cult recovery 101

Greeks Seek Strength in the Powers of a Revered Monk to Predict Events


Wall Street Journal
Gordon Fairclough

Elder Paisios Expected Travails; A Skeptical Facebook Page Draws Ire

December 3, 2012


SOUROTI, Greece—Legend has it that nearly three decades ago, a bearded Orthodox Christian mystic visiting here made an unsettling prediction: Greece in the future would experience a “great disruption and confusion,” followed by hunger and political turmoil.


Believers say this grim vision of Elder Paisios, an ascetic monk who died in 1994, was actually a prescient glimpse of the upheaval now gripping this debt-racked country—helping fuel a surge of interest in the Orthodox holy man by Greeks struggling to make sense of a brutal financial crisis.


Elder Paisios, who spent much of his adult life as a hermit on the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos in northeastern Greece, has become a popular sensation—with tales of his prognostications and miracles he is said to have performed posted online and recounted in popular books.


On Saturdays, hundreds of pilgrims line up at Elder Paisios’s gravesite here, waiting their turn to kneel, pray and kiss the wooden cross that marks his final resting place. They ask for help finding jobs, paying bills and surviving a downturn that has upended their lives.


“Paisios predicted many things, and his prophecies are now coming true,” said Costas Katsaounis, a 41-year-old military officer on a visit to the shrine. “He foresaw the crisis. But he also said it would get better, that we will overcome and prosperity will return. He’s helped a lot of people.”


Elder Paisios’s fame in some ways echoes that of Michel de Notredame, better known as Nostradamus, a 16th-century French apothecary who believers say foretold everything from the rise of Hitler to the terror attacks of Sept. 11.


“Figures like Paisios represent the shaman, the magician of the tribe,” said Alexandra Koronaiou, a sociologist at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. “They are the incarnation of a transcendental, invisible power.”


With Greece’s economy in the fifth year of a grinding recession that is expected to deepen further in 2013, unemployment above 25% and even middle-class families struggling to feed their children, many Greeks feel like their society is teetering on the brink of collapse, and they are seeking solace.


“When there is an event that brings an entire country to its knees, people look for a religious explanation,” said Vasilios Makrides, a religious-studies professor and specialist on Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. “They are seeking support from the supernatural.”


That is driving a fresh boom in all things Paisios. The elder’s wizened and bearded face, peering out from below a black cap, adorns devotional banners and cards inscribed with inspirational messages.


Bookstores stock dozens of Paisios-related titles, from books detailing his spiritual teachings to volumes filled with his commentary on everything from the coming of the apocalypse to Greece’s retaking of Constantinople, once the seat of Byzantine emperors and now Istanbul.


A woman prayed at the mystic’s grave in Souroti.

“They sell like crazy,” said Ionnis Aivaliotis, who works at the Zoe religious bookstore in downtown Athens. “Even nonbelievers are starting to read them. It gives people courage to withstand what’s coming.”


There is a Paisios diet guide—he was very thin—and a kids’ book, “Once Upon a Time, Children, There Was Elder Paisios.”


Over the past two years, conservative newspaper Dimokratia has sold 350,000 copies of Paisios-related titles—from compilations of his prophecies to his views on education. Other newspapers carry accounts of his reputed miracles.


Elder Paisios, born Arsenios Eznepedis in central Anatolia in 1924, is part of a long tradition of monastic spirituality that believers say confers a power of divination—to see things others cannot, to interpret signs and predict the course of events.


Even before his death in 1994, he was well known in religious circles, drawing the faithful to Mount Athos for spiritual guidance and advice. Many expect that he will eventually be canonized. (A church spokesman declined to comment.)


But the recent increase in attention has prompted a backlash from skeptics and drawn cautions from some in the Greek Orthodox Church hierarchy.


“People are looking for somewhere to turn,” said the Rev. Vasilios Havatzas, head of the church’s charitable operations in Athens. “But some are overreacting. They are making him into some kind of prophet,” he said, adding: “That doesn’t mean everything he said is right.”


But in a sign of the broad support for Elder Paisios, Greek police arrested 27-year-old Phillipos Loizos for creating a Facebook page that poked fun at Greeks’ belief in the miracles and prognostications of the late monk. He was charged with blasphemy and insulting religion. The blasphemy charge was later withdrawn.


Police received thousands of complaints about the page on the social-networking site for Elder Pastitsios, a play on the monk’s name. Pastitsio is a traditional baked pasta dish similar to lasagna. An ultranationalist lawmaker condemned the page in Parliament.

Mr. Loizos said he was using satire to criticize the commercialization of the monk and his message.


Many of Elder Paisios’s purported prophecies resonate. “The people will be so disappointed by the politicians of the two big parties, that they will get sick of them,” is one that rings true in an era when voter support for the country’s two mainstream parties, blamed for the crisis, has dropped sharply.


Some of the elder’s reported remarks hint at dark conspiracies—among them that the world is ruled secretly by a cabal of five people. He also predicted national triumphs for Greece, saying that Greeks would defeat Turkey, rule Constantinople and take part of Albania.


“Holy people like Elder Paisios are born once in a thousand years,” said Nikolaos Zournatzoglou, who has compiled three books of the elder’s pronouncements. “He was a gift from God and the Virgin Mary for humanity.”


In Souroti, about 20 miles from the northeastern Greek city of Thessaloniki, busloads of pilgrims arrived one Saturday recently to see the elder’s grave. Young and old, they prayed and took pictures. Some plucked a leaf of basil from a plant growing near the simple cross at his head.


Afterward in a gift shop in the basement of the rough-hewn stone church, visitors bought postcards, plaques with images of Elder Paisios and books by and about him, along with icons, crosses and other religious paraphernalia.


“There’s a lot of uncertainty now. We don’t know what is going to happen,” said Anastasia Constantinou, a waitress visiting the shrine who said her family has had to cut back on meat, on driving their car and on other normal activities as their income has fallen amid the downturn.


“People find consolation in faith,” Ms. Constantinou, 32, said. “Even though everyday life is difficult, Paisios gives strength to people. He helps them hold on.”


Write to Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared December 3, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Greeks Seek Strength in the Powers of a Revered Monk.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578143271912956476.html?KEYWORDS=paisios

Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network (RETIRN)

Since 1983, the Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network (RETIRN) has been providing counseling, forensic (legal), consultation, information and referral services to individuals and families adversely affected by high demand groups, manipulative and totalistic social, political, transformational and/or religious movements, such as:
  • destructive cults  (e.g., religious, political, therapy, marketing cults).
  • mass therapies (e.g., large group awareness trainings).
  • Satanism/Occultism (“black” magic).
  • certain “New Age” groups that engage in harmful and/or deceptive practices.


We are proud of our association with the International Cultic Studies Association (formerly American Family Foundation), the premier cult research and education organization.


RETIRN services include:

  • Family counseling: help in deciding what action to take when a loved one is involved with a cult.
  • Re-entry therapy: individual, family, and group psychotherapy for former cultists and their families.
  • Forensic examinations on issues related to destructive cultism (including child custody, competency, and infliction of psychological distress).
  • Consultation and training to mental health professionals and agencies, educational and religious organizations.
  • Public speaking: highly experienced and stimulating speakers for civic groups, clubs, and other organizations.
  • Cult-sensitive psychological testing & diagnostic evaluations: for assistance in treatment planning.
  • Information and referral to additional sources of support and help, including legal referrals.
  • Exit counseling: noncoercive, voluntary information and counseling sessions for current members of totalistic groups. We are proud of our relationships with recognized, competent, and ethical cult consultants and exit-counselors.

RETIRN Affiliated Consultants include:

  • Steven Eisenberg,
  • Patrick Ryan, 
  • Joe Kelly,
  • Carol Giambalvo, and 
  • David Clark.

Website

Contact:

RETIRN Associates are consultants, psychotherapists, and counselors, many of whom themselves are former cultists or have been exposed to destructive cults or other coercive influence techniques. They have specialized training and/or experience working with people who have been harmed by individuals and groups that utilize powerful manipulative techniques to coerce sudden and rapid changes in personality, behavior and/or beliefs (usually without informed consent). RETIRN assists cultists and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

113 E. Greenwood Avenue

Lansdowne, PA 19050
(610) 622-3109

409 Nottingham Road
Newark, DE 19711
(302) 368-9136 & (866) 538-9048 fax

70 Merthyr Road
Pontypridd, Wales CF37 4DD
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1443-400456

Special Program for Parents of SGAs (those who are born and raised in cultic groups)

The goal of the program will be to offer an environment in which parents can give one another mutual counsel and support.

Parents will have an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships resulting from multi-generational cult involvement.

When: 

Sunday afternoon, April 14, 2013 from 2 pm to 5 pm.

Where:
Englewood, NJ (directions to be sent to attendees)

Facilitators:
Fees:
There is no cost for the program; however, participants will be expected to help ICSA help others by becoming a Web member of ICSA. 

Note:
Space is very limited and attendance will be first come first served.  

Register:
Contact ICSA: 1-239-514-3081; mail@icsamail.com

Christian group makes legal appeal for charity status

Guardian
James Gray

A legal appeal will decide if the Charity Commission was right to deny charitable status to the Brethren movement – the case hinges on whether its doctrine and practices are compatible with public benefit

January 3, 2013

Last month saw the formal start of a charity tribunal appeal that could redefine the place of religion in the charity sector. The case – which has been the subject of increasingly acrimonious debate in parliament and the media – concerns the Charity Commission’s decision not to grant charitable status to the Preston Down Trust, which runs a meeting hall for south Devon’s Plymouth Brethren community.

Founded in the 19th century, the Brethren are a Christian movement whose lifestyle is characterised by daily bible study, an emphasis on traditional family roles and a rejection of radio, TV and cinema. Their doctrine of “separation” limits time spent with outsiders, but adherents say the popular perception that the community lives in isolation, severing all ties with those who choose to leave – hence the “Exclusive Brethren” epithet – is an outdated stereotype.

The case hinges on whether the doctrine and practices of the Brethren are compatible with the public benefit requirement of charity law. Until the Charities Act 2006 there was a presumption that “advancement of religion” was in itself a public benefit, but the act removed that presumption and required religious charities – just like those with other legally defined charitable purposes – to demonstrate explicitly how their activities made a positive contribution to the community.

In a recent letter to the Commons public administration select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the regulation of the charity sector and the 2006 act, the commission was forced to explain why the Druid Network had charitable status while the Brethren did not. The commission said this was because the former did not support events or organisations that were “exclusive”.

The commission has previously drawn on case law developed before 2006 to resolve such questions. But in its letter to the trust, the regulator said the act’s introduction – and the tribunal’s recent assessment of public benefit in relation to private schools – meant this aspect of charity law was now unclear. “The evidence is relation to any beneficial impact on the wider public is perhaps marginal and insufficient to satisfy us as to the benefit to the community,” it said.

The letter outlined two specific concerns: first, that the trust may not provide “meaningful access to participate in public worship” and secondly, that the supposedly rigid disciplinary practices of the Brethren, and the “effects of the doctrine and practice of separation on family, social and working life”, may negate potential public benefit. The letter stresses, however, that the latter is based on “public criticism” rather than solid evidence.

The commission considered referring the matter to the charity tribunal for clarification but decided not to. And as it deemed an internal decision review to be “inappropriate”, the trust’s only option – apart from accepting the decision – was to appeal to the tribunal and become a test case for other Brethren congregations, and potentially for other religious groups too.

When parliamentarians and parts of the media found out about its decision, they were quick to accuse the commission of “anti-Christian” bias. Brethren elders were invited to give evidence to the public administration select committee, during which Charlie Elphicke MP claimed the regulator was “committed to the suppression of religion”. The case also dominated last month’s Westminster Hall debate on charity registration, with some MPs calling for a full parliamentary inquiry.

To the surprise of many, the Brethren have run a tight public relations campaign – not that they’re relishing the attention. “It’s a feeling of puzzlement and great sorrow to us that we’re having to go through this battle,” says Rod Buckley, a member of the Preston Down congregation. “I don’t quite understand it. We do a lot in the community and people that know us, know that.”

Buckley points to the Brethren’s soup kitchens, food parcel collections and the help they gave to those affected by the recent floods as clear examples of their positive impact on the community. He adds that while holy communion – the “Lord’s supper” in Brethren parlance – is accessible only to members, other events are open to all. No different, he says, to many mainstream religious groups.

The commission stresses that it does not have general concerns about religious charities, but those following the case have warned it could have wider ramifications. “It does potentially impact on other organisations, particularly where they restrict access to participation in religious services, meetings or activities, or where there’s an emphasis on an enclosed community,” says Stephanie Biden, a senior associate at charity solicitors Bates Wells & Braithwaite.

In an unprecedented move, the tribunal has allowed the commission to file anonymous witness statements and for witness protection measures to be put in place. The decision is in response to evidence received by the commission from former Brethren members, whose relationships with family members still in the group are particularly sensitive.

If these witnesses do testify at the full hearing in March 2013, the tribunal may have to answer a question that could have far-reaching consequences: when do allegations of harm against a particular religion or denomination outweigh potential public benefit? There is no shortage of controversial religious groups on the register, after all.

Despite the commission’s protestations, the case is unlikely to be seen merely as a clarification of charity law. The regulator has found itself at the centre of a row about religious freedom – and with the Brethren vowing to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, it’s a row that’s likely to get even more heated in the coming months.

James Gray is an independent campaigns adviser and writer with a particular interest in education. His Twitter username is @james_gray_

Beyond belief

The Observer, 


With the likes of Madonna and Guy Ritchie giving celeb cred to Kabbalah, cults have never been more fashionable, nor more contentious. Nick Johnstone meets US cultbuster Rick Ross who, for a fee of $5,000, offers to deprogramme ‘victims’ and return them to their families

This is a story about believing too much. It’s a story about losing sight of the boundary, the invisible line between believing in something and letting it take over your life. It’s also a story about a man who has built his life and career on saving people who he thinks believe too much.
It’s December 2003 and I’m sitting in a room full of tanned, good-looking Californians, at the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, waiting for a rabbi to give us a free introductory lecture. I’m wearing a white name tag, my name scrawled across it. A few days earlier, in the Kabbalah Centershop, I nearly bought the ‘red string’ ($26 for a piece of thread that ‘protects us from the influences of the Evil Eye’). Always on the lookout for a cure-all for my recurring anxiety/depression problems, here I am, ever hopeful, wondering if the Kabbalah Center will be the answer to my problems.
The lecture reminds me of some New Age, self-help nightmare, visions of Tom Cruise in Magnolia passing through my mind as the rabbi talks endlessly about how the Kabbalah could make our lives so much richer. Quite literally. We are told that financial wealth, career success, love, happiness – all these things are within reach.
The next day, at a Hanukkah party, I mention I’ve been to the Kabbalah Center. Clearly, this is not the thing to say. One woman says she’s heard the Kabbalah Center is a ‘cult’. Her partner says he’s read that the Kabbalah Center lures you in and then tries to get its hands on your money. Another woman tells me about Rick Ross. She says he is America’s top ‘cult expert’, that I should visit his website, rickross.com, and read the file on the Kabbalah Center.
I go home confused. What is so bad about the Kabbalah Center? Given that its ideas are a Deepak Chopra-style interpretation of basic Kabbalah ideas, re-cast to suit our rehab, Prozac, self-improvement times, I found what it teaches useful in the same way I find therapy useful.
Later, scrolling through the ‘Group Information Database’ onrickross.com, online home of the Rick A Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements (RRI), a non-profit, tax-exempt archive, public-information service based in New Jersey, I find files on many different organisations, categorised both alphabetically and ideologically. There are files on ‘Hate’ groups (Aryan Nations, Stormfront and Westboro Baptist Church, whose web address isgodhatesfags.com). There are ‘Religious’ groups (International Church of Christ, Order of Christ/Sophia, Children of God, Jesus People, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Brethren), ‘Neo Eastern’ (Sai Baba, 3HO, Integral Yoga), ‘Satanic’ (First Church of Satan), ‘Human Potential’ (Scientology, Landmark Education), ‘Bible Based’ (The Holy Order of Mans, House of Yahweh, Jews for Jesus, Victory Church), ‘Sci-Fi/UFO’ (Chen-Tao/God’s Salvation Church, Raelians, Beta Dominion Xenophilia) and so on.
Within these categories are individual files both surprising – Deepak Chopra, Nation of Islam, Patty Hearst, Kim Jong-il – and expected – al-Qaeda, the Manson family, Jim Jones, David Koresh/Waco Davidians, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Although Ross keeps files on almost all of the estimated 5,000 active groups in the US (and on many of the estimated 500 groups in the UK), he is keen to stress that a group or individual’s inclusion on his website does not necessarily mean they are harmful, or a cult. He also stresses that no religious, political or personal agenda motivates the opening of a file. He only opens a file if a group or individual’s behaviour starts attracting controversy.
So who is Rick Ross, and why has he appointed himself both judge and jury?
Rick Ross was born to a Jewish family in November 1952. His father was a plumbing contractor and his mother a helper at the Jewish Community Center in Phoenix, Arizona. After high school, Ross worked for a finance company, then a bank, before falling into trouble with the law. In 1974, he was convicted for the attempted burglary of a vacant show house and sentenced to probation. The following year he was sentenced to five years’ probation after he and a friend embezzled property from a jewellery company. Ross then went to work for his cousin’s car-salvage business. In 1982, aged 30, he had his first introduction to the world of groups and cults when a Christian missionary group infiltrated his grandmother’s nursing home.
After successfully campaigning to have the group removed, Ross immersed himself in the psychology and methodologies of group activity, working as a volunteer, researcher and lecturer for various Jewish organisations, before striking out in 1986 as a private consultant and deprogrammer (an Orwellian-sounding term for someone hired to ‘unbrainwash’ people). Today, deprogrammers are known as intervention specialists, thought-reform consultants or exit counsellors.
In 1992, his reputation was sealed when the FBI sought his advice on David Koresh and the Waco (or Branch) Davidians. A year later, as the Waco siege raged, CBS hired him as on-scene analyst. Meanwhile, he was in court again, after Jason Scott, the 18-year-old subject of an involuntary intervention, filed charges of ‘unlawful imprisonment’. Scott’s mother had authorised Ross to hold Scott against his will in a bid to deprogramme him from the Life Tabernacle Church, an intervention method no longer practised by professionals in Ross’s field. After the court ruled in Ross’s favour, Scott won a civil suit in 1995 and was awarded $3m damages. Out of the ashes of bankruptcy, Ross launched rickross.com and left Phoenix for Jersey City, where he founded the Rick A Ross Institute.
Looking over his career, his moral credentials seem shaky at best. But then, taking into account his claimed 75 per cent success rate for interventions (he has worked on more than 350 cases, at a typical cost of $5,000, everywhere from the US to the UK, Israel to Italy), he has rescued many people from harmful situations and has worked as an expert court witness in cases relating to controversial groups.
Fast-forward to July 2004 and Rick Ross is telling me, via phone from his office in Jersey City, about an intervention case he worked on the previous summer involving the Kabbalah Center. Like most intervention cases, it began with an inquiry from a family; this time, a British family concerned about their daughter’s involvement with the centre in Los Angeles.
‘Their daughter Sarah was becoming increasingly disconnected from her family,’ Ross recalls. ‘Her personality seemed to have dramatically changed. Her entire life revolved around the Kabbalah Center. She worked there, spent most of her after-work time there, lived with other members and apparently had no romantic life.’
Despite working long hours, Sarah did not receive ‘meaningful compensation, nor benefits such as medical coverage. She appeared largely incapable of making her own decisions, or critically examining how her life had changed, or of considering the practical consequences of her involvement at the centre, such as her personal finances.’ After years of her involvement with the Kabbalah Center, Sarah’s family believed the situation was deteriorating. ‘They called me, hoping to find a way to intervene and discuss their concerns without the centre’s interference,’ says Ross.
When Sarah told her parents she would be coming home to the UK for the first time in years, for the opening of the London Kabbalah Centre, Ross hatched a plan. The family would rent cottages in the Cotswolds – something they had done often when Sarah was a child – and invite her to take a mini-break. Sarah agreed. And when she arrived, Ross was waiting.
Initially, he explained who he was, why her family had hired him, and why he believed she was being exploited in her position of ‘chevra’ (a full-time volunteer worker at the centre). After three hours, she stormed off, telling Ross and her family, ‘I understand what you’re trying to do here. I’m very upset, I’m very angry at everybody. I’m going to pack my stuff and I’m going to go back to London. You’ve disappointed me, you’ve tricked me. I’m not going to continue with this.’ This being a typical scenario, Ross had already appointed one of her brothers to handle any upsets. After several hours of discussions, Sarah’s brother persuaded her to give Ross one more hour of her time.
‘I told her that Philip Berg, the founder of the Kabbalah Center, once signed documents “Dr Philip Berg”, but in fact he has no PhD, though he may have an honorary, unaccredited or mail-order doctorate. And Berg paid himself $2.5m for intellectual property rights regarding books and tapes – $2.5m out of the [organisation’s] non-profit.’ Ross also explained to her that the school Philip Berg claimed to be closely associated with in Israel had denounced him. ‘Now, these would be things that I would not usually say to someone in the very beginning of an intervention,’ Ross says, ‘because they might become angry and walk out. I made these points quickly and she looked at me rather startled and said, “Can you prove that?” And I said, “Yes, I have all the documents with me.”‘
At this point, Sarah and Ross began talking. Three days later, their discussions came to a close. By then, she and her family were being bombarded with calls from the Kabbalah Center.
‘They were sending urgent messages to her parents’ London home, saying, “Where is she?”,’ Ross remembers. ‘And Sarah was someone Madonna knew personally through the centre and who worked with her daughter as part of their programmes. Guy Ritchie was expecting to see her at the opening of the new centre. When the Kabbalah Center was sending her emails saying, “Where are you?” she was in a mental health facility, Wellspring Retreat, a rehab centre for ex-cult members in the US. Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center is ‘a residential treatment facility specialising in the rehabilitation of victims of cultic abuse’. It was founded in Albany, Ohio, in 1986 by Dr Paul Martin and his wife Barbara. Like Sarah, Dr Martin crossed that line between a harmless belief in something and a faith that almost wrecked his life when he got involved with The Jesus People in 1971. At the time, he was a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, studying psychopharmacology (his specialist research field was hallucinogens).
‘This bunch of people came through campus in a VW van with a rock’n’roll band,’ he tells me, ‘proclaiming that Jesus was a better revolutionary than Marx or Che, and it was pretty impressive. They had better music and better-looking girls and I thought, “Maybe this is it,” so I dropped out of grad school.’
Believing himself to have been increasingly indoctrinated, Martin left the group in 1978, in the throes of a nervous breakdown. ‘I started having dissociative episodes. I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or awake. It was like a Fellini movie.’
As he recovered, he looked for answers as to how this had happened. ‘I picked up a copy of Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and it gave me cold chills because the similarities were really uncanny. I said, “Oh my god, I was in a cult!” I always thought cults were something that only happened to the weirdos, and I wasn’t a weirdo. The people in my group were the boy and girl next-door, the class valedictorian, a Vietnam war vet – a cross-section of regular people.’
After finishing his PhD and undergoing training in psychology and mental-health counselling, Dr Martin decided to focus on helping people put their lives back together after leaving groups and cults. Today, Wellspring has 15 full-time staff and nine beds. It’s a kind of Betty Ford Clinic, where patients conquer their addiction to beliefs, groups and leaders.
There is a formal screening process. ‘We make sure these people are really suitable for our programme,’ Martin explains. ‘Are they really cult victims or are they mentally ill? You have to make sure they’re not so sick or suicidal or debilitated that they could not even participate in a programme where there’s a lot of talk or dialogue.’
To verify Sarah’s story, I email a transcript of what Ross told me to the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles (earlier I had requested an interview with Philip Berg, which was declined), asking for their comment. In response, I receive a curt email from its publicist, Andy Behrman, informing me: ‘Rick Ross has never met anybody at the Kabbalah Center and to the best of our knowledge this story and the facts are entirely false.’ I forward the statement to Ross. ‘Mr Behrman knows very well who I am speaking about,’ he insists. ‘The young woman was a full-time “chevra” worker at the LA centre and well known to everyone there.’
I mention to Ross that while Sarah’s experiences with the Kabbalah Center sound troubling, her story is hardly comparable to the mass suicides of Waco or Jonestown, nor the killing sprees carried out in Charles Manson’s name. He explains that he is always careful to distinguish between a cult and a destructive or controversial group.
‘The Kabbalah Center is not stockpiling weapons,’ he says. ‘They don’t have a compound. I’ve received no complaints of physical abuse. They seem to be focused on money: buy the Kabbalah water, buy the red string, buy this, buy that, give us 10 per cent of your income, and so on.’
To determine whether a group is benign or destructive, Ross – like most professionals in his field – uses Lifton’s 1961 book as a diagnostic tool. Lifton details eight characteristics that typify a destructive group environment: dictating with whom members can communicate; convincing members they are a chosen people with a higher purpose; creating an us-versus-them mentality, whereby everything in the group is right and everything outside is wrong; encouraging members to share their innermost secrets and then purge whatever hinders their merging with the group; convincing members that their philosophical belief system is ‘the absolute truth’; creating an ‘in’ language of buzzwords and groupspeak which becomes a substitute for critical thinking; reinterpreting human experience and emotion in terms of the group’s doctrine; and reinforcing the idea that life within the group is good and worthy, and life outside evil and pointless. During an intervention, Ross brings out Lifton’s book, usually having picked apart the group’s own literature.
As a recovering alcoholic, I still think about where the line is between heavy drinking and alcoholism. In the same way, I ask myself when a life-enhancing involvement with a group, guru or individual becomes damaging? Ross explains that the process is gradual, insidious. ‘When people typically join, they only see what the group wants them to see. Then they are gradually spoon-fed more on a need-to-know basis. So,’ says Ross, ‘there’s this escalating involvement, a process of baby steps to deeper involvement in the group. You aren’t told the more radical beliefs of a group until you’ve been so heavily indoctrinated that you’re no longer able to critically evaluate those beliefs.’
According to Ross, the kind of person who typically becomes unhealthily involved with a group is looking for ideals and a sense of purpose. They’re very altruistic, he says, ‘because to be a good cult member you have to make a lot of sacrifices’. They may have been going through a difficult period in their lives. ‘When people are lonely, depressed, experiencing a major setback and some group comes along and says, “Look, we’ve got the answers, we can give you whatever you want, just put the red string on, drink the Kabbalah water and everything will be OK,” it’s very appealing.’
Carol Giambalvo is now retired, but she was once America’s leading thought-reform consultant. (She got into the profession when her stepdaughter became involved with Iskcon, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.) To her, it’s less about a personality type than a matter of circumstance. ‘People don’t join cults,’ she tells me. ‘They simply join a group that seems to have answers for their life goals: getting closer to God, self-improvement, getting rich, getting power, getting a feeling of belonging to something real special. People are deceived and their best attributes are used against them.’
As Giambalvo points out, the one unifying factor, according to research, is that people who get involved in a cultic group are in a major transitional stage in life: ‘A mid-life crisis, going to college, graduating college, loss of a loved one through death or divorce, moving to a new country or community – these are all normal transitional stages when we’re just a little more vulnerable to undue influence.’
Marguerite Corvini, now 24 and studying for a masters in social work at New York University, fits this definition. ‘A lot of people who get sucked into these groups are at a vulnerable point in their lives,’ she says. ‘That was certainly the case for me.’
From a wealthy family, she fell in with mystical Christian group Order of Christ/Sophia after graduating from college in 2001. Unsure what to do with her life, she was taken to Order meetings by her brother Michael, then a doctor in residency at Yale University. He had been introduced to the group by his then-girlfriend Shanti, daughter of Father Peter Bowes, who co-founded the Order in early 2001 with fellow ex-Holy Order of Mans priest, Mother Clare Watts. Michael introduced Marguerite to Father Bowes.
‘I was so freaked out by him,’ Marguerite says, getting breathless, his power over her still evident. But her brother’s devotion and reverence to Father Bowes caused her to cast those thoughts aside. Soon after, Michael moved into the Order house in Boston and asked her to do the same.
She was torn, but having always looked up to her brother, she moved into the house in February 2002 to become a ‘Novice’, a commitment that required her to take a vow of celibacy and obedience for a year.
‘It was a very monastic life. I had to break up with my boyfriend. My teacher, Reverend Beatrice, would tell me not to be sexually involved with my boyfriend, because if you’re having sex with somebody, you’re releasing that sexual energy and that energy should be focused on God. And if we had any sexual thoughts about anyone, we were urged to confess to our teachers.’
Eventually, Marguerite was given a clear message. ‘I was told that having a boyfriend was not right for my soul.’ Marguerite ‘cut off’ from her boyfriend, group-speak for severing communication with non-members. ‘He would call me, leave me messages, send emails.’
Finally, Reverend Beatrice put a stop to it. ‘She called him and said: “She can’t talk to you any more, she’s made a commitment to the programme and is celibate.”‘
Didn’t Marguerite find this strange?
‘I was upset, I was angry, but all the time in my head I was like, “But if this is what God wants for me, I want to be good, I want to reach my potential as a human being.”‘
In early 2003, Mr and Mrs Corvini, having both been diagnosed with cancer within a matter of weeks of one another, contacted Rick Ross. They said their dying wish was to have their children free from the Order of Christ/Sophia. Ross began planning an intervention. Meanwhile, when Michael and Marguerite received the news of their parents’ illness, they were encouraged not to react by Father Bowes.
‘Michael didn’t see them while they were sick,’ Marguerite remembers. ‘Whatever reason he had, it was probably a spiritual thing – “They want you to talk to them, that’s why they’re getting sick, they’re trying to manipulate you with their illness.”‘
Michael’s initial reaction was to sever ties. ‘He sent them this letter and basically cut off my mom,’ recalls Marguerite, who was by now training to be a deacon. ‘And I sent a letter, too. That’s something that Father Peter does, he has everybody send letters. It’s almost like he wants the parents to be so mad they cut off their kids.’
Soon after, Marguerite was urged to cut off her friends. Father Peter, she says, explained that she was free to leave but added, ‘When you meet Jesus, he’s going to say, “What happened Marguerite? You were on the right track and you strayed.” Then you are going to have to start all over again, and it’s going to be even harder to get to where you are now.’
We were just happily doing our thing and then this whole smear campaign against us starts,’ says Mother Clare Watts, mother of four (one is in the Order) and co-founder of the Order of Christ/Sophia, in her Southern drawl from the newest Order house, in Seattle. ‘It’s been so frustrating to us. Rick Ross goes after every single group he can because it’s a money thing. Money and power and anger. He’s such a slimy character, he’s just a sleaze. We actually ended up talking to some Scientologists and they said, “Oh dear, poor you, we’ve been putting up with this for 30 years. You’re just the latest victim.” They ended up sending us a ton of stuff about Rick Ross and the whole deprogramming history. I had to start learning about all this stuff. The word “cult” meant very little. Scientology even had us get advice from their attorneys.’
I ask her to explain the Order’s basic ideology. ‘Our core ideology is the inner path, the mystical path, where we are teaching people how to go inside their being and connect with the God-self inside of them.’
During our conversation, she talks enthusiastically about Rumi, the Kabbalah, Sufism, St Teresa of Avila – all the great mystics. It all sounds harmless. So why does she think Marguerite Corvini is calling the Order a ‘cult’ and Rick Ross has a file about their activities on his website?
‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘Father Peter and I are both psychotherapists, so we work with all of our students on the psychological and emotional pieces of their healing and their growth; we bump into people’s family issues, where there are still wounds from childhood in the way of their spiritual growth, where they’re holding anger and resentment and where they’re still under the control of their families’ emotional or life control. We put a high value on honesty. This is where we get in trouble.’
With the Corvinis’ health failing, Ross had to invent an opportunity for an intervention. He coached Mr Corvini on how to call Marguerite and ask if she would come home and drive her mother to hospital. Mr Corvini put the favour to his daughter. Marguerite told him she first needed to speak with Mother Clare, who is revered within the Order for her ability to communicate with the Virgin Mary. (When I ask Mother Clare if that is true, she says, ‘Yes, I have received revelations from Mother Mary, but we teach everyone to do that. The way Marguerite puts it, she makes us look like freaks. We teach everyone to make those connections with Master Jesus and Mother Mary.’)
‘I went to Mother Clare,’ remembers Marguerite. ‘And she said, “Let’s ask guidance.” So we sit down and ask God and she gets an answer and the answer is no, you shouldn’t go.’
Mother Clare had been suspicious. ‘I said to Marguerite, “You know, it feels like they’re up to something, but your mom may be dying some time in the next few months, so why don’t you go visit her? This may be goodbye.”‘
As soon as Marguerite got home, her father had her car taken to a garage for a service. Then, also on Ross’s advice, Mr Corvini had the phone lines cut. In the morning, Marguerite stepped out of the bathroom to find Ross, her parents, her grandmother and her best friend, all waiting for her on the landing. The intervention had begun. She thought of her car – then remembered it wasn’t there. The phone was dead. Trapped, she heard Ross out. He managed to win her over. The next day, she collected her belongings from the Order house and flew out to Ohio, where, like Sarah, she was admitted to the two-week treatment programme at Wellspring, which she credits with changing her life.
‘They used a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy to help me work through the thoughts and the whole process of how this happened to me. I’m a smart person, I’m well educated, I had pretty high self-esteem when I walked into Order of Christ/ Sophia, but by the time I came out I didn’t know who I was. Initially, I would just be driving in my car, chewing a piece of gum and listening to whatever radio station I wanted, and that was immense freedom.’
Marguerite could be talking here about drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling. It sounds like a typical 12-step recovery story. Now she’s had time to get her life back together, I ask her how she managed to lose herself so completely.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘You put a frog in boiling hot water, they’re going to jump out. You put them in lukewarm water and turn up the heat. By the time they realise they’re in a pot of boiling hot water, they’re kind of used to it. That’s what happened to me.’
And what did the Order make of her leaving? When she arrived home, there was a note waiting for her from Father Bowes. All it said was: ‘Where the hell are you?’
Soon after Marguerite left the Order, Ross set up an intervention to get Michael out as well, but as soon as Ross introduced himself, Michael fled his grandmother’s house. Today, he’s still a priest within the Order. Since then, other exit counsellors have tried to ‘free’ other members of the Order. None has been successful.
‘With Marguerite, we didn’t know yet to warn them about these interventions,’ Mother Clare tells me. ‘Now we warn people and people are aware. And they haven’t caught anybody again.’
Such is the impact of Ross’s attentions that there is now an ‘Open Letter to the Parents and Friends of Our Members’ by Father Bowes on the Order of Christ/Sophia website, which begins: ‘Families of some of our members in the Order of Christ/Sophia have expressed concern about whether we are a cult. The answer is simply, no we are not a cult.’ He goes on to attack ‘anti-cult experts’ who ‘attack legitimate spiritual communities simply because they are not mainstream. They select families that have money and charge high rates to help families force their adult children to leave.’
Two decades into his crusade, Ross has made a lot of enemies, ranging from groups anxious to protect their reputations, recruitment potential and profit margins, to group members fiercely loyal to their beliefs, such as Neo-Nazis who send Ross almost daily anti-Semitic messages. And then there’s the litigation. Presently, he’s facing three different lawsuits from groups who claim he has made slanderous, damaging statements about their activities.
‘I don’t think a day goes by when I’m not threatened by somebody,’ he sighs. ‘Whether it’s the threat of a lawyer or maybe something a little more colourful about how my anatomy might be re-arranged … I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people say they would not only kill me but would then wash my remains down the sewer personally. But if I wasn’t being sued and I wasn’t being harassed I’d honestly ask myself, “What difference am I really making? Am I really doing my job very well?” If Scientologists sent me a box of chocolates with a thank-you card, I’d think, “Boy, I must be in bad shape!”‘
As he says this, it dawns on me that everybody in this story believes or has once believed too much. Everybody thinks they’re right. Why did the Order of Christ/Sophia seemingly wreck Marguerite’s life while her brother Michael clearly feels it’s the best possible life path for him?
Why does Madonna credit the Kabbalah Center with enriching her life, while involvement with the very same centre appears to have resulted in Sarah being admitted to Wellspring?
Or is it less about the group and more about the individual? Maybe certain individuals, with pre-existing psychological problems, join one of these groups, have what they perceive to be a bad experience and end up blaming the group for everything wrong in their lives. For every Sarah or Marguerite, there are many others claiming that their lives have been enormously enriched by their affiliation with a particular group or organisation.
Why does Ross keep going? Is it really, as Mother Clare and many other critics and groups claim, a ‘money thing’? After a summer’s worth of correspondence with Ross, I believe his motives are genuine, even if there are many groups out there who claim he’s driven by profiteering.
But he, too, believes in the rightness of his moral compass. Everybody in a position of power or authority in this story, from Mother Clare to Rick Ross, believes they’re right. And then, lost somewhere in the gulf between them, are the people who don’t know how to believe in something without that faith taking over their lives.
· Some individuals’ names have been changed

Logic-Tight Compartments: How our modular brains lead us to deny and distort evidence

michaelshermer.com
Michael Shermer
How our modular brains lead us to deny and distort evidence
January 1, 2013
IF YOU HAVE PONDERED how intelligent and educated people can, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, believe that that evolution is a myth, that global warming is a hoax, that vaccines cause autism and asthma, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, conjecture no more. The explanation is in what I call logic-tight compartments—modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship.
The concept of compartmentalized brain functions acting either in concert or in conflict has been a core idea of evolutionary psychology since the early 1990s. According to University of Pennsylvania evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite (Princeton University Press, 2010), the brain evolved as a modular, multitasking problem-solving organ—a Swiss Army knife of practical tools in the old metaphor or an app-loaded iPhone in Kurzban’s upgrade. There is no unified “self” that generates internally consistent and seamlessly coherent beliefs devoid of conflict. Instead we are a collection of distinct but interacting modules often at odds with one another. The module that leads us to crave sweet and fatty foods in the short term is in conflict with the module that monitors our body image and health in the long term. The module for cooperation is in conflict with the one for competition, as are the modules for altruism and avarice or the modules for truth telling and lying.
Compartmentalization is also at work when new scientific theories conflict with older and more naive beliefs. In the 2012 paper “Scientific Knowledge Suppresses but Does Not Supplant Earlier Intuitions” in the journal Cognition, Occidental College psychologists Andrew Shtulman and Joshua Valcarcel found that subjects more quickly verified the validity of scientific statements when those statements agreed with their prior naive beliefs. Contradictory scientific statements were processed more slowly and less accurately, suggesting that “naive theories survive the acquisition of a mutually incompatible scientific theory, coexisting with that theory for many years to follow.”
Cognitive dissonance may also be at work in the compartmentalization of beliefs. In the 2010 article “When in Doubt, Shout!” in Psychological Science, Northwestern University researchers David Gal and Derek Rucker found that when subjects’ closely held beliefs were shaken, they “engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs … than did people whose confidence was not undermined.” Further, they concluded that enthusiastic evangelists of a belief may in fact be “boiling over with doubt,” and thus their persistent proselytizing may be a signal that the belief warrants skepticism.
In addition, our logic-tight compartments are influenced by our moral emotions, which lead us to bend and distort data and evidence through a process called motivated reasoning. The module housing our religious preferences, for example, motivates believers to seek and find facts that support, say, a biblical model of a young earth in which the overwhelming evidence of an old earth must be denied. The module containing our political predilections, if they are, say, of a conservative bent, may motivate procapitalists to believe that any attempt to curtail industrial pollution by way of the threat of global warming must be a liberal hoax.
What can be done to break down the walls separating our logic-tight compartments? In the 2012 paper “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing” in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, University of Western Australia psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues suggest these strategies: “Consider what gaps in people’s mental event models are created by debunking and fill them using an alternative explanation…. To avoid making people more familiar with misinformation…, emphasize the facts you wish to communicate rather than the myth. Provide an explicit warning before mentioning a myth, to ensure that people are cognitively on guard and less likely to be influenced by the misinformation…. Consider whether your content may be threatening to the worldview and values of your audience. If so, you risk a worldview backfire effect.”
Debunking by itself is not enough. We must replace bad bunk with sound science.

Aspects of Recovery

          Recovery from cults is a multifaceted process; initially it is the separation from the group, group practices, and meetings that bound us to the group. Therapy  helps address the emotional aspects of group involvement – feelings of betrayal, abuse and vulnerability to recruitment. It helps to develop and understanding of how the group’s doctrine was used to manipulate and encourage commitment.


          Our focus in this article is the development of an intellectual understanding of the characteristics of cultic groups – how they differ from non-cultic groups – and of the tactics often used to engender a high level of commitment, a key element of recovery.


Deception


          Deception lies at the core of mind-manipulating and cultic groups and programs. Many ex-members and supporters of cults are not fully aware of the extent to which they have been tricked and exploited.


          The following checklist of characteristics helps to define such groups. Comparing the descriptions on this checklist to bring your attention to aspects of the group with which you were involved may help bring your attention to areas of group life that are a cause for concern.


          If you check any of these items as characteristic of the group, and particularly if you check most of them, you might want to consider reexamining these areas of the group and how they affected you. Keep in mind that this checklist is meant to stimulate thought. It is not a scientific method of “diagnosing” a group.


Checklist of Cult Characteristics


          We suggest that you check all characteristics that apply to you or your group. You may find that your assessment changes over time, with further reading and research.


q  The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.

q  The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

q  The group is preoccupied with making money.

q  Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

q  Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

q  The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).

q  The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).

q  The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.

q  The group’s leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).

q  The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities).

q  The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.

q  Members’ subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.

q  Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.


The Distinction Between Cultic Groups and Non-Cultic Groups


          Making the distinction between cultic groups and non-cultic groups is significant. Group propaganda often tries to blur the distinction between cults, sects, communes and society’s organizations, (“The Catholic Church is a cult.” “The Marines are a cult.”).


          “I have had to point out why the United States Marine Corps is not a cult so many times that I carry a list to lectures and court appearances. It cites 19 ways in which the practices of the Marine Corps differ from those found in most modern cults….


          Cults clearly differ from such purely authoritarian groups as the military, some types of sects and communes, and centuries-old Roman Catholic and Greek and Russian Orthodox Orders. These groups, though rigid and controlling, lack a double agenda and are not manipulative or leader-centered. The differences become apparent when we examine the intensity and pervasiveness with which mind-manipulating techniques and deceptions are or are not applied.


          Jesuit seminaries may isolate the seminarian from the rest of the world for periods of time, but the candidate is not deliberately deceived about the obligations and burdens of the priesthood. In fact, he is warned in advance about what is expected, and what he can and cannot do….


          Mainstream religious organizations do not concentrate their search on the lonely and the vulnerable … Nor do mainstream religions focus recruitment on wealthy believers who are seen as pots of gold for the church, as is the case with those cults who target rich individuals …


          Military training and legitimate executive-training programs may use the dictates of authority as well as peer pressure to encourage the adoption of new patterns of thought and behavior. They do not seek, however, to accelerate the process by prolonged or intense psychological depletion or by stirring up feelings of dread, guilt, and sinfulness …


          And what is wrong with cults is not just that cults are secret societies. In our culture, there are openly recognized, social secret societies, such as the Masons, in which new members know up front that they will gradually learn the shared rituals of the group … In [cults] there is deliberate deception about what the group is and what some of the rituals might be, and primarily, there is deception about what the ultimate goal will be for a member, what will ultimately be demanded and expected, and what the damages resulting from some of the practices might be. A secret handshake is not equivalent to mind control.


How the United States Marine Corps Differs from Cults


  1. The Marine recruit clearly knows what the organization is that he or she is joining … There are no secret stages such as people come upon in cults. Cult recruits often attend a cult activity, are lured into ‘staying for a while,’ and soon find that they have joined the cult for life, or as one group requires, members sign up for a ‘billion year contract…’

  2. The Marine recruit retains freedom of religion, politics, friends, family association, selection of spouse, and information access to television, radio, reading material, telephone, and mail.

  3. The Marine serves a term of enlistment and departs freely. The Marine can reenlist if he or she desires but is not forced to remain.

  4. Medical and dental care are available, encouraged, and permitted in the Marines. This is not true in the many cults that discourage and sometimes forbid medical care.

  5. Training and education received in the Marines are usable later in life. Cults do not necessarily train a person in anything that has any value in the greater society.

  6. In the USMC, public records are kept and are available. Cult records, if they exist, are confidential, hidden from members, and not shared.

  7. USMC Inspector General procedures protect each Marine. Nothing protects cult members.

  8. A military legal system is provided within the USMC; a Marine can also utilize off-base legal and law enforcement agencies and other representatives if needed. In cults, there is only the closed, internal system of justice, and no appeal, no recourse to outside support.

  9. Families of military personnel talk and deal directly with schools. Children may attend public or private schools. In cults, children, child rearing, and education are often controlled by the whims and idiosyncrasies of the cult leader.

  10. The USMC is not a sovereign entity above the laws of the land. Cults consider themselves above the law, with their own brand of morality and justice, accountable to no one, not even their members.

  11. A Marine gets to keep her or his pay, property owned and acquired, presents from relatives, inheritances, and so on. In many cults, members are expected to turn over to the cult all monies and worldly possessions.

  12. Rational behavior is valued in the USMC. Cults stultify members’ critical thinking abilities and capacity for rational, independent thinking; normal thought processes are stifled and broken.

  13. In the USMC, suggestions and criticism can be made to leadership and upper echelons through advocated, proper channels. There are no suggestion boxes in cults. The cult is always right, and the members (and outsides) are always wrong.

  14. Marines cannot be used for medical and psychological experiments without their informed consent. Cults essentially perform psychological experiments on their members through implementing thought-reform processes without members’ knowledge or consent.

  15. Reading, education, and knowledge are encouraged and provided through such agencies as Armed Services Radio and Stars and Stripes, and through books, post libraries, and so on. If cult do any education, it is only in their own teachings. Members come to know less and less about the outside world; contact with or information about life outside the cult is sometimes openly frowned upon, if not forbidden.

  16. In the USMC, physical fitness is encouraged for all. Cults rarely encourage fitness or good health, except perhaps for members who serve as security guards or thugs.

  17. Adequate and properly balanced nourishment is provided and advocated in the USMC. Many cults encourage or require unhealthy and bizarre diets. Typically, because of intense work schedules, lack of funds, and other cult demands, members are not able to maintain healthy eating habits.

  18. Authorized review by outsiders, such as the U.S. Congress, is made of the practices of the USMC. Cults are accountable to no one and are rarely investigated, unless some gross criminal activity arouses the attention of the authorities or the public.

  19. In the USMC, the methods of instruction are military training and education, even indoctrination into the traditions of the USMC, but brainwashing, or thought reform, is not used. Cults influence members by means of a coordinated program of psychological and social influence techniques, or brainwashing.”

Adapted from Cults In Our Midst: The Hidden Menace to Our Everyday Lives, Margaret Singer with Janja Lalich, Jossey-Bass, 1995. Reprinted with authors’ permission.

AFF News, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1996

"Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work?

Excerpts from the book by Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich

The Therapeutic Relationship

               The relationship between patient and therapist is unique in important ways when compared to relationships between clients and other professionals such as physicians, dentists, attorneys, and accountants. The key difference is present from first contact: it is not clearly understood exactly what will transpire.  There is no other professional relationship in which consumers are more in the dark than when they first go to see a therapist.

               In other fields, the public is fairly well informed about what the professional does. Tradition, the media, and general experience have provided consumers with a baseline by which to judge what transpires. If you break your arm, the orthopedist explains she will take an X ray and set the bone; she tells you something about how long the healing will take if all goes well and gives you an estimate of the cost. When you go to a dentist, you expect him to look at your teeth, take a history, explain what was noted, and recommend a course of treatment with an estimate of time and cost. Your accountant will focus on bookkeeping, tax reports, and finances, and help  you deal with regulatory agencies.

               Consumers enter these relationships expecting that the training, expertise, and ethical obligations of the professional will  keep the client’s best interests foremost. Both the consumer and the professional are aware of each person’s role, and it is generally expected that the professional will stick to doing what he or she is trained to do. The consumer does not expect his accountant to lure him into accepting a new cosmology of how the world works or to “channel” financial information from “entities” who lived thousands of years ago; or for his dentist to induce him to believe that the status of his teeth was affected by an extraterrestrial experimenting on him. Nor does the patient expect the orthopedist to lead him to think the reason he fell and broke his arm was because he was under the influence of a secret Satanic cult.

               But seeing a therapist is a far different situation for the consumer. In the field of psychotherapy there is no relatively agreed upon body of knowledge, no standard procedures that a client can expect. There are no national regulatory bodies, and not every state has governing boards or licensing agencies. There are many types and levels of practitioners. Often the client knows little or nothing at all about what type of therapy a particular therapist “believes in” or what the therapist is really going to be doing in the relationship with the client.

               In meeting a therapist for the first time, most consumers are almost as blind as a bat about what will transpire between the two of them. At most, they might think they will probably talk to the therapist and perhaps get some feedback or suggestions for treatment. What clients might not be aware of is the gamut of training, the idiosyncratic notions, and the odd practices that they may be exposed to by certain practitioners.

               Consumers are a vulnerable and trusting lot. And because of the special, unpredictable nature of the therapeutic relationship, it is easy for them to be taken advantage of. This makes it all the more incumbent on therapists to be especially ethical and aware of the power their role carries in our society. The misuse and abuse of power is one of the central factors in what goes wrong.

Questions to Ask Your Prospective Therapist

               Ultimately, a therapist is a service provider who sells a service. A prospective client should feel free to ask enough questions to be able to make an informed decision about whether to hire a particular therapist.

               We have provided a general list of questions to ask a prospective therapist, but feel free to ask whatever you need to know in order to make a proper evaluation. Consider interviewing several therapists before settling on one, just as you might in purchasing any product.

               Draw up your list of questions before phoning or going in for your first appointment. We recommend that you ask these questions in a phone interview first, so that you can weed out unlikely candidates and save yourself the time and expense of initial visits that don’t go anywhere.

               If during the process a therapist continues to ask you, “Why do you ask?” or acts as though your questioning reflects some defect in you, think carefully before signing up. Those types of responses will tell you a lot about the entire attitude this person will express toward you – that is, that you are one down and he is one up, and that furthermore you are quaint to even ask the “great one” to explain himself.

               If you are treated with disdain for asking about what you are buying, think ahead: how could this person lead you to feel better, plan better, or have more self-esteem if he begins by putting you down for being an alert consumer? Remember, you may be feeling bad and even desperate, but there are thousands of mental health professionals, so if this one is not right, keep on phoning and searching.

1.    How long is the therapy session?
2.       How often should I see you?

3.       How much do you charge? Do you have a sliding scale?

4.       Do you accept insurance?

5.       If I have to miss an appointment, will I be billed?

6.       If I am late, or if you are late, what happens?

7.       Tell me something about your educational background, your degrees. Are you licensed?

8.       Tell me about your experience, and your theoretical orientation. What type of clients have you seen? Are there areas you specialize in?

9.       Do you use hypnosis or other types of trance-inducing techniques?

10.    Do you have a strong belief in the supernatural? Do you believe in UFOs, past lives, or paranormal events? Do you have any kind of personal philosophy that guides your work with all your clients?

11.    Do you value scientific research? How do you keep up with research and developments in your field?

12.    Do you believe that it’s okay to touch your clients or be intimate with them?

13.    Do you usually set treatment goals with a client? How are those determined? How long do you think I will need therapy?

14.    Will you see my partner, spouse, or child with me if necessary in the future?

15.    Are you reachable in a crisis? How are such consultations billed?

After the Interview, Ask Yourself:

1.       Overall, does this person appear to be a competent, ethical professional?

2.       Do I feel comfortable with the answers I got to my questions?

3.       Am I satisfied with the answers I got to my questions?

4.       Are there areas I’m still uncertain about that make me wonder whether this is the right therapist for me?

Remember, you are about to allow this person to meddle with your mind, your emotional well-being and your life. You will be telling her very personal things, and entrusting her with intimate information about yourself and other people in your life. Take seriously the decision to select a therapist, and if you feel you made a mistake, stop working with that one and try someone else.

How To Evaluate Your Current Therapy

               What if you have been in treatment a while? What do you ask or consider in order to help evaluate what is going on? The issues below may assist.

  1. Do you feel worse and more worried and discouraged than when you began the therapy?

Sometimes having top access one’s current life can be a bit of a downer, but remember, you went for help. You may feel you are not getting what you need. Most important, watch out if you call this to your therapist’s attention and he says, “You have to get worse in order to get better.” That’s an old saw used as an exculpatory excuse. Instead of discussing the real issues, which a competent therapist would, this response puts all the blame on you, the client. The therapist one-ups you, telling you he knows the path  you have to travel. It’s an evasion that allows the therapist to avoid discussing how troubled you are and that his treatment or lack of skill may be causing or, at the very least, contributing to your state.

  1. Is your therapist professional? Does he seem to know what he is doing? Or do features such as the following characterize your therapy:

·         The therapist arrives late, takes phone calls, forgets appointments, looks harassed and unkempt, smells of alcohol, has two clients arrive at one time, or otherwise appears not to have her act together at a basic level.

·         The therapist seems as puzzled or at sea as you do about your problems?

·         The therapist seems to lack overall direction, has no plans about what you two are doing.

·         The Therapist repeats and seems to rely on sympathetic platitudes such as “Trust me,” or “Things will get better. Just keep coming in.”

·         The therapy hour is without direction and seems more like amiable chitchat with a friend.

  1. Does your therapist seem to be controlling you, sequestering you from family, friends, and other advisers?

·         Does the therapist insist that you not talk about anything from your therapy with anyone else, thus cutting off the help that such talk normally brings to an individual, and making you seem secretive and weird about your therapy?

·         Does the therapist insist that your therapy is much more important in your life than it really is?

·         Does the therapist make himself a major figure in your life, keeping you focusing on your relationship with him?

·         Does the therapist insist that you postpone decisions such as changing jobs,  becoming engaged, getting married, having a child, or moving, implying or openly stating that your condition has to be cured and his imprimatur given before you act on your own?

·         Does the therapist mainly interpret your behavior as sick, immature, unstable? Does he fail to tell you that many of your reactions are normal, everyday responses to situations?

·         Does the therapist keep you looking only at the bad side of your life?

  1. Does your therapist try to touch you?

·         Handshakes at the beginning and end of a session can be routine. Anything beyond that is not acceptable. Some clients do allow their therapist to hug them when they leave, but this should be done only after you’ve been asked and have given your approval. If you are getting the impression that the touching is becoming or is blatantly sexualized, quit the therapy immediately.

·         Are you noticing what we call “the rolling chair syndrome”? Some therapists who begin to touch and encroach on the bodies of their clients have chairs that roll, and as time goes by they roll closer and closer. Before you realize what’s happened, your therapist might have rolled his chair over and clasped your knees between his opened legs. He may at first take this as a comforting gesture. Don’t buy it!

  1. Does your therapist seem to have only one interpretation for everything? Does she lead you to the same conclusion about your troubles no matter what you tell her?

You might have sought help with a crisis in your family, a seemingly irresolvable dilemma at your job, some personal situation, a mild depressed state after a death of a loved one, or any number of reasons. But before you were able to give sufficient history so that the therapist could grasp why you were there and what you wanted to work on, the therapist began to fit you into a mold. You find that, for example, the therapist insists on focusing on your childhood, telling you your present demeanor suggests that you were ritually abused or subjected to incest, or that you may be a multiple personality – currently three very faddish diagnoses.

–Excerpted with permission from “Crazy” Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? By Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich.

James Ray’s attorneys seek to exclude witnesses

Arizona Family, January 26, 2011

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Defense attorneys for a self-help guru facing manslaughter charges are asking a judge to keep two of the state’s witnesses from testifying at trial.


James Arthur Ray’s attorneys say the testimony of a man who studies cult behavior and a corporate risk management expert is irrelevant and would distract the jury.



Ray has pleaded not guilty to three counts of manslaughter stemming from the deaths of three people following a sweat lodge ceremony he led near Sedona in 2009.



Prosecutors say Ross will explain why participants felt they couldn’t leave the ceremony, and Steven Pace will speak to safety measures.



If Ross’ testimony is allowed, prosecutors want the judge to prohibit the defense from bringing up his criminal history or cult deprogramming practices.


Ray’s trial is set to begin Feb. 16.



Scientology and Its Discontents

October 2, 2011


Scientology and Its Discontents 1

Scott Lauder, Hulton Archive, Getty Images
In 1968, L. Ron Hubbard used his Electrometer to determine whether tomatoes experience pain. He concluded that they “scream when sliced.”

Enlarge Image

By Seth Perry
This past spring, in a course I called “American Scriptures,” my students and I listened to excerpts of a recording of L. Ron Hubbard lecturing on a boat in 1968. I had obtained the recording—which the Church of Scientology, the religious organization Hubbard founded, considers not for public circulation—from WikiLeaks, along with a transcript. I photocopied the relevant portions of the transcript and handed them out in class as aids to listening. The transcripts helped enable discussion of particular passages and allowed students to follow Scientology’s famously idiosyncratic lingo—”squirreling,” “ARC break,” “F/N.”
We did something similar with media productions of various other American religious movements, but what inevitably set Scientology’s apart was that as I handed out the transcripts, I told the students that I would have to ask for them back at the end of class. I explained that I did not want to be accused of having reproduced Scientology materials for circulation, thereby risking a lawsuit. My students, with some mirth, thought I was being a little dramatic, and maybe they were right—but I took the transcripts back all the same.
This classroom moment exemplifies the tensions inherent in studying and teaching Scientology. Hubbard’s teachings contain fascinating religious content that demands serious study—by those interested in religion writ large, and by those, like me, who study its American iterations. The organization that Hubbard created, however, frustrates that study.
The Church of Scientology has sought—through litigation and through extralegal harassment—to limit access to its materials and to discourage outsiders’ discussion of its teachings. Moreover, the church’s public profile—that of a belligerent, mendacious institution that produces couch-jumping celebrities—shadows the study of Scientology in the classroom. Students who are trying to take Scientology seriously as a religion worthy of study must come to terms with stories such as that of David Miscavige, the worldwide leader of the Church of Scientology, forcing his subordinates to compete to keep their jobs in a violent game of musical chairs set to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Two new books will make analysis of the Church of Scientology’s history and character easier. Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) is, as she intended it to be, “the first objective modern history of the Church of Scientology.” A careful, tireless reporter—she first wrote about Scientology forRolling Stone, in 2005—Reitman elaborates a more thorough and more human account of Scientology’s complicated history than has ever been available. Hugh Urban, a professor of religious studies at Ohio State University, has written an equally essential work in The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011), which is more concerned with the questions Scientology raises than about Scientology itself.
Urban’s interest is in using the church as “a critically important test case for thinking about much larger legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion as a whole.” “Religion,” he observes, as an academic area of study and as a label with moral, legal, and financial implications, does not have a static definition. In the 20th century, Scientology claimed the status of a religion over the objections of government agencies and public critics, and the ensuing process of negotiation allows us to watch the questions of religion being worked out with a unique level of transparency. “Which groups do we privilege with the label ‘religion,’ and which do we exclude?” Urban wonders. “More important, what are the stakes—legal, financial, and political—in laying claim to the status of religion?”
The two authors agree that Lafayette Ronald Hubbard understood those stakes. He was born in Nebraska in 1911, and his early life is the subject of two very different narratives. According to the church, he was an intrepid explorer, a war hero, a scientist, “the most published and translated author of all time”; to critics, he was a ne’er-do-well, a Navy junior officer who opened fire on some Mexican islands during World War II, a college dropout, a hack. The two narratives come together, though, around the publication of Dianetics,in 1950. Presented as the fruit of Hubbard’s research into the workings of the human mind, Dianetics had nothing religious about it. It is a self-help book based on the idea that traumatic events in one’s past are the source of all mental and most physical ills. By reviewing those events with the help of an auditor trained in Dianetics, those events could be cleared, Hubbard wrote—dissolved, their negative effects eliminated.
Despite criticisms from mental-health professionals, the Dianetics movement took off in 1950, spawning a network of loosely affiliated foundations. By one estimate, the foundations took in over a million dollars in the first year—and spent it all. As initial interest in the movement waned, Hubbard accepted funds from a wealthy supporter, effectively ceding control of his creation. In 1952 the remnant organization declared bankruptcy, and Hubbard was essentially back where he had started.
Spinning personal authority out of nothing more than one’s own assertions of special knowledge—the defining and most elusive ability of a prophet—is a supremely difficult thing. Hubbard did it not once but twice. He rebuilt around what he called, in an internal letter in 1953, “the religion angle.” Hubbard’s move into religious territory is typically thought of as a bald-faced strategy for tax evasion, but Urban demonstrates that the shift happened “in fits and starts” and was motivated by a number of concerns, perhaps not all of them financial. During “auditing”—Hubbard’s counseling method— Hubbard said he had found that many subjects spoke of traumatic events in their pasts which could not have happened to them—could not, that is, have been events of their current lives. Hubbard’s research, he said, led him into past lives and reincarnation—clearly, he felt, religious subjects. His thought expanded to contemplate his subjects’ past lives as other beings, as other forms of being, on other worlds, across a vast expanse of time. The methods and principles of Dianetics (Hubbard came to refer to the book itself as “Book One”) are still essential to Scientology—your past is still the source of the problems of your present. That past, though, now extends 76 trillion years. You have a lot of problems.
For the Church of Scientology, Hubbard wrote a creed, mandated that his officials dress like ministers, designed a cross, and created ceremonies for births, weddings, and funerals. Stung by the collapse of the decentralized movement that had grown up around Dianetics, he placed a powerful institution at the center of everything—auditor training and all publications flowed from it, and money flowed in, from individuals and from subsidiary organizations set up on a strictly controlled franchise model. Along with most previous works on Scientology, the two new books share a preoccupation with this institution.
Urban defines Scientology by the transparency of the institution’s adoption of religious trappings—”Scientology is a self-conscious attempt to make a religion, that is, a concerted effort to use explicitly religious sorts of discourse to describe, defend, define, and redefine itself,” he writes—and makes the process of this reimagination the centerpiece of his book, using it to talk about how claims to religious status are adjudicated in American law and public culture. He contextualizes Scientology’s birth in the mid-20th century—focusing, for instance, on the cold-war mentality behind the church’s constant suspicions and various CIA-like operations against perceived critics—and its future in the 21st, thinking through the significance of the Internet age for a religion that has depended on the modulated release of secrets.
For her part, Reitman is most concerned with the abuses that have been perpetrated by the institution. She spends no fewer than four chapters on the case of Lisa McPherson, the young woman who died in the care of Scientologists in 1995 after declining conventional medical care on their advice. Operation Snow White—the Church’s shockingly successful attempt to infiltrate the IRS, the FBI, the Justice Department, and other government agencies in the 1970s—looms large.
Reitman carefully relates stories from former Scientologists about life in the Sea Org, Scientology’s elite management corps, and these range from the frightening (accusations of forced labor and imprisonment) to the surreal: For much of his career, Hubbard gave orders through what he called his Messengers—mostly adolescent girls who were required not only to convey his words verbatim, but to imitate his voice while doing so. Her final chapter opens with the story of Miscavige’s game of musical chairs and continues with one couple’s harrowing story of escape from the church’s inner sanctum.
The unearthing of the church’s complicated, often ugly history is an essential part of the study of Scientology, but it does not need to be the sum total of that study. In both books, the religion that is Scientology is inseparable from the institution that is the Church of Scientology. Reitman takes some important steps in the direction of distinguishing the two, but with the exception of her interviews with one young woman, neither she nor Urban has significant material from current members of the church, and neither is able to present a clear idea of what it actually means for an average person to be a Scientologist. Urban asks what it means for Scientology to be regarded as a religion by various outsiders, but no study has yet answered the question of what it means for Scientology to act as a religion for its adherents.
A collected volume, Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis, published by Oxford in 2009, contains some essays that attempt to bring discussion of Scientology to this level—thinking through, for example, “The Development and Reality of Auditing,” as one essay is titled—but much work remains to be done.
Future research will need to populate the world of Scientology with the range of characters that populate studies of other religions—from the militant and evangelistic to the lukewarm, the familially obligated, the dissenting. These people are the texture of a religion, and they participate primarily at local levels, far removed from the inner workings of the Sea Org and the behavior of David Miscavige.
To bracket the institutional presence and look instead at the content of Scientology opens up the possibility of looking at how individuals have understood and applied Hubbard’s writings in their own lives. The material is rich—whatever else he was, Hubbard was an accomplished writer, and his texts exhibit a complexity at odds with his own demand that they be understood and applied in exactly one, officially approved way.
There is more to Scientology’s appeal, perhaps, than an aggressive sales pitch. Extracted from their smothering institutional context, the faith commitments of Scientology have an aesthetic depth that has not been explored by commentators outside the church. “Pain is extremely perishable. Pleasure is recorded in bronze,” Hubbard wrote in Dianetics. The Hubbard of Book One has an often graphic contempt for violence against women—an attitude that the world could certainly use more of—as well as a special concern for the well-being of children. Scientology’s ideal state of “clear,” Hubbard wrote, is, among other things, a return to childlike wonder:
“The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the strange part of it is that this glamour and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.”
In the light of such a sentiment, Tom Cruise’s erratic behavior on Oprah’s couch is maybe not so strange after all.
The precise methods of auditing, moreover, might appear odd, possibly even harmful, but the goal—to identify emotional hang-ups and face them as a means of eliminating them—is hardly unique to Scientology. Nor is the idea that your past is holding you back. Portions of Hubbard’s teachings that were once secrets now circulate widely online, drawing laughs (the famous intergalactic-war narrative; the belief that we all share an evolutionary memory of having once been a clam). The church bristles at discussion of such things, quite often to the extent of bringing in its lawyers.
At his best, though, Hubbard was unconcerned with ridicule. “Tell people who want to invalidate all this, ‘Your criticism is very just. It’s only fantasy,'” he wrote in A History of Man, in 1952. Urban quotes a fascinating line from an early lecture in which Hubbard leaves the door open for an expansive, playful understanding of his thought. “I’m just kidding you mostly. … I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them. … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and then go through a series of class-assigned exercises. … Let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.”
At the same time, the church’s strict enforcement of discipline and its aggressive attitude toward outsiders is directly traceable to Hubbard. In journalism and scholarship, the relentless focus on its institutional history reflects, oddly, an acceptance of the church’s own stance that the religious content of Scientology is inseparable from the institution. Hubbard infused the Church of Scientology with an authoritarianism unrivaled even in the realm of religious organizations.
Hubbard’s attitude toward his own and the church’s authority is crystallized in a 1965 missive known as “Keeping Scientology Working,” which he periodically rereleased and relentlessly emphasized until his death. “KSW,” in Scientology’s ubiquitous shorthand, makes plain that “standard tech”—Hubbard’s term for his own teachings—always works. In cases where a subject is not getting better through auditing, whatever is being applied is by definition not standard tech but something broken, either through misapplication of Hubbard’s methods or—much worse—through the personal innovations of the auditor. Hubbard called this “squirreling”—”going off into weird practices or altering Scientology.” Moreover, any attempt to apply the principles of auditing beyond the auspices of the church is by definition squirreling.
Such thinking, however, is always misguided—ideas and practices never stay in the boxes that authorities build for them. Squirreling is the rule of religion, not the exception. Reitman interviewed a number of people who have left institutional Scientology but still find value in Hubbard’s teachings, and she goes the farthest in positing that “Scientology as a philosophy” may have a future beyond the church as it has been known, offering an endorsement in her acknowledgments. If there is an argument to her book, it is that Scientology is due for its Reformation. “That a number of [ex-Scientologists] still value L. Ron Hubbard’s technology, if not the organizational management of the Church of Scientology, … is a testament to the growing number of Scientologists who hope to form an independent, and free, movement. I wish them all the best of luck in doing so.”
Scholars will remain indifferent to such endorsements, but the growth of Scientology outside of the church’s auspices would be an interesting thing to observe. Reitman and Urban have brought the study of Scientology to a crucial, long-delayed point—their work will allow for more critical reflection on an important part of 20th-century American religion. With this history available as a resource, scholarship on Scientology will be able to move away from obsession with the checkered history of a single institution and encompass the variety of ways in which individual Scientologists have lived their faith both within that institution and outside of it.
Seth Perry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Mellon Dissertation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.