A last look at cult expert Steve Hassan's Freedom of Mind

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.

Indirectly asking for help
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!”

Echoes of Dion Fortune
A recent article contains this quotation from a Dion Fortune occult novel:

“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.

Angels and demons in Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood books

This is the final article in the series inspired by Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. books. 

Unlike Anthony Horowitz's little Diamond Brothers stories, which may have inspired a few scenes in Jonathan Stroud's books, the Lockwood books can be extensively quoted from and commented on without much of the main action in the stories being revealed. This means that associated topics such as temptation and glamour can be discussed in detail without spoiling the books' accounts of the young psychical detection agents' exciting adventures and dangerous assignments and the variety of characters they encounter along the way.

I found more commentary-inspiring material in the Lockwood books than I originally expected. Most of it has been covered in previous articles, but there is still a little more to say about falling under the spell of a glamorous image and bright angels who are really dark demons.

Predatory ghosts, cult leaders, glamour, temptations and threats have been featured in separate articles; this article about Penelope Fittes and the 'master' she worships includes all these elements. 

The dark secrets of Penelope Fittes
Towards the end of The Empty Grave, it is revealed that the glamorous Penelope Fittes, who as previously described tempts Anthony Lockwood and his colleagues and shows her true, and very unpleasant, colours when thwarted and rejected, maintains her young and attractive appearance by very sinister means and is herself in thrall to someone with a glamorous image, someone who has all along been in the background helping her with her unsavoury activities. 

Ezekiel the supernatural entity
Penelope Fittes is under the spell of a golden ghost or Visitor called Ezekiel.  

Needless to say, Ezekiel's glittering image conceals an inner self that is the exact opposite of what he appears to be, and he too shows his real, and very unpleasant, self when threatened and defied.

Context and the total picture: Part III

The previous article in the series describes how some people who for better or worse put painful personal experiences into the context of a few other, often well-known, people’s lives decide to leave it at that.  They go just as far as they want or are able to go.

Now it is time to say something about the next steps on the path to detecting and understanding the unseen influences that appear to be at work in certain people’s lives.

Up to this point, candidates for moving on may have come across some interesting information incidentally and in small amounts; now they change their approach and do some investigations - actively looking for writers with Celtic connections after coming across one or two with Scottish ancestry for example. This involves a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. 

This stage also involves putting aside the personal approach in favour of thinking objectively and analytically about various patterns and common elements in the lives of many people of interest. These may or may not be elements that the investigator shares with them. 

Investigators may then move on to a stage where they start to wonder what, if anything, might be behind the patterns they detect. They start to think about the What, the Who, the How and the Why.

For example, I have experienced some unexpected, unwelcome and unsettling encounters  with people from the past. Recently I discovered that this also happened to the novelist Antonia White.  These encounters are not just random painful personal experiences shared with one or two others: looked at objectively and summarised, they are typical of the unpleasant incidents that certain selected people endure when, for example, they are at a low ebb, have received a jarring shock or had an encounter with an energy vampire.

This leads to speculation about orchestration, distress signals, telepathy and people who are remotely controlled by puppet masters behind the scenes! What forces are in operation? How does it all work? Who or what is behind it?