Why do people committed to their spiritual growth end up vulnerable to harmful cult dynamics?
I ask this not as someone standing outside looking in, but as someone who’s been drawn to these spaces over and over. I joke on the show that I’d be the first to join a cult and the first to leave. As an only child with divorced parents, I’ve spent years looking for sisterhood and belonging—from sororities in college to spiritual communities that promised deeper connection. Every single time, I notice something off, sound the alarm, and end up outcast for refusing to ignore what I see.
So when Matthew Remski—co-host of Conspirituality Podcast and someone who spent his 20s inside two high-demand spiritual groups—breaks down the mechanics of spiritual manipulation, I pay attention. Not because I agree with everything he says (I don’t), but because his analysis of how good people end up in bad situations is sharp, uncomfortable, and necessary.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Matthew explains why isolation, economic instability, and confusion about meaning create perfect conditions for manipulation. You’ll discover why charismatic spiritual teachers specialize in exploiting existential confusion, how high-demand groups teach spiritual bypassing as a feature rather than a bug, and the difference between a genuine teacher challenging you and a predator grooming you.
This conversation doesn’t dismiss spiritual seeking. It sharpens your ability to discern.
Why This Conversation Matters (Even If You’re Not in a Cult)
I need to be clear about something upfront: Matthew and I don’t land in the same place spiritually.
He’s skeptical of spiritual organizations in a way I’m not. I’ve found real healing in spiritual work—actual transformation, not just performance. I believe in energy work, I see everything as connected, and I trust that there’s intelligence beyond what we can measure. Matthew leads with suspicion. I lead with curiosity tempered by discernment.
But that’s exactly why this conversation matters.
Because the people most at risk aren’t the skeptics. They’re people like me. People like you, probably, if you’re reading this. People who are open, who are seeking, who believe that transformation is possible and that teachers can help guide us there.
The hardest thing about building a spiritual practice in 2025 is that the space is full of both genuine teachers and people selling salvation they don’t actually have access to. And the difference isn’t always obvious until you’re already in deep.
About Matthew Remski
Matthew Remski is co-host of Conspirituality Podcast and author of the forthcoming book Anti-Fascist Dad. He’s also written extensively on cult dynamics in yoga and wellness communities, including his previous book Conspirituality (co-authored with Derek Barris and Julian Walker).
What makes Matthew’s perspective valuable isn’t that he hates spirituality—he doesn’t. He was born Catholic, still finds meaning in liberation theology (Catholicism plus Marxism, as he describes it), and his spiritual life now centers on the radical practice of loving his autistic son without attachment to outcome.
What makes him credible is that he spent years inside these groups, believed deeply, and can now articulate the mechanics of how manipulation works from the inside out.
Why Loneliness Is the Gateway
Matthew describes two factors that made him vulnerable in his mid-20s: isolation and existential confusion.
He didn’t have a strong social network. He’d dropped out of college, was probably clinically depressed but undiagnosed, and was moving from one service job to another with no clear endpoint. And the world itself made no sense to him—the wealth inequality, the inaction on climate change, the perpetual wars. He couldn’t find the resources to address that fundamental confusion.
That’s when charismatic spiritual teachers found him.
“They specialize in taking the person who is really baffled by life and looking them straight in the eye and saying, I can lead you somewhere,” Matthew explains. “It’s mysterious and projective and intrusive, and the person doesn’t know you at all when they’re doing that, but it’s very effective.”
I get this. I’ve felt it. That moment when someone seems to see straight into the confusion you’ve been carrying and offers you a framework that makes it all make sense. When they promise belonging, purpose, and clarity all at once.
High-demand groups offer immediate welcome, a sense that you can relax, that your story matters, that you’ll be included and helped to make meaning. They often offer a kind of communism at the start—shared resources, free retreats if you work in the kitchen, room and board. Everything feels generous and open.
Until it doesn’t.
The Difference Between a Teacher and a Predator
So how do you tell the difference between a spiritual teacher who’s genuinely challenging you and one who’s manipulating you?
Matthew says you have to look at structure and form, not just content.
Warning signs include: everything in the group comes back to the “inscrutable wisdom” of the leader. People praise the leader constantly. Members track what the leader says day-to-day like they’re following White House news, organizing their lives around subtle shifts in the leader’s messaging.
Compare that to a simpler environment with institutional guardrails—you attend a class, pay what you can (with clear transparent pricing), discuss ideas openly, get challenged, and leave. The transaction is clear. The relationship doesn’t demand total devotion.
Matthew also points to content as a clue. If the teacher motivates you to deepen your connection with your neighborhood and community, to be in service with others, you’re probably on the right track. If the focus is on micromanaging your internal states, generating peak experiences, or obsessing over whether you’re “doing it right,” that’s a red flag.
“How do you actually know you’re progressing along this spiritual path?” Matthew asks. “In the groups I was in, there was no illusion they were doing any social service. Their only social service was to recruit more members.”
He tells the story of someone in the Shambhala Buddhist organization who left during the George Floyd protests. The person asked if they could open a donation box at the Minneapolis Dharma Center for protesters who needed medical supplies and bottled water. The temple leader said no, we don’t do anything political here.
That was the line. The disconnect between developing an “internal attitude” of compassion and actually putting it into practice. If it’s just about an internal attitude, they can always sell you another course. Because how would you ever know you’re doing it well enough?
Spiritual Bypassing as a Feature, Not a Bug
One of the most uncomfortable insights Matthew offers is that high-demand groups don’t just allow spiritual bypassing to happen—they teach it as policy.
In any group with a “self-sealing ideology” (where every question rolls back to “the text says so” or “the leader’s vision” or “spirit’s intuition”), bypassing becomes inevitable. When you hit a contradiction or witness mistreatment, the group already has canned explanations that route you away from the problem and back to faith.
These groups also encourage distrust of outside knowledge. Matthew describes how his Buddhist teacher could recite long passages of medieval Tibetan scripture flawlessly, which gave him instant credibility. But Matthew didn’t actually know liturgical Tibetan. He had no basis for verifying any of it. There was no outside source to check against.
And at crisis points—when someone starts asking hard questions—high-demand groups offer somatic rituals. Prayer, trance states, dancing, group meditation. Often with the instruction that you’re “too much in your head” or “too much in your thinking mind.”
As Matthew puts it: “Actually the concept was you’re full of shit and I want an answer to this particular question. And the response would be, what you really need to do is let the light of God into your heart and we’re gonna do a ritual to help you do that.”
This hit me because I’ve seen versions of this everywhere. The spiritual teacher who dismisses critical thinking as “ego.” The wellness influencer who responds to questions about safety with “you’re in resistance.” The coach who frames any doubt as your fear of transformation.
And sometimes? Sometimes the doubt is just good judgment.
Where I Differ From Matthew (And Why That’s Okay)
I want to be honest about something: I tune into Matthew’s podcast every now and then, and I’m either loving it or kind of triggered by it. But I keep coming back.
Because even though I’m more spiritual than Matthew will probably ever be—I love the woo, I see the energetic connections, I believe in things that can’t be measured—I also see the dangers. I see how people can take advantage of openness. I see how easy it is to manipulate someone who wants to believe.
Matthew leads with a Marxist analysis of power and labor. He sees spiritual communities through the lens of who owns what and who’s exploiting whom. That’s not my primary lens, but I can’t dismiss it. Because he’s often right about the power dynamics, even when I wouldn’t use his language to describe them.
I approach spiritual work with curiosity first and skepticism second. Matthew approaches with skepticism first. Neither of us is wrong. We’re just starting from different places and reaching for different things.
What matters is that we both believe discernment is sacred work.
The Cult of Politics (And Everything Else)
One moment in our conversation that really landed was when I said that right now, left versus right politics feels like two big cults to me.
People who were concerned about overreaching power in 2020 aren’t concerned now that their side holds it. They’re defending it. And the people raising alarms now were silent before. It’s not about values anymore—it’s about tribal allegiance.
When you join a group you feel you belong in, your mind’s first job becomes defending it rather than returning to your actual values.
Matthew points out that this isn’t unique to obvious cults. We’re all already twisting ourselves up in various ways just to function in a world that often doesn’t make sense. High-demand spiritual groups just amplify and accelerate patterns we’re already living with—at work, in politics, in our families.
He uses the example of watching cult documentaries. People watch and think, “God, that’s really bad. I would never be so stupid.” Meanwhile, they might be working for Amazon, urinating in a bag because they’re not allowed to take a break. Or working minimum wage at Walmart while also doing caregiving work that doesn’t pay enough.
The cult memoir does cultural work—it convinces “normal” people they’re not in shitty conditions when they actually are.
How to Protect Yourself Without Becoming Cynical
Matthew’s advice for avoiding manipulation is practical, not paranoid.
First, if you sense something is off about a spiritual teacher or group, listen to that. Google them. See if there’s controversy. Don’t dismiss your spidey sense just because you want to belong.
Second, do a forensic walk-back of what led you to that teacher. Don’t just ask the psychological question (what need was I trying to meet?). Ask the material questions too. What conditions created your isolation? Your economic instability? Your frail social connections?
Matthew thought for years that the moment the Buddhist teacher “locked him in” was when the teacher looked him in the eye and said, “You’ll realize you’re going to die and you have to do something about it to prevent that from happening.”
But years later, he realized there was a whole sequence of events that got him into that room—events that were personal, yes, but also cultural, social, and economic. The fact that he could pick up his possessions and fly to the next retreat depended on having a credit card. On having a non-professional life. On having frail social connections.
“Something made the stone really hard before” the charismatic teacher struck it and created the spark.
Understanding the conditions makes the moment less magical. And that’s protective.
Why I Keep Having These Conversations
One of the hardest things about building a brand online is watching people I respect end up in spaces I don’t ever want to be associated with. So I keep bringing conversations like this to the show—not to tell you what to believe, but to help you sharpen your own discernment.
You don’t need to land on my beliefs. You don’t need to join any tribe here. You need to find a path that’s genuinely beneficial to you, and that requires being able to tell the difference between genuine challenge and manipulation.
Matthew and I might not agree on everything, but we agree on this: thinking for yourself is a rebellion. Awakening is a discipline. And both require you to stay awake not just to the mysteries but to the mechanics of how power works.
I’m seven months pregnant as we record this. I can’t be outraged by the next thing. I can’t join every bandwagon. We were never meant to be exposed to this much, and sometimes the most spiritually attuned thing you can do is turn inward, focus on the people within your walls, and tend to your local community.
But even in that turning inward, you need discernment. Because the predators know that vulnerable people make the best prey. And spiritual people—people who are open, seeking, believing in transformation—are often the most vulnerable of all.
Not because we’re stupid. Because we’re hoping for something better.
Resources & Links from This Episode
- Conspirituality Podcast – https://www.conspirituality.net/
- Anti-Fascist Dad Podcast – https://open.spotify.com/show/2KD9lqHANm0BYybQKnMpQL
- Anti-Fascist Dad by Matthew Remski (forthcoming, April 2025) – https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/
- Conspirituality by Matthew Remski, Derek Barris, and Julian Walker – (search on Amazon or your preferred bookstore)
- Matthew Remski on Substack – https://matthewremski.substack.com/
- Matthew Remski on TikTok and YouTube: @AntiFascistDad
Take This Work Deeper
Want to sharpen your discernment with others navigating the same questions? Join the free Mind Love Collective for monthly themed calls and weekly challenge accountability. mindlove.com/join
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Episode 441: Why Spiritual People Are Most Vulnerable to Cult Dynamics
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