Why Are We So Susceptible?

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High-control groups don’t exploit a weakness in us. They exploit the best of us. That’s what makes them so dangerous — and so hard to explain to people who weren’t there.

How did I believe that?

How did I stay so long?

Why didn’t I see it?

Especially in the wake of Bruergate and the revelation of the depth of abuse, these questions carry shame underneath them. We live with the implication that believing was a failure of intelligence or character, that staying was weakness, that not seeing was a personal deficit of some kind. People who were never inside a high-control group sometimes reinforce this without meaning to. I could never be manipulated like that, they say.

My husband has struggled with this very thing. He was sent to church as a child, but his parents were not seriously religious. He decided early that he was not a believer in any of that because he was a reader and had critical thinking skills and it just didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

He would say things like, “how could they be so stupid as to believe that?” And I would look at him, knowing that I had, indeed, believed all that and so much more.

And the survivor, already carrying so much, absorbs one more piece of evidence that something is wrong with them.

I want to offer a different answer.

You were not susceptible because you were weak. You were susceptible because you are human. And the capacities that made you vulnerable are the same ones that make humans capable of everything extraordinary they have ever done.

The first thing they hijacked: your need to belong

For most of human history — hundreds of thousands of years before anything resembling modern society — being cast out of the group was death. Not metaphorical death. Actual death. You could not survive alone on the savanna. You could not hunt, defend yourself, raise children, or endure winter without the people around you. The group was your literal survival.

That history is written into you at a level far deeper than thought. Your neural architecture that monitors belonging, that craves acceptance, that registers exclusion as physical pain — that architecture is ancient, and it is not going away because we now live in cities with grocery stores and central heating. Evolution moves slowly.

You know it when you feel it. When you feel the sense of grief and loss and “othering,” your brain’s threat response to social rejection still fires as though your life depends on it, because for most of human existence, it did. It’s how I felt in the months and years after I left. It’s one reason it took me so long to leave. I often say you have to be willing to lose everyone you’ve ever loved, and that it’s like a break up times one thousand. That’s what leaving feels like.

High-control groups do not exploit a bug in this system. They exploit the system itself. They offer total belonging — the deepest, most complete sense of being known, accepted, and held that most people will ever experience. And then they attach a condition to it: stay, comply, believe, perform. The belonging is real. That is the genius and the cruelty of it simultaneously. You were not wrong to want what they offered. What they offered was genuinely what humans need. They simply weaponized it.

The Two by Two’s forewarned us we would be shunned if we left – in that indirect way of theirs. Little Mouse worries about her friend Ophelia. In “The Truth,” they talked about the Ophelia’s who had gone before: they just wanted a hedonistic lifestyle. They wanted to party and play and be superficial and that’s why they turned their back on God’s true ministry. No one ever left the Two by Twos for a good reason – the way they told the story. And we all knew — that our families would turn away, that the community would close its curtains — the moment we left.

They were not making an empty threat. They were activating the most primal fear in your nervous system. They had spent years ensuring that the community was your entire world, so that losing it meant losing everything.

You stayed because leaving felt like dying. In the oldest part of your brain, it was.

The second thing they hijacked: your need for meaning

We do not simply want to survive. We need to understand why we are surviving — what it is for, what it means, where it fits in a larger story. This hunger for meaning is also ancient, and it is also not going anywhere. It is what produces religion, philosophy, art, science, and every attempt to answer the questions that purely biological survival cannot touch: Why am I here? What should I do with my life? How should I treat other people? What happens when I die?

High-control groups offer a complete answer to every one of these questions. The answer is internally consistent, mutually reinforcing, and total — it explains everything, accounts for all apparent contradictions, and provides a framework for every decision you will ever face. The relief of that is real. When you are inside a system that has all the answers, life has a clarity and a purpose that is genuinely difficult to replicate outside it.

I remember that clarity. I remember standing to give my testimony as a child, convinced that I was part of the One True Way of God. I was 8 when I stood up and professed at Chelan Convention – and I knew this was the most important thing I was supposed to do. I had been talking and thinking about it ever since my dad quit going to Meeting six months prior. I had been told that Professing was exactly who I was and why I was here and what I was supposed to do. I remember the sense of cosmic significance — of being part of something that mattered eternally, that connected me to the first century and to God and to a purpose larger than any individual life. While that feeling was real, the system that produced it was corrupt. We experienced that genuine feeling of meaning, and losing it was one of the most disorienting parts of leaving.

We are not susceptible to high-control groups because we are primitive or irrational. We are susceptible because we cannot live without meaning. That is why humanity writes symphonies, cures diseases, and loves other people at great personal cost. You cannot have one without the other.

The third thing they hijacked: your desire to be good

This is the one that lives longest in survivors. Long after the theology is gone, long after the community is gone, long after the belonging and the meaning have been rebuilt elsewhere — this one stays.

I wanted to be good. I genuinely, earnestly, with everything I had, wanted to be a good, Professing girl. Professing girls wore the dresses. We kept the rules. We went to the Meetings and the conventions. We listened sincerely to the Workers on the platform and took copious notes. I took it seriously when they told us of the need of the Harvest Field and that we should give everything away and go into the Work. We did all of it not because we were coerced, though we were — but because we believed. We believed that goodness looked like this. We believed that sacrifice was holy. We believed that submission was virtue and that compliance was love.

That desire — the desire to be genuinely, deeply, self-sacrificially good — is not a pathology. It is one of the finest things about human beings. Every ethical tradition in human history, every religion and philosophy that has ever tried to make humans better to each other, is built on the realization that people have this desire and can be helped to act from it.

High-control groups take that desire and aim it at the group’s own interests. They define goodness as loyalty. They define virtue as compliance. They define love as silence in the face of harm. They take the most generative impulse a human being has — the impulse to contribute to something larger than yourself, to be worthy of the people around you, to matter — and they channel it into a system that benefits those at the top at the expense of everyone else.

When I gave away my car, my scholarship, my savings, and my future to go into the Work, I was not being foolish. I was being exactly the person the community had told me God wanted me to be. I was being good — by their definition. And their definition was the only one I had been given.

The fourth thing they hijacked: your love of learning

We derive genuine pleasure from the pursuit of new knowledge. The desire to understand — to take something apart and see how it works, to follow a question wherever it leads, to discover something that reframes everything you thought you knew — is one of the most distinctly human experiences there is.

High-control groups offer a world of learning. Scripture. History. Doctrine. The intricacies of the community’s rules and traditions and internal logic. Read and pray. Every day. Tis the true, the better way. There is always more to study, more to understand, more to master. The learning feels real because it is real — you are genuinely acquiring knowledge, genuinely developing expertise, genuinely becoming more fluent in a complex system.

What you are not permitted to notice is that all of the learning points inward. I was only learning more about how to live as a Professing girl. My learning served the system. Questions that point outward — toward the history the community has erased, toward the experiences of people who left, toward the research on how high-control groups work — those aren’t questions – they’re mutiny. The boundary of permitted inquiry is invisible until you bump against it. And by then, the learning you have already done has made you fluent in what would be seemly and what would not. This makes it seem like it just wouldn’t be professing of us to ask. The question feels foreign and unnatural and Worldly.

I grew up believing the Workers went back in an unbroken line to Jesus and the disciples. That belief was not the result of laziness. I had learned it thoroughly, and every adult in my orbit believed this was The Gospel Truth. Literally. We had no access to Cherie Kropp-Ehrig’s meticulous historical research showing that the Two by Two began with William Irvine in Ireland in 1897. The learning I did was real. The container it was poured into was designed to prevent the questions that would have cracked it open.

Will we get better at this?

I don’t know.

The same dynamics that produced the Two by Two produce every authoritarian political movement, every abusive institution, every system that takes human beings’ deepest needs and exploits them for the benefit of those with power. These patterns are very old and very adaptable. The costume changes — in one generation it is God’s highest calling, in another it is the nation’s destiny, in another it is your feminine nature — but the structure underneath is always the same: offer belonging, offer meaning, offer an identity, and then make leaving cost everything.

What is genuinely new, in the full sweep of human history, is the ability of survivors to find each other.

For most of human history, the geographic isolation that high-control groups depend on was nearly total. I spent my childhood surrounded by Professing people who believed what I believed. People who quit professing disappeared into silence. Those who left had no community on the other side — no language, no framework, no others who had made the same journey and could tell them what to expect.

That has changed. The internet — whatever its other costs — made it possible for survivors of the same high-control group to find each other across continents. To name what happened. To build resources. To say, clearly and in public: this is how the system works, this is what it does to people, and this is what it looks like to survive it. When the Dean Bruer scandal erupted, I found the Exposing Abuse site and the Ex-2×2 site on Facebook. Membership in those sites exploded from a few to thousands. Thousands of people who understood what I had been through. I reconnected with people I thought I had lost. People mentioned memories that were the same as mine. From the convention stew to taking our dolls out of Meeting and beating them – we shared a childhood across continents. That has been so deeply meaningful to me. I now have context of my meaning as an ex-2×2, and the ways that is so similar to others who left.

That naming matters more than it might appear. You cannot defend against something you cannot see. The more clearly we can describe the mechanisms — the belonging-as-trap, the meaning-as-control, the goodness-hijacked-for-compliance — the more possible it becomes for people inside to recognize what they are inside, and for people outside to understand what survivors experienced rather than wondering how they could have been so credulous.

I believe humanity can overcome our desire for high-control, abusive dynamics. I believe that understanding it clearly and helping each other heal are the beginnings of the possibility.

And understanding it clearly means starting here: you were not weak. You were human. The best parts of you were used against you. That is not your fault. That is the nature of the trap. It starts with self-empathy. Then you can turn that empathy outward – to your own kids, to the exes community, to people you once considered Worldly. It’s the opposite of what we were taught – and it feels so good and healing to learn to live with less judgment.

You wanted to be good. You were. Now you can open to a new, different way to see the world – one which includes so many people you didn’t have before. The way forward is in communion: shared community. And we learn that communion isn’t reserved only for people with their hair and clothes in a certain fashion sitting in a living room around “the emblems.” Communion is connection. With yourself. With the people close to you. With humanity.

The definition they gave you was the lie. Let’s write a new chapter.

Resources

This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for Two by Two survivors and anyone recovering from high-control religious communities.

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By Meliesa Tigard
April 28, 2026

Read on Substack:  
https://purpledoorjourneys.substack.com/p/why-are-we-so-susceptible?