Speaker 1: Since the nineteen eighties, more than two and a half
Speaker 1: million Americans have been pulled into a cult. It's estimated
Speaker 1: there are three thousand active cultic groups in America alone.
Speaker 1: From Nexium to the Branch Davidians in Waco, from the
Speaker 1: Scandal at Sarah Lawrence to Bickram Yoga, Wild Wild Country
Speaker 1: to Heaven's Gate. Everyone is talking about them, But what
Speaker 1: makes a cult a cult? How do they wield such power?
Speaker 1: On this fascinating episode of Navigating Narcissism, I'm honored to
Speaker 1: speak with doctor Yanya Lalich, one of the world's foremost
Speaker 1: experts on cults and coercion, who lost ten years of
Speaker 1: her life when she was lured into a radical political
Speaker 1: group that turned out to be a cult.
Speaker 2: She reveals the.
Speaker 1: Role of narcissism at the heart of every cult and
Speaker 1: breaks down the frightening tactics they use to systematically coerce millions.
Speaker 1: This podcast should not be used as a substitute for
Speaker 1: medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek
Speaker 1: independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare
Speaker 1: professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue,
Speaker 1: or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This
Speaker 1: episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering to some people.
Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the
Speaker 1: podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do
Speaker 1: not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions. iHeartMedia
Speaker 1: or their employees. Doctor Yanya. Such an honor to meet you.
Speaker 1: I just love your work. It's so complimentary to the
Speaker 1: work I do on narcissism in individual relationships.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you.
Speaker 4: It's wonderful to meet you as well, and I love
Speaker 4: your books as well.
Speaker 1: You spend a lot of time helping people who have
Speaker 1: left cult organized systems, or who are trying to leave,
Speaker 1: or even people who've gotten drawn in, and you talk
Speaker 1: to their family members.
Speaker 2: And cults are a big word out there. Every other day.
Speaker 1: There's a new documentary about it called This is Top
Speaker 1: of Mind for People. So let's just start with basics.
Speaker 1: Can you define what a cult is?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 4: A cult is essentially a closed social system, and it
Speaker 4: has four features that are important to me. The authoritarian
Speaker 4: or charismatic leader, the transcendent brief system, the systems of control,
Speaker 4: and the systems of influence. The first is that it
Speaker 4: has an authoritarian leader who is most often almost always
Speaker 4: a narcissist, and who demands all loyalty and all obedience,
Speaker 4: and you're not allowed to question that person. And the
Speaker 4: leader is typically the founder or the originator of the
Speaker 4: belief system. So the second feature is the belief system,
Speaker 4: which I call a transcendent belief system, and by that
Speaker 4: I mean it's an ideology or a belief system that
Speaker 4: basically gives you the answer to everything, the past, the present,
Speaker 4: and the future. And the philosophy behind the belief system
Speaker 4: is the end justifies the means. Once you have a
Speaker 4: philosophy that says the end justifies the means, that means
Speaker 4: you can be asked to do anything, and as long
Speaker 4: as it's in the service of the goals of the
Speaker 4: organization or the leader's wishes, it's okay. So that puts
Speaker 4: people into a kind of a sticky wicket because most
Speaker 4: people come into the cult unless they're born in it,
Speaker 4: with their own sense of morality, and over time they
Speaker 4: have to give up their own morality to what I say,
Speaker 4: the immorality of the leader because they are following these
Speaker 4: end justifies the means orders. And the third and fourth
Speaker 4: features are systems of influence and systems of control. What
Speaker 4: I mean by systems of control are the very overt
Speaker 4: rules and regulations, So that would be things like they
Speaker 4: may have you a dressing a certain way, speaking a
Speaker 4: certain way.
Speaker 3: They may have rules about.
Speaker 4: Who you can marry or not marry, how many children
Speaker 4: to have, how to raise the children, where to live,
Speaker 4: who to live with, et cetera, et cetera. These are
Speaker 4: the very obvious control mechanisms. Savvius are the systems of influence.
Speaker 4: These are the social psychological techniques or tactics that prey
Speaker 4: on your emotions. So this is where they're pushing your buttons, right,
Speaker 4: They're preying on guilt and shame and love and anger
Speaker 4: and fear. Right, And since we have responded to those
Speaker 4: things all of our lives, mostly, we immediately don't pick
Speaker 4: up that there's something wrong here, that my buttons are
Speaker 4: being pushed all the time, right, and that I'm reacting
Speaker 4: in this way. The purpose of that which is basically
Speaker 4: and those two combined, the controls and the influences, the
Speaker 4: purpose of that which is the indoctrination system.
Speaker 3: Is to attack the self.
Speaker 4: The cult essentially wants to take apart yourself so that
Speaker 4: they can rebuild you as a cult persona. Right, So
Speaker 4: they want to get rid of your instincts, your sense
Speaker 4: of self trust, your belief in yourself, your self confidence,
Speaker 4: et cetera. So you will essentially be kind of torn
Speaker 4: down without necessarily realizing it and built back up according
Speaker 4: to the principles of the group. So those are the
Speaker 4: four features. And then, of course most of these groups
Speaker 4: are exploiting people in some way, either sexually, financially, certainly, emotionally.
Speaker 3: Sometimes all three.
Speaker 1: You to me literally just described a narcissistic relationship.
Speaker 2: Right is you've.
Speaker 1: Talked about an authoritarian person who expects and almost requires
Speaker 1: loyalty and obedience. They have this belief system that it
Speaker 1: almost feels like a permanent gaslighting.
Speaker 2: It's not falsifiable.
Speaker 1: You cannot ever give evidence to the contrary because if
Speaker 1: you do, it will not be heard and integrated, but
Speaker 1: you will be shut down, right and you'll be told
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with you. And then you brought up
Speaker 1: something so important when you were talking about this transcendent
Speaker 1: belief system, which is this almost this slide in morality,
Speaker 1: the things that you ethical systems, even legal adherents and
Speaker 1: moral codes. You once adhered to, you start giving up
Speaker 1: on those so you can survive in this cultic system
Speaker 1: in a narcissistic relationship. I've had numerous survivors say I
Speaker 1: stopped being me and started doing things that I never
Speaker 1: dreamed I would do. I call it sort of the
Speaker 1: slide in morality just to survive in the relationship. And
Speaker 1: then when you talk about the systems of control, well,
Speaker 1: all narcissistic relationships are characterized by control, and the systems
Speaker 1: of influence really feel like manipulation, behaving in a way
Speaker 1: that induces guilt. Right, So that's every narcissistic relationship. People
Speaker 1: feel like they can't move around in these relationships because
Speaker 1: they feel or that they're violating the relational code or
Speaker 1: that they're going to be abandoned. But then what you said,
Speaker 1: which is shockwaving me right now, is this concept of
Speaker 1: indoctrinating the person, attacking the self, tearing down a person
Speaker 1: so you can rebuild them in a way that is
Speaker 1: functional for the cult leader and secondarily the cult system.
Speaker 1: What you describe in a cult almost feels a little
Speaker 1: bit more intentional. But that's every narcissistic relationship, whether it's
Speaker 1: a parent or a partner, or a boss that they
Speaker 1: don't care about your individual self. They're going to break
Speaker 1: that down. So what's left is a human being that
Speaker 1: exists in their service. The narcissistic person isn't rubbing their
Speaker 1: hands together like an evil genius. It is happening in
Speaker 1: this very under the radar slow way where it is
Speaker 1: a brick by brick taking a part of a person,
Speaker 1: or if it's a narcissistic parent, the first time that
Speaker 1: child exerts their autonomy game over, the child will immediately
Speaker 1: be shamed. The child will experience a parent's resentment, live
Speaker 1: with the cataclysmic fear of abandonment. That's too traumatizing. So
Speaker 1: the child, in order to survive, has to engage and
Speaker 1: buy in. So we're working in similar spaces, but the
Speaker 1: difference is you're talking about a group. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: an individual relationship. So how big does an group or
Speaker 1: an organization have to be to be considered a cult.
Speaker 4: There are one on one cults, there are family cults,
Speaker 4: as I'm sure you've run into. And what you described
Speaker 4: about the children is interesting because for those children who
Speaker 4: are born in a cult, they experience exactly that they're
Speaker 4: not to express any autonomy so they don't go through
Speaker 4: the same developmental stage as we did when we grew up,
Speaker 4: or someone who is not involved in a coercive situation,
Speaker 4: so when they get out, they have all of that
Speaker 4: to kind of redo, in a sense, the developmental work.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it can be any size. I mean, some
Speaker 4: cults are huge, thousands of members. Most of them boast
Speaker 4: about the number of members they actually have, but there.
Speaker 3: Are groups with thousands.
Speaker 4: And then I've worked with many small family cults and
Speaker 4: also the one on one cults, which are exactly as
Speaker 4: you say, really narcissistic relationships. I think one thing I
Speaker 4: do want to mention, because you said narcissists, aren't these
Speaker 4: evil people, you know, planning this all out? I think
Speaker 4: that is one slight difference with cult leaders. I think
Speaker 4: I believe that most I mean I've been doing this
Speaker 4: for thirty five years and I can't tell you the
Speaker 4: stories I have heard, and I believe that most cult
Speaker 4: leaders know what they're doing, and that most of them
Speaker 4: are what we call malignant narcissism, yes, and that they
Speaker 4: have a little bit of psychopathy, and they're very, very
Speaker 4: evil and very harmful. I mean, we can look at
Speaker 4: two recent examples of Keith Ranieri and Larry Ray of
Speaker 4: the Sarah Lawrence cult. I mean, it's unfathomable, especially Larry Ray,
Speaker 4: what he did to those kids. So cult leaders, I
Speaker 4: think tend to be a bit more abusive and harmful.
Speaker 3: Than your run of the mill narcissists, if you will.
Speaker 2: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: And it comes down to that intentionality, right, And I
Speaker 1: think that I'm sure you're more than familiar and we've
Speaker 1: talked about it on this podcast before, this idea of
Speaker 1: the dark tet trad of narcissism, psychopathy, machiavelianism, and sadism. Yes,
Speaker 1: those qualities are obviously every single cult leader ever. I
Speaker 1: like that formatting better because it accounts for the exploitativeness,
Speaker 1: the psychopathic cruelty, which is a lack of remorse, and
Speaker 1: there's an intentionality and that sadistic flair. And I think
Speaker 1: in intimate relationships people struggle with that, like do they
Speaker 1: wanted you this Ranieri and Ray?
Speaker 2: They wanted you that?
Speaker 1: This was an obsessive, a delusionally obsessive need for power.
Speaker 1: When you talk about first of all, I want to
Speaker 1: go back a minute, because I think everyone knows who
Speaker 1: Keith Ranieri andexium what that's about. I think fewer people
Speaker 1: know about Larry Ray. Could you just give us a
Speaker 1: brief overview of that. I just want to make sure
Speaker 1: that everyone has a context for that.
Speaker 4: Larry Ray was basically a con artist and had been
Speaker 4: in prison for fraud or something. When he got out
Speaker 4: of prison, his daughter, who was a student at Sarah
Speaker 4: Lawrence living in a dorm, had some roommates. His daughter said, Oh,
Speaker 4: my dad's coming to live with us for a while.
Speaker 4: So he actually moved into the dorm with these young people.
Speaker 4: He essentially indoctrinated these young people into believing that he
Speaker 4: was this like superhuman being, and then he convinced them
Speaker 4: that everything they did was wrong and hurting him, and
Speaker 4: they were owing him money, and he was very violent
Speaker 4: in the abuse of them. Eventually they moved to an
Speaker 4: apartment in New York and he had one of the
Speaker 4: young women become a prostitute. He tortured people, literally tortured people.
Speaker 4: You know, I knew so much about Ranieri and what
Speaker 4: he did. I thought nobody could really beat that. And
Speaker 4: then Larry Ray came along and I thought, Wow, he
Speaker 4: was beyond the pale. So that's who Larry ray Is
Speaker 4: and fortunately he got convicted, got a pretty good sentence,
Speaker 4: not as good as Ranier he got. And then most recently, Isabella,
Speaker 4: his so called second in command, just got convicted, which
Speaker 4: I actually wrote a piece about for MSNBC because she
Speaker 4: was definitely a victim, and not that cult members who
Speaker 4: do horrific things shouldn't be held accountable, but I think
Speaker 4: the courts also need to take into account what happens
Speaker 4: to people under coercion because we have to follow orders,
Speaker 4: and then it depends on what level you're at. But
Speaker 4: what happened in cases like Isabella is that through the indoctrination,
Speaker 4: we enter this state of mind that I call bounded choice.
Speaker 4: We've been so enclosed in this self sealing system. We
Speaker 4: have no reality checks, no other feedback. We're at the
Speaker 4: mercy of the leader. We believe our entire life future
Speaker 4: depends on staying with and obeying this leader to the
Speaker 4: point where, yes, we have choices, but our choices are
Speaker 4: confined and constrained by this system that we're locked in.
Speaker 4: So sure, if it's something insignificant like oh what am
Speaker 4: I going to have for lunch today or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah you have a choice about that.
Speaker 4: But if it's something significant, like can I leave, can
Speaker 4: I challenge the leader? No, those are thoughts that you
Speaker 4: cannot entertain because because you know that if you entertain
Speaker 4: those thoughts and God forbid act on them, you will
Speaker 4: basically die, either a literal or figurative death. Many cults
Speaker 4: say to you, if you leave, you're going to die,
Speaker 4: you know of some dread disease. You have to give
Speaker 4: up everything, give up your entire identity at that point,
Speaker 4: and most people, when they're in that state, cannot do that.
Speaker 4: And this is why so many people, especially at a
Speaker 4: higher level in a cult, experience what we call and
Speaker 4: I'm sure you're familiar moral injury, which is the effect
Speaker 4: of not just what happened to you, but what you
Speaker 4: did to others or that you saw happen to others,
Speaker 4: and that you couldn't do anything about. So, yes, I
Speaker 4: think someone who's at the level of Isabella Apollock and
Speaker 4: the dastardly thing she did at his command or knowing
Speaker 4: that's what he would want, she needed to be held accountable.
Speaker 4: But I think we are the courts and law enforcement
Speaker 4: also need to understand and have a little bit of
Speaker 4: compassion for the person who's caught in that position.
Speaker 1: I found this concept of bounded choice to be one
Speaker 1: of the most fascinating things I'd ever read. I'd never
Speaker 1: that terminology really captured something. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: We have a certain spectrum of choice. Okay, what you're
Speaker 1: describing as bounded choice is an absolute narrowing of that
Speaker 1: spectrum of choice, what you're calling a self sealing system,
Speaker 1: where you don't have any glimpse of a touchstone or
Speaker 1: a reality outside of that relationship. So although one looking
Speaker 1: from the outside, I'll say there's a door walk through it,
Speaker 1: that is actually that full spectrum a choice no longer exists.
Speaker 1: It's like the door doesn't exist or the door is locked. Right,
Speaker 1: Because the reason this is so for me is that
Speaker 1: this is in many ways the paradox of people in
Speaker 1: narcissistic relationships. Again, not nearly at the level of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about in terms of the level of coercion
Speaker 1: and danger and harm of stories we're talking about, but
Speaker 1: even in your garden variety narcissistic relationship, that spectrum of
Speaker 1: choice narrows to this really bounded realm of if I leave,
Speaker 1: people may think badly of me. I might you know,
Speaker 1: the system is not going to understand who this person's about.
Speaker 1: So the custody of the children will be affected, or
Speaker 1: my culture will cast me out, or I financially may not.
Speaker 4: Be able to make it, or he'll come after me,
Speaker 4: or I'll lose the children though correct, or.
Speaker 2: The post separation abuse.
Speaker 1: So and I think this is every narcissistic relationship ever,
Speaker 1: and that what happens is even therapists are guilty of this,
Speaker 1: which are supposed to be a compassionate system. Forget about
Speaker 1: law enforcement on all those other advocacy and justice systems.
Speaker 1: They don't understand bounded choice. Even therapists don't. So we'll
Speaker 1: often get into this mindset of like, well is an option,
Speaker 1: and I'm often like squirming in my charm.
Speaker 2: Like I don't know that it is.
Speaker 1: When you gave me this term bounded choice, I just
Speaker 1: want to let you know, doctor Yanya, this terminology has
Speaker 1: greatly helped therapist, So thank you for that. And I've
Speaker 1: sort of been the mouthpiece for that term in clinical realms,
Speaker 1: and because it really gets at what survivors can They're like,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I can leave this, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: literally I know I can, but I actually don't think
Speaker 1: I can.
Speaker 4: I so much appreciate that, And you know, I mean
Speaker 4: that idea of there's the door and you can't go
Speaker 4: through it. I lived that for five years in the
Speaker 4: cult that.
Speaker 3: I was in.
Speaker 4: I was ready to leave, and I could not figure
Speaker 4: out how to do it. I would get up every morning,
Speaker 4: get in the shower, cry my eyes out because we
Speaker 4: weren't allowed to cry, we have no emotions. And I'd
Speaker 4: get in my car and I would just wish that
Speaker 4: I'd be killed in a car accident because it was
Speaker 4: the only way I could see to get out. And
Speaker 4: that is the phenomenon that people who haven't lived through
Speaker 4: this don't have a really difficult time understanding.
Speaker 1: So since you've said that, and I heard you use
Speaker 1: the word we a few times, as though there's a
Speaker 1: sense of belonging for you in cult survivors, this has
Speaker 1: been your experience, can we talk about that? Can you
Speaker 1: tell us about the group that you were in and
Speaker 1: what that experience was like.
Speaker 4: So I was thirty years old, I had already graduated
Speaker 4: from college with honors.
Speaker 3: I had been a full bright scholar.
Speaker 4: I don't say these things to boast, but to let
Speaker 4: people know that it's not stupid, weird, crazy people who
Speaker 4: get into cults, but they look for the best and
Speaker 4: the brightest. I met a woman who was a friend
Speaker 4: of a friend, and we would have these great we'd
Speaker 4: go for coffee and have these great political conversations. This
Speaker 4: was right at the end of the Vietnam War, so
Speaker 4: people on the left were kind of looking for what
Speaker 4: do we do now?
Speaker 3: What do we do now?
Speaker 4: So she said at one point she asked to meet
Speaker 4: at my house, and she came over and with another
Speaker 4: person and said, you know, we have this study group.
Speaker 4: It's just for when. It's called women in the State,
Speaker 4: and we're reading about and trying to understand the role
Speaker 4: of women in the state, you know, state.
Speaker 3: With a capital S.
Speaker 4: And of course that sounded interesting to me. I'd always
Speaker 4: had this intellectual side to me, and I thought, well,
Speaker 4: I'll meet new people. That sounds great. So I joined
Speaker 4: the study group. Little did I know that it was
Speaker 4: a front group for a cult, and little did I
Speaker 4: know that probably half of the people there, five out
Speaker 4: of the ten people there were part of this background
Speaker 4: organization that I didn't know about. So we did these
Speaker 4: readings of like Marx and Lenin and Chairman Mile, things
Speaker 4: like that, and we'd be asked to be the person
Speaker 4: to present the reading at the next meeting, and of
Speaker 4: course when I presented it, they praised me and told
Speaker 4: me how wonderful and brilliant I was, and you know,
Speaker 4: all this what we call love bombing, you know, making
Speaker 4: me feel very special and loved. And then a little
Speaker 4: while later she asked to meet with me at my
Speaker 4: house again and said, well, what are you learning in
Speaker 4: the study group And I said, well, I'm learning that
Speaker 4: in order to really make social change, you have to
Speaker 4: have a Marxist, a disciplined Marxist Leninist organization. And she said, well,
Speaker 4: what if we told you we have one? And I'm like,
Speaker 4: what you know? And she said, yes, we have this
Speaker 4: international organization and it's really big, and you know, wouldn't
Speaker 4: you like to join? And I was like sure, So
Speaker 4: she said, oh, but you know, first you have so
Speaker 4: this is kind of bait and switch that they do,
Speaker 4: So first you have to fill out this questionnaire. So
Speaker 4: I filled out the questionnaire, which basically asked me everything
Speaker 4: about my life, my parents, my bank accounts, my passport number, everything, everything,
Speaker 4: and then I was admitted. And at the time, the
Speaker 4: group didn't even have a name, and I didn't even
Speaker 4: know it had a leader. But over time I learned that,
Speaker 4: and it was a small group then maybe twenty five
Speaker 4: thirty people we grew. We were extremely disciplined, very restricted,
Speaker 4: worked twenty hours days, seven days a week, month after month,
Speaker 4: year after year. People had various assignments. We had a
Speaker 4: big print shop and a publishing house, and a research
Speaker 4: institute and you know.
Speaker 3: The staff headquarters.
Speaker 4: All of the newspapers in San Francisco said we were
Speaker 4: a cult, and of course we then did damage control,
Speaker 4: like no, no, no, they're just read baiting.
Speaker 3: Us, you know.
Speaker 4: And most of the time we sat in circles and
Speaker 4: criticized each other and tore people down. And the purpose
Speaker 4: of that was following the guidelines of Chairman Mao of
Speaker 4: China that no matter what the criticism, you have to
Speaker 4: accept the kernel of truth, which basically meant you could
Speaker 4: be criticized for anything. So for example, at one point
Speaker 4: I was sent to New York to ask one of
Speaker 4: our supporters for whatever the equivalent of a million dollars
Speaker 4: was back then, which I went and did was embarrassing,
Speaker 4: and when I came back, I was put on trial
Speaker 4: and criticized for going to New York and asking this
Speaker 4: contact for a million dollars, which is.
Speaker 3: Exactly what I was ordered to do.
Speaker 4: And while you're sitting there in front of all these
Speaker 4: people on trial, you of course can't say, wait a minute,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, that's what I.
Speaker 3: Was told to do.
Speaker 4: So it was very very harsh life. And fortunately and
Speaker 4: I was always in leadership and in the inner circle
Speaker 4: around the leader, who was a drunken, narcissist, megalomaniac, former
Speaker 4: sociology professor.
Speaker 1: What was this organization you were in calls because we
Speaker 1: know what it is, but we don't even know what
Speaker 1: the name of it was.
Speaker 4: Well, the final name was the Democratic Workers Party. In
Speaker 4: the beginning, we were the Workers Party for Proletarian Socialism,
Speaker 4: but we decided that was a bit too much of
Speaker 4: a mouthful for the general public. But most of our
Speaker 4: work was done, especially early years, was done through front groups,
Speaker 4: and we never revealed that there was this organization behind everything.
Speaker 4: So we had like you know, front groups to like
Speaker 4: something called the Rebel Worker Organization to recruit workers, and
Speaker 4: we had an intellectual organization to recruit academics, and a
Speaker 4: hospital organization to recruit hospital workers.
Speaker 1: The danger of that, obviously, of that kind of positioning
Speaker 1: is it's not in this holistic, healthy way of that
Speaker 1: to be able to receive feedback and be self aware.
Speaker 1: It's really it almost always becomes weaponized. And what you're
Speaker 1: describing is, I'm going to tell you the criticism as
Speaker 1: a colonel of truth, I'm saying something even shrinks are
Speaker 1: guilty of doing that. By the way, you know, well,
Speaker 1: where's the truth in what your partner said. The whole
Speaker 1: thing was abusive, so let's not go searching for the
Speaker 1: truth is always my attitude. But that said that, being
Speaker 1: sent to go do the fundraising, you go do the fundraising,
Speaker 1: and then being criticized for doing the fundraising. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what happens in every narcissistic relationship. The person will literally
Speaker 1: be doing what they believe is the person's rule book,
Speaker 1: and then they're told, no, that's not what I wanted.
Speaker 1: That's all that gaslighting that completely undoes someone. But as
Speaker 1: you're going to this and even these twenty hour workdays,
Speaker 1: I've heard that thematically time and time again in cult organizations,
Speaker 1: cults and cults in general, of being able to do
Speaker 1: this inhumane amount of work, is that a strategy to
Speaker 1: numb people, to exhaust them so they can't question, like,
Speaker 1: what is the goal with all of that?
Speaker 4: It is a way to keep you exhausted and keep
Speaker 4: you from questioning and thinking, and you're just kind of
Speaker 4: functioning on wrote and that it also you know, in
Speaker 4: most cases, it's going to feed into the philosophy like
Speaker 4: we're the best and the greatest and we're saving the
Speaker 4: world in some one way or another. And so you know,
Speaker 4: we had this saying like another chairman mount, the Revolution
Speaker 4: isn't a tea party, right, so if people complained, it
Speaker 4: was like, well, no one ever said this was going
Speaker 4: to be easy. You know, you accepted this difficult life
Speaker 4: of being a cadre fighter for the revolution, so shut
Speaker 4: up and get the work.
Speaker 3: So it's both a way.
Speaker 4: To keep you exhausted but also to kind of again
Speaker 4: and break you down and just keep you working for
Speaker 4: the organization and supposedly meeting its goals.
Speaker 1: And another thing you mentioned, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is comment and called systems. You said you'd filled out
Speaker 1: this form with all kinds of sensitive information about you.
Speaker 2: What was that about?
Speaker 4: I mean, that was I think to make me feel
Speaker 4: vulnerable to know that they knew all this stuff about
Speaker 4: me and.
Speaker 3: They could pick away at pieces of it.
Speaker 4: So one of the things we had to do very
Speaker 4: early on was when we first joined, was we had
Speaker 4: to write our class history, right, so the history of
Speaker 4: our life and our family from a point of view
Speaker 4: of social class, right, And so everybody had to do that.
Speaker 3: So already they had a.
Speaker 4: Lot of information about you, so that when you wrote that,
Speaker 4: they could perhaps double check some things. But also everybody
Speaker 4: wrote a class history and then of course it got
Speaker 4: torn apart and you were told it wasn't good enough, right,
Speaker 4: and so then people had to rewrite it and rewrite
Speaker 4: it until it was the history that they wanted.
Speaker 3: So it was another way to erase your background.
Speaker 1: But what you described there, like that, that filling out
Speaker 1: that form, getting this vulnerable information again, that what we
Speaker 1: see diadically in narcissistic relationships. I call it the intel
Speaker 1: gathering phase of the relationship building, like you know, and
Speaker 1: it's really that staring deeply into your eyes and say
Speaker 1: tell me your deepest secret.
Speaker 2: I want to know all about you.
Speaker 1: And the other person might think this is about intimacy
Speaker 1: or closeness, but rather they're getting this and filing it
Speaker 1: away for future use. It's gathering the stuff, which in
Speaker 1: many cases people are giving in what feels like good faith, right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is what intimacy is, this is what trust is.
Speaker 1: They give it and then it is, like I always say,
Speaker 1: it's melted into bullets and it is used to harm
Speaker 1: that person.
Speaker 4: That's why it's so difficult to trust when you get out,
Speaker 4: you know, because everything you've done and given away was
Speaker 4: used against you.
Speaker 1: And that difficulty with trust is the sort of the
Speaker 1: legacy wound of anyone who's been in any form of toxic,
Speaker 1: abusive relational system, whether it's an individual, one on one,
Speaker 1: whether it's in a cult system. What was the penny
Speaker 1: drop moment for you? When did you lift your head
Speaker 1: and say something's not quite right here. You might not
Speaker 1: have known as a cult, maybe you did, but what
Speaker 1: was that moment for you?
Speaker 4: Okay, well this is a difficult story. But So in
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty one, so I had been in about five
Speaker 4: years and it was my birthday and my mother didn't call.
Speaker 4: My mother was back in Milwaukee, and my mother didn't call,
Speaker 4: and she always called me on my birthday.
Speaker 3: So I was like, this is weird.
Speaker 4: So I called my aunt, who's her youngest sister, and
Speaker 4: I said, you know, I'm just surprised I haven't heard
Speaker 4: from Mom. And she said, oh, your mother's in the hospital.
Speaker 4: They don't know what's wrong with her.
Speaker 3: And I'm like what.
Speaker 4: So I called the hospital and the doctor said, your
Speaker 4: mother's in a coma. We don't know what's wrong with her.
Speaker 4: If I were you, i'd get here. So I borrowed
Speaker 4: money from the cult and flew home. And when I
Speaker 4: got there, I demanded that one of the we had
Speaker 4: doctors in our organization, and one of the doctors said,
Speaker 4: when you get there, tell them to give her a
Speaker 4: cat scan.
Speaker 3: And this is before MRIs I think.
Speaker 4: So I got there, I demanded they give her a
Speaker 4: cat scan and the results came back and she had
Speaker 4: a gleoblastoma brain tumor, which most people know or maybe
Speaker 4: don't that it's one of the most malignant type of
Speaker 4: brain tumors.
Speaker 3: And so they said, we.
Speaker 4: Can operate and remove it, but it'll grow right back
Speaker 4: and she'll probably have four to six months to live.
Speaker 3: I was like, okay.
Speaker 4: So they did the operation and then she went through
Speaker 4: speech therapy and physical therapy and all of that occupational therapy,
Speaker 4: and every day the cult called me.
Speaker 3: When are you coming back? When are you coming back?
Speaker 4: And I was staying with my aunt, and my aunt said, oh,
Speaker 4: those people are so nice. They call you every day,
Speaker 4: you know, not knowing they were calling me to come back.
Speaker 4: So I it was time for her to leave the hospital.
Speaker 4: You know, at some point they want to kick you out.
Speaker 4: So I called my leader and I said, my mom's
Speaker 4: about to be discharged. Is nowhere for her to go,
Speaker 4: and I'd like permission to stay here with her until
Speaker 4: she dies. She has four to six months to live
Speaker 4: and then I'll come back. And she said, oh, well,
Speaker 4: let me check with you know, the queen, the general secretary.
Speaker 3: So she called back.
Speaker 4: A little while later and said, oh, we have a
Speaker 4: great idea, bring your mom out to California. Well, my
Speaker 4: mom was, you know, a little Serbian lady who I
Speaker 4: don't know if she'd ever left Milwaukee, was very close
Speaker 4: to her Orthodox church or Serbian Orthodox church. So I,
Speaker 4: you know, like a good militant, I said, oh okay,
Speaker 4: And they said, you know, we'll have one of your
Speaker 4: roommates move out. She can live in your house. So
Speaker 4: I went back. I got the room ready I got
Speaker 4: a walker and all that stuff from the American Cancer Society,
Speaker 4: and my aunt put her on a plane and flew
Speaker 4: her out. So she was living in my house, fairly weak,
Speaker 4: you know, wearing a wig because her head had been shaved,
Speaker 4: and I had to help her with bathing and things
Speaker 4: like that. But I still had to work every day.
Speaker 4: And at some point I said to the cult, look,
Speaker 4: you told me to bring my mom home, but I
Speaker 4: never see her. And they said, oh, okay, you can
Speaker 4: have dinner with her, forty five minutes for dinner every day.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh gee, So I did that, and
Speaker 4: then they decided she should work for the cult. So
Speaker 4: they had her working at one of our front groups,
Speaker 4: I don't know, doing filing or something, and somebody picked
Speaker 4: her up and brought her home. So again I wasn't
Speaker 4: seeing her every day because I'd leave at six in
Speaker 4: the morning. So one night I came home at about
Speaker 4: eleven o'clock at night and I opened the door to
Speaker 4: her room and she was lying dead on the floor,
Speaker 4: and I was just broken. And when I composed myself,
Speaker 4: I called my best friend who came over, who I
Speaker 4: had recruited into the cult, and I called the corner
Speaker 4: or whatever. I called my cult leader again or my
Speaker 4: leadership person who was the second in command, and I said,
Speaker 4: my mom just died and I'm having the body flown home.
Speaker 4: And on the other side of the line, she said,
Speaker 4: in this very harsh voice, well, you're not going home
Speaker 4: to the funeral, are you. And I looked at the
Speaker 4: phone and I thought, here, I am killing myself right,
Speaker 4: working twenty hour days blah blah blah to build a
Speaker 4: better world. And if this is the better world we're building,
Speaker 4: where I'm being told I can't go to my mother's
Speaker 4: funeral who just died in my house. So it was
Speaker 4: the first time I ever defied the organization. I said, no,
Speaker 4: I am going, and I borrowed money again and I
Speaker 4: flew home. I have absolutely no memory I planned the funeral.
Speaker 4: I planned the big in our tradition. We had a
Speaker 4: big Serbian dinner afterwards in the Serb hall, and neighbors
Speaker 4: came and her sisters, and halfway through I got up
Speaker 4: and left to take a flight back to San Francisco.
Speaker 4: And when I got back, I was met at the
Speaker 4: airport and told, you know, report at ten am to
Speaker 4: such and such a place. So the next morning. There
Speaker 4: I was again sitting in one of those high chairs
Speaker 4: with forty people in front of me, and I was
Speaker 4: criticized for putting my mother ahead of the revolution. And
Speaker 4: after several hours of being berated for that, not being
Speaker 4: able to cry, show no emotion. That was a breakdown
Speaker 4: for me. And that's when I was saying earlier, I
Speaker 4: knew I had to get out, but I could not
Speaker 4: figure out how to get out. I had nowhere to go,
Speaker 4: I had no money, I had a broken down car.
Speaker 4: I knew they'd come after me because I knew stuff,
Speaker 4: and I was just like a walking nervous breakdown, just
Speaker 4: like a robot. I lived like that for you know,
Speaker 4: four and a half years. So that was my breaking point.
Speaker 1: First of all, I'm so sorry, uh doctor Yanya. It's
Speaker 1: just it's such a devais dating story and one that
Speaker 1: stays with you in so so many ways. You know,
Speaker 1: as I was listening to that, I think what struck
Speaker 1: me was again, it's hard for me not to view
Speaker 1: this just lifted that this is a whole group, but
Speaker 1: even in an individual abusive relationship, these are the kinds
Speaker 1: of things that would happen. Why do you have to
Speaker 1: spend so much time taking care of your mother, Well,
Speaker 1: this is inconvenience to usk and and in a way
Speaker 1: it also felt like you were talking about this a
Speaker 1: horrifically abusive employer, like you need to report back. We
Speaker 1: don't care if this, We don't care of that. But
Speaker 1: it was obviously not just those things, which are terrible things.
Speaker 1: It was this larger system that had so enveloped you
Speaker 1: that there was that bounded choice. There was no choice.
Speaker 1: I guess my question for you going through because you
Speaker 1: were going through so much raw psychological pain, grief and loss,
Speaker 1: and starting to recognize that the system you were in
Speaker 1: there was something terribly terribly wrong about what was going
Speaker 1: on at this point when all these terrible things were happening.
Speaker 1: Was the word call even coming into your mind? Or
Speaker 1: was it that I'm in something?
Speaker 2: Really? What was your word?
Speaker 1: Was it abusive? Toxic? Problematic? Like clearly you knew something
Speaker 1: wrong this thing. We say we're doing this revolution, we're
Speaker 1: trying to make a better world, and yet the world
Speaker 1: we've created here is actually quite awful, so we're not.
Speaker 2: Meeting that goal.
Speaker 1: What was your framing on it when you realize something
Speaker 1: was wrong?
Speaker 4: I don't believe at that time I thought of the
Speaker 4: word cult. And of course I don't have any journals
Speaker 4: from that time because we weren't allowed to have anything
Speaker 4: like that. I just know that I felt trapped. I
Speaker 4: felt incredibly trapped, and I knew it was wrong and
Speaker 4: it was harsh, and it was hurting other people, and
Speaker 4: that I had heard other people. In those four years,
Speaker 4: a lot of other really crappy stuff happened, both to
Speaker 4: me and to others. I don't think I used the
Speaker 4: word cult until the very end when we all got out.
Speaker 1: So just again, crappy situation, bad, it's not good for me.
Speaker 2: How did you get out?
Speaker 4: So basically, you know, those of us who joined, as
Speaker 4: you said, in those early years, we were pretty burned
Speaker 4: out and pretty fed up and had been around her,
Speaker 4: you know, her inconsistencies and her madness and her corruption
Speaker 4: and drunkenness.
Speaker 3: And she left.
Speaker 4: It's too long to go into the details, but she
Speaker 4: left to go to Bulgaria because that was her communist heaven.
Speaker 4: At that point, we basically the inner circle basically kind
Speaker 4: of all looked at each other and said, we're in
Speaker 4: a cult.
Speaker 3: And basically we called together all.
Speaker 4: The members and some of the people who'd been expelled,
Speaker 4: and we had this big meeting in our print shop
Speaker 4: and tried to tell people what was going on behind
Speaker 4: the scenes. And it took about a week to convince
Speaker 4: people we were telling the truth and not trying.
Speaker 3: To have a coup.
Speaker 4: And then everybody just started pouring out their stories. You know,
Speaker 4: how they sold their blood to have enough money for
Speaker 4: their dues, how they never saw their spouse again after
Speaker 4: that person got expelled, how they gave their children to
Speaker 4: the spouse, you know, on and on with these horrific stories.
Speaker 4: And then she was coming back, and so the night
Speaker 4: before she came back, we took a vote and we
Speaker 4: voted unanimously to expel her, and then a second vote
Speaker 4: unanimous to dissolve the organization. And then we picked a
Speaker 4: team of people who would meet with her and tell
Speaker 4: her when she came back. And one of the women
Speaker 4: wore a wire so that all of us could hear
Speaker 4: what happened at that meeting. So basically, you had one
Speaker 4: hundred and twenty people who just had the rug out
Speaker 4: from under them, and you had a very stunned cult
Speaker 4: leader who was told the parties over, and you know,
Speaker 4: we all helped each other with resumes and getting jobs
Speaker 4: and clothes because we had no clothes. I mean, a
Speaker 4: lot of people like I ran the publishing house, so
Speaker 4: a lot of people would say they worked at the
Speaker 4: publishing house, and I'd be their reference. And you know,
Speaker 4: we just did whatever we could to support each other.
Speaker 4: And that was the beginning of my recovery.
Speaker 1: And at that point it became clear to all of
Speaker 1: you collectively it was a cult.
Speaker 4: It became clear to us all for a sliver of time.
Speaker 4: And then what happened is a lot of the people
Speaker 4: who had reputations on the left and who wanted to
Speaker 4: carry on with political work didn't want us to talk
Speaker 4: about what happened. And the rest of us were like,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, you know, the left needs to learn
Speaker 4: from this, and what do you mean we can't talk
Speaker 4: about what happened? And so what kind of a split happened?
Speaker 4: Also about what should happen to the assets because we
Speaker 4: had a print shop, we had we had a publishing house,
Speaker 4: we had the doctor's office.
Speaker 3: We had something like eighty.
Speaker 4: Computers in nineteen eighty five from people had that was
Speaker 4: a lot, and so we ended up having to take
Speaker 4: a vote for that as well. In our side won
Speaker 4: and a few years later, we each got a check
Speaker 4: for like, I don't know, one hundred and twenty dollars
Speaker 4: or something, you know, like your ten year pension. So
Speaker 4: that was a bit of a struggle that went on
Speaker 4: for over a year between people, mostly by letters, because
Speaker 4: it was even before email.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, no, it was it. And then it
Speaker 1: became clear. It didn't become clear. So it was the
Speaker 1: dismantling of this really was much more that this was unhealthy,
Speaker 1: this was wrong, this was corrupt, but not that this
Speaker 1: was a.
Speaker 4: Cult, right for some of the people and for a
Speaker 4: minority of the people, and even for myself. And so
Speaker 4: that kind of gave me the word cult. But when
Speaker 4: I was in New York at the time, nobody talked
Speaker 4: about political cults. Everything was religious cults, right, or gurus whatever.
Speaker 4: And I thought, okay, well maybe we weren't a cult.
Speaker 3: So I actually sat.
Speaker 4: Down and I made these lists, and this is what
Speaker 4: I have a lot of people I work with do.
Speaker 4: So you know, I'm like, okay, religious cult.
Speaker 3: They have Jesus.
Speaker 4: We had marks, they had the Bible. We had a
Speaker 4: book called The Training of the Cadre. They had this
Speaker 4: we had that they had and I was like, Yep,
Speaker 4: we were a cult. And then I started going to
Speaker 4: conferences and speaking and letting people know there aren't just
Speaker 4: religious cults. And of course now we know today there's
Speaker 4: every kind of cult imaginable.
Speaker 1: We will be right back with this conversation. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean absolutely. And you said, though, at that point began
Speaker 1: your recovery And what does recovery when a person has
Speaker 1: their eyes opened? I was in an abusive organization. Took
Speaker 1: some time before recognize it as a cult. But what
Speaker 1: is recovery from that?
Speaker 4: Like, you know, we have to accept that we'd been had,
Speaker 4: that we'd been duped, We have to accept the things
Speaker 4: we did to other people or saw, and then there's
Speaker 4: you know, you're basically left with a shattered self.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So I was forty years old, and I felt like
Speaker 4: I was fifteen. You know, I felt like I didn't
Speaker 4: know how to cross the street or open a bank account.
Speaker 4: And you also feel like you're this alien being. You know.
Speaker 4: I would go on these business dinners, business lunches in
Speaker 4: New York, cultural mecca. Right, I hadn't seen a movie.
Speaker 4: I'd seen three movies in ten years, and I'd have
Speaker 4: to talk with business clients and I didn't know what
Speaker 4: the hell to talk about, you know, I was like
Speaker 4: from Mars. So there's that sense of alienation, there's a shame,
Speaker 4: like you don't want to tell people. There's the guilt
Speaker 4: of what you did. There's enormous loss, you know, for
Speaker 4: you lose friends. You've lost a lot of people.
Speaker 3: Along the way.
Speaker 4: You know. In my case, I was never even allowed
Speaker 4: to grieve my mother's death. It's everything, it's everything, And
Speaker 4: so the best thing is, of course, you know, what
Speaker 4: we call psycho education, like not so much not at
Speaker 4: all traditional therapy where you go in and the therapist say, okay,
Speaker 4: tell me what happened when you were two years old.
Speaker 3: You know, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 4: You first have to unpack the cults, because if you don't,
Speaker 4: you're still looking at yourself through that mindset. And that's
Speaker 4: what most therapists don't get, which is why we do
Speaker 4: some training for therapists at my new nonprofit, because the
Speaker 4: cult survivors need more therapists who get this.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you're right again.
Speaker 1: The psycho educational piece is also sort of the one
Speaker 1: of the central pillars of working with survivors of narcissistic abuse,
Speaker 1: because once they understand what the traumatizing system looks like
Speaker 1: once they understand what this is. And I think it's
Speaker 1: the hiding and plain sight of it too, is that
Speaker 1: a narcissistic persons often quite successful in the world at large. Right,
Speaker 1: this is not someone who's looking at looking surly everywhere
Speaker 1: and everyone's pitying you. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: This is you're in a relationship with this person. Everyone's saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you're so lucky, you're part of something, or you're part
Speaker 1: of this relationship. But everything that you're sharing here, the
Speaker 1: one you started with, was an interesting one to me.
Speaker 1: You have to accept that you've been had right, And
Speaker 1: I understand that to be the subjective experience of a survivor,
Speaker 1: whether in a cled system, in a narcissistic relationship from
Speaker 1: my seat as a therapist, it's the I think that
Speaker 1: when we feel we've been had, we feel foolish, that
Speaker 1: we've been played right, like somebody just street con on us.
Speaker 1: But in fact what had happened was all the healthy
Speaker 1: functioning parts of yourself, a desire to belong, a commitment
Speaker 1: to a cause, a drawing to like minded people. Healthy
Speaker 1: parts of yourself were drawn into something right in a relationship.
Speaker 1: It might be that you saw something in this person
Speaker 1: that you believed in love, that you wanted to build
Speaker 1: a life with them, all healthy stuff, and then to
Speaker 1: find out that in fact, that's not what the social
Speaker 1: contract was on their side. It does feel like being had,
Speaker 1: but it's not really that you were foolish. It wasn't
Speaker 1: that you were foolish got played by a street colond
Speaker 1: because you're rolled up to a game of three card Monti.
Speaker 1: It's more that you had gone in with all the
Speaker 1: best parts of yourself and ran into something harmful. Is
Speaker 1: that self forgiveness in that process, that this was the
Speaker 1: best of you? You know, you were taking advantage of
Speaker 1: and that exploitativeness is an important part of the psycho.
Speaker 2: Education on what happened. Absolutely systems.
Speaker 4: I mean I get asked all the time, you know,
Speaker 4: is there a certain personality type who joins a cult?
Speaker 4: And I'm like, you know what, if there's any common denominator,
Speaker 4: it's idealism. You know, it's people who want a better world,
Speaker 4: a better self, a better family, you know, a better belief,
Speaker 4: spiritual belief, whatever. But it's not because people, as I
Speaker 4: said earlier, are stupid, weird, crazy, lazy. That's not who
Speaker 4: cult members want. I mean cult leaders want. And so
Speaker 4: while you have to accept that you did it and
Speaker 4: went along with it, you also have to realize that
Speaker 4: there was nothing wrong with you, right like this happens
Speaker 4: to everybody.
Speaker 3: It can happen to anybody.
Speaker 4: And the forgiveness bit is so much more about self forgiveness,
Speaker 4: which is one of the courses we taught forgiveness of self.
Speaker 4: I always say, you don't have to forgive the cult leader,
Speaker 4: lord knows. I mean, there's all this sort of mindfulness
Speaker 4: who stuff today about forgiveness. No, you don't ever have
Speaker 4: to forgive the person who abused you.
Speaker 3: Who you have to forgive in this context is yourself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, and deepen that understanding because they don't
Speaker 4: deserve bupkus.
Speaker 1: No, they don't deserve Sure as hell don't deserve forgiveness,
Speaker 1: you know. I think to my forgiveness is a rather
Speaker 1: divine state, and it implies that there would be meaningful
Speaker 1: change when someone receives that forgiveness, and that a lot
Speaker 1: of people put forgiveness of other ahead of forgiveness of self.
Speaker 1: And it's that again, you brought the best of yourself.
Speaker 1: But you just said something so interesting I want to
Speaker 1: come back to, which is that cult leaders cult groups
Speaker 1: don't want lazy and crazy. Talk more about that, because
Speaker 1: again you're right, the trope is of the lost person
Speaker 1: who there's something off about them. That's why they get
Speaker 1: drawn into this and they got nothing else going on.
Speaker 1: You're actually saying it's quite different.
Speaker 2: Why is that? You know, what's that about? They don't want.
Speaker 4: It's because they want They want a type personalities. They
Speaker 4: want people who are going to function, who are going
Speaker 4: to help raise money, who are going to recruit, who
Speaker 4: are going to bring in contacts to lend legitimacy, to
Speaker 4: run the businesses, to run the internal organization, set up
Speaker 4: the infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Cult leaders are pretty lazy.
Speaker 4: They don't do very much except give orders and bask
Speaker 4: in their whateverness. So they need people around them who
Speaker 4: can perform. And you know, I always say, the cult's
Speaker 4: not there to take care of you. You're there to
Speaker 4: take care of the cult leader.
Speaker 3: And the cult.
Speaker 4: So I mean, I know, in our case, if we
Speaker 4: had someone who joined, you know, as say a volunteer
Speaker 4: or general member, and they seemed a little fragile or
Speaker 4: maybe had too much sickness.
Speaker 3: We got rid of them. We were like, you know,
Speaker 3: this isn't right for you. Bye bye. We didn't want that.
Speaker 4: And the Unification Church used to do that, you know,
Speaker 4: when people had breakdowns, they would just dump them in
Speaker 4: front of a mental hospital and drive away. I mean,
Speaker 4: there's no caring for you in a cult. And of
Speaker 4: course they want people with money. So we saw that
Speaker 4: in the next case, right, you know, or celebrities, you know,
Speaker 4: people who are going to you know, oh, let's go
Speaker 4: coerce the Dalai Lama into meeting with us. Let's give
Speaker 4: him a million dollars, you know, and he can wrap
Speaker 4: a cloth around Ranieri.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely exactly. You know, it really is.
Speaker 1: And I think that that, you know, it's so funny
Speaker 1: you say that cult leaders are actually the ones who
Speaker 1: are lazy. I have more that it's entitlment, right, They're
Speaker 1: entitled to having everything done to them so if or
Speaker 1: for them, or with them, or as they wish. And
Speaker 1: so when people are entitled, almost by definition, they're lazy
Speaker 1: because they're not actually attending to the things that need
Speaker 1: to get done. But they put it under this rough
Speaker 1: break off. I shouldn't have to be the one who
Speaker 1: does this. I'm too important, I'm too divine, I'm to this.
Speaker 4: Right, right, it's the grandiosity, right, yeah, yeah, And we
Speaker 4: as members rationalize that, like I used to literally say
Speaker 4: to myself, well, we have stalin in our lineage, and.
Speaker 3: At least we haven't killed anyone yet.
Speaker 4: So you rationalize along the way. And you know, this
Speaker 4: is my metaphor about the shelf. You know, when you
Speaker 4: asked what was the breaking point? I think everybody who's
Speaker 4: in a cult, and I would imagine in a narcissistic
Speaker 4: relationship that you have doubts, but you have no way
Speaker 4: to express those doubts, right, because you know you'll be
Speaker 4: punished in some way, So you store all these things
Speaker 4: on this shelf in the back of your head, right,
Speaker 4: and then one day, one thing too much happens and
Speaker 4: the shelf breaks.
Speaker 3: That's what happened when my mother died.
Speaker 4: And then you don't necessarily you know it's a cult
Speaker 4: or evil narcissist, but you know there's something wrong, and
Speaker 4: then you start thinking about getting out, and then how
Speaker 4: and when you're able to get out again is a
Speaker 4: very specific situation, depending on the cult, the boyfriend, the whatever,
Speaker 4: that's going to be easier or harder, depending on the
Speaker 4: context of that.
Speaker 1: I love that metaphor of the shelf breaking. Some people
Speaker 1: call it sort of a rock bottom. It is death
Speaker 1: by a thousand cuts and then one day and it
Speaker 1: could actually be a relatively in your case, it was
Speaker 1: not inconsequential at all. It was the but it could
Speaker 1: be inconsequential. And that is the thing that accumulation and
Speaker 1: that idea. And I think people can see that, you know,
Speaker 1: the yawning bookshelf that for the one more book and boom,
Speaker 1: what just happened?
Speaker 2: I just put one book on it.
Speaker 1: And so I love that metaphor because I think that
Speaker 1: actually lines in though it interestingly a little bit, there's
Speaker 1: a beautiful complementarity to your work and the work of
Speaker 1: doctor Jennifer in the sense of she talks about this
Speaker 1: concept of betrayal blindness, sort of seeing the betrayal but
Speaker 1: not encoding it and not processing it. So it's not
Speaker 1: like you're in denial, and it's not like you're delusional.
Speaker 1: You see it, you just don't register it in a
Speaker 1: way in essence that would break the shelf. But one
Speaker 1: day those betrayals pile up in a way that the
Speaker 1: whole system busts. Now, things become more clear, but there's
Speaker 1: a danger in seeing it for all the reasons you say. So,
Speaker 1: there's a real complimentarity there. But I want to go
Speaker 1: back to recovery, because if you weren't allowed to not
Speaker 1: only grieve major losses in your case, the loss of
Speaker 1: your mother, but also in the group you were in,
Speaker 1: and in all narcissistic relationships, you also have to curtail
Speaker 1: your expression of emotion. If you express emotion, you will
Speaker 1: be gaslighted or shamed, or belittled, or be painted as
Speaker 1: somebody who is disregulated, and your emotion is never going
Speaker 1: to be empathized with, mirrored or received with compassion. People
Speaker 1: in narcissistic relationships really have themselves hemmed in to relatively
Speaker 1: restricted emotional expression. And when I work with these clients
Speaker 1: in therapy, they'll almost ninety nine percent of the time
Speaker 1: apologize for crying. I'm so sorry, I'm crying. I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's what happens in here. Actually, this is purpose built
Speaker 1: for crying.
Speaker 2: And that's what happened to you in a cult. It's
Speaker 2: hard to learn how.
Speaker 4: To absolutely right, absolutely and not only I always say
Speaker 4: to employers. The best people you can hire are former
Speaker 4: cult members because they're such hard workers. The manipulation of
Speaker 4: one's emotions in the cult is so major and has
Speaker 4: such a big impact during recovery because you're not used
Speaker 4: to feeling your feelings, and you're not used to understanding
Speaker 4: your feelings. It's why people are triggered all the time,
Speaker 4: and they overreact to the triggers because they're not used
Speaker 4: to being able to on their own have an emotion
Speaker 4: and understand it. And so it's like such a rollercoaster
Speaker 4: of a time, especially the first couple of years. And
Speaker 4: I'm sure this is true with narcissists having lived years
Speaker 4: in most cases walking on eggshells, like having lived with
Speaker 4: that level of anxiety, right, and then you get out
Speaker 4: and there's triggers and panic attacks and it just you know,
Speaker 4: it becomes really overwhelming for people.
Speaker 2: Oh, it absolutely does.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it does become and you're right, well, because
Speaker 1: the emotion can't be expressed. I think that actually is
Speaker 1: a driver of the sheer amount of panic that we
Speaker 1: see panic attacks, panic disorder in survivors, not just of cults,
Speaker 1: but with narcissistic relationships. Because there's no normative way to
Speaker 1: express I mean again as not been through a cult,
Speaker 1: but through so many narcissistic relationships that shape me developmentally
Speaker 1: that I to this day struggle with crying and it
Speaker 1: gets caught right here in my throat.
Speaker 2: Like this, and it's painful.
Speaker 1: I mean it's painful because of how much shame there was,
Speaker 1: so and so that's a microscopic level compared to what
Speaker 1: you're talking about systemically. And then nothing but apologies when
Speaker 1: that emotion looks like I've done something wrong, anyone's done
Speaker 1: something wrong by a normal show of tears, anger, sadness, worry,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't have someplace to go. It comes out
Speaker 1: in panic, and I think that that's a really important,
Speaker 1: really really important.
Speaker 4: And feeling stuck, you know, feeling stuck and unable to
Speaker 4: make decisions. I mean I remember people would say, oh,
Speaker 4: let's go to the movies.
Speaker 3: What do you want to say?
Speaker 4: And I'd say, I don't know, you decide, you know.
Speaker 4: It's like I couldn't make a decision, all right. I
Speaker 4: didn't want to take a stand on anything because all
Speaker 4: those years when I took a stand, it was the
Speaker 4: wrong stand, right. So it's like you're just kind of
Speaker 4: like creeping through life.
Speaker 1: Do you think that feeling stuck though, could that be
Speaker 1: sort of that bounded choice extrapolating into life even when
Speaker 1: the bound is gone. So now there's no more fear,
Speaker 1: but the bounded choice kind of follows you like a shadow.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and there is still fear.
Speaker 4: I mean, I was terrified that somebody was going to
Speaker 4: come after me, even though our cult was dissolved, you know.
Speaker 4: So most cults thrive on paranoia. It's such a wonderful
Speaker 4: way to keep people, you know, enmeshed right by this
Speaker 4: us versus them, fear, the outside world whatever. You know.
Speaker 4: We were afraid, oh the FBI was going to come
Speaker 4: and get us, you know.
Speaker 3: And so all of that.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think people don't understand the intensity of
Speaker 4: life in these kinds of situation, these systems, and then
Speaker 4: afterwards trying to unpack all that and still deal with
Speaker 4: the bottom of the pyramid. You know, your health, eating,
Speaker 4: you know, physical physical well being, exercise.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just it must feel, it must feel
Speaker 1: so lonely because no one else does get it. It's
Speaker 1: not the normative experience most people have had.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, And I mean that's why I do the
Speaker 4: work I do, and we you know, I've started this
Speaker 4: nonprofit to be able to have you know, we have
Speaker 4: discussion groups for survivors. We have for regular I call
Speaker 4: regular survivors of cults or narcissistic relationships trauma, and then
Speaker 4: also groups for people who were born or raised in
Speaker 4: a cult. And people get so much out of those groups,
Speaker 4: like just being able to spend an hour and a
Speaker 4: half with other people who know what you're talking about, right,
Speaker 4: and you don't have to explain yourself and you don't
Speaker 4: have to apologize. It's so powerful, and we certainly need
Speaker 4: more resources in our society, and especially for people who
Speaker 4: are born and raised.
Speaker 3: In a cult. There's nothing out there, nothing.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about that, because I
Speaker 1: think that group often gets forgotten. I have talked with
Speaker 1: some people I've worked with clinically with folks who have
Speaker 1: been born and raised into occult systems. I've also talked
Speaker 1: with them in other interviews I've done in other places
Speaker 1: i've worked. But I think you're absolutely right, that is
Speaker 1: a very different group. What did things look like for
Speaker 1: that group? Because it is very different?
Speaker 2: And what have you observed?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, it's really kind of my latest pet
Speaker 4: peeve that they're so little out there for people. Because
Speaker 4: my last research project at the university was I interviewed
Speaker 4: sixty nine people who grew up in cults and who
Speaker 4: left on their own, and that's the basis of my book,
Speaker 4: Escaping Utopia. And the stories were so incredible. I mean,
Speaker 4: the amount of sexual abuse and physical abuses in every
Speaker 4: kind of cult of these young children is just I'd
Speaker 4: get off the phone from these interviews and just flop
Speaker 4: on my bed and cry and cry and cry. I mean,
Speaker 4: it was just such hard stuff to hear. But what
Speaker 4: happens is, you know, they get out and some of
Speaker 4: them don't even know their real names, don't have birth certificates,
Speaker 4: they don't know if they have anybody out there who
Speaker 4: can help them, any other relatives. They don't know how
Speaker 4: to drive, they don't know about getting a ged. They
Speaker 4: end up living on the streets a lot of times,
Speaker 4: they end up doing sex, work on drugs. A lot
Speaker 4: of suicides, a horrific amount of suicides, and it's just criminal.
Speaker 4: And you know, people like that, and even some adults
Speaker 4: who join cults in me, you know, they go to
Speaker 4: a domestic violence shelter and they don't qualify, they don't
Speaker 4: get let in, so where do they go? And it's
Speaker 4: just it's so difficult because they leave everything, especially if
Speaker 4: they leave on their own, and then they have to
Speaker 4: carry on with life. In many cases their parents are
Speaker 4: still involved, and so do they have a relationship or not.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's so much to go through that it's
Speaker 4: really remarkable the ones who have survived and who've really
Speaker 4: some have done incredibly good work.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, in talking with some folks about this,
Speaker 1: there's some people who didn't realize they were raised in
Speaker 1: a cult. It was so normalized within the family that
Speaker 1: as the adult child started distancing from the system, especially
Speaker 1: if there are multiple siblings, and thinking, you know, in
Speaker 1: some cases they weren't getting it. And then someone else
Speaker 1: in the family said, did you know that such and
Speaker 1: such was a cult, And they're like no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: And then they do the deep dive and there's this
Speaker 1: horrific level of betrayal that you're like, how could you
Speaker 1: It wasn't even in about esk. They grew up, and
Speaker 1: then they again, they moved for a job, they weren't
Speaker 1: kept like, they weren't sort of confined and imprisoned, but
Speaker 1: once they left and were sort of mainstreamed into the world.
Speaker 2: That revelation.
Speaker 1: At first, it's almost like stages of grief, right Initially
Speaker 1: there's a tremendous amount of denial and anger, and then
Speaker 1: as the acceptance seeps in. One thing I had observed
Speaker 1: in several of these cases is a fair amount of
Speaker 1: rebellion and acting out. They were often raised in very
Speaker 1: very sort of restricted ways, and then the acting out,
Speaker 1: whether it was sexual acting, outer substances or anything, it
Speaker 1: actually could get very very dangerous, and that would be
Speaker 1: part of their sort of healing and recovery path, I
Speaker 1: know in Escaping Utopia. I mean just you know, to
Speaker 1: put a finer point on it. And you had talked
Speaker 1: about this also earlier about you you're talking about four
Speaker 1: year old children in forest labor. You'd give an example
Speaker 1: of a four year old child working in a bakery,
Speaker 1: and I'm just curious, how does this not run a
Speaker 1: foul of child labor laws.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, it is one of the ways we've
Speaker 4: been able to hold a few cults accountable lately or
Speaker 4: in the past few There was an organization, the Alamo Foundation,
Speaker 4: and he finally got convicted of labor trafficking. You know,
Speaker 4: it was one of the charges against Ranieri, also against
Speaker 4: Larry Ray. So most cults are doing labor trafficking. I mean,
Speaker 4: I worked for ten years for nothing, and I think
Speaker 4: what happens is when there are public business and customers
Speaker 4: might look and see, oh, well, there's a five year
Speaker 4: old cleaning the tables, and either they think it's cute
Speaker 4: or they just go whatever. Very few people are actually
Speaker 4: going to report it to the labor courts.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 4: We need people to be more conscientious about that and
Speaker 4: at least look into this situation. I mean, yeah, it
Speaker 4: could be a mom and pop shop and the kid
Speaker 4: is helping, or it could be a front for a
Speaker 4: cult like the Yellow Deli, which are these cafes that
Speaker 4: are fronts for the twelve Tribes.
Speaker 1: So, like your eyeballs, has there ever been as temp
Speaker 1: doctor Yanya to use things like racketeering statutes to bring
Speaker 1: down colts like because it can feel like organized crime, right,
Speaker 1: that many people a crime?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that did work with Ranieri. Here's the problem. First,
Speaker 4: there's a problem of finding lawyers who will even take
Speaker 4: on these cases because they think they're not going to win.
Speaker 4: And of course lawyers want to win, especially you know,
Speaker 4: if they're taking a case on contingency. When people leave
Speaker 4: a cult, it's the decision to take some kind of
Speaker 4: legal action is a very big step, and it's going
Speaker 4: to prolong your recovery. Most likely, it's going to put
Speaker 4: you through so much crap. If anybody's been involved in
Speaker 4: legal stuff, you know, depositions, you know, they just tear
Speaker 4: you down.
Speaker 3: It just can go on for years.
Speaker 4: So a lot of people decide, I just want to
Speaker 4: get on with my life, right, And then it's a
Speaker 4: matter of having been at a high enough level that
Speaker 4: perhaps you have actual evidence. So I mean, I've worked
Speaker 4: with a group of people who were part of a
Speaker 4: cult in Atlanta, and they were high level people who
Speaker 4: left inner circle. We created, They created, i should say,
Speaker 4: binders of evidence of every type medical malpractice, this, sex trafficking, this,
Speaker 4: that the other financial fraud. And I was able to
Speaker 4: connect them to the FBI in Atlanta, but nothing came
Speaker 4: of it, you know, nothing of it. So it can
Speaker 4: be so disheartening. I mean, look what it took Fornexium.
Speaker 4: You know, it took Catherine Oxenberg knowing the governor or
Speaker 4: somebody that finally they you know, after reporting things for years.
Speaker 4: Finally somebody acted on it. So it's a big struggle
Speaker 4: to get that to happen.
Speaker 1: How much of this is because cults are able to
Speaker 1: hide behind religious religiou projection, because it does feel like
Speaker 1: religious organizations somehow managed to really skirt the law. Is
Speaker 1: that a sort of another loophole that they can play on.
Speaker 1: We've talked about people healing from this, We've talked about
Speaker 1: people getting in. We've talked about people getting out. Do
Speaker 1: people get pulled back in? So a person does the work,
Speaker 1: says I'm out, this is a cult, this is wrong.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, they leave.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of situations or even after making that
Speaker 1: courageously about they get sucked back into the system.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, into either the same or a different system.
Speaker 4: But generally those are people who didn't do the psycho
Speaker 4: educational recovery. If you don't if you don't spend time
Speaker 4: doing the proper recovery where you understand what the heck
Speaker 4: happened to you and how it happened, it's really easy
Speaker 4: to get involved in something else. You know, we call
Speaker 4: those cult hoppers. Yeah, and you know, I've worked I've
Speaker 4: worked with people who've been in three four or five
Speaker 4: different cults before they finally like enough, you know that's so, Yes,
Speaker 4: that does happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And going back to what you're saying, before those
Speaker 1: like we're talking about these loopholes right become a religion
Speaker 1: you know, or you know, find ways to hide something
Speaker 1: that's come up in your writing. That actually was incredibly
Speaker 1: unsettling to me, doctor Yanya, was this idea of cult
Speaker 1: apologist and these are not and these are people who
Speaker 1: have educational credentials and from the the throne of that legitimacy,
Speaker 1: are basically saying you can't call groups cults. Can you
Speaker 1: break that down? Because that piece was actually quite stunning
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's been a decade's long problem.
Speaker 4: So back in the I would say probably the seventies
Speaker 4: and eighties when doctor Margaret Singer, who was a clinical
Speaker 4: psychologist at Berkeley, and she was the main sort of
Speaker 4: cult expert at the time, and eventually she was a
Speaker 4: dear friend of mine and my mentor. Margaret had done
Speaker 4: some legal cases involving some cults and she was brilliant
Speaker 4: in the courtroom and she was winning cases and over
Speaker 4: fists for families or for former members. So the cults
Speaker 4: realized they needed to get experts on their side. So
Speaker 4: somehow they convinced some of these academics that this was
Speaker 4: all about freedom of religion. And even though as we know,
Speaker 4: not all cults are religious, and so a number of academics,
Speaker 4: some I think, genuinely believe they're doing it to defend
Speaker 4: freedom of religion. Most of them, in my opinion, are
Speaker 4: doing it because they benefit. They work closely with the cults.
Speaker 4: They make their money that way. And so now we
Speaker 4: have this sort of gaggle of people who've been very
Speaker 4: well coordinated over time, some very influential academics or professionals,
Speaker 4: and they do things like, in my case, they try
Speaker 4: to keep me from testifying in court cases. They have
Speaker 4: gotten into the textbooks. So any psych one or sociology
Speaker 4: one textbook you pick up is going to say, oh,
Speaker 4: cults are really just nice new religions. There's no such
Speaker 4: thing as brainwashing. This is all just disgruntled former members
Speaker 4: who are making up stories. It's horrific, it really is.
Speaker 4: And how these people sleep at night, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't you know.
Speaker 1: I think what's stunning to me that anyone would be
Speaker 1: an apologist for these systems, is.
Speaker 3: You were talking to go to court and defend them.
Speaker 1: But you're talking about a group phenomenology that we're seeing
Speaker 1: replicated in all of these individual relationships. We see it
Speaker 1: replicated in sexual assault, we see it replicated in coerce
Speaker 1: of control, we see it replicated in domestic abuse. You know,
Speaker 1: cults are really basically scaling up of those individual dynamics,
Speaker 1: and that they've jumped on that word, and it's ghastly.
Speaker 1: I want to get back to the one more thing
Speaker 1: you said. I made a note to come back to this.
Speaker 1: You said, this word brainwashing is also an issue. We
Speaker 1: all use it rather cavalierly, but you said that there's
Speaker 1: some issues with this word.
Speaker 2: Can you talk to us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: So I think there's two things. The word originated during
Speaker 4: the fifties when a journalist who was actually a CI
Speaker 4: agent was in China and wrote a book called Brainwashing
Speaker 4: in Red China. So this was during what we called
Speaker 4: the Red Skine Right, and he described what was going
Speaker 4: on in Chairman Mao's China. You know, Mao took over
Speaker 4: the country in nineteen forty nine when they had the revolution.
Speaker 4: So then there was that movie The Manchurian candidate, So
Speaker 4: it all got quite exaggerated, Like, you know, our government
Speaker 4: apparently believed that the Russians in the Chinese had some
Speaker 4: magic potion that would turn people into these political robots
Speaker 4: who would do whatever, and so, you know, it all
Speaker 4: got sensationalized in a way. But the reality is, you know,
Speaker 4: there's other works by Robert J. Liften and Edgar Shin
Speaker 4: who studied people coming out of prison camps and out
Speaker 4: of communist China and wrote their books on thought reform
Speaker 4: and coercive persuasion and described exactly what that is, which
Speaker 4: is essentially indoctrination, or we could call it. As a sociologist,
Speaker 4: I sometimes call it resocialization. Right, you're being resocialized into
Speaker 4: this new n Then come along the cult apologists who
Speaker 4: want to convince everyone there's no such thing as brainwashing
Speaker 4: and that it's just a ridiculous idea that was totally
Speaker 4: disregarded by all of the American Psychological Association and all that,
Speaker 4: and it should never be accepted in the courts. And
Speaker 4: they did a whole campaign to the media and said,
Speaker 4: don't ever use the word brainwashing, don't use the word cult.
Speaker 4: If something happens, here's a list of people you should
Speaker 4: talk to, not these other people, and so it's in
Speaker 4: conjunction with the other work that they do. So while
Speaker 4: I absolutely believe there is such a thing as brainwashing,
Speaker 4: I was one of the main brainwashers in my cult.
Speaker 4: I mean, at one point the leader called me to
Speaker 4: a meeting and said, I want you to design a
Speaker 4: program that lets them know that they are accepting being brainwashed.
Speaker 4: And so I know it exists. I know what happened
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 3: I can give you.
Speaker 4: Prime examples, but I try not to use the word
Speaker 4: because of this controversy.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And so I use indoctrination and I use bounded choice
Speaker 4: as the result, and I'm able to take that into
Speaker 4: courts and have a grand old time.
Speaker 1: So it's funny you say that because I come up
Speaker 1: against something very similar, where the argument, if you will,
Speaker 1: against using terms like narcissism and narcissistic abuse is we
Speaker 1: are often working with the survivor, the person who's been
Speaker 1: through this. That's who's more likely to show up in
Speaker 1: a therapist's office, not the person who's doing the emotional
Speaker 1: abuse of manipulation. And so the thing that's often tossed
Speaker 1: back is, well, you're going on that person's description of
Speaker 1: the situation, I'm thinking they're not gonna who's gonna spend
Speaker 1: this much money to tell me a lie about someone?
Speaker 1: But okay, and you shouldn't be using narcissism because it
Speaker 1: represents a potentially diagnostic term, which is a load of
Speaker 1: you know what, because in fact, you know it's not.
Speaker 1: It's a description of a personality style that lines up
Speaker 1: with something called antagonism. But I do the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'll use words like antagonism, which you know. There is
Speaker 1: actually a whole world of narcissism apologists out there, many
Speaker 1: of whom are also have PhDs, so I get it.
Speaker 1: It's certainly not at the same level because cults, by
Speaker 1: definition do harm. There is no such thing as a
Speaker 1: good cult.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you, thank you, so.
Speaker 1: Because that's not a thing. It would be very heavy
Speaker 1: handed for me to say there's no such thing as
Speaker 1: a good narcissists. I think many of us do love
Speaker 1: people with those personality styles in our lives. What we
Speaker 1: recognize these are extraordinarily limited relationships, so the same malign
Speaker 1: wouldn't apply, right, But in the case of cults, it's
Speaker 1: just again, there's no such thing as a good cult. So,
Speaker 1: but it's a fascinating piece. I thought, how could someone
Speaker 1: be an apologist? And then I was like, who getting
Speaker 1: a little cult closest side of the road there? Because
Speaker 1: I was really really struck by that comment. My conversation
Speaker 1: will continue after this break. A little while ago, doctor Yanyo,
Speaker 1: you mentioned something you call it. You used the term
Speaker 1: new religious movement. Could you explain that term to us,
Speaker 1: because I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Speaker 4: Well, that's the term the cult apologists have come up with.
Speaker 4: So what they're saying, right, And what's funny about it
Speaker 4: is it certainly doesn't cover cults like the one I
Speaker 4: was in, So I mean, I was not in a
Speaker 4: new religious movement. But in their effort to pretend that
Speaker 4: they're defending religion, they'll say things like, you know, this
Speaker 4: is just a new religious movement and they're just going through,
Speaker 4: you know, growing pains and we should just let them
Speaker 4: do what they want to do and then they'll grow
Speaker 4: up and get over it.
Speaker 1: And it's like, hello, So you've also worked with family
Speaker 1: members who watch other family members get pulled into cults, right,
Speaker 1: that's a uniquely painful position. So now we're talking about
Speaker 1: the people who they themselves are not getting into a cult,
Speaker 1: but they're watching a loved one get pulled in. What
Speaker 1: Let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, this
Speaker 1: is what I'm worried about with my child or even
Speaker 1: my partner. Or maybe they're spending money and giving it
Speaker 1: to this organization and harming family finances or wasting their
Speaker 1: own money. Maybe whoever it is, someone close to you.
Speaker 1: What would your guidance be, What should they be looking
Speaker 1: for if they're worried that this might be happening to someone.
Speaker 4: Well, certainly if they're giving away money to something that
Speaker 4: seems fishy. I often advise families, if they can afford it,
Speaker 4: to hire a private investigator and sort of look into
Speaker 4: the background of the energy worker or whoever it is,
Speaker 4: or whatever the organization is or person leading it to
Speaker 4: find out you know, what's there in the background. You know,
Speaker 4: people's personality is changing. They only talk about one thing.
Speaker 4: They're very defensive. They're spending less and less time with you,
Speaker 4: any lesson less time doing things they used to do
Speaker 4: in love.
Speaker 3: There's just that.
Speaker 4: Kind of pulling away that happens, or I should say
Speaker 4: being pulled away and you know, I think most families
Speaker 4: these days recognize it pretty quickly. I mean, I have
Speaker 4: so many spouses either worried about a spouse or parents
Speaker 4: worried about children, or I even am working with children
Speaker 4: who are worried about parents. So it happens, you know,
Speaker 4: in every form. And this is where the shelf in
Speaker 4: the back of the head comes in, because what families
Speaker 4: want to do or friends whoever is plant seeds on
Speaker 4: that shelf, right, plant seeds that'll get that shelf to
Speaker 4: break one day, and not confront and not challenge. And
Speaker 4: you know, you don't have to agree, but you don't
Speaker 4: ever want to cut somebody off.
Speaker 3: If you're able to have contact, that is so.
Speaker 4: Important, and do whatever you can to retain that contact.
Speaker 4: If they want to cut you off, fine, but don't
Speaker 4: ever cut them off, no matter how goofy they get
Speaker 4: or seem to you, right, and always remind them of
Speaker 4: good times, good times together, that there was another world
Speaker 4: out there. You know, I always say, you want to
Speaker 4: tug at their emotional heart strings. You want to reawaken
Speaker 4: who they were before and what they liked before, and
Speaker 4: who you were to them before. So whether it's sending
Speaker 4: them their favorite cookies or sending a postcard from Aunt Mary. Whatever,
Speaker 4: it is, something that's.
Speaker 3: Going to go oh oh yeah, I remember Aunt Mary.
Speaker 3: She was always so nice to me.
Speaker 2: You know. Can you talk about critical compassion?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 4: So what I mean by that is people will often
Speaker 4: get involved in something that you know, to you might
Speaker 4: seem really unusual or crazy or ridiculous or offensive. And
Speaker 4: you know, I actually came up with this term during
Speaker 4: the sheltered in year, when I was getting so much
Speaker 4: contact from people whose relatives or friends or whoever, we're
Speaker 4: getting into QAnon or the anti vaxer movement and the
Speaker 4: far right stuff, and you know, they couldn't understand it,
Speaker 4: and they certainly didn't want to approve. I don't want
Speaker 4: to approve that you're now joining this neo Nazi group.
Speaker 3: You know, how can I do that?
Speaker 4: And so the idea of critical compassion is that it's
Speaker 4: so important to understand that that person is going through something,
Speaker 4: and that that person thinks they have found something that
Speaker 4: at that moment is speaking to them. Yep. And while
Speaker 4: you may know it's harmful or may lead to harm,
Speaker 4: that's not what you want to say to them right away,
Speaker 4: right You want to let them know that you're there
Speaker 4: for them, that you love them, that you don't want
Speaker 4: to have political arguments with them or spiritual arguments whatever.
Speaker 4: That you know, it's hard to say you respect something
Speaker 4: when you don't. So you can say, you know, I
Speaker 4: honor that, this is what you believe right now, But
Speaker 4: let's go fishing. Remember how much fun we used to
Speaker 4: have when we went fishing. Yeah, and try to not
Speaker 4: get into those confrontational discussions or arguments. But as I
Speaker 4: was saying earlier, tap into who the person was before,
Speaker 4: try to reawaken that.
Speaker 1: I absolutely love this in the sense of this again
Speaker 1: narcissistic abuse. Watching your friend who's in a toxic marriage
Speaker 1: or friendship or whatever. The temptation is to walk in
Speaker 1: right through the front door and say he's a bad guy,
Speaker 1: get out of this. And I said, that has never
Speaker 1: ever worked.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: I love this term because it recognizes and I love
Speaker 1: how you put it, they're going through something. They are
Speaker 1: going through something, and to just write it off as
Speaker 1: they're crazy or they're being brainwashed or they don't understand
Speaker 1: what's happening. First of all, you're being dismissive of someone
Speaker 1: you care about and they are going through something. And
Speaker 1: it is about holding I mean, this is very much
Speaker 1: the guidance I give to anyone who's trying to be
Speaker 1: a supporter is that you don't This is about you
Speaker 1: being a soft place to land and recognizing, Yes, it's
Speaker 1: painful to watch this, but there's no pushing fast forward
Speaker 1: on this. But I love that framing of suggesting that
Speaker 1: they do that thing with you, that was the joyful
Speaker 1: thing you did with them. That's so great, and it's
Speaker 1: so nice to hear the sociologists and the psychologists finding
Speaker 1: that complementary space and that would work with individual clients.
Speaker 1: It's really amazing. We've been talking a lot about NEXIM
Speaker 1: and Keith R. Nieri, but you can't tell the story
Speaker 1: of NEXIM without talking about Nancy Saltzman. Okay, so she
Speaker 1: was the number two again, a woman holding a high
Speaker 1: position in a called space. Would you say that because
Speaker 1: Nancy engage in what I would consider perpetrating level behavior,
Speaker 1: would you say she was experiencing bounded choice?
Speaker 4: I would say that she is imposing bound a choice
Speaker 4: on others through her practices, through her behavior, I believe
Speaker 4: that she herself benefited much more personally than someone who
Speaker 4: is truly just responding on wrote, even though it may
Speaker 4: not feel like that. So certainly she was manipulated by Ranieri,
Speaker 4: but I don't believe she was indoctrinated in the same
Speaker 4: way as other people. She'd helped create that system, right
Speaker 4: their tech or whatever they call it, the program, which
Speaker 4: I'm sure when she gets out of prison she'll just
Speaker 4: carry on with. So I don't put her in the
Speaker 4: same category as Isabella Pollock or even Claire Brauffman.
Speaker 2: Really who interesting?
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's talk about Claire Bronford, because I have
Speaker 1: to tell you I felt enrage at her. Claire could
Speaker 1: still be coming at people in that system is troubling
Speaker 1: to me. And Claire was also underwriting this. Without her money,
Speaker 1: I don't know that this thing would have gotten so
Speaker 1: far down the track. So where is that difference between Claire.
Speaker 1: I understand Nancy created curricula. Nancy, you know what, She
Speaker 1: will claim that she didn't know any of the terrible
Speaker 1: stuff that was happening, but I mean exactly, Okay, but
Speaker 1: what Claire continues to be an apologist for Ranieri. It
Speaker 1: feels like and financed it, actually gave it allowed this
Speaker 1: organization to seemingly cross international lines, get more of the
Speaker 1: reach mount up a legal defense for him.
Speaker 2: Where's the difference.
Speaker 4: I'd say the difference is that Claire was truly indoctrinated.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 4: That Claire, someone who I think has a ninth grade education,
Speaker 4: who was very in a sense needy as the poor
Speaker 4: little rich girl who were nearly manipulated all those years.
Speaker 4: I agree she let her money be used for terrible
Speaker 4: things against other people. But when the thing got busted
Speaker 4: and she got arrested and she has terrible lawyers, she
Speaker 4: has never had a psychological evaluation. She has never had
Speaker 4: any kind of counseling. We're here, you have Nancy Salzman
Speaker 4: on video, you know, like supposedly crying over her membership
Speaker 4: and her submission to him, which is pure bs as
Speaker 4: far as I'm concerned. But I can understand people being
Speaker 4: upset and angry. But here's where critical compassion comes in,
Speaker 4: because I do believe Claire is in a very different
Speaker 4: situation and that she would not still be a true
Speaker 4: believer if she had the right kind of care once
Speaker 4: she got an out of the snare.
Speaker 1: So that that takes me to the next question though. Okay,
Speaker 1: so people who were perpetrated against in cult spaces, who
Speaker 1: become perpetrators, who are apologists even when the whole thing
Speaker 1: blows up they didn't get the help, but don't most
Speaker 1: of these people remain deeply resistant to getting the help,
Speaker 1: even when it's that you need to do this, you
Speaker 1: need to do that. Am I correct in understanding that
Speaker 1: there's a fair amount of resistance to doing that?
Speaker 2: Or is that not the case?
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know if there's resistance on her part,
Speaker 4: and yet she is in general.
Speaker 3: Well, sure of course there's going to be resistance initially.
Speaker 4: That's why sometimes these things have to be court ordered
Speaker 4: in case where there's actually been arrest made or charges made.
Speaker 4: You know, that's the offensiveness, you know.
Speaker 1: And they're going back to the issue of family members
Speaker 1: who are trying to support a family member who may
Speaker 1: have gotten, you know, into one of these systems or
Speaker 1: remains in a cult. Maybe if we could get them therapy,
Speaker 1: that family member is going to say.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: They are enduring all of the coercion and the exploitation
Speaker 1: of being in a cult.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: And then some of them, even if the whole thing
Speaker 1: does manage to blow up, may still not be willing
Speaker 1: to receive what they need, like you said, the psycho education,
Speaker 1: the therapeutic work, whatever that looks like for any given individual.
Speaker 1: It creates this incredibly frustrating space because using Claire Bronforn
Speaker 1: as example, as long as someone like Claire Bronfman is
Speaker 1: still going to believe in Ranieri's innocence and still have
Speaker 1: access to money, Thank goodness he's away for one hundred
Speaker 1: and plus years, because it feels like Heddy not been
Speaker 1: with her money, this whole thing would have started again.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think the fact that they've been able
Speaker 4: to have contact and have contact with that crew on
Speaker 4: the outside, right, So my understanding is she is now
Speaker 4: cut off from him and from those other believers. That
Speaker 4: should help because all of that obviously was going to
Speaker 4: keep reinforcing her in her closed mindedness. So if she
Speaker 4: isn't having contact with them, and if she is ordered
Speaker 4: by the court to go through an evaluation, and if
Speaker 4: they get the right people to talk with her and
Speaker 4: meet with her, I think there is hope that she'll
Speaker 4: see the light.
Speaker 1: I guess it's a you know again, Doctor Fried would
Speaker 1: argue that betrayal blindness can be broken through that there
Speaker 1: is a point to somebody who shows it to you clearly,
Speaker 1: and you're not having those other kinds of conspiratorial voices
Speaker 1: in your ear that you might be able to see it.
Speaker 1: What I really want to talk about, because I think this
Speaker 1: is a really important thing for people to learn about,
Speaker 1: and I'm so happy to learn about this, is you
Speaker 1: have a new nonprofit, the Lales Center for Cults and Coercion.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us about your new nonprofit and the
Speaker 1: work that this organization is doing.
Speaker 4: Sure, I started the nonprofit because I'm about to be
Speaker 4: seventy eight years old, which is starting to seem old anyway.
Speaker 4: I realized that I have been doing all of this
Speaker 4: work all these years, both with families with survivors, you know,
Speaker 4: and also all the writing that I've done, and I
Speaker 4: want to make sure that there's some kind of legacy,
Speaker 4: you know, that I don't just fall down one day
Speaker 4: and it's all gone. So I have a team of
Speaker 4: people who are absolutely terrific. They're all survivors and with
Speaker 4: various skills. Beth Mettneer is a trauma therapist who herself
Speaker 4: was in one of those awful boarding schools in the
Speaker 4: trouble teen industry and then when she got out, you know,
Speaker 4: eventually she went to university got her degree. So she's
Speaker 4: been a trauma therapist for like twenty five years, lots
Speaker 4: of experience. What I'm trying to do is provide resources
Speaker 4: to help survivors and families with courses, discussion groups, we
Speaker 4: have writing workshops, you know, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 4: We're going to do a course on sort of how
Speaker 4: cults basically take from mainstream religions and use it against
Speaker 4: their followers, which is actually could be a course for
Speaker 4: the general.
Speaker 3: Public, yes, just prescribers.
Speaker 4: Yes, So we're doing, you know, whatever we can. We've
Speaker 4: obtained our tax deductible status, so we'll be able to
Speaker 4: accept donations because we provide scholarships for almost all of
Speaker 4: our resources, because many many survivors don't have the means.
Speaker 4: And my hope is that by sort of training and
Speaker 4: doing professional develop with the core team and the new
Speaker 4: people that we're bringing on board, as time goes on,
Speaker 4: people will be able to, you know, carry on what
Speaker 4: I've been doing and reach even more people.
Speaker 1: I think it's fantastic and I sometimes wonder in the
Speaker 1: era of social media and the way information people have
Speaker 1: no I mean there's a blessing to these open media
Speaker 1: platforms that people can get the word out, but there's
Speaker 1: also a danger of you know, now there's more ways
Speaker 1: to get the word out, and I actually think that
Speaker 1: we might see sort of a sad golden age of
Speaker 1: cults as people are able to do more of this
Speaker 1: work and recruit using those mechanisms. What are some examples
Speaker 1: of cults or cult organizations that we may not typically
Speaker 1: think of as being cults.
Speaker 4: Well, I once worked with someone who was in a
Speaker 4: dog training cult.
Speaker 2: Hm, I get that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I think any kind of organization that has a
Speaker 4: tough leader, usually considered charismatic, that doesn't have clear lines
Speaker 4: of accountability, that doesn't have transparency, I think any organization
Speaker 4: like that can become a cult because you know, people
Speaker 4: get carried away with their power and they started using
Speaker 4: their power, and so you know, there's karate cults, certainly
Speaker 4: we've talked about.
Speaker 3: There's yoga cults.
Speaker 4: There's acting workshop cults for you guys in Hollywood, there's.
Speaker 2: I've heard of those. Yeah, yeah, I mean right, multi.
Speaker 4: Level multi level marketing absolutely, and of course, so many
Speaker 4: of these management and leadership training courses that people are
Speaker 4: sent to from work.
Speaker 3: I mean all of that.
Speaker 4: That started again back in the sixties and seventies, you know,
Speaker 4: with Lifespring and st and cyworld that has so mushroomed
Speaker 4: and so grown and so seeped into the business world.
Speaker 4: I mean millions, actually billion dollars are spent every year
Speaker 4: on those programs. Oh yeah, and employees are sent to
Speaker 4: them and they can't say no, I'm not going to
Speaker 4: go because their job is in jeopardy. So you know
Speaker 4: what I always say to people is do your research.
Speaker 3: Like slow down.
Speaker 4: If they tell you the guru is only going to
Speaker 4: be here today so that you can see him lift
Speaker 4: off the cushion in a yellow light, he'll be back.
Speaker 4: Don't worry and do your research. I mean, just like
Speaker 4: you were buying a car, you don't buy the first
Speaker 4: car you see, so look on. As much as cults
Speaker 4: are able to use the Internet and social media to recruit,
Speaker 4: there's also an enormous amount of information on the Internet
Speaker 4: about all of these groups and organizations and leaders and
Speaker 4: con artists and energy workers in this.
Speaker 3: One and that one.
Speaker 4: So check everything out before you sign on to something.
Speaker 1: We're going to have people listening to this saying, you
Speaker 1: know what, about my dog training or my hot yoga studio,
Speaker 1: or my neighbor who keeps making me come to her
Speaker 1: supplement sales evenings or whatever. Is there a checklist or
Speaker 1: anything out there that people could use to sort of
Speaker 1: ask themselves.
Speaker 2: Am I in a cult?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: You know, the checklists are transparency, having your questions answered.
Speaker 4: Like if you ask questions and they say, oh, just
Speaker 4: come to one more workshop, then you can ask that question.
Speaker 4: By then you've forgotten the question, right, being able to
Speaker 4: challenge the leader, question the leader, knowing where the finances
Speaker 4: come from and where they go, you know, having lines
Speaker 4: of accountability, not using up all your time asking you
Speaker 4: to change things about yourself, change your name.
Speaker 3: Things like that.
Speaker 4: Yes, starting starting to strip away your identity.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I think all of those are kind of red flags.
Speaker 4: More than two thirds of people who get recruited are
Speaker 4: recruited by a friend, a family member, or worker.
Speaker 2: That's what I was gonna ask.
Speaker 4: So that's the rub, right, it's someone you know who
Speaker 4: is introducing you to something, and it's much harder for
Speaker 4: us to say no to someone we know.
Speaker 3: So you know, just be on guard.
Speaker 4: I swear to God, I don't want to say there's
Speaker 4: a cult under every bush, but I think there.
Speaker 2: Is there's a lot of you know.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've noticed too, is that there's
Speaker 1: a real pressure to recruit, you know, like bring in
Speaker 1: people that there could be a financial incentive to that,
Speaker 1: or even a congratulations to that, like you're doing right
Speaker 1: by the organization. Another thing I also noticed there's like
Speaker 1: step one, step two, step three, I want to be
Speaker 1: a step five, I want to be a step nine,
Speaker 1: or there'll be colors or metals or something associated with
Speaker 1: that each level up.
Speaker 2: So's it's a bit of.
Speaker 1: Carrot dangling and creating a greater buy in, and usually
Speaker 1: to advance in that organization is more and more money, deeper,
Speaker 1: deeper in doctrination. But I would also say it fosters
Speaker 1: a greater sense of belonging, you know, which is something
Speaker 1: I've noticed come up over and over with clients i've
Speaker 1: worked with, who are cult systems. What do you if
Speaker 1: there's one thing, what do you wish people understood more
Speaker 1: about cults?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: I think for me, the one thing is that there's
Speaker 4: nothing wrong with the people who joined cults. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think the stigma for people who've been in a
Speaker 4: cult is still so rampant in our society, and it's
Speaker 4: why I do as much public education as I can.
Speaker 4: I mean, as much as I work with survivors, I
Speaker 4: so want the public and our societal institutions to understand
Speaker 4: just how clever these groups are and how there's absolutely
Speaker 4: nothing wrong with someone who gets enmeshed in one of
Speaker 4: these and we need to have more compassion. We need
Speaker 4: to have more understanding. It's a miracle if it isn't you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I think that's it, and that more compassion.
Speaker 1: I say this about survivors of narcissistic abuse all the time,
Speaker 1: who are said, oh, come on, how bad could it be?
Speaker 1: And if it was that bad, why didn't you get out?
Speaker 2: That's the question. Didn't exactly all of that.
Speaker 1: So I love that, and I thank you for saying that,
Speaker 1: because I do think you know what ends up happening
Speaker 1: when people keep pathologizing the people who get into the cults,
Speaker 1: we actually take the heat off of what really should
Speaker 1: be scrutinized, which is the called leader and the cult organization.
Speaker 1: Here are my takeaways from my conversation with doctor Yanya.
Speaker 1: In our first takeaway, almost every aspect of a cult
Speaker 1: system sounds like a narcissistic relationship, the expectation of unwavering
Speaker 1: and unquestioning loyalty, obedience, requiring a person to fully surrender themselves,
Speaker 1: praying on guilt, shame, anger, love, fear, control, eroding self trust,
Speaker 1: and tearing a person down and building them back in
Speaker 1: a way the cult leader wants. And we know that
Speaker 1: it is difficult for people to break out of cults,
Speaker 1: that they will defend them while they are in them
Speaker 1: and find themselves changed and shaped in new and unrecognizable ways.
Speaker 1: It's similar to how it can feel impossible to leave
Speaker 1: a narcissistic relationship for a long time. These parallels are
Speaker 1: important for survivors to realize in order to foster self
Speaker 1: forgiveness and self compassion as they understand how imprisoning these
Speaker 1: relationships and systems are. For this next takeaway, one element
Speaker 1: of doctor Yanya's experience in the cult and the painful
Speaker 1: story of her mother's death hit me after the interview,
Speaker 1: as she had to face up to such a callous
Speaker 1: lack of empathy in the face of her mother's passing
Speaker 1: from the cult. It was an eye opening moment, but interestingly,
Speaker 1: doctor Yanya focused on the idea that they were supposed
Speaker 1: to be building a better world, and if this is
Speaker 1: what this looks like, then that is not okay. But
Speaker 1: after so much time of being made to ignore and
Speaker 1: deny her emotions, what she didn't share that jumped out
Speaker 1: at her is recognizing how badly she was being treated.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when we are in abusive relationships of any kind,
Speaker 1: we recognize intellectually what's wrong, but it can take longer
Speaker 1: to clearly see and feel that we are being emotionally
Speaker 1: harmed and to recognize that it is not okay for
Speaker 1: our next takeaway. Many of the techniques that doctor Yanya
Speaker 1: suggests as useful for survivors coming out of cults are
Speaker 1: very similar to what works with survivors of narcissistic relationships,
Speaker 1: such as psycho education about how a cult works, giving
Speaker 1: yourself enough time to adjust to life outside of the
Speaker 1: cult system, and self forgiveness. She also frames recovery from
Speaker 1: a cult relationship as a recovery of emotion and learning
Speaker 1: to emotionally respond to situations. Toxic relationships are places where
Speaker 1: emotions are shamed or not tolerated, and it takes a
Speaker 1: minute to learn that emotional vocabulary again or for the
Speaker 1: very first time. In this next takeaway. The concepts of
Speaker 1: bounded choice, self sealing systems, and.
Speaker 2: The shelf are all really useful.
Speaker 1: Tools that can help us understand what happens to people
Speaker 1: in narcissistically and other forms of emotionally abusive relationships. The
Speaker 1: shaming that often happens to people in narcissistic relationship why.
Speaker 2: Didn't you just leave?
Speaker 1: Doesn't account for how constrained choice can be when a
Speaker 1: person is being emotionally subjugated. We use the analogy of
Speaker 1: there being a door, but a person believing that the
Speaker 1: door is locked or not seeing it at all, and
Speaker 1: the manipulation inherent in an abusive relationship means that it
Speaker 1: is like the narcissistic relationship has its own weather and
Speaker 1: the distortion of reality that can make it feel like
Speaker 1: there is no escape. I really appreciated this concept of
Speaker 1: the shelf. The betrayals and confusion and invalidations and harm
Speaker 1: don't get forgotten, but they get put on this shelf
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind until that moment when
Speaker 1: the shelf.
Speaker 2: Breaks and you see it.
Speaker 1: That is a painful, scary, but also liberating moment for
Speaker 1: any survivor of a toxic relationship, whether it is a
Speaker 1: cult or just a regular invalidating relationship. In our next takeaway,
Speaker 1: I really appreciated her perspective on critical compassion because it
Speaker 1: is really applicable to people who are trying to be
Speaker 1: supportive of someone who may be in a narcissistic relationship.
Speaker 1: The temptation is to tell someone to get out or
Speaker 1: try to make them see what it really is. Her
Speaker 1: approach of critical compassion informs supporters that you don't need
Speaker 1: to get into an argument, but rather tap into the
Speaker 1: memories and your history with them and show them what
Speaker 1: life has looked like and what life could look like.
Speaker 1: Many times we don't know what to say to someone
Speaker 1: who is in a relationship that is emotionally harming them,
Speaker 1: and this concept of critical compassion gives.
Speaker 2: Us tools for how to respond.
Speaker 1: For our last takeaway, while there is no official checklist
Speaker 1: to determine whether an organization that you may be getting
Speaker 1: involved with is a cult, doctor Yanya offers some key
Speaker 1: points such as looking at transparency on how the organization
Speaker 1: is run and on the finances, their willingness to answer
Speaker 1: your questions without luring you into more classes and programs,
Speaker 1: your ability to be able to challenge the leader without
Speaker 1: being silenced or shamed, hard sells and asking you to
Speaker 1: make decisions quickly. Lines of accountability if they mandate anything
Speaker 1: that shapes or undercuts or strips your identity, such as
Speaker 1: asking you to change your name. Pressure to recruit or
Speaker 1: draw in new members into the organization, m