This month rising star Kate-Lois Elliott will make her Ed Fringe debut with HOW TO BELONG WITHOUT JOINING A CULT. The show centres around the true story of Kate’s family, who were brought up in a secretive cult until her mum escaped as a teenager. One generation later, in a completely unrelated set of events, a teenage Kate finds herself in the clutches of an equally toxic, controlling, and militant operation… you know, just your average group of teenage girls… Because, as it turns out, cults are everywhere. Kate shares here story below…

I’d always had a strong aversion to group mentality without knowing where it came from. I caused chaos in WhatsApp groups and was always the one complaining during the group shop on a Hen do.

When I was 24, I was sitting in a pub with some actor colleagues after a show and casually mentioned the religious sect that my mum had been brought up in. I looked up to see that everyone around the table was stunned – didn’t I know that it was a cult? 

That night, I Googled it and, low and behold, they were right. It was a full-blown cult. From what I read, this cult had all the worst parts of being Amish; without the real-world gap year or a choice to leave and without the fun butter making and nice hats.

It was the makings of a story that existed, I thought, only in Netflix documentaries. My mum had been born into a world where women’s sense of self was trained out of them – their husbands were chosen for them and they weren’t allowed to go to university, work or even read a newspaper. It sounded like living in a patriarchal 1800s puritan village, except it was in Croydon.

I then asked my mum about it, and she confirmed the truth. Why had she hidden it from me? She hadn’t really. She did mention it – evidently – or I wouldn’t have known about it in the first place. It was just that for her, it was normal. Also, having an interesting past has only become something of a badge of honour to wear recently… not like the 1980s, where  everyone adopted a public school accent and covered their scars with perms and a lot of cork tiling.

Then, when I asked how the family left, she said it was her who walked out first. She was just 16 years old. An oppressive cult was the only world she’d ever known. Her leaving led everyone else in her family to leave as well. When I was 16, the only thing I ever led anyone to was the local off licence that sold booze to under 18s.

The entire discovery blew my mind, but it also made so much sense: my mum’s aversion to blindly following rules, why my grandparents were still deeply religious and why everyone in my family had a low threshold for and visceral reaction to any level of coercive control. 

It also explained why years later, in an attempt to fit into a group instead of defy it, I allowed myself to be ganged up on by a narcissist pretending to be my friend. It wasn’t until I forced myself to walk away from that group completely and start listening to my instincts, that I found my sense of self, met a nice guy and changed careers.

It was the feeling that I had nothing else to lose that gave me the confidence to make choices without fear and gave me the strength to let my guard down, but also put up new and healthy boundaries. I’m now practicing not giving a damn what people think.

Writing and performing standup is a microcosm of that: comedy and theatre are so subjective that you can’t predict how people are going to react, nor does it cause any good trying to do something that feels inauthentic.  You may as well be an unfiltered version of yourself and find your people and screw the rest if they can’t take a joke.

 Kate-Lois Elliott brings ‘How To Belong Without Joining A Cult’ to Ed Fringe at the Gilded Balloon

 31st July – 26th August at 4pm (excludes 19th August)