Content warning: This post reflects on themes of cults, coercive control, religion-based abuse and psychological harm.

There are some documentaries you watch and move on from. And then there are the ones that stay with you…

Watching Trust Me (Netflix) this week left me with that sickly, unsettled feeling that lingers long after the credits roll. I was horrified, of course. Deeply horrified. The kind of horror that makes you pause the screen, stare into the distance and wonder how human beings can do this to one another in the name of faith, obedience, or ‘ truth’ 🙁

But alongside that horror was something else.

Fascination.

Not with the abuse itself ~ never that ~ but with the psychology of it all. The slow shaping of belief. The coercion. The way minds can be influenced inside closed systems. The way adults can be conditioned to accept the unacceptable and the way children can be born into a world where control is normalised before they are even old enough to question it.

And then there are the young people. The children born into these worlds before they have language for what is happening to them. Before they have choice. Before they know that life can look different. That is perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all ~ not only the control itself, but the way it reaches into childhood and shapes a person before they have had the chance to become fully their own.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

Because stories like this are often spoken about in extremes. Monsters. Victims. Evil. Innocence.

And yes, those words have their place.

But beneath all of that is something quieter and in many ways, more disturbing: the vulnerability of the human mind when fear, power, religion all become tangled together.

What does it do to a human when their world is built on absolute authority? What happens when doubt becomes sin? When obedience becomes survival? When leaving does not just mean walking away from a belief system, but losing your family, your identity, your safety, your entire understanding of reality?

These are not simple questions and Trust Me did not leave me with simple answers.

It left me thinking about coercive control in its most dangerous form ~ not always obvious at first, but layered, spiritualised, disguised as care, righteousness, protection. It left me thinking about how humans can be led, shaped and psychologically cornered over time.

How belief can be weaponised. How religion, in the wrong hands, can stop being about faith altogether and become something else entirely: power!

That is what made this documentary feel so icky!

Because it is easy from the outside to ask, ‘how could they believe this?’

But maybe the more honest question is, ‘What conditions make humans vulnerable to it?’ Isolation. Fear. Repetition. Authority. Community. Shame. Hope. The human need to belong. The human need to make meaning. The human need to trust something bigger than ourselves.

That is where this story becomes more than just a documentary about one group or one leader.

It becomes a story about humans.

About psychology.

About the terrifying ease with which control can take hold when critical thinking is punished and devotion is rewarded.

I finished Trust Me feeling equal parts disturbed and deeply reflective. Not just about cults, but about human behaviour itself.

About the fragility of the mind. About the strange and unsettling places humans can be led when power wears the mask of certainty.

Some stories shock you.

Some stories haunt you.

And some stories force you to sit with the uncomfortable truth that the line between belief and control can become dangerously thin in the wrong hands.

And maybe that is the part that lingers most ~ the children. The young lives shaped inside worlds they did not choose, learning fear before freedom, obedience before selfhood. There is something unspeakably sad about watching innocence moulded by power long before it ever has the chance to become its own thing.

This one carried all of it.

Love Rain x