A Little Bit Culty: Navigating Cults, Control and Coercion

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.

Author: Sarah Edmondson,Nippy Ames
Publisher: Trace 120 Press
Published: 04/20/2026
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.65d
ISBN: 9798993872117

About the Author
Edmondson, Sarah: - 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. Her whistleblower story is also featured in 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 A Little Bit Culty, and book of the same name. Her TEDx talk, "How to spot a cult," is featured on TED and has been viewed over 1.6 million times.Ames, Nippy: - As an actor and former college athlete, Anthony "Nippy" Ames was drawn to NXIVM's goals program. In his twelve years with the organization, he rose steadily up the ranks as a teacher, built centers in New York and Vancouver, and even met his now wife, A Little Bit Culty co-host, Sarah Edmondson. But when he learned that the company was, in fact, a dangerous cult, he wasted no time in doing exactly what needed to be done: Helping burn its carefully constructed public image to the ground.With NXIVM's notorious founder now behind bars facing a brisk 120-year sentence, Nippy isn't planning on going quiet anytime soon. As executive producer of the A Little Bit Culty podcast, Nippy has come full circle back to what he was born to do: performing, creating, and truth-telling. He's proving to be an emerging voice in the conversation around what it means to be an upstanding man, husband, and father today.

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