Videos on cults

• Why do people join cults? (31 sec.)

• How do cults lure people in? (40 sec.)

• What are cult leaders like? (32 sec.)

• What’s it like to be in a cult? (42 sec.)

• How do cults isolate you? (41 sec.)

• How do cults handle intimacy? (36 sec.)

‍ ‍About these videos

I created these videos to explore questions I had about cults. Each video contains excerpts from my novel The Children of the Children. I suggest watching them in the order shown.

I come at this from a place of pain. Several members of my family were in a cult. For years, the rest of us struggled to keep the lines of communication open. Gradually, everyone made their way out, but it was an incredibly difficult journey. The scenery and music in the videos are meant to offset the difficulty of the subject.

‍I wrote The Children of the Children because fiction allowed me to get inside the heads of my characters, and only by getting inside someone's head can you understand them. Through writing, research, and observing the world around me, including the last 10 years of American politics, I've come to realize that "groupthink," a phrase coined over 70 years ago after the release of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, is all around us. Everyone is susceptible to cult-like thinking, including you and me.

‍The Children of the Children is available in Kindle on Amazon and in print and audiobook at various outlets. Though inspired by real events, the story and characters are fictitious.