For some families, the absolute worst outcome can become shockingly real: instead of a loving parent, a family court can declare where your child sleeps tonight, whether you’re allowed to see them, and whether you’re even permitted to raise a concern about your spouse. In this week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, The Problems with America’s Family Courts, I talk with noted attorney Karen Winner, JD, about how the family court system is failing the people it is meant to protect - and protecting the people doing the most harm. Winner, a journalist turned attorney and the author of Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges, shares how her book, which started as a government investigation, became one of the few serious accounts of how family court actually operates in this country. It’s a conversation that every parent - and every citizen - should listen to, today.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

Next week’s podcast will be with the artist and author Ru Marshall; we talked about his book, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. His books influenced millions of people and contributed to the new-age movement. How could so many people get fooled (including myself) as I read all the Castaneda books when they came out.

This week’s livestream will be on Wednesday, August 26th, at 2 pm EDT; I will be discussing Natalie Harp, her obsession with Trump, lack of security clearance, whether she might be a foreign asset or agent, or whether she is just a very disturbed person. The reporting is that she keeps him in an “information silo” and feeds him only “good news,” which is typically lies- like his poll numbers are fantastic, prices are coming down, the war with Iran is almost ended, etc..

Have you heard about the extreme case in Texas, alleging Antifa were violent terrorists because they were protesting ICE? This Friday, August 28th, I will be doing a special livestream with Anne Speckhard, Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. Anne is a forensic psychologist. She will be sharing the facts of the case, based on her experience as an expert witness for the defense in the Texas case involving Antifa protestors, who have received disproportionately lengthy sentences (one 50 years, another 100) for protesting ICE.

If you missed last week’s livestreams, you can see them here:

How Trump Turns Information Into Power... and Power Into Money - Wednesday, August 19th

How to Build a Truth Engine: Groundbreaking Film about Propaganda with guest Friedrich Moser - Friday, August 21st

With all the inadvertent misinformation - and deliberate disinformation - being thrown around, it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not. Fortunately, Ground News is a great resource that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms that lead to “echo chambers” of polarized reporting. Start getting your balanced news today!

Remember, be sure that you, your neighbors, and everyone you know is registered to vote and ready to do so! We must defeat MAGA in the coming elections!

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

A family court judge can reach into your family, single you out by name, and rearrange your life by dinnertime: where your child sleeps tonight, whether you’re allowed to see them, whether you’re even permitted to raise a concern about your spouse. Karen Winner told me that in the opening minutes of our conversation, and it’s the line I keep coming back to. Winner is a journalist turned attorney and the author of Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges, a book that started as a government investigation and became one of the few serious accountings of how family court actually operates in this country.

Winner’s path into this work began at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, where she investigated financial abuse of women by their own divorce attorneys under Commissioner Mark Green. Three women brought her their stories, including Monica Getz, the ex-wife of saxophonist Stan Getz, and Peggy Hammond, ex-wife of blues musician John Hammond Jr. Winner went on to interview roughly a hundred people inside the system, insiders included. One judge pulled her aside in an empty courtroom to whisper how the wealthy get exploited by their own lawyers. The resulting report led to New York’s Statement of Client’s Rights, one of the first consumer protections written specifically for divorce clients, and still law today.

Why Family Court Operates Like a Closed System

What struck me most was Winner’s explanation of judicial discretion. Family court judges, she said, “operate without any checks and balances.” They decide behind closed doors, rarely have to explain their reasoning, and face almost no outside scrutiny because the whole apparatus runs at the state level.

Custody evaluations compound the problem. Courts routinely appoint psychologists to assess parents, but “there’s nobody reviewing the reviewers.” Their reports are often sealed from the public and, astonishingly, from the parents whose children’s futures depend on them. “It’s not fair,” Winner said. “It’s not democratic. It’s Kafka.” A small, favored pool of evaluators gets reused case after case, regardless of credentials, because judges default to whoever they already know.

That is the same undue influence dynamic I study in destructive cults: a closed information environment where the people affected by a decision have no way to question the process that produced it. When Bandy Lee joined me on this podcast, she described family courts as functioning like “a mini cult,” advancing a false narrative that protects the wrong parent while the public stays in the dark.

When the People Policing Lawyers Protect Them Instead

Winner’s most chilling material concerns what happens when a lawyer breaks the rules. In most states, complaints against attorneys stay confidential unless regulators pursue them, meaning a lawyer can accumulate a hundred complaints with no single complainant ever learning about the others. That secrecy, she told me, is exactly what let Roy Cohn, the disbarred McCarthy-era prosecutor who later mentored Donald Trump, keep practicing as a divorce lawyer for years while complaints piled up unseen. Cohn wasn’t disbarred until June 1986, months before his death (Washington Post).

Winner described a client whose lawyer forged her signature on an affidavit surrendering her child support, a forgery confirmed by a handwriting expert. The grievance committee still declined to act, telling the woman to file a separate civil suit against the same lawyer representing her in an active divorce. “Lawyers write the rules to protect lawyers,” Winner said. It’s a pattern I recognize from every closed system I’ve studied: those with the power to investigate wrongdoing are drawn from the same pool as the people who might commit it.

Parental Alienation and the Limits of Family Court

We also debated parental alienation, a genuinely contested area. Winner cited research showing that a protective parent actually coaches a child to make false abuse claims in fewer than two percent of custody cases, yet she said the alienation defense is routinely used by parents accused of abuse, often successfully, to win custody anyway. I pushed back with a case I testified in, Kendall v. Kendall in Massachusetts, where a father’s Bible-based group told their child that her Jewish mother was going to hell. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sided with the child’s welfare over the father’s religious claims. Winner and I didn’t fully agree on where the line sits, but we agreed the underlying dynamic, one parent systematically turning a child against the other, is real and devastating, regardless of what a family court chooses to call it.

What Actually Changes a Broken System

Winner isn’t without hope. England and Wales have rolled out a reporting pilot that lets journalists sit in on family court proceedings, with names redacted, a change the judiciary there called a “watershed moment for family justice” (Courts and Tribunals Judiciary). The United States has no equivalent. In the meantime, Winner points to court watcher programs, ordinary volunteers who sit in the gallery and observe. She told me studies show judges behave differently when someone is watching, which is really just social psychology: unaccountable power corrects itself only when accountability is added back in.

Winner is now working on a second book examining wrongful custody rulings as documented miscarriages of justice, including a case where a judge later resigned rather than face investigation after taking a trip with a father’s attorneys, only to leave her prior custody decisions untouched. That is the throughline of everything Winner and I discussed: systems built on secrecy don’t reform themselves. They need outside eyes, whether that’s a journalist, a court watcher, or a family member who refuses to accept that “the judge said so” is an explanation.

Further Reading

Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges by Karen Winner

Framed: Women in the Family Court Underworld — My conversation with Dr. Christine Cocchiola and Amy Polacko on their book documenting how protective mothers are set up to lose in family court.

Parental Abduction and Alienation: A Discussion with Psychiatrist Nick Child — How the tactics used to alienate a child from a parent mirror the coercive patterns found in cults.

You-Know-Who: An Alienated Daughter’s Memoir with Dana Laquidara — A firsthand account of growing up alienated from a parent, and what it took to reconnect decades later.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and Censorship of Experts with Bandy X. Lee, M.D. — Dr. Lee and I discuss family courts functioning like a “mini cult” that protects the wrong parent.

Alienated from her Mother at Age 4, Parental Alienation and Patterns of Cult Mind Control — On parental alienation as a standard operating procedure of undue influence, inside cults and outside them.

We are all social beings; forming groups comes naturally to us. Unfortunately, without clear guidelines, some of the groups we expect to be the healthiest can slip into unhealthy, authoritarian patterns of behavior. It can seem like a natural process. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my latest article for paid subscribers, When Doing Good Becomes The Cult, I explore how groups founded with the best of intentions, such as advocacy groups, tenants’ rights groups, trade unions, neighborhood groups, and more, can unwittingly slide into cultic behavior without realizing it. More importantly, I discuss how these patterns can be reversed to keep these groups healthy, vibrant, and truly democratic.

Paid subscribers can read this article for free today.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one; in addition to supporting my work, you’ll receive access to my complete catalog of interviews, articles, and helpful guides, such as:

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Alternet’s Matthew Rozsa interviewed me and wrote the piece, Expert unveils detox plan for the Trump cult, to discuss why people are drawn to follow authoritarian leaders and how Trump fits into the “dark triad” (or even the “dark tetrad”) of psychological patterns.

Most importantly, we discuss how it’s vital not to cut your loved one off - as with any cult, keeping the lines of communication open and providing them with a safe “off ramp” is the best method for a possible exit from the belief system.

The August 7th livestream with Lara Kaput and psychologist Maria Esguerra was so important that I decided to write a full Substack article titled “Inside Australia’s Landmark Cult Inquiry Report.” You can see the original livestream here.

A new article in RawStory, Trump’s ‘really concerning’ dementia symptoms revealed in late-night posts: expert quotes the livestream I did with physical therapist Adam James, also known as Epistemiccrisis, talking about Trump’s declining mental health and the dangerous ramifications for our democracy. That original livestream is here.

This week’s livestream will be on Wednesday, August 19th, at 2 pm EDT; I will be discussing another angle on Information Control (part of the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control).

Are you aware of the lawsuit filed against Trump’s Truth Social scheme to charge $100k a month for advance notice of Trump’s posts?

This is just one more example of Trump’s full-blown corruption. Of course, this gives the ultra-wealthy a major advantage in insider trading of future news events, allowing them to capitalize on current events through “prediction market” apps such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

This Friday, August 21st, I will be doing a special livestream with guest Friedrich Moser, producer and director of the excellent new documentary, How To Build a Truth Engine, an exploration of how our biological hard-wired neurological behavior makes us so susceptible to misinformation, and what we can do about it.

If you missed last week’s livestreams, you can see them here:

Ego Out of Control: How the Courts Can Fight Back Against Trump’s Narcissism - Wednesday, August 12th

Scientology Accused of Exploiting Children as Young as 13 with guest Jon Atack - Friday August 14th

Help Needed!

Operations & Content Coordinator (Part-Time) — This is a wear-many-hats role at Freedom of Mind Resource Center, supporting Dr. Steven Hassan’s work.

Beyond co-sharing admin roles (calendar, email, contacts, travel, invoicing), you’ll be technically savvy, assist with research and article writing, and support our social media team in promoting Dr. Hassan’s books, workshops, and consulting.

We’re looking for a resourceful individual with a genuine interest in Steve’s work on undue influence and coercive control.

On this week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, Escaping the Moonies and Rebuilding His Life, I add to my series on cults from Korea with my guest Ingo Michehl, M.Ed, a fellow survivor of the Moon organization, now living his best life as a therapist and life coach, helping others out of destructive groups and situations. We talk about our shared experiences, his upcoming movie, Jump, and how good life can be after a cult.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

Next week’s podcast will feature noted attorney Karen Winner, JD; we will discuss the problems of the family court system in the U.S.

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

Many people are startled to learn that a destructive cult-like framework is not a phenomenon reserved solely for religious entities, but one that actively manifests within nonprofit and advocacy circles. In fact, these organizations tend to be susceptible to unhealthy, cultish behavior.

These groups, centered around a mission, can and do slide down to the authoritarian end of the continuum, become harmful to their members, and exhibit the exact same qualities as religious cults.

By this, I mean that they stifle dissent, discourage autonomy, rally around an all-powerful leader or structure, and create phobias in their members. These groups can also facilitate an “us-versus-them” mentality and force a cult identity to manifest.

To illustrate this point, we may consider a nonprofit advocacy group that advocates for at-risk tenants. The members of this organization have indeed watched real families put on the street, are opposed by well-funded interests, and are, ultimately, part of what can be characterized as a noble mission.

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The hostility they face is not imagined; their opponents do surveil them, misquote them, and plant defamatory, insulting stories about them. The result is that when strict protocols are defined, they are often defensible.

One day, a volunteer, Sara, flags a potential issue and asks to present her concern that a planned action will alienate their client base – those whom the organization has a mandate to serve.

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Ingo Michehl spent six and a half years as one of the Moonies’ most productive fundraisers, selling laser-etched foil pictures out of a Ford Transit van at a twenty-fold markup, sleeping five hours a night, and believing every dollar liberated God’s suffering heart. Recruited off a San Francisco street corner at nineteen, he came out the other side with…

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Two survivors of authoritarian mind control cults joined me on a livestream last week, and both told me they needed days to recover from the impact of the report before they could talk about it on camera.

Psychologist Maria Esguerra, raised in the Children of God, said she went out and hiked for hours, crying, after she first read it.

Jehovah’s Witness wh…

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When people think about undue influence, they picture a controlling spouse, demanding pastor, or a parent who trains a child to obey. Few picture the head of American intelligence as an active cult member.

Since childhood, the woman who has led every U.S. intelligence agency has followed Chris Butler, whose group, the Science of Identity, taught its memb…

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Shincheonji recruits through what looks like an ordinary Bible study, and most people who walk through the door have no idea that it is a destructive cult. Chris Vishoot found out only after two and a half years as a devoted member. In 2018, a woman he met on a dating app invited him to what she called an innocent class on scripture. Within a year he was driving an hour each way to an unmarked building in Seattle, sleeping three to four hours a night, and reporting on Bible study students he had once sat beside as a recruit himself. I sat down with Chris on my podcast, Cults, Culture and Coercion, to hear how he got in, how he got out, and why he now helps other people leave the same group.

From Engineering Grad to Cult Recruiter

Chris grew up in a Christian household that expected the world to end at any moment. He graduated from the University of Washington with two engineering degrees, and by his mid-twenties he found himself asking a familiar question: is this all there is to life? Two friends had died young, and Chris, an agnostic at the time, was searching for something bigger. That search is exactly what recruiters for the group are trained to find and use.

Chris is now one of the more credible Christian ex-Shincheonji voices in the country. He runs Bible Vaccine Center, helps moderate the r/shincheonji subreddit for former members, and works with pastors whose congregations have been infiltrated by recruiters posing as ordinary Christians. He told me he wants to train with me in the Strategic Interactive Approach, the method I developed to help families reach loved ones still inside a cult, so he can expand his advocacy work.

How Shincheonji Recruits Through Bible Study

Shincheonji rarely is honest when it recruits. Chris’s girlfriend brought him to a weekly Bible study that started in a coffee shop and later moved to an unmarked building, meeting up to three times a week for three hours at a stretch. He wanted deeper theology than his agnostic drift had given him, so he kept going even after he noticed the group would not name itself. When he finally asked, he was given a cover name, Word and Life Theology School, complete with its own website built to look like an ordinary Christian ministry. Half of his fellow students, he later learned, were already members pretending to be new recruits, reporting back on him. His girlfriend was one of them.

“When you join, you sign what they call the Book of Life... the Church Registry,” Chris told me. “Then you pass over, meaning you graduate into the cult, and you are love-bombed. You would have your name, photo, everything on a projector screen, saying look at this first fruit, he passed over, he has special knowledge. Even though I was systematically lied to... my cult self overrode my true self, and I was fully convinced this is the place of truth.”

That split between an authentic self and a cult-programmed identity sits at the center of how I understand mind control and brainwashing. Influence itself is not the problem. It runs on a spectrum, from the healthy kind that respects a person’s free will to the undue influence that overrides it, the line every destructive cult crosses. “One of their first books, called Shin Tan: Birth of a God, was written by two former Unification Church members, so we have a lot of overlapping theology,” Chris said. “What Shincheonji calls the wisdom of hiding, there’s heavenly deception, where they justify that it’s okay to lie.” The Moonies, the group that recruited me in 1974, ran on identical logic.

The Toll on Body and Mind

The recruitment pipeline runs on exhaustion. Chris attended services and recruiting events up to seven days a week and slept three to four hours a night. His weight dropped from his normal 150 to 160 pounds down to as low as 110. This is a textbook example of behavior control, one piece of the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control^™, my framework for the behavior, information, thought, and emotional controls authoritarian groups use to keep members obedient.

“People would come up to me and say, Chris, I think this is a cult, something feels off,” Chris told me. “One of the more effective people who helped me wake up were my agnostic atheist roommates. My roommate’s wife asked me pointblank: you’ve been getting sick a lot, you’ve lost a lot of weight, did you notice? I hadn’t.”

The Gaslighting Algorithm

Shincheonji, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, has made repeated failed predictions, including a claim that its full 144,000 would be completed by 1987. When prophecies fail, Chris says leadership does not admit error. It rewrites history.

“I call it the gaslighting algorithm,” Chris said. “When you point out a doctrine change, they’ll say, well, Chris, you misunderstood the prophecy failure, and then they’ll state their new doctrine as if it was always taught that way.”

What finally cracked Chris’s belief was not theology. It was a marriage rule. Leadership had discouraged the relationship that got him recruited, then, two years later, required a six month wait and three rounds of interviews before he married another member. The inconsistency sent him digging into the group’s history, and what he found unsettled him: founder Lee Man Hee had passed through at least three earlier doomsday groups, including one that predicted the world would end on March 13, 1980, before starting Shincheonji the next day, March 14.

A Cult Leader Facing Justice

Lee Man Hee is now ninety-five, and the legal reckoning Chris predicted has already begun. Korean prosecutors arrested Lee on June 24, 2026, accusing him of pressuring at least 56,000 members into joining the ruling People Power Party between 2021 and 2024, reportedly to boost the party’s primaries and win favorable treatment for the church (Korea JoongAng Daily, June 24, 2026). On July 13, prosecutors indicted Lee and seven church executives for obstruction of business and violating South Korea’s Political Parties Act, filing the case just before the statute of limitations expired (Korea Times, July 13, 2026). It is not his first brush with the law. He was convicted of embezzling $6.5 million in 2020 after South Korean investigators tied his church to the country’s early COVID-19 outbreak and received a suspended sentence.

Chris expects the group to survive Lee’s death the way the Unification Church survived Sun Myung Moon’s, by claiming a new leader now carries the founder’s spirit.

Chris has no interest in changing anyone’s faith, and neither do I. Healthy religion, like any healthy relationship, survives scrutiny. Chris’s message to believers and skeptics alike is the same: ask questions before you commit. Does the group have a written statement of what it believes? Will its members tell you who founded it? Will they let you leave? A legitimate faith community will pass that test every time. Shincheonji will not.

“All he did was ask a simple question: do you have a statement of faith? That’s it,” Chris said of his father, who the group tried and failed to recruit. “Since they couldn’t produce one, he said, no thanks.”

What keeps me watching this space is not that groups like Shincheonji exist. It is how many more are coming, powered by AI systems that can now generate an ideology, a recruitment script, and a business plan on command. Chris and I share that worry. The antidote has not changed. Ask questions, protect your sleep, and never let anyone convince you that love has conditions attached.

Further Reading

The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ and Shincheonji: An Exploration with Former Member Chris Vishoot

Shincheonji Is a South Korean Cult Similar to the Moon Cult That Recruited Me — My own account of Shincheonji’s founding, tactics, and its parallels to the Unification Church that recruited me in 1974.

Shincheonji: A Cult Engaged in World-Wide Deceptive Recruitment — A deeper look at Shincheonji’s recruitment and deception tactics through my conversation with former member Jane.

Closer Look Initiative - A deep dive into Shincheonji and Refutation — This website goes through most of the claims made by Shincheonji and determines whether Shincheonji is faithful to the Bible.

r/Shincheonji — A subreddit for those who are looking for a community.

Bible Vaccine Center — A ministry co-founded by Chris Vishoot, its intent is to help people trapped in Biblical cults and help them escape and take control of their lives after leaving a damaging cult.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses Paradox — How another doomsday group weaponizes apocalyptic urgency; the same doctrine-rewriting Chris calls the gaslighting algorithm.

The Definitive Guide to Helping People in the Cult of Trump — My framework for applying cult dynamics and undue influence to political devotion, a theme Chris and I discussed at the end of our conversation.

Are Discord Servers the New Cult? — A look at how digital platforms recreate the isolation and control of a cult compound, relevant to Chris’s and my worries about AI-powered recruitment.

As Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard was positioned at the core of the American intelligence network. Her office received sensitive CIA analyses, intercepted communication logs from the NSA, international threat updates, and confidential assessments. This position wields immense influence, guiding national strategy on a grand scale.

Throughout my fifty years of work, I have frequently heard individuals recount the unsettling feeling of executing another person’s directives as their own, and the reality of having their decisions governed by an authoritarian figure or a manipulative organization.

This very dynamic influenced Tulsi Gabbard as someone charged with leading all American intelligence agencies. She operated under mysterious instructions regarding her viewpoints, public statements, and specific responses during adversarial live television interviews.

Following the groundbreaking exposé published by the Washington Post this past June regarding Tulsi Gabbard and her guru, I reached out to the primary whistleblower featured in the report, Rebecca Saltzburg.

Over several weeks I spoke with her at length, had her on my livestream and reviewed some of her original source documents, the same ones behind reporter Jon Swaine’s Washington Post exclusive. She had close, direct access to Gabbard and she is a firsthand witness to much of what she describes. She is also, as you will see, a source with a complicated history.

The Guru

Saltzburg, the Post whistleblower, became involved with the Science of Identity Foundation, the group Gabbard and her family have long followed, in the mid-1990s, and she worked on Tulsi Gabbard’s campaigns until she left in early 2019.

Chris Butler leads the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hawaii-based group presenting itself as part of the Gaudiya Vaishnava, or Hare Krishna, tradition (more on Hare Krishna here). He dropped out of the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s, taught meditation and Krishna devotion, and built a following of people who believed he spoke directly with God. Publicly, the group looks like a yoga and meditation community.

Chris Butler’s following was extremely devoted. In 1970, two of his followers told a Honolulu newspaper reporter they would do anything Butler asked, including kill themselves (Jon Swaine, Washington Post, June 2026). He incorporated the Science of Identity Foundation in 1977 and uses the title Jagad Guru.

Saltzburg and other former members describe an inner circle around Butler, including the Gabbard family, the Bellord family, and Sunil Khemaney, operating in secret behind the public face.

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Throughout this period, Saltzburg organized Butler’s private papers, served as one of his confidential secretaries, and spoke with him by phone for hours on ordinary days. Butler tolerated her disagreeing with him, she told me, while rank-and-file members were expected to treat his word, and the word of any group leader, as the word of God.

I use a framework I call the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control^TM, short for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control, to describe the techniques a group uses to make a person dependent and obedient.

By Saltzburg’s account, and by the Washington Post’s own reporting, Butler’s operation runs on all four. It directed members’ actions, it controlled what they were allowed to know, it forbade independent judgment, and it ran on phobia indoctrination, the practice of instilling irrational fear about leaving or even questioning a group.

Butler himself once described the CIA and other intelligence agencies as staffed by demonic, power-hungry men who wanted to control people with psychic powers, according to a 7,000-page archive of his lectures Washington Post reporter Jon Swaine reviewed. A former associate of Butler’s from the 1970s told the Post his real ambition was simpler: he wanted, in her words, “to rule the world.”

“Get It Done. Don’t Dick Around.”

When Post reporter Jon Swaine first spoke with Rebecca Saltzburg in November 2024, she had told him Gabbard was “a freethinker who took orders from no one” and played down Butler’s group entirely.

Saltzburg later described that she was unsure whether to trust the media to share her story correctly and wanted time to think about whether it was worth the safety risk to come forward. Nine months later, having fallen out with the Science of Identity leadership, she told him a different story and eventually shared more than 25,000 pages of emails and memos.

The documents show hundreds of memos, most from 2011 to 2017, containing what appears to be direction from an unnamed adviser on what legislation Tulsi Gabbard should introduce, what she should say, and how she should carry herself on television.

In one 2014 exchange, the adviser pushed her to propose legislation penalizing Americans who fought for the Islamic State.

“Get it started in the morning... Don’t dick around.” Gabbard issued a statement the next day and introduced a bill a week later.

On veterans’ health care the same year, the mystery adviser argued veterans should get outside care without needing government preapproval first.

“Actually put forward legislation. Get it done.” Gabbard’s op-ed three weeks later left out the preapproval detail, with a later email noting the unnamed adviser was “pissed she didn’t say” it. A month later, Gabbard introduced a bill including the exact detail.

Ahead of a 2015 CNN appearance, a memo instructed her to respond to being excluded from a presidential debate by saying it was not “a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation.” On air, she said nearly the same words.

Washington Post journalist Jon Swaine and a colleague compared Gabbard’s remarks in 32 television interviews between 2014 and 2016 against the talking-point memos prepared for them. In 24 of those appearances, she used the memo language almost verbatim. In the other eight, she used different words for the same ideas. Some of the limited remarks attributed to Gabbard herself in the transcripts read like agreement rather than resistance.

“That’s perfect, that line right there,” one says.

The memos to Tulsi Gabbard rarely name their author. When Jon Swaine asked Sunil Khemaney (one of the individuals high up in SIF) about them, Khemaney said he, not Butler, wrote most of the political material, along with Gabbard’s father, adding “one or two” memos touching on religion possibly came from Butler. He offered no way to verify which memos were whose and did not answer follow-up questions asking him to specify.

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However, several details contained in the memos to Tulsi Gabbard point toward Butler instead. One memo, buried in a 173-page policy dossier, reminisced about working as a teenager in Hawaii, where Butler grew up. Khemaney nor Mike Gabbard did.

In 19 memos the unnamed adviser appears to identify himself as Butler directly, mostly on questions of faith.

Team members occasionally referred to requests from “S,” while Khemaney is known within the group as “Syd.” One internal memo is addressed from Syd to S, possibly indicating they are different people.

Jon Swaine also asked the AI system Claude to run a stylometric analysis, comparing the unnamed adviser’s language against Butler’s own lecture archive and against Khemaney’s and Mike Gabbard’s writing.

Claude found the material most likely came from a single speaker resembling Butler more closely than the other two, based on shared nonstandard word choices. Though Claude AI, as Swaine wrote, did not claim certainty.

On May 20, 2026, having gotten no answers from Gabbard’s office for two months, Swaine emailed Gabbard, her press secretary, and her chief of staff to tell them the Washington Post planned to publish a story about her ties to Butler.

Two days later, on May 22, Fox News reported Gabbard would resign as director of national intelligence, a departure her office attributed to her husband’s rare bone cancer diagnosis. She formally left the position in mid-June, immediately before Swaine’s story ran on June 21.

It is undetermined whether Swaine’s reporting caused her departure, however a two-day gap between a reporter’s notice and a resignation announcement is a notable series of events.

What the Post Didn’t Cover

The Washington Post story centers on political control, but does not address two things Saltzburg raised with me directly. The first is a pattern of child sexual abuse within SIF she says goes back decades which she says leadership failed to act on.

The Post verified the 2025 case and the letter Saltzburg sent about it, however the decades-long pattern rests on Saltzburg’s own account to me, and I have not independently verified it the way Swaine verified the political memos.

I believe this deserves investigation, not silence, and I am not the one equipped to do that investigation. My hope is a respected trafficking expert like Julie K. Brown or other colleagues will contact Saltzburg and follow this post up.

The second thing is Butler’s history with China that independent, peer-reviewed research has documented. The Journal of Yoga Studies published “’Mother of Yoga’: Zhang Huilan, Chris Butler, and the Popularization of Yoga in the People’s Republic of China,” tracing Butler’s role building the yoga industry inside the People’s Republic of China. Saltzburg adds to this a 1976 talk in which Butler praised Mao Zedong’s pursuit of “pure communism,” and records of a China speaking tour she connects to Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlets.

To be clear, the Chinese people are the first victims of this political system, not its representatives, and criticizing Communist Party propaganda is not criticism of China or Chinese culture.

Third, in early 2026, Senator Mark Warner and Representative Jim Himes stated that an intelligence whistleblower complaint, filed in May 2025, was not transmitted to Congress until February 2026, along with an underlying intelligence report withheld from oversight committees. For months, even a senior member of the intelligence oversight committee was not permitted to see a complaint Gabbard’s office controlled. Gabbard called the accusation a “blatant lie.”

Was She Ever Free to Choose?

I know some readers will ask whether Gabbard should simply be judged as an adult who made her own choices.

Under the law, adults are responsible for their conduct, as is Gabbard. However, legal adulthood and genuine independent decision-making are not the same thing and conflating them is a mistake.

Gabbard’s parents raised her inside a system built, by design, to extinguish independent judgment before a child is old enough to consent to anything. Saltzburg describes a woman who as a child was programmed to be obedient to Butler.

Yes, she went to the military. Yes, she became a congresswoman. But many people who have held high demand profiles and jobs have simultaneously been totally indoctrinated into blind obedience.

Gabbard took direction on her votes, her television appearances, and her own words for years, sometimes agreeing enthusiastically with guidance she had no part in writing. This pattern does not describe a free adult weighing options, but someone whose capacity for independent decision-making was shaped, from childhood.

I am not excusing what Gabbard did while in government. However, we must analyze what undue influence does to a person’s ability to choose their own actions.

The Worrying Impact of Undue Influence on Politics

A person who, by a credible if contested account, took direction from a religious leader for years was confirmed to lead the agencies responsible for warning this country about foreign influence operations. This is true no matter your politics.

If any part of this sounds familiar to you at a much smaller scale, a parent who never disagrees with a pastor, an adult child who checks every decision with a controlling partner, you are looking at the same dynamic at a different size.

Undue influence does not stay contained inside one compound in Hawaii. It travels wherever the person carrying it goes, into a marriage, a workplace, or a cabinet post. My book Freedom of Mind® walks through a strategic approach for how to reach someone still caught inside a relationship or group like this one, without pushing them further away.

Saltzburg has repeatedly asked authorities to open a thorough investigation into potential wrongdoing by Gabbard, Butler, and other senior members of her religious circle. Her account is not simple, and I have tried to show you why. But the documents behind it are real, no one disputes this, and what they describe deserves a serious, independent look. I hope to bring you more as one unfolds.

Jon Swain’s Washington Post Article: Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that help shape her political career.

Rebecca’s website with focus on China patriotsfightcorruption.com

The recording of our livestream together is

Further Reading

Does Trump Display the Stereotypical Profile of a Cult Leader?

A look at how political cults form around a single leader, and why the same warning signs apply outside religious settings.

Political Cults, Leadership, Idealism, and Totalism: A Discussion with Dennis Tourish, Ph.D.

A conversation on how political organizations, left and right, take on the same coercive structures as religious cults.

Betrayal of The Spirit: Krishna Cults and Healing with Nori Muster Nori was head of PR for iskcon and has been very active helping children abused in the cult as well as cult education

Problems with the ISKCON Krishna Movement With Steven Gelberg, Nori Muster, and Henry Doktorski

Former NXIVM Member Sarah Edmondson Talks About Being Recruited Into and Escaping Keith Raniere’s Cult

Another firsthand account from a whistleblower who risked everything to expose abuse inside a closed group.

Sources

Jon Swaine, “Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career,” Washington Post, June 21, 2026 (with Cate Brown and Aaron Schaffer contributing)

“’Mother of Yoga’: Zhang Huilan, Chris Butler, and the Popularization of Yoga in the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of Yoga Studies, Vol. 5, journalofyogastudies.org

Senator Mark Warner and Representative Jim Himes, joint statement on withheld whistleblower complaint, February 2026

Fox News, on Gabbard’s May 22, 2026 resignation announcement

Say you were reading an article stating that a certain candy bar was beneficial to your health, but then you see that the author of the article had been paid by the makers of that candy, and the journal the article was published in was owned by the candy manufacturer’s parent company.

That candy wouldn’t taste so sweet anymore, would it?

And yet, a very similar thing has been done in the past by tobacco companies denying the carcinogenic effects of smoking, by fossil fuel companies denying climate change - and by certain high-control, destructive authoritarian groups trying to claim that they are “new religious movements” and that former members claiming abuse and the experts and historians tracking that abuse cannot be trusted. In this week’s Substack article for paid subscribers, Is That “Scholarship” Actually Cult Propaganda?, I discuss the knotty problem of cult “experts” who are paid by the groups they are defending as “harmless,” and the way they muddy the waters of academic research on the groups whose interests they serve.

This article can be read here by our paid subscribers, who also have access to my complete catalog of interviews, helpful guides, and thought-provoking articles, such as:

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I’m delighted to announce that my classic book, Combating Cult Mind Control, is now the August Monthly Deal on Audible, so if you want to get the audio version, now is the perfect time! Also, the Spanish version, Combatiendo el Control Mental de las Sectas, is also available on audiobook.

This week’s livestream will take place on Wednesday, August 5th, at 2 pm EDT; I will be answering viewer questions and discussing current events.

On Friday, August 7th at 2 pm EDT, I will be doing a special livestream with my guests Lara Kaput and Maria Esguerra; they have been working with the government of Victoria, Australia to make it easier for survivors of cult abuse to get justice, and harder for cults to get away with concealing and denying the abuse of children and other vulnerable members. We’ll be discussing how the landmark Victorian Parliament inquiry into recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organized fringe groups has tabled its report in parliament, with 98 findings and 39 recommendations.

You can read the report by the Legislative Assembly Legal and Social Issues Committee here, and watch the video in which Committee members reflect on the evidence they heard during the inquiry here.

If you missed last week’s livestream, you can find it here.

In this week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) with Anthony Forte, I speak with this brave survivor about his recruitment, his life in this doomsday cult - including an arranged marriage - and how he was able to break free!

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

This is the second in my series of speaking with survivors of cults based in Korea; next week’s episode will be with Chris Vishoot, who was a member of Shincheonji.

On Thursday at noon, I will be speaking at the Impact Guild Roundtable on Dismantling Disinformation, along with disinformation researcher Dave Troy and research analyst Frederick Clarkson. We’ll be talking about the coercive influence tactics and coordinated networks behind modern conspiracy movements. Please sign up for their newsletter to receive an invitation to the presentation.

Remember, be sure that you, your neighbors, and everyone you know is registered to vote and ready to do so! We must defeat MAGA in the coming elections!

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

Some of the pro-cult literature you will find on the internet these days will open onto something that on the surface looks like scholarship. However, don’t be fooled! Somewhere tonight, someone is typing a group’s name into a search bar for the first time. What comes back has been shaped by people with resources, patience, and perhaps financial reasons of their own.

Take for example, a journal with an editorial board and mailing address, publishing an article arguing that many of the groups my clients have recovered and escaped from, are in fact merely “new religious movements” — that should be allowed to operate as-is, and deserve protection despite their documented abuse.

The authors that publish these pro-cult articles can be compared to the “experts” that Big Tobacco hired to say with certainty, that smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer — even though the corporate heads had done their own research and knew for sure it did. Big Oil also uses the same propaganda playbook as cults, investing a fortune into buying politicians and writing legislation.

And so, like Big Tobacco, and like Big Oil, a multitude of authoritarian mind control cults (shall we call them Big Cult?) coordinate and have their propagandists regularly publish journal articles which are positive about their groups.

A few questions crop up. How can we recognize these propagandists? How could sociologists of religion write positive articles about destructive cults? Why?

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Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left…

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Many people take time away from work and head off on vacation in July, so it’s likely that you may have missed some of our articles and livestreams. We’ve certainly had a busy month!

We’ve been continuing with our series of helpful guides on high-control groups, how to recognize an authoritarian situation, and how to help people navigate away from groupthink and back into their authentic selves. Our most recent guides have included:

Two Ways To Question A Cult Member - talking to your loved one entrapped in an abusive relationship or authoritarian group

3 Reasons Cult Survivors Get Recruited Again - exploring why people “cult hop,” and how to stop the patterns that keep us walking into bad situations

When Your Marriage Fits the BITE Model - a look at how abusive relationships echo the same psychological mechanics as authoritarian cults, and what to do about it

If you aren’t already a paid subscriber and wish to support my work, now is an excellent time: paid subscribers are able to access helpful guides like the above, as well as my complete catalog of interviews, articles, and vital information.

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I’ve also been talking with some fascinating people: my July guests for the Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast have included Cryptocurrency expert Molly White, MLM survivor and psychotherapist Brandie Hadfield, and founder of CHILDUSA.org and noted human rights attorney and professor Marci Hamilton.

In this week’s episode of the podcast, 6,000 Images and No Idea It Was a Crime, I talk with forensic clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen on why autistic people can become both the victims and the unwitting offenders of the online world and how bad actors deliberately target neurodivergent individuals, deliberately exploiting black-and-white thinking, the need for belonging, and past trauma. It’s important to note that instead of blaming the targeted individuals, we must expose how manipulators prey on human vulnerabilities.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

Next week’s episode will feature Anthony Forte, a former member of the Korean doomsday cult, World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG), where he lived in an arranged marriage until his escape. We will then do ex-Shincheonji member Chris Vishoot, and ex Moonie Ingo Michehl, in a series on cults from Korea.

This week’s livestream will take place on Wednesday, July 29th, at 2 pm EDT; I will be discussing current news and answering viewer questions.

On Friday, I will be doing a livestream with special guest Rebecca Saltzburg, a former member of Chris Butler’s Science of Identity Foundation. This is the cult that Tulsi Gabbard, former Director of National Intelligence, was born into. Salzburg was top aide to Butler and Gabbard and has evidence that the cult has been deeply involved with China for decades. She left when she discovered minors were being sex trafficked, and there is suspicion that there might be direct links to the Epstein circle. Rebecca is a whistleblower and was featured in The Washington Post’s recent, year-long investigation into Tulsi Gabbard and Gabbard’s religious cult.

If you missed last week’s livestream, you can find it here.

And last but not least, this past Sunday, I was interviewed on Times Radio’s “Catch Up” with Darryl Morris. Morris asked me to talk about The Cult of Trump with a focus on the recent 180-degree flip Laura Loomer made from calling Ukraine nazis to flying there to now support Ukraine. Ukraine Chabad Rabbi Azman was Loomer’s host and I have previously written about the Russia aligned cult Allatra. I am very suspicious of Loomer- a right wing extremist.

I’d like to know more about what you’d like to see covered! Your input
helps me know what issues are important to you!

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have been downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the downl…

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The above question is one of the ones I get asked the most. Well-meaning family and friends see their loved one trapped in a high-control group or a toxic relationship, and also that their loved one is convinced that there’s nothing wrong.

How can you talk to them effectively? Is it even possible?

In this week’s Substack article for paid subscribers, Two Ways To Question A Cult Member, I explore this question and provide concrete strategies to help that loved one start the journey to recovery by asking open-ended, curious questions, by never condemning the group or the leader, and, most importantly, getting them to reclaim their own voice, their own opinions, and their own identity.

Paid subscribers can read the article now; if you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. Paid subscribers receive access to helpful guides like this, as well as my full catalog of interviews and articles, such as:

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Our regular weekly livestream will take place this week on Wednesday, July 22nd, at 2 pm EDT. We will talk about the Tate brothers’ arrest and the manosphere, Todd Blanche and Epstein cult, and more about Trump pissing off Republican lawmakers and taking steps to undermine the midterm elections. Bring your questions! For those unable to see past livestreams, you can find them here:

Wildfires, Heat Waves, & The Cost of Climate Change Denial w/ Bill McKibben - Friday, July 17th

McConnell’s Health, Trump, and the Fight for Government Transparency - Wednesday, July 15th (we had connectivity issues, so the conversation ended early - we hope to continue it soon).

In this week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, God, Law, and the Cult of Power, I speak with Marci Hamilton, Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation. She is also the author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty. Together, we recently published an article, Forced Labor Is Not Protected by the First Amendment, in the National Law Review, fully explaining our position and why freedom of religion must include freedom from religion.

We speak about her work and what it will take to restore the rule of law in the face of authoritarian religions inserting themselves into our courts and our politics.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

Next week’s guest will be Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen, a clinical psychologist with 30 years of experience specializing in autism spectrum disorders. Her new book, co-written with defense attorney Elizabeth Kelley and digital forensics expert Michele Bush, is Cybercrime and the Autism Spectrum: How the Online World Creates Victims and Offenders. We will be discussing how neurodivergent individuals are often targeted by high-control groups and how people on the spectrum can protect themselves from predation.

Finally, my monthly blog post in Psychology Today, The Cult of Jung, is a deep dive into the insular circle Carl Jung built, and its path through self-help today. In it, I explain how Jung originated several prevailing ideas in psychology, organized around his own authority and charisma. I think you’ll find it a compelling read!

I’d like to know more about what you’d like to see covered! Your input
helps me know what issues are important to you!

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire care…

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With all the love and logic you possess, you take a deep breath, find your courage, and proclaim to your family member, “Can’t you see this group is a destructive cult?”

To your chagrin, a wall goes up, the eyes go flat, and the person you love recites something that sounds like a recording. You walk away feeling that you have somehow pushed them further in.

In my time helping families reach loved ones inside destructive groups, I have learned that there is a clear difference between asking questions with curiosity versus asking them with a predetermined “trap” in mind. When you ask a question like this, you realistically are making a disguised statement and you hand the other person a position to defend — and a mind under undue influence is exquisitely trained to defend.

When you ask a genuine question, something very different happens. You invite the person to reach for an answer that lives inside them, and in reaching for it, they hear their own voice, not yours.

The Person’s Own Voice

There is a principle from social psychology that anyone trying to help a loved one should carry in their pocket. People believe what they hear themselves say and see themselves do far more deeply than what they are told.

Self-persuasion is vastly more effective and long lasting than direct persuasion because the motivation for change feels like it comes from within, and we often determine our own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions by observing our own behavior.

This is why, in destructive groups, new members are put to work recruiting others almost immediately. As I described in Combating Cult Mind Control, nothing crystallizes a person’s beliefs faster than having them persuade someone else to share those beliefs. The group understands, better than most families do, that self-persuasion is stronger than any lecture.

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When you tell a cult member, for example, that their leader is a fraud, you are one more outside voice to be dismissed, and the group has already warned them that you would say exactly this.

But when a well placed question leads them to articulate a doubt in their own words, that doubt becomes theirs. It cannot be unsaid, and it cannot be dismissed as your propaganda because they have come up with it themselves. This is why I tell families that the insight a person reaches on their own is worth a hundred facts you could have handed them.

The Difference Between a Leading Question and a Curious One

Many well intentioned families stumble when advised to “ask questions” instead of citing facts and figures to a cult member. They hear “ask questions” and begin asking questions that are really arguments in disguise.

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Many people who realize that a relationship or group is abusive will leave, only to fall into the same trap in different packaging. While some might blame the person for their repeated misfortune, it’s a sad truth that falling into a second cult is one of the most predictable outcomes of leaving the first one.

Understanding why it happens is the first step toward making sure it doesn’t happen again.

In this week’s article for paid subscribers, 3 Reasons Cult Survivors Get Recruited Again, I discuss the underlying reasons why survivors often find themselves in subsequent high-control groups, and the steps required to break this recurring pattern.

Read the full article here.

If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, now is an excellent time to become one. Paid subscribers directly support my work while gaining full access to an extensive library of resources, insightful articles, and exclusive interviews with leading experts, including:

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Our regular weekly livestream will take place this week on Wednesday, July 15th, at 2 pm EDT. Also, I will be having a special livestream with guest environmentalist legend Bill McKibben on Friday, the 17th, also at 2 pm. Bill was just interviewed on the Ezra Klein show, and I highly recommend listening to this! Bring your questions! For those unable to see last week’s livestreams, you can see them here:

Wednesday, July 8th - $2.2 BILLION RICHER?! Trump's Not-So Presidential Motivations Exposed

Friday, July 10th - Can Local Elections Stop Authoritarianism? Defending Democracy One Vote at a Time - with special guest Sarah Chadzynski

This week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, She Spent $115K in a Wellness Cult, features Brandie Hadfield, a registered psychotherapist and co-founder of the peer support nonprofit Flipping the Pyramid, who spent roughly ten years selling supplements for a wellness MLM (Multi-level Marketing group) before she understood she had been recruited into a commercial cult.

These groups disguise themselves as business opportunities, supportive communities for like-minded people, or even as a fun way to connect with others, but when you peel back the glossy messaging, you’ll find the strings of control, conditional “friendship,” and financial abuse that are the hallmarks of any high-control authoritarian organization.

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube

Read my Substack post about the interview here.

Next week’s episode will feature U Penn law professor and former CEO of CHILDusa.org, Marci Hamilton, author of God Vs. The Gavel, and noted advocate for the rights of children and other vulnerable individuals affected by abuse at the hands of high-control religious groups. We recently published an article, Forced Labor Is Not Protected by the First Amendment, in the National Law Review, fully explaining our position and why freedom of religion must include freedom from religion.

I’d like to know more about what you’d like to see covered! Your input
helps me know what issues are important to you!

As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!

You told yourself it would never happen again. And then, two or three years later, you look up and realize you are once again giving your money, your time, and your loyalty to a group or individual that has quietly taken over your life.

Perhaps it is a political movement that has an answer for everything or a wellness community with a charismatic leader and a strict set of rules. The second cult trap may even be a new relationship that started as the most intense connection you have ever felt.

If you were fooled once, you can tell yourself you didn’t know any better. But twice? Now the story you tell yourself becomes maybe the problem is me. Maybe I really can’t trust my own judgment.

Getting drawn into the second cultic control situation is not evidence that you are, or were, weak, or hopeless. It is often a predictable outcomes of leaving the first one. Understanding why it happens is the first step toward making sure it doesn’t happen again.

The Void the Cult Leaves Behind

When you leave a destructive group, you do not merely just leave a set of beliefs. Inside the group, you were handed certainty, a “loving” community, a clear identity, and an overriding sense of purpose.

One allure of this community is that each day was accounted for, and every big question had an answer. You never had to sit with ambiguity, because the group did your thinking for you. When you walk out the door, all of that vanishes at once, and what remains is a void.

In one of my earlier posts on identity after the cult, I described the strange grief of leaving. In the Moonies, I had a sense of purpose and certainty, and rejoining the real world meant losing all of that. You also may find yourself missing the feeling of being special and the comfort of having all the answers. This is a very human reaction.

The problem is that a new void does not want to stay empty for long. A new group or a new all consuming relationship can rush in to fill exactly the space the old one occupied, and it can feel like relief. Your nervous system, which spent years organized around belonging and obedience, recognizes the shape of the thing and reaches for it.

The 3 Vulnerabilities That Travel With You

There is a persistent popular myth that only weak, gullible, or uneducated people end up in cults. Law professor emeritus Alan Scheflin calls this “the myth of the unmalleable mind.”

It is a comforting lie, because it lets people believe that becoming entangled in a high control situation could never happen to them. In reality, we are all susceptible to social influence, and the single greatest vulnerability is simply a lack of education about how undue influence works.

However, survivors do carry some specific vulnerabilities out the door with them, and these are what make re-recruitment more likely.

The first vulnerability is an external locus of control. This is the psychological term for where a person believes that the successes and failures of their life are driven by outside forces like luck, fate, or powerful others rather than one’s own actions.

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A wellness MLM (Multi-Level Marketing/Pyramid Scheme organization) does not announce itself as a cult. It arrives as a smoothie recipe, a flyer of smiling mothers, and a promise of working from home while you take your health back.

My recent guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Brandie Hadfield, lived inside one for a decade. She is a Registered Psychothe…

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