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.