Survivor shame over what has been lost, and how one has been complicit.
Apologist shame: turned inside out and externalized as aggression.
Popular shaming, which tries to deflect attention from how close to home cultic dynamics really are.
In the cult landscape, shame is a common denominator. In this contemplation, Matthew unpacks various aspects, with help from the writing of cult theorists and recovery counselors Alexandra Stein, Daniel Shaw, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.
Show Notes
Music: Spiegel im Spiegel and Pari Intervallo: Pärt
Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved
The Relational System of the Traumatizing Narcissist — Shaw
Rachel Bernstein’s “One More Thing” at the end of Betrayal and Power w/ Nitai Joseph, former Hare Krishna — S4E5.
All of Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast.
What’s Behind the Blowback You’ll Get When You Engage Cult Members
“Deception, Dependence, Dread of Leaving” — Langone
“I Got Mine-ism”
Selected Bibliography:
Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of Attachment: a Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Routledge, 2015.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics, 2017.
Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: the Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Arent Being Fooled. Wiley, 2013.
Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control: the #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults. Freedom of Mind Press, 2016.
Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad. The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power. North Atlantic Books/Frog, 1993.
Lalich, Janja, and Madeleine Landau. Tobias. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. Bay Tree Pub., 2006.
Lalich, Janja. Escaping Utopia: Growing up in a Cult, Getting out, and Starting Over. Routledge, 2018.
Langone, Michael D. Recovery from Cults: Help for Victims of Psychological and Spiritual Abuse. W.W. Norton, 1995.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of “Brainwashing” in China.W.W. Norton, 1961.
Miller, Alice
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality podcast team.
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Thede Post-Cult Shame - We had a great question come into our DMs a while back.
The person wrote in to ask if we could reflect on the subject of what would help former cult members overcome shame.
This is evocative for me, not only because I have personal experience with it, but because shame is the common emotional denominator that governs three different zones in the cult landscape.
The zone of survivors, the zone of apologists, or those who are still enmeshed, and the zone of the general public.
I'll say a little bit about each, and then unpack from there.
First, survivor shame.
Shame is a keynote in every conversation I have with people in cult recovery, whether I'm just lending an ear or I'm working on a story.
In this zone, you can hear shame in its most direct and authentic form.
People are coming to grips with lost time, with deception and betrayal, with having alienated their families or neglected their children.
In the most acute cases, they are taking an inventory of the harm they caused to other people in the group.
They're wondering whether to reach out.
They're wondering what happened to the people they recruited, to the people they actively hurt.
Then there's apologist shame.
This second form of shame in the cult landscape doesn't actually look like shame at all.
It's turned inside out and then externalized in the form of aggression meted out by group members who are still embedded.
There's a lot of this flying around when an investigation is happening, when there's bad press, when a whistleblower takes to social media to tell their story.
The typical expressions here come in the form of victim blaming.
The cult member takes the shameful truth of the news emerging about the group and turns it into vicious accusations against the survivor or whistleblower.
They'll say that the survivor is delusional.
They'll say that the whistleblower is predatory.
This type of shame is really polarizing.
It can strengthen in-group bonds and delay exiting for many.
Finally, there's popular shame, which is the generally shameful aura around the subject of cults in the public square and popular culture.
Just consider the common phrase, they really drank the Kool-Aid.
And think about it for a moment.
What comes to mind?
Children wanting something sweet, but ultimately poisonous.
Guzzling it down, regardless of the danger.
They wanted sugar.
They wanted the yummy taste.
They ignored the warning signs and the risks.
But the thing is, this is a complete distortion of what actually happened in those final hours in the humid jungle at Jonestown.
More than 600 adults knew what was in the flavor aid.
They knew they were going to die, and they knew they were dying.
They knew they were murdering over 300 children.
They moved forward in a paranoid terror that was inculcated over years, and if that didn't move them to swallow, they were threatened at gunpoint.
It makes sense for the culture in general to launder this into a punchline, because what could be more awful?
But what does it say about how we want to view cult members?
They're children, they're foolish, they can't control themselves, and so they are easy to dupe.
But exactly the opposite is true.
They were adults, and it's actually quite difficult to indoctrinate adults so completely that they become complicit in the murder of their own children.
Today, the issue and the stakes have gone global with the spread of QAnon.
Even if QAnon's didn't speak in aphoristic jargon and memes, The internet would cloak these human beings in abstraction nonetheless.
How often have you had the sense that QAnon followers are infected with the disgust that surrounds Jim Watkins like a dirty halo?
Have you noticed that the Venn diagram of disgust for QAnons and MAGA deplorables is pretty much a circle?
As with the upside-down and extroverted shame of cult members who remain, this displaced and projected shame, so obvious in the public sphere, has the function of distancing people from the phenomenon, and perhaps distracting from all of the ways in which people have brushed up against these very dynamics, and maybe even participated in them.
It might remind them of their own families.
And who wants to think about that?
This popular shame carries a hidden confession.
There but for the grace of God go I. I want to note as I begin here that most of the research on cult recovery comes from the pre-digital era.
So my working assumption is that for those who see clear cultic dynamics at play in online movements like Conspirituality and QAnon, These dynamics will be recognizable for the long haul, but also require constant updating to reflect emerging research on algorithmic influence, influencer culture, and screen-related social isolation.
Okay, so breaking this down further.
Survivor shame.
I think it's pretty easy to understand that the ex-cult member has to navigate various textures of shame.
Lost years.
Lost opportunities.
They may have broken relationships.
The group may have destroyed the person's marriage.
Can you imagine being married to someone for years, and then the group that recruits you and showers you with love tells you that your marriage is an obstacle to your awakening?
That your attachment to your recalcitrant partner, who is actually resisting joining the group so that they can save your actual identity, is holding you back?
Can you imagine what it would feel like in hindsight if you left them because of that?
If you blew up a real-life bond you had worked on for years on behalf of a charlatan who needed your undivided attention?
I watched this happen in real time in the groups I was in, over and over.
It was horrible.
A special source of survivor shame is reserved for those who attained social status in the group, and now they understand it was a poison chalice.
If the love bombing they received on entry nourished their self-esteem, think about what it would feel like to have it turned inside out as they leave, and whether hatred from their former comrades and resentment from family members and friends.
There can be real whiplash there.
So there's personally shameful things that one can mourn for years, but then there's the shame that comes from realizing what you did on behalf of the group.
They may have been recruiters for the organization.
They might have been complicit in abuse or crimes.
There's a big inventory to take, and it is complex.
And there's also survivor's guilt, derived from a very confused and ambivalent history.
You were on the inside and you were trained to be enthusiastic and to hurt people like yourself.
