Combatting CULT MIND CONTROL STEVEN HASSAN IIIIIIIHII Park Street Press / dedicate this book to people all over the world who have ever experienced the loss of their personal freedom, in the hope that it might help ease their suffering. Park Street Press One Park Street Rochester, VT 05767 Copyright © 1988, 1990 by Steven Hassan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hassan, Steven. Combatting cult mind control / Steven Hassan, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89281-311-3 1. Cults—Controversial literature. 2. Cults—Psychological aspects. 3. Hassan, Steven. I. Title. BP603.H375 1990 306'. I—dc20 90-43697 CIP Printed and bound in the United States 10 98765432 Park Street Press is a division of Inner Traditions International, Ltd. Distributed to the book trade in Canada by Book Center, Inc., Montreal, Quebec Contents Foreword by Margaret Singer xiii Preface xvii Chapter 1 Exit-Counseling: The Background 1 Chapter 2 My Life in the Unification Church 12 Chapter 3 The Threat: Mind Control Cults Today 35 Chapter 4 Understanding Mind Control 53 Chapter 5 Cult Psychology 76 Chapter 6 Cult Assessment: How to Protect Yourself 95 Chapter 7 Exit-Counseling: Freedom Without Coercion 112 Chapter 8 How to Help 132 Chapter 9 Unlocking Cult Mind Control 148 Chapter 10 Strategies for Recovery 168 Chapter 11 The Next Step 187 Appendix Lifton's Eight Criteria of Mind Control 200 Resource Organizations 206 Endnotes 211 Bibliography 221 Index 233 About the Author 237 I Acknowledgments With heartfelt gratitude, I thank my parents, Milton and Estelle Hassan, for all their love and support. Whenever I needed them, they were there for me. They risked everything to rescue me from the Moonies and I will be forever grateful that they did. I wish to thank my sisters, Thea and Stephanie, as well as my brothers-in- law, Doug and Ken, for all they have done throughout the years. My aunt and uncle, Phyllis and Mort Slotnick, have always been a strong support. In addition I wish to thank Gary Rosenberg, Michael Strom, Nestor Garcia, and Gladys Rodriguez for their willingness to spend five very difficult days in 1976 counseling me back to reality. Without their help, 1 might have spent many more years in the Moonies. Special acknowledgments go to Aureet Bar-Yam who for more than seven years has put up with the incredible demands that my work has required. Her parents, Drs. Zvi and Miriam Bar-Yam, have been a source of much love, inspiration, and help in ways too numerous to recount. I would also like to thank just a few special friends: Gary Birns, Marc and Elyse Hirschorn, Monica Weiss, Lenny Harris, Dr. Karen Magarian, Joan Lebach, Michael Lisman, Russell Backer and Susan Mayer, Michael Stone, Chris and Lee Benton, Steve and Nell Morse, and others too numerous to mention here. They know who they arc Some individuals have been my teachers and, at times, my inspiration. I would like to thank Robert Jay Lifton, M.D; Milton H. Erickson, M.D.; Margaret Singer, Ph.D.; Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman; John Grinder, Ph.D.; and Richard Handler, Bill and Lorna Goldberg, David Gordon, and Stephen Lankton. Warm thanks go to those people who were instrumental in making this book happen. My best friend Chris Kilham helped me find my publisher, Ehud Sperling, who had the boldness, vision, and integrity to bring out this book. I also wish to thank Leslie Colket, managing editor, who believed in this book, made innumerable contributions, and oversaw its development from infancy to completion. I would like to acknowledge Ed Conroy for his editorial contribution, reworking my manuscript. He approached this project with vigor and insight and made it a much stronger book. xii Acknowledgments My thanks also to Susan Davidson and Anna Congdon for their valuable Foreword assistance refining the book into its present form. Many other people have helped me substantially along the way, providing me with information, insight, and editorial comments. I would also like to thank Alan MacRobert, Herb Rosedale, Betty and Kate Kilham, Fred Clarkson, James and Marcia Rudin, Priscilla Coates, David Rich, Carol Turn- bull, Carol and Noel Giambalvo, Chip Berlet, and Ford Greene. Some people mentioned here—friends, colleagues, former clients—were willing to share their stories of cult involvement and thereby enriched this book. I am most grateful for their assistance and their encouragement. In the many The phone was frighteningly loud. The clock read 4:30 A.M. It was difficult to years I have been involved in the cult field, I have met some of the most take in what a reporter from The Berkeley Gazette was saying on the phone: talented, most caring, and best people in the world. "Margaret, I hate to bother you this early, but we have just learned that Jim Jones has decided to pull the trigger down in Guyana. I've been here all night at a house in Berkeley talking with ex-members of People's Temple and with relatives of persons down in Jonestown. There's a mother here whose husband and twelve-year-old son are down there and she is desperate. It is not known if everyone's dead, or if there are survivors. I know I've told you not to work with ex-members of People's Temple because of the dangerous harassment that Jones' so-called 'Angels' direct against former members. But these people need to talk with you and get some help with what has happened." As daylight was breaking, I passed up the steps guarded by somber Berkeley police, as it was feared that Jones had left "hit orders" for members still in the area to wipe out defectors when he ordered the final "White Night," his term for the often rehearsed moment when he would have all his followers drink poison. The reporter, my son (also a reporter), and a few police officers had warned me not to give my usual gratis consultation services to ex-People's Temple members, even though I had long given these services to former cultists. Jones allegedly used his "angels" to wreak vengeance against members who left and against their supporters as well. The woman whose husband and young son were eventually identified as dead in Jonestown was only one of many. I spent hours and days meeting and talking with various survivors as they returned from Guyana to the Bay Area and attempted to get their lives going again after the Guyanese holocaust. There were attorney Tim Stoen and his wife Grace, whose young son had been held captive by Jones and died in Jonestown. There were the members of the basketball team who missed the mass suicide-murder. There was a nine-year- old girl who had survived having had her throat slit by a woman who then killed herself in Georgetown, Guyana, as part of Jones' mass death orders. There was Larry Layton, who faced courts in two countries for allegedly carrying out Jones' orders at the airport in Guyana where Rep. Leo J. Ryan and others died. I began to work with ex-cultists about six years before Jonestown and Foreword Foreword XV xiv continue to do so to this day. I have provided psychological counseling to more We must heed the potentially destructive and frightening impact that the than three thousand persons who have been in cults. I have written about some use of mind control by selfishly motivated groups can have on the very fabric of of this work and have talked with lay and professional groups in many countries a society. This book fills a need and deserves a wide audience about thought reform programs, intense indoctrination programs, cults, and related topics. Margaret T. Singer, Ph.D. My interest in the effects of thought reform programs began when I Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychology worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research after the Korean War. At University of California, Berkeley, California that point I met and worked with Edgar H. Schein, Ph.D., Robert J. Lifton, Recipient of the Leo J. Ryan Memorial Award M.D., and Louis J. West, M.D., pioneers in the study of the effects of intense indoctrination programs. I was involved in the follow-up studies of former prisoners of war, interviewed long-term prisoners of the Chinese, and partici­ pated over the years in much of the work on conceptualizing thought reform programs. As Steve Hassan does in this volume, I have repeatedly described the specific needs of persons who have been subjected to such and have emphasized the lack of knowledge that most citizens as well as mental health professionals have about the processes, effects, and aftermath of being subjected to thought reform programs. Steve Hassan has clearly and convincingly described how mind control is induced. He integrates his personal experience in a cult, and his practical skills developed in twelve years of exit-counseling of persons who have been in mind control situations, with theories and concepts in the scientific literature. The book comes alive with real-life examples. For the first time, an experienced exit-counselor outlines step by step the actual methods, sequence, and framework of what he does and how he works with families and the persons under mind control. He draws on the various scholarly works in the fields of thought reform, persuasion, social psychology, and hypnosis to offer theoretical frameworks for how mind control is achieved.