Welcome to The AACA Blog

Cults of the day. Cults of yesterday. And the people who lived through both.

AACA stands for Alliance Against Cult Abuse — the organization behind this site, and now this blog.

Every high-control group tells the same story about itself: we are the exception. We are the one true path, the one safe place, the one leader who won’t fail you. History says otherwise — again and again, in every era, on every continent, the same architecture of control gets rebuilt with a new name on the door.

This blog exists because the pattern is learnable, and because the people who lived inside it deserve more than a footnote.

What you’ll find here

This isn’t a second Compendium. The Compendium is the record — dates, structures, sourced facts, told with restraint. This blog is where the record gets a pulse:

• Survivor stories, told as fully and honestly as the people living them are willing to tell them — in their own words wherever we can manage it, not filtered through our summary of what we think they meant.
• Reporting and analysis on groups making news right now, and on ones that shaped the world decades ago but never got their reckoning.
• The patterns underneath the headlines — coercive control, isolation, manufactured dependency — named plainly enough that you can recognize them somewhere other than a group with “cult” in the headline: a workplace, a relationship, a family.

We’re not interested in shock value or true-crime spectacle. We’re interested in the mechanics of undue influence, because understanding the mechanics is what lets someone recognize it early — in their own life, or in time to reach someone they love.

An invitation, not a broadcast

We built this as a public reference, but a reference is only as good as the people who correct and add to it. If you lived through a group we write about, know a group that belongs in the Compendium, have a source or lead that deepens a story we’ve told, or just have a reaction — agreement, pushback, a question we didn’t think to ask — we want to hear it. This is meant to be a conversation, not a lecture. Submit a tip for corrections and story leads, or leave a comment on any post. Every submission gets read by a person, not a queue.

Thanks for being here. Let’s get into it.