Is It a Cult? - A Fellowship of Fear.

Those who leave felt they have nowhere to turn.

"They program these people to be so dependent on them that most people do self-destruct when they leave," Ken Haining said. "A lot end up being drunks, divorced, messed up, and then they'll say, 'See, that's what God did to them for leaving us.'

"And that's not what happened," Haining said. "What happened was the way they condition them. Again, I hate to use a catch phrase, but they're dysfunctional. They're short-circuited. They're mentally, spiritually short-circuited. They become so overly dependent."

Those still in the fellowship won't have anything to do with those who have left, adding to the sense of loneliness one feels after leaving.

"The people that were our friends, the people that said they loved us and that they were behind us and that they trusted in us, those people today are people that won't, if we saw them in the supermarket, they would be afraid to talk to us," Ross Ragan said. "Because they're afraid that we're possessed of the devil or that some kind of evil will come upon them because of their contact with us."

For many, that turnabout by old, dear friends is what makes leaving so hard. The gamut of emotions one faces after leaving the fellowship makes the experience a painful one.

"It's why so few people actually can work it out. It's too hard. I don't know how we actually ever got out," Sandi Haining said. "Sometimes it amazes me that we got out. I don't know how we got that far that we were able to get out. We were so immersed."