Part III: Escape

The Tools

"Before attempting a formal intervention, my friends and family had to help me gain critical thinking tools that I had lost in the cult. It is important not to be confrontational when you are trying to reach a cult member. Never use the word cult, mind control, or hypnosis. Just be interested. You can talk about friends, however. You can say, 'Do you remember Joanne? Her husband is an alcoholic and it is too bad because he drank a lot when they were dating. She should have known that might lead to alcoholism.' Or you can tell stories, even fairy tales. You can say, 'I was writing a fairy tale for a nursery school. I was wondering if you could listen to it for me?' You can then talk about this witch who controlled a village. Cult members don't want to talk about their group, but they are usually open to talking about other people or other cults, and you can help them experience what they are going through with those examples."

Non-forceful Intervention

"It can take 6 months, five years, before it feels like it is time to do an intervention. Nowadays it is very popular, if not standard, to do a non-forceful intervention. In the 70's they did deprogramming where they had to kidnap members off the streets, throw them in a room without any objects to keep them from hurting themselves and feed them protein. That was old school. Now they try and base it on the intervention process in which members are willing participants. An intervention is typically two to three days. If the subject says in the middle that he can't handle this, he can take a break for a couple of hours.

"For my formal intervention, I was sitting in my friend's house with some of my family, a couple of ex-members and an expert. We took our time, we talked about other groups, we watched videos about other groups, we talked abut hypnosis, we talked about what my life would be like if I stayed in the group for another five years. I would be paying $5,000 to $10,000 each month to study with Rama. It meant that I would be alone and not have any possessions.

"Three or four hours into the formal intervention, I popped out of it. It was kind of like waking up from a yearlong dream. It's as if you've always enjoyed milk shakes, and you wake up one morning and milk shakes never existed. It was all a hallucination, and you will never have milk shakes again. In the cult, the world is set up in a certain way, and every part of your life is explained. Then you realize that you were completely misled, and that you had no chance of getting out of that mind state."

Long-term Effects

"There are a few scraggly triggers that I can tell are triggers, like a certain place, certain foods. Where I kind of trance out and have to ground myself. This is the danger. There are people who leave cults for other reasons, like they didn't like the organization, they couldn't afford it, they got kicked out. Often those people jump from cult to cult. For the rest of their lives, they have all the same paranoias, all the same rituals, and they keep a limited life until they die because they never had an intervention."