mindyourmegan

Ethnography

Adaptive Faith: The Religion of Survival

Subtitle: How belief evolves after control and why healing feels like heresy

Author: *Megan A. Green
Project: Cognitive Culture Series
Date: October 2025

Abstract

This essay examines how survivors of coercive systems rebuild meaning once the language of faith has been weaponized against them.
“Belief” doesn’t disappear after trauma—it mutates, re-roots, and redefines itself.
Adaptive faith is not conversion; it’s cognitive repair.

From Doctrine to Data

After leaving a high-control structure, the first heresy is curiosity.
Survivors learn to test ideas without fear of exile. The process mirrors the scientific method: hypothesis, doubt, observation, revision.
In cultic recovery, spirituality becomes an experiment rather than an edict.

The Cognitive Function of Faith

Humans are pattern-seekers; belief offers continuity when memory fractures.
Trauma scrambles chronology, and faith provides a narrative spine—a way to connect events that would otherwise feel random.
When organized religion fails survivors, many construct micro-faiths: private rituals, playlists, prayers rewritten in secular code.

Adaptive faith is not about worship—it’s about regulating uncertainty.

The Heresy of Healing

Communities often interpret survivor autonomy as rebellion.
When someone chooses therapy over confession or embodiment over obedience, those still inside the system call it pride.
But healing is not apostasy; it’s literacy in self-trust.

Adaptive faith teaches that leaving is not loss—it’s translation.
The language of devotion changes, but the impulse to connect remains intact.

Reflexive Note

My own field journals read like psalms to science:
I measure belief in neurotransmitters and prayer in neural plasticity.
Yet the reverence remains.
Every time a survivor learns to trust their own perception again, I witness a resurrection of cognition.

TL;DR

Faith after control isn’t absence—it’s adaptation.
Survivors don’t abandon belief; they rebuild it in languages that no longer demand their silence.

Tags

#CognitiveCulture #FaithAndTrauma #CultRecovery #Neurodiversity #Spirituality #Ethnography #MeganWrites

The Myth of Objectivity

Subtitle: How neutrality fails trauma journalism and why empathy is a better metric

Author: Megan A. Green
Project: Cognitive Culture Series
Date: October 2025

Abstract

Traditional journalism still clings to a 20th-century fantasy: that reporters can observe without influencing.
But when covering trauma, disability, or cultic abuse, detachment becomes complicity.
This essay reframes “objectivity” as a cultural performance—a posture of distance that privileges comfort over truth.

The Problem with Neutrality

Neutrality implies that all sides deserve equal weight. In stories of harm, that’s false balance.
When survivors describe coercion, and perpetrators describe “misunderstandings,” giving both equal space isn’t fairness—it’s mathematical erasure.
Trauma fields require discernment, not detachment.

The Reporter as Participant

Every journalist shapes the narrative by the questions they ask, the silences they leave, and the platforms they choose.
Pretending otherwise absolves them of accountability.
Objectivity isn’t absence of bias—it’s unacknowledged bias wearing formal clothes.

I learned this the hard way. When sources from cultic networks spoke to me as a survivor first and a journalist second, their trust depended on shared experience, not credentials.
To pretend that empathy contaminated my reporting would be to deny the very method that made honesty possible.

Empathy as Methodology

Empathy doesn’t mean agreement; it means precision in listening.
It allows for context without collapse.
An empathetic reporter can distinguish between manipulation and memory without granting both equal credibility.

Trauma-informed journalism begins with self-audit:
– Who benefits from my framing?
– Whose pain am I translating for whose comfort?
– What language normalizes harm as inevitability?

Reframing Accuracy

The ethical pivot is from “objectivity” to transparency.
Readers deserve to know where a writer stands, what informs their lens, and how they manage conflicts of interest.
Honest subjectivity produces clearer data than feigned neutrality.

TL;DR

Objectivity is not the absence of bias; it’s the denial of empathy.
Trauma reporting demands clarity, not coldness.
The goal isn’t to stand outside the story—it’s to tell it without betraying the people who lived it.

Tags

#CognitiveCulture #Journalism #MediaEthics #TraumaReporting #DisabilityStudies #Ethnography #MeganWrites

Field Note 002: Re-entry and Method

Subtitle: On participant trust, observer bias, and the ethics of studying your own communities

Researcher: Megan A. Green
Field location: Northern New Jersey corridor
Date: October 2025

Abstract

This field note examines the methodological tension of conducting ethnography within one’s own social circles.
Returning to familiar networks—blind and disabled peers, former cult contacts, and long-time collaborators—requires constant negotiation between empathy and distance.
Re-entry brings both access and bias: the privilege of insider language, and the risk of over-identification.

Field Conditions

The air in North Jersey hums with recognition. People greet the researcher not as an academic, but as Rosie, Leah, or Megan-the-voice-writer.
Every name triggers a separate field dynamic. To gather data ethically here is to practice self-splitting: a deliberate toggling between witness and participant.

Community members often ask whether I’m “back for work or healing.” The answer is both.
The boundary between observation and participation collapses when the field site is your childhood bus route and your interviewee remembers your first cane.

Methodological Challenges

1. Familiarity Bias – People who know me pre-research tend to curate their stories, omitting what they assume I already understand.
2. Projection Bias – My presence evokes their memories of Leah, the persona trained in control. Participants sometimes test whether that persona still exists.
3. Compassion Fatigue – Long-term engagement in trauma fields can dull response accuracy. To counter this, I schedule decompression periods and run transcript reviews through accessibility tools for emotional tone calibration.

Ethical Framework

I operate under a trauma-informed consent model: participants may retract, revise, or anonymize contributions at any stage.
Notes are logged with pseudonyms and sensory tags instead of demographics.
Because many subjects share overlapping disability and cult-exit identities, confidentiality depends less on redaction and more on context obfuscation—shifting small details without altering truth value.

Research here is reciprocal. Each conversation must leave the participant at least as grounded as before it began.

Reflexive Notes

Re-entry feels like walking through layered time: each street corner holds a version of me that once observed from survival, not scholarship.
To study that landscape now is to admit that method can never be fully clean.
Bias is not failure—it’s a variable to be documented.

TL;DR

Studying your own communities is both privilege and peril.
The insider lens grants clarity others can’t access, but it also demands radical transparency about motive, memory, and method.

Tags

#FieldNotes #Ethnography #ResearchEthics #TraumaInformed #Accessibility #Reflexivity #ProjectLeah #MeganWrites

The Unseen Variable: Why Neurodivergent Women Are Still Misread

Subtitle: A journalist’s reflection on perception, projection, and power

Author: Megan A. Green
Project: Field Notes – Cognitive Culture Series
Date: October 2025

Abstract

Neurodivergent women often navigate a paradox of visibility: simultaneously “too much” and “not enough.”
They are praised for resilience while punished for the same traits that make resilience necessary.
This essay examines the social and cognitive biases that keep neurodivergent competence undervalued, and how those biases distort both data and empathy.

The Performance of “Normal”

In most workplaces and communities, women who disclose ADHD, autism, or trauma histories are measured against an unspoken behavioral script: calm, compliant, endlessly empathetic.
When they diverge — by info-dumping, stimming, pausing, or refusing small talk — the environment frames it as aggression or arrogance.
What’s rarely discussed is that neurotypical discomfort masquerades as objectivity. The label “difficult” often just means different pacing.

Emotional Labor in Disguise

Many neurodivergent women become experts in emotional triage.
They read tone like data, forecast burnout in others, and quietly patch every interpersonal leak in a system that doesn’t notice their maintenance work.
Yet the moment they set boundaries, the feedback loop turns: “cold,” “robotic,” “unfeeling.”
It’s not lack of compassion; it’s compassion with throughput control.

Cognitive Agility as Competence

The capacity to context-switch — between languages, registers, technical fields, or emotional terrains — is often treated as inconsistency rather than skill.
Society still values linear specialization over adaptive synthesis, even though survival now depends on synthesis.
Neurodivergent women frequently lead in this domain, but their leadership is invisible because it doesn’t resemble hierarchy.

Reframing the Narrative

Instead of asking neurodivergent women to mask better, the ethical question should be:
> “Why are we still designing cultures that interpret clarity as hostility and boundaries as ego?”

Until that question becomes standard in HR meetings, classrooms, and family dynamics, every neurodivergent success story remains an act of quiet rebellion.

TL;DR

Underestimation isn’t just prejudice; it’s misclassification.
Neurodivergent women aren’t unpredictable — they’re operating on richer data sets.
The world’s lag in reading that data is its own limitation, not theirs.

Tags

#Neurodiversity #WomenInSTEM #ADHD #Autism #Ethnography #SocialBias #CognitiveCulture #MeganWrites

The Cognitive Culture Series

Subtitle: Investigating how minds, systems, and narratives collide

Series by Megan A. Green
Category: Applied ethnography / Neurodiversity / Human systems

About the Series

Cognitive Culture is a long-form field analysis project exploring how human systems interpret intelligence, empathy, and emotion.
It documents what happens when the social script of “normal” collides with cognitive reality — especially for those of us who think or feel at atypical bandwidths.

Each installment blends lived ethnography with cultural journalism: firsthand observations, data analysis, and reflective critique.
The aim is to build a language for what’s often misread — the unseen cognitive economies shaping power, access, and belonging.

Core Themes

  • Neurodiversity as design, not deficit
  • Adaptive intelligence and emotional labor
  • The misclassification of competence
  • Trauma-informed analysis in professional contexts
  • Accessibility as cultural literacy

Reading Order

  1. The Unseen Variable: Why Neurodivergent Women Are Still Misread
    → Introduces the bias patterns that shape perception and projection.
  2. (Upcoming) The Economy of Attention
    → Examines how information overload reshapes identity and empathy.
  3. (Upcoming) Algorithmic Empathy
    → Investigates how AI mirrors or magnifies social misunderstanding.

TL;DR

Cognitive Culture looks beyond “awareness” campaigns.
It asks: how do we architect societies that read minds ethically — and stop confusing noise for intelligence?

Tags

#CognitiveCulture #Neurodiversity #Ethnography #Accessibility #MeganWrites #CultureStudies #HumanSystems

Field Note 001: Origin Sector

Subtitle: On returning to Jersey, Project Leah, and the ethics of field safety

Researcher: Megan A. Green
Field location: North New Jersey corridor
Date: October 2025

Abstract

This field note documents the researcher’s re-entry into the New Jersey region for ongoing ethnographic study connected to Project Leah, a longitudinal case analysis of coercive influence, consent negotiation, and survivor agency within post-cult communities.
The entry contextualizes safety concerns, relational ties, and operational boundaries relevant to data integrity and participant well-being.

Field Narrative

Virtual bases: Marcela, CP, HT, the North Jersey blind crew.

Flying direct into NJ later this month. Already have people on my pingy-ping-ping list — camp friends, the CP crew. Let’s see who I can catch. Totally winging this other than my crash post in central Jersey.

For privacy reasons, I’ve been asked not to share rooming arrangements here. The safety risk is simply too high. I’ve reached a kind of micro-celebrity status — despite assertions to the contrary — and some in this community are demanding information that isn’t theirs to have. They’re endangering Project Leah with that carelessness, and it will not be tolerated.

That’s my mami-hat talking. Love you all like neighbors. I’m not trying to be heavy — but Project Leah’s strongest ties are in NJ, and they hold leverage that could make or break my ability to gather data for Leah’s case study. I’ve invested too much to let that happen.

My cult contacts for Leah are based in Jersey City. They maintain emotional ties to Rosie’s family and sometimes attempt to tug on those threads — some have known me since Mama Miri’s pregnancy. These individuals are persuasive and not above manipulation to lure Leah, whom they perceive as my full self, back into a cult network.

Leah was trained to lead. I carry her technical skill set and capacity for high-control strategy, but I also carry the ethical refusal to use it. Could I go undercover as Leah? Yes — but the emotional toll is steep. Friends stop hearing from me, they panic, and if I go too deep into Leah’s world, institutional intervention becomes a risk. That world is dangerous; avoidance is survival.

I’m grateful for the allies whose cooperation with Project Consent studies allows safer data collection without endangering active cult victims. Every supportive action contributes to a protective research environment.

TL;DR

Returning home feels powerful and precarious. Re-entry heightens risk to Project Leah and the behavioral profile built for its case study. I’m trusting my network to safeguard data and discretion.
Please keep project-related information secure and share nothing without consent.

With warmth and Jersey-girl sass,
Megan A. Green

Tags

#FieldNotes #Ethnography #CultSurvivor #Accessibility #ProjectLeah #MeganWrites #Research #Consent #TraumaStudies

This space is part research journal, part survivor’s record, and part reconstruction manual. I write here as Megan, the case study version of myself — a journalist, developer, and fictionalized cult survivor who studies the systems that broke her and the systems that can rebuild something better. The cult in question is called The Sunnies. Some details mirror my own life. Others are composite — field notes drawn from survivor networks, research interviews, and creative reconstruction. Together, they form a portrait of what institutionalized manipulation looks like from the inside. I treat Megan’s story as journalistic ethnography — not sensationalized, but systematized. Each essay is both narrative and analysis: part lived memory, part code review of trauma. Here, you’ll find: • Field reflections from the Sunny years, translated through research and logic • The cognitive-science and social frameworks that explain why coercive systems work • The tools that disabled, neurodivergent, and trauma-impacted people use to rebuild agency Megan is the structural half of a larger whole. Rosie writes by rhythm; Megan writes by blueprint. Rosie moves through the field; Megan dissects what happened there. This blog is not about reliving trauma — it’s about rendering the architecture of belief, control, and recovery visible to anyone who needs to understand how it works. If you’ve ever wondered how cult conditioning intertwines with technology, language, and accessibility — this is where those threads meet. #CultSurvivor #Ethnography #Accessibility #WritingProcess #Neurodiversity #CognitiveScience #madamgreen #MeganWrites