About this site

Why it exists

Most of the harm done by high-control groups is done quietly, and most of the people it happens to spend years without a word for it. They know something is wrong. They have been told, persuasively and often kindly, that the wrongness is in them. By the time they leave, the faculty they would use to work out what happened is the exact faculty that was worked on.

This site exists to supply the missing vocabulary: to describe the mechanisms precisely enough that a person can recognise them, name them, and stop treating them as a private failure. It is built on the premise that clarity is itself a form of support — not a substitute for help, but frequently the thing that makes help possible.

What this site does

• Describes the structural mechanisms by which groups convert trust into control.
• Provides a private, self-scoring questionnaire across six domains of control.
• Maintains a working glossary for experiences that are otherwise hard to name.
• Sets out what recovery actually involves, and what families and friends can usefully do.
• Points toward organisations and practitioners who can do what a website cannot.
• Publishes first-person accounts on their contributors’ terms.

What it does not do

• It does not name groups, leaders or individuals. The reasoning is set out in full on the testimonies page: naming redirects the discussion onto a dispute about one organisation, which is the argument high-control groups are best at, and it exposes contributors rather than the site.
• It does not diagnose. Nothing here is a clinical assessment of you, of anyone else, or of any organisation.
• It does not give legal, medical or financial advice. Where those are needed — and they often are — you need a professional in your own jurisdiction.
• It does not investigate. Allegations of criminal conduct belong with the police, statutory safeguarding bodies, regulators, or journalists able to verify them properly.
• It does not oppose spirituality, religion, therapy, or community. The subject is structure, not belief. Many of the practices misused by coercive groups are genuinely valuable elsewhere.
• It does not tell anyone to leave. That decision belongs to the person making it, who knows their situation and its costs far better than a website can.

Editorial principles

Behaviour over belief

Every judgement on this site is about what a group does — how power is exercised, where accountability travels, what happens to people who question or leave. What a group believes is not the variable.

Degrees, not categories

“Is it a cult?” is a poor question. Groups sit on a continuum and move along it. The material here is written to be useful at every point on that line.

Agency is returned, not replaced

Telling someone what their experience means is the shape of the thing they just left. The purpose here is to hand back tools, not to supply a new framework that must be accepted.

Honesty about uncertainty

Where the field is contested — and parts of it genuinely are — this site says so rather than presenting one position as settled. See the note on a contested field. The questionnaire has not been formally validated, and says so on the page.

Nothing is collected

No tracking, no cookies, no third-party requests, no stored answers. A site about coercive control that surveilled its readers would be refuting itself. See Safety & privacy.

Contact

Email: anatomyofacult@gmail.com

If you would rather not write from an address that identifies you, a free account made for the purpose is fine. Nothing here requires your real name.

Write about any of the following:

• Contributing your story. Please read the contributor guidance first — particularly the section on identifiability.
• A term the glossary is missing, or an experience you have no word for. Describing it is usually the first half of defining it.
• A correction. Errors of fact are taken seriously and fixed promptly.
• A resource that should be listed, particularly outside the English-speaking world, where the list is thinnest.
• A safety problem with the site itself. Anything that could expose a reader is a priority.

Corrections

This site tries to describe a contested field accurately, and it will sometimes get things wrong. Corrections of fact are welcome, will be made promptly, and — where the change is substantive — will be noted rather than made silently.

Accessibility

The site is built as plain, semantic HTML: it works with keyboard navigation and screen readers, respects your system’s light or dark preference and any reduced-motion setting, and remains readable when text is enlarged. Nothing depends on colour alone, and the questionnaire’s questions are readable even with JavaScript switched off. If something here is difficult for you to use, please say so — that is a defect worth fixing.

Reuse

Text from this site may be reproduced for non-commercial support and educational use with attribution and a link. If you are a support organisation, therapist or helpline and it would be useful to adapt this material — including translating it — please get in touch; we would rather help than be quoted approximately.