The great escape

April 20, 2007 /  Charlie  /  2 Comments  /  News, Newspaper Article

Quitting a cult takes determination and expert help.

THE BEGINNING OF the rest of Matthew Klein’s life began one crisp morning in October 2001, on a street corner in a red light district of Winnipeg, Canada. That was the day he got thrown out of The Twelve Tribes, a fundamentalist Christian cult with about 3000 members worldwide. Klein, a chemical engineer from Sydney, had been with the group for two years, during which time he had surrendered all his money and submitted his wife and three small children to their control. Now, after a falling out, two cult members drove Klein and his three-year-old son, Bryson, to a hotel in one of the city’s roughest neighbourhoods, gave him $100 and told him to get out.

“The hotel sold pornography on the front counter,” Klein says. “They had signs warning people to double-lock their doors at night. It wasn’t the kind of place you want to have a three-year-old boy.”

Six years later, Klein, now 38, has finally got his life back. He has regained custody of his two other children, married again and rebuilt his career. But for years he was an emotional wreck, ridden with guilt, anxiety, anger and depression. “I tried everything,” he says. “I saw psychologists, psychiatrists and several counsellors but they were mostly useless.”

The only one who helped, Klein says, was Raphael Aron, head of a Melbourne group called Cult Counselling Australia. Aron is one of this country’s few full-time exit-counsellors: therapists, psychologists, and in some cases church workers, who specialise in getting people out of cults. Aron, 52, studied psychology at Melbourne University in the 1970s and has been exit-counselling for more than 30 years. These days he sees about six clients at a time. “I could do more,” he says. “There’s certainly the demand. But it’s heavy, intensive work.”

Most of his clients are people distraught at the estrangement of a family member. “There are many distressing aspects to cults,” Aron says, “the destruction of a person’s personality and the fact that many cults deal with Armageddon, which is an inherently negative way to look at the world. But by far the most upsetting thing is the family breakdown, the way children are separated from parents and siblings.”

The idea behind exit-counselling seems straightforward: that you reverse the psychological manipulation to which cults commonly subject their members. In practice it’s more complex, not least because of its history.

Exit-counselling came out of what used to be known as deprogramming, a practice pioneered in America during the 1970s by a Chattanooga-born civil rights activist called Ted Perkins. Perkins became interested in cults after almost losing his son to the Children of God. Researching the field – he sometimes “joined” cults to understand their methodology – he determined a highly interventionist resocialisation strategy, often abducting cult-members and subjecting them to intense “reverse-brainwashing”. He made front page news for his interstate car chases, eluding both state troopers and cult leaders, who dubbed him “Black Lightning” and accused him of being an agent of Satan.

Today’s methods are more sophisticated. “What we do is totally voluntary,” Aron says. “Cult members must come to the table of their own volition, otherwise the counselling won’t work.” Nevertheless, he says, “there’s a fine balance between getting someone into a room and being dishonest.”

Aron’s work often involves many painstaking months of preparation, including initially, drawing up a psychological profile of the cult member with the help of a third party, usually a family member. “We then decide who will make initial contact with the cult member. Will it be the sister, brother or mother? It can’t be me, because the cults know who I am and they hate me. The message they take to the cult member might be something like: ‘Dad is worried about you; he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Can I at least talk to you about what you’re doing and this group you’re in?’”

Location is important preferably away from the cult’s base as is timing. “You want to use a specific event in the person’s life, an anniversary, a marriage, to maximise the chances of reconnecting. It’s the job of the person making contact to establish a dialogue.

“When they feel that they’ve done this they might say to the cult member, ‘Look, I’m concerned about what you’ve told me, it sounds like this group might be a cult.’”

They then ask if it’s OK if someone else comes along to their talks. What they don’t tell them, Aron says, “is that ‘the someone else is me’.”

Only after the cult member accepts Aron’s involvement (by no means a given), can counselling begin. “The goal is to make them understand why they joined the cult in the first place,” Aron says.

What are the predisposing factors? For instance, someone who has difficulty with intimacy might be drawn to cults, because cults are notoriously un-intimate, with strict guidelines about relationships.

Counsellors also treat any damage caused by the cult. “Sometimes you have to start with their diet,” Louise Samways, a clinical psychologist and exit-counsellor based in Melbourne, says. “I often see people coming out of cults on extreme diets, the typical one being a high-carb, low-protein regime, which has a sedative effect.” (Ex-member Matthew Klein describes nutrition at The Twelve Tribes’ Australian headquarters, in Picton, south-west of Sydney, as “abysmal”. After a while you can’t even think straight because you’re basically malnourished.)

Samways, who in 1994 wrote a book about cults called Dangerous Persuaders, says ex-cult members often suffer from crippling fears and phobias, for example, “that leaving the group means they’re going to die. I’ve even had patients who thought that leaving would make them responsible for a cataclysmic global event.”

Ex-members may present with all kinds of conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression: “I’ve seen plenty of suicides,” says Adrian van Leen, of Concerned Christians Growth Ministries, a cult-busting organisation in Perth.

The psychological damage is profound. Particularly common, especially among some fundamentalist groups, are dissociative disorders.

“Dissociation is a normal state that occurs every two hours,” Samways says. “It’s basically when you daydream.” But some groups induce dissociation, which can have terrible effects on memory and concentration.

They use post-hypnotic suggestion to teach members to automatically slip into a dissociative state on cue. That cue may be when someone, even themselves, starts to question the cult. If that happens you often see them drop to their knees and start chanting.

But most pernicious of all is the implanting of false memories, a particularly useful method for creating conflict and separating a person from their family. “Memory is not a videotape,” Samways says.

“It’s an on-going self-directed movie that changes over time. This makes it relatively easy for someone to re-enforce and subtly change another person’s perception of their personal history.”

Treating this area (officially known as “recovered memory”) is, however, complex and potentially dangerous, so much so that the Australian Psychological Society has devised a set of specialist guidelines. “You can undo the damage,” Samways says, “but you must be extremely sensitive.”

So would exit-counselling work for terrorists? Could you resocialise, say, a Russian Neo-Nazi in the same way you might a Twelve Tribes member? “No”, Samways says. “There’s overlap there but there’s also big differences. A Palestinian bomber is often aggrieved and sees himself fighting injustice, which isn’t something that you can address coming in as a psychologist.”

For Matthew Klein, recovery meant helping others as much as himself. These days he occasionally assists Aron with exit-counselling and helps a group called Cult Information and Family Support.

“Some people never get over it, because they’re too embarrassed to admit they were in a cult,” Klein says. “They want to forget and move on. But you can’t just forget. These people can really screw with your head. Recognising that is the first step.”