99: Conspirituality Goes to Therapy (w/Rachel Bernstein)
Listeners: there’s a revolution going on. Legions of Twitter counselors and Instagram therapists has risen up to offer unsolicited sermons on cults, cult leaders, and cult recovery. With COVID closing down the studios, every third yoga teacher has become an expert in trauma. They’re starting Facebook groups. They’re selling courses. They’re doing their Family Systems work out in the open, displaying heroic levels of vulnerability. We’re just waiting for the first QAnon recovery MLM to launch on Kickstarter. We know it’s coming. There will be oils, and breathing exercises, and some very long emotional check-ins on Zoom.Meanwhile, Netflix is distinguishing itself from GaiaTV, the Netflix of cults, with an explosion of cult documentaries. There’s a gold rush on. Scouts for all of the streaming companies are lined up outside of the ashrams, vetting survivors to see who has the chops to carry a series. We seem to love them, but sometimes not as much as the sociopaths themselves. The cult doc is the new true crime chill.Beneath the feeding frenzy, there’s real work to be done. The QAnon Casualities subreddit has 235K followers as of today. We get dozens of emails and DMs from people who have had their lives upended by conspirituality and cults. We have hints and whispers to offer them, but no answers. Yes, we live in a capitalist hellscape in which emotional turmoil of the people is commodified and sold back to them in the form of workshops and bingeable series. But we are also able to host Rachel Bernstein, cult recovery therapist, to get some clarity on the basic phenomena that dominate our commons today.Program note: We’re going to try to stretch this out to 90 minutes so that we can each say we got a 45-minute free consult on why TF we’re doing this job.
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Conspiratuality 99.
Conspiratuality goes to therapy with Rachel Bernstein.
Listeners, there's a revolution going on.
Legions of Twitter counselors and Instagram therapists have risen up to offer unsolicited sermons on cults, cult leaders, and cult recovery.
With COVID closing down the studios, every third yoga teacher has become an expert in trauma.
They're starting Facebook groups, they're selling courses, they're doing their family systems work out in the open, displaying heroic levels of vulnerability.
We're just waiting for the first QAnon Recovery MLM to launch on Kickstarter.
We know it's coming.
There will be oils and breathing exercises and some very long emotional check-ins on Zoom.
Meanwhile, Netflix is distinguishing itself from Gaia TV, the Netflix of cults, with an explosion of cult documentaries.
There's a gold rush on.
Scouts for all of the streaming companies are lined up outside of the ashrams.
Vetting survivors to see who has the chops to carry a series.
We seem to love them, but sometimes not as much as the sociopaths themselves.
The cult doc is the new true crime chill.
Beneath the feeding frenzy, there's real work to be done.
The QAnon Casualties subreddit has 235,000 followers as of today.
We get dozens of emails and DMs from people who've had their lives upended by conspirituality and cults.
We have hints and whispers to offer them, but no answers.
Yes, we live in a capitalist hellscape in which emotional turmoil of the people is commodified and sold back to them in the form of workshops and bingeable series.
But we're also able to host Rachel Bernstein, cult recovery therapist, to get some clarity on the basic phenomena that dominate our commons today.
We're going to try to stretch this out to 90 minutes so that we can each say we got a 45 minute free consult on why the fuck we're doing this job.
Not in time for taxes, but maybe next year, right?
right, we can claim this. - Yeah, so hello, Rachel.
Welcome back.
You know, last time you joined us, it was for an episode called Long Haul QAnon.
That was episode 65.
We visited with Jittharth Jadeja.
He was a former Anon, talked about his relationship with his dad.
He's also a current moderator of the QAnon Casualties subreddit.
I imagine you've been busy, very busy over the last little while.
It's kind of an amazing time for cult research, cult recovery, and also cult education.
How have things been going?
Exactly as you said, I have been very busy and it has been a challenge actually keeping up with the numbers of people who are Who are needing my help, who are so overwhelmed by what's happening in the world and what's happening in their family system.
And they're not quite sure how to approach it and how to understand it and what to do about it.
And with a lot of these situations now with people who are getting caught up in certain ways of thinking, the intensity of the thought goes up as the civility goes down.
Right.
And that's been quite a challenge.
On this podcast we're really interested in psychology but there are a couple reasons that we try to be cautious about how we talk about the discipline and literature in relation to our subject matter and that is beyond the mere fact that we're just lay people.
The thing is that psychoanalyzing people from afar is not only speculative, but it can also create the impression of either an ad hominem attack or of a kind of ableism where we're just dismissing someone based on diagnosing them in ill-advised ways. but it can also create the impression of either an For conspiracy theorists, this can also come across to them as a kind of gaslighting of their legitimate concerns by saying that they're just crazy.
But the psychological dynamics at play in conspiracy theories, cults, and the public arc of influencers who gain social capital via this kind of messaging is still undeniably fascinating and layered.
So we were thinking we'd just ask you for your input as a psychotherapist and a cult specialist in terms of vocabulary, concepts, and boundaries in how we think and speak about this topic.
And we wanted to start with some just basic definitions of terms that fly around a little bit too easily and broadly.
And we might as well start with the top term and ask for your preferred definition of cult and what happens when the term is used in a sloppy way.
Okay, so I like that this is a two-part question because the second part about it being used in a sloppy way doesn't usually get asked but it's very important.
What I have developed in terms of my definition has really come from the former members themselves who have been in a lot of situations where there were overlapping themes, the things that distinguished that group from healthy groups.
And one of the top definitions, first of all, is the deception.
People are not able to make a fully educated decision before getting involved in what turns out to be a cult, because if you were told what was going to be happening to you, you would not get involved.
So deception is part of the recruitment method, but also what happens still in-house once you get involved.
Then there's the unquestioning devotion.
to the leader, to the philosophy, to the teachings, and that if you question there's something wrong with you.
The other is that there is a dividing and conquering so that You can't just get involved in this and still have attachments to your family, to your friends.
This needs to become your whole community.
This needs to be your priority in terms of your social world and your goals.
It needs to become your everything.
There's also a change in language.
A lot of people will say that they start to speak like people involved in a cult.
And that's one of the signs that I have people watch out for if they wonder if Their loved one is getting involved in something if they're starting to speak differently using different terminology.
The other is that it defines you.
So unlike a class that you might take or an organization that you might get involved in, it becomes your purpose.
It rates your value.
It really becomes all of you.
And defines also what kind of person you are and what kind of person you should be.
And the last part, I mean, we could go on with, you know, a lot of other parts of it, but the last part is the dependency.
Because someone usually at the helm of a cult has the ego need to hold on to the people there.
The way you do it is you make them dependent on you.
You make them feel that they can't trust themselves in the world outside or that the world is not a trustworthy place.
And so they're never going to be done with you because their ego is never done with needing you.
And so you will get this mistaken sense that you really can't exist without them.
Well, as a licensed marriage and family therapist, your definition of cult and your work around cults often refers to what you call the cult of two structure that we can see in long-term domestic abuse situations, but also a scenario that Netflix subscribers can see play out in a presentation like Bad Vegan.
Do cults of two ever broaden to cults of many?
Right, they do.
And just to go back to this idea of it being used in a sloppy way, because I realize I left that part out and I want to make sure to cover that and then want to get to this question.
The problem with when a definition is overused or when a net is cast too wide Then it is that then anything different can be called a cult and then if you say you're involved in a cult then it doesn't have the same kind of meaning it's the same kind of punch.
The other thing is that then cults can use the fact that it's misused and they can say well you know this is called a cult and that's called a cult so really what does it mean anyway?
And you don't want to give cults permission To belittle how dangerous they are because you're misusing the term.
The thing that I've noticed, because really what makes something a cult is the nature of the relationship between the person in charge and the person who they're controlling, then you can have a cult of two.
And what you have in a cult of two is something extremely intense because you are the focal point.
You are the only one.
And because you are the only one, you feel like you owe this person everything because they're giving you everything.
And the enmeshment is actually quite, quite intense.
And yes, they do grow.
So even if it's a cult of two, I will still watch out.
And I'll have families, for example, watch out and say, suddenly, you know, there might be someone else who's included in to make it a triad, or to grow it.
What happens is that If the leader is not getting their kind of ego supply fulfilled anymore to the degree that they need with that one person, then they will add other people in as more of a supply.
And they will, of course, not term it that way.
They'll say that they have so much they want to share that it would be right of them to Not just share it with you, but to share it with the world.
Let's see if we can introduce other people to this wonderfulness.
They'll present it as generosity.
Exactly.
Right, okay.
Right.
Now, you're speaking about the supply of the ego, which brushes up against the next term that I wanted to ask about, which is that popularly, and on the podcast as well, there's a lot of the use of the term narcissism to describe the psychology Of a, you know, conspirituality influencer, if we're talking about the podcast, and we're talking about somebody who frankly seems to be in it for themselves.
And, you know, it might be a reasonable popular usage, but can you tell us what narcissism is technically?
Are there healthy forms of it?
When does it become clinical?
When is it malignant?
Right, so I think when we talk about narcissism, I don't think that there are healthy forms of it and I think it is good to distinguish it from things like confidence.
Because confidence is good, narcissism isn't.
It also gets muddled because when someone shows any kind of hubris or kind of snobbishness, it's seen as narcissism.
But that's ill-defined.
And what you find with narcissism is yes, there is selfishness, there is the entitlement, the need for admiration, the grandiosity, the preoccupation with brilliance or beauty or power.
But in that way, it's not just someone acting in a certain way, it's an interplay between people.
What I need from you and what I need you to believe about yourself because it serves me.
So, it's not just an attitude, it's an interaction that really goes awry, that is very unhealthy.
You could have swagger, for example, without that necessarily expressing a need for a particular type of attention.
Exactly, right.
Because narcissism can go into the malignancy piece, which is more of an extreme form of it, where there is a complete lack of empathy.
Where you're drawing someone in to feed you and you do not care at all about the fact that you are a parasite draining your host.
And you don't care that you've left them really as a shell of a human being you also Have a sense of really at times wanting to be antagonistic just to drive the other person crazy just to To make them feel like they constantly have to apologize to you or they have to explain themselves It's an exhausting thing to be with a narcissist and especially a malignant narcissist, but the malignant
Malignancy also takes it in a certain direction that can be really very harmful because malignant narcissists are exploitative and they will use people up.
They're the ones also that a lot of people will talk about meeting people like this, that it could be a family member and you all attend a family member's funeral and And suddenly, right after the funeral, there's that one person in the family who feels they were slighted.
They weren't seated in the row with the people they should have been seated with.
They weren't invited to the after whatever it was, they make it about them.
So all the attention, even the mourners have to turn their attention onto this person Who doesn't like that the attention was on someone else even in moments like that?
You have someone who for example might I heard this story recently someone who said to her boss that she was she has brain cancer and was needing surgery And the boss was mad that she hadn't told her beforehand and hadn't given her enough time to hire someone new.
Awful.
So, how do you have that as your response?
Yeah.
Right?
Like, really?
You hear the word brain cancer and then you express that you're mad.
You make it about yourself.
In those moments, you know you're dealing with a narcissist.
The funeral dynamic you're talking about, I feel like I've heard so many stories about weddings, too, where you have the same sort of thing, right?
There's someone in the family who ends up just turning it into this intense, drawn-out conflict about who's important, who's being insulted, who's been left out, why am I not having center stage?
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
And they'll keep track.
Who was in this amount of photos?
And they were kept out of that one photo, and then they have to create a scene around themselves, kind of a swirling vortex around themselves.
And it happens at the nexus of these intensely interpersonal and relational moments, right?
There are no higher points in the family than the funeral and the wedding, and so if your thunder is stolen there, that's really painful.
Why should the bride and groom be getting all this attention?
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it seems to me, Rachel, I'd love to get your, your take on this, that a lot of times when people, as with cults, when people overuse a term like narcissism, they are often referring to swagger or confidence or, you know, self-importance.
And, and that the, the way that The way that I sort of think about it, and tell me if this is wrong, is that narcissism is much more a sort of manifestation of some kind of deep wounding, where actually deep down, a person feels very small, or very wounded, or very passed over, or that they have been
Traumatized in some way and that there's this overcompensation that you know one way I've heard it said is that there's a there's a kind of normal narcissism that happens developmentally in kids where they should be the center of attention and they should be getting praise for every little thing that they do and they should having extreme concern showed to them over when they fall down and bump their knee or something but that that has somehow gotten turned into something else that's a lot more unhealthy in an adult.
Right, exactly.
With kids, there is self-focus and there needs to be because that does actually help a child grow into feeling that they have some rights, that they have the ability to get what they think is fair to them, that they can walk around with some confidence They learn to speak up for themselves, and yeah, kids will often make it about themselves.
Even through adolescence, they make it about themselves.
That's normal.
It is different than narcissism, because narcissism includes what you're saying.
It includes that narcissistic injury.
It includes that part that is soft inside that is so easily targeted and hurt that that's why a lot of people will find that or they find out that they're with a narcissist because they suddenly get attacked and they don't know why.
And they don't know that it's because when they walked into their home they said hello to the dog before they said hello to their husband.
That was the narcissistic injury and then that husband or whoever will attack them back but attack them harder so that it doesn't happen again.
And suddenly they don't know why they're getting screamed at or blamed for something and it's just because in that moment the narcissist felt slighted.
You know, we're going to talk about some of the more outlandish claims in the territory that we cover, and I know that you cover as well in your own work.
But I just want to add here as a sort of a preview, it's hard to avoid what looks like the incredible self-importance of someone who says they've personally been chosen as savior figures with special knowledge, special powers.
These things make them highly influential.
Maybe the Galactic Federation has chosen them as the ambassador to Earth.
To spread this very, very important message, right?
And so on the one hand, there's obviously like the financial and career opportunism of someone with no other qualifications who has charisma, just confabulating this kind of public self as a way to gain power and esteem.
And it strikes me that social media is sort of the perfect way to, you know, to put out a sort of avatar of yourself that is this self-important, self-importance.
Yeah, I'm just curious your thoughts about that.
Right.
So, you know, I see there are these different kinds of personalities that you come across in the worlds where we explore, where we spend probably more time than we should, because it's fascinating.
You have the person who will just decide to say things because they have no sense that they need to hold to the truth.
The rules don't apply to them.
They can say whatever they want.
They're not held to any kind of internalized standard of honesty.
So then they say what they think is going to get a rise out of people or is going to get their attention or is going to help them be seen as sort of being raised above everyone else around them.
And they are making it up from start to finish.
And for them, it's a game.
And it's a cruel game, especially if they're then going to be roping people in with the guise of it being authentic.
And people are going to give up their lives for this.
Then you have the people who really do believe it, who really have a psychosis where they believe it, where you have kind of the heaven's gate personality, the leader who did believe in the mothership.
And while it doesn't make it any less dangerous, obviously, because they all died, still there is more of a foley of a shared psychosis.
Someone is sort of drawing you into their psychosis.
What I also see though is I see some people who start out with maybe making up a story and they realize it works and people listen and then they up their game and then they expand their story to be more fantastical and just to see if people will go along with it and that they can carry people along to The fact that they weren't just the leader of, you know, this universe, but of every universe.
And so, yeah.
And I think for them, they just want to see how far they can take it.
That compounding structure, too, seems to gel with the notion of repairing the narcissistic wound.
Like, if you find something that actually fills you up, if you find something that makes you feel better, why wouldn't you keep going?
And why wouldn't you expand it?
Because the wound isn't going away.
It's like, it feels, it probably feels like a black hole that you just pour more followers into, right?
Like, what would ever be enough?
Right.
I feel like that escalation is really apparent too.
If we just, like Matthew, if we just sort of tracked the timeline of the various channels that we've talked about over time, right?
Initially it's like, oh, this person has a being from another dimension talking through them.
Then the next iteration is this person has a group And then you also find people who seem to be starting something that feels more psychological and then suddenly it turns into something spiritual.
counsel of beings who are of the highest authority that are now talking through this individual.
Yeah.
They're making decisions now.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like the, it's the UN.
Right.
And then you also find people who seem to be starting something that feels more psychological and then suddenly it turns into something spiritual.
Suddenly they've been anointed by God to do this.
And, you know, and then people feel they can't argue with them because, well, God said it, they're not saying it.
God said it.
The other thing that seems to escalate is the cruelty for some people.
They will push that and they will see how much they can get away with or how much they can make people do to themselves or do to each other just because they told them to.
That's the malignant narcissist.
So, one of the things we've been tracking, on a slightly different note here, is how the Republicans have taken up this hashtag, OK Groomer, which I'm sure you've noticed.
And it looks like the mainstreaming of QAnon, like, wow, this is the next iteration of where this goes.
And the implication here is that People who support the human rights of gay and trans people by criticizing the quote-unquote don't say gay bill in Florida, for example, are actually pedophiles.
And, you know, this gets a little Freudian here, but what can you tell us about the principle of projection when we're talking about a kind of cultural or moral panic that's obsessed with child abuse?
Mm-hmm, right.
So on the one hand, being obsessed with child abuse, not a bad thing, right?
I mean, we're happy now that there are rules, that there are laws, that people are more on guard, people are more aware.
People know that there are protections out there so you know just like with anything that can go awry sometimes the kernel of it is from someplace that is good and meaningful and has actually made a difference in a positive way in people's lives.
What happens though is that then you have this kind of never-ending cycle where you can't get out of the ill logic.
You are then seen as a certain way, you're labeled something because you feel a certain way about this other thing And then the projection, the deflection, the redirection is all a way to keep the focus elsewhere.
It's like just throwing the tennis ball over there.
So everyone's looking over there.
And I think some of that is a power play to see if they can get you to see someone suddenly as a pedophile just because they're saying something.
And also it's so head spinning.
That when people enter into something that's head spinning, they're looking for something to kind of hold on to, like an anchor.
And so if you say, ah, the reason that they're saying this is because of this, a lot of people will feel very calmed by that.
Oh, now I get it.
You've given me this formula.
I'm so calmed and happy to have this formula.
I'm not going to spend the time looking to see if it's true.
I just like having it.
And so then people to make sense of this and to feel calmer will go along with the way that they define this.
But yeah, it's a way just to kind of get kind of the hounds off your scent.
It's very much like Scientology, actually, because Scientology, when you speak out against them, let's say, or even just attend a conference, Look, what used to happen to me, I would be there checking people into a cult-related conference and a Scientologist would suddenly be in my face screaming at me saying, what crimes have you committed?
What crimes are you guilty of?
And it was suddenly, all the focus was on me as though I was doing something or I was a felon, I had done something wrong.
So it's a technique that's been used before.
And it strikes me as, even on the political stage, it's not new, right?
This idea that there is an awful gay agenda that can somehow be summarized in some slanderous way, and that explains everything that our opponents are doing.
Even though it may not seem like it, they actually have this secret kind of agenda that they're trying to infiltrate into the psyches of our children with their perverse gay ideas.
Just wild.
And then all of the contradictions, as you were just describing, the turnabout is fair play kind of stuff.
I think about that a lot right now with the people who are obsessed with freedom while they're taking away abortion rights or wanting to hold up the police state.
It's like, we are the ones who are fighting for freedom and against tyranny while we seek to undermine democracy almost completely and usher in the despot rule of King Trump.
Very strange.
So we see these contradictions in cults as well, right?
So maybe the public face of the group and how the leader is represented can often be sort of diametrically opposed to what's really going on behind the scenes?
Right, so that's very often the case and what happens too is that you see a decline in the ability to have self-reflection in those moments.
And what I mean by that is, I'll use an example of something that one time happened in my office where I was quoted in an article about a particular group that studies mysticism.
And this particular group is more cult-like.
So the people in the group came to see me, a number of them, kind of a delegation came to see me to talk to me about how I had it all wrong and I was open to hearing about it because they were in it and I wasn't.
I had just attended some meetings so I could see and yes it ticked all the boxes of control and manipulation and a definition of a cult but still I was open to hearing and they said No one tells us what to think.
We are now able to live lives that are more independent and where we can be self-actualized, where we can be ourselves in a way that we can never be before, that the world has not afforded us the chance to be.
While they're saying this though, they are all dressed the same.
They're all drinking out of bottles with a label on it with the picture of the cult leader, because it's all been specially blessed by him.
They're all sitting in the same way, using the same language, talking about how they're more independent than they've ever been before.
Yeah, amazing.
And they couldn't see what was happening right there.
And so, yes, it is a huge way of having people really not Not understand that the thing that they feel so worried about happening to the rest of the world is just, you know, happening to them.
It also, to use another example, it reminds me of going back to Heaven's Gate There was this video taken of the people before they committed suicide where they all talked about how excited they were about the possibility of leaving their corporal selves and leaving the world as it was and how awful the world was.
And how it was filled with destruction and so bleak.
Meanwhile, while they're in this video, they're sitting in chairs in a beautiful garden, and the sky is blue and the birds are singing, and they're talking about how the world is like Armageddon.
And I want to say, even though they've already passed away, but I wanted to yell to the video, turn around!
Look right behind you.
There are flowers blooming.
It's a beautiful scene, but you can't see it.
You just can't see it.
And it was very sad.
Yeah, it's an incredible testament to the power that Applewhite had in relation to foisting that vision over decades and building that picture of the world that was completely misaligned with how they were actually living and what was actually going on at the moment that, yeah, they couldn't see the blue sky.
Right, and that they would never be able to connect with people.
Meanwhile, they had all connected with each other, which shows that it was possible for them to connect with people.
Yeah, you're making that even more tragic.
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, I'm not really fun at parties anymore.
I just have to say.
Yeah, we're kind of all that way, unfortunately.
It's a heartbreaking video and really fascinating for listeners who haven't seen it.
You can find it on YouTube.
There's a short version, but there's also like a two hour or something version where you just see all of these testimonies.
Stood out to me, again, is the uniformity that you were describing from that incident in your office, Rachel.
You know, they all have those similar haircuts, they're dressed in similar ways, there's an effort to be androgynous.
And this is an interesting thing, and this is the thing that Matthew and I sometimes discuss, and I know that in general it seems like the research shows that of course anyone can be drawn into a cult, but when I watched that Heaven's Gate exit testimony video, I feel like I'm looking at people who seem to have something in common in terms of their psychology, or maybe even in terms of their neuro-typology.
They seem to be particularly vulnerable.
Maybe that's just what's happened to them through the course of being indoctrinated, but I'm curious what you think about that.
Yeah, I mean what I found was that you had some people who had had some difficulty feeling like they could have success in the world outside that some of them felt really awkward.
I don't doubt that some of them were on the spectrum which can cause a lot of Feelings of awkwardness.
And it's a common thing that happens where people think that they don't fit in, unfortunately, because of some of their wiring.
But it doesn't mean that that's a life sentence.
It just means learning how to adapt and introducing the people in your life to what How you are in terms of your neurology and what you need in order to have a relationship.
It just takes some communication.
But what I found too is I found people who were so desperate to feel like their life had meaning.
And also that there was something better, there was something to look forward to, there was something that they knew was going to be giving them a sense of relief.
And some of them had really been in situations where they just didn't have a life that really felt good, that felt exciting, and this gave them A sense of excitement and I think some of them were grappling with their sexuality and at a time when there wasn't as much acceptance.
I don't think they would have necessarily felt the need to take on these ideas and the androgyny if they were dealing with the issues now.
Circling back to Freud again, before we move on, because we do have a question about attachment theory and vulnerability to influence.
And we've noticed that a huge part of the QAnon Imaginarium is preoccupied with this future spasm of political violence that's going to purify the landscape and get rid of all of the bad people and usher in a new era.
And this is also a very common paranoid theme in authoritarian cults.
And I'm wondering, or I always wonder when I hear language like this, whether or not I'm listening to the expression of what's known as a death wish.
Right, you know there is a lot tied in with this idea of a death wish and I think what happens too is that there is kind of a release of adrenaline that feels very exciting where you then have this passion around it because you're dealing with life and death.
Right.
And when you jump into those sorts of existential spaces then you do have more extreme emotion and you feel very tied in with the people who feel, who are like-minded.
I think that the irony of course with a lot of this
In terms of, you know, the world ending or this idea of violence, is that through this cultivation of drama and the fog that it creates, one of the things that I think people in QAnon and other groups like it don't realize is that the battle that they keep talking about is the battle they're creating.
And so, the fact that they're the ones stoking it is something I don't know if they're quite aware of, because they think they're preparing for it, and they think they're protecting people from it, but they're making it happen.
There's an ambivalence, because on one hand, Michael Flynn will call on them to be digital soldiers, and on the other hand, the memesphere that drove QAnon would also tell Anons to stand back or to be passive and to watch the show.
And so it seemed to me like there was an option for Monday and an option for Tuesday, that you could go out and be the hero within this game, really, or you could also sit back and watch it happen.
And it was a very, like from a cult studies perspective, and especially like a pre-digital cult studies perspective, it was really, really interesting because, you know, in the cults that I'm familiar with and have been in, there hasn't been that sort of buffet of options where, you know, you are equally participatory if you are passive and if you are prosecuting.
And in fact, the people who are acting as digital soldiers, they take up the slack on this day, but then they can become passive the next day.
And I think that works very well for a globalized network, networked extremely online.
There's no ashram, nobody has to get up at the same time, it's 24 hours a day.
There's kind of a tag team quality to it, and so I find that very interesting to think about, is that there's this mixture of aggression and passivity that was on offer for the Anons.
Right, and it does help to make people really feel like they're still part of the cause.
They're just interacting with it in different ways.
They're still waiting for their orders because they're not just not doing something because they don't feel like doing something, but it's because they were told that was one of the acceptable options.
Right.
Yeah, so the thing that they're doing is buying the popcorn and watching the show and staying tuned because they know where the show is going to be, right?
They know to watch the water.
Yeah, it's so circular because in order for there to be a show, there has to be somebody watching.
So you're right, Rachel, they're making the conflict happen, but they're also doing that from a kind of, you know, surveillance perspective as well.
They're making it happen as the audience.
Right, exactly.
Someone is still deciding who's going to be on the stage and who's going to be in the audience, or who's going to be in the mezzanine.
But still, you are placed in those spaces, even though I think you think you're making the decision on your own.
You know, we mentioned we were going to get to some questions about attachment theory, and Julian and I both have, I think, a layperson's understanding.
My favorite application of it in relation to cults and undue influence and social movements like QAnon is Alexandra Stein's idea of how cults foster disorganized attachment.
And so, I'm wondering, and we've spoken a little bit of it in the whiplash that people can feel between getting everything they need from a group, but then also being scared shitless by it.
Can you just walk us through how that works and help listeners understand how attachment theory is and maybe is not useful in cult recovery?
Right, so attachment theory is a very interesting theory.
I mean I remember learning about it through John Bowlby who kind of coined the term I believe originally and was helping people to understand this notion that a child needs to develop a relationship with at least one person in their life who is
able to be consistent, who's able to be safe, so that they can develop a healthy way of having not only an attachment but social and emotional development.
What happens with disorganized attachment is that then there is no safe, secure, or consistent base.
I mean that's one of the the causes.
There's a poor response to your distress.
And so then you can't trust the person who's supposed to be your caregiver who you've become or it's been propelled that you become dependent upon.
And with disorganized attachment, with some of these studies, they're hard to watch when you see children in some of these videos with, you know, when they have the caregiver look away when the child is feeling distressed, etc.
It's very hard to watch these things.
Um, but with disorganized attachment, you have a child, for example, who might cry when the caregiver leaves, but also might still be crying when they come back because they're worried about what's going to happen because that caregiver might yell at them for crying or might come in and show but also might still be crying when they come back because they're worried about Or might come in and show that they don't care.
And so within a cultic system, because there is this hierarchy that keeps, I think, being shifted, it's like the ground under your feet keeps getting moved so that there is nothing really secure and you don't know if what worked to make the leader happy with you on Thursday is going to work on Friday, then You are on edge and you can't fully relax.
With secure attachment, you can relax, you can breathe.
The relationship is an oasis, but there are no oases with an insecure attachment and with a disorganized attachment.
And I think cult leaders do that on purpose so no one really feels that they've mastered the system there.
They can, they're always scrambling to try to do it right or to try to do it better.
And someone who is a narcissist likes that someone's going to keep trying to please them.
So one, one of the things that helps, like when I'm working with people who are coming out of cultic groups, is to connect them with people.
And I do a lot of connecting with people who have left other groups and say that they're happy to be a resource to others and they, they're good, safe people.
So to connect them with other former members or To work with their family, to be the ones who can accept them back without question, without saying I told you so, without berating them for missing the funeral, with it being completely safe.
And one of the things that is very powerful when you provide someone with that safe space when they come out of a cult is it helps them detach more actually from their cult experience because they see what they were not provided.
They get to feel something.
They get to have their heart rate slow down in a way that it hadn't been for years.
And then they see what their cult involvement was doing to them.
I think one of the most stunning realizations that I got from
Stein's book called Terror and Brainwashing, I think, and also the way in which you've spoken about the subject is that the paradox of disorganized attachment for the cult follower mimics the paradox of the child who is terrified of the caregiver but must run towards them anyway because if they don't, they don't know where else they will be able to You know, find survival needs.
And so, and it resonated so strongly with my own experience in a cultic environment of going repeatedly into an environment that was literally terrifying.
It made me nauseous with terror, psychological terror.
But, the group was very, very efficient at interpreting that as a sign of growth or a sign of awakening or a sign that I was actually doing well or I was doing my own internal work.
I was waking up, the group was scaring the shit out of me and destroying all of my relationships and telling me at the same time that the terror I was feeling because of that was actually a kind of love that I just didn't recognize before.
Yeah, it's so interesting.
There could be a whole book on all of the terms that are used as justifications for abuse.
And when you have that in a cult and you also have it in an emotionally abusive relationship, you have the the phrases that are contradictory but somehow seem to come together or you want them to come together in these relationships.
The, um, you're never going to be good enough, you have disappointed me, you are a whole variety of insults, and no one Will love you the way I love you.
No one will care about you the way I care about you.
And you can't trust anyone else to the same degree that you can trust me.
So what do you do with all of that?
And so then you then try to figure out your place in that and how to remain safe.
And the only thing you can do is just keep trying to please that person.
That's why a lot of people will say, you know, why did that person stay so long?
Well, that's why they were in this loop of needing to make sure that the caregiver they believed was the only one they had left was still going to be able to take care of them.
Yeah, it's the thing that I always find myself saying in conversations about these topics is how The personality disorders, the abusive dynamics, the extreme psychological sort of profiles, that all of this is an amplification of something that is already there in smaller forms in more ordinary everyday situations, right?
That within families, for example, we might have the idea of I'm only being hard on you right now because you need to know the truth so that you can be a better person or so that you'll do better out in the world.
And sometimes that might even be true, but you see this sort of amplification of that.
The other thing that comes to mind is intermittent reinforcement.
And it seems to me that intermittent reinforcement is part of that.
Disorganized sort of attachment experience right that that sometimes you'll get praised and loved for doing it this way and the next time you might get yelled at and shunned and Condemned for doing it the same way.
Is that is that part of it?
It is a huge part of it.
It is actually It's incredible and and I'm glad that we Are actually covering it because
One of the things that takes place with intermittent reinforcement or intermittent gratification is that it draws a person in with such a fierce attachment because when they then get something positive back, because it's so rare, because it's unpredictable, or because it's so hard to get, It is delicious.
It's like giving water to someone who's been thirsty for days.
And so people will work hard to try to be able to have that feeling again and again and they'll go through not getting and being abandoned or being abused until they can feel that Again, it's the model of why people gamble, right?
Why there's going to be a payout every once in a while and you put more money onto the whatever you're getting, you know, the thing that you're playing is onto the table or whatever for your cards or a slot machine.
And you don't get, and you don't get, and you don't get, but when you do get, it feels so good.
In fact, I don't know, I was reading this study actually about gambling that within slot machines, there are two pieces of metal.
So it used to be when the coins came out, they wouldn't just hit the metal bottom, but there was a space underneath that metal piece and another metal piece so that It magnified the sound so that people from across the room or the casino could hear how much was coming out and they wanted to get that for themselves.
So there's so much psychology in all of it.
Yeah, all of that dopaminergic anticipatory, like, oh, maybe this time if I do it, it's going to happen.
And I just want to say as a quick aside, because Matthew, you've shared a little, I've talked on the podcast some about the cultish group I was in.
It was a very small group in the 90s and that there was all of that kind of intermittent reinforcement and harsh criticism, but you know, it's the way that you're going to become a truly awakened warrior who's healed the things that only I can see are wrong with you.
Right.
And I remember part of my healing process or part of my sort of realizing that I needed to get out of that group was recognizing that people I would bring or people that other members of the group would bring to say, hey, come take this class would come in Have an experience and go, yeah, that's not for me.
And recognizing that those of us who stayed were those who had some kind of place where we could be hooked by that particular dynamic of the very harsh and demanding parent figure who would occasionally give praise.
And that others were just like, I don't need this.
There are plenty of yoga classes in town.
You go ahead.
Enjoy.
Right, right.
Yeah, I think you know also one of the ways that people get away with mistreating people in this way is not only do they call it something else like love or the work or whatever it is or what you deserve or for your betterment, but they make it so that you feel specially chosen To be part of this inner circle of the people who are kind of worked over harder.
So you think that it's actually raised you in terms of your hierarchy.
So one of my sort of pet topics that I come back to from time to time on the podcast, mostly because it was so helpful to me when I first heard it explained was John Wellwood's idea of spiritual bypassing.
And I've always sort of had a hunch that One of the ways in which for some people spiritual bypassing happens, which is the use of spiritual ideas, experiences, beliefs, so as to sort of avoid having to deal with certain perhaps psychological experiences or pieces of work that need to be done, one of the ways that this sometimes happens is Perhaps dissociation.
And I'm curious what you think about that.
Did I get spiritual bypassing right in your understanding?
And then is dissociation like perhaps in some way overlapping with that?
Well I think that there is something um about the the meditative process the um kind of keeping yourself from having uh worldly thoughts and worldly concerns and that is part of this that really does put you in a different space in terms of what what you're focused on and what you're not also what you think is important to think about and What you think is not.
So, how you prioritize the thoughts that you have.
But yeah, I think that there are a lot of people who are under the impression or given the impression that if they do go into a dissociative state, they are communing with, you know, the ascended masters.
They are somehow raising themselves above and or having thoughts or having a connection that is more pure When really it is that they're either in a hypnotic trance or that they have just learned how to be, you know, how to dissociate, but that it's not making them necessarily any holier or any more connected to anything.
In fact, it's making them more disconnected.
Yeah, and yet it seems to me that in that disconnection, There is a sense of perhaps having transcended one's earthly needs, vulnerabilities, identity, sense of struggle with any of the things that are existentially difficult.
And so in that disconnection, I feel, and I know this from my own experience, that there can be a sense of the transcendent that is very Uh, soothing, but also sometimes very thrilling.
They're like, oh, oh, this is it.
This is the thing that everyone's talked about.
And then I wonder so much about people who believe, say that they're channeling or that they're getting special guidance from spirit.
They're downloading some special esoteric information.
I wonder how much of that is sort of a learned response to, over time, engaging in some sort of practice that isn't essentially dissociative.
And then there are these very unusual states or experiences that they enter into, if we take them at their word, that they are actually reporting on something they've been experiencing.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yeah, I think that, you know, when you think about people channeling or people talking about doing this automatic writing that, you know, that they're channeling some spirit who is causing their hand to move and their writing has come from a different source.
I mean, you know, sometimes that can come from an actual brain disorder, and it's something that Dr. Yuval Laor talks about, right, and when people are having a certain issue,
Neurological issue they can sometimes really feel that they're having a spiritual connection and they will have sort of copious amounts of thoughts and things that they suddenly need to write and you know it sort of overtakes them but it's actually a disorder and for other people I think what happens is in the in that moment where you transcend the ego the self
You become this empty vessel and then whoever is there to fill you up, to tell you what that is or why that's happening or what that means, you'll adopt because there isn't the resistance to it because you've emptied yourself out or at least, you know, that's what you know that you're supposed to do.
So, if someone tells you, ah, that's this, or that's this spirit, or that's because of that, then you might believe it, and then feel that you have that connection, and that power, and then you build up a lot on that.
You know, well, based on this connection, now I know this, or now I can do this.
It's all sort of built on a house of cards.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that brings us to this idea And I wonder if it's similar to what you were saying earlier about there being a sort of kernel of truth, right?
That it does seem like there's something about certain kinds of psychological work, or perhaps we could call it contemplative work, that is about what I think of as sort of softening ego defenses or identification with certain ways that we have structured our egos.
But the emphasis is often on either surrendering or abandoning or even killing the ego.
And I'm curious what you think, is this possible?
Is this something healthy to actually sort of try to attain?
So, I come back to this phrase a lot and it might not seem very lofty and kind of pedestrian, but I say, it's only a problem if it's a problem.
If you have a problem with your ego, if it gets in your way, if you're obnoxious, if you don't get along with people because of it, if you have a grandiosity that really gives you this skewed view of the self, then it's not a bad idea to look at your ego and to try to keep it in check.
Doesn't mean you have to get rid of it, it means you have to be able to kind of temper it.
And you have to understand that you might not be all that, and that you don't need to be all that, and that's okay.
But when somebody who's a cult leader, let's say, or a psychotherapist who is fraudulent, and I come across a lot of those in my work.
If they say that everyone needs to do the same thing, you're always going to have a problem, first of all, because for some people it was a problem and for other people it wasn't.
For some people, actually, they needed a little more ego.
They needed to be able to have a little more confidence.
They needed to be able to feel a little more capable.
And so if you're telling people who already feel in a weakened state to get rid of the ego, then you're further weakening them.
And so it's not beneficial to them at all.
You know, I want to turn to, you just mentioned fraudulent psychotherapists, and I wanted to turn to a little bit more of a difficult subject, which is that as we've seen it play out, QAnon has obviously resurrected the satanic panic of 30 years ago now.
And we feel that this is partly because it was never quite dead or resolved, that the institutions that we rely on for clarity in these situations really didn't come up with much that Journalism didn't really figure out what happened, and certainly the law didn't either.
We don't know why this moral panic took hold.
So, I mean, the first question is just introductory, which is, you know, what comes to mind when you think about that era and when you encounter these deeply held morbid anxieties reemerge?
Right, so you know, so much of it comes from a Christian tradition of there being this idea of Satan, of hell, and so it affects many people and it's going to actually have an impact then on a great percentage of the population.
And it's going to turn heads because it is when people talk about satanism or satanic cults it gets a rise out of people right away so it's sort of titillating.
What I I found during that period of time that was so disturbing were a couple of things.
One is that a lot of people would contact me during that time saying that they were then sure that they had been ritualistically abused when they were young through satanic cults.
And that some of these ideas came to them through their therapist who said, oh, you have repressed memories.
And then at the time, the go-to was, if you can't remember this period of time, that's because you were abused.
And the abuse at the time, like the abuse du jour, unfortunately was satanic abuse.
So there was sort of this kind of like runaway train went right there.
And so then a lot of people felt that they could suddenly remember being in a room standing in a pentagram and, you know, being sacrificed or animals being sacrificed.
And a lot of that made it hard to distinguish for therapists if the person you were working with was delusional or if this is something actually that had been fostered by somebody who they trusted, who was a mental health professional.
I think of the McMartin trials and I think about people who were just put through so much torture because this was the cause celeb and people want their causes just like the QAnon saved the children.
People want their causes.
The thing that was also disturbing though during this time was that there are people who They took advantage of the fact that this was on people's minds.
And then they started being very sadistic towards other people, saying it was satanic ritual, having kind of this way of getting away with being abusive, saying that it was from Satan.
And a lot of people then were doing sort of copycat abuses and creating satanic cults just because now they knew they were kind of popular.
And so it really, really, really got out of hand.
You know, I prepared these questions not realizing that you were actually a therapist during that time.
Is that what I'm understanding now?
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
So, it was the whole repressed memory thing, the whole idea of if you can't remember a period of time in your childhood, that means this, right?
There was an answer to, ah, that means that you were abused or that means that, you know, your parents were Satanists.
I mean, it's such a destructive thing to do, because it is true that for all of us, we all have stretches of time that we can't fully remember.
It doesn't mean something bad happened.
It could be that nothing bad happened, so it's not memorable.
Right?
So, I think when you have the, ah, here's the answer to that, and it's uniform, then you have a lot of people who will believe that something is true that didn't happen.
Then, they go on to accuse the people who must have done this to them.
And there were a lot of people on trial, a lot of People who were called by the Department of Children's Services, a lot of people who lost custody of their children during this time, all because of this wave of panic.
Now, we're talking about from the early 90s onwards.
I mean, it begins in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers in Victoria, British Columbia.
And of course, that picks up on previous themes that are as old as time.
But now I can ask you, how has the psychotherapeutic community reckoned with that?
Disaster, and I suppose that also this has been the time in which, over the last 30 years or so, that new regulatory frameworks have come in, maybe colleges have formed or have strengthened their certification processes.
How has your discipline dealt with this?
Right, so I want to say actually for people who were really engaged in the time that they've sort of dealt with it through a lot of embarrassment in retrospect realizing that they wreaked havoc on people's families.
One of the things that has come out of and a very important thing that has come out of that time is how social workers specifically deal with children Uh, when they think that they have been abused and how they make sure that they don't cultivate certain stories in terms of how they respond to what the kids are saying.
Um, because one of the things that became evident when people later on watched the videotapes of the children from McMartin, right, working with the social workers, that when the social workers asked the children, You know, what kind of abuse, you know, did you go through?
Did they touch you here?
Did they touch you there?
And, you know, did they talk about Satan, etc.?
And when the children really didn't have anything to say because nothing had happened, the social workers actually looked disappointed.
And so the children would make sure then that the adult wasn't disappointed with them.
So they'd start to tell a story and then they'd see the social worker look happier.
And so then there was that interplay that was promoting Those stories actually so now the way children are interviewed has has been shifted But also that it's not one size fits all that there's this idea that it can't be just because of this You know what's happening?
Now too is that there are a lot of people who are Who are told that they are trans when they say they're just not comfortable in their own skin.
And I say this, I have a bunch of kids, two of whom are trans, so I say this, not at all in any way to say that I am against this.
I love them and I love that they were able to follow
You know kind of becoming who they were always supposed to be and at the same time There have been a number of people who are on the spectrum who were sort of propelled into taking hormones Went through transitions and felt the same They still felt uncomfortable in their own skin because that wasn't the answer so you always have to be cautious making sure that the answer isn't just the one that's popular now and
Well, to your point about the leading questions and the sort of weight of an ideological answer or a theme that a therapist would like to emphasize, Julian's got a question about Teal Swan coming up, who we found provides kind of a bridging
I don't know, archetype between the satanic panic of yesteryear and the more Q adjacent influencer culture of today in the sense that her therapist Barbara Snow was famous or infamous in Utah for repeatedly
you know, wrongly influencing her clients and, you know, encouraging them to bring up charges that were found to have no merit.
And she even did it with her own family.
There's a friend of Teal Swan's who describes going to Barbara Snow for a session and that within the, you know, the first 45 minutes, Snow was telling her that, oh, this is what must have happened to you.
This is the ketamine that they gave you.
This is how you were abused.
And this is the ritual network that I That's part of how we get Teal Swan, is there's this direct line of historical progression from one era to the next.
Well, and even more than that, I believe that it was in court when somebody sued her, or maybe when she was before some kind of board who was deciding about her licensure, whatever the official situation was, that Snow is actually on record as saying that anytime one of the kids I was influencing I was interviewing, excuse me, but actually influencing.
Anytime one of the kids I was interviewing told me that it had not happened to them, I didn't believe it.
Which is just stunning, right?
And so she's the therapist of Teal Swan.
People like her and there's another one named Kaya Ra.
They're contemporary.
They've gained what we see as a cultic following through their gruesome origin story that echoes the satanic How do you make sense of this?
elements.
They're elaborate, supernatural, horrific tales of ritualized abuse and murder.
And then the traumatic backstory kind of intersects with this awakening to a special life purpose.
They've been contacted by the Ascended Masters, Alien Supreme Councils, as we mentioned before.
How do you make sense of this?
I mean, I always find myself wondering, is there a real traumatic history here that maybe has then gotten re-remembered or reconfigured as something much more gruesome and maybe compounded in some kind of way? is there a real traumatic history here that maybe has And I think,
And I wonder too, if they're making it up, to whatever extent they're conscious of that, that also takes some kind of person, right?
To go there.
Because that's an unusual thing to do.
Right.
It is.
And you know, I mean, Teal Swan is a...
Is a show woman, you know, I'm, you know, I think you always have to be cautious of people who say they're spiritual leaders and they're backlit and have filters.
And so there you go.
But what I, what I do find is that, you know, when you're dealing with all of this, you are also encompassing what happens in a lot of cults where they will say, What you see and what you hear and what you feel, sort of what's around you isn't real.
The only thing that's real is what I tell you is real.
Or the only, in one particular cult, and this is very hard for people to heal from, anything that's invisible is real.
Everything that you can see is not.
Dr. Margaret Singer had this wonderful quote, I'll always be in of her and her wisdom on this and she was someone who was a teacher to us early in this field and a professor at Berkeley she'd say that once you get involved in a cultic system you learn to deny the evidence of your senses and what can happen too is that you can go into therapy with someone and learn to deny the evidence of your senses and and
And that's when you have this detachment from what's real and what happened and what didn't.
And who is a culprit and who's a victim and who's a perpetrator and who's not.
And one of the things that I find when these stories are told is, yeah, it could be that people like Teal Swan and others have had difficult histories.
Could be.
And could be that's why they need this much attention and this much affirmation and why they need to be seen as perfect now and why they make sure that the people around them can't question them because they can't tolerate it.
And it could be because they were abused in the past.
I don't know.
But Wouldn't surprise me.
It's just that if they tell a story of something that is so egregious and is so dramatic, then they become a symbol of survival.
And then you look to them when you feel like you can't survive something that you're going through because look what they survived.
And then you want to follow their lead because they've lived through it themselves so that gives them some credibility but it also cultivates a certain sense of protectiveness from the followers.
Look, this person has been through so much.
I need to be kind to this person.
I can't leave this person.
If they ask for a donation, I'm going to give it.
Because, oh, look, you know, it kind of connects with your conscience.
So I think that it's something that unfortunately, really works for these people who tell these stories.
And it's hard to know if they're true or not.
And they're probably not.
But it gets people to care and it gets people to look up to them.
I didn't put it together, that piece about the story of survivorship becomes an invitation to a circle of protection, actually.
That the cult then actually has to become a series of caregivers in order to protect the story, in order to protect the experience.
But sometimes the experience that's described is so Absolutely outrageous, totally implausible, that I wonder if there's some sort of measurement for how belief can cross certain thresholds.
I'm thinking of how one of the things that Swan describes in her origin story is that as a child she was sewn into a corpse for 12 hours overnight.
Which, you know, unless the corpse is like filleted like a fish and the spine is taken out, like it's just, there's no, it's, a child, there's no child that fits into, it just doesn't make any sense.
It's totally impossible.
It's the kind of thing you make up to up the ante, right?
Yeah, but I guess I wonder what kind of scale of imaginative control must be generated in that moment in order for people not to get up and walk out.
Or, if they are caregivers, If they have transitioned into, I'm going to protect Swan's story, is there a sense in which they might even acknowledge that that might be symbolic, but it symbolizes how deep their experience is, and I'm not going to deny that either.
Right yeah you don't know how much they believe the story or how much they just feel for this person who might believe that this happened to them you know and I don't know if it matters at some point because they they're still going to care.
Sometimes unfortunately you know what I see also with some abusive relationships where people stayed with someone for a long time some
I deal with a lot of people who have left relationships with people who told war stories that they had been through the most horrific of times, or that a lot of them have been people who were awarded medals in some sort of Army, Marine Corps, something.
You know, they had done something for the country and they had incurred some sort of PTSD and that's why they somehow, that was the excuse they gave for mistreating the person they were with or screaming at them or hurting them.
And then that makes the other person feel they can't leave because usually the other part of the story is no one else believes me and everyone else has abandoned me.
Will you be special and smart enough and strong enough to be the one person Who won't abandon me, who will be brave enough to believe me, or smart enough to believe me.
That's incredibly tight.
That's like a very self-sealed loop, isn't it?
Very self-sealed, exactly.
And unfortunately too, that sometimes the more fantastical the story is, The more believable it is for some people because they think, wow, that's so out there.
I mean, who would make that up?
Well, a lot of people would make that up, right?
But that is the thought that people have.
But it falls into what I see as the sort of dual track of influence.
One is visible and one's invisible.
And so the visible part is the charm and the charisma and The invisible part is this messaging that happens at the same time, which is, if you question what I'm saying, you are closed-minded, you are not spiritual, you are not enlightened, you're not getting it.
So, when someone tells you a story about being sworn into a corpse, I mean, yeah, right?
Like, logically, it's not possible.
But you might in that moment think, that's crazy.
But the thought then that you've been trained to have is, oh, don't doubt.
Because doubt is going to keep you from receiving the gifts that this person is giving you.
And don't question, because that's the ego.
You've learned to push away all of your critical thinking.
So I will sometimes have people say, if you can take me back to the time where you first heard that story, and what was your initial thought before you talked yourself out of it?
It makes me wonder, too, about the circles of how close someone is to the leader, right?
That there may be some sense of increasing intimacy and access to the multifaceted nature of the leader that, oh, well, yeah, they're also really vulnerable in this way.
Everyone else sees them as this big, powerful, incredible figure who has contact with the divine.
And that's true, but because I'm even more special and even closer to the innermost circle, I get to see these things and I get to perhaps feel more protective and more accommodating of some of the things that just don't make sense.
I just have to say, too, that in my investigative work on Shambhala International and Sivananda Yoga, it's the person who's in the inner circle who is forced into that paradox of understanding the leader's fragility alongside their grandiosity.
That's also sort of a gateway to awakening to, oh, this is a human being and my job has been to wipe their ass and my job has been to, you know, provide all kinds of services for them and to be abused and the reality of their grandiosity is actually a big show.
So, the inner circle is also this sort of dangerous place for the leader to generate around them because they will end up showing more than is safe for them.
Which is probably why those are the people who bear often the biggest brunt of the abuse and control.
Absolutely, right.
You know, Rachel, we could talk all day.
We had these scenarios drawn up, but I think you've given us so much to think about, and so we really want to leave time to ask you the very serious question of, what's our problem?
What are our issues?
Julian and I, we were talking about it, we text together, we're on Slack.
We just can't figure out what's wrong with us.
We have these deep inner feelings that we can't process.
What is your professional guess as to why Julian and I are driven to do this godforsaken work?
What kind of therapy do you think we need?
Are you taking on clients?
And if you exorcise our demons, will our angels leave us too?
Right.
Yeah, yeah, so watch out for that.
Meanwhile, I'm not going to diagnose you because I do the same thing, so I'd be diagnosing myself.
So, what I can say, though, is that I love your curiosity.
And curiosity is a wonderful thing.
Because you want to find out why, you want to find out how.
There are not a lot of people who want to explore the human mind but also this sort of darker part of it where people can take advantage of people to this degree.
It's a hard thing to look at.
But it's really important because then you can understand the signs of it.
Then you understand what happened to you, you understand what happened to other people, and then you can try to warn them.
Watch out for this, because I've learned that's what you're going to have to look for to know if you're going to be safe or not.
So I think there's a certain kind of cultural protectiveness that both of you have, that you want to learn this information and not just have it, but share it.
So I appreciate that.
Well, that was a very nice therapy session, and I appreciate it.
I feel good.
I take Venmo if you need to.
I feel much better.
But I mean, I think I personally can also cross over into a crusading territory that I can identify as projective, that I've had certain experiences in my life and it's very difficult for me not to see them everywhere.
And I'm wondering, like, Is that something that you've had to check in yourself, or if you supervise anybody who's doing this work, do you have advice for them?
Right, yeah.
I think that, you know, it's important for people who are doing this work to have a sense about why they're doing it.
That if it is that they really do want to educate people, they want to help the public in some way, that they can't rescue everyone.
They can try to kind of help one person at a time or find a forum like this where they can reach out and help a lot of people, but you're not going to necessarily stop it from happening again.
While we're talking, 10, 20, 30 new cults are being formed.
And so, right, it's just going to be something that's going to coexist with us.
And so you have to be kind of okay with knowing that and do what you can.
But also to understand that you can also help people to a certain degree and then you want to try to foster them being able to protect themselves in the world.
There are a lot of people who go cult shopping, right?
go out from one into another or into that kind of a relationship.
So to help them keep themselves safe in the world is an important thing.
I know I care about it in a micro level and a macro level in that the micro is that I care about people and I like doing counseling and I find it interesting.
And every story is like a movie of the week.
And when I get sort of the general cases, like, oh, I'm having trouble with my 16-year-old, I'm like, hmm, that's like a palate cleanser.
Oh, I can handle that.
Whatever.
Like, there's no mothership involved.
But what I do find though also is that in a macro level, it helps me and I think it helps us understand the human condition and what people are looking for and what people are needing.
And how to try to provide that for people in the world, and connectedness, and community, and purpose.
And that when that's missing, people find cults.
And also, being a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I care about groupthink, and I care about where that can go.
And so, that's also the reason that I'm motivated.
Rachel, thank you so much for your time.
It's been a real pleasure.
It actually is kind of like sitting in therapy because there's something so relaxed and broad and I don't know, there's a lot of equanimity in how you treat the subject and I really appreciate that.
