Since the nineteen eighties, more than two and a half million Americans have been pulled into a cult. It's estimated there are three thousand active cultic groups in America alone. From Nexium to the Branch Davidians in Waco, from the Scandal at Sarah Lawrence to Bickram Yoga, Wild Wild Country to Heaven's Gate. Everyone is talking about them, But what makes a cult a cult? How do they wield such power?
On this fascinating episode of Navigating Narcissism, I'm honored to speak with doctor Yanya Lalich, one of the world's foremost experts on cults and coercion, who lost ten years of her life when she was lured into a radical political group that turned out to be a cult.
She reveals the.
Role of narcissism at the heart of every cult and breaks down the frightening tactics they use to systematically coerce millions. This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue,
or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering to some people. 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. iHeartMedia or their employees. Doctor Yanya. Such an honor to meet you. I just love your work. It's so complimentary to the work I do on narcissism in individual relationships.
Well, thank you.
It's wonderful to meet you as well, and I love your books as well.
You spend a lot of time helping people who have left cult organized systems, or who are trying to leave, or even people who've gotten drawn in, and you talk to their family members.
And cults are a big word out there. Every other day.
There's a new documentary about it called This is Top of Mind for People. So let's just start with basics. Can you define what a cult is?
Okay?
A cult is essentially a closed social system, and it has four features that are important to me. The authoritarian or charismatic leader, the transcendent brief system, the systems of control, and the systems of influence. The first is that it has an authoritarian leader who is most often almost always a narcissist, and who demands all loyalty and all obedience, and you're not allowed to question that person. And the leader is typically the founder or the originator of the
belief system. So the second feature is the belief system, which I call a transcendent belief system, and by that I mean it's an ideology or a belief system that basically gives you the answer to everything, the past, the present, and the future. And the philosophy behind the belief system is the end justifies the means. Once you have a philosophy that says the end justifies the means, that means you can be asked to do anything, and as long as it's in the service of the goals of the
organization or the leader's wishes, it's okay. So that puts people into a kind of a sticky wicket because most people come into the cult unless they're born in it, with their own sense of morality, and over time they have to give up their own morality to what I say, the immorality of the leader because they are following these end justifies the means orders. And the third and fourth
features are systems of influence and systems of control. What I mean by systems of control are the very overt rules and regulations, So that would be things like they may have you a dressing a certain way, speaking a certain way.
They may have rules about.
Who you can marry or not marry, how many children to have, how to raise the children, where to live, who to live with, et cetera, et cetera. These are the very obvious control mechanisms. Savvius are the systems of influence. These are the social psychological techniques or tactics that prey on your emotions. So this is where they're pushing your buttons, right, They're preying on guilt and shame and love and anger
and fear. Right, And since we have responded to those things all of our lives, mostly, we immediately don't pick up that there's something wrong here, that my buttons are being pushed all the time, right, and that I'm reacting in this way. The purpose of that which is basically and those two combined, the controls and the influences, the purpose of that which is the indoctrination system.
Is to attack the self.
The cult essentially wants to take apart yourself so that they can rebuild you as a cult persona. Right, So they want to get rid of your instincts, your sense of self trust, your belief in yourself, your self confidence, et cetera. So you will essentially be kind of torn down without necessarily realizing it and built back up according to the principles of the group. So those are the
four features. And then, of course most of these groups are exploiting people in some way, either sexually, financially, certainly, emotionally.
Sometimes all three.
You to me literally just described a narcissistic relationship.
Right is you've.
Talked about an authoritarian person who expects and almost requires loyalty and obedience. They have this belief system that it almost feels like a permanent gaslighting.
It's not falsifiable.
You cannot ever give evidence to the contrary because if you do, it will not be heard and integrated, but you will be shut down, right and you'll be told there's something wrong with you. And then you brought up something so important when you were talking about this transcendent belief system, which is this almost this slide in morality, the things that you ethical systems, even legal adherents and
moral codes. You once adhered to, you start giving up on those so you can survive in this cultic system in a narcissistic relationship. I've had numerous survivors say I stopped being me and started doing things that I never dreamed I would do. I call it sort of the
slide in morality just to survive in the relationship. And then when you talk about the systems of control, well, all narcissistic relationships are characterized by control, and the systems of influence really feel like manipulation, behaving in a way that induces guilt. Right, So that's every narcissistic relationship. People feel like they can't move around in these relationships because they feel or that they're violating the relational code or
that they're going to be abandoned. But then what you said, which is shockwaving me right now, is this concept of indoctrinating the person, attacking the self, tearing down a person so you can rebuild them in a way that is functional for the cult leader and secondarily the cult system. What you describe in a cult almost feels a little bit more intentional. But that's every narcissistic relationship, whether it's a parent or a partner, or a boss that they
don't care about your individual self. They're going to break that down. So what's left is a human being that exists in their service. The narcissistic person isn't rubbing their hands together like an evil genius. It is happening in this very under the radar slow way where it is a brick by brick taking a part of a person, or if it's a narcissistic parent, the first time that child exerts their autonomy game over, the child will immediately
be shamed. The child will experience a parent's resentment, live with the cataclysmic fear of abandonment. That's too traumatizing. So the child, in order to survive, has to engage and buy in. So we're working in similar spaces, but the difference is you're talking about a group. I'm talking about an individual relationship. So how big does an group or an organization have to be to be considered a cult.
There are one on one cults, there are family cults, as I'm sure you've run into. And what you described about the children is interesting because for those children who are born in a cult, they experience exactly that they're not to express any autonomy so they don't go through the same developmental stage as we did when we grew up, or someone who is not involved in a coercive situation, so when they get out, they have all of that to kind of redo, in a sense, the developmental work.
So yeah, it can be any size. I mean, some cults are huge, thousands of members. Most of them boast about the number of members they actually have, but there.
Are groups with thousands.
And then I've worked with many small family cults and also the one on one cults, which are exactly as you say, really narcissistic relationships. I think one thing I do want to mention, because you said narcissists, aren't these evil people, you know, planning this all out? I think
that is one slight difference with cult leaders. I think I believe that most I mean I've been doing this for thirty five years and I can't tell you the stories I have heard, and I believe that most cult leaders know what they're doing, and that most of them are what we call malignant narcissism, yes, and that they have a little bit of psychopathy, and they're very, very evil and very harmful. I mean, we can look at two recent examples of Keith Ranieri and Larry Ray of
the Sarah Lawrence cult. I mean, it's unfathomable, especially Larry Ray, what he did to those kids. So cult leaders, I think tend to be a bit more abusive and harmful.
Than your run of the mill narcissists, if you will.
I totally agree.
And it comes down to that intentionality, right, And I think that I'm sure you're more than familiar and we've talked about it on this podcast before, this idea of the dark tet trad of narcissism, psychopathy, machiavelianism, and sadism. Yes, those qualities are obviously every single cult leader ever. I like that formatting better because it accounts for the exploitativeness, the psychopathic cruelty, which is a lack of remorse, and
there's an intentionality and that sadistic flair. And I think in intimate relationships people struggle with that, like do they wanted you this Ranieri and Ray?
They wanted you that?
This was an obsessive, a delusionally obsessive need for power. When you talk about first of all, I want to go back a minute, because I think everyone knows who Keith Ranieri andexium what that's about. I think fewer people know about Larry Ray. Could you just give us a brief overview of that. I just want to make sure that everyone has a context for that.
Larry Ray was basically a con artist and had been in prison for fraud or something. When he got out of prison, his daughter, who was a student at Sarah Lawrence living in a dorm, had some roommates. His daughter said, Oh, my dad's coming to live with us for a while. So he actually moved into the dorm with these young people.
He essentially indoctrinated these young people into believing that he was this like superhuman being, and then he convinced them that everything they did was wrong and hurting him, and they were owing him money, and he was very violent in the abuse of them. Eventually they moved to an apartment in New York and he had one of the young women become a prostitute. He tortured people, literally tortured people. You know, I knew so much about Ranieri and what
he did. I thought nobody could really beat that. And then Larry Ray came along and I thought, Wow, he was beyond the pale. So that's who Larry ray Is and fortunately he got convicted, got a pretty good sentence,
not as good as Ranier he got. And then most recently, Isabella, his so called second in command, just got convicted, which I actually wrote a piece about for MSNBC because she was definitely a victim, and not that cult members who do horrific things shouldn't be held accountable, but I think the courts also need to take into account what happens to people under coercion because we have to follow orders,
and then it depends on what level you're at. But what happened in cases like Isabella is that through the indoctrination, we enter this state of mind that I call bounded choice. We've been so enclosed in this self sealing system. We have no reality checks, no other feedback. We're at the
mercy of the leader. We believe our entire life future depends on staying with and obeying this leader to the point where, yes, we have choices, but our choices are confined and constrained by this system that we're locked in. So sure, if it's something insignificant like oh what am I going to have for lunch today or whatever.
Yeah you have a choice about that.
But if it's something significant, like can I leave, can I challenge the leader? No, those are thoughts that you cannot entertain because because you know that if you entertain those thoughts and God forbid act on them, you will basically die, either a literal or figurative death. Many cults say to you, if you leave, you're going to die,
you know of some dread disease. You have to give up everything, give up your entire identity at that point, and most people, when they're in that state, cannot do that. And this is why so many people, especially at a higher level in a cult, experience what we call and I'm sure you're familiar moral injury, which is the effect of not just what happened to you, but what you did to others or that you saw happen to others,
and that you couldn't do anything about. So, yes, I think someone who's at the level of Isabella Apollock and the dastardly thing she did at his command or knowing that's what he would want, she needed to be held accountable. But I think we are the courts and law enforcement also need to understand and have a little bit of compassion for the person who's caught in that position.
I found this concept of bounded choice to be one of the most fascinating things I'd ever read. I'd never that terminology really captured something. Correct me if I'm wrong. We have a certain spectrum of choice. Okay, what you're describing as bounded choice is an absolute narrowing of that spectrum of choice, what you're calling a self sealing system, where you don't have any glimpse of a touchstone or
a reality outside of that relationship. So although one looking from the outside, I'll say there's a door walk through it, that is actually that full spectrum a choice no longer exists. It's like the door doesn't exist or the door is locked. Right, Because the reason this is so for me is that this is in many ways the paradox of people in
narcissistic relationships. Again, not nearly at the level of what we're talking about in terms of the level of coercion and danger and harm of stories we're talking about, but even in your garden variety narcissistic relationship, that spectrum of choice narrows to this really bounded realm of if I leave, people may think badly of me. I might you know, the system is not going to understand who this person's about.
So the custody of the children will be affected, or my culture will cast me out, or I financially may not.
Be able to make it, or he'll come after me, or I'll lose the children though correct, or.
The post separation abuse.
So and I think this is every narcissistic relationship ever, and that what happens is even therapists are guilty of this, which are supposed to be a compassionate system. Forget about law enforcement on all those other advocacy and justice systems. They don't understand bounded choice. Even therapists don't. So we'll often get into this mindset of like, well is an option, and I'm often like squirming in my charm.
Like I don't know that it is.
When you gave me this term bounded choice, I just want to let you know, doctor Yanya, this terminology has greatly helped therapist, So thank you for that. And I've sort of been the mouthpiece for that term in clinical realms, and because it really gets at what survivors can They're like, I don't feel like I can leave this, Like yeah, literally I know I can, but I actually don't think I can.
I so much appreciate that, And you know, I mean that idea of there's the door and you can't go through it. I lived that for five years in the cult that.
I was in.
I was ready to leave, and I could not figure out how to do it. I would get up every morning, get in the shower, cry my eyes out because we weren't allowed to cry, we have no emotions. And I'd get in my car and I would just wish that I'd be killed in a car accident because it was the only way I could see to get out. And that is the phenomenon that people who haven't lived through this don't have a really difficult time understanding.
So since you've said that, and I heard you use the word we a few times, as though there's a sense of belonging for you in cult survivors, this has been your experience, can we talk about that? Can you tell us about the group that you were in and what that experience was like.
So I was thirty years old, I had already graduated from college with honors.
I had been a full bright scholar.
I don't say these things to boast, but to let people know that it's not stupid, weird, crazy people who get into cults, but they look for the best and the brightest. I met a woman who was a friend of a friend, and we would have these great we'd go for coffee and have these great political conversations. This was right at the end of the Vietnam War, so people on the left were kind of looking for what do we do now?
What do we do now?
So she said at one point she asked to meet at my house, and she came over and with another person and said, you know, we have this study group. It's just for when. It's called women in the State, and we're reading about and trying to understand the role of women in the state, you know, state.
With a capital S.
And of course that sounded interesting to me. I'd always had this intellectual side to me, and I thought, well, I'll meet new people. That sounds great. So I joined the study group. Little did I know that it was a front group for a cult, and little did I know that probably half of the people there, five out of the ten people there were part of this background
organization that I didn't know about. So we did these readings of like Marx and Lenin and Chairman Mile, things like that, and we'd be asked to be the person to present the reading at the next meeting, and of course when I presented it, they praised me and told me how wonderful and brilliant I was, and you know, all this what we call love bombing, you know, making
me feel very special and loved. And then a little while later she asked to meet with me at my house again and said, well, what are you learning in the study group And I said, well, I'm learning that in order to really make social change, you have to have a Marxist, a disciplined Marxist Leninist organization. And she said, well, what if we told you we have one? And I'm like, what you know? And she said, yes, we have this international organization and it's really big, and you know, wouldn't
you like to join? And I was like sure, So she said, oh, but you know, first you have so this is kind of bait and switch that they do, So first you have to fill out this questionnaire. So I filled out the questionnaire, which basically asked me everything about my life, my parents, my bank accounts, my passport number, everything, everything, and then I was admitted. And at the time, the group didn't even have a name, and I didn't even
know it had a leader. But over time I learned that, and it was a small group then maybe twenty five thirty people we grew. We were extremely disciplined, very restricted, worked twenty hours days, seven days a week, month after month, year after year. People had various assignments. We had a big print shop and a publishing house, and a research institute and you know.
The staff headquarters.
All of the newspapers in San Francisco said we were a cult, and of course we then did damage control, like no, no, no, they're just read baiting.
Us, you know.
And most of the time we sat in circles and criticized each other and tore people down. And the purpose of that was following the guidelines of Chairman Mao of China that no matter what the criticism, you have to accept the kernel of truth, which basically meant you could
be criticized for anything. So for example, at one point I was sent to New York to ask one of our supporters for whatever the equivalent of a million dollars was back then, which I went and did was embarrassing, and when I came back, I was put on trial and criticized for going to New York and asking this contact for a million dollars, which is.
Exactly what I was ordered to do.
And while you're sitting there in front of all these people on trial, you of course can't say, wait a minute, wait a minute, that's what I.
Was told to do.
So it was very very harsh life. And fortunately and I was always in leadership and in the inner circle around the leader, who was a drunken, narcissist, megalomaniac, former sociology professor.
What was this organization you were in calls because we know what it is, but we don't even know what the name of it was.
Well, the final name was the Democratic Workers Party. In the beginning, we were the Workers Party for Proletarian Socialism, but we decided that was a bit too much of a mouthful for the general public. But most of our work was done, especially early years, was done through front groups, and we never revealed that there was this organization behind everything.
So we had like you know, front groups to like something called the Rebel Worker Organization to recruit workers, and we had an intellectual organization to recruit academics, and a hospital organization to recruit hospital workers.
The danger of that, obviously, of that kind of positioning is it's not in this holistic, healthy way of that to be able to receive feedback and be self aware. It's really it almost always becomes weaponized. And what you're describing is, I'm going to tell you the criticism as a colonel of truth, I'm saying something even shrinks are guilty of doing that. By the way, you know, well, where's the truth in what your partner said. The whole thing was abusive, so let's not go searching for the
truth is always my attitude. But that said that, being sent to go do the fundraising, you go do the fundraising, and then being criticized for doing the fundraising. That's exactly what happens in every narcissistic relationship. The person will literally be doing what they believe is the person's rule book, and then they're told, no, that's not what I wanted.
That's all that gaslighting that completely undoes someone. But as you're going to this and even these twenty hour workdays, I've heard that thematically time and time again in cult organizations, cults and cults in general, of being able to do this inhumane amount of work, is that a strategy to numb people, to exhaust them so they can't question, like, what is the goal with all of that?
It is a way to keep you exhausted and keep you from questioning and thinking, and you're just kind of functioning on wrote and that it also you know, in most cases, it's going to feed into the philosophy like we're the best and the greatest and we're saving the world in some one way or another. And so you know, we had this saying like another chairman mount, the Revolution isn't a tea party, right, so if people complained, it was like, well, no one ever said this was going
to be easy. You know, you accepted this difficult life of being a cadre fighter for the revolution, so shut up and get the work.
So it's both a way.
To keep you exhausted but also to kind of again and break you down and just keep you working for the organization and supposedly meeting its goals.
And another thing you mentioned, I don't know if this is comment and called systems. You said you'd filled out this form with all kinds of sensitive information about you.
What was that about?
I mean, that was I think to make me feel vulnerable to know that they knew all this stuff about me and.
They could pick away at pieces of it.
So one of the things we had to do very early on was when we first joined, was we had to write our class history, right, so the history of our life and our family from a point of view of social class, right, And so everybody had to do that.
So already they had a.
Lot of information about you, so that when you wrote that, they could perhaps double check some things. But also everybody wrote a class history and then of course it got torn apart and you were told it wasn't good enough, right, and so then people had to rewrite it and rewrite it until it was the history that they wanted.
So it was another way to erase your background.
But what you described there, like that, that filling out that form, getting this vulnerable information again, that what we see diadically in narcissistic relationships. I call it the intel gathering phase of the relationship building, like you know, and it's really that staring deeply into your eyes and say tell me your deepest secret.
I want to know all about you.
And the other person might think this is about intimacy or closeness, but rather they're getting this and filing it away for future use. It's gathering the stuff, which in many cases people are giving in what feels like good faith, right, Like, this is what intimacy is, this is what trust is. They give it and then it is, like I always say, it's melted into bullets and it is used to harm that person.
That's why it's so difficult to trust when you get out, you know, because everything you've done and given away was used against you.
And that difficulty with trust is the sort of the legacy wound of anyone who's been in any form of toxic, abusive relational system, whether it's an individual, one on one, whether it's in a cult system. What was the penny drop moment for you? When did you lift your head and say something's not quite right here. You might not have known as a cult, maybe you did, but what was that moment for you?
Okay, well this is a difficult story. But So in nineteen eighty one, so I had been in about five years and it was my birthday and my mother didn't call. My mother was back in Milwaukee, and my mother didn't call, and she always called me on my birthday.
So I was like, this is weird.
So I called my aunt, who's her youngest sister, and I said, you know, I'm just surprised I haven't heard from Mom. And she said, oh, your mother's in the hospital. They don't know what's wrong with her.
And I'm like what.
So I called the hospital and the doctor said, your mother's in a coma. We don't know what's wrong with her. If I were you, i'd get here. So I borrowed money from the cult and flew home. And when I got there, I demanded that one of the we had doctors in our organization, and one of the doctors said, when you get there, tell them to give her a cat scan.
And this is before MRIs I think.
So I got there, I demanded they give her a cat scan and the results came back and she had a gleoblastoma brain tumor, which most people know or maybe don't that it's one of the most malignant type of brain tumors.
And so they said, we.
Can operate and remove it, but it'll grow right back and she'll probably have four to six months to live.
I was like, okay.
So they did the operation and then she went through speech therapy and physical therapy and all of that occupational therapy, and every day the cult called me.
When are you coming back? When are you coming back?
And I was staying with my aunt, and my aunt said, oh, those people are so nice. They call you every day, you know, not knowing they were calling me to come back. So I it was time for her to leave the hospital. You know, at some point they want to kick you out. So I called my leader and I said, my mom's about to be discharged. Is nowhere for her to go, and I'd like permission to stay here with her until she dies. She has four to six months to live
and then I'll come back. And she said, oh, well, let me check with you know, the queen, the general secretary.
So she called back.
A little while later and said, oh, we have a great idea, bring your mom out to California. Well, my mom was, you know, a little Serbian lady who I don't know if she'd ever left Milwaukee, was very close to her Orthodox church or Serbian Orthodox church. So I, you know, like a good militant, I said, oh okay, And they said, you know, we'll have one of your roommates move out. She can live in your house. So
I went back. I got the room ready I got a walker and all that stuff from the American Cancer Society, and my aunt put her on a plane and flew her out. So she was living in my house, fairly weak, you know, wearing a wig because her head had been shaved, and I had to help her with bathing and things like that. But I still had to work every day. And at some point I said to the cult, look, you told me to bring my mom home, but I
never see her. And they said, oh, okay, you can have dinner with her, forty five minutes for dinner every day. I was like, oh gee, So I did that, and then they decided she should work for the cult. So they had her working at one of our front groups, I don't know, doing filing or something, and somebody picked her up and brought her home. So again I wasn't seeing her every day because I'd leave at six in
the morning. So one night I came home at about eleven o'clock at night and I opened the door to her room and she was lying dead on the floor, and I was just broken. And when I composed myself, I called my best friend who came over, who I had recruited into the cult, and I called the corner or whatever. I called my cult leader again or my leadership person who was the second in command, and I said, my mom just died and I'm having the body flown home.
And on the other side of the line, she said, in this very harsh voice, well, you're not going home to the funeral, are you. And I looked at the phone and I thought, here, I am killing myself right, working twenty hour days blah blah blah to build a better world. And if this is the better world we're building, where I'm being told I can't go to my mother's funeral who just died in my house. So it was
the first time I ever defied the organization. I said, no, I am going, and I borrowed money again and I flew home. I have absolutely no memory I planned the funeral. I planned the big in our tradition. We had a big Serbian dinner afterwards in the Serb hall, and neighbors came and her sisters, and halfway through I got up and left to take a flight back to San Francisco. And when I got back, I was met at the airport and told, you know, report at ten am to
such and such a place. So the next morning. There I was again sitting in one of those high chairs with forty people in front of me, and I was criticized for putting my mother ahead of the revolution. And after several hours of being berated for that, not being able to cry, show no emotion. That was a breakdown for me. And that's when I was saying earlier, I knew I had to get out, but I could not figure out how to get out. I had nowhere to go, I had no money, I had a broken down car.
I knew they'd come after me because I knew stuff, and I was just like a walking nervous breakdown, just like a robot. I lived like that for you know, four and a half years. So that was my breaking point.
First of all, I'm so sorry, uh doctor Yanya. It's just it's such a devais dating story and one that stays with you in so so many ways. You know, as I was listening to that, I think what struck me was again, it's hard for me not to view this just lifted that this is a whole group, but even in an individual abusive relationship, these are the kinds
of things that would happen. Why do you have to spend so much time taking care of your mother, Well, this is inconvenience to usk and and in a way it also felt like you were talking about this a horrifically abusive employer, like you need to report back. We don't care if this, We don't care of that. But it was obviously not just those things, which are terrible things. It was this larger system that had so enveloped you that there was that bounded choice. There was no choice.
I guess my question for you going through because you were going through so much raw psychological pain, grief and loss, and starting to recognize that the system you were in there was something terribly terribly wrong about what was going on at this point when all these terrible things were happening. Was the word call even coming into your mind? Or was it that I'm in something?
Really? What was your word?
Was it abusive? Toxic? Problematic? Like clearly you knew something wrong this thing. We say we're doing this revolution, we're trying to make a better world, and yet the world we've created here is actually quite awful, so we're not.
Meeting that goal.
What was your framing on it when you realize something was wrong?
I don't believe at that time I thought of the word cult. And of course I don't have any journals from that time because we weren't allowed to have anything like that. I just know that I felt trapped. I felt incredibly trapped, and I knew it was wrong and it was harsh, and it was hurting other people, and that I had heard other people. In those four years, a lot of other really crappy stuff happened, both to
me and to others. I don't think I used the word cult until the very end when we all got out.
So just again, crappy situation, bad, it's not good for me.
How did you get out?
So basically, you know, those of us who joined, as you said, in those early years, we were pretty burned out and pretty fed up and had been around her, you know, her inconsistencies and her madness and her corruption and drunkenness.
And she left.
It's too long to go into the details, but she left to go to Bulgaria because that was her communist heaven. At that point, we basically the inner circle basically kind of all looked at each other and said, we're in a cult.
And basically we called together all.
The members and some of the people who'd been expelled, and we had this big meeting in our print shop and tried to tell people what was going on behind the scenes. And it took about a week to convince people we were telling the truth and not trying.
To have a coup.
And then everybody just started pouring out their stories. You know, how they sold their blood to have enough money for their dues, how they never saw their spouse again after that person got expelled, how they gave their children to the spouse, you know, on and on with these horrific stories. And then she was coming back, and so the night before she came back, we took a vote and we voted unanimously to expel her, and then a second vote
unanimous to dissolve the organization. And then we picked a team of people who would meet with her and tell her when she came back. And one of the women wore a wire so that all of us could hear what happened at that meeting. So basically, you had one hundred and twenty people who just had the rug out from under them, and you had a very stunned cult leader who was told the parties over, and you know, we all helped each other with resumes and getting jobs
and clothes because we had no clothes. I mean, a lot of people like I ran the publishing house, so a lot of people would say they worked at the publishing house, and I'd be their reference. And you know, we just did whatever we could to support each other. And that was the beginning of my recovery.
And at that point it became clear to all of you collectively it was a cult.
It became clear to us all for a sliver of time. And then what happened is a lot of the people who had reputations on the left and who wanted to carry on with political work didn't want us to talk about what happened. And the rest of us were like, wait a minute, you know, the left needs to learn from this, and what do you mean we can't talk about what happened? And so what kind of a split happened?
Also about what should happen to the assets because we had a print shop, we had we had a publishing house, we had the doctor's office.
We had something like eighty.
Computers in nineteen eighty five from people had that was a lot, and so we ended up having to take a vote for that as well. In our side won and a few years later, we each got a check for like, I don't know, one hundred and twenty dollars or something, you know, like your ten year pension. So that was a bit of a struggle that went on for over a year between people, mostly by letters, because it was even before email.
Yeah yeah, yeah, no, it was it. And then it became clear. It didn't become clear. So it was the dismantling of this really was much more that this was unhealthy, this was wrong, this was corrupt, but not that this was a.
Cult, right for some of the people and for a minority of the people, and even for myself. And so that kind of gave me the word cult. But when I was in New York at the time, nobody talked about political cults. Everything was religious cults, right, or gurus whatever. And I thought, okay, well maybe we weren't a cult.
So I actually sat.
Down and I made these lists, and this is what I have a lot of people I work with do. So you know, I'm like, okay, religious cult.
They have Jesus.
We had marks, they had the Bible. We had a book called The Training of the Cadre. They had this we had that they had and I was like, Yep, we were a cult. And then I started going to conferences and speaking and letting people know there aren't just religious cults. And of course now we know today there's every kind of cult imaginable.
We will be right back with this conversation. Yeah, I mean absolutely. And you said, though, at that point began your recovery And what does recovery when a person has their eyes opened? I was in an abusive organization. Took some time before recognize it as a cult. But what is recovery from that?
Like, you know, we have to accept that we'd been had, that we'd been duped, We have to accept the things we did to other people or saw, and then there's you know, you're basically left with a shattered self.
Right.
So I was forty years old, and I felt like I was fifteen. You know, I felt like I didn't know how to cross the street or open a bank account. And you also feel like you're this alien being. You know. I would go on these business dinners, business lunches in New York, cultural mecca. Right, I hadn't seen a movie. I'd seen three movies in ten years, and I'd have to talk with business clients and I didn't know what the hell to talk about, you know, I was like
from Mars. So there's that sense of alienation, there's a shame, like you don't want to tell people. There's the guilt of what you did. There's enormous loss, you know, for you lose friends. You've lost a lot of people.
Along the way.
You know. In my case, I was never even allowed to grieve my mother's death. It's everything, it's everything, And so the best thing is, of course, you know, what we call psycho education, like not so much not at all traditional therapy where you go in and the therapist say, okay, tell me what happened when you were two years old.
You know, no, no, no, no no.
You first have to unpack the cults, because if you don't, you're still looking at yourself through that mindset. And that's what most therapists don't get, which is why we do some training for therapists at my new nonprofit, because the cult survivors need more therapists who get this.
Absolutely, you're right again.
The psycho educational piece is also sort of the one of the central pillars of working with survivors of narcissistic abuse, because once they understand what the traumatizing system looks like once they understand what this is. And I think it's the hiding and plain sight of it too, is that a narcissistic persons often quite successful in the world at large. Right, this is not someone who's looking at looking surly everywhere and everyone's pitying you. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
This is you're in a relationship with this person. Everyone's saying, oh, you're so lucky, you're part of something, or you're part of this relationship. But everything that you're sharing here, the one you started with, was an interesting one to me.
You have to accept that you've been had right, And I understand that to be the subjective experience of a survivor, whether in a cled system, in a narcissistic relationship from my seat as a therapist, it's the I think that when we feel we've been had, we feel foolish, that we've been played right, like somebody just street con on us. But in fact what had happened was all the healthy functioning parts of yourself, a desire to belong, a commitment
to a cause, a drawing to like minded people. Healthy parts of yourself were drawn into something right in a relationship. It might be that you saw something in this person that you believed in love, that you wanted to build a life with them, all healthy stuff, and then to find out that in fact, that's not what the social contract was on their side. It does feel like being had,
but it's not really that you were foolish. It wasn't that you were foolish got played by a street colond because you're rolled up to a game of three card Monti. It's more that you had gone in with all the best parts of yourself and ran into something harmful. Is that self forgiveness in that process, that this was the best of you? You know, you were taking advantage of and that exploitativeness is an important part of the psycho.
Education on what happened. Absolutely systems.
I mean I get asked all the time, you know, is there a certain personality type who joins a cult? And I'm like, you know what, if there's any common denominator, it's idealism. You know, it's people who want a better world, a better self, a better family, you know, a better belief, spiritual belief, whatever. But it's not because people, as I said earlier, are stupid, weird, crazy, lazy. That's not who
cult members want. I mean cult leaders want. And so while you have to accept that you did it and went along with it, you also have to realize that there was nothing wrong with you, right like this happens to everybody.
It can happen to anybody.
And the forgiveness bit is so much more about self forgiveness, which is one of the courses we taught forgiveness of self. I always say, you don't have to forgive the cult leader, lord knows. I mean, there's all this sort of mindfulness who stuff today about forgiveness. No, you don't ever have to forgive the person who abused you.
Who you have to forgive in this context is yourself.
Yeah, you know, and deepen that understanding because they don't deserve bupkus.
No, they don't deserve Sure as hell don't deserve forgiveness, you know. I think to my forgiveness is a rather divine state, and it implies that there would be meaningful change when someone receives that forgiveness, and that a lot of people put forgiveness of other ahead of forgiveness of self. And it's that again, you brought the best of yourself. But you just said something so interesting I want to come back to, which is that cult leaders cult groups
don't want lazy and crazy. Talk more about that, because again you're right, the trope is of the lost person who there's something off about them. That's why they get drawn into this and they got nothing else going on. You're actually saying it's quite different.
Why is that? You know, what's that about? They don't want.
It's because they want They want a type personalities. They want people who are going to function, who are going to help raise money, who are going to recruit, who are going to bring in contacts to lend legitimacy, to run the businesses, to run the internal organization, set up the infrastructure.
Cult leaders are pretty lazy.
They don't do very much except give orders and bask in their whateverness. So they need people around them who can perform. And you know, I always say, the cult's not there to take care of you. You're there to take care of the cult leader.
And the cult.
So I mean, I know, in our case, if we had someone who joined, you know, as say a volunteer or general member, and they seemed a little fragile or maybe had too much sickness.
We got rid of them. We were like, you know, this isn't right for you. Bye bye. We didn't want that.
And the Unification Church used to do that, you know, when people had breakdowns, they would just dump them in front of a mental hospital and drive away. I mean, there's no caring for you in a cult. And of course they want people with money. So we saw that in the next case, right, you know, or celebrities, you know, people who are going to you know, oh, let's go coerce the Dalai Lama into meeting with us. Let's give him a million dollars, you know, and he can wrap a cloth around Ranieri.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely exactly. You know, it really is.
And I think that that, you know, it's so funny you say that cult leaders are actually the ones who are lazy. I have more that it's entitlment, right, They're entitled to having everything done to them so if or for them, or with them, or as they wish. And so when people are entitled, almost by definition, they're lazy because they're not actually attending to the things that need to get done. But they put it under this rough break off. I shouldn't have to be the one who
does this. I'm too important, I'm too divine, I'm to this.
Right, right, it's the grandiosity, right, yeah, yeah, And we as members rationalize that, like I used to literally say to myself, well, we have stalin in our lineage, and.
At least we haven't killed anyone yet.
So you rationalize along the way. And you know, this is my metaphor about the shelf. You know, when you asked what was the breaking point? I think everybody who's in a cult, and I would imagine in a narcissistic relationship that you have doubts, but you have no way to express those doubts, right, because you know you'll be punished in some way, So you store all these things on this shelf in the back of your head, right, and then one day, one thing too much happens and the shelf breaks.
That's what happened when my mother died.
And then you don't necessarily you know it's a cult or evil narcissist, but you know there's something wrong, and then you start thinking about getting out, and then how and when you're able to get out again is a very specific situation, depending on the cult, the boyfriend, the whatever, that's going to be easier or harder, depending on the context of that.
I love that metaphor of the shelf breaking. Some people call it sort of a rock bottom. It is death by a thousand cuts and then one day and it could actually be a relatively in your case, it was not inconsequential at all. It was the but it could be inconsequential. And that is the thing that accumulation and that idea. And I think people can see that, you know, the yawning bookshelf that for the one more book and boom, what just happened?
I just put one book on it.
And so I love that metaphor because I think that actually lines in though it interestingly a little bit, there's a beautiful complementarity to your work and the work of doctor Jennifer in the sense of she talks about this concept of betrayal blindness, sort of seeing the betrayal but not encoding it and not processing it. So it's not like you're in denial, and it's not like you're delusional. You see it, you just don't register it in a
way in essence that would break the shelf. But one day those betrayals pile up in a way that the whole system busts. Now, things become more clear, but there's a danger in seeing it for all the reasons you say. So, there's a real complimentarity there. But I want to go back to recovery, because if you weren't allowed to not only grieve major losses in your case, the loss of your mother, but also in the group you were in, and in all narcissistic relationships, you also have to curtail
your expression of emotion. If you express emotion, you will be gaslighted or shamed, or belittled, or be painted as somebody who is disregulated, and your emotion is never going to be empathized with, mirrored or received with compassion. People in narcissistic relationships really have themselves hemmed in to relatively restricted emotional expression. And when I work with these clients in therapy, they'll almost ninety nine percent of the time
apologize for crying. I'm so sorry, I'm crying. I'm like, that's what happens in here. Actually, this is purpose built for crying.
And that's what happened to you in a cult. It's hard to learn how.
To absolutely right, absolutely and not only I always say to employers. The best people you can hire are former cult members because they're such hard workers. The manipulation of one's emotions in the cult is so major and has such a big impact during recovery because you're not used to feeling your feelings, and you're not used to understanding
your feelings. It's why people are triggered all the time, and they overreact to the triggers because they're not used to being able to on their own have an emotion and understand it. And so it's like such a rollercoaster
of a time, especially the first couple of years. And I'm sure this is true with narcissists having lived years in most cases walking on eggshells, like having lived with that level of anxiety, right, and then you get out and there's triggers and panic attacks and it just you know, it becomes really overwhelming for people.
Oh, it absolutely does.
And yeah, it does become and you're right, well, because the emotion can't be expressed. I think that actually is a driver of the sheer amount of panic that we see panic attacks, panic disorder in survivors, not just of cults,
but with narcissistic relationships. Because there's no normative way to express I mean again as not been through a cult, but through so many narcissistic relationships that shape me developmentally that I to this day struggle with crying and it gets caught right here in my throat.
Like this, and it's painful.
I mean it's painful because of how much shame there was, so and so that's a microscopic level compared to what you're talking about systemically. And then nothing but apologies when that emotion looks like I've done something wrong, anyone's done something wrong by a normal show of tears, anger, sadness, worry, but it doesn't have someplace to go. It comes out in panic, and I think that that's a really important, really really important.
And feeling stuck, you know, feeling stuck and unable to make decisions. I mean I remember people would say, oh, let's go to the movies.
What do you want to say?
And I'd say, I don't know, you decide, you know. It's like I couldn't make a decision, all right. I didn't want to take a stand on anything because all those years when I took a stand, it was the wrong stand, right. So it's like you're just kind of like creeping through life.
Do you think that feeling stuck though, could that be sort of that bounded choice extrapolating into life even when the bound is gone. So now there's no more fear, but the bounded choice kind of follows you like a shadow.
Right, yeah, and there is still fear.
I mean, I was terrified that somebody was going to come after me, even though our cult was dissolved, you know. So most cults thrive on paranoia. It's such a wonderful way to keep people, you know, enmeshed right by this us versus them, fear, the outside world whatever. You know. We were afraid, oh the FBI was going to come and get us, you know.
And so all of that.
I mean, I think people don't understand the intensity of life in these kinds of situation, these systems, and then afterwards trying to unpack all that and still deal with the bottom of the pyramid. You know, your health, eating, you know, physical physical well being, exercise.
You know, it's just it must feel, it must feel so lonely because no one else does get it. It's not the normative experience most people have had.
Right yeah, And I mean that's why I do the work I do, and we you know, I've started this nonprofit to be able to have you know, we have discussion groups for survivors. We have for regular I call regular survivors of cults or narcissistic relationships trauma, and then also groups for people who were born or raised in
a cult. And people get so much out of those groups, like just being able to spend an hour and a half with other people who know what you're talking about, right, and you don't have to explain yourself and you don't have to apologize. It's so powerful, and we certainly need more resources in our society, and especially for people who are born and raised.
In a cult. There's nothing out there, nothing.
Can you talk a little bit about that, because I think that group often gets forgotten. I have talked with some people I've worked with clinically with folks who have been born and raised into occult systems. I've also talked with them in other interviews I've done in other places i've worked. But I think you're absolutely right, that is a very different group. What did things look like for that group? Because it is very different?
And what have you observed?
Well, you know, it's really kind of my latest pet peeve that they're so little out there for people. Because my last research project at the university was I interviewed sixty nine people who grew up in cults and who left on their own, and that's the basis of my book, Escaping Utopia. And the stories were so incredible. I mean, the amount of sexual abuse and physical abuses in every kind of cult of these young children is just I'd get off the phone from these interviews and just flop
on my bed and cry and cry and cry. I mean, it was just such hard stuff to hear. But what happens is, you know, they get out and some of them don't even know their real names, don't have birth certificates, they don't know if they have anybody out there who can help them, any other relatives. They don't know how to drive, they don't know about getting a ged. They end up living on the streets a lot of times,
they end up doing sex, work on drugs. A lot of suicides, a horrific amount of suicides, and it's just criminal. And you know, people like that, and even some adults who join cults in me, you know, they go to a domestic violence shelter and they don't qualify, they don't get let in, so where do they go? And it's just it's so difficult because they leave everything, especially if they leave on their own, and then they have to
carry on with life. In many cases their parents are still involved, and so do they have a relationship or not. I mean, there's so much to go through that it's really remarkable the ones who have survived and who've really some have done incredibly good work.
I'll tell you, in talking with some folks about this, there's some people who didn't realize they were raised in a cult. It was so normalized within the family that as the adult child started distancing from the system, especially if there are multiple siblings, and thinking, you know, in
some cases they weren't getting it. And then someone else in the family said, did you know that such and such was a cult, And they're like no, no, no, no, no, And then they do the deep dive and there's this horrific level of betrayal that you're like, how could you It wasn't even in about esk. They grew up, and then they again, they moved for a job, they weren't kept like, they weren't sort of confined and imprisoned, but once they left and were sort of mainstreamed into the world.
That revelation.
At first, it's almost like stages of grief, right Initially there's a tremendous amount of denial and anger, and then as the acceptance seeps in. One thing I had observed in several of these cases is a fair amount of rebellion and acting out. They were often raised in very very sort of restricted ways, and then the acting out, whether it was sexual acting, outer substances or anything, it actually could get very very dangerous, and that would be part of their sort of healing and recovery path, I
know in Escaping Utopia. I mean just you know, to put a finer point on it. And you had talked about this also earlier about you you're talking about four year old children in forest labor. You'd give an example of a four year old child working in a bakery, and I'm just curious, how does this not run a foul of child labor laws.
Well, you know, it is one of the ways we've been able to hold a few cults accountable lately or in the past few There was an organization, the Alamo Foundation, and he finally got convicted of labor trafficking. You know, it was one of the charges against Ranieri, also against
Larry Ray. So most cults are doing labor trafficking. I mean, I worked for ten years for nothing, and I think what happens is when there are public business and customers might look and see, oh, well, there's a five year old cleaning the tables, and either they think it's cute or they just go whatever. Very few people are actually going to report it to the labor courts.
Correct.
We need people to be more conscientious about that and at least look into this situation. I mean, yeah, it could be a mom and pop shop and the kid is helping, or it could be a front for a cult like the Yellow Deli, which are these cafes that are fronts for the twelve Tribes.
So, like your eyeballs, has there ever been as temp doctor Yanya to use things like racketeering statutes to bring down colts like because it can feel like organized crime, right, that many people a crime?
Yeah, I mean that did work with Ranieri. Here's the problem. First, there's a problem of finding lawyers who will even take on these cases because they think they're not going to win. And of course lawyers want to win, especially you know, if they're taking a case on contingency. When people leave a cult, it's the decision to take some kind of legal action is a very big step, and it's going to prolong your recovery. Most likely, it's going to put
you through so much crap. If anybody's been involved in legal stuff, you know, depositions, you know, they just tear you down.
It just can go on for years.
So a lot of people decide, I just want to get on with my life, right, And then it's a matter of having been at a high enough level that perhaps you have actual evidence. So I mean, I've worked with a group of people who were part of a cult in Atlanta, and they were high level people who left inner circle. We created, They created, i should say, binders of evidence of every type medical malpractice, this, sex trafficking, this,
that the other financial fraud. And I was able to connect them to the FBI in Atlanta, but nothing came of it, you know, nothing of it. So it can be so disheartening. I mean, look what it took Fornexium. You know, it took Catherine Oxenberg knowing the governor or somebody that finally they you know, after reporting things for years. Finally somebody acted on it. So it's a big struggle to get that to happen.
How much of this is because cults are able to hide behind religious religiou projection, because it does feel like religious organizations somehow managed to really skirt the law. Is that a sort of another loophole that they can play on. We've talked about people healing from this, We've talked about people getting in. We've talked about people getting out. Do people get pulled back in? So a person does the work, says I'm out, this is a cult, this is wrong.
No, no, no, they leave.
Have you heard of situations or even after making that courageously about they get sucked back into the system.
Oh sure, into either the same or a different system. But generally those are people who didn't do the psycho educational recovery. If you don't if you don't spend time doing the proper recovery where you understand what the heck happened to you and how it happened, it's really easy to get involved in something else. You know, we call
those cult hoppers. Yeah, and you know, I've worked I've worked with people who've been in three four or five different cults before they finally like enough, you know that's so, Yes, that does happen.
Yeah, And going back to what you're saying, before those like we're talking about these loopholes right become a religion you know, or you know, find ways to hide something that's come up in your writing. That actually was incredibly unsettling to me, doctor Yanya, was this idea of cult apologist and these are not and these are people who have educational credentials and from the the throne of that legitimacy, are basically saying you can't call groups cults. Can you
break that down? Because that piece was actually quite stunning to me.
Yes, that's been a decade's long problem.
So back in the I would say probably the seventies and eighties when doctor Margaret Singer, who was a clinical psychologist at Berkeley, and she was the main sort of cult expert at the time, and eventually she was a dear friend of mine and my mentor. Margaret had done some legal cases involving some cults and she was brilliant in the courtroom and she was winning cases and over fists for families or for former members. So the cults
realized they needed to get experts on their side. So somehow they convinced some of these academics that this was all about freedom of religion. And even though as we know, not all cults are religious, and so a number of academics, some I think, genuinely believe they're doing it to defend freedom of religion. Most of them, in my opinion, are doing it because they benefit. They work closely with the cults.
They make their money that way. And so now we have this sort of gaggle of people who've been very well coordinated over time, some very influential academics or professionals, and they do things like, in my case, they try to keep me from testifying in court cases. They have gotten into the textbooks. So any psych one or sociology one textbook you pick up is going to say, oh, cults are really just nice new religions. There's no such
thing as brainwashing. This is all just disgruntled former members who are making up stories. It's horrific, it really is. And how these people sleep at night, I don't know.
I don't you know.
I think what's stunning to me that anyone would be an apologist for these systems, is.
You were talking to go to court and defend them.
But you're talking about a group phenomenology that we're seeing replicated in all of these individual relationships. We see it replicated in sexual assault, we see it replicated in coerce of control, we see it replicated in domestic abuse. You know, cults are really basically scaling up of those individual dynamics, and that they've jumped on that word, and it's ghastly. I want to get back to the one more thing you said. I made a note to come back to this.
You said, this word brainwashing is also an issue. We all use it rather cavalierly, but you said that there's some issues with this word.
Can you talk to us a little bit about that.
So I think there's two things. The word originated during the fifties when a journalist who was actually a CI agent was in China and wrote a book called Brainwashing in Red China. So this was during what we called the Red Skine Right, and he described what was going on in Chairman Mao's China. You know, Mao took over the country in nineteen forty nine when they had the revolution.
So then there was that movie The Manchurian candidate, So it all got quite exaggerated, Like, you know, our government apparently believed that the Russians in the Chinese had some magic potion that would turn people into these political robots who would do whatever, and so, you know, it all
got sensationalized in a way. But the reality is, you know, there's other works by Robert J. Liften and Edgar Shin who studied people coming out of prison camps and out of communist China and wrote their books on thought reform and coercive persuasion and described exactly what that is, which is essentially indoctrination, or we could call it. As a sociologist,
I sometimes call it resocialization. Right, you're being resocialized into this new n Then come along the cult apologists who want to convince everyone there's no such thing as brainwashing and that it's just a ridiculous idea that was totally disregarded by all of the American Psychological Association and all that, and it should never be accepted in the courts. And they did a whole campaign to the media and said, don't ever use the word brainwashing, don't use the word cult.
If something happens, here's a list of people you should talk to, not these other people, and so it's in conjunction with the other work that they do. So while I absolutely believe there is such a thing as brainwashing, I was one of the main brainwashers in my cult. I mean, at one point the leader called me to a meeting and said, I want you to design a program that lets them know that they are accepting being brainwashed. And so I know it exists. I know what happened to me.
I can give you.
Prime examples, but I try not to use the word because of this controversy.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I use indoctrination and I use bounded choice as the result, and I'm able to take that into courts and have a grand old time.
So it's funny you say that because I come up against something very similar, where the argument, if you will, against using terms like narcissism and narcissistic abuse is we are often working with the survivor, the person who's been through this. That's who's more likely to show up in a therapist's office, not the person who's doing the emotional
abuse of manipulation. And so the thing that's often tossed back is, well, you're going on that person's description of the situation, I'm thinking they're not gonna who's gonna spend this much money to tell me a lie about someone? But okay, and you shouldn't be using narcissism because it represents a potentially diagnostic term, which is a load of you know what, because in fact, you know it's not. It's a description of a personality style that lines up
with something called antagonism. But I do the same thing. I'll use words like antagonism, which you know. There is actually a whole world of narcissism apologists out there, many of whom are also have PhDs, so I get it. It's certainly not at the same level because cults, by definition do harm. There is no such thing as a good cult.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, so.
Because that's not a thing. It would be very heavy handed for me to say there's no such thing as a good narcissists. I think many of us do love people with those personality styles in our lives. What we recognize these are extraordinarily limited relationships, so the same malign wouldn't apply, right, But in the case of cults, it's just again, there's no such thing as a good cult. So, but it's a fascinating piece. I thought, how could someone be an apologist? And then I was like, who getting
a little cult closest side of the road there? Because I was really really struck by that comment. My conversation will continue after this break. A little while ago, doctor Yanyo, you mentioned something you call it. You used the term new religious movement. Could you explain that term to us, because I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Well, that's the term the cult apologists have come up with. So what they're saying, right, And what's funny about it is it certainly doesn't cover cults like the one I was in, So I mean, I was not in a
new religious movement. But in their effort to pretend that they're defending religion, they'll say things like, you know, this is just a new religious movement and they're just going through, you know, growing pains and we should just let them do what they want to do and then they'll grow up and get over it.
And it's like, hello, So you've also worked with family members who watch other family members get pulled into cults, right, that's a uniquely painful position. So now we're talking about the people who they themselves are not getting into a cult, but they're watching a loved one get pulled in. What Let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, this is what I'm worried about with my child or even
my partner. Or maybe they're spending money and giving it to this organization and harming family finances or wasting their own money. Maybe whoever it is, someone close to you. What would your guidance be, What should they be looking for if they're worried that this might be happening to someone.
Well, certainly if they're giving away money to something that seems fishy. I often advise families, if they can afford it, to hire a private investigator and sort of look into the background of the energy worker or whoever it is, or whatever the organization is or person leading it to find out you know, what's there in the background. You know, people's personality is changing. They only talk about one thing.
They're very defensive. They're spending less and less time with you, any lesson less time doing things they used to do in love.
There's just that.
Kind of pulling away that happens, or I should say being pulled away and you know, I think most families these days recognize it pretty quickly. I mean, I have so many spouses either worried about a spouse or parents worried about children, or I even am working with children who are worried about parents. So it happens, you know,
in every form. And this is where the shelf in the back of the head comes in, because what families want to do or friends whoever is plant seeds on that shelf, right, plant seeds that'll get that shelf to break one day, and not confront and not challenge. And you know, you don't have to agree, but you don't ever want to cut somebody off.
If you're able to have contact, that is so.
Important, and do whatever you can to retain that contact. If they want to cut you off, fine, but don't ever cut them off, no matter how goofy they get or seem to you, right, and always remind them of good times, good times together, that there was another world out there. You know, I always say, you want to tug at their emotional heart strings. You want to reawaken who they were before and what they liked before, and who you were to them before. So whether it's sending
them their favorite cookies or sending a postcard from Aunt Mary. Whatever, it is, something that's.
Going to go oh oh yeah, I remember Aunt Mary. She was always so nice to me.
You know. Can you talk about critical compassion?
Sure?
So what I mean by that is people will often get involved in something that you know, to you might seem really unusual or crazy or ridiculous or offensive. And you know, I actually came up with this term during the sheltered in year, when I was getting so much contact from people whose relatives or friends or whoever, we're getting into QAnon or the anti vaxer movement and the far right stuff, and you know, they couldn't understand it,
and they certainly didn't want to approve. I don't want to approve that you're now joining this neo Nazi group.
You know, how can I do that?
And so the idea of critical compassion is that it's so important to understand that that person is going through something, and that that person thinks they have found something that
at that moment is speaking to them. Yep. And while you may know it's harmful or may lead to harm, that's not what you want to say to them right away, right You want to let them know that you're there for them, that you love them, that you don't want to have political arguments with them or spiritual arguments whatever. That you know, it's hard to say you respect something when you don't. So you can say, you know, I honor that, this is what you believe right now, But
let's go fishing. Remember how much fun we used to have when we went fishing. Yeah, and try to not get into those confrontational discussions or arguments. But as I was saying earlier, tap into who the person was before, try to reawaken that.
I absolutely love this in the sense of this again narcissistic abuse. Watching your friend who's in a toxic marriage or friendship or whatever. The temptation is to walk in right through the front door and say he's a bad guy, get out of this. And I said, that has never ever worked.
Again.
I love this term because it recognizes and I love how you put it, they're going through something. They are going through something, and to just write it off as they're crazy or they're being brainwashed or they don't understand what's happening. First of all, you're being dismissive of someone
you care about and they are going through something. And it is about holding I mean, this is very much the guidance I give to anyone who's trying to be a supporter is that you don't This is about you being a soft place to land and recognizing, Yes, it's painful to watch this, but there's no pushing fast forward on this. But I love that framing of suggesting that they do that thing with you, that was the joyful
thing you did with them. That's so great, and it's so nice to hear the sociologists and the psychologists finding that complementary space and that would work with individual clients. It's really amazing. We've been talking a lot about NEXIM and Keith R. Nieri, but you can't tell the story of NEXIM without talking about Nancy Saltzman. Okay, so she was the number two again, a woman holding a high
position in a called space. Would you say that because Nancy engage in what I would consider perpetrating level behavior, would you say she was experiencing bounded choice?
I would say that she is imposing bound a choice on others through her practices, through her behavior, I believe that she herself benefited much more personally than someone who is truly just responding on wrote, even though it may not feel like that. So certainly she was manipulated by Ranieri, but I don't believe she was indoctrinated in the same
way as other people. She'd helped create that system, right their tech or whatever they call it, the program, which I'm sure when she gets out of prison she'll just carry on with. So I don't put her in the same category as Isabella Pollock or even Claire Brauffman.
Really who interesting?
Okay, So let's talk about Claire Bronford, because I have to tell you I felt enrage at her. Claire could still be coming at people in that system is troubling to me. And Claire was also underwriting this. Without her money, I don't know that this thing would have gotten so far down the track. So where is that difference between Claire.
I understand Nancy created curricula. Nancy, you know what, She will claim that she didn't know any of the terrible stuff that was happening, but I mean exactly, Okay, but what Claire continues to be an apologist for Ranieri. It feels like and financed it, actually gave it allowed this organization to seemingly cross international lines, get more of the reach mount up a legal defense for him.
Where's the difference.
I'd say the difference is that Claire was truly indoctrinated.
Uh huh.
That Claire, someone who I think has a ninth grade education, who was very in a sense needy as the poor little rich girl who were nearly manipulated all those years. I agree she let her money be used for terrible things against other people. But when the thing got busted and she got arrested and she has terrible lawyers, she has never had a psychological evaluation. She has never had
any kind of counseling. We're here, you have Nancy Salzman on video, you know, like supposedly crying over her membership and her submission to him, which is pure bs as far as I'm concerned. But I can understand people being upset and angry. But here's where critical compassion comes in, because I do believe Claire is in a very different situation and that she would not still be a true believer if she had the right kind of care once she got an out of the snare.
So that that takes me to the next question though. Okay, so people who were perpetrated against in cult spaces, who become perpetrators, who are apologists even when the whole thing blows up they didn't get the help, but don't most of these people remain deeply resistant to getting the help, even when it's that you need to do this, you need to do that. Am I correct in understanding that there's a fair amount of resistance to doing that?
Or is that not the case?
I mean, I don't know if there's resistance on her part, and yet she is in general.
Well, sure of course there's going to be resistance initially.
That's why sometimes these things have to be court ordered in case where there's actually been arrest made or charges made. You know, that's the offensiveness, you know.
And they're going back to the issue of family members who are trying to support a family member who may have gotten, you know, into one of these systems or remains in a cult. Maybe if we could get them therapy, that family member is going to say.
No, no, no, no no.
They are enduring all of the coercion and the exploitation of being in a cult.
No no, no, no no.
And then some of them, even if the whole thing does manage to blow up, may still not be willing to receive what they need, like you said, the psycho education, the therapeutic work, whatever that looks like for any given individual.
It creates this incredibly frustrating space because using Claire Bronforn as example, as long as someone like Claire Bronfman is still going to believe in Ranieri's innocence and still have access to money, Thank goodness he's away for one hundred and plus years, because it feels like Heddy not been with her money, this whole thing would have started again.
Well, and I think the fact that they've been able to have contact and have contact with that crew on the outside, right, So my understanding is she is now cut off from him and from those other believers. That should help because all of that obviously was going to
keep reinforcing her in her closed mindedness. So if she isn't having contact with them, and if she is ordered by the court to go through an evaluation, and if they get the right people to talk with her and meet with her, I think there is hope that she'll see the light.
I guess it's a you know again, Doctor Fried would argue that betrayal blindness can be broken through that there is a point to somebody who shows it to you clearly, and you're not having those other kinds of conspiratorial voices in your ear that you might be able to see it. What I really want to talk about, because I think this is a really important thing for people to learn about, and I'm so happy to learn about this, is you have a new nonprofit, the Lales Center for Cults and Coercion.
Can you tell us about your new nonprofit and the work that this organization is doing.
Sure, I started the nonprofit because I'm about to be seventy eight years old, which is starting to seem old anyway. I realized that I have been doing all of this work all these years, both with families with survivors, you know, and also all the writing that I've done, and I want to make sure that there's some kind of legacy, you know, that I don't just fall down one day and it's all gone. So I have a team of people who are absolutely terrific. They're all survivors and with
various skills. Beth Mettneer is a trauma therapist who herself was in one of those awful boarding schools in the trouble teen industry and then when she got out, you know, eventually she went to university got her degree. So she's been a trauma therapist for like twenty five years, lots of experience. What I'm trying to do is provide resources to help survivors and families with courses, discussion groups, we have writing workshops, you know, all kinds of things like that.
We're going to do a course on sort of how cults basically take from mainstream religions and use it against their followers, which is actually could be a course for the general.
Public, yes, just prescribers.
Yes, So we're doing, you know, whatever we can. We've obtained our tax deductible status, so we'll be able to accept donations because we provide scholarships for almost all of our resources, because many many survivors don't have the means. And my hope is that by sort of training and doing professional develop with the core team and the new people that we're bringing on board, as time goes on, people will be able to, you know, carry on what I've been doing and reach even more people.
I think it's fantastic and I sometimes wonder in the era of social media and the way information people have no I mean there's a blessing to these open media platforms that people can get the word out, but there's also a danger of you know, now there's more ways to get the word out, and I actually think that we might see sort of a sad golden age of cults as people are able to do more of this
work and recruit using those mechanisms. What are some examples of cults or cult organizations that we may not typically think of as being cults.
Well, I once worked with someone who was in a dog training cult.
Hm, I get that.
Yeah.
So I think any kind of organization that has a tough leader, usually considered charismatic, that doesn't have clear lines of accountability, that doesn't have transparency, I think any organization like that can become a cult because you know, people get carried away with their power and they started using their power, and so you know, there's karate cults, certainly we've talked about.
There's yoga cults.
There's acting workshop cults for you guys in Hollywood, there's.
I've heard of those. Yeah, yeah, I mean right, multi.
Level multi level marketing absolutely, and of course, so many of these management and leadership training courses that people are sent to from work.
I mean all of that.
That started again back in the sixties and seventies, you know, with Lifespring and st and cyworld that has so mushroomed and so grown and so seeped into the business world. I mean millions, actually billion dollars are spent every year on those programs. Oh yeah, and employees are sent to them and they can't say no, I'm not going to go because their job is in jeopardy. So you know what I always say to people is do your research.
Like slow down.
If they tell you the guru is only going to be here today so that you can see him lift off the cushion in a yellow light, he'll be back. Don't worry and do your research. I mean, just like you were buying a car, you don't buy the first car you see, so look on. As much as cults are able to use the Internet and social media to recruit, there's also an enormous amount of information on the Internet about all of these groups and organizations and leaders and con artists and energy workers in this.
One and that one.
So check everything out before you sign on to something.
We're going to have people listening to this saying, you know what, about my dog training or my hot yoga studio, or my neighbor who keeps making me come to her supplement sales evenings or whatever. Is there a checklist or anything out there that people could use to sort of ask themselves.
Am I in a cult?
Well?
You know, the checklists are transparency, having your questions answered. Like if you ask questions and they say, oh, just come to one more workshop, then you can ask that question. By then you've forgotten the question, right, being able to challenge the leader, question the leader, knowing where the finances come from and where they go, you know, having lines of accountability, not using up all your time asking you to change things about yourself, change your name.
Things like that.
Yes, starting starting to strip away your identity.
You know.
I think all of those are kind of red flags. More than two thirds of people who get recruited are recruited by a friend, a family member, or worker.
That's what I was gonna ask.
So that's the rub, right, it's someone you know who is introducing you to something, and it's much harder for us to say no to someone we know.
So you know, just be on guard.
I swear to God, I don't want to say there's a cult under every bush, but I think there.
Is there's a lot of you know.
One of the things I've noticed too, is that there's a real pressure to recruit, you know, like bring in people that there could be a financial incentive to that, or even a congratulations to that, like you're doing right by the organization. Another thing I also noticed there's like step one, step two, step three, I want to be a step five, I want to be a step nine, or there'll be colors or metals or something associated with that each level up.
So's it's a bit of.
Carrot dangling and creating a greater buy in, and usually to advance in that organization is more and more money, deeper, deeper in doctrination. But I would also say it fosters a greater sense of belonging, you know, which is something I've noticed come up over and over with clients i've worked with, who are cult systems. What do you if there's one thing, what do you wish people understood more about cults?
Well?
I think for me, the one thing is that there's nothing wrong with the people who joined cults. I mean, I think the stigma for people who've been in a cult is still so rampant in our society, and it's why I do as much public education as I can. I mean, as much as I work with survivors, I so want the public and our societal institutions to understand just how clever these groups are and how there's absolutely nothing wrong with someone who gets enmeshed in one of
these and we need to have more compassion. We need to have more understanding. It's a miracle if it isn't you.
Yeah, no, I think that's it, and that more compassion. I say this about survivors of narcissistic abuse all the time, who are said, oh, come on, how bad could it be? And if it was that bad, why didn't you get out?
That's the question. Didn't exactly all of that.
So I love that, and I thank you for saying that, because I do think you know what ends up happening when people keep pathologizing the people who get into the cults, we actually take the heat off of what really should be scrutinized, which is the called leader and the cult organization. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with doctor Yanya.
In our first takeaway, almost every aspect of a cult system sounds like a narcissistic relationship, the expectation of unwavering and unquestioning loyalty, obedience, requiring a person to fully surrender themselves, praying on guilt, shame, anger, love, fear, control, eroding self trust, and tearing a person down and building them back in
a way the cult leader wants. And we know that it is difficult for people to break out of cults, that they will defend them while they are in them and find themselves changed and shaped in new and unrecognizable ways. It's similar to how it can feel impossible to leave a narcissistic relationship for a long time. These parallels are important for survivors to realize in order to foster self forgiveness and self compassion as they understand how imprisoning these
relationships and systems are. For this next takeaway, one element of doctor Yanya's experience in the cult and the painful story of her mother's death hit me after the interview, as she had to face up to such a callous lack of empathy in the face of her mother's passing from the cult. It was an eye opening moment, but interestingly, doctor Yanya focused on the idea that they were supposed to be building a better world, and if this is
what this looks like, then that is not okay. But after so much time of being made to ignore and deny her emotions, what she didn't share that jumped out at her is recognizing how badly she was being treated. Sometimes when we are in abusive relationships of any kind, we recognize intellectually what's wrong, but it can take longer to clearly see and feel that we are being emotionally harmed and to recognize that it is not okay for
our next takeaway. Many of the techniques that doctor Yanya suggests as useful for survivors coming out of cults are very similar to what works with survivors of narcissistic relationships, such as psycho education about how a cult works, giving yourself enough time to adjust to life outside of the cult system, and self forgiveness. She also frames recovery from a cult relationship as a recovery of emotion and learning
to emotionally respond to situations. Toxic relationships are places where emotions are shamed or not tolerated, and it takes a minute to learn that emotional vocabulary again or for the very first time. In this next takeaway. The concepts of bounded choice, self sealing systems, and.
The shelf are all really useful.
Tools that can help us understand what happens to people in narcissistically and other forms of emotionally abusive relationships. The shaming that often happens to people in narcissistic relationship why.
Didn't you just leave?
Doesn't account for how constrained choice can be when a person is being emotionally subjugated. We use the analogy of there being a door, but a person believing that the door is locked or not seeing it at all, and the manipulation inherent in an abusive relationship means that it is like the narcissistic relationship has its own weather and the distortion of reality that can make it feel like there is no escape. I really appreciated this concept of
the shelf. The betrayals and confusion and invalidations and harm don't get forgotten, but they get put on this shelf in the back of your mind until that moment when the shelf.
Breaks and you see it.
That is a painful, scary, but also liberating moment for any survivor of a toxic relationship, whether it is a cult or just a regular invalidating relationship. In our next takeaway, I really appreciated her perspective on critical compassion because it is really applicable to people who are trying to be supportive of someone who may be in a narcissistic relationship. The temptation is to tell someone to get out or
try to make them see what it really is. Her approach of critical compassion informs supporters that you don't need to get into an argument, but rather tap into the memories and your history with them and show them what life has looked like and what life could look like. Many times we don't know what to say to someone who is in a relationship that is emotionally harming them, and this concept of critical compassion gives.
Us tools for how to respond.
For our last takeaway, while there is no official checklist to determine whether an organization that you may be getting involved with is a cult, doctor Yanya offers some key points such as looking at transparency on how the organization is run and on the finances, their willingness to answer your questions without luring you into more classes and programs, your ability to be able to challenge the leader without being silenced or shamed, hard sells and asking you to
make decisions quickly. Lines of accountability if they mandate anything that shapes or undercuts or strips your identity, such as asking you to change your name. Pressure to recruit or draw in new members into the organization, m