The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is conducting its 2022 Annual International Conference jointly with Info-Secte/Info-Cult of Montreal.
Conference Theme: Exploring the Needs of People Who Leave Controlling Groups and Environments
The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is conducting its 2022 Annual International Conference jointly with Info-Secte/Info-Cult of Montreal.
Conference Theme: Exploring the Needs of People Who Leave Controlling Groups and Environments
This paper will showcase interventions and resources created within the SGA community and offer a framework for how these initiatives could be applied to rehabilitation and reintegration efforts with repatriates from IS-controlled territories.
Who are the Unification Church and “The Moonies”? What is it like to grow up as a “Moonie”? What difficulties do people who are born-in face? Does our society provide adequate support to former members?
Many marginalised, neurominorities like myself (a racialised, queer womxn with Autism, ADHD and co-morbid mental health issues) can be more vulnerable to getting enmeshed into cults.
ennifer French Tomasic is a mental health counselor working with clients across the United States and Internationally. She has a Master’s Degree in the Psychology of Coercive Control and has been conducting research through Salford University.
Tommy’s story line and the processes of traumatic dissociation, reenactment, and misguided healing, that culminated in Tommy becoming (and failing as) a cult leader.
Far from being a meditation method that’s misleadingly sold as “not a religion,” almost every element of the program, from its marketing, its initiation or instruction methods, and its advanced programs, are of a “religious nature,” fundamentally suspect, and are offered by an organization that isn’t trustworthy. Its internally toxic, cultish, sexist nature is well known among those formerly involved, who’ve experienced firsthand the practices and habits common among the movement’s lifelong devotees.
The study we present here is the result of a PhD research on Islamic sectarianism in Pakistan. The fieldwork was done on the Pakistani community in Spain, mainly settled in Barcelona. Extensive qualitative interviews were undertaken with leaders of the different religious communities as well as its members, whereas quantitative data was provided through the analysis of questionnaires based on the Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (H. Abu Raiya, K.I. Pargament, A. Mahoney & C. Stein, 2008), where some scales were used, and some not (the conversion scale was not included, considering we were interested in Pakistani Muslims not converts): items of Islamic religious dimension, Islamic wellbeing, purpose of life, satisfaction with life, religious struggle and fundamentalism were added, plus new questions focused on belonging to different sects, cults, and denominations, and their attitudes towards their in-group and out-group.
The main purpose was to find out how Pakistani Muslims live their religion, a deeper understanding of Islamic religiousness, and how the migration experience affects them. The biggest difficulty was to convince them to fill in a questionnaire, considering the closeness of the community, their distrust for the purposes of the research, or the fact that many of them are illiterate and might find the questions too hard to answer. For that reason, we have relied more on the qualitative analysis of the discourses of the leaders and members of the different religious groups: among the Sunnis, Deobandis: Tablighi Jama’at; Barelvis: Minhaj ul-Quran, Dawat-ul Islam; Ahl-e Hadith; Jamaat-e Islami; Sufis; Ahmadiyya and Shias.