A Los Angeles therapist who has spent 30 years helping people escape high-control groups is heading to New Zealand with a blunt message: cults are not just a fringe phenomenon, they may be operating in your office, your gym or your child's classroom.

Rachel Bernstein, host of the IndoctriNation podcast and a licensed marriage and family therapist, is a keynote speaker at Decult 2026, a cult-awareness conference running at Christchurch Town Hall on October 24-25. She is also leading training workshops in Auckland and Wellington.

Bernstein's credentials are grim and extensive. She has worked with survivors of NXIVM, the notorious American group that pitched itself as personal-development coaching while operating as a sex cult. She coaches parents whose adult children have cut them off after recruitment, and has run interventions, including one guided in real time by phone while a partner wore a hidden earpiece during a delicate face-to-face conversation with a devotee in his 20s.

Her argument is that global uncertainty is fertile ground for coercive groups, and that the modern danger is subtle. Recruitment often happens through wellness messaging that leans on the scarcity technique — healing available only here, answers available only through us. Red flags in young people include sudden changes in clothing, sleep, eating and behaviour, plus a widening gulf between them and old friends and family. Groups frequently reframe concerned parents as abusive or toxic, and some escalate to extracting money through the recruit. Bernstein notes men are recruited as often as women but far less likely to ask for help.

For families, the conference's most practical value may be Bernstein's advice on approaching someone who has been drawn in. Her rules of thumb: never use the word "cult", which turns everything into a debate; listen without arguing; ask open questions about what the person feels they've found; avoid accusations, since the recruit often isn't acting of their own free will; and keep sending "forever messages" — reminders that the door home stays open. Even humour and old photos can reconnect someone with who they were before recruitment.

She also tempers expectations. Leaving is not the finish line — survivors often mourn the belonging they thought they'd found, and carry fear instilled by warnings about what happens to those who leave. Her current caseload includes a woman in her 70s who only recently walked away from a group she joined in her 20s, proof that exit remains possible at any age.

While this is social-issues territory rather than a typical holiday story, the Christchurch conference itself is a real, ticketed event, and Bernstein's workshops in Auckland and Wellington will interest educators, counsellors and anyone working with young people. For locals and visitors in those cities next week, it's a rare chance to hear frontline expertise on a subject most of us assume happens somewhere else.