Writing My Way Out of a Cult

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What happens when we use creative expression to help us heal from a traumatic experience like being in a cult? That’s what I’m here to explore in Creative Alchemy.

In this first episode, I share a bit about my story of joining a cult at the age of 22 in 1989 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. And I talk about how the recovery from that experience included a couple forms of writing, including journaling and eventually sharing about my experience in a memoir.

Learn more about Alexandra at AlexandraAmor.com

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

• Alexandra names the thing every cult survivor knows but outsiders don’t: nobody signs up for a cult, they join a meditation class, a community, a search for meaning. That reframe alone can lift a lot of shame.
• How cult leaders deliberately and strategically nurture the relationship of each follower to the leader, while undermining the relationships each follower has to the community and to their friends and family
• How Alexandra’s cult leader controlled and manipulated even the most intimate relationships of those who followed her
• The gradual, inch-by-inch nature of indoctrination describes why smart, good people don’t see it happening until it’s too late
• How creativity, specifically journaling, was one of the catalysts that helped Alexandra leave the cult she was in.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Alexandra Amor’s memoir, Cult, A Love Story
• Listen to Alexandra’s memoir on Spotify
• The Guru Papers by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad

Transcript

It was 1989. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I was a few weeks away from turning 22 years old. Most people at this age are focused on establishing a career or figuring out who they are as adults. In my case, I accidentally joined a cult.

My name is Alexandra Amor and this is episode 1 of Creative Alchemy.

Welcome everyone to the first episode of Creative Alchemy. I’m so happy you’re here.

Typically, on this podcast I’m going to interview guests who have used creativity and creative expression as part of their healing journey after a traumatic experience, like being part of a cult.

I want to structure the show this way so that others, perhaps you, might find support and encouragement on your path of healing.

There are so many podcasts available that are about cults. Which is great. I personally have listened to many of them and have learned things about my own experience because of them.

As I reflected on the intersection of creativity and healing, I realized that I don’t think there are as many shows that are FOR cult survivors, specifically aimed at helping and supporting cult survivors like me to heal.

That is where Creative Alchemy steps in.

My intention for the show is that it will offer resources, ideas, discussion and information around healing from a cult or other high-demand or traumatic experience. I want every episode to inspire listeners and to let them know they are not alone and that there IS a way to heal from a cult experience. And, even more specifically, that I believe creativity is one powerful way to aid our recovery.

Creativity – in all its forms – can alchemize grief, pain, anger, embarrassment and loneliness into something else. Something with the potential for a new beginning. Something lighter and more powerful.

This is not to dismiss the traumatic experience of being in a cult, but to know that creativity can support us as we travel the path of recovery from that experience.

Healing can and does take place and I can attest to that

On that note, let me segue into telling you about me and my story so that you have a frame of reference as we move forward with future episodes.

And, by the way, just so we’re perfectly clear this is human me speaking. I’m a real person. This is not an AI voice you’re listening to.

Also, before I begin I will say that if you want the expanded, technicolour version of the story I’m about to tell you, with all the details, you can read my award-winning memoir, Cult, A Love Story. It’s available wherever you buy books in ebook, paperback, hardback, large print and audiobook. I narrated the audiobook and if you have a Spotify premium subscription you can listen to the audiobook for free as part of your subscription. To do that go to AlexandraAmor.com/spotify.

In the cold open to this episode I set the stage. I was just about to turn 22 years old and had just moved a few weeks earlier to Vancouver, BC. I didn’t know anyone there except my family. I was living with my mum, step-dad and brother in the Kitsilano neighbourhood while I looked for an apartment and a job. I had very recently finished university in Calgary and, being so young, had no clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Which of course is completely normal, but when we’re that age and going through it, it feels scary.

For a few months before I made the move from Calgary to Vancouver, on our weekly phone calls my mum had been talking about a meditation class she’d been attending that she was excited about. Looking back, I can see that she had always been interested in personal growth, but this was the first time she’d mentioned meditation to me.

As I said, when I moved into her home I knew no one in the city and was bored and lonely. My mum invited me to attend one of the Wednesday night meditation classes with her. I accepted, probably because I was desperate for some sort of activity other than job and apartment hunting.

And perhaps I shouldn’t be so flippant.

I can see now that I was interested in personal growth from an early age

I was a psychology major at university and in a very fledgling way was interested in what motivates and drives human behaviour.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that I was also deeply traumatized by my upbringing, though I didn’t know it at the time. My parents had divorced when I was 11 and I was raised in large part after that by my father and his second wife. Both, unfortunately, were narcissistic, emotionally abusive alcoholics who wreaked havoc on my and my brother’s lives. My step-mother was a bit like a cult leader. Charismatic, controlling, manipulative, self-absorbed. So when I met the woman leading the meditation class there was a comfort in the familiarity of how she presented herself.

But wait. I’m getting ahead of myself.

I went to my first meditation class with my mum on a Wednesday night in July 1989. And, though I didn’t know it at the time, that was the beginning of ten years of indoctrination, coercion, and manipulation, with a sprinkling of marital infidelity thrown in for good measure.

The class was held in a basement meeting room of an office building in downtown Vancouver. When I followed my mum into the room I had a strong feeling immediate belonging. “I found it,” my heart said. I don’t know what I meant by ‘it’ at the time. Community, perhaps. Kindred spirits. No one had spoken a word to me yet. People were just mingling and chatting before the class began. At any rate, I was hooked from that moment on.

The room was long and rectangular and there were sectional seats along all the walls. The people were all white, mostly in their 30s and perhaps 40s. Gradually, as we neared the time for the class to begin, everyone settled in their seats.

At the top of the rectangle, at the far end of the room, sat the women who had recently changed her name to Limori. (And by the way, I always use pseudonyms for anyone I mention when I tell my cult story, so this is not her real name.) Until recently her name had been Rosemarie, but she had announced a few months earlier that ‘spirit’ had instructed her to change her name to Limori.

Meeting the Guru

She was, at first glance, a large and imposing figure. Physically large at about 100lbs overweight and also tall, as I would learn later when I saw her standing. And she was energetically large as well. She was the focus of the room’s attention, even when everyone was not looking at her.

She was Austrian by birth and had a German accent as a result. Hair dyed platinum blonde and swept back in a bun. Hands decorated with rings clasped over her belly. Eventually her clothes would all be custom made in silk by one of the women who became her handmaids, but that night, I vaguely recall that she was wearing a long skirt and blouse, which was her uniform at the time.

Perhaps if I had known the damage and destruction this woman would eventually bring to my life I would have turned and left the room, waited for my mother in the car. But that’s not how these things work, is it?

If you’ve been in a cult then you know intimately how the next few years unfolded.

Not the specifics, of course, but the pattern. I gradually became more and more connected to the group of people who followed and deified Limori. Eventually, I became one of those people.

I learned, as all of us in the group did, to stop my thoughts. I accepted that Limori had spirit guides and angels that talked to her. And later, when she said that she had begun speaking directly to God, I believed that as well. As we all did. Gradually, I began to believe that our group of 30 or so were the only people on the planet doing God’s true work. We were imbued with a special purpose and everyone else – literally, everyone else on the planet – wasn’t. We were the chosen ones.

I confess that now it sounds preposterous even to my ears to say this. And if you haven’t been in a cult it’s hard to understand how someone, let alone a lot of someones, can go from learning how to meditate to thinking you’re one of a select group that is saving the universe.

But I’m here to tell you it does happen.

Gradually. Silently. Inch by inch. Degree by seemingly harmless degree. We were the frogs in the proverbial pot of water, unaware that the temperature was slowly being raised all around us.

And here’s one of the tragedies of any cult; most of the people in a cult are well-meaning. Generally speaking, they are good people, doing their best to cope with a human life that can be so challenging. The people around me who followed Limori were kind, genuine, mostly gentle and sweet people. The kind of people who donate to good causes and who adopt stray animals. They were from all walks of life; professional lawyers, doctors and dentists. In other words, intelligent, worldly people.

Anytime I talk to someone who has never been in a cult and share a bit of my story they inevitably say, “That could never happen to me. I’m too skeptical.” Or “I’m too smart to have that happen.”

We all believe that until it happens, right?

And the way it happens is that we run into someone who knows how to pull all the right levers, push all the right buttons. Your buttons might not be the same as mine, and those who are coercive, manipulative, potential cult leaders know this. They know how to play each person like a unique instrument. But I do understand that this is something we cannot grasp until it has happened to us.

Looking back, the common denominator that I see in Limori’s followers was that we were all searching. We were searching for ways to understand life and to give it meaning. I can see this now, though I didn’t see it then. We were all looking for answers about life, the universe and everything. And a charismatic, charming, intelligent, manipulative, coercive person took advantage of that. She knew what she was doing. We did not.

And, of course, it has to be said that no one joins a cult. None of us joined a cult. No one ever does. We joined a meditation class. We wanted to improve ourselves, improve our lives, maybe connect with others with the same interests. None of us set out to ruin our own lives.

Now, there’s a person in my cult story who is very important but who we haven’t touched on until now.

The name I’ll give him is Michael.

That first night in the group, when my mother and I had sat down and the class was about to begin, my mother introduced me to a friend of hers that she’d met through the group. Michael was seated on her right and I was on her left, so he leaned around my mum as she introduced us and we said hello. I didn’t think too much of the interaction. Unlike in a movie or a book, there was no foreshadowing.

I had no idea how pivotal this person would come to be in my life, and, ten years later, how pivotal he would be in me leaving what had become a cult. He would become the person who drew me deeper than I could have ever imagined into indoctrination AND paradoxically he would be the person who woke me up and enabled me to leave the cult behind. Something that very sadly he has not been able to do for himself, as of this recording, all these years later.

But, getting back to that first night, like the rest of us, Michael was a seeker. He would later share with me that he’d been searching for some elusive something in his life that would provide answers to the questions he had. He had read the mystical, metaphysical books that were popular in the ‘80s. I can’t know exactly which ones he read but some that were in the zeitgeist were by people like Carlos Castenada, Edgar Cayce, Shirley Maclaine, Louise Hay, Shakti Gawain, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, and Wayne Dyer.

In Michael’s memoir, which was published in 2019 and is about his dedication to Limori, he shares that his existence until a specific moment in 1984 had been meandering and filled with doubt. Then he had a mystical experience that, among other things, left him with the knowledge that in order to prepare himself for a journey he was about to embark on, he needed to find a teacher. He began attending lectures on spirituality, and took classes on connecting with his inner knowing, as he describes it.

He had readings with psychics and healers, and he visited life improvement experts. He took a class from the Vancouver Psychic Society on meditation and spiritual awareness. Then he took the second level of that class.

Eventually he met Limori and realized she was the teacher he’d been looking for.

I met Michael on that July evening in 1989 that I mentioned earlier and our paths became parallel. He was 16 years my senior and wildly different from me; extraverted, worldly, gregarious, and life experienced. Conversely, I was introverted, naïve, and shy. We became friends because of the group we both valued and some years later I would consider him to be my best friend.

For the sake of brevity I’ll fast forward through several cult years now. And, again, if you’d like to learn more about all of this, you can read my book. I will say that gradually, I began to lose any small grasp I had on my sense of self and became more deeply indoctrinated into what Limori wanted and what she espoused to be the rules of the universe. Given that she supposedly had the Divine on speed dial it seemed the right thing to do to make her and her philosophies the centre of my world.

Nearly my entire social circle became comprised of those in the group. I spent more and more time on group excursions for spiritual retreats to the remote fishing lodge that Limori and her husband at the time owned and ran in central British Columbia. And all the while I became closer and closer to Michael until one day at a group retreat it was pointed out to me that I was in love with him. Complicating matters was the fact that he was dating and about to become married to another woman in the group.

**

Let me pause here and say that throughout my involvement with Limori’s group she did use, to great effect, the classic cult leader strategy of putting people together in relationships and then pulling them apart again. Those like my mother who were married to someone outside the group were always reminded that their spouse didn’t really understand them or our mission as saviours of the universe. Some relationships survived this manipulation, others did not. And for some members of the group, like my mother, it was the catalyst that convinced them to leave the group.

Just in case you’re not aware, I’ll do a little educational digression here to explain why cult leaders do this, partly because I find it so fascinating.

A cult leader’s primary objective is to cement the loyalty of each individual follower to themselves.

Think of this as a vertical line that goes from each follower to the cult leader. And then we can think of the relationships between followers, and also those relationships that they have with others outside the group, as horizontal lines.

So we’ve got a vertical line from each follower up to the cult leader. And we’ve got a web of horizontal lines between all the followers and also spreading outward to their other relationships.

The reason this visual matters is because what cult leaders do is deliberately and strategically undermine the horizontal connections. They chip away at each and every horizontal relationship each follower has because the result is that the vertical connection from each follower to the cult leader is strengthened. And that’s what the cult leader wants.

They want each and every follower to only have a deep and meaningful connection with them, the leader. Because this way the follower will make decisions in order to please the leader. They will work hard not to upset the cult leader, who has become their primary relationship. They will forsake others, including family members, in order to do the cult leader’s bidding. This strategy is a manipulation of the highest order and it takes a skilled coercive leader to do it.

I should also mention that it is a paradox that every cult is a very tight-knit group of people who consider themselves to be deeply loyal to one another and yet, they will also betray each other in the blink of an eye. The shared experience of being on a very special mission together bonds cult followers but additionally they have been trained and indoctrinated to protect their vertical relationship with their leader at all costs.

So, back to my story.

In my book I call this strategy I just outlined musical beds.

Limori used it to great effect. She was constantly bringing couples together and telling the couple, and the group, that the relationship had an important part to play in the work we were doing saving the universe. All these relationships were doomed from the start, of course, as she was following the playbook to a T. Although if any of us had a thought to question what was happening, of course we suppressed that thought.

In mid-1997 suddenly I found myself being pulled onto the dance floor for a deeply troubling version of the relationship do-si-do. This was a situation that would initially pull me deeper into the cult but then ultimately open the door for me to leave.

Michael and a woman named Jessica had been newly dating when I met them in 1989 and eventually Limori began to persuade Michael that it was of great spiritual importance that he and Jessica be married. He resisted, not being the type of person who wanted to settle down, but eventually Limori wore him down and the couple was married in Hawaii in May of 1993. Most of our group, including myself, traveled to Kauai to be at the beachfront wedding.

The couple settled into an apartment in a high rise in Vancouver’s False Creek neighbourhood and I think Michael saw the marriage as a spiritual project as much as anything else. He loved Jessica, of that I have no doubt. She had a bubbly, effervescent personality and adored Michael and his family of origin, having never had a stable loving one herself.

Meanwhile, I continually wrestled with how much I loved Michael, having never felt such a deep and abiding connection with anyone before. He was my partner in spiritual matters and my friend in every other way. The hardest part was I knew he loved me too. And not just in a platonic way.

In late June 1997 Limori made her next move on the chessboard that she had turned our lives into: I was summoned to Michael and Jessica’s apartment and offered the position of being Michael’s mistress.

Yes, really.

The story Michael and Jessica shared was that, of course, this request had come from Spirit, via Limori, and that it was of immense spiritual significance. That was always the lever Limori used for every demand she made of us. The universe won’t survive unless you do this thing.

At the time, I believed it. Jessica, Michael said, had been becoming increasingly selfish in their relationship and one evening a few weeks earlier he had felt something within himself snap. He felt unwilling to endure her behaviour any longer. He happened to speak to Limori on the phone a day or two later and she immediately knew something was wrong. That was when her plan started to be put into place.

Michael would ‘take a mistress’ so that he would be provided the comfort and love that he needed as an important part of God’s plan, but he and Jessica would stay married. Gradually, Limori eased Michael into this idea and eventually, after a period of a few weeks, it was understood that this job would be offered to me.

At some point, Michael broke this news to Jessica, who was, of course, completely devastated by this. I probably don’t have to explain how painful and heartbreaking this must have been for her. But, we were all so indoctrinated that she went along with it, thinking it was part of the divine plan that was unfolding. And so did I. After some consideration I agreed to my part in what was being proposed.

Thus began a year of hell for all three of us.

Jessica was living with a husband who was cheating on her with her consent. And she was being told that this was only happening because of her selfishness. In other words, she was being told the situation was her fault.

Michael was being torn in two by women he loved who were jealous of each other and possessive of him. Everything he did deeply hurt one or the other of us. He couldn’t win.

And I was tormented by being treated as a side-piece, an afterthought, a pawn whose only importance was as a comfort object to someone more important in God’s eyes.

What a mess.

After a year of this I was ready to call it quits, but didn’t. I couldn’t because I was so indoctrinated. I was entirely blind to how I was being manipulated and it would be years and many thousands of dollars in therapy before I understood the reasons Limori orchestrated things this way. It was genius on her part, really. It kept the three of us so unbalanced and focused on our misery that we could think of little else.

And, as ever, it gave us a spiritual project to work on, something we could discuss ad nauseum and try to learn from, as the group’s unwritten laws insisted we must do. Whatever we were uncomfortable with was ‘ego’ because this was God’s plan. If we didn’t like it, that was our problem and we needed to get right with the plan.

Then, in mid-1998, Jessica and Michael were instructed by Limori to divorce. Without her input none of us made any decisions at this point. And after all, she was the one calling the shots on this whole stupid situation. Michael and Jessica moved into separate apartments in Vancouver’s Fairview neighbourhood and Michael and I continued to date.

The next 12 months were a little easier for me because of this. And perhaps for Michael as well. We travelled to Hawaii on vacation, which was lovely. Not to mention that now he could introduce me to his friends and family. Until then, I’d been a secret, for obvious reasons. It felt good to come out of the closet.

I have always been a journaler.

I started journaling at a very young age and have continued to this day. I journaled before I joined the cult, during my cult involvement, and afterwards. To me, journaling is the way I process a lot of my feelings. It helps me to observe what I’m thinking and feeling. It helps me sort out exactly what I’m feeling during difficult times. I genuinely don’t know what I’d do without journaling.

In late 1999, in my journal, my authentic self was trying to get my attention. Which was a problem for more dominant my cult self. If you’ve been in a cult then you know the feeling of the push and pull between these two parts of ourselves. Part of the way indoctrination works is that it teaches us to shut down our authentic self and authentic voice. We are afraid of and stop the thoughts that contradict what the cult leader has taught us to believe. We don’t allow ourselves to feel or think anything that is not sanctioned by the cult and the cult leader.

So to have questions about the veracity of what Limori said and did coming up in my journal was deeply troubling for me. I worked as hard as I could to push these questions away.

And then, on December 30, 1999 all hell broke loose.

After Christmas spent with Michael’s family, he and I had traveled up to the fishing lodge that Limori ran with the help of some of her followers. She wasn’t there at the time but called the lodge many times a day to direct operations. Michael got onto the phone with her at one point on December 30 and was sequestered away in a bedroom with the telephone receiver for four hours.

Late that afternoon, he came out of the bedroom where he’d been talking with Limori, hung up the phone, and broke up with me. In front of the three cult-follewer employees of the lodge, no less. He said that he needed to ‘move into the new millennium unencumbered’. It took me a second to realize I was the encumbrance he needed to get rid of.

In one fell swoop I lost someone I loved very deeply and my spiritual community, because of course everyone in the group shunned me once I got back to Vancouver. No discussion. No negotiation. And, as I say in my book, certainly no mercy.

The next months were a blur of crushing grief and loss.

I started seeing a therapist in early January 2000, thanks to a suggestion from my mother. This was extremely helpful and I appreciate the therapist’s support to this day.

What’s really interesting is that it took me three years to realize the group was a cult.

My therapist clocked it almost right away.

Some months into our work together she recommended I read The Guru Papers by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad. I borrowed her copy and read it, glued to every page and just stunned that there were so many similarities between what the authors were describing and what I had experienced. Then I bought my own copy of the book and read it again.

Yet, I still didn’t get it that what I’d experienced was a cult. Finally, a couple of years later, maybe when the grief and loss haze had cleared up enough, the light dawned and I understood that what had happened to me wasn’t just weird. It had a name: cult indoctrination.

There is, of course, so much more detail to this story, but it’s too much to go into on a podcast episode. If you’d like to hear it all, my book is available wherever you buy books and on Spotify in audiobook.

Healing from a traumatic experience like being in a cult carries on throughout our lives. I’ve given you the larger story beats of my cult involvement today, some of which is a retelling of what I share in my memoir. But I can feel as I write these things down today, in July of 2026, that my perspective has changed from when I wrote the book, which was in 2008 and 2009.

I’m not saying that I’ve changed the details of what I’ve just shared, but I can feel and see that my understanding of what happened has deepened. My education about cults has expanded and therefore my perspective on it has changed. The healing has continued until today, 25 and a half years after leaving the cult, and it will continue beyond today.

Creativity has played and will play a huge part in that healing.

Which is why I’m hosting this podcast.

It is my belief and my experience that creativity can support, comfort and even teach us when we’re healing. As I said earlier, I wrote in a journal throughout my cult experience, and this habit was ultimately instrumental in helping me to heal from that experience. I took to my journals the day after Michael dumped me and I kept writing through all my grief, loss and confusion.

What I intend with this podcast is to find out how other cult survivors and survivors of different traumas have used creative expression on their healing paths. I’ve seen one-person theatrical productions that have been, in part, about healing. And comedy shows. We’ve all seen films and television that was a part of the artist’s healing process. Shows like Baby Reindeer or I May Destroy You come to mind.

It is my experience that, among other things, creative expression is healing. Creativity is a natural and normal human drive and desire and it makes sense that we would also use it to heal.

That is the focus of this show, Creative Alchemy.

Episodes will be posted each week with interviews with writers and artists and people of every kind, talking about how creativity has helped them in life and in healing.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride and find inspiration for your own healing path within.