Drank the Kool-Aid and Joined the Cult

Mmmm.... Kool-Aid. I did a search for killer Kool-Aid when I was thinking about this post. I managed to find a number of recipes for alcoholic beverages. Some other time I might have to post them instead.

Langone and West had this to say about cults: "Cults are groups that often exploit members psychologically and/or financially, typically by making members comply with leadership's demands through certain types of psychological manipulation, popularly called mind control, and through the inculcation of deep-seated anxious dependency on the group and its leaders.¹ "A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community."

Whenever you hear the word cult it automatically brings with it a reaction... images that come to mind. It's easy to think of Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, group pressure and brainwashing. We think that we will never fall into this trap. Most forms of abuse also involve some form of psychological abuse. It is the underpinning of everything else. I would argue that anyone who is abused as a child (or even experienced abuse as an adult) has already seen the cult mentality and been apart of it. Not all cults are to the extremes of Jonestown or Heavens Gate.

We just don't want to think of our parents as cult leaders. If we did then we wouldn't be able to idealize them quite so much. But it's not that hard to see some of the links. Manipulation... persuasion... and control are all common in abusive situations. We learn to keep the family secret and isolate ourselves to protect it. It's really not so different from that definition of a cult.

So maybe the healing process should be like what happens when someone gets out of a cult. They go through deprogramming. One method of deprogramming is used by Patrick: "When you deprogram people, you force them to think. ... But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to believe. They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again. " Maybe that is what you need to recover from abuse and become the person that others see. Deprogramming is definitely better then the killer kool-aid and the cyanide that goes with it.