Joe Kelly
"I was involved with two groups in the 70s. One was a group called Transcendental Meditation or TM, that was run by a Hindu guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became famous for being the Beatles guru. Here, we went from a simple 20-minute meditation technique to being convinced we could levitate for world peace.
Simultaneously, I was studying comparative religions, and was especially fascinated by Hinduism. I met a man—who I thought was my true guru—named Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, who had a group called the International Society of Divine Love. In the 1980s, he took a group of us from TM and established an ashram in Philadelphia, which was more structured and rigid. Some of its members even sued Maharishi for millions of dollars for being a fraud. Swami Prakashanand then used the money to set up a temple outside of Austin, Texas, called Barsana Dham. But the Swami was eventually convicted of abusing his follower’s children, though he ran back to India where he was protected.
After that, the group’s attorneys suggested we attend this conference where ex members of cults talk about their experiences, so we could understand how to evaluate whether someone is a spiritual guru or a conman. That’s when I first understood the psychology and sociology behind these groups, and decided I’d use my experiences to take apart the structures of belief for other people who had gravitated towards cults.People join cults if they are dissatisfied with their family, or want to find their own individuality, and such groups make them believe they will help you realise your true potential. One of the most challenging cases I’ve worked on was with a group that encouraged channeling, which is the concept that there is a world of dispossessed spirits that can educate the people of this world, and give you knowledge to live a better life.
But what they taught was that the use of drugs like ecstasy and LSD could help you gain this knowledge. Their approach was to gain more monetary benefit from the world, and they believed that through positive thinking and believing in prosperity, you can change your alignment with the universe, and it would bestow wealth upon you. It was led by a woman named Katherine Holt, who said she was channeling a spirit from the 17th century of a man named Father Andre, who was theoretically a mystic. She had about 30 followers, and would cause people to couple or decouple. She would ask them to do ecstasy, or have sex with people other than their spouses. I began working with a man named Mark, who had married a woman in the group. While in session, his wife was told to have sex with another man upstairs, while Mark could hear them. The leader told Mark that despite what he was hearing and feeling, he had to separate from that emotion. That he would only be free if he let go of the ego and ownership he felt for his wife, and refused to live by the norms of the society. He was tripping on drugs, but was told not to feel the emotions he was feeling.
At that point Mark realised there was something very wrong there. He went to his parents, who contacted me through the Cult Awareness Network. His dilemma was that his wife and child were in the group, and that child was being breastfed by a mom using LSD and ecstasy. We developed a strategy to reach out to the wife. Her family had a wedding in New England, so we went there. The cult told her to stay away from her husband, who was “evil” because he’d left the group. I was supposed to make him feel calm and try to help his wife see how wrong the group was. But, unbeknownst to me, my mentor had organised for Mark to take his child and move to a safe house in Colorado. It culminated in a long legal battle for custody, but eventually the group’s leader was arrested and the wife left."
Some of the most difficult cases for me are the ones that involve a family. Once there’s a romantic influence or friendship with other members of the cult, it becomes more difficult to break them out of it. (Cult Mediation website at (cultmediation.com)
Showing posts with label Cult-mediation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cult-mediation. Show all posts
Aug 18, 2024
These Former Cult Members Now Help Others Escape - Joseph Kelly
Project Hope Podcast: Joseph Kelly & Patrick Ryan (P2) on their histories that brought them to Cult Mediation (S2 Ep. 34, part 2)
Project Hope Podcast: Joseph Kelly & Patrick Ryan (P2) on their histories that brought them to Cult Mediation (S2 Ep. 34, part 1)
Joseph Kelly & Patrick Ryan have given decades to helping families and loved ones in an unhealthy group of high control / high demand. They are both internationally renowned cult mediation specialists and have also been known as cult intervention specialists, thought reform consultants, or exit counselors.
Joseph F. Kelly, a graduate of Temple University (focus on religion), spent 14 years in two different Eastern meditation groups (TM, International Society of Divine Love). He contributed a chapter to Captive Hearts, Captive Minds. He was (2010-2014) the News Desk Editor of ICSA Today.
Patrick Ryan (BA in Interdisciplinary Studies, Maharishi International University) is the founder and former head of TM-Ex, the organization of one-time Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement members. He is also one of the AFF associates whose advice to law enforcement officials might have helped avert the Waco debacle had it been heeded. He also shares part of his experience in “Recovery from Cults,” edited by Michael D. Langone. Both
Pat and Joe have facilitated many ICSA workshops for ex-members and families (1996-2023). They both lecture extensively on cult-related topics and have also contributed to writing about related topics, amidst which is their co-authoring of “Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants,” published in ICSA’s Cultic Studies Journal. Check out the Cult Mediation website at cultmediation.com
I also came across a VICE article, where the social media post images came from March 2021. These Former Cult Members Now Help Others Escape: https://plinkhq.com/i/
Joseph Kelly & Patrick Ryan on their histories that brought them to Cult Mediation (S2 Ep. 34, part 1)
Joseph Kelly & Patrick Ryan have given decades to helping families and loved ones in an unhealthy group of high control / high demand. They are both internationally renowned cult mediation specialists and have also been known as cult intervention specialists, thought reform consultants, or exit counselors.
Joseph F. Kelly, a graduate of Temple University (focus on religion), spent 14 years in two different Eastern meditation groups (TM, International Society of Divine Love). He contributed a chapter to Captive Hearts, Captive Minds. He was (2010-2014) the News Desk Editor of ICSA Today.
Patrick Ryan (BA in Interdisciplinary Studies, Maharishi International University) is the founder and former head of TM-Ex, the organization of one-time Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement members. He is also one of the AFF associates whose advice to law enforcement officials might have helped avert the Waco debacle had it been heeded. He also shares part of his experience in “Recovery from Cults,” edited by Michael D. Langone. Both
Pat and Joe have facilitated many ICSA workshops for ex-members and families (1996-2023). They both lecture extensively on cult-related topics and have also contributed to writing about related topics, amidst which is their co-authoring of “Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants,” published in ICSA’s Cultic Studies Journal. Check out the Cult Mediation website at cultmediation.com
I also came across a VICE article, where the social media post images came from March 2021. These Former Cult Members Now Help Others Escape: https://plinkhq.com/i/
These Former Cult Members Now Help Others Escape - Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan
I saw Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on a TV show, and got involved with him when I was 17. I spent five years at his university, where we were told things like we could walk through walls to save the world. Since his followers were Nobel Prize winners in physics and governors, we believed these claims. We did 22-hour-long meditations which pushed people to extreme points, many of them even jumping out of windows. Maharishi would also send people into war zones in Iran and Mozambique, often putting them in danger. Over time, I realised that despite everything, I couldn’t in fact levitate or walk through walls. So, I sued him for fraud and negligence.
After doing cult mediations for 38 years, I can tell you that while models are important tools to assess the approach of cult interventions, there is no one method to help someone. One of my most important learning experiences was in the early 2000s. I was in Australia to help a member of the Church of Scientology. The Church has a policy that they have to be against someone trying to “expose” them or telling their members to leave. So they had two private detectives follow me from my house in Philadelphia to Australia.
On my last night in Australia, I was served a lawsuit which said I had verbally molested a 17-year-old woman, and that she had demanded a restraining order. I had never met the woman in my life, but what they wanted to achieve through this is to frame a media narrative to affect my credibility. Also, according to Australian law, if I was at a restaurant and this woman walked in, I could get arrested. I had to fight a long legal battle, and ultimately, the judge ruled that I wasn’t guilty. But the church did everything to stop me.
Once, I was flying to Australia to attend my hearing and decided to carry a box of pancake mix when I was stopped at the airport. Turns out, the church had tipped them off saying I was a drug courier. When the authorities opened my bag, they saw white powder all over my stuff because the pancake mix had popped open. But after I told my story to the interrogating agent, he gave me a ten year visa to work in Australia, so even that backfired for the church. When dealing with the church, I’d have armed members parked in front of my house in Philadelphia, blankets covering all my windows from the outside and even people pressing their hands on my door’s keyhole so I was cut off from the outside world.
That’s also when I realised that instead of criticising a cult to its members, I needed to find a way to make them feel heard, especially by their family. If you can appreciate what I like, then you have a right to criticise it. So what I try to do is teach families why people find something beautiful in the cults they join.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/former-cult-members-help-escape-exit-counsellor-intervention-conspiracy-theories/
Feb 23, 2024
From Deprogramming to the Intervention 101 Approach: The Evolution of Cult Intervention
"As the knowledge base of cults, manipulation, and control has expanded, so too has the awareness that intervention is often more complex than at first it might appear. Many cult interventionists have become aware that, in addition to the manipulative and coercive tactics utilized by high control groups, there is often a mental health component that needs to be understood and addressed in order for the intervention to succeed. Our approach begins with an in-depth assessment of the family system to evaluate whether intervention is appropriate at a particular time, what part of family dynamics might be contributing to the situation, and who in the family could be helpful during intervention. For all of these reasons we have found it valuable to collaborate with a mental health professional for a more comprehensive understanding of the overall picture. This talk will explore the development of our family-centered, non-confrontational, respectful approach to understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one’s cult involvement. Vignettes from our cases will be presented to illustrate how this collaboration has enhanced our effectiveness as cult interventionists."
CultMediation.com / Intervention101.com how to effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.com renewing individual choice.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JaIl32ZquEA
Mar 28, 2022
Cult Mediation
Our approach is based upon our philosophy designed to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
http://cultmediation.com/
Mar 10, 2022
ICSA Annual Conference: The Evolution of Cult Intervention
Rachel Bernstein, Joseph Kelly, Patrick Ryan, Doni Whitsett
Saturday, June 25, 2022
11:00 AM-11:50 AM (part one)
12:00 PM-12:50 PM (part two)
As the knowledge base of cults, manipulation, and control has expanded, so too has the awareness that intervention is often more complex than at first it might appear. Many cult interventionists have become aware that, in addition to the manipulative and coercive tactics utilized by high control groups, there is often a mental health component that needs to be understood and addressed in order for the intervention to succeed. Our approach begins with an in-depth assessment of the family system to evaluate whether intervention is appropriate at a particular time, what part family dynamics might be contributing to the situation, and who in the family could be helpful during intervention. For all of these reasons we have found it valuable to collaborate with a mental health professional for a more comprehensive understanding of the overall picture. This talk will explore the development of our family-centered, non-confrontational, respectful approach to understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one’s cult involvement. Vignettes from our cases will be presented to illustrate how this collaboration has enhanced our effectiveness as cult interventionists.
Rachel Bernstein (Facilitator)
Former Member Support Group
Rachel Bernstein, MSed, LMFT, has been working with former cult members for nearly 30 years. She is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and Educator, who lives in Los Angeles, CA. She has been a member of ICSA for many years and has presented talks and moderated panels at ICSA conferences. Rachel previously ran the Maynard Bernstein Resource Center on cults, named after her father. She was the Clinician at the former Cult Clinic in Los Angeles, as well as the Cult Hotline and Clinic in Manhattan. She now treats former cult members and the families and friends of those in cults in her private practice. Rachel has facilitated numerous support groups for former cult members, for people who were in one-on-one cults, and for the families of those in cults. Rachel has published many articles, made media appearances, consulted on shows and movies about cults, and has been interviewed for podcasts and YouTube videos. Rachel is the host of her weekly Podcast, "IndoctriNation," about breaking free from systems of control. RachelBernsteinTherapy.com, bernsteinlmft@gmail.com 818-907-0036
Joseph Kelly
Interventionist, Cult Meditation
Joseph F. Kelly is a graduate of Temple University, has been a thought reform consultant since 1988. He spent 14 years in two different eastern meditation groups. He has lectured extensively on cult-related topics, and is a co-author of Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants, published in ICSA’s Cultic Studies Journal. For many years, Mr. Kelly has also co-facilitated ICSA pre-conference workshops for ex-members. Recently, he helped to initiate ICSA’s monthly meeting in Philadelphia. joekelly411@gmail.com. Websites: intervention101.com; cultmediation.com; cultrecovery101.com.
Patrick Ryan
Interventionist/Mediator/Religious Conflict Resolution, Cult Mediation
Cult Mediation Specialist Mr. Ryan is the founder and former head of TM-EX, the organization of ex-members of Transcendental Meditation. He established ICSA’s online resource (1995-2013), was the editor of AFF News, a news publication for former cult members (1995-1998), has contributed to the Cult Observer, AFF’s book, Recovery From Cults, is co-author of “Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants,” and has presented 50 programs about hypnosis, inner-experience, trance-induction techniques, communicating with cult members, conversion, cult intervention, exit counseling, intervention assessment, mediation, religious conflict resolution, thought reform consultation, eastern groups, transcendental meditation and workshops for educators, families, former members and mental health professionals at ICSA workshops/conferences. Mr. Ryan received the AFF Achievement Award (1997) from AFF, the Leo J. Ryan “Distinguished Service Award” (1999) from the Leo J. Ryan Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2011) from ICSA.
Doni Whitsett
Clinical Professor Emerita of Social Work, University of Southern California
Doni Whitsett, PhD, LCSW, MFT, is a Fulbright scholar and a Clinical Professor Emerita of Social Work at the University of Southern California where she taught courses focused on neurobiology, trauma, mental health, and sexuality for 25 years. As a psychotherapist in private practice she has been working with cult-involved clients and their families for almost 3 decades. She has presented to professional audiences both nationally and internationally in Australia, Canada, France, Poland, and Spain. Published articles focus on neurobiological implications of cult involvement and families and cults (co-authored with Dr. Stephen Kent). Her latest publications include chapters on “A modern psychodynamic approach to working with 1st generation cult survivors” and “Global violence of women in cults.” As an AASECT certified sex therapist Dr. Whitsett was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Scholarship in 2016 to study, teach, and do research on sexuality in China. whitsett@usc.edu; (323) 907-2400.
Mar 2, 2022
Cult Mediation
Since 1984, Cult Mediation has helped people with destructive cults, mind control, brainwashing, parental alienation, estrangement, abusive relationships, gurus, multi-level marketing, violent extremism and other forms of undue influence.
Our approach is based upon our philosophy designed to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
Meet the Team
Joseph Kelly
Cult Mediation Specialist
Cult Mediation Specialist
Joseph F. Kelly, a graduate of Temple University (focus in religion), has been a cult intervention specialist (thought reform consultant/exit counselor, mediator) since 1989. He spent 14 years in two different eastern meditation groups (TM, International Society of Divine Love). He is a co-author of “Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants,” published in ICSA’s Cultic Studies Journal, contributed a chapter to Captive Hearts, Captive Minds. He was (2010-2014) the News Desk Editor of ICSA Today. Mr. Kelly has also facilitated ICSA workshops for ex-members and families (1996-2018) and has lectured extensively on cult-related topics.
Patrick Ryan
Cult Mediation Specialist
Patrick Ryan is the founder and former head of TM-EX, the organization of ex-members of Transcendental Meditation. He established ICSA’s online resource (1995-2013), was the editor of AFF News, a news publication for former cult members (1995-1998), has contributed to the Cult Observer, AFF’s book, Recovery From Cults, is co-author of “Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants,” and has presented 50 programs about hypnosis, inner-experience, trance-induction techniques, communicating with cult members, conversion, cult intervention, exit counseling, intervention assessment, mediation, religious conflict resolution, thought reform consultation, eastern groups, transcendental meditation and workshops for educators, families, former members and mental health professionals at ICSA workshops/conferences. Mr. Ryan received the AFF Achievement Award (1997) from AFF, the Leo J. Ryan “Distinguished Service Award” (1999) from the Leo J. Ryan Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2011) from ICSA.
Feb 2, 2022
The Dynamics of Cult Involvement
The Dynamics of Cult Involvement - Jon Atack
January 29, 2022
Pat Ryan and Joe Kelly have worked helping people exit and recover from cults for many years. In this week's video, they join Jon to talk about the nature of authoritarian control, the nostalgia some people hold for the early days of their involvement, and how no two experiences are ever the same.
Jan 27, 2022
Should You Reconcile with an Estranged Sibling?
Brothers, Sisters, Strangers: Sibling Estrangement and the Road to Reconciliation, by Fern Schumer Chapman
Reviewed by Devon Frye
Reviewed by Devon Frye
Psychology Today
January 17, 2022
January 17, 2022
KEY POINTS
- Studies show that more than 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point in their lives.
- Reconciliation can be risky, so it's important to carefully evaluate whether to re-enter a relationship with a difficult sibling.
- There are no hard and fast rules on how to reconcile—or whether it's even necessary to discuss the roots of the cutoff.
"I just talked to Scott. He’s unbelievably upset. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do...”
I was stunned when I listened to this terrified voicemail from my 89-year-old mother. She was talking about my older brother—whom I hadn’t spoken to in decades—begging me to contact him and help him out of a dark place of illness and despair.
After clicking off my mother’s frantic message, I re-introduced myself to the concept of a sibling. “My brother,” I said out loud. He had been out of my life for so long that I didn’t even remember why we were apart.
Now, my mother’s desperate request raised profound questions. What is my responsibility to my brother when we’ve had no relationship for years? What is my responsibility to the family…to my mother? How can I trust my brother, who has repeatedly hurt and betrayed me?
To Reconcile or Not to Reconcile
Studies show that more than 40 percent of people have experienced family estrangement at some point in their lives. During the pandemic, many have found themselves weighing whether to try to reconcile. Aware of their own mortality, some fear that if they don’t contact an estranged family member now, they may never have the chance.
To approach reconciliation in a rational, self‐protective, yet open fashion, it’s crucial to assess one’s own feelings and the prospects for the relationship. Consider the following questions:
- Why is this relationship important to me—not to my family, or to anyone else, but to me?
- Does my family member want to resume a relationship?
- Can I set aside the anger, pain, and/or resentment that led to the break to change our pattern of relating?
- Do I want to resume this relationship even if I discover that neither of us has changed?
- What needs to be different to create a genuine relationship? (Identifying these needs helps each sibling establish boundaries for a renewed relationship.)
- Will I compromise too much of myself if I try to sustain a relationship with my difficult family member?
To Discuss or Not to Discuss
There are no rules on how to approach reconciling. Some people simply pick up a relationship without even discussing the past or the events that drove them apart. Other estranged siblings fear that they’ll continue to harbor resentments if they never discuss the source of their problems.
When they were in their 20s, Leah Barr of Naples, Florida, and her older brother stopped talking to each other. The two, now in their 60s, have never discussed the issues that fueled their estrangement. At the time of the cutoff, both had young children, and the families would alternate having Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at each other’s houses.
Suddenly, one year, Leah’s brother didn’t invite her family to the holiday dinner at his home. That seemed to be the catalyst. Afterward, when they attended a family gathering, the two would avoid each other. In time, the divide spread to other family members.
After six years, Leah says, the two finally spoke again at their mother’s funeral:
My brother and I looked at one another over her casket and said to each other that it was horrible our 59-year-old mother went to her grave thinking that two of her children were not talking. I swore I would never have another divide, even if it meant eating crow. I never want to hurt others in that way.
Yet, without an understanding of the causes, Leah says she never feels close to him. For a long time, she feared they would lapse back into estrangement.
I don’t know if I fully trust him because I don’t understand what the issue was then. How can I correct my own actions if I don’t know what I did wrong? And it’s hard to fully commit to someone when they’ve betrayed you in a fundamental way.
Leah describes their current relationship as an amicable cease‐fire, but she has no sense of peace.
How to Approach an Estranged Sibling
To promote understanding and reconciliation, estranged family members would benefit from:
- Sitting down together, face to face.
- Listening without interrupting, and without challenging each other’s stories. Seek understanding. Reconciliation is impossible without true, genuine listening.
- Acknowledging, with empathy, the other person’s hurt, anger, or alienation—even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Assume they have sincere, trustworthy intentions. When each party accepts the other's experiences, neither feels devalued or shut out.
- Letting go of anger.
- Emphasizing consistently your hope of creating a mutual bond—and your willingness to work at it.
My Reconciliation with My Brother After a 40-Year Estrangement
After that desperate message from our mother, I made the difficult decision to reach out to my brother. In many challenging but worthwhile conversations over the course of a year, we explored the reasons for the cutoff while rebuilding our relationship. I captured our emotional journey in my book Brothers, Sisters, Strangers: Sibling Estrangement and the Road to Reconciliation.
I wrote the book with my brother’s permission to share our story, and he wrote the afterword to offer his perspective. Even now, it’s deeply moving for me to read some of what he wrote: “We grew up together and we went through a lot during those years. [My sister] probably knows me better than anyone. I feel balanced that we have a relationship again...I don’t have the relationship I’d like with my niece and nephews. I can’t change the past, but at least I know I’ll always have a sister.”
Our mother, now 96, couldn’t be happier that we’ve reconciled. The work of reuniting would have been worth it for that alone. Even better, for my brother and me, there’s now a sense of peace where there was once only hurt and longing.
Dec 27, 2021
Master of the Cultiverse: Patrick Ryan on Transcendental Meditation
Season Two: Episode Eleven
December 27, 2021
"What do Pete Rose, Grandma Walton, skin boys, Dear Prudence, Brooks Brothers suits, David Lynch, Mary Tyler Moore, Merv Griffin, Mary Tyler Moore, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Margaret Singer have in common? They’re all mentioned in this episode, and you’ll have to listen to find out why. There’s just not enough room in these show notes to tell you. But don’t worry, you’ll be glad you listened, because Patrick Ryan can tell a culty oral history with the best of them. He joins Sarah and Nippy for the penultimate episode of Season 2, and it’s a doozy that just might make you take a second look at your meditation practice. As Stefon on SNL would say, “This one has something for everyone: Yogic flying, off-brand incense, and fake CIA operatives.” It’s been a batshit year, kids, so enjoy 2021’s last A Little Bit Culty episode drop.
More about today’s guest: Patrick Ryan is a graduate of Maharishi International University. He has been a cult intervention specialist since 1984. He’s the co-founder of TM-EX, the organization of ex-members of Transcendental Meditation, established ICSA’s online resource (1995-2013), and has presented 50 programs about hypnosis, inner-experience, trance-induction techniques, communicating with cult members, conversion, cult intervention, exit counseling, intervention assessment, mediation, religious conflict resolution, thought reform consultation, eastern groups, transcendental meditation and workshops for educators, families, former members and mental health professionals at ICSA workshops/conferences. Mr. Ryan received the AFF Achievement Award (1997) from AFF, the Leo J. Ryan Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2011) from ICSA. Along with fellow intervention specialist Joseph Kelly, Patrick publishes several cult news sites that are an indispensable resource for all things cult-related."
May 10, 2021
No More Normal: Walking Back Extremism
MARISA DEMARCO
KUMN
(Joe Kelly starts at 26:00)
Humans are peculiar. We are capable thoughts, feelings, and expressions ranging from unconditional love to insidious hate. It begs the question: where do we learn those concepts? And then: How do we unlearn them? Here is a good one: How does someone who has been a member of a group that professes hatred of other humans leave that community and ideology behind? What are the steps? What’s the process like? Who are the people that can help them?
There is no excuse for hate and oppression. That much is very clear. However, when one recognizes the poison of their thoughts and actions, how can they walk away from beliefs that feel key to their identities? How can they move forward fully accountable for their actions? Is there potential for redemption? In episode 28, we talk with a clinical psychologist about implicit bias, counselors on how to bring back family and friends who may have gone too far down the QAnon rabbit hole. And we hear from a former white supremacist who is helping others leave those groups and shed the thoughts of hate.
GUESTS:
Humans are peculiar. We are capable thoughts, feelings, and expressions ranging from unconditional love to insidious hate. It begs the question: where do we learn those concepts? And then: How do we unlearn them? Here is a good one: How does someone who has been a member of a group that professes hatred of other humans leave that community and ideology behind? What are the steps? What’s the process like? Who are the people that can help them?
There is no excuse for hate and oppression. That much is very clear. However, when one recognizes the poison of their thoughts and actions, how can they walk away from beliefs that feel key to their identities? How can they move forward fully accountable for their actions? Is there potential for redemption? In episode 28, we talk with a clinical psychologist about implicit bias, counselors on how to bring back family and friends who may have gone too far down the QAnon rabbit hole. And we hear from a former white supremacist who is helping others leave those groups and shed the thoughts of hate.
GUESTS:
- Tony McAleer, author of The Cure For Hate - A Former White Supremacists Journey From Violent Extremisim to Radical Compassion
- Diane Benscoter, founder, Own Your Brain
- Dr. John Dovidio, professor emeritus, Yale Universtiy
- Rachel Bernstein, therapist, host of IndoctoriNation Podcast
- Joseph Kelly, cult mediation specialist, Cult Mediation
Feb 24, 2021
Can Cult Studies Offer Help With QAnon? The Science Is Thin.
MICHAEL SCHULSON
Undark
February 24, 2021
DAYS BEFORE THE inauguration of President Joe Biden, at a time when some Americans were animated by the false conviction that former President Donald J. Trump had actually won the November election, a man in Colorado began texting warnings to his family. The coming days, he wrote, would be “the most important since World War II.” Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, the man believed, and he was arresting enemies in the Vatican and other countries. Predicting turbulence ahead, the man urged his wife and two adult children to begin stockpiling essential goods.
“Watch how the world and the United States are saved!” he wrote.
The man had shown an affinity for conspiracy theories in the past, according to one of his sons, who shared the text messages with Undark, requesting that his name and other identifying characteristics of his family be withheld because he feared exposing his father to public ridicule. Recently, however, his father’s preoccupations had taken a more hard-edged and political turn — often following the twisting storylines of QAnon, a collection of right-wing conspiracy theories that describe Trump and his allies battling an international cabal of liberal pedophiles.
His father’s texts about preparing for national upheaval worried the man, and he says he began checking corners and closets in the house to see if his father was indeed stockpiling supplies. He also ordered a book by Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor in Massachusetts who calls himself “America’s leading cult expert.” And he began looking — mostly, he said, just out of curiosity — for resources on “deprogramming” a loved one whom he worried had been brainwashed.
He is far from alone in trying anew to make sense of conspiracist thinking. Since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, many carrying signs and wearing clothing emblazoned with references to “Q,” deradicalization experts who cut their teeth on studies of militant Islamic ideologies have turned their attention to Trump-aligned right-wing extremists. Social psychologists who study conspiracy theorists and misinformation have also seen a sudden spike in interest in their work.
But some Americans have also begun using the language of cults and turning to specialists in cultic studies to make sense of the surge of online disinformation and conspiratorial thinking that have accompanied Trump’s rise.
“It is not hyperbole labeling MAGA as a cult,” the progressive activist Travis Akers wrote on Twitter in late January, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and adding that hard-line Trump supporters “are sick and need help.” Television journalist Katie Couric asked “how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?” Democratic U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager during Trump’s second trial, recently compared the Republican Party to a cult. And in a Reddit group where anguished relatives of QAnon adherents gather for support, or to swap various anti-cult strategies, there are many references to Hassan’s and other experts’ work.
“I’m inundated, daily, with families freaking out,” said Pat Ryan, a cult mediation expert in Philadelphia. Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in the New York City area who often works with ex-group members, also described an uptick in interest. “I’ve been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost — mentally, emotionally — in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories,” Shaw said.
Hassan, Ryan, and Shaw are part of the small field of cult experts who focus on the experiences of people who join intense ideological movements. Some are trained psychologists and social workers; others are independent scholars and uncredentialed professionals. Many identify as former cult members themselves. But for families hoping to “deprogram” a QAnon-obsessed loved one, it’s unclear how much evidence there is behind the methods of these practitioners.
“I’ve been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost — mentally, emotionally — in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.”
There’s broad agreement that “some groups harm some people sometimes,” said Michael Langone, a counseling psychologist and the director of the International Cultic Studies Association. But members of the field have sometimes clashed with academic experts, and even among themselves, especially over the notion that otherwise healthy people who subscribe to unorthodox belief systems are victims of a mental hijacking. Such thinking has received scant scientific reinforcement since sociologists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars first started pushing back on anti-cult hysteria in the U.S. decades ago. And while few cult specialists today claim to do the sort of deprogramming that gained popularity in the 1970s, some anti-cult practitioners — and licensed psychiatrists — do still embrace the idea that brainwashing and mind control pose real threats, and that they apply to online conspiracies.
Despite this, many other researchers today say that these notions simply discount human agency. For the most part, they say, people gravitate to ideas and assertions they’re already inclined to believe, and those disposed to get enthusiastic or obsessive about things will do just that, of their own volition. Still, for families divided over political conspiracy theories — and even over belief systems involving left-wing, Satan-worshipping child sex rings — many cult experts ultimately settle on advice that makes restoring and cultivating relationships the primary focus.
“Number one: Do not confront. It absolutely does not work,” said Steve Eichel, a clinical psychologist in Delaware and specialist in cult recovery. And number two: “Maintain your relationship with that person no matter what.”
THE ANTI-CULT MOVEMENT emerged in the 1970s, as a wave of new religious groups attracted young followers in the U.S. These included the Rajneeshees, whose rise in Oregon was the subject of a viral 2018 Netflix documentary; the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas; and the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. These were joined by radical political organizations like the Symbionese Liberation Army, which gained national attention for the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, an actor and heir who went on to participate in an armed bank robbery with the group.
In some cases, adherents made dramatic changes to their lives, espousing beliefs that many of their friends and relatives found to be bizarre. Some groups took extreme paths: In particular, more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple, a group based in San Francisco, died in 1978 at Jonestown, the compound their leader had built in Guyana, most from drinking a cyanide-laced punch.
Some alarmed parents and commentators labeled many of these movements cults. They described what happened to their children as brainwashing, and even as a new kind of pathology. “Destructive cultism is a sociopathic illness which is rapidly spreading throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world in the form of a pandemic,” Eli Shapiro, a doctor whose son had joined the Hare Krishnas, wrote in the journal American Family Physician in 1977. Symptoms of the pathology, Shapiro wrote, included “behavioral changes, loss of personal identity, cessation of scholastic activities, estrangement from family, disinterest in society, and pronounced mental control and enslavement by cult leaders.”
News reports throughout the 1970s and 80s offered a steady drumbeat of concern over cults — and related concepts like mind control. But over time, researchers raised questions over the efficacy of “deprogramming” interventions, as well as the idea that members of new religious movements were being brainwashed. Visual: Undark
In response, people began to organize. The American Family Foundation, launched in 1979, offered resources to families in distress. More hard-line groups, like the Cult Awareness Network, helped arrange deprogrammings of group members. In some cases, deprogrammers would kidnap a group member, detain them for hours or days, and use arguments and videos to try to undo the brainwashing.
The anti-cult movement soon ran into opposition from many sociologists and historians of religion, who argued that the anti-cultists often targeted religious movements that, while exotic to most Americans, were doing nothing wrong. They also questioned the very idea that brainwashing and deprogramming were real phenomena. In one landmark study, Eileen Barker, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, spent close to seven years studying members of the Unification Church, whose members are sometime called Moonies, after their leader. Barker followed people who entered church recruitment seminars, and she gave them numerous personality tests to measure things like suggestibility.
Barker argued that, far from experiencing brainwashing, the large majority of people who attended recruitment seminars opted not to join the Unification Church. Those who joined and stayed, she found, actually appeared to be more strong-willed and resistant to suggestion than those who had walked away. People who joined such groups, Barker told Undark, did so because they found something that, for whatever reason, “fitted with what they were looking for and lacked in normal society.” In other words, they were members because they wanted to be members.
Today, scholars like Barker tend to eschew the term cult because of its pejorative connotations, instead sometimes referring to groups like the Unification Church as new religious movements, or NRMs. In response, some cult experts have accused sociologists and scholars of religions of whitewashing the behavior of abusive groups. But the brainwashing model also failed to gain the endorsement of many psychologists. In 1983, the American Psychological Association convened a task force to investigate the issue. The group’s members — mostly clinical psychologists and psychiatrists involved in anti-cult work — argued that groups did indeed draw members in through “deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control.” But the APA’s expert reviewers were skeptical. One complained that sections of the draft report the group produced in 1986 read like an article in The National Enquirer, rather than an academic study.
“In general,” the members of the APA’s ethics board wrote in a letter rejecting the task force’s findings, “the report lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur.” (Clinical psychiatrists have been warmer toward the idea of brainwashing than research psychologists; since 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an authoritative source for the field, has warned of “identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion” that can result from “brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive,” and other traumas.)
The cultic studies field evolved. The hard-line Cult Awareness Network was bankrupted by legal actions, including a lawsuit stemming from a botched intervention in which deprogrammers seized an 18-year-old Christian fundamentalist, restrained him with handcuffs and duct tape, and held him captive in a beach house at the behest of the man’s mother. Today, Eichel said, deprogrammings are no longer done “by anyone ethical.”
The American Family Foundation began to make peace with the sociologists. The organization also renamed itself the International Cultic Studies Association. And while differences remain among people who study cults and NRMs, Langone, who has run the organization since 1981, said he is now friends with Barker and other scholars who once clashed with his organization.
Michael Kropveld, who runs the Center for Assistance and for the Study of Cultic Phenomena, or Info-Cult, in Montreal, got his start in the field in 1978, when he helped organize the deprogramming of a friend who had joined the Unification Church. Since then, his approach has mellowed — the organization long ago abandoned deprogramming, and Kropveld said that he now finds the concept of brainwashing to be lacking.
“Using terms like brainwashing or mind control tend to imply some magical kind of process that goes on that happens to people that are unaware of what’s happening to them,” he said. Kropveld believes that techniques of influence exist, but he thinks the reasons people gravitate to groups tend to be more complicated and individualized.
Still, he acknowledged, ideas like brainwashing have an appeal. “Simplistic messages” with vivid labels, he said, “are the ones that get the most attention.”
SOME CULT EXPERTS continue to find ideas like brainwashing to be useful. One of the most prominent is Steven Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church and the author of “Combating Mind Control.” In the past, Hassan has described the internet as a vehicle for mind control and “subliminal programming,” and he recently alleged that transgender “hypno porn” is being used as a form of “weaponized mind control” to recruit young people into gender transitions.
Watching Trump run for office in 2016 led to “a bizarre kind of déjà vu,” Hassan wrote in his most recent book, “The Cult of Trump.” “It struck me that Trump was exhibiting many of the same behaviors that I had seen in the late Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, whom I had worshipped as the messiah in the mid-70s.”
“To jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap,” Langone said.
In the days since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Hassan has offered expert analysis for CNN, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, and other outlets, and he has fielded questions from a popular Reddit group for people whose loved ones are QAnon adherents. (Through an assistant, Hassan declined requests for an interview with Undark, citing a busy schedule.)
Some people outside the cultic studies world have also made similar arguments, including Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant for the World Health Organization who, until recently, taught at Yale. In an email to Undark, Lee, who has helped promote Hassan’s work, wrote that a segment of Trump’s followers resembles cult members and suggested that the former president had cultivated a kind of mass psychosis.
She applies that analysis to a wide range of right-wing positions. Asked in a phone interview whether someone who believes that climate change is overblown and that progressive tax policy is a bad idea could be said to have an individual pathology, Lee demurred. “No,” she said, “I describe them as being victims of abuse.” Specifically, she explained, they suffered from “the abuse of systems that politics and industry have employed to psychologically manipulate the population into accepting policies that undermine their health, wellbeing, and even livelihood and lives.”
Not all experts in the cultic studies world buy this. Langone, the ICSA leader, specifically praised Hassan’s contributions to the field, but acknowledged that he’s skeptical of describing Trump followers as cultists. “I can understand why people don’t like Trump,” Langone said. “But to jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap.” He also fears the cultic element of QAnon is “overplayed by some of my colleagues in this field” and that the influence of QAnon itself may be overstated by media coverage.
Allegations of brainwashing are also out of step with some recent psychology research on misinformation and conspiracy theories. “How much of someone going down that rabbit hole is due to that person’s need, in a way — or this misinformation or this activity, this community — rather than these methods being pushed by whatever person is in charge?” asked Hugo Mercier, a cognitive psychologist at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and author of the 2020 book “Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.”
Mercier argues that the brainwashing model often gets the process backward: Rather than tricking people into harmful thinking, effective propaganda — or even pure misinformation — gives them permission to openly express ideas they already found appealing.
Gordon Pennycook, a social psychologist at the University of Regina in Canada, also argues that, while it may seem to relatives that someone has changed suddenly as they fall down a rabbit hole, such accounts typically misapprehend the sequence of events. “It’s not that their minds are being taken over,” he said. “Their minds were susceptible to it in the first place. What’s been taken over is their interests, and their focus, and so on.” People who gravitate to conspiracies, Pennycook says, have consistent personality traits that make those ideas appealing. “It’s not the conspiracies that are causing them to be overly aggressive and resistant to alternative narratives,” Pennycook said. Instead, those traits are “the reason they are so strongly believing in the conspiracies.”
Many scholars of new religious movements are also skeptical of the idea that disinformation and conspiracy theories should be understood as somehow hijacking people’s minds. Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American minority religions at Northeastern University, said she has heard people describe outlets like Fox News as brainwashing. “People who are watching it are adults who are making choices to consume that media,” said Goodwin. Similarly, she said, “the people who mounted an armed insurrection to take over the Capitol are adults that made choices.” An idea like deprogramming, she added, “makes it sound like, okay, well they’ve had their agency and their faculties taken from them.”
She sees no evidence that’s the case, even if, she said, that narrative can be comforting. “They make shitty choices,” she said. “People you love are going to make shitty choices.”
SOME FAMILIES HAVE gravitated toward cult specialists in the hopes that they can, indeed, help rescue a loved one from the tangled communities that grow around online conspiracy theories — and there are such specialists who say they can offer useful guidance, even if they can’t stage a full extraction. One of those is Ryan, the cult mediation specialist in Philadelphia. Raised in Florida, Ryan joined the Transcendental Meditation movement in his late teens and spent more than a decade as an avid practitioner of the popular global meditation movement, which was founded in the 1950s. Eventually, he came to believe he was part of a cult and left.
Whether it’s to field worries about a conspiratorial loved one or to mediate disagreement over membership in a religious movement, families who work with him fill out long questionnaires and may eventually participate in sessions that involve Ryan, his business partner, and a licensed psychiatrist. (Ryan, who has a degree in Eastern philosophy and business from Maharishi International University in Iowa, is not a licensed mental health counselor. That lets him intervene in “a way that it would be difficult for me to do given my professional license,” said Eichel, the Delaware psychologist, who sometimes refers families to Ryan.)
Ryan stressed that interventions are rare; usually, the extent of their work is helping families develop strategies to maintain a relationship. When Ryan and the family do decide on an intervention, it involves months of preparation. They sometimes employ elaborate ruses to coax the person into the room for a conversation with their relatives and Ryan.
“They make shitty choices,” Goodwin said. “People you love are going to make shitty choices.”
Whether such methods are reliably effective is difficult to ascertain, and, practitioners acknowledge, there is little research on outcomes. “You can be simplistic, and lucky, and get the person out,” said Langone, the ICSA head, stressing that people’s reasons for joining and leaving groups are often highly individualized. “There are not good statistics on the effectiveness of exit counseling,” Langone said.
During a conversation in late January, Ryan estimated that, within the past year, he had consulted for roughly 20 families dealing with loved ones who had gone deep into QAnon or a similar community. He has not recommended formal interventions to any of them. “The basis of what we would recommend is to stay connected, and how to do that,” said Ryan. “Because to influence someone, you have to have a relationship with them.”
For now, the son of the Colorado conspiracy theorist said he’s gotten adept at finding ways to exit uncomfortable conversations, and he does what he can to lay low and avoid confrontation. He thinks anything else is likely to be ineffective. “I think it’s just going to ride itself out,” he said earlier this month.
He’s now less confident that will happen — especially since after the inauguration his father moved on to sharing anti-vaccination theories with his family — and he’s unsure of what the future will hold. “I just I don’t know where any of this is going to go,” he said, “with the way that there’s just so much crazy going on right now in the United States.”
Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Aeon, NPR, Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, and Wired, among other publications.
https://undark.org/2021/02/24/cult-studies-qanon/
DAYS BEFORE THE inauguration of President Joe Biden, at a time when some Americans were animated by the false conviction that former President Donald J. Trump had actually won the November election, a man in Colorado began texting warnings to his family. The coming days, he wrote, would be “the most important since World War II.” Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, the man believed, and he was arresting enemies in the Vatican and other countries. Predicting turbulence ahead, the man urged his wife and two adult children to begin stockpiling essential goods.
“Watch how the world and the United States are saved!” he wrote.
The man had shown an affinity for conspiracy theories in the past, according to one of his sons, who shared the text messages with Undark, requesting that his name and other identifying characteristics of his family be withheld because he feared exposing his father to public ridicule. Recently, however, his father’s preoccupations had taken a more hard-edged and political turn — often following the twisting storylines of QAnon, a collection of right-wing conspiracy theories that describe Trump and his allies battling an international cabal of liberal pedophiles.
His father’s texts about preparing for national upheaval worried the man, and he says he began checking corners and closets in the house to see if his father was indeed stockpiling supplies. He also ordered a book by Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor in Massachusetts who calls himself “America’s leading cult expert.” And he began looking — mostly, he said, just out of curiosity — for resources on “deprogramming” a loved one whom he worried had been brainwashed.
He is far from alone in trying anew to make sense of conspiracist thinking. Since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, many carrying signs and wearing clothing emblazoned with references to “Q,” deradicalization experts who cut their teeth on studies of militant Islamic ideologies have turned their attention to Trump-aligned right-wing extremists. Social psychologists who study conspiracy theorists and misinformation have also seen a sudden spike in interest in their work.
But some Americans have also begun using the language of cults and turning to specialists in cultic studies to make sense of the surge of online disinformation and conspiratorial thinking that have accompanied Trump’s rise.
“It is not hyperbole labeling MAGA as a cult,” the progressive activist Travis Akers wrote on Twitter in late January, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and adding that hard-line Trump supporters “are sick and need help.” Television journalist Katie Couric asked “how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?” Democratic U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager during Trump’s second trial, recently compared the Republican Party to a cult. And in a Reddit group where anguished relatives of QAnon adherents gather for support, or to swap various anti-cult strategies, there are many references to Hassan’s and other experts’ work.
“I’m inundated, daily, with families freaking out,” said Pat Ryan, a cult mediation expert in Philadelphia. Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in the New York City area who often works with ex-group members, also described an uptick in interest. “I’ve been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost — mentally, emotionally — in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories,” Shaw said.
Hassan, Ryan, and Shaw are part of the small field of cult experts who focus on the experiences of people who join intense ideological movements. Some are trained psychologists and social workers; others are independent scholars and uncredentialed professionals. Many identify as former cult members themselves. But for families hoping to “deprogram” a QAnon-obsessed loved one, it’s unclear how much evidence there is behind the methods of these practitioners.
“I’ve been receiving many, many inquiries from terrified family members about a loved one who is completely lost — mentally, emotionally — in the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.”
There’s broad agreement that “some groups harm some people sometimes,” said Michael Langone, a counseling psychologist and the director of the International Cultic Studies Association. But members of the field have sometimes clashed with academic experts, and even among themselves, especially over the notion that otherwise healthy people who subscribe to unorthodox belief systems are victims of a mental hijacking. Such thinking has received scant scientific reinforcement since sociologists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars first started pushing back on anti-cult hysteria in the U.S. decades ago. And while few cult specialists today claim to do the sort of deprogramming that gained popularity in the 1970s, some anti-cult practitioners — and licensed psychiatrists — do still embrace the idea that brainwashing and mind control pose real threats, and that they apply to online conspiracies.
Despite this, many other researchers today say that these notions simply discount human agency. For the most part, they say, people gravitate to ideas and assertions they’re already inclined to believe, and those disposed to get enthusiastic or obsessive about things will do just that, of their own volition. Still, for families divided over political conspiracy theories — and even over belief systems involving left-wing, Satan-worshipping child sex rings — many cult experts ultimately settle on advice that makes restoring and cultivating relationships the primary focus.
“Number one: Do not confront. It absolutely does not work,” said Steve Eichel, a clinical psychologist in Delaware and specialist in cult recovery. And number two: “Maintain your relationship with that person no matter what.”
THE ANTI-CULT MOVEMENT emerged in the 1970s, as a wave of new religious groups attracted young followers in the U.S. These included the Rajneeshees, whose rise in Oregon was the subject of a viral 2018 Netflix documentary; the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas; and the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. These were joined by radical political organizations like the Symbionese Liberation Army, which gained national attention for the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, an actor and heir who went on to participate in an armed bank robbery with the group.
In some cases, adherents made dramatic changes to their lives, espousing beliefs that many of their friends and relatives found to be bizarre. Some groups took extreme paths: In particular, more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple, a group based in San Francisco, died in 1978 at Jonestown, the compound their leader had built in Guyana, most from drinking a cyanide-laced punch.
Some alarmed parents and commentators labeled many of these movements cults. They described what happened to their children as brainwashing, and even as a new kind of pathology. “Destructive cultism is a sociopathic illness which is rapidly spreading throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world in the form of a pandemic,” Eli Shapiro, a doctor whose son had joined the Hare Krishnas, wrote in the journal American Family Physician in 1977. Symptoms of the pathology, Shapiro wrote, included “behavioral changes, loss of personal identity, cessation of scholastic activities, estrangement from family, disinterest in society, and pronounced mental control and enslavement by cult leaders.”
News reports throughout the 1970s and 80s offered a steady drumbeat of concern over cults — and related concepts like mind control. But over time, researchers raised questions over the efficacy of “deprogramming” interventions, as well as the idea that members of new religious movements were being brainwashed. Visual: Undark
In response, people began to organize. The American Family Foundation, launched in 1979, offered resources to families in distress. More hard-line groups, like the Cult Awareness Network, helped arrange deprogrammings of group members. In some cases, deprogrammers would kidnap a group member, detain them for hours or days, and use arguments and videos to try to undo the brainwashing.
The anti-cult movement soon ran into opposition from many sociologists and historians of religion, who argued that the anti-cultists often targeted religious movements that, while exotic to most Americans, were doing nothing wrong. They also questioned the very idea that brainwashing and deprogramming were real phenomena. In one landmark study, Eileen Barker, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, spent close to seven years studying members of the Unification Church, whose members are sometime called Moonies, after their leader. Barker followed people who entered church recruitment seminars, and she gave them numerous personality tests to measure things like suggestibility.
Barker argued that, far from experiencing brainwashing, the large majority of people who attended recruitment seminars opted not to join the Unification Church. Those who joined and stayed, she found, actually appeared to be more strong-willed and resistant to suggestion than those who had walked away. People who joined such groups, Barker told Undark, did so because they found something that, for whatever reason, “fitted with what they were looking for and lacked in normal society.” In other words, they were members because they wanted to be members.
Today, scholars like Barker tend to eschew the term cult because of its pejorative connotations, instead sometimes referring to groups like the Unification Church as new religious movements, or NRMs. In response, some cult experts have accused sociologists and scholars of religions of whitewashing the behavior of abusive groups. But the brainwashing model also failed to gain the endorsement of many psychologists. In 1983, the American Psychological Association convened a task force to investigate the issue. The group’s members — mostly clinical psychologists and psychiatrists involved in anti-cult work — argued that groups did indeed draw members in through “deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control.” But the APA’s expert reviewers were skeptical. One complained that sections of the draft report the group produced in 1986 read like an article in The National Enquirer, rather than an academic study.
“In general,” the members of the APA’s ethics board wrote in a letter rejecting the task force’s findings, “the report lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur.” (Clinical psychiatrists have been warmer toward the idea of brainwashing than research psychologists; since 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an authoritative source for the field, has warned of “identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion” that can result from “brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive,” and other traumas.)
The cultic studies field evolved. The hard-line Cult Awareness Network was bankrupted by legal actions, including a lawsuit stemming from a botched intervention in which deprogrammers seized an 18-year-old Christian fundamentalist, restrained him with handcuffs and duct tape, and held him captive in a beach house at the behest of the man’s mother. Today, Eichel said, deprogrammings are no longer done “by anyone ethical.”
The American Family Foundation began to make peace with the sociologists. The organization also renamed itself the International Cultic Studies Association. And while differences remain among people who study cults and NRMs, Langone, who has run the organization since 1981, said he is now friends with Barker and other scholars who once clashed with his organization.
Michael Kropveld, who runs the Center for Assistance and for the Study of Cultic Phenomena, or Info-Cult, in Montreal, got his start in the field in 1978, when he helped organize the deprogramming of a friend who had joined the Unification Church. Since then, his approach has mellowed — the organization long ago abandoned deprogramming, and Kropveld said that he now finds the concept of brainwashing to be lacking.
“Using terms like brainwashing or mind control tend to imply some magical kind of process that goes on that happens to people that are unaware of what’s happening to them,” he said. Kropveld believes that techniques of influence exist, but he thinks the reasons people gravitate to groups tend to be more complicated and individualized.
Still, he acknowledged, ideas like brainwashing have an appeal. “Simplistic messages” with vivid labels, he said, “are the ones that get the most attention.”
SOME CULT EXPERTS continue to find ideas like brainwashing to be useful. One of the most prominent is Steven Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church and the author of “Combating Mind Control.” In the past, Hassan has described the internet as a vehicle for mind control and “subliminal programming,” and he recently alleged that transgender “hypno porn” is being used as a form of “weaponized mind control” to recruit young people into gender transitions.
Watching Trump run for office in 2016 led to “a bizarre kind of déjà vu,” Hassan wrote in his most recent book, “The Cult of Trump.” “It struck me that Trump was exhibiting many of the same behaviors that I had seen in the late Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, whom I had worshipped as the messiah in the mid-70s.”
“To jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap,” Langone said.
In the days since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Hassan has offered expert analysis for CNN, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, and other outlets, and he has fielded questions from a popular Reddit group for people whose loved ones are QAnon adherents. (Through an assistant, Hassan declined requests for an interview with Undark, citing a busy schedule.)
Some people outside the cultic studies world have also made similar arguments, including Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and consultant for the World Health Organization who, until recently, taught at Yale. In an email to Undark, Lee, who has helped promote Hassan’s work, wrote that a segment of Trump’s followers resembles cult members and suggested that the former president had cultivated a kind of mass psychosis.
She applies that analysis to a wide range of right-wing positions. Asked in a phone interview whether someone who believes that climate change is overblown and that progressive tax policy is a bad idea could be said to have an individual pathology, Lee demurred. “No,” she said, “I describe them as being victims of abuse.” Specifically, she explained, they suffered from “the abuse of systems that politics and industry have employed to psychologically manipulate the population into accepting policies that undermine their health, wellbeing, and even livelihood and lives.”
Not all experts in the cultic studies world buy this. Langone, the ICSA leader, specifically praised Hassan’s contributions to the field, but acknowledged that he’s skeptical of describing Trump followers as cultists. “I can understand why people don’t like Trump,” Langone said. “But to jump from not liking Trump to Trump as cult leader, I think, is a bit of a leap.” He also fears the cultic element of QAnon is “overplayed by some of my colleagues in this field” and that the influence of QAnon itself may be overstated by media coverage.
Allegations of brainwashing are also out of step with some recent psychology research on misinformation and conspiracy theories. “How much of someone going down that rabbit hole is due to that person’s need, in a way — or this misinformation or this activity, this community — rather than these methods being pushed by whatever person is in charge?” asked Hugo Mercier, a cognitive psychologist at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and author of the 2020 book “Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.”
Mercier argues that the brainwashing model often gets the process backward: Rather than tricking people into harmful thinking, effective propaganda — or even pure misinformation — gives them permission to openly express ideas they already found appealing.
Gordon Pennycook, a social psychologist at the University of Regina in Canada, also argues that, while it may seem to relatives that someone has changed suddenly as they fall down a rabbit hole, such accounts typically misapprehend the sequence of events. “It’s not that their minds are being taken over,” he said. “Their minds were susceptible to it in the first place. What’s been taken over is their interests, and their focus, and so on.” People who gravitate to conspiracies, Pennycook says, have consistent personality traits that make those ideas appealing. “It’s not the conspiracies that are causing them to be overly aggressive and resistant to alternative narratives,” Pennycook said. Instead, those traits are “the reason they are so strongly believing in the conspiracies.”
Many scholars of new religious movements are also skeptical of the idea that disinformation and conspiracy theories should be understood as somehow hijacking people’s minds. Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American minority religions at Northeastern University, said she has heard people describe outlets like Fox News as brainwashing. “People who are watching it are adults who are making choices to consume that media,” said Goodwin. Similarly, she said, “the people who mounted an armed insurrection to take over the Capitol are adults that made choices.” An idea like deprogramming, she added, “makes it sound like, okay, well they’ve had their agency and their faculties taken from them.”
She sees no evidence that’s the case, even if, she said, that narrative can be comforting. “They make shitty choices,” she said. “People you love are going to make shitty choices.”
SOME FAMILIES HAVE gravitated toward cult specialists in the hopes that they can, indeed, help rescue a loved one from the tangled communities that grow around online conspiracy theories — and there are such specialists who say they can offer useful guidance, even if they can’t stage a full extraction. One of those is Ryan, the cult mediation specialist in Philadelphia. Raised in Florida, Ryan joined the Transcendental Meditation movement in his late teens and spent more than a decade as an avid practitioner of the popular global meditation movement, which was founded in the 1950s. Eventually, he came to believe he was part of a cult and left.
Whether it’s to field worries about a conspiratorial loved one or to mediate disagreement over membership in a religious movement, families who work with him fill out long questionnaires and may eventually participate in sessions that involve Ryan, his business partner, and a licensed psychiatrist. (Ryan, who has a degree in Eastern philosophy and business from Maharishi International University in Iowa, is not a licensed mental health counselor. That lets him intervene in “a way that it would be difficult for me to do given my professional license,” said Eichel, the Delaware psychologist, who sometimes refers families to Ryan.)
Ryan stressed that interventions are rare; usually, the extent of their work is helping families develop strategies to maintain a relationship. When Ryan and the family do decide on an intervention, it involves months of preparation. They sometimes employ elaborate ruses to coax the person into the room for a conversation with their relatives and Ryan.
“They make shitty choices,” Goodwin said. “People you love are going to make shitty choices.”
Whether such methods are reliably effective is difficult to ascertain, and, practitioners acknowledge, there is little research on outcomes. “You can be simplistic, and lucky, and get the person out,” said Langone, the ICSA head, stressing that people’s reasons for joining and leaving groups are often highly individualized. “There are not good statistics on the effectiveness of exit counseling,” Langone said.
During a conversation in late January, Ryan estimated that, within the past year, he had consulted for roughly 20 families dealing with loved ones who had gone deep into QAnon or a similar community. He has not recommended formal interventions to any of them. “The basis of what we would recommend is to stay connected, and how to do that,” said Ryan. “Because to influence someone, you have to have a relationship with them.”
For now, the son of the Colorado conspiracy theorist said he’s gotten adept at finding ways to exit uncomfortable conversations, and he does what he can to lay low and avoid confrontation. He thinks anything else is likely to be ineffective. “I think it’s just going to ride itself out,” he said earlier this month.
He’s now less confident that will happen — especially since after the inauguration his father moved on to sharing anti-vaccination theories with his family — and he’s unsure of what the future will hold. “I just I don’t know where any of this is going to go,” he said, “with the way that there’s just so much crazy going on right now in the United States.”
Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Aeon, NPR, Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, and Wired, among other publications.
https://undark.org/2021/02/24/cult-studies-qanon/
Jan 16, 2021
Helping someone to leave an authoritarian group or abandon destructive beliefs
Jon Atack
January 2, 2021
Helping someone to leave an authoritarian group or abandon destructive beliefs. Cult intervention specialist Joe Kelly also talks with Jon about the difficulties of his profession.
Jon Atack
January 2, 2021
Helping someone to leave an authoritarian group or abandon destructive beliefs. Cult intervention specialist Joe Kelly also talks with Jon about the difficulties of his profession.
Jan 3, 2021
Helping People Escape Authoritarian Cults - with Joseph Kelly
Jon Atack, Family & Friends
January 2, 2021
Jon Atack: Helping someone to leave an authoritarian group or abandon destructive beliefs. Cult intervention specialist Joseph Kelly also talks with Jon about the difficulties of his profession.
January 2, 2021
Jon Atack: Helping someone to leave an authoritarian group or abandon destructive beliefs. Cult intervention specialist Joseph Kelly also talks with Jon about the difficulties of his profession.
Dec 16, 2020
Moving Beyond the Guru, with Joe Kelly
December 15, 2020
"Joe Kelly spent nine years in Transcendental Meditation and then five more with a rival swami, who convinced his former TM followers to sue for refunds from that group. This led to Joe meeting Margaret Singer, who helped to begin to rethink his involvement. For many years, Joe has worked helping members of authoritarian groups to rethink their involvement."
Nov 10, 2020
Secrets of Transcendental Meditation with Pat Ryan
jon atack, family & friends
November 10, 2020
Cult expert Pat Ryan was just 16 when he became involved with Transcendental Meditation. Soon afterwards, he enrolled at the accredited Maharishi International University, and while there he took the top-secret levitation, or Sidhis, course. Pat talks with Jon about his experience with TM and his work as an intervention counselor.
Aug 13, 2020
Online Event: Why People Join, Stay and Leave Groups, A Cult Model - Patrick Ryan
Abstract
Parents are likely to benefit from information about the beliefs, practices, and history of the group their loved one has joined. Research suggests that, in the West, hundreds of thousands of individuals join and leave cultic groups each year. Research studies also suggest that at least a sizable minority of those who join cultic groups are adversely affected. The families of these group members, tend to become concerned about their loved one‘s group involvement. This session will help family members concerned about a loved one‘s cult involvement or its aftereffects, learn how to assess their situations more effectively. Among the topics to be discussed are: Why people join and leave high-control, abusive groups.
Biography
Patrick Ryan is the founder and former head of TM-EX, the organization of ex-members of Transcendental Meditation. He established ICSA's online resource (1995-2013), was the editor of AFF News, a news publication for former cult members (1995-1998), has contributed to the Cult Observer, AFF’s book, Recovery From Cults, is co-author of "Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants," and has presented 50 programs about hypnosis, inner-experience, trance-induction techniques, communicating with cult members, conversion, cult intervention, exit counseling, intervention assessment, mediation, religious conflict resolution, thought reform consultation, eastern groups, transcendental meditation and workshops for educators, families, former members and mental health professionals at ICSA workshops/conferences. Mr. Ryan received the AFF Achievement Award (1997) from AFF, the Leo J. Ryan "Distinguished Service Award" (1999) from the Leo J. Ryan Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2011) from ICSA.
Websites: http://cultmediation.com/; https://www.intervention101.
Email: cultintervention@gmail.com
Phone: (215) 467-4939.
Online Event: Uniting the Continents: Support for the Pacific Rim -- for Families and Former Members Affected by Cultic Groups* Pacific Rim/UK: September 12/13, 2020, Saturday/Sunday* North America: September 11/12, 2020, Friday/Saturday
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