”
It’s a psychological pyramid scheme,
”
says Sarah Sullivan, describing her painful experience with
Lifespring, a
”
human potential
”
training program that some former participants and other
observers label a cult.
”
They promise all these results. They say you’ll ‘maximize your
potential’ and other unquantifiable jargon. But the main result is
that people who go through it praise Lifespring as the greatest
thing ever and recruit new people to take the course and give
Lifespring more money.
“It’s a psychological pyramid scheme,” says Sarah Sullivan, describing her painful experience with Lifespring, a “human potential” training program that some former participants and other observers label a cult. “They promise all these results. They say you’ll ‘maximize your potential’ and other unquantifiable jargon. But the main result is that people who go through it praise Lifespring as the greatest thing ever and recruit new people to take the course and give Lifespring more money.
“That’s not a real result. It’s a pyramid scheme whose only purpose is to feed itself on more and more people.”
Sullivan, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz and now lives in San Francisco, had just struck out on her own after college and was working in Los Angeles when she attended her first Lifespring workshop. After several training sessions that set her back several hundred dollars and were beginning to break down her sense of self, she found herself on a lonely freeway, on an errand for her Lifespring leader.
“One girl didn’t show up for the workshop one day,” Sullivan says, referring to intensive, 14-hour seminars that take place over several days. “The leader asked us, ‘Do you want to let her go? Do you want her to die?’ Because, the thing is, ‘Lifespring is life and being outside of Lifespring is death.’ That’s what they tell you, that’s what you start to believe. That you’ll literally die if you’re not in Lifespring. It’d be comical if it wasn’t so serious. I mean, I’m embarrassed that I was taken in by this.
“We all said, ‘Yes, we want to bring her back.’ And I was elected to go to her house and bring her back.
“So I’m driving down this obscure freeway with a couple of others, and suddenly I had this thought, ‘Oh my God, what the f– am I doing? I’m in a car, going to get this person for Lifespring because I think she’s going to die? What the hell?’
“But then my conditioning kicked in, all the stuff they’d been saying for the past three days, where every time you had a question against the group, they’d say things like, ‘Don’t you think you overanalyze your life?’ and ‘You like to be a victim, don’t you?’ … putting your doubts back on you.
“So I went ahead driving down the freeway. We go get the girl and bring her back. At the end of the workshop, she says to me, ‘Thank you, Sarah, you saved my life.’
Within a few months, Sullivan had been kicked out of the Lifespring program for failure to recruit any new initiates. She became severely depressed and was considering suicide.
A cult by any other name
What exactly is a cult? Well, whatever it is, it’s not Lifespring, the organization’s founder John Hanley, and his followers have consistently argued. Indeed, the term “cult” is a loaded one. Apologists for groups accused of being cults, often insist that such groups be called “new religious movements” instead of the pejorative “cults.”
Yet the sort of groups that are commonly described as cults share many common traits, say critics such as Rick Ross and Janja Lalich, both of whom work for organizations seeking to educate the public about such extreme groups. They are often led by a charismatic personality who demands complete obedience. They control members’ lives to a degree that limits their psychological or even physical ability to act freely or leave the cult. They employ tried and true psychological techniques – including “thought reform,” or brainwashing – upon people not prepared to recognize or counter such assaults. And they encourage hostility among members toward their own friends and family, by providing a surrogate family and hammering home a conflict between the “good” or “enlightened” cult insiders and the “bad” or “unenlightened” outsiders.
Probably nothing about the criticism of cults is more controversial than thought reform, the systematic breaking down of people’s sense of self to engineer total loyalty to a group or leader. The study of thought reform was pioneered by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, whose 1961 book “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” explored brainwashing practices in Communist China. Despite numerous examples of effective thought reform as practiced by groups ranging from cults to governments, many people are still highly skeptical about brainwashing and its effectiveness.
We know about the mass thought reform that resulted in the 1978 murder/suicide of nearly 1,000 members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, and the brainwashing of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (Lifton testified at Hearst’s trial). Yet the leap to considering that such a thing could happen to a loved one – let alone ourselves – is a long one indeed.
Just how do people become ensnared by cults? And what can friends and family do when it happens?
“I was 24,” relates Sullivan, “out of UCSC for a year. I was in LA and this roommate of mine, or ex-roommate of mine, called up to recruit me for Lifespring.
“I had complete scorn for these groups, but I was working at Palomar (a film production company), and I wasn’t moving up, and some people in the office had done similar things (like Lifespring), and their careers were much more successful than mine. I said, I should put aside my preconceptions, because these people were successful, and I figured they must know something I don’t.
“So I decided to try it out. I went to the meeting … it was so creepy. It was in this hotel ballroom and there was this sign that said, ‘What are you pretending not to know?’ I almost walked out.
“They didn’t allow us to talk to each other during the meeting. I later found out that a lot of these groups do that (don’t allow sidetalking) because it allows them to control the environment.
“But my group leader was this guy who was hot, and he kept saying you should do it, and he kept calling me up at home and I said, ‘He’s hot, and he’s doing it,’ and I thought if I did it maybe he’d be my boyfriend.”
What followed for Sullivan were extremely intense yelling sessions, in which members of the group were encouraged to find things wrong with each other and let them know about them. “People would be screaming at you, shouting, ‘I experienced you as pathetic! I experienced you as ugly!’ and if you said something nice, they’d attack you more,” she says.
It’s difficult to conceive that this kind of treatment would convince people to do anything but walk out of the room. But it can be part of a systematic process of thought reform that convinces the vulnerable that the extreme restrictions placed upon what is acceptable thought and what is not, is, in fact, making them more “free.”
“Cults prey on needy people,” says the Rev. Kevin Stottrup of the Community Baptist Church of Aromas. “Cults are pervasive in a subtle way. Children need to have an identity, and if they’re not receiving a positive identity from their family, they might try to build that identity with the cult. With the increasing number of broken homes, this is more and more a danger.”
Stottrup is quick to point out that people’s vulnerabilities in this regard can just as easily be exploited by mainstream religious groups and institutions, however.
“I had a woman who approached me, who wanted to know if it was OK to read a particular book. What she really wanted was an authoritative yes or a no.
“To develop critical thinking, coming from Christian perspective – and you know, many people will find this not to be objective, coming from a Christian pastor, which is fair enough – but the Bible says to test the spirit, and it’s using Jesus Christ as the context for doing this.
“We try to help people not to have such dependency upon us. If we’re just making them co-dependents, without them testing us to see if what we’re saying is true or not, if we’re being too parental, etc., we’re not helping.”
The cult critic Rick Ross agrees. Among his 10 tips for identifying a group as a cult is an intolerance for critical inquiry.
For Sullivan, the Lifespring experience systmatically undermined her capacity to be critical of the cultic message and left her believing her own doubts arose solely from flaws within herself.
How this is done is illustrated in an account of a Lifespring workshop by two psychologists, Dr. Janice Haaken and Dr. Richard Adams, who observed a Seattle, Wash. seminar in 1981. Haaken and Adams relate how, during a trust excercise, a particpant named James questioned the “all or nothing” definition of trust provided by the Lifespring trainer:
JAMES: I’m not sure what this had to do with real trust. I mean, it’s not an all or nothing thing – like, “I trust you,” or “I don’t trust you.” I would trust someone with my car before I would trust them with my child, depending on how well I knew the person.
TRAINER: Are you willing to consider the possibility that you don’t know what trust really means?
JAMES: (appearing confused and hesitating) Yes.
TRAINER: Thank you. You may sit down. (Audience applause)
Turning a legitimate criticism on its head like this is a signature psychological ploy by cults, say experts. Repeatedly breaking down people’s critical faculties in this way, combined with such techniques as sleep deprivation and ritual chanting can add up to what we would call brainwashing.
Getting out alive
One of the most insidious aspects of cults is that when they get their clutches on a vulnerable person, they will immediately start to turn them against their outside “base” of family and friends. This can make extricating the loved one from the cult very difficult, because the leader or group has already “predicted” that the “outsiders” would attempt such a thing … thus further impressing the member with the cult’s “wisdom” and “power.”
Daniel Roselle has a unique perspective on cults and getting out of them. The 29-year-old law student was literally born into a cult – the controversial Children of God movement founded by David “Moses” Berg in the late 1960’s. A bizarre combination of apocalyptic Christianity and the Free Love movement, the Children of God are accused of rampant sexual abuse of children by older members in a climate of ultra-heightened sexuality reflecting Berg’s particular pathology. Their zeal for producing children – Roselle has eight siblings, a typical family size in the Children of God, and his father is still a leading figure in the cult – combined with abuse and indoctrination for a toxic mix that Roselle has devoted himself to exposing.
“I do think the Children of God will disappear eventually. The people who’ve joined in the U.S., in the past 15 years, I could count on my hand.
“But that won’t happen fast enough for me.”
Roselle, the oldest of his siblings, managed personally to get four of his brothers and sisters out of the cult. Three others left of their own accord and just one is still in the Children of God.
“With my siblings, it was me vs. my parents for their minds and hearts,” he says. “So if I went back and said the cult is evil, etc., I would have been fullfilling the predictions of what I was going to become after I left. They were saying I was going to go off and become a male prostitute or something.
“Instead I just provided (my siblings) with a place to stay, to play video games, to talk about college. So I didn’t have to do anything, but one by one they started to come out and say, ‘I want to go to college.'”
Dr. Leah McDill, a Texas-based psychologist who has researched cults and coercive religious groups, agrees that patience and simply offering a refuge if needed is the best approach for people who have lost a loved one to a cult. This despite the instinct to take action and shake the loved one awake.
“In East Texas, we have a saying, ‘Hide and wait.’ It can be incredibly difficult to do if you’re fearful that someone is really hurting himself or herself, but it’s far more likely to be successful.”
One thing family and friends can do is to learn all they can about the cult in question, says Roselle.
“You have to read their literature and doctrine to understand it, to see how potentially dangerous they are. Smaller groups with a popular, charismatic leader tend to be a bit more immediately dangerous. Heaven’s Gate (an apocalyptic cult whose 39 members committed mass suicide in 1997), for example. On the other hand, something like 900 people died at Jonestown, so you never know.”
Stottrup, the Community Baptist Church pastor adds: “If you can provide a safe environment to talk about it, they can come out of it.”
For those emerging from a cult experience, the process of healing can take time. And it requires a great deal of effort and self-examination.
“There’s not a formula, but it can take two years or more for the person to heal, though the experience never goes away,” says McDill.
Sullivan was kicked out of Lifespring for her inability to recruit more members, which is essentially the entire purpose of the organization. Initially, she was berated for her failings, and even convinced to undergo a “self-imposed” punishment by dying her hair black as a sign of her inadequacies. She laughs now about the fact that none of her family or friends were gullible enough to fall for Lifespring – she’s proud of such a strong support group.
“None of my friends would do it. I couldn’t enroll anybody. All summer long this was going on, and people started avoiding me!
“But eventually, they kicked me out, because I wasn’t ‘trying hard enough.’ They said, ‘No one’s happy you’re here; you’re a drain on people. Are you happy to be a drain? Go be a drain by yourself.”
“Then I went off and wanted to kill myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. But I started reading books about cults, and I went to a psychologist because I felt I owed it to myself to try everything I could before suicide.
“I started to see what was wrong with it. I still had 10 different arguments for why Lifespring wasn’t a cult. But when I finally decided it was a cult about six months after I’d been kicked out, it was a total sense of freedom and my critical faculties were back. It wasn’t over, of course, but it was getting better for me.”
“It wasn’t really OK. It wasn’t a normal thing that happened.”
What’s a cult, anyway?
The first rule of cults is, “Hey, WE’RE not a cult!” Nevertheless, those who study these extreme groups clearly define what a cult is. Here are some of those definitions:
1. The group is lead by a self-proclaimed, living leader, who demands all veneration, and complete loyalty.
2. It has a totalitarian top-down structure, with no input from the base, or the members.
3. It uses a coordinated program of thought reform, or brainwashing techniques to inspire loyalty amongst adherence.
4. It is rooted in the deception, manipulation and exploitation of the members by the leaders.
5. There is a double set of ethics, in that members are required to be completely open, honest and disclosing within the group, but are told that it is OK to lie and deceive those outside the group, because the end justifies the means.
– Janja Lalich, the Educational Director of Community Resources on Influence and Control, an outreach service directed at educating the public about the potential dangers of cults
Some hints that a group might be a cult include:
1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget or expenses, such as an independently audited financial statement.
4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
7. There are records, books, news articles or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
8. Followers feel they can never be “good enough.”
9. The group/leader is always right.
10. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation; no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
– Rick Ross of the Rick A. Ross Institute, a non-profit organization that studies destructive cults and provides information about them to the public, in the “Warning Signs” section of www.rickross.com.
