The choice point and the cyber cult in retrospect: the beginning

 The Choice Point: 

A Subtle Betrayal of Instinct

My retrospective journey and analysis into how I ended up in a situation and why I will never get there again. 

This is my declaration that I will never abandon myself in this way again. 

This writing is about reclaiming agency, tracing the path of how I got here, and identifying the exact choice points

What is a choice point?

In a trauma-informed and psychological context, a “choice point” is a moment where you pause and make a conscious decision in response to a situation, particularly under stress, coercion, or complex interpersonal dynamic.

 These are points where your actions can either reinforce old patterns of trauma or begin to shift toward healthier, more empowered behavior.

Breaking it down further:

• 1 Psychological perspective:
• Choice points often occur when automatic, trauma-driven responses (like fawning, freezing, or dissociation) compete with reflective, values-driven responses.
• Recognizing a choice point is a skill in emotional regulation
• it’s the space where prefrontal cortex activity can override the limbic system’s reactive impulses.

2. Trauma-informed perspective:

People with histories of childhood abuse or interpersonal abuse may experience choice points as moments of intense internal conflict.

• For example: do I appease this person to avoid conflict (fawn), or do I assert my boundaries? 
• The nervous system may perceive even asserting boundaries as a threat, triggering stress responses.

3. Social and behavioral perspective:

- Choice points are opportunities to interrupt cycles of trauma bonding, moral injury, or manipulation.

• Each decision at a choice point either reinforces the unhealthy system or begins to dismantle it.
• those moments where I ignored the quiet voice of intuition because fear, hope, and conditioning overrode it.

At the time, I mistook self-sacrifice for growth. 

• I rationalised discomfort as “spiritual extension.” What I didn’t realize was that I was locked in trauma responses. 

• My nervous system wasn’t malfunctioning; it was following survival logic it had learned in childhood. When I look back now, I can name those patterns clearly:

• Fawning: placating others to secure attachment and avoid rejection.
• Dissociation: disconnecting from my gut instincts and numbing discomfort.
• Trauma Bonding: mistaking intensity and validation-withdrawal cycles for intimacy.

I believed these new spiritual relationships would be different. After all, these were “magickal adept” & “spiritually illuminated” people pursuing “metaphysical growth”. 

as a safety net—a kind of implicit contract that depth, reflection, or “awareness” would protect me from harm. I assumed that a commitment to spiritual or self-development practices would act as a barrier against ignorance or manipulative behavior.

In reality, what I learned through experience is that spirituality can be weaponised, especially in systems lacking accountability. 

The appearance of awareness, or the language of spiritual insight, can be used to justify coercion, gaslighting, or the erosion of boundaries. 

Assumption of shared understanding or alignment can itself become an instrument of control.

Lets peep from the interesting view

 a neuropsychological perspective, this functions through a mixture of social influence and cognitive predilection. 

Ok; 

Humans are wired to seek coherence and trust cues that signal moral or epistemic authority; 

when someone introduces themselves as spiritually developed or “awake,” or “knowing” 

Our limbic system and prefrontal cortex WILL automatically try and defer to them, suppressing our prefrontal Cortex, the brains critical assessment capacity. 

This is exactly what K leveraged in me, intentionally or not, and automatically as a collective in the structure of the community he led.

(n.bthis is why I love the intersection of mind and magick, and see them as inseperable because my first psychology course attested to over a decade ago, originally psychology WAS the study of consciousness). 

Between the BRAIN AND THS BODY what is? 

My lesson: never equate spirituality with superior intelligence or ethical discernment. 

Spiritual practice is orthogonal to critical thinking or moral judgment. 

Equally, interest in alternative media or non-mainstream perspectives is not a reliable marker of rationality, discernment, or immunity to cognitive distortion. 

People in these spaces can demonstrate just as many, if not more, cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and susceptibility to social manipulation as those in mainstream media/systems.

From a social science and trauma-informed lens, this was a significant learning point: my assumption of safety and shared ethics created vulnerability. 

I was relying on inferred norms rather than concrete boundaries or accountability structures. 

The lesson in trauma recovery terms is clear: discernment, explicit boundaries, and critical evaluation must coexist with empathy and engagement, no assumed alignment or shared ethos can substitute for these.

  

Trauma Flooding and Collapse

I found myself in dissociation and perpetual inner conflict, constantly justifying my emotions to K*, while noting that the intensity of these feelings was far beyond anything I had experienced since high school—or even earlier. To me, the emotional amplification felt almost infantile, yet I rationalized it as a consequence of “not being in real time,” meaning our interactions were online.

I have a strict personal boundary around online engagement. Since the grooming I experienced at age 13, I have never participated in online communities or dating, even after subsequent abusive relationships and years of therapy and healing. This community, with K* at the helm, was the first online environment I had re-entered since that original trauma.

Psychologically, this triggered a cascade of responses. The online nature of the interactions and the age difference (K* being significantly older) mirrored aspects of my early grooming experience, activating relational triggers buried deep from my adolescence. 

Neurobiologically, my limbic system—especially the amygdala

interpreted these cues as threats, flooding my nervous system with hypervigilance, anxiety, and heightened emotional reactivity. 

My prefrontal cortex tried to rationalize and “correct” the situation, which manifested as internalized blame and self-justification.

I constructed a narrative to make sense of the pain: perhaps this could be a corrective experience, a chance to process what I hadn’t been able to resolve as a teenager. 

Perhaps, because my first relationship had begun online with an older man, my last relationship could end the same way

Curative, but a antidote. 

These were cognitive distortions rooted in trauma, creating what social psychologists call a repetition compulsion, a tendency to unconsciously recreate relational patterns from unresolved trauma.

In truth, the responsibility was never really mine. 

My strict boundary:

“real life or you are wasting my time”was designed to protect me from this exact kind of scenario. 

But trauma and coercive relational dynamics often hijack even the most decisive boundaries, pulling survivors into cycles of self-blame and internalised reason. 

Recognising this is the first step in reclaiming agency.

J, K, and Boundary Erosion Disguised as Help

This collapse was set in motion long before I relapsed. It started when J*, my partner of six years, persistently pressured me to contact K*, a spiritual leader he (and I ) put on a pedestal. 

I said “no” dozens of of times. 

I was clear: I didn’t want K in my life. 

But J evaded that boundary frequently, supplying K’s emails, social media handles, and phone number, reframing his insistence as “care” or “wanting the best for me.”

This is a textbook tactic of boundary erosion disguised as support. 

When someone ignores your expressed limits but frames it as “help,” it destabilises your ability to trust your own no. 

That’s the beginning of gaslighting: the slow replacement of your internal compass with theirs.

I finally gave in during a period of deep exhaustion and grief in December 2019. 

A friend’s pet had died, and days later, my own beloved cat, Saskia, passed suddenly. 

The grief hit like a tidal wave. 

Pair that with environmental stressors—a bushfire crisis, the installation of a 5G box near our home, and extended fatigue

and I reached out to K for what I thought would be consolation or validation.

His first response wasn’t understanding. 

It was vanquishing: “Our work isn’t aligned to your original direction anymore. 

You need to catch up.”

That one sentence hooked into every trauma schema I carried

perfectionism, shame, and fear of abandonment. 

Instead of registering it as a red flag, 

Of course I was too bound in my existing trauma flood

I interpreted it as a test of my worthines

In retrospect

This is grooming 101: 

placing someone as “behind” or “deficient” so they feel compelled to demonstrate themselves.

Grooming, Gaslighting, and Identity Erosion

I spent weeks bingeing K’s content, printing and cataloguing thousands of pages of his teachings, desperately trying to “catch up.” 

By the end of that year, I had printed out over 5 massive folders of material. By 2023 there were 10. 

My life became a research project of the spiritual path

This wasn’t spiritual growth. 

It was coercive grooming.

The fire was a burning and a rising as it incererated the thousands of pages and allowed me a new foundation of what was necessary. Burnt the “people pleasing junk”. 

• K positioned himself as a gatekeeper of wisdom, framing access to healing as contingent on subordination
• He leveraged gaslighting—framing any antagonism or distress I expressed as evidence of my spiritual idocy or “ignorance.”

 - He created double binds: if I challenged him, I was “resistant”; 

if I complied, I was “growing.” 

• There was no safe choice.

• Over time, my sense of self began to dissolve. This is what experts call identity erosion. I stopped trusting my own thoughts, feelings, and instincts. Every emotion I had was reframed as evidence of a flaw, further binding me to his approval. By the time I realized I was trapped, I was in a state of secondary dissociation—numb, disconnected, unable to see a way out.
• The authentic path of spiritualityi walked prior, became a cataclysm and labrintyn (I have about 20 posts on this alone). I know I am Not alone.Lets stay tuned. 

Trauma Bonding and Collapse of Trust

• My relationship with J didn’t survive this dynamic. But the soul ache  wasn’t just about him
• it was about understanding that I had been groomed into an abusive dynamic that exploited my deepest wounds. K wasn’t a healer; he was a predator cloaked in spiritual terminology.

The aftermath was catastrophic:

.

I developed severe insomnia, often going days without sleep.

• self destructive Behaviour 
• I spiraled into suicidal ideation, culminating in a near-attempt.
• My cognitive and emotional regulation skills
• hard-won through years of therapy. crumbled
• dissociation and amnesia ; two years of time loss 
• I lost faith not just in spirituality but in myself
• This wasn’t a single traumatic event. It was a complex trauma timeline: a web of grooming, coercive control, boundary violations, and gaslighting that left me fragmented and stripped of trust.

The Erosion of Boundaries and the Spiral Into Dysregulation

• Within a few years of knowing K*, I found myself in a place I hadn’t been since adolescence: crying and screaming into the void, dissociating daily, and justifying my emotions to someone who seemed to twist and weaponise them. 

The intensity of these interactions felt regressive, almost infantile, as if my nervous system had been thrown backward into developmental trauma states. 

Rather than seeing this as a red flag, I blamed myself. I told myself I was “too emotional,” “not in real time,” and therefore unworthy of being taken seriously. 

This is a hallmark of gaslighting

when you start to believe that your reactions are proof of your inadequacy rather than a legitimate response to mistreatment.

• I had spent seven years pouring my time, energy, and emotional labor into projects and people who couldn’t or wouldn’t reciprocate. 
• My boundaries weren’t just violated—they had been systematically dismantled. 
• This is a classic outcome of coercive control, where power is exerted slowly and deliberately until your sense of autonomy erodes.

• By May 2021, my body and mind had reached a breaking point. I relapsed into substances I hadn’t touched in over a decade
• Xanax, alcohol, LSD, opiates—not out of recklessness, but out of desperation. 
• Each substance became a chemical escape hatch, an attempt to override a body locked in hypervigilance. My spiral wasn’t dramatic or sudden; it was a slow drowning.

• This discrepancy matters: I wasn’t weak or self-destructive. 
• My body was engaging in survival strategies; maladaptive now, but once life-saving. 
• This is dysregulation, not moral failure
• Trauma responses are deeply intelligent; they are the nervous system’s way of keeping you alive when the world feels unsafe.

***

Gaslighting, Psychological Harm, and Weaponized Dismissal

K*’s responses to my distress consistently reinforced feelings of shame and self-blame. Instead of being met with care, I found myself pleading to be taken seriously, often escalating to self-harm or suicidal ideation just to communicate the severity of my pain. This dynamic was devastating: the very person I sought safety from was the one pushing me to emotional extremes.

When someone minimises your pain, twists your words, and reframes your distress as overreaction, that is gaslighting. 

• Gaslighting is not just psychological abuse; it erodes your reality-testing abilities, making you question your own experiences and feelings. 
• Over time, it left me believing that my dysregulation was proof of my “brokenness,” rather than a natural response to mistreatment.

***

Red Flags: Stigma, Dehumanization, and Lack of Care

Early on, there were glaring signs that K* was unfit to hold space for anyone’s healing, though I didn’t yet have the strength to see them clearly. 

He regularly used stigmatising and degrading language about others in the community, particularly women with trauma histories. 

He referred to one member as a “meth head + psychotic schizo,” dismissing her suffering with contempt.

Coming from a background in mental health and counseling, I tried to educate him on the differences between trauma responses, psychotic episodes, delusions, and substance-induced states. I remember being stunned by his ignorance

especially given his own history with prescribed ADHD medication, and his refusal to acknowledge nuances in mental health. 

This wasn’t just ignorance; it wasdehumanisation, reducing vulnerable people to caricatures rather than complex individuals deserving of care.

***

Community Harm and Structural Neglect

One event stands out as an early turning point in my realization that K’s environment was unsafe. 

A woman in his Patreon community, whom I’ll call R*, began lashing out at me, calling me “fat and ugly.” 

K later disclosed that R* had schizophrenia and delusions and relied heavily on him for support. 

Rather than mediating with empathy or offering a structured response, K blocked and deleted her from the community outright.

This decision was made without any safety protocols, policies, or trauma-informed practices

a massive failure of care for a vulnerable individual in crisis. 

Instead of creating safety, K escalated harm.

Community Harm and Structural Neglect

One event crystallized my realization that K’s environment was unsafe. 

A woman in his Patreon community, whom I’ll call R*, began targeting me, calling me “fat and ugly.” K later disclosed that R* experienced schizophrenia and delusions and relied heavily on him for support. Rather than mediating with empathy, establishing boundaries, or offering a structured response, K blocked and deleted her from the community outright.

From R’s perspective*, this action likely compounded trauma rather than alleviating it. Individuals experiencing mental illness or trauma rely on predictable, virtuous, and trauma-informed responses to navigate crises. 

A sudden removal from the only social or supportive network she trusted would have intensified feelings of abandonment, shame, and isolation, and could have worsened underlying symptoms such as paranoia, dysregulation, and low self-worth. 

The lack of procedural safeguards effectively punished vulnerability, rather than providing therapeutic containment.

From a social science and organisational perspective, this illustrates systemic dysfunction. 

The community was structured around a single authority figure

K

without any formal governance, safety protocols, or clearly defined ethical frameworks. 

There was no mechanism for conflict resolution, crisis management, or protection of members’ psychological safety. 

Such unregulated hierarchies magnify power asymmetries: members become dependent, while accountability is nonexistent. 

Vulnerable individuals are disproportionately affected, while enablers or bystanders are also at risk of moral injury.

Psychologically, this triggered a cascade of secondary stress responses in me. Witnessing neglect and harm while attempting to maintain safety amplified hypervigilance, moral distress, and cognitive dissonance. 

My nervous system was constantly on alert, activating fight-flight-freeze responses through repeated exposure to unsafe dynamics. 

Attempts to mediate, educate, or problem-solve triggered fawning behaviors and reinforced my rescuer identity, even as I recognized the environment was unsafe.

Neurologically, repeated exposure to such unpredictable threats engages the amygdala and HPA axis, creating a chronic stress state. 

Mirror neuron systems may amplify empathic distress, causing my brain to register R*’s suffering as my own. 

Over time, this contributes to trauma bonding, hyperarousal, and dissociation—a neurological and psychological adaptation to environments where safety and ethical structures are absent.

The lack of organisational structure—no policies, no ethical oversight, no protocols for managing crises

was not just a minor executive failure. It created a systemic environment in which harm was acceptable and amplified, leaving all members vulnerable. 

For R*, (and others at K*s choosing) this meant the very systems meant to protect her wellbeing were absent. 

For me, it reinforced the untenable position of trying to retain ethical and psychological standards in a space where structural delinquency was entrenched in the culture.

This event was a critical turning point. But it was not one but one of many. 

I saw that K was not a facilitator or healer but a liability, running an unregulated, hierarchical “support” system where vulnerable individuals could be harmed with impunity. It marked the first time or many  I understood the interplay between interpersonal abuse, systemic neglect, and structural trauma in such communities.

** 

Trauma Bonding Through Chaos

Ironically, these moments of chaos deepened my attachment to K. I saw him as lacking “capacity so I thought I could help”. 

This is a hallmark of trauma bonding: the cycle of intermittent validation and abuse creates a chemical dependency on the abuser. 

After conflicts, K would occasionally show care or assurance, which only reinforced my dedication.

In trauma bonding, the nervous system becomes addicted to the highs and lows, misconstruing instability for connection.

Looking back, this was a replication of my earliest attachment wounds or interpersonal trauma across the lifespan. 

The neglect and chaos of my childhood and adolesence made me vulnerable to dynamics where love and abuse were intertwined. 

K wasn’t just a person in my life; he became a symbol of longing, anxiety, and survival all at once.

Staying to Help: The Rescuer Role and Moral Injury

Even as red flags piled up, I remained. 

Many do. 

Part of me believed I could help change this space into a refuge for others like me

people carrying trauma, pain, and narratives that didn’t fit anywhere else. 

I wanted to be the one to bring structure, safety, and empathy where there was none.

(isn't this a collective narrative for what I do interpersonally anyway)  

This instinct came from a permissible place, but it also came at a price. 

Trauma survivors often develop what’s called a rescuer identity; 

a survival adaptation where our own needs are deprioritized while we focus on “fixing” unsafe dynamics around us. 

It can feel empowering at first: 

if I can help others, maybe I’ll finally feel safe too. 

But over time, this becomes a form of fawning, a trauma response where you stay close to someone harmful because you think you can appease them or create safety by managing their chaos.

The rescuer identity is more than just a personality trait; it’s often a deeply ingrained survival strategy developed in childhood trauma environments. When a child grows up in unpredictable or unsafe conditions

whether through neglect, abuse, or emotional inconsistency 

they often learn that their safety depends on anticipating others’ needs. This can lead to parentification (becoming a caretaker at a young age) or hypervigilance (constantly scanning for danger). 

Over time, being a “helper” or “fixer” becomes hardwired into their nervous system as a way to regulate fear and create a sense of control.

In adulthood, this identity can morph into a compulsion to stay in unsafe or toxic dynamics. Social scientists and trauma theorists (e.g., Judith Herman, Pete Walker) often link this to fawning, one of the four primary trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn). 

Where fight and flight involve confrontation or escape, fawning is about appeasement: staying close to an abuser, caretaker, or authority figure to try to control harm through compliance, care, or charm.

This often creates a paradox: survivors like you feel powerful in the role of rescuer—“I can help, I can bring order, I can create safety for others”

but underneath, it keeps them trapped in a cycle of self-abandonment. 

In systems theory and attachment research, this is called role-locked trauma: a survivor becomes locked into a social role (caretaker, mediator, healer) that once kept them safe but now prevents authentic connection.

In cultic or coercive systems, this trait is actively exploited. 

Leaders and harmful group dynamics often weaponise empathy by framing victims as “special” or “chosen” if they can help “fix” or “hold” the leader or group. 

This isn’t just emotional manipulation; it’s a form of coercive control, where someone’s moral compass and altruism are leveraged to ensure compliance.

Looking back, I see how this was a form of moral injury. 

Moral injury coined to describe the psychological wounds soldiers experience when their actions, or inability to act

violates their core moral beliefs (Litz et al., 2009), moral injury now extends far beyond combat. 

It’s also used to describe harm that arises when someone is forced to participate in, witness, or remain complicit in systems that violate their deepest values.

For trauma survivors, moral injury cuts deeper than guilt or shame; it corrodes a person’s sense of identity and moral integrity. 

Staying in that harmful system wasn’t a matter of loyalty or blind devotion

it was *survival*. 

I couldn’t bear to abandon people who reminded me of myself at my most vulnerable. 

That instinct was rooted in empathy and integrity, yet the result was a slow betrayal of my own values. 

I thought that if I stayed, I could create meaning out of my suffering, organize change, and turn chaos into safety. I poured my energy into this vision. But over time, I realized I had given K* the symbolic authority to “allow” me to act on my own wisdom. 

That dependency itself was a form of harm;

a dismantling of my autonomy and agency.

This is how moral injury works: it’s not just trauma from violence or betrayal, but from the internal conflict of knowing your values while being trapped in a situation that makes living them impossible. 

In abusive or coercive environments, moral injury is compounded by gaslighting and trauma bonding: you’re made to doubt your moral compass, to distrust your instincts, and to believe that harm is necessary or deserved.

But now, I see that I never needed K*’s permission to act on the vision I carried. I am here to show myself that I can build what I imagined;without his approval, without his gatekeeping. 

The seeds of change I planted didn’t belong to him; they were gestated in me, in my own womb of creative force, rooted in the womb of Gaia herself. 

My work, my labor, my agency are mine to reclaim.

That choice to stay in a toxic situation slowly chipped away at my own sanity, and wellbeing. 

My empathy was used against me; weaponised and future faked for years as a reason to tolerate behaviour I should have walked away from.

Now I’m walking, I can build everything that was as it was originally intended. The difference now is I have the ability to walk the talk and talk my walk. 

Now you know what I went through, in a small way. Maybe together as we dive into the depths into my psychological journey and my trauma journey, you too, can understand the deeper nuanced mechanisms going on and recognise, its ok, not your fault, and collectively collaborate a novel solution to understand that trauma healing isn't one person propagating further fear, but collective creating changes together to communicate solutions, in safety.