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The Good Men Project [Pasadena CA]
November 2, 2025
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen
How does trauma-informed storytelling empower survivors of clergy and cult abuse through narrative agency and psychological healing?
Michelle Stewart is a cult survivor, author, and advocate whose memoir, “Judas Girl: My Father, Four Cults & How I Escaped Them All,” chronicles her childhood entry into, and adult exit from, multiple high-control religious groups. Raised in an environment that included a Hutterite community and other Anabaptist and Orthodox enclaves, she examines how spiritual authority, conformity, and secrecy enable abuse: Stewart’s work centers survivor safety, legal accountability, and ethical pastoral confidentiality. From Colorado, she speaks and writes about distinguishing mainstream faith from cultic enclaves, reforming confession practices, and fostering healing narratives that emphasize agency, nonlinearity, and evidence-based support for survivors.
In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Stewart differentiates organized religion from cults by centering survivor experience, highlighting speech suppression, enforced conformity, and authoritarian leadership. She recounts entering high-control groups as a child, including a Hutterite community, and leaving four groups by her twenties. Stewart critiques how confession and obedience to spiritual fathers can be weaponized, especially in Eastern Orthodox and Anabaptist enclaves, shielding crimes and silencing victims. She argues for universal mandatory reporting, accountability, and practical reforms prioritizing child safety and legal responsibility. As a survivor-advocate, she promotes trauma-informed interviewing and healing narratives emphasizing agency, nonlinearity, and systemic change over sensational detail.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Judas girl herself, Michelle Stewart. You are a cult survivor turned author and advocate. There are a few kinds of people: some are still in the cult, some have left and never talk about it again, and some, like you, write, speak, and advocate about this troubling aspect of human psychology and group dynamics. Let’s start with the obvious question: what separates a cult from a formal religion for you?
Michelle Stewart: I’ve been asked that many times, and you’ll hear different definitions from different people. There are shared traits, but no single academic litmus test—no exact checklist that determines whether something is a cult. My understanding has evolved. While there are standard features, I believe it’s the experiences of survivors that reveal whether something truly functions as a cult. When I talk with people from various groups—fringe offshoots of mainstream traditions, Amish or other Anabaptist communities, the Unification Church (often called the “Moonies”), or the Twelve Tribes—specific themes repeat. One is the inability to speak out freely. People may hold personal differences in belief or culture, but challenging authority often leads to ostracism. You can’t both belong and speak out. This shows up primarily in cases of abuse—people risk losing community, family ties, and support systems. Another consistent feature is the demand for conformity. In most mainstream congregations—Episcopal, Baptist, or Jewish synagogues—you see substantial diversity in lifestyle, politics, and personal views. In high-control groups, there’s far greater oversight of daily life. For example, some Orthodox Jewish communities observe detailed dietary laws (halakha) but also include health exemptions; in certain separatist Christian groups, such as some Anabaptist or Old Order communities, dress codes can be strict and engagement with outside politics limited or guided by leaders. In some groups, political or social views are tightly scripted. Within broad traditions you can find both healthy, pluralistic congregations and insular enclaves that become high-control. For instance, Eastern Orthodox Christianity as a whole is a mainstream religion. Yet, particular enclaves or breakaway groups can operate in cult-like ways. That distinction matters. People often respond, “You can’t call the Orthodox Church or the Amish a cult.” Labels applied to an entire faith are rarely accurate. But a person can have a cult-like experience within a subset of almost any tradition. You can live under a cult mentality while still being nominally part of a larger, mainstream religion.
Jacobsen: How does your experience fit into that? How did you fall into it?
Stewart: How did I fall into cults? I was brought in as a child. I was seven when my parents joined what I describe in my book Judas Girl: My Father, Four Cults & How I Escaped Them All as the first of four cults. For me, it began as a childhood experience that I later had to leave as an adult. When I entered, I had no understanding of what a cult was or even the vocabulary to describe it. I only knew that suddenly, I was in a highly controlled environment. The first group was a Hutterite community.
As I mentioned earlier, you can have an organized religion with cult-like enclaves within it. Moving from a mainstream evangelical background into a setting where the group controlled all finances, clothing, housing, work, and spending meant having almost no personal autonomy. I knew it was different, but I didn’t understand what those differences meant until years later. It wasn’t until my twenties—after four separate groups—that I escaped and began to reflect on and understand those experiences.
Jacobsen: What were the through lines for those four groups?
Stewart: Just to make sure I understand correctly—the commonalities between the four? Yes. There were several universal through lines. They connect back to how I define a cult. The first was that in all of these groups, church leadership was revered far above the average member and held unquestioned authority. There’s irony in the fact that many of them referred to their leaders as “servants,” when in practice, it was the opposite.https://c820bf8c4bac7639ec28d18d382c3f51.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html
Whether it was an Orthodox priest or a bishop in an Anabaptist sect—the kind I spent years in—the leader’s opinions were treated as sacred and beyond challenge. As a lay member, especially as a woman, my opinion was not considered equal. I was taught to accept that my wisdom was inferior. Leadership was seen as divinely superior.
With that came varying degrees of control. In some groups, the leader’s authority was absolute—obey or be expelled. In others, defiance led to psychological punishment: being ignored, condemned to hell, or subtly ostracized. It wasn’t always physical rejection but often psychological manipulation. That dynamic was consistent across every group.
Another constant was the use of God and salvation to control people. There was a mentality—unstated but deeply ingrained—that the ends justified the means. If you had to shun, manipulate, or even lie to someone to preserve their “salvation,” it was seen as justified. Abuse—whether psychological, emotional, or, for children, even physical—was rationalized in the name of saving souls. The goal was to ensure compliance with the group’s beliefs at any cost, because salvation was considered paramount.
Of course, not all cults are religious, but in my case, they all were. These were faith-based, coercive systems—extreme forms of existing religions. In this case, extreme iterations of Christianity, specifically of the Anabaptist tradition, which emerged during the Reformation and includes Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites, as well as parallels in specific Orthodox contexts. They were radical offshoots of otherwise recognized faiths.
There’s one more through line worth mentioning: the suppression of individuality. In every group, personal expression was discouraged. In some, conformity was enforced through clothing. In others, like the Orthodox sect I was part of, individuality was discouraged in thought, behavior, and aesthetics. Even how you decorated your home, prayed, or spoke had to conform. There was a constant demand for uniformity, presented as a condition for salvation.
Jacobsen: There are two points I want to touch on. The book is not anti-faith; it’s anti-abuse. The other is your father’s declining mental health, with his reported revelations. Can you expand on the distinction made in the former and the development—or deterioration—of the latter?
Stewart: That’s an essential aspect for me. Judas Girl speaks candidly about religion and religious control. As we discussed, there’s a difference between a cult and an organized religion, and beyond that, between people of faith and those with no organized religion at all. Judas Girl is meant to be accessible. If you’re not a person of faith, you won’t feel pressured to embrace someone else’s God. You can read it from a secular perspective. But if you are a person of faith, it’s written to help you understand how elements of faith can be both used and abused. In a sense, it’s almost written to protect faith.
There’s often backlash from people with a cultic mindset who claim that speaking out against a church is the same as speaking out against God. To me, speaking out against religious abuse is actually faith-affirming—just as speaking out against child abuse is affirming of parenthood and family. You can condemn abuse without condemning the larger institution. Abuse isn’t inherent to religion, but acknowledging and addressing it is essential for any faith to survive. I try to make that distinction clear throughout the book. It’s not a confrontation with God; it’s a confrontation with people who misuse God.
As for my father’s mental illness, it developed gradually. In his case, I believe his illness was the on-ramp to these extremist groups. He began showing schizoid and borderline personality traits. He was later diagnosed with aspects of both, although he avoided psychiatric treatment whenever possible. People with that type of mental framework tend to see things in extremes—very black and white—and that meshed perfectly with the rigid, binary worldview of cults.
There was also a part of him that wanted what he saw as a simpler life, which is ironic because being in a cult is anything but easy. They may offer a sense of unity and care, but the cost is enormous—far greater than simply living independently. His black-and-white mindset absorbed cult ideology like a sponge. As he developed more religious delusions—believing himself, and later others, to be prophets—he became increasingly susceptible to manipulation by cult leaders claiming divine authority.
Those two factors—mental illness and cult influence—worked in parallel. Each reinforced the other. Both eroded his ability to reason or listen to outside perspectives. When we entered a new group, family members who spoke against it became “the enemy.” Similarly, people with untreated mental illness often reject voices of reason that might anchor them. As he cut those ties, he spiraled further, descending into a kind of shared psychosis between his own mind and the cult ideology.
Jacobsen: How did you feel about that during that time? And how do you think about it now, knowing it doesn’t work?
Stewart: At the time, my understanding changed across my cult experiences. At first, I was young, and my father told me he believed he had a physical illness. I also didn’t have the education to understand mental illness. Another common thread in all these cults was a systematic denial of mental illness. They didn’t acknowledge it as real, or if they did, they framed it as a deliberate choice or a sin. That encouraged him and left me without tools or vocabulary. Someone growing up in secular society might encounter diagnoses and develop understanding earlier than I did. I first believed him when he said he was physically ill. As he developed spiritual delusions, I took them at face value. I was a child. It was terrifying, but I believed completely. When we entered an off-grid Anabaptist commune, by the fifth or sixth year the group started pushing back on him. I was a member of that church, which meant my obedience was to them over my parents. It was a conflict, but I had to obey the church. They confronted my dad. They wouldn’t call it mental illness; they called it lying and sin.
“We have deemed you are not a prophet. We have deemed you are not unwell.” That was even scarier, and it’s where part of the Judas Girl concept comes from. I had two authorities—a father and a church—each telling me to reject the other or go to hell and be abandoned. Both ended up dumping me. As that evolved and I gained my own understanding, it created a schism that made me question both my father’s mental well-being and these cult mentalities. It took a long time to put together. I knew the questions were growing, and they were confusing and terrifying at the time. As an adult, with education and academic learning about mental illness—and curiosity about my own experience—I look back and see a heartbreaking story of a father who was abusive, manipulative, and controlling, but also very ill and in need of help, exploited by cults and extreme religion. That is one foundation for why I wrote the book: to bring these thought processes and psychology to light so people can better understand cults around them and, possibly, their own experiences.
Jacobsen: Let’s take a round-table view. You’ve looked at Eastern Orthodox hierarchy as a kind of petri dish where allegations can climb multiple layers. How does that model differ from, for example, the Catholic Church’s more centralized, pyramidal hierarchy and the autocephalous—though still hierarchical—structure of Orthodoxy?
Stewart: I don’t have personal experience in the Catholic Church, so when I speak about it, I’m referring to conversations with people who do. We’ve compared stories. What stood out to me in the Eastern Orthodox Church—stronger than what my Catholic friends described—was the control held by the spiritual father, the confessor. In my experience, that person had enormous power over how one perceived salvation. They often used that influence to control people who wanted to report abuse.
The article we discussed was about abuse. I, along with others who I won’t name, experienced situations where we wanted to say, “I was abused, and I’m struggling.” The response was that seeking accountability outside confession wasn’t our role. It was said to be between the abuser and their spiritual father. We were told to confess our resentment or “unforgiving heart,” but never to speak publicly.
I saw that mindset climb the hierarchy. There’s a current case involving Father Matthew Williams—my brother-in-law—where layers of cover-up are alleged. There’s evidence that misconduct occurred long before the cases now on trial. When I say “petri dish,” I mean that the Church sees itself as responsible for the sins of its members—but only internally, to the exclusion of external authorities. In practice, this means that even criminal acts are treated as matters for spiritual correction rather than legal accountability.
While the Catholic Church has had cover-ups too, what sets parts of Orthodoxy apart, based on my experience and conversations, is the intense secrecy. The idea that “it’s not the business of the secular world to know the sins of the Church” allows abuse to remain hidden. I know people who were told explicitly that if they reported abuse, they would be denied communion. Considering that communion is tied to salvation, withholding it is devastating. That level of spiritual coercion goes beyond what I’ve heard in Catholic contexts. I have seen similar tactics in cultic environments. Still, within Orthodoxy, it’s distinct in how authority and obedience are used to silence victims.
Jacobsen: What are the ethical lines between pastoral confidentiality and shielding a crime?
Stewart: It’s interesting. I mentioned earlier that I have a social media account where people discuss these topics, and this week’s discussion was about the protections of confession—particularly when child abuse is confessed. Where are the ethical lines in that situation? I don’t have an obvious answer. Still, I believe the well-being of children and victims of sexual assault should always take priority.
Suppose a clergy member—or anyone providing pastoral care—is aware of ongoing abuse. In that case, I believe they have an ethical duty to protect the person being harmed. I phrased that deliberately: there’s a narrow space in pastoral care, especially under the sacrament of confession, where someone might seek forgiveness for past misdeeds that are no longer ongoing. In those cases, the clergy member might not be a mandatory reporter, though even that should be carefully examined. Those instances are rare, but they exist.
What troubles me most is why pastoral care—whether in Orthodox, Catholic, Amish, or Methodist settings—so often excludes accountability. Why is legal responsibility not part of the moral direction given by those in authority? It’s well known that, in many cases, it isn’t. Returning to our earlier discussion about the “petri dish” of confession, if clergy hold such profound authority in a person’s life, why isn’t that authority used to encourage, or even require, legal accountability?
Why are these two realms—spiritual care and justice—so disconnected? We’ve created a system where, in some Orthodox confessions and even specific Catholic contexts depending on jurisdiction, someone can confess to actively abusing a person and remain confident that no one will report it. They can continue serving as clergy, or in any position of authority, with complete impunity. That raises the deeper question: why are we still preserving this expectation of absolute privacy for abusers, instead of fostering a norm that confession should lead to accountability and protection for victims?
Jacobsen: This has been a recurring theme across some of my conversations—with counselors, psychologists, psychotherapists, and social workers—people who deal directly with the individual psyche and moral responsibility every day.
Through some of my conversations with counseling psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and social workers—people who deal with individuals one-on-one in intimate settings—I’ve noticed that these professions are bound by a clear duty to report abuse. Clergy, on the other hand, are also a kind of professional class. They’re educated, often intelligent, and serve hierarchical community roles.
Yet they’re not bound as strictly by mandatory reporting laws. There was a bill introduced in California last year to change that, but it didn’t pass. These are recurring concerns. So, what justifies lowering the universal standard of duty to report within religious contexts—for priests, bishops, or other clergy?
Why is that the case, and why shouldn’t it be? Why does religion get that exemption?
Stewart: My personal view is nuanced, but I believe there should be a consistent standard across professions. The argument for giving clergy a lower reporting standard doesn’t hold up when compared to the reasoning used for psychiatric or social work confidentiality.
When I’ve spoken with people who support the priest-penitent privilege, they often cite the sacramental nature of confession. The laws vary by state, and some jurisdictions differentiate between a casual conversation with a pastor and a formal sacramental confession. That distinction, mainly relevant to Catholic and Orthodox churches, effectively creates a privileged carve-out. A conversation with a minister in a Protestant setting might not receive the same protection, which raises fairness concerns on its own.
The justification I hear most often—and I can understand it emotionally, even if I disagree—is that this protection encourages abusers to seek repentance. The logic goes: if someone knows their confession could lead to legal consequences, they may never come forward, and the abuse will continue unchecked. By maintaining confidentiality, the clergy can supposedly help the person change course.
I understand that rationale but reject it. Mental health professionals also want people to come forward, to seek help for harmful impulses or past actions. But their systems recognize that protecting victims must take precedence over preserving an abuser’s privacy. The same principle should apply to clergy.
When confidentiality shields active abuse, it becomes complicity. There are cases where priests have confessed to abusing their own children, and the information was never reported. The result was continued reoffending. That, to me, is the moral failure of this privileged exemption. The idea that pastoral confidentiality should outweigh the safety of victims—especially in cases of ongoing abuse—is indefensible.
We know that the data show recidivism rates are high. We know from data that someone confessing to many of these crimes is highly likely to reoffend, even if the incident they’re confessing to is in the past. For that same reason, while I have empathy and sympathy for people in the Catholic or Orthodox churches who want to protect that sanctity—and that the seal of confession has long been recognized as inviolable—I think the victim’s rights truly have to come first, for the same reasons the psychological community reached that conclusion.
Jacobsen: What else? What would signal actual reform?
Stewart: I would say a public embrace of accountability. I would love—well, I mean, we never want a crime to have occurred—but I would love to see a scenario where a priest stepped up and reported abuse. I would like to see the church stand behind him. For example, years ago, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Christ of the Hills Monastery in Blanco, Texas. I happened to be; my then-spouse was being used by the defense in a child sexual abuse case. The conversation came up that they might try to subpoena the alleged perpetrator’s spiritual fathers to testify as to whether he had confessed to sexual abuse. The response was universal: “We will go to jail before we break the seal of confession.” And again, I understand that faith is deep and complicated, and I hurt for anyone who feels they must make that decision. However, reform to me would have been the opposite: the church saying, “We have potential child victims—ongoing child victims. We are accountable to the state first. We hold our clergy to higher standards than the general public, not lower.” That kind of accountability would signal real reform.
It would also help if people were made very clear—even in confession or religious counseling—that taking accountability for your actions outside of skipping communion for a few months is part of repentance. It’s part of the path to healing, not a way to avoid facing consequences. Changing that narrative entirely would give the process absolute integrity. Frankly, it would prevent more abuse than sheltering people in confession ever could. Right now, many think, “All I have to do is confess.” We know clergy members have confessed to child sexual abuse and then continued to serve liturgy afterward. If they knew that confession would not remain purely private, that would put real weight behind accountability and integrity within the church. It could be a significant turning point in shifting the culture around abuse.
Jacobsen: What about those without significant agency—children who grow up under those conditions? What are the additional risks and contexts for them in terms of community safety? For instance, we know from Orthodox records that most sexual assault cases involve adult women. In contrast, most pedophilic cases involve young boys. But children have an additional lack of agency when they’re cognitively undeveloped and under coercive control—not just part of a community but trapped within it. From your experience in law, is there additional context for that, or does the law treat both roughly the same, perhaps just applying child abuse statutes?
Stewart: I’ll answer this as best I can, and you can tell me if it needs reframing. As far as victims of abuse, what I’ve seen and experienced—and I mentioned this earlier—is the silencing of those victims. That needs to be completely reversed. I’ve seen policies in more mainstream churches where a victim of abuse knows they’ll receive immediate support if they report, rather than the church systematically silencing them or treating it as a matter for confession or for clergy to decide. I’ve seen this repeatedly across multiple churches with a cult-like mentality, where victims are told that forgiveness is required. That includes me. When you struggle psychologically, mentally, or emotionally as a victim of abuse, that struggle is layered on as another sin—your supposed inability to forgive or heal. It becomes another mechanism of control. I’ve also heard of more than one case where priests asked victims to recount details of their abuse repeatedly in confession.
I bring that up because part of the change I want to see is not only ensuring safety and the right to come forward, but also reforming how confession itself is taught and understood—how to identify abuse and manipulation even within the sacrament. That means recognizing when a priest abuses that role, whether for gratification or power. Confession should never be a place of manipulation. It should be spiritual guidance, not the endpoint for psychological, medical, or legal support. It’s a place for spiritual reflection, not for silencing or retraumatization.
Jacobsen: Your focus is on systems critique within the personal narrative. Do you ever focus on individual perpetrators who hold significant authority? Is it appropriate to do so, or is it generally better to focus on systems to achieve accountability?
Stewart: I think you need both. When I wrote my book, it came very much from a personal perspective. Specific individuals absolutely need to be called out. Abusers should be named, and every victim deserves full support and access to resources. Hence, they know it wasn’t their fault and that help exists. Focusing on specific perpetrators definitely has its place. In personal life, that’s often how things unfold—you respond to harm by identifying those responsible. Each scenario deserves attention and accountability.
That said, I lean toward systemic analysis because there’s always a percentage of any population that will abuse—whether through rape, child molestation, or psychological harm. What distinguishes abuse within specific religious systems is that those systems build scaffolding that allows abuse to thrive. It’s not limited to cults or extremist sects; we’ve seen it in mainstream religious institutions as well.
My focus happens to be on those environments where abuse in a more mainstream religious setting might be reported and stopped much more quickly. In contrast, some institutions create conditions where abuse thrives. I know you focus a lot on the Orthodox Church. Still, I’ve also done much work with Amish and Amish offshoots, which have very similar approaches. What we see in those cases are abusers who remain active for years, often with multiple victims, all covered for by the system.
Now, of course, the individual abuser is fully responsible for their behavior. But could they have been stopped if they lived within a structure that required accountability—mandatory reporting, sex offender registries, restrictions from being near children—instead of simply confessing, facing minimal church discipline, and then being placed back into authority over the same vulnerable groups? That, to me, is the key difference.
I live in Colorado. We have wildfires here. If a fire breaks out in a swamp, it won’t spread far. It’s still a fire and still dangerous, but in a wet area, it’s contained. Now imagine a drought area, like much of California. A single spark can become a massive blaze. The person who lit that spark is responsible, but the conditions make the destruction far greater. That’s how I see institutional abuse. Each case matters, but these systems create drought-like conditions—structures that let a small flame turn into a wildfire destroying countless lives. That’s where my focus lies.
Jacobsen: What are the consistencies in how cults and religions handle abuse cases? If someone were abused within the Moonies or within Orthodoxy, both institutions would respond in specific ways. What aspects would be essentially identical?
Non-extreme religions or cults too. When I interviewed David Pooler, he noted that regardless of Christian denomination, the immediate institutional response to clergy abuse is usually self-protection—and the community participates in that defensiveness. So, in that sense, cults and religions behave similarly.
Stewart: That’s a good observation. Reflecting on Pooler’s comment, I’d agree that there’s a general human tendency across institutions to be defensive. You can even see it in nonreligious contexts like the Boy Scouts. This organization systemically hid abuse to protect itself.
Where extreme religions and mainstream ones could diverge is in their foundation for accountability. Some mainstream or progressive religious institutions have taken steps to ensure victims or perpetrators are referred to legal and psychological support systems. But yes, many spiritual and organizational structures share that same reflex: to defend the institution, preserve public image, and protect financial interests. Religious organizations handle millions or even billions of dollars, and that economic dimension often reinforces secrecy.
Still, I’ve also seen positive exceptions. Some churches have acknowledged abuse publicly, reported it to authorities, and immediately defrocked or removed offending clergy. So, I wouldn’t say the behavior is universal across all religions. There’s a clear dividing line between how extreme or insular groups respond versus how more progressive, accountable, or legally compliant ones do.
Jacobsen: How can you tell a story while maintaining the objective fact that people have been victimized—whether or not they identify as victims, or adopt a survivor mindset, or eventually move toward one? That’s mainly up to them. So when it comes to interview practices and media work involving people who’ve been victimized—especially in cult contexts—how should we avoid falling into what’s often called “trauma porn”? How do we prevent the stigmatization or sensationalizing of trauma while still telling stories factually and empathetically, incorporating that first-person perspective? What are your recommendations?
Stewart: I love that question. And I’ve had to confront it while writing my own story—which, with permission, includes parts of others’ stories too. It’s a tricky space, and I don’t think there’s an obvious line. It’s one reason you’ve heard me in this conversation veering toward systemic critique—focusing on institutional change and mindset shifts—rather than delving too deeply into explicit personal accounts. However, I do explore those in my book.
When interviewing survivors, I approach it from the perspective of helping them share their experience in a way that fosters healing. Some interviewees won’t be fully healed, and that’s okay. But if they’re willing to talk, they’re usually at least beginning to process the experience and acknowledge that something wrong occurred. That’s the foundation.
I would strongly advise against pressing someone who hasn’t yet recognized their own abuse or manipulation into doing so on record. I’ve seen interviewers try to coax that realization out mid-conversation, and it rarely leads to genuine insight—it risks retraumatization instead. The focus should remain on healing and change.
For example, I can describe being in a car accident—my leg shattered, immense pain—but the emphasis should be on how I recovered: the physical therapy, the emotional reckoning, and how I reached a point where I could walk or even run again. That story becomes one of endurance and transformation. Likewise, if someone is speaking about abuse, the focus should be on why we’re telling the story: healing, accountability, prevention, or awareness.
You can convey the depth of trauma without detailing the blood and gore. Those visceral details can eclipse the point, which is understanding the impact and how change occurs. Include only enough to give context for the gravity of the experience, not to exploit it.
Ultimately, keep intent front and center. If the intent is to shock or horrify, that’s the wrong motive. If the intent is to illuminate, empower, and advocate for healing or accountability, then the story serves a purpose. And if someone’s goal is just to make audiences gasp, they probably shouldn’t be working in this space at all.
Jacobsen: What would you consider the healthiest self-narrative for survivors of cult or clergy abuse to adopt as they go through the healing process?
Stewart: I like how you framed that earlier—the distinction between victims, those with a victim mentality, those who are healing, and those who are thriving. Speaking from personal experience rather than an academic standpoint, I’d say that while reminders like “it’s not your fault” are essential, the most powerful narrative centers on healing as a journey.
First and foremost, you—and only you—are responsible for your healing. That may sound daunting, but it’s also liberating. Someone may have harmed you, but recognizing that you have not only the responsibility but also the power to heal gives you agency. That mindset moves you forward much more effectively than staying in a place of “I am broken.”
At the same time, it’s essential to understand that healing isn’t linear. You’re accountable to yourself and only to yourself as you uncover, process, and come to terms with what’s happened. There’s no timetable, no external requirement for how quickly or neatly that process unfolds.
There’s no requirement to have forgiven anyone by a specific date or to have recovered from PTSD in a particular timeline. Healing doesn’t obey a schedule. One of the most powerful realizations for me—and for many survivors—is that while abuse feels deeply personal, it actually isn’t. To the abuser, it was never truly about you.
That’s hard to internalize, because for most victims, the violation feels like the most personal event imaginable—especially in cases of sexual or psychological abuse. But when you can decouple yourself from it, when you can recognize that the abuse came from something entirely outside of you—a sickness, a distortion, a system—that’s when real healing starts.
The old saying “it’s not your fault” is true, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not only not your fault—it’s not about you. You were simply in the path of someone else’s damage, like a car running over something in the road. That may sound devaluing, but it’s freeing: none of this comes back to your worth.
In my own case, understanding that both the sexual and emotional abuse I endured had very little to do with me—realizing it wasn’t about who I was or what I did to “deserve” harm—was essential. Whether the cause was religious indoctrination, mental illness, moral corruption, or plain cruelty, it originated entirely in them, not in me.
Accepting that truth has been one of the most significant contributors to healing.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-