Imagine attending on a whim a life improvement seminar promising personal transformation. You decide to embrace its central teaching that you are 100% responsible for everything in your life, hoping for genuine change. You alone are responsible for the turns your life takes.
Initially, the message may feel empowering for some individuals. No more playing the victim. No more blaming others. You alone decide what happens to you. But when another member sexually assaults you in the parking lot after an evening session, the group’s philosophy turns against you.
“What made you decide to have this experience?” your coach asks. “What lesson is your soul trying to learn?”
You’re devastated, and not just by the assault but by the crushing belief that you somehow attracted the attack. Your coach tells you that people often decide to take risks, such as going out at night, to teach themselves to set firm boundaries. You hang your head, knowing that you’ve always had trouble with boundaries.
This is the trap of so-called “radical responsibility”, the doctrine that there are no victims, only creators of their own reality. It is one of the most destructive forms of psychological manipulation used by destructive cults.
How the Manipulation Works
Groups ranging from Scientology to NXIVM to est/The Forum have employed variations of this belief system—all of them utilizing essentially the same destructive framework: You choose your circumstances before birth, your karma from past lives determines your current suffering, or you unconsciously “pull in” whatever happens to you.
In Scientology, members learn that hey are spiritual beings who are “cause over life”, that is, responsible for their own troubles. Problems such as illness or poverty are attributed to the member’s own “overts” (supposed transgressions) or personal deficiencies.
In NXIVM, Keith Raniere taught that successful people take full responsibility for their experiences, while “victims” remain stuck in weakness.
Werner Erhard’s est seminars and their successor, The Forum, now Landmark Forum, taught participants that they were responsible for everything in their lives, including childhood abuse. Participants were sometimes told that if they had been molested as children, they had somehow “chosen” the experience.
The teachings create a closed loop of shame. When something bad happens, the member looks inward for the cause. When abuse occurs within the group, the victim questions what they did to attract it.
The abuser is never held accountable because the philosophy has already assigned blame to the person who was harmed, who believes that any problems they encounter are their own fault.
Why It Feels Like Empowerment
This type of manipulation can be highly effective because, to some, the idea can feel liberating. Many people are drawn to the notion that they alone have the power to control their circumstances. And like any effective con, there is a shred of truth in the framing for many.
“I’m a survivor, not a victim” is a healthy reframe for many trauma survivors.
However, there is a difference between healthy agency and unwarranted self-blame. Genuine empowerment acknowledges that while we cannot always control what happens to us, we can control how we respond to it. Destructive “responsibility” doctrines do not accept such framing and instead claim that we do control what happens to us, which means that any harm we experience is entirely our fault.
Cults exploit the resulting psychological trap. Members cannot acknowledge being victimized without admitting they are fundamentally weak or karmically flawed. To maintain a sense of being “evolved”, they must deny their own victimization when exploited or seek the guidance of the cult to stop “pulling in” negative experiences.
Within cults espousing radical responsibility, the self-blame cycle never stops—because we humans are continually subject to difficult and even traumatic life experiences. Being human means experiencing distress; there is always something new to blame yourself for.
The Psychology of Getting Stuck
Cult members who internalize such beliefs can’t name that they are being mind-controlled by a malignant narcissist. They cannot leave because leaving would mean admitting that the leader and group harmed them, and the doctrine states that harm is impossible, as only self-imposed lessons exist.
This dynamic shows up in several destructive patterns as members minimize or rationalize abuse. They may blame themselves for the group’s failures and remain loyal to abusive leaders because questioning them would mean their own suffering was meaningless.
Within destructive cults, the leader, doctrine, and group are always considered correct, while members are deemed inherently flawed. Since the philosophy is “perfect,” any problem that arises must be the fault of the individual member. Such thinking creates a feeling of perpetual inadequacy that keeps members compliant and controllable.
The belief needs to be strongly refuted, in promoting recovery from cult membership. Former members may struggle for years with crushing guilt, believing they deserve every bad thing that happened to them. Some feel they cannot call themselves survivors because the cult taught them that victimhood is bad. Once internalized, the belief can persist long after the person has physically left the group.
Radical Responsibility Is Not Personal Responsibility
Healing from programming in such a belief system requires dismantling the “just world” fallacy that cults sell to victims. In reality, bad things happen to good people, and we are not gods who create our own reality free from discomfort if only we ascend high enough.
Abandoning that the cultic notion of radical responsibility does not imply abandoning personal responsibility. Taking responsibility for your own actions is a healthy and necessary practice—and entirely different from accepting responsibility for someone else’s decision to harm you.
Let us lay responsibility where it really belongs. An abuser’s actions belong to the abuser. Your actions belong to you. Conflating the two is precisely how cults keep victims silent and compliant. True strength has never, and will never, require accepting blame for one’s own exploitation.
