In this episode, I sit down with author and author Steve Hassan to talk about his experiences growing up in a religious cult and how he became a writer and author. Steve talks about his experience growing up as a Jewish-American in the 60s and 70s, and why he believes that Judaism is a cult. I also talk about the history of cults and how they influence our understanding of the world, including the cults of the 80s and 90s. Finally, we talk about cults in general, and whether or not they are really a cult at all. This episode was produced and edited by Sarah Abdurrahman. Additional audio mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll and Alex Blumberg. Music by Ian Dorsch. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. If you like what you hear, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Rate/subscribe and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast! I'll be listening to it on Anchor.fm/TheCult of Mac Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. and comment down below. Thank you for rating and review the podcast if you're a supporter of Cult of Mccartan. Subscribe, review and subscribe to Cult of Mac! and share the podcast with your fellow cultists! and spread the word to your friends about Cult of the cult of the Cult of The Mac by clicking on social media? I'm looking out for cults everywhere! The cult of The Cult of Mc? I hope you like cults are a cult of Mac? and I'm listening to cults that have a cults like that too! Cheers, Mac, Mac's being Mac, The Cult Of The Mac, the Cult Of Mac and Mac's Being Apple? - The cults being Apple, Mac Subscribe and share it on your podcast, Mac being Mac? Subscribe to Cultof The Mac is being Apple's Cult of A cults Being Apple, the cult? And so much so that I can be a good cult, Mac is a good thing, and I can't help it's a good place to be helpful, and so on and so much more! - Mac's cults?
00:00:03.000Well, my understanding is back in the old days.
00:00:06.000It was Sam the Butcher and Joe the Barber, and my great-grandfather was a chazan, which is a singer of holy songs, like a cantor would be the term now.
00:00:17.000And when my grandfather came to Ellis Island, he didn't speak English, and they wrote it up as H-A-S-S-A-N. And so I've lived my life being thought of as an Arab, Being persecuted at times by Jews.
00:00:30.000I'm actually Jewish and I belong to a Jewish.
00:00:50.000They would look at me, and then they'd say, you don't look Sephardic, I'm Ashkenazi, but anyway, you know, like, act with some dignity and compassion and kindness.
00:01:03.000It's not like you did something anti-Semitic, right?
00:01:06.000The first time I was actually physically assaulted was during the Six Day War back in the 60s when I was in elementary school on a stairwell in Queens, New York.
00:01:18.000You were assaulted because of your ethnicity?
00:01:20.000I was assaulted by Jews who thought I was an Arab.
00:01:54.000You wrote a book, Combating Cult Mind Control.
00:01:59.000I got ahold of you because of my friend Nate Quarry, who used to fight for the UFC, and he is one who connected me to you, and he was a Jehovah's Witness for a while.
00:02:35.000So first, let me just say that book first came out in 1988, and it had a fellow on the front cover who looked a little bit like you, but clean-shaven, and he had a padlock and a chain around his forehead.
00:02:55.000And anyway, it's been out for 25, 27 years now in hardback, and I've finally bought the rights back, and I've updated it post-Internet, including terrorists and human trafficking, and including people born into cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses.
00:03:53.000Of ethical influence and unethical influence.
00:03:57.000And the idea is that one can look at specific behavioral components and determine whether or not it's a destructive cult or a benign cult or a constructive cult.
00:04:09.000So the word cult in and of itself tends to be pejorative, but...
00:04:13.000As someone who was quoted in the book called The Cult of Mac as a disciple, myself, in the book.
00:04:25.000I was literally interviewed by this writer who actually has a website called The Cult of Mac, and he said, my editor said I have to interview you.
00:04:34.000And I said, what about writing a book about computers?
00:04:45.000I said, I've been using Apple since 1982, and I have five Macs right now.
00:04:49.000But if you still want me to do an interview, I'll be happy to.
00:04:51.000I do believe that people there are certain people that are in a cult of Mac a hundred percent I noticed it in the 90s when I was on news radio all the people on the staff all the people that work behind the scenes they would get so excited when a new OS operating system came out Apple OS and they would talk about it like we've got a new one now it's gonna be better than Windows it's gonna be amazing yeah there's a science as a social science to creating a cult but again I cite the byte model and cite that you know If there's
00:05:22.000deception, so there's lack of informed consent, if there's extreme use of fear and guilt, if there's information control where people are being told you can't talk to critics or defectors or you need to cut off from family or friends who are questioning you, I'm concerned about human rights.
00:05:39.000I think the easiest way to understand what I do as a former cult member myself, it's really in support of the United Nations Union.
00:05:46.000Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:05:52.000You are anti-negative cults that have a detrimental effect on a person's life.
00:05:57.000Yeah, and I would actually blow the frame up a little bit bigger, since I've been doing this work for 39 years, and I would say I'm against undue influence.
00:06:08.000It's a legal term for exploitative influence as compared to ethical influence where like a therapist is trying to help somebody to confront their fears or his influence of helping somebody who is addicted to something that's that's killing them.
00:06:25.000But wouldn't you put a lot of religions in that category then that classification of undue influence?
00:06:34.000The answer is there are Jewish cults, for sure, and there are lots of other Jewish temples and affiliations that are not destructive cults.
00:08:25.000So would you say that by doing this, being involved in an organized religion, An ancient organized religion in a sect that you feel is positive.
00:08:35.000Would it be just more of a community of philosophy and maybe just a nice group of people that like to philosophize?
00:08:46.000Well, it is a nice group of people, and we are independent, although we're influenced by the renewal movement of Zalman Shakhtar Sholomi.
00:09:21.000It's not about putting other people down to be on your path.
00:09:25.000It's about awareness and consciousness.
00:09:29.000Well, that sounds like a very healthy perspective.
00:09:32.000I don't think I would be part of a spiritual community after everything I've been through that wasn't super healthy and giving me more than I was taking from me.
00:09:41.000Are you allowed to eat bacon in that group?
00:10:35.000Some people in Boston call it a cult, and I'm a happily say I've been there for 17 years from the very beginning of his invitation to become a rabbi there.
00:10:47.000And we've had our ups and downs, but it's healthy, it's accountable, the membership makes the agenda, it's not top-down, you know, a dictatorship-type thing, it's the membership.
00:11:20.000You know, human beings, we're, you know, imperfect.
00:11:24.000And the key is, you know, if somebody calls you on your shit, That you step back and you listen and you reflect and you either correct your behavior or you don't.
00:11:37.000And if you don't and if you're a part of a community like that in a leadership role, then they ask you to leave.
00:11:44.000And so that was what was going on there?
00:11:47.000In that particular case, I think she wanted more say-so.
00:11:52.000She didn't want to be the assistant rabbi.
00:12:16.000See, it's so weird to me that you're like an anti-cult guy, but this is clearly, at the very least, a very strong ideology with some pretty rigid sort of classifications of things.
00:12:53.000For me, I just want to grow, and I like being part of a group that's bigger than myself, particularly one that's interested in Helping Boston where members of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization where we're fighting for justice to raise minimum wage to help Get rid of egregious banking fees on immigrants.
00:13:16.000We bring in pro-Palestinian peace activists to speak.
00:13:21.000We bring in Steve Hassan to speak about cults.
00:13:26.000We do all kinds of interesting programming.
00:13:33.000And on a personal note, when I had cancer nine years ago, At Hodgkin's Lymphoma, people were offering to drive me to the hospital, make us meals, and it was just great to feel like we weren't alone facing that.
00:13:50.000That's great, and that's what I always hear from people that are in Christian churches that really, really enjoy it.
00:13:57.000They really enjoy the community, and they really enjoy the bond that they have with all these folks, and that it seems like coming together and sitting together on Sunday or whenever you do it and worshiping, That really, in fact, part of what's going on there is you're all making this sort of agreement to look at the possibility of there being a higher good for all of us and that you all join together in this.
00:14:20.000And then you get this bonding, this feeling of community that we kind of don't really have that much in this world.
00:14:27.000A lot of folks don't know their neighbors.
00:14:30.000I have a buddy who lives in an apartment building.
00:14:42.000And that's part of what needs to be changed, in my opinion, to make the world a healthier place where people do know their neighbors and they do offer help if somebody needs help.
00:14:54.000Well, that's the beauty of small towns.
00:14:56.000The beauty of less people is those people get appreciated more.
00:15:34.000I also think that, you know, modern culture and civilization and technology has created a false construct of what's important and what's real, where beingness and being part of a family or a community or a tribe Mattered as a central theme of our identity.
00:15:57.000Now it's consumerism and what status you have at your job or how much you're making or what car you're driving and where you're going on vacation.
00:16:07.000And this information overload and sleep deprivation that is very troubling.
00:16:18.000It's probably one of the most studied phenomenon, the effects on the mind and on the brain, lack of sleep.
00:16:26.000And it's one of the classic techniques used by destructive cults, by the way, sleep deprivation.
00:16:32.000But if one analyzes American society, my understanding is that the average American is sleep deprived.
00:16:39.000Isn't that one of the things that Scientology supposedly does to those folks that they have that work for pennies, what do they call them, the C-Core?
00:17:42.000The Scientologist will tell you, oh, Joe, you just licked your lips or your knee quivered.
00:17:48.000No, you've got to just freeze for 20 minutes.
00:17:51.000It's creating an altered state of consciousness known as trance.
00:17:55.000And I know we're going to talk more about trance, I'm sure.
00:17:59.000There's nothing wrong with trance states, but when you're in a trance state you're more suggestible to someone who has authority and who has an agenda to implant ideas in your head.
00:18:12.000Because you're not in your critical analytic part of your mind.
00:18:17.000So just sitting for 20 minutes with your hands on your lap and your feet flat would lead you to be more influenced by someone's suggestions?
00:18:44.000And the next one after that is bull baiting, where you have to stare straight forward and the Scientologist tries to get you to react or respond.
00:19:01.000They're desensitizing people from normal social cues and interactions, and they're cultivating a compliant, obedient, trans identity as a Scientologist.
00:19:17.000I didn't know that just staring at someone, just staring into someone's eyes can create an altered state of consciousness.
00:19:22.000A bunch of kids are going to listen to this.
00:19:24.000Actually staring at a candle, staring at a spot on a wall, that's known in hypnosis language as an eye fixation technique, is a very, very common technique for inducing an altered state of consciousness.
00:20:16.000I don't have somebody who's alienating me from my own inner voice and my own self and trying to imprint me with a totalistic ideology that's black and white, us versus them, good versus evil.
00:21:07.000Yeah, I was wanting an ideal world and looking around at what I saw in the media and the Russians were going to nuke us and already I was sensitized to global climate change way back then.
00:21:21.000I was in the last draft lottery to go to Vietnam.
00:21:24.000Anyway, I had been basically dumped by my girlfriends at 19. Chicks.
00:21:32.000And I was kind of bummed, and I was sitting in the cafeteria waiting for the new semester to start, and three women, pretending to be students, dressed like students, carrying books like students, asked if they can share my table, and they started asking me about the books that I had for my course.
00:26:10.000And not only that, but later when I got recruited into the group, I was told to drop out of Queens College from the cult sent back to Queens College to start a student group on campus to get people into the student group so they would drop out of Queens College.
00:27:01.000They were cute, and they were very flirtatious.
00:27:04.000They didn't say, by the way, masturbation is a sin, and Father's going to line us up with thousands of people in the sign who you're going to marry, and you have to wait four years to have sex with them.
00:28:16.000It's all about saving the person's soul and step-by-step incremental recruitment, finding out as much as you can about the person, saying almost nothing about what you are about and what the group is about.
00:28:32.000Unlike you, I wasn't particularly vulnerable at the time.
00:28:35.000So it was a good time for them to get after me.
00:28:38.000Because I was in the middle of some pretty intense stuff.
00:28:44.000I was gonna get roped up in some religion.
00:28:47.000But if they got me a couple years earlier, I think they could have got me.
00:28:51.000I was real vulnerable when I was like 18. So the reality is, as human beings, we have life cycle events where we're situationally vulnerable.
00:29:01.000Death of a loved one, breakup of a relationship, you know, moving to a new city, state or country, illness.
00:29:09.000There are things that every human being goes through.
00:29:12.000And for me, it's an overwhelming ignorance of the public to kind of blame the victims.
00:29:19.000Like, you were stupid for believing in this.
00:29:26.000As opposed to, tell me about your experience and tell me what happened.
00:29:33.000You know, there's a principle in social psychology called the fundamental attribution error.
00:29:39.000I know that's a lot of syllables, but it basically is the single most important principle of social psychology.
00:29:47.000And what it means is, what I was basically saying before, when people try to understand why other people are doing what they do, they over-attribute individual variables and they under-attribute social environmental variables.
00:30:02.000Social environment variables are gigantic.
00:30:17.000It's accumulation of data and the understanding of the relationships between events, reactions, and consequences.
00:30:24.000And when you're 18 years old, you don't have a lot of data.
00:30:27.000You only have a few things that are going on.
00:30:29.000And for me when I was 18, it was the breakup of me and this girl that I was dating and all of a sudden becoming a man, being responsible, having to go to college or get some sort of a job or some sort of a career and just the overwhelming possibilities of the future.
00:30:48.000And not having any clue as to how it was all going to play out.
00:30:52.000And if someone came along right then, I feel like they could have got me.
00:30:56.000I feel like I was real vulnerable around 18. When I met this hot Puerto Rican girl, I think I was about 20. And I was pretty determined at that time.
00:31:20.000That's very important because there's a lot of different things that can lock you in and then start to control you and start to suck money off of you and start to really dictate your behavior in a very unhealthy way.
00:31:49.000We've experienced a revolution in science and medicine and in psychology, and in particular social psychology.
00:31:59.000There's been so many, you know, pivotal experiments in the last 50 to 100 years that give us windows into understanding our vulnerabilities.
00:32:09.000So, for example, when I'm counseling someone who's involved with a destructive cult, I don't start out by saying, hey, you're in a cult, let me liberate you or something.
00:32:18.000In fact, my whole approach is empowering people to think for themselves.
00:32:21.000So I ask them questions with respect, because I really want them to think about it.
00:32:28.000In any case, I show them the Ash Conformity Study, Solomon-Ash.
00:32:34.000So the Solomon-Ash Conformity Study was framed to the people coming into it as a visual perception experiment.
00:32:43.000Basically, they'd be brought into a room with several people in a semi-circle, and there'd be a person in the front with a card with four lines on it, a sample line, And then three other lines of different sizes.
00:32:59.000Let's say a three inch sample line, a three inch, a four inch, and a five inch.
00:33:03.000But everyone is in on the experiment except the person in seat six.
00:33:08.000And after going around twice giving the correct answer, everyone confidently starts giving the wrong same answer.
00:33:16.000And the test is how many people will start to conform To giving the wrong answer, even though they can see with their own eyes what the correct answer is.
00:33:27.000And that study's been replicated thousands of times, and the answer is two-thirds start giving the wrong answer, even though they know intellectually that it's the wrong answer because it feels too uncomfortable to be in the room.
00:33:43.000And is that the testimony that they give when they're asked?
00:33:46.000I'm assuming they interview these people.
00:33:51.000And I even show a Dateline, an old Dateline episode, where they asked Anthony Practicanis, who's one of the foremost social psychologists, to actually do the study so they could film it.
00:34:01.000And they start out with this Asian woman who is the heroic resistor.
00:34:07.000Who gives the correct answer, but she's grimacing as she's giving the wrong answer, even though she knows it's the right answer.
00:34:14.000But because of the social forces, we have mirror neurons we want to fit into the people in the room.
00:34:30.000So I show that video, that experiment.
00:34:33.000And I always like to ask people, so tell me something you could do if you were in that situation to scientifically reality test that situation.
00:34:45.000Scientifically reality test, meaning what?
00:35:30.000So anyway, after the Ash Conformity Study, the Milgram Obedience Study, Stanley Milgram did a test.
00:35:36.000At the time, the dominant theory in psychology for explaining how the Nazis could do what they did was called the Authoritarian Personality.
00:35:46.000And Milgram said, I wonder if Americans would do the very same thing.
00:35:50.000And he developed this ingenious shock box, which really was a set of switches that had no electricity at all, but it sounded electrical.
00:35:59.000And he basically would bring people in, tell them they're doing a scientific experiment that's very important, that tests memory and punishment and learning.
00:36:09.000And set people up into a situation where they thought they were giving an electrical shock to the person in the next room, and it was all tape recorded, and it would increase 15 volts from mild to moderate to severe to extreme to XXXX. And there'd be a guy in a white lab coat acting very proper who happened to be a high school teacher who was moonlighting for a few extra bucks.
00:36:38.000And the test was how many people would electrocute a fellow human being in an hour because an authority figure told them they had to because they had made a commitment to do a scientific experiment.
00:36:53.000Yeah, I saw a radio lab, or listened rather to a radio lab podcast on that very thing.
00:37:01.000In fact, there's a movie that's coming out about it called The Experimenter.
00:37:06.000And the next study that I'm about to mention, the movie just came out a week or two ago called The Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo, who is one of my mentors.
00:37:16.000I was trying to get him on the podcast, but I was out of the country when he wanted to come on.
00:37:38.000So in his experiment, he randomly divided guys into guards and prisoners, and he did basically control behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions.
00:37:49.000And people started having nervous breakdowns, and some of the guards started becoming sadistic.
00:37:54.000And instead of saying, you know what, I don't want to do the experiment anymore, they had gotten so sucked into the experience that their only out was to have a nervous breakdown.
00:38:10.000So when I'm helping people understand what happens in the Scientology cult, the Mooney cult, the TM cult, or any number of other destructive cults, I want them to first...
00:38:44.000So, the answer is you don't need to be in a room with other people to be in a mind control cult, but it can get inside your head and create a new cult identity that suppresses your real identity and it's not healthy.
00:39:00.000Well, I have a very cursory understanding of Transcendental Meditation, so if you could, please tell me what exactly does that mean?
00:39:08.000So, and I have the story of a woman who was raised in TM in Chapter 6 of the new book, Gina Catania.
00:39:16.000So first of all, there's a thousand or more ways to meditate, and there's not one way to meditate.
00:39:43.000The point is that it's a tool for training consciousness.
00:39:48.000And ultimately, depending on your level of training, you want to not be a victim of your thoughts or your feelings.
00:39:55.000You want to not only develop a perspective and a wisdom approach, In consciousness, you want to also get out of the entire frame of self-dialogue and total beingness.
00:40:08.000But any group that says you have to do it our way or else, or if you're having bad reactions, they say that's good, you're unstressing, keep doing it.
00:40:18.000Is that what Transcendental Meditation says?
00:40:20.000Well, when you say bad reactions, how so?
00:40:23.000Ticks, headaches, barking like a dog, I've heard from some people who are meditating.
00:40:34.000Persinger wrote a book about TM and some of the negative after effects.
00:40:40.000And what you need to understand about a destructive cult is that there are many levels.
00:40:46.000If you're just doing a meditation and you're not doing the advanced and the next advanced and then becoming celibate.
00:40:54.000Oh, that's all in Transcendental Meditation as well?
00:40:57.000And Maharishi was saying if they didn't have 40,000 cities, which meant people were hopping around thinking they were levitating, that the world would blow up.
00:41:09.000So he was using the whole fear trip thing to raise a lot of money to get people to be these devotees.
00:43:09.000But the thing is, emotions, if you're having doubts or if you're having bad feelings, it's telling you to look at what's happening and maybe you need to make a change.
00:43:23.000But if you're in the TM movement and you're having bad feelings about the group, you're told that you need to meditate to get rid of that.
00:45:36.000Now, before he gave that speech, we were singing holy songs for three hours.
00:45:43.000That's after watching this crazy Exorcist movie.
00:45:47.000And I only remembered the Exorcist movie four years after I got out of the cult and I was studying psychology and we were learning about phobias.
00:45:57.000And I was thinking back, so how was I installed with phobias?
00:46:03.000And then I remembered this movie and this lecture.
00:46:32.000How can an intelligent person from an intact family who is gonna be a professional writer and be a college professor get sucked into a cult that wants to take over the world, make an automatic theocracy, abolish Satanic democracy.
00:46:55.000It was literally what we were pretty much told by Moon that, you know, we needed to reclaim the earth for God, not unlike ISIS and a few other cults out there.
00:47:09.000I was told the Holocaust was necessary because the Jews didn't accept Jesus.
00:47:15.000I had been educated about the Holocaust.
00:47:18.000I had been to Israel to the Holocaust Museum.
00:47:22.000When you heard that, what was your reaction?
00:50:50.000But my point being is, if they were not much older than you, if at all, and they were also victims of the same ideology, cult, whatever you want to call it, why would they be looking to manipulate you?
00:51:04.000So members were taught to believe, as they still are, that the world is headlong into an Armageddon situation of any moment.
00:51:15.000Judgment Day is happening and as much as you can to bring people into God and save their soul.
00:51:23.000Saving a person in the moon is meant saving 10 generations of their father's ancestors that are in the spirit world and their mother's ancestors in the spirit world.
00:51:33.000And they're all looking at you all the time Hoping you're going to make good decisions because if you do good things for God, you're going to make good vitality elements that will feed them in the spirit world.
00:51:48.000And every cult has its own convoluted yet internally totalistic system.
00:51:58.000But unlike Scientology, the Moonies are like, save others.
00:52:02.000Scientology is like, you know, become a god and control everybody.
00:52:06.000Control matter, energy, space, and time.
00:52:10.000Get people to do what you want them to do.
00:53:13.000You were only in it for two years, so this had to be a very quick transition from you, Steve Hassan, normal college student, to boom, full-on fasting for Nixon.
00:53:49.000Now, for some of my clients, they're literally at a vulnerable point in their life, maybe they're religious, and they're praying, Dear God, tell me what to do.
00:54:00.000And the next thing they know, the doorbell is ringing, and it's the Jehovah's Witnesses who want to study the Bible, and they're like, Misattributing thinking God just rang the doorbell as opposed to these people are going ringing every single doorbell within a six block.
00:54:38.000They're swinging at every pitch, essentially.
00:54:40.000They're knocking on every door, and every now and then they get that one ball that's in the strike zone, and that's Steve Hassan sitting there with his pile of books.
00:54:49.000Well, in my case, so I went to this three-day workshop.
00:55:03.000And after two years of working at the Holiday Inn in Hempstead as a banquet waiter on the weekends, I call up to find out when I'm supposed to report in, and he says, Steve, you won't believe it, but the wedding was canceled, so take the weekend off.
00:55:19.000And I had just had these women working on me all week, and I was like, well, maybe I'm meant to...
00:55:26.000Well, I did give them my word, but I gave them my word thinking I was never going to have a weekend off.
00:55:33.000And then I was kind of like, well, maybe I'm meant to go.
00:56:14.000And all of a sudden now I'm on the defensive.
00:56:17.000But there were no cell phones back then in 1974. It's the middle of the night.
00:56:24.000I have an option of getting out in the snow and trying to hitchhike.
00:56:30.000I'm like, what am I... Well, just wait for the morning.
00:56:34.000Just stay here and we'll drive you back in the morning.
00:56:37.000They slither around your bed like sirens while you sleep.
00:56:39.000Well, I was in a room where I wasn't sleeping.
00:56:44.000Yeah, so you've learned a little hypnosis there, Joe.
00:56:50.000In any case, the morning comes, the van has left, now you're fucked.
00:56:56.000Well, let's just go in and see what you think.
00:56:58.000And it was all orchestrated, because I later learned how to orchestrate it.
00:57:03.000And how many people were in there with you that were also new recruits?
00:57:08.000So that was another trick, a little bit of a scam, because they had people there that were acting like they were newcomers, but they weren't.
00:57:47.000So Moon himself was apparently in a cult in North Korea, and it turns out that most cult leaders were in a cult themselves, so they didn't learn the techniques out of thin air.
00:57:58.000But the interesting thing about my former cult...
00:58:01.000Was that the CIA set up the Korean CIA, because there had been two coups in South Korea to that point, and they were very worried about North Korean brainwashing, and they thought, you know, we need to do something to stabilize South Korea.
00:58:19.000So they had this brilliant idea of creating a private group that would help to re-educate political dissonance.
00:58:30.000And I only know about this because there was a Koreagate investigation from 76 to 78 where the founder of the Korean CIA was interviewed and he said he, quote, organized and utilized the Unification Church for use as a political tool,
01:00:23.000And I'm like, if you promise not to tell the parents, I can arrange it because I'm a leader.
01:00:29.000And she promised and fortunately she broke her promise and she told my parents and they hired some ex-members and they did a deprogramming intervention with me.
01:01:07.000But at the point that I said I want to leave and they wouldn't let me leave, I could have been something about false imprisonment.
01:01:15.000But the long and the short of it is I was so confident that what I was doing was correct and that I wasn't brainwashed.
01:01:23.000And at a critical juncture where they were moving locations because the cult was coming after me to rescue me, my father weeped.
01:01:32.000He just started crying and said, what would you do if it was your son who dropped out of school, quit his job and donated his bank account and got involved with a controversial group?
01:02:18.000And I had this four days where they were teaching me about thought reform and the psychology of totalism, which was a book by Robert J. Lifton about Chinese Communist brainwashing of the 50s.
01:02:29.000I had all of these experiences that were starting to surface that had been suppressed during my leadership.
01:02:37.000It's the same mechanism that allows people to be inspired, the same mechanism that allows people to be manipulated.
01:02:43.000You know, that mechanism being you see something, there's something about it that makes you excited.
01:02:49.000Like a great performance, a great concert, or an athletic performance where you get out of there, you just feel inspired.
01:02:56.000A great book that inspires you, it manipulates your brainwaves, it manipulates your consciousness.
01:03:02.000And it steers you in a certain direction.
01:03:05.000Is that same sort of mechanism that allows people to be influenced by others what allows people to be manipulated by others in this form, where you can actually literally change the way they think and view the world?
01:03:16.000That's a big piece of it, I would say.
01:03:18.000Is it sort of a flaw in the beautiful thing about inspiration?
01:03:26.000Well, I think you need to have the analytic part of your mind and a consciousness that just because it sounds great and looks great doesn't mean that it isn't great.
01:03:58.000You know, it's like there's those moments.
01:04:00.000I grew up with watching combat on TV and just, you know, anti-Nazi and, you know, that I don't mean I really wanted to fight.
01:04:09.000What I'm trying to get at is when you see things and when information and data gets into your mind, it influences you in this very strange way that can be positive and it can be inspirational, like whether it's seeing Michael Jordan put on an incredible performance or Ronda Rousey beating someone.
01:04:28.000Those moments where someone does something truly great and it's fuel for you.
01:04:46.000I talk about, in the book, like a virus that gets in and corrupts your operating system.
01:04:52.000You still have your original one, but now this malware has been inserted, and now you're working.
01:04:58.000You think that it's you, and I thought it was Steve, just the true Steve.
01:05:04.000And that the old Steve was the fallen Steve.
01:05:08.000But stepping back and getting perspective and seeing the patterns of mind control and manipulation in other groups and then reflecting back on your own experience is one of the basic tenets of what I do in my work,
01:05:25.000helping family members to rescue loved ones or helping people who were either born in a cult or recruited into a cult.
01:05:32.000So in a sense, this experience that you had when you were 19 was incredibly beneficial for your career.
01:07:03.000I had a belief, and this is very common, and I want to touch on Stefan Molyneux, which is how I learned about you, seeing your interview with him.
01:07:13.000But I believed I had an abused childhood.
01:07:17.000It was part of how they conditioned this new cult identity, suppressed my old identity, was they poisoned me against my past and recoded everything.
01:07:28.000So what did they tell you happened about your childhood?
01:07:32.000It wasn't that someone stood over me and told me, but it was part of the whole indoctrination system, listening to other people talking about abuses in their families, etc.
01:07:45.000But I literally, when I first got out of the group, I thought I was miserable, depressed, that my father was physically abusive.
01:07:53.000And when I said to my sister, well, dad was physically abusive, she went, what?
01:08:04.000But did you have an actual image in your mind of your father doing it?
01:08:07.000So I had one real memory that everything else was built off of, and it was an actual event that happened.
01:08:15.000I think I was 11 or 12. My father wanted to know where the change was for lunch, and I had bought baseball cards or something, and I lied, and my father slapped my face.
01:08:28.000That was the one time my father hit me.
01:08:35.000And my sisters were like, Dad never hit us because his father beat the crap out of him.
01:08:41.000Dad's issue wasn't he didn't want to hug us or hold us, but Dad was not physically abusive.
01:08:47.000So just one moment where he lost his patience with you and you...
01:08:51.000Just formed false memories based on that right and what what Scientology does is they have you go back and and and remember abuse from the past But then once you're done remembering whatever happened then you go into your past lives to remember all the abuse.
01:09:07.000That's where it's really And it keeps going on and on.
01:09:10.000But don't they, when they're doing that, in that auditing process, aren't they trying to get you to let it go?
01:09:15.000Like, isn't the idea that you repeat a traumatic event so many times that it means nothing to you?
01:09:21.000Like, if you've ever been around someone who doesn't swear, like your grandma or something like that, and she says, fuck, you're like, whoa!
01:10:01.000Qualitative difference between desensitization around a word or something and actually trauma processing.
01:10:07.000Harvard was using a very old model of catharsis, that you have to remember the abuse and you have to re-experience the abuse over and over and over again.
01:10:17.000And that's been thrown out by the mental health profession decades ago.
01:10:26.000Having them suffer the experience over and over and over again.
01:10:30.000If I want to help someone who's been abused, I tell them you have to be in your body, in the here and now, and you have a window or a TV screen seeing the younger you.
01:10:45.000And I don't want them to have associated memories.
01:10:49.000I want them to know that they're safe, that that did happen, but it's just incorrect to think the brain and the emotions are a battery and all you need to do is drain it and then it's gone.
01:11:30.000We opened this up by talking about different types of cults.
01:11:34.000And if any ideology that's black and white and that you're trying to compress human experience into the ideology is worrisome because no model is true.
01:11:58.000So in the last few years I've been trained in a form of attachment therapy where People who have personality disorders, which were hitherto believed to be permanent,
01:12:13.000can actually be cured in two to three years.
01:12:16.000And the technique is basically using hypnotherapy technique where you're asking the person to go back to a key traumatic moment in their childhood and asking them to imagine if they had the ideal mother or the ideal father that was uniquely suited to them.
01:12:35.000And they did exactly what you wanted them to do in that situation.
01:12:40.000And ask their imagination to fill in the scene.
01:12:46.000The person literally can create a positive reference point of safety Of security, of love, of connection, all the things that children need to experience to have a healthy sense of self.
01:13:05.000And people know that they were abused.
01:13:10.000But they're reparenting, to use another term.
01:13:13.000They're internally using their imagination.
01:13:18.000And what is now proven neuroscientifically is there's neurogenesis and neuroplasticity to the point where people can know that they were abused, remember it, but they can act as if they had that healthy mother and their healthy father and a healthy childhood.
01:14:03.000But they're no longer walking around Bleeding all over the place, afraid to trust somebody, having self-doubt, unable to touch and have sexual contact that feels good, because they've created these reference experiential states for themselves.
01:14:23.000Now these reference experiential states that they create, these theories and these practices of therapy, someone has to invent these.
01:14:35.000Like someone has to look at the problems, they have to figure out what's the best way to approach these things and come up with an idea and hope that it works.
01:14:41.000And as you said, there's like the L. Ron Hubbard methods that he was using that were really ancient.
01:14:48.000They thought that was going to work and it didn't work.
01:14:50.000Yeah, and he was never a mental health professional, but he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, and they did call it a religion to try to...
01:15:20.000In my case, I was out of the cult for four years when I first saw a formal hypnotist do a trance on somebody, and my reaction was, I used to do that when I was doing lectures.
01:15:36.000Like, I had no awareness that I had been taught to do hypnotic methods.
01:15:41.000I was told to model the older brothers, and it was kind of a behavioral modeling kind of thing.
01:15:50.000And I started wanting to learn hypnosis.
01:15:53.000I wanted to understand what it was, what it wasn't, how to do it ethically.
01:15:59.000And essentially, there has been a lot of trial and error and a lot of people have gotten hurt by the misuse of it.
01:16:06.000But if you're in a professional organization where there's a strict code of ethics...
01:16:12.000Where there are clear boundaries and people can trust that you're there just to help them.
01:16:19.000It's not about keeping you as a client forever.
01:16:24.000It's like the faster you can get out of treatment and just live your life, the happier the therapist is.
01:16:30.000And the more you can teach the person about how And how to know themselves and how to control their feelings or control their thoughts, etc., the better.
01:16:40.000What is happening right now in Europe, because of socialized medicine, is they really are testing a lot of these approaches and demonstrating that people, for example, with narcissistic personality disorder actually get cured after two to three years.
01:17:05.000But coming back to my work, when I was first doing this work and I was struck by people who were saying, but you were recruited at 19. You had an identity before.
01:17:36.000So they make up a successful, happy, positive childhood.
01:17:42.000Free of this ridiculous, confining ideology.
01:17:44.000Well, it's like if your real life is this storyline, and you create an alternate one that you use as a default, where instead of a parent beating you when you're asking for help,
01:18:48.000It's not like there's any hard, fast method for definitely curing people of weird psychological ailments or cult-like thinking.
01:18:55.000I think the human species is evolving.
01:18:59.000I think we're at a very low level of evolution in terms of our understanding of things.
01:19:08.000People are able to get out of the most horrendous abuse of childhoods and be functional and not just commit suicide or be drug addicts or be psychotic in a mental ward, but they're able to function.
01:19:23.000And what we're learning about the brain is just wonderful.
01:19:28.000I'm excited about the future in terms of that.
01:19:31.000That said, There's a huge potential for abuse of the techniques.
01:19:35.000By you saying that you don't like doing it, is it just because it's too taxing on you?
01:19:41.000Or is it because you really wish that this wasn't something that you really needed to do?
01:19:47.000Yeah, I mean, we can all sort of empathize with that.
01:19:52.000Of course, anybody who has children will look at, if you love your children, you look at people who were abused as children or abused especially by their parents, and it's just this unbelievably painful thing to hear.
01:20:05.000Forget about witness or be a part of, but to hear about someone being beaten by their parents or abused in some sort of a way.
01:20:13.000I had my friend Barry Crimmins on the podcast yesterday.
01:20:17.000Great stand-up comedian from Boston, and he has a new movie that's out today.
01:20:21.000It's called Call Me Lucky that Bob Goldthwait directed.
01:20:46.000You know, I mean, this trauma has sort of like defined him in some ways and strengthened him in other ways that his ability to overcome it, showing his perseverance.
01:20:58.000And often people who've been suffering a trauma like that, if they become comedians, they're compensating to try to counterbalance the pain.
01:21:12.000Because that would be someone who'd be vulnerable for someone who, you know, would have some reaching for a utopian view of the world or some better way, because you know the horror of the abuse, right?
01:21:26.000Yeah, so the truth is that the bigger cults don't want people who are seriously emotionally disturbed.
01:23:19.000It's amazing when you go over L. Ron Hubbard's past and how absolutely ridiculous it was.
01:23:24.000How many times he lied about things, all the nonsense that he said, and all the different times he was caught lying, and all the different people in his life that he would just make up crazy stories about being this World War II hero.
01:24:16.000And we debunked not only Hubbard, but the entire policies inside the organization.
01:24:24.000I was explaining mind control, and it's going to be made live on the internet that people can watch.
01:24:32.000The reason that he did this and why I encouraged him to do this was people were leaving David Miscavige's Church of Scientology but starting their own splinter group of Scientology where they were still idolizing Hubbard and still doing the tech and we wanted to debunk the whole thing from start to finish and I think it was done very masterfully.
01:24:56.000So, they were starting, like, subgroups where they came up with their own stuff?
01:25:00.000No, they were doing, they were taking, they were on automatic pilot of all the indoctrinations.
01:25:04.000He's trying to get you to bring that microphone closer up to your face.
01:25:11.000So, for example, the number two man and number three man, Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, had left the group and were spilling all the secrets of what, you know, all the criminal activities that were being done.
01:25:22.000They were creating independent Scientologists and trying to keep doing auditing and keep doing the processing.
01:25:30.000And it's like, dudes, come on, like, wake up.
01:26:12.000If anyone listening wants to know about Scientology, it's TonyOrtega.org.
01:26:16.000He wrote a book called The Unbreakable Miss Lovely about Paulette Cooper, who was a friend of mine when I left the Moonies in 1976. She wrote a book called The Scandal of Scientology.
01:26:27.000And the book is all about her life story and how this group harassed the hell out of her.
01:27:46.000They do all the bite model, the behavior control, information control, thought control, emotional control, make people over into a new identity and they are dependent and obedient.
01:27:57.000And I've co-developed a curriculum to help survivors to end the game to understand because that's what pimps call what they do, the game.
01:28:08.000So to basically understand that they don't love You know, the women in their stable, that they're products for exploitation, and the only way to win the game is to end it and get out and have a life.
01:28:23.000It's fascinating that you equate those, because it makes sense, but I've never done it before.
01:28:27.000I've never put it in my head and thought of a pimp and a prostitute being like the pimp runs a cult.
01:28:32.000So, if you read some of the manuals online by pimps, how to brainwash the hose, is their terminology for women, I actually tell the story in Chapter 6 of Rachel Thomas who was recruited while she was a junior at Emory College.
01:28:49.000She's a beautiful black woman and she was recruited by a pimp Who basically said, you're beautiful.
01:29:41.000Well, and the cult that I was most experienced with helping victims of was a cult called the Children of God, which the leader was Moses David Berg.
01:29:52.000And he was a pedophile and he had to leave the U.S. because he was going to be arrested.
01:29:57.000And in his cult, he had women be happy hookers for Jesus, and he basically told people they had to have sex with two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds.
01:30:11.000And when people would be either kicked out of that cult or run away, my theory is that pimps found them on the streets and started learning from them, the religious terminology, the family, etc.,
01:30:32.000And then the other thing that is occupying a lot of people's consciousness is terrorist cults like ISIS, Boko Haram, which are trafficking women, by the way.
01:30:44.000And they're taking not just weak, stupid people, but, for example, one of the architects of ISIS's social media recruiting network was the Son of an endocrinologist at Mass General Hospital,
01:30:59.000someone who was raised in Boston, went to a Catholic high school, and unfortunately or fortunately he was killed by a drone strike a few months ago, this kid.
01:31:11.000But my heart goes out to them, you know, people who get deceptively recruited and mind-controlled because it happened to me.
01:31:20.000And if I hadn't been deprogrammed, I could have done horrible acts of violence.
01:31:27.000So they were training you to sword fight, you said?
01:31:31.000Yeah, they basically trained me to die or kill on command.
01:31:35.000And they trained me that if I allowed a doubt when I was given an order by my superior that Satan was going to be invading me a la Exorcist.
01:31:46.000And so, you know, whatever I was told to do, I did.
01:32:24.000My gripe about his book and the documentary is that it didn't deal at all with mind control or brainwashing.
01:32:32.000It didn't give anyone who was watching the documentary or reading the book tools for how to protect themselves or if they were in a cult to self-reflect and analyze what was happening.
01:32:44.000Well, he's only got enough time to just fill an hour and a half or whatever it was, two hours.
01:32:50.000So my rant, Joe, when Wright's book first came out, I did a short video rant.
01:32:57.000I said, saying Going Clear is the definitive book on Scientology is like saying you've written a definitive book on cars and leaving out gas combustion engines.
01:33:11.000So I was frustrated, in other words, because you have brilliant people like Paul Haggis, who has an incredible Hollywood career, saying, I was stupid for believing this for 30 years and giving so much money to them.
01:33:30.000The group has changed dramatically because of former leaders coming out and speaking out.
01:33:36.000The group Anonymous helped a lot initially by wearing masks and saying, come on, let's protest.
01:33:44.000It scared them and it created a culture where people were more empowered to speak out against them.
01:33:51.000Right now we want the tax exemption to be stripped.
01:33:55.000There's no reason in the world we should be subsidizing a group that's paying millions of dollars to harass former members.
01:34:02.000That was one of the most disturbing aspects of the movie, when you find out how they achieve tax-exempt status by a litany of lawsuits they propelled against the IRS. And also hiring PIs to dig up dirt on the IRS commissioners, and hiring powerful lobbyists,
01:34:40.000The bottom line is that if there's a totalist group that has a black and white, us versus them, good versus evil, simplistic ideology that says that we have the vision for how the world has to be,
01:34:58.000or we have the tools for how to be the best person you can be, One needs to operate with some consumer awareness and say, who is this person?
01:35:13.000And whatever it is, seek critics and ex-members and know that if it's true, it will stand up to scrutiny.
01:35:19.000And if it isn't, You know, if it isn't true, why would you want to invest your time and your energy and your money in something that's not real?
01:35:28.000Don't you think people are just searching for meaning?
01:36:39.000I mean, for years, like every week or so, every month or so, whatever it was, I would get something in the mail inviting me to this, inviting me to that.
01:36:48.000I mean, it was just amazing how persistent they were.
01:36:51.000You were counted as one of the 8 million followers, even though there's really 20,000 or less.
01:39:18.000It was just a conversation where I asked him some questions.
01:39:20.000But it helped a lot of members wake up because they respect you and they got to listen to their divine leader lie.
01:39:33.000And it was powerful to hear him say, oh no, I don't tell people to defoo, or I always tell people to go to therapists before they cut off from all their family and friends.
01:39:44.000And people knew that that was a blatant lie, and it took a chink out of the mysticism of people who were true believers.
01:40:22.000He's a very eloquent guy and he's very smart, obviously, and he has some really interesting concepts, but he's very firm in his belief about certain things as well to the point where One of the things that I talked to him about, we played a video of him yelling about someone,
01:40:40.000if you believe in the state, that you want him killed.
01:41:18.000Well, he's another one of those, you know, anti-corporations while he's owning a corporation type people and, you know, saying that he's liberating people and he's in fact enslaving people into a totalistic belief system.
01:41:35.000Do you think this is just something that sort of happened along the way?
01:41:46.000I was hired by a family to consult to help a young man who was getting sucked in, and they were worried that he would try to cut off contact.
01:41:57.000So it was a relatively new phenomenon for me, but what was particularly interesting about this particular cult was that he was recruiting over the Internet.
01:42:06.000And that's how ISIS is largely recruiting as well.
01:42:57.000Yeah, the Robin Williams one really disturbed me.
01:42:59.000It's one of the things that I questioned him on because he said that he believed that Robin Williams...
01:43:03.000He made a video where saying that Robin Williams killed himself because of all the women that were addicted to free shit, I think is the way he described it.
01:43:11.000That these women who were addicted to getting money from him, they sucked him dry.
01:43:18.000He was worth millions of dollars when he died.
01:43:20.000He was not broke in any way, shape, or form.
01:43:23.000He certainly was diminishing in his ability or his ability to earn money was diminishing as he was getting older, but that's just normal for actors.
01:43:35.000He had real depression, and he also had Parkinson's, and the Parkinson's medication that he was on, one of the side effects was severe depression.
01:43:45.000Also, there's a good friend of mine, Dr. Mark Gordon, he's done a lot of work with people with traumatic brain injuries.
01:44:10.000And that it's a physiological response to your body being under in anesthesia for long periods of time, plus the physical trauma of the actual surgery itself, the injury, and your body's healing.
01:44:24.000Especially as you're older, that is a massive task to heal a heart that has been cut open and stitched up and your chest plate has been spread apart.
01:44:58.000I had that conversation with him just to ask him questions.
01:45:00.000And then after it was over, that's when all these videos started coming out and that's when I realized that he was deceptive about a few things in the conversation.
01:45:09.000Yeah, I was initially fantasizing that you would invite him back and I would be here and then some families who've been cut off from their loved one would be here and we could be like...
01:45:21.000You know, dude, tell all your followers to get a therapist and reconnect with their families.
01:47:01.000Ask yourself, when you were first getting involved with Molyneux, what did you think you were getting into?
01:47:06.000When you were first getting involved, did you believe you were going to be cutting off from your family, your friends, your life, dropping out of school, turning over your trust funds?
01:47:16.000What do you mean, turning over your trust fund?
01:48:26.000And sometimes you get in front of the wheel and you can't stop it.
01:48:30.000And then you're just spouting off about everything.
01:48:32.000Like you would do these videos, the truth about this or the truth about that, the truth about people that died.
01:48:37.000And you're talking about people that had very complex lives.
01:48:41.000They lived a hundred years or whatever the fuck they lived.
01:48:43.000And you can't just boil that down into one video.
01:48:49.000With very little research, especially when you're doing a hundred other videos a week and you're doing all these interviews and doing podcasts and doing all these things, you're talking about someone's life, man.
01:48:57.000You can't say the truth about Lincoln unless you fucking study Lincoln for a long period of time.
01:49:42.000You know, you're talking about this beloved guy who had this incredibly complex relationship, not just with his ex-wives, but with show business, with life, with depression, with drugs.
01:49:52.000Like, this is not something you can just boil down to a one-hour podcast or a one-hour YouTube video and just call the truth about someone.
01:50:02.000So I want to mention there's a retired child protective agency social worker named David Coopersen, who wrote a book about corporal punishment, because that's one of Molyneux's claims, etc.
01:50:17.000And Coopersen has studied a number of Molyneux videos and the whole ideology.
01:50:23.000And he's written a great book, by the way.
01:50:25.000It's on StopLegalChildAbuse.com is David's website.
01:50:30.000And he just more or less says, as someone who's worked with children who've been traumatized, whether it was beaten by their parents or their foster parents or sexually abused, the best thing is not to cut off contact with the abusive family.
01:50:47.000It's to have therapists and to have a healthy frame to work within it and not just to impose from the outside or by some authority figure who says that they know what's better.
01:51:01.000Because even kids who are being abused still have feelings towards their mother or father that are positive because of the way we're wired.
01:51:09.000So anyway, I wanted to get a plug-in for his book and the fact that...
01:51:14.000And then I wanted to mention Molly Koch.
01:51:17.000Molly B. Koch, K-O-C-H dot com, wrote a book on parenting called 27 Secrets to Raising Amazing Children.
01:51:24.000And she, too, when I asked her to comment as an expert on parenting about What Molyneux was saying, was saying this is not going to help people to be healthier human beings, to cut off contact from family and friends,
01:51:40.000no matter what happened in their childhood.
01:51:43.000But the best thing is with therapy, and ideally with a family therapist, To approach it to the extent that people are protected so they're not further abused by their family of origin.
01:51:56.000Well, this seems very black and white to me because if you're coming from an incredibly abusive family and your family was brutal and they beat you and they did horrible things to you, which I know people have come from, I think cutting them off is a great idea.
01:52:11.000So you think if your father sexually abused you, rapes you, beats you up, comes home in an alcoholic rage and breaks your skull, you should still call that guy?
01:52:24.000I'm saying you should be in therapy if that's happened to you.
01:52:29.000And your therapist should consider, depending on the course of treatment, approaching the father or the mother and getting them into therapy.
01:52:40.000Maybe they need to get off of alcohol or drugs, or maybe they need therapy.
01:52:48.000Just cutting off your entire background and past as a chop it off, for me, is really not a healthy long-term solution.
01:52:58.000I'm not even saying cutting off your entire past.
01:53:00.000I'm saying don't have contact with someone who is horrible to you.
01:53:05.000So what I'm trying to say, Joe, as a therapist, and I've seen these situations, I'm also involved with parental alienation cases where there's a divorce and the custodial parent brainwashes the children against the father or against the mother,
01:53:29.000Whatever is, also there's false memory syndrome where people were getting with not good therapists or using hypnosis or getting into cults and being like I was, believing I had this horrible childhood.
01:53:44.000Just cutting off and saying I can't ever talk with them again is not a healthy choice in my opinion.
01:53:50.000Being with an ethical therapist and finding a way to evaluate what's happening with them and getting them into treatment and then potentially to have some type of family therapy situation.
01:54:04.000If it's not going to be helpful ultimately, then of course, don't revictimize yourself.
01:54:10.000Don't allow yourself to continue to be abused.
01:54:13.000But this kind of This notion of lopping off your father, your mother, your sister, your brother because they were shitty to you 20 years ago or 40 years ago I think is a mistake as a therapist.
01:54:26.000You think it's a mistake across the board?
01:54:29.000But there are gotta be scenarios where you shouldn't be hanging out with your brother because your brother used to rape you or your brother used to beat you up.
01:54:47.000So this idea that blood and DNA somehow or another make you inexorably connected to some person that was horribly abusive to you.
01:54:55.000If you had a friend that you grew up with and your friend used to rape you and beat the fuck out of you, are you supposed to still contact them because they were your friend and they'll always be in your life?
01:55:04.000I think a friend who raped me is a different category than a father, a mother, a sister, a brother.
01:55:20.000I mean, if someone was horribly abusive to you and they're an evil person, and we both agree that there are evil people in the world, right?
01:56:08.000You're talking about people having, you just said people having a relationship with their own children.
01:56:12.000You're not talking about people that, the people that rape them and abuse them.
01:56:16.000You're not talking about people having a relationship with those people.
01:56:19.000So, for example, I mean, when they were in, for example, a cult like the Children of God, they weren't thinking that their father and mother were raping them and their aunt and their uncle were raping them, but they were having abusive sex.
01:56:34.000That was not something that they were ready for or wanted to have and it hurt, etc.
01:56:41.000And for me to just say, look, you know, cut off all contact and assume there's no possibility that they could grow, they can change, they could evolve, they could apologize, they could make it up to you.
01:57:14.000I'm saying use professionals as mediators to see what's possible in terms of constructive, healthy change.
01:57:22.000But you're putting this in this family context, and this is where it confuses me.
01:57:26.000Like, you should do that because they're your family, but you shouldn't do that if they were your friend.
01:57:32.000I guess I'm not meaning to sound so absolute, and every case should be evaluated individually, but I do have, I guess I've had too many cases where it was this kind of total cutoff.
01:57:48.000Maybe it's justified, but maybe it's not.
01:57:51.000Maybe the person really, you know, got great therapy and they are incredibly remorseful and they want to apologize and they're a decent human being.
01:58:00.000You can keep carrying the pain and the judgment and say, no, I'll never talk with you again, or try to accept them for where they are now and see whether or not they're going to be beneficial to your ongoing therapy.
01:58:15.000But shouldn't the onus be on the person who victimized you?
01:58:19.000If someone raped you and beat you, shouldn't the onus be on them to come and apologize to you or attempt to apologize to you?
01:58:31.000I think everyone ultimately has to take responsibility for their own lives and their own actions.
01:58:36.000I mean, I felt terrible for a lot of the things that I did in the Moonies, and I did my best to reach out to people I had recruited who I Whose lives I had interfered with.
01:58:46.000And it was a burden for many, many years as long as they continue to be in the group.
01:58:51.000And they're all out now, but virtually no one wants to talk with me.
01:58:56.000I think they still harbor really bad feelings towards me.
01:59:00.000Wow, that's got to be so strange for you to be in the position that you're in now, to have these people that look at you as someone who victimized them in the very way you're trying to shield people from today.
01:59:13.000So that's probably flavoring this idea that you want people to always try to hash it out or work it out because of your own personal experiences.
01:59:23.000Well, and I think people can grow and people can change.
01:59:38.000I know a lot of people have cut their parents off, and they're very happy because of it, because their parents were evil, and their parents are fucked up.
01:59:45.000I mean, and every time they would be with them or communicate with them would just be incredibly damaging, and they would have to deal with it for months on end, and the stress and the pain were just not worth it.
01:59:54.000And ultimately, they felt better to forgive that person, but not communicate with them.
02:00:04.000I guess I have more of the Jewish angle on forgiveness.
02:00:10.000Like, I don't believe in forgiving people who don't apologize and don't offer compensation and don't promise never to do it again and then never do it again.
02:00:23.000Only then is the person who is wrong in a position to forgive.
02:00:28.000But I'm not of the thing of just forgive.
02:00:32.000But I guess I think ultimately the more sense of fullness, of wholeness, of knowing that we do everything that's within our power, our sphere of influence to do,
02:00:48.000to be a good person, to bring goodness to the planet, is the way to operate.
02:00:54.000And I think that For me, with my father, he didn't beat me, but he didn't hug me.
02:01:02.000He didn't, you know, give me a lot of praise when I was growing up, because his father never gave him that.
02:01:09.000And instead of, when I was in therapy, instead of being angry at him, me stepping into his shoes as a child, realizing he was doing the best that he could.
02:01:20.000And at 30, I just, when I saw him, I just started Hugging him and he'd be like a board.
02:01:27.000And I'd just say, stand there because I need a hug.
02:01:31.000And by the time he was in his 80s, he was actually wanting the hug.
02:02:40.000Find out what's going on and I'm not saying put yourself in a position where you can be harmed, but you can use third parties to find out what's going on there and there could be some really radical positive changes that happen that could be a really good thing.
02:02:57.000I see your point in up to a certain degree.
02:03:01.000There's a certain degree of abuse that I think some parents have enacted on their children.
02:03:06.000There was a story that someone told me recently about this brother that was raping his sister, and this went on for years, and then the dad found out about it, and the dad joined in.
02:03:33.000You know, you can have family that's not related to you, the people that you love and trust, and if you treat them like their family, they'll treat you like family, too.
02:03:41.000I think you choose the people that you can be in contact with, and that's the problem that a lot of people have with this whole idea of family, is that you're born into them.
02:03:50.000It's like you just get a random hand of cards.
02:04:45.000You know, this idea of blood, that this person had sex with my mom and made me, that I have to forgive this dummy and spend time with him and try to work out why he beat the fuck out of my mom in front of me.
02:05:06.000My point of view as a therapist who's seen literally hundreds and hundreds of different cases and people can change.
02:05:15.000I also want to come back to the false memory point because there's a lot of people who went into therapy or they got into a cult and they came to have the belief that they were in a satanic cult or they were beaten and tortured by By their family and it's not true,
02:05:33.000but they're still acting as if it is and there's no effort to reality test, to actually talk to the siblings or talk with the neighbors or Most sexual predators have multiple victims.
02:05:46.000They're usually not just enacting on one particular person.
02:05:52.000And what I've been saying from the beginning is, you know, find a good therapist who's experienced with trauma and sexual abuse and such and do your process and consider I think there are hundreds.
02:07:42.000And nobody in the family wants anything to do with them.
02:07:45.000And I feel like I at least should make an effort to say to them, you know, there is such a thing as mind control.
02:07:52.000And they were doing what they thought they were supposed to do by being in the cult.
02:07:57.000And, you know, you were right to be angry at them for not being there for mom and for not being there.
02:08:03.000However, it doesn't mean that they're bad, bad people and that there isn't some value in reconnecting again.
02:08:10.000It was one of the more disturbing parts of going clear was seeing the people that were just emotionally devastated by the fact their family wouldn't talk to them anymore because they had been excommunicated.
02:08:20.000Right, so this disconnection, the JWs call it disfellowshipping, it's a common mind control technique to manipulate people to cut them off from family and friends if people are breaking rules or questioning the authority,
02:08:37.000It's not something that should be done by any legitimate religion, certainly not any legitimate organization, telling people you can't talk to your sister, your brother, your mother, your father, because some authority figure says God doesn't want it or that you've violated the rules.
02:08:57.000They're taking it to another level, right?
02:08:59.000They're saying you can't talk to them.
02:09:01.000It is against the rules to talk to them.
02:09:03.000They're not encouraging, defooing, you know, getting rid of your family of original origin.
02:09:47.000And in the mind of Scientologists, if you leave, you're going to go insane, you're going to commit suicide, you're going to become a drug addict.
02:09:58.000And they put phobias in members' minds against any mental health professional.
02:10:02.000So if you're feeling suicidal, if you're having major migraines, only do auditing, only do Scientology techniques.
02:10:12.000And at the point that, I think it was Paul Haggis that refused to refute his gay daughter when he learned that Scientology came out against the bill in California.
02:10:27.000That was his wake-up call because his love for his daughter trumped the cult ideology.
02:10:34.000How bizarre is that, that Scientology has anti-homosexual ideas?
02:10:41.000I think it's very bizarre, but a lot of cults are very anti.
02:11:10.000Because essentially, the cult identity does not want to acknowledge the person's true self.
02:11:18.000And every time he acts out his true nature, he feels bad.
02:11:23.000But the speculation is that they have some dirt on him.
02:11:26.000The speculation is that through the auditing process or the files that they keep on you, that was what they implied in the documentary, that they have these stacks of files on weird massages.
02:11:37.000They said that in the Time Magazine cover story in 1990. There's a huge amount of fear and threat that if you leave the group or speak out against the group, they're going to come after you and ruin your life.
02:11:51.000Unfortunately, a lot of people have fear.
02:11:54.000For me and other people who've left, you kind of have to rise above it and say, screw you.
02:12:04.000Go and tell whatever you want to tell, but screw you.
02:12:08.000For certain people, though, the ideology of Scientology, the tenets or the principles, seem to help them, give them some sort of structure.
02:12:17.000I mean, is there any way that there's anything beneficial to the way they...
02:12:22.000I mean, there's a lot of successful people that are Scientologists, and they seem ambitious and motivated.
02:12:28.000It seems like there's part of it, and I'm not trying to support Scientology, but I'm trying to look at this in a balanced perspective.
02:12:34.000Seems like at least some of what they're doing is trying to enhance your ability to function as a person, right?
02:12:58.000That's programmed into the Scientology identity that you have this higher truth, that you understand the nature of reality, that a certain technique is going to work.
02:13:09.000But what we know from the placebo effect, the power of authority and the power of suggestion is what's happening here.