Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults by Steven Hassan

Author:Steven Hassan [Hassan, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freedom of Mind Press
Published: 2015-03-25T15:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8 – Curing the Mind Control Virus

When most people begin to search for ways to release friends or relatives from cults, they know little or nothing about mind control, the characteristics of destructive cults, or how or where to begin.

Some may think the only available option is deprogramming. Yet they have no idea that deprogramming involves forcible abduction of the cult member, a process that is lengthy and coercive, along with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I do not recommend coercive deprogramming, and know of no reputable person who currently practices it.

Non-coercive ways to help now exist. I and others now use therapeutic techniques that are well established in the mental health profession, along with the latest, innovative approaches. Furthermore, today almost all the professionals who help cult members break free are themselves former members of mind control organizations. They are more likely to understand what cult members are thinking and feeling, and can share personal experiences and insight.

This chapter is a guide to interventions: how the process of curing the mind control virus works. I’ve included three cases of interventions I have conducted. The dialogues are reconstructed from memory, but the stories themselves are faithful reflections of real events. These case histories took place some years ago. Since then my approach has evolved significantly, into the Strategic Interactive Approach, which is what I use today. Nevertheless, many of the key concepts, dilemmas and techniques that appear in these stories continue to apply in the present day.

First, though, it’s important to give you some essential background on deprogramming.

Because I myself was deprogrammed in 1976, I am very familiar with its drawbacks. Back then, very few options were available to concerned relatives and friends of cult members. Either people tried to keep in contact with the member and hoped they would leave on their own, or they hired a deprogrammer. Cult leaders saw deprogramming as a terrible threat. They were losing many long-term, devoted members and leaders because of it. And those people were talking to the media and revealing details of the cults’ operations. Ex-members who had simply walked away tended to be paralyzed with guilt and fear, and usually kept their former cult involvement very quiet. But deprogrammees had access to a support network that understood what they had been through and gave them the strength and encouragement to speak out.

By the late 1970s, cult mind control had become intertwined in the public eye with forcible deprogramming. This was partly the result of public relations campaigns financed by some major cults to discredit critics and divert the debate from the cults themselves.156 The propaganda labeled deprogramming as “the greatest threat to religious liberty of all time.” Deprogrammers were falsely portrayed as beating and raping people to force them to recant their freely held religious beliefs. Influenced by this campaign, at least one movie portrayed deprogrammers as money-hungry thugs who were just as bad as cult leaders.

For the record, I know of no

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