Olivia MacDonnell: What Surviving a Cult Taught Me About Healing
Watch the full interview with Olivia here.
tl;dr
Highlight Reel
Cult survivor turned integration guide. Founder of Tap Integration. Healed through MDMA-assisted therapy, somatic work, and radical self-awareness.
Background
Raised in the Children of God cult communes across multiple countries. Her childhood was shaped by religious control, communal living, and trauma.
Rock Bottom
Ran away from the cult at 15 into chaos. Faced addiction, abuse, and deep isolation. Later spiraled while caregiving for her terminally ill mother, numbing with alcohol and pills.
3 Healing Modalities
MDMA-assisted therapy and trauma integration
Twelve-step recovery and spiritual reframing
Somatic healing, breathwork, and nervous system repair
Lesson for Others
Your story is not your sentence. Learn to hold paradox. Follow what lights you up. And when you’re ready, turn your pain into purpose. Healing starts with one choice.
Olivia’s Story
5 min read
Olivia MacDonell’s story begins in a world most of us can barely imagine. Born into the Children of God cult, a global, polyamorous organization known for strict routines, communal living, and spiritual control. She spent her childhood in constant motion, living in more than 30 different communes across multiple countries. Her days were meticulously scheduled, filled with religious rituals, group chores, and teachings from the cult’s founder. Freedom, individuality, and privacy didn’t exist.
From the outside, it looked like order. On the inside, it was anything but.
By the time she was a teenager, cracks had formed in the carefully constructed world she was raised in. Inspired by her older sister’s rebellion, Olivia began questioning the rules she had been taught to follow without hesitation. At 15, living in the hills of Guatemala, she ran away, determined to create a new life. But the outside world wasn’t the sanctuary she had hoped for.
Thrown into adulthood overnight, Olivia found herself navigating the streets of Guatemala alone, vulnerable, and unprepared. What followed were years of survival: bartending underage, enduring physical and sexual violence, and numbing her pain with drugs and alcohol. She was shot at. She was nearly killed. And yet, she kept going. “I thought this was just what life on the outside looked like,” she says, having no grasp of what a “normal” existence could look like.
Despite the chaos, moments of clarity would appear like flashes of light in a dark room. A visit back to the commune, meant to help an abusive boyfriend, ended up stirring something in her. A song, played spontaneously by a community leader, cracked her open. “I was flooded with love,” she remembers. It was the first time she had felt peace in years. That moment brought her back into the fold, but the systemic dysfunction of the group eventually pushed her out again.
By 19, she was living in Austin, Texas, trying to figure out who she was without the cult and without the chaos. But identity doesn’t rebuild overnight. Olivia bounced between toxic relationships, business ventures, and a party lifestyle that left her hollow. The turning point came when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Olivia left everything behind to move to Florida and care for her dying mother and aging grandmother. What should have been a time of healing brought her to her knees. She numbed the pain with her mother’s leftover morphine. She drank heavily. She lashed out. She blacked out behind the wheel. She was unraveling.
Then, someone sent her a five-minute Abraham Hicks audio clip about gratitude. It hit like lightning.
“That one clip shifted everything,” she says. “Suddenly, I remembered I had agency. I wasn’t just a victim of my life.”
The next day, she got out of bed with a new sense of purpose. Caregiving became an act of love, not a burden. Her mother, once bedridden, began to recover. For a while, things felt lighter.
But healing does not follow a straight path. After her mother’s death, Olivia found herself spiraling again. This time, she got sober. She entered a 12-step program and began confronting her past. A pivotal moment came during step four, when her sponsor asked if maybe it was she who had abandoned others first. “That one question helped me reclaim my power,” she says. “It cracked something open.”
Still, there were layers of trauma untouched by talk therapy alone. Olivia began researching MDMA-assisted therapy and learned about the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) test. She scored an 8 out of 10, an astonishing number and a mirror to the pain she had long carried without context. The shame began to lift.
Her first MDMA journey brought suppressed memories flooding back, not with fear, but with clarity. She saw her life from a new vantage point, one that allowed for both grief and grace. She started categorizing her healing into four areas: mind, body, heart, and spirit. Each part had been fractured. Each part needed tending.
She changed her nutrition, adopted breathwork and somatic healing, studied emotional intelligence, and redefined her spiritual beliefs. Slowly, she built a framework for integration, not just of psychedelic experiences, but of self.
That framework became Tap Integration, the company Olivia now leads. It is both a reflection of her healing and a resource for others. She hosts community events, facilitates healing spaces, and teaches others how to safely navigate post-traumatic growth. Her work is informed not just by training but by lived experience, mistakes, ruptures, and all.
What makes Olivia’s story powerful is not just that she escaped a cult or got sober or found purpose. It is how she weaves it all together, how she holds both the beauty and the betrayal of her past and chooses to use it as fuel.
“Your triggers aren’t enemies,” she says. “They’re messengers. They point to the places in you still waiting to be met with compassion.”
Today, Olivia is a lighthouse for those navigating their own darkness. And her light did not come from avoiding the pain. It came from walking straight through it.
