[ot] cult influence and power, 1988-2018

[Undiscussed Groomed for Male Slavery, One Victim of Many]

Tail of Chapter 2

                                I tracked down Dr. Robert Jay Lifton
and arranged a meeting at his
apartment in Manhattan. He was curious to know why I was so interested
in a book about Chinese brainwashing he had written 15 years earlier,
in 1961. He was amazed when I described to him, in detail, what the
Moonies do to recruit members and how they run their 3 day workshops,
their 7 day workshops, and their 21 day, 40 day, and 120 day
workshops. He said, “What you are telling me is so much more
sophisticated than what the Chinese did in the ‘50s. It’s like a
hybrid mutation of a virulent virus strain!”

				Lifton shifted my entire perspective on myself when he said, “You
know more about this than I do, because you’ve lived it. You know it
instrumentally. I only know it theoretically and second-hand. You must
study psychology and take what you know through your experience and
tell others about it.” He later asked me to co-author a book with him
on mind control (something that was never to be). I was flattered by
his offer and intended to take him up on it, but the timing wasn’t
right for me.

				I Decide To Go Public

				Meeting Lifton transformed my life. Instead of looking at myself
and seeing a college dropout, a poet with no poetry (I sorely
regretted throwing those four hundred poems away), and a former cult
member, I saw that perhaps there was a higher purpose for me. At that
time, although I was no longer a Moonie, I was still thinking somewhat
in black and white terms: good versus evil, us versus them. The
world’s most renowned expert on brainwashing thought that I had an
important contribution to make, that what I had experienced could be
useful in helping people. By this time I had started attending cult
awareness meetings of people affected by the problem and was
approached by many parents of people in the Moonies. They asked me if
I would talk to their children still trapped in the Moonies. I agreed.

				It was then, in 1976, that I seriously began taking steps to
become a professional counselor. At first I had my work cut out for
me; there were then no alternatives to forcible deprogramming. I had
undergone a little training as a peer counselor at college before
joining the Moonies. I myself had been deprogrammed. Most helpful of
all in talking to members was that I had been a Moonie at a high
level, and I knew the group doctrine and policies inside and out. I
reread Moon’s _Divine Principle_. I studied the Bible and sorted out
which things Moon said about it were true, which ones weren’t, and
what was taken out of context. I established my own belief system. I
was involved with deprogramming for about a year. A couple of the
cases may have involved abduction by parents or people they hired;
most were cases in which members came home to visit and weren’t
allowed to leave. Some of these were legal conservatorship cases, in
which the family received legal custody of an adult child. (Such
conservatorship laws are now gone. This change is partly the result of
legal and lobbying efforts by cult lawyers, as well as by more
well-intentioned people who did not understand the gross human rights
violations of mind control cults.)

				Fortunately, I was never sued. All of my cases were successful,
except two, when the Moonies went back to the group. The exhilaration
of helping someone reclaim their life and be restored to their loved
ones is beyond words. The closest thing I can use to describe the
feeling is how I felt when a friend of mine had a leg cramp in the
ocean and was going under and I ran out to the waves, dived in, swam
as hard and fast as I could and managed to pull him safely to shore.
However, I disliked the stress of forcible deprogramming and wanted to
find some other way to help members of destructive cults.

				After a year of going public, giving lectures, and doing
television and radio interviews, I decided that I needed to figure out
who I was again. I went back to college for a semester at Yale and
temporarily dropped out of my life as a full-time cult fighter. I
wrote poetry, played basketball, went out on dates, and tried to be
normal. I did not like Yale, switched to Boston University,
volunteered to be a counselor in two student counseling agencies and
got in touch with myself again.

				During this time, though, Moon was making new and bigger waves. In
Congress, the House Subcommittee on International Relations held a
lengthy investigation into Korean CIA activities in the United States
and other efforts by Korean agents to influence United States’
government decisions. I agreed to help the investigation as much as
the committee wanted, provided they not ask me to testify publicly.
The truth was, as the highest-ranking recent defector who knew a lot
of the inner workings, I was afraid of being harassed and possibly
murdered. I didn’t really follow the “Koreagate” investigation, except
when I read an occasional article. I was absolutely confident that the
government would expose the Moon group and it would be destroyed.

				The final report of the investigation had an 80-page section on
the Moonies.[45] The report found that the Moon organization
“systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and
Foreign Agents Registration Act laws, as well as state and local laws
relating to charity fraud.” It called for an interagency task force to
continue to gather evidence, and to prosecute Moon and other
Unification Church leaders for their criminal violations. The
subcommittee’s Republican minority included its own statement, which
said, in part, “It is difficult to understand why the appropriate
agencies of the Executive Branch have not long since taken action
against those activities of the Moon organization that are illegal.”

				The report was released October 31, 1978. Three weeks later,
California Congressman Leo J. Ryan, a member of the Koreagate
investigation, was gunned down at an airstrip near Jonestown, Guyana,
while trying to help members of another cult, the People’s Temple,
escape the horrors of Jim Jones’ camp. Others with Ryan were shot or
killed. I watched the news bulletins about the nine hundred people who
were dead because a cult leader had ordered mass murder. Chills went
down my spine. I had never heard of the People’s Temple before, but I
completely identified with the mindset of its members. I remembered
listening to Moon harangue us and ask if we were willing to follow him
to our deaths. I remembered hearing Moon say that if North Korea
invaded South Korea, he would send American Unification members to die
on the front lines, so that Americans would be inspired to fight
another land war in Asia.

				I spent days thinking about the cult problem. More than anything
else, the Jonestown massacre motivated me to become a public activist
again. I accepted several invitations to appear on television. I was
asked to speak at Senator Robert Dole’s public hearing on cults, on
Capitol Hill, in 1979. But at the last moment, all the ex-cult members
invited to speak were taken off the program due to political pressure
from cults. The hearing was a disaster and the effort to educate the
Government officials and the public about the dangers of destructive
cults was undermined.

				After that, Moon’s political influence began to grow. When Ronald
Reagan became president, Moon-controlled groups began funding the New
Right political movement in Washington. When it was clear the federal
government would do nothing about the Moonies, I decided to organize.
I started a group called Ex-Members Against Moon, later Ex-Moon, Inc.
I sponsored press conferences, edited a monthly newsletter, and gave
numerous interviews. I had considered starting a group of former
members from many different cult groups, but I decided that with the
release of the Congressional investigation, it would be more effective
for me to focus on the Moonies.

				I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department
of Defense, asking why a Moon company, Tong II Industries, was
permitted to make American M-16 rifles in Korea when only the South
Korean government had legal permission to do so. Was the Moon
organization part of the Korean government? Was the Department of
Defense giving it favored treatment? The request was turned down on
the grounds that revealing the information I asked for would
compromise the security of the United States. To this day I cannot
confirm what I believe to be the truth—that the Moon group was a
creature of the Intelligence agencies.

				Meanwhile, I knew that I would not do any more forceful
deprogramming. I had to find a way to help people out of cults that
would be less traumatic and less expensive, and that would not violate
the law. I had read many dozens of books and thousands of
pages—everything I could get my hands on—about thought reform,
brainwashing, attitude change, persuasion, and CIA recruitment and
indoctrination. The next and most important area to research was the
field of hypnosis.

				In 1980, I attended a seminar by Richard Bandler on hypnosis that
was based on the work of the psychiatrist Milton Erickson. Bandler and
John Grinder had also developed a model based on the work of therapist
Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson. They called it Neuro-Linguistic
Programming, or NLP. The seminar gave me a greater understanding of
techniques of hypnotic mind control and how to combat them. I spent
nearly two years studying NLP with everyone involved in its
formulation and presentation, even moving to Santa Cruz, California to
do an apprenticeship with John Grinder. By this time, I had fallen in
love and married. Eventually I moved back to Massachusetts when my
wife, Aureet Bar-Yam, was given a scholarship to work toward her
master’s degree in psychology at Harvard.[46]

				Over time, however, I became more and more concerned about the
ethics of NLP. It seemed to me that its leaders had launched a
mass-market campaign to promote NLP as a tool for power enhancement.
Bandler and Grinder shifted their focus from training away from
therapists and teachers. They started training anyone, especially
salespeople and business executives. One of my big problems was their
dictum, “Do what works.” Eventually I realized that NLP was amoral. It
depended entirely on the conscience and good will of the practitioner.
This was not too much of an issue with a licensed therapist who had
strict ethical guidelines. But it was another matter entirely when
practitioners were salespeople or corporate executives who were
interested in power, money, or sex. I left my association with NLP
forever.

				I earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology from
Cambridge College in 1985, allowing me to begin to receive training
from experts in the field of clinical hypnosis. I studied the work of
Dr. Milton Erickson from his books and tapes, and from people trained
by him. I learned a great deal about how the mind functions, as well
as how to communicate with people more effectively. These studies gave
me a better way to apply what I had learned to help people trapped in
cults. It was possible, I discovered, to create a model of the entire
process of change that occurs when a person gets drawn into a cult
group and then successfully leaves it.

				I asked myself a range of essential questions. What specific
factors make a person able to move out of a mind controlled psyche?
Why are certain interventions successful and others not? What goes on
in the thought processes of people who simply walk out of cults?
Patterns began to appear. I found that people who were able to walk
away without intervention were those who had maintained contact with
people outside the destructive cult. When people could maintain
communication with outsiders, valuable information that could change
their life could penetrate cult-constructed mental walls.

				I knew how important my father’s tears had been for me. More
importantly, I realized that he had been able to _invite me to look at
myself from his perspective_, and re-examine my own information from
his viewpoint. In analyzing my own experience, I recognized that what
helped me most was my own internal voice and my own first-hand
experiences, buried beneath all the emotional suppression and the
thought-stopping rituals of chanting and praying. Underneath, the real
me wasn’t dead. Maybe it had been bound and gagged, but I was still
very much alive. The accident and the deprogramming had helped move me
physically and psychologically to a place where I was able to get in
touch with myself. Indeed, it was my ideals and my own fantasy of an
ideal world that had lured me into the Moonies. Those ideals
ultimately enabled me to walk out and publicly condemn cult mind
control.

				No matter how deeply the Unification Church virus had invaded the
“child parts” of my identity—the real me had not been destroyed. After
decades of membership, I have learned that all of my “spiritual
children”—the people I recruited—have exited the cult. A very great
relief.

				After receiving my master’s degree, I began a new phase of my
life. While practicing psychotherapy and conducting my public
education activities, I also worked as the national coordinator for
FOCUS, a support group of former cult members who want to help each
other. For the past years, I have worked to increase public awareness
of destructive cults, undue influence, and mind control. These cults
did not go away as the idealistic youth of the 1970s became the young
professionals of the 1980s, the leaders of the 1990s and 2000s, and
the new retirees of the 2010s. Sadly, destructive cults continue to
grow, thrive, and recruit people of all ages and from all walks of
life.

				Yet, while destructive cults continue to grow, so too does our
understanding of the process of mind control and undue influence. The
availability of help for mind control victims continues to increase.
We know far more about the neurological processes of the brain than we
did even a decade ago. As more and more people—especially mental
health professionals, social workers, doctors, and lawyers—lose loved
ones to mind control cults, a sense of urgency is building. There are
some basic ways to identify destructive cults, protect yourself from
mind control, and help others shake free of its influence. Giving the
keys to that knowledge is what this book is all about.