Developed by William R. Miller and Stephen Rolnick in the 1980s for smoking cessation, the tools and techniques of Motivational Enhancement have become fundamental in the early treatment of all kinds of substance and process behavior addictions. Helping the addict to see that his mind is participating in a false reality is one of the "interview" techniques.
Reading Jon Atack's flawed but nevertheless edifying and useful opening minds: the secret world of manipulation, undue influences and brainwashing contemporaneously with Ron Miscavige's pretty much flawless and illuminating Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige and Me, I was stuck...
By the fact of the senior Miscavige's long, slow descent into the mind of Eric Hoffer's True Believer. Miscavige was a living example of the live frog staying in the pot to be boiled as the flame under it is turned up one degree at a time over the course of hours. And then suddenly encountering Atack's five-word phrase.
Dots connected. Just as they did in the course of developing treatment strategies for dealing with so many other forms of conditioning all called "addiction." Consider the process:
Does anyone start out to become a nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, heroin or oxycontin addict? Does anyone start out to become a slave to the slot machine, to another slice of pie (when they already tip the scales at 350), to the paycheck signed by the abusive boss who throws bowling balls under their feet and them blames them for screwing up, to running another mile when their body is already exhausted and eating itself, to buying one more outfit on that credit card they'll never be able to pay off, to the irresistible image on the porn website at 4:00 a.m., or to working himself to death without adequate food or sleep for the guru's cause?
Are any of those attachments to true realities? Or are they slowly conditioned, habituated and normalized obsessions with fantasies of satiation that only exist in the mind? (Ask any heroin stabber. Unlike most actively participating addicts, they know how they got there.)
Atack used the metaphor of being captured by the intensity of the emotions triggered an hour or so into a well-scripted and effectively photographed scene in a film like "Jurassic Park" or "Alien" or "The Terminator." Imagine being captured by such intensity day after day and week after week in the "service structure" of group devoted to "saving the world," such as I was in Werner Erhard's est or as Miscavige was as a member of the Sea Organization in L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology for 27 years.
None of the proffered "realities" were true. But they were compelling. And intense.
Addiction molto-expert Patrick Carnes built a powerful case for slowly increasing intensity as one of the most significant components of the addiction process in several of his books. In time, the intensity of the experience blinds the addict to the increasing costs of his obsessive attachment to whatever it is that masks off his increasingly uncomfortable emotions and somatic sensations.
The mind of the cult member ascending the (to him, invisible) levels of the guru's pyramid is boiled slowly. In time he is addicted. In time his participation in -- what is to an even minimally educated outsider -- a false reality is just as invisible. He is no longer sitting in the audience capable of reminded by someone else that "it's just a movie." He's up there, on the screen, in it.
Does that have any relevance in reaching out to the cult member who's still at stage one of the five stages of therapeutic recovery? If the addiction model is relevant here, then I -- as someone who's been dealing with addicts of many kinds in recovery for over 30 years -- am forced to say, "You bet your sweet @$$."
And I would use all the same experiential, explanitory devices used in modern-day addiction treatment to demonstrate to the cult member to make it as clear to him as it is to the substance or process behavior abuser that there really are other possibilities than being "up there, on the screen, in it."
Further reading:
Cult Membership as an Addiction Process... and a Process Addiction
Treating Cultism as an Addiction
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