For previous sections of this series go to: Captive Hearts, Captive Minds/Take Back Your Life
A NOTE regarding the book. The book is being revised and updated and will get a new title; Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (previously titled Captive Hearts, Captive Minds and this is the title I am working with) by Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias"
Chapter 3: Understanding Thought Reform Part 4
The Double Bind
This is defined as a "psychological dilemma in which a usually dependent person recieves conflicting interpersonal communication from a single source or faces disparagement no matter what his response to a situation. It imparts a message of hopelessness: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (p. 43).
This is used to keep a person feeling unstable. The authors state:
Double binds magnify dependence be injecting an additional element of unpredictablity into cult members’ relationships to their leadership. Consequently, members can never become too comfortable. Fear prevents them from challenging those on whom they have become dependent. (p.44)
The Cult "Pseudopersonality"
The following is a list og elements that are most likely to be a part of indoctrination.
- Isolation of the recruit and manipulation of his envoronment
- Control over channels of communication and information.
- Debilitation through inadequate diet and fatigue.
- Degradation or diminution of the self.
- Induction of uncertainty, fear, and confusion, with joy and certainty through surrender to the group as the goal.
- Alternation of harshness and leniency in a context of discipline.
- Peer pressure, often often applied through ritualized struggle sessions generating guilt and requiring open confessions.
- Insistence by seemingly all-powerful hosts that the recruit’s survival – physical or spiritual – depends on identifying with the group.
- Assignment of monotonous tasks or repetitive activities, such as chanting or copying written materials.
- Acts of symbolic betrayal and renunciation of self, family, and previously helf values, designed to increase the psychological distance between recruit and his previous way of life. (p. 44-45)
It is the use of these elements that make it so difficult for the recruit to be able to use their critical and rational thought processes. Responses to most questions become memorized quotes with most people in the group able to respond identically to questions put to them. Michael Langone (author of Recovery from Cults) states:
After converts commit themselves to a cult, the cult’s way of thinking, feeling, and acting becomes second nature, while important aspects of their precult personalities are suppressed or, in a sense, decay through disuse…. If allowed to break into consciousness, supressed memories or nagging doubts may generate anxiety which in turn, may trigger a defensive trnace-induction, such as speaking in tongues, to protect the cult imposed system of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. (p. 45)
After leaving the group ex-members feel confused. The pat answers they lived with no longer work and they struggle to find new ways to think feel and act. Robert Lifton described a phenomenon he called doubling. "Doubling is the formation of a second self which lives side by side with the former one,often for a considerable time." (p. 46)
Many people under stress are capable of developing a second self. In my work with abuse surivors (who all experienced a great deal of stress) it was quite common to identify a variety of personalities each with a particular ability to deal with stress. It makes perfect sense that when a recruit is manipulated into surrendering their true self for the ideologies of a cult that the new personality would be adaptive to the group’s beliefs.
The authors summarize the chapter with:
As explained earlier, the goal of thought reform is for the subject to become one with the ideal. In cults, personal ego boundaries disappear as the member begins to live for the group or the ideology. This change in identification, often accompanied by such actions as leaving school, changing jobs, dropping old friends, interests, and hobbies, and avoiding family, is what so alarms people as they watch a family member or friend become totally consumed by cult life. (p. 47).