Alexandra Stein has identified a remarkable thing about cults and abusive relationships:
They destabilize us, we crave safety, and because we have been led to drop outside friendships and distrust our own thoughts and emotions, the only source of safety we can imagine is the source of our disorientation and fear -- the abusive person or abusive cult.
We run toward and cling to the same entity that is destabilizing us.
Stein lists 5 characteristics of an authoritarian group.
1) The first of these characteristics is that the leader is both charismatic and authoritarian. Without charisma, the leader would be unable to draw people to him or herself.
What distinguishes a charismatic cult leader (or abusive single predator) from a charismatic person delighting us at a party is -- the cult leader or abusive partner is after CONTROL. You are not a person, you are an action figure for them, like Barbie, Ken or GI Joe.
2.) Cults and abusive relationships are
isolating. The US Marine Corps does not train you to despise, fear and avoid your family and outside friends; Cults and abusive partners do! The abusive leader or partner keeps you off balance.
Isolation goes deeper than this.
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"People in totalist organisations are pressed so tightly together that their individuality is erased – as are any trusting interactions among them. Everyone is a ‘friend’ but true friendship is suppressed as a diversion from, and a threat to, attachment to the cause, the leader and the group. In fact, far from finding true comradeship or companionship, followers face a triple isolation: from the outside world, from each other within the closed system, and from their own internal dialogue, where clear thinking about the group might arise."
3)
The third element of totalism is the total ideology, or, as Newman called it: ‘A historical totality that has no beginning, middle or end’. The exclusive belief system is controlled entirely by the leader.
4) Fear. For a totalist system to wield complete control, the leader must tap fear – this is the fourth element of totalism. The process of brainwashing that totalist systems engage in is one of psychological, coercive manipulation where the leader or group alternates terror with ‘love’..."
5)creation of deployable followers is the fifth characteristic of such groups. Marina, also recruited to the Tendency through therapy, rose to become a favoured member, working full-time on the group’s National Alliance paper, along with other tasks. She neglected her two children all while witnessing money laundering, fraud and other families being pulled apart. She was so loyal, she said: ‘I remember feeling like I would take a bullet for Fred.’
(Corboy note: friendship with such persons can lead you into the clutches of a predatory guru or group. These people may be totally unaware that they are routing new recruits towards their abusive leader. A friend who has become a deployable follower in a cult may recommend a therapist or bodyworker or merely talk about such a person in glowing terms. If you select that therapist or consult that bodyworker, you yourself may be recruited. It happened to me.)Quoted from a longer essay by Alexandra Stein
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People in totalist organisations are pressed so tightly together that their individuality is erased – as are any trusting interactions among them. Everyone is a ‘friend’ but true friendship is suppressed as a diversion from, and a threat to, attachment to the cause, the leader and the group. In fact, far from finding true comradeship or companionship, followers face a triple isolation: from the outside world, from each other within the closed system, and from their own internal dialogue, where clear thinking about the group might arise.
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aeon.co]
More food for thought from this same essay:
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For a totalist system to wield complete control, the leader must tap fear – this is the fourth element of totalism. The process of brainwashing that totalist systems engage in is one of psychological, coercive manipulation where the leader or group alternates terror with ‘love’. Bowlby said that when we are frightened, we don’t simply run away from the fear, but run to a safe haven, ‘to someone…’ – and that someone is usually a person to whom we feel attached. But when the supposed safe haven is also the source of the fear, then running to that person is a failing strategy, causing the frightened person to freeze, trapped between approach and avoidance.
Mary Main, the renowned attachment researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, called this type of fear-based relationship ‘disorganised attachment’. This has a two-fold result: a confused emotional bonding to the source of fear in a failed attempt to seek comfort, and a cognitive dissociation, that is, the inability to think about one’s feelings. Fear or stress without escape – ‘fright without solution’, as attachment researchers refer to it – is a traumatic state that derails a person’s ability to think logically and clearly about the situation and therefore to take action to resolve it. Further, never achieving safety from the threat, they will keep returning to the relationship trying to gain that safety. Having disabled logical thinking about the traumatic relationship, the leader can then introduce even more of the fictitious ideology to explain away and redirect the follower’s terror.
It’s a positive feedback loop with a biochemical element: physiologically, the victim is engaged in an effort to manage their cortisol or anxiety levels by seeking proximity to a safe haven, but never succeeding in attaining adequate comfort. It is for this reason that we can predict that cultic systems will attempt to interfere with and control any alternative attachment relationships a person might have. To fail to do so would allow the follower to find a safe haven elsewhere and potentially escape the emotional and cognitive control of the group
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Different groups have different fear-arousing themes and methods: the oncoming apocalypse, fear of outsiders, fear of punishment, and exhaustion, among many other types of threatening strategies. But the leader is always the sole saviour, the one who will lead them away from (or through) the fear they are experiencing to a wonderful safety, to paradise, to a perfect, transformed world.
Isolating and fear-driven systems led by authoritarian figures yield deployable followers who override their own survival needs and autonomy in the service of the group. This creation of deployable followers is the fifth characteristic of such groups.