Amanda Montel

That's because of my dad.

As a teenager, he was forced to join Synanon, a 70s California compound with matching overalls and a traumatizing truth-telling ritual called The Game.

But my dad escaped, became a neuroscientist and brought up a nosy kid who became obsessed with understanding how to identify cult-ish influence in everyday life.

As I got older, I couldn't help but notice that the same language tactics that my dad described in Synanon could be found kind of everywhere, like in my high school theater program and in the wellness industry and on my social media feed.

That's how I came to study the cultish spectrum, degrees of influence, none of which start out with LSD and robes, but instead, sneakily, with words.

I want to point out three cultish language tactics to listen for in everyday life.

The first is called the thought-terminating cliché.

Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, thought-terminating clichés are zingy stack expressions that are easy to memorize, easy to repeat and aimed at shutting down independent thinking and questioning.

So let's say you're a member of a group and there's a rule that you want to push back against.

You might get hit with a phrase like, trust the process, or it's all in God's plan to shut you down.

In Synanon, the phrase, act as if, effectively meant pretend that you believe until you do.

Today, in conspiracy theory-type groups, the phrase, do your research, basically means, stop asking me about mine.

Next, I want to talk about us-versus-them labels.

In Synanon, defectors were called splitties.

Today, you've got your sheeple, your NPCs, your industry plants.

When a label makes all of those people seem unilaterally evil and us superior, that's a red flag.

And thirdly, I want to mention loaded language, corporate synergistic visionaries, wellness, 5D consciousness.

At first, emotionally charged buzzwords like this feel like enlightenment.

Then one day you wake up and you realize you've completely surrendered your ability to talk and think for yourself.

This language works because it plugs straight into our cognitive biases, these deeply ingrained decision-making shortcuts that developed in earlier human brains to help us process information from the world around us enough to survive it.