Cult dynamics are everywhere!
Provokarte’s Solution?
Bring back the Arts!
From boardrooms to CrossFit boxes, self-help circles to yoga studios, the same manipulative patterns keep cropping up, dressed as growth, leadership or community.
Online, it’s amplified: influencer culture, algorithm-driven groupthink, and endless “transformations” that look different but follow the same script.
Provokarte helps you recognise these tactics before they trap you: manipulation, coercive control, emotional grooming and financial exploitation.
The antidote? Clear thinking, creative vision, and the Arts.
Protect your mind, your money, and your autonomy.
Tired of workplaces, training and communities that feel like a cult?
If you have ever left a workshop feeling humiliated, confused or pushed into fake “breakthroughs”, you are not imagining it.
If a group that once felt warm, welcoming and inspiring now sets off your alarm bells, you are not alone.
We’re surrounded by jargon, performance, and algorithm-fed identities — and slowly losing the ability to think for ourselves.
This work is about getting that back.
Not through more self-help, but through analysis, language, and the disciplines of the arts — poetry, literature, and critical thinking as tools for seeing clearly again.
I work with professionals, students and independent thinkers who want connection and growth without control, and with those rebuilding trust in their own judgement after coercive or confusing experiences.
Find out how to protect yourself from coercive influence, grow without signing up to some shady ponzi scheme, and start to rebuild confidence in your own judgment – on your own terms.
Why Recognizing Cult Dynamics Matters
When most people hear the word cult, they think of robes, chanting, or strange rituals in candlelit basements. They picture Scientology, NXIVM, the Manson Family, or those earnest young missionaries from the Church of Latter-Day Saints. They might think of the Jehovah’s Witnesses with their copies of The Watchtower, or the glossy herbal supplement schemes that promise health and wealth. But cults rarely start out looking like cults.
A cult is any group or organisation that uses psychological manipulation and control to demand absolute loyalty. A high-demand or high-control group may not call itself a religion or a movement at all. It might be a coaching school, a yoga collective, a wellness start-up, or a political community. These groups often promise transformation, belonging, or purpose, but behind the promise lies a system of undue influence: techniques designed to limit doubt, reward obedience, and create dependency.
Coercive control is the psychological glue that holds these systems together. They use emotional chains not physical ones; Techniques like isolation, guilt, fear, love-bombing, gaslighting, and constant pressure to conform. You don’t have to live in a commune to experience it. It happens in companies, classrooms, and therapy spaces every day.
Modern life has absorbed cultic techniques almost completely. HR departments talk about “alignment.” Coaches preach that “everything you need is within you.” Influencers sell enlightenment in ten steps. Political movements thrive on the same us-versus-them thinking that once defined religious sects. The tools of persuasion that once belonged to fringe groups have been repackaged as personal development, productivity, or leadership training – and they drive the algorithm of what we consume online.
Many of today’s most popular coaching and corporate programmes can trace their DNA to 1970s “large group awareness trainings” or LGATs, like Werner Erhard’s est and its offshoot, Landmark. One of the most successful coaching companies in the world comes from this lineage and is now fully integrated in HR departments and business schools, along with the radically neoliberal ideology embedded in its teachings. These were built on the same scaffolding as Scientology: euphoric highs, confession-style “breakthroughs,” and hierarchies where each level promises deeper truth. Whether they appear as self-help seminars, influencer academies, or culture-change consultancies, the structure is the same: pay, participate, submit, repeat.
As Mark Vicente, ex-member of NXIVM, puts it: ‘Nobody joins a cult. They join a good thing.’”
And that’s exactly why recognising the signs matters.
Buy the book: THINK: 7 Cult Dynamics Shaping Modern Business and Training
How manipulation techniques from cults can infiltrate coaching, therapy, and corporate training, – and how to spot them.
Quién soy
Soy Jenni Walford, fundadora de Provokarte. Soy de Cumbria, Reino Unido, y vivo en España desde 2002. Llevo más de dos décadas trabajando en educación, coaching y contextos terapéuticos.
Siempre me ha fascinado cómo las personas acaban integrándose en grupos que prometen pertenencia o transformación. Desde círculos de estudio religioso hasta programas de formación corporativa y de coaching, he visto cómo la manipulación sutil y la dependencia emocional pueden aparecer en cualquier parte, incluso en espacios que dicen ayudarnos a crecer. En varios de los espacios en los que me formé en Barcelona había numerosos rasgos propios de grupos sectarios, incluidos cursos certificados por universidades reales.
En Provokarte, utilizo el pensamiento crítico y las Artes para ayudar a las personas a reconocer y resistir la influencia indebida. Mi trabajo ayuda a recuperar claridad, confianza y libertad creativa tras experiencias de confusión o coerción. Propongo cambiar los libros de autoayuda por literatura de verdad, la escritura creativa y el cine de autor, y los grupos con dinámicas sectarias por clubes autogestionados y el buen y viejo hecho de socializar.
Course and Resources
Why do so many leadership programmes, coaching schools, wellness retreats and community groups follow the same script? Why do people who promise empowerment end up creating dependency, confusion and shame? Why does belonging so often come with a price; your free time, your boundaries, your critical mind?
Provokarte’s THINK • CREATE • RESIST model helps you recognise the emotional, social and ideological mechanics behind manipulative systems in work, wellness and community life. It brings together critical thinking, arts-based learning and research-driven tools to help you heal from abuse, recover your confidence, protect your autonomy and reconnect with your own sense of meaning.
Here you will find courses, e-books and creative activities that help you think clearly, express freely and resist coercive influence, to help you to heal, learn, grow and connect without giving up your independence. You can also sign up for 1-to-1 or team mentoring sessions or tailor-made consultancy services.
THINK
Discover what’s really going on behind today’s coaching, HR and wellbeing trends.
From pseudoscience and recycled rituals to collective highs, forced vulnerability and esoteric practices, we explore where these ideas come from, tracing their roots from early occult movements to modern self-help and coaching, and how they work.
We examine the beliefs that underpin them, from “you create your own reality” to other forms of subtle dogma, and how they shape the way people think, behave and see themselves.
Learn how to read texts, from self-help books to literature, and recognise the techniques used to influence emotions, shape thinking and create belief.
I offer one-to-one sessions and small group workshops for people affected by coercive coaching programmes or training, for professionals who encounter these dynamics in the workplace, and for coaches and educators who want to avoid them and take a different approach.
CREATE
This is a space where we stop consuming passively and start creating, thinking and expressing ourselves again.
In a culture of endless scrolling, optimisation and performance, creativity is too often reduced to content and productivity. Here, we do the opposite. We slow down, pay attention and create something that is genuinely our own.
Working with both fiction and non-fiction, you’ll develop your own voice while learning how creative techniques shape meaning and expression. This may include writing, painting, drawing and hands-on practical work that reconnects you with focus, imagination and craftsmanship.
This is also about sustaining a creative life. We explore reality, uncertainty, confidence, and the pressure to constantly produce or monetise your work.
Work with me one-to-one or in a small group if you want to develop your creative practice, think more independently, and build a way of learning and working that isn’t driven by algorithms, trends or empty self-help.
RESIST
This is a space where we learn to recognise coercion in the workplace and respond with clarity and firmness.
In workplaces, education and training environments, CULTura change programmes are increasingly introducing high-pressure methods under the language of development. What appears to be growth can quickly become control, especially when consent is unclear and questioning is discouraged.
We focus on practical tools: how to identify these dynamics early, how to document what is happening, and how to respond without putting yourself at unnecessary risk. This includes understanding informed consent, professional boundaries, and where ethical and legal lines are being crossed.
Resist is about protecting people, maintaining standards, and keeping working environments grounded in reality rather than ideology.
Work with me one-to-one or in small groups if you are dealing with coercive training at work, representing others as a union member or team lead, or building professional practices that prioritise ethics over pressure and compliance.
Recursos esenciales¡Muy pronto!
Libro: 7 dinámicas sectarias en el mundo empresarial y la formación
Descubre los mecanismos ocultos en la formación y la terapia con nuestra guía exhaustiva. ¡Cómprala aquí!
Comprender el consentimiento
Profundiza en los matices del consentimiento y en cómo el lenguaje puede ocultar un acuerdo real. Una lectura imprescindible para cualquier persona que trabaje o se forme en entornos de aprendizaje.
Checklists legales para trabajadores
Equípate con checklists legales prácticas diseñadas para proteger tus derechos en contextos de formación en el trabajo.
Plantillas para Onboardings éticas
Implanta procesos de incorporación que prioricen la ética y el consentimiento, garantizando un entorno seguro para todas las personas participantes.
Talleres y eventos
Participa en sesiones interactivas diseñadas para darte habilidades y conocimientos prácticos.
Directorio de sectas
Un listado de expertos y organizaciones sobre sectas. Esta lista está creciendo constantemente, así que vuelve a consultarla con frecuencia.
Glosario sectario de la A a la Z
Recorre el complejo mundo de las dinámicas sectarias con nuestro glosario previsto, que ofrecerá definiciones claras y análisis útiles.
Follow Us Online
Join the Provokarte community
Join the mailing list for evidence-based resources on cults, coercive control and critical thinking, along with course updates and ideas to support your creative practice.
Think. Create. Resist.
Not sure what you’re dealing with?
If something about a coaching programme, workplace initiative, training course or wellness organisation doesn’t sit right, I’d be happy to help you think it through.
Share your story, ask a question, or book a free 20-minute clarity session.