Rick Ross

And so I would say that there are Scientologists who may be feeling that their life is very difficult and that they're going through a lot of hardship, but basically Scientology is teaching them to suck it up. and to accept this as part of your process of being a better human being and that we know what is in your best interest better than you do.

And so when people leave destructive cults, many times they have not sorted things out and they feel there's something wrong with me. I couldn't hack it. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't loyal enough. Very similar to people in abusive controlling relationships, self-blaming, you know, hurt looking at themselves and saying, look, it's really, it's my fault what happened.

Instead of looking at the person who was an abusive controlling partner or the organization that was abusive and controlling and recognizing that they were to blame and that the person who was hurt is really a victim. So for people leaving cults, it's a process. of sorting it out, of, in essence, deprogramming themselves.

And what they often do is, this is done through a process of education where they read about cults, they read about the manipulation that goes on in cults, what we call brainwashing, and they sort it out and they begin to recognize what happened to them. But until they do that, they may blame themselves rather than the organization that hurt them. Wow.

There have been books and research done about the process of manipulation that is orchestrated, mandated systematically within cult groups. For example, the book Coercive Persuasion by Edgar Schein, a psychologist, a professor at MIT, and the books Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, who taught at Harvard.

And so these books inform, in large part, our understanding. Another excellent book is Influence by Robert Cialdini, which explores the basic structure of influence, the six principles, as he would identify them. So by understanding this research, this body of research, we can better understand what happens to people in destructive cults.

Schein would say there are three stages of coercive persuasion. First, you break people down. Then, when they are broken down, you then provide the means and the process of change that you want. And they become changed. You manipulate them in that diminished, broken state to be changed. And then after that, you refreeze them.

in that changed state, which is accomplished in large part by social isolation, peer reinforcement, and so on. So what happens to people in a group, like I'll give you an example. Synanon was a drug rehab community that then became a destructive cult. founded by Charles Diedrich in California. And they came up with what is called attack therapy, or the hot seat.

So they would take a member of the community, put them in the center of a circle of people, and those people would bombard them. with everything that was wrong with them, everything they needed to look at to change. And so they would break them down.

And then, once they were broken, and groups have various processes by which they break people down, then you are open to change because you feel, I'm broken. I am desperate for answers. Help me. So you're in distress. And then the group offers you the program, the means by which you can address your broken state and make yourself whole.

And then subsequently, you become part of this kind of subculture or community of like-minded people who reinforce that changed state of being. and keep you in that state of change, in that program. And so Lifton then has eight criteria which he lists to recognize a thought reform program. For example, what he calls milieu control, or control of the environment,

or what he would call the cult of confession. That is, in my view, what Scientology is doing in auditing. That is, get people to empty themselves with virtually no boundaries so that you know all their weaknesses, all their vulnerabilities, which you can then exploit. And then the group has what Lifton calls a sacred science, which is what we believe is absolute And you cannot question it.

If you do, you are unscientific, you are ungodly, you are demonic, whatever. But the group holds out its belief system as absolute without being able to question anything.

And then there's the demand for purity, which Lifton describes as a kind of black and white world, no shades of gray, where you are forced to either be the good and the pure or recognize that what you believe or what you think is impure and negative. So you're purging your mind and you're purging your emotions to conform with that demand for purity.

And then there's what Lifton calls doctrine over person, which is basically the subordinating of everything to the sacred science of the group so that everything you see must be seen through that lens. And you are doing this also, again, to yourself,

where you feel that any doubts, any misgivings you have are impure, are negative, are wrong, and therefore need to be purged according to the doctrine. So what Lifton would say is if these eight criteria, and there are eight of them, if they're evident in a group, whether they admit it or not, they're using thought reform.

And what Schein would say is this process of coercive persuasion likewise can be identified. And he first studied it through the re-education programs in communist China. And so this is really kind of the seminal research that forms the foundation for our understanding of what process goes on inside cults

that changes people in such a way that we from the outside look at them and we say, wow, those people are crazy. Why do they believe that stuff? But what we don't get is the process they have been put through to get where they're at and how controlled that environment that they're in really is to the extent that

they have been, in a sense, forced to accept a new normal, which is the beliefs and the behavior within the group that we would regard as bizarre. But within that bubble that they exist in, that alternate reality, it's seen as totally normal. Wow. Wow.

Well, this all started in around 2001, 2002. And I was approached by a family in New Jersey that their son and two daughters were involved in NXIVM. and I had never heard of it. Actually, at that point, it was called Executive Success Programs, or ESP, and the people involved were called espions. And they followed a guy named Keith Ranieri,