Leaving
Most people who join eventually leave, and the research on what actually helps is unglamorous: not rescue, not confrontation, but time, contact kept open, and support afterwards. The field moved from forcible deprogramming to voluntary exit counselling because the forcible version was both a crime and less effective. This facet is the way out, and the long work that follows it.
Part of Cults
7 moments in this segment.
- - Poster for a public evening on Scientology. A 1995 announcement poster for a public meeting in Ottersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, at which a former Scientologist spoke about the organisation. Talks by ex-members, staged by party youth wings, carried much of the German debate in the 1990s.
- - Two founding critics meet in Toronto. Gerry Armstrong and Nan McLean, among the earliest people to speak publicly against Scientology in Canada, at lunch in Toronto in September 2010. Former members who go on the record are the origin of most independent information about closed organisations.
- - Memorial service in Oakland, 2011. A memorial service at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland on 29 May 2011, when the panels naming everyone who died at Jonestown were dedicated. The memorial was the outcome of years of work by relatives and former members.
- - Jonestown memorial at Evergreen Cemetery, Oakland. The Oakland memorial for those who died at Jonestown in 1978 and whose remains were never claimed, photographed in 2011. Granite panels carrying the names were installed that year after a long campaign by relatives and former members.
- - From abduction to consent. An account of how intervention practice moved from forcible deprogramming, which involved abducting and confining adults, to voluntary exit counselling that the person can end at any point. Anti-cult organisations began distancing themselves from coercive methods in the late 1970s.
- - Clinicians without the training. A discussion of how few social workers and therapists have any training in high-demand group dynamics, and what continuing-education courses for them cover. Most people leave such groups on their own; the difficulty is afterwards.
- - Recovery takes longer than people expect. A conversation between a counsellor and a marriage and family therapist who works in cult recovery, on why reintegration is slow. The evidence supports ordinary interventions, trauma-informed therapy, peer support, housing, documents and qualifications, rather than dramatic rescues.
