Kate-Lois Elliott: Love-bombing, ritual sacrifice and the cult of the group chat

Kate-Lois Elliott is touring her show How To Belong Without Joining A Cult. In this piece, she talks to us about the similarities between friendship, WhatsApp groups and being in a cult.

When I was in my early twenties, a late-night conversation with a bunch of fellow actors in the pub led me to discover something that blew my mind: that the Christian sect my mum had left as a teenager was actually a well-known, powerful cult. Wild, right?

The drunken revelation explained the sometimes visceral reactions to controlling behaviour and cliquiness that I’d had in the past. And the later knowledge that I was neurodiverse (with the inability to conform to things just for the sake of conforming) was the cherry on top of the defiant cake that was my brain.

I’d always sought an explanation for why I should follow orders. I was that annoying employee, asking, “but why?” at seemingly simple, laborious tasks when I couldn't see a productive reason for doing them.

Whilst working a reception job in my 20s, I famously convinced an entire comms team that I’d been tasked with keeping a detailed tally of every single biscuit they took from the biscuit jar causing chaos throughout an 80 person company. I committed this anarchic corporate crime because I was fed up with being asked to fill in eight different spreadsheets with the same pointless information every morning – a system that had conceivably been put in place in the late 80s and never addressed.

I have also been that person in a friendship group to speak up about those group chat messages. You know the ones, “We did a group holiday shop for Cheryl’s Hen Do and bought a bunch of food you won’t eat, everyone owes me 100 euros, and it’s your turn to cook.”

Humanity is innately tribal. We love groups. We need them to survive. And don’t get me wrong, I love my friends, and I love how useful group chats are, even though most of mine are admittedly on mute. But I’m often left staring at the screen thinking, “Who made you leader?”. I guess, in the olden days (vaguely points at the past) I would have ended up cast out of the village, brewing herbs in a hut in the woods because I didn’t come to enough of the town meetings.

The need to belong in a group starts at school – a microcosm of society, run by frankly savage teenagers, roaming the halls with the ferocity of your favourite characters from reality TV, pouting at the cameras and saying, “I’m not here to be nice, I’m here to win”. Jokes aside, school is an ecosystem of intense hormones and angst, and it’s the perfect storm for culty group dynamics. As Tina Fey or pretty much any teen movie set in a high school will tell us, the only way to stay safe at school is to find your clique, but even then, it’s a minefield. Cadey Heron learns this the hard way: these groups don’t necessarily keep people safe because if you step out of line or don’t do what’s expected of you, you’re in as much danger of getting burned as ever.

The problem is that some people never fully leave that group mentality behind. I was speaking to a mum the other day who was comparing the anxieties of being AT school to the horror of trying to navigate mums at the school gate – literally mum-gate. Apparently, some of the mums were buying their kids the latest trainers so they could fit in, and even, on occasion, encouraging them to speak to some people and avoid others. On the surface, it makes sense: if that’s what kept them safe at school, then that’s what will protect their kids.

This doesn’t start or end with school. When I talk about groups, I’m not referring specifically to women, but women, in particular, have more to tackle here. These compulsions have developed from centuries of women-kind being made to feel by the wider world that they must adopt certain behaviours or tactics to survive. It feels icky to bring up this stuff because it feels negative, like a criticism of womanhood, but we need to dismantle the archaic, patriarchal systems that no longer serve us and the only way to do that is to talk about it.

So this is what I think: own it, sit with it, have openhearted, uncomfortable conversations about it. Lift each other up in spite of it. Know that any unwelcome feeling is a weapon historically used to divide us, and if we accept that, then we can let it go. By their very nature, group dynamics are gonna screw up every now and then – as sure as someone on Made In Chelsea is going to have a drink thrown in their face – but we have to address the centuries-old systems ingrained into our psyches, or they'll remain unspoken.

At the heart of any unhealthy group-like behaviour is a person with a desire to protect themselves. And don’t worry, nine times out of ten, that's all it is. There’s no danger of it progressing to cult status, but if you spot any compulsory group meets teamed with love-bombing, dodgy money transfers and ritual sacrifice, I’d maybe think about exiting the Whatsapp Group.

Kate-Lois Elliott is taking her show ‘How To Belong Without Joining A Cult’ on tour to Bristol (April 30th) Brighton (May 3rd), Oxford (May 16th), Southampton (May 17th), Cambridge (May 24th), Leeds (May 31st) and Hastings (June 12th). Tickets here

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