The Impact and Consequences of Institutional Abuse[1]

Janja Lalich, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology and Former Cult Member

California State University, Chico

Email: drlalich@sbcglobal.net

Website: www.cultresearch.org

            Thank you. First of all, I’d like to extend a big thank you to Jodi Hobbs for inviting to me to this very special convention, and also a special note of appreciation to Marcus Chatfield. Marcus and I have been emailing for some months now about his research and we spoke once on the phone. He is putting a yeoman’s effort (“yeoman,” a naval term, seems appropriate here on the Queen Mary) – into trying to sort out the historical and social-psychological antecedents to the experience of institutional abuse. And, well, it’s Marcus who told Jodi about me and so he is probably the primary cause for me being here.

            I have presented at many meetings and conferences, various gatherings and seminars, but I must say that I am most honored and thrilled to be at this gathering — for those of you who suffered through months and years at teen boot camps, extreme survivalist programs, and various unorthodox rehabs, schools, and reformatories are the true heroes here. Many of you most likely don’t know me or aren’t familiar with my work, but my area of specialty is cults, controversial groups, terrorist indoctrination, and other situations of undue influence. I call them “self-sealing systems” – these groups or families or churches or programs or organizations that engage in what some have called “thought reform” or “coercive persuasion” — and what most of us are familiar with colloquially as “brainwashing.”

            I came to this work as a result of personal experience. I was in a cult – a political cult – for about 10½ years in the 1970s and 80s. We thought we were going to change the world, and bring about social revolution. We modeled ourselves after WWII Resistance fighters and more specifically after communist organizations around the world. Believe it or not, China’s Chairman Mao, the man behind brutal campaigns against his own civilians, and the mass murder and starvation of millions of Chinese, was our hero. Needless to say, the organization I was in, the Democratic Workers Party, was a rather abusive group, with lots of sitting in a circle and subjecting some poor comrade to hours of harsh criticism, long hours of work, typically from 5am until well after midnight at various tasks, some meant just to keep us busy, others with perhaps actual political import, 7 days a week, year after year. Lots of rules and punishments, demotions and public humiliation – all in the name of our cause and our great leader. When I got out, at age 41, I spent some time healing – a lot of time, actually, and did a lot of reading and self-directed study, trying to make sense out of what had happened to me and my friends. I know that during those years in the cult, I became someone other than I wanted to be – or ever was before. And through that self-education, I realized I had been in a cult and I then learned everything I could about cults and thought reform and various instances of extreme behavior modification.

            But back to the subject at hand: brainwashing, thought reform, invasive modes of resocialization. These change processes are intrusive methods, rituals, exercises, techniques, practices aimed at an extreme resocialization of the individual, the aim of which is to get the subject to adopt a new worldview, a new outlook on life and a new perspective on the self. Some resocialization programs may be sanctioned by society, for example, military indoctrination to create a soldier, an unthinking killing machine. This is presumably done for the safety of a nation and its people. Other sanctioned institutional resocializations may include cloistered monks, nuns or priests who willingly undergo removal and separation from the larger society in order to live out a spiritual or religious vow.  Mental hospitals (formerly called insane asylums) are another site for a kind of resocialization to occur, which I suppose we as a society tend to condone, although they also can be places potentially rife with abuse and the use of techniques once thought acceptable, now deemed inhumane – such as cold baths, shock treatment, and so on.

            There is much that I now know and understand about the social psychology of thought reform and its historical foundations, about how it’s carried out, how and why it works – after all, I had the great “honor” of being trained to be one of the main brainwashers in the cult I was in — and I have studied these processes in depth for the past quarter century (gosh, that makes me feel old). But I have to say, that from everything I have read and heard about what you all, you survivors of institutional abuse, have experienced – it simply falls in a category of its own – it is sheer torture. Now torture – the physical kind – is not typically part of a brainwashing program, although certainly not unheard of. But what many of you and others endured was of a kind and with such intensity, brutality, and persistence that it puts your experiences in a realm of their own. Not that I’m trying to make you feel special – ha ha – but really what I’m trying to point out is the severity and enormity of what you experienced, which then has a huge impact on your recovery, your re-establishing your sense of self.

            I have found both from my own experience as a former cult member and from years of studying and working in this field and meeting with and speaking with literally hundreds of former members of closed groups that the process of leaving the group and then putting one’s life (and also one’s mind) together can be – and often is – a very troubled time, fraught with anxiety, indecision, anger, worry, fear, either too little or too much sleep, confusion, guilt, loneliness, the inability to think straight, flashbacks, shame, depression, suicidal thoughts, identity crises, loss of memory, and so on – in other words, a wild ride on an emotional roller coaster. Having been held in what sociologist Erving Goffman called “a total institution” in his 1961 book, Asylums, is not an experience easily overcome. As Goffman wrote, “These are forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self” (1961, p. 12).

            Despite all the debates about nature versus nurture, in the end, social scientists have come to understand that the “self” is a social construction that arises out of social experience. And our sense of self is something that we as individuals establish and affirm as we make our way through life, hopefully, without too much undue influence from others, but certainly not without influential factors. Finding the right balance between those “external” factors and our “internal” self is a lot of what life is about. Now in your case, you’ve had a phase in your life overwhelmed with undue influence – of the most negative and harmful kind. Your journey was unexpectedly and brutally interrupted and disrupted by forces outside yourself, by forces that claimed to have your best interests in mind, but proved themselves otherwise.

            But one way or another, you got out. So there you are – out in the world, facing the thrill and the fears of constructing a new life for yourself, and, also, a new self, a new identity. Now hopefully, you are able to do this construction of the self free of the constraints of a closed and close-minded system. It’s what I sometimes call the social construction of freedom. But that act, or that process, is not always so easy, is it? Despite how overjoyed we might be at finally having gotten out of the harsh, cruel, controlling environment. As agonizing as it was being in the abusive institution, you may find or have found that leaving and being out in the world can also be agonizing. Some of you are no doubt wondering why your parents or loved ones sent you there. Or you may be wondering why you didn’t get yourself out of the place sooner. Or you may be thinking, asking yourself, “How could I ever have bought into all that nonsense? How could I have been so stupid?”

            Ultimately, as a self-reflexive person – which you must be or you wouldn’t even be here at this convention – you have surely tried or perhaps are still trying to make sense of what all that was about. What was going on in that group setting? How did it affect you as an individual? How might it still be affecting you? Why did you do the things you did? Participate in activities while there that you now think are reprehensible? Believe the things you did? Asking oneself such questions, trying to make sense of it all, is the personal quest many former cult members and others who have experienced similar traumas embark on. I hope that what I present here today will help you put it in perspective.

            Unlike some cult members, when you look at your experiences in a closed, high-control institution, I don’t think we can say you were there because you liked it or it was easier or you wanted to be there, although perhaps some of you got something good out of it. Remember, the fact that you got something good out of it – if you did – doesn’t mean that there weren’t also bad and harmful actions taken against you. But as with most things in life, we don’t want to rush to simplistic explanations for this is an incredibly complex phenomenon.

            I imagine each of you is in a very different place with regard to this subject – some perhaps fresh out, others who’ve been dealing with related issues for some time, still others just coming to terms with how the experience affected you, some taking a more intellectual approach, others beginning to tell your stories, some becoming activists to work to eliminate these places from our society. I hope what I have to say has some relevance for all of you.

            What I think we’re talking about here are complex social organizations that are structured in a specific way so as to institutionalize and routinize social controls and social influences that are aimed at bringing about certain results — results that the leaders of these outfits want. As a sociologist, I believe firmly that social interaction forms human conduct. So, I don’t think we can fully understand and move on from our experiences, reactions, and behaviors in totalistic groups (or abusive institutions) without examining the structure, the social interactions, and then our own role within that context.

            So let me begin with my version of what that structure was. It includes four interlocking organizational aspects:

1. the authority figure, often a charismatic authority figure – although charisma is possibly less relevant in this situation, although the leader has to be a good-enough salesman and self-assured enough to be able to sell the program to unsuspecting parents, school officials, insurance companies, and so on.
2. the belief system, which I see as a transcendent belief system, meaning that you are required to go through a personal transformation to attain acceptance
3. a system of control, and
4. a system of influence

            Charismatic Authority: The purpose of the first aspect, authority, is to provide leadership and direction. The leader’s goal is to be accepted as the legitimate authority on all things. This is accomplished by privilege, secretiveness, inaccessibility, power, and command, and the hoped-for effect is that the members, or subjects, will identify with the leader(s) and the group’s goal.

            Transcendent Belief System: The purpose of the belief system is to provide a worldview, whose specific goal is to offer meaning and purpose through a moral imperative. The doctrine is inviolable and comes down from on high. The desired effect is the internalization of the belief system, which is to represent, in a sense, “freedom,” in the sense of being connected to the greater goal and aspiring toward a sort of salvation. This transcendent belief system upholds the dangerous philosophy of “the end justifies the means.”

            System of Control: The purpose of the third aspect, the system of control, is to provide organizational structure and hierarchy. Rigid boundaries define inaccessible space and topics closed to discussion or inquiry. The specific goal is to put forth a behavioral system and a disciplinary code by means of rules, regulations, and a system of sanctions and punishments. The hoped-for effect is compliance, and better still, blind obedience.

            System of Influence: The purpose of the final aspect, the system of influence, is to provide a confining social network of acceptable social interaction, and a group culture. Internalized norms, all-pervasive modeling, and constant monitoring serve to rule out inappropriate questioning and behavior norms and a code of conduct which members are expected to live by is the specific goal. That is accomplished by various methods of peer and leadership influence and modeling. The desired effect is conformity, or the self-renunciation required in order to remain on good terms in the group and one day attain the professed goal. Which I suppose is “freedom”

            I call this the fusion of freedom and self-renunciation. That may sound all high and mighty, but soon one realizes that there can be no freedom when one has renounced or denied the self.

            All of these four parts fit together like a 3-dimensional puzzle. Everything seems to fit in this scheme, and very little happens by chance. Even external events are interpreted to coincide with the institution’s worldview – your life before you were admitted, your family and your role in your family, your schooling, your friends and acquaintances, your various life adventures and experiences. It’s all reframed to fit the schema of this new overarching system that envelops you.

            For you, as the inmate, as the member, the goal was to perfect yourself against an impossible ideal, and to criticize yourself – and others – for failing to do so all along the way.

            For the leader, the goal is to perfect a body of subjects, of followers, of acolytes, who would continually struggle for the impossible ideal, and laud the leaders and the institution all along the way.

            When this process works, the fusion happens – and here I identify four more aspects, or phases: a bounded reality, the self-sealing system, personal closure, and a state of mind that I call bounded choice (Lalich, 2004).

            This is how it works: you become locked into a bounded reality, created by the self-sealing system in which every aspect and every activity reconfirms and validates, not you, but the system. There is no place in such a system for what social psychologist Edgar Schein (who in 1961 wrote Coercive Persuasion, his research on Korean War prisoners of war) called “disconfirming information.” Nothing is allowed in that will challenge the system. The flow of information – in and out – is totally controlled. Not only in and out of the system, but in and out of you, of your mind.

            In this situation, what occurs is something called “personal closure”—an idea first introduced by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson (1959, 1968) and expanded upon by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton (1969). (If you’re a reader, Erikson wrote some very useful books on identity and youth and the life cycle. And Lifton, of course, did the seminal work on brainwashing, which he called thought reform, first studying people in Chinese reeducation camps and cadre training schools, but then continued his work in the study of modern-day cults.) So, personal closure is a particular state of mind that is akin to a psychological trap.

            Functioning within the group setting requires a commitment that demands single-mindedness, a style of thinking characterized by dogmatism and rigidity, and there can be no identity outside the context of the group. Because of the power that the authoritative leaders have over their subjects’ lives, the threat of disapproval and punishment take over one’s psyche. Along with this comes a paranoia that focuses on the system you are in, but also raises the specter of the “evil” outside world.

            Feeling duty-bound and obligated, members find themselves participating in or witnessing activities that in other times may have violated a personal code of ethics. But now, the leader or leaders are the only moral arbiters. Through repetition, ritual, and other activities, this process desensitizes members to behavior previously considered unthinkable or objectionable. The longer a person remains in this setting, the more “invested” you are, in a sense, and all the more complicit perhaps with group actions, behaviors, and requirements. (This is where later the guilt and shame come in.) At this stage, life outside the group seems less and less available as an option.

            And finally, by means of the processes of identification and internalization, you feel yourself enveloped within the group and at the mercy of the leader. You are likely to still be experiencing dissonance and confusion, even though you may be conveying a sense of agreement. All this time, you have had access to fewer and fewer outside sources of information, and, therefore, little capacity for any reality checks outside the bounds of the system. Additionally, you begin to feel completely separated from any sort of pre-group identity. After a time, you cannot imagine life outside the group. Here the process has come full circle – to the state of personal closure.

            Personal closure is not meant in the sense of completion, which is one use of the term. We talk, for example, about getting closure on something. But here we are talking about personal closure, about boundaries around the self. Lifton’s usage refers to the closing in of the self in a kind of self-sealed inner world. Lifton described it as a “disruption of balance between the self and the outside world” (1969, p. 421): “Here, the individual encounters a profound threat to his personal autonomy. He is deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection which anyone requires to test the realities of his environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it. Instead, he is called upon to make an absolute polarization of the real (the prevailing ideology) and the unreal (everything else).”

            The personal closure that is the culmination of cultic life (or in your case, institutional life) is profoundly confining because the individual is closed to both the outside world (in your case, physically as well since you were confined) and his or her own inner life. Personal closure involves all aspects of your life. It’s about everything, all of your life, all of you.

            It is also much vaster than our understanding of the normal processes of conformity because of the depth and extent of the internalization and identification. The quality of the belief change in these groups actually shifts a person’s value structure – either temporarily or permanently.

            Within that context, all choices become institutional choices, and those choices are made by the leader, for no one else is qualified or has the authority to do so. Personal choices, should they even arise at all, are now formulated and constrained by the self-sealing framework and style of consideration, which always puts the institution first. Thus, your choices become “bounded choices” – hampered and confined by the constriction, not just of the system (which certainly has a role), but more importantly and more potently, by the constriction of your own thought patterns – which, once more, always put the institution first.

            So, what do we have here?

            The boundaries of knowledge have been shut tight and reinforced in 3 specific ways: through the process of resocialization, through the use of ideology, and through social control and influence. The goal of resocialization is the restructured personality, and this reconstruction often revolves around one aim: “to get the individual to identify with the socializing agent” (Coleman, 1990, p. 295) — in this case, whichever institution you happen to have been placed in. In Goffman’s writing on total institutions, he describes a process that he calls the “mortification of the self “– the process whereby the individual is stripped of all support and what was familiar to him before. “Upon entrance…” he writes, “he [is subjected to] a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, profanations of self. His self is systematically…mortified” (Goffman, 1961, p. 14). Self-mortification, role dispossession, curtailment of the self, obedience tests, will-breaking contests, physical indignities, forced confessions, all serve to create anxiety, loss of autonomy, and loss of sense of safety. You know the drill. I don’t have to tell you. You’ve been there. Such an assault upon the self is the crux of behavior modification, of thought reform.

            I cite these various researchers and professionals, not to bore you with academic references, but to help you understand that there are social scientists who have studied this phenomenon, who have criticized it, have pointed out the dangers and devastating effects. There is actually a long history of institutional abuse in its many forms – and you too are now experts in the subject.

            The desired effect from the institution’s point of view is a new self whose actions are dictated by the will or purpose of the actor or leader he has identified with. This is why people obey even when they are not around the group – It is then that will, the internalized will of the other, of the system, that generates one’s own internal sanctions for future actions. Bounded choice is constrained, then, by both external and internalized sanctions – real or imagined.

            Voila – you’ve been brainwashed.

            And now for that burning question: How do I undo it?

            Let me say first, for those of you who may be in pain, who may think the mental confusion and personal anguish will never end – I know it sounds trite, but it’s true that TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS. So let time be your ally. And please take comfort in knowing that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have gone this road before – and THERE IS LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.

            But you can cut down the time and you can shorten the tunnel, for one, by doing what you are doing this weekend, coming together with others who have experienced the same kind of trauma as you have and engaging in what I call psycho-education.

            But as to the question: how do I undo it? Well, I don’t believe that there is only one answer to that question – in fact, I no longer think there’s one answer to hardly any question, except maybe “what does 1 plus 1 equal?” One of the paradoxical consequences of living outside a cult or a closed system like you were in (and, by the way, from what I can tell, many of the behavioral modification programs that we’re here to discuss or you have experience with, that were and still are in existence qualify as a cult) – so one of the paradoxical consequences of living outside a closed system is that life gets more complex and a person is no longer satisfied with simplistic answers.

            There are two fundamental axioms to remember in dealing with some of the aftereffects: (1) we are socialized to respond to and respect authority figures, and (2) we are social animals who respond very much to peer pressure. Keeping that in mind may help ease some of the guilt and shame.

            When I work one on one with former cult members, there are several things I ask them to do that usually help, and that involves deconstructing the system to gain a full understanding of what was at play. And of course to recognize that because of what Lifton calls “milieu control” – control of information, of social contact, of outside realities – you were playing with less than a full deck. So in addition to the controlled environment along with the physical and psychological abuse, you were subjected to constant berating, badgering, exhaustion, malnutrition, various deprivations, all the while living in a depraved setting. So if you “bought into any of it,” if you succumbed in any way, don’t beat yourself up. What else could you have done? Give yourself a break. It’s time to take the pressure off. The keys to recovery are balance and moderation, both of which were quite likely absent in the program you were in.

            At the beginning of this presentation I mentioned some of the typical aftereffects: anxiety, indecision, worry, fear, either too little or too much sleep, confusion, guilt, loneliness, flashbacks, shame, obsessive thoughts, depression, suicidal thoughts, identity crises, loss of memory, panic attacks, anger, and so on. If you are experiencing any of these, that’s normal. Some of the other more common effects are:

1. Cognitive deficits – trouble concentrating, an inability to think straight, things that may hinder you at school or at work.
2. Experiencing low self-esteem, self-doubt, questioning yourself all the time.
3. Feeling that you have regressed to a childlike state. Remember, you were in a situation that enforced a state of dependency and loss of autonomy. When I got out of my group at age 41, I always say I felt like a stupid 15-year-old and a very tired 80-year-old at the same time.
4. Sometimes feeling frozen with fear, unable to act or make a decision.
5. Wanting revenge. Not knowing what to do with all your anger.

Anger is a normal reaction to the hurts and assaults you experienced. Anger is an appropriate response to abuse and exploitation. Some say that feeling angry is one of the first signs of recovery. Just as fear is the backbone of institutional control, anger can be the fuel of recovery. It fortifies your sense of what is right by condemning the wrong that was done to you. It gives you the energy and will to get through the ordeal of getting your life back together. Suppression of anger while in the institution more than likely contributed to depression and a sense of helplessness. Now the reverse is possible. But bear in mind that anger can also be a double-edged sword, especially if turned inward, toward the self or outward toward the wrong targets, innocent others, which can lead to increased isolation. One outlet for many people has been poetry or writing to release the anger. Or writing letters that never get sent to former leaders. Don’t act on it willy-nilly. There is a big difference between thinking, feeling, and acting out.

            I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t diagnose you, but most people coming out of such situations do get diagnosed with PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder. That means the emotional roller coaster may go on for some time; you may step off and have smooth times for a while, and then the roller coaster comes by and swoops you up again. That too is normal. The most important and effective thing you can do is find those aids that work for you. This process may or may not include professional therapy. The healing or recovery process varies for each of us, with ebbs and flows of progress, great insight, and profound confusion at times.

            I don’t like to tout my own book, but Take Back Your Life (Lalich & Tobias, 2006), which was written specifically to help folks recover from similar traumatic experiences, has proven so helpful for many, many people. My coauthor and I were compelled to write the book because more often than not, people coming out of cults and extremist environments have difficulty finding practical information. I, too, experiences that obstacle back in 1986 when I got out. I seemed to encounter one roadblock after another when I searched for useful information or helping professionals who were knowledgeable about this type of trauma.

And there are other good books out there as well. Another book I recommend is The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren (2010).

            Dealing with your emotions may be one of the biggest areas of concern. Typically as we grow up, through life’s various experiences, ups and downs, we learn the skills needed to handle and cope with a variety of situations. But you were likely removed from life just at the time when most folks are experiencing life, learning to sort through the challenges and acquire those skills. You were in an environment where your emotions were manipulated and controlled. So now you have to face that developmental task, and it may at times seem just too daunting. You may not even be able to sort out one emotion from another, or what is an appropriate or inappropriate response. So again, get some useful aids (such as the two books I just mentioned or a therapist or a trusted friend), and start to identify and distinguish between your various responses and reactions. How is anger different from fear, from frustration? How is sadness different from loneliness? How do you react when you are anxious? What sets it off? What can you do to avoid those situations or approach them differently? Keep a journal or a log. Start making sense of it. But it is important to find a comfortable pace for your healing process. In the beginning, in particular, your mind and body may simply need a rest. Allow yourself that.

             If you are having triggers and flashbacks, there are little tricks and exercises in the book to help you through those. A trigger can induce a dissociated state accompanied by a flood of memories. Sensory triggers area probably the most common: sights, physical sensations, sounds, smells, tastes. These triggers are reminders of specific experiences or people and are unique to each person. They may bring back the ambiance of the place, or engender specific emotional states, or even physical sensations. You’re not going crazy when these occur, although you may feel like it. The process of becoming immune to triggers begins when you become aware of what triggers you. Get rid of institutional souvenirs; keep a log; stay healthy. Research indicates that triggering happens most frequently when you are anxious, stressed, fatigued, or ill; and secondarily, when you’re distracted, lonely or uncertain. This very gathering may set off lots of triggers for many of you, just because we are talking about these things.

            And ask other survivors what works for them. But beware: don’t compare yourself to them or judge yourself by someone else’s progress. That’s never helpful. You are a unique human being with your own journey.

Recovering from such a traumatic experience will not end the moment you leave the abusive situation. Nor will it end after the first few weeks or months away from the group. On the contrary, depending on your circumstances, aspects of that experience may require some attention for the rest of your life.

            In an earlier book that I co-wrote with psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer, we outlined 5 major areas of post-cult adjustment (Singer & Lalich, 1995). These likely will relevant to you as well. The five categories are practical, psychological-emotional, cognitive, social-personal and philosophical-attitudinal. I have a handout available that outlines these and some of the typical issues likely to come up in each area.

            You may sometimes feel that it’s all one big mush and that it seems impossible to get a handle on – that’s why I feel the deconstruction of the experience is so important. Some people have found it very helpful to recreate their time in the group. Try to chart out what happened, when and why. Now it may seem counterintuitive to relive, but the better you understand intellectually what happened to you, the better you will be able to handle it emotionally. You can chart out your experiences and perhaps leave a column on the right where you can jot in notes or reminders that will help you get a grasp on what happened.

            If there was a specific ideology or belief system put forth by the institution, their philosophy of practice, the underpinnings of why they say they do what they do. Take that apart as well. See if it has any medical or psychological roots that are valid; debunk it, so that it no longer has any hold on you. And perhaps there may have been some good elements – this way you can sort those out, and not have to throw out the good with the bad.

            These exercises may not be easy to do. You may not want to do them all in one sitting. You may not want to do them if you’re feeling particularly vulnerable or shaky. You may want to do it with someone else, a trusted friend, someone else who was in the same or similar program.

            Learn to take things on a little at a time. Not every issue or aftereffect is going to be resolved at the same time. Perhaps make a list of the things that trouble you most, then prioritize it, and work on things systematically. Or if you reach a block, go back to your list and pick out some other area to work on. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Not everything needs to be settled today. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

            If you no longer trust, feel you don’t know how to have healthy relationships, there’s a section on that in the book as well. Engaging in healthy and trusting relationships after such a traumatic and invasive experience as you have endured is one of life’s big challenges afterwards. But it’s important to take on this challenge so you can create a solid and trustworthy social network around you.

            Establish a support system for yourself. Choose your friends wisely. Don’t associate with people who bring you down. Don’t think you have to tell everyone you encounter what you went through. There is often a tendency to say too much too soon, with family, on the job, or with new acquaintances. That’s left over from the time in the system when you were allowed to have no boundaries at all. You now can re-establish your personal space, guard it well. Trust you gut, your instinctual reactions, when you feel invaded or as though you’re losing your balance or perspective. The bottom line is that you get to decide what feels safe and what you feel prepared to discuss or explain.

            If you’re having trouble sleeping, remember the old remedies. Drink some warm milk. Play soft music. Go outside and get cold and then jump back in bed. That is supposed to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and slow your heart rate so you will fall asleep.

Also, you may want to seek out an ethical cognitive therapist – no tricks, no gimmicks, no New Age nonsense. Just good old talk therapy. I realize tht many of you may be hesitant to open up to any mental health professional after what you’ve been through and the way you were betrayed, but there are some good therapists out there who can help. There’s a checklist in the book for evaluating a good therapist.

            I’m not a big pill pusher, but there are some very good medications available now for anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. You don’t have to suffer as much as you might be. Remember, you probably got used to suffering while you were confined, perhaps you became desensitized to that kind of personal pain, or you think you should just suck it up and take it. That’s a bankrupt philosophy. If there is medication you can take for a time that will relieve some of your pain and allow you to function more effectively, consider it. Talk with your doctor or therapist about it. You probably don’t have to be on it forever, but it can be a wonderful short-term solution to getting through the really rough spots.

            Find what works for you – and work on it. Do what you can when it feels right, and if it seems like too much, like you don’t want to think about it another minute, then don’t. Trust your gut; follow your instincts. You can now. It does get better. The pain and the bad memories, the nightmares, the panic attacks will recede into the background.

            And never forget, you were strong enough to survive a most horrific ordeal. You are surely strong enough to succeed now.

References

Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Erikson, E. H. (1959/1980). Identity and the life cycle. New York Norton.

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and          other inmates. New York: Anchor Books.

Lalich, J. (2004.) Bounded choice; True believers and charismatic cults. Berkeley:            University of California Press.

Lalich, J., & Tobias, M. (2006). Take back your life: Recovering from cults and abusive     relationships. Berkeley, CA: Bay Tree

Lifton, R. J. (1969). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism. New York: Norton.

McLaren, K. (2010). The language of emotions: What your feelings are trying to tell you. Louisville, CO: Sounds True.

Schein, E. H. (1961/1971). Coercive persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the    “brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists. New          York: Norton.

Singer, M. T., & Lalich, J. (1995). Cults in our midst: The hidden menace in our      everyday lives.: San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Major Areas of Post-Cult Adjustment

Practical

Psychological-

Emo­tional

Cognitive

Social-Per­sonal

Philosophical-

Attitudinal

Makes living arrangements.

Arranges financial support.

Arranges medical & dental care.

Examines nutrition & eating habits.

Gets psychological examination, if needed.

Makes career & education plans, & gets vocational counseling, if needed.

Explains the years in the cult/abusive institution.

Structures daily life.

Copes with difficulties created by distrust of professional services: medical, dental, & mental health professionals, & educators.

Feels depressed.

Has feelings of loss.

Feels guilt & regret.

Lacks self-esteem & self-confidence; exhibits self-blaming attitudes & excessive doubts.

Has panic attacks.

Experiences relaxation-induced anxiety (RIA) & tics.

Separation from family & friends.

Exhibits fear of the group & others in general, especially authority figures.

Feels generalized paranoia & fear of the world.

Is overly dependent for age; submissive, suggestible.

Worries over realness of “past lives”; must sort out true past from one engendered by the cult/institution.

Is hypersensitive to sound, touch.

Experiences indecisiveness.

Experiences blurring of mental acuity.

Has difficulty concentrating.

Has memory loss.

Cannot recall what just read or heard.

Must stop using group language/lingo.

Has sense of losing track of time.

Experiences floating, slipping into altered states.

Has poor & unreliable sense of judgment.

Hears what others say uncritically & passively. Or may be hypercritical

Has recurring bizarre mental content from the experience: for example, waking dreams, fog-like states.

Has pervasive sense of alienation.

Needs to reconnect with family & friends.

Needs to make new friends.

Distrusts own ability to make good choices.

Has phobic-like con­striction of social contacts; mistrusts, distrusts others.

Feels loneliness.

Is confused about sexuality & sexual identity & roles.

Faces dealing with marital, family, parental, & child custody issues.

Fears making a commitment to another person.

Feels unable to make & express opinions.

Overextends self to make up for lost time; is unable to say no.

Has sense of being watched all the time (the fishbowl effect).

Is embarrassed & uncertain how or when to tell others about the experience; fears rejection.

Has hypercritical attitude toward others & society.

Needs to overcome aversions ingrained by the cult/institution.

Has condemning attitude toward normal human foibles & is harsh toward self & others; still judges by cult/institutional standards.

Lacks satisfaction with the world & self; feels emptiness at no longer being a world saver or on a mission.

Is unable to be kind to or supportive of others.

Fears joining any group or being active.

Feels loss of sense of being part of an elite group.

Needs to reactivate own belief system & moral code/values & sort out from ones adopted in the cult/institution.

From Cults in Our Midst by Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich. Copyright © 1995.

This article, authored by Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren, was published in the Journal of Homosexuality. It is based on a research project that examined narratives of gay and lesbian former Jehovah’s Witnesses. Click on the link at the top.

Lost Boy

By Brent W. Jeffs, with Maia Szalavitz

Reviewed by Janja Lalich, Ph.D.

New York: Broadway Books. 2009. ISBN-10: 0767931777; ISBN-13: 978-0-7679-3177-9 (hardcover). $24.95 ($16.47, Amazon.com). 256 pages.

 “The stories of my childhood are either idyllic, horrific, or filled with a sense of unreality,” writes the author of this important, highly informative, and poignant book. Lost Boy is the memoir of Brent Jeffs, nephew of Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). The FLDS sect split off from the Mormon church (LDS) in Utah when the LDS abandoned polygamy as a sacred practice in order to accommodate U.S. law and public pressure. Believing that the LDS had lost its way by doing this, some true believers established their own church, the FLDS, as did some others who refused to refrain from being polygamous. The FLDS garnered quite a bit of publicity and some measure of public sympathy when the group’s Eldorado, Texas ranch, Yearning for Zion, was raided by state officials on April 3, 2008. More than 400 children were removed from the compound on suspicion of child abuse and underage marriage. Shortly afterward, the Texas Department of Family and Child Protective Services brought me to that state for a weekend consultation with state officials, representatives from child welfare agencies and foster homes, education department officials, experts in various fields, and so on. We discussed and struggled with the best way to serve and protect the Yearning for Zion children, and their mothers, in that highly unusual situation. Over the course of the weekend, I learned a great deal more than I already knew about the inner workings and ideology of the FLDS, thanks to excellent presentations by, and my own lengthy discussions with former FLDS folks and others there who have worked closely with ex-FLDSers or are related to FLDS members. Therefore, much of what I read in this book corroborated what I heard at that meeting and reinforced my understanding of what life might be like during and after membership in the FLDS.

Lost Boy, as one may gather from the title, focuses in particular on the life of one of those many young men who were and are ejected from the cult at an early age in order not to be “in competition” with the older men in their incessant pursuit of wives. As the author writes, “Since 1999, hundreds of boys have been forced out of the FLDS. Many succumb to drink, drugs, and depression. Even as our prophet’s grandson, I wasn’t exempt.” Brent Jeffs came from what inside the FLDS is considered royalty—a family of “royal blood.” His grandfather, Rulon, was the FLDS prophet who was believed to speak directly to God; Rulon had 19 wives. Brent’s father and his uncle Warren were 2 of 65 siblings. Brent’s father had three wives, two of whom were full-blooded sisters, who gave birth to 20 children. Brent describes having literally thousands of cousins. Given his royal heritage, one might expect him to have been destined for great things within this secretive and reclusive clan. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Polygamy was the only world Brent or his family knew. He explains that both his parents came from generations of the practice, having “lived polygamy since Joseph Smith first introduced the ‘principle’ of ‘celestial marriage’ in 1843—and the same is true for most [FLDS] members.” Brent uses plain language, clear descriptions, and sometimes startling examples to paint a picture of family life in such an environment: for example, “Polygamy and its power structure continuously produce a constant, exhausting struggle for attention and resources.” A statement such as this one either precedes or concludes with vivid illustrations, creating an impressive panoply of scenes that forcefully substantiate the author’s claims.

Although shows like HBO’s Big Love tend to romanticize polygamy, showing over and over again how family love and strong bonds keep the protagonist family together through hardship, attacks, exposure, and so on, such viewings rarely depict the much darker side of polygamous communities. For example, absent is the number of deaths in the FLDS related to a genetic disorder that handicaps and kills many children early in life, which, according to Brent Jeffs, is consistently denied within the community, and results from generations of inbreeding reinforced by the fact that the cult rarely recruits outsiders. To make matters worse, under Warren Jeffs’s reign, these birth defects came to be seen as a curse and a sign of sin. Brent also mentions that with 50 percent of births being boys, being male is not such a privileged position in an environment in which the elders like to practice “sexual variety without guilt” and want the best pick of the female crop.

Unfortunately for Brent and many others (boys and girls, men and women), as time went on, successive generations of FLDS leadership instituted a more regimented, spartan, and harsh lifestyle. Isolation and change in leadership led to corruption and abuse. Life in the community became more difficult to cope with; yet, all the while, members tended to go along with leadership demands. In relation to this, Brent discusses the significance of the church command to “keep sweet,” a perfect example of Lifton’s “thought-stopping cliché,” used in this context to enforce members’ “happy” submission to rules and leadership wants and whims. Brent also explains this apparent submissiveness as emanating from family loyalties, family history, and brainwashing. Not only is the fear of losing everything they know quite overwhelming, but also members’ being ignorant of the way the rest of the world works helps to keep them compliant.

When the author was young, his Uncle Warren was principal of the Alta Academy, an FLDS school. There, during school time and during church sessions held in the building, Brent describes horrific sexual abuse of young boys, typically ages 5 and 6, perpetrated by Warren Jeffs, whose unquestioned power and rising stardom gave him free reign. Brent believes that the rape of one of his brothers, Clayne, by his uncle when his brother was 5 years old led to Clayne’s troubled life and later suicide. Another of Brent’s brothers died of a drug overdose. One important insight that Brent mentions is his recognition that, because he went to “regular” kindergarten (that is, not within the confines of the cult), that experience with its exposure to non-FLDS adults and children planted the seed in Brent that not all outsiders are bad. This realization helped him as he grew older and confronted life in mainstream society. As a child and an adolescent, Brent experienced and witnessed more than any human being should have to. His life goes from being considered part of the FLDS elite to being the ostracized son of an apostate after his father is excommunicated. From there, Brent eventually becomes one of the exiled “lost boys” and in this memoir, he expresses clearly the fear, paranoia, and confusion of that life. It is always a wonder to me that these brave young people survive with such a strong sense of life and goodness and compassion. It truly bears witness to the concept of resilience—and the power of self in the face of truth and freedom versus deceit and harm.

In Lost Boy, written with Maia Szalavitz (author of the excellent boot-camp exposé, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids), Brent Jeffs shares some of the best and worst of his young life. He offers readers a detailed and heartfelt look at a world most people know nothing about: a world that is too often allowed to carry on with exploitative practices and abuse, a world that we all should be concerned about. This is an important book, on a par with Not Without My Sister (reviewed in a previous issue of the Cultic Studies Review) and should be read by all.

People who know of me – rather than knowing me personally – know twothings about me: I have a name that on first glance looks difficult to pronounce, and, for the last 20 years, I’ve been studying cults. Let me explain both.

As the daughter of Serbian immigrants – there’s the first explanation – I wasn’t supposed to go to college. My “old-country” father thought girls were put on this earth to get married and have healthy Serbian babies, preferably boy babies. But I had different dreams and was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when college was affordable and scholarships were plentiful. I went off to school and completed a BA with Honors at the University of Wisconsin, followed by a Fulbright fellowship at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Afterwards, I decided not to pursue graduate studies and went to live and work in New York City, then spent four years or so living on a Spanish island, and eventually settled in San Francisco. It was the late ’60s-early ’70s and I was a free spirit, with lifelong aspirations of being a writer.

Why do I tell you all this? Because then I joined a cult!

Democratic Workers Party. Janja Lalich in front on left

If, back in 1974, anyone had ever told me that smart, independent, wise-cracking, hard-headed me would one day be under someone’s thumb, I would have surely laughed and said, “No, not me!” But yes, me – and I give this background in part to shatter the enduring myth that only the weak-willed and stupid could ever be in a cult.

For 10-plus years I lived in an extremely controlled and restrictive environment, a true believer in the idea that I had found my destiny and was working toward positive ends. I, with my comrades, but only because of our leader, was going to change the world –when in fact about the only thing that got changed was me. And not only was I brainwashed – a word I use intentionally and which I’ll come back to later – but I was one of the main brainwashers in my group!

When asked if I regret my cult experience, if I had to do it over again, I have consistently replied that yes, I do regret it and no, I wouldn’t do it again. Sure, I met some nice people and I learned some things; I can even say I learned a lot – with the caveat that I would rather have learned those things another way.

But it’s done. I did join a cult. I did spend more than 10 years constrained, confined,and often conflicted. That background is part of who I am – and so the only sane thing to do as far as I could tell was to “turn a bad thing into a good thing.”

Once out of the cult, after much inner turmoil, self-doubt, anxiety, and deliberation, I enrolled in graduate school and obtained a Ph.D. Today I make whatever contribution I can to bring to people in our society a better understanding of those controversial groups that some of us some of the time identify as cults. I also hope I can help former cult members better understand their own experiences and how they might come to some personal resolution with all that.

I’d like to review some of the relevant events in the 30 years since the deaths in Guyana, to remember and honor some of the notable people in our field,[2] and to suggest what we might look to in the future. Several interlocking themes run through my ideas here–

Who better to start with than my dear old friend and colleague, the late Margaret Singer, who would say, “Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a cult.”

And when I use the word cult, I’m not talking about religion or belief systems I “don’t like.” Some of our detractors like to make this all about unjust religious persecution or mainstream traditionalists picking on minority religions. Rather, I’m talking about imbalanced power relationships and ultra-authoritarian and controlling social systems.

I would add that we’d do well not only to study cults, but also to speak out about the consequences of membership in such a group and the controversial and sometimes harmful behaviors ofthe group as a whole.

I do not deny that positive experiences occur in a cult context, but what is of interest for me is the interactional dynamic found in cults that brings moral human beings to occasionally engage in insidious or demeaning behaviors, or sometimes just the plain incomprehensible. Over the years, we’ve witnessed countless violent eruptions – either inward or outward –related to one cult or another.
On November 18, 1978, more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died at his command and at the hands of their comrades in the remote jungle of British Guyana, a small nation on the northern coast of South America.

These true believers at Jonestown – all of them U.S. citizens – were living and working in that isolated community which they built from scratch – poorly fed, overworked, yet believing they were creating a utopian society forged out of Jones’s prophesies and fantasies.

How much coercion was involved? How much duplicity, manipulation, intimidation, threat?

We do know that once there, they couldn’t leave without the blessing of the leadership as each person’s passport was taken from them.

We do know that Jones had his people engage in suicide drills, called White Nights – these were loyalty tests.

Jones was not the first cult leader to ask, “Will you die for me?” But he was certainly one of the few to bring that to fruition on such a massive scale.

We do know that families and couples were separated from each other, made to live in separate quarters, and that children were not raised by their parents.

We do know that dissidents were often sedated (heavily drugged against their will) and confined to an “extensive care unit.”

We do know that children, as well as male and female adults, were physically or sexually abused.

We do know that Jones had a highly-functioning leadership body and medical entourage who kept him going and were instrumental in administering the poison on that last day, the ones who carried out Jones’s final call for what he labeled “Revolutionary Suicide.”

There was no exit for anyone who doubted or challenged the directive. The residents of the Jonestown commune were doomed. As they watched the children being forcefully injected first with the lethal mixture of cyanide and fruit drink, afterwards the adults could “choose” to poison themselves. Should one even have had the wherewithal to resist, he or she was threatened at gunpoint by a security squad made up of fellow parishioners. This larger-than-life incident is a hideous illustration of what I refer to as “bounded choice.”[3]

Horrific grisly pictures flooded the airwaves. I remember seeing them on TV while I was in a cult myself. One hard-core true believer – me – seeing the bloated, decomposing corpses of hundreds of other true believers piled one atop another. It was shocking.

Most of these people were from San Francisco, where I was living at the time. The Peoples Temple church building was in one of the very districts where I had walked hundreds of times organizing and recruiting, selling my cult’s newspaper, getting petitions signed, and even doing fundraising among the poor folk who lived in that neighborhood. Some of those same African American ladies who held quilting bees to create and donate beautiful pieces of work for our so-called political efforts may well have gone to Guyana and died in that jungle.

While the images of the dead were endlessly visible on TV, in newspapers and magazines, my cult’s newspaper ran a lengthy editorial in which our leader extolled Jones, his followers, and their socialist mission and vision. We understood why they did what they did, my leader wrote. We too lived in the belly of the beast and knew the desire to flee to a better land. Of course, that editorial was a superficial, knee-jerk sympathetic analysis –one cult leader defending another. And not for the first time. Over the years we’ve seen some strange bedfellows: various far-flung groups with opposing ideologies and goals coming together to join forces – in PR campaigns, legal battles, and so on.

So, what have we learned?

Do some cults induce their members to “commit suicide”?

Yes, but not often. Nonetheless, as much as we know that not every cult will go the way of Jonestown, we also know that one or two will; in fact, one or two or more have since then.

Should we consider these acts of induced suicide as murder?

Yes, I think so.

Should you have any doubts as to the control mechanisms at play, listen to this excerpt from a letter written to Jones by one of his inner-circle nurses. She is proposing how the end will take place:

Dad… The very people who resist Revolutionary Suicide because they want to save their asses would make excellent captives for the enemy… Though the strongest might kill themselves before being taken, the weakest — no matter what they might say in public meetings — would not kill themselves and would be the first to talk.

We prepare the people by reading over the p.a. system the words of strong, assertive revolutionaries of the past who took this choice… We will meet in the pavilion surrounded with highly trusted security with guns. Names will be called off randomly. People will be escorted to a place of dying by a strong personality… who is loving,supported [sic] but non sympathetic. They are accompanied by two strong security men with guns. (I don’t trust people to arrange their own death…but [it] can be arranged by outside pressure and no alternatives left open.) At the place of dying they are shot in the head and if Larry does not believe they are definitely dead, their throat is slit with a scalpel. I would be willing to help here if it is necessary. The bodies would bethrown in a ditch. It might be advisable to blindfold the people before going to the death place in that the blood and body remains on the ground might increase the agitation.[4]

So, can the unbridled narcissism of a cult leader lead to acts of violence – inward or outward?

Yes. Remember, not just Jones and his followers died – including 314 innocent children who did not make that choice – but also a U.S. Congressman and four members of the press were killed and others seriously wounded as they tried to leave.[5]

Each of the collective suicides/mass murders I’m about to mention is incredibly complex and warrants full discussion. I cite them briefly here as some of the other incidents we can learn from.

1993: In Texas 80 members of the Branch Davidians, followers of David Koresh, including 22 children, die in a blazing inferno at the Waco compound. We might ask: could Koresh have let his people go? [6]

1994 – 1997: A total of 74 people, members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada, Switzerland, and France died. Again this included infants and children, in brutal and ritual deaths. How much was compliance? How much coerced?[7]

1997: In Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed “collective suicide.” Two more followers of Marshall Applewhite followed suit within the next six months – and possibly more we’ve never learned about.[8]

2000: In Uganda, more than 400 members of The Movement for the Restoration of the 10 Commandments were brutally murdered and buried in secret mass graves; another 300+ burned to death in the locked church building.[9]

These are tragic, yes, no doubt about it. But in my mind, what is most important about Peoples Temple and Jonestown, and what is so important about other cults, is what they tell us about the systems of influence and control that are instituted to retain members and ensure their loyalty in words and deeds.

When we hear the term “ideological extremism,” we may most immediately think of acts of violence toward outsiders, such as we are seeing in many parts of the world today. However, what we must not lose sight of is that ideological extremism and the violence that may ensue is not just about orchestrated collective suicides or martyrs blowing up airplanes or crowded buses. Rather, at its core, it’s about the social structure that gets set up around that ideology, about the promise of“salvation” and the leader’s recipe for transformation that will take you there, about the institution of systems of influence and control within that self-sealing social structure to ensure obedience and conformity – and about the power relations and the power imbalance between the charismatic leader(s) and the followers.

Ultimately, whether or not one believes that cult members are brainwashed, it’s about taking at least some of the members to the social-psychological and emotional state of “bounded choice.”[10] This is when normal, intelligent, educated people give up years of their lives – and sometimes their very own lives or take the lives of others – because of the deep internalization of the group’s ideology and purported goals. Time and again, we see the unquestioning adulation of an authority figure, combined with personal sacrifice and disempowerment on the part of the follower. I submit that it requires that complex mix of elements to lead to acts of violence. These acts would not be possible, would not come to fruition without the social-psychological manipulation that goes on, unseen and unrecognized by most people on the outside.

But even more crucial, I believe, is understanding and recognizing that ideological extremism is manifested most frequently, not in suicide missions, but rather in the daily manipulation, oppression, subjugation, exploitation of and violence toward cult members and their families within the cult, including the children who are born and raised in that environment. If we take a broader view of ideological extremism and its consequences, we see other forms of violent outcomes, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; exploitation; murder; and mayhem. And not just among religious orquasi-religious groups, but groups with a range of belief systems.

Let me illustrate:

The Manson Family in 1969: in southern California, at least eight killed, four jailed, plus Charles Manson himself. Meanwhile Mansonite Leslie Van Houten, 58, has spent almost twice as many years in jail as she was alive at the time of her sentencing. She has completely renounced Manson, has been a model prisoner, completed a Master’s degree, and so on – yet she will never be forgiven and never paroled.[11]

Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974: the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by this political cult, whose other activities included police shootouts, bank robberies, attempted bombing, murder, and loss of life of an innocent

Symbionese Liberation Army

civilian as well as several SLA members themselves.[12]

Here’s a different kind of outcome.

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), one of most known and visible groups came to the U.S. in 1965, better known as the Hare Krishnas. Then in 2000, a class-action lawsuit was filed for alleged sexual abuse of children raised in ISKCON boarding schools. Of interest is the fact that the Hare Krishnas is one of the few controversial groups to issue an apology and offer compensation, mind you, with strings attached, and which some feel is inadequate.[13]

Children of God in 1968 into the 1970s: David Moses Berg’s group was formed in the heyday of cult activity in America, then moved worldwide. By 1974, this group (now known as The Family) was infamous for its controversial sex practices, which first involved sexual “sharing” with group members, then with strangers (the practice known as “flirty fishing”), then expanded to include children, including one’s own children![14]
In 1984 the cult led by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh put salmonella bacteria in the nearby town’s salad bars, hoping to sway the local election in the cult’s favor. The cult’s hope was that the townspeople wouldn’t make it to the voting booths that day.[15] More than 700 people were sickened. This was the first act of biological “warfare” – probably better described as a biological crime – in the U.S.

In 1992 the Minnesota Patriots Council, an anti-government militia group, managed to make some ricin, a deadly poison derived from castor beans, but they never figured out what to do with it.[16]

In 1995 Aum Shinrikyo released sarin, a type of nerve gas, in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and causing more than 5,000 to fall ill. This was chemical “warfare” – and perhaps more rightly called warfare because the Aum cult intended to bring about the destruction of humanity in their quest for Armageddon.[17]

Interestingly, a recent book, Bracing for Armageddon? by UCLA immunology professor William Clark[18] cites these last three examples, those orchestrated by cultic groups, as attempts at large-scale bioterror attacks.
But should we be worried? Dr. Clark doesn’t think so. According to him, the combined expertise needed – in microbiology, bioengineering, meteorology, and other scientific areas – to be successful in creating a biological weapon is highly unlikely to occur, not among terrorist groups, not among nations. And so we may assume, not among cults.[19]

Aum, for example, with all of its high-level scientifically-trained members, spent millions of dollars and almost a decade trying to develop biological weapons and were not successful. Dr. Clark believes we have much, much more to worry about from an avian flu or some other natural outbreak.

Nonetheless, today we are all concerned about terrorism and national security. We read every day of terrorist activities, the deaths, injuries, destruction. We see plenty of the aftermath on TV or the Internet.

Over the years, we have seen articles in the worldwide press about families remarking on how their loved one was seduced by a radical imam, a fellow student, someone in the mosque, a coworker, or a neighbor into becoming a revolutionary martyr. Words like “coercion,” “brainwashing,” “targeted recruitment,” and “persuasion” tend to surface in these reports.

Sadly, a recent CNN article reported on the prevalence of females being used for suicide bombing missions: “Intelligence gathered from detainees indicates that al Qaeda in Iraq is looking for women with three main characteristics: those who are illiterate, are deeply religious, or have financial struggles because most likely they’ve lost the male head of the household..If the woman’s psychological state is bad, they try to lure her with the illusions that she will be going to heaven. All of them come from the families of terrorists, and they are being recruited and pressured.”[20]

I have no doubt that a number of us have much to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the

Suicide bomber with child

recruitment and indoctrination of young men and women into terrorist organizations. They are not all becoming suicide bombers, we know that. For those who are selected for these martyrdom missions, the indoctrination need not be lengthy, as there are many other geopolitical, historical, theological, and personal factors involved that may make it a relatively swift process. But the point is: there is an indoctrination process – and that’s something that those of us who study cults know about. The vast majority of people are not born to kill, much less in that way. The suicide bombers are not psychopaths; they are victims.

It has also become clear to me in my review of the terrorism literature that so many – I’d even venture to say, the vast majority – of the primary authors have a minimal understanding, at best,[21] and a gross misunderstanding, at worst, of the influence processes that we are so aware of and attuned to – and which are certainly at play here. One of the more highly-regarded terrorism experts recently repeated what he wrote in an earlier book,[22] said that young Muslim youth are not susceptible to brainwashing,[23] and therefore that is not an explanation for why they get involved in terrorist organizations and activity. If Marc Sageman understood what brainwashing was, he couldn’t possibly make such a close-minded statement.

Ironically, Sageman goes on to describe the four-step process by which the youth get radicalized – a process that, for him, somewhat magically goes from personal experience to ideology to a social network where they chat about things to action. Not a single word about the change process an individual must go through to proceed from talk to action, especially when it involves violent, extremist action. No mention of the key elements of influence (possibly even, dare I say, coercion?) critical to such a process.

While terrorism is an important issue, we must also bear in mind that a culture of fear has been generated – at least in the United States – which may make terrorist activity appear to be a bigger threat than it is. A recently-released study by researchers at Simon Fraser University indicates that if we set aside the war in Iraq, acts of terrorism and resultant casualties have gone way down in the past five years – by more than 40% since 2001.[24] In addition, there’s been a 54% decline between 1985 and 2004 in the number of groups in the Middle East and North Africa using violence. One cause for this, according to the study, is the tremendous drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world. Much historical evidence reveals that once they lose public support, terrorist campaigns tend to be abandoned or defeated.

We saw that very phenomenon here in the U.S. in the 1970s, when the Weather Underground, a group of radical left-wing extremists, split off from the more moderate antiwar group, Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen, who blew up some buildings – and themselves – became very quickly isolated and irrelevant. So did the radical group Earth First!, when it advocated tree-spiking and other potentially violent acts to stop logging. Many lost interest and switched their support to more moderate environmental groups. The same dampening effect took place when extremists spurred on by the Army of God and several other hate groups incited the murder of abortion doctors. At least three doctors and four clinic staff were killed. Clinics were bombed and vandalized; staff and volunteers were stalked and harassed. Ultimately, the outcome was marginalization of that brand of ideological extremism and isolation if its perpetrators.

So while we certainly want to keep our sights on terrorist groups that use cult techniques to recruit and convert loyal followers into deployable agents, we must not forget what I consider to be our first priority – all those cults in our midst.

* * *

I’ve mentioned political groups and terrorist organizations in the same sentence that I’ve used the word “cult.” Let me be clear about what I mean when I use “c” word. Moreover, I’d like to address the ongoing controversy surrounding it, a debate that, unfortunately, still plagues us and sometimes distracts us and diverts us from our greater goals.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, the authors argue that terrorists like to be called jihadists because it associates them with a term that has positive connotations,[25] just as some cults surely would like to be called a “new religious movement” (NRM) because it puts them in a positive light. (Except of course a cult like the one I was in, which was political: “religious” is hardly an appropriate identifier for such a group, which is exactly part of the problem with the NRM term.) In the case of terrorists, once they’re called jihadists, it puts them smack dab in the middle of a religious framework, turning the discussion toward theology and away from the terrorizing and intimidation of the public and the murder of innocents. Jihad grants honor; it deflects from the unlawful violence and disorder. The authors of the op-ed piece end with this: “The label may seem passé, but terrorism is an internationally recognized word for an internationally recognized crime. If we want to win the war on words, we would do well to choose the ones we use with greater care.”[26]

As far as NRMs go, I am sometimes struck by the lack of complex thinking among some scholars. For one, they seem to think that if you identify a group as a cult, then you are also saying that it isn’t a religion, or a “new” religion, as though one necessarily precludes the other. They pat themselves on the back and declare “the cult wars” are over. Not so fast, I say.

Given what’s happening around the world today, their stance on the c-word and their incessant incantation that brainwashing doesn’t exist places them on the wrong side of history.

And now a debate among them seems to be about what signifies “new.” How old does something have to be before it’s no longer “new”? I think that misses the point. What is of interest are the features that signify that something is a cult as we understand that term – whether it be an NRM, and old RM, a club, a political group, a karate school, a commune, a family, a psychotherapy group, a UFO group, and so on. In that regard, we must look at the patterns of structure, social relations, power relations, and behavior that would allow us to characterize something as a cult.

Equally important, as touched on earlier, by not having a commonly agreed-upon neutral – or cross-discipline – identifier, we are left with no language with which to talk about those groups that are not theologically based, like my old group and so many others. Just as the term terrorism is internationally recognized, I submit that the term “cult” has a solid foundation: in the social sciences, that is, in sociology, anthropology, criminology, political science, social psychology, and psychology; in the humanities, that is, in religious studies, history, and American studies; as well as in business and organization theory. Never mind that some sympathetic academics and cult spokespersons would have us believe – or more importantly, would have the media, the legal profession and the general public believe – that there is no such thing as a cult and no such thing as brainwashing.

In a kind of misguided political correctness, much of the media may have backed down, opting for “sect” now most of the time. And some courts may have been fooled by the aggressive misleading tactics of a few so-called experts, although some courts have seen through that and have allowed testimony regarding the undue influence of cultic control. And I can tell you that the general public ain’t so dumb either. People understand these terms and have for decades.

Now I don’t mean to imply that this is so simple, or that there aren’t some misunderstandings or instances of jumping the gun or mislabeling that may go on. Realistically, that’s the case with anything controversial.
Yes, cult is a contested concept.[27] Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we should throw out the term. It has a good foundation; it’s been recognized repeatedly; and it serves a purpose.

Do we need to do a better job of explaining it? Sometimes, yes.

Do we need to speak out when it’s used improperly or too hastily? Yes, of course.

Does the term cult carry a negative connotation? Yes, I suppose it does for some people in some instances.

Do the cults bear some, if not all, responsibility for that? Yes, I believe they do.

Do cults get desperate and sometimes act out under the threat of outside pressure or the perception that they are being “persecuted”? Yes, some of them do. But that doesn’t mean we should shut up and go away, that we should discontinue our study of them or cease holding them accountable to decent human behavior and the laws of the land. In fact, we have seen that outside pressure has sometimes led a cult to change or “soften” its practices, as the polygamous FLDS is now claiming to no longer sanction underage marriages. Public scrutiny sometimes pays off, and I say that with the clarification that I am not advocating unwarranted government intervention or the passage of laws that would restrict our freedoms. But freedom also comes with the obligation to act responsibly.
Do we need to improve and deepen our own understanding of the phenomenon in all its manifestations? Yes, of course. This is why our ongoing research is so vital. Why we must strive to publish across disciplines. We must get our point of view out there in serious, substantive, grounded articles and books.

We must continue to fight – strategically and smartly – against the academic blacklisting that Ben Zablocki wrote about more than 10 years ago.[28] And not just the blacklisting of any discussion of brainwashing, as he was writing about in that particular article, but also we must fight against and expose the difficulty of getting anything published that presents a critical perspective of cults in general or of a specific group – no matter how well-researched and substantiated the work may be.

And – extremely important – we still have to work on getting people to better understand the complexities of cult involvement and commitment so they don’t blame the victim.

As with any area of study, we have to call our subject of interest something or we can’t study it, can’t talk about it. Frankly, I believe that we create more confusion and trouble for ourselves and deflect from our educational and research goals when we use a hodgepodge of terms – totalist, high-demand, closed, authoritarian, and so on. These are all well and good. I’ve got nothing against them, really. In fact, I myself have been guilty of this exercise in avoidance. But in reality, aren’t we really just shying away from saying it like it is?

I was quite heartened last month when the British Crown Prosecution Service ruled that the word cult was neither “abusive or insulting.” This was in relation to the London police issuing a summons to a young man picketing at one of the Anonymous demonstrations in front of the Scientology HQ there. The police insisted the boy remove his placard with the word “cult” on it. When the summons got thrown out, his mother said the decision was “a victory for free speech”[29] – and indeed it was.

What Does The Future Hold?

As I wrote in my book Bounded Choice, “The combination of charismatic leadership, a transcendent belief system, personal commitment, and social and psychological pressure is the key dynamic.”[30] It’s key to the transformation of the individual from dedicated believer to deployable agent and is the core of what we must strive to convey to others. Submitting oneself to the domination of a charismatic leader is an intimate and complex process; it is unique to each leader and each devotee. Yet, by examining the similarities of charismatic influence and control in its various forms, we stand to gain a more profound understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon. We also become better equipped to share our knowledge with other concerned professionals and the general public.

So much is happening in today’s world where we can contribute. A never-ending series of events is calling us:

• The recent situation with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in Texas.
• The prophet/leader of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, convicted last year of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a young man and a 14-year-old girl, and facing more charges in Arizona.[31]
• The wildly creative Anonymous protests around the world.
• The incessant flow of vulnerable individuals into terrorist organizations.

And there are plenty of other incidents:

• Three large “dream homes” set afire by eco-terrorists, the Earth Liberation Front, a group that. along with the Animal Liberation Front, has committed and claimed responsibility for hundreds of criminal attacks in the past decade. This one did seven million dollars in damage.[32]
• A group of followers (including at least four children) of a Russian cult leader barricaded themselves in a cave about 400 miles southeast of Moscow for more than seven months waiting for doomsday.[33]
• A media interview with an egocentric cult leader claiming to be the Messiah, who admitted on tape to “lying naked” with three underage girls (one as young as 12 years old), got busted and charged with criminal sexual contact with a minor about a week after the program aired on the National Geographic channel.[34]

All of this and more tells us that ideological extremism is alive and well. Cults thrive on ideological extremism. Through well-known mechanisms of influence and control – patterns we’ve seen time and again in these groups – individual lives become more and more constrained, sometimes gradually, sometimes rather quickly. Minds are shaped to respond in cult-approved ways. In the case of those who are born or raised in a cult, these controlling influences are everywhere around you, from birth, from childhood on. Growing up in such an environment may leave an imprint far beyond what many of us can begin to comprehend.

I’m currently engaged in a research project interviewing people who were born or raised in a cult. What’s unique about the population I’m interviewing is that all of these people left the cult on their own, either in adolescence or early adulthood. I am so humbled and awed by the life stories that these brave people are sharing with me. And the good news is, they survive. They build lives, they have relationships, they go to school, they establish careers, they figure out their emotions and what they believe in, they valiantly struggle with identity issues and with practical life matters, often without a helping hand.

It’s been clear for some time now that this is the new population that demands our attention. Their experiences, their insights are adding a whole new dimension to our knowledge base. Because of them, I would submit that the scientific understanding of “resilience” will be greatly expanded. They, too, are our heroes.

I read something on the Internet the other day: a Ph.D. professor wrote, “Suicide bombers are hardwired to become killers,” meaning they were born that way. Personally and professionally, I don’t believe that for a minute.
In fact, new brain research is showing us that the years of the “hard-wired traditionalists” are over. This new area of study, called neuroplasticity, is about whether or not the brain is fixed or flexible in its structure and capabilities.[35] And from this research, we are learning that the adult brain can change, that “the human brain is almost infinitely malleable.. People used to think that our mental meshwork . was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case.”[36] Even the adult mind is very plastic, they tell us. And these adaptations occur also at a biological level. If the brain has the ability to reprogram itself “on the fly,” as one neuroscientist put it,[37] then surely our brains can also be tampered with by others who have influence over us. This new science serves us in two ways:

First, it will help substantiate our stance that brainwashing does exist. That people can be and are changed through the concerted efforts of cultic systems of influence and control.

When I wrote in a poem shortly after leaving my cult, “They took my brain and made me something other than I wanted to be.,”[38] I didn’t have the scientific words for it then, but I knew I’d been brainwashed – and I knew I had done it to others as well.

Second, neuroplasticity research gives us new ways to understand and study the recovery process after someone leaves a cult.

I conclude with a challenge and a hope. Cults come in all sizes and shapes, with a variety of beliefs and practices. But they aren’t really mysterious as the media sometimes implies, leaving us with bewildering sound bites rather than substantive explorations that would shed light and bring clarity. We have some long-standing definitions and a set of characteristics that can be associated with these groups. Let’s stand by them. Let’s use them. Let’s be the ones to shed light. If a 16-year-old boy in London wasn’t intimidated by scare tactics, don’t you be either.

We can’t shy away from the new developments, such as in neuroscience, but neither should we forget the foundational works of Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein, and Margaret Thaler Singer. The work of Bruce Perry[39] is worthy of our attention. And of course, we must not ignore the basic social-psychological explanations emanating from Asch, Milgram, Janis, Goffman, Cialdini, Zablocki, myself, and others.

Cults don’t really do anything new or different from what’s been done for eons. They are just very good at packaging influence and control in a very deliberate way. I believe it is our responsibility as a movement and vitally important to train and nurture the next generation of scholars and practitioners to meet this challenge.

[1] This article is adapted from the paper given as the Keynote Address at the annual meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, Philadelphia, PA, June 27, 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Janja Lalich. Do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author. Contact: Janja Lalich, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, California State University, Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0445; jlalich@csuchico.edu

[2] This section of the presentation honoring people in the field of cultic studies has been deleted from this version of the Keynote Address.
[3] Lalich, Janja. Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
[4] Isaacson, Barry. “The secret letters of the Jonestown death cult.” The Spectator (UK), May 14, 2008.
[5] Singer, Margaret Thaler, with Janja Lalich. Cults in Our Midst. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
[6] Lalich. Bounded Choice, p. 10.
[7] Mayer, Jean-Francois. “‘Our Terrestrial Journey Is Coming to an End’: The Last Voyage of the Solar Temple,” Nova Religio, 1999, 2(2), pp. 172-196
[8] Lalich, Bounded Choice.
[9] Ibid., p. 12.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Associated Press. “Manson follower Van Houten denied parole for 18th time.” Enterprise-Record (Chico, CA), August 30, 2007.
[12] Taylor, Michael. “SLA’s Legacy a Violent Void.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 2002, pp. A1, A12.
[13] See http://www.surrealist.org for the perspective of former gurukulis.
[14] Williams, Miriam. Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult. New York: Eagle Brook/ Morrow, 1998. See also: Lattin, Don. Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edges. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007; and Jones, Kritina, Celeste Jones, & Juliana Buhring. Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed. London: Harper Element, 2007.
[15] Lalich, Bounded Choice, p.10.
[16] Palmquist, Matt. “Bioterror in Context: How and Why the Threat of Bioterrorism Has Been So Greatly Exaggerated.” Miller-McCune, June-July 2008, pp. 72, 73-76.
[17] Lifton, Robert Jay. Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.
[18] Clark, William R. Bracing for Armageddon?: The Science and Politics of Bioterrorism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[19] Palmquist, “Bioterror in Context.”
[20] Damon, Arwa. “Iraqi woman describes daughter’s descent into suicide bombing.” CNN.com, June 6, 2008.
[21] For an intelligent understanding of indoctrination of terrorists, see The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions by Neil J. Smelser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
[22] Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
[23] Sageman, Marc. “Explaining Terror Networks in the 21st Century.” Footnotes (American Sociological Association), May/June 2008, p. 7.
[24] Zakaria, Fareed. “What’s really scary about terror statistics.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2008.
[25] Singer P.W., and Elina Noor. “What Do You Call a Terror(Jihad)ist?” New York Times, June 2, 2008.
[26]Ibid.
[27] Smelser. Faces of Terrorism, p. 239.
[28] Zablocki, Benjamin D. “The Blacklisting of a Concept: The Strange History of the Brainwashing Conjecture in the Sociology of Religion.” Nova Religio 1997, 1(1), pp. 96-121.
[29] Dawar, Anil. “Schoolboy avoids prosecution for branding Scientology a cult.” The Guardian (UK), May 23, 2008.
[30] Lalich. Bounded Choice, p. xvi.
[31] Dobner, Jennifer. “Jury reaches verdict at polygamist trial.” Associated Press, September 25, 2007.
[32] Gillespie, Elizabeth M. “Dream homes set afire, apparently by eco-radicals.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 2008, p. A3.
[33] ‘Hope for end to Russia cave siege.” BBC News, March 29, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7320086.stm
[34] “Inside a Cult,” first broadcast on the National Geographic Channel, April 23, 2008. See also: Baker, Deborah, “New Mexico sect leader accused anew of sex abuse.” Associated Press, May 20, 2008.
[35] Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Penguin, 2007. See also: Schwartz, Jeffrey M., and Sharon Begley. The Miind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
[36] Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, pp. 56-63.
[37] Ibid., p. 60.
[38] First published in Lalich, Janja. “The Cadre Ideal: Origins and Development of a Political Cult.” Cultic Studies Journal, 1992, 9(1), 1, pp. 66-67
[39] Perry, Bruce, & Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Book Review Awesome Families: The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ. By Kathleen E. Jenkins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. 283. $22.95.

Reviewed byJanja Lalich, Ph.D.
California State University, Chico

Awesome Families is a thoughtful, well-written, and engaging ethnography on one of the more controversial new religious movements to emerge in recent decades. A family member’s involvement sparked Kathleen Jenkins’s interest in the International Churches of Christ (ICOC), which led her as a sociologist to undertake six years of fieldwork. To her credit, Jenkins did not succumb to the prevalent (and myopic) practice among many sociologists of religion of disregarding the experiences of ex-members, although occasionally she uses dismissive language when referring to statements by ex-members, concerned family members, and critics.

Nonetheless, this is a welcome addition to the study of cults and new religious movements, where well-executed studies of a single group are still rare. Detailed works such as this help to illuminate the complexities of conversion and commitment to controversial religious and social movements. Jenkins embeds her analysis in the context of contemporary issues related to family, gender relations, and culture (including conservative evangelical Christianity). This makes Awesome Families all the more relevant; it could easily be adopted for courses in sociology of religion, family, or gender. The author succeeds brilliantly in her effort at contributing to a “middle ground” in the field of cultic studies, as called for by Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins (Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field [University of Toronto Press, 2001]).

Jenkins set out to understand the attraction of a group that some hailed as “awesome” and infinitely rewarding, and which others saw as destroying families and intimate relationships. From its founding in 1979 until its demise in 2004, the ICOC, with “family” as a prominent theme in its structure and ideology, baptized more than 100,000 individuals worldwide. Jenkins’s astute observations on collective ritual and the orchestration of large events validate just how savvy such groups have become in their use of media (chap. 3). According to Jenkins, contemporary paradoxes of family, gender, and sexuality create personal (and cultural) confusions that were cleverly mined by the ICOC to lure converts with the promise of a fail-safe healing system. The rub, as she points out, is that such high-demand groups tend to be unable to sustain themselves. Once the promise is recognized as empty, believers—even the most loyal—tend to stray. Often this exodus is aided by revelations of corruption, leadership abuses, financial mismanagement, and duplicitous behavior (chap. 7). This is not a new story by any means, but Jenkins’s lively descriptions and artful analyses allow us better to understand true believers and the dilemma of living under the burden of too many contradictions (which boil down to individualism vs. submission to authority).

Jenkins deftly handles her wily subject matter. Systematic contradictions in ideology and practice, and the ways in which they were sustained through group discourse, are clearly delineated. ICOC’s promised awesome families were attainable only through “discipling,” nonoptional, one-on-one counseling that occurred everywhere in the ICOC environment (chap. 1). Ironically, with everything riding on disciplers’ wisdom and guidance, none were formally trained in counseling (chaps. 2, 5). Adherents subjected themselves to this incessant intrusion into their lives, Jenkins argues, because today, family therapy is acceptable, even inevitable, and ICOC convinced its members that discipling was a God-given therapeutic method for resolving all relational, familial, and personal problems. Members’ most troubling conflicts centered on relationships with non-ICOC relatives, stemming in part from the group’s goal of converting all family members. While instructed to remain true to their family of origin, except those too critical of ICOC (chap. 4), adherents also were taught that church family was the only “real” family (chap. 6). Even though “family” was touted as a number-one concern, members quickly learned that recruitment and fundraising were the actual priorities. Jenkins portrayed members making heroic efforts at dealing with the multiple demands on them to proselytize widely, raise perfect families, have awesome intimate relationships, be a wage earner, study the Bible, recruit, disciple, and be discipled.

To explain how ICOC members made sense of their lives, Jenkins employs Ann Swidler’s “culture in action” concept. This works to a point. Jenkins acknowledges she heard and saw only what members and leaders wanted her to. Thus, the front-stage performance of contented but confused cult members rationalizing the chaos and dissonance in their lives by extracting from a cultural toolkit felt overdrawn at times. Given the stress devoted members must have experienced, one wonders why Jenkins did not observe or learn about more eruptions and meltdowns instead of the many blissful narratives of “saves” and satisfaction. Here, former member accounts could have invigorated the analysis. Jenkins mentions frequently that ex-members told different stories about aspects of ICOC life, yet she rarely elaborates or shares those details so that we might see a more complete picture. This is the greatest weakness in an otherwise riveting account of life in a high-demand group. By relying so heavily on current members’ perceptions, Jenkins fails to explicitly explore and so downplays the ever-present mechanisms of social influence and social control in the ICOC. Such an addition might have told more about why someone submits to such an authoritarian cultic system. Nevertheless, the widespread and powerful organizational and social-psychological mechanisms are quite evident in Jenkins’s descriptions of everyday life and special events, and remain central to any understanding of what made this movement work, and ultimately fall apart.

But there I was, new to the San Francisco Bay Area and before long cleverly recruited into a group that preached Marxism and feminism and a passion for the working class. I was told that we would be unlike all other groups on the Left because we were led by women and because our leader was brilliant and from the working class. I was told that we would not follow the political line of any other country, but that we would create our own brand of Marxism, our own proletarian feminist revolution; we would not be rigid, dogmatic, sexist, or racist. We were new and different—an elite force. We were going to make the world a better place for all people.

The reality, of course, was that our practical work had little if anything to do with working-class ideals or goals. Our leader was an incorrigible, uncontrollable megalomaniac; she was alcoholic, arbitrary, and almost always angry. Our organization, with the word democratic prominent in its name, was ultra-authoritarian, completely top down, with no real input or criticism sought or listened to. Our lives were made up of eighteen-hour days of busywork and denunciation sessions. Our world was harsh, barren, and unrewarding. We were committed and idealistic dreamers who were tricked into believing that such demanding conditions were necessary to transform ourselves into cadre fighters. We were instructed that we were the “uninstructed” and that we must take all guidance from our leader who knew all. We were never to question any orders or in any way contradict or confront our leader. We were taught to dread and fear the outside world which, we were told, would shun and punish us. In fact, the shunning and punishment was rampant within; but, blinded by our own belief, commitment, and fatigue, in conjunction with the group’s behavior-control techniques, I and the others succumbed to the pressures and quickly learned to rationalize away any doubts or apprehensions.

I remained in that group for more than ten years.

When I got out of the cult in early 1986, I had to begin life anew. I was a decade behind in everything. Both my parents had died, and I had lost touch with former friends. I had to play catch up, so to speak, culturally, socially, economically, emotionally, and intellectually. But most important of all, I had to repair my soul. Who am I? How could I have committed the many unkind acts while in the group? Where do I belong now? What do I believe in now? Will I ever restore my faith in myself and in others? These are the kinds of questions and dilemmas that troubled me. Over time, and most recently through my contact and work with former members of many types of cults, I’ve come to see that the single most uniform aspect of all cult experiences is that it touches, and usually damages, the soul, the psyche.

I define a cult as a particular kind of relationship; it can be a group situation or between two people. Within that relationship there is an enormous power imbalance, but more than that, there is a hidden agenda. There is deception, manipulation, exploitation, and almost certainly abuse, carried out and/or reinforced by the use of social and psychological influence techniques meant to control behavior and shape attitudes and thinking patterns. A cult is led by a person (or sometimes two or three) who demands all veneration, who makes all decisions, and who ultimately controls most aspects of the personal lives of those who are cleverly persuaded that they must follow, obey, and stay in the good graces (i.e., the grips) of the leader.

Cult leaders and cult recruiters capture the hearts, minds, and souls of the best and brightest in our society. Cults are looking for active, productive, intelligent, energetic individuals who will perform for the cult by fund-raising, by recruiting more followers, by operating cult businesses and leading cult seminars. In the 1960s and 1970s it was perhaps more typical for cults to recruit primarily young people; this is no longer so. Today, cults recruit the young and old alike and everyone in between. With anywhere from three to five thousand cults active in the United States today, it is quite likely that a cult recruiter has been knocking on your door or that you have unwittingly answered a cult’s advertisement for a course, a workshop, a lecture, a book or tape, or some other product.

Today’s cults are so sophisticated in their recruitment and indoctrination techniques that their methods go far beyond what anybody imagined in the 1950s when certain scholars and researchers were studying and writing about thought-reform programs and systematic behavior-control processes. Cults today have perfected their approaches and refined their manipulations. They had to—after all, recruiting and retaining bright people isn’t easy. And this is again where the soul comes in.

Cults appeal to that part of us that wants something better. A better world for others or a better self—these are the genuine, heartfelt desires of decent, honest human beings. Cult recruiters are trained in how to play on those desires, how to make it look as though what the cult has to offer is exactly what you’re interested in. Cults can be formed around almost any topic; there are nine broad categories of cults: religious, Eastern-based, New Age, business, political, psychotherapy/human potential, occult, one-on-one, and miscellaneous (such as lifestyle or personality cults).

All cults, no matter their stripe, are a variation on a theme, for their common denominator is the use of coercive persuasion and behavior control without the knowledge of the person who is being manipulated. They manage this by targeting (and eventually attacking, dissembling, and reformulating according to the cult’s desired image) a person’s innermost self. They take away you and give you back a cult personality, a pseudopersonality. They punish you when the old you turns up, and they reward the new you. Before you know it, you don’t know who you are or how you got there; you only know (or you are trained to believe) that you have to stay there. In a cult there is only one way—cults are totalitarian, a yellow brick road to serve the leader’s whims and desires, be they power, sex, or money.

When I was in my cult, I so desperately wanted to believe that I had finally found the answer. Life in our society today can be difficult, confusing, daunting, disheartening, alarming, and frightening. Someone with a glib tongue and good line can sometimes appear to offer you a solution. In my case, I was drawn in by the proposed political solution—to bring about social change. For someone else, the focus may be on health, diet, psychological awareness, the environment, the stars, a spirit being, or even becoming a more successful business person. The crux is that cult leaders are adept at convincing us that what they have to offer is special, real, unique, and forever—and that we wouldn’t be able to survive apart from the cult. A person’s sense of belief is so dear, so deep, and so powerful; ultimately it is that belief that helps bind the person to the cult. It is the glue used by the cult to make the mind manipulations stick. It is our very core, our very belief in our self and our commitment, it is our very faith in humankind and the world that is exploited and abused and turned against us by the cults.

φφφ

When a person finally breaks from a cultic relationship, it is the soul, then, that is most in need of repair. When you discover one day that your guru is a fraud, that the “miracles” are no more than magic tricks, that the group’s victories and accomplishments are fabrications of an internal public-relations system, that your holy teacher is breaking his avowed celibacy with every young disciple, that the group’s connections to people of import are nonexistent … when awarenesses such as these come upon you, you are faced with what many have called a “spiritual rape.” Whether your cultic experience was religious or secular, the realization of such enormous loss and betrayal tends to cause considerable pain. As a result, afterwards, many people are prone to reject all forms of belief. In some cases, it may take years to overcome the disillusionment, and learn not only to have trust in your inner self but also to believe in something again.

There is also a related difficulty: that persistent nagging feeling that you have made a mistake in leaving the group—perhaps the teachings are true and the leader is right; perhaps it is you who failed. Because cults are so clever at manipulating certain emotions and events—in particular, wonder, awe, transcendence, and mystery (this is sometimes called “mystical manipulation”)—and because of the human desire to believe, a former cult member may grasp at some way to go on believing even after leaving the group. For this reason, many people today go from one cult to another, or go in and out of the same cultic group or relationship (known as “cult hopping”). Since every person needs something to believe in—a philosophy of life, a way of being, an organized religion, a political commitment, or a combination thereof—sorting out these matters of belief tends to be a major area of adjustment after a cultic experience.

Since a cult involvement is often an ill-fated attempt to live out some form of personal belief, the process of figuring out what to believe in once you’ve left the cult may be facilitated by dissecting the cult’s ideological system. Do an evaluation of the group’s philosophy, attitudes, and worldview; define it for yourself in your own language, not the language of the cult. Then see how this holds up against the cult’s actual daily practice or what you now know about the group. For some, it might be useful to go back and research the spiritual or philosophical system that you were raised in or believed in prior to the cult involvement. Through this process you will be better able to assess what is real and what is not, what is useful and what is not, what is distortion and what is not. By having a basis for comparison, you will be able to question and explore areas of knowledge or belief that were no doubt systematically closed to you while in the cult.

Most people who come out of a cultic experience shy away from organized religion or any kind of organized group for some time. I generally encourage people to take their time before choosing another religious affiliation or group involvement. As with any intimate relationship, trust is reciprocal and must be earned.

After a cult experience, when you wake up to face the deepest emptiness, the darkest hole, the sharpest scream of inner terror at the deception and betrayal you feel, I can only offer hope by saying that in confronting the loss, you will find the real you. And when your soul is healed, refreshed, and free of the nightmare bondage of cult lies and manipulations, the real you will find a new path, a valid path—a path to freedom and wholeness.

φφφφφ

Janja Lalich, Ph.D. is a researcher, educator and consultant specializing in cultism and extremist groups and ideologies. She is the author of Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (University of California Press, 2004); coauthor of Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (Bay Tree, 2006); Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives (Jossey-Bass, 1995); and “Crazy” Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? (Jossey-Bass, 1996); and editor of Women Under the Influence: A Study of Women’s Lives in Totalist Groups (special volume of the Cultic Studies Journal, 14(1), 1997). Dr. Lalich is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico, and may be reached at drlalich@sbcglobal.net. Her current research focuses on the experiences of individuals who were born and raised in a cult, and in particular their adjustment to mainstream society once they leave the cult.