You know the look on a person’s face when they’re too polite to say what they’re really thinking? That’s the look I get almost every time I tell someone I was once in a cult. The unspoken sentiment is this: How in the world could you—or any sensible person—be so stupid as to get duped into joining a cult?

That’s because the word cult triggers extreme images. We think of Jim Jones’s followers forced to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, members of Heaven’s Gate awaiting their ride on a comet, or perhaps the women of NXIVM turned into sex slaves. Add your own images.

These extreme examples are exactly what I, too, once thought a cult would look like. Which is why I never, during my thirty-two years entrapped in Aesthetic Realism, believed it was a cult. No. I was part of an elite group of exceedingly intellectual individuals studying a rigorous, scholarly body of knowledge about the arts, the self, and the aesthetic nature of reality. How dare anyone call us a cult?!

In fact, we are all surrounded by organizations that practice some form of coercive control. We just don’t know it because most of them look pretty normal from the outside—nothing like what we think of as a cult. We’re sure that if there were a cult lurking nearby, we’d be savvy enough to recognize it and steer clear.

But under certain, anyone can fall for a cult. Good people. Smart people. Industrious people. Educated people. People who come from good families. People like you and me. That’s because no matter how independent and freethinking any of us are, there can come a moment when we’re so overwhelmed by life’s struggles, or are so confused, we are susceptible to anyone or anything offering the solutions we seek.

Every cult knows that the best time to recruit someone is when they hit a rough patch, are searching for answers, or feel disillusioned with life. All it takes is a vulnerable moment.

Not to mention that cults usually disguise themselves as being about something that can be beneficial, such as religion, spirituality, meditation, yoga, wellness, and activism. But the subject matter is merely a pretext that lures us with the promise of fixing what’s wrong with ourselves and the world.

In other words, good things can be seized on and made into cults by bad people, grifters, and abusers.

This is true of Aesthetic Realism. Many of its teachings are benign. Some are even useful. For example, we should strive to “be grateful” and “have good will for people.”

Absolutely. Fine aspirations.

But like most cults, Aesthetic Realism promises to cure every personal problem and everything wrong in the world. (A big red flag.) Instead, it practices coercive control over the minds, hearts, and lives of the people in it. Perhaps the most egregious sin of Aesthetic Realism and its founder, Eli Siegel, was its conversion therapy (practiced until 1990) that supposedly turned gay people straight. When I submitted to it, as did hundreds of others, I did so under intense group pressure—a classic tactic of cult manipulation.

So, what is a cult? And how can you recognize one? The first step is to look not at what the group claims to be about, but at how it operates. Just about every cult, large or small, utilizes remarkably similar tactics and manipulation. I’ve adapted this list of cult characteristics from the excellent list developed by Michael D. Langone, former executive director of the International Cultic Studies Association.

Cult Characteristics

• Members display excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to a leader, whose belief system, ideology, and practices are seen as “The Truth,” as law.

• Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

• Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

• The leadership dictates how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).

• The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah on a special mission to save humanity).

• The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.

• The leader is not accountable to any authorities.

• Exalted ends justify whatever means the cult deems necessary. Members may participate in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (e.g., lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus causes).

• The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Tactics include peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

• Members must cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.

• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

• The group is preoccupied with making money.

• Members must devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

• Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

• The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They fear reprisals if they leave, or even consider leaving.

Guess what? Just about all these points match to a T my experience in Aesthetic Realism. It might have looked normal on the outside—just a group of serious students studying an esoteric philosophy.

But life within it wasn’t normal at all.