How Cult Dynamics Show Up in Romantic Partnerships: Power, Submission, Confession Cycles, and Somatic Hypervigilance

Most people don’t walk into a relationship intending to recreate the dynamics of a harmful group or controlling leader. And yet, when you’ve survived a cult—or anything with cult-like elements—your nervous system often carries forward the patterns you needed to survive. The body remembers hierarchies, power imbalances, and the pressure to confess, comply, or disappear. Your partner becomes the person you desperately want to trust, and simultaneously the person your body cannot fully relax with.

As a couples therapist in Saint Paul, MN, I see how these old relational blueprints show up in tender, confusing ways for couples who love each other deeply but feel trapped in cycles that make no logical sense. When you’ve been shaped by high-control environments, relationships require a different kind of care—slower, gentler, more attuned to the wisdom of the body.

This is where approaches like somatic couples therapy in St. Paul, MN, and depth-oriented trauma work become essential. Because cult wounds don’t live in reason; they live in the tissues, in breath, in the muscles that learned to brace for the next rule, the next correction, the next spiritual demand.

Below, I want to gently explore four patterns that often surface for survivors: power dynamics, submission cycles, confession behaviors, and somatic hypervigilance—and how you and your partner can begin healing them together.

1. Power Dynamics: When Leadership and Compliance Become a Relationship Template

Cults often revolve around a rigid and unquestioned hierarchy. Harriet Lerner, who writes extensively about relational imbalance, reminds us that power isn’t always about loud control—it also hides in silence, withdrawal, and emotional distance. For survivors of high-control systems, power may feel like a necessary organizing force. Your body may seek it—either by moving toward control or by surrendering it completely.

In romantic partnerships, this can look like:

• One partner unintentionally taking the “authority” position

• Difficulty making shared decisions
  

• Deference, even when it’s uncomfortable
  

• Feeling panicked when a partner disagrees
  

• Equating conflict with danger, betrayal, or punishment
  

Sometimes the survivor becomes the one who exerts control—because hypervigilance makes uncertainty unbearable. Other times, a survivor becomes the one who collapses or defers, even when they long to be seen as an equal.

Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, writes that power struggles often mask attachment fear: the fear of disconnection, abandonment, or disappointment. After cult involvement, that fear is amplified. If someone once had total authority over your emotions, dissent can feel like a threat to your survival.

Healing begins when couples slow down—way down. When, together, you can say:
“Power doesn’t have to be a hierarchy. We can learn a different shape.”

This is where relationship repair skills in Minneapolis, MN become crucial: grounding, co-regulation, naming power imbalances, and practicing the radical act of shared decision-making.

2. Submission Patterns: When Compliance Was Survival

Submission within relationships often isn’t a conscious choice. It’s a somatic reflex—your body learned that going still or pleasing others kept you safe. Cultic environments reward compliance and punish dissent, and the nervous system becomes wired to anticipate consequences before they appear.

Janina Fisher describes this as “structural dissociation”: parts of you that learned to appease stay on high alert, while other parts try desperately to reclaim autonomy.

In partnerships, this may look like:

• Agreeing quickly to avoid tension
  

• Saying “I’m fine” when you’re overwhelmed
  

• Feeling guilty for having needs
  

• Letting your partner’s preferences dominate
  

• Losing your sense of self around strong personalities
  

• Feeling ashamed when you try to assert yourself
  

Your partner may not be controlling at all—but your survival self doesn’t know that. It responds to tone, facial expressions, and pauses the same way it once did with spiritual leaders or group authorities.

A somatic approach helps gently retrain the body toward choice. We practice:

• Noticing the moment you start collapsing
  

• Tracking micro-tensions in the spine, jaw, and throat

• Staying physically present while expressing a boundary
  

• Allowing anger—without shame—to surface
  

Like a tree gradually learning it can reach toward the sun again, you rediscover your shape, your voice, your rootedness.

3. Confession Cycles: When Transparency Becomes a Nervous System Demand

Many cults use confession as a tool of control—requiring members to reveal doubts, fears, sins, or “shadow parts” to maintain purity or loyalty. Over time, the nervous system learns to equate vulnerability with safety—but only when it is one-sided.

In relationships, this often becomes:

• Oversharing to calm anxiety
  
  

• Relying on your partner to absolve guilt
  
  

• Feeling compelled to “clear” every small thought
  
  

• Fear that withholding equals moral failure
  
  

• Seeking reassurance that you’re “good,” “pure,” or “okay”
  
  

Stan Tatkin, founder of the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), calls this “external regulation”—using your partner’s reactions to stabilize your inner world. After cult involvement, this can be intense. You may constantly scan your partner’s face, waiting for approval or signs of disappointment. Confession becomes a relief valve for anxiety.

The healing path involves creating a new internal rhythm:
I can hold my feelings without purging them.
I can share from choice, not compulsion.
I can let silence be part of intimacy.

Partners can support this by staying steady, grounded, and non-reactive—showing that curiosity and compassion can replace the old dynamics of spiritual scrutiny.

4. Somatic Hypervigilance: When Love Feels Like a Threat to the Body

Perhaps the most tender and complex layer is somatic hypervigilance. Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, explains that trauma lives not only in memory but in physiological activation—in incomplete fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses.

Your partner raises an eyebrow → your stomach flips.
They pause before answering → your heart races.
They seem distracted → your ribs tighten.

Your body perceives threat long before your mind can reason with it.

In relationships, hypervigilance often manifests as:

• Reading too much into tone or pauses
  

• Feeling the need to “manage” your partner’s mood
  

• Bracing for rejection or punishment
  

• Difficulty relaxing during closeness
  

• Sudden floods of shame or panic
  

• Feeling unsafe even when nothing is wrong
  

This isn’t irrational. It’s adaptive. Your body survived something that required constant tracking of danger.

Somatic couples therapy creates a space where each partner can learn to sense, soothe, and co-regulate these responses with care. Instead of rushing into logical explanations or defensiveness, we slow down to the breath, the shoulders, the pelvis, the feet. We track the tiny shifts that help the nervous system realize:
This person is not that leader. This home is not that environment.

Healing becomes a shared practice of safety, not a solo effort.

Moving Toward Repair, Rootedness, and Shared Power

Cult dynamics don’t mean your relationship is broken. They simply reveal where your nervous system is still trying to protect you. With patience, gentle pacing, and attuned support, couples can learn to create a new relational ecosystem—one rooted in equality, choice, curiosity, and embodied safety.

If you and your partner are noticing these patterns and want to explore them with compassionate guidance, working with a couples therapist in Saint Paul, MN, who understands trauma, somatics, and cult recovery can help you grow toward one another again.

And as you practice new relationship repair skills in Minneapolis, MN or St. Paul, you begin to experience something that once felt impossible: A relationship where power is shared, vulnerability is chosen—not demanded—and your body slowly, steadily, learns how to exhale.

Can Somatic Couples Therapy in St. Paul, MN, Help Untangle Power and Control Patterns Rooted in Cult Dynamics?

When you’ve survived a high-control group or spiritual system, power often lingers in the body long after the system itself is gone. In romantic relationships, this can show up as submission, over-explaining, or pressure to confess thoughts and feelings before you’re ready—alongside constant vigilance to tone, silence, or approval. A disagreement, a firm boundary, or emotional distance can activate old survival responses shaped in environments where belonging depended on compliance. These patterns aren’t signs that something is wrong with you or your relationship; they’re your nervous system responding to dynamics it once had to navigate carefully.

Your private pay somatic couples therapist in St. Paul, MN, can help you and your partner begin to notice and soften these embodied patterns together. In private pay somatic couples therapy, you’ll learn to recognize how power, shame, confession cycles, or hypervigilance show up in the body and between you—and to practice staying present without collapsing, self-silencing, or managing your partner’s reactions. Over time, space opens for choice, mutuality, and connection that feels less guarded.

This work isn’t about confronting the past or forcing emotional transparency. It’s about restoring agency and regulation in the present. At NobleTree Therapy, sessions move at a pace your nervous system can handle. We honor how coercive systems shape the body’s relationship to power and use gentle, body-based practices to support grounded, consensual connection. If this resonates, you’re invited to reach out and explore whether this work feels like a next step.

• Let’s connect—schedule a free consultation

• Learn more about private pay somatic couples therapy at NobleTree

• You don’t have to dismantle these patterns all at once. Awareness and support can be a beginning.

Other Therapy Services Offered at NobleTree Therapy in St. Paul, MN

At NobleTree Therapy, we support individuals, couples, and families across Minnesota who are disentangling from relational systems shaped by control, silence, or conditional belonging. Many people come to this work carrying the imprint of environments—spiritual, familial, or cultural—where safety depended on compliance rather than choice. Somatic couples therapy in St. Paul, MN is one way we help partners slow down and examine how those early power dynamics continue to shape connection, conflict, and closeness in the present.

Alongside private pay somatic couples therapy, NobleTree Therapy offers LGBTQIA+ affirming care, support for healing religious trauma and spiritual abuse, and space for grief that emerges when belief systems, identities, or communities fall away. We also work with individuals exploring how hypervigilance, self-monitoring, or loss of agency show up in the body long after leaving high-control systems. Whether you’re learning to trust your own perceptions again, unlearning confession-based ways of relating, or practicing what it means to choose connection freely, our work honors your lived experience and the wisdom of moving at a pace your nervous system can sustain.

About the Author

Kendra Snyder, MA, LMFT, NCC (she/her) is the founder of NobleTree Therapy and a licensed trauma therapist serving Minnesota and Colorado. Her work is deeply informed by an understanding of how high-control groups, coercive spiritual systems, and rigid belief structures can shape a person’s sense of agency, identity, and relational safety. For over a decade, she has supported individuals and couples navigating the long aftereffects of environments where power, obedience, and belonging were tightly bound. Kendra’s approach is somatic, depth-oriented, and relational, with a particular focus on how survival strategies—such as submission, hypervigilance, or confession-based attachment—become embedded in the nervous system and carried into adult partnerships.

In her couples work and somatic couples therapy in St. Paul, MN, she helps partners recognize when old hierarchies are being reenacted in moments of conflict, silence, or emotional intensity, and how to gently interrupt those patterns without shame or urgency. Her practice is especially attuned to people healing from spiritual abuse, religious trauma, and chronic relational misattunement, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, adoptees, and those rebuilding a sense of self after identity fragmentation. Kendra believes that relational healing unfolds not through compliance or emotional performance, but through consent, presence, and the slow restoration of choice. At the heart of her work is a commitment to helping couples move out of survival-based relating and into connections that feel mutual, embodied, and genuinely free.