Joe Szimhart & CultAware - New Niche for Psychopaths

http://web.archive.org/web/19990421135659/http://www.theta.com/can_reform/indict3.html

K) KAREN LEVER, MAY 1990

On May 27, 1990, Karen Lever, 34-year-old president of a computer consulting company based in Redmond, Washington was abducted while unloading luggage from her car at the parking structure at the Seattle Airport. A van pulled up, three men got out, and two grabbed her. A fourth man helped force her into the van and a fifth man drove the van off. Karen was forced to lie face down. One man sat on her and clamped his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming.

The men told Karen that her parents, Dr. Ronald S. Lever and Doreen Lever of Encino, CA, were following in a car behind the van.

The van arrived at a large two-story house next to a lake, surrounded by woods with no other houses visible. A man in his late fifties referred to as "Diablo" was waiting at the house and was said to be the head of security. Her parents were waiting for her at the house.

Karen was led to a room on the lower floor of the house which contained only a bed and a table. The door to the room had been nailed open. A woman came into Karen's room introduced as "Jo." Jo searched Karen looking for weapons and any items she could use to hurt herself.

Deprogrammer Joe Szimhart of New Mexico then arrived and introduced himself. She recognized Szimhart from a television program she had once seen which featured several people affiliated with the Cult Awareness Network. Szimhart told her that he and Karen's parents believed that she was a "cult victim" because she had attended lectures and seminars given by Dr. Frederick Lenz. Szimhart said that he was Karen's "deprogrammer" and the men in the van were the "security team."

Szimhart and the deprogramming and security teams kept Karen Lever captive for eight days. She was guarded 24 hours a day, with guards accompanying her to the bathroom. The bathroom door had been nailed open. Szimhart lectured about cults and made her watch a number of videotapes. At other times, 4-5 others harangued her about her mental condition and immaturity.

In addition, two other women arrived during the week to join in the "deprogramming" - Karen Reinhardt of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin and Robyn Kliger of Berkeley, California. Robyn Kliger, who had been a fellow student of Lever's at the Univerity of California at San Diego, had been abducted and deprogrammed by Reinhardt and Szimhart at the hire of her mother, Eunice Kliger, head of the northern California CAN affiliate. Reinhardt was a frequent assistant of Szimhart at "deprogrammings" and organized CAN conferences at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where she worked.

Szimhart told Lever that he rarely practiced "involuntary deprogramming" as it risked going to jail and he had a family to support.

On the evening of June 3, the "deprogramming" ended and Karen was transported in another van by Szimhart and Robyn Kliger to a truck stop, where the security team left. Szimhart, Kliger and Karen then transferred into Karen's parents' rental car where Karen was transported to her car at the Seattle airport parking lot.
 
http://web.archive.org/web/19990421135659/http://www.theta.com/can_reform/indict3.html

L) BARBARA PONELLA, JANUARY 1991

On January 8, 1991 Barbara Ponella, a 26 year old, was abducted from the Grand Master of Tai-Zen Jiu-Jitsu Academy of Self-Defense in Long Island where she worked as a receptionist. Her parents, Charles and Constance Ponella, hired deprogrammers Randall Burkey, Joe Szimhart and others to deprogram her because they thought that karate instructor Howard Tague had a "cult-like" influence over Barbara.

During the kidnapping, Barbara's mother sprayed mace in Barbara's face while three men grabbed her and threw her into a van. Howard Tague fired three warning shots into the air and one at the van tires as they sped away.

Barbara was transported across state lines to Allentown, Pennsylvania by her abductors where deprogrammers Randall Burkey and Joe Szimhart were waiting.

After being "deprogrammed," Ponella was taken to the Wellspring retreat in Albany, Ohio, which is directed by CAN board member Paul Martin. On January 27, Barbara Ponella's parents arrived at Wellspring to take her home.

The police detectives who worked on the case were Detective Doug Jones and Detective Carmine Sessor. No indictments were issued because Barbara has not been willing to cooperate.

According to the diary of Joe Szimhart, which was seized in his Boise, Idaho arrest, Szimhart was paid on January 4, 1991 for the Ponella "deprogramming."

Information learned from Howard Tague the karate instructor, is that Barbara's parents had taken Barbara to Chicago for a "deprogramming seminar" during the November 1990 CAN convention. This is also referenced in a news article covering the abduction.
 
anart said:
These people are downright scary. I can't believe they get away with this behavior - actually - scratch that - this is planet earth in 2012, of course they do, the psychopaths are running the asylum.

They're doing it in league with family members and friends, and the victims may be quite vulnerable. If they can convince the family to commit a crime (kidnapping), that is control over them.

I have heard stories of "deprogramming" over the years and it never made sense to me. It couldn't work. But now it does start to make sense -- it was never supposed to work in the way one would naturally think. But what do the instigators get out of it? What happens to the people that have been "deprogrammed?" I would kind of expect to see suicides, breakdowns, and I don't know what. Are they being used for something?
 
Megan said:
anart said:
These people are downright scary. I can't believe they get away with this behavior - actually - scratch that - this is planet earth in 2012, of course they do, the psychopaths are running the asylum.

They're doing it in league with family members and friends, and the victims may be quite vulnerable. If they can convince the family to commit a crime (kidnapping), that is control over them.

I have heard stories of "deprogramming" over the years and it never made sense to me. It couldn't work. But now it does start to make sense -- it was never supposed to work in the way one would naturally think. But what do the instigators get out of it? What happens to the people that have been "deprogrammed?" I would kind of expect to see suicides, breakdowns, and I don't know what. Are they being used for something?

Those animals get money and the satisfaction of acting like the monsters they are with full sanction from the parents. The ultimate power trip - they are being paid to kidnap and torture people, with an good excuse to avoid the law.
 
Iron said:
Megan said:
anart said:
These people are downright scary. I can't believe they get away with this behavior - actually - scratch that - this is planet earth in 2012, of course they do, the psychopaths are running the asylum.

They're doing it in league with family members and friends, and the victims may be quite vulnerable. If they can convince the family to commit a crime (kidnapping), that is control over them.

I have heard stories of "deprogramming" over the years and it never made sense to me. It couldn't work. But now it does start to make sense -- it was never supposed to work in the way one would naturally think. But what do the instigators get out of it? What happens to the people that have been "deprogrammed?" I would kind of expect to see suicides, breakdowns, and I don't know what. Are they being used for something?

Those animals get money and the satisfaction of acting like the monsters they are with full sanction from the parents. The ultimate power trip - they are being paid to kidnap and torture people, with an good excuse to avoid the law.

Yes, it's truly diabolical. I can't imagine the damage this would do to a person. It would be bad enough to be kidnapped and tormented by strangers, but to have it done by your own family under the guise of "it's for your own good" is unimaginable...
 
Iron said:
Megan said:
anart said:
These people are downright scary. I can't believe they get away with this behavior - actually - scratch that - this is planet earth in 2012, of course they do, the psychopaths are running the asylum.

They're doing it in league with family members and friends, and the victims may be quite vulnerable. If they can convince the family to commit a crime (kidnapping), that is control over them.

I have heard stories of "deprogramming" over the years and it never made sense to me. It couldn't work. But now it does start to make sense -- it was never supposed to work in the way one would naturally think. But what do the instigators get out of it? What happens to the people that have been "deprogrammed?" I would kind of expect to see suicides, breakdowns, and I don't know what. Are they being used for something?

Those animals get money and the satisfaction of acting like the monsters they are with full sanction from the parents. The ultimate power trip - they are being paid to kidnap and torture people, with an good excuse to avoid the law.

Exactly. And the law is written by monsters like them to cover their sadistic asses! What they fear the most is that all these people whom they abused will get together and file a huge lawsuit against them, with all the publicity that comes with these trials. I wonder what this guy's family think he is doing for a living, if they actually knew the truth.

Mr. Premise said:
Yes, it's truly diabolical. I can't imagine the damage this would do to a person. It would be bad enough to be kidnapped and tormented by strangers, but to have it done by your own family under the guise of "it's for your own good" is unimaginable...

And yet it's the "loving" family who allows this to happen to them, again and again. Geez, I was chain-smoking to be able to finish all the accounts Guardian posted. What a nightmare these people lived through! And these are only the ones who came out in some form and spoke about it. How many others are there?
 
Guardian said:
Magorski noted that this is not the first time that West's activities have been the subject of controversy. In 1973 West came under heavy fire for his plans to establish a "Violence Center" at UCLA which would use chemical castration, psychosurgery and early childhood testing against African-Americans for social control. West's plans generated national protests, triggered by student demonstrations on the UCLA campus.

In 1989 West was replaced as the head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, a position he held for 20 years.

_http://mindcontrolblackassassins.com/tag/by-dr-louis-jolyn-jolly-west/

Extract of that (long) article (link above):

In 1973, in Governor Ronald Reagan’s State of the State message, he and California’s German High Command announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical (Rudolph Hess’ Applied Biology) facility, the Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence. Supported by state and federal funds (LEAA), the first center was planned for the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, headed by Dr. Louis Jolyn “Jolly” West, the CIA Maestro of Mind Control.

An early draft of West’s proposed UCLA center described using schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods as human guinea pigs to experiment on and screen for possible genetic defects. It also mentioned using psychosurgery as treatment on children to modify what he and the establishment perceived to be no more than anti-social behavior,

“Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse, modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness.”[102]

Dr. West planned to use an abandoned NIKE missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was a perfect Little Auschwitz, and secret adjunct to the center to experiment on California’s children and prisoners of color,

“It is accessible but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements making it suitable for prompt occupancy.
If this site were made available to the Neuropsychiatric Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new Center for Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.”[103]

Dr. West’s Chamber of Horrors also proposed chemical castration, implantation of transponders in sexual organs and the brain for remote control, biological control of women’s menstrual cycles to control crime, and eventual replacement of the U.S. legal system with psychiatric control.

One of the principal school districts that would have secretly feed Black and Brown children into Dr. West’s SS-CIA Mind Control Chamber of Horrors hidden away in the remote Santa Monica Mountains was Dr. Marcus A. Foster’s Oakland Unified School District.

On July 27, 1973, the California Council on Criminal Justice (CCCJ) voted 19 to 0 to approve the allocation of funds ($750,000) for Dr. West’s Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence.[104]

The CCCJ is an entity of the government of California that acts as the supervisory board concerning federal grants by President Nixon and the Berlin Wall’s collaborator, the LEAA.[105]

According to government documents reviewed by the Late Great Mae Brussell at the time, it revealed that Dr. West’s Violence Center was proven undoubtedly behind the veil under LEAA and Robert Finch of HEW.[106] It had been part of the Hutshnecker SS Plan.

The Technology of Mass Racial Persecution and Genocide

In September 1973, Dr. Marcus Foster introduced a proposal to place armed police “control personnel” in schools, and issue mandatory ID photo cards for all OUSD students K-12 funded through a grant from CCCJ . [107]

Foster’s proposal to put police in the schools and setup a forced computer data base of OUSD students in a predominately Black school district was met with widespread condemnation, mistrust, fear and protest.[108]

However, Foster’s mandatory student ID photo data base proposal was veiled and far more diabolical than anyone could imagine. It was only the tip of an iceberg. Unbeknown or exposed to many, the CCCJ funded OUSD student data base program would have included “Fingerprints.”[109] The OUSD student data base was to be part of a clandestine national security data base.

You would be absolutely naïve to history to think otherwise. In a landmark lawsuit filed in 2001in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on behalf of five Holocaust victims, the suit alleged that IBM knew the data-processing technology it supplied to the Third Reich would be “used to facilitate persecution and genocide.”[110]

“Hitler could not have so quickly and efficiently identified and rounded up Jews and other minorities, used them as slave laborers and ultimately exterminated them, without IBM’s assistance,” plaintiff’s attorney Michael Hausfeld said in a statement.[111]

From Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation,

“People and asset registration was only one of the many uses Nazi Germany found for high-speed data sorters. Food Allocation was organized around data-bases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews. Slav labor was identified, tracked, and managed largely through punch cars. Punch cards even made the trains run on time and cataloged their human cargo.” [112]

The THIRD REICH’s use of data processing and computer technology to go hand to hand to facilitate and manage concentration camps, the ghastly human medical experiments and mass racial genocide is an old story.

At the same time that CCCJ was planning to fuel Dr. West’s experimental violence center with about a million dollars in seed money, it was also funding a necessary computerized component to a national security data bank and Dr. West’s anti-violence applied biology center and lab, the implementation of computerized Bio-Dossiers on all OUSD children K-12 through the Forced Youth Identification Program.[113]

The Forced Youth Identification Program at the OUSD school level would feed into a U.S. Internal Warfare Identification Computer System. Student’s Bio-Dossiers would feed into Dr. West’s Horror Human Experimentation Chambers and track students as young as 6 years old on a U.S. Internal Warfare Identification Computer System for life.

Consistent with the way of the THIRD REICH, a computerized data base was an essential tool to Dr. Hutschnecker SS National Plan to identify, label, track and roundup Black and Brown children for bizarre and uncanny mind control-behavior modification human experimentation; concentration camps and prisons; to under educate and under employ, and ultimately annihilate.
 
_http://www.schillerinstitute.org/strategic/2004/AFF.html

American Family Foundation:

The Wardens in—Dirty Bertie’s ‘Lethal Chamber’

by Barbara Boyd
June 2004

Lord Bertrand Russell, one of the honorary chairman of the Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism, spilled the beans on the network's efforts in mass social engineering in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society. But this mind-control dictatorship was not a passing thought; Russell had been working on the idea for decades. Russell describes the program in a 1931 book, The Scientific Outlook —a totalitarian manual:

“In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.”

“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order,” Russell explained, “members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative....”

Russell issued a strong warning: “On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.”

The American Family Foundation (AFF), the secretive organization founded in 1979, and advised by the veterans of the CIA's and Army Intelligence's mind-control programs: MK-Ultra, BLUEBIRD, MKSEARCH, etc., are the “thought police” for Russell's dictatorship. Since its founding, the AFF has functioned as a lead agency in the black propaganda campaigns directed by the Anglo-American elite against Lyndon LaRouche. The central lie employed in this campaign is that LaRouche is the authoritarian leader of a political cult with anti-Semitic views. There is no basis for the allegation; it is merely the attaching of the label of the Frankfurt School's “Authoritarian Personality” onto LaRouche in order to intimidate his supporters, and contain his influence. It is the AFF's assigned role.

The AFF, which purports to be an “educational” and “theoretical” organization in a self-declared war against coercive “cults,” is actually a clearinghouse for the “Reesian psychiatric shock troops” (after Dr. John Rawlings Rees of the British Tavistock Institute) who practice coercive techniques. In tandem with criminalized elements of law enforcement, and Anglo-American intelligence agencies, the AFF's associates, known as “deprogrammers,” ran one of largest kidnapping-for-hire operations in American history. Providing the “theoretical” basis were the veterans of the CIA's MK-Ultra projects in the AFF's stable of experts. The combination of the CCF-MK-Ultra's cultural warfare created the “new religions” cults in the first place; and some of AFF's “anti-cult” experts were directly involed.

Wall Street's 'Fondi'

The AFF is financed by the Anglo-American financial elite—Wall Street speculators such as the House of Morgan, the Watson family of IBM founder Thomas “Pop” Watson, an overt collaborator of Hitler and Mussolini's, and the ultra-rightwing Scaife Foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife, which funds the network of foundations and think tanks that controls Dick Cheney's war party. AFF also received initial grants from the Pew Foundation; like Watson, members of the Philadelphia-based Pew family were Hitler sympathizers, and were secret funders of pro-Hitler organizations in the U.S. during the 1930s.

The single largest financial promoters of the AFF for the past decade have been the Bodman and Achelis Foundations, providing more than half a million dollars. These two separate foundations have overlapping trustees and officers and are both housed in the New York City law offices of Morris and McVeigh. The key operative for the foundations is John Irwin III, the chairman and treasurer.

Irwin III, a Wall Street speculator who also owns large tracts of land in Arizona and California, specializes in managing the charitable foundations of America's patrician “families,” including the fortune of his grandfather, “Pop” Watson, the super-spook and collaborator with Hitler who headed IBM from the 1930s onward. His father, John Irwin II, was international legal counsel for the Morgan interests, and was Henry Kissinger's chief deputy as Secretary of State. While Irwin III's primary businesses have been two venture capital firms—Hillside Capital and Brookside—he is better known for managing private foundations.

In fact, each of AFF's sponsoring foundations has a long history in dirty Anglo-American intelligence operations. Bodman, for example, funded the infamous New Age project, the “Temple of Understanding” at the United Nations, run by the Lucifer-worshipping Lucis Trust. On the “right,” it funded the International Rescue Committee of neoconservative icon Leo Cherne, and the late CIA director Bill Casey; the Manhattan Institute; Claremont College; and other neoconservative Straussian nests.

Bodman's executive director, Joseph Dolan, is also executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, set up by the Bradley Foundation to coordinate grants from all “conservative foundations” in the U.S. in order to win ideological hegemony on the nation's campuses and in its political institutions. Another of John Irwin III's foundations publicly campaigned, post-9/11, for the Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” justification for war against Islam.

AFF's official history claims it was founded in 1979 by a concerned parent, Kay Barney, the retired Raytheon International Affairs Director, and Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School, in response to the threat posed by violent and coercive cults, particularly in the aftermath of the purported mass suicides of the members of the People's Temple Church of the Rev. Jim Jones, in Guyana in 1978. In contemporary language, this version of AFF's founding is an “urban legend.” In reality, the AFF's business is mind-control. Three of its “experts,” Robert J. Lifton, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, and Margaret Singer, did not merely study mind-control—they practiced coercive conditioning in the Nazi-doctor-style horrific secret experiments funded by the CIA's and Army intelligence's MK-Ultra. A fourth MK-Ultra veteran with AFF, Rabbi Maurice Davis, actually financed the psychotic Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple suicide church, in Jones's early years in Indianapolis.

However, in 1977, when a series of Congressional hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives forced the CIA et al. to close down the covert mind-control programs, Lifton, Singer, West, and others who had worked for years on the covert CIA payroll, were cut loose. They found a new home in the AFF.

To build up AFF, an extensive funding apparatus came into being after many children of the elite crossed class lines and succumbed to the counterculture, joining the Moonies, the Krishnas, the Scientologists, or similar entities that came into being in the counterculture explosion of the 1970s. For every new experiment in irrationality produced by the “Age of Aquarius,” there was to be an equally irrational inquisitor refining and playing with the new belief structures.

AFF's role in furthering the MK-Ultra tradition of mind-control isn't surprising. A faction of the financier establishment has always preferred intelligence operations to be under corporate, not government, control. In fact, after World War II, John Irwin III's grandfather, “Pop” Watson of IBM, planned exactly such a private intelligence empire. A “deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services” approached Watson “with a business proposition,” writes R. Harris Smith in his book, OSS. “Why not form a private intelligence organization and offer its services on contract to the government? The two men raised the initial capital for the venture....” However, the project was sidelined because Federal legislation, the National Security Act of 1947, was already being prepared to create the CIA. As the Iran/Contra affair showed in the 1980s, the financier establishment never abandoned its commitment to private intelligence operations.

The AFF is just such a private operation, which functions, in fact, as the controller of live psychiatric experiments conducted by a network of kidnappers for hire, con men, and body snatchers of limited intellectual means and criminal records who claim to be able to “deprogram” members of cults by application of aversive psychological conditioning techniques—while enjoying protection from prosecution for their activities.

These deprogrammers operate in tandem with a number of known criminal and mercenary-for-hire agencies, which at one time constituted perhaps the largest professional kidnapping ring in modern American history. Often, the kidnapping operations intersected the activities of criminalized segments of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community, and this complication allowed some members of the criminal enterprise to escape prosecution. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), an organization whose Israeli affiliates are on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, constitute one hard-core terrorist capability employed by AFF-related “deprogrammers.” The Lubavitcher sect, the Hells Angels motorcycle club, and former U.S. Special Forces and British Special Air Services (SAS) commandos have also been employed in kidnapping operations. For example, Galen Kelly, dean of the deprogramming fraternity, who had no professional psychological or other training, utilized JDL terrorists in his kidnappings, and, until the 1990s, was so revered by his sponsors that he was given a seat on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Another JINSA Board member was Vice President Dick Cheney.

AFF, its close associate, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), and its cohort agency in attacks on LaRouche, the Anti-Defamation League, ran into turbulent times in the 1990s. CAN and its deprogrammer Rick Ross were convicted by a Federal jury of conspiracy and civil rights violations in their abusive kidnapping and deprogramming of Jason Scott, throwing CAN into bankruptcy. Galen Kelly was investigated and prosecuted federally for what Federal prosecutors called a garden-variety industry of kidnappings for hire. The ADL was revealed to be running a massive private political spying operation, collecting dossiers on thousands of Americans and groups whom the ADL viewed as subversive, or a potential threat to the policies of the insane Likud Party in Israel. Frederich Haack, the primary exponent and collaborator of the AFF in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, in November 1980, as international education director for the AFF, imported into Germany the Dennis King and ADL slanders against LaRouche in a collaborative effort with Kurt Hirsch, the editor of PDI (Democratic Press Initiative). Kurt Hirsch, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was exposed as an operative of the hated and feared East Germany intelligence agency the Stasi, specifically, Stasi Division X.

As a result of these scandals, in which Federal prosecutors characterized CAN as little more than a band of extortionists and con men preying on the emotions of frantic parents, and with the deaths of Margaret Singer, former AFF president Herbert Rosedale, and others, the AFF and the CAN network have been reorganized. Deprogrammers now characterize themselves as “exit counsellors” and “interventionists” and foreswear the techniques of the past. The name “Cult Awareness Network” was purchased by the Scientologists in CAN's bankruptcy proceedings, and the organization's former luminaries now operate under several different identities and websites. But AFF has recruited new officers and an international advisory board which extends into Mexico, Spain, Britain, and Europe, and is in a new aggressive mode.

A brief background sketch of the “professionals” who advise the AFF and CAN further demonstrates the project's nature.

Rabbi Maurice Davis: Advisor to AFF and CAN, participant in the CIA's MK-Ultra mind control program in Lexington, Ky., and sponsor of the development of the Jim Jones cult in Indianapolis prior to Jones's move to Guyana and the ensuing mass suicide;

Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West: Advisor to AFF, psychiatrist participating in the CIA's MK-Ultra LSD experiments and mind-control program in Oklahoma. West wrote that the government should supply drugs to control populations. “This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.” West directly collaborated with Huxley in drug experiments throughout the 1950s and early '60s.
In 1961, in a speech at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley elaborated his vision. “There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it,” lulled by “brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” After the 1960s race riots in the U.S., West promoted implanting electrodes in people's brains and chemical castration to control violence and political activity.

Dr. Margaret Singer: Advisor to AFF and CAN. Singer got her start as an Army psychiatrist studying Chinese society, Korean War veterans, and prisoners of war in association with A.H. Schein and Robert J. Lifton in the 1950s. The impetus for these studies came from “journalist” Edward Hunter's sensationalist account of “Brainwashing in Red China, the Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds,” and subsequent accounts of Korean “brainwashing” methods. Hunter worked for Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination in the CIA, and his propaganda campaign was used to justify the entire MK-Ultra mind-control program. Otherwise, Singer's writings were cited by the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, Inc., a CIA front operating at the same time as the CCF. Singer and Jolly West often collaborated, including on profiling the Haight Ashbury hippie drug “culture,” interviewing drug-crazed hippies about their LSD-induced religious experiences. The LSD initially came from CIA and related intelligence projects.

Eugene Methvin: An early board member of AFF and editor of the Reader's Digest. Methvin was a key promoter throughout the 1950s and '60s of utilizing private organizations to do the government's dirty work against “subversive threats.” Methvin believed that the methods of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, in using “guilt by association” and “calumny” to induce the desired popular opinion about targetted groups and individuals, were the appropriate “attack” prototypes.
The AFF's Totalitarians

While foundation money and media attention flowed to AFF for its activities, the theories of psychological coercion and cult activities advanced by Singer et al. on behalf of AFF were persistently rejected as being without scientific basis, in particular by the American Psychological Association (APA).

The AFF's definition of cults is drawn directly from Robert J. Lifton and his descriptions of “totalistic” environments and charismatic leaders—descriptions which themselves were developed in the CIA MK-Ultra context cited above and which also derive directly from Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and the Frankfurt School. Lifton states that the assumption governing all “totalistic” cults is “not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's ideas can be God; that an absolute science of ideas (and implicitly an absolute science of man) exists.” Lifton credits the Frankfurt School's Hannah Arendt as his mentor on this subject. Lifton, a dedicated existentialist, otherwise characterizes his work as the study of evil, and shared with Margaret Singer a fascination with the creation of schizophrenia.

As described earlier, the Frankfurt School saw as its historical task the destruction of Western civilization itself, first by undermining the Judeo-Christian legacy through an “abolition of culture,” and at the same time bringing into being new or counter cultures designed to increase the alienation of the population, creating “a new barbarism.” In the “authoritarian personality project,” funded by the American Jewish Committee ostensibly to explore the potential for anti-Semitism in the U.S., they attacked the “authoritarian character” of the American nuclear family, the “problem” of the American people's belief in a transcendent monotheistic God, the underlying “fascist” character of all forms of American patriotism, and American culture's excessive reliance on science, reason, and “abstract ideas.”

To transform the rational and productive society which was the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they proposed “techniques for overcoming resistance developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy,” and proposed that Eros be the major emotional source of “democracy.” To hold the “fascist impulse in check,” people must be able to “see themselves” and “be themselves.” Thus was born the erotic, perverse matrix of drug abuse, sexual perversion, and the glorification of violence which permeates our culture today. In one of the first newspaper slanders of Lyndon LaRouche in the Washington Post, a February 1974 article, reporter Paul Valentine opined that LaRouche must be authoritarian because he rejects “the free-wheeling self-indulgence of ... the radical counterculture.”

It is no wonder, then, that in 1987, the American Psychological Association categorically rejected the theories of Singer and her AFF friends. Singer, Jolly West, and Dr. Michael Langone, an executive with AFF and editor of the AFF's Cultic Studies Journal, had managed to sit on an APA task force to study Singer's theory of “Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control” (DIMPAC). But when the DIMPAC task force issued its report, on May 11, 1987, the APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility (BSER) issued an official memo, saying it was “unable to accept the report of the [DIMPAC] Task Force....” It lacked “the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for the APA imprimatur.” The decision stands to this day.

The methods of the MK-Ultra Nazi doctors come directly from the Frankfurt School, the CCF, and a project known as “the Cybernetics group,” which was the umbrella under which the CIA and British intelligence conducted their mass experimentation with psychedelics, including LSD-25, which eventually spilled out onto the streets of America's cities, and every American college campus, giving us the counterculture paradigm shift of 1966-72.

On the government side, MK-Ultra was created by the same people who created the CCF: CIA Director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). MK-Ultra was one of a dozen psy-ops programs with similar names using LSD-25, other hallucinogens, electroshock, planting of electrodes in the brains of subjects, sensory deprivation, and a host of other techniques in mind-control. The human guinea pigs were often unwitting. Dozens of deaths resulted, but the real number will never be known because then-CIA Director Richard Helms, who had worked with Dulles and Wisner, destroyed the files in 1977, when the U.S. Congress began an investigation.

But “the Cybernetics group,” which was intertwined with the Authoritarian Personality project of the Frankfurt School crowd, was much higher-level—and private. Two of the Authoritarian Personality project's directors, Max Horkheimer and R. Nevitt Stanford, who headed up Stanford University Institute for the Study of Human Problems, were directly involved in the LSD-25 mind-manipulation scheme.

Horkheimer was not only central to the CCF, he was also a leading participant in “the Cybernetics group,” which began its work on mind-control, financed by the Josiah Macy Foundation, in 1942. The Cybernetics group was also known as the “man-machine project” because of its study of Artificial Intelligence based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The leading participants in the Cybernetics group were Warren McCulloch, from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT; Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist who became the director of research at the Veterans' Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., where he ran secret MK-Ultra experiments; Bateson's wife, Margaret Mead, the anthropology “earth goddess” who became renowned as a proponent of negative population growth and primitive cultures. Several other leaders of the Cybernetics group were deeply involved in the CCF: John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Paul Lazarsfeld.

The MK-Ultra quacks also developed the arguments used today by George Soros's massive drug-legalization apparatus. CIA mind-manipulator R. Nevitt Stanford, who was part of the MK-Ultra programs, makes the argument in his forward to the book Utopiates: The Use and Users of LSD-25, published by the Tavistock Institute in 1965. “Only an uneasy Puritan” could support treating drug addicts “as a police problem instead of a medical one, while suppressing harmless drugs such as marijuana and peyote along with the dangerous ones.”
[…].
 
Alana said:
Exactly. And the law is written by monsters like them to cover their sadistic asses! What they fear the most is that all these people whom they abused will get together and file a huge lawsuit against them, with all the publicity that comes with these trials. I wonder what this guy's family think he is doing for a living, if they actually knew the truth.

Oh they know. He has a wife, and three daughters, two of whom he was allowed to Adopt from China. After what I've read about him, I suspect that the two Adopted kids were his live in torture victims...and the other daughter was probably groomed to take his place as a torturer? Of course I could have that backwards.

I'm still harvesting data from the nineties...I haven't even gotten to his current activities yet. His arrest and prosecution in 91 made him a lot more careful, and it appears "deprogramming" activities have gone underground
 
This is REALLY long, but worth the read because it explains how the "deprogramming" process has evolved. Of course I'm sure they're lying, but this is the spin they tried to put on their activities after the legal cases in the early 90's


Exit Counseling and the Decline of Deprogramming

Stephen A. Kent

Department of Sociology

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada



Joseph P. Szimhart

Exit Counselor

Pottstown, Pennsylvania


Abstract

An old model of forcibly deprogramming persons from controversial ideological organizations has given way to progressive, non-coercive models that emphasize dialogue within voluntary “exit counseling” settings. These non-coercive models approach counseling events partly as family crises that usually require careful preparation with relatives and friends. Counselors structure the meetings in ways that work within the value systems of the groups from which they are trying to remove their subjects. Moreover, they attempt to empower their subjects by giving them degrees of autonomy and control as the counseling sessions proceed. This new generation of exit counselors avoids the questionable and often forcible practices that deprogrammers undertook in the past. They also are attempting to regulate their profession by limiting their cooperative work with other counselors to those who adhere to a code of ethics. Nevertheless, competition and debate exist among counselors who use slightly different non-coercive models. This study discusses and positions these developing trends in exit counseling within the historical and cultural contexts in which forcible deprogramming first emerged but gradually declined.



In the early 1970s, a countercult movement emerged in response to controversial, ideologically driven groups throughout the Western world. This oppositional movement challenged these groups’ attempts both to attract youthful converts and to gain societal legitimacy. Such challenges included allegations that the groups used coercion, manipulation, and deception in their efforts to recruit and maintain members. On this important issue of recruitment, the ideology of the countercult movement intended to “confer a specific deviant status on those individuals who joined new religions” (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 25) or other ideological organizations such as fringe political parties and many motivational programs (Coates 1994: 93; see Robbins and Anthony 1982: 283). The deviant status insisted that converts had been brainwashed, and this interpretation legitimated the exercise of specific forms of intervention against members of these high-demand ideologies. At the time, the interveners referred to their actions as “deprogramming,” which assumed that young converts were “unable to manage their own lives and decisions . . .” (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 125). Sociological research on deprogramming concluded that persons (called deprogrammers) who undertook the practice saw their mission as “restoring earlier-valued social relationships” (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 125), but more generally, family and friends of these converts shared deeply rooted concerns about the converts’ well-being in a variety of areas (Langone 1993: 22-23).

Considerable scholarship focused on certain aspects of deprogramming, particularly on the array of legal issues that related to the practice. While a few academics looked at deprogramming as either a necessary evil or an appropriate response to a social and mental health crisis (Delgado 1977; 1984), most sociologists were highly critical of it (for example, Wright 1987: 93-98). Some critics discussed deprogramming in the context of alleged religious repression (for example, Shupe, Spielmann, and Stigall 1978) and reputed civil liberties violations, while others referred to its vigilante status (Shupe and Bromley 1980). In addition, most social scientists objected to the increased interpretive role that deprogramming provided to both the mental health profession and the popular media regarding the dynamics of new religions (see Robbins and Anthony 1982).

This scholarship, however, needs to be revisited following the virtual elimination of involuntary extractions (at least in North America) since the early 1990s, and their replacement with systematic programs of voluntary exit counseling. North America’s most active “exit counselors” responded to pressures imposed by the target groups, legal decisions, and professionalization, and they developed intervention techniques that appear to be effective and far less controversial than deprogramming in facilitating members’ decisions to leave high-demand ideological groups. Although these “successes” might be the consequence of well-understood processes of attitude change in social psychology, most exit counselors continue to describe their achievements according to “mind control” or “thought reform” models. Such models are the subject of fierce debate among sociologists of religion, but they receive much more support within the mental health community.

In this article, many of the insights about exit counseling come from one of the authors (Szimhart), who became a professional deprogrammer and exit counselor in 1986. Now semi-retired because of other commitments, Szimhart estimates that he was involved in more than 300 cases, with perhaps less than 10% of those cases involving the forcible acquisition of deprogramees. In 1991, he decided not to participate further in forcible deprogrammings, partly because he had faced criminal charges over a failed deprogramming in Idaho — a legal case that he won two years later in a jury trial. “. . . [T]he jury believed that while [co-defendants Kenneth] Paolini and [Joseph] Szimhart may have broken the law, it was probably necessary in this case” (Dvorak and Ronnow 1993). In September 1991, when a national magazine featured an article about him, Szimhart’s “average fee [was] between $300 to [sic] $400 a day. At least a quarter of his consultations [were] pro bono and over the phone” (Disend 1991: 35).

The other author (Kent) is a sociologist who has spoken with and interviewed hundreds of persons who hold various relationships to controversial groups: current members; former members; relatives of current or former members; law enforcement; etc. (see Kent, 2001). Many of his interview subjects had been the targets of deprogramming attempts; several parents (and one former law-enforcement official) also spoke to him about their efforts in this regard. Because many of the interviews that he conducted were with people who were active during a period when forcible deprogrammings were common, he was struck by the contrast between the earlier activities in the 1970s and 1980s and the virtual collapse of such activities during the mid- to late-1990s. The motivation for this article, therefore, is a desire to identify and analyze a major shift within the countercult movement — a shift that one of the authors (Szimhart) has experienced directly.
A Traditional Overview of Deprogramming

Deprogramming came into being in the early 1970s, not only because of the countercult movement’s activities, but also because of desperate and bewildered family members’ need for it. As the numbers of young adults increased who were involved in high-demand ideological groups (especially religious ones), “growing numbers of families became concerned with the role of cults in their children’s new and disturbing behavior: dropping out of school, cutting ties to families and friends and sometimes disappearing completely” (Tobias and Lalich 1994: 59). Moreover, parents who were able to obtain information about their adult children’s beliefs and behavior inside their newly joined groups often grew deeply concerned about their offspring’s physical and emotional well-being (Shupe, Bromley, and Oliver 1984: 129).[1] By believing that their children were “brainwashed,” parents construed that the unconventional activities and beliefs of their loved ones had arisen through the “mind control” techniques of the organization. Certainly memories of Charles Manson’s grip over his followers haunted parents, and the brainwashing model gained even greater support during the mid-1970s’ spectacle of Patricia Hearst’s transformation from kidnap victim to terrorist. As her story unfolded, it reinforced in parents’ eyes the ability of abusive groups to orchestrate dramatic personality changes.[2] More ominously, the 1978 murder-suicides of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana represented a worst-case scenario that all parents of so-called “cult” members feared.[3]

Yet even in the months before Jonestown, when Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman wrote about “the sudden, drastic alteration of personality in all its many forms” and called it “snapping,” parents were certain that these authors were describing what had happened to their young adult children (Conway and Siegelman 1978: 13). Deprogramming, many parents hoped, would “snap” them back out of the “cult” mindset. Indeed, four years later, these same authors published survey findings that seemed to prove the therapeutic value of deprogramming. Based upon “more than 400 former cult members from 48 different groups” (Conway and Siegelman 1982: 88). They reported:

More than two-thirds (71 percent) of those in our survey were deprogrammed, but only about 40 percent were abducted. In almost every case, those who were deprogrammed recovered more quickly and experienced fewer long-term effects than those who were not. Deprogrammees needed an average 10 months less rehabilitation time than non-deprogrammees (14 months instead of 24 months) and reported, on the average, less than half the long-term effects (Conway and Siegelman 1982: 92).[4]

Parents and other loved ones, therefore, believed that they had scientific proof for the value of deprogramming, even if the deprogrammers had to use some measure of force.

Not only did many loved ones believe that deprogramming had therapeutic value, but also the deprogrammers themselves promised to restore independent thinking to individuals, thereby allowing them to make decisions about their lives outside of the restrictions of the ideologically high-demand groups to which they had belonged. Sociologists writing about deprogramming, therefore, may have underplayed the more altruistic motives of many deprogrammers when they concluded that, in significant ways, they were “agents to whom parents delegated authority in order to restore their sons and daughters to career paths more in line with the parents’ own conceptions of normalcy” (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 121). Many deprogrammers said that it was equally if not more important to restore (what they called) critical thinking to persons who, in the deprogrammers’ view, had lost the capacity to think critically because of techniques of manipulation that “cults” used on them. Psychologist Brock Kilbourne (1983: 380), therefore, captured only some aspects of deprogramming when he defined it as a “practice which aims to return cult converts to prior and conventional commitments to family, work, and community, and may entail the use of force.” Worth emphasizing, however, is that parents and relatives also saw deprogrammers as counselors who would assist “cult-involved” loved ones in realizing the potential consequences of injurious or dangerous behaviors in which many of them were engaged.

The stereotypical portrayal of deprogramming was that it involved force to combat the previous “programming” of the members by the so-called “cults.” According to Coulter (1984: 98), the need for deprogramming was “based on the assumption that a barrage of experiences and indoctrination has resulted in the closing off of the person’s brain to normal critical debate, and that this can only be undone by a similar barrage of new information about the group to which he or she belongs, to break down that resistance to criticism.” Presumably, many deprogrammers felt that the only way to undo the alleged damage caused by “brainwashing” was to employ somewhat similar tactics that the so-called “cults” used to “program” members in the first place. They imposed these tactics through the use of force if they deemed it necessary.

The actual repertoire of tactics that deprogrammers used, however, was quite wide and diverse, and they varied according to the peculiar demands of individual cases. As David Bromley realized, “there are numerous possible combinations of coercive and voluntary deprogramming, rehabilitation, and therapy” (Bromley 1988: 195). When deprogrammers used force, it usually occurred in any of four aspects of the “deprogramming” event. First, the “deprogrammers” (or parents working with them) frequently grabbed their unwilling “targets,” placed them in vehicles, and transported them to pre-arranged locations (Shupe, Bromley, and Oliver 1984: 129). (Critics, of course, called these acts assault and kidnapping). Second, deprogrammers detained their targets (at least initially) against their wills (acts their critics called forcible confinement). Third, they sometimes restrained persons who physically resisted, seemed at risk of self-harm, or were likely to try to escape. Fourth, some deprogrammers denigrated detainees’ religious beliefs or leaders, justifying these actions as attempts to stir cult-deadened emotions (but eliciting charges from critics of religious rights violations). Even in the 1970s, however, serious divisions existed between deprogrammers who used force and at least some exit counselors who insisted upon non-coercive contact and interaction with members whom they hoped would leave controversial groups. Indeed, one exit counselor, former Scientologist Nan McLean (from Ontario, Canada), testified against deprogrammer Ted Patrick when he forcibly confined Scientologist Paula Dain and then brought in McLean (who did not know about the circumstances) to assist him (Dain v. Patrick 1979; McLean 1979; Superior Court 1980).

The deprogramming movement was disorganized, with no national or even regional conferences having been held before the 1980s to discuss and evaluate the deprogramming process (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 123). Frequently, families and deprogrammers connected through the social networks within various “anti-cult” groups such as the Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God (FREECOG, which formed around 1971 to combat the Children of God), the more-widely focused Volunteer Parents of America (VPA, which formed in southern California in 1973), and the Citizens Freedom Foundation (CFF or C.F.F., which formed in 1974 as an overall educational organization [Coates 1994: 94; Rambur 1974]).[5] In turn, CFF changed its name to the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) in 1985 (Crampton, n.d.: 12a), and CAN (like the CFF) held conferences that deprogrammers attended in order to meet others in the occupation and obtain parental contacts for future work.

An insinuation by an FBI agent that CAN might have been involved in planning a deprogramming appeared in a 1992 sworn affidavit by Special Agent Scott Salter. In referring to an earlier incident in which deprogrammer Galen Kelly allegedly (and, it turned out, actually) had kidnapped the wrong woman for deprogramming, agent Salter reported that the intended victim’s mother “placed calls to the Cult Awareness Network in Chicago in the three months prior to the May 5, 1992 abduction” (Salter 1992: 8). He did not indicate, however, what the mother and any CAN personnel discussed, so one cannot deduce that CAN was involved in any way with this kidnapping/deprogramming incident. However sympathetic many early CAN members might have been to deprogramming,[6] the organization itself played no formal role in facilitating or monitoring deprogrammers’ activities. In 1988, CAN’s Board of Directors even passed (by unanimous consent) a policy stating “No officers, Board Members, or paid staff of the Cult Awareness Network or its affiliates may participate in involuntary de-programming” (Cult Awareness Network 1988: 12). With all of the major countercult organizations officially distancing themselves from deprogramming, neither the active members of these organizations nor the deprogrammers themselves developed any formalized, professional, or ethical standards during the first two decades that deprogrammers operated. Discussions, however, about such standards were taking place during the mid-1980s within the social networks of CAN (see Giambalvo 2000: 1).[7]
Early Forms of Deprogramming--Ted Patrick and the Coercive Model

In the 1970s and 1980s, many types of deprogramming existed, but the one that received the most attention from both the media and academics was the coercive method that Ted Patrick practiced (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 122). Patrick was Governor Ronald Reagan’s Special Representative for Community Relations in California (Patrick and Dulack 1976: 37), and he became interested in the activities of the new religions when members of the Children of God attempted to convert his son and his nephew. Around the same time, he was receiving numerous complaints about the activities of this organization from concerned citizens. After his subsequent investigation, Patrick concluded that these organizations were “programming” individuals, and that the only way to return independent thinking capabilities to these people was to forcibly break the “mind control” that new religious “cults” had over their members. Thus, in 1971, Patrick coined the term deprogramming (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 123). In what may be the only systematic study about the impact of coercive deprogramming on a controversial group, Bromley concluded that Patrick “played a dominant role in the early history of deprogramming,” through his own coercive extractions and “through the network of trainees and disenchanted members who subsequently followed in his footsteps” (Bromley 1988: 198). The combined efforts of these deprogrammers “certainly had an impact” upon the Unification Church in the mid- to late-1970s and early 1980s (Bromley 1988: 204).

According to Shupe and Bromley (1980: 122):

coercive deprogramming was marked by abducting and detaining members of ‘cults’ against their will, haranguing them for extended periods of time under emotionally charged conditions, and then achieving in such individuals rapid redefinitions of their former religious experiences and beliefs that culminated in their apostasy.

Again, however, these sociologists may have stereotyped the process, because the image of “haranguing” deprogrammers belied the obvious fact that persuasion and dialogue were the preferred techniques whenever possible. Nevertheless, the logic and practice of coercive deprogramming began with the concerned but extra-legal (and, critics insisted, vigilante) response of one man, at the same time that families began meeting to discuss common grievances and concerns about the influence of high-demand religions or other ideological organizations in the lives of their loved ones.
Published Responses to Deprogramming by Critics and Target Groups

According to deprogramming critics, a combination of pressures on the individual resulted in physical and emotional fatigue that supposedly wore down the member’s resistance to accepting the deprogrammer’s views (see, for example, Coulter 1984; Melton and Moore 1982; Richardson et al. 1986; Shupe and Bromley 1980; Stoner and Parke 1977). Such representations of coercive deprogramming had occasional basis in fact, although some of the members already were fatigued from the regime of “cult” involvement, and actually gained rest and strength during the deprogramming experience. Predictably, however, the harsh and degrading tone that many academics (especially sociologists)[8] used to describe the process appeared in counter-deprogramming publications that various target groups themselves distributed to their members. The Children of God, for example, published at least three articles for its members against deprogramming. One article was a reprint of a March 1975 Canadian newspaper article critical of Patrick and deprogramming (Harpur 1975). Later, in September, COG published a member’s tale of the two deprogramming attempts that he had survived (one by Patrick himself [Cephas 1975]). Roughly two years later, the group reproduced another media article, this time from a Belgian magazine, which was very critical of Patrick and deprogramming (‘Special’ Magazine 1977).[9]

The most successful publication against deprogramming that a target group produced, however, was a 9-page “how-to” manual that surfaced in various countries during 1976 and 1977.[10] Dedicated to Ted Patrick, the fake manual advocated numerous techniques that deprogrammers were to use against their targets: food termination, sleep withdrawal, shame-inducement through nudity, physical coercion, verbal stress, the destruction of the target’s holy works from the controversial group, and sex with the target individuals (POWER 1976: 5-7). Copies of this manual appeared in Australia (Cheyney 1977; Hooks 1978; Perth Sunday Independent 1977; Tobin 1977), Canada (Flinn 1977; Marshall 1976), (probably) New Zealand (Central Leader 1977), the United Kingdom (Beckford 1985: 228-230; Ezard 1976), and the United States.[11] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) received the manual as a factual account, and it appeared in an information booklet that (at the time) Moonie sympathizer Dr. Herbert Richardson of the Toronto School of Theology prepared for the ACLU’s February 5, 1977 conference on “Religious Deprogramming.” Exactly one month later, the ACLU adopted a resolution “condemning use of deprogramming by parents attempting to recover their children from high-demand religious cults” (Philadelphia Daily News 1977).[12] In addition, the Belgian magazine article that the Children of God translated and distributed to its members worldwide referred to the manual (‘Special’ Magazine 1977: 5).

Suspicions about the deprogramming manual’s authenticity quickly surfaced in Australia (Tobin 1977), and a prominent Canadian reporter linked it to Scientology (Marshall, 1976)—a connection strengthened later with references found in Scientology’s Guardian Office material uncovered in the 1977 FBI raids against the organization. In the United Kingdom, however, the prestigious Guardian newspaper (not related to Scientology) carried a concerned article about the manual’s contents (Ezard 1976). A suspicious Australian group, the Better Family Relations Association, criticized the manual in the press, as did New Zealand’s Family Unity and Freedom of Worship (Central Leader 1977). British sociologist James Beckford located the manual and the organization (named POWER, or People’s Organized Workshop on Ersatz Religions) that published it in the context of efforts to discredit both Britain’s countercult “parents association” named FAIR, and individuals who had a countercult reputation (Beckford 1985: 230). More disturbingly, new religions’ supporter Frank K. Flinn accepted the manual’s authenticity in his article against deprogramming in a Canadian “new religions” newsletter in 1977 (Flinn 1977), as did Australian psychologist Michael W. Ross, who published a highly critical academic article against it (Ross 1979). If, by manufacturing the fake document, the Guardian Office’s intention was to horrify the public and its decision-makers by portraying deprogramming as a violent, sexually exploitative practice, then the tactic had considerable success.
Controversies and the Decline of Deprogramming

Several issues concerning the American First Amendment rights of individuals being deprogrammed arose during and after the late 1970s, and these issues had parallels in countries throughout the Western world. Often, in the eyes of the law, the forcible abduction of members of new religious movements was kidnapping. According to Shupe and Bromley (1980: 130) the use of forcible abduction was “the single most important reason that deprogrammers were never able to establish themselves as a legitimate occupation.”

In the United States, “[t]he First Amendment embraces two concepts--freedom to believe and freedom to act” (Bromley and Richardson 1980: 240). Other Western countries have analogous protections legally guaranteeing religious worship and religious behavior. Consequently, supporters of new religions whose members were targets for deprogramming condemned deprogramming for allegedly violating these basic human rights (see Levine 1980: 34; Robbins 1979: 43; Ross 1979: 205). Deprogramming’s American critics claimed further that intervention to extricate and deprogram members of new religions was ethically wrong because “such interference with the rights of nonconforming religious believers is constitutionally illegal and it violates the moral principles—chiefly the rights to equal concern and respect--on which the constitution is based” (Robbins, Shepherd, and McBride 1985: 95-96). According to Slade (1979: 81), “a number of decisions in state and federal appellate courts have supported this religious freedom” and “the laws guarantee that courts and court officers cannot be used to deny an individual’s basic rights to freedom of religion, speech, association, and privacy.”

For defenders of deprogramming, the issue was not freedom of religion and practice, but free and informed choice. Robbins and Anthony (1978: 77) stated that “the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, but necessary to each guaranteed freedom is freedom of thought.” Again, since supporters of deprogramming believed that authoritarian new religions controlled the minds of their members, these supporters were convinced that intervention often was the only way to return the members’ independent thinking capabilities. From this perspective, forcible seizure and physical restraint did not violate the First Amendment. Rather, by restoring the individuals’ ability to think freely, the deprogrammers returned peoples’ First Amendment rights (see Delgado 1977; 1984).

Indeed, deprogrammers and their supporters insisted that even though the practice of forcible removal was illegal, it was necessary to prevent the commission of an even greater evil. They insisted that the group’s control mechanisms inhibited members’ physical and psychological safety to the extent that members could not leave voluntarily (see Shupe, Bromley, and Oliver 1984: 129-132). Occasionally “the necessity defense” (or a variation of it) served to acquit deprogrammers whose failed efforts eventually landed them in court (see, for example, District Court of the United States 1974: 77-80).[13]

Deprogrammers also necessarily believed that members of new religious movements were “brainwashed” or operated under “mind control.” They reasoned that, for a person to be deprogrammed, he or she first must have been “programmed.” As popularly defined, brainwashing means that an individual or group has absolute control over another’s thinking and reasoning. The original definition of the term, however, is more directly related to the thought-reform and coercive-persuasion techniques employed in the Korean POW camps and post-Mao Chinese re-education programs (Lifton 1961; Zimbardo and Andersen 1993: 107). According to Philip Zimbardo and Susan Andersen (1993: 106):

It is a person (or various persons) in a convincing social situation--not gadgets or gimmicks--who controls the minds of others. The more worried we are about being regarded ignorant, uncultured, untalented, or boring, the more likely we are to take on the beliefs of those around us to avoid being rejected by them.

Taking a somewhat broader approach, Streiker (1984: 127) stated that the use of the term brainwashing “should be restricted to instances of acute depersonalization accomplished through the use of force and life-threatening stress.” No proof exists that any magical “brainwashing” formula exists, but the debate about the appropriateness of the term continues as social scientists attempt to identify the circumstances in which use of the term may be appropriate (see, for example, Kent and Hall 2000; and articles in Zablocki and Robbins [eds.] 2001).

Most new religious organizations recruited members through persuasion, manipulation, and/or deception and did not resort to the use of force. Nevertheless, controversial religions frequently used front groups to deceive recruits about the true nature of their organizations. Some used manipulation to indoctrinate members, gradually cutting off members’ ties to the outside world in an attempt to ensure that they became completely dependent upon their new sectarian environments. Group leaders and members also placed potential recruits in situations (such as high-speed praying, chanting in foreign languages, frenetic physical activity, complete stillness, etc.) for which they had no previous frames of meaning, and then provided meanings by (mis)attributing spirituality to those activities and the resultant feelings or sensations that they evoked (see Kent 1994). Deprogrammers might have perceived these conditions as “brainwashing” or “mind control,” but as Robbins and Anthony (1978: 77) stated a number of years ago, “. . . it seems far-fetched to equate movements such as Hare Krishna or the Unification church which exhibit a rapid turnover and a high dropout rate (even without deprogramming), with POW camps.”

Critics of coercive deprogramming said the practice was as bad as, or worse than, the recruitment and re-socialization techniques used in the controversial new religions (Bromley and Richardson 1980: 79; Stoner and Parke 1977: 230). Robbins, Shepherd, and McBride (1985) argued that while deprogrammers criticized the imposition of force and total environmental control that “cults” supposedly used to coercively change a person’s opinion, the deprogrammers themselves used such tactics as “brainwashing,” “mind control,” and “coercive persuasion.” One sociological study (Kim 1979: 201) argued that deprogramming itself was a form of coercive persuasion.

In a study that analyzed 94 parents’ responses to a questionnaire (the parents self-reported to a non-random sample) concerning their experiences with deprogramming, Langone found, “on the average, one-fourth to one-third of forced deprogrammings result in the convert’s returning to the cult,” although an additional 9% of these returnees eventually left voluntarily (Langone 1984: 74). When a deprogramming attempt failed, the member often returned to the new religious organization even more committed to its doctrines and lifestyle than before the intervention took place. Members of new religious organizations, for example, were under the impression that they were being persecuted in the same manner as the early Christians had been (Stoner and Parke 1977: 253). Coulter (1984: 102) stated that:

kidnapping cult members, restraining them against their will and subjecting them to brutal assault on their personalities until they finally confess they are wrong and agree to renounce their beliefs . . . does nothing but strengthen the claims of the cults that they are suffering from religious persecution because of their beliefs.

Members believed that, like the Catholics, they would work their way to world respectability and acceptance. From this perspective, individuals who escaped a deprogramming felt that they have “won a battle” (Stoner and Parke 1977: 253). Because controversial religious movements claimed to be victims whose members suffered persecution as a result of their beliefs, these groups taught their members to expect confrontation. In this way, deprogrammer interventions served to strengthen members’ beliefs in the accuracy of the groups’ predictions (Coulter 1984: 102).

Stoner and Parke (1977: 269) contended that many deprogrammers were:

ill-prepared and untrained in handling the psychological aspects of the intricate task they so readily undertake. Many, too, were lacking in the practical organizational skills that are necessary for projects that involve the sanity and self-images of those they seek to rescue.

Because controversial religious organizations promise their members peace, love, world unity, and happiness, deprogrammed members often felt shattered when they accepted that they had been lied to, and that the goals they had worked so hard for were unattainable. Even with their dreams of love, peace, and happiness destroyed, recently deprogrammed members often entered a state of identity confusion known as “floating” (which might be a form of dissociation), in which they vacillated between their “cult” and “non-cult” lives. During this time, an individual was “most likely to day-dream about his [or her] shattered religious dreams and long for the security of life within the religious cult” (Stoner and Parke 1977: 271). Pavlos (1982: 148) concluded, “. . . it seems clear that all too often the highly structured life of the cult wins out and the cultist becomes even more committed to an extreme cult lifestyle.”
Conservatorships

In the period from 1975 to 1977, American judges commonly granted temporary conservatorships and guardianships to parents concerned about the mental stability of children involved in new religions (Robbins 1979: 42). A conservatorship was a court order that legally allowed parents to remove their children from the new religious organizations. To obtain the court order, the parents had to convince a judge that their child’s mental and physical well-being was sufficiently jeopardized to warrant such action (Enroth 1977: 199). By 1981, “. . . bills that would allow courts under certain conditions to assign temporary guardians to adults who have joined so-called cults ha[d] been introduced in Connecticut, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Texas” (Berreby 1981: 3). In the next year, the Kansas House passed along a bill to the Senate that would have given “parents a clear right to retrieve their children for deprogramming from religious sects” (Tampa Tribune 1982). Among the most successful organizations to use conservatorship laws was the Tucson, Arizona-based Freedom of Thought Foundation, whose deprogrammers extracted more than 70 young people from various controversial groups during slightly more than a year of operations (which began approximately early 1976) (Chandler 1977a: 57; 1977b: 1; Townsend 1977: 5; see Shupe and Bromley 1980: 139-141).

The new religions soon learned, however, that they enjoyed formal protection under law, and they attempted to sue the deprogrammers for libel, violation of civil rights, and false imprisonment (Shupe and Bromley 1980: 130). Robbins (1979: 42) summarized the fate of American conservatorships as follows:

In 1977, in Katz vs. Superior Court, an intermediate appellate court in California threw out conservatorships granted by a lower court and propounded stringent criteria for the granting of such petitions in the future. After the State Supreme Court refused to review the case, judges all over the country became more circumspect in granting temporary conservatorships and guardianships in ex-parte hearings (hearings in which the potential conservatee is not represented) and without a definite indication of overwhelming incapacity on the part of the devotee.

Not surprisingly, targeted new religious or cult organizations worked to get legislation changed so that conservatorships were difficult if not impossible to obtain (Singer and Lalich 1995: 281). The legal victories on the part of several controversial religions resulted in a significant decline in legal deprogrammings in the late 1970s (Robbins 1979: 42). As late as 1980, however, a Bozeman, Montana judge granted to parents Sherwin and Marilyn Desens conservatorship over their 34 year-old daughter Nancy Desens-Jacob, who had joined a group called the Brotherhood and, by doing so, allegedly had “surrendered her money, her free will, her marriage, her children, her parents and her body” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1980).
Less Coercive and Non-Coercive Deprogramming in the 1970s and 1980s

As Bromley and Shupe realized, not all deprogrammings were punctuated with violence and force. Bromley indicated that the deprogrammers in the 1970s and early 1980s “began to discover that non-coercive tactics often were just as successful as coercive deprogramming in convincing [Unification Church] members to renounce group membership and were less disruptive to family solidarity in the event of failure” (Bromley 1988: 198; see Shupe and Bromley 1994: 9; Lewis 1989: 395). Regrettably, no systematic survey of deprogramming styles exists, so scholars must rely upon media portrayals, popularized books, and accounts by group members against whom deprogramming efforts failed (see, for example, Biermans 1986: 67-71). Consequently, most of the academic discussions of the process have presented it in a stereotypically violent and coercive manner, perhaps paralleling the alleged production of “atrocity tales” that deprogrammed people supposedly invented about events in high-demand groups (see Lewis 1989). Almost all academic accounts have de-emphasized if not ignored less violent and less confrontational forms.

In what might be the only academic study of a deprogramming, however, Dubrow-Eichel (1989; 1990) found only a brief moment of coercion in the initial contact between the deprogrammers and the unsuspecting Hare Krishna member, with no subsequent coercion (and no physical or emotional violence) during the five-day event (see Dubrow-Eichel 1989: 38-39, 105). Because of both the anecdotal literature and critical academic studies, which “suggested that confrontation played a central role in successful deprogrammings,” Dubrow-Eichel “was surprised at how rarely the deprogrammers engaged in personal confrontations” of their deprogramee (Dubrow-Eichel 1989: 109). This pattern of minimal coercion and no violence was quite common (see, for example, Disend 1991, involving one of the authors [Szimhart]), but no exact figures exist that allow quantification.

In this non-violent context, the deprogramming took on dimensions of (among other things) both a therapeutic relationship and a discourse containing persuasive conversation, teaching, and moral discussion (Dubrow-Eichel 1990: 207-211). It had communicative dimensions, cognitive dimensions, and social-affiliative dimensions (Dubrow-Eichel 1990: 210-213), and only one of the five deprogrammers who succeeded with the deprogramming had any professional training in communications (Dubrow-Eichel 1989: 35). The deprogrammers were socially skilled but (with that one exception) professionally untrained. Current practices within exit counseling produce results similar to those achieved under non-violent, minimally coercive deprogrammings, and they take place in conditions in which virtually all coercion has been removed.
Exit Counseling

Partly because of the legal risks and ethical issues arising from coercive deprogramming methods, so-called countercult counselors developed new, non-coercive means of intervention with members of controversial ideological movements. Likewise, several of the counselors working within the “countercult” movement obtained advanced degrees in programs related to mental health (e.g., psychology, social work), and their professional status would have been jeopardized by involvement in coercive or violent acts. Indeed, for years, a number of persons prominent in the countercult movement (Dr. John Clark, Priscilla Coates, Maurice Davis, Daphne Green, James and Marcia Rudin, Dr. Margaret Singer, and others) had counseled so-called “cult” members in non-coercive exchanges whenever those persons contacted them. Such non-coercive dialogues became increasingly important during the 1980s and 1990s, as persons in controversial groups developed extensive histories of involvement (sometimes dating back decades) that required lengthy periods of dialogue as they processed and understood their experiences. In essence, the relatively “quick” interventions of most deprogrammings of comparatively young people during the 1970s and early 1980s were increasingly unlikely to work. These pressures and limitations, combined with successes that deprogrammers and others achieved with minimal (and, in many cases, no) coercion or violence, provided the social context in which a new form of intervention developed. This new methodology became known as exit counseling, noncoercive deprogramming, thought-reform consulting, voluntary cult interventions, or re-evaluation. “Deprogramming has been replaced by a more respectful approach, which is educational in nature, more professional in delivery, more effective in outcome and, because it is voluntary, generally non-traumatizing” (Tobias and Lalich 1994: 60).

By the early 1980s, some deprogrammers were attempting to address the issue of forcible removals and kidnapping that others among them used. In, for example, an “Ex-Moon” newsletter from July 1980, Leslie Elliot wrote:

This letter grows out of a recent conversation between Steve Hassen, Gary Scharff, and myself — all of us being former Moonies as well as “deprogrammers” — and Bob, a counselor friend of Steve’s interested in becoming a “deprogrammer.” A number of us have been concerned about a seeming lack of standards for what constitutes an ethical as well as effective “deprogramming.”

This letter is to solicit your opinions and ideas on what methods or techniques are ethical, how parents should be prepared a [sic] and counseled, whether “rehabilitation” is desirable or not, fees for deprogramming services, etc. [sic] (Elliot, 1980).

By 1983, Hassan was teaching about non-coercive interventions in workshops he led, titled “Communicating With Cult Members.” Also that year, deprogrammers apparently met in the context of the CAN conference in an unsuccessful attempt to establish ethical standards and techniques (Blocksom 1992: 3).[14] Interestingly, exit counseling had become sufficiently well known by then (1983) that the leader of The Way International, Victor Paul Wierwille, warned his organization’s members about it:

The deprogrammers’ emphasis has recently shifted from violent abduction to a more subtle method, often called Voluntary Exit. Parents are now exhorted to subtly trick their children into talking to deprogrammers. Many of the same tactics as before (lying, etc.) are used in the “setup,” but the abduction is less violent whenever possible (Wierwille 1983).

Especially because some of Wierwille’s followers had been targeted in earlier deprogramming efforts (Buell 1982; Lewis 1981; New York Times 1981) and were also targeted later (Ostrander 1992), this shift in tactics was of great interest to Way leaders and members. Nevertheless, despite the diminished role of violence in the exit counseling practice, Wierwille still scorned it. “The point of this new mental terrorism,” he concluded, “is to prove to the victim that the ‘cult’ is irrational, illogical and dishonest, but that the deprogramming establishment provides the ‘mental health’ counseling to reintegrate victims into their former, old society” (Wierwille 1983). If we disregard the scornful tone of his statement, few exit counselors would have disagreed.[15]

By the mid-1990s, this more respectful approach appears to have replaced forcible “adult” deprogramming completely in North America, especially because of several high-profile cases that deprogramming targets brought against their unsuccessful deprogrammers. By far the best-known case was that involving CAN itself.[16] A civil court decision linked CAN to a failed deprogramming and forced the organization to declare bankruptcy. The controversial decision held CAN’s national office responsible because a CAN contact person provided a mother with the name of a person (Rick Ross) who did both voluntary and involuntary interventions with “cult” members.[17] After having completed two successful (and legal) deprogrammings with the two minor children, Ross accepted the mother’s offer to attempt a third deprogramming that involved an additional son, Jason Scott, who was a young adult. In early January 1991, this deprogramming failed, and it led to criminal charges that Ross eventually beat. The law firm of a prominent Scientologist, however, encouraged and then handled Scott’s successful civil lawsuit against Ross, his deprogramming team, and CAN (Goodstein 1996a; Kent and Krebs 1998: 40-41; Russell 1999: 16). Although evidence indicates that the CAN contact person was not acting in the capacity of a CAN volunteer when she made the referral (Kent and Krebs 1998: 40), a jury was convinced that she was a CAN agent following CAN procedures, and it held the national CAN office responsible for her actions. This court decision against CAN almost certainly marks the end of illegal deprogramming in North America, although its legal form still might persist in rare cases, as when parents have underage children or other minors in their care whom they wish to extract from controversial ideological organizations.[18]

The most important feature that distinguishes exit counseling from deprogramming is that exit counseling remains completely voluntary, although in some cases the initial family encounter might surprise the exit counselee. The main goal of exit counseling is to get members to re-evaluate their membership by offering them new information and education (Singer and Lalich 1995: 286). Exit counseling is comparable to planned interventions for someone who has a drug or alcohol problem (Dubrow-Eichel 1990: 208; Singer and Lalich 1995: 286; Tobias and Lalich 1994: 59). Often the exit counseling process includes the recommendation for follow-up sessions with post-exit counselors. Some of these follow-up sessions may take place in rehabilitation facilities (such as Wellspring in Ohio, or the recently opened Meadow Haven in Massachusetts).

David Clark et al. (1993: 155) describe exit counseling as “a voluntary, intensive, time-limited, contractual educational process that emphasizes the respectful sharing of information with members of exploitatively manipulative groups.” The first step of the process involves a person who knows the member (usually a parent or a spouse) contacting a counselor. If the counselor agrees to help, then the family and counselor proceed. The exit counselor next focuses on the family’s needs by providing information to these relatives about the particular organization. Exit counselors see their role in this early stage as assisting family and friends to “learn about cults in general as well as the specific area they are involved with and about manipulative influence techniques and thought reform processes” (Singer and Lalich 1995: 286).[19] (Disagreement exists, however, among some contemporary exit counselors regarding the time, depth, and amount of education and preparation families need or should receive.)[20]

A second dispute exists between information-oriented exit counselors and those who combine information with techniques intended to elicit change within the “cult clients” (see Clark et al. 1993: 173-178; Hassan 2000: 69-70). Heated exchanges, for example, over these and related approaches took place at the 2000 and 2001 American Family Foundation conferences. If the member is involved in an unknown group, then the exit counselor collects sufficient information about the group before the intervention can proceed. The family also might receive counseling if the counselor detects communication problems among members. Then the family must plan how to persuade the member to speak with the exit counselor. Only if the family is successful in convincing their loved one to the meeting do they proceed with the intervention (Clark et al. 1993: 156; Singer and Lalich 1995: 287). Costs of such interventions vary, but they can run between $500.00 and $750.00 per counselor per day (which might not include expenses such as preparation, food, lodging, and travel for members of the intervention team). Apparently, some exit counselors charge more, while others charge within the low end of the scale for the family education phase and increase the rate for the actual exit counseling period. In 2002, Szimhart learned from a client that one intervention specialist required $5000.00 per day or $500.00 per hour. But he estimates that the mean for most exit counselors remains under $1000.00 a day.

In practice, the planned meetings between counselors and target members take three forms, with variations within each configuration. First, straightforward (“overt”) meetings occur when a targeted group member agrees to talk openly with an exit counselor or former member (see Hassan 1988: 118). Second, covert interventions employ strategies that include role-playing (Hassan 1988: 123-128). For example, an exit counselor might “casually” meet the group member at a social function, strike up a relationship, and guide the person to a discussion about the group, with or without a family member present. Third, some meetings come as a surprise to the target person. After extensive family preparation, one or more exit counselors arrive shortly after the family has announced the meeting to the previously unsuspecting member. Whether a group member becomes involved in the exit-counseling process through overt, covert, or surprise methods, he or she has ultimate control over the proceedings and can terminate discussions immediately or at any time later. The net effect of client control is that the group member feels empowered over an aspect of life, which is a feeling that exit counselors hope to expand in the individual as the exit counseling continues.

The exit counselors who make these interventions usually operate within one of four ideational frameworks:

1. Some counselors are secularists whose interventions involve little if any emphasis on people’s beliefs (unless those beliefs are obviously harmful). Many counselors who currently operate (or previously operated) within this framework (for example, Giambalvo 1995; Streiker 1984; Tobias and Lalich 1994) approach their clients with an educational model. They assume that accurate information will distance people from controversial ideological organizations. Tobias and Lalich (1994: 59) describe exit counseling interventions as “planned meetings of the member, family, friends, and a team of professionals who use an educational model to enable the member to reach an informed decision about his or her allegiance to the group.”

Other counselors vary within this framework by emphasizing a therapeutic approach that makes use of educational material in the context of attempts to develop rapport with the client. Among the most comprehensive variations along these lines is the Strategic Interaction Approach developed by Steven Hassan. This method places less emphasis on education dissemination to a family about a client’s alleged cult and greater emphasis “on the growth of the entire family and support network, as well as on the cult member.” Hassan states that this approach helps “to identify factors that make people more vulnerable to mind control, such as learning disorders, unresolved sexual issues, or pre-existing phobias” (Hassan 2000: 71). In sessions with target “cult” members, Hassan hopes to establish rapport with his “clients” in order to facilitate discussions about their self-identities, their fears, and their doubts about their groups (see Hassan 1988: 148-167).

Because of the allegedly deceptive recruiting methods of controversial religions, the educationally oriented counselors assume that “many prospective group members have no accurate knowledge of the cult and almost no understanding of what will be expected of them as long-term members” (Tobias and Lalich 1994: 28). The secular framework in which these types of counselors conduct themselves might involve correcting facts regarding religious writings and histories, but it does not value any religious ideology as a proper ideational framework for exit counseling.

2. A second framework is a conservative religious one. Many standard exit-counseling strategies—family preparation, introduction of critical literature to the family, and follow-up counseling after the intervention—also apply to this framework, but its emphasis is on bringing people back into previous faiths. Christian exit counselors, for example, may attempt to “correct” alleged misperceptions about Biblical teaching, or they may witness to the alleged truth of the Gospel. At the same time, they also might use many of the same “mind control” arguments that are popular within exit-counseling circles. Counselors who work for the Watchman Fellowship in Alabama, the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, Christian Research Institute (both based in California), or Western Australia’s Concerned Christian Growth Ministries are examples of this religious persuasion toward exit counseling. Sometimes, secular counselors (such as Steven Hassan) are willing to integrate religious dimensions into their exit-counseling efforts if the situation warrants (Hassan 2000: 144-147).

Even though some instances of Christian-based exit counseling have occurred, many Evangelicals and Pentecostals have deep-seated concerns about all forms of exit counseling—concerns that date back to the early 1970s when some of Ted Patrick’s cases involved youth who had made commitments to high-demand Christian sects (see Newsweek 1973). By the early 1980s, deprogrammers had targeted members of such groups as the Assembly of God, Maranatha Campus Ministries, and Jews for Jesus. (Members of the latter group sometimes were deprogramming targets of the militant Jewish Defense League [Frame 1983; see Alnor and Enroth 1992: 18-19]).

Concerns continued among conservative Christians even after the rise of exit counseling, and a controversial 1992 article in an Evangelical publication presented these concerns dramatically. Two prominent Evangelicals and critics of abusive “cults,” William M. Alnor and sociology professor Ronald Enroth, wrote about what they saw as “ethical problems in exit counseling”:

The result of our inquiry is that out of approximately 15 major exit counselors operating in America, only a few appear to conduct themselves in a manner that communicates a sense of integrity and ethical concern. The field of exit counseling is full of men and women operating like loose cannons in a shadowy world of secrecy that contains little or no controls on their activities and offers little or no enforcement of ethical standards. Further, the amount of money major exit counselors charge is often excessive and unjustifiable, especially since in many instances their clients were vulnerable parents--driven by panic over the conviction that their children are involved in a cult. Fees in excess of $20,000 per case are not unusual (Alnor and Enroth, 1992: 15).

Later, Alnor and Enroth added more items to their list of concerns about exit counseling and the people who conduct them. This expanded list included a religious critique of non-Evangelical worldviews. These added items were “a lack of appropriate educational credentials, deficient accountability structures, inadequate follow-up, and the fact that certain evangelical exit counselors believe it ‘unethical’ to guide cult members into a fuller understanding of correct biblical doctrine” Alnor and Enroth 1992: 19). (Not surprisingly, this article initiated heated exchanges among persons who disagreed with their conclusions, factual presentations, and methodology.)[21] In sum, exit counseling raises a series of concerns among many Evangelical Christians, and these concerns contain their belief that they have an ethical, moral, and religious obligation to gain converts for their faith.

3. The third framework within which some of the exit counseling community operates is purely skeptical. Sharing similarities with the secular framework, it distinguishes itself by its singular emphasis on rational thinking. It discounts all irrational beliefs and utilizes a humanistic, agnostic view that depends heavily upon the scientific method for testing reality. Exit counselors utilizing this approach rely extensively upon people who are associated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and its publication outlets-- Prometheus Books and the journal, Skeptical Inquirer.

4. A fourth persuasion, which we call liberal-spiritual or transpersonal, involves what sceptics call fringe therapies (Ellis, 1989) and what religious conservatives call New Age and occult (Brook, 1989; Martin, 1989). The Spiritual Emergency Network (SEN), based at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California, most represents this view. Founded in 1980 by Christina Grof at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute, the SEN ten years later had a mailing list of 10,000 people and handled more than 150 calls monthly. At that time, SEN boasted more than 1,000 “helpers” who included doctors, psychotherapists, and “spiritual practitioners” (Thompson 1990: 57). Members of this group tend to look within the person for the cause and cure involving why he or she “joined” a supposedly destructive group, and these helpers are wary of authoritarianism and “fanaticism” (Grof and Grof 1989; Lash 1990). Although these helpers might not call themselves deprogrammers or exit counselors, they nevertheless represent another approach to helping people understand and assimilate the experiences they have had in abusive religions.

When meeting with a “client,” an exit counselor (or the exit counseling team) typically has a plan but is flexible, depending upon the member’s reactions and openness as he or she is presented with information (Singer and Lalich 1995: 287). The exit counselor usually approaches the member and presents his or her involvement with the organization as a family problem, which it usually is. “The exit counselor asks the cultist to participate in a review of information that may help him and his family better understand and cope with their problems” (D. Clark et al. 1993: 156). In a typical scenario, “[a]t first the person may be defensive and resistant, then he or she will become a more active participant in the process--asking and answering questions, expressing suppressed doubts and providing more examples of what is being discussed” (Singer and Lalich 1995: 289). Because the individual in the counseling setting is out of the ideologically controlling milieu, he or she can feel free to discuss his or her concerns about the group in an atmosphere of acceptance. These concerns might involve deceptive fundraising, recruiting, and other nagging questions that members cannot discuss in the environment of a totalistic organization. Likewise, the client’s experiential base and level of knowledge will depend upon his or her relationship with the controversial group (e.g., as a staff member, manager, workshop attendee, non-staff believer, etc.).

Regardless of the framework within which exit counselors operate or the flexibility with which they proceed, many of them also believe that these organizations prey on vulnerable people. Tobias and Lalich (1994: 28), for example, have identified several personality characteristics that might predispose individuals to involvement with new religious movements. These characteristics include: dependency (which involves a desire to belong and a lack of confidence), unassertiveness, gullibility, low tolerance for ambiguity, cultural disillusionment, naive idealism, a desire for spiritual meaning, susceptibility to trance-like states, and ignorance of how groups can manipulate individuals. (Omitted from this list are more complex, sociological analyses of conversion, which suggests that the emergent exit-counseling movement, like its deprogramming predecessor, relies most heavily on psychological and social psychological explanations for its interpretations of how and why people become involved in problematic religions.)

Because a controversial, high-demand, ideological organization provides the support and structure that an individual might have been lacking in his or her life, leaving the group and abandoning one’s social network (in the context of a highly structured lifestyle) can be extremely difficult. Understanding these difficulties, exit counselors provide members with support and information that can assist them in breaking away from the group (Singer and Lalich 1995: 280). Exit counselors believe that the educational process enables defecting members to develop an understanding of the true nature of their group involvement. “Armed with information and resources, and often backed up by an educated and supportive family environment, former cult members are more prepared to face the recovery process” (Tobias and Lalich 1994: 61).

To effectively present information to the member, counselors believe that they must be experts on what they frequently call thought reform techniques or programs. They also must have in-depth knowledge about the particular organization that the person is in. Consequently, they build extensive libraries of books, videos, internal documents, and media accounts of various controversial groups, and they use these sources throughout the counseling interventions (see Disend 1991: 32). Educational presentations of some of this material to families preparing for an intervention likely takes two or more days, with the actual time spent with the person in the group taking up to three or four days (and occasionally longer if situations and schedules warrant).

Because exit counselors must “know the cult’s language and idiom and its history and content and have extensive documented data about the leader” (Singer and Lalich, 1995: 287), a former member with in-depth background information often is on the counseling team. A former member might prove to be very helpful when the client invariably raises questions about the group leader or manager’s authenticity or divinity. The presence of a healthy, thriving, former member also shows the subject that he or she will not inevitably come to harm because of leaving the group. Although some exit counselors will take cases that involve a wide range of groups, others specialize in only one or a few controversial ideological organizations. (Inevitably, rivalry occasionally occurs among some exit counselors as they attempt to carve out specializations and public-expertise profiles within a market whose potential customers increasingly acquire “cult” information from the Internet.)

No pressure or coercive manipulation exists in the intervention, and the team respects the final decision of the member. If he or she decides to leave, then the exit counselor provides information to the exiting member about how to cope with reintegration to the world outside of the organization (D. Clark et al. 1993: 156). This reintegration may include a one- to three-week stay in a rehabilitation center where ex-members receive further education through contact with professionals and “cult” experts (Singer and Lalich 1995: 290).

According to Clark et al. (1993: 161), “the most important question to discuss and answer is how the cultist has changed since joining the group, for concern about the destructive changes is the family’s ethical justification for considering
 
I noticed something. Szimhart now calls himself and "exit counselor" instead of a "deprogrammer" however, he doesn't appear to possess the proper credentials to be calling himself a "counselor" in PA?

He's clearly still providing "family therapy" which also requires him to be licensed.
 
Szimhart currently claims to be a "crisis manager and caseworker" at MCES (-http://www.mces.org/) which is a
"TJC-Accredited Behavioral Health Hospital"

So this dipshidiot is soliciting the parents and/or spouses of pretty much anyone who's not Catholic, using his mind control techniques to convince them that their loved one is in a "cult" and needs an "intervention" (for big bucks of course) and drumming up potential business for the "Montgomery County Emergency Service, Inc." at the same time. First he fabricates and facilitates the alienation of affection of his victim's family, then he provides the services necessary for his victim to "recover" from the situation he created.

What a sweet scam for him!

I wonder if MCES gets any Federal money? If so, having a Catholic religious nut knocking on the doors of non-Catholics to drum up "mental health" business has got to be a no no?
 
He even admits that this is exactly what he's doing. He creates the problem, then provides the solution...for a price of course. He's even still promoting Rick Ross, a conviced Felon, on the MCES website.

_http://www.mces.org/PDFs/AnInsideLookatCults.pdf

My goal here is to briefly: (1) define the problem, (2) describe the solutions, and (3) offer some
informational resources.



Inside the cult controversies: Recovery from abusive groups
Joe Szimhart
MCES Crisis Department
Prior to and since coming to MCES, I have had an “other career” as a cult specialist and exit
counselor. Cults are a controversial and colorful topic. Since 1980, I have been an educator and
intervention specialist and have done more than 500 “exit counselings” internationally, and spent
countless hours of volunteer time helping former cult members.
Almost all exit counselors (AKA deprogrammers) have been former cult members. I am no
exception. Most who have tried their hand at the business, quit after a year or two. My cult
chapter began with a deep interest as an artist in Theosophy (primarily Agni Yoga)1 in the 1970s.
By 1979, I became caught-up in a large, apocalyptic, puritanical New Age sect rooted in
Theosophy.2 Attending several conferences with 4,000 enthusiastic devotees in California
changed me to the point that it ruined my first marriage. After recognizing a host of conflicts a
year after our divorce, I defected, or rather struggled away, on my own in 1980.
Recovery demanded an enormous amount of self-education and social, psychological and
spiritual adjustment. My efforts and lectures drew attention from, the media, deprogrammers and
exit counselors. Subsequently, I chaired and lectured for a cult awareness and counseling group
from 1985-1992 in New Mexico and began my international exit counseling career.
Exit counseling cases typically take several days to a week or more away from home. It is very
demanding on many levels, and requires a working knowledge of many hundreds of cultic
groups, group behavior, influence techniques, social psychology, comparative religion, and legal
systems in different nations. Making public statements about controversial organizations can be
risky. No insurance company will protect against liability (e.g., I was sued twice by a large
martial arts cult and a larger new age cult and was deposed by Church of Scientology and
Ramtha School of Enlightenment). I regularly get inquires from graduate students, but none have
followed up after learning what it requires and the risk involved. As a result, exit counseling has
shrunk to less than a handful of full time cult interventionists in America today.
My goal here is to briefly: (1) define the problem, (2) describe the solutions, and (3) offer some
informational resources.
Cults have been around since humans devised rites to influence natural forces, fickle gods,
ancestors, and objects with magical power. Ancient Greek and pagan religion was in reality an
extensive collection of non-exclusive cults directed at deities like the Sun (Helios), Zeus, Apollo,
and Mithra. The term “cult” came to mean spurious, radical and possibly harmful groups with
charismatic leaders of questionable character and motive. It is this definition of cult that I use
here. By mid-20th Century, primarily among Evangelicals, a cult was any form of worship not in
compliance with Evangelical interpretation of the Bible. Similar attitudes exist among Muslim
and Hindu fundamentalists. In other words, cults are “other” religions to a Fundamentalist.
However, in my view, this is not a religious belief problem but it involves questions regarding
knowledge and how that influences conduct and governance.
The cult problem is more about behavior than belief. Harmful cult behavior is the problem, but
what constitutes harm? Many scholars have proposed models and definitions.
Janja Lalich, PhD, a professor of sociology, developed one of the recent models called “Bounded
Choice” which she published as a book by that title in 2004.3 After a college, Lalich ventured
into the human rights field and joined the Democratic Workers Party headed by a charismatic
woman. After 11 years, Lalich and others broke away from the DWP thus dissolving the small
but potent organization, realizing a deep violation of personal freedom imposed by social and
psychological forces that blinded her as to what was really going on. As Lalich states, “I wanted
to figure out what the heck happened to me.” She soon got involved, with cult awareness groups
and with scholars in “brainwashing” theory including Dr Benjamin Zablocki (Rutgers), Dr
Margaret T Singer (1921-2003), Dr L Jolyn West (1924-99), and Dr Robert Jay Lifton (b1926).
Lalich’s Bounded Choice model compares her political cult experience with that of the Heaven’s
Gate “UFO” cult led by Marshall Applewhite. Heaven’s Gate made headlines in 1997 when 39
members were found dead in California after a ritual suicide. Although Marshall Applewhite
quietly co-led this cult under various other names (He and She; Bo and Peep; The Overcomers)
for over 25 years, the final act is what people recall. Until that final act, most people and the
press will generally ignore eccentric groups much as they ignore a homeless person with
schizophrenia until that person defaces a national monument or kills a celebrity.
Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration, Herbert Simon’s (1955, 1956,
1976) theory of bounded rationality, and Robert Jay Lifton’s (1961) theory of personal closure,
Lalich identifies four “organizational aspects” that contribute to harmful cult behavior:
1. Charismatic Authority: Relating to leader as godlike, heroic, messiah, or genius
2. Transcendent Belief System: Universal or “sacred” theme that transcends individuality;
transpersonal goals
3. System of Control: Rules, code of conduct, sense of “family,” selective information
4. System of Influence: Rituals, workshops, peer pressure, crisis management
Lalich says, “The result of this interactive dynamic is a “self-sealing system,” that is, a social
system that is closed to disconfirming evidence and structured in such a way that everything
reinforces the system. “Bounded choice” theory helps us understand the seemingly irrational
behavior of the most dedicated adherents. The theory attempts to take into account individual
choice within the context of an authoritarian, transcendent, closed group.”4
Lalich taps Lifton’s “theory of personal closure” or the experience adherents have under thought
reform systems with Totalist agendas. Dr Lifton’s 1961 book Thought Reform and the
Psychology of Totalism: A study of “brainwashing” in Communist China remains a seminal
resource. Lifton identified eight “themes” that appear to create a climate of thought reform (hsinao
in Chinese means ‘cleanse mind’ or ‘wash brain’ but properly translated means thought
reform) to create a deployable agent for a sacred cause. These themes occur throughout military
training, corporate behavior codes, and almost any exclusive group, club or gang formation to
some degree, but Lifton is clear that the more “totalist” an agenda becomes, the more closure or
bounded choice an individual will experience.
Lifton’s eight themes:
1. Milieu Control: Social and psychological environment under pervasive influence
2. Doctrine over Person: Loyalty to teaching, testament, codes; suppress self
3. “Sacred” Science: Doctrine is true and transcendent, thus cannot be questioned
4. Doctrine of Purity: One must continually “improve” according to god-like goals
5. Mystical Manipulation: Personal experience is covertly engineered by managers
6. Loaded Language: Code words and internal jargon identify one as a cult member
7. Cult of Confession: Revealing doubts, infractions obsessively for correction
8. Dispensing of Existence: Devaluing outsiders, naming who gets saved
High-demand or totalist cult systems, according to Lifton and Lalich, create an elite atmosphere
wherein loyal members can never do enough, know enough or be pure enough, thus setting up a
continual feeling of shame and guilt that the managers can readily exploit.
Dr Kathleen Taylor (2006), a neuroscientist, wrote Brainwashing: The Science of Thought
Control using Lifton’s eight themes as a sociological structure to help explain her research on
how our brains work when thinking creatively as opposed to unhealthy, inflexible “neuropathways”
that develop under influence of cults and in abusive relationships.5 More importantly,
Taylor offers a remedy to brainwashing by explaining how “stop and think” techniques primarily
located in the pre-frontal cortex work to keep our brains healthy and our choices wise.
Dr Arthur Deikman (2003), a psychiatrist, expanding on his 1994 version of this book, defines
cult behavior in Them and Us: Cult thinking and terrorist threat 6 according to four behaviors:
1. Compliance with a Group: Peer pressure, team over self
2. Dependence on a Leader: Hero worship; hierarchy; authoritarian
3. Avoiding Dissent: Suppress doubt, avoid critics, harmony at all cost
4. Devaluing the Outsider: Defines ‘them and us’
My four-part model of a harmful a cult was published several years ago:7
1. Transcendental Attraction: A grand scheme, special or secret knowledge,
2. Exclusive Leadership: Unique, charismatic authority with no peers
3. Circular Tension: Despite great effort to comply, or maintain a tight orbit around a
central idea and authority, actual gain to perfection remains unrealized
4. Exit Perils: Outside world is demonized, loss of salvation and social connection feared,
entire personal investment wasted if one defects
Cults often begin after a leader or “hero” establishes a charismatic relationship with followers or
fans. Sometimes this hero worship involves a philosopher or innovator in behavioral health.
Stone’s The Plato Cult addresses adulation for famous philosophers8 and brings them down to
earth:
“The case of Plato is not at all unique, merely extreme. In fact, all great philosophers
attract a reverence which is far stronger and more widespread than that which, by any
rational estimate, they are entitled to. The idolatry of Aristotle, for four hundred years
after the revival of his philosophy in the twelfth century, is a stock example. But Kant,
similarly, has enjoyed for two hundred years a reputation as a philosopher which is
ridiculously exaggerated: as is the odour of Enlightenment-sanctity which surrounds his
life. Hegel’s philosophy is now as much respected as it deserves to be despised, and even
his most prosaic (not to say sordid) political adjustments are represented, in retrospect, as
Absolute Spirit working itself out in history. And so on.”9
In the same vein, Robert Lifton in The Protean Self (1993) offers an antidote to not only the
sense of fragmentation we experience in the modern world but also the temptation we all have to
accept soothing, totalist answers to deal with fragmentation. Lifton points to notable behavioral
science theorists that created a charismatic relationship with their academic followers. Regarding
behavioral health theorists, Lifton writes: “Laing, Lacan, and Kohut experienced an irony in
common: each took on a powerful charisma for an immediate group of followers, a process that
inevitably “stops time,” imparts a form of magic to intellectual exchange, and thereby
undermines the original exploratory impulse.”
In a sense, cults create a transcendent experience that “stops time” for the follower who feels the
aura of a final answer to life’s questions. Thereby, “the original exploratory impulse” that got
them there freezes. All that remains is to deflect criticism and doubt and to stay in orbit around
the perceived savior or guru.
In the US, there is no established scientific or legal definition of harmful cult mind control or
brainwashing. The law does acknowledge contributing factors such as undue influence, fraud,
harassment, terroristic threat. A number of American, British and Australian scholars have been
contentiously arguing over the validity of thought reform theory since the 1970s.10 Existing
religions and eccentric social clubs are wary of established legal parameters regarding aggressive
recruitment and conversion techniques. Official positions regarding cults vary from nation to
nation with Germany, Israel, Russia and France having perhaps the most rigorous national
safeguards.
Recovery is the best revenge!
Most people, as I did, leave cults on their own. Some studies estimate that 80% of new recruits
defect within the first few years. Cult life can be very demanding. Think of a modified boot
camp that never ends! The demands can also be quite subtle yet deeply psychological. A loyal
cult member can maintain a mainstream job with an apparently seamless co-existence in society.
Think of the men one year before they piloted airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Many cult members defect out of shame and not because they see anything wrong with the
group. They feel inadequate for the demanding, holy, or total task. Others, realizing how deeply
they were duped, go through stages of anger, grief and retaliation all at once and not in any
sequence as I did. Most however choose not to retaliate recognizing the toll this might take on
emotional and psychological recovery, not to mention personal risk. Some of my colleagues and
I have been defamed, harassed, picketed and sued by cult groups. I presented papers twice at
annual meetings of the Association for Sociology of Religion. Scientology operatives attended
and demanded that I not be permitted to speak. In 1992, an IRS agent informed me that a martial
arts cult, whose leader went to jail as a result of my work exiting several high-ranking members,
had a “hit” out on me. That group also sued me for “slander.” The judge in Houston threw it out
but lawyers do not come cheap!
The intervention “industry” began in during the 1970s after new mass therapies like “est”, Jesus
movements like the Children of God and Peoples Temple, Eastern movements led by gurus and
Zen masters from India, Japan and Korea, and channeling cults led by people who “spoke” as
gods and angels mushroomed in Europe and America. By some counts, more than 3,000 new
cultic groups existed in America by the late 1970s. Although many of these groups have
imploded, faded away, or been absorbed into mainstream after de-radicalization, new ones are
always appearing. The cult problem may have changed due to a new era of Internet and social
mobility, but it has not gone away.
“Deprogramming” was coined around 1974 by Ted Patrick and others who would sometimes
resort to kidnapping or house arrest to “rescue” someone from a purported cult. Judges in the
United States might sign restraining orders or involuntary commitment papers to temporarily
detain cult members for deprogramming. This practice was challenged by Katz v. Superior
Court (1977), which ended court orders for deprogramming adults in America.11 Thereafter,
anyone who coercively detained an adult for exit counseling risked criminal charges. Close to
half of all coercive interventions fail so legal retaliation is a strong possibility. I was once tried in
Idaho, two years after a failed, coercively initiated intervention, but was acquitted of all
charges.12 Coercive deprogramming effectively ended in the United States 20 years ago.
The legal intervention, sometimes called non-coercive exit counseling, developed over the past
four decades. Nearly all interventions with cult members take place by surprise after extensive
preparation. The preparation of families can last one to three days prior to actual intervention.
Most occur weeks to many months down the road. Access to the cult member can be a big
problem as most have already had arguments with spouses or family, thus the topic is avoided. In
most cases, access and communication have already been cut off.
The ideal intervention begins with the client away from the group or person of influence in a
comfortable setting that will allow for many hours to several days of conversation and
discussion. In my experience, during interventions of this type, 10-16 hour days were typical.
Marathon discussions included educational video, extensive documentation and interaction with
ex-members in person or over the phone. Family members were always present.
Exit counselors rarely work one-on-one for a various reasons (e.g., liability.). The client (cult
member) can end the discussions at any time. Exit counselors will leave the premises if the client
no longer wants to interact. The family may continue to try to persuade the client to re-engage.
Interventions can stall for hours or even days. Due to the education shared during exit
counseling, recovery begins during the process. Recovery means that “stop and think” parts of
the brain have been re-engaged regarding ingrained beliefs, charismatic attachments, and
constricted behaviors. Although most of the following factors are addressed during intervention,
re-socialization after a cult experience depends on many factors including finances, mental
health, employment, relocation, children, medical condition, cult induced phobias, etc. There is
no set recovery plan that works for everyone. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from cults and
abusive relationships offers solid information useful for most any former cult member.13
In the Middle East and elsewhere, moderate Muslim clerics use an exit counseling technique to
re-socialize Islamist radicals and terrorists.14 This is a fascinating phenomenon with highly
successful results. It depends wholly on what one young Egyptian student said after 9/11 when
asked, “What will it take to defeat extremists?” He answered with one word: “Education.” Exit
counseling is primarily an educational process that uses principles of healthy skepticism, civility,
verifiable facts from history, group dynamics, and choice theory. The tough part is getting it
started without excessive or illegal coercion.
An old controversy remains: Civil libertarians will claim that these “prisoners” are being coerced
to renounce their religious beliefs, thus violating civil rights. To me this is tantamount to arguing
it is wrong to re-educate an engineer who designs high rise buildings with flawed techniques for
building a foundation. In the very least, that engineer must be stopped from contributing to
another high rise structure if he does not accept re-education.
There is a lot I have not covered. One-on-one dominance through folie à deux, spousal abuse or
battered women’s syndrome, crime syndicates, boot camps for recovery from addictions15, and
gang formation to name a few. Here are some websites that you may find useful:
_http://cultresearch.org/
_http://rickross.com
_http://freedomofmind.com/
Notes:
1 _http://www.agniyoga.org/ (around 3 million people in Russia today adhere to Agni Yoga. Notable US members:
Alan Arkin, the American actor and Henry Wallace, Sect. of Agriculture under the F D Roosevelt)
2 Founded in 1958 by Mark Prophet (real name; died 1973) the Summit Lighthouse changed its name to Church
Universal and Triumphant under the dynamic leadership of Mark Prophet’s second wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet
(1939-2007). Today it primarily goes by Summit Lighthouse again.
3 _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janja_Lalich
4 _http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/lalich_janja_boundedchoice_abs.htm
5 _http://www.amazon.com/Brainwashing-Science-Thought-Kathleen-Taylor/dp/0199204780/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
6 _http://www.deikman.com/wrong.html
7_http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview_new.asp?Subject=Razor%27s+Edge+Indeed%3A+A+Deprogramme
r%27s+View+of+Harmful+Cult+Activity
8 David Stone. The Plato Cult: And other philosophical follies (Basil Blackwell, Inc.,1991)
9 IBID xii
10 _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercive_persuasion
11 _http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/van_hoey_sara_cults_in_court.htm
12 _http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/szimhart.htm
13 _http://www.baytreepublish.com/take-back-life-fr.html
14 _http://www.ucm.es/info/unisci/revistas/UNISCI%20DP%2021%20-%20ROHAN.pdf;
http://www.cultnews.com/?cat=18
15 _http://stinkin-thinkin.com/2011/09/07/essential-reading-from-maia-szalavitz/
September 11, 2011
 
OK, I'm going to skip a couple decades here, from the 90's to Szimhart's present activities. The "Montgomery County Emergency Service, Inc." looks seriously dirty so I'm going to spend some time looking into them, their directors, etc.
 
Guardian said:
Szimhart currently claims to be a "crisis manager and caseworker" at MCES (-http://www.mces.org/) which is a
"TJC-Accredited Behavioral Health Hospital"

So this dipshidiot is soliciting the parents and/or spouses of pretty much anyone who's not Catholic, using his mind control techniques to convince them that their loved one is in a "cult" and needs an "intervention" (for big bucks of course) and drumming up potential business for the "Montgomery County Emergency Service, Inc." at the same time. First he fabricates and facilitates the alienation of affection of his victim's family, then he provides the services necessary for his victim to "recover" from the situation he created.

It IS the american miviludes - only more brutal, more criminal and more psychopathic.
 
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