THEY SAY REALITY is subjective, a construct built by our senses and experiences. But when you are in a cult, reality is not yours to define—it belongs to the leader.
It is a commodity that is rationed, altered, and sold back to you at the cost of your sanity. Looking back, the indoctrination process wasn’t a sudden break from the world I knew.
It wasn’t a singular moment where I snapped and decided to believe the unbelievable. It was a slow, methodical coloring of my perception.
It was the gradual erosion of my own judgment, chipped away day by day, until I reached a point where I no longer trusted my own mind.
I became a vessel for someone else’s “truth,” transforming slowly into a mindless robot who executed commands rather than processed thoughts.
The Mechanism of Doubt
The core of the manipulation was a simple, brutal equation that ruled every waking moment of my life: If I thought one thing, but the leader said something else, I was wrong.
It didn’t matter what my senses told me. It didn’t matter what basic logic dictated. It didn’t even matter what I had seen with my own eyes five minutes prior.
If there was a discrepancy between my internal reality and the leader’s spoken words, I would instinctively opt to agree with him. I had been trained to view my own mind as faulty.
I learned to twist my mind into knots, performing exhausting mental gymnastics to make my square peg fit into his round hole.
This wasn’t just about agreement; it was about survival. To belong, I had to abandon my own intuition. Dissent wasn’t just error; it was sin.
Chasing Invisible Beings
One of the starkest examples of this manufactured reality involved the physical world. The leader claimed there were invisible beings attached to our bodies.
He spoke of them with the certainty of a man describing the weather. He gave them histories, locations, and intents.
To my eyes? There was nothing. To my rational mind, which was fighting for its life in the background? It was pure fiction.
But because he said it was law, I forced myself to “find” them. I sat in silence, suppressing my skepticism, straining my imagination until I could validate his claim.
I wasn’t discovering a hidden spiritual truth; I was hallucinating on command. I was inducing a waking dream to avoid the terrifying cognitive dissonance of being the only one who didn’t “see.”
The Consensus Trap
This delusion was compounded by the environment. It wasn’t just the leader gaslighting me in a vacuum; it was everyone around me.
In a high-control group, the consensus is that the Dear Leader is always right. He is the north star by which everyone navigates.
Any thought you have that contradicts him is secondary, inferior, or a sign of your own moral failing. You look around the room, and everyone else seems to be nodding in profound understanding.
They seem to see the invisible beings. They seem to understand the illogical logic. When everyone around you is nodding in agreement with the absurdity, your own reality feels like madness.
You assume you are the broken one. You assume you are the only one missing the frequency.
The False Dependency
This created a false dependency that crippled my ability to function as an adult. I stopped looking inward for answers.
I stopped trusting my gut, which is the primary survival mechanism of any human being. Instead, I looked outward.
I would scan the leader’s face or the group’s reaction to know what I was supposed to think or feel about any given situation.
If a joke was told, I waited to see if the leader laughed before I smiled. If a tragedy occurred, I waited for the group to tell me if we were sad or indifferent.
I had outsourced my personality. I was a mirror, only capable of reflecting what was placed in front of me, incapable of generating my own light.
The “Truth Rundown”
The ultimate weapon in this psychological warfare was a specific practice called the “Truth Rundown.”
This was the institutionalization of gaslighting, given a bureaucratic name and a shiny procedure. During this process, I was forced to look at things I had actually observed.
These were real events, real feelings, and real instances of abuse that I had witnessed. The goal of the rundown was to make me label them as lies.
I had to verbally recant my own history. I had to sit there and invent an “accepted version” of events that satisfied the cult’s narrative and absolved the leadership of blame.
It is a profound violation of the self to look at the truth and call it a lie. It fractures something deep inside your psyche.
The Definition of Gaslighting
This is the definition of gaslighting: not just believing what you saw, but being coerced into believing what you were told to see.
It is the rewriting of history in real-time. By the end of the process, my reality was totally invalidated.
My opinion was only accepted if it mirrored the leader’s. If I held onto my own perception, I was punished, ostracized, or subjected to more “correction.”
I had surrendered my autonomy for the sake of belonging. I dismantled my own reality brick by brick until the only thing left standing was the lie.
I had become the perfect subject: a man who would reject the evidence of his own eyes to please his master.
The Road Back
Recognizing this mechanism is the first step in dismantling their reality and rebuilding your own. It is the moment you stop nodding.
The realization that you were not “crazy,” but rather systematically trained to ignore your own senses, is where freedom begins.
It is a painful process to reclaim your mind. You have to learn to trust your gut again, to value your own perception over the consensus of the crowd.
You have to accept that reality is messy, subjective, and often contradictory, but at least it is yours.
I am no longer a vessel for someone else’s truth. I am the narrator of my own life, and I will never let anyone hold the pen again.
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About the Author
Michael J. Mallen is a psychological thriller author and a survivor of coercive mind control. He draws on his real-world experience with dark psychology to deconstruct predatory behavior in his blog and his fiction. He is the author of the Nadine Singh Thrillers.
Curious how a cult leader operates?
Read False Idol – The Cult Thriller