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
By EJ DICKSON at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/what-is-cult-hopping-nxivm-dos-838750/
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 NXIVM, who 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."
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.
Also see A Basic Cult Library
