The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his075/kids.lzh/KIDS.TXT

Text File | 1991-07-07 | 37KB | 623 lines

CUL:Cults and Kids: A Study of Coercion  by Robert W. Dellinger

   BACKGROUND .....

   "There's always a pretty good number of self-appointed pied pipers,
self-appointed messianic people, self-appointed gurus in any society
who say to the confused masses: 'Follow me! I have a simple solution
for the complex problems of life.' But if the social structure has not
broken down, very few people will follow them," says Margaret Singer, a
clinical psychologist and a professor at the University of California's
medical school in San Francisco and in the Psychology Department at the
University of California, Berkley. Singer has talked to more than 500
cultist and ex-cult members, and has worked individually and in group
therapy with more than 200 people who have come out of cults.

   Cults are not new. When Eastern and Western cultures collided during
the last days of the Roman Empire, a number of apocalyptic movements
appeared. After the French Revolution in 1789, France witnessed a
tremendous rise in the number of cults.

   Cultic groups did not arrive on the scene in England until the 18th
century, during the Industrial Revolution. And the United States had to
wait until its citizens pushed west before these assemblies
proliferated. But many social observers believe that the recent growth
of cults in this country, which began in the late 1960's and became
really visible in the mid-1970's, has been something special.

   Singer estimates that three million young adults between the ages of
18 and 25 are affiliated with these movements. There are at least 250
different cults, she says, and, depending on the definition you use, as
many as 2,500 cults can be identified. According to Singer, these
groups fall into ten classes: neo-Christian-based cults; Hindu-and
eastern-based groups; occult, satanic, and witchcraft movements;
spiritualistic-based groups; Zen-based assemblies; race-based cults;
flying saucer-based cliques; psychological movements; political cults;
and communal-living groups.

   "It's important to note that all cults are not religious in their
content," Singer points out. "Some of them were communal living
arrangements at first. Synanon was started to help drug addicts, and
Scientology began as a new psychology and evolved into a religious
body. The contents of witchcraft and occult groups, psychological
movements, neo-Christian organizations and Hindu groups vary; but most
of these movements have become religions because of the wonderful
protection that the First Amendment and the many state tax laws give to
religious entities. By using the term religion, the new cults try to
blend themselves in and appear as if they are no different from
'institutionalized' religions. The point we're all trying to make is:
'Yes, they are different - at a social and political and informational
and power level!'"

   Singer says that today's cults are usually led by charismatic males
who center the love, devotion, and allegiance of the members on
themselves. Rabbis, ministers, priests, and other "legitimate"
religious leaders, on the other hand, keep the veneration of adherents
focused on God, abstract principles, and group purposes.

   "At the time they arise, cults try to tell people that they're
innovative and exclusive because part of their appeal is to say that
they're all-millennium," she explains. "Doomsday cults say that the end
of the world is coming in one way or another - the A-bomb, et cetera -
and that if you join brand X cult you'll be part of the elite who
survive and take over and lead the new order. But they usually turn out
to be pseudo-revolutionary in their actual practices. While these cults
and cult-like groups are saying they are the new way, they are really
far more restrictive than any of the life-styles in the surrounding
community.

   "Cults have only two basic purposes: recruiting new members and fund
raising. Cults may claim to make real social contributions, but, in
reality, these remain mere claims or minimal gestures."

   According to Singer, cults tend to have a double set of ethics. The
"love bombing" that the Moonies (members of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's
Unification Church) are famous for, the personality test that
Scientologists give, and the unconditional acceptance that almost all
of these groups show toward potential members, she claims, are totally
contrived. "If I apply to be a Catholic, the priest will spell out in
utter detail the church's doctrine and practices by making me take
religious instructions," she says. "If I go off to be an Episcopalian,
a Baptist, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a Jew - any of the
'institutionalized' religions - they want full-capacity informed
consent. Whereas, the cults start with duplicity and deception." "These
groups are able to attract people who don't really know that it's
totally staged. And then, after they get in, these young men and women
are unaware of what the methods - the social and psychological
manipulative tools that are applied to them - are going to do to their
thinking and how they are going to be separated off from their families
and from their past lives and their past religions and past
consciousness."

   HOW CULTS WORK .....

   Gary Scharff, once a religious studies major at Princeton
University, was recruited by the Unification Church in 1972. After
finishing his junior year, Scharff says he started feeling cynical
about the merits of learning theology from a textbook. Deciding that he
needed some time to sort things out, he went home to Louisville,
Kentucky, and got a job in a tool factory. It was there that the
Moonies recruited him.

   "I just met a couple of people from their bus team and was very
intrigued by them," he explains. "I had never heard of 'cult' or
'brainwashing' at that point. I had a mixed reaction. First, I felt
somewhat amused by the literature they gave me, which seemed to be
fairly childish and juvenile. They were proposing to answer the
profound questions of life in a series of three or four lectures, and
here I had spent three years trying to understand the questions. But
then, on the other hand, there was this really powerful devotion and
commitment in the young woman who handed me the literature and struck
up a conversation with me."

   Scharff knew that she must be from a fringe religious group, but he
thought it would be interesting to try to understand what real belief
was like without an intellectual foundation. Gradually, he got more and
more emotionally involved with members of the group. After eight
months, he moved into the Unification Church's local center. Still,
Scharff had no intention of signing up for life. He just wanted to
share their faith with them for a while. But soon he was asked to
attend a 100-day leadership training program near New York City. Church
officials assured him and his parents that he would be back in
Louisville in a couple of months. The camp, which operated on a rigid
schedule, was physically, emotionally, and mentally overpowering.
Scharff felt that he never had enough food to eat or hours to sleep.

   "We spent most of the time just sitting listening to lectures," he
recalls. "You would have this being-at-the-edge-of-consciousness kind
of awareness - the same feeling you have at three o'clock in the
afternoon on the day after you've pulled an all-nighter. There's a
shell that's just kind of surrounding you, and you don't feel alert.
You feel like anything could happen, and it would take you longer to
react to it and to even understand what it was. So there's kind of an
undertone of fearfulness that accompanies all your actions."

   Scharff describes the experience as a combination of affection and
deception. The love and concern made him less suspicious of his
mentors; the dishonesty and manipulation isolated him from his family
and friends and, eventually, from himself.

   "There's something continuously going on, from early in the morning
until late at night," he explains. "Even in those situations where
you're just moving from one location to another in the camp, there's
somebody on either side of you. Your attention is constantly drawn
towards things outside you, and so you're not in the kind of mental
posture to turn inward and reflect. You never get a chance to talk to
yourself because there's always somebody else talking to you. And that
becomes a very serious problem because so many ideas are unloaded on
you."

   "Ultimately, you become so fatigued and your emotions become so
strongly accentuated that they really kind of set off to the side any
kind of rational thinking process. You become an absorber of feelings
and attitudes and behavior patterns rather than an alert adult
responding to a community that is offering something which you can take
or leave. You really become committed more by default than by choice."

   The isolation, intellectual bombardment, and emotional fluctuation
worked their spell on 21-year-old Gary Scharff. After 90 days of
training, he was made director of the Pennsylvania Unification Church.
During his four years in the "Movement," he also was national director
of CARP (the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principle, a
recruitment arm of the Unification Church) and assistant director of
planning and development for a proposed system of Unification Church
seminaries. He gave the initial three-day workshop for people recruited
in New York City and did some public relations work, too.

   The experience still frightens him when he looks back, even though
he has been out of the group for four years. "I went into that thing
kind of emotionally involved but nonetheless an open-minded and alert
student of religion," he muses, "and I came out of it a very fanatical,
highly focused, totally submissive servant of Sun Myung Moon."

   The first step in "processing" cult recruits away from their past
lives, according to Margaret Singer, is separating them from their
families and friends. "Many of the groups refer to themselves as 'the
family' in one way or the other and emphasize 'We are your new family
now!'" she explains. "Several of the groups tell members, eventually,
that their parents are 'satanic.' Another group calls them 'potential
trouble sources.' One of the groups refers to all nonmembers, including
parents, as the 'wog world.' In quite a few of the groups, they say
your parents are only your physical parents."

   "They even structure families within the cult if families are
inducted into the group. The People's Temple did this. Jim Jones broke
up families. He would send the children of Mr. and Mrs. A to live with
Mr. and Mrs. B and C. If married couples go in, they, too, tend to be
broken up - because these are very upwardly centered groups, and the
cult leaders have found that it works best if they prevent lateral
allegiances and pairings and keep all the veneration and affiliations
directed upwards."

   Because most cults suppress and monitor phone calls, visitors, and
letters, Singer says that they are often able to convince new members
that their parents have abandoned them.

   Next, according to Singer, these groups try to get the neophytes to
focus on past deviant behavior - drug use, sexual misdeeds,
psychological hangups, poor social relationships. The mechanism is
often some kind of group confession or encounter session, and the
result is often recruits who now see their past as something evil. By
controlling and reinterpreting all information from the outside world,
keeping members busy marketing and proselytizing, using
thought-stopping cliches and a closed system of logic, squelching all
resistance and negativity, and reinforcing only group-desired behavior,
cults resocialize vulnerable individuals.

   "After they've been in a long enough time, the groups try to convey
to the new members that they won't be able to return to the outside,"
Singer explains. "One of the major cults says, 'Returning from here to
the world will be like eating your own vomit!' The new members are both
afraid to leave the group because of personal failure and afraid that
the group may come after them and bring them back. Most are relatively
debilitated from long hours of cult work every day, and, eventually,
they get to feeling very bad because they start to become aware of the
deception that was practiced upon them to get them in. But by then,
they have been in so long that they have almost no easy life to return
to. So the choice usually is to stay."

   "What I'm trying to paint is a picture of many, many pathways to
social and psychological manipulation, to restricting reflective
thinking, to restricting secondary associations, and to keeping the
person highly focused on the leader while they're in these groups."

   The Unification Church is not alone when it comes to using deception
and mental maneuvers to recruit and keep members, according to Singer
and others. Although the followers of Lord Krishna, the Hare Krishnas,
reserve their hard sell for the selling of their literature and
incense, they can be heavy proselytizers whenever a possible recruit
comes by. Critics (most noticeably Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman,
authors of the book "Snapping") claim that the constant chanting of
their mystical incantation or mantra invokes an unquestioning mental
state. Others contend that a horrendous work schedule plus a no-meat,
no-eggs, no-fish, low protein diet keep members of the International
Society for Krishna Consciousness in a constantly repressed condition.

   The Divine Light Mission is supported by the sale of converts'
possessions and gifts, and by the tithing of "preemies" (i.e.,
devotees). Counter-cultists say that the meditative "knowledge"
techniques practiced by its congregation are consciousness-altering
methods that harm a susceptible mind. At the heart of DLM philosophy,
in fact, is the idea that rational thought prevents human beings from
reaching God. Some former members have claimed that they were
brainwashed by being bombarded with the group's doctrine. Others have
reported such cognitive disturbances as memory loss and an inability to
read without "trancing out" - going into a meditative state.

   Margaret Singer believes that the Church of Scientology, the
Children of God, The Way International, the Tony and Susan Alamo
Christian Foundation, the Love Israel family, and the Body of Christ
all rely on coercive conversion methods. Others have also suggested
that many "Me Generation" movements, such as LifeSpring, TM, and est,
can influence an individual's thought processes.

   Rev. Kent Burtner, a Dominican priest who counsels former cult
members and their parents, believes that the best way to view all of
these groups is to place them on a continuum that runs from positive
support of the person to mind destructiveness through the use of
deception and abusive behavior modification techniques. "When you get
to Moon and his Booneville, California, training camp, there is no
question about the subterfuge and trickery going on there," he says.
"But when you look at some of these fringe 'human potential' groups,
then you get into this really fuzzy zone. Within this gray area, there
may be a case and time where an individual's freedom is totally
betrayed and another case where an individual's freedom, given slightly
different circumstances, is not. You really have to judge it on a case
by case basis."

   What is significant about these movements, according to Rev.
Burtner, are the psychological techniques that have been used to
convert and control followers. "I don't care whether it's someone
leading a Catholic charismatic prayer group or if it's Sun Myung Moon -
whether they're into a 'socially acceptable' form of spirituality of
not - if they start using methods that deprive individuals of their
ability to make a free choice, they're acting in a tremendously
destructive way towards the person," he says. "And that, to me, is an
objective evil."

   WHO JOINS AND WHY .....

   If these groups are so harmful, why would anybody enter one? In
studying cults, social scientists have come up with a number of reasons
to explain their popularity with today's youth and young adults. A
disillusionment with the scientific community, the military, big
business and labor, schools and colleges, government, family
relationships, and religions - every aspect of our materialistic
society - has made many human potential movements and cults appealing.
A longing for moral authority and a sense of purpose has also led
people into the waiting arms of assemblies with simple answers to
life's most puzzling problems.

   "It's not just a pathologigal people who join the cults," says
Margaret Singer. "There is no one type of person who becomes involved
with the cults. Rather, all of us at various times are more vulnerable
than at other times. Almost anyone who is in a period of loneliness is
in a vulnerable period in which he or she might get taken in by the
flattery and deceptive lures that cults use to recruit new members.
I've found that the people who've gotten involved with cults have
tended to be somewhat depressed. The cults picked them up between high
school and college, between romances, between college and their first
job, between marriage and when they were divorced. But they were in
between a major anchoring point and affiliation."

   Gary Scharff says that being a member of the Unification Church gave
him a strong feeling of commitment and sacrifice, of subordinating
himself to the higher goal of saving the world. "That was a very, very
powerful incentive," he confides. "It was very rewarding. I felt I was
really putting my life on the line, living by what I believed. It's a
feeling of really being devoted and having, in a sense, cast your fate
into the lap of God."

   But probably more than any other factor, the need for love and
friendship steers young people who are making the difficult transition
from late adolescence to adulthood into cults. At the heart of their
appeal is the promise of uncomplicated warmth and acceptance. Being a
member of one of these "communities of love" means being a part of what
some have called the ultimate in-group. "If you comply and focus your
thinking outward, do not dissent, stop thinking of your past family and
your past work," says Singer, "you will get lots of payoffs because you
have joined an elite group. And one way or another in this elite group,
you're going to become a perfect human being."

   "The attraction in the majority of cases has involved normal,
healthy kids going through temporary depressions," explains Jean
Merritt, a psychiatric social worker who has been counseling former
cult members and their families since 1973. "They have been caused by
the typical things that cause depressions in that age group: conflicts
with parents, boyfriend or girlfriend; problems in school; the loss of
a relative or a friend through death or divorce. A fair number of the
kids who have been approached by Moonies, let's say, when they were
feeling good laughed it off, knowing exactly that this was probably a
cult. They were not the least bit interested. Then they were approached
again when they weren't feeling so strong, and off they went."

   According to Merritt, cults usually go after single, white,
middle-class and upper-middle-class young people who have been taught
to be open to innovative ideas and to try new experiences. They are
often intelligent young men and women who are extremely idealistic and
altruistic. She says that some cults today are also actively recruiting
lower- and working-class inner-city youths. But beyond that, Merritt
believes there is no typical cult member. Young and old alike who are
at loose ends are easy prey to the cults' flattery and deception.

   PREVENTIVE GUIDANCE .....

   Margaret Singer believes in the importance of early education. "If
parents would get their kids to be a little more streetwise," she says,
"that's the main thing. There are no free lunches."

   Singer believes that fathers and mothers should become more
knowledgeable about the major cults so they can answer their children's
questions. But even more important, she feels that parents need to
listen and hear the feelings, concerns and fears of their sons and
daughters. "You must be the one who helps a young man or woman find
answers to his or her questions," she says. "If you don't, a cultist
may lure him or her off with false promises that there is one solution
to everything."

   Just as parents should talk to their kids about drug abuse, Jean
Merritt says they also need to inform them about cults. In giving
lectures around the country, she has discovered that high school
students are terribly naive about the whole subject of cults. Even
teenagers who know that it's bad news to get messed up with these
groups, don't know why. And Merritt insists that these people are just
as vulnerable as their unaware peers because they're likely to pass it
off as just another thing, like marijuana, that Dad and Mom will get
hysterical about.

   GETTING PEOPLE OUT .....

   "If your child has only been involved in a group a very short time
and still hasn't left home, there are certain ways that you can respond
to their questions," says Henrietta Crampton, secretary of Citizens
Freedom Foundation, a parents' counter-cult network with affiliates in
many states. "You can find out which cult your child is involved with
and who the leader is. You can call a local chapter of CFF or maybe
talk to an ex-cult member. But get the specifics. Then you can present
these facts to your child and get him or her to understand. If you know
early enough, you can stop it."

   The hardest thing for fathers and mothers who have lost a child to a
cult to swallow is their own guilt. Most are ashamed. Many see
themselves as failures. But because the cults recruit mainly from the
ranks of the idealistic and committed, the loss of their child is, in
fact, a kind of horrible personal compliment.

   Once a son or daughter has taken off with the group, most
professionals believe that the sooner the parents start trying to make
contact, trying to keep the lines of communication open, and trying to
lure the child out, the better. "So often parents think it's something
like Hula Hoop - it's just a passing fad," says Margaret Singer. "They
don't know how really tight the psychological and social pressures will
come to bear upon their child."

   Singer, Rev. Burtner, and Merritt believe that parents must keep in
mind that cults see the world through polarized glasses: everybody
inside is good and everybody outside is demonic or, at least,
influenced by Satan. If parents tip their hand too early by coming out
openly against the group, the recruit will often go underground and may
not be seen again for years. To counter this, the three counselors tell
parents to keep lots of "love messages" going to their kids.

   Parents who have had their children drawn into cults have three
basic options. By keeping communications going, they can try to get
their son or daughter to talk with a former member or local cult
authority. Sometimes this third party, by providing critical
information about the group, can break the cult's hold. Although many
cult watchers say this approach rarely works, the Jewish Community
Relations Council of Greater Philadelphia, a counter-cult organization,
recently reported that "hundreds of young people have been convinced to
leave the various cults as a result of discussions with concerned and
knowledgeable individuals. These discussions were entered into
voluntarily by the cult members, usually at the urging of their
parents."

   Some parents go to the courts when their children refuse to listen
to the "other side." There are two connected legal remedies:
conservatorship-guardianship and a writ of habeas corpus. Through
conservatorships-guardianships, a state places an adult in the
temporary custody of another adult. Although state laws differ about
the grounds on which these legal orders may be granted, the most common
reasons include being harmful to oneself and others, physical
infirmity, or mental incompetence. But civil libertarians argue that
it's an unconstitutional form of legal kidnapping, and many magistrates
are reluctant to issue these orders. If a judge decides that the
cultist does need a conservator-guardian, a writ of habeas corpus is
then issued to gain custody of the person. Most conservator-guardian
decrees specify a time period in which medical and mental health
evaluation and treatment must take place. At the end of these days or
weeks, the judge reviews the case.

   The last alternative, the forcible abduction and restraint of the
cult victim, is illegal. And although some judges have been sympathetic
to parents who take this course of action, these kidnappings have been
prosecuted at every level of the criminal justice system. Ted Patrick,
the well-known San Diego deprogrammer, has been jailed many times for
conspiring to forcibly remove a member from a cult. Others have been
fined. Many contemporary deprogrammers will only talk to cultists who
either come to them voluntarily or through a
conservatorship-guardianship.

   DEPROGRAMMING .....

   Whether a person leaves a group voluntarily, through a court order,
or by being illegally kidnapped, many counter-cult authorities believe
the recruit must be deprogrammed. "They don't get their heads on
straight unless they have a chance to talk to somebody who's been
through their experience, who knows what's going on inside of them
emotionally," says Neil Maxwell, a San Francisco pharmacist who has
done some 50 deprogrammings and who is willing to do more. "I think
it's a fantastic process. It's very similar to surgery to correct a
condition that can't be corrected in any other way. It's not a harsh
confrontation process but rather a kindly exchange of information."

   Rev. Burtner agrees that even when members choose to leave cults,
they still need to have the opportunity to sort things out. "We've had
kids who have left groups quite on their own, went home, and then
later, for some mysterious reason, went back to the cult," he says.
"Maybe they got left alone too long in the cult, and their reflective
processes began to work again. Then they panicked and fled the group.
But if that person doesn't get some good help, he or she will still
suffer from the residual effects of their experience, for example,
knee-jerk reactions to coercive circumstances. Another reason a person
might leave a group is that he or she overdoses on guilt. The cult must
make recruits surrender their guilt to the group, which, in turn,
enables the group to control them. But at the same time, the group must
maintain positive reinforcement - 'good strokes' - for without these,
the person is going to feel unworthy of remaining within the group."

   Although Rev. Burtner knows that some self styled "deprogrammers"
have tried to shock cultists out of their present mental state with
violence, he does not believe that shouting and screaming, sleep
deprivation, and sensory overload are the essence of the controversial
procedure. After conducting 16 deprogrammings, 14 of which have been
successful, Rev. Burtner is sure that emotional or physical strong-arm
methods do not work because these tactics simply reinforce the person's
paranoia. "Deprogramming," he explains, "is a counseling process
whereby a cult victim is given the opportunity to see a broad
perspective on his or her group; to see more fully the implications of
membership; to learn the rudiments of abusive behavior modification
techniques and the thought-reform process; to examine the values,
tenets, and practices of the group; to examine his or her own thoughts
and feelings so that the person reevaluates the affiliation and makes a
free personal choice."

   According to Rev. Burtner, cults put up a wall between a person's
own ideas and emotions and his or her reflections on these things. The
cultist is stripped of any spontaneous reactions. The group wants to
control all communication that an individual has with the innermost
self - to direct what, and even whether, a person may think and feel.
"So in the deprogramming, you've got to reach through that wall and
help them experience their own thoughts and their own feelings," he
says. "There are a lot of ways to go about doing that. Some
deprogrammers are very attuned to people's emotional wavelengths and
can help them pick up on these things, especially, with the help of
parents and friends who know what's real and what's not in a particular
person. Other deprogrammers prefer to go at it by means of a rational
discussion about the cult's activities, hoping that as they do it the
individual will show them some areas of anxiety. Once they've got ahold
of that, then they can help the person bring to the surface what's
really going on underneath."

   Gary Scharff was deprogrammed in Kansas by Joe Alexander, a
professional anti-cultist. After four days of talking and reading,
Scharff realized that he could not take people's freedom away in the
name of God. "I felt very, very much in solitude in having to make up
my own mind in a way that was as honest as I could possibly do," he
says. "It was a painful choice internally, even though I was treated
respectfully and lovingly from the outside."

   REENTERING SOCIETY .....

   Even when parents are able to get their son or daughter away from a
cult, their problems are not over. The former member faces a number of
hurdles in adjusting to life on the outside. "These people have a lot
of guilt over some of the practices in fund raising, over the fact that
they recruited a lot of people who are still back in the cult," says
Singer. "I've interviewed people who have left two or three small
children and a spouse back in the cult and are feeling very confused
about whether they should go back and try to get them out. They also
often feel very guilty about having censored mail and phone calls, and
having diverted friends and family of cult members in the past."

   Overwhelming moods of depression and loneliness also often arise.
Former members realize and regret the fact that they are out of step
both in the job and social worlds. Some feel abused by their cult
experience. Because most cults restrict all physical contact and
pairing, many ex-members also have intimacy and sexual-growth
difficulties. And leaving a cult means leaving behind loved ones -
comrades who have shared a special experience with you. Former members
must quickly find new friends in a world that they have been led to
believe is hostile.

   Because they are used to having every activity spelled out for them,
former cultists often feel that they cannot make it on their own. "I
find myself in some of our group therapy sessions saying to certain
people: 'Now you must buy an alarm clock and a tablet and pencil in
order to start getting your life structured, And you must start writing
down the list of things that you have to be in charge of,'" says
Singer. "Sometimes these have been 26- to 46-year-old adults who have
been in these groups and who need this type of restructuring and
encouragement to start doing all of these tiny decision-making things
that we all do."

   "Floating," the slipping back into the cult-altered state of
consciousness, is another after-effect. Like the flashbacks of drug
users, this trance-like condition where the person empties his mind can
be set off by stress, conflict, and depression or simply by certain
words and images. Some ex-members who experience these episodes feel
like they are going crazy. Others believe that the cult they belonged
to must be the real thing and that God is calling them back to it.
Additional consequences, according to some clinicians, include a
temporary decrease in mental sharpness, a fear of the cult, which is
sometimes based on reality, and extreme suggestibility.

   Singer describes one more problem encountered by cult veterans - the
"fishbowl effect." The family and friends of the ex-member are always
on the alert for any sign that the person is thinking about going back
to the group. As a result, any positive talk about the cult or its
members sends the family into panic. "Parents have to accept the fact
that although the cult itself was sort of bad, there were a lot of good
kids in it," Singer explains. "They have to let the kid talk about some
of the positive things - the warm friendships or even romances and the
sense that group-living taught them to connect more openly and warmly
to other people than they could before their cult days."

   Singer believes it is very important for parents to be aware of the
special emotional problems that former cult members must deal with
during their reentry into society. Most people need at least 30 days,
she says. On the average, it takes from 8 to 18 months for ex-cultists
to get back to their full level of functioning.

   Ideally, rehabilitation has several aspects. First of all, it is a
period for dealing with "floating." Second, the professional counselor,
who is an authority on cultic groups, explains to the individual how he
or she was manipulated. Finally, the counselor helps the person
integrate the group experience into present needs and future plans.

   People who join cults, says Rev. Burtner, have a lot of normal
developmental problems - conflicts with parents and resolutions about
themselves that are typical for their age group and need to be resolved
but are not. "When they go into a cult, it's like taking those things
and putting them into an icebox," he explains. "Then you take them out
of the cult, and you take the block of ice out of the freezer. And it
starts to melt, and these problems start to thaw out and then need to
be dealt with."

   But ex-cult members often report that they could not find anyone in
the mental health field who would help them sort out their troubled
feelings, fears, and beliefs. "So few professionals know anything about
what happens to these people," says Singer. "So many psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social workers feel that the cults are a passing
fad. But they're much more sophisticated and organized than that.
Secondly, there's a tendency for professionals to say there's a
pathology - some sort of abnormal condition - in the youth, or that
there's a psychopathology in the parents, and that if the parents
weren't peculiar people the children would never join cults. There's
this blaming of the victim and the victim's parents. We see this same
blaming-the-victim done in rape cases."

   Gary Scharff does not believe he had a difficult readjustment. Most
important, he had to relearn how to make decisions for himself. But it
took quite a while before Scharff's most serious side effect went away.
"I've always been a thoughtful and reflective kind of person," he says.
"And I felt proud of my ability to follow a thought and concentrate
very carefully on it. When I came out of the movement, I found that
there were times when I would be thinking about something and all of a
sudden it would just sort of go 'bing!' right in front of my face. I
would completely forget - not just lose a train of thought, but just
forget - everything that I had been thinking about. I felt like I was
left stranded without knowing what was going on in my mind. It was a
very frustrating feeling. And it wasn't until another year and a half
that I felt like I was able to really keep control of my attention
span."

   Margaret Singer, Jean Merritt, and Rev. Kent Burtner together have
counseled hundreds of former cultists like Gary Scharff. But the three
agree that there are other victims - the fathers, mothers, and brothers
and sisters of cult members. "The most important thing for the family
to remember is that there are people out there who are willing to
help," says Henrietta Crampton of CFF. "These parents aren't alone!"

   Citizens Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 266 McFarland, WI 53558