No Such Thing as a Good Cult w/ Mark Vicente Part 1

The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, I Heart Media, or their employees. They studied me very carefully. They listened to every television interview, everything had written every interview. They knew what I wanted. They knew I wanted to make the world better, and they knew I was looking for better ways to do it, better ways to make films.

So when they finally met me, they told me everything I wanted to hear. Nexium was a self proclaimed self development organization that claimed to foster personal growth and help people quote experience more joy in their lives end quote. The master manipulator behind all of this was Keith Ranieri, who was called Vanguard by the students in Nexium grandiose much.

Raneery and his confederates employed the standard cult playbook of manipulation, coercion, abuse, and exploitation to control people in the organization, especially those who dared to speak out against the organization or the curriculum. Over time, however, what really caught the attention of the world was the recruitment, sexual grooming, trafficking, and abuse of girls and women that took place within Nexium and sub

groups within it. Girls and women were coerced to have sex with Raineery and some women subjected to being branded with Raine's initials. Media reports have variously characterized Nexium as a pyramid scheme, a sex trafficking operation, and occult. Everything that happened in Nexium, from that charismatic, creepy and enigmatic leader to the gas lighting to the manipulation and abuse, are congruent with the architecture of a narcissistic relationship and

of a cult. And there ain't no such thing as a good cult. Today. I have the pleasure of talking with Mark Vicente, an author, speaker, whistle blower, and award winning director. His defection from the Nexium cult was chronicled in the HBO series The vow, Mark and other courageous whistleblowers exposed the criminal activity us of this organization, resulting

in multiple arrests and indictments. In this episode, we are going to hear what led him to make this bold move, how he got wrapped up in cults, and how it can happen to anyone. We'll talk with him on what he learned about narcissism by surviving a cult, and what he is working on now to expose narcissists and to help more people heal. Mark welcome. It's such a pleasure.

I mean, this has been such sort of an unexpected friendship that I got out of this and so I'm just it's just a pleasure to get to see you and also have this incredibly important conversation with somebody who I have to say in the times we have met, that you get it in such a unique way and with such depths. So this is really it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here to talk about

all this. So thank you. So let's start with I'm going to start at the top of the story, you know, which is what hooked you into next Um and what did you think you were signing up for Oh my God, when I start, I have to go further back. It's like when I was a kid. I think I was yearning for goodness. Like I grew up in South Africa. You know, I saw a lot of bad things when

I was a kid. I knew a party, it was a problem, and I was just thinking to myself, there has to be a better world, a better way than this. People kill other people because of the color of the skin. They don't care that something's not right. So I became obsessed with I have to find this better world. I have to find this goodness. I had the impression that

the goodness I was seeking I didn't have interesting. I think part of it was I grew up around I was raised by a woman mostly at different times as a child, and I sort of got the message and men are assholes. So I was thinking, Okay, men are assholes. And then I got the message from the more enlightened people in my family. White people are bad. So white guy, that means I'm screwed, so double jeopardy. They're right, Okay, so I'm I must be part of the problem. I

have to find goodness. I have to do whatever I can, and it became obsessed with it. That obsession led me to all kinds of spiritual pursuits for decades, and basically what it was a religious impulse that just kept on going again and again and again. So when I sort of got introduced to Nixium, I was being introduced to honor, you know, these beautiful values and making the world better.

And I thought, well, maybe this is the thing, because everything I've done thus far I always found problems with. Maybe this is the thing. This is what will help make me a better human being that can then make better film projects to make the world better. That was the hook for me. Let me ask you this and Mark, would you argue then that your vulnerability to an organization

like Nexium was not seeing the goodness in yourself? Absolutely absolutely correct, because now many years later, I feel it's very clear to me that the goodness I was looking for was always here. That's how I knew what to look for. It was this incredible project to frame that I was using with the lack of awareness that it was my frame. I didn't know that. Now I'm very clear on that my obsession was using media to make the world better. We were operating with the government, was heineous.

I mean it was a huge problem, and so there was a group of us, I mean, amazing people I worked with creating these anti apartheid films. Of course they all got banned, you know, South African. Eventually they came out. But my obsession was using media to make the world better. Okay, all right, So you want to make the world better and from this place of I'm not I'm not good enough, right, which is the ultimate vulnerability. Yet it sounds like you were, in some ways in kind of a good place when

you came to next. I'm like, you enjoyed making films, and like, professionally, I was in a very good place. That's the thing. Sometimes people say, oh, it's a it's a transition, you're going through your like it's some terrible point in your life. Not necessarily. You just have to have the right sales person to know what you want. And what I learned later, probably I learned this in two thousand seventeen when I spoke to earlier defectors. They

studied me very carefully. They listened to every television interview, everything I had written, every review interview. They knew what I wanted, They knew I wanted to make the world better, and they knew I was looking for better ways to do it, better ways to make films. So when they finally met me, they told me everything I wanted to hear. So were you targeted by next year? Where did you find that I was targeted? So what happened is so back in two thousand four, the film What to Believe

Do We Know? Which I directed? They saw that film and they were like, this guy, we think, this guy gets it, gets our mission. So they began studying everything about me, and then it was Nancy Salzman and somebody else reached out to me and invited me to a symposium with all these amazing scientists and metaphysicians and whatever, and of course I was like, oh, that sounds amazing. So I met them and I had one of the

most interesting conversations I've ever had in my life. Nancy Salzman was very good at what she did, which was understanding how to leverage everything I wanted and everything I was concerned about and afraid of to get me to pay attention to what she was saying and what she was offering was basically everything that I said I wanted. I want to change the world. I want to make the world better. And what she said is, she said,

but we need to work on you. And then she began the thing of all my problems and all my issues, and all my vulnerabilities and all my fears and all my angers and all the things that had to be dealt with. So my first intensive when I went was basically them data mining by insecurities. You know, which, by the way, as we know, that's the same thing that happens in a narcissistic relationship. I didn't know any of this. Then it's data mining. It is data mining. I love

how you put that. That needs to go on a T shirt, data mining your insecurities, because that's really sort of an interesting way to frame love bombing, because that's what was happening. It was I mean, they were picking me up in lear jets, flying me everywhere, saying we can finance the films you want to make. I was in heaven because it wasn't so much about me being a big deal. It was about what I could create with these resources and with these people. So they offered

me the world. It's so interesting as I hear you say this, because if we were to really use a love bombing almost like a relational framework for this they in two thousand four or certainly pretender and all of that,

if you want to look at it that way. They went online, they learned all about you as one would, and maybe even a dating profile, and nowadays, they figured out what you were about, and just as a love bomber would, they told you exactly what you wanted to hear based on what they learned about you, and then what they heard from you. That's precisely what a narcissistic

person does. Early on, they promised things like we're going to have a family, and we're going to travel here, and I'm going to support you when you pursue that. That's all future faking, yeah, and but it's compelling. And the thing is, and this I only learned much later in two thousand seventeen, once I started studying narcissism, I realized, oh, that's what I've been involved. And I've been in a relationship with a narcissist being ra nearing and then all

the flying monkeys which were behaving exactly like him. That's when I began to piece together what had happened, But at the time I didn't know. And also there were red flags. I mean, my very first intense of I remember around about day two, I thought to myself, something's not right. These people are so nice. They're kissing my ask so much. And I walked into Nancy Salzman's office and I said, I don't entirely trust what's happening here. And she said, what do you mean? And I said,

I think you have some multerarious motive. I just don't know what it is. And she just nodded her head, so like, well, why don't you just continue the curriculum and we'll discuss it again tomorrow. The next day they started teaching us projection, and basically what they had me understand or believe was that all these things that I was seeing in them were just my own projections of my own bad intent. Day three, I go back to her office and I'm just mortified, because I'm like, is

that what I was doing? She says, well, what do you think? And of course I came to the conclusion maybe that's true. And that was one of the That's what I call codified gas lining. The entire curriculum had baked into it this idea that whatever you were upset at was actually you. I would even say that that's in that case, it was quotified who was built into

a curriculum. But that's every narcissistic relationship right. Constantly, the person's bent back, and that's what starts to slow indoctrination into self blame and self doubt, which ends up becoming the cement and the glue of why people stay in narcissistic relationships. They really do believe it's them, they're convinced

of it. That's exactly right. And also, if you're an earnest seeker of understanding, which I was, I spent all this time thinking, oh, I need to root out all these problems in me, all these projections that I'm doing, all this bad intent that I have, I need to root it all out. And I became obsessed with trying to understand what are my limitations, How am I holding myself back? How am I seeing the world that's inaccurate? And it's this weird thing you turn in on yourself.

You learn to literally gaslight yourself constantly, every thought you have, every impulse, you start questioning what if I'm wrong? What if it's not them, if it's me. But by doing that you get to stay in the group, and the

group had a value to it. You learned pretty soon what's okay not okay because you're watching very carefully as well, and you say something and you see eyebrows rise or this happens, when that happens, and there's this weird thing of like, oh, that's not right in this environment, that's all right, that's all right, which later I learned is the same thing that happens in a in an abusive relationship with a narcissist, the person that's being abused is

mapping the other person's mind very carefully to try to figure out what's okay and not okay, And pretty soon you are so lost in the self gas lighting and the gas lighting they're doing. And all the time what they're saying is in order to become this kind of person, you need to examine this in yourself and this in yourself.

So the carrots constantly there. You don't want to throw it away at that point because you want to be that person, right, you want to be that person or I mean, and again in this case, it was very aspirational. You believed in the ideals that this organization was putting out there. It was about personal development at this time, and I think that's something that people need to understand. Mark Like nobody says, oh, today I'm going to sign up for a sex cult. That's not what anybody says.

You signed up for a professional personal development kind of a program. I thought I was signing up for joining the Star Trek Federation. Oh this is great, you know, fairness and rights and ethics and values and nobility and morality. This is good stuff. But that idea that it's good stuff and it was in a professional space, I actually think put you at greater risk in a strange way, because I think in the intimate relationship people will also own up to yeah, okay, it's my fairy tale. Sure,

I wanted to be in love. This person came along. I devalued myself. And I think that there's almost more written about that, if you will. But I think in this case, the professional piece, the idea that it's a part of growth, that it's cloaked in the seminar, that all feels it almost feels as though it's, like you said, use the word codified. I think that really nails it. I think that puts people, makes people very vulnerable. Next thing, I just ended up blowing up is a big story.

I think that there's small stories like this playing out as we've seen so many, so many You met people in there that were like powerful people, successful people. They seem legitimate, and I realized later that's what they used me for as well. They used me to legitimize him and the entire thing exactly. I think that the legitimization of a cult leader or a leader we don't even know that they're a cult leader yet per se, but that legitimization through other people, it really sets up that

recruitment pipeline. And honestly, that plays out in intimate relationships as well, because what happens is a person will say this person was their ex partner, and that person had a good job, or they're from a good family, or they're really attractive or whatever index they're using, and saying, well, if that person thought they were good, why wouldn't I. And it's a very similar mechanism. Yeah. Also, you're trapped by your own need to have that world exists. I

wanted there to be goodness in the world. I wanted there to be a place that I could go and other people could come, that we can learn about ourselves so we could behave in a better way, so the world will be better. And the problem is, if you at that point early on, stay to yourself, when you're really enamored with what you're learning, this is all just full of shit. You have to give up that dream.

Yes you do, Yes you do. We're very married to whatever it is, be it romantic partner, be that my dream, whatever it was. Giving that dream up launches you into an existential crisis you do not want to go into. But you know what nobody wants. That nobody wants that you're sort of forced into it because in my case, I saw things that were so morally reprehensible that I could not hold onto that dream. I had to just burn the entire thing to the ground, right, I had

to and hopefully refashion it in a healthier way. That's you, not on other people. And I think that that's the real that's the real challenge too. So you use the term you said, okay, started becoming aware I was in a narcissistic relationship. How did you even become like, how

did that term come into your purview? And when did you start using it and using that frame where you already out at that point where you need I was still in So what happened is Bonnie, my wife, had and out for a while, and she had been studying a lot, and she was working with an exit counselor and they were trying to figure out how do we help Mark. So there was a lot of strategy going on. One of the things that was interesting is I, for many years I had to call Rnary every single day.

It was something I had to do, and if you didn't, it was a problem. So I had to report to a bunch of other people and groups that I hadn't done it for whatever reason. What was my weakness, what was my fear? What was my vulnerability? You know? What was my lack of character, what was my lack of vision? Whatever it was? So I was like very military in

my calling every day. And at a certain point when I realized something was wrong, and it was round about March April two thousand seventeen, when I began to suspect that he might be lying. I started calling less and I knew he would know, And so I realized a

week had gone by, I have to call him. And Bonnie said to me, I want you to read an article before you call him, and she gave me an article I don't remember who it was by, but it was about the twenty things and narciss will do in a relationship with you, and it was, you know, like, uh, you know, a circular car stations from hell, gas lighting, this, that, the other, a whole bunch of things and that we

now understand. So I read the articles twenty things, I get on the phone with him, and the articles in my mind that we begin speaking and I sort of take off on my mind ten of those things, and when I hang up on the call, I realized I'm never speaking to him again. And I go to Bunny and I go he did ten of them, and then I realized, shit, is this guy a narcissist. It is

just like some kind of spiritual psychopath. And she was very kind and she just sort of nodded gently, you know, And that was one of the things that began the unraveling. And then I began investigating a lot more and learning what he was actually doing with the woman, and I

was just I was rageful. But before I knew what was going on, she was trying to show me a template, a pattern, what I was dealing with because I didn't know, and then I could talk to an exit counselor, and then I could start to listen because I was still so enamored with the idea. And this is a difficult thing to explain. Maybe it's not I thought he and I shared the same values. I thought. To turn against him was to learned against my own values. We were

so married in my mind in that way. So for me to question him, for me to allow the thought into my mind, what if this guy is a bad dude? What if this is an evil mofa meant that I may have to dismantle everything I thought was good. And that's terrified, but I had to. That was the approached that question. I was completely suicidal, had all kinds of suicidal ideation going on a whole bunch of things. And thank goodness, a part of me that met a part

of you that's watching everything. A part of me said, Mark, you've never thought about suicide ever. Something's wrong, And the other part of me goes, you're right, something's wrong, And that was the true crack. Thank goodness, you connected the dots in that way. You could easily see how it would go another way for somebody else, you know, because that what you did, that sort of walking away from a spiritual So it would be like somebody losing faith

in an organized religion. They believed in something they no longer do and in a different way. It's when a person learns this. For example, their parent is like and the parent is someone that held in high esteem, in high regard, they loved the idea of family. They were devoted to that, and then one day the whole thing crumbles. That is quite a day, and you had that day. What is amazing, though, is that you were willing to take the article that Bonnie gave you and implemented into

the conversation. That you had enough ego strength to actually allow that to happen, because some people would say, get this article away from you, don't know what you're talking about. That you were willing to integrate. That was that flexibility which you may not have known you had ended up saying, did you know that? But also she was very smart. I learned later in talking to people and showing them articles, to never show them an article that had the word

cult inists. Don't. She was careful in presenting me with things that wouldn't trigger me into defense posture. That was one of those things that seemed unrelated to me, so I said, okay, I'll read it. But then when I spoke to him, and I realized, this niggly feeling I've had for over a decade in our conversations. What if it's this thing that I just read? What if this? What if the circular conversation from Hell? Is this sor pular conversation from Hell? And is not that I just

can't keep up with him. This guy might just be like a sociopathic more on, and I'm trying to make sense of it. In fact, I realized later as I tried to wake other people up, they were all trying to make sense of stuff that didn't make sense, thinking that they were the problem, that they didn't have the intellect, which is what I thought too. I thought I didn't have the intellect to understand genius ideas. They're not genius at all. In fact, some of them are just psychopathic hogwash.

That's right. It was all a means of maintaining this incredible amount of control over all these people, and he got away with it. Now you know some of this, But I'd love to use this as a teaching point for everyone listening. Which are there are certain universal psychological dynamics that exist in cults. I would argue that these also exist in narcissistic relationships. Okay, so I'm going to just try these out on you and see if they fit. Okay,

So this would be being tested by the leader. This might be through abuse that maybe through a demand for sacrifice, and that of people who were in the organization will attempt to show tremendous devotion or be perfect and recruit other people. When you said you had to call every day all of that, would you agree that that dynamic

was there? Absolutely? What happened is you know, you're you're signing up for one thing, and then as time goes along, you're being asked to do things that might feel uncomfortable. And what they're doing is that basically testing your boundaries. How far can we go? And even if at first I was extremely defiant and they would say to me, you know, this defiance you have, this is a limitation because you're just saying no to everything without evaluation. You're

not evaluating anything. And I was like, well, I don't want to be the kind of person that doesn't evaluate, so maybe I'll be a little less defiant. I wish I kept it came back later, but yes, constant boundary testing, you know, like the curriculum got more and more weird. Like later on there was a curriculum called Ethicist and something called s op engine as the birthplace of what

would become Dost. This the secret underground thing, and there was talk about if you did something that went against your own values, then you had to do some kind of penance. More severe the penance was the better. And a part of me was like, this feels a lot like religion when I was a kid. Something's not right. But then you don't want to be the person that stands up and says, you guys are full of it,

because that's not going to go well. And at that point I did know that anybody who had left previously that said anything was destroyed. Their legal team destroyed them. These people ended up being indicted for things, crimes were made up. They were destroyed financially to the point that when they went to court to file bankruptcy they were stopped by these people. They destroyed reputations, they destroyed a

whole bunch of things. I was well aware later on that if I was the person that spoke out it was gonna be a huge problem now behind closed doors, starting in two thousand and fifteen, I was asking a lot of questions and I could see it wasn't going well because eventually he was going to handle me. But yes, the boundary testing is constant. It happens in all kinds of ways. It happens in the curriculum, the things you're asked to do, the things you're asked not to talk about.

It's all there and exactly the same as a relationship ups It's the same thing. And this is the thing I desperately want people to understand. It is the same. They might be slight variations, but the pattern, if you can look at the mathematics underneath it, it is identical. I mean completely identical. And I think people don't recognize how much boundary they keep. It's your sovereign territories getting annexed.

It's like a slow invasion and one day you look up and you're like, oh, I got swallowed up by this other country and you're no longer your own sovereign individual. You have completely come into their system, and you're almost like it's almost like you've become parasited, like now you can only serve the host. It's so true, that's exactly right.

What's a great metaphor. And the problem is you don't have the strength anymore to fight the way you did before because part of you has been hollowed out, Oh absolutely hollowed out. And they count on that and that constant encroaching. But then that fear of whatever that unnamed fear would be, and I think a lot of it's primal. It's fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, fear of

being an outsider. But the test and p this is where we get into this real problem I think and culture at large, is that we associate love with being tested, that I have to jump through these hoops to show my love, to show my devotion. That, unfortunately, is how love stories have often been crafted. And I think Calton Calton love stories share that is how can I show my love? How many love letters can I write? How

many things can I do? Really, it's instead of simply being loved because you're you, it's is I guess it's it's it's that's time immemorial. One could argue that's also sort of a transactional relationship. So that's so good. And also like if if somebody's testing you, run right, Oh, always always run if you're being tested in a relationship, run But I think unfortunately a lot of people like the game and they almost like to think I've earned something.

Not saying that's right, but I think that's the messaging. Because many children, especially those with narcissistic parents, felt that they had to win the parent over. That dynamic gets repeated in in relationships and adulthood. Another dynamic we see is the charismatic and exploitative leader. Clearly you saw that, would you have described Keith is charismatic? No, that's interest.

That's what's so interesting to see now that I've spent a lot more time honestly studying some of your work and other people's work, understanding covert narcissism is so interesting because he is not overt, he's not grandiose. In fact, he talks about humility. He acts in a way that's very humble. He's constantly downplaying his accomplishments. He gets other people to sort of talk about them, but he downplays them. So I didn't see grandiose. What I saw was humility.

But again, there was a lot of gas lighting going on, because I remember early on two thousand and six, I think I was at the gym with him and I saw him get really angry at something behind the counter, and I said to him, I've never seen you angry before. He says, I wasn't. Well, what were you doing? Is as I was just using a tone to match his tone, and part of me was like, oh, it seemed like all right, So there's all this gas lighting going on.

But I believe the version that he was selling. And also what happens is if you questioned that version, everybody else around you says, really, that's so weird. Do you want to work on why you're perceiving that? A right? So, so it's always housing it back into the individuals to not call him out. Did you were you familiar with the term communal narcissism? As you were coming out you

were not okay, So down the line you became familiar. Actually, I think I actually learned that from you, as I I remember thinking when I learned that term, I was like, oh, that's what we're dealing with here. My session with Mark will continue after this break. We have been hearing from Mark Vicente about his experience and Nexium, an abusive cult led by Keith Ranieri that proclaimed to be focused on

self improvement. Nexium used all of the techniques that we see in a narcissistic relationship, including love ming by data mining, which is an intense attempt to learn about another person so you can learn their pressure points and manipulate them, as well as labeling any questioning of Nexium as a flaw within Mark or the other members. Then it turned to confusion and a slow erosion of boundaries and sense

of self. Mark's story is a reminder that what happens within a cult like organization and with a cult leader is pretty damn similar to what happens in any narcissistic relationship, hijacking of the self, so communal narcissism. You know, for anyone listening. There's the technical term for it is agentic extro version. So what that means is extra version in

the service of getting validation. And in his case, it was this, I'm going to draw all these people together, but it would be the sort of false humility because one who say, in the world can't be you know, can't be out there and acting like a sort of a car salesperson and sort of being pretentious and preening about so there would be this sort of false kind of almost like either way. He even presented himself kind

of sloppily dressed in all of that. But it was all posturing because he actually thought he could save the world, which is incredibly grandiose. So all of that extroverted behavior, all of that bringing your group together, he was selling it as a means of saving the world, being a grand humanitarian, being better than everyone else. Exactly. It blew my mind because he had us bonded to each other, because it was difficult to bond to him because this

is a truly weird individual. But also even to think he was weird, you realize, okay, there's something wrong with me that I think that. So he had us bond with each other, create very tight bonds. I mean, there were groups of us that committed to things, you know, with each other, and if any one of us failed, we all would do a penance. So everything was through pain, this idea of pain and love being intertwined. I really thought he was humble, but later I understood everything he

was doing was for fuel. The grandiosity was very coverse. It was there because he wouldn't get necessarily personally upset at somebody. If he was there was an offense against him, he would get other people to get upset about it, so he would triangulate between everybody and get some and say to somebody else, you know, Mark doesn't seem to understand the value of what I've given him, and I think it's really a problem for him that he doesn't understand this. I think it might be worth having a

discussion with him. What he wasn't saying is I feel slighted and not important, and I want you to go after Mark and break him down because he didn't give me the requisite praise. That's what I want. That was the truth. Yeah, but that triangulation we see that narcissistic family systems to the parent using siblings and the family other extended family members to get what they need from another member of the family, and then what happens is

that person will relent. They may not agree with what the narcissist is asking for, but when you have that many people surrounding you, our human need to belong, especially in an organization like that. That's why everyone was coming together. Is it draws us to say, Okay, I'm going to give in, And it's a really big part of how whether in a cult or a family structure. And again I think a narcissistic family is really a cult a strong leader and then and or a manipulative leader totally.

And the other thing that you raised that's important is that people often say, well, why didn't you just leave? But why didn't you speak out? The issue is you're in this dynamic, like be a family dynamic, be at a cult dynamic where if you say something there are costs, and there's this existential dread you constantly have and being thrown out of the tribe, and that's a big thing. It is belonging, but it's the terror of being cast out at night. And you've given up a lot in

your life already, so these now are your bonds. Maybe this is the way you're making money. You don't have a lot of options anymore, and to go out into the forest at night alone, cast out of the tribe is like death. Well it was death for thousands and thousands of years for our species, and I think our reptilian brain hasn't let go of that fear, and so ostracism is probably right up there with death as a

primary fear. So it's actually we would say, anyone who's actually that willing to walk away from the group, that's almost not even normative from a mental health spacing. I don't even care what anybody thinks. So people care, People care deeply. And also how the idea that you you would not feel you could speak about this person that

everyone values so much. This becomes the emperor's clothes phenomenon that we see in narcissism all the time of people, whether it's a family member, matriarch, patriarch, head of a company, even a globally recognized religious leader, where people might look sideways and say, this doesn't feel right. But who's really going to be the one to say the beloved elderly

grandmother is actually a monster? You know? And that and as you say, the risk of ostracism, and I would argue the risk that you could be wrong, yes, and the risk to your worldview that you're trying desperate in the hole together, which is a much bigger deal than people might realize. You're trying to keep your psyche glued together when you know on a very deep level something's not right. So all of what you're saying is just

it's cult. One oh one, I'm not going to be labor it anymore because you just laid it all out. So one of the things, in terms of data mining, there was one particular intensive that they had us figure out what was the ways we were most afraid of dying, And they came up with like twelve different ways. Something that's eating you from the outside, something that's eating you from the inside, being being abandoned, being left alone, thinking

you're crazy, nothing making sense. So all these things that they data mind about what are our worst terrors, and all of those things were used later on at some point the minute you decided this is my boundary, now I'm maintaining this boundary. That information was used. That information was used against me in course. I mean when I was facing up against Nay in courts and his defense counsel was coming after me, he was slipping them notes all the time because he knew me very very very

well and so interesting. Every time he slipped the note, they come up with a question that was so targeted towards me, my worst fears, my hopes, my terrors. In any cult like mechanism, it's getting that information from people what could hurt them what could make them vulnerable happens in literally every narcissistic relationship. People say love bombing to them is private jets and dozens of roses and Champagne.

I said, no, that's not the love bombing part. You need to be concerned with the love bombing part, which to me, getting all that intel on someone you're calling a data mining is when they lean in and look into your eyes and say, just tell me your greatest fear baby, I want to take care of you. And you just gave them the keys to the kingdom because that's going to be turned around and used against you.

And the number of people, for example, who go through really contentious narcissistic divorces knowing that parent would literally take a bullet for those children. That's what they go for, not even that they wanted the kids in their house. They just simply know that this is how I could hurt them. So that weaponizing of your vulnerability is a classical part of any narcissistic relationship, whether it's an occult

or a one on one relationship. I remember one of them one saying to me when I early days, when I when I was thinking this isn't right. Somebody said to me, I thought you wanted to be a noble man, Mark, and that to me is like m m m. That hurts. It absolutely hurts, and it's a gaslight because you are being a nobleman. So in essence by making that comments or denying that, I hear about people going through this all the time and underpaid positions and mental health and academia.

And when the person pushes back and says I need a raise, well, don't you care about the populations we work with? And they're saying, yeah, I care about that, also care about my electricity. But that is gaslighting. And people don't even think of it that way. They think, oh, gosh, I'm just a mercenary awful person, or I'm not a noble person. So I think people don't even know these

things are happening. And maybe it's because it's not taught, And maybe it's not taught because the systems and institutions in place benefit from the ability to absolutely absolutely benefit from us. Absolutely. We will be right back with this conversation with Mark. So I'd like to switch gears a little bit because people want to understand this a little bit and talk about the leader you you've hinted a little bit because I hate even putting it this way

because he is such a horrible person. But what was compelling about him? You said he's not charismatic, you said he was vulnerable in his narcissistic presentation. So what was compelling to me? He leveraged our values and represented himself as being the gatekeeper of those values. Because I've spoken to a lot of women who said, no, he wasn't sexy, he wasn't kissed, Nobody wanted to sleep with him, nobody wanted to kiss him. He was a shlub. He really, he is a sub. He is a schlub. But but

you see, this was part of the whole thing. The whole thing was that he said he was a renuncius, he'd given up old worldly things. Didn't matter what he wore, He wore the same. Sure he was smelly, is because material things were not important. This is matters of ethics and mind and consciousness and stuff, etcetera, etcetera. So so yeah, so to me, it was what he represented. He basically at the very beginning, my very first conversation with him

was five hours long, a lot of data mining. He basically got me to believe that everything that he was doing was all I'd ever wanted. Now, once I understood later on a little bit more about NLP, this is interesting. Yeah, I had a meeting with Nancy Salzman at a law

firm in l A about some project. This was many years ago, and she went into that law firm and she was asking the lawyers a lot of questions, and she's writing things down and eventually they were getting missed by the way understandably, And eventually I said you when we left the meeting, what are you doing? She says, I'm making notes of keywords. They'll say something and I'll

ask them a question. I'll dig down deeper on what the thing is that they're talking about until I can find a word that really moves them, because later I'm going to use that word again. So, for instance, what they would do and we're near He taught her this. I think. Let's say you say to me, I say what do you want? And you say, well, I want love? And when you say love, what do you mean, Well,

I want let's say I want community. Okay, So when you say community, like, what is what is community to you? And you'd say something like togetherness and maybe togetherness, that that final word that it's hard for you to figure out, but that that word togetherness means something to you. Later on, I'd say, you know, Dr Romney, togetherness is as important to me as it is to you. And I'm firing that word in your mind again. That was the stuff that they were doing all the time, and that was

a lot of n LP. And do you want to explain a little bit about what n LP is. The idea is that every word you use represents some deep unconscious thought object to you. Love is a whole package of things inside of you. It fires things inside of you, and if you can understand what that person's version of that word is and what it fires in them, you can then use that word to manipulate them into a certain behavior that, to me, in the most simple terms,

is what it does. So what he was doing was he was doing that all the time, and then he would start use those words back, and that creates this kind of trance because you're hearing back everything that you believe and you start to think, this guy knows me better than my parents, because that's what they're trying to do. That's exactly right. The only difference is they know how to use this tech, so to speak, which your parents

didn't correct and most people don't. But when it's brought into these kinds of spaces to be able to fully control someone, it is it's using language as the really all the hidden I love that you use the word trance because I think that's what it is. When people are using language and the way you are about things that matter to you, you really do go into a trance, to go into trans go into you know what they

what they call deep structure and the whole. A lot of the tech that that was being used was to put a person into deep structure where things get very very fuzzy, and it is trans induction is what's going on. And we all learned to do it to different degrees. Once I realized what was going on, I was horrified. I was horrified that we learned this. I was horrified we were in this with other people. And I think

the thing I always struggled with. In fact, I know that Bunny, myself, Sarah, Nippia, and a bunch of us really didn't like the way things were going because we felt sometimes once the person was in that state, you were then putting into their minds things that weren't theirs, and we hated doing that right, so we just thought, we'll screw We're just gonna figure out what they want, as opposed to trying to bend their will in some way.

And so we were often, you know, given given shit about it or not being precise enough, you're not being this enough. But we knew something wasn't right. We just couldn't figure out what it was right. I'm coming back to your word trance because I've never thought of it in this realm, but I think about trance alongside trauma

bonding because that's what trauma bonding is. So thank you, Mark, You're giving me quite a gift today just using that word, because when we think of what a trance is, and it's not quite hypnosis, but it's just sort of otherworldly, like it's a like that dancing snake in the Jungle Book kind of moves around like that's a trance. And I think that in the trauma bonded phase, there are times the person is doing exactly what you want them

they are. You're they're doing everything, whether it's in line with values or fan to see or future or love. You're in that trance. Then the trance quickly gets stopped, and that is very destabilizing, in which a person wants to go back into that trance like state, and we'll do whatever they need to do to get back into that state, which usually means continuing to succomb and be subjugated by the narcissistic person. That's such a good point.

I actually have a great example. When I started working with Roneria on this film project. I wrote a treatment for the project. He gave me the idea. I wrote the treatment, he read it, and then his right hand woman at that time, Pam Cafford, said to me, he really likes it. He thinks you're a really good writer. So I went to have a meeting with him that night and he says, this is really good. That was the last time he ever said anything I did was good. And I kept on holding on for maybe one day

he'll think something I'm doing is good enough. That was a ten year hold on until eventually I was like, you're an idiot. You don't know what you're talking about. I actually know what I'm talking about, but it took a while. It takes a while, but that idea that you're forever chasing that high of that moment when they told you you hung the moon and you'll never get it again. But that chase can keep people stuck for decades.

And the other thing I learned recently, which I know you know about, is this this whole intimittent reinforcement things. It's just like you never know when the good stuff is coming, and you never know when the bad stuff is coming. And sometimes you today you do the thing that yesterday was good, but not today it's not anymore. You're like, what is going on? Right? And then you ask questions and they give you some weird explanation that doesn't totally make sense, but it must be you that

can't understand. And I know that happens in narcissisic relationships well completely. It's in coercive controlled relationships. And any narcissistic relationship that up and down, in and out, constantly being destabilized and constantly trying to get back to that good moment means people give up more and more and more of themselves, boundaries, a sense of self, even their bodies to be able to keep it going because they want

that so much. And it really does transfer to what happens early in life, especially, it was a narcissistic parent for the moment that narcissistic parent noticed you. The child spend their entire childhood fighting for those scraps, for those moments, and that's that's really the system that they're using there. So then Bonnie shows you the article. You know what you're dealing with at that moment that Penny dropped moment, the article that says the twenty things narcissists do, and

he only did ten. I'm surprised. I bet the other ten were there, probably if I dug deeper. But I was in so much denials. You know, how did things change once you had a word for it. I no longer felt crazy because I felt crazy for twelve years. That's a long time to feel And suddenly I was like, wait, that's what's going on. And it was a kind of disbelief at first. I was like, so he's actually got

a pathology. He's not wise. Maybe he doesn't have that I Q. Maybe he's not some enlightened version of something like, maybe he's just got some serious problems in his brain. That gave me so much foundation to finally put a little tippy toe on the ground and say, okay, let me explore this. And I couldn't cross this threshold until I had suicidal ideation. That was a threshold because everything money had been so smart. The Exit Council, she was working with them and I began working with was very

smart and how they did everything very carefully. But once I realized like I was insane. When I say I was insane, the suicidal ideation to me was I'm insane. That was the moment I'm like, all right, you need to like make space now, because I was holding on so desperately to this worldview. And once I made space, I mean, I'm not going to say it was fun. It was terrible. It was like the world is over. And then I went into this rage. Okay, this guy

is a narcissist. I just threw everything out. But I made space to start trying to figure out what had happened. And then the other thing I was dealing with as well was finally recognizing something had been done to me. I had been damaged. That recognition was very important because then I wasn't thinking to myself, I'm crazy, just oh, I've been damaged. Something's wrong with my perception. This has been done to me in a very precise way over

period of time. And then I began reading about narcissism obsessively, looking to see what happens in narcissistic abuse. What are the symptoms. Oh, there's the PTSD, there's the complex PTSD, there's the like feeling unhinged from reality. There's all the panic attacks, all the stuff and everything that I went in for twelve years prior, like panic attacks with one of the things, I had terrible anxiety. It all came back.

It all. It was just waiting for me because all that had happened was that all those things have been compartmentalized by shutting down your gut and having your gut shut down, and then you continue to shut it down. You compartmentalize normal things, normal outrages, normal upsets, normal like suspicions, and then all came, you know, all came back. And then once I realized what had happened to me, I was reading constantly, and I was watching videos constantly. I

was on the Internet trying to learn. At that point, Bonnie was thrilled. She was like, well, here's this, and here's this, and here's this and here's that, and she created this incredible sort of exit list to read, and so I read it all, and then we began sharing with every shared it with Sarah and Nippy, and we began sharing with everybody not only about narcissism, but also

about cults. Without speaking about cults, right, we had to speak about high conflict groups, you know, high control groups. We can talk about cults at that point. And we had to be careful with narcissism because if we talked about a spiritual narcissist, they got upset the people that we were trying to wake up. Because also what happened is every time any of us posted anything online the inside, we're working manically to try to sort of say it

was disinformation basically, or we're just being victims. You know, we finally succumbed to our own victimhood. I mean, one of the things they said about me was, oh, Mark's just giving into his wife. He has no mind of his own. Well, no, I didn't give it. I just finally saw the light, right, I finally saw that she was right. But it's there's a desperation, you know, cult like organizations, when once they sense that the wagons are circling,

there is a desperation. They move quicker and quicker and quicker, and there's an intensity that's all narcissistic relationships to. The intensity sort of starts to swing up once they sense that somebody is starting to see who they are. And the other thing. The smear campaign, Yes it's identical, Yes

it's identical. It's dentical, I mean, and the smear campaign for a person going through any narcissistic relationship, many people will report that to be as, if not more traumatizing than the narcissistic relationship, because after a moment, you're like, Okay, this person is a narcissist and they're behaving as a narcissist would, but that they've recruited all these people I once believed had my back, And some of the folks

recruited into the smear campaign aren't necessarily narcissistic themselves. They just are still so caught in that traumatically bonded kind of a situation. They're trying to keep it from being ostracized. They're trying to justify, they want it to be true, and so they are willing, they're willing to do this harm to someone else. That smear campaign model, I'll tell

you the harm there is. Actually, I as a clinician struggle sometimes more with clients not around the narcissistic abuse piece, the one on one as much as the smear campaign and the utter devastation that comes out of that many people coming at them in that way. It's it's horrifically traumatic, interesting because that is the thing that still hurts. Yes, yes, him, him, I'm like whatever I faced him in courts you guys in prison for a long time, at whatever my friends

or those I thought were my friends. That hurts. It hurts a lot, and in some ways there's still some good things there. You still saying this is not the person I saw manipulating and doing all this damage. It almost quadruples or quintupples the tragedy because you say, Okay, I see the game this person is playing, but now they literally turned this game back against me, and the collateral losses you're piling up are enormous. That betrayal trauma

is very profound. It is we should talk about betrayal trauma for a minute, because trauma is such a it's such a multifaceted thing, right, the traumas we think of you get mugged on the street late at night, or assaulted, you get in a terrible car wreck, you watch some harm come to somebody goes through a tornado, those sorts of traumas the betrayal trauma starts going into a different space where there are such a fundamental breach of trust by somebody you may have trusted in an implicit way.

That crash shows down your worldview. It gets a person in a way very differently than those other forms of trauma. But the problem, mark is is that a lot of people in the world don't recognize the betrayal trauma for how profound it is. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. People lie all the time. People's twist a knife in your back. Oh people cheat, And so it gets minimized, as though getting mugged in the street is a more valid form

of trauma than betrayal. And yet again, and so shrink, I'll tell you, betrayal trauma actually twists a person's mind up and because what it also does, Yes, it's a person you trusted as a person maybe you love, that turns against you. But what happens is your concepts of goodness and trust get broken. That's exactly right. They are not easy to repair. You know, I still don't feel

that trust is repaired. I am hyper vigilance still, and I even going into a situation where I say to myself, you can trust that you're going to be okay whatever happens. I'm not so sure if I can't trust that I'm okay. I'm not sure if I can trust this person. So there's a constant dialogue going on about trusting about goodness, which there's the entire world, so goodness for me now, although I feel so much of it is more intact.

I struggled to really I struggle when I'm dealing with people because I never want to say it's all good, and I don't want to say it's all bad, and then I feel a bit like I don't know, maybe I should just stay away. So many survivors of narcissistic abuse will say that, yeah, solely, but surely they come back online, they feel more normal, But that permanent revision of what trust is I am. My work with folks is to help them see that it's a new, more wise, richer,

kind of different kind of take on the truth. It's not black and white, it's not that it's a loss of innocence once you've gone through betrayal, trauma and narcissistic abuse and the world, things have to be earned in a different way by people. People have to earn your trust and if they're not up for it, they say, well, you're very cynical. I'm like, go, then okay, that call me cynical. We're good. So this one doesn't hit me because I still feel this pain on my head on like, wow,

that's still strong for me. Yes, it's very strong that because people really say I went through the world and I had a really good worldview and it forced collaborations and I got to talk to strangers, and as a fellow survivor, I'll tell you I'm very arms length. It takes it takes me a long time to warm up and gain trust, and I work with focusing and you accept that as part of you. You would even use the word damage before, and I would argue, you are

not damage. You were harmed. I hate the word damaged because it reflects something as though you yourself have been you've become something less than whereas you were harmed and action was targeted towards you and you withstood it. But I don't think you're damaged. I don't think any survivor of this is so. Here are some takeaways from my conversation with Mark. First, every narcissistic relationship is basically a cult of two and the same manipulation techniques are at play.

From Mark's story, we learned that a tool that narcissistic people use early on is data mining, learning your fears, your vulnerabilities, and showing an intense interest in you. That data ends up being something that will be used to manipulate you down the road. Take your time early in any new relationship, especially when someone is showing overwhelming interest in you. The cult leader that Mark described in his story defies the stereotype that many people have that all

narcissists are grandiose narcissist. Narcissism has many faces, and the false humility of the vulnerable narcissist or the communal narcissistic type. Posturing of sort of spiritual guru types who claim to want to make the world a better place can be tricky if we only pay attention to arrogant and pretentious showoffs, pay attention to red flat, and don't get lost in a one size fits all conception of narcissism. Trauma. Bonding is how people get drawn to and stuck in narcissistic relationships.

It's the constant push and pull. Days that feel great and you feel so understood, and then days that are confusing and dehumanizing. It becomes a constant state of trying to appease and win over the narcissist to keep the good days coming. Mark like in the back and forth of his relationship to a trance, and when we are in a trance, we are almost hypnotized. Remember that healthy

relationships of any kind are stable. Ups and downs are not good for us, and if those ups and downs resemble the early relationships in our life, we may get caught in the same chaotic cycles. Getting out of a narcissistic relation fationship, whether it is a cult or any other kind of relationship, maybe more painful than just maintaining

the toxic status quo. Once Mark and others decided to not play the game anymore or break ranks, that when they face the worst of it, smear campaigns, betrayal by people they believe to be their friends, and being blamed for what's happening. If you are going to step out of a narcissistic relationship, be prepared, have supports, seek out therapy, and have realistic expectations of what is to come. There is no easy way to escape the prison of toxic relationships.

Thanks for listening to Part one of this interview with Mark Vicente. Make sure to check out the rest of this conversation in Part two. A big thank you to our executive producers Jada Pinkett Smith, Valan Jethrow, Ellen Racket and and Dr Rominey de Vassila. And thank you to our producer Matthew Jones, associate producer Mara Della Rosa, and consultant Kelly Ebling. And finally, thank you to our editors and sound engineers Devin Donnaghee and Calvin Bailiff.