RR Moderator posted some important links on page 875. This one helped me immensely: [
www.culteducation.com]
This is an excerpt of chapter 22 of a book by Robert J. Lifton, M.D. titled: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.
Here are the topics covered:Milieu Control
Mystical Manipulation
The Demand for Purity
The Cult of Confession
The "Sacred Science"
Loading the Language
Doctrine Over Person
The Dispensing of Existence
Here is a quote from the last topic, The Dispensing of Existence:
“The totalist environment - even when it does not resort to physical abuse - thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation. A person can overcome this fear and find (in martin Buber's term) ‘confirmation,’ not in his individual relationships, but only from the fount of all existence, the totalist Organization. Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am), upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist "confirmation" with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this ‘erroneous path,’ his right to existence may be withdrawn.”
Even now, after claiming to have ended TLWF and declaring that the leaders have all “stepped down”, “the faithful" are being told not to read what survivors have written or listen to what they say. Their mantra is that survivors of this cult should forgive. The survivors have been denied existence in the sense that they are invisible or dead to the people still in the cult. The leaders can't let their members listen or hear because it would open the followers’ eyes. This has happened from the very beginning of the Walk, and is still happening today.