A Little Bit Culty

Culty shit is everywhere—and this book shows you how to spot it, escape it, and heal from it.

From former NXIVM insiders turned whistleblowers and hosts of the hit podcast A Little Bit Culty comes a gripping, practical, and surprisingly hopeful guide to understanding how manipulative people and systems get their hooks into us—and how to get your life back when they do.

Drawing from their harrowing experiences inside NXIVM, their roles in HBO’s The Vow, and hundreds of conversations with survivors and experts, Sarah Edmondson and Anthony “Nippy” Ames pull back the curtain on the tactics of coercive control: love bombing, gaslighting, identity erosion, charismatic leadership, toxic spirituality, trauma bonding, and more.
Blending memoir, survivor wisdom, cultural commentary, and hard-won humor, A Little Bit Culty decodes the red flags hiding in plain sight—in relationships, workplaces, wellness communities, social media movements, churches, and anywhere someone claims to have all the answers.

Whether you’re untangling your own experience, worried about someone you love, or simply curious how smart, capable people get drawn into high-control groups, this book is the compassionate, no-BS field guide you’ve been waiting for.
Part cautionary tale, part survival manual, and part rallying cry, A Little Bit Culty will leave you wiser, stronger, and far less likely to fall for anyone promising “transformation” at the cost of your autonomy.

Welcome to the club—the one that helps you stay out of cults.

Sarah Edmondson had been working in film, TV, and voiceover when she first encountered NXIVM—a personal and professional development company that promised to offer the tools to unlock her full potential. From 2005 to 2017, she went from student to coach, eventually running her own NXIVM center in Vancouver. After being invited to join DOS, a secretive "sisterhood" within NXIVM, Sarah questioned the organization's true intentions and became one of its most prominent whistleblowers.

In 2019, Sarah published Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult that Bound My Life with Kristine Gasbarre. In this tell-all memoir, she shares her harrowing fight to get out. Her whistleblower story is also featured in the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM and The Vow, the critically acclaimed HBO documentary series on NXIVM. 

Now based in Atlanta, Sarah and her co-host/husband Anthony "Nippy" Ames continue the conversation with their podcast and book of the same name, A Little Bit Culty—exploring the healing process with the help of experts, advocates, and fellow survivors. She's spoken at conferences and other events as a cult-recovery advocate. Her TEDx talk, "How to spot a cult," is featured on TED and has been viewed over 1.6 million times.