A few days ago I took Steve Hassan to the airport after a weekend of his speaking to a large synagogue in Los Angeles on the dangers of cults. SEE ARTICLE
Steve had quite a crowd and met a lot of people. The synagogue flew him out to educate the large congregation in the downtown LA area. I picked him up and took him to the airport, but not without bringing him back to our place for some of my homemade potato soup made with goat's milk and feta cheese. :-))
We caught up on the last few years and he is as cheery as ever. Like me, he's always working on new projects.
One thing Steve and I discussed is how much we miss the old Cult Awareness Network (CAN), where ex-members of all kinds of cults got together for lectures and workshops in various parts of the country several times a year. It struck me just how much ex-Witnesses miss out on hearing testimonies from other former cult members of other groups, and what a large part of important cult education you really miss out on by not doing so. Fortunately we have Youtube to help now, but it's just not nearly as impressionable as meeting the people in person. You get to see yourself in them.
Not counting any "supernatural" healing experiences or answers to prayer (which happen but are impossible to put in the upcoming figures here), I would rate the effectiveness of certain methods of helping a person come out of the Watchtower (or any cult) thusly - (rated 1-10, TEN being the most effective in removing the "demons" (implanted false ideas and concepts) in their head:
reading a good "life story" (personal experiences) book - 3
reading a book correcting their false Bible doctrines - 4
talking to an informed and stable former Witness for a few hours - 6
regularly visiting a former-member internet discussion board for a month or more - 7
seeing an exit-counselor or cult expert for at least a total of 8 hours - 9 to 10
spending a couple of days with an ex-JW group - 5
spending a couple of days with a group of mixed ex-cult members and formal lectures by experts - 9
Now these figures are subjective, and in no way apply the same to all, except for 2 of them: exit-counseling and spending time with OTHER kinds of ex-cult members. After 30 years of counseling people out of the Witnesses and other cults, that is my educated conclusion.
Why so little value of books compared to talking to educated outsiders who were (usually) not ex-JWs?
Mainly because people don't join cults because of doctrine, and also because they often can't relate to the very different experiences of others. For instance, a person who was badly treated by the Watchtower or its individual members cannot relate to my experience; where I was never treated badly by them and enjoyed 7 of the 8 years in it! Others can; but the experiences are very wide-ranging and the odds of one person's experience matching yours are relatively small.
Support groups for former Witnesses can work really well if the moderator is sharp and funny and knows how to keep discussions on track. But that is not always the case. Often people are not helped at all by some of these, if contention arises and is not dealt with properly (the exceeding importance of kindness, holding to guidelines, dealing with strong opinions without dissention, egotists, etc.) I did this for years, so I learned a lot. I also saw a lot of groups fail.
Discussion boards, if they have a LARGE membership, and are well-moderated by each other (and the "official" moderators are not often heard from), are helpful because they are actually a large online community which tend to be self-policing (like JWN - http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/). Smaller ones can turn out to be disasters as one or two persons learn how to disrupt the group and cause trouble; causing the group host to become discouraged and quit (happens very often). This can have the effect of turning the ex-member AWAY and maybe even back to the cult!
But being in a group of heterogenous (mixed) ex-members cuts out a lot of know-it-alls and troublemakers, and attendees are fascinated by learning how similar a Moonie's experience is to a Scientologist, or a Jehovah's Witness. This one factor alone can actually END YEARS OF GUILT AND FEAR OF GOD'S DISAPPROVAL OVERNIGHT, like a sudden revelation!
Ideally, an expert in the field of cult counseling is the best; but is made even much better by adding to it the heterogenous meetings as described above. If you can't afford counseling, the cheapest, fastest, and most effective way of dissolving all the cult baggage is attending the heterogenous groups. Unfortunately they are few and far between.
If this is the case, watching Youtube-type stories and films about OTHER cults is your best bet to exorcising the implanted "demons".
A lot of times I read some of the posts on JWN and I say to myself, "If only they talked to a former member of another group, they would be WAY more educated, and many of the discussions and arguments would be completely unnecessary. They tend to live in a bubble at times, like a single Alcoholics Anonymous group." That can be effective, but you never really see outside the box.
Ever since Scientology bankrupted CAN (Cult Awareness Network) years ago, there has not been a group that has taken its same place. ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association) is one of the few good ones I know of, and they do put on seminars. Sure, there are the Christian gatherings (which are also slowly becoming non-existent - how sad about the Blue Mountain Christian Retreat in Pennsylvania burning down a few days ago!), but those not inclined to be preached to may be turned off. For others they may have a very healing effect; but that is about 95% due to the host's competence (not counting "miracles" again).
Going to the Ex-Witnesses for Jesus conventions in Pennsylvania were also great times with Bill and Joan Cetnar, but it is just not the same as CAN was, because it was all too homogenous and predictable to be around. Everyone that has Jesus badges as the only answer to all life's problems can be just a little boring at times. God and the devil don't cause all the world's events, and they don't fix them all either. But each person is different in what they are looking for. If you are looking for a more meaningful religious experience, they can be very healing.
In CAN, we used to have EXPERTS in their field speak - masters like Margaret Singer from Berkeley, Christian magician Danny Korem, Robert J. Lifton, Robert Cialdini, Carol Giambalvo and some very high-level former Scientologists (Sea Org - Monica Pignotti) and also a few very good counselors, Christian and non-Christian, and University lecturers that specialized in psychology. You could meet Ted Patrick, the first notable deprogrammer who decided to go to a "weekend retreat" of a Moonie-type group where such tremendous physical and psychological pressure was put on him that he had to get out, or he knew he would end up becoming one of them; the persuasion and confusion became so strong. He went to get a kid out, and almost ended up a cult member himself!
His experience and those of Danny Korem's magic tricks clearly showed that ANYONE can be at least temporarily coerced or brainwashed into a cult. I laugh at those who say it could never happen to them.They think they have too strong of a mental constitution, without realizing that the goal of the group is first of all to DESTROY your constitution, and put another in its place - an EMOTIONAL and EXPERIENTIAL framework instead. And the leaders have FAR more experience than you in coercion and seduction.
These were the Jonestown years, the Charlie Manson years, the Children of God years. Former Hare Krishnas, Moonies (like Steve) and survivors of small Bible-based churches gone bad due to egotistical pastors or sick minds. You had ex-Elizabeth Claire Prophet followers, who built bomb shelters in Montana and stocked weapons back then. And that mentality still exists today in many groups in the U.S. alone.
No one to my rememberance at CAN thought of Witnesses as a cult when I started attending, including Steven Hassan (which was why he didn't mention Witnesses in his first book "Combatting Cult Mind Control," and later gave me credit for what I taught him about them in his second book, "Releasing the Bonds", and THAT WAS WHY I WROTE MY BOOK, to apply Robert J. Lifton's study to the Witnesses, because no one else had. My "Understanding Cult Mind Control Among Jehovah's Witnesses" was written really as an extension of Steve's book, applied to us ex-Witnesses.
Steve and I did several interventions on JWs together (as well as other Bible-based groups). I consider him one of the greatest mentors of my life; one of seven mentioned on the back cover of the latest Free Minds Journal.
Steve took time to visit with Tory Christman (my favorite ex-Scientologist, my counterpart from that cult, 30 years going) and did a two-part interview with her as you see HERE and HERE. Tory is very funny, sweet and a lot of fun. I have been to her ex-Sci meetings at her house in L.A. as well.
Face-to-face contact is the best; get to know people who have all kinds of experiences, and your world will get larger and larger. It becomes the REAL "flu shot" against ever joining any type of cult again.
Randy Watters - freeminds.org
article: http://www.freeminds.org/blogs/from-the-desk-of-randy/what-you-don-t-know-won-t-heal-you.html