From Home to Campus: How Childhood Trauma Shapes Cult Susceptibility and Cultic Leadership in College Students

Full Title: From Home to Campus: How Childhood Trauma Shapes Cult Susceptibility and Cultic Leadership in College Students

Author: Dylesia Barner

Abstract: College campuses are increasingly recognized as sites of recruitment for high-control groups, yet less attention has been given to the developmental and relational factors that shape students’ vulnerability to coercive influence or their replication of such dynamics within student-lead organizations.

This presentation introduces the Campus Cultic Susceptibility & Replication Model (CCSRM), a developmental framework that conceptualizes cult involvement and cult-like leadership on college campuses as occurring along a relational conditioning → coercive control continuum. Rather than framing cult risk as a product of belief systems or charismatic leaders, the model emphasizes family-of-origin conditioning as a central mechanism shaping students’ relationships to authority, belonging, obedience, and self-trust.

Drawing from clinical practice with college students, the CCSRM outlines three interconnected stages:

• Pre-campus relational conditioning, including spiritualized control, enmeshment, and accountability avoidance within a students’ family-of-origin;
• Campus transition vulnerability, during which students may be particularly susceptible to external high-control groups that mirror familiar relational dynamics; and
• Cultic replication within student-led organizations, where learned patterns of coercive control are reenacted in religious, activist, Greek, and service-based campus groups, even in the absence of an external cultic authority.

This session concludes with implications for prevention, assessment, and intervention in higher education, including trauma-informed approaches to student leadership, campus programming, and early identification of coercive dynamics. This model expands cult studies by situating coercive control within everyday developmental and institutional contexts, offering a framework for understanding how cultic dynamics emerge, migrate, and reproduce on college campuses.