Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2015 19:22:24 GMT
Getting Out of a Cult
people.howstuffworks.com/cult6.htm
Some individuals are just less susceptible to mind-control techniques than others, and they may have retained enough of a sense of self to make an informed decision to walk out.
But it's usually not that simple. There are ex-cultists who say they spent years working up the nerve to get out.
A true convert is completely dependent on the cult for every aspect of life and consciousness -- to the truly indoctrinated cult member, leaving means being alone and starting over. His sense of self has been completely broken down to the point that he doesn't even know who he is without his cult family. He may not have made a decision in years.
Gathering the confidence to voluntarily leave a totalist cult requires a tremendous act of will and doesn't come easily.
It might result from renewed contact with the outside world, such as a cult member speaking with her parents for the first time in a decade.
It might happen when a cult member has a psychological breakdown and believes she is simply too worthless to meet the expectations of the group, so she leaves to spare her cult family the weariness of her presence.
Or it might come about following a particularly traumatic experience that jolts the cult member into consciousness, such as witnessing the sexual assault of a child or a murder within the cult.
But making the decision to leave is only part of the process. The cult has to unlock the door, so to speak, in order for the member to get out.
Some destructive cults do let people leave. Usually, they'll put a lot of pressure on a member to stay; but in the end, a person can choose to go and not have to climb a barbed-wire fence in the dead of night or sneak past any armed guards.
In the mildest cases, a member who leaves may be "disowned" by the cult, forbidden any contact with the people that have been her family for months, years or decades, but the member won't suffer any physical harm when she walks out.
In the most severe cases, though, a cult may stop at nothing to maintain control over its members, and a person may fear for her life if she tries to leave.
When 16 members of The People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, decided they wanted to leave the cult in 1978 following a visit from a U.S. government group, several armed cult members followed them to the airport and opened fire.
They injured 11 people and killed a U.S. Congressman, three reporters and one member who was trying to leave. Fear of the consequences of this incident is what triggered leader Jim Jones to initiate the mass suicide and murder of 900 members of the cult.
While a peaceful, voluntary exit is certainly the preferred method of leaving a cult, it doesn't always happen that way.
There are those who don't want to escape at all but are grabbed from their beds at three in the morning and dragged back into the outside world.
This is typically the first stage in what is known as "deprogramming," which is an extreme method of removing someone from a cult against his will.
It's not easy to get someone to leave a destructive cult. Talking is always the first step.
But sometimes, the cultist is too well indoctrinated to really hear anything an outsider has to say, and other times there's no opportunity to talk at all.
A cult member may have severed all ties to the outside world.
Family members who fear for a loved one who's deeply involved in a totalist cult have to find another option if simple talking is impossible or doesn't work. At this point, they can go one of two ways: deprogramming or exit counseling.
Cult Deprogramming:
Deprogramming is the more drastic of the two approaches because it usually involves an initial kidnapping to get the cult member away from the cult. For this reason, deprogramming is a very expensive service. It can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
After the forced removal, deprogramming mostly involves hours and hours of intense "debriefing," during which a team of deprogrammers hold the cult member against his will and use ethical psychological techniques to try to counter the unethical psychological techniques used by the cult. The goal is to get the cult member to think for himself and re-evaluate his situation.
Debriefing methods can include:
educating the cult member on thought-reform techniques and helping him to recognize those methods in his own cult experience
asking questions that encourage the cult member to think in a critical, independent way, helping him to recognize that type of thinking and praising him for it
attempting to produce an emotional connection to his former life by introducing objects from his past and having family members share their memories of his pre-cult existence
Deprogramming was relatively common in the 1970s, but has fallen out of favor as an acceptable cult-removal method, partly because it's so expensive, partly because it involves kidnapping and imprisonment and partly because that kidnapping and imprisonment led to a lot of lawsuits over the years.
Now, most families turn to "exit counselors." Exit counseling leaves out the kidnapping and focuses instead on employing psychological techniques that might get the cult member to voluntarily submit to debriefing.
Exit counselors guide the family in the most effective ways to get a cult member to communicate with "outsiders."
Family members must be non-judgmental, calm and loving, or else they'll only reinforce the belief that all outsiders are "bad" and dangerous. If they succeed, and the cult member agrees to participate in the process, what happens next is essentially the same debriefing that occurs during deprogramming, with long sessions that take place over a number of days, but the cult member is free to leave.
[(the only fault I can personally find with this is that the cult victim becomes incredibly dependent on the 'rescuer' to replace the cult dependency, which is not only unhealthy but lets them open to another score of broken promises. It is helpful to rely on professionals)].
There's is no guarantee that any cult-removal technique will work. Some sources say that at least one-third of deprogrammings fail, and there are no definitive statistics on the success rate of exit counseling.
But when it does work, the cult member finds himself back in the outside world -- with a whole new set of problems. People who leave a totalist cult can suffer from a laundry list of psychological problems.
Some common ones include depression, anxiety, paranoia, guilt, rage and constant fear. They may have difficulty thinking clearly, making decisions, analyzing situations and performing everyday activities like picking out something to wear or going to the store to buy groceries.
Psychologist Michael Langone describes a common post-cult state he calls "floating," in which the former member goes back and forth from "cult to non-cult ways of viewing the world ... stalled in a foggy, 'in-between' state of consciousness."
Not everybody is psychologically damaged by a cult experience. Some go on with their lives after a relatively short adjustment period. But most people who have undergone thought reform suffer negative consequences when they leave the insulated environment of the cult. It can take years for a former cult member to readjust to life on the outside. Some people never completely return to their pre-cult level of functioning. But in most cases, counseling and family support can go a long way toward recovery.
Read more:
people.howstuffworks.com/cult6.htm