Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 20th) at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, and 5pm Europe, we will be getting together on Zoom for our monthly workshop.
Our May workshop is tomorrow at 11am ET. The title is An Autistic Guide to Red Flags: How Cults, Coercive Relationships, and Wellness Grifts All Use the Same Playbook.
A few months ago, I interviewed Sarma Melngailis. You may know her as the founder of Pure Food and Wine, the once-iconic raw vegan restaurant in New York, or as the subject of the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan. What you may not know, if you didn’t listen to the episode, is that Sarma is Autistic. She received her diagnosis in adulthood, and she has been speaking publicly about how her late-identified Autism is part of how she ended up where she ended up.
What surprised me about our conversation was how much of her story I recognized. Our situations looked nothing alike on the surface. Hers played out in headlines, mine did not. But we were both sucked in by the same pattern. Cults, coercive relationships, and wellness grifts all use the same recruitment and control techniques and late-diagnosed Autistic adults are particularly vulnerable to all of them. Love bombing in the early stages. Isolation from existing relationships. The reframing of doubt as disloyalty. Insider language that makes outside criticism feel ignorant. Financial entanglement that makes leaving costly.
That is why tomorrow’s workshop exists.
The workshop is designed to help you spot the red flags and understand why they slip past Autistic perception specifically. You will leave with a vocabulary you can apply immediately to your own life and a set of practical questions to ask when something feels off.
This meeting is for PAID members of the Autistic Culture Substack, but we never turn anyone away. If a paid subscription is not in the budget, just reply to this email.
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