Christina Warden
ESAAlliance Secretary: 2021 - Present
The Crossroads Program Group Member: 2000 - 2003
The Pathway Program, Step 2 Recovery and The Insight Program Staff Member: 2003 - 2005
My family was drawn in through family friends that joined the group. Crossroads staff in St. Louis tried to get my parents to pressure me into the group when I was 16, but I resisted until the group had them kick me out of the house for a few months. That wore down my defenses, so at 17, when faced with either homelessness or IOP, I officially joined the group, thinking I could outsmart it. Little did I realize that within a couple short weeks I would be fully indoctrinated: hook, line and sinker. I had no defense against the love bombing, and feeling useful as a helper. It would be five more years until I broke free after living in the upside down world of being on staff. An ABC News 15 investigation came crashing into my bubble when I was on a smoke break with Bob Meehan outside an AA meeting, and that is what first got me to question where I was in life. It was several months later when I finally felt strong enough to risk trusting my own desire to leave. I will never forget that drive back to St. Louis, it remains one of the bravest and proudest moments of my life.
In my first couple months out, I started to realize I’d just been through something seriously messed up, through conversations with my AA sponsor (I stayed in AA for several more years after the group) and also a dear friend who fled staff around the same time as I did. As we together recognized how abnormal and unethical some things were that went on in the group, it felt increasingly necessary for my sanity that I gain a better understanding of what I had just been through.
Through parallel winding roads of formal education and personal healing over the next decade, I went from viewing the group as sometimes harmful, to fundamentally dangerous. It was both validating and disturbing to find a shocking degree of similarity between the group and everything I read about cults. For years, I read so much about trauma, gaslighting, narcissism, the influence continuum, dissociation, unjust authority, psychological abuse, different kinds of cults, etc. I felt that I had to make sense of such a profoundly confusing experience, almost as though my life depended on it, and also because if I ever hoped to do something about it then I knew that I’d need to understand it. For all those years, there were only a few people in my life who really understood and a lot of other people seemed to think I was making something of nothing. Regardless, learning and talking about these things was helping me, and I hoped that I could put it to even greater use one day, helping others or maybe even challenging the groups somehow.
After lots of schooling and supervision, I became a Licensed Professional Counselor and have been able to help in so many situations because of this vantage point. My experience showed me that human relationships can damage us in the deepest of ways, and also that the primary thing that helps us heal from those is healthy relationships. When the survivor community linked up in the Fall of 2020 through Facebook, and started to mobilize to take down the group, I had literally been waiting for this to happen and was ecstatic. It has exceeded my hopes already, and we are still just getting started. I am beyond proud of this movement and grateful that I get to play a role in helping people make sense of something so baffling. It is an honor to make it harder for the groups to manipulate, exploit, and abuse innocent people.
Other than counseling full-time through my own private practice, and being the Secretary for the ESAAlliance, I enjoy time with my husband and our two pit bulls, and laughing with my friends. I workout, sing, make art, and write. I always keep learning and lately I’m learning a lot about the encouraging future of psychedelic therapy for its unique capacity to help people overcome depression, trauma, and anxiety related to fatal illness. We need more ways to safely and efficiently help people’s suffering, and we need ways that connect people back to nature, back to one another, and to ourselves. I know it’s no panacea, but I’m enjoying learning about it and feel hopeful about what lies ahead. Safe to say, I’ve come a long way. Mostly, it is incredible to be a part of our community and movement!