http://www.livejournal.com/users/harrahsahara/4547.html Minds and Emotions; Don't Blame Yourself 2005-05-04 10:55:00

Taken from:
http://hometown.aol.com/shawdan/essay.htm
Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Daniel Shaw, C.S.W.

Cult experts estimate that there are several thousand cultic groups in the United States today and that at least four million people have at some point in recent years been in one or more of such groups (Langone, 1993, p. 29). The former Cult Awareness Network, before being taken over by the Church of Scientology in the late '90s, reported that it received about 18,000 inquiries a year (Tobias & Lalich, 1994). Those of us interested in the phenomenon of cults have attempted to define our terms in various ways (see, e.g., Langone, 1993, p. 5). In this paper, I am defining a cult largely on the basis of the personality of its leader. In my definition, a cult is a group that is led by a person who claims, explicitly or implicitly, to have reached human perfection; or, in the case of a religious cult, who claims unity with the divine; and therefore claims to be exempt from social or moral limitations or restrictions. In the language of psychoanalytic diagnostics, such people would be called pathological narcissists, with paranoid and megalomaniacal tendencies. Without the cult leader, there is no cult, and from my perspective, in order to understand cult followers, we must simultaneously seek to understand cult leaders. I will attempt to describe the interplay of psychological dynamics between leader and follower that can enable cult leaders to dominate and control followers and enable cult followers to be seduced and manipulated into submission.

What Cultic Mind Control Is

History is largely a story of how mankind, through the individual minds of humanity working collectively, has struggled to set up the forms of human societies that are known to us which now cover the world. Fundamental to all of these has been the family or clan as the most basic building block upon which any culture has sought to base itself upon, and underlying the organization of any family unit has been the structure of power and authority. And it is the pattern of hierarchical authority (where one person or small group of persons hold final authority over a larger group and where this power is delegated to others under their supervision) is by far the most extensive and wide-ranging one found world wide, a pattern of authority that has profoundly shaped man's doings more than we can believe. Within hierarchies of many sorts, we have seen the establishment of husbands over wives, of parents over children, of rules over subjects, of priests over worshippers, of philosophers and masters over their disciples.

We live in social circles where we interact with others on the basis of our attendance to and familiarity with authority figures or our own individual places in the social scheme of things around us. Social orders always form where humanity interacts, from groups of children on playgrounds to senators in the corridors of power in Washington. This is such an obvious fact of life that it may seem rather elementary to raise the issue. But this reality, in our opinion, is where the darkest impulses and rationale of human nature this side of the Fall of man in Eden have been incubated. We speak here of the dark power of mind control, a powerful social dynamic used by destructive groups and individuals to dominate and control others around them, enabling them to compel action and belief from others on the basis of controlled thought. It is not just some high-powered exercise of persuasion, either: the mind control we will be speaking of here is that which is clearly damaging, abusive and even destructive to the hearts, minds and souls of those affected by it. Cultic groups utilize this social dynamic extensively since the essence of cultism involves the building of alternative spiritual communities complete with alternate hierarchies of power and authority that hold the community together (from the humblest cell group to the most massive organization) through coercive and manipulative ways.

The hunger for spiritual guidance and relief from varying degrees of despair and fear are often what impels people to explore religious and secular self-improvement groups. Yet the leaders of these groups typically do not attempt to help the seeker explore and make sense of the difficulties that have led him to seek spiritual consolation or self-improvement. Rather, the cult leader exploits the seeker's emotional vulnerabilities and seduces the seeker into a state of dependence. Promising the acquisition of success and power, salvation and redemption, or relief from frustration and inhibition, the leader persuades followers that the leader's self-proclaimed perfection can belong to the follower as well. All one must do is totally embrace the leader's ideology. In cults, this always means securing the leader's favor by enthusiastically agreeing to recruit others to the leader's program.

The questions most often asked of former cult members, usually with incredulity, are "How did you get into something like this? And why did you stay so long?" The unspoken subtext seems to be, "How could someone like you end up in something like this? There must have been something wrong with you." Certainly, people who join cults are not seeking to be controlled, made dependent, exploited, or psychologically harmed when they first commit themselves to membership. Cult members actually come to embrace and even glorify these kinds of mistreatment in part because their leaders, and their followers by proxy, have mastered the art of seduction, using techniques of undue influence (Cialdini, 1984). As Hochman (1990) notes, cults, by employing miracle, mystery, and authority, promise salvation. Instead of boredom---noble and sweeping goals. Instead of existential anxiety---structure and certainty. Instead of alienation---community. Instead of impotence ---solidarity directed by all-knowing leaders. (p. 179)

Cults prey upon idealistic seekers, offering answers to social problems and promising to promote bona fide social change. Recruitment addresses the anxieties and loneliness of people experiencing personal problems, transition, or crisis by holding out the promise of transformative healing within the framework of a caring and understanding community (Tobias & Lalich, 1994. Cults target members from middle-class backgrounds, often directly from college campuses, and the majority of members are of above average intelligence (Hassan, 1990; Kliger, 1994; Tobias & Lalich, 1994).

One common denominator is the offer of unconditional love, especially in spiritual groups. Another is the offer of purpose and meaning. Both of these experiences are vitalizing and can help dispel the sense of disconnectedness. For those whose development is marked by chronic deprivation of selfobject experience, or for those even temporarily deprived, the offer of these kinds of experiences at the right moment of vulnerability can be irresistible. Whether or not selfobject provision has been adequate in development, humans are potentially vulnerable, either because of early deprivation, or later due to unforeseen life circumstances, to the experience of alienation and isolation. When such vulnerability is present, the glamorous, charismatic cult leader can come to represent for many a longed-for, impossibly perfect selfobject parent who banishes powerlessness and loneliness.

Another highly seductive idea advertised in meditation-based cults is that "it is not necessary to be logical, rational, or even reasonable. The ultimately dominant criterion of what is good is a totally subjective feeling state. The goal of life becomes a good feeling, a never-ending high" (Garvey, 1993). This is not as hedonistic as it sounds. The search for this kind of unending happiness is often fueled, consciously or unconsciously, by a sense on the part of the recruit of unending failure and defeat, in vocational and/or interpersonal realms of his life. Many, who in their development, have not experienced adequate selfobject provision, live with the sense that they can never win, that nothing about them is ever good enough. They have developed a powerful emotional hunger, like that which Zweig describes, which the cult leader appears ideally suited to satisfy. Loyal members of a cult believe that their leader has magically transformed their lives and relieved their longing and suffering. On that basis, they will staunchly defend their leader even when his or her crimes are exposed. The "good feeling" of their initial conversion experience might consist of feeling "redeemed," "coming home at last," having been "lost, but now found," or being "saved." These intensely emotional experiences are attributed directly to the power and will of the leader. In the SYDA group, members were repeatedly instructed to refer all questions and doubts to their original conversion experience, and to "trust their own experience"---meaning to ignore, discard and feel ashamed about doubts and questions. In this way, objectivity---e.g., any negative information about the leader---is devalued. The guru, along with one's own subjective feeling state, is idealized. The bunker mentality response to any critical information about the group and its leaders then becomes: "That isn't my experience."

There are strong reasons for this need to banish objectivity. If one believes that the guru's power has healed one's pain and satisfied one's hunger, then for some, keeping the pain from returning means preserving the guru, at any cost. The pain of life that has been magically erased by the guru may indeed return if one rejects the guru. It may, and often does, return, along with many other warded off emotions, and these will need to be experienced, felt, understood, worked through, and made meaningful, if real transformation, not magic, is to occur. This is part of the complex process of human self-development that the cult solution can only pretend to address. For many who successfully exit cults, the process of transformation and expanded self-awareness they sought when they joined the cult only really begins once they have left the cult.

I link this determination to protect the cult leader at all cost to one of the most central formulations in the work of Fairbairn, the influential British Middle School psychoanalyst. Fairbairn (1943) spoke of a "moral defense," a way that developing children who are being neglected or abused by (or receiving inadequate selfobject provision from) their caregivers will subconsciously agree to "bear the burden of the badness." By excusing and protecting their abusers and blaming themselves for the neglect/abuse they are exposed to, these children choose, speaking metaphorically, to live in a world ruled by a benevolent God ("good" parents), where there is at least hope for redemption, rather than to confront the helplessness and hopeless despair of living in a world ruled by the Devil ("bad" parents). The child feels, "if it is me that is bad, there is hope. Maybe I can try to be good. But if it is my parents that are bad, there is nothing I can do -- I am doomed." Cult followers are in a similar position once they have become dependent on their leader. In cults, the leader depends on her ability to persuade her followers that she is always right. If anything is wrong, the follower is always to blame, never the leader, and the leader never lets the follower forget that those are the rules. By blinding themselves to the corruption and abuse of their leader, and taking on a sense of sinfulness, guilt and unworthiness in themselves, followers sustain their tie to the leader, and along with that tie, their hopes for redemption and salvation. Cult members are constantly obsessed with how they are perceived by the leader, whether they are good or bad, up or down. While obsessively striving for the leader's approval, they must also learn to accept the leader's need to humiliate others and to be ready at any time to assume the guilt and shame the leader constantly seeks to project on to others.

Kliger (1994), in her study of devotees of a leader named "Guru," demonstrates that it is precisely this conflict in the devotees that results in the high degree of somatization she found among them. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction amongst members was considered by Guru to be hostile, a threat to the community. Guru demanded that devotees show a happy face at all times, claiming that their unhappy faces made him physically and psychically ill. (This is also what Gurumayi teaches her SYDA staff.) Because the devotees were stigmatized by Guru for any expression of dissatisfaction, devotees suppressed these feelings, which then emerged through somatization. Physical illness was more acceptable to Guru, because he saw himself as a healer and could use a devotee's illness to demonstrate his power. If his healing efforts failed, however, devotees' illnesses were deemed a manifestation of their resistance, proving that they were hostile to Guru's mission. Punishment by shunning followed, which led either to devotees' further submission, or to their excommunication (Kliger, 1994, pp. 232-233). These kinds of shizophrenegenic mixed messages were pervasive in SYDA as well. For most of those SYDA members that I knew personally who worked directly with Gurumayi, attempting to please her would eventually lead to breakdowns in physical and mental health. Gurumayi resented people who were confident, and she was contemptuous of people who were weak. Trying to be what Gurumayi wanted you to be so that she would remain pleased with you was impossible, because she changed the rules at whim. It was common for staff members to disappear suddenly because they had been sent to rehabilitation centers for various addictions or disorders, or to a SYDA center in Honolulu for rest. In cults, breakdown is often the only option for members who have humiliated and diminished themselves as far as they could, and who unconsciously seek some sort of escape from the leader's insatiable demands for further abasement and submission.

When the magic helper is a drug such as heroin, the annihilation of the self may culminate in the death of the body. If it is food, the self is concealed in obesity, or enslaved to anorexia and bulimia. When the magic helper is an idealized but traumatizing parent who is ambivalently both hated and totally depended on, annihilation of the self manifests as the inability to separate and individuate. In my work with former cult members, my aim is to help them make sense of their experience in a way that feels meaningful. The psychoanalytically informed therapist will seek to facilitate former members' ability to bear the many losses they have experienced, not the least of which is the loss of belief in the cult and its leader. Former members may also have guilt to bear, along with intense fears about their future. As they become better able to bear the many kinds of pain connected to their cult experience, they can begin to regain hope and belief in their own ability to go on living and growing. To facilitate these goals, I focus initially on developing a clear picture of the abuse and exploitation they have been subjected to in the cult. It can be helpful during this process for the follower to speculate about the psychology of the cult leader, using the psychoanalytic theories I have discussed here, to develop a plausible psychological understanding of the leader's behavior. As the extent to which he has been manipulated and controlled becomes clearer to the former member, I will proceed to invite him to engage in a further psychological exploration of his own history, with the purpose of determining if there is any significant developmental trauma that may be connected to the cult involvement. If this is the case, there may be retraumatization that needs to be worked through as part of the exit and recovery process. There may also be ways in which earlier traumatization contributed to vulnerability to recruitment which can be helpful to understand, especially in terms of building healthy relationships in the future. When the personal context and meaning of the leader/follower relationship is illuminated fully in therapeutic work, the follower can come to feel confident that he can avoid painfully repetitive experiences, and instead create new relational experience.

Once the nature of the cult leader's abuse has been elaborated and clarified, and a useful psychological explanation for her behavior has been developed, my focus in helping the former member make sense of his experience will oscillate between exploration of psychological factors emerging from the specific familial matrix of the individual, psychological factors arising from universal developmental issues, and social and cultural factors that may have specifically influenced the individual. Any of these factors, in an infinite variety of combinations and proportions, may be useful to consider when seeking to help former cult members make sense of their experience. The community of professionals concerned with the destructive impact of cults is not monolithic. Neither is psychoanalysis. The theoretical formulations I have brought to bear on my work with former cult members are selected from a formidable variety of psychoanalytic theories, and represent personal choices that reflect personal values. Even if there were "one" correct psychoanalytic theory of cults, it would be only one of many theories from many other disciplines that could be relevant and useful. My contribution here is not meant to represent "the" position, psychoanalytic or other, on cult participation. Rather, I hope to generate interest in the potential for psychoanalytic therapy to be helpful to those who exit cults, and in the potential for psychoanalytic theories to be helpful to those who study cults.

I had deeply suppressed my doubts about SYDA for many years, but they suddenly and dramatically crystallized when I heard the story of the young woman I knew. In the phrase, "Don't ever tell anyone about this, especially not your mother," I heard a chilling echo of the voice of the incestuous father, the battering husband, the sexual harasser, the rapist. As Judith Herman says, in her seminal work entitled Trauma and Recovery (1992), "secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense" (p. 8). It was hearing these words, "Don't ever tell," that broke for me what Ernst Becker (1973) has called "the spell cast by persons -- the nexus of unfreedom." I recognized that, like many of my social work clients who were abused as children by their parents, I too had been subjected to abuse---by the person I called my guru.

Our Definition Of Mind Control

By definition, therefore, cultic mind control is a process of either unconscious or intentional change of an individual's behavior, thought, and emotional patterns through subtle, deceptive, and damaging means by unethical spiritual leaders who hold positions of trust and authority over them. It involves a process whereby an individual's means of independent thought is effectively controlled and even overcome by degrees, and an entirely different mode of thinking is adopted by them which is supplied by these leaders. It is this kind of power that leads men and women in cultic groups to accept as normal various kinds of abuse, outrages and privation that those outside the groups would recognize immediately for what it is.

This cultic mind control is achieved in a variety of situations and settings that are as diverse as they are common: they may involve social interactions from political groups to close-knit family relationships, all of which are found in civilizations world wide. Yet as seemingly unrelated as these settings may be, the operation of social dynamics intentionally aimed at controlling behavior and thought are found among them, and hence, the fundamental ingredients for mind control will also be present.

Why do we assert that mind control is such a twisted factor in society? We reply by reminding you of assertions we have made on another article in this site that express our most fundamental thesis on the subject: that the exercise of mind control proceeds from the manipulative motivations of human nature. We have contended that this side of human existence is essentially sullied by what Christian theology would calls our depravity, a sinful bent that all of us descend to in one way or another. Fallen man, operating from his essentially self-centered nature, seeking his own self-gratification at the expense of all else, will continually seek his own good according to his own convictions. And that same sad species of fallen man cannot and will not function alone.

We are social creatures who cannot function outside an established cultural norm of whatever common values we think we hold. In short, we want company and must have company with us as we socialize, and along the way, those who wish the preeminence among us for whatever reasons will seek to develop their factions, followings, movements, whatever. It is this drive for community and the primal human search for authority that break the ground for the seeds of mind control and manipulation by those who deem their vision and lifestyle as superior to anyone else's. Add the twistedness of our human tendency to dominate and control by the use of fear, threats and withheld social contact, and we can see more clearly why such a system of authoritarian abuse that mind control imposes can come about in settings other than the "cults" that are decried by the larger society.

A balanced understanding of cultic mind control doesn't imply that the controlled cult member has no ability to think for themselves, but it does assert that their capacity for independent thought is largely, if not entirely, suspended through their time of indoctrination and socialization into the group. The choices to submit to the authority of the group are indeed their own, but the choices are usually based upon their ignorance of the group's agenda of misinformation and their seriously impaired ability to objectively examine it . The process is gradual, yet relentless. Once having made the decision to relinquish their faculties of independent and critical thinking, step by step, the member will effectively lose their ability to make their own decisions relevant to the spirituality and/or philosophy they believe is beneficial to them.

Steve Hassan, a cult recovery specialist, observes helpfully that cultic mind control seeks "to undermine an individual's integrity in making his own decisions. The esssence of mind control is that it encourages dependence and conformity, and discourages autonomy and individuality (emphasis author's)" (1). When the only tool a person has to discern with - a free mind - is so completely and voluntarily hedged in under such a belief, mind control is inevitable.

So mind control is the ability to control and manipulate individuals through the usage of many sophisticated control techniques focusing upon the internal securing of independent thought and the external supplying of conditioned cognitive and behavioral responses. These dual objectives are the goals set forth by the person(s) who initiate the usage of these control techniques, supposedly for the personal benefit of those whom the controls have been imposed. But it is a presumptuous abuse of power, since it is almost always done at the personal expense of those whom are so controlled, subordinating personal initiative and freedom of mind to an imposition of their own wills and worldview upon them in a frequently unethical and even abusive manner. Accomplished by subtly staged forms of human socialization which often do not immediately tip off anyone to their truly manipulative nature, it is clear to us that mind control is a chilling reality that can be found in many more settings than we ever thought possible.

Mystical Manipulation - an intentional exaltation of the group's or group leader's authority by a carefully planned display of spiritual power or philosophical insight... ... The Sacred Science - the acceptance of a group's unique claims, authority and wisdom as supported by or at least being perfectly compatible with established scientific, historical, or psychological truths. This "new truth" is a profound revelation coming from the group and cannot be understood anywhere else but by membership in it. Group insights and teachings are presented as a perfect harmony of cutting edge scientific, spiritual or philosophical achievement that has never been achieved before by any other human endeavor, except, of course, by its' own visionary leadership!"

Go Back