Journalist Research Request: Sword and the Arm of the Lord
"[Jonathan Green is] an award-winning journalist working on a book under contract to Hachette about a 1980s white supremacist cult called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. They were active in Arkansas in the 1970s and 1980s, led by an apocalyptic preacher. They joined with the KKK and the Aryan Nations to pledge sedition against the US government. They killed ethnic minorities and ultimately played a role in the Oklahoma City bombing. The story is told through the women in the group. They joined the off-the-grid commune, wanting to be good Christians, only to succumb to indoctrination and, later, after the FBI took the group down, PTSD and deep trauma. I'm looking to understand why groups like CSA have a need to villainize outsiders, and in this case, ethnic minorities. How does it swell the leader's control to create enemies? And I'd like to know more about coercion and buried trauma, feelings of moral injury, guilt, shame, and how cult survivors overcome PTSD. It would be useful to understand this in terms of Christian cults. I would be extremely grateful for any help. mail@jonathangreenonline. www.jonathangreenonline.com"
ICSA is pleased to welcome four new members to its Board of Directors. Their combined expertise in psychotherapy, law, creative recovery, and research reflects ICSA's renewed commitment to transparency, survivor-centered leadership, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Please join us in welcoming Carol Merchasin, a renowned attorney who investigates and litigates misconduct within spiritual communities worldwide; Omar Saldaña, a social psychologist whose research advances understanding of psychological abuse in groups; Zoe Lambert, a writer, lecturer, and cult survivor who explores recovery through creative writing and wellbeing practices; and Adam Arnold, a psychotherapist and trainer whose trauma-responsive, consent-based practice supports survivors of coercive systems.
"Bobby Lerz put his 16-year-old daughter on a plane in New York so she could check into an eating-disorder clinic in Missouri. As a little girl, Elizabeth was "vivacious, gregarious, everybody's best friend," he tells me. But she struggled as a teenager. She was cutting classes, and Bobby observed her engaging in what seemed to be restrictive behaviors around food, sometimes using meals as bargaining chips: I'll eat this if I get that.
One day, Elizabeth brought home a brochure from the Castlewood Treatment Center. It looked like a luxury retreat: a modernist residential facility perched in the bluffs overlooking the Meramec River outside St. Louis. She begged to go, Bobby says, and, in 2011, he and her mother agreed. "When your daughter tells you she might have an eating disorder, your heart stops and you say, 'Okay, anything it takes to get you fixed,'" he says.
Several weeks in, strange things started happening. Elizabeth called to tell him that she had enjoyed bartending at his tavern. Bobby, who once worked as a chef for Howard Stern and owned a bar upstate, told her that it had never happened. He wouldn't let a teenager bartend, nor would his clientele. "It was a cop bar," he says.
"I could tell that I was on speakerphone, and I felt like I was in a therapeutic session," he says. "I heard snickering and girls in the background."
Not long after that, Bobby says, Elizabeth sent her stepsister — the daughter of Irene, whom Bobby had married in 2002 — an unsettling text, asking if Bobby had ever touched her inappropriately. When Bobby heard about it, he confronted Elizabeth: Why was she asking these awful questions? She'd just had a bad dream, he recalls her telling him. That, he adds, was "the last thing she ever said to me."
The next time Bobby saw his daughter was at a New York State Child Protective Services office. Four months after she'd gone into treatment in 2011, the agency, along with the Schenectady County Department of Social Services, launched an investigation into allegations Elizabeth had made against her father while at Castlewood. She claimed he had been raping her since she was 4 and alleged, in explicit detail, that numerous other men — including his friends, his bar's patrons, and local police officers — had joined in the abuse.
At the hearing, Bobby had trouble recognizing her. Once an accomplished cross-country runner, she was now chain-smoking. And when she took the stand, Bobby watched in horror as she seemed to play different characters. One was called "manager" and another one "firefighter," he says. She'd clench her fists and puff out her chest — that was "'protec-tor!'" Irene recalls, imitating the persona's low, booming voice. "It rings in my head how she would say that."
"After she testified — and it was the most glaringly sexual, disgusting, deviant testimony you ever heard — she gets up and she pirouettes like a ballerina out of the courtroom," Bobby says. "It was heartbreaking." Bobby denied the allegations then and still does. "I was investigated by everybody — state troopers, Child Protective Services, my local police," he adds. They probed Irene, too, who was at risk of losing custody of her own daughter, who is about the same age as Elizabeth. In the end, Bobby says he was told by investigators, "'there is nothing here.'"
In 2012, a judge ruled Elizabeth's account "incredible." Bobby was told that her claims were inconsistent and that her evidence contradicted itself. "The timelines weren't there. There was no corroboration. She had made up names," he says. After $45,000 in legal fees, there was at least a measure of vindication when the allegations were expunged from his record. But his relationship with his daughter was irreparably damaged. Despite the judge's finding, Elizabeth, whose real name is not Elizabeth, maintains her allegations against her father; her mother supports her account. Bobby, now a 61-year-old security guard, remains baffled at how his daughter, in just four months, turned into a stranger.
"We have spent 14 years just theorizing," Bobby says.
"Why Choose Castlewood Treatment Center?" read the brochure Elizabeth brought home. Besides its intimate ten-bed residential facility and the beautiful landscape, Castlewood, the pamphlet emphasized, had expertise in Internal Family Systems, a therapy centered on "the idea that each individual has multiple selves," known as parts. In IFS, a part isn't a metaphor. It's a literal personality with its own identity, age, feelings, and even body. Traditionally, "a person with separate autonomous personalities is viewed as sick or damaged" and might be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, according to Richard C. Schwartz, who conceived of the therapy in the 1980s and brought it to Castlewood in the early aughts. "What are called alters in those people are the same as what I call parts in IFS, and they exist in all of us." To him, that's a good thing: By singling out parts, locating them in our bodies, and engaging them in conversation, IFS is said to relieve even the most severely traumatized people of their emotional burdens.
In recent years, the practice has exploded on social media. TikTok is flooded with millions of videos mentioning IFS, including those of people role-playing and analyzing their parts, and more than 45,000 mental-health practitioners in the Psychology Today database offer it as a treatment. Schwartz's educational center, the IFS Institute, will have trained 15,000 therapists in the method by the end of this year, and another 5,000 are on a waiting list.
Celebrities have helped spread the word: Gwyneth Paltrow has praised IFS on her Goop podcast, and the writer Elizabeth Gilbert credited it with healing a toxic friendship. IFS "offers each of us nothing less than the cultivation of kindness, wisdom, and empowerment," writes Alanis Morissette in the introduction to Schwartz's 2021 book, No Bad Parts.
The scientific community takes a much less enthusiastic view of the practice. A growing number of psychiatrists and psychologists — who, at the doctoral level, study the brain and mind, unlike counselors and family therapists — are emerging with urgent warnings about the therapy, casting IFS as a simplistic allegory at best and, at the worst, a dangerous pseudoscience. While some patients find relief through IFS, critics argue that it's likely owing to the way it shifts responsibility for one's actions onto another persona or the fact that it recycles aspects of traditional talk therapy that are, in fact, helpful. "I'm aware of how trendy it has become," says Lynn Bufka, the head of practice at the American Psychological Association. There may be "elements of this intervention that are pretty standard and cut across what might be good psychotherapy, but the way it's packaged or described? Those ideas don't have a scientific basis."
For patients with vulnerabilities like complex PTSD, disordered eating, or psychosis — many of the very people IFS practitioners are taught to treat — the therapy could destabilize already fragile mental states. An "unstable sense of self," for example, is a defining feature of borderline personality disorder, a condition that commonly occurs alongside anorexia and bulimia. Last year, Lisa Brownstone, a University of Denver psychologist and eating-disorder specialist, co-wrote a report that raised questions about the risks of IFS. Brownstone had become alarmed after multiple patients appeared "disorganized and confused by treatments they had received from other providers that were IFS or IFS-informed," she says. "The process of splitting apart and having them speak from different perspectives within themselves can start to make it even less clear what their reality is."
Former Castlewood patients told me they had witnessed women crawling around like babies or lying in fetal positions. "It wasn't uncommon to see people shaking on the floor," says Kimberly MacDonald. Another used to run in circles, screaming. In the span of a second, someone could switch ages, genders, or even species. Another ex-patient described how a transformation might come on: A person would "start to twist their body, like some weird exorcism thing, scrunch their face," and say in a girlish voice, "Hi, I'm willow tree."
Over time, traumas that patients would divulge early in their stays snowballed to gruesome extremes. Some say they gathered in group sessions to listen to stories of parents pimping out their daughters to entire neighborhoods, a grandmother molesting a child in a bathtub, a child forced into a meat locker with dead animals, and someone who claimed to recover memories of sexual abuse as an infant. "It was almost like people wanted to one-up each other," says Maria Frisch, who was the research director of the center in 2011. "Really horrific things absolutely do happen. But do they only happen to people who went to Castlewood?"
In 2011, Lisa Nasseff was the first of four former Castlewood patients to sue the center and its co-founder and co-director, the psychologist Mark Schwartz. (No relation to Richard Schwartz.) She claimed that he took advantage of her malnourished, medicated, and emotionally distressed state to make her believe that she'd been repeatedly raped and was once part of a satanic cult and that he convinced her "to become increasingly isolated from her family and friends" by implicating them in the crimes she alleged. Then came lawsuits from Leslie Thompson, who said she recovered false memories of rape and participating in a cult that ate babies; Colette Travers, who claimed that therapists conjured memories of sexual abuse at the hands of family members and classmates; and Brooke Taylor, who said that she, too, was led to falsely accuse relatives of sexual abuse.
By then, Mark Schwartz had sold a stake in Castlewood to the private-equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners. In 2017, another private-equity firm, Riverside Co., took it over and renamed it Alsana. Last year, Alsana shut down its Missouri center for good but continues to operate four facilities in California and one in Alabama that have faced complaints similar to those at Castlewood.
The State of Missouri censured Mark Schwartz's license, and he agreed not to seek its renewal. After the lawsuits were settled, he moved to California, where he continues to treat patients with IFS at a facility in Monterey called Harmony Place. Richard Schwartz has never publicly addressed the scandal at Castlewood. Earlier this year, he spoke at an Alsana-sponsored conference on "the power of Internal Family Systems in treating eating disorders."
"That just breaks my heart that he's a celebrity," says one former patient, referring to Richard Schwartz. "There is no evidence IFS works. It's a sham, and it's dangerous."
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