Making peace with your “cult self”
Why this protective part deserves compassion
The RHR Digest | Publication Date: November 7th, 2025
Key Points:
If you were raised in a high-control religion or indoctrinated into a religious cult, you likely had to create a version of yourself that could survive inside that system.
This was the version of you that learned to obey, suppress doubts, and mirror what was expected.
Many people later come to identify this version of themselves as their “cult self,” a term used by cult experts like Steven Hassan and Jana Lalich to describe the self that emerges under the pressures of thought reform and control.
For many survivors of religious indoctrination, the memory of their “cult self” can bring up shame, disgust, or even guilt.
If you recognize yourself as having a cult self, you might look back and ask, “Why did I believe that?” or “Why did I treat people that way?”
But the truth is, this version of you was doing its best to keep you safe in an unsafe system.
The cult self is actually and adaptive part that stepped in to help you survive.
Why the Cult Self Forms
Steven Hassan describes the cult self as a “pseudo-identity” that forms through systematic control of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions—a framework known as the BITE Model.
In a high-control religion, your independent thoughts and emotions are often labeled as sinful or rebellious.
And at a minimum, most people learn that they can’t trust their thoughts or desires.
Over time, the authentic self retreats to the background, and the cult self becomes dominant to help you survive in that system.
Jana Lalich expands on this through her concept of bounded choice, which explains how even intelligent, kind people can make harmful or self-suppressing decisions when all available choices are constrained by indoctrination.
Within that limited worldview, the cult self has taken on the role of an obedient follower because no other options felt safe or available to you.
Developing a cult self is a natural psychological response to coercive control.
It’s how your brain and body protected you.
Seeing it this way helps move the focus away from blame and toward compassion.
Common Characteristics of the Cult Self
While everyone’s experience is different, there are common traits that tend to appear in those who lived under religious or cultic systems:
These traits often remain even after leaving, showing up as self-doubt, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or a fear of making “wrong” decisions.
How the Cult Self Affects You After Leaving
When you leave a high-control religion, your authentic self doesn’t instantly return.
The cult self often lingers because it was wired through years of conditioning.
This means you may still:
This can create an internal tug-of-war between the authentic self that longs for freedom and the cult self that still believes safety comes from obedience.
Recognizing this dynamic is the first step towards making peace with this part of you.
Making Peace with Your Cult Self
It’s really common to carry negative emotions towards the “cult self” or to want to completely erase this part of your past. You might feel ashamed of the beliefs you held, the actions you took, or the person you became under control.
But wanting to destroy or reject this part of yourself can actually cause more internal conflict and distress because the cult self originally developed as a protective mechanism—a survival strategy that helped you navigate an unsafe environment.
When you try to eradicate it, you’re essentially attacking a part of yourself that was trying to keep you safe.
This creates an internal war that can lead to increased shame, self-criticism, and disconnection from yourself.
The goal, instead, should be to integrate the cult self with compassion.
Integration doesn’t mean agreeing with past beliefs or behaviors.
It simply means acknowledging that this part of you existed for a reason and deserves understanding rather than condemnation.
Healing will often include bringing understanding and care to that part of you, recognizing its protective function, and gently helping it understand that you’re now safe enough to live authentically.
Here are ways to begin:
1. Acknowledge the Protective Function
Remind yourself that the cult self developed to help you stay safe and accepted. You learned the rules you were given. Survival required compliance, not rebellion.
Try journaling from your cult self’s perspective: “I was trying to keep you safe. I thought following the rules would protect us.”
This exercise can soften judgment and open empathy.
2. Practice Inner Dialogue
Borrowing from Internal Family Systems (IFS), imagine your authentic self gently connecting with the cult self.
Instead of pushing it away, you can say: “I know you were scared. You did what you had to do. You don’t have to run things anymore.”
This allows for integration instead of conflict.
3. Reclaim Agency
Each time you make a decision that reflects your true values, you weaken the control of the cult self.
Small, intentional choices—what you wear, what you read, what you believe—are powerful acts of self-reclamation.
4. Seek Supportive Communities
Healing happens best in safe, validating spaces.
Whether it’s a support group, a therapist familiar with religious trauma, or a recovery community, surround yourself with people who understand this process without judgment.
5. Learn About Thought Reform
Reading the work of cult experts can help you make cognitive sense of what happened to you, creating space for you to separate your identity from the system that shaped it.
When you understand the mechanisms of control, you begin to reclaim your story.
6. Allow Grief
Making peace means grieving the years lived under control and the parts of you that were silenced.
Letting yourself feel the sadness is what frees you to live as your full self again.
Offering Compassion to Your Cult Self
You don’t have to hate the version of you who once believed, obeyed, or complied.
That version of you was loyal, hopeful, and doing the best it could with the information and constraints it had.
Making peace with your cult self is essential for inner peace because doing so allows you to fully accept yourself and move forward without shame or self-condemnation.
As you hold this part of yourself with compassion, you’re cultivating the ability to look back with clear eyes and a soft heart, recognizing that survival sometimes requires you to become someone you wouldn’t have chosen to be.
Integration takes time, and there’s no timeline for this work.
Every compassionate acknowledgment of who you were helps you live more fully as who you are now.
Each moment you choose curiosity over judgment, understanding over shame, you’re rewriting the internal narrative that kept you bound.
You’re teaching that protective part of yourself that it can finally rest—that you’re safe now to be exactly who you are.
This is how healing happens: not through rejection, but through radical acceptance of your whole story.
Going Deeper
Here are a couple questions to journal about or to unpack during your next therapy session:
All of this is completely relatable; thank you, Megan. Your description of cult self characteristics and post-cult behaviors fits me perfectly–and I say that with shame but as much self-compassion as I can muster. Probably like many of us, indoctrination and the expectation of obedience, suppression, and compliance started for me at birth; my authentic, original self is buried very, very deep. So I especially appreciated the thoughts and resources you include here on separating identity from the system that shaped it.