This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Therapeutic Movements gathers four groups that presented themselves as offering psychological healing or self-improvement rather than religious salvation, chosen because together they trace how a therapy claim can grow into a closed and controlling system.
Synanon began as a pioneering drug rehabilitation community built around an intense group encounter practice called the Game, then evolved into a communal movement and declared itself a church, while critics described an increasingly authoritarian and violent organisation that became notorious for a 1978 attack placing a rattlesnake in a lawyer's mailbox, leading to criminal convictions before the organisation dissolved under legal and financial pressure. The Sullivan Institute, a psychotherapy group that became a communal society, taught a radical rejection of the traditional family, organising members' relationships and living arrangements through their own therapists, and former members describe it as a therapy cult that dissolved by the early 1990s amid custody disputes.
Church of Scientology, built on L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and a body of doctrine about the thetan, moves members through a graded series of courses and an auditing practice using an E-meter, and has drawn extensive scrutiny while disputing every cult characterisation applied to it. NXIVM presented itself as a professional development company before prosecutors described a coercive inner structure in which women were branded and held in servitude, and its leader Keith Raniere was convicted in 2019 on racketeering, sex trafficking and forced labour charges.