Two years ago, I received a late-night telephone call from a man who would give me only his first name. Bill said that he’d recently moved to Oakland and had been referred to me by a cult awareness organization in Florida. I get calls like this a few times a year—sometimes a referral from the cult awareness network, occasionally from the internet, and once in a while from someone I’d already met with. Because I was working full time as a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the university, I told Bill that he’d likely be better served calling a county psychological association for a referral to a private practice psychologist. “I’ve done that already,” he replied irritably. In fact, he had already tried therapy with both a psychologist and an MFT, but neither seemed to understand what he’d gone through.
“They couldn’t tell me what happened.”
Relenting, I told Bill that I’d be happy to meet with him, and suggested a coffee shop in Berkeley. As with each of these referrals, I was curious to hear Bill’s story. Although I would not provide psychotherapy to him, I hoped to explain to him how cults operate. Once he understood the powerful techniques of persuasion that were used against him, perhaps at least some of the guilt and foolishness he might be feeling over his cultic involvement would decrease. The next morning I arrived in the crowded coffee shop 15 minutes early. Bill was there already, sitting at a small corner table in the Phillies baseball cap he told me to look for. He was a tall, red-faced man in his mid-thirties, with the kind of physical build that suggested a retired athlete. I introduced myself and he nodded, his eyes tight. As I sat down across from him, he launched right into his story. “It’s about a church I joined in college,” he began. “I think it’s a cult—I read up on cults, but I just don’t know. The group I belonged to doesn’t sound like any of those famous ones, like Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown, and it’s not big or anything. But it’s a bad place.” He shook his head, gaze focused on the Formica tabletop. “I’m kind of a loss as to what exactly happened,” he continued. “I’m not a stupid man. I’m not, really. And I just can’t seem to figure out what went wrong.” Though Bill’s story was unique to him, it followed a pattern I was familiar with. He had been raised in a devout Lutheran family. As a freshman in college and far from home, he had been approached one day in the quad by a woman named Sarah. “She was real pretty and so nice to be around. She told me she was a student and we talked about school and God—we were both Christians.” She ended up inviting him to a prayer meeting that night at her church. Grateful for the attention of an attractive woman when he was struggling to find new friends, he went along. The prayer meeting was held in a storefront church a few blocks from the campus. Bill began attending weekly services there, and was made to feel so welcome that within a month he was visiting the church daily.
There always seemed to people there, no manner when he dropped by, and they were always glad to visit with him. The pastor, Brother Jacob, was an inspiring teacher who seemed to know just about everything about Bill, “or it seemed to me then that he did! About my spiritual struggles and my loneliness, about my trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life and wondering if I was even a good man.” By the end of his freshman year, Bill had dropped out of college to live with the group. “School just didn’t seem that important to me anymore,” he explained. “I was more concerned about the spiritual crisis in America.” As he became immersed in his new church family, he was persuaded that the Lutheran religion he’d been raised in was a false religion and that his only hope for salvation and peace of mind was with Brother Jacob’s church family. Over the next several years, Brother Jacob’s small, insular spiritual group moved often, eventually settling in Sonoma County, California. By the time they arrived, they included over 40 members. The theology of the group, as espoused by Brother Jacob, gradually morphed into an amalgam of fundamentalist Christianity and nebulous New Age teachings. In his daily sermons, Brother Jacob reinforced the belief that he was a divinely appointed prophet chosen by God to usher in a universal spiritual awakening. Despite Bill’s initial infatuation with her, he never became romantically involved with Sarah, the girl who introduced him to the church. Once he was firmly ensconced with the group, she distanced herself from him. Only belatedly did he learn that the other members considered her and Brother Jacob a married couple. The church members were forbidden contact with family or past friends without Jacob’s explicit permission, and the church community did not have television or radio and did not subscribe to newspapers. Bill and the other congregants relied solely on Jacob for outside news. Five years after his recruitment into the church, Bill married a church member new to the group, and they had a daughter together, six years old at the time I met with Bill. Brother Jacob officiated at the wedding and no marriage license was filed. “It got really bad after that,” Bill told me. “I didn’t have an education and mostly did construction work, odd and ends—grunt work like everybody else.” He turned his paychecks directly over to Brother Jacob. “I started thinking that this was pretty bad—and my wife and I weren’t getting along so good. I just prayed harder. Jacob preached to us every night for hours, and God help any one of us who fell asleep while he was talking. Mostly I was just tired all the time.” Bill couldn’t sleep and started losing weight. It was about then, around six months before he phoned me, that Brother Jacob began the ordeal he called “confession and redemption.” Brother Jacob would choose a member of the community to be criticized and belittled by the entire community for hours at a time, rationalizing this exercise as a way to rid the community of sin and temptation and put the sinner on a strong foothold to spiritual purity. It was at one of these group confessionals, when Bill was on “the hot seat,” that he finally “cracked up. My wife went after me, along with everybody else. Brother Jacobb egged her on until she ridiculed our sex life and made fun of my unspiritual, lustful attitudes and my shortcomings as a husband. Nobody there seemed to care how horrible that was for me. I was shamed in front of everybody.” At the end of that meeting, which seemed to go on for hours, Brother Jacob ordered Bill to maintain chastity until he’d worked through all his sins and worldly thoughts—until the spiritual welfare of the planet became his overwhelming desire. He was ordered to live in the garage until further notice. “It was then that I realized it was all like a really bad nightmare and I’d just wasted thirteen years of my life,” Bill told me. “I hadn’t spoken to my parents or brother in years, had no friends, and never finished school.” Bill was now working at two low-paying jobs and had hired an attorney to try to get custody of his six-year-old daughter, whose mother had remained in Jacob’s church. His attorney warned him to prepare for a long legal battle—he and his wife had never been legally married, and his wife disavowed his paternity of the child. Cult Recruitmen TacticsBill’s story illustrates perfectly the classic cultic recruitment and retention process. Margaret Singer, a preeminent 20th-century authority on cults, wrote in her definitive Cults in Our Midst about the six stages of cultic recruitment and retention. 1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and the changes taking place. Bill was recruited as a college student, when he was most vulnerable. He was away from home, far from his social support system, emotionally insecure, and lonely. It’s likely that Sarah had spent days recruiting on the campus and had approached dozens of solitary students before finding Bill. When he initially became involved with Brother Jacob, Bill thought he was joining a Christian church with spiritual and ethical beliefs much like his own. He had no inkling that Sarah had been trolling for new members and that the initial stages of his involvement with the group were carefully orchestrated to reinforce the commonalities Bill felt with the cult members.
He had no inkling that the initial stages of his involvement were carefully orchestrated to reinforce the commonalities Bill felt with the cult members.
2. Control the person’s time and, if possible, physical environment. Once Bill actually moved in with Jacob’s group, his time was rigorously controlled as he worked multiple physically exhausting jobs. Bill relinquished his income to Jacob, had no meaningful emotional contact with anyone outside the church community, and was dependent on Jacob and the other congregants for shelter, emotional support, and food. A cult could be in your own neighborhood and you might well not know it because the members have such superficial social interaction with nonmembers. If a cult member were to have outside interests, meaningful contact with friends and family outside of the cult, or personal interests not specifically tied to the cult, it would be a whole lot easier for him or her to just walk out when things got bad. Recruits are not allowed exposure to any people, situations or ideas that might help them look at the situation objectively; the consequence is that the ideas of the cult gradually replace independent thought. 3. Create a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, and dependency. One of the unbending tenets of cults is the “us versus them” mentality. Cult leaders justify this insularity in innumerable ways. In Bill’s case, Brother Jacob convinced his followers that his was a divinely directed spiritual path and that all other religions, Christian or otherwise, were either well meaning but false, or were diabolical. Citing the danger of “contamination,” Brother Jacob instructed his followers that to maintain their spiritual purity and avoid damnation, they needed to avoid as much as possible all contact with persons outside the community. To do otherwise would mean impeding God’s design for world spiritual harmony. 4. Suppress much of the person’s old behavior and attitudes. In his groundbreaking book on “brainwashing” techniques used by Communist prison guards during the Korean War, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton points out that “Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and present ‘evil,’ and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Communist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals—intellectual, emotional, and physical—aimed at social control and individual change.” (5, 1961)
This is certainly what happened to Bill. He had renounced his past beliefs and affiliations, but in this case the “confession and redemption” exercise that he participated in finally caused him to metaphorically snap. Years of hard physical labor, a failed marriage, and humiliation from his wife, Jacob, and the other cult members caused such emotional exhaustion that he fled the cult to try to recoup his sanity. 5. Instill new behavior and attitudes. With cults, the goal is to take whatever sense of morality or personal identity the person originally had and replace it with the leader’s own vision. Cultic indoctrination is gradual and incremental, just like the mind control described by Dr. Lifton. Everything happens in small, sometimes seemingly inconsequential steps. Had Bill been told at the first service at Brother Jacob’s church that he would have to disavow his family, drop out of school, perform mind-numbing physical labor for years, accept Jacob as a prophet, and be subjected to continual emotional abuse, it is unlikely he would have attended a second service. Jacob and his followers, however, kept hidden the central precepts of Jacob’s message. 6. Put forth a closed sense of logic; allow no real input or criticism. Brother Jacob continually reminded his congregation that to desert the group was tantamount to eternal damnation. Members of the community were taught that temptation was everywhere and could come from anyone and everyone not associated with Jacob. For hours each evening, Jacob lectured on theology, the evils of modern society, and the hypocrisy of organized religion. He warned his congregation that to lose sight of his message, even for a minute, would be tantamount to suicide.Brother Jacob warned his congregation that to lose sight of his message, even for a minute, would be tantamount to suicide.
He urged them to report any doubts or negative thoughts to Jacob immediately, and to assist each other in remaining spiritually pure by informing Jacob of any concerns they felt about the purity and purpose of their fellow congregants. Bill tried his best to live up to these strict rules; in doing so, he came to unquestionably accept the belief that Jacob was a prophet appointed by God.Exploiting vulnerability Despite decades of research on cults, there is no typical personality that is particularly susceptible to cult involvement. You can’t say, for instance, that cults recruit only timid, uneducated, or naïve people. But one thing that continually comes up is that most people who become involved with a cult are going through a vulnerable time in their lives. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the most typical recruits were young, which makes sense as there were thousands of young people adrift looking for a sense of direction and purpose. Today, college campuses remain good recruiting spots with young students away from home for the first time, vulnerable and lonely. But life transitions make us vulnerable at any age, and a cult can present itself favorably as a support network during these times. You might think of a woman whose husband divorces her after a 30-year marriage—her identity and sense of purpose have been focused on her family and now the family is gone; or a single parent whose children go away to college; or someone who has had a catastrophic death in the family; or a 50-year-old man who just lost his job of 20 years. These people bring job skills and potential earning power to the group. The elderly have become particularly good recruits because they have assets. If they own their own homes, the homes are probably paid off, they have Social Security and pensions, and they have free time to devote to the cult. Cults need these recruits to ensure their financial and social sustainability. During my predoctoral internship at a day treatment facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, I came to learn that one of my co-interns, doing her postdoctoral internship, had suffered a series of personal tragedies on the East Coast and had moved to California to start her life over. There had been a lapse of a few years before she felt organized enough to finish up her internship hours. One of the personal tragedies she was running away from was an abusive sexual relationship. She settled in Berkeley and, feeling the need for friendship and quiet reflection, she joined a free spiritual meditation group. At first they met twice a week, but gradually these meetings became more frequent and took up most of her free time. When I met her, the only people she really knew in California were the therapists at the day treatment center and her new friends in the meditation group. The group was part of a national spiritual organization controlled by a self-described guru. I realized early on that she had joined a cult, but my attempts to talk to her about it failed. She had a stack of cards on her desk, each printed with a quote by her guru. When I tried to talk with her about my research on cults, she would pick up one of the cards and read its message to me. These messages were innocuous, cloying, vaguely spiritual sayings. She was doing something called a thought-stopping technique. Followers of charismatic leaders are often taught that when they are faced with adversity, doubt, or challenge, they’re to say a specific mantra or prayer or do some specific activity that will bring the cult and its leader to the front of their minds and drive doubt away. Since she wasn’t open to my concerns about the group she’d joined, I stopped mentioning them. I figured that if she ever did decide to leave the group, she would know that she could talk to me. The other therapists avoided her. They found her smugness, her meditating during breaks, the photo of her guru on her desk, and the little aphorism cards irritating and troubling. When her postdoctoral internship was completed and my predoctoral internship was finishing up, she and I had the opportunity to receive funding to start a small drop-in clinic for runaway teenagers. For the first time in the 15 months I’d known her, I met with her outside the clinic. She refused to meet either at my home or at hers, so we arranged to convene at a picnic spot in a Berkeley park. When we met, she was flustered and nervous; she revealed that the local leader of her spiritual group had told her she shouldn’t trust me. We were writing out the rough draft of our proposal when it started raining. She suggested that, after all, it was okay to meet at her apartment. We hadn’t been at her apartment three minutes when her local spiritual leader phoned and informed her that he was holding an emergency mandatory meeting for the entire group. So much for that; I left. The next Monday, she left me a voicemail message stating that she had no interest in running a clinic with me. A month later, this woman who had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology was working at the cult’s San Francisco restaurant 12 hours a day, five days a week for $280 a month, while living in a group home owned by the cult.
Very few of those who briefly become involved with a cult will stay. As a PhD candidate I studied a small cult for my dissertation. Along with 18 other people, I attended a free introductory psychic healing offered by a local group. Six of us signed up and paid for a psychic healing class. When I finally stopped attending the group’s services eight months later, only one other person from the original 19 was still involved with the group.
But the damage done once someone decides to break away can vary tremendously, and the challenges of providing to psychotherapy to ex-cult members can be daunting. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for former members, and there’s no reliable data I am aware of that indicates success rates using any specific psychotherapeutic tool. Each client brings his or her own personal issues to the therapy session, which will vary depending on variables such as duration of involvement, age, educational background, and whether sexual abuse was part of the cult’s practices. Along with collaboratively developing a treatment plan that is unique to that client and which most clearly addresses the client’s pain and sense of loss, the most reasonable and helpful psychotherapy for a former cult member will involve education, patience, and case management when it’s needed.
Although I wasn’t in a position to offer psychotherapy to Bill when he contacted me, I will use his case as an example to highlight many of the issues to consider when providing psychotherapy to a person who has left a cult. When Bill exited the cult, he was 33 years old. He had dropped out of college in his sophomore year and worked as a construction laborer. He had acquired no job skills that could pay him much above the minimum wage, and now faced the daunting tasks of supporting himself, paying child support, and somehow earning enough money to finance what looked to be an expensive child custody legal battle. He was estranged from his biological family and had no friends outside of the cult.
