Was Someone Controlling Me, or Was It Just Me?

I remember when someone in the fitness program I belonged to was going through a divorce, and his wife, somewhere in the middle of it, accused him of being in a cult. He mentioned it in our group chat, and because I already had a vision in my head of what a cult was, my first reaction was, no fucking way, this isn’t a cult.

In the past, I probably would have shrugged it off, she’s just being dramatic, and moved on. But part of my transformation has been becoming more open to seeing someone else’s side of things, so instead of dismissing it, the comment stayed with me.

Although we’ve all heard the term, I actually looked it up. One definition describes a cult as a group whose beliefs or practices are considered coercive, insular, or dangerous. By that definition, there was no way the program qualified. Nobody was coercing us. Nobody was isolating us from our families. There was no danger. It wasn’t a cult. Not even close.

But I kept thinking about her comment, and I got curious about what she was actually seeing that made her reach for that word. So let’s go back to when I joined the program. At that time, I wasn’t looking for anyone’s approval. I was looking for some sort of transformation. That’s it. That’s what I wanted from it.

Here’s how it started. I’d seen other people’s transformations and heard the stories. The proof was right there. It clearly worked. What I didn’t have was proof it would work for me. I had hope, but not yet belief.

Then something started happening. My body began to change. The thing I’d only seen happen to other people was now happening to me. I lost the weight, muscles I hadn’t seen in years started showing again, and I got stronger. My energy came back, and with that, so did my confidence.

Holy shit! This works.

But looking back, something else was happening at the same time, and I didn’t recognize it nearly as fast. As my transformation progressed, I slowly started giving away some of the ownership of what I was becoming.

Looking back at how much my own life changed, I can understand why someone watching from the outside might not have understood what was actually going on. I started going to bed early and getting the rest my body needed instead of staying up or out late. I cut back on how much I drank and changed what I ate. Training became something I built my schedule around instead of something I squeezed in. Even my circle started shifting toward people who were living the same way I was.

None of that was forced on me. Nobody told me I couldn’t drink, who I could spend time with, or how I had to live. I made those choices because I wanted what was happening to me.

But there’s another side to transformation that I hadn’t really considered. While I was looking in the mirror and seeing someone I was proud to be becoming, the people who knew me before might have been watching someone they recognized slowly disappear. My routines changed. My priorities changed. The people I spent time with changed. The things I talked about changed. Behind so much of that change was this one program.

So no, those things didn’t make it a cult, at least not by the definition I looked up. But I know not everyone uses that definition. For a lot of people, the word gets used more loosely, for anything that looks like it’s swallowed someone whole or changed them past recognition. And I can understand how, from the outside, someone might reach for that word when they don’t understand what’s driving the change. What felt like transformation to me could look like disappearance to someone else.

But understanding what it might have looked like from the outside made me start looking more carefully at what was happening on the inside. And I think something important had already been set in motion before any of those changes happened.

I didn’t walk into the program completely satisfied with myself. I walked in because there were things I wanted to change and hadn’t been able to change on my own. When someone appears to have answers to something you’ve been struggling with, it’s easy to start placing them above you without even realizing you’re doing it. They know something you don’t. They have a system that’s producing results you haven’t been able to produce on your own. And when you’re starting from a place where your confidence isn’t exactly at its highest, that difference can feel even bigger.

Then the system starts working, and gratitude gets complicated. I was paying for a service. The knowledge, coaching, structure, and accountability weren’t gifts. They were part of what I was paying for, and I was the one doing the work. But emotionally, it didn’t always feel that way. As my life changed, part of me started feeling like I owed the program something for what was happening to me. I was paying them for the tools, but somewhere along the way, I started treating their approval like something I still had to earn.

My coach would tell me I was crushing it. That I was a great client. That I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing. Of course that felt good. I was working hard, and having someone recognize that work reinforced what I was doing.

At the same time, I was watching another kind of recognition happen all around me. On the same day every week, the owner posted a video where he talked about the program, mindset, and whatever else was on his mind that week. Part of it was recognizing members who were doing well, highlighting transformations, and naming a top performer. He would also occasionally recognize someone in the forums or comment on what they were accomplishing. I watched other people get noticed, and somewhere along the way, without consciously deciding that it mattered to me, I started wanting to be noticed too.

I wanted to hear my name mentioned. I wanted him to notice my progress picture. I wondered if maybe I’d be next. When I wasn’t, I could feel the disappointment. It wasn’t enough to ruin my day, but it was enough that I was aware of it. When the owner eventually recognized something I had done, it meant more to me than it probably should have.

Looking back, I understand why. This program had become connected to a transformation that was changing my life, and he was the founder and the public face of it. Nobody told me to put him on a pedestal, and he didn’t ask me to. But I associated him with something deeply meaningful that was happening to me, and somewhere along the way, his approval started carrying more weight than I realized.

None of it happened all at once. It happened slowly enough that I didn’t recognize what I was handing over until it was already done.

Then I was nominated for the Hall of Fame. I remember reading the message twice before it landed. My stomach did something I wasn’t expecting, this kind of buzzing, tingling feeling that spread through my whole body. Then I wanted to tell someone and didn’t have anyone in the room to tell. If I’m being completely honest, that’s what intensified everything. What strikes me now is that even the nomination felt less like recognition of something I had earned and more like something that had been given to me. I had done the work, but somehow they had become the ones who got to decide whether that work was worthy.

There was something else wrapped up in it too: belonging. I knew that if I was selected, I’d become part of a smaller, more exclusive group within the larger community. Being nominated meant I was now being considered for that group, and that alone carried weight for me. The more significance I gave that distinction, the more significance I gave to the people who had the power to grant it.

When I was eventually selected, that feeling only got stronger. Suddenly I wasn’t just doing well. I’d been told I was worthy. Worthy of recognition, worthy of belonging, worthy of having what I’d accomplished publicly validated. It felt incredible, but it also made me want more.

That wanting is part of what led me from the standard membership into the elite tier. Unlike the Hall of Fame, nobody had to choose me for this one. It was available to anyone willing to make the additional investment, and I chose to make it. But I don’t think the name was meaningless to me either. Elite signified something to me. Another level. Another step up from where I’d been.

I genuinely believed I was investing further in my transformation. That part was real, and I believed there was more I could learn and more I could accomplish. But looking back, I can see something else was mixed into that decision too. I wasn’t just becoming more invested in the program financially. I was becoming more invested in the recognition, status, and belonging I had begun to associate with it.

That’s the strange thing about recognition. I thought receiving it would satisfy the desire for it. Instead, it moved the bar. Being noticed felt good, so I wanted to be noticed again. Being chosen for the Hall of Fame felt good. Becoming Elite felt like another step forward. Somewhere along the way, these things stopped simply acknowledging my progress and started influencing how I measured it. Instead of just asking, Am I proud of what I’m doing?, another question had quietly slipped in beside it, Do they see it too?

Somewhere between encouragement, recognition, status, and belonging, I had started handing someone else the measuring stick.

Then something strange happened. The more I changed physically, the more I changed internally. I got more confident, more independent, more willing to trust my own judgment. I started questioning things instead of automatically accepting them. Strangely enough, the very program I once credited with helping me find that confidence had helped create a version of me that was becoming less dependent on the program itself.

Over the next several months, the cracks got harder to look past. One marketing piece in particular stuck with me. It used before-and-after photos of someone I knew, someone who’d made the Hall of Fame around the same time I did, and described what she used to look like as a disaster. I understood the business logic. I could even understand why that kind of marketing worked. But watching a friend’s body get called a disaster to sell the program to other people landed wrong, like all her work had just been the program doing something to her instead of something she did. Once that landed, I couldn’t unsee it.

Things I once might have ignored started bothering me. Decisions by management, marketing choices, promises and expectations. My tolerance for the gap between what I valued and what I saw reflected in the way things were being run got smaller. At first I thought that meant I was becoming negative. Now I think something very different was happening. I was becoming less reliant on their judgment and more reliant on my own. It wasn’t necessarily that anything on their end had changed. I was finally willing to trust what I was seeing, because I’d stopped needing them to be right in order to feel like I was doing something right.

Once that started happening, the pedestal got shorter. Not because someone fell off it, but because I stopped needing someone to stand on it.

So no, I don’t think anyone had been controlling me. But somewhere along the way, I’d quietly given this program and the people running it more influence over how I measured myself than I realized.

But here’s the part I think gets skipped over when people talk about walking away from something like this, so let me be honest about it. Seeing that clearly and being ready to act on it were not the same moment. The relationship I’d built with my coach was real. The transformation was real, and it was mine. But it happened inside their structure, under their name, with their program as the container for some of the most meaningful change of my life. Untangling my gratitude for what happened to me from the entity I experienced it through was its own work, separate from just seeing the pattern, and it was harder. I saw the pedestal getting shorter well before I was actually ready to step away from it. Knowing didn’t make leaving easy. It just made it possible, eventually.

There’s nothing wrong with recognition. There’s nothing wrong with wanting my coach to tell me I was doing well. There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud when my name got called or with being proud of making the Hall of Fame. The danger wasn’t in wanting those things. It was in letting someone else’s recognition become evidence of my worth, because that’s when I handed away something that belongs to me.

My coach didn’t get up and train for me. The owner didn’t walk my miles. The program didn’t choose my meals. Nobody else made the decisions on the days when motivation wasn’t there. They gave me structure, knowledge, accountability, a community, and tools that genuinely contributed to my transformation, and for that I can be genuinely grateful. But I did the work. Eventually, I needed to understand the difference.

Maybe that’s one of the final stages of any real transformation. At first, I needed someone to tell me that I could do it. Then I needed someone to tell me I was doing it. Eventually, maybe the goal is to no longer need anyone to tell me that at all. That doesn’t diminish the teacher. It might actually be the greatest evidence that the teaching worked.

Eventually, I was ready to act on what I’d come to understand about myself. When I sent the email, I didn’t frame it as an ending. I thanked them for the structure, the accountability, the community, the forums where I’d learned to say things I’d been carrying around for years. All of that was real, and I said so. But I also told them plainly that the goal had never been to depend on them forever. It was to build something in myself that could keep going without them.

I tried to be careful about what I left behind and what I took with me. I left the need to be noticed. I left the need for another top honor, another callout, another person to tell me whether what I’m doing is enough. I took the discipline. I took the habits. I took the lessons. I took the friendships. I took ownership of the person I became.

I noticed it in smaller ways too. For years, I kept my shirt on at the pool and the beach, embarrassed by how badly I’d let my body get. I used to imagine that if I ever got back in shape, taking it off would be part of the reward. This year, I finally could have. But when the time came, I left it on anyway. Even with it on, anyone could see how much my body had changed. I just didn’t need them to.

So was it a cult? No. But can I understand now why she thought it was one? Absolutely.

I don’t need to keep earning permission to believe in myself. I already gave it to myself, and this time, I’m the one who gets to keep it.

Was Someone Controlling Me, or Was It Just Me?
A Reflection by Alexander Bush
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