Tara Westover’s Educated stayed with me because I did not read it from a comfortable distance. I also grew up in a cult, although my experience was very different from hers. What I recognized was not the exact structure of her upbringing, but the underlying architecture: the gradual loss of freedom of self.

One difference stood out immediately. In my own upbringing, education was encouraged. We were expected to excel because we were taught that we were exceptional—that we were among the smartest and most informed people in the room. Academic achievement could coexist quite comfortably with profound restrictions on personal autonomy. In our case, one of the clearest boundaries was whom we were expected to marry. That contrast reminded me that high-control environments do not all use the same mechanisms. They control the parts of life that matter most to maintaining the system.

What felt especially familiar in Educated was the doomsday thinking. My own cult also emphasized a dangerous, corrupt outside world and an approaching catastrophe. That kind of worldview does more than create fear. It limits the future a child is allowed to imagine. When survival or spiritual safety is always hanging over you, independence can begin to feel selfish, reckless, or even dangerous.

Westover’s story ultimately made me think less about education itself than about ownership of the self. Leaving a high-control environment is not simply walking away from a family, belief system, or community. It means learning to trust your own perceptions, choices, and future after being taught that those things were never entirely yours.

I did not live Tara Westover’s story. But I recognized the mechanism: when a system defines both the danger and the path to safety, it can quietly take possession of a person’s future.

Daniella Mestyanek Young’s Uncultured was difficult for me to read for reasons that had less to do with the particulars of her childhood and more to do with what I recognized underneath them. I also grew up in a cult, although my experience was very different from hers. What felt familiar was the loss of freedom of self—the way a high-control system can decide not only what you believe, but what your own body, choices, and experiences are allowed to mean.

Sexuality is central to Uncultured, and that may be one of the most disturbing examples of this kind of control. Sex could be described as God’s love, used to justify sexual contact with children, treated as punishment or obligation, and then condemned as sinful depending on what those in authority needed it to mean. The contradiction is almost the point. When the rules can change at any moment, the only dependable rule is obedience.

That instability strips a person of more than consent. It interferes with the ability to understand your own body, establish boundaries, trust your instincts, or decide for yourself whether an experience was loving, harmful, wanted, or abusive. Authority becomes more powerful than the individual’s own perception.

My upbringing did not involve the same sexual practices Young describes, and I would never suggest that our experiences were interchangeable. But I recognized the underlying mechanism. Cults do not need to control every part of a person’s life in exactly the same way. They control what is necessary to preserve the system.

What stayed with me most was how much leaving requires a person to reclaim. Escape may remove you from the authority structure, but freedom of self has to be rebuilt: the right to define your own body, your own morality, your own relationships, and eventually your own life.