Brazil’s Cult of People: What It Means to Be Free

Sometimes walking away is the only way to stop walking away from yourself.

A writer reflected on this idea while watching a television show between work sessions. The show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, follows a group of Mormon wives who gained fame on TikTok and became involved in what they call “soft swing.” In one scene, a young woman argued with her mother, who had a long list of rules for her daughter’s behavior. The daughter had been avoiding church, facing the threat of excommunication, and trying to keep her freedom without losing her family.

The scene stopped the writer. It showed a struggle between being true to oneself and belonging. This is a human condition. People crave connection. They are wired for it. But connection to a group comes with a price. People follow rules. They hide parts of themselves that do not fit, sometimes small parts, sometimes large ones. In exchange, they get to belong. It is a transaction. The agreement is this: earn your place, stay in your lane, and the group will keep you. It is an unspoken loyalty contract, often signed before one is old enough to read the fine print.

The writer said she was in a cult for forty-three years. It was not a religious cult. There were no robes, no compound, and no charismatic leader asking for money. It was subtler and more pervasive. She called it the cult of people. Most people are born into it. It is the constant noise of other people’s needs, opinions, and expectations. It is the performance of connection, the seeking of external validation, and the addiction to being liked, needed, and included. It is organizing one’s inner life around what others can tolerate. It is making oneself small enough, palatable enough, and agreeable enough to keep the peace and keep the people. She was a devoted member for forty-three years and did not know she was in it.

Nearly seven years ago, she started leaving. It was not intentional at first. It came from things she did not choose, such as the pandemic, raising a child with special needs largely on her own, and the slow work of therapy. She began to see how much reaching, earning, and contorting she had done. How much of herself she had tucked away to stay connected to people who needed her manageable. She did not want to earn anymore but did not know who she would be without it.

She went through seven years of tears, deep loneliness, massive anxiety attacks, heartbreak, and losses. Her circle got smaller. She sat with the terrifying question of whether she had caused it. At times, she felt like she was in hell. She did not want to paint this process as something beautiful, because it has not been. But it has been something, and it has not been wasted.

In actual cults, deprogramming requires distance. One has to step away from the group that demanded self-betrayal, physically, emotionally, sometimes permanently, before one can see the water one was swimming in. The same is true here. When one starts creating distance from the cult of people, a few things happen. First, it looks like something is very wrong. One gets quieter. One stops performing. One declines invitations accepted out of obligation. The circle shrinks. The people still inside the cult do not understand it, and some take it personally. In the cult, withdrawing is the most threatening thing one can do because the cult needs participation to survive.

But something else happens too. Since one has already been abandoned by people who could not follow into honesty, abandonment loses some of its power. One stops lying to oneself to stay connected. One starts seeing the implicit agreements made for a lifetime, all the ways one traded pieces of oneself for belonging and called it love. One starts seeing clearly. Clarity is both the gift and the grief of this process.

Leaving the cult of people does not feel like freedom right away. It feels like loss. It feels like loneliness. It feels like a terrible mistake. At the same time, underneath all of that, something else grows. Something quieter and steadier. A self that is not performing. A voice one can trust. An internal compass that works because it is not being scrambled by everyone else’s signals. This is what healing actually looks like. It is not either/or, not broken or healed, not lost or found. It is both, simultaneously. Breaking down and breaking through at the same time. Sad and longing and also, somewhere underneath, knowing one deserves better. Making all the right decisions and still watching things fall apart. Hearing the voices that tear one down and still holding the younger version of oneself with kindness. That is not weakness. That is what it looks like to be a human being in the middle of becoming more honest.

The writer said she is not fully deprogrammed. She does not know if that is even the goal. She still gets lonely. She still feels the pull to earn her way back into rooms that cost her too much. She still grieves connections that could not survive her becoming more herself. But she is more comfortable with the sadness than she used to be. It does not scare her like it did. She has learned to sit with herself in a way she could not before, not because the discomfort went away, but because she stopped running from it.

She now knows this: the same thing that means no one is going to save you is also the thing that means no one gets to stop you. The aloneness that felt like abandonment turns out to also be the open road. When one stops organizing life around what the group can tolerate, one finds out what one actually wants, who one actually is, and what one is actually capable of. That is not a consolation prize. That is the road to freedom.