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IGM is a defensive strategy by which a member who has not (or believes they have not) directly experienced abuse or institutional betrayal within the group deflects stories of abuse within the group by immediately self-referring, saying things like: “I don’t know about other’s experience; I find/found the teacher/teachings to be profoundly helpful in my life.” The statement is usually couched within an unwillingness to act on behalf on victims or mitigate future harm.

In my own two cult experiences, I adopted the defence of IGM to varying degrees, and I remember many others who did as well. In the circle of people I’m thinking of, none of us (that I’m aware of) had prior experience with therapy*. We had all come from family and social cultures in which that just wasn’t part of the wellness toolbox. When we gravitated towards the techniques of meditation and yoga offered by the groups, we found that they could have powerful self-regulatory effects we had never felt before, and we were hooked.

*(Corboy note: It is therapy only when the therapist places your welfare first and foremost, and when the therapist is not protective of or a disciple of the
same Teacher, Baba, Sheikh, Muqaddam, Master, Pir or Murshid of the lodge that is harming you.)

I believe that many of us were under the illusion that the meditative/yogic technique was the key to our new-found capacity for self-regulation. I don’t think we understood that we’d been love-bombed, or acquired a new family / safe haven in one fell blissful swoop. We didn’t understand that our internal changes were as much relational as they were intra-personal. The messaging was always singular and privatized: “You can go within, you can find x, you can choose y, you can be responsible.” One was never encouraged to really examine who was saying this to you, or why, or what they might want.

A paradox formed part of the group’s deception: you were told you were entirely self-responsible, and yet the benefits you experienced were mostly if not entirely coming from the group dynamic. You were emotionally isolated within a group somatic process that made itself invisible.

My own, and I believe others’, prior training in self-responsibility (or lack of experience with therapy) gave us the impression that we were in a place in which we had to resolve all conflicts or grievances internally. In a cult you can’t ask people for help and expect transparency or existential honesty. It’s palpable, whether you cognize it or not, that anyone with standing in the community who you would go to for help will reframe your appeal in relation to some deeper way in which you must surrender to the teaching or the leadership. In other words: any counselling is highly motivated and manipulative. It’s designed to protect the dynamic by making it manageable. Nobody will suggest that you leave, when leaving might be the only healthy thing to do, as hard as it would be.

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One of the things that he talked about was the way Charlie got control over everybody by getting people to agree that he was something spectacular, and agree to his other self-serving ideas. He said that agreements are much more powerful than people realize they are, and that implied agreements are more powerful than overt agreements. It was those implied agreements that were making it very difficult for us to break away from him.

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The group member whose social and financial status is the product of the group’s hierarchy of harm will resist seeing that just as strongly as any consumer will resist seeing the harm of consumerism. If you point out that their relative comfort or safety in the group is dependent on any kind of “I-Got-Mine-ism“, you’ll face the same blowback that POC activists face when calling out white privilege, or women face when calling out male privilege. At the root here may be some deep strain of fragility that simply cannot turn the guilt of having benefited from the suffering of others into an active justice plan.

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Dominance hierarchies exist within high-demand groups just as they do outside of them, so not everyone suffers the same. However, everyone recruited into a high-demand group has been deceived in one way or another. They have had their time, energy, and emotional faculties hijacked for a purpose that is not their own, and which is rarely clear to them.

Those who bear the brunt of the abuse in a high-demand group — women, children the poor, the super-earnest and altruistic — emerge with clear disabilities, up to and including CPTSD. But — absent real sociopathy — even those who enjoyed a certain amount of power within the group will carry with them guilt, moral injury, and the sensation of sunken costs. Criticism or resistance to the group may make these wounds sting and provoke intense defensive responses related to any sense of responsibility for the abuse they may carry.

They are caught in a bind: they are not responsible for having been deceived, and yet they are responsible for the power that deception allowed them to have over others. It is far easier to dismiss critical engagement or vilify whistleblowers than it is to engage in this deep moral complexity.

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Everything the person feels about the leader they may feel about their fellow members. However, the web is intricate and the textures are subtle. If they’ve been in the group for years they have spent a long time finding the right niche of safety-that-isn’t-quite-safety. They have friends who are not primarily friends and family members who are not primarily family members: in both cases allegiance to the group trumps all.

As an outsider to that group, you are making an intervention in the voice of someone the group already vilifies. Of course you cannot understand them, of course you are out to destroy their vision. The number of people who have accused me to trying or wanting to destroy their communities is astonishing, until I realized that that defence is proof of the fragile insularity of the group.

The paradox of being in a group like this is that you are isolated within it.

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This is brilliant. I would add a further and very unpleasant dimension. That some of the people abusing others in high demand groups had already centred on sex offending in their lives, or on other forms of abuse or sadism which they fed on. These people have sensed the lack of respect and boundaries in high demand groups and purposefully embedded themselves so they could continue to offend, even more easily than before. So whistleblowers are directly threatening to such offenders, who will fight tooth and nail to destroy the whistleblower so as not to be exposed, or lose their hunting ground. This is not restricted to the highest leaders, and these types can even become very threatening and violent. Another reason whistleblowers and survivors are incredibly brave people.

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[forum.culteducation.com]

Date: December 31, 2016 07:37AM

If you are invited to be a Sufi, look and examine the size of the palace
built by each successive guru.

The larger the square footage of that palace, the more minions are needed
to scrape off the bird shit.

Ask if you've been invited to join because all they wanted was another minion.

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https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?5,4111,page=1032

Date: December 02, 2019 06:35AM

Onion and JJJ, yes, my memories are blurring together. There was no balcony during the seventies and the elevator was from the nineties.

As for the alternate entrance/exit, it was probably there so that G&M could enter and exit without rubbing shoulders with or feeling obligated to speak with the peons who paid for everything and did the work. They behaved very much as royalty. No dish room experience, rosebush duty, bathroom or laundry shifts for them.

Their only purpose was to keep everyone desperate for a crumb of attention while beating them up with "the Word". (And raking in and spending the dough.)

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They all describe the same manipulation tactics :
being flattered in the beggining, making them feel understood but then subtle ways to scare about leaving him, to demand total and unconditional devotion to him, to cut ties with everything else, to lose all self-autonomy and trust in self.

He is using : fear, guilt and shame. These are the main tools of Shunyamurti to play with the threads of his puppet followers using his very deep psychological understanding.

If you have guilt, fear or shame issues, and if you are potentially useful for his vision, he will use these to try to make a puppet slave out of you to serve his vision without self autonomy, freedom while believing that you are understanding yourself better and growing spiritually.

It actually might be true that you start understanding yourself better from all the psycho work that you do, but it remains a mental understanding that is not diving deep in the sensations and energies behind the traumas. Therefore the progress remains at the intellectual level and he maintains the control over your wounds and shadows.

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Maybe Kundalini Yoga Works through Trauma Responses
Alexandra Stein has pioneered the application of attachment theory to cult dynamics. Briefly put: she shows that the main task of the high-demand group is to re-wire the recruit’s attachment patterning to the disorganized end of the spectrum, where they are in an acute state of arousal amidst the contradiction of needing to devote themselves to the person who is abusing them.

One of the most personally resonant implications of this for me is Stein’s description of how surrendering to the tension of this conflict can seem to provide deep relief, even euphoria. I experienced this very strongly in both of the cults I was recruited into.

Quoting from Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, p. 38:
The second phase of a trauma response is dissociation: “detachment from an unbearable situation.” As previously described, in this state, both physiological states of hyperarousal and dissociation are activated: internal energy-consuming resources are simultaneously on full alert at the same time as the person is dissociating to try to shut down and conserve these resources. Imagine the toll on the body that this two-fold unresolvable process must take. Eventually, dissociation – freezing and giving up the failed effort to escape – comes to dominate. Along with giving up the struggle to fight against the group and the fear it has generated, the dissociated follower comes to accept the group as the safe haven and thus forms a trauma bond. This moment of submission, of giving up the struggle, can be experienced as a moment of great relief, and even happiness, or a spiritual awakening.

What little I know of KY/3H0 experience is that there is a strong emphasis upon altered and/or transcendent states. From my personal experience and research on other yoga groups, I know that the line between a “radiant fawning” response and a truly empowering experience can be hard to find. Worse, that line can be manipulated by the group or its leader, by suggesting to the member that their stress response is actually a sign of awakening. Groups in which spiritual practice is particularly intense, demanding, or life-pervading (Ashtanga Yoga, Sivananda Yoga, etc.), are hot spots for this conflation.

So as KY practitioners consider the conundrum of how effective the practices have been vs the picture that’s emerging of Bhajan and his lieutenants and enablers, I would encourage gentle reflection on the question of “Why were the practices efficient? Why did this work?” Because it’s possible that the euphoria and bliss, in some cases, was not only part of the abuse, but an essential mechanism for deepening trauma bonds within the group.