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Cult members identify with their leaders, and these identifications supplant previous identifications made with parental figures early in life. Because cult leaders generally are paranoid individuals, they indoctrinate their members into a paranoid vision of the world. (Tobias & Lalich, 1994) That is, cult leaders tend to ascribe the worst motives to the behavior of others. When individuals leave the cult, some may continue to have the paranoid feelings of the cult leader. For others, an awareness exists that their trusting nature prior to the cult made them more vulnerable to cult recruitment. For most former cultists, at a time that their sense of self is quite fragile, this paranoid attitude protects them from being unduly influenced by others.

However, in marital relationships, this paranoia can be destructive. When an individual who has been in a cult starts a relationship with someone with no prior cult involvement, the former cultist might interpret his or her partner’s behavior suspiciously or see negative motives behind the partner’s behavior. When two former cultists are in a relationship, this situation intensifies.

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The concept of transference operates in most important relationships, but it is particularly relevant to the interaction of couples. Freud originally defined the transference as containing “new editions . . . [that] replace some earlier person by the person of the physician [in the analytic relationship].” (Freud, 1905a, p. 116) This dynamic has been expanded and defined in the APA’s book of psychoanalytic terms and concepts as meaning “the displacement of patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behavior, originally experienced in relation to significant figures during childhood, onto a person involved in a current interpersonal relationship.” (Moore & Fine, 1990, p. 196)

Those working with couples become aware that, at times, each partner views the other as a significant figure from early life, most typically a parental figure. However, in working with those who have left a cult situation, therapists observe that partners often begin to view each other in the way they regarded the cult leader. This is particularly true for those who have spent many years in cults.

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Many former cultists also rely on the defense of projection. Freud first defined projection as a defense in which “an internal perception is suppressed . . . and enters consciousness in the form of an external perception.” (Freud, 1911b, p. 66) Projection more recently has been defined as “a mental process whereby a painful impulse or idea is attributed to the external world.” (Moore & Fine, 1990, p. 149)

That is, if there is a conflict about certain feelings, those feelings experienced but forbidden often are projected onto the marital partner. The cult leader made members feel as though they were selfish for any expression of self-interest. The leader’s attitude that a cult member should have no self-interest can be projected onto the marital partner. Former cultists may believe that their partners do not want them to have pleasures in life or that their partners will be unwilling to consider their desires. In part, this also is a projection of their own conflicts about the enjoyment of pleasure after the cult. They believe that they want pleasure, but because it was forbidden for so long in the cult, they unconsciously place their discomfort about their desires onto someone else. In effect, they think, “Although I want pleasure, he/she does not want me to be pleased.”