|
THE |
|
a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects. |
|
|
THE |
|
a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects. |
[from http://www.cyberpass.net/truth/essay.htm ]
Subject: Traumatic Abuse in Cults: An Exploration of an Unfamiliar Social Problem
by Daniel Shaw, C.S.W.
(This essay uses SYDA (Siddha Yoga) as an example of an abusive
cult)
May, 1996, Essay
To join in a discussion of issues relating to leaving Siddha
Yoga, see the newsgroup
alt.support.ex-cult.siddha-yoga most easily reached at
www.dejanews.com
Table of Contents
* Introduction
* What Is a Cult, and Why Do People Get Involved in Them?
* Seduction
* Thought Reform, or Mind Control
* Social Work Values vs. Cult Values
* Inner Emptiness and the Culture of Narcissism
* The Question of Pre-Existing and Induced Pathology: Blaming
the Victim
* The Dominating Leader and the Submissive Follower
* Traumas Suffered by Cult Members
* Rape
* Battering
* Incest
* Working With Cult Survivors
* Conclusions
* Table I: Resource Organizations
* References
Introduction
When I began social work school, it had been just two years since
I moved out of the spiritual community, the ashram, I had lived
and worked in for more than 10 years. In those two post-ashram
years, I did a good deal of soul searching, and concluded that my
life experience had been good preparation for a career in social
work. Nevertheless, I was taken aback when I began my field
placement at a community mental health center. Many of the
clients I was assigned described terrible histories of physical,
sexual and emotional abuse in childhood, and in some cases were
involved in ongoing abuse, either as perpetrators or victims.
Many of these clients were struggling to recover from devastating
addictions. Although my own life has been something of a bed of
roses in comparison with the suffering these clients have known,
I soon discovered I had a deeper connection to their experiences
than I at first realized.
I had always portrayed my participation in Siddha Yoga (also
known as SYDA), to myself and others, as an idealistic commitment
to a noble spiritual path, dedicated to spiritual awakening and
upliftment in the world. Just after school began, this
identification was shattered when I learned of an incident
concerning a friend of mine, a young woman just turned 21, who
was sexually harassed in the ashram by one of its most powerful
leaders. When she sought help from Gurumayi, the now 40 year old
female Indian guru who is the head of the ashram, Gurumayi told
the young woman that she had brought the harassment upon herself.
She was treated with contempt and made to feel ashamed. Through
her chief assistant, Gurumayi told the young woman, "don't ever
tell anyone about this, especially not your mother." (The woman's
mother was a longtime devotee of SYDA, who had made substantial
donations to the ashram over the years.) After two years of
intense inner conflict, the young woman finally did tell her
story. As a result, many others began to speak out, eventually
contributing to an extensive expos‚ of SYDA in The New
Yorker magazine (Harris, 1994). Published just two months after I
started school, the article revealed a Pandora's box of well
documented abuses by the leaders of SYDA that had been going on
for more than 20 years.
In the two years prior to the publication of the article, I had
slowly and painfully begun to acknowledge to myself and others
that there were aspects of SYDA and its leaders that I found
unethical and disturbing. In particular, I had witnessed and
personally experienced Gurumayi verbally and emotionally abusing
devotees, using spies and hidden microphones to gather
information, and publicly shaming and humiliating those with whom
she was displeased.
My doubts about SYDA crystallized when I heard the story of the
young woman I knew. In the phrase, "Don't ever tell anyone about
this, especially not your mother," I heard a chilling echo of the
voice of the incestuous father, the battering husband, the sexual
harasser, the rapist. As Judith Herman says, in her seminal work
entitled Trauma and Recovery (1992), "secrecy and silence are the
perpetrator's first line of defense" (p. 8). It was hearing these
words, "Don't ever tell," that broke for me what Ernst Becker
(1973) has called "the spell cast by persons -- the nexus of
unfreedom." As I began to explore my experiences and those of
others in connection with SYDA, I realized that because I had
accepted the leader's claims to perfection and enlightenment, I
had been unable to recognize abuses in the ashram for what they
were. My emerging insights, fostered by counseling and study,
have been strongly linked to my work with clients. Their
experiences helped to clarify my own, and understanding my
experiences helped me to form deeper therapeutic bonds with them.
The purpose of this essay is to use
1. my personal experience, both as a devotee of SYDA and now a
former devotee,
2. the social work and other social sciences literature on
cults, and
3. my field work experience of providing psychotherapeutic
treatment to clients with backgrounds of trauma and abuse,
to:
1. further social work knowledge and understanding of the
traumatic impact of religious cults;
2. explore the commonalities between victims of cult abuse and
other forms of abuse, such as rape, incest, and battering;
3. attempt to understand aspects of our culture that have
fostered a climate in which so many find themselves exposed
to exploitative and abusive behaviors in cultic groups; and
4. highlight the themes of my social work education that have
been most relevant for me, in connection with my work with
clients and my personal experience of abusive behaviors in
cults.
What Is a Cult, and Why Do People Get Involved in Them?
Cult experts estimate that there are about 5,000 cultic groups in
the United States today and that about 10 to 20 million people
have at some point in recent years been in one or more of such
groups (Langone, 1993). The Cult Awareness Network reports that
it receives about 18,000 inquiries a year (Tobias and Lalich,
1994). Michael Langone (1993), a psychologist who has worked with
approximately 3,000 families of cult members, defines a cult as:
a group or movement that, to a significant degree,
1. exhibits great or excessive devotion or dedication to some
person, idea, or thing,
2. uses a thought-reform program to persuade, control, and
socialize members (i.e., to integrate them into the group's
unique pattern of relationships, beliefs, values, and
practices),
3. systematically induces states of psychological dependency in
members,
4. exploits members to advance the leadership's goals, and
5. causes psychological harm to members, their families, and the
community (p. 5).
I would add to this definition that a religious cult is led by a
person who claims to have reached human perfection or unity with
the divine, and who claims therefore to be exempt from social or
moral limitations or restrictions. Within this autocracy, the
leader is not held to normative societal standards of conduct and
is not subject to any system of checks and balances. Behavior
that would in any other context be considered amoral, if not
psychopathic, is idealized by devotees as indicative of the
leader's transcendent perfection and enlightenment.
Seduction
The questions most often asked of former cult members, usually
with incredulity, are "How did you get into something like this?
And why did you stay so long?" The unspoken subtext seems to be,
"How could someone like you end up in something like this? There
must have been something wrong with you." Certainly most former
cult members were not seeking to be controlled, made dependent,
exploited, or psychologically harmed when they first committed
themselves to membership. One reason cults are so successful is
that they have mastered the art of seduction, using techniques of
undue influence (Cialdini, 1984). As Hochman (1990) notes, cults,
by employing miracle, mystery, and authority, "promise salvation.
Instead of boredom -- noble and sweeping goals. Instead of
existential anxiety -- structure and certainty. Instead of
alienation -- community. Instead of impotence -- solidarity
directed by all-knowing leaders" (p. 179). Cults prey upon
idealistic seekers, offering answers to social problems and
promising to promote bona fide social change.
Recruiting addresses the anxieties and loneliness of people
experiencing personal problems, transition or crisis, by holding
out the promise of transformative healing within the framework of
a caring and understanding community (Tobias et al.). Cult
recruiting often takes place in sophisticated settings, in the
form of seminars featuring persuasive, well-credentialed
speakers, such as successful professionals, respected academics
or popular artists, writers and entertainers. Cults target
members from middle-class backgrounds, often directly from
college campuses, and the majority of members are of above
average intelligence (Hassan, 1990; Kliger, 1994; Tobias et al.,
1994).
In recruiting programs, speakers and members present various
kinds of disinformation about cult leaders, including concealing
their existence altogether. Otherwise, the leader may be
represented as a humble, wise and loving teacher, when in reality
he or she is a despot in possession of a substantial fortune,
generated from member donations and (often illegal) business
activities. The apparent leader may be only a figurehead, while
the identity of the actual leader is concealed. False claims of
ancient lineages may be made, or the leader is falsely said to be
revered and renowned in his or her own country. Cult leaders
rewrite and falsify their own biographies.
Recruiting programs do not, for instance, inform participants
about leaders of the group having criminal records, or a group's
history of sexual abuse of members, or the group's involvement
with illegal activities. Seduction in cult recruitment always
involves strict control and falsification of information.
Thought Reform, or Mind Control
Thought reform, or mind control, is another important component
in understanding why cults are so prevalent in our society. The
psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (1987) studied the methods used by
the Chinese Communists during the Korean War to turn war
prisoners into willing accomplices, and called these methods
thought reform (see also Hinkle and Wolff, 1976; Schein, 1956;
Singer, 1979).
Thought reform (also known as mind control) is the foundation on
which cults are built. Lifton identified 8 phenomena that were
present in the systems of "ideological totalism" that he studied,
all of which can be found in cults:
1. Milieu control - control of communication within an
environment. Maintained primarily by increasingly isolating
members from non-members, this sets up what Lifton calls
"personal closure." One is constantly receiving reinforcement
to suppress personal doubts and struggles about what is true
or real;
2. Mystical manipulation, or planned spontaneity - a systematic
process, covertly planned and managed by the group leader,
whereby others come to invest him with omniscience,
omnipotence, or divine authority. This gives rise to the
embrace of an "ends justify the means" philosophy, since the
behavior and directives ofthe leader are always and only
interpreted as having a divine origin and purpose;
3. Demand for purity - the call for a radical separation of pure
and impure, of good and evil, within an environment and
within oneself. This creates a world of guilt and shame in
which devotees become obsessively preoccupied with hope of
reward and fear of punishment;
4. Cult of confession - linked to the demand for purity.
Required confession sessions, ostensibly for the purpose of
purification and spiritual evolution, manipulate the guilt
and shame mechanisms of followers, expose them totally to the
group, and deepen their sense of being owned by the group;
5. Sacred science - a set of dogmatic principles which claim to
be a science embodying the truth about human behavior and
human psychology. These principles must never be questioned,
and all experience must be filtered through them;
6. Loading the language - reduction and distortion of complex
concepts, thoughts, and feelings to simplistic clich‚s
and slogans, which are used to still and limit mental
processes of judgment and critical thinking;
7. Doctrine over person - one is made to feel that doubts of the
doctrine are a reflection of one's own inadequacies, defects,
or sins. The dogma is truth, and one's subjective experience
must be aligned with the dogma. To do otherwise is to risk
exclusion from the group. Since the doctrine is created to
serve the purposes of the sociopathic leader, followers must
split off or dissociate parts of themselves, and jettison
their own values, to justify actions or tenets of the leader
which would otherwise be intolerable to them.
8. Dispensing of existence - in the totalist vision of truth,
one who disobeys, or deviates from the dogma, is false,
deluded, or evil, and therefore instantly dispensable. The
leaders are the judge of who is deviant, and can change their
criteria at whim. Cults use the fear of banishment and
shunning to control and contain members. To fear rejection by
one's absolute ideal is tantamount to the profound dread of
annihilation. (See also Singer and Ofshe, 1990; Tobias et al.
For other theories of social control relevant to cults, see
Festinger, 1964; Gramsci, 1973; Zimbardo, 1988.)
While thought reform techniques were originally aimed at
peripheral aspects of the self, such as political and social
views, cults today aim at the core self, at a person's central
self-image (Singer et al.). The guru is perceived as a deity who
is always divinely right, and the devotee lives to please and
avoid displeasing the guru/god. In a totalitarian ideological
system, the cult leader's displeasure comes to mean for the
member that his core self is unworthy, monstrously defective, and
dispensable. The member has been conditioned to believe that loss
of the leader's "grace" is equivalent to loss of the self. As the
member becomes more deeply involved, his anxiety about remaining
a member in good standing increases. This anxiety is akin to the
intense fear, helplessness, loss of control and threat of
annihilation that Herman, in her discussion of psychological
domination, describes as induced in victims of both terrorists
and battering husbands:
The ultimate effect of these techniques is to convince the victim
that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile,
and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through
absolute compliance. The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in
his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being
allowed to live (p. 77). Thus the victim comes to identify with
the aggressor, accepting the aggression as purification, the
absence of aggression as beneficence. More than just being
between a rock and a hard place, this is a desperate and degraded
position to find oneself in.
Herman's motivation for writing Trauma and Recovery was to show
the commonalities "between rape survivors and combat veterans,
between battered women and political prisoners, between the
survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule
nations, and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps
created by tyrants who rule their homes" (p. 3). Tyrants who rule
religious cults subject members to similar violations.
Social Work Values vs. Cult Values
In my first year of social work school, just a few months after
breaking entirely with SYDA, I was asked to write a paper
comparing a value system I had previously experienced to the
social work value system I was currently exposed to. Social
workers are taught early in their education the values of their
profession: the clients' right to self-determination, respect and
dignity for all, the innate worth of a human being, respect for
uniqueness, and the facilitation of the realization of potential
(Woods and Hollis, 1990).
Religious cults are skillful in advertising the promotion of
these values as the core of their philosophy. For example, SYDA's
chief slogans, repeated frequently in public talks and SYDA
Foundation literature, are: "Honor, love, respect, worship your
Self. God dwells within you, as you. See God in each other." SYDA
claims that its guru is "a self-realized master," and that
following the teachings of the master lead to one's own
self-realization. The bait of these messages is used to attract
members.
Once membership is established, the messages are switched to
ever-increasing demands for obedience, submission and dependence.
The actual value system of a cult is often the antithesis of the
system it advertises.
The following is excerpted from the paper I wrote in which I
attempt to describe the value system of SYDA, especially in terms
of values linked to the concept of strength versus weakness, and
compare it to social work values:
In the culture of Gurumayi's ashram, nothing was more important
than the worship of and complete surrender to the guru. This is
the essence of Siddha Yoga. The SYDA Foundation literature
describes ad infinitum the proper ways to absorb oneself
completely in the Siddha, the perfected master, and also
describes the enlightenment, constant bliss and unity with the
Absolute that are supposed to result (Muktananda, 1978). I became
involved with SYDA at a point of transition in my life. I had
several ecstatic meditation experiences early in my exposure to
Siddha Yoga. Longing to belong and to be of service, I gradually
increased my commitment, finally giving up everything I had and
joining the ashram staff.
After a few years, I began to have more contact with Gurumayi. I
began to move toward the "inner circle," where everything started
to be different from what it had been when I was still in the
outer circles. Only in retrospect, since my break with Siddha
Yoga, am I able to describe what this culture was like. At the
time, I idealized everything about Gurumayi. We all found
ingenious ways of making her perfect no matter what, and making
her bizarre and cruel behavior "for our own good."
In this culture, if you had a problem, you were "weak," i.e., not
devoted and pure enough. You could be kicked out if you had a
problem. You could be dismissed, thrown out of meetings, or
ridiculed and humiliated publicly, sometimes in front of small
groups and at other times in front of thousands of people at
large public programs. Worst of all, if you earned the guru's
displeasure, she might ignore you completely. That was worse than
all the cruel and cutting remarks, which could at least be
rationalized as pearls of wisdom meant to purify you. Being
ignored meant that you were unworthy in the sight of God. If you
had a problem, you could be spied on by roommates who would tell
Gurumayi what you said and did. Or your room could be bugged with
a hidden microphone. Or you could be left behind, not taken on
Gurumayi's lecture tours all over the world - not worthy of being
included. You could even be told to go back out to the world and
work.
You were "strong," i.e., devoted and worthy, if you worked around
the clock and never took a vacation or a day off. You were strong
if you never needed anything. You were strong if you lived on a
pittance and never needed more money. But you were really strong
if you had lots of money and gave large amounts of it to the
guru. You were strong if you were willing to insult and harass
other people on behalf of the guru while protecting her from
being detected as the instigator.
You were weak if you were tired, or had any feelings other than
enthusiasm, happiness, and ardent devotion to the guru, asking
nothing from her. Being depressed or exhausted was not just weak,
it was considered selfish and an insult to Gurumayi. If you asked
for help, you were weak. Not just weak, but worthy of contempt.
Entering the field of social work is for me a rejection of the
values of the culture of Siddha Yoga. It is a return to life, to
compassion for humanity and for myself. I know now that asking
for help can be a sign of strength and courage; that problems
should be handled with sensitivity and care; and that part of
being strong is having real feelings without trying to deny them.
Recently, as I attempted to describe the cruelty I had
experienced in the cult to another social worker, he replied,
"was it cruelty, or just tough love?" Cults are totalitarian
communities, and as the saying goes, "power tends to corrupt --
and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Acton, 1887). Tough love
is hardly an appropriate description of the abuse of power that
is pervasive in cults. The impetus to write on this subject now
stems from several sources: the social work literature contains
scant contributions on cults (Addis, Schulman-Miller and
Lightman, 1984; Goldberg & Goldberg, 1982), and my social work
education has not included any discussion of this social problem.
In addition, many social work and other mental health workers are
themselves members of cultic groups. There is a need for
consciousness raising on this issue.
Some questions that need exploration in terms of working with
cult members are:
1. what are the traumas this population most commonly suffers,
2. how do we understand the role of pre-existing pathology
versus imposed pathology in working with cult victims, and
3. what are the struggles in recovery this population and their
families face as they leave the cult and re-enter the
community?
Social workers may also benefit from examining cults from a
sociocultural perspective. What are the forces in our culture and
society that allow such cults to flourish? While the memory of
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, the mass suicides of the
Solar Temple of the Sun cult, and the plan of Shoko Asahara, of
Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo, to create his own Armageddon, is still
fresh in our minds, let us address this latter group of questions
first.
Inner Emptiness and the Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch (1979), in describing the "culture of
narcissism," used the example of the writer Paul Zweig, a SYDA
devotee, to illustrate his ideas about "the void within" that
individuals in Western society have been struggling with in the
post-WWII era. Prior to his involvement in SYDA, Zweig spoke of
his growing "conviction, amounting to a faith, that my life was
organized around a core of blandness which shed anonymity upon
everything I touched"; of "the emotional hibernation which lasted
until I was almost thirty"; of persisting "suspicion of personal
emptiness which all my talking and my anxious attempts at charm
surround and decorate, but don't penetrate or even come close
to." When "the experience of inner emptiness, the frightening
feeling that at some level of existence I'm nobody, that my
identity has collapsed and no one's there" becomes overwhelming,
Zweig encounters Swami Muktananda, or Baba (Father), the original
founder of Siddha Yoga. From Baba, he learns to anesthetize his
"mental busyness, . . ., obsessive thinking and . . . anxiety."
Cushman (1990) notes that inner emptiness is expressed in many
ways in our culture, such as low self-esteem (the absence of a
sense of personal worth), values confusion (the absence of a
sense of personal convictions), eating disorders (the compulsion
to fill the emptiness with food, or to embody the emptiness by
refusing food), drug abuse (the compulsion to fill the emptiness
with chemically induced emotional experience of "receiving"
something from the world). It may also take the form of an
absence of personal meaning. This can manifest as a hunger for
spiritual guidance, which sometimes takes the form of a wish to
be filled up by the spirit of God, by religious "truth," or by
the power and personality of a leader guru (p. 604).
The hunger for spiritual guidance and religious truth is often
what impels people to explore religious groups. Problems arise
when the leaders of these groups proclaim themselves to be living
embodiments of this truth. The danger of cults lies in the leap
one must make, from embracing religious truth, to worshipping a
person claiming to be this truth. The danger increases when this
person promises salvation, redemption, or perfection, in exchange
for money, goods and services. While religious teachers are as
entitled as anyone else to earn a living by selling their
teachings, the claim that a leader is a perfected master is a
common denominator of destructive cults.
Whether or not a particular person is perfect is something that
can only be defended on a subjective basis -- "I experience you
as perfect, therefore, you are perfect." For some, a perfect
human being is a possibility; for others, a perfect human being
can only be an oxymoron.
Yet the myth of the perfect master can be so alluring, and the
need so compelling. Cushman speaks of the "lifestyle solution"
promoted by advertising, in which larger-than-life, glamorous
"selfobjects" (Kohut, 1984) in the form of products to be
acquired or incorporated, promise to magically transform the
empty self. Perhaps this solution to the problem of the inner
void -- acquisition of objects, worldly treasure -- is the
inverse of the guru solution, which promises to fill the empty
self with the spiritual treasure of a perfect, glamorous,
larger-than-life guru. As Kohut has said, the pressure of inner
emptiness can leave one especially vulnerable to "the seduction
of an external force posing as an ego ideal" (Kohut, 1990, p.
122).
Today, gurus use the technology and psychology of advertising to
provide ever more effective methods of seducing recruits. One of
the most seductive ideas advertised in meditation-based cults is
that "it is not necessary to be logical, rational, or even
reasonable. The ultimately dominant criterion of what is good is
a totally subjective feeling state. The goal of life becomes a
good feeling, a never-ending high" (Garvey, 1993). This is not
necessarily as selfish as it sounds. Loyal members of a cult
believe that their leader has magically transformed their lives
and relieved their suffering. On that basis, they will staunchly
defend their leader even when his or her crimes are exposed. The
"good feeling" of their initial conversion experience might
consist of feeling "redeemed," "coming home at last," having been
"lost, but now found," or being "saved." These intensely
emotional experiences are attributed directly to the power and
will of the leader. Groups such as SYDA skillfully control
devotees' thought processes by suggesting repeatedly that they
"trust their own experience." In this way, objectivity -- e.g.,
any negative information about the leader -- is devalued. The
guru, along with one's own subjective feeling state, is
idealized. The bunker mentality response to any critical
information about the group and its leaders then becomes: "that
isn't my experience."
There are strong reasons for this need to banish objectivity. If
one believes that the guru's power has healed one's pain, then
keeping the pain from returning means preserving the guru, at any
cost. Indeed, the pain of life that has been magically erased by
the guru will return if one rejects the guru. The pain will
return, along with many other warded off emotions, and these will
need to be experienced, felt, understood, worked through, and
made meaningful, if real transformation, not magic, is to occur.
This is part of the difficult process of self-development that
the guru solution simply sweeps under the rug.
The history of SYDA provides a good example of how far devotees
will go to defend the person they perceive as their savior. In
the early 80s, the Siddha Yoga community was shocked to learn
that Muktananda, a monk in his late 60s and supposedly a lifelong
celibate, had been secretly having sexual relations with western
female devotees for at least ten years. While many women thought
of themselves as willing participants, others felt coerced and
traumatized by the experience. Often his victims were female
children in their early teens. Many who were SYDA devotees at the
time heard these allegations and ignored them, in spite of wide
acknowledgment among those closest to Muktananda that they were
true. When several devotees spoke out publicly about Muktananda's
sexual abuses, two loyal devotees were dispatched by Muktananda
to threaten these whistle-blowers with disfigurement and
castration (Rodarmor, 1983). Nevertheless, to this day,
Muktananda is worshipped by SYDA devotees as a deity.
How can this kind of loyalty be understood? Under the influence
of cult mind control, devotees must make the Guru, who has
magically filled the inner void, exempt from all scrutiny and
judgment. Devotees come to depend completely on the absolute
perfection of the guru. Keeping the terror of emptiness and
meaninglessness at bay, no matter how artificially, becomes so
crucial to the devotee's survival, that he must deny truth, and
sacrifice his pre-cult values and integrity, in order not to lose
the all-providing, omnipotent, idealized guru. Long after the
glow of the conversion experience fades, regardless of the
exposes, the abuse and exploitation, many devotees maintain their
unreasoning loyalty, because for them, it has become a matter of
life or death.
The Question of Pre-Existing and Induced Pathology: Blaming the
Victim
If cults recruit members by baiting the traps of the culture of
narcissism with promises of redemption and fulfillment, how do we
understand the people who take the bait? What assumptions, if
any, can we make about this population? In addressing these
questions, it is necessary to confront two major themes:
1. pre-existing pathology and induced pathology, and
2. the question of blaming the victim.
Theorists such as Fromm (1965), Becker (1973) and Berger (1967)
havesought to understand the dynamics of dominance and
submission, sadism and masochism, that are built into the human
character and which are triggered in individuals and societies
exposed to certain influences. Fromm, and later Becker, were
moved to explore these human traits by the horror of Nazi
Germany; Berger's interest was oriented to the history of
religion. These ideas about man's vulnerability to certain
"pathological" behaviors can be used to suggest that those who
become cult victims are predisposed to submissive,
sadomasochistic behavior.
More recent theorists have been concerned with the phenomenon of
blaming the victims of rape and battering for asking for, or
failing to put a stop to, the abuse they have suffered (Herman;
Kliger). McNew and Abell (1995) and Silver and Iacano (1986) use
the term "sanctuary trauma" to describe how one who has already
experienced severe trauma, such as rape, often experiences a
secondary trauma in what was expected to be a supportive and
protective environment, such as in a police station, a courtroom,
or a therapist's office. Herman notes that "those who attempt to
describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their
own credibility. To speak publicly about one's knowledge of
atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims" (p.
2).
It is easy, but erroneous, to assume that only certain kinds of
people are predisposed to join cults. When noted cult-expert Joe
Szimhart speaks to audiences about cults and is asked what kind
of people join them, he points to the audience and says, "People
like you" (Szimhart, personal conversation). In studies conducted
by Langone (1993), in which cult members are given a battery of
standard psychological tests, he found that the percentage of
cult members who were diagnosable was only slightly higher than
the 20% of the general population commonly considered
diagnosable, suggesting that the cult population is not
necessarily markedly different from the norm. Langone asserts,
along with Martin and Hassan, that mind control techniques are
effective with all kinds of people, regardless of the previous
existence or non-existence of any kind of psychopathology.
The literature on working with former cult members stresses, for
the most part, that the pathology induced by the cult itself must
be acknowledged, and the former member must be helped with the
array of problems resulting from this induced pathology, before
any pre-existing, underlying pathology is assumed or explored
(Addis et al.; Clifford, 1994; Giambalvo, 1993; Goldberg, 1993;
Goldberg et al., 1982; Goldberg, 1993; Halperin, 1990; Hassan,
1990; Kliger, 1994; Langone, 1993; Langone and Chambers, 1991;
Martin, 1993; Martin and Langone, 1992; Morse and Morse, 1987;
Tobias, 1993). To do otherwise, for these authors, invalidates
the reality of the client, constituting a stigmatizing message
from the worker that the victims' traumatic experience has more
to do with their psychopathology than with the violations
perpetrated by the group.
I strongly agree that cult victims can be unfairly stigmatized or
pathologized. However, I suggest that workers risk creating a
false dichotomy when we polarize the issues of pre-existing
pathology and induced pathology in cult victims; and further,
that framing the issue in terms of pathology is, from the outset,
counter-productive. All human beings struggle with dependency,
with separation and individuation, and with conflicts over active
and passive wishes and fears. These are universal developmental
issues. As Herman points out, referring to Erikson's (1980) life
cycle stages, "trauma forces the survivor to relive all her
earlier struggles over autonomy, initiative, competence,
identity, and intimacy." Once a person is exposed to a thought
reform program and the traumatic violations that ensue,
developmental crises will be restimulated, whether they were
adequately resolved previously or not. The concept of "blaming
the victim" is misused, and unfair to the client, if it
encourages workers to overlook pre-existing factors which may
have contributed to the client's victimization.
Victims can and should be helped with both the induced and
pre-existing aspects of their problem, at the appropriate points
in treatment (Addis et al.; Clifford; Giambalvo; Goldberg, L.;
Goldberg et al.; Goldberg, W.; Hassan; Morse and Morse; Tobias et
al.).
The Dominating Leader and the Submissive Follower
In the interest, then, of better understanding the dynamics that
may lead some people to stay in cults, I wish to present certain
ideas about the human propensity to exploit and be exploited. As
the world watched the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930's and
40's, a literature developed during and after the Holocaust which
attempted to come to grips with, among other things, how
virtually an entire nation of people, the Germans, could be
persuaded to give up their morals, values, autonomy and
integrity, by one man, a charismatic megalomaniac named Adolf
Hitler. Many authors have attempted to find explanations for this
inexplicable horror. The ideas of Erich Fromm on this subject, as
presented in his book Escape From Freedom, are particularly
relevant here. (Also see Becker (1973), especially the chapter
entitled "The Spell Cast by Persons -The Nexus of Unfreedom"; and
Berger (1967), particularly the chapter entitled "The Problem of
Theodicy.")
Fromm examines the relationship of human development processes to
social, religious, economic and political forces in the
environment. He notes that the process of individuation frees a
child to "develop and express its own individual self unhampered
by those ties which were limiting to it. But the child also
becomes more free from a world which gave it security and
reassurance" (p. 46). Fromm continues:
If the economic, social and political conditions on which the
whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a
basis for the realization of individuality.. ., while at the
same time people have lost those ties which gave them
security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then
becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks
meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape
from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of
relationship to man and the world which promises relief from
uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom
(p. 52) (italics mine).
Fromm is describing, writing in 1941, the predicament of a life
which lacks meaning and direction, in a society which offers too
many dead-end destinations. This is where Paul Zweig found
himself - adrift in the culture of narcissism that Lasch
described twenty-five years later.
While Fromm speaks of the securing ties that are lost in the
process of becoming separate, there are those who would argue
that many children in the early stages of development possess
little more than false security, at best. Alice Miller, in The
Drama of the Gifted Child (1981), suggests that the development
of the true self, the goal of separation and individuation, is
thwarted when parents need and use their children to fulfill
their own egoistic wishes. Parents can train children to
experience their natural needs, feelings, and attempts at
self-expression, as destructive and shameful. Such children learn
to hide or suppress these unaccepted parts of themselves, and to
develop a false self which accommodates the needs of the parents
-- in essence, an act of self-annihilation (Winnicott, 1960).
While the developmental conflict between attachment and
separation invariably elicits feelings of isolation and
powerlessness, these feelings may be especially exacerbated when
the child's drive to separate is threatening to a needy and
narcissistically vulnerable parent, or thwarted by neglectful or
sadistic parents. Miller sees the problem of the child who
becomes a prisoner of the narcissistic parent as a pervasive
cultural phenomenon of our time.
Fromm attributes fear of separation to alienating and isolating
forces in society which have arisen gradually over centuries.
Miller sees this fear arising in the nursery, from the ways we
misunderstand and misuse our children. Whether we prefer the
macrocosmic or the microcosmic view, in attempting to understand
the problem of fear of separation and freedom, I believe these
perspectives are complementary, and both are useful and
necessary.
For the person who is tormented with anxiety about separation,
Fromm considers masochism to be one of the primary mechanisms of
escape from this torment. When the parental and/or social
environment cannot provide the security required for the
separation effort, then adopting the masochistic stance of
feeling small and helpless, or overwhelmed by pain and agony, can
be a way of avoiding and protecting oneself from having to fight
what would only be a losing battle. Between self-annihilation,
which provides a kind of control, and unsupported separation and
independence, which feels out of control, self-annihilation may
seem like the less terrifying of two evils.
However, annihilation of self is only one side of the attempt to
overcome unbearable feelings of powerlessness. Fromm points out
an alternative which bears more directly on the subject of cults:
The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and
more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and
participate in. This power can be a person, an institution,
God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion. By
becoming part of a power which is felt as unshakably strong,
eternal, and glamorous, one participates in its strength and
glory. One surrenders one's own self and renounces all
strength and pride connected with it, one loses one's
integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one
gains a new security and a new pride in the participation in
the power in which one submerges. One gains also security
against the torture of doubt (p. 177) (italics mine).
Fromm calls the power one submerges oneself in the "magic
helper." When one feels helpless and hopeless to express and
realize one's individual potential, dependence on a magic helper
provides a solution which shifts the emphasis off the self, which
is experienced as empty and worthless, to the magic helper. The
magic helper, in our fantasy, has all the answers, can take care
of everything, and loves and accepts us perfectly, thereby
confirming and validating our existence. Merging with the magic
helper banishes emptiness, loneliness and anxiety -- and magic
security is established. Then separation, individuation, and its
accompanying terrors can be averted altogether. One can join a
cult and effect a kind of separation from one's family and
background -- but the actual task of individuation is not
undertaken. The pseudo-separation attempt degenerates into a
regression to deeper levels of dependence and enmeshment.
In the relationship to the magic helper, "the question is then no
longer how to live oneself, but how to manipulate 'him' in order
not to lose him and how to make him do what one wants, even to
make him responsible for what one is responsible oneself" (Fromm,
p. 199). Paradoxically, obedience and goodness are among the most
common methods used to attempt to manipulate and control the
magic helper. Yet the enslavement to the magic helper that is
then experienced is resented and creates conflict. This conflict
must be repressed in order not to lose the magic helper.
Additionally, people who pose as magic helpers eventually and
inevitably demonstrate their imperfection, if not their complete
fraudulence. Thus, the underlying anxiety about the authenticity
of the magic helper, or about losing him through not being
worthy, constantly threatens the security sought for in the
relationship. This is a real double bind. As Berger notes, "the
masochistic attitude is inherently predestined to failure,
because the self cannot be annihilated this side of death and
because the other can only be absolutized in illusion" (p. 56).
(See footnote *)
(* Kliger, in her study of devotees of a leader named "Guru",
demonstrates that it is precisely this conflict in the devotees
that results in the high degree of somatization she found among
them. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction amongst members was
considered by Guru to be hostile, a threat to the community. Guru
demanded that devotees show a happy face at all times, claiming
that their unhappy faces made him physically and psychically ill.
(This is also what Gurumayi teaches her SYDA staff.) Because the
devotees were stigmatized by Guru for any expression of
dissatisfaction, devotees suppressed these feelings, which then
emerged through somatization. Physical illness was more
acceptable to Guru, because he saw himself as a healer and could
use a devotee's illness to demonstrate his power. If his healing
efforts failed, however, the devotee's illness was deemed a
manifestation of their resistance, proving that they were hostile
to Guru's mission. Punishment by shunning followed, which led
either to the devotee's further submission, or to their
excommunication (Kliger, pp. 232-233).)
When the magic helper is a drug such as heroin, the annihilation
of the self may culminate in the death of the body. If it is
food, the self is concealed in obesity, or enslaved to anorexia
and bulimia. When the magic helper is an idealized but
traumatizing parent who is ambivalently both hated and totally
depended on, annihilation of the self manifests as the inability
to separate and individuate.
When the magic helper is a guru, the annihilation of the self is
the loss of one's own voice, personal values, and integrity.
Again, SYDA provides useful material in support of this point. In
SYDA philosophy, the "ego" is devalued as something small and
selfish that must be surrendered to the guru, to be magically
transformed into pure awareness of the transcendent "inner Self,"
which is one with the guru and with God. The sense of "doership",
taking credit for or enjoying the fruits of one's own actions, is
in particular a sure sign of "wrong understanding." The right
understanding is that whatever the guru says or does is a direct
expression of God's will, and that everything good flows from the
magic grace of the guru. By surrendering the ego and the sense of
doership to the guru, the sins of pride and selfishness are
supposedly expiated. Practically, this means that experiencing
oneself as a center of agency and initiative, as a creative
person capable of taking pleasure in the use of one's own talents
and skills, should be a source of shame -- because nothing
belongs to oneself, it all belongs to and comes from the guru. On
the other hand, one must always be ready to confess and take
credit for one's sins and transgressions -- which in this system,
are the sole property of the small, impure, selfish ego.
When the mists of these tortuous obfuscations are cleared, one
has really only discovered a pseudo-moralistic rationale for
self-annihilation. The person posing as the magic guru is
revealed as an opportunistic entrepreneur, one who has learned
how to profit well from the variety of influences, in our inner
and outer worlds, which have caused us to feel afraid of freedom.
Traumas Suffered by Cult Members
When cult members finally leave the cult and seek help, they have
been exhausted by their long struggle to maintain the illusion of
a perfect master, and the concomitant deterioration of their
self-esteem. Many clinical workers are unfamiliar with the
particular issues likely to be present in this population.
Knowledge of the impact of more familiar abuses such as rape,
incest and battering can be extremely helpful in working with
cult members. Cult trauma entails violation, by the idolized and
deified leader, of the cult member's core sense of self. Rape,
incest and battering, often perpetrated by a trusted adult or
significant other, are also extreme violations and disruptions of
the self (Bell, J., 1995; Blake-White and Kline, 1985;
Chairamonte, J. (1992); Ellenson, G., 1989; Graziano, R., 1992;
Langley, M., 1982; Marton, F., 1988; McNew et al.; Patten, Gatz,
Jones, and Thomas, 1989). The following clinical material
compares aspects of some of these generally more familiar
violations with examples of cult violations.
Rape. A client I have been seeing for the last two years, Ms. R.,
was the victim of severe emotional abuse from her mother.
Although this example does not involve an actual rape, the
principles involved are similar and useful for the purposes of
this discussion.
Ms. R. is an intelligent 40 year old woman from a middle class
background who is extremely phobic, obsessive and subject to
panic anxiety. Although she successfully maintains a menial job,
she feels she is earning far below her potential and is
profoundly isolated and dissatisfied, without fulfilling work or
intimate relationships. She traces many of her difficulties to
her traumatic upbringing. Ms. R.'s mother was a disturbed woman
who was dependent on a variety of tranquilizers and barbiturates.
Nevertheless, as a child, Ms. R. saw her mother as an idealized
figure, vested with magical omnipotence. Ms. R. lived in terror
of her mother's demands for perfection, and her unpredictable
outbursts of rage. Nothing she did was considered good enough,
and she was made to feel that any form of self-expression was
destructive. She learned that only her mother's needs mattered,
and she experienced her own needs and feelings as shameful.
Ms. R. describes her experience of the cruel, contemptuous words
and looks of her mother, spit out at her with rage and
penetrating her to the core, leaving her feeling ever more alone
and ashamed, by using the metaphor of rape. Her mother's
rape-like verbal abuse has frozen Ms. R. in terror and
helplessness, and rendered her unable to separate or form a
stable sense of identity. She has cut off all contact with her
mother, saying that to reconcile with her would be like "getting
in bed with my own rapist." Yet she has internalized this
punitive mother and lives in constant fear of the people in her
world. In her transference to them, they are all potential
"psychic rapists."
The pattern of cruelty of Ms. R.'s mother is remarkably similar
to the behavior of cult leaders. Herman states that "violation
is, in fact, a synonym for rape. The purpose of the rapist is to
terrorize, dominate, and humiliate his victim, to render her
utterly helpless" (p. 58). In cults, victims are made helpless,
like rape victims, when they are repeatedly confronted and forced
to confess sins and transgressions. This phenomenon is sometimes
called "being on the hot seat." The hot seat confrontation, in
which accusatory words are hurled by group leaders like knives,
with the purpose of penetrating and wounding the core of the
devotee's self, is a violent, painful invasion of self-boundaries
disguised as "purification," for the good of the member. The
member is usually accused of behaving in some way which
demonstrates a lack of faith in or loyalty to the leader. This
alleged lack in the member is portrayed as a monstrous and
contemptible defect or transgression. In the midst of this
assault, which is often ongoing over an extended period, the cult
member on the hot seat must attempt to feel and express remorse
as well as appreciation of the leader's efforts to purify him.
Often, leaders who employ hot seat confrontations press the
victims' peers into service, inviting them to join in the
assault. This creates a situation not unlike a gang rape. These
confrontations may end with the ultimate humiliation --
excommunication, the equivalent for the member of psychic
annihilation; or else with the member's complete submission and
confession, leading to his rehabilitation as a member in good
standing. In either case, former cultists in therapeutic
treatment invariably describe their experience of abuse in the
cult as "spiritual rape" (Tobias et al.) Like a violent rapist
threatening his victim with death if she does not submit, in
confrontation/confession episodes, the guru has the devotee in
his or her power.
Battering. Battering comprises a cycle of violent assaults by one
domestic partner against the other, followed by a period of
reconciliation, which is then followed by an escalation phase and
a return to the violence. Herman notes that battering may also
include being taken by surprise, trapped, or exposed to the point
of exhaustion. The victim of battering comes to live in a state
of helplessness and terror.
Ms. R., described above, experienced her mother's unpredictable
outbursts of rage and cruelty, sometimes accompanied with slaps,
but often just comprising words and looks, as battering. She
stated in session that she began feeling crazy at a very early
age, when her mother would direct prolonged fits of rage toward
her, then suddenly disappear into her room. She would emerge
hours later as though nothing had happened, offering to read Ms.
R. a bedtime story. Ms. R. described another group of memories,
in which she was expected to do all the house cleaning on
Saturdays before she would be allowed to go outside and play. But
because her mother slept until early afternoon, and she was not
allowed to make noise that would wake her, the cleaning would not
be done until dinner, by which time the other children had gone
home and it would be too late to go outside. Ms. R. hated her
mother for trapping and isolating her in this way.
Yet when Ms. R.'s mother played the piano and asked her daughter
to sing,et, when Ms. R. took great pride in her ability to elicit
her mother's approval and pleasure -- rare and precious gifts
that she treasured. But the approval meant so much to Ms. R.,
that each time she lost it, she would be overwhelmed with grief,
rage, and self-blame. The unpredictable shifts Ms. R. experienced
between being the object of her mother's rage and derision at one
moment, and of her engulfing and overstimulating affection at
another, were desperately confusing. At age 8, Ms. R. began
engaging in compulsive hand washing rituals. Although these
rituals ceased long ago, Ms. R. remains imprisoned and paralyzed
by her doubts and fears about herself.
Similar conditions exist for cult members. They are frequently
expected to work 12 to 18 hour days, 7 days a week, with little
or no time off. This keeps them constantly isolated within the
system, vulnerable and exhausted. During a period where SYDA
members were being allowed a weekly day off, Gurumayi learned
that a staff member had spent an afternoon at a movie. She
promptly informed all staff that they would no longer be allowed
any days off or holidays. Gurumayi's own fondness for rented
videos and satellite television is one of her many well-guarded
secrets. But even if it were common knowledge, the devotee's
mission is to hold their guru exempt from human standards of
fairness, logic or ethical conduct. They must maintain and defend
their belief in her perfection, or face the catastrophic collapse
of the belief structure that upholds them. Similarly, the
battered child must blame herself for her parents' irrational
behavior, or risk losing the parents she depends on.
On the other hand, Gurumayi makes lavish displays of generosity
to certain members, usually timed before or after the member
would be put on the hot seat. Which of her inner circle is "in"
and which is "out" is a constant source of gossip among her
staff, who are anxious to be properly aligned for or against
those who are in or out of favor. One's status fluctuates
constantly and unpredictably. When cult members are repeatedly
insulted and humiliated by the guru for no understandable reason;
and the guru then makes a show of forgiving them, heaping praise
and attention on them; and when this cycle is repeated
continuously, without warning or reason, then the victim
experiences fear, desperation to comply, and helplessness -- just
as Ms. R did, and as the battered wife does. The guru does not
necessarily need to use physical violence, as the batterer does,
to keep devotees in line -- although many gurus, like those in
SYDA, do employ corporeal punishments. Because one's core sense
of self is placed completely in the power of the guru, emotional
and psychic wounds from the guru's cruel and contemptuous remarks
and behavior are experienced as devastatingly painful blows. When
these alternate with praise and ostentatious displays of
kindness, one is both made to feel crazy and made to feel more
dependent.
Incest. Another client, Ms. B., was molested by older male
relatives on two occasions in her childhood. Then from the age of
13-16, she was subjected to sexualizing behavior from her father.
When she was sixteen, her father raped her and had sexual
intercourse with her regularly for the next 3 years. Ms. B. went
on to become a crack addict and a prostitute, and is now in
rehabilitation.
Ms. B. is attractive and intelligent. She is childlike in many
ways, including her thumb-sucking in bed before she falls asleep.
She is also flirtatious, in the manner of a child seeking
approval and attention. But of course she is in an adult body.
Her original childhood needs for mirroring affirmation were met
with sexualization. Now, all of Ms. B.'s needs are
counterphobically translated into the need for sexual
gratification.
When I first saw Ms. B., she was going home from her
rehabilitation facility on weekends, and reported enjoying being
with her family. When I asked if she had any discomfort about
being with her father, she would report she had none. I was
struck at these times and many others at how devoid Ms. B. was of
affective responses to her intact memories of years of incest.
Although feelings about her father were dissociated, I discovered
that she was reenacting the incest at her facility. Ms.
B.revealed that she was involved in several secret sexual
liaisons which violated the house rules. She was in constant
torment over her fear of being discovered and dismissed from the
program. At the same time she conspired relentlessly to maintain
the secret affairs and protect the men involved from exposure.
Her lovers made it clear to her that if they were exposed, she
would be to blame for their downfall. She was experiencing
desperate confusion and anxiety in the reenactments, while
feeling nothing about her father, the original perpetrator. It
has not been easy to help Ms. B. see how these relationships
reenact her history of incest. Ms. B.'s father had succeeded in
manipulating her so that she felt responsible for arousing him.
She was afraid to expose him for fear of being despised by her
mother, who never noticed that anything was wrong. She also
didn't want to hurt her mother and see her fall apart, or destroy
her parents' marriage and lose the only home she knew. Crack
proved to be an effective relief from the desperate confusion Ms.
B. experienced -- until it brought her to prostitution,
degradation and near death.
When Ms. B. finally confronted her parents and told the truth
some months ago, her father did not deny what had happened, as
she had feared. Rather, he took the opportunity when her mother
was out of earshot to tell Ms. B. "if only you had said no." Her
mother also calls her now, crying, complaining of the destruction
of her marriage. It appears that neither parent was or is as
concerned about the destruction of their daughter as about
maintaining their status quo.
Cults are also incestuous and resemble incestuous families. Like
the incest victim, cult victims have been deceived and exploited,
persuaded to obey and maintain secrecy, by a trusted and
idealized parental/authority figure. Members may be keeping
secrets about the sexual abuse of others, or about their own
molestation. In SYDA, the previous guru was called "Baba," which
means father, and his successor is known as "Gurumayi," which
means Guru Mother. Muktananda had sexual intercourse with many of
the young women who adored him as a divine father. Gurumayi, who
succeeded Muktananda as the head of SYDA, was fully aware that
many young women were seduced or raped in her ashram by other
male authority figures there. Her response has been to protect
the perpetrators and blame the girls and young women, commanding
them to keep the secret. Blake-White states that because the
incest perpetrator is a trusted parent, the victim can be
ambivalent and confused about her own feelings to the point that
she may doubt her own reality.
Because cult members are being violated by their idolized guru
(or the guru is protecting their violators), they may suffer a
similar confusion of reality. This is demonstrated in SYDA, for
example, where many parents accepted the sexual abuse of their
daughters by Muktananda as a gift of divine grace, and devotees
who knew of his sexual activities ignored or rationalized them as
having a divine purpose.
In addition to issues of sexual abuse, other kinds of secrets
that cult members may be asked to keep include illegal practices
such as money laundering, violence toward group enemies, use of
illegal weapons, smuggling, and so on. Members who attempt to
speak out against abuses in the cult may be discredited,
intimidated, or shamed into believing that their own inner
corruption is being projected. Similarly, the incest victim is
told that she provoked her own mistreatment. Loyal members make
every effort to manipulate the guilt mechanisms of those who
criticize the group, with logic-twisting comments such as, "these
destructive things you say are hurting people's spiritual
progress." Similarly, the incest victim is told that revealing
the secret will destroy the family.
When cult members emerge from confusion, and become aware of
having been deceived and betrayed, their rage and despair may be
enormous. Yet cult members also struggle with issues of loyalty
to the perpetrator, and many remain emotionally crippled by
confusion and self-doubt. Like Ms. B. repeatedly reenacting her
trauma, many cultists become disillusioned in one cult only to
join another. Many feel an irresistible pull to return to the
original cult in which they were abused.
Working With Cult Survivors
It should not be surprising that cult survivors, having suffered
traumatic violations such as those described above, often present
with a very broad range of problems. While it is not within the
scope of this paper to review in detail current theories of work
with this population, I will briefly present some of the major
points on the subject. Both Giambalvo and Tobias provide detailed
information on their own work with cult members (also see Hassan;
Langone, 1993). They break down the problem areas for cult
survivors that workers should be aware of as follows:
1. the disarming of internalized mind-control mechanisms, and
education about deception and abuse in the cult (this step is
often accomplished in exit counseling, a specialized,
non-coercive, short-term educational intervention
specifically geared to cult issues);
2. becoming free of fears of being harmed by the cult leaders or
members. Specific fears could include: physical or verbal
assault; release of confidential and potentially embarrassing
information; or "divine retribution" in the form of accidents
or misfortunes. Because of indoctrination, these fears are
often intense at first, and can reach the point of panic
anxiety;
3. management of post-traumatic stress symptoms, particularly
"floating," a dissociative state experienced in connection
with damage from excessive meditation, chanting, mantra
repetition, etc.;
4. grief work in relation to loss and betrayal;
5. issues related to sexual abuse which may have taken place in
the cult;
6. health issues and medical care, including diet, which has
often been protein-deficient;
7. aid in restoring financial stability and planning for the
future, including vocational or educational planning;
8. issues related to sexuality;
9. restoring trust in relationships and managing intimacy, in
the context of friends and family;
10. restoring self-esteem;
11. finding meaning in the experience; addressing spirituality,
values and beliefs.
While the above list is fairly comprehensive, there are crucial
aspects of recovery from trauma that Herman (p. 213) emphasizes
that should not be overlooked when working with cult victims.
These include helping the client to:
1. create a coherent narrative, linked with feeling, from the
memory of the trauma;and
2. reestablish important relationships.
The latter point is particularly relevant for cult members who
may be faced with extreme isolation because they became estranged
from all but other cult members. Restoring pre-cult significant
relationships, especially family relationships, can help provide
desperately needed support for the survivor. Steve Hassan, a
leading exit counselor of cult members and their families,
considers family therapy to be an essential element in recovery
from cults. Before intervening with a cult member, Hassan works
with the member's family to address the systemic problems of
communication and relating that may have contributed to the
alienation of the member. He then assists the family and the cult
member with the complex process of reconnecting. In addition,
families of cult members often suffer terrible anguish and
confusion over the plight of the member.
They, too, often seek counseling to attempt to cope with the
disruption the cult has caused in their lives. The Cult Clinics
in New York and Los Angeles, maintained by Jewish family service
agencies, use individual, couples and group modalities to help
families with members who have become involved in cults.
Cult survivors may benefit enormously from group work. Lorna and
William Goldberg (Goldberg et al.) are social workers who have
run an ongoing support group for cult survivors for more than 15
years, in which former members offer mutual aid to each other as
they readjust to society. The Goldbergs see three stages in
recovery that they help group members to identify and work
through:
1. the stage of self-doubt, confusion, and depression,
2. the reemergence of the pre-cult personality, often
accompanied by actions aimed at exposure of the group, and
3. the stage ofintegration, which includes the ability to accept
positive aspects of the cult experience along with the
negative, and which is marked by a resumption of
goal-oriented activities geared toward productivity and
self-fulfillment.
The Goldbergs find that members who work through these three
stages in the support group are often interested in continuing in
individual psychotherapy, as a means of better understanding the
dynamics that led them to be vulnerable to cult participation.
Individual, group and family therapy may all be helpful modes of
intervention with cult survivors. Ultimately, the most helpful
aspect of treatment for the survivor is an empathic worker who
has knowledge and understanding of issues pertaining to cults.
Aside from information available in the literature on the subject
(see the References section), various organizations exist which
serve as information, treatment and resource centers about cults.
A list of some of these organizations is included at the end of
this paper (see Table 1).
Conclusions
The general public has had a good deal of media exposure in
recent years to child abuse, domestic violence, rape and incest
issues. Cult issues, on the other hand, are generally only
reported when the cult stockpiles arms or nerve gas, or involves
members in mass homicides or suicides. These extreme cults
provide the media with sensational stories, and the public
perception of cults tends to be limited to this type of group.
Yet these groups are the exception, not the rule. Far more
prevalent are the cults that do not have arsenals, or take
suicide pacts, or attempt to take over the world. These less
overtly dangerous groups may appear benign, or eccentric but
harmless. Unfortunately, they are rarely if ever harmless. Cults
form around paranoid, sociopathic leaders who gain power, and
often great wealth, through control and exploitation of members,
whether it be one follower or hundreds of thousands (Hochman;
Tobias). These leaders call themselves gurus, priests, teachers,
trainers, or therapists. Murder and suicide may or may not take
place, but violations similar in essence to battering, rape and
incest do. These traumatic violations are murders of the soul,
secret, invisible murders that never make the headlines.
I recently assisted in an exit counseling, an intervention
requested by a man in his early 40s who wished to extricate his
wife from the cult they had become involved in, which was also
the cult I had been in. The intervention was educational and
entirely voluntary, with the exit counselor speaking from his
extensive knowledge of cults in general, while I offered specific
information about my own experience of SYDA. While the husband
had been persuaded of the cult's fraudulence prior to the
intervention, the wife struggled painfully to integrate the
information she was hearing with the ecstatic epiphanies she had
experienced in the group. Toward the end of the intervention, as
she began to accept the facts about the group, she said, with
great emotion, "I have longed so all my life for a personal,
intimate, experience of a loving God; where am I going to find
that now?" In this poignant moment, it was apparent that the
woman's family of origin, and her marriage, had not been contexts
in which she had been able to experience loving intimacy in ways
that were fulfilling enough. Unmoved by and dissatisfied with the
more traditional faith she had been brought up in, she had placed
her hopes of finding this elusive love in the magic helpers of
the New Age. If it is painfully difficult to feel that one is
truly loved for who one truly is, one may long for a magical,
flawless love -- a love that can instill the conviction, once and
for all, that one is indeed worthy of being loved.
Many clients I have seen have also experienced terrible
disappointments and impediments in their attempts to love and
feel loved, to trust, and to feel fulfilled. They have
experienced betrayal and exploitation at the hands of parents
they idealized. They had to sacrifice themselves to meet the
narcissistic requirements of those whom they depended on. Some
never received the necessary mirroring for a sense of self even
to develop; or they came to define themselves as unlovable and
unwanted. Their search for acceptance and love has been, above
all else, lonely.
For Kohut (1984), the hallmark of therapeutic cure is the
client's sense of security derived from his newfound ability to
elicit empathic resonance from his human surroundings; or in
other words, the ability to feel sustained and nurtured by
different forms of human connectedness. For some, the inability
to even imagine this connectedness leads to addiction,
compulsiveness, isolation and despair. For others, the search for
connectedness leads to enslavement to a guru figure, a magic
helper.
As a social worker, my use of self has been deeply affected by my
experience and understanding of cult abuse. Many of the clients I
have seen in the last two years who come for treatment have
reached the end of their rope. They have depended on magic
helpers -- drugs, sex, food, and many others -- to the point
where they feel themselves on the brink of self-annihilation.
They want to find a way out of their enslavement, but the
alternative freedom is unfathomable. They want assurance to know
that if they relinquish the magic, and find themselves faced with
the terror of meaninglessness and aloneness, their pain will not
be endless and unendurable.
Among the many tasks I might have in helping these clients, an
essential task I perceive is to be with them -- to help them to
feel less alone, as they find the courage to live through the
pain of what they have not dared to face. If I can help them feel
less alone, then, gradually, I can try to help them make sense of
their suffering. This is the step in recovery from trauma that
Herman refers to when she says, "finally, the person has
reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that
encompasses the story of the trauma" (p. 213).
As I have struggled to construct a coherent system of meaning and
belief about my own traumatic experience in a religious cult, my
social work education and field work have provided me with a
sustaining connection to the knowledge and values of a profession
which I embrace and feel embraced by. It is my hope that what I
have learned may be of help to others.
DIRECT COMMENTS ABOUT THIS ESSAY TO: Daniel Shaw Press HERE to
Email, press HERE for Website.
Table 1: Resource Organizations
Organizations
American Family Foundation (AFF) Director: Michael D. Langone
P.O. Box 2265 Bonita Springs, FL 33959 (212) 249-7693
The Cult Clinic, c/o The Jewish Board of Children and Family
Services, 120 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, (212) 632-4640
Counseling Services Cult Clinic and Hotline Jewish Board of
Family and Children's Services Director: Arnold Marcowitz, MSW
120 W. 57th St. New York, NY 10019 (212) 632-4640
Cult Clinic Jewish Family Service 6505 Wilshire Blvd., 6th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90048 (213) 852-1234
Wellspring Retreat & Resource Center Director: Paul R. Martin
P.O. Box 67 Albany, OH 45710 (614) 698-6277
REFERENCES
Acton, L. (1887). Letter to Bishop Mandell-Creighton. In
Bartlett, J. (1980).
Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little Brown and Company.
Addis, M., Schulman-Miller, J., Lightman, M. (1984). The cult
clinic helps families in crisis. Social Casework, (65)9, pp.
515-22.
Becker, E. (1973). Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
Bell, J. (1995). Traumatic event debriefing: service delivery
designs and the role of social work. Social Work, (40)1, pp.
36-43.
Berger, P. (1967). The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday.
Blake-White, J. and Kline, C. (1985). Treating the dissociative
process in adult victims of childhood incest. Social Casework,
(66)7, pp. 394-402.
Chiaramonte, J. (1992). And the war goes on. Social Work, (37)5,
pp. 469-70.
Cialdini, R. (1984). Influence: The New Psychology of Modern
Persuasion. New York: Quill.
Clifford, M. (1994). Social work treatment with children,
adolescents, and families exposed to religious and satanic cults.
Social Work in Health Care, (20)2, pp. 35-55.
Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: toward a historically
situated psychology. American Psychologist, (45)5, pp. 599-611.
Ellenson, G. (1989). Horror, rage, and defenses in the symptoms
of female sexual abuse survivors. Social Casework, (70)10, pp.
589-96.
Erikson, E. (1980). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., Inc.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H., and Schachter, S., (1964). When
Prophecy Fails. New York: Harper and Row.
Fromm, E. (1965). Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon.
Garvey, K. (1993). The importance of information in preparing for
exit counselling: a case study. In Langone, M. (Ed.) (1993).
Recovery From Cults. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Giambalvo, C. (1993). Post-cult problems: an exit counselor's
perspective. In Langone, M. (Ed.) (1993). Recovery From Cults.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Goldberg, L. (1993). Guidelines for therapists. In Langone, M.
(Ed.) (1993).
Recovery From Cults. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Goldberg, L. & Goldberg, W. (1982). Group work with former
cultists. Social Work, (27)2.
Goldberg, W. (1993). Guidelines for support groups. In Langone,
M. (Ed.) (1993).
Recovery From Cults. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Gramsci, A. Letters From Prison. New York: The Noonday Press.
Graziano, R. (1992). Treating women incest survivors: a bridge
between "cumulative trauma" and "post-traumatic stress." Social
Work in Health Care, (17)1, pp. 69-85.
Halperin, D. (Ed.) (1983). Psychodynamic Perspectives on
Religion, Sect and Cult. New York: John Wright.
Harris, L. (1994). O Guru, Guru, Guru. The New Yorker, Nov. 14,
1994, pp. 92- 109.
Hassan, S. (1990). Combatting Cult Mind Control. Rochester, VT:
Park Street Press
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Hinkle, I. and Wolff, H. (1976). Communist interrogation and
indoctrination.
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. (76), pp. 115-74.
Hochman, J. (1990). Miracle, mystery and authority: the triangle
of cult indoctrination. Psychiatric Annals, (20)4, pp. 179-187.
Kliger, R. (1994). Somatization: social control and illness
production in a religious cult. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,
(18)2, pp. 215-245.
Kohut, H. (1969). On leadership. In Ornstein, Ed. (1990). The
Search for the Self,
Vol. 3. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, Inc.
_________. (1984). How does Analysis Cure? Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Langley, M. (1982). Post-traumatic stress disorders among Vietnam
combat veterans. Social Casework, (63)10, pp. 593-98.
Langone, M.D. (Ed.) (1993). Recovery From Cults. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.
Langone, M., Chambers, W. (1991). Outreach to ex-cult members:
the question of terminology. Cultic Studies Journal, (8)2, pp.
134-150.
Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.
Lifton, R.J. (1987). The Future of Immortality and Other Essays
for a Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books.
Martin, P. (1993). Post-cult recovery: assessment and
rehabilitation. In Langone, M. (Ed.) (1993). Recovery From Cults.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Martin, P., Langone, M. (1992). Post-cult symptoms as measured by
the MCMI before and after residential treatment. Cultic Studies
Journal, (9)2, pp. 219-250.
Marton, F. (1988). Defenses: invincible and vincible. Clinical
Social Work Journal, (16)2, pp. 143-55.
McNew, J. and Abell, N. (1995). Posttraumatic stress
symptomatology: similarities and differences between Vietnam
veterans and adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Social
Work, (40)1, pp. 115-126.
Morse, E. & Morse, J. (1987). Toward a theory of therapy with
cultic victims. American Journal of Psychotherapy, (41)4.
Muktananda, Swami (1978). The Play of Consciousness. San
Francisco: Harper and Row.
Patten, S. Gatz, Y., Jones, B., and Thomas, D. (1989).
Posttraumatic stress disorder and the treatment of sexual abuse.
Social Work, (34)3, pp. 197-203.
Rodarmor, W. (1983). The secret life of Swami Muktananda.
CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter, 1983.
Schein, E. (1956). The indoctrination program for prisoners of
war. Psychiatry, (19), pp. 148-172.
Silver, S. and Iacano, C. (1986). Symptom groups and family
patterns of Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In C.R. Figley (Ed.), Trauma and its Wake, (Vol. 2, pp. 78-96).
New York: Brunner/Mazel.
Singer, S. (1979). Coming out of the cults. Psychology Today,
(12), pp. 72-82.
Singer, M. and Ofshe, R. (1986). Attacks on peripheral versus
central elements of self and the impact of thought reforming
techniques. Cultic Studies Journal, (3)1, pp. 3-24.
_______________________. (1990). Thought reform programs and the
production of psychiatric casualties. Psychiatric Annals, (20),4,
pp. 188-193.
Tobias, M. (1993). In Langone, M. (Ed.), (1993). Recovery from
Cults. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Tobias, M. and Lalich, J. (1994). Captive Hears, Captive Minds:
Freedom and Recovery from Cults and Abusive Relationships.
Alameda, CA: Hunter House.
Winnicott, D. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false
self. In Winnicott, D. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the
Facilitating Environment. Madison, CT: International Universities
Press, Inc.
Woods, M. and Hollis, F. (1990). Casework: A Psychosocial Theory.
New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Zimbardo, P. (1988). Psychology and Life. Illinois: Scott,
Foresman and Co.
Zweig, P. (1976). Three Journeys: An Automythology. New York:
Basic Books.
EOF
|
The Arcane Archive is copyright by the authors cited.
Send comments to the Arcane Archivist: tyaginator@arcane-archive.org. |
|
Did you like what you read here? Find it useful?
Then please click on the Paypal Secure Server logo and make a small donation to the site maintainer for the creation and upkeep of this site. |
|
|
The ARCANE ARCHIVE is a large domain,
organized into a number of sub-directories, each dealing with a different branch of religion, mysticism, occultism, or esoteric knowledge. Here are the major ARCANE ARCHIVE directories you can visit: |
|
interdisciplinary:
geometry, natural proportion, ratio, archaeoastronomy
mysticism: enlightenment, self-realization, trance, meditation, consciousness occultism: divination, hermeticism, amulets, sigils, magick, witchcraft, spells religion: buddhism, christianity, hinduism, islam, judaism, taoism, wicca, voodoo societies and fraternal orders: freemasonry, golden dawn, rosicrucians, etc. |
SEARCH THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
There are thousands of web pages at the ARCANE ARCHIVE. You can use ATOMZ.COM
to search for a single word (like witchcraft, hoodoo, pagan, or magic) or an
exact phrase (like Kwan Yin, golden ratio, or book of shadows):
|
OTHER ESOTERIC AND OCCULT SITES OF INTEREST
Southern
Spirits: 19th and 20th century accounts of hoodoo,
including slave narratives & interviews
|