Thursday, May 30, 2019

How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another


What follows is the text of a recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine along with a commentary thereon. 

How People Leave One Cult — and End Up in Another

As the NXIVM case shows, “cult-hopping” is more common than you think


Teah Banks was born into an evangelical Christian sect called the Radio Church of God. Founded in the 1930s by an advertising sales representative turned minister, the insular group promoted an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament, eschewing divorce, premarital sex and even wearing makeup. “It was a super closed religion,” Banks, now 42, remembers. “We had pictures of the leader in our home. We worshipped him like he was a god.”

Although Banks started having questions about the group, she attended services until her 20s, when she was expelled from the organization. In 2004, she and her then-boyfriend, a filmmaker named Mark Vicente (best known for the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?), were approached by two women who wanted Vicente to make films for their organization, NXIVM, which taught a curriculum called the Executive Success Program, or ESP. The two women (one of whom was NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman) raved about their leader, a mathematician, scientist, judo champion and concert-level pianist who had patented a unique method of hacking the human brain. The man’s name, the women said, was Keith Raniere.

Banks and Vicente’s interest was piqued, and they agreed to join the women for lunch; when Salzman successfully used ESP methods to “cure” Banks of her lifelong lactose intolerance, she was even more intrigued. “I’m just like, wow, this is amazing. This woman is amazing,” she says. “And I said, ‘Nancy, I want to be one of your people.'” Blown away by the women and by ESP in general, Banks encouraged Vicente to take a NXIVM intensive; eventually, he bought an apartment in New York to be closer to group headquarters in Albany. She was involved with the group until 2005, when the two broke up, though she continued taking courses remotely for years afterward. Vicente, who eventually became a member of the NXIVM executive board, was involved with the group until 2017.

At the time she joined NXIVM, Banks had just left one large organization with an enigmatic leader at the helm. Vicente, too, had also just extricated himself from a similarly insular fringe spiritual organization: the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a group led by a New Age figure named JZ Knight, who claimed to be channeling a 35,000-year-old warrior deity named Ramtha. But even though they were both disillusioned with spiritual organizations, NXIVM struck them as different. “The first day you’re there, they’re like, ‘We’re not a cult. Cult is a bad word. It is used loosely,'” Banks said. “‘[We’re] a success school. We’re helping you raise your ethics.'”

The Church of Scientology struck young me as very different from the evangelical, fundamentalist & somewhat charismatic, Pentecostal congregation I'd been in as a child, as well as the more mainstream -- but equally preachy, dichotomistically moralizing and meaningless -- United Methodist congregation of my adolescence. 

I was quite taken in the late 1960s with the first two thirds or so of Hubbard's Dianetics, even if the final third came through as pretty strange. (Read it and come to your own decision.) The book was pretty solidly grounded in retitled concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis and post-Freudian psychodynamic theory, as well as Watsonian & Skinnerian behaviorism and learning principles. It explained a lot. And it pointed to some solutions. 

I signed up for the basic course and two others, even as the sales pressure began to increase. I attributed that to the same evangelical enthusiasm I'd seen as a child. For a while. Then I ran out of patience. 

Not long thereafter, however, I met some people in Eric Morris's acting school who were similarly disturbed by the guru's verbally abusive style (it may have been a normalized "thing" with acting coaches and directors at the time, however). They seemed to be able to brush it off because of what they were learning in their commune up off North La Brea near the Hollywood / West Hollywood border. I liked the sound of it (from them, anyway), and went to have a look. 

Some of the things I learned there squared with what I'd picked up -- and liked -- in the CoS courses, but I was immediately aware of other similarities that discomfited me a bit. I remained on the periphery even as I attended various lectures and group "explorations" with one or both of the two leaders there. I also did "workshops" on emotional release, etc. But over time, the seediness of it, as well as the increasing pressure to get more involved, sent me packing. 

I was drinking and using quite a bit by then, and experienced a nasty withdrawal depression that lasted several months. A co-worker handed me a New Times magazine article about something she thought I'd be interested in. I read it. Was immediately converted. And signed up for the next available "training."

A year a half later I was similarly depressed even in the midst of a very torrid love affair with the (married) woman of my dreams I'd met in yet another, all-day, human potential "encounter." I'm not sure I'd have given up The Quest had it not been for other, more immediately gratifying and far less stressful activities as the adoptee of big time rock & roll band. 

At this point, everyone knows the rest of the story: in March 2018, Raniere and five of his NXIVM cohorts, including Salzman, were arrested on such charges as sex trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forced labor. Raniere is currently standing trial in Brooklyn, where his former supporters (including Vicente) have testified that he, among other things, imprisoned a woman for nearly two years, convinced his followers that he controlled technology and the weather, and ran DOS, a secret all-female organization of “slaves” who were branded with his initials and told to have sex with him.

The general view in the media — and among former followers like Banks and Vicente, who declined to comment, presumably due to his involvement in the case against Raniere — is that NXIVM operated not as a self-improvement “school,” but as a cult run by Raniere, who used threats and coercion to keep his followers in line. The revelations came as a shock to Banks, now a makeup artist and YouTuber based in Oregon, who had fallen out with the community after her 2006 breakup with Vicente but had kept in touch with many members and taken classes for years afterwards. She even recorded an ASMR video about her time in NXIVM, speaking at length about her feelings of guilt over her involvement. “I truly thought that this group had answers, and isn’t that why we join any group? [Because] they have answers there that we don’t have inside ourselves,” she says in the video.

Truthfully, however, Banks’ feelings of guilt and self-blame weren’t warranted. It’s common for former cult members to join another group immediately following their departure, even if they find themselves disillusioned with organized religion or spirituality in general. This practice is known as “cult-hopping,” explains Steve KD Eichel, PhD, president of the International Cultic Studies Association, referring to it as “a phenomenon that those of us who have been studying this have been well aware of for over 30 years,” he says.

Because cultic studies is a relatively under-researched field (unsurprisingly, cults themselves are resistant to outsiders conducting research on their practices), there isn’t much data attesting to exactly how prevalent “cult-hopping” is. But anecdotally, Eichel says, the practice is common, in part because those who are kicked out of a cult or excommunicated (or leave out of disgust or other disaffection; see above) are looking for another organization to fill the void. Most cults, including NXIVM, teach adherents that they are wholly responsible for their own actions, which creates feelings of extreme self-doubt and anguish when they’re cut off from their support system. “That leaves [them] vulnerable to another group to say, ‘Well no, you’re in the wrong group, this is the right group,'” Eichel says.

Eichel, however, did not (yet? IDK) see the "process" or "behavioral" addiction dynamics of cult membership. Those of us who later recovered from our substance addictions, caught fire and went to school, assuredly do, however. By the late 1980s, people like Pia Mellody, Patrick Carnes, Anne Wilson Schaef and Arthur Deikman (see below) were using the term "cause addiction." And from there, is was an easy move on to cult addiction.  

Those who leave cults on their own – which Eichel says constitutes the “vast majority” of cult members — most often do so because they’ve had a bad experience with the group, perhaps observing something that violates their own ethics, or inconsistencies between the leader’s behavior and his teachings. But contrary to what you might expect, from the perspective of a former cult member, having one bad experience with a cult does not necessarily reflect on cult-like organizations as a whole. Eichel compares it to how most people would feel after they visit a bad dentist: sure, the experience of being poked and prodded by a poorly trained practitioner might make us slightly more wary of dentistry in general, but it certainly won’t stop anyone from hopping on Yelp and trying to find another, better dentist.

Former members may be disillusioned with that specific group, “but open to the next one,” Eichel says. “Because they think, ‘Of course that group didn’t have the truth. This one does.'” (Vicente’s case, Raniere actively referred to his experience with Ramtha when trying to recruit him for NXIVM, saying during his testimony that Raniere said “he needed to deprogram me from my mystical beliefs.”)

The fact that NXIVM promoted itself not as a religious or spiritual organization, but as a rational school of thought (as did Scientology, as did the Center for Feeling Therapy, as did Werner's est), probably helped Raniere reach people like Banks, who had grown up religious. “It seemed different,” she said. “It seemed more like a school versus a religion.” It also helped Raniere reach uber-wealthy, extremely well-educated people like Clare and Sarah Bronfman, the billionaire Seagram’s heiresses who served as Raniere’s benefactors (both served as Banks’ “coaches” for a short period of time). In addition to being able to attract powerful people to this group, they were able to couch [their ideology] in seemingly rational thought,” said Josh Bloch, the host of the CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVMwho has been covering the group for years. “I can understand why that would sound very attractive to someone who might be turned out by a flaky or nonscientific belief system.”

But the main reason why cult-hopping is so prevalent stems from an extremely common (and incorrect) assumption about cult members: that they’re inherently naive or poorly educated or vulnerable to being duped. On the contrary, Eichel says, most people who become involved in cults come from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds and have higher than average IQs. They also tend to have a history of becoming attracted to social justice movements and causes. “We’re talking about people who want to change the world, who want to do something productive,” he says. It isn’t until it’s too late, he says, that they realize the only person whose life they’re improving is their leader.

When we hear stories about cults, we tend to assume that they exist separate of us and our own communities; we tend to think that we would never be so naive as to succumb to the wiles of a charismatic leader selling us salvation or love or self-empowerment. But the truth is that anyone could be vulnerable to cult influence at a certain point in their lives, typically during a stage of transition, when they’ve just lost their job or had a child or experienced a bad breakup, says Eichel. “The primary cause of cult membership is bad luck,” he says. This was especially true for Banks, who joined NXIVM shortly after she had been kicked out of the church she had been raised in. “I was just really vulnerable at the time [and] losing my community,” she says. “I wanted to replace my community with these people.”

Banks’ time in NXIVM was relatively short, so it wasn’t characterized by as much anguish and betrayal as Vicente’s was; she says had they not broken up, and had she had enough money to continue taking courses regularly, she probably would have been much more involved. She says she learned a lot during her time in the group, and she credits what she learned in ESP with helping her recover from the childhood trauma of being molested. It’s for this reason that she continued speaking to her coaches at NXIVM for years and taking classes remotely whenever she could afford them. “I still wanted to be connected, because I felt like they were doing good. I feel like they were changing people’s lives,” she said. “I wanted to be part of that.”

That said, Banks says that in retrospect, there were certainly red flags during her time in the group: though her involvement predated the horrific acts that have emerged during Raniere’s trial, such as the branding or the recruitment of sex “slaves,” she did allegedly witness many temper tantrums from Salzman, as well as, at one point, borderline physically violent behavior from Raniere towards one of his girlfriends.

One need only climb up the side of any guru's cultic pyramid far enough to experience the switch after biting on all the bait at the lower levels. Evidently so often unrecovered survivors of child abuse themselves, the guru at the very top, and the cynical sociopaths at the two levels immediately below, can be counted upon to play "rescuer" on the cult's large, inverted, triangular pyramid until the recruits reach the middle levels. Thereafter, the guru plays the "persecutor." 

Knowing the extent of the cruelty of the people she once considered her friends and mentors, however, has led her to formally swear off any self-help group or organized religion. This time, she says, it’s for good.

“I will never join a group again. I will never be part of any organization,” she says. “I don’t care how great it sounds or who the leader is or whatever. I’ve grown out of all that stuff and I’ll never do it.”

If interested, see also "A (Cultic) Pilgrim's Progress." 

References

Carnes, P.: The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1997. 

Deikman, A.: The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

Deikman, A.: Meditations on a Blue Vase (Collected Papers), Napa CA: Fearless Books, 2014.

Deikman, A.: Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat, Berkeley CA: Bay Tree, 2003.

Karpman, S.: Fairy tales and script drama analysis, in Transactional Analysis Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 26, 1968.

Mellody, P.; Miller, A. W.: Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Come From, How It Sabotages Our Lives, San Francisco: Harper, 1989.

Mellody, P.; Miller, A. W.: Breaking Free: A Workbook for Facing Codependence, San Francisco: Harper, 1989.

Schaef, A. W.: Escape from Intimacy, New York: Harper-Collins, 1987.

Schaef, A. W.: When Society Becomes an Addict, New York: Harper & Row, 1987. 

Schaef, A. W.: Co-dependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated, New York: HarperOne, 1992.



Friday, May 10, 2019

Anecdotally Observed Cult Recruitment & Membership Patterns

Updated and enhanced 04-14-2021
The early stages of guru-pressured recruitment are often designed to be attractive to those who believe in the idea of "justice," "freedom of expression," "fairness," "rights" and such, on the fringes of what is now rapidly increasing political polarization.
Those who understand the codependent psychology of cult participation as well as the psychology of both substance and behavioral addiction (look up Edward Khantzian, George Koob, Harold Shaffer and Patrick Carnes, chop chop) can see the parallels, for sure. And those with scholastic understanding of cult dynamics and addiction can see an obvious skew toward "addicts" to behavioral processes (e.g.: "cause" addiction; sex, romance & relationship addiction; activity addiction; appearance addiction, exercise addiction, even attention -- or significance -- addiction) as well as substances in many cult populations. To wit:
1) The Asian-influenced (bogus Buddhist and Hindu, for the most part) meditation cults in the US in the '60s (e.g. SRFISKCON, Nicheren Shoshu and TM) were observably jam-packed full of hippies & neo-druggies looking to find another way to get "high." Since the 1970s, they have tended to overlap considerably with the typically meditation-grounded, pseudo-therapy cults like The Center for Feeling Therapy and The Newman Tendency
2) The evangelical / fundamentalist / charismatic, pseudo-Christian cults seem unusually populated with wannabe-covert sex, romance and relationship addicts as well as foodies (I saw a remarkable skew towards this in several Pentecostal churches (e.g. Assemblies of God, Calvary Chapel) over the course of several decades). 
3) The large-group awareness training and human potential cults (e.g. the CoS, est> Forum> Landmark, and Silva Mind Control) seem to have an unusual share of highly motivated, political cause addicts. Moreover, CoS and Landmark participants show up so often in county and state political party organizations for fund-raising and voter-motivation, it's hard to ignore the connection. 
If one lives in LA or San Francisco, one runs into a lot of persecuted LGTBQ people, idealistic liberals and bootstrap minorities in LGAT & HP cults. Whereas out in the boons, one runs into a lot of gun clubs and righteously whacko "Christians" (not really), pseudo-Libertarians, "sovereign citizens" and "tax victims."
LGAT & HP cults are also heavily skewed towards those who place a very high value on material achievement and recognition. Hence their decades-long popularity in the entertainment and media industries.
4) Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) cults tend to attract people interested in material achievement via wealth accumulation.
If interested in how The (recruitment & manipulation) Game is played, see...

Resources: 

Carnes, P.: Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, Minneapolis: Hazelden, 1989.

Carnes, P.: Don't Call it Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction, New York: Bantam, 1991.

Carnes, P.: The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1997. 

Khantzian, E. J.: The self-medication hypothesis of addictive disorders: Focus on heroin and cocaine dependence, in American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 142, 1985.

Khantzian, E.J.: The self medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: a reconsideration and recent applications, in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 4, No. 5, Jan-Feb 1997.

Koob, G.; Le Moal, M.: Drug addiction, dysregulation of reward, and allostasis, in Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol. 24, 2001.

Koob, G., Le Moal, M.: Plasticity of reward neurocircuitry and the ‘dark side’ of drug addiction, in National Neuroscientist, Vol. 8, 2005, doi:10.1038/nn1105-1442.

Koob, G.: A Role for Brain Stress Systems in Addiction, in Neuron, Vol. 59, No. 1, July 2008.

Koob, G.: Neurobiology of Addiction, in Focus, Vol. 9, December 2011.

Shaffer, H.; LaPlante, D., La Brie, R.; et al: Toward a Syndrome Model of Addiction: Multiple Expressions, Common Etiology; in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 12, 2004.

A Basic Cult Library 

Articles on Cult Dynamics, which includes several articles with exhaustive bibliographies on the psychology of cult dynamics

If anyone has better, large-population survey-based, statistical research on this topic, I'm all eyes and ears. 


How Terrorists Use Cult Mind Control Techniques

It's important to understand that Rage IS a Stage in the mental processing of those who see themselves as -- but hate the idea of being -- victims of oppression, and that adroit manipulators (e.g.: the radical mullahs, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, the Red Guards, the Weathermen, the Thuggees in what is now Pakistan, et al) knew how to keep such people stuck in that stage to benefit the leaders at the tops of various cultic pyramids.

Joost Meerloo's Rape of the Mind and William Sargant's Battle for the Mind also get into the use of mostly Russian (actually Pavlovian) techniques to manipulate thought and belief for political purposes. The techniques used by the radical Islamists appear to be collections of both Russian and Southern Asian methods described in Toch's, Meerloo's and Sargant's work, as well as in Hoffer's The True Believer, Abgrall's Soul Snatchers and Deikman's Them and Us. (See A Basic Cult Library.)

Suggested reading: