Yasmin:

"New Age" is not necessarily a religion. Mr. Hassan is indeed Jewish. He belongs to a nontraditional Jewish synagogue that practices Kaballah and that is not new age, but people of various religions and even agnostics can have new age belief systems and practice new age therapies such as NLP. There are even atheists who practice NLP. It has nothing to do with religion.

As for your condescending remark: "I think our conversation would be a little easier if you actually listened to what I say, instead of appearing to replay arguments you have previously had with other people. " -- that's very funny because I was having exactly the same thought about you! You do not seem to be understanding what I am saying and you keep repeating your misunderstandings over and over. Sorry if my frustration about this is coming out, but after awhile I do tend to lose patience when my words keep getting distorted.

You wrote: "Yes ,logically if the development of rapport ( or therapeutic alliance) is more important than the theoretical approach, then that applies to Mr Hassan too. ( That in fact was part of my point..) "

That has nothing to do with logic and I have not conceded that point. That is a question for research to determine and there are many, many studies that have showed specific treatments/theorie for specific conditions come out far superior to other treatments and other theories. For example the CBT/exposure based treatments are by far and away superior to psychoanalytic/psychodynamic and other treatments for phobias. There is a very large body of research that shows this is the case without question. There are also treatments for PTSD that have been shown to be superior to others and there are other conditions such as OCD for which this is the case. This has nothing to do with "rapport" (I notice you use the NLP jargon here -- the term used in the more mainstream community is therapeutic relationship).

That being said, this is not the case for coercive persuasion. Actually, I would challenge the notion that therapy is even needed in most cases. Contrary to Steve Hassan's self-serving assertions, there are many, many people leading very happy and fulfilling lives who left cults and had no therapy whatsoever. They recovered from the experience on their own. Being taken in by a cult is not a mental illness. Human beings can be tricked and when we get educated about how this could have happened, we tend to stop blaming ourselves and most of us can get on with our lives.

As for exit counseling getting people out of cults, at this point, there is really not reason to believe that mental health professionals can do a better job of it than someone who is not a mental health professional, such as Rick Ross who has successfully gotten thousands of people out of cults, just as many other non-mental health professionals have. There is no evidence that Steve Hassan injecting his counseling approach with his Masters level license does a better job of this.

Interestingly, the ones who seem to have the most trouble years after the cult experience are the ones who have been in years and years of therapy with self-proclaimed "cult experts", going from recovery workshop to recovery workshop, "cult expert" to "cult expert" to no avail, it seems and this is sad because these people are clearly not being helped, but they seem to be in the minority. We really don't know whether it is because the "cult expert" made things worse for them by making them feel as if they needed intensive therapy to get over what are for most people transitory symptoms that go away in a few months on their own or whether these people were more sensitive than others and truly did succumb to a condition for which they needed professional help. At this point, we don't know whether post cult "therapy" from experts will help such people in the minority who do not recover from the cult experience on their own or whether they do more harm than good. By the way, there is a great deal of research that shows that most people who experience any trauma do not develop PTSD and recover on their own. Only about 20% do not and need to get therapy. Rates vary depending on type of trauma but even for rape, which has the highest percentage, it is 50%. That means half of the people experiencing even the worst type of trauma do recover on their own. For people who do need therapy, though, there are well supported therapies for PTSD that are shown to be superior to other therapies. There are many reviews that have shown this.

As for bonafide therapies, they mean ones that have theories that are more widely accepted, not necessarily scientific and that is why many of us are so skeptical of this whole approach, but one important thing to realize is that they did not use the more unconventional fringe approaches. There are also many problems with the methods used in such studies -- this is not just one study, it is what is called a meta-analysis, where the results of many studies are combined by statistical methods and there have been some problems with the ones that claim relationship is the most important factor.

As for Hassan's claims, have another look at his website. He does not simply state that his approach is better than one who is not trained as a therapist (although that too, which you seem to accept, is actually highly questionable when it comes to exit counseling and no -- it is not widely agreed upon at all, as I explained in my paragraphs above). However, Hassan goes further than this. He states that his approach is better than that of other therapists who are not cult experts and he even offers a service where other trained licensed mental health professionals can pay him for supervision (see his Help for Ex-Members section). There is, however, no good evidence that Steve Hassan can help people better than anyone else with his NLP derived techniques and other methods, expert or not. It could well be that a well trained cognitive behavioral exposure therapist who is not necessarily a cult expert could help someone who had PTSD from a cult experience. Also, his claim that most ex-cult members need specialized help to recover has no support whatsoever, as many can recover and happily get on with their lives without the help of a mental health professional. This is part of a trend in the mental health profession that has recently been sharply criticized -- the tendency to "medicalize" and pathologize human suffering when in the past, most people have coped with and recovered from without such "professional" help and in some cases, the professionals can make things worse.

As for exit counseling, Hassan has a long history of making claims that his approach is better than others. Way back in 1992, I can recall being in a meeting of exit counselors where he created quite a bit of contention with his claims and really angered some of the others in the room. Rick Ross was also present at that meeting and called Hassan out on a paper he was distributing, claiming his approach was superior to others. In his 1988 book promo, he declared himself to be America's Leading Exit Counselor and in his current book promo, we can see he is saying that his strategic interaction approach is superior to exit counseling. This has been going on for years and he needs to be called out on this because there is no evidence of his superiority to anyone else.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2012 08:25PM by MonicaPignotti.

No I did not mean to imply that Mr. Hassan is into New Age, or anything along those lines.
My comment was about "New Agers" who use "NLP" or more accurately, those who cloak themselves as New Agers, but in fact use NLP persuasion tech to extract large sums of money from people, under the guise of "coaching" "healing" "blah blah". There are literally hundreds of them.
Anyone with knowledge of NLP should in fact being exposing the countless hucksters who use NLP tech, and conversational hypnosis tech to manipulate people. (but noone does, as they fear destroying their own business, or just don't care??)
I will check out Hassan's book, and see what he is doing.

Fees should be available with a simple call to the office.
How much?

Sadly, many people out to get rich, their answer to "how much" is similar to P Diddy's joke in a movie about how much it costs to produce a record...
How much does it cost?
How much you got?
;-)

Quote
yasmin
Hi All, interesting discussion.

Anticult; I agree that fee schedules should be readily available. I did a quick run around the web. Dr Mann has a couple of sites on the first two pages googling her name which provide an office contact number but don't provide a fee schedule. I checked Mr Hassans website; he apparently has another practitioner working with him: fees for her or the educational consultant are listed as an initial discount rate of $100 for an hour with Mr Hassan charging the same amount for 40 minutes. Dr Pignotti does not appear to do any therapeutic work as far as I can tell. I'm guessing that both Dr Mann and Mr Hassan provide further information regarding additional fees ( for Mr Hassan) and intial fees (for Dr Mann) when they are contacted. Dr Mann does mention that she accepts some insurance. (Many insurance companies prefer to only compensate PHD's).
What should the going rate be for cult type interventions; I am not sure.

Re Mr Hassan's religion; his website says he is Jewish, not New Age. Not sure if you were actually suggesting he had New Age beliefs or not.

Dr Pignotti,
You appear to be hinting that my use of the word"rapport" indicates I am an NLP practioner? Nope.

You might note also my previous link to a study which suggests that eye movements don't seem to indicate what NLP practioners believe they do.
It seems unlikely that an NLP practioner would do that.
To quote Freud; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar :)

By the way, I also used the term "therapeutic alliance". Perhaps you would prefer that I continued to use that term?

Again, please post the study or study analysis you are referring to.

We do however agree that different therapeutic modalities work better for different issues.

It is interesting that you identify yourself as having a psychology PHD, yet appear to have chosen not to practice in the field ( please correct me here if this is wrong)
and seem to be pretty ambivalent about whether psychology is helpful at all.

Given the lack of studies around the area of cults/coercive influence, I am assuming that you own opinions on the ineffectiveness of therapy are based on anecdotes, rather than on scientific studies?

By the way, I will definitely concede that in the area of for example recovered memories at least one study has been done that suggested that therapy to recover memories was worsening the patients condition rather than helping it. (Again, if you are interested in reading the actual study let me know and I will try to find it.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2012 12:02AM by yasmin.

Its a very good point that coming out of a cult is not a mental illness...which makes sense.


That is correct about the CBT/exposure, they have been shown to actually work for many people, in real studies. But as far as I know, there has been no studies of application to those coming out of cults at all.
And below that are some excellent points that hopefully many people will read.

What is the best approach to getting out of a cult, or group along those lines?
The only way to really find out, one would think, would be for some STUDIES to be done, where people in cults are assigned to a controlled study, to see if any methods work better than others.
As in, a random sample go to CBT, some are on a waiting list as a control, others do exit counselling, etc.
Only then can some data emerge.
Before that, its just Testimonials and anecdotes [www.skepdic.com] and salesmanship.

And people need to be very very cautious about "PTSD" treatments with unlicensed and untrained people in general. PTSD can lead to a desperate situation very fast, and needs a serious support system. Go to the professionals, which are not easy to find of course.

Look at Byron Katie, she targets "PTSD" sufferers in her sales process, and makes a fortune, running NLP style conversational hypnosis on people.

Byron Katie,PTSD trauma, "accept any and all risks of injury or death" [forum.culteducation.com]

Quote
MonicaPignotti
That is a question for research to determine and there are many, many studies that have showed specific treatments/theorie for specific conditions come out far superior to other treatments and other theories. For example the CBT/exposure based treatments are by far and away superior to psychoanalytic/psychodynamic and other treatments for phobias. There is a very large body of research that shows this is the case without question. There are also treatments for PTSD that have been shown to be superior to others and there are other conditions such as OCD for which this is the case. This has nothing to do with "rapport" (I notice you use the NLP jargon here -- the term used in the more mainstream community is therapeutic relationship).

That being said, this is not the case for coercive persuasion. Actually, I would challenge the notion that therapy is even needed in most cases. Contrary to Steve Hassan's self-serving assertions, there are many, many people leading very happy and fulfilling lives who left cults and had no therapy whatsoever. They recovered from the experience on their own. Being taken in by a cult is not a mental illness. Human beings can be tricked and when we get educated about how this could have happened, we tend to stop blaming ourselves and most of us can get on with our lives.

As for exit counseling getting people out of cults, at this point, there is really not reason to believe that mental health professionals can do a better job of it than someone who is not a mental health professional, such as Rick Ross who has successfully gotten thousands of people out of cults, just as many other non-mental health professionals have. There is no evidence that Steve Hassan injecting his counseling approach with his Masters level license does a better job of this.

Interestingly, the ones who seem to have the most trouble years after the cult experience are the ones who have been in years and years of therapy with self-proclaimed "cult experts", going from recovery workshop to recovery workshop, "cult expert" to "cult expert" to no avail, it seems and this is sad because these people are clearly not being helped, but they seem to be in the minority. We really don't know whether it is because the "cult expert" made things worse for them by making them feel as if they needed intensive therapy to get over what are for most people transitory symptoms that go away in a few months on their own or whether these people were more sensitive than others and truly did succumb to a condition for which they needed professional help. At this point, we don't know whether post cult "therapy" from experts will help such people in the minority who do not recover from the cult experience on their own or whether they do more harm than good. By the way, there is a great deal of research that shows that most people who experience any trauma do not develop PTSD and recover on their own. Only about 20% do not and need to get therapy. Rates vary depending on type of trauma but even for rape, which has the highest percentage, it is 50%. That means half of the people experiencing even the worst type of trauma do recover on their own. For people who do need therapy, though, there are well supported therapies for PTSD that are shown to be superior to other therapies. There are many reviews that have shown this.

As for bonafide therapies, they mean ones that have theories that are more widely accepted, not necessarily scientific and that is why many of us are so skeptical of this whole approach, but one important thing to realize is that they did not use the more unconventional fringe approaches. There are also many problems with the methods used in such studies -- this is not just one study, it is what is called a meta-analysis, where the results of many studies are combined by statistical methods and there have been some problems with the ones that claim relationship is the most important factor.

As for Hassan's claims, have another look at his website. He does not simply state that his approach is better than one who is not trained as a therapist (although that too, which you seem to accept, is actually highly questionable when it comes to exit counseling and no -- it is not widely agreed upon at all, as I explained in my paragraphs above). However, Hassan goes further than this. He states that his approach is better than that of other therapists who are not cult experts and he even offers a service where other trained licensed mental health professionals can pay him for supervision (see his Help for Ex-Members section). There is, however, no good evidence that Steve Hassan can help people better than anyone else with his NLP derived techniques and other methods, expert or not. It could well be that a well trained cognitive behavioral exposure therapist who is not necessarily a cult expert could help someone who had PTSD from a cult experience. Also, his claim that most ex-cult members need specialized help to recover has no support whatsoever, as many can recover and happily get on with their lives without the help of a mental health professional. This is part of a trend in the mental health profession that has recently been sharply criticized -- the tendency to "medicalize" and pathologize human suffering when in the past, most people have coped with and recovered from without such "professional" help and in some cases, the professionals can make things worse.

As for exit counseling, Hassan has a long history of making claims that his approach is better than others. Way back in 1992, I can recall being in a meeting of exit counselors where he created quite a bit of contention with his claims and really angered some of the others in the room. Rick Ross was also present at that meeting and called Hassan out on a paper he was distributing, claiming his approach was superior to others. In his 1988 book promo, he declared himself to be America's Leading Exit Counselor and in his current book promo, we can see he is saying that his strategic interaction approach is superior to exit counseling. This has been going on for years and he needs to be called out on this because there is no evidence of his superiority to anyone else.

Top notch book to consult is Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology by Lilienfeld, Lynn and Lohr, published almost a decade ago.

New articles should be available to supplement their wise counsel. They reviewed the literature on one much touted therapy, EMDR.

[www.google.com]

Hi all,
Corboy; interesting link, thank you.
Dr Pignotti;
to start the ball rolling on therapeutic relationships studies..
"Research summary on the therapeutic relationship and psychotherapy outcomes" Lambert, Micheal et al, (2001)
(Yes, I'm lazy and did not cite it properly, but that should be enough for you to find it)
From the abstract;
"Decades of research indicate the provision of therapy is an interpersonal process in which a main curative component is the nature of the therapeutic relationship"

Anticult,

Yes it would be interesting to read your analysis of Mr Hassans book.( Gotta get that book and read it sometime soon..) To be fair though, you might also want to compare his approach to modalities such as family systems and the work of Virginia Satir; NLP did co opt some "mainstream" therapeutic techniques.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2012 01:22AM by yasmin.

NLP did copy (model) some aspects of Satir. But I don't think that is the bone of contention.
Its a lot of the other stuff that is going on.
NLP runs like an LGAT seminar, where you have "content" which is different from the process they are putting you through at the same time.
So the NLPer can be talking about Satir, but at the same time screwing with your mind on a completely different level. Yes they do that, and they deny doing it. But that is what you learn when you train in NLP.
Every advanced NLPer is constantly screwing with your mind, they really are.
Its not even "psychology", NLP operates like an LGAT seminar.

NLP has such a bad reputation now, many of them never use the word NLP anymore, and just call it something else...like a business term, or new age, or spiritual, or whatever.


Its also true that Therapeutic Relationship is curative in itself, so that has to be factored into studies.

Also, in cult studies, one would have to test how well self-help works, like people posting on message boards and getting out of the cult themselves?

I think many academics avoid cult studies, as they don't want to be attacked, sued, hounded like Magaret Singer. Most academics like their house, and don't want to lose it defending themselves in court with a bogus SLAPP suit from some group like Landmark or Scientology.
Its a very serious problem, and that is why those groups/cults attack any critics, then there are less critics willing to stand up to them.

So we'll see if Mr Hassan is just using generic "NLP" like Swish patterns, which are just harmless Active Imagination work.
Or if he gets deeper into NLP "belief reprogramming" which is not harmless.
Or if he is using the NLP conversational hypnosis language and persuasion patterns, which is completely different as well.

I will able to see exactly what he is doing, or not doing in his book, in like 5 seconds.

There is a sample of the book here.


ebook sample of "Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs" by Steven Hassan
[epub-ebooks.net]

Quote
yasmin
Hi all,
Corboy; interesting link, thank you.
Dr Pignotti;
to start the ball rolling on therapeutic relationships studies..
"Research summary on the therapeutic relationship and psychotherapy outcomes" Lambert, Micheal et al, (2001)
(Yes, I'm lazy and did not cite it properly, but that should be enough for you to find it)
From the abstract;
"Decades of research indicate the provision of therapy is an interpersonal process in which a main curative component is the nature of the therapeutic relationship"

Again, this is not news to me. I am very well aware of these studies and grossly overstated and unwarranted claims including the one you cite and I have already responded regarding the problems with the claims made by those proponents of "therapeutic relationship" being primary. Again, it is deeply flawed and the consensus among the more scientifically minded psychologists is that this claim is not valid because it is based on highly problematic and flawed meta-analyses. What these authors state as if it is uncontroversial, is far from it and has been seriously challenged.

This has been nicknamed by psychologists as the DoDo Bird Verdict, the view that all must have prizes (from Alice in Wonderland). However, decades of research that properly compares specific therapies for specific conditions demonstrates otherwise, that there are very major differences between specific approaches for specific types of problems. Here is a review that explains some of the problems with this claim:

[www.srmhp.org]

But as I said, whether correct or not, none of this lets mental health professionals off the hook if they fail to provide clients with informed consent and offer them novel unsupported therapies and do not let their clients know of well supported therapies if they exist. Even if there aren't any, the therapist has the duty to inform the client that the treatment is experimental. After the recovered memory and DID fiasco in the 1990s that resulted in therapists who harmed clients by using interventions that lacked any scientific support whatsoever and multi million dollar judgments were rendered against the therapists, some of whom lost their licenses, at least some people have woken up and learned the lesson about the harm that can be done in the name of therapy.

And again, this really is irrelevant to Hassan because he claims superiority to others. If it really was just the relationship, people could go to any therapist with good relationship skills and it would not matter. The whole issue is irrelevant to this thread.

Quote
yasmin
Dr Pignotti,
You appear to be hinting that my use of the word"rapport" indicates I am an NLP practioner? Nope.

You might note also my previous link to a study which suggests that eye movements don't seem to indicate what NLP practioners believe they do.
It seems unlikely that an NLP practioner would do that.
To quote Freud; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar :)

By the way, I also used the term "therapeutic alliance". Perhaps you would prefer that I continued to use that term?

Again, please post the study or study analysis you are referring to.

We do however agree that different therapeutic modalities work better for different issues.

It is interesting that you identify yourself as having a psychology PHD, yet appear to have chosen not to practice in the field ( please correct me here if this is wrong)
and seem to be pretty ambivalent about whether psychology is helpful at all.

Given the lack of studies around the area of cults/coercive influence, I am assuming that you own opinions on the ineffectiveness of therapy are based on anecdotes, rather than on scientific studies?

By the way, I will definitely concede that in the area of for example recovered memories at least one study has been done that suggested that therapy to recover memories was worsening the patients condition rather than helping it. (Again, if you are interested in reading the actual study let me know and I will try to find it.)

Nope. I never said nor meant to hint that you are an NLP practitioner, only that you appear to have picked up their jargon, perhaps indirectly, since Hassan uses it frequently.

No, I never identified myself as having a PhD in Psychology. You are making many unwarranted assumptions. Do you have me confused with Cathleen Mann? I am not Cathleen Mann. My PhD is in Social Work, but regardless of what a person's PhD is in, are you aware that it is very common for PhDs in Psychology and Social Work do not practice clinically and it has nothing to do with what they think of clinical practice? Many hold faculty or research positions, although I did practice at the MSW level before I got my PhD.

No need to cite the recovered memory literature. I am already very well familiar with it.

I posted a link to a critique of the DoDo Bird Verdict you appear to be giving so much credence to, showing how flawed it is, on my other response. But again, you are really veering off the topic of this thread, which has nothing to do with the therapeutic relationship and everything to do with the claims Steven Hassan has made about the superiority of his approach. I am through discussing the DoDo Bird Verdict with you because it is irrelevant and side tracks from the issues at hand.

I'm not sure what you mean re "the ineffectiveness of therapy". I never made such a sweeping generalization. What I did was point out that there are therapies that have been shown to do harm. Read Scott Lilienfeld's review of Therapies that Do Harm. It is not anecdotal. There are actual studies where it was ethical to do them. In some cases, however, the therapies in question did so much damage that was documented in a court of law, that it would be unethical to research them -- no ethics committee would approve them. Coercive restraint therapy that has caused children to smother to death is an example of a therapy that need not be tested to know it is harmful. Knowledge of human physiology is enough. This has nothing to do with anecdotes. Proponents of these bogus therapies, try to reverse the burden of proof and accuse critics of being anecdotal, as you are now doing but the fact is that the person doing the therapy has the BURDEN OF PROOF to demonstrate that their practices are SAFE AND EFFECTIVE.

You also are missing the larger point, which is BURDEN OF PROOF. The burden of proof is on the people making claims about a particular therapy to show it is effective, not on critics. If there is a lack of evidence, it is dangerous, irresponsible and unethical for a practitioner to be making claims about it. You are attempting to reverse the burden of proof, which by the way is one of Lilienfeld's hallmark indicators of pseudoscience.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2012 03:21AM by MonicaPignotti.