cultsurvivor, do you actually believe that people who post in this forum have knowledge of cults limited only to websites? You are baiting for more information with the kind of accusing tone, especially your characterization of Griffis, that suggests to me you have a dog in this fight. Are you a member of Brick's "cult survivor" club? Is that the kind of cult survival you are
Forum: Coercive Persuasion and Undue Influence

Sallie, how would a "true sociopath" be excluded from those who commit suicide? Certainly there are reasons to commit suicide which are sociopathic rather than emotionally depressed. Anyone who believes they are affecting the world, material or spiritual, by committing suicide (crossing over to another level in which they believe they'll still have power, for example) is just using
Forum: Coercive Persuasion and Undue Influence

I have practiced regular Tai Chi and the reason Falun Gong is different is that it requires the practitioner to believe that this guy Li Hongzhi places a physical "wheel" inside of them and has some kind of control. That is extremely cult-like whereas traditional Tai Chi is mostly a way of understanding physical energy while practicing the exercises that do in fact greatly enhance your
Forum: Hate Groups

I think their exploitation of demon imagery or even identity is their form of the "fair game" policy. Think about it: they claim to be helping "demons", therefore anyone who is in a receptive position of supposedly "needing" their help is a "demon". Demonization is a basic human tactic of total war. It is universal. Whenever you see it used in any for
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

That's great, Anticult, because after posting what I did about the Catholic ("catholoid?") elements I went and explored their Youtube channel and of course, they have a smorgasbord designed to attract members from every other persuasion out there. "Indigo" for example, and the reptilians will pull the scientologists, and the political stuff for the materialists. Anyone
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

I'm Catholic, of the traditional sort, Sandman, and we tend to be sensitive to the way certain twists of Jesus' teachings characterize what we Catholics refer to as "heresies"... so it could get off topic because heresy is not particularly relevant to anyone outside our Catholic culture... except for the fact that Catholicism shares the unhappy distinction of being one of
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

I almost wanted to start a new thread because this one is so big and I am a late-comer to it, but I did read a lot of the beginning pages where Destenites show up to explain their beliefs along with Sandman and Anticult and other criticisms, then I skipped ahead. I noticed a few things that I have seen in some other New-Agey cults elsewhere that are involved with manipulating critical thinkin
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

There is another kind of stalker, often online but also off-line. The "gossip-stalker" is someone who uses casual common interest (both in the same project thread, or in the same church committee, etc) to get into small talk which quickly veers into a bad direction. They increasingly are feeding that information into unofficial back-ground checking schemes run by nonprofit orgs and othe
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships

I am a Catholic by upbringing who went for years away from the church and spent some time in a political cult, but am now mostly recovered and have re-entered the mainstream Roman Catholic church. During my travels over the years I went through that period of cult-hopping that seems to affect so many after exit from a seriously damaging cult. Fortunately I had good specialized therapy as well
Forum: Destructive Churches

I have not been using my messages and I just went in there to check some old ones. In a conversation I had with a board "regular", there was a name unconnected to it appearing in the colored bar: Odebrane, and another name also appeared over the list of messages: Wys3ane. I never had any contact with either of those names as far as I can recall and the messages I was reviewing were
Forum: Tech support for this board

Thank you suture. I think Neil Brick et al are interesting because you can indeed see the "cult dynamic" laid out there in plain view, and this can inform other discussions of cult process, but there is a more dangerous side to Neil Brick et al. One can mock his delusion that he is a trained Manchurian-candidate-type killer, created by this bizarre Masonic cult that he describes,
Forum: Coercive Persuasion and Undue Influence

I have returned to the church of my childhood, Roman Catholic, which is dangerous because there are a lot of little cults inside that big umbrella, (especially among the retreat groups) but I have found a solid traditional Latin Mass and that has a lot of cult-protection built in. Traditional Catholics are not big on huggie-feely stuff. The old Liturgy is not designed to affect emotions, in fa
Forum: Recovery from Destructive Cults and Groups

Warfrog, I am a woman and the way the cult I was in used people against each other left me with similar damage. Friendship is very hard for me and even affected my work, because my work carries a certain risk of publicity which can expose my employment and living arrangments. Sometimes I am immobilized because of it. I am not a naturally secretive person and so it is very hard for me. Because o
Forum: Recovery from Destructive Cults and Groups

My own cult experience is rooted in a "family cult". This is still a problem because of all the members of the rather large family who continue the pattern, which is particularly nasty. I blame it on the fact that my mother, (who is now in Heaven, all forgiven) relied on my eldest sister to raise the rest of us and so she (that sister) became locked into a control pattern at an earl
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships

One thing about anxiety: it is partly physical and partly cultural. If you hang around people who watch shows like Nancy Grace or America's Most Wanted all the time, they will re-inforce anxiety. If you hang around superstitious people who cannot translate faith in God into a relaxed approach to life, but who instead are always looking for sin or scandal, you will always be worried. Find pe
Forum: Recovery from Destructive Cults and Groups

Hi everyone, I don't post much but I used to be here a lot while recovering and trying to prevent myself from being re-recruited into new cults. Lately I've been reading over some historical material and studying cults within & on the fringes of the Catholic church (which has such a rich history in this subject!) and I remember an author whose name I could never pronounce and wh
Forum: Recovery from Destructive Cults and Groups

The wake-up in daylight thing is also important for people with tendencies to depression. My doctor explained that there is actually an enzyme triggered by neurons in the retina when bright sunlight hits it which helps the body move out of the sleep state. He told me to get up and get into bright light within 15 minutes of waking and stay in it for at least 20 minutes, and if I still felt unmo
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

You bring out some interesting points. You mention the 1984 point of connection between the two organizations. The actual separate identity of the organizations is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the point of how these orgs work together to enforce cult goals among the people they exploit, recruit, or injure. I saw the joint activity from the point of view of someone with cadre-level training a
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

This is all very disturbing. Are these guru-cons in some kind of competition to prove to each other that they can control people to the point of death? If a death occurred during a lengthy Sunday service, wouldn't the media be all over the responsible preacher? If a personal trainer drove a step-aerobics class to the point of killing a person, wouldn't the gym be shut down while th
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

If you do not see the violent side of Take Back The Night, how it in fact supports and encourages the rape of women as part of its own sexual warfare, you never saw the full truth about NatLFed. The New York office was full of upper class play-revolutionaries who were training young kids to accept the abuse as "normal" so that their activists in the field could be trained to us abus
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

QuoteSo, I dont trust political cults that employ any human being as use and dispose. NatLFed is all about use-and-dispose. An off-topic moment: I want to share a story about a man I knew only as "Grizzly" who had Karposi's. I was hiking the AT at the border between Massachusetts and Vermont one summer in the 1990's. I had a very close encounter with a very big black b
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

I have run across this label several times while looking at other cult issues. I know that there was a lot of cult-buzz around the "Church of Christ" in Boston at one time, but I don't know if the general name relates all to the same group. Is it a tightly controlled denominational name?
Forum: Destructive Churches

I doubt you can, or should, do anything. One of the things manipulators do is set their "enemies" up to create hostility that they then feed off as surely as if you wanted to join them in their little game. You may just drive them in deeper if you try to intervene. You've said your piece and your own friend knows you are available if the man should ask for help, so be satisfied wi
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships

I use quilting as a simple pastime that is portable. The chance encounters are not as problematic as the work-related ones, for me.
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships

HUrray for you! I've been through some doozies of therapists over the years, and I can see the flags you raise right away, in the punishment of people who have left: that is just a tactic to scare the ones who remain. Personally, I would leave a clear message on record or in writing that no contact is desired. That way they can't chase you around claiming you need "help&quo
Forum: Destructive Churches

Good point, Sallie... but I don't think I'll be using the Dahmer ploy! *lol* But I think we all have more problems because of the current culture of "reality tv" which encourages people to believe they have a right to know personal details of everyone around them. Those kind of people notice the subject changes and that just alerts them more. Anyway, I shared my employm
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships

Thank you Mary. I think it is good to put the jargon out there because people need to be alert to the game the jargon is supporting. I don't feel like opening my old box of material to find all the words NatLFed used as jargon, but they had the differentiation between "members" and "volunteers", between "volunteers" and "cadres", and there was anot
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

I looked at the site, and it appears to be mainly life and death stories. Cult survival is not always that dramatic, so how are you approaching this subject?
Forum: Former Cult Members and Affected Families

Thank you corboy for helping find links. The older story was in Christian Century magazine and also was retold in the "Public Eye" series, but ironically the left-leaning critics, who could be the most discerning about NatLFed's true fascist colors, seem often to move into aplogetics and trying to make it look like a sadly incompetent instead of successfully dangerous organizat
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

It is exactly the problem I face, and it gets worse for me as I get older because now it is compounded by the bigotry we face as "agism". In some ways that helps, actually, and I have decided to keep my grey hair because the younger people just don't take an interest, but older people do want to know everyone's life story. I think my anxiety is only half due to cult anxie
Forum: Abusive and Controlling Relationships