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Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Scientology was also very well known. Since the early 1990s, however, it has received much less media attention. Not because of a lack of public interest, but because of Scientology’s bottomless pockets and litigious nature. In fact, Scientology now holds the title of one of the most litigious organizations in the history of the world.
In the years since the first edition of Combating Cult Mind Control was published, some of the larger mind control groups spent millions of dollars to retain top law firms, public relations agencies, and private investigators. Some of these professionals are paid handsomely to threaten former group members; to underwrite significant disinformation campaigns; to undermine the fundamental human rights of current members; and to defend the mind control organizations against prosecution for blatantly criminal acts.
I will often use the terms mind control and undue influence.
Both refer to the process of controlling people by mentally hijacking their rational thought processes.
But the word deprogramming continues to be problematic for me to feel comfortable using as a term. People don’t erase people’s mental hard drives. Instead, I give people a toolkit for helping them make their own decisions and taking back their lives. I help people detect and remove the virus of mind control on their own. Reclaiming one’s power is something they ultimately need to do themselves, for themselves, not something I do to them.
The full name for what I teach and do is the Strategic Interactive Approach. A mouthful. What does it mean? It’s a customized, sophisticated, complex systems-theory approach, whereby I create a unique and ethical influence campaign to help individuals acquire a set of experiences and realizations that help them remove many of the invisible chains of mind control.
The goals of every SIA effort are to empower the individual to be their own person: to think critically, to evaluate, and to reality-test and to exercise their own free will.
Any citizen can profit from seeing how vulnerable to influence we all are and learning that mind control exists—that it is not a myth.
Take some time off (if possible, a minimum of a few weeks) and go to a restful place, away from other group members, and gather more information from other sources. Remember, if the group is a legitimate, valid organization, it will stand up to any scrutiny. It is far better to find out the truth now than to invest more time, money, and energy, only to discover years later that the group is very different from its idealized image.
Truth is stronger than lies, and love is stronger than fear. If you are involved with a religious organization, keep in mind that God created us with free will, and that no truly spiritual organization would ever use deception or mind control, or take away your freedom.
Don’t jump the gun and tell the person that you have bought this book or are reading it.
Be sure to also read my book Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, which will offer a great deal of further information and guidance.
Instead of sounding the alarm, adopt a curious yet concerned posture. Try to avoid confrontations and ultimatums.
Get as many concerned friends and relatives involved as you can. A strong first step will be for them to read this book, too. If everyone is prepared, they will not be caught off guard.
I am now developing programs to train mental health professionals, former cult members, and activists on mind control, undue influence, and cult psychology.
Usually, I am able to assist a person in making a dramatic recovery, accessing and reclaiming their authentic identity, or, at least, understanding that they have a better life ahead of them if they decide to leave the group.
It is fairly easy to advise people about what to watch out for. It is much harder and far more complicated to help someone leave a cult. That’s why the best way to deal with this problem and damage done to people in destructive cults is to “inoculate” people through education about cult mind control—particularly helping people learn how undue influence works.
Orwell depicted a world where “thought police” maintain complete control over people’s mental and emotional lives, and where it is a crime to act or think independently, or even to fall in love. Unfortunately, such places do exist right now, all over the world. They are mind control cults.
In these groups, basic respect for the individual is secondary to the leader’s whims and ideology. People are manipulated and coerced to think, feel, and behave in a single “right way.” Individuals become totally dependent on the group and lose the ability to act or think on their own.
I define any group that uses unethical mind control to pursue its ends—whether religious, political, or commercial—as a destructive cult.
The popular view of cults is that they prey on the disaffected and the vulnerable—losers, loners, outcasts, and people who simply don’t fit in. But the truth is very different. In fact, most cult recruits are normal people with ordinary backgrounds—and many are highly intelligent.
the Moon organization waged a successful public relations campaign, culminating in 1989 claiming that the term “Moonie” is one of religious and racial bigotry. It has since fallen into general disuse. So much so, that when I speak to college classes, few have even heard of the Moonies. But I remember when we wore tee shirts in the style of “I Love New York”—but emblazoned with the slogan: “I’m a Moonie and I Love It!”5
Members are subjected to workshops that thoroughly indoctrinate them in church beliefs,11 and typically undergo a conversion experience in which they surrender to the group. As a result, they become totally dependent upon the group for financial and emotional support, and lose the ability to act independently of it. Under these conditions, members are required to work long hours; exist on little sleep; eat boring junk food, sometimes for weeks on end; and endure numerous hardships for the sake of their “spiritual growth.”
If they snap from the pressure and begin to challenge their leaders’ authority or otherwise fall out of line, they are accused of being influenced by Satan and are subjected to even greater pressure in the form of re-indoctrination.
There are many different forms of mind control. Most people think of brainwashing almost as soon as they hear the term. But that is only one specific form. Mind control is any system of influence that disrupts an individual’s authentic identity and replaces it with a false, new one.
If they leave, those born into destructive groups are often shunned as evil and as “unbelievers” or “apostates”. Often, they are vilified and lies are told about them to members to keep them “faithful” and afraid to speak with defectors to hear their side of the story. Family members and friends are typically ordered to reject them and often have no contact with them.
Some members of destructive cults suffer physical abuse during their involvement, in the form of beatings or rape, while others simply suffer the abuse of long hours of grueling, monotonous work—15 to 18 hours a day, year in and year out. In essence, they become slaves with few or no resources, personal or financial. They become trapped in the group, which does everything it can to keep them, as long as they are productive. When they fall sick or are no longer an asset, they are often kicked out.
It is also important to recognize that there are different kinds of cults and they often operate quite differently. Different cults appeal to the many different human impulses: such as desire to belong; to improve oneself and others; to understand the meaning and purpose of life.
Religious cults are the most well known. They often have a charismatic leader and operate with religious dogma. Political cults, often in the news, are organized around a simplistic political theory, sometimes with a religious cloak. Psychotherapy/educational cults, which have enjoyed great popularity, purport to give the participant “insight” and “enlightenment.” Commercial cults play on people’s desires to make money. They typically promise riches but actually enslave people, and compel them to turn money over to the group.
These people related to each other like brothers and sisters and clearly felt they were part of one global family. They seemed very happy with their lives. After a month of feeling depressed, I was invigorated by all that positive energy.
He explained that Satan controlled the world after he had deceived Adam and Eve into disobeying God. Now God’s children had to deceive Satan’s children into following God’s will. He said, “Stop thinking from fallen man’s viewpoint.
33I was instantly drawn to him. He struck me as having a very spiritual, humble character. I wanted to learn everything I could from him.
Once he actually told the leaders that if we remained faithful and carried out our missions well, we would each be President of our own country one day. We too would have Mercedes Benz automobiles, personal secretaries, and bodyguards. By this point, I was encouraged to decide what country I might like to run when Unificationism took over the world.
was instructed to drop out of school, quit my job, and move into the center. My hair was cut short and I started to wear a suit and tie.
“When we take power in America,” he said, “we will have to amend the Constitution and make it a capital offense for anyone to have sexual relations with anyone other than the person assigned to them.” He explained that any sex that was not God-centered was the greatest sin a person could commit. If a person could not overcome temptation, it would be better to take away their physical body. We would be doing them a favor, and make it easier to restore them to righteousness in the spirit world. I thought of all the married people not in the movement who were destroying their spiritual bodies by
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Moon had an interesting, fairly typical narcissistic way of behaving—nice then nasty, double bind of motivating leaders. He would be nice to us at first, buying us gifts and taking us out for dinner or a movie. Then he would bring us back to his estate and yell and scream about how poorly we were performing.
We all felt a great deal of pressure to recruit a minimum of at least one new person per member per month, and all members had to report their activities each night to their central figure.
Fear of the outside world, particularly of our parents, was drilled into our minds.
Since we thought saving the world from evil and establishing God’s kingdom on Earth was the most important effort on the planet, we didn’t see it as “real” lying.
As a committed member, I did thought-stopping, sang “holy songs,” chanted and prayed silently to keep from hearing them. After all, I had been told all about deprogramming by leaders of the group. I wasn’t going to allow my “faith in God” to be broken by Satan.
As a member, I had been told many times that it was better to die or kill than to leave the church.
The former members were not at all what I expected. I assumed, because of my training, that they would be cold, calculating, unspiritual, money hungry, and abusive. They were warm, caring, idealistic, and spiritually minded, and they treated me with respect. 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.
I had the first negative thought about Moon in over two years: “What a snake!” That was it. Over two years of programming started collapsing like an elaborate house of cards. It had all been built upon one belief, that Moon was God’s greatest chosen man in all history—the Messiah. But if he was a liar, that meant he wasn’t trustworthy and wasn’t of God.
I missed the excitement of feeling that what I was doing was cosmically important. I missed the feeling of power that single-mindedness brought.
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 earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology from Cambridge College in 1985, allowing me to begin to receive training from experts in the field of clinical hypnosis.
I found that people who were able to walk away without intervention were those who had maintained contact with people outside the destructive cult. When people could maintain communication with outsiders, valuable information that could change their life could penetrate cult-constructed mental walls.
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.
Some are attempting to influence United States foreign policy by lobbying covertly for foreign powers.50 The Moonies, for example, were a major supplier of money and guns to the Contra forces in Nicaragua.51 They also invested between $70 and $100 million in Uruguay,52 in a failed attempt to turn that country into the cult’s first theocratic state—a springboard from which to pursue its declared goal: “to conquer and subjugate the world.”53
In the United States, cults exert tremendous economic clout by buying up huge blocks of real estate and taking over hundreds of businesses. Some enter corporations under the pretense of offering executive leadership training, while harboring a covert agenda of taking over the company. Some seek to influence the judicial system by spending millions of dollars annually on top attorneys to bend the law to their will.
