Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today.
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.
Deep Cut Intro Music
Single Origins — Pete Kuzma
Show Notes
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, et al. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002.
Oakes, Len. Prophetic Charisma: the Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities. Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Shaw, Daniel. Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.
Stein, Alexandra. Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I wrote and recorded this audio essay just over two years ago, but I think the topic of post-cult shame is evergreen.
If you or someone you know has been in a high-demand group, and you have an hour to sit back and contemplate recovery and self-forgiveness with the help of insights from Primo Levi, Alexandra Stein, and Daniel Shaw, Make yourself a cup of tea and settle in.
Thanks for listening.
♪ Music playing ♪ Post-cult shame.
Bye!
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.
To establish power and dignity by taking it from those who are below you.
I don't think anyone describes this as well as the Italian Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi.
Lévy died in 1987.
Some think it was suicide, and some believe it was an accident.
He coined the term grey zone to describe the shameful melting pot of totalitarian violence in which perpetrators and victims do a macabre pas de deux.
Now I'd like to give a caveat here as I quote from Lévy's final book, which is called The Drowned and the Saved, I want to be clear that I'm not comparing Holocaust experiences with cult experiences in some kind of one-to-one way.
I'm following in a tradition of cult researchers who reach back to survivors and luminaries like Lévy and Hannah Arendt, whose analyses of totalitarianism have been central to cult studies for more than half a century.
By way of introduction, I'll first quote from Alexandra Stein's cult research masterpiece, Terror, Love and Brainwashing, Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems.
Stein first introduced me to Levi's work.
Levi cautions us to resist simplistic answers to the complex questions that arise out of the world's experience of totalism.
He is also suggesting that we do not so easily separate ourselves from either the totalist lieutenants, the collaborators, or their victims.
To do so is to assume our immunity.
And to falsely assume immunity is to make ourselves vulnerable.
We may then fail to gain the real knowledge necessary to strengthen our ability to resist.
But despite research indicating that victims of totalism do not have special cult-seeking or self-victimizing tendencies or weaknesses prior to becoming trapped in totalist environments, people continue to say, it could never happen to me.
This separation between resistor and victim, us versus them, also results in a tendency to blame and shame victims.
A particularly disturbing form of this is discussed by Levy where he describes the intense shame experienced by survivors of Hitler's concentration camps for not having resisted enough.
Quote, you too could have, you certainly should have resisted.
Consciously or not, the survivor feels accused and judged, compelled to justify and defend himself.
Unquote.
This is a similar shame experienced by battered women and former cult members.
Why didn't you leave?
Or victims of child sexual abuse.
Why didn't you tell?
But this shaming only serves to give a false sense of security to those on the outside.
It does not help them to understand the actual dynamics at work so that they may protect themselves in the future.
So here's Levi talking about the shame calculus of being on the inside.
As the abuse rises, so does the horizontal violence.
The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate.
Terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever, even though ridiculously circumscribed in space and time, cowardice, and, finally, lucid calculation aimed at eluding the imposed orders and order.
All these motives, singly or combined, have come into play in the creation of this grey zone,
whose components are bonded together by the wish to preserve
and consolidate established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.
Now, Lévy explains that one of the most notable aspects of the grey zone is just how difficult it
is to understand and describe, let alone judge.
much.
He writes, Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state, the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators, never likable Never transparent is always difficult to evaluate.
It is a judgment that we would like to entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test for themselves what it means to act in a state of coercion.
Alessandro Manzoni, the 19th century novelist and poet, knew this quite well.
Quote, Provocateurs, oppressors, all those who in some way injure others, are guilty not only of the evil they commit, but also of the perversion into which they lead the spirit of the offended.
The condition of the offended does not exclude culpability, which is often objectively serious,
but I know of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgment.
Levi's willingness to focus on the unrelenting horror of horizontal violence is stunning.
in.
Here he is describing how the death camp administrators recruited prisoners to man the ovens in special squads, only the last of which survived, interrupted by liberation.
Conceiving and organizing the squads was National Socialism's most demonic crime.
Behind the pragmatic aspect, to economize on able men, to impose on others the most atrocious tasks, other more subtle aspects can be perceived.
This institution represented an attempt to shift onto others, specifically the victims, the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.
It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children, One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind.
This is a temptation one must resist.
In fact, the existence of the squads had a meaning, a message.
Quote, we, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are.
If we so wish, and we do so wish, We can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.
So what are the implications?
Levy goes to this extremely brave place, suggesting something that I believe every survivor of an abusive group must grapple with as they navigate shame.
That not only was your survival dependent on your privilege, but it may also have depended upon your own moral ambivalence.
He describes the following scene.
After my return from imprisonment, I was visited by a friend older than myself, mild and intransigent, the cultivator of a personal religion, which, however, always seemed to me severe and serious.
He was glad to find me alive and basically unhurt, perhaps matured and fortified, certainly enriched.
He told me that my having survived could not be the work of chance, of an accumulation of fortunate circumstances, as I did then and still do maintain, but rather of providence.
I bore the mark.
I was an elect.
I, the non-believer, and even less of a believer after the season of Auschwitz, was a person touched by grace, a saved man.
And why me?
It is impossible to know, he answered.
Perhaps because I had to write, and by writing bear witness.
Wasn't I in fact then, in 1946, writing a book about my imprisonment?
Such an opinion seemed monstrous to me.
It pained me as when one touches an exposed nerve, and kindled the doubt I spoke of before.
I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another.
I might have usurped, that is, in fact, killed.
The saved of the logger were not the best, those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message.
What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary.
Preferably, the worst survived.
The selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the grey zone, the spies.
It was not a certain rule.
There were none, nor are there certain rules in human matters.
But it was nevertheless a rule.
I felt innocent, yes.
But enrolled among the saved, and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others?
The worst survived.
That is, the fittest.
The best all died.
Finally, Levy gives a very lucid picture of the exhaustion of freedom after such an experience.
A certain fixed image has been proposed innumerable times, consecrated by literature and poetry, and picked up by the cinema.
The quiet after the storm, when all hearts rejoice.
To be freed from pain is delightful for us.
The disease runs its course and health returns.
To deliver us from imprisonment, our boys, the Liberators, arrive just in time with waving flags.
The soldier returns and again finds his family and peace.
Judging by the stories told by many who came back, and from my own memories, Leopardi, the pessimist, stretched the truth in this representation.
Despite himself, he showed himself to be an optimist.
In the majority of cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted.
For most, it occurred against a tragic background of destruction, slaughter, and suffering.
Just as they felt they were again becoming men, that is, responsible.
The sorrows of men returned.
The sorrow of the dispersed or lost family.
The universal suffering all around.
Their own exhaustion which seemed definitive, past cure.
The problems of a life to begin all over again amid the rubble, often alone.
Not pleasure the son of misery, but misery the son of misery.
Leaving pain behind was a delight for only a few fortunate beings, only for a few instants, or for a few very simple souls.
Almost always it coincided with a phase of anguish.
Anguish is known to everyone, even children, and everyone knows that it is often blank, undifferentiated.
Rarely does it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation.
And any label it does have is often mendacious.
One can believe or declare oneself to be anguished for one reason and be so due to something totally different.
One can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past.
One can think that one is suffering for others, out of pity, out of compassion, and instead be suffering for one's own reasons, more or less profound, more or less avowable and avowed, sometimes so deep that only the specialist, the analyst of souls, knows how to exhume them.
So there's one more angle on shame amongst survivors that I'll touch on here, and that's that shameful dependency and inadequacy is often the beating heart of the cult group, because it may be central to the leader's psyche.
I bring this up because all of the textures of shame I've covered through looking at Primo Levi's work so far are really focused on what the survivor generates internally through the creeping recognition of their own woundedness.
But I also think it's crucial to note that there is a very powerful and infectious source for shame.
It can come from the twisted soul of the leader.
He projects it outwards, and members are required to take it on when it's not theirs in order to maintain a bond that passes for love.
Daniel Shaw is a cult survivor and researcher.
In a discipline that's typically shy of saying too much about the inner lives of cult leaders, for what can we really say, they never go to therapy, they are never evaluated, Shaw has gone out on a limb to fashion an evocative psychoanalytic description of the cult leader as what he calls the traumatizing narcissist.
Here's a description.
First, the traumatizing narcissist has typically been exposed to cumulative relational trauma throughout the developmental years, in the form of chronic shaming at the hands of parents or other significant caregivers who are severely narcissistically disturbed.
Second, the adult traumatizing narcissist is obsessed with maintaining a rigid sense of omnipotent superiority and perfection, of infallibility, self-sufficiency, and entitlement, to the extent that she establishes an intensely defended conviction of righteousness and justification.
Third, rather than feel self-loathing and the helplessness of unrequited dependency needs, the traumatizing narcissist arranges to keep dependency and its accompanying shame external, assigned and belonging only to others.
to protect himself from self-loathing and ultimately from decompensation, literally mortification or psychic death by shame.
In a key paragraph from his book, Shaw writes, The narcissist in real life, a myth in his own mind, is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him, that he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior being in need of something he cannot provide for himself.
To remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate.
These spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be, for fear of being banished from his exalted presence.
He is compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation.
To the extent that he succeeds in keeping inadequacy and dependency external,
he can sustain in his internal world his delusions of shame-free, self-sufficient superiority.
The Lord's Prayer.
Turning now to Apologist Shame.
Here I'll quote from an article I've put up on Medium about the shame-driven responses that are typical amongst those who are still within a group or who are slowly making their way out.
This isn't a complete list, and it's not scientific.
It's based primarily on personal observation.
Some researchers might disagree with some of the premises here, so I'm including a bibliography of diverse resources in the show notes.
And I'm not presenting this list to imply that people whose cult ties lead them to gaslight or abuse others are somehow more deserving of empathy than anyone else.
None of the impulses described here excuse the behavior.
People who act out like this have work to do, but it may be hard for them to even develop the impulse to do it.
So here's the list.
1.
All group members are abuse victims, to varying degrees.
2.
The voices of survivors are psychologically threatening to those who have not yet owned their survivorhood.
3.
They love the group leader in a complex, intense, and painful way.
4.
They believe their community loves and protects them, but they also doubt it.
The survivor is the external representation of those doubts.
5.
They might have cognitive injuries.
6.
They may feel existentially dependent upon the group ideology.
7.
The financial benefits of group membership may be as invisible as other forms of privilege.
8.
Because the criticism of the group feels like it is attacking the group member's self and sense of authenticity, the survivor and the whistleblower will both be called frauds.
9.
Disentangling from online cult dynamics is complicated by online dependency.
The person will likely have to continue using the same technology that facilitated their recruitment for regular life.
So, breaking these down one by one.
The first one is, all group members are abuse victims to varying degrees.
So, to expand a bit on Primo Levi, dominance hierarchies exist within high-demand groups just as they do outside of them, so not everyone suffers the same.
However, everyone recruited into a high-demand group has been deceived in one way or another.
They have had their time, energy, and emotional faculties hijacked for a purpose that is not their own, and which is rarely clear to them.
Many of those who bear the brunt of the abuse in a high-demand group—women, children, the poor, the super-earnest, the super-altruistic—emerge with clear disabilities up to and including CPTSD.
But absent real sociopathy, even those who enjoyed a certain amount of power within the group will carry with them guilt, moral injury, and the bitterness of sunken costs.
Criticism or resistance to the group may make these wounds sting and provoke intense defensive responses related to any sense of responsibility for or shame about the abuse they may carry.
So they're caught in a bind.
They are not responsible for having been deceived, and yet they are responsible for the power that deception allowed them to have over others.
It is far easier to dismiss critical engagement or vilify whistleblowers than it is to engage in this deep moral complexity.
Secondly, the voices of survivors are psychologically threatening to those who have not yet owned their survivorhood.
So, this idea comes from my colleague Theodora Wildcroft, who's been a guest on the podcast.
On page 42 of my book, Practice and All is Coming, I wrote the following, inspired by our conversations.
Intuitively, we know that if we really listen to survivors, we might succumb to a kind of sickness marked by feelings of doubt, shame, and guilt.
We know we'll have to start asking questions about how the big picture is organized.
We'll have to bear out the possibility that everything we value is infected by everything we fear.
So what we do to trauma survivors, even sometimes if we are survivors ourselves, is that we shut those voices down and quarantine them in an attempt to keep ourselves sterile and safe.
So this begins to account for the reactions that go beyond silence and dismissal.
Often survivors and whistleblowers who speak up are not just refuted.
They are depicted with contempt, revulsion, and loathing.
The most basic form that this takes is through false psychiatric diagnoses.
I've seen many survivors labeled as mentally ill or, oh, they have a drinking problem.
For whistleblowers, it can be really crude.
I've had my physical appearance mocked, my face described as creepy, my intentions as predatory.
And this shocked me at first, until I understood through this contagion principle that whistleblowing quite literally reveals hidden cancer and rot.
And disgust is a reasonable response.
And there might be something else going on.
Some of the survivors I know radiate a kind of awareness of the world and of their own vulnerability that is somatized through hypervigilant affect.
They wear no masks in the world.
I believe that sometimes the raw honesty of their presence shows the person who has not yet come to terms with their own survivorship what it would feel like to live without armor.
And this is terrifying to them.
The third point is that those who are still embedded in a group love the group leader in a complex, intense, and painful way.
Many of them have been entrained to love the leader with a passion designed to overcome the fear that they provoke, or to rationalize or erase the harm that they commit.
These members might feel dependent on the leader's gaze or attention.
They might feel desperate to stay in their good graces.
Somewhere they are aware of the emotional and material capital they've given up to their commitment, and their ardor must measure up to that loss.
In some cases, their love mirrors what happens in the trauma bonding of intimate partner abuse.
And here's where I'd like to quote from the cult recovery therapist, Rachel Bernstein, who speaks on her podcast about the trauma bond.
She says, in the trauma bond, you become connected to the person who is abusing you or traumatizing you or stressing you out in a way that people outside the relationship might not understand necessarily.
Usually it goes like this, that you're with someone who is abusive, let's say, or who is selfish or narcissistic.
And they need to take this power away from you and make you feel small, and make you feel afraid of disappointing them and not getting things done perfectly.
And they get very punitive towards you.
But then, they are intermittently kind and giving, funny, forgiving, emotionally generous and soft.
And it's like intermittent gratification.
It draws you into something that is called a trauma bond, where you want that sweetness and that break from the mistreatment to continue for as long as it can.
So you learn that you can control it by shifting your behavior a bit and pleasing that person as best you can, so the sweetness and the break lasts for a longer time.
But really, in the back of your mind, you know it's not going to last forever and that the abuse is probably going to come back and then there will be a break from it again.
And you'll know what you need to do in order to try to keep that good feeling going and continue getting that break that you need.
But the cycle just continues.
And then, if the abuse comes back, you might feel you deserve it because you just had the recent experience of this person being kind to you.
And if a kind person is angry with you, you can more easily feel like it's your fault.
Children learn to appease someone who puts them under overwhelming stress or abuse because they have to.
If that person or those people are their only caretakers and they don't have anywhere else to go,
or any other adults in their lives who they really know yet and can rely on, they are stuck.
So that's Rachel Bernstein.
Now, if you engage with someone who is enmeshed in a high-demand group and has developed insecure attachments to the leaders,
it's going to be very hard to avoid implying that they are trauma-bonded, and this can be incredibly shameful.
Because in the process, you'll also be shedding light on the unconscious but persistent sense of betrayal that they feel in relation to the quote-unquote good leader who is actually hurting them and others.
By pointing out betrayal, you will be cast as the betrayer.
It's good to be aware of the vicious calculus at play.
The lengths to which people, wracked by apologist shame, will vilify survivors mirrors the conflicted love they express for the leader.
Here's the fourth point.
Apologists believe their community loves and protects them, but they also doubt it.
The survivor is the external representation of those doubts.
Everything the person feels about the leader, they may feel about their fellow members.
However, the web is intricate and the textures are subtle.
If they've been in the group for years, they have spent a long time finding the right niche of safety that isn't quite safety.
They have friends who are not primarily friends and family members who are not primarily family members.
And in both cases, allegiance to the group trumps everything.
As an outsider to that group, you are making an intervention in the voice of someone the group already vilifies.
Of course you cannot understand them, they will think.
Of course you are out to destroy their vision.
Cult journalists are routinely accused of trying or wanting to destroy their communities.
That defense is evidence of the fragile insularity of the group.
The paradox of being in a group like this is that you are isolated within it.
Alexandra Stein says it this way, quote, Contrary to the stereotype of cult life, followers are isolated not only from the outside world, but in this airless pressing together, they are also isolated from each other within the group.
They cannot share doubts, complaints about the group, or any attempt to attribute their distress to the actions of the group.
At the same time as this isolation from other people, either within or outside of the group, is occurring, there is also a deep loneliness and isolation from the self.
The time pressures, sleep deprivation, and the erasure of the individual mean there is never any opportunity for solitude, that creative and restful state where contemplation, thinking, and the space in which changes of mind might occur can take place.
As there is no space between people, neither is there any internal space allowed within each person for their own autonomous thought and feeling.
Thus, there is a triple isolation, from the outside world, from others in the group, and from one's own self.
That's Alexander Stein.
So the cult member is also aware at some level that they will be punished for leaving.
And this accounts for the dread famously articulated by Michael Langone and others.
As the person who stands outside of a cult and seems to offer you a pathway to leaving, you may become the very embodiment of that dread.
The fifth point is that apologists might have cognitive injuries.
If the group's practices have involved repetitive actions or rituals or mantras that have contributed to what we could call a dissociative reflex, it can be really hard for a group member to stay on point and think clearly.
The suppression of discursive, let alone critical, thinking is actually a feature of many group ritual instructions.
I've heard a lot of reports of people leaving high demand groups with substantial cognitive deficits.
In my own case, I've described it elsewhere, I couldn't concentrate for long enough to write a few coherent sentences together on account of the meditation and mantra practices I had been given.
So if you're communicating with a group member and it seems that they can't think straight, follow an argument through, or hold a stable definition of a term, hold space for the possibility that they simply can't.
It's like having a learning deficit.
Now if the repetitive ritual involves physical labor or pain, like people caught up for years in hardcore physical yoga cults, this can be another obstruction to cognition.
The person in chronic pain or who is dependent upon daily endorphin release rhythms to feel not miserable may simply not have the stamina for complex cognitive or psychological consideration.
For the person trying to recover from QAnon, I'm also going to assume that any cognitive injury caused by the repetition of content will be compounded by online addiction issues that impact the person's capacity to self-regulate.
Here's the sixth point.
The apologist may feel existentially dependent upon the group ideology.
If the group's belief system is totalizing and transcendent, if it has been ritually embedded for long enough, it can begin to feel like the member's own voice or sense of self.
Everything starts to lead back to the group's messaging, which is repeated internally over and over again.
Questions posed by outsiders are disruptions of that message, but more importantly, questions disrupt the self-soothing rhythm of how that message is internally recited.
Many group members report a feeling of deep anxiety when the internalized message is opened up to questioning.
It can feel as though the basis of the person's life is being attacked.
So, don't underestimate the power and danger of saying something as simple as, do you really believe that?
Here's another aspect.
If the person was recruited through totalizing promises, it might feel as though deconstruction of those promises feels totalizing.
This accounts for how often cult analysts are called bullies out to destroy our group by members.
It's actually upside down.
The analysis is calling out bullying.
The seventh point is that the financial benefits of group membership are also shameful.
The group member whose social and financial status is the product of the group's hierarchy of harm will resist seeing this just as strongly as any consumer will resist seeing the harm of consumerism.
And if you point out that their relative comfort or safety in the group is dependent on any kind of I-got-mine-ism, you're going to face the same blowback that people of colour activists face when calling out white privilege, or women face when calling out misogyny.
At the root, here, may be some deep strain of fragility that simply cannot turn the guilt of having benefited from the suffering of others into an active justice plan.
The eighth point is, because the criticism of a group feels like it is attacking the group member's self and sense of authenticity, they will call the critic or the survivor a fraud.
So this is classic projection.
People engage in ad hominem all the time in this world.
But in this discourse, the flip to ad hominem is so instantaneous it should raise big red flags.
The key things to notice are, as soon as the response has migrated into ad hominem, you won't be talking about the data anymore.
You won't be quoted directly.
You'll be defending irrelevant things like your religious commitments or daily habits.
I remember one yoga cult apologist saying that they could tell I was a carnivore from my writing style, and therefore I must be mistaken about everything.
A particular sore spot in this theme is around educational attainments.
Almost every single charismatic leader I've written about has falsified his educational background or source of lineage authority.
The follower of someone like that is in a precarious position with regard to legitimacy.
Legitimacy therefore becomes a fixation.
Ad hominem arguments begin to merge with arguments from authority.
Here's the ninth and final point.
Disentangling from online cult dynamics is complicated by online dependency.
The person will likely have to continue using the same technology that facilitated their recruitment for regular life.
So what happens when the very method of cultic recruitment, the internet, is also the basic infrastructure of human society?
What happens when social media can be manipulated towards the mirror opposite of its marketing promises?
Not only that, but what if social technologies actually benefit from the emotional stress they cause because stress raises engagement?
This is what we learned from research by Imran Ahmed and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
In episode 10, Ahmed explained that emotionally charged engagement, regardless of the content, is the core principle of monetization for the large platforms.
So I'm not an addictions expert in any way, but it would seem that for the QAnon member to recover from online indoctrination while still, every day, for work and basic communications, having to use the technology that literally pulled them into a fantasy world, this would be very much like a person recovering from substance abuse being constantly surrounded by the substance.
But it's not just the technology, however.
It's also the relational network and its scale.
Pre-digital cult theory did a lot to explain the ways in which charismatic leaders can isolate groups of followers together in brick-and-mortar spaces.
But QAnon is leaderless and isolates individual followers in their own homes, in the space between their devices and their eyeballs.
If it has social cohesion, It is of the same nature as that provided by the Facebook group.
But are Facebook groups strong enough to heal online abuse?
We don't know.
The pre-digital literature all suggests that repairing secure bonds in the real world is essential.
My gut sense is that the best shot at calm and nurturing conversation you have with your QAnon friend will be on a walk through the park.
or while bowling.
It is said that sunlight is a disinfectant for disinformation and corruption.
I get the feeling that in a literal sense, it can lighten shame.
The rabbit hole sector of the internet is a shameful place and it seems to be expanding.
It's totally obvious that my mental health improves the more time I spend logged off.
And I'm wondering if that's not just about overstimulation, catastrophic news, and soul-destroying hyperconsumption.
I'm wondering if this is also about a deeper shame that seems to hover between my head and the screen, shared around the world because, after all, aren't we connected, but at the same time lonely at its core?
The shame of what has happened to us?
What have we done?
And this leads me back to Primo Levi and how he contextualizes the shame of the Holocaust with something even more vast.
He writes, And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world.
It has been memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently
or not, that no man is an island, and that every bell tolls for everyone.
And yet there are those who, faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their back
so as not to see it and not feel touched by it.
Bye.
This is what the majority of Germans did during the twelve Hitlerian years, deluding themselves that not seeing was a way of not knowing and that not knowing relieved them of their share of complicity or contrivance.
But we were denied the screen of willed ignorance, T.S.
Eliot's partial shelter.
We were not able not to see.
The ocean of pain, past and present, surrounded us, and its level rose from year to year until it almost submerged us.
It was useless to close one's eyes or turn one's back to it because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon.
It was not possible for us, nor did we want to become islands.
The just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse,
shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they
felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence
and in them was irrevocable.
Never again could it be cleansed.
you It would prove that man, the human species, we in short, had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort.
It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
So what are the antidotes?
How is post-cult shame resolved?
I haven't seen any magic bullets, but I know it happens.
It has happened to an extent for me and for many others I have spoken to.
So here are the things that helped me and that I know have helped others.
Personal therapy.
Although you want to make sure that the psychotherapist has some familiarity with cults, because if they listen to your story and immediately start focusing on your issues rather than the violence committed against you and its impacts, you should find someone else.
Then there are three groups of people that are really good to talk to.
Survivors from the same group, survivors from other groups, and those who knew you before.
To talk with other survivors will normalize and depersonalize what happened to you.
And it really helps to clearly see how these patterns are recognizable.
You're not unique in your vulnerability.
And then to talk with old friends can remind you that you are still you.
In a few cases, I've seen survivors participate in the overall accountability process as it unfolds in relation to their group.
They'll come out on Facebook and acknowledge that they harmed other group members.
They'll explain that they were under undue influence, but that they still take responsibility And there's something about this gesture that feels like it could be empowering.
It consists of a full acknowledgement of one of the most shameful aspects of a personal history while moving into solidarity with other survivors.
I don't think this pathway is for everyone, but I wanted to mention it.
Also, something I've mentioned before on this podcast, and that I'll just repeat here, is something that the late Kathleen Mann told me, which is, you didn't join that cult.
You delayed leaving an organization that misrepresented itself.
And to this day, being reminded of how I was deceived at the threshold of the groups that recruited me, Has been really helpful.
Shame can also show up in very tricky ways.
I think it's fair to say that a considerable amount of my own research is driven by shame.
I want to get to the bottom of why it feels so bad.
And whenever my writing takes on a crusading tone or arc, I have to check in to see whether I'm offloading or not.
Now there's a lot of cult reporters and analysts out there that I think deal with the same issue.
They become super smart about cults in part as a defense against the shame of having been in a cult.
It reminds me of how in Good Will Hunting Matt Damon, I guess Will, became a math prodigy as a defense against the shame of his childhood abuse.
So every once in a while I Google that scene where Robin Williams is playing his counselor, Sean, and Sean sees this opportunity for Will to drop those defenses for a moment.
It's not your fault is the famous line that Williams repeats over and over again.
And slowly, this armored, smartass young man melts into his mentor's arms.
So, sometimes a movie scene also can really help.
If you're not a former cult member and you're listening to this out of interest, or because
you want to better understand a friend or family member, the final thing I'd like to
leave you with is a description from a memoir of a camp survivor that Primo Levi quotes.
The survivor's name is Philip Mueller, and he's describing the strange time following his liberation.
He's describing the exhaustion of freedom and all he had strength for.
Although it may seem incredible, I had a complete letdown or depression.
That moment, on which for three years all my thoughts and secret desires were concentrated, did not awaken happiness or any other feeling in me.
I let myself fall from my pallet and crawled to the door.
And once outside I tried vainly to go further, then I simply laid down on the ground in the woods and fell asleep.
