This full episode of Explained looks at how cults lure people in and exert control. Learn a cult’s telltale signs, and how loneliness in life and life online makes indoctrination easier than ever.

Amber Scorah is author of the memoir Leaving the Witness. Growing up in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, Scorah moved to mainland China to become an underground missionary. In China, she came to question these beliefs and left the religion. Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery, with no education or support system. After growing up in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, Amber learned Mandarin Chinese and moved to Mainland China to become an underground missionary. In China, encountering a new culture and making friends outside the faith for the first time, Amber came to question the beliefs she had been taught from childhood and ended up leaving the religion. Amber later moved to New York City, where she began a new life. Several years later, her three-month old son died on his first day in childcare. After this tragedy, Amber became a parental leave advocate.

With humor and piercing observations, Dawn Smith sheds light on growing up in a religious cult (The Jesus Movement) and what it takes to leave everything you’ve ever known.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religious organization with, reportedly, over eight million members across the world. Jehovah’s Witnesses are bible literalists who believe in Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and maintain that Armageddon will occur in the near future.

The organization also has many rules that members must follow. For example, the organization prohibits any sexual contact outside marriage, they prohibit holiday celebrations such as birthdays and Christmas, any political action such as voting, blood transfusions in the case of a medical emergency, they discourage any university education that is not in the trades and the organization has a stern stance against homosexuality.

There are also restrictions on how Jehovah’s Witnesses should look, what they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they do for recreation, and the people they should surround themselves with.

While some witnesses may find solace in the organizations rigid ideology, others find it difficult to adhere to its rules leading to anxiety and depression. Those feelings of anxiety and depression are compounded by the fear that breaking the rules or leaving the organization will result in them being disfellowshipped and shunned by friends and family.

The Cult Next Door is a short documentary film about Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles. Gothard, who shunned things like rock music and short skirts, is now facing charges of sexual harassment and assault. Many individuals see the group as cult-like and also very damaging to the ones involved in it: this is their story.