“Sometimes walking away is the only way to stop walking away from yourself.” ~unknown
I was in session. My TV was on in the background—something I had half started watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives On Hulu—I went into the kitchen and made lunch.
It’s about a group of Mormon wives who became famous on TikTok and became known as “Soft Swing”. In one scene, a young woman argues with her mother, who has a long list of rules about how her daughter should behave. The daughter is avoiding church, tiptoeing around threats of excommunication, and trying to hold on to her independence without losing her family.
I stood there watching, lunch forgotten, because something in it stopped me.
He is struggling between who he really is and who he is. And this is not just the human condition?
We crave connection. We’re hardware for it, for better and for worse. But tribal connections come with a price. It always has. You follow the rules. You hold on to the parts of yourself that don’t fit—sometimes small parts, sometimes huge parts—and in return, you can belong. It’s a transaction. Just change hands without dollar bills.
The underlying deal is: earn your spot, stay in your lane, and the group will keep you. It is a type of token economy. An unspoken loyalty agreement. And most of us signed it before we were old enough to read the fine print.
I was in a cult for forty-three years
It was not a religious cult. There were no costumes, no compounds, no charismatic leaders asking for your savings account. It was subtler and more comprehensive than that.
It was called the religion of man. Human worship is innate in most of us.
It’s the constant noise of other people’s needs, opinions, and expectations.
It is the function of connection – seeking external validation, addiction to choice, need, inclusion.
It is organizing your entire inner life around what the people around you can tolerate.
It is making itself small enough, delicious enough, agreeable enough to keep the peace and keep the people.
I have been a devoted member for forty-three years. I didn’t know I was in it. That’s how cults work.
Seven years of deprogramming
About seven years ago I started leaving. Not intentionally, at first. It came as a byproduct of things I didn’t choose—epidemics, raising a child with special needs, and the slow, messy work of therapy. I began to see, for the first time, how much I had been able to reach and earn for most of my life. How far I pulled myself away from being connected to people who needed me to be manageable.
I didn’t want to earn anymore. But I didn’t know what or who would earn me.
So I found out.
Seven years of tears. Loneliness that had no bottom. Common anxiety attacks in the middle of the day. Heartbreak and loss I did not see coming. Watching my circle get smaller and smaller and wondering if I somehow caused this. Feeling, at times, I was in hell.
I don’t want to paint it as something beautiful, because it wasn’t. But it has been something. And it was not wasted.
What deprogramming actually looks like
In true religion, deprogramming requires distance. Before you can begin to see the water you’ve been swimming in, you need to distance yourself from the group that claimed your self-betrayal—physically, emotionally, sometimes permanently.
When you start to distance yourself from people’s religion, a few things happen.
First, there seems to be something wrong with you. you calm down You stop performing. You decline invitations that you used to accept out of obligation. Your circle is shrinking. People around you – still inside the religion – don’t understand this, and some of them take it personally. Because in religion, withdrawal is the most threatening thing you can do. The cult needs your participation to survive.
But something else also happens. Because you’ve already been abandoned by people who couldn’t honestly pursue you, abandonment loses some of its power. Stop lying to yourself to stay connected. You begin to see the underlying contracts of your entire life—all the ways you’ve made a pact with the group, traded pieces of yourself for pieces of yourself, and called it love.
You begin to see clearly. And clarity, it turns out, is both the gift and the sorrow of this whole process.
of both/and
No one here tells you to give up people’s religion: it just doesn’t feel like freedom right now. It feels like a loss. It feels lonely. Looks like you made a terrible mistake.
And at the same time, underneath it all, something else is growing. Something calm and steady. A self that is not performing. A voice you can actually trust. An internal compass that works because it’s not being scrambled by everyone else’s signals.
It is the both/and that healing actually looks like – neither/or, neither broken nor healed, neither lost nor found. Both. at the same time To be broken and to be broken at the same time. Sad and longing and also, somewhere beneath it, you know you deserve better. Making all the right decisions and still watching things fall apart. Listening to the voice in your head that tears you apart and still—still—kindly holding the younger version of yourself.
It is not a weakness. It’s actually what it’s like to be a man in the middle of being more honest.
The path to freedom
I am not completely deprogrammed. I didn’t even notice that. I’m still single. I still sometimes feel the pull to return to the room which costs me a lot. I still mourn the connections that didn’t survive to become my own.
But I’m more comfortable with sadness than ever. It doesn’t scare me like it did. I learned to sit with myself in a way I couldn’t before – not because the discomfort went away, but because I stopped running from it.
What I know now is this: the same thing that means no one is going to save you means that no one is going to stop you. Loneliness that seems like abandonment also becomes the open road. When you stop organizing your life into what the group can tolerate, you’ll find out—perhaps for the first time—what you really want. Who you really are. What you are actually capable of.
This is not a consolation prize.
This is the way to freedom.
about Alison Briggs
Alison Jeanette Briggs is a therapist, author and speaker who helps women heal from codependency, childhood trauma and emotional neglect. She blends psychological insight with spiritual depth to guide clients and readers toward confidence, boundaries, and authentic connection. Alison is the author of the forthcoming memoir On Being Real: Healing the Co-Dependent Heart of a Woman and shares her reflections on healing, resilience and inner freedom here. on-being-real.com.
