After producing a series of articles in which I highlight and comment on material of special interest from Steven Hassan's best-selling guidebooks Combating Cult Mind Control and Freedom of Mind, I thought that I had reached the end of the exercise. However, Freedom of Mind has inspired just one more post.
Steve Hassan's detailed advice about how families and friends can help cult members and cult leavers via his Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) is very useful indeed. It is best to go straight to the source for his wise words on building teams, planning interventions, role playing, winning the trust of the cult member, asking key questions and other associated exercises and procedures; here I just want to feature a few miscellaneous extracts of particular interest, some of which have a wider application.
Steve Hassan describes a technique used by clever cult members to drop subtle hints to their families:
“I have had several families contact me after their cult son or daughter told them not to get a professional counselor to get them out. Before the cult member made that remark, the families had not realized that they could contact someone like me for help.”
This approach could be used in other situations - and I don't mean just by people who say, “It's my birthday tomorrow, but please don't tell anyone and don't get me anything!”
“You don’t know what you do want, but you do know what you don’t want.
Steve Hassan says something similar:
“It is useful, for instance, to be able to recognize and articulate the difference between what you do not want (a mediocre job) and knowing what you do want (a fulfilling career).”
It is indeed very useful to bring goals, preferences and requirements out into the open and nail them down.
Steve Hassan calls this exercise 'assertive motivation'. It can help to remove blocks, increase understanding and get someone going in the right direction.
The writer C. S. Lewis spoke of ways of getting key information "past watchful dragons", past the hostile forces that defend people's minds against certain ideas.
Steve Hassan says this:
“We want to deliver the information in a way that will be heard and digested, so it can slip past the cult identity’s filters.”
Fictional works such as C. S. Lewis's Narnian stories are one good way of camouflaging dangerous ideas, of smuggling them past those destructive dragons.
As mentioned in the article about getting people out of cults, Steve Hassan uses another subtle technique when it comes to enlightening cult members about the mind control and other destructive practices that they have been subjected to. He suggests speaking in terms of what other groups or cults do as opposed to what the cult in question does. This indirect approach avoids triggering the cult identity and helps to get information through to the cult member's real self.
What Steve Hassan says about dissociation and the two identities of cult members makes very informative reading.
Much of it can be applied to people from dysfunctional families: some of them may have been forced to adopt a second, false, identity just to survive.
This is very encouraging:
“Destructive influence is never 100% because it cannot erase a person’s authentic self.”
So there is always hope, even for someone who was born into a cult. Their suppressed real self is still there, and it can be brought out, strengthened and developed.
Striking statements that speak for themselves
”Cults succeed because they trap recruits in an all-encompassing web.”
"...destructive cults never deliver what they promise..."
“The more distorted our sense of reality, the more certain we will be that what we believe is accurate.”
“The more insistent a person is about the accuracy of his or her observations, the more likely it is that his or her sense of reality is distorted.”
These statements are all very true.
Freedom of Mind starts with a section that contains many testimonials from Steve Hassan's grateful admirers, people who have nothing but good to say about him, his books and his humanitarian work
This article ends with some commentary on a short but very thought-provoking quotation from one of the people who praise the book.
The parent of an ex-Scientologist has this to say:
“The Moonies would have undoubtedly left you alone, had they any idea what your indoctrination would eventually lead to! God works in mysterious ways.”
This extract raises some very big issues, the welfare of the individual versus that of the collective and short term versus long term gains for example. It also touches on the way that unseen influences seem to be at work in some people's lives.
If Steve Hassan had only said such things at the time and the Moonie recruiters had left him alone, he would have saved himself much pain.
On the other hand, he has benefitted greatly in the long term: he has capitalised on his former cult membership by making a living and a name for himself out of it. He has probably done much better for himself than he would have done if he had just said no!
Not only that, if Steve Hassan had never joined the Moonies he would not have been able to help large numbers of cult members, cult leavers and their families. His subsequent determination to counteract the effects of destructive cults by raising awareness and helping people both in person and via his writings has made the world a much better place.
As for the unseen influences, this is from J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring:
“Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”
Was Steve Hassan meant to join the Moonies as some kind of unwitting secret agent or undercover investigative journalist?
The Freedom of Mind resource centre:
Dr. Steven Hassan with his latest book:
