Newsletter: Welcoming the New Year! And Love Bombing: a Psychological Weapon
The pattern behind gifts, flattery, and fast commitment—and what it’s really for.
My team and I are taking a break to enjoy the holidays with friends and family this week, so we will not be hosting a livestream. Wishing you and your loved ones a joyful festive season from The Freedom of Mind team, with sincere hopes for a much brighter 2026.
One of the perennial questions I get asked as a cult expert is, “Why do people join destructive authoritarian groups?” So many people hear about the abuses of these high-control groups and scoff: “I would never let myself get fooled.” This sentiment demonstrates the lack of understanding of the methods these groups (and also domestic abusers) use to draw in unsuspecting victims, the tactics of recruitment, and the methods of psychological manipulation at play.
People don’t join destructive cults; they are seduced using lack of informed consent, deliberate disinformation, and emotional manipulation.
A Basic Guide to Love Bombing
One of the most common forms of emotional manipulation, used by abusive groups and domestic abusers alike, is “love bombing.” In this week’s post for our paid subscribers, The Anatomy of Love Bombing, I continue my Freedom of Mind Cults 101 series with this helpful guide on how to spot - and walk away from - love bombing.
In this post, we discuss:
What Love Bombing Actually Is
What Love Bombing Looks Like
What Love Bombing Does to the Brain
How Cults Customize the Love Bombing Process
How To Defuse the Love Bomb and Recover
Now is the perfect moment to become a paid subscriber if you haven’t already. Paid subscribers have access to my full range of interviews with experts, helpful articles and guides, including:
Taking Off the Rose-Colored Glasses - a guide to understanding the behavioral signs of abuse in relationships
Starting to Question if You Are in a Controlling Group or Relationship? - How to spot destructive, manipulative behavior
Psychologist Abuse? Therapist Abuse? Life Coach Abuse? - what to do when the person who is meant to be helping you is harming you instead
Denying Victims their Voice
Another way that destructive groups manipulate people is to deny that any abuse ever happened. One of the most insidious and, sadly, universal methods to deny abuse is to shame and even deny the state of victimhood. In my December post for Psychology Today, “There Are No Victims” - How Cults Weaponize Accountability”, I explore how many cults - often disguised as “self-help” groups and “empowerment” seminars - teach that “there are no victims,” implying that you have somehow chosen your suffering. This teaching, often presented as “empowerment,” actually serves the abusers by making victims blame themselves for abuse, rape, or exploitation. Unfortunately, this toxic belief has become shockingly “mainstream,” and I hope this article will explain why we need to resist this dangerous trope wherever we encounter it.
Moving from Hate to Love
Finally, for this week’s episode of my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast, I am offering a “Best of” episode: “Sins of my Father: Growing up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist” is even more relevant today than before, where I talk with Kelvin Pierce, whose father, Dr. William Pierce, was a notorious white supremacist and founded the National Alliance, a prominent hate group. Dr. Pierce also wrote the novel The Turner Diaries, which racists widely cite as inspiration for their racist beliefs and actions. Kelvin was able to turn away from the hateful beliefs he was raised with and has worked to foster love and inclusion in the world, even helping to establish an orphanage in the country of Georgia.
Listen on Apple | Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Or read the full blog post version:
Sins of my Father: Growing up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist
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!
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Does the “I would never let myself get fooled” sentiment demonstrate a lack of understanding of the methods used by cults and domestic abusers? The “yes” answer is itself a testable assumption.
I’m not questioning the reality that people expressing that sentiment become victims of psychological manipulation, but not everyone subjected to those tactics becomes a victim. Is that just random luck? Is it a function of the manipulator’s skill? Or is it what I suspect: that it’s like COVID where the likelihood that an individual will test positive is a function of whether the individual has been immunized.
Australian Nobel laureate Barry Marshall said that trying to convince other clinicians of his research — overturning established medical dogma and revolutionizing the treatment of peptic ulcers — was “impossible.” With that word, he described a scientific community responding to readily observable evidence the way I respond to mosquitos landing on my forearm. Ref: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)67587-3/fulltext
Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talent. I am only patiently curious.” In those words, he described a habitual response very different than the response Marshall received, not to mention the response a concerned individual receives from a victim of a cult’s psychological manipulation. And Einstein was also describing how he practiced science.
In his 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant summed up the work of Aristotle (384-322 BC) by saying: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Einstein’s excellence, then, was not an act, but a good habit. Conversely, the response Marshall received was not an act, but a bad habit.
Hypothetically, it’s possible to distinguish between the Einstein behavior pattern and the “reflexive dismissal of irrefutable evidence” behavior pattern, and it’s also possible to correlate that with the probability that an individual is susceptible to a cult’s recruitment tactics and/or domestic violence.
I don’t know if running such an experiment would be possible, but I suggest Einstein would have been quickly assessed by a cult as immune from the recruitment effort.