PART ZERO — The Beginning
Before I ever found myself on the wrong end of a wellness leader’s humiliating correction, and long before I learned how quickly love-bombing can turn into policing, I believed I was immune to such dynamics. I was a 26-year sober, grounded, science-driven woman. I’d rebuilt my life through evidence-based self-regulation, through neuroscience-backed meditation, and through functional nutrition tied to DNA and stress physiology. I knew how the nervous system worked. I understood trauma. I trusted my discernment.
But as sociologist Janja Lalich notes, people don’t join high-control groups because they’re weak. They join because they’re seeking. And seeking is one of the most human things we do. I was seeking!
I eventually joined an Optimization, wellness community decades into my search — this time as a practitioner, a guide, and moderator — I didn’t enter as a follower. I entered as someone offering service. Someone contributing value. Someone grounded.
The group looked like wellness, sounded like wellness, “do as I say, and you too will heal”. The kind of healing we’re all told to chase now—holistic, optimized, spiritually elevated. Breathwork, peptides, cold plunges, frequency talks, living beyond 5D, the endless mantras about alignment and sovereignty. It all shimmered with this modern language of elevation.
And in that shimmering, it was easy to miss the shadows underneath.
And maybe that’s exactly why the harm snuck up on me.
What I didn’t see until much later was the soft-control structure forming underneath the “support.” The subtle emotional policing disguised as devotion. The spiritualized language used to quiet discomfort. The hierarchical subtlety of a “leader” whose word became law, even when what he said was so far out of line, while everyone shook their head in agreement. The way my sense of safety—my actual physiology—shifted long before my mind dared to question anything.
This is the story of how my body pulled me out long before my mind caught up.
This is the beginning of a much bigger story about how our current wellness culture, in its most charismatic and commercialized forms, can quietly dysregulate the very nervous systems it claims to heal. We are being straight-up led and influenced by these online wellness “Bros” and “Biohackers” who, I believe, have lost their way, and are now driven by dollars.
The doorway in is never labeled “control.”
It’s labeled “healing,” “purpose,” “family,” “community,” “growth.”
Cult scholars have been writing about this for fifty years.
Wellness culture has simply modernized the packaging.
This is my story about what happens when the doorway in looks innocent — and what it takes to walk back out with your integrity, your voice, and your nervous system intact.
Tomorrow I will drop the next part. Stay with me.
I didn’t mean to join a “cult.”
I joined what I thought was an incredible community.
I joined as a professional, as a healer, as a person in service.
My body, however, sensed something long before I did.
That’s where this entire journey begins.
Where This Series Is Going
Over the coming weeks, inside Disregulated, I’ll be releasing a five-part editorial investigation into modern wellness culture, nervous system harm, digital spiritual hierarchies, and the very human reasons so many of us get pulled into systems that look nothing like cults, but behave a lot like them.
This series is the foundation of this Substack.
It’s also the origin story behind why I created the Calm Resilience System and why my work now centers on nervous-system literacy, service, and scientific integrity—not on charisma or ascension narratives.
If you stay with me, you’ll read:
Part One — The Lure
How grounded people (yes, especially women) get pulled into wellness systems that feel safe before they become controlling.
Part Two — The Indoctrination
The slow, subtle, almost elegant ways wellness morphs into hierarchy.
Part Three — The Harm
The toll—emotional, physical, biological—of staying loyal to a system that undermines your safety.
Part Four — The Reclamation
How the nervous system repairs itself after chronic relational threat and spiritualized manipulation.
Part Five — The New Path Forward
How this whole experience reshaped my life, my mission, and my work.
Stick With Me
Part One drops next.
There’s so much more to tell.
See you next time.
Lane
Before You Go…
If you want to follow the series — and get the tools I wish I had before my crash — subscribe below.
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Wellness shouldn’t hijack your nervous system. It should help you come home to it.