Sarah Edmondson
Do you think you could never be indoctrinated into a cult? Sarah Edmondson wants you to think again. Sarah spent 12 years in the NXIVM cult, where otherwise bright, well-meaning women were being coerced, abused and turned into sex slaves by the now convicted felon, Keith Raniere. In this episode, Sarah shares how her own intuition was slowly dismantled by the cult, and how you can spot the red flags of any type of abusive power before it’s too late.
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In this episode:
Life before NXIVM.
The core promises of the cult.
Rules and rituals of the community.
Making the decision to leave and meet with the DEA.
The process of healing and deprogramming.
Where Sarah’s life is today and her hope moving forward.
LINKS & RESOURCES:
Website: www.sarahedmondson.com
Book: Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped Nxivm, the Cult That Bound My Life
Charity Donation: www.igotout.org
Podcast: A Little Bit Culty
Instagram: @sarahedmondson | @alittlebitculty
Resources to help anyone:
in a high-control group or a cult
trying to figure out if you are in one
trying to help someone else get out of a one
Wise Words:
I think that's actually one of the most horrific things that were done to us is that our intuition was slowly dismantled.
The big promise really is joy. Imagine a world with joy. Imagine a world where nobody was petty. Nobody hated each other. We wouldn't bomb each other. We would take care of each other. Humanity would be united. This was the big promise to evolve ourselves, to evolve our petty issues, to evolve our likes and dislikes so that we could all get along as a human team.
So world peace, really, is the big promise, but starting with ourselves
What was a problem is that what I was selling and what I was doing was actually the opposite of what I said I was selling. So that was the trauma at the end of my 12 years, to find out that I had been pitching Keith as a humanitarian, ethical, compassionate leader and finding out that he, as you said earlier, he’s not only a conman, but he's…evil is a word that I struggle with because that was a word that was sort of discounted in NXIVM.
So I'm not sure how you wanna frame it, but he was a very bad person who hurt a lot of people and manipulated a lot of people.
We all underestimated the lengths to which people around him would lie.
I felt very uncomfortable, and I told her that, and she said, great.
It should feel uncomfortable. That means you're doing it right. And again, the indoctrination that leads up to this point makes me ripe to agree, okay, it's supposed to feel this way. It's supposed to feel uncomfortable in my body, that I'm pushing through that on purpose. That's what this whole thing's about.
I'm in a system where I believe that the people above me know better than me, which is one of the problems that I see with cults all the time if you're giving your authority to somebody else. And that's part of the nature of the dependency, which makes that structure inherent for any abuse of power to be incredibly detrimental.
Once we knew about the sex and he knew about the branding, we realized this was way worse than either of us could have imagined.
I had to constantly, and I'm still constantly questioning, do I believe that or is that something I learned there? And even if I did learn it there, is it something I wanna keep?
And if it is something I wanna keep, for me, part of my process is figuring out where that concept came from, like out in the world. Because a lot of times people leave their religions or their course of control or whoever, whatever group they're in, and they have to throw it all out or, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater as they say.
And for me, I didn't really wanna do that because there were so many good things that I got from the community
People who think that they're not susceptible or the most susceptible because they don't take the time to educate themselves. I wish I had been educated on the red flags of course, of control and cultic abuse.
It's great to want to better oneself. But the message I would have there is that you can do that in a way where you do not become dependent on a guru or an organization or a path or a way, because that's where you put yourself in a very vulnerable position and you don't need those things.
And also you're not broken. You're totally enough as you are.