decide not to lie. A child who feels ashamed of their very nature has nowhere to go. The shame becomes the condition in which they live. And a person living in shame about their own nature is a person who has already been taught that their inner knowing cannot be trusted — because the thing their inner knowing tells them they are is unacceptable.

This is why shame is the coercive control fractal’s most effective tool. It doesn’t just suppress one behavior or one question. It suppresses the faculty of self-trust entirely. It installs the control mechanism inside the person so the system doesn’t have to work as hard from the outside.

I started this essay with the stories of my own shame: my weight, tooth brushing, the belt and the wooden spoon. Such small pieces of a childhood – crystallized into the hardness of my shame – carried now in my body as chronic pain. This is the work now of my therapy – finding the shame, sitting with it, allowing it to dissipate. I hope to heal that pain.

I tell these stories not to relitigate my childhood but because I know they are not mine alone. The specific details are mine. The structure is universal to anyone raised inside a high-control system. The shame is not an accident of bad parenting. It is the mechanism, faithfully reproducing itself through the people who were also shaped by it.

My parents were not villains. They were earlier iterations of that coercive control fractal.

The conditions that allow the fractal to grow

Fibonacci spirals appear in sunflowers because of three specific conditions: circular space, the need to maximize packing, and the constraint that each new seed must grow from the previous ones. Change any of those conditions and you get a different pattern.

Coercive control replicates across generations because of three specific conditions: information asymmetry, isolation, and the suppression of inner knowing. Change any of those conditions and the fractal cannot reproduce cleanly.

Information asymmetry means the powerful control what is known. In the Two by Two, the history of William Irvine’s founding of the group in 1897 was suppressed for generations. The abuse was hidden. The financial flows were hidden. The scope of what was being done to children was hidden. When people cannot access information about the system they are inside, they cannot evaluate it. They can only experience it — and their experience has been pre-interpreted for them by the system itself.

Isolation means people cannot compare notes. They cannot reality-check with anyone outside. They have no external reference point for what is normal, what is healthy, what other families and communities look like. I grew up surrounded by Professing people. When I finally went to university and lived alongside students whose families looked nothing like mine, the information that arrived was disorienting and clarifying simultaneously. I had no idea. I had simply never been able to see it.

Suppression of inner knowing means people are taught that their own perception is untrustworthy — that their doubts are Satan’s influence, that their discomfort is pride, that their questions are rebellion. When you cannot trust what you perceive and feel and know, you cannot act on it. You cannot leave what you cannot name.

These three conditions are the soil in which coercive control grows. Remove them and the coercive control fractal loses its footing.

The counter-fractal

There is hope, because coercive control is not the only fractal pattern.

The antidote to a fractal is not fighting the pattern directly. It is changing the conditions. And changed conditions also fractal. There’s another mathematical repetition found all over the galaxy: Euler’s number — e, approximately 2.718. This is the mathematical constant that describes continuous compound growth. Anything that grows continuously follows e: populations, interest, the spread of disease, the spread of ideas. Euler’s number is found in the spread of diseases, the mapping of wave frequencies, compound interest, and in gambling. When you study math – it just keeps showing up.

Small consistent inputs compound over time into effects that look sudden from the outside but were accumulating all along. Like Fibonacci’s sequence, Euler’s number is a mathematical pattern repeated in disparate situations across the universe.

What you are building when you name the mechanism, break the isolation, and restore inner knowing — in a Substack article, in a survivor support group, in a book that tells the story through allegory so people can approach it sideways — is compound growth in the opposite direction. Each person who recognizes the fractal becomes someone who can name it to the next person. Each person who recovers their inner knowing raises children differently, builds relationships differently, creates communities differently.

The pattern self-replicates. But so does its antidote. Remember that compound growth starts small, and it seems like nothing is happening, and nothing, and there’s no point, and Then It GROWS!

A parent who was shamed into compliance raises children who are shamed into compliance — not out of malice, but because that is the pattern they were given and they have no other model. A parent who has done the work of recovery — who has named the shame, understood its origin, and learned to trust their own knowing — raises children with a different pattern installed. Those children build differently. Their children build differently still.

This is compound interest in human form. It looks slow and then it looks sudden. It looks like one person writing about their experience and then suddenly thousands of survivors finding each other across continents, recognizing shared memories, and discovering that what happened to them was a system, not a personal failing.

That recognition — it was a system — is the moment the fractal loses one of its essential conditions. Because a person who understands they were inside a system can begin to evaluate the system rather than only blaming themselves for their experience of it.

What Little Mouse is actually doing

I did not understand all of this when I wrote Little Mouse and the Purple Door. I wrote it because a story arrived in my head at a survivor retreat, and I followed it. I knew it was about leaving a high-control community and recovering a sense of self. I knew Little Mouse was loosely based on me, but she quickly became her own character. I knew allegory created the right kind of distance. I knew the Capybara represented the therapists and guides who walked beside me, rather than lead from above.

But every element of these books are changing the conditions that allowed coercive control to replicate, and that’s why I want them out in the world. Allegory is gentle enough to give to a current cult member or one who recently left.

The book changes information asymmetry — it names what happens inside these systems in a form that can circulate publicly, reach people who are still inside, and give language to people who have been out for years but couldn’t articulate what they survived.

The book breaks isolation — a survivor who reads it and recognizes their own experience discovers that someone else lived it too, named it, and found a way through. That recognition is a specific antidote to the aloneness that high-control groups depend on.

The book restores inner knowing — specifically and intentionally, through the Capybara’s message. No flavors are wrong. That is not simply a comforting sentiment: it is the distillation of my years in therapy. The counter-installation. It is placing a different message in the exact location where the system placed its own.

The journals continue that work. The Substack series names the mechanisms so people can see them. The Ex-2x2’s sites build a community across the world. We can break isolation at the local and national scale simultaneously.

None of it is fighting the fractal directly. All of it is changing the conditions.

You are the changed conditions

I want to say something directly to the survivors reading this.

Your recovery is not only personal. The work you are doing on yourself — learning to trust your own perception, naming what happened to you, building relationships based on consent rather than compliance — is changing the conditions for everyone around you. Your children if you have them. Your partner. Your friends. The people who read what you write or hear what you say or watch how you live.

The fractal of control replicates through people who were shaped by it and pass it on without knowing they are doing so. The counter-fractal replicates the same way — through people who were shaped by it, did the work of understanding it, and now carry a different pattern.

You are the counter-fractal. Your healing is the changed conditions.

The sunflower doesn’t know about Fibonacci. But given the right conditions, the spiral is inevitable. Given the right conditions — enough information in circulation, enough isolation broken, enough inner knowing restored — a different kind of pattern becomes inevitable too.

That is what we are building. One story, one article, one question, one conversation at a time. It compounds. Trust the math. (I’m a math teacher 🙂)

Before you close this article

Take a few minutes with this question:

Think about a belief you hold about yourself that arrived through shame — something you were taught to believe about your own nature, your own worthiness, your own right to take up space. Where did it come from? Who installed it? And is it actually true — or is it the coercive control fractal, doing what the fractal does?

Write about where that belief lives in your body right now. And write about what it would mean to release the condition that keeps it in place.

Healing happens when we create. Whether you want to write, draw, sculpt, or talk, the healing is in your response. It’s in listening to your inner voice and interacting with the questions in your own way.

The Little Mouse and the Purple Door companion journal has space for exactly this work. If you want to go deeper, the door is open.

Resources

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

• FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

• Little Mouse and the Purple Door and companion journal — purpledoorjourneys.com

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I live in the Wenatchee Valley. And this spring, something instructive happened here.

Both cities — Wenatchee and East Wenatchee — found ways to remove the Pride banners that had hung downtown during June.

East Wenatchee did it openly, if deceptively. A council member placed the banner policy on a workshop agenda and then denied that removal of the Pride banners was the goal. Local citizens didn’t fall for it. They showed up to the workshop — filling the room with rainbows, even though they were not permitted to speak in that venue. The follow-up meeting had to be moved to the school auditorium to accommodate the crowd. Despite letters, emails, letters to the editor, and packed public appearances at meeting after meeting, East Wenatchee rewrote its banner policy — incurring approximately $200,000 in additional annual expenses — and eliminated the Pride banners. This at a time when the city couldn’t afford to replace its failing HVAC system.

Wenatchee took a quieter route. The city granted the banner placement to the second group that applied, claiming the first application was incomplete. It was “incomplete” because it didn’t include the artwork — the same artwork that had been submitted the previous year, which the city already had on file. The applicant had been told explicitly at the time of filing that the artwork did not need to be supplied again. Instead of Pride banners, Wenatchee will hang red, white, and blue “family”-themed banners affiliated with Grace City Church and promoting Turning Point USA — a known hate group founded by Charlie Kirk.

The misdirect

Online, the response from supporters of this decision has been: why are you objecting? Family includes everyone.

This is a misdirect. These banners are not promoting a generic concept of family. They are promoting an organization that works against LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights at every level. The choice to call them “family” banners — bland, unobjectionable, warm — while using them to platform an organization that specifically targets queer people is not a coincidence. It is a tactic with a long history in right-wing political strategy in the United States.

Name something inclusive. Use it to exclude. Then accuse anyone who objects of being against the inclusive thing you named.

To the extent that people fall for it, they want to. If you want an excuse to push the queer community out of public life and still believe yourself to be a good person, this is the mechanism. But the mechanism only works if we don’t name it. The banners are not about family. They are about making queer people invisible in a space that had, for a few years, made them visible. That is what the fight is actually about.

And it is precisely why Pride banners are necessary. Not as decoration. As a statement that the people who live here — all of them, in their full authentic selves — belong here.

The fractal at street level

I have been writing in this series about coercive control as a fractal — a pattern that repeats at every scale, from the abusive relationship to the high-control religious community to the authoritarian nation-state. The mechanism is always the same: suppress inner knowing, require compliance as a condition of belonging, and make the cost of authenticity higher than most people can pay.

What happened in Wenatchee this spring is the fractal at street level. The message being sent to the queer community — through banner policies, through procedural sleight of hand, through the annual presence of Christian activists who show up at Pride to tell attendees they are going to hell — is the oldest message the control fractal knows: your authentic self is not acceptable here. You should not exist the way you are.

Queer children are thrown out of their homes for being who they are. I know far too many people for whom that is their story. It is also the story I wrote about Little Bea, who has to paint over her rainbow tail from infancy to survive in a world that permits only red and blue. When she finally reveals who she is, her own parents throw her through the purple door.

I did not invent that story. I was raised in a high-control religious community that preached the same message — that queer existence was a sin, that authenticity was rebellion against God, that belonging required conformity to a binary that was never actually about God at all. I watched people begin to flourish and thrive once they put down those coercive beliefs and trusted what they knew about themselves. The flourishing is real. The cost of suppressing it is real.

Enough already.

What the fractal cannot survive

Here is what happened next in Wenatchee, and why it matters.

The queer community and their allies did not primarily respond with protest. They raised money for two billboards that will be up all year — one in English that says You Are Loved with rainbows, and one in Spanish that says Love Thy Neighbor with rainbows. NCW Equity Alliance and Confluence Indivisible entered the Apple Blossom parade together — and walked a gay pride parade right through the middle of one of central Washington’s most beloved community traditions. I cannot remember ever seeing anything like it. Here we are.

I have been writing that creativity and joy are not incidental to resistance — they are the specific response that coercive systems cannot metabolize. An authoritarian system can suppress a protest. It can outlast a march. What it cannot do is suppress a community that is simply, joyfully, persistently itself in public. The response to being made invisible is to become more visible. The response to being told you don’t belong is to show up at the parade and dance.

This is what I mean when I write that creativity is a political act. The queer community in Wenatchee is demonstrating the thesis of this entire series, in real time, on Main Street.

Why I wrote Little Bea

On May 15th, Little Bea and the Golden Key comes out on Amazon. It is the second book in the Purple Door Journeys series.

Bea is born with a rainbow tail in a village where all tails are red or blue — one for girls, one for boys, nothing beyond or between. Her mother paints her tail red from infancy. Bea grows up not knowing what her own tail actually looks like. When the paint finally comes off and her parents see her rainbow tail, her father throws her through the purple door. She survives. She finds community. She builds a life.

I wrote it for everyone whose authentic self was told it could not be seen. For the children who were thrown out of their homes for existing. For the adults who are still painting over their rainbow because the cost of letting it show has always been too high. And for everyone who wants to understand — from the inside of an allegory, at the safe distance that story provides — what it actually costs someone to hide who they are, and what it means to finally stop.

I will have a booth at Wenatchee Pride in June with both Little Bea and its companion journal. Come find me. Bring your rainbows.

This book is for you.

What authentic community actually looks like

Listening to your own inner voice is not just a personal act. If you are straight, if you are cisgender, if you grew up in a community that never asked you to paint over who you are — then listening to your inner voice also means accepting that other people have the same right. It means releasing the binary thinking that tells you someone else’s authentic self is a problem that needs correcting. It means understanding that consent and respect are the foundations of healthy community — not coercion and conformity dressed as virtue.

This is new thinking for those of us raised in the Christian right. I know how uncomfortable it is. I also know that we cannot heal our own damage from coercive systems while continuing to apply coercive thinking to the people around us. The healing is connected. You cannot access your own inner knowing while insisting that someone else’s inner knowing is inadmissible.

And when you let go of that — when you trust your own knowing and trust that others have the same — you get to join the celebration. You get to walk in the parade. You get to stand under the billboard that says You Are Loved and know that it means you. Specifically you.

Rainbows. Joy. Authentic community. That is what the fractal cannot survive.

That is what Pride is for.

Before you close this article

Take a few minutes with this question:

Is there a part of yourself you have hidden — painted over — because the community you were in required a different color? It doesn’t have to be about gender or sexuality. It can be anything. A belief. A question. A way of seeing the world. Write about what it cost you to hide it, and what it would mean to let it show.

Healing happens when we create. Whether you want to write, draw, sculpt, or talk, the healing is in your response. It’s in listening to your inner voice and interacting with the questions in your own way.

The Little Bea and the Golden Key companion journal has space for exactly this work. If you want to go deeper, the door is open.

Resources

• Little Bea and the Golden Key and companion journal — available May 15th on Amazon | purpledoorjourneys.com

• Little Mouse and the Purple Door and companion journal — available on Amazon | purpledoorjourneys.com

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• PFLAG — pflag.org | Support for LGBTQ+ people and their families

• The Trevor Project — thetrevorproject.org | Crisis support for LGBTQ+ youth

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

I was at a retreat for Two by Two survivors when they took us outside to look at a purple door set into the side of a hill.

The facilitators sent us back inside with a simple instruction: draw what you imagine is behind it.

I struggled. My mother had been cruel to me whenever I tried to draw as a child — and that cruelty had done what cruelty does: it installed a voice that said my creative attempts were inadequate, that what came from inside me was not worth the paper it landed on. I am a deeply creative person. I have always been. And I have always been insecure about it, because the people who were supposed to receive my creativity with care had used it instead as an opportunity to diminish me.

I sat with the blank page. I picked up my pencil. And then I put it down.

I picked up my phone. And I began to write the words that I heard in my head. They came from somewhere I had spent a lifetime being told not to trust: There once was a little country mouse...

That is the origin of Little Mouse and the Purple Door. Not a publishing strategy. Not a therapeutic framework I had read about and decided to apply. My inner voice, speaking into a creative exercise designed to restore exactly that — my inner voice — and me, finally, after a lifetime of being told it could not be trusted, choosing to listen to it. The facilitators embraced it. None of us had any idea where it would go.

It took me a long time to understand what had happened in that room. Why a purple door. Why creativity. Why that particular act — putting down the assigned task and following the voice in my head — felt like something more than a nice moment at a retreat.

I want you to understand this was a political act. A civilizational one.

And to explain why, I have to go back seventeen centuries.

I studied this ground

I have a degree in European history with a minor in German. I spent a semester in Rome studying Roman history and the history of the early church — walking the same ground where the empire was built, where Christianity was formalized as a political project, where the canon was decided and the heretics were named. I didn’t understand at the time why that history felt so personal. I do now.

I was raised in the Two by Two — a high-control religious group that claimed to go back to Jesus, that turned out to go back to 1897, and that spent generations teaching its members that their inner knowing was the enemy of their salvation. And somewhere in the overlap of the history I studied and the psychology I lived, I arrived at this conclusion:

We are still fighting to preserve the Roman Empire.

Not as metaphor. As a literal description of our civilizational inheritance. And everyone who is trying to recover their own inner authority after having it systematically stripped by a high-control religious community – is fighting Rome.

The Two by Two did not invent what it did to us. It inherited it. From a tradition that goes back seventeen centuries. And understanding that inheritance changes what recovery means — and why a woman at a retreat putting down a pencil and picking up her phone is a more significant act than it sounds.

How Rome became God

Rome was not content to trade with the world. It needed to own it. Every territory Rome encountered — Egypt, Gaul, Britain, the tribal lands of northern Europe — Rome assessed not as a neighbor but as a resource and eventually an acquisition. The violence of those acquisitions was extraordinary: crucifixions, enslavements, the systematic destruction of indigenous cultural life.

But conquest by force has a limit. Soldiers cost money. Rebellions require suppression. You cannot hold an empire together by violence alone indefinitely. You need something that makes people consent to being governed. You need an ideology.

Constantine understood this. When he convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, he was not primarily engaged in a theological project. This was political. A fractured Christianity — dozens of competing gospels, communities, theologies, leadership structures — was a fractured empire. A unified creed was a tool of cohesion. Decide what is orthodox. Define what is heresy. Give the institution the authority to draw that line. And attach imperial power to the institution that draws it.

Four gospels were canonized — because there were four winds and four corners of the earth, cosmologically ordained, which meant it was not a human choice, which meant it could not be questioned. Think about the role of sacred science here. It goes all the way back to Rome.

The Gnostic gospels — the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip, and dozens of others — were excluded. Communities that had worshipped from these texts for generations were reclassified overnight. Not Christians in good standing. Heretics.

The Nicene Creed was written as a statement of orthodox belief — and as a boundary. What was inside the creed was civilization. What was outside it was chaos, error, danger. To be civilized was to be Roman, and to be Roman was now to be Christian. The two identities fused into a single civilizational project with a clear requirement: the surrender of individual spiritual authority to the institution that mediated access to God. The fractal of control, at imperial scale.

What the Gnostics knew that Rome could not permit

The Gnostic texts had to go because they were not the control fractal.

These gospels consistently located spiritual authority inside the individual. The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is within you and all around you — not in a building, not mediated by a priest, not dependent on correct creedal belief. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene gives a woman the role of primary apostle, receiving direct spiritual revelation and transmitting it to the others. The Gospel of Philip treats the spiritual life as a lived, embodied, experiential reality rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed.

This is a theology of inner knowing. Direct experience. The self as a trustworthy source of spiritual perception.

Constantine could not build an empire on that theology. An individual who trusts their own spiritual perception does not need a bishop. An individual who believes the kingdom of God is within them does not need an institution to grant them access to it. A community that locates authority in direct experience rather than hierarchical transmission cannot be controlled by a creed.

The Gnostics were not suppressed because their theology was wrong. They were suppressed because their theology was incompatible with coercive control. Inner knowing is incompatible with coercive control. It always has been. That is why every coercive system — from the Roman church to the Two by Two — begins by teaching you that your inner knowing cannot be trusted.

How the empire traveled

Rome fell. The ideology survived.

The Catholic Church preserved the fusion of Christian identity with civilizational authority through the medieval period, the Crusades, the Inquisition. When the European nations began colonizing the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Jesuits went with them — and the ideology went with the Jesuits. To be civilized was to be Christian. To be Christian was to be subject to the Universal Church — Catholic means universal. Indigenous peoples on multiple continents were not encountered as cultures with their own sophisticated knowledge, governance, and spiritual life. They were encountered as raw material for civilization — which meant for conversion, which meant for the suppression of their inner knowing and its replacement with orthodoxy.

Scholars of colonialism have noted that indigenous critics across the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific independently identified something striking about the European conquerors: the profound inequality of their societies, the rigid hierarchy that governed every relationship, the way power concentrated at the top and flowed in only one direction. These were not the observations of people who had no conception of governance. They were the observations of people whose own social structures were often far more egalitarian — and who recognized, with some clarity, that what was being brought to them was not civilization. It was domination wearing civilization’s clothing. They saw the fractals. They understood exactly what was happening.

The Puritans who settled New England carried the same inheritance in a new vessel. Purity culture — the covenant community, the godly nation, the sharp boundary between the orthodox and the apostate — traveled directly from the Roman church through the Reformation into the American experiment. The idea that America was a city on a hill, a new Jerusalem, a nation chosen by God to carry Christian civilization forward — that idea is Roman in origin, Constantinian in structure, and still alive in American political culture today.

The fractal works at every level of this society — from the individual, to the family, to the churches, to corporations and government agencies, to the nation itself. It is the mechanism by which the ideology reproduces itself across centuries and continents and scales: from the empire to the colony to the congregation to the family to the marriage to the individual soul told that its own inner voice is the enemy.

The fractal in the church

The Two by Two is a very small, very recent, very particular expression of a very old and very large pattern.

William Irvine did not invent the mechanism when he started the Two by Two in Ireland in 1897. He inherited it — from the evangelical tradition he was trained in, which inherited it from the Reformation, which inherited it from the medieval church, which inherited it from Rome. The specific doctrines are his. The mechanism is not.

When the Two by Two taught us that our doubts were Satan’s influence — that our questions were dangerous, that our inner voice was the enemy of our salvation, that our lives were not our own — it was transmitting a seventeen-century-old civilizational message in a new vessel. The vessel was small and obscure and met in living rooms. The message was the oldest one in Western history: do not trust yourself. Trust the institution. Outsource your agency. Your inner knowing will lead you astray. Orthodoxy is safety. Submission is love.

And when we recovered — when we walked through the purple door and began the long work of taking back our own inner authority — we were not just healing from the Two by Two. We were doing counter-colonial work on our own minds.

Why the healing looks like this

Now you understand why a purple door. Why creativity. Why allegory and journals and blank pages and the invitation to respond in whatever form your inner voice chooses.

The form of the healing is a direct counter to the form of the harm.

The harm was the suppression of inner knowing. The healing is the restoration of it. The harm was the replacement of individual perception with institutional orthodoxy. The healing is the recovery of trust in your own experience. The harm traveled through language that was absolute, creedal, thought-terminating. The healing travels through story and metaphor and image — forms that invite interpretation rather than demanding agreement, that create space for your meaning rather than installing someone else’s.

The Gnostic gospels were suppressed precisely because they located spiritual authority in direct experience and inner knowing. Every coercive system since Rome has required the suppression of exactly that. And the recovery of exactly that — your inner voice, your authentic flavor, your capacity to trust your own perception — is what every coercive system, at every scale, cannot survive.

Creativity is not a therapeutic tool. It is a political act. Imagination is not a luxury. It is the faculty that coercive systems most urgently need to suppress, because an individual who can imagine a different world is an individual who can no longer be fully convinced that this one is inevitable. An individual who trusts their own inner knowing is an individual who cannot be controlled by the claim that their inner knowing is the enemy.

The journals exist to stimulate exactly that. Not to tell you what to think. To give you space to find out what you already know. To practice the radical act of trusting your own perception. To discover, slowly and in your own time, that your flavor was never wrong.

No flavors are wrong.

That is not a comforting line at the end of a children’s book. It is a seventeen-century argument, finally answered. By a woman at a retreat, sitting with a blank page, choosing to put down the pencil and trust the voice in her head instead.

Before you close this article

Take a few minutes with this question:

When did you first have a thought, a feeling, or a perception that the community told you was dangerous — not wrong exactly, but unsafe to hold? Write about that moment. What was the thought? How old were you? What did you do with it? And what would your life look like now if you had been told, at that moment, that your inner knowing was trustworthy — that your flavor was not wrong?

Healing happens when we create. Whether you want to write, draw, sculpt, or talk, the healing is in your response. It’s in listening to your inner voice and interacting with the questions in your own way.

The Little Mouse and the Purple Door companion journal has space for exactly this work. If you want to go deeper, the door is open.

Resources

• Amazon Links

  • Little Mouse and the Purple Door

  • Little Mouse Journal

  • Little Bea and the Golden Key

  • Little Bea Journal

• Author’s Work is at Purple Door Journeys — www.purpledoorjourneys.com

• TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

• FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

In mathematics, a fractal is a pattern that repeats itself at every scale. Zoom in on a coastline and you see the same jagged shape you saw from the satellite. Zoom in again and there it is again — the same structure, smaller, but identical in form. The shape doesn’t change. Only the scale does.

I have come to understand coercive control as a fractal.

An abusive person. An abusive relationship. An abusive family. A cult. A nation under authoritarian rule. Each one is a different scale of the same structure. Each one operates by the same mechanism. And the mechanism has a name: the transfer of agency.

Give me your ability to decide what is true. Give me your ability to judge what is right. Give me your trust in your own instincts, your own perception, your own moral reasoning. Give me all of that — and frame the giving as faithfulness, love, submission, patriotism, devotion. Frame autonomy as selfishness, rebellion, sin, disloyalty, danger.

That is the mechanism. At every scale.

Outsourced agency

A survivor in the Two by Two community offered a term recently that resonated with me: outsourced agency. It describes the habit — the deeply installed belief — of transferring responsibility for one’s own thoughts, decisions, and moral judgments to an external authority. God. A leader. A system. A movement. Rather than recognizing and exercising one’s own capacity to choose.

It shows up as deferral: I’m waiting to be led. It shows up as abdication: It’s not mine to act on. It is framed as holiness: I’m waiting for the spirit to move me. It shows up as distrust of one’s own perception — the constant checking of internal experience against an external standard before allowing it to count as real.

In the Two by Two, outsourced agency was standard doctrine. We heard from the platform, repeatedly, that our lives were not our own. The potter was going to mold the clay and our job was to be the pliant clay that allowed the potter to do whatever he wanted. Over and over, we were taught that letting go, having no control, and therefore no responsibility, was the spiritual path. Godliness is passivity. Let go and let God.

We were also taught that our doubts did not originate within us — they were Satan’s influence. Any questions were evidence of Satan planting doubts because God is not the author of confusion. We were taught that the self — our appetites, our reasoning, our curiosity, our judgment — was one third of a soul-destroying triad: the World, Flesh, and Devil.

When your own nature is framed as something you cannot trust, trusting yourself is not an option. The self becomes the enemy. And the only safety is in the surrender of agency to something outside the self — something the community controls.

That is the point. The community set you up to control you and called it God.

The sheepfold and the fence

I remember sermons and the hymns about the sheepfold. There is rest. There is peace. In. The. Fold. The walls weren’t there to keep us in, we were told. They were there to keep danger out. Danger was constant. Danger was everywhere.

Once I left and became, from the community’s perspective, one of those dangerous outside influences — simply by sharing documented concern about real harm being done to real people — the framework shifted completely. The fence, once protective, now seemed to protect abusers when they did harm.

The further I get from that fence, the clearer its actual function becomes. It was never about our safety. It was always about control. Outsource our agency. Extract our labor, our life force. Sheep who cannot trust their own judgment, who believe danger lives inside their own questions, who understand the fence as love — those sheep do not leave. And if they cannot leave, whatever happens inside the fence can continue. The Capybara connects any True Mouse way with abuse because they can mistreat you all they want if you can never leave. The only safe spaces are the ones where you have the agency to leave.

We have seen, with devastating clarity since 2022, what continued inside that fence. The harm was not outside it.

The impossible burden of others’ salvation

Here is the particular cruelty of the Two by Two’s version of outsourced agency: it ran in two directions simultaneously.

We were taught that we had no authority over our own lives. And we were taught that we bore responsibility for the spiritual fate of the people around us. Our influence, we were told, was powerful enough to affect someone’s eternal salvation. When I quit going to Meetings, my mother called me and confronted me. “Well,” she said, “What are K’s going to think?” As a teen, I had helped bring these people to Meetings. I was responsible for their immortal souls and this responsibility was used as a reason I could not leave.

No agency over the self. Total responsibility for others. That is not a spiritual framework. That is a trap designed to keep people perpetually inadequate, perpetually dependent on the community’s judgment of how they are doing, perpetually unable to trust their own assessment of anything.

Toni Morrison wrote: “Freedom is not having no responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.”

That sentence undoes a lifetime of Two by Two teaching in twenty words. You get to choose your responsibilities. The salvation of the people around you was never yours to carry. Morrison is speaking a consent-based version of responsibility. It’s not yours to carry if you did not choose to pick it up. Regardless of the guilt you were taught to feel about it. You can put it down and let it go and set yourself free. You are responsible for the things you chose. Full stop.

They kept us compliant and exhausted and too busy guilting ourselves to notice what was happening around us. The Shrew in Little Bea has this all figured out. She tells Bea that the Elders want to keep everyone looking at their own tails so they don’t notice what the Elders are up to. It’s a classic misdirect. And it worked.

The larger fractal

The Turkish novelist Ece Temelkuran, writing about the global rise of authoritarianism, describes one of its core features as the outsourcing of morality. The population is encouraged — trained — to stop exercising independent moral judgment and to defer instead to the leader, the movement, the national will, whatever the authoritarian system designates as the proper seat of moral authority. Individual conscience becomes suspect. Loyalty becomes the highest virtue. And the question is this right? gets replaced by is this what we believe?

This is not an analogous to the Two by Two. This is the same dynamic playing out at a larger scale.

Coercive control is a fractal. The abusive partner who tells you that your perception cannot be trusted, that your judgment is distorted, that your instincts are leading you wrong — that person is operating the same mechanism as the cult that tells you your doubts are Satan’s influence. The cult is operating the same mechanism as the authoritarian state that tells its citizens their questions are dangerous and their loyalty to the collective is the only safe identity to hold.

The scale changes. The structure does not.

This matters beyond the personal, because it means the skill of recognizing coercive control — the skill that surviving the Two by Two gives you, if you do the work of understanding what happened — is not a narrow, specialized skill. It is the most broadly applicable skill a human being can develop in this particular historical moment. People who have learned to recognize the mechanism at the scale of a cult can recognize it at the scale of a nation. It’s what we’re calling out in Faux News. People who have learned to name “you cannot trust your own judgment” as a control tactic, rather than a spiritual insight, have an immunity that most of the population does not.

The wound the Two by Two left is real. And it is also, unexpectedly, a kind of education.

Reclaiming the self

The work of recovery, at its core, is the work of re-owning agency. Not recklessly. Not without guidance or relationship or community. But genuinely — understanding that your moral judgment is yours, that your perception is a legitimate source of data about the world, and that you are never willing to give it to another again. You’ll keep your own perceptions, allow for new information to come in, and trust your own gut. Others can negotiate with me; they can convince me; they can influence me -- but no one will ever own me again.

The same survivor who offered the term “outsourced agency” noted something important about his own recovery: seeking guidance is not the same as outsourcing agency. Guidance that informs your judgment is healthy. Guidance that replaces your judgment — that asks you to trust the guide’s perception over your own experience of your own life — is the mechanism. Once the relationships are consent-based, guidance can be given and received without coercive control. Consent is the key.

In Little Mouse and the Purple Door, the Capybara is a guide. But he does not tell Little Mouse what to think, what to believe, or what her experience means. He walks beside her. He asks questions. He makes room for her to arrive at her own conclusions in her own time. He offers the one thing the village never offered: the confidence that her own perception is trustworthy.

No flavors are wrong.

That is not just a comforting line. It is a direct counter-installation to the doctrine that the self cannot be trusted. Your flavor — your instincts, your questions, your doubts, your desire to understand your own life — was never wrong. It was always the most reliable thing you had. The community worked very hard to make you forget that. Recovery is the long work of remembering it.

Before you close this article

Take a few minutes with this question:

Where in your life right now do you still outsource your agency? It doesn’t have to be religious. It can be a relationship, a job, a family pattern, a political identity, a set of rules you follow without examining why. Write about one place where you defer to an external authority rather than your own judgment — and then write about what it would mean to trust yourself there instead. What are you afraid would happen? What does that fear tell you about what was installed?

If you want more space to go deeper, the Little Mouse and the Purple Door companion journal was built for exactly this work. The door is open.

Healing happens when we create. Whether you want to write, draw, sculpt, or talk, the healing is in your response. It’s in listening to your inner voice and interacting with the questions in your own way.

Resources

• Amazon Links

  • Little Mouse and the Purple Door

  • Little Mouse Journal

  • Little Bea and the Golden Key

  • Little Bea Journal

• Author’s Work is at Purple Door Journeys — www.purpledoorjourneys.com

• TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

• FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

May 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com

Not metaphorically. Literally. We were taught that the Workers were the direct continuation of the ministry Jesus established in Matthew 10 — that the line of men and women who had given up all possessions to preach in pairs had run, unbroken, from the first century through to the Worker living in my bedroom while I bunked with my sister. Every other church had a human founder and a human origin date. My mother told me not to mark “Catholic” or “Protestant” on forms because we were neither. We were the OG Christian church and the Catholics broke off from us.

This was the foundation of everything. It was the reason we couldn’t leave. It was the reason other churches were fraudulent. It was the reason the Workers’ authority over our lives was absolute. It was the reason I gave away my car and my scholarship and my future to go into the Work at twenty years old. You don’t question the one true way that goes back to Jesus. You surrender to it.

There is one problem with this foundation. It is a documented, deliberate, institutional lie. And the people who built the institution knew it was a lie when they built it.

The man they erased

His name was William Irvine. He was born in Scotland in 1863. He was a mining company general manager who professed faith at a revival meeting in 1893, studied at the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, and in 1895 joined the Faith Mission — an independent evangelical organization founded in 1886 to evangelize rural Scotland.

The Faith Mission, founded in 1886. Its Workers were itinerant. They preached in pairs. They stayed in converts’ homes. They held conventions and special meetings. They depended on God and on the generosity of believers for their material needs. They used these specific terms: professing, workers, missions, companion, fields, the work, harvest field.

Although I had never heard of the Faith Mission, I grew up with these terms. All of them. Borrowed wholesale from an organization founded nine years before William Irvine started what would call itself The Truth – which I call the Two by Twos.

In 1897, Irvine was sent by the Faith Mission to pioneer their work in southern Ireland. While there, reading Matthew 10:8-10, he was struck with an idea: what if Jesus intended his instructions to the twelve apostles to be followed by all preachers for all time? That August he held his first independent revival mission with John Long, a Methodist itinerant, in County Tipperary. Several converts became Workers. Two months later he held a second independent mission in County Meath. By 1899 he had gathered enough young male converts to send them out in pairs on an experimental mission to Scotland, putting the Matthew 10 interpretation into practice.

That is when and how the Two by Two began. Ireland, 1897. One man’s reading of one passage. Built on methods he had learned entirely from the Faith Mission, which he had learned from and then departed. Not the first century. Not an unbroken line through history. Not a restoration of the original church. A late Victorian evangelical revival movement founded by a Scottish mining manager who had a theological idea in Ireland in 1897.

The historical record for all of this exists. Court testimony from 1913. A newspaper interview from 1907. Convention sermons printed in the Impartial Reporter newspaper. William Irvine’s own letters, in which he himself claimed to be the founder. Telling the Truth, which maintains the largest collection of 2x2 historical documents on the internet, has assembled this record meticulously. The founding is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of documented historical fact that the community suppressed for generations.

How the lie worked

The claim of apostolic continuity back to Jesus was the central belief in the Two by Two and the source of their authority.

A church with a human founder can be questioned. If William Irvine started this in 1897, then William Irvine made choices that could be evaluated, challenged, found wanting. His interpretation of Matthew 10 could be compared to other interpretations. His methods could be weighed against other methods. The institution he built could be examined as the human institution it was.

But a church that has existed since Jesus — a church that is, by its own claim, the only unbroken continuation of the first-century ministry — cannot be questioned at all. To question it is to question Jesus himself. To leave it is to leave the one true way. To investigate it is to display a faithlessness that disqualifies your conclusions before you can form them.

This is what Robert Jay Lifton called sacred science: the claim that the group’s foundational doctrine is beyond question because it comes from an ultimate authority. Not just true, but unchallengeable. And in the Two by Two, the specific form sacred science took was historical. We were not just spiritually true. We were historically unique. We were the only ones who had been there since the beginning.

Everything the community required of its members rested on that foundation. The demand that Workers give up all possessions — justified by our continuity with the original disciples who did the same. The prohibition on divorce and remarriage — anchored in our status as the true church that had never compromised the original teaching. The shunning of those who left — because leaving the one true way was a spiritual catastrophe, not an authentic spiritual path. The absolute authority of the Overseers — because they stood in an unbroken line of authority going back to Christ.

Remove William Irvine from the story and the whole structure stands. Insert him back in — with his Faith Mission training and his 1897 eureka moment in County Tipperary — and the structure has no foundation. Everything built on the claim of apostolic continuity becomes a human institution making claims it had no right to make.

What it felt like to find out

I want to be honest about what discovering this did to me, because I think many of you will recognize it.

It did not feel like learning new information. It felt like the floor giving way.

Not because I still believed the Two by Two was the one true way — by the time I found this history, I had been out for several years. But because the belief had been installed at a level that went deeper than conscious conviction. I read the entire book, “The Secred Sect” thinking – they could have faked that. That’s not real. It could all have been faked. This is because, even years after I left, Two by Two neural programming determined how I evaluated truth claims. I saw young ex-FLDS women claiming with absolute certainty that Warren Jeffs would be out of jail soon. I understood why they are so convinced of a claim that is clearly a manufactured lie. Even after we leave, the religion is deeply imbedded in our subconscious. After I left, I drew a map of my internal self and wrote a big hole labeled “spirituality” right through the middle. I felt like I had a hole in the middle of my psyche where The Truth had been. The loss of the simple, certain world was incalculable.

Elise Heerde, a religious trauma counsellor and survivor who works with people leaving high-control groups, writes about this dimension of cult recovery: that leaving a high-control group means confronting not just what you believed but how the system taught you to evaluate belief itself. High-control religious systems do more than teach beliefs. They train people to equate certainty with safety. When the source of that certainty is revealed as fabricated, the disorientation rattles you to your core. Your nervous system has been trained to find safety in the system’s claims. I had been permitted no self-identity: my identity was the group identity of Professing Girl. I was only certain of myself in that context.

Kelly Thompson, an LCSW and Two by Two survivor who writes under the banner “There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was),” recently reflected on her own reckoning with the community’s history in a conversation on Mike Prussack’s Beyond Religion podcast: she described finding profound validation in the recent scandal exposure, and explored how creativity and memoir writing serve as powerful tools for healing from religious trauma. The validation she names is real — and I think it is specifically the validation of having your perception confirmed by evidence. When you always knew something was wrong and then the documents prove it, there is grief in that, and also something that feels like being handed back your own sanity.

That is part of what the historical record does for survivors. It confirms what you felt in your body when you were still inside: that the authority being claimed over your life was not what it said it was.

The specific cruelty of a historical lie

There are different kinds of institutional dishonesty. A church can be wrong about theology. It can be wrong about ethics. It can make bad decisions in good faith. These are real failures but they have a different character from what the Two by Two did.

The Two by Two suppressed William Irvine specifically because knowing about him would have ended the authority claim. This was not an error or an omission. It was a sustained, multi-generational institutional decision to hide the founder from the people whose lives were being governed in his name. Workers who knew the history chose silence. Members who stumbled onto the information were discouraged from sharing it. Cherie Kropp-Ehrig, whose meticulous historical research established the founding timeline definitively, did the work the community had every reason to do itself and chose not to do.

You were not kept ignorant because the information was unavailable. You were kept ignorant because ignorance was required for the authority structure to function. Your surrender — of your possessions, your career, your relationships, your right to question — was obtained under false pretenses. The claim that justified all of it was a claim the institution knew was false.

That is a specific and serious harm. It is not the same as being wrong. It is fraud.

What Little Mouse knew before she had the words

There is a moment in Little Mouse and the Purple Door that I wrote before I had fully articulated what I am writing now. The Capybara says to Little Mouse:

“Any village that teaches it’s the True Mouse Way will treat you badly because you can never leave — no matter what they do.”

The claim of being the True Mouse Way is a control mechanism. It forecloses exit before exit is ever contemplated. And in the Two by Two, the specific form that claim took — the historical claim, the apostolic continuity, the unbroken line to Jesus — made it more total than a merely theological claim could have been. You couldn’t just disagree with the doctrine. You had to be willing to say that the entire history was a lie. Which, it turns out, was exactly what the evidence required.

If you are working through what this means for your own story — the surrender you made, the years inside, the grief of having organized your life around a foundation that was fraudulent — the companion journal to Little Mouse has a section specifically for this: the moment the village reveals itself, and what it costs to see it clearly. You can work through it at your own pace, in your own words, with several lines of space for every question. Because your story deserves that much room.

What this means now

William Irvine was eventually excommunicated from the movement he founded — he began claiming to be a prophet in his own right, which the other Workers found inconvenient. He spent the last decades of his life in Jerusalem, writing letters, largely forgotten by the community he had built. He died in 1947. The movement continued without him, and without his name, and without any acknowledgment that he had ever existed.

That is a remarkable thing to sit with. The founder of the Two by Two was erased by them. The community that governed your life by claiming an authority that went back to Jesus was governed, in its origins, by a man they found it useful to pretend had never lived.

You were not wrong to feel, somewhere beneath the doctrine, that something didn’t add up. The historical record confirms it didn’t add up. The foundation was fabricated. The authority was claimed under false pretenses. And every surrender that was demanded of you in the name of that authority was extracted by fraud.

You didn’t lose your faith when you found this out. You found out that your faith had been placed in something that was never what it claimed to be. Those are entirely different things. And the difference matters — not for the institution’s sake, but for yours.

You trusted something that lied to you. That is not a failure of discernment. That is what happens when a sophisticated system is specifically designed to prevent discernment from reaching its conclusions.

There was nothing wrong with you. There never was.

Before you close this article, take a few minutes with this question:

When did you first encounter information that challenged what the Two by Two told you about its own origins — or about itself? Write about that moment. What was the information? How did you respond to it? Did you dismiss it, hide it, share it? And what finally made you willing to take it seriously? The gap between first encountering the truth and being willing to believe it is one of the most important and least-discussed parts of leaving. Your experience of that gap belongs to you — and it’s worth writing down.

Healing happens when we create. Whether you want to write, draw, sculpt, or talk, the healing is in your response. It’s in listening to your inner voice and interacting with the questions in your own way.

Resources

• Amazon Links

  • Little Mouse and the Purple Door

  • Little Mouse Journal

  • Little Bea and the Golden Key

  • Little Bea Journal

• Author’s Work is at Purple Door Journeys — www.purpledoorjourneys.com

• TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor

• Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info | The largest collection of Two by Two historical documents online

• Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634

• Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info

• Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.com

• Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com

• FBI Victim Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2

• Kelly Thompson TNWWY — thompsonk.substack.com | “There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was)”

• Elise Heerde — eliseheerde.com | Religious Trauma Fieldnotes on Substack

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities. Previous articles address financial abuse, mind control and sacred science, the resource-stripping of coercive systems, and why humans are susceptible to high-control groups.