Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults

by Steven Hassan

All I could think was “Father, forgive me” and “Crush Satan.” Over and over I chanted those lines to try to focus my mind on God and beg His forgiveness. I thought what had happened was “spiritual”—that I had been tested by Satan in the spirit world and had been defeated, and that this was what caused the accident, not the fact that I hadn’t slept in days.

The accident, however, began breaking the Moonies’ hold over me in several ways. First, I could sleep, eat, and rest. Second, I could finally see my beloved sister. Third, I could slow down and think, being away from the group’s constant reinforcement.

I actually believed it was better to do that than betray the Messiah! As a member, I had been told many times that it was better to die or kill than to leave the church.

That was the first time since I had joined that I allowed myself to think—for even a moment—from his perspective. I felt his pain, his anguish and worry, as well as his parental love.

As former members, they should have been miserable and guilt-ridden. They weren’t. They were very happy that they were out and free to lead their lives as they were doing. All of this was very perplexing.

The former members brought out psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and discussed the techniques and processes used by the Communist Chinese (the enemy!) to brainwash people during the 1950s. It became obvious to me that the processes we used in the Moonies were almost identical. A big question for me began to emerge,

That was it. Over two years of programming started collapsing like an elaborate house of cards.

I cried for a very long time. Someone returned and gave me a cold compress for my forehead. My head pounded, and I felt like a large throbbing open wound. That night was the most painful time of my whole life.

I felt as though I had awakened from a surreal dream and wasn’t sure what was reality—or as if I had stepped off a skyscraper and was headed toward the Earth, but I kept falling and never hit the ground.

I was overwhelmed by many emotions. I was sad and missed my friends in the group, particularly my “spiritual children,” the people I recruited. I missed the excitement of feeling that what I was doing was cosmically important. I missed the feeling of power that single-mindedness brought. Now, all I knew was that my leg was broken. I was broken. I felt tremendous embarrassment about having fallen for a cult.

For me, the burning issue was how the Moonies had ever managed to convert me and indoctrinate me so thoroughly that I could no longer think for myself.

I read everything I could get my hands on about brainwashing, attitude change, persuasion, thought reform, mind control, undue influence, and cults.

At first, the act of reading itself was extremely difficult. I had read only Moon literature for more than two years. I had trouble concentrating and was sometimes spaced out for long periods, not comprehending what I was reading. I was told that the mind is like a “muscle” and would regain its power through exercise. I forced myself to look up words in the dictionary. I forced myself to read line by line until I wor...

At that time, although I was no longer a Moonie, I was still thinking somewhat in black and white terms: good versus evil, us versus them.

I was asked to speak at Senator Robert Dole’s public hearing on cults, on Capitol Hill, in 1979. But at the last moment, all the ex-cult members invited to speak were taken off the program due to political pressure from cults.

After that, Moon’s political influence began to grow. When Ronald Reagan became president, Moon-controlled groups began funding the New Right political movement in Washington.

Eventually I realized that NLP was amoral. It depended entirely on the conscience and good will of the practitioner. This was not too much of an issue with a licensed therapist who had strict ethical guidelines. But it was another matter entirely when practitioners were salespeople or corporate executives who were interested in power, money, or sex. I left my association with NLP forever.

I found that people who were able to walk away without intervention were those who had maintained contact with people outside the destructive cult.

I realized that he had been able to invite me to look at myself from his perspective, and re-examine my own information from his viewpoint. In analyzing my own experience, I recognized that what helped me most was my own internal voice and my own first-hand experiences, buried beneath all the emotional suppression and the thought-stopping rituals of chanting and praying. Underneath, the real me wasn’t dead.

Briefly, a destructive cult is a group that violates its members’ rights and damages them through the abusive techniques of unethical mind control. It distinguishes itself from a normal, healthy social or religious group by subjecting its members to systematic control of behavior, information, thoughts and emotions (BITE) to keep them dependent and obedient.

I am extremely concerned about protecting personal liberty and defending the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom. I fully support people’s rights to believe as they choose, no matter how unorthodox their beliefs.

Modern cults have virtually unlimited popular appeal. For the sake of brevity, from here on I will refer to any group in which mind control is used in destructive ways as simply a cult.

Of course, even mainline religious organizations can have destructive aspects, use undue influence, or become destructive cults. Cults can arise within major religions, too.

One technique widely popular at that time was the “hot seat” which was first used by the drug rehab cult, Synanon.

People were introduced to certain techniques for inducing hypnotic trance—but often without adequate consideration of the ethical aspects of working with the subconscious mind.

Unscrupulous persons began using them to make money and gain power by manipulating a coterie of followers. (My earlier discussion of Neuro-Linguistic Programming provides one common example.)

These cults use many basic mind control techniques to provide participants with a peak experience—which is to say hypnotic euphoria, although I don’t think that Maslow would describe such events as ‘peak experiences’.

Commercial cults believe in the dogma of greed. They deceive and manipulate people to work for little or no pay in the hope of getting rich. Many such pyramid-scheme or multi-level marketing organizations promise big money, but in fact fleece their victims. They also destroy their victims’ self-esteem so they will not complain.

Indeed, the sheer number of sincere, committed members whom a newcomer meets is probably far more convincing than any doctrine or structure.

Recruiters are taught to size up each newcomer, and package and sell the cult in whatever way is most likely to succeed.

For the most part, these people were “wide open,” and often recruited themselves. It was always amazing to me to realize how many people told us they had just been praying to God to reveal to them what He wanted them to do with their lives. Many believed they were spiritually led to meet one of our members. With them it was simply a matter of sharing our testimonies and we would convince them they had been led to us by God.

The recruiter’s work is made considerably easier because most people have no idea how deep the pockets of major cults can be.

Why is there so much complacency about the threat of mind control cults? First, accepting that mind control can be effectively used on almost anybody challenges the age-old notion that human beings are rational, and responsible for (and in control of) all their actions. Such a worldview does not allow for any concept of mind control.

Second, we all have a belief in our own invulnerability.

Third, the processes of influence start from the moment we are born, so it’s easy to take the position that everything is mind control.

We don’t like feeling that events are out of control, so we put reality into an order that makes sense to us. When we hear that something bad has happened to someone (perhaps being mugged or raped), we usually try to find a reason to explain why that person was a victim.

What do phobias have to do with cult groups and mind control? In some cults, members are systematically made to be phobic about ever leaving the group. Today’s cults know how to effectively implant vivid negative images deep within members’ unconscious minds, making it impossible for them to even conceive of ever being happy and successful outside of the group.

Our beliefs serve as the major means of processing information—and of determining our behavior. We have a certain degree of conscious control, but most matters are controlled unconsciously. The conscious mind has a narrow range of attention. The unconscious does all the rest,

The unconscious mind is the primary manager of information.

Adults can easily be age-regressed to a time when they had little or no critical faculties. As children, we were helpless and dependent on our parents as the ultimate authority figures.

Put a person in a sensory deprivation chamber, and within minutes he will start to hallucinate and become incredibly suggestible. Likewise, put a person into a situation where his senses are overloaded with non-coherent information, and the mind will go “numb” as a protective mechanism. It gets confused and overwhelmed, and critical faculties no longer work properly. It is in this weakened state that people become very open to suggestion.

When people are subjected to a mind control process, most do not have any frame of reference for the experience, and consequently they often accept the frame of reference given to them by the group.

Like it or not, everyone is vulnerable to mind control. Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone needs affection and attention. Everyone is looking for something better in life: more wisdom, more knowledge, more money, more status, more meaning, better relationships, or better health. These basic human qualities and needs are exactly what cult recruiters prey upon.

It is important to remember that, for the most part, people don’t join cults. Cults recruit people.

The recruiter starts to learn all about the potential recruit—their hopes, dreams, fears, relationships, job and interests. The more information the recruiter can elicit, the greater their opportunity to manipulate the person. The recruiter then strategically plans how to bring the person into the group,

Once a person joins a destructive cult, for the first few weeks or months they typically enjoy a “honeymoon phase.”

Life in a destructive cult is, for the most part, a life of sacrifice, pain and fear.

People indoctrinated to perform excessive (hours-long) meditation or chanting techniques every day can become psychologically and physiologically addicted to the mind control technique. Such mind-stilling generates strong releases of brain chemicals which cause not only a dissociated mental state but also a “high” similar to that created by drugs and other addictions. Some former members who have used these techniques for several years report a wide variety of deleterious side effects, including severe headaches, involuntary muscle spasms and diminution of cognitive faculties like memory, concentration, and decision-making ability.

People are made to feel that any medical problem is the result of some personal or spiritual weakness.

Some cults tell members that going to a doctor would show their faithlessness.