Cult A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery

"This excellent memoir reveals how a charismatic, manipulative spirit medium can use love for God and neighbor as a hook to drag a small group of devotees into her cynical web of impossible goals for self-perfection. After a heroic struggle for insight, Alexandra Amor was one of the cult members who broke the abusive spell."
Joesph Szimhart, Cult Information Specialist

Knowledge is power. Buy this chilling memoir today and educate yourself about how cults work.

Interview with the Author, Alexandra Amor
How does one get swept up in a coercive environment?
No one joins a cult. That's a quote from Deborah Layton who wrote a book about her experiences with Jim Jones and the Jonestown cult. What she means is that no one knowingly puts themselves in a situation where they will be manipulated and controlled and abused. We join groups of people who are like-minded, whose values seem close to our own and slowly, slowly we are convinced that the leader knows better for us than we know for ourselves. As our choices become more and more limited and we are manipulated to believe that we cannot leave and that what we are doing is right and good, we lose track of our authentic selves and begin to develop what cult expert Steven Hassan calls a "cult self" that believes the doctrine we have been fed.

Joining a cult does not mean that someone is unintelligent or unworldly. It is an immensely complicated psychological process and one that I deal with in great detail in my book.

What was the name of the cult you were involved with?

The group I became involved with was not a famous or large organization. It was a small group of people who were interested in learning about meditation. The woman who ran the group was someone who considered herself to be a spiritual medium or psychic. She began applying thought reform (also called mind control) techniques on those who followed her; our choices became limited and we were told that if we left the group we would be leaving God, which is one of the criteria that's used to define a cult.

What caused you to leave the cult?
My escape from the cult came as a result of questions I had begun to have about the guru we followed, combined with a particularly nasty event that she subjected me to. I began to receive therapy after that event, while I still belonged to the group, but the therapist helped me to learn to trust my own feelings and to question the leader and the group I was involved with.